nctions upon equality of persons; to determine the
absolute principle of exchange; to neutralize the inequality of
individual faculties by collective force; to establish an equation
between property and robbery; to change the law of succession without
destroying the principle; to maintain the human personality in a
system of absolute association, and to save liberty from the chains
of communism; to synthetize the monarchical and democratic forms of
government; to reverse the division of powers; to give the executive
power to the nation, and to make legislation a positive, fixed,
and absolute science,--what a series of paradoxes! what a string of
delusions! if I may not say, what a chain of truths! But it is not
my purpose here to pass upon the theory of the right of possession. I
discuss no dogmas. My only object is to justify my views, and to show
that, in writing as I did, I not only exercised a right, but performed a
duty.

Yes, I have attacked property, and shall attack it again; but, sir,
before demanding that I shall make the amende honorable for having
obeyed my conscience and spoken the exact truth, condescend, I beg of
you, to cast a glance at the events which are happening around us; look
at our deputies, our magistrates, our philosophers, our ministers, our
professors, and our publicists; examine their methods of dealing with
the matter of property; count up with me the restrictions placed upon
it every day in the name of the public welfare; measure the breaches
already made; estimate those which society thinks of making hereafter;
add the ideas concerning property held by all theories in common;
interrogate history, and then tell me what will be left, half a century
hence, of this old right of property; and, thus perceiving that I have
so many accomplices, you will immediately declare me innocent.

What is the law of expropriation on the ground of public utility, which
everybody favors, and which is even thought too lenient? [36]

A flagrant violation of the right of property. Society indemnifies,
it is said, the dispossessed proprietor; but does it return to him the
traditional associations, the poetic charm, and the family pride which
accompany property? Naboth, and the miller of Sans-Souci, would have
protested against French law, as they protested against the caprice of
their kings. "It is the field of our fathers," they would have cried,
"and we will not sell it!" Among the ancients, the refusal of