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 a grave robbery for the jewelry on a corpse, the murder of a ninety-two-year-old miser and his housekeeper, the further murder of two old women who kept a hardware shop—which had netted him forty sous—and of another shopkeeper, which had netted him nothing. “See this hand?” Ravachol was quoted as saying; “it has killed as many bourgeois as it has fingers.” At the same time he had been living peaceably in lodgings, teaching the little daughter of his landlord to read.
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 it sprouted with the energy of a weed. In Germany he learned the bookbinder’s trade, wrote wrathfully for the revolutionary press, and achieved one term as deputy in the Reichstag in the seventies. Exiled for his revolutionary incitement, he had taken refuge first in England, where he became an Anarchist, founded his journal of fiery sentiments and welcomed the regicide of Alexander II in 1881 with such enthusiasm that he received a prison term of eighteen months. When his comrades, while he was in gaol, applauded equally the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish by Irish rebels in Dublin, England’s traditional tolerance was outraged at last; Freiheit was suppressed and Most, when he emerged, took his paper and his passion to the United States.
Freiheit’s incitements and ferocity continued unabated and to one reader seemed like “lava shooting forth flames of ridicule, scorn and defiance … and breathing hatred.” After working secretly for a time in an explosives factory in Jersey City, Most published a manual on the manufacture of bombs and expounded in uninhibited language in Freiheit on the uses of dynamite and nitroglycerine. His goal, like his hate, was generalized and directed toward destruction of the “existing class rule” by “relentless” revolutionary action. Most cared nothing for the eight-hour day, that “damned thing” as he called it, which even if gained would serve only to distract the masses from the real issue: the struggle against capitalism and for a new society.
In 1890 Most was forty-four, of medium height with gray, bushy hair crowning a large head, of which the lower part was twisted to the left by the dislocated jaw. A harsh, embittered man, he was yet so eloquent and impassioned when he spoke at the memorial meeting that his repellent appearance was forgotten. To one female member of the audience, his blue eyes were “sympathetic” and he seemed to “radiate hatred and love.”
Emma Goldman, a recent Russian Jewish immigrant of twenty-one, with a rebellious soul and a highly excitable nature, was transported. Her companion of the evening was Alexander Berkman, like herself a Russian Jew, who had lived in the United States less than three years. Persecution in Russia and poverty in America had endowed both these young people with exalted revolutionary purpose. Anarchism became their creed. Emma’s first job in the United States was sewing in a factory ten and a half hours a day for $2.50 a week. Her room cost $3.00 a month. Berkman came from a slightly better-class family which in Russia had been sufficiently well-off to employ servants and send him to the gymnasium. But economic disaster had overtaken them; a favorite uncle of revolutionary sentiments had been seized by the police and never seen again and Sasha (Alexander) had been expelled from school for writing a Nihilist and atheistic composition. Now twenty, he had “the neck and chest of a giant,” a high studious forehead, intelligent eyes, and a severe expression. From the “tension and fearful excitement” of M
ost’s speech about the martyrs, Emma sought “relief” in Sasha’s arms and subsequently her enthusiasm led her to Most’s arms as well. The tensions of this arrangement proved no different from those of any bourgeois triangle.
In June, 1892, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, the steelworkers’ union struck in protest against a reduction of wages by the Carnegie Steel Company. The company had ordered the wage cut in a deliberate effort to crush the union, and in expectation of battle, set about erecting a military stockade topped with barbed wire behind which it planned to operate the mills with three hundred strikebreakers recruited by the Pinkerton Agency. Having become a philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie discreetly retreated for the summer to a salmon river in Scotland, leaving his manager, Henry Clay Frick, to do battle with organized labour. No one was more competent or more willing. A remarkably handsome man of forty-three, with a strong black moustache merging into a short black beard, a courteous controlled manner and eyes which could become suddenly “very steely,” Frick came from a well-established Pennsylvania family. He dressed with quiet distinction in dark blue with a hairline stripe, never wore jewelry and when offended by a cartoon of himself in the Pittsburgh Leader, said to his secretary, “This won’t do. This won’t do at all. Find out who owns this paper and buy it.”
