Utopia: “A dream not realized, but not unrealizable.” Anarchy: “Absence of government.” Revolutions are conservations. — (P. J. Proudhon) The only true revolutions are the revolutions of ideas. — (Jouffroy) Let us make customs, and no longer make laws. — (Emile de Girardin) So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty…. Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. — (Saint Paul the Apostle)

What is this Book!

This book is not a literary work, it is an infernal labor, the cry of a rebel slave.

Being, like the cabin boy of the Salamander, unable, in my individual weakness, to strike down all those who, on the ship of the legal order, dominate and mistreat me, when my day is done at the workshop, when my watch is finished on the bridge, I descend by night to the bottom of the hold, I take possession of my solitary corner and, there, with teeth and claws, like a rat in the shadows, I scratch and gnaw at the worm-eaten walls of the old society. By day, as well, I use my hours of unemployment, I arm myself with a pen like a borer, I dip it in bile for grease, and, little by little, I open a way, each day larger, to the flood of the new; I relentlessly perforate the hull of Civilization. I, a puny proletarian, on whom the crew, the horde of exploiters, daily inflict the torment of the aggravated misery of the brutalities of exile or prison, I open up the abyss beneath the feet of my murderers, and I spread the balm of vengeance on my always-bloody scars. I have my eye on my Masters. I know that each day brings me closer to the goal; that a formidable cry—the sinister every man for himself!—will soon resound at the height of their joyous intoxication. A bilge-rat, I prepare their shipwreck; that shipwreck alone can put an end to my troubles and to those of my fellows. Come the revolution, will not the suffering have, for biscuit, ideas in reserve, and, for a life-line, socialism!

This book is not written in ink; its pages are not paper sheets.

This book is steel, turned in octavo, and charged with fulminate of ideas. It is an authoricidal projectile that I cast in a thousand copies on the cobblestones of the civilizées. May its shards fly far and mortally pierce the ranks of the prejudiced. May it split the old society down to its foundations.

Privileged ones!—for those who have sown slavery, the hour has come to reap rebellion. There is not a worker who, in the hidden reaches of his brain, does not clandestinely fashion some thoughts of destruction. You, you have the bayonet and the penal code, the catechism and the guillotine; we have the barricade and utopia, sarcasm and the bomb. You, you are the pressure; we are the mine: one spark can blow you up!

Know that today, in their iron shackles, beneath their superficial torpor, the multitudes are composed of grains of powder; the fibers of the thinkers are its caps. Is it not without risk that you crush liberty on the brow of the somber multitudes. Rash reactionaries!—God is God, you say. Yes, but Satan is Satan!… The elect of the golden calf are few, and hell is full of the damned. Aristocrats, there is no need to play with fire, the fire of hell, understand!…

This book is not a document, it is an act. It has not been traced by the gloved hand of a fantasist; it is filled with heart and logic, with blood and fever. It is a cry of insurrection, a strike of the tocsin rung with the hammer of the idea in the hearing of the popular passions. It is moreover a chant of victory, a triumphant salvo, the proclamation of individual sovereignty, the advent of universal liberty; it is full and complete amnesty for the authoritarian sorrows of the past by anarchic decree of the humanitarian future.

This is a book of hatred, a book of love!….

Preface

“Know yourself.”

Social science proceeds by inductions and deductions, by analogy. It is by a series of comparisons that it arrives at the combination of truth.

Thus, I will proceed by analogy.

I will try to be brief. The large volumes are not those that are most read. In preference to long dissertations, to classical pedagogies, I will employ the colorful phrase, it has the advantage of being able to say a lot in a few words.

I am far from being steeped in science. I have read a bit, observed more, and meditated a great deal. I am, I believe, despite my ignorance in one of the one of the most favorable places to sum up the needs of humanity. I possess all the passions, although I cannot satisfy them, those of love and those of hate, the passion for extreme luxury and for extreme simplicity. I understand all appetites, those of the heart and of the belly, those of the flesh and of the mind. I have a taste for white bread, but also for black bread, for stormy discussions and also for sweet causeries. I know all the appetites, physical and moral; I have the intuition of all intoxications; all that which excites or calms has seductions for me: the café and poetry, champagne and art, wine and tobacco, milk and honey, spectacles, tumult and lights, shadow, solitude and pure water. I love work, hard labors; I also love leisure, times of languid idleness. I could live a little and find myself rich, consume enormously and find myself poor. I have looked through the keyhole at the intimate life of opulence, I know its hot houses and it sumptuous salons; and I also know from experience both cold and poverty. I have been overfull and I have been hungry. I have a thousand caprices and not one pleasure. I am likely to commit at times what the argot of the civilized blacken with the name of virtue, and more often still what they honor with the name of crime. I am the man most empty of prejudices and most full of passions that I know; proud enough to not be vain, and too proud to be hypocritically modest. I have only one face, but that face is as mobile as the face of the waves; at the least breath, it passes from one expression to another, from calm to storm and from anger to tenderness. That is why, as a multiple passionality, I hope to deal with human society with some chance of success, because treating it well depends as much on the knowledge that one has of one’s own passions, as on the knowledge that one has of the passions of others.

The world of anarchy is not of my invention, certainly, any more than it is the invention of Proudhon, nor of Pierre, nor of Jean. Each by himself invents nothing. Inventions are the result of collective observations; is the explanation of a phenomenon, a scratch made on the colossus of the unknown, but it is the work of all men and all generations of men linked together by an indissoluble solidarity. Now, if there is invention, I have the right at most to a patent of improvement. I would be rather poorly praised if some hoaxers wanted to apply to my face the title of the chief of a school. I know that one expounds ideas bringing together or straying more or less from known ideas. But what I do not understand is that there have been men who accept them slavishly, in order to make themselves the followers of the first comer, to model themselves on his way of seeing, to imitate him in the least details: and to put on, like a soldier or a lackey, his uniform or his livery. At least adjust them to your waistline; trim them or widen them, but do not wear them as-is, with sleeves too short or tails too long. Otherwise, it is not a sign of intelligence; it is hardly worthy of a man who feels and thinks, thus it is ridiculous.

Authority aligns men under its flags by discipline, it shackles them by the code of military orthodoxy, passive obedience; its imperious voice commands silence and immobility in the ranks, autocratic fixity. Liberty rallies men to its banner with the voice of free examination; it does not petrify them in the same line. Each lines up where he likes and moves as he pleases. Liberty does not regiment men under the plume of the head of a sect: it initiates them in the movement of ideas and inculcates in them the sentiment of active independence. Authority is unity in uniformity! Liberty is unity in diversity. The axis of authority, it is knout-archie [literally, government by whip]. Anarchy is the axis of liberty.

For me, it is much less a question of making disciples than of making men, and one is a man only on condition of being oneself. We incorporate the ideas of others and incarnate our ideas in others; we combine our thoughts, and nothing is better than that; but let us make of that mixture a conception henceforth our own. Let us be an original work and not a copy. The slave models himself on the master; he imitates. The free man only produces his own type; he creates.

My plan is to paint a picture of society as society appears to me in the future: individual liberty is moving anarchically in the social community and producing harmony.

I do not presume to impose my views on others. I do not descend from cloudy Sinai. I do not march escorted by lightning and thunder. I am not sent by the autocrat of the whole universe to reveal his words to his so-humble subjects and publish the imperial ukase of his commandments. I inhabit the depths of society; I have drawn from them some revolutionary thoughts, and I pour them forth, rending the darkness. I am a seeker of truths, a herald of progress, a star-gazer for enlightenment. I sigh after happiness and I conjure up its ideal. If that ideal makes you smile, do as I do, and love it. If you find imperfections in it, correct them. If it displeases you, create another. I am not exclusive, and I will willingly abandon mine for yours, if yours seems more perfect to me. However, I see only two great figures possible; one can modify its expression, that is not to change its traits: there is absolute liberty or absolute authority. As for me, I choose liberty. We have seen the works of authority, and its works condemn it. It is an old prostitute that has never learned anything but depravation and never engendered anything but death. Liberty still only makes herself known by her timid smile. She is a virgin that the embrace of humanity has still not made fertile; but, let man allow himself to be seduced by her charms, let him give her all his love, and she will soon give birth to generations worthy of the great name that she carries.

To weaken authority and criticize its acts is not enough. A negation, in order to be absolute, needs to complete itself with an affirmation. That is why I affirm liberty, why I deduce its consequences.

I address myself above all to the proletarians, and the proletarians are for the most part still more ignorant than me; also, before giving an account of the anarchic order, a portrait which will be for this book the last stroke of the author’s pen, it is necessary to outline the history of Humanity. I will follow its march across the ages in the past and in the present and I will accompany it into the future.

In this sketch I have to recreate a subject touched with a master’s hand by a great artist in poetry. I don’t have his work at hand; and if I had it, I rarely reread a book, as I have neither the leisure nor courage for it. My memory is my only library, and my library is often quite disordered. If some reminiscences escape me, if I happen to draw from my memories, believing I drew it from my own thoughts, I declare at least that it will be without knowing or wishing to. I hold plagiarists in horror. However, I am also of the opinion of Alfred de Musset, I thus think what another has thought before me. I would desire one thing, it is that those who have not read the book of Eugène Pelletan, Le Monde Marche, will want to read the book before continuing the reading of mine. The work of this brilliant writer are a museum of the reign of humanity up through our times, magnificent pages that it is always good to know, and which will be an aid to more than one civilizee, leaning on his elbows before my work, not only to supply what it lacks, but also to aid in understanding its shadows and lights.

And now, reader, if you want to travel along with me, stock up on intelligence, and let’s go!

Geological Question.

