Parliamentarism – Louise Michel (1896)

_{‘Prison Flower’, drawing by Louise Michel}

From ‘Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Communism’, July 1896, London, UK

Parliamentarism is the art of making sufferers have patience eternally. It is in its last throes today; the tuft of grass to which the old world clings is about to give way and sink into to the abyss — it is the hour in which the masses, always deceived, see the worthlessness of lying promises and the reality of their misery.

It is also the hour when humanity has reached a stage so close to the new world that truth can no longer be denied. The true ideal, the happiness of all in peace and liberty, is revealed so clearly that it is but necessary to open our eyes to see it.

Parliamentarism in vain throws a veil over social rottenness; it is visible in spite of all, so bloody, so tainted, that there is danger to all in not burying it as soon as possible.

Humanity, having reached a virile age, can no longer be content with parliamentary lies, for man can verify their results; the time has gone by when they lulled men to sleep in order to bleed them tranquilly; parliamentarism must come to an end; the instinct of self-preservation, reasoned by the light of scientific discoveries, experience and history, by an irresistible call of progress, tends towards a general improvement of the human race. All circumstances prove it.

The animal, egotistical and miserable order of society is becoming dislocated in all quarters; it is not parliamentarism, itself in a state of corruption, that can improve matters.

Lafontaine, without thinking he was doing so, once drew a picture of parliamentary methods. A pedant holding forth to a child fallen in the water is a good example of parliamentarism — “My friend, help me out of danger, you can lecture afterwards,” answers the child (fable by Lafontaine). Such is the case, with this difference, that the child had fallen by chance. But that it is parliamentarians themselves who deepen the abyss, attract people into it, and try to keep them there till death.

With this difference, too, that the people do not dream of calling parliament to the rescue.

“Heroic times are over,” said Gambetta, an incarnation of parliamentarism. On the contrary, heroic times are coming. We are reaching them, hearts are tempered by the whirlwind blowing from all quarters like the steel of swords in the furnace.

A new public opinion answers to Liberty’s call; corrupt parliamentarism has had no part in producing this new spirit. On the contrary, at a time when all is action and life in transforming the human flock into true humanity, the works of parliamentarism are as usual but empty words, and this is proved by the way one of its chief organs, Le Temps, May 1st, speaks of one of the heroes who come from all quarters to help the Cubans to win their independence. It says: “A Frenchman who is among the filibusters of the ‘Competidor’ will be court-martialled tomorrow.”

It is by the evil influence of parliament that Spaniards, Frenchmen and Italians die for the conquest or preservation of colonies, where the real filibusters, those of the State, fatten according to parliamentary fashion.

Parliamentary promises to the people are like those made use of by the Reading ogress to gain the confidence of the poor wretches who gave her their infants. The result is the same, immensely magnified; and, like the Reading monster, parliamentarism in its delirium commits all sorts of crimes as if hallucinated. It is the end. Not too soon does the dawn of a new era rise and dissipate the horrible nightmares that haunt the agony of this vampire society.

LOUISE MICHEL