In the meantime affairs in Russia took quite a new turn. The war
which Russia began against Turkey in 1877 had ended in general
disappointment. There was in the country, before the war broke out, a
great deal of enthusiasm in favour of the Slavonians. Many believed,
also, that the war of liberation in the Balkans would result in a move
in the progressive direction in Russia itself. But the liberation
of the Slavonian populations was only partly accomplished. The
tremendous sacrifices which had been made by the Russians were rendered
ineffectual by the blunders of the higher military authorities.
Hundreds of thousands of men had been slaughtered in battles which
were only half victories, and the concessions wrested from Turkey were
brought to naught at the Berlin Congress. It was also widely known that
the embezzlement of State money went on during this war on almost as
large a scale as during the Crimean war.
It was amidst the general dissatisfaction which prevailed in Russia
at the end of 1877, that one hundred and ninety-three persons,
arrested since 1873, in connection with our agitation, were brought
before a high court. The accused, supported by a number of lawyers
of talent, won at once the sympathies of the public. They produced
a very favourable impression upon St. Petersburg society; and when
it became known that most of them had spent three or four years in
prison, waiting for this trial, and that no less than twenty-one of
them had either put an end to their lives by suicide or become insane,
the feeling grew still stronger in their favour, even among the judges
themselves. The court pronounced very heavy sentences upon a few, and
relatively lenient ones upon the remainder; saying that the preliminary
detention had lasted so long, and was so hard a punishment in itself,
that nothing could justly be added to it. It was confidently expected
that the Emperor would still further mitigate the sentences. It
happened, however, to the astonishment of all, that he revised the
sentences only to increase them. Those whom the court had acquitted
were sent into exile in remote parts of Russia and Siberia, and from
five to twelve years of hard labour were inflicted upon those whom the
court had condemned to short terms of imprisonment. This was the work
of the chief of the Third Section, General Mézentsoff.
At the same time, the chief of the St. Petersburg police, General
Trépoff, noticing, during a visit to the house of detention, that one
of the political prisoners, Bogolúboff, did not take off his hat to
greet the omnipotent satrap, rushed upon him, gave him a blow, and,
when the prisoner resisted, ordered him to be flogged. The other
prisoners, learning the fact in their cells, loudly expressed their
indignation, and were in consequence fearfully beaten by the warders
and the police. The Russian political prisoners bore without murmuring
all hardships inflicted upon them in Siberia, or through hard labour,
but they were firmly decided not to tolerate corporal punishment. A
young girl, Véra Zasúlich, who did not even personally know Bogolúboff,
took a revolver, went to the chief of police, and shot at him. Trépoff
was only wounded. Alexander II. came to look at the heroic girl, who
must have impressed him by her extremely sweet face and her modesty.
Trépoff had so many enemies at St. Petersburg that they managed to
bring the affair before a common-law jury, and Véra Zasúlich declared
in court that she had resorted to arms only when all means for bringing
the affair to public knowledge and obtaining some sort of redress had
been exhausted. Even the St. Petersburg correspondent of the London
‘Times,’ who had been asked to mention the affair in his paper, had not
done so, perhaps thinking it improbable. Then, without telling anyone
about her intentions, she went to shoot Trépoff. Now that the affair
had become public, she was quite happy to know that he was but slightly
wounded. The jury acquitted her unanimously; and when the police tried
to rearrest her, as she was leaving the court-house, the young men of
St. Petersburg, who stood in crowds at the gates, saved her from their
clutches. She went abroad, and soon was among us in Switzerland.
This affair produced quite a sensation throughout Europe. I was at
Paris when the news of the acquittal came, and had to call that day
on business at the offices of several newspapers. I found the editors
glowing with enthusiasm, and writing forcible articles in honour of
this Russian girl. Even the ‘Revue des Deux Mondes,’ in its review of
the year 1878, declared that the two persons who had most impressed
public opinion in Europe during the year were Prince Gortchakóff at
the Berlin Congress and Véra Zasúlich. Their portraits were given side
by side in several almanacs. Upon the workers of Western Europe the
devotion of Véra Zasúlich produced a profound impression.
