Of all the towns of Switzerland that I know, La Chaux-de-Fonds is
perhaps the least attractive. It lies on a high plateau entirely
devoid of any vegetation, open to bitterly cold winds in the winter,
when the snow lies as deep as at Moscow, and melts and falls again
as often as at St. Petersburg. But it was important to spread our
ideas in that centre, and to give more life to the local propaganda.
Pindy, Spichiger, Albarracin, the two Blanquists, Ferré and Jeallot,
were there, and from time to time I could pay visits to Guillaume at
Neuchâtel, and to Schwitzguébel in the valley of St. Imier.
A life full of work that I liked began now for me. We held many
meetings, distributing ourselves our announcements in the cafés and the
workshops. Once a week we held our section meetings, at which the most
animated discussions took place, and we went also to preach anarchism
at the gatherings convoked by the political parties. I travelled a good
deal, visiting other sections and helping them.
During that winter we won the sympathy of many, but our regular work
was very much hampered by a crisis in the watch trade. Half the
workers were out of work or only partially employed, so that the
municipality had to open dining rooms to provide cheap meals at cost
price. The co-operative workshop established by the anarchists at La
Chaux-de-Fonds, in which the earnings were divided equally among all
the members, had great difficulty in getting work, in spite of its high
reputation, and Spichiger had to resort several times to wool-combing
for an upholsterer in order to get his living.
We all took part, that year, in a manifestation with the red flag at
Bern. The wave of reaction spread to Switzerland, and the carrying
of the workers’ banner was prohibited by the Bern police in defiance
of the constitution. It was necessary, therefore, to show that at
least here and there the workers would not have their rights trampled
underfoot, and would offer resistance. We all went to Bern on the
anniversary of the Paris Commune, to carry the red flag in the streets,
notwithstanding the prohibition. Of course there was a collision with
the police in which two comrades received sword cuts and two police
officers were rather seriously wounded. But the red flag was carried
safe to the hall, where a most animated meeting was held. I hardly
need say that the so-called leaders were in the ranks, and fought
like all the rest. The trial involved nearly thirty Swiss citizens,
all themselves demanding to be prosecuted, and those who had wounded
the two police officers coming forward spontaneously to say that they
had done it. A great deal of sympathy was won to the cause during
the trial; it was understood that all liberties have to be defended
jealously, in order not to be lost. The sentences were consequently
very light, not exceeding three months’ imprisonment.
However, the Bern Government prohibited the carrying of the red flag
anywhere in the canton; and the Jura Federation thereupon decided to
carry it, in defiance of the prohibition, in St. Imier, where we held
our congress that year. This time most of us were armed, and ready to
defend our banner to the last extremity. A body of police had been
placed in a square to stop our column; a detachment of the militia was
kept in readiness in an adjoining field, under the pretext of target
practice--we distinctly heard their shots as we marched through the
town. But when our column appeared in the square, and it was judged
from its aspect that aggression would result in serious bloodshed,
the mayor let us continue our march undisturbed to the hall where the
meeting was to be held. None of us desired a fight; but the strain of
that march in fighting order, to the sound of a military band, was such
that I do not know what feeling prevailed in most of us during the
first moments after we reached the hall--relief at having been spared
an undesired fight, or regret that the fight did not take place. Man is
a very complex being.
* * * * *
Our main activity, however, was in working out the practical and
theoretical aspects of anarchist socialism, and in this direction the
federation has undoubtedly accomplished something that will last.
