The Real Criminals

THIS WEEK A MOB LYNCHED TWO CRIMINALS WHO, WHILE FLEEING, HAD FIRED on it.[56] I imagine that after hiding under their counters at the sight of the brandished revolvers the shop owners must have felt a heroic pleasure in lynching the disarmed man. They’re brave men who are only brave when the enemy is lying on the ground. Little medals of gold, silver and vermeil were their reward.

This is perfectly normal. But allow me to regret that the criminals were such bad shots. They should teach the courageous citizens how to really earn their amusement.

They are enthusiastic in the hunt for rebels while in the face of the other bandits, the real ones, the perfidious and invincible ones, they are oh so servile. O! You thieves, you who have begun the game, when you lose see to it that they pay for their cowardice!

For there are workers in the mob that ferociously lynches rebels, the kind of workers who protest against the rising cost of living; there are rapacious merchants who can’t curse loudly enough the financiers whose speculation ruins them; there are functionaries enslaved by the state; prostitutes of all kinds, the defeated, the crushed …

When they pounce on the ashen thief they forget those who starve them, those who shoot them down, those who domesticate them. And yet, aren’t these the true and the worst criminals?

Men of the pen—and many others—have shed tears over the messenger who is currently dying in the hospital. This poor wretch through his submissive weakness and his stupid honesty, was the accomplice of criminals of a far higher caliber than the ones they are hunting down. He was the lackey of financiers, businessmen who today replace the brigand barons of the past.

The money Caby transported, where did it come from?[57] How many dead men were needed to place in the hands of a few cosseted bourgeois those 300,000 francs? How many?

Remember the wages that the workers of the textile mills and the Jewish hatmakers and certain glaziers live on, or rather, die on. Remember that the number of tuberculars reaches the level of 65 percent in certain industries. Do an accounting of the cost in ruined lives, in lives eliminated, for every thousand-franc note deducted from the thankless labor of these dying men!

The Boneff brothers have written a beautiful book on “The Tragic Life of Workers.” Dryly, without any emphasis, they have described how entire populations labor, fight in vain, and inevitably die of alcoholism, overwork, poverty, tuberculosis, of a thousand and one gangrenes. And it is precisely from those who suffer most that capital draws it greatest profits. Naturally.

The money of the Société Générale comes from this. It is, if we must speak in terms that are cruel but precise, the profits derived from the systematic murder of the plebes.

It must be admitted that they don’t all come from there. The Rothschilds, like Victor Hugo’s sinister Thénardier, made their fortune on the mass graves of Waterloo. One fortune is as good as any other, and money has no smell. The Schneiders, etc. fructified their capital in Morocco, unless it was in Tonkin or Madagascar. It was for them that civilization’s drunken soldiers massacred and pillaged to such a point that it disgusted Pierre Loti. Yesterday it was Casablanca, today it’s Tripoli and the Congo. These names alone speak of the bloodied palm groves, the peaceful villages machine-gunned, oases overflowing with pestilential corpses. But money has no smell.

The criminals who hatch these profitable massacres last summer nearly provoked a Franco-German war. But it was only postponed, not canceled. Until then they’ll continue to enrich themselves with all they’ll take from the proletarian mass.

And yet, in the eyes of all it seems impossible to call the rulers criminals, and it is only the rare dreamer who from time to time dreams of lynching them. The crowd they bully respects them, salutes them, votes for them, demonstrates for them, dedicates itself to them, brings them banknotes that they lose, by chance, on the street …

It’s because the crowd is cowardly and they are strong. They kill sheltered behind the ramparts of the penal code; they execute for the fatherland; they own enormous and solid prisons.

But on the other hand, woe on the poor wretch who, tired of wasting his days at the factory, snatches the purse of a society woman so he can live on what she would use only for her amusement. Woe on the exasperated unemployed worker who takes his bread. Woe on the anarchist rebel who refuses slavery and acts like a rebel. The vanquished pay for the others.

“Catch the thief!” A human beast flees down the street, and from all around cops, workers, and shop owners converge on him. Just a moment ago they were all shaking, ready to faint under the threat of the armed rebel. But he dropped his weapon. Too bad for him, now. Eyes shine, fists are tightened, mouths laugh and shout. Ha! Now he’s been knocked down. Ha! The savage dance of honest people trampling the defeated, a hundred against one. They’ll be given medals, since medals were given to the soldiers in Morocco. They’ll be given medals on the orders of the high bandits, the masters of money.

(l’anarchie, January 25, 1912)

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