some individuals, he calmly and indefatigably urged them to draw the lessons of the past. Of their own past. In the wake of the Commune and the disintegration of the International had come helplessness. Wildcat strikes and huge riots had erupted pretty well everywhere, hopelessly and bereft Alexander Marius Jacob of political awareness—beggars’ revolts. Ineffectual labour con- Alias Escande, alias Attila, alias Georges, alias gresses had been held in secret: some sensational trials, like the Bonnet, alias Feran, alias Hard to Kill, alias The Lyons trial of 1874, had offered an ephemeral platform. Living Burglar as refugees around La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Swiss Jura, some comrades had striven to keep the ideal alive. But no one had managed for very long to propagate it in a France where every Bernard Thomas militant was registered, shadowed and imprisoned, denied any support from a terror-stricken populace. By 1880 most of the amnestied Communards had come home from penal servitude, promptly to resume the work of agita- tion where they had left off. Simultaneously, an idea had been thrown up by the Jura’s international congresses: since the people were asleep, they needed awakening. Since they were afraid, confidence had to be put back into them by proving to them that the Versaillese could be matched blow for blow. Mon- sieur Thiers had issued a declaration of war by massacring the Communards: the gauntlet would be picked up. It was at this point that the erstwhile prince Kropotkin, a geographer and ex- plorer of Siberia, more titles than the Romanovs and recently escaped only a few years since from Saint Petersburg’s Peter and Paul prison, had issued, through Geneva’s Le Révolté, his explosive watchword: ‘Our action should be permanent revolt, by word of mouth, in writing, by dagger, gun, dynamite and sometimes even by the ballot paper when it is a question of voting for the ineligible Blanqui or Trinquet. We are consis- tent, and we, as rebels, have recourse to every weapon when it is time to strike. ANYTHING OTHER THAN LEGALITY IS ACCEPTABLE TO US!’ Paul Brousse had reiterated this embrace of political murder 1970 in the columns of Geneva’s L’Avant-Garde.. ‘When the mur- 72 Alexandre had replied with a diatribe upon the necessity of allowing the creative capacity of the individual to develop. Martinaud said nothing for a long time but just stared doggedly at the sea. He stated in a sad, almost pained voice: ‘Take care, Jacob. Utopias are dangerous. In seeking to have everything at one fell swoop, you risk destroying everything.’ The conversation had died. They had taken their leave of each other. Every time that Alexandre thought back on the meeting, his fists clenched. Martinaud belonged to the lowest of the low: the liberals. People who have an easy conscience because they think they understand things. Anarchist ideas were so self-evident! So self-evident that they need only be propagated everywhere and one would have a general uprising to contend with. The only serious problem remained the propaganda issue. How to alert the exploited to the fact that they had only all to break their chains at the same time in order to be free? That question had been asked for the past twenty-odd years. During the summer of 1897, Charles Malato arrived in Mar- seilles in the course of a tour undertaken in an attempt to coor- dinate the actions of the provincial groups, if that turned out to be feasible. Alexandre was introduced to him on the premises of L’Agitateur. He was instantly won over by him. A man of thirty years, with a face that looked as though it had been lit up by the ordeals he had gone through: the adolescent soon came to look upon him as a sort of model. This was the first hero from the anarchist pantheon that he had seen at such close quarters. When Malato expounded upon some idea with that warm, singsong voice of his, everything became crystal clear. They formed a circle around him. He reviewed the movement’s history. Spoke of the ines- timable daring and devotion displayed by the militants of an earlier generation—and of their half-failure as well. Without letting himself be put off by the excess of avenging furyin 71 the only anarchist who pulled it off, some argued. In 1897, he could see no other cause to which to commit himself than an- archy, being as he was possessed by the absolute, having seen only injustice and atrocity in the world and he scented only compromise in a France that was a disappointment to him. Contents Following hours spent over his type-case at old man Juge’s place, he would occasionally stroll down by the docks. He was sometimes seized then by a hankering for the trade winds, and Introduction ...................... 