In autumn 1792, a serious economic crisis led to a rise in the cost of living. Unrest developed with demands for taxation measures. Robespierre intervenes in this speech to promote the limitation of property rights,2 or, more precisely, their subordination to the right of existence.
To address the people’s representatives on ways of providing for its subsistence is to address them not only on the most sacred of their duties but also the most precious of their interests. For they surely identify themselves with the people.
I do not mean to plead only the cause of indigent citizens, but that of property-owners and tradespeople too.
I will limit myself to recalling a few obvious principles, but ones that seem to have been forgotten. I will refer only to simple measures that have already been proposed, for the task here is not so much to create brilliant theories as to return to the primary notions suggested by common sense.
In every country where nature provides for the needs of men with prodigality, scarcity can only be imputed to defects of administration or of the laws themselves; bad laws and bad administration have their origins in false principles and bad morals.
It is a fact generally recognized that the soil of France produces a great deal more than is needed to feed her inhabitants and that the present scarcity is an artificial one. The conclusion to be drawn from this fact and the principle I have stated may be awkward, but this is no time to flatter ourselves. Citizens, it is you who will have the glory of making genuine principles prevail, and giving the world just laws. You are certainly not here to plod servilely along the rut of tyrannical prejudices traced by your predecessors; rather you are starting a new career in which no one has preceded you. You need at least to subject to severe examination all the laws made under royal despotism and under the auspices of noble, ecclesiastical or bourgeois aristocracy; and so far you have no others at all. The most imposing authority being cited is that of a minister of Louis XVI, fought by another of the same tyrant’s ministers.3 I saw the birth of the Constituent Assembly’s legislation on the grain trade; it was just the same as in the period that preceded it; and it has still not changed, because the interests and prejudices that were its foundations have not changed at all. I saw, during the time of that Assembly, the same events that are now occurring once again; I saw the aristocracy accuse the people; I saw hypocritical intriguers attributing their own crimes to defenders of liberty whom they called agitators and anarchists; I saw an impudent minister, whose virtue it was not permitted to question, demanding worship from France while ruining her, and from the centre of those criminal intrigues saw tyranny emerge, armed with martial law, to wallow legally in the blood of starving citizens. Millions to the minister from whom it was forbidden to ask for accounts, subsidies that went into the pockets of leeches on the people, unlimited freedom of trade, and bayonets to calm fears or appease hunger: such was the vaunted policy of our first legislators.
Subsidies can be discussed; freedom of trade is necessary up to the point where homicidal greed starts to abuse it; the use of bayonets is an atrocity; the system is essentially incomplete, because it fails to touch on the real principle.
The errors into which we have fallen on this matter seem to me to come from two main causes.
Firstly, the authors of the theory treated foodstuffs essential for life as ordinary merchandise, and made no distinction between the trade in wheat, for example, and the trade in indigo; they had far more to say about the grain trade than about the subsistence of the people; and having failed to bring that fundamental matter into their calculations, they made a faulty application of generally obvious principles; that mixture of true and false added something specious to an erroneous system.
Secondly, they did even less to adapt it to the stormy circumstances that revolutions bring; and their vague theory, even if it had been good for ordinary times, would have no application to the instantaneous measures that moments of crisis can require of us. They counted for much the profits of merchants or landowners, and the lives of men for almost nothing. And why? It was great men, ministers, the rich who were writing, who governed; had it been the people, it seems probable that this system would have been given a few modifications!
Common sense indicates, for example, the truth that foodstuffs that are in no way essential to life can be left to untrammelled speculation by the merchant; any momentary scarcity that might be felt is always a bearable inconvenience; and it is acceptable in general that the unlimited freedom of such a market should turn to the greater profit of the state and some individuals; but the lives of men cannot be subjected to the same uncertainty. It is not necessary that I be able to purchase brilliant fabrics; but I do need to be rich enough to buy bread, for myself and my children. The merchant is welcome to retain goods coveted by wealth and vanity in his shops, until he finds the moment to sell them at the highest possible price; but no man has the right to amass piles of wheat, when his neighbour is dying of hunger.
What is the first object of society? It is to maintain the imprescriptible rights of man. What is the first of those rights? The right to life.
The first social law is therefore the one that guarantees all members of society the means to live; all the others are subordinate to that one; property was only instituted and guaranteed to consolidate it; it is primarily to live that people have property. It is not true that property can ever be in opposition to human subsistence.
The foods necessary to man are as sacred as life itself. Everything essential to conserve life is property common to the whole of society. Only the surplus can be individual property and left subject to the enterprise of merchants. Any mercantile speculation I make at the expense of my fellow’s life is not trade at all, it is brigandage and fratricide.
