Frontmatter

Titlepage

Words
of a
Rebel

By
P. Kropotkin


Translation and introduction by George Woodcock

Original French edition (Paroles d'un Révolteé) Paris
C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, Éditeurs 1885

Contents

    Introduction by George Woodcock
    Introduction to the First French Edition by Elisie Reclus
    Chapter 1: The Situation Today
    Chapter 2: The Breakdown of the State
    Chapter 3: The Inevitability of Revolution
    Chapter 4: The Coming Revolution
    Chapter 5: Political Rights
    Chapter 6: To the Young
      1.
      2.
      3.
      4.
    Chapter 7: War!
    Chapter 8: Revolutionary Minorities
    Chapter 9: Order
    Chapter 10: The Commune
    Chapter 11: The Paris Commune
      1.
      2.
      3.
    Chapter 12: The Agrarian Question
      1.
      2.
      3.
    Chapter 13: Representative Government
      1.
      2.
      3.
      4.
    Chapter 14: Law and Authority
      1.
      2.
      3.
      4.
    Chapter 15: Revolutionary Government
      1.
      2.
      3.
    Chapter 16: All of Us Socialists!
    Chapter 17: The Spirit of Revolt
      1.
      2.
      3.
      4.
    Chapter 18: Theory and Practice
    Chapter 19: Expropriation
      1.
      2.
      3.

Introduction by George Woodcock

Paroles d'un Revolte was Kropotkin's first book, published in Paris in 1885, and this is its first complete English version. A very different work from the more familiar books of the mature Kropotkin, like Mutual Aid; Fields, Factories and Workshops; and Memoirs of a Revolutionist, it is the product of an anarchist agitator rather than a libertarian savant. And it derives its interest as much from what it reveals about an important transitional phase in the development of anarchist doctrines as it does for what it shows us of Kropotkin himself during a transitional period for him as well, an activist interlude between his escape from Russian prisons and his long refuge in the productive exile of London suburbia.

The forcing house of early anarchism was the First International, the International Workingmen's Association that was founded in London in 1864 by a heterogenous group of rebels and reformers, including the mutualist followers of the early anarchist Proudhon, some English trade unionists, a handful of German socialists led by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and a scattering of the neo-Jacobin followers of August Blanqui and the Italian nationalist followers of Giuseppe Mazzini. The designation "anarchist" was not much used by any faction at this period (though Proudhon had proclaimed himself an "anarchist" in 1840) but an essential division existed between those, like Marx and his followers, who wished to proceed by governmental means towards the social revolution (with the State perhaps withering away, as Engels put it -- in the far future), and those, soon to be led by Michael Bakunin, who believed that the State and the revolution were incompatible entities and that the revolution should lead immediately to the libertarian society based on the federation of communes and workers' associations.

The Congresses of the International became battlegrounds between the Marxists and the Bakuninists, and very soon the dispute took on national lines, with the revolutionaries of Latin Europe -- Spain and Italy, the Midi of France and the French-speaking parts of Switzerland -- supporting Bakunin, and the northern Europeans in general supporting Marx, with the English trade unionists holding the middle ground. The Marxists gained control of the General Council, but at the Hague Congress in 1872 the Bakuninist influence became so strong that the Marxists moved the headquarters of the General Council to New York, where it quickly languished and died. Meanwhile the Bakuninists gained control of what remained of the International in Europe, and the Jura Federation of Switzerland, where the watchmakers were disciples of Bakunin almost to a man, became its main nerve centre. There, at Sonvillier, antigovernmental groups had held their first gathering in November 1871, even before the breakup of the Hague Congress, and it was at St. Imier that the libertarian section of the International held its first Congress in 1873.

Kropotkin had encountered the Bakuninists in the Jura in 1872 on his first trip to western Europe and he had been converted by their dedication as much as by their arguments. When he returned to Switzerland in early 1877 after his escape from Russian prisons, he quickly resumed contact with his comrades in the Jura, only to find that the libertarian International was quickly following its Marxist opposite on the way to extinction. Its last Congress would actually be held at Verviers in Belgium in 1877 and then it would die quietly away. Even in the Jura the spark that "le grand Michel" had implanted flickered out after Bakunin died in 1876.

