CHAPTER V

THE PROPAGANDA OF ANARCHY “PAR LE FAIT”

“_I came not to send peace, but a sword.... I am come to send fire on the earth._”—JESUS CHRIST.

“_It is not by metaphysics that men will be undeceived: the truth must be proven by deeds._”—VOLTAIRE.

“Not songs of loyalty alone are these, But songs of insurrection also, For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over, And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him, And stakes his life to be lost at any moment.”

WALT WHITMAN.

“La force destructive est une force créatice.”—BAKOUNINE.

“_If I were dying of starvation, and had no means of buying a piece of bread, and were to go by a baker’s where bread was within reach, I should help myself to it. And the way I should reason would be this: That bread belongs to the baker, but it is more God’s bread than it is the baker’s, and I am one of God’s little boys, and therefore understand the proximity of this loaf to be the answer to the prayer I offered my Father this morning: ‘Give me this day my daily bread_.’”—DR. CHARLES PARKHURST.

“_His [Dr. Parkhurst’s] principle of necessity is one easily misapplied; but it is right, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson’s reply to the man whose excuse for stealing a loaf of bread was that he ‘must live.’ ‘I don’t see the necessity,’ said the rude moralist. And so said the custodian of morality when David stole the shew-bread for his starving soldiers; but our Lord said he did right._”—Editorial in NEW YORK INDEPENDENT.

“_I hold it blasphemy that a man ought not to fight against authority. There is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it in the beginning._”—GEORGE ELIOT, in Felix Holt, the Radical.

With regard to doctrines, ultimate aims, and the three methods of disseminating them already described,—oral and written propaganda and the propaganda by example,—French anarchists are all of the same mind; but with regard to the fourth means, the propaganda by the overt act of violence (_la propagande par le fait_), there is anything but unanimity among them.

No anarchist, the simon-pure Tolstoyan excepted, denies the right to collective revolt, the duty, even, of insurrection. But this attitude has nothing distinctive about it. The same right and the same duty have been affirmed and reaffirmed by the republicans of all ages, and by the royalists, also, when they have been temporarily out of power, the only appreciable difference being that the republicans and royalists have esteemed them as a means of realising rather than a means of spreading their ideal.

The emergence into public prominence of the insurrectional idea which anarchists had long held—more or less consciously—dates from the Peace Congress held in Geneva in 1867, at which the Belgian César de Paepe created a sensation by declaring that “not peace, but war, must be preached.” “Peace,” he explained, “can be hoped for only as a fruit of victory in the social war.” Bakounine, just then coming to the front in Europe, lent the weight of his authority to De Paepe’s idea.

In 1876, the _Fédération Italienne_ approved a definite declaration (signed by Cafiero and Malatesta) of the same purport:—

“The _Fédération Italienne_ believes that insurrection, destined to affirm by deeds the principles of liberty, is the most efficacious agency of propaganda and the only one which, without corrupting and deceiving the masses, can penetrate even the lowest social strata, and draw the live forces of humanity into the struggle the _Internationale_ is carrying on.”

Four months later, in the spring of 1877, this credo of insurrection was put in practice at Letino and San Galo, Italy, where Cafiero, Malatesta, Ceccarelli, and the rural priests, Fortini and Tamburini, with thirty followers, took possession of the public buildings, imprisoned or drove out the local authorities, set fire to the archives and property records, and seized and distributed the tax money among the people.

The same year a memorial of the Congress of Fribourg, signed by Kropotkine and Elisée Reclus among others, declared:—

“We are revolutionists because we desire justice. Never has great progress, special or general, been made by simple, pacific evolution. It has always been made by a revolution. If the work of mental preparation is accomplished slowly, the realisation of the ideas occurs quickly,”—an utterance with which may be compared Kropotkine’s, “Governments have never done anything but give a legal sanction to accomplished revolutionary facts”; Jean Grave’s, “We are revolutionists because we have the reasoned conviction that the privileged will not abandon one of their privileges if they are not forced to it”; and this confession of Guillaume Froment in Zola’s _Paris_:—

