Peter Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel , 1885.
NOTES
Chapter One -- The Situation Today
1. Gervinus. Introduction a l'histoire du dix-neuvieme stiecle. Peter Kropotkin.
2. Giuseppe Ferrari. La Raison d'Etat. Peter Kropotkin
Chapter Two -- The Breakdown of the State
3. It is difficult to know what Kropotkin had in mind with this statement. Norway had been ceded by Denmark to Sweden in 1814. In the 1880s it was still a disaffected part of the Swedish kingdom, and nationalist feeling was becoming so strong that in 1905 it would split away and assume its independence. Clearly the state of Sweden and Norway was well on its way to disintegration when he wrote. Trans.
4. During the 1880s the French franc stood at roughly 4.8 to the US dollar and 24 to the pound sterling. Trans.
Chapter Three -- The Inevitability of Revolution
5. Leon Gambetta (1838-1882) was one of the founders of the Third Republic in France after the downfall of the Second Empire in 1871. He served many years as leader of the Chamber of Deputies and briefly, from November 1881 to January 1882, as Prime Minister of France. Trans.
6. These lines were written as the result of a report by Mrs. Emma Brown on child workers in the Massachusetts factories; it appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. After having visited most of the factories in the company of a well-known economist, Mrs. Brown reached the conclusion that nowhere were the laws on child labour being observed. In each establishment, she would see whole gangs of children, and the appearance of these poor creatures left no doubt that they already carried in their frail bodies the germs of chronic sicknesses: anaemia, physical deformities, tuberculosis, etc. 44% -- nearly half the workers employed in the factories of Massachusetts -- are children below 15 years of age. And why this preference for children among the employers? Because they are paid only a quarter (24%) of what is paid to an adult worker.
It is well known that, despite the laws supposed to protect children, the factories and even the coal mines of Europe are swarming with children, who often work twelve hours a day. Peter Kropotkin.
Chapter Four -- The Coming Revolution
7. Felix Rocquin. LEsprit revolutionnaire avant la Revolution. Peter Kropotkin.
8. Augustin Thierry (1795-1856), French historian of the Middle Ages who wrote what was long thought the classic history of the Norman Conquest of England, in his youth a disciple of the socialist Saint-Simon. Trans.
9. Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), French radical politician, active in the foundation of the Third Republic, and an opposition leader until finally he became Prime Minister of France from 1917-1920. It must be recorded here that when Kropotkin was imprisoned in 1883, Clemenceau led the group of deputies in the Chamber who demanded his release. Trans.
Chapter Five -- Political Rights
10. Emile de Girardin (1806-1881), an active journalist in Paris from the 1848 Revolution down to the Third Republic; he almost singlehandedly invented the cheap popular press in France with his La Presse, as early as 1836; he was a clever feuilletonist, and the Vicar of Bray of French journalism, supporting all the timely adventurers at the right time. Trans.
Chapter Six -- To the Young
11. Rudolf Clausing (1822-1888), German mathematical physicist who enunciated the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that "Heat cannot of itself pass from a colder to a hotter body." Such simplistic statements won celebrity in the nineteenth century. Trans.
12. Themis. Greek goddess of law and custom who convened the Olympian assembly of the gods. She is generally represented as blindfolded, carrying a pair of scales and a cornucopia. Trans.
Chapter Seven -- War
13. The construction of the St. Gotthard Tunnel under the Alps was completed in 1880, shortly before Kropotkin wrote. Its eight years of construction were marred by severe epidemics of various kinds, and ankolostosis (a disease fusing the vertebrae) was one of the worst sicknesses encountered there. Trans.
14. The Russian liberal thinker, Alexander Herzen (1812-1870) went into voluntary exile from his country in 1847, and so he saw the revolutions of 1848 at close hand and was disillusioned by their outcome. Nevertheless, he devised a "Russian Socialism," a populist doctrine he felt suited to his country, and became a great influence on movements of rebellion in Russia through his expatriate periodicals, The Northern Star and The Bell. Trans.
15. Ever since 1798 when Napoleon led an expedition to Egypt and was expelled by the British, there was rivalry between the two powers which was exacerbated when the Suez Canal was built between 1865 and 1869 by a French combine led by De Lesseps. However, the British took over the canal in 1875 and from 1883 gained control over Egypt as a necessary link on the great route to India. Trans.