“If one says to them (i.e., to the civilized) that our swirl of approximately two hundred comets and planets presents but the image of a bee occupying a single cell in the hive; that the other fixed stars, each one surrounded by such a swirl, represent other planets, and that the whole of this vast universe, in its turn, counts only as a single bee in a hive formed of approximately a hundred and thousand sidereal universes, the ensemble of which comprises a biniverse, that then comes the triniverse formed from several thousand biniverses, and so on; finally, that each one of these universes, biniverses, triniverses is a creature, having, like us, its own soul, its own phases of youth and old age, death and birth…….; they will not follow this theme to its end, they will cry out against the insanity, the outrageous daydream; and yet they pose in principle the universal analogy!” — (Ch. Fourier)

We know the physiognomy of the Earth, its external structure. The pencil, the brush and the pen have retraced the features. The canvases of the artists and the books of the poets have taken it in its cradle and have made us see it first enveloped in the swaddling clothes of the flood, all soft still and with the tint of the first days; then firming up and covering itself with a vegetative mane, animating its sites, improving itself as it advances in life.

We also know its internal structure, its physiology; we have made the anatomy of its entrails. Excavations have stripped its skeleton to which we have given the name of mineral; its arteries, where the water circulates, its intestines covered with a viscous flow of fire.

But who has occupied themselves with its psychological organism? Nobody. Where within it is the seat of its thought? Where is its brain located? We don’t know. And yet the globes, despite being of a different nature than our own, are no less thinking and moving beings. Is that which we have taken for the surface of the earth really the surface? And by skinning it, by the scalping of the atmospheres that envelope it, don’t we leave its flesh and fibers exposed, pierce the cerebellum clear to the spinal cord, and strip the skin from the bones?

Who knows if, for the terrestrial globe, which is also an animated being, of which the zoological study is so far from being completed, who knows if humanity is not its brain-matter? If the human atom is not the animalcule of thought, the molecule of planetary intelligence functioning under the vast cranium of its atmospheric rings? Do we know anything of the nature of its intimate senses? And would it be strange if all our social actions, a swarm of homuncular societies, were the ideas and dreams that people the face of the globe from one pole to the other?

I won’t claim a prima facie resolution of the question, or affirm or deny it absolutely. I have certainly not thought enough about the subject. I only pose the thing in interrogative form, in order to provoke research and a response. I very well may make that response myself. It does not appear to me without interest to consider the intellectual organization of the of the being within which we have been born, any more than it appears to me uninteresting to occupy myself with its bodily organism. For whoever wants to study the zoology of beings, animals or planets, psychology is inseparable from physiology.

This prologue ended, let us leave the world to turn on its axis and gravitate towards its sun, and let us occupy ourselves with the movement of humanity and its gravitation towards progress.

First Part. Movement of Humanity

I.

‘‘A cretin! That is to say a poor, dejected being, timid and small; a matter that moves or a man that vegetates, a disgraced creature which is stuffed with aqueous vegetables, black bread and flood waters; – a nature without industry, without ideas, without past, without future, without forces; – an unfortunate who does not recognize his fellows, who does not speak, who remains insensible to the world outside, who is born, grows and dies in the same place, miserable as the bitter lichen and the gnarled oaks. Oh! to see the man squatting in the dust and the head tilted toward the ground, arms hanging, bent back, knees flexed, eyes bright or dull, the gaze vague or frightening in its fixity, barely able to reach out his hand to passers-by – with sunken cheeks, with long fingers and long toes, hair standing on end like the fur of cats, a receding or drawn brow, a flat head and a monkey’s face. How imperceptible our body is in the midst of the universe, if it is not magnified by our knowledge! How the first men were trembling in the face of flood waters and falling rock! As the great Alps dwarf the mountaineer of Valais! As he creeps slowly, from their feet to their heads, by barely passable paths! One might say that he is afraid of arousing subterranean furies. An earthworm, ignorant, slave, cretin, man would be all of that today if he had never revolted against force. And there he is, superb, giant, God, because he has dared all! But man would still fight against the Revolution! The son would curse his mother. Moses, saved from the waters, would deny the noble daughter of the Pharaoh! That cannot be. To the God of heaven, to Fatality, the blind Lightning; to the God of the earth, to the free man, the Revolution which sees clear. Fire against fire, flash against flash, deluge against deluge, light against light. Heaven is not so high that we can not already see it; and man sooner or later attains what he desires!” — (Ernest Cœurderoy) ‘‘The world moves.’’— (E. Pelletan)

The world moves, as Pelletan says—a beautiful writer, but a bourgeois writer, a Girondin writer, a theocrat of the intelligence. Yes, the world moves forward, on and on. Initially, it started by crawling, face to the ground, on knees and elbows, rummaging with its snout an earth still soaked with the waters of the deluge, and it fed itself on peat. The vegetation made it smile, and it raised itself on its hands and feet, and it grazed with its muzzle on tufts of grass and the bark of trees. Crouching at the foot of the tree whose height solicited its regard, it dared to lift its head; then it raised its hands to the height of his shoulders, then finally it was standing on its own two feet, and, from this height, it dominated with the weight of its gaze all that which had dominated it the moment before. Then, still so weak and naked, it felt something like a thrill of pride. It had just learned the measure of its own body. The blood which, in the horizontal gait of the man, had buzzed in its ears and deafened it, suffused its eyes and blinded it, flooded its brain and muffled it; this blood, finding its level, like the fluvial waters, the océanide waters, after the flood, this blood flowed back in its natural arteries by the revolution from horizontality to human verticality, clearing his forehead from one temple to the other, and uncovering, for the fertilization, the limon of all the intellectual seeds.

Until then, the human animal had only been a brute among brutes; he had just revealed himself as man. Thought had dawned; it was still in the germinal state, but the seed contained future harvests… The tree in whose shadow the man had stood up bore fruit; he took one of them with his hand, the hand… that hand which until then had been for him only a leg and had served him to drag himself, to advance, now it was going to become the sign of his royal animality, the scepter of his terrestrial power. Having eaten the fruit in his reach, he sees some that his arm cannot reach. So he uproots a young shoot, extends the reach of his arm by means of this stick to the height of the fruit and detaches it from its branch. This stick will soon aid him in his walking, in defending himself against wild beasts or to attack them. After having bitten fruit, he wanted to bite flesh; and off he goes to hunt; and as he has plucked the apple, lo and behold he kills the game. And he makes a fur garment from some animal skins, a shelter with some branches and leaves from trees, those trees who trunks he had grazed yesterday, and whose highest crowns he climbs today in order to seek out the eggs and nestlings of birds. His eyes, which he had held glued to the crust of the soil, now contemplated with majesty the azure sky and all the golden pearls in its splendid jewel case. It is his sovereign crown, king among all those who breathe, and to each of these celestial jewels, he gives a name, and an astronomical value. The instinct that wailed in him has been succeeded by an intelligence which still babbles but will speak tomorrow. His tongue, like his hands, has been untied and both operate at once. He can converse with his fellows and join his hands with theirs, exchange with them ideas and strengths, sensations and feelings. The man is no longer alone, isolated, and feeble; he is a race. He thinks and acts, and he participates by thought and action in all that thinks and acts among other men. Solidarity has been revealed to him. His life is increased by it: he no longer lives only in his individuality, no longer only in the present generation, but in the generations that have preceded him and in those that will follow him. Originally a reptile, he has become a quadruped, from a quadruped a biped, and, standing on his two feet, he advances bearing, like Mercury, wings on his head and heels. Through sight and thought, he rises like an eagle above the clouds and plunges into the depths of the infinite. The coursers that he has tamed lend him their agility in crossing terrestrial spaces; the hollowed trunks of trees cradle him on the waves, some branches carved as paddles serve him as fins. From a simple grazer he has made himself a hunter, then a shepherd, a farmer, and an industrial worker. Destiny has said to him: March! And he marches, always advancing. And he has stolen a thousand secrets from nature; he has shaped wood, molded the earth, forged metals; he has put his stamp on everything around him.

Thus the individual-man has emerged from chaos. He has first vegetated as a mineral or plant; then he has crawled; he advances and aspires to the winged life, to a more rapid and extensive locomotion. Man-humanity is still a fetus, but the fetus develops in the organ of generation, and after its successive phases of growth, it will emerge, free itself finally from the chaos, and, from gravitation to gravitation, attain the fullness of its social faculties.

II.

– God is evil. – Property is Theft. – Slavery is Assassination. — (P.-J. Proudhon) The Family is Evil; it is Theft; it is Assassination.

Everything that was, was necessary. Recriminations would change nothing. The past is the past, and there is no returning there, except to draw some lessons from it for the future.

In the first days of the human being, when men, still feeble in strength and number, were dispersed over the globe and vegetated, rooted and scattered in the forests like bluets in the fields, shocks and strains could hardly occur. Each lived upon the common teat, and it produced abundantly for all. Besides, a little was enough for a man: fruit to eat, leaves for clothing or shelter, such was the trifling sum of his needs. Only, what I observe, the point on which I insist, is that man, from his debut in the world, on emerging from the belly of the earth, at the hour when the instinctive law guides the first movements of newborn beings, at that hour when the great voice of nature speaks into their ears and their destiny is revealed to them by this voice which shows the birds the aerial spaces, the fish the underwater firmaments, and the other animals the plains and forests to roam; which says to the bear: you shall live solitary in your den, to the ant: you shall live in society in the anthill; to the dove: you shall live couple in the same nest, male and female, in the times of love;–man then hears that voice say to him: you will live in community on the earth, free and in fraternity with your fellows; a social being, sociability shall increase your being; rest your head where you will, pick fruits, kill game, make love, eat or drink, you are everywhere at home; everything belongs to you as to all. If you want to do violence to your neighbor, male or female, your neighbor will respond with violence, and, you know, their strength is nearly equal to your own; give free reign to all your appetites, to all your passions, but do not forget that there must be a harmony between your strength and your intelligence, between what pleases you and what pleases others. And, now, go: the earth, on these conditions, will be for you the garden of the Hesperides.

