The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  A bulwark of the Spanish government was General Martínez de Campos, whose strong arm had restored the monarchy in 1874. After this he had defeated the Carlists, suppressed an early Cuban insurrection, and served as Premier and Minister of War. On September 24, 1893, he was reviewing a parade of troops in Barcelona. From the front row of the crowds an Anarchist named Pallas, who had been with Malatesta in the Argentine, threw first one bomb and then a second, killing the General’s horse, one soldier and five bystanders, but erratically leaving its intended victim, who was thrown under the body of his horse, only bruised. Pallas, as he confessed with pride, had planned to kill the General and “his whole staff.” When condemned to death by court-martial he cried, “Agreed! There are thousands to continue the work.” He was allowed to take farewell of his children but, for some barbaric reason, not of his wife and mother. Sentenced to be shot with his back to a firing squad, another Spanish variant of usual custom, he repeated the cry of Andalusia, “Vengeance will be terrible!”

  It came within weeks, again in the Catalan capital, and in the number of its dead was the most lethal of all the Anarchist assaults. November 8, 1893, almost coinciding with the Haymarket anniversary, was opening night of the opera season at the Teatro Lyceo and the audience in glittering evening dress was listening to William Tell. In the midst of this drama of defiance to tyrants, two bombs were thrown down from the balcony. One exploded, killing fifteen persons outright, and the other lay unexploded, threatening to burst at any moment. It caused a pandemonium of “terror and dismay,” shrieks and curses and a wild rush for the exits in which people “fought like wild beasts to escape, respecting neither age nor sex.” Afterwards, as the wounded were carried out, their splendid dresses torn, blood streaming over their starched white shirt fronts, crowds gathered outside “cursing both Anarchists and police,” according to a reporter. Seven more died of their wounds, giving a total of twenty-two dead and fifty wounded.

  The answer of the government was as fierce. Police raided every known club or home or meeting place of social discontent. Hundreds, even thousands, were arrested and thrown into the dungeons of Montjuich, the prison fortress seven hundred feet above the sea, whose guns dominate the harbor and city of Barcelona and foredoom any revolt by that chronically rebellious city. So full were the cells that new prisoners had to be kept shackled in warships anchored below. There being in this case no one to admit to the guilt of so many deaths, torture was applied mercilessly to extract a confession. Prisoners were burned with irons or forced with whips to keep walking thirty, forty, or fifty hours at a time and subjected to other procedures indigenous to the country of the Inquisition. By these means information was extorted that led to the arrest in January, 1894, of an Anarchist named Santiago Salvador who admitted to the crime in the Opera House as an act of revenge for Pallas. His arrest was immediately answered by his fellow Anarchists of Barcelona with another bombing, which killed two innocent persons. The government replied with six death sentences carried out in April upon prisoners from whom some form of confession had been extracted by torture. Salvador, who had attempted ineffectively to kill himself by revolver and poison, was tried separately in July and executed in November.

  The ghastly tale of the Opera House explosion in Spain excited the nerves of authorities everywhere and caused even the English to question whether allowing Anarchists to preach their doctrines openly was advisable. When, three days later, the Anarchists held their traditional memorial meeting for the Haymarket martyrs, questions were put in Parliament about the conduct of the Liberal Home Secretary, Mr. Asquith, in permitting it, since such meetings required specific approval by the Home Office in advance. Mr. Asquith endeavored to shrug the matter aside as insignificant but was “crushed,” according to a reporter, by the Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Balfour, who in his languid way suggested that the right to throw bombs was not an open question for public meetings nor defensible on the ground that society was badly organized. Whether convinced by Balfour or by second thoughts about the Spanish deaths, Asquith in any event reversed himself and announced a few days later that, as “the propagation of Anarchist doctrine was dangerous to the social order,” no further open meetings of Anarchists would be permitted.

