Policy of "Mountain" -- Royalist tendencies of Girondins -- They reject agrarian law, and swear to respect property Continuous conflict between Gironde and "Mountain" -- Socialistic aims of Montagnards -- Brissot and Robespierre -- Order versus Revolution Since August 10 the Commune of Paris had dated its documents from "the Fourth Year of Liberty and the First of Equality." The Convention dated its acts from "the Fourth Year of Liberty and the First Year of the French Republic." And in this little detail already appeared two ideas confronting one another. Was there to be a new revolution grafted upon the preceding one? Or would France confine herself to establising and legalizing the political liberties won since 1789? Would she be content with consolidating the middle-class government, slightly democratized, without calling upon the mass of the people to take advantage of the immense readjustment of wealth accomplished by t...
The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936Preface These essays are less an analysis of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War of 1936-39 than an evocation of the greatest proletarian and peasant revolution to occur over the past two centuries. Although they contain a general overview and evaluation of the Anarchist and Anarchosyndicalist movements (the two should be clearly distinguished) in the three-year struggle at the end of the 1930s, they are not intended to be a full account of those complex events. It is no exaggeration to say that the Spanish Revolution was the farthest-reaching movement that the Left ever produced, for reasons the essays that follow will make clear. The Spanish proletariat and peasantry, led largely by Anarchist militants whose names will never be known to us, strained the limits of what we in the 1930s called "proletarian socialism" and went appreciably beyond them. Far more than the leaders of the Anarchosyndicalist National Confederation of Labor and the Iberian Anarchist Fede...