Read Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism Online
Authors: Peter Marshall
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Intellectual History, #20th Century, #Philosophy, #v.5, #Political Science, #Amazon.com, #Retail
Anarchism as a movement only started gathering momentum in the 1860s in France, mainly inspired by Proudhon’s mutualism and his ideas expressed in
De la Capacité politique des classes ouvrières
(1865). Workers’ associations and mutual credit schemes were considered the principal way forward. Towards the end of the 1860s men like Eugène Varlin and Benôit Malon helped shift the emphasis from mutualism to Bakuninite collectivism in the French sections of the First International. The Paris Commune of 1871, which declared ‘the absolute autonomy of the Commune extended to all the localities of France’, advocated in theory a form of Proudhonian federalism. In practice little could be done except to keep public services going and defend its existence. In the bloody aftermath, amongst the anarchists Varlin was shot, Louise Michel was transported to a penal settlement, and Elisée Reclus was imprisoned.
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The anti-authoritarians within in the International saw the Commune as the spontaneous expression of federalist, anti-statist ideas and it strengthened their argument for the Communal reconstruction of post-revolutionary society. The Federal Committee of the Jura Federation in 1872 saw the principle issue at stake in the socialist movement was the choice between the
Commune libre
or the
Volkstaat.
By 1875, the Commune was gradually becoming a myth. As
Le Révolté
declared on 1 November 1879, ‘the people, who in modern times have first formulated in practice the anarchist programme of the proletariat by constituting the free Commune of Paris, cannot be for authoritarianism.’
For a decade after the Commune all anarchist and socialist activity was declared illegal in France. The Jura in Switzerland became the new centre of opposition to the General Council of the International, and the nucleus of the incipient European anarchist movement. Its principal leader James Guillaume argued that federalism in the sense given to it by the Paris Commune and Proudhon meant above all the negation of the nation and the State. In a federal revolution:
There is no more State, no more central power superior to groups and imposing its authority on them; there is only collective force resulting from the federation of groups … The national and central State no longer existing, and the Communes enjoying the fullness of their independence, there is truly
an-archy.
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In 1873 Paul Brousse, a graduate of the medical school of Montpellier University, joined the Jura Federation and tried to give anarchism a scientific basis and make it more militant. He had been with the Republican opposition at the end of the Second Empire, but on joining the International he soon became an opponent of Marx and the General Council, and played a major role in the anti-authoritarian wing. He was expelled from the Montpellier section of the International in 1872. After a short period of exile in Spain where he became more influenced by Bakuninite ideas and was involved in an uprising in Barcelona in 1873, he moved to Switzerland.
Kropotkin became acquainted with him there and described him as ‘a young doctor full of mental activity, uproarious, sharp, lively, ready to develop any idea with a geometrical logic to its utmost consequences’. At the Berne Congress of the International in 1874, Brousse had heard Malatesta and Cafiero insisting that revolution consists more in deeds than in words. Matching the violence of the Russian and Italian anarchists, Brousse became a leading exponent of ‘propaganda by the deed’, which led to conflict with the moderate James Guillaume.
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He was sufficiently eminent to give a speech, along with Guillaume and Reclus, at Bakunin’s funeral in Bern in 1876.
In the same year Brousse edited
Die Arbeiter-Zeitung
, and later launched from La Chaux-de-Fonds
L’Avant-Garde.
Under the rubric ‘Collectivism, Anarchy, Free Federation’, the latter organ called for the replacement of the State by a society based on contract and the free federation of groups formed around each need and interest. The strategy advocated by the journal was extremely violent, calling for the creation of the Commune by insurrection: ‘It is necessary to desert the ballot boxes and man the barricades, and for that, it is necessary to get organized.’
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Its motto was ‘Rise, people, in your might!/ Worker, take the machine!/ Take the land, peasant!’
After being one of the most active anarchist organizers and militants, on his return to France in 1880 Brousse went over to the socialists and developed the reformist doctrine of ‘possibilism’ which sought improvements through factory legislation and municipal politics. ‘The ideal’, he wrote in 1883, ‘divided into several practical stages; our aims should, as it were, be immediatized so as to render the
possible.
’
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He formed the Possibilist Party which became the most powerful socialist organization in France in the 1880s.
