In combating authority, then, the Anarchists had to attack every institution of which power had constituted itself the defender, and the necessity for which it seeks to demonstrate in order to justify its own existence. Thus the scope of Anarchistic ideas was widened. Starting out, with a simple political negation, the Anarchist has had to attack economic and social prejudices also, to find a formula which, while denying private property, the basis of our present economic order, should at the same time affirm our aspirations for a future organization. Hence the word Communism naturally came to be coupled with the word Anarchy.
Further on we shall see that certain lovers of the quintessence of abstraction have sought to claim that, from the moment Anarchy signified complete expansion of individuality, the words Anarchy and Communism protested against such a coupling. Against this insinuation we shall prove that individuality cannot develop except in the community; that the latter cannot exist unless the former evolves freely; and that they mutually complement each other.
It is this diversity of problems to attack and to solve which has made the success of Anarchistic ideas, and contributed to their rapid growth; so much so that, launched forth by a group of unknown persons without means of propaganda, they today more or less invade art, science, and literature. Hatred of authority, social demands, date far back; they arise as soon as man is able to recognize that he is oppressed. But through how many phases and systems was it necessary that the idea should pass, before it could assume its present form!
One of the first who formulated it in its intuitional stage was Rabelais, in describing the life of the Abbey of Thelemes. But how obscure it still was! How little he believed it applicable to society in its entirety, since entrance into the community was reserved to a minority of privileged persons attended by a train of domestics attached to their person!
In 1793 the Anarchists were much talked of. Jacques Roux and “the madmen” appear to us to have been the ones who, during the Revolution, saw most clearly, and sought the best means of turning it to the benefit of the people. Hence the bourgeois historians have left them in the shade. Their history is still to be written; the documents buried in the archives and the libraries still await him who shall have the time and the courage to dig them up, bring them to light, and reveal the secret of things still very incomprehensible to us, in that tragic period of history. We can therefore scarcely form any appreciation of their program. One must come down to Proudhon before he sees Anarchy positing itself as the adversary of authority and power, and beginning to take definite shape. But as yet it is but a theoretical enemy; practically, Proudhon, in his social organization, leaves in existence, under different names, the administrative machinery which is the very essence of government. Up to the end of the empire Anarchy appears under the form of a vague mutualism, which, in France, during the first years that followed the Commune, foundered in the misled and misleading movement of cooperative associations for production and consumption. But before coming to this impotent solution, a sprout had detached itself from the springing tree. In Switzerland, the International had given birth to the “Jurassian Federation” in which Bakunin propagated the idea of Proudhon—Anarchy the enemy of authority—but developing, enlarging, incarnating it in social demands. From this epoch dates the true dawn of the present Anarchist movement.
Certainly many prejudices still existed, many illogical notions appeared in the ideas promulgated. The propagandist organization still contained many of the germs of authoritarianism; many of the elements of the authoritarian conception still survived. But what of it? The movement was launched; the idea grew, purified itself, and became more and more defined. And when, not quite thirteen years ago, Anarchy was affirmed at the Congres du Centre, in France, though still very feeble, though the act of a very weak minority (having against it not only those satisfied with the present social order, but also those pseudo-revolutionaries who only see in popular demands a means of grasping at power) the idea contained sufficient expansive force to take root without any other means of propaganda than the fervor of its adherents. It had sufficient vigor to induce the supporters of the capitalistic regime to injure and persecute it, and men of good faith to discuss it—a proof of strength and vitality. Hence, in spite of the crusade of those who could consider themselves, in some degree, leaders of any of the divers divisions of public opinion, in spite of calumnies, excommunications, condemnations, in spite of the prison, the idea of Anarchy has made headway. Groups have been founded, propagandist organs have been created in France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, Norway, America, Australia, in the Slavic tongue, in German, Jewish, Czech, Armenian—a little everywhere and in all idioms. But what is more important, from the little group of malcontents by whom they were formulated, Anarchistic ideas have radiated through all classes of society. Wherever man displays his cerebral activity they have infiltrated. Art, science,
