Tacitus reports; but he does not say who cultivated the fields, and 
explicitly states that the slaves only paid dues and performed no 
statute labour, so it would appear that what little agricultural work 
was required had to be performed by the bulk of the adult men. 

As was stated above, the form of marriage was pairing mar- 
riage gradually approximating to monogamy. It was not yet strict 
monogamy, for polygamy was permitted among high society. 
On the whole (unlike the Celts) they insisted on strict chastity 
among girls. Tacitus likewise speaks with particular warmth of the 
inviolability of the matrimonial bond among the Germans. He 
gives adultery on the part of the woman as the sole reason for 
divorce. But his report contains many gaps here, and in any case, 
it excessively holds up the mirror of virtue to the loose Romans. 
So much is certain: if the Germans in their forests were such 
exceptional models of virtue, only slight contact with the outer 
world was required to bring them down to the level of the other, 
average, Europeans. In the whirl of Roman life the last trace of 
strict morality disappeared even faster than the German language. 
It is enough to read Gregory of Tours.* It goes without saying that 
the refined opulence of sensuality could not exist in the primeval 
forests of Germany as it did in Rome, and so in this respect also 
the Germans were superior enough to the Roman world, without 
ascribing to them a continence in carnal matters that has never 
prevailed among any people as a whole. 

From the gentile system arose the obligation to inherit the feuds 
as well as the friendships of one’s father and relatives; and also 
wergeld, the fine paid in atonement for murder or injury, in place 
of blood revenge. A generation ago this wergeld was regarded as a 
specifically German institution, but it has since been proved that 
hundreds of peoples practised this milder form of blood revenge 
which had its origin in the gentile system. Like the obligation to 
render hospitality, it is found, for instance, among the American 
Indians. Tacitus’ description of the manner in which hospitality 
was exercised (Germania, 21) is almost identical, down to details, 
with Morgan’s relating to his Indians. 

@ Gregorius Turonensis, Historia Francorum.— Ed. 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 241 

The heated and ceaseless controversy as to whether or not the 
_Germans in Tacitus’ time had definitively divided up the cultivated 
land and how the pertinent passages should be interpreted is now 
a thing of the past. Now it has been established that the cultivated 
land of nearly all peoples was tilled in common by the gens and 
later on by communistic family communities, which Caesar still 
found among the Suebi*; that later the land was allotted and 
periodically re-allotted to the individual families; and that this 
periodical re-allotment of the cultivated land has been preserved 
in parts of Germany down to this day, no more need be said on 
the subject. If the Germans in one hundred and fifty years passed 
from common cultivation, such as Caesar expressly attributes to 
the Suebi—they have no divided or private tillage whatsoever, he 
says—to individual cultivation with the annual redistribution of 
the land in Tacitus’ time, it is surely progress enough; a transition 
from that stage to the complete private ownership of land in such 
a short period and without any outside intervention was an utter 
impossibility. Hence I read in Tacitus only what he states in so 
many words: They change (or redivide) the cultivated land every 
year, and enough common land is left over in the process.” It is 
the stage of agriculture and appropriation of the soil which exactly 
tallies with the gentile constitution of the Germans of that time. 

I leave the preceding paragraph unchanged, just as it stood in 
former editions. Meantime the question has assumed another 
aspect. Since Kovalevsky has demonstrated (see above, p. 44°) that 
the patriarchal household community was widespread, if not 
universal, as the intermediate stage between the mother-right 
communistic family and the modern isolated family, the question 
is no longer whether the land was common or private property, as 
was still discussed between Maurer and Waitz, but what form 
common property assumed. There is no doubt whatever that in 
Caesar’s time the Suebi not only owned their land in common, but 
also tilled it in common for common account. The questions 
whether their economic unit was the gens or the household 
community or an intermediate communistic kinship group, or 
whether all three of these groups existed depending on land 
conditions will remain subjects of controversy for a long time yet. 
But Kovalevsky maintains that the conditions described by Tacitus 

a Caesar, Commentarii de bello Gallico, IV, 1.— Ed. 

b Tacitus, Germania, 26.— Ed. 

¢ The text below, up to the words ‘While in Caesar...” (p. 242), was added by 
Engels in the 1891 edition.— Ed. 

4d See this volume, p. 167.— Ed. 

presuppose not the Mark or village community, but the household 
community; only this latter developed, much later into the village 
community, owing to the growth of the population. 