Before arriving at the combination of the races, the Earth, a little girl eager to dabble in generation, hewed and carved from the clay, in the days of its ferment, many shapeless monsters that she then crumpled and tore up with a quiver of anger and a deluge of tears. Every work demands an apprenticeship. And it is necessary to make many defective attempts before arriving at the formation of complete beings, at the composition of species. For the human species, her masterwork, she made the mistake of squeezing the brains a bit and giving a little too much scope to the belly. The development of the one does not correspond to the development of the other. This makes an uneven joint, leading to disharmony. It is not a reproach that I address to her. Could she have done better? No. It was in the inevitable order that it be thus. Everything was rough and savage around man; man must then begin by being rough and savage; too great a delicacy of the senses would have killed him. The sensitive withdraws into itself when the weather is stormy. It only blossoms under the calm and radiant blue.

The day then comes when the increase of the human race surpasses the increase of their intelligence. Man, still on the edge of idiocy, had little rapport with man. His stupefaction makes him fierce. His body is, it is true, much refined from its primitive abjection; he had trained his muscular dexterity well, conquered bodily strength and agility; but his mind, awakened for a moment, had fallen back into its embryonic lethargy threatened to drag on in that state. The intellectual fiber stagnated it its swaddling clothes. The goad of pain became necessary to tear the mind of man from its somnolence and recall him to his social destiny. The fruits became more rare, the chase more difficult: he had to compete for possession. Men were brought together, often in order to fight, but also to lend their support. No matter how, there was contact. Rootless as they were, men and women would pair up; then they would form groups, tribes. The groups had their herds, then their fields, then their workshops. Intelligence was from now on released from it torpor. The voice of necessity cried, March! And they marched. However, all this progress was not accomplished without heartbreak. The development of ideas always lagged behind the development of appetites. Equilibrium, once upset, could not be reestablished. The world advanced, or rather teetered in blood and tears. Iron and flame brought desolation and death everywhere. The strong killed the weak or took possession of them. Slavery and oppression attached themselves like a leprosy to the flanks of humanity. The natural order collapsed.

A supreme moment, which would decide for a long series of centuries the fate of humanity. What would intelligence do? Would it vanquish ignorance? Would it deliver men from the torment of mutual destruction? Would it lead them from this labyrinth where sorrow and hunger wail? Would it show them the road paved with fraternal instincts which leads to liberation, to general happiness? Would it break the odious chains of the patriarchal family? Would it break down the emerging barriers of property? Would it destroy the tablets of the law, the governmental power, that double-edged sword which kills those it should protect? Would it lead to triumph the revolt which always threatens the tyranny which always stirs? Finally, – column of light, principle of life – would it found the anarchic order in equality and liberty or, – funerary urn, essence of death – would it found an arbitrary order on hierarchy and authority? Which would have the upper hand, the fraternal communion of interests or their fratricidal division? Would humanity perish two steps from its cradle?

Alas! Very nearly so! In its inexperience, humanity took the poison for an elixir. It writhed in terrible convulsions. It did not die; but centuries have passed on its head without being able to put an end to the torments that devour it; the poison always burns its innards.

That poison, a mix of nicotine and arsenic, is labeled with a single word: God…

From the day when Man has swallowed God, the sovereign master; from the day when it allowed into its brain the idea of an Elysium and a Tartarus, of a hell and an otherworldly paradise, from that day he was punished because he had sinned. The authority of heaven logically sanctioned authority on the earth. The subject of God became the creature of man. It was no longer a question of free humanity, but of masters and slaves. And it was in vain that, for a thousand years, the legions of Christ died as martyrs to atone for its sin, called original, and deliver it from God and his pomps, from the authority of Church and State.

As the physical world had its deluge, the moral world has had its own as well. Religious faith submerged consciences, brought devastation in minds and hearts. All the robberies of force were legitimated by the ruse. The possession of man by man became taken for granted. From then on the revolt of the slave against the master was suppressed by the lure of heavenly rewards or infernal punishments. Woman was stripped of her titles to the name of human, deprived of her soul, and relegated forever to the rank of the domestic animals. The holy institution of authority covered the ground with temples and fortresses, soldiers and priests, swords and chains, instruments of war and instruments of torture. Property, fruit of conquest, became sacred for the victors and the vanquished, in the insolent hand of the invader as in the flashing eyes of the dispossessed. The family, arranged in a pyramid with the leader at the head, women, children, and servants at the base, the family was consolidated and blessed, and dedicated to the perpetuation of the evil. In the midst of this flood of divine beliefs, the liberty of man sinks down, and with it the instinct for demanding right against fact. All that there was of revolutionary forces, all that there was of vital energy in the struggle for human progress, all of that was drowned, swallowed up; all of that disappeared in the floods of the cataclysm, in the depths of superstition.

Will the moral world, like the physical world, emerge from the chaos someday? Will the light shine in the darkness? Will we witness a new genesis of humanity? Yes, for the idea, that other dove which wanders its surface, the idea which has still not found a patch of earth to gather a palm, the idea sees the level of prejudices, errors, and ignorance diminish day by day under the sky, – that is to say under the skull, – of human intelligence. A new world will issue from the Ark of utopia. And you, silt of the societies of the past, peat of Authority, will serve to fertilize the germination and blossoming of the societies of the Future and to illuminate in the gaseous state the monument of Liberty.

Could that moral cataclysm have been avoided? Was man free to think and act otherwise than he did? We might as well say that the Earth was free to avoid the deluge. Every effect has its cause. And… but here comes an objection that I see coming from far off, which every smug confessor of God will not fail to pose to you, chuckling with delight:

“You say, Mr. Déjacque, that ever effect has a cause. Very well. But then, you recognize God, for in the end the universe was not created all by itself; it is an effect, is it not? And who do you expect created it, if not God?… God is thus the cause of the universe? Ah! Ah! You see, I have you, my poor Mr. Déjacque; you could not escape me. There is no way out.”

“Imbecile! And the cause… of God?”

“The cause of God… the cause of God… Damnation! You know very well that God cannot have a cause, since he is the first cause.”

“But, you brute, if you admit that there is a first cause, then there is no more of anything, and there is no more God, since if God can be its own cause, the universe can perhaps also be the proper cause of the universe. That is as easy as ABC. If, on the contrary, you affirm with me that every effect has its cause, and that consequently there is no cause without a cause, your God must also have one. For in order to be the cause of which the universe is the effect, it must be the effect of a superior cause. What’s more, I want to tell you, the cause of which your God is the effect is not at all of a higher order; very well, it is of a very inferior order; that cause is very simply your cretinism. Go on, that is enough interruption. Silence! And understand this well from now on: you are not the son, but the father of God.

So I say that every effect has its cause. Only, that cause is visible or invisible for us, depending on whether or vision or our thought is more or less perfect, and our vision or our thought is an optical instrument that is very crude, very incomplete.

There is not a being which is not the plaything of circumstances, and man is like the other beings in this respect. He is dependant on his nature and the nature of the objects that surround him, or, to put it better, the beings that surround him, for all these objects have voices which speak to him and constantly modify his education. All of man’s liberty consists of satisfying his nature, of yielding to his attractions. All that he has a right to demand of his fellows is that they do not attack his liberty, the complete development nature. All that they have a right to demand of him is that he does not attack theirs. From his first steps, man having grown prodigiously in strength, and having grown a bit in intelligence as well, although the proportion was not the same, and comparing what he had become with what he had been in the cradle, the man was amazed, dizzied. Pride is innate with him. This sentiment has doomed him; it will also save him. The bourrelet of creation weighed on the head of the human child. It wanted to be rid of it. And as it already have the knowledge of many things, even though there remained many things for it to experience; as it could not explain certain facts, and wanted all the same to explain them, it found nothing better than to expel them from the natural order and relegated them to the supernatural spheres. In its vain ignorance, the terrible child wanted to play with the unknown, it has made a false step, and it has fallen head first on the angle of absurdity. Toddler’s mutiny, wound of youth, of which it will long bear the scar!…

Man, – what pride, and at the same time what childishness! – man has thus proclaimed a God, creator of all things, an idiotic and ferocious God, a God in his own image. That is to say that he had made himself the creature of God. He has laid the egg, he has incubated it and he began to adore his chick, – I was going to say his droppings, – for man must have had a very violent diarrhea of the brain the day when he does the necessary… with such foolishness. The chick naturally has for a henhouse some temples, some churches. Today that chick is an old cock, three-quarters featherless, without crest and spurs, an old carcass so stunted that it hardly deserves to have its neck twisted to put it in the kettle. Science has taken from it, one by one, all of its terrible attributions. And the acrobats in cassocks, who still wander the fairgrounds of the world, no longer have much more of the almighty God than the image displayed on the posters of their shack. And yet that image is still a werewolf for the mass of humanity. Ah! if, instead of kneeling before it, the faithful of the divinity had dared to look into its face, they would see clearly that it was not a real person, but a bad painting, a bit of varnish and mud, a masque all greasy with blood and sweat, an antique masque with which the intriguers cover themselves in order to impose on the simple and rope them in.

Like religion, – the family, property and government have had their cause. It is equally in the ignorance of man. It is a consequence of the nature of his intelligence, more lackadaisical about awakening than the nature of his physical faculties.

Among the beasts, depending on whether the young ones require care for a longer or shorter period of time, the material instinct is more or less developed and is exercised in a more or less different manner, according to the condition suitable for the species. Nature watches over the preservation of the species. Among the wild animals, there are none which live other than in a solitary state: the she-wolf nurses her cubs and seeks her own food; she does not keep company with the male; her strong individuality is all-sufficient. Maternal love doubles her strength. Among the birds, frail and tender creatures, the nightingale, the warbler, the mother incubates her offspring in the nest, the male will go to seek a beakful. There is a union between the two sexes until the day when the living fruits of their love have grown warm down and strong feathers, and they are vigorous enough to cleave the air with the strokes of their wings and go to the fields to harvest their food. Among the insects, the ants and bees, sociable races, the young are raised in common; there, individual marriage does not exist, the nation being one single, indivisible family.

