A BAS LA CHAMBRE
“The battles of the heroes of the future will be individualistic, not against the armed force of governments but against the apathetic routine and inertia of the human masses.”—Edward Carpenter.
“As a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.”
Isaiah.
“Resist not evil.”“Swear not at all.”“Judge not that ye be not judged.”“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast and give to the poor.”“Ye shall know them by their fruits.”—Jesus Christ.
“And when He was accused of the chief priests and elders, He answered nothing.”—Saint Matthew.
“The most dangerous foe to truth and freedom among us is the solid majority.... The majority has might,—unhappily,—but right it has not. I, and the few, the individuals, are right.”
Dr. Stockman, inIbsen’sAn Enemy of the People.
“Should you say to him, ‘But you injure your brother men by accepting a remuneration below the value of your labour, and you sin against God and your own soul by obeying laws which are unjust,’ he will answer you with the fixed gaze of one who understands you not.... Human laws are only good and valid in so far as they conform to, explain, and apply the law of God. They are evil whensoever they contrast with or oppose it; and it is then not only your right, but your duty, to disobey and abolish them.”—Mazzini.
“To profit by all the circumstances of life, to make one’s acts accord with one’s ideas, is to carry on apropagande par le faitof a slow but continuous action which must produce its results.”—
Jean Grave.
WHEN that great and original child of nature, Thoreau, the Hermit of Walden, protested against the collection of taxes in Concord town, he little suspected, probably, that he was prefiguring a revolutionary movement which, before the century was over, was to alarm the sleek and the smug of the Old World and the New; and yet, whether Thoreau realised it or not, his attitude was the anarchistic attitude and his act an act of thepropagande par l’exemple.
The attitude of the American anti-slavery champion, William Lloyd Garrison, was also essentially anarchistic.
“Garrison,” says Tolstoy, “as a man enlightened by Christianity, starting out with a practical aim,—the struggle against slavery,—understood very soon that the cause of slavery was not a casual, temporary seizure of several millions of negroes by the Southerners, but an old and universal anti-Christian recognition of the right of violence of some people over others. The means towards the recognition of this right was always the evil, which people considered possible to outroot or to lessen by rude force; that is, again by evil. And, realising this, Garrison pointed out against slavery, not the sufferings of the slaves, not the cruelty of the slave-owners, not the equal rights of citizens, but the eternal Christian law of non-resistance. Garrison understood that which the most forward champions against slavery failed to understand,—that the sole irresistible means against slavery was the denial of the right of one man over the liberty of another under any circumstances whatever.
“The Abolitionists attempted to prove that slavery was illegal, unprofitable, cruel, degrading, and so forth; but the pro-slavery champions, in their turn, proved the untimeliness, the danger, and the harmful consequences which would arise from the abolition ofslavery. And neither could convince the other. But Garrison, understanding that the slavery of the negroes was but a private case of general violence, put forth the general principle with which it was impossible to disagree,—that no one, under any pretext, has the right of ruling; that is, of using force over his equals. Garrison did not insist so much on the right of slaves to be free as he denied the right of any man whatever, or of any company of men, to compel another man to do anything by force. For the battle with slavery he put forth the principle of the battle with all the evil of the world.”
The refusal of the citizens of the little French commune of Counozouls to pay their taxes between 1902 and 1904 because they were deprived of their hereditary right to supply themselves with wood from an adjacent forest, and the “passive resistance” of the nonconformists in England to the enforcement of the new education act, and of the French Catholics to the expulsion of the monastic orders, are recent instances of probably unconsciouspropagande par l’exemple.
Tolstoy has made a clear and full statement of the purport of thepropagande par l’exemple.
“Taxes,” he says, “were never instituted by common consent, ... but are taken by those who have the power of taking them.... A man should not voluntarily pay taxes to governments either directly or indirectly; nor should he accept money collected by taxes either as salary or as pension or as a reward; nor should he make use of governmental institutions supported by taxes, since they are collected by violence from the people.”
He holds military service in similar abhorrence:—
“Every honest man ought to understand that the payment of taxes which are employed to maintain and arm soldiers, and, still more, serving in the army, are not indifferent acts, but wicked and shameful acts, since he who commits them not only permits assassination, but participates in it.”
In an apologue, “Too Dear,” he demonstrates that law courts, prisons, and armies are alike useless to a sound civilisation. Inshort, Tolstoy renounces the state, and prays for its extinction, root and branch:—
“The doctrine of humility, pardon, and love, is incompatible with the state, with its arrogance, its deeds of violence, its executions, its wars. Real Christianity not only excludes the possibility of acknowledging the state, but also destroys its foundation.... The sum of all the evil possible to the people, if left to themselves, could not equal the sum of the evil actually accomplished by the tyranny of church and state.”
What could a militant anarchist say more? And there is no limit to the extent to which these anarchistic utterances of Tolstoy might be multiplied.
Most French anarchists believe that the privileged will never surrender their privileges without a desperate resistance. Only a little handful of them are Tolstoyans in maintaining that simple non-resistance faithfully adhered to will alone suffice to regenerate the world. But they nearly all hold that cumulative non-resistance is, under certain conditions, the most effective resistance (”faire le vide autour des institutions sociales est le meilleur moyen de les démolir”); and a majority of them, probably,—certainly a majority of their more intellectual element,—esteem it by far the most important propaganda for the present hour.
