Introduction

The International Working Men’s Association, in setting itself the aim of rallying under one banner the scattered forces of the world proletariat and thus becoming the living representative of the community of interests that unites the workers, was bound to open its doors to socialists of all shades. Its founders and the representatives of the workers’ organisations of the Old and New worlds who at international congresses sanctioned the General Rules of the Association, forgot that the very scope of its programme would allow the declassed elements to worm their way in and establish, at its very heart, secret organisations whose efforts, instead of being directed against the bourgeoisie and the existing governments, would be turned against the International itself. Such has been the case with the Alliance of Socialist Democracy.

At the Hague Congress, the General Council demanded an inquiry into this secret organisation. The Congress entrusted the task to a commission of five (citizens Cuno, Lucain, Splingard, Vichard and Walter, who resigned), which delivered its report at the session of September 7. The Congress passed the following resolution:

1. To expel from the International Mikhail Bakunin, as founder of the Alliance and also for an act committed on his own behalf;

2. To expel James Guillaume, as a member of the Alliance;

3. To publish the documents relating to the Alliance.

Since its members are scattered over various countries, the Commission of Inquiry into the Alliance was unable to publish the documents which were the basis of its report, and so Citizen Vichart, the only member resident in London, sent them to the protocol commission, which is now publishing them, on its own responsibility, in the ensuing report.

The file on the Alliance was so voluminous that the commission sitting during the Congress only had time to familiarise itself with the most important documents in order to arrive at a practical conclusion; thus, most of the Russian material could not be submitted to it; and the report presented by it to the Congress, since it only covered part of the question, can no longer be considered adequate. We have therefore been obliged to give a history of the Alliance so that the reader will be able to understand the meaning and importance of these documents.

The documents published by us belong to several categories. Some have already been published separately and mostly in French, but to understand the spirit of the Alliance properly, they must be compared with others, since, collated in this way, they appear in a new light. One of them is the programme of the public Alliance. Other documents belong to the International and are being published for the first time; still others belong to the Spanish branch of the secret Alliance, whose existence was publicly disclosed in the spring of 1872 by members of the Alliance. Anyone who has followed the Spanish movement during this period will only find more detailed information on facts which have already been made more or less public. These documents are important, not because they are being published for the first time, but because it is the first time that they have been compared in such a manner as to reveal the common secret action from which they originated, and above all because we are comparing them with the two categories of documents which follow. The first consists of documents published in Russian which disclose the true programme and methods of the Alliance. These documents, thanks to the language which protected them, remained hitherto unknown in the West, and this circumstance made it possible for the authors to give free rein to their imagination and their language. The faithful translations furnished by us will allow the reader to gauge the intellectual, moral, political and economic worth of the Alliance’s leaders.

The second category consists of a single document: the Alliance’s secret statutes; it is the only document of any substantial length that is being published, for the first time, in this report. It may be asked whether revolutionaries are permitted to publish the statutes of a secret society, of a supposed conspiracy. First, these secret statutes were expressly named among the documents whose publication was demanded at the Hague Congress by the Alliance commission and none of the delegates, not even the member constituting the minority of the commission, voted against this. This publication has therefore been formally ordered by the Congress, whose instructions we must carry out; but it is essential to point out the following:

Here we have a society which, under the mask of the most extreme anarchism, directs its blows not against the existing governments but against the revolutionaries who accept neither its dogma nor its leadership. Founded by a minority at a bourgeois congress, it infiltrates the ranks of the international organisation of the working class, at first attempts to dominate it and, when this plan fails, sets to work to disorganise it. It brazenly substitutes its sectarian programme and narrow ideas for the broad programme and great aspirations of our Association; it organises within the public sections of the International its own little secret sections which obey the same instructions and in a good many instances succeed in gaining control of the public sections by prearranged action; in its newspapers it publicly attacks all those who refuse to submit to its will, and by its own avowal provokes open warfare within our ranks. It resorts to any means, any disloyalty to achieve its ends; lies, slander, intimidation, the stab in the back—it finds them all equally suitable. Finally, in Russia it substitutes itself entirely for the International and commits, in its name, crimes against the common law, acts of fraud and an assassination for which the government and bourgeois press has blamed our Association. And the International must remain silent about all these acts because the society responsible for them is secret! The International has in its possession the statutes of this society, which is its mortal enemy; statutes in which it openly proclaims itself a modern Society of Jesus and declares that it has the right and the duty to practise all the methods employed by the Jesuits; statutes that explain in a flash the whole series of hostile acts to which the International has been subjected from this quarter; but the International must not make use of these statutes—that would be denouncing a secret society!

There is only one means of combating all these intrigues, but it will prove astonishingly effective; this means is complete publicity. Exposure of all these schemings in their entirety will render them utterly powerless. To protect them with our silence would be not only an act of naïveté that the leaders of the Alliance would be the first to ridicule; it would be sheer cowardice. What is more, it would be an act of treachery towards those Spanish members of the International who, while belonging to the secret Alliance, have not hesitated to divulge its existence and its mode of action, since it has set itself up in open hostility to the International. Besides, all that is contained in the secret statutes is to be found, in much more emphatic form, in the documents published in Russian by Bakunin and Nechayev themselves. The statutes are but their confirmation.

Let the ringleaders of the Alliance cry out that they have been denounced. We deliver them up to the scorn of the workers and the benevolence of the governments whom they have served so well in disorganising the proletarian movement. The Zurich Tagwacht, in a reply to Bakunin, had every right to say:

“If you are not a paid agent, the one thing quite certain is that a paid agent would never have succeeded in doing as much harm as you.”


II. The Secret Alliance

The Alliance of Socialist Democracy is entirely bourgeois in origin. It did not emerge from the International; it is the off spring of the League of Peace and Freedom, a still-born bourgeois republican society. The International was already firmly established when Mikhail Bakunin took it into his head to play the part of the proletariat’s emancipator. The International only offered him a field of activity common to all its members. In order to secure advancement there, he would have had to win his spurs by dint of hard and dedicated work; he thought he would find a better opportunity and an easier path on the side of the bourgeois members of the League.

Thus, in September 1867, he had himself elected member of the Permanent Committee of the League of Peace, and he took his part seriously; it could even be said that he and Barni, now a deputy at Versailles, were the life and soul of this committee. Posing as theoretician of the League, Bakunin was to have published under its auspices a work entitled Le fédéralisme, le socialisme et l’anti-théologisme. However, he soon realised that the League was still an insignificant society and that the liberals of which it was composed only saw in its congresses a means of combining pleasure trips with high-flown harangues, while the International, in contrast, was growing from day to day. He now dreamed of grafting the League onto the International. To put this plan into practice, Bakunin, on Elpidin’s introduction, had himself accepted in July 1868 as member of the Geneva Central Section; on the other hand, he got the League Committee to adopt a proposal suggesting that the International Congress of Brussels should form a pact of offensive and defensive alliance between the two societies; and in order that the League’s Congress should sanction this fiery initiative, he drew up, and then made the Committee endorse and distribute, a confidential circular to the “Gentlemen” of the League. In it, he admitted frankly that the League, hitherto a hopeless farce, could not gain in importance except by opposing the alliance of the oppressors with

“the alliance of the peoples, the alliance of the workers ... we will not become anything unless we wish to be the sincere and serious representatives of millions of workers.”

The providential mission of the holy League was to present a bourgeois parliament, nominated by itself, to the working class, which was invited to entrust this body with its political management.

“In order to become a beneficial and real power,” concludes the circular, “our League must become the pure political expression of the great economic and social interests and principles which are triumphantly developed and propagated today by the great International Association of the Working Men of Europe and America.”

The Congress of Brussels had the temerity to reject the League’s proposition. Bakunin’s disappointment and fury knew no bounds. On the one hand, the International was slipping out of his protection. On the other, the League’s chairman, Professor Gustav Vogt, read him a stern lecture.

“Either you were not sure,” he wrote to Bakunin, “of the effect of our invitation, in which case you have compromised our League; or you knew what a surprise your friends of the International had in store for us, in which case you have most infamously deceived us. I ask you what we are going to tell our Congress...”

Bakunin replied in a letter which anyone was invited to read.

“I could not have foreseen,” he said, “that the Congress of the International would reply with an insult as gross as it was pretentious, but this is due to the intrigues of a certain clique of Germans who detest the Russians” (verbally, he explained to his audience that this clique was Marx’s). “You ask me what we are going to do. I earnestly request the honour of replying to this gross insult on behalf of the Committee, from the platform of our Congress.”

Instead of keeping his word, Bakunin changed his tune. He proposed to the League’s Berne Congress a programme of fantasy socialism in which he called for equalisation of classes and individuals, in order to outdo the ladies of the League who had hitherto only demanded equalisation of the sexes. Defeated again, he left the Congress with an insignificant minority and went to Geneva.

The alliance of bourgeois and workers dreamed of by Bakunin was not to be limited to a public alliance. The secret statutes of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy (see Documents, No. 1) contain indications which make it clear that, in the very heart of the League, Bakunin had laid the foundations for the secret society which was to control it. Not only are the names of the governing bodies identical to those of the League (Permanent Central Committee, Central Bureau, National Committees), but the secret statutes declare that the “majority of the founder members of the Alliance” are “former members of the Berne Congress”. In order to win recognition for himself as head of the International, he had to present himself as head of another army whose absolute devotion to him was to be ensured by a secret organisation. After having openly planted his society in the International, he counted on extending its ramifications into all sections and on taking over absolute control by this means. With this aim, he founded the (public) Alliance of Socialist Democracy in Geneva. Ostensibly, this was only a public society which, although entirely absorbed by the International, was, however, to have a separate international organisation, a central committee, national bureaux, and sections independent of our Association; alongside our annual Congress, the Alliance was to hold its own publicly. But this public Alliance covered another which, in its turn, was controlled by the even more secret Alliance of the international brethren, the Bodyguard Hundred of the dictator Bakunin.

The secret statutes of the “organisation of the Alliance of the international brethren” indicate that in this Alliance there were “three grades: I. The international brethren; II. the national brethren; III. the half-secret, half-public organisation of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy”.

I. The international brethren, whose number is limited to a “hundred”, form the college of cardinals. They are subordinate to a central committee and to national committees organised into executive bureaux and supervisory committees. These committees are themselves responsible to the “constituent”, or general, assembly of at least two-thirds of the international brethren. These members of the Alliance

“have no homeland other than the world revolution, no foreign land and no enemy other than the reaction. They reject any policy of negotiation and concession, and regard as reactionary any political movement which does not have as its immediate and direct goal the triumph of their principles”.

But since this article relegates to the Greek Calends the political action of the Hundred, and since these irreconcilable ones do not intend to renounce the advantages attached to public functions, Article 8 reads:

“No brother shall accept a public post except with the consent of the Committee to which he belongs.”

We shall see, when we come to discuss Spain and Italy, how the leaders of the Alliance hastened to implement this article in practice. The international brethren

“are brethren ... each of whom must be sacred to all the others, more sacred than a blood brother. Each brother shall be helped and protected by all the others to the limits of the possible.”

The Nechayev affair will show us what this mysterious limit of the possible is.

“All the international brethren know one another. No political secret must ever exist among them. None may take part in any secret society whatever without the positive consent of his Committee and, if necessary, should the latter so demand, without that of the Central Committee. And he may take part only on condition that he reveals to them all the secrets that could interest them directly or indirectly.”

The Pietris and the Stiebers only use inferior or lost people as informers; but by sending their false brethren into secret societies to betray secrets of the latter, the Alliance imposes the role of spy on the very men who, according to its plan, should take control of the “world revolution”.— Moreover, the revolutionary buffoon crowns the ignoble with the grotesque.

“Only he may become an international brother who has sincerely accepted all the programme in all its consequences, theoretical and practical, and who adds revolutionary passion to intelligence, energy, honesty” (!) “and discretion—he who has the devil in his flesh.”

II. The national brethren are organised in each country as a national association by the international brethren and under the same plan, but in no case should they suspect even the existence of an international organisation.

III. The Secret International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, whose members are recruited everywhere, has a legislative body in the Permanent Central Committee which, when it meets, christens itself the General Secret Assembly of the Alliance. This meeting takes place once a year during the Congress of the International, or, in special cases, when convoked by the Central Bureau or else by the Geneva Central Section.

The Geneva Central Section is the “permanent delegation of the permanent Central Committee”, and the “Executive Council of the Alliance”. It is subdivided into the Central Bureau and the Supervisory Committee. The Central Bureau, consisting of 3 to 7 members, is the real executive power of the Alliance:

“it will receive its guidance from the Geneva Central Section and will pass on its communications, not to say its secret orders, to all the National Committees, from which it will receive secret reports at least once a month.”

This Central Bureau has found a way of having its cake and eating it, of being secret and public at the same time; for, as part of the

“secret central section, the Central Bureau shall be a secret organisation ... as the executive directorate of the public Alliance, it shall be a public organisation”.

And so it can be seen that Bakunin had already organised all the secret and public direction of his “dear Alliance” even before it existed, and that the members who took part in any election were only puppets in a play staged by himself. Moreover, he did not hesitate to say so, as we shall soon see.—The Geneva Central Section, whose task was to guide the Central Bureau, was itself only part of the comedy; for its decisions, although settled by majority vote, were only binding on the Bureau if the majority of its members did not wish to appeal against them to the general assembly, which it must convoke at three weeks’ notice.

“To be regular, the General Assembly, when thus convoked, must be composed of two-thirds of all its members.”

It can be seen that the Central Bureau had surrounded itself with all the constitutional guarantees necessary to ensure its independence.

One might be naive enough to believe that this autonomous Central Bureau had at least been freely elected by the Geneva Central Section. Nothing of the kind. The provisional Central Bureau had been

“presented to the Geneva initiating group as provisionally elected by all the founder members of the Alliance, of whom the majority, as former members of the Berne Congress, have returned to their countries” (except for Bakunin) “ after having delegated their powers to Citizen B.”

The founder members of the Alliance were thus nothing more than a few bourgeois secessionists from the League of Peace.

In this way, the Permanent Central Committee, which had annexed the constituent and legislative power over the whole Alliance, was nominated by itself. The permanent executive delegation of this Permanent Central Committee, the Geneva Central Section, was nominated by itself and not by this Committee. The Central Executive Bureau of this Geneva Central Section, instead of being elected by it, was imposed on it by a group of individuals who had all “delegated their powers to Citizen B.”

And so “Citizen B.” is the pivot of the Alliance. To retain his pivotal function, the secret statutes of the Alliance say literally:

“Its ostensible form of government will be that of a presidency in a federative republic”,—

a presidency prior to which the president already existed in permanent “Citizen B.”

Since the Alliance is an international society, each country is to have a National Committee formed

“of all the members of the Permanent Central Committee who belong to the same nation”.

It only requires three members to constitute a National Committee. To ensure the regularity of the hierarchical ladder,

“the National Committees will serve as the sole intermediaries between the Central Bureau and all the local groups of their country”.

The National Committees

“shall have the task of organising the Alliance in their countries so that it shall always be dominated and represented at the Congresses by members of the Permanent Central Committee”.

This is what is known in the language of the Alliance as organising from the bottom to the top. These local groups only have the right to approach the National Committees with their programmes and rules so that they might be submitted

“for confirmation by the Central Bureau, without which the local groups cannot belong to the Alliance”.

Once this despotic and hierarchic secret organisation had been injected into the International, all that remained to finish matters was to disorganise it. All it needed for this was to anarchise and autonomise its sections and transform its central organs into simple letter-boxes—”correspondence and statistical bureaus”—as was, indeed, attempted later.

The list of revolutionary services rendered by permanent “Citizen B.” was not so glorious that he could hope to make permanent in the secret Alliance, much less in the public one, the dictatorship which he had appropriated for his own convenience. He therefore had to hide it under democratic-sounding humbug. And so the secret statutes prescribe that the provisional Central Bureau (for which read the permanent citizen) will function until the Alliance’s first public general assembly, which would nominate the members of the new Permanent Central Bureau. But

“as it is urgent that the Central Bureau should always consist of members of the Permanent Central Committee, this latter, through the organ of its National Committees, will take care to organise and direct all the local groups in such a way that they will delegate to this assembly only members of the Permanent Central Committee or, failing them, men absolutely devoted to the leadership of their respective National Committees, so that the Permanent Central Committee should always have the upper hand in the entire organisation of the Alliance”.

These instructions were not given by a Bonapartist minister or prefect on the eve of the elections, but, in order to ensure his permanence, by the anti-authoritarian, quintessential, immense anarchist, the archpriest of the organisation from bottom to top, the Bayard of the autonomy of sections and the free federation of autonomous groups—Saint-Michael Bakunin.

So far we have analysed the secret organisation designed to perpetuate the dictatorship of “Citizen B.”; now let us deal with his programme.

“The association of international brethren aims for a universal revolution, simultaneously social, philosophical, economic and political, so that of the present order of things—based on private property, exploitation, and the principle of authority, whether religious, metaphysical, bourgeois-doctrinaire, or even Jacobinrevolutionary—not a stone shall remain standing, first in all Europe and then throughout the rest of the world. With the cry of peace for the workers, liberty for all the oppressed and death to the rulers, exploiters and guardians of all kinds, we seek to destroy all states and all churches along with all their institutions and laws, religious, political, juridical, financial, police, university, economic and social, so that all these millions of poor human beings, deceived, enslaved, tormented and exploited, delivered from all their directors and benefactors, official and officious, collective and individual, may breathe at last with complete freedom.”

Here indeed we have revolutionary revolutionism! The first condition for the achievement of this astounding goal is to refuse to fight the existing states and governments with the means employed by ordinary revolutionaries, but on the contrary to hurl resounding, grandiloquent phrases at

“the institution of the State and that which is both its consequence and basis—i.e., private property”.

Thus it is not the Bonapartist State, the Prussian or Russian State that has to be overthrown, but an abstract State, the State as such, a State that nowhere exists. But while the international brethren in their desperate struggle against this State that is situated somewhere in the clouds know how to avoid the truncheons, the prison and the bullets that real states deal out to ordinary revolutionaries, we see on the other hand that they have reserved themselves the right, subject only to papal dispensation, to profit by all the advantages offered by these real bourgeois states. Fanelli, an Italian deputy, Soriano, an employee of the government of Amadeus of Savoy, and perhaps Albert Richard and Gaspard Blanc, Bonapartist police agents, show how amenable the Pope is in this respect... That is why the police shows so little concern over “the Alliance or, to put it frankly, the conspiracy” of Citizen B. against the abstract idea of the state.

The first act of the revolution, then, must be to decree the abolition of the state, as Bakunin did on September 28 in Lyons, despite the fact that this abolition of the state is of necessity an authoritarian act. By the state he means all political power, revolutionary or reactionary,

“for it matters little to us that this authority calls itself church, monarchy, constitutional state, bourgeois republic, or even revolutionary dictatorship. We detest them and we reject them all alike as infallible sources of exploitation and despotism”.

And he goes on to declare that all the revolutionaries who, on the day after the revolution, want “construction of a revolutionary state” are far more dangerous than all the existing governments put together, and that

“we, the international brethren, are the natural enemies of these revolutionaries”

because to disorganise the revolution is the first duty of the international brethren.

The reply to this bragging about the immediate abolition of the state and the establishment of anarchy has already been given in the last General Council’s private circular on “Fictitious Splits in the International”, of March 1872, page 37:

“Anarchy, then, is the great war-horse of their master Bakunin, who has taken nothing from the socialist systems except a set of labels. All socialists see anarchy as the following programme: once the aim of the proletarian movement, i.e., abolition of classes, is attained, the power of the State, which serves to keep the great majority of producers in bondage to a very small exploiter minority, disappears, and the functions of government become simple administrative functions. The Alliance reverses the whole process. It proclaims anarchy in proletarian ranks as the most infallible means of breaking the powerful concentration of social and political forces in the hands of the exploiters. Under this pretext, it asks the International, at a time when the old world is seeking a way of crushing it, to replace its organisation with anarchy.”

Let us see, however, just what the consequences of the anarchist gospel are; let us suppose the state has been abolished by decree. According to Article 6, the consequences of this act will be: the bankruptcy of the state, an end to the payment of private debts by the intervention of the state, an end to the payment of all taxes and all contributions, the dissolution of the army, the magistrature, the bureaucracy, the police and the clergy (!); the abolition of official justice, accompanied by an auto-da-fé of all title-deeds and all judicial and civil junk, the confiscation of all productive capital and instruments of labour for the benefit of the workers’ associations and an alliance of these associations, which “will form the Commune”. This Commune will give individuals thus dispossessed the strict necessaries of life, while granting them freedom to earn more by their own labour.

What happened at Lyons has proved that merely decreeing the abolition of the state is far from sufficient to accomplish all these fine promises. Two companies of the bourgeois National Guards proved quite sufficient, on the other hand, to shatter this splendid dream and send Bakunin hurrying back to Geneva with the miraculous decree in his pocket. Naturally he could not imagine his supporters to be so stupid that they need not be given some sort of plan of organisation that would put his decree into practical effect. Here is the plan:

“For the organisation of the Commune—a federation of permanently acting barricades and the functioning of a Council of the Revolutionary Commune by the delegation of one or two deputies from each barricade, and one per street, or per block, these deputies being invested with imperative mandates and always responsible and revocable at any time” (odd barricades, these barricades of the Alliance, where instead of fighting they spend their time writing mandates). “The Commune Council, thus organised, will be able to elect from its membership special Executive Committees for each branch of the revolutionary administration of the Commune.”

The insurgent capital, thus constituted as a Commune, then proclaims to the other communes of the country that it renounces all claim to govern them; it invites them to reorganise themselves in a revolutionary way and then to send their responsible and recallable deputies, vested with their imperative mandates, to an agreed place where they will set up a federation of insurgent associations, communes and provinces and organise a revolutionary force capable of triumphing over reaction. This organisation will not be confined to the communes of the insurgent country; other provinces or countries will be able to take part in it, while “the provinces, communes, associations and individuals that side with the reaction shall be debarred from it”.

So the abolition of frontiers goes hand in hand with the most benevolent tolerance towards the reactionary provinces, which would not hesitate to resume the civil war.

Thus in this anarchistic organisation of the tribune-barricades we have first the Commune Council, then the executive committees which, to be able to be anything at all, must be vested with some power and supported by a public force; this is to be followed by nothing short of a federal parliament, whose principal object will be to organise this public force. Like the Commune Council, this parliament will have to assign executive power to one or more committees which by this act alone will be given an authoritarian character that the demands of the struggle will increasingly accentuate. We are thus confronted with a perfect reconstruction of all the elements of the “authoritarian State”; and the fact that we call this machine a “revolutionary Commune organised from bottom to top”, makes little difference. The name changes nothing of the substance; organisation from bottom to top exists in any bourgeois republic and imperative mandates date from the Middle

Ages. Indeed Bakunin himself admits as much when (in Article 8) he describes his organisation as a “new revolutionary State”.

As for the practical value of this plan of revolution with its talking instead of fighting, we shall say nothing.

Now we shall reveal the secret of all the Alliance’s double and triple-bottomed boxes. To make sure that the orthodox programme is adhered to and that anarchy behaves itself properly,

“it is necessary that in the midst of popular anarchy, which will constitute the very life and energy of the revolution, unity of revolutionary idea and action should find an organ. This organ must be the secret and world association of the international brethren.

“This association proceeds from the conviction that revolutions are never made either by individuals or by secret societies. They come about, as it were, of their own accord, produced by the force of things, by the course of events and facts. They are prepared over a long time deep in the instinctive consciousness of the popular masses, and then they flare up.... All that a well-organised secret society can do is, first, to assist in the birth of the revolution by spreading among the masses ideas corresponding to their instincts, and to organise, not the army of the revolution—the army must always be the people” (cannon fodder), “but a revolutionary General Staff composed of devoted, energetic, intelligent and above all sincere friends of the people, who are not ambitious or vain, and who are capable of serving as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea” (monopolised by them) “and the popular instincts.”

“The number of these individuals should not, therefore, be too large. For the international organisation in the whole of Europe a hundred firmly and seriously united revolutionaries would be sufficient. Two or three hundred revolutionaries would be enough for the organisation of the biggest country.”

So everything changes. Anarchy, the “unleashing of popular life”, of “evil passions” and all the rest is no longer enough. To assure the success of the revolution one must have unity of thought and action. The members of the International are trying to create this unity by propaganda, by discussion and the public organisation of the proletariat. But all Bakunin needs is a secret organisation of one hundred people, the privileged representatives of the revolutionary idea, the general staff in the background, self-appointed and commanded by the permanent “Citizen B”. Unity of thought and action means nothing but orthodoxy and blind obedience. Perinde ac cadaver We are indeed confronted with a veritable Society of Jesus.

To say that the hundred international brethren must “serve as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and the popular instincts”, is to create an unbridgeable gulf between the Alliance’s revolutionary idea and the proletarian masses; it means proclaiming that these hundred guardsmen cannot be recruited anywhere but from among the privileged classes.


III. The Alliance in Switzerland

The Alliance, like Falstaff, found that “the better part of valour is discretion”. Also, the “devil in the flesh” of the international brethren did not prevent them from deferring humbly in every way to the power of the existing States, while protesting vigorously against the institution of the abstract State; but he directed their attacks solely against the International. First, they wanted to dominate it. Having failed to do so, they tried to disorganise it. We shall now show their activities in the different countries.

The international brethren were merely a general staff in the reserve: they lacked an army. They considered the International created to that end. If they were to be allowed to take command of an army, they had to insinuate the public Alliance into the International. Fearing that the former might lose face if they applied to the General Council for admission, which would be tantamount to recognising its authority, they approached the Belgian and Paris Federal Councils several times and without success. These repeated refusals forced the Alliance to ask the General Council, on December 15, 1868, for affiliation. They sent their statutes and their programme in which they openly announced their intentions (Documents, No. 2). Although the Alliance declared itself “entirely absorbed by the International” it aspired to form a second international corps within the International. Alongside the International’s General Council, elected by the Congresses, there was to be the Alliance’s Central Committee, which would sit at Geneva and would be self-nominated; alongside the International’s local groups, there would be the Alliance’s local groups which, through the intermediary of their national bureaux, functioning outside the national bureaux of the International, “would apply to the Alliance’s Central Bureau for their admission into the International”. The Central Bureau of the Alliance was, then, appropriating the right of admittance to the International. Alongside the Congresses of the International, there were to be the Congresses of the Alliance, for “during the annual working men’s Congresses, the Alliance’s delegation” aspired to hold “its public sittings in separate premises”.

On December 22, the General Council (in a letter published in its circular: Fictitious Splits in the International, p. 7) stating that these aspirations were in flagrant contradiction to the International’s rules, flatly rejected the affiliation of the Alliance. Several months later, the Alliance again applied to the General Council and demanded to know whether its principles were acceptable or not. In case of an affirmative answer, it declared itself prepared to dissolve and break up into simple sections of the International. On March 9, 1869, the General Council (see Fictitious Splits in the International, p. 8) replied that for it to pronounce on the scientific value of the Alliance’s programme would be to exceed its functions, and that if “equalisation of classes” was replaced by “abolition of classes”, there would be no obstacle to converting the sections of the Alliance into sections of the International. It added:

“ The dissolution of the Alliance and the entrance of its sections into the International once settled, it would, according to our Regulations, become necessary to inform the Council of the seat and the numerical strength of each new section?’

On June 22, 1869, the Geneva section of the Alliance announced to the General Council as a fait accompli the dissolution of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, all of whose sections had been invited “to transform themselves into the International sections”. After this explicit declaration, and misled by some signatures on the programme which gave the impression that the Alliance had been recognised by the Romance Federal Committee, the General Council admitted it. It should be added that not one of the conditions accepted had ever been fulfilled, far from it: the secret organisation hidden behind the public Alliance now went into full action. Behind the International’s Geneva section was the Central Bureau of the secret Alliance; behind the International’s sections of Naples, Barcelona, Lyons and Jura hid the secret sections of the Alliance. Relying on this free-masonry, whose existence was suspected neither by the mass of the International’s membership nor by their administrative centres, Bakunin hoped to win control of the International at the Basle Congress in September 1869. At this Congress, thanks to its dishonest methods, the secret Alliance found itself represented by at least ten delegates, including the famous Albert Richard and Bakunin himself. They had brought with them a number of blank mandates which could not be used owing to the lack of reliable people, although they were offered to the Basle members of the International. Even this numerical strength, however, was not enough to make Congress sanction the abolition of the right of inheritance, that relic of Saint-Simon which Bakunin wanted to use as the practical point of departure for socialism; much less was it able to impose on the Congress his dream of transferring the General Council from London to Geneva.

Meanwhile, there was open war in Geneva between the Romance Federal Committee, almost unanimously supported by the Geneva members of the International, and the Alliance. The latter’s allies in this war were Le Progrès of Locle edited by James Guillaume, and L’Egalité of Geneva which, although an official organ of the Romance Federal Committee, was edited by a committee which mainly consisted of the Alliance members and attacked the Romance Federal Committee at every possible opportunity. Without losing sight of its great aim—the transfer of the seat of the General Council to Geneva—the editorial board of L’Égalité launched a campaign against the existing General Council and invited Le Travail of Paris to lend its support. In its circular of January 1, 1870, the General Council declared that it considered it unnecessary to enter into controversy with these newspapers. Meanwhile, the Romance Federal Committee had already removed the Alliance members from the editorial board of L’Égalité.

At this stage, the sect had not yet donned its anti-authoritarian mask. Believing that it would be able to take over the General Council, it was the first, at the Basle Congress, to put forward and edit the administrative resolutions conceding to the latter the “authoritarian powers” which it was to attack so violently two years later. Nothing gives a clearer picture of its idea of the General Council’s authoritarian role than the following extract from Le Progrès of Locle edited by James Guillaume (December 4, 1869) concerning the conflict between the Social-Demokrat and Der Volksstaat:

“It seems to us that it should be the duty of our Association’s General Council to intervene, to open an inquiry into what is happening in Germany, to decide between Schweitzer and Liebknecht, and thereby put a stop to the uncertainty into which we are thrown by this strange situation.”

Is it possible to believe that this is the same Guillaume who, in a circular from Sonvillier on November 12, 1871, reproached this same General Council, which had not been authoritarian enough previously, for having “wanted to introduce the principle of authority into the International”?

