Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [52]
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