PART SIXTH WESTERN EUROPE (continued 2)

The sudden attacks of sadness of which I have already spoken, during which Alexander II. reproached himself with the reactionary character his reign had assumed, now took the shape of violent paroxysms of tears. He would sit weeping by the hour, filling Mélikoff with despair. Then he would ask his minister, ‘When will your constitutional scheme be ready?’ But if, two days later, Mélikoff said that it was ready, the Emperor seemed to have forgotten all about it. ‘Did I mention it?’ he would ask. ‘What for? We had better leave it to my successor. That will be his gift to Russia.’

When rumours of a new plot reached him, he was ready to undertake something, in order to give satisfaction to the Executive Committee; but when everything seemed to be quiet among the revolutionists, he turned his ear again to his reactionary advisers, and let things go. At any moment Mélikoff expected dismissal.

In February 1881 Mélikoff reported that a new plot had been laid by the Executive Committee, but its plan could not be discovered by any amount of searching. Thereupon Alexander II. decided that a sort of consultative assembly of delegates from the provinces should be called. Always under the idea that he would share the fate of Louis XVI., he described this gathering as an Assemblée des Notables, like the one convoked by Louis XVI. before the National Assembly in 1789. The scheme had to be laid before the council of state, but then again he hesitated. It was only on the morning of March 1 (13), 1881, after a new warning by Lóris Mélikoff, that he ordered it to be brought before the council on the following Thursday. This was on Sunday, and he was asked by Mélikoff not to go out to the parade that day, there being immediate danger of an attempt on his life. Nevertheless, he went. He wanted to see the Grand Duchess Catherine (daughter of his aunt, Hélène Pávlovna, who had been one of the leaders of the reform party in 1861), and to carry her the welcome news, perhaps as an expiatory offering to the memory of the Empress Marie. He is said to have told her, ‘Je me suis décidé à convoquer une Assemblée des Notables.’ However, this belated and half-hearted concession had not been announced, and on his way back to the Winter Palace he was killed.

It is known how it happened. A bomb was thrown under his iron-clad carriage, to stop it. Several Circassians of the escort were wounded. Rysakóff, who flung the bomb, was arrested on the spot. Then, although the coachman of the Tsar earnestly advised him not to get out, saying that he could drive him still in the slightly damaged carriage, he insisted upon alighting. He felt that his military dignity required him to see the wounded Circassians, to condole with them as he had done with the wounded during the Turkish war, when a mad storming of Plevna, doomed to end in a terrible disaster, was made on the day of his fête. He approached Rysakóff and asked him something; and as he passed close by another young man, Grinevétsky, who stood there with a bomb, Grinevétsky threw the bomb between himself and the Tsar, so that both of them should be killed. Both were fearfully wounded, and lived but a few hours.

There Alexander II. lay upon the snow, abandoned by every one of his followers! All had disappeared. It was some cadets, returning from the parade, who lifted the dying Tsar and put him in a sledge, covering his shivering body with a cadet mantle. And it was one of the terrorists, Emeliánoff, with a bomb wrapped in a paper under his arm, who, at the risk of being arrested on the spot and hanged, rushed with the cadets to the help of the wounded man. Human nature is full of these contrasts.

Thus ended the tragedy of Alexander the Second’s life. People could not understand how it was possible that a Tsar who had done so much for Russia should have met his death at the hands of revolutionists. To me, who had the chance of witnessing the first reactionary steps of Alexander II. and his gradual deterioration, who had caught a glimpse of his complex personality, and seen in him a born autocrat, whose violence was but partially mitigated by education, a man possessed of military gallantry, but devoid of the courage of the statesman, a man of strong passions and weak will—it seemed that the tragedy developed with the unavoidable fatality of one of Shakespeare’s dramas. Its last act was already written for me on the day when I heard him address us, the promoted officers, on June 13, 1862, immediately after he had ordered the first executions in Poland.

IX

A wild panic seized the court circles at St. Petersburg. Alexander III., who, notwithstanding his colossal stature and force, was not a very courageous man, refused to move to the Winter Palace, and retired to the palace of his grandfather, Paul I., at Gatchina. I know that old building, planned as a Vauban fortress, surrounded by moats and protected by watch towers, from the tops of which secret staircases lead to the Emperor’s study. I have seen the trap-doors in the study for suddenly throwing an enemy on the sharp rocks in the water underneath, and the secret staircase leading to underground prisons and to an underground passage which opens on a lake. All the palaces of Paul I. had been built on a similar plan. In the meantime, an underground gallery, supplied with automatic electric appliances to protect it from being undermined by the revolutionists, was dug round the Aníchkoff palace in which Alexander III. resided when he was heir-apparent.

A secret league for the protection of the Tsar was started. Officers of all grades were induced by triple salaries to join it, and to undertake voluntary spying in all classes of society. Amusing scenes followed, of course. Two officers, without knowing that they both belonged to the league, would entice each other into a disloyal conversation, during a railway journey, and then proceed to arrest each other, only to discover at the last moment that their pains had been labour lost. This league still exists in a more official shape, under the name of Okhrána (Protection), and from time to time frightens the present Tsar with all sorts of concocted dangers, in order to maintain its existence.

A still more secret organization, the Holy League, was formed at the same time, under the leadership of the brother of the Tsar, Vladímir, for the purpose of opposing the revolutionists in different ways, one of which was to kill those of the refugees who were supposed to have been the leaders of the late conspiracies. I was of this number. The grand duke violently reproached the officers of the league for their cowardice, regretting that there were none among them who would undertake to kill such refugees; and an officer, who had been a page de chambre at the time I was in the corps of pages, was appointed by the league to carry out this particular work.

The fact is that the refugees abroad did not interfere with the work of the Executive Committee at St. Petersburg. To pretend to direct conspiracies from Switzerland, while those who were at St. Petersburg acted under a permanent menace of death, would have been sheer nonsense; and as Stepniák and I wrote several times, none of us would have accepted the dubious task of forming plans of action without being on the spot. But, of course, it suited the plans of the St. Petersburg police to maintain that they were powerless to protect the Tsar because all plots were devised abroad, and their spies—I know it well—amply supplied them with the desired reports.

Skóbeleff, the hero of the Turkish war, was also asked to join this league, but he blankly refused. It appears from Lóris Mélikoff’s posthumous papers, part of which were published by a friend of his at London, that when Alexander III. came to the throne, and hesitated to convoke the Assembly of Notables, Skóbeleff even made an offer to Lóris Mélikoff and Count Ignátieff (‘the lying Pasha,’ as the Constantinople diplomatists used to nickname him) to arrest Alexander III., and compel him to sign a constitutional manifesto; whereupon Ignátieff is said to have denounced the scheme to the Tsar, and thus to have obtained his nomination as prime minister, in which capacity he resorted, with the advice of M. Andrieux, the ex-prefect of police at Paris, to various stratagems in order to paralyze the revolutionists.

If the Russian Liberals had shown even moderate courage and some power of organized action at that time, a National Assembly would have been convoked. From the same posthumous papers of Lóris Mélikoff, it appears that Alexander III. was willing for a time to convoke a National Assembly. He had made up his mind to do so, and had announced it to his brother. Old Wilhelm I. supported him in this intention. It was only when he saw that the Liberals undertook nothing, while the Katkóff party was busy at work in the opposite direction—M. Andrieux advising him to crush the nihilists and indicating how it ought to be done (the ex-prefect’s letter to this effect was published in the said papers)—that Alexander III. finally resolved on declaring that he would continue to be an absolute ruler of the Empire.

A few months after the death of Alexander II. I was expelled from Switzerland by order of the federal council. I did not take umbrage at this. Assailed by the monarchical powers on account of the asylum which Switzerland offered to refugees, and menaced by the Russian official press with a wholesale expulsion of all Swiss governesses and ladies’ maids, who are numerous in Russia, the rulers of Switzerland, by banishing me, gave some sort of satisfaction to the Russian police. But I very much regret, for the sake of Switzerland itself, that that step was taken. It was a sanction given to the theory of ‘conspiracies concocted in Switzerland,’ and it was an acknowledgment of weakness, of which other powers took advantage at once. Two years later, when Jules Ferry proposed to Italy and Germany the partition of Switzerland, his argument must have been that the Swiss Government itself had admitted that Switzerland was ‘a hotbed of international conspiracies.’ This first concession led to more arrogant demands, and has certainly placed Switzerland in a far less independent position than it might otherwise have occupied.

