The Autobiography of a Revolutionist: Western Europe
VII.
IN the meantime affairs in Russia took quite a new turn. The war which Russia began against Turkey in 1877 had ended in general disappointment. There was in the country, before the war broke out, a great deal of enthusiasm in favor of the Slavonians. Many believed, also, that a war of liberation in the Balkans would result in a move in the progressive direction in Russia itself. But the liberation of the Slavonian populations was only partly accomplished. The tremendous sacrifices which had been made by the Russians were rendered ineffectual by the blunders of the higher military authorities. Hundreds of thousands of men had been slaughtered in battles which were only half victories, and the concessions wrested from Turkey were brought to naught at the Berlin congress. It was also widely known that the embezzlement of state money went on during this war on almost as large a scale as during the Crimean war.
It was under these circumstances that one hundred and ninety-three persons, arrested since 1873, in connection with our agitation, were brought before a high court at the end of 1877. The accused, supported by a number of lawyers of talent, won at once the sympathies of the great public. They produced a very favorable impression upon St. Petersburg society ; and when it became known that most of them had spent three or four years in prison, waiting for this trial, and that no less than twenty-one of them had either put an end to their lives by suicide or become insane, the feeling grew still stronger in their favor, even among the judges themselves. The court pronounced very heavy sentences upon a few, and relatively lenient ones upon the remainder; saying that the preliminary detention had lasted so long, and was so hard a punishment in itself, that nothing could justly be added to it. It was confidently expected that the Emperor would still further mitigate the sentences. It happened, however, to the astonishment of all, that lie revised the sentences only to increase them. Those whom the court had acquitted were sent into exile in remote parts of Russia and Siberia, and from five to twelve years of hard labor were inflicted upon those whom the court had condemned to short terms of imprisonment. This was the work of the chief of the Third Section, General Mdzentsoff.
At the same time, the chief of the St. Petersburg police, General Trepoff, noticing, during a visit to the house of detention, that one of the political prisoners, Bogoluboff, did not take off his hat to greet the omnipotent satrap, rushed upon him, gave him a blow, and, when the prisoner resisted, ordered him to be flogged. The other prisoners, learning the fact in their cells, loudly expressed their indignation, and were in consequence fearfully beaten by the police. The Russian political prisoners bore without murmuring all hardships inflicted upon them in Siberia or through hard labor, but they were firmly decided not to tolerate corporal punishment. A young girl, Veéra Zasulich, who did not even personally know Bogolùboff, took a revolver. went to the chief of police, and shot at him. Trepotf was only wounded. Alexander II. came to look at the heroic girl, who must have impressed him by her extremely sweet face and her modesty. Trépoff had so many enemies at St. Petersburg that they managed to bring the affair before a common-law jury, and Véra Zasulich declared in court that she had resorted to arms only when all means for bringing the affair to public knowledge and obtaining some sort of redress had been exhausted. (Even the London Times had refused to mention it.) Then, consulting nobody about her intentions, she went to shoot Trepoff. Now that the affair had become public, she was quite happy to know that he was but slightly wounded. The jury acquitted her unanimously; and when the police tried to rearrest her, as she was leaving the court house, the young men of St. Petersburg, who stood in crowds at the gates, saved her from their clutches. She went abroad, and soon was among us in Switzerland.
This affair produced quite a sensation throughout Europe. I was at Paris when the news of the acquittal came, and had to call that day on business at the offices of several newspapers. I found the editors fired with enthusiasm, and writing powerful articles to glorify the girl. Even the serious Revue des Deux Mondes wrote, in its review of the year, that the two persons who had most impressed public opinion in Europe during 1878 were Prince Gortehakóff at the Berlin congress and Vera Zasulich. Their portraits were given side by side in several almanacs.
Upon the workers in Europe the act of Véra Zasulich produced a tremendous impression, and, without any plot having been formed, four attempts were made against crowned heads in close succession. The worker Hoedel and Dr. Nobiling shot at the German Emperor ; a few weeks later, a Spanish worker, Oliva Moncási, followed with an attempt to shoot the King of Spain, and the cook Passanante rushed with his knife upon the King of Italy. The governments of Europe could not believe that such attempts upon the lives of three kings should have occurred without there being at the bottom some international conspiracy, and they jumped to the conclusion that the Jura Federation and the International Workingmen’s Association were responsible.
More than twenty years have passed since then, and I may say most positively that there was absolutely no ground whatever for that supposition. 1 lowever, all the European governments fell upon Switzerland, reproaching her with harboring revolutionists who organized such plots. Paul Brousse, the editor of our Jura newspaper, the Avant-Garde, was arrested and prosecuted. The Swiss judges, seeing there was not the slightest foundation for connecting Brousse or the Jura Federation with the recent attacks, condemned Brousse to only a couple of months’ imprisonment, for his articles ; but the paper was suppressed, and all the printing offices of Switzerland were asked by the federal government not to publish this or any similar paper. The Jura Federation thus remained without an organ.
Besides, the politicians of Switzerland, who looked with an unfavorable eye on the anarchist agitation in their country, acted privately in such way as to compel the leading Swiss members of the Jura Federation either to retire from public life or to starve. Brousse was expelled from Switzerland. James Guillaume, who for eight years had maintained against all obstacles the official organ of the federation, and made his living chiefly by teaching, could obtain no employment, and was compelled to leave Switzerland and remove to France. Adhémar Schwitzguébel found no work in the watch trade, and, burdened as he was by a large family, had to retire from the movement. Spichiger was in the same condition, and emigrated. It thus happened that I, a foreigner, had to undertake the editing of the organ of the federation. I hesitated, of course, but there was nothing else to be done, and with two friends, Dumartheray and Herzig, I started a new paper at Geneva, in February, 1879, under the title of Te RYvolte. I had to write most of it myself. We had twenty-three francs (less than four dollars) to start the paper, but we all set to work to get subscriptions, and succeeded in issuing our first number. It was moderate in tone, but revolutionary in substance, and 1 did my best to write it in such a style that complicated historical and economical questions should be accessible to every intelligent worker. Six hundred was the utmost limit which the edition of our previous papers had ever attained. We printed two thousand copies of Le Revoke, and in a few days not one was left. The paper was a success, and still continues, at Paris, under the name of Temps Nouveaux.
