What is Property?

XI

3. That this judgment of the Academy be recorded in its printed collections.
   These three propositions, put to a vote, are adopted."

After this burlesque decree, which its authors thought they were making energetic by giving it the form of a denial, I have only to ask the reader not to measure the intelligence of my compatriots by that of our Academy.

While my patrons in social and political sciences were fulminating anathema against my brochure, a man from outside the Franche-Comté, who did not know me, who could even have believed himself personally attacked by the overly sharp criticism I had made of the economists, a publicist as learned as he is modest, loved by the people whose pain he feels, honored by the power he strives to enlighten without flattering or debasing it, M. Blanqui, member of the Institute, professor of political economy, and partisan of property, defended me before his colleagues and before the minister, and saved me from the blows of a justice that is always blind because it is always ignorant.

I thought the reader would see with pleasure the letter that M. Blanqui did me the honor of writing to me at the time of the publication of my second memoir, a letter as honorable for its author as it is flattering for the one who is its object.

"I hasten to thank you for the copy of your second memoir on property that you were so kind as to send me. I read it with all the interest that knowledge of the first naturally inspired in me. I am very glad...