CHAPTER VII

THE CHARACTER OF THE PROPAGANDIST “PAR LE FAIT”

“_Give the devil his due._”—Popular proverb.

“_He rose at five, and read until the work hour. His shop associates, knowing him sincere, generous, incapable of platitude, did not detest him in spite of his unsociable ways._”—J.-H. ROSNY, in Le Bilatéral.

“_Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful: but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs._”—THOMAS CARLYLE.

“_J’ai regardé le juge en face. Certain d’abord d’être pendu, Je ne me suis pas défendu. A quoi bon mendier sa grâce! Le cuir est fait pour le tanner; Le code est fait pour condamner. J’ai regardé le juge en face._”

MAURICE BOUKAY, in Chansons Rouges.

The first anarchist I ever knew in any country was a dear, grandfatherly American workingman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who conducted me, the Sunday following our chance meeting, to an ethical culture society in Dorchester on purpose to show me how children should be taught to be good.

The second was a young doctor of philosophy, dreaded by reputable Boston for his well-documented _sans-gêne_, who chanced to be rusticating on a farm where I spent ten days with a gang of a dozen city street boys. I found him infinitely gentle and kind; and it was he of all the farm household who came to relieve me one night while I was keeping an anxious bedside vigil beside one of the boys, who had received an accidental injury to the head that threatened to prove dangerous.

These my first two experiences with anarchist types were scarcely of a nature to dismay me, nor have I ever found anything dismaying in the private characters of the anarchists I have since known in the Old World.

In an every way remarkable study of the anarchist temperament, based on a thorough investigation of anarchists of many professions and all stations in life, A. Hamon, author of _La France Sociale et Politique_ and _Une Psychologie du Militaire Professionnel_, has arrived at these suggestive conclusions:—

“The positive method confirmed by the rational method enables us to establish an ideal type of anarchist whose mentality is the aggregate of common psychic characteristics. Every anarchist partakes sufficiently of this ideal type to make it possible to differentiate him from other men. The typical anarchist, then, may be defined as follows: a man perceptibly affected by the spirit of revolt under one or more of its forms,—opposition, investigation, criticism, innovation,—endowed with a strong love of liberty, egoistic, or individualistic, and possessed of great curiosity,—a keen desire to know. These traits are supplemented by an ardent love of others, a highly developed moral sensitiveness, a profound sentiment of justice, an alert logical faculty, and pronounced combative tendencies.

“Such is the average psychic type of the anarchist. He is, to summarise, a person rebellious, liberty-loving, at once individualistic and altruistic, enamoured of justice, and imbued with missionary zeal.”

To these conclusions every one who has been privileged to know well any number of anarchists will be likely to subscribe. And, if M. Hamon, instead of extending his investigations to all sorts and conditions of anarchists, had limited them to the propagandists _par le fait_, his conclusions would not have been essentially different. He would probably have felt constrained to admit that the “ardent love of others” and the “profound sentiment of justice” were curiously blended with petty cravings for notoriety or large desires for glory; the “missionary zeal,” with a reticence amounting to mystification about matters of purely personal concern or projects of violence; and the “highly developed moral sensitiveness,” with a seemingly contradictory moral callousness regarding the means permissible to attain an end. But, on the other hand, M. Hamon would surely have added these sterling qualities: a rare love of animals, surpassing sweetness in all the ordinary relations of life, exceptional sobriety of demeanour, frugality and regularity, austerity even, of living, and courage beyond compare.

Ravachol, the most difficult of all the French propagandists _par le fait_ to comprehend, Ravachol who never allowed (no more than a great financier might) a sentiment of humanity to interpose when the success of a plan was at stake, who never showed a gleam of remorse for his murder of the miser hermit of Chambles and the pillaging for jewels of the tomb of the Marquise de la Rochetaille,[46]—Ravachol was by the testimony of all who knew him well, even his enemies, an unusually kind-hearted man where the Cause—I had almost said where politics—was not concerned. In his young manhood he supported his mother and younger brother, and treated them with the greatest consideration. He was fond of children, and remonstrated fiercely against cruelty to animals. The presiding judge tried in vain to wrest from the little son of Ravachol’s _compagne_ some hint of brutality on Ravachol’s part. “_Il était très doux avec maman et avec moi_” was all the boy could be got to say; and the only time Ravachol broke down during his detention and trial was at the sight of this little one. Chaumartin, who had betrayed Ravachol from fear or some baser motive, said on the witness-stand, “He taught my little children to read, and cut out pictures for them”; and Ravachol forgave this same Chaumartin his baseness in open court.

Only a short time before the explosion of the rue de Clichy, Ravachol escorted to a shoe store a pitiable beggar girl he had chanced upon in the street, and saw her provided with a new pair of shoes, for which he paid seven francs.

The charities and compassions of Pini, and Duval’s more than platonic solicitude for the welfare of working-women, have been previously noted.

Decamp, though he earned barely fr. 2.50 per day, and had a wife and three children to provide for, adopted a homeless six-year-old child to save it from vagabondage.

Faugoux, who was given twenty years of hard labour for stealing dynamite, wrote to a _camarade_ regarding the damaging testimony of one Drouet:—

“As to Drouet, I pardon him his want of frankness regarding me. He has little instruction, and he hoped in this way to save himself from the law. This _compagnon_, although convinced, has much sentiment for his family; and this is a powerful motive. When he thought of the struggle and the misery which his wife and child would have to support, he forgot that he was an anarchist. Let us not lay it up against him nor refuse him our hands.”

Salsou adored, as he was adored by, his father and mother and his several brothers and sisters. He wrote them often in the years after he left home for the _trimard_; and his letters were replete with affection, notably one in which he acknowledged the photograph of his mother and two of the children, Martha and Henri, playfully calling the last named “Henricon.” His _compagne_ had no complaint to make of his treatment of her, and even his laundress testified to his being courteous and kind.

Reader’s of Zola’s _Germinal_ will remember the anarchist Souvarine’s affection for the pet rabbit, Pologne, and his sorrow at her death. The point is well observed. Nearly every French anarchist, whether propagandist _par le fait_ or not, is a defender of the rights of all four-footed things; and many are strict vegetarians. In her fascinating autobiography, Louise Michel returns again and again with flaming wrath to the sufferings of domestic animals.

“Under my revolt against the strong,” she says, “I find, farther back than I can remember distinctly, a horror of the tortures inflicted on dumb beasts. I would have liked to see the animal defend himself,—the dog bite the one who abused him, the horse, bleeding under the lash, trample on his torturer. But always the dumb beast endures his lot with the resignation of the subdued races. What an object of pity is the beast!”

This typical anarchist trait is graphically illustrated by the following anecdote related by Flor O’Squarr:—

“One day in July I stopped before a book-stall of the rue Châteaudun, close by the rue Laffitte, when I was joined by an anarchist who led me before the show window of a bird dealer a few steps away. There, with a hand that shook, he pointed out to me some white mice shut up in tiny iron cages that were provided with squirrels’ wheels, whereon the little beasts galloped without respite.

“‘See there,’ moaned the dynamiter, ‘tell me if men are not villains! These poor white mice, so delicate, so pretty, suffer frightfully, don’t you know it, churning like that in this instrument of torture. It gives them nausea and pains in the stomach.’ He would have strangled the dealer without remorse to avenge the mice.”

Zola, in his account of the trial of the dynamiter Salvat (_Paris_), makes the culprit’s fellow-workmen testify that he was “a worthy man, an intelligent, diligent, and highly temperate workman, who adored his little daughter, and who was incapable of an indelicacy or meanness”; and this characterisation of a bomb-thrower of fiction might be applied with little change to almost every real bomb-thrower who has operated in France. Scarcely one appears to have been—the _propagande_ apart—what we call a “bad egg” and the French call a “_mauvais sujet_” or to have had a bad disposition. There is scarcely a drunkard, a gambler, a libertine, or a domestic tyrant, in the lot. Indeed, they have had so few of the vices of genius that one almost sighs over their essential commonplaceness.

They have nearly all been highly abstemious and nearly all great readers. Pini’s living expenses averaged less than three francs a day, and were no more after a successful theft than before,—the best possible proof that he was not given to reckless dissipation.

Ravachol spent somewhat more than Pini,—seven or eight francs a day, on an average,—but was no hard liver. Philip, one of the French authors of the explosion at Liège (spring of 1904), devoted a legacy to the cause. Baumann educated himself in evening schools after reaching manhood. Salsou, who had read the _Révolution Sociale_ of Proudhon at fifteen, devoted a good part of his earnings to the purchase of journals and books. He paid from four to seven francs a week for his lodgings, and lived in other respects accordingly. Potatoes and onions “were the chief of his diet.” He left his room regularly about seven in the morning, returned about the same hour at night, and went out very little evenings even to the group meetings, preferring to stay at home and read till a late hour. In fact, the only things his associates found to reproach him for were his over-seriousness and his taciturnity.

“He was an honest, laborious, sober man,” testified his employer at his trial, “and ever ready to do a favour, but very much shut up in himself,—not in the least communicative. He passed for a scholar.” Whereupon Salsou, referring to his condemnation at Fontainebleau for having talked of his faith, retorted, “If they reproach me with being uncommunicative, it is because I know what it costs to be communicative.”

“The aim of the press,” said Zola, apropos of the public reception of Salvat’s attempt (_Paris_), “seemed to be to besmirch Salvat, in order, in his person, to degrade anarchy; and his life was made out to be one long abomination.... His faults, magnified, were paraded without the causes that had produced them, and without the excuse of the environment which had aggravated them. What a revolt of humanity and justice there was in the soul of Froment, who knew the true Salvat,—Salvat, the tender mystic, the chimerical and passionate spirit, thrown into life without defence, always weighted down and exasperated by implacable poverty, and finding his account at last in this dream of restoring the golden age by destroying the old world!”

