Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [50]
Their optimism was the outstanding characteristic of these leaders. They were certain that Anarchism because of its lightness must triumph and the capitalist system because of its rottenness must fall, and they sensed a mysterious deadline in the approaching end of the century. “All are awaiting the birth of a new order of things,” wrote Reclus. “The century which has witnessed so many grand discoveries in the world of science cannot pass away without giving us still greater conquests. After so much hatred we yearn to love each other and for this reason we are the enemies of private property and the despisers of law.”
Kropotkin’s benevolent eyes peering at the world around him found encouraging signs everywhere. The increasing number of free museums, free libraries and free parks, for instance, seemed to him to be progress toward the Anarchist day when all private property would eventually become common property. Were not turnpikes and toll bridges becoming free? Were not municipalities providing free water and free street lights? Proof of the Anarchists’ contention that the society of the future would no longer be held together by government but by the “free association of men into groups” was, he thought, appearing in such developments as the International Red Cross, the trade unions and even the cartels of shipowners and railroads (elsewhere being denounced as “Trusts” by a rather different type of reformer in America).
As formulated by men like Kropotkin, Malatesta, Jean Grave and Reclus, Anarchism at the end of the century may have attained, in the words of one of its recorders, “a shining moral grandeur,” but only at the cost of a noticeable removal from reality. These men had all suffered prison more than once for their beliefs. Kropotkin himself had lost his teeth as a result of prison scurvy. They were not men of the ivory tower except in so far as their heads were in ivory towers. They were able to draw blueprints of a state of universal harmony only by ignoring the evidence of human behavior and the testimony of history. Their insistence on revolution stemmed directly from their faith in humanity, which, they believed, needed only a shining example and a sharp blow to start it on its way to the golden age. They spoke their faith aloud. The consequences were frequently fatal.
Anarchism’s new era of violence opened in France just after the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. A two-year reign of dynamite, dagger and gunshot erupted, killed ordinary men as well as great ones, destroyed property, banished safety, spread terror and then subsided. The signal was given in 1892 by a man whose name, Ravachol, seemed to “breathe revolt and hatred.” His act, like nearly all that followed it, was a gesture of revenge for comrades who had suffered at the hands of the State.
On the previous May Day of 1891, at Clichy, a working-class suburb of Paris, a workers’ demonstration led by les anarchos carrying red banners with revolutionary slogans was charged by mounted police. In the melee five police were slightly, and three Anarchist leaders severely, wounded. Dragged to the police station, the Anarchists were subjected, while still bleeding and untended, to a passage à tabac of uncontrolled savagery, being made to pass between two lines of policemen under kicks and blows and beatings with revolver butts. At their trial, Bulot, the prosecuting attorney, charged that one of them, on the day before the riot, had called