The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels (classic novels .txt) 📕

The ancient slavery had lost its vitality. Neither in the country in large scale agriculture, nor in the manufactories of the towns did it yield any more returns—the market for its products had disappeared. And small scale production and artisanship, to which the gigantic production of the flourishing time of the empire was now reduced, did not leave any room for numerous slaves. Only house and luxury slaves of the rich were still retained by society. But this declining slavery was as yet sufficiently strong to brand productive labor as slave work, as below the dignity of free Romans; and everybody was now a free Roman. An increasing number of superfluous slaves who had become a drug on their owners were dismissed, while on the other hand the number of colonists and of beggared free men (similar to the poor whites in the slave states of America) grew continuously. Christianity is perfectly innocent of this gradual decline of ancient slavery. For it had taken part in the slavery of the Roman empire for centuries. It never prevented the slave trade of Christians later on, neither of the Germans in the North, nor of the Venetians on the Mediterranean, nor the negro traffic of later years.[34] Slavery died, because it did not pay any longer. But it left behind its poisonous sting by branding as ignoble the productive labor of free men. This brought the Roman world into a closed alley from which it could not escape. Slave labor was economically impossible and the labor of free men was under a moral ban. The one could exist no longer, the other could not yet be the fundamental form of social production. There was no other help but a complete revolution.

The provinces were not any better off. The most complete reports on this subject are from Gaul. By the side of the colonists, free farmers still existed there. In order to protect themselves against the brutal blackmail of the officials, judges and usurers, they frequently placed themselves under the protectorate of a man of influence and power. Not only single individuals did so, but whole communities, so that the emperors of the fourth century often issued decrees prohibiting this practice. But what good did protection do to the clients? The patron imposed the condition that they should transfer the title of their lots to him, and in return he assured them of the free enjoyment of their land for life—a trick which the holy church remembered and freely imitated during the ninth and tenth century, for the greater glory of God. In the fifth century, however, about the year 475, Bishop Salvianus of Marseilles still vehemently denounced such robbery and relates that the methods of the Roman officials and great landlords became so oppressive that many "Romans" fled to the districts occupied by the barbarians and feared nothing so much as a return under Roman rule. That poor parents frequently sold their children into slavery, is proved by a law forbidding this practice.

In return for liberating the Romans from their own state, the barbarians appropriated two-thirds of the entire land and divided it among themselves. The distribution was made by gentile rules. As the number of the conquerors was relatively small, large tracts remained undivided in the possession of the nation, the tribe or the gens. Every gens distributed the land for cultivation and pastures to the individual households by drawing lots. We do not know whether repeated divisions took place at that time. At any rate, this practice was soon discarded in the Roman provinces, and the individual lot became salable private property, a so-called freehold (allodium). Forests and pastures remained undivided for collective use. This use and the mode of cultivating the divided land was regulated by tradition and the will of the community. The longer the gens lived in its village, and the better Germans and Romans became amalgamated in the course of time, the more did the character of kinship lose ground before territorial bounds. The gens disappeared in the mark commune, the members of which, however, still exhibited traces of kinship. In the countries where mark communes were still preserved—in the North of France, in England, Germany and Scandinavia—the gentile constitution gradually merged into a local constitution and thus acquired the capacity of being fitted into a state. Nevertheless this local constitution retained some of the primeval democratic character which distinguishes the whole gentile order, and thus preserved a piece of gentilism even in its enforced degeneration of later times. This left a weapon in the hands of the oppressed, ready to be wielded by them even in the present time.

The rapid loss of the bonds of blood in the gens as a result of conquest caused the degeneration of the tribal and national organs of gentilism. We know that the rule over subjugated people does not agree with the gentile constitution. Here we have an opportunity to observe this on a large scale. The German nations, masters of the Roman provinces, had to organize their conquests. But they could neither adopt the Romans as a body into their gentes, nor rule them by the help of gentile organs. A substitute for them had to be placed at the head of the Roman administrative bodies that were largely retained in local affairs, and this substitute could only be another state. Hence the organs of the gentile constitution had to become organs of the state, and under the pressure of the moment this took place very rapidly. Now the first representative of the conquering nation was the military leader. The internal and external security of the conquered territory demanded that his power should be strengthened. The moment had arrived for the transition from war leadership to monarchy. And the change took place.