The average French anarchist is forced to recognise at the outset the unpalatable truth that a good half of his customary doings are based on the government and property he opposes. He rejects the theory of money, but he must buy and sell. He abhors the state, but serves it, and uses its tax-supported institutions; and he is constantly finding himself in situations where he must do violence to his inmost convictions, or get out of life altogether by the portals of suicide or want. There are some unorthodox doings, however, which can be avoided without incurring a martyrdom out of all decent proportion to the seriousness of the occasion.
“If the force of power crushes you to-day, if, in spite of everything, authority fetters you in your evolution, there is always acertain margin for resistance. Fill this margin without being afraid of overstepping it,” advises one of the moderate advocates of thepropagande par l’exemple.
The two forms of non-resistance oftenest enjoined by Tolstoy (namely, non-payment of taxes and refusal to serve in the army) are so disastrous in their consequences—as Tolstoy himself would have seen, had he not been born into a high estate and had he not attained a ripe age and an assured position before his revolutionary ideas completely matured—that they can hardly be said to come within this margin. And they are inculcated in France less with a view to inciting isolated individuals to put them into practice immediately than in the hope that a day may arrive when they will be suddenly put into practice simultaneously by so large a number of persons that coercion will be out of the question.
Similarly, refusal to handle money, to pay interest, to pay rent, to take oath, to testify in court, and to do jury duty, call down such speedy retribution that these, too, must be interpreted as lying in the generality of cases outside the margin mentioned above.
On the other hand, protest against parliamentarianism by abstention from voting (la propagande abstentionniste) is a thoroughly feasible kind of non-resistance, and is practised almost universally by the anarchists of France.
“If we seek,” says Jean Grave, “tofaire le videaround the political machine, it is to the end of not forfeiting our right to act by and for ourselves. It is to preserve our liberty of action that we reject every compromise with the actual political order of things. It is to habituate ourselves to this liberty which is thesummumof our aspirations that we attempt to exercise it in our struggle against the present social state. To the individuals whom they wish to enlist under their banner, the advocates of authority say, ‘Send us to the Chamber to make laws in your favour!’
“To those whom they wish to make think, the anarchists, after having exposed the facts, explain that they have no favours to expect from anybody; and that, when a thing seems to them bad, the best way to destroy it is to ‘faire le vide’ about it; ... that theynever await from the good pleasure of their masters the authorisation to conform their acts to their thoughts; and that they commission nobody to legislate as to what they should do.”
Abstention from marriage (which, as ordinarily practised, the anarchist considers legalised prostitution, and the theoretical indissolubility of which he regards as nothing short of blasphemy) is another thoroughly feasible kind of non-resistance. And it is rare to find an anarchist, whose marital status was not fixed before he gave in his adherence to anarchism, who deigns to consult the pleasure or implore the blessing of any authority whatsoever in a matter which, to his thinking, concerns no one but himself and the person of his choice.22
Malthusianism, also,—in spite of a reverence for the procreative instinct, on the part of anarchists, which Zola’sFéconditédoes not surpass,—is in high favour in anarchistic circles. The motives for the anarchist’s refusal to bring offspring into the world are set forth in Octave Mirbeau’s ejaculation of disgust called out by a project of law for checking depopulation introduced by one M. Piot into the Senate:—
“I dispute that depopulation is an evil. In a social state like ours, in a social state which fosters preciously, scientifically, in special cultures, poverty and its derivative, crime; in a social state which, in spite of new investigations and in spite of new philosophies, relies solely on the prehistoric forces,—murder and massacre,—what matters to the people—the only class, for that matter, which still produces children—this much-discussed question of depopulation? If the people were clairvoyant, logical with their wretchedness and their servitude, they would desire, not the cessation of depopulation, but its redoubling. We are constantly being told that depopulation is the gravest danger which threatens the future of the country. In what, pray, dear Monsieur Piot, and you, also, excellent legislators, who lull us ceaselessly with your twaddle? In this, you say, that there will comeinevitably a time when we shall no more have enough men to send out to be killed in the Soudan, in Madagascar, in China, in thebagnes, and in the barracks. You are dreaming of repeopling now, then, only for the sake of depeopling later on? Ah, no, thank you. If we must die, we like better to die at once and by a death of our own choosing.”
Besides discountenancing elections and marriage, the zealous propagandistpar l’exempleflouts “those whose sole power lies in the obedience of cringers”; defies “those whose character he despises”; refuses to go to law or to accept interest for loans; abstains from the luxuries which the bourgeois deems indispensable; protests against insolence on the part of government functionaries, brutality, high-handed invasion of domiciles, and insults to women on the part of the police, cruelty on the part of landlords, and bulldozing on the part of foremen and employers. He violates deliberately the deep-seated social usages which, equally with the political, judicial, and economic usages, twist and warp existence; and strives to keep himself in his labour, his friendships, and his domestic relations “saturated with aversion for the bourgeois, and for whatever in existence savours of capitalism and thebourgeoisie, and with a sentiment of solidarity towards all who are struggling for sincere living.”
“There is a view [of culture],” says Matthew Arnold in his immortal essaySweetness and Light, “in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it,—motives eminently such as are called social,—come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is, then, properly described, not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection: it isa study of perfection. It moves by the force not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good.”
