beyond the ancient utterance, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Universally the anarchist formula is, All things are lawful.
But the very anarchists make a distinction between anarchist outrage and ordinary crime. The bomb outrage of Emile Henry (1894) was condemned by Elysée Reclus as an ordinary crime, and even Most considered the assassination of the empress Elizabeth useless. On the other hand we must not forget that anarchism is a menace to the very anarchists themselves, that Kropotkin and Reclus were threatened with death by anarchists.
Many anarchists attack monogamic marriage, demanding free marriage and free love (a species of communism), but this doctrine can no longer be regarded as exclusively characteristic of socio-political anarchism.
Impelled by Stirner and Feuerbach, the new ethic, that which would annihilate the state and political action, deposes God. Atheism is taken as a matter of course. Ni Dieu ni maître! To the anarchist this seems to follow necessarily upon a recognition of the nature of theocracy. Anarchistic atheism is not satisfied simply with amonarchism, but goes on to demand that astatism shall be universalised. At most, if he be a solipsist, he may proclaim himself God and tsar.
Anarchism readily degenerates into the anarchism of anarchism. The anarchist conception of liberty leads Bakunin to proclaim chaos. The metaphysic of anarchism becomes indeterminist; miracle plays its ancient role in the anarchist chaos; anarchist philosophers become poets; anarchist politicians develop into utopians.
There are striking relationships between anarchism and the so-called decadent movement. We see this in Nietzsche and in such poets as Tailhade. It is natural that anarchist ideals and methods, crime above all, should serve as a stimulant to weary souls.[1]
Even a very incomplete knowledge of anarchist literature will teach us that we must not take decadent grandiloquence at its face value. There is for example a booklet entitled The Right to Sin; its frontispiece is a titan bearing a rock;
- ↑ In Brussels there was at one time an anarchist Café au Tombeau, where the tables were shaped like coffins and the utensils like skulls and sepulchral urns.
