To the judgment of these two friends I could trust implicitly. If Herzig frowned, muttering, ‘Yes—well—it may go,’ I knew that it would not do. And when Dumartheray, who always complained of the bad state of his spectacles when he had to read a not quite legibly written manuscript, and therefore generally read proofs only, interrupted his reading by exclaiming, ‘Non, ça ne va pas!’ I felt at once that it was not the proper thing, and tried to guess what thought or expression provoked his disapproval. I knew there was no use asking him, ‘Why will it not do?’ He would have answered: ‘Ah, that it not my affair; that’s yours. It won’t do; that is all I can say.’ But I felt he was right, and I simply sat down to rewrite the passage, or, taking the composing stick, set up in type a new passage instead.
I must own that we had also hard times with our paper. No sooner had we issued five numbers than the printer asked us to find another printing office. For the workers and their publications the liberty of the Press inscribed in the Constitutions has many limitations beside the paragraphs of the law. The printer had no objection to our paper—he liked it; but in Switzerland all printing offices depend upon the government, which employs them more or less in issuing statistical reports and the like; and our printer was plainly told that if he continued to harbour our paper he need not expect to have any more orders from the Geneva government. I made the tour of all the French-speaking part of Switzerland and saw the heads of all the printing offices, but everywhere, even from those who did not dislike the tendency of the paper, I received the same reply: ‘We could not live without orders from the government, and we should have none if we undertook to print “Le Révolté.”’
I returned to Geneva in very low spirits, but Dumartheray was only the more ardent and hopeful. ‘It’s all very simple,’ he said. ‘We buy our own printing plant on a three months’ credit, and in three months we shall have paid it.’ ‘But we have no money, only a few hundred francs,’ I objected. ‘Money? nonsense! Weshallhave it! Let us only order the type at once and immediately issue our next number and money will come!’ Once more he had judged quite right. When our next number came out from our ownImprimerie Jurassienne, and we had told our difficulties and issued a couple of small pamphlets besides—all of us helping in the printing—the money came in, mostly in coppers and silver, but it came. Over and over again in my life I have heard complaints among the advanced parties about the want of money, but the longer I live the more I am persuaded that our chief difficulty does not lie so much in money as inmenwho would march firmly and steadily towards a given aim in the right direction and inspire others. For twenty-one years our paper has now continued to live from hand to mouth, appeals for funds appearing on the front page almost in every number; but as long as there is a man who sticks to it and puts all his energy into it, as Herzig and Dumartheray did at Geneva, and Grave has done for the last sixteen years at Paris, the money comes in and the printing expenses are more or less covered, mainly by the pennies of the workers. For a paper, as for everything else, men are of an infinitely greater value than money.
We started our printing office in a tiny room, and our compositor was a Little Russian, who undertook to put our paper in type for the very modest sum of sixty francs a month. So long as he had his plain dinner every day, and the possibility of going occasionally to the opera, he cared for nothing more. ‘Going to the Turkish bath, John?’ I asked him once as I met him at Geneva in the street, with a brown paperparcel under his arm. ‘No, removing to a new lodging,’ he replied in his melodious voice, with his usual smile.
Unfortunately, he knew no French. I used to write my manuscript to the best of my caligraphic ability—often thinking with regret of the time I had wasted in the writing classes of our good Ebert at school—but John would read a French manuscript in the most fantastical way, and would set up in type the most extraordinary words of his own invention; but as he ‘kept the space,’ and the length of his lines had not to be altered for making the corrections, there were only a dozen letters in each line to be changed, and we managed to do it pretty well. We were on excellent terms with him, and I soon learned some ‘comping’ under his direction. The paper was always ready in time to take the proofs to a Swiss comrade who was the responsible editor, and to whom we pedantically submitted them before going to print, and then one of us carted the formes to a printing office. OurImprimerie Jurassiennesoon became widely known for its publications, especially for its pamphlets, which Dumartheray insisted upon never selling at more than one penny. Quite a new style had to be worked out for such pamphlets. I must say that I often had the wickedness of envying those writers who could use any amount of pages for developing their ideas, and were allowed to make the well-known excuse of Talleyrand: ‘I have not had the time to be short.’ When I had to condense the results of several months’ work—upon, let me say, the origins of law—into a penny pamphlet, I had to give extra time in order to be short. But we wrote for the workers, and twopence for a pamphlet is often too much for them. The result was that our penny and halfpenny pamphlets sold by the scores of thousands, and were reproduced in every other country in translations. My leaders from that period were edited later on, while Iwas in prison, by Elisée Reclus, under the title of ‘The Words of a Rebel,’ ‘Paroles d’un Révolté.’
France was always the chief object of our aims, but ‘Le Révolté’ was severely prohibited in France, and the smugglers have so many good things to import into France from Switzerland that they did not care to endanger their trade by meddling with papers. I went once with them, crossing in their company the French frontier, and found that they were very brave and reliable men, but I could not induce them to undertake the smuggling in of our paper. All we could do was to send it in sealed envelopes to about a hundred persons in France. We charged nothing for postage, leaving it to the voluntary contributions of our subscribers to cover our extra expenses—which they always did—but we often thought that the French police were missing a splendid opportunity for ruining ‘Le Révolté,’ by subscribing to a hundred copies and sending no voluntary contributions.
