The trial began at Lyons in the first days of January, 1883, and lasted about a fortnight. The accusation was ridiculous, as everyone knew that none of the Lyons workers had ever joined the International, and it entirely fell through, as may be seen from the following episode. The only witness for the prosecution was the chief of the secret police at Lyons, an elderly man, who was treated at the court with the utmost respect. His report, I must say, was quite correct as concerns the facts. The anarchists, he said, had taken hold of the population; they had rendered opportunist meetings impossible, because they spoke at each meeting, preaching communism and anarchism, and carrying with them the audiences. Seeing that so far he had been fair in his testimony, I ventured to ask him a question: “Did you ever hear the International Workingmen’s Association spoken of at Lyons?”
“Never,” he replied sulkily.
“When I returned from the London congress of 1881, and did all I could to have the International reconstituted in France, did I succeed?”
“No. They did not find it revolutionary enough.”
“Thank you,” I said, and turning toward the procureur added, “There’s all your prosecution overthrown by your own witness!”
Nevertheless, we were all condemned for having belonged to the International. Four of us got the maximum sentence, five years’ imprisonment and four hundred dollars’ fine; the remainder got from four years to one year. In fact, they never tried to prove anything concerning the International. It was quite forgotten. We were simply asked to speak about anarchism, and so we did. Not a word was said about the explosions; and when one or two of the Lyons comrades wanted to clear this point, they were bluntly told that they were not prosecuted for that but for having belonged to the International—to which I alone belonged.
There is always some comical incident in such trials, and this time it was supplied by a letter of mine. There was nothing upon which to base the accusation. Scores of searches had been made at the houses of French anarchists, but only two letters of mine had been found. The prosecution tried to make the best of them. One was written to a French worker when he was despondent. I spoke to him in my letter about the great times we were living in, the great changes coming, the birth and spreading of new ideas, and so on. The letter was not long, and little capital was made out of it by the procureur. As to the other letter, it was twelve pages long. I had written it to another French friend, a young shoemaker. He earned his living by making shoes in his own room. On his left side he used to have a small iron stove, upon which he himself cooked his daily meal, and upon his right a small stool upon which he wrote long letters to the comrades, without leaving his shoemaker’s low bench. After he had made just as many pairs of shoes as were required to cover the expenses of his extremely modest living, and to send a few francs to his old mother in the country, he would spend long hours in writing letters in which he developed the theoretical principles of anarchism with admirable good sense and intelligence. He is now a writer well known in France and generally respected for the integrity of his character. Unfortunately, at that time he would cover eight or twelve pages of note paper without one single full stop, or even a comma. I once sat down and wrote a long letter in which I explained to him how our written thoughts subdivide into sentences, clauses, and phrases, each of which should end with its appropriate period, semicolon, or comma, and so on—in short, gave him a little lesson in the elements of punctuation. I told him how much it would improve his writings if he adopted this simple plan.
This letter was read by the prosecutor before the court and elicited from him most pathetic comments. “You have heard, gentlemen, this letter”—he went on, addressing the Court. “You have listened to it. There is nothing particular in it at first sight. He gives a lesson in grammar to a worker … But”—and here his voice vibrated with accents of a deep emotion—“it was not in order to help a poor worker in getting instruction which he, owing probably to laziness, failed to get at school. It was not to help him to earn an honest living. No! gentlemen, it was written in order to inspire him with hatred for our grand and beautiful institutions, in order only the better to infuse into him the venom of anarchism, in order to make of him only a more terrible enemy of society. Cursed be the day when Kropotkin set his foot upon the soil of France!”
We could not help laughing like boys all the time he was delivering that speech; the judges stared at him as if to tell him that be was overdoing his role, but be seemed not to notice anything, and, carried by his eloquence, went on speaking with more and more theatrical gestures and intonations. He really did his best to obtain his reward from the Russian government.
Very soon after the condemnation the presiding magistrate was promoted to the magistracy of an assize court. As to the procureur and another
