Month: December 2013

Contr'un

Flora Tristan, “The Modern Utopians” (1846)

December 24, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve started translating a short posthumous work by Flora Tristan, “The Emancipation of Woman,” published in 1846. I’m presenting the final chapter, which includes brief appraisals of a number of prominent socialists, including Proudhon. You’ll also find a comparatively glowing paragraph on one Simon Ganneau, a Saint-Simonian heretic known as the Mapah, who believed himself the androgyne incarnation of both the Mère and Père (Ma+Pa), messiah-figures sought by Saint-Simon’s followers. He founded a religion called Evadaisme, a name combining those of Eve and Adam. The whole work is quite interesting, combining influences from various early socialist schools with Tristan’s own […]
Bakunin Library

Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis — First Letter (1870)

December 24, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
[There are two manuscripts by Bakunin with titles very close to “Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis,” written one after the other and overlapping in some places, but substantially different. The 12,000-word “Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis” in the Dolgoff anthology is drawn from one of the later parts of a 54,000-word manuscript identified in the Collected Works collection with the title “Lettre à un Français.” A second manuscript, 10,000 words long, broken into separate letters, and identified as “Lettres à un Français sur la crise actuelle,” followed. Here is the first letter from the […]
Bakunin Library

Report of the Commission on the Question of Inheritance (1869)

December 22, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
GENEVA, AUGUST 27 ───────── Report of the Commission ON THE QUESTION OF INHERITANCE ADOPTED  BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE GENEVA SECTIONS Citizens, This question which will be discussed at the Congress de Basle is divided into two part, the first consisting of the principle, the second the practical application of the principle. The question of the principle itself must be considered from two points of view: that of utility and that of justice. From the point of view of the emancipation of labor, is it useful, is it necessary for the right of inheritance to be abolished? To pose […]
Bakunin Library

Pan-Slavism (1870)

December 21, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
PAN-SLAVISM Pan-Slavism is the order of the day in our official and unofficial world. It is the dominant idea of the present reign. After having emancipated our peasants, as they say, after having given them liberty and happiness, our generous benefactor, Czar Alexander II, no longer has any thought today but that of going to deliver the Slavic people, our brothers, who still groan under the yoke of the Germans and the Turks. They speak of nothing but this in the court at St. Petersburg, in the higher regions of the army and the bureaucracy. The salons of St. Petersburg […]
Bakunin Library

The Death Penalty in Russia (1870)

December 20, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
THE DEATH PENALTY IN RUSSIA To the editors of the Rappel. Gentlemen, In the issue of January 29 of your estimable paper, I have found a very amusing letter from my compatriot, Prince Wiasemsky, in which he has been so tiresome as to note the ignorance of M. J. Simon and some other signatories of the bill on the abolition of the death penalty, and which ends by declaring to you that the death penalty no longer exists in Russia, having been abolished by the Empress Catherine II. That news appears to have dismayed you. Frightened about the obvious inferiority […]
Bakunin Library

Bourgeois Oligarchy (La Révolte, July 1871)

December 18, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
BOURGEOIS OLIGARCHY —– It is obvious that liberty will not be restored to the world and that the real interests of society, of all the groups, of all the local organizations, as well as all the individuals who form society, could find real satisfaction only after the abolition of the State. It is obvious that all the so-called general interests of society, that the State is supposed to represent, and that, in reality, are nothing but the general and constant negation of the positive interests of the regions, provinces, communes, associations and the majority of individuals subject to the State, […]
manifestos

Manifesto of the Sixty Workers of the Seine (1864)

December 17, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
I was looking at how much of Proudhon’s Political Capacity of the Working Classes I had translated at various times into English, with some thought about taking it up as the next logical bit of his work to tackle, when The Theory of Property finally gets finished, here in the next month or two. It’s a work that I started reading through enough years ago that my French was at that time very, very rusty. So I had to search around on some old thumb drives to find some of my earliest work on it, and in the process found […]
Contr'un

An obscure Proudhon volume

December 16, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
The Besancon archive contains a number of Proudhon’s manuscripts, but also several scanned books, one of which appears to be quite obscure: Comment les affaires vont en France, et pourquoi nous aurons la guerre, si nous l’avons : à propos des nouveaux projets de traités entre les compagnies de chemin de fer et l’Etat / par P.-J. Proudhon : A. Schnée , 1859. That’s roughly “How Business Goes in France, and Why We Have War, If We Have It: Regarding Some New Plans for Agreements between the Railroad Companies and the State.” Unsurprisingly,  given the title, some of the contents […]
Bakunin Library

Letter to “La Réforme” (January 1845)

December 14, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
Letter to “La Réforme” (January 1845) Monsieur! The Gazette des Tribunaux has announced, together with other Paris newspapers, the ukase issued against Mr. Golowine and myself. I regard the proceedings, certainly not so delicate, of the Russian government against us as something so natural and above all so insignificant, in comparison with the enormous iniquities which it commits each day in our unfortunate homeland, that I certainly would not allow myself, Monsieur, to speak to you of myself, if I did not find myself forced to it by a letter that Mr. Golowine thought he should address to the Gazette […]
Bakunin Library

Letter to Le Constitutionnel, March 19, 1846

December 13, 2013 Shawn P. Wilbur
Monsieur. I am Russian, and I love my country. It is for that very reason that I make some wishes at this moment, like many Russians, for the triumph of the Polish insurrection polonaise. The oppression of Poland is a shame for my country, and its liberty would perhaps be the beginning of our own. I want first of all to bring my testimony, as an honest man, in an affair which occupies at this moment all the French papers, I want to speak of the persecution of the Basilian nuns of Lithuania. For my part, I am completely convinced […]