James Joll, The Anarchists, Second Edition, 1979.

Chapter VI
Saints and rebels


'I'm one of many thousands of young men of my class . . . in whose brains certain ideas are fermenting. There's nothing original about me at all. I'm very young and very ignorant; it's only a few months since I began to talk of the possibility of a social revolution with men who have considered the whole ground more than I could possibly do. I'm a mere particle,' Hyacinth wound up, 'in the grey immensity of the people. All I pretend to is my good faith and a great desire that justice should be done.'
Henry James: The Princess Casamassima

I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: 'He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any regime except the regime of liberty.'
Gustave Courbet, on rejecting the Legion of Honour


1

All over Europe in the 1890s new ideas and new movements were challenging the political, moral and artistic conventions of the previous generation. The more industrial society seemed to be expanding, the more people began to be aware of its inequalities. The richer the rich became, the solider and more ostentatious the outward signs of their wealth, the greater the gap appeared to be between them and the working classes, and the more dissatisfied intellectuals and artists became with the social values of capitalist society. As the morality and conventions of society seemed to many to stifle individual expression and to force men into hypocrisy, so the idea of a total revolt against the established order acquired a personal as well as a social and political connotation. Thus the end of the nineteenth century and the coming of the twentieth seemed to symbolize the possibility of a new social and moral order for the future.

While anarchism had a natural appeal to the workers in countries where they were denied the possibility of peaceful change [131] and reform, to the intellectuals in the great capitals of western Europe it seemed to offer a political theory which could combine a vision of a just society with the assertion of individual freedom; and those artists and writers who believed in a bohemian rejection of bourgeois conventions found in anarchism -- and especially in le propagande par le fait -- a compelling example of total revolt. Eager for social change and for violent sensations, many young intellectuals, for a time at least, were prepared to follow Kropotkin or Nietzsche indiscriminately, or to move from anarchism to various forms of violent nationalism. (Later, as their passionate desire for action waned with age and their sense of what was practicable grew, many of them turned to the more humdrum paths of orthodox social democracy.) As Leon Blum put it: 'The whole literary generation of which I was a part was impregnated with anarchist thought.'1

Of the figures who inspired the anarchists, both those who wanted political and social revolution and those who wanted to assert the sanctity of the individual against the anonymity of industrial society and the hypocrisy and constraint of bourgeois 'Victorian' morality, Peter Kropotkin was perhaps the most influential. When he finally settled in England in 1886 he was forty-four years old, but his time in prison had left him in delicate health and his days as an active leader of revolutionary movements were over. In fact, although before leaving Russia he had advocated the use of armed bands to stir up revolution among the peasants, and although he had shared the hopes of many anarchists in the 1870s and 1880s that revolution was near, he soon reverted to the belief, which he had derived from N. V. Tchaikovsky, that it was by means of the printed word that the cause of the revolution could best be served and that a clandestine pamphlet was worth more than the terrorist's bomb or the assassin's dagger.

By 1886 he had suffered for his beliefs. He had spent two years in the fortress of Peter and Paul in St Petersburg and three as a political prisoner in France, and these sentences, as well as his dramatic escape from Russia, had made him a legendary figure in revolutionary circles. During these years, too, he had read and reflected further on the nature of social change. His personal experience of prison life had made him a passionate advocate of [132] penal reform; indeed, for the rest of his life there were few warm-hearted liberal movements with which he did not sympathize, and no meeting or letter of protest against injustice was complete without his presence or signature. In England, where he lived in extremely modest circumstances -- his estates in Russia had been confiscated -- he became a respected and much-loved figure, whose simplicity and sincerity impressed even those who disagreed with his opinions, and he ended by being considered as a sort of anarchist saint, whose integrity and goodness could be set against the violence and terror with which the anarchist movement was popularly associated. As the great Danish critic, Georg Brandes, wrote: 'Seldom have there been revolutionists so humane and mild. . . . He has never been an avenger but always a martyr. He does not impose sacrifices upon others; he makes them himself.'2

In England, Kropotkin became a friend of all sorts of radicals. He respected and liked William Morris, but could not agree with his rejection of machines and technical progress, since, for Kropotkin, as for Godwin, it was mechanization that would eventually liberate men from innumerable tedious and degrading tasks. 'William Morris's hatred of machines', he wrote, 'proved that the conception of the machine's power and gracefulness was missing from his poetical genius.'3 He was a friend of trade-union leaders like Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, and had been enormously impressed by the solidarity and mutual loyalty of the London dockers in the great strike of 1889. At the same time, his geographical writings made him respectable in academic circles -- at one moment there was even a rumour that he was going to be given a chair at Cambridge. He attended dinners of the Royal Geographical Society and firmly refused to rise and drink the health of the queen. To the end of his life he was consistent in his refusal to acknowledge the state or to accept anything from it. When he eventually returned to Russia in 1917 he refused an invitation to join the provisional government and, again, after the bolsheviks had taken power, he would not accept Lunacharsky's offer of a government subsidy towards the cost of reprinting his works. The one point in his career when, it seemed to many of his friends and disciples, he was inconsistent, was during the First World War, when he warmly supported the war against Germany. [133] He shared Bakunin's dislike of the Germans and his populist faith in the innate virtues of the Russian people, and believed, as Bakunin had in 1870, that a German victory would mean a strengthening of the regimented, disciplined state which he continued to hate. His attitude led him to break with old associates such as Malatesta, who continued to insist that a man 'ought never to fight except for the social revolution',4 and it also brought expressions of contempt from rival revolutionaries, so that Stalin, for example, wrote, 'the old fool must have completely lost his mind'.5

In fact, Kropotkin, for all his dislike of terrorism -- 'On his lips the word "Nechaevism" was always a strong rebuke', one of his disciples reported6 -- believed that in certain situations violence was justified, and that it might well be the only means of revolution. When the news of the 1905 revolution in Russia reached him he went so far as to go and practise with a rifle in a shooting gallery in case he had a chance of returning to Russia to fight. This was one of the points which separated him from Tolstoy, for whose views he otherwise had much sympathy and for whose genius he had great admiration. The difference between the anarchist and the Tolstoyan position was well expressed by an anonymous writer who provided an introduction to Tolstoy's pamphlet on War and Compulsory Military Service when this was published in 1896 by the anarchist Bibliotheque des Temps Nouveaux, with which Kropotkin, Jean Grave and Elisee Reclus were all associated. Tolstoy is, the writer asserts, an anarchist:

