Chapter Twelve
At about four p.m. on March 3, 1792, Jacques-Guillaume Simonneau, the newly elected mayor of Étampes, a little town thirty miles south of Paris, went out to negotiate with a crowd that had assembled in the marketplace. Throughout the winter, there had been disturbances as a poor harvest and surging inflation sent the price of wheat soaring. Étampes lay between the productive, privately owned cereal farms around Orléans and the vast market of Paris, and daily convoys of grain passed through the town, or were warehoused nearby and sold in the marketplace. The owner of a large tannery that employed sixty workers, Simonneau was both wealthy and, like most businessmen, a strong supporter of the revolution, because it promised to provide what the ancien régime had failed to deliver, fairer taxation and freer trade within France.
Helping the Americans to independence at a cost of more than one billion livres was the factor that finally broke royalist France’s rickety economy. Annual accounts showed that government revenues exceeded expenditure, but they did so only by ignoring the interest on the American debt that consumed 40 percent of the government’s income. When the king reluctantly summoned the Three Estates to deal with the crisis, a wide confederation of interests—peasants, intellectuals, new landowners, and urban merchants or bourgeoisie—had welcomed the opportunity to reform the whole structure of the ancien régime. For the peasants, the great achievement was the abolition of aristocratic privileges on August 4, 1789, while the bourgeoisie and the landowners approved the National Assembly’s efforts to modernize both the political and economic systems.
The apparent unity of their interests was reflected in the Declaration of the Rights of Man issued by the assembly later that month. Echoing the American Declaration of Independence, the first article stated that “All men are born free and equal in rights,” while article 17 promised that “Property is an inviolable and sacred right. No one may be deprived of it unless public necessity, legally established, evidently requires it.” When the new taxes failed to produce enough revenue, even the property owners and bourgeoisie had supported the assembly’s decision to confiscate church land, about 10 percent of France’s territory, and to issue paper money, known as assignats, against its value of about two billion livres.
Given this background, there was nothing incongruous in a businessman like Simonneau belonging to the Jacobins, the most radical wing in the National Assembly. That there might be a conflict between the declaration’s two sets of rights, those of humans and of property, did not become apparent until the afternoon when he walked out to confront the demonstrators. Although armed with clubs, pitchforks, and scythes, the mob was not initially violent. For three hours, they argued with the mayor, demanding that the price of grain, 50 percent higher than the year before, be drastically reduced. For his part, the fifty-one-year-old Simonneau robustly defended the government’s view that interfering in the market was counterproductive because “Liberty in commerce is the principal source of abundance.”
By evening, tempers had begun to unravel. Feeling himself threatened, Simonneau ordered a detachment of National Guards with him to fire on the crowd. The soldiers refused, and the enraged crowd began to strike at the mayor with their weapons. He was clubbed and punched to the ground, then stabbed with scythes and pitchforks, and at last finished off, it was said, by a bullet from one of his own soldiers.
The concept of private property in land had only clearly emerged in France a generation earlier, but until the moment of Simonneau’s murder there was nothing to suggest that it would not develop along English lines. As in England, the symptoms of the disease were easier to detect than the infection. Eighteenth-century France certainly seethed with peasant anger at the enclosure of common land and the elimination of traditional rights of access as wealthy merchants, motivated partly by a sustained period of high cereal prices, bought feudal estates for cash. But similar upheavals had occurred in earlier periods. From the 1750s, however, two new ingredients had become common, the employment of géomètres, or land surveyors, to measure out the properties exactly, and the preparation of plans parcellaires, or estate maps, drawn to scale to show precisely what a proprietor owned.
In place of the traditional variable units that indicated how much the earth would produce, the géomètres insisted on accurate measures that allowed one property to be compared in area to another in exactly defined perches, consisting of eighteen pieds, each 12.789 inches long, and invariable arpents measuring one-hundred square perches precisely. “We have put all these defective arpents in good order,” surveyors in the Lyon area boasted, “so that in each district their content is regulated in either perches, pas or pieds.” The significance of the new invariable measures was explained in an influential surveyor’s encyclopedia, Métrologie, published in 1780: “They are the rule of justice and the guarantee of property which must be sacred.”
