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 con- siderable 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 paralyzed, and the misery among the weavers was so great that crowds of chil- dren 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 pop- ularity of General Boulanger, who had permitted this dis \ 448 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST tribution 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 vexa- tions 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 on 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 councilors and political leaders, as also against the press, which made light of a very acute crisis, while nothing was undertaken 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 con- spicuous in times of desolation and misery, as they imper- — sonate 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 A PANIC AT LYONS 449 hours of the morning, one could see newspaper men and politicians feasting and drinking in company with gay wo- men. 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 worker who was occasionally there, a socialist, 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 recruit- ing 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 neighborhood to realize the extent to which the pop- ulation and the schools are still in the hands of the Catho- lic 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, repre- senting me as the leader of the agitation, who had come on purpose from England 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 con- signments 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 French 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.
Not only was the house searched, but my wife, who was Joing to Geneva, was arrested at the station in Thonon, and 450 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST: searched. But of course absolutely nothing was found te compromise me or any one else.: Ten days passed, during which I was quite free to go away, if I wished to doso. I received several letters ad. vising 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 wrote that I must leave at once, because otherwise I should be the first victim of the 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. Since so many of my friends ie | 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 it is terrible to see a young life extinguished in your presence after a brave struggle against death. Both my wife and I were broken down. ‘Three or four hours later, as the dull winter morning was dawning, gendarmes came to my house to arrest me. Seeing in what a state my wife was, I asked | permission to remain with her till the burial was over, pro-| mising upon my word of honor to be at the prison door ab a given hour; but it was refused, and the same night I was taken to Lyons. LElisée Reclus, notified by telegraph, came at once, bestowing on my wife all the gentleness of his golden heart; friends came from Geneva; and although the funeral was absolutely civil, 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 tulers. When my trial was going on, the peasants used to come from the mountain villages to town to get the papers, and to see how my affair stood before the court. | Another incident which profoundly touched me was the aes ice ae ARRESTED BY THE FRENCH POLICE 451 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 con- ‘siderable 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 ‘east about the bail, but must leave France immediately. ‘In some mysterious way he had managed to see me freely, /—not in the double-grated iron cage in which I was al- ‘lowed interviews with my wife, — and he was as much ‘affected by my refusal to accept the offer as I was by that ‘touching token of friendship on the part of one whom, with his excellent wife, I had already learned to esteem so highly.
The French government wanted to have one of those ‘great trials which produce an impression upon the popula- _tion, 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 be- ‘fore a simple police court for having belonged to that asso- ‘ciation. 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 every one knew that none of the Lyons work- ‘ers 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 452 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST 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 meeting, preaching communism and anarchism, and carry- ing with them the audiences. Seeing that so far he had been fair in his testimony, I ventured to ask him a ques- tion: “ Did you ever hear 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 added, “‘ There’s all your prosecution overthrown by your own witness! ” Nevertheless, we were all condemned for having belonged to the International. Four of us got the maximum senence five years’ imprisonment and four hundred dollars’ fine; the remainder got from four years to one year. la fick they 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 clear this point, 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 accusation. Scores of searches had been made at the houses of French anarchists, | but only two letters of mine had been found. The prosecu- A COMICAL INCIDENT 453 tion tried to make the best of them. One was written to a French worker when he was despondent. 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 ' soon. 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 makhave a small iron stove, upon which he himself cooked his ing shoes in his own room. On his left side he used to 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 to cover the expenses of his extremely modest living, and to send a few francs to his ‘old mother in the country, he would spend long hours in writing letters in which he developed the theoretical prin- ciples of anarchism with admirable good sense and intel- ligence. He is now a writer well known in France and "generally respected for the integrity of his character. Un- "fortunately, at that time he would cover eight or twelve pages of note paper without 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 written thoughts subdivide into sentences, clauses, and phrases, each of which should end with its appropriate period, semicolon, or comma, and so on, — in short, gave him a little lesson in the elements of punctuation. I told him how much it would improve his writings if he adopted this simple plan.
