Chapter 2

“I think I hear a little bird who singsThe people by and by will be the stronger:The veriest jade will wince whose harness wringsSo much into the raw as quite to wrong herBeyond the rules of posting,—and the mobAt last fall sick of imitating Job.”Lord Byron.

“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire!To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,!Would we not shatter it to bits, and then!Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!”Rubáiyát ofOmar Kháyyám.

“Le moins de gouvernement possible.”

Victor Hugo(Programme Politique).

“The state is the curse of the individual.”—Ibsen.

Manual labour, far from being an occasion for shame, honours man. What is shameful is to use man as a vile instrument of lucre, to esteem him only in proportion to the vigour of his arms.”—Encyclical ofLeo XIII.

Enough of these ambiguous formulas, such as ‘the right to work’ or ‘to each the integral product of his labour.’ What we proclaim is the right to a competency, to a competency for all.”—Kropotkine.

And the savants will be troubled in their knowledge, and this knowledge will appear to them like a little black point when the sun of the intelligences shall rise.”—Lamennais.

“THERE is nothing new under the sun,” and anarchism is no exception to the truth of this maxim. But the beginnings of anarchistic philosophy and the development of anarchism, however suggestive they may be, do not fall within the province of this volume. Therefore it is not necessary to expound the tenets or to trace the influence of the anarchist or semi-anarchist devotees through the ages: the Taoists of China (whose founder, Lao-Tse (600B.C.), was a contemporary of Pythagoras and Confucius), the social prophets of Islam from Mazdak in the sixth century to the wonderful Bab in the first half of the nineteenth century, Saint Anthony of Padua and Jean Vicenza in the thirteenth century, Savonarola at the end of the fifteenth, the Anabaptists under Thomas Munzer, Mathiesen, and Jean de Leyde in the sixteenth, Razine the Cossack and the Scottish Covenanters in the seventeenth, Mandrin the brigand in the eighteenth, and the Jesuits of Paraguay in the last half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. I do not pretend to determine whether the Guelph-Ghibelline feud, which rent Europe for more than two hundred years, was or was not a struggle between despotism and religious democracy, or whether Gregory VII., Alexander III., Gregory IX., Innocent IV., and Boniface VIII. were or were not revolutionary popes endeavouring to realise the social dreams of the Franciscans and Dominicans. I do not try to discover what there is of truth in the astonishing claims of certain exalted students of occultism, mysticism, and comparative religions, that anarchism found expression in the worship of the Indian Siva, the Persian Mithras, the Chaldean Baal-Moloch, and the Greek Bacchus; in the conspiracy of the Bacchanals (described by Livy) in the first half of the second century before Christ; in the colossal extravagances of the Cæsars; in thebizarreriesof the Nicolaites, the Cainites, the Carpocratians, the Ophites, and other Gnosticsof Egypt during the first five centuries of the Christian era; in theConsortiaunder Constantine; and in the fanaticisms of the Inquisitors, the Lollards, Flagellants, Bégards, Patarins, Templars, and Devil-worshippers during the Middle Ages. I do not dwell upon nor so much as collate the anarchistic tendencies and sanctions which anarchist scholars discern in the writings or sayings of Job and the Old Testament prophets, of Athanasius, Chrysostom, and Saint Francis of Assisi, Plato, Jesus, Rabelais, Bourdaloue, and Bossuet, and the pre-Revolutionary Encyclopedists (especially Diderot and Rousseau). I even pass by the far more pertinent teachings, systems, personalities, and careers of the admitted precursors of modern anarchism; of Max Stirner and Fourier, of Proudhon, the father of modern anarchist doctrine, and of “the mysterious Russian,” Bakounine, the father of the modern anarchist party. I also pass by the agrarian revolt of Gracchus Babœuf (guillotined by Barras in 1797); the emergence of the learned Russian Kropotkine, and of the Italians Cafiero and Malatesta; the relations between French anarchism and Russian nihilism; the struggle for Italian liberation; the founding of theInternationaleand of theFédération Jurasienne; the epic struggle for the control of theInternationalebetween Karl Marx, representing authoritative centralisation, and Bakounine, representing anti-authoritative federalism. I neglect, in a word, the more than interesting history of the slow evolution of modern anarchism, and coming directly, without further ado, to the France of to-day, attack the questions,—What is anarchy? What does the anarchist want? And how does he hope to get it?

Of the contemporary French Encyclopedists who are preparing, or think they are preparing, the revolution of the twentieth century, three are eminently fitted by their learning, by their capacity for straight thinking and utterance, by their sense of historical perspective, their power of keen analysis and bold synthesis, by their breadth, their tolerance, their humanity, their integrity, and their consecration, to answer these questions. They are Pierre Kropotkine, Elisée Reclus, and Jean Grave.But Kropotkine, while the author of such epoch-making works asLa Conquête du Pain, L’Anarchie: son Idéal, andLes Paroles d’un Révolté, is a Russian, not a Frenchman, by birth and breeding, and has been little in Paris of late; and Reclus1(one of the most learned geographers of his time), though never far away from the anarchist movement, is, by reason of his devotion to his specialty, rarely in the thick of it. Besides, he has made his home in Belgium for many years.

