[40] M. Andrieux’s La Révolution Sociale was probably not the last journal of its class.
[41] The militant anarchist’s knowledge of the code and of legal procedure is also phenomenal. There is nothing he enjoys better, when in good humour, than to remind his judge of a forgotten or wilfully neglected formality.
[42] Baumann shot a priest who was personally unknown to him for the sake of the propaganda.
[43] Ravachol was attempting to make a convert an hour and a half after the explosion of the rue de Clichy.
[44] Passanante attempted to assassinate King Humbert of Italy.
[45] The prosecution of Tailhade was probably a sop to the Russian diplomats, his article having been specially directed against the czar.
[46] Ravachol justified these acts to himself on the ground that the living and still more the dead had no right to hold wealth in unproductiveness while human beings were starving. The proceeds of both these deeds were religiously consecrated by him to the propagande.
[47] The probable author of the explosion at the Restaurant Véry.
[48] Accused of complicity in various overt acts, but not condemned.
[49] Ravachol’s masterful sneer at the church on his way to the guillotine was not, it seems, pure perverseness. Ravachol had taken a real liking to the prison priest, whom he admitted to be a good fellow, but he had such a horror of being claimed by the church after his death as an eleventh-hour penitent that he had requested the priest not to assist at his execution. To this request the priest had answered,—could anything well be more maladroit?—“I cannot avoid it. I shall be there by the same right as the headsman.”