About the same time a conspiracy similar to that undertaken at Bologna was launched by Enrico Malatesta and some friends in Apulia. A heavy chest of guns had been dispatched from Tarentum to a station in the province of Bari, from which it was carried on a cart to the old château of Castel del Monte, which had been chosen as the rendezvous. "Many hundreds of conspirators," Malatesta recounts, "had promised to meet at Castel del Monte. I arrived, but of all those who had sworn to be there we found ourselves six. No matter. We opened the box of arms and found it was filled with old percussion guns, but that made no difference. We armed ourselves and declared war on the Italian army. We roamed the country for some days, trying to gain over the peasants, but meeting with no response. The second day we met eight carabinieri, who opened fire on us and imagined that we were very numerous. Three days later we discovered that we were surrounded by soldiers. There remained only one thing to do. We buried the guns and decided to disperse. I hid myself in a load of hay, and thus succeeded in escaping from the dangerous region." [(24)] An attempt at insurrection also took place in Romagna, but it appears to have been limited to cutting the telegraph wires between Bologna and Imola.
Back of all the Italian riots lay a serious economic condition. The peasants were in very deep distress, and it was not difficult for the Bakouninists to stir them to revolt. The Bulletin of the Jura Federation of August 16 informs us: "During the last two years there have been about sixty riots produced by hunger; but the rioters, in their ignorance, only bore a grudge against the immediate monopolists, and did not know how to discern the fundamental causes of their misery." [(25)] This is all too plainly shown in the events of 1874. Beyond giving the Bakouninists a chance to play at revolution, there is little significance in the Italian uprisings of that year.
The failure of the various insurrections in France, Spain, and Italy was, naturally enough, discouraging to Bakounin and his followers. The Commune of Paris was the one uprising that had made any serious impression upon the people, and it was the one wherein the Bakouninists had played no important part. The others had failed miserably, with no other result than that of increasing the power of reaction, while discouraging and disorganizing the workers. Even Bakounin had now reached the point where he was thoroughly disillusioned, and he wrote to his friends that he was exhausted, disheartened, and without hope. He desired, he said, to withdraw from the movement which made him the object of the persecutions of the police and the calumnies of the jealous. The whole world was in the evening of a black reaction, he thought, and he wrote to the truest and most devoted of all that loyal circle of Swiss workmen, James Guillaume, that the time for revolutionary struggles was past and that Europe had entered into a period of profound reaction, of which the present generation would probably not see the end. "He urged me," relates Guillaume, "to imitate himself and 'to make my peace with the bourgeoisie.'" [(26)] "It is useless," are Bakounin's words, "to wish obstinately to obtain the impossible. It is necessary to recognize reality and to realize that, for the moment, the popular masses do not wish socialism. And, if some tipplers of the mountains desire on this account to accuse you of treason, you will have for yourself the witness of your conscience and the esteem of your friends." [(27)]
In July, 1873, Bakounin retired to an estate that had been bought for him through the generosity of Cafiero, on the route from Locarno to Bellinzona, and for the next few months lavish expenditures were made in the construction and reconstruction of an establishment where the "intimates" could be entertained. That fall Bakounin wrote to the Jura Federation, announcing his retreat from public life and requesting it to accept his resignation. "For acting in this way," he wrote, "I have many reasons. Do not believe that it is principally on account of the personal attacks of which I have been made the object these last years. I do not say that I am absolutely insensible to such. However, I would feel myself strong enough to resist them if I thought that my further participation in your work and in your struggles could aid in the triumph of the cause of the proletariat. But I do not think so.
"By my birth and my personal position, and doubtless by my sympathies and my tendencies, I am only a bourgeois, and, as such, I could not do anything else among you but propaganda. Well, I have a conviction that the time for great theoretical discourses, whether printed or spoken, is past. In the last nine years there have been developed within the International more ideas than would be necessary to save the world, if ideas alone could save it, and I defy anybody to invent a new one." [(28)]
This letter in reality marks the end of Bakounin's activity in the revolutionary movement. After squandering most of Cafiero's fortune, Bakounin sought a martyr's death in Italy, but in this, as in all his other exploits, he was unsuccessful. And from that time on to his death his life is a humiliating story as he sought here and there the necessary money for his livelihood. Nearly always he had been forced to live from hand to mouth. Money, money, money was the burden of hundreds of his letters. In order to obtain funds he had resorted to almost every possible plan. He had accepted money in advance from publishers for books which he had never had time to write. From time to time he would find an almoner to care for him, only in the end to lose him through his importunate and exacting demands. An account is given by Guillaume of what I believe is the last meeting between Bakounin and certain of his old friends in September, 1874. Ross, Cafiero, Spichiger, and Guillaume met Bakounin in a hotel at Neuchâtel. Guillaume, it appears, was cold and unfeeling; Cafiero and Ross said nothing, while Spichiger wept silently in a corner. "The explicit declaration made by me ..." says Guillaume, "took away from Bakounin at the very beginning all hope of a change in our estimation of him. It was also a question of money in this last interview. We offered to assure to our old friend a monthly pension of 300 francs, expressing the hope that he would continue to write, but he refused to accept anything. As a set-off, he asked Cafiero to loan him 3,000 francs (no longer 5,000), ... and Cafiero replied that he would do it. Then we separated sadly." [(29)]
On the first of July, 1876, Bakounin, after a brief illness, died at Bern at the house of his old friend, Dr. Vogt. The press of Europe printed various comments upon his life and work. The anarchists wrote their eulogies, while the socialists generally deplored the ruinous and disrupting tactics that Bakounin had employed in the International Working Men's Association. This story will be told later, but it is well to mention here that since 1869 an unbridgeable chasm had opened itself between the anarchists and the socialists. When they first came together in the International there was no clear distinction between them, but, after Bakounin was expelled from that organization in 1872, at The Hague, his followers frankly called themselves anarchists, while the followers of Marx called themselves socialists. In principles and tactics they were poles apart, and the bitterness between them was at fever heat. The anarchists took the principles of Bakounin and still further elaborated them, while his methods were developed from conspiratory insurrections to individual acts of violence. While the idea of the Propaganda of the Deed is to be found in the writings of Bakounin and Nechayeff, it was left to others to put into practice that doctrine. For the next thirty years the principles and ideals of anarchism made no appreciable headway, but the deeds of the anarchists became the talk and, to a degree, the terror of the world.
FOOTNOTES:
[G] Previous to 1848, socialism was used by Robert Owen and his followers, as well as by many French idealists, to mean phalansteries, colonies, or other voluntary communal undertakings. Marx and Engels at first called themselves "communists," and were thus distinguished from these earlier socialists. During the period of the International all its members began more and more to call themselves "socialists." The word, anarchism, was rarely used. As a matter of fact, it was the struggle in the International which eventually clarified the views of both anarchists and socialists and made clear the distinctions now recognized between communism, anarchism, and socialism. See Chapter VIII, infra.
[H] This is from "The Commune of Paris," which was read by Marx to the General Council of the International on May 30, two days after the last of the combatants of the Commune were crushed by superior numbers on the heights of Belleville.