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Title: Courtroom speech Author: Auguste Vaillant Language: en Topics: speech, France Source: Retrieved on April 21, 2012 from http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/goldman/Writings/Anarchism/violence.html Notes: From the speech before the French Chamber of Deputies, 1894, prior to receiving sentence of death for a political crime
Gentlemen, in a few minutes you are to deal your blow, but in receiving
your verdict I shall have at least the satisfaction of having wounded
the existing society, that cursed society in which one may see a single
man spending, uselessly, enough to feed thousands of families; an
infamous society which permits a few individuals to monopolize all the
social wealth, while there are hundreds of thousands of unfortunates who
have not even the bread that is not refused to dogs, and while entire
families are committing suicide for want of the necessities of life.
Ah, gentlemen, if the governing classes could go down among the
unfortunates! But no, they prefer to remain deaf to their appeals. It
seems that a fatality impels them, like the royalty of the eighteenth
century, toward the precipice which will engulf them, for woe be to
those who remain deaf to the cries of the starving, woe to those who,
believing themselves of superior essence, assume the right to exploit
those beneath them! There comes a time when the people no longer reason;
they rise like a hurricane, and pass away like a torrent. Then we see
bleeding heads impaled on pikes.
Among the exploited, gentlemen, there are two classes of individuals.
Those of one class, not realizing what they are and what they might be,
take life as it comes, believe that they are born to be slaves, and
content themselves with the little that is given them in exchange for
their labor. But there are others, on the contrary, who think, who
study, and who, looking about them, discover social iniquities. Is it
their fault if they see clearly and suffer at seeing others suffer? Then
they throw themselves into the struggle, and make themselves the bearers
of the popular claims.
Gentlemen, I am one of these last. Wherever I have gone, I have seen
unfortunates bent beneath the yoke of capital. Everywhere I have seen
the same wounds causing tears of blood to flow, even in the remoter
parts of the inhabited districts of South America, where I had the right
to believe that he who was weary of the pains of civilization might rest
in the shade of the palm trees and there study nature. Well, there even,
more than elsewhere, I have seen capital come, like a vampire, to suck
the last drop of blood of the unfortunate pariahs.
Then I came back to France, where it was reserved for me to see my
family suffer atrociously. This was the last drop in the cup of my
sorrow. Tired of leading this life of suffering and cowardice, I carried
this bomb to those who are primarily responsible for social misery.
I am reproached with the wounds of those who were hit by my projectiles.
Permit me to point out in passing that, if the bourgeois had not
massacred or caused massacres during the Revolution, it is probable that
they would still be under the yoke of the nobility. On the other hand,
figure up the dead and wounded on Tonquin, Madagascar, Dahomey, adding
thereto the thousands, yes, millions of unfortunates who die in the
factories, the mines, and wherever the grinding power of capital is
felt. Add also those who die of hunger, and all this with the assent of
our Deputies. Beside all this, of how little weight are the reproaches
now brought against me!
It is true that one does not efface the other; but, after all, are we
not acting on the defensive when we respond to the blows which we
receive from above? I know very well that I shall be told that I ought
to have confined myself to speech for the vindication of the people’s
claims. But what can you expect! It takes a loud voice to make the deaf
hear. Too long have they answered our voices by imprisonment, the rope,
rifle volleys. Make no mistake; the explosion of my bomb is not only the
cry of the rebel Vaillant, but the cry of an entire class which
vindicates its rights, and which will soon add acts to words. For, be
sure of it, in vain will they pass laws. The ideas of the thinkers will
not halt; just as, in the last century, all the governmental forces
could not prevent the Diderots and the Voltaires from spreading
emancipating ideas among the people, so all the existing governmental
forces will not prevent the Reclus, the Darwins, the Spencers, the
Ibsens, the Mirbeaus, from spreading the ideas of justice and liberty
which will annihilate the prejudices that hold the mass in ignorance.
And these ideas, welcomed by the unfortunate, will flower in acts of
revolt as they have done in me, until the day when the disappearance of
authority shall permit all men to organize freely according to their
choice, when everyone shall be able to enjoy the product of his labor,
and when those moral maladies called prejudices shall vanish, permitting
human beings to live in harmony, having no other desire than to study
the sciences and love their fellows.
I conclude, gentlemen, by saying that a society in which one sees such
social inequalities as we see all about us, in which we see every day
suicides caused by poverty, prostitution flaring at every street corner,
— a society whose principal monuments are barracks and prisons, — such a
society must be transformed as soon as possible, on pain of being
eliminated, and that speedily, from the human race. Hail to him who
labors, by no matter what means, for this transformation! It is this
idea that has guided me in my duel with authority, but as in this duel I
have only wounded my adversary, it is now its turn to strike me.
Now, gentlemen, to me it matters little what penalty you may inflict,
for, looking at this assembly with the eyes of reason, I can not help
smiling to see you, atoms lost in matter, and reasoning only because you
possess a prolongation of the spinal marrow, assume the right to judge
one of your fellows.
Ah! gentlemen, how little a thing is your assembly and your verdict in
the history of humanity; and human history, in its turn, is likewise a
very little thing in the whirlwind which bears it through immensity, and
which is destined to disappear, or at least to be transformed, in order
to begin again the same history and the same facts, a veritably
perpetual play of cosmic forces renewing and transferring themselves
forever.