Global Intellectual History

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The origins of ‘collectivism’: Pierre-Joseph

Proudhon’s contested legacy and the debate
about property in the International Workingmen’s
Association and the League of Peace and Freedom

Edward Castleton

To cite this article: Edward Castleton (2017) The origins of ‘collectivism’: Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon’s contested legacy and the debate about property in the International Workingmen’s
Association and the League of Peace and Freedom, Global Intellectual History, 2:2, 169-195, DOI:
10.1080/23801883.2017.1350114

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2017.1350114

Published online: 31 Jul 2017.

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GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, 2017
VOL. 2, NO. 2, 169–195
https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2017.1350114

The origins of ‘collectivism’: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s

contested legacy and the debate about property in the
International Workingmen’s Association and the League of
Peace and Freedom
Edward Castleton
Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de l’Environnement Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Université de Franche-
Comté, Besançon, France

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This paper examines how the concept of ‘collectivism’, which ‘Anarchism’; origins of;
emerged in debates in the International Workingmen’s ‘collectivism’; origins of;
Association (IWMA) about how to reform landed property, was nineteenth-century
Francophone socialism
largely shaped by transnational European discussions in the late
(Belgium; France;
1860s and early 1870s about Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s ideas both Switzerland); international
within the IWMA and the initially overlapping internationalist Workingmen’s Association;
organization, the League of Peace and Freedom. League of Peace and
Freedom; Proudhon, P.-J

I
According to James Guillaume, writing in 1903–1904, the exact origins of the word, col-
lectivisme, and its initial use as an abstract noun were in the wake of the fourth Inter-
national Workingmen’s Association (IWMA) Congress, held in Basel in 1869 (6–12
September), in the pages of his Le Locle-based newspaper, Le Progrès.1 The neologism’s
use, one might add for the purposes of lexicographic precision, followed the generalization
of the term collectivistes used to describe those proponents of the socialization of landed
property in the IWMA who had distinguished themselves at the third IWMA congress,
held in Brussels the year before (6–13 September 1868). When Guillaume (1844–1916)
made this point, he himself had long since moved on from the heady days of the
IWMA: he had left his native Swiss Jura and moved to Paris where he had distinguished
himself as a historian of education during the French Revolution. But in the early twen-
tieth century, Guillaume chose, after a long silence, to return to his militant past. In the
course of reflecting on the introduction of the doctrine of ‘collectivism’, Guillaume insisted
on its differences from a more state-based understanding of ‘communism’, understood
commonly in the early twentieth century to consist of the public monopoly, under the
aegis of a working-class dictatorship, not only of property and the means of production
but also of the means of consumption. These reflections, stimulated in part by the
edition Guillaume helped prepare with Max Nettlau of Mikhail Bakunin’s works, would
develop into Guillaume’s four-volume memoir of his experience in the IWMA.2 Insisting

CONTACT Edward Castleton edward.castleton@univ-fcomte.fr

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
170 E. CASTLETON

on the fundamental compatibility of the ‘collectivization’ of landed property with Pierre-

Joseph Proudhon’s ‘an-archical’ vision held dear by many of the very same mutualist fac-
tions who voted against collectivization at the Basel Congress, Guillaume was keen to
argue that a consensus existed within supposedly opposing factions of the IWMA,
which would have revealed itself had not the Franco-Prussian War erupted the following
year. If by the time of the Paris Commune, the essentially French-based mutualist camp
had moved irretrievably rightwards, the decisions of the IWMA General Council in the
aftermath of the Paris Commune seemed only to confirm as accurate Guillaume’s criti-
cisms of the General Council after he and Bakunin were excluded from the First Inter-
national at the fifth IWMA congress held at The Hague (2–7 September 1872). Indeed,
it has subsequently proven easy enough, particularly when Guillaume’s influential
account has been cast through the lens of twentieth-century anarchist hagiography, to
portray the General Council composed of Marx and Engels’s allies as a bunch of shills
for state-centric and Germanophilic socialism. But as Guillaume was at pains to point
out, the fallout of The Hague Congress went well beyond the factional schism in the
IWMA which followed the General Council’s decision, and he struggled to demonstrate
that from 1872 onwards ‘collectivism’ and ‘communism’ regrettably came to be perceived
as at antipodes to one another, despite the promise of the late 1860s, a moment in which it
might have been demonstrated, through a properly ecumenical debate about how best to
eliminate private property, that even the seemingly incompatible ideas of Proudhon and
Marx could have been reconciled.3 While insisting upon this unfortunate ideological rea-
lignment in the 1870s, Guillaume, perhaps unintentionally, and his less ecumenical allies,
often deliberately, made a subtle but progressive semantic shift confounding fissures
within the organizational politics of the IWMA with the range of far-left socialist attitudes
towards government at large.4 Regardless of Guillaume’s conciliatory aims, this shift
would have a profound influence on how historians from the twentieth century
onwards would write about the origins of ‘anarchism’ as stemming from a principled ideo-
logical conflict with ‘Marxism’ dating back to the time of the IWMA.5 Yet Guillaume sig-
nificantly maintained his position about the compatibility between Proudhon and Marx to
the end of his life, even writing a curious 1911 article entitled ‘Proudhon communiste’ for
Pierre Monatte’s syndicalist journal, La Vie Ouvrière, in which he claimed Proudhon
might even have been a ‘communist without knowing it’.6
The supposed unity of an ephemeral golden age of the IWMA Guillaume evoked,
however, was not subscribed to by many of the dissenting IWMA members at the Basel
Congress, notably André Murat, whom Guillaume was at pains to refute in Le Progrès.7
Murat could not understand the difference between a supposedly ‘an-archical’ collectivi-
zation and a more state-driven ‘communism’, insofar as both required the intervention of
a public authority in order to attenuate inequalities in the distribution of wealth. Nor was
he alone. Contrary to Guillaume’s retrospective attempts to define ‘collectivism’ as a par-
ticular bottom-up variant of radical socialist critiques of private property distinct from
authoritarian, state-driven, top-down solutions to inequalities in ownership commonly
identified by the early twentieth century with ‘communism’, in the eyes of most Franco-
phone contemporaries collectivisme was essentially synonymous with just that sort of com-
munisme in the late 1860s.8 This amalgamation was often made by critics of the IWMA’s
radicalization, first at its third IWMA conference, held in Brussels, and then, more mark-
edly, at the fourth IWMA congress, held in Basel, whereupon the concept of ‘collectivism’
 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 171

seemingly emerged triumphant, thanks to the efforts of César De Paepe (1842–1890) and
his Belgian contingent, reinforced by the support of Bakunin, Guillaume, and their Swiss
allies. In conventional proleptic narratives of the IWMA’s ideological evolution, the Basel
congress is typically cast as indicative of the marginalization of ‘Proudhonian’ ideas,
loosely construed as a programmatic assemblage of mutualism, exchange banks, anti-fem-
inist misogyny, and a reluctance to engage in forms of class conflict as strikes – an ideo-
logical concoction particularly favoured by Parisian IWMA members such as Murat,
Henri Tolain, Ernest-Édouard Fribourg, Charles Limousin, Félix-Eugène Chemalé, and
others.9 If the subsequent conflict between Marx and Bakunin after the Franco-Prussian
War would largely overshadow this displacement, revealing ‘collectivism’ to be an insuffi-
cient source for programmatic consensus within the ranks of the IWMA, it nevertheless
remains hard to understand at first glance how one could possibly argue, as Guillaume
later tried to do, that Proudhon’s beliefs were unconsciously ‘communist’. On the con-
trary, hostility to ‘communism’ in the late 1860s was especially evident among two of
Proudhon’s literary executors, regular correspondents, and confidants, Jérôme-Amédée
Langlois (1819–1885) and Gustave Chaudey (1817–1871), both of whom, as self-pro-
claimed devotees of Proudhon, were opposed to the ‘collectivism’ of the IWMA.
A former naval officer and collaborator with Proudhon in his various newspapers from
the 1848–1850 period and one of the editors of a posthumous edition of Proudhon’s final
theory of property, Langlois attended the 1869 Basel IWMA Congress, where he inter-
vened, stating that the jejune International was only going to alienate rural populations,
much like French socialists had done during the Second Republic, by issuing proclama-
tions on the need to collectivize landed property. He also expressed his fear that the see-
mingly ‘liberal’ communism of the collectivists could easily become ‘authoritarian’, since
following the institutional logic of their revolutionary agenda, the state would be com-
pelled to own everything and impose its own hierarchies on all forms of production.10
The case of Chaudey is even more noteworthy with regard to Guillaume’s assertion.
Briefly an IWMA member sympathetic to the French cooperative movement and a pro-
minent member of the League of Peace and Freedom, Chaudey was also an important
oppositional journalist associated with Le Phare de la Loire, Le Courrier du dimanche,
and, most notably, with the influential republican daily, Le Siècle, where he was a
member of the editorial staff. He was, like Langlois, named an executor of Proudhon’s lit-
erary estate, and he had contributed actively to Proudhon’s 1863 abstentionist campaign,
finishing Proudhon’s last work, De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières (1865), after
his death, and editing both an unfinished manuscript by Proudhon about Chaudey’s
friend, the painter Gustave Courbet, and Proudhon’s fragmentary notes on geography
and the idea of ‘natural borders’.11 In a letter Chaudey sent to Courbet referring to the
second annual congress of the League of Peace and Freedom, recently held in Berne
(21–25 September 1868) approximately two weeks after the Brussels IWMA conference
earlier that month in which the collectivization of landed property was first officially
voted upon, he wrote:
We have done a good enough job at Berne. I found myself in hand-to-hand combat with the
famous Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary, carrying in his wake all the collectivists, or par-
tisans of collective property. It’s a new word for that old tune of communism. They also have a
way of conceiving of the federalist idea which, by expanding it and letting it spread and go
well beyond the concrete (the concrete is the true realism), reduce it to a pure abstraction, a
172 E. CASTLETON

chimera, an imperceptible generality, a sentimental banality. We fought all of that robustly

and firmly, and, with a complete victory, we reconstituted the Peace League on a serious
and robust foundation.12

