CHAPTER XVII

THE REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT IN PROSE LITERATURE & THE DRAMA

“_I have intended to rehabilitate the pariah, whatever form it may take; whether it be a buffoon, like Triboulet, a courtesan, like Marion Delorme, a poisoner, like Lucrezia Borgia, the oppressed, like the people. Those who say that I have practised art for art’s sake say a silly thing. No one, more than I, has practised art for society and humanity. I have always worked for this end, and have known what I wished to do_.”—VICTOR HUGO.

“_We know what it cost the First Empire to have displeased Châteaubriand, what it cost Louis Philippe to have offended Lamartine, Napoleon III. to have vexed Victor Hugo_.”—GASTON DESCHAMPS.

“_The aptitude for commerce is an inferior aptitude. There are multitudes of banks in which fortunes are perpetuated. Is there an unbroken line of Hugos, of Ampères, of Courbets, which progresses incessantly from father to son? Commerce is an absurd criterion of merit, base in itself and still more degrading when it is regulated by laws like ours._”

Hélier, in ROSNY’S Le Bilatéral.

“_This morning I received the visit of the police commissary, my neighbour, accompanied by four alcoholics. They turned everything topsy-turvy in my rooms, mixed up my correspondence, rumpled my collection of prints, and all to seize, at the end, a wood-cut of Maurin and the works of Tolstoy._”

Meyrargues, in VICTOR BARRUCAND’S Avec le Feu.

“_I believe it is impossible to-day for a great mind not to be somewhat anarchistic._”—AUGUSTIN FILON.

“_My own art is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual outside of all rules and of all social necessities_.”—EMILE ZOLA.

Whatever may be the verdict of posterity regarding the literary and philosophical activity of this restless, problematic period, the verdict of the contemporary world seems to be that Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Zola are the three biggest literary philosophers (or philosophical littérateurs) of their day and generation; and it is a noteworthy fact, to put it mildly, that the attitude towards society of each one of these three intellectual giants is, more or less openly, revolutionary. All three may be claimed by the parties of revolt without any considerable forcing of the note.

Tolstoy, by reason of his adoration of Jesus, his insistence on a literal interpretation of Jesus’ teachings, his advocacy of non-resistance as the most effective form of resistance, and his attempts to incorporate liberty in education and, by education, in life, seems to fall naturally enough into the category of the “Christian anarchist.” But, whether Tolstoy be a “Christian anarchist” or a “Christian socialist,” as certain Christian socialists rather presumptuously claim, is immaterial. He is opposed to the established order, and belongs indisputably with the revolutionists.

Ibsen is a fearless, implacable, self-confessed destroyer of dogma and tradition, whom the anarchists may claim without doing violence either to themselves or to him.

The attitude of Zola towards society and the social problem is not so easy to define.

Zola exposed with a frankness bordering on brutality the rottenness of the wealthy and privileged classes, the oppressions and cruelty of capital, the selfishness and hypocrisy of ministers, magistrates, army officers, and priests; pictured with a friendliness bordering on advocacy the sufferings and struggles of the labourers, and stated with perfect fairness the most revolutionary ideas and ideals. That he had in him little enough of the stuff of which real martyrs are made—in spite of his constitutional inability to “shut himself up in his works, and act only through them,” as he a hundred times announced his intention of doing—was shown clearly enough by his ignominious flight when things turned against him in the Dreyfus affair. Nevertheless, no novelist of his time—at least none in France—has portrayed so masterfully, so sympathetically, one might almost say so devoutly, the character of the extreme, the martyr type of anarchist, the _propagandiste par le fait_.

Zola is said to have boasted of the progress anarchistic violence made after he “launched his Souvarine into the world.” The charge is probably a libel; but from this cold, calculating, consecrated Souvarine of _Germinal_ to the generous, sentimental Salvat of Paris the sincere _propagandiste par le fait_ was explained, excused, admired, extolled by him.

This is not saying that Zola was consciously (or unconsciously) an advocate of the _propagande par le fait_. He extended an equal cordiality to all the reformers and innovators who are groping towards a new and better world. The evils of contemporary society are so gigantic, in his view, and the necessity for a change of some sort so imperative, that he could understand and condone any and every honest protest, no matter how imprudent and no matter how fruitless.

Besides, Zola was more of an observer than a philosopher, and more of a poet than either. His later works, and _Germinal_ at least among his earlier ones, are primarily prose epics. He loved the dynamiter for his epic value as Milton loved his magnificent Satan, and may have had no more intention of holding him up to men as an exemplar than Milton had of instituting devil-worship.

It is not normal for the poet to have a coherent system, and it is extremely doubtful if Zola had one. Still, the poet must have, like other mortals, his personal point of view; and Zola’s personal point of view (which is not for a moment to be confounded with his point of view as a poet) seems to have been that of the scientists of his novels,—anarchistic as to end, but evolutionary as to means: the attitude of Guillaume Froment in _Paris_, who saw in “unities creating worlds, atoms producing life by attraction, by free and ardent love, the only scientific theory of society,” and who “dreamed of the emancipated individual evolving, expanding without any restraint whatsoever, for his own good and for the good of all.” The attitude of Bertheroy (_Paris_), “who worked, in the seclusion of his laboratory, for the ruin of the present superannuated and abominable régime, with its God, its dogmas, its laws, but who desired also repose, too disdainful of useless acts to join in the tumults of the street, preferring to live tranquil, rich, recompensed, in peace with the government (whatever it might be), all in foreseeing and preparing the formidable issue of to-morrow,”—the Bertheroy who says: “I have only contempt for the vain agitations of politics, revolutionary or conservative. Does not science suffice? Of what use is it to wish to hurry things when a single step of science does more to advance humanity towards the city of justice and truth than a hundred years of politics and social revolt? Science alone is revolutionary: it alone can make not only truth, but justice prevail, if justice is ever possible here below. Of a certainty, it alone brushes away dogmas, expels the gods, creates light and happiness. It is I, member of the Institute, rich and decorated, who am the only revolutionist.” The attitude of Jordan (_Travail_), “a completely emancipated spirit, a tranquil and terrible evolutionist, sure that his labour will ravage and renew the world.... According to Jordan, it is science solely that leads humanity to truth, to justice, to final happiness, to the perfect city of the future towards which the peoples are so slowly and painfully advancing.”

All things considered, it would not be unfair, perhaps, to address to Zola himself the words which he made this Jordan speak to the reforming hero of _Travail_, Luc Froment: “Only, my noble friend, you are nothing more nor less than an anarchist, complete evolutionist as you believe yourself; and you have every reason to say that, while it is with the formula of Fourier that we must begin, it is by _l’homme libre dans la commune libre_ that we must end.” And, if Zola had been thus addressed, it is not unlikely that he would have replied laughingly, as he made his Luc reply, “At any rate, let’s begin; and we shall see in due time whither logic leads us.”

There is no doubt possible regarding Zola’s belief in a good time coming. His later books were fairly saturated with a sublime faith almost childlike. There is also no doubt that he believed that science consecrated to the service of humanity is quite capable of regenerating the world, as he indicated by the communistic experiment of Luc in _Travail_. But whether he believed that science _will_ be consecrated to the service of humanity or whether he was presenting a method which might be employed, and which he simply hoped, almost against hope, would be so employed, is not so clear. Thus, in the last chapter of _Travail_, after giving a beautiful picture of the superb results of the peaceable revolution accomplished through the altruistic initiative of Luc in the commune of Beauclair, he added a sort of apocalyptic vision of the happenings in the principal divisions of the big world outside, in which the same superb results have been secured by violence,—by a bloody, socialistic _coup d’état_, by the multiplication of anarchistic bombs, by a universal war,—quite as if he would say to the classes in power: “I have shown you how society may be renewed. I have shown you the way of your salvation, the only way. If you would but walk in this way, you might save yourselves and the world with you. But you will not. You are too stupid, too selfish, too obstinate, too corrupt. You will not. I have known you only too long, and I know you will not. Well, then, so much the worse for you! Expropriation, massacre, annihilation, await you!”

If you ask intellectual Frenchmen, without distinction of social position or political faith, who is the foremost living French man of letters, five out of six will answer, without an instant’s hesitation, Anatole France. Less pictorial, less colossal, and less epic than Zola, but more penetrating and more profound; æsthetic and erudite (in the good old-fashioned sense of the latter word), subtile, suave, and refined; abundantly endowed with the humour and the wit in which Zola was deficient; as impeccable in point of language and style as Zola was careless, as measured as Zola was violent, as gentle as Zola was brutal, as finished as Zola was crude; as perfect an embodiment of the Greek spirit as Zola, if he had only had a keener sense of the grotesque, would have been of the Gothic,—Anatole France is none the less a redoubtable iconoclast,—the most redoubtable iconoclast of his generation, perhaps. A playful pessimist, a piquant anarchist, a mischievous nihilist, if you will, but a pessimist, an anarchist, a nihilist, for all that. “Prejudices,” he says, “are unmade and remade without ceasing: they have the eternal mobility of the clouds. It is in their nature to be august before appearing to be odious; and the men are rare who have not the superstition of their time, and who look straight in the eye what the crowd does not dare to look at.” M. France is one of these rare men. He combines the amiable doubt of Montaigne with the mocking irreverence of Voltaire and the subversive grace of Renan. “The end which M. France seems to pursue persistently,” says one of his literary brethren, “is the demolition of the social edifice by the force of a logic tinctured with irony, without anger, and without phrases. By as much as Zola, Tailhade, and Mirbeau are ardent and passionate when they attack society, by so much is M. France calm and feline; but he is not, on that account, the less to be feared.”

As the most eminent living representative of the best classic traditions of French prose, M. France is the idol of the lettered youth of France. From admiration of form to acceptance of the substance underlying the form is but a step. His ideas insinuate themselves consequently into the very penetralia of culture,—that exquisite culture which brooks the presence of nothing common or unclean,—and they act as a disintegrating force in circles where downright revolutionary propaganda cannot enter.

In his writings, Anatole France is the precise intellectual counterpart—at every point but that of Catholicism, and even here his passion for Augustine, Chrysostom, and the other Church Fathers deters him from displaying an uncomely asperity—of his own adorable creation, l’Abbé Coignard,[105] the “delicious Catholic _révolté_, who juggles with principles and human institutions as if they were a Merry Andrew’s painted spheres; the railing anarchist who lashes with jests and whose only bombs are _bons mots_.” And the best characterisation it is possible to give of M. France, the genial iconoclast, is to repeat certain of his observations on the character of his Abbé and certain of the sayings he puts into his Abbé’s mouth,—which I accordingly do in the following detached paragraphs, making no pretence of preserving in the translation the peculiar savour and charm of the original:—

OF THE CHARACTER OF JERÔME COIGNARD.

“His free intelligence trampled under foot vulgar beliefs and never accepted without examination the common opinion, except in what had to do with the Catholic faith in which he was immovable.

“The sagest of moralists, a sort of marvellous blend of Epicurus and Saint Francis of Assisi.... He preserved, in his boldest explorations, the attitude of a peaceful promenader.... It is certain that the world, to his eyes, resembled less the deserts of the Thébaïde than the gardens of Epicurus. He sauntered therein with the audacious ingenuousness which is the essential trait of his character and the elemental principle of his teaching.”

“Never did spirit show itself at once so daring and so pacific, nor temper its disdain with more sweetness.... He despised men with tenderness. He endeavoured to teach them that, since they have nothing anywhere near great in themselves except their capacity for suffering, they can cultivate nothing useful or beautiful but compassion.”

“It was his benevolence which impelled him to humiliate his fellows in their sentiments, their knowledge, their philosophy, and their institutions. He had to show them that their imbecile natures have neither imagined nor constructed anything worth being attacked or defended very energetically, and that, if they knew the fragile crudity of their greatest works, such as laws and empires, they would fight over them only in play, for the sheer fun of the thing, like the children who build castles of sand on the rim of the sea.”

