Exceptional complete autograph manuscript of Ravachol’s true last testament — largely unpublished — unknown in this form, preceding its rewriting by a third party for publication in the press. A unique testimony to the genuine thought of the anarchist icon.
Four-page lined quarto manuscript, entirely written in black ink and signed twice “Konigstein Ravachol” at the foot of each sheet. Pencil corrections within the text, possibly in the hand of his lawyer. Some horizontal folds and very minor marginal tears, without loss.
Written in his prison cell during the second Montbrison trial that led to his death sentence, this text, hastily penned, without punctuation or capital letters, and in naïve spelling, was meant to be delivered orally by Ravachol during the hearing.
“Ravachol was dead set on putting in his two cents for the defence, not to defend himself, but to explain. No luck, dammit! Four words in and the judge cut him off. His statement isn’t lost, by Jove!” (Émile Pouget, in Père Peinard, July 3–10, 1892).
This self-styled Rocambole of anarchism was not allowed to read his statement aloud, but he handed it to his lawyer Maître Lagasse, and by June 23 the forbidden text appeared in the conservative newspaper Le Temps.
This first publication was so faithful to the original that it preserved the author's eccentric spelling — a fidelity that Émile Pouget would ironically criticise in the Père Peinard issue of July 3, 1892, one week before Ravachol’s execution: “Le Temps, that opportunist bedsheet, printed it as is. Like a true Jesuit, it even printed it too true. Ravachol had written the thing for himself; he knew how to read it — but there wasn’t a word of correct spelling, seeing as he knew about spelling as much as he knew about cabbage farming. Le Temps printed the thing without changing a line, so it’s practically unreadable [...]. That’s exactly what the bastards wanted, dammit! [...] I’m reprinting it below, without changing a word, just fixing the spelling.”
That same July 3 issue of Père Peinard included a corrected version — orthographically — of the statement initially published in Le Temps.
This dual publication, combined with Ravachol’s defiant bearing before the guillotine, had a powerful effect on public opinion. Until then, even anarchist publications had kept a certain distance from this provocative criminal, suspected of using the anarchist cause for personal gain. But following his execution, the testament was quickly reproduced in other newspapers, and Ravachol’s final cry of revolt soon became a genuine anarchist anthem among libertarians worldwide.
However, the version circulated in the press — the only known version until now, the original manuscript having disappeared — differs markedly from the manuscript in our possession.
Indeed, the style was lightly polished, several turns of phrase refined, and, most significantly, entire passages were excised, including the conclusion paragraph, which was fully replaced.
Our manuscript, with its crossings-out and revisions, is likely the original version of this political testament. Written in a single burst, in dense handwriting, without punctuation or paragraph breaks, it includes two lengthy sections expressing concerns for public health that are entirely absent from the published version.
The first is a third of a page-long passage about the “dangerous ingredients” added to bread: “no longer needing money to live, there’d be no fear of bakers adding dangerous ingredients to bread to make it look better or heavier, since it wouldn’t profit them, and they’d have, like everyone else and by the same means, access to what they needed for their work and existence. There’d be no need to check whether the bread weighs right, if the money is counterfeit, or if the bill is correct.”
The second, nearly a full page long, concerns the silk-dyeing industry in which Ravachol had worked: “If one reflects attentively on all the wasted materials and the energy required to produce them, it becomes clear that all that labour was for nothing — to produce chemicals and fix them on silk, which then gets burned by the overload of ingredients dangerous to workers and turns the silk into something unsafe to touch or wear, especially from the dust released when these chemicals dry.”
The length of these passages — and their absence from the printed version — indicates their importance to the author and profoundly alters the discourse’s reception.
Unlike the well-known version, this manuscript focuses on individual well-being and public health. More importantly, it draws on the personal experience of its author — his background as a silk worker — which formed the bedrock of Ravachol’s political awakening. The only other known manuscript by him (now lost, but transcribed in the republican newspaper L’Écho de Lyon) also featured a digression on silk-making and its effects on worker health.
Yet the published speech makes no mention of this formative occupation, which concludes the original manuscript. Instead, a prosaic paragraph is replaced with a strikingly eloquent plea whose polished style and rhetorical flourish break entirely with the rest of the speech — now linked only by Ravachol’s peculiar spelling.
“Yes, I repeat: society creates criminals, and you jurors…”; “I am just an uneducated worker; but because I have lived the life of the wretched, I feel the injustice of your repressive laws more keenly than any wealthy bourgeois.”; “Judge me, gentlemen of the jury, but if you have understood me, then in judging me, you judge all the wretched.”
