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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  This agreeable person, conventionally dressed in the black frock coat of a Victorian gentleman, was an uncompromising apostle of the necessity of violence. Man’s progress toward perfection was being held back, he wrote, by the “inertia of those who have a vested interest in existing conditions.” Progress needed a violent event “to hurl mankind out of its ruts into new roads.… Revolution becomes a peremptory necessity.” The spirit of revolt must be awakened in the masses by repeated “propaganda of the deed.” This phrase, which became the banner of Anarchist violence, was first used by a French Socialist, Paul Brousse, in 1878, a year which saw four attempts on crowned heads: two on Wilhelm I of Germany and one each on the Kings of Spain and Italy. “The Idea is on the march,” Brousse wrote, “and we must seek to inaugurate the propaganda of the deed. Through a royal breast is the way to open the road to revolution!”

  The next year at an Anarchist Congress in the Swiss Jura, Kropotkin specifically advocated propaganda of the Deed, if somewhat less explicit as to method. Though never recommending assassination in so many words, he continued during the eighties to urge a propaganda by “speech and written word, by dagger, gun and dynamite.” He sounded an inspiring summons in the pages of La Révolte to “men of courage willing not only to speak but to act, pure characters who prefer prison, exile and death to a life that contradicts their principles, bold natures who know that in order to win one must dare.” Men such as these must form an advance guard of revolution long before the masses were ready, and in the midst of “talking, complaining, discussing,” must do the “deed of mutiny.”

  “A single deed,” Kropotkin wrote at another time, “is better propaganda than a thousand pamphlets.” Words are “lost in the air like the sound of church bells.” Acts are needed “to excite hate for the exploiters, to ridicule the Rulers, to show up their weakness and above all and always to awaken the spirit of revolt.” The acts he loftily called for on paper were performed, but not by him.

  In the nineties, when he was in his fifties, Kropotkin, though never altering his demand for revolt, subdued a little his enthusiasm for the individual Deed. Although “the revolutionary spirit gains immensely through such deeds of individual heroism,” he wrote in La Révolte of March, 1891, “nevertheless it is not these heroic acts that make revolutions. Revolution is above all a mass movement.… Institutions rooted in centuries of history are not destroyed by a few pounds of explosives. The time for such action has passed and the time for the anarchist and communist idea to penetrate the masses has come.” Disclaimers, however, rarely have the same force as the original proposition.

  In London, in a restaurant in Holborn during the coal strike of 1893, Kropotkin was arguing with Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, two tough-minded trade unionists. “We must destroy! We must pull down! We must be rid of the tyrants!” shouted Mann.

  “No,” said Kropotkin in his foreign accent, with the eyes of a scientist gleaming behind his spectacles, “we must build. We must build in the hearts of men. We must establish a kingdom of God.”

  He had the plans for the kingdom already drawn. After the revolution—which he calculated would take three to five years to accomplish the overthrow of governments, the destruction of prisons, forts and slums and the expropriation of land, industries and all forms of property—volunteers would take inventory of all food stocks, dwellings, and means of production. Printed lists would be distributed by the million. Everyone would take what he needed of the things which existed in plenty and there would be rationing of the things of which there was shortage. All property would be community property. Everyone would draw upon the community warehouse for food and goods according to his needs and would have the right “to decide for himself what he needs for a comfortable life.” As there would be no more inheritance, there would be no more greed. All able-bodied males would enter into “contracts” with society through their groups and communes by which they would engage to do five hours’ daily work from the age of twenty-one to about forty-five or fifty, each in a labour of his choice. In return, society would guarantee them the enjoyment of “houses, stores, streets, conveyances, schools, museums, etc.” There would be no need for enforcement or judges or penalties because people would fulfill their contracts out of their own need of “cooperation, support and sympathy” from their neighbors. The process would work because of its very reasonableness, although even Kropotkin might have noticed that the reasonableness of something is rarely a motive in human affairs.