“The majesty of the laws did not impose on his clairvoyant soul; and he deplored the fact that the unfortunate are burdened with so many obligations of which, for the most part, it is impossible to discover the origin or the sense.”

“What he had the least of was the sense of veneration. Nature had refused it him, and he did nothing to acquire it. He would have feared, in exalting some, to debase others; and his universal charity embraced equally the humble and the proud.”

SOME OF JERÔME COIGNARD’S SAYINGS.

_Of Society and Governments_:

“After the destruction of all the false principles, society will subsist, because it is founded upon necessity, the laws of which, older than Saturn, will rule when Prometheus shall have dethroned Jupiter.”

“I conclude that all the laws with which a minister swells his portfolio are vain documents that can neither make us live nor prevent us from living.”

“It is well-nigh a matter of indifference whether we are governed in one fashion or another, and ministers are imposing only by reason of their clothes and their carriages.”

“These assemblies [parliaments] will be founded upon the confused mediocrity of the multitude of which they will be the issue. They will revolve obscure and multiple thoughts. They will impose on the heads of the government the task of executing vague wishes, of which they will not have full consciousness themselves; and the ministers, less fortunate than the Œdipus of the fable, will be devoured, one after the other, by the hundred-headed Sphinx, for not having guessed the riddle of which the Sphinx herself did not know the answer. Their greatest hardship will be to resign themselves to impotence, to words instead of action. They will become rhetoricians, and very bad rhetoricians, since the talent which carried with it ever so little clarity would ruin them. They will be obliged to speak without saying anything, and the least stupid among them will be condemned to deceive more than the others. In this way the most intelligent will become the most contemptible. And, if there shall be some capable of arranging treaties, regulating finance, and supervising affairs, their ability will profit them nothing; for time will be lacking, and time is the stuff of great enterprises.”

_Of the Army_:

“I have observed that the trade the most natural to man is that of soldiering; it is the one towards which he is the most easily borne by his instincts and by his tastes, which are not all good. And apart from certain rare exceptions, of which I am one, man may be defined as an animal with a musket. Give him a handsome uniform and the hope of going to fight, he will be content.... The military condition has this also in keeping with human nature, that one is never forced to think therein; and it is clear that we were not made to think.”

“Thought is a disease peculiar to certain individuals, and could not be propagated without bringing about promptly the end of the species. Soldiers live in bands, and man is a sociable animal. They wear costumes of blue and white, blue and red, gray and blue, ribbons, plumes, and cockades; and these give them the same prestige with women that the cock has with the hen. They go forth marauding and to war; and man is naturally thieving, libidinous, destructive, and sensible to glory.”

“It is astounding, Tournebroche, my son, that war and the chase, the mere thought of which ought to overwhelm us with shame and remorse in recalling to us the miserable necessities of our nature and our inveterate wickedness, should, on the contrary, serve as matter for the pride of men; that Christians should continue to honour the trade of butcher and headsman when it is hereditary in the family; and that, in a word, among civilised peoples the illustriousness of the citizens is measured by the quantity of murder and carnage they carry, so to speak, in their veins.”

_Of the Academy_:

“Happy he who has not put his hope in The Academy! Happy he who lives exempt from fears and desires, and who knows that it is equally vain to be an Academician and not to be an Academician! Such a one leads, without trouble, a life hidden and obscure. Beautiful liberty follows him everywhere. He celebrates in the shade the silent orgies of wisdom, and all the Muses smile on him as on their adept.”

“The immortality which has just been decreed to M. de Séez neither a Bossuet nor a Belzunce desires. It is not graven in the hearts of wondering peoples: it is inscribed in a big register.”

“If there are to be found, among the forty, persons of more polish than genius, what harm is there in this? Mediocrity triumphs in the Academy. Where does it not triumph? Do you find it less powerful in the parliaments and in the councils of the crown, where, surely, it is less in its place? Does one need to be a rare man to work on a dictionary which pretends to control usage and which can only follow it?

“The _Académistes_ or _Académiciens_ were instituted, as you know, to fix the proper usage in what concerns discourse, to purge the language of every venerable and popular impurity, and to prevent the appearance of another Rabelais, another Montaigne, _tout puant la canaille, la cuistrerie, et la province_.”

“Genius is something unsociable. An extraordinary man is rarely a man of resources. The Academy was very well able to do without Descartes and Pascal. Who can say that it could as easily have done without M. Godeau or M. Conrart?”

_Of Justice, Courts, and Judges_:

“I hold man free in his acts because my religion teaches it; but, outside the doctrine of the Church (which is unequivocal), there is so little reason to believe in human liberty that I shudder in thinking of the verdicts of a justice that punishes actions of which the motives, the order, and the causes equally elude us, in which the will has often little part, and which are sometimes accomplished unconsciously.”

“Tournebroche, my son, consider that I am speaking of human justice, which is different from the justice of God, and which is generally opposed to it.”

“The cruelest insult that men have been able to offer to our Lord Jesus Christ has been the placing of his image in the halls where the judges absolve the Pharisees who crucified him and condemn the Magdalen whom he lifted up with his divine hands.”[106]

“What has he, the Just, to do with these men who could not show themselves just, even if they wished it, since their dreary duty is to consider the actions of their fellows not in themselves and in their essence, but from the single point of view of the interests of society; that is to say, in the interests of this mass of egoism, avarice, errors, and abuses which constitute communities, and of which they (the judges) are the blind conservators.”

“Judges do not sound the loins and do not read hearts, and their justest justice is crude and superficial.... They are men; that is to say, feeble and corruptible, gentle to the strong and pitiless to the weak. They consecrate by their sentences the cruelest social iniquities; and it is difficult to distinguish, in this partiality, what comes from their personal baseness and what is imposed on them by the duty of their profession, this duty being, in reality, to support the State in what it has of evil as well as in what it has of good; to watch over the conservation of public morals, whether they are excellent or detestable.... Furthermore, it should be observed that the magistrate is the defender, by virtue of his function, not only of the current prejudices to which we are all more or less subject, but also of the time-worn prejudices which are conserved in the laws after they have been effaced from our souls and our habits. And there is not a spirit ever so little meditative and free that does not feel how much there is of Gothic in the law, while the judge has not the right to feel it.”

