lands were again wholly confiscated by the State in 1818, and plundered anew during three years. What remained of them was only returned to the communes at the end of that period, in 1816.
This was by no means the end. Every new régime saw in communal lands a source of reward for its supporters. Therefore at three different intervals since 1880, the first time in 1837 and the last under Napoleon III, laws were promulgated to force peasants to divide what they possessed of forests and common pasture-lands; and three times the government was compelled to abrogate this law on account of the peasants' resistance. All the same, Napoleon the Third was able to profit by it and bag several large estates for his favorites.
These are facts; and this is what, in scientific language, is called the "natural death" of the communal landed property under the influence of economic laws! As well call the massacre of a hundred thousand soldiers on a battlefield "natural death."
What happened in France happened also in Belgium, England, Germany, Austria,—in fact everywhere in Europe, Slav countries excepted.
Strange that the periods of plundering the communes should correspond in all Western Europe! The methods alone vary. Thus in England those in power did not dare to enact sweeping measures; they preferred passing several thousands of separate "enclosure acts" by which, in each special case. Parliament sanctioned the confiscation of land—it does so still—and gave to the squire the right of keeping common lands he had fenced in. And notwithstanding that Nature has ever since respected the narrow furrows by which communal fields were temporarily divided among families in the villages of England, and that we have clear descriptions of this form of landed property at the beginning of the century in the books of a certain Marshall, scientific men (such as Seebohm, worthy emulator of Fustel de Coulanges) are not wanting to maintain and teach that communes have never existed in England save in the form of serfdom!