  Shaw, with his unrelenting common sense, picked out the trouble in a Fabian Tract called The Impossibilities of Anarchism, published in 1893 and reprinted several times during the next ten years. If man is good and institutions bad, he asked, if man will be good again as soon as the corrupt system ceases to oppress him, “how did the corruption and oppression under which he groans ever arise?” Yet the fact that Shaw felt required to write the Tract was his tribute to the force of the Idea.

  The most vexing problem of the Anarchist plan was the question of an accounting of the value of goods and services. According to the theories of Proudhon and Bakunin, everyone would be paid in goods in proportion to what he produced. But this required a body to establish values and do the accounting, an Authority, which was anathema to “pure” Anarchy. As resolved by Kropotkin and Malatesta, the solution was to assume that everyone would want to work for the good of the whole, and since all work would be agreeable and dignified, everyone would contribute freely and take from the community storehouse freely without the necessity of accounting.

  In proof Kropotkin evolved his theory of “mutual aid” to show that Anarchism had a scientific basis in the laws of nature. Darwin’s thesis, he argued, had been perverted by capitalist thinkers. Nature was not, in fact, red in tooth and claw nor animated by the instinct of each living thing to survive at the cost of its fellow but, on the contrary, by the instinct of each to preserve the species through “mutual assistance.” He drew examples from the ants and the bees and from wild horses and cattle—who form a ring when attacked by wolves—and from the communal field and village life of men in the Middle Ages. He greatly admired the rabbit, which, though defenceless and adapted to nothing in particular, yet survived and multiplied. The rabbit symbolized for him the durability of the meek who, an earlier Preacher had claimed, would inherit the earth.

  Although Kropotkin never slackened his lust for the total destruction of the bourgeois world, that world could not forbear to honor him. He was such a distinguished scholar—and besides, a Prince. When he refused membership in the Royal Geographic Society because it was under royal patronage, he was invited anyway to the Society’s dinner, and when he refused to rise upon the chairman’s toast to “The King!” the chairman promptly rose again to propose “Long live Prince Kropotkin!” and the whole company stood up to join in the toast. When he visited the United States in 1901 and lectured to the Lowell Institute in Boston, he was entertained by its intellectual elite and, not to be outdone, by Mrs. Potter Palmer in Chicago. His memoirs were commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly, his books bore the imprint of the most respectable publishers. When Mutual Aid appeared, the Review of Reviews called it “a good healthy cheerful, delightful book which does one good to read.”

  Aside from Kropotkin, Anarchist thought was most highly developed in France. Among a wide assortment, some serious and some frivolous, the leaders were Elisée Reclus and Jean Grave. Reclus, with a dark-bearded melancholy face of somber beauty like that of a Byzantine Christ, was the soothsayer of the movement. He had fought on the barricades of the Commune and marched to prison down the dusty blood-stained road to Versailles. He came from a distinguished family of scholars and, besides his work as a geographer, had devoted years to explaining and preaching the Anarchist system through his books and through the journals he edited at one time or another with Kropotkin and Grave. In his lectures at the Université Nouvelle of Brussels, where he held for a time the chair of Geography, he exerted on listeners, wrote one of them, an “irresist
ible magnetism.” He moved from the formation of the earth to the future of man and “affirmed, like Rousseau, his unalterable faith in human goodness once it was released from the blemishes of a society founded on force.”

  In contrast, Grave came from a working-class family. Once a shoemaker and then, like Proudhon, a typesetter and printer, he had, in the eighties, practiced making fulminate of mercury to blow up the Prefecture of Police or the Palais Bourbon, seat of the French parliament. His book, The Dying Society and Anarchism, so persuasively argued the overthrow of the State and offered so many insidious suggestions that it cost him two years in prison. While there he wrote another book, Society After the Revolution, which he promptly printed himself and published upon his release. Being utopian, it was not considered dangerously subversive by the authorities. In a fifth-floor garret in a working-class street, the Rue Mouffetard, he now edited, largely wrote, and printed on a hand press La Révolte, at the same time working on his great history, Le Mouvement libertaire sous la troisième république. In a room furnished with a table and two chairs, he lived and worked, dressed invariably in a French workman’s long black blouse, surrounded by pamphlets and newspapers, “simple, silent, indefatigable,” and so absorbed in his thought and task that “he seemed like a hermit from the Middle Ages who forgot to die eight hundred years ago.”