Something of the same noble and refined philosophy underlies this insistence, by the greater anarchist teachers, on the proselyting value of truth of intercourse and of downright living and on the consequent necessity of the training and purifying of the individual as the surest means of changing a socialmilieu. In the individual refusal to live the “conventional lies” which Max Nordau (who has long trembled on the verge of anarchism) anathematised is a real disintegrating force. “We must begin with ourselves,” says Jean Grave, “in our efforts at transformation.” And it is sure that the saintliness of Louise Michel, the fine simplicity and modesty of Elisée Reclus, the voluntary poverty of the gentle Jean Grave, and the unobtrusive virtues of their obscure disciples are factors of tremendous importance to the anarchist movement. Dialectics are powerless before the blameless living of such real apostles of “sweetness and light.” They may not have the whole truth,—they would be the last to claim that they have,—but there must be some shred of truth in a belief that is thus witnessed by beautiful character.
In pinning so much of their faith to the gradual modification of daily habits of thinking and acting, these anarchists reveal themselves no mean psychologists and no ordinary students of human nature; and it is regarding this relatively prosaicpropagande par l’exemplethat the choicest anarchist spirits have spoken their most sagacious and most winning words.
Thus, the late Pierre Lavroff wrote: “There exists another form of propaganda accessible to all temperaments, provided the conviction be sincere; and many times this form, though wanting theéclatwhich accompanies the burning word or the heroic act, proves to be the most efficacious in the life of every day.
... “The conditions of the actual social régime oppose themselves at every instant to a life in conformity with conviction more than the juridical conditions retard the extension of advanced ideas and more than the police surveillance prevents the revolutionary agitation.
“It has often been remarked that the most considerable transformationsin the ideas of society have occurred, not because the arguments which were advanced against existing forms and beliefs had acquired more force, but in consequence of an insensible modification in mental habits. During entire centuries the same arguments were repeated; but the habits of thought acted as a cuirass, and repulsed for a long time all the attacks made against error. Then, at a given moment, this cuirass yielded, all at once, without any apparent cause. Religious doubt, political liberalism, the propaganda of socialism, are more or less prominent examples. The heroic acts which strike the imagination merely prepare a soil which befits these changes. The great majority lets itself—and will a long time yet let itself—be guided by habits. Arguments make no great impression upon it. It modifies its customs by imitation alone. In the case of heroic acts this imitation extends only to individuals exceptionally placed. Its veritable domain is the daily living. Every new doctrine which embraces practical moral elements must provide a series of models which may be imitated, not by an exceptional hero, but by an ordinary man. The numerous examples incorporate the new doctrine into the daily life. They are, broadly speaking, the most efficacious propagandists of new ideas. Truth realising itself in living is much more accessible than truth in a state of thought. The ideas which an individual propagates act upon a small number, upon the best prepared. A way of life is less conspicuous, but exercises a more intense action on the masses. The propaganda carried on by the daily example is the most potent auxiliary of the spoken word. It surpasses often in influence the most energetic agitation directed against an existing evil....
“For the majority of men thepropagande par l’exempleis the only form which makes tangible the spoken propaganda. It alone changes the habits of thinking and living. It produces, in fact, a modification of the psychic dispositions of society; and it opens the way for society to be influenced by the energetic acts of exceptional individuals, for whom it prepares a receptive soil.”
Before words of such keen observation and high moral and philosophicimport from men who have not forgotten how to think because they seem sometimes to dream, only an attitude of reverence is possible; and the admission is forced that some of these anarchists are not so very flighty, after all, and that some of them are “not so bent on acting and instituting, even with the great aim of diminishing human error and misery ever before their thoughts, but that they can remember that acting and instituting are of little use, unless they know how and what they ought to act and institute.”
Another manifestation of thepropagande par l’exemplehas been the creation, in France and abroad, of anarchist experiment stations where an effort has been made to realise on a small scale, by isolation from the world at large, the social arrangements which are, on a large scale, the anarchist dream.
The agricultural colony founded in Algeria by M. Regnier, one of the sons-in-law of Elisée Reclus, seems to have been the only really successful venture in this line; and I am not sure whether even this is still in existence.
The other anarchist colonies set up abroad—notablyLa Colonie Cecilia, which was one of the by-products of the emigration from France to South America—have all come to more or less speedy grief.
The reasons are not far to seek. The colonists were totally ignorant of the regions to which they emigrated. They looked to find easier living and well-nigh perfect liberty, and were amazed and disillusionised when they discovered that conditions were not so very different under these new civilisations from what they were under the old.
They were ignorant of each other. No selection having been exercised in forming the groups, the orthodox were overshadowed by the heterodox and by adventurers who were not anarchists at all; and many even of the orthodox were too timorous or too weary to resume, under new skies, the struggle which they fancied, in quitting Europe, they had left behind forever. Misunderstandings, disputes, and even spoliation were the natural result.
They were farther handicapped by a lack of preliminary funds for their installations, by the absence of the appliances of civilisation to which they were accustomed, and by unfamiliarity with the agriculture or other work they had to do.
But the primary reason—the reason which may indeed be said to include all the other reasons—for the failure of the French anarchist colonies in foreign lands is that the transition the colonists were called upon to make was far too abrupt. As Jean Grave has pointed out in this connection, “People cannot pass thus brusquely from a society where fighting and egoism are obligatory on every being to a society where the relations between individuals are those of love, of sympathy, of benevolence, of solidarity, where you take no heed of the faults of those who surround you, ignoring the follies of your neighbours while they ignore yours. The existing social state has in no way prepared us for solidarity and benevolence.”
The French attempts to found anarchist colonies at home have fared little, if any, better than the attempts to found them abroad.