It is to Jean Grave, therefore, the youngest of the three, the present editor of the journalLes Temps Nouveauxand author ofLa Société Mourante,La Société Future,La Société au Lendemain de la Révolution,L’Individu et la Société, andL’Anarchie: son But, ses Moyens, that it seems best to confide the delicate task of presenting the French anarchistic idea and ideal; and, because I cannot trust myself to summarise without bias thecredoof a sect to which I do not belong, I quote in full the comprehensive first chapter of his important doctrinal volume,L’Anarchie: son But, ses Moyens:—

“In spite of the fact that the idea of anarchy has emerged from the obscurity in which men have attempted to stifle it, in spite of the fact that to-day (thanks to persecution, thanks to laws of exception such as are made in the worst monarchies) the words ‘anarchy’ and ‘anarchist’ are unfamiliar to none, there are not many who know exactly what anarchy is.

“The intervention of the anarchists in the Dreyfus affair, where they were much in evidence, had the effect of bringing them into contact with bourgeois politicians, who knew absolutely nothing about them; but anarchy did not come out into a clearer light from this association.

“Anarchy, in the eyes of some, is robbery, assassination, bombs, a return to savagery; anarchists are only house-breakers, loafers, who would divide all wealth in order to be able to amuse themselves with doing nothing.

“In the eyes of others, anarchy is a sort of Utopia, of golden-agedream which they readily grant to be very beautiful, but a dream good at best to illustrate books of ethics or fantastic social schemes with. The most kindly disposed regard anarchy as a vague aspiration which they do not hesitate to recognise as desirable for humanity to attain, but as so completely inaccessible that there is no reason for making any decided effort to realise it, and consider the anarchist as a species of lunatic whom it is prudent to avoid, a pitifulilluminéwho strays from the practicable paths to lose himself in the vagueness of Utopia.

“They are very few who know that anarchy is a theory resting on rational bases, that anarchists are men who, having collated the complaints of those who suffer from the actual social order, and having saturated themselves with human aspirations, have undertaken a critique of the institutions which control us, analysing them, weighing their worth, and estimating what they are capable of producing, and who, from the sum total of their observations, deduce logical natural laws for the organisation of a better society.

“Of course, the anarchists do not pretend to have invented the critique of the social order. Others had done that before them. As soon as power began to exist, there were malcontents who made no bones of railing at its acts; and, if we possessed the legends which men handed down from generation to generation before writing was known, we should probably find therein satires against the chiefs. It is quite possible to criticise the existing order of things without being an anarchist, and there are those who have done this in a successful fashion which the anarchists will never surpass.

“But what anarchists believe they have done more than the other critics, more than the existing socialistic schools or the socialistic schools which preceded them, is to have gotten their bearings in the midst of the confused mass of errors which spring from the complexity of social relations, to have remounted to the causes of misery, of exploitation, and finally to have laid bare the political error which made men place hope in good governments, good governors, good legislation, good dispensers of justice, as efficacious remedies for the ills from which humanity suffers.

“Anarchy, studying man in his nature, in his evolution, demonstrates that there cannot be good laws or good governments or faithful appliers of the laws.

“Every human law is necessarily arbitrary; for, however just it may be, and whatever may be the breadth of view of those who make it, it represents only a part of human development, only an infinitesimal fragment of the aspirations of all. Every law formulated by a parliament, far from being the product of a great conception, is, on the contrary, only the mean of public opinion, since parliament itself, by its very manner of recruitment, represents only a very mediocre mean.

“Applied to all in the same fashion, the law becomes thus, by the very force of things, arbitrary and unjust for those who are on this side or on that side of the mean.

“A law, then, not being able to represent the aspirations of all, can be made effective on those who would infringe it only by fear of punishment. Its application involves the existence of a judicial and repressive apparatus, and it becomes thus the more odious as its coercive force is the more sure.

“The law unjust to start with, because, conception of minority or majority, it wishes to impose itself on the whole, becomes still more unjust because applied by men who, having the defects and the passions, the prejudices and the personal errors, of appreciation of men, cannot act, whatever be their probity, except under the influence of these prejudices and errors.

“There can be no good laws, nor good judges, nor, consequently, good government, since the existence of these implies a single rule of conduct for all, while it is diversity which characterises individuals.”

“No society based on human laws, then,—and this is the case of all societies past and present,—can fully satisfy the ideal of every one.

“The minority of idlers alone who, by ruse and by force, have managed to seize the power, and who use, to their own profit, the forces of the collectivity,—this minority alone, I say, can find their account in this order of things and interest themselves in its prolongation. But they can only make it last with the help of the ignorance of individuals regarding their own personalities, their possibilities, and their capacities.

“But however great the ignorance of the people may be, when the pressure is too strong, they revolt. This is why our society is so unstable, why the laws are repeatedly violated by those who make them or by those who are charged to apply them, when their interest points that way; for, power being based on force, it is to force that all those resort who are in power and wish to maintain themselves there, as well as all those who are in pursuit of power.

“Made to be applied to all and to content everybody, the laws derange more or less every individual, who wishes, while he is under them, to abolish or relax them, but who wishes them more vigorous when it is his turn to apply them.

“Nevertheless, new aspirations do arise; and, when the antagonism becomes too great between these aspirations and the political laws, the door opens wide to disorders and to revolution.

“And it will always be the same so long as no other way is found to repair the harm done by a law recognised as bad than the application of a new law. This ignorance on the part of men makes human institutions, once established, resist changes. The names vary, but the things remain.

