unbalanced persons or which determine some 

 cases of fanaticism amongst men honest at 

 bottom but touched with hypersesthesia. 



It is the politico-social questions, most 

 extreme in their form, which have at each 

 historic moment the most intense suggestive 

 power. In Italy it was Mazzini-ism or 

 Carbonarism sixty years ago ; socialism 

 twenty years ago ; now it is anarchism. 



It is easy to understand that there has been 

 at each epoch, and following the ruling 

 tendency, cases of personal violence. Felice 

 Orsini, for example, is one of the martyrs of 

 the Italian revolution. 



In each case of individual violence, if one 

 does not wish to keep to judgments necessarily 

 erroneous and born under the stimulus of 

 excitement, our conclusions should only be 

 the result of a physio-psychical examination 

 of its perpetrator, as for every other crime. 



Felice Orsini was a political criminal from 

 passion. Amongst the anarchists of our day 

 who use bombs, or are assassins, can be found 

 the born criminal, who simply covers his con- 

 genital want of moral or social sense with a 

 political varnish ; the insane criminal, or 

 mattoid, whose defect of mental equilibrium 

 connects itself with the political ideas of the 

 moment ; one may also find the criminal from 

 political passion truly convinced, and all but 

 normal, with whom the criminal act is solely 

 determined by the false idea (which socialism 

 fights against) of the possibility of a social 

 transformation by individual violence. 



* Hamon, Les Hommes et les theories de I'anarchie. 



K 



