Paris and the Social Revolution Part 19

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 ma.s.s meetings, _punchs-conferences_, _soupes-conferences_, _matinees-conferences_, _ballades propagandistes_, _soirees 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]

[Ill.u.s.tration: M. JAUReS[56]]

Anarchists and socialists unite in anti-clerical and anti-militarist ma.s.s meetings, in interfering riotously with public wors.h.i.+p, in shouting, _A bas l'Armee!_ 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 Federes_[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 greve generale_, which several of their congresses have indorsed, and _la pan-cooperation_ 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: M. GUESDE[60]]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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'etat_ by the absence of the magnetic man and the propitious occasion.

The nationalists would pause at nothing that would enable them to subst.i.tute 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 Guerin's organ, _L'Anti-Juif_, regularly carries this head-line, "_Defendre tous les travailleurs, Combattre tous les speculateurs_." _L'Autorite_, _L'Intransigeant_, _La Libre Parole_, and _La Patrie_ are as truly revolutionary sheets as are _Les Temps Nouveaux_ and _Le Libertaire_; while Paul de Ca.s.sagnac, Baron Legoux, Lur-Saluces, the gilded youth of the "_illet Blanc_" ("White Carnation") who battered the President's hat at Auteuil, Rochefort, Drumont, Guerin, Regis, and Deroulede are as much revolutionists as the socialist Jules Guesde or the anarchist Jean Grave.

Some time before his expulsion Deroulede 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'etat_); the will of the people (that is, revolution); the will of the representative a.s.sembly (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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: JULES GUeRIN]

Deroulede and Guerin 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 Guerin was holding Fort Chabrol, the Dreyfusard anarchists were exhorted by the anarchist leader, Sebastien Faure, to change their cries of _A bas Guerin!_ to _Vive Guerin!_ 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 _etat d'esprit revolutionnaire_. Paris revolutionists and Parisians, then, are, in the last a.n.a.lysis, pretty nearly one and the same thing.

PART II

THE ELITE

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_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._"

Sh.e.l.lEY.

CHAPTER IX

THE REVOLUTIONARY TRADITIONS OF THE LATIN QUARTER

"_When the students sing the_ Carmagnole, _France trembles._"

"_The monarchy of July persecuted the cancan, which historically seems to have been the anarchy of the period._"-AUReLIEN SCHOLL.

"_Humble spot, dingy little court, oh, how charming I find you!

Hence will go forth some day the Revolution which shall save us; the age which by chloroform has already suppressed pain will suppress hunger also._"

MICHELET on the College de France.

"_The great movement of ideas which occurred in France under the silent reign of Napoleon III., when the tribune was mute, the press muzzled, and the right of a.s.sembly confiscated, had for its stage the_ bra.s.series _of the Latin Quarter._"-EDMOND LEPELLETIER.

"The Sorbonne," says Eugene Pelletan, "s.h.i.+nes from the heights through the early mists like the dawn of intelligence. It is there that the French Revolution was really born, thence was its point of departure....

"On this sacred mount of the university a philosopher in monkish garb spoke one day in the open air. What did he say?

It matters little. He said something new, and the mult.i.tude listened because he was the first to defend the claims of the earth,-the right of reason to reason; and, while he spoke, a veiled woman, with lips on fire, clung to the grating of a convent over yonder, and encouraged him with gestures in default of words.

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

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

In the relatively limited area included between Notre Dame, where the G.o.ddess of Reason was enthroned in the Great Revolution; the Place Maubert,[62] with its statue of Etienne Dolet, the sixteenth-century printer, burned for impiety and atheism; the Square Monge, with its statue of Francois Villon; the Place Monge, with its statue of Louis Blanc; the Pantheon, with its memorials to the intellectual liberators, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, and Voltaire; the Place de l'Ecole de Medecine, with its statue of Danton doughtily inscribed, "_Pour vaincre les ennemis de la justice, il faut de l'audace, encore de l'audace et toujours de l'audace_"; the Place St. Germain des Pres, with its statue of Diderot; and the Place de l'Inst.i.tut, with its statue of Condorcet,-every inch of ground is rich in souvenirs of the intellectual history of France and of the convulsions by which this history's various stages have been marked.

Here on the left bank of the Seine, where Abelard, in the twelfth century, "discoursed to all the earth,-to two popes, twenty cardinals, and fifty bishops, to all the orders, all the modern schools which descended from the mountain and inundated Europe";[63] whither came Dante in the fourteenth century for the lectures of Siger de Brabant; the Greek Lascaris in the fifteenth and Calvin and Loyola in the sixteenth centuries; where the _trouvere_ Rutebuf in the thirteenth century and the poet Villon in the fifteenth carried on the _propagande par l'exemple_ and even the _propagande par le fait_; where, in the early part of the fifteenth century, the _Cabocherie_ decreed the reign of virtue and equality, pillaged the dwellings of the wealthy, and had all things common; where, in the sixteenth century, the _Commune Catholique_ was set up at the instigation of an anti-royalist preacher of St. Severin; where, in the same century, Francois Rabelais, Clement Marot, and La Boetie (friend of Montaigne and social democrat before his time) prepared themselves, in their very different fas.h.i.+ons, to alternately edify and castigate the civilisation of their epoch, and Rene Descartes, in the seventeenth century, to found modern philosophy and to destroy scholasticism; where the eighteenth-century Encyclopedists set themselves to solve the problem of human destiny, and begot the Revolution; where, in the century just closed, the trinity of the College de France, Michelet, Quinet, and Mickiewicz, formed the men who were to set up the Third Republic on the ruins of the Second Empire,-in this intellectual and nerve centre of Paris, of France, and at intervals of the world, revolutionary action has been so often suited to the revolutionary thought that no one dreams of crying out crime or mystery when, in the course of excavations, human bones are exhumed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MeGOTIERS OF THE PLACE MAUBERT]

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

Abelard was censured for heterodoxy, hounded from one monastery to another, and condemned finally to perpetual silence. Ramus, antagonist of the philosophy of Aristotle, was included in the ma.s.sacre of St.

Bartholomew. "In Ramus," says Michelet, "they fancied they were killing a second Abelard. They thought to butcher mind." Clement Marot was imprisoned, and forced to flee from France. Descartes, maltreated by Catholics and Protestants alike, forbidden to teach, and threatened with death, took refuge first in Holland and then in Sweden. Vanini was burned at the stake. Buffon was persecuted for his _Histoire Naturelle_, and Montesquieu for his _Esprit des Lois_. Michelet, who "scratched the heavens with his white hand,"[64] Mickiewicz, Quinet, and Renan were expelled from the College de France.

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

Eugene Pelletan thus describes the students of the university's beginnings:-

"A mixed, vagabond population, drifted together from n.o.body could say where, they live by the grace of G.o.d, they eat when they can, they sleep on straw, and carry their begging wallets proudly, as if conscious they hold there the word of the future.... When they do not dine, they have the resource of the cabaret; and, always noisy, always care-free, they prowl about at nightfall, they force now and then the door of a bourgeois, and, when the watch rushes to the uproar, they put it to rout, quit with answering for the misdemeanour to the rector, who invariably exonerates."

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

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

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

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