The decree of expulsion was delivered to me immediately after I had returned from London, where I was present at an anarchist congress in July 1881. After that congress I had stayed for a few weeks in England, writing the first articles on Russian affairs from our standpoint, for the ‘Newcastle Chronicle.’ The English press, at that time, was an echo of the opinions of Madame Novikóff—that is, of Katkóff and the Russian state police—and I was most happy when Mr. Joseph Cowen agreed to give me the hospitality of his paper in order to state our point of view.

I had just joined my wife in the high mountains where she was staying, near the abode of Elisée Reclus, when I was asked to leave Switzerland. We sent the little luggage we had to the next railway station and went on foot to Aigle, enjoying for the last time the sight of the mountains that we loved so much. We crossed the hills by taking short cuts over them, and laughed when we discovered that the short cuts led to long windings; and when we reached the bottom of the valley, we tramped along the dusty road. The comical incident which always comes in such cases was supplied by an English lady. A richly dressed dame, reclining by the side of a gentleman in a hired carriage, threw several tracts to the two poorly dressed tramps, as she passed them. I lifted the tracts from the dust. She was evidently one of those ladies who believe themselves to be Christians, and consider it their duty to distribute religious tracts among ‘dissolute foreigners.’ Thinking we were sure to overtake the lady at the railway station, I wrote on one of the pamphlets the well-known verse relative to the rich and the Kingdom of God, and similarly appropriate quotations about the Pharisees being the worst enemies of Christianity. When we came to Aigle, the lady was taking refreshments in her carriage. She evidently preferred to continue the journey in this vehicle along the lovely valley, rather than to be shut up in a stuffy railway train. I returned her the pamphlets with politeness, saying that I had added to them something that she might find useful for her own instruction. The lady did not know whether to fly at me or to accept the lesson with Christian patience. Her eyes expressed both impulses in rapid succession.

My wife was about to pass her examination for the degree of Bachelor of Science at the Geneva University, and we settled, therefore, in a tiny town of France, Thonon, situated on the Savoy coast of the Lake of Geneva, and stayed there a couple of months.

As to the death sentence of the Holy League, a warning reached me from one of the highest quarters of Russia. Even the name of the lady who was sent from St. Petersburg to Geneva to be the head centre of the conspiracy became known to me. So I simply communicated the fact to the Geneva correspondent of the ‘Times,’ asking him to publish the information if anything should happen, and I put a note to that effect in ‘Le Révolté.’ After that I did not trouble myself more about it. My wife did not take it so lightly, and the good peasant woman, Madame Sansaux, who gave us board and lodgings at Thonon, and who had learned of the plot in a different way (through her sister, who was a nurse in the family of a Russian agent), bestowed the most touching care upon me. Her cottage was out of town, and whenever I went to town at night—sometimes to meet my wife at the railway station—she always found a pretext to have me accompanied by her husband with a lantern. ‘Wait only a moment, Monsieur Kropótkin,’ she would say; ‘my husband is going that way for purchases, and you know he always carries a lantern!’ Or else she would send her brother to follow me at a distance, without my noticing it.

X

In October or November 1881, as soon as my wife had passed her examination, we removed from Thonon to London, where we stayed nearly twelve months. Few years separate us from that time, and yet I can say that the intellectual life of London and of all England was quite different then from what it became a little later. Everyone knows that in the forties England stood almost at the head of the socialist movement in Europe; but during the years of reaction that followed, this great movement, which had deeply affected the working classes, and in which all that is now put forward as scientific or anarchist socialism had already been said, came to a standstill. It was forgotten in England as well as on the Continent, and what the French writers describe as ‘the third awakening of the proletarians’ had not yet begun in Britain. The labours of the agricultural commission of 1871, the propaganda amongst the agricultural labourers, and the previous efforts of the Christian socialists had certainly done something to prepare the way; but the outburst of socialist feeling in England which followed the publication of Henry George’s ‘Progress and Poverty’ had not yet taken place.

The year that I then passed in London was a year of real exile. For one who held advanced socialist opinions, there was no atmosphere to breathe in. There was no sign of that animated socialist movement which I found so largely developed on my return in 1886. Burns, Champion, Hardie, and the other labour leaders were not yet heard of; the Fabians did not exist; Morris had not declared himself a socialist; and the trade unions, limited in London to a few privileged trades only, were hostile to socialism. The only active and outspoken representatives of the socialist movement were Mr. and Mrs. Hyndman, with a very few workers grouped round them. They had held in the autumn of 1881 a small congress, and we used to say jokingly—but it was very nearly true—that Mrs. Hyndman had received all the congress in her house. Moreover, the more or less socialist radical movement which was certainly going on in the minds of men did not assert itself frankly and openly. That considerable number of educated men and women who appeared in public life four years later, and, without committing themselves to socialism, took part in various movements connected with the well-being or the education of the masses, and who have now created in almost every city of England and Scotland a quite new atmosphere of reform and a new society of reformers, had not then made themselves felt. They were there, of course; they thought and spoke; all the elements for a widespread movement were in existence; but, finding none of those centres of attraction which the socialist groups subsequently became, they were lost in the crowd; they did not know one another, or remained unconscious of their own selves.

Tchaykóvsky was then in London, and, as in years past, we began a socialist propaganda amongst the workers. Aided by a few English workers whose acquaintance we had made at the congress of 1881, or whom the prosecutions against John Most had attracted to the socialists, we went to the Radical clubs, speaking about Russian affairs, the movement of our youth toward the people, and socialism in general. We had ridiculously small audiences, seldom consisting of more than a dozen men. Occasionally some grey-bearded Chartist would rise from the audience and tell us that all we were saying had been said forty years before, and was greeted then with enthusiasm by crowds of workers, but that now all was dead, and there was no hope of reviving it.

Mr. Hyndman had just published his excellent exposition of Marxist socialism under the title of ‘England for All’; and I remember, one day in the summer of 1882, earnestly advising him to start a socialist paper. I told him with what small means we began editing ‘Le Révolté,’ and predicted a certain success if he would make the attempt. But so unpromising was the general outlook, that even he thought the undertaking would be a certain failure, unless he had the means to defray all its expenses. Perhaps he was right; but when, less than three years later, he started ‘Justice,’ it found a hearty support among the workers, and early in 1886 there were three socialist papers, and the Social Democratic Federation was an influential body.

In the summer of 1882 I spoke, in broken English, before the Durham miners at their annual gathering; I delivered lectures at Newcastle, Glasgow, and Edinburgh about the Russian movement, and was received with enthusiasm, a crowd of workers giving hearty cheers for the Nihilists, after the meeting, in the street. But my wife and I felt so lonely at London, and our efforts to awaken a socialist movement in England seemed so hopeless, that in the autumn of 1882 we decided to remove again to France. We were sure that in France I should soon be arrested; but we often said to each other, ‘Better a French prison than this grave.’

Those who are prone to speak of the slowness of evolution ought to study the development of socialism in England. Evolution is slow; but its rate is not uniform. It has its periods of slumber and its periods of sudden progress.

XI

We settled once more in Thonon, taking lodgings with our former hostess, Madame Sansaux. A brother of my wife, who was dying of consumption, and had come to Switzerland, joined us.

I never saw such numbers of Russian spies as during the two months that I remained at Thonon. To begin with, as soon as we had engaged lodgings, a suspicious character, who gave himself out for an Englishman, took the other part of the house. Flocks, literally flocks of Russian spies besieged the house, seeking admission under all possible pretexts, or simply tramping in pairs, trios, and quartettes in front of the house. I can imagine what wonderful reports they wrote. A spy must report. If he should merely say that he has stood for a week in the street without noticing anything mysterious, he would soon be put on the half-pay list or dismissed.