“Men, not having yet been able to arrive at a social conception other than that of authority, are condemned to turn in the same circle, and will be condemned to turn in the same circle so long as they shall not have altered their conception. Royalty, empire, dictatorship, republic, centralisation, federalism, communalism,—these are all at bottom so many phases of authority. Whether in the name of a single person or in the deceitful name of the majority, always the will of some is imposed on all.

JEAN GRAVE IN HIS WORKSHOPJEAN GRAVE IN HIS WORKSHOP“There is no more intimate or engagingbusiness interior in Paris.”

JEAN GRAVE IN HIS WORKSHOP

“There is no more intimate or engaging

business interior in Paris.”

“Furthermore, if the individual increases his knowledge in a continuous fashion, it is only in a very slow fashion. Still he has arrived to-day at the point where, to develop himself in his integrity, it is necessary that his autonomy be complete, that his aspirations express themselves freely, that he be permitted to cultivate them in all their breadth, that nothing fetter his free initiative and his evolution.

“And so it is that now, at last, anarchists draw from their study of the existing social organisation this important lesson: that human laws ought to disappear, carrying with them the legislative, executive, judicial, and repressive systems which impede human evolution by causing murderous crises in which many thousands of human beings perish, by delaying all humanity in its forward march, and, sometimes, even by dragging it backward.”

“While the politicians have not got beyond this formula, which they believe thene plus ultraof liberty,—‘l’individu libre dans la commune, la commune libre dans l’état,’—we know that these political forms are incompatible with liberty, since they tend always to submit a number of men to the same rule; and we formulate our device, ‘l’individu libre dans l’humanité libre,’—the individual, left free to attach himself according to his tendencies, his affinities, free to seek out those with whom his liberty and his aptitudes can accord, unfettered by the political organisations which are determined by geographical or territorial considerations.

“For man to develop himself freely in his physical, intellectual, and moral nature, for him to reveal all his capacities, it is necessary that each individual be able to satisfy all his physical, intellectual, and moral needs. And this satisfaction can only be assured to all if the soil, which is the creation of no one, is placed at the free disposition of whoever is capable of tilling it, and if the existing equipment, product of the labour of preceding generations, ceases to belong to a minority of parasites who exacta large tithe upon the resultant of its activity and the activity of those who work it.

“The earth too much cut up, on the one hand, to permit the small land-holders to employ the powerful machinery which would effectively second their efforts, appropriated in immense lots, on the other hand, by a class of idlers who secure, without work, an income from the production of those to whom they consent to rent,2—the earth nourishes its existing population with difficulty. And I have not counted the ignorance which is fostered by a defective education and which causes the greater part of the cultivators to cling to the traditional processes of cultivation,—processes which demand far too much work and effort for the results.

“Yet, in spite of these sources of waste, the earth would still manage to nourish, after a fashion, every living being if the middlemen were not there to warehouse the products and to speculate and gamble upon them, in such a way that the majority of persons are never in a condition to buy what they need. The fault, then, if all have not enough to eat, lies with the defective social organisation, and is not due to lack of production. A better distribution of products would alone be sufficient to give every one enough to eat, while a better management of the soil and a better use of the instruments of production would bring about abundance for all.

“A clearer comprehension of things will bring the peasant to understand that his interest, properly understood, is to unite his parcel of land with the parcels of his neighbours, to associate his efforts with their efforts, in order to diminish his toil and increase his production.

“And as no one has the right to sterilise, for his sole pleasure, the slightest parcel of land, so long as there is a single being who has not plenty to eat, the coming revolution will have for one of its objects to put the soil into the hands of those who shall wishto cultivate it and the farm machines into the hands of those who shall wish to operate them.

“All this, anarchy seeks to demonstrate to the peasant, explaining to him that the masters who impose upon him exploit likewise the workman of the towns, trying to make him comprehend that, far from considering the town workman as an enemy, he should stretch out his hand to him, to the end that they may aid each other in the struggle for life, and arrive thus at disembarrassing themselves of their common parasites.

“To the workman, anarchy demonstrates that he must not expect his enfranchisement to come from providential saviours, nor from the palliatives with which the puppets of politics, who wish to control his vote and so dominate him, try to dazzle him; that the emancipation of the individual can be brought about only by the individual’s own action, can result only from his own energy and his own efforts when, knowing how to act, he shall use his liberty in place of demanding it.”

“It is not alone to those who are dying of want that anarchy addresses itself. To satisfy one’s hunger is a primordial right which takes precedence over all other rights and stands at the head of the claims of a human being. But anarchy embraces all the aspirations and neglects no need. The list of its demands includes all the demands of humanity.

“Mirbeau, in hisMauvais Bergers, makes one of the characters proclaim to workmen on a strike their right to beauty. And, indeed, every being has a right not only to what sustains life, but also to whatever renders it easy, enlivens it, and embellishes it. They are rare, alas! in our social state, who can live their lives amply.

“Some there are whose physical needs are satisfied, but who are retarded in their evolution by a social organisation which is conditioned by the narrowness of conception of the average intellect,—artists, littérateurs, savants, all who think, suffer morally, if not physically, from the present order of things.