Ever since they began to appear, the Alliance’s newspapers had not confined themselves to propagating its special programme, in which no one could have seen any harm; but they insisted on creating and interposing a premeditated confusion between its own programme and that of the International. This occurred wherever the Alliance was running, or collaborating with, a newspaper—in Spain, in Switzerland, in Italy; but it was in the Russian publications that the system reached perfection.

The sect struck a decisive blow during the Congress of the Romance Federation at La Chaux-de-Fonds (April 4, 1870). It was a matter of forcing the Geneva sections to recognise the public Alliance of Geneva as being part of the federation and of transferring the Federal Committee and its organ to a locality in Jura where the secret Alliance was in control.

When the Congress opened, two delegates from the “Alliance section” asked to be admitted. The Geneva delegates proposed the deferment of this matter until the end of the Congress and the immediate discussion of the programme as more important. They declared that their imperative mandate ordered them to resign rather than admit this section to their group

“in view of the intrigues and domineering tendencies of the Alliance people, and because to vote for the admission of the Alliance would be to vote for a split in the Romance Federation”.

But the Alliance did not want to miss this opportunity. The proximity of the little Jura sections had enabled them to obtain a feeble fictitious majority, since Geneva and the big centres of the International were only very weakly represented. On the insistence of Guillaume and Schwitzguebel, the section was admitted by a majority contested by only one or two votes. The Geneva delegates received from all the sections, which were immediately consulted by telegraph, the order to withdraw from the Congress. With the International’s members at La Chaux-de-Fonds supporting the Genevans, the members of the Alliance had to leave the premises of the Congress, since they belonged to the local sections. Although, according to their own organ (see La Solidarité for May 7, 1870), they only represented fifteen sections, whereas Geneva alone had thirty, they usurped the name of the Romance Congress, nominated a new Romance Federal Committee, in which Chevalley and Cagnon distinguished themselves, and promoted Guillaume’s La Solidarité to the rank of the Romance Federation’s organ. This young schoolmaster had the special mission of decrying “the factory workers” of Geneva, those odious “bourgeois”, of making war on L’Égalité, the newspaper of the Romance Federation, and of preaching absolute abstention in political matters. The most notable articles on this latter subject were written by Bastelica at Marseilles, and by the two pillars of the Alliance at Lyons, Albert Richard and Gaspard Blanc, Incidentally, the short-lived and fictitious majority of the Congress at La Chaux-de-Fonds had acted in flagrant violation of the statutes of the Romance Federation which it claimed to represent; and it should be noted that the Alliance’s leaders had played an important part in compiling these statutes. Under articles 53 and 55, any important decision by the Congress, to acquire force of law, had to be sanctioned by two-thirds of the federal sections. Now the sections of Geneva and La Chaux-deFonds alone, which had declared themselves opposed to the Alliance, constituted over two-thirds of the total number. At two big general meetings, the International’s Geneva members, in spite of opposition from Bakunin and his friends, almost unanimously approved the conduct of their delegates who, to general applause, suggested to the Alliance that it should stay where it belonged and give up its ambitions of entering the Romance Federation; on this condition, reconciliation could be achieved. Later, some disillusioned members of the Alliance proposed its dissolution, but Bakunin and his acolytes opposed this with all their might. Nevertheless, the Alliance continued to insist on joining the Romance Federation, which was then forced to decide on the expulsion of Bakunin and the other ringleaders.

And so there were now two Romance Federal committees, one at Geneva, the other at La Chaux-de-Fonds. The vast majority of the sections remained loyal to the former, while the latter had a following of only fifteen sections, many of which, as we shall see later, ceased to exist one by one.

Hardly had the Romance Congress closed, when the new Committee at La Chaux-de-Fonds in a letter signed by F. Robert, secretary, and Henri Chevalley, chairman (see note above, p. 474), called for the intervention of the General Council. After examining the documents submitted by both sides, the General Council decided, on June 28, 1870, to let the Geneva Committee retain its old functions, and to invite the new Federal Committee of La Chaux-de-Fonds to adopt a local name. Disappointed in its hopes by this decision, the Committee of La Chaux-de-Fonds denounced the General Council for authoritarianism, forgetting that it had been the first to ask for the latter’s intervention. The trouble caused to the Swiss Federation by this persistence in trying to usurp the name of the Romance Federal Committee forced the General Council to suspend all official relations with the Committee of La Chaux-de-Fonds.

On September 4, 1870, the Republic was proclaimed in Paris. The Alliance felt that the hour had come to “unchain the revolutionary hydra in Switzerland” (Guillaume’s style). La Solidarité launched a manifesto demanding the formation of Swiss volunteers to fight the Prussians. This manifesto, if we are to believe the pedagogue Guillaume, although “in no way anonymous”, was nevertheless “unsigned”. Unfortunately, all the Alliance’s belligerent fervour evaporated after the seizure of the newspaper and the manifesto. “But I,” exclaimed the seething Guillaume, who was burning to “risk his neck”, “I have remained at my post ... by the newspaper’s printing press” (Bulletin jurassien, June 15, 1872).

The revolutionary movement in Lyons was just flaring up. Bakunin hastened to rejoin his lieutenant, Albert Richard, and his sergeants, Bastelica and Gaspard Blanc. On September 28, the day of his arrival, the people had occupied the Town Hall. Bakunin installed himself there. And then came the critical moment, moment anticipated for many years, when Bakunin could at last accomplish the most revolutionary act that the world had ever seen: he decreed the Abolition of the State. But the State, in the shape and form of two companies of bourgeois National Guards, made an entry through a door which had inadvertently been left unguarded, cleared the hall, and forced Bakunin to beat a hasty retreat to Geneva.

At the very moment when the belligerent Guillaume was defending the September Republic “at his post”, his faithful Achates, Robin, fled from this Republic and sought refuge in London. Although aware that he was one of the Alliance’s most fanatic supporters and, moreover, the author of the attacks launched against it in L’Egalité, and in spite of the reports from the Brest sections on Robin’s far from courageous conduct, the General Council accepted him owing to the absence of its French members. From that moment on, Robin never ceased to act as the officious correspondent of the Committee of La Chaux-de-Fonds. On March 14, 1871, he proposed convoking a private conference of the International to clear up the Swiss dispute. The Council, realising in advance that great events were brewing in Paris, flatly refused. Robin made several more attempts and even proposed that the Council should make a definite decision on the dispute. On July 25, the General Council decided that this matter should be one of the questions submitted to the Conference which was to be convoked in September 1871.

On August 10, the Alliance, little desirous of seeing its activities scrutinised by a conference, announced that it had been dissolved as from the sixth of that month. However, reinforced by a few French refugees, it soon reappeared under other names, such as the “Section of Socialist Atheists” and the “Section of Propaganda and Revolutionary Socialist Action”. In conformity with Resolution V of the Basle Congress and by agreement with the Romance Federal Committee, the General Council refused to recognise these sections, which were new hotbeds of intrigue.

The London Conference (September 1871) confirmed the General Council’s decision of June 28, 1870 concerning the Jura dissidents.

La Solidarité had ceased to exist, and the new adherents of the Alliance founded La Révolution Sociale, one of whose contributors was Mme. André Léo. At the Congress of the League of Peace in Lausanne, when Ferré was in prison waiting for the time when he would go to Satory, she had declared that

Raoul Rigault and Ferré were the two sinister figures of the Commune who, until then” (the execution of the hostages) “had not ceased to demand bloody measures, though always unsuccessfully”.

From its first issue, this newspaper had striven to put itself on the same level as Le Figaro, Le Gaulois, and Le Paris-Journal and other filthy rags by republishing their scurrilous attacks on the General Council. It now considered the time ripe for fanning the flames of national hatred even within the International itself. According to it, the General Council was a German committee master-minded by a Bismarck.

With its three resolutions concerning the Swiss dispute, the political action of the working class, and the public disowning of Nechayev, the Conference had hit the Alliance hard. The first of these resolutions placed the blame directly on the pseudoRomance Committee at La Chaux-de-Fonds and approved the action of the General Council. It advised the Jura sections to join the Romance Federation, and in the event of this union not proving possible, it decided that the sections representing the mountains should take the name of the Jura Federation. It was stated that if their committee continued its newspaper war in front of the bourgeois public, these papers would be disowned by the General Council.—The second resolution, on the political action of the working class, nullified the confusion which Bakunin had wished to cause in the International by inserting into his programme the doctrine of absolute abstention in political matters.—The third resolution, on Nechayev, was a direct threat to Bakunin. It will be seen later, when we discuss Russia, to what extent Bakunin was personally interested in hiding the nefarious deeds of the Alliance from Western Europe.

The Alliance rightly saw this as a declaration of war, and immediately went into action. The Jura sections which supported the pseudo-Romance committee met in Congress on November 12, 1871 at Sonvillier. There were sixteen delegates present who claimed to represent nine sections. In accordance with the report by the Federal Committee, the Courtelary section, represented by two delegates, “had suspended its activities”; the central section of Locle “had ended by dissolving itself”, but had temporarily reconstituted itself in order to send two delegates to the Congress of sixteen; the section representing the engravers and guillocheurs of Courtelary (two delegates) “formed as a resistance society” outside the International; the propaganda section of La Chaux-de-Fonds (one delegate) “is in a critical situation, and its position, far from improving, tends rather to deteriorate”. The central section of Neuchâtel (two delegates, one of them Guillaume) “has suffered considerably, and would have inevitably fallen, but for the dedication of several members”. The two social study circles of Sonvillier and Saint-Imier (four delegates) in the district of Courtelary were formed, according to the report, due to the dissolution of the Courtelary central section; now, the few members of this district had themselves represented three times, and by six delegates! The Moutier section (one delegate) seemed only to consist of its Committee. And so of sixteen delegates, fourteen represented dead or moribund sections. But to gain some idea of the damage done to this federation by the preaching of anarchy, one must read this report a little further. Of twenty-two sections, only nine were represented at the Congress; seven had never replied to any of the Committee’s communications, and four were declared well and truly defunct. And this is the federation which believed itself called to shake the International to its very foundations!

The Congress of Sonvillier began, however, by submitting to the London Conference, which had imposed on it the name of the Jura Federation; but at the same time, as proof of anarchism, it declared that the whole of the Romance Federation was dissolved. (The latter restored autonomy to the Jurassians by driving them out of the sections.) The Congress then put out its bombastic circular with the principal aim of protesting against the legality of the Conference and of appealing to a general Congress which should be convoked as soon as possible.

The circular accused the International of having deviated from its spirit, which was no less than “an immense protest against authority”. Until the Congress of Brussels, everything had been for the best in the best of all possible societies; but at Basle, the delegates lost their heads and, prey to “blind trust”, they “violated the spirit and the letter of the general statutes” in which the autonomy of each section and each group of sections had been so clearly proclaimed. Now the International had written the word authority on its banners, but the Jura Federation, that puppet of the Alliance, had written autonomy of the sections. We have already seen how the Alliance means to put this autonomy into practice.

The sins of the Basle Congress were exceeded even more by those of the London Conference, whose resolutions

“tend to turn the International, a free federation of autonomous sections, into an hierarchic and authoritarian organisation of disciplined sections placed entirely under the control of the General Council which can arbitrarily either refuse to admit them or suspend their work”.

The members of the Alliance who drew up this circular evidently forgot that their secret rules were only made to consolidate an “hierarchic and authoritarian organisation” dominated by permanent “Citizen B.”, and that instructions were being given in it to “discipline” the sections and place them not only “in the hands”, but under “the high hand”, of that same “citizen”.

If the sins of the Conference were mortal, then the sin of sins, the sin against the holy spirit, was committed by the General Council. There were “several individuals” in it who considered their

“mandate” (as Council members) “to be their own private property, and London seemed to them the immutable capital of our Association.... Some went so far ... as to make their particular programme, their personal tenets the predominant ones in the International ... as the only official theory acknowledged in the Association ... and in this way an orthodoxy gradually formed with its seat at London and the members of the General Council as its representatives.”

In short, they wanted to establish the unity of the International by “centralisation and dictatorship”.— In this same circular, the Alliance aspired to dominate the International “with its own particular programme”, declaring it to be “an immense protest against authority” and proclaiming that the emancipation of the workers by the workers themselves must be achieved “without any controlling authority, even though this authority has been elected and sanctioned by the workers”. We shall see that wherever the Alliance had any influence, it did exactly what it falsely accused the General Council of doing—it tried to impose its ridiculous travesty of a theory as “the only official theory acknowledged in the Association”.—This only affected the Alliance’s public and open activities. As for its secret activities, “the spirit and the letter” of the secret statutes have already enlightened us concerning the degree of “orthodoxy”, of “personal doctrine”, of “centralisation” and of “dictatorship” which reigned in this “free federation of autonomous groups”. We fully realise that the Alliance wanted to prevent the working class from creating for itself a common leadership, since Bakunin’s providence had already foreseen this when setting up his Alliance as the general staff of the revolution.

Far from wanting to impose an orthodoxy on the International, the General Council had proposed at the London Conference that the sectarian names of certain sections should be abolished, and this proposition was accepted unanimously.

Here is the General Council’s statement on sects in its private circular (Fictitious Splits, p. 24).

“The first phase of the proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie is marked by a sectarian movement. That is logical at a time when the proletariat has not yet developed sufficiently to act as a class. Certain thinkers criticise social antagonisms and suggest fantastic solutions thereof, which the mass of workers is left to accept, preach and put into practice. The sects formed by these initiators are abstentionist by their very nature, i.e., alien to all real action, politics, strikes, coalitions, or, in a word, to any united movement. The mass of the proletariat always remains indifferent or even hostile to their propaganda. The Paris and Lyons workers did not want the Saint-Simonians, the Fourierists, the Icarians, any more than the Chartists and the English trades unionists wanted the Owenists. These sects act as levers of the movement in the beginning, but become an obstruction as soon as the movement outgrows them; after which they become reactionary. Witness the sects in France and England, and lately the Lassalleans in Germany who, after having hindered the proletariat’s organisation for several years, ended by becoming simple instruments of the police. To sum up, we have here the infancy of the proletarian movement, just as astrology and alchemy are the infancy of science. If the International were to be founded it was necessary that the proletariat Would go through this phase.

“Contrary to the sectarian organisations with their vagaries and rivalries, the International is a genuine and militant organisation of the proletarian class of all countries united in their common struggle against the capitalists and the landowners, against their class power organised in the state. The International’s Rules, therefore, speak of only simple ‘working men’s societies’, all following the same goal and accepting the same programme, which presents a general outline of the proletarian movement, while leaving its theoretical elaboration to be guided by the needs of the practical struggle and the exchange of ideas in the sections, unrestrictedly admitting all shades of socialist convictions in their organs and Congresses.”

The Alliance did not want the International to be a militant society. The circular demanded that it should be the faithful image of the future society:

“We must therefore try to bring this organisation as close as possible to our ideal.... The International, embryo of the future human society, must henceforth be the faithful image of our principles of liberty and federation, and must reject any principle leading to authoritarianism, to dictatorship.”

If the Jura Federation had succeeded in its plan to transform the International into the faithful image of a society which did not yet exist, and to forbid it any means of concerted action, with the secret aim of subjecting it to the “authoritarianism and dictatorship” of the Alliance and its permanent dictator, “Citizen B.”, this would have gratified the desires of the European police, who wanted nothing more than to see the International forced to retreat.

To prove to their former colleagues of the League of Peace and to the radical bourgeoisie that the campaign which they had just launched was directed against the International and not against the bourgeoisie, the men of the Alliance sent their circular to all the radical newspapers. M. Gambetta’s La République française hastened to acknowledge their services with an article full of encouragement for the Jurassians and attacks on the London Conference. The Bulletin jurassien, happy to have found this support in the bourgeois press, reproduced in extenso this article in its issue No.,a thus showing that the ultra-revolutionary members of the Alliance and the Gambettists of Versailles were united by an entente that was indeed cordiale. To spread more widely among the bourgeoisie the welcome tidings of an incipient split in the International, the Sonvillier circular was sold in the streets of several French cities, notably Montpellier, on market day. It is known that the sale of printed matter on the streets, in France, must be authorised by the police.*

This circular was distributed by the bale wherever the Alliance thought it could recruit friends and malcontents against the General Council. The result was almost negligible. The Spanish members of the Alliance declared themselves opposed to the convocation of the Congress as demanded by the circular and even had the audacity to send reprimands to the Pope. In Italy, only one person, Terzaghi, declared himself in favour of the Congress for a while. In Belgium, where there were no known members of the Alliance, but where the International’s entire movement was floundering in a morass of bourgeois phrases about political abstention, autonomy, liberty, federation, and decentralisation and was stuck fast in its own petty parochial interests, the circular had some success. Although the Belgian Federal Council abstained from supporting the convocation of an extraordinary General Congress—which, incidentally, would have been absurd, since Belgium had been represented by six delegates at the Conference—it drew up draft general statutes which simply suppressed the General Council. When this proposition was discussed at the Belgian Congress, the delegate for Lodelinsart observed that the best criterion, for the workers, was the mood of their employers. To judge solely by the joy which the idea of suppressing the General Council engendered among the employers, it could be claimed that it was impossible to

“commit a bigger blunder than to decree this suppression”.

The proposition was consequently rejected. In Switzerland, the Romance Federation protested vigorously, but everywhere else the circular was merely received with the silence of contempt.

The General Council replied to the Sonvillier Circular and to the Alliance’s continual manoeuvrings with a ‘ private circular: Fictitious Splits in the International dated March 5, 1872. A large part of this circular has been summarised above. The Hague Congress effectively dealt with these intrigues and with the intriguers themselves.

Indeed, these men who made a noise out of all proportion to their importance, met with indisputable success. The whole of the liberal and police press openly sided with them; in their personal defamation of the General Council and their impotent attacks on the International, they were backed by self-styled reformers from all countries: in England, by the bourgeois republicans whose intrigues were foiled by the General Council; in Italy, by the dogmatic free-thinkers who, under Stefanoni’s banner, proposed to found a “universal society of rationalists” with an obligatory seat at Rome, an “authoritarian” and “hierarchic” organisation, atheist monasteries and convents, etc., and whose statutes award a marble bust to be installed in the Congress hall for every bourgeois who donates ten thousand francs; finally, in Germany, by the Bismarckian socialists who, apart from their police newspaper, the Neuer Social-Demokrat, act as whiteshirts for the Prusso-German Empire.

When La Revolution Sociale ceased publication, the Alliance used as its official press organ the Bulletin jurassien which, under the pretext of protecting the autonomous sections against the authoritarianism of the General Council and against the usurpations of the London Conference, was working to disorganise the International. Its issue of March 20, 1872 frankly averred that

“by International it does not mean this or that organisation embracing part of the proletariat today. Organisations are secondary and transitory.... The International is, to put it more generally, the feeling of solidarity among the exploited which dominates the modern world”.

The International reduced to a pure “feeling of solidarity” will be even more platonic than Christian charity. To give proof of the honest methods applied by the Bulletin, we quote the following passage from a letter by Tokarzewicz, editor-in-chief of the Polish newspaper Wolnosc in Zurich:

“In the Bulletin jurassien No. 13, there is a programme of the Polish Socialist Society of Zurich which will publish its newspaper Wolnosc in a few days. We authorise you, three days after the receipt of this letter, to inform the International’s General Council that the programme is false.”

The issue of this Bulletin for June 15 contains the answers from the Alliance members (Bakunin, Malon, Claris, Guillaume, etc.) to the General Council’s private circular. Their answers do not answer any of the accusations which the General Council brought against the Alliance and its leaders. The pope, at a loss for explanations, decided to close the debate by calling the circular “a pile of filth”.

“Moreover,” he declared, “I have always reserved the right to bring all my calumniators before a jury of honour, which the next Congress will doubtless not refuse me. And as soon as this jury OFFERS ME all the guarantees of an impartial and serious trial, I will be able to reveal to it, with all the necessary details, all the facts, both political and personal, without fearing the inconveniences and dangers of an indiscreet disclosure.”

Needless to say, Citizen B. risked his neck—as usual. He did not appear at The Hague.

The Congress was drawing near, and the Alliance knew that before it was held, a report was to be published on the Nechayev affair. Citizen Utin had been commissioned by the Conference to compile it. It was of vital importance that this report should not be published before the Congress, so that the members would not be fully informed about it. Citizen Utin went to Zurich to carry out his task. Hardly had he settled there, when he was the victim of an assassination attempt which we unhesitatingly ascribe to the Alliance. In Zurich, Utin had no enemies apart from a few Slavs of the Alliance under the “high hand” of Bakunin. Moreover, the organisation of ambushes and assassinations is one of the methods of struggle recognised and employed by this society; we shall see other examples in Spain and Russia. Eight persons who spoke a Slavonic language lay in wait for Utin in an isolated spot near a canal. When he drew near them, they attacked him from behind, hit him repeatedly on the head with large stones, inflicted a dangerous wound on one of his eyes, and would have killed him and thrown him into the canal after first beating him up, had it not been for the arrival of four German students. On seeing them, the assassins fled. This attempt did not prevent Citizen Utin from finishing his work and sending it to the Congress.


IV. The Alliance in Spain

After the Congress of the League of Peace held at Berne in September 1868, Fanelli, one of the Alliance’s founders and a member of the Italian parliament, went to Madrid. He had been furnished with references by Bakunin for Garrido, deputy at Cortès, who put him in touch with republican circles, bourgeois and working-class alike. A short while after, in November of that year, Alliance membership cards were sent from Geneva to Morago, Cordova y Lopez (republican with ambitions of becoming a deputy and the editor of the Combate, a bourgeois newspaper), and to Rubau Donadeu (unsuccessful candidate for Barcelona, founder of a pseudo-socialist party). The knowledge of the arrival of these membership cards threw the young international section of Madrid into confusion. President Jalvo withdrew, not wanting to belong to an association which harboured a secret society composed of bourgeois and which allowed itself to be ruled by that society.

As early as the Basle Congress, the Spanish International had been represented by two Alliance members, Farga Pellicer and Sentiiïon, the latter being featured on the official list of delegates as “delegate for the Alliance”. After the Congress of the Spanish International in Barcelona (June 1870), the Alliance established itself at Palma, Valencia, Malaga and Cadiz. In 1871, sections were founded at Seville and Cordoba. At the beginning of 1871, Morago and Vifias, delegates of the Barcelona Alliance, suggested to members of the Federal Council (Francisco Mora, Angel Mora, Anselmo Lorenzo, Borrell, etc.) ... the foundation of an Alliance section in Madrid; but the latter objected, saying that the Alliance was a dangerous society if it was secret, and useless if it was public. For the second time, the mere mention of the name was enough to sow the seeds of discord in the heart of the Federal Council; Borrell even uttered these prophetic words:

"From now on, all trust between us is dead."

But when government persecution forced the members of the Federal Council to emigrate to Portugal, it was there that Morago succeeded in convincing them of the usefulness of this secret association, and it was there that the Alliance section of Madrid was founded at their initiative. At Lisbon, a few Portuguese, who were members of the International, were affiliated to the Alliance by Morago. Finding, however, that these newcomers did not offer him enough guarantees, he founded, without their knowledge, another Alliance group consisting of the worst elements among the bourgeois and the workers, recruited from the freemasons. This new group, which included an unfrocked curate named Bonança, attempted to organise the International by sections of ten members who, under its direction, were to help carry out the schemes of the Comte de Péniche, and whom this political intriguer managed to drag into a dangerous venture of which the sole aim was to put him in power. In view of the Alliance intrigues in Portugal and Spain, the Portuguese members of the International withdrew from this secret society and at the Hague Congress they pressed for its expulsion from the International as a public safety measure.

At the Conference of the Spanish International at Valencia (September 1871), the Alliance delegates, also delegates of the International as always, gave their secret society a complete organisation for the Iberian peninsula. The majority of them, believing that the Alliance programme was identical to that of the International, that this secret organisation existed everywhere, that it was almost a duty to join it, and that the Alliance was striving to develop and not dominate the International, decided that all the members of the Federal Council should be initiated. As soon as Morago, who until then had not dared to return to Spain, heard about this fact, he came to Madrid in all haste and accused Mora of “wanting to subordinate the Alliance to the International”, which was contrary to the Alliance’s intentions. And to give weight to this opinion, he let Mesa read, the following January, a letter from Bakunin in which the latter evolved a Machiavellian plan for domination over the working class. This plan was as follows:

“The Alliance must appear to exist within the International, but in reality at a certain distance from it, in order better to observe and control it. For this reason, members who belong to Councils and Committees of International sections must always be in the minority in the Alliance sections.” (Statement by José Mesa, dated September 1, 1872, addressed to the Hague Congress).

At a meeting of the Alliance, Morago accused Mesa of having betrayed Bakunin’s society by initiating all the members of the Federal Council, which gave them a majority in the Alliance section and established, in fact, the domination of the International over the Alliance. To avoid this domination, the secret instructions prescribed that only one or two Alliance members should infiltrate into the councils or committees of the International and control them under the direction and with the support of the Alliance section where all resolutions were passed which the International ought to adopt.— From that moment, Morago declared war on the Federal Council and, as in Portugal, founded a new Alliance section which remained unknown to those under suspicion. The initiates at various points in Spain backed him up and began to accuse the Federal Council of neglecting its duties to the Alliance, as is proved by a circular from the Valencia Alliance section (January 30, 1872) signed “Damon”, Montoro’s Alliance pseudonym.

When the Sonvillier circular arrived, the Spanish Alliance took care not to side with Jura. Even the mother section of Barcelona, in an official letter of November 14, 1871, treated pope Michael, whom it suspected of personal rivalry with Karl Marx,* very curtly and in an altogether heretic manner.

“The present General Council cannot last beyond next year’s Congress, and its baneful activities can only be temporary.... A public rupture, on the contrary, would deal our cause a blow from which it would only recover with difficulty, assuming it resisted. We cannot, then, encourage in any way your separatist tendencies... Some of us have wondered if, apart from the question of principle, there might not also be in it, or alongside it, personal problems —problems of rivalry, for instance, between our friend Michael and Karl Marx, between the members of the old A. and the General Council.. We have been distressed to see, in La Révolution Sociale, the attacks on the General Council and Karl Marx... When we know the opinion The Federal Council supported this letter, which shows how little influence the Swiss centre had in Spain at the time. But afterwards it was noticeable that grace had fallen on the recalcitrant hearts. At a meeting of the Madrid Federation of the International (January 7, 1872), at which the Sonvillier circular was discussed, the new group, headed by Morago, prevented the reading of the Romance Federation’s counter-circular and suppressed the discussion. On February 24, Rafar (Alliance pseudonym of Rafael Farga) wrote to the Alliance’s Madrid section:

“It is essential to kill the reactionary influences and authoritarian tendencies of the General Council.”

However, it was only at Palma in Majorca that the Alliance was able to achieve the public adherence of the International’s members to the Jura circular. It can be seen that ecclesiastical discipline was beginning to break the last attempts at resistance to the infallibility of the pope.

Faced with all this underground work, the Spanish Federal Council realised that it must get rid of the Alliance as soon as possible. The government persecutions furnished it with a pretext. In the event of the International’s dissolution, it proposed to form secret groups of “defenders of the International” into which the Alliance sections would imperceptibly merge. The introduction of numerous members was bound to change the character of the sections, and they would finally disappear with these groups on the day when the persecutions ceased. But the Alliance guessed at the hidden purpose of this plan and foiled it, although without this organisation, the International’s existence in Spain would have been in jeopardy if the government had carried out its threats. The Alliance, on the contrary, made the following proposal:

“If we are outlawed, it would be useful to give the International an external form which could be allowed by the government; the local councils would be like secret cells which, under the Alliance’s influence, would impose on the sections a wholly revolutionary direction.” (Circular of the Alliance’s Seville section, October 25, 1871.)

of our friends on the peninsula, who are influencing the local councils, then this might change our attitude towards a general decision, to which we shall conform in every respect, etc., etc.”

The old A. is the public Alliance nipped in the bud by the General Council. The copy of the letter from which we have taken these passages is in Alerini’s handwriting.

Cowardly in action, bold in words—such was the Alliance in Spain, as elsewhere.

The London Conference’s resolution on working-class politics forced the Alliance into open hostilities with the International and gave the Federal Council an opportunity to state its perfect agreement with the great majority of the International’s membership. Furthermore, it suggested the idea of forming a big working men’s party in Spain. To achieve this aim, the working class would first have to be completely isolated from all the bourgeois parties, especially the Republican party which recruited most of its voters and active supporters from the workers. The Federal Council advised abstention in all elections of deputies, whether monarchist or republican. To rid the people of all illusions about the pseudo-socialist phraseology of the Republicans, the editors of La Emancipation, who were also members of the Federal Council, sent a letter to the representatives of the Federalist Republican party, who were holding a congress in Madrid, in which they asked them for practical measures and called on them to state their attitude to the International’s programme. This meant delivering a serious blow to the Republican party. The Alliance undertook to soften it, since it was, on the contrary, in league with the Republicans. In Madrid, it founded a newspaper, El Condenado, which adopted as its programme the three cardinal virtues of the Alliance: Atheism, Anarchy, and Collectivism, but which preached to the workers that they should not demand a reduction in working hours. “Brother” Morago had a fellow contributor in Estévanez, one of the three members of the Republican party’s Directing Committee and lately governor of Madrid and Minister for War. At Malaga, Pino, a member of the Federal Commission of the pseudo-International, and, at Madrid, Felipe Martin, now the Alliance’s commercial traveller, were serving the Republican party as electoral agents. And in order to have its Fanelli in the Spanish Cortès, the Alliance proposed backing Morago’s candidature.

The Alliance already had two serious grudges against the Federal Council: 1) the latter had abstained on the Jura question;

2) it had also attempted to infringe its [the Alliance’s] inviolability. After the Council adopted a position over the Republican party which wrecked all the Alliance’s plans, the latter decided to destroy it. The letter to the Republican Congress was taken by the Alliance as a declaration of war. La Igualdad, the party’s most influential organ, violently attacked the editors of La Emancipacion and accused them of having sold themselves to Sagasta. The Condenado encouraged this disgraceful charge by maintaining a stubborn silence. The Alliance did more for the Republican party. As a result of this letter, it had the editors of La Emancipacion expelled from the International’s Madrid Federation, which it dominated.

