Paris and the Social Revolution Part 36

"Let us silence the ambitious who see in the suffering of the people only a means of attaining their ends. Let us replace the politics of personalities (so remote from the interests of the ma.s.ses) by a finely human organisation of things. Let us vote for the idea which cannot betray us.

"LET US VOTE FOR FREE BREAD!

"VICTOR BARRUCAND."[107]

In _Avec le Feu_, a novel whose action is placed in the troubled period of the execution of Vaillant and the overt act of Emile Henry, M.

Barrucand has given an exceedingly subtle and suggestive study of the disgust with society of a certain element of the intellectual _elite_, and of the reasons for their espousal of the anarchist cause.

The princ.i.p.al character, one Robert, is a good type of the cultured, semi-neurasthenic anarchist of a period chiefly characterised by its restlessness and yearning:-

"On certain evenings he descended into the street, and saturated himself with the crowd. On the benches he breathed the mortality of the squares. He suffered for these miserable cattle who bleed no more under the goad of conscience. He roamed entire nights as chance led, hunting the debris of souls, exploring with his emotions, as with a dark lantern, the pavements of the drowsy city. At daybreak he came back shivering, coughing, weary with over-walking, drunk with pity, his stomach steeped in bad drinks. He concluded then that labour had brutalised the species, and he sought the secret of lifting it up. On these mornings he speculated daringly, dreamed of sacrifices, of revolts, of n.o.ble disdains, of ferocious protests against philanthropy and respectability. A savour of death blended with his charity and perfumed his heroic sleep."

The novel ends dramatically, not with bomb-throwing, but with suicide, which this strange anarchist hero, who aspires to bomb-throwing, without having the necessary force of character to achieve it, chooses in its stead.

It would be unfair to cla.s.s M. Barrucand as an anarchist, or even as a revolutionist, on the strength of this book, in spite of the generally sympathetic tone which pervades it. In fact, M. Barrucand's philosophy as displayed therein is of so cynical and, at times, of so flippant an order, his temperament so weary and so buoyant, his moral outlook so severe and lackadaisical, his style so lurid and simple, his appreciations so morbid and sane, and his literary method so impressionistic, realistic, and symbolic, by turns, that it would be rash to draw any conclusions from it whatsoever, did not his att.i.tude in his other works-notably in his two historical biographies, _La Vie Veritable du Citoyen Rossignol_, _Vainqueur de la Bastille_, and _Memoires et Notes de Choudieu, Representant du Peuple_-and his identification with the movement for Free Bread enroll him definitively in the ranks of revolt.

Maurice Barres, who is at present an apostle of nationalism, was at one time cla.s.sed as a "sentimental anarchist,"-an anarchist "with a rebel's brain and a voluptuary's nerves, who would wear purple and fine linen."

"I am an enemy of the laws," he said at that time.

Among other French novelists and short-story writers of a certain reputation who are more or less revolutionary in tone may be mentioned:-

Georges Darien, author of _Biribi-Armee d'Afrique_, a novel of the convict-legion, which has proved a potent factor in lessening the rigours of the companies of discipline; Dubois-Dessaulle,[108] author of _Sous la Casaque_, who, after being released from the convict-legion to which he had been consigned (because a brochure by Jean Grave and an article by Severine were found in his knapsack), had the superhuman courage to soak his left arm in kerosene and set fire to it in order to avoid ever being sent back into this inferno; Jean Ajalbert, author of _Sous le Sabre_; Marcel Lami, author of _La Debandade_; Louis Lamarque, author of _Un An de Caserne_; Paul Brulat, author of _La Faiseuse de Gloire_, _Le Nouveau Candide_, _La Gangue_, and _Eldorado_, books replete with generous indignation against social abuses; Jean Lombard, one of the makers of the programme of the _Congres Regional_ of Paris (1880) which declared for cla.s.s candidates, whose untimely death was a great loss to French literature; Camille Pert, author of _En l'Anarchie_; Henri Rainaldy, author of _Delcros_, an exposure of the cowardices and murderousness of society; Adolphe Rette, author of _Le Regicide_; Marcel Schwob, author of _Spicilege_; Mme. Severine, author of _Pages Rouges_; Frantz Jourdain, author of _L'Atelier Chanterel_; Zephirin Ragana.s.se, author of _Fabrique de Pions_; Louis Lumet, author of _La Fievre_; M. Reepmaker, author of _Vengeance_; Theodore Cheze, Henri Fevre, Jules Cazes, Pierre Valdagne, and the _feuilletoniste_ Michel Zevacco.