For the first year we had to rely entirely upon ourselves; but gradually Elisée Reclus took a greater interest in the work, and finally joined us, giving after my arrest more life than ever to the paper. Reclus had invited me to aid him in the preparation of the volume of his monumental geography, which dealt with the Russian dominions in Asia. He knew Russian himself, but he thought that, as I was well acquainted with Siberia, I might aid him in a special way; and as the health of my wife was poor, and the doctor had ordered her to leave Geneva with its cold winds at once, we removed early in the spring of 1880 to Clarens, where Elisée Reclus lived at that time. We settled above Clarens, in a small cottage overlooking the blue waters of the lake, with the pure snow of the Dent du Midi in the background. A streamlet that thundered like a mighty torrent after rains, carrying away immense rocks in its narrow bed, ran under our windows, and on theslope of the hill opposite rose the old castle of Châtelard, of which the owners, up to the revolution of theburla papei(the burners of the papers) in 1799, levied upon the neighbouring serfs feudal taxes on the occasion of their births, marriages, and deaths. Here, aided by my wife, with whom I used to discuss every event and every proposed paper, and who was a severe literary critic of my writings, I produced the best things that I wrote for ‘Le Révolté,’ among them the address ‘To the Young,’ which was spread in hundreds of thousands of copies in all languages. In fact, I worked out here the foundation of nearly all that I have written later on. Contact with educated men of similar ways of thinking is what we anarchist writers, scattered by proscription all over the world, miss, perhaps, more than anything else. At Clarens I had that contact with Elisée Reclus and Lefrançais, in addition to permanent contact with the workers, which I continued to maintain; and although I worked much for the geography, I was able to produce even more than usually for the anarchist propaganda.
In Russia, the struggle for freedom was taking a more and more acute character. Several political trials had been brought before high courts—the trial of ‘the hundred and ninety-three,’ of ‘the fifty,’ of ‘the Dolgúshin circle,’ and so on—and in all of them the same thing was apparent. The youth had gone to the peasants and the factory workers, preaching socialism to them; socialist pamphlets, printed abroad, had been distributed; appeals had been made to revolt—in some vague, indeterminate way—against the oppressive economical conditions. In short, nothing was done that is not done in the socialist agitation in every other country of the world. No traces of conspiracy against the Tsar, noreven of preparations for revolutionary action, were found; in fact, there were none. The great majority of our youth were at that time hostile to such action. Nay, looking now over that movement of the years 1870-78, I can confidently say that most of them would have felt satisfied if they had been simply allowed to live by the side of the peasants and the factory-workers, to teach them, to collaborate with them, either individually or as members of the local self-government, in any of the thousand capacities in which an educated and earnest man or woman can be useful to the masses of the people. I knew the men and say so with full knowledge of them.
Yet the sentences were ferocious—stupidly ferocious, because the movement, which had grown out of the previous state of Russia, was too deeply rooted to be crushed down by mere brutality. Hard labour for six, ten, twelve years in the mines, with subsequent exile to Siberia for life, was a common sentence. There were such cases as that of a girl who got nine years’ hard labour and life exile to Siberia, for giving one socialist pamphlet to a worker: that was all her crime. Another girl of fourteen, Miss Gukóvskaya, was transported for life to a remote village of Siberia, for having tried, like Goethe’s Klärchen, to excite an indifferent crowd to deliver Koválsky and his friends when they were going to be hanged—an act the more natural in Russia, even from the authorities’ standpoint, as there is no capital punishment in our country for common-law crimes, and the application of the death penalty to ‘politicals’ was then a novelty, a return to almost forgotten traditions. Thrown into the wilderness, this young girl soon drowned herself in the Yeniséi. Even those who were acquitted by the courts were banished by the gendarmes to little hamlets in Siberia and North-east Russia, where they had to starve on the government allowance of six shillings per month. There are no industries in suchhamlets, and the exiles were strictly prohibited from teaching.
As if to exasperate the youth still more, their condemned friends were not sent direct to Siberia. They were locked up first for a number of years, in central prisons, which made them envy the convict’s life in a Siberian mine. These prisons were awful indeed. In one of them—‘a den of typhoid fever,’ as the priest of that particular gaol said in a sermon—the mortality reached twenty per cent. in twelve months. In the central prisons, in the hard labour prisons of Siberia, in the fortress, the prisoners had to resort to the strike of death, the famine strike, to protect themselves from the brutality of the warders, or to obtain conditions—some sort of work, or reading, in their cells—that would save them from being driven into insanity in a few months. The horror of such strikes, during which men and women refused to take any food for seven or eight days in succession, and then lay motionless, their minds wandering, seemed not to appeal to the gendarmes. At Khárkoff, the prostrated prisoners were tied up with ropes and fed artificially, by force.
Information of these horrors leaked out from the prisons, crossed the boundless distances of Siberia, and spread far and wide among the youth. There was a time when not a week passed without disclosing some new infamy of that sort, or even worse.
Sheer exasperation took hold of our young people. ‘In other countries,’ they began to say, ‘men have the courage to resist. An Englishman, a Frenchman, would not tolerate such outrages. How can we tolerate them? Let us resist, arms in hand, the nocturnal raids of the gendarmes; let them know, at least, that since arrest means a slow and infamous death at their hands, they will have to take us in a mortal struggle.’ At Odessa, Koválsky and his friends met with revolver shots the gendarmes who came one night to arrest them.
The reply of Alexander II. to this new move was the proclamation of a state of siege. Russia was divided into a number of districts, each of them under a governor-general, who received the order to hang offenders pitilessly. Koválsky and his friends—who, by the way, had killed no one by their shots—were executed. Hanging became the order of the day. Twenty-three persons perished in two years, including a boy of nineteen, who was caught posting a revolutionary proclamation at a railway station: this act was the only charge against him. He was a boy, but he died like a man.
Then the watchword of the revolutionists became ‘self-defence:’ self-defence against the spies who introduced themselves into the circles under the mask of friendship, and denounced members right and left, simply because they would not be paid if they did not denounce large numbers of persons; self-defence against those who ill-treated prisoners; self-defence against the omnipotent chiefs of the state police.
