The Proud Tower (15 page)

As formulated by men like Kropotkin, Malatesta, Jean Grave and Reclus, Anarchism at the end of the century may have attained, in the words of one of its recorders, “a shining moral grandeur,” but only at the cost of a noticeable removal from reality. These men had all suffered prison more than once for their beliefs. Kropotkin himself had lost his teeth as a result of prison scurvy. They were not men of the ivory tower except in so far as their heads were in ivory towers. They were able to draw blueprints of a state of universal harmony only by ignoring the evidence of human behavior and the testimony of history. Their insistence on revolution stemmed directly from their faith in humanity, which, they believed, needed only a shining example and a sharp blow to start it on its way to the golden age. They spoke their faith aloud. The consequences were frequently fatal.

Anarchism’s new era of violence opened in France just after the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. A two-year reign of dynamite, dagger and gunshot erupted, killed ordinary men as well as great ones, destroyed property, banished safety, spread terror and then subsided. The signal was given in 1892 by a man whose name, Ravachol, seemed to “breathe revolt and hatred.” His act, like nearly all that followed it, was a gesture of revenge for comrades who had suffered at the hands of the State.

On the previous May Day of 1891, at Clichy, a working-class suburb of Paris, a workers’ demonstration led by
les anarchos
carrying red banners with revolutionary slogans was charged by mounted police. In the melee five police were slightly, and three Anarchist leaders severely, wounded. Dragged to the police station, the Anarchists were subjected, while still bleeding and untended, to a
passage à tabac
of uncontrolled savagery, being made to pass between two lines of policemen under kicks and blows and beatings with revolver butts. At their trial, Bulot, the prosecuting attorney, charged that one of them, on the day before the riot, had called on the workers to arm themselves, and told them, “If the police come, let no one fear to kill them like the dogs they are! Down with Government!
Vive la révolution!
” Bulot thereupon demanded the death penalty for all three, which, since no one had been killed, was an impossible demand that he might better not have made. It was to start a train of dynamite. For the moment, M. Benoist, the presiding judge, acquitted one defendant and sentenced the other two to five and three years’ imprisonment respectively, the maximum allowable in the circumstances.

Six months after the trial, the home of M. Benoist on the Boulevard St-Germain was blown up by a bomb. Two weeks later, on March 27, another bomb blew up the home of Bulot, the prosecuting attorney, in the Rue de Clichy. Between the two explosions the police had circulated a description of the suspected criminal as a thin but muscular young man in his twenties with a bony, yellowish face, brown hair and beard, a look of ill health and a round scar between thumb and first finger of the left hand. On the day of the second explosion a man of this appearance took dinner at the Restaurant Véry in the Boulevard Magenta, where he talked volubly to a waiter named Lhérot about the explosion, which no one in the quarter yet knew had taken place. He also expressed anti-militarist and Anarchist opinions. Lhérot wondered about him but did nothing. Two days later the man returned and this time Lhérot, noticing the scar, called the police. When they arrived to arrest him the slight young man suddenly became a giant of maniacal strength and it required ten men and a terrific struggle to subdue and take him prisoner.

This was Ravachol. He had adopted his mother’s name in preference to Koenigstein, the name of his father, who had abandoned his wife and four children, leaving Ravachol at eight years of age as chief breadwinner of the family. At eighteen, after reading Eugène Sue’s
The Wandering Jew
, he had lost faith in religion, adopted Anarchist sentiments, attended their meetings, and as a result, was dismissed with a younger brother from his job as a dyer’s assistant. Meanwhile, his younger sister died and his elder sister bore an illegitimate child. Although Ravachol found other jobs, they did not pay enough to keep the family from misery. Accordingly, he took to illegal supplements, but with a certain fierce pride of principle. Robbery of the rich was the right of the poor “to escape living like beasts,” he said in prison. “To die of hunger is cowardly and degrading. I preferred to turn thief, counterfeiter, murderer.” He had in fact been all these and grave robber as well.