He affirms as we do that every government functions in a pathological fashion and by its very nature corrupts all it touches; he denies in advance that any law, any regulation, any will from above can have any power for good; he abhors the military system as absolutely contrary to all freedom and justice; but he repudiates all resistance to evil. He calls himself a Christian anarchist. . . . For our part the words ['turn the other cheek'] attributed to the prophet of Nazareth seem to us an abomination.. . . Every man worthy of the name must resist to the limit of his strength, not for himself but for all the other human beings whom he represents, and whom he would degrade by his cowardice and ennoble by his courage. The old [134] Roman saying remains for ever the expression of the truth: 'Against the enemy, revendication is eternal.' Revendication, not vengeance, for we know the determining influence of circumstances, and we feel hatred for nobody.7

Kropotkin himself, in a letter to an English friend a few years earlier, had expressed a similar attitude towards revenge:

We may say that revenge is no aim in itself. Surely, it is not. But it is human and all revolts have borne and for a long time will bear the character. In fact, we have not suffered from the persecutions as they, the workers, suffered; we who, in our houses, seclude ourselves from the cry and sight of human sufferings, we are no judges of those who live in the midst of all this hell of suffering. . . . Personally, I hate these explosions, but I cannot stand as a judge to condemn those who are driven to despair. . . . One single thing -- that revenge must not be erected into a theory. That no one has the right to incite others to it, but that if he keenly feels all that hell and does a desperate act, let him be judged by those who are his peers, his equals in bearing those pariah's sufferings.8

Kropotkin's dilemma was that he had seen from his own experience in Russia that there were often circumstances in which a violent upheaval offered the only possibility of change, while at the same time, his own temperament and beliefs made him dislike the prospect. His fear was always that the revolution might be forced into the methods of the state which it was aiming to destroy. 'Terrorism', he wrote in his history of The Great French Revolution, 'is always a method of government.'9 And he was constantly repeating that a 'revolutionary government' was a contradiction in terms, since the whole point of a revolution was to abolish government. However, he refused to accept, as Tolstoy did and as Gandhi was to do, that non-violence could be made into a principle of action, since there were, in his view, sometimes situations so desperate that violence was the lesser evil; and it is for this reason that Kropotkin's support for the allied cause during the First World War is not quite as surprising or as inconsistent as it first seems.

Kropotkin and Tolstoy never met, but Tolstoy saw exactly [135] what Kropotkin's position was. 'His arguments in favour of violence', he wrote, 'do not seem to me to be the expression of his opinions, but only of his fidelity to the banner under which he has served so honestly all his life.'10 In return, Kropotkin saw the point of Tolstoy's final departure from his home and of his rejection of all worldly values. 'I am not astonished to learn', he wrote at the end of Tolstoy's life,

that Tolstoy has decided to retire to a peasant's house where he might continue his teachings without having to rely upon anyone else's labour for supplying himself or his family with the luxuries of life. It is the necessary outcome of the terrible inner drama he had been living through the last thirty years - the drama, by the way, of thousands upon thousands of intellectuals in our present society. It is the accomplishment of what he was longing for for a long time.11

Kropotkin differed from Tolstoy because he refused to accept non-violence as a principle. He also differed from him in rejecting Christianity, even in Tolstoy's highly unorthodox form. He thought of himself first and foremost as a scientist, and his social philosophy and his ethical system were, he believed, soundly based on empirical observations. From the time of his early expeditions in Siberia he had become convinced that men worked better together and achieved more when they were cooperating freely and equally: the men who accompanied him on his explorations, for example, responded much more readily once they realized that Kropotkin was not relying on his position and privileges as a noble and an officer to secure their obedience. The primitive tribes he observed seemed to have customs and instincts which regulated their social life without the need of government or laws. For Kropotkin, primitive society, so far from providing an example of Hobbesian conflict and of the war of all against all, showed rather that cooperation and 'mutual aid' were the natural state of man if left uncorrupted by government and by laws which result from the 'desire of the ruling class to give permanence to customs imposed by themselves for their own advantage', whereas all that is necessary for harmonious living are 'those customs useful for society. . . which have no need of law to insure respect'.12 [136]

His own observations were, Kropotkin believed, reinforced by the theories of Darwin; and his most extensive theoretical work, Mutual Aid, was explicitly written to counter T. H. Huxley's interpretation of Darwin's evolutionary theory. Huxley thought that life was a continuous free fight and believed that it was as a result of this struggle for existence that species survived or evolved into new forms of life. Instead, according to Kropotkin, the law of nature was a law of cooperation, of mutual aid rather than of struggle. Within each species mutual support is the rule, and for each example of rivalry a counter-example of reciprocal assistance can be produced, 'Here you have the dominative swans; there the extremely sociable kittiwake-gulls among whom quarrels are rare and short; the prepossessing polar guillemots which continually caress each other. . . .'13 Again and again in his writings Kropotkin comes back to Darwin's example of the blind pelican whom his comrades kept supplied with fish.

Kropotkin's optimistic and idealistic assumptions about the animal world were repeated in respect of primitive human societies. Man was originally sociable and innocent, and throughout history his instincts to cooperate have asserted themselves -- in primitive communities, in the Greek city-states, in the medieval urban communes -- only to be corrupted by the over-elaboration of the machinery of society, by the blind covetousness of a few merchants, by the refusal of the citizens to exercise their rights and by their willingness therefore to delegate power to representative assemblies whose members are at best mediocrities and at worst tyrants. Kropotkin, for all his optimism and naivete, realized that the ideal society could only be the result of eternal vigilance. Although man's natural instincts were on the whole good, the fundamental problem of ethics is to find a solution to the contradiction between those feelings 'which induce man to subdue other men in order to utilize them for his individual ends' and those which

induce human beings to unite for attaining common ends by common effort: the first answering to that fundamental need of human nature - struggle, and the second representing another equally fundamental tendency - the desire for unity and mutual sympathy.14
[137]

The latter instincts -- those making for human solidarity and mutual aid and sympathy -- must be encouraged in two ways, by means of a sound economic organization and by means of a fresh approach to systems of morality. By this means humanity could be helped towards the next step in evolution. 'The ideal of the anarchist... is a mere summing-up of what he considers to be the next phase of evolution. It is no longer a matter of faith; it is a matter for scientific discussion.'15 On the moral plane what is needed is an ethical system which springs from man's own good instincts and which does not rely on any outside sanction to enforce it.

