Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

58 / ANARCHISM
erty, domicile, low price, guaranteed: no more antagonism, no more war, no more
centralization, no more governments, no more priests ...
No more Authority! That is to say further: free contract in place of arbitrary law;
voluntary transactions in place of the control of the State; equitable and reciprocal
justice in place of sovereign and distributive justice; rational instead of revealed morals;
equilibrium offorces instead of equilibrium of powers; economic unity in place of
political centralization.
13. Anselme Bellegarrigue: Anarchy is Order (1850)
ProLld/wn was not alone during the 1848 Revolution in France in advocating anarchist ideas.
AnselmI' Rellegarriglle, a yOLlng JOLlrnalist fi"Oll1 TOLllollse, pllblished L'Anarchie, Journal de
rOrdre, in Paris in 1850, having previously edited one of the most popular social democratic dailies
in TOLllollse, La Civilisation. As with many others, Rellegarriglle left France after Louis Napoleon
's December 1851 COllP d'etat, eventually settling in El Salvador. The following excerpts,
trallSlated by Pall/ Sharkey, are takenfi"Oll1 tIle Kate Sharpley Librmy edition (London, 2002) entitled
Anarchist Manifesto, and are reprinted WitIl the kind permission of the publisher.
ANARCHY IS THE NEGATION OF GOVERNMENTS. Governments, whose pupils we are,
have naturally found nothing better to devise than to school us in fear and horror of
their destruc tion. But as governments in turn are the negations of individuals or of
the people. it is reasonable that the latter. waking up to essential tntths, should grildually
come to feel a greater horror at its own annihilation than that of its masters.
Anarchy is an ancient word, but for us that word articulates a modern notion, or
rather, a modem interest, the idea being ddughier lo lhe inlerest. History has described
as "anarchic" the condition of a people wherein there are several governments
in contention one with another; but the condition of a people desirous of
being governed but bereft of government precisely because it has too many is one
thing and the condition of a people desirous of governing itself and bereft of government
precisely because it wishes none quite another. In ancient times, indeed, anarchy
was civil war, not because it meant absence of governments but, rather, because
it meant a multipl icity of them and competition and strife among the governing
classes. The modern notion of absolute social truth or pure democracy has ushered
in an entire series of discoveries or interests which have turned the terms of the traditional
equation upside down. Thus anarchy, which, when contrasted with the term
monarchy, means civil war, is, from the vantage point of absolute or democratic
truth, nothing less than the true expression of social order.