CHAPTER VI

THE CAUSES OF PROPAGANDA “PAR LE FAIT”

“_For so persecuted they the prophets which were before you._”

JESUS CHRIST.

_“As soon as an intelligent workingman says, ‘I ought to earn so much,’ he is denounced as a leader of a band, and is discharged._”

J.-H. ROSNY, in Le Bilatéral.

“_On the pavement in mid December—a mother with her two months’ child still at the breast!_

“_But this is forcing her to beg, it is condemning the children to death. And I am well, and I am strong, and I am courageous; and they refuse me work. Ah! I am under the ban of society._”

Journal d’un Anarchiste (AUGUSTIN LÉGER).

“_You, Meyrargues, will speak, others will act. But let it be understood that this blood [Vaillant] calls for blood._

“_They were silent, reconciled, baptized in the fluid of this death. A state of heroic grace possessed them, effaced their differences, their quarrels, and their gibes._”—VICTOR BARRUCAND, in Avec le Feu.

“_John Brown’s body lies mouldering in the grave, His soul goes marching on._”

American Popular Song.

A study of the various manifestations in France of the _propagande par le fait_ shows that the greater part of the overt anarchist acts, whether counterfeitings, stealings, or killings, have proceeded from a more or less well-grounded desire for personal or party vengeance; they have been committed by persons who have either suffered unjustly themselves at the hands of government or society or have lived very close to those who have so suffered.

The sensational killing of the assistant superintendent, Watrin,[31] by the striking miners of Decazeville (1886) was a horrible crime or a wholesome act of popular justice, according to the point of view. The fury of the mob is explained, if not excused, by the fact that this Watrin was allowed a premium of five per cent. upon every reduction of wages he was able to accomplish, coupled with the other fact that his brutal and insatiate rapacity had forced wages down thirty per cent. in eight years.

The anarchist house-breaker, Clément Duval, had been seriously handicapped in the struggle for existence. In the Franco-Prussian war he had received two wounds which had rendered him permanently unfit for his trade of iron worker, and had contracted a disease which had forced him to spend nearly four years out of ten in various hospitals. He had experienced real want in the course of his many periods of enforced idleness.

Pini had suffered much at the hands of society and the state. Many a time, when out of work, he had been glad to sleep on straw, at two cents a night, in the faubourg of La Glacière. His autobiography, which he wrote in jail, while awaiting his trial, is, like every formal utterance Pini ever made, exceedingly illuminating. Of his early life he says:—

“Son of a poor pariah, I began my career surrounded with the luxuries which the _bourgeoisie_ heaps upon us from our very cradles. I saw six of my brothers die of want. One of my sisters wore herself out in the service of a stingy family of bourgeois.

“My old father (an ancient Garibaldian), after a painful existence, in which he had given to the _bourgeoisie_ sixty years of his sweat and enriched a good number of employers, died like a dog in a charity hospital.

“I passed 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 régime of essential justice.

“How noble they appeared to me, these men whom the bourgeois loaded with insults after having sucked their blood!

“The _Paroles d’un Révolté_ 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 Léveillé, 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 shin-bones, pummellings for panting chests, blows of revolver butts for aching heads. It was the dance of the vanquished. They mauled the poor fellows with inexorable malice and ignoble ingenuity. The police band tortured with ferocious joy.

“When they stopped, it was from weariness and only to reopen the séance half an hour later. So passed 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 Léveillé.”

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 Véry restaurant was in retaliation for the delivery of Ravachol to the police by the garçon L’Hérot.

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 lié 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 assume 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 donné des étrennes aux honnêtes 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.”

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 hardships 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 _Père 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 pass 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 littérateur Zo d’Axa, in his piquant _De Mazas à Jérusalem_, 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 assaults 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 constituted 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 associate 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 passed 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 manœuvre it was indispensable that the other countries prosecute their refractory citizens in the same fashion.

“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 reconstituting 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 sturdy 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” (_procès des trente_), embracing several of the theoricians, dilettanti, and littérateurs which resulted, necessarily, in acquittal, but which left much bad feeling behind; the “trial of the forty” (_procès 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 littérateur Alexandre Cohen and the art critic Félix Fénéon; in the winter of 1900-01—to pass 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.

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 municipal 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 assembling 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 assassin 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 gratitude 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, fictitious 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 _concièrges_, 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 circumstances. 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 class 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 Révolution 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 assiduous 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 café garçon, 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 garçon’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 assurance 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 Véry restaurant was dynamited precisely as it had been predicted that it would be, whence arose, as the _Père Peinard_ exultantly and maliciously remarked at the time, “a new and capital word, _Véryfication_.”

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 passion 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, Björnson, 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 entities. 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 _Café 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 Félix Dubois, a declared opponent of anarchy, in _Le Péril Anarchiste_; and this revised version of the venerable proverb, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” _donne à 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 assisting 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 protégé:—

“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 dispassionate 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 passion 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 taché de sang, c’était l’aurore, La vieille aurore avec ses roses de festin, Qui se levait honteuse à l’appel du destin Pour éclairer des yeux que la mort allait clore._”

Another poet intoned,—

“_Que ton souffle se mêle à la création, Que la rosée de ton sacrifice mouille nos âmes stériles, Que ton exemple unique soit comme l’eau d’un seule nuage Qui fait germer toutes les plantes dans la forêt!_”

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.

A fierce handbill, “_A Carnot le Tueur_,” was distributed broadcast. Two red flags were planted on the grave, and a black flag was unfurled, bearing the inscription, “_Vive la Mort!_”

On every anniversary of Vaillant’s death, unless the police interfere, similar scenes are enacted in the Champ de Navets; and in these weird, commemorative rites the dead man’s little daughter, Sidonie, who was adopted by the _camarades_, plays a spectacular part.

