The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

On the evening of the attack on the home of the prosecutor, a gaunt, bearded man in his forties had dinner at the Restaurant Very on the Boulevard Magenta, and talked to the waiter, a man named Lhérot, about the explosion – which no one yet knew about. When the same man came back two days later, Lhérot tipped off the police and he was arrested. But was he Ravachol? Fortunately, the police had a new method of identification, invented by a police clerk named Bertillon. He believed that certain measurements were unique – the circumference of the head, length of hand, foot and so on – and had talked the police into giving his system a trial. Konigstein-Ravachol had been briefly under arrest after the murder of an old miser at his hut in the forest, but released for lack of evidence: however, Bertillon had taken his measurements at the time. They now proved that this man who had talked of bombing was Ravachol himself. (As a result, Bertillon became world-famous, and his system was adopted by every major police force in the world – only to be replaced in a few years by fingerprinting.)

The waiter Lhérot talked a little too triumphantly about his part in the arrest; the evening before the trial, there was a bomb explosion at the restaurant, which killed the proprietor, Lhérot’s brother-in-law.

Ravachol himself was a figure who gave the French public nightmares. Born forty-two years earlier, he had become the breadwinner of the family when his father – named Koenigstein – had deserted them when his son was eight. Like Troppmann, he became devoted to Eugene Sue’s Wandering Jew, and its revelations of the wickedness of the Jesuits had turned him into an atheist. When he became interested in anarchism, both he and a younger brother were dismissed by their employer. He watched the family starve – his young sister died – and dreamed of revenge. He took up robbery to supplement his income. He felt no remorse about his four victims because, he said, they were ‘middle class’.

The explosion in the restaurant intimidated the judges, and they sentenced Ravachol to a prison term – although bombing was a capital offence. But when the police were able to produce evidence for the four other murders, Ravachol was tried again and sentenced to death. He cried ‘I shall be avenged!’

In November of that year, a bomb was found in the Paris office of a mining company that was involved in a strike; a policeman carefully carried it off to the local station, where it exploded, killing five. Paris, suddenly, was thrown into panic; restaurants suffered as no one dared to venture into one. There was a rumour that the anarchists intended to poison the city’s reservoirs. But many of the younger poets and painters revelled in all the excitement and declared their support for anarchism.

In December 1893, another embittered member of the unemployed, August Vaillant, who had been put out on to the streets at the age of twelve, threw a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies. It was a small bomb, intended to alarm rather than kill. A poet named Laurent Tailhade was enthusiastic, and exclaimed: ‘What does it matter about the victims if it is a fine gesture?’ The judges disagreed, and Vaillant was executed. A week later, a bomb exploded in the restaurant of the Gare St-Lazare, killing one and injuring twenty. Two more explosions in Paris streets killed only one passer-by; and when a bomb exploded in the pocket of a Belgian anarchist named Jean Pauwels, killing him, he was found to be responsible for the two street explosions. A bomb in the Restaurant Foyot put out the eye of the poet Laurent Tailhade. The man who was finally arrested and tried for the Gare St-Lazare explosion, Emile Henry, said it was aimed against the bourgeoisie who could afford to eat in restaurants.

On 24 June 1894, the president of France, Sadi Carnot, was driving in an open carriage through the streets of Lyons, where he was visiting an exhibition; he told the police to allow people to approach him if they wanted to. A young man holding a rolled-up newspaper stepped forward, then removed a knife from the newspaper and plunged it into Carnot’s stomach, shouting ‘Vive la revolution! Vive l’anarchie!’ He proved to be a young Italian, Santo Caserio. Carnot died soon after. Caserio was executed shouting ‘Vive l’anarchie!’

The anarchist scare in France ended abruptly. The government put thirty anarchists on trial, accused of conspiracy. The jury refused to be stampeded, and acquitted them all, except three burglars. This rational gesture deprived the anarchists of more martyrs and took the steam out of their propaganda. Besides, leaders of the movement, such as Kropotkin and Malatesta, were already beginning to doubt the wisdom of violence when it attracted undesirables like Ravachol. The French socialist movement became theoretical once again.