In spite of government persecution, the Federal Council, during its six-month period of administration after the Conference of Valencia, had raised the number of local federations from 13 to 70; it had, in 100 other localities, prepared the setting up of local federations and had organised eight trades into national resistance societies; moreover, the great association of Catalan factory workers was being formed under its auspices. These services had given the members of the Council such moral influence that Bakunin felt it necessary to bring them back on to the path of truth with a long fatherly admonition sent to Mora, the Council’s general secretary, on April 5, 1872 (see Documents, No. 3). The Congress of Saragossa (April 4-11, 1872), despite the efforts of the Alliance, which was represented by at least twelve delegates, annulled the expulsion and renominated two of the expelled members for the new Federal Council, ignoring their repeated refusals to accept their candidatures.

During the Congress of Saragossa, as always, the Alliance was holding secret meetings on the side. The members of the Federal Council proposed dissolving the Alliance. To prevent the proposal being rejected, it was neatly circumvented. Two months later, on June 2, those same citizens, in their capacity as leaders of the Spanish Alliance and on behalf of its Madrid section, sent the other sections a circular in which they renewed their proposal, giving the following reason:

“The Alliance has deviated from the path which it should, in our opinion, have taken in this region; it has falsified the idea which brought it into being and, instead of being an integral part of our great Association, an active element which would have given impetus to the different organisations of the International by helping and encouraging them in their development, it has broken away completely from the rest of the Association and has become an organisation apart and, as it were, superior, with tendencies towards domination, introducing mistrust, discord and division among us.... At Saragossa, instead of bringing solutions and ideas, it has, on the contrary, only put impediments and obstacles in the way of the important work of the Congress.”

Of all the Spanish Alliance sections, only the one at Cadiz responded by announcing its dissolution. On the very next day, the Alliance again had the signatories of the June 2 circular expelled from the International’s Madrid Federation. It used as its pretext an article in La Emancipacion of June 1 which demanded an enquiry into

“the sources of the wealth acquired by ministers, generals, magistrates, public officials, mayors, etc. ... and by all those in politics who, without having exercised any public functions, have lived under the wing of the governments, lending them their support in the Cortès and hiding their iniquities under a mask of false opposition ... and whose property should have been confiscated as a first measure on the day after a revolution”.

The Alliance saw this as a direct attack on its friends in the Republican party and accused the editors of La Emancipacion of having betrayed the cause of the proletariat under the pretext that in demanding the confiscation of property stolen from the State, they implicitly recognised private property. Nothing demonstrates more clearly the reactionary spirit which was hidden under the Alliance’s revolutionary charlatanism and which it wanted to inject into the working class. Nothing proves more clearly the bad faith of the Alliance members than the expulsion, as defenders of private property, of the very men whom they had anathematised for their communist ideas.

This new expulsion was made in violation of the rules in force prescribing the formation of a jury of honour for which the accused could nominate two out of the seven jurors, against whose verdict he could appeal to the section’s general assembly. Instead of all this, the Alliance, in order to avoid any restriction of its autonomy, had the expulsion decreed at the same sitting at which it made the accusation. Out of the section’s total membership of 130, only 15 were present, and these were in league with one another. The expelled members appealed to the Federal Council.

This Council, thanks to the Alliance’s intrigues, had been transferred to Valencia. Of the two members of the old Federal Council who were re-elected at the Congress of Saragossa, Mora had not accepted and Lorenzo had tendered his resignation shortly afterwards. From that moment, the Federal Council belonged body arid soul to the Alliance. And so it responded to the appeal of the expelled members with a declaration of its incompetence, although Article 7 of the Spanish Federation’s rules imposed on it the duty of suspending, with the right of appeal to the next Congress, any local federation which violated the statutes. The expelled members then formed a “new federation” and demanded recognition from the Council which, in deference to the autonomy of the sections, formally refused. The New Madrid Federation then approached the General Council, which accepted it in conformity with Articles II, 7 and IV, 4 of the Administrative Regulations. The Hague General Congress approved this act and unanimously admitted the delegate from the New Madrid Federation.

The Alliance realised the full importance of this first rebellious move. It realised that, unless it were nipped in the bud, the Spanish International, so docile hitherto, would slip out of its hands’, and so it set in motion all the means at its disposal, honest and otherwise. It began with defamation. It announced in the newspapers and posted up in the section halls the names of the expelled members: Angel and Francisco Mora, José Mesa, Victor Pages, Iglesias, Saenz, Calleja, Pauly and Lafargue were dubbed traitors. Mora, who, to carry out his duties as general secretary, had given up his job and for long months had been maintained by his brother, since there were no funds out of which to pay him, was accused of having lived at the International’s expense. Mesa, who was editing a fashion magazine to earn his living and had just translated an article for an illustrated journal, was alleged to have sold himself to the bourgeoisie. Lafargue was charged with the mortal sin of having, by a gargantuan dinner, submitted to the temptations of St. Anthony the weak flesh of Martinez and Montoro, two members of the new Federal Council of the Alliance, as if they carried their consciences in their paunches. We are only mentioning here the public and published libels. These measures failing to yield the results desired, the next move was intimidation. In Valencia, Mora was lured into an ambush by members of the Federal Council who were waiting for him armed with clubs. He was rescued by the members of the local federation who knew the ways of these gentlemen and asserted that it was in the face of arguments equally striking that Lorenzo had tendered his resignation. At Madrid, a similar attempt was made shortly afterwards on Iglesias. The Alliance congregation of the Index marked out La Emancipation for the censure of the faithful. At Cadiz, to instil a salutary fear into the hearts of the sinful, it was stated that any person selling La Emancipation would be expelled from the International as a traitor. The Alliance’s anarchy takes the form of inquisitorial practice.

As was its custom, the Alliance tried to have all the representation of the Spanish International at the Hague Congress made up of its own members. To this end, the Federal Council passed round the sections a private circular whose existence was carefully kept secret from the New Madrid Federation. It proposed to send to the Congress a collective representation elected by the votes of all members of the International, and to raise a general contribution of 25 centimos per head to defray the expenses. Since the local federations had no time to arrive at an agreement on the candidatures, it was clear, as the facts proved, that the Alliance’s official candidates, delegated to the Congress at the International’s expense, would be elected. However, this circular fell into the hands of the New Madrid Federation and was forwarded to the General Council which, knowing that the Federal Council was subordinate to the Alliance, saw that the moment for action had arrived and sent a letter to the Spanish Federal Council, in which it was stated:

“Citizens,

“We hold proof that within the International, and particularly in Spain, there exists a secret society called the Alliance of Socialist Democracy. This society, whose centre is in Switzerland, considers it its special mission to guide our great Association in keeping with its own particular tendencies and lead it towards goals unknown to the vast majority of International members. Moreover, we know from the Seville Razon that at least three members of your Council belong to the Alliance...

“If the organisation and character of this society were already contrary to the spirit and the letter of our Rules, when it was still public, its secret existence within the International, in spite of its promise, represents no less than treason against our Association. The International knows but one type of members, all with equal rights and duties; the Alliance divides them into two classes, the initiated and the uninitiated, the latter doomed to be led by the former by means of an organisation of whose very existence they are unaware. The International demands that its adherents should acknowledge Truth, Justice and Morality as the basis of their conduct; the Alliance obliges its supporters to hide from the uninitiated members of the International the existence of the secret organisation, the motives and even the aim of their words and deeds.”

The General Council also asked them to provide certain material for the inquiry into the Alliance which it intended to present to the Hague Congress, and an explanation of how they reconciled their duties to the International with the presence in the heart of the Federal Council of at least three notorious members of the Alliance.

The Federal Council replied with an evasive letter in which, however, it recognised the Alliance’s existence.

Since the manoeuvres which we have been discussing seemed inadequate to guarantee the success of the election, the Alliance went so far in its newspapers as to nominate Farga, Alerini, Soriano, Marselau, Mendez and Morago as official candidates. The result of the voting was: Marselau—3,568; Morago—3,442; Mendez—2,850; Soriano—2,751. Of the other candidates, Lostau obtained 2,430 votes in four Catalan towns which were clearly not yet properly disciplined; Fusté scored 1,053 votes at Sans in Catalonia. None of the other candidates gained more than 250 votes. To ensure the election of Farga and Alerini, the Federal Council gave the city of Barcelona, where the Alliance predominated, the privilege of nominating its own delegates, who were, naturally, Alerini and Farga.—The same official circular stated that the four Catalan towns which had nominated Lostau and Fusté, thus rejecting the Alliance’s official candidates, paid 2,654 reales (663 frs. 50 c.) for the delegation’s expenses whereas the other Spanish cities, on which the Alliance had foisted its own candidates, since the workers were little accustomed to managing their own affairs, only paid a total of 2,799 reales (699 frs. 75 c). The New Madrid Federation had good reason to say that the money of the International’s members was being used to send the Alliance’s delegates to the Hague. Furthermore, the Alliance’s Federal Council did not pay in full the subscriptions due to the General Council.

All this was not enough for the Alliance. It had to have an Alliance imperative mandate for its delegates, and this is how it was wangled. Through its circular of July 7, the Federal Council demanded, and obtained, the authorisation to lump together in one collective mandate the imperative mandates issued by the local federations. This manoeuvre, worse than any Bonapartist plebiscite, allowed the Alliance to draw up for its delegation a mandate which it intended to impose on the Congress, while forbidding its own delegates to take part in the voting unless an immediate change was made in the manner of voting as prescribed to the International in its Administrative Regulations. That this was mere mystification is proved by the fact that the Spanish delegates at the Congress of Saint-Imier, despite their mandate, took part in the voting which was being carried out by federations, the manner so much praised by Castelar and practised by the League of Peace.*

Vinas, a medical student, whom Sentinon, in a letter of January 26, 1872, recommended to Liebknecht as “the soul of the International in Barcelona”, left the International during the persecution so as not to compromise his family, although the police did not even bother to imprison him.

Farga Pellicer, another Alliance leader, was accused in the same letter from Sentinon of having absconded during the persecution, leaving the others to take the legal responsibility for his articles. The rabbit-like courage of the Alliance members boldly asserts, at all times and in all places, their anti-authoritarian autonomy. Their way of protesting against the authority of the bourgeois state is to take flight.

Soriano, another leader, and a professor of ... occult sciences, withdrew from the International at the height of the persecution. At the Congress of Saragossa, he opposed, with pathetic courage, the public holding of the Congress demanded by Lafargue and other delegates, because he considered it imprudent to provoke the anger of the authorities. Recently, under Amadeus, Soriano accepted a government post.


V. The Alliance in Italy

In Italy, the Alliance preceded the International. Pope Michael stayed there and built up numerous contacts among the young radical elements of the bourgeoisie. The first section of the Italian International, the one at Naples, was, since the time of its foundation, controlled by these bourgeois and Alliance elements. Gambuzzi,* a lawyer and one of the founders of the Alliance, raised his “model worker” Caporusso to the chairmanship of the section. At the Basle Congress, Bakunin, arm in arm with his faithful Caporusso, represented the Neapolitan members of the International, whereas Fanelli,** the Antonelli of the Alliance and a delegate for workers’ associations formed outside the International, was delayed en route owing to illness.

Morago, shopkeeper and frequenter of taverns, preserved his autonomy as a professional gambler by living on the earnings of his wife and his apprentices. When the Federal Council emigrated to Lisbon, he deserted his post as member of the Council and suggested throwing the International’s papers into the sea. When Sagasta outlawed the International, he again deserted his post as member of the Madrid local Council and sheltered from the storm in the haven of the Alliance. Although lacking a Christ, the Alliance abounded in St. Peters.

Clémente Bové, as Chairman of the Catalan Factory Workers’ Association (las très clases de vapor), was discharged and expelled for his excessively autonomous handling of funds.

Dionisio Garcia Fraile, called “our dear colleague” by La Federation, an Alliance organ, in its issue of July 28, 1872, where he published a long letter full of attacks on the New Madrid Federation, worked for the police at Saint-Sebastien and embezzled funds belonging to sections of the International.

His close friendship with the Holy Father went to our brave Caporusso’s head. On returning to Naples, he thought himself superior to the other Alliance members; he behaved as if he were the boss of the section.

“His trip to Basle changed Caporusso completely... He came back from the Congress with strange ideas and pretensions entirely contrary to our association’s principles. He spoke, at first quietly, then openly in an imperious manner, of powers which he did not, and could not, have; he affirmed that the General Council had confidence in no one but himself, and that if the section did not bow to his will, he had been empowered to dissolve it and found another.” (Official report from the Naples section to the General Council, November 1871, drawn up and signed by Carmelo Palladino, Alliance lawyer.)

Caporusso’s powers must have come from the Alliance’s Central Committee, for the International never issued any of the kind. The good Caporusso, who only saw the International as a source of personal profit, nominated his son-in-law, an ex-Jesuit and an unfrocked priest,

“professor of the International, and compelled the unfortunate workers to swallow his tirades on respect for private property and other fatuities of bourgeois political economy” (letter from Cafiero).*

He then sold himself to the capitalists, who were disturbed about the progress being made by the International in Naples. On their orders, he dragged the Neapolitan furriers into a completely hopeless strike. Imprisoned with three other members, he pocketed the sum of 300 frs. sent by the section for the maintenance of the four prisoners. These noble deeds led to his expulsion from the section, which continued to exist until it was forcibly dissolved (August 20, 1871). But the Alliance, on escaping from police persecution, profited by this to take the International’s place. When sending the official report quoted above, Carmelo

In November 1871, a section consisting of various elements was formed in Milan. It included workers, mainly mechanics brought by Cuno, alongside students, journalists from the small newspapers, and clerks, all completely under the influence of the Alliance. Owing to his pan-Germanic origins, Cuno was debarred from these mysteries. However, he made sure that after a pilgrimage to Locarno, the Rome of the Alliance, these young bourgeois were organised into a section of the secret society. Shortly afterwards (February 1872), Cuno was arrested and deported by the Italian police. Thanks to this heavenly providence, the Alliance now had a free field, and gradually gained control over the Milan section of the International.

On October 8, 1871, the Working Men’s Federation was formed in Turin. It asked the General Council for admission to the International. Its secretary, Carlo Terzaghi, wrote literally: “Attendiamo i vostri ordini” (we await your orders). To prove that the International in Italy, from its first steps, must work its way through the bureaucratic channels of the Alliance, he announced that

“the Council will receive through Bakunin a letter from the Working Men’s Association in Ravenna declaring itself a section of the International”.

On December 4, Carlo Terzaghi informed the General Council that the Working Men’s Federation was divided, since the majority were Mazzinists and the minority had formed a section called Emancipation of the Proletarian. He profited by the occasion to ask the Council for money for his newspaper II Proletario. It was not the General Council’s business to provide for the needs of the press; but there was in London a committee which was engaged in collecting funds to assist the International’s press. The committee was about to send a subsidy of 150 frs., when the Gazzettino Rosa announced that the Turin section had openly sided with Jura and had decided to send a delegate to a world congress convoked by the Jura Federation. Two months later, Terzaghi boasted to Regis that he had taken this resolution after having received Bakunin’s instructions personally, at Locarno. In view of this hostile attitude to the International, the committee did not send the money.

Although Terzaghi was the Alliance’s right arm at Turin, the true papal nuncio there was a certain Jacobi, a self-styled Polish physician. In order to explain the hatred which he felt for the so-called pan-Germanism of the General Council, this doctor member of the Alliance accused it of

“negligence and inertia in the Franco-Prussian war; it should be blamed for the failure of the Commune, in that it did not use its immense power to support the movement in Paris, and its Germanic tendencies are conspicuous when one considers that, at the walls of Paris, in the German army, there were 40,000 members of the International” (!), “and the General Council could not, or would not, use its influence to prevent the continuation of the war” (!!—Report from Regis to the General Council, March 1, 1872).

Confusing the General Council with the Press Committee, he accused it of “following the theory of corrupt and corrupting governments” by refusing the 150 francs to Terzaghi of the Alliance. To prove that this complaint came from the bottom of the Alliance’s heart, Guillaume considered it his duty to repeat it at the Hague Congress.

While Terzaghi was publicly beating the big anti-authoritarian drum of the Alliance in his newspaper, he was secretly writing to the General Council and asking it to refuse authoritatively the subscriptions of the Working Men’s Federation of Turin and demanding the formal excommunication of the journalist Beghelli, who was not even a member of the International. This same Terzaghi, the “friend (amicone) of the Turin prefect of police, who used to offer him vermouth when they met” (official report of the Federal Council of Turin, April 5, 1872), denounced at a public meeting the presence of the refugee Regis, sent to Turin by the General Council. Given these leads, the police went in pursuit of Regis, who only managed to cross the frontier thanks to the section’s help.

Terzaghi ended his Alliance assignment in Turin as follows. When serious charges were levelled against him, he

“threatened to burn the section’s books if he were not re-elected secretary, if they refused to submit to his authority, or if they censured him in any way. In any one of these cases, he would take his revenge by becoming a police agent, (questurino)” (report of the Turin Federal Council, quoted above).

Terzaghi had good reason for wanting to intimidate the section. In his capacity as treasurer and secretary, he had helped himself to the funds far too liberally in the truly Alliance fashion. Despite the Council’s official ban, he had allotted himself an allowance of 90 frs.; he had entered in the books, as paid, sums which had not been paid and which had disappeared from the funds. The balance sheet personally drawn up by him showed 56 frs. in hand which could not be found and which he refused to make good, as well as declined to pay for 200 subscription stamps received from the General Council. The General Assembly unanimously threw him out (scaccio) (see report quoted above). The Alliance, which always respected the autonomy of sections, ratified this expulsion by immediately nominating Terzaghi honorary member of the Florentine section and, later, as delegate for that section to the Conference of Rimini.

In a letter of March 10 a few days later, Terzaghi explained his expulsion to the General Council as follows: he had tendered his resignation as member and secretary of that section of riff-raff and spies (canaglia et mardocheria) because it was “composed of government agents and Mazzinists”, and they had tried to pin the blame on him “do you know what for? For preaching war on capital!” (a war which he had been practising on the section’s funds). The letter was intended to prove that the General Council had been strangely misled about the character of this brave Terzaghi who asked for nothing better than to be its humble servant. After all, he had “always declared that, to be a member of the International, it was necessary to pay one’s subscriptions to the General Council”—contrary to the secret orders of the Alliance.

“If we joined the Congress of Jura, it was not to make war on you, dear friends; we were merely swimming with the stream. Our aim was to bring a word of peace into the conflict. As for the centralisation of the sections, without depriving them, however, of some of their own autonomy, I find it very useful”.—”I hope that the higher Council will refuse to admit the Mazzinist Working Men’s Federation. You may be sure that no one will dare tax you with authoritarianism. Myself, I assume all the responsibility... If it were available, I would like to have an accurate biography of Karl Marx. We haven’t an authentic one in Italy, and I would like to be the first to have this honour.”

And what was behind all this toadying?

“Not for myself, but for the cause, so as not to give way to my numerous enemies and to show them that the International is united, I earnestly beg you, if there is still time, to allow me the subsidy of 150 frs. which was decreed to me by the higher Council.”

Imagining himself to be immune, Terzaghi seems to have made himself so impossible in Florence with new escapades that even Fascio Operaio was forced to disown him. Let us hope that the Jura Committee will better appreciate his services.

If in Terzaghi the Alliance had found its true representative, it was in Romagna that it found its real territory, where it formed its group of so-called International sections whose first rule of conduct was not to observe the General Rules, not to announce their own formation, and not to pay subscriptions to the General Council. They were true autonomous sections. They adopted the name of Fascio Operaio and served as centres for various working men’s associations. Their first Congress, held at Bologna on March 17, 1872, was asked:

“In the general interest, and to guarantee the complete autonomy of the Fascio Operaio, should we subject it to the direction of the General Committee in London or to the one in Jura, or should it remain entirely independent, while keeping up relations with both committees?”

The reply was in the form of the following resolution:

“The Congress does not recognise the General Committee of London or that of Jura as anything other than mere correspondence and statistical bureaux, and instructs the local representation in Bologna to establish relations with both of them and to report back to the sections.”

The Fascio Operaio committed a great blunder in disclosing the mysterious existence of the Alliance’s secret centre to the profane. The Jura Committee felt obliged to make a public denial of its secret existence.—As for the General Council, the representation at Bologna never once informed it of its own existence.

As soon as the Alliance heard about the convocation of the Hague Congress, it pushed to the fore its Fascio Operaio which, in the name of its autonomous authority, or its authoritarian autonomy, grabbed the title of Italian Federation and convoked a conference at Rimini on August 5. Of the 21 sections represented there, only one, that of Naples, belonged to the International, whereas none of the really active sections of the International was represented, not even that of Milan. This Conference disclosed the Alliance’s plan of campaign in the following resolution:

“Considering that the London Conference (September 1871) has tried to impose, with its resolution IX, on the whole International Working Men’s Association an authoritarian doctrine which is that of the German Communist Party;

“that the General Council is the promoter and supporter of this fact;

“that the doctrine of the authoritarian communists is the negation of the revolutionary sentiment of the Italian proletariat;

“that the General Council has employed highly unworthy methods, such as calumny and mystification, with the sole aim of imposing its special communist authoritarian doctrine on entire International Association;

“that the General Council has reached the height of unworthiness with its private circular, dated London, March 5, 1872, in which, pursuing its work of calumny and mystification, it reveals all its craving for authority, particularly in the two remarkable passages following:

“‘It would be difficult to carry out orders without enjoying moral “authority”, in the absence of any other “freely recognised authority”’. (Private circular, p. 27).

“‘The General Council intends to demand at the next Congress an investigation of this secret organisation and its promoters in certain countries, such as Spain, for example (p. 31);

“that the reactionary spirit of the General Council has provoked the revolutionary resentment of the Belgians, the French, the Spaniards, the Slavs, the Italians, and some of the Swiss, and has also provoked the proposition for the suppression of the Council and likewise the reform of the General Rules;

“that the General Council, not without reason, has convoked the General Congress at The Hague, the place furthest removed from these revolutionary countries;

“FOR THESE REASONS,

“The Conference solemnly declares to all the workers of the world that from this moment the Italian Federation of the International Working Men’s Association breaks off all solidarity with the General Council of London, affirming at the same time economic solidarity with all the workers and proposing to all sections which do not share the authoritarian principles of the General Council that they send their representatives on September 2, 1872 not to The Hague, but to Neuchâtel (Switzerland) for the opening of the general anti-authoritarian Congress on the same day.

“Rimini, August 6, 1872. For the Conference: Carlo Cafiero, chairman, Andrea Costa, secretary”.

The attempt to substitute the Fascio Operaio for the General Council was a total failure. Even the Spanish Federal Council, a mere branch of the Alliance, did not dare to submit the Rimini resolution to the vote of the International’s Spanish members. The Alliance, to make amends for its blunder, went to the Hague Congress without cancelling the convocation of its antiauthoritarian Congress at Saint-Imier.

Italy had only become the promised land of the Alliance by special act of grace. Pope Michael unveils this mystery for us in his letter to Mora (Documents, No. 3):

“Italy has what other countries lack: a youth which is passionate, energetic, completely at a loss, with no prospects, with no way out, and which, despite its bourgeois origins, is not morally and intellectually exhausted like the bourgeois youth of other countries. Today it is throwing itself headlong into revolutionary socialism, accepting our entire programme, the programme of the Alliance. Mazzini, our mighty antagonist of genius” (sic) “is dead, and the Mazzinist party is completely disorganised, and Garibaldi is letting himself be carried away more and more by that youth which bears his name, but is going, or rather running, infinitely further ahead of him.” *

The Holy Father is right. The Alliance in Italy is not a “workers’ union”, but a rabble of déclassés. All the • so-called sections of the Italian International are run by lawyers without clients, doctors with neither patients nor medical knowledge, students of billiards, commercial travellers and other tradespeople, and principally journalists from small papers with a more or less dubious reputation. Italy is the only country where the International press—or what calls itself such—has acquired the typical characteristics of Le Figaro. One need only glance at the writing of the secretaries of these so-called sections to realise that it is the work of clerks or professional authors. By taking over all the official posts in the sections in this way, the Alliance managed to compel the Italian workers, every time they wanted to enter into relations with one another or with the other councils of the International, to resort to the services of déclassé members of the Alliance who found in the International a “career” and a “way out”.


VI. The Alliance in France

The French members were not very numerous but they were more keen. At Lyons, the Alliance was led by Albert Richard and Gaspard Blanc, and at Marseilles by Bastelica—all three of whom were active contributors to the newspapers run by Guillaume. It is thanks to them that the Alliance succeeded in disorganising the movement at Lyons in September 1870. This movement, for them,

Here is what Garibaldi himself says about this: “My dear Crescio — hearty thanks for sending to me your Avvenire Sociale which I shall read with interest. You intend, in your paper, to make war upon untruth and slavery. That is a very fine programme, but I believe that the International, in fighting against the principle of authority, makes a mistake and obstructs its own progress. The Paris Commune fell because there was in Paris no authority but only anarchy, Spain and France are suffering from the same evil. I wish success to the Avvenire, and, remain yours, G. Garibaldi.»

was only important in that it allowed Bakunin to launch his unforgettable decree on the abolition of the State.—The activities of the Alliance after the failure of the Lyons insurrection are neatly summed up in the following passage from a letter by Bastelica (Marseilles, December 13, 1870):

“Our real power among the workers is enormous; but our section has not been reorganised since the last persecutions. We dare not do this for fear that in the absence of the leaders, the elements may disintegrate. We are biding our time.”

That Bastelica, then in a foot regiment, could at any moment be sent away from Marseilles, was sufficient reason for him to hinder the reorganisation of the International section, so essential to its autonomy did he consider the presence of Alliance leaders.—The most evident result of the Alliance’s activities was to discredit in the eyes of the workers of Lyons and Marseilles the International, which, as always and everywhere, it claimed to represent.

The end of Richard and Blanc is known. In the autumn of 1871, they turned up in London and attempted to recruit from among the French refugees auxiliaries for a Bonapartist restoration. In January 1872, they published a brochure: L’EMPIRE ET LA FRANCE NOUVELLE. Appel du peuple et de la jeunesse a la conscience française, by Albert Richard and Gaspard Blanc, Brussels, 1872.

With the usual modesty of the Alliance’s quacks, they trotted out their patter as follows:

“We, who have formed the great army of the French proletariat ... we, the most influential leaders of the International in France ... happily, we have not been shot, and we are here to raise before them (ambitious parliamentarians, bloated republicans, self-styled democrats of all kinds) the standard under which we fight, and to fling forth to an astounded Europe—despite the calumnies, despite the threats, despite the attacks of every kind in store for us—this cry which issues from the depths of our conscience and which shall resound ere long in the hearts of all the French: —

We shall refrain from investigating whether these two members of the Alliance who had become imperialists owing to the “normal progression of their ideas”, were mere “riff-raff”, as they were called by their old friend Guillaume at The Hague, or whether the pope of the Alliance had given them the special mission of joining the ranks of the Bonapartist agents. The documents of the Russian Alliance which, according to the secret statutes, will unveil the mystery of mysteries of this mysterious society and from which we shall be citing extracts further on, state expressly that the international brethren must infiltrate everywhere and may even receive orders to enrol in the police force. Incidentally, the veneration of these two brethren for their emperor of the peasants does not exceed that in which Bakunin held his own tsar of the peasants in 1862.

After the fall of the Commune, the International grew rapidly in all the French cities which had not been infiltrated by the Alliance. At the Hague Congress, the Secretary for France was able to announce that the International had its organisations in over thirty departments. The two principal Alliance correspondents for France, Benoît Malon and Jules Guesde (the latter was a signatory of the Sonvillier circular) who knew about this rapid development of our Association, tried to disorganise it in the Alliance’s favour. When their letters failed to have the desired effect, emissaries were sent, including a Russian named Mechnikov; but their efforts came to nothing. These same individuals who impudently accused the General Council of preventing the workers from

“organising themselves in each country freely, spontaneously, and according to their own spirit, and particular customs” (letter from Guesde, September 22, 1872)

told the workers—as soon as they began to organise themselves freely, spontaneously, etc., but in complete harmony with the General Council—that the Germans in the Council were oppressing them and that there was no salvation outside their orthodox anti-authoritarian church. The French workers, who were aware only of the oppression from the Versailles, sent these letters to the General Council and asked them what it all signified.

This move by the Alliance in France is the best proof that, as soon as it began to lose hope of dominating the International, it began to fight it. Every section which was not brought under its domination was regarded as an enemy more hostile even than the bourgeoisie. He who is not for us, is against us is the rule which it openly avowed in its Russian manifestos. For the Alliance, the success of the general movement was a misfortune if that movement did not bow under the yoke of its sectarianism. And at the very time when the French working class needed above all some kind of organisation, the Alliance went to the aid of Thiers and the Rurals by declaring war on the International.

Now let us see who were the Alliance’s agents during its campaign in favour of the Versailles.

At Montpellier, M. Guesde had for confidant a man named Paul Brousse, a medical student, who was attempting to carry out Alliance propaganda through the whole department of Hérault, where Guesde had formerly been editor of the Droits de l’Homme. Shortly before the Hague Congress, when members of the International for the South of France met to subscribe for a common delegate to the Congress, Brousse tried to persuade the Montpellier section not to pay its share and not to say anything until the Congress had settled matters under discussion. The Committee for the South—the Montpellier section, decided to ask the Congress to exclude Brousse from the International for having “acted disloyally in provoking a split in the heart of the section.” His friend Guesde, in a communication sent in October from Rome to the Liberté of Brussels, denounced this authoritarian move against Brousse and cited Calas of Montpellier as the instigator, writing out his name in full, whereas he referred to Brousse by his initials. Alerted by this denunciation, the police kept watch on Calas, and immediately afterwards confiscated a letter in the post from Serraillier to Calas in which much was said about Dentraygues of Toulouse. On December 24, Dentraygues was arrested.

The Alliance’s most active helpers at Narbonne were: Gondres, unmasked as a police informer; Bacave who, at Narbonne and Perpignan, was carrying out the duties of police agent; and de Saint-Martin, a lawyer and a correspondent of Malon’s. In 1866, M. de Saint-Martin had applied for a post in the Ministry of the Imperial Court and the Fine Arts. When he was sentenced in 1869 to pay fine of 800 frs. for a press offence, republicans collected money to pay his fine; but Saint-Martin, instead of using the funds for this purpose, went on a little trip to Paris at the expense of the workers who, to avoid a scandal, had to contribute all over again. Shortly after the May days in 1871, the same SaintMartin applied to the Versailles government for the post of subprefect.

