[Peter Kropotkin, a Russian of noble descent who lived most of his adult life in London, was the primary anarchist theorist of the late-nineteenth century. His writings include Mutual Aid, a seminal text of anarcho-communism, and the autobiographical Memoirs of a Revolutionist. In the following excerpt from his memoirs, originally published in 1899, Kropotkin recalls the mark Bakunin had made on a group of Swiss radicals.]

Bakúnin was at that time at Locarno. I did not see him, and now regret it very much, because he was dead when I returned four years later to Switzerland. It was he who had helped the Jura friends to clear up their ideas and to formulate their aspirations; he who had inspired them with his powerful, burning, irresistible revolutionary enthusiasm. As soon as he saw that a small newspaper, which Guillaume began to edit in the Jura hills (at Locle), was sounding a new note of independent thought in the socialist movement, he came to Locle, talked for whole days and whole nights long to his new friends about the historical necessity of a new move in the anarchist direction; he wrote for that paper a series of profound and brilliant articles on the historical progress of mankind towards freedom; he infused enthusiasm into his new friends, and he created that centre of propaganda from which anarchism spread later on to other parts of Europe.

After he had moved to Locarno—from whence he started a similar movement in Italy and, through his sympathetic and gifted emissary, Fanelli, also in Spain—the work that he had begun in the Jura hills was continued independently by the Jurassians themselves. The name of 'Michel' often recurred in their conversations—not, however, as that of an absent chief whose opinions would make law, but as that of a personal friend of whom everyone spoke with love, in a spirit of comradeship. What struck me most was that Bakúnin's influence was felt much less as the influence of an intellectual authority than as the influence of a moral personality. In conversations about anarchism, or about the attitude of the federation, I never heard it said, 'Bakúnin has said so' or 'Bakúnin thinks so,' as if it clenched the discussion. His writings and his sayings were not a text that one had to obey—as is often unfortunately the case in political parties. In all such matters, in which intellect is the supreme judge, everyone in discussion used his own arguments. Their general drift and tenor might have been suggested by Bakúnin, or Bakúnin might have borrowed them from his Jura friends—at any rate, in each individual the arguments retained their own individual character. I only once heard Bakúnin's name invoked as an authority in itself, and that struck me so much that I even now remember the spot where the conversation took place and its surroundings. The young men began once in the presence of women some young men's talk, not very respectful towards the other sex, when one of the women present put a sudden stop to it by exclaiming: 'Pity that Michel is not here: he would have put you in your place!' The colossal figure of the revolutionist who had given up everything for the sake of the revolution, and lived for it alone, borrowing from his conception of it the highest and purest conceptions of life, continued to inspire them.