Socialist papers have often a tendency to become mere annals of complaints about existing conditions. The oppression of the laborers in the mine, the factory, and the field is related ; the misery and sufferings of the workers during strikes are told in vivid pictures; their lielplessness in the struggle against employers is insisted upon : and this succession of hopeless efforts, related in the paper, exercises a most depressing influence upon the reader. To counterbalance that effect, the editor has to rely chiefly upon burning words by means of which he tries to inspire his readers with energy and faith. I thought, on the contrary, that a revolutionary paper must he, above all, a record of those symptoms which everywhere announce the coming of a new era, the germination of new forms of social life, the growing revolt against antiquated institutions. These symptoms should be watched, brought together in their intimate connection, and so grouped as to show to the hesitating minds of the great number the invisible and often unconscious support which advanced ideas find everywhere, when a revival of thought takes place in society. To make one feel sympathy with the throbbing of the human heart all over the world, with its revolt against age-long injustice, with its attempts at working out new forms of life, — this should be the chief duty of a revolutionary paper. It is hope, not despair, which makes successful revolutions.
Historians often tell us how this or that system of philosophy lias accomplished a certain change in human thought, and subsequently in institutions. Rut this is not history. The greatest social philosophers have only caught the indications of coining changes, have understood their inner relations, and, aided by induction and intuition, have foretold what was to occur. It may also be easy to draw a plan of social organization, by starting from a few principles and developing them to their necessary consequences, like a geometrical conclusion from a few axioms ; but this is not sociology. A correct social forecast cannot be made unless one keeps an eye on the thousands of signs of the new life, separating the occasional facts from those which are organically essential, and building the generalization upon that basis.
This was the method of thought that X endeavored to familiarize my readers with, using plain comprehensible words, so as to accustom the most modest of them to judge for himself whereunto society is moving, and himself to correct the thinker if the latter comes to wrong conclusions. As to the criticism of what exists, I went into it only to disentangle the roots of the evils, and to show that a deep-seated and carefully-nurtured fetichism with regard to the antiquated survivals of past phases of human development, and a widespread cowardice of mind and will, are the main sources of all evils.
Dumartheray and Herzig gave me full support in that direction. 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 often they were 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 at 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. Boycotted by all Geneva employers, and fallen with his family into sheer misery, he nevertheless supported the paper till it became possible to transfer it to Paris.
To the judgment of these two men 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, ça 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.
For the first year we had to rely entirely upon ourselves ; but gradually Elisée Reclus took a greater interest in the work, and finally joined us, giving more life than ever to the paper after my arrest. Reclus had invited me to aid him in the preparation of the volume of his monumental Geography which dealt with the Russian dominions in Asia. He had learned Russian, but thought that, as I was well acquainted with Siberia, I might be helpful; and as the health of my wife was poor, and the doctor had ordered her to leave Geneva with its cold winds at once, we removed early in the spring of 1880 to Clarens, where Klisée Reclus lived at that time. We settled above Clarens, in a small cottage overlooking the blue waters of Lake Geneva, with the pure snow of the Dent du Midi in the background. A streamlet that thundered like a mighty torrent after rains, carrying away immense rocks and digging for itself a new bed, ran under our windows, and on the slope of the hill opposite rose the old castle of Chatelard, of which the owners, up to the revolution of the burla papei (the burners of the papers) in 1799, levied upon the neighboring peasants servile taxes on the occasion of births, marriages, and deaths. Here, aided by my wife, with whom I used to discuss every event and every proposed paper, and who was a severe literary critic of my writings, I produced the best things that I wrote for the paper, among them the address To the Young, which was spread in hundreds of thousands of copies in all languages. In fact, I worked out here the foundation of nearly all that I wrote later on. Contact with educated men of similar ways of thinking is what we anarchist writers, scattered by proscription all over the world, miss, perhaps, more than anything else. At Clarens I had that contact with Elisée Reclus and Lefracais; and although I worked much for the Geography, I could produce even more than usual for the anarchist propaganda.
VIII.
In Russia, the struggle for freedom was taking a more and more acute character. Several political trials had been brought before high courts, — the trial of “ the hundred and ninety-three,” of “ the fifty,” of “ the Dolgúshin circles,” and so on, — and in all of them the same thing was apparent. The youth had gone to the peasants and the factory workers, preaching socialism to them ; socialist pamphlets, printed abroad, had been distributed; appeals had been made to revolt — in some vague, indeterminate way — against the oppressive economical conditions. In short, nothing was done that does not occur in socialist agitations in every other country of the world. No traces of conspiracy against the Tsar, or even of preparations for revolutionary action, were found; in fact, there were none. The great majority of our youth were at that time hostile to such action. Nay, looking now over that movement of the years 1870-78, I can say in full confidence that most of them would have felt satisfied if they had been simply allowed to live by the side of the peasants and the workers, to teach them, to collaborate in any of the thousand capacities — private or as a part of the local self-government — in which an educated and earnest man or woman can be useful to the masses of the people. I knew the men, and say so with full knowledge of them.
Yet the sentences were ferocious, — stupidly ferocious, because the movement, which had grown out of the previous state of Russia, was too deeply rooted to be crushed down by mere brutality. Hard labor for six, ten, twelve years in the mines, with subsequent exile to Siberia for life, was a common sentence. There were such cases as that of a girl who got nine years’ hard labor and life exile to Siberia, for giving one socialist pamphlet to a worker : that was all her crime. Another girl of fourteen, Miss Gukóvskaya, was transported for life to a remote village of Siberia, for having tried, like Goethe’s Klärchen, to excite an indifferent crowd to deliver Kovalsky and his friends when they were going to be hanged, — an act the more natural in Russia, even from the authorities’ standpoint, as there is no capital punishment in our country for commonlaw crimes, and the application of the death penalty to “ politicals ” was then a novelty, a return to almost forgotten traditions. Thrown into the wilderness, this young girl soon drowned herself in the Yenisei. Even those who were acquitted by the courts were banished by the gendarmes to little hamlets in Siberia and Northeast Russia, where they had to starve on the government’s monthly allowance, one dollar and fifty cents (three rubles). There are no industries in such hamlets, and the exiles were strictly prohibited from teaching.
As if to exasperate the youth still more, their condemned friends were not sent direct to Siberia. They were locked up, first, for a number of years, in central prisons, which made them envy the convict’s life in Siberia. These prisons were awful indeed. In one of them — " a den of typhoid fever,” as the priest of that particular jail said in a sermon — the mortality reached twenty per cent in twelve months. In the central prisons, in the hard-labor prisons of Siberia, in the fortress, the prisoners had to resort to the strike of death, the famine strike, to protect themselves from the brutality of the warders, or to obtain conditions — some sort of work, or reading, in their cells — that would save them from being driven into insanity in a few months. The horror of such strikes, during which men and women refused to take any food for seven or eight days in succession, and then lay motionless, their minds wandering, seemed not to appeal to the gendarmes. At Khárkoff, the prostrated prisoners were tied up with ropes and fed by force, artificially.
