KROPOTKIN This movement, which is only just beginning to be understood, was for many years travestied by State and ecclestical historians. The absolute liberty of the individual, who must only obey the .commandments of his conscience, and Communism were the watchwords of this revolt. It was only later, when Church and State succeeded in exterminating its most ardent defenders, and juggled with jt to their own profit, that this movement, diminished and deprived pf i(s revolutionary character, became Luther's Reformation. It began by Communist Anarchism preached, and in some places, practi§ed. If we set aside the religious formula:, which are a tribute to that epoch, we find the very essenceof the current of ideas which we ,represent to-day: the negation of all law, both State and divine, the .conscienceof each individual being thus his only law; the commune, jibsolute master of its destiny, retaking its lands from feudal lords, and refusing all personal or monetary service to the State. In fact, Communism and equality put into practice. Moreover when Denck, one of the philosophers of the Anabaptist movement, was asked if he did· not at least recognise the authority of the Bible, he answered that the pnly obligatory rule of conduct is the one that each .individual finds for himself in the Bible. And yet these vague formula: borrowed Jrom ecclesiastical slang, this authority "of the book" from which it js so easy to borrow arguments for and against Communism, for and _againstauthority, and so uncertain to define what liberty is, these very -religious tendencies of the revolt contained already the germ of an .tmavoidabledefeat. Originating in towns, the movement spread to the country. The peasants refused to obey anybody, and planting an old shoe on a pike ·by way of a flag, took back the lands which the lords had seized from -the village communities; they broke their bonds of serfdom, drove _awaypriest and judge, and constituted themselves into free communes. It was only by the stake, the wheel, the gibbet, by massacring more than a hundred thousand peasants in a few years, that royal or imperial -power, allied to the papal or reformed church, (Luther inciting to massacre peasants more violently even that the ·Pope), put an end to these risings that had· for a moment threatened the constitution of -nascent States. Born of popular Anabaptism, the Lutheran Reformation, leaning on the State, massacred the people and crushed the movement from which it originally had derived its strength. The survivors of this immense wave of thought took refuge in the communities of the "Moravian Brothers", who, in their turn, were destroyed ·by Church and State. Those among them who were not exterminated, sought shelter, some in'the South-East of Russia, others in Greenland, where to this day they have been able to live in communities and to refuse Jill service to the State. 30 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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