I.—P. J. Proudhon.

Pierre Joseph Proudhon has been described as the “Father of Anarchy.” He was born at Besancon on the 15th January, 1809. His writings and correspondence, which, in their entirety, fill no fewer than forty-seven volumes, are regarded by the Anarchists as their Bible.

“What is Property?”—Proudhon’s first great work—was issued in 1840, and created quite a stir. The question contained in the title he himself answered in the words so often since adopted as a summary of their belief on the point by Anarchists—“property is theft.” In 1842 his work, “A Notice to Proprietors,” was seized, and its author summoned to the Assizes at Doubs. He read a written defence to the jurors, who acquitted him.

In June, 1848, Proudhon was elected to the Constituent Assembly, as a representative of the Département de la Seine, in opposition to his Anarchist principles which forbade all dealings with authority or with the State. Proudhon, says Langlois, “saw that the Constituent Assembly was endangered by the coalition of the monarchical parties with Louis Buonaparte, who was already planning his coup d’état.” He did not hesitate to openly attack the man who had just received 5,000,000 of votes. He wanted to break the idol; he succeeded only in getting prosecuted and condemned himself. The prosecution demanded against him was authorised by a majority of the Constituent Assembly, in spite of the speech which he delivered on that occasion. Declared guilty by the jury, he was sentenced, in March, 1849, to three years’ imprisonment and the payment of a fine of 4,000 francs, which he evaded by fleeing to Belgium.

Anarchy, according to Proudhon, was the culmination of social progress, and he deprecated and violently condemned the existence of any authority other than a man’s own moral sense. “No more parties,” he says; “no more authority; absolute liberty of the man and the citizen—in three words, such is our political and social profession of faith” (“Les Confessions d’un Révolutionnaire,” pp. 25-36). Such opinions, even when put into writing, are all very well when held in theory by people possessing education and a fair share of ordinary commonsense, but it will at once be seen that tremendous danger arises when half-educated men and women of the type of modern Anarchists, who, owing to their own laziness or the pressure of circumstances and environment, cherish a grievance against society at large. Such writings, couched in violent language, only have the effect of feeding the hatred of the discontented until at last they take the revolutionary statements literally, and carry out in practice what was taught as a theory. The faith the Anarchists have in Proudhon and his writings proves the danger of such ideas being put into circulation by the educated. Certainly there were some before Proudhon’s days who preached the rottenness of society and occasionally hinted at the desirability of a revolutionary upheaval, but it was Proudhon who collated these opinions, and enlarged upon them with results the disastrous effect of which can never be fully known.

Proudhon died near Paris, on the 19th of January, 1865.

II.—Michael Bakounine.

Michael Bakounine, “founder of Nihilism and apostle of Anarchy,” was born of an ancient aristocratic Russian family in 1814. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Proudhon. In Paris, in the year 1848, he delivered a public appeal inciting the Poles and Russians to organise a grand Pan-Slavonic revolutionary confederation. The Czar of Russia demanded Bakounine’s expulsion from France, which was acceded to. A reward of 10,000 roubles was next offered for his arrest and transportation into Russian territory, but the Revolution of February brought him back to France. However, he quickly quitted to attend at the Congress of Slavs. After this he went to Dresden and became one of the chiefs of the May revolution. Forced to fly from Dresden, he was arrested, sent to prison, and condemned to death in May, 1850, which sentence was afterwards commuted to imprisonment for life. Bakounine escaped and fled to Austria, but was again arrested and sentenced to death for high treason, which sentence was again commuted to life imprisonment. The Austrian Government finally handed him over to the Government of Russia. He was confined in a fort for several years, and finally banished to Siberia, from which he managed to escape and obtain passage to Japan, and from there to California. In 1860, he alighted, like a thunderbolt, in London.

Here he assisted Herzen and Ogareff in editing and publishing the “Kolokol” (The Bell), a revolutionary sheet which appealed to the Poles and Russians to join hands in a revolutionary confederation. On September 28, 1870, he organised an insurrection at Lyons, the failure of which necessitated his flight to Geneva. The Paris Communist rising of 1871 is attributed largely to the teaching and influence of Bakounine.

Of the many writings of Bakounine, “God and the State” is, undoubtedly, the most important. In opposition to Voltaire’s famous phrase, “If God does not exist it will be necessary to invent him,” Bakounine puts this extraordinary opposite, “If God exists, it will be necessary to abolish him.” His Anarchistic sentiments may be judged from the following excerpt from his “God and the State”: “In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can only turn to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them. Such is the sense in which we are really Anarchists.”

The famous “Revolutionary Catechism,” which some attribute to Bakounine, and others to the Anarchist Netschajef, is as follows: “The Revolutionist is a man under a vow.... If he continues to live in this world, it is only in order to annihilate it all the more surely. A revolutionary despises everything doctrinaire, and renounces the science and knowledge of the world in order to leave it to future generations; he knows but one science, that of destruction. For that, and for that only, he studies mechanics, physics, chemistry, and even medicine. For the same purpose he studies day and night living science—men, their character, positions, and all the conditions of the existing social order in all imaginary spheres. The object remains always the same; the quickest and most effective way possible of destroying the existing order.... For him exists only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, one satisfaction, the reward of revolution. Day and night he must have but one thought—inexorable destruction.... For the purpose of irrevocable destruction a revolutionist can, and may, often live in the midst of society, and appear to have the most complete indifference to his surroundings. A revolutionist may penetrate everywhere; into high society, among the nobility, among shopkeepers, into the military, official or literary world, into the ‘third section’ (the secret police), and even into the Imperial Palace.”

The Catechism divides society into several categories; those in the first of these categories are condemned to death without delay. “In the first place we must put out of the world those which stand most in the way of the revolutionary organisation and its work.” The members of the second category are to be allowed to live “provisionally” in order that “by a series of abominable deeds they may drive the people into unceasing revolt.” The third class, the rich and influential, must be exploited, for the sake of the revolution, and made to become “our slaves.” With the fourth class, of Liberals of various shades of opinion, arrangements must be made on the basis of their programme; they must be initiated and compromised, and made use of for the perturbation of the State. The fifth class, the doctrinaires, must be urged forward, while the sixth and most important class consists of the women, for making use of whom, for revolutionary purposes, the Revolutionary Catechism gives explicit directions.

Bakounine died at Berne, in Switzerland, on July 2, 1876.

III.—Elisée Reclus.

Although a leader of Anarchism in France, is also a professor of geography at the Brussels Free University. He is the author of a gigantic work entitled, “The Earth and its Inhabitants,” for which he has been decorated by a French scientific society.

A revolutionist by nature, he took part in the Paris Communist Insurrection of 1871, and was taken prisoner. Imprisoned for some time on the convict ships in Brest Harbour, he was ultimately released at the instance of an international appeal of men of science. His Anarchist writings are not many, but they have been translated into several languages.

Elie Reclus, brother of Elisée and librarian of the National Library under the Commune, is also an Anarchist and an ethnologist of high repute, and is employed in scientific work by the publishing house of Hachette & Co.

Elisée Reclus was once asked, as an educated man, to condemn the violence of his uneducated associates. “Condemn the propaganda by deed,” he asks, “but what is this propaganda except the preaching of well-doing and love of humanity by example? Those who call the ‘propaganda by deed’ acts of violence prove that they have not understood the meaning of this expression. The Anarchist who understands his part, instead of massacring somebody or other, will exclusively strive to bring this person round to his opinions, and to make of him an adept who, in his turn, will make ‘propaganda of deed’; by showing himself good and just to all those whom he may meet.” This same Elisée Reclus was asked by the editor of the Sempre Avanti his true opinion of Ravachol, the Anarchist scoundrel who lived by thieving, coining, robbing graves, and who ended up under the guillotine for murdering an old man in order to get his money. “I admire his courage,” says Reclus; “his goodness of heart, his greatness of soul, the generosity with which he pardons his enemies, or rather, his betrayers. I hardly know of any men who have surpassed him in nobleness of conduct. I reserve the question as to how far it is always desirable to push to extremities one’s own right, and whether other considerations moved by a spirit of human solidarity ought not to prevail. Still, I am none the less one of those who recognise in Ravachol a hero of a magnanimity but little common.”⁠[2]

IV.—Prince Kropotkin.