These lines alone would seem to problematize the established prehistory of ‘anarchism’, or
at least the role played in this supposed prehistory by its reputed founding fathers, Proud-
hon and Bakunin (founders who themselves, furthermore, did not always call themselves
‘anarchists’). Proudhon and Bakunin appear to have been on amicable enough interper-
sonal terms, even if there certainly had not been a deep friendship between the two
during Proudhon’s lifetime.13 Chaudey and Bakunin, on the other hand, were enemies.
Their 1868 spat at the League Congress was partly responsible for Bakunin first founding
the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, an organization whose ambiguous
international status would later be the basis for the Marx–Bakunin conflict. Given that
the Berne congress marked the moment when Bakunin, popularly thought of in the
mid-1860s by European contemporaries as a sort of Russian Garibaldi famous for his acti-
vist role in 1848, subsequent trial, imprisonment, and eventual escape from Siberia, pub-
lically became Bakunin, one of anarchism’s founding fathers, it is surprising that the
League’s relation to the IWMA has generated little interest among scholars,14 and this
despite the importance accorded to it in Fribourg’s autobiographical account15 or the
fact that Bakunin’s first (characteristically incomplete) programmatic attempt to summar-
ize his beliefs, Fédéralisme, socialisme et antithéologisme (1867), was addressed to the
Central Committee of the League with the aim of influencing the forthcoming Berne Con-
gress.16 Most scholarship on Bakunin has regrettably focused on Bakunin from 1869
onwards and has been excessively attentive to his conflict with Marx and the effect of
the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune on his radicalization, while ignoring
his evolution between the Polish Revolt of 1863 and his eventual 1868 break with the cos-
mopolitan coterie of radical republicans at the League.17
As for Chaudey’s role in the League, his debate with Bakunin, or its relation to the con-
cerns of the IWMA, historians have been utterly oblivious or indifferent, content to sum-
marize Bakunin’s interventions at Berne at most, and at that, typically only in passing.18
Unlike Bakunin, who maintained almost iconic status for the Western Far Left well into
the twentieth century, history has not been kind to Chaudey, partly because of the circum-
stances surrounding his death during the Paris Commune. Chaudey was shot in prison
during the final days of the Commune by the vindictive Blanquist police prefect, Raoul
Rigault, having been accused by the latter of ordering, as maire-adjoint of the nineteenth
arrondissement of Paris, the national guard to shoot on crowds surrounding the Hôtel-de-
Ville on 22 January 1871.19 Despite the sordid nature of this inglorious end, Chaudey was
sufficiently principled in his political convictions to endorse (with some reservations) the
communalist movement in Le Siècle on the same federalist republican grounds he had
consistently defended in the League of Peace and Freedom. Even if he was not as com-
mitted to the IWMA as he was to the more establishment League, Chaudey appears to
have seen himself as someone supportive of working-class self-determination, while decid-
edly anchored in the more bourgeois progressive republican camp in favour of accelerating
the political de-imperialization of France through federalist decentralization on a national
and European level. Indeed, Chaudey’s status as a ‘Proudhonian’ – much like that of other
analogously more moderate contemporary republican European federalists influenced by
 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 173

Proudhon such as Giuseppe Ferrari in Italy or Francisco Pi y Margall in Spain – has been
largely obfuscated by a historiographical posterity constructed around twentieth-century
ideological concerns.
This is not the place to examine either the evolution of Chaudey’s advocacy journalism
over the course of the 1860s up until the Paris Commune, or to explore in depth the Proud-
hon–Chaudey relationship. Suffice it to say that Chaudey’s remarks to Courbet are not only
interesting insofar as they immediately contradict Guillaume’s much later retrospective
attempts to gloss over ideological disagreements within European socialism in the late
1860s. Like Langlois’s opposition at the Basel IWMA congress, Chaudey’s spat with
Bakunin at the League event was also in many ways directly the outgrowth of a debate
about Proudhon’s competing theories of property. Indeed, it is possible to revisit what
has long considered a familiar tale – that of those events leading up to Bakunin joining
the IWMA and the final triumph of ‘collectivism’ in the September 1869 Basel IWMA Con-
gress – by examining how Proudhon’s ideas were respectively interpreted by contempor-
aries during the same period in the immediate years following his death. For in many
respects, at variance with long dominant schematic linear histories of the IWMA, the ulti-
mate triumph of ‘collectivism’ might have been as much the fruit of larger European debates
between rival, incompatible interpretations of Proudhon’s beliefs as that of a more straight-
forward ideological victory of ‘collectivists’ over ‘Proudhonians’.

II
Chaudey’s consignment to the oblivion of historical amnesia is in many ways all the more
ironic given that, in editing Proudhon’s De la Capacité politique des classes ouvrières for
publication, he clearly chose for political purposes not to incorporate all of Proudhon’s
fragmentary notes in the final publication, notably some highly critical remarks Proudhon
made about Tolain in his preparatory manuscripts.20 The standard line asserting the role
of proudhonisme in the IWMA from Jules Puech’s 1907 study onwards, has been, typically
after making some passing references to Tolain’s Manifeste des Soixante (co-written with
the radical republican journalist, Henri Lefort), to take the Mémoire des délégués français
au Congrès de Genève presented at the first annual IWMA congress as an expression of
Tolain other supposedly ‘Proudhonian’ working-class militants devoted faithfulness to
Proudhon’s ideas, citing its references to De la capacité politique and Proudhon’s earlier
1851 work, Idée générale de la revolution au XIXe siècle.21 In contrast to Proudhon’s appar-
ent reluctance, Chaudey’s openness to Tolain’s efforts might have been responsible for this
association. Having died in January 1865, long before the IWMA could develop in France
in any serious way, Proudhon had little say about the new organization. It might be that
Chaudey even added an optimistic sentence or two about the nascent International in a
footnote to De la Capacité that Proudhon himself possibly did not write,22 and it
appears that Chaudey generally moderated the tone of a work, which was in many
ways directed as much against Tolain and his allies as against his formerly faithful disciple
from the Second Republic who had joined the official liberal parliamentary opposition to
the Second Empire, Alfred Darimon.
Once one looks beyond France, however, a different picture emerges about the recep-
tion of Proudhon’s ideas. Contrary to legends about the prominence of a ‘Proudhonian’
French labour movement during the Second Empire, as even the most cursory glance
174 E. CASTLETON

through the index of Jacques Freymond et al.’s four volumes readily reveals, those IWMA
members who most frequently mentioned Proudhon by name or evoked, whether criti-
cally or favourably, his ideas in IWMA congresses, were almost invariably Belgian.
Partly due to his 1858–1862 exile in Brussels, Proudhon had a sizeable impact on
Belgian radical circles.23 Even though sometimes critical of Proudhon’s beliefs, consider-
able space was regularly given to his ideas in La Tribune du Peuple (1863–1869), an influ-
ential Brussels-based, IWMA paper from the 1860s in which De Paepe, Hector Denis, and
Guillaume de Greef often contributed.24 La Liberté (1865–1873), Brussels-based like La
Tribune, also ran several articles devoted to Proudhon’s ideas, and, despite its small read-
ership, was one of the best quality socialist francophone papers of the late 1860s partisan to
the IWMA.25 Subsequent to the 1869 IWMA Congress in Basel, La Liberté would notably
engage with the successor publication of La Tribune du Peuple, César De Paepe’s L’Inter-
nationale (1869–1873), in a lengthy debate – one in which Proudhon’s ideas were fre-
quently evoked in both papers – over the course of a series of seemingly interminable
exchanges between De Paepe and an anonymous La Liberté correspondent (most likely
Guillaume de Greef) about the advantages and disadvantages of the collectivization of
landed property.26 Finally, one of De Paepe’s jobs during his stint as a typographer, was
to oversee the republication of Proudhon’s works (his job was to copyedit them for the
publisher Lacroix), and, despite whatever influence Jean-Guillaume de Colins or Marx
may have had on him, De Paepe was as critically influenced by his early discovery of
Proudhon at work as Proudhon had been in his youth when as a typographer in Besançon
he oversaw the publication of one of Charles Fourier’s books. Even if De Paepe would
eventually break with many of Proudhon’s later ideas about property in the late 1860s,
he began his career as a disciple, and, despite his apparent dissidence, his very language
betrays the conceptual and idiomatic influences of Proudhon.27
This was particularly evident in his intervention at the third IWMA conference held at
Brussels (6–13 September 1868), wherein ‘collectivist’ ideas were first publicly debated
within the organization. There, De Paepe distinguished himself for his report on landed
property, which presented an extended argument for its abolition and collectivization
by virtue of the principle of eminent domain (land would belong to the nation under man-
agement of either the state, the commune, or various agricultural associations – there was
room for debate). In making these arguments, De Paepe brought up Proudhon as an auth-
ority – notably the Proudhon who had written the 1840 work, Qu’est-ce que la propriété? –
while at the same time rejecting Proudhon’s posthumous 1866 work which Chaudey and
Langlois had a hand in editing, Théorie de la propriété.28 For De Paepe, the latter work’s
thesis that property could serve a legitimate functional purpose as a guarantee of freedom
vis-à-vis the state was unconvincing, unlike the more straightforward 1840 argument that
all forms of property – including landed property – were theft. And De Paepe even used
such obvious Proudhonian conceptual terms as force collective and liquidation sociale,
mentioning in passing the writings of Proudhon’s occasional collaborator, Georges
Duchêne, to describe how the productive advantages of the concentration of capital and
industry could be turned to the working classes’ advantage as the latter reorganized them-
selves along mutualist lines and transformed all forms of rent into annuities owned collec-
tively in exchange for the use of the means of production, whether in industry or in
agriculture.29 In this context, De Paepe saw fit to use Proudhon’s posthumous Théorie
de la propriété against its central thesis, quoting a passage in which Proudhon argued
 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 175

