FREEDOM, the realization of freedom: who can deny that this is what today heads the agenda of history? … Revolutionary propaganda is in its deepest sense the negation of the existing conditions of the State, for, with respect to its innermost nature, it has no other program than the destruction of whatever order prevails at the time.... We must not only act politically, but in our politics act religiously, religiously in the sense of freedom, of which the one true expression is justice and love. Indeed, for us alone, who are called the enemies of the Christian religion, for us alone it is reserved, and even made the highest duty … really to exercise love, this highest commandment of Christ and this only way to true Christianity.

"The Reaction in Germany" (1842), Bakunin's first political writings, under the pseudonym "Jules Elysard"; it was not until 1860 that he began to publicly assert a stance of firm atheism and vigorous rejection of traditional religious institutions.