Prince Pierre Alexeivitch Kropotkin was born in Moscow in 1842. He is one of the most remarkable men of the day! A man of high ideals, of infinite fortitude and courage, and brilliant intellectual parts, he can find no home in his native Russia, but is driven forth to seek asylum among strangers. He has known the misery of captivity in gaol as well as the bitterness of expulsion from home! Arrested in 1874 for secretly propagating his principles in Russia, he spent two years and a half in the Peter and Paul fortress without a trial, but afterwards escaped to England. He was expelled from Switzerland for participation in the London International Congress of 1881; arrested in France in the autumn of 1882, and tried at Lyons in January, 1883, for belonging to an “association of malefactors,” was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment; was released early in 1886, left France, and has since resided in England. He lives at Bromley, in Kent, where, after his writings, bookbinding and carpentry are his recreations. It may surprise students of the Encyclopædia Britannica and Chambers’s Encyclopædia to learn that in the former the article on Russia, and in the latter, those on Russia, Asia, and France, are from the pen of Prince Kropotkin. He is sixty years of age now; a frequent contributor to the London Anarchist journal Freedom, as well as to various continental Anarchist journals, and a well-known figure in London Anarchist circles.

V.—Amilcare Cipriani.

A man of action rather than of theory, Amilcare Cipriani, the Italian Anarchist, has spent nearly twenty-five years in prison. In 1861, 1862, 1866, and 1869 he took part in the Mazzini and Garibaldi insurrections in Italy. After the disaster of Aspromonte in 1862, doubly a deserter and rebel (for he had twice left his regiment to join Garibaldi), Cipriani had to leave the country as best he might, his revolutionary instincts turning him to the troubles of Greece, where he threw himself energetically into the insurrection, and finally shared the fate of exile with those whose cause he had taken up. We find him next in Egypt, organising the “Società Democratica Italiana” among the Italian residents in Alexandria, and gathering around himself youthful enthusiasm into a “Falange Sacra,” who held themselves in readiness for a call from Garibaldi. After returning to Italy to help in the ’66 fight, he joined in the insurrection of Crete, and enrolled himself among the “rebel band” of Zimbrakàkis. It was here he met Flourens, with whom he afterwards worked in the Paris Commune. When the struggle in Crete was suppressed, Flourens was arrested and handed over to the care of the French police, and Cipriani took refuge again in Alexandria, where certain incidents took place which led to his condemnation to penal servitude by the Italian Government. In Egypt Cipriani was the representative of Dervieux & Co., the great bankers. He was invited one night to a supper party of his own “comrades,” where a dispute arose which became of a violent nature. Some of the “comrades,” thinking he had money, attacked him and demanded that money. Cipriani was forced to save himself against the aggression of his friends, and in so doing mortally wounded one of them, an Italian named Santini. Whilst trying to escape from his dangerous position, he was surrounded by zaptiehs (police), and was on the point of being arrested, but he resisted, and as they used their arms, he forced his way through them by shooting at them and killing one. Having escaped, he took refuge in the interior of Egypt, where he lived for some time under a false name. He succeeded in embarking for and reaching London, where he was a photographer for some time. On September 4, 1870, when the French Republic was proclaimed, he joined the first battalion of the National Guards, together with Flourens. On October 31 of the same year and January 21, 1871, he was one of the chief participators in the unsuccessful attempts made in Paris to capture the Hotel de Ville and to drive out the Provisional Government. On March 18, and after, Cipriani fought for the Paris Commune. He raised the Battalions of Belleville (the most revolutionary part of Paris), which was commanded by Flourens, whose aide-de-camp he was, and whose devoted friend he had become whilst fighting for the liberty of the Cretans. In the last sortie made by the Communists towards Mont Valérien, Flourens, deceived by a Versailles spy, was treacherously killed. Cipriani, in defending him, was seriously wounded and afterwards carried to Versailles, where a court-martial condemned him to be shot. His wound saved his life; for the five soldiers who were to be shot with him arrived at Satory before Cipriani could be lifted from his bed and carried to the place of execution. At the moment they were taking him down from the cart to be led before the platoon which was to shoot him, a messenger from Thiers arrived with orders to put off the execution. For eighteen months he was kept in solitary confinement. Tried a second time by court-martial, he was condemned to transportation to New Caledonia for life. On the transport boat, “La Danaé,” he showed his usual rebellious spirit in resisting orders. He was condemned by the admiral to seventy days’ imprisonment in a cell, with nothing but bread and water, for refusing to clean the floor. In New Caledonia it was the same. He was condemned to three years’ hard labour for having denounced an order of the Governor of the island. On his return to Paris, after the amnesty, he was expelled from France, on January 1, 1881, whence he returned to Italy. He was arrested at Rimini on a charge of revolutionary conspiracy, and taken to Milan. There he was kept in prison until an amnesty came granting his release. He was, however, immediately re-arrested and sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labour for the affair in Alexandria. He was released in 1888, in consequence of the great popular agitation in his favour—nine times during his imprisonment was he elected as deputy, though, as an Anarchist, he declined to take his seat in Parliament on his liberation. In Rome, 1891, he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for his part in the May Day riots of that year, when a planned insurrection was frustrated only by the presence of 25,000 troops. Over 500 Anarchists were arrested on this occasion. During the last Greco-Turkish War Cipriani received several wounds; and in 1900 offered to raise a regiment of volunteers to fight on behalf of the Boers, but his offer was not accepted.