Information of these horrors leaked out from the prisons, crossed the boundless distances of Siberia, and spread far and wide among the youth. There was a time when not a week passed without disclosing some new infamy of that sort, or even worse.
Sheer exasperation took hold of our young people. “ In other countries, they began to say, " men have the courage to resist. An Englishman, a Frenchman, would not tolerate such outrages. How can we tolerate them ? Let us resist, arms in hands, the nocturnal raids of the gendarmes; let them know, at least, that since arrest means a slow and infamous death at their hands, they will have to take us in a mortal struggle. At Odessa, Kovdlsky and his friends met with revolver shots the gendarmes who came one night to arrest them.
The reply of Alexander II. to this new move was the proclamation of a state of siege. Russia was divided into a number of districts, each of them under a governor general, who received the order to hang offenders pitilessly. Kovdlsky and his friends — who, by the way, had killed nobody by their shots — were executed. Hanging became the order of the day. Twenty-three persons perished in two years, including a boy of nineteen, who was caught posting a revolutionary proclamation at a railway station: this act— I say it deliberately — was the only charge against him. He was a boy, but he died like a man.
Then the watchword of the revolutionists became “self-defense : ” self-defense against the spies who introduced themselves into the circles under the mask of friendship, and denounced members right and left, simply because they would not be paid if they did not accuse large numbers of persons ; self-defense against those who ill treated prisoners; self - defense against the omnipotent chiefs of the state police.
Three functionaries of mark and two or three small spies fell in that new phase of the struggle. General Mézentsoff, who had induced the Tsar to double the sentences after the trial of the hundred and ninety-three, was killed in broad daylight at St. Petersburg ; a gendarme colonel, guilty of something worse than that, had the same fate at Ivietf ; and the governor general of Klnfrkoff — my cousin, Dmitri Kropotkin — was shot as he was returning home from a theatre. The central prison, in .which the first famine strike and artificial feeding took place, was under his orders. In reality, he was not a bad man, — I know that his personal feelings were somewhat favorable to the political prisoners ; but he was a weak mail and a courtier, and he hesitated to interfere. One word from him would have stopped the ill treatment of the prisoners. Alexander II. liked him so much, and his position at the court ivas so strong, that his interference very probably would have been approved. “ Thank you ; you have acted according to my own wishes, " the Tsar said to him, a couple of years before that date, when he came to St. Petersburg to report that he had taken a peaceful attitude in a riot of the poorer population of Khárkoff, and had treated the rioters very leniently. But this time he gave his approval to the jailers, and the young men of Khárkoff were so exasperated at the treatment of their friends that one of them shot him.
However, the personality of the Emperor was kept out of the struggle, and down to the year 1879 no attempt was made on his life. The person of the Liberator of the serfs was surrounded by an aureole which protected him infinitely better than the swarms of police officials. If Alexander II. had shown at this juncture the least desire to improve the state of affairs in Russia; if he had only called in one or two of those men with whom he had collaborated during the reform period, and had ordered them to make an inquiry into the conditions of the country, or merely of the peasantry; if he had shown any intention of limiting the powers of the secret police, his steps would have been hailed with enthusiasm. A word would have made him “ the Liberator ” again, and once more the youth would have repeated Herzen’s words : “ Thou hast conquered, Galilean.” But just as during the Polish insurrection the despot awoke in him, and, inspired by Katkbff, he resorted to hanging, so now again, following the advice of his evil genius, Katkóff, he found nothing to do but to nominate special military governors — for hanging.
Then, and then only, a handful of revolutionists, — the Executive Committee, — supported, I must say, by the growing discontent in the educated classes, and even in the Tsar’s immediate surroundings, declared that war against absolutism which, after several attempts, ended in 1881 in the death of Alexander II.
Two men, I have said already, lived in Alexander II., and now the conflict between the two, which had grown during all his life, assumed a really tragic aspect. When he met Solovibff, who shot at him and missed the first shot, he had the presence of mind to run to the nearest door, not in a straight line, but in zigzags, while Solovióff continued to fire ; and he thus escaped with hut a slight tearing of his overcoat. On the day of his death, too, he gave a proof of his undoubted courage. In the face of real danger he was courageous; hut he continually trembled before the phantasms of his own imagination. Once he shot an aide-de-camp, when the latter had made an abrupt movement, and Alexander thought he was going to attempt his life. Merely to save his life, he surrendered entirely all his imperial powers into the hands of those who cared nothing for him, but only for their lucrative positions.
He undoubtedly retained an attachment to the mother of his children, even though he was then with the Princess Dolgoruki, whom he married immediately after the death of the Empress. “ Don’t speak to me of the Empress ; it makes me suffer too much,” he more than once said to L5ris Mdlikoff. And yet he entirely abandoned the Empress Marie, who had stood faithfully by his side while he was the Liberator ; he let her die in the palace in abject neglect. A well-known Russian doctor, now dead, told his friends that he, a stranger, felt shocked at the neglect with which the Empress was treated during her last illness, — deserted, of course, by the ladies of the court, who reserved their courtesies for the Princess Dolgorúki. Even the most elementary prescriptions of nursing and cleanliness were not attended to.
When the Executive Committee made the daring attempt to blow up the Winter Palace itself, Alexander II. took a step which had no precedent. He created a sort of dictatorship, vesting unlimited powers in LGris Melikoff. This general was an Armenian, to whom Alexander II. had once before given similar dictatorial powers, when the bubonic plague broke out on the Lower Volga, and Germany threatened to mobilize her troops and put Russia under quarantine if the plague were not stopped. But as no new attempts followed immediately after that explosion, the Tsar regained confidence, and a few months later, before Mdlikoff had been allowed to do anything. he was dictator no more : he was simply minister of the interior. The sudden attacks of sadness of which I have already spoken, during which Alexander II. reproached himself with the reactionary character that his reign had assumed, now took the shape of violent paroxysms of tears. He would sit weeping by the hour, bringing Mélikoff to despair. Then he would ask his minister, “ When will your constitutional scheme he ready ? ” If, two days later, Mélikoff said that it was now ready, the Emperor seemed to have forgotten all about it. " Did I mention it ? ” he would ask. “ What for ? We had better leave it to my successor. That will he his gift to Russia.”
