1.

ON the 18th of March, 1871, the people of Paris rose against a rule that was generally detested and despised, and proclaimed the city of Paris independent, free, and belonging only to itself.

This overthrow of central power was made without the usual scenes of a revolutionary uprising: on that day there were neither volleys of shot nor floods of blood shed behind the barricades. The rulers were eclipsed by an armed people going out into the streets; the soldiers evacuated the city, the bureaucrats hastened towards Versailles, taking with them everything they could carry. The government evaporated like a puddle of stinking water under the breath of a spring wind, and by the 19th, having shed hardly a drop of its children's blood, Paris found itself free of the past that had contaminated the great city.

At the same time, the revolution that had been accomplished in this way opened up a new era in the series of revolutions, by which the people march forward from slavery to freedom. Under the name of The Paris Commune a new idea was born, destined to become the point of departure for future revolutions.

As is always the case with great ideas, it was not a product of the conceptions of an individual philosopher. It was born of the collective intelligence; it sprang from the heart of an entire people. But it was vague in the beginning, and many among those who helped to realize it and who even gave their lives for it, did not imagine the event as we conceive it today; they did not fully understand the revolution they were inaugurating, nor the fecundity of the new principle which they were seeking to put into execution. It was only with practical application that one began to perceive its future importance; it was only in the working out of the thought from this time onwards that the new principle became more and more specific and clear, and appeared in all its lucidity, all its beauty, its justice and the importance of its results.

As soon as socialism had taken a new impetus in the five or six years preceding the Commune, Kropotkin is presumably referring to the International Working Men's Association, which was founded on the 28th September 1864; its presence stimulated socialist propaganda and organization in most European countries. Trans. ³² one question above all preoccupied the elaborators of the coming social revolution: the question of knowing what form of political grouping among societies would be the most propitious for that great economic revolution which current industrial development imposes on our generations, and which must lead to the abolition of individual property and the communalizing of all the capital accumulated by preceding generations.

The International Workingmen's Association gave that response. Association, it said, should not be restricted to one nation; it should extend beyond all the artificial frontiers. And soon that great idea would penetrate the hearts of the people and capture their minds. Hounded since then by an alliance of all the reactionaries, it has nonetheless survived, and as soon as the obstacles raised to its development are destroyed to the cheers of the insurgent people, it will be reborn stronger than ever.

But it remained to be seen what would be the integral parts of that vast Association. At that time two great currents of ideas confronted each other with their solutions to that great question: the Popular State on the one hand, and Anarchy on the other.

According to the German socialists, the State should take possession of all accumulated wealth and give it to workers' associations; it should organize production and exchange, and keep watch over public life, over the functioning of society.

To this the majority of socialists of Latin race, replied that such a State -even admitting that by some impossible chance it could exist-would be the worst of tyrannies, and they opposed this ideal with a new ideal copied from the past; an-archy, that is to say, the complete abolition of States, and reorganization from the simple to the complex through the free federation of the popular forces of producers and consumers.

It was soon admitted, even by "Statists" less imbued with government prejudices, that Anarchy indeed represented a greatly superior form of organization than that envisaged in the popular State; but, they declared, the anarchist ideal is so far beyond us that we cannot concern ourselves with it at the present time. At the same time, anarchist theory lacked a concrete and simple formula with which to define its point of departure, to give body to its aims, and to show that they were based on a conception that had a real existence among the people. The federation of workers' corporations and groups of consumers across the frontiers and apart from the existing States, still seemed too vague a concept; and at the same time, it was easy to perceive that they could not comprehend the whole diversity of human manifestations. A clearer formula, one that was easier to comprehend, and which had its basic elements in the reality of things, was needed.

If it had been merely a matter of elaborating a theory, we might well ask how important theories are. But until a new idea has found a form of expression that is clear, precise and derived from actual existence, it will not seize on people's minds or inspire them to the point of embarking on a decisive struggle. The people do not plunge into the unknown without gaining the support of a reliable and clearly formulated idea which serves, so to speak, as a springboard from which to take off. And this takeoff point, life itself will indicate.