By the 1760s, the bug had infected increasing numbers of existing seigneurs in Burgundy and eastern France, who engaged in a process of renovation des terriers, or renewal of traditional feudal dues, often accompanied by new, accurate plans of their estates. In the feudal west and sharecropping south, the old ways still held good, but even in La Vendée, the most conservative region of Brittany, richer peasants were enclosing communal fields and taking steps that might have led to private ownership.
From the 1780s, parts of Paris had become a building site as speculators, aristocratic and commercial, built northward toward Montmartre, and transformed the royal gardens beside the Champs Elysées into fashionable hotels for tenants such as the American minister Thomas Jefferson. An unofficial banking system run by the country’s leading law firms channeled money and credit from savers to borrowers primarily for real estate deals. Access to credit enabled the same class to buy most of the land confiscated from the church, often paying with cheaply acquired devalued assignats, and later to snap up the estates of refugee aristocrats.
The new property owners enjoyed one other marked advantage. Unlike more than half of France’s population and most of its patois-speaking peasants, they both spoke and read French, the language of their title deeds and of the royal law courts where, as a sudden spike in legal cases in the 1780s showed, they increasingly sought to enforce their rights. All this followed the English pattern, as did the eviction of peasants without written leases, the increase in rents, and the use of legislation to widen their claims to exclusive possession of the earth.
As late as 1792, their influence in the Legislative Assembly enabled the new proprietors to abolish communal grazing rights, known as vaine pâture, on arable land that had been harvested. “The right of vaine pâture,” declared a sympathizer, “infringes on the rights of property. Any estate burdened with this right becomes common property when the proprietor has removed his crops.” Depriving poorer peasants of the right to graze cattle on the stubble left after harvest must have hit particularly hard following a succession of bad harvests, and the proprietors’ use of political power to protect their property offered unmistakable evidence that the French land revolution still had momentum.
In such circumstances, the news of Simonneau’s murder created a wave of public revulsion. As the foreign minister, Pierre Lebrun, warned the assembly, the killing of the mayor showed that “all property, all authority is equally threatened.” One of his audience proposed that the body be buried in the Panthéon as that of a national martyr. A memorial parade organized in Simonneau’s honor attracted two hundred thousand spectators and included a procession of sixty regiments, bands playing funeral music, and a float bearing a model of the Bastille, the very icon of the revolution. Many in the parade carried banners with the words “Liberté, Egalité, Proprieté,” while others simply said “Indivisibles.” But Simonneau’s killing revealed the opposite: between property rights and human rights existed a stark division.
The attack on property was launched by Pierre Dolivier, a priest in the parish next to Étampes. When entire families were starving, he said, “It is revolting that the rich man and all that surrounds him—men, dogs and horses—lack for nothing in their idleness, and that those who earn a living only by force of working succumb under the double burden of labor and undernourishment.” The belief that anyone had a natural right to property beyond what they needed to support themselves and their families was wrong, he asserted. It was the law, not nature, that enabled an individual to claim property in the land. The state was entitled to curtail a proprietor’s wealth in order to keep people fed. To the fury of the new landowners and the bourgeoisie, Dolivier roundly declared that “Only the Nation can really own its land. Natural property does not extend beyond the body of each individual.”
No such claim had been made before. Under feudal conditions the king had been assumed to own the state, but that was a god-given property intrinsic to kingship itself. For the first time, it was supposed that the state actually owned the land, because it represented the people who lived there. In the early twentieth century the French Socialist leader Jean-Jaurés praised Dolivier for having shifted “the Declaration of the Rights of Man towards the light of socialism.” But at the time, even Maximilien Robespierre, leader of the most radical Jacobins, did not share such a view of property. However, Dolivier could and did claim powerful support from what was becoming the handbook of the revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract.
