The exasperation produced by the execution of Vaillant was aggravated by the indelicacy—unpardonable from the Parisian point of view—of holding the execution during the Carnival, and by the atrocious pleasantry of the Minister of the Interior, Raynal, who said, “J’ai donné des étrennes aux honnêtes gens.”
Georges Etievant, who wounded two policemen, had had his life rendered absolutely impossible by the persecution of the police. Implicated by them in a theft of dynamite in 1891, he is said, on good authority, to have served his time rather than denounce the real culprit, who was a father of a family. Banished for the first article he wrote after his release, he tried to
SALSOU practise sculpture in London, but was prevented by the machinations of the French secret police, who made him lose all his work. He was a starving, shelterless outcast at the moment of his crime.
Salsou, who attempted the life of the Persian shah during the Exposition of 1900, had lost work by reason of his opinions earlier in life. Furthermore, he had been arrested for vagabondage at Fontainebleau while making his way from Lyons to Paris on foot in 1894, and, this charge of vagabondage being groundless, had been condemned to three months of prison for vaunting his anarchist belief, on the dubious testimony of a police spy, who had been put into the same cell with him for the express purpose of “drawing him out.”
Finally, the condemnation of Salsou to hard labour for life, in punishment of a relatively insignificant attempt by which no one was hurt, was based on diplomatic rather than judicial reasoning. He died soon after his arrival at Cayenne, in consequence, probably, of the hardships to which he was subjected. His body was thrown to the sharks in the presence of a number of functionaries, who amused themselves by taking photographs of the fight for its possession. Certain of the prisoners, who were witnesses of this revolting scene, have taken a solemn oath to avenge it.
It looks very much as if the high-handed suppression of free speech in France during the early eighties had been largely instrumental in producing the numerous overt anarchist acts during the nineties, and as if the continued policy of the authorities in “making examples” by an overstraining of the law had inspired other anarchists to follow the examples of those who were made examples of.
“The anarchists,” says Jean Grave, very justly, “suffer governmental persecutions, not only when they revolt, which is quite comprehensible, but even when they content themselves with a peaceable propagation of their way of understanding things, and that notwithstanding the fact that at the present time the majority of the governors pretend to have granted the greatest political liberty.... The police have been ferocious, pitiless, towards the workers. They have hunted the anarchists like wild beasts. For a word a bit strong, for an article a trifle more violent than usual, years of prison have fallen on them.... Treated like wild beasts, certain ones act like wild beasts.... ‘Who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind.’”
In 1882 sixty-six anarchists were tried at Lyons, and sixty-one convicted (fifteen for contumacy), among them Kropotkine and the scientist Emile Gauthier. The unjust condemnation of Emile Pouget and Louise Michel, referred to in a previous chapter, came soon after.
“Cyvoct was sentenced to death[34] at Lyons,” says the Chronology of the Père Peinard, under the date December 11, 1883, “for the crime of having been managing editor of an anarchist journal at the moment when an unknown person placed a bomb in a dive where the swells amused themselves.”