The internal disintegration of the Third Republic undoubtedly helped strengthen the anarchist movement a great deal. The situation in France was completely different from Germany and most of Eastern Europe, where people were not yet acquainted with bourgeois democracy or a genuine parliamentary system of governance, and could therefore still hope for major changes through a shift in political forms. By contrast, the French people had experienced a wide range of governmental forms since the days of the Great Revolution: the Jacobin dictatorship, Napoleon’s military governance, the return of the Bourbon monarchy, the Orléanists, the deluded hopes and rapid decline of the Second Republic, the return of Bonapartism, and the internal rot of the parliamentary system under the Third Republic. Under the circumstances, it is easy to understand that the politically advanced elements of French society had lost faith in the old forms of rule and were on the lookout for new ways forward.
In France, as happened to be the case in all of the Latin countries, there have always been certain aspirations among the populace that share an affinity with anarchism. Proudhon’s powerful influence was still clearly evident in political thought and has been embraced by broad swaths of the French labor movement up to the present day. The concepts that the great French thinker had set down in his General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century and numerous other works were rooted so deeply in the social views of the time because they were seen as a natural extension of the ideas of the Great Revolution. For Proudhon, the struggle against absolutism that the Revolution had ushered in was far from over. …
For him, socialism was not just an economic matter, but also a cultural one that encompassed every sphere of human activity. If the cause of social liberation was to avoid playing into the hands of a new despotism, he knew that the authoritarian traditions of monarchical thought could not be eliminated in only one sphere while they were maintained in every other. For him, economic exploitation, political repression, and intellectual bondage were no more than different manifestations with the same root cause. …
It was primarily Proudhon’s reasoning that fed the Paris Commune’s ambitions against political centralization and for a free confederation of municipalities. For many people, the elimination of political power from the life of a society by managing social concerns with free agreements and overcoming economic monopoly through cooperative labor in the interest of all appeared to be the starting point for new social progress. This was reinforced by the fact that the frequent changes in political form had not produced any tangible results and could not be seen as anything other than an endless parade of the same social ills marching under different banners.
… Given that taking political power was of no importance to them, the anarchists did not form a cohesive political party like most other socialist tendencies did. What they were striving for was a restructuring of social life based on personal liberty and economic equality. They knew that a goal such as that could not be achieved through political regulations and governmental decisions. Like all cultural achievements throughout history, social changes had to gain ground among the people themselves and ripen from within.