A number of the revolutionists who are primarily public agitators have made attempts of varying merit to propagate their pet ideas through the medium of fiction. Such are Sebastien Faure with his _romans-feuilletons_ and Jean Grave with his _Malfaiteurs_, his military romance, _La Grande Famille_, and his book for boys, _Les Aventures de Nono_.

The most thorough single-volume study that has as yet appeared of the psychology of the different varieties of contemporary revolutionary types, and of their aims and methods, is unquestionably J.-H.

Rosny's[109] romance, _Le Bilateral_. But M. Rosny, although he has appeared on a public platform in company with professed _revoltes_, to protest against "_La Cruaute Contemporaine_," is primarily a scientific observer, who cannot reasonably be cla.s.sed as an agitator.

Like the hero of this romance (Helier, the "Bilateral," who habitually looks at all sides of a subject, and then looks at them again), Rosny is impa.s.sive, impartial, tolerant, eclectic. Far from excusing the crimes and errors of the capitalistic state, he is equally far from throwing in his lot with those who would incontinently overturn it.

"To think," says the Bilateral to his _doctrinaire_ socialist and anarchist friends, "that there are mult.i.tudes of brave souls like you who, like you, see only white and black.

Nothing but white and black! Why, _citoyens_, the complex is grey, all shades of grey."

Again he says: "You see, my dear" (he is speaking to an ardent socialist girl), "that in the things of the social order we meet rarely a problem simple enough to make it possible to a.s.sert;-'it is this' or 'it is that.' Generally, between _this_ and _that_ there are an endless number of points to elucidate.... There is a high civilisation with plenty of grain, with immense unemployed forces, with a science already so large that it can resolve the problem of giving to all a nest and nourishment; ... and those above are stupid, and those below are stupid, and all so evilly disposed! My G.o.d!

dear child, if the people were not a brutal instinct, we might indeed hope for a consoling solution."

Still, again, speaking to a group upon the Bourse: "'History, science, daily observation, demonstrate to us that nothing durable is elaborated without the aid of the great collaborator, Time. Did this horse-chestnut-tree grow in a day? And you would have the humanity which has evolved so slowly-oh, so slowly!-through myriads of years, humanity bounded by prejudices, by predispositions against progressive ideas, humanity which includes a hundred social sects ready to combat each other,-you would have this humanity change by means of a lousy, b.l.o.o.d.y, revolution? Granted that once, after centuries of patience, a cataclysm like that of '93 occurred. (And, even so, France, properly speaking, has no reason to felicitate itself over Jacobinism.) But you pretend to establish as a normal condition these cataclysms which can be only the exception in the social life; and it is this that I am powerless to conceive.'

"'Bravo!' exclaimed the bourgeois.

"'I have nothing to do with your bravos!' cried the Bilateral, with a shade of nervousness. 'If their ignorance saddens me, your rottenness exasperates me; and it is not of protecting the rich that I think, but of preventing a generous minority of the poor from getting themselves butchered to no purpose or from casting France into the maw of the rival powers. As to the vile and cowardly cormorants, the whole race of big and little parasites, the vermin that swarm in this pseudo-republic alongside of the Orleanist penny-sc.r.a.pers and the pests of imperialism, if I had only to press a b.u.t.ton to annihilate them all, I would not hesitate a second.'"

Other fiction writers who have shown an understanding of the gravity of the revolutionary issue, a familiarity with revolutionary tenets and the workings of the revolutionary mind, but whose points of view are either neutral, like Rosny's, or frankly hostile, are Rachilde, Jane de la Vaudere, Augustin Leger, Paul Dubost, and Adolphe Cheneviere. These have aided the propaganda, in their own despite, by rendering the revolutionary types familiar and comprehensible, and so lifting them out of the category of monsters.

