BAKUNIN AND THE ITALIANS. By T. R. Ravindranathan. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's
University Press, 1988. x, 332 pp. *C?$35.95, cloth; $...., paper.*
Italy figured prominently in Bakunin's life after his escape from Siberia in 1861. He lived
in Florence and Naples for four years in the mid-1860s and maintained relations with Italy
until his death in 1876. This monograph is the first in any language to focus exclusively on
Bakunin's activity in Italy for this entire period. On this subject it supersedes Rosselli's
<EM>Mazzini e Bakunin</EM> and Romano's <EM>Storia del movimento socialista in Italia</EM>,
showing
the latter
wrong on a good number of important points.
The book is chronological. Early chapters deal with Bakunin's evolution through the early
1860s and his life in Florence and Naples. The author then discusses Bakunin's Naples period
in greater detail and demonstrates his crucial role in launching the First International in
Italy. Ravindranathan examines the Paris Commune's influence in Italy, recounts the rise of
"Bakuninism" there, traces the Italian attitude toward the split in the International,
describes the "insurrectionary fever" of 1873-74, and analyzes the decline of Bakunin's
influence in Italy after his death. This study validates Mikl�s Moln�r's conclusion (in Le
d�clin de la Premi�re internationale) that the International's disintegration was due to its
very success. The variety of social conditions in all the countries where the organization
had taken root made it impossible to come up with any coherent and universally applicable
general program.
Bakunin arrived in Naples at "a very critical point in the political evolution of the local
Left republicans," who were disenchanted with Garibaldi and Mazzini but could not replace
them. Bakunin, by contrast, "articulated with great clarity the distinction between social
and political revolution" (p. 232). The author proves Bakunin's influence on the first
fifteen years of Italian socialism ("largely the history of the Bakuninist movement," p. 237)
by a skillful integration of intellectual and social history. The key link is his sensitive
use of newspapers and periodicals from these years. (It would be instructive to compare his
method with E.L. Rudnitskaia's in her recent and related Russkaia revoliutsionnaia mysl/:
Demokraticheskaia pechat/, 1864-1873.) Despite long paraphrases of rare primary sources, and
long quotations from them, this book is very readable. One hopes that the author's work in
collecting these sources will facilitate the Archives Bakounine project.
The author appears unaware of Mikl�s K�n's work on Bakunin's contacts with Freemasonry in the
1860s. Ravindranathan could have helped clarify whether or not these contacts explain
Bakunin's ideas on revolutionary organizations, a thesis K�n argues but does not prove. The
author invites a real quibble only when he describes Bakunin as a "libertarian" socialist
(e.g., pp. 158, 232). This error, which is not central to the argument, may result from
seeing Bakunin as more connected with the Russian terrorists who emerged from the failure of
populism, than with such figures as Proudhon and Lelewel who strongly influenced him in the
1840s. Bakunin's doctrine was one of revolutionary federalist collectivism. However, the
author is correct to conclude that Bakunin's reliance on spontaneity made it difficult to
transmit his ideas to future generations.
Treating Bakunin as neither saint nor fool, holy or otherwise, Ravindranathan humanizes him.
The rarity of precedent for this in the historiography makes the feat all the more remarkable
and welcome.