A general awareness of the anarchist movement as a distinct strand within socialism did not appear until the beginning of the decade. Even as late as 1876 James Guillaume in the Jurassian Federation complained that the terms ‘anarchist’ and ‘anarchy’ expressed only a negative idea and led to ‘distressing ambiguities’.
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Elisée Reclus however soon argued that the notoriety of the term would aid their cause by attracting attention.
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At the same time, the Federation moved from collectivism to communism. The first mention of anarcho-communism was made by a French exile living in Geneva François Dumartheray who, in 1876
in Aux Travailleurs manuels partisans de l’action politique
, announced the publication of a pamphlet on the subject which in the event has never been traced.
In October 1876 anarcho-communism was adopted by the Italian Federation at its Florence congress, and Malatesta and Cafiero travelled to Switzerland and told their Swiss comrades about it. In 1876 Guillaume in his pamphlet
Idées sur l’organisation sociale
also argued that after the revolution there would be a general sharing out of wealth and consumption need not be related strictly according to work. Kropotkin claimed that he was ignorant of the doctrine as late as 1889, but in the following year it was officially adopted on his insistence by the Congress of the Jurassian Federation at La Chaux-de-Fonds.
With the lifting of restrictions on political activity in France in 1881, anarchism became recognizable for the first time as an identifiable movement.
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A remarkable group of activists emerged. The shoemaker Jean Grave, who edited
La Révolte
and
Les Temps Nouveaux
, was an able and indefatigable propagandist. Emile Pouget edited the scurrilous
Le Père Peinard
and went on to become a leading exponent of anarcho-syndicalism. The ex-Jesuit seminarist Sébastien Faure popularized anarchist theory in a series of pamphlets and founded the
Le Libertaire
in 1899 which continued into the 1950s. Kropotkin’s presence in France at the time greatly inspired the movement and he wrote for the leading anarchist journals, especially
Le Révolté
and its successor
La Révolte.
Many of his works first appeared in French.
Elisée Reclus, the geographer, felt no compunction about using his knowledge to support the anarchist cause. His brother Elie also wrote about
Les Primitifs
(1903), employing the findings of anthropology to demonstrate the possibility of a free society, but he took an increasingly pessimistic interest in past myths and religions. Elisée Reclus remained an optimist and became the most competent French exponent of anarchism at the end of the nineteenth century. He not only supported
La Révolte
and
Le Révolté
with money and contributions but his purely anarchist pamphlets like
A mon frère, le paysan
(1893) and
Evolution et révolution
(1880) had a wide circulation.
But while these thinkers were elaborating a profound critique of the French State, and developing a persuasive anarcho-communist alternative, a series of spectacular and bloody acts of propaganda by the deed won anarchism its notorious reputation in the popular mind which it has never been able to shake off. In the desperate social unrest in the 1880s many anarchists thought that the only way to bring down the State was through
a campaign of terror. Jean Grave for one concluded at the time that ‘all the money spent to propose deputies would be more judiciously used to buy dynamite’.
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Charles Gallo agreed and threw a bottle of vitriol from the gallery of the Paris Stock Exchange and then starting firing his revolver at random. The legendary François-Claudius Ravachol placed bombs in the houses of two French judges (whom he held responsible for imposing severe sentences on two workers after a May Day demonstration). His name became immortalized in the verb –
ravacholiser
(to blow up). Théodule Meunier bombed a barracks and the restaurant where Ravachol had been betrayed to the police (killing the proprietor and a customer). Auguste Vaillant hurled a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies (killing no one).
The most notorious terrorist at this time was the young intellectual Entile Henry, who threw a bomb in the Café Terminus in the Gare St Lazare in Paris to show the vulnerable side of the bourgeoisie. He killed one customer and injured twenty others. At his trial, Henry declared:
I wanted to show the bourgeoisie that henceforth their pleasures would not be untouched, that their insolent triumphs would be disturbed, that their golden calf would rock violently on its pedestal until the final shock that would cast it down among filth and blood.
