The anarchist movement had taken a considerable development in France
during the years 1881 and 1882. It was generally believed that the
French mind was hostile to communism, and within the International
Workingmen’s Association ‘collectivism’ was preached instead.
Collectivism meant then the possession of the instruments of production
in common, each separate group having, however, to settle for itself
whether the consumption of produce should be on individualistic or
communistic lines. In reality, the French mind was hostile only to
the monastic communism, to the _phalanstère_ of the old schools. When
the Jura Federation, at its congress of 1880, boldly declared itself
anarchist-communist--that is, in favour of free communism--anarchism
won wide sympathy in France. Our paper began to spread in that country,
letters were exchanged in great numbers with French workers, and an
anarchist movement of importance rapidly developed at Paris and in some
of the provinces, especially in the Lyons region. When I crossed France
in 1881, on my way from Thonon to London, I visited Lyons, St. Etienne,
and Vienne, lecturing there, and I found in these cities a considerable
number of workers ready to accept our ideas.
By the end of 1882 a terrible crisis prevailed in the Lyons region. The
silk industry was paralysed, and the misery among the weavers was so
great that crowds of children stood every morning at the gates of the
barracks, where the soldiers gave away what they could spare of their
bread and soup. This was the beginning of the popularity of General
Boulanger, who had permitted this distribution of food. The miners of
the region were also in a very precarious state.
I knew that there was a great deal of fermentation, but during the
eleven months I had stayed at London I had lost close contact with
the French movement. A few weeks after I returned to Thonon I learned
from the papers that the miners of Monceau-les-Mines, incensed at the
vexations of the ultra-Catholic owners of the mines, had begun a sort
of movement; they were holding secret meetings, talking of a general
strike; the stone crosses erected on all the roads round the mines
were thrown down or blown up by dynamite cartridges, which are largely
used by the miners in underground work, and often remain in their
possession. The agitation at Lyons also took a more violent character.
The anarchists, who were rather numerous in the city, allowed no
meeting of the opportunist politicians to be held without obtaining
a hearing for themselves--storming the platform, as a last resource.
They brought forward resolutions to the effect that the mines and all
necessaries for production, as well as the dwelling-houses, ought
to be owned by the nation; and these resolutions were carried with
enthusiasm, to the horror of the middle classes.
The feeling among the workers was growing every day against the
opportunist town councillors and political leaders as also against
the Press, who made light of a very acute crisis, and undertook
nothing to relieve the widespread misery. As is usual at such times,
the fury of the poorer people turned especially against the places
of amusement and debauch, which become only the more conspicuous in
times of desolation and misery, as they impersonate for the worker
the egotism and dissoluteness of the wealthier classes. A place
particularly hated by the workers was the underground café at the
Théatre Bellecour, which remained open all night, and where, in the
small hours of the morning, one could see newspaper men and politicians
feasting and drinking in company with gay women. Not a meeting was
held but some menacing allusion was made to that café, and one night a
dynamite cartridge was exploded in it by an unknown hand. A socialist
working-man, who was occasionally there, jumped to blow out the lighted
fuse of the cartridge, and was killed, while a few of the feasting
politicians were slightly wounded. Next day a dynamite cartridge was
exploded at the doors of a recruiting bureau, and it was said that the
anarchists intended to blow up the huge statue of the Virgin which
stands on one of the hills of Lyons. One must have lived at Lyons or
in its neighbourhood to realize the extent to which the population
and the schools are still in the hands of the Catholic clergy, and to
understand the hatred that the male portion of the population feel
toward the clergy.
A panic now seized the wealthier classes of Lyons. Some sixty
anarchists--all workers, and only one middle-class man, Emile Gautier,
who was on a lecturing tour in the region--were arrested. The Lyons
papers undertook at the same time to incite the government to arrest
me, representing me as the leader of the agitation, who had come from
England in order to direct the movement. Russian spies began to parade
again in conspicuous numbers in our small town. Almost every day I
received letters, evidently written by spies of the international
police, mentioning some dynamite plot, or mysteriously announcing
that consignments of dynamite had been shipped to me. I made quite
a collection of these letters, writing on each of them ‘Police
Internationale,’ and they were taken away by the police when they made
a search in my house. But they did not dare to produce these letters
in court, nor did they ever restore them to me. In December, the house
where I stayed was searched in Russian fashion, and my wife, who was
going to Geneva, was arrested at the station in Thonon, and also
searched. But of course nothing was found to compromise me or anyone
else.