Whenever a fresh anarchist trial occurs in France, this inglorious farce of press vilification is re-enacted. Not content with heaping on the culprit’s head all the misdemeanours of which he has been guilty and many crimes of which he has not been guilty, the bourgeois organs try to strip him of his one incontrovertible attribute,—courage. They dare—knowing him well under lock and key—to call him “coward.”

No, my respectable, quaking bourgeois, not that! Robber, murderer, incendiary, fornicator, what you will (if you must judge by your rule of thumb), but not coward! It is too much! You cannot deny the dynamiter what you concede to the vilest criminals and even to the beast of the jungle.

Duval all but killed the police brigadier Rossignol, who attempted to arrest him. For the judge who tried to worm out of him proofs of the existence of accomplices, he had this fine epigram: “_Vous n’aurez ma langue qu’avec ma tête_.” Condemned to death, he refused to sign a petition for clemency. The innocent Cyvoct, under sentence of death, also refused to sue for pardon.

Two officers were wounded before Francis[47] could be secured on the Boulevard de Strasbourg, and it took four officers to hold Parmeggiani.[48]

Pini had to be lassooed in the heart of Paris like a buffalo of the plains, and it was only when wounded that he could be retaken after his escape from Cayenne.

Lorion, advertised everywhere by the police for an incendiary speech at Roubaix (immediately after his release from a five years’ imprisonment), openly led a band to the sack of the office of a Lille newspaper which had treated him as a police spy, and then made good his escape to Havre; but, determined to purge away the last vestige of the charge against him, he returned to the region of Lille, and wounded two officers before he could be taken.

Decamp defended himself, after his cartridges were finished and his knife gone, with a bayonet,—which he succeeded in wresting from one of his assailants,—until he swooned from loss of blood. In court he said:—

“You can guillotine me. I prefer it. I have had enough of your prisons and your _bagnes_. Off with my head! I do not defend it. I deliver it, shouting, ‘_Vive l’Anarchie!_’ What does one _camarade’s_ head more or less amount to, if only our beautiful Hope spreads!”

Baumann constituted himself a prisoner, and demanded the guillotine. Etievant wrote from London a little while before his attempt:—

“We are here in large numbers, the proscribed of all countries, convinced of the final triumph of Liberty, having made great sacrifices already for the Idea, and fortifying ourselves with the hope of rendering service to poor humanity which has limped along painfully for so many centuries; and yet I begin to doubt that we have done everything that we might have done and in consequence everything that we should have done. Would it not have been better to struggle even unto death there where the hazard of birth had placed us? Rather than to flee precipitately before the threats and the blows of authority, would it not have been better to make the sacrifice of our lives?” By deliberately returning to Paris, Etievant answered his own question in the affirmative.

Henry, whose attitude in court was that of a pontiff, “defended himself in the street like a little lion,” says Barrucand. “He resisted till he was at the very end of his forces, even under the heels of the police. Flippant, ferocious, he mocked the officers, said that he had just arrived from Pekin, and would not give his name.”

Vaillant denounced himself when he stood a fair chance of escape, and bore himself proudly before his judges and before the guillotine.

Ravachol, king of cynics, risked discovery in passing the _octroi_ (city revenue office) with dynamite in his satchel; walked long distances on foot and rode in jolting omnibuses while carrying materials that the slightest shock might explode; showed himself after each of his attempts with an appalling indifference to recognition; defended himself superbly before the Véry restaurant, whither he had returned for no other apparent purpose than to finish the conversion of the garçon L’Hérot, whom he had found sympathetically inclined a fortnight before; advanced to the guillotine (though bound in a painful and ignoble fashion) singing the most blasphemous and defiant of all the stanzas of the venerable _Père Duchêne_;[49] hurled in the teeth of Deibler, the headsman, the epithet, “_Cochon!_” and, as the knife fell, cried “_Vive la Ré_”—The word was never finished. Some of the bourgeois papers, determined to deprive Ravachol of the cynical grandeur of his death by making him out a retractor, claimed the unfinished word to be _République_ instead of _Révolution_.

It is the petty work of little men to call a man a coward who can die like this. A consummate villain,—yes, judged by conventional standards,—but no coward.

The man who dies like a man—and let it not be forgotten there are a hundred and one ways of doing it—is to be admired for that, whether he be called John Huss or John Brown, Saint Stephen or Saint Jean Népomucène, Charles I. or Louis XVI., Raleigh or Ravachol, Petronius Arbiter or Louis Lingg.

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“_He [Ravachol] endured everything without a murmur, all the pain and all the punishment, because, in the sombre heaven to which his criminal reveries mounted, he had seen his chimera pass, because he believed himself an apostle._”—FLOR O’SQUARR, in Les Coulisses de l’Anarchie.

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