y
have no cause and no right to reproach the "Mountain" with Anarchist
tendencies.

[10] Jean Grave says in his book, _La Societe Mourante_, p.
21: "In the year 1793 one talked of Anarchists. Only Jacques
Roux and the '_surages_' appear to have been those who saw
the Revolution most clearly, and wished to turn it to the
benefit of the people; and, therefore, the bourgeois
historian has left them in the background; their history has
still to be written; the documents buried in archives and
libraries are waiting for one who shall have time and courage
to exhume them, and bring to light the secrets of events that
are to us almost incomprehensible. Meanwhile, we can pass no
judgment on their programme." Of course _we_ can do so still
less.

Neither Danton nor Robespierre, the two great lights of the
"Mountain," dreamed of making a leap into the void of a society
without government. Their ideal was rather the omnipotence of society,
the all-powerful State, before which the interests of the individual
were scattered like the spray before the storm; and the great
Maximilian, the "Chief Rabbi" of this deification of the State,
accordingly called himself "a slave of freedom." Robespierre and
Danton, on their side, called the Hebertists Anarchists. If one can
speak of a principle at all among these people, who placed all power
in the hands of the masses who had no votes, and the whole art of
politics in majorities and force, it was certainly not directed
against the abolition of authority. The maxims of these people were
chaos and the right of the strongest. Marat, the party saint, had
certainly, on occasion, inveighed against the laws as such, and
desired to set them aside; but Marat all the time wanted the
dictatorship, and for a time actually held it. The Marat of after
Thermidor was the infamous Caius Gracchus Baboeuf, who is now
usually regarded as the characteristic representative of Anarchism
during the French Revolution--and regarded so just as rightly, or
rather as wrongly, as those mentioned above. Baboeuf was a more
thorough-going Socialist than Robespierre; indeed he was a Radical
Communist, but no more. In the proclamation issued by Baboeuf for
the 22d of Floreal, the day of the insurrection against the
Directoire, he says: "The revolutionary authority of the people will
announce the destruction of every other existing authority." But that
means nothing more than t