SELLERS OF CHANSONS

“They teach their motley audiences to sing
the songs they have the wit to sell them.”

The consequence is, being of no party, I shall offend all parties; Never mind! Lord Byron.

I have no mockings or arguments I witness and wait. Walt Whitman.

PARIS AND THE
SOCIAL REVOLUTION

A STUDY OF
THE REVOLUTIONARY ELEMENTS IN THE
VARIOUS CLASSES OF PARISIAN SOCIETY
BY
ALVAN FRANCIS SANBORN
With Illustrative Drawings By
VAUGHAN TROWBRIDGE

BOSTON
SMALL MAYNARD & COMPANY
MCMV

Copyright, 1905, by
Small Maynard & Company
Incorporated

Entered at Stationers’ Hall

Press of
Geo. H. Ellis Co.
Boston, U.S.A.

TO THE
PROLETARIAT OF AMERICA
THIS BOOK IS
REVERENTLY INSCRIBED

PREFACE

IT was the author’s original intention to let this book make shift without the conventional preface, as befitted the unconventionality of its theme. But he has learned since it was begun—what it was very stupid of him not to have known at the outset—that in the matter of heresies, ethical, social, and political as well as theological, interest is bound to pass for approval, explanation for advocacy, and sympathy, be it ever so slight, for profound belief: as if a man who showed a curiosity about and appreciation of dogs should, by that very fact, become a dog; or as if (since there may seem to be an unfortunate implication of contempt in this illustration) a German who attempted to expound honestly English temperament, opinions, and traditions should, by that very fact, become an Englishman.

Once for all, then, the author is not a revolutionist, though there are moments when he fancies he would like to be one, it appears such an eminently satisfying state. It takes faith to be a revolutionist; and he is, alas! mentally incapable of faith. He is not an anarchist, not a socialist, not a radical, not a “red republican,” nor a “mangeur de prêtres.” His affiliations have not been even Dreyfusard in France, nor even Bryanite in America. He is a conservative of the conservatives, only prevented from being a reactionary by the fact that reaction is but another form of revolution, and the most hopeless and faith-exacting of them all. So far from being a revolutionist, he is an evolutionist only under protest,—vi et armis, as it were. He favours things as they are, things as they were quite as often, while things as they might be contain for him no allure. He cherishes enormously this imperfect old world as it is, still more as it was; has not the slightest desire to reconstruct it after his own formula, and would not willingly exchange it for any hypothetical world which, up to the present hour, restless human ingenuity has devised.

He is “naturally beforehand shy of novelties, new books, new faces, new years,” and is “sanguine only in the prospects of other [former] years.” He likes old cabinets, old comedies, old prints, old stuffs, old pipes, old wine, old ships, old trees, old shoes, old friends, old customs, old crotchets, and old ladies.

He prefers infinitely—it is very wrong and foolish, perhaps, but he cannot help it—ancient hostelries to modern hotels, spontaneous neighbourliness to organised benevolence, fireplaces to furnace-heaters, and waving meadows to close-cropped lawns; a blooded aristocrat to a social struggler, a patriot to a cosmopolite, a brave drinker to a total abstinence apostle, an illiterate Breton peasant to the “smart” product of improved schools, a mediæval cloister to a free-thinker’s hall, and an easy-going priest to a nervous sceptic; beauty to utility, superstition to science, ritual to plain sense. A uniform appeals to him more than a business suit, a coquettish gown more than the most advanced hygienic bloomer, a solicitous mother and competent housewife more than a brilliant club woman. He finds more satisfaction in old-fashioned, comfortable ideas than in disquieting progressive ones. He would quite as soon be domineered over by a noble as by a parvenu or a pot-house politician, and is less shocked by the colossal pretensions of a pope than by the puerile bumptiousness of a small-minded clergyman. He deplores railways, trolleys, bicycles, automobiles, and compulsory education, because they all tend to destroy native dialects, customs, and costumes, obliterate all local colour, and so render lands far separated dully alike. He resents the presumptuousness of that Reason which is so seldom reasonable, and would not shed a tear nor distil a regret if telephones, telegraphs, and psychical research were swept off the face of the earth.

He is well aware, therefore, that there is good to be said of time-honoured institutions: of the state; of the army, the church, and the courts of law, the props of the state; and of capitalists, the pets and protégés of the state. On occasion he could write a fervid defence of each and every one of these established things. But he is equally aware that there is good to be said of the conscientious opponents of the state, its props and its protégés. To say this good is his present business; and, if he seems to bend over backward sometimes in saying it, it should be borne in mind that they also have bent over backward—nay, turned double somersaults backward—who, prompted by terror, prejudice, intolerance, hatred, or contempt, have pronounced unqualified condemnation on the consecrated antagonists of things as they are; and it should at least be queried whether his indiscretions may not be excused (if not altogether justified) thereby.

No, the author is not a revolutionist, but he is acquainted with plenty of good fellows who are. “He has eaten their bread and salt; he has drunk their water and wine.” He has taken pot-luck with them, witnessed their privations, and listened to the telling of their dreams. He thinks he comprehends them, he knows he loves them, and he would present them as he has found them to the world.

This attitude will be understood by all who really believe in fair play, in giving every man his innings and the devil his due; who can admit merits equally in Christians and Pagans, Jesuits and Agnostics, Classicists and Romanticists, Greeks and Goths; who admire a beau geste alike in missionary and filibuster, condottiere and crusader, martyr and toreador, pirate and king,—in a Jeanne d’Arc and a Ravaillac, a Kitchener and a Joubert, a Sheridan and a Mosby, a Dewey and an Aguinaldo, a Hobson and a Cervera, a Makaroff and a Uryu, a Napoleon and a Musolino, a Richard Cœur de Lion and a Robin Hood, a Nelson and a Cambronne. It will be understood by all those who appreciate a joke, even when it turns against themselves; who recognise the nobility of straight thinking and bold speaking, the sublimity of high passion, the regenerating force of righteous resentment and stubborn resistance, and the holiness of self-sacrifice for an ideal; who have a faculty for putting themselves in other men’s places or have learned the hard lesson of calling no thing “common or unclean”; who love men because they are men, serve women because they are women, compassionate suffering because it is suffering, reverence him who hath much struggled to no apparent purpose, and pardon much, like the Christ, to him who hath much loved.

That these persons are the few does not seriously matter. It is a great thing to be understood by a few.

Alvan F. Sanborn.

Paris, January, 1905.

CONTENTS

Part I THE PEOPLE

“I think I hear a little bird who sings The people by and by will be the stronger: The veriest jade will wince whose harness wrings So much into the raw as quite to wrong her Beyond the rules of posting,—and the mob At last fall sick of imitating Job.” Lord Byron.

Chapter I

WHAT THE ANARCHIST WANTS

“Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire! To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,! Would we not shatter it to bits, and then! Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!” Rubáiyát of Omar Kháyyám.

“Le moins de gouvernement possible.”

Victor Hugo (Programme Politique).

“The state is the curse of the individual.”—Ibsen.

Manual labour, far from being an occasion for shame, honours man. What is shameful is to use man as a vile instrument of lucre, to esteem him only in proportion to the vigour of his arms.”—Encyclical of Leo XIII.

Enough of these ambiguous formulas, such as ‘the right to work’ or ‘to each the integral product of his labour.’ What we proclaim is the right to a competency, to a competency for all.”—Kropotkine.

And the savants will be troubled in their knowledge, and this knowledge will appear to them like a little black point when the sun of the intelligences shall rise.”—Lamennais.

“THERE is nothing new under the sun,” and anarchism is no exception to the truth of this maxim. But the beginnings of anarchistic philosophy and the development of anarchism, however suggestive they may be, do not fall within the province of this volume. Therefore it is not necessary to expound the tenets or to trace the influence of the anarchist or semi-anarchist devotees through the ages: the Taoists of China (whose founder, Lao-Tse (600 B.C.), was a contemporary of Pythagoras and Confucius), the social prophets of Islam from Mazdak in the sixth century to the wonderful Bab in the first half of the nineteenth century, Saint Anthony of Padua and Jean Vicenza in the thirteenth century, Savonarola at the end of the fifteenth, the Anabaptists under Thomas Munzer, Mathiesen, and Jean de Leyde in the sixteenth, Razine the Cossack and the Scottish Covenanters in the seventeenth, Mandrin the brigand in the eighteenth, and the Jesuits of Paraguay in the last half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. I do not pretend to determine whether the Guelph-Ghibelline feud, which rent Europe for more than two hundred years, was or was not a struggle between despotism and religious democracy, or whether Gregory VII., Alexander III., Gregory IX., Innocent IV., and Boniface VIII. were or were not revolutionary popes endeavouring to realise the social dreams of the Franciscans and Dominicans. I do not try to discover what there is of truth in the astonishing claims of certain exalted students of occultism, mysticism, and comparative religions, that anarchism found expression in the worship of the Indian Siva, the Persian Mithras, the Chaldean Baal-Moloch, and the Greek Bacchus; in the conspiracy of the Bacchanals (described by Livy) in the first half of the second century before Christ; in the colossal extravagances of the Cæsars; in the bizarreries of the Nicolaites, the Cainites, the Carpocratians, the Ophites, and other Gnostics of Egypt during the first five centuries of the Christian era; in the Consortia under Constantine; and in the fanaticisms of the Inquisitors, the Lollards, Flagellants, Bégards, Patarins, Templars, and Devil-worshippers during the Middle Ages. I do not dwell upon nor so much as collate the anarchistic tendencies and sanctions which anarchist scholars discern in the writings or sayings of Job and the Old Testament prophets, of Athanasius, Chrysostom, and Saint Francis of Assisi, Plato, Jesus, Rabelais, Bourdaloue, and Bossuet, and the pre-Revolutionary Encyclopedists (especially Diderot and Rousseau). I even pass by the far more pertinent teachings, systems, personalities, and careers of the admitted precursors of modern anarchism; of Max Stirner and Fourier, of Proudhon, the father of modern anarchist doctrine, and of “the mysterious Russian,” Bakounine, the father of the modern anarchist party. I also pass by the agrarian revolt of Gracchus Babœuf (guillotined by Barras in 1797); the emergence of the learned Russian Kropotkine, and of the Italians Cafiero and Malatesta; the relations between French anarchism and Russian nihilism; the struggle for Italian liberation; the founding of the Internationale and of the Fédération Jurasienne; the epic struggle for the control of the Internationale between Karl Marx, representing authoritative centralisation, and Bakounine, representing anti-authoritative federalism. I neglect, in a word, the more than interesting history of the slow evolution of modern anarchism, and coming directly, without further ado, to the France of to-day, attack the questions,—What is anarchy? What does the anarchist want? And how does he hope to get it?

Of the contemporary French Encyclopedists who are preparing, or think they are preparing, the revolution of the twentieth century, three are eminently fitted by their learning, by their capacity for straight thinking and utterance, by their sense of historical perspective, their power of keen analysis and bold synthesis, by their breadth, their tolerance, their humanity, their integrity, and their consecration, to answer these questions. They are Pierre Kropotkine, Elisée Reclus, and Jean Grave. But Kropotkine, while the author of such epoch-making works as La Conquête du Pain, L’Anarchie: son Idéal, and Les Paroles d’un Révolté, is a Russian, not a Frenchman, by birth and breeding, and has been little in Paris of late; and Reclus[1] (one of the most learned geographers of his time), though never far away from the anarchist movement, is, by reason of his devotion to his specialty, rarely in the thick of it. Besides, he has made his home in Belgium for many years.

It is to Jean Grave, therefore, the youngest of the three, the present editor of the journal Les Temps Nouveaux and author of La Société Mourante, La Société Future, La Société au Lendemain de la Révolution, L’Individu et la Société, and L’Anarchie: son But, ses Moyens, that it seems best to confide the delicate task of presenting the French anarchistic idea and ideal; and, because I cannot trust myself to summarise without bias the credo of a sect to which I do not belong, I quote in full the comprehensive first chapter of his important doctrinal volume, L’Anarchie: son But, ses Moyens:—

“In spite of the fact that the idea of anarchy has emerged from the obscurity in which men have attempted to stifle it, in spite of the fact that to-day (thanks to persecution, thanks to laws of exception such as are made in the worst monarchies) the words ‘anarchy’ and ‘anarchist’ are unfamiliar to none, there are not many who know exactly what anarchy is.

“The intervention of the anarchists in the Dreyfus affair, where they were much in evidence, had the effect of bringing them into contact with bourgeois politicians, who knew absolutely nothing about them; but anarchy did not come out into a clearer light from this association.

“Anarchy, in the eyes of some, is robbery, assassination, bombs, a return to savagery; anarchists are only house-breakers, loafers, who would divide all wealth in order to be able to amuse themselves with doing nothing.

“In the eyes of others, anarchy is a sort of Utopia, of golden-age dream which they readily grant to be very beautiful, but a dream good at best to illustrate books of ethics or fantastic social schemes with. The most kindly disposed regard anarchy as a vague aspiration which they do not hesitate to recognise as desirable for humanity to attain, but as so completely inaccessible that there is no reason for making any decided effort to realise it, and consider the anarchist as a species of lunatic whom it is prudent to avoid, a pitiful illuminé who strays from the practicable paths to lose himself in the vagueness of Utopia.

“They are very few who know that anarchy is a theory resting on rational bases, that anarchists are men who, having collated the complaints of those who suffer from the actual social order, and having saturated themselves with human aspirations, have undertaken a critique of the institutions which control us, analysing them, weighing their worth, and estimating what they are capable of producing, and who, from the sum total of their observations, deduce logical natural laws for the organisation of a better society.

“Of course, the anarchists do not pretend to have invented the critique of the social order. Others had done that before them. As soon as power began to exist, there were malcontents who made no bones of railing at its acts; and, if we possessed the legends which men handed down from generation to generation before writing was known, we should probably find therein satires against the chiefs. It is quite possible to criticise the existing order of things without being an anarchist, and there are those who have done this in a successful fashion which the anarchists will never surpass.

“But what anarchists believe they have done more than the other critics, more than the existing socialistic schools or the socialistic schools which preceded them, is to have gotten their bearings in the midst of the confused mass of errors which spring from the complexity of social relations, to have remounted to the causes of misery, of exploitation, and finally to have laid bare the political error which made men place hope in good govern ments, good governors, good legislation, good dispensers of justice, as efficacious remedies for the ills from which humanity suffers.

“Anarchy, studying man in his nature, in his evolution, demonstrates that there cannot be good laws or good governments or faithful appliers of the laws.

“Every human law is necessarily arbitrary; for, however just it may be, and whatever may be the breadth of view of those who make it, it represents only a part of human development, only an infinitesimal fragment of the aspirations of all. Every law formulated by a parliament, far from being the product of a great conception, is, on the contrary, only the mean of public opinion, since parliament itself, by its very manner of recruitment, represents only a very mediocre mean.

“Applied to all in the same fashion, the law becomes thus, by the very force of things, arbitrary and unjust for those who are on this side or on that side of the mean.

“A law, then, not being able to represent the aspirations of all, can be made effective on those who would infringe it only by fear of punishment. Its application involves the existence of a judicial and repressive apparatus, and it becomes thus the more odious as its coercive force is the more sure.

“The law unjust to start with, because, conception of minority or majority, it wishes to impose itself on the whole, becomes still more unjust because applied by men who, having the defects and the passions, the prejudices and the personal errors, of appreciation of men, cannot act, whatever be their probity, except under the influence of these prejudices and errors.

“There can be no good laws, nor good judges, nor, consequently, good government, since the existence of these implies a single rule of conduct for all, while it is diversity which characterises individuals.”

“No society based on human laws, then,—and this is the case of all societies past and present,—can fully satisfy the ideal of every one.

“The minority of idlers alone who, by ruse and by force, have managed to seize the power, and who use, to their own profit, the forces of the collectivity,—this minority alone, I say, can find their account in this order of things and interest themselves in its prolongation. But they can only make it last with the help of the ignorance of individuals regarding their own personalities, their possibilities, and their capacities.

“But however great the ignorance of the people may be, when the pressure is too strong, they revolt. This is why our society is so unstable, why the laws are repeatedly violated by those who make them or by those who are charged to apply them, when their interest points that way; for, power being based on force, it is to force that all those resort who are in power and wish to maintain themselves there, as well as all those who are in pursuit of power.

“Made to be applied to all and to content everybody, the laws derange more or less every individual, who wishes, while he is under them, to abolish or relax them, but who wishes them more vigorous when it is his turn to apply them.

“Nevertheless, new aspirations do arise; and, when the antagonism becomes too great between these aspirations and the political laws, the door opens wide to disorders and to revolution.

“And it will always be the same so long as no other way is found to repair the harm done by a law recognised as bad than the application of a new law. This ignorance on the part of men makes human institutions, once established, resist changes. The names vary, but the things remain.

“Men, not having yet been able to arrive at a social conception other than that of authority, are condemned to turn in the same circle, and will be condemned to turn in the same circle so long as they shall not have altered their conception. Royalty, empire, dictatorship, republic, centralisation, federalism, communalism,—these are all at bottom so many phases of authority. Whether in the name of a single person or in the deceitful name of the majority, always the will of some is imposed on all.

JEAN GRAVE IN HIS WORKSHOP

“There is no more intimate or engaging

business interior in Paris.”

“Furthermore, if the individual increases his knowledge in a continuous fashion, it is only in a very slow fashion. Still he has arrived to-day at the point where, to develop himself in his integrity, it is necessary that his autonomy be complete, that his aspirations express themselves freely, that he be permitted to cultivate them in all their breadth, that nothing fetter his free initiative and his evolution.

“And so it is that now, at last, anarchists draw from their study of the existing social organisation this important lesson: that human laws ought to disappear, carrying with them the legislative, executive, judicial, and repressive systems which impede human evolution by causing murderous crises in which many thousands of human beings perish, by delaying all humanity in its forward march, and, sometimes, even by dragging it backward.”

“While the politicians have not got beyond this formula, which they believe the ne plus ultra of liberty,—‘l’individu libre dans la commune, la commune libre dans l’état,’—we know that these political forms are incompatible with liberty, since they tend always to submit a number of men to the same rule; and we formulate our device, ‘l’individu libre dans l’humanité libre,’—the individual, left free to attach himself according to his tendencies, his affinities, free to seek out those with whom his liberty and his aptitudes can accord, unfettered by the political organisations which are determined by geographical or territorial considerations.

“For man to develop himself freely in his physical, intellectual, and moral nature, for him to reveal all his capacities, it is necessary that each individual be able to satisfy all his physical, intellectual, and moral needs. And this satisfaction can only be assured to all if the soil, which is the creation of no one, is placed at the free disposition of whoever is capable of tilling it, and if the existing equipment, product of the labour of preceding generations, ceases to belong to a minority of parasites who exact a large tithe upon the resultant of its activity and the activity of those who work it.

“The earth too much cut up, on the one hand, to permit the small land-holders to employ the powerful machinery which would effectively second their efforts, appropriated in immense lots, on the other hand, by a class of idlers who secure, without work, an income from the production of those to whom they consent to rent,[2]—the earth nourishes its existing population with difficulty. And I have not counted the ignorance which is fostered by a defective education and which causes the greater part of the cultivators to cling to the traditional processes of cultivation,—processes which demand far too much work and effort for the results.

“Yet, in spite of these sources of waste, the earth would still manage to nourish, after a fashion, every living being if the middlemen were not there to warehouse the products and to speculate and gamble upon them, in such a way that the majority of persons are never in a condition to buy what they need. The fault, then, if all have not enough to eat, lies with the defective social organisation, and is not due to lack of production. A better distribution of products would alone be sufficient to give every one enough to eat, while a better management of the soil and a better use of the instruments of production would bring about abundance for all.

“A clearer comprehension of things will bring the peasant to understand that his interest, properly understood, is to unite his parcel of land with the parcels of his neighbours, to associate his efforts with their efforts, in order to diminish his toil and increase his production.

“And as no one has the right to sterilise, for his sole pleasure, the slightest parcel of land, so long as there is a single being who has not plenty to eat, the coming revolution will have for one of its objects to put the soil into the hands of those who shall wish to cultivate it and the farm machines into the hands of those who shall wish to operate them.

“All this, anarchy seeks to demonstrate to the peasant, explaining to him that the masters who impose upon him exploit likewise the workman of the towns, trying to make him comprehend that, far from considering the town workman as an enemy, he should stretch out his hand to him, to the end that they may aid each other in the struggle for life, and arrive thus at disembarrassing themselves of their common parasites.

“To the workman, anarchy demonstrates that he must not expect his enfranchisement to come from providential saviours, nor from the palliatives with which the puppets of politics, who wish to control his vote and so dominate him, try to dazzle him; that the emancipation of the individual can be brought about only by the individual’s own action, can result only from his own energy and his own efforts when, knowing how to act, he shall use his liberty in place of demanding it.”

“It is not alone to those who are dying of want that anarchy addresses itself. To satisfy one’s hunger is a primordial right which takes precedence over all other rights and stands at the head of the claims of a human being. But anarchy embraces all the aspirations and neglects no need. The list of its demands includes all the demands of humanity.

“Mirbeau, in his Mauvais Bergers, makes one of the characters proclaim to workmen on a strike their right to beauty. And, indeed, every being has a right not only to what sustains life, but also to whatever renders it easy, enlivens it, and embellishes it. They are rare, alas! in our social state, who can live their lives amply.

“Some there are whose physical needs are satisfied, but who are retarded in their evolution by a social organisation which is conditioned by the narrowness of conception of the average intellect,—artists, littérateurs, savants, all who think, suffer morally, if not physically, from the present order of things.

“Daily they are wounded by the pettinesses of current existence, and disheartened by the mediocrity of the public to whom they address themselves, and whom they must consider if they wish to sell their works,—a situation which conducts those who would not die of hunger to compromise, to vulgar and mediocre art.

“Their education has led many of them to believe that they are of an essence superior to the peasant, to the manual worker, from whom, for the matter of that, they are for the most part descended. They have been persuaded that it is necessary, if their ‘talent’ is to develop and their imagination is to have full swing, that the ‘vile multitude’ take upon its shoulders the heavy tasks, devote itself to serving them, and wear itself out in making, by its labour, life easy for them; that they must have, if their genius is to attain its complete fruition, the same atmosphere of luxury and of idleness as the aristocratic classes.

“A healthy conception of things teaches that a human being, to be complete, must exercise his limbs as well as his brain, that labour is degrading only because it has been made a sign of servitude, and that a man truly worthy of the name does not need to impose the cares of his existence on others.

“One man is as good as another: that there are degrees of development is due to causes of which we are ignorant, but such or such an illiterate may have moral qualities superior to the moral qualities of those who are more learned than he. In any case, intelligence, if it blesses him who possesses it, does not confer on him the right to exploit or govern others. These differences of development merely imply differences of desires, of aspirations, of ideals; and it is for the individual himself who is so favoured to realise what responds best to his conception of happiness.

“Besides, these differences of development only appear to us as great as they do because education, ill understood and ill distributed, perpetuates prejudices and errors. Imagination, invention, observation, judgment, if they vary somewhat in intensity in different individuals, do not differ in essence. They are simple faculties of our brain which do not lose their quality for being employed to construct a machine or a house, solder a kettle, or make a shirt, rather than to write a romance or a treatise on anatomy.

“Greedy of hierarchy, we humans have divided into high and low occupations the diverse employment of our forces. The parasites who have made themselves our masters, all in proclaiming themselves superior, have established that there is nothing truly noble but idleness, that there is nothing truly beautiful but force exerted to destroy; that force expended to produce, to draw out of the earth and out of industry whatever is necessary to sustain life, is of a vile, inferior quality, and that its use should be reserved to the servile classes.

“On this basis we continue to declare certain occupations low, forgetting that they are such only because one class is forced to pursue them in the service of another class, to submit to its orders and caprices, to abdicate its liberty; but there can be nothing base in no matter what work which consists in ministering to our own needs.

“The artist and the littérateur belong to the masses. They cannot isolate themselves, and inevitably feel the effects of the surrounding mediocrity. It is vain for them to intrench themselves behind the privileges of the ruling classes, to attempt to withdraw into their ‘tour d’ivoire’: if there is debasement for him who is reduced to performing the vilest tasks to satisfy his hunger, the morality of those who condemn him to it is not superior to his own; if obedience degrades, command, far from exalting character, degrades it also.

“To live their dream, realise their aspirations, they, too, must work—for the moral and intellectual elevation of the masses. They, too, must understand that their own development is made up of the intellectuality of all; that, whatever the heights they believe they have attained, they belong to the multitude. If they strain to rise above the multitude, a thousand bonds hold them to it, fetter their action and their thought, preventing them forever from reaching the summits they have glimpsed. A society normally constituted does not admit slaves, but a mutual exchange of services between equals.”

“The very savant, who considers dealing with knowledge the noblest employ of the human faculties, must learn that knowledge is not a private domain reserved for a few adepts uttering oracles before a public of ignoramuses, who take them at their word; and that in science, as in art and in literature, the faculties of judgment, of observation, and of comparison, do not differ from the faculties employed in occupations which we consider more vulgar.

“In spite of the intellectual compression which has held humanity down for so many centuries, science has been able to progress and develop, thanks to the critical spirit of individuals refractory to official teaching and ready-made conceptions. It ought, then, to be put within the reach of all, to become accessible to all aptitudes, in order that this spirit of criticism which has saved it from obscurantism may contribute to hasten its full efflorescence.

“Knowledge is divided into so many diverse branches that it is impossible for the same individual to know them all in their entirety, the duration of a human life being far from sufficient for a man to acquire enough ideas to be able to investigate them in their minutest details.

“To study them,—that is, if he expects to be able to criticise them,—he is forced to have recourse to the labours of his predecessors and also of his contemporaries.

“It is from all human knowledge that the general synthesis must proceed. What we know to-day is only a means for acquiring the knowledge of to-morrow. And an individual obtains reliable knowledge only in accepting the help of all. The observations of the humblest persons are not always to be disdained. Let the savants also, then, cease to believe themselves a caste apart, let them understand once for all that knowledge does not demand special aptitudes, and that it must be accessible to all, in order that all, in developing themselves, may contribute thus to the general development.”

“What is true for individuals is true for nations. Just as an individual cannot live without the support of all, a people cannot exist without the co-operation of the other peoples. A nation which should shut itself up within its frontiers, ceasing all relations with the rest of the world, would not be slow to retrograde and perish. It is then absurd and criminal to foment, under colour of patriotism, hatreds nominally national, but which are in reality only pretexts for the governing classes to legitimise the scourge, militarism, of which they have need to assure their power.

“Every nation has need of the other nations. There is not a region which, for one product or another, is not the customer of another region. And it is no reason for you to hate your neighbours because they speak a different language, because a hundred years ago they invaded and ravaged regions which are indifferent to you to-day; and it is no reason for you to feel yourselves outraged by this ancient invasion because, once upon a time, the inhabitants of the invaded regions suffered under the yoke which now galls you.

“There is not a single nation which cannot reproach its neighbours with some crime of this sort; not a single nation which at the present moment does not hold within its borders some province incorporated against the desire of its inhabitants. And, if those who performed these acts of brigandage were highly detestable, in what respect are their descendants responsible therefor? Should we also be held responsible for the acts of brigandage which our histories teach us to admire as glorious achievements?

“Who among those who aspire to live solely by their own work can take delight in seeing one nation rush upon another nation? It is only those who have made themselves the masters of nations, and who find it for their interest to augment the numbers of those whom they exploit, who feel the need of supplying aliment to the troops they train for the work of slaughter. These understand perfectly that a menace of war with a neighbour serves to justify the existence of the armies which are their main prop.

“The despots who have exalted patriotism into a new religion know very well how to ignore frontiers when the defence of their privileges or the extension of their exploitation is at stake. If it is a question of hunting down subversive ideas, the French, German, Italian, Swiss, Russian, and other bourgeois are ready enough to lend to each other their diplomats and their police.

“Is it a question of putting down a strike? The exploiters are not slow to engage foreign workmen, so that they consent to work at the lowest wage; and governments would not hesitate, if there were need, to lend each other their armies.

“And do not all the international understandings which have been established for finance, the postal service, commerce, navigation, railroads, prove that it is the entente pacifique, after all, which is the supreme law?

“The anarchists would bring the workers to see a brother in every workingman, on whichever side of the frontier he chances to have been born.

“Brothers in misery, suffering from the same ills, bowed beneath the same yoke, they have the same interests to defend, the same ideal to pursue. Their veritable enemies are those who exploit them, who enslave them and prevent their development. It is against their masters that they should arm themselves.”

“Anarchy pays little attention to the shady combinations of politics. It professes the most profound disdain for politicians. The promises of the place-seekers interest it only as they disclose all the inanity of politics, and only as they can be made use of to demonstrate that the social organisation will not be transformed until the day when a resolute attack shall be made against its economic defects.

“If the politicians believe the lies they retail, they are simple ignoramuses or imbeciles; for the slightest reasoning should suffice to make them understand that, when a disease is to be cured and its return prevented, its causes must be attacked. If they lie purposely, they are rascals; and, in the one case as in the other, they deceive those whose confidence they win by their babble and their intrigue.

“Those who exploit the actual economic organisation will always seek to direct to their own profit all the attempts at amelioration that are suggested, and there will always be people who are dismayed by brusque changes and who prefer to rely on middle terms which seem to them to conciliate all interests.

“It will always be for the advantage of the masters to deceive the oppressed regarding the veritable means of enfranchisement, and there will always be enough cormorants greedy of power to assist them in their work of muddling questions.

“Anarchy demonstrates the inanity of every attempt at amelioration which attacks only the effect while letting subsist the cause.

“So long as the wealth of society shall be the appanage of a minority of loafers, this minority will employ it in living at the expense of those whom it exploits. And, as it is the possession of capital which makes strength and gives the mastery of the social organisation, they are always in a position to turn to their own profit every amelioration which is undertaken.

“For an amelioration to benefit all, privileges must be destroyed. It is to re-enter into the possession of that of which they have been despoiled that the efforts of those who possess nothing ought to tend. To break the power which crushes them, to prevent its reconstitution, to take possession of the means of production, to create a social organisation in which social wealth can no more be concentrated in the hands of a few,—this is what the anarchists dream.

“If the exploitation of man is to be prevented, the bases of the economic order must be changed: the soil and all that which is the product of anterior generations must rest at the free disposition of those who can work them, must not be monopolised for the gain of any party whatsoever,—individual, group, corporation, commune, or nation.

“This is what the partisans of partial reforms do not comprehend, and yet this is what conscientious study of economic facts demonstrates. Nothing good can come from the activity of the charlatans of politics. Human emancipation cannot be the work of any legislation, of any concession of liberty on the part of those who rule. It can only be the work of the fait accompli, of the individual will affirming itself in acts.”

“Basing itself upon the evolutionist doctrine, rejecting all preconceived will in the phenomena by which the evolution of worlds and beings is manifested, recognising that this evolution is solely the work of the forces of matter in contact, simply the result of the transformations which this matter undergoes in the course of its own evolution, anarchy is frankly atheistic, and repels every idea of any creating or directing entity whatsoever.

