Moribund Society and Anarchy

who declaim so much against the Anarchists for demanding expropriation by force distress themselves very much about expropriating the nobility in 1789, and frustrating the peasantry who had made themselves useful by hanging country squires, destroying charter-houses, and seizing seigniorial wealth? Did not the confiscations and sales, either fictitious or at absurd prices, which were made, have for their object the spoliation of the former possessors and the peasants who hoped for a share, in order that the bourgeoisie might monopolize the spoil to their own profit? Did they not make use of the out-and-out right of force, which they masked and sanctioned by legal comedies? Was not this spoliation iniquitous, (admitting that which we demand to be so, which it is not) seeing that it was not done for the benefit of the collectivity, but helped solely to enrich certain traffickers, who straightway hastened to make war upon the peasants that had thrown themselves into the assault upon the castles, by shooting them or treating them as brigands? The bourgeoisie, then, are badly out of place in crying out against robbery when we want to force them to make restitution, for their property is itself but the fruit of robbery.

VI

The Family

Property, the family, authority, have developed along parallel lines; of this there is no doubt. Granting that men united their efforts under the pressure of a common need, of some obstacle to be overcome against which individual efforts had exhausted themselves in vain, it follows that the benefits resulting from this cooperation of forces were shared in common. These associations being temporary, confined to the immediate result to be obtained, there is likewise no doubt that the first human association must have been, as it still is among certain mammiferous animals⁠—some of the anthropoid apes⁠—the nucleus of the family; that is to say, a group of one or a number of females and their young around the strongest male, who, in order to preserve his authority, expelled from the horde all the young males that had become old enough to give him umbrage. But as to whether this authority of the male was complete and assumed sway over every group from the start, it would be rash to decide; for though we find, among savages, examples in which the association having increased in numbers, by the grouping together of several family centers the authority of the male is preponderant, yet by a number of very convincing examples, by a number of customs such as that of couvade it would seem that the mother-right of primogeniture was the first recognized.1 Certain peoples exist in which the children belong to the tribe of the mother; others in which the authority of the male is already recognized, but in which his sister’s children inherit his possessions to the exclusion of his own. This would go to establish a transition from maternal to paternal authority. Another transitional characteristic is this custom of couvade, by which, when the woman is in confinement, it is the man who goes to bed, swallows drugs, and receives congratulations upon his delivery. In this one feels that the man, in order to affirm his authority over his progeny, needs facts to prove his paternity. He would not need them if it were not contested by anterior customs, which have perhaps disappeared, but the memory of which is perpetuated by the practice of retroactive customs that the former gave rise to.

As to the union of men and women, how many times has its form not been changed? At the outset, the very beginnings of humanity, there is no form of marriage; the most complete promiscuity reigns between the sexes; the male cohabits with the first female that comes in his way, who on the other hand accepts or submits to the caresses of all the males that take her. As men develop and become a little less brutal, though a great amount of promiscuity still reigns, they commence to distinguish a primitive sort of relationship. They have not yet learned to distinguish the terms father, mother, brother, sister, very definitely, but unions between tribes having the same totem, or the same common origin, are forbidden; the women, however, continue to belong to all the men, and the latter to all the women, of the tribe. Later on, the male having been acknowledged, the latter begins to recognize certain degrees of consanguinity and affiliation; but marriages continue to take place between brothers and sisters, the son inherits any member of his father’s harem without scruple. A still further step in evolution must be taken before the mother of the heir ceases to be included in the inheritance.

Observe also that if there be peoples among whom a single male may possess several females, on the other hand there exist some among whom the females possess several males. But these progressive steps, these changes of custom, do not follow logically, one after the other, mutually eliminating each other, as a more complex one appears. Rather these customs are founded one upon the other, fused and confused in such a manner that they can no longer be recognized. Their combinations are so multiplied, customs are so superimposed upon each other, eliminating one here, another there, that it is only by studying the observations of former travelers and still existing tribes that we are enabled to form an approximate idea of human evolution.

From all this, then, it follows that property has rested upon other bases than those upon which it is today supported, has had another method of division, and owes its present destiny only to force, cunning and robbery; for it is quite clear that the family having begun in common association, individual property could not then exist, and, consequently, that what originally belonged to all could not become the property of individuals without some sort of spoliation. In like manner the family has been quite different from what it now is. And