rs the death of vague human beings, if thereby the individual
affirms himself."

The bourgeoisie no longer knows where to turn. "I who have fought so
much for Positivism," moans Emile Zola, "well, yes! after thirty years
of this struggle, I feel my convictions are shaken. Religious faith
would have prevented such theories from being propagated; but has it not
almost disappeared to-day? Who will give us a new ideal?"

Alas, gentlemen, there is no ideal for walking corpses such as you! You
will try everything. You will become Buddhists, Druids, Sars, Chaldeans,
Occultists, Magi, Theosophists, or Anarchists, whichever you prefer--and
yet you will remain what you are now--beings without faith or
principle, bags, emptied by history. The ideal of the bourgeois has
lived.

For ourselves, Social-Democrats, we have nothing to fear from the
Anarchist propaganda. The child of the bourgeoisie, Anarchism, will
never have any serious influence upon the proletariat. If among the
Anarchists there are workmen who sincerely desire the good of their
class, and who sacrifice themselves to what they believe to be the good
cause, it is only thanks to a misunderstanding that they find themselves
in this camp. They only know the struggle for the emancipation of the
proletariat under the form which the Anarchists are trying to give it.
When more enlightened they will come to us.

Here is an example to prove this. During the trial of the Anarchists at
Lyons in 1883, the working man Desgranges related how he had become an
Anarchist, he who had formerly taken part in the political movement, and
had even been elected a municipal councillor at Villefranche in
November, 1879. "In 1881, in the month of September, when the dyers'
strike broke out at Villefranche, I was elected secretary of the strike
committee, and it was during this memorable event ... that I became
convinced of the necessity of suppressing authority, for authority
spells despotism. During this strike, when the employers refused to
discuss the matter with the workers, what did the prefectural and
communal administrations do to settle the dispute? Fifty gendarmes, with
sword in hand, were told off to settle the question. That is what is
called the pacific means employed by Governments. It was then, at the
end of this strike, that some working men, myself among the number,
understood the necessity of seriously studying economic questions, and,
in order to do so, we agreed to meet in