Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel , 1885.
XVII
The Spirit of Revolt
1. In the lives of societies there are epochs when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it imposes itself. New ideas germinate everywhere, they seek to emerge, to find an application to life, but they continually clash with the force of the inertia of those whose interest is to maintain the old system; they stifle in the suffocating atmosphere of old prejudices and traditions. At the same time accepted ideas on the constitution of states, on the laws of social equilibrium, on the political and social relations between citizens, no longer hold ground before the severe criticism which saps them every day and on every occasion, in the salon as much as in the tavern, in the works of the philosopher as much as in daily conversation. Political, economic and social institutions begin to fall into ruin; like buildings that have become uninhabitable, they obstruct and hinder the development of the seeds that germinate in the cracks of their crumbling walls and sprout all around them.
The need for new life makes itself felt. The established code of conduct, which governs most men in their daily lives, no longer seems sufficient. It becomes evident that a situation, hitherto considered to be equitable, is in fact nothing but a crying injustice; the morality of yesterday is today recognized as a revolting immorality. The conflict between new ideas and old traditions breaks out in all classes of society, in all circles, even in the heart of the family. The son enters into a struggle with the father; he finds revolting what his father found natural throughout his life; the daughter rebels against the principles which her mother has transmitted to her as the fruit of long experience. The popular consciousness is up in arms against the scandals that arise every day in the very heart of the privileged and idle class, against the crimes that are committed daily in the name of the right of the strongest to maintain the privileges of the few. Those who long for the triumph of justice, who want to see the new ideas put into practice, are soon forced to recognize that the realization of their generous, humanitarian and regenerative ideas cannot take place in society as it is constituted: they understand the necessity for revolutionary turmoil that will sweep away all this decay, enliven with its breath the hearts that have grown torpid, and bring to humanity the devotion, the abnegation, the heroism, without which a society becomes debased and degraded and eventually decomposes.
In epochs set on an unbridled course of self-enrichment, of feverish speculations and crises, of the sudden ruin of great industries and the brief flourishing of other branches of production, of scandalous fortunes amassed in a few years and dissipated as quickly, one soon realizes that the economic institutions which preside over production and exchange are far from giving society the good health they were supposed to guarantee it; they lead precisely to a contrary result. In place of order, they breed chaos, in place of well-being, poverty and insecurity for the future, in place of harmony of interest, a perpetual war of the exploiter against the producer, of the exploiters and producers among themselves. One sees society breaking up more and more into two hostile camps and subdividing at the same time into thousands of small groups waging bitter war on each other. Tired of such conflicts, tired of the miseries they engender, society begins to search for a new organization; it cries out for a complete remodelling of the property system, of the systems of production and exchange and all the economic relations that stem from them.
The governmental machine, charged with sustaining order, has not yet completely broken down. But at each turn of its wornout wheels, it stumbles and halts. Its functioning becomes more and more difficult, and the discontent caused by its failures steadily increases. Every day there are new demands.
"Reform this! Reform that!" people are crying out from every side. "War, finance, courts, police, everything must be remodelled, reorganized, established on new foundations," say the reformers. Meanwhile, everyone understands that it is impossible to repair and remodel any individual institution because all are interdependent; everything would have to be changed at the same time, and how is this to be done when society is divided into two openly hostile camps? If one satisfied the malcontents, it would merely create new ones.
Incapable of moving in the direction of reform, since that would mean engaging in revolution, and at the same time too powerless to show themselves as frankly reactionary, the governments turn to half measures, which satisfy nobody and merely arouse new discontents. The mediocrities who in these transitory times are charged with steering the ship of state, dream only of one thing: to enrich themselves in anticipation of the coming disaster. Attacked from all sides, they defend themselves clumsily, they dodge from side to side, they commit folly upon folly, and they come together in the end to cut the last cord of salvation; they drown the prestige of the government in the ridicule of their incompetence.
At such periods, the revolution imposes itself. It becomes a social necessity; the situation is a revolutionary situation.
