hs later for
strangling the hermit of Chambles, and he was then executed.

"What shall one think of Ravachol?" says Prolo in _Les Anarchistes_. "He
assassinated a mendicant, he broke into tombs in order to steal jewels,
he manufactured counterfeit money, or, more exactly, substituting
himself for the State, he cast five-franc pieces in silver, with the
authentic standard, and put them in circulation. Lastly, he dynamited
some property. He is of mystical origin. Profoundly religious in his
early youth, he embraces with the same ardor, the same passion, and the
same spirit of sacrifice the new political theory of equality. He throws
himself deliberately outside the limits of the society which he
abhors--kills, robs, and avenges his brothers. And let anyone question
him, he replies: 'A begging hermit, he is a parasite and should be
suppressed. One ought not to bury jewels when children are hungry, when
mothers weep, and when men suffer from misery. The State makes money. Is
it of good alloy? I make it as the State makes it and of the same alloy!
As to dynamite, it is the arm of the weak who avenge themselves or
avenge others for the humiliating oppression of the strong and their
unconscious accomplices.'"[2]

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