“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 destinPour éclairer des yeux que la mort allait clore.”
“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 destinPour 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 nuageQui fait germer toutes les plantes dans la forêt!”
“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 nuageQui 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 littledaughter, Sidonie, who was adopted by thecamarades, plays a spectacular part.
A STREET RIOTA STREET RIOT
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 acamaradeis 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 chancethat so large a proportion of the propagandistspar le faithail 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 Passanante44and 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 ParisMatinimmediately 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 thebagneof 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. Thelit 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 thechemise 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 theMatinis 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 inLe Libertaire. This article would have been seen, had the authorities but had the tact to ignore it, only by the few regular readers ofLe Libertaire, and would have beenread 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 thelettrés. But the author must needs be haled into court;45and, 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 andbreadth of France; and all the papers teem withchroniques, 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 obscureLibertaireis 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.
THE GUILLOTINE IN THE MOONLIGHT
“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.
“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-documentedsans-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 ofLa France Sociale et PolitiqueandUne 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 loveof 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 propagandistspar 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 propagandistspar le faitto 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 knewhim 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’scompagnesome 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 acamaraderegarding 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. Thiscompagnon, 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 thetrimard; and his letters were replete with affection, notably one in which he acknowledged the photographLOUISE MICHELLOUISE MICHELof his mother and two of the children, Martha and Henri, playfully calling the last named “Henricon.” Hiscompagnehad no complaint to make of his treatment of her, and even his laundress testified to his being courteous and kind.
Reader’s of Zola’sGerminalwill 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 propagandistpar le faitor 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—thepropagandeapart—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 inevening schools after reaching manhood. Salsou, who had read theRévolution Socialeof 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 incontrovertibleattribute,—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 Francis47could 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 yourbagnes. Off with my head! I do not defend it. I deliver it, shouting, ‘Vive l’Anarchie!’ What doesonecamarade’shead 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 theoctroi(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 foundsympathetically 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 venerablePère Duchêne;49hurled 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 beRépubliqueinstead ofRévolution.
It is the petty work of little men to call a man a coward who can die like this. A consummate villain,—yes, judged by conventional standards,—but no coward.
The man who dies like a man—and let it not be forgotten there are a hundred and one ways of doing it—is to be admired for that, whether he be called John Huss or John Brown, Saint Stephen or Saint Jean Népomucène, Charles I. or Louis XVI., Raleigh or Ravachol, Petronius Arbiter or Louis Lingg.
ANNIVERSARY DECORATIONS, MUR DES FÉDÉRÉSANNIVERSARY DECORATIONS, MUR DES FÉDÉRÉS
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.
“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 arerévoltés,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 arerévoltés.”—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.
A SOCIALIST BOOKSHELF
A SOCIALIST BOOKSHELF
ONE of the plainest after-results of the Dreyfus affair, into which the socialists50as 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 anddoctrinaireamong their fellow-socialists felt compelled, because of this, to withdraw from them their support.In like manner the socialist deputies who have helped to maintain the Combes ministry have been constrained to a similar opportunism. So it has come about that the French socialists,M. VAILLANTM. VAILLANT52who formerly were, broadly speaking, all revolutionary, are now divided into the two distinct and even hostile camps51of evolutionary socialists and revolutionary socialists.
With the evolutionary socialists—who are, perhaps, for being the less logical only the more philosophical—this book has, from the very nature of its subject, nothing to do. The revolutionary socialists alone concern us.
It is needless to say thatdoctrinairesocialism anddoctrinaireanarchism are at opposite poles of the world of thought. Absolute authority is as much the ideal of the one as absolute liberty is the ideal of the other. For the anarchist the betterment of society depends primarily on the betterment of the individual, while for the socialist the betterment of the individual depends primarily on the betterment of society. The complete realisation of socialism presupposes the perfection of human machinery, and the complete realisation of anarchism the perfection of human nature. The theories of the vicarious atonement and salvation by character present, in another field, a somewhat analogous contrast. Nevertheless, these theoretically antithetical systems find in their antagonism to actual conditions so many points of contact that it is not always easy for an outsider to determine whether a given revolutionist is an anarchist or a revolutionary socialist, and not always easy, one more than half suspects, for a revolutionist to determine himself in which of the two classes he really belongs.
LÉANDRE’S CARICATURE OF PAUL DÉROULÈDE AS DON QUIXOTELÉANDRE’S CARICATURE OF PAUL DÉROULÈDE AS DON QUIXOTEBy permission of “Le Rire”
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 forthe 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 wordcitoyen, which the anarchists abhor); but they do wish for the downfall of the present state (with whose bad faith and impotence they are thoroughly disgusted) as the first step towards setting up the socialistic state, and they hold collective revolt the most likely means of effecting this downfall; all of which, in troubled periods, amounts to very much the same thing practically as if they abjured the state altogether. Like the anarchists, they demand the abolition of private property, and they are opposed, like them, to charity (as the term is popularly understood), to patriotism, and to armies. Like the anarchists, furthermore (though this does not seem to be a logical necessity for either), they are violently opposed to the church; and they are (with less inevitableness than the anarchists in the same matter) more or less hostile to marriage.
M. BROUSSEM. BROUSSE53
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 propagandapar 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 similarpenchantfor thechanson 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 weekliesand monthlies,54and serves as a bond of union and a means of communication between individuals and groups; and they make a copious use of placards, manifestos, pictures, artistic posters, and souvenir postal cards.55
M. JAURÈSM. JAURÈS56
Anarchists and socialists unite in anti-clerical and anti-militarist mass meetings, in interfering riotously with public worship, in shouting,A bas l’Armée!andA 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 theMur des Fédérés57(May) and of Etienne Dolet58(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-operation59as practised at present; but they have something of the same faith as the anarchists thatla grève générale, which several of their congresses have indorsed, andla pan-coopérationwill 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 allthe “outs” are willing to resort to revolutionary methods to overturn thestatu quoand all the “ins” would be willing to resortM. GUESDEM. GUESDE60to revolutionary methods to restore their respective dispensations if, by a turn of the wheel of fortune, they should become the “outs.”
The anarchists and the socialists are by no means the only bodies who find the Third Republic detestable, and who, to make way with it, would gladly descend into the street. The royalists and imperialists are reactionary revolutionists, only deterred from insurrection and acoup d’étatby 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-SemitesM. ALLEMANEM. ALLEMANE61at 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, andLa Patrieare as truly revolutionary sheets as areLes Temps NouveauxandLe 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, thecoup d’état); the will of the people (that is, revolution); the will of the representative assembly (that is, parliament). I will do all in my power to make the last method—the most peaceable—effective; but I do not greatly count on it, and I declare myself determined to venture everything for the triumph of the other two.”
JULES GUÉRINJULES 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 ofA bas Guérin!toVive 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, anétat d’esprit révolutionnaire. Paris revolutionists and Parisians, then, are, in the last analysis, pretty nearly one and the same thing.
Montmartre va descendre
“Montmartre va descendre!”