In 1877 the last issue of the Bulletin of the Jura Federation, which had been the semi-official organ of pure anarchism, was published. Kropotkin contributed a few articles to late numbers, and then retreated to Geneva, where anarchist activity was reviving because of the presence of a number of exiles from Russia and refugees from the Paris commune, and here he and the young French doctor Paul Brousse collaborated in editing a small paper, L'Avant Garde, intended mainly for smuggling into southern France. By publishing articles praising terrorist attacks on European rulers, L'Avant Garde offended Switzerland's increasing susceptibility to the pressures from its more powerful neighbours, and it was suppressed in December 1878, Brousse being briefly imprisoned because as editor he assumed responsibility for articles with whose extremity of approach he disagreed.

Kropotkin felt that it was urgent to create a journal that would take over the role of L'Avant Garde, but when he sought for collaborators, he found the other leading anarchists then in Geneva, including Reclus and Malatesta, had other things to do. Eventually it was with two Geneva working men that he went to work, Franqois Dumartheray and George Herzig; Kropotkin portrayed them vividly in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist, and it is worth quoting his words, since they convey a great deal about the setting in which the essays contained in Paroles d'un Revolte were written, first of all for publication in the new magazine, Le Revolte,

Dumartheray was born in one of the poorest peasant families in Savoy. His schooling had not gone beyond the first rudiments of a primary school. Yet he was one of the most intelligent men I ever met. His appreciations of current events and men were so remarkable for their uncommon good sense that they were often prophetic. He was also one of the finest critics of the current socialist literature, and was never taken in by the mere display of fine words or would-be science. Herzig was a young clerk, born in Geneva; a man of suppressed emotions, shy, who would blush like a girl when he expressed an original thought, and who, after I was arrested, when he became responsible for the continuance of the journal, by sheer force of will learned to write very well...

To the judgement of these two friends I could trust implicitly. If Herzig frowned, muttering, 'Yes -- well -- it may go,' I knew that it would not do. And when Dumartheray, who always complained of the bad state of his spectacles when he had to read a not quite legibly written manuscript, and therefore generally read proofs only, interrupted his reading by exclaiming, 'Non, ca ne va pas!' I felt at once that it was not the proper thing and tried to guess what thought or expression provoked his disapproval. I knew there was no use asking him, 'Why will it not do?' He would have answered: 'Ah, that is not my affair; that's yours. It won't do; that is all I can say.' But I felt he was right, and I simply sat down to rewrite the passage, or, taking the composing stick, set up in type a new passage instead.

Kropotkin setting up his own words in type was a development that took place after the Quixotic beginnings of Le Revolte. The three editor-publishers started with 15 francs left over from L'Avant Garde and scraped up another 10 francs between them. (The franc was then valued at about 5 to the US dollar.) Yet they decided boldly to print 2,000 copies of the first issue even though no local anarchist paper in the past sold more than 600 copies. They begged another 50 francs and the paper appeared; there were new troubles, for very soon the printer told Kropotkin that he had been informed he would lose his lucrative government printing contracts if he continued to produce La Revolte, and when he visited all the other printing houses in Geneva and in the towns of the Jura, Kropotkin came away every time with the same answer.

Dumartheray immediately suggested that they should buy a plant on credit and set up their own printing establishment. In spite of Kropotkin's misgivings they did so, establishing the Imprimerie Jurasienne and very quickly working themselves out of debt.

The arrangement could not have been more eccentric, for the compositor in the tiny room where they edited and set up their type, which a printing house ran off clandestinely for them, was a little Russian who worked for 60 francs a month and knew no French, less of a disability than it might appear, for the worst typographical errors occur when a language is known at a functional level and the compositor-typographer inserts a familiar but wrong word or spelling, or substitutes a homonym when in doubt. With vigilant correction, Kropotkin, Dumartheray, Herzig and their White Russian managed well. But Kropotkin himself also learned to compose type and indeed, as Dumartheray remembered, played his full part in producing as well as writing Le Revolte.

He never wasted a moment at the printing establishment, either working as compositor or handling a little hand-press for the printing of our small pamphlets.

When the forms of the journal had to be carried to the printing house, he was the first to seize the shafts of the cart. When the printed sheets were returned to the shop, he set an example of great ability to his comrades of folding and dispatching copies.