“I was only a positivist, a savant given over entirely to observation and experience, accepting nothing beyond the verified fact. Scientifically, socially, I admitted a simple and slow evolution, generating humanity as the human being himself is generated. And it was then that, in the history of the globe and in that of societies, I was forced to make a place for the volcano, the abrupt cataclysm, the sudden eruption, which has marked each geologic phase, each historic period. One comes thus to perceive that a step has never been taken, nor a progress made, without the aid of terrible catastrophes. Every forward march has sacrificed billions of existences. Our narrow justice revolts, we treat Nature as an atrocious mother; but, if we do not excuse the volcano, we must, nevertheless, endure it as forewarned savants when it breaks out, and then, ah! then, I am perhaps a dreamer, like the others: I have my ideas.”

The year following the Fribourg Congress (1878) Kropotkine warmly advocated insurrection before the Congress of the _Fédération Jurasienne_. “By insurrections,” he said, “the anarchists seek to quicken popular sentiment and initiative to the double end of a violent expropriation and the disorganisation of the state.” The congress pronounced formally in favour of the insurrectional principle, and from that day to this it has never been seriously questioned in any important anarchist quarter.

If the overt act by the individual anarchist is not viewed with the same unanimous and unqualified approval as the collective act of insurrection, it is because there is an easy distinction (representing, perhaps, a real difference) to be made between the individual act directed against the principle of authority incarnated in an official of the state,—president, minister, deputy, general, senator, judge, and police prefect,—when it comes under the general head of regicide (a reform measure which is almost as old as the world), and the individual act directed against the principle of property incarnated in any member of the _bourgeoisie_ whatsoever, when it comes under the general head—O deterrent power of a name!—of murder.

The first kind of individual attempt (regicide) encounters little opposition based on principle within the anarchist ranks. It is opposed, as Alexander H. Stephens opposed the foundation of the Confederacy (of which he accepted the vice-presidency, once it was declared), on grounds of expediency. As regicides, Caserio, Vaillant,[26] Bresci,[27] Pallas (whose attempt against the Maréchal Campos was glorified by the International Labor Congress at Chicago in 1893), and the assassin of Alexander II. fall into much the same category as Brutus, Cromwell, Harmodius and Aristogiton, and the executioners of Louis XVI.; and, in the case at least of the assassin of the czar, the classification, while not perhaps ideal, might be worse.

As to weapons, the popular distinction (which is, in fact, more nice than wise) between the pistol and stiletto, on the one hand, and the bomb, on the other, is not made. “I admit all means, even the bomb,” says Charles Malato, who approved Pallas and Vaillant, but regretted Henry’s attempted slaughter of the bourgeois at the _Café Terminus_, “if only it be well placed; and yet I am not a drinker of blood.”

The second kind of individual attempt—the suppression of members of the _bourgeoisie_ for the sole reason that they are bourgeois—is disapproved by all the anarchists but a small knot of extremists.

This disapproval, which is for the most part purely formal and passive when the act attains the person against whom it was directed, and its unselfishness is immediately evident, may become aggressive, not to say bitter, in certain quarters, when a tragic botch has been made of the job (by a mistake in victims) or when its significance as an act of propaganda has been obscured by the presence of motives of personal revenge. Elisée Reclus, of all the eminent French theoricians, has shown himself the most consistently refractory to this sort of _propagande par le fait_. In an article called out by the rapid succession of individual attempts in 1892, he said:—

“When you have a grudge against a person, you seek him out, you have an explanation with him, but you do not make innocent persons bear the brunt of your rancour.

“Anarchy is the _summum_ of humane theories. Whoso calls himself anarchist should be gentle and good. All overt acts of the nature of that of yesterday are looked on by true _compagnons_ as crimes. If those who perpetrate these barbarities act with the design of promulgating the anarchist creed, they deceive themselves completely.

“Things will come to such a pass, there will be such disgust with the _compagnons_, they will inspire such horror, that no one will be willing to hear anarchy so much as spoken of.

“And yet the idea is beautiful: it is grand. See to it that it is respected. The persons who do evil in its name befoul our doctrines.”

