Emile Souvestre, in his work on Firnisterre , mentions the existence of agrarian communities in Brittany. He says it is notuncommon to find farms there, cultivated by several families associated together. He states that they live peacefully andprosperously, though there is no written agreement to define the shares and rights of the associates. According to theaccount of the Abbé Delalande, in the small islands of Hoedic and Houat, situated not far from Belle Isle, the inhabitants livein community. The soil is not divided into separate properties. All labour for the general interest, and live on the fruits oftheir collective industry. The curé is the head of the community; but in case of important resolutions, he is assisted by acouncil composed of the twelve most respected of the older inhabitants. This system, if correctly described, presents one ofthe most archaic forms of agrarian community. In 1860, the commissioners for the prize of honour for agriculture in the Jurawere struck with a fact which the author of the report took care to put prominently forward: almost all the farms aredirected by a group of couples, of patriarchal habits, living and labouring in common. There are, then, still existing here andthere traces of the ancient communities, which for so many centuries protected the existence of rural populations; but, likethose representatives of primitive Fauna which are on the point of disappearing, it is to the wildest and most remote spotsthat we must go in search of them. One cannot refrain from a feeling of regret, on thinking of the complete ruin ofinstitutions inspired by a spirit of fraternity and mutual understanding unknown to the present age. Formerly they were theprotection of the serf against the rigours of feudality; and, what was not less important, presided at the birth of smallproperty, which is characteristic of the agrarian condition of France.
We shall see bow in England the nobility took advantage of its supremacy in the state to create latifundia at the expense ofthe small properties, which it gradually annexed as it made their existence more and more difficult. How was it that inFrance, where the nobility were armed with even more excessive privileges than in England, and the peasants were far morecrushed and destitute of rights, a similar economic evolution was not produced? Why, even under the old system, did smallproperty make such progress in the country where everything was against it, and disappear in that where political libertyseemed to afford it complete security? I have never yet seen any explanation of this striking contrast presented by the twocountries. The chief cause seems to me to be that agrarian communities were preserved in France until the eighteenthcentury, whereas they disappeared at a very early date in England. So long as they existed, they formed an obstacle to theextension of the lord's domain: in the first place, because their existence was secure and their duration permanent; secondly,because the principle of collectivity gave them a great power of cohesion and resistance: and, finally, because their propertywas, one may say, inalienable, and was protected from excessive subdivision and the vicissitudes of partition resulting fromsuccession or sale. If these associations could survive through the whole of the middle ages without material change, like themonasteries, it was because they had a similar constitution to the monasteries. Being corporations, they bad the perpetuity ofcorporations. When the peasants dissolved these communities, and created small rural property by partition, the nobility hadlost all power of extension, and the Revolution was already at hand, which was to destroy their privileges and to afford therights of the cultivators a full security. Between the moment when the members of the communities transformed themselvesinto small proprietors, and that when the Code Civil appeared to finally emancipate them, the feudal aristocracy, alreadyenfeebled, had not had the time to employ its wealth and its supremacy for the enlargement of its domains. In England, onthe contrary, communities ceased to exist at a period when the nobility were still all-powerful. The small proprietarycultivators found themselves isolated, and unable to defend their rights. Their lands were consequently usurped one afteranother by the lord of the manor. The agricultural population acquired individual property too soon; and so latifundia wereconstituted at their expense. If collective property had been maintained longer, agricultural associations on disappearingwould have left in their place a nation of proprietors, as in France. It is a remarkable fact that by the agrarian system ofprimitive times falling into desuetude in England earlier than in other countries, the feudal nobility has been enabled toperpetuate itself there, and that it is the premature establishment of individual property which has prevented the creation of arural democracy such as we see in France.
1. It may be of use to give the text of this important passage: "Nec quisquam agri inodum certum aut fines habet proprios,sed magistratus ac principes, in annos singulos, gentibus cognationibusque hominum qui una coterunt, quantum tis et quoloco visum est, agri attribuunt atque anno post alio transire cogunt." Caesar, De Bello Gallico , vi. 22.
2. De la Saisine , by M. Würth, procureur général at Ghent. Gand, 1873. See also J. Simonnet, Hist. et théorie de LaSaisine , and Lehüeron, Inst. carol ., p. 52.
