PART II

PARIS AND THE

SOCIAL REVOLUTION

[Illustration: SELLERS OF CHANSONS

“_They teach their motley audiences to sing

the songs they have the wit to sell them._”]

[Illustration: Title page]

_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

[Illustration: Printer’s Mark]

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

PAGE

I. What the Anarchist Wants 5

_Suggestions of the beginnings of anarchistic philosophy and

of the history of the development of anarchy—The contemporary

French Encyclopedists, Pierre Kropotkine, Elisée Reclus, and

Jean Grave—The introductory chapter of Jean Grave’s_

L’Anarchie: son But, ses Moyens, _selected as the best

exposition of the French anarchistic doctrine—Current

misconceptions of anarchy—The rational bases of anarchy—The

reasons for its opposition to laws and to governments—The

anarchistic ideal_ “l’individu libre dans l’humanité

libre.”—_Development of the physical, intellectual, and moral

nature of the individual necessary to attain this

ideal—Freedom to satisfy all physical, intellectual, and moral

needs a necessity—The freedom of the soil the first

prerequisite, after that the freedom of the domain of

knowledge and art—Anarchy frankly international—Its demands

for absolute liberty in the domain of thought as in that of

deeds—Its utopianism denied._

II. The Oral Propaganda of Anarchy 25

_The simplest, most natural form of propaganda, telling

one’s faith to one’s neighbours—The group the unit of

public oral propaganda—Characteristics of the group, its

meetings, its statistics, its autonomy—Federations and

congresses—Communication between groups—Union meetings

of groups—Anarchist mass-meetings_—Punchs-conférences

and soupes-conférences—Ballades de propagande—Déjeuners

végétariens—_Amateur theatricals—The_ Maison du Peuple—Soirée

familiale—_The_ trimardeur—_The_ chanson _as a means of

propaganda, with examples of revolutionary chansons._

III. The Written Propaganda of Anarchy 61

_The anarchist press,_ Le Journal du Peuple, Les Plébéiennes,

Le Libertaire—_Jean Grave and_ Les Temps Nouveaux—_The press

as a means of intercommunication between the_ camarades, _the_

trimardeurs, _and the groups_—L’Education Libertaire—_Amateur

papers—Ephemeral character of the anarchist press_—Le Père

Peinard _and its editors—Anarchist almanacks—Financial

difficulties of the anarchist press and methods of raising

funds—Difficulties encountered in publication and

circulation_—“Les Lois Scélérates”—_Placards and fliers—Paul

Robin and his system of_ éducation intégrale—Le Collège

Libertaire—_The study of the masters and of their forerunners

and disciples—Popular editions of great writers who tend

towards anarchy—Violent brochures._

IV. The Propaganda of Anarchy by Example 91

_Thoreau and Garrison as precursors of the anarchistic

attitude—Tolstoy on the propaganda by example—Its

importance—Practicable and impracticable acts of this

form of propaganda—Octave Mirbeau on depopulation—Pierre

Lavroff on propaganda by example—Anarchist

experiment stations and reasons for their failure—The

attitude of anarchists towards trade-unionism_—La grève

universelle—_The attitude of anarchists towards

co-operation_—La pan-coopération.