It was then the golden age of the Russian secret police. Ignátieff’s policy had borne fruit. There were two or three bodies of police competing with one another, each having any amount of money at their disposal, and carrying on the boldest intrigues. Colonel Sudéikin, for instance, chief of one of the branches—plotting with a certain Degáeff, who after all killed him—denounced Ignátieff’s agents to the revolutionists, and offered to the terrorists all facilities for killing the minister of the interior, Count Tolstóy, and the Grand Duke Vladímir; adding that he himself would then be nominated minister of the interior, with dictatorial powers, and the Tsar would be entirely in his hands. This activity of the Russian police culminated, later on, in the kidnapping of the Prince of Battenberg from Bulgaria.

The French police, also, were on the alert. The question, ‘What is he doing at Thonon?’ worried them. I continued to edit ‘Le Révolté,’ and wrote articles for the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and the ‘Newcastle Chronicle.’ But what reports could be made out of that? One day the local gendarme paid a visit to my landlady. He had heard from the street the rattling of some machine, and wished to report that I had in the house a secret printing press. So he came in my absence and asked the landlady to show him the press. She replied that there was none, and suggested that perhaps the gendarme had overheard the noise of her sewing-machine. But he would not be convinced by so prosaic an explanation, and actually compelled the landlady to use the machine, while he listened inside the house and outside, to make sure that the rattling he had heard was the same.

‘What is he doing all day?’ he asked the landlady.

‘He writes.’

‘He cannot write all day long.’

‘He saws wood in the garden at midday, and he takes walks every afternoon between four and five.’ It was in November.

‘Ah, that’s it! When the dusk is coming on?’ (A la tombée de la nuit?) And he wrote in his note-book, ‘Never goes out except at dusk.’

I could not well explain at that time this special attention of the Russian spies; but it must have had some connection with the following. When Ignátieff was nominated prime minister, advised by the ex-prefect of Paris, Andrieux, he hit on a new plan. He sent a swarm of his agents into Switzerland, and one of them undertook the publication of a paper which slightly advocated the extension of provincial self-government in Russia, but whose chief purpose was to combat the revolutionists, and to rally to its standard those of the refugees who did not sympathize with terrorism. This was certainly a means of sowing division. Then, when nearly all the members of the Executive Committee had been arrested in Russia, and a couple of them had taken refuge at Paris, Ignátieff sent an agent to Paris to offer an armistice. He promised that there should be no further executions on account of the plots during the reign of Alexander II., even if those who had escaped arrest fell into the hands of the government; that Chernyshévsky should be released from Siberia; and that a commission should be nominated to revise the cases of all those who had been exiled to Siberia without trial. On the other side, he asked the Executive Committee to promise to make no attempts against the Tsar’s life until his coronation was over. Perhaps the reforms in favour of the peasants, which Alexander III. intended to make, were also mentioned. The agreement was made at Paris, and was kept on both sides. The terrorists suspended hostilities. Nobody was executed for complicity in the former conspiracies; those who were arrested later on under this indictment were immured in the Russian Bastille at Schlüsselburg, where nothing was heard of them for fifteen years, and where most of them still are. Chernyshévsky was brought back from Siberia, and ordered to stay at Astrakhan, where he was severed from all connection with the intellectual world of Russia, and soon died. A commission went through Siberia, releasing some of the exiles, and specifying terms of exile for the remainder. My brother Alexander received from it an additional five years.

While I was at London, in 1882, I was also told one day that a man who pretended to be a bonâ fide agent of the Russian government, and could prove it, wanted to enter into negotiations with me. ‘Tell him that if he comes to my house I will throw him down the staircase,’ was my reply. The consequence of it was, I suppose, that while Ignátieff considered the Tsar guaranteed from the attacks of the Executive Committee, he thought that the anarchists might make some attempt and wanted therefore to have me out of the way.

XII

The anarchist movement had taken a considerable development in France during the years 1881 and 1882. It was generally believed that the French mind was hostile to communism, and within the International Workingmen’s Association ‘collectivism’ was preached instead. Collectivism meant then the possession of the instruments of production in common, each separate group having, however, to settle for itself whether the consumption of produce should be on individualistic or communistic lines. In reality, the French mind was hostile only to the monastic communism, to the phalanstère of the old schools. When the Jura Federation, at its congress of 1880, boldly declared itself anarchist-communist—that is, in favour of free communism—anarchism won wide sympathy in France. Our paper began to spread in that country, letters were exchanged in great numbers with French workers, and an anarchist movement of importance rapidly developed at Paris and in some of the provinces, especially in the Lyons region. When I crossed France in 1881, on my way from Thonon to London, I visited Lyons, St. Etienne, and Vienne, lecturing there, and I found in these cities a considerable number of workers ready to accept our ideas.

By the end of 1882 a terrible crisis prevailed in the Lyons region. The silk industry was paralysed, and the misery among the weavers was so great that crowds of children stood every morning at the gates of the barracks, where the soldiers gave away what they could spare of their bread and soup. This was the beginning of the popularity of General Boulanger, who had permitted this distribution of food. The miners of the region were also in a very precarious state.

I knew that there was a great deal of fermentation, but during the eleven months I had stayed at London I had lost close contact with the French movement. A few weeks after I returned to Thonon I learned from the papers that the miners of Monceau-les-Mines, incensed at the vexations of the ultra-Catholic owners of the mines, had begun a sort of movement; they were holding secret meetings, talking of a general strike; the stone crosses erected on all the roads round the mines were thrown down or blown up by dynamite cartridges, which are largely used by the miners in underground work, and often remain in their possession. The agitation at Lyons also took a more violent character. The anarchists, who were rather numerous in the city, allowed no meeting of the opportunist politicians to be held without obtaining a hearing for themselves—storming the platform, as a last resource. They brought forward resolutions to the effect that the mines and all necessaries for production, as well as the dwelling-houses, ought to be owned by the nation; and these resolutions were carried with enthusiasm, to the horror of the middle classes.

The feeling among the workers was growing every day against the opportunist town councillors and political leaders as also against the Press, who made light of a very acute crisis, and undertook nothing to relieve the widespread misery. As is usual at such times, the fury of the poorer people turned especially against the places of amusement and debauch, which become only the more conspicuous in times of desolation and misery, as they impersonate for the worker the egotism and dissoluteness of the wealthier classes. A place particularly hated by the workers was the underground café at the Théatre Bellecour, which remained open all night, and where, in the small hours of the morning, one could see newspaper men and politicians feasting and drinking in company with gay women. Not a meeting was held but some menacing allusion was made to that café, and one night a dynamite cartridge was exploded in it by an unknown hand. A socialist working-man, who was occasionally there, jumped to blow out the lighted fuse of the cartridge, and was killed, while a few of the feasting politicians were slightly wounded. Next day a dynamite cartridge was exploded at the doors of a recruiting bureau, and it was said that the anarchists intended to blow up the huge statue of the Virgin which stands on one of the hills of Lyons. One must have lived at Lyons or in its neighbourhood to realize the extent to which the population and the schools are still in the hands of the Catholic clergy, and to understand the hatred that the male portion of the population feel toward the clergy.

A panic now seized the wealthier classes of Lyons. Some sixty anarchists—all workers, and only one middle-class man, Emile Gautier, who was on a lecturing tour in the region—were arrested. The Lyons papers undertook at the same time to incite the government to arrest me, representing me as the leader of the agitation, who had come from England in order to direct the movement. Russian spies began to parade again in conspicuous numbers in our small town. Almost every day I received letters, evidently written by spies of the international police, mentioning some dynamite plot, or mysteriously announcing that consignments of dynamite had been shipped to me. I made quite a collection of these letters, writing on each of them ‘Police Internationale,’ and they were taken away by the police when they made a search in my house. But they did not dare to produce these letters in court, nor did they ever restore them to me. In December, the house where I stayed was searched in Russian fashion, and my wife, who was going to Geneva, was arrested at the station in Thonon, and also searched. But of course nothing was found to compromise me or anyone else.