Here is another Alliance agent: in November 1871, Calas wrote to Serraillier:

“You may count on Citizen Abel Bousquet’s absolute devotion to the social cause, he is ... chairman of the Socialist Committee of Béziers.”

Two days later, on November 13, Serraillier received the following statement:

“Convinced that our mutual friend, Citizen Calas, has been badly let down in that this citizen relied on M. Bousquet, Chairman of the Electoral Committee of Béziers, and the latter is most unworthy of this, since he is secretary to the Central Police Commissioner for Béziers ... in agreement with Citizen Calas, who has recognised the mistake of which he was the victim, we shall ask Citizen Serraillier to regard as cancelled the last letter sent to him by Citizen Calas and, moreover, we shall ask him, if it can be done, to have M. Bousquet expelled from the International. By authority of the socialist democracy of Béziers and Pézénas” (here follow the signatures).

Serraillier profited by this statement to denounce, in L’Emancipation of Toulouse (December 19, 1871), this M. Bousquet as a police agent.—A letter dated Narbonne, July 24, 1872, says that M. Bousquet

“is combining the functions of brigadier chief of police with those of travelling agent for the Genevan dissidents”.

It is therefore only natural that the Bulletin jurassien of November 10, 1872 should have come out in his defence.


VII. The Alliance after the Hague Congress

It is known that at the last sitting of the Hague Congress, the fourteen delegates of the minority tabled a declaration of protest against the resolutions adopted. This minority consisted of the following delegates: four Spanish, five Belgian, two Jurassian, two Dutch, and one American.

After having agreed at Brussels with the Belgians on the principles for common action against the new General Council, the Jurassians and the Spaniards left for Saint-Imier in Switzerland to hold the anti-authoritarian Congress which the Alliance had arranged to have convoked by its acolytes in Rimini.

This Congress was preceded by that of the Jura Federation, which rejected the resolutions of The Hague, notably the one expelling Bakunin and Guillaume. As a result, the Federation was suspended by the General Council.

The Alliance was fully represented at the anti-authoritarian congress. Beside the Spaniards and the Jurassians, there were six Italian delegates, including Costa, Cafiero, Fanelli, and Bakunin in person; two delegates claimed to represent “several French sections”, and another delegate—two American ones. In all, fifteen “allies”. This Congress finally offered Bakunin “all the guarantees of an impartial and serious trial”; and here, too, complete unanimity prevailed. These men, of whom at least half did not belong to the International, appointed themselves members of a supreme tribunal called upon to pronounce the final sentence upon the acts of a General Congress of our Association. They announced their absolute rejection of all resolutions passed by the Hague Congress and refused to recognise in any way the powers of the new General Council elected by it. Finally, they formed, on behalf of their federations and without any form of mandate to that effect, an offensive and defensive alliance, a “pact of friendship, of solidarity, and of mutual defence”, against the General Council and all those who recognised the resolutions of the Hague Congress. They defined their abstentionist anarchism in the following resolution, which was a direct condemnation of the Paris Commune:

“The Congress declares 1 ) that the destruction of all political power is the first duty of the proletariat; 2) that any organisation of supposedly provisional and revolutionary political power aiming to bring about this destruction can only be yet another hoax and will be as dangerous to the proletariat as all governments in existence today.”

Finally, it was decided to invite the other autonomist federations to join the new pact and to hold a second anti-authoritarian Congress six months later.

The split within the International was thus proclaimed. From that moment, the Jura Committee openly took over the management of the dissidents’ affairs. The part of the International which followed it was no more than the old public Alliance reconstituted and serving as a cover and tool for the secret Alliance.

On returning to Spain, the four Aymon sons, members of the Spanish Alliance, published a manifesto full of calumnies against the Congress at The Hague and flattery for the one at Saint-Imier. The Federal Council supported this libel and, on the orders of the Swiss centre, convoked at Cordoba for December 25, 1872 the regional Congress which was not to have taken place until April 1873. The Swiss centre, for its part, hastened to disclose to everybody the subordinate position which the Council had been occupying beside it. Over the head of the Spanish Council, the Jura Committee sent the Saint-Imier resolutions to all the local federations in Spain.

At the Congress of Cordoba, there were only 36 federations represented out of 101 (the official number given by the Federal Council); and so this was a minority Congress if ever there was one. The newly formed federations were represented by numerous delegates; Alcoy had six, and yet this federation had never been represented before in a regional Congress. Even during the time of the Hague Congress, it had not yet existed, since it had not provided one vote or one centime to the Spanish delegation. The important and active federations, such as Gracia (500 members), Badalona (500), Sabadell (125), Sans (1,061), were conspicuous by their absence. In a list of forty-eight delegates, there were fourteen notorious Alliance members, of whom ten represented federations of which they were not members and which probably did not even know them. Sure of the majority which it had engineered, the Alliance gave itself a free hand. The regional federation’s statutes, drawn up at Valencia and sanctioned at Saragossa, were scrapped, the Spanish Federation decapitated, and its Federal Council replaced by a simple correspondence and statistical commission which did not even retain the function of sending in the Spanish subscriptions to the General Council. Finally, the Alliance broke with the International, rejecting the resolutions of the Hague Congress and adopting the Saint-Imier pact. It went so far in its anarchy as to repudiate in advance the next General Congress and to substitute for it a new anti-authoritarian Congress

“ in case the first one does not restore the dignity and independence of the International by repudiating the Hague Congress”.

At The Hague, the Alliance wanted to impose, by means of the Spanish imperative mandate, the manner of voting which best suited it at the time. At Cordoba, it went so far as to prescribe, nine months in advance, the resolutions which must be adopted by the next General Congress. It must be admitted that the autonomy of sections and federations could not be pushed any further.

In expelling the Alliance and its leaders from the International, the Hague Congress gave fresh impetus to the anti-Alliance movement in Spain. The New Madrid Federation was supported in its newly launched campaign by the federations of Saragossa, Vitoria, Alcalâ de Henares, Gracia, Lerida, Dénia, Pont de Vilumara, Toledo, Valencia, the new federation of Cadiz, etc. The Federal Council’s circular convoking the Congress of Cordoba asked it to set itself up in judgment on the resolutions passed at the Hague General Congress. This was in flagrant violation not only of the General Rules, but also of the Spanish regional statutes, which stated in Article 13:

“The Federal Council will implement, and will cause to be implemented, the resolutions of the regional and international Congresses.”

The New Madrid Federation reacted with a circular to the other local federations in which it declared that by this act the Federal Council had put itself outside the International, and asked them to replace it with a new provisional council whose mission would be strict observance of the Rules and not passive obedience to the Alliance’s orders. This proposal was accepted; a new Federal Council was appointed with its seat at Valencia. In its first circular (February 2, 1873), it declared itself to be “the faithful guardian of the International’s Rules as drawn up and sanctioned at the international and regional Congresses”, and protested vigorously against those who wished to sow

“anarchy within the International, anarchy before revolution, disarmament before triumph! What a joy to the bourgeoisie!”

The Belgians held their Congress at the same time as the Spaniards and likewise rejected the Hague resolutions. The General Council replied to them, as to the Spanish secessionists, with the resolution of January 26, 1873, which declared that “all societies or individuals refusing to acknowledge the Congress resolutions, or wilfully neglecting to perform the duties imposed by the rules and administrative regulations—place themselves outside of, and cease to belong to the International Working Men’s Association.” On May 30, it finalised this declaration with the following resolution:

“Whereas the Congress of the Belgian federation, held at Brussels on the 25th 8c 26th day of December 1872, resolved to declare null 8c void the resolutions of the 5th General Congress;

“Whereas the Congress of a part of the Spanish federation, held at Cordoba from December 25th  to January 2nd 1873, resolved: to repudiate the resolutions of the 5th General Congress 8c to adopt the resolutions of an anti-international meeting;

“Whereas a meeting, held at London January 26th 1873, resolved: to repudiate the action taken by the 5th General Congress;

“The General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association in obedience to the statutes 8c administrative regulations 8c in accordance with its resolution of January 26th 1873, hereby declares:

“All regional 8c local federations, sections 8c individuals having participated in 8c recognising the resolutions of the above mentioned meetings & Congresses at Brussels, Cordoba 8c London,— have placed themselves outside of Sc are no longer members of the International Workingmen’s Association.”

At the same time, it declared once more that no regional Italian federation of the International exists, since no organisation calling itself by this name has fulfilled the minimal conditions for admission and affiliation as imposed by the Rules and Administrative Regulations. In different parts of Italy, however, there are sections which are in order as far as the General Council is concerned and are in communication with it.

For their part, the Jurassians held another Congress on April 27 and 28 at Neuchâtel. There were nineteen delegates present from ten Swiss sections, and a so-called section from Alsace; two Swiss sections and one French section sent no delegates. The Jura Federation thus claimed to count twelve sections in Switzerland. But the delegate for Moutier declared that he had only come to speak in favour of reconciliation with the International, and had an imperative mandate not to take part in the work of the Congress. Moutier had, in fact, broken away from the Jura Federation after the Congress of Saint-Imier. This left eleven sections. The fact that the report from the Committee scrupulously abstained from giving the slightest indication about their internal position and their strength gives us the right to assume that they had no more vitality than at the time of the Congress of Sonvillier. In compensation, the report draws up in battle order the external forces of the Jurassians, the allies whom the Alliance gained after the Hague Congress. According to this report, they were nearly all federations of the International:

“Italy” — But we have seen that there is no Italian federation.

“Spain”—Although the majority of the Spanish International members have moved across into the secessionist camp, we have just seen that the Spanish Federation still exists and is in regular communication with the General Council.

“France, in what is seriously organised there”, that is, the “section of France”, which apologised to the Congress of Neuchâtel for not having sent a delegate. We are taking good care not to disclose to the Jurassians what is still “seriously organised” in France, despite the latest persecutions, which have demonstrated well enough on whose side this serious organisation was and which, as always, have solicitously spared the few Alliance members in France.

“The whole of Belgium”—is the dupe of the Alliance, whose principles she is far from sharing.

“Holland, except for one section”—that is to say, two Dutch sections supported not the Saint-Imier pact, but the anti-separatist declaration of the minority at The Hague.

“England, except for a few dissidents”!—The “dissidents”, that is to say, the vast majority of the English sections of the International, held their Congress on June 1 and 2 at Manchester, where twenty-six delegates were present representing twentythree sections; whereas the “England” of the Jurassians had no sections or Federal Council, much less a Congress.

“America, apart from a few dissidents”!—The American Federation of the International exists and functions regularly in complete harmony with the General Council. It has its Federal Council and its Congresses. The “America” of the Jura Committee consists purely of those bourgeois dealers in free love, paper money, public appointments and bribes, who were represented so magnificently at the Hague Congress by Mr. West that even the Jura delegates dared not speak or vote in his favour.

“The Slavs”—that is to say, the “Slav section of Zurich”, which, as always, figures as a whole race. The Poles, the Russians, and the Austrian and Hungarian Slavs of the International, as open enemies of the secessionists, do not count.

This is what the allies of the Alliance amounted to. If the eleven Jura sections were no more real than the majority of these allies, their committee had good reason to keep silent about them.

In this battle order of the Alliance, Switzerland was conspicuous by her absence. There were very good reasons for this. A month later, on June 1 and 2, a general Swiss Working Men’s Congress was held in Olten to organise resistance and strikes. Five Jurassians there preached the gospel of absolute autonomy of the sections; they made the Congress waste over half its time. Finally, the matter had to be put to vote. The result was that of eighty delegates, seventy-five voted against the five Jurassians who had no alternative but to leave the hall.

At its secret gatherings, however, the Alliance apparently did not subscribe, where its real forces were concerned, to the illusions which it wanted to impose on the public. At that same Congress of Neuchâtel, it had the following resolution adopted:

“Considering that, in accordance with the General Rules, the General Congress of the International meets every year without need of convocation by the General Council, the Jura Federation proposes to all the federations of the International that they should meet for a General Congress on Monday, September 1, in a Swiss town.”

And to prevent this congress from repeating the “fatal errors of The Hague”, it was requested that the Alliance delegates and their allies should meet, on August 28, for an anti-authoritarian Congress. From the debate on this proposition, it emerges that

“for us, the only General Congress of the International will be the one convoked directly by the federations themselves, and not the one which the so-called General Council of New York might attempt to convoke”

Here, then, is the split carried to extremes with all the attendant consequences. The members of the International will go to the congress which the preceding Congress has instructed the General Council to convoke in a Swiss town of its own choosing. The Alliance members and their suite of dupes will go to a congress convoked by themselves on the strength of their autonomy. We wish them a pleasant journey.


VIII. The Alliance in Russia

The Alliance’s activities in Russia were revealed to us by the political trial known as “the Nechayev affair” which took place in July 1871 before the Court of Justice in St. Petersburg. For the first time in Russia, a political trial took place before a jury and in public. All the accused, numbering over eighty men and women, belonged, with a few exceptions, to the student youth. From November 1869 to July 1871, they were kept in detention in the dungeons of the fortress in St. Petersburg, with the result that two of them died and several others went insane. They were brought out of prison to be condemned to the Siberian mines, to penal servitude, and to imprisonment for fifteen, twelve, ten, seven and two years. And those acquitted by the public tribunal were then exiled as an “administrative measure”.

Their crime was that they had belonged to a secret society which had usurped the name of the International Working Men’s Association, to which they had been affiliated by an emissary of the international revolutionary committee who carried mandates stamped with a fake seal of the International; and this emissary had forced them to commit a series of frauds and had obliged several of them to help him in an assassination. It was this assassination which put the police on the trail of the secret society; but, as always, the emissary disappeared. The police showed such perspicacity in their investigations that it was possible to assume a detailed denunciation. Throughout the whole of this affair, the role of the emissary was highly ambiguous. This emissary was Nechayev, who carried a certificate-mandate to the following effect:

“The bearer of this certificate is one of the authorised representatives of the Russian branch of the World Revolutionary Alliance.—No. 2771.”

This certificate carried: 1) a stamp, in French: "European Revolutionary Alliance. General Committee"; 2) date—May 12, 1869; 3) signature—Mikhail Bakunin*

In 1861, as a result of the fiscal measures intended to deprive poor young people of a higher education, and as a result of disciplinary steps aimed at subjecting them to arbitrary police control, the students made a vigorous and unanimous protest which they took from their meetings out into the streets to be expressed in impressive demonstrations. St. Petersburg University was then closed for a time and the students were imprisoned or exiled. This government move drove the young people into secret societies which inevitably resulted in large numbers of the members being imprisoned, banished, or sent to Siberia. Others, to provide the necessary means for the poor students to continue their studies, founded mutual aid funds. The more serious of them decided not to give the government any further pretext for suppressing these funds, which were organised so that business matters could be discussed at small meetings. These business meetings provided the opportunity to discuss political and social questions at the same time. Socialist ideas had penetrated so deeply among the Russian student youth, who were mainly the sons of peasants and other poor people, that they already dreamed of putting them immediately into practice. Every day, this movement spread further in the educational institutions and injected into Russian society poor young people of plebeian origin who were instructed in, and permeated with, socialist ideas. The heart and soul of this movement’s theoretical aspect was Chernyshevsky, now in Siberia. It was at this point that Nechayev, profiting by the International’s prestige and the enthusiasm of the young, tried to convince the students that the time had passed for concern with such trivialities, now that there existed a huge secret society affiliated to the International and occupied in fomenting world revolution and ready for immediate action in Russia. He managed to hoodwink a few young people and inveigle them into committing criminal acts, which gave the police the pretext for

* St. Petersburg Gazette*, 1871, Nos. 180, 181, 187 and others.

crushing the whole of this student movement, so dangerous to official Russia.

In March 1869, there arrived at Geneva a young Russian who tried to ingratiate himself with all the Russian emigrants by posing as a delegate from the St. Petersburg students. He introduced himself under various names. Some of the emigrants knew positively that no delegate had been sent from that city; others, after talking to the supposed delegate, took him for a spy. In the end, he let himself be known by his real name, which was Nechayev. He said that he had escaped from the St. Petersburg fortress, where he had been incarcerated as one of the chief instigators of the disorders which had broken out in January 1869 in the capital’s educational institutions. Several of the emigrants, who had suffered long spells of detention in this fortress, knew from experience that all escape was impossible, and so they were aware that on this point Nechayev was lying; on the other hand, since the newspapers and letters which they received with the names of wanted students never mentioned Nechayev, they regarded his alleged revolutionary activity as mere legend. But Bakunin took up Nechayev’s cause and made a tremendous fuss about it. He proclaimed to all and sundry that this was the “envoy extraordinary of the great secret organisation existing and active in Russia”. Bakunin was beseeched not to disclose to this person the names of his acquaintances whom he could compromise. Bakunin gave his word; how he kept it will be shown by the documents of the trial.

During an interview that Nechayev requested of a refugee, he was forced to admit that he was not the delegate of any secret organisation, but he had, he said, comrades and acquaintances whom he wished to organise, adding that it was essential to gain control over the old emigrants in order to influence the young people with their prestige and to profit by their printing press and their money. Shortly afterwards, Words came out, addressed to the students by Nechayev and Bakunin. In it, Nechayev repeated the legend of his escape and appealed to the young people to devote themselves to the revolutionary struggle. In the student unrest Bakunin discovers “an all-destroying spirit opposed to the State ... which has emerged from the very depths of the people’s life” *; he congratulates his “young brethren on their revolutionary tendencies.... This means that the end is in sight of this infamous Empire of all the Russias!” His anarchism served him as a pretext to take a swipe at the Poles, accusing them of only working

“for the restoration of their historic state” (!!).— “They dream, therefore, of a new enslavement of their people”, and should they succeed “they would become our enemies as much as the oppressors of their own people. We shall fight them in the name of the social revolution and liberty for the whole world”.

Bakunin is clearly in agreement with the tsar on this issue: The

Poles must be prevented at all costs from managing their internal affairs as they think fit. During all Polish insurrections, the official Russian press has always accused the Polish insurgents of being “the oppressors of their own people”. A touching point of agreement between the organs of the Third Department ** and the archanarchist of Locarno!

The Russian people, Bakunin continues, are at present living in conditions similar to those that forced them to rise under Tsar Alexei, father of Peter the Great. Then it was Stenka Razin, the Cossack brigand chief, who placed himself at their head and showed them “the road” to “freedom”. In order to rise today the people are waiting only for a new Stenka Razin; but this time he

“will be replaced by the legion of déclassé young men who already live the life of the people... Stenka Razin, no longer an individual hero but a collective one” (!) “consequently they have an invincible hero behind them. Such a hero are all the magnificent young people over whom his spirit already soars.”

To perform this role of a collective Stenka Razin, the young people must prepare themselves through ignorance:

“Friends, abandon with all speed this world doomed to destruction. Leave its universities, its academies, its schools [...] and go among the people,” to become “the mid-wife of the people’s self-emancipation, the uniter and organiser of their forces and efforts. Do not bother at this moment with learning, in the name of which they would bind you, castrate you... Such is the belief of the finest people in the West... The world of the workers of Europe and America calls you to join them in a fraternal alliance.”

* It shall be noted that these Words were published at the very moment of the persecutions and sentences, when the young people were doing their utmost to moderate their movement which the police themselves found it so advantageous to exaggerate.

** The Third Department of the Imperial Russian Chancellory is the Central Bureau of the secret political police in Russia.

In its secret statutes, the Alliance tells its third-grade members that

“the principles of this organisation ... shall be even more explicitly exposed in the programme of the Russian socialist democracy”.

We have here the beginnings of this promise’s fulfilment. In addition to the habitual anarchist phrases and the chauvinistic hatred of the Poles that Citizen B. has never been able to conceal, we see him here for the first time acclaiming the Russian brigand as the type of the true revolutionary and preaching to Russian young the cult of ignorance, under the pretext that modern science is merely official science (can one imagine an official mathematics, physics or chemistry?), and that this is the opinion of the finest people in the West. Finally he ends his leaflet by letting it be understood that through his mediation the International is proposing an alliance to these young people, whom he forbids even the learning of the Ignorantines.

This evangelical Word played a great part in the Nechayev conspiracy. It was read secretly to every neophyte before his initiation.

At the same time as this Word (1869), anonymous Russian publications came out: 1) The Setting of the Revolutionary Question; 2) The Principles of Revolution“; 3) Publications of the “People’s Judgment” Society (“Narodnaya Rasprava”) No. 1, summer 1869, Moscow.—All these writings were printed in Geneva, as is proved by the fact that the type was identical with that used for other Russian publications in Geneva—furthermore, this fact was a matter of public notoriety among all the Russian emigrants,— which did not prevent these publications from carrying on their first page the stamp: “Printed in Russia—Gedruckt in Russland”, to mislead the Russian students into thinking that the secret society possessed considerable resources in Russia itself.

The Setting of the Revolutionary Question gives away its authors at once. The same phrases, the same expressions as those used by Bakunin and Nechayev in their Words:

“Not only the state must be destroyed, but also revolutionaries of the State and the cabinet. We are certainly for the people.”

By the law of anarchist assimilation, Bakunin assimilates himself to the student youth:

“The government itself shows us the road we must follow to attain our goal, that is to say, the goal of the people. It drives us out of the universities, the academies, the schools. We are grateful to it for having thus put us on such glorious, such firm ground. Now we have ground under our feet, now we can do things. And what are we going to do? Teach the people? That would be stupid. The people know themselves, and better than we do, what they need” (compare the secret statutes which endow the masses with “popular instincts”, and the initiates with “the revolutionary idea”). “Our task is not to teach the people but to rouse them.” Up to now “they have always rebelled in vain because they have rebelled separately... We can render them extremely valuable assistance, we can give them what they have lacked so far, what has been the principal cause of all their defeats. We can give them the unity of universal movement by rallying their own forces.”

This is where the doctrine of the Alliance, anarchy at the bottom and discipline at the top, emerges in all its purity. First by rioting comes the “unleashing of what today are called the evil passions” but “in the midst of popular anarchy, which will constitute the very life and energy of the revolution, unity of revolutionary idea and action should find an organ”. That organ will be the world Alliance, Russian section, the Society of the People’s Judgment.

But Bakunin is not to be satisfied merely with youth. He calls all brigands to the banner of his Alliance, Russian section.

“Brigandage is one of the most honourable forms of the Russian people’s life. The brigand is a hero, a protector, a people’s avenger, the irreconcilable enemy of the state, and of all social and civil order established by the state, a fighter to the death against the whole civilisation of the civil servants, the nobles, the priests and the crown... He who fails to understand brigandage understands nothing of Russian popular history. He who is not in sympathy with it, cannot be in sympathy with Russian popular life, and has no heart for the measureless, age-long sufferings of the people; he belongs to the enemy camp, among the supporters of the state... Brigandage is the sole proof of the vitality, the passion and the strength of the people... The brigand in Russia is the true and only revolutionary—the revolutionary without phrases, without rhetoric culled from books, an indefatigable revolutionary, irreconcilable and irresistible in action, a popular and social revolutionary, not a political or class revolutionary... The brigands in the forests, in the towns and in the villages scattered all over Russia, and the brigands held in the countless gaols of the empire make up a single, indivisible, close-knit world—the world of the Russian revolution. It is here, and here alone, that the real revolutionary conspiracy has long existed. He who wants to undertake real conspiracy in Russia, who wants a people’s revolution, must go into this world... Following the road pointed out to us now by the government, which drives us from the academies, the universities and schools, let us throw ourselves, brethren, among the people, into the people’s movement, into the brigand and peasant rebellion and, maintaining a true and firm friendship among ourselves, let us rally into a single mass all the scattered outbursts of the muzhiks” (peasants). “Let us turn them into a people’s revolution, meaningful but ruthless.” *

In the second leaflet, The Principles of Revolution, we find a development of the order given in the secret statutes that “not a stone shall remain standing”. All must be destroyed in order to produce “complete amorphism”, for if even “one of the old forms” be preserved, it will become the “embryo” from which all the other old social forms will be regenerated. The leaflet accuses the political revolutionaries who do not take this amorphism seriously of deceiving the people. It accuses them of having erected

“new gallows and scaffolds where the surviving brother revolutionaries have been done to death... So it is that the people have not yet known a real revolution... A real revolution does not need individuals standing at the head of the crowd and commanding it, but men hidden invisibly among the crowd and forming an invisible link between one crowd and another, and thus invisibly giving one and the same direction, one spirit and character to the movement. This is the sole purpose of bringing in a secret preparatory organisation and only to this extent is it necessary.”

Here, then, the existence of the international brethren, so carefully concealed in the West, is exposed to the Russian public and the Russian police. Further the leaflet goes on to preach systematic assassination and declares that for people engaged in practical revolutionary work all argument about the future is

“criminal because it hinders pure destruction and hampers the advent of the beginning of the revolution. We believe only in those who show their devotion to the cause of revolution by deeds, without fear of torture or imprisonment, and we renounce all words that are not immediately followed by deeds. We have no further use for aimless propaganda that does not set itself a definite time and place for realisation of the aims of revolution. What is more, it stands in our way and we shall make every effort to combat it... We shall silence by force the chatterers who refuse to understand this.”

* To mystify his readers Bakunin confuses the leaders of the popular uprisings of the 17th and 18th centuries with the brigands and thieves of the Russia of today. As regards the latter, the reading of Flerovsky’s book The Condition of the Working Class in Russia would disillusion the most romantic souls concerning these poor creatures from whom Bakunin proposes to form the sacred phalanx of the Russian revolution. The sole brigandage — apart from the governmental sphere, of course — still being carried out on a large scale in Russia is the stealing of horses, run as a commercial enterprise by the capitalists, of whom the “revolutionaries without phrases” are but the tools and victims.

These threats were addressed to the Russian emigrants who had not bowed to Bakunin’s papal authority and whom he called doctrinaires.

“We break all ties with the political emigrants who refuse to return to their country to join our ranks, and until these ranks become evident, with all those who refuse to work for their public emergence on the scene of Russian life. We make exception for the emigrants who have already declared themselves workers of the European revolution. From now on we shall make no further repetitions or appeals... He who has ears and eyes will hear and see the men of action, and if he does not join them his destruction will be no fault of ours, just as it will be no fault of ours if all who hide behind the scenes are cold-bloodedly and pitilessly destroyed, along with the scenery that hides them.”

At this point we can see right through Bakunin. While enjoining the emigrants on pain of death to return to Russia as agents of his secret society—like the Russian police-spies who would offer them passports and money to go there and join in conspiracies—he grants himself a papal dispensation to remain peacefully in Switzerland as “a worker of the European revolution”, and to occupy himself composing manifestos that compromise the unfortunate students whom the police hold in their prisons.

“While not recognising any other activity but that of destruction, we acknowledge that the forms in which it manifests itself may be extremely varied: poison, dagger, noose, etc. The revolution sanctifies all without distinction. The field is open!—Let all young and healthy minds undertake at once the sacred work of destroying evil, purging and enlightening the Russian land by fire and sword, uniting fraternally with those who will do the same thing throughout Europe.”

Let us add that in this sublime proclamation the inevitable brigand figures in the melodramatic person of Karl Moor (from Schiller’s Robbers), and that No. 2 of The People’s Judgment, quoting a passage from this leaflet, calls it straight out “a proclamation of Bakunin’s “.

Number 1 of the Publications of the “People’s Judgment”* Society begins by proclaiming that the general uprising of the Russian people is imminent and close at hand.

“We, that is to say, that part of the popular youth which have reached a certain stage of development, we must clear the way for it; in other words, we must

* Bakunin and Nechayev always translate this expression as “justice populaire”, but the Russian word “rasprava” means not justice, but judgment, or rather revenge.

eliminate all the obstacles to its progress and prepare favourable conditions for it... In view of the imminence of the uprising, we deem it necessary to unite into a single indissoluble whole all revolutionary efforts scattered all over Russia. That is why we have decided to publish, on behalf of the revolutionary centre, leaflets in which every one of our coreligionaries scattered all over Russia, every one of the workers for the sacred cause of the Revolution, although unknown to us, will always see what we want and where we are going.”

The leaflet then states:

“Thought has value for us only inasmuch as it serves the great cause of universal pan-destruction. The revolutionary who studies the revolution in books will never be good for anything... We have no more faith in words. The word has value for us only when it is followed by action; but not all is action which bears the name. For example, the modest and too circumspect organisation of secret societies which have no external manifestations is, in our view, nothing but ridiculous and disgusting child’s play. By external manifestations, we mean only a series of acts positively destroying something, a person, a thing, an enchainment which hinders popular emancipation... Without sparing our lives, without stopping before any threat, any obstacle, any danger, etc., we must, by a series of audacious and, yes, arrogant attempts, burst into the life of the people and inspire them with faith [...] in their own powers, awaken them, rally them and urge them on to the triumph of their own cause.”

But suddenly the revolutionary phrases of the Judgment turn into attacks on The People’s Cause, a Russian newspaper published in Geneva which defended the programme and organisation of the International. It was, as we see, of the greatest importance for the Alliance propaganda that Bakunin was carrying out in Russia in the name of the International, that a newspaper unmasking his fraud should be silenced.

“If this newspaper continues in the same fashion, we shall not hesitate to express and demonstrate to it what our relations with it must be... We are convinced that all serious men will now lay aside all theory, and the more so all doctrinairism. We can prevent the publication of writings which, though sincere, are nevertheless contrary to our banner, by various practical means at our disposal.”

After these threats to its dangerous rival, the People’s Judgment continues:

“Among the leaflets lately published abroad, we recommend, almost without any reserve, Bakunin’s appeal to the declasse student youth... Bakunin is right when he advises to leave the academies, the universities, and the schools, and to go among the people.”

Bakunin noticeably never lets slip the occasion to offer himself a swing of the censer.

The second article is entitled: “A glimpse at the past and present notions of the cause.” We have just seen Bakunin and Nechayev threatening the Russian organ of the International abroad. In this article, we shall see them descend on Chernyshevsky, the man who, in Russia, had done most to draw into the socialist movement the student youth whom they claimed to represent.

