I felt this devotion as a standing reproach. I saw how eager the workers were to gain instruction, and how despairingly few were those who volunteered to aid them. I saw how much the toiling masses needed to be helped by men possessed of education and leisure in their endeavours to spread and to develop the organization; but few and rare were those who came to assist without the intention of making political capital out of this very helplessness of the people! More and more I began to feel that I was bound to cast in my lot with them. Stepniák says, in his ‘Career of a Nihilist,’ that every revolutionist has had a moment in his life when some circumstance, maybe unimportant in itself, has brought him to pronounce his oath of giving himself to the cause of revolution. I know that moment; I lived through it after one of the meetings at the Temple Unique, when I felt more acutely than ever before how cowardly are the educated men who hesitate to put their education, their knowledge, their energy at the service of those who are so much in need of that education and that energy. ‘Here are men,’ I said to myself, ‘who are conscious of their servitude, who work to get rid of it; but where are the helpers? Where are those who will come to serve the masses—not to utilize them for their own ambitions?’
Gradually some doubts began, however, to creep into my mind as to the soundness of the agitation which was carried on at the Temple Unique. One night a well-known Geneva lawyer, Monsieur A., came to the meeting, and stated that if he had not hitherto joined the Association it was because he had first to settle his own business affairs; having now succeeded in that direction, he came to join the labour movement. I felt shocked at this cynical avowal, and when I communicated my reflections to my stone-mason friend he explained to me that this gentleman, having been defeated at the previous election, when he sought the support of the radical party, now hoped to be elected by the support of the labour vote. ‘We accept their services for the present,’ my friend concluded, ‘but when the revolution comes our first move will be to throw all of them overboard.’
Then came a great meeting, hastily convoked, to protest, as it was said, against the calumnies of the ‘Journal de Genève.’ This organ of the moneyed classes of Geneva had ventured to suggest that mischief was brewing at the Temple Unique, and that the building trades were going once more to make a general strike, such as they had made in 1869. The leaders at the Temple Unique called the meeting. Thousands of workers filled the hall, and Ootin asked them to pass a resolution, the wording of which seemed to me very strange: an indignant protest was expressed in it against the inoffensive suggestion that the workers were going to strike. ‘Why should this suggestion be described as a calumny?’ I asked myself. ‘Is it, then, a crime to strike?’ Ootin concluded in the meantime a hurried speech in support of his resolution with the words, ‘If you agree, citizens, with it I will send it at once to the press.’ He was going to leave the platform, when somebody in the hall suggested that discussion would not be out of place; and then the representatives of all branches of the building trades stood up in succession, saying that the wages had lately been so low that they could hardly live upon them; that with the opening of the spring there was plenty of work in view, of which they intended to take advantage to increase their wages; and that if an increase were refused they intended to begin a general strike.
I was furious, and next day hotly reproached Ootin for his behaviour. ‘As a leader,’ I told him, ‘you were bound to know that a strike had really been spoken of.’ In my innocence I did not suspect the real motives of the leaders, and it was Ootin himself who made me understand that a strike at that time would be disastrous for the election of the lawyer, Monsieur A.
I could not reconcile this wire-pulling by the leaders with the burning speeches I had heard them pronounce from the platform. I felt disheartened, and spoke to Ootin of my intention to make myself acquainted with the other section of the International Association at Geneva, which was known as the Bakunísts. The name ‘anarchist’ was not much in use then. Ootin gave me at once a word of introduction to another Russian, Nicholas Joukóvsky, who belonged to that section, and, looking straight into my face, he added with a sigh, ‘Well, you won’t return to us; you will remain with them.’ He had guessed right.
IX
I went first to Neuchâtel, and then spent a week or so among the watchmakers in the Jura Mountains. I thus made my first acquaintance with that famous Jura Federation which played for the next few years an important part in the development of socialism, introducing into it the no-government, or anarchist, tendency.
In 1872, the Jura Federation was becoming a rebel against the authority of the general council of the International Workingmen’s Association. The Association was essentially a working-men’s organization, the workers understanding it as a labour movement and not as a political party. In East Belgium, for instance, they had introduced into the statutes a clause in virtue of which no one could be a member of a section unless employed in a manual trade; even foremen were excluded.
The workers were moreover federalist in principle. Each nation, each separate region, and even each local section had to be left free to develop on its own lines. But the middle-class revolutionists of the old school who had entered the International, imbued as they were with the notions of the centralized, pyramidal secret organizations of earlier times, had introduced the same notions into the Workingmen’s Association. Beside the federal and national councils, a general council was nominated at London, to act as a sort of intermediary between the councils of the different nations. Marx and Engels were its leading spirits. It soon appeared, however, that the mere fact of having such a central body became a source of substantial inconvenience. The general council was not satisfied with playing the part of a correspondence bureau; it strove to govern the movement, to approve or to censure the action of the local federations and sections, and even of individual members. When the Commune insurrection began in Paris—and ‘the leaders had only to follow,’ without being able to say whereto they would be led within the next twenty-four hours—the general council insisted upon directing the insurrection from London. It required daily reports about the events, gave orders, favoured this and hampered that, and thus put in evidence the disadvantage of having a governing body, even within the Association. The disadvantage became still more apparent when, at a secret conference held in 1871, the general council, supported by a few delegates, decided to direct the forces of the Association towards electoral agitation. It set people thinking about the evils of any government, however democratic its origin. This was the first spark of anarchism. The Jura Federation became the centre of opposition against the general council.
The separation between leaders and workers which I had noticed at Geneva in the Temple Unique did not exist in the Jura Mountains. There were a number of men who were more intelligent, and especially more active, than the others; but that was all. James Guillaume, one of the most intelligent and broadly educated men I ever met, was a proof-reader and the manager of a small printing office. His earnings in this capacity were so small that he had to give his nights to translating novels from German into French, for which he was paid eight francs for sixteen pages.