160 KROPOTKIN'S REVOLUTIONARY PAMPHLETS courts would true justice
16 KROPOTKIN'S REVOLUTIONARY PAMPHLETS considered as the most gifted ones, without caring for the right of full development for all-is merely a disguised return towards the now-existing education-monopoly of the few. It simply means a "right to their full development" for the privileged minorities. But. as such monopolies cannot be maintained otherwise than under the protection of a monopolist legislation and an organized coercion by the State, the claims of these individualists necessarily end in a return to the state idea and to that same coercion which they so fiercely attack themselves. Their position is thus the same as that of Spencer, and of all the so-called "Manchester school" of economists, who also begin by a severe criticism of the State and end in its full recognition in order to maintain the property monopolies, of which the State is the necessary stronghold. Such was the growth of anarchist ideas, from the French Revolution and Godwin to Proudhon. The next step was made within the great "International Working Men's Association," which so much inspired the working-classes with hope, and the middle classes with terror, in the years 1868· IS7o-just before the Franco-German War. That this association was not founded by Marx, or any other personality, as the hero-worshippers would like us to believe, is self-evident. It was the outcome of the meeting, at London, in 1862, of a delegation of French workingmen who had come to visit the Second International Exhibition, with representatives of British Trade Unions and radicals who received that delegation. ANAR.CHISM AND THE FREE COMMUNE With the Franco-German War came the crushing defeat of France, the provisory government of Gamhetta and Thien, and the Commune of Paris, followed by similar attempts at Saint Etienne in France, and at Barcelona and Cartagena in Spain. And these popular insurrections brought into evidence what the polit1ctll aspect of a social revolution ought to be. MODERN SCIENCE AND ANARCHISM 163 Not a democratic republic, as was said in 1848, but the free, independent Communist Commune. , 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 inte n: a- tional. Both the Jacobinists and the communaht . .e. the centralists and the federalists--were represented 10 the uprising, and necessarily they came into conflict ih each other. The most; warlike elements were the Jacob101sts 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 tnumph , of the people in the economic field. For the Latin nations, the Commune of Paris, followed by similar attempts at Cartagena and Barcelona, settled the ideas of the revolutionary proletariat. This was the fQ1'1n that the social revolution must takethe independent commune. Let all the country and all the world be against it; but once its inhabitants have decided that they will communalize the consumption of commodities, their exchange, and their production, they must realize it among themselves. And in SO doing, they will find such forces as never could be called into life and to the service of a great cause, if they attempted to take in the sway of the revolution the whole country including its most backward or indifferent regions. Better to fight such strongholds of reaction openly than to drag them as so many chains rivetted to the feet of the fighter. More than that. We made one step more. We understood that if no central govexnment was needed to rule the independent communes, if the national government is thr wn overboard and national unity is obtained by free federatIon,