Michael Bakunin
September 1870
1 September 1870
My dear friend,
Recent events have placed France in such a position that it can no longer be saved from a long and terrible enslavement, from ruin, from misery, from annihilation, except by a mass uprising of the armed people.
With your main army destroyed - and this is no longer in doubt today - France has only two options left:
Either submit shamefully, cowardly, to the insolent yoke of the Prussians, bow under the rod of Bismarck and all his Pomeranian lieutenants; abandon Alsace and Lorraine, which do not want to be German, to the military despotism of the future Emperor of Germany; pay three billion in reparations, not counting the billions that this disastrous war will have cost you; accept from the hand of Bismark a government, a crushing and ruinous public order, with the Orleans or Bourbon dynasty, returning once again to France in the wake of foreign armies; to see itself for ten or twenty years reduced to the miserable state of present-day Italy, oppressed and constrained by a viceroy who will administer France under the rule of Prussia, as Italy has hitherto been administered under the rule of France; to accept, as a necessary consequence, the ruin of national commerce and industry, sacrificed to German commerce and industry; to witness, finally, the intellectual and moral decline of the entire nation;
Or else, to avoid this ruin, to give the French people the means to save themselves.
Well, my friend, I have no doubt that all the titled and well-off men of France, with very few exceptions, that the vast majority of the upper and middle bourgeoisie, would consent to this cowardly abandonment of France rather than accept its salvation by popular uprising. Indeed, a popular uprising is a social revolution, the fall of privileged France. The fear of this revolution drove them, twenty years ago, under the dictatorship of Napoleon III; it will drive them today under the sword of Bismarck and under the constitutional and parliamentary rod of the Orleans. Popular freedom causes them such a terrible fear that, to avoid it, they will easily accept all shames, consent to all cowardices - even if these cowardices ruin them later, provided that they serve them now.
Yes, all of official France, all of bourgeois and privileged France, conspires for the Orleans, consequently conspires against the people. And the European powers see this as a good thing. Why? Because everyone knows that if France tries to save itself through a formidable popular uprising, it will be the signal for the unleashing of revolution throughout Europe.
Why then is the restoration of the Orleans dynasty not yet an accomplished fact? Because the collective and obviously reactionary dictatorship of Paris is currently powerless. Napoleon III and the empire have already fallen, but the entire imperial machine continues to function; and they dare not change anything, because changing all of this would mean proclaiming the revolution, and proclaiming the revolution is precisely what they want to avoid.
5 September
Behold the emperor taken prisoner and the republic proclaimed in Paris, with a provisional government.
Has the internal situation of France changed because of this? I do not think so; and the reflections that I was about to share with you on the impotence of the empire have lost none of their truth and their relevance when applied to the government that has just been formed through the fusion of the republican left and the Orleanist left.
I suppose that the members of this government are animated by the very sincere desire to save the homeland; it is not by trying to use the power of action of the administrative mechanism, before which the incorrigible Thiers was still amazed in the session of August 26, it is not, I say, by following the old governmental routine that they will be able to do anything good; if they seriously want to seek the salvation of France in the people, they will be forced to break all this administrative machine, and, in accordance with the proposals of Esquiros, Jouvencel, and General Cluseret, to return the initiative of action to all the revolutionary communes of France, freed from all centralising government and all tutelage, and consequently called upon to form a new organisation by federating amongst themselves for defence.[1]
I will briefly present my supporting evidence.
The provisional government, even under the most favourable circumstances, can:
Neither constitutionally reform the current administrative system;
Nor completely, or even significantly, change its personnel.
Constitution reforms can only be done by some Constituent Assembly, and it is not necessary to demonstrate that convening a Constituent Assembly is impossible at this time when there is not a week, not a day to lose. As for the changing of personnel, to carry it out in a serious manner it would be necessary to find one hundred thousand new functionaries in just a few days, with the certainty that these new functionaries would be more intelligent, more energetic, and more honest than the current ones. Simply stating this requirement makes it clear that its realisation is impossible.
There are therefore only two alternatives for the provisional government: either resign itself to using this essentially Bonapartist administration, which will be in its hands be a poisoned weapon against itself and against France; or break this governmental machine, without even trying to replace it with another, and to give the most complete freedom of initiative to all the provinces, to all the communes of France, which amounts to the dissolution of the current State.
But by destroying the administrative machine, the men of the left will deprive themselves of the only means they had of governing France. Paris, having thus lost official command and the power to initiate by decree, will retain only the initiative of the example it can set by placing itself at the head of this national movement.
Is Paris capable, through the energy of its resolutions, of playing this role? No; Paris is too absorbed with concern for its own defence to be able to direct and organise the national movement of France. Besieged Paris will turn into a vast camp; its entire population will form a single army, disciplined by the sense of danger: but an army does not reason, does not act as a leading and organising force - it fights.
The only and best thing that Paris can do in the interest of its own salvation and that of the whole of France is to proclaim and provoke the absolute independence and spontaneity of the provincial movements - and if Paris forgets and neglects to do so, for whatever reason, patriotism commands the provinces to rise up and organise themselves spontaneously and independently of Paris.
Is this uprising of the provinces still possible? Yes, if the workers of the great provincial cities, Lyon, Marseille, Saint-étienne, Rouen, and many others, have blood in their veins, energy in their hearts and strength in their arms, if they are living men and not socialist doctrinaires.
We cannot rely upon the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois see and understand nothing outside of the State and the regular methods of the State. The maximum of their ideal, their imagination and their heroism is the revolutionary aggrandisement of the power and action of the State in the name of public safety. But I have already demonstrated that the action of the State, at this time and in the present circumstances, far from saving France, can only kill it.
Do you perhaps believe in an alliance between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, in the name of national salvation? This is the programme that Gambetta outlines in his letter to Le Progrès of Lyon, and I think it is right to tell you my opinion of this famous letter.