It seems that Emile Henry's favourite book, his "_livre de chevet_," the book which he contrived to secrete in his cell during a part of his imprisonment, and which his jailers, when they pounced upon it, imagined to be of the most incendiary nature, was Cervantes' _Don Quixote_. And it is not infrequently the case, in this matter of literature, that the most potent revolutionary agents are those which make the least pretence of being so. The masterpieces of the humourists Meilhac, Halevy, Tristan Bernard, Jules Renard, Pierre Veber, and Georges Courteline, which hold up to ridicule rather than to reprobation the emptiness and baseness of society; such books of pity and of pardon as Daudet's _Jack_, Goncourt's _Fille Elisa_, and Loti's _Livre de la Pitie et de la Mort_; books of aspiration, like Prevost's _Confessions d'un Amant_ and Bourget's _Terre Promise_; of wrath, like Leon Daudet's _Morticoles_; of "revolt against Puritanism," like Pierre Louys' _Aphrodite_; of energy, like Barres'

_Deracines_; of searching, like Huysmanns' _Cathedrale_; of regret, like Bazin's _Terre qui Meurt_; of unmoral pessimism, like De Maupa.s.sant's _Bel-Ami_; and the whole range of disquieting feminist fiction,-may turn out to be the most active social ferments and the real forerunners (little as their authors would wish it) of violent change,-of revolt and revolution!

All contemporary fiction, in fact, has in it something of the doubt, the trouble, and the protest of the period; and, once upon this tack, nothing less than a minute examination of every novel and volume of short stories that has appeared since the Franco-Prussian war would be imposed.

Of the essayists, critics, and philosophers[110] who are more or less militant iconoclasts and _revoltes_, the most important are:-

A. Ferdinand Herold, who expounds his att.i.tude as follows: "From the time I was able to think a little for myself, I have had an anarchist mind. I mean that I have always had a horror of undisputed authority, of dogmatism, and of conventional ideas,-ideas which, the greater part of the time, one does not attempt to justify to himself"; Camille Mauclair, who says: "If anarchy is primarily the reform of ethics, in accordance with the principles of individualism, I can declare squarely that anarchy was born in me, with the study of metaphysics and the awakening of sensibility in the period when I began to know myself....

Furthermore, pity for the disinherited and execration of the spoliators is a point of honour for the few clean and upright people who are still to be found in the world"; Bernard Lazare,[111] who says: "Authority, its value, and its _raison d'etre_ are things which I have never been able to comprehend. That a man arrogate to himself the right to domineer over his fellows, in any fashion whatsoever, is still inconceivable to me. At first I regarded myself as the only victim of baneful circ.u.mstances and vicious wills. Later I came to consider mankind at large; and from my own sentiments I divined the feelings of those who more or less continuously, or at some moment of their existence, are slaves. Then what had appeared to me odious for myself appeared to me odious for all"; Gustave Geffroy, who devoted a decade to his biography of the Communard Blanqui, ent.i.tled _L'Enferme_; Henry Mazel, who exclaimed in the _Mercure de France_, "We are all anarchists, thank G.o.d!" Alfred Naquet, a convert from nationalism; Urbain Gohier, author of _L'Armee contre la Nation_; Victor Charbonnel, ex-priest and editor of _La Raison_, and Henri Berenger, editor of _L'Action_, who have acted together in exciting the ma.s.ses to anti-clerical rioting; the socialist-anthropologist Charles Letourneau; the bacteriologists Melchnikoff, Roux, and Duclaux;[112] Charles Albert and Armand Charpentier, apostles of _l'amour libre_; Christian Cornelissen, Georges Pioch, Jean Jullien, G. Bachot, Leopold Lacour, Jules Laforgue,[112] B.

Guineaudau, Auguste Chirac, Albert Delacour, E. Fourniere, Jacques Santarelle, Louis Lumet, Maurice Bigeon, A. Hamon, Camille de St. Croix, Felix Feneon, Han Ryner, Alex. Cohen, Henri Bauer,[112] Charles Vallier, Gabriel de la Salle, Emile Michelet, Laurent Tailhade, Francis de Pressense, Maurice Le Blond, Saint-Georges de Bouhelier, G. Lhermitte, Paul Robin, Eugene Montfort, and Gustave Kahn.