They were hard times for Kropotkin. He took nothing out of the funds of Le Revolte for the two weeks each month that preparing the journal occupied, and his family were no longer able to send him money from Russia, so that he lived by his scientific journalism, which was ill-paid and laborious. As he told Malatesta at the time, he often had to work until four in the morning to earn enough money to bring out the journal. In late 1878 he had married a Russian woman student, Sophie Ananiev, and by 1880 Sophie was suffering from the cold winds of Geneva, so that the doctors suggested finding a more sheltered place to live. Elisee Reclus, then a refugee from the Commune, was working on his Geographie Universelle at Clarens, a village in the hills above Lac Leman, and he invited Kropotkin to join him, so Peter and Sophie moved to "a small cottage overlooking the blue waters of the lake, with the pure snow of the Dent du Midi in the background."

It was at Clarens, near enough to Geneva to maintain his contacts with the workers there, but far enough away to avoid an excess of visitors, that Kropotkin wrote his best articles for Le Revolte, including most of those which later became part of Paroles d'un Revolte. His pieces in the early issues were mainly concerned with the contemporary issues, prophesying, with the airy optimism that flourished in those days, the proximate destruction of the massive states and empires that threatened the peace of Europe. Elisee Reclus, in his preface, talks of material written and published in Le Revolte between 1879 and 1882, but the articles included actually run from 1880 to 1882. They were written while Kropotkin was in constant touch with Reclus, and they were also the subject of constant discussion between Peter and Sophie, "with whom I used to discuss every event and every proposed paper, and who was a severe literary critic of my writings." He was also in fairly regular touch with leading libertarian exiles like Malatesta and the old Communard Lefrancais, and of course, through his collaborators in Le Revolte, with working class comrades in Geneva. As a result, the essays in Paroles d'un Revolte give as good a picture as one can find of the changes that were transforming the anarchist movement during the early 1880s.

To begin, the movement's distinctiveness was being more sharply defined at this time. The anarchists might still talk of themselves as socialists -- and socialists of the true kind -- but they also defined their own direction more boldly than ever before as anarchist.

The breakup of the First International had in fact created a rift between the authoritarian and the libertarian socialists that would prove impossible to bridge. A United Congress in Ghent in 1877, which Kropotkin attended under the name of Levashov, ended in total failure, and an Anarchist Congress, held in London in May 1881 and attended by Kropotkin, Malatesta, Louise Michel and many other of the well-known spokespeople for the cause did little more than define anarchist attitudes, since no lasting organization resulted from it.

In a series of Congresses in 1891,1893 and 1896 the socialist Second International refused to invite the anarchists and kept out those who arrived. The split, which was already evident when Kropotkin was editing Le Revolte, had by the 1890s become definitive, and only a few socialists of the maverick kind, like William Morris, continued to associate with the anarchists.

Words of a Rebel makes quite clear, in both political and economic terms, the grounds for the division between anarchists and socialists. Kropotkin rejects the ideas of parliamentary democracy put forward by the republican bourgeoisie; he also condemns the ideas of revolutionary government put forward by Marx's followers and the ideas of revolutionary dictatorship put forward by the followers and the ideas of revolutionary government of Auguste Blanqui. Like Bakunin before him he sees the revolution as a popular insurrection in the broadest of terms, with power abolished, or perhaps rather ignored out of existence, and with the general expropriation of property and its takeover by communal groups, the producers and the consumers. The public wealth, all that has been accumulated by the joint work of mankind over the centuries, would thus return to its rightful owners, the people. Anarchism in this way revealed itself as the logical extremity of populism, and one had only to read Words of a Rebel to realize why it became impossible for the anarchists to work any longer with authoritarian revolutionaries or with the advocates of representative government, whose democratic pretensions Kropotkin and his associates rejected with contempt as another form of tyranny. The attitude was not entirely a new one. Proudhon's tirades against universal suffrage had been monumental and seemed to be justified when the French people in the twilight of the 1848 revolution voted in Prince Louis Napoleon as their president.