  The followers who were the body of the movement never formed a party but associated only in small, localized clubs and groups. A few comrades would pass out notices informing friends that, for instance, “the Anarchists of Marseilles are establishing a group to be called The Avengers and Famished which will meet every Sunday at —–. Comrades are invited to come and bring reliable friends to hear and take part in the discussions.” Such groups existed not only in Paris but in most of the large cities and many small towns. Among them were the “Indomitables” of Armentières, the “Forced Labour” of Lille, the “Ever-Ready” of Blois, “Land and Independence” of Nantes, “Dynamite” of Lyons, the “Anti-Patriots” of Charleville. With similar groups from other countries, they occasionally held Congresses, such as the one in Chicago during the World’s Fair in 1893, but they neither organized nor federated.

  Enrico Malatesta, the firebrand of Anarchism, was an Italian, always carrying the flame to whatever corner of the world there was an Anarchist group. Ten years younger than Kropotkin, he looked like a romantic bandit who might have befriended the Count of Monte Cristo. In fact, he came from a well-off bourgeois family and as a young medical student had been expelled from the University of Naples for participating in a student riot at the time of the Paris Commune. Thereafter he learned the electrician’s trade in order to make a living, joined the Italian section of the International, sided with Bakunin against Marx, led an abortive peasant revolt in Apulia, went to prison and then into exile. He tried to direct the Belgian general strike of 1891 away from its petty aim of manhood suffrage because the vote, in his Anarchist credo, was merely another booby trap of the bourgeois state. He was expelled for similar revolutionary efforts from one country after another and condemned to five years on the prison island of Lampedusa, from which he escaped in a rowboat during a storm. When confined to Italy he escaped in a packing case marked “sewing machines.” It was loaded on a boat for Argentina, where he hoped to prospect for gold in Patagonia to provide funds for the cause, and where, in fact, he found it, only to have his claim confiscated by the Argentine government.

  Not content merely with talking about the coming disappearance of the State, Malatesta was constantly embroiled in practical attempts designed to help it disappear. This caused him to be suspected of deviating from “pure” Anarchism and even of leaning toward Marxism. On one occasion he was shot by an Italian fellow-Anarchist of the extreme anti-organizzatori wing. Never discouraged, no matter how many of the insurrections he midwifed were stillborn, Malatesta was always just in or out of prison, fresh from some dramatic escape or desperate adventure, forever an exile without a home or with hardly a room to call his own, always turning up, as Kropotkin said, “just as we saw him last, ready to renew the struggle, with the same love of man, the same absence of hatred for adversaries or jailers.”

  Their optimism was the outstanding characteristic of these leaders. They were certain that Anarchism because of its lightness must triumph and the capitalist system because of its rottenness must fall, and they sensed a mysterious deadline in the approaching end of the century. “All are awaiting the birth of a new order of things,” wrote Reclus. “The century which has witnessed so many grand discoveries in the world of science cannot pass away without giving us still greater conquests. After so much hatred we yearn to love each other and for this reason we are the enemies of private property and the despisers of law.”

  Kropotkin’s benevolent eyes peering at the world around him found encouraging signs everywhere. The increasing number of free museums, free libraries and free parks, for instance, seemed to him to be progress toward the Anarchist day when all private property would eventually become common property. Were not turnpikes and toll bridges becoming free? Were not municipalities providing free water and free street lights? Proof of the Anarchists’ contention that the society of the future would no longer be held together by government but by the “free association of men into groups” was, he thought, appearing in such developments as the International Red Cross, the trade unions and even the cartels of shipowners and railroads (elsewhere being denounced as “Trusts” by a rather different type of reformer in America).