Hence, it is claimed, the German settlements on the territory 
they occupied in the time of the Romans, and on the territory they 
later took from the Romans, must have been not villages, but large 
family communities comprising several generations, which culti- 
vated a corresponding tract of land and used the surrounding 
waste land as a common Mark with their neighbours. The passage 
in Tacitus concerning the change of the cultivated land would 
then actually have an agronomic sense, namely, that the communi- 
ty cultivated a different tract of land every year, and the land 
cultivated during the previous year was left fallow or allowed to 
grow quite wild again. The sparsity of the population would have 
left enough spare waste land to make all disputes about Jand 
unnecessary. Only after the lapse of centuries, when the members 
of the household had increased in number to such an extent that 
common housekeeping became no longer possible under prevail- 
ing conditions of production, did the household communities 
dissolve. The former common fields and meadows were then 
divided in the familiar manner among the individual households 
now forming, at first for a time, and later once and for all, while 
forests, pastures and bodies of water remained common property. 

As far as Russia is concerned, this course of development 
appears to have been fully proved historically. As for Germany, 
and, to a lesser extent, for other Germanic countries, it cannot be 
denied that, in many respects, this view affords a_ better 
interpretation of the sources and an easier solution of difficulties 
than the former idea of tracing the village community back to the 
time of Tacitus. The oldest documents, for instance, the Codex 
Laureshamensis,’*° are on the whole more easily explained with the 
help of the household community than of the village Mark 
community. On the other hand, it presents new difficulties and 
new problems that need solution. Here, only further investigation 
can decide. I cannot deny, however, that it is highly probable the 
household community was also the intermediate stage in Germany, 
Scandinavia and England. 

While in Caesar the Germans had partly just taken up settled 
abodes, and partly were still seeking such, they had been settled 
for a full century in Tacitus’ time; correspondingly, the progress 
in the production of means of subsistence was unmistakable. They 
lived in log houses; their clothing was still of the primitive forest 
type, consisting of rough woollen cloaks and animal skins, and 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 243 

linen underclothing for the women and high society. They lived 
on milk, meat, wild fruit and, as Pliny adds, oatmeal porridge* 
(the Celtic national dish in Ireland and Scotland to this day). Their 
wealth consisted of livestock, of an inferior breed, however, the 
animals being small, unsightly and hornless; the horses were small 
ponies and no racers. Money, Roman only, was little and rarely 
used. They made no gold- or silverware, nor did they attach any 
value to them. Iron was scarce and, at least among the tribes on 
the Rhine and the Danube, was apparently almost wholly 
imported, not mined by themselves. The runic script (imitations of 
Greek and Latin letters) was only known as a secret code and used 
exclusively for religious sorcery. Human sacrifices were still in 
vogue. In short, they were a people just risen from the middle 
stage of barbarism to the upper stage. While, however, the tribes 
immediately bordering on the Romans were prevented by the easy 
import of Roman industrial products from developing a metal and 
textile industry of their own, there is not the least doubt that the 
tribes of the North-East, on the Baltic, did develop these 
industries. The pieces of armour found in the bogs of Schleswig— 
a long iron sword, a coat of mail, a silver helmet, etc., together 
with Roman coins from the close of the second century-—and the 
German metalware spread by the migration of peoples represent a 
peculiar type of fine workmanship, even where they are modelled 
on Roman originals. With the exception of England, emigration to 
the civilised Roman Empire everywhere put an end to this native 
industry. How uniformly this industry arose and developed is 
shown, for instance, by the bronze spangles. The specimens found 
in Burgundy, in Romania and along the Sea of Azov might have 
been produced in the very same workshop as the English and the 
Swedish ones, and are likewise of undoubtedly Germanic origin. 
Their constitution was also in keeping with the upper stage of 
barbarism. According to Tacitus,” there was commonly a council of 
chiefs (principes) which decided matters of minor importance and 
prepared more important matters for the decision of the popular 
assembly. The latter, in the lower stage of barbarism, at least in 
places where we know it, among the Americans, existed only for 
the gens, not yet for the tribe or the confederacy of tribes. The 
chiefs (principes) were still sharply distinguished from the war 
chiefs (duces), just as among the Iroquois. The former were 
already living, in part, on honorary gifts, such as livestock, grain, 

a Plini Secundi Naturalis historiae libri 37, XVI, 17.— Ed. 
b Tacitus, Germania, 11.— Ed. 