When rumors of a new plot reached him, he was ready to undertake something; but when everything seemed to be quiet among the revolutionists, he turned his ear again to his reactionary advisers, and let things go. Every moment Mélikoff expected dismissal.
In February, 1881, Melikoff reported that a new plot had been laid by the Executive Committee, but its plan could not be discovered by any amount of searching. Thereupon Alexander II. decided that a sort of consultative assembly of delegates from the provinces should be called. Always under the idea that he would share the fate of Louis XVI., he described this gathering as an Assemblee des Notables, like the one convoked by Louis XVI. before the National Assembly in 1789. The scheme had to be laid before the council of the state, but then again he hesitated. It was only on the morning of March 1 (13), 1881, after a final warning by Lóris Melikoff, that he ordered it to be brought before the council on the following Thursday. This was on Sunday, and he was asked by Mélikoff not to go out to the parade that day, there being danger of an attempt on his life. Nevertheless, he went. He wanted to see the Grand Duchess Catherine (daughter of his aunt, Héléne Pàvlovna, who was one of the leaders of the emancipation party in 1881), and to carry her the welcome news, perhaps as an expiatory offering to the memory of the Empress Marie, He is said to have told her, “ Je me suis decide a convoquer une Assemble des Notables.” However, this belated and half-hearted concession had not been announced, and on his way back to the Winter Palace he was killed.
It is known how it happened. A bomb was thrown under his iron-clad carriage, to stop it. Several Circassians of the escort were wounded. Rysakdff, who flung the bomb, was arrested on the spot. Then, although the coachman of the Tsar earnestly advised him not to get out, saying that he could drive him still in the slightly damaged carriage, he insisted. He felt that his military dignity required him to see the wounded Circassians, to condole with them as he had done with the wounded during the Turkish war, when a mad storming of Plevna, doomed to end in a terrible disaster, was made on the day of his fete. He approached Rysakdff and asked him something ; and as he passed close by another young man, Grinevetsky, the latter threw a bomb between himself and Alexander II., so that both of them should be killed. They lived but a few hours.
There Alexander II. lay upon the snow, profusely bleeding, abandoned by every one of his followers ! All had disappeared. It was cadets, returning from the parade, who lifted the suffering Tsar from the snow and put him in a sledge, covering his shivering body with a cadet mantle and his bare head with a cadet cap. And it was one of the terrorists, Emeli&noff, with a bomb wrapped in a paper under his arm, who, at the risk of being arrested on the spot and hanged, rushed with the cadets to the help of the wounded man. Human nature is full of these contrasts.
Thus ended the tragedy of Alexander II.’s life. People could not understand liow it was possible that a Tsar who had done so much for Russia should have met his death at the hands of revolutionists. To me, who had the chance of witnessing the first reactionary steps of Alexander II. and bis gradual deterioration, who had caught a glimpse of his complex personality, — that of a born autocrat, whose violence was but partially mitigated by education, of a man possessed of military gallantry, but devoid of the courage of the statesman, of a man of strong passions and weak will, — it seemed that the tragedy developed with the unavoidable fatality of one of Shakespeare’s plays. Its last act was already written for me on the day when I heard him address us, the promoted officers, on June 13, 1802, immediately after the first executions in Poland.
IX.
A wild panic seized the court circles at St. Petersburg. Alexander III., who, notwithstanding his colossal stature and force, was not an overcourageous man, refused to move to the Winter Palace, and retired to the palace of his grandfather, Paul I., at Gatchina. I know that old building, planned as a Vauban fortress, surrounded by moats and protected by watch towers, from the tops of which secret staircases lead to the Emperor’s study. I have seen the trap doors in the study, for suddenly throwing an enemy on the sharp rocks in the water underneath, and the secret staircase leading to underground prisons and to an underground passage which opens on a lake. All the palaces of Paul I. had been built on a similar plan. An underground gallery was dug round the Anichkoff palace of Alexander III., and was supplied with automatic electric appliances to protect it from being undermined by the revolutionists.
A secret league for the protection of the Tsar was started. Officers of all grades were induced by triple salaries to join it, and to undertake voluntary spying in all classes of society. Comical scenes followed, of course. Two officers, without knowing that they both belonged to the league, would entice each other into a disloyal conversation, during a railway journey, and then proceed to arrest each other, only to discover at the last moment that their pains had been labor lost. This league still exists in a more official shape, under the name of Okhrána (Protection), and from time to time frightens the present Tsar with all sorts of concocted “ dangers,” in order to maintain its existence.
A still more secret organization, the Holy League, was formed at the same time, under the leadership of the brother of the Tsar, Vladimir, for the purpose of opposing the revolutionists in different ways, one of which was to kill those of the refugees who were supposed to have been the leaders of the late conspiracies. 1 was of this number. The grand duke violently reproached the officers of the league for their cowardice, regretting that there were none among them who would undertake to kill such refugees ; and an officer, who had been a page de cliambre at the time 1 was in the corps of pages, was appointed by the league to carry out this particular work. Skbbeleff, tlie hero of the Turkish war, was asked to join this league, but he blankly refused. It appears from Loris Melikott’s posthumous papers, part of which were published by a friend of his at London, that when Alexander III. came to the throne, and hesitated to convoke the Assembly of Notables, Skdbeleff even made an offer to Ldris Melikoif and Count Igmltietf (“ the lying Pasha,” as the Constantinople diplomatists used to nickname him) to arrest Alexander III., and compel him to sign a constitutional manifesto : whereupon Igndtiefif is said to have denounced the scheme to the Tsar, and thus to have obtained his nomination as prime minister, in which capacity he resorted to various stratagems in order to paralyze the revolutionists.
The fact is that the refugees abroad did not interfere with the work of the Executive Committee at St. Petersburg. To pretend to direct conspiracies from Switzerland, while those who were at St. Petersburg acted under a permanent menace of death, would have been sheer nonsense ; and as Stepnidk and I wrote several times, none of us would have accepted the doubtful task of forming plans of action without being on the spot. But of course it suited the plans of the St. Petersburg police to maintain that they were powerless to protect the Tsar because all plots were devised abroad, and their spies — 1 know it well —amply supplied them with the desired reports.