A communistic workshop, opened in Paris in 1885 by a number of anarchistic tailors whom a strike had left without employment, was closed at the end of a year; but whether by reason of internal disagreements or by reason of the intrigues of interested employers it is not easy, from the evidence, to determine. The product was divided equally among all the members of the association,—the unskilled, the sick, the aged, and the impotent included.
The anarchistCommune de Montreuil(said to be the original of thephalanstèreof Descaves’ and Donnay’s highly successful play,La Clairière) was established in 1892 at Montreuil-sous-Bois, a suburb of Paris. A workshop was rented in which the members spent all the time they could spare from their regular employments in working for the benefit of those who might be in need, and Saturday lectures were given. The plans involved, further, hiring a piece of ground to be cultivated for a similar purpose in a similar fashion, a gradual cessation of working for employersas occasion permitted and results warranted, a school for children, and a library for adults. These plans were frustrated, not by the petty rivalries of the women (as in the Descaves-Donnay play), but by the dissolution of theCommuneby the government as a part of the wholesale anarchist repressions of 1893-94. Some of the original members of theCommune de Montreuilhave since banded themselves together for an exchange of services with the idea of habituating themselves to make and utilise products “without commercial exchange, representative value, or appraisal”; but the exchangers remain in their respective homes.
At Angers, in the Maine-et-Loire, a department remote from Paris, a number of anarchist workingmen pledged themselves some time since to divide their wages at the end of each week “in order to equalise the conditions of existence.”
It is impossible to draw any conclusion whatsoever from experiments that are so partial as these and that have been conducted under such unfavourable conditions.
In the two great modern industrial reform movements—trade-unionism and co-operation—the anarchist finds other fields for thepropagande par l’exemple.
He is bound to look askance at trade-unions, and, if a purist, to hold himself aloof from them, because by the very fact of trying to raise wages they recognise the legitimacy of the wage system, and because they often resort to politics, and implore the intervention of parliament to gain their ends.
“The unions are wheels in the capitalistic machine because they are placed—if only temporarily—under the conditions of the capitalistic system,” says one. “To accept discussion with one’s exploiters is to confess their right to exploitation,” says another. “Theraison d’êtreof the union is to negotiate with the employers, to quibble over the greater or less degree of exploitation; while an anarchist should aim only at the destruction of this exploitation,” says still another.
Regarding the efficiency of trade-unions as a means of permanently bettering the conditions of the working classes, to saynothing of insuring their emancipation, the anarchist has no illusions. On the contrary, he does them scanter justice than even the capitalist, who, however he may antagonise them, at least pays them the sincere compliment of fearing them. The anarchist has not a particle of faith in trade-unionism as such. He is more orthodox than the most orthodox of economists as to the iron law of wages (la loi d’airain des salaires), the inexorableness of the operation of supply and demand, and the impotence of strikes. He maintains stoutly that a so-called trade-union victory can, in the nature of the case, be only the semblance of a victory, since gains cannot be defended, since an increase in wages cannot be maintained, against an unfavourable market, and since, even if it could be maintained, it would be counterbalanced in the long run by the increased cost of living consequent thereon. Whoever would oppose the trade-union theory and practice will find in the anarchist writings and speeches the completest possible arsenal of weapons ready forged to his hand. No apologist for things as they are can have exposed more relentlessly than he the financial foolishness of fighting millions of dollars with hundreds of dollars, and of pitting the danger of actual starvation against the relatively insignificant danger of decreased profits,—of combating strength with weakness, in a word, on the former’s chosen ground.
Nevertheless, the anarchist recognises that the trade-union is a natural grouping of the proletariat; that it was the first important grouping to acknowledge, by acts, the irrepressible conflict between capital and labour, the first to boldly lift and wave the standard of industrial revolt, the first to shift the attempt at enfranchisement from the political to the economic ground, and the first to appreciate the advantages of internationalism; that it is the best considerable example thus far of solidarity in action, the most favourable soil for anarchistic good seed—particularly the good seed of thepropagande par l’exemple—within present reach, the most favourable ground for disputing the future with the socialists, and an excellent weapon of offence and defence.And he approves of strikes, with all their demonstrable financial futility, because they keep to the fore the idea of revolt, and because—a sort of left-handed reason—every unsuccessful strike is an argument in his favour, inasmuch as it shows the emptiness of partial measures that do not reach the cause.
Besides, he discerns a trend his way in the growing trade-union advocacy of the “universal strike” (grève universelleorgrève générale) which he regards as but another name for the revolution.
At the time of the memorablegrève des terrassiers,23Gustave Geffroy contributed toLe Journala sketch entitled “Tableau de Grève,” which is at once a vivid pen-picture and a prophecy:—
“We could easily have believed ourselves, these latter days, borne backward to the days of the siege of Paris or the weeks which followed the time of the Commune, in perceiving above the pedestrians the silhouettes of cavaliers on patrol and the hands of soldiers in campaign accoutrements in the public squares and along the banks of the Seine.... When the redoubtable question of labour and ofmisèreis the order of the day, it is anguish with silence which reigns in the street where pass the soldiers under arms.