Ten days passed, during which I was quite free to go away, if I had wished to do so. I received several letters advising me to disappear—one of them from an unknown Russian friend, perhaps a member of the diplomatic staff, who seemed to have known me, and who wrote that I must leave at once, because otherwise I should be the first victim of an extradition treaty which was about to be concluded between France and Russia. I remained where I was; and when the ‘Times’ inserted a telegram saying that I had disappeared from Thonon, I wrote a letter to the paper giving my address, and declaring that since so many of my friends were arrested I had no intention of leaving.

In the night of December 21, my brother-in-law died in my arms. We knew that his illness was incurable, but to see a young life extinguished in your presence, after a brave struggle against death, is terrible. We both were quite broken down. Three or four hours later, as the dull winter morning was dawning, gendarmes came to the house to arrest me. Seeing in what a state my wife was, I asked to remain with her till the burial was over, promising upon my word of honour to be at the prison door at a given hour; but this was refused, and the same night I was taken to Lyons. Elisée Reclus, notified by telegraph, came at once, bestowing on my wife all the gentleness of his great heart; friends came from Geneva; and although the funeral was an absolutely civil one, which was a novelty in that little town, half of the population was at the burial, to show my wife that the hearts of the poorer classes and the simple Savoy peasants were with us, and not with their rulers. When my trial was going on, the peasants followed it with sympathy, and used to come every day from the mountain villages to town to get the papers.

Another incident which profoundly touched me was the arrival at Lyons of an English friend. He came on behalf of a gentleman well known and esteemed in the English political world, in whose family I had spent many happy hours at London in 1882. He was the bearer of a considerable sum of money for the purpose of obtaining my release on bail, and he transmitted me at the same time the message of my London friend that I need not care in the least about the bail, but must leave France immediately. In some mysterious way he managed to see me freely—not in the double-grated iron cage in which I was allowed interviews with my wife—and he was as much affected by my refusal to accept the offer he came to make as I was by this touching token of friendship on the part of one who, with his wonderfully excellent wife, I had already learnt to esteem so highly.

The French government wanted to have one of those great trials which produce an impression upon the population, but there was no possibility of prosecuting the arrested anarchists for the explosions. It would have required bringing us before a jury, which in all probability would have acquitted us. Consequently, the government adopted the Machiavellian course of prosecuting us for having belonged to the International Workingmen’s Association. There is in France a law, passed immediately after the fall of the Commune, under which men can be brought before a simple police court for having belonged to that association. The maximum penalty is five years’ imprisonment; and a police court is always sure to pronounce the sentences which are wanted by the government.

The trial began at Lyons in the first days of January 1883, and lasted about a fortnight. The accusation was ridiculous, as everyone knew that none of the Lyons workers had ever joined the International, and it entirely fell through, as may be seen from the following episode. The only witness for the prosecution was the chief of the secret police at Lyons, an elderly man, who was treated at the court with the utmost respect. His report, I must say, was quite correct as concerns the facts. The anarchists, he said, had taken hold of the population, they had rendered opportunist meetings impossible because they spoke at each such meeting, preaching communism and anarchism, and carrying with them the audiences. Seeing that so far he had been fair in his testimony, I ventured to ask him a question: ‘Did you ever hear the name of the International Workingmen’s Association spoken of at Lyons?’

‘Never,’ he replied sulkily.

‘When I returned from the London congress of 1881, and did all I could to have the International reconstituted in France, did I succeed?’

‘No. They did not find it revolutionary enough.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and turning toward the procureur I added, ‘There you have all your case overthrown by your own witness!’

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?

There was another point which I vividly realized since the very first weeks of my imprisonment, but which, in some inconceivable way, escapes the attention of both the judges and the writers on criminal law—namely, that imprisonment in an immense number of cases is a punishment which strikes quite innocent people far more severely than the condemned prisoners themselves.

Nearly every one of my comrades, who represented a fair average of the working-men population, had either their wife and children to support, or a sister or an old mother who depended for their living upon his earnings. Now, being left without support, these women did their best to get work, and some of them got it, but none of them succeeded in earning regularly even as much as fifteen pence a day. Nine francs (less than eight shillings), and often six shillings a week, to support themselves and their children was all they could earn. And that meant evidently underfeeding, privations of all sorts, and the deterioration of the health of the wife and the children: weakened intellect, weakened energy and will. I thus realized that what was going on in our law courts was in reality a condemnation of quite innocent people to all sorts of hardships, in most cases even worse than those to which the condemned man himself is submitted. The fiction is that the law punishes the man by inflicting upon him a variety of physical and degrading hardships. But man is such a creature that whatever hardships be imposed upon him, he gradually grows accustomed to them. As he cannot modify them he accepts them, and after a certain time he puts up with them, just as he puts up with a chronic disease, and grows insensible to it. But what, during his imprisonment, becomes of his wife and children, that is, of the innocent people who depend upon him for support? They are punished even more cruelly than he himself is. And in our routine habits of thought no one ever thinks of the immense injustice which is thus committed. I realized it only from actual experience.

In the middle of March 1883, twenty-two of us who had been condemned to more than one year of imprisonment, were removed in great secrecy to the central prison of Clairvaux. It was formerly an abbey of St. Bernard, of which the great Revolution had made a house for the poor. Subsequently it became a house of detention and correction, which went among the prisoners and the officials themselves under the well-deserved nickname of ‘house of detention and corruption.’

So long as we were kept at Lyons we were treated as the prisoners under preliminary arrest are treated in France; that is, we had our own clothes, we could get our own food from a restaurant, and one could hire for a few francs per month a larger cell, a pistole. I took advantage of this for working hard upon my articles for the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and the ‘Nineteenth Century.’ Now, the treatment we should have at Clairvaux was an open question. However, in France it is generally understood that, for political prisoners, the loss of liberty and forced inactivity are in themselves so hard that there is no need to inflict additional hardships. Consequently, we were told that we should remain under the régime of preliminary detention. We should have separate quarters, retain our own clothes, be free from compulsory work, and be allowed to smoke. ‘Those of you,’ the governor said, ‘who wish to earn something by manual work, will be enabled to do so by sewing stays or engraving small things in mother-of-pearl. This work is poorly paid; but you could not be employed in the prison workshops for the fabrication of iron beds, picture frames, and so on, because that would require your lodging with the common-law prisoners.’ Like the other prisoners we were allowed to buy from the prison canteen some additional food and a pint of claret every day, both being supplied at a very low price and of good quality.

The first impression which Clairvaux produced upon me was most favourable. We had been locked up and had been travelling all the day, from two or three o’clock in the morning, in those tiny cupboards into which the cellular railway carriages are usually divided. When we reached the central prison we were taken temporarily to the cellular, or punishment quarters, and were introduced into the usual but extremely clean cells. Hot food, plain but of excellent quality, had been served to us notwithstanding the late hour of the night, and we had been offered the opportunity of having the half-pint of very good vin du pays (local wine) which was sold to the prisoners by the prison canteen, at the extremely low price of 24 centimes (less than 2½d.) per quart. The governor and the warders were most polite to us.

Next day the governor of the prison took me to see the rooms which he intended to give us, and when I remarked that they were all right but only a little too small for such a number—we were twenty-two—and that overcrowding might result in illness, he gave us another set of rooms in what was in olden times the house of the superintendent of the abbey, and now was the hospital. Our windows looked out upon a little garden, and beyond it we had beautiful views of the surrounding country. In another room on the same landing old Blanqui had been kept the last three or four years before his release. Before that he had been imprisoned in the cellular house.

Besides the three spacious rooms which were given to us, a smaller room was spared for Gautier and myself, so that we could pursue our literary work. We probably owed this last favour to the intervention of a considerable number of English men of science who, as soon as I was condemned, had addressed a petition to the President asking for my release. Many contributors to the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ as well as Herbert Spencer and Swinburne, had signed, while Victor Hugo had added to his signature a few warm words. Altogether, public opinion in France received our condemnation very unfavourably; and when my wife had mentioned at Paris that I required books, the Academy of Sciences offered the use of its library, and Ernest Renan, in a charming letter, put his private library at her service.