“By the very nature of their profession, judges are inclined to see a culprit in every prisoner; and their zeal seems so terrible to certain European peoples that they have them assisted, in important cases, by ten citizens chosen by lot. From which it appears that chance, in its blindness, guarantees the life and liberty of the accused better than the enlightenment of the judges can. It is true that these impromptu bourgeois magistrates, selected by a lottery, are held well outside the affair of which they see only the exterior pomp. It is true further that, being ignorant of the laws, they are called in, not to apply them, but also simply to decide, by a single word, if there is occasion to apply them. We are told that assizes of this sort give absurd results sometimes, but that the peoples who have established them cling to them as to a highly precious protection. I easily believe it. And I comprehend the acceptance of verdicts rendered in this fashion, which may be inept and cruel, but of which the absurdity and barbarity are, so to speak, attributable to nobody. Injustice seems tolerable when it is sufficiently incoherent to appear involuntary.”

“Just now this little bailiff, who has so strong a sentiment of justice, suspected me of belonging to the party of thieves and assassins. On the contrary, I so far disapprove theft and assassination that I cannot endure even the copy of them regularised by the laws; and it is painful for me to see that judges have found no better means of punishing robbers and homicides than by imitating them. For, after all, Tournebroche, my son, in good faith, what are fines and the death penalty, if not robbery and assassination perpetrated with an august exactitude? And do you not see that our justice merely tends, in all its pride, to this shame of avenging an evil by an evil, a suffering by a suffering, and in doubling misdemeanours and crimes in the name of equilibrium and symmetry?

“Customs have more force than laws. Gentleness of demeanour and sweetness of spirit are the only remedies which can reasonably be applied to legal barbarity. For to correct laws by laws is to take a slow and uncertain route.”

But for the historic setting, the turn of the phrase, and the absence of bitterness, one might fancy himself reading the contemporary anarchist organs, _Les Temps Nouveaux_ and _Le Libertaire_.

Anatole France is as chary of Utopias as Zola is prone to them. He fears nothing so much as intemperance of emotion and speech. He believes in nothing, not even in his own unbelief. “If ever M. Anatole France,” says Gaston Deschamps, “seeks martyrdom, it will be to confess the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, to affirm the nothingness of human opinions, and to attest, at the price of his blood, that there is no truth”; and yet it was apropos of this same M. France that this same M. Deschamps, in the course of a contention that literature always ends by having its way, sounded the note of warning placed at the beginning of this chapter.

In spite of the dilettante humour or, to be more accurate, the dilettante philosophy that informs his writings, Anatole France did not remain within his _tour d’ivoire_ during that strange Dreyfus affair which transformed nearly every literary Frenchman into an agitator—for one side or the other. Like Zola and like most of his fellow-craftsmen of an anarchistic or socialistic bent, he engaged actively in the anti-militarist campaign, the pretext of which was the wrongs of a Jew whom they believed to be persecuted. In M. France, apostle of the nothingness of things in general and in particular, such a course was very surprising and, it must be admitted, very inconsistent. His most plausible excuse probably is that he could not help himself, his chivalrous instincts proving stronger than his quietism. But he might defend himself, if he thought it worth while, by citing the reply of Jerôme Coignard to his satellite Tournebroche when the latter inquired why he would “reduce to dust the foundations of equity, of justice, of laws, and of all the civil and military magistracies”:—

“My son, I have always observed that the troubles of men come to them from their prejudices, as spiders and scorpions come from the dimness of cellars and from the humidity of vaults. It is good to flourish the broom and the brush a little in all the dark corners. It is good even to give a little blow of the pick here and there in the walls of the cellar and garden to frighten the vermin and prepare the necessary ruins.”

M. France has not yet gone back into the _tour d’ivoire_ from which the irresistible “Affair” drew him. He is a member of the executive committee of the Co-operative Bakery and a leader in the organisation of the _Universités Populaires_; he presided on the occasion of the Victor Hugo Centennial over a gigantic mass meeting of the latter, in which he gave “a little blow of the pick” to clericalism; and in 1903 he contributed an introduction to Premier Combes’ volume _Campagne Laïque_, in defence of anti-clericalism.

At a recent anniversary of Diderot, whom both anarchists and socialists claim as an ancestor, but who is more particularly an idol of the anarchists, he said:—

“_Citoyens_, master-spirits who are our friends have come here to speak of Diderot, the savant, and Diderot, the philosopher. As for me, I have only a word to say. I desire to show you Diderot, the friend of the people. This son of the cutler of Langres was an excellent man. A contemporary of Voltaire and of Rousseau, he was the best of men in the best of centuries.

“He loved men and the pacific works of men. He conceived the great design of lifting up into esteem the manual trades looked down upon by the military, civil, and religious aristocracies.

“_Citoyens_, at a time when the united enemies of knowledge, of peace, of liberty, arm themselves against the Republic, and threaten to stifle democracy under the weight of all that which does not think, or thinks only against thought, you have had a happy inspiration in singling out for honour the memory of this philosopher who teaches men happiness through work, knowledge, and love; and who, looking far into the future, announced the new era, the coming of the proletariat into a pacified and comforted world.

“His penetrating view discerned our present struggles and our future successes. And it is not too much to say that Diderot, whose memory we celebrate to-day, Diderot, dead for one hundred and twenty years, touches us very closely; that he is ours, a great servitor of the people and a defender of the proletariat.”