“But, as it is absolute liberty, if it combats religious error, it is primarily from the point of view of truth, and, specifically, because the priesthoods which have sprung up about the different religious dogmas pretend to use the force which their authority and capital lend them to impose their beliefs and to make even those who reject all religions help pay for them.

“As to whatever concerns the intimate thought of each, anarchists understand that an individual cannot think otherwise than his own mentality permits. They would see no objection to people gathering together in special buildings for the purpose of addressing prayers and praises to a hypothetical being if they did not attempt to impose their beliefs on others.

“Anarchists look for the triumph of reason from, and only from, the culture of minds; and they know from themselves that force and oppression cannot stifle ideas.

“They demand absolute liberty in the domain of thought as in that of deeds, in the family as in society.

“Like all the forms of human activity, the association of the sexes has not to brook the control or solicit the sanction of any person whatsoever. It is absurd to wish to set limits to, raise barriers against, or impose restraints on the affections of individuals. Love, friendship, hatred, do not come at call: we feel them or endure them without being able to help ourselves, without even, more often than not, being able to explain them and unravel their motives.

“Marriage, then, can be trammelled by no rule, by no law other than that of mutual good faith and sincerity. It can have no duration beyond the reciprocal affection of the two beings associated, and should be dissoluble at the will of the party for whom it becomes a burden.

“True, there will always remain some problems which cannot be solved without friction and pain, such as the disposition of the children, the suffering of the party in whom love survives, and other matters of sentiment. But these difficulties cannot be resolved any better by pre-established rules: on the contrary, constraint only envenoms the difficulties. It will be the duty of the interested parties to find the solution of the difficulties which estrange them.

“The best that can be hoped for is that the moral level of humanity will be so far elevated that goodness and tolerance will increase and bestow their healing balm on the human passions, which by their very nature elude regulation and control.

“The great objection behind which the adversaries of anarchy intrench themselves when driven into their last redoubts is this, that the anarchist ideal is beautiful, certainly, but much too beautiful ever to be realised, since humanity will never be well-behaved enough to attain it.

“This objection is specious. No one can say what humanity will be to-morrow; and there is no phase of its past development which, if it had been foreseen and announced to the generations preceding, would not have been held (with reasons galore) quite as unrealisable as the anarchist ideal is held by those who cannot abstract themselves from the present,—a mental state not hard to understand, since the average brain has not yet accomplished the evolution which will smooth the way for the new order of things.

“As long as individuals stagnate in servitude, waiting for providential men or events to put an end to their abjectness, as long as they shall be contented to hope without acting, so long the ideal that is the most beautiful, the ideal that is the simplest, will rest, necessarily, in a state of pure reverie, of vague Utopia.

“Where, except in the fable, has Fortune been seen to descend to the threshold of the sleeper, and wait patiently till it pleases his indolence to take her?

“When individuals shall have reconquered their self-esteem, when they shall be convinced of their own force, when, tired of bending the back, they shall have found once more their dignity, and shall know how to make it respected, then they will have learned that the will can accomplish everything when it is at the service of a trained intellect.

“They have only to will to be free, to be free.”

Chapter II

THE ORAL PROPAGANDA OF ANARCHY

“Woe is me if I preach not the gospel!”—Saint Paul.

“The orthodox believers went to hear Him, but understood nothing.”

Tolstoy.

“For He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”

Saint Matthew.

“The chanson, like the bayonet, is a French weapon.”—Jules Claretie.

“We must arm the camarades, we must never rest from arming the camarades, with stronger and stronger arguments. We must enrich their memories and imaginations with fresh facts which prove more clearly the necessity of the social revolution.”—Pierre Lavroff.

ANARCHIST propaganda is of four sorts, viz.: I. Oral. II. Written. III. By example (propagande par l’exemple). IV. By the overt act of violence (propagande par le fait).

With the anarchistic as with other creeds the simplest, most natural form of oral propaganda is, of course, that which consists in telling one’s faith to one’s neighbour.

The proselyting zeal that prompts a man to take his gospel with him wherever he goes,—to his workshop, to his café, to his restaurant, to the street corner, to “the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker,”—and to couple with exhortation the

“Little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love”

that make up neighbourly service, is a force not the less real and potent because its operations are unseen and the measure of them cannot be taken. It is a factor to be reckoned with, the

“presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense”;

but it is essentially an affair of the soul not to be declared save by the novelist or poet, and it is of the same substance in all cases of genuine conviction, whatever the basis of the conviction may be.

The unit of the only oral propaganda of which the public can take cognisance is the “group” (le groupe).

The anarchist group is unique—among organisations, one would say if one might. Whether it consist of three persons or thirty, or some number between these limits,—in point of fact it is oftener three than thirty, with an average of perhaps a dozen,—it has neither constitution nor by-laws, neither president, vice-president, nor executive board. It is as exempt from human guidance as a Quaker meeting, to which, for the matter of that, it bears more than this one superficial resemblance, and as guiltless as an old-fashioned ladies’ committee meeting of parliamentary law. Now the camarades do not always conduct themselves with exemplary decorum, and it sometimes happens that two or three of them are on their feet together and talking at once; but, at the most, this predicament does not arise more frequently than in more rule-bound bodies, and it cannot, on the whole, be said that the groups are any more disorderly, distrait, dilly-dallying, and ineffective than the boresome assemblies in which, often, conceited lack-brains make parliamentary tactics an end, not a means, by perpetually “rising to points of order” and “appealing from the decisions of the chair.”

The group meets sometimes at a café or wine-shop and sometimes at the lodging of a member. It is oftenest born of a mutual desire for fellowship on the part of the anarchists of a street or quarter; but it may result, quite independently of propinquity, from a common enthusiasm for a special phase of the doctrine, a common wish to pursue the same line of study, or from a common interest in some concrete enterprise, such as coming to the rescue of strikers, raising funds for the families of the victims of police persecution, founding libraries and lecture courses, or the circulation of tracts. In any case there are no formal conditions of membership, a group never being at a loss to rid itself, without appeal to written law or precedent, of an intruder who makes himself obnoxious.

The programmes of group meetings vary infinitely with the tempers and caprices of the members, as well as with the objects of the groups; but they may be said, in general, to consist of the reading of original essays and poems, reports on the progress of the cause at home and abroad, a consideration of the bearing on the cause of the latest events in the world at large, an exchange of journals and brochures accompanied by expositions and discussions of their contents, a volunteering of service for the tasks in hand, and that untrammelled exchange of ideas in which the lines between speech-making and conversation, wrangle and discussion, are not too rigidly drawn.

The group is highly ephemeral. Everything about it being guided by the exigencies of the moment, it rarely survives the accomplishment of the special object for which it is formed. It dies, as it is born, easily; or, rather, yielding to the charm of the untried, it takes to itself a new body when the old body grows cramping or monotonous. Such deaths do not signify complete exhaustion of vitality or even a diminution of strength. By a sort of transmigration of souls the vital force is redistributed, that is all.

This remarkable fluidity makes it practically impossible to get any group statistics that are worth the paper they are written on. An estimate made a few years back by a person who seemed as well situated as any one to know, put the number of groups at about one hundred in Paris and between four hundred and five hundred in the rest of France. The same authority would probably give rather higher figures now. But such figures, even if accurate, are of very slight importance, since the number of groups is no criterion whatever of the number of anarchists. The most militant anarchists hold aloof from the groups in order to have complete freedom of action and escape police surveillance; many are in commercial or administrative situations which counsel reticence; and many labourers are constrained to a similar reticence by the danger of losing their jobs. Furthermore, many anarchists call themselves socialists in order to benefit by the greater tolerance accorded to the socialists, especially since the Combes ministry came into power. In a word, the anarchist has every reason to conceal his identity from the prying statistician, and usually succeeds in doing so. Mark Twain, commenting once on the inadequate census returns of the Jews in America, affirmed that he himself was personally acquainted with several million. The meagre numbers ordinarily assigned to the anarchists in France tempt one strongly to imitate Mark’s facetious audacity. At least, if French anarchists are really so few, one may affirm with safety that he is personally acquainted with them all.

Group names are of no great moment when group identity is so evanescent; but some of the names are picturesque or suggestive enough to bear recording:—

Les Enfants de la Nature, La Panthère de Batignolles, Les Gonzes Poilus du Point-du-Jour, La Jeunesse Anti-Patriotique de Belleville, Le Drapeau Noir, Les Quand Même, La Révolte des Travailleurs, Le Cercle Internationale, La Torpille, Le Groupe Libertaire, Les Forçats, Le Réveil, Les Résolus, L’Emancipation, Les Anti-Travailleurs, Les Indomptables, Les Sans-Patrie, Les Amis de Ravachol, Les Cœurs de Chêne, La Dynamite, Terre et Indépendance, Les Indignés, La Vipère, L’Affamé, Le Glaive, Les Parias de Charonne.

As each individual of a group is a law unto himself, recognising no authority in the group as a whole, so each group is a law unto itself, independent of every other group and recognising no higher authority whatsoever. In France, formerly, as is still the case in several countries, groups of the same region formed a federation; but the only present tangible proofs of the existence of an anarchist movement on a large scale are district, national, and international congresses to which whoever wishes[3] may be a delegate. These congresses have no legislative, administrative, or coercive power over their component parts; their functions are purely advisory like those of the district conferences of the Congregational churches in America.

A newly formed group usually gets itself into touch, by correspondence, with its senior groups somewhat after the manner of a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle or the local branch of a “correspondence university.” Thus: “The group Les Vengeurs would like to put itself into communication with the existing groups. Those who have not received a personal letter, but who wish to correspond, are requested to direct their letters to the following address,” etc.

Union meetings of several groups are not infrequent. Thus: “L’Avenir Social of St. Ouen invites the camarades of the groups of St. Denis, Stains, Argenteuil, Puteaux, and Aubervilliers to a grand meeting which will be held Sunday, February 17, at 8.30 o’clock.” But these union meetings can no more bind by their action the individual groups participating than the “union temperance meetings” of the churches of New England towns can bind the action of the individual churches participating.

Anarchist mass meetings are relatively rare. If landlords are found willing to let their halls to anarchists,—and such landlords are not plentiful,—the police interpose at the last moment. Besides, money to pay for a hall is not always forthcoming, and the hesitancy of even the warmest sympathisers to compromise themselves by appearing publicly in the company of the camarades has to be reckoned with. But the anarchist has ways of holding a mass meeting—without holding it—that are worth two of holding it in the stereotyped fashion, and that speak volumes for his resourcefulness.

One of his favourite devices is to get himself named in due form a candidate for the Chamber, which gives him the right to cover the walls of the government buildings with unstamped posters[4] and the free use of the public-school property for meetings. “Several camarades are astonished” (I quote from a number of Le Libertaire) “to see Libertad a candidate. Reassure yourselves. With his customary enthusiastic and communicative eloquence he exposes in his meetings the imbecility and the infamy of the parliamentary system. Paraf-Javal seconds him with his marvellous talent as a logician. Between them they are doing an excellent and useful work. At the last meeting an auditor—to carry out the farce of the campaign rally—proposed a resolution which was not voted, but which was gayly read by Libertad in the midst of general approbation. You will perceive by this resolution that our camarade is not on the point of occupying a seat in the Palais-Bourbon:—

“‘The electors assembled in the school building of the Boulevard de Belleville, after having listened to the bogus candidate Libertad and the camarade Paraf-Javal, conclude (agreeing thus at every point with the candidate himself) that voting is too stupid to be thought of, and that liberty of opinion, like every other liberty, is not to be asked for, but to be taken, whatever the obstacles. They are determined to send packing all the genuine candidates in whom they see only imbeciles or knaves.’”

The anarchist’s sense of humour, you see, is much more highly developed than is ordinarily supposed. Nothing tickles this sense of humour more than to pack the meetings of his antagonists, the bourgeois politicians, divert these meetings from their primitive object by virtue of numbers, address, strength of lung, hardness of fist, or all of these combined, and so carry on his propaganda at the expense of the very persons it is directed against.

He effects this peacefully, as a rule, if his numbers are overwhelmingly superior. In this case it is very much an affair of bravado and lungs. He simply elects a bureau[5] to his mind—for so good an end he is more than willing to stifle his scruples against parliamentarianism—and, having installed a number of the camarades upon the platform, carries on the meeting with his own orators and as nearly in his own fashion as circumstances permit; of course, not without more or less noise and abusive protest, if the adherents of the original cause remain in the audience.

If, however, the numbers are more evenly matched, the interlopers, without attempting to capture the organisation of the meeting, make a dash for the front at a preconcerted signal, scale the platform as though it were a rampart, throw down every member of the bureau into the body of the house, and send the speaking-desk with its pitcher and glass of eau sucrée, the secretary’s table, and all the rest of the platform paraphernalia flying after them. Then, if resistance is offered on the floor of the hall, a pitched battle ensues, and the possession of the platform (except as it gives the advantage of position and an admirable chance to strut, game-cock fashion) counts for little, in the utter impossibility of getting heard, even if it is maintained, which it is not always, there being instances on record of the platform being taken and retaken, quite as if it were a strategic redoubt, several times in a single evening. Supposing, however, that the interlopers follow up the platform victory by another victory in the body of the hall, and succeed in ejecting the rightful occupants completely; the dispossessed, if they are not able to call up re-enforcements for a re-entry and renewal of the conflict, have no other redress than to persuade the proprietor of the hall to vacate it by cutting off the gas supply or by summoning the police. Either way, they gain nothing but the emptiest sort of dog-in-the-manger vengeance, since they cannot hope to resume their own interrupted meeting.

During the days succeeding the Dreyfus affair, when excitement was running high over the struggle between the nationalists and the socialists for the control of the Paris municipal council, a great nationalist mass meeting (”une grande réunion patriotique”), to be presided over by a nationalist deputy and addressed by other celebrities of the party, was announced for half-past eight of a certain Friday evening, in the assembly room of the Tivoli-Vauxhall, close by the Place de la République. On the morning of the night set for the meeting all the nationalist organs printed the following item:—

“We are informed at the last moment that the anarchists are coming in force to-night to our patriotic meeting at Tivoli-Vauxhall in order to prevent its being held and to transform it into a demonstration of sans-patrie. They propose to wave the red and the black flag. We are obliged, therefore, much to our regret, to take measures to prevent the entrance of our adversaries, and must limit the entries strictly to those who are provided with invitations. Invitations may be had by applying at,” etc., etc.

On the other hand, the revolutionary organs of the same morning printed the following:—

“The Comité d’Action Révolutionnaire invites all republicans, all socialists, and all libertaires [libertaire is a euphonious name for anarchist] to assist at the public meeting organised by the nationalists for this evening, Friday, at 8.30, Tivoli-Vauxhall, rue de la Douane in the Château d’Eau Quarter. All the camarades and citoyens are urged to wear the red eglantine.”

To one familiar with Parisian ways these antithetic notices promised a beautiful scrimmage. There was a beautiful scrimmage.

The doors opened at eight, and during half an hour or more the persons duly provided with invitations straggled into the hall; while, on the sidewalk opposite, a hostile crowd of socialists and anarchists, which the police had the greatest difficulty in restraining, asserted angrily their right to enter.

Just as the president of the evening, a phenomenally fat politician, arose to speak, the police lines gave way under the strain put upon them; there was a terrific stampede across the street, and before the public had time to pull themselves together again and before the ticket-takers could oppose the slightest resistance or really knew what was happening, more than two thousand persons without invitations had invaded the hall.

“Vive la Sociale! Vive l’Anarchie! A bas l’Armée!” bellowed the invaders.

“Vive le Drapeau! Vive Rochefort! Vive l’Armée!” screamed the invaded.

And, presto! pandemonium reigned.

In vain the elephantine president brandished his bell and pounded on the table. In vain he made a speaking trumpet with his hands and roared through it for order. The antagonistic yells mounted, collided, cracked, and exploded in mid air.

“A bas la Calotte!”—“Vive l’Armée!”

“Mort aux Juifs!”—“A bas Drumont!”

“A bas Zola!”—“Vive Loubet!”

“Vive l’Internationale!”—“Vive le Drapeau!”

In the rear of the hall, to the air of Les Lampions, a surging band chanted,

—

“Déroulède à Charenton,[6] Déroulède à Charenton, Ton taine, Déroulède à Charenton, Déroulède à Charenton, Ton ton.”

And in the front of the hall another surging band retorted, to the same air,—

“Conspuez Loubet! Conspuez Loubet! Conspuez!”

“Enlevez l’homme tonneau!” (Away with the hogshead-man!) a shrill and mocking voice in one corner piped.

“Enlevez l’homme tonneau!!”

a hundred, five hundred, a thousand voices caught up the derisive cry.

“ENLEVEZ L’HOMME TONNEAU!!!”

the whole two thousand interlopers bawled.

And, bawling thus, they seethed on to the platform like a wave, lifted the frantically gesticulating “homme-tonneau” and his two hundred of avoirdupois clean off his feet, and, receding with multitudinous laughter, swept him down the aisle and out through the door as if he were a chip, and all his satellites and followers in the wake of him.

The new broom of the proverb never swept one-half so clean. Not a nationalist, at least not a nationalist who dared to raise a nationalist cry, was left in the hall. The socialists and anarchists were in complete possession; but the real scrimmage of the evening was yet to come.

A bureau was chosen in which the two parties were about equally represented, and a resolution was passed branding the nationalists as tools of the bourgeois and as royalist reactionaries more dangerous than the royalists themselves. Then a socialist, in an excess of zeal, made the blunder of introducing a resolution committing the meeting to the support of a certain socialist candidate for the municipal council. The anarchists, holding to their cardinal principle of non-participation in elections, vigorously dissented. Hot words followed; the crucial differences between the doctrines were evoked and emphasised; old injuries were recalled; old disputes were raked up; old sores were probed and laid open. Plainly, the hall was much too small for both.

From furious debate the meeting went to still more furious shouts and counter-shouts. Vive l’Anarchie, which had so lately locked arms with Vive la Sociale, now confronted it and hissed threatenings and curses in its teeth. And from shouts (there being no “homme-tonneau” to kindle saving laughter) the meeting went to blows. Fists, canes, umbrellas, chairs, and benches cleaved the air; shoes battered shins and heads concaved stomachs; clothes were torn, hats crushed in and trampled under foot; furniture was dismembered, and mirrors, windows, and gas globes were shattered. The field days of the French Chamber were left far in the rear, so was even the legendary South Boston Democratic caucus. The pushing, pulling, pounding, kicking, scratching, biting, and butting, the oaths and calls for help, the howls, growls, and yelps of baffled rage and pain, would need the pen of a French Fielding to describe and transcribe.

Finally, the socialists passed out by the same door as the nationalists, and in very much the same fashion. But the anarchists had barely time to catch their breath and to pronounce the socialists “the tools of the bourgeois and the most dangerous of reactionaries, because the most disguised,” when the police arrived, and with their fateful “Messieurs, la réunion est dissoute,” backed up by the extinction of the gas, evacuated the hall.

Once in the street, the anarchists were solidaire again with the socialists against their common bourgeois enemies, the nationalists. What is more, all three were solidaire against their common enemy, the police; and the latter were forced to call on their reserves and a body of the Garde Républicaine to disperse the rioters.

The joint debates (assemblées contradictoires) which are held, now and then, during the political campaigns, are very apt to degenerate into similar scrimmages. As a rule, such encounters—there must be a special providence for scrimmages as there is for

MAULED TO DEATH FOR SHOUTING,
"VIVE L'ARMEE!" lovers—work no great harm beyond bruises to those engaged in them; but fatal results are not unknown. Not long ago, at an anti-militarist meeting in the hall of the “Mille Colonnes,” a man who had the bad taste or the misplaced courage to cry, “Vive l’Armée!” was quickly mauled to death by the infuriate audience. This was not an “assemblée contradictoire,” it is true; but, if it had been, the outcome would probably have been the same.

It is only fair to say, however, that the anarchists, on such occasions, are not more intolerant than others. There is no certainty that a man would have fared better who, alone, in a patriotic assembly at that time had raised the cry, “A bas l’Armée!”

The anarchist, with all his haughty insistence on directness and sincerity, is not totally averse to taking or administering the sugar-coated pill. He has punchs-conférences (punch-talks) and soupes-conférences (soup-talks), the former for himself, the latter for others. At the punch-conférence he washes down the word with the beverage of his choice,—more often wine, coffee, or beer than the punch which gives the name. At the soupe-conférence he dispenses to hungry vagabonds the soup that sustains life and the doctrines that, to his mind, explain it and make it worth while; precisely as the city missionaries and the “Salvation lassies” dispense food and gospel to “hoboes” at the “mission breakfasts” and “hallelujah lunches” of English and American cities and large towns.

In the summer he has “ballades de propagande,”—picnic trips into the country, which are given a serious turn by doctrinal speeches, in the open air, after lunch.

He has also—at least he had for a season—his weekly déjeuners végétariens, at which the somewhat attenuated coating of sugar which a vegetarian lunch gives to the lecture pill is overlaid with the more substantial sweetness of frolic, song, and badinage.

He has his theatre (that is to say, he has his amateur theatricals) about which a glamour of mystery and adventure is shed by the fact the greater part of the répertoire is under the ban of the censorship. Entrance to the performances is by invitation only and free. It is thus the law is evaded, a fixed and obligatory cloak-room charge replacing the fee of admission.

The Maison du Peuple of the rue Ramey, which calls itself socialistic from motives of prudence, has a permanent band of actors (le Théâtre Social) on the border line between professionals and amateurs, who give evening and matinée performances nearly every Sunday throughout the winter and spring, and who occasionally go upon the road.

A single announcement will suffice to explain the operations of this and all similar troupes:—

“Théâtre Social.

Maison du Peuple de Paris, 47 rue Ramey (4, impasse Pers).

“Camarades,

“Before its departure for Belgium, where it is going to give a series of representations of its great success, L’Exemple, the Théâtre Social has decided to give two other representations (evening and matinée) of the piece of Chéri-Vinet, at the Maison du Peuple, in order to accommodate the camarades of the suburban districts.

“We invite you, then, camarades, to assist at the third and fourth representations (strictly private) of L’Exemple, interdicted by the Censorship, the unpublished revolutionary drama in 4 acts and 5 tableaux, which will be given Sunday, the 31st of March, at two o’clock and at half-past eight sharp.

“L’Exemple will be preceded by En Famille, a piece by Méténier in one act.

“Obligatory cloak-room fee, ten sous.

“Invitations may be procured at the Maison du Peuple, 47 rue Ramey, at the offices of L’Aurore, La Petite République, and Le Petit Sou, and at the house of the citoyen A——, number —, rue Championnet.”

As at the Théâtre d’Application (formerly la Bodinière), the various independent theatres, and the “Thursdays” of the Odéon, the performance of the revolutionary troupe is usually preceded by an explanatory or relevant talk either by its author or some well-known thinker or littérateur. Thus, when Charles Malato’s Barbapoux, announced as an “Œuvre Aristophanesque, Symbolico-fantaisiste,” was performed at the Maison du Peuple, Malato himself provided an introductory lecture, entitled “Le Cléricalisme et le Nationalisme.”

Above all, the anarchist has his soirée familiale. For example:—

“The anarchist group, Les Résolus, announce for Mardi Gras a grand soirée familiale et privée, to begin at nine. Concert by amateurs, preceded by a lecture by L. Réville, subject ‘Le Socialisme et l’Anarchie,’ and followed by a ball and a tombola [lottery]. Entrance free. Obligatory cloak-room fee, six sous.”

In a big, barn-like, crudely lighted, smoke-begrimed, rafter-ceilinged hall, whose walls are adorned with the painted texts which are anarchy’s great watchwords,

NOTRE ENNEMI C’EST NOTRE MAÎTRE

La Fontaine

LA PROPRIÉTÉ C’EST LE VOL

Proudhon

LA NATURE N’A FAIT NI SERVITEUR NI MAÎTRE
JE NE VEUX NI DONNER NI RECEVOIR DES LOIS

Diderot

LE CLÉRICALISME C’EST L’ENNEMI

Gambetta

NI DIEU NI MAÎTRE

Blanqui

to the laboured sounds of a patient, plethoric orchestra, the Résolus couples, some commonplace, some grotesque, and some graceful, dance with honest zest; but with a restraint and modesty in striking contrast with the reckless abandon of such resorts as the Moulin Rouge, maintained mainly for the prudent depravity of touring English and American men and (alas!) women, who flock there to fan jaded or hitherto unawakened senses into flame, under the flimsy pretext or the fond illusion that they are studying French life.

A BALL AT THE MAISON DU PEUPLE

DANCING AT THE MOULIN ROUGE

In connection with the soirée familiale, it is highly diverting to note the same advertising dodges on the part of the managers; the same meaningless compliments to performers on the part of those who introduce them; the same ill-concealed impatience on the part of the audience during the serious part of the exercises for the dancing to begin; the same fluttering preoccupation with ribbons, robes, coiffures, and aigrettes, and the same jealousies of superior beauty, superior style, and more numerous or assiduous adorers on the part of the young women; and the same fussy solicitude on the part of doting mammas to have their daughters dance with the young men that are “likely” as in assemblies that do not occupy themselves with lofty ideas and ideals; also the same tiptoeing excitement over the drawing of the tombola as in the soirées of the working people, who do not profess a contempt for gain.

But he would be a precipitate reasoner, not to say a sorry churl, who should pounce on these little charming inconsequences as refutations of the anarchist theory, or should even call attention to them as other than reassuring evidence that the anarchist is a very human and likable being, not unaffected with amiable vices, and that he is not the abject slave of that angular consistency which, if it be a virtue at all, is the most unlovely of all the virtues. Your sound anarchist will probably tell you that he is sincerely ashamed of these failings, that they are deplorable relics of the old spirit of over-reaching which cannot, in the nature of the case, be entirely expelled so long as the old social régime continues. But this apology is so familiar, so threadbare even, it has been proffered so many, many times by so many very different sorts of people, that you prefer to ignore it, and attribute the anarchist’s dainty peccadilloes to the good old human nature which has always made men so much more companionable—let us guard ourselves against saying so much better—than their creeds.

In all the anarchist assemblies—the group meetings, the congresses, the mass meetings, and the various social and semi-social evenings—the trimardeur is a noteworthy figure. The trimardeur[7] (literally, pilgrim of the great road) is a camarade who devotes himself to winning converts while making his tour of France. He has a certain kinship with the ancient bard, the mediæval troubadour and itinerant friar, and the German apprentice on his Wanderjahre.

A TRIMARDEUR DISPUTING WITH SOCIALISTS

But he is chiefly interesting as being the nearest modern approach to the early Christian apostle and the most perfect embodiment of the missionary spirit in existence. Figure him as the contemporary missionary or missionary agent minus a salary and a domicile,—if you can imagine such an anachronistic phenomenon!

He is usually a skilful and reliable workman who has lost his job from his irresistible propensity to spread radical ideas among his fellow-workmen or for his active connection with a strike. He sets out on his proselyting tour “with neither purse nor scrip nor shoes,” “neither bread, neither money” almost literally; and, literally, without “two coats.” In the country he mingles with the peasants and farm labourers, sleeping under their roofs, “eating and drinking such things as they give,” and converting as many as he may, sure of a welcome, for that matter, wherever there is a lodge—and where is there not?—of that most fraternal of all freemasonries,—discontent. In the cities he works during his sojourn, if work is to be had; and, when he “goes out of a city,” he blesses that city if it has “received” him, and “he shakes off the very dust from his feet as a testimony against it” if it has “received him not.”

The origin, methods, and manners of the trimardeur have been well described by one Flor O’Squarr. I take up his description at the point where the incipient trimardeur has been turned away by his employer. “He offers his labour to the factory opposite, to the foundry adjacent. Vain proceeding! Unfavourable reports immediately follow him or have preceded him there. The employers also combine. He will be received nowhere except by mistake and for a short time. At the beginning this conspiracy of the world against him surprises and disturbs him. He exclaims: ‘What have I done to them, then? Why do they drive me away thus, as they would a mangy or vicious cur? I have defended my interests and those of my fellows. It was my right, after all.’

“Later he discerns injustice in this persistent hostility,—bourgeois injustice, parbleu! This discovery provokes in him the idea of revolt, as a draught of alcohol inflames the blood. Persecution has begun then. Well, let it be so! He will accept it, not without pride. The theory of anarchy sinks a little deeper into his brain, after the manner of a spike on which the employers have tried their sledges. Then he buckles his belt, turns up his pantaloons, tightens his shoe-lacing, and gains the trimard with a few sous in his pocket, en route for the nearest large town, where he hopes to find employment and an unworked field for his neophytic zeal.

“If he sets out from Angers, from Trélazé, for instance, he tramps as far as Nantes, where he improvises himself porter or stevedore along the quays of the Loire, undertaking with the rashest indifference any occupation for which only muscle is required....

“Signalled anew, ... our man rebuckles his belt, turns up again his pantaloons, retightens his shoe-lacing, and gains the trimard with a few sous in his pocket, headed towards St. Nazaire or Brest, towards Rennes or towards Cherbourg, towards any city whatsoever in which he can hope to earn his bread and convert men. Along the road he manages to get shelter on the farms, and he carries on his propaganda among the peasantry.

“This tireless fanaticism will carry him through Normandy towards the regions of the north. He will be expelled from the spinning-mills of Rouen, the glass-works of Douai, the mines of Anzin, the forges of Fives. From there he will pass into Belgium, always ‘on the hoof’ (à pattes) and on the trimard: he will visit Brussels, where the marvellous workingmen’s organisations of Brasseur and Jean Volders will make him shrug his shoulders,—‘Fudge, all that! authoritative socialism, that’; Antwerp, which will detain him a week, a bit disconcerted by the machine; Liège and Scraing, which will keep him a month; le Borinage, which he will contemplate as a promised land. Perhaps he will go into Germany, the vast Germany so inclement to anarchy,—that is, if he does not descend into the east by the Luxembourg, and gain the Jura by the Vosges.

“In two or three years he will have seen many districts and many countries, and will have scattered behind him everywhere, indifferently, seeds of revolt without troubling himself about the nature of the ground. His information will be considerably augmented. He will have made good by experience the defects of his education. He will know various languages and patois, having spoken Breton at Vannes, Normand at Caen, Walloon at Namur, Flemish at Gand, Marollien at Brussels, German in the east or in Switzerland; and, like the cosmopolitan Bohemian who had learned to borrow five francs in all the tongues of the world, he will have become capable of preaching anarchy in all the ‘argots.’...

EVENING IN A CABARET

“If during his travels the trimardeur has not acquired fine manners, at least he has acquired some very extended notions on customs and industries. He will know, without referring to a note, by a simple habit of memory, the distribution of the revolutionary contingents, here, there, and everywhere, in labour unions or socialist or anarchist groups, and the efficacy of each; what can be attempted at Montpellier, what is possible at Calais, how the iron is extracted at Mont-Canigan, and how it is worked at St. Chamond; why the fitters of the Seine are better paid than those of Nevers or Creuzot; where one stands a chance of being welcomed if one has been driven from the workshops of la Ciotat; by what artifice one may travel gratuitously in the baggage-cars of the company of the Midi, etc., etc. This miscellaneous information is not a bad substitute for science, and forms in fact a sort of fund of practical science very useful in the every-day life.”