Thus, while Marx also, writing the last volume of Capital at about the same time as Kropotkin wrote Words of a Rebel, would talk of the "expropriation of the expropriators," the two men used the term in entirely different ways, Marx to advocate a collectivist State under the "dictatorship of the proletariat," and Kropotkin to advocate a free society in which government would be abolished at the same time as private property, without an indefinite waiting period for what Engels once wistfully called "the withering away of the State." As anarchism defined itself more sharply from other kinds of socialism, two new directions emerged, one in terms of the economic organization of a revolutionary society, and the other in terms of pre-revolutionary tactics. Both were adumbrated in Paroles d'un Revolte.

The first was the theoretical shift to anarchist communism, in which Kropotkin and his associates at the time were closely involved. Early anarchists, like their State socialist counterparts, tended to concentrate on the control of production, considering that the important achievement was to socialize the places and means of production, which in the case of the various anarchist schools meant getting them into the hands of the workers. Proudhon had advocated a society of individual craftsmen and peasants who possessed -- rather than actually owning -- their own land and workshops. Larger enterprises in industry and transport would be controlled by associations of workers, and the whole would be cemented by a network of people's banks in which credit would be given for the full value of the work performed. Later, Bakunin and his associates moved on to a collectivist idea of the ownership of the means of production. Individual property would be abolished, everything would be owned by collective associations of workers or local communes, but still payment would be made to individual workers in proportion to the actual value of the work they had done; in one way or another, the wages system would survive.

Anarchist communism addressed the problem of consumption as well as that of production. Saint-Simon, the early Utopian socialist, is credited with inventing the phrase that would echo down through the nineteenth century: "from each according to his means, to each according to his needs." And to this question the collectivist way of doing justice to the producer was no answer. For it was, after all, as consumers that human beings lived and survived.

It began to dawn on the anarchists as early as the 1870s that the liberation of economic resources from the profit-oriented limitations of capitalism would result in increased production of necessities so that for the first time in history there would be enough for all. And this in turn would solve the difficulty of relating access to consumer goods to actual work achievement; it would also take care of the problem of those who were unable to work or too old to work or were doing more for humanity by their writing or painting than by making bread rolls or turning screws. And in all its forms, with free distribution according to need, the wages system would die away. It was not wholly a new idea. Sir Thomas More had advocated it in Utopia in the sixteenth century and the Digger Gerard Winstanley in the seventeenth; it was a feature of Thomas Campanella's City of the Sun, and even in the work-oriented phalansteries envisaged by Charles Fourier in the early nineteenth century those who could not be persuaded to find work attractive would still have their right to receive the means of a good life from the community.

The idea of linking anarchism and communism seems to have been developed and polished in the small group of activists gathered in Geneva during the late 1870s and the early 1880s. Elisee Reclus had been a Phalansterian, a follower of Fourier, until he fell under the spell of Michael Bakunin and became a leading anarchist, and it seems likely that he brought some of Fourier's ideas with him. But the first publication advocating anarchist communism was a little pamphlet by the Francois Dumertheray who eventually assisted Kropotkin in publishing Le Revolte. The pamphlet, Aux Travailleurs Manuels Partisans de L'Action Politique was published in Geneva during 1876, which rules out any influence on the part of Kropotkin, who did not reach Geneva after his escape from Russia until February 1877, though it seems very likely that Reclus and Dumartheray had been discussing the idea. It spread quickly and G. Cherkesov, the Georgian prince who was active among the anarchists at this period, says that the idea was accepted everywhere in Swiss libertarian circles during 1877, though many were still reluctant to use the phrase, "anarchist communism." It was taken up by Italian anarchists like Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero who often found it convenient to hide out in Switzerland when police persecution at home became too intense.

It was a joint effort by Reclus, Cafiero and Kropotkin that persuaded the 1880 Congress of the Jura Federation to accept free communism as its economic doctrine. Kropotkin presented a report entitled "The Anarchist Idea from the Point of View of its Practical Realization," later published in Le Revolte but not included in Words of a Rebel. The report stressed the need for a revolution, when it came, to be based on the local communes, which would carry out all the necessary expropriations and socialise the means of production. The report did not specifically mention the communist method of distribution, but in the speech that accompanied it Kropotkin made it quite clear that he regarded communism -- in the sense of free distribution of goods and the abolition of any form of wages system -- as the result that should follow immediately from the collectivization of the means of production. He made Le Revolte the organ of the new anarchist trend and so his name would henceforward be associated with it. Words of Rebel contained the first essays in which he worked out the idea. A more concrete discussion of anarchist communism would appear in later works, notably in The Conquest of Bread, but also, developed in a different way, in Mutual Aid and Fields, Factories and Workshops.

