Paris and the Social Revolution Part 35

"Happy he who has not put his hope in The Academy! Happy he who lives exempt from fears and desires, and who knows that it is equally vain to be an Academician and not to be an Academician! Such a one leads, without trouble, a life hidden and obscure. Beautiful liberty follows him everywhere. He celebrates in the shade the silent orgies of wisdom, and all the Muses smile on him as on their adept."

"The immortality which has just been decreed to M. de Seez neither a Bossuet nor a Belzunce desires. It is not graven in the hearts of wondering peoples: it is inscribed in a big register."

"If there are to be found, among the forty, persons of more polish than genius, what harm is there in this? Mediocrity triumphs in the Academy. Where does it not triumph? Do you find it less powerful in the parliaments and in the councils of the crown, where, surely, it is less in its place? Does one need to be a rare man to work on a dictionary which pretends to control usage and which can only follow it?

"The _Academistes_ or _Academiciens_ were inst.i.tuted, as you know, to fix the proper usage in what concerns discourse, to purge the language of every venerable and popular impurity, and to prevent the appearance of another Rabelais, another Montaigne, _tout puant la canaille, la cuistrerie, et la province_."

"Genius is something unsociable. An extraordinary man is rarely a man of resources. The Academy was very well able to do without Descartes and Pascal. Who can say that it could as easily have done without M. G.o.deau or M. Conrart?"

_Of Justice, Courts, and Judges_:

"I hold man free in his acts because my religion teaches it; but, outside the doctrine of the Church (which is unequivocal), there is so little reason to believe in human liberty that I shudder in thinking of the verdicts of a justice that punishes actions of which the motives, the order, and the causes equally elude us, in which the will has often little part, and which are sometimes accomplished unconsciously."

"Tournebroche, my son, consider that I am speaking of human justice, which is different from the justice of G.o.d, and which is generally opposed to it."

"The cruelest insult that men have been able to offer to our Lord Jesus Christ has been the placing of his image in the halls where the judges absolve the Pharisees who crucified him and condemn the Magdalen whom he lifted up with his divine hands."[106]

"What has he, the Just, to do with these men who could not show themselves just, even if they wished it, since their dreary duty is to consider the actions of their fellows not in themselves and in their essence, but from the single point of view of the interests of society; that is to say, in the interests of this ma.s.s of egoism, avarice, errors, and abuses which const.i.tute communities, and of which they (the judges) are the blind conservators."

"Judges do not sound the loins and do not read hearts, and their justest justice is crude and superficial.... They are men; that is to say, feeble and corruptible, gentle to the strong and pitiless to the weak. They consecrate by their sentences the cruelest social iniquities; and it is difficult to distinguish, in this partiality, what comes from their personal baseness and what is imposed on them by the duty of their profession, this duty being, in reality, to support the State in what it has of evil as well as in what it has of good; to watch over the conservation of public morals, whether they are excellent or detestable.... Furthermore, it should be observed that the magistrate is the defender, by virtue of his function, not only of the current prejudices to which we are all more or less subject, but also of the time-worn prejudices which are conserved in the laws after they have been effaced from our souls and our habits. And there is not a spirit ever so little meditative and free that does not feel how much there is of Gothic in the law, while the judge has not the right to feel it."

"By the very nature of their profession, judges are inclined to see a culprit in every prisoner; and their zeal seems so terrible to certain European peoples that they have them a.s.sisted, in important cases, by ten citizens chosen by lot.

From which it appears that chance, in its blindness, guarantees the life and liberty of the accused better than the enlightenment of the judges can. It is true that these impromptu bourgeois magistrates, selected by a lottery, are held well outside the affair of which they see only the exterior pomp. It is true further that, being ignorant of the laws, they are called in, not to apply them, but also simply to decide, by a single word, if there is occasion to apply them. We are told that a.s.sizes of this sort give absurd results sometimes, but that the peoples who have established them cling to them as to a highly precious protection. I easily believe it. And I comprehend the acceptance of verdicts rendered in this fashion, which may be inept and cruel, but of which the absurdity and barbarity are, so to speak, attributable to n.o.body. Injustice seems tolerable when it is sufficiently incoherent to appear involuntary."

"Just now this little bailiff, who has so strong a sentiment of justice, suspected me of belonging to the party of thieves and a.s.sa.s.sins. On the contrary, I so far disapprove theft and a.s.sa.s.sination that I cannot endure even the copy of them regularised by the laws; and it is painful for me to see that judges have found no better means of punishing robbers and homicides than by imitating them. For, after all, Tournebroche, my son, in good faith, what are fines and the death penalty, if not robbery and a.s.sa.s.sination perpetrated with an august exact.i.tude? And do you not see that our justice merely tends, in all its pride, to this shame of avenging an evil by an evil, a suffering by a suffering, and in doubling misdemeanours and crimes in the name of equilibrium and symmetry?

"Customs have more force than laws. Gentleness of demeanour and sweetness of spirit are the only remedies which can reasonably be applied to legal barbarity. For to correct laws by laws is to take a slow and uncertain route."