that small landowners would probably need to band together if they were ever to be able to
compete with the productive advantages of large landholders and that in doing so they
might create property arrangements resembling Slavic forms of land possession.
By Slavic possession, De Paepe thought Proudhon had in mind the sorts of free conces-
sions in land accorded to local farmers by communes in Russia which Herzen, Bakunin
and the Russian Populists sought to rehabilitate. Certainly Proudhon had been on familiar
terms with Herzen (particularly during the French Second Republic) and was aware of
Herzen’s ideas about how Russian rural customs might be made compatible with a
form of Slavic socialism. De Paepe could not possibly know this because of the truncated
manner in which the posthumous Théorie de la propriété was published by Proudhon’s
executors. In fact, Proudhon’s later theory of property was part of a much larger manu-
script on the history of Poland, the natural geographic and ethnographic history of
states, the principle of nationalities, and the salutary institutional role played by private
property in strengthening those equally salutary post-1815 liberal constitutional arrange-
ments which would one day usher in decentralized federalist political regimes rendered
compatible with future mutualist economic arrangements.30 Much of this lengthy unpub-
lished manuscript was designed to refute those who would argue that communal forms of
Slavic property might provide a basis for an alternative social order to that found in
Western European market economies. Proudhon’s executors chose only to publish the
chapter on property in Proudhon’s Polish manuscript, most likely because the unpub-
lished work was too violently anti-Polish (and by extension, pro-Tsarist Russian), and it
seemed inappropriate to any European progressive cause to publicize Proudhon’s particu-
lar contempt for the cause of Polish nationality after the 1863 Polish revolt was crushed.
Thus, the occasional enigmatic references to Slavic property in the posthumous Théorie
are quite confusing, in part because Proudhon never before displayed any interest in
the subject, but also because they were part of a larger historical argument – one which
could easily be misinterpreted (as De Paepe did in quoting them) – linking the weakening
of the centralized state form in Western Europe to the institutional proliferation of allodial
property. Accordingly, freehold property – that is to say ownership without rent – acted as
a political counterweight to state power, thereby providentially achieving a historical legiti-
macy private property could never acquire through appeals to human morality (since,
insofar it was discussed in terms of rights, property was still theft in Proudhon’s eyes).
Much of Eastern Europe, on the other hand, was governed by feudal property relations
based on eminent domain, and so remained mired in pre-market social conditions domi-
nated by aristocracy, despotism, and retrograde religious sentiment. The forced modern-
ization of countries like Poland through partition – even when done by Tsarist Russia
under the seemingly enlightened guidance of Alexander II (the serfs had, after all, recently
been emancipated) – might actually accelerate the sorts of social disruption of elite auth-
ority necessary for freedom and individual autonomy to appear like desirable human
aspirations for a backwards peasantry.
Proudhon himself appears to have been confused by the kind of argument he was led to
make in the course of writing a screed against the principle of nationalities applied to the
Polish question, and there is some manuscript evidence that around the time Proudhon
drafted De la capacité politique, he wanted to attenuate some of the more straightforwardly
liberal aspects of his later property argument.31 In De la capacité, both in its manuscript
form and in the form it was eventually published by Chaudey, Proudhon was careful to
176 E. CASTLETON

separate the question of ownership in the countryside from that of ownership in cities.32
But for a contemporary reader of Proudhon in the late 1860s, even for a close one like De
Paepe, these philological subtleties would not have been so obvious, which probably
explains both why De Paepe suggested that Proudhon had committed a form of apostasy
in his later Théorie de la propriété, and why he chose to draw on a certain number of select
quotations lifted from the posthumous Théorie in his IWMA study of landed property,
thereby suggesting that the mature Proudhon might have reluctantly admitted to the
superior claims of the early 1840 critique in the last instance.33 For De Paepe, the early
and middle writings of Proudhon – once combined with the neo-Physiocratic ideas of
Colins, and his Belgian followers, the father and son duo of Louis and Agathon De
Potter – were sufficient to formulate an argument for the superior productivity the collec-
tivization of landed property would bring.34 Confronted with Tolain and Charles Long-
uet’s opposition to De Paepe’s proposal (neither quoted Proudhon in the course of
debate), De Paepe argued that their positions were inconsistent since, like pretty much
everyone else in the IWMA, they were in favour of the public appropriation and manage-
ment of mines, railways, roads, and canals. De Paepe failed to understand why they then
arbitrarily drew the line with land used for farming. After all, despite what such critics
claimed, ‘there is […] no one here who is an absolute partisan of individual property;
we are all more or less communists, if it is the case that the considerations of the Commis-
sion can be regarded as communism’.35 In De Paepe’s vision of an ideal future society,
ground rent could even be replaced by a form of land tax taking into account natural
inequalities in soil condition.
This was the first most serious public attempt in an IWMA congress to engage with any
aspect of Proudhon’s thought, and De Paepe, influenced by the criticisms of Agathon De
Potter whom he had published in the pages of La Tribune du Peuple,36 had seized on a
genuine paradox in Proudhon’s writings in a way that other Brussels Congress delegates
who referenced Proudhon with regards to strikes, apprenticeships, exchange banks, and
the mutualization of credit (including those who have subsequently often been considered
by IWMA historians to have been ‘Proudhonians’) did not. De Paepe’s initiative was one
of the most notable of the Congress, and although it passed without an outright majority
(30 to 4, with 15 abstentions), it represented a setback for the mutualist camp culminating
in their final defeat by a ‘collectivist’ majority at the 1869 IWMA congress held in Basel.
This does not necessarily mean that one should take at face value Paul Lafargue’s quip that
collectivism was the Belgian counterfeit of Marxism, however. De Paepe’s remarks in
several 1869 letters to Marx (written both before and after the fourth IWMA congress
held in Basel in September of that year) about how, just as he had done to himself, De
Paepe now sought to ‘deproudhonize’ Belgian IWMA members – notably the editorial
staff of La Liberté – do not detract from the obvious impact that discussions of Proudhon’s
ideas (and not those of Marx) had in shaping the entire collectivization debate.37
This is something that was obvious to contemporaries such as Pierre Coullery (1819–
1903), Swiss member of the IWMA and James Guillaume’s ideological antagonist in the
Jura.38 Coullery, who had been president of the pro-Garibaldi international congress of
the Universal Federative Association of Democracy held in Brussels in 1863, deplored
the radical turn discussions of property had taken in the IWMA, and he wrote on 27 Sep-
tember 1868 in his La Chaux-de-Fonds-based La Voix de l’Avenir (at the time the official
IWMA paper in Francophone Switzerland), that the pernicious influence of Colins and his
 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 177

school on De Paepe was creating an unhealthy eclectic synthesis of Colins and Proudhon
among the Belgian IWMA leadership. It was this untenable and contradictory admixture
which had accordingly led intoxicated Belgian IWMA members to advocate the principle
of collective property in land.39 De Paepe and Vandenhouten’s 6 October response to
Coullery in La Voix de l’Avenir was that there was no such thing as ‘Proudhonians’ or
‘Colinsians’ among the Belgian IWMA members, but that many of them (and not just
the Belgians), at once hostile to interest rates and surplus value and inspired by the
ideas of Proudhon about ‘free’ credit, interest-free banking, the commutative exchange
of services and products, mutualism, and other such ‘Proudhonian’ notions, were also
in favour of collective property. Nor did they see any problematic incoherence in this
dual position.40
To go from the specificities of the Belgian case to arguing that the IWMA was ‘Proud-
honian’ in orientation during its first congresses would be something of a stretch, however,
since the influence of Proudhon’s thought was circuitous and the appropriation of his
ideas was highly selective and polemical as so often is the case in the transnational circula-
tion of ideas. Despite all the hagiographic readings retrospectively imposed in chronicling
its organizational history, the First International was initially rather open-minded and
pluralist in its orientation, far too much so for one to be able to apply ideological labels
to it with any ease. It should be studied in the general context of a much larger interna-
tionalization of pan-European discussions characteristic of the late 1850s and all of the
1860s, obvious in the successive colloquia, often held in either Belgium or Switzerland
(to escape French imperial censorship), by the Congress on Artistic and Literary Property
(Brussels, 1858; Antwerp, 1861), the Congresses of the International Association for the
Progress of the Social Sciences (Brussels, 1862; Ghent, 1863; Amsterdam, 1864; Berne,
1865), that of the International Student Congress (Liege, 1865) or those of the aforemen-
tioned League of Peace and Freedom (Geneva, 1867; Berne, 1868; Lausanne, 1869). In the
larger cultural history of Europe, this was a period which, due to the particular post-1851
political situation of France, witnessed the blossoming of radical republican thought
dormant since the failed 1848 revolutions. Anti-authoritarian flourishing was facilitated
through the aforementioned congresses, various secular educations societies, and
Masonic lodges, whose effects were in many ways analogous to those described for the
case of the late eighteenth century by Reinhart Koselleck in his Kritik und Krise.41 The
Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune would mark the end of this brief renais-
sance (as well as the pan-European use of the French language as the vehicle for the ver-
nacular of social democratic revolution), and it is likewise perhaps no coincidence that
from the vestiges of the Second Empire’s collapse would emerge ideas later posthumously
lumped together as ‘anarchism’ (ideas which were relics, in many ways, of these earlier
radical anti-authoritarian discussions of the 1860s). It is important, however, not to
gloss over this general European climate of effervescent anti-imperial republicanism
and insist too much on the IWMA’s exceptional nature, looking only for possible ‘precur-
sor’ organizations such as the Democratic Association (1847), the Communist League
(1848), the International Association (founded in 1855), the International Democratic
Congress (founded in 1862), or the aforementioned Universal Federative Association of
Democracy (founded in 1863) of which Coullery had been a prominent member.
This favourable climate for European dissent most likely explains why the IWMA’s
General Council – intrigued enough by the newly created League, which was fortuitously
178 E. CASTLETON