“It has been so everywhere this week. About the stacks of arms, along the route of the cavaliers, not a cry has escaped, as if each one, by some tacit understanding, knew that destiny must not be tempted nor risks run. The public regarded without uttering a word, gazed fixedly at these sons of the soil and of the faubourg, wearing uniforms and equipped with provisions and cartridges as if they were entering on a campaign in this peaceful city. Where was the enemy? These strikers, slowly promenading, listlessly dangling their arms,—they who set forth habitually to work, and who return from work with a rapid, cadenced step,—and quite stupefied at having become idle strollers; adversaries little fierce, without arms, without their tools even,having in their favour only their patience, their passivity, their hope, and especially their assurance that sooner or later they will conquer, when all their fellows shall will it like them.
“It is this fatality of the victory of numbers which is the enemy; it is against this that the regiments and the squadrons have been sent out, against this that to-morrow they would have trundled out the artillery. All this parade of force would have been made this time, could have been made, in fact, only in pure loss.... And so it will be—we can now affirm it—on that future day when thegrève généraleshall be interpreted in this fashion, when there shall be everywhere only dismaying calm, the tragic refusal to work, when the soldiers called out to guarantee order shall find only order everywhere,—placid visages and folded arms. Military display will be useless on that day. The great social change will have come by the fact of that new sort of revolution which a reactionary journalist designated very justly, the other day, by the name of the passive revolution....
... “Ah! the good time when the people offered itself freely as a target on a pile of paving-stones in a narrow street!
“This good time is no more. The great boulevards, the broad avenues, the power of the artillery which can sweep everything from afar without the insurgents seeing anything but the quick flame, the sounding light, the cloud of smoke, were already there to assure the end of the ancient street war. It was not enough. The revolutionary tactics also have changed, in proportion as the revolutionary party has extended, has gained in force, and has become more conscious of its destinies....
“Seek not elsewhere than in a profound transformation of the human mind the cause of the tranquillity of a strike in which we behold the placid confrontation of the workingman and the soldier. For all observers endowed with reason andsang-froid, to whatever party they belong, the spectacle is that of the toiling mass reconnoitring the ground and testing its strength. Nothing less than a pacific and irresistible transformation is announced. Of course, thegrève généralecan be realised only by an understandingthroughout an organisation far-seeing and complete, and then, only, thanks to a certain combination of circumstances; but this is not saying it cannot be realised.
“It is easy to brand such a programme as tainted with Utopia and struck with sterility. But to do so is to refuse to recognise the sense of facts and especially the power of a unique idea. Bear in mind that this idea of thegrève généralehas already thousands of adherents, not only in France, but in Germany, in England, in America, and you will have some chance of appreciating the significance of the strike of to-day, so different from the strike of yesterday, in spite of a few traditional incidents into which the strikers and the government have been betrayed.”
Geffroy, the writer of the above, is not an anarchist, but a socialist. Few anarchists see in thegrève générale, as he does, a purely passive revolution, which will prevail without the shedding of a drop of blood or any other violence whatsoever. Most of its anarchist advocates regard it, “not as a strike of folded arms, but as a general revolt of the proletariat, outside of all political lines, for the conquest of the means of production and for complete emancipation.”
Thegrève généraleapart, the anarchist who enters the trade-union24does it, incidentally, perhaps, to rid the union of the curse of politics and to score over the socialists, but primarily to transform it by the influence of precept (and, still more, of example) from “a reform movement for the defence of the material and moral interests of the workers, and especially the satisfaction of such immediate desires as the amelioration of salaries and the diminution of the working day,” into “an economic movement of the working class against the capitalistic class for the suppression of the latter and of the régime which they represent.”
Consequently, anarchist writings are replete with solemn warnings to the faithful against the insidious peril of having anythingto do with the unions with any other object in view than that of making them other than they are.
From co-operation, as from trade-unionism, the purists of anarchy keep themselves prudently aloof by reason of the risk of contamination from too close contact with commercial processes and partial measures.
Other anarchists—the majority, perhaps—are still holding co-operation under observation, waiting for it to display more satisfactory credentials before they declare themselves. Thus theEtudiants Socialistes Révolutionnaires Internationalistes25“have pronounced for it,” says A. D. Bancel, “all in pronouncing against it.”
Others do not object to participating passively in the movement, so that they are not called on to aid in the work of organisation and serve on boards and committees.
The rest have espoused it with more or less enthusiasm because its efforts are economic rather than political, because it militates against socialism, because it is a phase of the struggle between classes; because it is of a high educational value to the proletariat in showing it its real position; because it fosters internationalism; because its unit, the co-operative group, like the union, is an expression of solidarity, an excellent field for thepropagande par l’exempleand a convenient weapon of combat; and finally because its ultimate aim isla liberté intégrale.
There is apan-coopérationas there is agrève universelle. And, as thegrève universelle(which is the revolution) is regarded by some as the inevitable consummation of trade-unionism, sola pan-coopération, aliasla république coopérative, aliasl’alliance coopérative internationale(which is likewise the revolution), is regarded by some as the inevitable consummation of co-operation.
By these latter a critical moment is foreseen when the angry meeting ofle capitalisme autoritaireandle coopératisme libertairewill kindle a colossal, world-wide, and purifying conflagration.
“I came not to send peace, but a sword.... I am come to send fire on the earth.”—Jesus Christ.
“It is not by metaphysics that men will be undeceived: the truth must be proven by deeds.”—Voltaire.
“Not songs of loyalty alone are these,But songs of insurrection also,For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over,And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him,And stakes his life to be lost at any moment.”Walt Whitman.
“Not songs of loyalty alone are these,But songs of insurrection also,For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over,And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him,And stakes his life to be lost at any moment.”Walt Whitman.