Three functionaries of mark and two or three small spies fell in that new phase of the struggle. General Mézentsoff, who had induced the Tsar to double the sentences after the trial of the hundred and ninety-three, was killed in broad daylight at St. Petersburg; a gendarme colonel, guilty of something worse than that, had the same fate atKíeff; and the Governor-General of Khárkoff—my cousin, Dmítri Kropótkin—was shot as he was returning home from a theatre. The central prison, in which the first famine strike and artificial feeding took place, was under his orders. In reality, he was not a bad man—I know that his personal feelings were somewhat favourable to the political prisoners; but he was a weak man and a courtier, and he hesitated to interfere. One word from him would have stopped the ill-treatment of the prisoners. Alexander II. liked him so much, and his position at the court was so strong, that his interference very probably would havebeen approved. ‘Thank you; you have acted according to my own wishes,’ the Tsar said to him, a couple of years before that date, when he came to St. Petersburg to report that he had taken a peaceful attitude in a riot of the poorer population of Khárkoff, and had treated the rioters very leniently. But this time he gave his approval to the gaolers, and the young men of Khárkoff were so exasperated at the treatment of their friends that one of them shot him.
However, the personality of the Emperor was kept out of the struggle, and down to the year 1879 no attempt was made on his life. The person of the Liberator of the serfs was surrounded by an aureole which protected him infinitely better than the swarms of police officials. If Alexander II. had shown at this juncture the least desire to improve the state of affairs in Russia; if he had only called in one or two of those men with whom he had collaborated during the reform period, and had ordered them to make an inquiry into the conditions of the country, or merely of the peasantry; if he had shown any intention of limiting the powers of the secret police, his steps would have been hailed with enthusiasm. A word would have made him ‘the Liberator’ again, and once more the youth would have repeated Hérzen’s words: ‘Thou hast conquered, Galilean.’ But just as during the Polish insurrection the despot awoke in him, and, inspired by Katkóff, he resorted to hanging, so now again, following the advice of the same evil genius, Katkóff, he found nothing to do but to nominate special military governors—for hanging.
Then, and then only, a handful of revolutionists—the Executive Committee—supported, I must say, by the growing discontent in the educated classes, and even in the Tsar’s immediate surroundings, declared that war against absolutism which, after several attempts, ended in 1881 in the death of Alexander II.
Two men, I have said already, lived in Alexander II., and now the conflict between the two, which had grown during all his life, assumed a really tragic aspect. When he met Solovióff, who shot at him and missed the first shot, he had the presence of mind to run to the nearest door, not in a straight line, but in zigzags, while Solovióff continued to fire; and he thus escaped with but a slight tearing of his overcoat. On the day of his death, too, he gave a proof of his undoubted courage. In the face of real danger he was courageous; but he continually trembled before the phantasms of his own imagination. Once he shot at an aide-de-camp, when the latter had made an abrupt movement, and Alexander thought he was going to attempt his life. Merely to save his life, he surrendered entirely all his imperial powers into the hands of those who cared nothing for him, but only for their lucrative positions.
He undoubtedly retained an attachment to the mother of his children, even though he was then with the Princess Dolgorúki, whom he married immediately after the death of the Empress. ‘Don’t speak to me of the Empress; it makes me suffer too much,’ he more than once said to Lóris Mélikoff. And yet he entirely abandoned the Empress Marie, who had stood faithfully by his side while he was the Liberator; he let her die in the palace in complete neglect, having by her side only two ladies entirely devoted to her, while he stayed himself in another palace, and paid her only short official visits. A well-known Russian doctor, now dead, told his friends that he, a stranger, felt shocked at the neglect with which the Empress was treated during her last illness—deserted, of course, by the ladies of the court, who reserved their courtesies for the Princess Dolgorúki.
When the Executive Committee made the daring attempt to blow up the Winter Palace itself, Alexander II. took a step which had no precedent. He created a sort of dictatorship, vesting unlimited powers in LórisMélikoff. This General was an Armenian, to whom Alexander II. had once before given similar dictatorial powers, when the bubonic plague broke out on the Lower Vólga, and Germany threatened to mobilize her troops and put Russia under quarantine if the plague were not stopped. Now, when he saw that he could not have confidence in the vigilance even of the Palace police, Alexander II. gave dictatorial powers to Lóris Mélikoff, and as Mélikoff had the reputation of being a Liberal, this new move was interpreted in the sense that the convocation of a National Assembly would soon follow. However, no new attempts against his life having been made immediately after that explosion, he regained confidence, and a few months later, before Mélikoff had been allowed to do anything, the dictator became simply a Minister of the Interior.
The sudden attacks of sadness of which I have already spoken, during which Alexander II. reproached himself with the reactionary character his reign had assumed, now took the shape of violent paroxysms of tears. He would sit weeping by the hour, filling Mélikoff with despair. Then he would ask his minister, ‘When will your constitutional scheme be ready?’ But if, two days later, Mélikoff said that it was ready, the Emperor seemed to have forgotten all about it. ‘Did I mention it?’ he would ask. ‘What for? We had better leave it to my successor. That will be his gift to Russia.’
When rumours of a new plot reached him, he was ready to undertake something, in order to give satisfaction to the Executive Committee; but when everything seemed to be quiet among the revolutionists, he turned his ear again to his reactionary advisers, and let things go. At any moment Mélikoff expected dismissal.
In February 1881 Mélikoff reported that a new plot had been laid by the Executive Committee, but its plancould not be discovered by any amount of searching. Thereupon Alexander II. decided that a sort of consultative assembly of delegates from the provinces should be called. Always under the idea that he would share the fate of Louis XVI., he described this gathering as anAssemblée des Notables, like the one convoked by Louis XVI. before the National Assembly in 1789. The scheme had to be laid before the council of state, but then again he hesitated. It was only on the morning of March 1 (13), 1881, after a new warning by Lóris Mélikoff, that he ordered it to be brought before the council on the following Thursday. This was on Sunday, and he was asked by Mélikoff not to go out to the parade that day, there being immediate danger of an attempt on his life. Nevertheless, he went. He wanted to see the Grand Duchess Catherine (daughter of his aunt, Hélène Pávlovna, who had been one of the leaders of the reform party in 1861), and to carry her the welcome news, perhaps as an expiatory offering to the memory of the Empress Marie. He is said to have told her, ‘Je me suis décidé à convoquer une Assemblée des Notables.’ However, this belated and half-hearted concession had not been announced, and on his way back to the Winter Palace he was killed.
