Paris and the Social Revolution Part 8

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 Revolte_, and before that _Le Revolte_), which was founded at Geneva, Switzerland, by Elisee 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 t.i.tle 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-Federal_ 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 cla.s.sics and from the writings of contemporary scientists and litterateurs, 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 acc.u.mulate."

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 Congres Ouvrier Revolutionnaire 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 cla.s.sified 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, ill.u.s.trations, 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, litterateurs, 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, pa.s.sing most of his exile in Switzerland, where he was intimately a.s.sociated 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. Medard,-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 a.s.sistant 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 mediaeval 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, una.s.suming 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 Salpetriere begin; at the junction of such typical highways as the rue Claude Bernard, pa.s.sing 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 _Bibliotheque d'Education Libertaire_ of the Faubourg St.

Antoine, which is not only the organ of the various _Bibliotheques 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.

Herold, 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 _Bibliotheques 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 _Bibliotheques 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 ma.n.u.script, and are read aloud in the meetings (very much as in the old-fas.h.i.+oned 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 a.s.sistance, thus:-

"The group _Les Resolus_ 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 "ca Ira," Le Forcat_, _L'Insurge_, _Le Droit Social_, _L'Etendard Revolutionnaire_, _Le Defi_, _Le Drapeau Noir_, _L'Affame_, _Terre et Liberte_, _L'Audace_, _L'Hydre Anarchiste_, _L'Idee Ouvriere_, _L'Homme Libre_, _La Revolution Sociale_, _L'Emeute_, _La Liberte Sociale_, _Le Droit Anarchique_, _La Misere_, _Le Deschard_, _Le Falot_, _L'Idee Libre_, _Le Pere Jean Chiffonier de Paris_, _Le Pere 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 _Pere d.u.c.h.ene_ of Eugene Vermesch), was the _Pere 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 appet.i.tes, 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 _Pere 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 t.i.tles of the articles are untranslatable.

Whatever exception to its morals one may take, one is forced to admit that the _Pere 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 s.h.i.+pwreck 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 distinguis.h.i.+ng 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 _Pere Peinard_ was even more a one man's paper than is Drumont's _La Libre Parole_ or Rochefort's _L'Intransigeant_. Apart from the ill.u.s.trations, 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 Elysee 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 a.s.sembling 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 a.s.size 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 _Pere 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 Sebastien 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 ama.s.sed 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 ent.i.tled _Le Pot-a-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-a.s.sessment 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 pa.s.s 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 embarra.s.sing 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)."