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In the earlier part of the nineteenth century, after the defeat of the Great Revolution, Europe passed, as is known, through a period of general reaction in the domain both of politics and of science and philosophy. The White Terror of the Bourbons in France; the Holy Alliance concluded in 1815 at Vienna between Austria, Germany, and Russia; mysticism and pietism at the Courts and in the upper classes, and State police everywhere, triumphed all along the line. However, with all that, the fundamental principles of the Revolution did not perish. The gradual liberation of the peasants and the town workers from a state of semi-serfdom in which they had been living till then, equality before the law, and representative government—these three principles promulgated by the Revolution and carried by the French armies all over Europe, as far as Poland and Russia, gradually made headway in France and elsewhere. After the Revolution, which had begun to preach the great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the slow evolution began—that is to say, the slow transformation of institutions, and the application to every-day life of the ideas proclaimed in France in 1789–1793. Such a slow realisation, during a period of evolution, of the principles that have been proclaimed during the preceding revolutionary period, can even be considered as a general law of human development.

If the Church, the State, and Science trampled under their feet the banner on which the Revolution had inscribed its device: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"; if compromise with existing conditions, political and economical servitude, had become the watchword of the moment, even with philosophers of that period—Hegel in Germany and Cousin in France—nevertheless, the great principles of Liberty gradually began to penetrate into life.