On July 5 the strikebreakers recruited by Frick were to be brought in to operate the plant. When they were ferried in armored barges across the Monongahela and were about to land, the strikers attacked with homemade cannon, rifles, dynamite and burning oil. The day of furious battle ended with ten killed, seventy wounded, and the Pinkertons thrown back from the plant by the bleeding but triumphant workers. The Governor of Pennsylvania sent in eight thousand militia, the country was electrified, and Frick in the midst of smoke, death, and uproar, issued an ultimatum declaring his refusal to deal with the union and his intention to operate with non-union labour and to discharge and evict from their homes any workers who refused to return to their jobs.
“Homestead! I must go to Homestead!” shouted Berkman on the memorable evening when Emma rushed in waving the newspaper. It was, they felt, “the psychological moment for the deed.… The whole country was aroused against Frick and a blow aimed at him now would call the attention of the whole world to the cause.” The workers were striking not only for themselves but “for all time, for a free life, for Anarchism”—although they did not know it. As yet they were only “blindly rebellious,” but Berkman felt a mission to “illumine” the struggle and impart the “vision of Anarchism which alone could imbue discontent with conscious revolutionary purpose.” The removal of a tyrant was not merely justifiable; it was “an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people” and it was the “highest duty” and the “test of every true revolutionist” to die in its cause.
Berkman boarded the train for Pittsburgh bent on killing Frick but surviving long enough himself “to justify my case in court.” Then in prison he would “die by my own hand like Lingg.”
On July 23 he made his way to Frick’s office, where he was admitted when he presented a card on which he had written, “Agent of a New York employment firm.” Frick was conferring with his vice-chairman, John Leishman, when Berkman entered, pulled out a revolver and fired. His bullet wounded Frick on the left side of his neck; he fired again wounding him on the right side, and as he fired the third time, his arm was knocked up by Leishman so that he missed altogether. Frick, bleeding, had risen and lunged at Berkman, who, attacked also by Leishman, fell to the floor dragging the other two men with him. Freeing one hand, he managed to extract a dagger from his pocket, and stabbed Frick in the side and legs seven times before he was finally pulled off by a deputy sheriff and others who rushed into the room.
“Let me see his face,” whispered Frick, his own face ashen, his beard and clothes streaked with blood. The sheriff jerked Berkman’s head back by his hair, and the eyes of Frick and his assailant met. At the police station two caps of fulminate of mercury of the same kind Lingg had used to blow himself up were found on Berkman’s person (some say, in his mouth). Frick lived, the strike was broken by the militia, and Berkman went to prison for sixteen years.
All this left the country gasping, but the public shock was as nothing compared to that which rocked Anarchist circles when in Freiheit of August, 27, Johann Most, the priest of violence, turned apostate to his past and denounced Berkman’s attempt at tyrannicide. He said the importance of the terrorist deed had been overestimated and that it could not mobilize revolt in a country where there was no proletarian class-consciousness, and he dealt with Berkman, now a hero in Anarchist eyes, in terms of contempt. When he repeated these views verbally at a meeting, a female fury rose up out of the audience. It was Emma Goldman, armed with a horsewhip, who sprang upon the platform and flayed her former lover across his face and body. The scandal was tremendous.
That personal emotions played a part both in Most’s act and hers can hardly be doubted. Most may have taken his cue from Kropotkin and Malatesta, who already in Ravachol’s case had begun to question the value of gestures of violence. But the dedicated Berkman was no Ravachol and it was clearly jealousy of him as a younger rival both in love and in the revolutionary movement that galled Most. His splenetic attack on a fellow Anarchist who had been ready to die for the Deed was a stunning betrayal from which the movement in America never fully recovered.
