kens that tends to destroy the class character of the
State itself. The inherent weakness of Bakounin's entire philosophy lay
in this fact, that it begins with the necessity of abolishing God and
the State, and that it can never get beyond that or away from that. And,
as a necessary consequence, Bakounin had to oppose every measure that
looked toward any compromise with the State, or that might enable the
working class to exercise any influence in or through the State.

When, therefore, the German party at its congress at Eisenach demanded
the suffrage and direct legislation, when it declared that political
liberty is the most urgent preliminary condition for the economic
emancipation of the working class, Bakounin could see nothing
revolutionary in such a program. When, furthermore, the party declared
that the social question is inseparable from the political question and
that the problems of our economic life could be solved only in a
democratic State, Bakounin, of course, was forced to oppose such
heresies with all his power. And these were indeed the really vital
questions, upon which the anarchists and the socialists could not be
reconciled. It is in his _Lettres a un Francais_, written just after the
failure of his own "practical" efforts at Lyons, that Bakounin
undertakes his criticism of the program of the German socialists.
Preparatory to this task, he first terrifies his French readers with the
warning that if the German army, then at their doors, should conquer
France, it would result in the destruction of French socialism (by which
he means anarchism), in the utter degradation and complete slavery of
the French people, and make it possible for the Knout of Germany and
Russia to fall upon the back of all Europe. "If, in this terrible
moment, ... [France] does not prefer the death of all her children and
the destruction of all her goods, the burning of her villages, her
cities, and of all her houses to slavery under the yoke of the
Prussians, if she does not destroy, by means of a popular and
revolutionary uprising, the power of the innumerable German armies
which, victorious on all sides up to the present, threaten her dignity,
her liberty, and even her existence, if she does not become a grave for
all those six hundred thousand soldiers of German despotism, if she does
not oppose them with the one means capable of conquering and destroying
them under the present circumstances, if she does not reply to this
i