This letter was read by the prosecutor before the court and elicited from him most patheticcomments. ‘“ 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 in grammar to a worker...But’? —and here his voice vibrated with 454 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST accents of a deep emotion — “it was not in order to help a poor worker in getting instruction which he, owing prob- ably to laziness, failed to get at school. It was not to help him to earn an honest living. No! gentlemen, it was writ- ten in order to inspire him with hatred for our grand and beautiful institutions, in order only the better to infuse into him the venom of anarchism, in order to make of him only a more terrible enemy of society. Cursed be the day when Kropétkin set his foot upon the soil of France! ” We could not help laughing like boys all the time he was delivering that speech; the judges stared at him as if to tell him that he was overdoing his role, but he seemed not to notice anything, and, carried by his eloquence, 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 magis- trate 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 thus had its origin in the Lyons trial.
This trial—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 our doctrines for a fortnight —had a powerful influence in clearing away false ideas about anarchism in France, and surely contributed to some extent to the re- vival of socialism in other countries. As to the condemna-!
tion, 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”’ found fault with © UNJUSTLY CONDEMNED 455 the verdict, which ‘nothing in the proceedings before 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 voices, until we were released.
XIII THE trial was over, but I remained for another couple of months in 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 com- trades, 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.
During my sojourn at Lyons I began to realize the awfully demoralizing influence of the prisons upon the prisoners, which brought me later to condemn unconditionally the whole institution.
The Lyons prison is a ‘‘ modern” structure, built in the shape of a star, on the cellular system. The spaces be-_ tween the rays of the star are occupied by small asphalt | paved yards, and, weather permitting, the inmates are taken to these yards to work outdoors. ‘The chief occupation is — the beating out of silk cocoons to obtain floss silk. Flocks of children are also taken at certain hours to these yards. | Thin, enervated, underfed, — the shadows of children, —I | often watched them from my window. Anemia was | plainly written on all the little faces and manifest in their | thin, shivering bodies; and all day long — not only in | the dormitories, but even in the yards, in the full light of | the sun — they pursued their debilitating practices. What — EVILS OF THE PRISON SYSTEM 457 will become of them after they have passed through that schooling and come out with their health ruined, their wills annihilated, their energy reduced? Anemia, with its dimin- ished energy, its 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 these children _yeceive in their surroundings! Mere isolation, even if it were rigorously carried out —and it cannot be — would he 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 criminals are bred in these nurseries, which the state supports and which society tolerates, simply because it does not want to hear its own diseases spoken of and dissected. ‘Imprisoned in childhood, jail bird for life,” is what I heard afterwards from all those who were interested in criminal matters. And when I saw these chil- dren, and realized what they have to expect in the future, T could not but continually ask myself: “ Which of them is the worse criminal? — this child or the judge who con- demns every year hundreds of children to this fate?” I gladly admit that the crime of the judge is unconscious.