“Nous partons tous faire le tour du monde Quand nous manquons de travail et de pain; Et cependant notre terre féconde Produit assez pour tout le genre humain, Nos exploiteurs veulent jouir sans cesse: Dans tous nos maux ils trouvent un plaisir. Nous travaillons pour créer la richesse, Et de misère il nous faudrait mourir?” Refrain. “Allons, debout! les Trimardeurs, Tous les hommes, enfin, veulent l’indépendance; Supprimons donc nos exploiteurs, Afin d’avoir le droit de vivre dans l’aisance.”

So runs the first stanza of the Chant des Trimardeurs; and this chanson, though execrable poetry, is, nevertheless, amply suggestive of the spirit of the trimardeur, and at the same time fairly illustrative of the popular revolutionary chanson (chanson populaire révolutionnaire).

“Of all the peoples of Europe,” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “the French people is the one whose temperament is the most inclined to the chanson.

“The chanson is the Frenchman’s ægis against ennui.... He uses it sometimes as a kind of consolation for the losses and reverses he sustains. He sings his defeats, his poverty, and his ills as readily as his prosperity and his victories. Beating or beaten, in abundance or in need, happy or unhappy, gay or sad, he sings always. One would say that the chanson is the natural expression of all his sentiments.”

France’s chanson populaire has always been one of the most important breeders and disseminators of social and political discontent. It has always kept pace with and frequently forerun revolutions. It is not surprising, therefore, that it is looked on by the anarchists as one of the most efficacious means of propaganda. The circulation among the masses of songs of revolt (chansons de propagande) is vigorously carried on by a number of revolutionary publishing concerns, which retail them at two sous each[8] and wholesale them at fr. 4.50 a hundred, and which also distribute them gratuitously as often as a camarade or sympathiser will provide a fund for the purpose.

In these chansons, logic is deliberately ignored, and metaphysics and ethics are very little meddled with. All the subtleties and refinements of the doctrine, all the gentleness and sweet reasonableness of the accredited expounders of the doctrine, are crowded out by the necessity for the simple, downright, direct appeal to the passion which is the chanson’s peculiar province.

The very titles of these chansons de propagande show that their purpose is inflammation rather than persuasion. Notice a few of them:—

“Ouvrier, prends la Machine!” “Crevez-moi la Sacoche” (money-bag)! “Fusille les Voleurs,” Les Briseurs d’Images, Le Drapeau Rouge, Le Réveil, “Vivement, Brav’ Ouvrier!” La Chanson du Linceul.

When proselytism is not sufficiently pronounced in the chansons themselves, caustic foot-notes make up the deficiency. Thus this definition of the word députés: “Deputies are persons who make rules for others and exceptions for themselves.”

These chansons, besides being sung in the various anarchist functions, appear, along with ballads, amorous ditties, and the topical songs of the day, on the programmes of the little wine-shop concerts of the faubourgs, at which each and every person present is expected to “do his turn” and all are counted on to help out with the choruses. These diminutive faubourg concert halls are the lineal descendants of the famous historic workingmen’s goguettes and guinguettes into which the great Déjazet was happy to escape and from which the thought and the spirit of revolt were never far distant. “Behind their closed doors,” says Jules Claretie, “the government was roundly berated, the couplets of the chansonniers there becoming for it more redoubtable than the fiercest articles of the press.”

The chansons de propagande—the more catchy, least compromising of them, that is—are sung in the public squares and on the street corners of the working districts by the itinerant musicians, who are at all seasons, but especially at fête times, a picturesque feature of Paris streets, and who conduct so many open-air singing schools, as it were, in that they teach their motley audiences to sing the songs they have the wit to sell them.

Only a few of the anarchist chansons ever see the types. The majority either circulate in handwriting among the groups or, without having been taken down, are transmitted orally, like the mediæval folk-songs or the Homeric lays, suffering, like those, all sorts of modifications and corruptions of text in the transmission.

Of the chansons populaires révolutionnaires which have come down to the present from the Great Revolution, the Marseillaise, a true chanson de propagande in its time, well called by Lamartine “the fire-water of the Revolution,” is not in favour with the orthodox anarchists, because it is essentially patriotic and uses the offensive word citoyen. The “Ça Ira” is still sung by the anarchists, but not always to its original words. The Père Duchêne, a part of which dates from the Directoire, is sung mainly by the coal-miners of the region of the Loire. The Carmagnole alone—the saucy, rollicking, explosive, diabolic Carmagnole!—has held its own against all new-comers, changing, but losing nothing of its sauciness, its explosiveness, and its diabolism as it has passed from the versions of 1792-93 through its seven clearly defined texts to the version of the memorable strike of Montceau-les-Mines in 1883.

After the execution of Ravachol[9] the airs of the “Ça Ira” and the Carmagnole were combined into a chanson called La Ravachole, which, in spite of this hybrid origin, may fairly be classed as the latest and by far the most vindictive version of the Carmagnole.

LA RAVACHOLE I Dans la grande ville de Paris (bis) Il y a des bourgeois bien nourris, (bis) Il y a les miséreux Qui ont le ventre creux. Ceux-là ont les dents longues, Vive le son, vive le son, Ceux-là ont les dents longues, Vive le son D’ l’explosion. [47] Refrain Dansons la Ravachole, Vive le son, vive le son, Dansons la Ravachole, Vive le son D’ l’explosion. Ah, ça ira, ça ira, ça ira, Tous les bourgeois goût’ront d’ la bombe, Ah, ça ira, ça ira, ça ira, Tous les bourgeois on les saut’ra, On les saut’ra. II Il y a les magistrats vendus, (bis) Il y a les financiers ventrus, (bis) Il y a les argosins; Mais pour tous ces coquins Il y a d’ la dynamite, Vive le son, vive le son, Il y a d’ la dynamite, Vive le son D’ l’explosion! Dansons, etc. III Il y a les sénateurs gâteux, (bis) Il y a les députés véreux, (bis) Il y a les généraux, Assassins et bourreaux, Bouchers en uniforme, Vive le son, vive le son, Bouchers en uniforme, Vive le son D’ l’explosion. Dansons, etc. [48] IV Il y a les hôtels des richards (bis) Tandis que les pauvres déchards (bis) A demi-morts de froid Et souffrant dans leurs doigts. Refilent la comète, Vive le son, vive le son, Refilent la comète, Vive le son D’ l’explosion. Dansons, etc. V Ah, nom de dieu, faut en finir! (bis) Assez longtemps geindre et souffrir! (bis) Pas de guerre à moitié! Plus de lâche pitié! Mort à la bourgeoisie, Vive le son, vive le son, Mort à la bourgeoisie, Vive le son D’ l’explosion! Dansons, etc.

The revolutions of 1830, 1848, and 1871, as well as the Great Revolution, left to the people generous heritages of bourgeois-baiting chansons. The barricades of those agitated periods rang with lyric improvisations born of the ferment and frenzy of the hour. The authors were oftener clerks or day labourers than they were poets or professional chansonniers, and their songs, many of the best of which have survived, were genuine songs of the people. But the one supremely great chanson populaire révolutionnaire of the last half of the century just closed, a song as striking in its way as the Carmagnole, the “Ça Ira,” the Père Duchêne, or the Marseillaise, is the Internationale. Wherever there is revolt or faith in revolt, brotherhood or yearning after brotherhood, this stupendous hymn of the religion of humanity (for it is much more a hymn than a chanson) is fervidly and reverently sung. The Internationale has something of the profundity and awfulness of Martin Luther’s “Ein’ Feste Burg.” Like that marvellous psalm, it is at once uplifting and crushing. In concept it is probably the biggest song of liberty that has ever been written. It is surely the biggest in this respect of all the French revolutionary chansons. As the Marseillaise, with its fierce, defiant staccatos and fiery, resistless appeal, is the perfect lyric expression of the fury of onset (furia francese) in the field, and as the Carmagnole, with its madly reeling, rolling, booming rhythms and its terrible, mocking, blasphemous mirth, is the perfect lyric expression of the drunkenness and dare-devilness of mobs and barricades, so the Internationale, with its slow, solemn, stately measure and its universal reach of feeling and of thought, is the perfect lyric expression of the eternal might and majesty of humanity. Hearing it, it is as if one heard the cadenced beat of the million-millioned tread of the advancing race, sweeping all barriers of pride and prejudice before it.

In the meetings, the numerous stanzas of the Carmagnole and the Internationale are generally delivered as a solo from the platform by a camarade who is blessed with a good memory and exceptional lung power, the audiences leaping into the choruses. The effect is invariably inspiriting, whatever the personality of the soloist or the quality of his voice, and whatever the composition and the voices of the audience. Indeed, these two chansons seem to belong to that rare sort of music which cannot be spoiled by bad, if it be not half-hearted, execution. So that there is conviction behind it, it carries,—the music in which sincerity and fervour atone for all defects of pitch, key, and voice.

In the open air, the more familiar stanzas are sung in unison just as is the Marseillaise, just as are the songs of the students, and just as are, for that matter, all the songs of the people in France,—a method by which a great deal more is gained in lilt and concentration (where only the primal emotions are concerned) than is lost in charm. And I defy any one who has a drop of red blood in him to be at the centre of several thousand excited people who are shouting the Marseillaise, the Internationale, or the Carmagnole, and not join in, even though his every instinct and belief be anti-revolutionary and he has neither voice nor ear. He who has not shared the surging and chanting of an angry Paris mob has only half experienced the popular thrill, and can have only half an idea what solidarity of emotion means.

The Internationale is as much the rallying cry of the opening of the twentieth century as the Marseillaise was of the opening of the eighteenth; and it would not be surprising if its author, Eugène Pottier, who is already called by the faithful “the Tyrtæus of the Social Revolution,” should win ultimately the same sort of an apotheosis as Rouget de Lisle won by the Marseillaise.

Poor Pottier, who died in 1887 at seventy-one years of age, saw only the beginning of the phenomenal vogue of his masterpiece as a revolutionary slogan.

Pottier was one of the few who dared to speak his mind freely during the Second Empire, and was a prominent figure on the barricades of both 1848 and 1871. He was proscribed for his participation in the Commune, but escaped to America, where he remained till amnesty was declared. Unable to work steadily at his trade after his return, because his natural employers resented the part he had taken in the organisation of his craft, as well as his share in the Commune, and systematically neglected as a poet and song-writer by the bourgeois press, his poverty was terrible at times,—so terrible that it is no hyperbole to say that many of his best pieces were written with his heart’s blood. They were real cries of real anguish. His boundless love and pity for the poor and his incessant struggle for the emancipation of the oppressed turned his life—like that of the noble Communard, Blanqui, to whom he dedicated a marvellous sonnet—into an uninterrupted series of self-sacrifices; and he stands side by side with Blanqui among the finest modern revolutionist types. Many of his chansons besides the Internationale have survived him. He left also a quantity of far from despicable poems.

They are legion, the men of the people whom anarchy has inspired of late years to sing; but the majority of them are unknown to the general public and even to other anarchistic groups than their own. A few, however, have a Parisian reputation for their abilities or eccentricities.

Paul Paillette, a quaint, picturesque personality, inhabits a correspondingly quaint and picturesque lodging, which he calls his “grenier de philosophe” (philosopher’s garret) on the summit of Montmartre. He was originally a jeweller; but of late years he has supported himself by rendering his own productions and those of Bruant and Xanrof in the salons of the bourgeois, who gladly pay him for ridiculing and abusing them. He is also a favourite feature of the union meetings and soirées familiales in several quarters of the city.

Paul Paillette can be bitter, caustic, and violent when he chooses; but his dominant note is gentle, hopeful, idyllic, and ideal, as the following chanson from his principal volume, Les Tablettes d’un Lézard, testifies:—

HEUREUX TEMPS Air: Le Temps des Cerises. I Quand nous en serons au temps d’anarchie, Les humains joyeux auront un gros cœur Et légère panse. Heureux, on saura, sainte récompense, Dans l’amour d’autrui doubler son bonheur! Quand nous en serons au temps d’anarchie, Les humains joyeux auront un gros cœur. [52] II Quand nous en serons au temps d’anarchie, On ne verra plus d’êtres ayant faim Auprès d’autres ivres: Sobres nous serons et riches en vivres; Des maux engendrés ce sera la fin. Quand nous en serons au temps d’anarchie, Tous satisferont sainement leur faim. III Quand nous en serons au temps d’anarchie, Le travail sera récréation Au lieu d’être peine. Le corps sera libre, et l’âme sereine, En paix, fera son évolution. Quand nous en serons au temps d’anarchie, Le travail sera récréation. IV Quand nous en serons au temps d’anarchie, Les petits bébés auront au berceau Les baisers des mères. Tous seront choyés, tous égaux, tous frères; Ainsi grandira ce monde nouveau. Quand nous en serons au temps d’anarchie, Les bébés auront un même berceau. V Quand nous en serons au temps d’anarchie, Les vieillards aimés, poètes-pasteurs, Bénissant la terre, S’éteindront, béats, sous le ciel mystère, Ayant bien vécu, loin de ces hauteurs. Quand nous en serons au temps d’anarchie, Les vieillards seront de bien doux pasteurs. VI Quand nous en serons au temps d’anarchie, Nature sera paradis d’amour; Femme souveraine, Esclave aujourd’hui, demain notre reine, Nous rechercherons tes ordres du jour! Quand nous en serons au temps d’anarchie, Nature sera paradis d’amour. VII Il semble encore loin, ce temps d’anarchie; Mais, si loin soit-il, nous le pressentons; Une foi profonde Nous fait entrevoir ce bienheureux monde Qu’hélas! notre esprit dessine à tâtons. Il semble encore loin, ce temps d’anarchie; Mais, si loin soit-il, nous le pressentons!

A LA RENOMMÉE DES POMMES-DE-TERRE FRITES

Brunel, a café garçon by profession, author of Le Chant des Peinards, has been associated with Paul Paillette in organising soupes-conférences and déjeuners végétariens.

Achille Leroy calls himself “author, publisher, and international book-seller,” and his invariable response to the simple salutation, “Comment ça va?” (How goes it?) is:—“L’idée marche” (The idea moves). He earns his living by selling his own and other iconoclastic works at the doors of revolutionary gatherings,[10]—anarchist gatherings preferred,—scrupulously devoting to the cause whatever he may gain beyond the bare necessities. Though an honest, harmless body, if ever there was one, he is so addicted to the spots where trouble is going on or brewing that he has been arrested many times; for instance, on the day of the 1899 Grand Prix for having cried, “A bas les Sergots!” Achille wrote a letter of self-defence at that time which was printed in certain of the newspapers and in the Almanach de la Question Sociale. He was also defended in the Journal du Peuple by M. Lucien Perrin, as follows:—

“Among the condemnations which evoked violent murmurs from the listeners was that of our worthy camarade, Achille Leroy, the revolutionary publisher. He had bravely cried, ‘Vive la Liberté!’ when he was seized by the police and maltreated, as only these brutes know how. As he was unarmed, and had committed no violence, the police officers accused him of having cried, ‘A bas les Sergots!’ (what a crime!) The ruse succeeded, and our friend was condemned to a month of prison without reprieve.”

Auguste Valette, a roving vagabond character, sometimes attached to a Paris caveau (concert-cellar) or café-concert and sometimes to a strolling show, gained some little notoriety at the time of the trial of Salsou for his attempt against the Shah of Persia, and came near being indicted with Salsou as an accomplice because two violent anarchist poems by him, dedicated to Salsou, were found among the latter’s papers.

Other singers of anarchy are Olivier Souêtre, author of Marianne and La Crosse en l’Air, two chansons that enjoy and deserve high favour; H. Luss, author of La Défense du Chiffonnier and La Grève de Cholet; Félix Pagaud, author of Les Tueurs; Daubré, to whom is attributed the last stanza of Père Duchêne; Hippolyte Raullot, Jacques Gueux, Martinet de Troyes, Pierre Niton, and Jean la Plèbs, who style themselves “poètes plébéiens”; Théodore Jean, Luc, Marquisat, Doublier, etc. It is useless to go on naming them, as their names mean nothing outside of the revolutionary circles of Paris.

They are all most striking individualities, however, ranging all the way from freaks to heroes; and it is the individuality which they lavish on the rendering of their chansons that constitutes their drawing power. You must hear a Brunel, a Valette, a Paul Paillette, sing his own chansons to comprehend the influence they exert, since, in simple print, the most of these productions seem decidedly flat.

Père La Purge, the jovial-faced cobbler of the narrow, dark, and tortuous rue de la Parcheminerie in the Latin Quarter, calls for a special word here, because he perpetuates worthily the revolutionary tradition of the cobbler.

Père La Purge is a perfect modern counterpart of the cobblers who secreted intended victims of the massacre of St. Bartholomew under the refuse of their shops; who, under Richelieu, managed to get letters to prisoners in the Bastille by sewing them between the soles of the prisoners’ shoes; who were among the first shop-keepers to set the tricolor cockade over their shops, and made themselves otherwise remarked for their zeal in the Revolution; and who, under the Restoration, played an important revolutionary rôle by placarding the walls of their shops with caricatures and Pasquinades (Pasquino, it should not be forgotten, was a cobbler) and by secretly circulating seditious pamphlets and chansons.

The invasion of machinery to do heeling and soling “while you wait” (ressemelage Américain) is driving out of Paris the old-time cobblers who made their shops rendezvous of the opposition and nurseries of revolt. But a few of these cobblers still persist; and of these Père La Purge is the best known, if not the most talented or most dangerous, example. His Chansons du Gars, which are issued with a superb cover design by Ibels, display a great deal of shrewdness and aptness of phrase,—

“I ‘a d’ la malice! Oui, foi d’ Bap’tiss!”

but his most popular work is the lurid and penny-dreadful Chanson du Père La Purge, which has given him his name.

LA CHANSON DU PÈRE LA PURGE I Je suis le vieux Père La Purge, Pharmacien de l’humanité, Contre sa bile je m’insurge Avec ma fille, Egalité. [56] Refrain J’ai ce qu’il faut dans ma boutique, Sans le tonnerre et les éclairs, Pour watriner toute la clique Des affameurs de l’Univers. II Pendant que le peuple s’étiole Sur le pavé, sans boulotter, Bourgeoisie, assez de la fiole! Avec ma purge il faut compter. J’ai ce qu’il faut, etc. III J’ai des poignards, des faulx, des piques, Des revolvers et des lingots, Pour attaquer les flancs uniques Des Gallifets et des sergots. J’ai ce qu’il faut, etc. IV J’ai du pétrole et de l’essence Pour badigeonner les châteaux; Des torches pour la circonstance, A porter au lieu de flambeaux. J’ai ce qu’il faut, etc. V J’ai du picrate de potasse, Du nitro de chlore à foison, Pour enlever toute la crasse Du palais et de la prison. J’ai ce qu’il faut, etc. [57] VI J’ai des pavés, j’ai de la poudre, De la dynamite, oh! crénom! Qui rivalise avec la foudre Pour vous enlever le ballon. J’ai ce qu’il faut, etc. VII Le gaz est aussi de la fête! Si vous résistez, mes agneaux, Au beau milieu de la tempête Je fais éclater ses boyaux. J’ai ce qu’il faut, etc. VIII Ma boutique est toute la France, Mes succursales sont partout. Où la faim pousse à la vengeance, Prends la bouteille et verse tout! J’ai ce qu’il faut dans ma boutique, Sans le tonnerre et les éclairs, Pour watriner toute la clique Des affameurs de l’Univers.

“ENLEVEZ L’HOMME TONNEAU!”

“For the great Idea, the idea of perfect and free individuals For that, the bard walks in advance, leader of leaders.” Walt Whitman.

Chapter III

THE WRITTEN PROPAGANDA OF ANARCHY

“The wonder is that he didn’t take a pair of tongs to hand me my paper. He held it towards me with the tips of his fingers in a horrified fashion, full of bourgeois indignation at the idea that the> Père Trimard came to one of his lodgers.”—Journal d’un Anarchiste (Augustin Léger).

“You are not guilty because you are ignorant, but you are guilty when you resign yourselves to ignorance.”—Mazzini.

“What we should try to do is to sow ideas, to force reflection, leaving to time the care of making the ideas which it shall have received blossom into consciousness and deeds.”—Jean Grave.

In 1898-99 Sébastien Faure took advantage of the exceptional chance for agitation offered by the Dreyfus matter to found an anarcho-Dreyfusard daily, Le Journal du Peuple. All other attempts to establish a daily anarchist organ seem to have failed completely,[11] and the Journal du Peuple lived—if its feeble panting for existence can rightly be called living—only a few months. After its demise, M. Faure, as if to conceal his defeat, started an anarchist weekly, Les Plébéiennes, the good will of which he was not slow and, apparently, not too reluctant to turn over to another anarchist weekly, Le Libertaire (eight pages, price two sous a copy), which had been printed intermittently at Montmartre for a considerable period, and which M. Faure himself had been instrumental in founding. The public proclamation of the consummation of the fusion between Les Plébéiennes and Le Libertaire, which, being the fusion of two miseries, was at the farthest possible remove from the up-to-date fusion that goes to the forming of a trust, is of interest because it throws a great deal of light on the make-up of an anarchist paper, and on the anomalous and difficult position in the newspaper world of the anarchist press:—

“Because of material difficulties—want of money, to speak frankly—the Libertaire was obliged to suspend publication. It reappears to-day after a very short eclipse, and we have every reason to hope that the regularity of its appearance will be exposed to no fresh interruptions....

“We have profited by this short, obligatory vacation to attempt to group about the Libertaire new forces and more numerous signatures; in a word, to take all the measures necessary to insure it a vigorous life.... You will see elsewhere that our friend Sébastien Faure has interrupted the publication of his excellent Plébéiennes in order to rally as many readers as possible about the Libertaire. It is in the Libertaire, then, that Sébastien Faure will hereafter express his thoughts as often as he shall feel inclined to do so.

“Furthermore, precious and assiduous collaborators have formally promised us regular contributions; namely, Laurent Tailhade, who with his incisive and scholarly pen will treat especially of the vulgarities of Christianity; Paul Ary Cine, who will expose barrack life; Raphaël Dunois, who will chronicle and interpret the labor movement; Georges Pioch, dramatic and literary criticism; J. G. Prodhomme, musical criticism; A. R. Vertpré, art criticism; Alfred Griot, review of the reviews; Fred-Pol, review of the week; Alfred Bloch, scientific chronique; A. Harrent, anti-clerical chronique....

“In a word, we are doing what we can. Let our readers on their side do what they can in making known the Libertaire, in seeking new purchasers for it, in sending us financial aid sometimes, and in establishing in favour of their organ a serious and persevering propaganda.

“In this manner we can be certain that we and ours will have a journal to voice our opinions, our angers, and our hopes, and one which we can depend on to lead the people in the way that is frankly ‘libertaire’ on the fast-approaching day when it is going to be necessary to ‘fight it out,’ when all the political parties are going to fall on each other in order to retain power or usurp it. We are on the eve of important events. It is the moment for all of us to show ourselves, to shake off, some of us, our apathy, others of us our egoism, to silence all our dissensions, to combine with force will, abnegation, and audacity.”—Le Libertaire.

DORMER-WINDOW OF JEAN GRAVE’S WORKSHOP

Older, solider, more temperate, more dignified, and—if the word in such a strange connection is permissible—more conservative, indeed so solid, temperate, dignified, and conservative that it has been more than once referred to as the Temps of the anarchist press, is Les Temps Nouveaux, an eight-page weekly, sold, like Le Libertaire, at two sous a copy. Les Temps Nouveaux (formerly La Révolte, and before that Le Révolté), which was founded at Geneva, Switzerland, by Elisée Reclus and Pierre Kropotkine more than a quarter of a century ago, has appeared regularly ever since with only slight interruptions and the few changes of title that commemorate its encounters with the law. It came to Paris soon after its foundation, being forced to emigrate from Switzerland on account of the anarchist attempt against the Palais-Fédéral at Berne. Its most distinguished, and at the same time most distinctive, feature is a literary supplement made up in considerable part of selections from the French and foreign classics and from the writings of contemporary scientists and littérateurs, not avowed revolutionists, which arraign the evils of society or support any one of the articles of the anarchist creed. It also reproduces in full addresses by non-anarchist celebrities in which concessions are made to revolutionary ideals or ideas.

“You may seize our journals, our brochures,” says the editor, Jean Grave, “you will not prevent the camarades from reading what the bourgeois authors have written on the rottenness and abjectness of the present hour. This alone is more terrible than all the revendications and threats we can accumulate.”

From time to time this supplement serves to make public the addresses prepared for prohibited anarchist congresses, as in the year of the last Exposition, when it printed the papers which would have been read at the International Anarchist Congress (euphoniously named Le Congrès Ouvrier Révolutionnaire Internationale) if a frightened or over-prudent ministry had not forbidden the sitting of the congress.

The contents of all the literary supplements thus far issued have been classified under the heads of War, Militarism, Property, Family, Religion, Law, Justice, The Magistracy, Poverty, Wage-earning, etc., and they have been reproduced (with added selections, illustrations, and complete bibliographies) in as many volumes as there are heads.[12]

Thanks, perhaps, to the clever handling of its literary supplement; thanks, perhaps, to the thoughtfulness and relative tolerance of the body of the paper, the Temps Nouveaux has an appreciable circulation among artists, littérateurs, savants, economists, bibliophiles, and various other sorts of cultured people quite outside of anarchist circles.

The present editor, Jean Grave, is one of the most winning personalities in the anarchist or any other contemporary movement for reform. A Lyonnais by origin, a shoemaker and later a printer by trade, Jean Grave came to Paris in his early manhood. He took part in the Commune, and was one of the banished after its downfall, passing most of his exile in Switzerland, where he was intimately associated with Kropotkine and Reclus.

As editor, despite his comparative moderation, he has not been immune from persecution. Like Kropotkine, his predecessor in the editorial chair, Jean Grave has a fair experimental knowledge of the inside of prison walls. A thorough man of the people, and proud of the fact,—he has always retained his printer’s blouse,—his person and his writings alike are nevertheless instinct with the most perfect urbanity.

There is no more picturesque corner in Paris than that on which, for many years now, the Temps Nouveaux has had its office in the top of an aged and mellow six-story building whose ground floor is a wine-shop and whose wrinkled roof and plant-bedecked dormer-window overlook the sixteenth-century church of St. Médard,—no more intimate and engaging business interior than the paper, book, and brochure bestrewn, flower-and-print-decorated, slanting-walled loft in which Jean Grave (veritable “attic philosopher”) and his assistant make up and administer their sheet. Nothing could be more open and kind than the welcome you get when, having felt your way up a winding stair as damp and dark as a mediæval donjon-keep, you turn the latch-key, hospitably left in the outside of the door, and with a premonitory knock enter the loft; always providing your entry is courteous and your coming well motived. Indeed, I know in all Paris nothing morally finer than the example Jean Grave’s gentle, unassuming life offers of consecration to the ideal.

There is something peculiarly significant in the fact that the office of this anarchist organ (whose mission is to be, like the university settlement, a picket of civilisation carrying light into dark places) is located on the line where the university and the industrial districts overlap each other, at the very point where the Quartier Latin ceases and the Faubourgs Coulebarbe and Salpêtrière begin; at the junction of such typical highways as the rue Claude Bernard, passing the Ecole Normale, the rue Monge, in which many students lodge, the broad Avenue des Gobelins, with its evening and Sunday animation as a labourers’ promenade, and the steeply ascending rue Mouffetard, with its motley street market for the poor.[13]

The Temps Nouveaux, the Libertaire, and the anarchist weeklies of the provinces serve to keep the individual camarades, the “groups,” and the trimardeurs in close touch with each other and with the whole anarchist body, as well as to narrate events, establish the real significance of the casualty columns of the bourgeois press, and expound the doctrine of anarchy. They also lend themselves to mutual relief work,—raising subscriptions for the camarades in distress from lack of employment, and securing comforts for the camarades in prison and for their families. They likewise signal mouchards (police spies), and predict their movements, rehabilitate camarades unjustly accused of espionage, denounce the crookedness of employers, arrange for lectures, and, especially, utilise for the best interests of the movement the varied information gleaned here, there, and everywhere by trimardeurs, who are for them so many unsalaried correspondents.

An anarchist monthly, L’Education Libertaire, has lately been founded by the Bibliothèque d’Education Libertaire of the Faubourg St. Antoine, which is not only the organ of the various Bibliothèques Libertaires[14] of Paris and the provinces, but also a review of real solidity and distinction.

Its nature and scope may be judged by a brief excerpt from its first prospectus:—

“L’Education Libertaire will contain:—

“I. One or two articles by the writers of note who have accorded us their literary collaboration. [Follows a list of a score or more collaborators, of whom Pierre Quillard, A. F. Hérold, Urbain Gohier, Charles Malato, Henri Rainaldy, and Laurent Tailhade have a Parisian or more than Parisian reputation.]

“II. Certain of the lectures delivered in the Bibliothèques Libertaires. These lectures will also be printed as brochures, which, the type being already set, will cost nothing but the paper and printing. We shall get thus the brochure at one sou.

“III. Articles upon the different theories of education and the attempts at ‘libertaire’ education, a large subject, which will give rise to interesting discussions.

“IV. Communications or articles from the Bibliothèques Libertaires.

“V. A concise summary of the month’s happenings, social, economic, foreign, scientific, etc.

“VI. Criticisms of the books of which we shall receive two copies,—one for the library of the review, the other to circulate among the libraries which have given in their adherence to the review.”

The number of camarades who are afflicted with the cacoethes scribendi being almost as great as those who are afflicted with the cacoethes loquendi, many of the groups have little amateur papers of their own. These amateur papers sometimes remain in manuscript, and are read aloud in the meetings (very much as in the old-fashioned American lyceums); are sometimes mimeographed for distribution among the members; and sometimes are printed, to be sold, by a camarade who has a hand-press at his disposition,—rarely by a professional printer. When a group which is ambitious for a paper does not feel sufficient unto itself in literary talent, it solicits outside assistance, thus:—

“The group Les Résolus is going to print a journal in the form of a brochure. The ‘copains’ call upon the camarades who are willing to collaborate to communicate with the camarade Rodor.”

The number of anarchist papers in existence is as nothing to the number that has disappeared. Le Riflard, L’Attaque, La Lutte, Le “Ça Ira,” Le Forçat, L’Insurgé, Le Droit Social, L’Etendard Révolutionnaire, Le Défi, Le Drapeau Noir, L’Affamé, Terre et Liberté, L’Audace, L’Hydre Anarchiste, L’Idée Ouvrière, L’Homme Libre, La Révolution Sociale, L’Emeute, La Liberté Sociale, Le Droit Anarchique, La Misère, Le Deschard, Le Falot, L’Idée Libre, Le Père Jean Chiffonier de Paris, Le Père Peinard, and scores of others have lived and died in Paris and the provinces within the last thirty years. Of them all, the most famous, not because the most violent, but because the most violent with talent and wit (indeed, the most famous incendiary sheet in France since the Père Duchêne of Eugène Vermesch), was the Père Peinard. While its circulation was never enormous (8,000-15,000 copies), it came to the knowledge of the bourgeois, and gave them such a turn that it seems likely to remain in the public consciousness for at least a generation.