We had a small garden, where we could play nine-pins or jeu de boules. We managed, moreover, to cultivate a narrow bed running along the wall, and, on a surface of some eighty square yards, we grew almost incredible quantities of lettuces and radishes, as well as some flowers. I need not say that we at once organized classes, and during the three years that we remained at Clairvaux I gave my comrades lessons in cosmography, geometry, or physics, also aiding them in the study of languages. Nearly every one learned at least one language—English, German, Italian, or Spanish—while a few learned two. We also managed to do some book-binding, having learned how from one of those excellent Encyclopédie Roret booklets.

At the end of the first year, however, my health again gave way. Clairvaux is built on marshy ground, upon which malaria is endemic, and malaria, with scurvy, laid hold of me. Then my wife, who was studying at Paris, working in Würtz’s laboratory and preparing to take an examination for the degree of Doctor of Science, abandoned everything, and came to stay in the hamlet of Clairvaux, which consists of less than a dozen houses grouped at the foot of an immense high wall which encircles the prison. Of course, her life in that hamlet, with the prison wall opposite, was anything but gay; yet she stayed there till I was released. During the first year she was allowed to see me only once in two months, and all interviews were held in the presence of a warder, who sat between us. But when she settled at Clairvaux, declaring her firm intention to remain there, she was soon permitted to see me every day, in one of the small guard-houses of the warders, within the prison walls, and food was brought me from the inn where she stayed. Later, we were even allowed to take a walk in the governor’s garden, closely watched all the time, and usually one of my comrades joined us in the walk.

I was quite astonished to discover that the central prison of Clairvaux had all the aspects of a small manufacturing town, surrounded by orchards and cornfields, all encircled by an outer wall. The fact is that if in a French central prison the inmates are perhaps more dependent upon the fancies and caprices of the governor and the warders than they seem to be in English prisons, the treatment of the prisoners is far more humane than it is in the corresponding lock-ups on this side of the Channel. The mediæval spirit of revenge which still prevails in English prisons has long since been given up in France. The imprisoned man is not compelled to sleep on planks, or to have a mattress on alternate days only; the day he comes to the prison he gets a decent bed and retains it. He is not compelled either to do degrading work, such as to climb a wheel, or to pick oakum; he is employed, on the contrary, in useful work, and this is why the Clairvaux prison has the aspect of a manufacturing town in which iron furniture, picture-frames, looking-glasses, metric measures, velvet, linen, ladies’ stays, small things in mother-of-pearl, wooden shoes, and so on, are fabricated by the nearly 1,600 men who are kept there.

Moreover, if the punishment for insubordination is very cruel, there is none of the flogging which still goes on in English prisons: such a punishment would be absolutely impossible in France. Altogether, the central prison at Clairvaux may be described as one of the best prisons in Europe. And yet, the results obtained at Clairvaux are as bad as in any one of the lock-ups of the old type. ‘The watchword nowadays is to say that prisoners are reformed in our prisons,’ one of the members of the prison administration once said to me. ‘This is all nonsense, and I shall never be induced to tell such a lie.’

The pharmacy at Clairvaux was underneath the rooms which we occupied, and we occasionally had some contact with the prisoners who were employed in it. One of them was a grey-haired man in his fifties, who ended his term while we were there. It was touching to learn how he parted with the prison. He knew that in a few months or weeks he would be back, and begged the doctor to keep the place at the pharmacy open for him. This was not his first visit to Clairvaux, and he knew it would not be the last. When he was set free he had not a soul in the world to whom he might go to spend his old age. ‘Who will care to employ me?’ he said. ‘And what trade have I? None! When I am out I must go to my old comrades; they, at least, will surely receive me as an old friend.’ Then would come a glass too much of drink in their company, excited talk about some capital fun—some capital ‘new stroke’ to be made in the way of theft—and, partly from weakness of will, partly to oblige his only friends, he would join in it, and would be locked up once more. So it had been several times before in his life. Two months passed, however, after his release, and he was not yet back to Clairvaux. Then the prisoners, and the warders too, began to feel uneasy about him. ‘Has he had time to move to another judicial district, that he is not yet back? One can only hope that he has not been involved in some bad affair,’ they would say, meaning something worse than theft. ‘That would be a pity: he was such a nice, quiet man.’ But it soon appeared that the first supposition was the right one. Word came from another prison that the old man was locked up there, and was now endeavouring to be transferred to Clairvaux.

The old prisoners were the most pitiful sight. Many of them had begun their prison experience in childhood or early youth, others at a riper age. But ‘once in prison, always in prison,’ such is the saying derived from experience. And now, having reached or passed over the age of sixty, they knew that they must end their lives in a gaol. To quicken their departure from life the prison administration used to send them to the workshops where felt socks were made out of all sorts of woollen refuse. The dust in the workshop soon gave these old men consumption, which finally released them. Then four fellow prisoners would carry the old comrade to the common grave, the graveyard warder and his black dog being the only two beings to follow him; and while the prison priest would march in front of the procession, mechanically reciting his prayer and looking round at the chestnut or fir-trees along the road, and the four comrades carrying the coffin would enjoy their momentary escape out of prison, the black dog would be the only being affected by the solemnity of the ceremony.

When the reformed central prisons were introduced in France, it was believed that the principle of absolute silence could be maintained in them. But it is so contrary to human nature that its strict enforcement had to be abandoned. In fact, even solitary confinement is no obstacle to intercourse between the prisoners.

To the outward observer the prison seems to be quite mute; but in reality life goes on in it as busily as in a small town. In suppressed voices, by means of whispers, hurriedly dropped words, and scraps of notes, every news of any interest spreads immediately all over the prison. Nothing can happen either among the prisoners themselves, or in the cour d’honneur, where the lodgings of the administration are situated, or in the village of Clairvaux, where the employers of the factories live, or in the wide world of Paris politics, but that it is communicated at once throughout all the dormitories, workshops, and cells. Frenchmen are of too communicative a nature for their underground telegraph ever to be stopped. We had no intercourse with the common-law prisoners, and yet we knew all the news of the day. ‘John, the gardener, is back for two years.’ ‘Such an inspector’s wife has had a fearful scrimmage with So-and-So’s wife.’ ‘James, in the cells, has been caught transmitting a note of friendship to John from the framers’ workshop.’ ‘That old beast So-and-So is no more minister of justice: the ministry has been upset.’ And so on; and when the news goes that ‘Jack has got two five-penny packets of tobacco in exchange for two flannel spencers,’ it flies round the prison in no time.

Demands for tobacco were continually pouring in upon us; and when a small lawyer detained in the prison wanted to transmit to me a note, in order to ask my wife, who was staying in the village, to see from time to time his wife, who was also there, quite a number of men took the liveliest interest in the transmission of that message, which had to pass I do not know how many hands before it reached its goal. And when there was something that might specially interest us in a paper, this paper, in some unaccountable way, would reach us, with a little stone wrapped into it, to help its being thrown over a high wall.

Cellular imprisonment is no obstacle to communication. When we came to Clairvaux and were first lodged in the cellular quarter, it was bitterly cold in the cells; so cold, indeed, that when I wrote to my wife, who was then at Paris, and she got my letter, she did not recognize the writing, my hand being so stiff with the cold. The order came to heat the cells as much as possible; but do what they might, the cells remained as cold as ever. It appeared afterwards that all the hot-air tubes in the cells were choked with scraps of paper, bits of notes, penknives, and all sorts of small things which several generations of prisoners had concealed in the pipes.

Martin, the same friend of mine whom I have already mentioned, obtained permission to serve part of his time in cellular confinement. He preferred isolation to life in a room with a dozen comrades, and went to a cell in the cellular building. To his great astonishment he found that he was not at all alone in his cell. The walls and the keyholes spoke round him. In a day or two all the inmates of the cells knew who he was, and he had acquaintances all over the building. Quite a life goes on, as in a beehive, between the seemingly isolated cells; only that life often takes such a character as to make it belong entirely to the domain of psychopathy. Kraft-Ebbing himself had no idea of the aspects it takes with certain prisoners in solitary confinement.