In the first months of 1891 a weekly publication called _L'Endehors_[113] (_The Outsider_) was founded by a band of young literary men. They were Zo d'Axa, Roinard, Georges Darien, Felix Feneon, Lucien Descaves, Victor Barrucand, Arthur Byl, A. Tabarant, Bernard Lazare, Charles Malato, Pierre Quillard, Ghil, Edmond Cousturier, Henri Fevre, Edouard Dubus, A. F. Herold, Georges Lecomte, Etienne Decrept, Emile Henry, Saint-Pol-Roux, Jules Mery, Alexandre Cohen, J. LeCoq, Chatel, Cholin, Ludovic Malquin, Camille Mauclair, Octave Mirbeau, Lucien Muhlfeld, Pierre Veber, Victor Melnotte, A. Mercier, Tristan Bernard, Paul Adam, Charles Saunier, Jean Ajalbert, Emile Verhaeren, Henri de Regnier, and Francis Viele-Griffin.

The journal bore by way of epigraph this phrase of its leading spirit and director, Zo d'Axa: "_Celui que rien n'enrole et qu'une impulsive nature guide seule, ce hors la loi, ce hors d'ecole, cet isole chercheur d'au dela, ne se dessine-t-il pas dans ce mot, L'Endehors?_"

It explained its purpose as follows: "We belong neither to a party nor to a group. We are outsiders. We go on our way, individuals, without the Faith which saves and blinds. Our disgust with society does not engender convictions in us. We fight for the pleasure of fighting without dreaming of a better future. What matter to us the to-morrows which in the centuries shall be! What matter to us the little nephews! It is _endehors_, outside of all laws, of all rules, of all theories, even anarchistic; it is now, from this moment, that we wish to give ourselves over to our compa.s.sions, to our transports, to our gentleness, to our wrath, to our instincts, with the proud consciousness of being ourselves."

The first number of _L'Endehors_ appeared in May, 1891, immediately after the ma.s.sacre of Fourmies,-in which old men, women, and children, among them a young girl bearing a hawthorn sprig by way of a flag of truce, were shot down by the troops of the government,-and dealt bravely and scathingly with this horrible incident; and the last number was issued in January, 1893, when the paper was forcibly suppressed.

The staff of _L'Endehors_ defended and even glorified Ravachol.

Mirbeau's "_Apologie de Ravachol_" (referred to above) is one of the finest bits of impa.s.sioned writing he has ever done. Paul Adam's "_Eloge de Ravachol_" is also noteworthy. Here is a brief extract:-

"Politics would have been banished completely from our preoccupations, had not the legend of sacrifice, of the gift of a life for the happiness of humanity, suddenly reappeared in our epoch, with the martyrdom of Ravachol.... At the end of all these judicial proceedings, _chroniques_, and calls to legal murder, Ravachol stands as the unmistakable propagator of the great idea of the ancient religions, which extolled the seeking of death by the individual for the good of the world,-the abnegation of one's self, of one's life, and one's good name by the exaltation of the humble and the poor.

Ravachol is plainly the restorer of the essential sacrifice....

"He saw suffering round about him, and he has enn.o.bled the suffering of others by offering his own in a holocaust. His incontestable charity and disinterestedness, the energy of his acts, his courage before inevitable death, lift him into the splendours of legend. In this time of cynicism and of irony A SAINT IS BORN TO US. His blood will be the example from which new courages and new martyrs will spring. The grand idea of universal altruism will bloom in the red pool at the foot of the guillotine. A fruitful death is about to be consummated.

An event of human history is about to be inscribed in the annals of the peoples. The legal murder of Ravachol will open a new era."

_L'Endehors_ prophesied (or rather supposed), in an article ent.i.tled "_Notre Complot_," Vaillant's attempt against the Chamber;[114] and the ex-members of its staff partic.i.p.ated, after its supposition had become a fact, in the phenomenal demonstrations at Vaillant's tomb. The indignation in literary circles over the execution of Vaillant was so intense that M. Magnard in _Le Figaro_ uttered a vigorous protest against "_la Vaillantolatrie_"; and the most orthodox writers in the most orthodox journals suddenly proclaimed the necessity of stemming this tide of anarchistic heresy in high places (to which _L'Endehors_ had, so to speak, first given a habitation and a name) by the accomplishment of a number of necessary but long-delayed legal and social reforms.