  London’s Anarchists at this time were mostly Russians, Poles, Italians and other exiles who centered around the “Autonomie,” an Anarchist club, and a second group among Jewish immigrants who lived and worked in desperate poverty in the East End, published a Yiddish-language paper, Der Arbeiter-Fraint, and gathered at a club called the “International,” in Whitechapel. The English working class, to whom acts of individual violence came less naturally than to Slavs and Latins, was on the whole not interested. An occasional intellectual like William Morris was a torch-bearer; but he was mainly interested in his personal version of a utopian state, and his influence having waned by the end of the eighties, he lost control of Commonweal, the journal he had founded and edited, to more militant, plebeian and orthodox Anarchists. Another journal, Freedom, was the organ of an active group whose mentor was Kropotkin, and a third, called The Torch—edited by the two daughters of William Rossetti—published the voices of Malatesta, Faure and other French and Italian Anarchists.

  In 1891 with the appearance of The Soul of Man Under Socialism a strange recruit alighted briefly on the movement like a gorgeous butterfly and then flew off. The author of the essay was Oscar Wilde. He had been much moved by the personality of Kropotkin and saw true freedom for the Artist in a society in which, “of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question.” Despite his title he objected to Socialism on the same ground as the orthodox Anarchist, namely, that it was “authoritarian.” If governments are to be armed with economic power, “if in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.” Wilde’s vision was of Socialism founded upon Individualism, and when this had set free the true personality of man, the Artist would at last come into his own.

  In France meanwhile there had been no pause in the assaults. On November 8, 1892, at the time of a miner’s strike against the Société des Mines de Carmaux, a bomb was deposited in the Paris office of the company on the Avenue de l’Opéra. Discovered by the concierge, it was taken out to the sidewalk and carefully carried off by a policeman to the nearest precinct station, in the Rue des Bons Enfants. As the policeman was bringing it in, it burst with a devastating explosion, killing five other policemen who were in the room. They were blown to fragments, blood and bits of flesh were splashed over shattered walls and windows, pieces of arms and legs lay about. Police suspicion centered on Emile Henry, younger brother of a well-known radical orator and son of Fortuné Henry who had escaped to Spain after being condemned to death in the Commune. When Emile Henry’s movements during the day were traced, it appeared impossible that he could have been in the Avenue de l’Opéra at the right moment, and for the time being, no arrests were made.

  The bomb in the police station threw Paris into a panic; no one knew where the next bomb would hit. Anyone connected with the law or police was regarded by his neighbors—since Parisians live largely in apartments—as if he had the plague and was often given notice to leave by his landlord. The city, wrote an English visitor, was “absolutely paralyzed” with fear. The upper classes “lived again as if in the days of the Commune. They dared not go to the theatres, to restaurants, to the fashionable shops in the Rue de la Paix or to ride in the Bois where Anarchists were suspected behind every tree.” People exchanged terrible rumors: the Anarchists had mined the churches, poured prussic acid in the city’s reservoirs, were hiding beneath the seats of horsecabs ready to spring out upon passengers and rob them. Troops were assembled in the suburbs ready to march, tourists took flight, the hotels were empty, busses ran without passengers, theatres and museums were barricaded.

  The time was in any case one of public rancor and disgust. Hardly had the Republic warded off the Boulanger coup d’état than it was put to shame by th
e nexus of corruption revealed in the Panama scandal and in the official traffic in decorations. Day after day in Parliament during 1890–92 the chain of Panama financing through loans, bribes, slush funds and sales of influence was uncovered, until, it was said, 104 deputies were involved. Even Georges Clemenceau was smeared by association and lost his seat in the next election.

