At that time Ziirich was full of Russian students, both women and men. The famous Oberstrass, near the Poly- technic, was a corner of Russia, where the Russian language prevailed over all others. The students lived as most Rus- sian students do, especially the women; that is, upon very little. Tea and bread, some milk, and a thin slice of meat cooked over a spirit lamp, amidst animated discussions of the latest news from the socialistic world or the last book ‘read, — that was their regular fare. Those who had more ‘money than was needed for such a mode of living gave it ‘for the common cause, —the library, the Russian review ‘which was going to be published, the support of the Swiss ‘labor papers. As to their dress, the most parsimonious “economy reigned in that direction. Pushkin has written in ‘a well-known verse, “‘ What hat may not suit a girl of six- teen?’ Our girls at Ziirich seemed defiantly to throw this question at the population of the old Zwinglian city: ‘Can ‘there be a simplicity in dress which does not become a girl, when she is young, intelligent, and full of energy?” _ With all this, the busy little community worked harder than any other students have ever worked since there were universities in existence, and the Ziirich professors were never ‘tired of showing the progress accomplished by the women at the university, as an example to the male students.
For many years I had longed to learn all about the In- “ternational Workingmen’s Association. Russian papers mentioned it pretty frequently in their columns, but they were not allowed to speak of its principles or of what it was ‘doing. I felt that it must be a great movement, full of 270 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST consequences, but I could not grasp its aims and tendencies, Now that I was in Switzerland, I determined to satisfy 7 longings.: The association was teh at the height of its develop- ment. Great hopes had been awakened in the years 1840-. 48 in the hearts of European workers. Only now we begin’ to realize what a formidable amount of socialist literature | was circulated in those years by socialists of all denomi-. nations, — Christian socialists, state socialists, Fourierists, | Saint-Simonists, Owenites, and so on; and only now we’ begin to understand the depth of this movement, as we dis- cover how much of what our generation has considered the product of contemporary thought was already developed and. said — often with great penetration — during those years. The republicans understood then under the name of “ re-| public ”’ a quite different thing from the democratic organ- ization of capitalist rule which now goes under that name. | When they spoke of the United States of Europe, they understood the brotherhood of workers, the weapons of war transformed into tools, and those tools used by all members of society for the benefit of all, — ‘the iron returned to the laborer,” as Pierre Dupont said in one of his songs. They | meant not only the reign of equality as regards criminal | law and political rights, but particularly economic equality. | The nationalists themselves saw in their dreams Young Italy, Young Germany, and Young Hungary taking the | } lead in far-reaching agrarian and economic reforms. | The defeat of the June insurrection at Paris, of Hungary | by the armies of Nicholas I., and of Italy by the French. and the Austrians, and the fearful reaction, political and intellectual, which followed everywhere in Europe, totally — destroyed that movement. Its literature, its ecileverneoiaa| i its very principles of economic revolution and universal — brotherhood, were simply forgotten, lost, during the next twenty years.
THE INTERNATIONAL 271 However, one idea had survived, — the idea of an inter- rational brotherhood of all workers, which a few French migrants continued to preach in the United States, and the followers of Robert Owen in England. The under- standing which was reached by some English workers and t few French workers’ delegates to the London Inter- aational Exhibition of 1862 became the starting-point for a ‘ormidable movement, which soon spread all over Europe, ind included several million workers. The hopes which jad been dormant for’ twenty years were awakened once nore, when the workers were called upon to unite, “ with- put distinction of creed, sex, nationality, race, or color,’’ te proclaim that “the emancipation of the workers must be their own work,’”’ and to throw the weight of a strong, inited, international organization into the evolution of man- tind, — not in the name of love and charity, but in the name of justice, of the force that belongs to a body of men noved by a reasoned consciousness of their own aims and Jspirations.
