Paris and the Social Revolution Part 2

"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 enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, and there will always be enough cormorants greedy of power to a.s.sist 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 reconst.i.tution, 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 disposition of 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 the _fait 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 ent.i.ty 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 a.s.sociation of the s.e.xes 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 a.s.sociated, 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 pa.s.sions, 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 generations preceding, 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 to _will_ to be free, to _be_ free."

[Ill.u.s.tration: La France Libre]

CHAPTER II

THE ORAL PROPAGANDA OF ANARCHY

_"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.

_"The_ chanson, _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 cafe, to his restaurant, to the street corner, to "the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker,"-and to couple with exhortation the

"_Little, nameless, unremembered acts Of 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_).