Paris and the Social Revolution Part 15

"I pa.s.sed my childhood in a charity asylum; and, my primary studies finished, I was forced at the age of twelve years to go to work in a printing-office, where I earned just one franc a week."

Driven from Italy in his young manhood for his connection with the leaders of the "Workingman's Party,"[32] he took refuge in Switzerland, and after a few months came to Paris.

His disillusion in regard to Paris is highly significant. He had dreamed of finding there democracy, and found flagrant inequality instead.

He was successively chimney-sweep, bricklayer, groom, coal-heaver, sawyer, clerk, and street-hawker. His tribute to the Paris workingmen, with whom he was thus intimately thrown, is especially fine:-

"They were mostly illiterate, but reasoned better than I. They had studied the great, practical book of suffering, the pages of which are printed in characters of blood and tears. It was these poor pariahs who initiated me into the great anarchistic ideal, and who, out of the midst of their misery, expounded to me how society could be tranquil and happy under the regime of essential justice.

"How n.o.ble they appeared to me, these men whom the bourgeois loaded with insults after having sucked their blood!

"The _Paroles d'un Revolte_ of Kropotkine made a fervent anarchist of me, and it was only then that I began to perceive men and things in their true light."

The outrages inflicted by the Clichy police on Dardare, Decamp, and Leveille, who had defended their right to carry the black flag, revolvers in hand, and the cavalier treatment of these same men by the personages of the court before which they were summoned, were the probable provocations for the unsuccessful attempt,[33] of which Ravachol was suspected to be the author, on the Clichy station-house and for the explosions of the rue de Clichy and the Boulevard St. Germain for which he was condemned.

"Manacled and bleeding," wrote Zo d'Axa at the time in _L'Endehors_, "the three men were landed in the station-house.

Their respite was not long. The officers were not slow to pay the prisoners a visit, and this is what they brought with them: kicks for s.h.i.+n-bones, pummellings for panting chests, blows of revolver b.u.t.ts for aching heads. It was the dance of the vanquished. They mauled the poor fellows with inexorable malice and ign.o.ble ingenuity. The police band tortured with ferocious joy.

"When they stopped, it was from weariness and only to reopen the seance half an hour later. So pa.s.sed the day of the arrest and other subsequent days.

"Their eyes blackened, their heads swollen and unrecognisable, their bodies bruised, their spirits broken, the poor fellows had no more force to resist. They remained inert under poundings as under the lash of insult. Their wounds festered, and they were refused water to wash the sores. A month after the arrest the bullet that might have given him gangrene had not been extracted from the leg of Leveille."

Some allowance should be made in the above account for the evident partisan spirit of Zo d'Axa. But there is plenty of unbiased evidence to demonstrate the culpability of the police in this affair and to explain the epidemic of overt acts that came after it.

Rulliers and Pedduzi, who attempted (the latter with success) to kill their employers, had both had their work taken away because of their anarchist belief.

Ravachol had been driven from workshop after workshop for his opinions.

In his defence, which the presiding judge, Darrigrand, refused to allow him to read, he said:-

"I worked to live and to make a living for those who belonged to me. So long as neither I nor mine suffered too much, I remained what you call honest. Then work failed me, and with this enforced idleness came hunger. It was then that this great law of nature, this imperious voice which brooks no retort,-the instinct of self-preservation,-pushed me to commit certain crimes and misdemeanours for which you reproach me and of which I recognise myself to be the author."

The explosion at the Very restaurant was in retaliation for the delivery of Ravachol to the police by the garcon L'Herot.

Lorion, who fired on and wounded gendarmes to prove he was calumniated in being treated by the socialists as a police spy, had been detained for five years in the House of Correction for having insulted the police at the _age of thirteen_.

President Carnot signed his own death warrant in refusing to commute the sentence of Vaillant, who was condemned to the guillotine for throwing a bomb which neither killed nor seriously wounded anybody.

"Whether he admits it or not," wrote Henri Rochefort, prophetically at the time, "M. Carnot will remain the veritable executioner of Vaillant

'_Qu'il aura de ses mains lie sur la bascule._'

"And, as he will be the only one to benefit by his decision, the least that can be asked for is that he a.s.sume all the risks."