“Certainly, the peasants have never engaged in imagining forms of the future social order; nevertheless, after the elimination of all obstructions (that is, after the pan-destructive revolution, which is the first thing to be accomplished and consequently the most important one for us), they will be able to arrange their lives with more sense than can be found in the theories and projects of the doctrinarian socialists who want to impose themselves on the people as teachers and, even worse, directors. In the eyes of people not corrupted by the spectacles of civilisation, the tendencies of these unwanted teachers are only too obvious. They seek, under the pretext of science and art,etc., to prepare cosy little niches for themselves and their kind. Even if these tendencies were disinterested and naive, even if they were but the inevitable fruit of all order imbued with modern civilisation, the people would gain nothing by them. The ideal goal of social equality was incomparably better achieved in the Cossack society organised by Vasily Us in Astrakhan after the departure of Stenka Razin, than in Fourier’s phalansteries, the institutions of Cabet, Louis Blanc and other socialist savants” (!), “or in the associations of Chernyshevsky.”

Here follows a page of invective against the latter and his comrades.

The cosy little niche that Chernyshevsky was preparing for himself was presented to him by the Russian government in the form of a prison cell in Siberia, whereas Bakunin, relieved of this danger in his capacity as worker for the European revolution, limited himself to demonstrations from without. And it was at the very time when the government severely forbade the mere mention of Chernyshevsky’s name in the press, that Messrs Bakunin and Nechayev attacked him.

Our “amorphous” revolutionaries continue:

“We undertake to demolish this rotten social edifice... We come from the people with our skins rent by the teeth of the existing order; we come guided by hatred for all that is not of the people, having no notion of moral obligations or of any kind of honesty towards this world which we hate and of which we expect nothing but evil. We have but one single invariable and negative plan: that of merciless destruction. We categorically renounce the elaboration of future conditions of life, this task being incompatible with our activities, and for that reason we regard as futile all purely theoretical brain work... We undertake exclusively the destruction of the existing social order.”

These two demonstrators from without are insinuating that the attempted assassination of the tsar in 1866 was one of a “series of pan-destructive acts” committed by their own secret society:

“It was Karakozov who began our sacred work on April 4, 1866. Only since that time has the consciousness of their revolutionary powers been stirring to life among the young people... It was an example, a deed! No propaganda can be of such great significance.”

They then draw up a long list of “creatures” condemned by the committee to immediate death. Several “will have their tongues torn out” ... but

“we shall not touch the tsar ... we shall save him for the judgment of the people, of the peasants; this right belongs to all the people ... so let our executioner live until the moment of the popular storm... “

No one will venture to doubt that these Russian pamphlets, the secret statutes, and all the works published by Bakunin since 1869 in French, come from one and the same source. On the contrary, all these three categories complement one another. They correspond to some extent to the three degrees of initiation into the famous organisation of pan-destruction. The French brochures of Citizen B. are written for the rank and file of the Alliance, whose prejudices are taken into account. They are told of nothing but pure anarchy, of anti-authoritarianism, of a free federation of autonomous groups and other equally harmless things: a mere jumble of words. The secret statutes are intended for the international brethren of the West; there anarchy becomes “the complete unleashing of people’s life ... of evil passions”, but underneath this anarchy there lies the secret directing element— the brothers themselves; they are given only a few vague indications on the morality of the Alliance, stolen from Loyola, and the necessity of leaving not a stone standing is mentioned only in passing, because these are Westerners brought up on philistine prejudices and some allowances have to be made for them. They are told that the truth, too blinding for eyes not yet accustomed to true anarchism, will be fully revealed in the programme of the Russian section. Only to the born anarchists, to the people elect, to his young people of Holy Russia does the prophet dare to speak out openly. There anarchy means universal pan-destruction; the revolution, a series of assassinations, first individual and then en masse; the sole rule of action, the Jesuit morality intensified; the revolutionary type, the brigand. There, thought and learning are absolutely forbidden to the young as mundane occupations that could lead them to doubt the all-destructive orthodoxy. Those who persist in adhering to these theoretical heresies or who apply their vulgar criticism to the dogmas of universal amorphism are threatened with a holy inquisition. Before the youth of Russia the Pope need feel no restraint either in the form or substance of his utterances. He gives his tongue free play and the complete absence of ideas is expressed in such grandiloquent verbiage that it cannot be reproduced in French without weakening its comic effect. His language is not even real Russian. It is Tartar, so a native Russian has stated. These small men with atrophied minds puff themselves up with horrific phrases in order to appear in their own eyes as giants of revolution. It is the fable of the frog and the ox.

What terrible revolutionaries! They want to annihilate and amorphise everything, “absolutely everything”. They draw up lists of proscribed persons, doomed to die by their daggers, their poison, their ropes, by the bullets from their revolvers; they “will tear out the tongues” of many, but they will bow before the majesty of the tsar. Indeed, the tsar, the officials, the nobility, the bourgeoisie may sleep in peace. The Alliance does not make war on the established states, but on the revolutionaries who do not stoop to the role of supernumeraries in this tragicomedy. Peace to the palaces, war on the cottages! Chernyshevsky was libelled; the editors of The People’s Cause were warned that they would be silenced “by various practical means at our disposal”; the Alliance threatened to assassinate all revolutionaries who were not with it. This is the only part of their pan-destructive programme which they began to carry out. We shall now describe the first exploit of this nature.

After April 1869, Bakunin and Nechayev began preparing the ground for the revolution in Russia. They sent letters, proclamations and telegrams from Geneva to St. Petersburg, Kiev, and other cities. They knew, however, that they could not send letters and proclamations, much less telegrams, to Russia without the “Third Department” (the secret police) knowing about them. All this could have no purpose other than that of compromising others. These cowardly tricks of men who risked nothing in their fine city of Geneva resulted in the arrest of a great many persons in Russia. However, they were warned of the danger that they were causing. We have in our hands proof that the following passage in a letter from Russia was communicated to Bakunin:

“For mercy’s sake, let Bakunin know that if he holds anything sacred in the revolution, he must stop sending his lunatic proclamations, which are leading to searches in several cities and to arrests, and are paralysing all serious work.”

Bakunin replied that it was all nonsense and that Nechayev had left for America. But, as will be seen later, Bakunin’s clandestine code makes it obligatory to

“compromise completely ... the ambitious men and liberals of different shades ... so that retreat becomes impossible for them, and make use of them”. (The Revolutionary Catechism, § 19.)

Here is one proof. On April 7, 1869, Nechayev wrote to Mme. Tomilova, wife of a colonel who later died of grief after the arrest of his wife, that “there is an enormous amount to be done in Geneva”, and he urged her to send a reliable man for talks with him.

“The cause on which we must take counsel does not concern only our trade, but that of all Europe. Things are in ferment here. There’s a soup boiling up that Europe will never manage to swallow. So make haste.”

Then comes the Geneva address. This letter did not reach its destination; it was confiscated in the post by the secret police, and resulted in the arrest of Mme. Tomilova, who only learned about it during the investigation. (Report of the Nechayev trial, St. Petersburg Gazette, No. 187, 1871.*)

Here is another fact which demonstrates Bakunin’s circumspection in organising a conspiracy. Mavritsky, a student at the Kiev Academy, received proclamations which had been sent to him from Geneva. He immediately handed them over to the government, which hastened to send to Geneva a trustworthy man, that is, a spy. Bakunin and Nechayev formed a close association with this delegate from the south of Russia, supplied him with

* All the facts cited by us in connection with the Nechayev conspiracy are extracts from the reports of the trial as published in the St. Petersburg Gazette. We shall quote the number of the issue from which they have been taken. proclamations and the addresses of persons whom Nechayev claimed to know in Russia, and gave him what could only be taken as a letter of confidence and recommendation (St. Petersburg Gazette, No. 187).

On September 3 (September 15, new style), 1869, Nechayev introduced himself in Moscow to Uspensky, a young man he had known before going abroad, as emissary of the World Revolutionary Committee in Geneva, and showed him the mandate quoted above. He told Uspensky that emissaries from this European Committee would be coming to Moscow furnished with similar mandates, and that he, Nechayev, had been given the mission of

“organising a secret society among the student youth ... to provoke a popular uprising in Russia”.

On Uspensky’s recommendation, Nechayev, in order to find a safe refuge, went to the Agricultural Academy, which was some distance from the city, and contacted Ivanov, one of the students best known for their devotion to the interests of the young and the people. Henceforth, the Agricultural Academy was to be Nechayev’s centre of activity. First, he introduced himself under a false name and told how he had travelled a great deal in Russia; that the people were ready to rise everywhere and would have done so long ago had not the revolutionaries advised them to wait patiently until the completion of their great and powerful organisation, which was going to combine all the revolutionary forces of Russia. He urged Ivanov and other students to join this secret society, headed by an all-powerful Committee in whose name everything was done, but whose composition and locale must remain unknown to its members. This Committee and this organisation constituted the Russian Branch of World Union, of the Revolutionary Alliance, of the International Working Men’s Association I *

Nechayev began by distributing the above-mentioned Words among the students to show them that Bakunin, the celebrated revolutionary of 1848 who had escaped from Siberia, was playing an important role in Europe, that he was the chief plenipotentiary

* It should be noted that in Russian the words for association, union and alliance (obshchestvo, soyuz, tovarishchestvo) are more or less synonymous and can often be used indiscriminately. Similarly, the word for international is mostly rendered by “world” (vsemirny). In the Russian press, “International Association” is thus often translated by words which could equally well be rendered into French as “Alliance universelle”. It was by making use of this confusion in terms that Bakunin and Nechayev succeeded in exploiting our Association’s name and in ruining about a hundred young people. of the workers, that he signed the mandates issued by the General Committee of the World Association, and that this hero advised them to give up their studies, etc. To give them a striking example of devotion unto death, he read them a poem by Ogarev, Bakunin’s friend and the editor of Herzen’s Kolokol; entitled The Student, it was dedicated to his “young friend Nechayev”. In it, Nechayev was represented as the ideal student, as the “indefatigable fighter since childhood”. Ogarev sang of how Nechayev suffered in his early years for the sake of the living work of science; how his devotion to the people had grown; how, pursued by the vengeance of the tsar and by the fear of the Boyars, he took to a life of wandering (skitanye, or vagabondage); how he went on a pilgrimage to cry out to the peasants from east to west: “Assemble together, rise up courageously”, etc. etc.; how he ended his life in penal servitude amid the snows of Siberia; how, being no hypocrite, he remained faithful all his life to the struggle; and how, till his last breath, he repeated: “All the people must conquer their land and their liberty!” This Alliance poem was published in the spring of 1869, when Nechayev was amusing himself in Geneva. Batches of it were sent to Russia along with the other proclamations. It would seem that the mere act of copying out this poem had the effect of inspiring a feeling of self-sacrifice in the neophytes, for, on the Committee’s instructions, Nechayev had it copied out and distributed by each new initiate (statements by several of the defendants).

Music seems to be the only thing which was to escape the amorphism to which universal pan-destruction reduced all the arts and sciences. On behalf of the Committee, Nechayev ordained that propaganda should be carried out by means of revolutionary music, and tried hard to find a tune to which this poetic masterpiece could be sung by the young people (St. Petersburg Gazette, No. 190).

The mystic legend of his death did not prevent him from hinting that Nechayev might well be still alive, or from telling, under oath of secrecy, that Nechayev was in the Urals as a worker and that he had founded workers’ associations there. (St. Petersburg Gazette, No. 202). He disclosed this mainly to those who were “good for nothing”, that is, to those who dreamed of founding working men’s associations, in order to inspire them with admiration for this fabulous hero. Finally, when the legends of his imaginary escape from the St. Petersburg Fortress and of his poetic death in Siberia had sufficiently prepared their minds and he believed that the initiates were well enough versed in the catechism, he finally brought about his evangelical resurrection and announced that he was Nechayev in person! But it was no longer the Nechayev of old, ridiculed and despised by the students of St. Petersburg, as is affirmed by the witnesses and the defendants; this was the plenipotentiary of the World Revolutionary Committee. The miracle of his transformation had been engineered by Bakunin. Nechayev had complied with all the conditions demanded by the statutes of the organisation he preached; he had “distinguished himself by actions known and appreciated by the Committee”; he had, in Brussels, organised and directed an important strike by members of the International; the Belgian Committee had sent him as delegate to the Geneva International, where he had met Bakunin, and since, to use his own expression, “he disliked resting on his laurels”, he had returned to Russia to begin “revolutionary activities”. He gave an assurance that a whole general staff of sixteen Russian refugees had come with him.*

Uspensky, Ivanov, and four or six other young people appear to have been the only ones in Moscow who let themselves be taken in by this balderdash. Four of these initiates were ordered to recruit new adherents and to form circles or small sections. The plan of organisation is to be found in the documents of the trial; it conforms in almost every point to that of the secret Alliance. The “general rules of the organisation” were read out before the court, and not one of the principal initiates disputed their authenticity. Furthermore, issue No. 2 of The People’s Judgment edited by Bakunin and Nechayev admitted the authenticity of the following articles:

“The organisation is based on trust in the individual.— No member knows to which grade he belongs, that is to say, whether he is far from or near the centre.— Obedience to the Committee’s orders must be absolute, without any objections.— Renunciation of all property in favour of the Committee, which can dispose of it.—Any member who has recruited a certain number of proselytes to our cause and who has proved by his deeds the degree of his strength and abilities, may familiarise himself with these rules and, later, with the society’s statutes to a greater or lesser extent. The degree of his strength and abilities is assessed by the Committee.”

* None of the Russian refugees re-entered Russia, and in any case there are no sixteen Russian political refugees to be found in the whole of Europe.

To hoodwink the Moscow members, Nechayev told them that the organisation in St. Petersburg was already an enormous one, whereas in reality not a single circle or section existed there. In a moment of forgetfulness, he exclaimed to an initiate : “In St. Petersburg, they have been faithless to me like women and have betrayed me like slaves.” When in St. Petersburg, however, he said that the organisation was making admirable progress in Moscow.

When, in this latter city, they asked to see a member of the Committee, he invited a young St. Petersburg officer, who was interested in the student movement, to come with him to Moscow and see the circles there. The young man agreed, and on the way Nechayev consecrated him “delegate extraordinary of the Committee of the International Association of Geneva”.

“You could not,” he said, “be admitted to our meetings if you were not a member, but here is a mandate certifying that you are a member of the International Association, and as such you will be admitted.”

The mandate bore a French stamp and read: “The bearer of this mandate is the plenipotentiary representative of the International Association.” The other defendants affirm that Nechayev assured them that this stranger was the “true agent of the Geneva Revolutionary Committee” (St. Petersburg Gazette, Nos. 225 and 226).

Dolgov, a friend of Ivanov, testifies that

“when speaking of the secret society organised with the aim of supporting the people in the event of an uprising and of directing the insurrection so as to ensure its success, Nechayev also spoke of the International Association and said that Bakunin was serving as a contact with it” (No. 198).

Ripman confirms that

“to divert him from his ideas on cooperative associations, Nechayev told him that there was an International Working Men’s Association in Europe, and that to attain the goal pursued by the International, it was enough to join this Association, a section of which already existed in Moscow” (No. 198).

Further on, we see from the statements of the defendants that Nechayev was misrepresenting the International as a secret society and his own society as a branch of the International. He also assured the initiates that their Moscow section was going to proceed by strikes and associations on a large scale, just like the International. When the accused Ripman asked him for the society’s programme, Nechayev read him several passages from a French leaflet on the aims of the society. The defendant understood that this leaflet was the International’s programme and added:

“Since there had been a lot of talk about this society in the press, I did not see anything very criminal in Nechayev’s proposition.”

Kuznetsov, one of the chief defendants, said that Nechayev had read the programme of the International Association (No. 181). His brother stated that

“he had seen them at his brother’s place copying out a French leaflet which must have been the society’s programme” (No. 202).

The defendant Klimin declared that he had been read

“the programme of the International Association with a few lines written as a postscript by Bakunin ... but as far as I remember, this programme was couched in very vague terms and said nothing about the means of achieving the aim, but spoke only of equality in general” (No. 199).

The defendant Gavrishev explained that the

“French leaflet, insofar as it was possible to grasp its meaning, contained an exposition of the principles held by the representatives of socialism who had had their Congress at Geneva”.

Finally, the deposition of the defendant Svyatsky completely clarifies for us the nature of this mysterious French leaflet: during the search, he was found in possession of a leaflet written in French and entitled: Programme de l’Alliance internationale de la démocratie socialiste.

“Much had been said about the International Association in the newspapers,” he said, “and I was interested to know its programme for purely theoretical purposes” (St. Petersburg Gazette, No. 230.)

These depositions prove that the secret programme of the Alliance had been passed off in manuscript as the International’s programme. That the World Revolutionary Committee, of which Nechayev said he was an emissary, and the Central Bureau of the Alliance (Citizen B.) were identical is proved by the deposition of the chief defendant, Uspensky, who declared that he had collected together all the minutes of the circle’s meetings “in order to send an account to Bakunin in Geneva”. Pryzhov, one of the principal defendants, testified that Nechayev had ordered him to go to Geneva with a report for Bakunin.

Owing to lack of space, we are not going to mention here all the lies, stupidities, swindles, and acts of violence on the part of Bakunin’s agent which were brought to light by the trial. We will only take note of the more striking examples.

Everything was a mystery in this organisation. Dolgov said that

“before joining this society, he would have liked to know its organisation and means. Nechayev had replied that that was a secret and he would get to know it later” (St. Petersburg Gazette, No. 198).

When the members ventured to ask questions, Nechayev shut them up, saying that in accordance with the statutes, no one had the right to know anything until he had distinguished himself by some act (No. 199).

“As soon as we had agreed to become members of the society,” declared one of the accused, “Nechayev began to terrorise us with the power and might of the Committee which, according to him, existed and directed us. He said that the Committee had its own police, and that if anybody broke his word or acted contrary to the orders of individuals who were more highly placed than our circle, the Committee would have recourse to vengeance.” The defendant confessed that “having noticed Nechayev’s swindles, he informed him that he intended to withdraw completely from this business and go to the Caucasus to recover his health. Nechayev told him that this was not allowed, and that the Committee could punish him with death if he dared to leave the society. He also ordered him to go to a meeting and speak there of the secret society in order to recruit new members, and to read the poem on Nechayev’s death. When the defendant refused, Nechayev threatened him. ‘You’re not here to discuss matters,’ he shouted. ‘You’re obliged to obey the Committee’s orders without objection’ “ (No. 198).

If this were only an isolated instance, there might be grounds for doubt; but several of the defendants, who could not possibly have come to an understanding with one another, testify to exactly the same thing.—Another declared that the circle’s members, on realising that they had been tricked, wanted to leave the society but did not dare do so for fear of the Committee’s revenge (No. 198).

One witness, speaking of one of his accused friends, said: The accused Florinsky did not know how to shake off Nechayev, who was preventing him from getting on with his work. The witness advised him to leave Moscow and go to St. Petersburg, but Florinsky replied that Nechayev would find him in St. Petersburg just as he did in Moscow; that Nechayev was outraging the convictions of a great many young people by terrorising them, and that what Florinsky seemed to fear was a denunciation on Nechayev’s part.

“It was said, and I heard it,” testified Likhutin, “that Nechayev was sending very violent letters from abroad to his acquaintances to compromise them and get them arrested. This way of acting was one trait of his character” (No. 186).

Yenisherlov stated even that he was beginning to regard Nechayev as a government agent.

During the meeting of a small circle, one of the members, Klimin, in reply to a stranger who was present ns emissary of the Committee and expressed his dissatisfaction with the conduct of the circle, said that

“they themselves were also dissatisfied; that at the beginning the recruits were told that each section could act more or less independently without passive obedience being demanded of its members; but subsequently things had been run quite differently and the Committee was reducing them to the state of slaves” (No. 199).

Nechayev used to issue his orders on pieces of paper stamped: “Russian Section of the World Revolutionary Alliance. Form for the public”, and he formulated his instructions as follows: “The Committee orders you to...” carry out such-and-such, go to such-and-such a place, etc.

One young officer, who had become disillusioned, wanted to leave the society. Nechayev seemed to agree to this, but he demanded compensation. The officer had to obtain for him a bill for 6,000 rubles (nearly 20,000 frs.) signed by Kolachevsky. In 1866, Kolachevsky, after Karakozov’s attempt to assassinate the tsar, had been detained with his two sisters for a long period. At the time of the present incident, one of them was serving a second term in prison for a political offence. The whole family was under rigorous police surveillance and Kolachevsky could expect to be arrested at any moment. Nechayev made use of this situation. On his orders, the young officer mentioned above invited Kolachevsky to his own place under a false pretext, entered into conversation with him, and gave him some proclamations, which the other took out of curiosity. No sooner had Kolachevsky gone out into the street, than he was accosted by an officer who ordered the other to follow him, announcing that he was working for the Third Department (secret police), and that he knew that Kolachevsky had on his person proclamations of a seditious nature. Now the possession of these alone is enough to lead to years of detention and penal servitude for a man if he has had the misfortune already to have been compromised in a political matter. The self-styled agent of the Third Department invited Kolachevsky to get into a carriage, and, once they were inside, offered him the chance to buy himself off by signing on the spot a bill for 6,000 rubles. Forced to choose between this offer and the prospect of going to Siberia, Kolachevsky signed. The next day, another young man, Negreskul, on learning of this business, suspected Nechayev of being involved, immediately sought out the supposed agent of the Third Department, and demanded an explanation of his swindle. The latter denied everything; the bill had been hidden and was not retrieved until later during the search. The discovery of the conspiracy and Nechayev’s flight made it impossible for him to cash the note.— Negreskul had known Nechayev for a long time and had been the victim of one of his swindles in Geneva. Bakunin had then tried to recruit him. Later, they had extorted a hundred rubles from him (No. 230). He had ended up by being compromised by Nechayev, although he detested him and thought him capable of any villainy. He was arrested and died in prison.

We have seen that Ivanov had been one of Nechayev’s first recruits. He was one of the most beloved and most influential students at the Moscow Agricultural Academy. He devoted himself to bettering the lot of his comrades and organised aid societies and dining rooms where poor students could eat free of charge and which served as a cover for meetings at which they discussed social questions. He devoted all his spare time to teaching the children of peasants living near the Academy. His comrades testify that he threw himself passionately into all these activities, giving away his last kopek and quite often sacrificing his own hot meals.

Ivanov was struck by the stupidity of the terrorist proclamations issued by Nechayev and Bakunin. He could not understand why the Committee kept ordering the distribution of Words, Ogarev’s Song of Death, The People’s Judgment and, finally, Bakunin’s Appeal to the Russian Nobility, a purely aristocratic proclamation.* He

* Here are some extracts from the Appeal to the Russian Nobility, a proclamation published by Bakunin: “What privileges have we received for having, during the first half of the 19th century, been the mainstay of the throne which has been shaken to its very foundations so many times; for having, in 1848, during the storms of popular madness unleashed over Europe, saved by our noble deeds the Russian empire from the socialist Utopias that threatened to invade it?... What have we been accorded for having saved the Empire from dismemberment, for having extinguished in Poland the flames of the conflagration which threatened to set all Russia on fire, for having, to this very moment, worked with unsparing energy and with unparalleled courage to destroy the revolutionary elements in Russia? — Was it not from our midst that there came Mikhail Muravyov, that gallant man whom Alexander II himself, for all his feeble-mindedness, named the saviour of his country? — What have we gained from all this? For all these inestimable services, began to lose patience and to ask where this Committee was, what it was doing, and what sort of a Committee it was that invariably put Nechayev in the right and the other members in the wrong. He expressed a desire to see someone from this Committee. He had acquired the right to this, since Nechayev himself had promoted him to a rank equivalent to that of member of a national committee of the secret Alliance. It was then that Nechayev extricated himself from this predicament by staging the comedy, as described above, of the emissary from the Geneva International.

One day, Nechayev ordered the transfer to the Committee of money intended for the students’ mutual aid society. Ivanov protested, and a quarrel ensued. Other comrades urged Ivanov to submit to the Committee’s decision, since they had accepted the statutes which demanded this submission. Ivanov gave way to their insistences and grudgingly complied. Nechayev then began thinking out a plan for getting rid of this man whom he probably regarded as a doctrinaire revolutionary deserving death. He engaged Uspensky in theoretical conversations on punishment, on the elimination of disloyal members who, by their rebellion, could compromise and ruin the whole vast secret organisation.

The manner in which Nechayev ran his secret society was such as to engender doubts concerning the serious nature of the organisation. The sections had to hold regular sittings to examine the academic registers of the names of all the students, to mark those who were considered likely recruits, and to investigate means of procuring money. One such means was subscription lists for “students who have suffered”, that is, who had been administratively banished. The proceeds from these lists went straight into the Committee’s pocket, that is to say, Nechayev’s. The sections had to obtain all kinds of clothes which were kept in a safe place and were used by Nechayev as disguise during his flight. But the principal occupation consisted in copying out the Song of Death and the proclamations cited above. The members of the conspiracy had to write down as accurately as possible everything that was

we have been skinned of everything we possess... Our present appeal is a declaration by a vast majority of the Russian nobility which has long been ready and organised... We feel our strength in our right, we boldly throw down the gauntlet before the despot, the German princeling Alexander II Saltykov-Romanov, and we challenge him to a noble and knightly combat which must be taken up in 1870 between the descendants of Rurik and the party of the Russian independent nobility.”

“Muravyov, that gallant man”, is nothing but the executioner of Poland. said at their meetings, and Nechayev threatened them with the Committee, which had its spies everywhere, in the event of them daring to hide anything. Each had to bring to the circle written reports on everything that he had been doing in between meetings, and these reports had to be compiled into a summary for despatch to Bakunin.

All these puerile and inquisitorial practices made Ivanov doubt the very existence of the Committee and the much vaunted powers of this organisation. He began to suspect that it all boiled down to preposterous exploitation and a colossal hoax. He confided to his close friends that if things stayed as they were and if they were given nothing better to do than these silly tasks, he would break with Nechayev and would found a serious organisation himself.

It was then that Nechayev took a decisive step. He gave the order for his proclamations to be put up in the students’ dining rooms. Ivanov realised that the posting up of these proclamations would lead to the closing of the dining rooms, the banning of meetings, and the dispersal of the best students. He therefore opposed the measure (this is, in fact, what happened: the students’ dining room was closed down and all the delegates appointed to manage it were exiled). A quarrel flared up over this, during which Nechayev kept repeating his stereotyped statement: “It’s the Committee’s orders!”

Ivanov was in utter despair. On November 20, 1869, he approached a member of the section, Pryzhov, and informed him that he was quitting the society. Pryzhov communicated this statement to Uspensky who, in his turn, hastened to inform Nechayev and, a few hours later, these three met at Kuznetsov’s place, where Nikolayev also had lodgings. Nechayev announced that Ivanov must be punished for rebelling against the Committee’s orders, and that he must be eliminated to prevent him from doing them any more damage. Kuznetsov, Ivanov’s close friend, apparently did not grasp Nechayev’s intention, and so the latter declared that Ivanov must be killed. Pryzhov shouted to Kuznetsov: “Nechayev is mad, he wants to kill Ivanov, he must be prevented.” Nechayev put a stop to their hesitation with his habitual statement: “Do you also want to rebel against the Committee’s orders? If there’s no other way of killing him, I’ll go to his room tonight with Nikolayev and we’ll strangle him.” He then suggested luring Ivanov that night to a grotto in the Academy park under pretext of digging up a printing-press which had been hidden for a long time, and they would assassinate him there.

Thus, even at this supreme moment, Nechayev himself paid tribute to Ivanov’s loyalty. He was sure that, in spite of his resignation, Ivanov would come and help to dig up the printing-press, and that he was incapable of betraying him since, if he had been harbouring any such intention, he would have carried it out before leaving the society or immediately afterwards. If Ivanov had wanted to denounce Nechayev to the police, he had the chance to get them caught in the act. Quite to the contrary, Ivanov was delighted to have positive proof at last that this organisation actually existed, a tangible sign that it possessed the means of action, even if it were only printer’s type. Forgetting all the threats so often made by Nechayev to the unfaithful, he hastened to leave a friend with whom he was having tea and at whose place Nikolayev had called on Nechayev’s orders, and off he went in obedience to the summons.

In the darkness of the night, Ivanov went unsuspectingly towards the grotto. Suddenly, a cry rang out. Someone had jumped on him from behind. A terrible struggle began, with nothing to be heard but the grunting of Nechayev and the groans of his victim, whom he was strangling with his bare hands. Then a shot rang out, and Ivanov fell down dead. Nechayev’s revolver bullet had pierced Ivanov’s skull. “Quick, rope and stones,” shouted Nechayev, rummaging through the dead man’s pockets for papers and money. They then threw him into a pond.

On returning to Kuznetsov’s place, the assassins took measures to hide the traces of their crime. They burned Nechayev’s blood-stained shirt. The accomplices were gloomy and uneasy. Suddenly, a second revolver shot rang out and a bullet whistled past Pryzhov’s ear. Nechayev apologised for “having wanted to show Nikolayev how his revolver worked”. The witnesses unanimously testified that this had been another assassination attempt. Nechayev had wanted to kill Pryzhov because the latter had dared in the morning to protest against the murder of Ivanov.

Immediately afterwards, Nechayev rushed from Moscow to Petersburg with Kuznetsov, leaving Uspensky to act in Moscow. At Petersburg, he made a pretence of always being busy with his organisation; but, to his great astonishment, Kuznetsov noted that there was even less of an organisation there than in Moscow. He dared to question Nechayev: “Where is the Committee, then? Would it be you, by any chance?” — Nechayev denied this again and assured him that the Committee existed. He returned to Moscow and admitted to Nikolayev that since Uspensky had already been arrested, the same would happen to all the others very soon, and that “he did not know what he ought to do any more”. It was then that Nikolayev, his most faithful follower, decided to ask him if the famous Committee really existed, or if Nechayev himself was its sole embodiment.

“Without giving a positive reply to this question, he told me that all means were permissible for drawing people into such a cause, that this rule was also practised abroad, that this rule was followed by Bakunin just as by others, and that if such men submitted to this rule, it was entirely natural that he, Nechayev, should act in the same manner” (No. 181).

He then ordered Nikolayev to go with Pryzhov to Tula and fraudulently extort a passport from a worker who was an old friend of Nikolayev’s. He later went to Tula himself, where he entreated a Mme. Alexandrovskaya to accompany him to Geneva; it was absolutely necessary for him.

