The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The Anarchists believed that with Property, the monarch of all evil, eliminated, no man could again live off the labour of another and human nature would be released to seek its natural level of justice among men. The role of the State would be replaced by voluntary cooperation among individuals and the role of the law by the supreme law of the general welfare. To this end no reform of existing social evils through vote or persuasion was of any use, for the ruling class would never give up its property or the powers and laws which protected ownership of property. Therefore, the necessity of violence. Only revolutionary overturn of the entire malignant existing system would accomplish the desired result. Once the old structure was in rubble, a new social order of utter equality and no authority, with enough of everything for everybody, would settle smilingly upon the earth. So reasonable seemed the proposition that once apprised of it the oppressed classes could not fail to respond. The Anarchist task was to awaken them to the Idea by propaganda of the word and of the Deed, and one day, one such deed would flash the signal for revolt.

  During the first and formulative period of Anarchism, beginning around the time of the revolutionary year 1848, its two major prophets were Pierre Proudhon of France and his disciple, Michael Bakunin, a Russian exile who became the active leader of the movement.

  “Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me,” Proudhon proclaimed, “is a usurper and a tyrant; I declare him to be my enemy.… Government of man by man is slavery” and its laws are “cobwebs for the rich and chains of steel for the poor.” The “highest perfection” for free society is no government, to which Proudhon was the first to give the name “An-archy.” He excoriated government in a passion of contempt. “To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, ruled, censored, by persons who have neither wisdom nor virtue. It is every action and transaction to be registered, stamped, taxed, patented, licensed, assessed, measured, reprimanded, corrected, frustrated. Under pretext of the public good it is to be exploited, monopolized, embezzled, robbed and then, at the least protest or word of complaint, to be fined, harassed, vilified, beaten up, bludgeoned, disarmed, judged, condemned, imprisoned, shot, garroted, deported, sold, betrayed, swindled, deceived, outraged, dishonored. That’s government, that’s its justice, that’s its morality! And imagine that among us there are democrats who believe government to be good, socialists who in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity support this ignominy, proletarians who offer themselves candidates for President of the Republic! What hypocrisy!”

  Proudhon believed that the “abstract idea of right” would obviate the need of revolution and man would be persuaded to adopt the stateless society through reason. What Bakunin added, learning from Russia under Nicholas I, was the necessity of violent revolution. As opposed to his rival, Karl Marx, who maintained that revolution would come only from an industrial proletariat, organized and trained for the task, Bakunin believed that immediate revolution could explode in one of the more economically backward countries—Italy, Spain or Russia—where the workers, though untrained, unorganized and illiterate, with no understanding of their own wants, would be ready to rise because they had nothing to lose. The task of the conscientious revolutionist was to popularize the Idea among the masses, hitherto bound in ignorance and prejudice by the ruling class. It was necessary to make them conscious of their own wants and “evoke” from them thoughts to match their impulses, thoughts of revolt. When this happened the workers would know their own will and then “their power will be irresistible.” Bakunin, however, lost control of the First International to Marx, who believed in organization.

  There was an inherent paradox within the body of Anarchism that frustrated progress. Anarchism rejected the political party, which Proudhon had called a mere “variety of absolutism”; yet to bring about a revolution it was necessary to submit to authority, organization and discipline. Whenever Anarchists met to prepare a program, this terrible necessity rose up to face them. Loyal to their Idea, they rejected it. Revolution would burst from the masses spontaneously. All that was needed was the Idea—and a spark.

  Each strike or bread riot or local uprising the Anarchist hoped—and the capitalist feared—might be the spark. Mme Hennebau, the manager’s wife in Zola’s Germinal, watching the march of the striking miners under the bloody gleam of the setting sun, saw “the red vision of revolution that on some sombre evening at the end of the century would carry everything away. Yes, on that evening the people, unbridled at last, would make the blood of the middle class flow,… in a thunder of boots the same terrible troop, with their dirty skins and tainted breath, would sweep away the old world.… Fires would flame, there would be nothing left, not a sou of the great fortunes, not a title deed of acquired properties.”