16. Count Gyula Andrassy, prime minister of Austro-Hungary, and The Earl of Salisbury, British foreign secretary, were both thorns in sides of the Russian autocrats. It was Andrassy who with Bismarck created in 1879 the Austro-German alliance that would be turned against Russia in 1914, while Salisbury exerted pressure on Russia in order to avert war in the Balkans between that country and Turkey in 1878. Gatchina had been the situation of the tsar's summer place since the days of Catherine the Great Trans.
17. The great capitalist dynasties of 19th century continental Europe. The Rothschilds were merchant bankers on a large scale, operating in the major European capitals and wielding power through their loans to governments; the Schneiders were French manufacturers who began by building the first French locomotive in 1838 and the first river steamboat in 1840, and eventually branched out into armaments, dominating that industry, as a French equivalent to Krupp, by World War I. Trans.
Chapter Eight -- Revolutionary Minorities
18. Jules Favre (1809-1880) was a resolute republican opponent of Napoleon III during the Second Empire, but lost credit and influence when his negotiations for ending the Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871 with the surrender of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. Trans.
19. Louis Blanc (1811-82) was an early socialist who advocated "social Workshops" operated by the workers as the beginning of a socialist society. He was a member of the provisional government during the 1848 revolution, but fled to England when the revolution turned sour, and there he wrote the massive 12-volume History of the French Revolution to which Kropotkin refers. Trans.
20. Camille Desmoulins (1760-1794) was one of the great orators of the French Revolution, celebrated for his speech in the gardens of the Palais Royal calling on the Parisians to take up arms (July 12,1789). A moderate Jacobin, he was guillotined in company with Danton on April 5,1794, when Robespierre purged the ruling party of his rivals. Trans.
21. Mirabeau. Honore Gabriel Riquetti (1749-1791) abandoned his title of Comte de Mirabeau when he entered the States-General in 1789, becoming the spokesman of the third estate and working for a constitutional monarchy in which he hoped to be prime minister. He entered into secret talks with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; they failed to listen to his advice, and Mirabeau died before his dealings with them were discovered. Trans.
22. Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828-93), a French determinist historian whose principal work was The Origins of Contemporary France (1876-93). Trans.
23. The black flag was not universally accepted by anarchists at this time. Many, like Kropotkin, still thought of themselves as socialists and of the red flag as theirs also. Trans.
Chapter Nine -- Order
24. The true beginnings of the resistance to Austrian rule in Belgium, which ended in its independence in 1830, was the rebellion of 1789 to 1790, inspired by the French Revolution, which was defeated at the time but left a lasting heritage of resistance to Hapsburg rule. Trans.
25. The word "sans-culotte" was actually first used in 1789. It did not mean bare-bottomed, but referred to those more radical -- and usually lower middle class -- revolutionaries who chose to wear pantalons (trousers) in preference to the culottes (knee breeches) favoured by the aristocrats. Trans.
26. The word "nihilists" was certainly not "launched" by Turgenev, though he popularized it in Fathers and Sons. (1861). The Oxford English Dictionary cites a use in 1817 by an American theologian, and the concept of nihilism cropped up in the religious word battles of the Reformation period. Trans.
27. The word anarchist was first used in a positive way by Proudhon himself, in What is Property? (1840), but it had already been used in a derogatory way against the Levellers during the English Civil War of the 17th century (they were called "Switzerising anarchists") and by the Girondins against the enragis during the French Revolution.
28. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was the founder of Utilitarianism and famous for his declaration that the only true criterion of political action was that it should promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. He was an influential penal and legislative reformer. Trans.
Chapter Ten -- The Commune
29. Emile de Lavaleye (1822-1892). Belgian economist; Kropotkin is probably referring to his he socialisme conteporain, which appeared in 1881. Trans.
30. Augustin Thierry. See note 8.
31. Attempts were made to form Communes in Lyon and Marseille at the same time as the Paris Commune; they were largely led by Bakuninists, and Bakunin himself was active in Lyon. The Spanish town of Cartagena was the centre of the socalled Cantonalist movement against centralised authority in 1873, when its communalist defenders withstood a siege of several months. Trans.
32. A good modern study of American nineteenth century communities is Mark Holloway's Heavens on Earth, 1951. Trans.
Chapter Eleven -- The Paris Commune
33. Kropotkin is presumably referring to the International Working Men's Association, which was founded on the 28th September 1864; its presence stimulated socialist propaganda and organization in most European countries. Trans.