When we study, in the works of our best historians, the genesis and the development of the great revolutionary outbreaks, we usually find under the title of "the causes of the revolution" a striking panorama of the situation on the eve of events. The poverty of the people, the general insecurity, the vexatious measures of the government, the odious scandals that expose the great vices of society, the new ideas striving to emerge and clashing against the incapacity of the supporters of the old system; nothing is lacking. In contemplating such a panorama one reaches the conviction that the revolution was in fact inevitable, that there was no real way out except through insurrectionary activity.
Let us take, for example, the situation before 1789, as the historians show it to us. You seem to hear the peasant complaining of the salt tax, of the tithes, of the feudal dues, and developing in his heart an implacable hatred for the landlord, the monk, the monopolist, the steward. You hear the bourgeois complaining of having lost their municipal privileges, and loading their curses upon the king. You hear the people cursing the queen, rebelling against what they hear the ministers are doing, and telling each other all the time that the taxes are intolerable, the rents exorbitant, the crops are bad and the winters too hard; that food is dear and the merchants greedy, that the village lawyers devour the peasants' harvests and that the rural gendarme acts like a little king, that even the postal service is badly organized and the officials are lazy. In short, everyone complains that nothing is working. "It cannot go on! It will come to a bad end!" people are saying on every side.
But from these still pacific thoughts about insurrection and revolt, extends a great abyss which among the major part of mankind divides reason from act, thought from will, from the need to act. How is that abyss crossed? How did these men, who just yesterday grumbled peacefully about their fate as they puffed their pipes and a moment afterwards humbly saluted the same gendarme they had just been cursing a few days later, seize their pitchforks and billhooks, and attack in his castle the lord who yesterday had seemed so terrible? By what magic have these men, whom their wives justifiably treated as cowards, become transformed today into heroes who march through shot and shell to conquer their rights. How have these words, so often spoken in the past and lost on the air like the fading sound of bells, at last become transformed into acts?
The answer is simple.
It is the action of the minorities, continuous action endlessly renewed, that achieves this transformation. Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission and panic. What forms will the agitation take? All the most varied forms that are dictated to it by the circumstances, the means and the temperaments that are available. Sometimes mournful, sometimes mocking, but always audacious; sometimes collective, sometimes purely individual, it will not neglect any of the means at hand, any circumstance of public life, to keep the spirit awake, to propagate and formulate discontent, to excite hatred against the exploiters, to ridicule governments and expose their weakness, and above all and always to reawaken audacity, the spirit of revolt, through preaching by example.
2. When a revolutionary situation is produced in a country where the spirit of revolt is not yet sufficiently awakened in the masses to express itself through tumultuous street demonstrations or by riots and uprisings, it is through their action that the minorities reawaken the feeling of independence and the breath of courage, without which no revolution could be accomplished.
Men of courage who are not content with words, but who seek to put them into execution, integrated characters for whom the act is one with the idea, for whom prison, exile and death are preferable to a life against their principles, who know one must be daring in order to succeed -- these are the scouts who start the combat long before the masses are excited enough openly to raise the flag of insurrection and to march, arms in hand, to the conquest of their rights.
In the midst of the complaints, the chatter, the theoretical discussions, an act of revolt, individual or collective, takes place that gives expression to the dominant aspirations. Perhaps at the first the masses remain indifferent. While admiring the courage of the individual or the group that initiates action, they may well follow first of all the wise and prudent ones who hasten to condemn action as "folly" and to say that "the fools and hotheads will compromise us all." They have so carefully calculated -- these wise and prudent ones -- that their party, carrying on its work slowly, will succeed in a hundred, in two hundred, or perhaps in three hundred years in conquering the whole world -- and here the unexpected intervenes! The unexpected, of course, is whatever had not been foreseen by them, the wise and prudent. Whoever knows and possesses a brain even slightly organized, is well aware that a theoretical propaganda for the revolution will necessarily be translated into deeds, long before the theoreticians have decided that the moment to act has come; nevertheless, the wise theoreticians will get angry with the fools, will excommunicate them, will declare anathema against them. But the fools will gather sympathy, the mass of the people will secretly applaud their audacity, and they will find imitators. As the first of them go to populate the prisons and penitentiaries, others will appear to continue their work: the acts of illegal protest, of revolt, of revenge, will continue and multiply.
