Comrade Pietro Kropotkin — whose readers know, for essays that the “Cronaca” has recently published, the acute analysis of modern international conflicts — summarizes in a unique fact, of exclusive national character, the original causes of the war present in the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine to the Germanic empire in 1871.

There, all the excitement of war.

Because, the need to maintain its dominion over the two provinces, violently usurped, has pushed Germany towards the paradoxical armaments which, constituting a constant threat to peace and European equilibrium, have led to the militarization of the entire old continent, a constant eve of arms that year after year has gone on to become the exclusive concern of every state, making any further progress, any life of thought, any proletarian attempt at emancipation, impossible.

Fixing with such naïve candor the causes of the war, to comrade Kropotkin the reasons to take sides for France, England and, necessarily, for Russia against the two central empires, are no longer lacking; and although — as if to appease a remorse — he hopes that “the workers may learn from war which and how much part to play in unleashing the armed conflicts between the different nations, the state exercises the capital” he considers the first duty of every man of liberty and progress “of the proletarians conscripted under the banners of the International Labor Standards above all, to do everything in their power and according to their respective capacities to crush this invader”.

Germany in Metz, an entrenched camp with aggressive intentions, can on the same day of the declaration of war venture two hundred and fifty thousand men over Paris. And under such conditions, not only is France not free to draw on its own development, but workers in Belgium from France from Switzerland from the Netherlands will never be able, under such conditions, to start a liberation movement.

Feudal Germany would come down en masse to crush them.

And all the emails of German imperialism were there! What’s worse: Russian autocratism daringly tomatoes the reaction, the compulsory military service established in almost all the nations of the West: in Germany itself the survival of outdated feudal institutions, the constitutional derision of a parliament enslaved to the monarch, the warlike fury of lightning and menace, repeat only by the provocative attitudes of imperial Germany their cause and their reason.

Woe betide if you don’t make embankment, immediately, to the river: Holland, Belgium, eastern France, Finland, Denmark will be tomorrow German provinces. Antwerp and Calais will tomorrow be the naval bases of the new military operations that will put England at the mercy of the Kaiser, making it impossible, in the perennial threat, even in the United Kingdom, to make any civil life throb.

It should not be forgotten that Germany alone or with the accord of Russia has never cultivated anything but hatred for the France of the Revolution and has always been the gendarme, the instrument of all restoration; and that we Italians should particularly remember that “in 1860, when the Hapsburgs and Lorraine were driven out of Tuscany, Modena, Parma and Florence became the capital of Italy, we found in Germany the most tenacious opposition”.

In conclusion, warns the Kropotkin, if in the common effort of all the nations of Europe Germany is not crushed, we will have, if not more, another half century of reaction.

These, faithfully deduced from his letter to Professor Steffen in the “Freedom” of last October, the arguments of comrade Kropotkin who, stirring the specter of the German imperialist reaction against which he would like — along with the phalanxes of the allies, the dragons of the republic and the Czar Cossacks — to oppose the fervent coalition of all men of liberty, of the International Labor Party, before any other, and forced to foresee from the comrades an anxiety and an objection.

— But can it be a sincere crusade of civilization and liberty that has the banners on the forehead and the sword in the scales and in the game, the decisive stakes, the Cossack hordes of the Little Father? And in the hands of the autocracy, the Holy Synod, the Hundred Blacks, the Duma — a constitutional mockery at least as much as the Reichstag — will the destinies of civilization and freedom be better off than under the cannons of the Krupp and the heels of the Kaiser? And do you not prepare yourself, old comrade enchanted under the gusts of the most painful experience, still an atrocious disillusionment, the mortal disillusionment of which is drunk in history every proletarian generation heaving to reconstruct on the ruin of a tyranny the fortune of a more exaggerated, more infamous tyranny?

— Don’t go down! — reassures the good Kropotkin in whom intimate desire rises to the solemn safety of the Vatican. — Don’t be alarmed! “Those who follow the Russian revolutionary movement attentively and studiously can tell you what the feeling of modern Russia is and can assure you that under no circumstances will the autocracy be restored to the forms that existed before 1905, and that a Russian constitution will never take on the imperialist forms and spirit that the parliamentary regime in Germany did and did[5].

***

The broad consensus that Kropotkin’s statements received in the cenacles of democratic liberalism explains in itself the sense of painful astonishment with which they were received by the comrades. They do not ignore, and have explained to a certain extent, their preferences for traditions, culture and the French proletariat.

He had quenched his thirst, young, at the superb sources of 18^th century philosophy Peter Kropotkin who came to the revolutionary movement under the caress of the voices, the memories, the men of the glorious Commune; and, by the same geographical nature of the revolutionary movement, with intellectual and proletarian France he cultivated for forty years assiduous familiarity of relationships. They would never have predicted, however, that the old official melancholy of the Cossacks of Love had survived so long that it would become daylight, and that the declared anti-militarism, with the excitement of the friends of France — who had bitterly repudiated it in peace and quiet — would not oppose the law on the three-year stay, and they were entitled to believe that the aspirations of the musicians towards the spa and freedom he saw in any Russian constitution, unlike the German constitution immune from imperialist leprosy, an obstacle at least as arduous, as erect as in the autocracy, always surviving and vigorous.