It is known how it happened. A bomb was thrown under his iron-clad carriage, to stop it. Several Circassians of the escort were wounded. Rysakóff, who flung the bomb, was arrested on the spot. Then, although the coachman of the Tsar earnestly advised him not to get out, saying that he could drive him still in the slightly damaged carriage, he insisted upon alighting. He felt that his military dignity required him to see the wounded Circassians, to condole with them as he had done with the wounded during the Turkish war, when a mad storming of Plevna, doomed to end in a terrible disaster, was made on the day of his fête. He approached Rysakóff and asked him something; and as he passed close by anotheryoung man, Grinevétsky, who stood there with a bomb, Grinevétsky threw the bomb between himself and the Tsar, so that both of them should be killed. Both were fearfully wounded, and lived but a few hours.
There Alexander II. lay upon the snow, abandoned by every one of his followers! All had disappeared. It was some cadets, returning from the parade, who lifted the dying Tsar and put him in a sledge, covering his shivering body with a cadet mantle. And it was one of the terrorists, Emeliánoff, with a bomb wrapped in a paper under his arm, who, at the risk of being arrested on the spot and hanged, rushed with the cadets to the help of the wounded man. Human nature is full of these contrasts.
Thus ended the tragedy of Alexander the Second’s life. People could not understand how it was possible that a Tsar who had done so much for Russia should have met his death at the hands of revolutionists. To me, who had the chance of witnessing the first reactionary steps of Alexander II. and his gradual deterioration, who had caught a glimpse of his complex personality, and seen in him a born autocrat, whose violence was but partially mitigated by education, a man possessed of military gallantry, but devoid of the courage of the statesman, a man of strong passions and weak will—it seemed that the tragedy developed with the unavoidable fatality of one of Shakespeare’s dramas. Its last act was already written for me on the day when I heard him address us, the promoted officers, on June 13, 1862, immediately after he had ordered the first executions in Poland.
A wild panic seized the court circles at St. Petersburg. Alexander III., who, notwithstanding his colossal stature and force, was not a very courageous man, refused tomove to the Winter Palace, and retired to the palace of his grandfather, Paul I., at Gatchina. I know that old building, planned as a Vauban fortress, surrounded by moats and protected by watch towers, from the tops of which secret staircases lead to the Emperor’s study. I have seen the trap-doors in the study for suddenly throwing an enemy on the sharp rocks in the water underneath, and the secret staircase leading to underground prisons and to an underground passage which opens on a lake. All the palaces of Paul I. had been built on a similar plan. In the meantime, an underground gallery, supplied with automatic electric appliances to protect it from being undermined by the revolutionists, was dug round the Aníchkoff palace in which Alexander III. resided when he was heir-apparent.
A secret league for the protection of the Tsar was started. Officers of all grades were induced by triple salaries to join it, and to undertake voluntary spying in all classes of society. Amusing scenes followed, of course. Two officers, without knowing that they both belonged to the league, would entice each other into a disloyal conversation, during a railway journey, and then proceed to arrest each other, only to discover at the last moment that their pains had been labour lost. This league still exists in a more official shape, under the name of Okhrána (Protection), and from time to time frightens the present Tsar with all sorts of concocted dangers, in order to maintain its existence.
A still more secret organization, the Holy League, was formed at the same time, under the leadership of the brother of the Tsar, Vladímir, for the purpose of opposing the revolutionists in different ways, one of which was to kill those of the refugees who were supposed to have been the leaders of the late conspiracies. I was of this number. The grand duke violently reproached the officers of the league for their cowardice, regretting that there were none among them who would undertake tokill such refugees; and an officer, who had been a page de chambre at the time I was in the corps of pages, was appointed by the league to carry out this particular work.
The fact is that the refugees abroad did not interfere with the work of the Executive Committee at St. Petersburg. To pretend to direct conspiracies from Switzerland, while those who were at St. Petersburg acted under a permanent menace of death, would have been sheer nonsense; and as Stepniák and I wrote several times, none of us would have accepted the dubious task of forming plans of action without being on the spot. But, of course, it suited the plans of the St. Petersburg police to maintain that they were powerless to protect the Tsar because all plots were devised abroad, and their spies—I know it well—amply supplied them with the desired reports.
Skóbeleff, the hero of the Turkish war, was also asked to join this league, but he blankly refused. It appears from Lóris Mélikoff’s posthumous papers, part of which were published by a friend of his at London, that when Alexander III. came to the throne, and hesitated to convoke the Assembly of Notables, Skóbeleff even made an offer to Lóris Mélikoff and Count Ignátieff (‘the lying Pasha,’ as the Constantinople diplomatists used to nickname him) to arrest Alexander III., and compel him to sign a constitutional manifesto; whereupon Ignátieff is said to have denounced the scheme to the Tsar, and thus to have obtained his nomination as prime minister, in which capacity he resorted, with the advice of M. Andrieux, the ex-prefect of police at Paris, to various stratagems in order to paralyze the revolutionists.