Henceforward indifference is impossible. Those who in the beginning did not even ask themselves what the "fools" wanted, are forced to become concerned, to discuss their ideas, to take sides for or against. But the deed that attracts general attention, the new idea, infiltrates into men's minds and gains proselytes. Such an act in a few days does more than the propaganda of thousands of leaflets.
Above all, it awakens the spirit of revolt, it gives birth to audacity. The old system, defended by police, magistrates, gendarmes and soldiers, seemed indestructible, like that old fortress, the Bastille, which also seemed impenetrable in the eyes of the unarmed people who gathered under its high walls, garnished with cannons ready to fire. But people soon see that the established system does not have the strength they had supposed. Here an audacious act will be enough to throw into confusion for several days the whole government, to shake the colossus. There a riot turns a whole province topsy-turvy, and the soldiers, so imposing up to now, withdraw before a handful of peasants, armed with stones and staves; the people observes that the monster is not so terrible as it had believed, and begins to realise that a few energetic efforts will be enough to bring it to the ground. Hope is born in men's hearts; let us remember that if exasperation often leads to riots, it is always hope, the hope of winning that makes the revolutions.
The government resists; it reacts in fury. But, if repression in the past killed the energy of the oppressed, now, in periods of ferment, it produces the contrary effect. It provokes new acts of rebellion, individual and collective; it pushes on the rebels to heroism and more and more their actions move into new areas, become generalized and develop in complexity. The revolutionary party is reinforced by elements which hitherto had been hostile to it -- or had wallowed in indifference. The government, the ruling classes, the privileged groups, all begin to disintegrate; some are for complete resistance, others declare themselves ready to renounce their privileges temporarily, so as to calm the spirit of revolt, with the intent of taking control later on. The cohesion of the government and of the privileged classes is broken down.
The ruling classes indeed may have recourse to a furious reaction. But it is no longer the time for that; it will only make the struggle sharper and more terrible, and the revolution which emerges can only be all the bloodier because of it. On the other hand, the smallest concession on the part of the ruling classes, because it comes too late and is torn from them by struggle, will merely do more to awaken the revolutionary spirit. The people which, in the past, might have been content with such concessions, now realizes that the enemy is flinching; it anticipates victory, it feels its courage growing, and the very men who yesterday, crushed down by poverty, were content with complaining in secret, now raise their heads and go forward proudly to the conquest of a better future.
Finally, the revolution breaks out and the more bitter the struggle preceding it has been, the more formidable it will become.
The direction which the revolution will assume is clearly dependent on the sum of the circumstances that have led up to the cataclysm. But it can be foreseen in advance, by reference to the strength of the revolutionary action deployed in the preparatory period by the various advanced groups.
Such a group or party may have ably elaborated the theories it puts forward and the programmes it seeks to realize, and it may have propagated these activities by word and pen. But it has not sufficiently affirmed its aspirations openly, in the streets, by actions which are the realization of the way of thinking it represents; it has acted very little or -- just as serious -- it has not acted at all against those who are its real enemies, it has not struck against the institutions it would like to undo. It is strong in theory but it has not developed strength of action; it has done little to arouse the spirit of revolt or to direct it against all it must seek to attack when the revolution takes place. So this party is less well known. Because its aspirations have not been affirmed continually and each day by acts whose fame reaches the most isolated cabin and so have not sufficiently infiltrated the mass of the people, it has not passed through the crucible of the crowd and the street, and has not received their simple endorsement in the language of the people.
The most zealous writers within the party may be known to their readers as thinkers of merit, but they have neither the repute nor the capacities of the man of action, and on the day when the crowd goes down into the street, it will prefer to follow the counsels of those whose theoretical ideas are perhaps less clearly formulated and whose aspirations are less broad, but whom it knows because it has seen them in action.