I will not repeat here what I have said in a book, ‘In Russian and French Prisons,’ which I published in England in 1886, soon after my release from Clairvaux, upon the moral influence of prisoners upon prisoners. But there is one thing which must be said. The prison population consists of heterogeneous elements; but, taking only those who are usually described as ‘the criminals’ proper, and of whom we have heard so much lately from Lombroso and his followers, what struck me most as regards them was that the prisons, which are considered as a preventive measure against anti-social deeds, are exactly the institutions for breeding them and for rendering these offences worse and worse after a man has received prison education. Everyone knows that the absence of education, the dislike of regular work acquired since childhood, the physical unpreparedness for sustained effort, the love of adventure when it receives a wrong direction, the gambling propensities, the absence of energy and an untrained will, and carelessness about the happiness of others, are the causes which bring this category of men before the courts. Now I was deeply impressed during my imprisonment by the fact that it is exactly these defects of human nature—each one of them—which the prison breeds in its inmates; and it is bound to breed them because it is a prison, and will breed them so long as there are prisons. Incarceration in a prison necessarily, fatally, destroys the energy of a man, and still more kills his will. In prison life there is no room for exercising one’s will. To possess one’s own will in prison means surely to get into trouble. The will of the prisoner must be killed, and it is killed. Still less is there room for exercising one’s natural sympathies, everything being done to destroy free contact with those outside the prison and within it with whom the prisoner may have feelings of sympathy. Physically and mentally he is rendered less and less prepared for sustained effort; and if he has had formerly a dislike for regular work, this dislike is only the more increased during his prison years. If, before he first came to the prison, he soon felt tired by monotonous work, which he could not do properly, or had a grudge against underpaid overwork, his dislike now becomes hatred. If he doubted about the social utility of current rules of morality, now, after having cast a critical glance upon the official defenders of these rules, and learned his comrades’ opinions of them, he openly casts the rules overboard. And if he has got into trouble in consequence of a morbid development of the passionate sensual side of his nature, now, after having spent a number of years in prison, this morbid character is still more developed—in many cases to an appalling extent. In this last direction—the most dangerous of all—prison education is most effective.

In Siberia I had seen what sinks of filth, and what workshops of physical and moral deterioration the dirty, overcrowded, ‘unreformed’ Russian prisons were, and at the age of nineteen I imagined that if there were less overcrowding in the rooms, and a certain classification of the prisoners, and healthy occupations were provided for them, the institution might be substantially improved. Now, I had to part with these illusions. I could convince myself that as regards their effects upon the prisoners, and their results for society at large, the best ‘reformed’ prisons—whether cellular or not—are as bad as, or even worse, than the dirty lock-ups of old. They do not ‘reform’ the prisoners. On the contrary, in the immense, overwhelming majority of cases, they exercise upon them the most deteriorating effect. The thief, the swindler, the rough man, and so on, who has spent some years in a prison, comes out of it more ready than ever to resume his former career; he is better prepared for it; he has learned how to do it better; he is more embittered against society, and he finds a more solid justification for being in revolt against its laws and customs; necessarily, unavoidably, he is bound to go farther and farther along the anti-social path which first brought him before a law court. The offences he will commit after his release will be graver than those which first got him into trouble; and he is doomed to finish his life in a prison or in a hard-labour colony. In the above-mentioned book I wrote that prisons are ‘universities of crime, maintained by the state.’ And now, thinking of it at fifteen years’ distance, in the light of my subsequent experience, I can only confirm that statement of mine.

Personally I have no reason whatever to complain of the years I have spent in a French prison. For an active and independent man the restraint of liberty and activity is in itself so great a privation that all the remainder, all the petty miseries of prison life, are not worth speaking of. Of course, when we heard of the active political life which was going on in France, we resented very much our forced inactivity. The end of the first year, especially during a gloomy winter, is always hard for the prisoner. And when spring comes, one feels more strongly than ever the want of liberty. When I saw from our windows the meadows assuming their green garb, and the hills covered with a spring haze, or when I saw a train flying into a dale between the hills, I certainly felt a strong desire to follow it, to breathe the air of the woods, to be carried along with the stream of human life into a busy town. But one who casts his lot with an advanced party must be prepared to spend a number of years in prison, and he need not grudge it. He feels that even during his imprisonment he remains not quite an inactive part of the stream of human progress which spreads and strengthens the ideas which are dear to him.

At Lyons my comrades, my wife, and myself certainly found the warders a very rough set of men. But after a couple of encounters all was set right. Moreover, the prison administration knew that we had the Paris press with us, and they did not want to draw upon themselves the thunders of Rochefort or the cutting criticisms of Clémenceau. And at Clairvaux there was no need of such a restraint. All the administration had been renewed a few months before we came thither. A prisoner had been killed by warders in his cell, and his corpse had been hanged to simulate suicide; but this time the affair leaked out through the doctor; the governor was dismissed, and altogether a better tone prevailed in the prison. I took back from Clairvaux the best recollections of its governor; and altogether, while I was there, I more than once thought that, after all, men are often better than the institutions to which they belong. But having no personal griefs, I can all the more freely, and most unconditionally condemn the institution itself, as a survival from the dark past, wrong in its principles, and a source of unfathomable evil to society.

One thing more I must mention as it struck me, perhaps, even more than the demoralising effects of prisons upon their inmates. What a nest of infection is every prison, and even a law court for its neighbourhood—for the people who live about them. Lombroso has made very much of the ‘criminal type’ which he believes to have discovered amongst the inmates of the prisons. If he had made the same efforts to observe people who hang about the law courts—detectives, spies, small solicitors, informers, people preying upon simpletons, and the like—he would have probably concluded that his ‘criminal type’ has a far greater geographical extension than the prison walls. I never saw such a collection of faces of the lowest human type, sunk far below the average type of mankind, as I saw by the score round and within the Palais de Justice at Lyons. Certainly not within the prison walls of Clairvaux. Dickens and Cruikshank have immortalized a few of these types; but they represent quite a world which gravitates round the law courts, and infuses its infection far and wide around them. And the same is true of each central prison like Clairvaux. Quite an atmosphere of petty thefts, petty swindlings, spying and corruption of all sorts spreads like a blot of oil round every prison.

I saw all this; and if before my condemnation I already knew that society is wrong in its present system of punishments, after I left Clairvaux I knew that it is not only wrong and unjust in this system, but that it is simply foolish when, in its partly unconscious and partly wilful ignorance of realities, it maintains at its own expense these universities of crime and these sinks of corruption, acting under the illusion that they are necessary as a bridle to the criminal instincts of man.

XIV

Every revolutionist meets a number of spies and agents provocateurs in his path, and I have had my fair share of them. All governments spend considerable sums of money in maintaining this kind of reptile. However, they are mainly dangerous to young people. One who has had some experience of life and men soon discovers that there is about these creatures something which puts him on his guard. They are recruited from the scum of society, amongst men of the lowest moral standard, and if one is watchful of the moral character of the men he meets with, he soon notices something in the manners of these ‘pillars of society’ which shocks him, and then he asks himself the question: ‘What has brought this person to me? What in the world can he have in common with us?’ In most cases this simple question is sufficient to put a man upon his guard.

When I first came to Geneva, the agent of the Russian government who had been commissioned to spy the refugees was well known to all of us. He went under the name of Count Something; but as he had no footman and no carriage on which to emblazon his coronet and arms, he had had them embroidered on a sort of mantle which covered his tiny dog. We saw him occasionally in the cafés, without speaking to him; he was, in fact, an ‘innocent’ who simply bought in the kiosques all the publications of the exiles, very probably adding to them such comments as he thought would please his chiefs.

Different men began to pour in when Geneva was peopled with more and more refugees of the young generation; and yet, in one way or another, they also became known to us.

When a stranger appeared on our horizon, he was asked with usual nihilist frankness about his past and his present prospects, and it soon appeared what sort of person he or she was. Frankness in mutual intercourse is altogether the best way for bringing about proper relations between men. In this case it was invaluable. Numbers of persons whom none of us had known or heard of in Russia—absolute strangers to the circles—came to Geneva, and many of them, a few days or even hours after their arrival, stood on the most friendly terms with the colony of refugees; but in some way or another the spies never succeeded in crossing the threshold of familiarity. A spy might make common acquaintances; he might give the best accounts, sometimes correct, of his past in Russia; he might possess in perfection the nihilist slang and manners, but he never could assimilate the particular kind of nihilist ethics which had grown up amongst the Russian youth—and this alone kept him at a distance from our colony. Spies can imitate anything else but those ethics.