_ Two strikes at Paris, in 1868 and 1869, more or less relped by small contributions sent from abroad, especially rom England, insignificant though they were in themselves, nd the prosecutions which the French imperial government, lirected against the International, became the origin of an — Mmense movement in which the solidarity of the workers if all nations was proclaimed in the face of the rivalries of wnd of a struggle against capital with the aid of inter- tational support, carried away the most indifferent of th vorkers. ‘The movement spread like wildfire in France, italy, and Spain, bringing to the front a great number of ntelligent, active, and devoted workers, and attracting to it ‘few decidedly superior men and women from the wealthier sducated classes. A force, never before suspected to exist, grew stronger every day in Europe; and if the movement the states. The idea of an international union of all ‘ate 272 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST had not been arrested in its growth by the Franco-German war, great things would probably have happened in Europe, deeply modifying the aspects of our civilization, and un- , doubtedly accelerating human progress; but the crushing \ victory of the Germans brought about abnormal conditions; ‘it stopped for a quarter of a century the normal development of France, and threw all Europe into the period of militarism: Ii which we are living at the present time.
All sorts of partial solutions of the great social question had currency at that time among the workers: codperation, productive associations supported by the state, people’s banks, gratuitous credit, and so on. Each of these solu- tions was brought before the “sections” of the association, and then before the local, regional, national, and interna- tional congresses, and eagerly discussed. Every annual congress of the association marked a new step in advance, in the development of ideas about the great social problem| which stands before our generation and calls for a solution, The amount of intelligent things which were said at these ~ congresses, and of scientifically correct, deeply thought over ideas which were circulated, —all being the results of the collective thought of the workers, — has never yet been sufficiently appreciated; but there is no exaggeration in saying that all schemes of social reconstruction which are now in vogue under the name of “scientific socialism” 01 ‘anarchism’? had their origin in the discussions and re ports of the different congresses of the International Asso ciation. The few educated men who joined the movemen’ have only put into a theoretical shape the criticisms ant the aspirations which were expressed in the sections, ant subsequently in the congresses, by the workers themselves. | The war of 1870-71 had hampered the development O the association, but had not stopped it. In all the indus trial centres of Switzerland numerous and animated sec.
THE INTERNATIONAL 273 tions of the International existed, and thousands of workers flocked to their meetings, at which war was declared upon the existing system of private ownership of land and factories, and the near end of the capitalist system was pro claimed. Local congresses were held in various parts of the country, and at each of these gatherings the most arduous and difficult problems of the present social organization were discussed, with a knowledge of the matter and a depth of conception which alarmed the middle classes even more than did the numbers of adherents who joined the sections, or groups, of the International. The jealousies and preju- dices which had hitherto existed in Switzerland between the privileged trades (the watchmakers and the jewelers) and the rougher trades (weavers, and so on), and which had prevented joint action in labor disputes, were disappearing.
‘The workers asserted with increasing emphasis that, of all the divisions which exist in modern society, by far the most ‘important is that between the owners of capital and those ‘who come into the world penniless, and are doomed to re- “Main producers of wealth for the favored few.
_ Italy, especially middle and northern Italy, was honey- combed with groups and sections of the International; and ‘in these the Italian unity so long struggled for was declared a mere illusion. The workers were called upon to make ‘their own revolution, — to take the land for the peasants and the factories for the workers themselves, and to abolish» ‘the oppressive centralized organization of the state, whose ‘historical mission always was to protect and to maintain ) the exploitation of man by man.
NT In Spain, similar organizations covered Catalonia, Valen- ‘cia, and Andalusia; they were supported by, and united “with, the powerful labor unions of Barcelona, which had already introduced the eight hours’ day in the building ‘trades. The International had no less than eighty thou. ‘savd regularly paying Spanish members; it embodied al?