It is not always easy for the outsider to grasp why, of two anarchist acts of violence with similar exterior aspects, the same _camarade_ praises the one and deplores the other. What is more, he will understand still less when the _camarade_ has explained. There are labyrinths of subtleties in anarchist apologetics through whose intricate windings the lay intelligence has no Ariadne-given thread to guide it, and depths of esoteric metaphysics which only the plummet of the adept can sound.

Vaillant had almost unanimous plaudits from the _camarades_, no little praise from the socialists, and approval—mark the humorous note!—from certain of the deputies whose lives he had jeopardised.

Ravachol, author of the explosions at the houses of the judges Benoit and Bulot and of other overt acts less readily comprehensible, was practically repudiated at first by the _Temps Nouveaux_ (then _La Révolte_) on account of a dubious past, but was recognised loyally, if languidly, as soon as his entire disinterestedness was made plain.

The general attitude of the _Temps Nouveaux_ towards the _propagande par le fait_ is one of guarded detachment, verging on complete indifference,—an attitude of rare prudence, sanity, and sagacity. It treats the whole matter of the individual attempt as a side issue, with an unfortunate tendency to divert the attention of both the faithful and the unfaithful from the basal principles of anarchy, and makes it very clear that it would ignore it altogether if it could.

“If anarchy,” says this representative journal, “does not reject violence when it is demonstrated to be indispensable to enfranchisement, it does not elevate it into a system. Violence is for it a means, debatable, like everything, but which is, at most, only an accessory affair. It must disappear when the obstacles are overcome, and weakens in nothing any of the elements of the ideal itself....

“Deeds are not counselled, nor spoken, nor written. They are done. Sometimes a deed done effects more than a long period of writing. This journal will always be the first to applaud those who act. We are, then, far from repelling the _propagande par le fait_. Only—we have said it before, and we repeat it—the _propagande par le fait_ cannot be the work of a journal. It is not for us to say to individuals: ‘Do this! Do that!’ If they are convinced and conscientious, they will know what they have to do....

“To say to the workers, ‘Do this, burn that, hang that one,’ is child’s play, since the reader may demand with reason why he who preaches so glibly does not do himself what he urges others to do.”

The American labour leaders are wont to assure us, while reserving to themselves in all cases the right to criticism and opposition, that there never has been, using terms broadly, and never can be, an unsuccessful strike, since the strike that is the least necessary and most immediately disastrous serves the large purpose of focussing public attention on the strained relations between capital and labour, of revealing by a sort of cathode-ray efficacy the hidden ills of the body politic, and so of bringing just that much the nearer the final cure.

Similarly, the anarchist leaders assert that in anarchy no forces are lost, and that the manifestations which are, in appearance, the most foolhardy and shocking may have, equally with those which are, in appearance, the most reasonable, the saving merit of compelling the thoughtless world to think. “And perhaps,” says one of these leaders, “it will occur to the hide-bound _bourgeoisie_ to find society defective when they shall have discovered that there is some danger in perpetuating its errors.”

“The anarchist had been told,” wrote Zo d’Axa in _L’Endehors_, apropos of the dynamite exploits of an unknown, who turned out to be Ravachol, “that the idea for which he was willing to brave every danger did not exist. He had had it dinned into his ears that, in other times, the precursors talked less and acted more. His theory had been laughed at. His hope had been mocked. When, upon the highway as an apostle, he had attempted to convert the people, no one of these laughers and mockers had been willing to tarry and listen an instant.

“Now, behold him!

“Like the street vender drawing crude charcoal pictures on the sidewalk to attract the cockney crowd to which he means to offer an _article de Paris_ a little later, a primitive propagandist of anarchy has decided to force attention by the brutality of an act.

“Back of this act is the faith, so much tabooed, to which he has at last drawn fruitful discussion.

“It was an Idea the dynamiter displayed.

“And no one can deny it,—at the moment when, by favour of the excitement, the journals are giving their readers the very ‘_articles de Paris_’ which the terrible unknown dreamed of showing. Side by side with their invectives the _Figaro_, the _Eclair_, other sheets, print and expound theories which had not had the freedom of their columns before. These journals have become, in spite of their reserves, the propagators of the accursed Idea.

