A Head Will Fall

NOTHING IS MORE REPUGNANT THAN THE MACABRE JUDICIAL COMEDY THAT all too often ends in a new exploit of the guillotine, one which is contrary to vulgar common sense, revolting to feelings and, from the social point of view, as unjust as it is immoral.

Vulgar common sense clearly demonstrates in vain that a wound isn’t healed by amputation; that one crime—and a murder coldly decided on and prepared by the official representatives of society is a crime par excellence—doesn’t make right another, and in no way prevents the future crimes that contemporary illogic render inevitable. Logic and common sense! Only a few eccentrics—the anarchists—timidly attempt to conform to them.

Revolting? Yes, the death penalty is as revolting as can be. In a few tragic pages of his Mêlée Sociale Clemenceau related the horror of executions. He then hurried to forget them (one forgets so many things when one becomes a minister). Fifteen years after he described it, the sinister scene in the gray and red dawn of La Roquette Prison is being replayed. It only revolts dreamers like us.

Unjust, immoral … Big words that are laughed at in this twentieth century of all-out civilization. Do we ever see those who rule by the force of injustice seek to be just in their acts? And do we ever see the imbeciles who live under their influence and support them aspire to anything? Come now!! Justice and morality are things to be taught in the stupefying classrooms so that children learn not to rebel later on.

So instead of worrying about this nonsense they judge, they sentence, and they kill. Journalists, speculating on the bloodthirsty hysteria of the mob demands heads; magistrates, symbolically garbed in purple, deliberate, split hairs, discuss before deciding if the wretch who stands before them will through their sinister good humor be sent to Maroni’s garden of tortures or put in the hands of their compère Deibler.[52] This depends strictly on these gentlemen’s mod. All that’s needed is for the grocer who presides over the jury to be a cuckold, for his business to go badly, for him to have a corn on his foot and a man’s fate is sealed. The honest people applaud. The most sensitive rejoice when the clemency of the judges has destined a poor bugger to torture instead of sending him straight to his death. But when a head falls most of them are delirious with joy.

To judge, to condemn, to torture or guillotine are all as idiotic as they are useless, not to say harmful. But who cares? Most people understand nothing about this. It’s the veritable apotheosis of imbecility: magistrates, judges, executioners, soldiers, none of them understand a thing.

Others, frightened by crimes whose tide is rising and which threaten them, feel themselves to be in danger and strike out blindly. Not understanding that repressive ferocity is pointless and that it is the cause of crime that must be attacked; that from the moment that people are hungry, lack air and sun, and have their health destroyed in factories and barracks, it is inevitable that they will rob and murder. But go talk of correct reasoning, of science, of determinism to people who are confused by fear and are enslaved to petty interests.

This time will be like all the others. The judicial machine has functioned and unless the chubby Fallières has, after attending some truculent banquet, the “humanitarian” idea of sending Liabeuf to the galleys, a head will fall. But this time it’s not the head of some unlucky soul or a brute …

This was a very simple story. The vice squad cops who are, as Clemenceau so picturesquely said, “official scoundrels,” had sated themselves on this victim in order to justify the salary society allocates to them to brutalize prostitutes and hunt down nonmilitary pimps. They thought it less dangerous to arrest an inoffensive passerby. When dealing with an authentic pimp one must always fear being stabbed. With this worker, they thought, impunity was certain. The little young man protested. A waste of time. If all citizens are equal according to the text of the law, in practice no word can counterbalance the words spoken by a cop. “Pimp!” the cops said, just as on other occasions they said “Demonstrator!” That was enough.

Luckily, it happens that the police sometimes choose poorly. They arrest someone who it happens is not completely flabby and less fearful than an official revolutionary. A good bugger who has guarded intact the notion of his individual dignity and whose energy isn’t satisfied with jeremiads and has enough determination to move from words to acts, even if this involves a serious risk.

This is a summary of the Liabeuf Affair.

