communalise tho consumption of commodities, their exchange, and their production, theу must realise it among themselves. And in so doing, they will find such forces as never could be called into life and to the service of a great cause, if they attempted to take in the sway of the Revolution the whole country including its most backward or indifferent regions. Better openly to fight such strongholds of reaction than to drag them as so many chains rivetted to the feet of the fighter.
More than that. We made one step more. We understood that if no central Government was needed to rule the independent Communes, if the national Government is thrown overboard and national unity is obtained by free federation, then a central municipal Government becomes equally useless and noxious. The same federative principle would do within the Commune.
The uprising of the Paris Commune thus brought with it the solution of a question which tormented every true Revolutionist. Twice had France tried to bring about some sort of a Socialist revolution, by imposing it through a Central Government, more or less disposed to accept it: in 1793–94, when she tried to introduce l’égalité de fait—real, economic equality—by means of strong Jacobinist measures; and in 1848, when she tried to impose a "Democratic Socialist Republic." And each time she failed. But now a new solution was indicated: the free Commune must do it on its own territory, and with this grew up a new ideal—Anarchy.
We understood then that at the bottom of Proudhon's "Idée Générale sur la Révolution au Dix-neuvième Siècle" (unfortunately, not yet translated into English) lay a deeply practical idea—that of Anarchy. And in the Latin countries the thought of the more advanced men began to work in this direction.
Alas! in Latin countries only: in France, in Spain, in Italy, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and the Wallonic part of Belgium. The Germans, on the contrary, drew from their victory over France quite another lesson and quite different ideals—the worship of the centralised State.
The centralised State, hostile even to national tendencies of independence; the power of centralisation and a strong central authority—these were the lessons they drew from the victories of the German Empire, and to these lessons they cling even now, without understanding that this was only a victory of a military mass, of the universal obligatory military service of the Germans