  Yet each time, as when Zola’s miners faced the guns of the gendarmerie, the spark was stamped out. The magic moment when the masses would awaken to their wants and their power did not come. The Paris Commune flared and died in 1871 and failed to signal a general insurrection. “We reckoned without the masses who did not want to be roused to passion for their own freedom,” wrote Bakunin, disillusioned, to his wife. “This passion being absent what good did it do us to have been right theoretically? We were powerless.” He despaired of saving the world and died, disillusioned, in 1876, a Columbus, as Alexander Herzen said, without America.

  Meanwhile in his native land his ideas took root in the Narodniki, or Populists, otherwise the Party of the People’s Will, founded in 1879. Because of communal use of land peculiar to the Russian peasant, reformers worshipped the peasant as a natural Socialist who needed only the appearance of a Messiah to be awakened from his lethargy and impelled upon the march to revolution. The bomb was to be the Messiah. “Terrorist activity,” stated the Narodniki program, “consisting in destroying the most harmful person in government, aims to undermine the prestige of the government and arouse in this manner the revolutionary spirit of the people and their confidence in the success of the cause.”

  In 1881 the Narodniki struck a blow that startled the world: they assassinated the Czar, Alexander II. It was a triumphant coup, equal, they imagined, to the battering down of the Bastille. It would shout aloud their protest, summon the oppressed and terrorize the oppressors. Instead it ushered in reaction. The dead Czar, whose crown may have been the symbol of autocracy but who in person was the “Liberator” of the serfs, was mourned by the peasants, who believed “the gentry had murdered the Czar to get back the land.” His ministers opened a campaign of savage repression, the public, abandoning all thoughts of reform, acquiesced, and the revolutionary movement, “broken and demoralized, withdrew into the conspirators’ cellar.” There Anarchism’s first period came to an end.

  Before the movement burst into renewed bloom in the nineties, a single terrible event which enlarged the stature of Anarchism took place, not in Europe, but in America, in the city of Chicago. There in August, 1886, eight Anarchists were sentenced by Judge Joseph Gary to be hanged for the murder of seven police killed on the previous May 4 by a bomb hurled into the midst of an armed police force who were about to break up a strikers’ meeting in Haymarket Square.

  The occasion was the climax of a campaign for the eight-hour day, which in itself was the climax of a decade of industrial war centering on Chicago. In every clash the employers fought with the forces of law—police, militia and courts—as their allies. The workers’ demands were met with live ammunition and lockouts and with strikebreakers protected by Pinkertons who were armed and sworn in as deputy sheriffs. In the war between the classes, the State was not neutral. Driven by misery and injustice, the workers’ anger grew and with it the employers’ fear, their sense of a rising menace and their determination to stamp it out. Even a man as remote as Henry James sensed a “sinister anarchic underworld heaving in its pain, its power and its hate.”

  Anarchism was not a labour movement and was no more than one element in the general upheaval of the lower cl
ass. But Anarchists saw in the struggles of labour the hot coals of revolution and hoped to blow them into flame. “A pound of dynamite is worth a bushel of bullets,” cried August Spies, editor of Chicago’s German-language Anarchist daily, Die Arbeiter-Zeitung. “Police and militia, the bloodhounds of capitalism, are ready to murder!” In this he was right, for in the course of a clash between workers and strikebreakers, the police fired, killing two. “Revenge! Revenge! Workingmen to arms!” shrieked handbills printed and distributed by Spies that night. He called for a protest meeting the next day. It took place in Haymarket Square, the police marched to break it up, the bomb was thrown. Who threw it has never been discovered.

