Marius Jacob's Speech to the Court
On a Sunday in 1902 the anarchist Alexandre Marius Jacob, helped by two of the forty members of his group, broke into a jeweller's in the Rue Quincampoix in Paris, in broad daylight, using an umbrella and a hole in the floor above. The money taken was to assist in financing the anarchist movement. They got away with jewels to the value of 13,000 francs. Arrested at Abbeville in 1904, he was condemned to life imprisonment with hard labour and deported to the Iles de la Sante. In 1929 he was released and died in 1954 at the age of 75. His exceptional personality suggested not only characters such as Arsene Lupin but also, many years later, the robbery technique used by Jules Dassin in his film "Rififi".
"Sirs,
Now you know who I am: a rebel who lives from the fruits of his robberies. Moreover I have set fire to various hotels and defended my freedom against the aggression of the agents of the state. I have laid bare my struggle for existence and submit it as a problem to your intelligence. Not recognising in anyone the right to judge me, I am asking neither for pardon nor indulgence. I am not soliciting what I hate and despise. You are the stronger, dispose of me as you think best Send me to prison or to the gallows, it matters little to me. But before parting, let me say a last word.....
You have called a man: "thief “ and "bandit," applied the letter of the law and now you ask if it could have been otherwise. Have you ever seen a rich man become a bandit? I have never known any. I, who am neither rich nor a property owner, had only this arm and a brain to assure my conservation, which is why I have had to act different. Society allowed me only three means of existence: to work, to beg, or to steal. Work, contrary to repelling me, pleases me. Man cannot abstain from work: his muscles and his brain, possess a combination of energy which must be got rid of. What disgusted me was to sweat blood and water for a salary, that which must be got rid of. What disgusted me was to sweat blood and water for a salary, that is to create wealth from which I should be exploited. In one word, I was repelled against consigning myself to the prostitution of work. Begging is degradation, the negation of all dignity. Every man has the right to enjoy life;
"The right to live is not begged, it is taken."
Theft is restitution, the regaining of possession. Rather than be closed in a workshop like in a prison, rather than beg that to which I have a right, I have preferred to rebel and fight my enemies face to face, making war on the rich, and attacking their property. I understand that you would have preferred me to have submitted to your laws, that as a docile worker I should have created wealth in exchange for a miserable wage and that, my body exploited and my brain brutalised, I should have let myself curl up and die in a street corner. In that case you would not have called me a "cynical bandit," but an "honest worker." Fawning upon me you would have given me a medal at work. The priests allow their believers a paradise, you are less abstract, you give them .a piece of paper.
I thank you very much for so much goodness, for so much gratitude. Sirs! I prefer to be a cynic aware of his rights, than an automat.
From the moment I had possession of my consciousness, I gave myself to theft without any scruples. I do not accept your moral pretence which imposes respect of property as a virtue, when the worst thieves are the property owners themselves.
Consider yourselves lucky that this super-stition has grown in the people' in that it is exactly they who are your best policemen. Knowing the weakness of the law, or rather, the strength, you have made them your firmest protectors. But, beware, everything comes to an end. All that which is built by force and cunning can be destroyed by cunning and strength.
The people are evolving continually. Instructed in these truths and conscious of their rights, all the famished, all the exploited in one word, all your victims, will arm themselves with a "pig's foot" attacking your houses to take back the wealth which they created and which you have stolen. Thinking about it carefully they will prefer to run any risk rather than fatten you, while moaning in poverty. Prison ... . forced labour, the gallows... are not such terrible prospectives in the face of a whole life of brutalisation, full of every kind of suffering. The boy who struggles for a piece of bread in the bowels of the earth without ever seeing the sunshine, can die from one minute to the next, victim of an explosion of grisou. The bricklayer who works on the roofs, can fall and reduce himself to crumbs. The sailor knows the date of his departure but docs not know when he will return. Numerous other workers contract fatal illnesses in the exercise of their trades, they become weak, poison themselves, kill themselves in creating everything for you. Including the policemen, the bodyguards who. for a bone that you throw them, often die in the struggle against your enemies.
Enclosed in your egoism, you remain before this vision, isn't that so? The people are afraid, you say. We govern them with the terror of the repression; if they shout, we shall throw them in prison; if they grumble, we shall deport them, if they become agitated, we shall send them to the guillotine. Bad calculations, Sirs, believe me. The sentences you inflict are not a remedy against acts of rebellion. Repression, instead of being a remedy, or a palliative, does nothing but aggravate the ill.
Coercive measures can only sow the seeds of hatred and vengeance. It is a fatal cycle. For the rest, since you have begun cutting off heads, populating the prisons and penitentiaries, you have perhaps stopped all the hatred from manifesting itself? Reply! The facts demonstrate your impotence. In my case you know exactly that my conduct could not have any conclusion other than the penitentiary or the guillotine, yet, as you see, it is not that which has stopped me from acting. If I have given myself to stealing it is not for gain or for the love of money, but for a question of principle, of right. I prefer to conserve my freedom, my independence, my dignity as a man, instead of making myself the artifice of fortune or of my employer. To put it more crudely, without euphemism, I prefer to be a thief than robbed.
Certainly I too condemn the fact that a man violently and cunningly takes possession through the work of another. But it is exactly for this that I have waged war on the rich, robbers of the produce of the poor. I too should be happy to live in a society where all thieving would be impossible. I do not approve of theft, and I have only used it as a means of revolt to combat the most iniquitous of all thefts: individual property.
To eliminate an effect, it is necessary preventively to destroy the cause. If theft exists it is because “everything” only belongs to “some”. The struggle will only disappear when men put together joy and pain, work and wealth, when everything will belong to everyone.
Revolutionary anarchist, I have made my revolution. Anarchy will come!
Marius Jacob
(Translated by Jean Weir)
From The Cienfuegos Anarchist Review, Volume 1, Number 3 - Autumn 1977