The Collected Works of Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin.

3.

A study has still to be made -- and highly interesting, attractive and above all instructive it would be -- of the various means of agitation to which revolutionaries have had recourse in various periods, to accelerate the advent of the revolution, to make the masses aware of the events that are in preparation, to show the people more clearly who are its main enemies, and to awaken audacity and the spirit of revolt. We know very well why a revolution may have been necessary, but it is only by instinct and by groping in the past that we can divine how revolutions come into being.

The Prussian general staff has recently published a manual for the use of the army on the art of defeating popular insurrections; it teaches in this work how one disorganizes a revolt, how one demoralizes and scatters its forces. The study of which we speak would be a reply to that publication and to so many others that treat the same subject, sometimes with less cynicism. It would show how a government can be disorganized, how its forces can be scattered, how one can restore the morale of a people weighed down and depressed by the poverty and the oppression it has suffered.

Up to the present, no such study has been made. Historians have told us eloquently of the great steps by which humanity has marched towards its liberation, but they have paid little attention to the periods preceding revolutions. Absorbed by the dramas they attempt to sketch out, they skim with a quick hand over the prologues, and it is the prologues that interest us most of all.

For what picture could be more gripping, more sublime or more beautiful than that of the efforts made by the precursors of revolutions? What incessant labour on the part of the peasants and a few men of action from the bourgeoisie before 1789; what persevering struggle on the part of the republicans from the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 to their fall in 1830; what activity on the part of the secret societies during the reign of the grand bourgeois Louis Philippe! Could any picture be more poignant than that of the conspiracies initiated by the Italians to shake the Austrian yoke, their heroic attempts, the unspeakable sufferings of their martyrs? Could there be a tragedy more sad yet impressive at the same time than that which would recount all the vicissitudes of the secret activity undertaken by the youth of Russia against the government and the landowning and capitalist systems from 1860 down to our own day? What noble figures would rise up before the modern socialist in reading such dramas; what examples of sublime devotion and self-sacrifice, and at the same time, what revolutionary education -- not theoretical but practical -- from which the present generation might profit!

This is not the place to make such a study. We must therefore limit ourselves to choosing some examples, so as to show how our predecessors went about their revolutionary agitation, and what kind of conclusions might be drawn from such studies.

We shall throw a glance over one of these periods, that preceding 1789, and, leaving aside the analysis of the circumstances which created a revolutionary situation towards the end of the past century, we shall be content with a review of various methods of agitation employed by our predecessors.

Two great achievements emerged as a result of the revolution of 1789-93. On the one hand, the abolition of the royal autocracy and the advent of the bourgeoisie to power, and on the other the abolition of serfdom and of feudal tenure in the countryside. The two are intimately linked; neither could have succeeded without the other. And these two currents are present already in the agitation that preceded the revolution; the agitation against the monarchy in the heart of the bourgeoisie, and the agitation against the landlords among the peasants.

Let us take a look at both.

The newspaper had not at that time gained the importance it enjoys today; the brochure, the pamphlet, the leaflet of three or four pages then took the place it now occupies, and such publications swarmed and multiplied. The brochure made available to the great masses the ideas of the philosophers and the economists who were the precursors of revolutions; the pamphlet and the broadsheet served the agitation by their attacks on the three principal enemies, the king and his court, the aristocracy and the clergy. They did not concern themselves with theory but operated by means of derision.

Thousands of these broadsheets told of the vices of the court and particularly of the queen, ridiculing the establishment, stripping it of its deceptive embellishments, showing it naked with all its faults, its dissipations, its perversity, its stupidity. The royal love affairs, the scandals of the courts, the crazy extravagance, the Famine Pact -- that alliance of the rich with the wheat monopolists to enrich themselves while starving the people: such were the subjects of these pamphlets. The pamphleteers were always on the attack and they did not neglect any circumstance of public life if it could be turned against the enemy. One had only to bring the facts into the open and the pamphlet and the broadsheet would be there, treating them freely in their own way. They lent themselves better than the newspaper to this kind of agitation. The newspaper is a considerable enterprise, and one must consider the risks of capsizing it; such a mishap would make difficulties for a whole party. But the pamphlet and the broadsheet compromise only the writer and the printer -- and they have to be tracked down!