In an earlier essay, The Origin of Inequality, published in 1754, Rousseau had given expression to the general unease in France as feudal possession gave way to private ownership. He pictured the very first property maker staking out some ground and claiming it as his own exclusive possession: “From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not someone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.” But once made, this claim to individual ownership of the earth inexorably brought into being laws to protect it—“property, once recognised, gave rise to the first rules of justice”—and eventually the beginnings of government. The problem was that governments also protected extremes of wealth and power. “It is manifestly against the Law of Nature,” he concluded, “that a handful of men wallow in luxury, while the famished multitudes lack the necessities of life.”
Virtually everything that Rousseau wrote, whether it concerned society, education, nature, or politics, became a best seller. He wrote dramatically and his passionate commitment to individual freedom was irresistible. In The Social Contract, published eight years later, he presented a solution not simply to the inequality problem but to the seeming impossibility of creating a government that would be strong enough to protect a person and yet would allow her to “remain as free as before.”
Rousseau’s ideal government was one that embodied “the general will” of the people. Reflecting his Calvinist background, he ascribed to the general will all the better qualities of human nature, those that naturally pursued happiness and cared for the welfare of others, leaving selfish ambition to the individual. While it would protect its citizens’ absolute rights to life and liberty, the government would only guard such property as was needed for the individual’s safety and subsistence—“Having his share, he ought to keep to it, and can have no further right against the community.” Beyond that amount the importance of preserving equality might require the government to limit the property owner’s rights. It clearly had the power to do so because “the right which each individual has to his own estate is always subordinate to the right which the community has over all.”
With that sentence, Rousseau set his general will government, and any that followed his model, on a collision course with the solipsistic claim of private property that its individual rights came before any communal needs. When human rights struck property rights, the gutters would overflow with blood.
In the months after Simonneau’s murder, the national mood changed. By the summer of 1792, the European monarchies had declared war on republican France, and the flood of assignats had driven the rate of inflation sharply higher. Resentment against cash-rich merchants and landowners grew bitter. In November, a petition, clearly influenced by Dolivier, was presented to the assembly, demanding an end to the free trade in corn, and a limit of 120 arpents (about one hundred acres) on the amount of land one person could own. That winter, the streets of Paris resounded to the violent attacks of Jacques Roux and his followers, nicknamed les enragés, against the rich. The Paris Commune, the city’s local authority, pressed for price controls, and the Parisian poor, made desperate by hunger and deprivation, increased the pressure. Early in the New Year, a crowd of barelegged laundrywomen led the sansculottes of Paris to the assembly, demanding that it cap the price of wheat and put an end to the profits of speculators. On April 24, 1793, the explosion occurred. Robespierre, by then the most popular politician in France, told the Paris club of the Jacobins that the Declaration of Rights had been changed.
Robespierre’s speeches were famous for their meandering length although, in the view of his critics, they “rarely culminated in any specific measure or legal provision.” But they struck a confrontational tone that was increasingly in tune with the mood of ordinary Parisians driven desperate by hunger and deprivation. “Who are our enemies?” he would demand and in the next sentence supply the answer: “The vicious and the rich.” His rhetorical device of eliding political and psychological hatred proved hugely effective. “All aristocrats are corrupt,” he declared, “and every corrupt man is an aristocrat.” Even delivered in a voice described as “dull, monotonous, and wearisome,” these menacing, all-enveloping accusations drew wild applause from his followers in the public galleries. Thus it was in the knowledge that he was backed by popular opinion in Paris that Robespierre informed the senior Jacobins of the revised version of human rights. “The right of property is limited, and applies only to that portion which the law guarantees,” he said. “Every ownership, any trade, which bears prejudicially on the existence of our fellow-creatures is necessarily illicit and immoral.”
Across the country, Jacobin clubs persuaded local courts to block any moves by landowners that infringed on communal rights or peasant occupancy. New laws were passed giving local communes, the replacements of the old feudal parishes, the power to keep common land intact or allocate its use to the poor and propertyless. In June 1793, year one of the French Republic, its new constitution was ratified, giving the vote to all males and guaranteeing four rights to its citizens: “equality, liberty, security, and property.” Ostensibly, France now shared with the United States the distinction of having both human and property rights written into its constitutional DNA, but in reality there was a crucial difference. Following Rousseau, the constitution deemed the government to be expressing the general will, and thus to be imbued with such moral authority it could “command only what is just and useful to society; it can forbid only what is injurious to it.”
