Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

As to the large deductions about “concentration” made by certain economists, they are mere hypotheses--useful, of course, for stimulating research, but becoming quite noxious when they are represented as economical laws, when in reality…

These figures speak for themselves and show what an immense importance the small industry has in France.

The small industry of Paris fights hard for its maintenance, and it shows its vitality by the numberless machine-tools which are continually invented by the workers for improving and cheapening the produce.

One can appreciate in it both the variety of the small industries which are carried on in French towns and the skill and inventing powers of the workers.

It also appears very probable that if we find a highly developed working population in Vienna and Warsaw, this depends again to a very great extent upon the very considerable development of similar small industries, which stimulate…

At every step, in the field, in the garden, in the orchard, in the dairy, in the industrial arts, in the hundreds of small inventions in these arts, one sees the creative genius of the folk.

What most deserves admiration is--not so much the development of the great industries, which, after all, here as elsewhere, are to a great extent international in their origins--as the creative and inventive powers and capacities of…

Thus, when the rural making of plain chairs became unprofitable, articles of luxury and stylish chairs began to be fabricated in the villages, and similar transformations are found everywhere.

On the contrary, the delicacy of the work and the extreme variety of patterns were a distinctive feature of the Tarare muslins and a cause of their success.

Altogether it may be said that the région lyonnaise is characterised as a separate centre of French civilisation and art, and that a remarkable spirit of research, discovery and invention has developed there in all directions--scientific…

In short, we have here quite a world of industries of modern origin, and with them of inventions made to simplify the work of the hand.

And it is remarkable to notice that as soon as electricity gave the possibility to return to domestic work, 300 workers left at once the small workshops and took to work in their houses.

At Oyonnax, a small town on the Ain, we have a big centre for the fabrication of combs, an industry more than 200 years old, which took a new development since the last war through the invention of celluloid.

In the neighbourhoods of Nantua and Cluses silks are woven in nearly all villages, the peasants giving to weaving their spare time from agriculture, while quite a number of small workshops (mostly less than twenty looms, one of 100 looms)…

When I visited these villages between the Swiss frontier and Besançon in the year 1878, I was struck by the high degree of relative well-being which I could observe, even though I was perfectly well acquainted with the Swiss villages in…

To every house a garden is attached, and none of the misery of big cities is to be seen.

In the woody regions of the Perche and the Maine we find all sorts of wooden industries which evidently could only be maintained owing to the communal possession of the woods.

All sorts of hardware and locks are fabricated by the peasants during the time they can spare from agriculture, and real works of art, some of which were much admired at the exhibition of 1889, are produced by these humble peasant…

Agriculture and industry are thus going here hand in hand, the importance of not severing the union being perhaps best seen at Loudéac, a small town in the midst of Brittany (department of Côtes-du-Nord).

But the factory has created “quite a world of tiny workshops” in this purely agricultural region: small tin-ware workshops, tanneries, potteries, and so on, while the slags are transformed in small factories into manure.

In Brittany, in the neighbourhood of Quimperlé, a great number of small workshops for the fabrication of the felt hats which are worn by the peasants is scattered in the villages; and rapidly improving agriculture goes hand in hand with…

Thousands of women are employed now in their houses in sewing the “uppers” and in embroidering fancy shoes.

On the contrary, in an industry which supplies the home market--namely, in the fabrication of linen handkerchiefs, which itself is of a quite recent growth--we see that cottage-weaving is, even now, in full prosperity.

But, as is seen already from the preceding, new small industries have grown up instead, and this is also the case in many other parts of France.

And Reybaud remarked that the horrible dwellings in town, and the general condition of the factory hands, stood in a wonderful contrast with the relative welfare of the rural weavers.