THE STATE towards urban agglomerations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The same tactics were employed towards villages and peasants. As soon as the State felt itself strong enough, it destroyed the village commune, ruined the peasants committed to its mercy and plundered the common lands. Historians and economists paid by the State have no doubt taught us that the village commune, having become an obsolete form of landownership obstructing agricultural progress, was bound to disappear by the action of natural economic forces. Politicians and bourgeois economists do not tire of repeating this even nowadays, and there · are revolutionists and socialists (those who pretend to be scientific) who recite this fable learned in school. Yet a more odious and deliberate falsehood has never been affirmed by science, for history swarms with documents amply proving, to those who wish to know (for France it would almost suffice to read · Dalloz) that the village commune was first of all deprived by the State of its privileges, its independence, its juridical and legislative powers, and that later its lands were either simply stolen by the rich under State protection, or else confiscated by the State itself. Plundering began as early as the sixteenth century in France, and grew apace in the following century. As early as 1659 the State took the communes under its superior protection and we need only read Louis XIV's edict of 1667 to learn what plundering of communal lands took place at that period. "Men have taken possession of lands when it suited them ... lands have been divided ... in order to plunder the communes fictitious debts have been devised," said the "Sun King" in this edict. Two years later he confiscated for his own benefit all the revenues of the communes. In the following century it is estimated that at least half the communal lands were appropriated by the aristocracy and the clergy under State patronage. Yet communes continued to exist until 1787. The village council met under the elm, granted lands, appointed taxes (the documents relating to this are to be found in Babeau-Le village sous l'ancien regime). Turgot, however, in the province of which he was governor, found the village councils "too noisy" and abolished them during his governorship, substituting assemblies elected among the well-to-do. In 1787, on the eve of the Revolution, the State made this measure general in its application. The mir was abolished and thus communal affairs fell into the hands of a few syndics, elected by the richest bourgeois and peasants. The Constituent Assembly sanctioned this Jaw in December 1789, and the bourgeois, substituting themselves for the nobles, plundered what remained of communal lands. Many a peasant revolt w2s necessary to force the Convention in 1792 to sanction what the rebellious peasants had accomplished in the Eastern part of France. That is to say, the Convention ordered 33 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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