A few months after the death of Alexander II. I was expelled from Switzerland,11112 by order of the federal council. I did not take umbrage at this. Assailed by the monarchical powers on account of the asylum which Switzerland offered to refugees, and menaced by the Russian official press with a wholesale expulsion of all Swiss governesses and ladies’ maids, who are numerous in Russia, the rulers of Switzerland, by banishing me, gave some sort of satisfaction to the Russian police. But I very much regret, for the sake of Switzerland itself, that that step was taken. It was a sanction given to the theory of “ conspiracies concocted in Switzerland,” and it was an acknowledgment of weakness, of which Italy and France took advantage at once. Two years later, when Jules Ferry proposed to Italy and Germany the partition of Switzerland, his argument must have been that the Swiss government itself had admitted that Switzerland was “ a hothed of international conspiracies.” This first concession led to more arrogant demands, and has certainly placed Switzerland in a far less independent position than it might otherwise have occupied.
The decree of expulsion was delivered to me immediately after I had returned from London, where I was present at an anarchist congress in July, 1881. After that congress I had stayed for a few weeks in England, writing the first articles on Russian affairs from our standpoint for the Newcastle Chronicle. The English press, at that time, was an echo of the opinions of Madame Novikdff, — that is, of Katkdff and the Russian state police, — and I was most happy when Mr. Joseph Cowen agreed to give me the hospitality of his paper in order to state our point of view.
I had just joined my wife in the high mountains where she was staying, near the abode of Elisée Reclus. We sent the little luggage we had to the next railway station and went on foot to Aigle, enjoying for the last time the sight of the mountains that we loved so much. We crossed the hills by taking short cuts over them, and laughed when we discovered that the short cuts led to long windings ; and when we reached the bottom of the valley, we tramped along the dusty road. The comical incident which always comes in such cases was supplied by an English lady. A richly dressed dame, reclining by the side of a gentleman in a hired carriage, threw several tracts to the two poorly dressed tramps, as she passed them. I lifted the tracts from the dust. She was evidently one of those ladies who believe themselves to be Christians, and consider it their duty to distribute religious tracts among dissolute foreigners.” Thinking we were sure to overtake the lady at the railway station, I wrote on one of the pamphlets the well-known verse relative to the rich and the kingdom of God, and similarly appropriate quotations about the Pharisees being the worst enemies of Christianity . When we came to Aigle, the lady was taking refreshments in her carriage. She evidently preferred to continue the journey in this vehicle along the lovely valley, rather than to be shut up in a stuffy railway train. I returned her the pamphlets with politeness, saying that I had added to them something that she might find useful for her own instruction. The lady did not know whether to fly at me, or to accept the lesson with Christian patience. Her eyes expressed both impulses in rapid succession.
My wife was about to pass her examination for the degree of Bachelor of Science at the Geneva University, and we settled, therefore, in a tiny town of France, Thonon, situated on the Savoy coast of the Lake of Geneva, and stayed there a couple of months.
As to the death sentence of the Holy League, a warning reached me from one of the highest quarters of Russia. Even the name of the lady who was sent from St. Petersburg to Geneva to be the head centre of the conspiracy became known to me. So I simply communicated the fact and the names to the Geneva correspondent of the Times, asking him to publish them if anything should happen, and I put a note to that effect in Le Revolté. After that I did not trouble myself more about it. My wife did not take it so lightly, and the good peasant woman, Madame Sansaux, who gave us board and lodgings at Thonon, and who had learned of the plot in a different way (through her sister, who was a nurse in the family of a Russian agent), bestowed the most touching care upon me. Her cottage was out of town, and whenever I went to town at night—sometimes to meet my wife at the railway station — she always found a pretext to have me accompanied by her husband with a lantern. " Wait only a moment, Monsieur Kropotkin,” she would say ; “ my husband is going that way for purchases, and you know he always carries a lantern! ” Or else she would send her brother to follow me at a distance, without my noticing it.
X.
I must now conclude this rather long autobiography with a short sketch of my subsequent life.
In October or November, 1881, as soon as my wife had passed her examination, we removed from Thonon to London, where we stayed nearly twelve months. Few years separate us from that time, and yet I can say that the intellectual life of London and of all England was quite different then from what it became a little later. Every one knows that in the forties England stood almost at the head of the socialist movement in Europe; but during the years of reaction that followed, that great movement, which had deeply affected the working classes, and in which all that is now represented as scientific or anarchist socialism had already been said, came to a standstill. It was foi’gotten in England as well as on the Continent, and what the French writers describe as “ the third awakening of the proletarians ” had not yet begun in Britain. The labors of the agricultural commission of 1871, Arch’s propaganda amongst the agricultural laborers, and the efforts of the Christian socialists certainly were preparing the way ; but the outburst of socialist feeling in England which followed the publication of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty had not yet taken place.
The year that I then passed in London was a year of real exile. For one who held advanced socialist opinions, there was no atmosphere to breathe in. There was no sign of that animated socialist movement which I found so largely developed on my return in 1886. Burns, Champion, Hardie, and the other labor leaders were not yet heard of; the Fabians did not exist; Morris had not declared himself a socialist ; and the trade unions, limited in London to a few trades only, were hostile to socialism. The only active and outspoken representatives of the socialist movement were Mr. and Mrs. Hyndman, with a very few workers grouped round them. They had held in the autumn of 1881 a small congress, and we used to say jokingly — but it was very nearly true — that Mrs. Hyndman had received all the congress in her house. Moreover, the more or less socialist radical movement which was certainly going on in the minds of men did not assert itself frankly and openly. That considerable number of educated men and women who appeared in public life four years later, and, without committing themselves to socialism, took part in various movements connected with the well-being or the education of the masses, and who have now created in almost every city of England and Scotland a quite new atmosphere of reform and a new society of reformers, had not then made themselves felt. They were there, of course; they thought and spoke ; all the elements for a widespread movement were in existence ; but. finding none of those centres of attraction which the socialist groups subsequently became, they were lost in the crowd; they did not know one another, or remained unconscious of their own selves.
Tchaykovsky was then in London, and, as in years past, we began a socialist propaganda in the radical clubs. Aided by a few English workers whose acquaintance we had made at the congress of 1881, or whom the prosecutions against John Most had attracted to the socialists, we went to the clubs, speaking about Russian affairs, the movement of our youth toward the people, and socialism in general. We had ridiculously small audiences, seldom consisting of more than a dozen men. Occasionally some gray-bearded Chartist would rise from the audience and tell us that all we were saying had been said forty years before, and was greeted then with enthusiasm by crowds of workers, but that now all was dead, and there was no hope to revive it.
