Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

The conflict, being thus engaged in on larger issues, will purify the social atmosphere itself; and the numbers of victims on both sides will certainly be much smaller than they would have been in case the fight had been fought upon…

It will depend chiefly upon the constructive forces of society taking for the moment a free course; upon the inspirations being of a higher standard, and so winning more sympathy even from those who, as a class, are opposed to the change.

In this last case the conflict itself will depend much less upon the efficacy of firearms and guns than upon the force of the creative genius which will be brought into action in the work of reconstruction of society.

If the workers had taken steps towards the socialization of property, the revenge could not have been more terrible.

Nearly thirty thousand workers were slaughtered, as is known, not in battle but after they had lost the battle.

Having lived for two months in fear that the workers would make an assault upon their property rights, the rich men of France took upon the workers just the same revenge as if they had made the assault in reality.

However, when the movement was crushed, no account was taken by the middle classes of the modesty of the Communalist claims of the insurgents.

On the contrary, they took these rights under their protection.

When the workers became, in March 1871, the masters of the great city, they did not attack the property rights vested in the middle classes.

The question is, then, not so much how to avoid revolutions as how to attain the greatest results with the most limited amount of civil war, the least number of victims, and a minimum of mutual embitterment.

Besides, I began gradually to understand that revolutions, i.e. periods of accelerated rapid evolution and rapid changes, are as much in the nature of human society as the slow evolution which incessantly goes on now among the civilized…

The most ardent defenders of the present economical conditions had already abandoned the plea of right in defending the present privileges--questions as to the opportuneness of such a change having already taken its place.

And I saw that the idea of emancipation of the workers from the present wage-system was making headway amongst the middle classes themselves.

However, I soon noticed that no revolution, whether peaceful or violent, has ever taken place without the new ideals having deeply penetrated into the very class itself whose economical and political privileges had to be assailed.

I only once heard Bakúnin’s name invoked as an authority in itself, and that struck me so much that I even now remember the spot where the conversation took place and its surroundings.

In all such matters, in which intellect is the supreme judge, everyone in discussion used his own arguments.

His writings and his sayings were not a text that one had to obey--as is often unfortunately the case in political parties.

In conversations about anarchism, or about the attitude of the federation, I never heard it said, ‘Bakúnin has said so’ or ‘Bakúnin thinks so,’ as if it clenched the discussion.

What struck me most was that Bakúnin’s influence was felt much less as the influence of an intellectual authority than as the influence of a moral personality.

The name of ‘Michel’ often recurred in their conversations--not, however, as that of an absent chief whose opinions would make law, but as that of a personal friend of whom everyone spoke with love, in a spirit of comradeship.

A subsequent journey to Belgium, where I could compare once more the centralized political agitation at Brussels with the economic and independent agitation that was going on amongst the clothiers at Verviers, only strengthened my views.

Here I saw that the workers were not a mass that was being led and made subservient to the political ends of a few men; their leaders were simply their more active comrades--initiators rather than leaders.

But the absence of a division between the leaders and the masses in the Jura Federation was also the reason why there was not a question upon which every member of the federation would not strive to form his own independent opinion.

There is more independence and more originality among petty trades’ workers.

The very organization of the watch trade, which permits men to know one another thoroughly and to work in their own houses, where they are free to talk, explains why the level of intellectual development in this population is higher than…