34. We reproduce these lines from I'Histoire populaire et parlementaire by Arthur Arnould, a work we have great pleasure in calling to the attention of our readers. Peter Kropotkin.
35. Written in March 1881. Peter Kropotkin.
36. Jules Michelet (1798-1874) was the greatest of French romantic historians. His monumental Histoire de la France and his Histoire de la Revolution frangais are patriotic epics which more than any other works created the great French national myths, of Joan of Arc and of the Revolution. Trans.
Chapter Twelve -- The Agrarian Question
37. The Land League was founded by Michael Davitt in October 1879 with aims of fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale of the right to occupancy. When Charles Stewart Parnell was arrested for inflammatory nationalist speeches, the League called on tenants to refuse payment of rents. Thereupon the British government suppressed it as a legal organization in October 1881, but it continued as a powerful secret society. Trans.
38. Presumably Kropotkin is talking here of the terrorist group known as Los Desheredados (The Disinherited). The majority of the anarchists in Spain expressed disapproval of their methods. Trans.
39. Arthur Young (1741-1820) was an agricultural writer who travelled extensively in the rural areas of England, Wales, Ireland and France and described them in his published journals. His Travels during the Years 1787,1788,1789 is an extremely valuable document on peasant France immediately before the Revolution. Trans.
40. Written in 1880. Peter Kropotkin.
41. See the figures given by the Times of 13th October 1880. Peter Kropotkin.
42. Irish Land League. See note 37. Trans.
Chapter Thirteen -- Representative Government
43. The "brigand" to whom Kropotkin refers is of course Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, grandson of Napoleon I, who was elected president in 1848, and in 1852 elevated himself to the rank of Emperor with the title of Napoleon III. Trans.
44. Augustin Thierry. See note. 8. Trans.
45. Jeremy Bentham. See note 28. Trans.
46. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), an early anarchist theoretician, the first actually to call himself "anarchist," who advocated mutualism, the interaction of people in small work and community groups, and federalism, by which he meant the replacement of the state by the free interplay of such groups. His most important works among many were probably Wiat is Property? (1840) and The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century (1851). Trans.
47. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). British philosopher who described himself as a Utilitarian and was an early advocate of women's rights. His best known work is On Liberty (1859) which is libertarian rather than liberal in approach. Trans.
48. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was a non-Darwinian evolutionist who coined the phrase, later wrongly attributed to Darwin, "the survival of the fittest." He was a libertarian thinker who criticized the institution of the state and warned of the dangers of parliamentary democracy, and many of the individualist anarchists accepted him as one of their own. Trans.
49. Emilian Ivanovich Pugachev (1726-1775) led a major rebellion of Cossacks and peasants in central Russia between 1773 and 1775 which Catherine the Greaf s armies defeated only with difficulty since Pugachev (who claimed to be the assassinated Tsar Peter III) had instituted the abolition of serfdom over large areas.
•Pugachev was eventually captured and cruelly executed in Moscow, Trans.
50. General Marie Esm£ Patrice de MacMahon was a French monarchist chosen as president of the country in 1873. Instead of restoring the monarchy he seems to have intended a coup d'etat in his own benefit, but a newly elected republican chamber of deputies resisted his efforts, and MacMahon was forced to accept the principle of ministerial responsibility to parliament rather than to the president. Trans.
51. Robert Macaire was the picaresque hero of a play of the same name by Frederic Lemaitre and Benjamin Antier which was produced in the 1830s. He was, par excellence, the wholly amoral and charming rogue. Trans.
52. Herbert Spencer. See note 48. Trans.
53. Proudhon tells, in his Confessions d'un Rtvolutionnaire (1849) how, when he was elected to the French Constitutent Assembly in 1848, he found himself entirely isolated from public life and especially from that of the workers he set out to represent. Trans.
54. Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-62), set out to write a history of civilization instead of battles and kings. By his death he completed only the two volumes of his History of Civilization in England, but these profoundly influenced liberal historiography. Trans.
55. Cola di Rienzi (or Rienzo) (13137-1354) was the leader of a popular movement in Rome and tried, with wavering support from Pope Clement VI and Pope Innocent VI to create a popular empire in central Italy. However, power went to his head and his arbitrary rule led to a popular rising and his assassination. There is no real difference, Kropotkin is suggesting, between autocrats and demagogues. Trans.
56. Hanseatic League, an alliance of North Sea and Baltic German trading cities founded formally in 1358 and lasting into the 17th century. Hamburg, Lubeck and Breman were its leading cities; it dealt especially with trade to Scandinavia, Russia and England, where its establishments were called Steelyards. Trans.