In his moral thinking Kropotkin was much influenced by a young French philosopher, M. Guyau, whose most important work, Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction, was published in 1885, during Kropotkin's spell as political prisoner in the old convent of Clairvaux, where he himself was reflecting about the moral basis of society. Kropotkin called Guyau an 'anarchist without knowing it' and he repeatedly used the phrase 'morality without obligation or sanction' to describe his own ethical doctrines. Guyau was an interesting writer who coldly dissected previous moral philosophy and exposed its fallacies, showing that a belief which made morality dependent on an external metaphysical sanction was as erroneous as one based on the pleasure-calculus of the utilitarians; and, while he had considerable sympathy with the Kantian idea of an incontrovertible categorical imperative that imposes duty on us, he found this position, too, to be philosophically untenable. Man is thrown back on himself alone: the motives for his actions are within him, unconscious as well as conscious, and his conduct is necessarily the product of these. It was foolish to define duty except in terms of one's own capacities: 'Je puis done je dois.' It is pointless to expect man to behave other than as his nature dictates. 'Immorality is an interior mutilation.' Thought and action are one, and thought must lead to action: 'He who does not act as he thinks, thinks incompletely.'16

Guyau's neo-stoicism is a good deal bleaker than Kropotkin's morality based on the natural instinct for mutual aid. Guyau's picture of man is that of a mariner left at sea in a damaged vessel: 'No hand guides us, no eye sees for us; the rudder has long been [138] broken, or rather there has never been one, we have to make it; it is a great task and it is our task.'17 Nevertheless, Guyau stresses, as Kropotkin did, that man has generous instincts as well as selfish ones, and that sympathy and compassion are as natural to him as envy and hatred. 'Life is not just nutrition, it is also production and fecundity. To live is to spend as well as to acquire.'18 For Kropotkin, Guyau reinforced the beliefs about the nature of man and of human progress which he believed were justified by his interpretation of the theory of evolution and his observation of primitive communities. What was necessary in order to put into practice a morality without obligation or sanctions was a new economic order of society which would promote only man's good instincts and give no opportunity for the expression of his bad ones. To achieve this goal a revolution was necessary and a total reorganization of society to produce a state of what Kropotkin called 'anarchist communism'. A revolution is necessary because:

Everything hangs together in our society and it is impossible to reform anything without the whole structure collapsing. The moment you strike at private property in one of its forms- land or industry - you will be forced to strike at all the others. The very success of the revolution will impose this.19
Previous revolutions had failed because only by the immediate expropriation of stocks and fields and factories could the food supply be maintained while the foundations of the new society were being laid: 'Du pain, il faut du pain a la Revolution!' This would not only avoid the economic difficulties, Kropotkin optimistically hoped, which had led to the Terror in 1792 and to the reaction against the Second Republic in 1848; it would also be the first step towards the new order.
To make prosperity a reality, this immense capital -- cities, houses, tilled fields, factories, means of communication, education, must stop being considered as private property which the monopolist can dispose of as he likes. This rich productive equipment, so painfully obtained, constructed, developed, invented by our ancestors must become common property so that the collective spirit can draw from it the greatest advantages [139] for everyone. We must have expropriation. Prosperity for all as an end, expropriation as a means.20

Once the act of expropriation had taken place the way would be open for anarchist communism. Kropotkin was insistent that this should be based on the principle of 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs', and stated repeatedly that it was not possible to allocate the fruits of labour according to the actual work a man did. There was much argument in anarchist circles on this point and on the whole question of ownership. Proudhon had envisaged a society where each member would have a small amount of domestic property, and the various types of cooperative movement which he inspired thought of the means of production as being owned in common by the members, with each of them owning a share of the products or their proceeds. For Kropotkin, however, this was at best a transitional stage. Eventually there would be no ownership at all and everything would simply be freely available to him who needed it. Optimistically, he was always seeing in contemporary society developments which seemed to show that the world was moving in the direction he wanted, and he was enthusiastic about the growth of free public services: 'The librarian of the British Museum does not ask the reader what have been his previous services to society, but simply gives him the books he requires.'21 He was impressed by the way in which, in the liberal society of late Victorian England, the state appeared to be abdicating, and voluntary associations taking over. Again and again he pointed to the British Life-Boat Association as an example of the way in which society might be organized on the basis of free cooperation for humane causes by men who made their help freely available to those in need. He summed up his beliefs as follows:

Common possession of the necessaries of production implies the common enjoyment of the fruits of the common production; and we consider that an equitable organization of society can only arise when every wage-system is abandoned and when everybody, contributing to the common well-being to the full extent of his capacities, shall enjoy from the common stock of society to the fullest possible extent of his needs.22
[140]

It is an ideal that the anarchists have shared with the communists. Mr Khrushchev, for instance, told the 22nd Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that in the decade 1971-80 'the material and technical basis of communism will be created, and there will be an abundance of material and cultural benefits for the whole population; Soviet society will come close to a stage where it can introduce the principle of distribution according to needs'.23 Kropotkin and his anarchist disciples thought, however, that these ends could be achieved, not by centralized state direction, but by mutual cooperation and free association. Just as he had been impressed by the work of voluntary societies in England, so he saw with optimistic approval examples of voluntary cooperation on an international scale in the running of vast enterprises without government intervention. Indeed, in his enthusiasm for the International Postal Union and especially for the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits, he comes close to a Saint-Simonian faith in the beneficent possibilities of large-scale business concerns. He believed that in the intermediate stage of the revolution, before the ideal society was finally established, mutual aid and good sense could solve all problems. If there were temporary shortages, then rationing would have to be introduced; and, if this is necessary, 'the last rations would be reserved for those who need them most; announce that and you will see whether you will not obtain unanimous agreement'.24 He did not believe that such shortages need last long. He -- and still more his wife -- was an enthusiastic gardener, and shared with Fourier a belief in the pleasures and virtues of gardening; and, indeed, in the difficult years at the end of his life, when he had returned to Russia after the Revolution, it was largely the products of Princess Kropotkin's vegetable garden that kept them alive. He believed that intensive modern methods of market-gardening, as he had observed them in the Channel Islands and elsewhere, could produce enough to feed large urban populations. The Department of Seine-et-Oise alone could, he thought, supply the whole of Paris if properly cultivated. The manufactured goods which the farmer would receive in return for his produce -- money having, of course, been abolished -- would soon be produced in abundance by improved mechanical processes. Kropotkin had great faith in the possibilities of machines, [141] not only to increase production, but also to perform the tasks which, even in an ideal society, nobody would want to perform. 'If there is still work which is really disagreeable in itself, it is only because our scientific men have never cared to consider the means of rendering it less so,'25 he wrote, and he was excited because a Mrs Cochrane in Illinois had invented a washing machine.