  As formulated by men like Kropotkin, Malatesta, Jean Grave and Reclus, Anarchism at the end of the century may have attained, in the words of one of its recorders, “a shining moral grandeur,” but only at the cost of a noticeable removal from reality. These men had all suffered prison more than once for their beliefs. Kropotkin himself had lost his teeth as a result of prison scurvy. They were not men of the ivory tower except in so far as their heads were in ivory towers. They were able to draw blueprints of a state of universal harmony only by ignoring the evidence of human behavior and the testimony of history. Their insistence on revolution stemmed directly from their faith in humanity, which, they believed, needed only a shining example and a sharp blow to start it on its way to the golden age. They spoke their faith aloud. The consequences were frequently fatal.

  Anarchism’s new era of violence opened in France just after the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. A two-year reign of dynamite, dagger and gunshot erupted, killed ordinary men as well as great ones, destroyed property, banished safety, spread terror and then subsided. The signal was given in 1892 by a man whose name, Ravachol, seemed to “breathe revolt and hatred.” His act, like nearly all that followed it, was a gesture of revenge for comrades who had suffered at the hands of the State.

  On the previous May Day of 1891, at Clichy, a working-class suburb of Paris, a workers’ demonstration led by les anarchos carrying red banners with revolutionary slogans was charged by mounted police. In the melee five police were slightly, and three Anarchist leaders severely, wounded. Dragged to the police station, the Anarchists were subjected, while still bleeding and untended, to a passage à tabac of uncontrolled savagery, being made to pass between two lines of policemen under kicks and blows and beatings with revolver butts. At their trial, Bulot, the prosecuting attorney, charged that one of them, on the day before the riot, had called on the workers to arm themselves, and told them, “If the police come, let no one fear to kill them like the dogs they are! Down with Government! Vive la révolution!” Bulot thereupon demanded the death penalty for all three, which, since no one had been killed, was an impossible demand that he might better not have made. It was to start a train of dynamite. For the moment, M. Benoist, the presiding judge, acquitted one defendant and sentenced the other two to five and three years’ imprisonment respectively, the maximum allowable in the circumstances.

  Six months after the trial, the home of M. Benoist on the Boulevard St-Germain was blown up by a bomb. Two w
eeks later, on March 27, another bomb blew up the home of Bulot, the prosecuting attorney, in the Rue de Clichy. Between the two explosions the police had circulated a description of the suspected criminal as a thin but muscular young man in his twenties with a bony, yellowish face, brown hair and beard, a look of ill health and a round scar between thumb and first finger of the left hand. On the day of the second explosion a man of this appearance took dinner at the Restaurant Véry in the Boulevard Magenta, where he talked volubly to a waiter named Lhérot about the explosion, which no one in the quarter yet knew had taken place. He also expressed anti-militarist and Anarchist opinions. Lhérot wondered about him but did nothing. Two days later the man returned and this time Lhérot, noticing the scar, called the police. When they arrived to arrest him the slight young man suddenly became a giant of maniacal strength and it required ten men and a terrific struggle to subdue and take him prisoner.

  This was Ravachol. He had adopted his mother’s name in preference to Koenigstein, the name of his father, who had abandoned his wife and four children, leaving Ravachol at eight years of age as chief breadwinner of the family. At eighteen, after reading Eugène Sue’s The Wandering Jew, he had lost faith in religion, adopted Anarchist sentiments, attended their meetings, and as a result, was dismissed with a younger brother from his job as a dyer’s assistant. Meanwhile, his younger sister died and his elder sister bore an illegitimate child. Although Ravachol found other jobs, they did not pay enough to keep the family from misery. Accordingly, he took to illegal supplements, but with a certain fierce pride of principle. Robbery of the rich was the right of the poor “to escape living like beasts,” he said in prison. “To die of hunger is cowardly and degrading. I preferred to turn thief, counterfeiter, murderer.” He had in fact been all these and grave robber as well.