“La force destructive est une force créatice.”—Bakounine.
“If I were dying of starvation, and had no means of buying a piece of bread, and were to go by a baker’s where bread was within reach, I should help myself to it. And the way I should reason would be this: That bread belongs to the baker, but it is more God’s bread than it is the baker’s, and I am one of God’s little boys, and therefore understand the proximity of this loaf to be the answer to the prayer I offered my Father this morning: ‘Give me this day my daily bread.’”—Dr. Charles Parkhurst.
“His [Dr. Parkhurst’s] principle of necessity is one easily misapplied; but it is right, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson’s reply to the man whose excuse for stealing a loaf of bread was that he ‘must live.’ ‘I don’t see the necessity,’ said the rude moralist. And so said the custodian of morality when David stole the shew-bread for his starving soldiers; but our Lord said he did right.”—Editorial inNew York Independent.
“I hold it blasphemy that a man ought not to fight against authority. There is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it in the beginning.”—George Eliot, in Felix Holt, the Radical.
WITH regard to doctrines, ultimate aims, and the three methods of disseminating them already described,—oral and written propaganda and the propaganda by example,—French anarchists are all of the same mind; but with regard to the fourth means, the propaganda by the overt act of violence (la propagande par le fait), there is anything but unanimity among them.
No anarchist, the simon-pure Tolstoyan excepted, denies the right to collective revolt, the duty, even, of insurrection. But this attitude has nothing distinctive about it. The same right and the same duty have been affirmed and reaffirmed by the republicans of all ages, and by the royalists, also, when they have been temporarily out of power, the only appreciable difference being that the republicans and royalists have esteemed them as a means of realising rather than a means of spreading their ideal.
The emergence into public prominence of the insurrectional idea which anarchists had long held—more or less consciously—dates from the Peace Congress held in Geneva in 1867, at which the Belgian César de Paepe created a sensation by declaring that “not peace, but war, must be preached.” “Peace,” he explained, “can be hoped for only as a fruit of victory in the social war.” Bakounine, just then coming to the front in Europe, lent the weight of his authority to De Paepe’s idea.
In 1876, theFédération Italienneapproved a definite declaration (signed by Cafiero and Malatesta) of the same purport:—
“TheFédération Italiennebelieves that insurrection, destined to affirm by deeds the principles of liberty, is the most efficacious agency of propaganda and the only one which, without corrupting and deceiving the masses, can penetrate even the lowest socialstrata, and draw the live forces of humanity into the struggle theInternationaleis carrying on.”
Four months later, in the spring of 1877, this credo of insurrection was put in practice at Letino and San Galo, Italy, where Cafiero, Malatesta, Ceccarelli, and the rural priests, Fortini and Tamburini, with thirty followers, took possession of the public buildings, imprisoned or drove out the local authorities, set fire to the archives and property records, and seized and distributed the tax money among the people.
The same year a memorial of the Congress of Fribourg, signed by Kropotkine and Elisée Reclus among others, declared:—
“We are revolutionists because we desire justice. Never has great progress, special or general, been made by simple, pacific evolution. It has always been made by a revolution. If the work of mental preparation is accomplished slowly, the realisation of the ideas occurs quickly,”—an utterance with which may be compared Kropotkine’s, “Governments have never done anything but give a legal sanction to accomplished revolutionary facts”; Jean Grave’s, “We are revolutionists because we have the reasoned conviction that the privileged will not abandon one of their privileges if they are not forced to it”; and this confession of Guillaume Froment in Zola’sParis:—
“I was only a positivist, a savant given over entirely to observation and experience, accepting nothing beyond the verified fact. Scientifically, socially, I admitted a simple and slow evolution, generating humanity as the human being himself is generated. And it was then that, in the history of the globe and in that of societies, I was forced to make a place for the volcano, the abrupt cataclysm, the sudden eruption, which has marked each geologic phase, each historic period. One comes thus to perceive that a step has never been taken, nor a progress made, without the aid of terrible catastrophes. Every forward march has sacrificed billions of existences. Our narrow justice revolts, we treat Nature as an atrocious mother; but, if we do not excuse the volcano, we must, nevertheless, endure it as forewarned savants when it breaksout, and then, ah! then, I am perhaps a dreamer, like the others: I have my ideas.”
The year following the Fribourg Congress (1878) Kropotkine warmly advocated insurrection before the Congress of theFédération Jurasienne. “By insurrections,” he said, “the anarchists seek to quicken popular sentiment and initiative to the double end of a violent expropriation and the disorganisation of the state.” The congress pronounced formally in favour of the insurrectional principle, and from that day to this it has never been seriously questioned in any important anarchist quarter.
If the overt act by the individual anarchist is not viewed with the same unanimous and unqualified approval as the collective act of insurrection, it is because there is an easy distinction (representing, perhaps, a real difference) to be made between the individual act directed against the principle of authority incarnated in an official of the state,—president, minister, deputy, general, senator, judge, and police prefect,—when it comes under the general head of regicide (a reform measure which is almost as old as the world), and the individual act directed against the principle of property incarnated in any member of thebourgeoisiewhatsoever, when it comes under the general head—O deterrent power of a name!—of murder.
