ly the
enthusiasm, here gentle and intimate, would become incomparably more
intense and the atmosphere more agitated by the mutual contagion of the
human beings in a crowd.

"At bottom, in what did the charm of Bakounin consist? I believe that it
is impossible to define it exactly. It was not by the force of
persuasion that he agitated. It was not his thought which awakened the
thought of others. But he aroused every rebellious heart and awoke there
an 'elemental' anger. And this anger, transplendent with beauty, became
creative and showed to the exalted thirst for justice and happiness an
issue and a possibility of accomplishment. 'The desire for destruction
is at the same time a creative desire,' Bakounin has repeated to the end
of his life."[32]

FOOTNOTE:

[F] This formidable peasant insurrection occurred in 1669-1671. When
Pougatchoff, a century later, in 1773-1775, urged the Cossacks and serfs
to insurrection against Catherine II, the Russian people saw in him a
new Stenka Razin; and they expected in Russia, in 1869 and the following
years, a third centennial apparition of the legendary brigand who, in
the minds of the oppressed people, personified revolt.

CHAPTER II

A SERIES OF INSURRECTIONS

At the beginning of the seventies Bakounin and his friends found opening
before them a field of practical activity. On the whole, the sixties
were spent in theorizing, in organizing, and in planning, but with the
seventies the moment arrived "to unchain the hydra of revolution." On
the 4th of September, 1870, the Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris,
and a few days afterward there were many uprisings in the other cities
of France. It was, however, only in Lyons that the Bakouninists played
an important part. Bakounin had a fixed idea that, wherever there was an
uprising of the people, there he must go, and he wrote to Adolphe Vogt
on September 6: "My friends, the revolutionary socialists of Lyons, are
calling me there. I am resolved to take my old bones thither and to play
there what will probably be my last game. But, as usual, I have not a
sou. Can you, I do not say lend me, but give me 500 or 400, or 300 or
200, or even 100 francs, for my voyage?"[1] Guillaume does not state
where the money finally came from, but Bakounin evidently raised it
somehow, for he left Locarno on September 9. The night of the 11th he
spent in Neuchatel, where he conferred with Guillaume regarding the
publication of a manuscri