a: 274 ' MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST the active and thinking elements of the population; and by its distinct refusal to meddle with the political intrigues during 1871-72 it had drawn to itself in a very high de- gree the sympathies of the masses. The proceedings of its. provincial and national congresses, and the manifestoes which they issued, were models of a severe logical criticism © of the existing conditions, as well as admirably lucid state-_ ments of the workers’ ideals. | In Belgium, Holland, and even in Portugal, the same | movement was spreading, and it had already brought into ~ the association the great mass and the best elements of the — Belgian coal miners and weavers. In England, the always — conservative trade unions had also joined the movement, at least in principle, and, without committing themselves to _ socialism, were ready to support their Continental brethren | in direct struggles against capital, especially in strikes. In | Germany, the socialists had concluded a union with the | rather numerous followers of Lassalle, and the first founda- | tions of a social democratic party had been laid. Austria | and Hungary followed in the same track; and although | no international organization was possible at that time in | France, after the defeat of the Commune and the reaction | which followed (Draconic laws having been enacted against | the adherents of the association), every one was persuaded, | nevertheless, that this period of reaction would not last, | and that France would soon join the association again and take the lead in it. | When I came to Ziirich, I joined one of the local sec- | tions of the International Workingmen’s Association. I. also asked my Russian friends where I could learn more about the great movement which was going on in other | countries. ‘Read,’ was their reply, and my sister-in-law, | who was then studying at Ziirich, brought me large nums | bers of books and collections of newspapers for the last two | years. I spent days and nights in reading, and received a ee SOCIALISTIC LITERATURE yak deep impression which nothing will efface; the flood of new thoughts awakened is associated in my mind with a tiny clean room in the Oberstrass, commanding from a window a view of the blue lake, with the mountains beyond it, where the Swiss fought for their independence, and the high spires of the old town, — that scene of so many reli- cious struggles.
Socialistic literature has never been rich in books. It is written for workers, for whom one penny is money, and its main force lies in its small pamphlets and its newspapers. Moreover, he who seeks for information about socialism finds in books little of what he requires most. They con- tain the theories or the scientific arguments in favor of socialist aspirations, but they give no idea how the workers accept socialist ideals, and how the latter could be put into ‘practice. There remains nothing but to take collections of ‘papers and read them all through,—the news as well as ‘the leading articles, the former perhaps even more than the latter. Quite a new world of social relations and methods of thought and action is revealed by this reading, which gives an insight into what cannot be found anywhere else, —namely, the depth and the moral foree of the movement, ithe degree to which men are imbued with the new theories, {their readiness to carry them out in their daily life and ‘to suffer for them. All discussions about the impractica- bility of socialism and the necessary slowness of evolution are of little value, because the speed of evolution’ can only ‘be judged from a close knowledge of the human beings of ‘whose evolution we are speaking. What estimate of a sum ‘ean be made without knowing its components?
The more I read, the, more I saw that there was before ‘me a new world, unknown to me, and totaliy unknown to ‘the learned makers of sociological theories, ‘LI could know only by living in the Workingmen’s Associa- ‘tion and by meeting the workers in their every-day life. I a world that 276 MEMOIRS OF A’ REVOLUTIONIST: y decided, accordingly, to spend a couple of months in such a life. My Russian friends encouraged me, and after a few days’ stay at Ziirich I left for Geneva, which was then a great centre of the international movement. | The place where the Geneva sections used to meet was the spacious Masonic Temple Unique. More than two thousand men could come together in its large hall, at the general meetings, while every evening all sorts of com- mittee and section meetings took place in the side rooms, or classes in history, physics, engineering, and so on were held. Free instruction was given there to the workers by the few, very few, middle-class men who had joined the movement, mainly French refugees of the Paris Commune, It was a people’s university as well as a people’s forum. One of the chief leaders of the movement at the Temple Unique was a Russian, Nicholas Ootin, — a bright, clever, and active man; and the real soul of it was a most sympa- thetic Russian salle who was known far and wide amongst the workers as Madame Olga. She was the working force in all the committees. Both Ootin and Madame Olga re- ceived me cordially, made me acquainted with all the men. of mark in the sections of the different trades, and invited! me to be present at the committee meetings. So I went, but I preferred being with the workers themselves. Tak- ing a glass of sour wine at one of the tables in the hall, I used to sit there every evening amid the workers, and soon became friendly with several of them, especially with a stone-mason from Alsace, who had left France after the insurrection of the Commune. He had children, just about the age of the two whom my brother had so suddenly lost a few months before, and through the children I was soon on good terms with the family and their friends. I could thus follow the movement from the inside, and know the workers’ view of it. | AN ELEVATING INFLUENCE 204 The workers had built all their hopes on the interna- ‘tional movement. Young and old flocked to the Temple ‘Unique after their long day’s work, to get hold of the scraps of instruction which they could obtain there, or to listen to the speakers who promised them a grand future, based upon the common possession of all that man requires for the production of wealth, and upon a brotherhood of men, without distinction of caste, race, or nationality. All hoped that a great social revolution, peaceful or not, would soon come and totally change the economic conditions. No one desired class war, but all said that if the ruling classes rendered it unavoidable through their blind obstinacy, the war must be fought, provided it would bring with it well- ‘being and liberty to the downtrodden masses.