The exasperation produced by the execution of Vaillant was aggravated by the indelicacy-unpardonable from the Parisian point of view-of holding the execution during the Carnival, and by the atrocious pleasantry of the Minister of the Interior, Raynal, who said, "_J'ai donne des etrennes aux honnetes gens._"

Georges Etievant, who wounded two policemen, had had his life rendered absolutely impossible by the persecution of the police. Implicated by them in a theft of dynamite in 1891, he is said, on good authority, to have served his time rather than denounce the real culprit, who was a father of a family. Banished for the first article he wrote after his release, he tried to practise sculpture in London, but was prevented by the machinations of the French secret police, who made him lose all his work. He was a starving, shelterless outcast at the moment of his crime.

Salsou, who attempted the life of the Persian shah during the Exposition of 1900, had lost work by reason of his opinions earlier in life.

Furthermore, he had been arrested for vagabondage at Fontainebleau while making his way from Lyons to Paris on foot in 1894, and, this charge of vagabondage being groundless, had been condemned to three months of prison for vaunting his anarchist belief, on the dubious testimony of a police spy, who had been put into the same cell with him for the express purpose of "drawing him out."

[Ill.u.s.tration: SALSOU]

Finally, the condemnation of Salsou to hard labour for life, in punishment of a relatively insignificant attempt by which no one was hurt, was based on diplomatic rather than judicial reasoning. He died soon after his arrival at Cayenne, in consequence, probably, of the hards.h.i.+ps to which he was subjected. His body was thrown to the sharks in the presence of a number of functionaries, who amused themselves by taking photographs of the fight for its possession. Certain of the prisoners, who were witnesses of this revolting scene, have taken a solemn oath to avenge it.

It looks very much as if the high-handed suppression of free speech in France during the early eighties had been largely instrumental in producing the numerous overt anarchist acts during the nineties, and as if the continued policy of the authorities in "making examples" by an overstraining of the law had inspired other anarchists to follow the examples of those who were made examples of.

"The anarchists," says Jean Grave, very justly, "suffer governmental persecutions, not only when they revolt, which is quite comprehensible, but even when they content themselves with a peaceable propagation of their way of understanding things, and that notwithstanding the fact that at the present time the majority of the governors pretend to have granted the greatest political liberty.... The police have been ferocious, pitiless, towards the workers. They have hunted the anarchists like wild beasts. For a word a bit strong, for an article a trifle more violent than usual, years of prison have fallen on them.... Treated like wild beasts, certain ones act like wild beasts.... 'Who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind.'"

In 1882 sixty-six anarchists were tried at Lyons, and sixty-one convicted (fifteen for contumacy), among them Kropotkine and the scientist Emile Gauthier. The unjust condemnation of Emile Pouget and Louise Michel, referred to in a previous chapter, came soon after.

"Cyvoct was sentenced to death[34] at Lyons," says the Chronology of the _Pere Peinard_, under the date December 11, 1883, "for the crime of having been managing editor of an anarchist journal at the moment when an unknown person placed a bomb in a dive where the swells amused themselves."

It could not be better put. Cyvoct was in Switzerland at the time of the explosion, and could not by any possibility have been the author of it.

He was not even the writer of the article which was held by the court to have provoked the attempt.

The next year Gueslaff was condemned to ten years of hard labour for an attempt at Montceau-les-Mines, which he made at the instigation and under the direction of a police agent.

Three years later-to pa.s.s rapidly on-anarchists were sentenced for revolutionary speeches at Laon. In 1890 Merlino, Malato, and Louise Michel were incarcerated on the same charge. There was an indiscriminate and purely preventive ingathering (_rafle_) of anarchists the 22d of April, 1892, in prevision of the trial of Ravachol and the dreaded demonstration of May 1, and another _rafle_, also indiscriminate and purely preventive, on the New Year's Day preceding the execution of Vaillant,-a measure which wrought untold injury-could governmental malice or stupidity go farther?-to anarchist workingmen, and brought untold suffering on their families, from the fact that it coincided with the moment for the payment of the January rent (_terme_).[35] It was of the former _rafle_, in which he was included, that the litterateur Zo d'Axa, in his piquant _De Mazas a Jerusalem_, wrote:-

"The police drag-net trick of this month of April, '92, will become historic.