“Is it a result?

“Men read, discuss, realise perhaps.”

To _comprehend_ the foregoing manner of reasoning or, rather, point of view (the word “comprehend” is italicised lest any one confound inoffensive comprehension with dangerous approval), one must have had in some country or other some bitter experience—stinging rebuke or angering, insulting rebuff—with the vapid self-complacency, the dogmatic thick-wittedness, the dictatorial stubborness, and the cruel hard-heartedness of the bourgeois. One must have been shocked and sickened by his vulgar flaunting of a stupid—or wicked?—determination to persist in his denial that his fellow-men ever starve, unless he can see them, with his own eyes, throw up their hands dramatically, stagger, and fall around him.

If one has had this disillusionising experience with the bourgeois, he will _comprehend_—there will be no lapsing here into such atrociously bad form as hinting the possibility of acquiescence—that there are numerous poor devils who say, “Let the bourgeois have the dramatic demonstration of starvation, since he will credit no other!”

He will _comprehend_ that there are some, not poor devils, who think that a certain manifestation of the hungry in Trafalgar Square was a beautiful eye-opener for the British public; that there are others who look upon the march of Coxey’s grotesque army as anything but a ridiculous failure; and that there are still others who, recalling a memorable famine winter in Boston,—the shudderful winter when the authority of the state was invoked to disperse a peaceable assembling of the unemployed,—hold it a real pity that the assembling was quite so peaceable.

He will _comprehend_ these last when they say that a few broken window-panes in the swaggering Back Bay and self-sufficient West End would have made the inhabitants of those districts less glib in their assertions that there was no real suffering in the city and less eager, by way of a clinching argument, to parrot, as having happened to their very selves, the incident which probably did happen sometime and somewhere to some one, thanks to some irresponsible tramp’s sense of humour,—of the professedly hungry man who refused to work because he had a previous engagement to march in the procession of the unemployed.

There is an appreciable distance from broken windows to broken heads. Still it is plain enough that the person who can _comprehend_ the point of view that in a given exigency applauds the first can _comprehend_ (always bear in mind that this word is an innocuous one) the point of view that in a graver exigency applauds the second.

If it is true that there are bourgeois, as there are dogs, who understand no argument and respect no appeal but the blow,—let it not be said here that it is true,—it is not surprising, however deplorable it may be, that there are those among the proletariat who find it “a source of innocent merriment,” in the words of Gilbert’s Lord High Executioner, “to make the penalty fit the crime.”

Anarchist and dynamiter are so far from being interchangeable terms that it would be possible and, perhaps, justifiable to write a treatise on the theory of anarchy without making the slightest reference to dynamiting or any other form of the _propagande par le fait_. Taken by itself, the list of the overt anarchist acts in France during the last twenty-five years seems a long one; but, when it is viewed in the light of the total number of anarchist believers, it is evident that the dynamiter is the exception among the _camarades_. When, furthermore, the few hundred victims anarchy has made in all the world during the quarter of a century it has been militant are compared with the number of the victims the Minotaur—poverty—devours in a single country in a single year,[28] or with the havoc wrought by any one of the commoner diseases, anarchy as a menace to human life ceases to appear a very serious matter.

Nevertheless, the alarm the _propagande par le fait_ has excited is not to be wondered at. The dread of the dynamiter, like the savage’s dread of the railroad, is a dread of the mysterious and uncontrollable, superstitious perhaps, but which no amount of civilisation can entirely eradicate from the human mind. Lightning, which also does relatively little damage, is feared, and will probably continue to be feared so long as there is no forecasting where it will strike.

In the case of the new dynamite propaganda the unknown quantities were, in the beginning at least, so numerous as to be bewildering; and several of them still remain uneliminated. Much more is now known about anarchist doctrines, about the nature and power of dynamite, and the other fabulously destructive modern explosives, and a little more about the characters of the persons who employ these explosives. But the dynamiter’s seeming illogicality in the choice of his victims and his actual inability—comparable only to a woman’s proverbial awkwardness in throwing a stone—to attain the victims he has chosen, while he does attain others, are as pronounced as ever.