“Daily they are wounded by the pettinesses of current existence, and disheartened by the mediocrity of the public to whom they address themselves, and whom they must consider if they wish to sell their works,—a situation which conducts those who would not die of hunger to compromise, to vulgar and mediocre art.

“Their education has led many of them to believe that they are of an essence superior to the peasant, to the manual worker, from whom, for the matter of that, they are for the most part descended. They have been persuaded that it is necessary, if their ‘talent’ is to develop and their imagination is to have full swing, that the ‘vile multitude’ take upon its shoulders the heavy tasks, devote itself to serving them, and wear itself out in making, by its labour, life easy for them; that they must have, if their genius is to attain its complete fruition, the same atmosphere of luxury and of idleness as the aristocratic classes.

“A healthy conception of things teaches that a human being, to be complete, must exercise his limbs as well as his brain, that labour is degrading only because it has been made a sign of servitude, and that a man truly worthy of the name does not need to impose the cares of his existence on others.

“One man is as good as another: that there are degrees of development is due to causes of which we are ignorant, but such or such an illiterate may have moral qualities superior to the moral qualities of those who are more learned than he. In any case, intelligence, if it blesses him who possesses it, does not confer on him the right to exploit or govern others. These differences of development merely imply differences of desires, of aspirations, of ideals; and it is for the individual himself who is so favoured to realise what responds best to his conception of happiness.

“Besides, these differences of development only appear to us as great as they do because education, ill understood and ill distributed, perpetuates prejudices and errors. Imagination, invention, observation, judgment, if they vary somewhat in intensity in different individuals, do not differ in essence. They are simple faculties of our brain which do not lose their quality forbeing employed to construct a machine or a house, solder a kettle, or make a shirt, rather than to write a romance or a treatise on anatomy.

“Greedy of hierarchy, we humans have divided into high and low occupations the diverse employment of our forces. The parasites who have made themselves our masters, all in proclaiming themselves superior, have established that there is nothing truly noble but idleness, that there is nothing truly beautiful but force exerted to destroy; that force expended to produce, to draw out of the earth and out of industry whatever is necessary to sustain life, is of a vile, inferior quality, and that its use should be reserved to the servile classes.

“On this basis we continue to declare certain occupations low, forgetting that they are such only because one class is forced to pursue them in the service of another class, to submit to its orders and caprices, to abdicate its liberty; but there can be nothing base in no matter what work which consists in ministering to our own needs.

“The artist and the littérateur belong to the masses. They cannot isolate themselves, and inevitably feel the effects of the surrounding mediocrity. It is vain for them to intrench themselves behind the privileges of the ruling classes, to attempt to withdraw into their ‘tour d’ivoire’: if there is debasement for him who is reduced to performing the vilest tasks to satisfy his hunger, the morality of those who condemn him to it is not superior to his own; if obedience degrades, command, far from exalting character, degrades it also.

“To live their dream, realise their aspirations, they, too, must work—for the moral and intellectual elevation of the masses. They, too, must understand that their own development is made up of the intellectuality of all; that, whatever the heights they believe they have attained, they belong to the multitude. If they strain to rise above the multitude, a thousand bonds hold them to it, fetter their action and their thought, preventing them forever from reaching the summits they have glimpsed. A societynormally constituted does not admit slaves, but a mutual exchange of services between equals.”

“The very savant, who considers dealing with knowledge the noblest employ of the human faculties, must learn that knowledge is not a private domain reserved for a few adepts uttering oracles before a public of ignoramuses, who take them at their word; and that in science, as in art and in literature, the faculties of judgment, of observation, and of comparison, do not differ from the faculties employed in occupations which we consider more vulgar.

“In spite of the intellectual compression which has held humanity down for so many centuries, science has been able to progress and develop, thanks to the critical spirit of individuals refractory to official teaching and ready-made conceptions. It ought, then, to be put within the reach of all, to become accessible to all aptitudes, in order that this spirit of criticism which has saved it from obscurantism may contribute to hasten its full efflorescence.

“Knowledge is divided into so many diverse branches that it is impossible for the same individual to know them all in their entirety, the duration of a human life being far from sufficient for a man to acquire enough ideas to be able to investigate them in their minutest details.

“To study them,—that is, if he expects to be able to criticise them,—he is forced to have recourse to the labours of his predecessors and also of his contemporaries.

“It is from all human knowledge that the general synthesis must proceed. What we know to-day is only a means for acquiring the knowledge of to-morrow. And an individual obtains reliable knowledge only in accepting the help of all. The observations of the humblest persons are not always to be disdained. Let the savants also, then, cease to believe themselves a caste apart, let them understand once for all that knowledgedoes not demand special aptitudes, and that it must be accessible to all, in order that all, in developing themselves, may contribute thus to the general development.”

“What is true for individuals is true for nations. Just as an individual cannot live without the support of all, a people cannot exist without the co-operation of the other peoples. A nation which should shut itself up within its frontiers, ceasing all relations with the rest of the world, would not be slow to retrograde and perish. It is then absurd and criminal to foment, under colour of patriotism, hatreds nominally national, but which are in reality only pretexts for the governing classes to legitimise the scourge, militarism, of which they have need to assure their power.