I never thought much of Gambetta, but I confess that this letter showed him to be even more insignificant and dim than I had imagined. He took his role as a moderate, wise, reasonable republican quite seriously, and at a time when France is crumbing and perishing and can only be saved if all French people are truly driven by the devil, M. Gambetta finds the time and inspiration necessary to write a letter in which he begins by declaring that he intends “to uphold with dignity the role of governmental democratic opposition.” He speaks of the “programme that is both republican and conservative that he has set out since 1869,” that of “making policy derived from universal suffrage predominate,” (but then it is the plebiscite of Napoleon III) “to prove that in the current circumstances, the republic is now the very condition of salvation for France and of the European equilibrium; - that there is no longer security, peace, progress except in wisely practiced republican institutions” (as in Switzerland probably!); - “that France cannot be governed against the middle classes, and that it cannot be led without maintaining a generous alliance with the proletariat” (generous on whose part? Undoubtedly the bourgeoisie’s.) “Only the republican form allows for a harmonious reconciliation between the just aspirations of the workers and respect for the sacred rights of property. The just-milieu is an outdated policy. Caesarism is the most ruinous, the most bankrupt of solutions. Divine right is definitively abolished. Jacobinism is now a ridiculous and unhealthy concept. Only rational and positivist democracy (do you hear the charlatan!) can reconcile everything, organise everything, fertilise everything (let us see how?). 1789 laid down the principles (not all of them, far from it; the principles of bourgeois freedom, yes; but those of equality, those of proletarian freedom, no); 1792 made them triumph (and that is no doubt why France is so free!); 1848 gave them the sanction of universal suffrage (in June, no doubt[2]). It is up to the current generation to realise the republican form (as in Switzerland), and to reconcile, on the basis of justice (legal justice obviously) and the elective principles, the rights of the citizen and the functions of the State, in a progressive and free society. To achieve this goal two things are necessary: to eliminate the fear of some and calm the distrust of others; to bring the bourgeoisie to a love of democracy, and the people to trust their elder brothers.” (Why not trust the nobility, which is even older than the bourgeoisie?)
No, M. Gambetta’s hopes are illusions. By what right would the bourgeoisie ask the people to trust it? It is the bourgeoisie that unleashed war upon France through its cowardly subservience to power; and the people, who understand this, also understand that it is now up to them to take the affairs of the homeland into their own hands.
There will undoubtedly be, in the bourgeois class, a considerable number of young people who, driven by the despair of patriotism, will wholeheartedly enter into the popular movement that must save France; but it will not be possible for them to bring the entire bourgeoisie along with them, and to give it the audacity, the energy, the understanding of the situation that it lacks.
I think that at this time, in France, there are only two classes capable of this supreme movement required for the salvation of the homeland: the workers and the peasants.
Do not be surprised that I speak of the peasants. Peasants only sin through ignorance, not through lack of character. Not having too much, even worn-out by life, not having suffered the deleterious action of bourgeois civilisation, which only slightly touched them, they have retained all the energetic temperament, all the nature of the people. Property, love and the enjoyment not of pleasure but of gain have indeed made them considerably selfish, but have not diminished their instinctive hatred for those who enjoy the fruits of the earth without producing them through their own labour. Moreover, the peasant is fundamentally patriotic, nationalistic, because he worships the land, has a true passion for it, and will wage war to the death against any foreign invaders who come to drive him from his fields.
But to win over the peasant, great caution must be exercised. If it is true that the peasant hates the invader of the land, and that he also hates the fine Gentlemen who cheat him, he hates no less, unfortunately, the urban workers.
This is the great misfortune, this is the great obstacle to the revolution. The worker despises the peasant, the peasant returns his contempt with hatred. And yet, between these two great halves of the people, there is in reality no conflicting interest; there is only a vast and fatal misunderstanding, which must be eliminated at all costs.
The more enlightened, more civilised, and therefore somewhat more bourgeois and doctrinaire socialism of the cities misunderstands and despises the primitive, natural and much more savage socialism of the countryside. The peasant, for his part, considers the worker to be the servant or soldier of the bourgeois, and he hates him as such, to the point of becoming himself the servant and soldier of reaction.
Since this fatal antagonism is based solely upon a misunderstanding, one of the two parties must take the initiative in explanation and reconciliation. This initiative naturally belongs to the more enlightened party, namely the urban workers.
In my next letter, I will examine the grievances of the workers against the peasants, grievances which it is important for the workers to be fully aware of themselves if they want to work seriously towards a reconciliation.
6 September
The main grievances of the workers against the peasants can be reduced to three:
First, that the peasants are ignorant, superstitious and bigoted, and that allow themselves to be led by priests;
Second, that they are devoted to the emperor;
Third, that they are fanatical supporters of private property.
It is true that the French peasants are completely ignorant; but is that their fault? Has anyone ever thought of educating them? Is that a reason to despise and mistreat them? But by that logic, the bourgeois, who are undeniably more learned than the workers, would have the right to despise and mistreat the latter; and we know many bourgeois who say so, who base their right to domination on this superiority of education and who deduce from it the duty of subordination for the workers. What makes the workers great compared to the bourgeoise is not their education, which is limited, but their instinct for justice, which is undeniably strong. But do the peasants lack this instinct for justice? Look at them closely; in undoubtedly different forms, you will find it there in its entirety. In them, alongside their ignorance, you will find a profound common sense, an admirable subtlety, and that energy for work which constitutes the honour and salvation of the proletariat.
You say the peasants are superstitious and bigoted, and they let themselves be led by priests. - Their superstition is the product of their ignorance, artificially and systematically fostered by all bourgeois governments. And besides, they are not nearly as superstitious and bigoted as you claim: it is their wives who are. But are all the wives of the workers truly free from the superstitions and doctrines of the Roman Catholic religion? As for the influence and direction of the priests, they only superficially submit to them, to the extent that internal peace requires and as long as it does not contradict their interests. This superstition did not prevent them, after 1789, from buying Church lands confiscated by the State, despite the malediction the Church had placed on both the buyers and sellers. It follows, therefore, that to definitely eliminate the influence of priests in the countryside, the revolution only has to do one thing: to put the interests of the peasants in conflict with those of the Church.
I have heard with sorrow not only revolutionary Jacobins, but also socialists who have been indirectly influenced by this school, put forward this completely anti-revolutionary idea that the future republic will have to abolish by decree all public worship and also decree the violent expulsion of all priests. First, I am the absolute enemy of revolution by decree, which is a consequence and application of the idea of the revolutionary State, that is to say of reaction hiding behind the appearance of revolution. To this system of revolutionary decrees, I oppose that of revolutionary acts, the only effective, consistent and true one, outside of the intervention of any official and authoritarian violence.