When we come to the question of revolutionary tactics, we have to remember that Kropotkin adhered to the romantic revolutionary tradition which took its inspiration from the French Revolution of 1789-93. He virtually ignored the fact that England in the seventeenth century and the Americans in the eighteenth had experienced their own revolutions (Charles I was after all executed by his own subjects nearly a century and a half before Louis XVI), which had considerable influence in France during the pre-revolutionary period. In his somewhat narrow vision he saw, as would become evident in the pages of Le Revolte, the lesser revolutionary outbreaks of 1830 and 1848, and the Paris Commune of 1871. There was something of the millenarian historicist about Kropotkin; he displayed the rather schizoid attitude common to many nineteenth century revolutionaries, who wished to see men free, but regarded the process of socio-political development as historically determined; the influence of Hegel filtered far. He always believed there would be a great European war, and that there would be a great and final revolution in the not far distant future, and in the long run he was correct, for the European war came in 1914, and revolution on a large scale came in 1917, but in Russia rather than France, and it turned out to be an operation of the partisans of revolutionary dictatorship in which Kropotkin's hopes were submerged and negated. It is against such authoritarian revolutionaries as the Bolsheviks, who combined the tactical views of Marx and of Blanqui, that Kropotkin was speaking in Words of a Rebel. He envisaged a different kind of revolutionary militant, who understands that true revolutions are the work of the people themselves, and perceives his own role as that of enlightening and inspiring by appropriate propaganda rather than attempting to control the revolution either in its course or in its fulfilment.

And it is in this context that he develops the idea of deeds as well as words as the media of revolutionary propaganda. Both in Words of a Rebel, and to a much greater extent in his major historical work, The Great French Revolution, so largely a study of grassroots insurrection, Kropotkin sets out to show that the real initiatives of the revolution were carried out by the people, who forced the politicians to act in ending serfdom and distributing the land, and that their action was prepared and encouraged by largely unknown militants who performed acts of symbolic defiance, sometimes involving violence against the regime and its representatives. His thinking ran parallel to that of the Italian anarchists, who had derived from mid-nineteenth century radical republicans like Carlo Pisacane the idea that the propaganda of the word was fruitless unless accompanied by revolutionary actions, even if for the moment they were futile. It was in accordance with these ideas that Italian militants like Malatesta and Cafiero led rather pointless peasant uprisings like the Benevento insurrection in 1877.

Later, long after the appearance of Paroles d'un Revolte, anarchists would carry the idea of the propaganda of the dead into the series of attempted and often successful assassinations and terrorist attacks, in France and Spain especially, that gave anarchism its bad name and placed Kropotkin himself in the difficult position of having to determine whether to approve of actions that often appeared arbitrary and inhuman. In later years he refrained from condemning anarchist terrorists, but increasingly rarely gave them his approval. Indeed, as time went on his whole attitude towards violence became ambivalent, his pacific actions and his violent words often failing to harmonize, and the romantic cult of the barricades and of popular revenge that he still nourished when he wrote Paroles d'un Revolte would become so fragile by the end of the century that Tolstoy could remark of him with some justice:

His arguments in favour of violence do not seem to be the expression of his opinions, but only of his fidelity to the banner under which he has served so honestly all his life.

But Tolstoy was talking about the seer of Mutual Aid, whereas here we have the fiery young revolutionary who in fact never fired a shot in anger or stood behind a barricade, but who could contemplate with equanimity and even with a certain mild man's relish the violent deeds of the revolutionary terror of 1793 because they were perpetrated by members of the people.

In spite of the fact that he was never in the right place at the right time to take place in an actual insurrection, Kropotkin was still a genuine militant, modifying his writing to a clear simplicity that would appeal to worker readers. And there is no doubt that governments of the time in a number of countries considered him a dangerous presence.

