tion of the great part of the old property, that is
to say, of the property crystallized in fiefs, in royal and princely
domains and in mortmain, with the real and personal rights derived
therefrom, put at the disposal of the state, which by the necessity of
things had become an exceptional, terrible and all-powerful government,
an extraordinary mass of economic resources; thus, there were, on the
one side, the singular policy of the assignats which finally annulled
themselves, and on the other side, the formation of the new proprietors
who owed their fortune to the chances of gambling, to intrigue and to
speculation. And who again would have dared thereafter to swear upon the
ancient, sacred altar of property, when his recent and authentic title
rested in so evident a manner upon the knowledge of fortunate
circumstances? If it had ever passed through the head of so many
troublesome philosophers, beginning with the Sophists, that law is a
creation of man, useful and convenient, this heretical proposition might
seem thenceforth a simple and intuitive truth to the meanest of the
beggars in Paris. Had not the proletarians with all the common people
given the impulse to the revolution in general by the expected movements
of April, 1789, and did they not afterwards find themselves, as it were,
driven anew from the stage of history after the failure of the revolt of
Prairial in 1795? Had they not carried on their shoulders all the ardent
defenders of liberty and equality? Had they not held in their hands the
Paris Commune, which was, for a time, the impulsive organ of the
Assembly and of all France; had they not finally the bitter disillusion
of having created new masters for themselves with their own hands? The
bewildering consciousness of this disillusion constitutes the
psychological motive, rapid and immediate, of the conspiracy of Babeuf,
which, for that very reason, is a great fact in history, and bears in
itself all the elements of objective tragedy.

The land which fief and mortmain had, as it were, bound to a body, to a
family, to a title, now, delivered from its bonds, had become a
commodity, to serve as a basis and instrument for the production of
merchandise; so docile a commodity, that it was put into circulation in
the form of morsels of paper. And around these symbols, multiplied to
such a degree over the things that they were to represent that they
finished by no longer having any value, Business came forth, a