Anatole France is the gentlest and subtlest ironist of his time; Octave Mirbeau (to whom M. France’s _Jerôme Coignard_ was dedicated) is the fiercest. M. Mirbeau has not yet obtained the world renown of Zola nor the national renown of M. France, but he may become in time as famous as either. He surpasses every living French writer in portraying the monstrous, the atrocious, and the horrible, and in expressing hatred and disgust; and his irony—too often fulminated, in violation of the commonest courtesy, not to say decency, against individuals antipathetic to him—rives and blasts like the thunderbolt. It is doubtful if the world has seen anything comparable to him for vitriolic vindictiveness since England had Dean Swift. He is bitter, brutal, savage, terrifying to the last degree; “one of those combative natures,” says Eugène Montfort, “who are dreaded because their conviction partakes of the nature of an animate being, ... breathes, feeds, grows, is endowed with the instinct of self-preservation and struggles for life.”

His _Calvaire_, as he himself puts it, “strips war of all its heroism.” His _Journal d’une Femme de Chambre_ is the most complete and awful arraignment of society it is possible to imagine between the covers of a single volume. Merciless towards the hypocrisy and hollowness of the hour, towards meanness and pretentiousness, towards impotent and misdirected philanthropy, above all, towards the stupidity and ugliness of the smug bourgeois, whom he fairly flays alive as Apollo flayed Marsyas, M. Mirbeau is, on the other hand,—and here his resemblance to Swift ceases,—infinitely humane and uplifting, full of tenderness and chivalry for the outcast and unfortunate, for the goodness which would diffuse happiness everywhere; full of generous ardour, high aspiration, and unfaltering faith in the ultimate triumph of the just.

M. Mirbeau is a declared anarchist; and, as such, he published a wonderful Apology of Ravachol, furnished an introduction for Jean Grave’s most famous volume, and played a leading rôle in the Dreyfus affair.

His _chroniques_ are daring, incisive, brilliant, explosive, virile, insulting. They cut, burn, scald, corrode. His short stories are passionate, dramatic, lyrical even, all in being realistic. His novels, though they deal only indirectly with public issues, are upon all the anarchist library lists.

Emile Zola, Anatole France, and Octave Mirbeau are held, by many persons who do not in the least share their views, to be the three pre-eminent masters of modern French fiction. On a distinctly lower plane than these three, but still far above mediocrity, are two other novelists of a revolutionary cast, Lucien Descaves and Victor Barrucand.

Descaves demonstrated in his first volume—a collection of short stories entitled _Le Calvaire d’Héloïse Pajadin_—the depressing and degrading influence of the decent poverty of petty clerks and tradesmen; his _La Colonne_ portrayed the contrasts of the Commune; and his _Soupes_ exposed the hypocrisies, cruelties, and absurdities of professional and amateur charity and philanthropy. But M. Descaves’ specialty is the army: it is in his novels of the barracks that he is at his best, and by these works he is best known.

In these books, with a talent which approaches genius, through hundreds of pages he holds the reader’s attention to the flat, stale, and unprofitable barrack life,—to its pettiness, selfishness, monotony, physical and moral untidiness, desolation and disgust,—a life entirely lacking in all that we are accustomed to consider the material for romance. Under his skilful handling the commonplace and the vulgar become alternately tragic and grimly comic; and his _Sous-Offs_ and _Emmurés_, to which he owes his nomination as a charter member of the _Académie Goncourt_, are almost classics of their kind. Less exalted and less epic than Zola, of whose big, spectacular qualities he is quite destitute, Descaves is, nevertheless, much closer to Zola than he is to Mirbeau or to France. And he easily surpasses Zola in the latter’s much-heralded but rather superficial realism; that is, in the capacity for heaping up significantly and without boresomeness minute, unromantic details.

Descaves has a square bull-dog head and jaw, if his photographs are to be trusted. He certainly has a bull-dog’s fixity of purpose in the matter of both substance and form. Nothing in the world will induce him to relax his grip on his immediate aim to indulge in fine ideas or fine writing. His style is cold, hard, dry, correct, keen, and sure. He is an out-and-out anarchist, who has played a fairly active part in the events of the last few years. His _Sous-Offs_, though entirely free from doctrinal discussion, cost him, by reason of its damaging revelations, an encounter with the law. No other novel—indeed, no other work of this generation, unless it be Bruant’s _chanson_, _Biribi_—has exerted so profound an anti-militarist influence in France.

In 1895 Victor Barrucand published in the _Revue Blanche_ a series of articles, concluding with a serious proposition for the establishment of “_Le Pain Gratuit_” (free bread); and on the occasion of the municipal elections of that year he placarded the principal communes of France with the following appeal:—

“TO THE PEOPLE.

“The tactics of the ambitious and the usurpers have always been to create division in order to reign.

“WORKERS!

“Be no more divided over political programmes of which you are the dupes.

“Band yourselves together upon the basis of your interests.

“Let us not expect anything from the good will of anybody, but let us define our own wills. Let us not say to any exterior power, ‘GIVE US (_Donnez-nous_) OUR DAILY BREAD’; for manna will not fall from heaven nor from the governmental spheres. But let us say, ‘GIVE OURSELVES’ (_Donnons-nous_)! We can, if we will it, affirm with solidarity true LIBERTY FOR ALL.

“Let us combine our determination and our scattered energies, and let us constitute the great party of men with hearts upon this question of bread, proclaiming THE RIGHT TO LIVE (_le droit à la vie_) without humiliating conditions.

“Let bread, in all the communes, be the property of all, like the water of the fountains, the lights of the streets, and the streets themselves.

“We have free instruction, which profits only those who can receive instruction. Let us organise, more justly, LE PAIN GRATUIT for the profit and the liberty of all the workers.

“Let the bread necessary to life be a right, and not an alms. Let it be no more the derisive price with which the labourer, nourisher of the rich, is paid. Let us abrogate the law of death inscribed on the margin of the code against him who has not found a way to sell himself.

“THE PEOPLE MUST SPEAK OUT LOUD AND FIRM! THEY MUST DICTATE THEIR TERMS!

