Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [49]
In contrast, Grave came from a working-class family. Once a shoemaker and then, like Proudhon, a typesetter and printer, he had, in the eighties, practiced making fulminate of mercury to blow up the Prefecture of Police or the Palais Bourbon, seat of the French parliament. His book, The Dying Society and Anarchism, so persuasively argued the overthrow of the State and offered so many insidious suggestions that it cost him two years in prison. While there he wrote another book, Society After the Revolution, which he promptly printed himself and published upon his release. Being utopian, it was not considered dangerously subversive by the authorities. In a fifth-floor garret in a working-class street, the Rue Mouffetard, he now edited, largely wrote, and printed on a hand press La Révolte, at the same time working on his great history, Le Mouvement libertaire sous la troisième république. In a room furnished with a table and two chairs, he lived and worked, dressed invariably in a French workman’s long black blouse, surrounded by pamphlets and newspapers, “simple, silent, indefatigable,” and so absorbed in his thought and task that “he seemed like a hermit from the Middle Ages who forgot to die eight hundred years ago.”
The followers who were the body of the movement never formed a party but associated only in small, localized clubs and groups. A few comrades would pass out notices informing friends that, for instance, “the Anarchists of Marseilles are establishing a group to be called The Avengers and Famished which will meet every Sunday at —–. Comrades are invited to come and bring reliable friends to hear and take part in the discussions.” Such groups existed not only in Paris but in most of the large cities and many small towns. Among them were the “Indomitables” of Armentières, the “Forced Labour” of Lille, the “Ever-Ready” of Blois, “Land and Independence” of Nantes, “Dynamite” of Lyons, the “Anti-Patriots” of Charleville. With similar groups from other countries, they occasionally held Congresses, such as the one in Chicago during the World’s Fair in 1893, but they neither organized nor federated.
Enrico Malatesta, the firebrand of Anarchism, was an Italian, always carrying the flame to whatever corner of the world there was an Anarchist group. Ten years younger than Kropotkin, he looked like a romantic bandit who might have befriended the Count of Monte Cristo. In fact, he came from a well-off bourgeois family and as a young medical student had been expelled from the University of Naples for participating in a student riot at the time of the Paris Commune. Thereafter he learned the electrician’s trade in order to make a living, joined the Italian section of the International, sided with Bakunin against Marx, led an abortive peasant revolt in Apulia, went to prison and then into exile. He tried to direct the Belgian general strike of 1891 away from its petty aim of manhood suffrage because the vote, in his Anarchist credo, was merely another booby trap of the bourgeois state. He was expelled for similar revolutionary efforts from one country after another and condemned to five years on the prison island of Lampedusa, from which he escaped in a rowboat during a storm. When confined to Italy he escaped in a packing case marked “sewing machines.” It was loaded on a boat for Argentina, where he hoped to prospect for gold in Patagonia to provide funds for the cause, and where, in fact, he found it, only to have his claim confiscated by the Argentine government.
Not content merely with talking about the coming disappearance of the State, Malatesta was constantly embroiled in practical attempts designed to help it disappear. This caused him to be suspected