The French propagandists par le fait, from Ravachol to Baumann,[42] may have grievously deluded themselves; but they have unquestionably believed themselves to be apostles honoured in being set apart for martyrdom.
The stigmata are many and unmistakable. They have had the singleness of purpose and the merciless logic of zealots. They have preached in season and out of season,[43] before judges, in prisons, and at the guillotine. They have consecrated the time allotted for their own defence to the defence of anarchist tenets, have accepted advocates under protest, and have refused to sign requests for the commutation of their sentences. They have borne the odium of deeds of which they were not guilty, because they thereby secured a pulpit for their preaching, and left the real authors free to operate. They have held it sweet to die for the faith. They have displayed, in the awful presence of the knife, the trance-like ecstasy of the illuminate.
In Part I. of his powerful two-part drama, Au-dessus des Forces Humaines, the hero of which is a dynamiter, the great-minded Norseman, Björnson, has emphasised this fact, that it is among the propagandists par le fait of anarchy that we must look for the modern martyrs, for the men who witness their faith with their blood, who sacrifice themselves unreservedly for their fellow-men, who welcome death with smiles and outstretched arms because they are confident that their martyrdom will usher in the redemption of mankind.
Zola and a host of lesser literary lights have been emphasising the same fact in France.
“I know Vaillant,” says one of the characters of Victor Barrucand’s novel Avec le Feu. “He is afflicted with a hypertrophy of the sentiments. He believes in nature, in humanity, in justice. He hopes for the reign of the entities. He is the embodiment of disinterestedness. He wanted to act. Like a brave bull, he charged the imaginary obstacle.... He is sincere, he carries his faith like a torch, he would set the world on fire by way of persuasion.... He is generous, sanguine, sentimental,—the typical French revolutionist.”
And of Emile Henry, author of the explosion of the Café Terminus, Zo d’Axa writes:—
“I hear him still, little more than a child, but already grave, self-centred, and close-mouthed, sectarian even, as all those forcibly become whose faith is troubled by no doubts, those who see—hypnotised, may I say?—the end, and then reason, judge, and decide with mathematical implacability. He believed firmly in the advent of a future society, logically constructed and harmoniously beautiful. What he reproached me for was not counting enough on the regeneration of the race, not referring everything to the ideal standard of anarchy. Apparent contradictions shocked his logical sense. He was astounded that any one who came to realise the baseness of an epoch could continue to take any pleasure therein.”
The ferociousness of the self-styled conservators, who made it their business to hang and burn witches, engendered the morbid exaltation that made inoffensive, impressionable people accuse themselves of being witches. The logical and inevitable counterpart of a Saul of Tarsus breathing threatenings and slaughter is a Stephen beholding the heavens opened. It has always been so, and probably always will be.
“The guillotine is the nimbus of the saints of this new religion,” writes Félix Dubois, a declared opponent of anarchy, in Le Péril Anarchiste; and this revised version of the venerable proverb, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” donne à penser. It makes one query whether the fanaticism of this latter-day sect has not been inflamed rather than allayed by every anarchist head that has fallen. Fancy the feelings of a fervent, conscientious anarchist assisting at the public decapitation of one of his coreligionists. Zola has described in unforgettable pages the entry of the contagion of martyrdom into the system of his sincere, learned, and great-souled anarchist character, Guillaume Froment, at the execution of Froment’s protégé:—
“Ah! the dumb stroke, the heavy shock of the knife! Guillaume heard it penetrate far into this quarter of want and work, heard it resound in the inmost recesses of the wretched lodgings, where, at this hour, thousands of workers were rising for the hard labour of the day. It took on there a formidable meaning. It told the exasperation of injustice, the madness of martyrdom, the agonising hope that the blood shed would hasten the victory of the disinherited.”