Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [62]
Almost without pause fell the next blow, the last in the French series and the most important in its victim, although the least in its assassin. In Lyons on June 24, 1894, during a visit to the Exposition in that city, President Sadi Carnot was stabbed to death by a young Italian workman with the cry, “Vive la révolution! Vive l’anarchie!” The President was driving in an open carriage through crowds that lined the streets, and had given orders to his escort to let people approach if they wanted to. When a young man holding a rolled-up newspaper thrust himself forward from the front row, the guards did not stop him, thinking the newspaper contained a bouquet of flowers for the President. Instead it contained a dagger and, with a terrible blow, the young man plunged it six inches into the President’s abdomen. Carnot died within three hours. His wife next day received a letter mailed before the attack and addressed to the “Widow Carnot” which enclosed a photograph of Ravachol inscribed, “He is avenged.”
The assassin was a baker’s apprentice, not yet twenty-one, named Santo Caserio. Born in Italy, he had become acquainted with Anarchist groups in Milan, the home of political turbulence. At eighteen he was sentenced for distributing Anarchist tracts to soldiers. Following the drift of other restless and troublesome characters, he went to Switzerland and then to Cette in the south of France, where he found work and a local group of Anarchists which went by the name “Les Coeurs de Chêne” (“Hearts of Oak”). He was brooding over Vaillant’s case and the refusal of the President to give a reprieve when he read in the newspapers of the President’s forthcoming visit to Lyons. Caserio decided at once to do a “great deed.” He asked for a holiday from his job and for twenty francs that were due him, and with the money, bought a dagger and took the train for Lyons. There he followed the crowds until he met his opportunity.
Afterwards, in the hands of his captors and in court he was docile, smiling and calm. His wan and rather common but gentle face looked to one journalist like “the white mask of a floured Pierrot illuminated by two bright little blue eyes, obstinately fixed. His Up was ornamented by a poor little shadow of a moustache which seemed to have sprouted almost apologetically.” During his interrogation and trial he remained altogether placid and talked quite rationally about Anarchist principles, by which he appeared obsessed. He described his act as a deliberate “propaganda of the deed.” His only show of emotion was at mention of his mother, to whom he was greatly attached and to whom he had been writing letters regularly when away from home. When the gaoler came to wake him on August 15, the day of execution, he wept for a moment and then made no further sound on the way to the guillotine. Just as his neck was placed on the block he murmured a few words which were interpreted by some as the traditional “Vive l’anarchie!” and by others as “A voeni nen,” meaning, in the Lombard dialect, “I don’t want to.”
When Anarchism slew the very chief of State, it reached a climax in France after which, suddenly, face to face with political realities and the facts of life in the labour movement, it retreated. At first, however, it looked as if the Anarchists would be handed a magnificent opportunity for either propaganda or martyrdom. Charging to the offensive, the Government on August 6 staged a mass trial of thirty of the best known Anarchists in an effort to prove conspiracy between theorists and terrorists. As the known terrorists had already been executed, the only examples the Government could produce were three minor characters of the “burglar” type, none of them Ravachols. Of the leaders, Elisée Reclus had left