Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (86 page)

In his lifetime, Gandhi’s ideas were popularized in the West by books such as Richard Gregg’s
The Power of Non-Violence
(1935). The Dutch anarchist Bart de Ligt in his
The Conquest of Violence
(1937) warned his fellow anarchists that ‘The more violence, the less revolution’ and linked Gandhi’s moral non-violence with the non-violent direct action of the syndicalists, notably in their use of the general strike. In the 1950s and 1960s, anarcho-pacifism came to the forefront in the New Left and the campaigns for nuclear disarmament, and it looked for a time that a non-violent revolution might be possible towards the end of the sixties before the transatlantic reaction set in.

Anarchy is order: government is civil war.
A
NSELME
B
ELLEGARRIQUE

There is no such thing as revolutionary power, for all power is reactionary by nature.
C
ONFEDERACIóN
N
ACIONAL
DEL
T
RABAJO
(S
PAIN
)

The greater the violence, the weaker the revolution.
B
ART
DE
L
IGT

Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom, but an oceanic circle whose centre will be the

individual.

M
OHANDAS
G
ANDHI

F
RANCE
IN
MANY
WAYS
was the cradle of the historic anarchist movement. Its seeds were scattered by the
enragés
during the French Revolution and began to grow amongst the workers in the 1840s. France produced in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon the ‘father’ of the organized anarchist movement. Proudhon not only inspired the varieties of anarchism which developed in the second half of the nineteenth century but the mutualist workers with whom he was associated helped set up the First International Working Men’s Association. Towards the end of the century, France witnessed the worst examples of terrorist ‘propaganda by the deed’ as well as the great imaginative flowering of anarchism amongst the writers and artists of Symbolism and Post-Impressionism. It also gave rise to one of anarchism’s most constructive forms — anarcho-syndicalism.

The libertarian spirit had been strong in France ever since the irreverent Rabelais coined his motto ‘Do what you will’, and la Boétie offered his insights about voluntary servitude. The anti-authoritarian utopias of Foigny and Fénelon had been followed by the searing criticisms of the
philosophes
, Morelly, Meslier, Diderot and Rousseau. They all fired the mood of discontent which was eventually to culminate, of course, in the French Revolution.

The French Revolution set the context of many of the disputes and struggles on the Left which were to follow in the nineteenth century. From the beginning there was a struggle between the libertarians and the federalists and the authoritarians and centrists. Condorcet, who believed in the perfectibility of man and the possibility of a free and classless society even while awaiting his execution at the hands of the authoritarian Jacobins, proposed a remarkable scheme of
mutualité
, that is a vast mutual aid association among all workers. The moderate Girondins also advocated a form of federalism as a means of saving France from a Jacobin Paris.

A more revolutionary and spontaneous form of federalism developed in the ‘districts’ or ‘sections’ into which Paris had been organized administratively for elections. Out of these emerged the Commune of Paris. Many popular societies and revolutionary committees also arose which soon replaced the Jacobin-dominated sections. But while it was argued that the Commune must legislate and administer itself, it remained a kind of
federalist direct democracy. Mutualism and federalism not only became later the twin pillars of Proudhon’s system but Kropotkin was convinced that the principles of anarchism found their origin in the deeds of the French Revolution.
¹

The term anarchist was still used as a term of abuse at the time. It was applied indiscriminately to libertarians and authoritarians alike by their opponents. In England, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham in his anti-revolutionary
Anarchical Fallacies
(1791) attacked the French Declaration of Rights, arguing that it would replace the old tyranny of a single master by the new tyranny of collective anarchy. The Jacobins called the
sans culottes
anarchists and were called anarchist in turn by the Directory which replaced them. The
sans-culottes
, the revolutionary mob who took to the streets in the spring and summer of 1793, were not strictly speaking anarchists for they helped overthrow the Girondins and bring about the Jacobin dictatorship.

Once in power Robespierre employed the epithet to attack those on the Left whom he had used for his own ends. But it was also adopted as a term of pride: in September 1793, the
Sans-Culottes of Beaucaire
informed the Convention: ‘We are poor and virtuous
sans-culottes
; we have formed an association of artisans and peasants … we know whom our friends are: those who have delivered us from the clergy and nobility, from the feudal system … those whom the aristocrats called anarchists, factious elements, Maratists.’
²
It was Marat of course who had called for revolution in 1789 and declared that ‘the people have broken the yoke of nobility; in the same way they will break that of wealth’. He was however in practice an extreme authoritarian.