With no display of philosophy (which is not saying it had no philosophy), it played openly upon the appetites, prejudices, and rancours of the proletariat. Without reserve or disguise, it incited to theft, counterfeiting, repudiation of taxes and rents, killing, and arson. It counselled the immediate assassination of deputies, senators, judges, priests, and army officers. It advised unemployed workingmen to take food for themselves and their families wherever it was to be found, to help themselves to shoes at the shoe-dealers’ when the spring rains wet their feet and to overcoats at the clothiers’ when winter winds nipped them. It urged employed workingmen to put their tyrannical employers out of the way, and to appropriate their manufacturing plants; farm labourers and vintagers to take possession of the farms and vineyards, and turn the landlords and vine-owners into fertilizing phosphates; miners to seize the mines and to offer picks to the stockholders, in case they showed a willingness to work like their brother men, otherwise to dump them into the disused shafts; conscripts to emigrate rather than perform their military service; and soldiers to desert or shoot down their officers. It glorified poachers and other deliberate breakers of the law. It recounted the exploits of the olden-time brigands and outlaws, and exhorted moderns to follow their example.

Citations from the Père Peinard are impossible, less because of a constantly recurring broadness that is more than broadness (since this might easily be dodged in extracts) than because it was written in the picturesque slang of the faubourg, which can no more be rendered into English than Chimmie Fadden, for instance, could be rendered into French. The very titles of the articles are untranslatable.

Whatever exception to its morals one may take, one is forced to admit that the Père Peinard was a remarkable production in its way. For blended drollery and diabolism, camaraderie and cynicism, gaminerie and gruesomeness, it would be hard in contemporary writing to find its counterpart. Like the unmatched narrative of the shipwreck in the second canto of Don Juan, it was at once rollicking and horrible, flippant and terrible, ribald and sublime. In it there was no distinguishing between the antics, grimaces, and piquant impudence of the buffoon and the imprecations of the tragedian or the anathemas of the prophet; and, while there were times when the sight of this grinning fury was merely grotesque, there were others (seconds, at least) when it was magnificent.

The Père Peinard was even more a one man’s paper than is Drumont’s La Libre Parole or Rochefort’s L’Intransigeant. Apart from the illustrations, which were the work of obscure caricaturists now thrice famous,—a fact which gives the file a high value with collectors,—it was practically all written by its editor, Emile Pouget. Pouget is by general consent one of the “best fellows in the world.” Nevertheless, he is no dilettante revolutionist. His grievances against society are very real ones. He was forced out of his original occupation as a dry-goods clerk because he tried to organise his fellow-employees; and he was condemned (along with Louise Michel) on disgracefully insufficient evidence for a misdemeanour in connection with a meeting of the unemployed, of which he was not guilty. The following account of the affair is so fully substantiated by the official record of the trial that it may be accepted as practically authentic:—

“The organisers of this meeting of the unemployed simply had in view to bring together on the Esplanade des Invalides the greatest number possible of hungry persons. They intended it to be less a revolt than a demonstration. They had no thought whatever of marching on the Elysée or on the Ministry of the Interior. They merely wished to say to the bourgeoisie: ‘Look at us. We are 20,000 without means of existence.’ And the Esplanade des Invalides had been chosen in order that they might not be accused of impeding circulation. The police, disturbed at the idea of so large a number of men assembling in one place, took every precaution to prevent it. They closed the Esplanade, and forced those who came to the meeting into the streets adjacent, where disorders naturally arose. Certain individuals, who really had eaten nothing since the night before, invaded three bake-shops. The bake-shops were cleaned out in five minutes as if by enchantment.

“Pouget had pillaged nothing, planned nothing, directed nothing. He was simply overheard to say of these poor devils during the pillage: ‘They take bread because they are hungry. They are right.’ He repeated it spiritedly in the assize court, and he was condemned to eight years of prison for ‘incitation to pillage.’ It would have been more precise to condemn him for approbation of pillage, since, in point of fact, he had not committed any other crime.”

During its entire existence the Père Peinard carried on an extensive traffic in brochures, chansons, etc., of the same violent nature as itself. It also published an Almanack for 1894, which is now rare and much prized in book-collecting quarters.

The first anarchist Almanack was issued in 1892 by Sébastien Faure, who made the laughable and, from the point of view of sale, disastrous blunder of basing it on the anarchist-hated Gregorian calendar.

Pouget’s Almanack, forewarned, avoided this rock of offence. It was a rehash of his paper, supplemented by a lengthy philosophico-historical disquisition on the calendar, appreciations of all the months, allegorical observations on tides and eclipses, an anarchist chronology, and a bundle of fantastic predictions,—all in the paper’s highly coloured faubourien slang.

“If ever,” says Jean Grave somewhere, “the history of this movement is written, if ever it is revealed how the anarchist publications have lived, how they have amassed sou by sou the sums necessary to their appearance, the world will be astounded at the proofs of solidarity and devotion which will thus be brought to light. It will appreciate what a force conviction is, especially among the most disinherited.”

There is something pathetic as well as diverting about the forced preoccupation of the anarchist organs with the question of the money which they consider it a part of their mission to depreciate, something well-nigh cruel in the ironical destiny that compels them to be perpetually harping on the thing which it is one of their pet dreams to abolish,—to plead on their last pages for the same thing their first pages abuse.

This inconsequence between the thought and the deed is not, however, to be confounded with hypocrisy. It is accepted because unavoidable, but accepted sorrowfully and bitterly; and it does not profit individuals.

In choosing to depend for their sinews of war on the contributions of the camarades rather than on the advertising which would contaminate and enslave them, the anarchist journals have certainly chosen the lesser moral evil. There is even a certain Quixotic heroism in this choice, which is the more apparent since it is at the price of this inestimable, if incomplete, moral independence that the socialists are able to carry on a propaganda of a wider range. By way of compensation for their sacrifice in refusing bourgeois advertising, it sometimes happens that the anarchist journals are supported, without running the slightest moral danger, by bourgeois funds. So it was that in the Faubourg St. Antoine several years ago the anarchist cabinet-makers preached the annihilation of their employers during several months. The cabinet-makers founded an organ entitled Le Pot-à-colle (The Glue-pot), in the first number of which they chanced to give one of the manufacturers a terrible castigation. The relatively small edition printed was sold so fast that the camarades most interested barely managed to get copies. A watch was set on the news-stands of the faubourg, and it was discovered that it was the business rivals of the attacked manufacturers who had snapped up the papers. The discovery was utilised to such good purpose that the phenomenal popularity of the Glue-pot continued just as long as there was a manufacturer left in the district to “roast.”

The following statement of the review L’Education Libertaire to its subscribers gives a better idea than pages of explanation by an outsider could give of the poverty to which anarchist publications are subject and of their uphill struggle to get the wherewithal to live:—

“TO OUR SUBSCRIBERS

“Those of our readers who have followed our attempt month by month know by what a slow progression we have arrived at the bringing out of this Review.

“We shall continue, as in the past, to publish in each number the accounts of the preceding number. This will enable the readers to appreciate the pecuniary effort that must be made if the publication is to be continued.

“We have received a hundred francs for this number and forty for subsequent numbers. We have lumped the money all together to pay in part for this number. We shall not appear again until we have in the treasury the necessary sum. It is for our readers, if they approve of our attempt, to interest their friends in the Review, and engage them to subscribe.

“We have accepted subscriptions of three months, six months, and one year. By that we mean subscriptions for three numbers, six numbers, and twelve numbers. If the state of our treasury does not permit us to appear every month, our subscribers will, none the less, receive as many numbers as they have subscribed for at the rate of ten sous per number. We formally bind ourselves, having received subscriptions for one year, to print the Review twelve times. As to dates, we guarantee nothing. The camarades who are the administrators of this journal are workingmen, able to dispense very little money; and it would take them long months of self-assessment to get together the 200 francs necessary for the publication of each number.

“To facilitate the diffusion of our Review and the search for new subscribers, we have prepared special propagandist numbers, which we will send, postpaid, for five sous each to readers who are already subscribers. These special numbers have printed on every page in red ink, ‘Read and Circulate.’ They may secure subscribers for us if each of us pass one or two about in his own circle.

“As to the next number, we urge the camarades who have subscribed for only three months or six months to make their subscriptions annual, in which case we shall be able to appear again early in December.”

The accounts referred to in the second paragraph of the above are exceedingly suggestive reading. They recorded one subscription of twenty francs. The remainder of the subscriptions ranged from two sous to two francs. The total receipts were fr. 57.10. The expenses of printing and mailing the number were fr. 73.60, and the incidental expenses were fr. 11.55. The deficit for this number was, therefore, fr. 28.05; but, the deficit on the two preceding numbers having amounted to fr. 32.80, the review at the end of its third number showed a deficit of fr. 60.85.

Very trifling seems this deficit to those of us who are accustomed to read the balance sheets of large journals, but very real and very embarrassing are the difficulties which it presents to the publishers of an anarchist periodical. The financial statement is followed by this notice:—

“To cover this deficit and reimburse the camarades who advanced us money, we offer for sale at ten sous, postpaid, the one hundred and thirty copies of the Preparatory Series which we still have left (3 numbers with covers, 18 pages each).”

The acknowledgment of subscriptions and contributions through the columns of the papers is theoretically for the sake of saving the labour and expense of correspondence and postage; and, when the names of the contributors are given by initials only, as is sometimes done, the device may stand for what it claims to be. But when, as too frequently happens, the names are printed in full, it is impossible not to suspect the editors of catering to precisely the same sort of vanity as that which lies back of bourgeois subscription lists.

These account columns are further utilised by the camarades—but here at least the taint is scarcely a bourgeois one—for the launching of pleasantries (more or less astute) and for the expression of sentiments, the affirmation of brotherhood, the declaration of principles, and the utterance of prophecies or threats.

In a recent subscription list of Le Libertaire these signatures appeared: Nemesis, fr. 0.50; L’Alouette, 0.50; Ni Dieu ni Maître, 0.50; Un Evadé du Bagne Schneider, 0.50; Trois Mètres de Corde pour le Roussin D——, 0.50; Un Va-nu-pied, 0.25; Un Coopérateur Communiste-anarchiste, 0.30; Trois Semeurs à Lille, 0.25; Après la Conférence de Sébastien Faure, 2 fr.; Trois Coopérateurs, 0.30; Un Miséreux, 0.10; Un Garçon de Café Ennemi de la Tyrannie, 0.30; Deux Trimardeurs, 2 fr.; Un Camarade Dévoué, 1 fr.; A Bas la Lâcheté Humaine, 1 fr.; Vive l’Energie Individuelle! 1 fr.; Trois Copains Rochefortais, 4 fr.; Le Breton du Jardin des Plantes, 0.30.

A recent device for raising funds, which is at the same time an additional means of propaganda,

PIERRE JOSEPH PROUDHON[15] is the sale of anarchist pictures. Up to 1886 a portrait of Louise Michel was the only picture published under anarchist auspices. In that year La Révolte (now Les Temps Nouveaux), having become convinced of the proselyting value of pictures, attempted to buy for reproduction such of the plates of the illustrated weekly L’Illustration as had or could be given a revolutionary meaning. This attempt failing, it set about producing a series of pictures of its own called Images de Propagande, to be sold at prices ranging from ten to twenty-five sous. These Images de Propagande are all genuine works of art by artists of renown, and the complete collection is much sought by amateurs. The Temps Nouveaux has also turned to the advantage of the propaganda the illustrated postal card fever, and has prepared a series of anarchist pictures especially for children.

The pictorial propaganda has gained even the provinces. The following is an excerpt from an anarchist periodical:—

“The camarades of Roubaix will soon enter into possession of their little press. For a long while they have ardently desired a press, but some efforts still remain to be made. If we make a pecuniary appeal to the camarades, it is that we may get together more quickly the sum necessary for the purchase.... To hasten matters, if possible, a Roubaisien camarade has had the idea of photographing on a plaque of good size (18 by 24 centimetres) the engraving representing the Chicago martyrdom and a drawing with the portraits of Emile Henry,[16] Caserio,[17] and Angiolillo on a plaque of 9 by 12 centimetres. Price, Martyrs of Chicago, fr. 1.40, postpaid; Henri, Caserio, Angiolillo, 85 centimes, postpaid. Send orders to,” etc.

There is probably no greater obstacle to the progress of the written propaganda than the perpetual petty annoyances that arise from an inadequacy of funds. It is by no means the only one. The anarchist who has already in hand the means to pay for having his journal printed is often unable to find a printer who will undertake the work. “The copains of Grenoble,”—the item is from a trimardeur’s report,—“after having done everything in their power to launch their paper, rebuffed by all the printers (downright refusal, exorbitant charge, etc.), have decided to buy a mimeograph and to autograph manifests, which they will sow broadcast.”

Supposing his journal printed, however, the anarchist editor is still far from the end of his troubles. He has to get it properly distributed; and in this undertaking, likewise, he encounters numerous difficulties.

It is so compromising in every way

LITTLE ANARCHISTS to be known as a reader of an anarchist publication that few even of the sympathetically inclined, unless they have a pronounced taste for martyrdom, care to lower themselves in the eyes of their postman, their concièrge, and their neighbours, and to run the risk of being black listed in all quarters by receiving an anarchist paper regularly through the post. Besides, they have a perfectly natural reluctance to pay in advance the subscription price of three months, six months, or a year, for a paper that may not be able to keep alive two months. They prefer to buy the numbers at the news-stands as they come out,—a procedure which not only considerably diminishes the publisher’s net returns, but keeps him in a highly inconvenient uncertainty with regard to his budget. In some years the news-stand sale of the Temps Nouveaux, for instance, has been nine-tenths of the whole circulation.

This very news-stand sale is lessened by the indifference or positive ill-will of the newsdealers, who either decline to handle anarchist papers at all; or, if they do handle them, contrive to keep them well out of view. Furthermore, the railway and post-office authorities take a mischievous or malignant delight in delaying the delivery of anarchist printed matter when they cannot find pretexts for holding it up altogether.

“We receive frequent complaints, which we know are justified for the most part,” says Le Libertaire, “on account of tardiness in the arrival of our paper. We assure our dealers and subscribers that the journal is sent out regularly every Thursday, barring the weeks when money is lacking. Consequently, it is to the malice of the railroads and the post-office that the delay must be ascribed.”

To counteract these and other hindrances to the sale of their wares, anarchist editors have to resort to numerous devices. These devices may be in the form of stereotyped requests to readers to secure other readers, and to force the hands of the dealers, of which the following are good examples:—

“Friends and Readers,

“If you would be useful to the Journal du Peuple, and serve the ideas which it defends, buy several copies and distribute them to the persons whom you judge capable of buying it later for themselves.”

“We urge our friends in Paris to keep demanding our paper of the newsdealers in order to compel them to handle it. A bit of determination on the part of each, and ça ira.”

Often the advertisement appears as a more presuming and exacting appeal to loyalty, as, for example:—

“Our liquidation of the end of the year permits us to spare a quantity of back numbers. We beg those of our friends who are willing to take upon themselves their distribution, either in the meetings or at the doors of the factories, to let us know how many copies to send them.”

At other times, resort is taken to such original and audacious schemes as the following:—

“Journals for All

“The reactionary press penetrates into the rural districts, while many of the libertaire journals are unknown there. We remind our readers that the enterprise ‘Journals for All,’ 17 rue Cujas, holds itself at their disposition to give them the addresses of poor provincials who would be delighted to receive their papers once they have been read. It will cost them a stamp of two centimes each day and the trouble of wrapping and addressing. In thus sending away their papers, our readers will be doing a work highly advantageous to the propaganda. Write the secretary for fuller particulars.”

“Here is a means of circulating our paper which, employed upon a certain scale, would be highly efficacious: All the camarades who can make the sacrifice of a certain number of copies should roll them into a more or less tempting small package, wrap them well to protect them, and then throw them into the doorways of houses, slip them into the baskets of women on their way to or from market, or give them to the children in the street to take home to their parents.”

Finally, the wily stratagems of a determined and not over-scrupulous secret police and the special rigour of a body of more or less biased judges in applying Draconian laws of exception must be reckoned with. In no department of their work do the former display more cunning or the latter more severity. Nevertheless, they have never been able, combined, to prevail over the intensity of the anarchist proselyting spirit far enough to prevent for any length of time the spread of the written word. Trick has been matched by trick and audacity by audacity. The defiance with which the authorities are met is well typified by the following manifesto:—

“Readers and Subscribers of L’Insurgé, take notice!

“We announce to our readers that we shall not be able to appear this week; but, in spite of all the rascalities of the government, we intend to appear in the breach again very soon. Vive l’homme libre dans l’humanité libre! Vive l’Anarchie!

“Santaville
“[Managing Editor of L’Insurgé].”

Previous to 1881 the press law was such that a condemned journal was forced to change its name, if it wished to reappear; and the tradition survives of an anarchist sheet at Lyons which suffered eighteen successive condemnations (involving for the managing editors imprisonment for terms varying from six months to two years), and which, therefore, bore successively eighteen different names.

After 1881 until the passage of the special anarchist restrictive acts popularly known as the Lois Scélérates, a journal could pass through any number of condemnations without losing its identity; the guilt of the responsible editor being held as purely personal. It was during this golden age of relative liberty that the Père Peinard saw ten of its managing editors condemned within three years—as a cavalry officer leading a charge may see horses shot out from under him—without having its advance materially impeded.

“Once the condemned editor was out of the way,” says a writer familiar with the administration of this curious journal, “it was as if no condemnation had intervened. There was somewhere on the trimard in France or abroad an anarchist who owed to the state two years of Ste. Pélagie and a 3,000-franc fine,[18] but the journal was not touched. Le Père Peinard remained unassailable....

“From the number and the gravity of the sentences imposed it would seem that the Père Peinard must have experienced great difficulty in the recruitment of its editors or that it must have paid them enormous salaries. Quite the reverse. The fanaticism of the anarchists was such that they vied with each other in imploring of Pouget the favour of a chance to be condemned. At any given moment several were impatiently awaiting their turn. Never did the Père Peinard pay one of its editors. Never did it even allow him a free subscription. The editor of the Père Peinard was a special type, a volunteer of the assize court, who went to the prison as water goes to the river, and who pushed his disinterestedness to the point of buying his own paper—two sous out of his pocket—every Sunday.”

Under the present laws it would be more difficult for so saucy and reckless a sheet as the Père Peinard to keep up its laughter over the discomfiture of the authorities; that is, if it were printed in France.

To-day a paper of this sort, to appear here with anything like an approach to regularity, would have to be printed in some foreign town that is tolerant towards anarchists, and smuggled through the mails inside of other journals or in covers with unsuspicious titles. This propaganda at long range is too expensive to be carried on in a wholesale fashion. It has its periods of favour, however, and is never totally neglected. Apropos of unsuspicious cover titles, it is on record that the journal L’Internationale, which used to be printed in the French colony of London, regaled the prying eyes of the French post-office employees and the police with such more than reputable inscriptions as these: Mandement de S. E. le Cardinal Manning, Petit Traité de Géographie, Rapport sur la Question du Tunnel Sous-Marin, Contes Traduits de Dickens, Lettres d’un Pasteur sur la Sainte Bible.

Once, at least,—more than once, it is probable,—anarchist doctrines have been preached in a journal founded and supported by the prefecture of police,—an ideal arrangement, it would seem, since both parties thereto find their account therein, the anarchists in having a chance to say their say without grubbing for funds, and the police in having large occasion for self-felicitation over their shrewdness in keeping the anarchists under strict surveillance.

The practical impossibility of carrying on a journal successfully without a permanent and known office, subscription lists, and the assistance of the newsdealers, has made the anarchist resort to the secret issue by unknown presses of placards and hand-bills whenever he has anything very special or very incendiary to say,—particularly at election time, when he is exceedingly active in preaching abstention from the polls, and during the enrolment and departure of the conscripts. The police will tear down the placards, of course, but rarely before they have been read; and they may arrest the distributors of the fliers, but this does not recall the fliers which have been put forth. More than this they cannot do, since either there is no printer’s mark to guide them or, if one appears, it is false or fantastic, such as “117 rue de la Liberté, ville de la Fraternité, Etats-Unis de l’Humanité, Département de l’Egalité.”

The tantalising documents float into the streets quietly and gently like snowflakes, before the very eyes of the police, and are irresponsible as snowflakes, having nothing more than these about them to indicate their itinerary or origin.

Here is an election placard which may serve as a sample:—

“A BAS LA CHAMBRE!

“People, retake your liberty, your initiative, and keep them. The Government is the valet of Capital. Down with the Government! Down with the king, Loubet! To the sewer with the Senate! To the river with the Chamber! To the dunghill with all this ancient social rottenness! Away with the Chamber! Away with the Senate! Away with the Presidency! Away with Capital!

“Vive la Révolution Sociale! Vive l’Anarchie!

“(Signed) An Anarchist Group.”

In the view of the larger-minded anarchists—the Reclus, the Kropotkines, the Graves—the betterment of society must be preceded by the betterment of the individuals that make up society. Education is the corner-stone of the structure their hope has builded. They realise that they have undertaken a moral and intellectual labour of long reach, calling for infinite energy and patience, for years and perhaps generations of scattered, seemingly bootless initiative, exhortation, and example. So far as these leaders are concerned, no charge could well be falser than the one that is daily being brought against them of ignoring the calendar in all their calculations, juggling with an abstract social man,—very much as the elder economists juggled with their “economic man,”—and expecting with childlike naïveté to make human nature and the world over in a twinkling.

“For the establishment of the anarchist society,” says Jean Grave, “it is necessary that each individual taken separately be able to govern himself, that he knows how to make his autonomy respected while respecting the autonomy of others, and that he succeeds in liberating his volition from the tyranny of surrounding influences....

... “Now for individuals to dispense with authority, for each one to be able to exercise his autonomy without coming into conflict with his fellows, it is essential that we all acquire a mentality appropriate to this state of things.”

The thoughtful anarchist is well aware that, for the production of this appropriate mentality, his placards, posters, and hand-bills, his pictures and chansons, his weeklies, monthlies, and annuals, are ludicrously inadequate and inapt. He is far from despising these agencies. He recognises their value as popularisers and as ferment; but he is struggling towards a propaganda of a deeper, more compelling nature as rapidly as he is able. He would (like the devout Catholic) assume complete control of the mental training of his children, taking them out of the public schools, which impose respect for his two bugbears—authority and property—along with other bourgeois commonplaces and superstitions, in order to give, in schools of his own, the complete, well-rounded education which he calls l’éducation intégrale.

M. Paul Robin, who made a passably successful experiment with this éducation intégrale at the Prévost Orphanage, Cempuis,[19] during the years 1880 to 1894, has expounded the meaning of the phrase in an article which it would be a real pleasure to quote entire. A few paragraphs will suffice, however, to reveal the loftiness, the sweetness, and the eminent sanity of his ideas:—

“The word intégrale, applied to education, includes the three epithets, physical, intellectual, and moral, and indicates further the continuous relations between these three divisions.

“L’éducation intégrale is not the forced accumulation of an infinite number of notions upon all things: it is the culture, the harmonious development, of all the faculties of the human being,—health, vigour, beauty, intelligence, goodness....

“L’éducation physique embraces muscular and cerebral development. It satisfies the need of exercise of all our organs, passive as well as active,—a need given the authority of law by physiology. To note this development and to learn to direct it with prudence, anthropometric observations should be made and anthropometric statistics continuously kept.

“The exercise of the senses, the calculations necessary in sports and in physical exertion of every sort,—races, workshop labour, etc.,—have their influence on the intellect, and render attractive certain tasks often considered repulsive because of the awkward manner in which they have been approached.

“L’éducation intellectuelle has to do with two totally distinct matters,—matters of opinion, variable, debatable, the cause of quarrels, antagonisms, rivalries; and matters of fact, of observation, of experience, whose solutions are identical for all beings. The old teaching occupied itself almost entirely with the first matters to the neglect of the second. The new teaching, on the contrary, should diminish as much as possible the number and prominence of the first in favour of the second. In whatever of the first is of necessity retained, notably the acquisition of languages, it should limit itself to the purely practical side, and reserve the study of the complicated, illogical evolution of language for a small, selected group of adults who are well grounded in the sciences....

... “On the other hand, the study of nature, of industry (by its practice in workshops), of the sciences (in laboratories and observatories), gives to the brain a harmonious development, makes it well balanced, and imparts a great justness of judgment. Theoretical study in books should only come after the excitation given by real practice, to supplement and co-ordinate the elements which the practice has furnished. From this concordance in the knowledge and appreciation of real facts results inevitably a tendency to concord upon all other matters; that is to say, veritable social peace....

“It should not be forgotten that the éducation intégrale, physique, and intellectuelle, must combine knowledge and art, the knowing and the doing.

“A genuine intégral is at once theorician and practician. He unites the two qualities systematically separated by the official routine, which maintains, on the one side, primary and professional instruction, and, on the other, secondary and higher instruction. His is the brain that directs and the hand that executes. He is at one and the same time artisan and savant.

“There is no need of detailing at length a programme of moral education. Morality, like reason, is a resultant: it depends on the ensemble. The part of teaching in it is slight. The child assimilates in the measure of his intellectual development ideas of social reciprocity and of goodness; but moral education is especially a work of influence, the consequence of a normal existence in a normal environment. The physiological régime and the general direction given to the thoughts by the teaching as a whole are its principal elements.

“Great care should be taken to exclude false, demoralising ideas, narrowing prejudices, dismaying impressions, everything that can throw the imagination out of the true into trouble and disorder, morbid suggestions and excitation to vanity; to suppress occasions of rivalry and jealousy; to assure the continual view of calm, ordered, and natural things; to organise a simple, occupied, animated, varied life, divided between play and work. The progressive usage of liberty and of responsibility should be developed, preaching should be done mainly by example, and, above all, an effort should be put forth to make happiness prevail....

“As to the inferior, backward, degenerate children,—sad consequences of a succession of hereditary blights, aggravated by deplorable, haphazard births and a heels-over-head education,—these are moral invalids, for whom it is necessary to care with compassion and of whom almost nothing should be demanded. It is necessary, doubtless, to take, with all possible humanity, precautions to prevent their injuring or contaminating the others; but one must guard one’s self well against believing that he has the right to punish them because of a nature for which they are not responsible.”

Apart from this one notable experiment, little or nothing has as yet been done in Paris or elsewhere in France towards the systematic application of l’éducation intégrale. The anarchist school, rather pretentiously called a college (le Collège Libertaire), opened in 1901 on the edge of the university quarter of Paris, has only succeeded so far in establishing a few evening courses for adults, the lack of funds that handicaps every anarchistic enterprise being supplemented in this case by the difficulty of securing proper teachers, because of the danger, amounting almost to a certainty, of loss of position, if regularly employed teachers lend themselves to a revolutionary enterprise. The recent foundation by the anarchists of a child’s paper, Jean-Pierre, is an interesting experiment along this educational line.

While waiting for the éducation intégrale to win its way, the more intellectual anarchists are making a strong effort to increase the study of the masters and of the forerunners and disciples of the masters. To this end the principal anarchist organs, especially the Temps Nouveaux, keep on sale and persistently recommend the reading of the works of the principal dead and living authors, native and foreign, who have expounded anarchy or who tend—or are claimed to tend—towards anarchy: Proudhon, Stirner, and Bakounine; Darwin, Büchner, Herzen, Godwin, and Herbert Spencer; Ibsen, Björnson, Tolstoy, Leopardi, and Nietzsche; Louise Michel, Elisée Reclus, Jean Grave, and Kropotkine; the anti-militarists Richet, Dubois-Dessaule, Vallier, and Urbain Gohier; the sociologists Charles-Albert and Jules Huret; the philosophers Guy and Letourneau; Lefèvre, the student of comparative religions; Guyau, the moralist; the novelists and dramatists Marsolleau, Darien, Descaves, Chèze, Raganasse, Lami, Lumet, and Ajalbert; the Italian Malato, the German Eltzbacher, the Hollander Nieuwenhuis, the American Tucker, and the Spaniard Tarrida del Marmol.

Furthermore, selected portions from nearly all these writers and from Hamon, Saurin, Malatesta, Tcherkesoff, Janvion, Chaughi, Darnaud, Sébastien Faure, Lavroff, Paul Delasalle, and Cafiero, are published, as brochures in editions running as high as sixty thousand and at prices ranging from one sou to fifteen sous (usually two sous) each, so that for a total outlay of two or three francs those who have not the means to buy or the application to read the fr. 3.50 volumes may familiarise themselves with anarchist thought in all its most important bearings. The real nature of the contents of some of the brochures is disguised by the use of innocuous titles. Thus a certain appeal to desertion from the army bears on its cover this inscription: “Pour la Défense des Intérêts Typographiques.”

Unlike the placards, posters, and hand-bills, most of the brochures are restrained in tone. Now and then, however, an anonymous brochure is issued from nobody knows what printing establishment that startles the public and puts the policy on its mettle. The most famous of these (worth its weight in gold now to bibliophiles for its rarity) is the Indicateur Anarchiste: Manuel du Parfait Dynamiteur (40 pages, published 1887).

The Indicateur Anarchiste was practically a reprint of a series of articles that had appeared in the London journal, L’Internationale,[20] under the rubric “Un Cours de Chimie Pratique,” which articles were in their turn practically a reprint of a series that appeared in La Lutte of Lyons under the rubric “Produits Anti-Bourgeois.” They included minute directions for the fabrication and use of several explosives and of Greek fire, the common and scientific names and the prices of their ingredients, and a detailed description of the tools and vessels best adapted to the various necessary processes. The announcement of the original series in La Lutte was as follows:—

“Produits Anti-Bourgeois

“Under this heading we shall put before our friends the inflammable and explosive materials which are the best known, the easiest to handle and prepare,—in a word, the most useful. These preparations are not classical. If we point them out to the camarades notwithstanding, it is because we have discovered that they are superior to others and offer less danger.

“We shall mention only the most indispensable products, and yet these are unknown to many of the camarades. In the approaching conflict each one must be a bit of a chemist. This is why it is high time to take matters into our own hands, and demonstrate to the bourgeois that what we want we want in earnest.”

The excitement aroused by the publication and general circulation of this ominous brochure proved to be well-nigh gratuitous. Experience has demonstrated that in France, where the most scholarly anarchists are little inclined to participate in the propagande par le fait,[21] the majority of dynamiters are forced (like Salvat in Zola’s Paris), to steal their explosives. They are not capable of putting the precepts of this so-called popular manual, rudimentary as they appear, into practice; the required manipulations, even when reduced to their simplest terms, being too dangerous and delicate for any but laboratory trained hands to execute.

“The battles of the heroes of the future will be individualistic, not against the armed force of governments but against the apathetic routine and inertia of the human masses.”—Edward Carpenter.

Chapter IV

THE PROPAGANDA OF ANARCHY BY EXAMPLE

“As a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.”

Isaiah.

“Resist not evil.”
“Swear not at all.”
“Judge not that ye be not judged.”
“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast and give to the poor.”
“Ye shall know them by their fruits.”—Jesus Christ.

“And when He was accused of the chief priests and elders, He answered nothing.”—Saint Matthew.

“The most dangerous foe to truth and freedom among us is the solid majority.... The majority has might,—unhappily,—but right it has not. I, and the few, the individuals, are right.”

Dr. Stockman, in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.

