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By Root 1249 0

the country, but his nephew Paul Reclus, Jean Grave, Sebastien Faure and others were in the dock. In the absence of a party or corporate body as defendant, the prosecution was in a difficulty similar to having no corpus delicti. Nevertheless it accused what it called the “sect” of aiming at the destruction of the State through propaganda that encouraged theft, pillage, arson and murder “in which each member of the sect cooperates according to his temperament and facilities.” In dread perhaps of the irresistible oratory of Faure, the prosecution did all the talking, hardly allowing the defendants to open their mouths and regretting it when they did. Addressing Felix Fenéon, the art critic and first champion of the Impressionists, who was one of the defendants, the presiding judge said, “You were seen talking with an Anarchist behind a lamppost.”

“Can you tell me, Your Honor,” replied Fenéon, “where is ‘behind a lamppost’?”

In the absence of evidence connecting the accused with the deeds, the jury was not impressed and acquitted everyone except the three burglars, who were given prison terms. Once again French common sense had reasserted itself.

The jury’s sensible verdict deprived Anarchism of a cause célèbre, but a greater reason for the decline that followed was that the French working class was too realistic to be drawn into a movement suffering from self-inflicted impotence. The sterility of deeds of terror was already beginning to be recognized by leaders like Kropotkin, Malatesta, Reclus and even Johann Most. Searching for other means of bringing down the State, they were always tripped up by the inherent paradox: Revolution demands organization, discipline and Authority; Anarchism disallows them. The futility of their position was beginning to make itself felt.

Banished from the meeting of the Socialist Second International in London in 1896, because of their refusal to subscribe to the necessity of political action, Anarchist groups called a Congress of their own in Paris in 1900. They made efforts to arrive at a formula of union which the comrades could accept, but every proposal foundered against the stubborn devotion to singleness of Jean Grave. A second attempt in a Congress at Amsterdam in 1907 produced a short-lived International Bureau which, for lack of support, soon withered and ceased to function.

Yet in the end there was a kind of tragic sense in the Anarchist rejection of Authority. For, as the Jesuit-educated Sebastien Faure said in a moment of cold realism, “Every revolution ends in the reappearance of a new ruling class.”

Realists of another kind during these years began to come to terms with the labour movement. It was the eight-hour day that the French working class wanted, not bombs in parliament or murdered presidents. But it was the Anarchist propaganda of the Deed that woke them to recognition of what they wanted and the necessity of fighting for it. That was why Ravachol, whom they understood, became a popular hero and songs were sung about him in the streets. Ever since the massacres of the Commune, the French proletariat had been prostrate; it was the Anarchist assaults that brought them to their feet. They sensed that their strength lay in collective action, and in 1895, only a year after the last of the attentats, there was formed the Confédération Générale de Travail (CGT), France’s federation of labour.

Upon the Anarchists, frustrated by their own inherent paradox, it exerted a strong pull. One by one they drifted into the trade unions, bringing with them as much of their doctrine as could be applied. This merger of Anarchist theory and trade-union practice took the form known as Syndicalism, derived from syndicat, the French word for trade union. In this altered form, though extremists of the “pure” kind like Jean Grave shunned it, French Anarchism developed during the years 1895–1914.

Its dogma was direct action through the general strike and its new prophet was Georges Sorel. Under his banner the general strike was to replace propaganda of the deed. The overthrow of capitalism,