etc., from their fellow tribesmen. As in America, they were mostly 
elected from the same family. The transition to father right 
favoured, as in Greece and Rome, the gradual transformation of 
elective office into hereditary office, thus giving rise to a noble 
family in each gens. Most of this ancient, so-called tribal nobility 
perished during the migration of peoples,’”’ or shortly after. The 
military leaders were elected solely on their efficiency, irrespective 
of descent. They had little power and had to rely on force of 
example. As Tacitus explicitly states, actual disciplinary power in 
the army was held by the priests.* The popular assembly was the 
real power. The king or tribal chief presided; the people decided: 
a murmur signified “nay”, acclamation and clanging of weapons 
meant “aye”. The popular assembly was also the court of justice. 
Complaints were brought up here and decided; and death 
sentences were pronounced, the latter only in cases of cowardice, 
treason or unnatural lasciviousness. The gentes and other subdivi- 
sions also judged in a body, presided over by the chief, who, as in 
all original German courts, could be only director of the 
proceedings and questioner. Among the Germans, always and 
everywhere, sentence was pronounced by the entire community. 

Confederacies of tribes came into existence from Caesar’s time. 
Some of them already had kings. The supreme military command- 
er already aspired to tyrannic power, as among the Greeks and 
Romans, and sometimes succeeded in achieving it. Such successful 
usurpers were by no means absolute rulers; nevertheless, they 
began to break the fetters of the gentile constitution. While freed 
slaves generally occupied an inferior position, because they could 
not belong to any gens, they often gained rank, wealth and 
honours as favourites of the new kings. The same occurred after 
the conquest of the Roman Empire in the case of the military 
leaders who had now become kings of large lands. Among the 
Franks, the king’s slaves and freedmen played a major role first at 
court and then in the state; a large part of the new nobility was 
descended from them. 

There was one institution that especially favoured the rise of 
royalty: the retinue. We have already seen how among the 
American Redskins private associations were formed alongside the 
gentile system for the purpose of waging war off their own back. 
Among the Germans, these private associations had already 
developed into standing bodies. The military commander, who 
had earned himself a reputation, gathered around his person a 

a Tacitus, op. cit., 7.— Ed. 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 245 

host of young people, who were eager for booty and pledged 
personal loyalty to him, as he did to them. He fed them, gave 
them gifts and organised them on_ hierarchical principles: a 
bodyguard and a troop poised for immediate action in short 
expeditions, a corps of officers ready for larger campaigns. Weak 
as these retinues must have been, as indeed they proved to be 
later, for example, under Odoacer in Italy,'’** they, nevertheless, 
served as the germ of decay of the old popular liberties, and stood 
the test as such during and after the migration of peoples. 
Because, first, they created favourable ground for the rise of royal 
power. Secondly, as Tacitus already observed,* they could be held 
together only by continuous warfare and plundering expeditions. 
Looting became the main object. If the chieftain found nothing to 
do in his neighbourhood, he marched his troops to other peoples 
among whom there was war and the prospect of booty. The 
German auxiliaries, who under the Roman standard even fought 
Germans in large numbers, partly consisted of such retinues. They 
were the first germs of the Landsknecht” system, the shame and 
curse of the Germans. After the conquest of the Roman Empire, 
these kings’ retainers, together with the bonded and the Roman 
court attendants, formed the second main constituent part of the 
subsequent nobility. | 

In general, then, the German tribes, combined into peoples, had 
the same constitution that had developed among the Greeks of the 
Heroic Age and among the Romans at the time of the so-called 
kings: a popular assembly, council of gentile chiefs and military 
commander who was already aspiring to real royal power. It was 
the most highly developed constitution the gentile order could 
actually produce; it was the model constitution of the higher stage 
of barbarism. As soon as society passed beyond the limits for 
which this constitution sufficed, the gentile order was finished. It 
burst asunder and the state took its place. 

Vill 

THE FORMATION OF THE STATE 
AMONG THE GERMANS 

According to Tacitus the Germans were a very numerous 
people. An approximate idea of the strength of individual German 

a Ibid., 14.— Ed. 
b Mercenary.— Ed. 