The party which has done most revolutionary agitation, which has manifested most liveliness and audacity, will get the best hearing on the day when action becomes necessary, when someone must march at the head to accomplish the revolution. But a party which has not had the audacity to declare itself by revolutionary action in the preparatory period, a party which has not generated an impetus powerful enough to inspire individuals and groups with feelings of renunciation, with an irresistible desire to put their ideas into practice (if that desire had existed it would have been translated into action well before the whole populace had gone down into the streets), a party that has not known how to make its flag popular and its aspirations palpable and comprehensible, that party will have a scanty chance of realizing even the smallest part of its programme. It will be overtaken by the activist parties.
This is what we learn from the history of the periods that preceded the great revolutions. The revolutionary bourgeoisie perfectly understood all this; they neglected no means of agitation to awaken the spirit of revolt as they sought to demolish the monarchical regime: The French peasant of the past century also understood it instinctively when he agitated for the abolition of feudal rights; and the International acted in accordance with these same principles when it sought to awaken the spirit of revolt in the hearts of the city workers, and to direct it towards the natural enemy of the wage-earner -- the monopolist of the instruments of work and of raw materials.
3. A study has still to be made -- and highly interesting, attractive and above all instructive it would be -- of the various means of agitation to which revolutionaries have had recourse in various periods, to accelerate the advent of the revolution, to make the masses aware of the events that are in preparation, to show the people more clearly who are its main enemies, and to awaken audacity and the spirit of revolt. We know very well why a revolution may have been necessary, but it is only by instinct and by groping in the past that we can divine how revolutions come into being.
The Prussian general staff has recently published a manual for the use of the army on the art of defeating popular insurrections; it teaches in this work how one disorganizes a revolt, how one demoralizes and scatters its forces. The study of which we speak would be a reply to that publication and to so many others that treat the same subject, sometimes with less cynicism. It would show how a government can be disorganized, how its forces can be scattered, how one can restore the morale of a people weighed down and depressed by the poverty and the oppression it has suffered.
Up to the present, no such study has been made. Historians have told us eloquently of the great steps by which humanity has marched towards its liberation, but they have paid little attention to the periods preceding revolutions. Absorbed by the dramas they attempt to sketch out, they skim with a quick hand over the prologues, and it is the prologues that interest us most of all.
For what picture could be more gripping, more sublime or more beautiful than that of the efforts made by the precursors of revolutions? What incessant labour on the part of the peasants and a few men of action from the bourgeoisie before 1789; what persevering struggle on the part of the republicans from the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 to their fall in 1830; what activity on the part of the secret societies during the reign of the grand bourgeois Louis Philippe! Could any picture be more poignant than that of the conspiracies initiated by the Italians to shake the Austrian yoke, their heroic attempts, the unspeakable sufferings of their martyrs? Could there be a tragedy more sad yet impressive at the same time than that which would recount all the vicissitudes of the secret activity undertaken by the youth of Russia against the government and the landowning and capitalist systems from 1860 down to our own day? What noble figures would rise up before the modern socialist in reading such dramas; what examples of sublime devotion and self-sacrifice, and at the same time, what revolutionary education -- not theoretical but practical -- from which the present generation might profit!
This is not the place to make such a study. We must therefore limit ourselves to choosing some examples, so as to show how our predecessors went about their revolutionary agitation, and what kind of conclusions might be drawn from such studies.
We shall throw a glance over one of these periods, that preceding 1789, and, leaving aside the analysis of the circumstances which created a revolutionary situation towards the end of the past century, we shall be content with a review of various methods of agitation employed by our predecessors.
Two great achievements emerged as a result of the revolution of 1789-93. On the one hand, the abolition of the royal autocracy and the advent of the bourgeoisie to power, and on the other the abolition of serfdom and of feudal tenure in the countryside. The two are intimately linked; neither could have succeeded without the other. And these two currents are present already in the agitation that preceded the revolution; the agitation against the monarchy in the heart of the bourgeoisie, and the agitation against the landlords among the peasants.
Let us take a look at both.