“Every nation has need of the other nations. There is not a region which, for one product or another, is not the customer of another region. And it is no reason for you to hate your neighbours because they speak a different language, because a hundred years ago they invaded and ravaged regions which are indifferent to you to-day; and it is no reason for you to feel yourselves outraged by this ancient invasion because, once upon a time, the inhabitants of the invaded regions suffered under the yoke which now galls you.

“There is not a single nation which cannot reproach its neighbours with some crime of this sort; not a single nation which at the present moment does not hold within its borders some province incorporated against the desire of its inhabitants. And, if those who performed these acts of brigandage were highly detestable, in what respect are their descendants responsible therefor? Should we also be held responsible for the acts of brigandage which our histories teach us to admire as glorious achievements?

“Who among those who aspire to live solely by their own work can take delight in seeing one nation rush upon another nation? It is only those who have made themselves the masters of nations, and who find it for their interest to augment the numbers of thosewhom they exploit, who feel the need of supplying aliment to the troops they train for the work of slaughter. These understand perfectly that a menace of war with a neighbour serves to justify the existence of the armies which are their main prop.

“The despots who have exalted patriotism into a new religion know very well how to ignore frontiers when the defence of their privileges or the extension of their exploitation is at stake. If it is a question of hunting down subversive ideas, the French, German, Italian, Swiss, Russian, and other bourgeois are ready enough to lend to each other their diplomats and their police.

“Is it a question of putting down a strike? The exploiters are not slow to engage foreign workmen, so that they consent to work at the lowest wage; and governments would not hesitate, if there were need, to lend each other their armies.

“And do not all the international understandings which have been established for finance, the postal service, commerce, navigation, railroads, prove that it is theentente pacifique, after all, which is the supreme law?

“The anarchists would bring the workers to see a brother in every workingman, on whichever side of the frontier he chances to have been born.

“Brothers in misery, suffering from the same ills, bowed beneath the same yoke, they have the same interests to defend, the same ideal to pursue. Their veritable enemies are those who exploit them, who enslave them and prevent their development. It is against their masters that they should arm themselves.”

“Anarchy pays little attention to the shady combinations of politics. It professes the most profound disdain for politicians. The promises of the place-seekers interest it only as they disclose all the inanity of politics, and only as they can be made use of to demonstrate that the social organisation will not be transformed until the day when a resolute attack shall be made against its economic defects.

“If the politicians believe the lies they retail, they are simple ignoramuses or imbeciles; for the slightest reasoning should suffice to make them understand that, when a disease is to be cured and its return prevented, its causes must be attacked. If they lie purposely, they are rascals; and, in the one case as in the other, they deceive those whose confidence they win by their babble and their intrigue.

“Those who exploit the actual economic organisation will always seek to direct to their own profit all the attempts at amelioration that are suggested, and there will always be people who are dismayed by brusque changes and who prefer to rely on middle terms which seem to them to conciliate all interests.

“It will always be for the advantage of the masters to deceive the oppressed regarding the veritable means of enfranchisement, and there will always be enough cormorants greedy of power to assist them in their work of muddling questions.

“Anarchy demonstrates the inanity of every attempt at amelioration which attacks only the effect while letting subsist the cause.

“So long as the wealth of society shall be the appanage of a minority of loafers, this minority will employ it in living at the expense of those whom it exploits. And, as it is the possession of capital which makes strength and gives the mastery of the social organisation, they are always in a position to turn to their own profit every amelioration which is undertaken.

“For an amelioration to benefit all, privileges must be destroyed. It is to re-enter into the possession of that of which they have been despoiled that the efforts of those who possess nothing ought to tend. To break the power which crushes them, to prevent its reconstitution, to take possession of the means of production, to create a social organisation in which social wealth can no more be concentrated in the hands of a few,—this is what the anarchists dream.

“If the exploitation of man is to be prevented, the bases of the economic order must be changed: the soil and all that which is the product of anterior generations must rest at the free dispositionof those who can work them, must not be monopolised for the gain of any party whatsoever,—individual, group, corporation, commune, or nation.

“This is what the partisans of partial reforms do not comprehend, and yet this is what conscientious study of economic facts demonstrates. Nothing good can come from the activity of the charlatans of politics. Human emancipation cannot be the work of any legislation, of any concession of liberty on the part of those who rule. It can only be the work of thefait accompli, of the individual will affirming itself in acts.”

“Basing itself upon the evolutionist doctrine, rejecting all preconceived will in the phenomena by which the evolution of worlds and beings is manifested, recognising that this evolution is solely the work of the forces of matter in contact, simply the result of the transformations which this matter undergoes in the course of its own evolution, anarchy is frankly atheistic, and repels every idea of any creating or directing entity whatsoever.

“But, as it is absolute liberty, if it combats religious error, it is primarily from the point of view of truth, and, specifically, because the priesthoods which have sprung up about the different religious dogmas pretend to use the force which their authority and capital lend them to impose their beliefs and to make even those who reject all religions help pay for them.

“As to whatever concerns the intimate thought of each, anarchists understand that an individual cannot think otherwise than his own mentality permits. They would see no objection to people gathering together in special buildings for the purpose of addressing prayers and praises to a hypothetical being if they did not attempt to impose their beliefs on others.

“Anarchists look for the triumph of reason from, and only from, the culture of minds; and they know from themselves that force and oppression cannot stifle ideas.

“They demand absolute liberty in the domain of thought as in that of deeds, in the family as in society.