Take e. g. the realm of the Franks. The victorious Salians had not only come into possession of the extensive Roman state dominions, but also of all the large tracts that had not been assigned to the more or less small mark communities, especially of all large forest tracts. The first thing which the king of the Franks, now a real monarch, did was to change this national property into royal property, to steal it from the people and to donate or give it in lien to his retainers. This retinue, originally composed of his personal war followers and of the subcommanders of the army, was increased by Romans, i. e., romanized Gauls who quickly became invaluable to the king through their knowledge of writing, their education and their familiarity with the language and laws of the country, and with the language of Latin literature. But slaves, serfs and freed slaves also became his courtiers. From among all these he chose his favorites. At first they received donations of public land, and later on these benefits were generally conferred for the lifetime of the king. The foundation of a new nobility was thus laid at the expense of the people.

But this was not all. The wide expanse of the empire could not be governed by means of the old gentile constitution. The council of chiefs, if it had not become obsolete long ago, could not have held any more meetings. It was soon displaced by the standing retinue of the king. A pretense at the old public meeting was still kept up, but it also was more and more limited to the meeting of the subcommanders of the army and the rising nobles.

Just as formerly, the Roman farmers during the last period of the republic, so now the free land-owning peasants, the mass of the Frank people, were exhausted and reduced to penury by continual civil feuds and wars of conquest. They who once had formed the whole army and, after the conquest of France, its picked body, were so impoverished at the end of the ninth century that hardly more than every fifth man could go to war. The former army of free peasants, convoked directly by the king, was replaced by an army composed of dependents of the new nobles. Among these servants were also villeins, the descendants of the peasants who had acknowledged no master but the king and a little earlier not even a king. Under Charlemagne's successors the ruin of the Frank peasantry was aggravated by internal wars, weakness of the royal power and corresponding overbearance of the nobles. The latter had received another addition to their ranks through the installation by Charlemagne of "Gau"[35] (district) counts who strove to make their offices hereditary. The invasions of the Normans completed the wreck of the peasantry. Fifty years after the death of Charlemagne, France lay as resistless at the feet of the Normans, as four hundred years previous the Roman empire had lain at the feet of the Franks.

Not only was the external impotence almost the same, but also the internal order or rather disorder of society. The free Frank peasants found themselves in a similar position as their predecessors, the Roman colonists. Ruined by wars and robberies, they had been forced to seek the protection of the nobles or the church, because the royal power was too weak to shield them. But they had to pay dearly for this protection. Like the Gallic farmers, they had to transfer the titles of their land to their patrons, and received it back from them as tenants in different and varying forms, but always only in consideration of services and tithes. Once driven into this form of dependence, they gradually lost their individual liberty. After a few generations most of them became serfs. How rapidly the free peasants sank from their level is shown by the land records of the abbey Saint Germain des Prés, then near, now in, Paris. On the vast holdings of this abbey in the surrounding country 2788 households, nearly all of them Franks with German names, were living at Charlemagne's time; 2080 of them were colonists, 35 lites,[36] 220 slaves and only 8 freeholders. The practice of the patrons to demand the transfer of the land titles to themselves and give the former owners the use of the land for life, denounced as ungodly by Salvianus, was now universally practiced by the Church in its dealings with the peasants. The compulsory labor that now came more and more into vogue, had been moulded as much after the Roman angariae, compulsory service for the state, as after the services of the German mark men in bridge and road building and other work for common purposes. By all appearances, then, the mass of the population had arrived at the same old goal after four hundred years.

That proved two things: Firstly, that the social differentiation and the division of property in the sinking Roman empire corresponded perfectly to the contemporaneous stage of production in agriculture and industry, and hence was unavoidable; secondly, that this stage of production had not been essentially altered for better or worse during four hundred years, and therefore had necessarily produced the same division of property and the same classes of population. The town had lost its supremacy over the country during the last centuries of the Roman empire, and had not regained it during the first centuries of German rule. This presupposes a low stage of agriculture and industry. Such a general condition produces of necessity the domination of great proprietors and the dependence of small farmers. How impossible it was to graft either the slave labor of Roman latifundian economy or the compulsory labor of the new large scale production into such a society, is proved by Charlemagne's very extensive experiments with his famous imperial country