Kropotkin, P. . The Great French Revolution, 1789-1793 (N. F. Dryhurst, Trans.) New York: Vanguard Printings. (Original work published 1909) THE PEOPLE BEFORE THE REVOLUTION Condition of people previous to 1789--Wanton luxury of aristocrats--Poverty of majority of peasants--Rise and importance of well-to-do peasant class It would be waste of time to describe here at any length the condition of the peasants in the country and of the poorer classes in the towns on the eve of 1789. All the historians who have written about the great French Revolution have devoted eloquent pages to this subject. The people groaned under the burden of taxes levied by the State, rents and contributions paid to the lord, tithes collected by the clergy, as well as under the forced labor exacted by all three. Entire populations were reduced to beggary and wandered on the roads to the number of five, ten or twenty thousand me...
This text is from my copy of Kropotkin, P. "The State: Its Historic Role," London: Freedom Press, 1946; The Translator notes are from the Vanguard version. Translator's Notes When Kropotkin was invited by Jean Grave, editor of Les Temps Nouveaux, to take part in a series of lectures to be held in the Milles Colonnes Hall in Paris in March 1896, he chose two subjects: The State: Its Historic Role and Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Its Ideal. Bearing in mind that his greatest work, Mutual Aid, had been appearing as a series of articles in The Nineteenth Century from 1890-1896 his choice of subjects for these lectures is not surprising. Kropotkin explains in the French edition of his Memoirs "The research that I carried out in the course of familiarizing myself with the institutions of the barbarian period and...