One must have lived among the workers at that time: realize the effect which the sudden growth of the associa- tion had upon their minds, —the trust they put in it, the lov with which they spoke of it, the sacrifices they made for it.
Every day, week after week and year after year, thousands _of workers gave their time and their money, even went hungry, in order to support the life of each group, to secure the appearance of the papers, to defray the expenses of the congresses, to support the comrades who had suffered for the association, — nay, even to be present at the meetings -and the manifestations. Another thing that impressed me deeply was the elevating influence which the International - exercised. Most of the Paris Internationalists were almost total abstainers from drink, and all had abandoned smoking. ‘Why should I nurture in myself that weakness?” they said. The mean, the trivial disappeared to leave , room for the grand, the elevating inspirations.
Outsiders never realize the sacrifices which are made by the workers in order to keep their labor movements alive.
_ No small amount of moral courage was required to join openly a section of the International Association, and to 278 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST face the discontent of the master and a probable dismissal at the first opportunity, with the long months out of work which usually followed. But even under the best circum- stances, belonging to a trade union, or to any advanced party, requires a series of uninterrupted sacrifices. Even a few pence given for the common cause represent a burden on the meagre budget of the European worker, and many pence had to be disbursed every week. Frequent attend- ance at the meetings means a sacrifice, too. For us it may be a pleasure to spend a couple of hours at a meeting, but | for men whose working day begins at five or six in the | morning those hours have to be stolen from necessary rest.
I felt this devotion as a standing reproach. I saw how | eager the workers were to gain instruction, and despairingly few were those who volunteered to aid them. I saw how much the toiling masses needed to be helped by men pos- | sessed of education and leisure, in their endeavors to spread | and to develop the organization; but few were those who | came to assist without the intention of making political | capital out of this very helplessness of the people! More | and more I began to feel that I was bound to cast in my | lot with them. Stepnidk says, in his ‘‘ Career of a Nihilist,” | that every revolutionist has had a moment in his life when | some circumstance, maybe unimportant in itself, has brought him to pronounce his oath of giving himself to the cause of revolution. I know that moment; I lived through it after one of the meetings at the Temple Unique, when I felt) more acutely than ever before how cowardly are the edu- cated men who hesitate to put their education, their know- ledge, their energy, at the service of those who are so much in need of that education and that energy. ‘‘ Here are men,” I said to myself, ‘‘ who are conscious of their servi- tude, who work to get rid of it; but where are the helpers? Where are those who will come to serve the masses — not o utilize them for their own ambitions? ” Gradually, however, some doubts began to creep into my mind as to the soundness of the agitation which was car- ried on at the Temple Unique. One night, a well-known Geneva lawyer, Monsieur A., came to the meeting, and stated that if he had not hitherto joined the association, it was because he had first to settle his own business affairs; having now succeeded in that direction, he came to join the labor movement. I felt shocked at this cynical avowal, and when I communicated my reflections to my stone-mason friend, he explained to me that this gentleman, having been defeated at the previous election, when he sought the support of the radical party, now hoped to be elected by the support of the labor vote. ‘‘ We accept their services for the present,’ my friend concluded, ‘‘ but when the revolution comes, our first move will be to throw all of them overboard.’’