During the same year, 1878, without any plot having been formed, four
attempts were made against crowned heads in close succession. The
workman Hoedel, and after him Dr. Nobiling, shot at the German Emperor;
a few weeks later, a Spanish workman, Oliva Moncási, followed with an
attempt to shoot the King of Spain, and the cook Passanante rushed
with his knife upon the King of Italy. The governments of Europe could
not believe that such attempts upon the lives of three kings should
have occurred without there being at the bottom some international
conspiracy, and they jumped to the conclusion that the anarchist Jura
Federation was the centre of that conspiracy.
More than twenty years have passed since then, and I can say most
positively that there was absolutely no ground whatever for such
a supposition. However, all the European governments fell upon
Switzerland, reproaching her with harbouring revolutionists who
organized such plots. Paul Brousse, the editor of our Jura newspaper,
the ‘Avant-Garde,’ was arrested and prosecuted. The Swiss judges,
seeing there was not the slightest foundation for connecting Brousse
or the Jura Federation with the recent attempts, condemned Brousse to
only a couple of months’ imprisonment for his articles; but the paper
was suppressed, and all the printing offices of Switzerland were asked
by the federal government not to publish this or any similar paper. The
Jura Federation was thus silenced.
Besides, the politicians of Switzerland, who looked with an
unfavourable eye on the anarchist agitation in their country, acted
privately in such a way as to compel the leading Swiss members of
the Jura Federation either to retire from public life or to starve.
Brousse was expelled from Switzerland. James Guillaume, who for eight
years had maintained against all obstacles the ‘Bulletin’ of the
federation, and made his living chiefly by teaching, could obtain
no employment, and was compelled to leave Switzerland and remove
to France. Adhémar Schwitzguébel, boycotted in the watch trade and
burdened by a large family, had finally to retire from the movement.
Spichiger was in the same condition, and emigrated. It thus happened
that I, a foreigner, had to undertake the editing of a paper for the
federation. I hesitated, of course, but there was nothing else to
be done, and with two friends, Dumartheray and Herzig, I started a
new fortnightly at Geneva, in February 1879, under the title of ‘Le
Révolté.’ I had to write most of it myself. We had only twenty-three
francs to start the paper, but we all set to work to get subscriptions,
and succeeded in issuing our first number. It was moderate in tone, but
revolutionary in substance, and I did my best to write it in such a
style that complicated historical and economical questions should be
comprehensible to every intelligent worker. Six hundred was the utmost
limit which the edition of our previous papers had ever attained. We
printed two thousand copies of ‘Le Révolté,’ and in a few days not one
was left. It was a success, and it still continues, at Paris, under the
title of ‘Temps Nouveaux.’
Socialist newspapers have often a tendency to become mere annals of
complaints about existing conditions. The oppression of the workers
in the mine, the factory, and the field is related; the misery and
sufferings of the workers during strikes are told in vivid pictures;
their helplessness in the struggle against their employers is
insisted upon; and this succession of hopeless efforts, described
every week, exercises a most depressing influence upon the reader. To
counterbalance that effect, the editor has to rely chiefly upon burning
words, by means of which he tries to inspire his readers with energy
and faith. I thought, on the contrary, that a revolutionary paper must
be, above all, a record of those symptoms which everywhere announce
the coming of a new era, the germination of new forms of social life,
the growing revolt against antiquated institutions. These symptoms
should be watched, brought together in their intimate connection, and
so grouped as to show to the hesitating minds of the greater number
the invisible and often unconscious support which advanced ideas find
everywhere, when a revival of thought takes place in society. To make
one feel in sympathy with the throbbing of the human heart all over the
world, with its revolt against age-long injustice, with its attempts
at working out new forms of life--this should be the chief duty of a
revolutionary paper. It is hope, not despair, which makes successful
revolutions.
Historians often tell us how this or that system of philosophy has
accomplished a certain change in human thought, and subsequently in
institutions. But this is not history. The greatest social philosophers
have only caught the indications of coming changes, have understood
their inner relations, and, aided by induction and intuition, have
foretold what was to occur. Sociologists have also drawn plans of
social organizations, by starting from a few principles and developing
them to their necessary consequences, like a geometrical conclusion
from a few axioms; but this is not sociology. A correct social forecast
cannot be made unless one keeps an eye on the thousands of signs of
the new life, separating the occasional facts from those which are
organically essential, and building the generalization upon that basis.