However, although machines might reduce tedious and unpleasant work, some manual labour would be desirable. Like Proudhon, Kropotkin believed that work had a virtue of its own and he thought that everyone should do some manual work, not only in order to contribute his share towards producing the communal necessities of life but also for its own sake. This was particularly necessary for the writer and artist: authors must first learn to be printers, and painters must experience the scenes they paint. 'He must have seen the sunset as he comes home from work. He must have been a peasant with other peasants to keep its splendour before his eyes.'26 After a man had done the few hours' work that was needed, he would be free to follow his own pursuits and to produce for himself anything he wanted above what was available in the common fund. At no point would his labour be regulated; nothing would be required of him beyond what he was prepared to give. Kropotkin wrote in a passage which sums up his main beliefs:

The anarchists conceive of society in which all the mutual relations of its members are regulated, not by laws, not by authorities whether self-imposed or elected, but by mutual agreements between the members of that society and by a sum of social customs and habits - not petrified by law, routine or superstition, but continuously developing and continually readjusted in accordance with the ever-growing requirements of a free life stimulated by the progress of science, invention and the steady growth of higher ideals. No ruling authorities, then. No government of man by man; no crystallization and immobility, but a continual evolution such as we see in nature.27

Kropotkin's appeal lay partly in the goodness and patent sincerity of his own nature, but partly, too, in his optimistic ability to reconcile apparently contradictory desires and values. The revolution need not mean the end of old values; for in the [142] traditional associations and relationships of primitive societies lay the pattern for the new age. A society based on small units need not turn its back on the technical progress of the machine age: 'Have the factory and the workshops at the gates of your fields and gardens.'28 The village communities would have up-to-date machinery in their communal factories. Moreover, unlike Marx, whose doctrine that all history was the history of class struggles implies that the revolution and the new order would emerge from a bloody clash, Kropotkin suggested that there were already signs in the development of existing society that the process of evolution was at work and that the beneficent processes of nature rather than the relentless forces of the historical dialectic would bring the new order into being.

Because he seemed to offer the best of so many worlds, Kropotkin's disciples and followers were extremely varied. Thus his Paroles d'un revoke (a collection of articles from his paper) and his Great French Revolution were translated into Italian by the young socialist schoolmaster Benito Mussolini, who found the first book 'overflowing with a great love of oppressed humanity and infinite kindness'.29 Gandhi and his followers responded to Kropotkin's populist message and his idea of natural village communities spontaneously springing up. Oscar Wilde was impressed by his personality and message: 'Two of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own experience', he wrote while in prison himself, 'are the lives of Verlaine and of Prince Kropotkin: both of them men who have passed years in prison: the first, the one Christian poet since Dante; the other, a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia.'30 And, in his Soul of Man under Socialism, Wilde produced a pamphlet which linked his own aestheticism and religiosity with ideas borrowed from Kropotkin. Few of Kropotkin's successors added much to his doctrine, but, in each generation since, a few gentle and dedicated men and women have found inspiration in his simple childlike optimism and in the hope he offered that man might not be as bad as he seemed and that scientific and technical progress need not necessarily involve a moral retrogression.

If Kropotkin was the most famous anarchist theorist of the late nineteenth century, there were many others who were spreading [143] anarchist ideas and discussing some of the fundamental problems of the anarchist society. In France, Charles Malato quarrelled with Jean Grave because the former believed that the anarchist movement needed leaders and some minimal organization. There were constant arguments about the exact nature of the economic organization of the future anarchist world. Was society to be communist, and everything available to all on the principle of 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need', or was it to be 'collectivist', with the members owning their fields and factories in common on a cooperative basis and preserving some private property? How far could the anarchist movement include the extreme individualists who rejected not only all authority but sometimes all cooperation? In general, however, although passionately conducted and although personal differences often accentuated theoretical divergences of opinion, most of these discussions were rather unrealistic. The essence of anarchism, after all, was freedom of choice and the absence of central direction. There were some anarchist writers who saw that these discussions were at the moment unreal and irrelevant, and one of the most intelligent of the Italian anarchists, Saverio Merlino, summed up the possibilities open for the future as follows:

Pacts of association can differ much from each other. In one association the workers will pledge themselves to give a certain number of hours of work, in another to carry out a given task in a definite time. The workers in one association will prefer to put the products of their labour in common; others to take a part proportionate to their work.31
Years later, in 1924, one of the chief participants in these debates, Errico Malatesta, put them in their true perspective:
What are the forms which production and exchange will take? Will communism (joint production and consumption free for all) triumph, collectivism (production in common and sharing the products according to the labour contributed by each) or individualism (to each the individual possession of the means of production and enjoyment of the whole product of one's own labour) . . .? Probably all the possible means of ownership and of the utilization of the means of production will be experimented [144] with at the same time in the same or in different places, and will affect each other and exist at the same time until practice has taught which form or forms are the best.32

In the 1890s, too, the anarchists were not only concerned with clarifying their own beliefs. They also had to determine their attitudes to other revolutionary parties. Even more than in the days of Marx and Bakunin twenty years earlier, it was the Social Democrats who seemed as much a hindrance to the development of anarchist ideas as the bourgeois or aristocratic parties which governed the states of Europe. Social Democracy was now a mass movement supported by the votes of millions of workers: and in the congresses of the newly founded Second International -- at Brussels in 1891 and Zurich in 1893 - the anarchists tried in vain to make their point of view heard. The Italian lawyer, Francesco Saverio Merlino, interrupted the sessions to try and convince the participants that by their acceptance of political activity they were no longer revolutionaries and were betraying their fundamental principles; and he was arrested and deported by the Belgian police. The Dutch anarchist pastor Domela Nieuwenhuis criticized the spirit of compromise which he detected in the motions about political activity which were carried at these conferences. If the word Christianity were substituted for the word socialism, he claimed, even the Pope would be able to support these resolutions. He was already worried by what he regarded as signs of the breakdown of international solidarity among socialists and by their failure to realize that a war between nations should be turned into a war between classes. But for all Merlino's eloquence and Nieuwenhuis's obvious sincerity, the Zurich congress of the International in 1893 finally expelled the anarchists and committed the socialist movement to political action, and the London congress of 1896, in spite of last-minute interruptions by the anarchists, failed to change this ruling.33

Among the critics of the bureaucratization and lack of revolutionary ardour which the anarchists felt were endangering the socialist parties, and especially the largest of them, the German Social Democratic Party, was a group of young Germans who were expelled from the party. The man who was their ideological leader and who devoted the rest of his life to developing a Utopian [145] view of non-violent anarchism as well as becoming a serious literary critic was Gustav Landauer. Landauer's anarchism is of interest not only because of his insistence on the fact that the social revolution must come about by voluntary cooperation alongside of and in opposition to the existing state which it would eventually supersede, but also because he made a real attempt to come to terms with the fact of nationalism. Anarchism, in his view, while it would destroy the national state, would also have to satisfy the deep cultural needs of people to use their own language and maintain their own cultural traditions:

Nationalism is a beautiful and attractive truth; its connection with economic life is a lie. There is the German language and linked with it German customs, German art, German poetry. But there is not German coal and German iron, German sewing machines and German chemicals.
Economic cooperation would link men with each other and with the land they tilled, so that free communities would exist naturally and spontaneously without the need for an artificial state: and in them cultural traditions would flourish in a purely spiritual form without enmity towards rival cultures. 'The essence of Germanity (das Deutschtum) is not living together, the crowding together of a tribe (eines Stammes) . . . [it] is spirit, is a quality which binds men together, is language.34 Landauer was Jewish; and his feeling for the Jewish national tradition brought him close (as with the French anarchist Bernard Lazare) to some sections of the Zionist movement; and one of his closest friends and his literary executor was the Jewish thinker Martin Buber.

