Most French anarchists believe that the privileged will never surrender their privileges without a desperate resistance. Only a little handful of them are Tolstoyans in maintaining that simple non-resistance faithfully adhered to will alone suffice to regenerate the world. But they nearly all hold that cumulative non-resistance is, under certain conditions, the most effective resistance (”faire le vide autour des institutions sociales est le meilleur moyen de les démolir”); and a majority of them, probably,—certainly a majority of their more intellectual element,—esteem it by far the most important propaganda for the present hour.
The average French anarchist is forced to recognise at the outset the unpalatable truth that a good half of his customary doings are based on the government and property he opposes. He rejects the theory of money, but he must buy and sell. He abhors the state, but serves it, and uses its tax-supported institutions; and he is constantly finding himself in situations where he must do violence to his inmost convictions, or get out of life altogether by the portals of suicide or want. There are some unorthodox doings, however, which can be avoided without incurring a martyrdom out of all decent proportion to the seriousness of the occasion.
“If the force of power crushes you to-day, if, in spite of everything, authority fetters you in your evolution, there is always a certain margin for resistance. Fill this margin without being afraid of overstepping it,” advises one of the moderate advocates of the propagande par l’exemple.
The two forms of non-resistance oftenest enjoined by Tolstoy (namely, non-payment of taxes and refusal to serve in the army) are so disastrous in their consequences—as Tolstoy himself would have seen, had he not been born into a high estate and had he not attained a ripe age and an assured position before his revolutionary ideas completely matured—that they can hardly be said to come within this margin. And they are inculcated in France less with a view to inciting isolated individuals to put them into practice immediately than in the hope that a day may arrive when they will be suddenly put into practice simultaneously by so large a number of persons that coercion will be out of the question.
Similarly, refusal to handle money, to pay interest, to pay rent, to take oath, to testify in court, and to do jury duty, call down such speedy retribution that these, too, must be interpreted as lying in the generality of cases outside the margin mentioned above.
On the other hand, protest against parliamentarianism by abstention from voting (la propagande abstentionniste) is a thoroughly feasible kind of non-resistance, and is practised almost universally by the anarchists of France.
“If we seek,” says Jean Grave, “to faire le vide around the political machine, it is to the end of not forfeiting our right to act by and for ourselves. It is to preserve our liberty of action that we reject every compromise with the actual political order of things. It is to habituate ourselves to this liberty which is the summum of our aspirations that we attempt to exercise it in our struggle against the present social state. To the individuals whom they wish to enlist under their banner, the advocates of authority say, ‘Send us to the Chamber to make laws in your favour!’
“To those whom they wish to make think, the anarchists, after having exposed the facts, explain that they have no favours to expect from anybody; and that, when a thing seems to them bad, the best way to destroy it is to ‘faire le vide’ about it; ... that they never await from the good pleasure of their masters the authorisation to conform their acts to their thoughts; and that they commission nobody to legislate as to what they should do.”
Abstention from marriage (which, as ordinarily practised, the anarchist considers legalised prostitution, and the theoretical indissolubility of which he regards as nothing short of blasphemy) is another thoroughly feasible kind of non-resistance. And it is rare to find an anarchist, whose marital status was not fixed before he gave in his adherence to anarchism, who deigns to consult the pleasure or implore the blessing of any authority whatsoever in a matter which, to his thinking, concerns no one but himself and the person of his choice.[22]
Malthusianism, also,—in spite of a reverence for the procreative instinct, on the part of anarchists, which Zola’s Fécondité does not surpass,—is in high favour in anarchistic circles. The motives for the anarchist’s refusal to bring offspring into the world are set forth in Octave Mirbeau’s ejaculation of disgust called out by a project of law for checking depopulation introduced by one M. Piot into the Senate:—