The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property

"Rafe Blaufarb is a historian who has focused a lot of his work on the French Revolution . I have read many books on this period, and more often than not, they tend to instrumentalise historical facts to use them in 20th-century debates in favour or against modern ideologies such as capitalism, Soviet communism , totalitarianism, etc. But this one was the most interesting to me by far: it sticks to the Revolution itself and delves into what Blaufarb calls the invention of modern property. He doesn’t try to point fingers by choosing sides. All he shows is how terribly difficult it was for revolutionary legislators to separate property rights from political rights and define ‘legitimate’ property, because of how much these concepts were interwoven in 18th-century French society. Before the Revolution, French society was a trifunctional system composed of the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate. And indeed, the two dominating classes (clergy and nobility) had been able to justify their privileges by the idea that this system was based on an exchange of services: they were organising society, for example by maintaining order, recording contracts and transactions, providing spiritual guidance, educating children, etc. But because of this, when the dust settled and time came for the legislators to decide what they wanted this new society to look like, they had a really hard time separating legitimate rights of the clergy and nobility from privileges merely inherited from historical oppression and domination. The corvées are a good example because, at first glance, they look to our modern eye like an obvious form of serfdom, acquired through violence and domination. But as most of the revolutionary legislators were landowners themselves, they became afraid that reassessing this type of relationship might be going too far. After all, they claimed, was working one or two days a week for free really that different from paying a rent of one or two-sevenths of your work? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter An even more difficult case to solve was the lods , a form of payment due to the local lord when a parcel was sold from one person to another on the land they administered. Lods were difficult to completely get rid of, which made legislators try several approaches. The main one consisted of using documents to identify words directly related to serfdom or violent appropriation, as opposed to words more akin to a mutual contract, and trying to rule the legitimacy of each case based on semantics. But of course this was far from easy and straightforward. It seems like a fair system should have also taken into account the amount of property owned by each landlord. It’s not quite the same form of domination to own the land used by one family, 100 families, or 10,000 families—regardless of the words you use to describe this property on paper. We can actually find documents showing that a couple of people had the idea of creating progressive taxes on inheritance of wealth, such as the ones that will be in place in the 20th century. But of course, in the early 19th century, this seemed really premature; the political will to go as far as to take excessive wealth and redistributing it was nearly nonexistent. But what I also like about this book is that Blaufarb shows how non-deterministic this kind of process really is: it’s more a series of struggles that can take quite dramatic turns, based on what actors decide to do. When facing issues that no one had ever even thought of, French legislators had to improvise and decide how to recreate social relations, and what they considered to be a fair system. And in particular, they had to choose where to stop in their efforts to reduce inequalities—that’s a complex question that nobody has ever truly solved, including today. Well, the difference with 1789 is that we’ve had two more centuries to imagine a strategy to redistribute wealth and property, and decrease inequalities of power. We still don’t have a magic formula that would solve everything, but we have many more guidelines as to what should be done to make our societies fairer. Of course it doesn’t prevent some people from saying that we shouldn’t open a ‘Pandora’s box of redistribution’, because according to them we’d never know where to stop. This hypocritical discourse existed after the Revolution, and has never really stopped existing since then."