Nevertheless, we were all condemned for having belonged to the International. Four of us got the maximum sentence, five years’ imprisonment and a hundred pounds’ fine; the remainder got from four years to one year. In fact, our accusers never tried to prove anything concerning the International. It was quite forgotten. We were simply asked to speak about anarchism, and so we did. Not a word was said about the explosions; and when one or two of the Lyons comrades wanted to have this point cleared up, they were bluntly told that they were not prosecuted for that, but for having belonged to the International—to which I alone belonged.

There is always some comical incident in such trials, and this time it was supplied by a letter of mine. There was nothing upon which to base the whole accusation. Scores of searches had been made at the French anarchists’, but only two letters of mine had been found. The prosecution tried to make the best of them. One was written to a French worker, who felt despondent and disheartened. I spoke to him in my letter about the great times we were living in, the great changes coming, the birth and spreading of new ideas, and so on. The letter was not long, and little capital was made out of it by the procureur. As to the other letter, it was twelve pages long. I had written it to another French friend, a young shoemaker. He earned his living by making shoes in his own room for a shop. On his left side he used to have a small iron stove, upon which he himself cooked his daily meal, and upon his right a small stool upon which he wrote long letters to the comrades, without leaving his shoemaker’s low bench. After he had made just as many pairs of shoes as were required for covering the expenses of his extremely modest living, and for sending a few francs to his old mother in the country, he would spend long hours in writing letters in which he developed the theoretical principles of anarchism with admirable good sense and intelligence. He is now a writer, well known in France and generally respected for the integrity of his character. Unfortunately, at that time he would cover eight or twelve pages of notepaper without having put one single full-stop, or even a comma. I once sat down and wrote a long letter in which I explained to him how our thoughts subdivide into groups of sentences, which must be marked by full-stops; into separate sentences which must be separated by stops, and finally into secondary ones which deserve the charity of being marked at least with commas. I told him how much it would improve his writings if he took this simple precaution.

This letter was read by the prosecutor before the court, and elicited from him most pathetic comments: ‘You have heard, gentlemen, this letter’—he went on, addressing the court. ‘You have listened to it. There is nothing particular in it at first sight. He gives a lesson of grammar to a worker.... But’—and here his voice vibrated with accents of deep emotion—‘it was not in order to help a poor worker in instruction which he, owing probably to his laziness, failed to get at school. It was not to help him in earning an honest living.... No, gentlemen—it was written in order to inspire him with hatred for our grand and beautiful institutions, in order only the better to infuse him with the venom of anarchism, in order to make of him only a more terrible enemy of society.... Cursed be the day that Kropótkin put his foot on the soil of France!’ he exclaimed with a wonderful pathos.

We could not help laughing like boys all the time he delivered that speech; the judges stared at him as if to tell him that he was overdoing his rôle, but he seemed not to notice anything, and, carried on by his eloquence, he went on speaking with more and more theatrical gestures and intonations. He really did his best to obtain his reward from the Russian government.

Very soon after the condemnation the presiding magistrate was promoted to the magistracy of an assize court. As to the procureur and another magistrate—one would hardly believe it—the Russian government offered them the Russian cross of Sainte-Anne, and they were allowed by the republic to accept it! The famous Russian alliance had thus its origin in the Lyons trial.

This trial, which lasted a fortnight, during which most brilliant anarchist speeches, reported by all the papers, were made by such first-rate speakers as the worker Bernard and Emile Gautier, and during which all the accused took a very firm attitude, preaching all the time our doctrines, had a powerful influence in spreading anarchist ideas in France, and assuredly contributed to some extent to the revival of socialism in other countries. As to the condemnation, it was so little justified by the proceedings that the French Press—with the exception of the papers devoted to the government—openly blamed the magistrates. Even the moderate ‘Journal des Economistes’ blamed the condemnation, which ‘nothing in the proceedings of the court could have made one foresee.’ The contest between the accusers and ourselves was won by us, in the public opinion. Immediately a proposition of amnesty was brought before the Chamber, and received about a hundred votes in support of it. It came up regularly every year, each time securing more and more votes, until we were released.

XIII

The trial was over, but I remained for another couple of months at the Lyons prison. Most of my comrades had lodged an appeal against the decision of the police court and we had to wait for its results. With four more comrades I refused to take any part in that appeal to a higher court, and continued to work in my pistole. A great friend of mine, Martin—a clothier from Vienne—took another pistole by the side of the one which I occupied, and as we were already condemned, we were allowed to take our walks together; and when we had something to say to each other between the walks, we used to correspond by means of taps on the wall, just as in Russia.

Already during my sojourn at Lyons I began to realize the awfully demoralising influence of the prisons upon the prisoners, which brought me later to condemn unconditionally the whole institution.

The Lyons prison is a ‘modern’ prison, built in the shape of a star, on the cellular system. The spaces between the rays of the star-like building are occupied by small asphalte-paved yards, and, weather permitting, the inmates are taken to these yards to work outdoors. They mostly beat out the unwound silk cocoons to obtain floss silk. Flocks of children are also taken at certain hours to these yards. Thin, emasculated, underfed—the shadows of children—I often watched them from my window. Anæmia was plainly written on all the little faces and manifest in their thin, shivering bodies; and not only in the dormitories but also in the yards, in the full light of the sun, they themselves increased their anæmia. What will become of these children after they have passed through that schooling and come out with their health ruined, their will annihilated, their energy weakened? Anæmia, with its weakened energy and unwillingness to work, its enfeebled will, weakened intellect, and perverted imagination, is responsible for crime to an infinitely greater extent than plethora, and it is precisely this enemy of the human race which is bred in prison. And then, the teachings which the children receive in these surroundings! Mere isolation, even if it were rigorously carried out—and it cannot be—would be of little avail; the whole atmosphere of every prison is an atmosphere of glorification of that sort of gambling in ‘clever strokes’ which constitutes the very essence of theft, swindling, and all sorts of similar anti-social deeds. Whole generations of future prisoners are bred in these nurseries which the state supports and society tolerates, simply because it does not want to hear its own diseases spoken of and dissected. ‘Imprisoned in childhood: prison-bird for life,’ was what I heard afterwards from all those who were interested in criminal matters. And when I saw these children and realized what they had to expect in the future, I could not but continually ask myself: ‘Which of them is the worst criminal—this child or the judge who condemns every year hundreds of children to this fate?’ I gladly admit that the crime of these judges is unconscious. But are, then, all the ‘crimes’ for which people are sent to prison as conscious as they are supposed to be?