Unlike many of the theoretical anarchists, however, who were never confronted with the need actually to take part in a revolution, Landauer in November 1918 flung himself into the revolution in Bavaria with the feeling that to be consistent with his own beliefs he could not stand aside. He became a minister in the short-lived Munich soviet republic in April 1919 -- when for a little more than a week before being ousted by communists, a group of Bohemian anarchists and intellectuals saw themselves as establishing a new free and independent Bavaria. When shortly afterwards the reaction set in and the Right regained power, Landauer was arrested and murdered in prison. [146]

2

Among the French working class, already accustomed to hearing Proudhon's doctrines, and in many parts of Italy and Spain where Bakunin and his disciples had been the first to preach revolution, the ideas of Kropotkin, Malatesta and the other anarchist thinkers took root and played an important part in the development of working-class movements and organizations. At the same time, however, anarchism as a political philosophy was particularly attractive to a number of artists and writers who combined a genuine social conscience and sympathy for the poor, among whom out of economic necessity their lives were often spent, with a desire to free themselves from the conventions and hypocrisies of bourgeois life; and so, especially in France, a number of painters and writers became associated more or less closely with the anarchist movement. Not many of them painted or wrote in a style that was particularly anarchist; perhaps it was only the Dada movement a quarter of a century later that attempted to do for artistic conventions what Ravachol or Emile Henry were doing to the social structure.

Proudhon, it is true, had had strong views about the arts, and was in some ways the founder of the doctrine of social realism which has become the official communist aesthetic line in our own day. Art, he thought, must serve a moral and social purpose; it must bring home to people the realities of the life of the poor and move them to change the social system. Art he defined as 'an idealist representation of nature and ourselves with the aim of perfecting our species physically and morally'.35 He was, as might be expected, opposed to the idea of the artist as an antisocial bohemian or as a devotee of the doctrine of art for art's sake. 'Art for art's sake', he wrote, 'is a debauch of the heart and dissolution of the spirit.'36 In the society of the future the artist would be 'a citizen, a man like any other; he will follow the same rules, obey the same principles, observe the same conventions, speak the same language, exercise the same rights, fulfil the same duties. . . .'37

One great painter, Gustave Courbet, was a close friend of Proudhon, as has been mentioned. Courbet inspired much of [147] Proudhon's thinking about art, even though Proudhon's own appreciation of painting was strictly limited. Indeed, Courbet claimed to have written part of Proudhon's Du principe de l'art himself, though this is probably just an example of the vanity that was so important a trait in Courbet's character. Courbet was, of course, an artist and not a thinker -- 'plus artiste que philosophe', as Proudhon said. Nevertheless, he was a rebel by temperament and, on occasion, an active political as well as artistic revolutionary. He first met Proudhon in the turbulent days of 1848 and soon became interested in his ideas. Some, at least, of his paintings began to have a social message of the kind of which Proudhon approved. When he painted The Stone Breakers in 1849, Courbet wrote:

As I was driving in our carriage on the way to the chateau of Saint-Denis near Maisieres, to paint a landscape, I stopped to watch two men breaking stones on the road, the most complete personifications of poverty. An idea for a picture came to me at once.. .. On one side is an old man of seventy, bent over his task, sledge-hammer poised in the air, his skin tanned by the sun, his head shaded by a straw hat; his trousers of coarse material are all patched; inside the cracked sabots torn socks which had once been blue show his bare heels. On the other side is a young man with a dusty head and swarthy complexion; his back and arms show through the holes in his filthy tattered shirt; one leather brace holds up the remnants of his trousers, and his leather boots, covered with mud, gape dismally in several places. The old man is kneeling, the young one stands behind him holding a basket of crushed rock. Alas! in labour such as this, one's life begins that way, it ends the same way.38
Proudhon later made this message explicit in a way that Courbet perhaps did not consciously intend: 'The Stone Breakers is a satire on our industrial civilization, which constantly invents wonderful machines . .. to . . . perform all kinds of labour .. . and yet is unable to liberate man from the most backbreaking toil.'39 For Courbet himself, however, the political message of his realism was incidental: 'I stirred up,' he said, 'not deliberately, but simply by painting what I saw, what they [the reactionaries] called the social question.'40 [148]

However, from time to time Courbet painted what he called a 'subversive' picture, of which the most famous is the anticlerical Return from the Conference -- a group of drunken priests on their way back from a meeting -- which so shocked Catholic opinion that a devout son of the church bought the picture and destroyed it. Courbet's revolutionary temperament made him an active participant in the Commune of 1871. He was himself a member of the Commune and in charge of artistic policy. Thus he was involved in the plans for demolishing the Vendome Column -- a monument, it seemed to him, to Bonapartist despotism and militarism -- and as a result he not only served six months in prison but also spent his last years in exile in Switzerland, defending himself against a lawsuit by which he was personally to be held responsible for the cost of re-erecting the column.

Courbet's dissolute bohemianism was far removed from Proudhon's ideal of the artist who would be just like any other citizen. (Indeed, the social nonconformity of artists has been a constant trial to reformers attempting to fit them into a political system.) James Guillaume, who never lost a certain schoolmasterliness, remembered Courbet at an anarchist congress in the Jura in 1872:

This good-natured, childish colossus sat down with two or three friends he had brought with him, at a table which was soon covered with bottles; he sang all evening without being asked, in a rough, peasant voice, monotonous country songs from the Franche-Comte, which ended up by boring us.41
(Guillaume was not the only one to be distressed by Courbet's tuneless singing, for this had also irritated Berlioz when he was sitting for his portrait.) When Courbet died in 1877 one of the anarchist papers did not claim more for him than to say: 'The greatest merit of Courbet... is in our view that he has not created a closed school in the name of realism. Courbet's pupils do not copy him slavishly and do not imitate him; they develop him.'42