Mr. Hyndman had just published his excellent exposition of Marxist socialism under the title of England for All; and I remember, one day in the summer of 1882, earnestly advising him to start a socialist paper. I told him what small means we had when we started Le Revolté, and predicted a certain success if he would make the attempt. But so gloomy was the general outlook that even he thought the undertaking would be absolutely hopeless unless he had the means to defray all its expenses. Perhaps he was right; but when, less than three years later, he started Justice, it found a hearty support among the workers, and early in 1886 there were three socialist papers, and the Social Democratic federation was an influential body.
In the summer of 1882, I spoke, in broken English, before the Durham miners at their annual gathering; I delivered lectures at Newcastle, Glasgow, and Edinburgh about the Russian movement, and was received with enthusiasm, a crowd of workers giving hearty cheers for the nihilists, after the meeting, in the street. But my wife and I felt so lonely at London, and our efforts to awaken a socialist movement in England seemed so hopeless, that in the autumn of 1882 we decided to remove again to France. We were sure that in France I should soon be arrested ; but we often said to each other, “ Better a French prison than this grave.”
Those who are prone to speak of the slowness of evolution ought to study the development of socialism in England. Evolution is slow ; but its rate is not uniform. It has its periods of slumber and its periods of sudden progress.
XI.
We settled once more in Thonon, taking lodgings with our former hostess, Madame Sansaux. A brother of my wife, who was dying of consumption, and had come to Switzerland, joined us.
I never saw such numbers of Russian spies as during the two months that I remained at Thonon. To begin with, as soon as we had engaged lodgings, a suspicious character, who gave himself out for an Englishman, took the other part of the house. Flocks, literally flocks of Russian spies besieged the house, seeking admission under all possible pretexts, or simply tramping in pairs, trios, and quartettes in front of the house. I imagine what wonderful reports they wrote. A spy must report. If he should merely say that he has stood for a week in the street without noticing anything mysterious, he would soon be put on the halfpay list or dismissed.
It was then the golden age of the Russian secret police. Ignatieff’s policy had borne fruit. There were two or three bodies of police competing with one another, each having any amount of money at their disposal, and carrying on the boldest intrigues. Colonel Sudéikin, for instance, chief of one of the branches, — plotting with a certain Degáeff, who after all killed him. — denounced Igndtieff’s agents to the revolutionists, and offered to the terrorists all facilities for killing the minister of the interior, Count Tolstói, and the Grand Duke Vladimir; adding that he himself would then be nominated minister of the interior, with dictatorial powers, and the Tsar would be entirely in his hands. This activity of the Russian police culminated, later on, in the kidnapping of the Prince of Battenberg from Bulgaria.
The French police, also, were on the alert. The question, “ What is he doing at Thonon ? ” worried them. I wrote articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Newcastle Chronicle, and I continued to edit Le Revolte. But what reports could be made out of that ? One day the local gendarme paid a visit to my landlady. He had heard from the street the rattling of a sewing machine, and wished to report that I had in my house a secret printing press. So he came in my absence and compelled the landlady to sew on her machine, while he listened inside the house and outside, to make sure that the rattling he had heard was the same.
“ What is he doing all day ? ” he asked the landlady.
“ He writes.”
“ He cannot write all day long.”
“ He saws wood in the garden at midday, and he takes walks every afternoon between four and five.” It was in November.
“Ah, that’s it! When the dusk is coming?” (A la tombée de la nuit?) And he wrote in his notebook, “ Never goes out except at dusk.”
I could not well explain at that time this special attention of the Russian spies ; but it must have had some connection with the following. When Ignáticff was nominated prime minister, advised by the ex-prefect of Paris, Andrieux, he hit on a new plan. He sent a swarm of his agents into Switzerland, and one of them undertook the publication of a paper which slightly advocated the extension of provincial self-government in Russia, but whose chief purpose was to combat the revolutionists, and to rally to its standard those of the refugees who did not sympathize with terrorism. This was certainly a means of sowing division. Then, when nearly all the members of the Executive Committee had been arrested in Russia, and a couple of them had taken refuge at Paris, Ignátieff sent an agent to Paris to offer an armistice. He promised that there should be no further executions on account of the plots during the reign of Alexander II., even if those who had escaped arrest fell into the hands of the government; that Chernyshevsky should be released from Siberia ; and that a commission should be nominated to review the cases of all those who had been exiled to Siberia without trial. On the other side, he asked the Executive Committee to promise to make no attempts against the Tsar’s life until his coronation was over. Perhaps the reforms in favor of the peasants, which Alexander III. intended to make, were also mentioned. The agreement was made at Paris, and was kept on both sides. The terrorists suspended hostilities. Nobody was executed for complicity in the former conspiracies ; those who were arrested later on under this indictment were immured in the Russian Bastille at Schlusselburg, where nothing was heard of them for fifteen years, and where most of them still are. Chernyshevsky was brought back from Siberia, and ordered to stay at Astrakhan, where he was severed from all connection with the intellectual world of Russia, and soon diedA commission went through Siberia, releasing some of the exiles, and specifying terms of exile for the remainder. My brother Alexander received from it an additional five years.
While I was at London, in 1882,I was told one day that a man who pretended to be a bona fide agent of the Russian government, and could prove it, wanted to enter into negotiations with me. “ Tell him that if he comes to my house I will throw him down the staircase,” was my reply. Probably the result was that while Ignátieff considered the Tsar guaranteed from the attacks of the Executive Committee, he was afraid that the anarchists might make some attempt, and wanted to have me out of the way.
XII.
The anarchist movement had undergone a considerable development in France during the years 1881 and 1882. It was generally believed that the French mind was hostile to communism, and within the International Workingmen’s Association “collectivism ” was preached instead. It meant then the possession of the instruments of production in common, each separate group having to settle for itself whether the consumption of produce should be on individualistic or communistic lines. In reality, however, the French mind was hostile only to the monastic communism, to the phalanst’ere of the old schools. When the Jura Federation, at its congress of 1880, boldly declared itself anarchistcommunist,—that is, in favor of free communism, —anarchism won wide sympathy in France. Our paper began to spread in that country, letters were exchanged in great numbers with French workers, and an anarchist movement of importance rapidly developed at Paris and in some of the provinces, especially in the Lyons region. When I crossed France in 1881, on my way from Thonon to London, I visited Lyons, St. Etienne, and Vienne,lecturing there, and I found in these cities a considerable number of workers ready to accept our ideas.