“Like all the forms of human activity, the association of the sexes has not to brook the control or solicit the sanction of any person whatsoever. It is absurd to wish to set limits to, raise barriers against, or impose restraints on the affections of individuals. Love, friendship, hatred, do not come at call: we feel them or endure them without being able to help ourselves, without even, more often than not, being able to explain them and unravel their motives.

“Marriage, then, can be trammelled by no rule, by no law other than that of mutual good faith and sincerity. It can have no duration beyond the reciprocal affection of the two beings associated, and should be dissoluble at the will of the party for whom it becomes a burden.

“True, there will always remain some problems which cannot be solved without friction and pain, such as the disposition of the children, the suffering of the party in whom love survives, and other matters of sentiment. But these difficulties cannot be resolved any better by pre-established rules: on the contrary, constraint only envenoms the difficulties. It will be the duty of the interested parties to find the solution of the difficulties which estrange them.

“The best that can be hoped for is that the moral level of humanity will be so far elevated that goodness and tolerance will increase and bestow their healing balm on the human passions, which by their very nature elude regulation and control.

“The great objection behind which the adversaries of anarchy intrench themselves when driven into their last redoubts is this, that the anarchist ideal is beautiful, certainly, but much too beautiful ever to be realised, since humanity will never be well-behaved enough to attain it.

“This objection is specious. No one can say what humanity will be to-morrow; and there is no phase of its past development which, if it had been foreseen and announced to the generationspreceding, would not have been held (with reasons galore) quite as unrealisable as the anarchist ideal is held by those who cannot abstract themselves from the present,—a mental state not hard to understand, since the average brain has not yet accomplished the evolution which will smooth the way for the new order of things.

“As long as individuals stagnate in servitude, waiting for providential men or events to put an end to their abjectness, as long as they shall be contented to hope without acting, so long the ideal that is the most beautiful, the ideal that is the simplest, will rest, necessarily, in a state of pure reverie, of vague Utopia.

“Where, except in the fable, has Fortune been seen to descend to the threshold of the sleeper, and wait patiently till it pleases his indolence to take her?

“When individuals shall have reconquered their self-esteem, when they shall be convinced of their own force, when, tired of bending the back, they shall have found once more their dignity, and shall know how to make it respected, then they will have learned that the will can accomplish everything when it is at the service of a trained intellect.

“They have only towillto be free, tobefree.”

La France Libre

“Woe is me if I preach not the gospel!”—Saint Paul.

“The orthodox believers went to hear Him, but understood nothing.”

Tolstoy.

“For He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”

Saint Matthew.

“Thechanson,like the bayonet, is a French weapon.”—Jules Claretie.

“We must arm the camarades, we must never rest from arming the camarades, with stronger and stronger arguments. We must enrich their memories and imaginations with fresh facts which prove more clearly the necessity of the social revolution.”—Pierre Lavroff.

ANARCHIST propaganda is of four sorts, viz.: I. Oral. II. Written. III. By example (propagande par l’exemple). IV. By the overt act of violence (propagande par le fait).

With the anarchistic as with other creeds the simplest, most natural form of oral propaganda is, of course, that which consists in telling one’s faith to one’s neighbour.

The proselyting zeal that prompts a man to take his gospel with him wherever he goes,—to his workshop, to his café, to his restaurant, to the street corner, to “the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker,”—and to couple with exhortation the

“Little, nameless, unremembered actsOf kindness and of love”

that make up neighbourly service, is a force not the less real and potent because its operations are unseen and the measure of them cannot be taken. It is a factor to be reckoned with, the

“presence of a good diffused,And in diffusion ever more intense”;

but it is essentially an affair of the soul not to be declared save by the novelist or poet, and it is of the same substance in all cases of genuine conviction, whatever the basis of the conviction may be.

The unit of the only oral propaganda of which the public can take cognisance is the “group” (le groupe).

The anarchist group is unique—among organisations, one would say if one might. Whether it consist of three persons or thirty, or some number between these limits,—in point of fact it is oftener three than thirty, with an average of perhaps a dozen,—it has neither constitution nor by-laws, neither president, vice-president, nor executive board. It is as exempt from human guidance as a Quaker meeting, to which, for the matter of that, it bears more than this one superficial resemblance, and as guiltlessas an old-fashioned ladies’ committee meeting of parliamentary law. Now thecamaradesdo not always conduct themselves with exemplary decorum, and it sometimes happens that two or three of them are on their feet together and talking at once; but, at the most, this predicament does not arise more frequently than in more rule-bound bodies, and it cannot, on the whole, be said that the groups are any more disorderly, distrait, dilly-dallying, and ineffective than the boresome assemblies in which, often, conceited lack-brains make parliamentary tactics an end, not a means, by perpetually “rising to points of order” and “appealing from the decisions of the chair.”

The group meets sometimes at a café or wine-shop and sometimes at the lodging of a member. It is oftenest born of a mutual desire for fellowship on the part of the anarchists of a street or quarter; but it may result, quite independently of propinquity, from a common enthusiasm for a special phase of the doctrine, a common wish to pursue the same line of study, or from a common interest in some concrete enterprise, such as coming to the rescue of strikers, raising funds for the families of the victims of police persecution, founding libraries and lecture courses, or the circulation of tracts. In any case there are no formal conditions of membership, a group never being at a loss to rid itself, without appeal to written law or precedent, of an intruder who makes himself obnoxious.