We saw that a new form of society is germinating in the civilized
nations, and must take the place of the old one: a society of equals,
who will not be compelled to sell their hands and brains to those who
choose to employ them in a haphazard way, but who will be able to
apply their knowledge and capacities to production, in an organism so
constructed as to combine all the efforts for procuring the greatest
sum possible of well-being for all, while full, free scope will be
left for every individual initiative. This society will be composed
of a multitude of associations, federated for all the purposes
which require federation: trade federations for production of all
sorts--agricultural, industrial, intellectual, artistic; communes
for consumption, making provision for dwellings, gas works, supplies
of food, sanitary arrangements, etc.; federations of communes among
themselves, and federations of communes with trade organizations; and
finally, wider groups covering the country, or several countries,
composed of men who collaborate for the satisfaction of such economic,
intellectual, artistic, and moral needs as are not limited to a given
territory. All these will combine directly, by means of free agreements
between them, just as the railway companies or the postal departments
of different countries co-operate now, without having a central railway
or postal government, even though the former are actuated by merely
egoistic aims and the latter belong to different and often hostile
States; or as the meteorologists, the Alpine clubs, the lifeboat
stations in Great Britain, the cyclists, the teachers, and so on,
combine for all sorts of work in common, for intellectual pursuits, or
simply for pleasure. There will be full freedom for the development
of new forms of production, invention, and organization; individual
initiative will be encouraged, and the tendency toward uniformity and
centralization will be discouraged.
Moreover, this society will not be crystallized into certain
unchangeable forms, but will continually modify its aspect, because it
will be a living, evolving organism; no need of government will be
felt, because free agreement and federation can take its place in all
those functions which governments consider as theirs at the present
time, and because, the causes of conflict being reduced in number,
those conflicts which may still arise can be submitted to arbitration.
None of us minimized the importance and depth of the change which we
looked for. We understood that the current opinions upon the necessity
of private ownership in land, factories, mines, dwelling houses, and so
on, as a means of securing industrial progress, and of the wage-system
as a means of compelling men to work, would not soon give way to higher
conceptions of socialized ownership and production. We knew that a
tedious propaganda and a long succession of struggles, individual and
collective revolts against the now prevailing forms of property, of
individual self-sacrifice, of partial attempts at reconstruction and
partial revolutions would have to be lived through, before the current
ideas upon private ownership would be modified. And we understood also
that the now current ideas concerning the necessity of authority--in
which all of us have been bred--would not and could not be abandoned
by civilized mankind all at once. Long years of propaganda and a long
succession of partial acts of revolt against authority, as well as a
complete revision of the teachings now derived from history, would
be required before men could perceive that they had been mistaken in
attributing to their rulers and their laws what was derived in reality
from their own sociable feelings and habits. We knew all that. But we
also knew that in preaching change in both these directions we should
be working with the tide of human progress.
When I made a closer acquaintance with the working population and their
sympathizers from the better educated classes, I soon realized that
they valued their personal freedom even more than they valued their
personal well-being. Fifty years ago the workers were ready to sell
their personal liberty to all sorts of rulers, and even to a Cæsar,
in exchange for a promise of material well-being, but now this was no
longer the case. I saw that the blind faith in elected rulers, even if
they were taken from amongst the best leaders of the labour movement,
was dying away amongst the Latin workers. ‘We must know first what we
want, and then we can do it best ourselves,’ was an idea which I found
widely spread among them--far more widely than is generally believed.
The sentence which was put in the statutes of the International
Association: ‘The emancipation of the workers must be accomplished by
the workers themselves,’ had met with general sympathy and had taken
root in minds. The sad experience of the Paris Commune only confirmed
it.
When the insurrection broke out, considerable numbers of men belonging
to the middle classes themselves were prepared to make, or at least
to accept, a new start in the social direction. ‘When my brother and
myself, coming out of our little room, went out in the streets,’
Elisée Reclus said to me once, ‘we were asked on all sides by people
belonging to the wealthier classes: “Tell us what is to be done? We are
ready to try a new start;” but _we_ were not prepared yet to make the
suggestions.’
Never before had a government been as fairly representative of all the
advanced parties as the Council of the Commune, elected on March 25,
1871. All shades of revolutionary opinion--Blanquists, Jacobinists,
Internationalists--were represented in it in a true proportion. And yet
the workers themselves, having no distinct ideas of social reform to
impress upon their representatives, the Commune Government did nothing
in that direction. The very fact of having been isolated from the
masses and shut up in the Hôtel de Ville paralysed them. For the very
success of socialism, the ideas of no-government, of self-reliance, of
free initiative of the individual--of anarchism, in a word--had thus
to be preached side by side with those of socialized ownership and
production.