“Should you say to him, ‘But you injure your brother men by accepting a remuneration below the value of your labour, and you sin against God and your own soul by obeying laws which are unjust,’ he will answer you with the fixed gaze of one who understands you not.... Human laws are only good and valid in so far as they conform to, explain, and apply the law of God. They are evil whensoever they contrast with or oppose it; and it is then not only your right, but your duty, to disobey and abolish them.”—Mazzini.

“To profit by all the circumstances of life, to make one’s acts accord with one’s ideas, is to carry on a propagande par le fait of a slow but continuous action which must produce its results.”—

Jean Grave.

WHEN that great and original child of nature, Thoreau, the Hermit of Walden, protested against the collection of taxes in Concord town, he little suspected, probably, that he was prefiguring a revolutionary movement which, before the century was over, was to alarm the sleek and the smug of the Old World and the New; and yet, whether Thoreau realised it or not, his attitude was the anarchistic attitude and his act an act of the propagande par l’exemple.

The attitude of the American anti-slavery champion, William Lloyd Garrison, was also essentially anarchistic.

“Garrison,” says Tolstoy, “as a man enlightened by Christianity, starting out with a practical aim,—the struggle against slavery,—understood very soon that the cause of slavery was not a casual, temporary seizure of several millions of negroes by the Southerners, but an old and universal anti-Christian recognition of the right of violence of some people over others. The means towards the recognition of this right was always the evil, which people considered possible to outroot or to lessen by rude force; that is, again by evil. And, realising this, Garrison pointed out against slavery, not the sufferings of the slaves, not the cruelty of the slave-owners, not the equal rights of citizens, but the eternal Christian law of non-resistance. Garrison understood that which the most forward champions against slavery failed to understand,—that the sole irresistible means against slavery was the denial of the right of one man over the liberty of another under any circumstances whatever.

“The Abolitionists attempted to prove that slavery was illegal, unprofitable, cruel, degrading, and so forth; but the pro-slavery champions, in their turn, proved the untimeliness, the danger, and the harmful consequences which would arise from the abolition of slavery. And neither could convince the other. But Garrison, understanding that the slavery of the negroes was but a private case of general violence, put forth the general principle with which it was impossible to disagree,—that no one, under any pretext, has the right of ruling; that is, of using force over his equals. Garrison did not insist so much on the right of slaves to be free as he denied the right of any man whatever, or of any company of men, to compel another man to do anything by force. For the battle with slavery he put forth the principle of the battle with all the evil of the world.”

The refusal of the citizens of the little French commune of Counozouls to pay their taxes between 1902 and 1904 because they were deprived of their hereditary right to supply themselves with wood from an adjacent forest, and the “passive resistance” of the nonconformists in England to the enforcement of the new education act, and of the French Catholics to the expulsion of the monastic orders, are recent instances of probably unconscious propagande par l’exemple.

Tolstoy has made a clear and full statement of the purport of the propagande par l’exemple.

“Taxes,” he says, “were never instituted by common consent, ... but are taken by those who have the power of taking them.... A man should not voluntarily pay taxes to governments either directly or indirectly; nor should he accept money collected by taxes either as salary or as pension or as a reward; nor should he make use of governmental institutions supported by taxes, since they are collected by violence from the people.”

He holds military service in similar abhorrence:—

“Every honest man ought to understand that the payment of taxes which are employed to maintain and arm soldiers, and, still more, serving in the army, are not indifferent acts, but wicked and shameful acts, since he who commits them not only permits assassination, but participates in it.”

In an apologue, “Too Dear,” he demonstrates that law courts, prisons, and armies are alike useless to a sound civilisation. In short, Tolstoy renounces the state, and prays for its extinction, root and branch:—

“The doctrine of humility, pardon, and love, is incompatible with the state, with its arrogance, its deeds of violence, its executions, its wars. Real Christianity not only excludes the possibility of acknowledging the state, but also destroys its foundation.... The sum of all the evil possible to the people, if left to themselves, could not equal the sum of the evil actually accomplished by the tyranny of church and state.”

What could a militant anarchist say more? And there is no limit to the extent to which these anarchistic utterances of Tolstoy might be multiplied.

Most French anarchists believe that the privileged will never surrender their privileges without a desperate resistance. Only a little handful of them are Tolstoyans in maintaining that simple non-resistance faithfully adhered to will alone suffice to regenerate the world. But they nearly all hold that cumulative non-resistance is, under certain conditions, the most effective resistance (”faire le vide autour des institutions sociales est le meilleur moyen de les démolir”); and a majority of them, probably,—certainly a majority of their more intellectual element,—esteem it by far the most important propaganda for the present hour.

The average French anarchist is forced to recognise at the outset the unpalatable truth that a good half of his customary doings are based on the government and property he opposes. He rejects the theory of money, but he must buy and sell. He abhors the state, but serves it, and uses its tax-supported institutions; and he is constantly finding himself in situations where he must do violence to his inmost convictions, or get out of life altogether by the portals of suicide or want. There are some unorthodox doings, however, which can be avoided without incurring a martyrdom out of all decent proportion to the seriousness of the occasion.

“If the force of power crushes you to-day, if, in spite of everything, authority fetters you in your evolution, there is always a certain margin for resistance. Fill this margin without being afraid of overstepping it,” advises one of the moderate advocates of the propagande par l’exemple.

The two forms of non-resistance oftenest enjoined by Tolstoy (namely, non-payment of taxes and refusal to serve in the army) are so disastrous in their consequences—as Tolstoy himself would have seen, had he not been born into a high estate and had he not attained a ripe age and an assured position before his revolutionary ideas completely matured—that they can hardly be said to come within this margin. And they are inculcated in France less with a view to inciting isolated individuals to put them into practice immediately than in the hope that a day may arrive when they will be suddenly put into practice simultaneously by so large a number of persons that coercion will be out of the question.

Similarly, refusal to handle money, to pay interest, to pay rent, to take oath, to testify in court, and to do jury duty, call down such speedy retribution that these, too, must be interpreted as lying in the generality of cases outside the margin mentioned above.

On the other hand, protest against parliamentarianism by abstention from voting (la propagande abstentionniste) is a thoroughly feasible kind of non-resistance, and is practised almost universally by the anarchists of France.

“If we seek,” says Jean Grave, “to faire le vide around the political machine, it is to the end of not forfeiting our right to act by and for ourselves. It is to preserve our liberty of action that we reject every compromise with the actual political order of things. It is to habituate ourselves to this liberty which is the summum of our aspirations that we attempt to exercise it in our struggle against the present social state. To the individuals whom they wish to enlist under their banner, the advocates of authority say, ‘Send us to the Chamber to make laws in your favour!’

“To those whom they wish to make think, the anarchists, after having exposed the facts, explain that they have no favours to expect from anybody; and that, when a thing seems to them bad, the best way to destroy it is to ‘faire le vide’ about it; ... that they never await from the good pleasure of their masters the authorisation to conform their acts to their thoughts; and that they commission nobody to legislate as to what they should do.”

Abstention from marriage (which, as ordinarily practised, the anarchist considers legalised prostitution, and the theoretical indissolubility of which he regards as nothing short of blasphemy) is another thoroughly feasible kind of non-resistance. And it is rare to find an anarchist, whose marital status was not fixed before he gave in his adherence to anarchism, who deigns to consult the pleasure or implore the blessing of any authority whatsoever in a matter which, to his thinking, concerns no one but himself and the person of his choice.[22]

Malthusianism, also,—in spite of a reverence for the procreative instinct, on the part of anarchists, which Zola’s Fécondité does not surpass,—is in high favour in anarchistic circles. The motives for the anarchist’s refusal to bring offspring into the world are set forth in Octave Mirbeau’s ejaculation of disgust called out by a project of law for checking depopulation introduced by one M. Piot into the Senate:—

“I dispute that depopulation is an evil. In a social state like ours, in a social state which fosters preciously, scientifically, in special cultures, poverty and its derivative, crime; in a social state which, in spite of new investigations and in spite of new philosophies, relies solely on the prehistoric forces,—murder and massacre,—what matters to the people—the only class, for that matter, which still produces children—this much-discussed question of depopulation? If the people were clairvoyant, logical with their wretchedness and their servitude, they would desire, not the cessation of depopulation, but its redoubling. We are constantly being told that depopulation is the gravest danger which threatens the future of the country. In what, pray, dear Monsieur Piot, and you, also, excellent legislators, who lull us ceaselessly with your twaddle? In this, you say, that there will come inevitably a time when we shall no more have enough men to send out to be killed in the Soudan, in Madagascar, in China, in the bagnes, and in the barracks. You are dreaming of repeopling now, then, only for the sake of depeopling later on? Ah, no, thank you. If we must die, we like better to die at once and by a death of our own choosing.”

Besides discountenancing elections and marriage, the zealous propagandist par l’exemple flouts “those whose sole power lies in the obedience of cringers”; defies “those whose character he despises”; refuses to go to law or to accept interest for loans; abstains from the luxuries which the bourgeois deems indispensable; protests against insolence on the part of government functionaries, brutality, high-handed invasion of domiciles, and insults to women on the part of the police, cruelty on the part of landlords, and bulldozing on the part of foremen and employers. He violates deliberately the deep-seated social usages which, equally with the political, judicial, and economic usages, twist and warp existence; and strives to keep himself in his labour, his friendships, and his domestic relations “saturated with aversion for the bourgeois, and for whatever in existence savours of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, and with a sentiment of solidarity towards all who are struggling for sincere living.”

“There is a view [of culture],” says Matthew Arnold in his immortal essay Sweetness and Light, “in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it,—motives eminently such as are called social,—come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is, then, properly described, not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection: it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good.”

Something of the same noble and refined philosophy underlies this insistence, by the greater anarchist teachers, on the proselyting value of truth of intercourse and of downright living and on the consequent necessity of the training and purifying of the individual as the surest means of changing a social milieu. In the individual refusal to live the “conventional lies” which Max Nordau (who has long trembled on the verge of anarchism) anathematised is a real disintegrating force. “We must begin with ourselves,” says Jean Grave, “in our efforts at transformation.” And it is sure that the saintliness of Louise Michel, the fine simplicity and modesty of Elisée Reclus, the voluntary poverty of the gentle Jean Grave, and the unobtrusive virtues of their obscure disciples are factors of tremendous importance to the anarchist movement. Dialectics are powerless before the blameless living of such real apostles of “sweetness and light.” They may not have the whole truth,—they would be the last to claim that they have,—but there must be some shred of truth in a belief that is thus witnessed by beautiful character.

In pinning so much of their faith to the gradual modification of daily habits of thinking and acting, these anarchists reveal themselves no mean psychologists and no ordinary students of human nature; and it is regarding this relatively prosaic propagande par l’exemple that the choicest anarchist spirits have spoken their most sagacious and most winning words.

Thus, the late Pierre Lavroff wrote: “There exists another form of propaganda accessible to all temperaments, provided the conviction be sincere; and many times this form, though wanting the éclat which accompanies the burning word or the heroic act, proves to be the most efficacious in the life of every day.

... “The conditions of the actual social régime oppose themselves at every instant to a life in conformity with conviction more than the juridical conditions retard the extension of advanced ideas and more than the police surveillance prevents the revolutionary agitation.

“It has often been remarked that the most considerable transformations in the ideas of society have occurred, not because the arguments which were advanced against existing forms and beliefs had acquired more force, but in consequence of an insensible modification in mental habits. During entire centuries the same arguments were repeated; but the habits of thought acted as a cuirass, and repulsed for a long time all the attacks made against error. Then, at a given moment, this cuirass yielded, all at once, without any apparent cause. Religious doubt, political liberalism, the propaganda of socialism, are more or less prominent examples. The heroic acts which strike the imagination merely prepare a soil which befits these changes. The great majority lets itself—and will a long time yet let itself—be guided by habits. Arguments make no great impression upon it. It modifies its customs by imitation alone. In the case of heroic acts this imitation extends only to individuals exceptionally placed. Its veritable domain is the daily living. Every new doctrine which embraces practical moral elements must provide a series of models which may be imitated, not by an exceptional hero, but by an ordinary man. The numerous examples incorporate the new doctrine into the daily life. They are, broadly speaking, the most efficacious propagandists of new ideas. Truth realising itself in living is much more accessible than truth in a state of thought. The ideas which an individual propagates act upon a small number, upon the best prepared. A way of life is less conspicuous, but exercises a more intense action on the masses. The propaganda carried on by the daily example is the most potent auxiliary of the spoken word. It surpasses often in influence the most energetic agitation directed against an existing evil....

“For the majority of men the propagande par l’exemple is the only form which makes tangible the spoken propaganda. It alone changes the habits of thinking and living. It produces, in fact, a modification of the psychic dispositions of society; and it opens the way for society to be influenced by the energetic acts of exceptional individuals, for whom it prepares a receptive soil.”

Before words of such keen observation and high moral and philosophic import from men who have not forgotten how to think because they seem sometimes to dream, only an attitude of reverence is possible; and the admission is forced that some of these anarchists are not so very flighty, after all, and that some of them are “not so bent on acting and instituting, even with the great aim of diminishing human error and misery ever before their thoughts, but that they can remember that acting and instituting are of little use, unless they know how and what they ought to act and institute.”

Another manifestation of the propagande par l’exemple has been the creation, in France and abroad, of anarchist experiment stations where an effort has been made to realise on a small scale, by isolation from the world at large, the social arrangements which are, on a large scale, the anarchist dream.

The agricultural colony founded in Algeria by M. Regnier, one of the sons-in-law of Elisée Reclus, seems to have been the only really successful venture in this line; and I am not sure whether even this is still in existence.

The other anarchist colonies set up abroad—notably La Colonie Cecilia, which was one of the by-products of the emigration from France to South America—have all come to more or less speedy grief.

The reasons are not far to seek. The colonists were totally ignorant of the regions to which they emigrated. They looked to find easier living and well-nigh perfect liberty, and were amazed and disillusionised when they discovered that conditions were not so very different under these new civilisations from what they were under the old.

They were ignorant of each other. No selection having been exercised in forming the groups, the orthodox were overshadowed by the heterodox and by adventurers who were not anarchists at all; and many even of the orthodox were too timorous or too weary to resume, under new skies, the struggle which they fancied, in quitting Europe, they had left behind forever. Misunderstandings, disputes, and even spoliation were the natural result.

They were farther handicapped by a lack of preliminary funds for their installations, by the absence of the appliances of civilisation to which they were accustomed, and by unfamiliarity with the agriculture or other work they had to do.

But the primary reason—the reason which may indeed be said to include all the other reasons—for the failure of the French anarchist colonies in foreign lands is that the transition the colonists were called upon to make was far too abrupt. As Jean Grave has pointed out in this connection, “People cannot pass thus brusquely from a society where fighting and egoism are obligatory on every being to a society where the relations between individuals are those of love, of sympathy, of benevolence, of solidarity, where you take no heed of the faults of those who surround you, ignoring the follies of your neighbours while they ignore yours. The existing social state has in no way prepared us for solidarity and benevolence.”

The French attempts to found anarchist colonies at home have fared little, if any, better than the attempts to found them abroad.

A communistic workshop, opened in Paris in 1885 by a number of anarchistic tailors whom a strike had left without employment, was closed at the end of a year; but whether by reason of internal disagreements or by reason of the intrigues of interested employers it is not easy, from the evidence, to determine. The product was divided equally among all the members of the association,—the unskilled, the sick, the aged, and the impotent included.

The anarchist Commune de Montreuil (said to be the original of the phalanstère of Descaves’ and Donnay’s highly successful play, La Clairière) was established in 1892 at Montreuil-sous-Bois, a suburb of Paris. A workshop was rented in which the members spent all the time they could spare from their regular employments in working for the benefit of those who might be in need, and Saturday lectures were given. The plans involved, further, hiring a piece of ground to be cultivated for a similar purpose in a similar fashion, a gradual cessation of working for employers as occasion permitted and results warranted, a school for children, and a library for adults. These plans were frustrated, not by the petty rivalries of the women (as in the Descaves-Donnay play), but by the dissolution of the Commune by the government as a part of the wholesale anarchist repressions of 1893-94. Some of the original members of the Commune de Montreuil have since banded themselves together for an exchange of services with the idea of habituating themselves to make and utilise products “without commercial exchange, representative value, or appraisal”; but the exchangers remain in their respective homes.

At Angers, in the Maine-et-Loire, a department remote from Paris, a number of anarchist workingmen pledged themselves some time since to divide their wages at the end of each week “in order to equalise the conditions of existence.”

It is impossible to draw any conclusion whatsoever from experiments that are so partial as these and that have been conducted under such unfavourable conditions.

In the two great modern industrial reform movements—trade-unionism and co-operation—the anarchist finds other fields for the propagande par l’exemple.

He is bound to look askance at trade-unions, and, if a purist, to hold himself aloof from them, because by the very fact of trying to raise wages they recognise the legitimacy of the wage system, and because they often resort to politics, and implore the intervention of parliament to gain their ends.

“The unions are wheels in the capitalistic machine because they are placed—if only temporarily—under the conditions of the capitalistic system,” says one. “To accept discussion with one’s exploiters is to confess their right to exploitation,” says another. “The raison d’être of the union is to negotiate with the employers, to quibble over the greater or less degree of exploitation; while an anarchist should aim only at the destruction of this exploitation,” says still another.

Regarding the efficiency of trade-unions as a means of permanently bettering the conditions of the working classes, to say nothing of insuring their emancipation, the anarchist has no illusions. On the contrary, he does them scanter justice than even the capitalist, who, however he may antagonise them, at least pays them the sincere compliment of fearing them. The anarchist has not a particle of faith in trade-unionism as such. He is more orthodox than the most orthodox of economists as to the iron law of wages (la loi d’airain des salaires), the inexorableness of the operation of supply and demand, and the impotence of strikes. He maintains stoutly that a so-called trade-union victory can, in the nature of the case, be only the semblance of a victory, since gains cannot be defended, since an increase in wages cannot be maintained, against an unfavourable market, and since, even if it could be maintained, it would be counterbalanced in the long run by the increased cost of living consequent thereon. Whoever would oppose the trade-union theory and practice will find in the anarchist writings and speeches the completest possible arsenal of weapons ready forged to his hand. No apologist for things as they are can have exposed more relentlessly than he the financial foolishness of fighting millions of dollars with hundreds of dollars, and of pitting the danger of actual starvation against the relatively insignificant danger of decreased profits,—of combating strength with weakness, in a word, on the former’s chosen ground.

Nevertheless, the anarchist recognises that the trade-union is a natural grouping of the proletariat; that it was the first important grouping to acknowledge, by acts, the irrepressible conflict between capital and labour, the first to boldly lift and wave the standard of industrial revolt, the first to shift the attempt at enfranchisement from the political to the economic ground, and the first to appreciate the advantages of internationalism; that it is the best considerable example thus far of solidarity in action, the most favourable soil for anarchistic good seed—particularly the good seed of the propagande par l’exemple—within present reach, the most favourable ground for disputing the future with the socialists, and an excellent weapon of offence and defence. And he approves of strikes, with all their demonstrable financial futility, because they keep to the fore the idea of revolt, and because—a sort of left-handed reason—every unsuccessful strike is an argument in his favour, inasmuch as it shows the emptiness of partial measures that do not reach the cause.

Besides, he discerns a trend his way in the growing trade-union advocacy of the “universal strike” (grève universelle or grève générale) which he regards as but another name for the revolution.

At the time of the memorable grève des terrassiers,[23] Gustave Geffroy contributed to Le Journal a sketch entitled “Tableau de Grève,” which is at once a vivid pen-picture and a prophecy:—

“We could easily have believed ourselves, these latter days, borne backward to the days of the siege of Paris or the weeks which followed the time of the Commune, in perceiving above the pedestrians the silhouettes of cavaliers on patrol and the hands of soldiers in campaign accoutrements in the public squares and along the banks of the Seine.... When the redoubtable question of labour and of misère is the order of the day, it is anguish with silence which reigns in the street where pass the soldiers under arms.

“It has been so everywhere this week. About the stacks of arms, along the route of the cavaliers, not a cry has escaped, as if each one, by some tacit understanding, knew that destiny must not be tempted nor risks run. The public regarded without uttering a word, gazed fixedly at these sons of the soil and of the faubourg, wearing uniforms and equipped with provisions and cartridges as if they were entering on a campaign in this peaceful city. Where was the enemy? These strikers, slowly promenading, listlessly dangling their arms,—they who set forth habitually to work, and who return from work with a rapid, cadenced step,—and quite stupefied at having become idle strollers; adversaries little fierce, without arms, without their tools even, having in their favour only their patience, their passivity, their hope, and especially their assurance that sooner or later they will conquer, when all their fellows shall will it like them.

“It is this fatality of the victory of numbers which is the enemy; it is against this that the regiments and the squadrons have been sent out, against this that to-morrow they would have trundled out the artillery. All this parade of force would have been made this time, could have been made, in fact, only in pure loss.... And so it will be—we can now affirm it—on that future day when the grève générale shall be interpreted in this fashion, when there shall be everywhere only dismaying calm, the tragic refusal to work, when the soldiers called out to guarantee order shall find only order everywhere,—placid visages and folded arms. Military display will be useless on that day. The great social change will have come by the fact of that new sort of revolution which a reactionary journalist designated very justly, the other day, by the name of the passive revolution....

... “Ah! the good time when the people offered itself freely as a target on a pile of paving-stones in a narrow street!

“This good time is no more. The great boulevards, the broad avenues, the power of the artillery which can sweep everything from afar without the insurgents seeing anything but the quick flame, the sounding light, the cloud of smoke, were already there to assure the end of the ancient street war. It was not enough. The revolutionary tactics also have changed, in proportion as the revolutionary party has extended, has gained in force, and has become more conscious of its destinies....

“Seek not elsewhere than in a profound transformation of the human mind the cause of the tranquillity of a strike in which we behold the placid confrontation of the workingman and the soldier. For all observers endowed with reason and sang-froid, to whatever party they belong, the spectacle is that of the toiling mass reconnoitring the ground and testing its strength. Nothing less than a pacific and irresistible transformation is announced. Of course, the grève générale can be realised only by an understanding throughout an organisation far-seeing and complete, and then, only, thanks to a certain combination of circumstances; but this is not saying it cannot be realised.

“It is easy to brand such a programme as tainted with Utopia and struck with sterility. But to do so is to refuse to recognise the sense of facts and especially the power of a unique idea. Bear in mind that this idea of the grève générale has already thousands of adherents, not only in France, but in Germany, in England, in America, and you will have some chance of appreciating the significance of the strike of to-day, so different from the strike of yesterday, in spite of a few traditional incidents into which the strikers and the government have been betrayed.”

Geffroy, the writer of the above, is not an anarchist, but a socialist. Few anarchists see in the grève générale, as he does, a purely passive revolution, which will prevail without the shedding of a drop of blood or any other violence whatsoever. Most of its anarchist advocates regard it, “not as a strike of folded arms, but as a general revolt of the proletariat, outside of all political lines, for the conquest of the means of production and for complete emancipation.”

The grève générale apart, the anarchist who enters the trade-union[24] does it, incidentally, perhaps, to rid the union of the curse of politics and to score over the socialists, but primarily to transform it by the influence of precept (and, still more, of example) from “a reform movement for the defence of the material and moral interests of the workers, and especially the satisfaction of such immediate desires as the amelioration of salaries and the diminution of the working day,” into “an economic movement of the working class against the capitalistic class for the suppression of the latter and of the régime which they represent.”

Consequently, anarchist writings are replete with solemn warnings to the faithful against the insidious peril of having anything to do with the unions with any other object in view than that of making them other than they are.

From co-operation, as from trade-unionism, the purists of anarchy keep themselves prudently aloof by reason of the risk of contamination from too close contact with commercial processes and partial measures.

Other anarchists—the majority, perhaps—are still holding co-operation under observation, waiting for it to display more satisfactory credentials before they declare themselves. Thus the Etudiants Socialistes Révolutionnaires Internationalistes[25] “have pronounced for it,” says A. D. Bancel, “all in pronouncing against it.”

Others do not object to participating passively in the movement, so that they are not called on to aid in the work of organisation and serve on boards and committees.

The rest have espoused it with more or less enthusiasm because its efforts are economic rather than political, because it militates against socialism, because it is a phase of the struggle between classes; because it is of a high educational value to the proletariat in showing it its real position; because it fosters internationalism; because its unit, the co-operative group, like the union, is an expression of solidarity, an excellent field for the propagande par l’exemple and a convenient weapon of combat; and finally because its ultimate aim is la liberté intégrale.

There is a pan-coopération as there is a grève universelle. And, as the grève universelle (which is the revolution) is regarded by some as the inevitable consummation of trade-unionism, so la pan-coopération, alias la république coopérative, alias l’alliance coopérative internationale (which is likewise the revolution), is regarded by some as the inevitable consummation of co-operation.

By these latter a critical moment is foreseen when the angry meeting of le capitalisme autoritaire and le coopératisme libertaire will kindle a colossal, world-wide, and purifying conflagration.

Chapter V

THE PROPAGANDA OF ANARCHY “PAR LE FAIT”

“I came not to send peace, but a sword.... I am come to send fire on the earth.”—Jesus Christ.

“It is not by metaphysics that men will be undeceived: the truth must be proven by deeds.”—Voltaire.

“Not songs of loyalty alone are these, But songs of insurrection also, For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over, And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him, And stakes his life to be lost at any moment.” Walt Whitman.

“La force destructive est une force créatice.”—Bakounine.

“If I were dying of starvation, and had no means of buying a piece of bread, and were to go by a baker’s where bread was within reach, I should help myself to it. And the way I should reason would be this: That bread belongs to the baker, but it is more God’s bread than it is the baker’s, and I am one of God’s little boys, and therefore understand the proximity of this loaf to be the answer to the prayer I offered my Father this morning: ‘Give me this day my daily bread.’”—Dr. Charles Parkhurst.

“His [Dr. Parkhurst’s] principle of necessity is one easily misapplied; but it is right, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson’s reply to the man whose excuse for stealing a loaf of bread was that he ‘must live.’ ‘I don’t see the necessity,’ said the rude moralist. And so said the custodian of morality when David stole the shew-bread for his starving soldiers; but our Lord said he did right.”—Editorial in New York Independent.

“I hold it blasphemy that a man ought not to fight against authority. There is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it in the beginning.”—George Eliot, in Felix Holt, the Radical.

WITH regard to doctrines, ultimate aims, and the three methods of disseminating them already described,—oral and written propaganda and the propaganda by example,—French anarchists are all of the same mind; but with regard to the fourth means, the propaganda by the overt act of violence (la propagande par le fait), there is anything but unanimity among them.

No anarchist, the simon-pure Tolstoyan excepted, denies the right to collective revolt, the duty, even, of insurrection. But this attitude has nothing distinctive about it. The same right and the same duty have been affirmed and reaffirmed by the republicans of all ages, and by the royalists, also, when they have been temporarily out of power, the only appreciable difference being that the republicans and royalists have esteemed them as a means of realising rather than a means of spreading their ideal.

The emergence into public prominence of the insurrectional idea which anarchists had long held—more or less consciously—dates from the Peace Congress held in Geneva in 1867, at which the Belgian César de Paepe created a sensation by declaring that “not peace, but war, must be preached.” “Peace,” he explained, “can be hoped for only as a fruit of victory in the social war.” Bakounine, just then coming to the front in Europe, lent the weight of his authority to De Paepe’s idea.

In 1876, the Fédération Italienne approved a definite declaration (signed by Cafiero and Malatesta) of the same purport:—

“The Fédération Italienne believes that insurrection, destined to affirm by deeds the principles of liberty, is the most efficacious agency of propaganda and the only one which, without corrupting and deceiving the masses, can penetrate even the lowest social strata, and draw the live forces of humanity into the struggle the Internationale is carrying on.”

Four months later, in the spring of 1877, this credo of insurrection was put in practice at Letino and San Galo, Italy, where Cafiero, Malatesta, Ceccarelli, and the rural priests, Fortini and Tamburini, with thirty followers, took possession of the public buildings, imprisoned or drove out the local authorities, set fire to the archives and property records, and seized and distributed the tax money among the people.

The same year a memorial of the Congress of Fribourg, signed by Kropotkine and Elisée Reclus among others, declared:—

“We are revolutionists because we desire justice. Never has great progress, special or general, been made by simple, pacific evolution. It has always been made by a revolution. If the work of mental preparation is accomplished slowly, the realisation of the ideas occurs quickly,”—an utterance with which may be compared Kropotkine’s, “Governments have never done anything but give a legal sanction to accomplished revolutionary facts”; Jean Grave’s, “We are revolutionists because we have the reasoned conviction that the privileged will not abandon one of their privileges if they are not forced to it”; and this confession of Guillaume Froment in Zola’s Paris:—

“I was only a positivist, a savant given over entirely to observation and experience, accepting nothing beyond the verified fact. Scientifically, socially, I admitted a simple and slow evolution, generating humanity as the human being himself is generated. And it was then that, in the history of the globe and in that of societies, I was forced to make a place for the volcano, the abrupt cataclysm, the sudden eruption, which has marked each geologic phase, each historic period. One comes thus to perceive that a step has never been taken, nor a progress made, without the aid of terrible catastrophes. Every forward march has sacrificed billions of existences. Our narrow justice revolts, we treat Nature as an atrocious mother; but, if we do not excuse the volcano, we must, nevertheless, endure it as forewarned savants when it breaks out, and then, ah! then, I am perhaps a dreamer, like the others: I have my ideas.”

The year following the Fribourg Congress (1878) Kropotkine warmly advocated insurrection before the Congress of the Fédération Jurasienne. “By insurrections,” he said, “the anarchists seek to quicken popular sentiment and initiative to the double end of a violent expropriation and the disorganisation of the state.” The congress pronounced formally in favour of the insurrectional principle, and from that day to this it has never been seriously questioned in any important anarchist quarter.

If the overt act by the individual anarchist is not viewed with the same unanimous and unqualified approval as the collective act of insurrection, it is because there is an easy distinction (representing, perhaps, a real difference) to be made between the individual act directed against the principle of authority incarnated in an official of the state,—president, minister, deputy, general, senator, judge, and police prefect,—when it comes under the general head of regicide (a reform measure which is almost as old as the world), and the individual act directed against the principle of property incarnated in any member of the bourgeoisie whatsoever, when it comes under the general head—O deterrent power of a name!—of murder.

The first kind of individual attempt (regicide) encounters little opposition based on principle within the anarchist ranks. It is opposed, as Alexander H. Stephens opposed the foundation of the Confederacy (of which he accepted the vice-presidency, once it was declared), on grounds of expediency. As regicides, Caserio, Vaillant,[26] Bresci,[27] Pallas (whose attempt against the Maréchal Campos was glorified by the International Labor Congress at Chicago in 1893), and the assassin of Alexander II. fall into much the same category as Brutus, Cromwell, Harmodius and Aristogiton, and the executioners of Louis XVI.; and, in the case at least of the assassin of the czar, the classification, while not perhaps ideal, might be worse.

As to weapons, the popular distinction (which is, in fact, more nice than wise) between the pistol and stiletto, on the one hand, and the bomb, on the other, is not made. “I admit all means, even the bomb,” says Charles Malato, who approved Pallas and Vaillant, but regretted Henry’s attempted slaughter of the bourgeois at the Café Terminus, “if only it be well placed; and yet I am not a drinker of blood.”