holding its first congress in Geneva (9–12 September 1867) shortly after the IWMA’s con-
gress in Lausanne (2–8 September 1867) – did reluctantly agree to send over some of its
delegates to the League event, despite Marx’s personal Russophobic distaste for pacifism (a
distaste exacerbated by the disastrous failure of the 1863 Polish revolt). Founded in 1867
by Emile Accolas, Charles Lemonnier, Jules Barni, and Garibaldi, among others concerned
by the geopolitical ramifications of Prussia’s absorption of Schleswig-Holstein in 1866 and
its possibly dangerous impact on French imperial foreign policy, the League was avowedly
political and republican in its orientation, advocating the decentralization of states into
semi-autonomous provinces and municipalities, the abolition of standing armies and
their replacement by national militias, the proliferation of individual liberties, and the cre-
ation of a federation of European states. No doubt, the progressive nature of the League
appealed to IWMA members, who saw the League’s Congress as a chance to mingle
with a veritable who’s who of republican Europe.
The League’s Geneva Congress began well enough given the co-mingling of two differ-
ent activist worlds. At the beginning of the congress, overtures were made to the League by
Swiss IWMA members like Charles Perron (in an open letter on behalf of the workers of
Geneva) and James Guillaume (in an open letter on behalf of the International). Both
asserted how the working class was hurt by war, and both associated peace with general
improvements in economic well-being. Not yet a member of the IWMA, Bakunin also
intervened. Responding to a speech by one of Marx’s occasional allies of convenience,
Sigismund Ludwig Borkheim, who advocated the declaration of war on Russia in the
name of European peace, Bakunin chose to underscore the absolute incompatibility
between centralized, bureaucratic, religious, and militarized states in general, on the one
hand, and freedom, on the other.42 According to him, certainly the Russian empire
needed to be replaced by a free federation of semi-autonomous peoples, provinces and
municipalities endowed with the right to secession. But the supposed ideal of the
League, the creation of a ‘United States of Europe’, would not be possible unless all the
European states, regardless of whether they were monarchies or republics, were radically
decentralized from the bottom up, through the free federation of communes within pro-
vinces, to that of provinces within nations, and, only then, nations within a genuine Euro-
pean federation.43 Bakunin rejected in passing the principle of nationalities understood as
anything more than an ethnographic fact – one which definitely did not warrant state
aggrandizement on the basis of the false pretext of natural borders.
To judge by contemporary reactions, however, Bakunin’s discourse was not considered
especially provocative. The general tenor of the League event was quite radical – too
radical notably for many of the Catholic delegates and some of the moderate Swiss
hosts of the League event led by the long-time Genevan radical politician, James Fazy.
As James Guillaume noted in his contemporary account of the Congress (published in
the form of a series of articles published in Pierre Coullery’s La Chaux-de-Fonds-based
satirical paper, Diogène and reprinted in his memoir, L’Internationale, documents et sou-
venirs), the President of the Congress, the Bernese anticlerical radical politician Pierre
Jolissaint, even quoted Proudhon as an authority at one point.44 More alarming to
League members was French IWMA member Chemalé’s speech about the dangers of
civil war that excessive inequality and poverty might cause (since the accumulation of
wealth and the centralization of despotic power went hand in hand). Although
Chemalé argued like many other League members that federalism and freedom (combined
 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 179

with socialism) was the answer, the evocation of class struggle was not appreciated.45 At
this point, Gustave Chaudey intervened in the Congress with the intention of building a
bridge between the IWMA and the League.46 Chaudey began his actual speech by affirm-
ing the incompatibility between interstate peace and militarized monarchies, or any pol-
itical state granting the rights of war and peace exclusively to its executive branch.
Approving what Bakunin and others had already stated, he, too, insisted on the need
for federalism and decentralization. If France should abandon its pretentions of expanding
its territory to the Rhine, Germany should become a large confederation and not another
militarized monarchy. But Chaudey slyly shifted his discussion to the intertwined nature
of economics and politics, suggesting that genuine pacifists should be interested in the
condition of the European working class, much the same way the latter should be inter-
ested in the sort of republican federalist politics espoused by League members. This last
remark was an obvious attempt to bridge the working-class concerns of the IWMA and
those more bourgeois republican ones of the League, and it was received with standing
ovations.
Such efforts to forge a rapprochement between the forces of republican international-
ism and those of working-class internationalism would prove far from successful in the
coming years. The unfriendly exchange about collective property between Coullery and
De Paepe little over a year later was in many ways revelatory of the growing tension
(both inside and outside the IWMA) between an older generation of internationalists
favouring decentralization and republicanism and sympathetic to the sort of socialism
they associated with Proudhon, and a younger generation, more favourable to the
radical resolution of economic questions in the name of the pressing interests of the
working classes.47 This tension was obvious at the Bernese League of Peace and
Freedom congress (21–25 September) which was held between the Brussels IWMA con-
gress and the Coullery-De Paepe spat. As Marx’s encouragement, the IWMA did not offi-
cially send a delegation to the League’s second annual congress to be held in Berne two
weeks after the IWMA Brussels event. Not all IWMA members agreed with this decision,
desiring instead an alliance between the two international organizations. However, the
IWMA’s decision might have reassured some nervous League members who were con-
cerned, after the 1867 Geneva Congress, that there was too much uncomfortable
overlap between the two organizations. Bakunin, himself an active member of the
League and member of the intermediary Commission assigned to determine future
League discussions, wrote to Gustav Vogt on 16 September reassuring him that he did
not want to dissolve ‘our League in the International League of Workers’. He went on
to add that there might even be the possibility of making a sort of transaction between
the two international organizations in which both would unify their revolutionary aims,
while sticking to their respective domains of specialization.48
According to Bakunin, the recent IWMA Brussels conference had made the momen-
tous and commendable decision of affirming the necessity of accelerating the economic
equalization of all individuals and classes through the abolition of all forms of landed
and (by implication) individual hereditary property.49 Bakunin thought that the job of
the League was now to explore how this process might work itself out politically, especially
given that such a measure would necessarily end in the radical transformation of the state
form as it was known in contemporary Europe and resolve the social question partly
through political means.50 Although suspicious of Bakunin’s machinations, Vogt did
180 E. CASTLETON

make some overture to the IWMA at Brussels. And an open letter from eight French
IWMA members held at Sainte-Pélagie prison was read at the beginning of the League
Congress. But the attempts of Bakunin and his circumstantial allies to radicalize the
League entirely overshadowed the Berne League congress.
Taking the place as rapporteur on the social question of League member and Proud-
hon’s former friend and translator, Karl Grün, Chaudey became the scapegoat of a
vocal minority’s unsuccessful bid to coordinate the aims of the League and those of the
IWMA. Chaudey affirmed that the development of specifically working-class demands
should be considered beyond the League’s purview. Interstate peace being the precondi-
tion for the sort of freedom requisite for working-class consciousness and emancipation
ever to arise, its promotion by the League (through, for example, the latter’s endorsement
of federalism or freedom of assembly) would necessarily play its part in the transformation
of the economic system by fostering a political system more favourable to progressive
working-class emancipation.51 Chaudey insisted on the federalist nature of the Berne con-
gress – the League’s mission was ‘federalism applied to political economy’52 – and advo-
cated the economic autonomy of industries, workshops, and classes.
Bakunin countered that the League should vote on the identity of the League’s mission
with that of the IWMA’s.53 Because peace and freedom, Bakunin asserted, would not be
possible outside of the economic ‘equalization’ of classes and individuals, it was necessary
for the League to study the practical means to achieve this end. According to Bakunin, it
was time for League members to accept the truly radical nature of their organization, shed
their class prejudices, and publically affirm principles in keeping with those endorsed by
the IWMA. For the question really was ‘are we socialists in the sense of the workers or in
that of the bourgeois?’54 Chaudey was an example of the latter. According to Bakunin, the
European working classes did not want class autonomy (which necessarily presupposed
economic and social differentiation) but wanted instead a society based on equality.
Rather than patronizing the working classes, condescending to them like Chaudey, the
League should endorse the principle of economic and social equality that the IWMA
had approved. In making these claims, Bakunin did not want any League members to
think he was a ‘communist’, however, since he endorsed the abolition of the state form,
was in favour of the reorganization of society from the bottom up through the collectivi-
zation of property by means of voluntary associations, and was opposed to all forms of
inheritable property. Bakunin regretted even having employed the expression ‘equaliza-
tion of classes’ and admitted he probably should have just spoken of their ‘suppression’
altogether and the unification of society through the abolition of socioeconomic and intel-
lectual inequality.55 According to him, natural inequalities could easily be overcome once
property relations were overturned, and equality of opportunity, equal education and
work were recognized as the foundations of social order, a point Chaudey ought to
have recognized as someone close to Proudhon.56
Victor Jaclard, a Blanqui devotee sensitive to IWMA concerns (the ‘Blanquist’ faction
was at the time trying to infiltrate the IWMA), sought to identify himself even more expli-
citly with De Paepe’s IWMA initiative in Brussels on landed property, and used Chaudey’s
presence as a pretext to reference directly Proudhon’s ideas about property (even though
Chaudey, himself, had not even addressed the issue of ownership in his speech).57 For
Jaclard, Chaudey was guilty of tacitly endorsing an absolute, inalterable and individuated
conception of property arrangements, whereas he should have understood, as Proudhon’s
 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 181

intestate executor, the fundamentally unjust, monopolistic nature of these existing