V. The Propaganda of Anarchy _par le Fait_ 105

_Lack of unanimity among French anarchists regarding this

method of propaganda—The emergence into public prominence of

the insurrectional idea—César de Paepe’s speech at the Geneva

Peace Congress of 1867—Declaration of the_ Fédération

Italienne—_Insurrections at Letino and San Galo,

Italy—Utterances at the Congresses of Fribourg and of the_

Fédération Jurasienne—_Distinction between the individual

overt act when directed against an official of the state and

when directed against an individual member of the_

bourgeoisie—_The latter acts disapproved by the majority of

anarchists—Elisée Reclus on this subject—The attitude of_ Les

Temps Nouveaux—_Zo d’Axa on the overt acts of

Ravachol—Statistics of the victims of anarchists—Reasons for

the alarm excited by the propaganda_ par le fait—_Some humorous

features of the panic during the period of “The Terror”—Theft

as a form of propaganda par_ le fait—_Charles Malato and Jean

Grave on this subject—Cases of Clément Duval and Pini—Extent

of anarchist thefts—Counterfeiting—Case of L’Abruti._

VI. The Causes of Propaganda _par le Fait_ 131

_Desire for vengeance the cause of the greater part of the

overt acts of anarchists—The death of Watrin—Such acts proceed

mainly from those who have suffered injustice either in their

own person or in that of those near to them—The cases of

Duval, Pini, Dardare, Decamp, Léveillé, Rulliers, Pedduzi,

Ravachol, Lorion, Vaillant, Etievant, Salsou—Zo d’Axa on the

police_ rafle _of April, 1892—Recent questionable repressive

measures—Collusion of state officials and police to turn

revolutionary disturbances to selfish ends—Legality often

strained by the government in its repressive measures—Overt

acts almost never the result of conspiracy—Belief in his

“mission” of the propagandist_ par le fait—_The_ stigmata _of this

vocation—Testimony of Björnson, Zola, and other

writers—Stimulating effect of the executions of anarchists

upon anarchist fanaticism—Sympathy of many who are not

anarchists excited by overstraining of legal forms and undue

severity in repressive measures—The apotheosis of

Vaillant—Anarchist anniversaries—Why so many violent

anarchists are Italians—England’s immunity from overt

anarchist acts—The futility of repressing the free expression

of violent ideas—The case of Laurent Tailhade._

VII. The Character of the Propagandist par le Fait 155

_The salient traits of the anarchist character—The average

psychic type of the anarchist as indicated by A.

