Paris and the Social Revolution Part 10

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

"_L'education integrale_ is not the forced acc.u.mulation 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'education physique_ embraces muscular and cerebral development. It satisfies the need of exercise of all our organs, pa.s.sive 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'education 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 _education integrale_, _physique_, and _intellectuelle_, must combine knowledge and art, the knowing and the doing.

"A genuine _integral_ 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 a.s.similates 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 regime and the general direction given to the thoughts by the teaching as a whole are its princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sure 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 compa.s.sion 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'education integrale_. The anarchist school, rather pretentiously called a college (_le College Libertaire_), opened in 1901 on the edge of the university quarter of Paris, has only succeeded so far in establis.h.i.+ng 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 _education integrale_ 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 princ.i.p.al anarchist organs, especially the _Temps Nouveaux_, keep on sale and persistently recommend the reading of the works of the princ.i.p.al 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, Buchner, Herzen, G.o.dwin, and Herbert Spencer; Ibsen, Bjornson, Tolstoy, Leopardi, and Nietzsche; Louise Michel, Elisee 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; Lefevre, the student of comparative religions; Guyau, the moralist; the novelists and dramatists Marsolleau, Darien, Descaves, Cheze, Ragana.s.se, 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, Sebastien 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 t.i.tles. Thus a certain appeal to desertion from the army bears on its cover this inscription: "_Pour la Defense des Interets 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 n.o.body 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 cla.s.sical. 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 partic.i.p.ate 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ma.s.ses._"-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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d.

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 circ.u.mstances 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, Th.o.r.eau, 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 Th.o.r.eau realised it or not, his att.i.tude was the anarchistic att.i.tude and his act an act of the _propagande par l'exemple_.

The att.i.tude 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 circ.u.mstances 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 "pa.s.sive 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 inst.i.tuted 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 inst.i.tutions supported by taxes, since they are collected by violence from the people."

He holds military service in similar abhorrence:-