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THE NEWEST ANARCHISM 231
hounded as an outlaw, and in 1894 they were broken,
scattered, and isolated. Scorning
all relations with the
political groups and indeed excluded from them, as from
other sections of the labor movement, by their own tactics,
they found themselves almost alone, without the opportunity
even of propagating their views. Facing a
blank wall, they began then to discuss the necessity of
radically changing their tactics, and in that year one of
the most militant of them, Emile Pouget, who had been
arrested several times for provoking riots, undertook to
coarse vegetables would make an awful howl if
persuade his associates to enter actively into the trade
unions. In his peculiar argot he wrote in Pcre Peinard:
"If there is a group into which the anarchists should
thrust themselves, it is evidently the trade union. The
the anarchists,
whom they imagine they have gagged, should
profit by the circumstance to infiltrate themselves in
droves into the trade unions and spread their ideas there
without any noise or blaring of trumpets." (1) This
plea had its effect, and more and more anarchists began
to join the trade unions, while their friends, already in
the unions, prepared the way for their coming.
Pelloutier,
a zealous and efficient administrator, had already
become the dominant spirit in one entire section of the
French labor movement, that of the Bourses du Travail.
In another section, the carpenter Tortellier, a roving agitator
and militant anarchist, had already persuaded a
large number of unions to declare for the general strike
as the sole effective weapon for revolutionary purposes.
Moreover, Guerard, Griffuelhes, and other opponents of
political action were preparing the ground in the unions
for an open break with the socialists. By 1896 the
strength
of the anarchists in the trade unions was so
great that the French delegates to the international so-