But so much so; on the ground of compromises and so on: moved the starting point the deviations are going to spread to the antithesis without losing the relative logical appearance. When you exclude the homeland you are forced to say class, to see no more than the social revolution; when, on the other hand, wild antagonisms collide in the shadow of the ethnic symbol you rebuild the fictitious and absurd unity that you call France or Germany or Russia or Italy, you obliterate, without even realizing it, the process of differentiation in which the social revolution is taking place. symbol had gone dissolute, and of the nation you will have back the pride and anxieties, hatreds and loves, in solidarity with orders instituted interests that repulse you, armed meeting brothers of whom you would not know ‘ disown in time and space the identity of fate and destiny; squalid fantasies of a democracy that you have spent the best of life to defeat, soldiers of the Kaiser or Czar when you thought you had no more enthusiasm and blood than for the social revolution- ‘ le. German socialists, French anti-militarists, Italian trade unionists and... Peter Kropotkin.

It is the logic of contradiction, which is in principle.

* * *

Seeking out who started the war is both idle and sterile. Kropotkin, who blames Germany for it, sees Keir Hardie and Bernard Shaw rise up against it, accusing the government of their own country, England; while in France the Delaisi, after the rescission of the Franco-German union for the Baghdad railway, followed by the Anglo-French military convention of the Delcasse, strengthened by the law on the three-year standstill, gives the character of a real provocation to the war; and against Kropotkin that the hour of war sees the completion of the Kiel Canal, others, not without foundation, believe that England urgently needed to surprise Germany before it had exhausted its naval program of 1915 from which the disproportion between the two rival fleets would be mitigated.

We would sail into the sea of conjecture and hypothesis without hope of reaching positive conclusions. The treaties of alliance, the military conventions, the financial combinations that for every war are the necessary preliminary warp, are stipulated, they are consumed in the closed and grim circles of the court, between the States, in the credit institutions directly concerned and equally barred to any unhealthy plebeian investigation. The so-called nation, the contributors and voters, the generals and deputies, ignore it as we do, and as for the last-minute deceptions, it teaches the war of 1871 that a few decades must pass before the public can see it.

All that is left of the positive, the real, the tangible, is the blissful abyss of armaments in which, not Germany alone, but all the governments of the old and new world, from England to Japan, have plunged every generous resource for thirty years.

— Ineluctable reaction to the German armaments flattened against Western civilization, interrupts the Kropotkin.

— Even Japan, even China, even Spain and the two Americas? we would ask him if we did not know that no one knows better than he does what the task of the great armies and formidable armies is today, that on morsels of bread and with the blood of the dispossessed they cram governments into the service of insatiable capital.

* * *

That no government has dared to push armaments to the paroxysm drawn from the Germanic empire, and truth that Kropotkin must be credited with; but between General Von Bernhardi who dreams for the German homeland a civil mission to which the sword can only tear the path6 and Paul Louis who in a recent study highlights the industrial power achieved by Germany in the last forty years, different presumptions that imply the same need, We incline on the luminous footsteps marked by Kropotkin himself to induce that to find an outlet for these treasures of the homeland industry, to conquer and protect the colonial markets, so that the Kaiser’s army and Tarmata would gather against the competitors that the ways of the formidable conquest had to barricade.

6 F. V. Bernhardi: “Germany and net war”, p. 258.

The more the war is delineated in its fundamental objectives, between the direct and real antagonists, our hypothesis finds more and more vast and decisive confirmation. We will say more: the real reasons for the war, its characters and its unconfessed aims, jump suddenly and irrecusable even to those who close their eyes to not see.

The war that is between France and Germany; and it does not appear, no, the clash of England, area of the constitutional pact, against Germany, guardian of divine law; but savage competition from two exasperated merchants, one of whom has held the dominion of the seas, the monopoly of the international market, the other from his lands, his mines, his prodigious workshops, his sweat, his toil, and the squalid resignation of his servants, has overwhelmed him in forty years and wants to contend for the secular lordship of the seas and markets.

A shameless pirate’s harbor so remote, so foreign to any concern of civilization and barbarism that not against German feudalism — changed name and mask of feudalism and of every land from Nicholas II’s Russia to Rockefeller’s and Wilson’s Spain of Alfoncito or Air America — but against, the intrusive, incoercible German industry, the anathemas and cannons of the allies are pinned; against Germany which has progressed, against Germany which thirty years ago extracted seventy million tons of fuel from its mines and now spills two hundred and thirty million on the market; against Germany, which in the last thirty years has increased from one to three the production of iron, from one to seven the production of cast iron, from one to eighteen the production of steel, to twenty-five billion its traffic with foreign countries, which in 1875 did not draw on the eight billion; against the made in Germany for the made in England, and the war that tears the old continent, as we will explain better in the following chapter.

But in the meantime, what do they have to see, what do they have to share with these bandits of finance and the stock market, Comrade Kropotkin, the men of liberty, the proletarians from across the Channel or the Rhine?

What?