  In proportion as the prestige of the State sank, Anarchism flourished. Intellectuals flirted with it. The buried dislike of government and law that exists in most men is nearer to the surface in some. Like the fat man who has a thin man inside crying to get out, even the respectable have a small Anarchist hidden inside, and among the artists and intellectuals of the nineties his faint cry was frequently heard. The novelist Maurice Barrès, who at one time or another tried every position in the political spectrum as a tribune for his talents, glorified Anarchist philosophy in his l’Ennemi des Lois and Un Homme Libre. The poet Laurent Tailhade hailed the future Anarchist society as a “blessed time” when aristocracy would be one of intellect and “the common man will kiss the footprints of the poets.” Literary anarchism enjoyed a vogue among the Symbolists, like Mallarmé and Paul Valéry. The writer Octave Mirbeau was attracted to Anarchism because he had a horror of authority. He detested anyone in uniform: policemen, ticket-punchers, messengers, concierges, servants. In his eyes, said his friend Léon Daudet, a landlord was a pervert, a Minister a thief, lawyers and financiers made him sick and he had tolerance only for children, beggars, dogs, certain painters and sculptors and very young women. “That there need be no misery in the world was his fixed belief,” said a friend; “that there nevertheless was, was the occasion of his wrath.” Among painters, Pissarro contributed drawings to Le Père Peinard and several brilliant and savage Parisian illustrators, including Théophile Steinlen, expressed in the Anarchist journals their disgust at social injustice; sometimes, as when the President of France was caricatured in soiled pajamas, in terms unprintable in a later day.

  Scores of these ephemeral journals and bulletins appeared, with names like Antichrist, New Dawn, Black Flag, Enemy of the People, the People’s Cry, The Torch, The Whip, New Humanity, Incorruptible, Sans-Culotte, Land and Liberty, Vengeance. Groups and clubs calling themselves “Anti-patriots’ League” or “Libertarians” held meetings in dimly lit halls furnished with benches where members vented their contempt for the State, discussed revolution, but never organized, never affiliated, accepted no leaders, made no plans, took no orders. To them the State, in its panic over the Ravachol affair, in its rottenness revealed by the Panama affair, appeared to be already crumbling.

  In March of 1893 a man of thirty-two named August Vaillant returned to Paris from Argentina, where he had gone in the hope of starting a new life in the New World but had failed to establish himself. Born illegitimate, he was ten months old when his mother married a man not his father, who refused to support the child. He was given to foster parents. At twelve, the boy was on his own in Paris, living by odd jobs, petty theft and begging. Somehow he went to school and found white-collar jobs. At one time he edited a short-lived weekly called l’Union Socialiste but soon, like others among the disinherited, gravitated to Anarchist circles. As secretary of a Fédération des groupes indépendants, he had some contact with Anarchist spokesmen, among them Sebastien Faure, whose “harmonious and caressing voice,” beautiful phrases and elegant manners could make anyone believe in the millennium as long as they were listening to him. Vaillant married, parted from his wife, but kept with him their daughter, Sidonie, and acquired a mistress. Not the footloose or libertarian type, he held together his tiny family until the end. After his failure in Argentina he tried again to make a living in Paris, and like his contemporary Knut Hamsun, then hungrily wandering the streets of Christiania, experienced the humiliation of “the frequent repulses, half-promises, the curt noes, the cherished deluded hopes and fresh endeavors that always resulted in nothing,” until the last frustration when he no longer had any respectable clothes to wear when applying for a job. Unable to afford a new pair of shoes, Vaillant wore a pair of discarded galoshes he had picked up in the street. Finally he found work in a sugar refinery paying 3 francs a day, too little to support three people.

  Ashamed and bitter to see his daughter and mistress go hungry, disillusioned with a world he never made, he decided to end his life. He would not go silently but with a cry of protest, “a cry of that whole class,” as he wrote the night before he acted, “which demands its rights and some day soon will join acts to words. At least I shall die with the satisfaction of knowing that I have done what I could to hasten the advent of a new era.”

  Not a man to kill, Vaillant planned a gesture that had some logic. He saw the disease of society exemplified by the scandal-ridden Parliament. He manufactured a bomb out of a saucepan filled with nails and with a non-lethal charge of explosive. On the afternoon of December 9, 1893, he took it with him to a seat in a public gallery of the Chambre des Députés. An observer saw a tall gaunt figure with a pale face rise to his feet and hurl something down into the midst of the debate. Vaillant’s bomb detonated with the roar of a cannon, spraying the deputies with metal fragments, wounding several but killing none.