The unlettered protagonist of Augustin Leger's novel _Le Journal d'un Anarchiste_ appreciates the review conducted by one Hector de la Roche-Sableuse, of which _L'Endehors_ may well have been the model, in the following fashion:-

"After all, in spite of their gibberish, these reviews of the _jeunes gens_ lent me by Roche-Sableuse are sometimes interesting. They shed crocodile tears over the lot of the people? It is possible. They do not believe a word of what they write? I do not say no. All this does not prevent them from seeing clearly at times, and from putting their fingers often on the truth. Besides, although these fine little _messieurs_ are not in the least anxious at heart for the triumph of the proletariat, because they know very well that it would remove several cushions from under their elbows, they understand and they expound perfectly the legitimacy of our claims. And I applaud with both hands the eulogiums they p.r.o.nounce on the n.o.ble victims our cause already counts. In short, they have interested me, and I have learned not a little from them."

_L'Endehors_ was publicly praised by Georges Clemenceau, Henri Bauer, Laurent-Tailhade, and Jean de Mitty. The last-named said of it:-

"This little sheet so modest in appearance and at the same time so fastidious in make-up that it might easily have been taken for a club periodical or for the exclusive organ of a few aesthetes, raised more tempests and provoked more pa.s.sions than a riot in the street. Violent it certainly was, and violent with a violence which, for wearing always a literary, subtile, and complex form, penetrated no less deeply, and gained no less to its object the scattered energies and wills that were craving definite guidance. Opportune or not, the influence of _L'Endehors_ was exerted effectively.... But, aside from its action on public affairs, the journal of Zo d'Axa realised an incontestable intellectual effort; and it is for the beauty of this effort that it pleases me to invoke it."

It is to be noted that Emile Henry, in whose pontifical att.i.tude before his judges even his bitterest antagonists found "something atrociously superior and disquieting," and in whom the sympathetic Albert Delacour discerns, or thinks he discerns (by reason of his solitary meditations, his perpetual ratiocination, his hatred of action up to the moment of supreme action, his disgust with life,[115] and his brooding on death), a modern Hamlet, is the only member of the _Endehors_ group who has committed an overt act of violence.

Of the rest, some have since identified themselves closely with socialism, some with Boulangism and nationalism, and some with anarchism; some have given themselves to the creation of the humorous or the beautiful without too obvious a destructive prepossession; and some have held themselves scrupulously "_endehors_."

Most have remained _revoltes_ of one sort or another. Only a few have conformed, and a part of these only outwardly. Thus Paul Adam, who has seemed several times, by reason of the enormous range of his interests and the disconcerting agility of his intelligence, to be utterly lost to revolution, has written, nevertheless, a number of novels of revolutionary trend. He published in 1900 a defence of Bresci which might have been written the very same day as his "_Eloge_" of Ravachol, and he reaffirmed his essential anarchism as late as the spring of 1904.

Of those who have remained strictly "_endehors_," Zo d'Axa,[116]

uncorrected by hard experiences of prison and exile, resumed in 1898 his a.s.sault upon the abuses of society in his now famous _Feuilles_ with a fierceness, a versatility, an independence, a finesse, a facility in anathema, and a redundance in disdain that have rarely, if ever, been matched in revolutionary pamphleteering-and privateering. It was as if Mirbeau, with all the withering force of his mighty scorn, had descended into the street, or as if _Pere Peinard_ had attained the level of literature.

The _Feuilles de Zo d'Axa_ appeared irregularly in the form of placards, as events invited, during the troubled years of 1898 and 1899, and created an enormous sensation. Nothing was exempt from the sharpshooting of this guerilla of the asphalt,-this handsome, red-bearded "_mousquetaire chercheur de justes aventures_," whom all Paris knows by his picturesque brown cape and felt.

"To the argument of the mult.i.tude," he wrote in his salutatory, "to the catechism of the crowds, to all the _raisons-d'etat_ of the collectivity, behold the personal reasons of the Individual oppose themselves!... He goes his way, he acts, he takes aim, because a combative instinct makes him prefer the chase to the nostalgic siesta. On the borders of the code he poaches the big game,-officers and judges, bucks or _carnivori_. He dislodges from the forests of Bondy the herd of politicians. He amuses himself by snaring the ravaging financier. He beats up at all the cross-roads the domesticated _gent de lettres_, fur and feathers; all the debauchers of ideas, all the monsters of the press and the police."

Lucien Descaves compares the series of Zo d'Axa's writings to "a beautiful road bordered with pity and hatred and paved with wrath and revolt."