Paris and the Social Revolution Part 18

"One day in July I stopped before a book-stall of the rue Chateaudun, 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 Liege (spring of 1904), devoted a legacy to the cause.

Baumann educated himself in evening schools after reaching manhood.

Salsou, who had read the _Revolution 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 a.s.sociates 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sionate 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 tete_." Condemned to death, he refused to sign a pet.i.tion 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 la.s.sooed 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 a.s.sailants,-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 const.i.tuted 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sing 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 Very restaurant, whither he had returned for no other apparent purpose than to finish the conversion of the garcon L'Herot, whom he had found sympathetically inclined a fortnight before; advanced to the guillotine (though bound in a painful and ign.o.ble fashion) singing the most blasphemous and defiant of all the stanzas of the venerable _Pere d.u.c.h.ene_;[49] hurled in the teeth of Deibler, the headsman, the epithet, "_Cochon!_" and, as the knife fell, cried "_Vive la Re_"-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 _Republique_ instead of _Revolution_.

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 Nepomucene, Charles I. or Louis XVI., Raleigh or Ravachol, Petronius Arbiter or Louis Lingg.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ANNIVERSARY DECORATIONS, MUR DES FeDeReS]

"_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 pa.s.s, because he believed himself an apostle._"-FLOR O'SQUARR, in Les Coulisses de l'Anarchie.

CHAPTER VIII

SOCIALISTS AND OTHER REVOLUTIONISTS

"_If the spirit of revolt is an essential part of the anarchist mentality, it is not alone in this sort of mentality that it is found. All anarchists are_ revoltes, _but all persons who display tendencies to revolt are not anarchists. Thus in the political and social sphere a number of the partisans of the bygone regimes are_ revoltes."-A. HAMON.

"_I went yesterday to hear Paul Deroulede.... As for me, I confess that I particularly relished this frankness of accent, this conviction capable of folly._"-ALEXANDER HEPP.

"_Honour, to my thinking, consists entirely in the fine quality of the motive which directs the act. Now I have always seen the conduct of Paul Deroulede dominated by an anxious and continual care for our national greatness, by the reparation of our disasters. All the movements, all the supreme prayers of his heart, are eminently French. That suffices me._"

SULLY-PRUDHOMME.

"_There are no practical socialists but the anti-Semites._"

EDOUARD DRUMONT.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Socialist Bookshelf]

One of the plainest after-results of the Dreyfus affair, into which the socialists[50] as well as the anarchists threw themselves with glee for the superb opportunity it offered to undermine patriotism and destroy the army, has been a cleavage between the more conservative and the more radical elements of the socialist party.

The primary cause of this division may be found in the fact that two socialists (one of whom, M. Millerand, had previously been decidedly militant) accepted portfolios in the coalition ministry which supervised the Dreyfus trial at Rennes and which survived it for a time. This official service had such a sobering effect, both upon the ministers themselves and upon their immediate following, that their socialism became frankly opportunist; and the more radical and _doctrinaire_ among their fellow-socialists felt compelled, because of this, to withdraw from them their support. In like manner the socialist deputies who have helped to maintain the Combes ministry have been constrained to a similar opportunism. So it has come about that the French socialists, who formerly were, broadly speaking, all revolutionary, are now divided into the two distinct and even hostile camps[51] of evolutionary socialists and revolutionary socialists.

[Ill.u.s.tration: M. VAILLANT[52]]

With the evolutionary socialists-who are, perhaps, for being the less logical only the more philosophical-this book has, from the very nature of its subject, nothing to do. The revolutionary socialists alone concern us.

It is needless to say that _doctrinaire_ socialism and _doctrinaire_ anarchism are at opposite poles of the world of thought. Absolute authority is as much the ideal of the one as absolute liberty is the ideal of the other. For the anarchist the betterment of society depends primarily on the betterment of the individual, while for the socialist the betterment of the individual depends primarily on the betterment of society. The complete realisation of socialism presupposes the perfection of human machinery, and the complete realisation of anarchism the perfection of human nature. The theories of the vicarious atonement and salvation by character present, in another field, a somewhat a.n.a.logous contrast. Nevertheless, these theoretically ant.i.thetical systems find in their antagonism to actual conditions so many points of contact that it is not always easy for an outsider to determine whether a given revolutionist is an anarchist or a revolutionary socialist, and not always easy, one more than half suspects, for a revolutionist to determine himself in which of the two cla.s.ses he really belongs.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LeANDRE'S CARICATURE OF PAUL DeROULeDE AS DON QUIXOTE

_By permission of "Le Rire"_]

The revolutionary socialists, like the anarchists, are high-minded dreamers, who are bent on procuring happiness for the human kind.

Unlike the anarchists, they partic.i.p.ate in elections, and do not desire the abolition of the state (as is indicated by their use of the word _citoyen_, which the anarchists abhor); but they do wish for the downfall of the present state (with whose bad faith and impotence they are thoroughly disgusted) as the first step towards setting up the socialistic state, and they hold collective revolt the most likely means of effecting this downfall; all of which, in troubled periods, amounts to very much the same thing practically as if they abjured the state altogether. Like the anarchists, they demand the abolition of private property, and they are opposed, like them, to charity (as the term is popularly understood), to patriotism, and to armies. Like the anarchists, furthermore (though this does not seem to be a logical necessity for either), they are violently opposed to the church; and they are (with less inevitableness than the anarchists in the same matter) more or less hostile to marriage.

[Ill.u.s.tration: M. BROUSSE[53]]