  The sensation, as soon as the news was known, was enormous, and was made memorable by an enterprising journalist. He asked for comment that night at a dinner given by the journal La Plume to a number of celebrities, including Zola, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rodin and Laurent Tailhade. The last-named replied grandly and in exquisite rhythm, “Qu’importe les victimes si le geste est beau?” (What do the victims matter if it’s a fine gesture?) Published in Le Journal next morning, the remark was soon to be recalled in gruesome circumstances. That same morning Vaillant gave himself up.

  All France understood and some, other than Anarchists, even sympathized with his gesture. Ironically, these sympathizers came from the extreme right, whose anti-Republican forces—Royalists, Jesuits, floating aristocracy and anti-Semites—despised the bourgeois state for their own reasons. Edouard Drumont, author of La France Juive and editor of La Libre Parole, who was busy raging at the Jews involved in the Panama scandal, produced a piece richly entitled “On Mud, Blood and Gold—From Panama to Anarchism.” “The men of blood,” he said, “were born out of the mud of Panama.” The Duchesse d’Uzès, married into one of the three premier ducal families, offered to give a home and education to Vaillant’s daughter (whom Vaillant, however, preferred to leave to the guardianship of Sebastien Faure).

  In an angry mood, and determined to finish off the Anarchists once and for all, the government acted to stifle their propaganda. Two days after Vaillant’s bomb, the Chamber unanimously passed two laws making it a crime to print any direct or “indirect” provocation of terrorist acts or to associate with intent to commit such acts. Although known as les lois scélérates (the scoundrelly laws), they were hardly an unreasonable measure, since the preaching of the Deed was in fact the principal incitement. Police raided Anarchist cafés and meeting places, two thousand warrants were issued, clubs and discussion groups scattered, La Révolte and Le Père Peinard closed down, and leading Anarchists left the country.

  On January 10, Vaillant came to trial before five judges in red robes and black gold-braided caps. Charged with intent to kill, he insisted that he had intended only to wound. “If I had wanted to kill I could have used a heavier charge and filled the container with bullets; instead, I used only nails.” His counsel, Maître Labori, who was destined for drama and violence in a far more famous case, defended him with spirit as un exaspéré de la misère. It was parliament, Labori said, which was guilty, for failing to remedy “the misery of poverty that oppresses one third of a nation.” Despite Labori’s efforts, Vaillant received the death penalty, the first time in the Nineteenth Century it had been imposed on a person who had not killed. Trial, verdict and sentence were rushed through in a single day. Almost immediately petitions for pardon began to assail President Sadi Carnot, including one from a group of six
ty deputies led by Abbé Lemire, who had been one of those wounded by the bomb. A fiery Socialist, Jules Breton, predicted that if Carnot “pronounced coldly for death, not a single man in France would grieve for him if he were one day himself to be victim of a bomb.” As incitement to murder, this cost Breton two years in prison and proved to be the second comment on the Vaillant affair, which was to end in strange and sinister coincidence.

  The government could not pardon an Anarchist attack upon the State. Carnot refused to remit the sentence and Vaillant was duly executed on February 5, 1894, crying, “Death to bourgeois society! Long live Anarchy!”

  The train of death gathered speed. Only seven days after Vaillant went to the guillotine, he was avenged by a blow of such seemingly vicious unreason that the public felt itself in the midst of nightmare. This time the bomb was aimed not against any representative of law, property or State, but against the man in the street. It exploded in the Café Terminus of the Gare St-Lazare in the midst, as Le Journal wrote, “of peaceful, anonymous citizens gathered in a café to have a beer before going to bed.” One was killed and twenty wounded. As later became clear, the perpetrator acted upon a mad logic of his own. Even before he came to trial, the streets of Paris rocked with more explosions. One in the Rue St-Jacques killed a passer-by, one in the Faubourg St-Germain did no damage and a third exploded in the pocket of Jean Pauwels, a Belgian Anarchist, as he was entering the Church of the Madeleine. He was killed and proved to have set off the other two. On April 4, 1894, a fourth exploded in the fashionable Restaurant Foyot, where, though it killed no one, it put out the eye of Laurent Tailhade, who happened to be dining there and who only four months earlier had shrugged aside the victims of a “fine gesture.”