Although the anarchists accepted Duval and defended his acts, Ravachol
was variously appreciated by them. Jean Grave, the French anarchist, and
Merlino, the Italian anarchist, both condemned Ravachol. "He is not one
of us," declared the latter, "and we repudiate him. His explosions lose
their revolutionary character because of his personality, which is
unworthy to serve the cause of humanity."[3] Elisee Reclus, on the
contrary, wrote of Ravachol in the _Sempre Avanti_ as follows: "I admire
his courage, his goodness of heart, his grandeur of soul, the generosity
with which he has pardoned his enemies. I know few men who surpass him
in generosity. I pass over the question of knowing up to what point it
is always desirable to push one's own right to the extreme and whether
other considerations, actuated by a sentiment of human solidarity, ought
not to make it yield. But I am none the less of those who recognize in
Ravachol a hero of a rare grandeur of soul."[4]
In the _Entretiens politiques et litteraires_, under the title, _Eloge
de Ravachol_, Paul Adam wrote: "Whatever may have been the invectives of
the bourgeois press and the tenacity of the magistrates in dishonoring
the act of the victim, they have not succeeded in persuading us of his
error. After so many judicial debates, chronicles, and appeals to legal
murder, Ravachol remains the propagandist of the grand idea of the
ancient religions which extolled the quest of individual death for the
good of the world, the abnegation of self, of one's life, and of one's
fame for the exaltation of the poor and the humble. He is definitely the
Renewer of the Essential Sacrifice."[5] Museux, in _l'Art social_, said:
"Ravachol has remained what he at first showed himself, a rebel. He has
made the sacrifice of his life for an idea and to cause that idea to
pass from a dream into reality. He has recoiled before nothing, claiming
the responsibility for his acts. He has been logical from one end to the
other. He has given example of a fine character and indomitable energy,
at the same time that he has summed up in himself the vague anger of the
revolutionists."[6]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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