18* 

peoples we get from Caesar*; he puts the number of Usipetes and 
Tencteri who appeared on the left bank of the Rhine at 180,000, 
including women and children. Thus, about 100,000 to a single 
people,* considerably more than, say, the entire number of 
Iroquois in their heyday, when they, not quite 20,000 strong, 
became the terror of the whole country, from the Great Lakes to 
the Ohio and Potomac. If we were to attempt to group on a map 
the individual peoples settled near the Rhine who are better 
known to us from reports, we would find that such a people 
would occupy on the average approximately the area of a Prussian 
administrative district, about 10,000 square kilometres, or 182 
geographical square miles.” The Germania Magna of the Romans, 
reaching to the Vistula, comprised, however, roundly 500,000 
square kilometres. Counting an average of 100,000 for any single 
people, the total population of Germania Magna would have 
amounted to five million—a respectable figure for a barbarian 
group of peoples; by our standards—10 inhabitants to the square 
kilometre, or 550 to the geographical square mile—very little. But 
this does not by any means include all the Germans living at that 
time. We know that German peoples of Gothic origin, Bastarnae, 
Peucini and others, lived along the Carpathian Mountains all the 
way down to the mouth of the Danube. They were so numerous 
that Pliny designated them as the fifth main tribe of the 
Germans‘; in 180 B.C. they were already serving as mercenaries 
of the Macedonian King Perseus, and even in the first years of the 
reign of Augustus they were pushing their way as far as the 
vicinity of Adrianople. If we assume that they numbered only one 
million, then, at the beginning of the Christian era, the Germans 
numbered probably six million at the least. 

After settling in Germany, the population must have grown with 
increasing rapidity. The industrial progress mentioned above 
would suffice to prove this. The finds in the bogs of Schleswig, to 
judge by the Roman coins uncovered with them, date from the 
third century. Hence at that time the metal and textile industry 

* The number taken here is confirmed by a passage in Diodorus on the Celts of 
Gaul: “In Gaul live numerous peoples of unequal strength. The biggest of them 
number about 200,000, the smallest 50,000.” (Diodorus Siculus, V, 25.) That gives 
an average of 125,000. The individual Gallic peoples, being more highly developed, 
must certainly have been more numerous than the German ones. 

4 Caesar, Commentarii de bello Gallico, IV, 15.— Ed. 
b The German geographical mile is equal to 7.42 km.— Ed. 
¢ Plini Secundt Naturalis historiae libri 37, IV, 14.— Ed. 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 247 

was already well developed on the Baltic, lively trade was carried 
on with the Roman Empire, and the wealthier class enjoyed a 
certain luxury—all evidence of a greater population density. At 
this time, however, the Germans started their general assault along 
the whole line of the Rhine, the Roman frontier rampart and the 
Danube, a line stretching from the North Sea to the Black 
Sea—direct proof of the ever-growing population striving out- 
wards. During the three centuries of battle, the whole main body 
of the Gothic peoples (with the exception of the Scandinavian 
Goths and the Burgundians) moved towards the South-East and 
formed the left wing of the long line of attack; the High Germans 
(Herminones) pushed forward in the centre of this line, on the 
Upper Danube, and the Iscaevones, now called Franks, on the 
right wing, along the Rhine. The conquest of Britain fell to the lot 
of the Ingaevones. At the end of the fifth century the Roman 
Empire, exhausted, bloodless and helpless, lay open to the 
invading Germans. 

In preceding chapters we stood at the cradle of ancient Greek 
and Roman civilisation. Now we are standing at its grave. The 
levelling plane of Roman world domination had been passing over 
all countries of the Mediterranean basin, and this for centuries. 
Where the Greek language offered no resistance all national 
languages had had to give way to a corrupt Latin. There were no 
longer any distinctions of nationality, no more Gauls, Iberians, 
Ligurians, Noricans; all had become Romans. Roman administra- 
tion and Roman law had everywhere dissolved the old bodies of 
consanguinei and thus crushed the last remnants of local and 
national self-expression. The new-fangled Romanism offered no 
compensation; it expressed no nationality, but only lack of 
nationality. The elements of new nations existed everywhere. The 
Latin dialects of the different provinces diverged more and more; 
the natural boundaries that had once made Italy, Gaul, Spain, 
Africa’? independent territories still existed and _ still made 
themselves felt. Yet nowhere was there a force capable of 
combining these elements into new nations; nowhere was there the 
least trace of any capacity for development or any power of 
resistance, much less of creative capacity. The immense human 
mass of that enormous territory was held together by one bond 
alone—the Roman state; and this, in the course of time, had 
become its worst enemy and oppressor. The provinces had ruined 
Rome; Rome itself had become a provincial town like all the 
others, privileged, but no longer ruling, no longer the centre of 
the world empire, no longer even the seat of the emperors and 

vice-emperors, who lived in Constantinople, Trier and Milan. The 
Roman state had become an immense complicated machine, 
designed exclusively for draining dry its subjects. Taxes, services 
for the state and levies of all kinds drove the mass of the people 
deeper and deeper into poverty. The extortionate practices of the 
governors, tax collectors and soldiers caused the pressure to 
become intolerable. This is what the Roman state with its world 
domination had brought things to: it had based its right to 
existence on the preservation of order within and _ protection 
against the barbarians without. But its order was worse than the 
worst disorder, and the barbarians, against whom the state 
pretended to protect its citizens, were longed for by them as 
saviours. 