arrangements.58 Jaclard went on to mention Michelet’s observation, as had De Paepe,
about the unlimited love of the French peasantry for landed property, a clear sign that
he had read De Paepe’s earlier IWMA proposal and endorsed it.
Proudhon’s name having been invoked on several occasions, Chaudey clearly felt
obliged to clarify matters, stating that he was certainly more familiar with Proudhon’s
work than Jaclard, and that the latter would be better off studying Proudhon’s posthumous
theory of property than diverting the attention of League members from matters agreed
upon for discussion, since collective property and the question of ownership were not
what the League had been called upon to debate in the first place.59 Again, it was not
for the League to guide the nascent labour movement.60
Discussion about federalism during the fourth session reawakened the debate, when
Bakunin made a speech about why the Russian empire, a threat to global freedom,
needed to be destroyed, and why the greater Russian peoples needed to be granted the
right to self-determination through the decentralization of the state apparatus to the pro-
vincial and communal level. This could occur largely because property relations in Russia
and Eastern Europe had never been well defined, and until the invasion of the Tartars, the
earth basically belonged to all. Bakunin’s definition of self-determination (and by way of
extension, secession) radically separated the state from the nation, making the former sub-
servient to the latter, but Bakunin also expanded his understanding from communes and
provinces to associations and individuals insofar as contractual relations of any sort
applied to them. As he had done with earlier intervention on property, Bakunin went
far beyond the nominal subject of his intervention – the geopolitical status of Russia
and its consequences for world peace – to insist that it was necessary that the League
vote to abolish the state form altogether.61 All states being criminally dangerous and a
threat to world peace, Bakunin concluded provocatively that the only serious solution
for League members desirous of world peace was to work towards the global dissolution
of government, regardless of its political form, and its transformation into a universal fed-
eration of free producers’ associations on a planetary scale.62
Bakunin’s lengthy discourse was followed a shorter one by the French geographer,
Élisée Reclus, arguing that any discussions of creating a genuinely federal republic
should comprise not only Europe but the entire world, including China and the Southern
Hemisphere. With the abolition of hereditary property, states should be replaced by volun-
tary associations, which – much like the principalities and communes from pre-Tartar
Russia that Bakunin evoked – should be nomadic. Jaclard, less anti-statist than Bakunin
and Reclus, thought the ideal of a ‘United States of Europe’ (Les États-Unis d’Europe
was the name of the League’s newspaper) should be replaced with that of a ‘united’ (pre-
sumably universal) republic, which would require – were the self-determination of com-
munes and provinces ever to be functional within a federal system – the abolition of
individuated property. Any obstacles towards the realization of the League’s nominal
irenic goal came from the class prejudices of League members themselves, for to rid the
world of despotism one would have to rid the world not only of property but also of
the gutless, brainless bourgeoisie which defended it.63
Certainly outside of the radical fringes of the League, Bakunin’s egalitarian petitio prin-
cipii were not very popular, for they were overwhelmingly voted down by the League’s del-
egations. During the fifth session of the Berne Congress eighteen members from the
182 E. CASTLETON

League (Bakunin included) decided publicly to resign. Although the official stenographic
transcript of the League Congress does not contain this session, the transcript of Bakunin’s
speech as published (in French) in the Kolokol does suggest that following the group res-
ignation, Chaudey adamantly reiterated his opposition to any excessively subversive
attempts to radicalize the League from within.64 According to Bakunin, Chaudey, con-
founding ‘collectivists’ with ‘communists’, had withdrawn the word ‘equality’ from the
League’s programme, and Bakunin concluded with a stark ultimatum, imploring League
members to admit whether either they were in favour of the abolition of class differences
or they supported the persistence of social inequalities.65
Bakunin would go on to create his semi-secretive International Alliance of Socialist
Democracy in Geneva with the other members who had resigned from the League, and
place ‘the political, economic, and social equalization of classes’ in the second article of
its platform.66 In a 22 December 1868 letter to Marx, Bakunin confessed the impact the
Berne Congress had had on his own evolution, bending over backwards to flatter his cor-
respondent, who, for his part, was already suspicious of the creation of Bakunin’s new
organization. According to Bakunin, since the Berne Congress, having finally bid farewell
to the bourgeoisie and recognized the primacy of economic (as opposed to political)
change, Bakunin was now Marx’s proud (albeit belated) disciple.67 Such grandstanding
aside, it is clear that Bakunin’s break with the League was also synonymous for him
with a break with those contemporaries who avowedly affiliated themselves with Proud-
hon’s ideas and doctrines. In a subsequent 21 April 1869 letter to his new Swiss disciple
James Guillaume, one finds Bakunin referring to ‘Tolain, Chemalé and others’ as ‘Proud-
honians of the later, bad version of Proudhon’ who wanted to safeguard individual prop-
erty and associate themselves with the bourgeoisie rather than definitively breaking with
bourgeois socialists.68
Jaclard, for his part, returned to Paris to initiate a campaign of demonization against
Chaudey. Fellow Blanqui devotee Gustave Tridon wrote in a tract of the ‘deleterious influ-
ences which we denounced and which were beaten’ recently (Tridon was referring to
Tolain and his allies’ defeat at the IWMA Brussels congress), influences which then
sided at Berne with a sort of ‘bourgeois doctrinarisme69 to stamp on the social revolution’.
In this context, Chaudey was singled out for special mention:
[…] Chaudey showed peremptorily just how far a certain sick Proudhonism could go after
the death of the master and dirty his memory!

Let him think, if he can, about Proudhon’s own words:

‘If there exist any Proudhonians, and one tells me there are, they are most certainly
imbeciles!’

Hmm! Imbecile after the Congress at Berne, that’s quite lenient.70

The quote attributed by Tridon to Proudhon is quite possibly apocryphal, although the
same weariness with regards to ideological affinities and etiquettes was apparently also
shared by Marx, if one is to believe the (again possibly apocryphal) quote Engels cited
in a letter to Eduard Bernstein: ‘What is certain is that myself, I am not a Marxist.’71 Retro-
spectively, it is difficult not to read into Tridon’s menacing tone, itself indicative of the
growing feud between the Parisian Blanquist faction and Chaudey, without seeing some
foreshadowing of the latter’s murder by fellow Blanquist Rigault during the final hours
 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 183

of the Paris Commune.72 But it clearly also confirms how, with anti-imperial sentiment
consolidating itself across Europe over the course of the 1860s, socialist militants were
keen to rewrite the history of their ideas to sectarian advantage, as an impatient
younger generation which came of age under Napoleon III found itself increasingly at
odds with a seemingly more moderate older republican generation whose initiation to pol-
itical revolution came in 1848.

III
As far as the IWMA was concerned, Chaudey’s League victory in Berne was pyrrhic. The
fourth IWMA conference, held in Basel (5–12 September 1869), would oversee the
triumph of De Paepe’s Brussels initiative on landed property with absolute majorities
all around. An initiative in favour of abolishing inheritance would likewise be put forth
with less success by Bakunin and his Geneva-based group. In his rapport presented on
behalf of the Brussels IWMA section on the collectivization of landed property, De
Paepe again quoted from Proudhon’s posthumous Théorie, emphasizing that even Proud-
hon recognized (in a passage that Proudhon probably did not write) that in order for
genuine moveable property to exist, immoveable property – property in land – had to
belong to everyone. Again De Paepe consciously drew from Proudhon’s conceptual voca-
bulary – using phrases like liquidation sociale present in Proudhon’s 1851 Idée générale de
la Révolution au XIXe siècle – to make his point that farm rent should be thought of in
terms of the reimbursement of annuities.73 In the ensuing debates, Albert Richard and
Bakunin, now officially an IWMA member, made arguments insisting on the need to
go one step further and abolish inheritance. Bakunin even argued, rather incoherently,
that along with the collectivization of landed property, it was necessary to destroy all ter-
ritorial nation-states and construct a world state composed of millions of workers in their
place. If the opponents of the collectivization of agricultural property overwhelmingly lost
when the delegates’ votes were counted, they were slightly more successful when it came to
Bakunin’s push to have the IWMA vote in favour of abolishing inheritance, where they
benefited from the support of De Paepe and the General Council. Subsequent to the
latter vote, Langlois remarked on the growing communist tenor of the congress discus-
sions, which – were the apparent desire for collectivization of IWMA militants to grow
more than to encompass just land – might spell the outright negation of traditional mutu-
alist positions on such matters as interest-free credit.74
Nor was there any consensus outside of IWMA congresses where the issues of collective
property in rural land and the abolition of inheritance had likewise become increasingly
divisive and polarizing. As was the case for Chaudey, Langlois and other more moderate
and older militants of a republican socialist sensibility, Pierre Coullery, for example, did
not particularly understand the difference between collectivism and communism, and
he did not hesitate to accuse James Guillaume’s Le Locle-based paper, Le Progrès, of
being run by ‘authoritarian communists’, an expression, ironically enough, Guillaume
himself would use in early 1870 in unfavourable contradistinction to the anti-authoritar-
ian collectivists grouped around Bakunin,75 and which Bakunin himself would use later on
to describe Marx and his socialist allies.76
As for the League, after Berne Charles Lemonnier wrote a series of articles both for the
official League paper and Le Phare de la Loire invoking Proudhon’s mature theory of
184 E. CASTLETON

property to refute those newfangled collectivists who were in reality indistinguishable