When throwers of bombs massacre persons they would not have harmed for the world, and when bombs are found in such diverse spots as cafés, restaurants, hotels, churches, soldiers’ recruiting offices and barracks, police stations, bazaars, private dwellings, public markets, stock exchanges, employment bureaus, and old people’s homes, who, indeed, can boast of his security? In the course of the years 1891-95 the fear of the dynamiters assumed such proportions as to amount almost to a panic, and this period is still referred to as “The Terror” in certain quarters.

“_Ah, ah! c’est pas un’ crac La dynamit’ nous fich’ l’ trac,_”

sang the clever _Montmartrois chansonnier_ Eugène Lemercier in a witty topical song, _Le Trac de la Dynamite_, which had an enormous vogue.

At that time irresponsible rumour attributed to the _camarades_, to the “_catastrophards_,” such fell and fantastic schemes for the annihilation of the old society as the dispersion of malignant microbes, the poisoning of the water supply, and the introduction of nitro-glycerine into reservoirs, conduits, and sewers. There were frequent thefts of dynamite, the authors of which remained for some time at large. An anarchist _cocher_ (probably demented) rode down pedestrians in pursuance of a vow he had made to exterminate the bourgeois. Public alarm was aggravated by the professional imaginings of the reporters and the police. It was wantonly played upon by the _estampeurs_ (blackmailers and swindlers vaguely affiliated with “the groups”), who coined money by selling to a willingly gullible press bogus tips of conspiracies and contemplated explosions,—notably the mining of the _Opéra_, the _Palais de Justice_, and the Presidential Tribune at Longchamp, and the assassination of Leo XIII.,—and by _fumistes_ (practical jokers), who perpetrated sardonic jokes with sand, iron filings, and sardine boxes, which were taken to the municipal laboratories[29] with the same infinite precautions as the real bombs in the ominous-looking vehicle presided over by the _cocher_ “Ramasse” and drawn by the horse “Dynamite.”

During “The Terror” landlords begged or ordered magistrate tenants to quit their premises, lest they draw down bombs as trees draw down the thunderbolts, and added to their “TO LET” notices these reassuring words, “IL N’Y A PAS DE MAGISTRAT DANS LA MAISON”; the neighbours of judges compromised by the anarchist trials hastily moved into other parts of the city and even into the country; rag-pickers and _concièrges_ fainted or had hysterics at the sight of sardine tins in the garbage boxes; _concièrges_ quakingly told their heads before venturing to open the street doors for their own belated lodgers; anarchist tenants were as sedulously sought as magistrate lodgers were avoided, were loaded with soft words and favours, and implored not to worry themselves about their rent bills; and café and restaurant garçons vied with each other in flattering the caprices of their anarchist customers.

Flor O’Squarr tells of an anarchist, real or assumed, who, having regaled himself with a bountiful repast in a high-priced restaurant close by the Madeleine, called for the proprietor, and said:—

“I have had an excellent meal, and I haven’t a sou to pay for it. Arrest me, if you like; but I warn you that I am an anarchist, and that you expose yourself to the vengeance of my associates. Choose!” The panic-stricken Boniface insisted on drinking the audacious fellow’s health in champagne, and, when visited the following day by the police, who had heard of the affair, refused to make complaint against the swindler or give information that might lead to his detection. “A charming person, very polite, very well bred, and not proud,” was all that could be got out of him.

“_Le vol_” (theft) is another recognised form of the _propagande par le fait_.

“Are you cold,” says Charles Malato, “then enter the great bazaars which are crammed with unused garments, and take them; are you hungry, invade the meat-shops. Everything human industry produces belongs to you because you are men, and you are cravens if you do not take what you need.” Several international congresses have passed resolutions exhorting the hungry to take food wherever they can find it.