5 for night watches in the tropics when he was at the helm and the ship was carving a wake through the phosphorescent wa- The Bandits 12 ters. But he soon came upon former comrades: they conjured The Agitator 34 up the past a little: but then they no longer had anything more I ............................. 34 to say. They were miserable wretches, trundling their defeats II ............................. 50 through a world of shadows. III ............................ 82 With Captain Martinaud maybe… But how would he go IV ............................ 99 about explaining to him that he had discovered a goal in life, a hundred times grander than the command of a ship? The Hundred and Fifty ‘Crimes’ of the OtherAr- How would he explain to him the Stateless, government-less, sène Lupin 120 Lawless, police-less, judge-less world, basking in harmony, I ............................. 120 towards which he was presently working? He had tried on the II ............................. 150 day when he had come across him near the Lazaret docks. He III ............................ 186 had told him with all fire how the criminal was the product of IV ............................ 207 society’s injustice—and how most offences are only committed V ............................. 221 for gain. Abolish the injustice, captain, and you will do away with the vast majority of crimes! Society looks upon offenders A Quarter of a Century on Devil’s Island 259 as rebellious slaves in need of punishment; we regard them as I ............................. 259 sick brothers whom we will make every effort to cure with II ............................. 284 every means that science may indicate to us. The history of III ............................ 320 the West today boils down to the history of the conquest of power by a succession of castes. But that is not necessarily the The Quiet Family Man 336 definitive history of the whole of mankind. Some Bibliography . 355 ‘You cannot alter the fact that there are wolves and sheep, Newspapers . 355 gluttons and misers,’ Martinaud had murmured, startled byso On the penal colony . 356 much vehemence. On anarchy . 356 Various . 357 70 3 the hilltops three months after Millerand’s speech, in August 1896. In no particular did Alexandre see eye to eye with this strat- egy. Sure, they shared with the Marxists the goal of achieving a society without exploiters or exploited, without execution- ers or victims. Sure, in France, a capitalist country like the rest of Europe, there was in progress a sometimes bloody but at all times oppressive class struggle. But take control of the gov- ernment? No. ‘The State is Evil’, Bakunin said. Injustice springs inevitably from man’s government of man. To set up a dictator- ship of the proletariat would be to fall into a worse trap than ever, for the inevitable short term implications of such a setup would be the need for a secret police, press censorship and a dictatorship exercised over minds as well as bodies. The precise opposite of the spread of freedom. According to Alexandre’s cronies, politics is not practised by delegating one’s powers for a 5 year term to some individ- ual whom one is not entitled to replace if one is unhappy with him, which boils down to being a citizen for the one thousand four hundred and sixtieth portion of one’s life—1461 in leap years—on the glorious day when one stuffs one’s ballot paper into the ballot box: politics is practised, ought to be practised every day in any true democracy. The pamphlets bequeathed to Alexandre by the orphan are at one in their condemnation of universal suffrage. Louise Michel encapsulates them all in a single phrase: ‘Your vote is the lowing of an ox scenting the slaughterhouse’. At the end of six months of militant activity, he was so well schooled in such writings that he quoted from them as casu- ally as drawing breathe. They spoke Bakunin like Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose. The daily practice of action had turned the trainee-helmsman into a professional agitator. He had em- braced anarchy in its entirety. It afforded him an ideal, a philos- ophy, a guiding rule. Had he lived at the start of the Christian era, he might perhaps have been one of the followers of Jesus— 69 putting into effect. Since the 1893 elections their numberhas Introduction grown to 45 in the Chamber—quite an advance compared with the 12 in the preceding legislature—but a tiny minority Rigor and precision have finally disappeared from the field in the context of the 445 ‘aquarium crumb gobblers’ as the of human procrastination. With the recognition that a strictly parliamentary deputies are known. organisational perspective is not enough to solve the dilemma Aside from a handful of persons wistful for Bonapartism or of ‘what is to be done’, the need for order and security has the monarchy, overwhelmed since the MacMahon venture— transferred itself to the field of desire.