Maître Labori’s eloquent pleading, though it did much to establish his reputation as an advocate, proved as vain in the case of this refractory prolétaire as it did later in the case of his bourgeois client, Dreyfus; and Pini was given twenty years of hard labour for his thieving and his impertinent impenitence.
Pini whose thefts were legion, Pini who in the guise of the son of an Italian cardinal paid reconnoitring visits to the archbishopric of Paris, and dreamed the colossal dream of rifling the Vatican, Pini, I say, never stole for himself nor for his friends, but only for the propaganda, for humanity. He was the altruistic thief of the century’s close par excellence. Every son of his thieving was devoted to the cause. He gave to street beggars freely, but always from his legitimate earnings, never from the proceeds of his expeditions, and never without reproaching them for stretching out their hands to beg when they might steal. “Sometimes, even in winter,” says one who claims to have known him well, “Pini, half-clothed and almost barefoot, traversed Paris to carry assistance to the destitute compagnons. He distributed among them one franc or two francs out of his own pocket; but he did not encroach upon the capital of two or three hundred louis which had resulted from his last exploit. He subsidised several French and Italian presses for the printing of journals, manifests, and placards. The stolen money belonged to the cause, to the idea, to the future.”
When he gave of his consecrated hoard to individuals, as he sometimes did, it was always because the propaganda was directly involved. Thus he supported for two years at the University of Milan the son of an imprisoned camarade, and aided many of the camarades who were in prison or who had been obliged to flee to escape imprisonment. He was blamed by some of his associates for having invested a sum of stolen money in an industrial enterprise. The blame was just from the anarchist point of view; and yet, even in this case, the profits were plainly destined in advance for the propaganda.
Within the last two or three years the treasures of the churches have been the greatest sufferers from the pilferers on principle, who have been inflamed by the anti-clerical campaign of the Combes ministry.
As anarchist killings have been very little formidable, viewed in the large, so the aggregate of the anarchist stealings is, in social or criminal statistics, a negligible quantity. These stealings have not brought expropriation appreciably nearer, and have only served the anarchist cause, if they have served it at all, by keeping before the public mind the fact that the anarchist theory is as much opposed to property as it is to government.
The majority of the thieves who call themselves anarchists in court are thieves first and anarchists afterwards,—eleventh-hour converts, who, having fallen on the misfortune of detection, essay to play anarchist rôles, prompted thereto by a sense of humour, a hope of securing the sympathy and support of the camarades, or a yearning for the homage of the “petit peuple de Paris”, who, as Marcel Prévost has pointed out, “adore all revolutionists.”
One other form of propaganda par le fait remains to be mentioned; namely, counterfeiting. But anarchist counterfeiting has not been advocated, it seems, by the accredited anarchist theoricians, and has not been provided with a romantic halo by any master practitioner, like Pini; in short, has not attained the dignity of a public peril, and calls for no extended notice here. The greater part of the so-called anarchist counterfeiters are common criminals or vulgar charlatans with whom anarchy is a mercenary after-thought, or they are simple police spies.
The most picturesque of the real anarchist counterfeiters who have passed through the judicial mill is the Lyonnais poète-chansonnier known as “L’Abruti.”
“L’Abruti” (“The Imbruted”), the uncomplimentary name, intended as a fling against society, is of his own choosing, tormented by that craving for the great road, for space and liberty which has been the blessing and the curse of the best and the worst of men since time was,—from Abraham, Homer, Cain, Esau, and John the Baptist to Morrow, Salsou,[30] Ravachol, Richepin, and Josiah Flynt; L’Abruti swore off working for the detested bourgeois one fine day, and, shouldering a little pack in which he had stowed a stew-pan, a coffee-pot, a set of mysterious steel implements, and some scraps of writing-paper, set out from Lyons in true troubadour or, to be more accurate, in true trimardeur style, to make his tour of France.