The programmes of group meetings vary infinitely with the tempers and caprices of the members, as well as with the objects of the groups; but they may be said, in general, to consist of the reading of original essays and poems, reports on the progress of the cause at home and abroad, a consideration of the bearing on the cause of the latest events in the world at large, an exchange of journals and brochures accompanied by expositions and discussions of their contents, a volunteering of service for the tasks in hand, and that untrammelled exchange of ideas in which the lines between speech-making and conversation, wrangle and discussion, are not too rigidly drawn.

The group is highly ephemeral. Everything about it being guided by the exigencies of the moment, it rarely survives the accomplishment of the special object for which it is formed. It dies, as it is born, easily; or, rather, yielding to the charm of the untried, it takes to itself a new body when the old body grows cramping or monotonous. Such deaths do not signify complete exhaustion of vitality or even a diminution of strength. By a sort of transmigration of souls the vital force is redistributed, that is all.

This remarkable fluidity makes it practically impossible to get any group statistics that are worth the paper they are written on. An estimate made a few years back by a person who seemed as well situated as any one to know, put the number of groups at about one hundred in Paris and between four hundred and five hundred in the rest of France. The same authority would probably give rather higher figures now. But such figures, even if accurate, are of very slight importance, since the number of groups is no criterion whatever of the number of anarchists. The most militant anarchists hold aloof from the groups in order to have complete freedom of action and escape police surveillance; many are in commercial or administrative situations which counsel reticence; and many labourers are constrained to a similar reticence by the danger of losing their jobs. Furthermore, many anarchists call themselves socialists in order to benefit by the greater tolerance accorded to the socialists, especially since the Combes ministry came into power. In a word, the anarchist has every reason to conceal his identity from the prying statistician, and usually succeeds in doing so. Mark Twain, commenting once on the inadequate census returns of the Jews in America, affirmed that he himself was personally acquainted with several million. The meagre numbers ordinarily assigned to the anarchists in France tempt one strongly to imitate Mark’s facetious audacity. At least, if French anarchists are really so few, one may affirm with safety that he is personally acquainted with them all.

Group names are of no great moment when group identity is so evanescent; but some of the names are picturesque or suggestive enough to bear recording:—

Les Enfants de la Nature,La Panthère de Batignolles,Les Gonzes Poilus du Point-du-Jour,La Jeunesse Anti-Patriotique de Belleville,Le Drapeau Noir,Les Quand Même,La Révolte des Travailleurs,Le Cercle Internationale,La Torpille,Le Groupe Libertaire,Les Forçats,Le Réveil,Les Résolus,L’Emancipation,Les Anti-Travailleurs,Les Indomptables,Les Sans-Patrie,Les Amis de Ravachol,Les Cœurs de Chêne,La Dynamite,Terre et Indépendance,Les Indignés,La Vipère,L’Affamé,Le Glaive,Les Parias de Charonne.

As each individual of a group is a law unto himself, recognising no authority in the group as a whole, so each group is a law unto itself, independent of every other group and recognising no higher authority whatsoever. In France, formerly, as is still the case in several countries, groups of the same region formed a federation; but the only present tangible proofs of the existence of an anarchist movement on a large scale are district, national, and international congresses to which whoever wishes3may be a delegate. These congresses have no legislative, administrative, or coercive power over their component parts; their functions are purely advisory like those of the district conferences of the Congregational churches in America.

A newly formed group usually gets itself into touch, by correspondence, with its senior groups somewhat after the manner of a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle or the local branch of a “correspondence university.” Thus: “The groupLes Vengeurswould like to put itself into communication with the existing groups. Those who have not received a personal letter, but who wish to correspond, are requested to direct their letters to the following address,” etc.

Union meetings of several groups are not infrequent. Thus: “L’Avenir Socialof St. Ouen invites thecamaradesof the groupsof St. Denis, Stains, Argenteuil, Puteaux, and Aubervilliers to a grand meeting which will be held Sunday, February 17, at 8.30 o’clock.” But these union meetings can no more bind by their action the individual groups participating than the “union temperance meetings” of the churches of New England towns can bind the action of the individual churches participating.

Anarchist mass meetings are relatively rare. If landlords are found willing to let their halls to anarchists,—and such landlords are not plentiful,—the police interpose at the last moment. Besides, money to pay for a hall is not always forthcoming, and the hesitancy of even the warmest sympathisers to compromise themselves by appearing publicly in the company of thecamaradeshas to be reckoned with. But the anarchist has ways of holding a mass meeting—without holding it—that are worth two of holding it in the stereotyped fashion, and that speak volumes for his resourcefulness.

One of his favourite devices is to get himself named in due form a candidate for the Chamber, which gives him the right to cover the walls of the government buildings with unstamped posters4and the free use of the public-school property for meetings. “Severalcamaradesare astonished” (I quote from a number ofLe Libertaire) “to see Libertad a candidate. Reassure yourselves. With his customary enthusiastic and communicative eloquence he exposes in his meetings the imbecility and the infamy of the parliamentary system. Paraf-Javal seconds him with his marvellous talent as a logician. Between them they are doing an excellent and useful work. At the last meeting an auditor—to carry out the farce of the campaign rally—proposed a resolution which was not voted, but which was gayly read by Libertad in the midst of general approbation. You will perceive by this resolution that ourcamaradeis not on the point of occupying a seat in thePalais-Bourbon:—

“‘The electors assembled in the school building of the Boulevard de Belleville, after having listened to the bogus candidateLibertad and thecamaradeParaf-Javal, conclude (agreeing thus at every point with the candidate himself) that voting is too stupid to be thought of, and that liberty of opinion, like every other liberty, is not to be asked for, but to be taken, whatever the obstacles. They are determined to send packing all the genuine candidates in whom they see only imbeciles or knaves.’”

