Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/59

Rh analyses of character are, then, quite secondary in importance, and even altogether negligible.

It seems, however, that it is more difficult to reason in this way, when we are concerned with acts of violence, than with any other set of circumstances. That is due to our habit of looking on conspiracy as the typical example of violence, or as the anticipation of a revolution; we are thus led to ask ourselves whether certain criminal acts could not be considered heroic, or at least meritorious, if we were to take into account the happy consequences for their fellow-citizens anticipated by the perpetrators, as the result of their crimes. Certain individual criminal attempts have rendered such great services to democracy that the latter has often consecrated as great men those who, at the peril of their lives, have tried to rid it of its enemies; it has done this the more readily since these great men were no longer living when the hour for dividing the spoils of victory arrived, and we know that the dead obtain admiration more easily than the living.

Each time an outrage occurs, the doctors of the ethico-social sciences, who swarm in journalism, indulge in reflections on the question, Can the criminal act be excused, or sometimes even justified, from the point of view of the highest justice? Then there is an irruption into the democratic press of that casuistry for which the Jesuits have so many times been reproached.

I think it may be useful here to mention a note on the assassination of the Grand Duke Sergius which appeared in Humanité of Febniary 18, 1905; the author was not one of those vulgar members of the Bloc whose intelligence is hardly superior to that of a negrito, he was one of the leading lights of the State universities: Lucien Herr is one of those who ought to know what they are talking about. The title Just Reprisals warns us that the question is to be treated from a high ethical standpoint; it is the