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The results of the previous uprisings had a terribly depressing effect upon nearly all the older men, but there were four youths attached to Bakounin's insurrectionary ideas whose spirits were not bowed down by what had occurred. Carlo Cafiero, Enrico Malatesta, Paul Brousse, and Prince Kropotkin were at the period of life when action was a joyous thing, and they undertook to make history.
Cafiero we know as a young Italian of very wealthy parents. Malatesta "had left the medical profession and also his fortune for the sake of the revolution." Paul Brousse was of French parentage, and had already distinguished himself in medicine, but he cast it aside in his early devotion to anarchism.
Finally, we note as eager defenders of Anarchist Communism the Italians Carlo Cafiero, the former friend of Bakunin, who devoted the whole of his great wealth to the Anarchist cause; Merlino, and Malatesta all of them men of action of the most reckless character, who have become acquainted with the prisons of many lands, and still wander through life as homeless revolutionaries.
In July, 1873, Bakounin retired to an estate that had been bought for him through the generosity of Cafiero, on the route from Locarno to Bellinzona, and for the next few months lavish expenditures were made in the construction and reconstruction of an establishment where the "intimates" could be entertained.
In agreement with this the Italians, represented by Cafiero and Malatesta, took part in the London Congress in the following year. On their return these two men developed an active agitation, and began a bitter campaign against the moderate Socialists, especially when their leader Costa was elected to Parliament, which the Anarchists regarded as a betrayal of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie.
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