If it has never been conclusively proved that a ministry has gone to the extent of organising riotings[36] and bogus anarchist attempts (as capitalists have been known to organise strike violence) in order to maintain itself in power, to further a domestic project, bolster up a foreign policy, or win in advance the moral support of the community for a contemplated rigorous suppression of free assembling and free speech, there have been times, as is more than hinted at in Zola’s Paris, when a ministry has been publicly accused and currently believed to have done these things.
According to M. Rochefort, who makes a specialty of launching sensational hypotheses,[37] the attempts of Vaillant and Salsou[38] (by which practically no damage was done) were prepared by the police, acting under government orders. These charges are not to be taken more seriously, of course, than others from the same charlatanical source. They are, perhaps, their own best refutation. On the other hand, it has been proved over and over again that not only cabinet ministers, but politicians in general, as well as financiers and journalists,—all those, in a word, who “fish in troubled waters,”—sometimes act in collusion with the police in turning street disturbances, even at the risk of bloodshed, to their own selfish or partisan advantage.
Furthermore, as if it were not enough to be able to repose on laws of exception that belong logically to the worst monarchies, the government has an unfortunate way of straining legality, ever and anon, even to the breaking point.
Such governmental acts as the transference of papers taken from nihilist refugees in Paris (1890) to the Russian authorities in order to enable the Russian police to arrest nihilists living in Russia; the prohibition of the holding of the International Labour Congress (1900), which it would have been so easy to suppress at the first really incendiary utterance; the extradition of the boy Sipido (the would-be assassin of the then Prince of Wales), a proceeding of such doubtful legality that the ministry responsible for it was censured by a vote of 306 to 206 in the Chamber; the invasion of the Bourse de Travail (1903) by the police, an act which Premier Combes himself was obliged to denounce in the Chamber; and the refusal of the Minister of Justice (1904) to rehabilitate Cyvoct, who adduced overwhelming proofs of his innocence;—all these are fair samples of the far from edifying means the authorities are constantly employing to secure respect for the law.
It is not to be expected that the servant will be more scrupulous than the master, and we long ago became accustomed to the idea that it takes a knave to catch a knave. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to experience a sensation of disgust at the vileness of some of the methods to which the police descend whenever anarchists are concerned.
The police chieftains exaggerate (if they do not deliberately aggravate) the gravity of the public peril (as a wily physician might exaggerate the gravity of an illness) in order to win from their ministers the praise and gratitude which mean for them enlarged brigades, increase of secret funds, and individual promotion.
The rank and file of the police, feeling a similar necessity of making a good showing with their immediate superiors, entrap anarchists into street disturbances or violations of the common law, and fabricate, with the aid of false witnesses, fictitious crimes for the suspects on their lists who are not obliging enough to make incendiary speeches or commit violence. They invade the privacy of their homes on the flimsiest pretexts; slander them to their compagnes, their neighbours, and their friends; poison the minds of their concièrges, their landlords, and their employers against them; in short, they render their lives generally unlivable by mean and meddling tricks.
This is no imaginative sketch,—so far from it that, if the police should take it into their heads, during one of the anarchist flurries which occur periodically, to make a descent upon the lodgings of the writer, who is anything but an anarchist, he would probably be imprisoned (or, at least, confined preventively) for the sole offence of having in his possession the numerous red-covered volumes, brochures, caricatures, placards, and chansons which he has found it necessary to collect in the preparation of this book. If he were a Frenchman, he would certainly have much difficulty in avoiding temporary confinement under such circumstances. Being an American, he might escape with being courteously, but strenuously, requested to cross the border.
This elaborate spy system, this shrewdness, chicanery, and, not to mince words, villany on the part of the police, is, after all, more or less futile. It serves no great purpose in the suppression of the propagande par le fait.
It is well enough for a police prefect to boast publicly, as did M. Andrieux, back in the eighties, of the ease with which he penetrates the meetings of the groups, and recruits spies among the camarades,[39] and to shake his sides over the fine trick he plays on the camarades in conducting a journal[40] for them with funds provided by the state.