The first kind of individual attempt (regicide) encounters little opposition based on principle within the anarchist ranks. It is opposed, as Alexander H. Stephens opposed the foundation of the Confederacy (of which he accepted the vice-presidency, once it was declared), on grounds of expediency. As regicides, Caserio, Vaillant,26Bresci,27Pallas (whose attempt against the Maréchal Campos was glorified by the International Labor Congress at Chicago in 1893), and the assassin of Alexander II. fall into much the same category as Brutus, Cromwell, Harmodius and Aristogiton, and the executioners of Louis XVI.; and, in thecase at least of the assassin of the czar, the classification, while not perhaps ideal, might be worse.
As to weapons, the popular distinction (which is, in fact, more nice than wise) between the pistol and stiletto, on the one hand, and the bomb, on the other, is not made. “I admit all means, even the bomb,” says Charles Malato, who approved Pallas and Vaillant, but regretted Henry’s attempted slaughter of the bourgeois at theCafé Terminus, “if only it be well placed; and yet I am not a drinker of blood.”
The second kind of individual attempt—the suppression of members of thebourgeoisiefor the sole reason that they are bourgeois—isCHARLES MALATOCHARLES MALATOdisapproved by all the anarchists but a small knot of extremists.
This disapproval, which is for the most part purely formal and passive when the act attains the person against whom it was directed, and its unselfishness is immediately evident, may become aggressive, not to say bitter, in certain quarters, when a tragic botch has been made of the job (by a mistake in victims) or when its significance as an act of propaganda has been obscured by the presence of motives of personal revenge. Elisée Reclus, of all the eminent French theoricians, has shown himself the most consistently refractory to this sort ofpropagande par le fait. In an article called out by the rapid succession of individual attempts in 1892, he said:—
“When you have a grudge against a person, you seek him out, you have an explanation with him, but you do not make innocent persons bear the brunt of your rancour.
“Anarchy is thesummumof humane theories. Whoso calls himself anarchist should be gentle and good. All overt acts of the nature of that of yesterday are looked on by truecompagnonsas crimes. If those who perpetrate these barbarities act with the design of promulgating the anarchist creed, they deceive themselves completely.
“Things will come to such a pass, there will be such disgust with thecompagnons, they will inspire such horror, that no one will be willing to hear anarchy so much as spoken of.
“And yet the idea is beautiful: it is grand. See to it that it is respected. The persons who do evil in its name befoul our doctrines.”
It is not always easy for the outsider to grasp why, of two anarchist acts of violence with similar exterior aspects, the samecamaradepraises the one and deplores the other. What is more, he will understand still less when thecamaradehas explained. There are labyrinths of subtleties in anarchist apologetics through whose intricate windings the lay intelligence has no Ariadne-given thread to guide it, and depths of esoteric metaphysics which only the plummet of the adept can sound.
Vaillant had almost unanimous plaudits from thecamarades, no little praise from the socialists, and approval—mark the humorous note!—from certain of the deputies whose lives he had jeopardised.
Ravachol, author of the explosions at the houses of the judges Benoit and Bulot and of other overt acts less readily comprehensible, was practically repudiated at first by theTemps Nouveaux(thenLa Révolte) on account of a dubious past, but was recognised loyally, if languidly, as soon as his entire disinterestedness was made plain.
The general attitude of theTemps Nouveauxtowards thepropagande par le faitis one of guarded detachment, verging on complete indifference,—an attitude of rare prudence, sanity, and sagacity. It treats the whole matter of the individual attempt as a side issue, with an unfortunate tendency to divert the attention of both the faithful and the unfaithful from the basal principles of anarchy, and makes it very clear that it would ignore it altogether if it could.
“If anarchy,” says this representative journal, “does not reject violence when it is demonstrated to be indispensable to enfranchisement, it does not elevate it into a system. Violence is for it a means, debatable, like everything, but which is, at most, only an accessory affair. It must disappear when the obstacles are overcome, and weakens in nothing any of the elements of the ideal itself....
“Deeds are not counselled, nor spoken, nor written. They are done. Sometimes a deed done effects more than a long period of writing. This journal will always be the first to applaud those who act. We are, then, far from repelling thepropagande par le fait. Only—we have said it before, and we repeat it—thepropagande par le faitcannot be the work of a journal. It is not for us to say to individuals: ‘Do this! Do that!’ If they are convinced and conscientious, they will know what they have to do....
“To say to the workers, ‘Do this, burn that, hang that one,’ is child’s play, since the reader may demand with reason why he who preaches so glibly does not do himself what he urges others to do.”
The American labour leaders are wont to assure us, while reserving to themselves in all cases the right to criticism and opposition, that there never has been, using terms broadly, and never can be, an unsuccessful strike, since the strike that is the least necessary and most immediately disastrous serves the large purpose of focussing public attention on the strained relations between capital and labour, of revealing by a sort of cathode-ray efficacy the hidden ills of the body politic, and so of bringing just that much the nearer the final cure.
Similarly, the anarchist leaders assert that in anarchy no forces are lost, and that the manifestations which are, in appearance, the most foolhardy and shocking may have, equally with those which are, in appearance, the most reasonable, the saving merit of compelling the thoughtless world to think. “And perhaps,” says one of these leaders, “it will occur to the hide-boundbourgeoisieto find society defective when they shall have discovered that there is some danger in perpetuating its errors.”
“The anarchist had been told,” wrote Zo d’Axa inL’Endehors, apropos of the dynamite exploits of an unknown, who turned out to be Ravachol, “that the idea for which he was willing to brave every danger did not exist. He had had it dinned into his ears that, in other times, the precursors talked less and acted more. His theory had been laughed at. His hope had been mocked. When, upon the highway as an apostle, he had attempted to convert the people, no one of these laughers and mockers had been willing to tarry and listen an instant.
