This was written in October, 1869, a month after the Basel congress. On the 1st of January, 1870, the General Council at London sent a private communication to all sections of the International, and on the 28th of March it was followed by another. These, together with various circulars dealing with questions of principle, but all consisting of attacks upon Bakounin personally or upon his doctrines, finally goaded him into open war upon Marx, the General Council, all their doctrines, and even upon the then forming socialist party of Germany, with Bebel and Liebknecht at its head. During the year 1870 Bakounin was preparing for the great controversy, but his friends of Lyons interrupted his work by calling him there to take part in the uprising of that year. He hastened to Lyons, but, as we know, he was soon forced to flee and conceal himself in Marseilles. It was there, in the midst of the blackest despair, that Bakounin wrote: "I have no longer any faith in the Revolution in France. This nation is no longer in the least revolutionary. The people themselves have become doctrinaire, as insolent and as bourgeois as the bourgeois.... The bourgeois are loathsome. They are as savage as they are stupid--and as the police blood flows in their veins--they should be called policemen and attorneys-general in embryo. I am going to reply to their infamous calumnies by a good little book in which I shall give everything and everybody its proper name. I leave this country with deep despair in my heart."[23] He then set to work at last to state systematically his own views and to annihilate utterly those of the socialists. Many of these documents are only fragmentary. Some were started and abandoned; others ended in hopeless confusion. With the most extraordinary gift of inspirited statement, he passes in review every phase of history, leaping from one peak to another of the great periods, pointing his lessons, issuing his warnings, but all the time throwing at the reader such a Niagara of ideas and arguments that he is left utterly dazed and bewildered as by some startling military display or the rushing here and there of a military maneuver. In _Lettres a un Francais_; _Manuscrit de 114 Pages, ecrit a Marseille_; _Lettre a Esquiros_; _Preambule pour la Seconde Livraison de l'Empire Knouto-Germanique_; _Avertissement pour l'Empire Knouto-Germanique_; _Au Journal La Liberte, de Bruxelles_; and _Fragment formant une Suite de l'Empire Knouto-Germanique_, he returns again and again to the charge, always seeking to deal some fatal blow to Marxian socialism, but never apparently satisfying himself that he has accomplished his task. He touches the border of practical criticism of the socialist program in the fragment entitled _Lettres a un Francais_. It ends, however, before the task is done. Again he takes it up in the _Manuscrit ecrit a Marseille_. But here also, as soon as he arrives at the point of annihilating the socialists, his task is discontinued. In