The second kind of individual attempt—the suppression of members of the bourgeoisie for the sole reason that they are bourgeois—is

CHARLES MALATO disapproved by all the anarchists but a small knot of extremists.

This disapproval, which is for the most part purely formal and passive when the act attains the person against whom it was directed, and its unselfishness is immediately evident, may become aggressive, not to say bitter, in certain quarters, when a tragic botch has been made of the job (by a mistake in victims) or when its significance as an act of propaganda has been obscured by the presence of motives of personal revenge. Elisée Reclus, of all the eminent French theoricians, has shown himself the most consistently refractory to this sort of propagande par le fait. In an article called out by the rapid succession of individual attempts in 1892, he said:—

“When you have a grudge against a person, you seek him out, you have an explanation with him, but you do not make innocent persons bear the brunt of your rancour.

“Anarchy is the summum of humane theories. Whoso calls himself anarchist should be gentle and good. All overt acts of the nature of that of yesterday are looked on by true compagnons as crimes. If those who perpetrate these barbarities act with the design of promulgating the anarchist creed, they deceive themselves completely.

“Things will come to such a pass, there will be such disgust with the compagnons, they will inspire such horror, that no one will be willing to hear anarchy so much as spoken of.

“And yet the idea is beautiful: it is grand. See to it that it is respected. The persons who do evil in its name befoul our doctrines.”

It is not always easy for the outsider to grasp why, of two anarchist acts of violence with similar exterior aspects, the same camarade praises the one and deplores the other. What is more, he will understand still less when the camarade has explained. There are labyrinths of subtleties in anarchist apologetics through whose intricate windings the lay intelligence has no Ariadne-given thread to guide it, and depths of esoteric metaphysics which only the plummet of the adept can sound.

Vaillant had almost unanimous plaudits from the camarades, no little praise from the socialists, and approval—mark the humorous note!—from certain of the deputies whose lives he had jeopardised.

Ravachol, author of the explosions at the houses of the judges Benoit and Bulot and of other overt acts less readily comprehensible, was practically repudiated at first by the Temps Nouveaux (then La Révolte) on account of a dubious past, but was recognised loyally, if languidly, as soon as his entire disinterestedness was made plain.

The general attitude of the Temps Nouveaux towards the propagande par le fait is one of guarded detachment, verging on complete indifference,—an attitude of rare prudence, sanity, and sagacity. It treats the whole matter of the individual attempt as a side issue, with an unfortunate tendency to divert the attention of both the faithful and the unfaithful from the basal principles of anarchy, and makes it very clear that it would ignore it altogether if it could.

“If anarchy,” says this representative journal, “does not reject violence when it is demonstrated to be indispensable to enfranchisement, it does not elevate it into a system. Violence is for it a means, debatable, like everything, but which is, at most, only an accessory affair. It must disappear when the obstacles are overcome, and weakens in nothing any of the elements of the ideal itself....

“Deeds are not counselled, nor spoken, nor written. They are done. Sometimes a deed done effects more than a long period of writing. This journal will always be the first to applaud those who act. We are, then, far from repelling the propagande par le fait. Only—we have said it before, and we repeat it—the propagande par le fait cannot be the work of a journal. It is not for us to say to individuals: ‘Do this! Do that!’ If they are convinced and conscientious, they will know what they have to do....

“To say to the workers, ‘Do this, burn that, hang that one,’ is child’s play, since the reader may demand with reason why he who preaches so glibly does not do himself what he urges others to do.”

The American labour leaders are wont to assure us, while reserving to themselves in all cases the right to criticism and opposition, that there never has been, using terms broadly, and never can be, an unsuccessful strike, since the strike that is the least necessary and most immediately disastrous serves the large purpose of focussing public attention on the strained relations between capital and labour, of revealing by a sort of cathode-ray efficacy the hidden ills of the body politic, and so of bringing just that much the nearer the final cure.

Similarly, the anarchist leaders assert that in anarchy no forces are lost, and that the manifestations which are, in appearance, the most foolhardy and shocking may have, equally with those which are, in appearance, the most reasonable, the saving merit of compelling the thoughtless world to think. “And perhaps,” says one of these leaders, “it will occur to the hide-bound bourgeoisie to find society defective when they shall have discovered that there is some danger in perpetuating its errors.”

“The anarchist had been told,” wrote Zo d’Axa in L’Endehors, apropos of the dynamite exploits of an unknown, who turned out to be Ravachol, “that the idea for which he was willing to brave every danger did not exist. He had had it dinned into his ears that, in other times, the precursors talked less and acted more. His theory had been laughed at. His hope had been mocked. When, upon the highway as an apostle, he had attempted to convert the people, no one of these laughers and mockers had been willing to tarry and listen an instant.

“Now, behold him!

“Like the street vender drawing crude charcoal pictures on the sidewalk to attract the cockney crowd to which he means to offer an article de Paris a little later, a primitive propagandist of anarchy has decided to force attention by the brutality of an act.

“Back of this act is the faith, so much tabooed, to which he has at last drawn fruitful discussion.

“It was an Idea the dynamiter displayed.

“And no one can deny it,—at the moment when, by favour of the excitement, the journals are giving their readers the very ‘articles de Paris’ which the terrible unknown dreamed of showing. Side by side with their invectives the Figaro, the Eclair, other sheets, print and expound theories which had not had the freedom of their columns before. These journals have become, in spite of their reserves, the propagators of the accursed Idea.

“Is it a result?

“Men read, discuss, realise perhaps.”

To comprehend the foregoing manner of reasoning or, rather, point of view (the word “comprehend” is italicised lest any one confound inoffensive comprehension with dangerous approval), one must have had in some country or other some bitter experience—stinging rebuke or angering, insulting rebuff—with the vapid self-complacency, the dogmatic thick-wittedness, the dictatorial stubborness, and the cruel hard-heartedness of the bourgeois. One must have been shocked and sickened by his vulgar flaunting of a stupid—or wicked?—determination to persist in his denial that his fellow-men ever starve, unless he can see them, with his own eyes, throw up their hands dramatically, stagger, and fall around him.

If one has had this disillusionising experience with the bourgeois, he will comprehend—there will be no lapsing here into such atrociously bad form as hinting the possibility of acquiescence—that there are numerous poor devils who say, “Let the bourgeois have the dramatic demonstration of starvation, since he will credit no other!”

He will comprehend that there are some, not poor devils, who think that a certain manifestation of the hungry in Trafalgar Square was a beautiful eye-opener for the British public; that there are others who look upon the march of Coxey’s grotesque army as anything but a ridiculous failure; and that there are still others who, recalling a memorable famine winter in Boston,—the shudderful winter when the authority of the state was invoked to disperse a peaceable assembling of the unemployed,—hold it a real pity that the assembling was quite so peaceable.

He will comprehend these last when they say that a few broken window-panes in the swaggering Back Bay and self-sufficient West End would have made the inhabitants of those districts less glib in their assertions that there was no real suffering in the city and less eager, by way of a clinching argument, to parrot, as having happened to their very selves, the incident which probably did happen sometime and somewhere to some one, thanks to some irresponsible tramp’s sense of humour,—of the professedly hungry man who refused to work because he had a previous engagement to march in the procession of the unemployed.

There is an appreciable distance from broken windows to broken heads. Still it is plain enough that the person who can comprehend the point of view that in a given exigency applauds the first can comprehend (always bear in mind that this word is an innocuous one) the point of view that in a graver exigency applauds the second.

If it is true that there are bourgeois, as there are dogs, who understand no argument and respect no appeal but the blow,—let it not be said here that it is true,—it is not surprising, however deplorable it may be, that there are those among the proletariat who find it “a source of innocent merriment,” in the words of Gilbert’s Lord High Executioner, “to make the penalty fit the crime.”

Anarchist and dynamiter are so far from being interchangeable terms that it would be possible and, perhaps, justifiable to write a treatise on the theory of anarchy without making the slightest reference to dynamiting or any other form of the propagande par le fait. Taken by itself, the list of the overt anarchist acts in France during the last twenty-five years seems a long one; but, when it is viewed in the light of the total number of anarchist believers, it is evident that the dynamiter is the exception among the camarades. When, furthermore, the few hundred victims anarchy has made in all the world during the quarter of a century it has been militant are compared with the number of the victims the Minotaur—poverty—devours in a single country in a single year,[28] or with the havoc wrought by any one of the commoner diseases, anarchy as a menace to human life ceases to appear a very serious matter.

Nevertheless, the alarm the propagande par le fait has excited is not to be wondered at. The dread of the dynamiter, like the savage’s dread of the railroad, is a dread of the mysterious and uncontrollable, superstitious perhaps, but which no amount of civilisation can entirely eradicate from the human mind. Lightning, which also does relatively little damage, is feared, and will probably continue to be feared so long as there is no forecasting where it will strike.

In the case of the new dynamite propaganda the unknown quantities were, in the beginning at least, so numerous as to be bewildering; and several of them still remain uneliminated. Much more is now known about anarchist doctrines, about the nature and power of dynamite, and the other fabulously destructive modern explosives, and a little more about the characters of the persons who employ these explosives. But the dynamiter’s seeming illogicality in the choice of his victims and his actual inability—comparable only to a woman’s proverbial awkwardness in throwing a stone—to attain the victims he has chosen, while he does attain others, are as pronounced as ever.

When throwers of bombs massacre persons they would not have harmed for the world, and when bombs are found in such diverse spots as cafés, restaurants, hotels, churches, soldiers’ recruiting offices and barracks, police stations, bazaars, private dwellings, public markets, stock exchanges, employment bureaus, and old people’s homes, who, indeed, can boast of his security? In the course of the years 1891-95 the fear of the dynamiters assumed such proportions as to amount almost to a panic, and this period is still referred to as “The Terror” in certain quarters.

“Ah, ah! c’est pas un’ crac La dynamit’ nous fich’ l’ trac,”

sang the clever Montmartrois chansonnier Eugène Lemercier in a witty topical song, Le Trac de la Dynamite, which had an enormous vogue.

At that time irresponsible rumour attributed to the camarades, to the “catastrophards,” such fell and fantastic schemes for the annihilation of the old society as the dispersion of malignant microbes, the poisoning of the water supply, and the introduction of nitro-glycerine into reservoirs, conduits, and sewers. There were frequent thefts of dynamite, the authors of which remained for some time at large. An anarchist cocher (probably demented) rode down pedestrians in pursuance of a vow he had made to exterminate the bourgeois. Public alarm was aggravated by the professional imaginings of the reporters and the police. It was wantonly played upon by the estampeurs (blackmailers and swindlers vaguely affiliated with “the groups”), who coined money by selling to a willingly gullible press bogus tips of conspiracies and contemplated explosions,—notably the mining of the Opéra, the Palais de Justice, and the Presidential Tribune at Longchamp, and the assassination of Leo XIII.,—and by fumistes (practical jokers), who perpetrated sardonic jokes with sand, iron filings, and sardine boxes, which were taken to the municipal laboratories[29] with the same infinite precautions as the real bombs in the ominous-looking vehicle presided over by the cocher “Ramasse” and drawn by the horse “Dynamite.”

During “The Terror” landlords begged or ordered magistrate tenants to quit their premises, lest they draw down bombs as trees draw down the thunderbolts, and added to their “To Let” notices these reassuring words, “Il n’y a pas de Magistrat dans la Maison”; the neighbours of judges compromised by the anarchist trials hastily moved into other parts of the city and even into the country; rag-pickers and concièrges fainted or had hysterics at the sight of sardine tins in the garbage boxes; concièrges quakingly told their heads before venturing to open the street doors for their own belated lodgers; anarchist tenants were as sedulously sought as magistrate lodgers were avoided, were loaded with soft words and favours, and implored not to worry themselves about their rent bills; and café and restaurant garçons vied with each other in flattering the caprices of their anarchist customers.

Flor O’Squarr tells of an anarchist, real or assumed, who, having regaled himself with a bountiful repast in a high-priced restaurant close by the Madeleine, called for the proprietor, and said:—

“I have had an excellent meal, and I haven’t a sou to pay for it. Arrest me, if you like; but I warn you that I am an anarchist, and that you expose yourself to the vengeance of my associates. Choose!” The panic-stricken Boniface insisted on drinking the audacious fellow’s health in champagne, and, when visited the following day by the police, who had heard of the affair, refused to make complaint against the swindler or give information that might lead to his detection. “A charming person, very polite, very well bred, and not proud,” was all that could be got out of him.

“Le vol” (theft) is another recognised form of the propagande par le fait.

“Are you cold,” says Charles Malato, “then enter the great bazaars which are crammed with unused garments, and take them; are you hungry, invade the meat-shops. Everything human industry produces belongs to you because you are men, and you are cravens if you do not take what you need.” Several international congresses have passed resolutions exhorting the hungry to take food wherever they can find it.

About this right of the individual to take for himself whatever is necessary to sustain his life, a right admitted theoretically, for the matter of that, by many who do not consider themselves revolutionists,—by popes, prelates, and theologians even, all the way from Saint Thomas to Manning and Parkhurst,—anarchists of all complexions agree absolutely. But over the right to steal in general there is as much dispute among them as there is over the right to kill. Some hold stealing meritorious, if the victims are properly chosen; others, if the profits are devoted scrupulously to the oral or written propaganda; others still, if they are turned over to the poor. Those who approve theft unreservedly are few indeed. Jean Grave admits that he is somewhat perplexed, but inclines to approve the open, defiant theft. He says:—

“Anarchy recognises in every individual from the moment he has seen the light of day the right to live. Individuals suffer from hunger by reason of a defective social organisation. And yet the planet has still, and will have for a long time, enough and more than enough to nourish the beings it carries. Every individual who finds himself reduced by the fault of society to a want of bread has the right to rebel against society, to take food wherever it exists....

POSSIBLE REVOLUTIONISTS

“Nevertheless, there is a thing that puzzles many of us; namely, the ignoble means it is necessary to employ, if one would steal, the perpetual deceit to throw the victim off his guard, the constant duplicity to capture his confidence....

“Every one acts as he understands, as he can. If his ways of proceeding are in contradiction with the established order of things, it is for him and the defenders of the code to have an explanation. But, when certain persons pretend to derive their way of living from a special order of ideas, when they seek to disguise with the cloak of the propagande deeds done for their own preservation, we have a right to say what we think.

“If, then, we place ourselves at the view-point of the right which the individual has to live, he may steal. It is his privilege, especially if society drives him to want by refusing him work. And I add that it would be very stupid of him to commit suicide when society has made him destitute. The right to the defence of one’s own existence being primordial, one must take where there is.

“But, if the act of stealing is to assume a character of revendication or of protest against the defective organisation of society, it must be performed openly, without any subterfuge.

“‘But,’ retort the defenders of le vol, ‘the individual who acts openly will deprive himself thus of the possibility of continuing. He will lose thereby his liberty, since he will be at once arrested, tried, and condemned.’

“Granted. But, if the individual who steals in the name of the right to revolt resorts to ruse, he does nothing more nor less than the first thief that comes along who steals to live without embarrassing himself with theories.

“It is with stealing as it is with the military service. There are persons who refuse to let themselves be enrolled, preferring to expatriate themselves. This way of proceeding has its little character of protestation. But alongside of these there are others who, by the simulation of an infirmity, by taking advantage of an exemption or the utilisation of an efficacious protection, manage to evade military servitude. They are right, surely,—a thousand times right,—from their point of view. But, if they tell us that they have thereby performed acts of revolutionary propaganda, and contributed to demolish the régime, it would be easy to demonstrate that their claim is false....

“To resort to ruse, to dissimulate, in order to capture the confidence of the person one is planning to despoil, is, it must be confessed, an unwholesome and degrading line of conduct.”

Among the few Paris pilferers whose lives have distilled the odour of sanctity, who have taken on themselves to perpetuate the tradition of the magnanimous bandit, the philanthropic pirate, and the tender-hearted outlaw, to incarnate the paradox of the “bon voleur” (honest thief), the two most famous are Pini and Duval.

Clément Duval, who robbed and attempted to burn the mansion of Mlle. Madeleine Lemaire, was an iron worker of an independent spirit, who became so disgusted with the sufferings and humiliations of the labourer’s lot that he determined to make a dramatic protest. His previous record was absolutely clean, save for a petty theft from an employer when his compagne and children had eaten nothing for twenty-four hours; and he carried away from the Lemaire residence only a small part of the valuables at his disposal, which shows that gain was not his primary object. In his written defence, which the presiding judge, Berard des Glajeux, did not allow him to read, he dwelt at great length on the hardships of the working-woman. In fact, Duval was a feminist of the first water. Saint Clément Duval! Forget him not, feminists, when you make up your calendar of saints!

In the Revue Bleue, a publication which can hardly be accused of having a revolutionary bias, M. Paul Mimande wrote of Duval: “Well, to my thinking, this thief, this incendiary, is honnête.... I believe him incapable of robbing and killing to satisfy his cupidity. He worked for the collectivity alone. Duval has the serenity of the illuminé who suffers for a holy cause. He is logical in submitting, without murmurs or protestations, to the hard rules of the bagne. Very sincerely, he refuses to find himself disgraced by the livery of the convict; and he shows it by his bearing and his talk. His conscience cries out to him that he has acted well. What does the rest matter!

“I had a long conversation with Clément Duval. I questioned him searchingly; and I discerned in his phrases, ardent, but hollow, a sort of atavic duplicate of the times of John Huss.”

Duval had neither instruction nor the gift of eloquence, and succeeded ill in explaining his theories to the jury of the Seine. Pini, on the other hand, who had been at great pains to educate himself, was an orator and philosopher as well as a student. His defence—less a defence of himself than of his theory of the right to steal (le droit au vol)—was as splendid a bit of impertinence as was ever delivered in a court-room.

Calmly, cynically, with a control of voice and charm of gesture that would have done credit to the most gifted advocate, he said (in part):—

“As to us anarchists, it is with the untroubled assurance of performing a duty that we make our attacks on property. We have two objects in view: first, to claim for ourselves the natural right to existence which you bourgeois concede to beasts and deny to men; second, to provide ourselves with the materials best suited for destroying your show, and, if it becomes necessary, you with it. This manner of reasoning makes your hair stand on end; but what would you have? This is the state of the case. The new times have come. There was a time when the starving wretch who appropriated a morsel of bread, and was arraigned before your plethoric persons therefor, admitted that he had committed a crime, craved pardon, and promised to perish of hunger (he and his family) rather than touch again the property of another. He was ashamed to show his face. To-day it is very different. Extremes meet; and man, after having sunk so low, is retrieving himself splendidly. Arraigned before you for having smashed the strong boxes of your compeers, he does not excuse his act, but defends it, proves to you with pride that he has yielded to the natural need of retaking what had been previously stolen from him; he proves to you that his act is superior in morality to all your laws, flouts your mouthings and your authority, and in the very teeth of your accusations against him tells you that the real thieves, messieurs les juges! are you and your bourgeois band.

“This is precisely my case. Be assured I do not blush under your charges, and I experience a delicious pleasure in being called thief by you.”

Maître Labori’s eloquent pleading, though it did much to establish his reputation as an advocate, proved as vain in the case of this refractory prolétaire as it did later in the case of his bourgeois client, Dreyfus; and Pini was given twenty years of hard labour for his thieving and his impertinent impenitence.

Pini whose thefts were legion, Pini who in the guise of the son of an Italian cardinal paid reconnoitring visits to the archbishopric of Paris, and dreamed the colossal dream of rifling the Vatican, Pini, I say, never stole for himself nor for his friends, but only for the propaganda, for humanity. He was the altruistic thief of the century’s close par excellence. Every son of his thieving was devoted to the cause. He gave to street beggars freely, but always from his legitimate earnings, never from the proceeds of his expeditions, and never without reproaching them for stretching out their hands to beg when they might steal. “Sometimes, even in winter,” says one who claims to have known him well, “Pini, half-clothed and almost barefoot, traversed Paris to carry assistance to the destitute compagnons. He distributed among them one franc or two francs out of his own pocket; but he did not encroach upon the capital of two or three hundred louis which had resulted from his last exploit. He subsidised several French and Italian presses for the printing of journals, manifests, and placards. The stolen money belonged to the cause, to the idea, to the future.”

When he gave of his consecrated hoard to individuals, as he sometimes did, it was always because the propaganda was directly involved. Thus he supported for two years at the University of Milan the son of an imprisoned camarade, and aided many of the camarades who were in prison or who had been obliged to flee to escape imprisonment. He was blamed by some of his associates for having invested a sum of stolen money in an industrial enterprise. The blame was just from the anarchist point of view; and yet, even in this case, the profits were plainly destined in advance for the propaganda.

Within the last two or three years the treasures of the churches have been the greatest sufferers from the pilferers on principle, who have been inflamed by the anti-clerical campaign of the Combes ministry.

As anarchist killings have been very little formidable, viewed in the large, so the aggregate of the anarchist stealings is, in social or criminal statistics, a negligible quantity. These stealings have not brought expropriation appreciably nearer, and have only served the anarchist cause, if they have served it at all, by keeping before the public mind the fact that the anarchist theory is as much opposed to property as it is to government.

The majority of the thieves who call themselves anarchists in court are thieves first and anarchists afterwards,—eleventh-hour converts, who, having fallen on the misfortune of detection, essay to play anarchist rôles, prompted thereto by a sense of humour, a hope of securing the sympathy and support of the camarades, or a yearning for the homage of the “petit peuple de Paris”, who, as Marcel Prévost has pointed out, “adore all revolutionists.”

One other form of propaganda par le fait remains to be mentioned; namely, counterfeiting. But anarchist counterfeiting has not been advocated, it seems, by the accredited anarchist theoricians, and has not been provided with a romantic halo by any master practitioner, like Pini; in short, has not attained the dignity of a public peril, and calls for no extended notice here. The greater part of the so-called anarchist counterfeiters are common criminals or vulgar charlatans with whom anarchy is a mercenary after-thought, or they are simple police spies.

The most picturesque of the real anarchist counterfeiters who have passed through the judicial mill is the Lyonnais poète-chansonnier known as “L’Abruti.”

“L’Abruti” (“The Imbruted”), the uncomplimentary name, intended as a fling against society, is of his own choosing, tormented by that craving for the great road, for space and liberty which has been the blessing and the curse of the best and the worst of men since time was,—from Abraham, Homer, Cain, Esau, and John the Baptist to Morrow, Salsou,[30] Ravachol, Richepin, and Josiah Flynt; L’Abruti swore off working for the detested bourgeois one fine day, and, shouldering a little pack in which he had stowed a stew-pan, a coffee-pot, a set of mysterious steel implements, and some scraps of writing-paper, set out from Lyons in true troubadour or, to be more accurate, in true trimardeur style, to make his tour of France.

Sauntering out of the sunrise in the morning, between hedge-rows traceried with the fragrant eglantine, free of fancy and free of limb; ruminating the “heureux temps d’anarchie” prophesied by the poète-camarade Laurent Tailhade, “temps où la plèbe baiserait la trace des pas des poètes”; casting about for couplets with a mind attuned to Verlaine’s poetic precept,—

“Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure Eparse au vent crispé du matin Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym”;

exploring the motionless blue and the scudding white of the sky for a fresh image; exchanging good words and snuff-pinches with passing rustics and smiles and badinage with the rustics’ wives and daughters; halting now and again to quaff from a wayside spring, to catch a thrush’s liquid note, a magpie’s gibe, or a linnet’s whistle, to unshoulder his pack, and, using it as an escritoire, to fix on paper a just-discovered rhyme, or, using it as a pillow, to enjoy the discreet fellowship of a pipe and out of its curling smoke-fantasies fashion Utopias; beguiling the hours of the short shadows with alternate scribblings and siestas; and sauntering into the sunset when the long shadows came,—L’Abruti passed the days.

He dined and supped by the roadside under spicy limes or voluptuous acacias, lavishing his omelettes, his coffee, and his chansons on all chance passers-by.

With his mysterious implements and the aid of flame, in some dusky forest thicket where a witch might weave a spell, he fabricated the wherewithal to buy his eggs and coffee; and he passed the nights, according to the weather, under the stars or in some hospitable grange.

The idyl was rudely interrupted—a fig for civilisation!—by the Philistine-minded gendarmes. L’Abruti was tried, and condemned to prison, though he had never gone beyond the fabrication of the ten-cent piece, instead of being decorated, as certain bourgeois are who deserve no better of society, and counterfeit talent instead of dimes.

Served him right, perhaps, for violating his country’s laws! Served him right, unquestionably,—delicious, whimsical minstrel that he was,—for departing from the good old begging tradition!

It seems a pity, all the same. He was such a jolly good fellow.

A RAID BY THE POLICE

“He [Souvarine] was going out into the unknown. He was going, with his tranquil air, to his mission of extermination wherever dynamite could be found to destroy cities and men. It will be he, no doubt, when the expiring bourgeoisie shall hear the street pavements exploding under every one of its steps.”—Emile Zola, in Germinal.

Chapter VI

THE CAUSES OF PROPAGANDA “PAR LE FAIT”

“For so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”

Jesus Christ.

“As soon as an intelligent workingman says, ‘I ought to earn so much,’ he is denounced as a leader of a band, and is discharged.”

J.-H. Rosny, in Le Bilatéral.

“On the pavement in mid December—a mother with her two months’ child still at the breast!
“But this is forcing her to beg, it is condemning the children to death. And I am well, and I am strong, and I am courageous; and they refuse me work. Ah! I am under the ban of society.”

Journal d’un Anarchiste (Augustin Léger).

“You, Meyrargues, will speak, others will act. But let it be understood that this blood [Vaillant] calls for blood.
“They were silent, reconciled, baptized in the fluid of this death. A state of heroic grace possessed them, effaced their differences, their quarrels, and their gibes.”—Victor Barrucand, in Avec le Feu.

“John Brown’s body lies mouldering in the grave, His soul goes marching on.” American Popular Song.

A study of the various manifestations in France of the propagande par le fait shows that the greater part of the overt anarchist acts, whether counterfeitings, stealings, or killings, have proceeded from a more or less well-grounded desire for personal or party vengeance; they have been committed by persons who have either suffered unjustly themselves at the hands of government or society or have lived very close to those who have so suffered.

The sensational killing of the assistant superintendent, Watrin,[31] by the striking miners of Decazeville (1886) was a horrible crime or a wholesome act of popular justice, according to the point of view. The fury of the mob is explained, if not excused, by the fact that this Watrin was allowed a premium of five per cent. upon every reduction of wages he was able to accomplish, coupled with the other fact that his brutal and insatiate rapacity had forced wages down thirty per cent. in eight years.

The anarchist house-breaker, Clément Duval, had been seriously handicapped in the struggle for existence. In the Franco-Prussian war he had received two wounds which had rendered him permanently unfit for his trade of iron worker, and had contracted a disease which had forced him to spend nearly four years out of ten in various hospitals. He had experienced real want in the course of his many periods of enforced idleness.

Pini had suffered much at the hands of society and the state. Many a time, when out of work, he had been glad to sleep on straw, at two cents a night, in the faubourg of La Glacière. His autobiography, which he wrote in jail, while awaiting his trial, is, like every formal utterance Pini ever made, exceedingly illuminating. Of his early life he says:—

“Son of a poor pariah, I began my career surrounded with the luxuries which the bourgeoisie heaps upon us from our very cradles. I saw six of my brothers die of want. One of my sisters wore herself out in the service of a stingy family of bourgeois.

“My old father (an ancient Garibaldian), after a painful existence, in which he had given to the bourgeoisie sixty years of his sweat and enriched a good number of employers, died like a dog in a charity hospital.

“I passed my childhood in a charity asylum; and, my primary studies finished, I was forced at the age of twelve years to go to work in a printing-office, where I earned just one franc a week.”

Driven from Italy in his young manhood for his connection with the leaders of the “Workingman’s Party,”[32] he took refuge in Switzerland, and after a few months came to Paris.

His disillusion in regard to Paris is highly significant. He had dreamed of finding there democracy, and found flagrant inequality instead.

He was successively chimney-sweep, bricklayer, groom, coal-heaver, sawyer, clerk, and street-hawker. His tribute to the Paris workingmen, with whom he was thus intimately thrown, is especially fine:—

“They were mostly illiterate, but reasoned better than I. They had studied the great, practical book of suffering, the pages of which are printed in characters of blood and tears. It was these poor pariahs who initiated me into the great anarchistic ideal, and who, out of the midst of their misery, expounded to me how society could be tranquil and happy under the régime of essential justice.

“How noble they appeared to me, these men whom the bourgeois loaded with insults after having sucked their blood!

“The Paroles d’un Révolté of Kropotkine made a fervent anarchist of me, and it was only then that I began to perceive men and things in their true light.”

The outrages inflicted by the Clichy police on Dardare, Decamp, and Léveillé, who had defended their right to carry the black flag, revolvers in hand, and the cavalier treatment of these same men by the personages of the court before which they were summoned, were the probable provocations for the unsuccessful attempt,[33] of which Ravachol was suspected to be the author, on the Clichy station-house and for the explosions of the rue de Clichy and the Boulevard St. Germain for which he was condemned.

“Manacled and bleeding,” wrote Zo d’Axa at the time in L’Endehors, “the three men were landed in the station-house. Their respite was not long. The officers were not slow to pay the prisoners a visit, and this is what they brought with them: kicks for shin-bones, pummellings for panting chests, blows of revolver butts for aching heads. It was the dance of the vanquished. They mauled the poor fellows with inexorable malice and ignoble ingenuity. The police band tortured with ferocious joy.

“When they stopped, it was from weariness and only to reopen the séance half an hour later. So passed the day of the arrest and other subsequent days.

“Their eyes blackened, their heads swollen and unrecognisable, their bodies bruised, their spirits broken, the poor fellows had no more force to resist. They remained inert under poundings as under the lash of insult. Their wounds festered, and they were refused water to wash the sores. A month after the arrest the bullet that might have given him gangrene had not been extracted from the leg of Léveillé.”

Some allowance should be made in the above account for the evident partisan spirit of Zo d’Axa. But there is plenty of unbiased evidence to demonstrate the culpability of the police in this affair and to explain the epidemic of overt acts that came after it.

Rulliers and Pedduzi, who attempted (the latter with success) to kill their employers, had both had their work taken away because of their anarchist belief.

Ravachol had been driven from workshop after workshop for his opinions. In his defence, which the presiding judge, Darrigrand, refused to allow him to read, he said:—

“I worked to live and to make a living for those who belonged to me. So long as neither I nor mine suffered too much, I remained what you call honest. Then work failed me, and with this enforced idleness came hunger. It was then that this great law of nature, this imperious voice which brooks no retort,—the instinct of self-preservation,—pushed me to commit certain crimes and misdemeanours for which you reproach me and of which I recognise myself to be the author.”

The explosion at the Véry restaurant was in retaliation for the delivery of Ravachol to the police by the garçon L’Hérot.

Lorion, who fired on and wounded gendarmes to prove he was calumniated in being treated by the socialists as a police spy, had been detained for five years in the House of Correction for having insulted the police at the age of thirteen.

