Paris and the Social Revolution Part 16

For these superfluous persecutions of the anarchists it is sometimes the police and sometimes the ministry that is responsible; which it is not always easy to determine, owing to the close connection between the French national and the Paris munic.i.p.al governments.

If it has never been conclusively proved that a ministry has gone to the extent of organising riotings[36] and bogus anarchist attempts (as capitalists have been known to organise strike violence) in order to maintain itself in power, to further a domestic project, bolster up a foreign policy, or win in advance the moral support of the community for a contemplated rigorous suppression of free a.s.sembling and free speech, there have been times, as is more than hinted at in Zola's _Paris_, when a ministry has been publicly accused and currently believed to have done these things.

According to M. Rochefort, who makes a specialty of launching sensational hypotheses,[37] the attempts of Vaillant and Salsou[38] (by which practically no damage was done) were prepared by the police, acting under government orders. These charges are not to be taken more seriously, of course, than others from the same charlatanical source.

They are, perhaps, their own best refutation. On the other hand, it has been proved over and over again that not only cabinet ministers, but politicians in general, as well as financiers and journalists,-all those, in a word, who "fish in troubled waters,"-sometimes act in collusion with the police in turning street disturbances, even at the risk of bloodshed, to their own selfish or partisan advantage.

Furthermore, as if it were not enough to be able to repose on laws of exception that belong logically to the worst monarchies, the government has an unfortunate way of straining legality, ever and anon, even to the breaking point.

Such governmental acts as the transference of papers taken from nihilist refugees in Paris (1890) to the Russian authorities in order to enable the Russian police to arrest nihilists living in Russia; the prohibition of the holding of the International Labour Congress (1900), which it would have been so easy to suppress at the first really incendiary utterance; the extradition of the boy Sipido (the would-be a.s.sa.s.sin of the then Prince of Wales), a proceeding of such doubtful legality that the ministry responsible for it was censured by a vote of 306 to 206 in the Chamber; the invasion of the _Bourse de Travail_ (1903) by the police, an act which Premier Combes himself was obliged to denounce in the Chamber; and the refusal of the Minister of Justice (1904) to rehabilitate Cyvoct, who adduced overwhelming proofs of his innocence;-all these are fair samples of the far from edifying means the authorities are constantly employing to secure respect for the law.

It is not to be expected that the servant will be more scrupulous than the master, and we long ago became accustomed to the idea that it takes a knave to catch a knave. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to experience a sensation of disgust at the vileness of some of the methods to which the police descend whenever anarchists are concerned.

The police chieftains exaggerate (if they do not deliberately aggravate) the gravity of the public peril (as a wily physician might exaggerate the gravity of an illness) in order to win from their ministers the praise and grat.i.tude which mean for them enlarged brigades, increase of secret funds, and individual promotion.

The rank and file of the police, feeling a similar necessity of making a good showing with their immediate superiors, entrap anarchists into street disturbances or violations of the common law, and fabricate, with the aid of false witnesses, fict.i.tious crimes for the suspects on their lists who are not obliging enough to make incendiary speeches or commit violence. They invade the privacy of their homes on the flimsiest pretexts; slander them to their _compagnes_, their neighbours, and their friends; poison the minds of their _concierges_, their landlords, and their employers against them; in short, they render their lives generally unlivable by mean and meddling tricks.

This is no imaginative sketch,-so far from it that, if the police should take it into their heads, during one of the anarchist flurries which occur periodically, to make a descent upon the lodgings of the writer, who is anything but an anarchist, he would probably be imprisoned (or, at least, confined preventively) for the sole offence of having in his possession the numerous red-covered volumes, brochures, caricatures, placards, and _chansons_ which he has found it necessary to collect in the preparation of this book. If he were a Frenchman, he would certainly have much difficulty in avoiding temporary confinement under such circ.u.mstances. Being an American, he might escape with being courteously, but strenuously, requested to cross the border.

This elaborate spy system, this shrewdness, chicanery, and, not to mince words, villany on the part of the police, is, after all, more or less futile. It serves no great purpose in the suppression of the _propagande par le fait_.

It is well enough for a police prefect to boast publicly, as did M.

Andrieux, back in the eighties, of the ease with which he penetrates the meetings of the groups, and recruits spies among the _camarades_,[39]

and to shake his sides over the fine trick he plays on the _camarades_ in conducting a journal[40] for them with funds provided by the state.

Such boasting and such self-gratulatory chuckling are well enough in their way; but they are rather idle in view of the looseness of organisation of the groups, which any one, if he dissemble ever so little, may frequent, and the insignificance and unreliability of the information obtained from such easily recruited spies. Besides, there is a cla.s.s of anarchists who become police spies, nominally, for the express purpose of leading the police astray by false information.

Controlling one journal is not controlling all, and a controlled journal is not less a propagandist force because the public money goes (however secretly) to the making of it. M. Andrieux's _La Revolution Sociale_ not only preached anarchy, but preached it (here the police short-sightedness appears) very effectively. It converted some of those who have since become the most feared of militant propagandists, and goaded certain of the previously converted into action.

Overt acts are seldom, if ever, arranged in the groups. Vaillant did not breathe a word of his projected attempt against the Chamber of Deputies to his group of Choisy-le-Roi. It is the exception rather than the rule when a really dangerous character is an a.s.siduous frequenter of the groups; and, if he is, he does not often take the group members into his confidence. The "conspiracy" which is bruited about at every fresh anarchist attempt is rarely proved in France, for the very good reason that in France it rarely exists outside of the excited imagination of the frightened public and the professional suspiciousness of the detective and judge. "Why will they prate of plots?" says Zo d'Axa.

"There is something better. There is an idea which is alive and stirs, and which is making its way on every hand."

It is well enough, again, for the anthropometric expert, M. Bertillon (since it seems to amuse him), to enrich his criminal museum with photographs, relics, and statistics of the militant and non-militant anarchists who are brought his way by the police _rafles_; but what, after all, does it profit him to know the "bigness of the skull, the standing height, the sitting height, the size of the right ear and the left foot," so that "he has no instrument to register," to borrow Zo d'Axa's pregnant phrase, "the significance of a shoulder-shrug"?

The police may plume themselves on knowing the anarchists' resorts, faces, and aliases, and their tricks of cipher and invisible ink. But this police knowledge of the anarchists is offset by the anarchists'

knowledge of the police.[41] It is diamond cut diamond in this respect.

In 1901 a cafe garcon, acting on a wager, mounted the step of President Loubet's state carriage, and dropped in the president's lap a mysterious bundle which contained a photograph of the garcon's little daughter. The bundle might as easily have contained a bomb, and all Paris shuddered.

After the great _rafle_ of April, 1892, this same M. Loubet (then a minister), relying on the a.s.surance of the police, proclaimed to the _bourgeoisie_ that they might sleep in peace for a time, since all the dangerous anarchists were under lock and key. Four days later the Very restaurant was dynamited precisely as it had been predicted that it would be, whence arose, as the _Pere Peinard_ exultantly and maliciously remarked at the time, "a new and capital word, _Veryfication_."

Somebody's shoulder-shrug had not been taken account of.

The police expert knowledge of the anarchists, much as it is vaunted, has not sufficed to prevent numerous overt anarchist acts in the immediate past; and there is little reason to believe it can prevent the next overt act to which a resolute man may make up his mind.

In carefully guarding dynamite from theft, the French police have rendered a real service to the public safety. But until the revolver and the poniard, which are surer than dynamite of their chosen victims, can be submitted to a similar control, the greatest service the police can render against the _propagande par le fait_ would seem to be the purely negative one of not exasperating anarchists indiscriminately and unnecessarily, and of not brutally crowding them to the wall.

The injustice of courts, the deceitfulness of ministries, the corruption of parliament, and the unscrupulousness of the police, as well as the inequalities of society, are important factors in the formation of the "_catastrophards_," or propagandists _par le fait_. But they all become insignificant before the pa.s.sion for martyrdom, which has always, in some form or other, possessed a minority of the human race.

The French propagandists _par le fait_, from Ravachol to Baumann,[42]

may have grievously deluded themselves; but they have unquestionably believed themselves to be apostles honoured in being set apart for martyrdom.

The _stigmata_ are many and unmistakable. They have had the singleness of purpose and the merciless logic of zealots. They have preached in season and out of season,[43] before judges, in prisons, and at the guillotine. They have consecrated the time allotted for their own defence to the defence of anarchist tenets, have accepted advocates under protest, and have refused to sign requests for the commutation of their sentences. They have borne the odium of deeds of which they were not guilty, because they thereby secured a pulpit for their preaching, and left the real authors free to operate. They have held it sweet to die for the faith. They have displayed, in the awful presence of the knife, the trance-like ecstasy of the illuminate.

In Part I. of his powerful two-part drama, _Au-dessus des Forces Humaines_, the hero of which is a dynamiter, the great-minded Norseman, Bjornson, has emphasised this fact, that it is among the propagandists _par le fait_ of anarchy that we must look for the modern martyrs, for the men who witness their faith with their blood, who sacrifice themselves unreservedly for their fellow-men, who welcome death with smiles and outstretched arms because they are confident that their martyrdom will usher in the redemption of mankind.

Zola and a host of lesser literary lights have been emphasising the same fact in France.

"I know Vaillant," says one of the characters of Victor Barrucand's novel _Avec le Feu_. "He is afflicted with a hypertrophy of the sentiments. He believes in nature, in humanity, in justice. He hopes for the reign of the ent.i.ties.

He is the embodiment of disinterestedness. He wanted to act.

Like a brave bull, he charged the imaginary obstacle.... He is sincere, he carries his faith like a torch, he would set the world on fire by way of persuasion.... He is generous, sanguine, sentimental,-the typical French revolutionist."

