Violence and the Labor Movement

by Robert Hunter

At the beginning of the seventies Bakounin and his friends found opening before them a field of practical activity. On the whole, the sixties were spent in theorizing, in organizing, and in planning, but with the seventies the moment arrived "to unchain the hydra of revolution." On the 4th of September, 1870, the Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris, and a few days afterward there were many uprisings in the other cities of France. It was, however, only in Lyons that the Bakouninists played an important part. Bakounin had a fixed idea that, wherever there was an uprising of the people, there he must go, and he wrote to Adolphe Vogt on September 6: "My friends, the revolutionary socialists of Lyons, are calling me there. I am resolved to take my old bones thither and to play there what will probably be my last game. But, as usual, I have not a sou. Can you, I do not say lend me, but give me 500 or 400, or 300 or 200, or even 100 francs, for my voyage?" [(1)] Guillaume does not state where the money finally came from, but Bakounin evidently raised it somehow, for he left Locarno on September 9. The night of the 11th he spent in Neuchâtel, where he conferred with Guillaume regarding the publication of a manuscript. On the 12th he arrived in Geneva, and two days later set out for Lyons, accompanied by two revolutionary enthusiasts, Ozerof and the young Pole, Valence Lankiewicz.

Since the 4th of September a Committee of Public Safety had been installed at the Hôtel de Ville composed of republicans, radicals, and some militants of the International. Gaspard Blanc and Albert Richard, two intimate friends of Bakounin, were not members of this committee, and in a public meeting, September 8, Richard made a motion, which was carried, to name a standing commission of ten to act as the "intermediaries between the people of Lyons and the Committee of Public Safety." Three of these commissioners, Richard, Andrieux, and Jaclard, were then appointed to go as delegates to Paris in order to come to some understanding with the Government. Andrieux, in the days of the Empire, had acquired fame as a revolutionist by proposing at a meeting to burn the ledger of the public debt. It seems, however, that these close and trusted friends of Bakounin began immediately upon their arrival in Paris to solicit various public positions remunerative to themselves, [(2)] and, although they succeeded in having General Cluseret sent to take command of the voluntary corps then forming in the department of the Rhone, that proved, as we shall see, most disastrous of all.

This is about all that had happened previous to Bakounin's arrival in Lyons, and, when he came, there was confusion everywhere. Even the members of the Alliance had no clear idea of what ought to be done. Bakounin, however, was an old hand at insurrections, and in a little lodging house where he and his friends were staying a new uprising was planned. He lost no time in getting hold of all the men of action. Under his energetic leadership "public meetings were multiplied and assumed a character of unheard-of violence. The most sanguinary motions were introduced and welcomed with enthusiasm. They openly provoked revolt in order to overthrow the laws and the established order of things." [(3)] On September 19 Bakounin wrote to Ogaref: "There is so much work to do that it turns my head. The real revolution has not yet burst forth here, but it will come. Everything possible is being done to prepare for it. I am playing a great game. I hope to see the approaching triumph." [(4)]

A great public meeting was held on the 24th, presided over by Eugène Saignes, a plasterer and painter, and a man of energy and influence among the Lyons workmen, at which various questions relative to proposed political changes were voted upon. But it was the following day, the 25th, that probably the most notable event of the insurrection took place. "The next day, Sunday, was employed," Guillaume says, "in the drawing up and printing of a great red placard, containing the program of the revolution which the Central Committee of Safety of France proposed to the people...." [(5)] The first article of the program declares: "The administrative and governmental machinery of the State, having become powerless, is abolished. The people of France once again enter into full possession of themselves." The second article suspends "all civil and criminal courts," and replaces them "by the justice of the people." The third suspends "the payment of taxes and of mortgages." The fourth declares that "the State, having decayed, can no longer intervene in the payment of private debts." The fifth states that "all existing municipal organizations are broken up and replaced in all the federated communes by Committees of Safety of France, which will exercise all powers under the immediate control of the people." The revolution was at last launched, and the placard ends, "Aux Armes!!!" [(6)]

While the Bakouninists were decreeing the revolution by posters and vainly calling the people to arms, an event occurred in Lyons which brought to them a very useful contingent of fighters. The Lyons municipality had just reduced the pay of the workers in the national dock yards from three to two and a half francs a day, and, on this account, these laborers joined the ranks of the insurgents. On the evening of September 27 a meeting of the Central Committee of Safety of France took place, and there a definite plan of action for the next day was decided upon. Velay, a tulle maker and municipal councillor, Bakounin, and others advised an armed manifestation, but the majority expressed itself in favor of a peaceful one. An executive committee composed of eight members signed the following proclamation, drawn up by Gaspard Blanc, which was printed during the night and posted early the next morning: "The people of Lyons ... are summoned, through the organ of their assembled popular committees, to a popular manifestation to be held to-day, September 28, at noon, on the Place des Terreaux, in order to force the authority to take immediately the most energetic and efficacious measures for the national defense." [(7)]