However much Courbet enjoyed his association with Proudhon and the link between his art and Proudhon's philosophy, it was in art itself that he was truly revolutionary. While art must, he thought, be related to the world in which the painter lived -- 'in my opinion, art and talent for an artist can be only [149] means for the application of his personal abilities to the ideas and objects of the age he lives in'43 -- it was in destroying past artistic styles that Courbet's own revolution was made. As he himself wrote of one of his most famous paintings:

Burial at Ornans was in reality the burial of romanticism. . . . Through my affirmation of the negation of the ideal and all that springs from the ideal, I have arrived at the emancipation of the individual and finally at democracy. Realism is essentially a democratic art.44
It is true that Courbet's totally unsentimental peasants, his sombre, powerful, unromantic and unidealized landscapes did provide a vision of the world which was in keeping with anarchist philosophy; and the painters of the next generation who were closest to anarchism -- Camille Pissarro, Seurat, Signac -- were to attempt something similar. Of these painters Camille Pissarro was the most consistently and actively a member of the anarchist movement. He was exiled after the Commune and in 1894 he had to take refuge in Belgium to avoid the persecution of the anarchists in France after the murder of President Carnot.45 Some of his lithographs, such as Les Porteuses du bois and Les Sans-Gite, were executed for anarchist periodicals, and he designed a cover for a pamphlet by Kropotkin. He was a friend of the anarchist editor and publicist, Jean Grave, and had read a considerable amount of political theory, including Marx as well as Kropotkin. His attitude towards the latter was best expressed in a letter he wrote in 1892:
I have just read Kropotkin's book (La Conquete du pain). I must confess that, if it is Utopian, it is in any case a very beautiful dream. And, as we have often had the example of Utopias which have become realities, nothing prevents us from believing that this may well be possible one day, unless mankind founders and returns to complete barbarism.46

When in 1894 the Paris police seized the subscription list of La Revolte, Jean Grave's paper which had previously been edited by Kropotkin, the names it contained were impressive and included Alphonse Daudet, Anatole France, Stephane Mallarme and Leconte de Lisle, as well as those artists and writers more actively [150] and practically involved with the anarchist movement, such as Signac, Maximilien Luce, Camille Pissarro and Octave Mirbeau. Few of the artists, however, who knew Jean Grave personally or subscribed to La Revolte bothered to work out their anarchist beliefs very far. For them, anarchism was simply the natural creed for artists who regarded themselves aesthetically as in the avant-garde and therefore as irrevocably opposed to bourgeois society, which treated them with ridicule and refused to buy their work, and which, at the same time, refused very many of their fellow citizens a decent way of life. 'Everything new', the critic Felix Feneon wrote in an article about Pissarro, 'to be accepted requires that many old fools must die. We are longing for this to happen as soon as possible.'47 Most artists and writers were too occupied with their own aesthetic discoveries and experiments to worry about anarchist ideas in any detail. Mallarme, although he replied, when asked for his views on terrorism, that he 'could not discuss the acts of these saints', was nevertheless more interested in the development of his own esoteric, symbolist poetic world. Seurat, too, the most self-consciously theoretical of the post-impressionist painters, although he seems to have had anarchist sympathies, and although pictures like La Baignade a Asnieres (now in the National Gallery, London), with its working-class bathers and background of factory chimneys, show aspects of urban industrial life, was primarily concerned with his scientific theories of colour which, he claimed, provided a new basis for painting, rather than with anarchist theories which would provide a new basis for society, or at least a new range of subject-matter for painters.

Even Signac, who was more politically involved - and, unlike Seurat, who died in 1891 at the age of thirty-two, not only lived through the anarchist decade of the 1890s but also survived long enough to end up as an active supporter of the communist party -had a clear conception of the frontier between ideology and art. He said in a lecture in 1902:

The anarchist painter is not one who will show anarchist paintings, but one who without regard for lucre, without desire for reward, will struggle with all his individuality, with a personal effort, against bourgeois and official conventions.. . . The subject [151] is nothing, or at least is only one part of the work of art, not more important than the other elements, colour, drawing, composition ... when the eye is educated, the people will see something other than the subject in pictures. When the society we dream of exists, the worker, freed from the exploiters who brutalize him, will have time to think and to learn. He will appreciate the different qualities of the work of art.48
Signac himself occasionally executed allegorical paintings or works with direct propagandist implications, but his art was never dominated by them. In spite of his anarchist sympathies, he and the others among the disciples of Seurat who shared these beliefs -- Luce or Theo van Rysselberghe -- did not produce anarchist art; still less did the most philosophical and reflective artist to be associated with them, Camille Pissarro.

It was the anarchist critics and journalists who persuaded many artists and writers that their instinctive revolt against bourgeois society and their sympathy with the sufferings of the poor should drive them to active support of the anarchist movement. Felix Feneon, for example -- the critic who first recognized Seurat's genius and originality and who coined the term 'post-impressionism' -- was a convinced anarchist, in spite of his dandified appearance and his post as a minor civil servant in the War Ministry. He was associated with a number of advanced literary and artistic periodicals, and, after his dismissal from the War Ministry, he became assistant editor of the most important and influential of all of the artistic reviews of the 1890s, the Revue Blanche. He was a friend of the symbolist poets Mallarme and Jules Laforgue, as well as of Verlaine and the post-impressionist painters. He made no secret of his anarchist beliefs and when, after the murder of President Carnot, thirty men were accused of criminal conspiracy, he was one of them He seems to have enjoyed the occasion: when the judge asked him where the detonators which were found in his office came from, he replied: 'My father picked them up in the street.' 'How do you explain detonators being found in the street?' the judge asked. 'The police magistrate asked me why I had not thrown them out of the window,' Feneon answered. 'You see, one may find detonators in the street.'49 It is hard to tell how far Feneon's conspiratorial [152] anarchism went, and how far it was an affectation; but it cost him a spell in prison and lost him his job in the ministry. Another Parisian anarchist writer, Laurent Tailhade, who coined a famous phrase about terrorism -- 'Qu'importe les vagues humanites, pourvu que le geste soit beau' -- was less fortunate and became the victim of his own beliefs, for he lost an eye when a bomb exploded in the restaurant where he was eating.

