Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Modern Science and Anarchism (1912).pdf/64

 of the first half of the nineteenth century, the ideas of local independent action were handed down, at least among the French, from the powerful and truly revolutionary and constructive action of the "Sections" of Paris and the Communes of 1793–94, which I have described lately in "The Great French Revolution."

It must be said, however, that the former, i.e., the Jacobinist current, undoubtedly was the more powerful of the two. The educated middle-class people who had joined the International were mostly Jacobinist.

And now came the terrible Franco-German War, into which Napoleon III. and his advisers madly rushed, in order to save the Empire from the rapidly advancing revolution; and with it came the crushing defeat of France, the Provisory Government of Gambetta and Thiers, and the Commune of Paris, followed by similar attempts at Saint Etienne in France, and at Barcelona and Carthagena in Spain. And these popular insurrections brought into evidence what the political aspect of a Social Revolution ought to be.

Not a Democratic Republic, as was said in 1848, but the free, independent Communist Commune.

Of course, the Paris Commune itself suffered from the confusion of ideas as to the economic and political steps to be taken by the Revolution, which prevailed, as we saw, in the International. Both the Jacobinists and the Communalists—i.e., the centralists and the federalists—were represented in the uprising, and necessarily they came into conflict with each other. The most warlike elements were the Jacobinists and the Blanquists, but the economic, Communist ideals of Babeuf had already faded among their middle-class leaders. They treated the economic question as a secondary one, which would be attended to later on, after the triumph of the Commune, and this idea prevailed. But the crushing defeat which soon followed, and the bloodthirsty revenge taken by the middle class, proved once more that the triumph of a popular Commune was materially impossible without a parallel triumph of the people in the economic field.

For the Latin nations, the Commune of Paris, followed by similar attempts at Carthagena and Barcelona, settled the ideas of the revolutionary proletariat.

This was the form that the Social Revolution must take—the independent Commune. Let all the country and all the world be against it; but once its inhabitants have decided that they will