Untitled

A SERIES OF TRAGEDIES
8l
avenges his brothers. And let anyone question him, he
replies 'A begging hermit, he is a : parasite and should
be suppressed. One ought not to bury jewels when children
are hungry, when mothers weep, and when men suffer
from misery. The State makes money. Is it of good
alloy I make it as the State makes it and of the same
alloy! As to dynamite,
it is the arm of the weak who
avenge themselves or avenge others for the humiliating
oppression of the strong and their unconscious accomplices.'"
(2)
Although the anarchists accepted Duval and defended
his acts, Ravachol was variously appreciated by them.
Jean Grave, the French anarchist, and Merlino, the Italian
anarchist, both condemned Ravachol. "He is not one
of us," declared the latter, "and we repudiate him. His
explosions lose their revolutionary character because of
his personality, which is
unworthy to serve the cause of
humanity." (3) Elisee Reclus, on the contrary, wrote of
Ravachol in the Sempre Avanti as follows : "I admire
his courage, his goodness of heart, his grandeur of soul,
the generosity with which he has pardoned his
enemies.
I know few men who surpass him in generosity. I pass
over the question of knowing up to what point it is always
desirable to push one's own right to the extreme
and whether other considerations, actuated by a sentiment
of human solidarity, ought not to make it yield.
But I am none the less of those who recognize in Ravachol
a hero of a rare grandeur of soul." (4)
In the Entretiens politiques et littcraires, under the
title, Eloge de Ravachol, Paul Adam wrote : "Whatever
may have been the invectives of the bourgeois press and
the tenacity of the magistrates in dishonoring the act of
the victim, they have not succeeded in
persuading
us of
his error. After so many judicial debates, chronicles,