Untitled

172 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
various circulars dealing with questions of principle, but
all consisting of attacks upon Bakounin personally or
upon his doctrines, finally goaded him into open war
upon Marx, the General Council, all their doctrines, and
even upon the then forming socialist party of Germany,
with Bebel and Liebknecht at its head. During the year
1870 Bakounin was preparing for the great controversy,
but his friends of Lyons interrupted his work by calling
him there to take part in the uprising of that year. He
hastened to Lyons, but, as we know, he was soon forced
to flee and conceal himself in Marseilles. It was there,
in the midst of the blackest despair, that Bakounin wrote :
"I have no longer any faith in the Revolution in France.
This nation is no longer in the least revolutionary. The
people themselves have become doctrinaire, as insolent
and as bourgeois as the bourgeois
. . . The bourgeois
are loathsome. They are as savage as they are
stupid — and as the police blood flows in their veins— they
should be called policemen and attorneys-general in embryo.
I am going to reply to their infamous calumnies
by a good little book in which I shall give everything and
everybody its proper name. I leave this country with
deep despair in my heart." (23) He then set to work at
last to state systematically his own views and to annihilate
utterly those of the socialists. Many of these documents
are only fragmentary. Some were started and
abandoned; others ended in hopeless confusion. With
the most extraordinary gift of inspirited statement, he
passes in review every phase of history, leaping from one
peak to another of the great periods, pointing his lessons,
issuing his warnings, but all the time throwing at the
reader such a Niagara of ideas and arguments that he is
left utterly dazed and bewildered as by some startling
military display or the rushing here and there of a mili-