When I was working with Reclus there was at Clarens one such individual, from whom we all kept aloof. We knew nothing bad about him, but we felt that he was not ‘ours,’ and as he tried only the more to penetrate into our society, we became suspicious of him. I had never said a word to him, and consequently he was especially after me. Seeing that he could not approach me through the usual channels, he began to write me letters, giving me mysterious appointments for mysterious purposes in the woods and in similar places. For fun, I once accepted his invitation and went to the spot, with a good friend following me at a distance; but the man, who probably had a confederate, must have noticed that I was not alone, and did not appear. So I was spared the pleasure of ever saying to him a single word. Besides, I worked at that time so hard that every minute of my time was taken up either with the Geography or ‘Le Révolté,’ and I entered into no conspiracies. However, we learned later on that this man used to send to the Third Section detailed reports about the supposed conversations which he had had with me, my supposed confidences, and the terrible plots which I was concocting at St. Petersburg against the Tsar’s life! All that was taken for ready money at St. Petersburg. And in Italy, too. When Cafiero was arrested one day in Switzerland, he was shown formidable reports of Italian spies, who warned their government that Cafiero and I, loaded with bombs, were going to enter Italy. The fact was that I never was in Italy, and never had had any intention of visiting the country.

In point of fact, however, the spies do not always fabricate reports wholesale. They often tell things that are true, but all depends upon the way a story is told. We passed some merry moments about a report which was addressed to the French government by a French spy who followed my wife and myself as we were travelling in 1881 from Paris to London. The spy, probably playing a double part—as they often do—had sold that report to Rochefort, who published it in his paper. Everything that the spy had told in this report was correct—but the way he had told it!

He wrote for instance: ‘I took the next compartment to the one that Kropótkin had taken with his wife.’ Quite true; he was there. We noticed him, for he had managed at once to attract our attention by his sullen, unpleasant face. ‘They spoke Russian all the time, in order not to be understood by the other passengers.’ Very true again: we spoke Russian as we always do. ‘When they came to Calais, they both took a bouillon.’ Most correct again: we took a bouillon. But here the mysterious part of the journey begins. ‘After that, they both suddenly disappeared, and I looked for them in vain, on the platform and elsewhere; and when they reappeared, he was in disguise, and was followed by a Russian priest, who never left him until they reached London, where I lost sight of the priest.’ All that was true again. My wife had a slight toothache, and I asked the keeper of the restaurant to let us go into his private room, where the tooth could be stopped. So we had disappeared indeed; and as we had to cross the Channel, I put my soft felt hat into my pocket and put on a fur cap: so I was ‘in disguise.’ As to the mysterious priest, he was also there. He was not a Russian, but this is irrelevant: he wore at any rate the dress of the Greek priests. I saw him standing at the counter and asking something which no one understood. ‘Agua, agua,’ he repeated in a woful tone. ‘Give the gentleman a glass of water,’ I said to the waiter. Whereupon the priest began to thank me for my intervention with a truly Eastern effusion. My wife took pity on him and spoke to him in different languages, but he understood none but modern Greek. It appeared at last that he knew a few words in one of the South Slavonian languages, and we could make out: ‘I am a Greek; Turkish embassy, London.’ We told him, mostly by signs, that we too were going to London, and that he might travel with us.

The most amusing part of the story was that I really found for him the address of the Turkish embassy, even before we had reached Charing Cross. The train stopped at some station on the way, and two elegant ladies entered our already full third-class compartment. Both had newspapers in their hands. One was English, and the other—a tall, nice-looking person, who spoke good French—pretended to be English. After having exchanged a few words, she asked me à brûle-pourpoint: ‘What do you think of Count Ignátieff?’ And immediately after that: ‘Are you soon going to kill the new Tsar?’ I was clear as to her profession from these two questions; but, thinking of my priest, I said to her: ‘Do you happen to know the address of the Turkish embassy?’ ‘Street So-and so, number So-and-so,’ she replied without hesitation, like a schoolgirl in a class. ‘You could, I suppose, also give the address of the Russian embassy?’ I asked her, and the address having been given with the same readiness, I communicated both to the priest. When we reached Charing Cross, the lady was so obsequiously anxious to attend to my luggage, and even to carry a heavy package herself with her gloved hands, that I finally told her, much to her surprise: ‘Enough of that; ladies do not carry gentlemen’s luggage. Go away!’

But to return to my trustworthy French spy. ‘He alighted at Charing Cross’—he wrote in his report—‘but for more than half an hour after the arrival of the train he did not leave the station, until he had ascertained that everyone else had left it. I kept aloof in the meantime, concealing myself behind a pillar. Having ascertained that all passengers had left the platform, they both suddenly jumped into a cab. I followed them nevertheless, and overheard the address which the cabman gave at the gate to the policeman—12, street So-and-so—and ran after the cab. There were no cabs in the neighbourhood; so I ran up to Trafalgar Square, where I got one. I then drove after him, and he alighted at the above address.’

All facts in this narrative are true again—the address and the rest; but how mysterious it all reads. I had warned a Russian friend of my arrival, but there was a dense fog that morning, and my friend overslept himself. We waited for him half an hour, and then, leaving our luggage in the cloak-room, drove to his house.

‘There they sat till two o’clock with drawn curtains, and then a tall man came out of the house, and returned one hour later with their luggage.’ Even the remark about the curtains was correct: we had to light the gas on account of the fog, and drew down the curtains to get rid of the ugly sight of a small Islington street wrapped in a dense fog.

When I was working with Elisée Reclus at Clarens I used to go every fortnight to Geneva to see to the bringing out of ‘Le Révolté.’ One day as I came to our printing office, I was told that a Russian gentleman wanted to see me. He had already seen my friends and had told them that he came to induce me to start a paper like ‘Le Révolté’ in Russian. He offered for that purpose all the money that might be required. I went to meet him in a café, where he gave me a German name—Tohnlehm, let us say—and told me that he was a native of the Baltic provinces. He boasted of possessing a large fortune in certain estates and manufactures, and he was extremely angry with the Russian Government, for their Russianizing schemes. On the whole he produced a somewhat indefinite impression, so that my friends insisted upon my accepting his offer; but I did not much like the man from first sight.

From the café he took me to his rooms in an hotel, and there began to show less reserve and to appear more like himself and in a still more unpleasant light. ‘Don’t doubt my fortune,’ he said to me; ‘I have made a capital invention. There’s a lot of money in it. I shall patent it, and get a considerable sum for it, and give it all for the cause of the revolution in Russia.’ And he showed me, to my astonishment, a miserable candlestick, the originality of which was that it was awfully ugly and had three bits of wire to put the candle in. The poorest housewife would not have cared for such a candlestick, and even if it could have been patented, no ironmonger would have paid the patentee more than a couple of sovereigns. ‘A rich man placing his hopes on such a candlestick! This man,’ I thought to myself, ‘can never have seen better ones,’ and my opinion about him was made up: ‘He was no rich man at all, and the money he offered was not his own.’ So I bluntly told him: ‘Very well, if you are so anxious to have a Russian revolutionary paper, and hold the flattering opinion about myself which you have expressed, you will have to put your money in my name at a bank, and at my entire disposal. But I warn you that you will have absolutely nothing to do with the paper.’ ‘Of course, of course,’ he said, ‘but just see to it, and sometimes advise you, and aid you in smuggling it into Russia.’ ‘No, nothing of the sort! You need not see me at all.’ My friends thought that I was too hard upon the man, but some time after that a letter was received from St. Petersburg warning us that we would have the visit of a spy of the Third Section—Tohnlehm by name. The candlestick had thus rendered us a good service.

