Anarchists!

ANARCHY, ANARCHISM, ANARCHIST!!! HORRIFYING WORDS THAT FREEZE WITH fright and make those ignorant of their meaning tremble.

Anarchist!

The bourgeois shudders, a mute anger in his eyes. For him it’s the irreducible enemy, the man upon whom neither palliatives, contracts, nor promises have any effect. The bourgeois is stupid: he reads little, doesn’t study at all, and less than anything shows any concern for anarchist theory. He only knows of it from the blows delivered by its supporters. When you speak to him of anarchism he recalls violent strikes, expropriations, bombs, Ravachol … And he fears for his skin, for his property, for all his happy parasitism that he sees is threatened.

Anarchist!

The worker looks at you flabbergasted and slightly frightened. Ah, yes … dynamite, direct action, the implacable war on exploiters, but also the war on the gutless, on the cowardly, on the imbeciles sleeping through their oppression who feel that “things have always been this way and they’ll always be this way …” The worker is troubled. He fears for his peace of a submissive beast; he is ashamed of his weakness. But above all, he knows nothing about anarchism, and the weak fear what they don’t know.

Anarchist!

The socialist has a vague smile of scorn and condescension. “You want to jump over stages. You’re going too fast.” What a weak argument and how badly it hides all the ignorance and timidity of people who are used to being led and find shepherds necessary. An argument for those who are frightened by action. An argument of those who never heard our ideas …

Anarchist!

The scientist and the scholar, those officials of the formulas of knowledge, furrow their brows. For them the anarchist is the heretic who laughs at his dry formulas, logically examines the most age-old gospels. He is the non-indoctrinated, the man outside of every church, even the monist …

Anarchy, anarchism, anarchists! Horror!

Oh wretched people, the atrophied and blinded of all classes, poor people who a heredity of slaves has given souls that are senile since childhood, incapable of conceiving a free and young life, powerless to even desire it, how sincerely we pity you!

How our hearts suffer for all of you, men living in the dark, prisoners of old formulas, of absurd conventions, prisoners of your own stupidity!

How powerful is our desire to carry the torch into your darkness, to make a beneficent clarity shine in your minds!

This is why the obscurantism that has taken refuge in you makes us uncompromising enemies. The darkness fears the light.

We love you, for we love men, but we hate your meticulous mercantilism, your hypocritical morality; we deeply detest your vegetative and bestial existence, your pitiful lack of intelligence.

We fight for you as we fight for all men, and it is always you we encounter along the way; it’s you we must fight, miserable human herd!

But our love of men, our determination to free them by freeing ourselves gives us the strength to be merciless.

Anarchists, we want a better life for all men, one finally worth living. We want them to be free, equal, brothers in a beautiful and harmonious life from which hatred and anger, injustice, and poverty will be banished.

But for this to occur, for humanity to reach the happiness toward which it has marched for centuries through ravines of blood and tears, all maleficent authorities must be abolished: the state, property, religion, and law.

The state: an impersonal, irresponsible entity that arrogates to itself the absurd right to rule human life.

Property: a criminal institution that arranges things so that a few own what should belong to all, and which permits this few to impose the exploitation of wage labor on the majority of their kind.

Religion: the control of consciences and minds, and whose multiform lies justify every form of injustice.

Laws: ridiculous and vain in their criminal folly of wanting to contain all of life within narrow limits.

When all of this collapses under the triumphant pressure of freed men—anarchists—when tiaras, crowns, codes, and swords will have disappeared, humans will live.

Until then, that is, as long as all of you—O! wretched people, bourgeois, workers, oppressors and oppressed—stubbornly remain in the darkness, we will be your enemy.

Always and in every act of your petty and sad existence you will find confronting you, building over your mud, our insolent life, the anarchist life, continuous rebellion.

(Le Révolté, November 28, 1908)