' But are 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 from the very first weeks of my imprisonment, but which in - some inconceivable way has escaped the attention of both the judges and the writers on criminal law; namely, that _ imprisonment is in an immense number of cases a punish- - ment which bears far more severely upon quite innocent people than upon the condemned prisoner himself. Nearly every one of my comrades, who represented a fair 458 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST average of the working population, had either wife and children to support, ora sister or old mother who depended for her living upon his earnings. Now being left without support, all of these women did their best to get work, and some of them got it; but none of them succeeded in earn- ing regularly even as much as thirty cents (1 fr. 50 c.) a day. Nine francs (less than two dollars) and often only a dollar and a half a week to support themselves and their children, — these were their earnings. And that meant, of course, underfeeding, privations of all sorts, and deterioration of health, weakened intellect, impaired energy and will power. 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 hardship; in most cases even worse than those to which the condemned man him- self is subjected. The fiction is that the law punishes the man by inflicting upon him a variety of degrading physical and mental hardships. But man is so made that whatever — hardships may be imposed upon him, he gradually grows ac-_ customed to them. If 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 them. But during his imprisonment what becomes of his wife and children, or of the other innocent people who depended upon his 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 in- justice which is thus committed. TI 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 imprison- — ment, 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 IN THE PRISON OF CLAIRVAUX 459 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 “ Encyclopedia Britannica”? and the “Nineteenth Century.” Now, the treatment we should have at Clairvaux was an open ques- tion. However, in France it is generally understood that, for political prisoners, the loss of liberty and the forced in- activity are in themselves so hard that there is no need to inflict additional hardships. Consequently, we were told that we should remain under the same régime that we had had at Lyons. We should have separate quarters, retain ‘our own clothes, be free of compulsory work, and be al- lowed 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 favorable. We had been locked up and had been traveling all the day, from two or three o’clock in the morning, in those tiny cupboards into which the railway carriages used for the transportation of prisoners are usually divided. When we reached the central prison, we were 460 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST taken temporarily to the penal quarters, and were intro. duced into 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 a half-pint each of the very good vin du pays, which was sold at the prison canteen at the extremely modest price of twenty-four centimes (less than five cents) per quart. The governor and all 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, 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 had been in olden times the house of the superin- tendent of the abbey, and was now the hospital. Our windows looked down upon a little garden and off upon 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 was confined in one of the cells in the cellular house.
We obtained thus three spacious rooms, and a smaller room was spared for Gautier and myself, so that we could pursue our literary work. We probably owed this last favor to the intervention of a considerable number of Eng- lish men of science, who, as soon as I was condemned, had signed a petition asking for my release. Many contributors to the “Encyclopedia Britannica,” Herbert Spencer, and Swinburne were among the signers, while Victor Hugo had added to his signature a few warm words. Altogether, public opinion in France received our condemnation very unfavorably; and when my wife had mentioned at Paris that I required books, the Academy of Sciences offered its library, and Ernest Renan, in a charming letter, put his” private library at her service., WRITING AND TEACHING IN PRISON 461 We had a small garden, where we could play ninepins or jew de boules, and soon we managed to cultivate a nar- row bed along the building’s wall, in which, on a surface of some eighty square yards, we grew almost incredible quan- tities of lettuce and radishes, as well as some flowers. I need not say that at once we 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 bookbinding, 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 Wiirtz’s laboratory and preparing to take an ‘examination for the degree of Doctor of Science, abandoned. everything, and came to the tiny 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 op- ‘posite, 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 houses within the prison walls where a post of warders was kept, 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.
462 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST 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 correspond- ing institutions on the other side of the Channel. The medieval revengeful system which still prevails in English prisons has been given up long since in France. The im- prisoned man is not compelled to sleep on planks, or to have a mattress on alternate days only; the day he comes to prison he gets a decent bed, and retains it. He is not compelled, either, to degrading work, such as to climb a wheel, or to pick oakum; he is employed, on the contrary, in useful work, and this ig why the Clairvaux prison has the aspect of a manufacturing town, iron furniture, picture frames, looking-glasses, metric measures, velvet, linen, ladies’ stays, small things in mother of pearl, wooden shoes, and | s0 on, being made by the nearly sixteen hundred men who are kept there.: Moreover, if the punishment for insubordination is very. eruel, there is, at least, none of the flogging which goes on still 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 | penal institutions in Europe. And, with all that, the re-; sults obtained at Clairvaux are as bad as in any of the prisons of the old type. “The watchword nowadays is that con-_ victs 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 SAD CONDITION OF AGED PRISONERS 463 which we occupied, and we occasionally had some contact with the prisoners who were employed in it. One of them was a gray-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 com- pany, excited talk about some capital fun, — some “ 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 had not yet returned 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 endeavoring tc be transferred to Clairvaux.
The old men 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, al- ways in prison;” such is the saying derived from experi- ence And now, having reached or passed beyond the age 464 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST