KROPOTKIN the restitution of communal lands to the peasants. This took place only when the land had already been retalien by revolutionary means. It is the fate of all revolutionary Jaws to be put into action when they arc already accomplished facts. Nevertheless the Convention tainted this law with bourgeois gall. It decreed that lands retaken from nobles should be divided into equal parts among "active citizens" only-that is to say among the village bourgeois. By one stroke of the pen it thus dispossessed "passiv~ citizens," that is to say the mass of impoverished peasants, who had most need of these communal lands. Upon which, fortunately, the peasants again revolted and in 1793 the Convention passed a new Jaw decreeing the division of communal lands among all inhabitants. This was never put into practice and only served as an excuse for new thefts of communal lands. Would not such measures suffice to bring about -what these gentlemen call "the natural death" of communes? Yet communes still existed. On August 24th, 1794, the reaction now in power, struck the final blow. The State confiscated all communal lands and made of them a guarantee fund for the public debt, putting them up to auction and selling them to its creatures the "Thermidorians." This law was happily repealed on Prairal 2nd, in the year V, after being in force for three years. But at the same time, communes were abolished, and replaced by cantonal councils in order that the State might the more easily fill them with its creature~. This lasted till 1801 when village communes were revived; but then the government took it upon itself to appoint mayors and syndics in each of the 36,000 communes! This absurdity lasted till the revolution of July 1830, after which the law of 1789 was again put into force. In the interval communal lands were again wholly confiscated by the State in 1813 and plundered anew for three years. What remained of them was only returned to the communes in 1816. This was by no means the end. Every new regime saw in communal lands a source of reward for its supporters. Therefore at three different intervals since 1830-the first time in 1837 and the last under Napoleon III-Jaws were promulgated to force peasants to divide what they possessed of forests and common pasture-lands, and three times the government was compelled to abrogate this Jaw on account of the peasants' resistance. All the same Napoleon III was able to profit by it and snatch several large estates for his favouri::~. This is what, in scientific language, these gentlemen call the "natural death" of the communal landed property under the influence of economic laws. One might as well call the massacre of a hundred thousand soldiers in a battlefield "natural death"! What happened in France happened also in Belgium, England, Germany, Austria; in fact everywhere in Europe, Slav countries c;"- ceptecl. 34 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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