Thus, in this example, if by misfortune they wanted to decree the abolition of religious services and the expulsion of priests, you can be sure that the least religious peasants would side with the church and the priests, if only out of a sprit of contradiction, and because a legitimate, natural feeling, the basis of freedom, rebels in every man against any imposed measure, even if it had freedom as its goal. We can therefore be certain that if the cities were foolish enough to decree the abolition of the church and the expulsion of the priests, the countryside, siding with the priests, would revolt against the cities and become a terrible instrument in the hands of reaction. But should we then allow the priests and their power to remain standing? Not at all. They must be fought in the most energetic way - not as ministers of the Roman Catholic religion, but because they have been the most effective supporters of this deplorable imperial regime which has brough the calamities of war upon France; because by persuading people to vote for the emperor, and by promising them that they would have peace and security on this condition, they have deceived the people, and they are therefore schemers and traitors.
The main reason why all revolutionary authorities throughout the world have always produced so little revolution is that they have always wanted to make it by themselves, by their own authority and power, which has invariably led to two results: first, an excessive narrowing of revolutionary action, because it is impossible for even the most intelligent, most energetic, most frank revolutionary authority to grasp many issues and interests at once, every dictatorship, whether individual or collective, insofar as it is formed of one or more official figures, is necessarily very limited, very blind, and incapable of penetrating the depths or embracing the full breadth of popular life - just as it is impossible for the most powerful vessel to measure the depth and breadth of the ocean; and then, to overcome resistance, because every act of authority and official power, legally imposed, inevitably awakens in the masses a feeling of revolt, reaction.
What then should revolutionary authorities do - and let us try to ensure that there are as few as possible - what should they do to extend and organise the revolution? They should not make it themselves by decrees, not impose it on the masses, but provoke it within the masses. They must not impose any organisation upon them, but by encouraging their autonomous organisation from the bottom up, work using individual influence over the most intelligent men in each locality, so that this organisation conforms as closely as possible to true principles. That is the whole secret to success.
Who can doubt that this work encounters immense difficulties? Do you think that a revolution is child’s play, and that it be accomplished without overcoming innumerable difficulties? Today’s socialist revolutionaries have little or nothing to imitate from the revolutionary methods of the Jacobins of 1793. Revolutionary routine would be their downfall. They have to work in the thick of things, they have to create everything.
I return to the peasants.
The supposed Bonapartist sympathies of the French peasants, which constitute another grievance of the workers against them, do not worry me at all. It is a superficial symptom of the socialist instinct, distorted by ignorance and exploited by malice, a skin condition that cannot resist the heroic remedies of revolutionary socialism; it is a negative expression of their hatred for the fine Gentlemen and for the bourgeois of the cities. The peasants will give neither their land, nor their money, nor their lives for Napoleon IIII, but they will gladly give him the lives and property of the others, because they hate the others, and because they have been led to see in Napoleon the emperor of the peasants, the enemy of the bourgeoisie. And note that in that deplorable affair where the peasants of a commune in the Dordogne slaughtered and burned a young and noble landowner, the dispute began with these words spoken by a peasant: “Ah! There you are, fine Gentleman; you yourself stay comfortably at home because you are rich, and you send the poor people to war. Well, we are going home, let them come and get us there.” In these words, you can see the vivid expression of the peasant’s hereditary resentment against the rich landowner, but by no means the fanatical desire to sacrifice himself and go and be killed for the emperor; on the contrary, [you see] the perfectly natural desire to escape military service.
Moreover, in the villages where love for the emperor has become a cult and a passionate habit - if such villages exist - there is no need to even speak of the emperor. The Bonapartist superstition must be destroyed in practice, by dismantling the administrative machine, by undermining the influence of those who fostered imperial fanaticism, but without saying a word against the emperor himself. This is the true way to succeed, the method I have already recommended to you regarding the priests.
The last and main argument of the city workers against the peasants is the latter’s greed, their crude selfishness and their passionate attachment to the individual ownership of land.
The workers who criticise them for all this should first ask themselves: who is not selfish? Who in today’s society is not greedy, in the sense that they cling furiously to the little wealth they have been able to accumulate, which guarantees, in the current economic anarchy and in this society that is merciless to those who are starving, their own existence and the existence of their loved ones? The peasants are not communists, it is true; they fear and hate those who advocate redistribution because they have something to preserve, at least in their imagination, and imagination is a great power that is generally underestimated in society. The workers, the vast majority of whom own nothing, are infinitely more inclined towards communism than the peasants; nothing could be more natural: the communism of the one is as natural as the individualism of the other - there is nothing to boast about, nor to despite in others - both being, with all their ideals and passions, the products of the different environments that produced them. And besides, are all the workers themselves communists?
It is therefore not a question of blaming the peasants, nor of denigrating them, it is a question of establishing a revolutionary course of action which turns the difficultly into an advantage, which would not only prevent the individualism of the peasants from pushing them into the party of reaction, but which, on the contrary, would use it to make the revolution triumph.
Apart from the method I propose, there is only one other: the terrorism of the cities against the countryside. Now, as I have said, and I cannot repeat it too often: those who use such a method will kill the revolution instead of making it triumph; we must absolutely renounce this old weapon of terror, of violence organised by the State, a weapon borrowed from the arsenal of Jacobinism; it would only succeed in pushing the ten million French peasants into the camp of reaction.
Fortunately - I say fortunately - France’s defeats do not allow it to think for a single moment about terrorism or the despotism of the revolutionary State. And without that, it is more than likely that many socialists, imbued with Jacobin prejudices, would have wanted to use force to impose their programme. They would have, for example, convened a Convention composed of deputies from the cities: this Convention would have wanted to impose collectivism upon the countryside by decree; the countryside would have risen up, and to subdue them, it would have been necessary to resort to an immense armed force. This army, necessarily subject to military discipline, would have had generals, probably ambitious ones; - and there you have it, the entire machine of the State reconstituting itself piece by piece. Once the machine was reconstituted, they would soon have had the operator, the dictator, the emperor. All of this would inevitably have happened to them, because that is the very logic of things.
Fortunately, today, events themselves will force the workers to open their eyes and renounce this fatal system. They would have to be mad to want to engage in terrorism in the countryside under current circumstances. If the countryside were to rise up against the cities now, the cities, and France with them, would be lost. The workers sense this, and this is partly what explains to me the apathy, the incredible inertia of the working-class populations in most of France’s major cities.
