A study of the various manifestations in France of the propagande par le fait shows that the greater part of the overt anarchist acts, whether counterfeitings, stealings, or killings, have proceeded from a more or less well-grounded desire for personal or party vengeance; they have been committed by persons who have either suffered unjustly themselves at the hands of government or society or have lived very close to those who have so suffered.
The sensational killing of the assistant superintendent, Watrin,[31] by the striking miners of Decazeville (1886) was a horrible crime or a wholesome act of popular justice, according to the point of view. The fury of the mob is explained, if not excused, by the fact that this Watrin was allowed a premium of five per cent. upon every reduction of wages he was able to accomplish, coupled with the other fact that his brutal and insatiate rapacity had forced wages down thirty per cent. in eight years.
The anarchist house-breaker, Clément Duval, had been seriously handicapped in the struggle for existence. In the Franco-Prussian war he had received two wounds which had rendered him permanently unfit for his trade of iron worker, and had contracted a disease which had forced him to spend nearly four years out of ten in various hospitals. He had experienced real want in the course of his many periods of enforced idleness.
Pini had suffered much at the hands of society and the state. Many a time, when out of work, he had been glad to sleep on straw, at two cents a night, in the faubourg of La Glacière. His autobiography, which he wrote in jail, while awaiting his trial, is, like every formal utterance Pini ever made, exceedingly illuminating. Of his early life he says:—
“Son of a poor pariah, I began my career surrounded with the luxuries which the bourgeoisie heaps upon us from our very cradles. I saw six of my brothers die of want. One of my sisters wore herself out in the service of a stingy family of bourgeois.
“My old father (an ancient Garibaldian), after a painful existence, in which he had given to the bourgeoisie sixty years of his sweat and enriched a good number of employers, died like a dog in a charity hospital.
“I passed my childhood in a charity asylum; and, my primary studies finished, I was forced at the age of twelve years to go to work in a printing-office, where I earned just one franc a week.”
Driven from Italy in his young manhood for his connection with the leaders of the “Workingman’s Party,”[32] he took refuge in Switzerland, and after a few months came to Paris.
His disillusion in regard to Paris is highly significant. He had dreamed of finding there democracy, and found flagrant inequality instead.