Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [12]
More than most cities, Paris retained the memory of revolutions. In 1789, 1793, 1848, and 1871, Parisians had sacrificed their lives to overturn the established order — and, for a time, succeeded in doing so. The words “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” carved on buildings and monuments were a continual reminder of the ideals of the city’s revolutionary past, and by the turn of the twentieth century, many still felt these were goals that had yet to be fully realized. At sidewalk cafés and in shadowy meeting halls, people engaged in heated debates about politics and philosophy. These were by no means theoretical discussions. Parisians understood that ideas could be turned into action.
Among the most ardent of the would-be revolutionaries were those who espoused anarchism. The idea that the state — -government itself — is responsible for most of humankind’s problems has deep roots in the French psyche. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Swiss-born philosopher whose ideas formed the underpinnings of the French Revolution, idealized the “natural man” who needed no government to enforce his proper conduct. (Rousseau, however, fell short of opposing government altogether.) The first French thinker to discuss what he termed “anarchism” was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in his 1840 work Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (What Is Property?). His short answer: “Property is theft.” Though Proudhon did not advocate the abolition of private property and did find a place for government in his ideal society (a national bank, for example, would finance workers’ projects), his slogan appealed particularly to those who wanted a drastic leveling of social classes and an end to government that served to protect the wealthy.
The most prominent anarchist of the mid-nineteenth century was Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian émigré who had met Proudhon and tried to turn the Frenchman’s ideas into action. Bakunin took part in the rebellions in Paris in 1848 and Dresden in 1849. Imprisoned, he escaped and joined other Russian agitators in London, where he initiated ambitious schemes for worldwide anarchist revolutions. (Interestingly, he bitterly quarreled with Karl Marx, because Bakunin believed Marxist revolutions would increase the power of governments over their people — a prediction that proved correct.) Bakunin’s writings were not subtle or difficult to understand. He wrote: “The revolutionary is a man under vow. He ought to occupy himself entirely with one exclusive passion: the Revolution.… He has only one aim, one science: destruction.… Between him and society, there is war to the death, incessant, irreconcilable.” 36 Bakunin died in 1876, but his ideas remained influential, and anarchism grew into a force that was widely feared by those who had an investment in the established order.
Anarchism exploded on the scene in the 1890s in Paris and in other European cities. Its adherents called bomb throwing the “propaganda of the deed.” In Paris, a new reign of terror started in 1891, when workers protesting low pay marched under the black anarchist banner on May Day. This led to fighting between the police and anarchists in the Clichy section of Montmartre. Three marchers were arrested and one was sent to prison. In retaliation for the arrests, on March 11, 1892, bombs were set off at the house of the judge who had sentenced the protesters. A few days later another bomb went off at the house of the public prosecutor who had pressed the case. The chief culprit, a man named Ravachol, was captured largely through the efforts of Alphonse Bertillon, chief of the Service of Judicial Identity of the Paris police. Bertillon had developed a system of identifying suspects based on measurements of their faces and bodies and had introduced other scientific crime-fighting techniques. Ravachol’s capture, however, made Bertillon a household name.
Even so, the violence continued when an anarchist named Auguste Vaillant struck inside the Chamber of Deputies in December 1893. Vaillant had gone to the Chamber with a bomb, intending to kill the premier of France and the president of the Chamber.