"To the priests, the soldiers, the judges, to those people who educate, instruct and govern men, I dedicate these pages of Murder and Blood." There is an allegory about the hypocrisy of European 'civilisation' and about the 'Law of Murder'. There is also a denunciation of bloody French and English colonialism and a ferocious attack on what Mirbeau saw as the corrupt morality of bourgeois capitalist society and the state, which he believed were based on murder. Little seems to have changed since then and his indictment could just as well be directed at the horrors of the Nazi regime or more recent events in Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay. www.victorian-erotica.org