  The defendants’ speeches to the court after sentence, firm in Anarchist principle and throbbing with consciousness of martyrdom, resounded throughout Europe and America and provided the best propaganda Anarchism ever had. In the absence of direct evidence establishing their guilt, they knew and loudly stated that they were being tried and sentenced for the crime, not of murder, but of Anarchism. “Let the world know,” cried August Spies, “that in 1886 in the state of Illinois eight men were sentenced to death because they believed in a better future!” Their belief had included the use of dynamite, and society’s revenge matched its fright. In the end the sentences of three of the condemned were commuted to prison terms. One, Louis Lingg, the youngest, handsomest and most fervent, who was shown by evidence at the trial to have made bombs, blew himself up with a capsule of fulminate of mercury on the night before the execution and wrote in his blood before he died, “Long live anarchy!” His suicide was regarded by many as a confession of guilt. The remaining four, including Spies, were hanged on November 11, 1887.

  For years afterward the silhouette of the gallows and its four hanging bodies decorated Anarchist literature, and the anniversary of November 11 was celebrated by Anarchists in Europe and America as a revolutionary memorial. The public conscience, too, was made aware by the gallow’s fruit of the misery, protest and upheaval in the working class.

  Men who were Anarchists without knowing it stood on every street corner. Jacob Riis, the New York police reporter who described in 1890 How the Other Half Lives, saw one on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. The man suddenly leaped at a carriage carrying two fashionable ladies on an afternoon’s shopping and slashed at the sleek and shining horses with a knife. When arrested and locked up, he said, “They don’t have to think of tomorrow. They spend in an hour what would keep me and my little ones for a year.” He was the kind from which Anarchists of the Deed were made.

  Most of them were voiceless or could speak their protest only in the wail of a dispossessed Irish peasant spading his field for the last time, who was asked by a visitor what he wanted. “What is it I am wantin’?” cried the old man, shaking his fist at the sky. “I want the Day av Judgment!”

  The poor lived in a society in which power, wealth and magnificent spending were never more opulent, in which the rich dined on fish, fowl and red meat at one meal, lived in houses of marble floors and damask walls and of thirty or forty or fifty rooms, wrapped themselves in furs in winter and were cared for by a retinue of servants who blacked their boots, arranged their hair, drew their baths and lit their fires. In this world, at a luncheon for Mme Nellie Melba at the Savoy, when perfect peaches, a delicacy of the season, were served up “fragrant and delicious in their cotton wool,” the surfeited guests made a game of throwing them at passers-by beneath the windows.

  These were the rulers and men of property whose immense possessions could, it seemed, only be explained as having been accumulated out of the pockets of the exploited masses. “What is Property?” asked Proudhon in a famous question and answered, “Property is theft.” “Do you not know,” cried Enrico Malatesta in his Talk Between Two Workers, an Anarchist classic of the nineties, “that every bit of bread they eat is taken from your children, every fine present they give to their wives means the poverty, hunger, cold, even perhaps prostitution of yours?”

  If in their economics the Anarchists were hazy, their hatred of the ruling class was strong and vibrant. They hated “all mankind’s tormentors,” as Bakunin called them, “priests, monarchs, statesmen, soldiers, officials, financiers, capitalists, moneylenders, lawyers.” To the workers themselves it was not the faraway rich but their visible representatives, the landlord, the factory owner, the boss, the policeman, who were the Enemy.

  They could hate but only a few were rebels. Most existed in apathy, stupefied by poverty. Some gave up. A woman with four children who made match boxes at 4½ cents a gross, and by working fourteen hours could make seven gross a day for a total of 31½ cents, threw herself out of the window one day and was carried from the street dead. She was “discouraged,” a neighbor said. A young man who had a sick mother and had lost his job was charged in magistrate’s court with attempted suicide. The lockkeeper’s wife who pulled him out of the river testified how “as fast as I pulled to get him out, he crawled back” until some workmen came to assist her. When the magistrate congratulated the woman on her muscular powers, the courtroom laughed, but an observer named Jack London wrote, “All I could see was a boy on the threshold of life passionately crawling to a muddy death.”

