At the same time, the chief of the St. Petersburg police, General Trepov, noticing, during a visit to the house of detention, that one of the political prisoners, Bogolyubov, did not take off his hat to greet the omnipotent satrap, rushed upon him, gave him a blow, and, when the prisoner resisted, ordered him to be flogged. The other prisoners, learning the fact in their cells, loudly expressed their indignation, and were in consequence fearfully beaten by the warders and the police. The Russian political prisoners bore without murmuring all hardships inflicted upon them in Siberia or through hard labor, but they were firmly decided not to tolerate corporal punishment. A young girl, Véra Zasúlich, who did not even personally know Bogolyubov, took a revolver, went to the chief of police, and shot at him. Trepov was only wounded. Alexander II came to look at the heroic girl, who must have impressed him by her extremely sweet face and her modesty. Trepov had so many enemies at St. Petersburg that they managed to bring the affair before a common-law jury, and Véra Zasúlich declared in court that she had resorted to arms only when all means for bringing the affair to public knowledge and obtaining some sort of redress had been exhausted. Even the St. Petersburg correspondent of the London Times had been asked to mention the affair in his paper, but had not done so, perhaps thinking it improbable. Then, without telling anyone her intentions, she went to shoot Trepov. Now that the affair had become public, she was quite happy to know that he was but slightly wounded. The jury acquitted her unanimously; and when the police tried to rearrest her, as she was leaving the court house, the young men of St. Petersburg, who stood in crowds at the gates, saved her from their clutches. She went abroad and soon was among us in Switzerland.
This affair produced quite a sensation throughout Europe. I was at Paris when the news of the acquittal came, and had to call that day on business at the offices of several newspapers. I found the editors fired with enthusiasm, and writing powerful articles to glorify the girl. Even the serious Revue des Deux Mondes wrote, in its review of the year, that the two persons who had most impressed public opinion in Europe during 1878 were Prince Gorchakov at the Berlin congress and Véra Zasúlich. Their portraits were given side by side in several almanacs. Upon the workers in Europe the devotion of Véra Zasúlich produced a tremendous impression.
A few months after that, without any plot having been formed, four attempts were made against crowned heads in close succession. The worker Hoedel and Dr. Nobiling shot at the German Emperor; a few weeks later, a Spanish worker, Oliva Moncasi, followed with an attempt to shoot the King of Spain, and the cook Passanante rushed with his knife upon the King of Italy. The governments of Europe could not believe that such attempts upon the lives of three kings should have occurred without there being at the bottom some international conspiracy, and they jumped to the conclusion that the Jura Federation and the International Workingmen’s Association were responsible.
More than twenty years have passed since then, and I may say most positively that there was absolutely no ground whatever for that supposition. However, all the European governments fell upon Switzerland, reproaching her with harboring revolutionists, who organized such plots. Paul Brousse, the editor of our Jura newspaper, the Avant-Garde, was arrested and prosecuted. The Swiss judges, seeing there was not the slightest foundation for connecting Brousse or the Jura Federation with the recent attacks, condemned Brousse to only a couple of months’ imprisonment, for his articles; but the paper was suppressed, and all the printing-offices of Switzerland were asked by the federal government not to publish this or any similar paper. The Jura Federation thus remained without an organ.
Besides, the politicians of Switzerland, who looked with an unfavorable eye on the anarchist agitation in their country, acted privately in such a way as to compel the leading Swiss members of the Jura Federation either to retire from public life or to starve. Brousse was expelled from Switzerland. James Guillaume, who for eight years had maintained against all obstacles the official organ of the federation, and made his living chiefly by teaching, could obtain no employment, and was compelled to leave Switzerland and remove to France. Adhémar Schwitzguébel found no work in the watch trade, and, burdened as he was by a large family, had to retire from the movement. Spichiger was in the same condition, and emigrated. It thus happened that I, a foreigner, had to undertake the editing of the organ of the federation. I hesitated, of course, but there was nothing else to be done, and with two friends, Dumartheray and Herzig, I started a new fortnightly paper at Geneva, in February, 1879, under the title of Le Révolté. I had to write most of it myself. We had only twenty-three francs (about four dollars) to start the paper, but we all set to work to get subscriptions, and succeeded in issuing our first number. It was moderate in tone, but revolutionary in substance, and
