If I had to answer the following question, “What is slavery?” and if I should respond in one word, “It is murder,” my meaning would be understood at once. I should not need a long explanation to show that the power to deprive a man of his thought, his will, and his personality is the power of life and death. So why to this other question, “What is property?” should I not answer in the same way, “It is theft,” without fearing to be misunderstood, since the second proposition is only a transformation of the first?

I undertake to discuss the very principle of our government and of our institutions – namely, property: in this I am within my right. I may be wrong in the conclusion I draw from my research, but I am within my right. I want to place the last theme of my book first, and I am still within my right.

One author teaches that property is a civil right, based on occupation and sanctioned by law; another holds that it is a natural right, arising from labour; and these doctrines, though they seem opposed, are both encouraged and applauded. I contend that neither occupation nor labour nor law can create property, which is rather an effect without a cause. Am I to be censured for this?

But complaints arise: “Property is theft!” This is the battle-cry of '93, the signal for revolutions!

Reader, be reassured that I am not an agent of discord or an instigator of sedition.

Property is impossible; equality does not exist. The former is odious to us, but we want to possess it; the latter dominates all our thoughts, but we do not know how to realise it. Who will explain this profound antagonism between our conscience and our will? Who will point out the causes of this pernicious error which has become the most sacred principle of justice and society? I am bold enough to undertake the task, and I hope to succeed.

But before explaining how man has violated justice, it is necessary to determine what justice is.

First part

Of the moral sense in man and in animals

The philosophers have debated the question of the precise line separating the intelligence of man from that of animals, and their habit has been to offer much foolishness before coming down to the only course open to them, observation. It was reserved to a modest scholar, who perhaps did not pride himself on his philosophy, to put an end to the interminable controversy by one of those simple but luminous distinctions which are worth more than systems. Frédéric Cuvier separated instinct from intelligence.

But as yet no one has proposed this question:

Is the difference between moral sense in man and that in the beast one of kind or only of degree?

If anyone had until now dared to maintain the latter alternative, his thesis would have seemed scandalous, blasphemous, and offensive to morality and religion.

The letter which follows served as a preface to the first edition of this memoir:

Messieurs:

In your deliberation of 9 May 1833 concerning the triennial pension founded by Mme Suard, you expressed the following wish: “The Academy requests the pensioner to present annually, in the first two weeks in July, a succinct and clear statement of the various studies which he pursued during the past year.”

Messieurs, I will now discharge this duty.

When I solicited your votes, I boldly declared my intention to direct my studies to the discovery of ways “to improve the physical, moral, and intellectual condition of the most numerous and poorest class.” This idea, foreign as it may have seemed to the purpose of my candidacy, you received favourably; and by the precious distinction with which you have been pleased to honour me, you changed this formal offer into an inviolable and sacred obligation. From then on I understood how worthy and honourable the society I was dealing with was. My respect for its enlightenment, my recognition of its benefits, and my zeal for its glory have been boundless.

I was convinced from the first that, in order to escape the beaten path of opinions and systems, it was necessary to follow scientific procedures and a rigorous method in the study of man and of society; and so I devoted a year to grammar and philology.

The last resort of proprietors, the thundering argument whose invincible power reassures them is that, in their opinion, equality of conditions is impossible. “Equality of conditions is a chimera,” they cry with a knowing air; “distribute wealth equally today, and tomorrow this equality will have vanished.”

To this banal objection, which they repeat everywhere with the most incredible assurance, they never fail to add the following commentary, as a sort of “Glory be to the Father”:

“If all men were equal, nobody would work.”

This anthem is sung with a number of verses: “If all were masters, nobody would obey.” “If nobody were rich, who would employ the poor?” “And if nobody were poor, who would labour for the rich?” … But enough of these recriminations; we have better arguments to consider.

If I show that property itself is impossible, that property is a contradiction, a chimera, a utopia, and if I show this no longer by metaphysics and jurisprudence but by numbers, equations and calculations, imagine the fright of the astounded proprietor! And what do you, reader, think of the retort?

Numbers rule the world, mundum regunt numeri. This proverb is as true for the moral and political as for the sidereal and molecular world. The elements of justice are the same as those of algebra; legislation and government are nothing else than the arts of making classifications and balancing powers; and all of jurisprudence is in the rules of arithmetic.

Modern jurists, following the economists, have abandoned the theory of first occupancy as too destructive and have adopted that which regards property as born of labour. This is a delusion based on circular reasoning. In order to labour it is necessary to occupy, says Monsieur Cousin. Consequently, since the right of occupancy is equal for all, I have added in my turn that to labour it is necessary to accept equality.

“The rich,” exclaims Jean-Jacques [Rousseau], “have vainly said, ‘It is I who have built this wall, I who have earned this land by my labour.’ ‘Who gave these orders?’ we may reply, ‘and by what right do you demand payment from us for labour which we did not impose upon you?’” All sophistry fails against this reasoning.

But the partisans of labour do not see that their system is an absolute contradiction of the Code, all the articles and provisions of which assume property to be based upon the fact of first occupancy. If labour alone, through the appropriation which results from it, gives birth to property, then the Civil Code lies, the charter is a falsehood, and our whole social system is a violation of this right. This will appear from the evidence in the discussion we shall present in this and the next chapter concerning the right of labour as well as the fact of property.

Definitions

Roman law defined property – jus utendi et abutendi re sua, quatenus juris ratio patitur – as the right to use and abuse a thing within the limits of the law. A justification of the word “abuse” has been attempted on the grounds that it signifies not senseless and immoral abuse but only absolute domain – a vain distinction invented for the sanctification of property and without effect against the delights of enjoying it, which it neither prevents nor represses. The proprietor has the power to let his crops rot underfoot, sow his field with salt, milk his cows on the sand, turn his vineyard into a desert, and use his vegetable garden as a park: are these acts “abuse” or not? In matters of property, use and abuse are necessarily indistinguishable.

According to the Declaration of Rights, published as a preface to the Constitution of '93, property is “the right to enjoy and dispose at will of one's goods, one's income, and the fruit of one's labour and industry.”

Code Napoléon, article 544: “Property is the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner, provided we do not act against the laws and regulations.”

First memoir

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's What is Property? (1840) appeared at a crucial point in modern French history. Just ten years before, during the “three glorious days” of revolution in July 1830, the Orleanist monarchy had been founded with a fanfare of liberal bombast and high hopes, in some quarters, of fulfilling the aims of the first French Revolution. “What is the Third Estate?” the Abbé Sieyès had asked in 1789; and his answer – “Everything” – seemed now on the point of fulfillment, with the nation finally and truly united under the general will and according to the principles of liberty and justice. For a time this political dream of bourgeois hegemony, pursued within the framework of constitutional monarchy, was shared by workers as well as members of the propertied elite, who were following François Guizot's famous advice – “Enrich yourselves!”

Before the decade was up, however, the July Monarchy seemed to many observers to have degenerated into a tyranny of wealth and status hardly better than the Old Regime. Love of liberty had turned into a “religion of property.” The ruling principle was neither equality nor fraternity but sheer “egoism”; the nation celebrated by Guizot, Michelet, and others had become a scene of class struggle between owners and workers – the haves and the have-nots or, in the parlance of the day, the prolétaries versus the propriétaries.