Mme. Alexandrovskaya had been seriously compromised during the disturbances of 1861 and 1862. She even had been committed to prison, where her conduct had left much to be desired. In a fit of frankness, she had written a confession to her judges, and this confession had compromised many people. After all this, she was interned in a provincial town under police surveillance. As she was afraid of not being able to obtain a passport, Nechayev procured one for her, no one knows how. It might be asked why Nechayev had sought out for his travelling companion a woman whose company alone would be enough to get him arrested at the frontier. However, he arrived in Geneva safe and sound with Mme. Alexandrovskaya at his side and, while his wretched dupes were being thrown into prison cells, he and Bakunin set about preparing the second issue of The People’s Judgment Bakunin, unbelievably proud to see the Journal de Genève mention the Nechayev conspiracy with himself as having played the principal part, forgot that his The People’s Judgment claimed to be published in Moscow, and he inserted in it a whole page of the article from the Journal de Genève in French. As soon as the journal was ready, Mme. Alexandrovskaya was given the task of taking it into Russia with other proclamations. At the frontier, an agent of the Third Department, who was waiting for Mme. Alexandrovskaya, confiscated the parcel. After her arrest, she gave him a list of names which could not have been known except to Bakunin alone.—One of the accused in the Nechayev affair, and one of his closest friends, admitted to the tribunal that

“he had hitherto considered Bakunin an honest man, and he could not understand how he and others could have subjected this woman in such a craven fashion to the danger of arrest”.

If Bakunin evaded the necessity of himself going to Russia in order to direct in person the great revolution whose imminent explosion he predicted, at least he worked in Europe as if he had “the devil in his flesh”. Le Progrès of Locle, the organ of the Swiss Alliance, published long excerpts from The People’s Judgment In it, Guillaume praised the great successes of the great Russian socialists/ and declared that his abstentionist programme was identical to that of the great Russian socialists. At the Congress of La Chaux-de-Fonds, when Utin attempted to disclose Nechayev’s nefarious deeds, Guillaume interrupted him by saying that to speak of these men was espionage. As for Bakunin, he was writing in La Marseillaise as if he had just returned from “a long journey through distant lands which are not reached by free newspapers” so as to create the impression that matters in Russia were taking such a revolutionary turn that he considered his presence there essential.

We now come to the dénouement of the tragi-comedy of the Russian Alliance. In 1859, Herzen had received a bequest of 25,000 frs. from a young Russian to carry on revolutionary propaganda in Russia. Herzen, who had never wanted to release this sum to just anybody, nevertheless let himself be caught by Bakunin, who managed to relieve him of it by assuring him that Nechayev represented a vast and powerful secret organisation. Nechayev therefore thought himself entitled to demand his share. But the two international brethren, whom the assassination of

* In 1868, less than two years before the Congress of La Chaux-de-Fonds at which the Alliance members had their doctrine of political abstention sanctioned, Bakunin deploring, in La Démocratie of Chassin, the political abstention of the French workers, wrote: “Political abstention is a stupidity invented by scoundrels to deceive idiots.”

Ivanov had failed to split, began quarrelling over a money matter. Bakunin refused. Nechayev left Geneva and published in London, in the spring of 1870, a Russian newspaper The Commune (Obshchina) in which he publicly claimed from Bakunin the rest of the capital which the latter had received from the then deceased Herzen. Here, indeed, is proof that the international brethren

“never attack one another, nor settle their differences in public”.

The leading article in the second issue of The People’s Judgment contains yet another funeral dirge in poetic prose on Nechayev, that hero always dead and always living.

This time, the hero had been strangled by the gendarmes who were taking him to Siberia. Disguised as a workman, he had been arrested at Tambov while drinking in a tavern. This arrest had led to extraordinary unrest in government circles. They could speak of nothing but “Nechayev in disguise ... denunciations ... secret societies ... Bakuninists ... revolution”. On the occasion of Nechayev’s death, the governor of Perm has sent a telegram to Petersburg. The text of this telegram is quoted in full. Another telegram, also quoted in full, was sent to the Third Department, and The People’s Judgment knew that “having received this telegram, the chief of police jumped in his chair and smiled an evil smile all that evening”. Thus it was that Nechayev died a second time.

Ivanov’s murder is admitted in the article, which describes it as

“an act of vengeance by the society on a member for any deviation from his duties. The stern logic of true workers for the cause must not stop at any act leading to the success of the cause, much less at acts which may save the cause and avert its ruin”.

For Bakunin, the “success of the cause” was the imprisonment of eighty young people.

The second article is entitled: “He who is not for us, is against us”, and contains an apologia for political assassination. The fate of Ivanov, who is not mentioned by name, is promised to all revolutionaries who do not adhere to the Alliance:

“The critical moment has come ... military operations between the two camps have commenced ... it is no longer possible to remain neutral: to abide by the golden mean is out of the question, for this would mean being caught in the cross-fire between two hostile armies which have begun shooting at one another; this would mean exposing oneself pointlessly to death, it would mean falling under fire from both sides without a chance of defending oneself. It would mean suffering the lashes and tortures of the Third Department, or falling under the bullets of our revolvers.”

Next come expressions of gratitude, apparently ironical, to the Russian government for its

“cooperation in the development and the rapid advance of our work, which is approaching its much-desired goal at a headlong speed”.

At the very time when the two heroes were thanking the government for speedily bringing closer “the much-desired goal”, all the members of the so-called secret organisation were under arrest.—Then the article makes a new appeal. It “welcomes with open arms all fresh and honest forces”, but warns them that once they have submitted to these embraces, they must yield to all the exigencies of the society:

“Any renunciation, any withdrawal from the society, made knowingly through lack of faith in the truth and justice of certain principles, leads to removal from the list of the living”.

And our two heroes ridicule those who have been arrested; they are nothing more than petty liberals; the true members of the organisation are protected by the secret society, which does not allow them to be apprehended.

The third article is entitled: The Fundamental Principles of the Social Order of the Future. This article shows that if the ordinary mortal is punished like a criminal for even thinking about the social organisation of the future, this is because the leaders have arranged everything in advance.

“The ending of the existing social order and the renewal of life with the aid of the new principles can be accomplished only by concentrating all the means of social existence in the hands of OUR COMMITTEE, and the proclamation of compulsory physical labour for everyone.

“The committee, as soon as the present institutions have been overthrown, proclaims that everything is common property, orders the setting up of workers’ societies” (artels) “and at the same time publishes statistical tables compiled by experts and pointing out what branches of labour are most needed in a certain locality and what branches may run into difficulties there.

“For a certain number of days assigned for the revolutionary upheaval and the disorders that are bound to follow, each person must join one or another of these artels according to his own choice... All those who remain isolated and unattached to workers’ groups without sufficient reason will have no right of access either to the communal eating places or to the communal dormitories, or to any other buildings assigned to meet the various needs of the brother-workers or that contain the goods and materials, the victuals or tools reserved for all members of the established workers’ society; in a word, he who without sufficient reason has not joined an artel, will be left without means of subsistence. All the roads, all the means of communication will be closed to him; he will have no other alternative but work or death.”

Each artel will elect from its members an assessor (“otsenshchik”), who regulates the work, keeps the books on production and consumption and the productivity of every worker, and acts as a go-between with the general office of the given locality. The office, consisting of members elected from among the artels of the locality, conducts exchange between these artels, administers all the communal establishments (dormitories, canteens, schools, hospitals) and directs all public works: “All general work is managed by the office, while all individual work requiring special skills and craftsmanship is performed by special artels.”

Then comes a long set of rules on education, hours of work, feeding of children, freeing of inventors from work and so on.

“With full publicity, knowledge and activity on the part of everyone all ambition, as we now know it, all deception will disappear without a trace, will vanish forever... Everyone will endeavour to produce as much as possible for society and consume as little as possible; all the pride, all the ambition of the worker of those times will rest in the awareness of his usefulness to society.”

What a beautiful model of barrack-room communism! Here you have it all: communal eating, communal sleeping, assessors and offices regulating education, production, consumption, in a word, all social activity, and to crown all, OUR COMMITTEE, anonymous and unknown to anyone, as the supreme director. This is indeed the purest anti-authoritarianism.

To give this absurd plan of practical organisation the semblance of a theoretical basis, a small note is attached to the very title of this article:

“Those who wish to know the complete theoretical development of our principal theses, will find them in the writing published by us: Manifesto of the Communist Party.”

In fact, the Russian translation of the Manifesto (German) of the Communist Party, 1847, was announced, price one franc, in every issue of the Kolokol in 1870, alongside Bakunin’s Appeal to the Officers of the Russian Army and the two issues of The People’s Judgment. The very Bakunin who abused this Manifesto to lend weight to his Tartar fantasies in Russia, had it denounced by the Alliance in the West as an ultra-heretical writing preaching the baleful doctrines of German authoritarian communism (see the resolution of the Rimini Conference, Guillaume’s address at The Hague, Bulletin jurassien No. 10-1 l,c the Federacion of Barcelona, etc.)

Now that the common herd knows the role “our committee” is destined to perform, it is easy to understand this competitive hatred of the state and of any centralisation of the workers’ forces. Assuredly, while the working class continues to have any representative bodies of its own, Messrs. Bakunin and Nechayev, revolutionising under the incognito of “our committee”, will not be able to put themselves in possession of the public wealth or reap the benefit of this sublime ambition which they so ardently desire to inspire in others — that of working much to consume little!

Nechayev took great care of a booklet written in cypher and called The Revolutionary Catechism. He claimed that the possession of this book was the special privilege of any emissary or agent of the International Association. According to all the depositions and the strong evidence provided by the lawyers, this catechism had been written by Bakunin, who never dared to deny paternity. Furthermore, the form and the content of this work clearly show that it came from the same source as the secret statutes, the Words, the proclamations, and The People’s Judgment, which we have already mentioned. The revolutionary catechism was only a supplement to these. These pan-destructive anarchists, who want to reduce everything to amorphism in order to create anarchy in morality, push bourgeois immorality to the limit. We have already been able to assess, from a few examples, the worth of this Alliance morality whose dogmas, purely Christian in origin, were first drawn up in meticulous detail by the Escobars of the 17th century. The only difference being that the Alliance exaggerated the terms to the ridiculous and replaced the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church of the Jesuits with its arch-anarchist and pan-destructive "holy revolutionary cause". The revolutionary catechism is the official code of this morality, formulated systematically and quite openly this time. We are publishing it in extenso, just as it was read before the tribunal during the sitting of July 8, 1871.

§ 1. The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has neither personal interests, nor affairs, nor feelings, nor attachments, nor property, nor even a name. Every part of him is absorbed by one sole interest, one sole thought, one sole passion: the revolution.

§ 2. In the depths of his being, not only in words, but in deeds, he has severed all ties with civil order and with the entire civilised world, with laws, decencies, morality, and the conventions generally accepted in that world. He is its implacable enemy, and if he continues to live in it, it is only to destroy it more surely.

§ 3. A revolutionary despises all doctrinairism and renounces worldly science, leaving it for future generations. He only knows one science: that of destruction. For that purpose and none other, he studies mechanics, physics, chemistry, and perhaps medicine. With the same goal, he studies living science day and night—men, characters, positions, and all conditions of the existing social order in all possible spheres. The goal remains the same: the destruction, as quickly as possible and as certainly as possible, of this foul (poganyi) order.

§ 4. He despises public opinion. He despises and hates the existing social morality with all its instincts and in all its manifestations. For him, everything is moral that favours the triumph of the revolution, and everything is immoral and criminal that impedes it.

§ 5. The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no mercy for the State in general or for the entire civilised class of society, and he should no more expect mercy for himself. Between him and society there is a struggle, open or concealed, but always incessant, irreconcilable, and to the death. He must accustom himself to withstand torture.

§ 6. Strict with himself, he must be the same with others. All feelings of affection, all the softening feelings of kinship, friendship, love and gratitude must be stifled in him by a unique and cold passion for the revolutionary cause. For him, there is only one joy, one consolation, one reward and one satisfaction: the success of the revolution. Night and day, he must have only one thought and one goal—implacable destruction. Pursuing this goal coldly and without respite, he must himself be ready to perish and to destroy with his own hands all that which obstructs the achievement of this goal.

§ 7. The nature of the true revolutionary excludes all romanticism, all sensitivity, all enthusiasm, and all involvement; it even excludes personal hatred and vengeance. Revolutionary passion, having become with him a habit every day and every moment, must be combined with cold calculation. Everywhere and always he must obey not his personal impulses, but whatever is prescribed to him by the general interests of the revolution.

§ 8. The revolutionary can only have friendship and affection for the man who has proved by his deeds that he is, like him, a revolutionary agent. The degree of friendship, devotion, and other obligations towards such a comrade are only measured by the degree of his usefulness in the practical work of the pan-destructive (vserazrushitelnaya) revolution.

§ 9. It is superfluous to speak of solidarity among revolutionaries, for in it lies all the strength of the revolutionary cause. The revolutionary comrades who find themselves at the same level of revolutionary consciousness and passion must, as much as possible, deliberate in common on all important matters and make their decisions unanimously. In the execution of a matter thus decided, each must rely on himself as much as possible. In the execution of a series of destructive acts, each must act on his own and not have recourse to the assistance or advice of his comrades, unless it is indispensable for success.

§ 10. Each comrade should have at hand several revolutionaries from the second and third rank, that is, from those who have not been fully initiated. He must consider them as part of the general revolutionary capital placed at his disposal. He must expend his share of the capital economically and try to extract from it as much profit as possible. He regards himself as capital destined to be expended for the triumph of the revolutionary cause, but it is capital which he cannot dispose of alone and without the consent of all the fully initiated comrades. § 11. When a comrade finds himself in danger, then in order to decide whether or not he should be saved, the revolutionary must not consider any personal feeling, but solely the interest of the revolutionary cause. Consequently, he must calculate, on the one hand, the degree of usefulness furnished by his comrade and, on the other, the quantity of revolutionary forces necessary to rescue him; he must see which way the scales tip and he must act accordingly.

§ 12. A new member, after having proved his worth, not by words, but by deeds, can only be accepted by the association unanimously.

§ 13. A revolutionary enters the world of the State, the world of the classes, the so-called civilised world, and lives in it solely because he has faith in its imminent and total destruction. He is not a revolutionary if he holds on to anything whatever in this world. He must not hesitate before the destruction of any position, tie or man belonging to this world. He must hate everything and everybody equally. So much the worse for him if he has in this world ties of kinship, friendship, or love; he is not a revolutionary if these ties can stay his hand.

§ 14. With the aim of implacable destruction, a revolutionary can, and often must, live in society, while pretending to be entirely different from what he really is. A revolutionary must penetrate everywhere, into the upper and the middle classes alike, into the merchant’s shop, into the church, into the aristocratic palace, into the bureaucratic, military and literary world, into the Third Department (secre t police), and even into the imperial palace.

§ 15. The whole of this foul society must be divided into several categories. The first consists of those who are condemned to death without delay. The comrades should draw up lists of these condemned men in the order of their relative harmfulness to the success of the revolutionary cause, so that the first numbers may be disposed of before the others.

§ 16. In drawing up these lists and in establishing these categories, no influence should be exerted by the personal villainy of a man, or even by the hatred which he inspires in the members of the organisation or in the people. This villainy and this hatred may even be useful to some extent in stirring up a popular revolt. The only consideration should be taken of the measure of profit for the revolutionary cause which may result from the death of a certain person. Consequently, the first to be destroyed must be those who are most dangerous to the revolutionary organisation and whose violent and sudden death can most frighten the government and break its strength by depriving it of energetic and intelligent agents.

§ 17. The second category should consist of people who are allowed to live provisionally (!) so that by a series of monstrous acts they will drive the people to the inevitable revolt.

§ 18. The third category covers a large number of highly placed brutes or individuals who are remarkable neither for their minds nor for their energy, but who, by virtue of their position, have wealth, connections, influence, and power. We must exploit them in every way possible, outwit them, confuse them, and, wherever possible, by possessing ourselves of their filthy secrets, make them our slaves. In this way, their power, connections, influence and wealth will become an inexhaustible treasure and an invaluable help in various enterprises.

§ 19. The fourth category is composed of various ambitious men in the State service, and liberals of different shades. We can conspire with these on their own programme, putting up an appearance of following them blindly. We must get them into our hands, seize their secrets, compromise them completely, so that retreat becomes impossible for them, and make use of them to cause trouble within the State.

§ 20. The fifth category consists of doctrinaires, conspirators, revolutionaries, all those who babble at meetings and on paper. They must be constantly encouraged and inveigled into practical and dangerous demonstrations which will have the effect of eliminating the majority, while making true revolutionaries out of some.

§ 21. The sixth category is very important—the women, who must be divided into three classes: first, useless women without spirit or heart, who must be exploited in the same way as the third and fourth categories of men; second, fervent, devoted and capable women, who are nevertheless not with us because they have not yet arrived at a practical and phraseless revolutionary awareness; they must be used like the fifth category of men; finally, women who are entirely with us, that is to say, who have been fully initiated and who have accepted our programme in its entirety. We must treat them as the most valuable of our treasures, for without their help we can do nothing.

§ 22. The Association has no goal other than the total emancipation and the happiness of the people, that is to say, manual workers (chernorabochi lyud). But, convinced that this emancipation and this happiness cannot be achieved except by means of a people’s revolution which will destroy everything, the Association will employ all its means and all its forces to magnify and increase the ills and evils which must finally exhaust the patience of the people and stir them to a mass uprising.

§ 23. By a people’s revolution, the Society does not mean a movement directed after the classic model of the West, which, always hesitating before property and the traditional social system of so-called civilisation and morality, has hitherto restricted itself to the overthrow of one political form in order to replace it with another and to creating a so-called revolutionary State. The only revolution which can be beneficial to the people is that which will destroy from bottom to top the whole idea of the State and will turn upside-down all the traditions, state system, and classes in Russia.

§ 24. To this end, the Society has no intention of imposing on the people any kind of organisation from above. The future organisation will undoubtedly emerge from the movement and life of the people, but that is the concern of future generations. Our concern is terrifying, total, implacable and universal destruction.

§ 25. Consequently, in drawing closer to the people, we must above all join up with the elements of the people’s life which, since the foundation of the Muscovite State, have not ceased to protest, not only with words, but with their deeds, against everything which is directly or indirectly tied up with the State, against the nobility, against the bureaucracy, against the clergy, against the business world, and against petty tradesmen, the exploiters of the people. We must join the adventurist world of the brigands, who are the true and unique revolutionaries in Russia.

§ 26. To concentrate this world into a single pan-destructive and invincible force—that is the whole meaning of our organisation, our conspiracy, and our task.

To criticise this masterpiece would be to weaken its comic impact. It would also mean taking too seriously this amorphous pan-destroyer who succeeded only in making a single personage of Rodolphe, Monte-Christo, Karl Moor and Robert Macaire. We shall limit ourselves to stating, with the aid of a few comparisons, that the spirit and even the terms of the catechism, without counting the laborious exaggerations, are identical to those of the secret statutes and other Russian works of the Alliance.

The three grades of initiation defined in the Alliance’s secret statutes are reproduced in § 10 of the catechism, where mention is made of “revolutionaries from the second and third rank... who have not been fully initiated”.—The duties of the international brethren as defined in Article 6 of the rules are the same as those enjoined by §§ 1 and 13 of the catechism.—The conditions under which the brethren can accept governmental posts as defined in Article 8 of the rules “are even more explicitly defined” in § 14 of the catechism, where they are given to understand that they may join the police if so ordered.—The advice given to the brethren (Rules, Article 9) to consult one another, is reproduced in § 9 of the catechism.—Articles 2, 3 and 6 of the programme of the international brethren attribute to the revolution precisely the same character as §§ 22 and 23 of the catechism.—The Jacobins of Article 4 of the programme become, in § 20 of the catechism, a subdivision of “the fifth category of men”, condemned to death in both documents.—The ideas expressed in Articles 5 and 8 of the programme on the progress of a truly anarchist revolution are the same as those in § 24 of the catechism.

The condemnation of science in § 3 of the catechism recurs in all the Russian publications. The idealisation of the brigand as the type of the revolutionary, which does not exist in the Words except in embryo, is openly affirmed and preached in all the other writings: The “fifth category” of § 20 of the catechism is applied, in The Setting of the Revolutionary Question, to “Revolutionaries of the State and the Cabinet”. Here, as in §§ 25 and 26, it is stated that the first duty of the revolutionary is to throw himself into brigandage. It is only The Principles of Revolution and The People’s Judgment that begin to preach the pan-destruction ordained by §§ 6, 8 and 26 of the catechism, and systematic assassination in §§ 13, 15, 16 and 17.

Bakunin, however, tried to leave no room for doubt over his complicity in the so-called Nechayev conspiracy. He published a proclamation: To the Officers of the Russian Army, dated “Geneva, January 1870” and signed Mikhail Bakunin. This proclamation, “price one franc”, was announced as Bakunin’s work in all the issues of the Kolokol for 1870. Here are some extracts.

It begins by declaring, as Nechayev had done in Russia, that

“the hour of the last struggle between the house of Romanov-Holstein-Gottorp and the Russian people is approaching, the struggle between the Tartar-German yoke and the broad liberty of the Slavs. Spring is on our threshold, and the battle will commence in the first days of spring ... the revolutionary force is ready and its triumph is assured in the presence of the profound and general mass discontent now reigning all over Russia”.

An organisation exists to direct this imminent revolution, for a secret organisation is like the general staff of an army, and this army is the entire people.

“In my appeal to the young Russian brothers, I said that Stenka Razin who will put himself at the head of the masses during the destruction, so clearly at hand, of the Russian Empire, will no longer be an individual hero, but a collective Stenka Razin. Every man who is not a fool will easily understand that I was speaking of a secret organisation existing and acting already at this moment, strong in the discipline, devotion, and passionate self-sacrifice of its members and in their passive obedience to all the instructions of an unique committee which knows everything and is known by no one.

“The members of this committee have achieved total self-renunciation. This is what gives them the right to demand absolute renunciation from all the other members of the organisation. They have to such an extent renounced everything most coveted by vain, ambitious, and the power-seeking men, that, having finally renounced personal property, public or official power, and, in general, all fame in society, they have condemned themselves to eternal oblivion, ceding to others glory, external appearances, and the renown of the cause, and only keeping for themselves, and even then always collectively, the very essence of this cause.

“Like the Jesuits, only not with the aim of enslaving, but with that of liberating the people, each of them has even renounced his own will. In the committee, as in the whole organisation, it is not the individual who thinks, wishes and acts, but the collective. Such a renunciation of his own life, his own thought and his own will may seem impossible, even revolting, to many. It is, in fact, difficult to achieve, but it is indispensable. It will seem particularly difficult to the novices, to those who have only just joined the organisation, to men who have not yet lost the habit of wordy and futile bragging, to men who play at honour, personal dignity and right, to those who in general let themselves be diverted by the wretched phantoms of a supposed humanity, behind which can be seen, in Russian society, a general servility towards the most vile and abject realities of life. This renunciation will seem painful to those who seek in a great cause the satisfaction of their vanity and an occasion for phrase-making, and who love the cause not for its own sake, but for the drama which it confers on them personally.”

“Each new member joins our organisation voluntarily, knowing in advance that once he has become a part of it, he belongs to it entirely and not to himself any more. Entry into the organisation is voluntary, but to leave it is impossible, since every member who resigns will undoubtedly endanger the very existence of the organisation, which must not depend on the irresponsibility, the whims or discretion, however great or small it may be, or on the honesty and the strength of one or several individuals... Consequently, whoever wishes to join must know in advance that he is giving himself to it entirely, with all that he possesses by way of strength, means, knowledge and life, unreturnably... This is clearly and precisely expressed in its programme, which has been published and is obligatory for all members of the committee and for all those who do not belong to it... If a member is truly inspired by” (revolutionary) “passion, everything that the organisation demands of him will seem easy. It is a known fact that passion acknowledges no difficulties; it recognises nothing as impossible, and the greater the obstacles are, the greater is the screwing up of the will, strength, and knowledge of the man moved by passion. There is no room for minor personal passions in a man possessed by this passion; he does not even need to sacrifice them, because they do not exist in him any more. A serious member of the association has stifled in himself all feeling of curiosity, and he remorselessly persecutes this failing in all others. Although he recognises himself as worthy of all confidence, and precisely because he is worthy of it, that is to say, because he is a serious man, he does not seek, and does not even want to know, more than is necessary for him to fulfil as well as possible the mission entrusted to him. He only discusses business with persons who have been allocated to him, and he says nothing which has been forbidden by the orders he has received, and in general he conforms strictly and unconditionally to the orders and instructions which come down to him from above, without ever asking, or even wanting to ask about the position of the organisation to which he belongs, since he naturally wishes to be entrusted with as many tasks as possible, but he nevertheless waits patiently for the moment when it will be entrusted to him.

“So rigid and so absolute a discipline may astonish and even shock the novice; but it will neither astonish nor offend a serious member, a man truly strong and sensible. On the contrary, it will afford him pleasure and guarantee his security, provided that he is under the influence of that absorbing passion, which I have already mentioned: for the people’s triumph. A serious member will realise that such discipline is an indispensable pledge of the relative impersonality of each member, a sine qua non of the common triumph; that this discipline alone is capable of forming a true organisation and of creating a collective revolutionary force which, basing itself on the elemental power of the people, will be in a condition to conquer the formidable force of the State organisation.

“You may ask: how can you submit to the dictatorial control of a Committee unknown to you? But the Committee is known to you: first, by its published programme, which has been drawn up with such clarity and precision, and which is explained in even greater detail to every member who joins the organisation. Secondly, it recommends itself to you by the blind confidence placed in it by persons whom you know and respect—the confidence which makes you give preference to this organisation rather than to any other. It makes itself known even still more fully to the active members of the organisation by its indefatigable and determined activity, which extends everywhere and always conforms to the programme and goal of the organisation. And everybody submits voluntarily to its authority, becoming more and more convinced, through practical experience, on the one hand, of its truly astonishing foresight, of its vigilance, of its energy so full of wisdom and of its ability to match its instructions to the sought-after goal; and, on the other hand, of the necessity and salutary effect of such discipline.

“I could be asked: if the identity of the personnel constituting the Committee remains an impenetrable mystery to everyone, how were you able to find out about it and convince yourself of its real worth?—I will answer this question frankly. I do not know a single member of this Committee, nor the number of its members, nor its place of residence. I know one thing: it is not abroad, but is in Russia itself, as is only right; for a Russian revolutionary committee abroad would be an absurdity, the very idea of which could only occur to those empty-headed and stupidly ambitious phrasemongers who belong to the emigration and who hide their conceited and evilly intriguing inactivity behind the sonorous name of The People’s Cause.*

“After the Decembrist conspiracy of the nobility (1825), the first serious attempt at organisation was made by Ishutin and his comrades. The existing organisation is the first organisation of revolutionary forces in the whole of Russia which has truly succeeded. It has profited by all preparations and experience; no reaction will force it to dissolve; it will survive all governments, and it will not cease to act until its entire programme has become daily life in Russia and everywhere else in the world.

* The reader will remember that this was the title of a Russian newspaper of the International published in Geneva by a few young Russians who knew perfectly well the real worth of the so-called committee and Bakunin’s organisation.

“About a year ago, the Committee thought it would be useful to inform me of its existence and it sent me its programme, together with an exposition of the general plan of revolutionary action in Russia. Completely in agreement with both of these, and having assured myself that the enterprise, like the men who had taken the initiative with it, was truly serious, I did what, in my opinion, every honest refugee ought to do: I submitted unconditionally to the authority of the Committee as the sole representative and controlling body of the revolution in Russia. If I am addressing you today, I am only obeying the Committee’s orders. I cannot say more to you about this. I will add one more word on this subject. I know the organisation’s plan sufficiently well to be convinced that no force is capable of destroying it. Even if, in the imminent struggle, the popular party has to suffer a new defeat—which none of us fears, since we all believe in the forthcoming triumph of the people—but even if our hopes should be dashed, in the midst of the most appalling reprisals, in the midst of the most savage reaction, the organisation will still remain safe and sound...

“The basis of the programme is the widest and most humanitarian possible: complete liberty and complete equality of all human beings, based on communal ownership and communal labour and equally obligatory to all except, of course, those who would rather die of hunger than work.

“This is the present programme of the working people in all countries, and it fully corresponds to the age-old demands and the instincts of our people... In submitting this programme to the lower orders of the people, the members of our organisation are astounded to notice how immediate and broad is their grasp of it, and with what eagerness they accept it. This means that the programme is ready. It is unvarying. He who is for this programme will come with us. He who is against us is the friend of the people’s enemies, the tsar’s gendarme, the tsar’s executioner, our own enemy...

“I have told you that our organisation is solidly built and now I add that it has taken root so strongly among the people that, even if we suffer a defeat, the reaction will be powerless to destroy it...

“The servile press, obedient to the orders of the Third Department, is trying to persuade the public that the government has managed to seize the conspiracy by its very roots. It has not seized anything whatever. The Committee and the organisation are intact and always will be, the government will soon be convinced of this, for the explosion of the people is near at hand. It is so near, that everyone must now decide if he wishes to be our friend, the friend of the people, or our enemy instead and that of the people. To all friends, to whatever place or position they belong, our ranks are open. But how are we to find you, you will ask? The organisation, which surrounds you on all sides, which counts among you its numerous adherents, will itself find him who seeks with sincere desire and strong will to serve the cause of the people. He who is not with us, is against us. Choose.”

In this pamphlet signed with his name, Bakunin pretends not to know the place and composition of the Committee on whose behalf he speaks and on whose behalf Nechayev acted in Russia. However, the only authority which the latter had to act on the Committee’s behalf was signed by Mikhail Bakunin, and the only man who received reports on the activity of the sections was, once again, Mikhail Bakunin. And so when Mikhail Bakunin vows passive obedience to the committee, it is to Mikhail Bakunin himself that he swears obedience.