This was the method of thought with which I endeavoured to familiarize
our readers--using plain comprehensible words, so as to accustom the
most modest of them to judge for himself whereunto society is moving,
and himself to correct the thinker if the latter comes to wrong
conclusions. As to the criticism of what exists, I went into it only to
disentangle the roots of the evils, and to show that a deep-seated and
carefully-nurtured fetishism with regard to the antiquated survivals of
past phases of human development, and a widespread cowardice of mind
and will, are the main sources of all evils.
Dumartheray and Herzig gave me full support in that direction.
Dumartheray was born in one of the poorest peasant families in Savoy.
His schooling had not gone beyond the first rudiments of a primary
school. Yet he was one of the most intelligent men I ever met. His
appreciations of current events and men were so remarkable for their
uncommon good sense that they were often prophetic. He was also one of
the finest critics of the current socialist literature, and was never
taken in by the mere display of fine words, or would-be science. Herzig
was a young clerk, born at Geneva; a man of suppressed emotions, shy,
who would blush like a girl when he expressed an original thought,
and who, after I was arrested, when he became responsible for the
continuance of the journal, by sheer force of will learned to write
very well. Boycotted by all Geneva employers, and fallen with his
family into sheer misery, he nevertheless supported the paper till it
became possible to transfer it to Paris.
To the judgment of these two friends I could trust implicitly. If
Herzig frowned, muttering, ‘Yes--well--it may go,’ I knew that it would
not do. And when Dumartheray, who always complained of the bad state
of his spectacles when he had to read a not quite legibly written
manuscript, and therefore generally read proofs only, interrupted his
reading by exclaiming, ‘Non, ça ne va pas!’ I felt at once that it was
not the proper thing, and tried to guess what thought or expression
provoked his disapproval. I knew there was no use asking him, ‘Why will
it not do?’ He would have answered: ‘Ah, that it not my affair; that’s
yours. It won’t do; that is all I can say.’ But I felt he was right,
and I simply sat down to rewrite the passage, or, taking the composing
stick, set up in type a new passage instead.
* * * * *
I must own that we had also hard times with our paper. No sooner had
we issued five numbers than the printer asked us to find another
printing office. For the workers and their publications the liberty
of the Press inscribed in the Constitutions has many limitations
beside the paragraphs of the law. The printer had no objection to our
paper--he liked it; but in Switzerland all printing offices depend
upon the government, which employs them more or less in issuing
statistical reports and the like; and our printer was plainly told
that if he continued to harbour our paper he need not expect to have
any more orders from the Geneva government. I made the tour of all
the French-speaking part of Switzerland and saw the heads of all the
printing offices, but everywhere, even from those who did not dislike
the tendency of the paper, I received the same reply: ‘We could not
live without orders from the government, and we should have none if we
undertook to print “Le Révolté.”’
I returned to Geneva in very low spirits, but Dumartheray was only
the more ardent and hopeful. ‘It’s all very simple,’ he said. ‘We buy
our own printing plant on a three months’ credit, and in three months
we shall have paid it.’ ‘But we have no money, only a few hundred
francs,’ I objected. ‘Money? nonsense! We _shall_ have it! Let us
only order the type at once and immediately issue our next number and
money will come!’ Once more he had judged quite right. When our next
number came out from our own _Imprimerie Jurassienne_, and we had told
our difficulties and issued a couple of small pamphlets besides--all
of us helping in the printing--the money came in, mostly in coppers
and silver, but it came. Over and over again in my life I have heard
complaints among the advanced parties about the want of money, but
the longer I live the more I am persuaded that our chief difficulty
does not lie so much in money as in _men_ who would march firmly and
steadily towards a given aim in the right direction and inspire others.
For twenty-one years our paper has now continued to live from hand to
mouth, appeals for funds appearing on the front page almost in every
number; but as long as there is a man who sticks to it and puts all
his energy into it, as Herzig and Dumartheray did at Geneva, and Grave
has done for the last sixteen years at Paris, the money comes in and
the printing expenses are more or less covered, mainly by the pennies
of the workers. For a paper, as for everything else, men are of an
infinitely greater value than money.
