Condorcet escapes from the Jacobin police and successfully makes his way to a village near the frontier; tired and harassed, he goes into a little inn, sits down before the fire, warms his hands and asks for a piece of chicken. The good-natured old woman who keeps the inn, and who is a great patriot, reasons like this: 'He is covered with dust, so he must have come a long way; he asks for chicken, so he must have money; his hands are white, so he must be an aristocrat.' Putting the chicken into the stove she goes to another inn ; there the patriots are in session: a citoyen, who is Mucius Scaevola ; the liquor-seller and citoyen, who is Brutus, and Timoleon, the tailor. They ask for nothing better, and ten minutes later one of the wisest leaders of the
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French Revolution is in prison and handed over to the police of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!
Napoleon, who had the police talent developed to the highest degree, turned his generals into spies and informers. The hangman of Lyons, Fouche, founded a complete theory, system, science of espionage, through the prefects, unbeknown to the prefects, through \vanton women and blameless shopkeepers, through servants and coach-men, through doctors and barbers.
Napoleon fell, but his tool remained, and not only his tool but the man who wielded it. Fouche went over to the Bourbons; the strength of the espionage lost nothing; on the contrary, it was reinforced by monks and priests. Under Louis-Philippe, in whose reign bribery and easy profit became one of the moral forces of government, half the petits bourgeois became his spies, his police chorus, a result to which their service in the National Guard, in itself a police duty, specially contributed.
During the February Republic three or four branches of genuinely secret police forces were formed and several professedly secret ones. There was the police of Ledru-Rollin and the police of Caussidiere, there was the police of Marrast and the police of the provisional government, there was the police of order and the police of disorder, the police of Louis-Napoleon and the police of the Due d'Orleans. All were on the look-out, all were watching each other and informing on each other; if we assume that these secret reports were made from conviction, with the best of motives and gratis, yet they were still secret reports. . . . This pernicious custom, encountering on the one hand sorry failures, and on the other morbid, unbridled thirst for money or pleasure, corrupted a whole generation.
We must not forget, either, the moral indifference, the vacillation of opinion, which was left like sediment from intermittent revolutions and restorations. Men had grown used to regarding as heroism and virtue on one day what would on the next be a crime punished with penal servitude; the laurel wreath and the executioner's brand alternated several times on the same head.
By the time they had become accustomed to this a nation of spies was ready.
All the latest discoveries of secret societies and conspiracies, all the denunciations of refugees have been made by false members of societies, bribed friends, men who had won confidence with the object of betrayal.
There were examples on all hands of cowards who, through fear of prison and exile, revealed secrets and destroyed their friends, as a faint-hearted comrade destroyed Konarski. But neither among us nor in Austria is there a legion of young men,
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cultured, speaking our language, making inspired speeches in clubs, writing revolutionary a rticles and serving as spies.
Moreover, the government of Napoleon is excellently placed for making use of informers of all parties. It represents the revolution and the reaction, war and peace, the year 1 789 and Catholicism, the fall of the Bourbons and the four-and-a-half per cents. It is served both by Falloux the Jesuit, B illault the socialist, La Rochejaquelin the legitimist, and a mass of people to whom Louis-Philippe has been a benefactor. The corruption of all parties and shades of opinion naturally flows t<Jgether and ferments in the Palace of the Tuileries.
P. -J. ProLLclltOll
AFTER THE FALL of the June barricades the printing-presses fell too. The frightened journalists \vere silent. Only old Lamennais rose up like the sombre shadow of a judge, cursed Cavaignacthe Due of Alba of the June days-and his companions, and sombrely said to the people: 'And you be silent: you are too poor to have the right to speak!'
When the first fright at the state of siege had passed and the newspapers began coming to life again, they found themselves confronted, not with violence, but with a perfect arsenal of legal chicanery and judicial tricks. The old baiting, par force, of editors began, the process in which the ministers of Louis-Philippe distinguished themselves. The trick consisted in exhausting the guaranteed fund by a sl'ries of lawsuits that invariably ended in prison and a money fine. The fine is paid out of the fund ; until this is made up again thl' paper cannot be published ; as soon as it is made good, thl're is a new la\'listlit. This game is always successful, for the ll'gal authorities are always hand in glove with the gowrnment in all political prosecutions.
At first Ledru-Rollin, and afterwards Colonel Frappoli1 as the representative of Mazzini's party, contributed large sums of 1 Frappoli, Ludovico ( 1 8 1 5-78 ) , an Italian politician who took part in the revolutionary movement of 1 8+8, was a partisan of Garibaldi's, and always on the extreme left in the Italian Parliament. He reintroduced Freemasonry into Italy. ( Tr.)
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money, but could not save La Reforme. All the more outspoken organs of socialism and republicanism were destroyed by this method. Among these, and at the very beginning, was Proudhon's Le Representant du Peuple, and later on his Le Peuple.
Before one prosecution was over, another began.
One of the editors-it was Duchesne, I think-was brought three times out of prison to the lawcourts on fresh charges ; and every time was sentenced once more to prison and a fine. When on the last occasion before the ruin of the paper the verdict was declared, he said to the prosecutor: 'L'addition, s'il vous plait!'
As a matter of fact, it added up to ten years in prison and a fine of fifty thousand francs.
Proudhon was on trial when his newspaper was stopped after the 13th of June. The National Guard burst into his printingoffice on that day, broke the printing-press and scattered the type, as though to assert, in the name of the armed bourgeois, that the period of the utmost violence and despotism of the police was coming on in France.
The indomitable gladiator, the stubborn Besant;on peasant, would not lay down his arms, but at once contrived to publish a new journal, La Voix du Peuple. It was necessary to find twentyfour thousand francs for the guarantee fund. Emile Girardin would have been ready to give it, but Proudhon did not want to be dependent on him, and Sazonov suggested that I should contribute the money.