"It is the first in date among the most cynical a.s.saults of modern times upon liberty of thought.

"The true inwardness of the affair is now known.

"The government wished to profit by the emotion caused by the explosions of the _Caserne Loban_ and the rue de Clichy to encircle in a gigantic trial of tendency the militant revolutionists. The ministry and its docile agents pretended to believe that certain opinions const.i.tuted complicity. The writer, explaining how the disinherited gravitate inevitably towards theft, became, by the simple fact of this explanation, a thief himself. The thinker, studying the wherefore of the _propagande par le fait_, became the secret a.s.sociate of the lighters of tragic fuses. The philosopher had no right to counsel indulgence and to view without giddiness the facts.

"Society must rid itself of those of its members who are so corrupt as to desire it better....

"Evidently, the impartiality of the judges was not to be counted on. The word of command had been pa.s.sed along. It would be useless to prove that not only we were not cut-purses nor cut-throats, but that no organisation existed among us, even from the political point of view. The tribunals would sentence us with the same unconcern.

"A single point was doubtful. For the success of the manuvre it was indispensable that the other countries prosecute their refractory citizens in the same fas.h.i.+on.

"Well, what the French Republic had premeditated, Holland, England, and even Germany had the decency to be unwilling to undertake. The venerable monarchies did not yield to the solicitations of the young republic, which dreamed of reconst.i.tuting in an inverse sense the _Internationale_. There were parleyings to this end, but they came to nothing. The hunt of the free man was not decreed by all Europe. Our fallen democracy realised from that moment that she could not do worse than the worst autocracies.... The order was given to set us at large.

"The politico-judiciary machination had miscarried. All it had been able to do was to hold us a month in jail, and gall our wrists slightly with the infamous irons....

"In making arbitrary arrests, our masters, for all their excitement, had no illusions. They knew very well that they would be forced, in the end, to restore to liberty men against whom not a single specific fact could be adduced; but they said to themselves this, 'Mazas will calm them!' Now Mazas calms nothing at all....

"It is just the opposite that happens. Deranged in their habits, perturbed in their affairs, losing often their means of subsistence, those who are victims of the provocative raids go out of prison more rebellious than they entered it....

"The little ones are hungry in the house, the baker refuses credit, the landlord threatens eviction, the employer has given another the job.

"Rage mounts. It overflows. Some commit suicide by an overt act; and, surely, the least st.u.r.dy take a step forward. The timid grow bold. In the solitude of the cell logical thought has gone back to causes, has deduced responsibilities.

"Ideas become clarified. The man who has been incarcerated for the platonic crime of subversive social love learns hatred."

Among other questionable repressive measures may be mentioned the famous "trial of the thirty" (_proces des trente_), embracing several of the theoricians, dilettanti, and litterateurs which resulted, necessarily, in acquittal, but which left much bad feeling behind; the "trial of the forty" (_proces des quarante_); the condemnation of Zo d'Axa and his managing editor, Matha, to eighteen months of prison and a 3,000-franc fine; the expulsion of the litterateur Alexandre Cohen and the art critic Felix Feneon; in the winter of 1900-01-to pa.s.s over the intervening period-a long-drawn-out series of wholesale _rafles_ made, nominally, to suppress the bands of thieves and thugs who had grown numerous and insolent during the comparative immunity of the preceding summer, in reality quite as much to enable the police to locate anew the _camarades_ of whom they had lost track during their preoccupation with the Exposition; countless perquisitions and preventive arrests throughout the length and breadth of France just before the last visit of the czar; and in the spring of 1904 the turning over of Russian refugees to the Russian police,-so many arbitrary and oppressive acts which will bear, if they have not already borne, their inevitable fruit of hatred and revolt.