Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [51]
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