Then came a great meeting, hastily convoked, to protest, as it was said, against ‘‘ the calumnies ” of the “ Journal de Genéve.” This organ of the moneyed classes of Geneva had ventured to suggest that mischief was brewing at the Temple Unique, and that the building trades were going once more to make a general strike, such as they had made in 1869. The leaders at the Temple Unique called the meet- ing. Thousands of workers filled the hall, and Ootin asked them to pass a resolution, the wording of which seemed to me very strange, —an indignant protest was ex- pressed in it against the inoffensive suggestion that the workers were going to strike. ‘ Why should this sugges- tion be described as a calumny?” I asked myself. ‘Is it then a crime to strike?’ Ootin concluded a hurried speech with the words, “If you agree, citizens, to this resolution, I will send it at once to the press.” He was going to leave the platform, when somebody in the hall suggested that discussion would not be out of place; and then the representatives of all branches of the building wee 280 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST |: trades stood up in succession, saying that the “yages ha lately been so low that they could hardly live upon them; that with the opening of the spring there was plenty of work in view, of which they intended to take advantage to increase their wages; and that if an increase were refused they intended to begin a general strike. » I was furious, and next day hotly reproached Ootin for his behavior. ‘As a leader,” I told him, ‘you were bound to know that a strike had really been spoken of.”. In my innocence I did not suspect the real motives of the © leaders, and it was Ootin himself who made me under- — stand that a strike at that time would be disastrous for the | election of the lawyer, Monsieur A. | I could not reconcile this wire-pulling by the leaders — with the burning speeches I had heard them pronounce » from the platform. I felt disheartened, and spoke to Ootin | of my intention to make myself acquainted with the other | section of the International Association at Geneva, which - was known as the Bakunists; the name “anarchist” was | not much in use then. Ootin gave me at once a word of | introduction to another Russian, Nicholas Joukévsky, who — belonged to that section, and, looking straight into my face, _ he added, with a sigh, ‘* Well, you won’t return to us; you will remain with them.’”’ He had guessed right.
IX I went first to Neuchatel, and then spent a week or so among the watchmakers in the Jura Mountains. I thus made my first acquaintance with that famous Jura Federa- tion which for the next few years played an important part in the development of socialism, introducing into it the no-government, or anarchist, tendency.
In 1872 the Jura Federation was becoming a rebel against the authority of the general council of the International Workingmen’s Association. The association was essentially a workingmen’s movement, the workers understanding it ‘as such and not as a political party. In east Belgium, ‘for instance, they had introduced into the statutes a clause ‘in virtue of which no one could be a member of a section ‘unless employed in a manual trade; even foremen were excluded.
The workers were, moreover, federalist in principle. ‘Each nation, each separate region, and even each local sec- \tion had to be left free to develop on its own lines. But ithe middle-class revolutionists of the old school who had entered the International, imbued as they, were with the ‘notions of the centralized, pyramidal secret organizations of oe times, had introduced the same notions into the ‘Workingmen’s Association. Beside the federal and na- \tional councils, a general council was nominated at London, to act as a sort of intermediary between the councils of the different nations. Marx and Engels were its leading spirits. ‘It soon appeared, however, that the mere fact of having ‘such a central body became a source of substantial incon- venience. ‘The general council was not satisfied with play- 282 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST ing the part of a correspondence bureau; it strove to govern | the movement, to approve or to censure the action of the local federations and sections, and even of individual mem- | bers. When the Commune insurrection began in Paris, | —and “the leaders had only to follow,’ without being | able to say whereto they would be led within the next | twenty-four hours, — the general council insisted upon di- recting the insurrection from London. It required daily reports about the events, gave orders, favored this and hampered that, and thus put in evidence the disadvantage | of having a governing body, even within the association. | The disadvantage became still more evident when, at a secret conference held in 1871, the general council, sup- ported by a few delegates, decided to direct the forces of | the association toward electoral agitation. It set people | thinking about the evils of any government, however demo- | cratic its origin. This was the first spark of anarchism. | The Jura Federation became the centre of eppriiion to the. general council.
The separation between leaders and workers which I had noticed at Geneva in the Temple Unique did not exist in| the Jura Mountains. There were a number of men who! were more intelligent, and especially more active than the others; but that was all. James Guillaume, one of the most intelligent and broadly educated men I ever met, was a proof-reader and the manager of a small printing-office. His earnings in this capacity were so small that he had to give his nights to translating novels from German into. French, for which he was paid eight frances —one dollar and sixty cents — for sixteen pages!?
When I came to Neuchatel, he told me that unfortus nately he could not give even as much as a couple of hours. for a friendly chat. The printing-office was just issuing. that afternoon the first number of a local paper, and in: FRIENDS AT NEUCHATEL 283 addition to his usual duties of proof-reader and co-editor, he had to write the addresses of a thousand persons to whom the first three numbers were to be sent, and to put on the wrappers himself.
