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Untitled Article
secure ; the rooftt violent convulsion would not endanger it ; in a country where nearly two-thirds of the male adult population possess property in land , and where the notions entertained of the inviolability of property are so pedantic and ( if we may be permitted the expression ) so prudish , that there are persons who will gravely maintain that the state has no right to make a road through a piece of land without the owner ' s consent , even on payment of compensation .
• Strange as it may appear , in the declaration of rights , drawn up by Robespierre , and adopted by the Socitte des Droits de l Homme } there is not , with the one exception which we have mentioned , one single proposition on the subject of property which was considered exceptionable even by those who were so scandalized at the above definition . No limitation of the right of property was hinted at ;
no new or alarming maxim promulgated ; unless such be implied in the recognition of the principle of the English poor laws , that so * ciety is bound to provide subsistence and work for its indigent members ; and this document was rejected by the convention , by the body which put to death Louis XVI ., and created the revolutionary tribunal , rejected by that body as anarchical . Yet there are people who believe that the principle of the French revolution was spoliation of property ! For the thousandth time , we say to the English Tories and
Whigs , that they are as utterly ignorant of the French revolution as of the revolutions among the inhabitants of the moon . Acts of injustice were done ; rights , which really partook of the nature of property , were not always treated as such ; but the respect of the revolutionary assemblies for all that they considered as entitled to the name of property amounted to actual narrowness and-bigotry . We do not affirm this solely of the comparatively moderate and enlightened men who composed the constituent assembly , but in even a greater degree of the violent revolutionists of the convention , to whose obtuser and less cultivated intellects
such a prejudice was more natural . In the height of the reign of terror anti-property doctrines would have been scouted , even more decidedly than now ; no one dared avow them for fear of the guillotine ; nor do such doctrines figure in the history of the revolution at all , save in the solitary instance of the conspiracy of Baboeuf , greatly posterior to the fall of Robespierre and the Montagne . ' ?*«*•
In April , 1834 , about three months after the above article was written , the leaders in a general strike of the silk-weavers of Lyons , which had just terminated unsuccessfully , were prosecuted by order of government ; and this prosecution , together with the knowledge that the detestable law then in progress through the Chambers for putting down all associations unlicensed by
government would be applied to the extinction of trades' unions , provoked the unfortunate insurrection at Lyons , which lasted five days , and was with some difficulty suppressed . This was not a political , but a trades union insurrection . The government , however , took that base advantage of the alarm excited b y it which all French governments have lon g heen accustomed to take of all events exciting a panic among those who have something- to lose * They got up an insignificant riot in the streets of Paris , called it ail Insurrection , took the moat violent measures for repressing it ,
Untitled Article
The MoiMer Trial 895
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1835, page 395, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2646/page/31/
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