Human young take a long time to raise. The human female could not do it herself, nurse it, cradle it and still provide for her own needs. It is necessary that the man draw closer to her, like the bird with its brood, that he help with the household tasks and bring food and drink back to the cabin.

Man has often been less constant and more brutal than the birds, and maternity has always been a heavier burden than paternity.

That was the cradle of the family.

At the time when the earth was a vast virgin forest, the horizon of man was more limited. He lived like the hare in the limits of its nest. His region did not extent more than a day or two’s journey. The lack of communications made man nearly a stranger to man. Not being cultivated by the society of his fellows, his intelligence remained fallow. Wherever there could be conurbation of men, the progress of their intelligence acquired more strength and more extent. Man, disciple of man, gathered the servile, made a flock of them, confined them in pens. He plowed the fields, sowed the furrows and saw the harvest ripen there. But soon from the depths of the uncultivated forests appeared wild men whom hunger drove from the woods. Isolation kept them in the state of brutes; fasting, under the whip by which they were assembled, made them fierce. Like a pack of furious wolves, they would pass through the middle of these fields, massacring the men, raping and butchering the women, destroying the harvest and driving the herds before them. Later, the would take possession of the fields, establish themselves in the habitations, spare the lives of half of their victims, of whom they would make a herd of slaves. The man was yoked to the plow; the woman took her place with the hens or in the pig sty, destined for the cares of the cooking pot or the obscene appetites of the master.

This armed robbery by violators and murderers, this theft was the kernel of property.

At the news of these robberies, the producers who were not yet conquered assembled in the city, in order to better protect themselves against the invaders. Following the example of the conquerors, whose approach they dreaded, they named a chief or chiefs charged with organizing the public forces and watching over the security of the citizens. Just as the devastating hordes had established conventions which regulated the share of each in the spoils; so they established a legal system to regulate their disagreements and guarantee to each the possession of the instruments of labor. But soon the chiefs would abuse their power. The laborers of the city no longer had to defend themselves only against the abuses from outside, but also against abuses from within. Unknowingly, they had introduced and established the enemy in the heart of the square. Pillage and murder had breached the walls and sat enthroned in the midst of the forum, supported by the authoritarian beams. The republic bore in its entrails its gnawing worm. Government had just been born there.

Certainly, it would be preferable that the family, property, government and religion not invade the domain of facts. But, in this time of individual ignorance and collective improvidence, could it be otherwise? Could infancy not be infancy? Social science, like the other sciences, is the fruit of experiment. Could man hope that nature would disrupt the order of the seasons, and that it would grant him the grape harvest before the flowering of the vine, and the liqueur of harmony before the development of the ideas?

In that era of savage childbirth, when the Earth still bore on her skin the scars of a difficult delivery; when, rolling in her soiled sheets, she still shuddered at the memory of her labor pains, and when in her hours of fever, she twisted and tore at herself, and made floods of sulfur and fire gush from the craters of her breasts; when, in her terrible convulsions, she crushed, laughing a wild laugh, her limbs between the rocks; in that era all peopled with horrors and disasters, with furies and deformities, man, assailed by the elements, was prey to all the fears. Danger surrounded him, and harried him from all sides. His mind and his body were both in peril; but above all he had to concern himself with the body, to save the fleshly globe, the star, in order the preserve the radiance, the mind. Now, I repeat, his intelligence was not at a level with his physical faculties; muscular strength had a step on intellectual force. The latter, moved more slowly than the former, let itself be outdistanced by it, and marched behind it. A day will come when the opposite will be the case, and when intellectual force will surpass physical force in speed; it will be the cart, become a locomotive, which will tow the ox. Everything that is destined to gain high peaks begins first by extending its roots underground before growing towards the light and spreading its foliage there. The oak sprouts less quickly than the grass; the acorn is smaller than the pumpkin; and yet the acorn contains a colossus. A remarkable thing, the child prodigies, little marvels at a young age, are rarely geniuses at the age of maturity. In the fields of men as in the societies of wheat, there are seeds that lie dormant longer beneath the earth which often produce the finest stalk, the richest fruits. Before rising, the sap needs to collect.

Everything that happens afterwards is only the consequence of these three facts, family, property, and government, gather in a single one, which they have all three crowned sanctified,–religion. So I will rapidly pass over all that remains to cross of the past, as I pass over that which is in the zones of the present, in order to arrive more swiftly at the goal, the society of the future, the world of anarchy. In this retrospective sketch of humanity, as in the outline of the future society, my intention is not to make even an abridged history of the march of human progress. I indicate, rather than narrate. It is up to the reader to fill in from memory or intuition what I forget or fail to mention.

III.

Liberty, equality, fraternity! – or death! — (Revolutionary sentence.) An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. — (Moses.)

The world marches. From a pedestrian it made itself a cavalier, navigator of the road. Commerce, that conquest, and conquest, that other commerce, galloped on the gravel of the great ways and sailed on the flood of the marine plains. The chests of the camels and the prows of the ships cut across the deserts and the Mediterraneans. Horses and elephants, oxen and chariots, sails and galleys maneuvered under the hand of man and traced their furrow on the earth and on the wave. The idea penetrated with the sword in the flesh of the populations, it circulated in their veins with the foodstuffs of all climates, it was reflected in their sight with the merchandise of all countries. The horizon had expanded. Man had marched, first from the family to the tribe, then from the tribe to the city, and finally from the city to the nation. Asia, Africa, and Europe no longer formed but one continent; the armies and caravans had bridged the distances. India, Egypt, Greece, Carthage and Rome had overflowed one on the other, rolling in their current blood and gold, iron and fire, life and death; and, like the waters of the Nile, they had borne with the devastation a fertilizing manure for the arts and sciences, industry and agriculture. The flood of the ravagers having passed by or been absorbed by the conquered people, progress hastened to lift its head and to furnish a finer and more ample harvest. India first, then Egypt, then Greece, then Rome had each shone in their turn on the undulations of men and had matured their head [intelligence] a little. Architecture, statuary, and letters already formed a magnificent sheaf. In its revolutionary flight, philosophy, like an electric fluid, still wandered in the clouds, but it growled softly and occasionally sent out some sparks while waiting to rid itself of its shackles and produce the thunderbolt. All-powerful Rome had one foot in Persia and the other in Armorica. Like the divine Phoebus driving the chariot of the sun, it held in its hands the reins of light and shone on the world. But it its triumphal course, it had passed its zenith and entered into its decadent phase. Its proconsular dictatorship bordered on its decline. It had indeed, at some distance, triumphed over the Gauls and Carthaginians; it had wiped out, in blood and nearly at its gates, a formidable insurrection of slaves; one hundred thousand Spartacuses had perished, arms in hand, cut to the heart by the swords of the civic legions; the broken links had been resoldered and the chain rendered weightier by the idea. But the she-wolf had been frightened. And that struggle, where it had been necessary to spend the better part of its strength, that struggle to the death had exhausted it. – Oh! In recalling to myself those great June days of ancient times, that immense barricade raised by the gladiators before the privileged of the Republic and the armies of the Capitol; oh! I cannot help thinking in these modern times of that other levee of shields of the proletarians, and to salute across the centuries, – I, the vanquished of the banks of the Seine, – the vanquished of the banks of the Tiber! The noise made by such rebellions is not lost in the night of time, it reverberates from fiber to fiber, from muscle to muscle, from generation to generation, and it will have its echo on the earth as long as society will be a den of exploiters!…

The gods of the Capitol grew old, Olympus crumbled, undermined by a new heresy. The pagan Gospel had become unreadable. The progress of time had corroded its letter and spirit. Progress produced the Christian fable. The Empire had followed the Republic, the Caesars and emperors the tribunes and consuls. Rome was always Rome. But the debauched praetorians, the auctioneers of empire had replaced the recruiters of people, the bloody pioneers of universal unity. The Roman eagles were no longer deployed to the murmur of strong breezes, their weary eyes could not longer gaze at the great lights. The dull torches of the orgy alone suited their aging pupils; the exploits of the circus and the hippodrome were enough for their bellicose caducity. Like Jupiter, the eagle appeared old. The time of moral decomposition had arrived. Rome was now hardly a shadow of Rome. The sewer was its Acheron, and it drifted, drunk with abjection and led by the steersman of decadence, towards the resting place of the dead.

In those days, as life appears in the breast of cadavers, as vegetation emerges from putrefaction; in those days, Christianity swarmed in the catacombs, sprouted underground, and pushed like grass through the pores of society. The more it was mowed down the more strength it acquired.

Christianity, work of the Saint-Simonians of the era, has a revolutionary character more superficial than profound. The formalists follow one after another and… resemble one another. It is always [a matter] of universal theocracy, God and the pope; never-ending authority, both celestial and terrestrial, the begetting father and the Père Enfantin, but also father Cabet and the Almighty Father, the Supreme Being and the holy father Robespierre; hierarchy of all degrees, command and submission at every instant, the shepherd and the lamb, the victim and the sacrificer. It is always the herdsman, the dogs and the flock, God, the priests and the mob. To the extent that it will be a question of divinity, the divinity will always have as a consequence in humanity, – at the summit, – the pontiff or the king, the man-God; the altar, the throne, or the seat of authority; the tiara, the crown, or the presidential gown: the personification on the earth of the sovereign master of the heavens. – At the basis, – slavery or servitude, the system of helots or the proletariat; the fasting of the body and the intelligence; the rags of the attic or the rags of the penal colony; the work and the fleece of the brutes, the work skimmed, the fleece sheared, and the flesh itself devoured by the rich. – And between these two terms, between the base and the summit, – the clergy, the army, the bourgeoisie; the church, the barracks, the shop; theft, murder, cunning; man, lackey to his superiors, and arrogant lackey to his inferiors, crawling as the reptiles crawl, and, sometimes, rearing up and hissing like them.