Hamon—Personal character of Ravachol, Pini, Duval,

Faugoux, Salsou—The anarchist’s abhorrence of cruelty

to animals—The propagandist_ par le fait _rarely a worthless

fellow—Frugality and domestic virtues of prominent

anarchist criminals—Personal courage of this type, with

notable examples._

VIII. Socialists and Other Revolutionists 167

_Revolutionary and evolutionary socialists—Radical differences

between theoretic socialism and anarchism—Practical aims

common to both—Similarity in methods of propaganda—Union of

anarchists and socialists against common enemies in troubled

periods—Similarity in attitude of both towards trade-unionism

and co-operation—Revolutionary tendencies of royalists,

imperialists, anti-Semites, and nationalists—Déroulède’s

proclamation to his electors—Anarchist approval of Jules

Guérin’s defence of “Fort Chabrol.”_

IX. The Revolutionary Traditions of the Latin Quarter 177

_The Sorbonne as a centre of epoch-making

thought—Abélard—Richness of the Latin Quarter in souvenirs of

intellectual and political revolution—Latin Quarter martyrs of

revolutionary thinking—Periods of cringing on the part of the

university the exception—The lawless student life of the

Middle Ages—The students in the time of Louis XIV.—The cafés

and cabarets as revolutionary agents—The conflict between

Romanticists and Classicists at the beginning of the

nineteenth century—The part played by the students in the

revolutions of_ 1830 _and_ 1848—_The student protest against the_

coup d’état _of the third Napoleon—The students as a

revolutionary force under the Second Empire—Vallès, Gambetta,

Vermesch, Blanqui, Rochefort—The students and the Commune—The

relation of the Latin Quarter cafés and cabarets to the

Commune—Love of laughter, love of liberty, and love of love

the three characteristic traits of the spirit of the Latin

Quarter._

X. The Revolutionary Spirit in the Latin Quarter of To-day 189

_The alleged decadence of the spirit of the Latin Quarter—The

truth and the falsity of the charge—Differences in the

present-day manifestation of the three characteristic traits

of the spirit of the Quarter—The dress and manners of students

of to-day—The contemporary_ grisette—_The anniversary of

Mürger—The real student cafés and cabarets—The student

publications—The_ cénacles _of the Quarter—The present hour

primarily a period of transition, the student of to-day

seeking his way—Revolutionary thought well represented in the

university faculties—Student outbreaks during the last thirty

years._

XI. Bohemians of the Latin Quarter 207

_Bohemians by choice—Those not attached to the university who

inhabit the Latin Quarter for the sake of its advantages, from

affection, or from force of habit—A typical example—Henri

Pille, Maurice Bouchor, Jean Richepin, Paul Bourget_—“Les

Vivants”—_Bohemians from necessity—Renegades from the

Bohemianism of the Quarter—Clovis Hugues on the sacrifice of

long hair—Two types of_ “moutons”—_Ways and means of the

Bohemians—Their hardships—The arrival of prosperity too late._

XII. Those who Starve 221

_Mürger’s_ Biographie d’un Inconnu—_A brief recital of its

story—The hero of the novel a permanent type_—Saint Joseph

de la Dèche—La misère en habit noir—_The case of

Dr. Laporte—The verdict of the judge._

XIII. Those who Kill Themselves 231

“La littérature qui tue”—_Picturesque suicide of a young

Latin Quarter poet as narrated by Emile Goudeau—Suicide

of René Leclerc—Other cases of suicide—Greater proportion

of suicide among victims_ of la misère en habit noir.

XIV. Freaks and Fumistes 239

_The_ chevaliers d’industrie _of the Quarter—Their detestation

of the_ bourgeoisie—_More comedy than tragedy in their lives—The

types of Vallès’_ Réfractaires—_Fontan-Crusoe, Poupelin, and

M. Chaque—Other vagabond types—Eugène Cochet, Amédée Cloux,

Bibi-la-Purée, La Mère Casimir, Le Marquis de Soudin, the

artist bard of Père Lunette’s, Achille Leroy, Gaillepand, La

Mère Souris, Victor Sainbault, Coulet—Professional humourists

and deliberate farceurs—Sapeck, Karl, Zo d’Axa—A novel

candidate—Relation of starvation, suicide, freakishness, and_

fumisterie _to the revolutionary spirit._

XV. Montmartre and _La Vache Enragée_ 257

_The cavalcades of_ La Vache Enragée _in 1896 and 1897—Origin

of the phrase—Literary, artistic, and musical celebrities who

have eaten of the_ Vache Enragée—_The manner of living of the

typical_ Montmartrois—_His resourcefulness—His poses and

so-called affectations often devices for cheap living—The

restaurants, cafés, crèmeries, and cabarets of

Montmartre—Their traditions and their esprit de corps—The

Montmartre of the tourist—The real Montmartre—Its relation to

Paris—Cost of living at Montmartre—Spring-time in Montmartre._

XVI. Literary and Artistic Cabarets of Montmartre 281

_The history of Montmartre—The exodus of the_ “Hydropathies”

_and the_ “Hirsutes” _from the Latin Quarter—The_ Grand’