Under this principle, what is the problem that needs to be solved on this matter of legislation on subsistence? It is this: to guarantee to all members of society the enjoyment of that portion of the fruits of the earth which is necessary for their existence, and to landowners or cultivators the price of their industry, while yielding the surplus to freedom of trade.
I defy the most scrupulous defender of property to contest these principles, short of declaring openly that he understands this word as the right to despoil and assassinate his fellows. So how have people been able to claim that any sort of restriction, or rather any regulation of the trade in wheat, was an attack on property, and disguise that barbaric system under the specious name of freedom of trade? Do the authors of this system not perceive that they are inevitably in contradiction with themselves?
Why are you forced to approve the prohibition of grain exports whenever abundance is not assured in the interior? You yourselves fix the price of bread; do you fix that of spices, or of the brilliant products of India? What is the cause of all these exceptions, if it is not the very obviousness of the principles I have just developed? What am I saying? Sometimes the government even subjects the trade in luxury goods to modifications dictated by sound policy; why should the one affecting the people’s subsistence be compulsorily exempt?
No doubt if all men were just and virtuous; if cupidity were never tempted to devour the people’s substance; if the rich, receptive to the voices of reason and nature, regarded themselves as the bursars of society, or as brothers to the poor, it might be possible to recognize no law but the most unlimited freedom; but if it is true that avarice can speculate on the misery and tyranny itself on the despair of the people; if it is true that all the passions declare war on suffering humanity, then why should not the law repress these abuses? Why should it not stay the homicidal hand of the monopolist, as it does that of the common murderer? Why should it not concern itself with the subsistence of the people, after caring so long for the pleasures of the great, and the power of despots?
Now, what are the means of repressing these abuses? It is claimed that they are impracticable; I maintain that they are as simple as they are infallible; it is claimed they present an insoluble problem, even to genius; I maintain that at least they present no difficulty to common sense and good faith; I maintain that they injure neither the interests of commerce, nor the rights of property.
Let the circulation of goods be protected throughout the whole Republic; but let the necessary measures be taken to ensure that circulation takes place. It is precisely the lack of circulation that I am complaining about. For the scourge of the people, the source of scarcity, is the obstacles placed in the way of circulation, under the pretext of rendering it unlimited. Does public subsistence circulate when greedy speculators are keeping it piled in their granaries? Does it circulate, when it is accumulated in the hands of a small number of millionaires who withhold it from the market, to make it more valuable and rare; who coldly calculate how many families must perish before the commodity reaches the release date fixed by their atrocious avarice? Does it circulate, when it merely crosses the regions where it is produced, before the eyes of indigent citizens suffering the tortures of Tantalus,4 to be swallowed up in the unknown pit of some public scarcity entrepreneur? Does it circulate when alongside the most abundant harvests the needy citizen languishes, unable to give a gold piece or a slip of paper valuable enough to obtain a bag of it?
Circulation is that which puts the essential foodstuff within reach of all men, and carries abundance and life into humble cottages. Does blood circulate when it is congested in the brain or in the chest? It circulates when it flows freely through the body; subsistence is the blood of the people, and its free circulation is no less necessary to the social body than that of the blood to the life of the human body. So support the free circulation of grain, by preventing all harmful congestions. By what means is this object to be achieved? By depriving cupidity of the motive and facility to bring them about. The three things that favour them are: secrecy, undefined freedom, and the certainty of impunity.
Secrecy, when anyone can hide a quantity of public subsistence of which he is depriving the whole of society; when he can fraudulently cause it to vanish and transport it either to foreign countries or to inland warehouses. Now, two simple measures are proposed: the first is to take the necessary steps to record the quantity of grain that each area has produced, and that each landowner or farmer has harvested. The second consists in forcing grain merchants to sell the grain on the market, and forbidding all transportation of purchases during the night. Neither the practicability nor the usefulness of these measures needs to be proved; for neither is contested. Is that legitimacy? But how in any case could general police regulations, made in the interests of society, be seen as an attack on property? Ha! what sort of good citizen can complain of being obliged to act with probity and in broad daylight? To whom are the shadows necessary, other than conspirators and knaves? Besides, have I not proved to you that society had the right to demand the portion that is necessary for the subsistence of the citizens? What am I saying? This is the most sacred of its duties. How then could the laws necessary to ensure its fulfilment be unjust?