Turning again to Guillaume, we find "At noon many thousands of men pressed together on the Place des Terreaux. A delegation of sixteen of the national dock-yard workmen entered the Hôtel de Ville to demand of the Municipal Council the reëstablishment of their wage to three francs a day, but the Council was not in session. Very soon a movement began in the crowd, and a hundred resolute men, Saignes at their head, forcing the door of the Hôtel de Ville, penetrated the municipal building. Some members of the Central Committee of Safety of France, Bakounin, Parraton, Bastelica, and others, went in with them. From the balcony, Saignes announced that the Municipal Council was to be compelled to accept the program of the red proclamation of September 26 or to resign, and he proposed to name Cluseret general of the revolutionary army. Cluseret, cheered by the crowd, appeared in the balcony, thanked them, and announced that he was going to Croix-Rousse" (the working-class district). [(8)] He went there, it is true, but not to call to arms the national guards of that quarter. Indeed, his aim appears to have been to avoid a conflict, and he simply asked the workers "to come down en masse and without arms." [(9)] In the meantime the national guards of the wealthier quarters of the city hastened to the Hôtel de Ville and penetrated the interior court, while the Committee of Safety of France installed itself inside the building. There they passed two or three hours in drawing up resolutions, while Bakounin and others in vain protested: "We must act. We are losing time. We are going to be invaded by the national bourgeois guard. It is necessary to arrest immediately the prefect, the mayor, and General Mazure." [(10)] But their words went unheeded. And all the while the bourgeois guards were massing themselves before the Hôtel de Ville, and Cluseret and his unarmed manifestants were yielding place to them. In fact, Cluseret even persuaded the members of the Committee of Safety to retire and those of the Municipal Council to return to their seats, which they consented to do.

Bakounin made a last desperate effort to save the situation and to induce the insurgents to oppose force to force, but they would not. Even Albert Richard failed him. The Revolutionary committee, after parleying with the Municipal Councillors, then evacuated the Hôtel de Ville and contented itself with issuing a statement to the effect that "The delegates of the people have not believed it their duty to impose themselves on the Municipal Council by violence and have retired when it went into session, leaving it to the people to fully appreciate the situation." [(11)] "At the moment," says Guillaume, "when ... Mayor Hénon, with an escort of national bourgeois guards, reëntered the Hôtel de Ville, he met Bakounin in the hall of the Pas-Perdus. The mayor immediately ordered his companions to take him in custody and to confine him at once in an underground hiding-place." [(12)] The Municipal Councillors then opened their session and pledged that no pursuit should be instituted in view of the happenings of the day. They voted to reëstablish the former wage of the national dock-yard workers, but declared themselves unable to undertake the revolutionary measures proposed by the Committee of Safety of France, as these were outside their legal province.

In the meantime Bakounin was undergoing an experience far from pleasant, if we are to judge from the account which he gives in a letter written the following day: "Some used me brutally in all sorts of ways, jostling me about, pushing me, pinching me, twisting my arms and hands. I must, however, admit that others cried: 'Do not harm him.' In truth the bourgeoisie showed itself what it is everywhere: brutal and cowardly. For you know that I was delivered by some sharpshooters who put to flight three or four times their number of these heroic shopkeepers armed with their rifles. I was delivered, but of all the objects which had been stolen from me by these gentlemen I was able to find only my revolver. My memorandum book and my purse, which contained 165 francs and some sous, without doubt stayed in the hands of these gentlemen.... I beg you to reclaim them in my name. You will send them to me when you have recovered them." [(13)]

As a matter of fact, it was at the instance of his follower, Ozerof, that Bakounin was finally delivered. When he came forth from the Hôtel de Ville, the Committee of Safety of France and its thousands of sympathizers had disappeared, and he found himself practically alone. He spent the night at the house of a friend, and departed for Marseilles the next day, after writing the following letter to Palix: "My dear friend, I do not wish to leave Lyons without having said a last word of farewell to you. Prudence keeps me from coming to shake hands with you for the last time. I have nothing more to do here. I came to Lyons to fight or to die with you. I came because I am profoundly convinced that the cause of France has become again, at this supreme hour, ... the cause of humanity. I have taken part in yesterday's movement, and I have signed my name to the resolutions of the Committee of Safety of France, because it is evident to me that, after the real and certain destruction of all the administrative and governmental machinery, there is nothing but the immediate and revolutionary action of the people which can save France.... The movement of yesterday, if it had been successful ... could have saved Lyons and France.... I leave Lyons, dear friend, with a heart full of sadness and somber forebodings. I begin to think now that it is finished with France.... She will become a viceroyalty of Germany. In place of her living and real socialism,[G] we shall have the doctrinaire socialism of the Germans, who will say no more than the Prussian bayonets will permit them to say. The bureaucratic and military intelligence of Prussia, combined with the knout of the Czar of St. Petersburg, are going to assure peace and public order for at least fifty years on the whole continent of Europe. Farewell, liberty! Farewell, socialism! Farewell, justice for the people and the triumph of humanity! All that could have grown out of the present disaster of France. All that would have grown out of it if the people of France, if the people of Lyons, had wished it." [(14)]