About this right of the individual to take for himself whatever is necessary to sustain his life, a right admitted theoretically, for the matter of that, by many who do not consider themselves revolutionists,—by popes, prelates, and theologians even, all the way from Saint Thomas to Manning and Parkhurst,—anarchists of all complexions agree absolutely. But over the right to steal in general there is as much dispute among them as there is over the right to kill. Some hold stealing meritorious, if the victims are properly chosen; others, if the profits are devoted scrupulously to the oral or written propaganda; others still, if they are turned over to the poor. Those who approve theft unreservedly are few indeed. Jean Grave admits that he is somewhat perplexed, but inclines to approve the open, defiant theft. He says:—

“Anarchy recognises in every individual from the moment he has seen the light of day the right to live. Individuals suffer from hunger by reason of a defective social organisation. And yet the planet has still, and will have for a long time, enough and more than enough to nourish the beings it carries. Every individual who finds himself reduced by the fault of society to a want of bread has the right to rebel against society, to take food wherever it exists....

“Nevertheless, there is a thing that puzzles many of us; namely, the ignoble means it is necessary to employ, if one would steal, the perpetual deceit to throw the victim off his guard, the constant duplicity to capture his confidence....

“Every one acts as he understands, as he can. If his ways of proceeding are in contradiction with the established order of things, it is for him and the defenders of the code to have an explanation. But, when certain persons pretend to derive their way of living from a special order of ideas, when they seek to disguise with the cloak of the _propagande_ deeds done for their own preservation, we have a right to say what we think.

“If, then, we place ourselves at the view-point of the right which the individual has to live, he may steal. It is his privilege, especially if society drives him to want by refusing him work. And I add that it would be very stupid of him to commit suicide when society has made him destitute. The right to the defence of one’s own existence being primordial, one must take where there is.

“But, if the act of stealing is to assume a character of revendication or of protest against the defective organisation of society, it must be performed openly, without any subterfuge.

“‘But,’ retort the defenders of _le vol_, ‘the individual who acts openly will deprive himself thus of the possibility of continuing. He will lose thereby his liberty, since he will be at once arrested, tried, and condemned.’

“Granted. But, if the individual who steals in the name of the right to revolt resorts to ruse, he does nothing more nor less than the first thief that comes along who steals to live without embarrassing himself with theories.

“It is with stealing as it is with the military service. There are persons who refuse to let themselves be enrolled, preferring to expatriate themselves. This way of proceeding has its little character of protestation. But alongside of these there are others who, by the simulation of an infirmity, by taking advantage of an exemption or the utilisation of an efficacious protection, manage to evade military servitude. They are right, surely,—a thousand times right,—from their point of view. But, if they tell us that they have thereby performed acts of revolutionary propaganda, and contributed to demolish the régime, it would be easy to demonstrate that their claim is false....

“To resort to ruse, to dissimulate, in order to capture the confidence of the person one is planning to despoil, is, it must be confessed, an unwholesome and degrading line of conduct.”

Among the few Paris pilferers whose lives have distilled the odour of sanctity, who have taken on themselves to perpetuate the tradition of the magnanimous bandit, the philanthropic pirate, and the tender-hearted outlaw, to incarnate the paradox of the “_bon voleur_” (honest thief), the two most famous are Pini and Duval.

Clément Duval, who robbed and attempted to burn the mansion of Mlle. Madeleine Lemaire, was an iron worker of an independent spirit, who became so disgusted with the sufferings and humiliations of the labourer’s lot that he determined to make a dramatic protest. His previous record was absolutely clean, save for a petty theft from an employer when his _compagne_ and children had eaten nothing for twenty-four hours; and he carried away from the Lemaire residence only a small part of the valuables at his disposal, which shows that gain was not his primary object. In his written defence, which the presiding judge, Berard des Glajeux, did not allow him to read, he dwelt at great length on the hardships of the working-woman. In fact, Duval was a feminist of the first water. Saint Clément Duval! Forget him not, feminists, when you make up your calendar of saints!

In the _Revue Bleue_, a publication which can hardly be accused of having a revolutionary bias, M. Paul Mimande wrote of Duval: “Well, to my thinking, this thief, this incendiary, is _honnête_.... I believe him incapable of robbing and killing to satisfy his cupidity. He worked for the collectivity alone. Duval has the serenity of the _illuminé_ who suffers for a holy cause. He is logical in submitting, without murmurs or protestations, to the hard rules of the _bagne_. Very sincerely, he refuses to find himself disgraced by the livery of the convict; and he shows it by his bearing and his talk. His conscience cries out to him that he has acted well. What does the rest matter!