This was the antithesis of the United States Constitution, which created a marketplace of balanced competing interests. Armed with the absolute authority to determine what was useful and what was harmful to society, a government elected under the 1793 constitution would have been able to determine the extent of its citizens’ rights. In the face of the worsening economic and military situation, however, the constitution was suspended in October 1793, and its sweeping power was invested in the nine members of the Committee of Public Safety.
Under the influence of Robespierre, the committee, whose remit was to “terrorize” France’s foes, unleashed an official campaign of terror in the summer aimed at a new kind of enemy, hostile not to France, but to equality. “All the rich are vicious, in opposition to the Revolution,” Robespierre told the Jacobins. An ever-widening circle of people fell within the definition, especially after a cap was set on the price of all essential goods. Shopkeepers whose prices were too high, peasants who hoarded wheat, lawyers who criticized the mock trials, all followed the aristocrats and wealthy and bared their necks to the blade of the guillotine. In his familiar contrapuntal rhetoric, Robespierre justified the use of fear to enforce loyalty to the revolution, praising “virtue without which terror is evil, [and] terror without which virtue is powerless.”
Madison’s nightmare of the propertyless seizing power from the propertied had become a reality. The blood that gushed down the gutters of Lyon, one of the centers of resistance, and stained the waters of the Rhone for miles downstream was the more shocking because it was the outcome of deliberate violence by the government against its own citizens. Worse still, almost three-quarters of its victims were the very peasants and workers for whom equality was being sought.
“What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?” Jefferson had written in 1787, expressing sympathy with Shays’s rebellion against the propertied interests of Massachusetts. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” The sansculottes would have applauded the sentiment. But the unravelling of society followed swiftly on the use of the guillotine. Unemployment soared as factory owners, shopkeepers, and landowners hid or emigrated. Abroad, France’s conscript armies sustained themselves on their conquests, but at home an economic catastrophe spiraled out of control. By the time Robespierre was overthrown and guillotined in the Thermidor revolt of July 1794, bringing an end to the Terror, industrial production had collapsed, unemployed workers filled country lanes and city streets, and the state was in debt to the tune of over five billion livres.
The ideas of Father Dolivier did not disappear when Napoleon grandly announced in 1799 that the principles of the Revolution had been secured, and consequently “the Revolution is finished.” A direct line of thought connected the radical clergyman’s belief that the size of landed properties should be limited for the general good to the arguments put forward by the leader of the Society of Equals, François-Noel “Gracchus” Babeuf, the first person in modern times to be known as a “communist.”
The lesson that Babeuf drew from the failure of the Terror was that it had not gone far enough. To create social equality, government must confiscate and redistribute any land above what was needed for survival and “eradicate within every last individual the hope that he might ever become richer, more powerful, or more distinguished because of his talents, than any of his equals.” Government was justified in following this policy, because “whatever an individual hoards of the land and its fruits beyond what he needs for his own nourishment has been stolen from society.”
From Babeuf by way of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who distilled this strand of French Socialism into the lambent phrase “Property is theft,” the argument for the nationalization of private property was waiting for Karl Marx when he arrived in Paris in 1843. In The Communist Manifesto he began the task of applying a rural theory to the industrial age, showing how the goal of establishing an egalitarian state would come about through the proletarian revolution. Over the next thirty years, he would set the terms for the great war of the late twentieth century between capitalism and Communism.
The political failure of the Revolution made it appear as though the two kinds of liberty could not coexist. If the freedom to acquire property existed independently of the state, it seemed that no government could legitimately restrict it; if the power of the state to enforce human rights was so overwhelming that its citizens could, in Rousseau’s words, be “forced to be free” by the government, then property rights might, as Babeuf argued, lawfully be extinguished by the state.