In America, two events helped to take some of the bitterness out of the anarchist struggle. The most articulate and passionate spokesman of revolution, Johann Most (who had been expelled from Germany for liberalism, then from England for praising the Irishmen who assassinated Lord Frederick Cavendish in Phoenix Park, Dublin) suddenly announced that he had ceased to support ‘the propaganda of the deed’; he denounced a young anarchist named Alexander Berkman who had made an attempt to kill the manager of the Carnegie Steel Works during a strike. The denunciation may have been prompted by the fact that Berkman had supplanted Most as the lover of a young Jewish revolutionary, Emma Goldman; nevertheless, it influenced large numbers of American anarchists. Then the governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, re-examined the case of the Chicago, anarchists and announced that the jury had been ‘packed’ with men who were specially chosen to convict. Altgeld’s motives were also not entirely disinterested – he had a personal grudge against Judge Gary, who had been in charge of the trial. Altgeld was defeated at the next election; but his gesture helped to restore the good name of American justice, and to undermine the anarchists’ insistence that everyone in authority was a crook.

In Spain, it was a grimmer story. The Spaniards are strangers to moderation. In January 1892, there was a minor peasants’ revolt in Andalusia. Farm-workers marched to try and free four men who had been imprisoned for taking part in labour agitations ten years before; police broke them up and four ringleaders were killed by garrotting. In September 1893, the Spanish Prime Minister, Martinez de Campos, was attacked by an anarchist as he reviewed troops in Barcelona; two bombs thrown by a man named Pallas killed his horse and six people, but left him only bruised. Pallas was garrotted. Seven weeks later, two bombs were thrown in a theatre in Barcelona, causing panic and leaving twenty-two dead and fifty injured. The police now began to make indiscriminate arrests – the figure ran into thousands – and tortured suspects to extort confessions. Seven people confessed and were executed, including the man who had admitted the theatre bombing.

In June 1896, a bomb was thrown at a religious procession in Barcelona, killing eleven and injuring forty. The premier, Antonio Canovas del Castillo, ordered more mass arrests and torture. Four suspected terrorists were executed, seventy-six sentenced to prison terms. An account of the tortures published in a Paris newspaper caused an international outcry. In August 1897, Castillo was taking a holiday at a spa in the Basque mountains when he was approached by a pleasant-looking blond young man, who produced a revolver and killed him. Madame de Castillo hurled herself on him screaming ‘Assassin.’ ‘I am not an assassin,’ replied the young man gravely, ‘I am an avenger.’ He was in due course garrotted.

In September 1898, the empress Elizabeth of Austria, wife of the emperor Franz Joseph, was stabbed to death by a young Italian named Lucheni. He had remarked to a fellow workman: ‘Ah, how I’d like to kill somebody. But it must be somebody important, so it gets in the papers.’

The next victim was the last of the nineteenth century. King Humbert of Italy had escaped one assassination attempt in 1897, when a man tried to stab him in his carriage; he moved too quickly. But in July 1900 he was distributing prizes to athletes in Monza when a man stepped up to the carriage and killed him with four revolver shots. The assassin was an Italian named Bresci, who had travelled from America. He was sentenced to life imprisonment – since Italy had no death penalty – but committed suicide in prison.

In America, an unbalanced young Polish immigrant named Leon Czolgosz carried a clipping about the assassination of King Humbert wherever he went. He attended anarchist meetings, but seemed so muddled and strange that the comrades suspected him of being a police agent. In September 1901, Czolgosz stood in a line in Buffalo, New York State, to shake hands with President McKinley, who was visiting the American Exposition. He shot McKinley, who died eight days later. McKinley was the third American president to die at the hands of an assassin, the previous two being Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield – the latter shot by an unbalanced religious maniac named Charles Guiteau who liked to describe himself as the premier of England. Czolgosz was electrocuted, although one psychiatrist diagnosed him as suffering from delusions. And McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt, pushed Congress into amending the Immigration Act to exclude anyone who taught disbelief in or opposition to organised government.