Indeed, the workers are at this moment completely bewildered and stunned by the novelty of the situation. Until now, they have known little more than their sufferings through personal experience; everything else, their ideals, their hopes, their political and social imaginings, their practical plans and projects, dreamt rather than contemplated for the near future - all this they took much more from books, from current and constantly discussed theories, than from reflection based upon life experience. They have continually ignored their daily lives and experiences, and are not accustomed to drawing inspiration or thought from them. Their thinking has been nourished by a certain theory accepted by tradition, without criticism, but with complete confidence, and this theory is nothing other than the political systems of the Jacobins, modified more of less for the use of socialists. Now, this theory of revolution has gone bankrupt, its main foundation, the State, the power of the State, having crumbled. In the current circumstances, the application of the terrorist method, so beloved by the Jacobins, has obviously become impossible. And the workers of France, who know no other, are bewildered. They tell themselves, quite rightly, that it is impossible to carry out official, regular and legal terrorism, or to use coercive means against the peasants, that it is impossible to establish a revolutionary State, a central Committee of Public Safety for all of France, at a time when the foreign invasion is not only at the border as in 1792, but in the heart of France, a stone’s throw from Paris. They see the whole official organisation crumbing, they despair with good reason of being able to create another, and do not understand, these revolutionaries, any salvation outside of public order, do not understand, these men of the people, the power and life that is in what the official people of all colours, from the white [la fleur de lys] to the darkest red, call anarchy; they fold their arms and say to themselves: We are doomed, France is lost.
No, my friends, it is not lost, if you do not wish to doom yourselves, if you are men, if you wish to save it. For that, you know what you must do: the administration, the government, the entire machine of the State is crumbling on all sides; do not despair of this, and do not try to rebuild these ruins. Freed from all this official architecture, appeal to popular life, to freedom, and you will save the people.
I return once again to the peasants. I have never believed that, even in the most favourable circumstances, the workers could every have the power to impose collectivism [collectivité] upon them; and I have never desired it, because I abhor any imposed system, because I sincerely and passionately love freedom. This false idea and this freedom-killing hope constitute the fundamental aberration of authoritarian communism, which, because it needs regularly organised violence, needs the State, and which, because it needs the State, necessarily leads to the reconstitution of the principle of authority and a privileged class of State functionaries. Collectivism can only be imposed upon slaves - and then collectivism becomes the very negation of humanity. Amongst a free people, collectivism can only arise naturally; not through imposition from above, but through spontaneous movement from below, freely and necessarily at the same time, when the conditions of privileged individualism, the political and legal institutions of the State, have themselves disappeared.
7 September
Having discussed the grievances of the workers against the peasants, we must now consider the grievances of the peasants, the source of their hatred for the towns.
I will list them as follows:
1. The peasants feel despised by the cities, and the contempt shown to them is quickly sensed, even by children, and is not forgiven.
2. The peasants think - and not without good reason, not without a lot of evidence and historical experience to support this belief - that the cities want to dominate them, govern them, often exploit them, and always impose upon them a political order they do not care for.
3. The peasants also consider the urban workers as redistributors, and fear that the socialists will come and confiscate their land which they love above all else.
What, then, must the workers do to overcome this distrust and animosity of the peasants towards them? First, they must cease showing them contempt, cease despising them. This is necessary for the salvation of the revolution and themselves, for the hatred of the peasants constitutes an immense danger. If it were not for this distrust and hatred, the revolution would have happened long ago, because the animosity that unfortunately exists in the countryside against the cities constitutes, in every country, the basis and main force of reaction. Therefore, in the interest of the revolution that must emancipate them, the workers must stop showing this contempt toward the peasants as soon as possible. They also owe it out of justice, for truly they have no reason to despise them or to hate them. Peasants are not lazy; they are hard workers just like themselves, only they work under different conditions. That is all. In the presence of the bourgeois exploiter, the worker must feel like the brother of the peasant.
The peasants will march with the workers of the city for the salvation of the homeland as soon as they are convinced that the city workers do not intend to impose their will on them, nor any political and social order invented by the cities for the greater happiness of the countryside; as soon as they have been given the assurance that the workers have no intention whatsoever of taking their land.
Well, it is absolutely necessary today that the workers truly renounce this claim and this intention, and that they renounce it in such a way that the peasants know it and remain completely convinced of it. The workers must renounce it, for even if such claims were feasible, they would be supremely unjust and reactionary; and now that their realisation has become utterly impossible, they would only constitute a criminal folly.
By what right would the workers impose any form of government or economic organisation on the peasants? By the right of revolution, they say. But a revolution ceases to be a revolution when it acts despotically, and when, instead of bringing freedom to the masses, it provokes reaction within them. The method and the condition, if not the main goal of the revolution, is the annihilation of the principle of authority in all its possible manifestations, it is the complete abolition of the political and juridical State, because the State, younger brother of the Church, as Proudhon has very well demonstrated, is the historical consecration of all despotisms, of all privileges, the political rationale for all economic and social enslavements, the very essence and centre of all reaction. When, in the name of the revolution, one wants to create a State, even if only a provisional State, one is therefore creating reaction and working for despotism, not for freedom; for the institution of privilege against equality.
It is as clear as day. But the socialist workers of France, raised in the political traditions of the Jacobins, have never wanted to understand it. Now they will be forced to understand it, fortunately for the revolution and for themselves. Where did this pretension come from, as ridiculous as it is arrogant, as unjust as it is disastrous, to impose their political and social ideal on ten million peasants who do not want it? This is evidently yet another bourgeois legacy, a political inheritance of bourgeois revolutionary thought. What is the foundation, the explanation, the theory of this pretension? It is the supposed or real superiority of intelligence, education, in short of working-class civilisation, over the civilisation of the countryside. But do you realise that such a principle can legitimise all conquests and consecrate all oppressions? The bourgeoise have never had any other way to prove their mission and their right to govern, or, which means the same thing, to exploit the working world. From nation to nation, as well as from one class to another, this fatal principle, which is none other than that of authority, explains and establishes a right to all invasions and all conquests. Have not the Germans always used this to excuse all their attacks against the freedom and independence of Slavic peoples and to legitimise their violent and forced Germanisation? It is, they say, the conquest of civilisation over barbarism.[3] Beware, the Germans are also beginning to realise that Germanic, Protestant civilisation is far superior to the Catholic civilisation of Latin peoples in general, and to French civilisation in particular. Beware lest they soon imagine that they have the mission to civilise you and make you happy, just as you imagine that you have the mission to civilise and emancipate your compatriots, your brothers, the peasants of France. For me, both claims are equally odious, and I declare to you that both in international relations and in relations between classes, I will always side with those whom people seek to civilise by this method. I will rebel with them against all these arrogant civilisers, whether they call themselves workers or Germans and, in rebelling against them, I will serve revolution against reaction.