By the end of 1882 a terrible crisis prevailed in the Lyons region. The silk industry was paralyzed, and the misery among the weavers was so great that crowds of children stood every morning at the gates of the barracks, where the soldiers gave away what they could spare of their bread and soup. This was the beginning of the popularity of General Boulanger, who had permitted this distribution of food. The miners of the region were also in a very precarious state.
I knew, of course, that there was a great deal of fermentation, but during the eleven months I had stayed at London I had lost close contact with the French movement. A few weeks after I returned to Thonon I learned from the papers that the miners of Monceaules-Mines, incensed at the vexations of the ultra-Catholic owners of the mines, had begun a sort of movement; they were holding secret meetings, talking of a general strike ; the stone crosses erected on all the roads round the mines were thrown down or blown up by dynamite cartridges, which are largely used by the miners in underground work, and often remain in their possession. The agitation at Lyons also took on a more violent character. The anarchists, who were rather numerous in the city, allowed no meeting of the opportunist politicians to be held without obtaining a hearing for themselves, — storming the platform, as a last resource. They brought forward resolutions to the effect that the mines and all necessaries for production, as well as the dwelling houses, ought to be owned by the nation ; and these resolutions were carried with enthusiasm, to the horror of the middle classes.
The feeling among the workers was growing every day against the opportunist town councilors and political leaders and the press, who made light of a very acute crisis, and undertook nothing to relieve the widespread misery. As is usual at such times, the fury of the poorer people turned especially against the places of amusement and debauch, which become only the more conspicuous in times of desolation and misery, as they impersonate for the worker the egotism and dissoluteness of the wealthier classes. A place particularly hated by the workers was the underground cafe at the Theatre Bellecour, which remained open all night, and where, in the small hours of the morning, one could see newspaper men and politicians feasting and drinking in company with gay women. Not a meeting was held but some menacing allusion was made to that café, and one night a dynamite cartridge was exploded in it by an unknown hand. A worker who was occasionally there, a socialist, jumped to blow out the lighted fuse of the cartridge, and was killed, while a few of the feasting politicians were slightly wounded. Next day a dynamite cartridge was exploded at the doors of a recruiting bureau, and it was said that the anarchists intended to blow up the huge statue of the Virgin which stands on one of the hills of Lyons. One must have lived at Lyons or in its neighborhood to realize the extent to which the population and the schools are still in the hands of the Catholic clergy, and to understand the hatred that the male portion of the population feels toward the clergy.
A panic now seized the wealthier classes of Lyons. Some sixty anarchists — all workers, and only one middle-class man, Emile Gautier, who was on a lecturing tour in the region — were arrested. The Lyons papers undertook at the same time to incite the government to arrest me, representing me as the leader of the agitation, who had come on purpose from England to direct the movement. Russian spies began to parade again in conspicuous numbers in our small town. Almost every day I received letters, evidently written by spies of the international jjolice, mentioning some dynamite plot, or mysteriously announcing that consignments of dynamite had been shipped to me. I made quite a collection of these letters, writing on each of them t: Police Internationale,” and they were taken away by the police when they made a search in my house. But they did not dare to produce these letters in court, nor did they ever restore them to me.
Not only was the house searched, but my wife, who was going to Geneva, was arrested at the station in Thonon, and searched. But of course absolutely nothing was found to compromise me or any one else.
Ten days passed, during which I was quite free to go away, if I wished to do so. I received several letters advising me to disappear, — one of them from an unknown Russian friend, perhaps a member of the diplomatic staff, who seemed to have known me, and wrote that I must leave at once, because otherwise I would be the first victim of the extradition treaty which was about to be concluded between France and Russia. I remained where I was ; and when the Times inserted a telegram saying that I had disappeared from Thonon, I wrote a letter to the paper, giving my address, and declaring that since so many of my friends were arrested I had no intention of leaving.
In the night of December 21 my brother-in-law died in my arms. Three or four hours later, as the dull winter morning was dawning, gendarmes came to my house to arrest me. Seeing in what a state my wife was, I asked permission to remain with her till the burial was over, promising upon my word of honor to be at the prison door at a given hour; but it was refused, and the same night I was taken to Lyons. Elisée Reclus, notified by telegraph, came at once, bestowing on my wife all the gentleness of his golden heart; friends came from Geneva; and although the funeral was absolutely civil, which was a novelty in that little town, half of the population was at the burial, to show my wife that the hearts of the poorer classes and the simple Savoy peasants were with us, and not with their rulers. When my trial was going on, the peasants used to come from the mountain villages to town, to get the papers and to see how my affair stood before the court.
Another incident which profoundly touched me was the arrival at Lyons of an English friend, who brought with him a considerable sum of money for the purpose of obtaining my release on bail; he suggested to me at the same time that I need not care in the least about the bail, but must leave France immediately. He managed in some mysterious way to see me freely, — not in the double-grated iron cage in which I was given interviews with my wife, — and he seemed to be as much affected by my refusal to accept the offer as I was by that touching token of friendship on the part of a person whom I had learned to esteem so highly in London in 1881.
There was no possibility of prosecuting the arrested anarchists for the explosions. It would have required bringing us before a jury, which in all probability would have acquitted us. Consequently, the government adopted the Machiavellian course of prosecuting us for having belonged to the International Workingmen’s Association. There is in France a law, passed immediately after the fall of the Commune, under which men can be brought before a simple police court for having belonged to that association. The maximum penalty is five years’ imprisonment ; and a police court is always sure to pronounce the sentences which are wanted by the government.
The trial began at Lyons in the first days of January, 1883, and lasted about a fortnight. The accusation was ridiculous. as every one knew that none of the Lyons workers had ever joined the International, and it entirely fell through, as may be seen from the following episode. The only witness for the prosecution was the chief of the secret police at Lyons, an elderly man, who was treated at the court with the utmost respect. His report, I must say, was quite correct as concerns the facts. The anarchists, he said, had taken hold of the population, they had rendered opportunist meetings impossible, they preached communism and anarchism. Seeing that so far he had been fair in his testimony, I ventured to ask him a question: “ Did you ever hear the name of the International Workingmen’s Association spoken at Lyons ? ”
“ Never,” he replied sulkily.
“ When I returned from the London congress of 1881, and did all I could to have the International reconstituted in France, did I succeed ? ”
“ No. They did not find it revolutionary enough.”