Late in 1881 he was expelled from Switzerland because of articles in Le Revolte, supporting the actions of the Narodnaya Volya, which that year killed the Tsar Alexander II. He settled at Thonon, just over the border from Geneva, but spent most of the following year wandering, particularly in England, though he continued to write for Le Revolte. In October 1882 he returned to Thonon with the intent of remaining near his Geneva comrades. But by this time a surge of discontent and violence among the workers in the Lyon region had drawn the attention of the French authorities to him, though he seems to have been in no way directly implicated. He and many other anarchists in the Midi were arrested in a sweep at the end of December, and on the 3rd January 1883 he appeared with 53 other men before the Police Correctional Court in Lyon. Since no evidence existed of his implication in the recent acts of violence, he was charged under a law passed after the Commune of being a member of an illegal organization, and though the prosecutor was forced to admit that the International no longer existed, he was still condemned to five years in prison.

Despite protests by English writers and scientists and French liberal intellectuals and politicians, the French government yielded to pressure from the Russian authorities and kept Kropotkin at Clairvaux prison (the old monastery of St. Bernard) until January 1886, when the protests had become too great to be ignored and he was released, to start his long exile in England. Thus Kropotkin was in prison when Reclus and his other friends put together the group of articles that formed Paroles d'un Revolte; it was published in 1885 by Flammarion, an established liberal publisher.

Le Revolte was continued by Hertiz after Kropotkin went to prison, and by Jean Grave who went to Geneva in 1883, and who brought the journal to Paris in 1885. There it was continued until Grave changed it to La Revolte in 1887; Kropotkin would write for La Revolte the essays that became The Conquest of Bread.

Paroles d'un Revolte was translated into Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Russian, and eventually Chinese. Parts of it were published separately and spread Kropotkin's message even wider. An Appeal to the Young, for example, sold 80,000 copies in France alone, and was also published, openly or clandestinely, in at least fifteen other languages. Thus Paroles became, as Kropotkin and Reclus intended, a book of genuine mass appeal.

Until now, Paroles d'un Revolte never appeared in its entirety in an English translation. Some of the chapters, like An Appeal to the Young, Law and Authority and War appeared as pamphlets under various auspices, the first translated by the veteran social democrat, H. M. Hyndman, and others were printed as essays in The Commonweal, the organ of the Socialist League which at that time was dominated by an anarchist faction.

One reason for the lack of an English version of Paroles d'un Revolte was that none of the English anarchist groups of the late nineteenth century had the resources, financial or organizational, to publish and distribute a full-sized book. They were all small minority groups, and even Freedom Press, which Kropotkin and a few of his associates founded in 1886 and which continues to this day, published no more in the late nineteenth century than the journal Freedom and a few pamphlets; the only actual book that it brought out before the Great War would be Kropotkin's Modern Science and Anarchism in 1912, a translation of a book originally published in Russian in 1901.

All of Kropotkin's books that have appeared in English up to the present were in fact originally published by commercial houses impressed by the quality of their scientific or historical contributions or, in the case of Memoirs of a Revolutionist, by the sheer romantic appeal of Kropotkin's life. There were no liberal or radical publishing houses in London like Flammarion and Stock in Paris that would take a chance on a work of unashamed revolutionary propaganda by a relative unknown, as Kropotkin was when he arrived in London in 1886. Even The Conquest of Bread, much more constructive in its proposals than Words of a Rebel, did not appear under the imprint of an English house until 1906, though it was published by a French commercial house in 1892. By that time a broad interest had been created in Kropotkin through the publication of In Russian and French Prisons, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Fields, Factories and Workshops, and Mutual Aid.

Paroles d'un Revolte, with its revolutionary optimism and its apocalyptic view of the revolution itself, would in fact have aroused little response in nineteenth century England, where even Chartism had not led to a full-scale insurrection and where the radical tradition out of which the Labour party and the trade union movement emerged was based on gradualism and non-violent action: even when violence emerged, as among the Luddites, it was likely to be directed against property rather than persons. And for that reason the book has remained, even for most English-speaking anarchists, something of an exotic curiosity, representing a world of romantic expectations and violent facts outside their experience.