President Carnot signed his own death warrant in refusing to commute the sentence of Vaillant, who was condemned to the guillotine for throwing a bomb which neither killed nor seriously wounded anybody.

“Whether he admits it or not,” wrote Henri Rochefort, prophetically at the time, “M. Carnot will remain the veritable executioner of Vaillant

‘Qu’il aura de ses mains lié sur la bascule.’

“And, as he will be the only one to benefit by his decision, the least that can be asked for is that he assume all the risks.”

The exasperation produced by the execution of Vaillant was aggravated by the indelicacy—unpardonable from the Parisian point of view—of holding the execution during the Carnival, and by the atrocious pleasantry of the Minister of the Interior, Raynal, who said, “J’ai donné des étrennes aux honnêtes gens.”

Georges Etievant, who wounded two policemen, had had his life rendered absolutely impossible by the persecution of the police. Implicated by them in a theft of dynamite in 1891, he is said, on good authority, to have served his time rather than denounce the real culprit, who was a father of a family. Banished for the first article he wrote after his release, he tried to

SALSOU practise sculpture in London, but was prevented by the machinations of the French secret police, who made him lose all his work. He was a starving, shelterless outcast at the moment of his crime.

Salsou, who attempted the life of the Persian shah during the Exposition of 1900, had lost work by reason of his opinions earlier in life. Furthermore, he had been arrested for vagabondage at Fontainebleau while making his way from Lyons to Paris on foot in 1894, and, this charge of vagabondage being groundless, had been condemned to three months of prison for vaunting his anarchist belief, on the dubious testimony of a police spy, who had been put into the same cell with him for the express purpose of “drawing him out.”

Finally, the condemnation of Salsou to hard labour for life, in punishment of a relatively insignificant attempt by which no one was hurt, was based on diplomatic rather than judicial reasoning. He died soon after his arrival at Cayenne, in consequence, probably, of the hardships to which he was subjected. His body was thrown to the sharks in the presence of a number of functionaries, who amused themselves by taking photographs of the fight for its possession. Certain of the prisoners, who were witnesses of this revolting scene, have taken a solemn oath to avenge it.

It looks very much as if the high-handed suppression of free speech in France during the early eighties had been largely instrumental in producing the numerous overt anarchist acts during the nineties, and as if the continued policy of the authorities in “making examples” by an overstraining of the law had inspired other anarchists to follow the examples of those who were made examples of.

“The anarchists,” says Jean Grave, very justly, “suffer governmental persecutions, not only when they revolt, which is quite comprehensible, but even when they content themselves with a peaceable propagation of their way of understanding things, and that notwithstanding the fact that at the present time the majority of the governors pretend to have granted the greatest political liberty.... The police have been ferocious, pitiless, towards the workers. They have hunted the anarchists like wild beasts. For a word a bit strong, for an article a trifle more violent than usual, years of prison have fallen on them.... Treated like wild beasts, certain ones act like wild beasts.... ‘Who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind.’”

In 1882 sixty-six anarchists were tried at Lyons, and sixty-one convicted (fifteen for contumacy), among them Kropotkine and the scientist Emile Gauthier. The unjust condemnation of Emile Pouget and Louise Michel, referred to in a previous chapter, came soon after.

“Cyvoct was sentenced to death[34] at Lyons,” says the Chronology of the Père Peinard, under the date December 11, 1883, “for the crime of having been managing editor of an anarchist journal at the moment when an unknown person placed a bomb in a dive where the swells amused themselves.”

It could not be better put. Cyvoct was in Switzerland at the time of the explosion, and could not by any possibility have been the author of it. He was not even the writer of the article which was held by the court to have provoked the attempt.

The next year Gueslaff was condemned to ten years of hard labour for an attempt at Montceau-les-Mines, which he made at the instigation and under the direction of a police agent.

Three years later—to pass rapidly on—anarchists were sentenced for revolutionary speeches at Laon. In 1890 Merlino, Malato, and Louise Michel were incarcerated on the same charge. There was an indiscriminate and purely preventive ingathering (rafle) of anarchists the 22d of April, 1892, in prevision of the trial of Ravachol and the dreaded demonstration of May 1, and another rafle, also indiscriminate and purely preventive, on the New Year’s Day preceding the execution of Vaillant,—a measure which wrought untold injury—could governmental malice or stupidity go farther?—to anarchist workingmen, and brought untold suffering on their families, from the fact that it coincided with the moment for the payment of the January rent (terme).[35] It was of the former rafle, in which he was included, that the littérateur Zo d’Axa, in his piquant De Mazas à Jérusalem, wrote:—

“The police drag-net trick of this month of April, ‘92, will become historic.

“It is the first in date among the most cynical assaults of modern times upon liberty of thought.

“The true inwardness of the affair is now known.

“The government wished to profit by the emotion caused by the explosions of the Caserne Loban and the rue de Clichy to encircle in a gigantic trial of tendency the militant revolutionists. The ministry and its docile agents pretended to believe that certain opinions constituted complicity. The writer, explaining how the disinherited gravitate inevitably towards theft, became, by the simple fact of this explanation, a thief himself. The thinker, studying the wherefore of the propagande par le fait, became the secret associate of the lighters of tragic fuses. The philosopher had no right to counsel indulgence and to view without giddiness the facts.

“Society must rid itself of those of its members who are so corrupt as to desire it better....

“Evidently, the impartiality of the judges was not to be counted on. The word of command had been passed along. It would be useless to prove that not only we were not cut-purses nor cut-throats, but that no organisation existed among us, even from the political point of view. The tribunals would sentence us with the same unconcern.

“A single point was doubtful. For the success of the manœuvre it was indispensable that the other countries prosecute their refractory citizens in the same fashion.

“Well, what the French Republic had premeditated, Holland, England, and even Germany had the decency to be unwilling to undertake. The venerable monarchies did not yield to the solicitations of the young republic, which dreamed of reconstituting in an inverse sense the Internationale. There were parleyings to this end, but they came to nothing. The hunt of the free man was not decreed by all Europe. Our fallen democracy realised from that moment that she could not do worse than the worst autocracies.... The order was given to set us at large.

“The politico-judiciary machination had miscarried. All it had been able to do was to hold us a month in jail, and gall our wrists slightly with the infamous irons....

“In making arbitrary arrests, our masters, for all their excitement, had no illusions. They knew very well that they would be forced, in the end, to restore to liberty men against whom not a single specific fact could be adduced; but they said to themselves this, ‘Mazas will calm them!’ Now Mazas calms nothing at all....

“It is just the opposite that happens. Deranged in their habits, perturbed in their affairs, losing often their means of subsistence, those who are victims of the provocative raids go out of prison more rebellious than they entered it....

“The little ones are hungry in the house, the baker refuses credit, the landlord threatens eviction, the employer has given another the job.

“Rage mounts. It overflows. Some commit suicide by an overt act; and, surely, the least sturdy take a step forward. The timid grow bold. In the solitude of the cell logical thought has gone back to causes, has deduced responsibilities.

“Ideas become clarified. The man who has been incarcerated for the platonic crime of subversive social love learns hatred.”

Among other questionable repressive measures may be mentioned the famous “trial of the thirty” (procès des trente), embracing several of the theoricians, dilettanti, and littérateurs which resulted, necessarily, in acquittal, but which left much bad feeling behind; the “trial of the forty” (procès des quarante); the condemnation of Zo d’Axa and his managing editor, Matha, to eighteen months of prison and a 3,000-franc fine; the expulsion of the littérateur Alexandre Cohen and the art critic Félix Fénéon; in the winter of 1900-01—to pass over the intervening period—a long-drawn-out series of wholesale rafles made, nominally, to suppress the bands of thieves and thugs who had grown numerous and insolent during the comparative immunity of the preceding summer, in reality quite as much to enable the police to locate anew the camarades of whom they had lost track during their preoccupation with the Exposition; countless perquisitions and preventive arrests throughout the length and breadth of France just before the last visit of the czar; and in the spring of 1904 the turning over of Russian refugees to the Russian police,—so many arbitrary and oppressive acts which will bear, if they have not already borne, their inevitable fruit of hatred and revolt.

For these superfluous persecutions of the anarchists it is sometimes the police and sometimes the ministry that is responsible; which it is not always easy to determine, owing to the close connection between the French national and the Paris municipal governments.

If it has never been conclusively proved that a ministry has gone to the extent of organising riotings[36] and bogus anarchist attempts (as capitalists have been known to organise strike violence) in order to maintain itself in power, to further a domestic project, bolster up a foreign policy, or win in advance the moral support of the community for a contemplated rigorous suppression of free assembling and free speech, there have been times, as is more than hinted at in Zola’s Paris, when a ministry has been publicly accused and currently believed to have done these things.

According to M. Rochefort, who makes a specialty of launching sensational hypotheses,[37] the attempts of Vaillant and Salsou[38] (by which practically no damage was done) were prepared by the police, acting under government orders. These charges are not to be taken more seriously, of course, than others from the same charlatanical source. They are, perhaps, their own best refutation. On the other hand, it has been proved over and over again that not only cabinet ministers, but politicians in general, as well as financiers and journalists,—all those, in a word, who “fish in troubled waters,”—sometimes act in collusion with the police in turning street disturbances, even at the risk of bloodshed, to their own selfish or partisan advantage.

Furthermore, as if it were not enough to be able to repose on laws of exception that belong logically to the worst monarchies, the government has an unfortunate way of straining legality, ever and anon, even to the breaking point.

Such governmental acts as the transference of papers taken from nihilist refugees in Paris (1890) to the Russian authorities in order to enable the Russian police to arrest nihilists living in Russia; the prohibition of the holding of the International Labour Congress (1900), which it would have been so easy to suppress at the first really incendiary utterance; the extradition of the boy Sipido (the would-be assassin of the then Prince of Wales), a proceeding of such doubtful legality that the ministry responsible for it was censured by a vote of 306 to 206 in the Chamber; the invasion of the Bourse de Travail (1903) by the police, an act which Premier Combes himself was obliged to denounce in the Chamber; and the refusal of the Minister of Justice (1904) to rehabilitate Cyvoct, who adduced overwhelming proofs of his innocence;—all these are fair samples of the far from edifying means the authorities are constantly employing to secure respect for the law.

It is not to be expected that the servant will be more scrupulous than the master, and we long ago became accustomed to the idea that it takes a knave to catch a knave. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to experience a sensation of disgust at the vileness of some of the methods to which the police descend whenever anarchists are concerned.

The police chieftains exaggerate (if they do not deliberately aggravate) the gravity of the public peril (as a wily physician might exaggerate the gravity of an illness) in order to win from their ministers the praise and gratitude which mean for them enlarged brigades, increase of secret funds, and individual promotion.

The rank and file of the police, feeling a similar necessity of making a good showing with their immediate superiors, entrap anarchists into street disturbances or violations of the common law, and fabricate, with the aid of false witnesses, fictitious crimes for the suspects on their lists who are not obliging enough to make incendiary speeches or commit violence. They invade the privacy of their homes on the flimsiest pretexts; slander them to their compagnes, their neighbours, and their friends; poison the minds of their concièrges, their landlords, and their employers against them; in short, they render their lives generally unlivable by mean and meddling tricks.

This is no imaginative sketch,—so far from it that, if the police should take it into their heads, during one of the anarchist flurries which occur periodically, to make a descent upon the lodgings of the writer, who is anything but an anarchist, he would probably be imprisoned (or, at least, confined preventively) for the sole offence of having in his possession the numerous red-covered volumes, brochures, caricatures, placards, and chansons which he has found it necessary to collect in the preparation of this book. If he were a Frenchman, he would certainly have much difficulty in avoiding temporary confinement under such circumstances. Being an American, he might escape with being courteously, but strenuously, requested to cross the border.

This elaborate spy system, this shrewdness, chicanery, and, not to mince words, villany on the part of the police, is, after all, more or less futile. It serves no great purpose in the suppression of the propagande par le fait.

It is well enough for a police prefect to boast publicly, as did M. Andrieux, back in the eighties, of the ease with which he penetrates the meetings of the groups, and recruits spies among the camarades,[39] and to shake his sides over the fine trick he plays on the camarades in conducting a journal[40] for them with funds provided by the state.

Such boasting and such self-gratulatory chuckling are well enough in their way; but they are rather idle in view of the looseness of organisation of the groups, which any one, if he dissemble ever so little, may frequent, and the insignificance and unreliability of the information obtained from such easily recruited spies. Besides, there is a class of anarchists who become police spies, nominally, for the express purpose of leading the police astray by false information. Controlling one journal is not controlling all, and a controlled journal is not less a propagandist force because the public money goes (however secretly) to the making of it. M. Andrieux’s La Révolution Sociale not only preached anarchy, but preached it (here the police short-sightedness appears) very effectively. It converted some of those who have since become the most feared of militant propagandists, and goaded certain of the previously converted into action.

Overt acts are seldom, if ever, arranged in the groups. Vaillant did not breathe a word of his projected attempt against the Chamber of Deputies to his group of Choisy-le-Roi. It is the exception rather than the rule when a really dangerous character is an assiduous frequenter of the groups; and, if he is, he does not often take the group members into his confidence. The “conspiracy” which is bruited about at every fresh anarchist attempt is rarely proved in France, for the very good reason that in France it rarely exists outside of the excited imagination of the frightened public and the professional suspiciousness of the detective and judge. “Why will they prate of plots?” says Zo d’Axa. “There is something better. There is an idea which is alive and stirs, and which is making its way on every hand.”

It is well enough, again, for the anthropometric expert, M. Bertillon (since it seems to amuse him), to enrich his criminal museum with photographs, relics, and statistics of the militant and non-militant anarchists who are brought his way by the police rafles; but what, after all, does it profit him to know the “bigness of the skull, the standing height, the sitting height, the size of the right ear and the left foot,” so that “he has no instrument to register,” to borrow Zo d’Axa’s pregnant phrase, “the significance of a shoulder-shrug”?

The police may plume themselves on knowing the anarchists’ resorts, faces, and aliases, and their tricks of cipher and invisible ink. But this police knowledge of the anarchists is offset by the anarchists’ knowledge of the police.[41] It is diamond cut diamond in this respect.

In 1901 a café garçon, acting on a wager, mounted the step of President Loubet’s state carriage, and dropped in the president’s lap a mysterious bundle which contained a photograph of the garçon’s little daughter. The bundle might as easily have contained a bomb, and all Paris shuddered.

After the great rafle of April, 1892, this same M. Loubet (then a minister), relying on the assurance of the police, proclaimed to the bourgeoisie that they might sleep in peace for a time, since all the dangerous anarchists were under lock and key. Four days later the Véry restaurant was dynamited precisely as it had been predicted that it would be, whence arose, as the Père Peinard exultantly and maliciously remarked at the time, “a new and capital word, Véryfication.”

Somebody’s shoulder-shrug had not been taken account of.

The police expert knowledge of the anarchists, much as it is vaunted, has not sufficed to prevent numerous overt anarchist acts in the immediate past; and there is little reason to believe it can prevent the next overt act to which a resolute man may make up his mind.

In carefully guarding dynamite from theft, the French police have rendered a real service to the public safety. But until the revolver and the poniard, which are surer than dynamite of their chosen victims, can be submitted to a similar control, the greatest service the police can render against the propagande par le fait would seem to be the purely negative one of not exasperating anarchists indiscriminately and unnecessarily, and of not brutally crowding them to the wall.

The injustice of courts, the deceitfulness of ministries, the corruption of parliament, and the unscrupulousness of the police, as well as the inequalities of society, are important factors in the formation of the “catastrophards,” or propagandists par le fait. But they all become insignificant before the passion for martyrdom, which has always, in some form or other, possessed a minority of the human race.

The French propagandists par le fait, from Ravachol to Baumann,[42] may have grievously deluded themselves; but they have unquestionably believed themselves to be apostles honoured in being set apart for martyrdom.

The stigmata are many and unmistakable. They have had the singleness of purpose and the merciless logic of zealots. They have preached in season and out of season,[43] before judges, in prisons, and at the guillotine. They have consecrated the time allotted for their own defence to the defence of anarchist tenets, have accepted advocates under protest, and have refused to sign requests for the commutation of their sentences. They have borne the odium of deeds of which they were not guilty, because they thereby secured a pulpit for their preaching, and left the real authors free to operate. They have held it sweet to die for the faith. They have displayed, in the awful presence of the knife, the trance-like ecstasy of the illuminate.

In Part I. of his powerful two-part drama, Au-dessus des Forces Humaines, the hero of which is a dynamiter, the great-minded Norseman, Björnson, has emphasised this fact, that it is among the propagandists par le fait of anarchy that we must look for the modern martyrs, for the men who witness their faith with their blood, who sacrifice themselves unreservedly for their fellow-men, who welcome death with smiles and outstretched arms because they are confident that their martyrdom will usher in the redemption of mankind.

Zola and a host of lesser literary lights have been emphasising the same fact in France.

“I know Vaillant,” says one of the characters of Victor Barrucand’s novel Avec le Feu. “He is afflicted with a hypertrophy of the sentiments. He believes in nature, in humanity, in justice. He hopes for the reign of the entities. He is the embodiment of disinterestedness. He wanted to act. Like a brave bull, he charged the imaginary obstacle.... He is sincere, he carries his faith like a torch, he would set the world on fire by way of persuasion.... He is generous, sanguine, sentimental,—the typical French revolutionist.”

And of Emile Henry, author of the explosion of the Café Terminus, Zo d’Axa writes:—

“I hear him still, little more than a child, but already grave, self-centred, and close-mouthed, sectarian even, as all those forcibly become whose faith is troubled by no doubts, those who see—hypnotised, may I say?—the end, and then reason, judge, and decide with mathematical implacability. He believed firmly in the advent of a future society, logically constructed and harmoniously beautiful. What he reproached me for was not counting enough on the regeneration of the race, not referring everything to the ideal standard of anarchy. Apparent contradictions shocked his logical sense. He was astounded that any one who came to realise the baseness of an epoch could continue to take any pleasure therein.”

The ferociousness of the self-styled conservators, who made it their business to hang and burn witches, engendered the morbid exaltation that made inoffensive, impressionable people accuse themselves of being witches. The logical and inevitable counterpart of a Saul of Tarsus breathing threatenings and slaughter is a Stephen beholding the heavens opened. It has always been so, and probably always will be.

“The guillotine is the nimbus of the saints of this new religion,” writes Félix Dubois, a declared opponent of anarchy, in Le Péril Anarchiste; and this revised version of the venerable proverb, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” donne à penser. It makes one query whether the fanaticism of this latter-day sect has not been inflamed rather than allayed by every anarchist head that has fallen. Fancy the feelings of a fervent, conscientious anarchist assisting at the public decapitation of one of his coreligionists. Zola has described in unforgettable pages the entry of the contagion of martyrdom into the system of his sincere, learned, and great-souled anarchist character, Guillaume Froment, at the execution of Froment’s protégé:—

“Ah! the dumb stroke, the heavy shock of the knife! Guillaume heard it penetrate far into this quarter of want and work, heard it resound in the inmost recesses of the wretched lodgings, where, at this hour, thousands of workers were rising for the hard labour of the day. It took on there a formidable meaning. It told the exasperation of injustice, the madness of martyrdom, the agonising hope that the blood shed would hasten the victory of the disinherited.”

So long as the guillotining of the anarchists is as dispassionate as that of other killers of their kind, the guillotined are exalted into martyrs by their coreligionists alone. But when, as in the case of Vaillant, who had destroyed no life, the evident purpose of the courts is to wreak vengeance, not to deal justice, and when legal forms are stretched, if not completely snapped, by the weight of popular prejudice and passion with its old, old cry of “Crucify, crucify!” then, not only the sectaries of anarchy, but revolutionists of every shade, and all those who, while not revolutionists, are not quite ready to subscribe to the formula that society, like the king, “can do no wrong,” are pained and shocked. These last add, unconsciously perhaps, several rays to the halos of martyrdom about the heads of the anarchist thus wronged; and the cause of a single tiny sect is confounded for the time being with the cause of the oppressed at large.

The apotheosis of Vaillant is one of the most significant phenomena of modern times. His fate was sincerely and widely deplored in literary and artistic circles and by reputable contributors (if not by editors) in even the capitalistic press.

The spontaneous public pilgrimage to his burial-place, the Champ de Navets, took the police so completely by surprise that they were not prepared to arrest it. A stone, inscribed “Labor improbus omnia vincit,” was hastily erected over his grave while its guardians were at breakfast.

Although it was midwinter, bunches of fresh flowers were fairly showered upon the mound. These and the wreaths of immortelles and artificial flowers, which the French so much affect as funeral tributes, were nearly all accompanied by striking legends. A significant one of these read: “Glory to thee who wast great. I am only a child, but I will avenge thee.” There was also a symbolic crown of thorns.

The scenes that were enacted over this anarchist grave were of a poignant, mystic, almost uncanny intensity.

An aged man raised a babe above the heads of the crowd, and said impressively, “Behold the tomb of the martyr!”

A labourer lifted his voice to utter five simple terrible words, “Vaillant, thou shalt be avenged.”

A blind man declaimed: “In its lethargy the people is like a person buried alive. It wakes sometimes in the night of the tomb, and convulsively strains to break the planks of its coffin. From the depths of darkness I have heard thy cry of rage and of despair, O Vaillant! Thou hast threatened the powerful, those who live on the people and serve them not. Thy arm was raised, but thou wast thine only victim; and now earth fills thy mouth. Alas!”

A poet recited,—

“Un ciel boueux taché de sang, c’était l’aurore, La vieille aurore avec ses roses de festin, Qui se levait honteuse à l’appel du destin Pour éclairer des yeux que la mort allait clore.”

Another poet intoned,—

“Que ton souffle se mêle à la création, Que la rosée de ton sacrifice mouille nos âmes stériles, Que ton exemple unique soit comme l’eau d’un seule nuage Qui fait germer toutes les plantes dans la forêt!”

A ragged snail-gatherer led the crowd to the spot (a hollow against the wall) where a basket of the clotted blood that had flowed from the severed head had been hidden. Men, women, and children knotted lumps of the ensanguined sawdust in their handkerchiefs and besmeared their hands.

A fierce handbill, “A Carnot le Tueur,” was distributed broadcast. Two red flags were planted on the grave, and a black flag was unfurled, bearing the inscription, “Vive la Mort!”

On every anniversary of Vaillant’s death, unless the police interfere, similar scenes are enacted in the Champ de Navets; and in these weird, commemorative rites the dead man’s little daughter, Sidonie, who was adopted by the camarades, plays a spectacular part.

A STREET RIOT

The anniversary of the death of Ravachol is celebrated by a pilgrimage of the faithful to the tomb of Diderot, who is regarded as a precursor of anarchism (Montbrison, where Ravachol is buried, being too far away for Parisians); and every anniversary of the deaths of those who have died for the cause and every funeral of a camarade is made a pretext for keeping alive the morbid cult. But the great saint day of the French anarchist calendar is the 11th of November, the anniversary of the anarchist executions at Chicago.

All anarchistic (one might almost say all revolutionary) Europe honestly believes—whether rightly or wrongly history has yet, perhaps, to decide—that the Chicago hanging was as flagrant a violation of human rights, and the preceding trial as disgraceful a travesty of justice, as the worst absolute monarchy has ever had the audacity to perpetrate. Whatever the influence of this dramatic execution may have been in America, it was highly inflammatory in Europe. Under a practically free immigration system, America will be indeed fortunate if she does not, sooner or later, import long-stored-up rancour, originating from this event.

In the rest of Europe, as in France; in Russia, Germany, and Austria, in Italy and Spain, the violent anarchist acts of the last twenty-five years have been, broadly speaking, so many reprisals for real or fancied injuries suffered at the hands of government or society.

It is as nearly proved as a thing that is not susceptible of mathematical proof well can be that the almost complete immunity of England from anarchist violence (the Fenian attempts can hardly be so classed) has been due, in part at least, to the relative liberty of speech, press, and assemblage she has accorded,—accorded with an almost heroic consistency, in view of the pressure European governments have brought to bear upon her to change her policy. And it is surely something other than mere chance that so large a proportion of the propagandists par le fait hail from Italy. The unconcerned fashion in which the Italian peasants and labourers—at Milan, at Carrara, in Sicily—have been given cold lead when they have had the effrontery to ask for bread, and the mediæval tortures, a hundred times worse than death, inflicted on Passanante[44] and his successors, under the hypocritical guise of clemency and humanity, have acted naturally enough as provocations toward anarchism rather than restraints against it.

The following account of the fate which awaited Bresci appeared in the Paris Matin immediately after his condemnation had been pronounced:—

“The penalty of imprisonment for life which has fallen upon Bresci is very rigorous, and will be aggravated by solitary confinement day and night.

“The condemned man will probably be taken to the bagne of St. Etienne, where he will be clothed in the black and yellow striped prison uniform. During the first years he will occupy a cell two and a half metres long and one metre wide, which has never more than a half-light. Later he will be transferred to a cell a little larger and fully lighted. A table, slightly inclined, half a metre wide, will serve him for bed and furniture. His food will be bread and water once a day only. The jailers will hand it in to him through a hole covered with coloured glass, which permits them to see the prisoner without being seen by him.

“The days must pass in absolute silence. The punishments which threaten the prisoner who does not submit to this terrible régime are: I. The “strait-jacket” (chemise de force). II. Irons which bind the hands to the feet, holding the body bent forward. III. The lit de force, a wooden box exactly like a coffin, pierced at the lower end with two holes for the feet. The legs cannot be moved, and the arms are held motionless by the chemise de force.

“After ten years of this régime the prisoner is allowed to work during the day; but at night he returns to isolation and silence. Neither visits nor letters—nothing—can penetrate this tomb till the day when death or madness comes to deliver him who inhabits it.”

The above is given for what it is worth without a guarantee of the strict accuracy of every detail. But the Matin is not a revolutionary sheet, and would seem to have no good reason for misrepresentation. If only one-half of what it reveals is true, the crime of the Italian government will seem to many more heinous than the worst thing the anarchists have ever done or been accused of doing. No wonder Bresci contrived to put himself out of the way before a year had elapsed, and little wonder that the friends of Bresci have threatened reprisals.

The folly of taking official cognisance of the expression of incendiary views was signally demonstrated at the time of the last visit of the czar to France, when the poet Laurent Tailhade was sentenced to a year of prison and a 1,000-franc fine for a prose-poem glorifying regicide, published in Le Libertaire. This article would have been seen, had the authorities but had the tact to ignore it, only by the few regular readers of Le Libertaire, and would have been read through, it is safe to say, only by a small and unexcitable minority of these; for M. Tailhade is characterised by a style that is incomprehensible, save to the lettrés. But the author must needs be haled into court;[45] and, presto! Paris and the provinces are in an uproar. Well-known literary and artistic personalities—Zola, Gustave Kahn, Frantz Jourdain, E. Ledrain, and Jean Marestan among them—testify for their brother craftsman in person, and Mirbeau, De Hérédia, and Anatole France by letter. The auditors applaud the culprit’s utterances, bear him away, after the announcement of the verdict, in triumph, and hold banquets in his honour. The dangerous article, or at least its incriminated passages, and the proceedings of the court are published, in spite of the fact that such publication is expressly forbidden by law, throughout the length and breadth of France; and all the papers teem with chroniques, leading articles, and skits upon Tailhade or anarchism. Indignation meetings are held in every corner of Paris, and resolutions of protest are passed by socialists, free thinkers, and simple republicans, and even by Masonic lodges.

The obscure Libertaire is given an enormous quantity of free advertising, the anarchist propaganda is carried on by its enemies, and a martyr is made of a man with no special vocation for martyrdom. To be sure, the offender is in durance for a twelve-month, but he is not silent; and nobody is deterred from following his example. A clearer instance of making a mountain out of a molehill it would be hard to find.

Chapter VII

THE CHARACTER OF THE PROPAGANDIST “PAR LE FAIT”

“Give the devil his due.”—Popular proverb.

“He rose at five, and read until the work hour. His shop associates, knowing him sincere, generous, incapable of platitude, did not detest him in spite of his unsociable ways.”—J.-H. Rosny, in Le Bilatéral.

“Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful: but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.”—Thomas Carlyle.

“J’ai regardé le juge en face. Certain d’abord d’être pendu, Je ne me suis pas défendu. A quoi bon mendier sa grâce! Le cuir est fait pour le tanner; Le code est fait pour condamner. J’ai regardé le juge en face.” Maurice Boukay, in Chansons Rouges.

THE first anarchist I ever knew in any country was a dear, grandfatherly American workingman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who conducted me, the Sunday following our chance meeting, to an ethical culture society in Dorchester on purpose to show me how children should be taught to be good.

The second was a young doctor of philosophy, dreaded by reputable Boston for his well-documented sans-gêne, who chanced to be rusticating on a farm where I spent ten days with a gang of a dozen city street boys. I found him infinitely gentle and kind; and it was he of all the farm household who came to relieve me one night while I was keeping an anxious bedside vigil beside one of the boys, who had received an accidental injury to the head that threatened to prove dangerous.

These my first two experiences with anarchist types were scarcely of a nature to dismay me, nor have I ever found anything dismaying in the private characters of the anarchists I have since known in the Old World.

In an every way remarkable study of the anarchist temperament, based on a thorough investigation of anarchists of many professions and all stations in life, A. Hamon, author of La France Sociale et Politique and Une Psychologie du Militaire Professionnel, has arrived at these suggestive conclusions:—

“The positive method confirmed by the rational method enables us to establish an ideal type of anarchist whose mentality is the aggregate of common psychic characteristics. Every anarchist partakes sufficiently of this ideal type to make it possible to differentiate him from other men. The typical anarchist, then, may be defined as follows: a man perceptibly affected by the spirit of revolt under one or more of its forms,—opposition, investigation, criticism, innovation,—endowed with a strong love of liberty, egoistic, or individualistic, and possessed of great curiosity,—a keen desire to know. These traits are supplemented by an ardent love of others, a highly developed moral sensitiveness, a profound sentiment of justice, an alert logical faculty, and pronounced combative tendencies.

“Such is the average psychic type of the anarchist. He is, to summarise, a person rebellious, liberty-loving, at once individualistic and altruistic, enamoured of justice, and imbued with missionary zeal.”

To these conclusions every one who has been privileged to know well any number of anarchists will be likely to subscribe. And, if M. Hamon, instead of extending his investigations to all sorts and conditions of anarchists, had limited them to the propagandists par le fait, his conclusions would not have been essentially different. He would probably have felt constrained to admit that the “ardent love of others” and the “profound sentiment of justice” were curiously blended with petty cravings for notoriety or large desires for glory; the “missionary zeal,” with a reticence amounting to mystification about matters of purely personal concern or projects of violence; and the “highly developed moral sensitiveness,” with a seemingly contradictory moral callousness regarding the means permissible to attain an end. But, on the other hand, M. Hamon would surely have added these sterling qualities: a rare love of animals, surpassing sweetness in all the ordinary relations of life, exceptional sobriety of demeanour, frugality and regularity, austerity even, of living, and courage beyond compare.