Social conditions were no less desperate. Right from the last 
period of the republic, Roman rule had been intent on the ruthless 
exploitation of the conquered provinces. The emperors had not 
abolished this exploitation; on the contrary, they had regularised 
it. The more the empire fell into decay, the higher rose the taxes 
and compulsory services, and the more shamelessly the officials 
robbed and blackmailed the people. Commerce and industry were 
never the business of the Romans, who dominated other peoples. 
Only in usury did they excel all others, before and after them. 
The commerce that existed and managed to maintain itself for a 
time was reduced to ruin by official extortion; what survived was 
carried on in the eastern, Grecian, part of the empire, but this is 
beyond the scope of our study. Universal impoverishment; decline 
of commerce, handicrafts, the arts, and of the population; decay 
of the towns; retrogression of agriculture to a lower stage—this 
was the ultimate outcome of Roman world domination. 

Agriculture, the decisive branch of production in the whole 
ancient world, now became so more than ever. In Italy, the 
immense aggregations of estates (latifundia) which had covered 
nearly the whole territory since the end of the republic, had been 
utilised in two ways: either as pastures, on which the population 
had been replaced by sheep and oxen, the care of which required 
only a few slaves; or as villas, on which large-scale horticulture had 
been pursued with masses of slaves, partly to serve the luxurious 
needs of the owners and partly for sale at the urban markets. The 
great pastures had been preserved and even enlarged. But the 
villa estates and their horticulture had fallen into ruin with the 
impoverishment of their owners and the decay of the towns. 
Latifundian economy based on slave labour was no_ longer 
profitable; but at that time it was the only possible form of 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 249 

large-scale agriculture. Small-scale farming again became the only 
profitable form. Villa after villa was parcelled out and leased in 
small lots to hereditary tenants, who paid a fixed sum, or to 
partiarii,* farm managers rather than tenants, who received 
one-sixth or even only one-ninth of the year’s product for their 
work. Mainly, however, these small plots were distributed to 
colons, who paid a fixed amount annually, were tied to the land 
and could be sold together with the plots. Admittedly, they were 
not slaves, but neither were they free; they could not marry free 
citizens, and marriages among themselves were not regarded as 
fully valid marriages, but as mere concubinage (contubernium), as 
in the case of the slaves. They were the forerunners of the 
medieval serfs. 

The slavery of antiquity had outlived itself. Neither in large- 
scale agriculture in the country, nor in the manufactories of the 
towns did it any longer bring in a worthwhile return—the market 
for its products had disappeared. Small-scale agriculture, however, 
and small handicrafts, to which the gigantic production of the 
flourishing times of the empire was now reduced, had no room 
for numerous slaves. Society found room only for the domestic 
and luxury slaves of the rich. But moribund slavery was still 
sufficiently virile to make all productive work appear as slave 
labour, unworthy of a free Roman—and everybody was now a 
free Roman. On this account, on the one hand, there was an 
increase in the number of superfluous slaves who, having become 
a drag, were emancipated; on the other hand, there was an 
increase in the number of colons and of ruined freemen (similar 
to the poor wuires in the ex-slave states of America). Christianity is 
perfectly innocent of this gradual dying out of ancient slavery. It 
had partaken in slavery in the Roman Empire for centuries, and 
later did nothing to prevent the slave trade of Christians, either of 
the Germans in the North, or of the Venetians on the 
Mediterranean, or the Negro slave trade of later years.* Slavery 
no longer paid, and so it died out; but dying slavery left behind its 
poisonous sting by outlawing the productive work of the free. This 
was the blind alley in which the Roman world was caught: slavery 

* According to Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, the principal industry of Verdun 
in the tenth century, that is, in the Holy German Empire, was the manufacture of 
eunuchs, who were exported with great profit to Spain for the harems of the 
Moors. 

a Sharecroppers.— Ed. 
b Liutprand, Antapodosis, V1, 6.— Ed. 

was economically impossible, while the labour of the free was 
morally proscribed. The one could no longer, the other could not 
yet, be the basic form of social production. Only a complete 
revolution could be of help here. 

