💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › sante-caserio-defense-speech.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:52:50. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Defense Speech Author: Sante Caserio Date: 1894 Language: en Topics: trial statement, self-defense, speech, propaganda of the deed, assassination, France Source: Retrieved on 24th September 2020 from https://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/caserio/trial.htm Notes: Originally published in Alexandre Lacassagne’s L’Assassinat de Président Carnot, Lyon, 1894. Translated by Mitchell Abidor.
After assassinating French president Sadi Carnot in order to avenge the
execution of Auguste Vaillant for throwing a bomb in the Chamber of
Deputies, he delivered this, his final speech, at his trial.
---
Gentlemen of the jury, I’m not going to defend myself but rather explain
my action.
While still young I learned that present society is poorly organized, so
poorly that every day many unfortunates commit suicide, leaving wives
and children in the most terrible distress. Workers in their thousands
look for work and can’t find any. Poor families beg for their food and
shiver from the cold. They suffer the worst poverty. The youngest ask
their poor mothers for food and the latter can’t give them any because
they don’t have anything. The few things that were in the house were
already sold or traded. All they can do is ask for alms; they’re often
arrested for vagabondage.
I left my native land because I was often brought to tears upon seeing
little girls of eight or ten forced to work fifteen hours a day for a
miserable wage of twenty centimes. Young women of eighteen or twenty
also work twenty hours a day for a laughable salary. And this doesn’t
only happen to my compatriots, but to all workers who sweat all day long
for a morsel of bread while their labor brings in money in abundance.
The workers are forced to live under the most wretched conditions and
their food consists of a bit of bread, a few spoonfuls of rice, and
water. And so when they reach the age of thirty or forty they’re dying
of fatigue and die in hospitals. What’s more, as a consequence of their
poor diets and overwork these sad creature are devoured in their
hundreds by pellagra, an illness that, in my country, attacks, as the
doctors say, those who are malnourished and who lead a hard and deprived
existence.
I saw that there are some people who are hungry and some children who
suffer while food and clothing are abundant in the cities. I saw several
great industries full of clothing and wool products and I also saw
warehouses full of wheat and corn that would be suitable for those who
needed them. And from another point of view, I saw thousands of people
who don’t work, who produce nothing, and who live thanks to the labor of
others; who every day spend thousands of francs to amuse themselves; who
corrupt the daughters of workers; who own lodgings with forty or fifty
rooms, twenty or thirty horses, and several servants: in a word, all the
pleasures of life.
I believe in God, but when I see such inequality among men, I recognize
that it isn’t God who created man but man who created God. And I
discovered that those who want their property respected have an interest
in preaching paradise and hell and keeping the people in a state of
ignorance.
A short time ago, Vaillant threw a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies in
protest against the current system of society. He killed no one and only
wounded a few people. But bourgeois justice condemned him to death. And
not satisfied with the condemnation of the guilty man, it pursued the
anarchists and arrested, not only those who knew Vaillant, but even
those who attended an anarchist lecture.
The government didn’t think of their wives and children. It didn’t
consider that a man held in a cell isn’t the only one to suffer, that
his little ones ask for bread. Bourgeois justice didn’t trouble itself
with these innocents, who don’t even know what society is. It’s not
their fault if their fathers are in prison; all they want to do is eat.
The government went so far as to search people’s private homes, to open
personal letters, to prohibit lectures and meetings and practiced the
most infamous oppression against us. Even today hundreds of anarchists
are arrested for having written an article in a newspaper or for having
expressed an opinion in public.
Well then, if the government employs guns, chains, and prisons against
us, must we anarchists, who defend our lives, remain locked in our
houses? No. On the contrary, we answer governments with dynamite, bombs,
the stylus, and the dagger. In a word, we must do all we can to destroy
the bourgeoisie and government. Gentlemen of the jury, you who are the
representatives of bourgeois society, if you want my head, take it. But
don’t think that in doing so you are stopping the anarchist movement.
Beware: man reaps what he sows.