Candlesticks, or anything else, these people almost always betray themselves in one way or another. When we were at London in 1881 we received, on a foggy morning, the visit of two Russians. I knew one of them by name; the other, a young man whom he recommended as his friend, was a stranger. He had volunteered to accompany his friend on a few days’ visit to England. As he was introduced by a friend, I had no suspicions whatever about him; but I was very busy that day with some work, and asked another friend who stayed close by to find them rooms and to take them about to see London. My wife had not yet seen London either, and she went with them. In the afternoon she returned saying to me: ‘Do you know, I dislike that man very much. Beware of him.’ ‘But why? What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘Nothing, absolutely nothing; but he is surely not “ours.” By the way he treated the waiter in a café, and the way he handles money, I saw at once that he is not “ours,” and if he is not—why should he come to us?’ She was so certain of her suspicions that, while she performed her duties of hospitality, she nevertheless managed never to leave that young man alone in my study, even for one minute. We had a chat, and the visitor began to exhibit himself more and more under such a low moral aspect that even his friend blushed for him, and when I asked more details about him, the explanations he gave were even still less satisfactory. We were both on our guard. In short, they both left London in a couple of days, and a fortnight later I got a letter from my Russian friend, full of excuses for having introduced to me the young man who, they had found out, at Paris, was a spy in the service of the Russian embassy. I looked then into a list of Russian secret service agents in France and Switzerland which we, the refugees, had received lately from the Executive Committee—they had their men everywhere at St. Petersburg—and I found the name of that young man on the list, with one letter only altered in it.

To start a paper, subsidized by the police, with a police agent at its head, is an old plan, and the prefect of the Paris police, Andrieux, resorted to it in 1881. I was with Elisée Reclus in the mountains when we received a letter from a Frenchman, or rather a Belgian, who announced to us that he was going to start an anarchist paper at Paris and asked our collaboration. The letter, full of flatteries, produced upon us an unpleasant impression, and Reclus had moreover some vague reminiscence of having heard the name of the writer in some unfavourable connection. We decided to refuse collaboration, and I wrote to a Paris friend that we must first of all ascertain from whence the money came with which the paper was going to be started. ‘It may come from the Orleanists—an old trick of the family—and we must know its origin.’ My Paris friend, with a workman’s straightforwardness, read that letter at a meeting at which the would-be editor of the paper was present. He simulated offence, and I had to answer several letters on this subject; but I stuck to my words: ‘If the man is in earnest, he must show us the origin of the money.’

And so he did at last. Pressed by questions he said that the money came from his aunt—a rich lady of antiquated opinions who yielded, however, to his fancy of having a paper and had parted with the money. The lady was not in France; she was staying at London. We insisted nevertheless upon having her name and address, and our friend Malatesta volunteered to see her. He went with an Italian friend who was connected with the second-hand trade in furniture. They found the lady occupying a small flat, and while Malatesta spoke to her and was more and more convinced that she was simply playing the aunt’s part in the comedy, the furniture-friend, looking round at the chairs and tables, discovered that all of them had been taken the day before—probably hired—from a second-hand furniture dealer, his neighbour. The labels of the dealer were still fastened to the chairs and the tables. This did not prove much, but naturally reinforced our suspicions. I absolutely refused to have anything to do with the paper.

The paper was of an unheard-of violence. Burning, assassination, dynamite bombs—there was nothing but that in it. I met the man, the editor of the paper, as I went to the London congress, and the moment I saw his sullen face, and heard a bit of his talk, and caught a glance of the sort of women with whom he always went about, my opinions concerning him were settled. At the congress, during which he introduced all sorts of terrible resolutions, the delegates kept aloof from him; and when he insisted upon having the addresses of anarchists all over the world, the refusal was made in anything but a flattering manner.

To make a long story short, he was unmasked a couple of months later, and the paper was stopped for ever on the very next day. Then, a couple of years after that, the prefect of police, Andrieux, published his ‘Memoirs,’ and in this book he told all about the paper which he had started and the explosions which his agents had organized at Paris, by putting sardine boxes filled with ‘something’ under the statue of Thiers.

One can imagine the quantities of money all these things cost the French and every other nation.

I might write several chapters on this subject, but I will mention only one more story of two adventurers at Clairvaux.

My wife stayed in the only inn of the little village which has grown up under the shadow of the prison wall. One day the landlady entered her room with a message from two gentlemen, who came to the hotel and wanted to see my wife. The landlady interceded with all her eloquence in their favour. ‘Oh, I know the world,’ she said, ‘and I may assure you, madame, that they are the most correct gentlemen. Nothing could be more comme-il-faut. One of them gave the name of a German officer. He is surely a baron or a “milord,” and the other is his interpreter. They know you perfectly well. The baron is going now to Africa, perhaps never to return, and he wants to see you before he leaves.’

My wife looked at the address of the message, which was: ‘A Madame la Principesse Kropotkine,’ and needed no further proof of the comme-el-faut of the two gentlemen. As to the contents of the message, they were even worse than the address. Against all rules of grammar and common-sense the ‘baron’ wrote about a mysterious communication which he had to make. She refused point-blank to receive the baron and his interpreter.

Thereupon the baron wrote to my wife letter upon letter, which she returned unopened. All the village soon became divided into two parties—one siding with the baron and led by the landlady, and the other against him, and headed, as a matter of fact, by the landlady’s husband. Quite a romance was circulated. ‘The baron had known my wife before her marriage. He had danced with her many times at the Russian embassy in Vienna. He was still in love with her, but she, the cruel one, refused even to allow him to cast a glance at her before he went upon his perilous expedition....’

Then came the mysterious story of a boy whom we were said to conceal. ‘Where is their boy?’ the baron wanted to know. ‘They have a son, six years old by this time—where is he?’ ‘She never would part with a boy if she had one,’ the one party said. ‘Yes, they have one, but they conceal him,’ the other party maintained.

For us two, this contest was a very interesting revelation. It proved that our letters were not only read by the prison authorities, but that their contents were made known to the Russian embassy as well. When I was at Lyons, and my wife went to see Elisée Reclus in Switzerland, she wrote to me once that ‘our boy’ was going on well; his health was excellent, and they all spent a very nice evening at the anniversary of his fifth birthday. I knew that she meant ‘Le Révolté,’ which we often used to name in conversation ‘our gamin’—our naughty boy. But now that these gentlemen were inquiring about ‘our gamin,’ and even designated so correctly his age, it was evident that the letter had passed through other hands than those of the governor. It was well to know such a thing.

Nothing escapes the attention of village folk in the country, and the baron soon awakened suspicions. He wrote a new letter to my wife, even more loquacious than the former ones. Now, he asked her pardon for having tried to introduce himself as an acquaintance. He owned that she did not know him; but nevertheless he was a well-wisher. He had to make to her a most important communication. My life was in danger and he wanted to warn her. The baron and his secretary took an outing in the fields to read together that letter and to consult about its tenor—the forest-guard following them at a distance—but they quarrelled about it, and the letter was torn to pieces and thrown in the fields. The forester waited till they were out of sight, gathered the pieces, connected them, and read the letter. In one hour’s time the village knew that the baron had never really been acquainted with my wife; the romance which was so sentimentally repeated by the baron’s party crumbled to pieces.

‘Ah, then, they are not what they pretended to be,’ the brigadier de gendarmerie concluded in his turn; ‘then they must be German spies’—and he arrested them.

It must be said in his excuse that a German spy had really been at Clairvaux shortly before. In time of war the vast buildings of the prison might serve as depôts for provisions or barracks for the army, and the German General Staff was surely interested to know the inner capacity of the prison buildings. A jovial travelling photographer came accordingly to our village, made friends with everyone by photographing them for nothing, and was admitted to photograph, not only the inside of the prison yards, but also the dormitories. Having done this, he travelled to some other town on the eastern frontier, and was there arrested by the French authorities as a man found in possession of compromising military documents. The brigadier, fresh from the impression of the photographer’s visit, jumped to the conclusion that the baron and his secretary were also German spies, and took them in custody to the little town of Bar-sur-Aube. There they were released next morning, the local paper stating that they were not German spies but ‘persons commissioned by another more friendly power.’