For five months while it was isolated by the siege, Paris had lived its own life and it had come to understand the vast economic, intellectual and moral powers at its disposal; it had glimpsed and understood the strength of its initiatives. At the same time, it had seen that the band of l brigands who had seized power did not know how to organize anything -either the defence of France or the development of the interior. It had seen how this central government had set itself against all that the intelligence of a great city might bring to fruition. It had seen more than that: the powerlessness of any government to ward off great disasters or to assist positive evolution when it is ripe for fulfilment.. During the siege it had suffered frightful poverty, the poverty of the workers and defenders of the town, beside the indolent luxury of the idlers. And it had seen the failure, thanks to the central power, of all its attempts to put an end to this scandalous regime. Each time the people wished to take a free initiative, the government doubled its fetters, and the idea was born quite naturally that Paris should turn itself into an independent Commune, able to realize within its wails the will of the people.

Suddenly, the word Commune, began to emerge from every mouth.

The Commune of 1871 could not be any more than a first sketch. Born at the end of a war, surrounded by two armies ready to give a hand in crushing the people, it dared not declare itself openly socialist, and proceeded neither to the expropriation of capital nor to the organization of work, nor even to a general inventory of the city's resources. Nor did it break with the tradition of the State, of representative government, and it did not attempt to achieve within the Commune that organization from the simple to the complex it adumbrated by proclaiming the independence and free federation of Communes. But it is certain that if the Commune of Paris had lived a few months longer, the strength of events would have forced it towards these two revolutions. We should not forget that [in the French Revolution] the bourgeoisie devoted four years of the revolutionary period to proceed from a moderate monarchy to a bourgeois republic; it should not surprise us that the people of Paris could not overleap in a single day the gulf that separated the anarchist Commune from the rule of bandits. But we must also realize that the revolution, which in France and certainly also in Spain, will be communalist. It will take up the work of the Paris Commune where it was halted by the assassinations perpetrated by the men of Versailles.

The Commune succumbed, and the bourgeoisie took its revenge in the way we know, because of the fear the people had created among their rulers by shaking off the yoke of government. Events proved that there were indeed two classes in modern society: on the one hand, the man who works, who gives to the owner more than half of what he produces, and who in the meantime accepts too easily the crimes of his masters; on the other hand the idler, the glutton, animated by the instincts of the wild beast, hating his slaves and ready to massacre them like wild beasts.

After having surrounded the people of Paris and cut off all their exits, the rulers released on them soldiers brutalized by barrack life and wine, and said to them openly in the Assembly: "Kill the wolves, the she-wolves, and the cubs!" And to the people they said:

Whatever you do, you will perish! If you are taken with arms in your hands-death! If you beg for mercy-death! To whatever side you turn your eyes, left, right, before, behind, above, below-death! You are not only outside the law; you are outside humanity. Neither age nor sex will be able to save you, either you or yours. You will die, but before that you will savour the agony of your wife, of your sister, of your mother, of your daughter, of your son, even down to the cradle! Before your eyes they will drag the wounded from the ambulances to slash them with sword bayonets and bludgeon them with rifle butts. They will drag them, still alive, by their broken legs or bleeding arms, and throw them into the river like bags of ordure that scream and suffer.

Death! Death! Death!

And after this frantic orgy upon a pile of corpses, after the mass exterminations, a vengeance both mean and atrocious was to continue-floggings, thumbscrews, unendurable fetters, blows of prison guards, insults, hunger, all the refinements of cruelty.

Are the people likely to forget these great deeds?

"Down, but not out," the Commune is being reborn today. This is not merely a dream of the conquered caressing in their imagination a beautiful mirage of hope. No! The Commune today becomes the precise and visible aim of the revolution that already rumbles near us. The idea penetrates the masses, gives them a flag to march behind, and we firmly count on the present generation to accomplish the social revolution of the Commune, and in this way put an end to the ignoble exploitation by the bourgeoisie, rid the people of the tutelage of the new State, and inaugurate in the evolution of the human species a new era of liberty, equality and solidarity.