It had no effect on the public at large, who were aware only of the Anarchists’ blows, or attentats, as the French called them. Society’s fear of the disruptive force within its bowels grew with each attack. In the year after Homestead the fear burst out when Governor John P. Altgeld of Illinois pardoned the three remaining Haymarket prisoners. A strange, hard, passionate man who had been born in Germany and brought to the United States at the age of three months, Altgeld had come from a boyhood of hardship and manual labour. He had fought in the Civil War at sixteen, had studied law, become State’s Attorney, judge and finally Governor and had made a fortune in real estate, and was an almost demonic liberal. He had pledged himself to right the injustice done by the drumhead trial as soon as he had the power and he was also not unmotivated by a personal grudge against Judge Gary. As soon as he was elected Governor he set in motion a study of the trial records and on June 26, 1893, issued his pardon along with an 18,000-word document affirming the illegality of the original verdict and sentence. He showed the jury to have been packed and “selected to convict,” the judge prejudiced against the defendants and unwilling to conduct a fair trial, and the State’s Attorney to have admitted that there was no case against at least one of the defendants. These facts had not been unknown, and in the year between the verdict and the hanging, many prominent Chicagoans, uneasy over the death sentence, had worked privately for pardon and had in fact been responsible for the commutation of the sentence of the three defendants now still alive. But when Altgeld displayed publicly the cloven hoof of the Law, he shook public faith in a fundamental institution of society. Had he pardoned the Anarchists as a pure act of forgiveness, there would have been little excitement. As it was, he was excoriated by the press, by ministers in their pulpits, by important persons of all varieties. The Toronto Blade said he had encouraged “the overthrow of civilization.” So outraged was the New York Sun that it resorted to verse:
Oh wild Chicago …
Lift up your weak and guilty hands
From out the wreck of states
And as the crumbling towers fall down,
Write ALTGELD on your gates!
Altgeld was defeated for office at the next election. Although there were other reasons besides the pardon, he never held office again before he died at fifty-five in 1902.
Simultaneously with these events the era of dynamite exploded in Spain. There it opened with more ferocity, continued in more savagery and excess and lasted longer than in any other country. Spain is the desperado of countries, with a tragic sense of life. Its mountains are naked, its cathedrals steeped in g
loom, its rivers dry up in summer, one of its greatest kings built his own mausoleum to inhabit while he lived. Its national sport is not a game but a ritual of danger and blood-letting. Its special quality was expressed by the deposed Queen, Isabella II, who, on a visit to the capital in 1890, wrote to her daughter, “Madrid is sad and everything is more unusual than ever.”
In Spain it was natural that the titans’ struggle between Marx and Bakunin for control of the working-class movement should have ended in victory for the Anarchist tendency. In Spain, however, where everything is more serious, the Anarchists organized, with the result that they took root and their power lasted long into the modern period. Like Russia, Spain was a cauldron in which the revolutionary element boiled against a tight lid of oppression. The Church, the landowners, the Guardia Civil, all the guardians of the State held the lid down. Although Spain had a Cortes and a façade of the democratic process, in reality the working class did not have open to it the legal means for reform and change which existed in France and England. Consequently, the appeal of Anarchism and its explosive methods was stronger. But unlike “pure” Anarchism, the Spanish form was collectivist because it had to be. Oppression was too heavy to allow hopes of individual action.
In January, 1892, occurred an outburst which, like the May Day affair at Clichy, was to inaugurate a terrible cycle of deed, retaliation and revenge. Agrarian revolt was endemic in the south where the immense latifundia of absentee landlords were farmed by peasants who worked all day for the price of a loaf of bread. Four hundred of them now rose in revolt, and armed with pitchforks, scythes and what firearms they could lay hold of, marched on the village of Jerez de la Frontera in Andalusia. Their object was the rescue of five comrades sentenced to life imprisonment in chains for complicity in a labour affair ten years earlier. The rising was promptly suppressed by the military and four of the leaders garroted, a Spanish form of execution in which the victim is tied with his back to a post and strangled with a scarf which the executioner twists from behind by means of a wooden handle. Zarzuela, one of the condemned, died calling upon the people to “avenge us.”
The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 Page 12