“Let us vote no more for individuals nor for complicated programmes. Let us vote for LE PAIN GRATUIT! Let there be no political divisions upon this point. Let us be with those who are with us, and be on our guard against the false philanthropists who promise more butter than bread.

“Let us begin at the beginning. Let us lay the corner-stone of a social edifice which shall shelter our children FREE AND RECONCILED IN THE COMMON HAPPINESS.

“Let us silence the ambitious who see in the suffering of the people only a means of attaining their ends. Let us replace the politics of personalities (so remote from the interests of the masses) by a finely human organisation of things. Let us vote for the idea which cannot betray us.

“LET US VOTE FOR FREE BREAD!

“VICTOR BARRUCAND.”[107]

In _Avec le Feu_, a novel whose action is placed in the troubled period of the execution of Vaillant and the overt act of Emile Henry, M. Barrucand has given an exceedingly subtle and suggestive study of the disgust with society of a certain element of the intellectual _élite_, and of the reasons for their espousal of the anarchist cause.

The principal character, one Robert, is a good type of the cultured, semi-neurasthenic anarchist of a period chiefly characterised by its restlessness and yearning:—

“On certain evenings he descended into the street, and saturated himself with the crowd. On the benches he breathed the mortality of the squares. He suffered for these miserable cattle who bleed no more under the goad of conscience. He roamed entire nights as chance led, hunting the débris of souls, exploring with his emotions, as with a dark lantern, the pavements of the drowsy city. At daybreak he came back shivering, coughing, weary with over-walking, drunk with pity, his stomach steeped in bad drinks. He concluded then that labour had brutalised the species, and he sought the secret of lifting it up. On these mornings he speculated daringly, dreamed of sacrifices, of revolts, of noble disdains, of ferocious protests against philanthropy and respectability. A savour of death blended with his charity and perfumed his heroic sleep.”

The novel ends dramatically, not with bomb-throwing, but with suicide, which this strange anarchist hero, who aspires to bomb-throwing, without having the necessary force of character to achieve it, chooses in its stead.

It would be unfair to class M. Barrucand as an anarchist, or even as a revolutionist, on the strength of this book, in spite of the generally sympathetic tone which pervades it. In fact, M. Barrucand’s philosophy as displayed therein is of so cynical and, at times, of so flippant an order, his temperament so weary and so buoyant, his moral outlook so severe and lackadaisical, his style so lurid and simple, his appreciations so morbid and sane, and his literary method so impressionistic, realistic, and symbolic, by turns, that it would be rash to draw any conclusions from it whatsoever, did not his attitude in his other works—notably in his two historical biographies, _La Vie Véritable du Citoyen Rossignol_, _Vainqueur de la Bastille_, and _Mémoires et Notes de Choudieu, Représentant du Peuple_—and his identification with the movement for Free Bread enroll him definitively in the ranks of revolt.

Maurice Barrès, who is at present an apostle of nationalism, was at one time classed as a “sentimental anarchist,”—an anarchist “with a rebel’s brain and a voluptuary’s nerves, who would wear purple and fine linen.” “I am an enemy of the laws,” he said at that time.

Among other French novelists and short-story writers of a certain reputation who are more or less revolutionary in tone may be mentioned:—

Georges Darien, author of _Biribi-Armée d’Afrique_, a novel of the convict-legion, which has proved a potent factor in lessening the rigours of the companies of discipline; Dubois-Dessaulle,[108] author of _Sous la Casaque_, who, after being released from the convict-legion to which he had been consigned (because a brochure by Jean Grave and an article by Sévérine were found in his knapsack), had the superhuman courage to soak his left arm in kerosene and set fire to it in order to avoid ever being sent back into this inferno; Jean Ajalbert, author of _Sous le Sabre_; Marcel Lami, author of _La Débandade_; Louis Lamarque, author of _Un An de Caserne_; Paul Brulat, author of _La Faiseuse de Gloire_, _Le Nouveau Candide_, _La Gangue_, and _Eldorado_, books replete with generous indignation against social abuses; Jean Lombard, one of the makers of the programme of the _Congrès Régional_ of Paris (1880) which declared for class candidates, whose untimely death was a great loss to French literature; Camille Pert, author of _En l’Anarchie_; Henri Rainaldy, author of _Delcros_, an exposure of the cowardices and murderousness of society; Adolphe Retté, author of _Le Régicide_; Marcel Schwob, author of _Spicilege_; Mme. Sévérine, author of _Pages Rouges_; Frantz Jourdain, author of _L’Atelier Chanterel_; Zéphirin Raganasse, author of _Fabrique de Pions_; Louis Lumet, author of _La Fièvre_; M. Reepmaker, author of _Vengeance_; Théodore Chèze, Henri Fèvre, Jules Cazes, Pierre Valdagne, and the _feuilletoniste_ Michel Zevacco.

A number of the revolutionists who are primarily public agitators have made attempts of varying merit to propagate their pet ideas through the medium of fiction. Such are Sébastien Faure with his _romans-feuilletons_ and Jean Grave with his _Malfaiteurs_, his military romance, _La Grande Famille_, and his book for boys, _Les Aventures de Nono_.

The most thorough single-volume study that has as yet appeared of the psychology of the different varieties of contemporary revolutionary types, and of their aims and methods, is unquestionably J.-H. Rosny’s[109] romance, _Le Bilatéral_. But M. Rosny, although he has appeared on a public platform in company with professed _révoltés_, to protest against “_La Cruauté Contemporaine_,” is primarily a scientific observer, who cannot reasonably be classed as an agitator.

Like the hero of this romance (Hélier, the “Bilatéral,” who habitually looks at all sides of a subject, and then looks at them again), Rosny is impassive, impartial, tolerant, eclectic. Far from excusing the crimes and errors of the capitalistic state, he is equally far from throwing in his lot with those who would incontinently overturn it.

“To think,” says the Bilatéral to his _doctrinaire_ socialist and anarchist friends, “that there are multitudes of brave souls like you who, like you, see only white and black. Nothing but white and black! Why, _citoyens_, the complex is grey, all shades of grey.”