We started our printing office in a tiny room, and our compositor was
a Little Russian, who undertook to put our paper in type for the very
modest sum of sixty francs a month. So long as he had his plain dinner
every day, and the possibility of going occasionally to the opera, he
cared for nothing more. ‘Going to the Turkish bath, John?’ I asked him
once as I met him at Geneva in the street, with a brown paper parcel
under his arm. ‘No, removing to a new lodging,’ he replied in his
melodious voice, with his usual smile.
Unfortunately, he knew no French. I used to write my manuscript to the
best of my caligraphic ability--often thinking with regret of the time
I had wasted in the writing classes of our good Ebert at school--but
John would read a French manuscript in the most fantastical way, and
would set up in type the most extraordinary words of his own invention;
but as he ‘kept the space,’ and the length of his lines had not to be
altered for making the corrections, there were only a dozen letters in
each line to be changed, and we managed to do it pretty well. We were
on excellent terms with him, and I soon learned some ‘comping’ under
his direction. The paper was always ready in time to take the proofs
to a Swiss comrade who was the responsible editor, and to whom we
pedantically submitted them before going to print, and then one of us
carted the formes to a printing office. Our _Imprimerie Jurassienne_
soon became widely known for its publications, especially for its
pamphlets, which Dumartheray insisted upon never selling at more than
one penny. Quite a new style had to be worked out for such pamphlets.
I must say that I often had the wickedness of envying those writers
who could use any amount of pages for developing their ideas, and were
allowed to make the well-known excuse of Talleyrand: ‘I have not had
the time to be short.’ When I had to condense the results of several
months’ work--upon, let me say, the origins of law--into a penny
pamphlet, I had to give extra time in order to be short. But we wrote
for the workers, and twopence for a pamphlet is often too much for
them. The result was that our penny and halfpenny pamphlets sold by
the scores of thousands, and were reproduced in every other country in
translations. My leaders from that period were edited later on, while
I was in prison, by Elisée Reclus, under the title of ‘The Words of a
Rebel,’ ‘Paroles d’un Révolté.’
France was always the chief object of our aims, but ‘Le Révolté’ was
severely prohibited in France, and the smugglers have so many good
things to import into France from Switzerland that they did not care to
endanger their trade by meddling with papers. I went once with them,
crossing in their company the French frontier, and found that they were
very brave and reliable men, but I could not induce them to undertake
the smuggling in of our paper. All we could do was to send it in sealed
envelopes to about a hundred persons in France. We charged nothing for
postage, leaving it to the voluntary contributions of our subscribers
to cover our extra expenses--which they always did--but we often
thought that the French police were missing a splendid opportunity for
ruining ‘Le Révolté,’ by subscribing to a hundred copies and sending no
voluntary contributions.
For the first year we had to rely entirely upon ourselves; but
gradually Elisée Reclus took a greater interest in the work, and
finally joined us, giving after my arrest more life than ever to the
paper. Reclus had invited me to aid him in the preparation of the
volume of his monumental geography, which dealt with the Russian
dominions in Asia. He knew Russian himself, but he thought that, as I
was well acquainted with Siberia, I might aid him in a special way;
and as the health of my wife was poor, and the doctor had ordered her
to leave Geneva with its cold winds at once, we removed early in the
spring of 1880 to Clarens, where Elisée Reclus lived at that time. We
settled above Clarens, in a small cottage overlooking the blue waters
of the lake, with the pure snow of the Dent du Midi in the background.
A streamlet that thundered like a mighty torrent after rains, carrying
away immense rocks in its narrow bed, ran under our windows, and on
the slope of the hill opposite rose the old castle of Châtelard,
of which the owners, up to the revolution of the _burla papei_ (the
burners of the papers) in 1799, levied upon the neighbouring serfs
feudal taxes on the occasion of their births, marriages, and deaths.
Here, aided by my wife, with whom I used to discuss every event and
every proposed paper, and who was a severe literary critic of my
writings, I produced the best things that I wrote for ‘Le Révolté,’
among them the address ‘To the Young,’ which was spread in hundreds of
thousands of copies in all languages. In fact, I worked out here the
foundation of nearly all that I have written later on. Contact with
educated men of similar ways of thinking is what we anarchist writers,
scattered by proscription all over the world, miss, perhaps, more than
anything else. At Clarens I had that contact with Elisée Reclus and
Lefrançais, in addition to permanent contact with the workers, which I
continued to maintain; and although I worked much for the geography, I
was able to produce even more than usually for the anarchist propaganda.