The Great Demarcation

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


Deeply original....The book's elegant argument proposes a simultaneous birth of a modern state and a modern property regime.--John Markoff, American Historical Review

The Great Demarcation will be highly useful to specialists of old regime and revolutionary France. The great merit of this book is that it clearly explains many of the categories and distinctions in old-regime property law that exercised so much quiet influence over social life in France, even beyond 1789. Another is the verve with which Blaufarb asserts the coherence and radicalism of the revolutionary project.--Paul Cheney, History

[Rafe Blaufarb's] book provides something more: a history of the united, self-conscious efforts of the lawyer deputies who reworked the historical and legal reasoning of their era to achieve the Great Demarcation of property from power. For this, we are in his debt. This is a major contribution to our understanding of the French Revolution.--Joseph F. Byrne, French History

The Great Demarcation describes the efforts of French revolutionaries to make 'a radical distinction between private property and public power.' Blaufarb's wonderful monograph describes the long, difficult process of creating this separation in the laws of the land...[Blaufarb] not only illuminates a complex, poorly understood legislative and legal campaign but also makes important contributions to the understanding of the French Revolution itself...Essential.--CHOICE

This is a major piece of scholarship which will be required reading for economic historians and historians of the French Revolution alike. Based on exhaustive research, masterfully argued, and lucidly written, it shows how the French Revolutionaries worked to separate public power and private property, thereby taking a crucial step towards the creation of the property regimes that we still live with today. It also shows clearly that they consciously pursued this goal from the very start, thereby reasserting the Revolution's ideological coherence and radicalism in this hugely significant domain.--David Bell, author of Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present

Everyone knows that the French Revolution established a new regime based upon absolute private property. But until this splendid book, we had no idea what a momentous and difficult labor this entailed. This great demarcation established an entire set of binaries fundamental to the modern condition: the political and the social, state and society, sovereignty and ownership, the public and the private. As lucid as it is learned, The Great Demarcation is a work of profound scholarship-a fundamental contribution not only to the history of the French Revolution but also to the emergence of the modern world.--William H. Sewell, Jr., University of Chicago

With sparkling clarity, Blaufarb analyzes one of the most important and hitherto under-conceptualized aspects of modern life: the French Revolution's demarcation of state power and private property as distinct legal, political, and institutional realities. Deeply researched and cogently argued.--Rebecca Spang, author of Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

When the French revolutionaries abolished 'feudal' property, they thought they had cut a gordian knot. Rafe Blaufarb shows, in convincing detail, how in practice they were forced to unpick it strand by strand. Establishing property rights on a fresh basis proved hideously complex. It took many years to complete, and even the Napoleonic Code did not tie up all the loose ends. The Great Demarcation is a cool and masterly account of how one of the greatest changes undertaken by the French Revolution was painstakingly brought about.--William Doyle, author of The Oxford History of the French Revolution