  The failure of practical attempts at Anarchism in Bakunin’s period caused Anarchist theory and practice to veer off in a direction not toward the earth but toward the clouds. In the new period beginning in the nineties, its aims, always idyllic, became even more utopian and its deeds less than ever connected with reality. It became impatient. It despised the puny efforts of Socialists and trade unionists to achieve the eight-hour day. “Eight hours of work for the boss is eight hours too much,” proclaimed the Anarchist paper, La Révolte. “We know that what is wrong with our society is not that the worker works ten, twelve or fourteen hours, but that the boss exists.”

  The most prominent among the new Anarchist leaders was Prince Peter Kropotkin, by birth an aristocrat, by profession a geographer, and by conviction a revolutionist. His sensational escape after two years’ imprisonment from the grim fortress of Peter and Paul in 1876 had endowed him with a heroic aura, kept bright afterwards during his years of exile in Switzerland, France and England by unrepentant and unremitting preaching in the cause of revolt.

  Kropotkin’s faith in mankind, despite a life of hard experience, was inexhaustible and unshatterable. He gave the impression, said the English journalist Henry Nevinson, who knew him well, of “longing to take all mankind to his bosom and keep it warm.” Kindliness shone from his bald and noble dome ringed with a low halo of bushy brown hair. An ample beard spread comfortably beneath his chin. He was very short, “with hardly enough body to hold up the massive head.” Descended from princes of Smolensk who, according to family tradition, belonged to the Rurik Dynasty, which had ruled Russia before the Romanovs, Kropotkin took his place in that long line of “conscience-stricken” Russian nobility who felt guilty for belonging to a class which had oppressed the people for centuries.

  He was born in 1842. After service as an officer of Cossacks in Siberia, where he studied the geography of the region, he became Secretary of the Geographical Society, for whom he explored the glaciers of Finland and Sweden in 1871. Meanwhile he had become a member of a secret revolutionary committee, and on this being discovered, his arrest and imprisonment followed. After his escape in 1876—the year Bakunin died—he went to Switzerland, where he worked with Elisée Reclus, the French geographer and a fellow Anarchist, on Reclus’ monumental geography of the world. Kropotkin wrote the volume on Siberia and, with Reclus, founded and for three years edited Le Révolté, which, after suppression and a rebirth in Paris as La Révolte, was to become the best-known and longest-lived Anarchist journal. His stream of convincing and passionate polemics, the prestige of his escape from the most dreaded Russian prison, his active work with the Swiss Anarchists of the Jura—which caused his expulsion from Switzerland—all topped by his title of Prince, made him Bakunin’s recognized su
ccessor.

  In France, where he came next in 1882, the traditions of the Commune had nourished a militant Anarchist movement of which there was a flourishing group in Lyons. A police raid and a retaliatory bomb causing one death had been followed by the arrest and trial of fifty-two Anarchists, including Kropotkin, on charges of belonging to an international league dedicated to the abolition of property, family, country and religion. Sentenced to prison for five years, Kropotkin had served three, had then been pardoned by President Grévy and, with his wife and daughter, had settled in England, the inevitable refuge of political exiles at the time.

  In a small house in Hammersmith, a drearily respectable dormitory of outer London, he continued to write fiery paeans to violence for La Révolte, scholarly articles for geographical journals and for the Nineteenth Century, to entertain visiting radicals in five languages, to lecture Anarchist club meetings in a cellar off Tottenham Court Road, to thump the piano, and paint, and to charm with his sweet temper and genial manners everyone who met him. “He was amiable to the point of saintliness,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, “and with his full beard and lovable expression might have been a shepherd from the Delectable Mountains. His only weakness was the habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight. And he was right in the end.” This weakness was in fact an expression of Kropotkin’s optimism, for war to him was the expected catastrophe that was to destroy the old world and clear the way for the triumph of Anarchy. The “galloping decay” of states was hastening the triumph. “It cannot be far off,” he wrote. “Everything brings it nearer.”