Things were no better in the provinces. Most of the reports we 
have concern Gaul. By the side of the colons, free small peasants 
still existed there. In order to protect themselves against the brutal 
extortions of the officials, judges and usurers, they frequently 
placed themselves under the protection, the patronage, of a man 
possessed of power; and they did this not only singly, but in whole 
communities, so much so that the emperors of the fourth century 
often issued decrees prohibiting this practice. But what use was it 
to those who sought this protection? The patron imposed the 
condition that they transfer the title of their lands to him, and in 
return he ensured them usufruct of their land for life—a trick 
which the Holy Church remembered and freely imitated during 
the ninth and tenth centuries, for the greater glory of God and 
the enlargement of its own landed possessions. At that time, to be 
sure, about the year 475, Bishop Salvianus of Marseilles. still 
vehemently denounced such robbery and related that the oppres- 
sion of the Roman officials and great landlords had become so 
intolerable that many “Romans” fled to the districts already 
occupied by the barbarians, and the Roman citizens who had 
settled there feared nothing so much as coming under Roman rule 
again.” That poor parents frequently sold their children into 
slavery in those days is proved by a law issued against it. 

In return for liberating the Romans from their own state, the 
German barbarians appropriated two-thirds of the entire land and 
divided it among themselves. The division was made in accordance 
with the gentile system; as the conquerors were relatively small in 
number, large tracts remained undivided, in the possession partly 
of the whole people and partly of individual tribes or gentes. 
In each gens fields and pastures were distributed among the 
individual households in equal shares by lot. We do not know 
whether repeated redivisions took place at that time; at all events, 
this practice was soon discarded in the Roman provinces, and the 
individual allotment became alienable private property, allodium. 
Forests and pastures remained undivided for common use; this 
use and the mode of cultivating the divided land were regulated 
by ancient custom and the decision of the entire community. The 
longer the gens existed in its village, and the more Germans and 

a Salvianus, De Gubernatione Dei, V, 8.— Ed. 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 2011 

Romans merged in the course of time, the more the consanguine- 
ous character of the ties retreated before territorial ties. The gens 
disappeared in the Mark community, in which, however, traces of 
the origina] kinship of the members were visible still often enough. 
Thus, the gentile constitution, at least in those countries where 
Mark communities were preserved—in the North of France, in 
England, Germany and Scandinavia—was imperceptibly trans- 
formed into a territorial constitution, and thus became capable of 
being fitted into the state. Nevertheless, it retained the naturally 
evolved democratic character which distinguishes the whole gentile 
order, and thus preserved a piece of the gentile constitution even 
in its degeneration, forced upon it in later times, thereby leaving a 
weapon in the hands of the oppressed, ready to be wielded even 
in modern times. 

The rapid disappearance of the blood tie in the gens was due to 
the fact that its organs in the tribe and the whole people had also 
degenerated as a result of the conquest. We know that rule over 
subjugated people is incompatible with the gentile constitution. 
Here we see it on a large scale. The German peoples, masters of 
the Roman provinces, had to organise their conquest; but the mass 
of the Romans could neither be absorbed into the gentile bodies 
nor ruled by means of the latter. A substitute for the Roman state 
had to be placed at the head of the Roman local administrative 
bodies, which at first largely continued to function, and _ this 
substitute could only be another state. Thus, the organs of the 
gentile constitution had to be transformed into organs of state, 
and owing to the pressure of circumstances, this had to be done 
very quickly. The first representative of the conquering people 
was, however, the military commander. The securing of the 
conquered territory internally and externally demanded that his 
power be increased. The moment had arrived for transforming 
military leadership into kingship. This was done. 

Let us take the kingdom of the Franks. Here, not only the wide 
dominions of the Roman state, but also all the very large tracts of 
land that had not been assigned to the large and small Gau and 
Mark communities, especially all the large forests, fell into the 
hands of the victorious Salian people as their unrestricted 
possession. The first thing the king of the Franks, transformed 
from an ordinary supreme military commander into a real 
monarch, did was to convert this property of the people into a 
royal estate, to steal it from the people and to donate or grant it to 
his retainers. This retinue, originally composed of his personal 
military retainers and the rest of the subcommanders of the army, 

was soon augmented not only by Romans, that is, Romanised 
Gauls, who quickly became indispensable to him owing to their 
knowledge of writing, their education and familiarity with the 
Romance vernacular and literary Latin as well as with the laws of 
the land, but also by slaves, serfs and freedmen, who constituted 
his Court and from among whom he chose his favourites. All 
these were granted tracts of public land, first mostly as gifts and 
later in the form of benefices—originally in most cases for the 
period of the life of the king'*°—and so the basis was laid for a 
new nobility at the expense of the people. 