I offered to aid him in writing the addresses, but that was not practicable because they were either kept in mem- ory, or written on scraps of paper in an unreadable hand. “Well, then,” said I, “ I will come in the afternoon to the office and put on the wrappers, and you will give me the time which you may thus save.”
We understood each other. Guillaume warmly shook my hand, and that was the beginning of a standing friend- ship. We spent all the afternoon in the office, he writ- ing the addresses, I fastening the wrappers, and a French communard, who was a compositor, chatting with us all the while as he rapidly set up a novel, intermingling his con- versation with the sentences which he was putting in type and which he read aloud.
“The fight in the streets,” he would say, “became very sharp”...“Dear Mary, I love you”...“ The workers were furious and fought like lions at Montmartre”...» “and he fell on his knees before her”...“and that lasted for four days. We knew that Gallifet was shooting all prisoners, —the more terrible still was the fight,’? — / and so on he went, rapidly lifting the type from the case. It was late in the evening when Guillaume took off his working blouse, and we went out for a friendly chat for a _ couple of hours; then he had to resume his work as editor of the ‘ Bulletin” of the Jura Federation.
At Neuchatel I also made the acquaintance of Malon. He was born in a village, and in his childhood he was a _ shepherd. Later on, he came to Paris, learned there a trade, — basket-making, — and, like the bookbinder Varlin and the carpenter Pindy, with whom he was associated in the International, had come to be widely known as one of 284 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST x Ahe leaders of the Association when it was prosecuted in -/1869 by Napoleon III. All three had quite won the hearts / of the Paris workers, and when the Commune insurrection broke out, they were elected members of the Council of the Commune, each receiving a large vote. Malon was also mayor of one of the Paris arrondissements. Now, in Switzerland, he earned his living as a basket-maker. He had rented for a few coppers a month a small open shed, out of town, on the slope of a hill, from which he enjoyed, while at work, an extensive view of the lake of Neuchatel. At night he wrote letters, a book on the Commune, short articles for the labor papers, and thus he became a writer.
Every day I went to see him, and to hear what the broad- faced, laborious, slightly poetical, quiet, and most good- hearted communard had to tell me about the insurrec- tion in which he took a prominent part, and which he had just described in a book, “‘The Third Defeat of the French Proletariat.”
One morning, as I had climbed the hill and reached his shed, he met me, quite radiant, with the words: ‘‘Do you know, Pindy is alive! Here is a letter from him: he is in Switzerland.’”’ Nothing had been heard of Pindy since he| was seen last on the 25th or 26th of May at the Tuileries, ' and he was supposed to be dead, while in reality he had: remained in concealment in Paris. And while Malon’s fingers continued to ply the wickers and to shape them into. an elegant basket, he told me in his quiet voice, which only, slightly trembled at times, how many men had been shot. by the Versailles troops on the supposition that they were Pindy, Varlin, himself, or some other leader. He told me what he knew of the deaths of Varlin — the bookbinder, whom the Paris workers worshiped —and old Delécluze, who did not want to survive that new defeat, and many others; and he related the horrors which he had witnessed. during that carnival of blood with which the wealthy classes | REFUGEES OF THE COMMUNE 285 of Paris celebrated their return to the capital, and then the spirit of retaliation which took hold of a crowd of people, led by Raoul Rigault, which executed the hostages of the Commune.
His lips quivered when he spoke of the heroism of the children; and he quite broke down when he told me the story of that boy whom the Versailles troops were about to shoot, and who asked the officer’s permission to hand first a silver watch, which he had on, to his mother, who lived close by. The officer, yielding to an impulse of pity, let the boy go, probably hoping that he would never return. But a quarter of an hour later the boy came back, and, taking his place amidst the corpses at the wall, said: “I am ready.” Twelve bullets put an end to his young life.
I think I never suffered so much as when I read that terrible book, “‘Le Livre Rouge de la Justice Rurale,” which contained nothing but extracts from the letters of the i fi i i _ ents, written from Paris during the last days of May, 1871, relating the horrors committed by the Versailles army, under Gallifet, with a few quotations from the Paris “‘ Figaro,” im- bued* with a bloodthirsty spirit toward the insurgents. I was seized with a profound despair of mankind as I read these pages, and I should have retained that despair, had I not seen afterward, in those of the defeated party who had l