We consider it useless to insist that the trend and even the language of this work signed by Bakunin are entirely identical with the other anonymous Russian documents. What we want to point out is the manner in which Bakunin applied the morality of the catechism here. He commences, first, by preaching it to the Russian officers. He tells them that he and the other initiates have simultaneously carried out a duty and filled a gap in setting themselves up as the Jesuits of the revolution and that, as far as the Committee is concerned, they have no more personal will than the celebrated “corpse” of the Society of Jesus. In order that the officers should not be shocked by the murder of Ivanov, he tries to make them understand the necessity of assassinating every member who would like to leave the secret society. He then applies this same morality to his own readers by lying flagrantly to them. Bakunin knew that the government had arrested not only all the initiates in Russia, but ten times more that number of persons who had been compromised by Nechayev for belonging to the famous “fifth category” of the catechism; that there was no longer so much as the shadow of an organisation in Russia; that its Committee no longer existed there and never had existed apart from Nechayev, then with him in Geneva; furthermore, that this pamphlet would not bring in a single recruit in Russia; that it could only furnish the Government with a pretext for fresh persecutions. Yet he proclaimed that the Government had seized nothing whatever; that the Committee was still holding sessions in Russia and was displaying indefatigable and determined activity that extended everywhere, truly astounding foresight, vigilance, energy full of wisdom, and staggering ingenuity (the statements made at the trial testify to this); that his secret organisation, the only serious one that had existed in Russia since 1825, was intact; that it had penetrated down to the lower orders of the people, who were eagerly accepting its programme; that the officers were surrounded by it; that the revolution was imminent and would break out in a few months, in the spring of 1870. It was purely to give himself the pleasure of the drama which it conferred on him personally in front of his false international brethren and in front of his mirror that Bakunin, who pretended to have “renounced his own life, his own thought, and his own will”, to be superior to the “wordy and futile bragging” of “men who play at honour, personal dignity, and right”, that he, Mikhail Bakunin, addressed the Russians with these lies and this bragging.

This same man who in 1870 preaches to the Russians passive, blind obedience to orders coming from above and from an anonymous and unknown committee; who declares that Jesuitical discipline is the condition sine qua non of victory, the only thing capable of defeating the formidable centralisation of the State— not just the Russian state but any state; who proclaims a communism more authoritarian than the most primitive communism—this same man, in 1871, weaves a separatist and disorganising movement into the fabric of the International under the pretext of combating the authoritarianism and centralisation of the German Communists, of introducing autonomy of the sections, a free federation of autonomous groups, and of making the International what it should be: the image of the future society. If the society of the future were modelled on the Alliance, Russian section, it would far surpass the Paraguay of the Reverend Jesuit Fathers, so dear to Bakunin’s heart.


IX. Conclusion

While granting the fullest freedom to the movements and aspirations of the working class in various countries, the International had nevertheless succeeded in uniting it into a single whole and making the ruling classes and their governments feel for the first time the worldwide power of the proletariat. The ruling classes and the governments recognised this fact by concentrating their attacks on the executive body of our whole Association, the General Council. These attacks became increasingly intense after the fall of the Commune. And this was the moment that the Alliancists, on their part, chose to declare open war on the General Council! They claimed that its influence, a powerful weapon in the hands of the International, was but a weapon directed against the International itself. It had been won in a struggle not against the enemies of the proletariat but against the International. According to them, the General Council’s domineering tendencies had prevailed over the autonomy of the sections and the national federations. The only way of saving autonomy was to decapitate the International.

Indeed the men of the Alliance realised that if they did not seize this decisive moment, it would be all up with their plans for the secret direction of the proletarian movement of which Bakunin’s hundred international brethren had dreamed. Their invective wakened approving echoes in the police press of all countries.

Their resounding phrases about autonomy and free federation, in a word, war-cries against the General Council, were thus nothing but a manoeuvre to conceal their true purpose—to disorganise the International and by doing so subordinate it to the secret, hierarchic and autocratic rule of the Alliance.

Autonomy of the sections, free federation of the autonomous groups, anti-authoritarianism, anarchy — these were convenient phrases for a society of the “declassed” “with no prospects and no way out”, conspiring within the International to subject it to a secret dictatorship and impose upon it the programme of M. Bakunin!

Stripped of its melodramatic finery, this programme amounts to the following:

1. All the depravities in which the life of declassed persons ejected from the upper strata of society must inevitably become involved are proclaimed to be so many ultra-revolutionary virtues.

2. It is regarded as a matter of principle and necessity to debauch a small minority of carefully selected workers, who are enticed away from the masses by a mysterious initiation, by making them take part in the game of intrigues and deceit of the secret government, and by preaching to them that through giving free rein to their “evil passions” they can shake the old society to its foundations.

3. The chief means of propaganda is to attract young people by fantastic lies about the extent and power of the secret society, prophecies of the imminent revolution it has prepared and so on, and to compromise in government eyes the most progressive people from among the well-to-do classes with a view to exploiting them financially.

4. The economic and political struggle of the workers for their emancipation is replaced by the universal pan-destructive acts of heroes of the underworld—this latest incarnation of revolution. In a word, one must let loose the street hooligans suppressed by the workers themselves in “the revolutions on the Western classical model”, and thus place gratuitously at the disposal of the reactionaries a well-disciplined gang of agents provocateurs.

It is hard to say what predominates in the theoretical elucubrations and practical endeavours of the Alliance—clowning or infamy. Nevertheless, it has succeeded in provoking within the International a muffled conflict which for two years has hindered the actions of our Association and has culminated in the secession of some of the sections and federations. The resolutions adopted by the Hague Congress against the Alliance were therefore merely a matter of duty: the Congress could not allow the International, that great creation of the proletariat, to fall into nets spread by the riff-raff of the exploiting classes. As for those who wish to deprive the General Council of the prerogatives without which the International would be nothing but a confused, disjointed and, to use the language of the Alliance, "amorphous" mass, we cannot regard them otherwise than as traitors or dupes. London, July 21, 1873

The Commission: E. Dupont, F. Engels, Léo Frankel, C. Le Moussu, Karl Marx, Aug. Serraillier


X. Appendix

In 1857, Bakunin was sent to Siberia, not to forced labour, as his accounts would have us believe, but simply to live there in exile. At that period, the governor of Siberia was Count Muravyov-Amursky, Bakunin's cousin and a relative of the Muravyov who was the executioner of Poland. Thanks to this relationship and to the services which he had rendered to the government, Bakunin enjoyed exceptional position and favours in Siberia.

Petrashevsky, leader and organiser of the 1849 conspiracy, was in Siberia at that time. Bakunin adopted an openly hostile attitude to him and tried to harm him in every way possible, which was easy for him as a cousin of the governor-general. His persecution of Petrashevsky gave Bakunin further grounds for governmental favours. A shady affair, which had considerable repercussions in Siberia and in Russia, put an end to this struggle between the two exiles. As a result of criticism levelled against the conduct of a highly-placed official who was playing at liberalism, a storm broke out in the governor-general's entourage and ended in a duel to the death. Now this whole affair stank so much of personal intrigues and fraudulent dealings, that the whole population was disturbed and accused the chief officials of having assassinated the victim of the duel, a young friend of Petrashevsky’s. Unrest took on such proportions that the government became fearful of a popular riot. Bakunin sided with the high officials, Muravyov included. He used his influence to have Petrashevsky exiled to a remoter place and he defended Petrashevsky’s persecutors in a long letter signed by him as witness and sent to Herzen. The latter, when publishing it in the Kolokol suppressed all the attacks against Petrashevsky; but the manuscript copy made of this letter while on its way to St. Petersburg was circulated there, and so the original text reached the public.

The merchants of Siberia, who are generally more liberal than those in Russia, wanted to found a university there in order not to have to send their children any more to distant schools in Russia, and to create an intellectual centre in those parts. For this, they needed imperial authorisation. Muravyov, advised and encouraged by Bakunin, opposed this project. Bakunin’s hatred of science goes back a long way. This is perfectly well-known in Siberia. Challenged on this point several times by the Russians, Bakunin could not deny it, but always explained his conduct by saying that, while preparing for his escape, he sought to win the good graces of his cousin the governor.

Not only did Bakunin use and abuse governmental favours, but for trifling sums of money he obtained them in abundance for the capitalists, contractors and tax-farmers. Bakunin’s proclamations, confiscated from Nechayev’s victims and published by the government in 1869 and 1870, contained lists of proscribed persons, including the notorious Katkov, editor-in-chief of the Moscow Gazette The latter took his revenge by publishing the following disclosure in his newspaper: he had in his possession letters sent to him by Bakunin from London on his arrival from Siberia, in which he begged Katkov, as an old friend, to advance him several thousand rubles. Bakunin admits that during his stay in Siberia he had been receiving an annuity from a vodka tax-farmer who paid him for ensuring, by his intercession, the good graces of the governor. This dishonourable fee (Bakunin ceased to collect it after his escape) weighed on his conscience; he wanted to send back to the tax-farmer the money received from him. He asked his friend Katkov for an advance to enable him to perform this good deed. Katkov refused.

At the time when Bakunin sent this request to his old friend Katkov, the latter had long since won his spurs in the service of the Third Department, devoting his newspaper to denunciations of the Russian revolutionaries and particularly of Chernyshevsky, as well as of the Polish revolution. And so, in 1862, Bakunin requested money of a man whom he knew to be a denouncer and a literary bandit in the pay of the Russian Government. Bakunin has never dared to deny this grave charge.

Supplied with money obtained by the methods already known to us, and enjoying the high protection of the governor, Bakunin was able to escape with the greatest of ease. Not only did he procure a passport in his own name to travel in Siberia, he obtained the official assignment of inspecting the region as far as its eastern frontiers. Once he arrived at the port of Nikolayevsk, he crossed without difficulty to Japan, from where he was able calmly to embark for America and arrive in London at the end of 1861. Thus did this new Mohammed accomplish his miraculous hegira.

On March 3, 1861, Alexander II proclaimed, to the tumultuous plaudits of all liberal Europe, the emancipation of the serfs. The efforts of Chernyshevsky and the revolutionary party to obtain the preservation of communal landownership had produced results, but in a manner so unsatisfactory that, even before the proclamation of the manifesto emancipating the serfs, Chernyshevsky sadly admitted:

“Had I known that the question raised by me was to receive such a solution, I would have preferred to suffer a defeat rather than win such a victory. I would rather they had acted as they had intended, without any regard for our claims.” And, indeed, the act of emancipation was nothing but a swindle.

A large part of the land was taken away from its real owners, and a system was proclaimed whereby the peasants could buy back their land. This act of bad faith by the tsar gave Chernyshevsky and his party a new and irresistible argument against imperial reforms. The liberals, ranging themselves under Herzen’s banner, bayed at the top of their voices: “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!” By Galilean, they meant Alexander II.— From that moment, the liberal party, whose chief organ was Herzen’s Kolokol, never ceased to sing the praises of the tsar-liberator and, to distract the public’s attention from the complaints and claims which were stirred up by this anti-popular act, they asked the tsar to continue his emancipatory work and to launch a crusade for the liberation of the oppressed Slav peoples and for the achievement of pan-Slavism.

In the summer of 1861, Chernyshevsky, in the journal Sovremennik, denounced the manoeuvres of the pan-Slavists and told the Slav peoples the truth about the state of affairs in Russia and about the selfish obscurantism of their false friends, the pan-Slavists. It was then that Bakunin, on his return from Siberia, judged that the moment had arrived for him to step forward. He wrote the first part of a long manifesto published as a supplement by Kolokol on February 15, 1862, and entitled: To the Russian, Polish and All Slav Friends. The second part never appeared.

The manifesto begins with the following declaration:

“I have retained the audacity of all-conquering thought, and in heart, will and passion I have remained true to my friends, to the great common cause, to myself... I now appear before you, my old and tested friends, and you, my young friends, who live by one thought and one will with us, and I ask you: admit me to your midst again and may I be permitted, with you and in your midst, to devote all my remaining life to the struggle for Russian freedom, for Polish freedom, for the freedom and independence of all Slavs.”

If Bakunin addresses this humble prayer to his old and young friends, it is because

“it is bad to be active in a foreign land. I experienced this in the revolutionary years: neither in France nor in Germany was I able to gain a foothold. And so, while preserving all my ardent sympathy of former years for the progressive movement of the whole world, in order not to waste the rest of my life I must henceforth limit my direct activity to Russia, Poland, and the Slavs. These three separate worlds are inseparable in my love and in my faith.”

In 1862, eleven years ago, at the age of forty-seven, the great anarchist Bakunin preached the cult of the state and pan-Slav patriotism.

“It might be said that the Great-Russian people has hitherto lived only the external life of the state. However burdensome its position may have been within, reduced to extreme ruin and slavery, it has nevertheless cherished the unity, strength and greatness of Russia, and has been ready to make any sacrifice for their sake. And so there has been a growing awareness among the Great-Russian people of the state and patriotism, not in words, but in deeds. And so it alone has survived as a people among the Slav tribes; it alone has held out in Europe and made itself felt by all as a force... Do not fear that it may lose its legitimate influence and the political force which it has acquired solely by struggles lasting three centuries and accomplished by martyr-like abnegation to safeguard its state integrity... Let us send the Tartars to Asia, the Germans to Germany, and let us be a free people, a purely Russian people...”

To lend more authority to this pan-Slav propaganda, which ends by calling for a crusade against the Tartars and the Germans, Bakunin refers the reader to the Emperor Nicholas:

“They say that Emperor Nicholas himself, not long before his death, when preparing to declare war on Austria, wanted to call all the Austrian and Turkish Slavs, Magyars and Italians to a general uprising. He had stirred up against himself an eastern storm and, to defend himself against it, he wanted to transform himself from a despotic emperor into a revolutionary emperor. They say that his proclamations to the Slavs as also an appeal to the Poles had already been signed by him. However much he hated Poland, he understood that, without it, a Slav uprising was impossible ... he overcame his aversion to such an extent that he was ready, it is said, to recognise the independent existence of Poland, but ... only beyond the Vistula.”

The very man who, since 1868, has played the internationalist, preached, in 1862, a war of the races in the interests of the Russian Government. Pan-Slavism is an invention of the St. Petersburg cabinet and has no other goal but to extend Russia’s European frontiers further west and south. But since one dare not announce to the Austrian, Prussian and Turkish Slavs that their destiny is to be absorbed into the great Russian Empire, one represents Russia to them as the power which will deliver them from the foreign yoke and which will reunite them in a great free federation. Thus, pan-Slavism is open to various shades of interpretation, from the pan-Slavism of Nicholas to that of Bakunin; but they all tend to the same end and all are, at bottom, in an entente cordiale, as is proved by the passage which we have just quoted. The manifesto’ to which we now turn will leave us in no doubt on this score.

We have seen that, consequent upon the emancipation of the serfs, war broke out between the liberal and the revolutionary parties in Russia. Round Chernyshevsky, leader of the revolutionary party, there gathered a whole phalanx of journalists, a large group of officers, and the student youth. The liberal party was represented by Herzen, a few pan-Slavists, and a large number of peaceful reformers and admirers of Alexander II. The government lent its support to the liberals. In March 1861, the university students in Russia declared themselves vigorously in favour of the affranchisement of Poland. In the autumn of 1861, they tried to resist the “coup d’état” which wanted, by disciplinary and fiscal measures, to deprive the poor students (over two-thirds of the total number) of the chance to receive a higher education. The government declared this protest to be a riot, and in Petersburg, Moscow and Kazan, hundreds of young people were thrown into gaols, expelled from the universities, or banned from them after three months’ detention. And for fear that these young people might aggravate the discontent of the peasants, a decree of the State Council forbade ex-students all access to public functions in the villages. But the persecutions did not stop there. Professors such as Pavlov were exiled; public courses organised by students who had been expelled from the universities, were shut down; fresh police hunts were undertaken on the most futile pretexts; the “student youth fund”, only just authorised, was abruptly suppressed; newspapers were banned. All this brought the indignation and agitation of the radical party to a head and compelled it to resort to the underground press. At this point, a manifesto entitled Young Russia was published with an epigraph by Robert Owen. This manifesto exposed clearly and in detail the internal situation of the country, the state of the various parties and of the press, and, in proclaiming communism, deduced the necessity for a social revolution. It called on all serious people to group round the radical banner.

Hardly had this manifesto issued from the underground press, when, by a fatal coincidence (unless the police had a hand in it), numerous fires broke out in St. Petersburg. The government and the reactionary press joyously seized on the occasion to accuse the young people and all the radical party of incendiarism. The prison cells filled up again, and the roads to exile were once more thronged with victims. Chernyshevsky was arrested and thrown into the St. Petersburg fortress, from where, after two long years of intense suffering, he was sent to forced labour in Siberia.

Before this catastrophe, Herzen and Gromeka, who later contributed to the pacification of Poland as governor of one of its provinces, delivered a series of furious attacks, the former in London, the latter in Russia, on the radical party, and insinuated that Chernyshevsky would perhaps end up by receiving a decoration.—In as moderate an article as possible, Chernyshevsky called on Herzen to consider carefully the consequences of the new role which the Kolokol was going to play in open hostility to the Russian revolutionary party. Herzen pompously declared that he was ready to pronounce, in the presence of those he called international democrats—Mazzini, Victor Hugo, Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, etc.— the famous toast to the health of the great tsar-liberator and, “whatever is said”, he added, “by the revolutionary Daniels of Petersburg, I know that despite all their protests, this toast will find a favourable echo in the Winter Palace” (the tsar’s residence). The revolutionary Daniels were Chernyshevsky and his friends.

Bakunin got the better of Herzen. It was when the revolutionary party was completely routed and Chernyshevsky was in prison, that Bakunin published, at the age of fifty-one, his notorious pamphlet to the peasant tsar: Romanov, Pugachev or Pestel. The People’s Cause. By Mikhail Bakunin, 1862.

“Many are still wondering whether there will be a revolution in Russia. It is taking place gradually, it reigns everywhere, in everything, in all minds. It acts still more successfully through the hands of the government than through the efforts of its own adherents. It will not abate and will not cease until it has regenerated the Russian world, until it has created a new Slav world.

“The dynasty is working to bring about its own destruction. It seeks its salvation in wishing to stop the life of the people which is awakening instead of protecting it. This life, if it were understood, could have raised the imperial house to hitherto unknown heights of power and glory... It is a pity! Rarely has it fallen to the lot of the tsar’s house to play so majestic and so beneficent a role. Alexander II could so easily become the idol of the people, the first peasant tsar,* mighty not through fear, but through the love, liberty and prosperity of his people. Relying on that people, he could become the saviour and head of the entire Slav world...

“For that all that was necessary was a Russian heart, broad and strong in magnanimity and truth. All Russian and Slav living reality went to him with open arms, ready to serve as a pedestal for his historic greatness.”

Bakunin then demands the abolition of the state of Peter the Great, of the German state, and the creation of the “new Russia”. The fulfilment of this task is entrusted to Alexander II.

“His beginning was magnificent. He proclaimed freedom for the people, freedom and a new life after a thousand years of slavery. It seemed as if he wanted to organise the Russia of the peasants” (zemskaya Rossiya), “because in Peter’s state a free people was unthinkable. On February 19, 1861, in spite of all the shortcomings and absurd contradictions in the Ukase on the Emancipation of the peasants, Alexander II was the greatest, most loved and most powerful tsar who ever existed in Russia.”—However, “liberty is contrary to all the instincts of Alexander II”, because he is German, and “a German will never understand and never love the Russia of the peasants ... he only dreamed of strengthening the edifice of Peter’s state ... having undertaken a thing that is fatal and impossible, he is working to his own ruin and that of his house, and he is on the point of plunging Russia into a bloody revolution”.

According to Bakunin, all the contradictions of the ukase on emancipation, all the shootings of peasants, the student disturbances, all the terror, in a word,

“is fully explained by the tsar’s lack of a Russian spirit and of a heart loving the people, by his insane striving to preserve Peter’s state at all costs ... and yet it is he, he alone who could accomplish in Russia the most serious and most beneficial revolution without shedding a drop of blood. He can still do so now. If we despair of the peaceful outcome, it is not because it would be too late, but because we have ended up by despairing of Alexander II and his ability to understand what is the only way of saving himself and Russia. To stop the movement of the people who are wakening up after a thousand years of sleep is impossible. But if the tsar were to put himself firmly and boldly at the head of the movement, his power for the good and the glory of Russia would be unlimited.”

For this, he would only have to give the peasants land, liberty, a n d SELF-GOVERNMENT.

“Do not fear that regional SELF-GOVERNMENT might break the ties between the provinces, that the unity of the Russian land might be shaken; the autonomy of the provinces will be only administrative, internally legislative, juridical, but not political. And in no country, with the exception, perhaps, of France, is the people endowed to the same extent as in Russia with a sense of unity, of harmony, of integrity of the state, and of national greatness.”

* The title of peasant tsar (Zemsky Tsar) conferred on Alexander II was invented by Bakunin and the Kolokol.

At that time, the convocation of a national assembly was being demanded in Russia. Some wanted it to resolve the financial difficulties, others to put an end to the monarchy. Bakunin wanted it to express the unity of Russia and to consolidate the power and greatness of the tsar.

“Since the unity of Russia has hitherto found its expression only in the person of the tsar, it needs another representation, that of a national assembly... The question is not to know whether or not there will be a revolution, but whether it will be peaceful or bloody. It will be peaceful and beneficial if the tsar, putting himself at the head of the popular movement, undertakes, with the national assembly, broadly and resolutely to transform Russia radically in the spirit of freedom; but if he wishes to retreat, or stops at half-measures, the revolution will be frightful. It will then take on the character of a pitiless massacre in consequence of the uprising of the entire people... Alexander II can still save Russia from total ruin and from bloodshed.”

Thus, in 1862, the revolution, for Bakunin, meant the total ruin of Russia, and he beseeched the tsar to save the country from it. For many Russian revolutionaries, the convocation of a national assembly would be equivalent to the collapse of the imperial house; but Bakunin puts an end to their hopes and announces to them that

“a national assembly will be against them and for the tsar. And if the national assembly should be hostile to the tsar? It is not possible; it is the people who will send their delegates, the people whose faith in the tsar is without limits to this day and who respect everything about him. Whence, then, would the hostility come?.. There is no doubt that if the tsar convoked the national assembly now” (February 1862), “he would, for the first time, find himself surrounded by men sincerely devoted to him. If the anarchy lasts a few years longer, the attitudes of the people may change. Life moves fast in our times. But, at present the people are for the tsar and against the nobility, against the officials, against everything that wears German dress” (that is to say, European-style dress). “In the official Russian camp, all are enemies of the people, all except the tsar. Who, then, will try to speak to the people against the tsar? And even if someone should try to do so, would the people believe him? Was it not the tsar who emancipated the peasants against the will of the nobility, against the general desire of the officials?

“Through their delegates, the Russian people will meet their tsar face to face for the first time. It is a decisive moment, critical to the highest degree. Will they like one another? The whole future of the tsar and of Russia will depend on this meeting. The confidence and devotion of the delegates towards the tsar will be boundless. Relying on them, going to meet them with faith and love, he will elevate his throne to a height and a security which it has never attained before. But what if, instead of the tsar-emancipator, the people’s tsar, the delegates find in him a Petersburg emperor in Prussian uniform, a narrow-hearted German? What if, instead of the expected liberty, the tsar gives them nothing, or next to nothing?.. Then, woe to tsarism! At least it will be the end of the Petersburg, German, Holstein-Gottorp emperorship.

“If, at this fatal moment, when the question of life or death, of peace or blood, is about to be decided for the whole of Russia, if the tsar of the people were to appear before the national assembly as a good and loyal tsar, loving Russia, ready to give the people an organisation according to its will, what could he not do with such a people! Who would dare to rise up against him? Peace and confidence would be re-established as if by a miracle, money would be found, and everything would be arranged simply, naturally, without prejudice to anybody, and to the general satisfaction. Guided by such a tsar, the national assembly would create a new Russia. No malevolent attempt, no hostile force, would be in a state to fight against the reunited might of the tsar and the people... May one hope that this alliance will become fact? We have every reason to say No.

Whatever he might say, Bakunin does not despair of dragging his tsar along, and in order to persuade him, he threatens him with the revolutionary youth who, if the tsar does not make haste, will be able to accomplish its mission and find its way to the people.

“And why is this youth not for you, but against you? That is a great misfortune for you ... they need, above all, liberty and truth. But why has it abandoned the tsar? Why has it declared itself against him who first gave liberty to the people?... Has it perhaps let itself be carried away by the abstract revolutionary ideal and the sonorous word ‘republic’} That may be partly so, but it is only a secondary and superficial cause. The majority of our progressive youth understands well that Western abstractions, whether conservative, bourgeois, liberal, and democratic, are not applicable to the Russian movement... The Russian people is not moved according to abstract principles ... the Western ideal is alien to it, and all attempts by conservative, liberal or even revolutionary doctrinairism to subject it to its own tendencies will be futile ... it has its own ideal ... it will bring new principles into history, will create another civilisation, a new religion, a new right, a new life.

“Faced with this great, serious, and even terrible figure of the people one dare not commit stupidities. Youth will abandon the ridiculous and disgusting role of impostrous schoolteachers... What could we teach the people? If one leaves aside the natural sciences and mathematics, the last word of our science will be the negation of the so-called immutable truths of the Western doctrine, the complete negation of the West.”

Bakunin then descends on the authors of Young Russia accusing them of doctrinairism, of wanting to set themselves up as the people’s teachers, of having compromised the cause, of being children who do not understand anything and who have drawn their ideas from a few Western books which they have read.— The government, which at that time arrested these same young people as incendiaries, hurled the same reproaches at them. And so to reassure his tsar, Bakunin announces that

“the people do not support this revolutionary party ... the vast majority of our youth belongs to the people’s party, to the party which has as its sole and single aim the triumph of the people’s cause. This party has no prejudices either for or against the tsar, and if the tsar, having begun the great work, had not betrayed the people, it would never have abandoned him, and even now it is not too late for him; and even now that youth would follow him with joy provided he would march at the head of his people. It would not allow itself to be stopped by any of the Western revolutionary prejudices. It is time for the Germans to go to Germany. If the tsar had realised that henceforth he must be the head not of an enforced centralisation, but of a free federation of free peoples, then, relying on a solid and regenerated force, allying himself with Poland and the Ukraine, breaking all the detested German alliances, and boldly raising the pan-Slav banner, he would become the saviour of the Slav world

“Yes, indeed, war on the Germans is a good and indispensable thing for the Slavs, at all events better than stifling the Poles to please the Germans. To rise and free the Slavs from the yoke of the Turks and the Germans will be a necessity and a sacred duty of the emancipated Russian people.”

In the same pamphlet, he calls on the revolutionary party to rally under the banner of the people’s cause. Here are some articles of faith from the programme of this popular cause à la tsar:

“Article 1. We” (Bakunin and Co.) “want popular SELF-GOVERNMENT in the commune, in the province, in the region and, finally, in the state, with or without the tsar—it doesn’t matter, according as the people wish.—Article 2. ...We are ready, and duty commands us, to come to the aid of Lithuania, Poland, and the Ukraine so as to prevent all violence, and to protect them against all their external enemies, especially the Germans.—Article 4. With Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, we wish to lend a hand to all our Slav brothers now groaning under the yoke of the kingdom of Prussia and of the Austrian and Turkish empires, and we undertake not to sheathe the sword as long as a single Slav remains in German, Turkish, or any other slavery.”

Article 6 prescribes an alliance with Italy, Hungary, Rumania and Greece. These were the very alliances then being sought by the Russian Government.

“Article 7. We shall strive, with all the other Slav tribes, to make the cherished dream of the Slavs come true, to establish a great and free pan-Slav federation, [...] so that there shall be but a sole indivisible pan-Slav power.

“This is the vast programme of the Slav cause, this is the last indispensable word of the Russian popular cause. To this cause we have devoted our whole life.

“And now, where shall we go, and with whom shall we march? We have said where we want to go; we have also said with whom we shall march—with none other than the people. It remains to be known whom we shall follow. Shall we follow Romanov, Pugachev, or a new Pestel, if one can be found? *

“Let us tell the truth. We would prefer to follow Romanov, if Romanov could, and would, transform himself from a Petersburg emperor into a peasant tsar. We would willingly rally under his banner, because the Russian people still recognises him, and because his power is already created, ready to act, and could become an invincible force if he gave it the popular baptism. We would follow him, moreover, because he alone can accomplish the great peaceful revolution without shedding a drop of Russian or Slav blood. Bloody revolutions sometimes become necessary owing to human stupidity; nevertheless they are a great evil and a great misfortune, not only as regards their victims, but as regards the purity and the fullness of the goal for which they are accomplished. We saw this during the French revolution.

“Thus, our attitude to Romanov is clear. We are not his enemies, any more than we are his friends. We are the friends of the Russian popular cause, of the Slav cause. If the tsar is at the head of this cause, we shall follow him; but if he opposes it, we shall be his enemies. Therefore, the whole question is to know whether he wishes to be the Russian tsar, the peasant tsar, Romanov, or the Petersburg, the Holstein-Gottorp emperor. Does he wish to serve Russia, the Slavs, or the Germans? This question will soon be settled, and then we shall know what we must do.”

Unfortunately, the tsar did not deem it appropriate to convoke the national assembly for which Bakunin, in this pamphlet, was already proposing his own candidature. He gained nothing out of his electoral manifesto and his genuflexions before Romanov. Humiliatingly deceived in his frank confidence, he had no alternative but to throw himself headlong into pan-destructive anarchy.

After this lucubration of a teacher who prostrated himself before his peasant tsar, his pupils and friends, Albert Richard and

Gaspard Blanc, had every right to cry at the top of their voices: “Long live Napoleon III, emperor of the peasants!”


XI. Documents

The copy of these statutes which is now in our possession is partly written in Bakunin’s hand. He gave copies not only to his initiates, but to many more people whom he hoped to seduce with the disclosure of his splendid programme. The vanity of the author proved stronger than the sinister furtiveness of the mystifier. * Romanov is the tsar’s surname. Pugachev was the leader of a great Cossack uprising under Catherine II. Pestel was the leader of the 1825 conspiracy against Nicholas I. He was hanged.

ORGANISATION OF THE ALLIANCE

OF THE INTERNATIONAL BRETHREN

THREE GRADES:

I. International brethren.

II. National brethren.

III. The half-secret, half-public organisation of the International Alliance of

Socialist Democracy.

I. RULES OF THE INTERNATIONAL BRETHREN

1. The International Brethren have no homeland other than the world Revolution, no foreign land and no enemy other than the Reaction.

2. They reject any policy of negotiation and concession, and regard as reactionary any political movement which does not have as its immediate and direct goal the triumph of their principles.