But if that is the case, some will ask, should we abandon the ignorant and superstitious peasants to all the influences and intrigues of reaction? Not at all. Reaction must be crushed in the countryside as well as in the towns; but to do so, we must confront it in practice, and not limit ourselves to waging war against it with decrees. As I have already said, nothing can be eradicated with decrees. On the contrary, decrees and all acts of authority only strength what they seek to destroy.
Instead of trying to take the land the peasants possess today, let them follow their natural instincts, and do you know what will happen them? The peasant will want all the land for himself; he will see the grand lord and rich bourgeois, whose vast estates diminish his field, as an outsider and a usurper. The Revolution of 1789 gave the peasants the Church’s lands; he will want to take advantage of another revolution to gain the bourgeoisie’s lands.
But if that were to happen, if the peasants were to take possession of all the land that does not yet belong to them, would this not have reinforced the principle of private property in an unfortunate way, and would the peasants not find themselves more hostile than ever to the socialist workers in the cities?
Not at all, because the legal and political recognition of the State, the guarantee of property, will be lacking for the peasant. Property will no longer be a right; it will be reduced to the status of a mere fact.
So it will be civil war, you will say. Private property no longer being guaranteed by any higher authority, and being defended only by the energy of the owner alone, everyone will want to seize the property of others, the strongest will plunder the weakest.
It is certain that, at first, things will not proceed in a completely peaceful manner: there will be struggles, public order will be disturbed, and the initial consequences of such a situation could constitute what is commonly called a civil war. But would you rather hand France over to the Prussians? Do you think the Prussians will respect public order and not kill or plunder anyone? Do you prefer slavery, shame and utter misery, the inevitable fruits of a Prussian victory that your hesitations and scruples will have made certain, to a momentary upheaval that must save the country?
No, let us not have childish fears about the drawbacks of a peasant uprising. Do you not think that, despite the few excesses that might occur here and there, the peasants, no longer restrained by the authority of the State, will devour one another? If they try to do so at the beginning, they will soon convince themselves of the material impossibility of continuing on this path, and then they will try to reach an agreement, compromise and organise themselves. The need to feed themselves and their children, and consequently the need to continue the work of the countryside, the need to secure their homes, their families and their own lives against unforeseen attacks, all this will undoubtedly soon force them to enter the path of mutual arrangements.
And do not believe that in these arrangements, brought about outside of any official tutelage, by mere force of circumstances, the strongest and richest yield a predominant influence. The wealth of the rich will no longer be guaranteed by legal institutions, and therefore will cease to be a power. Wealthy peasants are powerful today only because they are protected and courted by State functionaries and the State itself. If this support is lacking, their power will disappear at the same time. As for the shrewder, the strongest, they will be nullified by the collective power of the masses, of the great number of small and very small peasants, as well as the rural proletariat, a mass today enslaved, reduced to mute suffering, but which the revolutionary movement will arm with an irresistible power.
I do not claim, note it well, that the countryside reorganised in this way, from the bottom up, will immediately create an ideal organisation, conforming in all respects to the one we dream of. What I am convinced of is that it will be a living organisation, a thousand times superior to the one that now exists, and which, moreover, being on the one hand open to active propaganda of the cities, and on the other never being able to be fixed and, so to speak, petrified by the protection of the State and the law, will progress freely and will be able to develop and improve itself in an indefinite, but always living and free way, never decreed or legalised, until finally it reaches a point as reasonable as can be hoped for in our time.
Since life and spontaneous action, suspended for centuries by the absorbing action of the State, will be returned to the communes, it is natural that each commune will take as the starting point for its new development, not the intellectual and moral state in which the official fiction supposes it, but the actual state of civilisation; and since the degree of actual civilisation varies greatly between the communes of France, as well as between those of Europe in general, a great difference in development will necessarily result; but mutual understanding, harmony and an equilibrium established by common agreement will replace the artificial unity of States. There will be new life and a new world.
8 September.
I foresee you will object to everything I have written to you about the peasants, their organisation, and their reconciliation with the workers.
You will tell me: “But will not this revolutionary agitation, this internal struggle that must necessarily arise from the destruction of political and legal institutions, paralyse nation defence? Instead of repelling the Prussians, will not France on the contrary be delivered to the invasion?”
Not at all. History proves that nations never appeared so powerful externally as when they felt deeply agitated and troubled internally, and conversely they were never so weak as when they appeared united under some authority and within some kind of order. Ultimately, nothing could be more natural: struggle is life, and life is strength. To convince yourself of this, compare a few periods in your own history. Contrast France emerging from the Fronde[4], in the youth of Louis XIV, with France in his old age, the monarchy firmly established, unified, pacified by the great king; the former resplendent with victories, the latter marching from defeat to defeat toward ruin. Likewise compare France of 1792 with the France of today. If France was ever torn apart by civil war, it was certainly in 1792 and 1793; the movement, the struggle, the life-or-death struggle, was taking place throughout the republic; and yet France victoriously repelled the invasion of almost all of Europe allied against it. In 1870, the united and pacified France of the empire was defeated by the armies of Germany and appears so demoralised that you must fear for its existence.
You could without doubt cite the example of present-day Prussia and Germany, which are not torn apart by any civil war, which on the contrary show themselves to be singularly resigned and submissive to the despotism of their sovereign, and which nevertheless today develop a formidable power. But this exceptional fact can be explained by two particular reasons, neither of which can be applied to present-day France. The first is the unitary passion that for fifty-five years has only grown at the expense of all other passions and ideas in the unfortunate Germanic nation. The second is the sophisticated perfection of its administrative system.
As for the unitary passion, this inhuman and freedom-destroying ambition to become a great nation, the foremost nation in the world - France also experienced it in its time. This passion, like those furious fevers that momentarily give the sick person superhuman strength, only to then completely exhaust them afterward and plunge them into utter prostration - this passion, after having grown in France for a very short period of time, led to a catastrophe from which it has hardly recovered, even today, fifty-five years after the defeat at Waterloo, that its present misfortunates are nothing, in my opinion, but a relapse, a second stroke of apoplexy which this time will certainly cause the patient, that is to say the military, political and juridical State, to succumb.