Ravachol, the most difficult of all the French propagandists par le fait to comprehend, Ravachol who never allowed (no more than a great financier might) a sentiment of humanity to interpose when the success of a plan was at stake, who never showed a gleam of remorse for his murder of the miser hermit of Chambles and the pillaging for jewels of the tomb of the Marquise de la Rochetaille,[46]—Ravachol was by the testimony of all who knew him well, even his enemies, an unusually kind-hearted man where the Cause—I had almost said where politics—was not concerned. In his young manhood he supported his mother and younger brother, and treated them with the greatest consideration. He was fond of children, and remonstrated fiercely against cruelty to animals. The presiding judge tried in vain to wrest from the little son of Ravachol’s compagne some hint of brutality on Ravachol’s part. “Il était très doux avec maman et avec moi” was all the boy could be got to say; and the only time Ravachol broke down during his detention and trial was at the sight of this little one. Chaumartin, who had betrayed Ravachol from fear or some baser motive, said on the witness-stand, “He taught my little children to read, and cut out pictures for them”; and Ravachol forgave this same Chaumartin his baseness in open court.

Only a short time before the explosion of the rue de Clichy, Ravachol escorted to a shoe store a pitiable beggar girl he had chanced upon in the street, and saw her provided with a new pair of shoes, for which he paid seven francs.

The charities and compassions of Pini, and Duval’s more than platonic solicitude for the welfare of working-women, have been previously noted.

Decamp, though he earned barely fr. 2.50 per day, and had a wife and three children to provide for, adopted a homeless six-year-old child to save it from vagabondage.

Faugoux, who was given twenty years of hard labour for stealing dynamite, wrote to a camarade regarding the damaging testimony of one Drouet:—

“As to Drouet, I pardon him his want of frankness regarding me. He has little instruction, and he hoped in this way to save himself from the law. This compagnon, although convinced, has much sentiment for his family; and this is a powerful motive. When he thought of the struggle and the misery which his wife and child would have to support, he forgot that he was an anarchist. Let us not lay it up against him nor refuse him our hands.”

Salsou adored, as he was adored by, his father and mother and his several brothers and sisters. He wrote them often in the years after he left home for the trimard; and his letters were replete with affection, notably one in which he acknowledged the photograph

LOUISE MICHEL of his mother and two of the children, Martha and Henri, playfully calling the last named “Henricon.” His compagne had no complaint to make of his treatment of her, and even his laundress testified to his being courteous and kind.

Reader’s of Zola’s Germinal will remember the anarchist Souvarine’s affection for the pet rabbit, Pologne, and his sorrow at her death. The point is well observed. Nearly every French anarchist, whether propagandist par le fait or not, is a defender of the rights of all four-footed things; and many are strict vegetarians. In her fascinating autobiography, Louise Michel returns again and again with flaming wrath to the sufferings of domestic animals.

“Under my revolt against the strong,” she says, “I find, farther back than I can remember distinctly, a horror of the tortures inflicted on dumb beasts. I would have liked to see the animal defend himself,—the dog bite the one who abused him, the horse, bleeding under the lash, trample on his torturer. But always the dumb beast endures his lot with the resignation of the subdued races. What an object of pity is the beast!”

This typical anarchist trait is graphically illustrated by the following anecdote related by Flor O’Squarr:—

“One day in July I stopped before a book-stall of the rue Châteaudun, close by the rue Laffitte, when I was joined by an anarchist who led me before the show window of a bird dealer a few steps away. There, with a hand that shook, he pointed out to me some white mice shut up in tiny iron cages that were provided with squirrels’ wheels, whereon the little beasts galloped without respite.

“‘See there,’ moaned the dynamiter, ‘tell me if men are not villains! These poor white mice, so delicate, so pretty, suffer frightfully, don’t you know it, churning like that in this instrument of torture. It gives them nausea and pains in the stomach.’ He would have strangled the dealer without remorse to avenge the mice.”

Zola, in his account of the trial of the dynamiter Salvat (Paris), makes the culprit’s fellow-workmen testify that he was “a worthy man, an intelligent, diligent, and highly temperate workman, who adored his little daughter, and who was incapable of an indelicacy or meanness”; and this characterisation of a bomb-thrower of fiction might be applied with little change to almost every real bomb-thrower who has operated in France. Scarcely one appears to have been—the propagande apart—what we call a “bad egg” and the French call a “mauvais sujet” or to have had a bad disposition. There is scarcely a drunkard, a gambler, a libertine, or a domestic tyrant, in the lot. Indeed, they have had so few of the vices of genius that one almost sighs over their essential commonplaceness.

They have nearly all been highly abstemious and nearly all great readers. Pini’s living expenses averaged less than three francs a day, and were no more after a successful theft than before,—the best possible proof that he was not given to reckless dissipation.

Ravachol spent somewhat more than Pini,—seven or eight francs a day, on an average,—but was no hard liver. Philip, one of the French authors of the explosion at Liège (spring of 1904), devoted a legacy to the cause. Baumann educated himself in evening schools after reaching manhood. Salsou, who had read the Révolution Sociale of Proudhon at fifteen, devoted a good part of his earnings to the purchase of journals and books. He paid from four to seven francs a week for his lodgings, and lived in other respects accordingly. Potatoes and onions “were the chief of his diet.” He left his room regularly about seven in the morning, returned about the same hour at night, and went out very little evenings even to the group meetings, preferring to stay at home and read till a late hour. In fact, the only things his associates found to reproach him for were his over-seriousness and his taciturnity.

“He was an honest, laborious, sober man,” testified his employer at his trial, “and ever ready to do a favour, but very much shut up in himself,—not in the least communicative. He passed for a scholar.” Whereupon Salsou, referring to his condemnation at Fontainebleau for having talked of his faith, retorted, “If they reproach me with being uncommunicative, it is because I know what it costs to be communicative.”

“The aim of the press,” said Zola, apropos of the public reception of Salvat’s attempt (Paris), “seemed to be to besmirch Salvat, in order, in his person, to degrade anarchy; and his life was made out to be one long abomination.... His faults, magnified, were paraded without the causes that had produced them, and without the excuse of the environment which had aggravated them. What a revolt of humanity and justice there was in the soul of Froment, who knew the true Salvat,—Salvat, the tender mystic, the chimerical and passionate spirit, thrown into life without defence, always weighted down and exasperated by implacable poverty, and finding his account at last in this dream of restoring the golden age by destroying the old world!”

Whenever a fresh anarchist trial occurs in France, this inglorious farce of press vilification is re-enacted. Not content with heaping on the culprit’s head all the misdemeanours of which he has been guilty and many crimes of which he has not been guilty, the bourgeois organs try to strip him of his one incontrovertible attribute,—courage. They dare—knowing him well under lock and key—to call him “coward.”

No, my respectable, quaking bourgeois, not that! Robber, murderer, incendiary, fornicator, what you will (if you must judge by your rule of thumb), but not coward! It is too much! You cannot deny the dynamiter what you concede to the vilest criminals and even to the beast of the jungle.

Duval all but killed the police brigadier Rossignol, who attempted to arrest him. For the judge who tried to worm out of him proofs of the existence of accomplices, he had this fine epigram: “Vous n’aurez ma langue qu’avec ma tête.” Condemned to death, he refused to sign a petition for clemency. The innocent Cyvoct, under sentence of death, also refused to sue for pardon.

Two officers were wounded before Francis[47] could be secured on the Boulevard de Strasbourg, and it took four officers to hold Parmeggiani.[48]

Pini had to be lassooed in the heart of Paris like a buffalo of the plains, and it was only when wounded that he could be retaken after his escape from Cayenne.

Lorion, advertised everywhere by the police for an incendiary speech at Roubaix (immediately after his release from a five years’ imprisonment), openly led a band to the sack of the office of a Lille newspaper which had treated him as a police spy, and then made good his escape to Havre; but, determined to purge away the last vestige of the charge against him, he returned to the region of Lille, and wounded two officers before he could be taken.

Decamp defended himself, after his cartridges were finished and his knife gone, with a bayonet,—which he succeeded in wresting from one of his assailants,—until he swooned from loss of blood. In court he said:—

“You can guillotine me. I prefer it. I have had enough of your prisons and your bagnes. Off with my head! I do not defend it. I deliver it, shouting, ‘Vive l’Anarchie!’ What does one camarade’s head more or less amount to, if only our beautiful Hope spreads!”

Baumann constituted himself a prisoner, and demanded the guillotine. Etievant wrote from London a little while before his attempt:—

“We are here in large numbers, the proscribed of all countries, convinced of the final triumph of Liberty, having made great sacrifices already for the Idea, and fortifying ourselves with the hope of rendering service to poor humanity which has limped along painfully for so many centuries; and yet I begin to doubt that we have done everything that we might have done and in consequence everything that we should have done. Would it not have been better to struggle even unto death there where the hazard of birth had placed us? Rather than to flee precipitately before the threats and the blows of authority, would it not have been better to make the sacrifice of our lives?” By deliberately returning to Paris, Etievant answered his own question in the affirmative.

Henry, whose attitude in court was that of a pontiff, “defended himself in the street like a little lion,” says Barrucand. “He resisted till he was at the very end of his forces, even under the heels of the police. Flippant, ferocious, he mocked the officers, said that he had just arrived from Pekin, and would not give his name.”

Vaillant denounced himself when he stood a fair chance of escape, and bore himself proudly before his judges and before the guillotine.

Ravachol, king of cynics, risked discovery in passing the octroi (city revenue office) with dynamite in his satchel; walked long distances on foot and rode in jolting omnibuses while carrying materials that the slightest shock might explode; showed himself after each of his attempts with an appalling indifference to recognition; defended himself superbly before the Véry restaurant, whither he had returned for no other apparent purpose than to finish the conversion of the garçon L’Hérot, whom he had found sympathetically inclined a fortnight before; advanced to the guillotine (though bound in a painful and ignoble fashion) singing the most blasphemous and defiant of all the stanzas of the venerable Père Duchêne;[49] hurled in the teeth of Deibler, the headsman, the epithet, “Cochon!” and, as the knife fell, cried “Vive la Ré”—The word was never finished. Some of the bourgeois papers, determined to deprive Ravachol of the cynical grandeur of his death by making him out a retractor, claimed the unfinished word to be République instead of Révolution.

It is the petty work of little men to call a man a coward who can die like this. A consummate villain,—yes, judged by conventional standards,—but no coward.

The man who dies like a man—and let it not be forgotten there are a hundred and one ways of doing it—is to be admired for that, whether he be called John Huss or John Brown, Saint Stephen or Saint Jean Népomucène, Charles I. or Louis XVI., Raleigh or Ravachol, Petronius Arbiter or Louis Lingg.

ANNIVERSARY DECORATIONS, MUR DES FÉDÉRÉS

“He [Ravachol] endured everything without a murmur, all the pain and all the punishment, because, in the sombre heaven to which his criminal reveries mounted, he had seen his chimera pass, because he believed himself an apostle.”—Flor O’Squarr, in Les Coulisses de l’Anarchie.

Chapter VIII

SOCIALISTS AND OTHER REVOLUTIONISTS

“If the spirit of revolt is an essential part of the anarchist mentality, it is not alone in this sort of mentality that it is found. All anarchists are révoltés, but all persons who display tendencies to revolt are not anarchists. Thus in the political and social sphere a number of the partisans of the bygone régimes are révoltés.”—A. Hamon.

“I went yesterday to hear Paul Déroulède.... As for me, I confess that I particularly relished this frankness of accent, this conviction capable of folly.”—Alexander Hepp.

“Honour, to my thinking, consists entirely in the fine quality of the motive which directs the act. Now I have always seen the conduct of Paul Déroulède dominated by an anxious and continual care for our national greatness, by the reparation of our disasters. All the movements, all the supreme prayers of his heart, are eminently French. That suffices me.”

Sully-Prudhomme.

“There are no practical socialists but the anti-Semites.”

Edouard Drumont.

ONE of the plainest after-results of the Dreyfus affair, into which the socialists[50] as well as the anarchists threw themselves with glee for the superb opportunity it offered to undermine patriotism and destroy the army, has been a cleavage between the more conservative and the more radical elements of the socialist party.

The primary cause of this division may be found in the fact that two socialists (one of whom, M. Millerand, had previously been decidedly militant) accepted portfolios in the coalition ministry which supervised the Dreyfus trial at Rennes and which survived it for a time. This official service had such a sobering effect, both upon the ministers themselves and upon their immediate following, that their socialism became frankly opportunist; and the more radical and doctrinaire among their fellow-socialists felt compelled, because of this, to withdraw from them their support. In like manner the socialist deputies who have helped to maintain the Combes ministry have been constrained to a similar opportunism. So it has come about that the French socialists,

M. VAILLANT[52] who formerly were, broadly speaking, all revolutionary, are now divided into the two distinct and even hostile camps[51] of evolutionary socialists and revolutionary socialists.

With the evolutionary socialists—who are, perhaps, for being the less logical only the more philosophical—this book has, from the very nature of its subject, nothing to do. The revolutionary socialists alone concern us.

It is needless to say that doctrinaire socialism and doctrinaire anarchism are at opposite poles of the world of thought. Absolute authority is as much the ideal of the one as absolute liberty is the ideal of the other. For the anarchist the betterment of society depends primarily on the betterment of the individual, while for the socialist the betterment of the individual depends primarily on the betterment of society. The complete realisation of socialism presupposes the perfection of human machinery, and the complete realisation of anarchism the perfection of human nature. The theories of the vicarious atonement and salvation by character present, in another field, a somewhat analogous contrast. Nevertheless, these theoretically antithetical systems find in their antagonism to actual conditions so many points of contact that it is not always easy for an outsider to determine whether a given revolutionist is an anarchist or a revolutionary socialist, and not always easy, one more than half suspects, for a revolutionist to determine himself in which of the two classes he really belongs.

LÉANDRE’S CARICATURE OF PAUL DÉROULÈDE AS DON QUIXOTE

By permission of “Le Rire”

The revolutionary socialists, like the anarchists, are high-minded dreamers, who are bent on procuring happiness for the human kind. Unlike the anarchists, they participate in elections, and do not desire the abolition of the state (as is indicated by their use of the word citoyen, which the anarchists abhor); but they do wish for the downfall of the present state (with whose bad faith and impotence they are thoroughly disgusted) as the first step towards setting up the socialistic state, and they hold collective revolt the most likely means of effecting this downfall; all of which, in troubled periods, amounts to very much the same thing practically as if they abjured the state altogether. Like the anarchists, they demand the abolition of private property, and they are opposed, like them, to charity (as the term is popularly understood), to patriotism, and to armies. Like the anarchists, furthermore (though this does not seem to be a logical necessity for either), they are violently opposed to the church; and they are (with less inevitableness than the anarchists in the same matter) more or less hostile to marriage.

M. BROUSSE[53]

They do not advocate the individual overt act of violence (though they often sympathise with it when committed), and, hoping for social salvation from social machinery, neglect the propaganda par l’exemple. With these exceptions their methods of propaganda are identical with those of the anarchists. They dispense the word orally, as the anarchists dispense it by means of mass meetings, punchs-conférences, soupes-conférences, matinées-conférences, ballades propagandistes, soirées familiales, and amateur theatricals, and have a similar penchant for the chanson populaire.

The socialists have their special books and brochures and ingenious methods of circulating them and their special propagandist press, which includes several dailies, as well as weeklies and monthlies,[54] and serves as a bond of union and a means of communication between individuals and groups; and they make a copious use of placards, manifestos, pictures, artistic posters, and souvenir postal cards.[55]

M. JAURÈS[56]

Anarchists and socialists unite in anti-clerical and anti-militarist mass meetings, in interfering riotously with public worship, in shouting, A bas l’Armée! and A bas la Patrie! They also unite in distributing to the conscripts manuals reciting their duties in the regiments, chief of which are disobedience and desertion; and they commemorate together many of the same anniversaries, especially those of the Mur des Fédérés[57] (May) and of Etienne Dolet[58] (August). It is at election times mainly that they try conclusions fiercely with each other, because of their antagonistic sentiments towards the exercise of the vote.

The revolutionary socialists esteem lightly trade-unions, except as a means of coercing ministries to paternalism, and take little interest in co-operation[59] as practised at present; but they have something of the same faith as the anarchists that la grève générale, which several of their congresses have indorsed, and la pan-coopération will coincide with the revolution.

In a certain sense—and not so very far-fetched a sense, either—every political party in Paris is revolutionary, inasmuch as all the “outs” are willing to resort to revolutionary methods to overturn the statu quo and all the “ins” would be willing to resort

M. GUESDE[60] to revolutionary methods to restore their respective dispensations if, by a turn of the wheel of fortune, they should become the “outs.”

The anarchists and the socialists are by no means the only bodies who find the Third Republic detestable, and who, to make way with it, would gladly descend into the street. The royalists and imperialists are reactionary revolutionists, only deterred from insurrection and a coup d’état by the absence of the magnetic man and the propitious occasion. The nationalists would pause at nothing that would enable them to substitute a plebiscitary for the present parliamentary republic, and the anti-Semites

M. ALLEMANE[61] at nothing that would expel or dispossess the Jews. Rochefort and Drumont call themselves socialists; and Guérin’s organ, L’Anti-Juif, regularly carries this head-line, “Défendre tous les travailleurs, Combattre tous les spéculateurs.” L’Autorité, L’Intransigeant, La Libre Parole, and La Patrie are as truly revolutionary sheets as are Les Temps Nouveaux and Le Libertaire; while Paul de Cassagnac, Baron Legoux, Lur-Saluces, the gilded youth of the “Œillet Blanc” (“White Carnation”) who battered the President’s hat at Auteuil, Rochefort, Drumont, Guérin, Régis, and Déroulède are as much revolutionists as the socialist Jules Guesde or the anarchist Jean Grave.

Some time before his expulsion Déroulède said to his electors: “There is no other means of safety than a revolution at once popular and military, having at its head a civilian and a soldier, both loyally resolved to maintain the republic. To deliver France and the republic, there are three methods possible: the will of a man (that is, the coup d’état); the will of the people (that is, revolution); the will of the representative assembly (that is, parliament). I will do all in my power to make the last method—the most peaceable—effective; but I do not greatly count on it, and I declare myself determined to venture everything for the triumph of the other two.”

JULES GUÉRIN

Déroulède and Guérin are both in banishment at this moment for overt acts against the state. And, while the strict legality of the forms of the high court trial that condemned them is more than dubious, there is no doubt possible as to their essential guilt.

While Guérin was holding Fort Chabrol, the Dreyfusard anarchists were exhorted by the anarchist leader, Sébastien Faure, to change their cries of A bas Guérin! to Vive Guérin! since, whatever the anti-Dreyfusard, anti-Semite rebel might have been before the siege or might be after it, he was logically one of them as long as he was defying the authority of the state.

The fact is that Paris, in spite of her excessive conservatism in certain directions, has, and ever since the Great Revolution has had, an état d’esprit révolutionnaire. Paris revolutionists and Parisians, then, are, in the last analysis, pretty nearly one and the same thing.

	Part II THE ELITE

“Montmartre va descendre!”

“The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men and, of the human frame, A mechanized automaton.” Shelley.

Chapter IX

THE REVOLUTIONARY TRADITIONS OF THE LATIN QUARTER

“When the students sing the Carmagnole, France trembles.”

“The monarchy of July persecuted the cancan, which historically seems to have been the anarchy of the period.”—Aurélien Scholl.

“Humble spot, dingy little court, oh, how charming I find you! Hence will go forth some day the Revolution which shall save us; the age which by chloroform has already suppressed pain will suppress hunger also.”

Michelet on the Collège de France.

“The great movement of ideas which occurred in France under the silent reign of Napoleon III., when the tribune was mute, the press muzzled, and the right of assembly confiscated, had for its stage the brasseries of the Latin Quarter.”—Edmond Lepelletier.

“THE Sorbonne,” says Eugène Pelletan, “shines from the heights through the early mists like the dawn of intelligence. It is there that the French Revolution was really born, thence was its point of departure....

“On this sacred mount of the university a philosopher in monkish garb spoke one day in the open air. What did he say? It matters little. He said something new, and the multitude listened because he was the first to defend the claims of the earth,—the right of reason to reason; and, while he spoke, a veiled woman, with lips on fire, clung to the grating of a convent over yonder, and encouraged him with gestures in default of words.

“The man represents human intellect hampered by the church, and the woman represents France confined in a cloister; but Abélard will grow, and will assume day by day, like the Indian god, a fresh avatar. To-morrow—for what is to-morrow in the life of a people?—he will bear, according to the ironical or severe humour of France, the name of Rabelais, the name of Descartes, the name of Rousseau, the name of Voltaire. And, side by side with him, the Idea, the insulted, the abused Idea, will advance with slow and tragic steps between two rows of fagots, a flame in her forehead and her hands at her sides, until the day when she shall wrest the torch from the executioner, and proclaim herself Queen.”

Whoever would unfold the progress of the revolutionary spirit in France from the earliest times through the centuries must needs write a history of the Sorbonne and of the seat of the Sorbonne, the Pays Latin (the Latin Quarter).

In the relatively limited area included between Notre Dame, where the goddess of Reason was enthroned in the Great Revolution; the Place Maubert,[62] with its statue of Etienne Dolet, the sixteenth-century printer, burned for impiety and atheism; the Square Monge, with its statue of François Villon; the Place Monge, with its statue of Louis Blanc; the Panthéon, with its memorials to the intellectual liberators, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, and Voltaire; the Place de l’Ecole de Médecine, with its statue of Danton doughtily inscribed, “Pour vaincre les ennemis de la justice, il faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace et toujours de l’audace”; the Place St. Germain des Prés, with its statue of Diderot; and the Place de l’Institut, with its statue of Condorcet,—every inch of ground is rich in souvenirs of the intellectual history of France and of the convulsions by which this history’s various stages have been marked.

Here on the left bank of the Seine, where Abélard, in the twelfth century, “discoursed to all the earth,—to two popes, twenty cardinals, and fifty bishops, to all the orders, all the modern schools which descended from the mountain and inundated Europe”;[63] whither came Dante in the fourteenth century for the lectures of Siger de Brabant; the Greek Lascaris in the fifteenth and Calvin and Loyola in the sixteenth centuries; where the trouvère Rutebœuf in the thirteenth century and the poet Villon in the fifteenth carried on the propagande par l’exemple and even the propagande par le fait; where, in the early part of the fifteenth century, the Cabocherie decreed the reign of virtue and equality, pillaged the dwellings of the wealthy, and had all things common; where, in the sixteenth century, the Commune Catholique was set up at the instigation of an anti-royalist preacher of St. Sévérin; where, in the same century, François Rabelais, Clément Marot, and La Boétie (friend of Montaigne and social democrat before his time) prepared themselves, in their very different fashions, to alternately edify and castigate the civilisation of their epoch, and René Descartes, in the seventeenth century, to found modern philosophy and to destroy scholasticism; where the eighteenth-century Encyclopedists set themselves to solve the problem of human destiny, and begot the Revolution; where, in the century just closed, the trinity of the Collège de France, Michelet, Quinet, and Mickiewicz, formed the men who were to set up the Third Republic on the ruins of the Second Empire,—in this intellectual and nerve centre of Paris, of France, and at intervals of the world, revolutionary action has been so often suited to the revolutionary thought that no one dreams of crying out crime or mystery when, in the course of excavations, human bones are exhumed.

MÉGOTIERS OF THE PLACE MAUBERT

Revolutionary thinking has not been practised with impunity in the Quartier Latin. From Abélard to Michelet and Renan, religious, political, and philosophical heresies have called down ecclesiastical, governmental, and academical wrath with the usual result of helping to propagate the heresies.

Abélard was censured for heterodoxy, hounded from one monastery to another, and condemned finally to perpetual silence. Ramus, antagonist of the philosophy of Aristotle, was included in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. “In Ramus,” says Michelet, “they fancied they were killing a second Abélard. They thought to butcher mind.” Clément Marot was imprisoned, and forced to flee from France. Descartes, maltreated by Catholics and Protestants alike, forbidden to teach, and threatened with death, took refuge first in Holland and then in Sweden. Vanini was burned at the stake. Buffon was persecuted for his Histoire Naturelle, and Montesquieu for his Esprit des Lois. Michelet, who “scratched the heavens with his white hand,”[64] Mickiewicz, Quinet, and Renan were expelled from the Collège de France.

There have been periods, it is true, when the university faculties have been servile and cringing,—mere tools of the potentates of church and state,—and periods when the students have been craven or lethargic; but these periods are the exceptions. Speaking broadly, the Quartier has been from first to last a preserve of free living and free thinking, a stronghold of opposition, a centre of agitation, and a hot-bed of revolution.

Eugène Pelletan thus describes the students of the university’s beginnings:—

“A mixed, vagabond population, drifted together from nobody could say where, they live by the grace of God, they eat when they can, they sleep on straw, and carry their begging wallets proudly, as if conscious they hold there the word of the future.... When they do not dine, they have the resource of the cabaret; and, always noisy, always care-free, they prowl about at nightfall, they force now and then the door of a bourgeois, and, when the watch rushes to the uproar, they put it to rout, quit with answering for the misdemeanour to the rector, who invariably exonerates.”

“Scantily clad and almost vagabonds,” says another historian of this early period, “but not depriving themselves of good cheer, the future magistrates and theologians, who were to antagonise in parliament the will of the king, were already revolutionary.”

In the fourteenth century the faculties, morally, and the students, both morally and materially, cast in their lots with the revolution of Etienne Marcel, who is credited with having invented the barricade.

Reign succeeded reign, and still the good habit of thrashing the watch was kept up. Besides, there were battles-royal galore between the students and the troops of the king.

The students made themselves jugglers, fakirs, and buffoons on the Pont-Neuf, then a favourite, shop-lined promenade. They sacked cook-shops and taverns, and levied tribute from belated pedestrians. The lawless exploits of François Villon, singer of villanelles to Guillemette, the tapissière, and Jehanneton, the chaperonnière, in the reigns of Charles VII. and Louis XI., have become legendary.

That other great François (Rabelais) has portrayed the democratic and turbulent temper of the students of a somewhat later period.

During the reign of Louis XIV., the merry, strolling players and mountebanks, Tabarin and Gaultier-Garguille (the latter the inventor of the farce), had numerous imitators among the students; which jovial humour did not prevent the latter from entering heartily into the Fronde,[65] risking their lives on “the Day of the Barricades” and exercising their caustic wit against the court and the hated foreign minister, Mazarin, in lampoons called Mazarinades.

The trenchant criticisms and the comprehensive formulas, which appeared in the Encyclopedists’ published works, captivated many professors of the university,[66] and made a direct and profound impression on the students. But it seems to be no exaggeration to say that it was the cafés and cabarets of the Left Bank rather than the university that fanned the smouldering flame of discontent into a conflagration of rebellion. In them the fiercest revolutionary clubs of the epoch had their rendezvous. At the Café Procope,—transformed, alas! into a vulgar restaurant only a year or so back,—Hébert presided over a club which burned before the door the journals found too tame for its ideas, and Danton met with Marat, Legendre, and Fabre d’Eglantine; and the Procope was only one of a score. Indeed, it would take a volume to do full justice to the part played in French history by the Latin Quarter cafés from 1780 to Napoleon’s establishment of himself in power.

Under the Restoration the social and political Utopias of the Icarians, the Fourierites, and the Saint-Simonians, commanded the interest, if not the allegiance, of a considerable portion of the university. “The new Sorbonne,” says Vacherot, “far from viewing unmoved the liberal movement which was to culminate in the revolution of July, participated in it actively, lending it the prestige of its most spirituel, its most serious, and its most eloquent teaching.”

It was in great part the students, as all know who have followed the vicissitudes of Marius and Cosette in Les Misérables, who were responsible for the insurrection of 1830.

It was in the spheres of literature and art, however, where Romanticism was struggling to supplant Classicism, that the hottest passions were kindled. The influence of Scott, Byron, and the rising Hugo dominated, even in the matter of dress. Romanticists adopted the costumes of Moslems, Corsairs, and Giaours: the Quartier resembled a fancy-dress ball-room, and men fought in its streets for their artistic as they had in other times for their political and religious creeds.

The students of the reign of Louis Philippe have been thus pictured by De Banville: “Young, gay, reckless, but possessed of native distinction, coquettishly arrayed in velvet and all sorts of original and fancy costumes, capped with Basque bérets and felts à la Rubens, they went up and down, sauntering, singing, gazing into space, alone, or in pairs, or in groups, or three by three, selling their text-books willingly at the old book dealers in order to enter the cabaret,—a custom which, as you know, dates from the twelfth century.”

Of this same youth and that which came immediately after it Aurélien Scholl writes: “The young men of the schools thought solely of fêtes and of fun. The Quartier resembled strangely the Bohème of Mürger,—la noce, nothing but la noce. The historiographer of this epoch finds only farces to narrate, and such farces!”

And yet the students played almost as large a part in the revolution of 1848 as in that of 1830. Under their masks of flippancy they were serious. They had merely been waiting for the strategic moment and a leader; and, when in 1847 Antonio Watripon, bent on a “reawakening of the schools,” founded a journal, La Lanterne du Quartier Latin, as a means of organising and directing the student opposition, they took an active part in the demonstrations which brought about the downfall of the government of Louis Philippe.

They sprang to arms again, soon after, against the disillusionising coup d’état of the third Napoleon, while the workingmen remained relatively submissive. “At the news that Louis Napoleon is getting ready to confiscate the public liberties,” says Scholl, “a wave of indignation sweeps over the length and breadth of the Quartier. The students invade, and pronounce inflammatory discourses in, café after café, crèmerie after crèmerie. They descend without hesitation into the street to combat the troops of the tyrant, and many pay for their heroism with their lives.”

The discouragement which followed the complete establishment of the authority of the usurper naturally gave rise to a sort of lassitude, which was mistaken by many for sycophancy or indifference, and was generally regarded as proof positive of the degeneration of the student type. But the students, although temporarily silent and outwardly submissive, had not disarmed. It was not long before Vallès, Gambetta, Vermesch, Blanqui, Rochefort, and scores of others, who participated a little later in the Commune or in the founding of the Third Republic, were busily sowing the seeds of disaffection in the cafes; and in 1865 this fresh revolutionary movement was given coherence and direction by Les Propos de Labienus, the little masterpiece of Rogeard.

It was, in point of fact, mainly in the cafés of the Latin Quarter rather than in the university proper that the revolution of 1871, as well as that of 1789, was fermented.

In 1866, at the Café de la Renaissance Hellénique, a revolutionary club was formed, consisting of eight persons, the oldest of whom was barely twenty-two,—five law students, a medical student, a painter, and a rentier,—the first overt act of which was a riotous protest against the production of Augier’s La Contagion at the Odéon. Most, if not all, of the charter members of this club, which was soon consolidated with a club of older men meeting at the Café Serpente, saw the inside of the prison of Ste. Pélagie before the Commune was achieved.

“The Renaissance,” says Auguste Lepage in his Cafés Artistiques et Littéraires de Paris, “had a special physiognomy at the absinthe hour and after dinner. Noisy, uncombed students entered, mounted to the second floor, got together in groups, and talked politics or took a turn at billiards. They lighted long pipes, artistically coloured; and through the smoke clouds might be heard, together with the voices of the speechifiers, the clicks of the ivory balls as they met on the green cushions. Etudiantes accompanied the students. These strikingly dressed girls smoked cigarettes and occupied themselves with politics.”