The anarchist’s sense of humour, you see, is much more highly developed than is ordinarily supposed. Nothing tickles this sense of humour more than to pack the meetings of his antagonists, the bourgeois politicians, divert these meetings from their primitive object by virtue of numbers, address, strength of lung, hardness of fist, or all of these combined, and so carry on his propaganda at the expense of the very persons it is directed against.

He effects this peacefully, as a rule, if his numbers are overwhelmingly superior. In this case it is very much an affair of bravado and lungs. He simply elects abureau5to his mind—for so good an end he is more than willing to stifle his scruples against parliamentarianism—and, having installed a number of thecamaradesupon the platform, carries on the meeting with his own orators and as nearly in his own fashion as circumstances permit; of course, not without more or less noise and abusive protest, if the adherents of the original cause remain in the audience.

If, however, the numbers are more evenly matched, the interlopers, without attempting to capture the organisation of the meeting, make a dash for the front at a preconcerted signal, scale the platform as though it were a rampart, throw down every member of thebureauinto the body of the house, and send the speaking-desk with its pitcher and glass ofeau sucrée, the secretary’s table, and all the rest of the platform paraphernalia flying after them. Then, if resistance is offered on the floor of the hall, a pitched battle ensues, and the possession of the platform (except as it gives the advantage of position and an admirablechance to strut, game-cock fashion) counts for little, in the utter impossibility of getting heard, even if it is maintained, which it is not always, there being instances on record of the platform being taken and retaken, quite as if it were a strategic redoubt, several times in a single evening. Supposing, however, that the interlopers follow up the platform victory by another victory in the body of the hall, and succeed in ejecting the rightful occupants completely; the dispossessed, if they are not able to call up re-enforcements for a re-entry and renewal of the conflict, have no other redress than to persuade the proprietor of the hall to vacate it by cutting off the gas supply or by summoning the police. Either way, they gain nothing but the emptiest sort of dog-in-the-manger vengeance, since they cannot hope to resume their own interrupted meeting.

During the days succeeding the Dreyfus affair, when excitement was running high over the struggle between the nationalists and the socialists for the control of the Paris municipal council, a great nationalist mass meeting (”une grande réunion patriotique”), to be presided over by a nationalist deputy and addressed by other celebrities of the party, was announced for half-past eight of a certain Friday evening, in the assembly room of the Tivoli-Vauxhall, close by the Place de la République. On the morning of the night set for the meeting all the nationalist organs printed the following item:—

“We are informed at the last moment that the anarchists are coming in force to-night to our patriotic meeting at Tivoli-Vauxhall in order to prevent its being held and to transform it into a demonstration ofsans-patrie.They propose to wave the red and the black flag. We are obliged, therefore, much to our regret, to take measures to prevent the entrance of our adversaries, and must limit the entries strictly to those who are provided with invitations. Invitations may be had by applying at,” etc., etc.

On the other hand, the revolutionary organs of the same morning printed the following:—

“TheComité d’Action Révolutionnaireinvites all republicans,all socialists, and alllibertaires[libertaireis a euphonious name for anarchist] to assist at the public meeting organised by the nationalists for this evening, Friday, at 8.30, Tivoli-Vauxhall, rue de la Douane in the Château d’Eau Quarter. All thecamaradesandcitoyensare urged to wear the red eglantine.”

To one familiar with Parisian ways these antithetic notices promised a beautiful scrimmage. Therewasa beautiful scrimmage.

The doors opened at eight, and during half an hour or more the persons duly provided with invitations straggled into the hall; while, on the sidewalk opposite, a hostile crowd of socialists and anarchists, which the police had the greatest difficulty in restraining, asserted angrily their right to enter.

Just as the president of the evening, a phenomenally fat politician, arose to speak, the police lines gave way under the strain put upon them; there was a terrific stampede across the street, and before the public had time to pull themselves together again and before the ticket-takers could oppose the slightest resistance or really knew what was happening, more than two thousand persons without invitations had invaded the hall.

“Vive la Sociale!Vive l’Anarchie!A bas l’Armée!” bellowed the invaders.

“Vive le Drapeau!Vive Rochefort!Vive l’Armée!” screamed the invaded.

And, presto! pandemonium reigned.

In vain the elephantine president brandished his bell and pounded on the table. In vain he made a speaking trumpet with his hands and roared through it for order. The antagonistic yells mounted, collided, cracked, and exploded in mid air.

“A bas la Calotte!”—“Vive l’Armée!”

“Mort aux Juifs!”—“A bas Drumont!”

“A bas Zola!”—“Vive Loubet!”

“Vive l’Internationale!”—“Vive le Drapeau!”

In the rear of the hall, to the air ofLes Lampions, a surging band chanted,

—

Back to Index Next