The anniversary of the death of Ravachol is celebrated by a pilgrimage of the faithful to the tomb of Diderot, who is regarded as a precursor of anarchism (Montbrison, where Ravachol is buried, being too far away for Parisians); and every anniversary of the deaths of those who have died for the cause and every funeral of a _camarade_ is made a pretext for keeping alive the morbid cult. But the great saint day of the French anarchist calendar is the 11th of November, the anniversary of the anarchist executions at Chicago.

All anarchistic (one might almost say all revolutionary) Europe honestly believes—whether rightly or wrongly history has yet, perhaps, to decide—that the Chicago hanging was as flagrant a violation of human rights, and the preceding trial as disgraceful a travesty of justice, as the worst absolute monarchy has ever had the audacity to perpetrate. Whatever the influence of this dramatic execution may have been in America, it was highly inflammatory in Europe. Under a practically free immigration system, America will be indeed fortunate if she does not, sooner or later, import long-stored-up rancour, originating from this event.

In the rest of Europe, as in France; in Russia, Germany, and Austria, in Italy and Spain, the violent anarchist acts of the last twenty-five years have been, broadly speaking, so many reprisals for real or fancied injuries suffered at the hands of government or society.

It is as nearly proved as a thing that is not susceptible of mathematical proof well can be that the almost complete immunity of England from anarchist violence (the Fenian attempts can hardly be so classed) has been due, in part at least, to the relative liberty of speech, press, and assemblage she has accorded,—accorded with an almost heroic consistency, in view of the pressure European governments have brought to bear upon her to change her policy. And it is surely something other than mere chance that so large a proportion of the propagandists _par le fait_ hail from Italy. The unconcerned fashion in which the Italian peasants and labourers—at Milan, at Carrara, in Sicily—have been given cold lead when they have had the effrontery to ask for bread, and the mediæval tortures, a hundred times worse than death, inflicted on Passanante[44] and his successors, under the hypocritical guise of clemency and humanity, have acted naturally enough as provocations toward anarchism rather than restraints against it.

The following account of the fate which awaited Bresci appeared in the Paris _Matin_ immediately after his condemnation had been pronounced:—

“The penalty of imprisonment for life which has fallen upon Bresci is very rigorous, and will be aggravated by solitary confinement day and night.

“The condemned man will probably be taken to the _bagne_ of St. Etienne, where he will be clothed in the black and yellow striped prison uniform. During the first years he will occupy a cell two and a half metres long and one metre wide, which has never more than a half-light. Later he will be transferred to a cell a little larger and fully lighted. A table, slightly inclined, half a metre wide, will serve him for bed and furniture. His food will be bread and water once a day only. The jailers will hand it in to him through a hole covered with coloured glass, which permits them to see the prisoner without being seen by him.

“The days must pass in absolute silence. The punishments which threaten the prisoner who does not submit to this terrible régime are: I. The “strait-jacket” (_chemise de force_). II. Irons which bind the hands to the feet, holding the body bent forward. III. The _lit de force_, a wooden box exactly like a coffin, pierced at the lower end with two holes for the feet. The legs cannot be moved, and the arms are held motionless by the _chemise de force_.

“After ten years of this régime the prisoner is allowed to work during the day; but at night he returns to isolation and silence. Neither visits nor letters—nothing—can penetrate this tomb till the day when death or madness comes to deliver him who inhabits it.”

The above is given for what it is worth without a guarantee of the strict accuracy of every detail. But the _Matin_ is not a revolutionary sheet, and would seem to have no good reason for misrepresentation. If only one-half of what it reveals is true, the crime of the Italian government will seem to many more heinous than the worst thing the anarchists have ever done or been accused of doing. No wonder Bresci contrived to put himself out of the way before a year had elapsed, and little wonder that the friends of Bresci have threatened reprisals.

The folly of taking official cognisance of the expression of incendiary views was signally demonstrated at the time of the last visit of the czar to France, when the poet Laurent Tailhade was sentenced to a year of prison and a 1,000-franc fine for a prose-poem glorifying regicide, published in _Le Libertaire_. This article would have been seen, had the authorities but had the tact to ignore it, only by the few regular readers of _Le Libertaire_, and would have been _read through_, it is safe to say, only by a small and unexcitable minority of these; for M. Tailhade is characterised by a style that is incomprehensible, save to the _lettrés_. But the author must needs be haled into court;[45] and, presto! Paris and the provinces are in an uproar. Well-known literary and artistic personalities—Zola, Gustave Kahn, Frantz Jourdain, E. Ledrain, and Jean Marestan among them—testify for their brother craftsman in person, and Mirbeau, De Hérédia, and Anatole France by letter. The auditors applaud the culprit’s utterances, bear him away, after the announcement of the verdict, in triumph, and hold banquets in his honour. The dangerous article, or at least its incriminated passages, and the proceedings of the court are published, in spite of the fact that such publication is expressly forbidden by law, throughout the length and breadth of France; and all the papers teem with _chroniques_, leading articles, and skits upon Tailhade or anarchism. Indignation meetings are held in every corner of Paris, and resolutions of protest are passed by socialists, free thinkers, and simple republicans, and even by Masonic lodges.

The obscure _Libertaire_ is given an enormous quantity of free advertising, the anarchist propaganda is carried on by its enemies, and a martyr is made of a man with no special vocation for martyrdom. To be sure, the offender is in durance for a twelve-month, but he is not silent; and nobody is deterred from following his example. A clearer instance of making a mountain out of a molehill it would be hard to find.