Powerful rhetoric, and a grandiloquent finale in which one struggles to recognise the oral style of a worker whose only other fully published text — his Memoirs, dictated to his guards on the evening of March 30, 1892 — ends as abruptly and unceremoniously as our manuscript.
This soaring conclusion in praise of anarchism — for which no manuscript trace exists, and which is wholly absent even in outline from our version — is, beyond doubt, apocryphal.
Given that the first publication appeared in a conservative newspaper, it is unlikely that the journalist authored it. It is far more probable that the version sent to the press was revised and polished by Ravachol’s lawyer, Maître Louis Lagasse — an engaged legal advocate for several anarchist newspapers and future Radical-Socialist deputy.
Our manuscript thus sheds light on the ideological reframing of Ravachol’s message — not a betrayal, but a careful recasting within a more intellectual framework. The appropriation of this man, still the day before vilified as corrupting the anarchist cause, proved a complete success. He became an icon of defiance and independence, celebrated in song, sanctified in novels, idolised by fighters, and even institutionalised — his name becoming, in Walloon, a common noun.
Alongside Proudhon and Bakunin, the grand theorists of anarchy, there was lacking a figure of action — someone who embraced the violence at the core of nihilist ideology. Through this extraordinary declaration, Ravachol became that long-awaited martyr.
It is doubtful whether the authentic version of Ravachol’s speech, as we reveal it today, would have had such an impact — especially when, as Émile Pouget noted about its first appearance, “you’ve got to bust your brains to catch the meaning.” But he added slyly: “Those stuffed-shirt bourgeois think you have to spell right to have ideas in your head.”
Indeed, it would be presumptuous to claim that Ravachol’s reputation was usurped by the pen of a clever ideologue. The original manuscript, while revealing the fabrication, also highlights the genuine depth of Ravachol’s ideas and the roots of his revolt. Every notion polished or reworded by the lawyer is, albeit in rougher form, present in the manuscript.
For Ravachol, misery and deprivation drive the desperate to crime. From the outset, he holds accountable “society, which by its organisation sets people in constant conflict with one another, [and] is solely responsible.”
In response, the justice system, he argues, treats not the causes but the consequences of poverty: “Perhaps, in time, people will understand that the anarchists are right when they say that to achieve moral and physical peace, we must eliminate the causes that breed crime and criminals. [...] Well, gentlemen, there are no more criminals to judge, only the causes of crime to eradicate.”
This defence of anarchist violence is not gratuitous: despite his limited writing ability, Ravachol outlines a reform and proposes a utopian vision based on social justice: “In creating the Code, legislators forgot that they were not attacking the causes but merely the effects, and thus were not eliminating crime. [...] It would suffice to build a new society where all is held in common, and where each, producing according to ability and strength, could consume according to need.”
And in denouncing social misery, Ravachol’s original text needed no reworking by his lawyer: “Do those who have more than enough care whether others lack the essentials? A few will offer small help, but it’s negligible and cannot relieve all those in need — who will die prematurely due to all kinds of deprivation, or choose suicide to escape a miserable life, to avoid enduring the torments of hunger, countless humiliations, with no hope of relief.”
Stripped of rhetorical embellishment, this moving manuscript reveals the preoccupations of a man condemned to die. Death is omnipresent — both of criminals driven by need, and of the impoverished who labour to exhaustion. The rapid scrawl, lack of punctuation, and breathless phrasing convey the urgency of a final testament: an ink-drenched gasp in which the condemned man tries to explain his actions and summarize his struggle. There is no pause for the reader — the four pages are filled to the last line, and Ravachol, as if to stand by every word or fearing he would not finish, signs each sheet.
A previously unpublished testimony from Ravachol — who stole and killed to survive — this testament reclaims his thought in all its authenticity. Here, we see the final words of an ordinary man, driven by a real fight for justice — far removed from both the anarchist-Christ image and the criminal-Judas who hijacked the libertarian cause.
The man who emerges from this crucial document is certainly no orator. But his speech — twice censored, by judge and lawyer — reveals humanist concerns likely too advanced for his time. At the height of the industrial revolution, he denounces not only poverty and the unequal distribution of wealth, but also the dangers of industrial chemistry for the health of the working class.
Behind the ideologue and utopian Ravachol, this unpublished manuscript reveals François Claudius Koënigstein — more modest in tone but more visionary in thought — a forerunner of the ecological and public health challenges of the future.
A powerful last testament to human dignity.