But for the historic setting, the turn of the phrase, and the absence of bitterness, one might fancy himself reading the contemporary anarchist organs, _Les Temps Nouveaux_ and _Le Libertaire_.

Anatole France is as chary of Utopias as Zola is p.r.o.ne to them. He fears nothing so much as intemperance of emotion and speech. He believes in nothing, not even in his own unbelief. "If ever M. Anatole France," says Gaston Deschamps, "seeks martyrdom, it will be to confess the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, to affirm the nothingness of human opinions, and to attest, at the price of his blood, that there is no truth"; and yet it was apropos of this same M. France that this same M.

Deschamps, in the course of a contention that literature always ends by having its way, sounded the note of warning placed at the beginning of this chapter.

In spite of the dilettante humour or, to be more accurate, the dilettante philosophy that informs his writings, Anatole France did not remain within his _tour d'ivoire_ during that strange Dreyfus affair which transformed nearly every literary Frenchman into an agitator-for one side or the other. Like Zola and like most of his fellow-craftsmen of an anarchistic or socialistic bent, he engaged actively in the anti-militarist campaign, the pretext of which was the wrongs of a Jew whom they believed to be persecuted. In M. France, apostle of the nothingness of things in general and in particular, such a course was very surprising and, it must be admitted, very inconsistent. His most plausible excuse probably is that he could not help himself, his chivalrous instincts proving stronger than his quietism. But he might defend himself, if he thought it worth while, by citing the reply of Jerome Coignard to his satellite Tournebroche when the latter inquired why he would "reduce to dust the foundations of equity, of justice, of laws, and of all the civil and military magistracies":-

"My son, I have always observed that the troubles of men come to them from their prejudices, as spiders and scorpions come from the dimness of cellars and from the humidity of vaults.

It is good to flourish the broom and the brush a little in all the dark corners. It is good even to give a little blow of the pick here and there in the walls of the cellar and garden to frighten the vermin and prepare the necessary ruins."

M. France has not yet gone back into the _tour d'ivoire_ from which the irresistible "Affair" drew him. He is a member of the executive committee of the Co-operative Bakery and a leader in the organisation of the _Universites Populaires_; he presided on the occasion of the Victor Hugo Centennial over a gigantic ma.s.s meeting of the latter, in which he gave "a little blow of the pick" to clericalism; and in 1903 he contributed an introduction to Premier Combes' volume _Campagne Laque_, in defence of anti-clericalism.

At a recent anniversary of Diderot, whom both anarchists and socialists claim as an ancestor, but who is more particularly an idol of the anarchists, he said:-

"_Citoyens_, master-spirits who are our friends have come here to speak of Diderot, the savant, and Diderot, the philosopher.

As for me, I have only a word to say. I desire to show you Diderot, the friend of the people. This son of the cutler of Langres was an excellent man. A contemporary of Voltaire and of Rousseau, he was the best of men in the best of centuries.

"He loved men and the pacific works of men. He conceived the great design of lifting up into esteem the manual trades looked down upon by the military, civil, and religious aristocracies.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OCTAVE MIRBEAU]

"_Citoyens_, at a time when the united enemies of knowledge, of peace, of liberty, arm themselves against the Republic, and threaten to stifle democracy under the weight of all that which does not think, or thinks only against thought, you have had a happy inspiration in singling out for honour the memory of this philosopher who teaches men happiness through work, knowledge, and love; and who, looking far into the future, announced the new era, the coming of the proletariat into a pacified and comforted world.

"His penetrating view discerned our present struggles and our future successes. And it is not too much to say that Diderot, whose memory we celebrate to-day, Diderot, dead for one hundred and twenty years, touches us very closely; that he is ours, a great servitor of the people and a defender of the proletariat."

Anatole France is the gentlest and subtlest ironist of his time; Octave Mirbeau (to whom M. France's _Jerome Coignard_ was dedicated) is the fiercest. M. Mirbeau has not yet obtained the world renown of Zola nor the national renown of M. France, but he may become in time as famous as either. He surpa.s.ses every living French writer in portraying the monstrous, the atrocious, and the horrible, and in expressing hatred and disgust; and his irony-too often fulminated, in violation of the commonest courtesy, not to say decency, against individuals antipathetic to him-rives and blasts like the thunderbolt. It is doubtful if the world has seen anything comparable to him for vitriolic vindictiveness since England had Dean Swift. He is bitter, brutal, savage, terrifying to the last degree; "one of those combative natures," says Eugene Montfort, "who are dreaded because their conviction partakes of the nature of an animate being, ... breathes, feeds, grows, is endowed with the instinct of self-preservation and struggles for life."

His _Calvaire_, as he himself puts it, "strips war of all its heroism."

His _Journal d'une Femme de Chambre_ is the most complete and awful arraignment of society it is possible to imagine between the covers of a single volume. Merciless towards the hypocrisy and hollowness of the hour, towards meanness and pretentiousness, towards impotent and misdirected philanthropy, above all, towards the stupidity and ugliness of the smug bourgeois, whom he fairly flays alive as Apollo flayed Marsyas, M. Mirbeau is, on the other hand,-and here his resemblance to Swift ceases,-infinitely humane and uplifting, full of tenderness and chivalry for the outcast and unfortunate, for the goodness which would diffuse happiness everywhere; full of generous ardour, high aspiration, and unfaltering faith in the ultimate triumph of the just.