Well, Germany is now gripped by precisely the same fever, the same passion for national greatness, which France experienced and underwent in all its phases at the beginning of this century and which, for that very reason, has now become incapable of stirring and electrifying it. The Germans, who today consider themselves the foremost people in the world, are at least half a century behind France; what am I saying? you have to go back much further to find the equivalent of the phase they are going through today. The Berlin Official Gazette foretells that in the near future, as a reward for their heroic devotion, they will have “the establishment of a great Teutonic empire, founded upon the fear of God and true morality.” Translate this into good Catholic language, and you have the empire dreamt of by Louis XIV. Their conquests, of which they are now so proud, would set them back two centuries! Therefore, all that there is of honest and truly liberal intelligence in Germany - without even mentioning the social-democrats - is beginning to worry about the consequences of national victories. A few more weeks of sacrifices like those Germany has had to make thus far, half by force, half by exaltation, and the fever will begin to subside; the German people will count their losses in men and money, compare them to the gains made, and then King Wilhelm and Bismarck will have good reason to be on their guard. And that is why they feel the absolute necessity of returning victorious and with hands full.
The other reason for the extraordinary power currently developed by the Germans is the excellence of their administrative machine, excellence not from the point of view of the freedom and well-being of the people, but from the point of view of the exclusive wealth and power of the State. The administrative machine, however perfect it may be, is never the life of the people, on the contrary, it is its absolute and direct negation. Therefore the force it produces is never a natural, organic, popular force, instead it is an entirely mechanical and artificial force. Once broken, it does not renew itself, and its reconstruction becomes exceedingly difficult. That is why one must be careful not force the results. Yet, that is precisely what Bismarck and his king have done; they have already forced the machine. Germany has mobilised one and a half million soldiers, and God knows the hundreds of millions it has spent. Let Paris resist, let all of France rise up behind it, and the German machine will collapse.
15 September 1870.
After telling you what I think about the possible union of workers and peasants to save France, I want to return once against to the central point of my thesis, namely the absolute impotence of any republican or other government, and especially of the Gambetta and Co. government, to prevent the catastrophe that is being prepared and which can only be averted by the direct and all-powerful action of the people themselves.
If I bring back into the course of my argument a few points I have already presented, it is because there are things that cannot be repeated too often: for the salvation of the French people depends on understanding these things.
Let us therefore see what the current government might try to do to organise national defence.
The first difficulty that comes to mind is this. This organisation, even in the most favourable circumstances, and even more so in the present crisis, can only succeed on one condition: that the organising power remains in immediate, regular, incessant contact with the country it proposes to organise. But there is no doubt that within days, when Paris is occupied by the German armies, the government’s communications with the rest of the country will be completely cut off. Under those circumstances, no organisation is possible. Moreover, at that crucial moment, the government of Paris will be absorbed by the defence of Paris itself and by the internal difficulties it will encounter that, even if it were composed of the most intelligent and energetic men, it would be impossible for it to think of anything else.
It is true that the government could relocate outside of Paris, to some large provincial city, Lyon, for example. But then it would no longer exercise any authority over France, because in the eyes of the people, especially in the eyes of the peasants, since it is composed not of elected representatives of all of France, but of the elected representatives of Paris, that is to say, of men some unknown, others hated by the countryside - this government would have no legitimate right to rule over France. If it remained in Paris, supported by the workers of Paris, it would still impose itself upon France, at least on the cities, and perhaps even upon the countryside, despite the pronounced hostility of the peasants towards the men who comprise it. For, it must be admitted, Paris exerts such great historical prestige on all French imaginations that, whether they like it or not, they will always end up obeying it.
But once the government leaves Paris, this powerful reason will no longer exist. Let us even suppose that the large provincial city where it has moved its residence acclaims it, and ratifies by this acclamation the elected representative of the people of Paris: this support of a provincial city will not sway the rest of France, and the countryside will not feel any more bound to obey it.
And what means, what instrument will it use, to obtain obedience? The administrative machine? Assuming that it can still function, is it not entirely Bonapartist, and will it not precisely serve, with the support of the priests, to incite the countryside against the republican government? It will therefore be necessary to contain the rebellious countryside, and, for that, part of the regular troops who were supposed to face the Prussians will have to be used. And since the senior officers are almost all Bonapartists, the government, which will need devoted and loyal men, will be forced to dismiss them and look for others: the army will have to be completely reorganised to make it an instrument capable of defending the republic against reactionary insurrection. Meanwhile, the Prussians will take Paris, and the countryside will destroy the republic: and that is the only thing that an official, governmental, attempt at defence, by regular, administrative means can lead to.
Woe to France if it were to expect from the current government the renewal of the marvels of 1793. These marvels were not produced solely by the power of the State, of the government, but also and above all by the revolutionary enthusiasm of the entire French people, who, taking their affairs into their own hands with the energy of despair, organised a centre of resistance and action in every city, in every commune. - And then, if the State born from the movement of 1789, still so young, so imbued with popular life and passions, was able to show itself capable of saving the homeland, it must be said that since then it has aged considerably and become thoroughly corrupt. Overhauled and amended, and worn down to its very foundations by Napoleon I; restored as best as possible by the Bourbons, corrupted and weakened by the July Monarchy, it reached under the Second Empire the ultimate degree of corruption and impotence; and now, the only thing that can be expected of it is its complete disappearance along with all the police, administrative, juridical and financial institutions that supported it - to make way for natural society, for the people who reclaim their natural rights and who rise up.
But, you will say, the provisional government has summoned all the electors for the first half of October, in order to appoint a Constituent Assembly; this will be able to radically reform the administrative system, as did that of 1789, and thus give new life to the political State, which is falling into ruins.
This objection is not serious. Let us suppose that, in accordance with the decision of the provisional government - which seems to me to be a defiant gesture thrown at the Prussians rather than a considered resolution - let us suppose, I say, that the elections take place regularly, and that an Assembly emerges whose majority will be willing to support all the intentions of the republican government. I maintain that this Assembly will not be able to carry out real and profound reforms at this time. That would be tantamount to attempting a flanking manoeuvre in the face of a powerful enemy, like the manoeuvre Bazaine attempted against the Prussians, which ended so badly for him. Is it really at the very moment when the government most needs the energetic and regular services of the administrative machine that it should try to renew and transform it? This would require paralysing it completely for a few weeks; and what would the government do during that time, deprived of the machinery it needs to govern the country?
This same impossibility will prevent the government from making any radical changes to the personnel of the imperial administration itself. It would have to create a legion of new men. All it can do, all it has done so far, is to replace the prefects and sub-prefects with others who are in general not much better.