Yet, though he does not seem to have made any great effort to get his first book published in English, Kropotkin never disowned it. Indeed, it was published in Russia after the revolution by the anarcho-syndicalist publishing house, Golos Truda, in 1921, just before the final suppression of the anarchists by the Bolsheviks, and it contained a postface by Kropotkin, written in 1919 when he had had time to digest the negative lessons of the Communist dictatorship. What he said then echoes in many ways his original words in Paroles; the revolution had been incomplete, and there would be yet more wars between the great powers; the only way to avoid them was by accomplishing the real social revolution, the anti-governmental revolution of the anarchists. He sums up his argument in the last sentence of that Postface, written under the shadow of Lenin's tyranny.

It is clear that, in these conditions, we can still foresee a series of wars for the civilized countries -- wars ever more bloody and more savage -- if these countries do not carry out their own social revolutions and reconstruct their lives on new and more socially oriented foundations. Everyone in Europe and the United States, except for the exploiting minority, understands this necessity.

But it is impossible to accomplish such a revolution by means of dictatorship and power. Without a broad reconstruction starting from the bottom upwards and carried out by the workers and peasants themselves, the social revolution will be condemned to bankruptcy. The Russian revolution has confirmed it once again, and one hopes that the lesson will be understood, and that everywhere, in Europe and in America, serious efforts will be made to create in the heart of the working class -- peasants, workers and intellectuals -- the framework of the future revolution, without obeying orders from on high, but showing themselves capable of elaborating the free forms of a whole new economic life.

In sum, though in hindsight it may seem a minor work in the Kropotkin canon, Words of a Rebel is historically and biographically important in marking a stage in Kropotkin's development -- the frontline revolutionary agitator -- and a crucial time of self-definition in the anarchist movement that sees it sailing free from the main current of socialism. And though the tentativeness with which it launches major ideas may make it seem an apprentice work, Words of a Rebel contains an astonishing number of sketched-out ideas, about the organization of a free society, about the transformation of agriculture and industry, about revolutionary traditions and methods, that would be filled out in his major works.

Certainly late twentieth century readers, and especially the late twentieth century anarchists, will find features in the book disturbing, not merely the revolutionary euphoria, but also the evident puritanism, the artistic philistinism, and the acceptance of violence as inevitable -- and praiseworthy so long as it is revolutionary.

Like many anarchists of his time Kropotkin took a poor view of what he regarded as sexual libertinism, which he identified in Words of a Rebel as a fault peculiar to the idle rich. In later years he would be critical of Emma Goldman's sexual revolutionism and he refused to speak up for his fellow anarchist Oscar Wilde when the latter was imprisoned for homosexual actions in 1896. All art he distrusted, even though Camille Pissaro was his friend, unless it served a propaganda end or praised the heroes of revolution.

And though in Mutual Aid Kropotkin would implicitly offer an alternative way to violent overthrow when he revealed the structure of mutual aid institutions already at work in society, in Words of a Rebel no attention is paid to the virtues of non-violent direct action, which in recent years and especially in 1989 has toppled authoritarian systems that for half a century seemed immoveable. Like everything else, the revolution evolves and changes, and in recent decades it has been evolving away from violence.

Introduction to the First French Edition by Elisie Reclus

For the last two and a half years, Peter Kropotkin has been in prison, cut off from the society of his fellows. His punishment is harsh, but the silence that has been imposed on him relating to the subjects nearest his heart is painful in another way: his captivity would weigh less heavily if he were not gagged. Months and years will doubtless flow by before the power of communicating is restored to him and he will be able to resume his interrupted conversation with his comrades.

The period of forced meditation which our friend is suffering will certainly not be to him time lost, but to us it seems very long! Life runs quickly, and we sadly watch the weeks and months flow by while that proud and honest voice remains unheard. Instead, what banalities will be dinned into us! What lying words will insult our minds! What mercenary half-truths will echo in our ears! We wait to hear again that sincere and unrestrained voice which so boldly proclaimed what is right.

But if the prisoner of Clairvaux no longer has the freedom to communicate with his comrades from the depths of his cell, at least they can remember their friend and put together his past writings. It is a duty I am able to fulfil and to which I gladly devote myself. The articles Kropotkin wrote between 1879 and 1882 in the anarchist paper, Le Revolte, seem to be suitable for publication as a collection; they are not dominated by the chance succession of daily events, but follow each other in a logical thematic order, while the vehemence of thought they project gives them the necessary unity of a book.

