CONVERSATION ON THE LIFE
AND DEATH
OF RAVACHOL
I see only condemnation to death which distinguishes a man, thought
Mathilde: it is the only thing which cannot be bought. (de Stendhal — The
Red and the Black.)
These voices were heard near
the sea, on a peaceful summer evening: half-naked, on the blond beaches, some men were lying lazily beside
beautiful young women, and, although they lived today, the
dying rays of the sun, the soft caress of the waves, the harmony of the
twilight gave to their words and gestures the charm, that we like to attribute,
in fantasy perhaps, to the sages and courtesans of the past, seated under
marble porticos where rained down, with the virile aroma of the spray, the noble
shade of the oleanders. As they did not know that their discourse would be
detected, they doubtless did not study to deceive, so much did they appear to
have spoken in all sincerity what anyone thought who agreed to reflect and not
fool themselves; and when I recall now that unforgettable conversation, I ask
myself if it is not, on the contrary, the charm of such syllables which
conferred to the landscape the splendor of bygone eras.
THE POET
Thus we
do not die without having known, other than by legend and epic, the man
superior even to the idea that we have made for ourselves of the gods, the hero:
that one, bereft of the omnipotence that we grand with too much good grace supernatural
phantoms, remaining a man like us, capable of failing and, alas! of being
defeated, has sanctified some acts that appear coarse and detestable, and he
will deserve that in future ages the poets will celebrate him as in the past
they sang of the slayers of monsters and fateful righters of wrong.
THE
PHILOSOPHER
Certainly,
Ravachol was a hero. When he had once felt the iniquity of suffering for causes
which were not in him and that the rest of the herd respected foolishly, he
accepted the struggle against the triumphant Beast, and each time that he could,
at the risk of his life, dedicated ungrudgingly to the certain torture, he
performed the necessary murder.
A YOUNG
WOMAN
The
necessary murder, you said. Who has revealed to you that this man was not a
bloody, rapacious brute, some assassin, who understood nothing of the greatness
of revolt, only killed in order to steal?
THE
PHILOSOPHER
I do not
believe it: he understood that he must steal and he must kill, and that it
would be contemptible and demeaning to hold out his hand. One had preached to
him the traditional resignation: he boldly refused to resign himself and gave
the example of liberating anger. Two portraits of him show quite well how a
doubt such as yours first imposes itself on some reasonable people: one was taken immediately
after his arrest, the other when his normal appearance had
reappeared. The first image is that of an exhausted beast: the expression of
the face bruised by blows is terrible; the second is of an infinite gentleness,
the eye affectionate and splendid with tenderness and love. No phrase has
better rendered its individual beauty than a phrase of a police psychologist that
was reported to me: “There is no woman’s smile worthy of his.” That is the true
Ravachol. Consider that he abandoned his haughty serenity for a moment and
cried at seeing come to the witness stand some children that the had played
with in the past; recall with what magnanimous commiseration he greeted the
wretch who had betrayed him, and especially the passionate goodbye that he
addressed before the judges to the woman that he loved, also a prisoner, and
sure however that the words spoken would cost him some new rigors. His attitude
during the double trial has been admirable for its simplicity and dignity, and
those who have condemned him will be obliged despite themselves to recognize
him as a generous soul.
A JURIST
That may be, and nonetheless they
had to condemn because he had
violated the law.
THE POET
The word
law alone makes me shiver with horror
and disgust. That a man claims to judge another already appears to me one of
the most repugnant follies that could haunt obtuse and bestial brain. But that
one has determined in advance that this or that would be, by virtue of a
moronic formula, taken for criminal or licit, that is what surpasses every
imagining of savagery and inanity. They cannot have a common measure, because never
under the sun have two identical acts been accomplished, and no one can foresee
the innumerable multiplicity of characters and circumstances.
A
POSITIVIST
I will
agree willingly that the notion of good and evil is conventional. But it does
not seem that the convention is arbitrary: it expresses some necessary
relations and transpose into human language some social inevitabilities that
science confirms in all certainty.
THE
PHILOSOPHER
That’s a
very daring speech. Alone the mathematical demonstrations show the certainty, because
they derive from the mind which cannot contradict itself. One conceives badly, once
one accepts the idea of numbers, that 2 and 2 does not make 4. But its is
gratuitously that you call science a system of nature: your science is a
momentary conception of life, something like a mnemonics, more or less rational
for some time, and as ridiculous, after new discoveries, as the most childish of
errors. As for the so-called social science, it is still more vain than the
physical and natural sciences, perpetually shifting and ephemeral, and without which, however, by
your own admission, it could not exist: these
phenomena are too complexes for one to be able to observe them, and at every
moment individual wills will clash with experience and contradict the chimerical
laws.
A
POSITIVIST
But it is still necessary that these wills manifest themselves clearly. I have read the last declarations of Ravachol, and
I hardly understand what dream he has formed of the new world.
THE
PHILOSOPHER
In order
to know exactly what you want, you must only want mediocre things and imagine
the world as a banal catalog of a store of novelties. A precise desire finds
itself limited by that very thing, while a slightly confused conception lets
blossom in their wild and savage liberty the miraculous roses of the
unconscious.
THE
INSTINCTIVE
I am
astonished to hear you discussing so peacefully what other men condemn, you
whose very life is a perpetual negation of violence. You are here, poets,
philosophers, close to the sparkling sea; the mouths of young women will not
refuse your lips; you have never known hunger, never on the winter roads have
your teeth chattered: you do not kill, do not steal, and you go proclaiming
across the world the gospel of revolution and destruction. But you have some
hands that are too timid, I fear, to light dynamite bombs or securely hold the handle of the
knife. Others get drunk on the hatred you pour, and those, in
the prisons, in the penal colonies and on the scaffolds, suffer miserably from
listening to you. Do you act in your turn?
THE POET
Well! We
act according to our nature: you just, without thinking, made our apology. Yes,
mean will perhaps let themselves be subjected eternally to the yoke; they
hardly notice that they suffer and that monstrous tyrannies crush them. We come
to shake them from their sleep and their cowardice; we will bring down the
secular idols, and nothing will remain that we cast into the abyss, and with enthusiasm.
We have not been hungry, we have not shivered on the winter roads, but when we
kiss the mouths of the young women the anguish of universal suffering poisons
our pleasure, and we suffer in all those whom we know are crucified around us. From
this moment, we will no longer keep quiet and our clamor will go increasingly from
the earth up to the stars: then when the hour comes, we will disappear, hearts joyful,
struck perhaps by our brothers that we have freed.
THE
PHILOSOPHER
We will be struck by our
brothers and we disappear, hearts
joyful, if our death, we who are called the wise, is as glorious as that of
that unlettered sublime, and if we sing during the crowning moments the
collapse of every hierarchy and all authority.
A YOUNG
WOMAN
I think
that you should at least select less cynical poems and a wiser harmony.
THE
PHILOSOPHER
What
does it matter, as long as we say well what we wanted to say? He marched haughtily
to the guillotine, and the more the words were crude and spewed out sewers, the
better they reach the stupid old man
with a white beard, the prison-warden of eternity, the odious “rewarder-avenger”
who has weighed on man for centuries and amazed by his indulgent ignominy Moses,
Monsieur Voltaire and the moralist Jules Simon.
Thus, on
the white sands, the voices alternate, harsh and insidious by turns, and the
red flower of the sun shed its petals in the twilight towards the night and the
sea.
Pierre Quillard.
Source: Mercure de France, September 1892, 47-52.
[Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]
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