Page:The State Its Historic Role.djvu/34

 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?

—Evidently not.

To allow citizens to constitute 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 constitute 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 as far as possible; or else to allow the provincial well-to-do to enrich themselves at the people's expense, as was the case in England up till now, and is so still in institutions and in customs.

This is easily understood. Customary law is naturally pertaining 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 the Convention (known under the name of Code Napoleon) does not recognize customary law, it only recognizes Roman law, or rather Byzantine law.

That is why in France when the wind blows down a tree on the National highway, or a peasant prefers giving a stonebreaker two or three francs to the unpleasant task of repairing the communal road himself, it is necessary for twelve or fifteen employees of the home office and treasury to be put in motion, and for more than fifty documents to be exchanged between these austere functionaries, before the tree can be sold, or the peasant receives permission to deposit two or three francs into the communal treasury.

Should you have any doubts about it you will find these fifty documents recapitulated and duly numbered by M. Tricoche in the Journal des Economistes.

This under the third Republic, be it understood, for I do not speak of the barbarous methods of the ancient régime that limited itself to