On the other hand, the socialists were equally bitter in their attacks upon the anarchists. They denounced their methods as suicidal and the Propaganda of the Deed as utter madness. In _La Periode Tragique_, when Duval, Decamps, Ravachol, and the other anarchists in France were committing the most astounding crimes, Jules Guesde and other socialist leaders condemned these outrages and protested against being associated in the public mind with those who advocated theft and murder as a method of propaganda. Indeed, the anarchists in the late seventies and in the eighties lost many who had been formerly friendly to them. Guesde and Plechanoff, both of whom had been influenced in their early days by the Bakouninists, had broken with them completely. Later Paul Brousse and Andrea Costa left them. And, in fact, the anarchists were now incapable of any effective action or even education. Without committees, executives, laws, votes, or chairmen, they could not undertake any work which depended on organized effort, and, except as they managed from time to time to gain a prominent position in some labor or radical organization built up by others, they had no influence over any large body of people. They were fighting desperately to prevent extinction, and in their struggle a number of extraordinarily brilliant and daring characters came to the front. But during the next decade their tragic desperation, instead of advancing anarchism, served only to strengthen the reactionary elements of Europe in their effort to annihilate the now formidable labor and socialist movements.