The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property

by Rafe Blaufarb

What does it mean to own something? What sorts of things can be owned, and what cannot? How does one relinquish ownership? What are the boundaries between private and public property? Over the course of a decade, the French Revolution grappled with these questions. Punctuated by false starts, contingencies, and unexpected results, this process laid the foundations of the Napoleonic Code and modern notions of property.

As Rafe Blaufarb demonstrates in this ambitious work, the French Revolution remade the system of property-holding that had existed in France before 1789. The revolutionary changes aimed at two fundamental goals: the removal of formal public power from the sphere of property and the excision of property from the realm of sovereignty. The revolutionaries accomplished these two aims by abolishing privately-owned forms of power, such as jurisdictional lordship and venal public office, and by dismantling the Crown domain, thus making the state purely sovereign. This brought about a Great Demarcation: a radical distinction between property and power from which flowed the critical distinctions between the political and the social, state and society, sovereignty and ownership, the public and private. It destroyed the conceptual basis of the Old Regime, laid the foundation of France's new constitutional order, and crystallized modern ways of thinking about polities and societies.

By tracing how the French Revolution created a new legal and institutional reality, The Great Demarcation shows how the revolutionary transformation of Old Regime property helped inaugurate political modernity

Genres: History, Economics, Politics, Law, Philosophy, France

304 pages, Hardcover

Published June 1, 2016

Reviews

[David Montgomery · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting but also quite dense book about the transition from to "modern" definitions of property in Revolutionary France (and, by extension, to a lot of the world due to adoption of the Napoleonic Code). Before the Revolution, most property had multiple owners, one person who owned feudal rights over the land and another who owned the right to use it (subject to the payment of feudal dues); this complex system of property had impacts on political rights (and indeed public offices were themselves also property). It's all quite complex, and the transformation from 1789 into the 19th Century followed a convoluted path. Blaufarb traces this with a detached perspective and a heavy emphasis on the intellectual arguments brought to bear on the problem by various sides. There's some really interesting stuff here, but the whole book is probably too dense for the general reader. For those with interest and grounding in either Revolutionary-era French history or in the history of property law, though, this is a must-read.