Christianity was all of that. In the evangelical utopia there was much more chaff than wheat, and the wheat has been stifled by the chaff. Christianity, in reality, has been much more a conservation than a revolution. But, from its appearance, there was in it some sap/lifeblood subversive of the old social order. That is what raised woman from her inferiority and proclaimed her the equal of man; what broke the irons in the thought of the slave and opened to him the doors of a world where the damned of this one would be the elect of that. There had already been in some parts revolts of Amazons, as there had been revolts of helots. But it is not in the destiny of man and woman to march divided and exclusively from one another. The Christ, or rather the multitude of Christs that the name personifies, took them by the hand, made brothers and sisters of them, gave them the word for a sword, future immortality for a place to conquer. Then, from the height of his cross, he showed them the circus: and all the free recruits, these volunteers of the religious revolution set forth, – hearts beating and courage in their faces, to the lion’s maw, to the blaze of the pyre. Man and woman mixed their blood in the arena and received side by side the baptism of the martyr. Woman was not the least heroic. It is her heroism which decided the victory. These young girls tied to a post and delivered to the teeth of the flames or eaten alive by ferocious beasts; these gladiators without defenses, who died with such good grace and with so much charm; these women, these Christians bearing on their brows the halo of enthusiasm, all these massacres, become apotheoses, ended by impressing the spectators and by stirring them in favor of the victims. They would espouse their beliefs. The martyrs moreover rose from their ashes. The circus, which had massacred so many of them, always massacred them, and always armies of assailants came to stretch out their necks and die there. In the end, however, the circus admitted its defeat, and the victorious emblems of Christendom were displayed on the walls of the field of carnage. Christianity would become Catholicism. The good grain, exhausted, would give way completely to the bad.

The grandeur of Rome no longer existed but in name. The empire struggled like a castaway in the midst of an ocean of barbarians. That rising tide overran the Roman possessions and breached the walls of the imperial city. Rome succumbed to the fury of the waves [lames]. Pagan civilization had had its dawn, its zenith, its setting; now it tied up the bloody glimmer of its last rays in the gloomy immensities. Following that tempest, all that there was of scum at the heart of society tossed on its surface and sat in state on the crest of these barbaric intelligences. The successors of the apostles tainted in its dignity the virginity of Christianity. The fraternal immaculate conception aborted on its bed of triumph. The doctors in charge of the delivery had introduced into the maternal organ a killing solvent, and the drug had produced its effect. On the day of delivery, the fetus no longer gave signs of life. Then, in place of the aborted fraternity, they put the young from their own loins, a monster half authority and half servility. The barbarians were too uncouth to perceive the fraud, and they worshipped the usurpation of the Church as a legitimate thing. To propagate the new cult, to take around the cross and banner was the mission of barbarism. Only, in these hands used to wielding the sword, they reversed the image of the crucified. They throttled the crucifix by the head, which they took for the handle, and put its point in the air like a blade out of a sheath.

However, these great displacements of men did not occur without shifting some barriers in their passage. Some properties and nationalities were modified. Slavery become servitude. The patriarchate/patriarchy had had its days of splendor, it was now the turn of the prelacy and the barony. Military and religious feudalism covered the ground with keeps and steeples. The baron and the bishop were the powerful then. The federation of these demi-gods formed the empire of which the kings and the popes were the master-gods, the suzerain lords. – The Middle Ages, nocturnal disk, rose on the horizon. The bees of science no longer had anywhere to deposit their honey, if it was not in some monastery cell; and still the very holy catholic inquisition would infiltrate there the pincers and red iron in the hand to destroy the precious deposit and torture the philosophical swarm. Already it was no longer the shadows of the twilight but the funereal veils of the night which glided over the manuscripts of antiquity. The darkness was so thick that it seemed that humanity must never escape from it. Eighteen times the tolling of the centuries rang on the clock of time before the huntress Diana shot like an arrow the first rays of the dawn in the heart of that long night. Only once during those eighteen centuries of barbarism or civilization, – call them what you will, – one single time, the giant Humanity stirred beneath its chains. He would have still endured the tithe and the land tax, the corvée and the hunger, the lash and the gallows, but the violation of his flesh, the odious seigneurial rights weighed too heavily on his heart. The titan convulsively clenched its fists, gnashed its teeth, opened its mouth, and an eruption of torches and pitchforks, of stones and scythes flowed out over the lands of the seigneurs; and château-forts collapsed and chatelaines loaded with crimes ground under the debris. The wildfire that lowly vassals had kindled, which enlightened/illuminated for an instant the somber feudal period, was extinguished in their own blood. The Jacquerie, like Christianity, had its martyrs. The war of the peasants of France, like that of the helots of Rome, led to defeat. The Jacques, those legitimate sons of the Christs and the Spartacuses, would share the fate of their ancestors. There would soon be no more of that rebellion than a bit of ash. The emancipation of the communes was all that resulted from it. Only the notables among the villagers would profit from it. But the spark brooded under the ashes and should later produce a general conflagration: 89 and 93 would blaze over the world.

We know that era too well for it to be necessary to revisit it. I will say just one thing: what doomed the Revolution of 93, was first, as always, the ignorance of the masses, and then it was the Montagnards, people more unruly than revolutionary, more agitated than agitators. What doomed the Revolution, was the dictatorship, it was the committee of public safety, royalty in twelve persons superimposed on a vast body of citizen-subjects, who from them on became accustomed to be nothing more than the enslaved limbs of the great mind, to having no other will than the will of the head that dominated them; so much that, the day when that head was decapitated, there would be no more republicans. The head dead, the body dies. The chattering multitude clapped their hands at the Thermidorian representation, as it clapped its hands before the trestles of the Decemvirs and as it clapped its hands at the spectacle of the [coup of] 18 Brumaire. They had wanted to dictate to the masses, they had worked at their exhaustion by stripping them of all initiative, by making them abdicate all individual sovereignty. They had subjugated them in the name of the Republic and by the yoke of the conductors of the res publica; the Empire only had to yoke this cattle to its chariot to be cheered by it. While if, on the contrary, we had left to each the task of representing himself, of being his on agent; if this committee of public safety was composed of the thirty millions inhabitants who peopled the territory of the Republic, that is to say of all that which in this number, men or women, were of an age to think and act; if the necessity then had forced each to seek, in his initiative or in the initiative of his close relations, the proper measures to safeguard their independence; if one had reflected more carefully and that we have seen that the social body like the human body is not the inert slave of thought, but rather a sort of animated still [alambic] the free function of whose organs produces thought; that the thought is only the quintessence of that anarchy of evolution the unity of which is caused by the attractive forces alone; finally, if the Montagnard bourgeoisie had had less monarchic instincts; if it had only wanted to count as one drop among others in the arteries of the revolutionary flood, instead of posing like a pearl/bead crystallized/precipitated on its flood, like an authoritarian gem set in its foam; if it had wanted to revolutionize the heart of the masses instead of enthroning itself over them and claiming to govern them: doubtless the French armies would not have disemboweled nations with cannon shots, planted the tricolor flag over all the European capitals, and slap with the slanderous and so-called honorary title of French citizen all the conquered people; doubtless not. But the genius of liberty would have made men everywhere inside as outside; but each man had become an impregnable citadel, each intelligence an inexhaustible arsenal, each arm an invincible army to combat despotism and destroy it in all its forms; but the Revolution, that Amazon with the fascinating eye, that conqueror of man by humanity, would have struck up some great social Marseillaise, and unfold over the earth its scarlet scarf, the rainbow of harmony, the radiant purple of unity!…

The Empire, restoration of the Caesars, led to the restoration of the old monarchy, which was a progress over the Empire: and the restoration of the old monarchy led to 1830, which was a progress from 1815. But what progress! A progress in idea much more than in facts.

Since the ages of antiquity, the sciences had constantly gained ground. The Earth is no longer a solid and immobile surface, as we formerly believed in the days of a creator-God, ante- or ultra-diluvian monster. No: the earth is a globe always in motion. The heavens are no longer a ceiling, the floor of a paradise or an Olympus, a sort of vault painted in blue and festooned with golden corbels; it is an ocean of fluid of which neither the eyes nor the thoughts can plumb the depths. The stars, like the suns roll in that azure wave, and are worlds gravitating, like our own, in their vast orbits, and with an animated pupil under their luminous lashes. This definition of the Circulus: “Life is a circle in which we can find neither beginning nor end, for, in a circle, all the points of the circumference are the beginning or end;” that definition, taking some more universal proportions, will receive an application closer to the truth, and thus become more understandable to the common. All these globes circulating freely in the ether, attracted tenderly by these, repulsed gently by those, all obeying only their passion, and finding in their passion the law of their mobile and perpetual harmony; all these globes turning first by themselves, then grouping together with other globes, and forming what is called, I believe, a planetary system, a colossal circumference of globes voyaging in concert with more gigantic planetary systems, from circumference to circumference, always extending, and always finding new worlds to increase their volume and always unlimited spaces in which to execute their progressive evolutions; in the end, all these globes of globes and their continuous movement can only give a spherical idea of the infinite, and demonstrate by irrefutable arguments, – arguments that one can touch with the eye and the thought, – that anarchic order is universal order. For a sphere that always turns, and in every sense, a sphere which has neither beginning nor end, can have neither high nor low, and consequently neither a god at the summit nor a devil at the base. The Circulus in universality dethrones divine authority and proves its negation by proving the movement, as the circulus in humanity dethrones the governmental authority of man over man and proves it absurd by proving movement. Just as the globes circulate anarchically in universality, so men should circulate anarchically in humanity, under the sole impetus of sympathies and antipathies, reciprocal attractions and repulsions. Harmony can only exist by anarchy. That is the whole solution of the social problem. To desire to resolve it otherwise, is to want deny Galileo eternally, to say that the earth is not a sphere, and that this sphere does not revolve. And yet it turns, I will repeat with that poor old man who was condemned to perjure himself, and accepted the humiliation of life in order, no doubt, to save his idea. With this great authoricide, I forgive his apparent cowardice in favor of his science: it is not only the Jesuits who believe that the end justifies the means. The idea of the Circulus in universality is in my eyes a subject of too great scope to devote to it only these few lines; I will return to it. While awaiting more complete developments, I call on revolutionaries to meditate on this passage.