M. Mirbeau is a declared anarchist; and, as such, he published a wonderful Apology of Ravachol, furnished an introduction for Jean Grave's most famous volume, and played a leading role in the Dreyfus affair.

His _chroniques_ are daring, incisive, brilliant, explosive, virile, insulting. They cut, burn, scald, corrode. His short stories are pa.s.sionate, dramatic, lyrical even, all in being realistic. His novels, though they deal only indirectly with public issues, are upon all the anarchist library lists.

Emile Zola, Anatole France, and Octave Mirbeau are held, by many persons who do not in the least share their views, to be the three pre-eminent masters of modern French fiction. On a distinctly lower plane than these three, but still far above mediocrity, are two other novelists of a revolutionary cast, Lucien Descaves and Victor Barrucand.

Descaves demonstrated in his first volume-a collection of short stories ent.i.tled _Le Calvaire d'Helose Pajadin_-the depressing and degrading influence of the decent poverty of petty clerks and tradesmen; his _La Colonne_ portrayed the contrasts of the Commune; and his _Soupes_ exposed the hypocrisies, cruelties, and absurdities of professional and amateur charity and philanthropy. But M. Descaves' specialty is the army: it is in his novels of the barracks that he is at his best, and by these works he is best known.

In these books, with a talent which approaches genius, through hundreds of pages he holds the reader's attention to the flat, stale, and unprofitable barrack life,-to its pettiness, selfishness, monotony, physical and moral untidiness, desolation and disgust,-a life entirely lacking in all that we are accustomed to consider the material for romance. Under his skilful handling the commonplace and the vulgar become alternately tragic and grimly comic; and his _Sous-Offs_ and _Emmures_, to which he owes his nomination as a charter member of the _Academie Goncourt_, are almost cla.s.sics of their kind. Less exalted and less epic than Zola, of whose big, spectacular qualities he is quite dest.i.tute, Descaves is, nevertheless, much closer to Zola than he is to Mirbeau or to France. And he easily surpa.s.ses Zola in the latter's much-heralded but rather superficial realism; that is, in the capacity for heaping up significantly and without boresomeness minute, unromantic details.

Descaves has a square bull-dog head and jaw, if his photographs are to be trusted. He certainly has a bull-dog's fixity of purpose in the matter of both substance and form. Nothing in the world will induce him to relax his grip on his immediate aim to indulge in fine ideas or fine writing. His style is cold, hard, dry, correct, keen, and sure. He is an out-and-out anarchist, who has played a fairly active part in the events of the last few years. His _Sous-Offs_, though entirely free from doctrinal discussion, cost him, by reason of its damaging revelations, an encounter with the law. No other novel-indeed, no other work of this generation, unless it be Bruant's _chanson_, _Biribi_-has exerted so profound an anti-militarist influence in France.

In 1895 Victor Barrucand published in the _Revue Blanche_ a series of articles, concluding with a serious proposition for the establishment of "_Le Pain Gratuit_" (free bread); and on the occasion of the munic.i.p.al elections of that year he placarded the princ.i.p.al communes of France with the following appeal:-

"TO THE PEOPLE.

"The tactics of the ambitious and the usurpers have always been to create division in order to reign.

"WORKERS!

"Be no more divided over political programmes of which you are the dupes.

"Band yourselves together upon the basis of your interests.

"Let us not expect anything from the good will of anybody, but let us define our own wills. Let us not say to any exterior power, 'GIVE US (_Donnez-nous_) OUR DAILY BREAD'; for manna will not fall from heaven nor from the governmental spheres.

But let us say, 'GIVE OURSELVES' (_Donnons-nous_)! We can, if we will it, affirm with solidarity true LIBERTY FOR ALL.

"Let us combine our determination and our scattered energies, and let us const.i.tute the great party of men with hearts upon this question of bread, proclaiming THE RIGHT TO LIVE (_le droit a la vie_) without humiliating conditions.

"Let bread, in all the communes, be the property of all, like the water of the fountains, the lights of the streets, and the streets themselves.

"We have free instruction, which profits only those who can receive instruction. Let us organise, more justly, LE PAIN GRATUIT for the profit and the liberty of all the workers.

"Let the bread necessary to life be a right, and not an alms.

Let it be no more the derisive price with which the labourer, nourisher of the rich, is paid. Let us abrogate the law of death inscribed on the margin of the code against him who has not found a way to sell himself.

"THE PEOPLE MUST SPEAK OUT LOUD AND FIRM! THEY MUST DICTATE THEIR TERMS!

"Let us vote no more for individuals nor for complicated programmes. Let us vote for LE PAIN GRATUIT! Let there be no political divisions upon this point. Let us be with those who are with us, and be on our guard against the false philanthropists who promise more b.u.t.ter than bread.

"Let us begin at the beginning. Let us lay the corner-stone of a social edifice which shall shelter our children FREE AND RECONCILED IN THE COMMON HAPPINESS.