In general, however, for the artists and writers, anarchism represented a general attitude to life rather than a specific theory about society, except for those who, like Pissarro, Signac and Octave Mirbeau, were linked with Jean Grave and La Revolte, or who, like Steinlen, sometimes wrote or drew for one or other of the anarchist papers or periodicals. While some of them, such as Camille Pissarro, were attracted by the generosity of Kropotkin's ideas and the vision of a world where men would live in free association with each other, others were excited by the assertion that there should be no limits to an individual's freedom other than those imposed by his own nature; their emotions were deeply stirred by the violent gestures of the anarchists. Alongside the social anarchism of Kropotkin or Malatesta there grew up a wild, bohemian, individualist anarchism which was often an embarrassment to the more constructive and philosophical anarchists. Maurice Barres, for example, one of the most brilliant of a brilliant generation, in the novels of his youth grouped under the title of Le Quite du Moi and, more specifically, in L'Ennemi des Lois (1892), makes his heroes look at ethical systems, philosophies and ways of life in search of a means of total self-expression without regard to convention or the needs of others. In L'Ennemi des Lois, the protagonists -- after studying Saint-Simon, Fourier and Marx -- are converted by a scene in a vivisection laboratory into anarchists, and retire to the country to lead a life of selfish altruism:

For them, other selves exist to the same extent as their own, so that the conditions of the happiness of others are blended with the conditions of their own happiness. They do not break the flowers which they love to smell; if they suffered it would diminish their pleasure; their refined sensuality suppresses all immorality.50

Although the search for self-development and self-expression was [153] one way of expounding a 'morality without obligation or sanctions', it was a very different one from that of Kropotkin and his disciples. As Jean Grave pointed out when writing of L'Ennemi des lois:

The anarchism presented in this book is only an anarchism appropriate to millionaires. To free oneself from the laws it is necessary to have an income of 100,000 francs or to marry a wife who has it. . .. Nevertheless this is an interesting book to read in that it proclaims the individual freed from society and the sole judge of his happiness.51

Into the intellectual world of Paris, already familiar with the notions of a morality without obligation or sanctions and eager to assert the freedom of the individual from the restraints of society, came the doctrines of Nietzsche. His works began to appear in French translation in the late 1890s and, however much people may have differed about the meaning of their message, at least he shouted defiance at bourgeois conventions and encouraged the development of each personality to its limits, regardless of the violence this might involve. Nietzsche was too inconsistent a writer to supply anyone with a coherent pattern of life, but his 'reversal of all values', the claim that 'God is dead' and the command 'Du sollst werden, der du bist' ('You must become who you are') all encouraged anyone who wanted to break with contemporary values, moral aesthetic or political. As Emma Goldman put it: 'Nietzsche was not a social theorist, but a poet and innovator. His aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse; it was of the spirit. In that respect Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats.'52 A few intellectuals, around the turn of the century, already aware of Nietzsche's ideas in some form or other, discovered another German writer who seemed to some people to provide a philosophical basis for a doctrine of individualist anarchism. This was Max Stirner.

Stirner was the pen name of an obscure German philosopher, a retired teacher in an academy for young ladies who moved on the fringe of Hegelian circles. His main work Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (usually translated into English as The Ego and Its Own) was published in 1845 and aroused little outside interest, although Bakunin knew about his ideas. However, his work was [154] rediscovered in the German-speaking world in the 1890s. It was known to the Danish critic Brandes and also to Ibsen, and extracts from a French translation appeared in the Revue Blanche in 1900. Stirner, in tortuous, obscure, repetitive, splenetic prose declared war on society and on all past philosophy. His immediate target was the Hegelian belief in spirit as the moving factor in human development, but more generally he attacked both Christian moral teaching and that of Kant.

The divine is God's affair; the human the affair of 'humanity'. My business is neither the divine nor the human, it is not what is True, Good, Right, Free, etc., but only what is mine, and it is not something general but is individual (einzig) as I am individual. For me nothing is higher than myself.53
This is his essential message, repeated in one form or another on every page, and it is summed up in his conclusion:
I am owner of my own strength when I am aware of myself as an individual. In the individual even the owner (Eigner) returns to his creative nothingness out of which he was born. Every higher being over me, whether God or man, weakens the feeling of my own individuality, and only pales before the sun of my consciousness. If I place my trust in myself, the unique individual (den Einzigen), then it is based on its own passing mortal creator which itself vanishes, and I can say I have based my trust on nothing. (Ich habe meine Sache auf Nichts gestellt.)54
It is a doctrine that comes very near to some forms of later existentialism.

Stirner was not a very important thinker nor a very interesting one, though capable of the occasional striking phrase, such as: 'A Prussian officer once said, "Every Prussian carries a policeman in his breast." ' However the extreme nature of his views seemed to many young intellectuals the most complete expression of all their anti-conventional values. Benito Mussolini, who in his left-wing socialist days had considerable sympathy for anarchism, wrote in 1912:

Let the way be opened for the elemental forces of the individual, [155] for no other human reality exists except the individual. We shall support all that exalts, amplifies the individual, that gives him greater freedom, greater well-being, greater latitude of life; we shall fight all that depresses, mortifies the individual. Why cannot Stirner become fashionable again?55

Individual anarchism was of little political importance and was often, in its extreme solipsism and violent self-expression, an embarrassment to the anarchists who believed in a social revolution rather than simply a rejection of conventional moral values. Nevertheless, it was a factor in the psychological make-up of many revolutionaries. Through the writings of Nietzsche and Stirner it could produce a self-made superman like Mussolini; it could contribute to the defiant assault on the past by the Futurists. It could also produce the early twentieth-century version of the 'beat' of the 1950s -- figures like the bearded, ragged, passionate man who called himself Libertad and founded in Paris a weekly called L'Anarchie and a series of causeries populaires to propagate his ideas of total individual freedom. It could haunt the imagination of writers, so that echoes of the ideas of individual anarchism can already be heard in Ibsen's Peer Gynt, as well as in later works such as Gide's Immoralist and in the 'acte gratuit' of Lafcadio in his Les Caves du Vatican. It could drive men off to live in free communities - most of which only lasted a short time, and which were condemned by many anarchist thinkers, such as Elisee Reclus, who wrote: 'We must not shut ourselves up at any price; we must remain in the vast world to receive all its impressions, to take part in all its vicissitudes and to receive all its instruction.'56

There was a young Russian emigre who took the name of Victor Serge and who was later to become a successful writer and a member of the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union, though he was imprisoned there in the 1930s and later escaped from Russia. While he was movuig in anarchist circles in Paris and Brussels in the early years of the century he visited an anarchist colony founded by Fortune Henry, the brother of Emile Henry, the famous terrorist. Serge's account of the divergent tendencies among the people he met there shows how many beliefs were embraced by the label 'anarchist':

Tramps, a little Swiss plasterer of prodigious intelligence, a [156] Russian officer who was a Tolstoyan anarchist with a noble blond head, who had escaped after the failure of an insurrection and who a year later was to die of hunger in the Forest of Fontainebleau . . . then a formidable chemist who came from Odessa via Buenos Aires, all helped to answer the great problems. The individualist printer: 'There's only yourself in the world; try not to be either a salaud or a nouille.' The Tolstoyan: 'Let us be new men, salvation is within us.' The Swiss plasterer . . . 'All right, but don't let's forget to use our fists in the factories.' The chemist, after listening a long time said with his Russo-Spanish accent: 'All that's humbug: in the social war we need good laboratories.'57