If the Russian Liberals had shown even moderate courage and some power of organized action at that time, a National Assembly would have been convoked. From the same posthumous papers of Lóris Mélikoff, it appears that Alexander III. was willing for a time to convoke a National Assembly. He had made up his mind to do so, and had announced it to his brother. OldWilhelm I. supported him in this intention. It was only when he saw that the Liberals undertook nothing, while the Katkóff party was busy at work in the opposite direction—M. Andrieux advising him to crush the nihilists and indicating how it ought to be done (the ex-prefect’s letter to this effect was published in the said papers)—that Alexander III. finally resolved on declaring that he would continue to be an absolute ruler of the Empire.
A few months after the death of Alexander II. I was expelled from Switzerland by order of the federal council. I did not take umbrage at this. Assailed by the monarchical powers on account of the asylum which Switzerland offered to refugees, and menaced by the Russian official press with a wholesale expulsion of all Swiss governesses and ladies’ maids, who are numerous in Russia, the rulers of Switzerland, by banishing me, gave some sort of satisfaction to the Russian police. But I very much regret, for the sake of Switzerland itself, that that step was taken. It was a sanction given to the theory of ‘conspiracies concocted in Switzerland,’ and it was an acknowledgment of weakness, of which other powers took advantage at once. Two years later, when Jules Ferry proposed to Italy and Germany the partition of Switzerland, his argument must have been that the Swiss Government itself had admitted that Switzerland was ‘a hotbed of international conspiracies.’ This first concession led to more arrogant demands, and has certainly placed Switzerland in a far less independent position than it might otherwise have occupied.
The decree of expulsion was delivered to me immediately after I had returned from London, where I was present at an anarchist congress in July 1881. After that congress I had stayed for a few weeks in England, writing the first articles on Russian affairs from our standpoint, for the ‘Newcastle Chronicle.’ The English press, at that time, was an echo of the opinionsof Madame Novikóff—that is, of Katkóff and the Russian state police—and I was most happy when Mr. Joseph Cowen agreed to give me the hospitality of his paper in order to state our point of view.
I had just joined my wife in the high mountains where she was staying, near the abode of Elisée Reclus, when I was asked to leave Switzerland. We sent the little luggage we had to the next railway station and went on foot to Aigle, enjoying for the last time the sight of the mountains that we loved so much. We crossed the hills by taking short cuts over them, and laughed when we discovered that the short cuts led to long windings; and when we reached the bottom of the valley, we tramped along the dusty road. The comical incident which always comes in such cases was supplied by an English lady. A richly dressed dame, reclining by the side of a gentleman in a hired carriage, threw several tracts to the two poorly dressed tramps, as she passed them. I lifted the tracts from the dust. She was evidently one of those ladies who believe themselves to be Christians, and consider it their duty todistributereligious tracts among ‘dissolute foreigners.’ Thinking we were sure to overtake the lady at the railway station, I wrote on one of the pamphlets the well-known verse relative to the rich and the Kingdom of God, and similarly appropriate quotations about the Pharisees being the worst enemies of Christianity. When we came to Aigle, the lady was taking refreshments in her carriage. She evidently preferred to continue the journey in this vehicle along the lovely valley, rather than to be shut up in a stuffy railway train. I returned her the pamphlets with politeness, saying that I had added to them something that she might find useful for her own instruction. The lady did not know whether to fly at me or to accept the lesson with Christian patience. Her eyes expressed both impulses in rapid succession.
My wife was about to pass her examination for the degree of Bachelor of Science at the Geneva University, and we settled, therefore, in a tiny town of France, Thonon, situated on the Savoy coast of the Lake of Geneva, and stayed there a couple of months.
As to the death sentence of the Holy League, a warning reached me from one of the highest quarters of Russia. Even the name of the lady who was sent from St. Petersburg to Geneva to be the head centre of the conspiracy became known to me. So I simply communicated the fact to the Geneva correspondent of the ‘Times,’ asking him to publish the information if anything should happen, and I put a note to that effect in ‘Le Révolté.’ After that I did not trouble myself more about it. My wife did not take it so lightly, and the good peasant woman, Madame Sansaux, who gave us board and lodgings at Thonon, and who had learned of the plot in a different way (through her sister, who was a nurse in the family of a Russian agent), bestowed the most touching care upon me. Her cottage was out of town, and whenever I went to town at night—sometimes to meet my wife at the railway station—she always found a pretext to have me accompanied by her husband with a lantern. ‘Wait only a moment, Monsieur Kropótkin,’ she would say; ‘my husband is going that way for purchases, and you know he always carries a lantern!’ Or else she would send her brother to follow me at a distance, without my noticing it.
In October or November 1881, as soon as my wife had passed her examination, we removed from Thonon to London, where we stayed nearly twelve months. Few years separate us from that time, and yet I can say that the intellectual life of London and of all England wasquite different then from what it became a little later. Everyone knows that in the forties England stood almost at the head of the socialist movement in Europe; but during the years of reaction that followed, this great movement, which had deeply affected the working classes, and in which all that is now put forward as scientific or anarchist socialism had already been said, came to a standstill. It was forgotten in England as well as on the Continent, and what the French writers describe as ‘the third awakening of the proletarians’ had not yet begun in Britain. The labours of the agricultural commission of 1871, the propaganda amongst the agricultural labourers, and the previous efforts of the Christian socialists had certainly done something to prepare the way; but the outburst of socialist feeling in England which followed the publication of Henry George’s ‘Progress and Poverty’ had not yet taken place.
