Land tenure, shelter and the right of ownership.

It is certain that the right of ownership is the most sacred of all the rights of the citizen and more important in certain respects than liberty itself. Beware of listening to that impostor: you are lost if you forget that the fruit belong to all and the land belongs to no one! The fair apportionment of essential commodities entailed no common ownership of the means of production, no wholesale redistribution of the land, no ‘agrarian law’ and few if any curtailments of individual property rights. Nevertheless, declarations of principle decreed at regular intervals by the Convention make it clear that while no erosion of the sacrosanct right of ownership would be tolerated, the ‘red scare’ was very real and the risk of such erosion taking place was clearly perceived. At its very first sitting, on 21 September 1792, Danton had moved to much acclaim that all ‘territorial, individual and industrial properties would be eternally maintained’; on 18 March 1793 the death sentence was imposed on whomsoever proposed a lex agraria or ‘any other law subversive of territorial, commercial and industrial properties’, while on 7 May the people's representatives-on-mission were charged with ‘affirming liberty and ensuring the guarantee of properties’ and on 21 September, as the Terror was inaugurated, the spectre of arbitrary land redistribution was once again squarely laid to rest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]