Peter Kropotkin

Although The Conquest of Bread is undoubtedly one of the fundamental classics of anarchism, its present day validity is not as certain as it is linked to a precise situation of class struggle which cannot be easily clarified by referring to the analyses contained in the present volume. Put it aside? Consign it to the pleasing research of the historiographers, ever capable of giving a semblance of life to what has long been dead? Make a great task of separating the wheat from the chaff, patiently pointing out the parts that are still valid and those that are decidedly out of date? And, in such a case, what would remain of the unity of the work which, although accidental as it consists of pieces written at different times, cannot fail to leap to the eyes of even the most casual reader?

Kropotkin’s work on the French Revolution is without doubt one of the fundamental interpretations of events that were to transform the destiny of humanity. Its importance lies in two premises: the design of a revolutionary development that is different and more significant than that usually suggested by bourgeois historians, and the individuation of the first symptoms of the current of thought and action which, a century later, was to take the name of anarchism.

We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the rule of a law, which regulates every event in life—our birth, our education, our development, our love, our friendship—that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves.