An article in Le Libertaire written in response to the beginning of the Second War of Italian Independece. A conflict that heavily involved French troops against the Habsburg Empire.
The ultimatum of the bombshells and the voice of the colonels carries the day:
War is declared!...
The eagle of legend is born again, risen from among the taxidermist’s specimens. It takes wing again, and cracks the air with claps of thunder:
War is declared!...
Fear of the Revolution shakes the Masters on their thrones, the sovereigns of men and nations, all those who hold the scepter or the helm of the social galleys, and forces them to cast into the midst of the peace their last means of rescue, their bronze [medal] of mercy:
War is declared!...
Rome and the ultramontanes, Catholicism and the Jesuits push their eldest, legitimate such of Austria against their younger, bastard son of France; the want to end with his usurpation:
War is declared!...
The coalition and the invasion of the Holy Alliance soar on their vampire’s wings over the Tuileries and prepare to revel in a new Waterloo:
War is declared!...
The Czar of the Don allies himself, offensively and defensively with the Czar of the Seine. The Emperor of the Orient and the Emperor of the Occident threaten revolutionary Europe with a two-headed despotism:
War is declared!...
In the face of current events, will the Social Revolution remain mute and immobile in the depths of its subterranean dens, or will it surge forth, from beneath the hooves of the horses and the wheels of the cannons, at the height of the battle, in the midst of the bloody mêlée, sweeping, with flow of lava, across the field of carnage and oppression? Will it profit from the rivalries of the consecrated and crowned exploiters to overturn the gates and bounds everywhere, and make fertile the terrain of anarchic unity?
Will Europe always be enslaved, or will it finally be free?
Are we dogs or wolves?
Will you children be men or subjects?
Proletariat! It is up to you to respond; it is up to you to speak and act for the destinies.
As you think and act, it will be done.
Whoever wants much can do much.
Do you want the social conquest, or don’t you?
“All means are good to arrive at the goal: the end justifies the means.”
To our posts, then! The undisciplined and the undisciplinable, the volunteers, men or bands, of An-archy: to arms! And war to the bourgeois, war to the priests, war to the warriors!
To arms! To arms! — War is declared!...
SOURCE: Le Libertaire, May 12, 1859 (written on the occasion of the Second Italian War of Independence)
Déjacque, Joseph, 1822-1864, “War is Declared!,” The Libertarian Labyrinth, accessed March 20, 2018, http://library.libertarian-labyrinth.org/items/show/3156.
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