Such authors, to begin with, have emancipated themselves from censorship. It is true that the pretty little instrument of contemporary Jesuitism -- the modern newspaper journalism that annihilates all of a revolutionary writer's freedom of expression -- had not then been invented, but there was still the "lettre de cachet" by which writers and printers could be locked away in prison, a brutal method, but at least frank.

That is why authors got their pamphlets printed either in Amsterdam or in some unnamed place "a hundred leagues from the Bastille, under the Liberty Tree." In this way they were not forced to constrain themselves about hitting hard, about vilifying the king, the queen and her lovers, the grandees of the court, the gentry. The police occupied themselves with the clandestine press by searching the bookshops and arresting those who peddled pamphlets, but the unknown authors avoided prosecution and continued their work.

Songs -- which are sometimes too frank to be printed yet find their way all over a country once they have been committed to memory -- have always been one of the most effective means of propaganda. They poured contempt on established authority, they scoffed at crowned heads, they disseminated in the very hearts of families a contempt for royalty, a hatred for the clergy and the aristocracy, a hope of soon seeing the advent of the revolution.

But it was above all the poster to which the agitators resorted. The poster was more talked of, it stirred up the people more than a pamphlet or a brochure. Thus placards -- either printed or made by hand -- appeared on every occasion when something had happened that interested the mass of the public. Torn down today, they reappeared tomorrow, enraging the government and its myrmidons. "We missed your grandfather; we shall not miss you!" the king reads today on a sheet pasted on his palace walls. Tomorrow it is the queen who weeps with rage on learning how the details of her shameful life are being displayed upon the walls. Such were the beginnings of that hatred which the people afterwards dedicated to the woman who would coldly have exterminated Paris, so long as she could remain queen and autocrat.

The courtiers propose to celebrate the birthday of the Dauphin. The posters threaten to set fire to the four corners of the city, and thus they sow panic while preparing people's minds for something extraordinary. Or they announce that on the day of rejoicings "the king and queen will be led under a good escort to the Place de Grave, and then go on to the Hotel de Ville to confess their crimes, and will mount a scaffold to be burnt alive." The king convokes the Assembly of Notables, and immediately the posters announce that "the new troupe of comedians organized by the Sieur de Calonne ⁶⁸ (prime minister) will begin its representations on the 29th of this month and give an allegorical ballet entitled The Barrel of the Danaides." Or perhaps, becoming ever more bold, the posters find their way into the queen's own porch, announcing to her that the tyrants would soon be executed.

But it is above all against the wheat monopolists, against the tax farmers, against the intendants, that placards were used. Each time there was a ferment among the people, the posters announced a St. Bartholomew's day of the intendants and the farmers general. If a particular wheat merchant or manufacturer or official were detested by the people -- the placards condemned him to death "in the name of the Council of the People," in the name of the "Popular Parliament," etc., and later, when the occasion arose to start an uprising, it was against these exploiters, whose names had so often been announced on the posters, that popular anger was directed.

If one could only gather together all the innumerable posters that were pasted up during the ten or fifteen years that preceded the revolution, one would understand what an immense role this kind of agitation played in preparing for the uprising of the people. Jovial and jesting to begin, increasingly menacing as the moment of crisis drew nearer, they were always alert, always quick to respond to each circumstance of current politics and to the disposition of the masses; they excited anger and contempt, they named the true enemies of the people, they aroused in the breasts of the peasants, the workers and the bourgeoisie alike a hatred against their enemies, and they announced the day of liberation and revenge.

To hang or to tear apart an effigy was a very widespread custom in the past century. It was also one of the most popular means of agitation. Every time there was a popular ferment, processions would form carrying a lifesize doll representing the enemy of the moment which they hanged, burnt or tore apart. "Childishness!" said the young old men who think themselves so reasonable. But in fact the assault on the home of Reveillon during the elections of 1789, the execution of Foulon and of Bertier,⁶⁹ which changed completely the character of the expected revolution, were no more than the accomplishment in reality of what had been prepared for long ago by the execution of puppets of straw.

Here are a few examples among a thousand. The people of Paris did not like Maupeou, one of the ministers dear to Louis XIV. One day there was a demonstration; voices from the crowd shouted: "Judgement of the High Court condemns the Sieur Maupeou, Chancellor of France, to be burnt alive and his ashes scattered to the wind!" after which the crown actually marched to the statue of Henry IV with a dummy of the chancellor, fitted out in all his insignia, and the doll was burnt to the cheers of the crowd. Another day, a puppet of Abbe Terray was hanged from a lamppost in ecclesiastical garb with white gloves. In Rouen they quartered Maupeou in effigy, and when the gendarmes prevented a demonstration from forming, they contented themselves with hanging by the feet an effigy of a monopolist, with wheat leaking from its nose, mouth and ears.

A whole propaganda was contained in that puppet and a propaganda far more effective in making itself known than abstract propaganda, which speaks only to a small number of the converted.

The essential factor in preparing the uprisings that preceded the revolution was that the people became used to going down into the street, to manifesting its opinions in public places, and learnt to defy the police and the troops, even the cavalry.

That is why the revolutionaries of the epoch did not neglect any of the means they disposed of to draw the crowd into the streets and to provoke the security forces.

Each circumstance of public life in Paris and in the provinces was utilized in this manner. If public opinion had induced the king to dismiss a detested minister, there would be rejoicing and endless illuminations. To attract everybody, they let off fireworks and shot up rockets "in such quantity that in some places one seemed to be walking on cardboard." And if money was lacking to buy such things, they would stop passers-by and ask of them "politely but firmly -- contemporaries record -- a few pennies for the diversion of the people." Then, when the crowd had gathered, orators would address them, explaining and commenting on events, and the clubs would openly recruit and organize. And if the cavalry or other troops came to disperse the crowd, they would hesitate to employ violence against peaceful men and women, while the squibs that exploded before the horses and the foot soldiers, to the cheers and laughter of the public, tempered the ardour of those who advanced too far in among the people.

In the provincial towns the chimney sweeps often went through the streets, parodying the royal "bed of justice"; everyone burst into laughter on seeing a man with a sooty face playing the part of the king or his wife. Acrobats and jugglers, attracting thousands of spectators in the main square, would let fly, in the course of their comical patter, all kinds of barbs against the powerful and the rich. A procession takes shape, the statements become increasingly threatening. Then let the powerful or rich man look out if his carriage appears on the scene! He will certainly be manhandled by the crowd. Occasions are never lacking for intelligent men to provoke demonstrations, first of all by mockers, but then by men ready to act, especially if the agitation is prepared in advance through the deeds of men of action.

Once all this is present -- on the one hand a revolutionary situation and general discontent, and on the other the posters, pamphlets, songs, executions in effigy -- the population will be emboldened and their gatherings will become more and more threatening. Today, it is the Archbishop of Paris who is assaulted in a public square; tomorrow it is a duke or a count who narrowly escapes being thrown into the water; another day the crowd amuses itself by jeering at the members of the government as they pass by; thus the acts of revolt vary constantly in anticipation of the day when a spark will be sufficient for a demonstration to turn into a riot and a riot into a revolution.

"It is the dregs of the people, scoundrels and layabouts, who make such riots," our pompous historians will tell us today. And of course it was not among people in easy circumstances that the bourgeois revolutionaries in fact found their allies. Such folk confined themselves to recriminating in the drawing rooms and grovelling on their bellies a moment afterwards, and it was among the ill-famed taverns of the workers' suburbs that the revolutionaries went in search of comrades armed with cudgels when they stirred people to jeer at the Archbishop of Paris. I say this with all due deference to the good fellows of historians who deny these facts today.

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3.