These few personnel changes will inevitably further demoralise the current administration. Endless infighting and a muted internal war will ensue, rendering it a hundred times more incapable of action that it is today; so that the republican government will have at its disposal an administrative machine that will not even be as good as the one that, however badly, carried out the orders of the imperial ministry.
To remedy this problem, the provisional government will undoubtedly send into the departments pro-consuls, extraordinary commissioners. This would then be the height of disorganisation.
Indeed, it is not enough to be endowed with extraordinary powers, to take extraordinary measures of public safety, to have the power to create new forces, to be able to provoke in a corrupt administration, and in populations systematically unaccustomed to all initiative, a salutary impetus, an energy, an activity. For this, you must still possess what the bourgeoisie of 1792 and 1793 had to such a high degree, and what the current bourgeoisie, even the republicans, absolutely lacks - you must possess revolutionary intelligence, will, audacity. And how can you imagine that the commissioners of the provisional government, the subordinates of Gambetta and Co., will possess these qualities, since their superiors, the members of the government, the leaders of the republican party, have not found them in their own hearts?
Apart from these personal qualities which gave the men of 1793 a truly heroic character, if the extraordinary commissioners with the Jacobins of the National Convention were so successful, it was because this Convention was genuinely revolutionary, and, relying in Paris on the popular masses, on the vile multitude, to the exclusion of the liberal bourgeoisie, it had ordered all its proconsuls to likewise rely everywhere and always on that same popular rabble [canaille populaire]. The commissioners sent by Ledru-Rollin in 1848, and those that Gambetta may send today, have made and will necessarily make a complete fiasco, for the opposite reason, and the latter even more than the former, because this opposite reason will act even more powerfully on them than on their predecessors of 1848. This reason is that both have been and will be, to a more or less noticeable degree, radical bourgeois, delegates of bourgeois republicanism, and as such enemies of socialism, enemies of a truly popular revolution.
This antagonism between bourgeois revolution and popular revolution did not exist in 1793, neither in the consciousness of the people nor even in that of the bourgeoisie. The truth that the freedom of any privileged class - and consequently that of the bourgeoisie - was essentially founded upon the economic enslavement of the proletariat had not yet been disentangled from historical experience. As a fact, as a real effect, this truth had always existed; but it had been so confused with other facts and masked by so many different historical interests and tendencies, especially religious and national ones, that it had not yet emerged in its great simplicity and in its present clarity, neither for the bourgeoisie, the employer of labour, nor for the proletariat, the wage-earner, that is to say exploited by it. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat were indeed henceforth natural enemies but without knowing it; as a result of this ignorance, each attributed its fears or its woes to imaginary causes, not to their real antagonism; and believing themselves united in interests, they marched together against the monarchy, the nobility and the priests.
This is what constituted the great strength of the revolutionary bourgeoisie of 1793. Not only did they not fear the unleashing of popular passions, but they provoked it with all their might, as the only means of salvation for the homeland and for themselves against internal and external reaction. When an extraordinary commissioner, delegated by the Convention, arrived in a province, he never addressed himself to the local bigwigs, nor to the well-gloved revolutionaries; he addressed himself directly to the sans-culottes, the popular rabble, and it was upon them that he relied to execute the decrees of the Convention against the big-wigs and the respectable revolutionaries. What they were doing therefore was not strictly speaking centralisation or administration, but provocation. They did not come to a place to dictatorially impose the will of the National Convention. They did this only on very rare occasions, and where they came to an area that was decidedly and unanimously hostile and reactionary. Then they arrived accompanied by troops who added the argument of the bayonet to their civic eloquence. But usually they came alone, without a single solider to support them, seeking their strength only from the masses, whose instincts were always in line with the thoughts of the Convention. Far from restricting the freedom of popular movements, for fear of anarchy, they provoked them in every way. The first thing they usually did was form a popular club where none already existed. Revolutionaries through and through, they quickly recognised the true revolutionaries amongst the masses and allied themselves with them to incite revolution and anarchy, and to organise this popular anarchy in a revolutionary manner. This revolutionary organisation was the only administration and the only executive force used by the proconsuls of 1793.
Such was the true secret of the power of these giants, whom the pygmy Jacobins of our day admire, but whom they are powerless to imitate.
The commissioners of 1848 were men of a completely different calibre, from a completely different background. They and their leaders, the members of the provisional government, belonged to the bourgeoisie, which had become doctrinaire and was now fatally separated from the people. The heroes of the great revolution were to them what the tragedies of Corneille and Recine had been in literature - classic examples. They wanted to copy them, but life, passion, the sacred fire were gone. Where action was needed, they could only produce empty phrases, pretences. When they found themselves amongst the proletariat, they felt ill at ease, like otherwise honest people who are forced to deceived. They racked their brains to find a living word, a fruitful thought: they found nothing.
In all the revolutionary phantasmagoria of 1848, there were only two truly serious men, though quite unlike each other: Proudhon and Blanqui. All the rest were nothing but bad actors, who performed the Revolution as the medieval brotherhoods performed the Passion - until the moment when Louis Bonaparte came to draw the curtain.
The instructions that the commissioners of 1848 received from Ledru-Rollin were as incoherent and vague as the thoughts of this self-same revolutionary. They were all the grand words of 1793, without any of the grand things, the grand goals, or especially the energetic resolution of that era. Ledru-Rollin, like the wealthy bourgeois and rhetorician that he is, has always been the natural and instinctive enemy of socialism. Today, after great effort, he has finally managed to understand cooperative societies; but he does not feel he has the strength to go any further.
Louis Blanc, that Robespierre in miniature, this worshipper of the intelligent and virtuous citizen, this epitome of the State communist, of the doctrinaire and authoritarian socialist. In his youth, he wrote a very small pamphlet on “The Organisation of Labour”, and even today, in the face of the immense work and the prodigious development of the International, he still remains at that point. Not a murmur of his words, not a spark of his brain, has given life to anyone. His intelligence is sterile, just as his entire personally is barren. Even today, in a letter recently addressed to the Daily News, in the face of the horrible and fratricidal slaughter being carried out by the two most civilised nations in the world, he could find nothing else in his head and in his heart but this advice, which he addresses to the French republicans, “to propose to the Germans, in the name of the brotherhood of peoples, a peace equally honourable for both nations.”
Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc were, as is well known, the two great revolutionaries of 1848, before the June Days: one a bourgeois lawyer, a pompous rhetorician with Dantonesque airs and pretensions; the other, a Robespierre-Babeuf reduced to the smallest proportions. Neither of them knew how to think, will, or above all, dare. Moreover, the Bishop Lamourette of that time, Lamartine, had imprinted upon all the actions and all the men of the era, except Proudhon and Blanqui, his false note and his false character of conciliation - that conciliation which in reality meant sacrifice of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie, and which led to the June Days.
The extraordinary commissioners therefore left for the provinces, carrying in their pockets the instructions of these great men - moreover the recommendations of a very real reactionary character which were made to them by the moderate republicans of the National, the Marrasts, the Bastides, the Jules Favres, etc.
Is it any wonder that these unfortunate commissioners accomplished nothing in the departments except to stir up widespread discontent with the dictatorial tone and manner they chose to adopt? They were ridiculed and wielded no influence whatsoever. Instead of turning to the people, and only to the people, like their predecessors in 1793, they focused solely on trying to convert the privileged classes to the republic. Instead of organising popular power everywhere by unleashing revolutionary passions, they preached to the proletariat moderation, calm, patience, and a blind faith in the generous designs of the provisional government. The reactionary provincial circles, initially intimidated by this revolution which had so unexpectedly fallen upon their heads and by the arrival of these commissioners from Paris, regained courage when they saw that these Gentlemen only knew how to make phrases and were themselves afraid of the people; and the result of the mission of the commissioners of 1848 was the sad Constituent Assembly that you know.
After June, things were different. The bourgeois who were genuinely socialist, those who had joined the socialist camp under the influence of the great catastrophe that had killed in a single blow all the revolutionary actors of February, became serious men and made serious efforts to revolutionaries France. They even succeeded to a large extent. But it was too late; the reaction, for its part, had reorganised itself with a formidable power, and, thanks to the terrible means provided by the centralisation of the State, it ended up triumphing completely, even more than it had intended, in the December days.
Well, the commissioners that Gambetta will be able to send to the departments will be even more wretched than the commissioners of 1848. Enemies of the socialist workers, as well as the Bonapartist administration and peasants, on whom will they rely? Their instructions will obviously commend them to suppress the socialist revolutionary movement in the cities, and the Bonapartist reactionary movement in the countryside - but with whose help? From a disorganised administration, itself remaining half or three-quarters Bonapartist - and a few hundred bloodless republicans and Orleanists: republicans as insignificant, as uncertain and as disorientated as themselves, remaining outside of the popular mass and exercising no influence on anyone; and Orleanists, good only, like all rich people, at exploiting and turning a movement to the benefit of the reaction, but themselves incapable of a resolute and energetic action. And note that the Orleanists will be by far the stronger of the two, for, besides the great financial resources at their disposal, they also have the advantage of knowing what they want, while the republicans, in addition to their extreme poverty, have the misfortunate of not knowing where they are going and remaining detached from all real interests, both privileged and popular. It will follow from this that the commissioners will either do nothing, or, if they do something, will do so only with the support of the Orleanists, and will thus have worked in reality only for the restoration of the Orleans.
Now, what is my final conclusion?
It is sufficiently clear from everything I have said, and indeed, I began by giving it to you in my first letter. I say that in the danger France faces, a danger greater than any it has faced for centuries, there is only one means of salvation: a general and revolutionary uprising of the people.
If the people rise, I have no doubt of victory. I only fear one thing: that the danger will not seem pressing enough, immense enough, threatening enough to give them the desperate courage they need. At this very moment, there is no shortage of Frenchmen who viewed the capture of Paris, the ruin and subjugation of France by the Prussians, as utterly impossible, impossible to the point of being ridiculous. And they calmly let the enemy advance, trusting in France’s destiny, and imagining that merely saying “It is impossible” is enough to prevent it from happening.
It is absolutely necessary to awake from this dream, Frenchmen, if any of you still allow yourselves to be lulled by these dire illusions. No, I tell you: This terrible misfortunate, the very thought of which you refuse to admit, is not impossible. On the contrary, it is so certain that if you do not rise en masse today to exterminate the German soldiers who have invaded French soil, tomorrow it will be a reality. Several centuries of national predominance have so accustomed you to considering yourselves the premier and most powerful people in the world that you have not yet realised the gravity of your present situation. Here is this situation:
France as a State is lost. It can no longer save itself through regular and administrative means. It is now up to natural France, to the France of the people to enter the stage of history, to save its freedom and that of all Europe, by a vast, spontaneous, entirely popular uprising, outwith of any official organisation, of any governmental centralisation. And France, by sweeping the armies of the King of Prussia from its territory, will at the same time have liberated all the peoples of Europe and accomplished the social emancipation of the proletariat.
[1] So much for Engels' assertion that “federalism... consisted precisely in the fact that each town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not co-operation with other towns but separation from them, this precluding any possibility of a combined attack” for Bakunin “[a]s early as September 1870 (in his Lettres à un français)... had declared that the only way to drive the Prussians out of France by a revolutionary struggle was to do away with all forms of centralised leadership and leave each town, each village, each parish to wage war on its own”. (“The Bakuninists at work”, Marx-Engels Collected Works 23: 592). (Translator)
[2] The June days (les journées de Juin) of the 1848 Revolution was an uprising by French workers which took place between 22 and 26 June 1848 in response to plans to close the National Workshops, created by the Second Republic to provide work for the unemployed. The National Guard crushed the revolt, with over 1,500 either killed or injured and 4,000 deported to French Algeria. It marked the end of the hopes of a “democratic and social republic” (république démocratique et sociale). (Translator)
[3] It should be noted that in reply to Bakunin’s Pan-Slavism, Engels asserted that the Slavs have been “forced to attain the first stage of civilisation only by means of a foreign yoke, are not viable and will never be able to achieve any kind of independence” and that the conquered should give “thanks for the Germans for having given themselves the trouble of civilising the stubborn Czechs and Slovenes, and introducing among them trade, industry, a tolerable degree of agriculture, and culture!” (“Democratic Pan-Slavism”, Marx-Engels Collected Works 8: 367, 369). (Translator)
[4] The Fronde was a series of civil wars in the Kingdom of France between 1648 and 1653 in which the young King Louis XIV confronted the combined opposition of the princes, the nobility, the noble regional court assemblies (parlements), as well as much of the French population, and managed to subdue them all. (Translator)