Social Text - 72 (Fall 2002) Volume 20, No. 3. pp. 9-20.
"Kropotkin’s history of the French Revolution has a revealing chapter on anarchists. Kropotkin notes that they were greatly feared by both the Girondins and the Jacobins, and they dominated many key moments of action and deliberation in the Revolution. Yet they left behind little direct trace, except in the pamphlets of others in which they were attacked. And Kropotkin’s great history enacts this presence. Anarchists are given only one short chapter, but they are present as a force in every scene. They were the people willing to make revolution at every turn, "even against themselves." These anarchists were precisely, in Kropotkin’s history, both the movement and limits of the French Revolution. The contemporary Italian anarchist Alfredo Bonanno points out in his introduction to Kropotkin’s study that Kropotkin had a keen historical sense of these anarchists. He argues that Kropotkin understood their violence, and violence in general, as a bourgeois phenomenon. Neither this violence, nor the authoritarianism it makes possible, had any place in the communist anarchism that interested Kropotkin. Bonanno himself calls terror "a bourgeois ideal." Violence turns to terror in Kropotkin’s history. But this is not a condemnation for Kropotkin. It is a question of historical limits."
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