ver a question of principle, regarding State communism, of
which he himself and the English and German parties which he directs are
the most ardent partisans. Then it will be a fight to the finish. But
there is a time for everything, and the hour for this struggle has not
yet sounded.... Do you not see that all these gentlemen who are our
enemies are forming a phalanx, which must be disunited and broken up in
order to be the more easily routed? You are more erudite than I; you
know, therefore, better than I who was the first to take for principle:
_Divide and rule_. If at present I should undertake an open war against
Marx himself, three-quarters of the members of the International would
turn against me, and I would be at a disadvantage, for I would have lost
the ground on which I must stand. But by beginning this war with an
attack against the rabble by which he is surrounded, I shall have the
majority on my side.... But, ... if he wishes to constitute himself the
defender of their cause, it is he who would then declare war openly. In
this case, I shall take the field also and I shall play the star
role."[22]

This was written in October, 1869, a month after the Basel congress. On
the 1st of January, 1870, the General Council at London sent a private
communication to all sections of the International, and on the 28th of
March it was followed by another. These, together with various
circulars dealing with questions of principle, but all consisting of
attacks upon Bakounin personally or upon his doctrines, finally goaded
him into open war upon Marx, the General Council, all their doctrines,
and even upon the then forming socialist party of Germany, with Bebel
and Liebknecht at its head. During the year 1870 Bakounin was preparing
for the great controversy, but his friends of Lyons interrupted his work
by calling him there to take part in the uprising of that year. He
hastened to Lyons, but, as we know, he was soon forced to flee and
conceal himself in Marseilles. It was there, in the midst of the
blackest despair, that Bakounin wrote: "I have no longer any faith in
the Revolution in France. This nation is no longer in the least
revolutionary. The people themselves have become doctrinaire, as
insolent and as bourgeois as the bourgeois.... The bourgeois are
loathsome. They are as savage as they are stupid--and as the police
blood flows in their veins--they should be called policemen and
attorneys-general in embryo. I am go