Thus, from discovery to discovery, the sciences advance. New continents, the two Americas, Australia, was grouped around the old. One of the proclaimers of American independence, Franklin, snatched the lightning from the hands of Jehovah, and science made of it a domestic force which travels on a thread of iron with the speed of a flash and fetch you the response to the word that you throw it, with the docility of a dog. Fulton tamed steam, that amphibious locomotive, that Salomon de Caus had grasped by the throat. He muzzled it and gave it for armor the hull of a ship, and he took advantage of some muscular fins to replace the capricious wingspan of the sails. And the strength of the hydra is so great that it laughs at winds and waves, and it is so well tamed that it obeys with an incredible suppleness to the least pressure of the helmsman.

On land, on roads lined with rails, the monster the body of iron and the raucous voice, with flaming lungs, leaves for behind it the tender, the coucou [a kind of carriage] and the stage-coach. At the signal of the one who mounts it, at a light tap of the stirrup, it leaves, dragging in tow a whole avenue of rolling houses, the population of a whole quarter of town, and that with a speed which prevails over the flight of the bird. In the factories, slave to the thousand cogs, it work with a marvelous dexterity at the most delicate labors as at the crudest work. Typography, that magnificent invention by means of which we sculpt the word and reproduce it in thousands of copies, typography owes it a new development. It is it which weaves the cloth, dyes it, waters it, stitches it, it which saws the wood, files the iron, polishes the steel; it finally which fashions a mass of instruments of labor and objects of consumption. In the fields, it clears, it labors, it sows, it harrows and it reaps; it grinds the grain under the millstone; the milled wheat, it bears to the city, it kneads it and makes it into bread: it is an encyclopedic laborer. Without doubt, in society as it is organized, the steam machine displaces many existences/livelihoods and has competed successfully with [human] arms. But what is that but a partial and passing evil, in comparison with the general and final results? It is it that clears the roads of the future. In Barbarism as in Civilization, which in our days are synonymous, progress can make a road only by passing over corpses. The era of peaceful progress will only open on the bones of the civilized world, when monopoly will have given the last gasp and the products of labor will be in the public domain.

Astronomy, physics, chemistry, all the sciences, to put it better, had progressed. Social science alone had remained stationary. Since Socrates who drank the hemlock, and Jesus who was crucified, it had no great light. When, in the most squalid regions of society, in something very differently contemptible than a stable, in a shop, was born a great reformer. Fourier came to discover a new world where all the individualities have a value necessary to the collective harmony. The passions are the instruments of the living concert which has for a bow the fiber/disposition of the attractions. It was hardly possible that Fourier would entirely reject the habit; he preserved, despite himself, from his commercial education, bourgeois tradition, some prejudices in favor of authoritarian and servitude which made him deviate from absolute liberty and equality, from anarchy. Nonetheless, I take off my hat to this bourgeois, and I recognize in him an innovator, a revolutionary. As much as the other bourgeois are dwarfish, so much that one is a giant. His name will remain inscribed in the memory of humanity. 1848 arrived, and revolutionary Europe caught fire like a powder-trail. June, that jacquerie of the nineteenth century, protested against the modern abuses of the new seigneur. The violation of the right to work and of the right to love, the exploitation of man and woman by gold raised up the proletariat and put weapons in its hands. The feudalism of capital trembled on its bases. The great barons of usury and the baronets of small business walled themselves up in their counting-houses, and from the height of their platform launch at the insurrection enormous blocs of armies, boiling floods of mobile guards. By means of Jesuitical tactics they managed to crush the revolt. More than thirty thousand rebels, men, women and children, were cast into the dungeons of the hulks and blockhouses. Countless prisoners were shot, in defiance of a placard posted at all the street-corners, which invited the insurgents to lay down their arms and declared that there would be neither victors nor vanquished, but only brother, – warring brothers, they meant! The roads were littered with bits of brains. The disarmed proletarians were crammed in the vaults of the Tuileries, the Hôtel de Ville, and the Ecole Militaire, in the stables of the barracks, in the quarries of Ivry, in the ditches of the Champ-de-Mars, in all the cesspits of the capital of the civilized world, and massacred there with all the refinements of cruelty! Shots rained through all the basement windows, lead fell in the guise of bread in these cesspools where, among the rales of the dying, the bursts of mad laughter, – they splashed in the blood and piss up to the knees, asphyxiated by the lack of air and tortured by hunger and thirst. The neighborhoods were treated, as in the Middle Ages, as a place taken by storm. The archers of civilization would go up in the houses, descend into the cellars, probing all the nooks and crannies, passing the blade of the bayonet through anything that appeared suspect. Between the dismantled barricades and the place of each cobblestone one could have put the head of a corpse… Never, since the world began, had we seen such slaughter. And not only the national guards of the city and the province, the industrialists and the shopkeepers, the bourgeois and their satellites would commit after the combat a thousand and one atrocities; but even the women, the women of the shop and of the salon, would show themselves till more relentless then their husbands in the bloody scramble. It was they who, from the height of balconies, waves the scarfs; they who cast flowers, ribbons, and kisses to the troops conducting the convoys of prisoners; they who insulted the vanquished; they who demanded with loud cries and with dreadful words that they shoot before their door and hang from their shutters these chained lions whose roaring had made them grow pale in the midst of their agio or their orgy; they who, at the passage of these gigantic victims of torture, spat in their faces these words, which for many were a sentence: To death! To the garbage!… Ah! Those women were not women, but females of the bourgeois!

They thought they had destroyed Socialism in the blood. They had, on the contrary, just given it the baptism of life! Crushed in the public square, it took refuge in the clubs, in the workshops, like Christianity in the catacombs, recruiting proselytes everywhere. Far from destroying the sentence, the persecution had made it germinate. Today, like the grain of wheat under the snow, the seed is buried under money, victor over labor. But let time pass, let the thaw arrive, let the liquidation melt with a spring sun all that cold display of lucre, that metallic blanket heaped up in layers on the breast of the proletariat; let the revolutionary season emerge from the Fish of February [Pisces] and enter into the sign of Aries, and we will see Socialism lift up its head and follow its zodiacal momentum until it has reached the figure of the Lion, – until the grain has produced its ear.

As 89 had its rebellious angel: Mirabeau, launching from the heart of the Jeu de Paume [Tennis Court], that fierce/bloody apostrophe at the brow of the aristocracy: “Go say to your master that we are here by the will of the people, and that we will only leave by the force of bayonets!”, 48 also had it Proudhon, another rebellious spirit, who in a book, had spit that fatal conclusion in the face of the bourgeoisie: “Property, it is theft!” Without 48, that truth would have long rested ignored in the depths of some library of the privileged. 48 has brought it to light, and given it for setting the advertisement of the daily press, the full blown abundance/diversity of the clubs: it has been etched in the thought of each laborer. The great merit of Proudhon is not to have been always logical, far from it, but of having provoked others to seek logic. For the man who also said: “God is evil, – Slavery is assassination, Charity is a mystification”, – and so on; the man who has demanded with so much force the liberty of man; that same man, alas! has also attacked the liberty of woman: he has banned for from society, he has declared her outside of humanity. Proudhon is still only a fraction of revolutionary genius; half of his being is paralyzed, and it is unfortunately the side of the heart. Proudhon has anarchic tendencies, but he is not an anarchist; he is not humanity, he is masculinity. But if, – as reformer, there are flaws to that diamond, – as agitator, it has some dazzling gleams. Certainly, that is something. And the Mirabeau of the Proletariat has no reason to envy the Mirabeau of the Bourgeoisie; he has surpassed him with all the loftiness of his groundbreaking intelligence. The one was only a single surge of rebellion, he was a flash, a glimmer rapidly extinguished in the darkness of corruption. The other made thunder clap after thunder clap reverberate. He has not only threatened, he has struck down the old social order. Never has a man crushed in his passage so many age-old abuses, so many so-call legitimate superstitions.

89 was the 48 of the insurgent Bourgeoisie against the nobility; 48, the 89 of the insurgent Proletariat against the Bourgeoisie. See you soon, 93!

And now, pass on provisional authorities: white republic, as long ago called for it a famous poet who feared then that one would melt down the Vendome Column to make two pieces of it. Pass on, blue republic and red republic, republic called moderate and honest, as it made of men known as devoted, doubtless because these men and that republic were neither one nor the other. Pass too, pashaism of Cavaignac the African, hideous Othello, jealous of the form, who stabbed the Republic in the heart because it had some social leanings. Pass, Napoleonic presidency, emperor and empire, pontificate of theft and murder, catholicity of mercantile, Jesuitical and soldierly interests. Pass, pass, last glimmers of the lamp [of] Civilization and, before you go out, make move on the panes of the temple of Plutus [the Bourse?] the bourgeois shadows of that great seraph. Pass, pass, dying light, and illuminate in receding the nightly rounds of the courtesans of the present regime, phantoms grouped around the specter of Sainte-Hélène, that whole phantasmagoria of titled, mitered, tasseled, silvered, coppered, verdigrised revenants, that bohemia of court, of sacristy, of shop and backroom, sophisticated sorcery of the imperial Sabbat. Pass! pass! The dead go fast!…

Go on, Caesar, in that den of vice that they called the Tuileries, satisfy your obscene whims: caress these ladies, and these flasks, empty the cup of princely delights; sleep, Masters, on cushions of smooth satin, or velvet pillows. That elysian whorehouse is well worthy of your old hovel of Hay-Market. Go on, ex-constable of London, take your scepter in hand, and beat them all, these great lackey-lords, and that whole people lackeys of your lackeys; bend them further still under the weight of your despotism and your abjection. Go on, providential man, break the bones of this skeleton society; reduce it to powder, so that one day the Revolution will have nothing to do but breath over it to make it disappear.

