In some places they even indulged the grotesque
hallucination of a "Convention together with a Napoleon."
After the first revolution had converted the serf farmers into
freeholders, Napoleon fixed and regulated the conditions under which,
unmolested, they could exploit the soil of France, that had just fallen
into their hands, and expiate the youthful passion for property. But
that which now bears the French farmer down is that very allotment of
land, it is the partition of the soil, the form of ownership, which
Napoleon had consolidated. These are the material condition that turned
French feudal peasant into a small or allotment farmer, and Napoleon
into an Emperor. Two generations have sufficed to produce the inevitable
result the progressive deterioration of agriculture, and the progressive
encumbering of the agriculturist The "Napoleonic" form of ownership,
which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the condition for
the emancipation and enrichment of the French rural population, has, in
the course of the century, developed into the law of their enslavement
and pauperism.
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