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[9] London, 1795, 2 vols.

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Our next business is to turn from theoretical considerations of the =contrat social= to the practice based upon this catchword; and to look for traces of Anarchist thought upon the blood-stained path of the great French Revolution—that typical struggle of the modern spirit of freedom against ancient society. We are the more desirous to do this, because of the frequent and repeated application of the word Anarchist to the most radical leaders of the democracy by the contemporaries, supporters, and opponents of the Revolution. As far as we in the present day are able to judge the various parties from the history of that period,—and we certainly do not know too much about it,—there were not apparently any real Anarchists[10] either in the Convention or the Commune of Paris. If we want to find them, we must begin with the Girondists and not with the Jacobins, for the Anarchists of to-day recognise—and rightly so—no sharper contrast to their doctrine than Jacobinism; while the Anarchism of Proudhon is connected in two essential points with its Girondist precursors—namely, in its protest against the sanction of property and in its federal principle. But, nevertheless, neither Vergniaud nor Brissot was an Anarchist, even though the latter, in his Philosophical Examination of Property and Theft (1780), uttered a catchword, afterwards taken up by Proudhon. At the same time, they have no cause and no right to reproach the “Mountain” with Anarchist tendencies.