Chapter 12 : A Good Example

A Good Example

(Editor’s note: Jean-Jacques Liabeuf was an apache, or member of a Parisian street gang, who, upon his release for his unjust imprisonment as a pimp, sought out the policemen responsible for his arrest and killed a policeman attempting to detain him. His became a cause célèbre of the Left. Despite a campaign that involved socialists, syndicalists, and anarchists, Liabeuf was executed on July 2, 1910.)

THE OTHER DAY A “TERROR” OF THE CITY BARRIERS, WHO THE COPS WERE arresting for some misdeed I don’t know a thing about, rightly wiped the floor with four of them. Four cops taken down like that by a guy they were getting ready to quietly rough up—now that’s a job well done. It took a few hundred of Ferrer’s avengers on the October 13 of glorious memory to take down just one!

For having done his job so well I find this Liabeuf quite sympatico, much more so than certain fearsome revolutionaries who, after having suffered the third degree, vehemently protest … journalistically.

And yet, the apaches in general don’t interest me very much. They differ too little from honest people. With certain rare (and estimable) exceptions, their mentality and methods are identical. Both recognize authority and make use of it. Both have a view of life that is illogical and lacking in beauty, which is verified by everything they do. Just as the honest citizen considers his wife as his property and denies her any individual will, the pimp sees his hooker as a profit center. Both shamelessly exploit. The honest merchant robs through deception under the protection of the law; the apache operates through violence against the law. Only the way they end differ in any way. While the financier will end peacefully, honored, and decorated, Charlot de Menilmuche or the Bastoche will likely end up in the penal colony, unless a final bit of bad luck acquaints him with the widow-maker.[51]

I would say that nine times out of ten the apaches are nothing but poorly adapted or unlucky bourgeois. But we must render them this justice: they are less cowardly, less spineless than honest people, and because of this resemble men a bit more.

For example, this Liabeuf, arrested two weeks ago on the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, in wiping the floor with four cops, acted like a man where almost everyone else—including revolutionaries and anarchists—ordinarily act like cowards.

I don’t know why they were arresting him, and in any case that seems to me to be secondary. Whatever the official causes the fact remains: in the name of the lawmen pounced on another man because in the struggle for life he had transgressed the rules of the code.

He had transgressed the law! But did he ever subscribe to it? Had he recognized it?

Is it not the height if illogic to accuse an individual of not recognizing the rules he is perhaps ignorant of, to which no one ever asked him to subscribe, and which others unknown to him decreed?

I am ignorant of the law and I repudiate it. In my eyes nothing justifies it. It is imposed on me by brute force. It is only respected and obeyed by the weakest because of phalanxes of prison guards, cops, and soldiers.

For a word, a writing, an act—simply that, for such is the fantasy of a judge or policeman—the abstract power of the law is made real and delivers a blow. Its dogs attack the rebel. Magistrates deliberately cut so many days, months, and years from his life, which he’ll pass in the horror of prison. They coldly torture him through solitude, silence, darkness; they turn him into a formless gray thing without any activity of his own.

There is nothing more natural than the fact that, their gilded abjection being threatened by rebels—conscious resistors or not—the masters of the day defend themselves; that they pitilessly suppress the rebel; that they make Brennus’s famous word their motto: “Woe on the vanquished!” and that they kill the apache whose knife threatens their bellies, the poet and the thinker who awaken people’s consciousness, and the anarchist conquering his life against theirs. Let them kill! The battle will be merciless on both sides, but at least we won’t know the infamy and torment of jails.

It is logical that in order to live a man should kill another when the latter gets in his way. It is logical that the dispossessed attack the possessors and that the possessors respond with fusillades. It is logical that the apache, the rebel against the prison of labor, kills a rentier, and logical when the rentier kills him when they have him in their hands.

Kill. That’s your right, and ours. But don’t torture. That is the true crime, the evil, repugnant act. To deprive a man of air and light, to gag him, tie his arms and legs, take from him all of life’s joys and leave him nothing but suffering, that is the crime par excellence.

Existence without freedom becomes the worst of agonies. And every law being one more hindrance to individual freedom, every individual endowed with will is, by definition, a rebel. So every time that a man is attacked in the name of that law—which creates theft, fraud, and falsehood, which stifles and tortures—if there is even the least drop of virile strength left in him he must defend himself, ferociously, desperately.

The right to live implies the right to kill whoever prevents me from living. The will to live imposes on me the duty (the necessity) of killing whoever wants to rob me of freedom, without which there is no life.

But people are so cowardly these days. Accumulated slaveries have made man so flabby and senile that even the primordial instinct of the animal retaliating for a bite with a blow with his claw has fallen asleep in him. If the wolves who the winter exasperates leave the woods, their mouths burning to wrest their nourishing pittance; if every animal fights back against hunger or the yoke, the poor stoically support their poverty, and all men allow themselves to be oppressed, ridiculed, and tortured without rebelling.

These are no longer the days of open carnage when violent and clearly defined forces collided. A weak humanitarianism lulls masters and slave. They want peace—international, social, individual, all possible peace. And hypocritically, their faces veiled in smiles, they fight through use of corruption, betrayal, and deceit. Fear reigns, the fear of blood and effort, the fear of leaving sweet somnolence behind.

This explains the carefree casualness of the privileged, juggling with the fate of the common run of mortals. Insults, vexations, spoliations, and the arbitrary relentlessly whip the individual on. Men exploit with impunity other men who are a hundred times more numerous than they.

Amid so much weakness and cowardice I admire the person who dares to defend himself. It’s necessary that there arise more often the figure of the apache in order to teach poltroons and tormentors respect for the individual.

For the cops received a good lesson, and it was a scathing one, as sharp a one as being whipped. And for those—the anarchist rebels—who push their way through mocking the authorities and who the law waits for in ambush at every turning, this apache gave a good lesson.

(l’anarchie, January 27, 1910)

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