Now, then, this very law is the first of the "idees
Napoleoniennes," which the second Bonaparte must uphold. If he still
shares with the farmers the illusion of seeking, not in the system of
the small allotment itself, but outside of that system, in the influence
of secondary conditions, the cause of their ruin, his experiments
are bound to burst like soap-bubbles against the modern system of
production.
The economic development of the allotment system has turned bottom
upward the relation of the farmer to the other classes of society.
Under Napoleon, the parceling out of the agricultural lands into small
allotments supplemented in the country the free competition and the
incipient large production of the cities. The farmer class was
the ubiquitous protest against the aristocracy of land, just then
overthrown. The roots that the system of small allotments cast into the
soil of France, deprived feudalism of all nutriment. Its boundary-posts
constituted the natural buttress of the bourgeoisie against every stroke
of the old overlords.
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