Pinte—_Rodolphe Salis—The origin, career, and influence of

the_ Chat Noir—_Its successors and imitators—Closest existing

counterparts of the_ Chat Noir—Le Conservatoire, Le Cabaret

des Quat’z’ Arts, Le Cabaret des Arts, La Veine, La Boîte à

Fursy, and Le Tréteau de Tabarin—_Bohemian conclaves which

have superseded the cabarets—The chanson as a moulder of

public opinion—Revolutionary chansons in Montmartre

cabarets—Jules Jouy, Maxime Lisbonne, Marcel Legay, Gaston

Couté, Xavier Privas_—Cabarets brutaux—_Bruant’s_ Mirliton,

_Alexandre’s_ Cabaret Bruyant—_Three poets of talent imbued

with a revolutionary spirit, Bruant, Jehan Rictus, Maurice

Boukay—The revolutionary traditions of Montmartre—Bourgeois

fear of Montmartre_—“Montmartre va descendre”—_The relations

between the workingmen, the littérateurs, and the artists at

Montmartre—Their revolutionary spirit._

XVII. The Revolutionary Spirit in Prose Literature and

the Drama 313

_The revolutionary attitude of Tolstoy, Ibsen, and

Zola—Revolutionary influence of Anatole France and Octave

Mirbeau—Lucien Descaves—Victor Barrucand and his campaign for

free bread—Other novelists whose works have a revolutionary

trend—Revolutionary psychology—Rosny’s_ Le Bilatéral—_Other

fiction writers who understand the gravity of the issue—The

influence of “les auteurs gais”—Essayists, critics, and

philosophers who are more or less militant iconoclasts or

révoltés—The origin and influence of_ L’Endehors—_The

subsequent activity of the_ Endehors group—_The group of_

L’Idée Nouvelle—Revues des jeunes—_Other_ revues _hospitable

to revolutionary writings—Octave Mirbeau, Lucien Descaves,

Maurice Donnay—Other playwrights whose pieces are frankly

revolutionary—Playwrights whose works are revolutionary by

implication—The_ Théâtre Libre _and its successors—Variety

theatres and concert halls—The trend of literature from

socialism to anarchism—The testimony of Clovis Hugues and

Fierens-Gevaert—The relation of the French_ libertaire _literary

movement to that in other European countries._

XVIII. The Revolutionary Spirit in Poetry, Music, and Art 361

_The anarchistic spirit more or less natural to the

poet—Revolutionary singers in France at the beginning of the

nineteenth century—Hégésippe Moreau, Victor Hugo, Eugène

Vermesch—Living poets of revolt—Laurent Tailhade, Jean

Richepin—Tailhade’s imprisonment—The socialist poets Clovis

Hugues and Maurice Bouchor—The relations between freedom of

expression and freedom of thought in poetry—More

revolutionists among artists than in any other class engaged

in liberal pursuits—Courbet, Cazin, Carrière—Impressionism and

the revolutionary spirit—Luce and Signac_—The Salon des

Indépendants _as a refuge for revolutionists—The import of the

work of Rodin and Meunier—Jules Dalou—Painters who picture the

Christ in a modern setting—The revolutionary leanings of the_

dessinateurs—_Léandre, Forain, Hermann-Paul, Willette,

Steinlen_—L’Assiette au Beurre—_The revolutionary attitude of

the great body of contemporary French caricaturists towards

the institutions of society—Bernard Shaw’s comment on the

music of Wagner—Wagner as a revolutionist—The revolutionary

spirit in the new school of French music—Alfred Bruneau and

Gustave Charpentier_—Louise—_The evident connection between

the anarchistic philosophy and polyphonic orchestration, vers

libre, and impressionism in art._

XIX. To What End? 391

_The advice of Gamaliel, the Pharisee, on innovators in

religion and the words of Montaigne concerning the strange

and the incredible—The proper province of philosophic

doubt_—“La folie d’hier est la sagesse de demain”—_The

difficulty with which human nature realises the truth of

the maxim—The attitude of public opinion to Barrucand’s

scheme for free bread—Pertinent questions regarding

the alleged unreasonableness of revolutionary theories—The

theories of anarchism and socialism in comparison

with the history of social evolution—The natural result of

education of the masses—A successful social revolution no

guarantee of a millennium—The essentials of happiness

found in the eternal realities of life._

ILLUSTRATIONS

Sellers of _Chansons_ Frontispiece

The Anarchist’s Dream Vignette Title-page

Place Clichy (_Vignette Section Title_) Page 1

Jean Grave in his Workshop facing ” 10

La France Libre (_Tailpiece_) ” 22

Mauled to Death for shouting _“Vive l’Armée”_ ” 35

A Contrast in Dances:—

I. A Ball at the _Maison du Peuple_ facing ” 38

II. Dancing at the _Moulin Rouge_

A _Trimardeur_ disputing with Socialists ” 40

Evening in a _Cabaret_ facing ” 42

_A la Renommée des Pommes-de-terres Frites_ ” 52

“_Enlevez l’homme tonneau_” (_Tailpiece_) ” 57

Dormer-window of Jean Grave’s Workshop

(_Office of “Les Temps Nouveaux”_) facing ” 62

Pierre Joseph Proudhon ” 74

Little Anarchists ” 75

A Revolutionary Poster (_Tailpiece_) ” 87

Charles Malato ” 112

A Raid by the Police (_Tailpiece_) ” 127

Salsou ” 135

A Street Riot (_Place de la Concorde_) facing ” 148

The Guillotine in Moonlight (_Tailpiece_) ” 152

Louise Michel ” 158

Anniversary Decorations, _Mur des Fédérés_ (_Tailpiece_) ” 163

A Socialist Bookshelf ” 167

M. Vaillant ” 168

Léandre’s Caricature of Paul Déroulède facing ” 168

M. Brousse ” 169

M. Jaurès ” 170

M. Guesde ” 171

M. Allemane ” 171

Jules Guérin ” 172

“_Montmartre va descendre_” (_Vignette Section Title_) ” 173

Mégotiers of the Place Maubert ” 179

Notre Dame from Pont d’Austerlitz (_Tailpiece_) ” 185