The newspaper had not at that time gained the importance it enjoys today; the brochure, the pamphlet, the leaflet of three or four pages then took the place it now occupies, and such publications swarmed and multiplied. The brochure made available to the great masses the ideas of the philosophers and the economists who where the precursors of revolutions; the pamphlet and the broadsheet served the agitation by their attacks on the three principal enemies, the king and his court, the aristocracy and the clergy. They did not concern themselves with theory but operated by means of derision.
Thousands of these broadsheets told of the vices of the court and particularly of the queen, ridiculing the establishment, stripping it of its deceptive embellishments, showing it naked with all its faults, its dissipations, its perversity, its stupidity. The royal love affairs, the scandals of the courts, the crazy extravagance, the Famine Pact -- that alliance of the rich with the wheat monopolists to enrich themselves while starving the people: such were the subjects of these pamphlets. The pamphleteers were always on the attack and they did not neglect any circumstance of public life if it could be turned against the enemy. One had only to bring the facts into the open and the pamphlet and the broadsheet would be there, treating them freely in their own way. They lent themselves better than the newspaper to this kind of agitation. The newspaper is a considerable enterprise, and one must consider the risks of capsizing it; such a mishap would make difficulties for a whole party. But the pamphlet and the broadsheet compromise only the writer and the printer -- and they have to be tracked down!
Such authors, to begin with, have emancipated themselves from censorship. It is true that the pretty little instrument of contemporary Jesuitism -- the modern newspaper journalism that annihilates all of a revolutionary writer's freedom of expression -- had not then been invented, but there was still the "lettre de cachet" by which writers and printers could be locked away in prison, a brutal method, but at least frank.
That is why authors got their pamphlets printed either in Amsterdam or in some unnamed place "a hundred leagues from the Bastille, under the Liberty Tree." In this way they were not forced to constrain themselves about hitting hard, about vilifying the king, the queen and her lovers, the grandees of the court, the gentry. The police occupied themselves with the clandestine press by searching the bookshops and arresting those who peddled pamphlets, but the unknown authors avoided prosecution and continued their work.
Songs -- which are sometimes too frank to be printed yet find their way all over a country once they have been committed to memory -- have always been one of the most effective means of propaganda. They poured contempt on established authority, they scoffed at crowned heads, they disseminated in the very hearts of families a contempt for royalty, a hatred for the clergy and the aristocracy, a hope of soon seeing the advent of the revolution.
But it was above all the poster to which the agitators resorted. The poster was more talked of, it stirred up the people more than a pamphlet or a brochure. Thus placards -- either printed or made by hand -- appeared on every occasion when something had happened that interested the mass of the public. Torn down today, they reappeared tomorrow, enraging the government and its myrmidons. "We missed your grandfather; we shall not miss you!" the king reads today on a sheet pasted on his palace walls. Tomorrow it is the queen who weeps with rage on learning how the details of her shameful life are being displayed upon the walls. Such were the beginnings of that hatred which the people afterwards dedicated to the woman who would coldly have exterminated Paris, so long as she could remain queen and autocrat.
The courtiers propose to celebrate the birthday of the Dauphin. The posters threaten to set fire to the four corners of the city, and thus they sow panic while preparing people's minds for something extraordinary. Or they announce that on the day of rejoicings "the king and queen will be led under a good escort to the Place de Grave, and then go on to the Hotel de Ville to confess their crimes, and will mount a scaffold to be burnt alive." The king convokes the Assembly of Notables, and immediately the posters announce that "the new troupe of comedians organized by the Sieur de Calonne71 (prime minister) will begin its representations on the 29th of this month and give an allegorical ballet entitled The Barrel of the Danaides." Or perhaps, becoming ever more bold, the posters find their way into the queen's own porch, announcing to her that the tyrants would soon be executed.
But it is above all against the wheat monopolists, against the tax farmers, against the intendants, that placards were used. Each time there was a ferment among the people, the posters announced a St. Bartholomew's day of the intendants and the farmers general. If a particular wheat merchant or manufacturer or official were detested by the people -- the placards condemned him to death "in the name of the Council of the People," in the name of the "Popular Parliament," etc., and later, when the occasion arose to start an uprising, it was against these exploiters, whose names had so often been announced on the posters, that popular anger was directed.