VI.—Carlo Cafiero.

Carlo Cafiero was one of the most energetic and revolutionary of Italian Anarchists, and an intimate associate of Michael Bakounine, the founder of Nihilism. Born of a rich family in Barletta, he was educated at a Catholic seminary and at the University of Naples, and intended for a diplomatic career. Whilst still quite young, he inherited a large fortune from his parents. Nevertheless, he became a convinced Anarchist, threw up his profession, and left Florence, the then capital of Italy, for London, where he gave himself up to the study of revolutionary doctrines. His wealth was henceforth given up to the cause of Anarchism. In 1873 he joined the International, and with Bakounine formed an active propagandist centre in Switzerland. In 1874 he took part in the Bologna insurrection, and afterwards, with Malatesta and thirty-five other Anarchists, took active share in organising the armed revolt at Benevento. He was captured, and, after seventeen months’ imprisonment, went to France, was expelled, and eventually returned to Italy. Already in bad health, he was again imprisoned, and consigned to solitary confinement, from the effects of which he never recovered. Shortly after his release he became hopelessly insane, and finally ended his days in a madhouse.

VII.—Emma Goldman.

The “High Priestess of Anarchy in America,” as she is called, is Emma Goldman, whose speeches it is said, incited the Anarchist Czolgosz in his attack on President McKinley. She was born in Russia, but educated in Germany. Eight years ago Emma Goldman was sent to prison for ten months in New York for her incentives to violence. She is exceedingly popular among the American Anarchists. Her almost masculine face, adorned with pince-nez, her plain black dress, often with red ribbon at the neck, her peculiar half-closed eyes, are familiar to the “groups.”

She has spent the greater part of her life in America; while she has also visited England and addressed audiences in London. All her family were orthodox, but, commencing as an ardent Radical, she was converted to Anarchism by the hanging of the Chicago Anarchists in 1887. She says of herself: “I have since led strikes and done everything I could for the people. I am a member of no group. I believe only in individual freedom and responsibility as the true basis of Anarchy.”

The writer attended her lectures in London. She ridiculed the ideas and methods of Socialism, and upheld the theory of violence. As an orator she is neither original nor even effective, and leaves her audience quite unimpressed. Whatever she is as an orator, there is no doubt that her writings are followed with a great deal of interest by the men and women who share her opinions. She has just married (I use the word “married” for want of the Anarchistic substitute) Alexander Berkmann, the Russian Jew Anarchist who shot Mr. Carnegie’s manager in 1892, and her association with him—“martyr” as he is regarded as being—lends to her position in Anarchists’ affections a force which her teachings and personality alone could not inspire.

VIII.—Louis Lingg.

One of the Chicago “martyrs,” who, condemned to death for complicity in the bomb-throwing of 1886, committed suicide in jail by means of a cigar loaded with dynamite.