The year that I then passed in London was a year of real exile. For one who held advanced socialist opinions, there was no atmosphere to breathe in. There was no sign of that animated socialist movement which I found so largely developed on my return in 1886. Burns, Champion, Hardie, and the other labour leaders were not yet heard of; the Fabians did not exist; Morris had not declared himself a socialist; and the trade unions, limited in London to a few privileged trades only, were hostile to socialism. The only active and outspoken representatives of the socialist movement were Mr. and Mrs. Hyndman, with a very few workers grouped round them. They had held in the autumn of 1881 a small congress, and we used to say jokingly—but it was very nearly true—that Mrs. Hyndman had received all the congress in her house. Moreover, the more or less socialist radical movement which was certainly going on in the minds of men did not assert itself frankly and openly. That considerable number ofeducated men and women who appeared in public life four years later, and, without committing themselves to socialism, took part in various movements connected with the well-being or the education of the masses, and who have now created in almost every city of England and Scotland a quite new atmosphere of reform and a new society of reformers, had not then made themselves felt. They were there, of course; they thought and spoke; all the elements for a widespread movement were in existence; but, finding none of those centres of attraction which the socialist groups subsequently became, they were lost in the crowd; they did not know one another, or remained unconscious of their own selves.
Tchaykóvsky was then in London, and, as in years past, we began a socialist propaganda amongst the workers. Aided by a few English workers whose acquaintance we had made at the congress of 1881, or whom the prosecutions against John Most had attracted to the socialists, we went to the Radical clubs, speaking about Russian affairs, the movement of our youth toward the people, and socialism in general. We had ridiculously small audiences, seldom consisting of more than a dozen men. Occasionally some grey-bearded Chartist would rise from the audience and tell us that all we were saying had been said forty years before, and was greeted then with enthusiasm by crowds of workers, but that now all was dead, and there was no hope of reviving it.
Mr. Hyndman had just published his excellent exposition of Marxist socialism under the title of ‘England for All’; and I remember, one day in the summer of 1882, earnestly advising him to start a socialist paper. I told him with what small means we began editing ‘Le Révolté,’ and predicted a certain success if he would make the attempt. But so unpromising was the general outlook, that even he thought the undertaking would bea certain failure, unless he had the means to defray all its expenses. Perhaps he was right; but when, less than three years later, he started ‘Justice,’ it found a hearty support among the workers, and early in 1886 there were three socialist papers, and the Social Democratic Federation was an influential body.
In the summer of 1882 I spoke, in broken English, before the Durham miners at their annual gathering; I delivered lectures at Newcastle, Glasgow, and Edinburgh about the Russian movement, and was received with enthusiasm, a crowd of workers giving hearty cheers for the Nihilists, after the meeting, in the street. But my wife and I felt so lonely at London, and our efforts to awaken a socialist movement in England seemed so hopeless, that in the autumn of 1882 we decided to remove again to France. We were sure that in France I should soon be arrested; but we often said to each other, ‘Better a French prison than this grave.’
Those who are prone to speak of the slowness of evolution ought to study the development of socialism in England. Evolutionisslow; but its rate is not uniform. It has its periods of slumber and its periods of sudden progress.
We settled once more in Thonon, taking lodgings with our former hostess, Madame Sansaux. A brother of my wife, who was dying of consumption, and had come to Switzerland, joined us.
I never saw such numbers of Russian spies as during the two months that I remained at Thonon. To begin with, as soon as we had engaged lodgings, a suspicious character, who gave himself out for an Englishman, took the other part of the house. Flocks, literally flocks of Russian spies besieged the house, seeking admissionunder all possible pretexts, or simply tramping in pairs, trios, and quartettes in front of the house. I can imagine what wonderful reports they wrote. A spy must report. If he should merely say that he has stood for a week in the street without noticing anything mysterious, he would soon be put on the half-pay list or dismissed.
It was then the golden age of the Russian secret police. Ignátieff’s policy had borne fruit. There were two or three bodies of police competing with one another, each having any amount of money at their disposal, and carrying on the boldest intrigues. Colonel Sudéikin, for instance, chief of one of the branches—plotting with a certain Degáeff, who after all killed him—denounced Ignátieff’s agents to the revolutionists, and offered to the terrorists all facilities for killing the minister of the interior, Count Tolstóy, and the Grand Duke Vladímir; adding that he himself would then be nominated minister of the interior, with dictatorial powers, and the Tsar would be entirely in his hands. This activity of the Russian police culminated, later on, in the kidnapping of the Prince of Battenberg from Bulgaria.
The French police, also, were on the alert. The question, ‘What is he doing at Thonon?’ worried them. I continued to edit ‘Le Révolté,’ and wrote articles for the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and the ‘Newcastle Chronicle.’ But what reports could be made out of that? One day the local gendarme paid a visit to my landlady. He had heard from the street the rattling of some machine, and wished to report that I had in the house a secret printing press. So he came in my absence and asked the landlady to show him the press. She replied that there was none, and suggested that perhaps the gendarme had overheard the noise of her sewing-machine. But he would not be convinced by so prosaic an explanation, and actually compelled the landlady to use the machine, while he listened insidethe house and outside, to make sure that the rattling he had heard was the same.
‘What is he doing all day?’ he asked the landlady.
‘He writes.’
‘He cannot write all day long.’
‘He saws wood in the garden at midday, and he takes walks every afternoon between four and five.’ It was in November.
‘Ah, that’s it! When the dusk is coming on?’ (A la tombée de la nuit?) And he wrote in his note-book, ‘Never goes out except at dusk.’