Priests, intone the Te Deum over the planks of your churches. Baptize, catechize, confess, marry and bury the living and the dead; sprinkle the word with sermons and holy water in order to exorcise the demon of free thought.

Soldiers, sing the dregs and the foam, the red intoxications. Kill at Sebastopol and kill in Paris. Bivouac in the blood and the wine and the sputum; empty your tins and empty your rifles; smash human skulls and make their brains gush out; unstop tons of spirit, make them flow in a purple stream, and wallow in this stream to drink full gulps… Victory! soldiers: you have, in the number of 300 thousand, and after two years of hesitation, taken the ramparts of Sebastopol, defended by the fair-haired children of Russia; and, 500 thousand strong, and after one or two nights of ambush, you have conquered, with a wholly military bravura, the boulevards of Paris, these boulevards where parade, arm in arm, an army of strollers of all ages and all sexes. Soldiers! you are brave, and from the depths of his grave [Louis-Auguste] Papavoine contemplates you!…

Judges, informers, legislators and executioners, track, deport, guillotine, penalise the good and the bad according to the code, that proliferation of malcontents who, encountering you, nibblers and devourers of budgets, do not think that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Manipulators of the scales of justice, weigh in the weight of gold the culpability for the social demands. – Bankers, shopkeepers, factory owners, leeches of production for whom the producer is such a pleasant prey, reach out your trunks, grasp the proletariat by the throat, suck all the gold from his veins. Speculate, trade, engage in usury, exploit; make holes in the worker’s smock and holes in the moon. Rich men, fatten your paunch and thin the flesh of the poor. – Lawyers, plead the pro and the con, the black and the white; dispossess the widow and orphan for the profit of the influential prevaricator, and the small artisan for the profit of the large industrialist. Provoke trials among the proprietors, until society convenes your trial and that of property. Lend to the criminal tribunals the support of your parodies of defense, and so exonerate the sentence, under the pretext of exonerating the accused. – Bailiffs, solicitors and notaries, write on paper stamped with acts of property or piracy; dispossess these and invest in those; frolic like caterpillars on the rich and fertile summits, in order to drain more quickly the sap which from lower layers rises without ceasing to feed them. – Doctors of Public Education, who have the ability/faculty to mercurialize the children of society in the name of the university or clerical, cretinism, spank the girls and boys and then spank them again. – Graduates of the Faculty of Medicine for the mercurial and arsenical medication, authorize the sick, experiment on the proletarians and torture them on the beds of your hospitals. Go on, empiricals, not only your certificate of scientific incapacity and parochial rapacity authorizes you to it, but you have, moreover, the guarantee of the government. Do it, and if only you are in possession of an aristocratic clientele and a right-thinking character, the head of State will detach from his crown a star of gold to hang from your buttonhole.

All of you, finally, who luxuriate in shame, abusers of authority on whom fortune smiles, as the prostitutes smile on the doorsteps of the houses of ill repute; debauchees of the Christian decadence, corrupters and corrupted, stamp, stamp on the “vile multitude,” soil it with your much, wound it with your heels, try to kill its decency, its intelligence, its life; do it, and do it again!…

And then, after…?

Will you prevent the sun from shining and progress from following its course? No, for you could not make it so that usury is not usury, that poverty is not poverty, that bankruptcy is not bankruptcy, and that revolution is not revolution!!…

Oh, Bourgeois, you who have never produced anything but abuses, and who dream of eternal satisfactions by managing your momentary satisfactions, tell me, Bourgeois, when you pass now through the streets, don’t you sense something like a shadow that follows you, something that goes and does not lose your trail? As long as you are standing, dressed in the imperial livery, as in a breast-plate, as long as you have regimented bayonets for crutches, and the blade of the guillotine tops this immense body of weapons, with the penal catechism on one side and the religious code on the other; as long as capital shines on all of that like a sun of Austerlitz, Bourgeois, you will have nothing to fear from the wolf, the hyena or the ghost whose scent frightens you. But, on the day when a veil passes over the sun; the day when your livery will be worn down to threads, the day when, shivering in your nudity, you stumble from misstep to misstep and roll to the ground, alarmed, terrified; the day when you fall back from Moscow to Berezina; oh! that day, I say to you, woe to you! The wolf, the hyena, or the ghost will open you at the belly and the throat, and it will devour your entrails, and it will tear into shreds you livery and your limbs, your bundles of bayonets and you catechisms and codes. Then it will be over for your utopia of capital. Like a kite whose string is broken, your sun of gold will plunge into the abyss. Paris will become your Waterloo; and Waterloo, you know, leads to St. Helena… In truth, in truth I tell you, there will be neither pity nor mercy for you. “Remember June!” they will shout at you. Eye for eye and tooth for tooth! – Bourgeois, bourgeois, you have been too Jewish to know the law of Moses…

Ah! Always iron, lead and fire! Always fratricide among men! Always victors and vanquished! When will the time of bloody trials cease? Will Civilization, which eats cadavers, finally die from indigestion?

When then will men understand that Authority is evil;

– That Property, which is also authority, is evil;

– That the Family, which is still authority, is evil;

– That Religion, which is always authority, is evil;

– That Legality, Constitutionality, Regulativity, Contractality, which are all authority, are evil, still evil, always evil!

Genius of Anarchy, spirit of future centuries, deliver us from evil!!!

Second Part. Anarchic Utopia

Prelude

Dream, Idea, Utopia Daughters of right, sylphs of my dreams, Equality! Liberty! my loves! Will you always only be lies! Fraternity! Will you always flee from us! No, n’est-ce pas ? my darling goddesses; The day approaches when the ideality The old clock-face of reality Will mark the hour of utopias!… Dear utopia, ideal of my heart, Oh! defy one more the ignorance and error. — (Les Lazaréennes)

What is a utopia? A dream unrealized, but not unrealizable. The utopia of Galileo is now a truth; it has triumphed despite the sentence of his judges: the earth turns. The utopia of Christopher Columbus was realized despite the clamor of his detractors: a new world, America, has risen at his call from the depths of the Ocean. What was Salomon de Caus? A utopian, a madman, but a madman who discovered steam. And Fulton? Another utopian. Instead, ask the academicians of the Institute and their emperor and master, Napoleon, called the Great… Great like the prehistoric monsters, with stupidity and ferocity. All innovative ideas were utopias at their birth; age alone, by developing them, makes them enter the world of the real. The seekers of ideal happiness, like the searchers for the philosopher’s stone, will never realize their utopia absolutely, but their utopia will be the cause of humanitary progress. Alchemy did not succeed in making gold, but it has drawn from its crucible something good more precious than a vain metal; it has produced a science, chemistry. Social science will be the work of the dreamers of perfect harmony.

Humanity, that conquering immortal, is an army corps that has its vanguard in the future and its rearguard in the past. To move the present and pave its way, it must have its outposts of skirmishers, lost sentries who shoot the idea at the limits of the Unknown. All the great stages of humanity, its forced marches on the terrain of social conquest have only been established in the steps of the guides of thought. “Forward!” cried these explorers of the Future, standing on the alpine summits of utopia. “Halt!” grumbled the laggards of the Past, squatting in the ruts of mired reactions. “March!” responded the genius of Humanity. And the great revolutionary masses set off at its voice.—Humanity! On the road of future centuries I fly the flag of the anarchic utopia, and cry to you: “Forward!” Let the stragglers of the Past sleep in their cowardly immobility and find death there. Respond to their death-rattle, to their deathly groans with a resounding call to movement, to life. Put the clarion of Progress to your lips, take your insurrectionary drumsticks in your hands, and beat and sound the marching tune.

—March! March!! March!!!

Today when steam exists in all its virility, and electricity exists in an infant state; today when locomotion and navigation are made with great speed; that there are no longer Pyrenees, nor Alps, nor deserts, nor oceans; today when the printing house publishes the word in hundreds of thousands of copies and commerce peddles in even the most unknown corners of the globe; today when exchange by exchange we open the ways of unity; today when the labors of generations have formed, stage by stage and arch by arch, this gigantic aqueduct that pours across the present world torrents of science and enlightenment; today when the motive and the force of expansion exceeds all that the most utopian dreams of ancient times could imagine of the grandeur of modern times; today when the word “impossible” scratched out of the human dictionary; today when man, new Phoebus directing the advance of steam, warms up the vegetation and produces where he pleases greenhouses where sprout, grow and flower the plants and trees of all climates, an oasis that the traveler encounters in the midst of the snow and ice of the North; today when human genius, in the name of its suzerainty, has taken possession of the sun, that focus of brilliant artists, when it has captured its rays, chained them in its workshop, and constrained them, like servile vassals, to etch and paint its image on zinc plates or sheets of paper; today, finally, when every march takes giant’s steps, is it possible that Progress, that giant among giants, will continue to advance softly, softly [piano-piano] on the railways of social science? No, no. I tell you that it will change its pace; it will put itself in step with steam and electricity, and it will struggle with them with peace and agility. Woe then to those who want to stop it in its course: they will be spewed out in shreds on the other side of the tracks by the cowcatcher of the colossal locomotive, that cyclops with an eye of fire that tows with all the heat of hell the satanic procession of humanity, and which, standing up on its axles, advances, brow high and head lowered, along the straight way of anarchy, shaking in the air its brown hair studded with sparks of flame! Woe to those who would want to go against this rolling volcano! All the gods of the ancient and modern worlds are not big enough to measure up to this new Titan. Make way! Make way! Step aside, crowned cowherds, merchants of human livestock who return from Poissy with your cart, Civilization. Pull over, Lilliputian bully-boys, and make way for utopia. Make way! Make way for the forceful breath of the Revolution! Step aside, money-changers and forgers of chains, make way for the idea-changers, to the forger of the thunderbolt!…