The fate of such experiments in communal living was always much the same whatever the social philosophy which inspired them, and they almost always broke up under the pressures of economic failure or of sexual jealousy. The anarchist communes were inspired by the inextinguishable optimism characteristic of one kind of anarchist thinking; and when they failed there were always people ready to try again. As one of them wrote in an unsuccessful attempt to raise money after the collapse of one of these 'milieux libres' which were established in France in the years before the First World War:

If the causes of this setback are wholly of a moral order, if those comrades who believed themselves to be emancipated still had certain prejudices . . . you will perhaps not think it unsuitable that others, better prepared by the experience of those who preceded them, should continue the work we have begun.58
A failure to learn from experience is not limited to anarchists, but it is certainly very common among them.

The whole point of anarchism in the 1890s was that it was not a coherent political or philosophical movement. A creed which could include Kropotkin and the extreme individualist disciples of Stirner, a criminal like Ravachol or a great artist like Camille Pissarro, bohemian intellectuals and tough working-class labour bosses -- such a creed owed its attraction to the very fact that it embraced so many disparate individuals and temperaments. However, if it was to become a serious and effective social force in [157] the twentieth century, new methods of action and fresh ideas were going to be needed. In the first quarter of the twentieth century the anarchists were to see yet another revolution going wrong, and to attempt new tactics and even accept a degree of organization in the hope of still achieving their own social revolution.


Notes

1 Quoted L. Levy, Comment Us sont devenus Socialistes (Paris 1932), p. 21.

2 G. Brandes, Preface to P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (London 1899), vol. I, pp. xiii-xiv.

3 Kropotkin, Memoirs, p. 139.

4 G. Woodcock and I. Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince (London 1950), p. 381.

5 ibid., p. 380.

6 ibid., p. 360.

7 Introduction to L. Tolstoy, La guerre et le service obligatoire (Brussels 1896).

8 Kropotkin to Mrs Dryhurst, 1893, quoted Woodcock and Avakumovic, op. cit. p. 248.

9 P. Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution (New York 1909), p. 535.

10 Quoted Woodcock and Avakumovic, op. cit., p. 351.

11 ibid., p. 353.

12 P. Kropotkin, Law and Authority, reprinted in Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets, ed. G. Roger N. Baldwin (New York 1927), pp. 205-6.

13 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London 1902), p. 34.

14 Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development (New York 1924), p. 22.

15 Kropotkin, Anarchist Communism (1887) in Baldwin (ed.), op. cit., p. 47.

16 M. Guyau, Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction (Paris 1885), p. 29.

17 ibid., p. 252.

18 ibid., p. 246.

19 P. Kropotkin, La conquete du pain (Paris 1892), p. 60.

20 ibid., pp. 20-1.

21 Kropotkin, Anarchist Communism, p. 60.

22 ibid., p. 59.

23 The Times, 21 July 1960.

24 Kropotkin, La conquete du pain, p. 81.

25 Kropotkin, Anarchist Communism, p. 71.

26 Kropotkin, La conquete du pain, p. 159.

27 Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchism in Baldwin (ed.), op. cit., p. 157.

28. P. Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops (London 1899), p. 272.

29 Woodcock and Avakumovic, op. cit., p. 302.

30 Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (London 1950), p. 112.

31 Saverio Merlino, Necessita e Basi di una Intesa (Brussels 1892), reprinted in Saverio Merlino, Concezione critica del Socialismo Libertario, ed. Aldo Venturini and Pier Carlo Masini (Florence 1957), p. 99.

32 L. Fabbri, Malatesta, I'Vomo e il Pensiero (Naples 1951), pp. 1.12-13.

33 See James Joll, The Second International 1899-1914 (rev. ed. London 1974), ch. III.

34 Gustav Landauer, 'Dreissig sozialistische Thesen', Die Zukunft, vol. 58,1907, reprinted in Ruth Link-Salinger (ed.), Gustav Landauer, Erkenntnis und Befreiung: Ausgewaklte Reden und Aufsätze (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1976), p. 29.

35 P.-J. Proudhon, Du principe de Part et de sa destination sociale (Paris 1865), p. 43.

36 ibid., p. 46.

37 ibid., pp. 367-8.

38 Courbet to Wey, 26 November 1849, quoted Gerstle Mack, Gustave Courbet (London 1951), pp. 69-70.

39. Proudhon, Du principe de l'art, pp. 236 -- 7, quoted Mack, op. cit., p. 70.

40 Quoted Mack, op. cit., p. 71.

41 J. Guillaume, L'Internationale, vol. Ill, p. 295.

42 L'Avant-Garde, 12 January 1878, quoted Charles Thomann, Le mouvement anarchiste dans les montagnes neuchate-loises et le Jura bernois (La Chaux-de-Fonds 1947), p. 123.

43 Le Courrierdu Dimanche, 29 December 1861, quoted Mack, op. cit., p. 102.

44 1861, quoted Mack, op. cit., p. 89.

45 See Benedict Nicolson 'The Anarchism of Camille Pissarro' in The Arts, no. 2 (London 1947), pp. 43-51.

46 Quoted Eugenia W. Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform: France and Belgium 1885-1898 (New Haven, Conn. 1961), p. 189.

47 Quoted John Rewald, Post-Impressionism from Van Gogh to Gauguin (New York 1956), p. 155.

48 Robert L. and Eugenia W. Herbert, 'Artists and Anarchism: Unpublished Letters of Pissarro, Signac and Others', I. (The Burlington Magazine, vol. CII, no. 692, November 1960, p. 479).

49 John Rewald, 'Felix Feneon' (Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th series, vols xxxi-xxxii, 1947-8), vol. II, p. 110.

50 Maurice Barres, L'ennemi des his (Paris 1910), p. 302.

51 Les Temps Nouveaux, March 1896, quoted Eugenia Herbert, op. cit., p. 83.

52 Emma Goldman, Living My Life (London 1932), vol. I, p. 194.

53 Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (Leipzig 1901), p. 8.

54 Stirner, op. cit., p. 379.

55 Quoted Laura Fermi, Mussolini (Chicago 1961), p. 70.

56 Quoted J. Maitron, Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France (1830-1914) (Paris 1950), p. 379.

57 Victor Serge, Memoires d'un revolutionnaire (Paris 1951), pp. 20-1.

58 Maitron, op. cit., p. 405.