I could not well explain at that time this special attention of the Russian spies; but it must have had some connection with the following. When Ignátieff was nominated prime minister, advised by the ex-prefect of Paris, Andrieux, he hit on a new plan. He sent a swarm of his agents into Switzerland, and one of them undertook the publication of a paper which slightly advocated the extension of provincial self-government in Russia, but whose chief purpose was to combat the revolutionists, and to rally to its standard those of the refugees who did not sympathize with terrorism. This was certainly a means of sowing division. Then, when nearly all the members of the Executive Committee had been arrested in Russia, and a couple of them hadtakenrefuge at Paris, Ignátieff sent an agent to Paris to offer an armistice. He promised that there should be no further executions on account of the plots during the reign of Alexander II., even if those who had escaped arrest fell into the hands of the government; that Chernyshévsky should be released from Siberia; and that a commission should be nominated to revise the cases of all those who had been exiled to Siberia without trial. On the other side, he asked the Executive Committee to promise to make no attempts against the Tsar’s life until his coronation was over. Perhaps the reforms in favour of the peasants, which Alexander III.intended to make, were also mentioned. The agreement was made at Paris, and was kept on both sides. The terrorists suspended hostilities. Nobody was executed for complicity in the former conspiracies; those who were arrested later on under this indictment were immured in the Russian Bastille at Schlüsselburg, where nothing was heard of them for fifteen years, and where most of them still are. Chernyshévsky was brought back from Siberia, and ordered to stay at Astrakhan, where he was severed from all connection with the intellectual world of Russia, and soon died. A commission went through Siberia, releasing some of the exiles, and specifying terms of exile for the remainder. My brother Alexander received from it an additional five years.
While I was at London, in 1882, I was also told one day that a man who pretended to be abonâ fideagent of the Russian government, and could prove it, wanted to enter into negotiations with me. ‘Tell him that if he comes to my house I will throw him down the staircase,’ was my reply. The consequence of it was, I suppose, that while Ignátieff considered the Tsar guaranteed from the attacks of the Executive Committee, he thought that the anarchists might make some attempt and wanted therefore to have me out of the way.
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 orcommunistic lines. In reality, the French mind was hostile only to the monastic communism, to thephalanstèreof 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 ofthe 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 abrave 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 thearrested 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 withadmirable 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.
The trial was over, but I remained for another couple of months at the Lyons prison. Most of my comrades had lodged an appeal against the decision of the police court and we had to wait for its results. With four more comrades I refused to take any part in that appeal to a higher court, and continued to work in mypistole. Agreat friend of mine, Martin—a clothier from Vienne—took anotherpistoleby the side of the one which I occupied, and as we were already condemned, we were allowed to take our walks together; and when we had something to say to each other between the walks, we used to correspond by means of taps on the wall, just as in Russia.
Already during my sojourn at Lyons I began to realize the awfully demoralising influence of the prisons upon the prisoners, which brought me later to condemn unconditionally the whole institution.
The Lyons prison is a ‘modern’ prison, built in the shape of a star, on the cellular system. The spaces between the rays of the star-like building are occupied by small asphalte-paved yards, and, weather permitting, the inmates are taken to these yards to work outdoors. They mostly beat out the unwound silk cocoons to obtain floss silk. Flocks of children are also taken at certain hours to these yards. Thin, emasculated, underfed—the shadows of children—I often watched them from my window. Anæmia was plainly written on all the little faces and manifest in their thin, shivering bodies; and not only in the dormitories but also in the yards, in the full light of the sun, they themselves increased their anæmia. What will become of these children after they have passed through that schooling and come out with their health ruined, their will annihilated, their energy weakened? Anæmia, with its weakened energy and unwillingness to work, its enfeebled will, weakened intellect, andpervertedimagination, is responsible for crime to an infinitely greater extent than plethora, and it is precisely this enemy of the human race which is bred in prison. And then, the teachings which the children receive in these surroundings! Mere isolation, even if it were rigorously carried out—and it cannot be—would be of little avail; the whole atmosphere of every prison is an atmosphere of glorification of that sort of gambling in ‘clever strokes’ which constitutes the very essence oftheft, swindling, and all sorts of similar anti-social deeds. Whole generations of future prisoners are bred in these nurseries which the state supports and society tolerates, simply because it does not want to hear its own diseases spoken of and dissected. ‘Imprisoned in childhood: prison-bird for life,’ was what I heard afterwards from all those who were interested in criminal matters. And when I saw these children and realized what they had to expect in the future, I could not but continually ask myself: ‘Which of them is the worst criminal—this child or the judge who condemns every year hundreds of children to this fate?’ I gladly admit that the crime of these judges is unconscious. But are, then, all the ‘crimes’ for which people are sent to prison as conscious as they are supposed to be?
There was another point which I vividly realized since the very first weeks of my imprisonment, but which, in some inconceivable way, escapes the attention of both the judges and the writers on criminal law—namely, that imprisonment in an immense number of cases is a punishment which strikes quite innocent people far more severely than the condemned prisoners themselves.
Nearly every one of my comrades, who represented a fair average of the working-men population, had either their wife and children to support, or a sister or an old mother who depended for their living upon his earnings. Now, being left without support, these women did their best to get work, and some of them got it, but none of them succeeded in earning regularly even as much as fifteen pence a day. Nine francs (less than eight shillings), and often six shillings a week, to support themselves and their children was all they could earn. And that meant evidently underfeeding, privations of all sorts, and the deterioration of the health of the wife and the children: weakened intellect, weakened energy and will. I thus realized that what was going on in our law courts was in reality a condemnation ofquite innocent people to all sorts of hardships, in most cases even worse than those to which the condemned man himself is submitted. The fiction is that the law punishes the man by inflicting upon him a variety of physical and degrading hardships. But man is such a creature that whatever hardships be imposed upon him, he gradually grows accustomed to them. As he cannot modify them he accepts them, and after a certain time he puts up with them, just as he puts up with a chronic disease, and grows insensible to it. But what, during his imprisonment, becomes of his wife and children, that is, of the innocent people who depend upon him for support? They are punished even more cruelly than he himself is. And in our routine habits of thought no one ever thinks of the immense injustice which is thus committed. I realized it only from actual experience.
In the middle of March 1883, twenty-two of us who had been condemned to more than one year of imprisonment, were removed in great secrecy to the central prison of Clairvaux. It was formerly an abbey of St. Bernard, of which the great Revolution had made a house for the poor. Subsequently it became a house of detention and correction, which went among the prisoners and the officials themselves under the well-deserved nickname of ‘house of detention and corruption.’
