What is Property?

know the economic and academic languages too well to play with words pregnant with storms. Therefore, I believe that you have done with property what Rousseau did, eighty years ago, with letters: a magnificent and poetic debauchery of spirit and science. That is, at least, my opinion.

"This is what I said to the Institute the day I reported on your book. I learned that there was a desire to prosecute it legally; you will perhaps never know by what chance I was fortunate enough to prevent it (1). What an eternal sorrow it would have been for me if the King's Prosecutor, that is to say, the executor of high works in intellectual matters, had come after me and, as it were, in my footsteps, to attack your book and torment your person! I spent two terrible nights because of it, I swear to you, and I only succeeded in holding back the secular arm by making it felt that your book was an academic dissertation, and not an incendiary manifesto. Your style is too elevated ever to serve the madmen who argue with stones in the street about the greatest questions of our social order. But take care, sir, that they do not soon come, despite you, to seek materials in this formidable arsenal, and that your vigorous metaphysics does not fall into the hands of some crossroads sophist who would comment on it before a starving audience: we would have looting as a conclusion and peroration.

(1) M. Vivien, Minister of Justice, before ordering any prosecution against the Memoir on Property, wished to have the opinion of M. Blanqui, and it was upon the observations of this honorable academician that he spared a writing against which the furies of the public prosecutor's office were already aroused. M. Vivien is not the only man of power to whom, since my first publication, I have owed assistance and protection: but such generosity in political regions is rare enough that it should be recognized graciously and without restriction. I have always thought, for my part, that bad institutions make bad magistrates, just as the cowardice and hypocrisy of certain bodies come solely from the spirit that governs them. Why, for example, despite the virtues and talents that shine within them, are academies in general centers of intellectual repression, stupidity, and base intrigue? This question would deserve to be proposed by an academy: there would be competitors.