But this was not all. The far-flung empire could not be 
governed by means of the old gentile constitution. The council of 
chiefs, even if it had not long died out, could not have assembled 
and was soon replaced by the king’s permanent retinue. The old 
popular assembly was still ostensibly preserved, but more and 
more as an assembly of the subcommanders of the army and the 
newly-rising magnates. The free landowning peasants, the mass of 
the Frankish people, were exhausted and reduced to penury by 
continuous civil war and wars of conquest, the latter particularly 
under Charlemagne, just as the Roman peasants had been during 
the last period of the republic. These peasants, who originally had 
formed the whole army, and after the conquest of the Frankish 
lands had been its core, were so impoverished at the beginning of 
the ninth century that scarcely one out of five could provide the 
accoutrements of war. The army of free peasants, called up 
directly by the king, was replaced by an army composed of the 
servitors of the newly arisen magnates. Among these servitors 
were also villeins, the descendants of the peasants who previously 
had known no master but the king, and still earlier had known no 
master at all, not even a king. Under Charlemagne’s successors the 
ruin of the Frankish peasantry was completed by internal wars, the 
weakness of royal authority and corresponding encroachments of 
the magnates, whose ranks were augmented by the Gau counts, 
established by Charlemagne and eager to make their office 
hereditary, and finally by the incursions of the Normans. Fifty 
years after the death of Charlemagne, the Frankish Empire lay as 
helpless at the feet of the Normans as four hundred years 
previously the Roman Empire had lain at the feet of the Franks. 

Not only the external impotence, but the internal order, or 
rather disorder, of society, was almost the same. The free Frankish 
peasants found themselves in a position similar to that of their 
predecessors, the Roman colons.” Ruined by war and plunder, 
they had to seek the protection of the newly arisen magnates or 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 253 

the Church, for royal authority was too weak to protect them; but 
they had to pay dear for this protection. Like the Gallic peasants 
before them, they had to transfer the ownership of their land to 
their patrons, and received it back from them as tenants in 
different and varying forms, but always on condition of perform- 
ing services and paying dues. Once driven into this form of 
dependence, they gradually lost their personal freedom; after a 
few generations most of them became serfs. How rapidly the free 
peasants were degraded is shown by Irminon’s land records of the 
Abbey Saint-Germain-des-Prés, then near, now in, Paris.* Even 
during the life of Charlemagne, on the vast estates of this abbey, 
stretching into the surrounding country, there were 2,788 
households, almost exclusively Franks with German names; 2,080 
of them were colons, 35 lites,'? 220 slaves and only 8 freeholders! 
The custom by which the patron had the land of the peasants 
transferred to himself, giving to them only the usufruct of it for 
life, the custom denounced as ungodly by Salvianus, was now 
universally practised by the Church in its dealings with the 
peasants. Feudal servitude, now coming more and more into 
vogue, was modelled as much on the lines of the Roman 
angariae,’* compulsory services for the state, as on the services 
rendered by the members of the German Mark in bridge and road 
building and other work for common purposes. Thus, it looked as 
if, after four hundred years, the mass of the population had come 
back to the point it had started from. 

This proved only two things, however: First, that the social 
stratification and the distribution of property in the declining 
Roman Empire had corresponded entirely to the then prevailing 
level of production in agriculture and industry, and hence had 
been inevitable; second, that this level of production had not sunk 
or risen to any material extent in the course of the ensuing four 
hundred years, and, therefore, had just as necessarily produced 
the same distribution of property and the same class division of 
the population. During the last centuries of the Roman Empire, 
the town had lost its earlier supremacy over the country, and did 
not regain it during the first centuries of German rule. This 
presupposes a low level of development in agriculture, and in 
industry as well. Such an overall] situation necessarily gives rise to 
big ruling landowners and dependent small peasants. How scarcely 

a Data from Irminon’s land records are presumably quoted from P. Roth’s 
Geschichte des Beneficialwesens von den dltesten Zeiten bis ins zehnte Jahrhundert, 
p. 378.— Ed. 

possible it was to superimpose either the Roman latifundian 
economy run with slave labour or the newer large-scale farming 
run with serf labour onto such a society, is proved by Char- 
lemagne’s massive experiments with his famous imperial villas,’”° 
which passed away leaving hardly a trace. These experiments were 
continued only by the monasteries and were fruitful only for 
them; but the monasteries were abnormal social bodies founded 
on celibacy. They could do the exceptional, and for that very 
reason were bound to remain exceptions. 

