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Title: For Émile Henry Author: Victor Serge Date: May 23, 1908 Language: en Topics: Emile Henry, letter, insurrectionary anarchy Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1908/05/emile-henry.htm
I think that acts of brutal revolt strike their target, for they awaken
the masses, shake them up with the lashing of a whip, and show the real
face of the bourgeoisie, still trembling at the moment the rebel climbs
the gallows.
To those who say to you that hatred doesn’t engender love, answer that
it is living love that often engenders hatred.
First, a few words to the comrades.
Let them not reproach me for glorifying a man, making him into a banner.
We want neither tribunes nor martyrs nor prophets. But in order to be
strong you have to know yourself, and in order to better support the
struggles of today you have to know the joys and fears of past hours.
And then it is so good, in this world governed by so many crooked
interests, among the base masks that surround us, to once again see the
clear profiles of those who were able to be honest in a humanity of
brutes.
I will also not write an apology for murder of whatever kind. Murders
will be the most painful page in our history. And it is certainly one of
society’s greatest crimes to have forced us, we who want peace and love,
to shed blood.
On May 21, 1894, Émile Henry, twenty-one and a half years old, died on
the gallows at la Roquette Prison in Paris.
The previous April 28, he had been sentenced to death by the jury of the
Seine, having admitted his guilt in a series of terrorist attacks: “The
explosion on the rue des Bons-Enfants that killed five people and led to
the death of a sixth; the explosion at the Café Terminus that killed one
person, mortally wounded another and wounded a number of others;
finally, six shots fired at those who pursued him.” He had acted with
complete lucidity and never once sought to attenuate the terror his acts
inspired.
He was twenty-one; it was the springtime of his life; it was the month
of May, the spring of nature; and though the death sentence was certain,
his tranquil courage, made up of intelligence and enthusiasm, never
flagged for a second.
He was the son of a worker and a worker himself, having worked in a
shop. A rational education backed by a remarkable spirit of logic and
observation led him to anarchism. At first, simply revolted by the sight
of social injustice he became a socialist. “Attracted to socialism for a
moment,” he said, “it didn’t take long for me to move away from the
party. I loved freedom too much, had too much respect for individual
initiative, too much repugnance for being part of a group to take a
number in the matriculated army of the Fourth Estate. In any case, I saw
that in the end socialism changes nothing of the current order. It
maintains the authoritarian principle and this principle, whatever
so-called free-thinkers might say, is nothing but a holdover of faith in
a supreme power.” His studies showed anarchism to be “a gentle morality
in harmony with nature that will regenerate the old world.” He became a
militant.
The strike in Carmaux had just failed, killed by politicians, leaving
the workers weakened and starving. In the general depression Émile Henry
decided to make heard a voice more fearful and virile than that of
speechmakers: dynamite. It told the defeated who the real
revolutionaries were; it told the victors that outside the speechifiers
and the passive crowd, there were men who knew how to act.
Then came the Vaillant Affair (who was guillotined for having thrown a
bomb in the Chamber of Deputies). The repression was frightful; in just
a few days, mass arrests, searches, confiscation of publications, and
expulsions decimated the ranks of the propagandists. The rebels were
hunted down. Henry responded with an act: the bomb in the Café Terminus.
He was arrested.
At the hearings his calm and tranquility were disconcerting. The
newspapers said this was either cynicism or an act. Not at all! It was
the satisfied awareness of someone certain of having lived a useful and
beautiful life. An actor? It’s a strange actor who throws his head to
the spectators.
For his judges, he had subtle raillery, astounding responses. When the
president of the tribunal evoked Henry’s bloodstained hands, Henry
pointed at his red robe. When the same man reproached him for having
abandoned a military career begun at the École Polytechnique, he had
this marvelous response: “A beautiful career to be sure. One day they
would have ordered me to fire on the unfortunate like Commandant Chapu
at Fourmies. Thanks, but I'd rather be here.”
Up to the guillotine, he remained as good, as brave. And can anyone say
that such an end wasn’t worth more than the long labor of the submissive
and pointless death in a hospice or on a park bench? To be sure, there
are other struggles that are less bloody and perhaps more useful; to be
sure, speech that inspires enthusiasm, the written word, the invincible
propagator of ideas, and above all a life spreading examples of love and
fraternity are means of combat that are more beautiful. But to end by
delivering an axeblow to the crumbling edifice, to end with the
consciousness of having contributed even a bit to the great labor of
emancipation, was a hundred times better that the idiotic death of a
worker filling the bosses’ safes.
On the gallows, his dry throat launched at the radiant May sun a cry of
hope and bravery that the sound of the blade couldn’t stifle: “Courage,
comrades! Vive l'anarchie!”
It was a death whose memory will live on. A death that free men will
later remember with gratitude. For alongside the people of our century,
the arrivistes, crushers, deceivers of all kinds; the immense mass of
imbecilic followers and serfs, this young man marching towards death
when everything in him wanted to live, this young man dying for the
ideal is truly a luminous figure.
His blood was a beautiful seed from which new fighters will be born. And
someday soon, when the wind will spread fire and construct barricades,
the bourgeois who thought they'd crushed the new idea with bullets and
guillotines will see the fatal harvest bloom.
Yes, anarchy is an ideal of peace and happiness. Yes, we love men with
an infinite love, and every drop of their blood causes us pain. And it’s
because we love him, because we want to see him free, good, and happy,
that we are merciless towards everything that blocks the road of
humanity on its march towards the light!