In any case, it is becoming clear even to the French unionists that direct action is not and cannot be, as Guesde has pointed out, revolutionary action. It cannot transform our social system. It is destined to failure just as insurrection as a policy was destined to failure. Rittinghausen said at Basel in 1869: "Revolution, as a matter of fact, accomplishes nothing. If you are not able to formulate, after the revolution, by legislation, your legitimate demands, the revolution will perish miserably."[50] This was true in 1848, in 1871, and even in the great French Revolution itself. Nothing would have seemed easier at the time of the French Revolution than for the peasants to have directly possessed themselves of the land. They were using it. Their houses were planted in the midst of it. Their landlords in many cases had fled. Yet Kropotkin, in his story of "The Great French Revolution," relates that the redistribution of land awaited the action of Parliament. To be sure, some of the peasants had taken the land, but they were not at all sure that it might not again be taken from them by some superior force. Their rights were not defined, and there was such chaos in the entire situation that, in the end, the whole question had to be left to Parliament. It was only after the action of the Convention, June 11, 1793, that the rights of ownership were defined. It was only then, as Kropotkin says, that "everyone had a right to the land. It was a complete revolution."[51] That the greatest of living anarchists should be forced to pay this tribute to the action of Parliament is in itself an assurance. For masses in the time of revolution to grab whatever they desire is, after all, to constitute what Jaures calls a fictitious ownership. Some legality is needed to establish possession and a sense of security, and, up to the present, only the political institutions of society have been able to do that. For this precise reason every social struggle and class struggle of the past has been a political struggle.