Translation:Ravachol!
First cry
Ravachol!
His head escapes the blade!
The jurors who dared to do this, who dared to block their ears to the clamors of baying death, were they afraid? Were they afraid of killing a man whose mysterious vengeance does not all die with him? Or, beyond the act itself, of which they were being shouted at for its terrifying horror, did they only listen to the voice of the future Idea, the dominating idea that specializes and elevates this act? I do not know. We never know what can happen in the conscience of a juror, nor to what supreme injunctions they obey when meting out death or life.
The jurors trembled less than the Press that mocks, insults, and curses them. The Press wanted blood. Like the well-provided bourgeoisie whose blind instincts it summarizes, whose threatened privileges it defends, it was afraid. And fear is ferocious. To give itself the illusion of atrocious courage, fear loves to paint its pallor red. It also believes that the sound of the legal knife, the thud on the infamous board of a tortured body, will prevent it from hearing the chattering of its teeth, the frantic gallops of its pulse, and those voices which, day by day, grow bolder, angrier, rising from the depths of the social hell. It is mistaken. There are deaths that return; there are voices that cannot be stifled. And the void is filled with terrible enigmas. I abhor spilled blood, ruins, death. I love life, and all life is sacred to me. That is why I will ask of the anarchist ideal what no form of government has been able to give me: love, beauty, peace among men. Ravachol does not frighten me. He is transitory, like the terror he inspires. He is the thunderclap that gives way to the joy of the sun and calming skies. After the somber work, the dream smiles — a dream of universal harmony, as envisioned by the admirable Kropotkin.
Moreover, society would be wrong to complain. It alone has given birth to Ravachol. It has sown misery; it reaps rebellion. That is just. And then, one should count.
Who, during this slow, eternal march toward execution that has been the history of humanity, who has spilled the blood — always the same blood — without pause, without a moment of pity? Governments, religions, industries — those penal colonies of labor — are drenched in it. Murder drips from their laws, their prayers, their progress. Just yesterday, there were the frenzied butcheries that, as the Commune lay dying, transformed Paris into a charnel house; there were those useless massacres where innocent women and tiny children embraced the ballistic virtuosity of the Lebel rifles at Fourmies. And every day, there are mines that explode, burying fifty, a hundred, five hundred poor devils in a single minute of horrific destruction, their charred bodies never to see the sun again. And there are those atrocious conquests in distant lands, where happy, unknown, and peaceful races writhe beneath the boot of the Western slaver, the plunderer of continents, the impure violator of virgin lands and ancestral forests.
Every step one takes in this society bristling with privileges is marked by a spot of blood; at every gear of the governmental machinery, the flesh of the poor is ground up, spinning and quivering; and tears flow everywhere, in the night of suffering where no one dares to enter. In the face of these ceaseless slaughters and ceaseless tortures, what is this cracking wall, this collapsing staircase? The hour we are living through is hideous. Never has misery been greater, because it has never been more conscious, because it has never stood so close to the spectacle of squandered wealth, the promised land of comfort from which it is constantly driven away. Never has the law, which only protects banks, weighed more heavily on the bruised shoulders of the poor. Capitalism is insatiable, and wage labor worsens the ancient slavery. The stores are overflowing with clothes, yet some go naked; they are stuffed with food, yet some die of hunger on the doorsteps of indifferent rich people. No cry is heard; when a louder complaint pierces through the painful clamor, the Lebels arm themselves, and the troops set in motion.
And that is not all.
A people do not live by their stomachs alone; they also live through their minds. Intellectual joys are as necessary to them as physical joys. They have a right to beauty just as they have a right to bread. Well, those who could give them these urgent joys, those who could elevate its spirit, are treated as public enemies, hunted like criminals, tracked down like anarchists, beaten like the poor. They are reduced to living in solitude. An immense barrier separates them from the crowd, to whom only repugnant spectacles are reserved, over whom hangs the enormous, sordid, and impenetrable veil of triumphant stupidity. We are witnessing an unprecedented social phenomenon: that at this time, so rich in great artists, great poets, and great scientists, never has public taste sunk so low, never has ignorance wallowed in more abject pleasures.
And yet, if the hour we are living through is hideous, it is also formidable; it is the hour of popular awakening. And this hour is full of unknowns. The forbearance of the oppressed, of the abandoned, has lasted long enough. They want to live; they want to enjoy; they want their share of happiness in the sun. No matter what the rulers do, no matter how far they go in indulging the worst reactions of fear, they will prevent nothing of what must come to pass. We are approaching the decisive moment in human history. The old world is collapsing under the weight of its own crimes. It is itself that will light the bomb destined to destroy it. And this bomb will be all the more terrible because it will contain neither gunpowder nor dynamite. It will contain Idea and Compassion : these two forces against which nothing can prevail.
Octave Mirbeau