第15章 BAKUNIN AND ANARCHISM(3)

Being compelled to leave France, he went to Brussels, where he renewed acquaintance with Marx.A letter of his, written at this time, shows that he entertained already that bitter hatred for which afterward he had so much reason.``The Germans, artisans, Bornstedt, Marx and Engels--and, above all, Marx--are here, doing their ordinary mischief.Vanity, spite, gossip, theoretical overbearingness and practical pusillanimity--reflections on life, action and simplicity, and complete absence of life, action and simplicity--literary and argumentative artisans and repulsive coquetry with them: `Feuerbach is a bourgeois,' and the word `bourgeois' grown into an epithet and repeated ad nauseum, but all of them themselves from head to foot, through and through, provincial bourgeois.With one word, lying and stupidity, stupidity and lying.In this society there is no possibility of drawing a free, full breath.I hold myself aloof from them, and have declared quite decidedly that I will not join their communistic union of artisans, and will have nothing to do with it.''

The Revolution of 1848 led him to return to Paris and thence to Germany.He had a quarrel with Marx over a matter in which he himselfconfessed later that Marx was in the right.He became a member of the Slav Congress in Prague, where he vainly endeavored to promote a Slav insurrection.Toward the end of 1848, he wrote an ``Appeal to Slavs,'' calling on them to combine with other revolutionaries to destroy the three oppressive monarchies, Russia, Austria and Prussia.Marx attacked him in print, saying, in effect, that the movement for Bohemian independence was futile because the Slavs had no future, at any rate in those regions where they hap- pened to be subject to Germany and Austria.Bakunin accused Mars of German patriotism in this matter, and Marx accused him of Pan-Slavism, no doubt in both cases justly.Before this dispute, however, a much more serious quarrel had taken place.Marx's paper, the ``Neue Rheinische Zeitung,'' stated that George Sand had papers proving Bakunin to be a Russian Government agent and one of those responsible for the recent arrest of Poles.Bakunin, of course, repudiated the charge, and George Sand wrote to the ``Neue Rheinische Zeitung,'' denying this statement in toto.The denials were published by Marx, and there was a nominal reconciliation, but from this time onward there was never any real abatement of the hostility between these rival leaders, who did not meet again until 1864.

Meanwhile, the reaction had been everywhere gaining ground.In May, 1849, an insurrection in Dresden for a moment made the revolutionaries masters of the town.They held it for five days and established a revolutionary government.Bakunin was the soul of the defense which they made against the Prussian troops.But they were overpowered, and at last Bakunin was captured while trying to escape with Heubner and Richard Wagner, the last of whom, fortunately for music, was not captured.

Now began a long period of imprisonment in many prisons and various countries.Bakunin was sentenced to death on the 14th of January, 1850, but his sentence was commuted after five months, and he was delivered over to Austria, which claimed the privilege of punishing him.The Austrians, in their turn, condemned him to death in May, 1851, and again his sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life.In the Austrian prisons he had fetters on hands and feet, and in one of them he was evenchained to the wall by the belt.There seems to have been some peculiar pleasure to be derived from the punishment of Bakunin, for the Russian Government in its turn demanded him of the Austrians, who delivered him up.In Russia he was confined, first in the Peter and Paul fortress and then in the Schluesselburg.There be suffered from scurvy and all his teeth fell out.His health gave way completely, and he found almost all food impossible to assimilate.``But, if his body became enfeebled, his spirit remained inflexible.He feared one thing above all.It was to find himself some day led, by the debilitating action of prison, to the condition of degradation of which Silvio Pellico offers a well-known type.He feared that he might cease to hate, that he might feel the sentiment of revolt which upheld him becoming extinguished in his hearts that he might come to pardon his persecutors and resign himself to his fate.But this fear was superfluous; his energy did not abandon him a single day, and he emerged from his cell the same man as when he entered.''[14]

[14] Ibid.p.xxvi.