Again he says: “You see, my dear” (he is speaking to an ardent socialist girl), “that in the things of the social order we meet rarely a problem simple enough to make it possible to assert;—‘it is this’ or ‘it is that.’ Generally, between _this_ and _that_ there are an endless number of points to elucidate.... There is a high civilisation with plenty of grain, with immense unemployed forces, with a science already so large that it can resolve the problem of giving to all a nest and nourishment; ... and those above are stupid, and those below are stupid, and all so evilly disposed! My God! dear child, if the people were not a brutal instinct, we might indeed hope for a consoling solution.”

Still, again, speaking to a group upon the Bourse: “‘History, science, daily observation, demonstrate to us that nothing durable is elaborated without the aid of the great collaborator, Time. Did this horse-chestnut-tree grow in a day? And you would have the humanity which has evolved so slowly—oh, so slowly!—through myriads of years, humanity bounded by prejudices, by predispositions against progressive ideas, humanity which includes a hundred social sects ready to combat each other,—you would have this humanity change by means of a lousy, bloody, revolution? Granted that once, after centuries of patience, a cataclysm like that of ‘93 occurred. (And, even so, France, properly speaking, has no reason to felicitate itself over Jacobinism.) But you pretend to establish as a normal condition these cataclysms which can be only the exception in the social life; and it is this that I am powerless to conceive.’

“‘Bravo!’ exclaimed the bourgeois.

“‘I have nothing to do with your bravos!’ cried the Bilatéral, with a shade of nervousness. ‘If their ignorance saddens me, your rottenness exasperates me; and it is not of protecting the rich that I think, but of preventing a generous minority of the poor from getting themselves butchered to no purpose or from casting France into the maw of the rival powers. As to the vile and cowardly cormorants, the whole race of big and little parasites, the vermin that swarm in this pseudo-republic alongside of the Orleanist penny-scrapers and the pests of imperialism, if I had only to press a button to annihilate them all, I would not hesitate a second.’”

Other fiction writers who have shown an understanding of the gravity of the revolutionary issue, a familiarity with revolutionary tenets and the workings of the revolutionary mind, but whose points of view are either neutral, like Rosny’s, or frankly hostile, are Rachilde, Jane de la Vaudère, Augustin Léger, Paul Dubost, and Adolphe Chenevière. These have aided the propaganda, in their own despite, by rendering the revolutionary types familiar and comprehensible, and so lifting them out of the category of monsters.

It seems that Emile Henry’s favourite book, his “_livre de chevet_,” the book which he contrived to secrete in his cell during a part of his imprisonment, and which his jailers, when they pounced upon it, imagined to be of the most incendiary nature, was Cervantes’ _Don Quixote_. And it is not infrequently the case, in this matter of literature, that the most potent revolutionary agents are those which make the least pretence of being so. The masterpieces of the humourists Meilhac, Halévy, Tristan Bernard, Jules Renard, Pierre Veber, and Georges Courtéline, which hold up to ridicule rather than to reprobation the emptiness and baseness of society; such books of pity and of pardon as Daudet’s _Jack_, Goncourt’s _Fille Elisa_, and Loti’s _Livre de la Pitié et de la Mort_; books of aspiration, like Prévost’s _Confessions d’un Amant_ and Bourget’s _Terre Promise_; of wrath, like Léon Daudet’s _Morticoles_; of “revolt against Puritanism,” like Pierre Louys’ _Aphrodite_; of energy, like Barrès’ _Déracinés_; of searching, like Huysmanns’ _Cathédrale_; of regret, like Bazin’s _Terre qui Meurt_; of unmoral pessimism, like De Maupassant’s _Bel-Ami_; and the whole range of disquieting feminist fiction,—may turn out to be the most active social ferments and the real forerunners (little as their authors would wish it) of violent change,—of revolt and revolution!

All contemporary fiction, in fact, has in it something of the doubt, the trouble, and the protest of the period; and, once upon this tack, nothing less than a minute examination of every novel and volume of short stories that has appeared since the Franco-Prussian war would be imposed.

Of the essayists, critics, and philosophers[110] who are more or less militant iconoclasts and _révoltés_, the most important are:—

A. Ferdinand Hérold, who expounds his attitude as follows: “From the time I was able to think a little for myself, I have had an anarchist mind. I mean that I have always had a horror of undisputed authority, of dogmatism, and of conventional ideas,—ideas which, the greater part of the time, one does not attempt to justify to himself”; Camille Mauclair, who says: “If anarchy is primarily the reform of ethics, in accordance with the principles of individualism, I can declare squarely that anarchy was born in me, with the study of metaphysics and the awakening of sensibility in the period when I began to know myself.... Furthermore, pity for the disinherited and execration of the spoliators is a point of honour for the few clean and upright people who are still to be found in the world”; Bernard Lazare,[111] who says: “Authority, its value, and its _raison d’être_ are things which I have never been able to comprehend. That a man arrogate to himself the right to domineer over his fellows, in any fashion whatsoever, is still inconceivable to me. At first I regarded myself as the only victim of baneful circumstances and vicious wills. Later I came to consider mankind at large; and from my own sentiments I divined the feelings of those who more or less continuously, or at some moment of their existence, are slaves. Then what had appeared to me odious for myself appeared to me odious for all”; Gustave Geffroy, who devoted a decade to his biography of the Communard Blanqui, entitled _L’Enfermé_; Henry Mazel, who exclaimed in the _Mercure de France_, “We are all anarchists, thank God!” Alfred Naquet, a convert from nationalism; Urbain Gohier, author of _L’Armée contre la Nation_; Victor Charbonnel, ex-priest and editor of _La Raison_, and Henri Bérenger, editor of _L’Action_, who have acted together in exciting the masses to anti-clerical rioting; the socialist-anthropologist Charles Letourneau; the bacteriologists Melchnikoff, Roux, and Duclaux;[112] Charles Albert and Armand Charpentier, apostles of _l’amour libre_; Christian Cornélissen, Georges Pioch, Jean Jullien, G. Bachot, Léopold Lacour, Jules Laforgue,[112] B. Guineaudau, Auguste Chirac, Albert Delacour, E. Fournière, Jacques Santarelle, Louis Lumet, Maurice Bigeon, A. Hamon, Camille de St. Croix, Félix Fénéon, Han Ryner, Alex. Cohen, Henri Bauer,[112] Charles Vallier, Gabriel de la Salle, Emile Michelet, Laurent Tailhade, Francis de Pressensé, Maurice Le Blond, Saint-Georges de Bouhélier, G. Lhermitte, Paul Robin, Eugène Montfort, and Gustave Kahn.

