2.

When a revolutionary situation is produced in a country where the spirit of revolt is not yet sufficiently awakened in the masses to express itself through tumultuous street demonstrations or by riots and uprisings, it is through their action that the minorities reawaken the feeling of independence and the breath of courage, without which no revolution could be accomplished.

Men of courage who are not content with words, but who seek to put them into execution, integrated characters for whom the act is one with the idea, for whom prison, exile and death are preferable to a life against their principles, who know one must be daring in order to succeed -- these are the scouts who start the combat long before the masses are excited enough openly to raise the flag of insurrection and to march, arms in hand, to the conquest of their rights.

In the midst of the complaints, the chatter, the theoretical discussions, an act of revolt, individual or collective, takes place that gives expression to the dominant aspirations. Perhaps at the first the masses remain indifferent. While admiring the courage of the individual or the group that initiates action, they may well follow first of all the wise and prudent ones who hasten to condemn action as "folly" and to say that "the fools and hotheads will compromise us all." They have so carefully calculated -- these wise and prudent ones -- that their party, carrying on its work slowly, will succeed in a hundred, in two hundred, or perhaps in three hundred years in conquering the whole world -- and here the unexpected intervenes! The unexpected, of course, is whatever had not been foreseen by them, the wise and prudent. Whoever knows and possesses a brain even slightly organized, is well aware that a theoretical propaganda for the revolution will necessarily be translated into deeds, long before the theoreticians have decided that the moment to act has come; nevertheless, the wise theoreticians will get angry with the fools, will excommunicate them, will declare anathema against them. But the fools will gather sympathy, the mass of the people will secretly applaud their audacity, and they will find imitators. As the first of them go to populate the prisons and penitentiaries, others will appear to continue their work: the acts of illegal protest, of revolt, of revenge, will continue and multiply.

Henceforward indifference is impossible. Those who in the beginning did not even ask themselves what the "fools" wanted, are forced to become concerned, to discuss their ideas, to take sides for or against. But the deed that attracts general attention, the new idea, infiltrates into men's minds and gains proselytes. Such an act in a few days does more than the propaganda of thousands of leaflets.

Above all, it awakens the spirit of revolt, it gives birth to audacity. The old system, defended by police, magistrates, gendarmes and soldiers, seemed indestructible, like that old fortress, the Bastille, which also seemed impenetrable in the eyes of the unarmed people who gathered under its high walls, garnished with cannons ready to fire. But people soon see that the established system does not have the strength they had supposed. Here an audacious act will be enough to throw into confusion for several days the whole government, to shake the colossus. There a riot turns a whole province topsy-turvy, and the soldiers, so imposing up to now, withdraw before a handful of peasants, armed with stones and staves; the people observes that the monster is not so terrible as it had believed, and begins to realise that a few energetic efforts will be enough to bring it to the ground. Hope is born in men's hearts; let us remember that if exasperation often leads to riots, it is always hope, the hope of winning that makes the revolutions.

The government resists; it reacts in fury. But, if repression in the past killed the energy of the oppressed, now, in periods of ferment, it produces the contrary effect. It provokes new acts of rebellion, individual and collective; it pushes on the rebels to heroism and more and more their actions move into new areas, become generalized and develop in complexity. The revolutionary party is reinforced by elements which hitherto had been hostile to it -- or had wallowed in indifference. The government, the ruling classes, the privileged groups, all begin to disintegrate; some are for complete resistance, others declare themselves ready to renounce their privileges temporarily, so as to calm the spirit of revolt, with the intent of taking control later on. The cohesion of the government and of the privileged classes is broken down.

The ruling classes indeed may have recourse to a furious reaction. But it is no longer the time for that; it will only make the struggle sharper and more terrible, and the revolution which emerges can only be all the bloodier because of it. On the other hand, the smallest concession on the part of the ruling classes, because it comes too late and is torn from them by struggle, will merely do more to awaken the revolutionary spirit. The people which, in the past, might have been content with such concessions, now realizes that the enemy is flinching; it anticipates victory, it feels its courage growing, and the very men who yesterday, crushed down by poverty, were content with complaining in secret, now raise their heads and go forward proudly to the conquest of a better future.

Finally, the revolution breaks out and the more bitter the struggle preceding it has been, the more formidable it will become.

The direction which the revolution will assume is clearly dependent on the sum of the circumstances that have led up to the cataclysm. But it can be foreseen in advance, by reference to the strength of the revolutionary action deployed in the preparatory period by the various advanced groups.

Such a group or party may have ably elaborated the theories it puts forward and the programmes it seeks to realize, and it may have propagated these activities by word and pen. But it has not sufficiently affirmed its aspirations openly, in the streets, by actions which are the realization of the way of thinking it represents; it has acted very little or -- just as serious -- it has not acted at all against those who are its real enemies, it has not struck against the institutions it would like to undo. It is strong in theory but it has not developed strength of action; it has done little to arouse the spirit of revolt or to direct it against all it must seek to attack when the revolution takes place. So this party is less well known. Because its aspirations have not been affirmed continually and each day by acts whose fame reaches the most isolated cabin and so have not sufficiently infiltrated the mass of the people, it has not passed through the crucible of the crowd and the street, and has not received their simple endorsement in the language of the people.

The most zealous writers within the party may be known to their readers as thinkers of merit, but they have neither the repute nor the capacities of the man of action, and on the day when the crowd goes down into the street, it will prefer to follow the counsels of those whose theoretical ideas are perhaps less clearly formulated and whose aspirations are less broad, but whom it knows because it has seen them in action.

The party which has done most revolutionary agitation, which has manifested most liveliness and audacity, will get the best hearing on the day when action becomes necessary, when someone must march at the head to accomplish the revolution. But a party which has not had the audacity to declare itself by revolutionary action in the preparatory period, a party which has not generated an impetus powerful enough to inspire individuals and groups with feelings of renunciation, with an irresistible desire to put their ideas into practice (if that desire had existed it would have been translated into action well before the whole populace had gone down into the streets), a party that has not known how to make its flag popular and its aspirations palpable and comprehensible, that party will have a scanty chance of realizing even the smallest part of its programme. It will be overtaken by the activist parties.

This is what we learn from the history of the periods that preceded the great revolutions. The revolutionary bourgeoisie perfectly understood all this; they neglected no means of agitation to awaken the spirit of revolt as they sought to demolish the monarchical regime: The French peasant of the past century also understood it instinctively when he agitated for the abolition of feudal rights; and the International acted in accordance with these same principles when it sought to awaken the spirit of revolt in the hearts of the city workers, and to direct it towards the natural enemy of the wage-earner -- the monopolist of the instruments of work and of raw materials.