As though to underline the divide, the English economist and cleric Reverend Thomas Malthus wrote an essay in 1800, On the Present High Price of Provisions, in which he explained in terms as uncompromising as Babeuf’s why the unconstrained working of the free-market, even in times of famine, was the most efficient way of feeding a population. “The man who refuses to send his corn to market when it is at twenty pounds a load because he thinks that in two months time it will be at thirty [pounds],” Malthus argued, “if he be right in his judgment and succeed in his speculation, is a positive and decided benefactor to the state.” The reason was that his load of grain would arrive when it was most needed rather than being put on sale when there was still a plentiful supply. And the higher price would encourage him and his fellow grain producers to plant more for the next season.
According to Malthus’s rationale, a profit-driven system of land ownership had to operate without government interference, whatever the short-term pain, otherwise the producers would seek higher profits elsewhere, or, as happened in France, be driven out of production altogether. His thesis was warmly received by Britain’s dominant political class, the “country gentlemen.” They were determined to reduce the taxes they paid, and Malthusian economics offered a justification for cutting the welfare provisions of the Poor Law that had lasted since the land revolution.
From the outbreak of the Revolution, fear of French ideas of liberty had added to the already suffocating political influence of Britain’s landowners. Their power so stifled party politics that just two increasingly reactionary Tory prime ministers, William Pitt the younger and the Earl of Liverpool, held office for thirty-three of the forty-four years between 1783 and 1827. Their long tenure testified to the ability of the government to keep the country gentlemen’s support, even for the high level of taxation needed to pay for Britain’s costly war against French ideas.
In exchange, the country gentlemen won a wave of “Inclosure Acts,” a reduction in their contribution to the Poor Law, and a ferocious social program that prescribed capital punishment for any attack on property—the penalty for stealing a sheep or damaging farm machinery was hanging. With the outbreak of the French Revolution, Pitt pandered to their fear of equal rights by introducing bans on free speech and political meetings, by suspending habeas corpus, and by creating a gigantic army of informers and spies to report on any suspicious behavior. In 1793, the Scottish political reformer Thomas Muir was sentenced to fourteen years’ exile in the prison colony of Australia simply for advocating universal suffrage. Thousands of others received lesser sentences for their participation in the Corresponding Societies that discussed the latest ideas from south of the English Channel.
From the repressive nature of Britain’s response to the French Revolution, it was clear that a political system built purely on property rights had entered a blind alley. Having tamed their only real competitor, the monarchy, the landowners possessed a virtual monopoly of political power. They used it not merely to protect their property but to crush any calls for political reform that threatened their control. So long as they retained unchallenged power—and they would until a new kind of property manufactured by the Industrial Revolution came to challenge the old form—Britain’s landed democracy seemed doomed to follow Poland’s aristocratic version into political sterility.
Certainly to Thomas Jefferson, whose blueprint would globalize the idea of privately owned land during the nineteenth century, British politics and British property appeared equally moribund. What he dreamed of was a fairer, more democratic way of owning the earth.
Jefferson’s underlying suspicion about the scope of private property rights crystalized into outright hostility while he was minister, or ambassador, to France. The catalyst was an encounter in October 1785 with a poor woman on the outskirts of the royal hunting park at Fontainebleau. Although surrounded by unused but potentially productive land, the woman and her two sons had to survive on the few cents a day she could earn by casual labor, while the royal family and aristocrats with rental incomes of more than $2.5 million a year reserved for their own pleasure vast tracts of ground that could have provided a living for the poor.
“The consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,” Jefferson wrote indignantly to Madison. To break up large, inherited estates, he proposed legislation to outlaw entails and primogeniture that encouraged the concentration of land in a few hands. Liberty required government to intervene to prevent a minority accumulating too much wealth. Bluntly, he called for governments to “tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.” Where privately owned ground was left uncultivated, and the poor were consequently denied land to work, “it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.” In other words, where the two conflicted, the natural right to happiness ought to have priority over property rights.
