A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

egarded as a libel on the nature of the poor. But Bernard Shaw sounded a note of realism in a
Fabian pamphlet when he asked how, if human nature was so perfect, the oppression and
corruption had arisen in the first place.
Anarchist disturbances came to France in the early 1890s. On May Day 1891, three anarchists were
arrested for taking part in a demonstration and badly beaten up by the police. At their trial, the
prosecuting attorney demanded the death sentence - an absurd demand, since the men were only
accused of incitement to violence. The judge was more reasonable; he acquitted one, and sentenced
the others to three and five years respectively. In the following year, there was an explosion at the
home of the judge, which demolished a stairway but fortunately injured no one. Two weeks later,
the home of the prosecuting lawyer was blown up. A left-wing professor who was arrested after the
first explosion - and no doubt subjected to the vigorous interrogation methods of the French police -
admitted that he had planned the attack, but said that it had been carried out by a man named
Ravachol. This Ravachol, it seemed, was already known to the police - not as a political
revolutionary, but as a burglar and suspected murderer. His real name was Konigstein, and he was
believed to have killed four people - an old man and three old women - in the course of robberies.
On the evening of the attack on the home of the prosecutor, a gaunt, bearded man in his forties had
dinner at the Restaurant Very on the Boulevard Magenta, and talked to the waiter, a man named
Lhérot, about the explosion - which no one yet knew about. When the same man came back two
days later, Lhérot tipped off the police and he was arrested. But was he Ravachol? Fortunately, the
police had a new method of identification, invented by a police clerk named Bertillon. He believed
that certain measurements were unique - the circumference of the head, length of hand, foot and so
on - and had talked the police into giving his system a trial. Konigstein-Ravachol had been briefly
under arrest after the murder of an old miser at his hut in the forest, but released for lack of
evidence: however, Bertillon had taken his measurements at the time. They now proved that this
man who had talked of bombing was Ravachol himself. (As a result, Bertillon became worldfamous,
and his system was adopted by every major police force in the world - only to be replaced
in a few years by fingerprinting.)
The waiter Lhérot talked a little too triumphantly about his part in the arrest; the evening before the
trial, there was a bomb explosion at the restaurant, which killed the proprietor, Lhérot’s brother-inlaw.
Ravachol himself was a figure who gave the French public nightmares. Born forty-two years
earlier, he had become the breadwinner of the family when his father - named Koenigstein - had
deserted them when his son was eight. Like Troppmann, he became devoted to Eugene Sue’s
Wandering Jew, and its revelations of the wickedness of the Jesuits had turned him into an atheist.
When he became interested in anarchism, both he and a younger brother were dismissed by their
employer. He watched the family starve - his young sister died - and dreamed of revenge. He took
up robbery to supplement his income. He felt no remorse about his four victims because, he said,
they were ‘middle class’.
The explosion in the restaurant intimidated the judges, and they sentenced Ravachol to a prison
term - although bombing was a capital offence. But when the police were able to produce evidence
for the four other murders, Ravachol was tried again and sentenced to death. He cried ‘I shall be
avenged!’
In November of that year, a bomb was found in the Paris office of a mining company that was
involved in a strike; a policeman carefully carried it off to the local station, where it exploded,