If one could only gather together all the innumerable posters that were pasted up during the ten or fifteen years that preceded the revolution, one would understand what an immense role this kind of agitation played in preparing for the uprising of the people. Jovial and jesting to begin, increasingly menacing as the moment of crisis drew nearer, they were always alert, always quick to respond to each circumstance of current politics and to the disposition of the masses; they excited anger and contempt, they named the true enemies of the people, they aroused in the breasts of the peasants, the workers and the bourgeoisie alike a hatred against their enemies, and they announced the day of liberation and revenge.
To hang or to tear apart an effigy was a very widespread custom in the past century. It was also one of the most popular means of agitation. Every time there was a popular ferment, processions would form carrying a lifesize doll representing the enemy of the moment which they hanged, burnt or tore apart. "Childishness!" said the young old men who think themselves so reasonable. But in fact the assault on the home of Reveillon during the elections of 1789, the execution of Foulon and of Bertier,72 which changed completely the character of the expected revolution, were no more than the accomplishment in reality of what had been prepared for long ago by the execution of puppets of straw.
Here are a few examples among a thousand. The people of Paris did not like Maupeou, one of the ministers dear to Louis XIV. One day there was a demonstration; voices from the crowd shouted: "Judgement of the High Court condemns the Sieur Maupeou, Chancellor of France, to be burnt alive and his ashes scattered to the wind!" after which the crown actually marched to the statue of Henry IV with a dummy of the chancellor, fitted out in all his insignia, and the doll was burnt to the cheers of the crowd. Another day, a puppet of Abbe Terray was hanged from a lamppost in ecclesiastical garb with white gloves. In Rouen they quartered Maupeou in effigy, and when the gendarmes prevented a demonstration from forming, they contented themselves with hanging by the feet an effigy of a monopolist, with wheat leaking from its nose, mouth and ears.
A whole propaganda was contained in that puppet and a propaganda far more effective in making itself known than abstract propaganda, which speaks only to a small number of the converted.
The essential factor in preparing the uprisings that preceded the revolution was that the people became used to going down into the street, to manifesting its opinions in public places, and learnt to defy the police and the troops, even the cavalry.
That is why the revolutionaries of the epoch did not neglect any of the means they disposed of to draw the crowd into the streets and to provoke the security forces.
Each circumstance of public life in Paris and in the provinces was utilized in this manner. If public opinion had induced the king to dismiss a detested minister, there would be rejoicing and endless illuminations. To attract everybody, they let off fireworks and shot up rockets "in such quantity that in some places one seemed to be walking on cardboard." And if money was lacking to buy such things, they would stop passers-by and ask of them "politely but firmly -- contemporaries record -- a few pennies for the diversion of the people." Then, when the crowd had gathered, orators would address them, explaining and commenting on events, and the clubs would openly recruit and organize. And if the cavalry or other troops came to disperse the crowd, they would hesitate to employ violence against peaceful men and women, while the squibs that exploded before the horses and the foot soldiers, to the cheers and laughter of the public, tempered the ardour of those who advanced too far in among the people.
In the provincial towns the chimney sweeps often went through the streets, parodying the royal "bed of justice"; everyone burst into laughter on seeing a man with a sooty face playing the part of the king or his wife. Acrobats and jugglers, attracting thousands of spectators in the main square, would let fly, in the course of their comical patter, all kinds of barbs against the powerful and the rich. A procession takes shape, the statements become increasingly threatening. Then let the powerful or rich man look out if his carriage appears on the scene! He will certainly be manhandled by the crowd. Occasions are never lacking for intelligent men to provoke demonstrations, first of all by mockers, but then by men ready to act, especially if the agitation is prepared in advance through the deeds of men of action.
