Vallières’ confession

Vallieres' confession BARRY COOPER In July, 1851, Michael Bakunin, having recently arrived at the Peter-and-Paul Fortress , was visited by Count Orlov, one of Tsar Nicholas' principal aides, who invited the prisoner on behalf of his imperial master, to write a full confession of his sins. He was to write not as a criminal to his judge but as a fallen sinner to his spiritual confessor. Bakunin complied with the Tsar's order, declaring himself "a prodigal, estranged, and perverted son before an insulted and angry father" and signed the document "the sincerely repentent sinner, Michael Bakunin." 1 Today, when men who frighten the authorities as Bakunin frightened the guardians of European and Russian order over a century ago, are sent to jail, they are not called upon by Tsars to confess their spiritual transgressions . A generation after Bakunin it also would have been unthinkable to confess, for by then the struggles between secret police and secret revolutionaries had developed more or less formal rules of procedure and spiritual confession was not among them. In addition, subsequent revolutionary conspirators have tended to keep their spiritual anguish to themselves or present their morality to the public in the guise of ideologically justified integrity, historical responsibility, objective complicity, and so on. If this characterization of twentieth-century "revolutionary morality" is accurate, the recent book by Pierre Vallieres, Negres blancs d'Amerique,2 stands as a singular exception: Vallieres seeks no refuge or justification in ideology, at least not in the usual meaning of the term. Vallieres' Marxism, if such it can be termed, provides, from time to time, an analytical framework for his discussion of the structure of the North American * I would like to thank Tom Hockin and Ramsay Cook for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Journal of Canadian Studies economy; it also serves as an eschatalogical vision of a future wherein man has redeemed himself. But Vallieres does not "justify" his actions on the basis of his hopes. Some will argue that it is not a confession at all but, as the subtitle suggests, a premature autobiography . But what is a confession if not an acknowledgement? And what is Negres blancs if not an acknowledgement of what Vallieres has become in his own eyes ?3 There is no Tsar; indeed, the "Tsar" does not acknowledge he has a political foe. But Bakunin did not write only for the Tsar, nor did Vallieres write only for himself. Carr reports that "though he [ Bakunin] professes in more than one passage to have found the task [of writing the confession] difficult, the relish with which he wrote is evident in every page,"4 and Vallieres wrote for others beside himself, if only for those to whom he made the appeal to choose revolution. Bakunin signed his confession with a formula of repentance whereas Vallieres is defiant.5 But what does Bakunin repent? Not his revolutionary way of life but his lack of success at actualizing it. The confession is full of bitter analysis of the revolutionary events in Paris, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Baden and Frankfurt and how the republicans betrayed the revolution when their own property was at stake. Moreover, even Bakunin's remorse at the futility of his own activity is tempered by faith which, at one point, he calls "one half of victory, one half of success." Vallieres too, whatever his personal remorse at being in jail, has, as we shall see, this same burning revolutionary faith. Neither man is malicious although Bakunin preserves more dignity in his denunciation of authority, never confusing the personal qualities of a man with his position as an enemy. Vallieres is, perhaps, more bitter in his attacks upon men in public office but, in the light of his personal association with many of them, this is no surprise; in any event, Vallieres is neither mean nor self-righteous. These personal characteristics 3 of Vallieres should be noted if for no other reason than to contrast him with other, more vulgar and hypocritical purveyors of spite who call themselves revolutionaries. So long as Vallieres is alive his story cannot fully be told; his biography is "premature " and so too is...