I said that the other causes of the disastrous operations by the monopoly were undefined liberty and impunity. What surer way of encouraging greed and detaching it from any sort of brake, than to state as a principle that the law has not even the right to supervise it, to subject it to the lightest of curbs? That the only rule prescribed for it is the power to try anything, with impunity? What am I saying? Such is the degree of perfection to which this theory has been carried that it is all but established that hoarders are impeccable; that monopolists are benefactors of humanity; that in the quarrels that arise between them and the people it is the people who are always in the wrong. Either the crime of monopoly is not possible or it is real. If it is a chimera, how come that people have always believed in that chimera? Why have we been suffering its ravages since the first moment of our revolution? Why do believable reports and incontestable facts point to its culpable manoeuvres? And if it is real, through what strange privilege does it alone obtain the right to be protected? What limits would the pitiless vampires who speculate in human misery set to their attacks, if any kind of protest was invariably met with bayonets and the absolute command to believe in the purity and beneficence of all hoarders? Undefined liberty is none other than the excuse, the safeguard and the cause of this abuse. How then could it be its cure? What is being complained of? Precisely those evils that the present system has produced, or at least evils that it has not managed to prevent. And what remedy is proposed to us? The present system. I denounce the assassins of the people to you, and you reply: let them be. Under this system, everything is against society; everything favours the grain merchants.
Here, legislators, all your wisdom and all your circumspection are needed. Such a subject is always delicate to deal with; it is dangerous to add to the alarm of the people and to seem even to be authorizing its discontent. It is still more dangerous to silence the truth and to dissimulate principles. But if you are willing to observe them, all difficulties evaporate; only principles can stem the source of the evil.
I am well aware that when we examine the circumstances of some particular riot, aroused by the real or imagined scarcity of wheat, we sometimes recognize the influence of an outside cause. Ambition and intrigue need to start trouble: sometimes it is those same men who stir up the people, to find the pretext to slaughter it and to make liberty itself seem terrible in the eyes of weak and selfish individuals. But it is no less true that the people is naturally upright and peaceable; it is always guided by a pure intention; the malevolent can only stir it up by presenting a motive that is powerful and legitimate in its eyes. They make use of its discontent rather than whipping it up; and when they lead it into ill-considered acts, through the pretext of subsistence, they can do so only because it is receptive to such impressions, from oppression and misery. A contented people was never a turbulent people. Anyone who knows men, and especially anyone who knows the French people, also knows that it is not in the power of a madman or a bad citizen to make it rise for no reason against the laws that it loves, still less against its chosen representatives and against the liberty it has conquered. It is for those representatives to show the same confidence in it that it places in them, and to frustrate aristocratic malevolence, by satisfying its needs and calming its fears.
Even the fears of the citizens ought to be be respected. How can they be calmed, if you remain inactive? The very measures being proposed, even if they are less necessary than we think, the mere fact that the people desires them, that they prove your attachment to its interests, should be enough to persuade you to adopt them. I have already mentioned the nature and spirit of these laws, and will limit myself here to asking that any draft decrees that propose precautions against monopoly be given priority, while reserving the right to suggest modifications should they be adopted. I have already proved that these measures and the principles on which they are based were necessary to the people. I am now going to prove that they are useful to the rich and to all property owners.
I would take from them no honest profit, no legitimate property; I would take from them only the right to infringe on those of others; I would not destroy commerce at all, only the monopolist’s brigandage; I would sentence them only to the punishment of allowing their fellows to live. Now nothing, really, could be more advantageous to them; the greatest service the legislator can perform for men is to force them to be honest folk. The greatest interest of man is not to accumulate treasure, and the sweetest property is certainly not to devour the subsistence of a hundred poor families. The pleasure of comforting his fellows, and the glory of serving his homeland, are worth at least as much as that deplorable advantage. What use to the greediest speculators is the undefined freedom of their odious trade? It makes them either oppressed or oppressors. The latter destiny is especially frightful. Rich egoists, learn to foresee and avert in good time the terrible results of the struggle of pride and limp passions against justice and humanity. Let the example of the nobles and kings be a lesson to you. Learn to savour the charms of equality and the delights of virtue; or at least be content with the advantages that fortune gives you, and leave the people some bread, work and morals. The enemies of liberty thrash about in vain to tear the bosom of their homeland; they will no more stay the course of human reason than that of the sun; cowardice shall never triumph over courage; the spirit of intrigue had better flee before the spirit of liberty. And you, legislators, remember that you are the representatives not of a privileged caste, but of the French people; do not forget that the source of order is justice; that the surest guarantor of public peace is the well-being of the citizens, and that the long convulsions that tear states apart are only the combat of prejudice against principle, egoism against the general interest, the arrogance and passions of powerful men against the rights, and the needs, of the weak.