from communists.77 Chaudey intervened in the third annual League Congress (14–18 Sep-
tember 1869), held in Lausanne two days after the close of the IWMA event in Basel, refut-
ing the attempts of Longuet and Fribourg to insist upon the necessity of the League
addressing the social question. Chaudey’s relatively hostile reaction to their interventions
demonstrated how much the acrimonious nature of the League debates of the previous
year in Berne no longer made the promise of a partnership between the League and the
IWMA conceivable. Addressing Longuet and Fribourg directly, Chaudey remarked –
raising cackles from the crowd – that they spoke as if there actually was a republican, con-
stitutional regime with a decentralized structure in France, and that League members were
in charge of its military, administration, and budget.78 Longuet and Fribourg supposed the
preexistence of the sort of federalist republican political reforms necessary for mutualism
ever to flourish, and it was the implementation of the latter which should take precedence
in League discussions. Chaudey argued that the League should henceforth best not even
discuss the social question whatsoever since it only led to the sorts of class baiting that
characterized the behaviour of Bakunin and his allies in the previous Bernese Congress,
in which League members were invariably denounced as ‘bourgeois’ each time the
subject was broached. If the social question was exclusively a working-class matter of
concern, Chaudey reasoned, then let those militants claiming to represent the working
classes resolve it themselves and no longer bother the League until they actually had some-
thing conclusive and credible to present.79 If the substance of what Chaudey said was in
many ways the same as what he had claimed at the Geneva and Berne congresses, the
message, as it was now formulated in 1869, was much more hostile to the IWMA than
previously. Gone was any reference to ‘federalism applied to political economy’. This
rift with the IWMA would be conclusively confirmed after Chaudey’s death, at the 25–
29 September 1871 League Congress, when, drawing attention among other things to
Chaudey’s murder, League leaders came out in support of Thiers’s repression of the
Paris Commune and jeered André Léo’s attempt to draw attention to the criminal
nature of this repression. As many commentators have noted, following the Franco-Prus-
sian war, the League discussions would become even more moderate in their orientation,
focusing on the promotion of international law at the expense of advocating self-govern-
ment, decentralization, and political and economic federalism.80
Bakunin, for his part, would denigrate Chaudey as a ‘reactionary’ and a ‘bourgeois’ in a
number of his manuscripts from the 1871 period, arguing that Chaudey got what he
deserved during the Commune, having discredited himself as a member of a ‘still-born’
Proudhonian coterie of which Langlois and Tolain were also members.81 If he was critical
of Proudhon’s position on Poland and his metaphysical idealism,82 Bakunin claimed else-
where in his manuscripts that he was Proudhon’s rightful successor.83 Bakunin asked
Guillaume to write a study of Proudhon for the same Zurich-based Russian publisher
who had commissioned Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy (1873). The resulting pamphlet,
published anonymously in Russian in 1874, exposed Proudhon’s ideas as they were
expressed in what were supposedly his most genuinely revolutionary writings : those
most relevant to the concerns of the IWMA, dating from the 1849–1851 period, and advo-
cating the abolition of the political state and the organization of society in an economic
federation of producers.84 According to the unnamed author of the preface (most likely
Bakunin himself), the last works of Proudhon were bastardized by unreliable executors
 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 185

of Proudhon’s literary estate like Chaudey and Langlois who had tendentiously distorted
his beliefs in accordance with their own bourgeois biases.85 In a chapter on property in the
anonymous pamphlet, Guillaume, who had some experience with vulgarizing Proudhon’s
ideas having previously written a number of articles in 1869 exposing his theories of taxa-
tion,86 argued that Proudhon’s lifelong aversion to authoritarian communism (understood
as the state monopolization of all forms of ownership) had led him to want to safeguard
individual property at the end of his life. Yet, the author argued, Proudhon had recognized
here and there in his writings that it was necessary to find a third form of ownership, iden-
tical to what IWMA members called collectivisme and roughly analogous to what De Paepe
described at the Brussels IWMA congress: a future society composed of a federation of
voluntary producers’ associations regulating the distribution and exchange of products
and the overall levels of production while working to attenuate the bad effects of
monopoly.87
None of these intellectual efforts to achieve doctrinal coherence could help what was
left of the IWMA, however. Despite the 1872 break with the General Council in the
name of a more ecumenical organizational structure, IWMA programmatic infighting
continued unabated in the new ‘anti-authoritarian’ International. For one thing, there
was the inevitable practical question to argue over of who was going to run the various
collectivized forms of production after a Proudhonian ‘social liquidation’ if the state
was simultaneously to be abolished. Also as electoral politics became more important in
shaping the course of socialism’s development throughout Europe, the initial unity of
the coalition formed in 1872 against the General Council at the unofficial IWMA
counter-congress, held in Saint-Imier (15 September 1872), was increasingly chimerical.88
De Paepe and the Belgians openly argued with their Swiss allies at the 1874 Brussels
IWMA Congress over the question of political action. Frustrated by the direction the
‘anti-authoritarian’ IWMA had taken, Guillaume left the Swiss Jura for Paris in 1878.
Such former Fédération Jurassienne affiliates as Paul Brousse and Jules Guesde would
eventually leave behind their anti-electoral pasts in Switzerland to found parties of their
own in France in the 1880s. Andrea Costa would do the same in Italy. In the repressive
political climate of the 1880s, those few European revolutionaries committed to the exist-
ence of an international ‘anarchist’ movement, influenced by the ideas of Brousse and
Costa before their conversions to parliamentary democracy and backed by Kropotkin,
debated the merits of violent insurrection, ‘propaganda of the deed’, political assassination,
and ‘anarcho-communism’ as alternatives preferable to participating in electoral politics
or focusing exclusively on the particular demands of various labour movements. With
critical distance, it is hard not to interpret the intransigent ‘Jurassic Anarchism’ of the
Swiss Francophone Federation as being, by the late 1870s, idiomatically stuck in a time
warp preventing its dwindling militants from moving forward past 1871. As if proof
that ‘anarchism’ in its nascent form was prisoner to a conceptual and discursive frame
of reference harkening back to an earlier, more obviously Francocentric era of socialist
radicalism, one of the Bulletin de la Fédération Jurassienne’s last articles before Guil-
laume’s departure was a critical commentary on a traditionally conservative defense of
private property rights given by the Duc de Broglie in the pages of the French Journal
des Débats in 1848, the year of a much more promising aborted revolution than that
which transpired in 1871.89 The supposed novelty of collectivisme does not appear to
have proffered enough propagandistic sustenance for the anti-authoritarian Swiss in the
186 E. CASTLETON

less Francocentric post-revolutionary politics of the 1870s. A sign of local desperation, bits
of Guillaume’s anonymous 1874 Russian tract on Proudhon were trundled out by the Bul-
letin in a series of 1877 articles in order to marshal Proudhon’s 1851 critique of ‘direct
legislation’ and the ideas of the German republican, Moritz Rittinghausen, against con-
temporary attempts to generalize to all of Switzerland the Canton of Zurich’s influential
constitutional decision to apply Rittinghausen’s ideas about popular referendum
initiatives.90
Faced with dwindling membership and lacking a convincing practical program during
the late 1870s, Guillaume and the other contributors to the Federation’s Bulletin neverthe-
less could find consolation in the generally positive reception of largely academic historical
research on alternative property arrangements in the past popularized by the Belgian pub-
licist Emile de Laveleye – erudite research which seemed to make the idea of ‘collectivism’
more palatable than in the late 1860s when it inspired horrified indignation from contem-
poraries who claimed the recent neologism was identical to oppressive forms of ‘commun-
ism’.91 Similarly, when Benoît Malon republished a selection of some of De Paepe’s IWMA
writings in 1895, he cited how the Belgian socialist had already anticipated the practical
application of ideas which Laveleye would later popularize in more recondite form.92
De Paepe, for his part, became fascinated by the writings of Nikolay Chernyshevsky,
and helped translate him into French.93 Over the course of the 1870s, Marx, himself,
apparently became greatly interested in Chernyshevsky’s work as well as that of other
scholars writing about the Russian mir, village communities, and Slavic property arrange-
ments, and it has even been speculated that Marx abandoned writing a sequel to volume of
Capital as he became increasingly bogged down by his readings of both ethnographic
research on the historical origins of property and intensive studies of agricultural practices,
notably in Russia.94 Engels – who had about as little desire to publicize Marx’s somewhat
favourable appreciation of certain aspects of Russian rural institutions and customs
regarding ownership as Proudhon’s executors did in publishing his denigrations of
Poland and Slavic property arrangements – would eventually publish some of this research
(minus the Russian material) in bastardized form after Marx’s death in his 1884 The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. If Marx took up the cause of the
‘nationalization’ of land in the IWMA, he made sure to distinguish this goal from the
sort of ‘social liquidation’ first Proudhon, then later De Paepe, proposed.95 Seconded by
Engels, ever ‘the general’ loyal to his friend in that ideological hothouse which was the
IWMA immediately after the destruction of the Paris Commune, Marx continued with
gusto his crusade against any potential rival socialist theorists, notably the ‘anarchists’
grouped around Bakunin, and the persistent intellectual influence of his old bugbear,
Proudhon.96 Picking up where Marx left off in his 1847 Poverty of Philosophy in a
series of 1872 articles published as The Housing Question, Engels, himself, attacked
attempts to popularize in Germany Proudhon’s programmatic ‘social liquidation’
project dating back to the Second Republic and its rent-to-own measures as put forth
in Proudhon’s 1851 Idée générale.97 When Engels first encountered the same work by
Proudhon upon its publication, he thought much of its contents had been plagiarized
from the Communist Manifesto and therefore was a moderate improvement over Proud-
hon’s earlier output.98 Times had changed when he penned the preface to the second
German edition of The Housing Question in 1887. Engels could now console himself
that the European working-class movement had finally rid itself of Proudhon’s influence
 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 187

thanks to the growing influence of Marx’s ideas.99 Unsurprisingly, Engels ignored the
extent to which Proudhon’s own ideas had surreptitiously played a critical role in deter-
mining the emergence, by the 1870s, of ‘collectivism’ as a meaningful term, one by that
time increasingly synonymous with ‘socialism’ itself.100 If the word ‘collectivism’ seems
in hindsight to lead one necessarily forward to Soviet Russia and the experience of
‘really existing socialism’ in the twentieth century, one must not forget that it was first for-
mulated in the context of IWMA and League debates about the relative merits of Proud-
hon’s ideas.

