To the Conscripts – l’anarchie (1906)

Translated from the French of the original article in l’anarchie, number 77, September 27, 1906, edited by Anna Mahé and Albert Libertad

Comrades,

In a few days, the most beautiful and sweetest of fatherlands will order some of you to leave the family home, to tear yourselves away from the tender affections of a father, a mother, a lover or friends, to undergo two years in the barracks.

After having been prepared by school and family for the idea of the fatherland; after having learned to consider as enemies all who are of different customs, languages, and who live outside the fixed limits called borders; they come, under the pretext of national defense, and in the name of acquired freedoms, to impose on you a degrading slavery.

But if the defense of France is the main reason for this imposition, why aren’t the troops that make up the army spread out along the borders and coasts? What are they doing inside the nation?

All regimes, all successive governments, have always employed this force for what they have agreed to call the maintenance of internal order; which means, in clear and precise terms, the defense of the strongbox and the protection of the plundering classes against the logical claims of the proletariat.

Didn’t a bourgeois economist, Jean-Baptiste Say, write that far from protecting national independence, a large military establishment is perhaps what compromises it the most, as a result of the aggressive tendencies it determines in those who have it at their disposal. Yes, these old words still deserve reflection in this day and age.

After all, what are they going to order you to do, after making you wear a ridiculous uniform?

To make an abstraction of your individuality, to constrict all initiative, all intellectual life, and to subjugate you to a degrading obedience submitted to an idiotic hierarchy that is the negation of all reason. You will be told that the orders of your superiors must be carried out without murmur, without examination, with blind faith.

Apart from hatred of the foreigner, which you have already acquired, you will be taught to regard as despicable anyone born on the same soil as you who has a conception contrary to passive obedience or acceptance of the rules imposed by the government.

And once the spirit of reflection, of freedom has been destroyed in you, you will become the killing machines used to consolidate the reign of arbitrariness over ignorance.

You will also be employed in the service of humiliating and provocative police that will perpetuate boss servitude and misery, the fate that will be yours tomorrow; to constrict any impulse of generous revolt on the part of the oppressed, that you, the sons of workers, will put your energy at the service of our oppressors; it is you who, frightened by the fear of punishment, on the barbaric orders of your officers, will cowardly shoot your fathers, your mothers, your sisters, your friends; for you will kill, here, indifferent people who will be the relatives of those who will carry out the same order in your country.

It is to combat this selfish fanaticism of fatherland and army in all its forms, which destroys, in the individual, the revolutionary spirit of human solidarity, that we come to tell you, young people, to whom habits have always taken the place of reason, that it is time to reject all these religious and secular metaphysics which only serve to consolidate the privileges of the few and maintain the troubles and misery of the many.

Glory, honour, the army, the fatherland, god: these are all vague terms that have become magical and with which leaders past and present have bent and are still bending the masses.

All wars are criminal and benefit only the plutocracy that governs us and the speculators who exploit us. So we say to you: stop being sacrificial sheep, hurl anathema at assassins, stop being passive slaves; become thinking beings determined to defend not the interests of your masters, but your right to life.

The fatherland is gentle to the rich, inexorable to the unfortunate. The fatherland perpetuates antagonism, continuing the fiercest authority.

It is to maintain this tyrannical state that you are going to sacrifice two beautiful years of your youth and perhaps your life.

If your recklessness leads you to a strike, understand that the brutal gestures of your spinelessness in the defense of capital, oppressing your brothers, will also be turned against you. Won’t you be the oppressed of tomorrow?

When they send you to the border or on colonial expeditions, you’ll still only be sacrificing your lives for wormy bankers or shameless speculators, and if you come back sick and miserable, what will your motherland do for you? Nothing.

That mother is nothing but a stepmother!

This is why we anti-militarists have decided to respond to any declaration of war with insurrection.

Don’t think we’re rejecting a master to accept the oppression of some spurred and crowned mercenary… especially as the anti-militarist work we’re doing here is being done more intensely elsewhere.

Fighting against armies opens up a new era in the science of happiness.

Break the circle of old-fashioned traditions; let the blindfold that has been kept over your eyes no longer hide the sun from you. Slaves, break your chains, let your brains fall in love with beautiful revolutionary disobedience, and if your blood must flow, let it be for your happiness and your freedom.