Erfrecht

(1) Div., “The General Council of the First International 1868-1870 – Minutes: Meeting of the Council July 20 [1868]”, Progress ?; “Cit. Marx opened the discussion on the question: The Right to Inheritance. He said the question had been put by the Alliance of Socialist Democrats of Geneva and the council had accepted it for discussion. The Alliance of Geneva tended above all the entire abolition of the Right to Inheritance. There were two forms of inheritance. The testamentary right, or inheritance by will, had come from Rome and had been peculiar to Rome. The father of the Roman family had exercised absolute authority over everything belonging to his household. The Roman family father must not be compared with the father of a family of the present day. The Roman household had included slaves and clients whose affairs and interests the head had been obliged to defend and maintain in public. There had been a superstition that when this man died his ghost remained as a watch in the house to see that things were done right or to torment if things were managed wrong. In the early times of Rome people had sacrificed to this house god; even blood-feasts had been celebrated in his honour and to appease his wrath. By and by it had become fashionable to compromise with this spirit by an heir-at-will. It had been the roman immortality of the soul. The will of the deceased had been perpetuated by a testament, but this testament had not necessarily brought a fortune to the successor who inherited, but the will of the deceased had been looked upon as a religious duty. In course of time these heirs-at-will had laid claim to the fortune too, but even in imperial times had never been allowed more than a fourth by law. That pagan superstition had been transmitted to Christian countries and was the foundation of the right of will as at present existing in England and the United States. /

(2) Passim: The German right to inheritance was the intestate right, the familiright, which treated an estate as a sort of court of worship of which he father of the family was the manager. When this manager died the property fell to all the children. The Germans had known of no other hereditary rights; the Church of Rome had introduced the roman right and the feudal system and falsified the German right, because feudal property bearing a military charge could not have been divided The French Revolution had returned to the German right of inheritance. In England we had all sorts of nonsensical things; the individual had the most absolute right to will away his property, even to disinherit his own offspring and by this he ruled long after he ceased to exist. This right of will might be left for the middle class to deal with as it was a print which would work against the aristocracy. In Prussia only a little of man’s property could be willed away. / The working class who had nothing to inherit had no interest in the question.”