Shortly before he returned from Paris in 1789, Jefferson would propose to Madison a yet more radical plan based on the principle “that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” By this, he meant that users of the land could naturally claim ownership of it during their lifetime, but that any further rights, such as passing it on to designated heirs, had to be created by laws “flowing from the will of society.” The usufruct suggestion has generally been regarded as an aberration, largely because he linked it to a wider belief that all laws and contracts and even forms of government should be limited to nineteen years, after which period they would lapse and need to be renewed.
But the proposal that the territory of the new United States should have been owned by its citizens only as leasehold, rather than as outright property, was not unthinkable. By the Treaty of Paris that ended the war with Britain in 1783, all the ground between the Appalachians and the Mississippi passed to the United States. Consequently the land already belonged to the nation and could legally be distributed in any form the government chose.
In Britain, nineteen years was the usual term for a lease, and by retaining ownership, the government would benefit from any increase in the value of its new territory. In 1990, when President Mikhail Gorbachev started to introduce a market economy to the Soviet Union, thirty of America’s most distinguished economists wrote an open letter strongly recommending him not to sell off the state’s land, because in the long term it was more economically efficient to rent or lease it. Their argument was precisely the same as Jefferson’s: leasing the land would allow future generations to enjoy a rising income from its growing value, while the sale of it would give a small gain but allow speculators to make the largest profit.
On his return to the United States, Jefferson dropped the usufruct proposal for owning land from public utterance, but it continued to appear in his private correspondence about other forms of ownership, such as that of inventions. Nor did he ever alter his belief that the right to individually owned land itself was simply a legal concept created by a long-established society, and that any idea of a natural right of private ownership was superficial nonsense.
A democratic government, consequently, had the right to legislate so that property was owned in the public interest, and he believed this to be especially true of a republican government that needed to safeguard the independence of its citizens by securing as wide a distribution of land as possible. To achieve that end, Jefferson argued, government intervention to restrict property rights and to redistribute wealth through increasing taxation was not only right but a duty.
Yet, by the sort of paradox that characterized his unsurpassedly creative political career, he, more than any other single person, laid the foundations for the greatest private property society in history.
The first steps were taken in 1784, just before Jefferson went to Paris. Three different Congressional committees under his chairmanship reported their recommendations for dealing with the formerly British territory lying between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. The strategy they proposed was that it should become not merely American territory, but American property. The land had first to be bought from its native inhabitants, but not by individuals or states, only by the United States. Before the national government disposed of this territory, it should survey the land in squares—a shape simple to measure out, and easily checked for size by the would-be purchaser—with the lines running north-south and east-west.
Not only would the land be presurveyed, Jefferson’s committee on the Western Lands proposed that it should be divided up into square territories—they were given exotic names like Cherronesus, Pelisipia, and Polypotamia—and when the population within any of them reached twenty thousand, the inhabitants could apply to join the Union as an independent state. Until then the territories were to be governed by officers appointed by Congress, and their admission would only be approved on certain conditions. The new states would “forever remain a part of the United States of America”; their government had to be “republican in form,” and “after the year 1800 of the Christian aera, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states.”
What Jefferson had in mind when drawing up these proposals was a gigantic piece of social engineering. All Americans were to have at least “a little portion of land” because that would guarantee their republican independence of mind and freedom from outside pressure. “The small landholders are the most precious part of a state,” he told Madison. In his ideal republic, these hardworking farmers would provide a bedrock of republican virtue. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1782, “whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” But the smallness of their holding was important. As his letters from Paris made clear, too great a size led to inequality and poverty, and thus threatened the republic’s democratic structure.
Although some of his proposals were discarded in his absence, notably the names and a system of decimal measurement he had recommended, the acquisition of territory, its survey and sale as private property, and the power of Congress to supervise the entire process leading to statehood, were adopted into law. As much as his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and purchase of the Louisiana Territory, Jefferson’s plan for the physical and political structure of the future United States earns him his place as the single most important influence in the nation’s beginnings. That the Founding Father most hostile to the concept of private landed property should have been the architect of its greatest triumph must be reckoned as one of the stranger quirks of history.