3. They are Brethren—they never attack one another, nor settle their differences in public or in front of the courts. Their only justice is a jury of arbitrators, elected from among the brethren by the two parties.

4. Each must be sacred to all the others, more sacred than a blood brother. Each brother shall be helped and protected by all the others to the limits of the possible.

5. Only he may become an international brother who has sincerely accepted all the programme in all its consequences, theoretical and practical, and who adds revolutionary passion to intelligence, energy, honesty and discretion, he who has the devil in his flesh. We impose neither duty nor sacrifice. But he who has this passion will do many things without even imagining that he is making sacrifices.

6. A brother must have neither business, interests, nor duties more serious and more sacred than the service of the revolution and of our secret Association, which must serve the revolution.

7. A brother always has the right to refuse to render the services demanded of him by the Central Committee or by his National Committee, but many successive refusals will lead to his being considered unconscientious or lazy, and he may be suspended by his National Committee and, on the representation of this latter, temporarily expelled by the Central Committee pending a final decision by the Constituent Committee.

8. No brother shall accept a public post except with the consent of the Committee to which he belongs.— None shall undertake public actions or appearances contrary or even foreign to the line of conduct determined by his Committee and without having consulted the latter. Every time that two or more brothers are together, they shall consult each other on all important public matters. 9. All the International Brethren know one another. No political secret must ever exist among them. None may take part in any secret society whatever without the positive consent of his Committee and, if necessary, should the latter so demand, without that of the Central Committee.—And he may take part only on condition that he reveals to them all the secrets that could interest them directly or indirectly.

10. The organisation of International Brethren is subdivided as follows: A. The General, or Constituent, Committee. B. The Central Committee. C. The National Committees.

A. The General Committee

This is an assembly of all or at least two-thirds of the International Brethren convoked regularly either at stipulated intervals, or in extraordinary assembly by a majority of the Central Committee. It is the supreme constituent and executive power of our entire organisation, whose programme, rules and organic statutes it can modify.

B. The Central Committee

Consists of: a) the Central Bureau, and b) the Central Supervisory Committee. The latter’s members are all the international brethren who, not belonging to the Bureau, are sufficiently near to be convoked at two days’ notice, and, naturally, all brethren who happen to be passing through. For the rest, they are guided in all their mutual relationships by the Rules of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy (see Articles 2-4).

C. The National Committees

Each National Committee shall consist of all the international brethren (irrespective of nationality) who are in or near the centre of the national organisation. Each National Committee is subdivided equally into: a) a National Executive Bureau, and b) a National Supervisory Committee. This latter will include all international brethren present who are not in the Bureau. The same relationships as in the Alliance of Socialist Democracy.

11. The admission of a new brother requires the unanimity of all members present (not less than three) of the National Committee and the confirmation by a two-thirds majority of the Central Committee. The Central Committee may admit a new member by the unanimous agreement of all its members.

12. Each National Committee is to meet at least once a week to control and activate the organisational, propaganda and administrative work of its Bureau.— It is the natural judge of the conduct of each member in everything affecting his revolutionary dignity or relations with society. Its verdicts must be presented to the Central Committee for confirmation. It will direct the activities and all the public appearances of all members. Either through its Bureau or through a brother designated by it, it must maintain regular correspondence with the Central Bureau, to which it must write at least once every fortnight.

13. The National Committee will organise a secret Association of the National Brethren in its country.

II. THE NATIONAL BRETHREN

14. The National Brethren must be organised in each country so that they can never deviate from the guidance of the general organisation of the International Brethren, and notably from that of the General Committee and of the Central Committee. Their programmes and their rules may only be finally put into operation after they have received the sanction of the Central Committee.

15. Each National Committee may, if it finds it useful, establish among them two categories: a) that of National Brethren who know one another all over the country, and b) that of Brethren who do not know one another except in small groups.— In no case will the National Brethren even suspect the existence of an international organisation.

16. The provincial centres, consisting entirely or partly of international brethren or national brethren of the first category, shall be established at all the principal points in the country, with the mission of promoting as thoroughly and as far as possible the secret organisation and the propaganda of its principles—not contenting themselves with acting in the cities, but also trying to propagate them in the villages and among the peasants.

17. The National Committees shall attempt to raise the necessary financial means as soon as possible, not only for the success of their own organisation, but also for the general needs of the whole Association. They will therefore send a part—half?—to the Central Bureau.

18. The National Bureaux must be very active, remembering that the principles, programmes and rules are of no worth unless the persons who have to put them into execution have the devil in their flesh.

SECRET ORGANISATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCE

OF SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY

1. The Permanent Central Committee of the Alliance consists of all the members of the Permanent National Committees and of those of the Geneva Central Section. When together, all these members constitute the Secret General Assembly of the Alliance, which is the constituent and supreme power of the Alliance and which will meet at least once a year at the Working Men’s Congress as delegates of the Alliance’s different national groups; it may also be convoked at any time equally by the Central Bureau or by the Geneva Central Section.

2. The Geneva Central Section is the permanent delegation of the permanent Central Committee. It is composed of all the members of the Central Bureau and of all those of the Supervisory Committee, who must always be members of the permanent Central Committee.—The Central Section will be the Supreme Executive Council of the Alliance, within the limits of the Constitution and of the line of conduct which can only be laid down and modified by the General Assembly. It will decide on all questions of execution (not of constitution and general policy) by a simple majority of votes, and its resolutions thus adopted shall be binding on the Central Bureau, unless the Bureau, by a majority of its members, wishes to appeal to the General Assembly, which it must convoke in this case at three weeks’ notice.—To be regular, the General Assembly, when thus convoked, must be composed of two-thirds of all its members.

3. The Central Bureau, the executive power, will consist of 3 to 5 or even 7 members, who must always at the same time be members of the Permanent Central Committee Like one of the two parts which make up the Secret Central Section, the Central Bureau shall be a secret organisation. As such, it will receive its guidance from the Central Section and will pass on its communications, not to say its secret orders, to all the National Committees, from which it will receive secret reports at least once a month. As the Executive Directorate of the public Alliance, it shall be a public organisation. As such, it shall be on more or less private or public terms, according to country and circumstances, with all the National Bureaux, from which it shall also receive reports once a month. Its ostensible form of government will be that of a presidency in a federative republic. The Central Bureau, as the secret as well as public executive power of the Alliance, shall activate the society’s secret and public propaganda and shall promote its development in all countries by all possible means. It shall administer the part of the finances which, in accordance with Article 6 of the public regulations, are sent to it from all countries for general needs. It shall publish a newspaper and pamphlets, and shall send travelling agents to form Alliance groups in the countries where there are none. In all the measures which it adopts for the good of the Alliance, it shall moreover submit to the decisions of the majority of the Secret Central Section, to which, incidentally, all its members shall belong. As an organisation both secret and public, and since it must be composed entirely of members of the Permanent Central Committee, the Central Bureau must always be a direct representation of this Committee. The Provisional Central Bureau will now be presented to the Geneva initiating group as provisionally elected by all the founder members of the Alliance, of whom the majority, as former members of the Berne Congress, have returned to their countries after having delegating their powers to Citizen B. This Bureau will function until the first public General Assembly which, in accordance with Article 7 of the public Regulations, must meet as a branch of the International Working Men’s Association at the next Working Men’s Congress. It follows that members of the New Central Bureau must be nominated by this Assembly. But as it is urgent that the Central Bureau should always consist solely of members of the Permanent Central Committee, this latter, through the organ of its national committees, will take care to organise and direct all the local groups in such a way that they will delegate to this Assembly only members of the Permanent Central Committee, or, failing them, men absolutely devoted to the leadership of their respective national committees, so that the Permanent Central Committee should always have the upper hand in the entire organisation of the Alliance.

4. The Supervisory Committee shall exercise control over all the actions of the Central Bureau.—It shall consist of all the members of the Permanent Central Committee resident either in the place itself, or near the residence of the Central Bureau, and also all the members temporarily present or just passing through, with the exception of the members who make up the Bureau. At the request of two members of the Supervisory Committee, all the members of the latter must at three days’ notice meet with the members of the Central Bureau to constitute the Assembly of the Central Section of’the Supreme Executive Council, whose rights are defined in Article 2.

5. The National Committees will be formed of all the members of the Permanent Central Committee who belong to the same nation.—As soon as there are three members of the Permanent Central Committee who belong to the same nation, they will be invited by the Bureau and, if necessary, by the Central Section, to form the National Committee of their country. Each National Committee may create a new member of the Central Committee of its country, but not otherwise than by the unanimous agreement of all the members. As soon as a new member has been appointed by a National Committee, the latter shall immediately inform the Central Bureau, which shall register this new member and shall thereby confer on him all the rights of a member of the Permanent Central Committee.—The Geneva Central Section is likewise invested with the power to create new members by the unanimous agreement of all its members. Each National Committee has, as its special mission, the foundation and organisation of the public as well as secret national group of the Alliance in its country. It shall be the group’s supreme chief and administrator through its National Bureau, which it shall have the task of creating and forming entirely of Permanent Central Committee members. The national committees shall have the same relationship, rights and powers witfi regard to their respective Bureaux as the central section with regard to the Central Bureau.—The national committees, which shall be formed by combining their respective bureaux and supervisory committees, shall recognise no authority other than the Central Bureau, and shall serve as the sole intermediaries between this latter and all the local groups of their country for propaganda and administration, and likewise for the collecting and paying in of subscriptions. The national committees, through their respective bureaux, shall have the task of organising the Alliance in their countries so that it shall always be dominated and represented at the Congresses by members of the Permanent Central Committee.

As the national bureaux organise their local groups, they shall make it their concern to submit the regulations and programme to the central bureau for confirmation, without which the local groups cannot belong to the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy.

PROGRAMME

OF THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST ALLIANCE

1. The International Alliance has been founded to promote the organisation and acceleration of the World Revolution on the basis of the principles proclaimed in our programme.

2. In conformity with these principles, the goal of the revolution cannot be other than: a) The destruction of all ruling powers and all religious, monarchic, aristocratic and bourgeois authority in Europe. Consequently, the destruction of all existing states with all their political, juridical, bureaucratic and financial institutions, b) The reconstitution of a new society on the sole basis of freely associated labour, taking collective ownership, equality and justice as the starting point.

3. The Revolution as we conceive it, or rather as the force of circumstances today inevitably presents it, is essentially international or universal in character. In view of the menacing coalition of all the privileged interests and all the reactionary powers in Europe, which have at their disposal all the formidable means given them by a cleverly organised organisation, and in view of the profound schism which reigns everywhere today between the bourgeoisie and the workers, no national revolution will succeed if it does not extend at once to all the other nations, and it will never cross the frontiers of a country and adopt this universal character unless it carries within itself all the elements of this universality—that is to say, unless it is an openly socialist revolution, destructive of the state, and creative of liberty through equality and justice; for nothing henceforth shall be able to reunite, electrify, and arouse the great and only true power of the century—the workers—except the total emancipation of labour on the ruins of all the institutions which protect hereditary landownership and capital.

4. Since the impending Revolution can only be universal, the Alliance, or, not to mince words, the conspiracy which must prepare, organise and accelerate it, must also be universal.

5. The Alliance will pursue a double aim: a) It will endeavour to disseminate among the masses of all countries the right ideas on politics, social economy, and all philosophical questions. It will carry out active propaganda by means of newspapers, pamphlets and books, and also by founding public associations, b) It will seek to affiliate to itself all intelligent, energetic, discreet and well-disposed men who are sincerely devoted to our ideas, in order to form all over Europe, and as far as possible in America, an invisible network of dedicated revolutionaries who have become more powerful through this very Alliance.

PROGRAMME AND OBJECTIVES

OF THE REVOLUTIONARY ORGANISATION

OF THE INTERNATIONAL BRETHREN

1. The principles of this organisation are the same as those of the programme of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy. They are even more explicitly defined, as regards women, the family from the point of view of religion and law, and the state, in the programme of the Russian Socialist Democracy.

The Central Bureau moreover reserves the right to present shortly a more comprehensive theoretical and practical exposition of these principles.

2. The association of international brethren aims for a universal revolution, simultaneously social, philosophical, economic and political, so that of the present order of things—based on private property, exploitation, domination and the principle of authority, whether religious, metaphysical, bourgeois-doctrinaire, or even Jacobin-revolutionary—not a stone shall remain standing, first in all Europe and then throughout the rest of the world. With the cry of peace for the workers, liberty for all the oppressed, and death to the rulers, exploiters and guardians of all kinds, we seek to destroy all states and all churches along with all their institutions and laws, religious, political, juridical, financial, police, university, economic and social, so that all these millions of poor human beings, deceived, enslaved, tormented and exploited, delivered from all their directors and benefactors, official and officious, collective and individual, may breathe at last with complete freedom.

3. Convinced that individual and social evil resides far less in individuals than in the organisation of things and in social position, we shall be humane as much from a sense of justice as from considerations of utility, and we shall destroy positions and things without pity in order to be able to spare human beings without any danger to the Revolution. We deny to society free will and the supposed right to punish. Justice itself, taken in the most humane and broadest sense, is but a negative and transitional idea, as it were. It poses social problems, but it does not think them over, merely indicating the only possible way to human liberation, namely, the humanisation of society through liberty in equality; the positive solution can only be given through the increasingly rational organisation of society. This solution, which is so desirable and is the ideal that we all have in common ... is the liberty, morality, intelligence and well-being of each through the solidarity of all—human fraternity.

Every human individual is the involuntary product of the natural and social environment in which he is born and develops, and which continues to exert an influence upon him. The three great causes of all human immorality are: inequality, political, economic and social; the ignorance which is its natural result; and their inevitable consequence—slavery.

Since the organisation of society is always and everywhere the sole cause of the crimes committed by men, it is hypocritical or obviously absurd on society’s part to punish criminals, when all punishment presumes culpability and the criminals are never culpable. The theory of culpability and punishment is a theological issue, that is to say, it is a combination of religious hypocrisy and the absurd.

The only right which can be allowed to society in its present state of transition is the natural right to assassinate the criminals, which it has itself produced, in the interests of its own protection, and not the right to judge and condemn them. This right will not even be one in the strictly accepted sense of the word; it will be rather a natural fact, distressing but unavoidable, a sign and product of the impotence and stupidity of the existing society; and the more society is able to avoid using it, the nearer it will be to its own actual liberation. All revolutionaries, all oppressed, all suffering victims of the existing organisation of society, whose hearts are naturally full of vengeance and hatred, would do well to remember that the kings, oppressors and exploiters of all kinds are as much to blame as the criminals who have emerged from the masses: they are malefactors, but they are not to blame, since they too are, like ordinary criminals, the involuntary products of the existing order of society. One should not be surprised if, at the first moment, the insurgent people kill a great many of them—this will be an inevitable calamity, perhaps, as futile as the damage caused by a tempest.

But this natural fact will be neither moral nor even useful. In this respect, history is full of lessons: the terrible guillotine of 1793, which could not be accused of idleness or tardiness, did not succeed in destroying the nobility in France. The aristocracy there was, if not completely destroyed, at least profoundly shaken, not by the guillotine, but by the confiscation and sale of its estates. And, in general, it may be said that political massacres have never killed parties; they have shown themselves above all impotent against the privileged classes, since power is rooted much less in men than in the positions which are given to the privileged by the organisation of things, that is to say, by the institution of the state and by its consequence and also by its natural basis, private property.

To carry out a radical revolution, one must therefore attack positions and things, one must destroy property and the state; then there will be no need to destroy men and to condemn oneself to the unfailing and inevitable reaction which has never failed and never will fail to produce the massacre of human beings in any society.

But in order to have the right to be humane to human beings without endangering the revolution, one must be ruthless with positions and things; it will be necessary to destroy everything, and, above all and before everything else, property and its inevitable corollary—the State. This is the whole secret of the revolution.

One should not be surprised at the Jacobins and the Blanquists who became socialists by necessity rather than by conviction, and for whom socialism is a means, not an end of the Revolution, since they want the dictatorship, that is to say, the centralisation of the state, and the state will lead them by a logical and inevitable necessity to the reconstitution of property—it is quite natural, we say, that, not wishing to carry out a radical revolution against things, they dream of a bloody revolution against men.—But this bloody revolution, founded on the construction of a powerfully centralised revolutionary state, would inevitably result, as we shall prove more fully later, in a military dictatorship under a new master. Consequently, the triumph of the Jacobins or the Blanquists would mean the death of the Revolution.

4. We are the natural enemies of those revolutionaries—future dictators, regulators and tutors of the revolution—who, even before the existing monarchic, aristocratic and bourgeois states have been destroyed, already dream of creating new revolutionary states as centralised as, and even more despotic than the existing states, and who have acquired so great a habit of order created from above and so great a horror of what seems to them like disorder, but is nothing other than the frank and natural expression of the people’s life, that even before a good and salutary disorder has been produced by the revolution, they already dream of putting an end to it and of muzzling it by the force of an authority which will have nothing of revolution but the name, but which will, in effect, be no more than a new reaction, since it will really be a new condemnation of the masses, governed by decrees, to obedience, stagnation and death, that is, to slavery and exploitation by a new quasi-revolutionary aristocracy.

5. We understand revolution to mean the unleashing of what today are called the evil passions and the destruction of what, in the same language, is called “public order”.

We do not fear anarchy, and we invoke it, convinced that from this anarchy, that is to say, from the complete manifestation of the people’s life unleashed, there must emerge liberty, equality, justice, a new order, and the very force of Revolution against Reaction. This new life—the people’s revolution—will doubtless not delay in organising itself, but will create its revolutionary organisation from bottom to top and from the circumference to the centre—in conformity with the principle of liberty, and not from top to bottom, nor from the centre to the circumference after the manner of all authority—for it matters little to us that this authority calls itself Church, Monarchy, constitutional State, bourgeois Republic, or even revolutionary dictatorship. We detest them and we reject them all alike as infallible sources of exploitation and despotism.

6. The revolution, as we understand it, must from the very first day destroy, radically and totally, the state and all the state’s institutions. The natural and necessary consequences of this destruction will be: a) the bankruptcy of the state; b) an end to the payment of private debts by the intervention of the state, leaving each debtor the right to pay if he wants; c) an end to the payment of all taxes and to the deduction of all contributions, direct or indirect; d) the dissolution of the army, the magistrature, the bureaucracy, the police and the clergy; e) the abolition of official justice, the withdrawal of everything which juridically called itself law, together with the exercise of those laws. Consequently, the abolition and auto-da-fé of all title-deeds, deeds of inheritance, purchase, gift, and all trials—in a word, of all juridical and civil red tape. Everywhere and in everything, revolutionary acts instead of the law created and guaranteed by the state; f) the confiscation of all productive capital and instruments of labour for the benefit of working men’s associations, which should collectively use them for production; g) the confiscation of all church and state property, and likewise of individually owned precious metals for the benefit of the Federative Alliance of all the working men’s associations, that is, the Alliance which will form the Commune.

In return for the confiscated goods, the Commune will give what is strictly necessary to all individuals thus deprived, who may later gain more by their own work if they are able and willing.— h) For the organisation of the Commune—a federation of permanently acting barricades and the functioning of a Council of the Revolutionary Commune by the delegation of one or two deputies from each barricade and one per street, or per block, these deputies being invested with imperative mandates and always responsible and revocable at any time. The Commune Council, thus organised, will be able to elect from its membership special executive committees for each branch of the revolutionary administration of the Commune, i) A declaration by the insurgent capital, once organised as a commune, that, having destroyed the authoritarian and tutelary state, which it was entitled to do since it had been the state’s slave like all the other localities, it renounces its right, or rather all claims, to direct or dictate to the provinces, k) An appeal to all provinces, communes, and associations, while allowing them all to follow the example set by the capital, first to reorganise themselves in a revolutionary way, and then to delegate to an agreed place of assembly their deputies, all likewise empowered with imperative mandates and responsible and revocable, to constitute a federation of associations, communes and provinces which have risen in the name of the same principles, and to organise a revolutionary force capable of triumphing over the reaction. The sending, not of official revolutionary commissars with shoulder sashes, but of revolutionary propagandists into all the provinces and communes—above all among the peasants, who can be turned into revolutionaries neither by principles nor by the decrees of some dictatorship, but only by revolutionary action itself, that is to say, by the consequences which will infallibly be produced in all the communes by the complete cessation of the official juridical life of the state. Abolition of the national state also in the sense that any foreign country, province, commune, association, or even isolated individual that rises in the name of the same principles, shall be received into the revolutionary federation without regard for existing state frontiers, although they belong to different political or national systems; and in the sense that any of one’s own provinces, communes, associations and individuals that side with the Reaction, shall be excluded from it. It is, then, by the very fact of the spreading and organisation of the revolution with a view to the mutual defence of the insurgent countries, that the universality of the revolution shall triumph, based on the abolition of frontiers and on the destruction of the states.

7. There can be no victorious political or national revolution henceforth unless the political revolution becomes a social revolution, and unless the national revolution, precisely because of its character, radically socialist and destructive of the state, becomes the universal revolution.

8. Since the revolution must be carried out everywhere by the people, and since the supreme direction of it must always remain with the people organised into a free federation of agricultural and industrial associations, the new and revolutionary state, organising itself from bottom to top by way of revolutionary delegation, and embracing all the countries that have risen in the name of the same principles without regard for the old frontiers and for differences in nationality, will have as its goal the administration of the public services and not the government of the peoples. It will constitute the new homeland, the Alliance of the Universal Revolution against the Alliance of all the reactionary forces.

9. This organisation excludes any idea of dictatorship and of tutelary ruling power. But for the very establishment of this revolutionary alliance and for the triumph of the revolution against the reaction, it is necessary that in the midst of popular anarchy which will constitute the very life and energy of the revolution, unity of revolutionary idea and action should find an organ. This organ must be the secret and world Association of the international brethren.

10. This association proceeds from the conviction that revolutions are never made either by individuals, or even by secret societies. They come about, as it were, of their own accord, produced by the force of things, by the course of events and facts. They are prepared over a long time deep in the instinctive consciousness of the popular masses, and then they flare up, often induced, apparently, by insignificant causes. All that a well-organised secret society can do is, first, to assist in the birth of the revolution by spreading among the masses ideas corresponding to their instincts, and to organise, not the army of the revolution—the army must always be the people—but a sort of revolutionary general staff composed of devoted, energetic, intelligent and above all sincere friends of the people, who are not ambitious or vain, and who are capable of serving as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and the popular instincts.

11. The number of these individuals should not, therefore, be too large. For the international organisation in the whole of Europe, a hundred firmly and seriously united revolutionaries would be sufficient. Two or three hundred revolutionaries would be enough for the organisation of the biggest country.

The socialist minority of the League of Peace and Freedom having broken away from this league owing to the majority vote at the Berne Congress, which made a formal declaration opposing the fundamental principle of all the working men’s associations, namely, the economic and social equality of classes and individuals, has thereby adhered to the principles proclaimed by the Working Men’s Congresses held at Geneva, Lausanne and Brussels. Several members of this minority, who belong to different nations, have suggested to us that we organise a new International Alliance of Socialist Democracy wholly merged with the great International Working Men’s Association, but adopting as its special mission the study of political and philosophical questions on the same basis of this great principle of the universal and real equality of all human beings on earth.

Convinced, for our part, of the usefulness of such an enterprise, which will give the sincere socialist democrats of Europe and America a means of understanding one another and of affirming their ideas without any pressure from the false socialism which bourgeois democracy now finds it useful to flaunt, we have thought it our duty to take the joint initiative with these friends in forming this new organisation.

Consequently, we have set ourselves up as the central section of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, and we are today publishing its Programme and Regulations.

PROGRAMME

OF THE INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCE

OF SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY

1) The Alliance declares itself to be atheist; it strives for the abolition of cults, the substitution of science for faith and of human justice for divine justice.

2) It seeks, above all, the political, economic and social equalisation of classes and of individuals of both sexes, commencing with the abolition of the right of inheritance, so that in future the enjoyment of the benefits should be equal to the production of each, and so that, in conformity with the decision taken by the last Congress of workers at Brussels, the land and instruments of labour, like all other capital, by becoming the collective property of society as a whole, may not be used except by the workers, that is to say, by agricultural and industrial associations.

3) It requires all children of both sexes, from the day of their birth, to have equality of the means of development, that is to say, maintenance, education and training at all levels in science, industry and the arts, being convinced that this equality, at first purely economic and social, will eventually lead to the increasing natural equality of individuals by eliminating all the artificial inequalities which are historical products of social organisation as false as it is iniquitous.

4) As the enemy of all despotism, recognising no political form other than the republican, and rejecting outright all reactionary alliance, the Alliance also rejects all political action which does not have for its immediate and direct goal the triumph of the cause of the workers against Capital.

5) It recognises that all the political and authoritarian states now existing, as they are reduced more and more to the simple administrative functions of the public services in their respective countries, must disappear in the universal union of free Associations, agricultural and industrial alike.

6) Since the social question cannot find a definitive and practicable solution except on the basis of the international or universal solidarity of the workers of all countries, the Alliance rejects any policy founded on so-called patriotism and the rivalry of nations.

7) It wants the universal Association of all the local Associations through liberty.

REGULATIONS

1) The International Alliance of Socialist Democracy is constituted as a branch of the International Working Men’s Association, all of whose General Rules it accepts. 2) The founder-members of the Alliance provisionally organise a Central Bureau at Geneva.

3) The founder-members belonging to the same country constitute the National Bureau of that country.

4) The National Bureaux have the mission of establishing, in all localities, local groups of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy which, through the intermediary of their respective National Bureaux, will apply to the Central Bureau of the Alliance for admission to the International Working Men’s Association.

5) All the local groups will form their bureaux in accordance with the custom adopted by the local sections of the International Working Men’s Association.

6) All members of the Alliance undertake to pay a subscription of ten centimes per month, of which half shall be retained for its own needs by each national group, and the other half shall be remitted to the funds of the Central Bureau for its general needs. In countries where this sum is considered too high, the National Bureaux, in agreement with the Central Bureau, may reduce it.

7) During the annual Congress of Workers, the Delegation of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy, as a branch of the International Working Men’s Association, shall hold its public sessions in a separate place.

(Written in French)

“April 5, 1872, Locarno,

“Dear Ally and Comrade,

“As our friends at Barcelona have invited me to write to you, I do so with all the more pleasure since I have learned that I also, like my friends, our allies of the Jura Federation, have become, in Spain as much as in other countries, the target for the calumnies of the London General Council. It is indeed a sad thing that in this time of terrible crisis, when the fate of the proletariat of all Europe is being decided for many decades to come, and when all the friends of the proletariat, of humanity and justice, should unite fraternally to make a front against the common enemy, the world of the privileged which has been organised into a state—it is very sad, I say, that men who have, moreover, rendered great services to the International in the past, should be impelled today by evil authoritarian passions, should lower themselves to falsification and the sowing of discord, instead of creating everywhere the free union which alone can create strength.

“To give you a fair idea of the line which we are taking, I have only one thing to tell you. Our programme is yours; it is the very one which you proclaimed at your Congress last year, and if you stay faithful to it, you are with us for the simple reason that we are with you. We detest the principle of dictatorship, governmentalism and authority, just as you detest them; we are convinced that all political power is an infallible source of depravity for those who govern, and a cause of servitude for those who are governed.—The state signifies domination, and human nature is so made that all domination becomes exploitation. As enemies of the state in all its manifestations anyway, we certainly do not wish to tolerate it within the International. We regard the London Conference and the resolutions which it passed as an ambitious intrigue and a coup d’état, and that is why we have protested, and shall continue protesting to the end. I am not touching on personal questions, alas! they will take up too much time at the next world Congress, if this Congress takes place, which I strongly doubt myself; for if things continue to proceed as they are doing, there will soon no longer be a single point on the continent of Europe where the delegates of the proletariat will be able to assemble in order to debate in freedom. All eyes are now fixed on Spain, and on the outcome of your Congress. What will come of it? This letter will reach you, if it reaches you at all, after this Congress. Will it find you at the height of revolution or at the height of reaction? All our friends in Italy, France and Switzerland are waiting for news from your country with unbearable anxiety.

“You doubtless know that the International and our dear Alliance have progressed enormously in Italy of late. The people, in the country as much as in the towns, are now in an entirely revolutionary situation, that is to say, they are economically desperate; the masses are beginning to organise themselves in a most serious manner and their interests are beginning to become ideas.—Up to now, what was lacking in Italy was not instincts, but organisation and an idea. Both are coming into being, so that Italy, after Spain and with Spain, is perhaps the most revolutionary country at this moment. Italy has what other countries lack: a youth which is passionate, energetic, completely at a loss, with no prospects, with no way out, and which, despite its bourgeois origins, is not morally and intellectually exhausted like the bourgeois youth of other countries. Today, it is throwing itself headlong into revolutionary socialism accepting our entire programme, the programme of the Alliance. Mazzini, our mighty antagonist of genius, is dead, the Mazzinist party is completely disorganised, and Garibaldi is letting himself be carried away more and more by that youth which bears his name, but is going, or rather running, infinitely further ahead of him. I have sent to our friends in Barcelona an Italian address; I shall soon send them others. It is good and it is necessary that the Alliancists in Spain should enter into direct relations with those in Italy. Are you receiving the Italian socialist newspapers? I recommend above all: the Eguaglianza of Girgenti, Sicily; the Campana of Naples; the Fascio Operaio of Bologna; II Gazzettino Rosa, and, above all, II Martello of Milan—unfortunately the latter has been banned and all the editors imprisoned.

“In Switzerland, I recommend to you two Alliancists: James Guillaume (Switzerland, Neuchâtel, 5, rue de la Place d’Armes) and Adhémar Schwitzguébel, engraver (member and corresponding secretary of the Committee of the Jura Federation), Switzerland, Jura Bernois, Sonvillier, Mr. Adhémar Schwitzguébel, engraver.” (Bakunin’s address follows.)

“Alliance and fraternity.

M. Bakunin

“Please convey my greetings to brother Morago, and ask him to send me his newspaper.

“Are you receiving the Bulletin de la Federation jurassienne?

“Please burn this letter, as it contains names.”

The Hague Congress has expelled Bakunin from the International, not only as a founder of the Alliance, but also for a personal deed. The authentic document in support of this deed is still in our hands, but political considerations oblige us to refrain from publishing it.