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CHAPTER II
A SERIES OF INSURRECTIONS
At the beginning of the seventies Bakounin and his
friends found opening before them a field of practical
activity. On the whole, the sixties were spent in theorizing,
in organizing, and in planning, but with the seventies
the moment arrived "to unchain the hydra of revolution."
On the 4th of September, 1870, the Third Republic
was proclaimed in Paris, and a few days afterward
there were many uprisings in the other cities of
France. It was, however, only in Lyons that the Bakouninists
played an important part. Bakounin had a
fixed idea that, wherever there was an uprising of the
people, there he must go, and he wrote to Adolphe Vogt
on September 6 :
"My friends, the revolutionary socialists
of Lyons, are calling me there. I am resolved to take
my old bones thither and to play there what will probably
be my last game. But, as usual, I have not a sou. Can
you, I do not say lend me, but give me 500 or 400, or
300 or 200, or even 100 francs, for my voyage" (1)
Guillaume does not state where the money finally came
from, but Bakounin evidently raised it
somehow, for he
left Locarno on September 9. The night of the nth he
spent in Neuchatel, where he conferred with Guillaume
regarding the publication of a manuscript. On the 12th
he arrived in Geneva, and two days later set out for
Lyons, accompanied by two revolutionary enthusiasts,
Ozerof and the young Pole, Valence Lankiewicz.
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