Once all this is present -- on the one hand a revolutionary situation and general discontent, and on the other the posters, pamphlets, songs, executions in effigy -- the population will be emboldened and their gatherings will become more and more threatening. Today, it is the Archbishop of Paris who is assaulted in a public square; tomorrow it is a duke or a count who narrowly escapes being thrown into the water; another day the crowd amuses itself by jeering at the members of the government as they pass by; thus the acts of revolt vary constantly in anticipation of the day when a spark will be sufficient for a demonstration to turn into a riot and a riot into a revolution.
"It is the dregs of the people, scoundrels and layabouts, who make such riots," our pompous historians will tell us today. And of course it was not among people in easy circumstances that the bourgeois revolutionaries in fact found their allies. Such folk confined themselves to recriminating in the drawing rooms and grovelling on their bellies a moment afterwards, and it was among the ill-famed taverns of the workers' suburbs that the revolutionaries went in search of comrades armed with cudgels when they stirred people to jeer at the Archbishop of Paris. I say this with all due deference to the good fellows of historians who deny these facts today.
4. If its action had been limited to attacking the men and institutions of government, without touching economic institutions, would the Great Revolution ever have become what it was in reality -- that is to say, a general uprising of the popular masses -- peasants and workers -- against the privileged classes? Would the revolution have lasted four years? Would it have shaken France to the marrow? Would it have developed that invincible spirit which gave it the strength to resist an alliance of kings?
Certainly not! Let historians celebrate as much as they wish the glories of the "gentlemen of the Third Estate," of the Constituent Assembly, of the Convention; we know what really happened. We know that the revolution would have ended with nothing more than a microscopic constitutional limitation of royal power, without touching the feudal system, if peasant France had not risen from one end of the land to the other and had not, for four years, sustained a true anarchy -- the spontaneous revolutionary action of groups and individuals, independent of all governmental tutelage. We know that the peasant would have remained a beast of burden for the landlord, if the Jacquerie had not raged from 1788 to 1793, up to the time when the Convention was forced to consecrate by a law what the peasants had already accomplished through action: the abolition without compensation of all the feudal dues and the restitution to the Communes of the property that in the past, under the old regime, had been stolen from them by the rich. One might have waited in vain for justice from the Assemblies if the barefooted fellows without breeches had not thrown into the parliamentary balance the weight of their cudgels and their pikes.
But it was neither by agitation against the ministers nor by pasting up in Paris posters directed against the Queen, that the uprising of the small villages could be brought about. This uprising, a result of the general situation of the country, was also prepared by the agitation that went on in the heart of the populace, conducted by men of the people who attacked its immediate enemies: the squire, the landholding priest, the wheat monopolist, the rich merchant.
This kind of agitation is less well known than that we have already described. The history of Paris has been written, but that of the villages has not been seriously begun: history still ignores the peasant, yet even the little we know of the matter is enough to give us a good idea of what happened.
The pamphlet and the broadsheet did not penetrate into the villages; hardly any peasants at that time could read. It was by the image, printed or often daubed by hand, simple and easily understandable, that propaganda was carried on. A few words traced in the margins of crudely made images, and a whole story took shape in the popular imagination concerning the king, the queen, the Count d'Artois, Madame de Lamballe,73 the famine pact, the lords -- "vampires sucking the blood of the people"; it ran through the villages and prepared people's minds. A typical poster, made by hand and attached to a tree, would provoke the people to revolt, promising the advent of better times, and telling of the riots that had broke out in provinces at the other end of France.
Under the name of "The Jacks," secret groups formed themselves in the villages, either to set fire to the lord's manor house, or to destroy his crops or his livestock, or in the last resort to execute him; many times a corpse was found in a chateau pierced by a knife with this inscription: "In the name of the Jacks."
A heavy coach would be descending a ravine-broken hillside, taking the lord to his domain. But two peasants helped by the coachman would strangle him and tumble his body into the ravine, and later in his pocket would be found a paper saying: "In the name of the Jacks!" -- and so it went on.