Nevertheless, progress was made during these four hundred 
years. Even if in the end we find almost the same main classes as 
in the beginning, still, the people who constituted these classes had 
changed. Ancient slavery had disappeared; gone were also the 
ruined poor freemen, who had despised work as slavish. Between 
the Roman colonus and the new villein there had been the free 
Frankish peasant. The “useless reminiscences and vain strife” of 
decaying Romanism were dead and buried. The social classes of 
the ninth century had taken shape not in the bog of a declining 
civilisation, but in the travail of a new one. The new race, masters 
as well as servants, was a race of men compared with its Roman 
predecessors. The relation of powerful landlords and serving 
peasants, which for the latter had been the hopeless form of the 
decline of the world of antiquity, was now for the former the 
starting-point of a new development. Moreover, unproductive as 
these four hundred years appear to have been, they, nevertheless, 
left one great product behind them: the modern nationalities, the 
refashioning and regrouping of West European humanity for 
impending history. The Germans, in fact, had infused new life 
into Europe; and that is why the dissolution of the states in the 
German period ended, not in Norman-Saracen subjugation, but in 
the development from the benefices and patronage (commenda- 
tion '*°) to feudalism, and in such a tremendous increase in the 
population that the profuse bloodshed caused by the Crusades 
barely two centuries later could be borne without injury.* 

But what was the mysterious magic potion with which the 
Germans infused new vitality into dying Europe? Was it in the 
innate miraculous power of the German race, as our chauvinistic 
historians would have it? By no means. The Germans were a 
highly gifted Aryan tribe, especially at that time, in the process of 
all-out vigorous development. It was not their specific national 

a The end of the sentence, from the words “and in such a tremendous 
increase...” was added by Engels in the 1891 edition.— Ed. 

Origin of the Family, Private Property and State 255 

qualities that rejuvenated Europe, however, but simply—their 
barbarism, their gentile constitution. 

Their personal competence and bravery, their love of liberty, 
and their democratic instinct, which regarded all public affairs as 
its own affairs, in short, all those qualities which the Romans had 
lost and which were alone capable of forming new states and of 
raising new nationalities out of the muck of the Roman 
world—what were they but the characteristic features of bar- 
barians in the upper stage, fruits of their gentile constitution? 

If they transformed the ancient form of monogamy, moderated 
male rule in the family and gave a higher status to women than 
the classical world had ever known, what enabled them to do so if 
not their barbarism, their gentile customs, their still vital heritage 
from the time of mother right? 

If they were able in at least three of the most important 
countries—Germany, Northern France and England—to preserve 
and carry over to the feudal state a piece of the genuine gentile 
constitution in the form of the Mark communities, and thus give 
to the oppressed class, the peasants, even under the hardest 
conditions of medieval serfdom, local cohesion and the means of 
resistance which neither the slaves of antiquity nor the modern 
proletarians found ready at hand—to what did they owe this if 
not to their barbarism, their exclusively barbarian mode of settling 
in gentes? 

And lastly, if they were able to develop and raise to universality 
the milder form of servitude which they had been practising at 
home, into which also slavery in the Roman Empire was more and 
more converted—a form which, as Fourier first emphasised, gave 
to those subjected to servitude the means of gradual emancipation 
as a class (fournit aux cultivateurs des moyens d’affranchissement 
collectif et progressif*) and is therefore far superior to slavery, 
which permits only of the immediate manumission of the 
individual without any transitory stage (antiquity did not know any 
abolition of slavery by a victorious rebellion), whereas in fact the 
serfs of the Middle Ages, step by step, achieved their emancipation 
as a class—to what was this due if not their barbarism, thanks to 
which they had not yet arrived at complete slavery, either in the 
form of the ancient labour slavery or in that of the Oriental 
domestic slavery? 

All that was vital and life-bringing in what the Germans infused 
into the Roman world was barbarism. In fact, only barbarians are 

a Furnishes for the cultivators means of collective and gradual emancipation (see 
Ch. Fourier, Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales, p. 220).— Ed. 

capable of rejuvenating a world labouring in the throes of a dying 
civilisation. And the highest stage of barbarism, to which and in 
which the Germans worked their way up previous to the migration 
of peoples, was precisely the most favourable one for this process. 
This explains everything. 

IX