Louis Lingg was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1864. His father was employed as a lumber-man, his mother did laundry work. Life was pleasant enough to young Lingg in his boyhood days, but when his father met with an accident at his work which ruined his health, hunger and want were soon experienced in the family, despite the strenuous efforts of the mother to keep the home going. The harsh treatment his father received from his master created in Lingg’s heart a hatred of capitalists which speedily turned his energies in the direction of revolutionary propaganda.

Meanwhile, having served his apprenticeship as a carpenter, Lingg left home for the United States, in 1885. He went to Chicago, joined the union of his trade, and became one of the chief organisers of the eight hours movement. He had an ardent belief that the great revolutionary struggle between capital and labour was close at hand, and that the people needed arms to fight those in authority. He therefore studied explosives, and made a supply of bombs to be ready in case of need. His figure stands apart somewhat from those of the other real martyrs—Parsons, Spies, Fischer, and Engel—with whom he was very slightly acquainted, or not acquainted at all, until they met in the dock. They were propagandists; he a man of action.

Addressing the Court, in answer to the Judge’s question as to why sentence of death should not be pronounced upon him, he defiantly concluded his speech with the following: “I have told Captain Schaak (chief of the police) and I stand by it, ‘If you cannonade us, we shall dynamite you!’ You laugh! Perhaps you think ‘You’ll throw no more bombs!’ But let me assure you that I die happy on the gallows, so confident am I that the hundreds and thousands to whom I have spoken will remember me, and when you shall have hanged us, then, mark my words, They will do the bomb-throwing! In this hope do I say to you, ‘I despise you; I despise your order, your laws, your force-propped authority! Hang me for it!’”

IX.—Louise Michel.

Louise Michel, who has been variously styled the “Joan of Arc of Anarchism” and the “Red Virgin of the Commune,” started life as a devout young school-teacher in a French village.

She went to Paris, became a Communist, and, dressed in the uniform of the National Guard, and armed with a carbine, she led bands of Communists at the barricades in 1871. She sacrificed her liberty to save her mother, whom the soldiers had arrested. At the subsequent court-martial, where many of her co-revolutionists were condemned to execution, Louise Michel cried defiantly, “You would sentence me to death? You dare not! You are afraid lest I should show before your rifles more courage than you showed before the Prussian shot.” The verdict was imprisonment for life. When in St. Lazare Prison, this woman of contradicting and warring moods deprived herself of food for days together so that the other prisoners might have it. She was later deported to the penal settlement of New Caledonia.

After the lapse of a few years the woman revolutionary received her liberty. M. Rochefort was at the railway station to welcome her back to Paris. “Take care,” she exclaimed, as he embraced her; “do not suffocate the little blind cat I have in my pocket.” The animal had been her companion throughout the long voyage.

Some years later Louise Michel lived in London, where, for some time, she conducted a school in Fitzroy Square, Soho, for the children of Anarchists. Based entirely on Anarchist principles, the school was, of course, a failure. In a not very large room Louise and two or three others attempted to teach simultaneously several different subjects. Ordinary notions of school discipline received scant attention. The fundamental Anarchist principle of individual liberty for all and everyone was here carried out in its fulness. The teachers did try to teach, but the boys and girls could not possibly learn or even hear anything, for the children moved about in the room, talked and shouted, or sat quietly just as they pleased. While in one part of the room the teachers tried to attract their pupils to lessons of arithmetic, or other subjects, Louise herself gave them practical lessons in piano playing, the children surrounding her, climbing on chairs, and even on her shoulders; the general noise being so great that nobody could be heard at all by either teacher or pupil. Two or three “comrades” stood about also in the room, usually, discussing and gesticulating, adding to the general disorder.

A feature of Louise Michel’s character was her great love for the poor, to whom she practically devoted her life and her meagre earnings.

Among her notable sayings were the following—

“What is human life when great ideas are at stake? The killing of a few means the emancipation of many.”

“A revolution in Russia may begin the great movement of progress in the world.”

“People are learning that this is not a time for killing; but for life, for work, for art, for science, for fraternity.”

Asked what she would do if the Presidency of the French Republic were offered her, she replied: “I should accept it for twenty-four hours—just long enough to empty all the banks and all the prisons.” She finished her stormy career at Marseilles on January 9, 1905.