“I was only a positivist, a savant given over entirely to observation and experience, accepting nothing beyond the verified fact. Scientifically, socially, I admitted a simple and slow evolution, generating humanity as the human being himself is generated. And it was then that, in the history of the globe and in that of societies, I was forced to make a place for the volcano, the abrupt cataclysm, the sudden eruption, which has marked each geologic phase, each historic period. One comes thus to perceive that a step has never been taken, nor a progress made, without the aid of terrible catastrophes. Every forward march has sacrificed billions of existences. Our narrow justice revolts, we treat Nature as an atrocious mother; but, if we do not excuse the volcano, we must, nevertheless, endure it as forewarned savants when it breaks out, and then, ah! then, I am perhaps a dreamer, like the others: I have my ideas.”
The year following the Fribourg Congress (1878) Kropotkine warmly advocated insurrection before the Congress of the Fédération Jurasienne. “By insurrections,” he said, “the anarchists seek to quicken popular sentiment and initiative to the double end of a violent expropriation and the disorganisation of the state.” The congress pronounced formally in favour of the insurrectional principle, and from that day to this it has never been seriously questioned in any important anarchist quarter.
If the overt act by the individual anarchist is not viewed with the same unanimous and unqualified approval as the collective act of insurrection, it is because there is an easy distinction (representing, perhaps, a real difference) to be made between the individual act directed against the principle of authority incarnated in an official of the state,—president, minister, deputy, general, senator, judge, and police prefect,—when it comes under the general head of regicide (a reform measure which is almost as old as the world), and the individual act directed against the principle of property incarnated in any member of the bourgeoisie whatsoever, when it comes under the general head—O deterrent power of a name!—of murder.
The first kind of individual attempt (regicide) encounters little opposition based on principle within the anarchist ranks. It is opposed, as Alexander H. Stephens opposed the foundation of the Confederacy (of which he accepted the vice-presidency, once it was declared), on grounds of expediency. As regicides, Caserio, Vaillant,[26] Bresci,[27] Pallas (whose attempt against the Maréchal Campos was glorified by the International Labor Congress at Chicago in 1893), and the assassin of Alexander II. fall into much the same category as Brutus, Cromwell, Harmodius and Aristogiton, and the executioners of Louis XVI.; and, in the case at least of the assassin of the czar, the classification, while not perhaps ideal, might be worse.
As to weapons, the popular distinction (which is, in fact, more nice than wise) between the pistol and stiletto, on the one hand, and the bomb, on the other, is not made. “I admit all means, even the bomb,” says Charles Malato, who approved Pallas and Vaillant, but regretted Henry’s attempted slaughter of the bourgeois at the Café Terminus, “if only it be well placed; and yet I am not a drinker of blood.”
The second kind of individual attempt—the suppression of members of the bourgeoisie for the sole reason that they are bourgeois—is
CHARLES MALATO disapproved by all the anarchists but a small knot of extremists.
This disapproval, which is for the most part purely formal and passive when the act attains the person against whom it was directed, and its unselfishness is immediately evident, may become aggressive, not to say bitter, in certain quarters, when a tragic botch has been made of the job (by a mistake in victims) or when its significance as an act of propaganda has been obscured by the presence of motives of personal revenge. Elisée Reclus, of all the eminent French theoricians, has shown himself the most consistently refractory to this sort of propagande par le fait. In an article called out by the rapid succession of individual attempts in 1892, he said:—
“When you have a grudge against a person, you seek him out, you have an explanation with him, but you do not make innocent persons bear the brunt of your rancour.