The Communards

MARCH … AND NOW RETURNS THE ANNIVERSARY OF MAD HOPES, OF THE furious impulses and butcheries of the Commune, our last attempt at revolution. Forty-one years after the frightening experience the same illusions give rise in the same people to the same dangerous hopes. For if, as the proverb says, we live on hope, it also happens that we die of it; that for his dreams man gambles with his life—and loses.

One of the hopes most deeply rooted in the popular soil is that in the magic virtues of insurrection. This is only natural. It is derived from the feeling of confidence inspired by force. What is force not capable of? The people, who suffer its rigors, upon whom the privileged and adventuress minorities daily exercise their power, learn in this way the immeasurable value of the solid fist, the saber, and ruse. These are the means by which they are tamed and they count on these things alone to have its day and time. There’s nothing surprising in the fact that such a faith should preserve its prestige despite the worst lessons. The belief in revolution is nothing but confidence in the power of brute force, a confidence vulgarized and depicted for the use of the crowd. A defeat presages nothing; it doesn’t extinguish the hope for victory in the defeated. The Commune died in 1871 under Gallifet’s boot? Well, Long Live the Insurrection!

It isn’t the intelligence of the popular crowd that expresses itself in this way, but its instinct, and this is why reasoning has no more success with these believers than the costly experiences of yesterday and the day before.

Have there been more conclusive experiences? Revolutions have never achieved their goals. They have sometimes “succeeded,” but in reality they have neither destroyed what they wanted to destroy nor constructed anything new or better. In fact, they’ve only succeeded when bourgeois liberals and intriguers have joined the insurgent people. Without the assistance of these forces insurrections invariably fail. It was because at the last moment they were abandoned by the wealthy “moderates” that the rebels of Moscow in 1905 were cut to pieces despite their heroism; and it’s because the republican petite bourgeoisie didn’t agree to back it that the Barcelona uprising was put down in three days. The revolutionary minority, the working people and the masses, lack not only the organizational qualities and the knowledge necessary for the success of a political—and even more, a social—upheaval, but even more, they are lacking in the resources, men and money. There is no doubt that a revolution can triumph with the cooperation of shop owners, liberal and sympathetic philanthropists, lawyers, and a few perspicacious bankers. But these messieurs will only intervene if they have good reason to do so; in general, they snatch the movement. And when friends are installed in city hall, the barracks, the town halls promising decisive reforms as is right, the game has been won. But by whom?

Is this not the abridged history the recent Portuguese revolution? The proletarians of Lisbon and Porto, socialist and anarchist, who paid for the republic with their persons, only understood their role four months later when the soldiers of the new government—their sons—fired on them. Exactly like the old one. But why insist? Is this not the synthesis of the history of the most famous revolution, of the Great French Revolution, of which all that is left are some refrains: “Ah, ça ira, ça ira …” swiped by a brilliant bandit, by men who were soldiers by chance, and by speechmakers …

And yet the Commune was the “Great federation of pain,” as Jules Vallès said. And if it didn’t have a general staff specialized in organization and social war to guide it toward a propitious destiny, it had strategists, several of whom had gone to the excellent school of Blanqui—the true Imprisoned One—and it came at the right moment, rich in horrors, backed by the anger of a population desolated by war having a disorganized government to fight. It was heroic, stubborn, the federation of pains, and heroically incompetent.

It was typical: humanitarian despite the war and as if war can be made by half; honest, as our revolutionaries brag of being, for whom there is no worse insult than being confused with “crooks”; honest and respectful of the money of others, a thousand times more than the others were of the lives of the Communards; futile, divided by the rivalries of impromptu generals and legislators; divided also by mistrust, though they hadn’t yet invented the Revolutionary Security force; heroic, to be sure, and admirably so … But can the people do better? Lacking in education, not used to thinking, not knowing how to count on themselves, needing for the least effort to be in groups, led, federated—alas—could the workers and beggars of 1912 do better? They would still have the resource of bravely, unblinkingly having themselves killed for their beautiful dream. They’ll have only that resource …

Because they aren’t the strongest. Because their real enemies are within them; their inconsistency, their sentimentality, their ignorance places them at the mercy of avid soldiers, fierce politicians, and loudmouths. A society is a complex organism that takes centuries to form, to perfect itself and that only succeeds in doing so by absorbing countless energies, competencies, and talents. You would like to remake this work in a few days, you race of “serfs” and “villeins” in whom the religious and authoritarian past left a durable imprint? If you caress this dream other fédérés will pass before the wall!

And we will perhaps admire them, but we won’t follow them. More than they, because we are more conscious, we have a profound love of life and the invincible desire to take our part of the feasts the sun. But in order to become stronger we have to become more circumspect, and we have placed our goals here and not in the beyond, in the reality of our individual lives and not in the fiction “humanity.”

Man must live instead of giving himself, offering himself in a holocaust to the Dream! Let his courage allow finally to become a free man, ardent and noble, instead of succumbing as a vain hero to (perhaps) modify the name of a tyranny. And if he falls, it’s better that he do so on his own account. And if he succeeds, his life as a rebel will contribute to the evolution of the social environment at least as much as the deaths of the others.

(l’anarchie, March 28, 1912)