We certainly foresaw that if full freedom is left to the individual
for the expression of his ideas and for action, we should have to face
a certain amount of extravagant exaggerations of our principles. I
had seen it in the Nihilist movement in Russia. But we trusted--and
experience has proved that we were right--that social life itself,
supported by a frank, open-minded criticism of opinions and actions,
would be the most effective means for threshing out opinions and for
divesting them of the unavoidable exaggerations. We acted, in fact, in
accordance with the old saying that freedom remains still the wisest
cure for freedom’s temporary inconveniences. There is, in mankind, a
nucleus of social habits, an inheritance from the past, not yet duly
appreciated, which is _not_ maintained by coercion and is superior to
coercion. Upon it all the progress of mankind is based, and so long as
mankind does not begin to deteriorate physically and mentally, it will
not be destroyed by any amount of criticism or of occasional revolt
against it. These were the opinions in which I grew confirmed more and
more in proportion as my experience of men and things increased.
We understood, at the same time, that such a change cannot be produced
by the conjectures of one man of genius, that it will not be one man’s
discovery, but that it must result from the constructive work of the
masses, just as the forms of judicial procedure which were elaborated
in the early mediæval ages, the village community, the guild, the
mediæval city, or the foundations of international law, were worked out
by the people.
Many of our predecessors had undertaken to picture ideal commonwealths,
basing them upon the principle of authority, or, on some rare
occasions, upon the principle of freedom. Robert Owen and Fourier had
given the world their ideals of a free, organically developing society,
in opposition to the pyramidal ideals which had been copied from the
Roman Empire or from the Roman Church. Proudhon had continued their
work, and Bakúnin, applying his wide and clear understanding of the
philosophy of history to the criticism of present institutions, ‘built
up while he was demolishing.’ But all that was only preparatory work.
The International Workingmen’s Association inaugurated a new method of
solving the problems of practical sociology by appealing to the workers
themselves. The educated men who had joined the association undertook
only to enlighten the workers as to what was going on in different
countries of the world to analyse the obtained results, and, later on,
to aid the workers in formulating their conclusions. We did not pretend
to evolve an ideal commonwealth out of our theoretical views as to what
a society _ought to be_, but we invited the workers to investigate the
causes of the present evils, and in their discussions and congresses
to consider the practical aspects of a better social organization than
the one we live in. A question raised at an international congress was
recommended as a subject of study to all labour unions. In the course
of the year it was discussed all over Europe, in the small meetings of
the sections, with a full knowledge of the local needs of each trade
and each locality; then the work of the sections was brought before the
next congress of each federation, and finally it was submitted in a
more elaborate form to the next international congress. The structure
of the society which we longed for was thus worked out, in theory and
practice, from beneath, and the Jura Federation took a large part in
that elaboration of the anarchist ideal.
For myself, placed as I was in such favourable conditions, I gradually
came to realize that anarchism represents more than a mere mode of
action and a mere conception of a free society; that it is part of a
philosophy, natural and social, which must be developed in a quite
different way from the metaphysical or dialectic methods which have
been employed in sciences dealing with man. I saw that it must be
treated by the same methods as natural sciences; not, however, on the
slippery ground of mere analogies, such as Herbert Spencer accepts, but
on the solid basis of induction applied to human institutions. And I
did my best to accomplish what I could in that direction.
V
Two congresses were held in the autumn of 1877 in Belgium: one of the
International Workingmen’s Association at Verviers, and the other an
International Socialist congress at Ghent. The latter was especially
important, as it was known that an attempt would be made by the
German social democrats to bring all the labour movement of Europe
under one organization, subject to a central committee, which would
be the old general council of the International under a new name.
It was therefore necessary to preserve the autonomy of the labour
organizations in the Latin countries, and we did our best to be well
represented at this congress. I went under the name of Levashóff; two
Germans, the compositor Werner and the engineer Rinke, walked nearly
all the distance from Basel to Belgium; and although we were only nine
anarchists at Ghent, we succeeded in checking the centralization scheme.
