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Title: Letter to Arnold Ruge Author: Mikhail Bakunin Date: May 1843 Language: en Topics: letter, Libertarian Labyrinth Source: Retrieved on 24th April 2021 from https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/bakunin-library/letter-to-arnold-ruge-may-1843/ Notes: Translated by Shawn Wilbur from the French text published in La vie ouvrière, No. 112, May 20, 1914,
St. Peter’s Island, Lake Biel, May 1843.
Our friend Marx has passed on your letter from Berlin. You seem
disgruntled with Germany. You only see the family and the bourgeois,
cooped up with all its thoughts and all its desires between four stakes,
and you do not want to believe in the springtime that will make it
emerge from its hole. Ah, dear friend! Do not lose faith! You
especially, do not lose it! What! me, the Russian, the Barbarian, I do
not renounce it, I do not want to despair of Germany: and you who are in
the very midst of the movement, you who have lived through its
beginning, and been surprised by its development, you now want to accuse
of powerlessness these same ideas from which previously, when their
strength had still not been put to the test, you expected everything?
Oh, I agree, the day of the German ’89 is still far off! Haven’t the
Germans always remained several centuries behind? But that is not a
reason to cross your arms now and be shamefully disheartened. If men
like you no longer believe in the future of Germany, no longer want to
work for it, then who will believe, and who will act?
I write this letter on the island of Rousseau, on Lake Biel. You know, I
do not thrive on imaginations and clichés; but I feel myself tremble
with all my being at the thought that today even, when I write to you,
and on such a subject, I have been led to this place by destiny. Oh yes,
I attest to it, my belief in the victory of humanity over the priests
and tyrants is the same belief that the great exile a poured into so
many millions of hearts, and that he had carried here with him. Rousseau
and Voltaire, those immortals, have become young again; it is in the
most intelligent heads of the German nation that they celebrate their
resurrection; a powerful enthusiasm for humanism and for the finally
regenerated State, of which man has really become the principle, a
burning hatred of the priests and of the insolent stain that they
impress on everything that is humanly great and true, has entered the
world anew. Philosophy will yet one day enjoy the role that it has so
gloriously fulfilled in France; and it is not an argument against it,
that its formidable power has revealed itself to its adversaries before
having been revealed to itself. It is naĂŻve and does not expect, at
first, the struggle and persecution: for it takes all men for reasonable
beings and addresses itself to their reason, as if that reason commanded
them as a sovereign. It is always in order that its adversaries, who
have the gall to declare: “We are unreasonable and we wish to remain
so,” begin through unreasonable measures the practical combat, the
resistance to reason. Voltaire once said: You, little men, graced with a
little job that gives you a little authority in a little country, you
cry out against philosophy? In Germany, we are in the era of Rousseau
and Voltaire, and those of us who are young enough to gather the fruits
of our labor, will see a great revolution and a time when it will be
worth the pain of having lived. These words of Voltaire, we can repeat
them, with the certainty that history will confirm them no less this
time than the first.
The French, at this moment, are still our masters. They have over us,
from the political point of view, an advance of several centuries, and
all that follows from it. That powerful literature, and that art, all so
lively, that culture and that intellectualization of all the people, so
many conditions of which we only have a distant understanding! We must
acquire what we lack; we must give the lash to our metaphysical pride,
which cannot stimulate the world; we must learn, we must work day and
night, to make ourselves capable of living as men among men, to be free
and make others free; we must – I always return to this – finally take
possession of our era and our thoughts. The thinker and the poet have
the privilege of anticipating the future and of constructing, in the
midst of the chaos of the death and decomposition that surrounds us, a
new world of liberty and beauty.
And knowing all that, initiated into the secret of the eternal powers
that will give birth to the new times, you want to give up hope? If you
give up hope in Germany, you not only give up hope in yourself, you
renounce the pleasure of truth, to which you have devoted yourself. Few
men are noble enough to devote themselves entirely and without
reservation to the action of the liberating truth, few know how to
transfer to their contemporaries that movement of the heart and head;
but the one to whom in has once been given to be the mouth of Liberty
and to captive the world with the charming accents of the voice of the
goddess, that one possesses a guarantee for the victory of their cause
that another can only obtain in their turn the a similar effort and a
similar success.
But we must – I must acknowledge it – break with our own past. We have
been beaten. It is brutal force alone, it is true, that has been an
obstacle to the movement of thought and poetry; but that brutality would
have been impossible, if we had not had lead an existence apart in the
heaven of learned theory, if we had had the people on our side. It was
not before them that we have posed the question of its proper cause. The
French have done otherwise. Their liberators would have been crushed, if
they could have been.
I know that you love the French, that you sense their superiority. That
is enough for a strong will, in such a great cause, to make itself their
imitator, and to match them. What feeling! What inexpressible bliss que
this effort and this power! Oh, how I envy you such a task, and even
your anger, for that too is the feeling felt by all the noble hearts of
your people. May I only collaborate with you: my blood and my life for
the liberation of that people! Believe me, it will rise, it will reach
the great daylight of human history. It will not always make itself a
title to glory of that shame of the Germans, of being the best servants
of all tyrannies. You reproach it for not being free, for only being a
domesticated people. You only say there what it is: how can you conclude
from that what it will be?
Was it not just the same in France? And yet how quickly was the whole of
France transformed into a nation, and her sons became citizens! It is
not permissible for us to abandon the cause of the people, even if they
deserted it themselves. The bourgeois have defected, they persecute us:
what does it matter? Their children will only devote themselves more
faithfully to our cause: the fathers try to kill freedom, they will die
striving for it.
And what advantage do we not have over the men of the eighteenth
century! in their time, they talked to themselves. We, we have living
before our eyes the gigantic results of their ideas, we can enter into
contact with these results through practice. Let us go to France, let us
cross the Rhine, and we will be, in a single step, transported into the
midst of new elements, which, in German, are still to be born. The
diffusion of political thought in all the strata of society, the energy
of thought and speech, which only explodes in the most prominent heads
because it gives issue, through each word, to the concentrated passion
of an entire people, – all of that could teach us now through a living
spectacle. A journey in France and even a prolonged stay in Paris would
be for us of the greatest utility.
The German theory, cast down from the heights of its heaven, today sees
itself, in its fall, mangled by some brutal theologians and stupid
country squires, who shake it by the ears, like we do a hunting dog, to
show it the way to take. It has largely deserved it. It would be well if
that fall cured it of some of its pride. It would be up to it to draw
from that adventure this lesson, that on the solitary somber heights it
is abandoned without defense, and that it is only in the heart of the
people that is can find security. “Who will win over the people, we or
you?” these obscure eunuchs cry to the philosophers. Oh, shame that such
has taken place! But also cheers and honor to the men who can bring
about the triumph of the cause of humanity now.
It is here, yes, it is here that the combat truly begins: and so strong
is our cause, that we, a few scattered men, with hands tied, by our
war-cry alone we inspire fright in their myriads! Let us go, with heart,
and I want to break your bonds, oh Germans who wish to become Greeks, me
the Scythian. Send me you works. On the island of Rousseau I will print
them, and in letters of fire I will inscribe once more in the heavens
the history of the defeat of the Persians!