At his trial on April 26, 1892, he stated that his motive had been to avenge the Anarchists of Clichy who had been beaten up by the police and “not even given water to wash their wounds,” and upon whom Bulot and Benoist had imposed the maximum penalty although the jury had recommended the minimum. His manner was resolute and his eyes had the peculiarly piercing gaze expressive of inner conviction. “My object was to terrorize so as to force society to look attentively at those who suffer,” he said, putting volumes into a sentence. While the press described him as a figure of sinister violence and cunning and a “colossus of strength,” witnesses testified that he had given money to the wife of one of the imprisoned Clichy Anarchists and bought clothes for her children. At the end of the one-day trial he was sentenced to imprisonment at hard labour for life. But the Ravachol affair had just begun.

The waiter Lhérot, meanwhile, was winning heroic notoriety by regaling customers and journalists with his story of the Scar, the Recognition and the Arrest. As a result he attracted an unknown avenger who set off a bomb in the Restaurant Véry which killed, not Lhérot, but his brother-in-law, M. Véry, the proprietor. The act was hailed by
Le Père Peinard
, an Anarchist journal given to coarse street argot, with the ghoulish double pun, “
Vérification!
”

By now the police had uncovered a whole series of Ravachol’s crimes, including a grave robbery for the jewelry on a corpse, the murder of a ninety-two-year-old miser and his housekeeper, the further murder of two old women who kept a hardware shop—which had netted him forty sous—and of another shopkeeper, which had netted him nothing. “See this hand?” Ravachol was quoted as saying; “it has killed as many bourgeois as it has fingers.” At the same time he had been living peaceably in lodgings, teaching the little daughter of his landlord to read.

His trial for these murders opened on June 21 in an atmosphere of terror induced by the avenger’s bomb in the Restaurant Véry. Everyone expected the Palais de Justice to be blown up; it was surrounded by troops, every entrance guarded, and jurors, judges and counsel heavily escorted by police. Upon being sentenced to death, Ravachol said that what he had done had been for the “Anarchist idea” and added the prophetic words, “I know I shall be avenged.”

Faced with this extraordinary person, at once a monster of criminality and a protector and avenger of the unfortunate, the Anarchist press fell into discord. In
La Révolte
Kropotkin repudiated Ravachol as “not the true, the authentic” revolutionary but the “
opéra-bouffe
variety.” These deeds, he wrote, “are not the steady, daily work of preparation, little seen but immense, which the revolution demands. This requires other men than Ravachols. Leave them to the
fin de siècle
bourgeois whose product they are.” Malatesta likewise, in the literary Anarchist journal,
l’En Dehors
, rejected Ravachol’s gesture.

The difficulty was that Ravachol belonged almost but not quite to that class of Ego Anarchists who had one serious theorist in the German Max Stirner and a hundred practitioners of the
culte de moi.
They professed an extreme contempt for every bourgeois sentiment and social restraint, recognizing only the individual’s right to “live anarchistically,” which included burglary and any other crime that served the need of the moment. They were interested in themselves, not in revolution. The unbridled operations of these “miniature Borgias,” usually ending in gun battles with the police and flaunted under the banner of “Anarchism,” added much to the fear and anger of the public, who did not distinguish between the aberrant and the true variety. Ravachol was both. There was in him a streak of genuine pity and fellow feeling for the oppressed of his class which led one Anarchist paper to compare him with Jesus.

On July 11, calm and unrepentant, he went to the guillotine, crying at the end, “
Vive l’anarchie!
” At once the issue was clear. Overnight he became an Anarchist martyr and among the underworld, a popular hero.
La Révolte
reversed itself. “He will be avenged!” it proclaimed, adding its bit to the unfolding cycle of revenge.
L’En Dehors
opened a subscription for the children of an accomplice tried along with Ravachol. Among the contributors were the painter Camille Pissarro, the playwright Tristan Bernard, the Belgian Socialist and poet Emile Verhaeren, and Bernard Lazare (soon to be an actor in the Dreyfus case). A verb,
ravacholiser
, meaning “to wipe out an enemy,” became current, and a street song called “La Ravachole,” sung to the tune of “La Carmagnole,” carried the refrain:

It will come, it will come,
Every bourgeois will have his bomb.

Ravachol’s significance was not in his bombs but in his execution. Meantime, violence erupted across the Atlantic.

Anarchism, which rejected government in sexual matters as in all others, had its love affairs, and one that was to have explosive effect upon the movement in America was at this time in progress in New York. It began in 1890 at a memorial meeting for the Haymarket martyrs at which the speaker was the German exile Johann Most, with the twisted face and deformed body, who edited the Anarchist weekly
Freiheit
in New York.

An untended childhood accident which caused his facial disfigurement, a scorned and lonely youth spent wandering from place to place, sometimes starving, sometimes finding odd jobs, was natural food for an animus against society. In Most it sprouted with the energy of a weed. In Germany he learned the bookbinder’s trade, wrote wrathfully for the revolutionary press, and achieved one term as deputy in the Reichstag in the seventies. Exiled for his revolutionary incitement, he had taken refuge first in England, where he became an Anarchist, founded his journal of fiery sentiments and welcomed the regicide of Alexander II in 1881 with such enthusiasm that he received a prison term of eighteen months. When his comrades, while he was in gaol, applauded equally the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish by Irish rebels in Dublin, England’s traditional tolerance was outraged at last;
Freiheit
was suppressed and Most, when he emerged, took his paper and his passion to the United States.

Freiheit
’s incitements and ferocity continued unabated and to one reader seemed like “lava shooting forth flames of ridicule, scorn and defiance … and breathing hatred.” After working secretly for a time in an explosives factory in Jersey City, Most published a manual on the manufacture of bombs and expounded in uninhibited language in
Freiheit
on the uses of dynamite and nitroglycerine. His goal, like his hate, was generalized and directed toward destruction of the “existing class rule” by “relentless” revolutionary action. Most cared nothing for the eight-hour day, that “damned thing” as he called it, which even if gained would serve only to distract the masses from the real issue: the struggle against capitalism and for a new society.

In 1890 Most was forty-four, of medium height with gray, bushy hair crowning a large head, of which the lower part was twisted to the left by the dislocated jaw. A harsh, embittered man, he was yet so eloquent and impassioned when he spoke at the memorial meeting that his repellent appearance was forgotten. To one female member of the audience, his blue eyes were “sympathetic” and he seemed to “radiate hatred and love.”

Emma Goldman, a recent Russian Jewish immigrant of twenty-one, with a rebellious soul and a highly excitable nature, was transported. Her companion of the evening was Alexander Berkman, like herself a Russian Jew, who had lived in the United States less than three years. Persecution in Russia and poverty in America had endowed both these young people with exalted revolutionary purpose. Anarchism became their creed. Emma’s first job in the United States was sewing in a factory ten and a half hours a day for $2.50 a week. Her room cost $3.00 a month. Berkman came from a slightly better-class family which in Russia had been sufficiently well-off to employ servants and send him to the
gymnasium.
But economic disaster had overtaken them; a favorite uncle of revolutionary sentiments had been seized by the police and never seen again and Sasha (Alexander) had been expelled from school for writing a Nihilist and atheistic composition. Now twenty, he had “the neck and chest of a giant,” a high studious forehead, intelligent eyes, and a severe expression. From the “tension and fearful excitement” of Most’s speech about the martyrs, Emma sought “relief” in Sasha’s arms and subsequently her enthusiasm led her to Most’s arms as well. The tensions of this arrangement proved no different from those of any bourgeois triangle.

In June, 1892, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, the steelworkers’ union struck in protest against a reduction of wages by the Carnegie Steel Company. The company had ordered the wage cut in a deliberate effort to crush the union, and in expectation of battle, set about erecting a military stockade topped with barbed wire behind which it planned to operate the mills with three hundred strikebreakers recruited by the Pinkerton Agency. Having become a philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie discreetly retreated for the summer to a salmon river in Scotland, leaving his manager, Henry Clay Frick, to do battle with organized labour. No one was more competent or more willing. A remarkably handsome man of forty-three, with a strong black moustache merging into a short black beard, a courteous controlled manner and eyes which could become suddenly “very steely,” Frick came from a well-established Pennsylvania family. He dressed with quiet distinction in dark blue with a hairline stripe, never wore jewelry and when offended by a cartoon of himself in the Pittsburgh
Leader
, said to his secretary, “This won’t do. This won’t do at all. Find out who owns this paper and buy it.”