Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [60]
All France understood and some, other than Anarchists, even sympathized with his gesture. Ironically, these sympathizers came from the extreme right, whose anti-Republican forces—Royalists, Jesuits, floating aristocracy and anti-Semites—despised the bourgeois state for their own reasons. Edouard Drumont, author of La France Juive and editor of La Libre Parole, who was busy raging at the Jews involved in the Panama scandal, produced a piece richly entitled “On Mud, Blood and Gold—From Panama to Anarchism.” “The men of blood,” he said, “were born out of the mud of Panama.” The Duchesse d’Uzès, married into one of the three premier ducal families, offered to give a home and education to Vaillant’s daughter (whom Vaillant, however, preferred to leave to the guardianship of Sebastien Faure).
In an angry mood, and determined to finish off the Anarchists once and for all, the government acted to stifle their propaganda. Two days after Vaillant’s bomb, the Chamber unanimously passed two laws making it a crime to print any direct or “indirect” provocation of terrorist acts or to associate with intent to commit such acts. Although known as les lois scélérates (the scoundrelly laws), they were hardly an unreasonable measure, since the preaching of the Deed was in fact the principal incitement. Police raided Anarchist cafés and meeting places, two thousand warrants were issued, clubs and discussion groups scattered, La Révolte and Le Père Peinard closed down, and leading Anarchists left the country.
On January 10, Vaillant came to trial before five judges in red robes and black gold-braided caps. Charged with intent to kill, he insisted that he had intended only to wound. “If I had wanted to kill I could have used a heavier charge and filled the container with bullets; instead, I used only nails.” His counsel, Maître Labori, who was destined for drama and violence in a far more famous case, defended him with spirit as un exaspéré de la misère. It was parliament, Labori said, which was guilty, for failing to remedy “the misery of poverty that oppresses one third of a nation.” Despite Labori’s efforts, Vaillant received the death penalty, the first time in the Nineteenth Century it had been imposed on a person who had not killed. Trial, verdict and sentence were rushed through in a single day. Almost immediately petitions for pardon began to assail President Sadi Carnot, including one from a group of sixty deputies led by Abbé Lemire, who had been one of those wounded by the bomb. A fiery Socialist, Jules Breton, predicted that if Carnot “pronounced coldly for death, not a single man in France would grieve for him if he were one day himself to be victim of a bomb.” As incitement to murder, this cost Breton two years in prison and proved to be the second comment on the Vaillant affair, which was to end in strange and sinister coincidence.
The government could not pardon an Anarchist attack upon the State. Carnot refused to remit the sentence and Vaillant was duly executed on February 5, 1894, crying, “Death to bourgeois society! Long live Anarchy!”
The train of death gathered speed. Only seven days after Vaillant went to the guillotine, he was avenged by a blow of such seemingly vicious unreason that the public felt itself in the midst of nightmare. This time the bomb was aimed not against any representative of law, property or State, but against the man in the street. It exploded in the Café Terminus of the Gare St-Lazare in the midst, as Le Journal wrote, “of peaceful, anonymous citizens gathered in a café to have a beer before going to bed.” One was killed and twenty wounded. As later became clear, the perpetrator acted upon a mad logic of his own. Even before he came to trial, the streets of Paris rocked with more explosions. One in