57. Etienne Marcel (1316-1358) was an early French advocate of parliamentary government who in the period after the French king's defeat by the Black Prince at Poitiers managed to seize control of Paris and enter into allegiance with the peasant revolt of 1358. However, the peasant revolt was suppressed, Paris was isolated, and Marcel lost his popularity and was assassinated. Trans.
Chapter Fourteen -- Law and Authority
58. Montesquieu, Charles-Louis, Baron de. (1669-1755). French political philosopher, whose main and most influential work, L'Esprit des Lois was 14 years in preparation, although it took only 2 years before an English translation appeared in 1750. Trans.
59. Buckle. See note 53. Trans.
60. The Field of May. In some of the smaller Swiss cantons a measure of direct democracy still prevails, and the citizens gather in a field on the edge of the town, often with a great lime tree as a focus as in Appenzell, and actually vote their own laws on the spot, appointing at the same time a council to see that the people's will is carried out. Trans.
61. Here Kropotkin is presumably referring to the Constitution of the Third Republic, which was adopted in 1875. Trans.
Chapter Fifteen -- Revolutionary Government
62. Jacques-Pierre Brissot (1754-1793) was a leader of the moderate Girondins during the French Revolution, and active opponent of slavery. Falling into rivalry with Robespierre, he was guillotined, as the other Girondin leaders had been, on the 31st October, 1793. Robespierre would follow him 7 months later. Trans.
63. Mirabeau. See note 21. Trans.
64. Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881), the personification of French conspiratorial revolutionism, spent more than 33 of his 75 years in gaol and knew the insides of 30 prisons. He founded or joined a whole series of secret societies, fomented a number of revolts and was at least once condemned to death. He remained active until his death by apoplexy in 1881. Trans.
65. Young Italy (Giovoni Italia), was founded by the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini in 1831. Its propaganda was successful, but its attempts at insurrection failed. In
1848 it was absorbed into Mazzini's Italian National Committee. Trans.
66. The Executive Committee was the activist core of Narondnay Volya, the People's Will, a terrorist group founded in 1879 by militants disillusioned with the failure of gradualist policies. It was the Executive Committee that planned and carried out the assassination of the Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Trans.
67. Blanqui. See note 64. Trans.
68. Tadeusz Kosciuzko was a Polish officer who fought with distinction on the side of the rebels in the American War of Independence, and then, returning to Poland, led in 1794 an uprising against Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the powers that had divided his country between them. He lived out his life in France, the United States and Switzerland, where he died. Trans.
69. After an insurrection in August 1792, a National Convention was elected, which abolished the kingdom of France and established the First Republic. Trans.
70. "The tailor who became president of the United States" was Andrew Johnson (18081875) who succeeded on Lincoln's assassination in 1865. His reconstruction programmes, attempting to repair the damage of the Civil War, were mostly failures, and he was actually impeached by his opponents, though he continued
in office to 1869, the end of his term. Trans.
Chapter Seventeen -- The Spirit of Revolt
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.
Chapter Eighteen -- Theory and Practice
74. Albert Schaeffle (1831-1903) was briefly the Austrian minister of commerce and agriculture (1871). He was a radical reformist rather than a radical, and had a considerable influence on social welfare legislation in both Austria and Germany. Trans.
Chapter Nineteen -- Expropriation
75. Louis de Saint Just (1767-1794) became one of the leading Jacobin ideologues when he published his Esprit de la revolution et de la Constitution de France. He was tireless in self-sacrifice for the cause, but, when he became a member of the Committee of Public Safety in 1793, became a ruthless persecutor of all who disagreed with him. Some have seen him as a saint of the revolution, others -- with perhaps more justice -- as a cold-blooded and sadistic bigot. He was guillotined at the same time as Robespierre in July 1794. Trans.
76. Henry George (1839-97) is best known as the founder of the single tax movement, whose ideas were very influential among American socialists and radicals in the late nineteenth century. Believing that one of the main causes of poverty was the fact that both land revenues and the unearned increase in land values profited only the few, he proposed a single tax on land from which all the expenses of government would be met. Kropotkin appears to have misread his proposals. Trans.
77. This, of course, is a modification of the famous aphorism by Kropotkin's great predecessor, Michael Bakunin (1814-1876) who in 1842 declared "The passion to destroy is also a creative urge." Trans.