He made clear that he saw himself as part of an international anarchist movement which no government could crush:
You have hanged in Chicago, decapitated in Germany, garrotted in Jerez, shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Montbrison and Paris, but what you will never destroy is anarchy. Its roots are too deep. It is born in the heart of a society that is rotting and falling part. It is a violent reaction against the established order. It represents all the egalitarian and libertarian aspirations that strike out against authority. It is everywhere, which makes it impossible to contain. It will end by killing you!
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On the scaffold, Henry exclaimed: ‘Long live Anarchy! My death will be avenged.’ It certainly was. In 1894, an Italian anarchist Santo Jeronimo Caserio stabbed to death President Sadi Carnot of France. Kropotkin and others tried to excuse such acts as desperate responses to an impossible situation, but no such tortuous arguments could assuage the public revulsion. As the writer Octave Mirbeau drily observed: ‘A mortal enemy of anarchism could not have done better than Emile Henry when he hurled his inexplicable bomb in the midst of peaceful anonymous people who had come to a café to drink a beer before going to bed.’
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While anarchism showed its ugliest and most destructive side in the
terrorists acts at the end of the nineteenth century in France, it also inspired many artists and writers in its most creative form. Gustave Courbet of course had been a friend of Proudhon who had argued that art must have a moral and social purpose, and that it should be ‘an idealist representation of nature and ourselves with the aim of perfecting our species physically and morally’.
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The view was shared by Courbet who depicted the life of the poor, and it eventually contributed to the theory of social realism. Courbet in his famous
Burial at Ornans
tried to negate the ideal of Romanticism and arrive at the emancipation of the individual. He became a member of the Commune and responsible for artistic policy; as a result he was involved in the decision to demolish the Vendôme Column in Paris, a symbol of Napoleon’s military dictatorship.
Many of the Post-Impressionist painters found in anarchism a confirmation of their call for artistic freedom, their revolt against bourgeois society, and their sympathy for the poor and oppressed. Camille Pissarro and his son Lucien contributed regularly to
Le Père Peinard
and to Jean Grave’s
Les Temps Nouveaux.
Pissarro like Courbet was exiled after the Commune and in 1894 had to move to Belgium to escape the persecution of the anarchists following the assassination of President Carnot. Paul Signac, who eventually ended up in the Communist Party, declared in 1902: ‘The anarchist painter is not one who will show anarchist paintings, but one who without regard for lucre, without desire for reward, will struggle with all his individuality, with a personal effort, against bourgeois and official conventions …’
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Steinlen and later Vlaminck and other Fauvist artists also contributed to
Les Temps Nouveaux.
A young French philosopher who greatly impressed Kropotkin was J. M. Guyau who offered in his
Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction
(1884) a view of morality free from all external duty and coercion. Guyau rejected the utilitarian calculus as well as metaphysical sanctions, arguing that we create our own morality through rational choice. Unlike Stirner and Nietzsche, however, he did not draw egoistic conclusions: we have a superabundance of energy which leads us to go beyond the instinct of self-preservation to feel compassion for others. Altruism is therefore based on a natural need to live a full, intense and productive life. Guyau was unable to develop these insights for he died when he was thirty-four, but Kropotkin felt that he was an anarchist without being conscious of it.
Amongst other writers, the novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau, whom Degas called the ‘pyromaniac fireman’, came to anarchism in his maturity after reading Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Elisée Reclus. His ornate novels often show a fascination with the very vices he condemns, and his heroes are listless rebels. In
Sébastien Roch
, a study of a young man traumatized by his Jesuit education, Mirbeau raises the question whether
youth will ever rebel against the suffocating system run by priests and police.
Le Jardin des supplices
, inspired by the Dreyfus affair, offers an Oriental allegory of Western corruption and legalized torture, while
Le Journal d’une femme de chambre
, made recently into a successful film, shows the bourgeoisie held together principally by its vices. Amongst his explicitly anarchist writings, Mirbeau wrote the immensely successful pamphlet
La Grève des électeurs
which sold in tens of thousands.
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He was a lifelong anti-militarist, and his comment on the political violence of the 1880s proved the most astute of all his contemporaries: ‘The biggest danger of the bomb is the explosion of stupidity that it provokes.’ However, it did not stop him from describing Ravachol as ‘the peal of thunder to which succeeds the joy of sunlight and of peaceful skies’.
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