Ten days passed, during which I was quite free to go away, if I
had wished to do so. I received several letters advising me to
disappear--one of them from an unknown Russian friend, perhaps a
member of the diplomatic staff, who seemed to have known me, and who
wrote that I must leave at once, because otherwise I should be the
first victim of an extradition treaty which was about to be concluded
between France and Russia. I remained where I was; and when the ‘Times’
inserted a telegram saying that I had disappeared from Thonon, I wrote
a letter to the paper giving my address, and declaring that since so
many of my friends were arrested I had no intention of leaving.
In the night of December 21, my brother-in-law died in my arms. We knew
that his illness was incurable, but to see a young life extinguished
in your presence, after a brave struggle against death, is terrible.
We both were quite broken down. Three or four hours later, as the dull
winter morning was dawning, gendarmes came to the house to arrest me.
Seeing in what a state my wife was, I asked to remain with her till the
burial was over, promising upon my word of honour to be at the prison
door at a given hour; but this was refused, and the same night I was
taken to Lyons. Elisée Reclus, notified by telegraph, came at once,
bestowing on my wife all the gentleness of his great heart; friends
came from Geneva; and although the funeral was an absolutely civil one,
which was a novelty in that little town, half of the population was at
the burial, to show my wife that the hearts of the poorer classes and
the simple Savoy peasants were with us, and not with their rulers. When
my trial was going on, the peasants followed it with sympathy, and used
to come every day from the mountain villages to town to get the papers.
Another incident which profoundly touched me was the arrival at Lyons
of an English friend. He came on behalf of a gentleman well known and
esteemed in the English political world, in whose family I had spent
many happy hours at London in 1882. He was the bearer of a considerable
sum of money for the purpose of obtaining my release on bail, and he
transmitted me at the same time the message of my London friend that
I need not care in the least about the bail, but must leave France
immediately. In some mysterious way he managed to see me freely--not in
the double-grated iron cage in which I was allowed interviews with my
wife--and he was as much affected by my refusal to accept the offer he
came to make as I was by this touching token of friendship on the part
of one who, with his wonderfully excellent wife, I had already learnt
to esteem so highly.
The French government wanted to have one of those great trials which
produce an impression upon the population, but there was no possibility
of prosecuting the arrested anarchists for the explosions. It would
have required bringing us before a jury, which in all probability
would have acquitted us. Consequently, the government adopted the
Machiavellian course of prosecuting us for having belonged to the
International Workingmen’s Association. There is in France a law,
passed immediately after the fall of the Commune, under which men can
be brought before a simple police court for having belonged to that
association. The maximum penalty is five years’ imprisonment; and a
police court is always sure to pronounce the sentences which are wanted
by the government.
The trial began at Lyons in the first days of January 1883, and lasted
about a fortnight. The accusation was ridiculous, as everyone knew that
none of the Lyons workers had ever joined the International, and it
entirely fell through, as may be seen from the following episode. The
only witness for the prosecution was the chief of the secret police at
Lyons, an elderly man, who was treated at the court with the utmost
respect. His report, I must say, was quite correct as concerns the
facts. The anarchists, he said, had taken hold of the population, they
had rendered opportunist meetings impossible because they spoke at each
such meeting, preaching communism and anarchism, and carrying with them
the audiences. Seeing that so far he had been fair in his testimony,
I ventured to ask him a question: ‘Did you ever hear the name of the
International Workingmen’s Association spoken of at Lyons?’
‘Never,’ he replied sulkily.
‘When I returned from the London congress of 1881, and did all I could
to have the International reconstituted in France, did I succeed?’
‘No. They did not find it revolutionary enough.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and turning toward the procureur I added, ‘There
you have all your case overthrown by your own witness!’
Nevertheless, we were all condemned for having belonged to the
International. Four of us got the maximum sentence, five years’
imprisonment and a hundred pounds’ fine; the remainder got from four
years to one year. In fact, our accusers never tried to prove anything
concerning the International. It was quite forgotten. We were simply
asked to speak about anarchism, and so we did. Not a word was said
about the explosions; and when one or two of the Lyons comrades
wanted to have this point cleared up, they were bluntly told that
they were not prosecuted for that, but for having belonged to the
International--to which I alone belonged.
There is always some comical incident in such trials, and this time
it was supplied by a letter of mine. There was nothing upon which
to base the whole accusation. Scores of searches had been made at
the French anarchists’, but only two letters of mine had been found.
The prosecution tried to make the best of them. One was written to a
French worker, who felt despondent and disheartened. I spoke to him in
my letter about the great times we were living in, the great changes
coming, the birth and spreading of new ideas, and so on. The letter
was not long, and little capital was made out of it by the procureur.
As to the other letter, it was twelve pages long. I had written it
to another French friend, a young shoemaker. He earned his living by
making shoes in his own room for a shop. On his left side he used to
have a small iron stove, upon which he himself cooked his daily meal,
and upon his right a small stool upon which he wrote long letters to
the comrades, without leaving his shoemaker’s low bench. After he had
made just as many pairs of shoes as were required for covering the
expenses of his extremely modest living, and for sending a few francs
to his old mother in the country, he would spend long hours in writing
letters in which he developed the theoretical principles of anarchism
with admirable good sense and intelligence. He is now a writer, well
known in France and generally respected for the integrity of his
character. Unfortunately, at that time he would cover eight or twelve
pages of notepaper without having put one single full-stop, or even a
comma. I once sat down and wrote a long letter in which I explained to
him how our thoughts subdivide into groups of sentences, which must be
marked by full-stops; into separate sentences which must be separated
by stops, and finally into secondary ones which deserve the charity of
being marked at least with commas. I told him how much it would improve
his writings if he took this simple precaution.
This letter was read by the prosecutor before the court, and elicited
from him most pathetic comments: ‘You have heard, gentlemen, this
letter’--he went on, addressing the court. ‘You have listened to it.
There is nothing particular in it at first sight. He gives a lesson
of grammar to a worker.... But’--and here his voice vibrated with
accents of deep emotion--‘it was not in order to help a poor worker in
instruction which he, owing probably to his laziness, failed to get
at school. It was not to help him in earning an honest living.... No,
gentlemen--it was written in order to inspire him with hatred for our
grand and beautiful institutions, in order only the better to infuse
him with the venom of anarchism, in order to make of him only a more
terrible enemy of society.... Cursed be the day that Kropótkin put his
foot on the soil of France!’ he exclaimed with a wonderful pathos.
We could not help laughing like boys all the time he delivered that
speech; the judges stared at him as if to tell him that he was
overdoing his rôle, but he seemed not to notice anything, and, carried
on by his eloquence, he went on speaking with more and more theatrical
gestures and intonations. He really did his best to obtain his reward
from the Russian government.
Very soon after the condemnation the presiding magistrate was promoted
to the magistracy of an assize court. As to the procureur and another
magistrate--one would hardly believe it--the Russian government offered
them the Russian cross of Sainte-Anne, and they were allowed by the
republic to accept it! The famous Russian alliance had thus its origin
in the Lyons trial.
This trial, which lasted a fortnight, during which most brilliant
anarchist speeches, reported by all the papers, were made by such
first-rate speakers as the worker Bernard and Emile Gautier, and during
which all the accused took a very firm attitude, preaching all the time
our doctrines, had a powerful influence in spreading anarchist ideas
in France, and assuredly contributed to some extent to the revival of
socialism in other countries. As to the condemnation, it was so little
justified by the proceedings that the French Press--with the exception
of the papers devoted to the government--openly blamed the magistrates.
Even the moderate ‘Journal des Economistes’ blamed the condemnation,
which ‘nothing in the proceedings of the court could have made one
foresee.’ The contest between the accusers and ourselves was won by us,
in the public opinion. Immediately a proposition of amnesty was brought
before the Chamber, and received about a hundred votes in support of
it. It came up regularly every year, each time securing more and more
votes, until we were released.