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180 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
his criticism of the program
of the German socialists.
Preparatory to this task, he first terrifies his
French readers with the warning that if the German
army, then at their doors, should conquer France, it
would result in the destruction of French socialism (by
which he means anarchism), in the utter degradation
and complete slavery of the French people, and make it
possible for the Knout of Germany and Russia to fall
upon the back of all Europe. "If, in this terrible moment,
. . .
[France] does not prefer the death of all
her children and the destruction of all her goods, the
burning of her villages, her cities, and of all her houses
to slavery under the yoke of the Prussians, if she does
not destroy, by means of a popular and revolutionary
uprising, the power of the innumerable German armies
which, victorious on all sides up to the present, threaten
her dignity, her liberty, and even her existence, if she
does not become a grave for all those six hundred thousand
soldiers of German despotism, if she does not oppose
them with the one means capable of conquering and
destroying them under the present circumstances, if she
does not reply to this insolent invasion by the social revolution
no less ruthless and a thousand times more menacing
— it is certain, I maintain, that then France is lost,
her masses of working people will be slaves, and French
socialism will have lived its life." (32)
Approaching his subject in this dramatic manner,
Bakounin turns to examine the degenerate state of socialism
in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany to see "what
will be the chances of working-class emancipation in all
the rest of Europe." (33) In the first country socialism
is only in its infancy. The Italians are wholly ignorant
of the true causes of their misery. They are crushed,
maltreated, and dying of hunger.
They are "led blindly