Or one day, at a crossroads, a gallows would appear, bearing this inscription: "If His Lordship dares to collect his dues, he will be hanged on this gibbet. Whoever dares to pay His Lordship will meet the same fate!" And the peasant made his payments no longer unless he was forced to do so by the local police, happy at heart to have found a pretext for not paying. He felt that there was a hidden force that sustained him; he became used to the idea of not paying, of rebelling against the squire, and soon, in fact, he no longer paid anything at all and wrung from the landlord, by means of threats, the renunciation of all feudal dues.
Continually in the villages one saw posters announcing that henceforward there would no longer be any dues to pay, that the chateaus must be burnt and the registers of dues destroyed at the same time, that the Council of the people was about to issue a degree to that effect, etc.
"Bread! No more dues or taxes!" These were the slogans that were spread in the villages -- slogans that were comprehensible to all, that went right to the heart of the mother whose children had not eaten for three days and straight to the mind of the peasant harassed by the constabulary for his back taxes. "Down with the monopolist!" went the cry, and his storehouses were broken into, his convoys of wheat held up, and rebellion was unleashed in the provinces. "Down with the toll-gates!" and the barriers would be burnt, the officials beaten to death, anD the towns, lacking money, revolted in their turn against the central power which demanded it of them. "Set fire to the tax registers, the account books, the municipal archives!" and as the musty old documents burned in July 1789, so power disintegrated, the lords emigrated, and the revolution extended ever more broadly its circle of fire.
Everything that was played out on the great stage of Paris was no more than a reflection of what had happened in the provinces during the revolution which, for four years, rumbled through each town, each hamlet, and in which the people concerned itself much less with its enemies in the central government than with its closer enemies: the exploiters and bloodsuckers at home.
To sum it up: The revolution of 1788-93, which offers us on a grand scale the disorganization of the State by popular revolution (eminently economic as all truly popular revolutions must be) can thus provide us with valuable lessons.
Long before 1789, France already presented a revolutionary situation. But the spirit of revolt had not yet sufficiently matured for the revolution to break out. This is why it was towards the development of that spirit of insubordination, of audacity, of hatred against the social order, that the revolutionaries directed their efforts.
While the revolutionaries from the bourgeoisie directed their attacks against the government, the popular revolutionaries, the men of the people whose names history has not even preserved, prepared their uprising, their revolution, by acts of revolt directed against the lords, the revenue officials and the exploiters of every kind.
In 1788, when the approaching revolution made its presence known through serious riots by the mass of the people, the royal party and the bourgeoisie sought to control it by a few concessions. But how could one calm that popular wave by such expedients as the States General, the Jesuitical concessions of the 4th August, or the wretched acts of the legislature? In this way one might appease a political skirmish, but with so little it was impossible to restrain a popular revolt. The wave kept on mounting. But in attacking property, at the same time it disorganized the State, it made all government absolutely impossible, and the revolt of the people, directed against the lords and the rich in general ended after four years, as we all know, in the sweeping away of both the monarchy and absolutism.
Such is the progress of all great revolutions. It will also be the way in which the next revolution will develop and progress if, as we are convinced, it will be not merely a simple change of government, but a true popular revolution, a cataclysm which will transform from top to bottom the system of property.
Notes 71. Charles-Alexandre de Calonne (1734-1802) was Louis XVI's controller general of finance who through attempts at reform precipitated the French Revolution. Attempting to throw more of the burden of taxation on the nobles and the clergy, he convened an Assembly of Notables in February 1787, the precursor of the States General of 1789 in which the Third Estate gained control. He was never "prime minister." Trans.
72. For a fuller account of these incidents and of those mentioned below, see Kropotkin's own book, Vie Great French Revolution (1909), reprinted by Black Rose Books, 1990. Trans.
73. Charles, Comte d'Artois, was the young brother of Louis XVI and head of the reactionary faction at court. The Princesse de Lamballe was a Piedmontese noblewoman and Marie Antoinette's confidante. Both of them helped to keep the king on the disastrous course he followed. Madame de Lamballe was murdered by the mob during the Terror. The Comte d'Artois escaped and returned, at the Restoration in 1815, to become Charles X in the revived monarchy. Trans.