It could not be better put. Cyvoct was in Switzerland at the time of the explosion, and could not by any possibility have been the author of it. He was not even the writer of the article which was held by the court to have provoked the attempt.
The next year Gueslaff was condemned to ten years of hard labour for an attempt at Montceau-les-Mines, which he made at the instigation and under the direction of a police agent.
Three years later—to pass rapidly on—anarchists were sentenced for revolutionary speeches at Laon. In 1890 Merlino, Malato, and Louise Michel were incarcerated on the same charge. There was an indiscriminate and purely preventive ingathering (rafle) of anarchists the 22d of April, 1892, in prevision of the trial of Ravachol and the dreaded demonstration of May 1, and another rafle, also indiscriminate and purely preventive, on the New Year’s Day preceding the execution of Vaillant,—a measure which wrought untold injury—could governmental malice or stupidity go farther?—to anarchist workingmen, and brought untold suffering on their families, from the fact that it coincided with the moment for the payment of the January rent (terme).[35] It was of the former rafle, in which he was included, that the littérateur Zo d’Axa, in his piquant De Mazas à Jérusalem, wrote:—
“The police drag-net trick of this month of April, ‘92, will become historic.
“It is the first in date among the most cynical assaults of modern times upon liberty of thought.
“The true inwardness of the affair is now known.
“The government wished to profit by the emotion caused by the explosions of the Caserne Loban and the rue de Clichy to encircle in a gigantic trial of tendency the militant revolutionists. The ministry and its docile agents pretended to believe that certain opinions constituted complicity. The writer, explaining how the disinherited gravitate inevitably towards theft, became, by the simple fact of this explanation, a thief himself. The thinker, studying the wherefore of the propagande par le fait, became the secret associate of the lighters of tragic fuses. The philosopher had no right to counsel indulgence and to view without giddiness the facts.
“Society must rid itself of those of its members who are so corrupt as to desire it better....
“Evidently, the impartiality of the judges was not to be counted on. The word of command had been passed along. It would be useless to prove that not only we were not cut-purses nor cut-throats, but that no organisation existed among us, even from the political point of view. The tribunals would sentence us with the same unconcern.