ABSTRACT
SUch is the tragic story of barely forty years of terrorism in Western Europe. It reads far more like lurid fiction than the cold facts of history. Yet these amazing irreconcilables actually lived—in our time—and fought, at the cost of their lives, the entire organization of society. Surely few other periods in history can show a series of characters so daring, so bitter, so bent on destruction and annihilation. Bakounin, Nechayeff, Most, Lingg, Duval, Decamps, Ravachol, Henry, Vaillant, Caserio, and Luccheni—these bewildering rebels—individually waged their deadly conflict with the world. With the weakness of their one single life in revolt against society—protected as it is by countless thousands of police, millions of armed men, and all its machinery for defense—these amazing creatures fought their fight and wrote their page of protest in the world’s history. Think of it as we will, this we know, that the world cannot utterly ignore men who lay down their lives for any cause. Men may write and agitate, they may scream never so shrilly about the wrongs of the world, but when they go forth to fight single-handed and to die for what they preach they have at least earned the right to demand of society an inquiry.
