Now public opinion turned entirely against the baron and his secretary, who had to live through more adventures. After their release they entered a small village café, and there ventilated their griefs in German in a friendly conversation over a bottle of wine. “You were stupid, you were a coward,” the self-styled interpreter said to the self-styled baron. “If I had been in your place, I would have shot that examining magistrate with this revolver. Let him only repeat that with me—he will have these bullets in his head!” And so on.
A commercial traveler who sat quietly in a corner of the room rushed at once to the brigadier to report the conversation which he had overheard. The brigadier made an official report immediately, and again arrested the secretary—a pharmacist from Strasbourg. He was taken before a police court at the same town of Bar-sur-Aube, and got a full month’s imprisonment “for menaces uttered against a magistrate in a public place.” After that the baron had more adventures, and the village did not resume its usual quietness till after the departure of the two strangers.
I have here related only a very few of the spy stories that I might tell. But when one thinks of the thousands of villains going about the world in the pay of all governments—and very often well paid for their villainies—of the traps they lay for all sorts of artless people, of the vast sums of money thrown away in the maintenance of that army, which is recruited in the lowest strata of society and from the population of the prisons, of the corruption of all sorts which they pour into society at large, nay, even into families, one cannot but be appalled at the immensity of the evil which is thus done.
XV
Demands for our release were continually raised, both in the press and in the Chamber of Deputies—the more so as about the same time that we were condemned Louise Michel was condemned, too, for robbery! Louise Michel—who always gives literally her last shawl or cloak to the woman who is in need of it, and who never could be compelled, during her imprisonment, to have better food than her fellow prisoners, because she always gave them what was sent to her—was condemned, together with another comrade, Pouget, to nine years’ imprisonment for highway robbery! That sounded too bad even for the middle-class opportunists. She marched one day at the head of a procession of the unemployed, and, entering a baker’s shop, took a few loaves from it and distributed them to the hungry column: this was her robbery. The release of the anarchists thus became a war-cry against the government, and in the autumn of 1885 all my comrades save three were set at liberty by a decree of President Grévy. Then the outcry in behalf of Louise Michel and myself became still louder. However, Alexander III objected to it; and one day the prime minister, M. Freycinet, answering an interpellation in the Chamber, said that “diplomatic difficulties stood in the way of Kropotkin’s release.” Strange words in the mouth of the prime minister of an independent country; but still stranger words have been heard since in connection with that ill-omened alliance of France with imperial Russia.
In the middle of January, 1886, both Louise Michel and Pouget, as well as the four of us who were still at Clairvaux, were set free.
My release meant also the release of my wife from her voluntary imprisonment in the little village at the prison gates, which began to tell upon her health, and we went to Paris to stay there for a few weeks with our friend, Elie Reclus—a writer of great power in anthropology, who is often mistaken outside France for his younger brother, the geographer, Elisée. A close friendship has united the two brothers from early youth. When the time came for them to enter a university, they went together from a small country place in the valley of the Gironde to Strasbourg, making the journey on foot—accompanied, like true wandering students, by their dog; and when they stayed at some village, it was the dog which got the bowl of soup, while the two brothers’ supper very often consisted only of bread with a few apples. From Strasbourg the younger brother went to Berlin, whither he was attracted by the lectures of the great Ritter. Later on, in the forties, they were both at Paris. Elie Reclus became a convinced Fourierist, and both saw in the republic of 1848 the coming of a new era of social evolution. Consequently, after Napoleon III’s coup d’état, they both had to leave France, and emigrated to England. When the amnesty was voted, and they returned to Paris, Elie edited there a Fourierist cooperative paper, which circulated widely among the workers. It is not generally known, but may be interesting to note, that Napoleon III, who played the part of a Caesar—interested, as behooves a Caesar, in the conditions of the working classes—used to send one of his aides-de-camp to the printing office of the paper, each time it was printed, to take to the Tuileries the first sheet issued from the press. He was, later on, even ready to patronize