“Now, behold him!
“Like the street vender drawing crude charcoal pictures on the sidewalk to attract the cockney crowd to which he means to offer anarticle de Parisa little later, a primitive propagandist of anarchy has decided to force attention by the brutality of an act.
“Back of this act is the faith, so much tabooed, to which he has at last drawn fruitful discussion.
“It was an Idea the dynamiter displayed.
“And no one can deny it,—at the moment when, by favour of the excitement, the journals are giving their readers the very ‘articles de Paris’ which the terrible unknown dreamed of showing. Side by side with their invectives theFigaro, theEclair, other sheets, print and expound theories which had not had the freedom of their columns before. These journals have become, in spite of their reserves, the propagators of the accursed Idea.
“Is it a result?
“Men read, discuss, realise perhaps.”
Tocomprehendthe foregoing manner of reasoning or, rather, point of view (the word “comprehend” is italicised lest any one confound inoffensive comprehension with dangerous approval), one must have had in some country or other some bitter experience—stinging rebuke or angering, insulting rebuff—with the vapid self-complacency, the dogmatic thick-wittedness, the dictatorialstubborness, and the cruel hard-heartedness of the bourgeois. One must have been shocked and sickened by his vulgar flaunting of a stupid—or wicked?—determination to persist in his denial that his fellow-men ever starve, unless he can see them, with his own eyes, throw up their hands dramatically, stagger, and fall around him.
If one has had this disillusionising experience with the bourgeois, he willcomprehend—there will be no lapsing here into such atrociously bad form as hinting the possibility of acquiescence—that there are numerous poor devils who say, “Let the bourgeois have the dramatic demonstration of starvation, since he will credit no other!”
He willcomprehendthat there are some, not poor devils, who think that a certain manifestation of the hungry in Trafalgar Square was a beautiful eye-opener for the British public; that there are others who look upon the march of Coxey’s grotesque army as anything but a ridiculous failure; and that there are still others who, recalling a memorable famine winter in Boston,—the shudderful winter when the authority of the state was invoked to disperse a peaceable assembling of the unemployed,—hold it a real pity that the assembling was quite so peaceable.
He willcomprehendthese last when they say that a few broken window-panes in the swaggering Back Bay and self-sufficient West End would have made the inhabitants of those districts less glib in their assertions that there was no real suffering in the city and less eager, by way of a clinching argument, to parrot, as having happened to their very selves, the incident which probably did happen sometime and somewhere to some one, thanks to some irresponsible tramp’s sense of humour,—of the professedly hungry man who refused to work because he had a previous engagement to march in the procession of the unemployed.
There is an appreciable distance from broken windows to broken heads. Still it is plain enough that the person who cancomprehendthe point of view that in a given exigency applauds the firstcancomprehend(always bear in mind that this word is an innocuous one) the point of view that in a graver exigency applauds the second.
If it is true that there are bourgeois, as there are dogs, who understand no argument and respect no appeal but the blow,—let it not be said here that it is true,—it is not surprising, however deplorable it may be, that there are those among the proletariat who find it “a source of innocent merriment,” in the words of Gilbert’s Lord High Executioner, “to make the penalty fit the crime.”
Anarchist and dynamiter are so far from being interchangeable terms that it would be possible and, perhaps, justifiable to write a treatise on the theory of anarchy without making the slightest reference to dynamiting or any other form of thepropagande par le fait. Taken by itself, the list of the overt anarchist acts in France during the last twenty-five years seems a long one; but, when it is viewed in the light of the total number of anarchist believers, it is evident that the dynamiter is the exception among thecamarades. When, furthermore, the few hundred victims anarchy has made in all the world during the quarter of a century it has been militant are compared with the number of the victims the Minotaur—poverty—devours in a single country in a single year,28or with the havoc wrought by any one of the commoner diseases, anarchy as a menace to human life ceases to appear a very serious matter.
Nevertheless, the alarm thepropagande par le faithas excited is not to be wondered at. The dread of the dynamiter, like the savage’s dread of the railroad, is a dread of the mysterious and uncontrollable, superstitious perhaps, but which no amount of civilisation can entirely eradicate from the human mind. Lightning, which also does relatively little damage, is feared, and will probably continue to be feared so long as there is no forecasting where it will strike.
In the case of the new dynamite propaganda the unknownquantities were, in the beginning at least, so numerous as to be bewildering; and several of them still remain uneliminated. Much more is now known about anarchist doctrines, about the nature and power of dynamite, and the other fabulously destructive modern explosives, and a little more about the characters of the persons who employ these explosives. But the dynamiter’s seeming illogicality in the choice of his victims and his actual inability—comparable only to a woman’s proverbial awkwardness in throwing a stone—to attain the victims he has chosen, while he does attain others, are as pronounced as ever.
When throwers of bombs massacre persons they would not have harmed for the world, and when bombs are found in such diverse spots as cafés, restaurants, hotels, churches, soldiers’ recruiting offices and barracks, police stations, bazaars, private dwellings, public markets, stock exchanges, employment bureaus, and old people’s homes, who, indeed, can boast of his security? In the course of the years 1891-95 the fear of the dynamiters assumed such proportions as to amount almost to a panic, and this period is still referred to as “The Terror” in certain quarters.