Notes
1. Notably in a series of 1904 articles, republished as Le Collectivisme de l’Internationale, them-
selves inspired by the request of Sorbonne philosophy professor André Lalande to define the
term collectivisme for the latter’s projected Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie,
finally published in its entirety in 1924, 148–9.
2. L’Internationale, documents et souvenirs. Guillaume helped Nettlau edit volumes 2–6 of the
1895–1913 Stock edition of Bakunin’s Œuvres.
3. Guillaume, Le Collectivisme de l’Internationale, 16–20, and Guillaume, L’Internationale, v. 1
(t. 2), 298–9.
4. For a recent critical exploration of the consequences of this discursive shift, written from the
polemical perspective of a long-standing anarcho-syndicalist militant, see René Berthier’s
suggestive La Fin de la Première Internationale, passim.
5. This historiographical tradition continues to this day, although in thankfully more attenuated
form. See Robert Graham’s recent We Do Not Fear Anarchy, We Invoke It. In the standard
historical accounts of the IWMA published during the twentieth century (particularly during
the Cold War), the conflict of personalities and beliefs pitting Marx against Bakunin was typi-
cally represented as the climacteric of the First International’s history. Scholarship and mili-
tant writings often pitched this feud either as a precursor to intra-left internecine quarrels
about the Soviet Union or as an initial struggle between the competing ideologies of ‘anar-
chism’ and ‘Marxism’ – indeed, frequently even as both, and invariably as a showdown of
competing doctrinal principles. Particularly for Marxist scholars, the story of the IWMA
more or less ends at The Hague in 1872 once Marx was subsequently no longer a major
player in the First International and the Marx–Bakunin rivalry was resolved from the stand-
point of the General Council. Yet if the post-Hague, post-Marx story of the demise of the
official, General Council-backed IWMA has generated little interest, nor have the successive
‘anti-authoritarian’ federalist congresses held after 1872 and their eventual fragmentation,
dwindling attendance, and ultimate marginalization stimulated historians’ research. This
latter story of the organizational decline and fall of the majority dissenters initially sympath-
etic to Bakunin and Guillaume has not proven suitable for anarchist hagiography, particu-
larly given that the Marx–Bakunin conflict is invariably considered a foundational
moment inciting the emergence of ‘anarchism’ as an identifiable doctrine and distinct
strand of political thought. For a welcome exception to this trend examining the later
post-1872 IWMA congresses, see Berthier, La Fin de la Première Internationale.
6. “Proudhon communiste,” 312. This was before 1914, whereupon dormant antagonisms were
reawakened once more. One of Guillaume’s last published works – appearing after the out-
break of World War I – was entitled Karl Marx pangermaniste et l’Association Internationale
des Travailleurs de 1864 à 1870.
7. Guillaume responded to Murat in his Le Locle-based paper, Le Progrès (1 January 1870). His
response is reproduced in L’Internationale, v. 1 (1), 254–7.
8. See Jean Dubois’s lexicographic compilation, Le Vocabulaire politique et social en France de
1869 à 1871, 259–60 and 391–2.
188 E. CASTLETON

9. For a recent example of this sort of narrative construction, see Mathieu Léonard, L’émanci-
pation des travailleurs. Une histoire de la Première Internationale. For some corrective criti-
cisms of this ideological periodization and the exaggeration of ‘Proudhonian’ influence on
the Parisian labour movement in last decade of the Second Empire, see Moss, “La Première
Internationale, la coopération et le mouvement ouvrier à Paris (1865–1871).” See also more
recently Hayat, “The Construction of Proudhonism Within the IWMA.”
10. Quoted in Freymond, La Première Internationale, v. 2, 66. Besides collaborating on the post-
humous editions of Proudhon’s unfinished manuscripts, Langlois would also edit the 14-
volume 1875 edition of Proudhon’s correspondence, as well publish a synthesis of Proud-
hon’s philosophical, economic and moral beliefs in a two-volume series of studies entitled
L’Homme et la Révolution: huit études dédiées à P.-J. Proudhon. On Langlois’s relations
with Proudhon, see Chantal Gaillard’s discussion in Nicolas Devigne, Proudhon par
l’image, 337–48.
11. Respectively, Du Principe de l’Art et sa destination sociale and France et Rhin. On Chaudey’s
relations with Proudhon, see Chantal Gaillard’s entry on Chaudey in Devigne, Proudhon par
l’image, 262–83.
12. Ms. 2234, Bibliothèque d’Étude et de Conservation, Besançon, ff. 18–19 recto–verso. See also
Pierre Lafille dans “Trois lettres inédites de Chaudey adressées à Courbet”, 10.
13. On this subject, see Mervaud, “Lettres de Bakunin à Quinet et Proudhon” and Vuilleumier,
“Notes sur les rapports entre Bakounine et Proudhon.”
14. An important exception to this general trend is Wilhelmus Hubertus Van der Linden’s dense
study of nineteenth-century pacifism, The International Peace Movement, 1815–1874, 675–
931 passim, especially 738–76.
15. Fribourg, L’Association Internationale des Travailleurs, 127–31.
16. First published in 1895 by Nettlau in volume 1 of the Stock edition of Bakunin’s Oeuvres, 41–
238.
17. For exceptions to this general rule, see volume 3 of René Berthier’s L’autre Bakounine,
entitled De la révolution démocratique à la révolution sociale, passim, and the collection of
Bakunin’s writings he has edited, Bakounine, Textes sur la question slave et l’Europe du
Nord, 1862–1864.
18. A rare exception being Van der Linden’s International Peace Movement.
19. Chaudey’s guilt in these shootings has been notably called into question by Maxime Vuil-
laume in his Mes Cahiers rouges, tome 8, Deux drames, 11–101.
20. See his note, dated 15 August 1863, in MS. 2805, f. 84 recto and f. 83 recto, Bibliothèque
d’Étude et de Conservation, Besançon.
21. See Puech, Le Proudhonisme dans l’Association international des travailleurs as well as the
recent qualifications made in this regard by Hayat, “The Construction of Proudhonism
Within the IWMA.”
22. See the footnote in Proudhon, De la Capacité politique des classes ouvrières, 162–4, which
does not correspond to anything in the original manuscript.
23. Freymond, La Première Internationale, vols. 1–4, and Bartier, “Proudhon et la Belgique.”
24. On La Tribune du peuple, see Francis Sartorius, Tirs croisés: La petite presse bruxelloise des
années 1860 (complément), 59–74.
25. On La Liberté, see Mayné, Eugène Hins: Une grande figure de la Première Internationale en
Belgique, 106–25.
26. This debate occurred principally between October and December 1869. Most of De Paepe’s
polemic in L’Internationale was republished by De Paepe’s friend, Benoît Malon, in the first
volume of his 1895 collection of De Paepe’s writings from the IWMA period, Les Services
publics, précédés de deux essais sur le collectivisme, v. 1, 103–35.
27. For example, as late as the second annual IWMA congress, held in Lausanne (2–8 September
1867), De Paepe argued in a rapport de la section belge (written with Léon Fontaine and
Alphonse Vandenhouten) that, as Proudhon suggested during his 1848 writings, interest-
free credit should be a public service, national banks should be structured with this aim,
 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 189

and while waiting for this reform, mutualist banking should be encouraged by the newly
created International.
28. Proudhon, Théorie de la propriété.
29. On Proudhon’s programmatic agenda of ‘social liquidation’ and the Second Republic context
in which it was elaborated, see Castleton, “The Many Revolutions of Pierre-Joseph Proud-
hon.” On Proudhon’s collaboration with Duchêne in this regard and its relation to Proud-
hon’s conceptions of ‘mutualism’ and ‘collective force’, see Castleton, “Association,
Mutualism, and Corporate Form.” On Duchêne and Proudhon more generally, see
Chantal Gaillard’s discussion in Devigne, Proudhon par l’image, 305–11.
30. Held at the municipal library of Besançon, this manuscript will be published in a critical
edition in 2018 by the Cahiers de la MSHE Ledoux, Besançon. For some analysis of this
manuscript’s contents within the framework of Proudhon’s ultimate philosophical preoccu-
pations in the years immediately prior to his death, see Castleton, “Une anthropologie
téleologique.”
31. For instance, in some manuscript notes for De la Capacité written at some point between the
1863 parliamentary elections and his death, and in which Proudhon reevaluated his identi-
fication of property in the earlier (but also posthumous) Théorie with its supposedly absolute
and unconditional Roman law definition. See MS. 2882 (Besançon), f. 20 recto–verso.
32. In a few pages of the second chapter of De la Capacité politique, 26–32, although Proudhon
suggested there might be room for common ground between rural small-holders and urban
workers. This observation was related to a larger one circumscribing those socio-professional
groups potentially interested in the rhetoric of ‘association’. See Castleton, “Association,
Mutualism, and Corporate Form,” 143–4.
33. De Paepe already suggested as much in a 22 February 1866 letter to Agathon de Potter
apropos a critical review of Proudhon’s Théorie de la Propriété that De Potter had submitted
to La Tribune du Peuple (published in the 18 and 25 February 1866 issues). See Vervaeck,
“Brieven van Cesar de Paepe aan Agathon De Potter,” 17–118. De Paepe first expressed in
a IWMA venue his adherence to Proudhon’s early property critique and its compatibility
with other contemporary theories entailing land collectivization. See his 31 January 1868
article in La Tribune du Peuple.
34. The introduction of Colins’s ideas into the Belgian IWMA sections happened shortly after
the death of Proudhon around the summer of 1865. On Colins and his influence, see
Rens, Introduction au socialisme rationnel de Colins and Rens and Ossipow, Histoire d’un
autre socialisme. L’École colinsienne 1840–1940.
35. Freymond, La Première Internationale, v. 1, 398. Initially sympathetic to ‘Proudhonian’
mutualism, Longuet would only flip over to the side of his future father-in-law, Marx, and
his allies on the General Council shortly before the 1872 IWMA Congress held at the Hague.
36. See above, note 32.
37. See, for instance, Dandois, Entre Marx et Bakounine, 80–1 and 85–6.
38. On Coullery, see Wiss-Belleville, Pierre Coullery und die Anfänge der Arbeiterbewegung in
Bern und der Westschweiz.
39. “Congrès international des travailleurs,” La Voix de l’Avenir, 27 septembre 1868. Article
reprinted in the ‘Pièces justificatives’ of Mémoire présenté par la Fédération jurassienne de
l’Association internationale des travailleurs à toutes les fédérations de l’internationale, 13–16.
40. La Voix de l’Avenir, 18 octobre 1868. Article reprinted in the appendices of Mémoire présenté,
16–20.
41. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis. On the French context of the 1860s, see Tchernoff, Le Parti
républicain au coup d’État et sous le Second Empire, 286–362.
42. On Borkheim’s role at the Congress, see volume 3 of Bakunin’s complete works edited by
Lehning, Les Conflits dans l’Internationale, 241–52.
43. Annales du Congrès de Genève, 191.
44. Guillaume, L’Internationale, v. 1 (1), 52.
45. César de Paepe made a similar point in a speech towards the end of the League Congress.
190 E. CASTLETON

