Such boasting and such self-gratulatory chuckling are well enough in their way; but they are rather idle in view of the looseness of organisation of the groups, which any one, if he dissemble ever so little, may frequent, and the insignificance and unreliability of the information obtained from such easily recruited spies. Besides, there is a class of anarchists who become police spies, nominally, for the express purpose of leading the police astray by false information. Controlling one journal is not controlling all, and a controlled journal is not less a propagandist force because the public money goes (however secretly) to the making of it. M. Andrieux’s La Révolution Sociale not only preached anarchy, but preached it (here the police short-sightedness appears) very effectively. It converted some of those who have since become the most feared of militant propagandists, and goaded certain of the previously converted into action.
Overt acts are seldom, if ever, arranged in the groups. Vaillant did not breathe a word of his projected attempt against the Chamber of Deputies to his group of Choisy-le-Roi. It is the exception rather than the rule when a really dangerous character is an assiduous frequenter of the groups; and, if he is, he does not often take the group members into his confidence. The “conspiracy” which is bruited about at every fresh anarchist attempt is rarely proved in France, for the very good reason that in France it rarely exists outside of the excited imagination of the frightened public and the professional suspiciousness of the detective and judge. “Why will they prate of plots?” says Zo d’Axa. “There is something better. There is an idea which is alive and stirs, and which is making its way on every hand.”
It is well enough, again, for the anthropometric expert, M. Bertillon (since it seems to amuse him), to enrich his criminal museum with photographs, relics, and statistics of the militant and non-militant anarchists who are brought his way by the police rafles; but what, after all, does it profit him to know the “bigness of the skull, the standing height, the sitting height, the size of the right ear and the left foot,” so that “he has no instrument to register,” to borrow Zo d’Axa’s pregnant phrase, “the significance of a shoulder-shrug”?
The police may plume themselves on knowing the anarchists’ resorts, faces, and aliases, and their tricks of cipher and invisible ink. But this police knowledge of the anarchists is offset by the anarchists’ knowledge of the police.[41] It is diamond cut diamond in this respect.
In 1901 a café garçon, acting on a wager, mounted the step of President Loubet’s state carriage, and dropped in the president’s lap a mysterious bundle which contained a photograph of the garçon’s little daughter. The bundle might as easily have contained a bomb, and all Paris shuddered.
After the great rafle of April, 1892, this same M. Loubet (then a minister), relying on the assurance of the police, proclaimed to the bourgeoisie that they might sleep in peace for a time, since all the dangerous anarchists were under lock and key. Four days later the Véry restaurant was dynamited precisely as it had been predicted that it would be, whence arose, as the Père Peinard exultantly and maliciously remarked at the time, “a new and capital word, Véryfication.”
Somebody’s shoulder-shrug had not been taken account of.
The police expert knowledge of the anarchists, much as it is vaunted, has not sufficed to prevent numerous overt anarchist acts in the immediate past; and there is little reason to believe it can prevent the next overt act to which a resolute man may make up his mind.
In carefully guarding dynamite from theft, the French police have rendered a real service to the public safety. But until the revolver and the poniard, which are surer than dynamite of their chosen victims, can be submitted to a similar control, the greatest service the police can render against the propagande par le fait would seem to be the purely negative one of not exasperating anarchists indiscriminately and unnecessarily, and of not brutally crowding them to the wall.
The injustice of courts, the deceitfulness of ministries, the corruption of parliament, and the unscrupulousness of the police, as well as the inequalities of society, are important factors in the formation of the “catastrophards,” or propagandists par le fait. But they all become insignificant before the passion for martyrdom, which has always, in some form or other, possessed a minority of the human race.