“The aim of the press,” said Zola, apropos of the public reception of Salvat’s attempt (_Paris_), “seemed to be to besmirch Salvat, in order, in his person, to degrade anarchy; and his life was made out to be one long abomination.... His faults, magnified, were paraded without the causes that had produced them, and without the excuse of the environment which had aggravated them. What a revolt of humanity and justice there was in the soul of Froment, who knew the true Salvat,—Salvat, the tender mystic, the chimerical and passionate spirit, thrown into life without defence, always weighted down and exasperated by implacable poverty, and finding his account at last in this dream of restoring the golden age by destroying the old world!”
Whenever a fresh anarchist trial occurs in France, this inglorious farce of press vilification is re-enacted. Not content with heaping on the culprit’s head all the misdemeanours of which he has been guilty and many crimes of which he has not been guilty, the bourgeois organs try to strip him of his one incontrovertible attribute,—courage. They dare—knowing him well under lock and key—to call him “coward.”
No, my respectable, quaking bourgeois, not that! Robber, murderer, incendiary, fornicator, what you will (if you must judge by your rule of thumb), but not coward! It is too much! You cannot deny the dynamiter what you concede to the vilest criminals and even to the beast of the jungle.
Duval all but killed the police brigadier Rossignol, who attempted to arrest him. For the judge who tried to worm out of him proofs of the existence of accomplices, he had this fine epigram: “_Vous n’aurez ma langue qu’avec ma tête_.” Condemned to death, he refused to sign a petition for clemency. The innocent Cyvoct, under sentence of death, also refused to sue for pardon.
Two officers were wounded before Francis[47] could be secured on the Boulevard de Strasbourg, and it took four officers to hold Parmeggiani.[48]
Pini had to be lassooed in the heart of Paris like a buffalo of the plains, and it was only when wounded that he could be retaken after his escape from Cayenne.
Lorion, advertised everywhere by the police for an incendiary speech at Roubaix (immediately after his release from a five years’ imprisonment), openly led a band to the sack of the office of a Lille newspaper which had treated him as a police spy, and then made good his escape to Havre; but, determined to purge away the last vestige of the charge against him, he returned to the region of Lille, and wounded two officers before he could be taken.