So long as we were kept at Lyons we were treated as the prisoners under preliminary arrest are treated in France; that is, we had our own clothes, we could get our own food from a restaurant, and one could hire for a few francs per month a larger cell, apistole. I took advantage of this for working hard upon my articles for the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and the ‘Nineteenth Century.’ Now, the treatment we should have at Clairvaux was an open question. However, in France it is generally understood that, for political prisoners, the loss of liberty and forced inactivity are in themselvesso hard that there is no need to inflict additional hardships. Consequently, we were told that we should remain under therégimeof preliminary detention. We should have separate quarters, retain our own clothes, be free from compulsory work, and be allowed to smoke. ‘Those of you,’ the governor said, ‘who wish to earn something by manual work, will be enabled to do so by sewing stays or engraving small things in mother-of-pearl. This work is poorly paid; but you could not be employed in the prison workshops for the fabrication of iron beds, picture frames, and so on, because that would require your lodging with the common-law prisoners.’ Like the other prisoners we were allowed to buy from the prison canteen some additional food and a pint of claret every day, both being supplied at a very low price and of good quality.
The first impression which Clairvaux produced upon me was most favourable. We had been locked up and had been travelling all the day, from two or three o’clock in the morning, in those tiny cupboards into which the cellular railway carriages are usually divided. When we reached the central prison we were taken temporarily to the cellular, or punishment quarters, and were introduced into the usual but extremely clean cells. Hot food, plain but of excellent quality, had been served to us notwithstanding the late hour of the night, and we had been offered the opportunity of having the half-pint of very goodvin du pays(local wine) which was sold to the prisoners by the prison canteen, at the extremely low price of 24 centimes (less than 2½d.) per quart. The governor and the warders were most polite to us.
Next day the governor of the prison took me to see the rooms which he intended to give us, and when I remarked that they were all right but only a little too small for such a number—we were twenty-two—and that overcrowding might result in illness, he gave us another set of rooms in what was in olden times thehouse of the superintendent of the abbey, and now was the hospital. Our windows looked out upon a little garden, and beyond it we had beautiful views of the surrounding country. In another room on the same landing old Blanqui had been kept the last three or four years before his release. Before that he had been imprisoned in the cellular house.
Besides the three spacious rooms which were given to us, a smaller room was spared for Gautier and myself, so that we could pursue our literary work. We probably owed this last favour to the intervention of a considerable number of English men of science who, as soon as I was condemned, had addressed a petition to the President asking for my release. Many contributors to the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ as well as Herbert Spencer and Swinburne, had signed, while Victor Hugo had added to his signature a few warm words. Altogether, public opinion in France received our condemnation very unfavourably; and when my wife had mentioned at Paris that I required books, the Academy of Sciences offered the use of its library, and Ernest Renan, in a charming letter, put his private library at her service.
We had a small garden, where we could play nine-pins orjeu de boules. We managed, moreover, to cultivate a narrow bed running along the wall, and, on a surface of some eighty square yards, we grew almost incredible quantities of lettuces and radishes, as well as some flowers. I need not say that we at once organized classes, and during the three years that we remained at Clairvaux I gave my comrades lessons in cosmography, geometry, or physics, also aiding them in the study of languages. Nearly every one learned at least one language—English, German, Italian, or Spanish—while a few learned two. We also managed to do some book-binding, having learned how from one of those excellent Encyclopédie Roret booklets.
At the end of the first year, however, my healthagain gave way. Clairvaux is built on marshy ground, upon which malaria is endemic, and malaria, with scurvy, laid hold of me. Then my wife, who was studying at Paris, working in Würtz’s laboratory and preparing to take an examination for the degree of Doctor of Science, abandoned everything, and came to stay in the hamlet of Clairvaux, which consists of less than a dozen houses grouped at the foot of an immense high wall which encircles the prison. Of course, her life in that hamlet, with the prison wall opposite, was anything but gay; yet she stayed there till I was released. During the first year she was allowed to see me only once in two months, and all interviews were held in the presence of a warder, who sat between us. But when she settled at Clairvaux, declaring her firm intention to remain there, she was soon permitted to see me every day, in one of the small guard-houses of the warders, within the prison walls, and food was brought me from the inn where she stayed. Later, we were even allowed to take a walk in the governor’s garden, closely watched all the time, and usually one of my comrades joined us in the walk.
I was quite astonished to discover that the central prison of Clairvaux had all the aspects of a small manufacturing town, surrounded by orchards and cornfields, all encircled by an outer wall. The fact is that if in a French central prison the inmates are perhaps more dependent upon the fancies and caprices of the governor and the warders than they seem to be in English prisons, the treatment of the prisoners is far more humane than it is in the corresponding lock-ups on this side of the Channel. The mediæval spirit of revenge which still prevails in English prisons has long since been given up in France. The imprisoned man is not compelled to sleep on planks, or to have a mattress on alternate days only; the day he comes to the prison he gets a decent bed and retains it. He is not compelled either to do degrading work, such as to climb a wheel, or to pick oakum; he is employed, onthe contrary, in useful work, and this is why the Clairvaux prison has the aspect of a manufacturing town in which iron furniture, picture-frames, looking-glasses, metric measures, velvet, linen, ladies’ stays, small things in mother-of-pearl, wooden shoes, and so on, are fabricated by the nearly 1,600 men who are kept there.
Moreover, if the punishment for insubordination is very cruel, there is none of the flogging which still goes on in English prisons: such a punishment would be absolutely impossible in France. Altogether, the central prison at Clairvaux may be described as one of the best prisons in Europe. And yet, the results obtained at Clairvaux are as bad as in any one of the lock-ups of the old type. ‘The watchword nowadays is to say that prisoners are reformed in our prisons,’ one of the members of the prison administration once said to me. ‘This is all nonsense, and I shall never be induced to tell such a lie.’