Personally, there’s nothing about Liabeuf to interest us. Honest worker or apache, it’s no difference to us: the distinction is too subtle for anarchist logic to take pleasure in. Certified honest people are often the worst rats, and among those called apaches there can unquestionably be found people of greater individual value. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, one can say that the ones are no better than the others, which flatters neither of them. As concerns Liabeuf, it doesn’t mean a thing to us to know what he really was. But we must recognize the energy he demonstrated in a situation where we are used to seeing cowardice.

Viewed on its own, his act is an anarchist act.

He wanted to kill the policemen Maugras and Mors, who had sent him to prison and prohibited his residing in Paris. Outside any purely sentimental considerations—which have their importance—this sentence nonchalantly delivered was of a kind to upset an entire existence.

The “official scoundrels” of morality—ministerial style—caused him to suffer an irreparable humiliation and brutally intervened in his life, whose course they changed. I understand that a man of a vigorous character thought vengeance was absolutely necessary. But was this really vengeance? Wasn’t it rather an act of legitimate defense?

They beat him. He defended himself. What isn’t normal is that such cases occur so rarely. What is abnormal is the cowardly indifference of the countless unfortunates who suffer without balking the humiliations of the many valets of capital and authority. Clearly the secular school and the barracks have obtained magnificent results: they have created in the overwhelming majority of those whose youth they’ve ground down the mentality of slaves they can use at will.

Healthy men will never forget that for the individual defending his life is a primordial duty.

As biology teaches us, in a well-constituted organism every attack that places its organism in danger is immediately followed by a vigorous reaction. Sociologists teach us that in the free communities of primitives, where slavery was not yet established, that to each denial of justice committed to the detriment of someone, to every affront, to every threat, the insulted individual responded with an equivalent reaction. For it is an inexorable law of nature that any being incapable of defending itself will disappear.

And this law is rigorously verified in social life. The man who doesn’t defend himself, accepting the oppression society places on him without reacting, always disappears. There are those who simply die, murdered by tuberculosis or in service to the fatherland in Madagascar, in Tonkin, or wherever. There are those who peacefully end their days in bed at age sixty, without having lived a single moment of their own. From their first step till their final shudder they never had their own will, they were never individualities. He was Mr. John Doe, Mr. Everyman, whose existence no one bothered with and whose death will pass noticed. He never struck back; he passively accepted the blows that quickly turned him into a gray, unassuming, flabby silhouette: someone shapeless.

The person who wants to live, to grab in the present his share of the sun, of flowers and joy, must affirm himself. Must know how to walk alone, think with his own brain. Act freely; react without truce against the fetters placed by an absurd social organization on the satisfaction of his most elementary needs and most logical wishes. Resisting enslavement is a condition sine qua non of the fulfillment of individual life.

In a word: defending oneself. Rendering blow for blow. There are obstacles, there are circumstances where force is the only weapon that can be used.

Liabeuf, though wanting to strike the direct artisans of his misfortune, struck by chance the agents who arrested him.

There is no worse wrong that can be committed against an individual than that of depriving him of his freedom. Even death is less serious, for it is not painful while imprisonment constitutes a continuous, abominable torture. We can call it a “death that is granted consciousness,” and even this metaphor is powerless to explain how horrible the abolition of all that characterizes life for him is for a human being.

Rebellion is essential against this ultimate assault. The sole fact of depriving a man of his freedom for an hour justifies the strongest reprisals on his part. What am I saying? The mere act of a policeman putting his hand on your shoulder, because it signifies an attack on the human personality, is sufficient reason on its own to justify any form of revolt.

I will end by citing the words that legend attributed to Duval, one of the first anarchist militants in France. He is supposed to have responded to the cop’s sacramental “In the name of the law, I arrest you,” by this phrase that followed the shot from his revolver: “In the name of freedom, I eliminate you!”

(l’anarchie, May 12, 1910)

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