“I had a long conversation with Clément Duval. I questioned him searchingly; and I discerned in his phrases, ardent, but hollow, a sort of atavic duplicate of the times of John Huss.”

Duval had neither instruction nor the gift of eloquence, and succeeded ill in explaining his theories to the jury of the Seine. Pini, on the other hand, who had been at great pains to educate himself, was an orator and philosopher as well as a student. His defence—less a defence of himself than of his theory of the right to steal (_le droit au vol_)—was as splendid a bit of impertinence as was ever delivered in a court-room.

Calmly, cynically, with a control of voice and charm of gesture that would have done credit to the most gifted advocate, he said (in part):—

“As to us anarchists, it is with the untroubled assurance of performing a duty that we make our attacks on property. We have two objects in view: first, to claim for ourselves the natural right to existence which you bourgeois concede to beasts and deny to men; second, to provide ourselves with the materials best suited for destroying your show, and, if it becomes necessary, you with it. This manner of reasoning makes your hair stand on end; but what would you have? This is the state of the case. The new times have come. There was a time when the starving wretch who appropriated a morsel of bread, and was arraigned before your plethoric persons therefor, admitted that he had committed a crime, craved pardon, and promised to perish of hunger (he and his family) rather than touch again the property of another. He was ashamed to show his face. To-day it is very different. Extremes meet; and man, after having sunk so low, is retrieving himself splendidly. Arraigned before you for having smashed the strong boxes of your compeers, he does not excuse his act, but defends it, proves to you with pride that he has yielded to the natural need of retaking what had been previously stolen from him; he proves to you that his act is superior in morality to all your laws, flouts your mouthings and your authority, and in the very teeth of your accusations against him tells you that the real thieves, _messieurs les juges!_ are you and your bourgeois band.

“This is precisely my case. Be assured I do not blush under your charges, and I experience a delicious pleasure in being called thief by you.”

Maître Labori’s eloquent pleading, though it did much to establish his reputation as an advocate, proved as vain in the case of this refractory _prolétaire_ as it did later in the case of his bourgeois client, Dreyfus; and Pini was given twenty years of hard labour for his thieving and his impertinent impenitence.

Pini whose thefts were legion, Pini who in the guise of the son of an Italian cardinal paid reconnoitring visits to the archbishopric of Paris, and dreamed the colossal dream of rifling the Vatican, Pini, I say, never stole for himself nor for his friends, but only for the propaganda, for humanity. He was the altruistic thief of the century’s close _par excellence_. Every son of his thieving was devoted to the cause. He gave to street beggars freely, but always from his legitimate earnings, never from the proceeds of his expeditions, and never without reproaching them for stretching out their hands to beg when they might steal. “Sometimes, even in winter,” says one who claims to have known him well, “Pini, half-clothed and almost barefoot, traversed Paris to carry assistance to the destitute _compagnons_. He distributed among them one franc or two francs out of his own pocket; but he did not encroach upon the capital of two or three hundred louis which had resulted from his last exploit. He subsidised several French and Italian presses for the printing of journals, manifests, and placards. The stolen money belonged to the cause, to the idea, to the future.”

When he gave of his consecrated hoard to individuals, as he sometimes did, it was always because the propaganda was directly involved. Thus he supported for two years at the University of Milan the son of an imprisoned _camarade_, and aided many of the _camarades_ who were in prison or who had been obliged to flee to escape imprisonment. He was blamed by some of his associates for having invested a sum of stolen money in an industrial enterprise. The blame was just from the anarchist point of view; and yet, even in this case, the profits were plainly destined in advance for the propaganda.

Within the last two or three years the treasures of the churches have been the greatest sufferers from the pilferers on principle, who have been inflamed by the anti-clerical campaign of the Combes ministry.

As anarchist killings have been very little formidable, viewed in the large, so the aggregate of the anarchist stealings is, in social or criminal statistics, a negligible quantity. These stealings have not brought expropriation appreciably nearer, and have only served the anarchist cause, if they have served it at all, by keeping before the public mind the fact that the anarchist theory is as much opposed to property as it is to government.