46. Guillaume’s journalistic account of Chaudey’s speech does not appear in full in his reproduc-
tion of his Diogène articles on the Genevan Congress republished in L’Internationale, because
Guillaume could not find copies of the relevant issues while in Paris writing his memoir of his
experience in the IWMA. This account can be found in the 17, 24 and 31 January 1868 issues
of Diogène.
47. In the ensuing ideological imbroglio over landed property, Coullery’s La Voix de l’Avenir
would lose its status as an IWMA paper officially representing the sections of Francophone
Switzerland.
48. This letter is quoted in Guillaume, L’Internationale, v. 1 (1), 72–4 as well as in Freymond, La
Première Internationale, v. 1, 449–51.
49. De Paepe had not discussed the complications regarding inheritance that the collectivization
of land would create, but Bakunin seized on the issue as it was his regular hobbyhorse in any
discussion of an economic nature.
50. Bakunin’s confounding of the property-inheritance issue with the issue of centralized states
and with the political-theological problem of the root of reactionary forms of authority in
religion was in keeping thematically with many of the concerns of European radical progress-
ive opinion. For example, the International Association for the Progress of the Social Sciences
had held debates in its 1862–1865 congresses in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland
on inheritance and decentralization as well as on working-class coalitions, secular morality,
anticlericalism, and the need for educational reform.
51. Bulletin sténographique du Deuxième Congrès de la Paix et de la Liberté, 81–2. These steno-
graphic transcripts regrettably only reproduce the first four of the five sessions of the
Congress.
52. Ibid., 82.
53. French language transcripts of Bakunin’s speeches (albeit significantly different from that
found in the League’s much more succinct stenographic transcript) were reprinted in Alex-
ander Herzen’s Kolokol (1 December 1868) and subsequently in the appendices of Mémoire
présenté, 20–38.
54. Ibid., 22.
55. Bulletin sténographique, 29–30.
56. Ibid., 30–1.
57. On Jaclard and Blanquist tactics, see Dommanget, Blanqui et l’opposition révolutionnaire,
passim.
58. Bulletin sténographique, 116–18.
59. Ibid., 119–20.
60. Ibid., 121.
61. Ibid., 234.
62. Ibid., 235.
63. Ibid., 245–46.
64. This speech, as in the case of Bakunin’s other interventions during the League Congress, was
likewise republished in the appendices of Mémoire présenté, 36–8, although neither published
transcription might be entirely accurate and likely any textual embellishments favor Bakunin.
65. Ibid., 38.
66. Bakunin also would write a series of articles against the League in June–July 1869 for the
Geneva-based Swiss Francophone IWMA paper (official successor to Coullery’s La Voix
de l’Avenir), L’Égalité.
67. This letter is reproduced by Guillaume, L’Internationale, v. 1 (1), 103; and Freymond, La Pre-
mière Internationale, v. 1, 452–3.
68. Guillaume, L’Internationale, v. 1 (1), 154.
69. The term, not easily translatable into English, refers back to those French liberals of the Res-
toration era associated with François Guizot.
70. Tridon, ‘Un billet de faire-part’, quoted in full in Fribourg, L’Association Internationale des
Travailleurs, 185, and Dommanget, Blanqui et l’opposition révolutionnaire, 217.
 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 191

71. The comment was supposedly made by Marx to fellow IWMA member and son-in-law, Paul
Lafargue and was frequently used in the twentieth century by those seeking to oppose Marx’s
ideas to those of ‘Marxism’.
72. Chaudey’s fate seems all the more hapless given that he had actually defended in court the
Blanquists famously arrested (Rigault included) in November 1866 at the café Renaissance
for having formed a secret society actively participating in such subversive international
events as, among other things, the 1865 Liege student congress and the first IWMA Congress,
held in Geneva.
73. Liquidation sociale was the title and subject of the fifth study of Proudhon’s Idée générale de
la Révolution au XIXe siècle, 192–234. The use of the expression, liquidation sociale, would
become widespread in Francophone radical socialist circles between 1869 and 1871. See
Dubois, Le Vocabulaire politique et social en France, 335–6.
74. Freymond, La Première Internationale, v. 2, 95.
75. Guillaume, L’Internationale, v. 1 (1), 257.
76. In his unfinished 1870–1871 work, L’Empire knouto-germanique et la révolution sociale en
France.
77. Van der Linden, The International Peace Movement, 771–2.
78. Bulletin officiel du Congrès de la Paix et de la Liberté, 129.
79. Ibid., 129–30.
80. See Van der Linden, passim.
81. Lehning, Michel Bakounine et l’Italie, v. 1, 241.
82. Lehning, Les Conflits dans l’Internationale, 199 and Lehning, Étatisme et anarchie, 317. In
English translation, Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, 142.
83. Étatisme et anarchie, note 104, 427.
84. Anonymous, Anarchija po Prudonu. Guillaume burned the French manuscript in 1909
although some of the portions of the original pamphlet were published in the Bulletin de
la Fédération jurasienne: 3 and 10 January 1875; 4 and 18 March 1877, 1 April 1877. Guil-
laume’s pamphlet was essentially an exegesis of Proudhon’s 1849 Confessions d’un révolu-
tionnaire and his 1851 Idée générale.
85. Lehning translated Bakunin’s anonymous preface in volume 6 of his edition of Bakunin’s
complete works, Relations slaves, 1870–1875, LXIV and LXVII.
86. Le Progrès, 12 and 22 January 1869; 2 and 20 February 1869; 17 April 1869.
87. Relations slaves, LXVII–VIII.
88. On this subject, see Berthier, La Fin de la Première Internationale.
89. Bulletin de la Fédération Jurassienne, 25 February and 4 March 1878.
90. Ibid., 4 and 18 March, 1 April 1877. The Belgian members of the IWMA had already more or
less made this same criticism of Rittinghausen and constitutional politics in Zurich in 1869,
claiming that all forms of representation and political delegation which did not mirror the
division of labor were illusory. But by the 1870s, the Belgians were more open to participating
in the political process and rejected the anti-politics of the increasingly isolated Swiss mili-
tants holed up in the Jura. On Rittinghausen’s initiatives in Swiss context, see Marc Vuilleu-
mier’s 1996 article, “Le courant socialiste au XIXe siècle et ses idées sur la démocratie directe”,
recently republished in his essay collection, Histoires et combats, 321–46; and within the
larger context of French political thought between the French Revolution and World War
I, see Chambost, “Socialist Visions of Direct Democracy.”
91. Bulletin de la Fédération Jurassienne, 4 March 1876. On Laveleye and the general intellectual
context in which his writings on property was received, see Grossi, An Alternative to Private
Property.
92. De Paepe, Les Services publics, v. 1, 16, n. 1.
93. See his collaborative translations of Chernyshevsky (done with Alexis Tveretinov), notably
Chernyshevsky’s book on John Stuart Mill’s work of political economy, L’économie politique
jugée par la science, (Fr. trans. 1874); Lettre sans adresse sur l’abolition du servage en Russie
(Fr. trans. 1874); and his famous 1863 novel, Que faire? (Fr. trans. 1876).
192 E. CASTLETON

94. On Marx’s post-Capital ethnographic interest in communal forms of property (and particu-
larly the Russian mir), the literature is vast. In English, see, most recently, Stedman Jones,
Karl Marx, 568–86.
95. For instance, in a talk entitled “The Nationalisation of the Land” read in 1872 before the
Manchester section of the IWMA, reproduced in Marx Engels Collected Works, v. 23, 131–6.
96. For examples of writings by the duo directed at both Bakunin and Proudhon during this
period, see, for example, MECW, v. 23, 392–7, 422–5, and 454–580.
97. For Zur Wohnungsfrage in English translation, see MECW, v. 23, 317–91.
98. See Engels’s 21 August 1851 letter to Marx, MECW, v. 38, 435. Engels’s extensive manuscript
notes on Proudhon’s Idée générale have been published in MECW, v. 11, 545–70.
99. MECW, v. 26, 426–7. Ironically, the very last article of the Fédération Jurassienne’s Bulletin,
appearing roughly a decade earlier (25 March 1878), was a succinct exposition of the theory
of anarchism outlined by the principal target of Engels’s polemic in Zur Wohnungsfrage, the
German writer Arthur Mülberger. In the review’s anonymous summary, the Bulletin
regretted that Mühlberger was so attached to Proudhon’s ideas as not to recognize the differ-
ence between ‘present-day anarchists, partisans of collective property’ and the ‘hot-headed
champion of individualism’ who was Proudhon.
100. For instance, if one takes such an infallible conceptual bellwether of enlightened Franco-
phone liberal economic opinion as the famous 1852–1853 Dictionnaire de l’économie poli-
tique, edited by Charles Coquelin and Gilbert Guillaumin and then juxtaposes it with its
1890 successor, the Nouveau dictionnaire de l’économie politique edited by Léon Say and
Joseph Chailley, one notices that the entry on socialisme from the 1852–1853 volume was
replaced by one on collectivisme in 1890.

Acknowledgements
Regardless of its ultimate defects, this article has benefitted greatly from conversations I have had
with René Berthier, Michel Cordillot, Florian Eitel, Marianne Enckell, and Marc Vuilleumier. The
article originally grew out of a paper given for a June 2014 commemorative conference on the
IWMA given at the University of Paris IV (Sorbonne).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
Research was funded at the time by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche project, ‘Utopies19’, in
conjunction with the MSHE Ledoux.

Notes on contributor
Edward Castleton is a research affiliate of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de l’Environne-
ment Claude-Nicolas Ledoux as well as of the philosophy faculty of the Université de Franche-
Comté, Besançon, France. He is currently editing Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s manuscripts for
publication.

Bibliography
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 GLOBAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 193

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