“A single point was doubtful. For the success of the manœuvre it was indispensable that the other countries prosecute their refractory citizens in the same fashion.
“Well, what the French Republic had premeditated, Holland, England, and even Germany had the decency to be unwilling to undertake. The venerable monarchies did not yield to the solicitations of the young republic, which dreamed of reconstituting in an inverse sense the Internationale. There were parleyings to this end, but they came to nothing. The hunt of the free man was not decreed by all Europe. Our fallen democracy realised from that moment that she could not do worse than the worst autocracies.... The order was given to set us at large.
“The politico-judiciary machination had miscarried. All it had been able to do was to hold us a month in jail, and gall our wrists slightly with the infamous irons....
“In making arbitrary arrests, our masters, for all their excitement, had no illusions. They knew very well that they would be forced, in the end, to restore to liberty men against whom not a single specific fact could be adduced; but they said to themselves this, ‘Mazas will calm them!’ Now Mazas calms nothing at all....
“It is just the opposite that happens. Deranged in their habits, perturbed in their affairs, losing often their means of subsistence, those who are victims of the provocative raids go out of prison more rebellious than they entered it....
“The little ones are hungry in the house, the baker refuses credit, the landlord threatens eviction, the employer has given another the job.
“Rage mounts. It overflows. Some commit suicide by an overt act; and, surely, the least sturdy take a step forward. The timid grow bold. In the solitude of the cell logical thought has gone back to causes, has deduced responsibilities.
“Ideas become clarified. The man who has been incarcerated for the platonic crime of subversive social love learns hatred.”
Among other questionable repressive measures may be mentioned the famous “trial of the thirty” (procès des trente), embracing several of the theoricians, dilettanti, and littérateurs which resulted, necessarily, in acquittal, but which left much bad feeling behind; the “trial of the forty” (procès des quarante); the condemnation of Zo d’Axa and his managing editor, Matha, to eighteen months of prison and a 3,000-franc fine; the expulsion of the littérateur Alexandre Cohen and the art critic Félix Fénéon; in the winter of 1900-01—to pass over the intervening period—a long-drawn-out series of wholesale rafles made, nominally, to suppress the bands of thieves and thugs who had grown numerous and insolent during the comparative immunity of the preceding summer, in reality quite as much to enable the police to locate anew the camarades of whom they had lost track during their preoccupation with the Exposition; countless perquisitions and preventive arrests throughout the length and breadth of France just before the last visit of the czar; and in the spring of 1904 the turning over of Russian refugees to the Russian police,—so many arbitrary and oppressive acts which will bear, if they have not already borne, their inevitable fruit of hatred and revolt.
For these superfluous persecutions of the anarchists it is sometimes the police and sometimes the ministry that is responsible; which it is not always easy to determine, owing to the close connection between the French national and the Paris municipal governments.