THl> STATn The periods of plundering communes correspond in all Western Europe. The methods alone vary. Thus in England they did nc: dare enact sweeping measures; they preferred passing several thousands of separate enclosureacts by which, in each special case, parliament sanctioned the confiscation of land (it does so still) and gave lO the squire the right to keep common lands he had fenced in. No:- withstanding that nature has up till now respected the narrow furrows by which communal fields were temporarily divided among families in the villages of England, and that we have clear descriptions of this form of landed property at the beginning of the century in the book.; of a certain Marshall, scientific men (such as Seebohm, worthy emularor of Fustel de Coulanges) are not wanting ro maintain and teach that communes have never existed in England save in the form of serfdom! We find the same thing going on in Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain. In one way or another personal appropriation of lands formerly communal was almost brought to completion towards the fifties in this century. Peasants have only kept scraps of their common lands. This is the way in which the mutual assurance of lord, priest, soldier and judge-the State-has behaved towards peasants in order to despoil them of their last guarantee against misery and economic servitude. But, while organising and sanctioning this plunder, could the State respect the institution of the commune as an organ of local life? Obviously not. To allow citizens to constitllte a federation among themselves in order to appropriate some functions of the State would have been a contradiction of principle. The State demands personal and direct submission of its subjects without intermediate agents; it requires equality in servitude; it cannot allow the State within the State. Therefore as soon as the State began to coll3titute itself in the sixteenth century it set to work to destroy all bonds of union that existed among citizens, both in towns and villages. If under the name of municipal institutions it tolerated any vestiges of autonomy (never of independence), it was only with a fiscal aim, to lighten the central budget, or to allow the provincial well-to-do to enrich themselves at the people's expense as is still done to this day in English institutions and customs. This is easily understood. Customary law naturally pertains .to local life and Roman law to centralisation of power. The two cannot live side by side and the one must kill the other. That is why under French rule in Algeria, when a Kabyle djemmah-a village commune-wants to plead for its lands, every inhabitant of the commune must bring his isolated action before the judge, who will hear fifty or two hundred' isolated actions sooner than hear the collective suit of the djemmah. The Jacobin code of tthe 35 Biblioteca Gino Bianco ·
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