— I had hardly finished writing these lines when I was forced to stop, as I have been forced to do quite often in the course of this work. The excessive stress on all my faculties, to lift and cast off the burden of ignorance which weighs on my head, that fanatic over-excitement of thought, acting on my weak temperament, made tears pour from my eyes. I choked and sobbed. Blood beat in my temples and raised in my brain some torrential waves, boiling flood that my arteries did not stop precipitate there through all their channels. And while with the right hand I tried to contain and calm the frantic activity of my brow, with the left hand I tried in vain to contain the accelerated pulsations of my heart. The air no longer reached my lungs. I tottered like a drunken man, going to open the window of my room. I approached my bed and threw myself down on it.—I asked myself: Was I going to lose life or reason? And I got up, not being able to remain lying down, and I lay down again, unable to remain standing. It seemed to me that my head would explode, and that someone twisted my breasts with pliers. I choked: iron muscles grasped my by the throat… Ah! The Idea is a lover who in its ardent embraces bites you until you cry out, and only leaves you a moment, breathless and spent, to prepare yourself for new and more ardent caresses. To woo her, if you are not strong in science, you must be brave in intuition. “Back!” she says to the rogues and cowards, “You are unbelievers!” And she leaves them to mope outside the shrine. That languorous, splendid and passionate mistress requires men of saltpeter and bronze for lovers. Who knows how many days each of her kisses costs! Once the spasm subsided, I sat down at my desk. The Idea came to sit beside me. And, my head resting on her shoulder, one hand in her hand and the other in the curls of her hair, we exchanged a long look of calm intoxication. I went back to writing, and in her turn she leaned on me. and I felt her soft contact reawaken the eloquence in my brain and in my heart, and her breath again inflamed mine. After rereading what I had written, and in thinking of that inert mass of prejudices and ignorance that it was necessary to transform into active individualities, into free and studious intelligences, I felt a hint of doubt slip into my mind. But the Idea, speaking in my ear, soon dispelled it. A society, she told me, which in its most obscure strata, under the blouse of the worker, feels such revolutionary lava rumble, storms of sulfur and fire such as circulate in your veins; a society in which are found some disinherited to write what you have written, and thus appeal to all the rebellions of arms and intelligence; a society where such writings find presses to print them and men to clasp the hands of their authors; where these authors, who are proletarians, still find bosses to employ them,—with exceptions, naturally,—and where these heretics of the legal order can walk the streets without being marked on the forehead with a hot iron, and without anyone dragging them to the stake, them and their books; oh, go on, such a society, although it is officially the adversary of new ideas, is close to going over to the enemy… If it still does not have a feeling of the morality of the Future, at least it no longer has a feeling for the morality of the Past. The society of the present is like a fortress surrounded on all sides, which has lost communication with the army which has protected it and which has been destroyed. It knows that it can no longer resupply. So it no longer defends itself except for appearances sake. One can calculate in advance the day of its surrender. Without any doubt, there would still be volleys of cannon shots exchanged; but when it has exhausted its last munitions, emptied its arsenals and its granaries of abundance, it must strike the flag. The old society no longer dares protect itself, or, if it does protect itself, it is which a fury which testifies to its weakness. Young people enthusiastic for the good can be bold and see success crown their audacity. The old, envious and cruel, always fail in their recklessness. There are still in our days, and more than ever, many priests to religionize souls, as there are judges to torture bodies; soldiers to pasture on authority, as there are bosses to live at the expense of the workers. But priests and judges, soldiers and bosses no longer have faith in their priesthood. There is in their public glorification of themselves, by themselves, something like an ulterior motive of shame for doing what they do. All these social climbers, these bearers of chasubles or robes, of belts garnished with pieces of gold or steel blades, do not feel at ease between the world that is coming and the world that is departing; their legs are reckless, and they feel like they’re walking on hot coals. It is true that they always continue to preside, to sentence, to shoot, to exploit, but, “in their heart of hearts, they are not sure they are not thieves and assassins!…” that is to say that they do not dare to admit it to themselves fully, for fear of being too afraid. They vaguely understand that they are at odds, that civilized society is a society of ill repute, and that one day or another the Revolution can accomplish a raid of justice in this dive. The footstep of the future echoes dully on the cobblestones. Three knocks on the door, three blasts of the alarm in Paris, and that’s it for the stakes and the players!

Civilization, the daughter of Barbarism, who has Savagery for a grandmother, Civilization, exhausted by eighteen centuries of debauchery, suffers from an incurable disease. She is condemned by science. She must pass away. When? Sooner than one might think. Her sickness is a pulmonary phthisis, and we know that consumptives maintain the appearance of life up to the last hour. One debauched night she will lie down, to rise no more.

When the Idea had finished speaking, I drew her gently into my lap and there, between two kisses, I asked her the secret of the future times. She was so tender and so good to those who love her ardently that she could not refuse me. and I remained hanging at her lips and gathered each of her words, as if captivated by the attractive fluid, by the emanations of light with which her pupil inundated me. how beautiful she was then, the graceful enchantress! I wish I could retell with all the charm with which she told me these splendors of the anarchic utopia, all these magical delights of the Harmonian world. My pen is not skillful enough to give anything but a pale glimpse. Let those who would know its ineffable enchantments appeal, as I did, to the Idea, and let them, guided by her, evoke in their turn the sublime visions of the ideal, the luminous apotheosis of future ages.

II.

Ten centuries have passed over the face of Humanity. We are in the year 2858. —Imagine a savage from the earliest ages, torn from the heart of his primitive forest and cast without transition forty centuries distant into the midst of present-day Europe, in France, at Paris. Suppose that a magical power had liberated his intelligence and walked him through the marvels of industry, agriculture, architecture, of all the arts and all the sciences, and that, like a cicerone , it had shown him and explained to him all their beauties. And now imagine the astonishment of that savage. He would fall down in admiration before all these things; he would not be able to believe his eyes or ears; he would cry out at the miracle, the civilization, the utopia!

Now imagine a civilisée suddenly transplanted from the Paris of the 19th century to the time of humanity’s beginnings. And imagine his amazement before these men who still have no other instincts but those of the brute, who graze and bleat, who bellow and ruminate, who kick and bray, who bite, claw and roar, men for whom their fingers, tongue, and intelligence are tools of which they do not know the use, a mechanism of which they are not in a state to understand the works. Picture this civiliseé, thus exposed to the mercy of savage men, to the fury of wild beasts and untamed elements. He could not live among all these monstrosities. For him it would be disgust, horror, and chaos!

Well! The anarchic utopia is to civilization what civilization is to savagery. For one who has crossed by thought the ten centuries that separate the present from the future, who has entered into the future world and explored its marvels, how has seen, heard and felt all its harmonious details, who has been initiated into all the pleasures of that humanitary society, for that person the world of the present is still an uncultivated, swampy land, a cesspool peopled with fossil men and institutions, a monstrous skeleton of society, something misshapen and hideous that the sponge of the revolutions must wipe from the surface of the globe. Civilization, with it monuments, its laws, and its customs, with its property boundaries and its ruts of nations, its authoritarian brambles and its familial roots, its prostitutional vegetation; Civilization with its English, German, French, and Cossack patois, with its gods of metal, its crude fetishes, its pagodian animalities, its mitered and crowned caimans, its herds of rhinoceros and deer, of bourgeois and proletarians, its impenetrable forests of bayonets and its bellowing artilleries, bronze torrents stretched out in their carriages, roaring and vomiting up cascades of bullets; Civilization, Civilization, with its caves of misery, its penal colonies and its workshops, its houses of prostitution and detention, with its mountainous chains of palaces and churches, of fortresses and shops, its dens of princes, bishops, generals, and bourgeois, obscene macaques, hideous vultures, ill-mannered bears, metalivores and carnivores who soil with their debauchery and make bleed with their claws human flesh and intelligence; Civilization, with its Penal gospel and its religious Code, its emperors and its popes — its gallows-constrictors which throttle a man in their hemp loops and then swing him on high from a tree, after having broken his neck, its guillotine-alligators which crush you like a dog between their terrible jaws and separate the head from the body with one blow of their triangular portcullis; Civilization, finally, with its habits and customs, its pestilential charters and constitutions, its moral cholera, all its epidemic religionalities and its governmentalities; Civilization, in a world, in all its vigor and exuberance, Civilization, in all its glory, is, for the one who has fixed in his sight the dazzling Future, what the savagery at the origin of the world would be for the Civilizee, the newly born man emerging from his terrestrial mold and still wading through the menses of chaos; so also the anarchic utopia is, for the civilisée, what the revelation of the civilized world would be for the savage; that is to say something hyperbolically good, hyperbolically beautiful, something ultra- and extra-natural, the paradise of man on the earth.

III.

Man is an essentially revolutionary being. He does not know how to stay in place. He does not live the life of limits, but the life of the stars. Nature has given him movement and light, in order to orbit and shine. Isn’t the limit itself, although slow to move, transformed imperceptibly each day until it is entirely metamorphosed, and doesn’t continue in the eternal life its eternal metamorphoses?

So, Civilisees, do you want to be more limited than the limits?

“Revolutions are acts of conservation.”

So revolutionize yourself, in order to preserve yourself.

In the arid desert where our generation is camped, the oasis of anarchy is still for the caravan worn out from marches and counter-marches, a mirage floating at random. It is up to human intelligence to solidify that vapor, to settle the azure-winged phantom on the ground, to give it a body. Do you see over there, in the dee