Faithful to his scientific method, the author exposes first the general situation of society, its schemes and vices, its elements of discord and war; he studies the symptoms of decay that the states display to us, and reveals the cracks that are opening in their structures and turning them to ruins. Then he shows what the clues offered by the experience of contemporary history have to offer us in our search for an anarchist evolution of society; he reveals their precise meaning and draws out the lessons they convey. Finally, in the chapter entitled "Expropriation," he sums up his ideas, drawn as they are from observation and experience, and calls on people of good will not to be content with knowledge only, but to bring themselves to action.

There is no need for me to sing the author's praises on this occasion. He is my friend, and if I said everything good that I know of him, I might be suspected of blindness or accused of partiality. It is enough to evoke the opinions of his judges and even of his jailers. Among those who have observed his life from near or far, there is nobody who does not respect him, who does not bear witness to his great intelligence and his heart overflowing with goodwill; there is nobody who will not acknowledge his nobility and purity of nature. And indeed, is it not for these very qualities that he has become forcibly acquainted with exile and captivity? His crime has been to love the poor and the powerless; his offense has been to plead their cause. Public opinion is unanimous in respecting this man, and yet it is not surprised to see the prison door close firmly upon him, so natural does it seem that superiority should be ill repaid and that devotion should be accompanied by suffering. It is impossible to see Kropotkin in the grip of the prison system and to offer a greeting to him, without asking oneself: "And why am I free? Why am I not also in prison? Is it perhaps because I am not worthy of it?"

Yet the readers of this book have less reason to concern themselves with the author as a person than with the value of the ideas he offers. I submit these ideas with confidence, to the kind of fair-minded people who do not pass judgement on a book until they have read it, or form an opinion about it before they have understood it. Put aside your prejudices, learn to disengage yourself from your interests, and read these pages simply in search of the truth without immediately becoming concerned with its application. The author asks only one thing of you, to share for a brief while his ideal, the welfare of all, not that of a privileged few. If this willingness, however fleeting it may be, is truly sincere and not a mere caprice of fantasy, an image that does no more than pass before your eyes, it is likely that you will soon find yourselves in agreement with the writer. And if you come to share his hopes, you will understand his words. But you will also know in advance that these ideas will not load you with honours; they will never make you the recipient of a position with great perquisites; more likely they will draw down on you at best the distrust of your old friends, and at worst some more brutal blow from on high. If you go in search of justice, be prepared to suffer iniquities.

At the moment when this book is being published, France is in the midst of an electoral crisis. I am not simple enough to recommend that the candidates should read this book -- they have other "duties" to fulfil -- but I do invite the voters to pick up Words of a Rebel, and I especially recommend to them the chapter entitled "Representative Government." There they will learn how much their confidence is justified in these men who appear from all sides to court the honour of representing in parliament their fellow citizens. Just at present everything is made to look well. The candidates are of course omniscient and infallible, but what will they become once they have received their mandates? When they have eventually achieved their fragments of kingly power, will they not inevitably be seized by the exaltation of office and, like real monarchs, see themselves as exempt from the need to show either wisdom or virtue? Even if they had any intent of keeping the promises which they lavished before being elected, how could they hope to sustain their integrity once they were surrounded by the mob of patronage seekers and interested advisers? Even if one can imagine a man being unspoilt on the day he entered the Chamber of Deputies, how can one hope that he would emerge uncorrupted? In this setting dominated by intrigue we see such men turning to right and left as if they were drawn by some dominating machine. At best they become time-servers who put on a good face and make a quick impression, only to turn their backs soon afterwards and pitifully allow themselves to be pushed to the wall.

Our salvation does not lie in the choice of new masters. As anarchists and enemies of Christianity, we must remind a whole society that pretends to be Christian of these words spoken by a man they made into a God: "Say unto no man, Master, Master." Let everyone remain his own master. Do not turn towards those who sit in office, or to the noisy demagogues in your search for a true message of freedom. Listen rather to the voices that come from below, even if they have to pass through the bars of a prison cell.

Elisee Reclus
Clarens, Switzerland
1st October, 1885