When the Directory came to call the authoritarian Jacobins whom they had replaced in 1795 as ‘anarchists’ the term began to develop its elasticity of meaning which makes it so misleading, especially since:

Nevertheless, not only in practice but also in theory, there were popular leaders reaching characteristically anarchist conclusions, particularly amongst the
enragés
, a loose movement of revolutionaries who rejected parliamentary politics, practised direct action, and looked to economic reform. One of their leaders was named Anacharsis Clootz. When the Girondin Brissot called for the suppression of the
enragés
in 1793, he declared:

Apart from the references to the safety of the individual and the morality of the people, at least there was some element of truth in this definition.

Chief among the
enragés
was Jacques Roux, a country clergyman who became a member of the General Council of the Commune. He has been remembered for escorting the king to the guillotine and for urging the mob to direct action, such as the seizure of goods in shops. He was also one of the first to link political freedom with economic equality: ‘Freedom is but an empty phantom if one class of men can starve another with impunity. Freedom is but an empty phantom when the rich man can through his monopoly exercise the right of life and death over his fellow men.’
⁵
The Jacobins accused him of telling the people that ‘every kind of government must be proscribed’; he was arrested and condemned to death by them, but he committed suicide before they could enjoy their triumph. But for all his libertarian profession, Roux like Marat remained an extreme authoritarian.

It was Jean Varlet however who came closest to being an anarchist during the French Revolution. He asserted the absolute sovereignty of the Section. He was imprisoned during the Terror but survived to mount a blistering attack on the Jacobin dictatorship in a work entitled
L’Explosion
:

The work may be considered the earliest anarchist manifesto in continental Europe.

Gracchius Babeuf with the support of the
enragés
tried in his
Conspiration des Égaux
to overturn the Directory in 1796. He called for perfect equality, attacked private property as the principal source of ills in society, and believed everything should be shared in common. Kropotkin saw a direct filiation from Babeuf’s conspiracy to the International Working Men’s Association set up in 1866.
⁷
But Babeuf was never an anarchist like Varlet for he looked to the State, run by a revolutionary dictatorship, to bring about his ‘Republic of Equals’.

It was the French thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who was the first to call himself deliberately and provocatively an anarchist. To the rhetorical
question ‘What are you then?’, Proudhon replied unequivocally in
What is Property?
in 1840:

Aware of the derivation of the word anarchy from the Greek, Proudhon rejected the government of man by man as oppression, and insisted that society finds its highest perfection in the union of order and anarchy: ‘Just as man seeks justice in equality, society seeks order in anarchy.’
⁹
This apparent paradox had a profound meaning: only society without artificial government could restore the natural order and social harmony.

Proudhon generally spelt the word ‘an-archy’ to emphasize its etymological meaning. He not only defined anarchy as a ‘state of total liberty’ but referred to ‘absolute liberty, which is synonymous with order’.
¹⁰
He added to the potential confusion by occasionally using the word anarchy in its negative sense, associating it with property and exploitation, the complete
laissez faire
of ‘Industrial Empire’, and referring to the ‘anarchy of commercial capitalism’ and ‘anarchical capitalism’.
¹¹
Towards the end of his life, he grew more cautious and preferred to call himself a ‘federalist’ rather than an anarchist. His followers did not call themselves anarchists either but mutualists, after the principle of the mutual exchange of the products of labour. Bakunin however described anarchism as ‘Proudhonism broadly developed and pushed to its extreme consequences’.
¹²

Proudhon may have been the most influential anarchist thinker in France but he was not the only one. At the time of the 1848 Revolution an obscure revolutionary called Anselme Bellegarrique launched the slogan ‘Anarchy is order: government is civil war’ quite independently of Proudhon. Before disappearing into Central America, he went on to publish in 1850 two issues of
L’Anarchie, Journal de l’Ordre
which combined a form of Stirnerite egoism with a vision of a free society based on the commune, without government and armies. The physician Ernest Coeurderoy and the upholsterer Joseph Déjacque also participated in the 1848 Revolution and the bitterness of failure and exile led them to apocalyptic celebration of violence and barbarism. ‘Anarchist revolutionaries’, Coeurderoy declared, ‘we can take hope only in the human deluge, we can take hope only in chaos, we have no recourse but a general war.’
¹³

Déjacque edited the anarchist paper
Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social
in New York from 1858 to 1861. He advocated ‘war on civilization
by criminal means’ and secret societies in
La Question Révolutionnaire
(1854). He let his utopian imagination run riot in
L’Humanisphère
in which man holds in his hand ‘the sceptre of science’ which had once been attributed to the gods. Each is his own representative in a ‘parliament of anarchy’.
¹⁴
Déjacque’s ‘humanispheres’ resemble Fourier’s ‘phalansteries’ and while based on the principle of complete freedom reflect a similarly rigid planning.