The majority of the thieves who call themselves anarchists in court are thieves first and anarchists afterwards,—eleventh-hour converts, who, having fallen on the misfortune of detection, essay to play anarchist rôles, prompted thereto by a sense of humour, a hope of securing the sympathy and support of the _camarades_, or a yearning for the homage of the “_petit peuple de Paris_”, who, as Marcel Prévost has pointed out, “adore all revolutionists.”

One other form of _propaganda par le fait_ remains to be mentioned; namely, counterfeiting. But anarchist counterfeiting has not been advocated, it seems, by the accredited anarchist theoricians, and has not been provided with a romantic halo by any master practitioner, like Pini; in short, has not attained the dignity of a public peril, and calls for no extended notice here. The greater part of the so-called anarchist counterfeiters are common criminals or vulgar charlatans with whom anarchy is a mercenary after-thought, or they are simple police spies.

The most picturesque of the real anarchist counterfeiters who have passed through the judicial mill is the _Lyonnais poète-chansonnier_ known as “_L’Abruti_.”

“_L’Abruti_” (“The Imbruted”), the uncomplimentary name, intended as a fling against society, is of his own choosing, tormented by that craving for the great road, for space and liberty which has been the blessing and the curse of the best and the worst of men since time was,—from Abraham, Homer, Cain, Esau, and John the Baptist to Morrow, Salsou,[30] Ravachol, Richepin, and Josiah Flynt; L’Abruti swore off working for the detested bourgeois one fine day, and, shouldering a little pack in which he had stowed a stew-pan, a coffee-pot, a set of mysterious steel implements, and some scraps of writing-paper, set out from Lyons in true troubadour or, to be more accurate, in true _trimardeur_ style, to make his tour of France.

Sauntering out of the sunrise in the morning, between hedge-rows traceried with the fragrant eglantine, free of fancy and free of limb; ruminating the “_heureux temps d’anarchie_” prophesied by the _poète-camarade_ Laurent Tailhade, “_temps où la plèbe baiserait la trace des pas des poètes_”; casting about for couplets with a mind attuned to Verlaine’s poetic precept,—

“_Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure Eparse au vent crispé du matin Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym_”;

exploring the motionless blue and the scudding white of the sky for a fresh image; exchanging good words and snuff-pinches with passing rustics and smiles and badinage with the rustics’ wives and daughters; halting now and again to quaff from a wayside spring, to catch a thrush’s liquid note, a magpie’s gibe, or a linnet’s whistle, to unshoulder his pack, and, using it as an _escritoire_, to fix on paper a just-discovered rhyme, or, using it as a pillow, to enjoy the discreet fellowship of a pipe and out of its curling smoke-fantasies fashion Utopias; beguiling the hours of the short shadows with alternate scribblings and siestas; and sauntering into the sunset when the long shadows came,—L’Abruti passed the days.

He dined and supped by the roadside under spicy limes or voluptuous acacias, lavishing his omelettes, his coffee, and his _chansons_ on all chance passers-by.

With his mysterious implements and the aid of flame, in some dusky forest thicket where a witch might weave a spell, he fabricated the wherewithal to buy his eggs and coffee; and he passed the nights, according to the weather, under the stars or in some hospitable grange.

The idyl was rudely interrupted—a fig for civilisation!—by the Philistine-minded gendarmes. L’Abruti was tried, and condemned to prison, though he had never gone beyond the fabrication of the ten-cent piece, instead of being decorated, as certain bourgeois are who deserve no better of society, and counterfeit talent instead of dimes.

Served him right, perhaps, for violating his country’s laws! Served him right, unquestionably,—delicious, whimsical minstrel that he was,—for departing from the good old begging tradition!

It seems a pity, all the same. He was such a jolly good fellow.

_“He [Souvarine] was going out into the unknown. He was going, with his tranquil air, to his mission of extermination wherever dynamite could be found to destroy cities and men. It will be he, no doubt, when the expiring_ bourgeoisie _shall hear the street pavements exploding under every one of its steps._”—EMILE ZOLA, in Germinal.