And of Emile Henry, author of the explosion of the _Cafe Terminus_, Zo d'Axa writes:-

"I hear him still, little more than a child, but already grave, self-centred, and close-mouthed, sectarian even, as all those forcibly become whose faith is troubled by no doubts, those who see-hypnotised, may I say?-the end, and then reason, judge, and decide with mathematical implacability. He believed firmly in the advent of a future society, logically constructed and harmoniously beautiful. What he reproached me for was not counting enough on the regeneration of the race, not referring everything to the ideal standard of anarchy.

Apparent contradictions shocked his logical sense. He was astounded that any one who came to realise the baseness of an epoch could continue to take any pleasure therein."

The ferociousness of the self-styled conservators, who made it their business to hang and burn witches, engendered the morbid exaltation that made inoffensive, impressionable people accuse themselves of being witches. The logical and inevitable counterpart of a Saul of Tarsus breathing threatenings and slaughter is a Stephen beholding the heavens opened. It has always been so, and probably always will be.

"The guillotine is the nimbus of the saints of this new religion,"

writes Felix Dubois, a declared opponent of anarchy, in _Le Peril Anarchiste_; and this revised version of the venerable proverb, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," _donne a penser_. It makes one query whether the fanaticism of this latter-day sect has not been inflamed rather than allayed by every anarchist head that has fallen. Fancy the feelings of a fervent, conscientious anarchist a.s.sisting at the public decapitation of one of his coreligionists. Zola has described in unforgettable pages the entry of the contagion of martyrdom into the system of his sincere, learned, and great-souled anarchist character, Guillaume Froment, at the execution of Froment's protege:-

"Ah! the dumb stroke, the heavy shock of the knife! Guillaume heard it penetrate far into this quarter of want and work, heard it resound in the inmost recesses of the wretched lodgings, where, at this hour, thousands of workers were rising for the hard labour of the day. It took on there a formidable meaning. It told the exasperation of injustice, the madness of martyrdom, the agonising hope that the blood shed would hasten the victory of the disinherited."

So long as the guillotining of the anarchists is as dispa.s.sionate as that of other killers of their kind, the guillotined are exalted into martyrs by their coreligionists alone. But when, as in the case of Vaillant, who had destroyed no life, the evident purpose of the courts is to wreak vengeance, not to deal justice, and when legal forms are stretched, if not completely snapped, by the weight of popular prejudice and pa.s.sion with its old, old cry of "Crucify, crucify!" then, not only the sectaries of anarchy, but revolutionists of every shade, and all those who, while not revolutionists, are not quite ready to subscribe to the formula that society, like the king, "can do no wrong," are pained and shocked. These last add, unconsciously perhaps, several rays to the halos of martyrdom about the heads of the anarchist thus wronged; and the cause of a single tiny sect is confounded for the time being with the cause of the oppressed at large.

The apotheosis of Vaillant is one of the most significant phenomena of modern times. His fate was sincerely and widely deplored in literary and artistic circles and by reputable contributors (if not by editors) in even the capitalistic press.

The spontaneous public pilgrimage to his burial-place, the Champ de Navets, took the police so completely by surprise that they were not prepared to arrest it. A stone, inscribed "_Labor improbus omnia vincit_," was hastily erected over his grave while its guardians were at breakfast.

Although it was midwinter, bunches of fresh flowers were fairly showered upon the mound. These and the wreaths of immortelles and artificial flowers, which the French so much affect as funeral tributes, were nearly all accompanied by striking legends. A significant one of these read: "Glory to thee who wast great. I am only a child, but I will avenge thee." There was also a symbolic crown of thorns.

The scenes that were enacted over this anarchist grave were of a poignant, mystic, almost uncanny intensity.

An aged man raised a babe above the heads of the crowd, and said impressively, "Behold the tomb of the martyr!"

A labourer lifted his voice to utter five simple terrible words, "Vaillant, thou shalt be avenged."

A blind man declaimed: "In its lethargy the people is like a person buried alive. It wakes sometimes in the night of the tomb, and convulsively strains to break the planks of its coffin. From the depths of darkness I have heard thy cry of rage and of despair, O Vaillant!

Thou hast threatened the powerful, those who live on the people and serve them not. Thy arm was raised, but thou wast thine only victim; and now earth fills thy mouth. Alas!"

A poet recited,-

"_Un ciel boueux tache de sang, c'etait l'aurore, La vieille aurore avec ses roses de festin, Qui se levait honteuse a l'appel du destin Pour eclairer des yeux que la mort allait clore._"

Another poet intoned,-

"_Que ton souffle se mele a la creation, Que la rosee de ton sacrifice mouille nos ames steriles, Que ton exemple unique soit comme l'eau d'un seule nuage Qui fait germer toutes les plantes dans la foret!_"

A ragged snail-gatherer led the crowd to the spot (a hollow against the wall) where a basket of the clotted blood that had flowed from the severed head had been hidden. Men, women, and children knotted lumps of the ensanguined sawdust in their handkerchiefs and besmeared their hands.