“Thank you,” I said, and turning toward the procureur added, “There’s all your prosecution thrown to the ground by your own witness ! ”
Nevertheless, we were all condemned for having belonged to the International. Four of us got the maximum sentence, five years’ imprisonment and four hundred dollars’ fine ; the remainder got from four years to one year. In fact, they never tried to prove anything concerning the International. It was quite forgotten. We were simply asked to speak about anarchism, and so we did. Not a word was said about the explosions ; and when one or two of the Lyons comrades wanted to clear this point, they were bluntly told that they were not prosecuted for that, but for having belonged to the International, — to which I alone belonged.
Very soon after that condemnation the presiding magistrate got his reward. He was promoted to the magistracy of an assize court. As to the procureur and another magistrate, — one hardly would believe it, — the Russian government offered them the Russian cross of Sainte-Anne, and they were allowed by the republic to accept it! The famous Russian alliance had its origin in the Lyons trial.
This trial — during which most brilliant anarchist speeches, reported by all the papers, were made by such first-rate speakers as the worker Bernard and Emile Gautier, and during which all the accused took a very firm attitude, preaching our doctrines for a fortnight — had a powerful influence in clearing away false ideas about anarchism in France, and surely contributed to some extent to the revival of socialism in other countries. As to the condemnation, it was so little justified by the proceedings that the French press — with the exception of the papers devoted to the government — openly blamed the magistrates. The contest between the accusers and ourselves was won by us, in the public opinion. Immediately a proposition of amnesty was brought before the Chamber, and received about a hundred votes in support of it. It came up regularly every year, each time securing more and more voices, until we were released.
XIII.
In the middle of March, 1883, twentytwo of us, who had been condemned to more than one year of imprisonment, were removed in great secrecy to the central prison of Clairvaux. It was formerly an abbey of St. Bernard, of which the great Revolution had made a house for the poor. Subsequently it became a house of detention and correction, which went among the prisoners and the officials themselves under the well-deserved nickname of “ house of detention and corruption.”
So long as we were kept at Lyons we were treated as the prisoners under preliminary arrest are treated in France ; that is, we had our own clothes, we could get our own food from a restaurant, and one could hire for a few francs per month a larger cell, a pistole. I took advantage of this for working hard upon my articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Nineteenth Century. Now, the treatment we should have at Clairvaux was an open question. However, in France it is generally understood that, for political prisoners, the deprivation of liberty and the forced inactivity are in themselves so hard that there is no need to inflict additional hardships. Consequently, we were told that we should remain under the same regime that we had had at Lyons. We should have separate quarters, retain our own clothes, be free of compulsory work, and be allowed to smoke. “ Those of you,” the governor said, “ who wish to earn something by manual work ” — the family of the prisoner is always made to suffer, even more than the convict himself — " will be enabled to do so by sewing stays or engraving small things in mother of pearl. This work is poorly paid ; but you could not be employed in the prison workshops for the fabrication of iron beds, picture frames, metric measures, velvet, and so on, because that would require your lodging with tlie common - law prisoners.” Like the other prisoners, we were allowed to buy from the prison canteen some additional food and a pint of claret every day, both being supplied at a very low price and of good quality.
Three spacious rooms were given us in the hospital building, and a smaller room was spared for Gautier and myself, so that we could pursue our literary work. We probably owed this last favor to the intervention of a considerable number of English men of science, who, as soon as I was condemned, had signed a petition asking for my release. Many contributors to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Herbert Spencer and Mr. Swinburne, were among the signers, while Victor Hugo had added to his signature a few warm words. Altogether, public opinion in France met our condemnation most unfavorably ; and when my wife had mentioned at Paris that I required books, the Academy of Sciences offered its library, and Ernest Renan, in a charming letter, put his private library at her service.
We had a small garden, where we could play ninepins or jeu de boules, and soon we managed to cultivate a narrow bed along the building’s wall, in which, on a surface of some eighty square yards, we grew almost incredible quantities of lettuce and radishes, as well as some flowers. I need not say that at once we organized classes, and during the three years that we remained at Clairvaux I gave my comrades lessons in cosmography, geometry, or physics, also aiding them in the study of languages. Nearly every one learned at least one language, — English, German, Italian, or Spanish, — while a few learned two. We also managed to do some bookbinding, having learned how from one of those excellent Encyclopedic Roret booklets.
At the end of the first year, however, my health again gave way. Clairvaux is built on marshy ground, upon which malaria is endemic, and malaria, with scurvy, laid hold of me. Then my wife, who was studying at Paris, working in Würtz’s laboratory and preparing to take an examination for the degree of Doctor of Science, abandoned everything, and came to the tiny hamlet of Clairvaux, which consists of less than a dozen houses grouped at the foot of an immense high wall which encircles the prison. Of course, her life in that hamlet, with the prison wall opposite, was anything but gay ; yet she stayed there till I was released. During the first year she was allowed to see me only once in two months, and all interviews were held in the presence of a warder, who sat between us. But when she settled at Clairvaux, declaring her firm intention to remain there, she was soon permitted to see me every day, in one of the small houses within the prison walls where a post of warders was kept, and food was brought me from the inn where she stayed. Later, we were even allowed to take a walk in the governor’s garden, closely watched all the time, and usually one of my comrades joined us in the walk.
Demands for our release were continually raised, both in the press and in the Chamber of Deputies, — the more so as about the same time that we were condemned Louise Michel was condemned, too, for robbery ! Louise Michel, who always gives literally her last shawl or cloak to the woman who is in need of it, and who never could be compelled, during her imprisonment, to have better food, because she always gave her fellow prisoners what was sent to her, was condemned, together with another comrade, Pouget, to nine years’ imprisonment for highway robbery ! That sounded too bad even for the middle-class opportunists. She marched one day at the head of a procession of the unemployed, and, entering a baker’s shop, took the bread from it and distributed it to the hungry column : this was her robbery. The release of the anarchists thus became a war cry against the government, and in the autumn of 1883 all my comrades save three were set at liberty by a decree of President Grevy. Then the outcry in behalf of Louise Michel and myself became still louder. However, Alexander III. objected to it; and one day the prime minister, M. Freycinet, answering an interpellation in the Chamber, said that “ diplomatic difficulties stood in the way of Kropotkin’s release.” Strange words in the mouth of the prime minister of an independent country ; but still stranger words have been heard since in connection with that ill-omened alliance of France with imperial Russia.
In the middle of January, 1886, both Louise Michel and Pouget, as well as the four of us who were still at Clairvaux, were set free ; and after a few weeks’ stay at Paris I went once more to London. There I found the socialist movement in full swing, and took a hearty part in it. Life in London was no more the dull, vegetative existence that it had been for me four years before.
P. Kropotkin.