A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

killing five. Paris, suddenly, was thrown into panic; restaurants suffered as no one dared to venture
into one. There was a rumour that the anarchists intended to poison the city’s reservoirs. But many
of the younger poets and painters revelled in all the excitement and declared their support for
anarchism.
In December 1893, another embittered member of the unemployed, August Vaillant, who had been
put out on to the streets at the age of twelve, threw a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies. It was a
small bomb, intended to alarm rather than kill. A poet named Laurent Tailhade was enthusiastic,
and exclaimed: ‘What does it matter about the victims if it is a fine gesture?’ The judges disagreed,
and Vaillant was executed. A week later, a bomb exploded in the restaurant of the Gare St-Lazare,
killing one and injuring twenty. Two more explosions in Paris streets killed only one passer-by; and
when a bomb exploded in the pocket of a Belgian anarchist named Jean Pauwels, killing him, he
was found to be responsible for the two street explosions. A bomb in the Restaurant Foyot put out
the eye of the poet Laurent Tailhade. The man who was finally arrested and tried for the Gare St-
Lazare explosion, Emile Henry, said it was aimed against the bourgeoisie who could afford to eat in
restaurants.
On 24 June 1894, the president of France, Sadi Carnot, was driving in an open carriage through the
streets of Lyons, where he was visiting an exhibition; he told the police to allow people to approach
him if they wanted to. A young man holding a rolled-up newspaper stepped forward, then removed
a knife from the newspaper and plunged it into Carnot’s stomach, shouting ‘Vive la revolution!
Vive l’anarchie!’ He proved to be a young Italian, Santo Caserio. Carnot died soon after. Caserio
was executed shouting ‘Vive l’anarchie!’
The anarchist scare in France ended abruptly. The government put thirty anarchists on trial, accused
of conspiracy. The jury refused to be stampeded, and acquitted them all, except three burglars. This
rational gesture deprived the anarchists of more martyrs and took the steam out of their propaganda.
Besides, leaders of the movement, such as Kropotkin and Malatesta, were already beginning to
doubt the wisdom of violence when it attracted undesirables like Ravachol. The French socialist
movement became theoretical once again.
In America, two events helped to take some of the bitterness out of the anarchist struggle. The most
articulate and passionate spokesman of revolution, Johann Most (who had been expelled from
Germany for liberalism, then from England for praising the Irishmen who assassinated Lord
Frederick Cavendish in Phoenix Park, Dublin) suddenly announced that he had ceased to support
‘the propaganda of the deed’; he denounced a young anarchist named Alexander Berkman who had
made an attempt to kill the manager of the Carnegie Steel Works during a strike. The denunciation
may have been prompted by the fact that Berkman had supplanted Most as the lover of a young
Jewish revolutionary, Emma Goldman; nevertheless, it influenced large numbers of American
anarchists. Then the governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, re-examined the case of the Chicago,
anarchists and announced that the jury had been ‘packed’ with men who were specially chosen to
convict. Altgeld’s motives were also not entirely disinterested - he had a personal grudge against
Judge Gary, who had been in charge of the trial. Altgeld was defeated at the next election; but his
gesture helped to restore the good name of American justice, and to undermine the anarchists’
insistence that everyone in authority was a crook.
In Spain, it was a grimmer story. The Spaniards are strangers to moderation. In January 1892, there
was a minor peasants’ revolt in Andalusia. Farm-workers marched to try and free four men who
had been imprisoned for taking part in labour agitations ten years before; police broke them up and