Twenty-two years have passed since; a number of International Socialist
congresses have been held, and at every one of them the same struggle
has been renewed--the social democrats trying to enlist all the
labour movement of Europe under their banner and to bring it under
their control, and the anarchists opposing and preventing it. What an
amount of wasted force, of bitter words exchanged and efforts divided,
simply because those who have adopted the formula of ‘conquest of
power within the existing states’ do not understand that activity in
this direction cannot embody all the socialist movement! From the
outset socialism took three independent lines of development, which
found their expression in Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen.
Saint-Simonism has developed into social democracy, and Fourierism into
anarchism; while Owenism is developing, in England and America, into
trade-unionism, co-operation, and the so-called municipal socialism,
and remains hostile to social democratic state socialism, while it
has many points of contact with anarchism. But because of failure to
recognize that the three march toward a common goal in three different
ways, and that the two latter bring their own precious contribution to
human progress, a quarter of a century has been given to endeavours
to realize the unrealizable Utopia of a unique labour movement of the
social democratic pattern.
* * * * *
The Ghent congress ended for me in an unexpected way. Three or four
days after it had begun, the Belgian police learned who Levashóff was,
and received the order to arrest me for a breach of police regulations
which I had committed in giving at the hotel an assumed name. My
Belgian friends warned me. They maintained that the clerical ministry
which was in power was capable of giving me up to Russia, and insisted
upon my leaving the congress at once. They would not let me return to
the hotel; Guillaume barred the way, telling me that I should have to
use force against him if I insisted upon returning thither. I had to go
with some Ghent comrades, and as soon as I joined them, muffled calls
and whistling came from all corners of a dark square over which groups
of workers were scattered. It all looked awfully mysterious. At last,
after much whispering and subdued whistling, a group of comrades took
me under escort to a social democrat worker, with whom I had to spend
the night, and who received me, anarchist though I was, in the most
touching way as a brother. Next morning I left once more for England,
on board a steamer, provoking a number of good-natured smiles from the
British custom-house officers, who wanted me to show them my luggage,
while I had nothing to show but a small hand-bag.
I did not stay long in London. In the admirable collections of the
British Museum I studied the beginnings of the French Revolution--how
revolutions come to break out; but I wanted more activity, and soon
went to Paris. A revival of the labour movement was beginning there,
after the rigid suppression of the Commune. With the Italian Costa and
the few anarchist friends we had among the Paris workers, and with
Jules Guesde and his colleagues who were not strict social democrats at
that time, we started the first socialist groups.
Our beginnings were ridiculously small. Half a dozen of us used to
meet in cafés, and when we had an audience of a hundred persons at a
meeting we felt happy. No one would have guessed then that two years
later the movement would be in full swing. But France has its own ways
of development. When a reaction has gained the upper hand, all visible
traces of a movement disappear. Those who fight against the current are
few. But in some mysterious way, by a sort of invisible infiltration
of ideas, the reaction is undermined; a new current sets in, and then
it appears, all of a sudden, that the idea which was thought to be
dead was there alive, spreading and growing all the time; and as soon
as public agitation becomes possible, thousands of adherents, whose
existence nobody suspected, come to the front. ‘There are at Paris,’
old Blanqui used to say, ‘fifty thousand men who never come to a
meeting or to a demonstration; but the moment they feel that the people
can appear in the streets to manifest their opinion, they are there to
storm the position.’ So it was then. There were not twenty of us to
carry on the movement, not two hundred openly to support it. At the
first commemoration of the Commune, in March 1878, we surely were not
two hundred. But two years later the amnesty for the Commune was voted,
and the working population of Paris was in the streets to greet the
returning Communards; it flocked by the thousand to cheer them at the
meetings, and the socialist movement took a sudden expansion, carrying
with it the Radicals.
The time had not yet come for that revival, however, and one
night, in April 1878, Costa and a French comrade were arrested. A
police-court condemned them to imprisonment for eighteen months as
Internationalists. I escaped arrest only by mistake. The police wanted
Levashóff, and went to arrest a Russian student whose name sounded
very much like that. I had given my real name, and continued to stay
at Paris under that name for another month. Then I was called to
Switzerland.