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SEEKING THE CAUSES *09
Lombroso says in his exhaustive study of the causes
of violence, Les Anarchistes: "History
is rich in examples
of the complicity of criminality and politics, and
where one sees in turn political passion react on criminal
instinct and criminal instinct on political passion.
— While
has on his side all honest people Cato, Brutus,
Pompey
Cicero; Caesar, more popular than he, has as his
followers
only degenerates — Antony, a libertine and drunkard ;
Curio, a bankrupt; Clelius, a madman; Dolabella, who
made his wife die of grief and who wanted to annul
all debts; and, above all, Catiline and Clodius. In
Greece the Clefts, who are brigands in time of peace,
have valiantly championed the independence of their
country. In Italy, in i860, the Papacy and the Bourbons
hired brigands to oppose the national party and its
troops; the Mafia of Sicily rose up with Garibaldi; and
the Camorra of Naples cooperated with the liberals. And
this shameful alliance with the Camorra of Naples is not
yet dissolved the last ;
parliamentary struggles relative to
the acts of the government of Naples have given us a
sad echo of it— which, alas, proves that it still lasts without
hope of change for the future. It is especially at the
initial stages of revolutions that these sorts of people
abound. It is then, indeed, that the abnormal and unhealthy
spirits predominate over the faltering and the
weak and drag them on to excesses by an actual epidemic
of imitation." (21)
Marx and Engels saw very clearly the part that the
criminal elements would play in any uprising, and as
early as 1847 tnev wrote in the Communist Manifesto:
"The 'dangerous class,' the social scum, that passively
rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society,
may, here and there, be swept into the movement
by a proletarian revolution its conditions of
; life, how-