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THE FOLLOWING TEXT is a summary of a book published in 2014 (in French), Kropotkin and the Great War, whose subtitle is “The anarchists, the CGT, and the social democracy in the face of war.”1 The year 2016 marked the centenary of the publication of the famous Manifesto of the Sixteen in which a small number of anarchists took position in favour of the countries of the Entente against Germany and its allies. What motivated my writing the book is that Kropotkin’s signing of this Manifesto has always aroused – and rightly so – a malaise in the anarchist movement, but that no one, to my knowledge, dared to address the issue head on.

The subtitle aims to suggest that Kropotkin was not an isolated actor in this matter : the other actors are anarchists in general ; the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), the trade union organisation that had managed to organise a general strike against the war in 1912 but eventually joined the Sacred Union ; and the German social-democracy, which was also an essential actor in defining the context in which a handful of anarchist activists signed this controversial Manifesto. I tried to understand the reasons that led Kropotkin to this unfortunate and useless initiative – useless insofar as there were other means of conveying the message that the Russian revolutionary wanted to convey