A Caveau of the Latin Quarter ” 189

A Latin Quarter Type (_Félix Gras’ Son_) facing ” 198

The Panthéon (_Tailpiece_) ” 203

Jean Richepin ” 212

Taverne du Panthéon on Mardigras facing ” 216

The Institute (_Tailpiece_) ” 218

The Louvre (_Tailpiece_) ” 227

A Suicide of the Latin Quarter ” 233

The Pont du Carrousel (_Tailpiece_) ” 236

Site of the Château Rouge (_rue Galande_) facing ” 246

Zo d’Axa’s Novel Candidate ” 248

Second-hand Book Mart of the Latin Quarter (_Tailpiece_) ” 253

Grün’s Design for Float in Cavalcade of _La Vache Enragée_ ” 258

The Real Montmartre (I. _La rue Mont-Cénis_) facing ” 262

Montmartre Types ” 268

The Real Montmartre (II. _La rue St. Vincent_) facing ” 268

The Real Montmartre (III. _La rue Mont-Cénis_) ” 273

A Montmartre Carrousel (_Tailpiece_) ” 278

The Real Montmartre (IV. _Cabaret du Lapin Agile_) ” 281

At Aristide Bruant’s

(_Cabaret du Boulevard Rochechouart_) facing ” 284

“Buffalo” ” 290

Alexandre ” 294

At Alexandre’s (_Cabaret de la rue Pigalle_) facing ” 296

Maurice Boukay ” 297

_Maquereaux_ ” 300

Jehan Rictus (_with fac-simile of manuscript_) facing ” 300

“_Les Corbeaux_” (_Tailpiece_) ” 310

Emile Zola facing ” 314

Anatole France ” 317

A Pair of Army Officers ” 321

Octave Mirbeau ” 326

Xavier Privas delivering his Lecture “_L’Argent

contre l’Humanité_” facing ” 342

La Comédie Française (_Tailpiece_) ” 358

Laurent Tailhade facing ” 368

Clovis Hugues ” 369

Paris from Montmartre (_Tailpiece_) ” 388

A Contrast in Funerals facing ” 394

The Eternal Realities (_Endpiece_) ” 399

[Illustration: Place Clichy]

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 governments, 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.

[Illustration: 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.”

[Illustration: La France Libre]

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.

[Illustration: MAULED TO DEATH FOR SHOUTING, “VIVE L’ARMÉE!”]

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 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.

[Illustration: A BALL AT THE MAISON DU PEUPLE

_To the laboured sounds of a patient, plethoric

orchestra, the couples dance with honest

zest; but with a restraint and modesty_]

[Illustration: DANCING AT THE MOULIN ROUGE

_in striking contrast with the reckless abandon

of such resorts as the Moulin Rouge, maintained

mainly for the prudent depravity of tourists_.]

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_.

[Illustration: 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_.’...

[Illustration: EVENING IN A CABARET

“_The little wine-shop concerts at

which every person present is

expected to do his turn._”]

“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._

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._

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._

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._

[Illustration: A LA RENOMMÉE DES POMMES-DE-TERRE FRITES

_Fried potatoes sold at

one sou the package_]

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!_

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._

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._

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._

[Illustration: “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._

[Illustration: DORMER-WINDOW OF JEAN GRAVE’S WORKSHOP

_Office of “Les Temps Nouveaux,”

in the rue Mouffetard_]

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.

[Illustration: PIERRE JOSEPH PROUDHON[15]]

A recent device for raising funds, which is at the same time an

additional means of propaganda, 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.

[Illustration: LITTLE ANARCHISTS]

It is so compromising in every way 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.

[Illustration: A Revolutionary Poster]

* * * * *

“_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

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

[Illustration: CHARLES MALATO]

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....

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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 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.”

[Illustration: SALSOU]

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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: The Guillotine in Moonlight ]

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 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.

[Illustration: LOUISE MICHEL]

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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: A Socialist Bookshelf]

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,

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.

[Illustration: M. VAILLANT[52]]

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.

[Illustration: 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.

[Illustration: 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]

[Illustration: 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 to revolutionary

methods to restore their respective dispensations if, by a turn of the

wheel of fortune, they should become the “outs.”

[Illustration: M. GUESDE[60]]

[Illustration: M. ALLEMANE[61]]

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 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.”

[Illustration: 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

[Illustration: “_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.