In the first months of 1891 a weekly publication called _L’Endehors_[113] (_The Outsider_) was founded by a band of young literary men. They were Zo d’Axa, Roinard, Georges Darien, Félix Fénéon, Lucien Descaves, Victor Barrucand, Arthur Byl, A. Tabarant, Bernard Lazare, Charles Malato, Pierre Quillard, Ghil, Edmond Cousturier, Henri Fèvre, Edouard Dubus, A. F. Hérold, Georges Lecomte, Etienne Decrept, Emile Henry, Saint-Pol-Roux, Jules Méry, Alexandre Cohen, J. LeCoq, Chatel, Cholin, Ludovic Malquin, Camille Mauclair, Octave Mirbeau, Lucien Muhlfeld, Pierre Veber, Victor Melnotte, A. Mercier, Tristan Bernard, Paul Adam, Charles Saunier, Jean Ajalbert, Emile Verhaeren, Henri de Regnier, and Francis Vielé-Griffin.

The journal bore by way of epigraph this phrase of its leading spirit and director, Zo d’Axa: “_Celui que rien n’enrôle et qu’une impulsive nature guide seule, ce hors la loi, ce hors d’école, cet isolé chercheur d’au delà, ne se dessine-t-il pas dans ce mot, L’Endehors?_”

It explained its purpose as follows: “We belong neither to a party nor to a group. We are outsiders. We go on our way, individuals, without the Faith which saves and blinds. Our disgust with society does not engender convictions in us. We fight for the pleasure of fighting without dreaming of a better future. What matter to us the to-morrows which in the centuries shall be! What matter to us the little nephews! It is _endehors_, outside of all laws, of all rules, of all theories, even anarchistic; it is now, from this moment, that we wish to give ourselves over to our compassions, to our transports, to our gentleness, to our wrath, to our instincts, with the proud consciousness of being ourselves.”

The first number of _L’Endehors_ appeared in May, 1891, immediately after the massacre of Fourmies,—in which old men, women, and children, among them a young girl bearing a hawthorn sprig by way of a flag of truce, were shot down by the troops of the government,—and dealt bravely and scathingly with this horrible incident; and the last number was issued in January, 1893, when the paper was forcibly suppressed.

The staff of _L’Endehors_ defended and even glorified Ravachol. Mirbeau’s “_Apologie de Ravachol_” (referred to above) is one of the finest bits of impassioned writing he has ever done. Paul Adam’s “_Eloge de Ravachol_” is also noteworthy. Here is a brief extract:—

“Politics would have been banished completely from our preoccupations, had not the legend of sacrifice, of the gift of a life for the happiness of humanity, suddenly reappeared in our epoch, with the martyrdom of Ravachol.... At the end of all these judicial proceedings, _chroniques_, and calls to legal murder, Ravachol stands as the unmistakable propagator of the great idea of the ancient religions, which extolled the seeking of death by the individual for the good of the world,—the abnegation of one’s self, of one’s life, and one’s good name by the exaltation of the humble and the poor. Ravachol is plainly the restorer of the essential sacrifice....

“He saw suffering round about him, and he has ennobled the suffering of others by offering his own in a holocaust. His incontestable charity and disinterestedness, the energy of his acts, his courage before inevitable death, lift him into the splendours of legend. In this time of cynicism and of irony A SAINT IS BORN TO US. His blood will be the example from which new courages and new martyrs will spring. The grand idea of universal altruism will bloom in the red pool at the foot of the guillotine. A fruitful death is about to be consummated. An event of human history is about to be inscribed in the annals of the peoples. The legal murder of Ravachol will open a new era.”

_L’Endehors_ prophesied (or rather supposed), in an article entitled “_Notre Complot_,” Vaillant’s attempt against the Chamber;[114] and the ex-members of its staff participated, after its supposition had become a fact, in the phenomenal demonstrations at Vaillant’s tomb. The indignation in literary circles over the execution of Vaillant was so intense that M. Magnard in _Le Figaro_ uttered a vigorous protest against “_la Vaillantolâtrie_”; and the most orthodox writers in the most orthodox journals suddenly proclaimed the necessity of stemming this tide of anarchistic heresy in high places (to which _L’Endehors_ had, so to speak, first given a habitation and a name) by the accomplishment of a number of necessary but long-delayed legal and social reforms.

The unlettered protagonist of Augustin Léger’s novel _Le Journal d’un Anarchiste_ appreciates the review conducted by one Hector de la Roche-Sableuse, of which _L’Endehors_ may well have been the model, in the following fashion:—

“After all, in spite of their gibberish, these reviews of the _jeunes gens_ lent me by Roche-Sableuse are sometimes interesting. They shed crocodile tears over the lot of the people? It is possible. They do not believe a word of what they write? I do not say no. All this does not prevent them from seeing clearly at times, and from putting their fingers often on the truth. Besides, although these fine little _messieurs_ are not in the least anxious at heart for the triumph of the proletariat, because they know very well that it would remove several cushions from under their elbows, they understand and they expound perfectly the legitimacy of our claims. And I applaud with both hands the eulogiums they pronounce on the noble victims our cause already counts. In short, they have interested me, and I have learned not a little from them.”

_L’Endehors_ was publicly praised by Georges Clemenceau, Henri Bauer, Laurent-Tailhade, and Jean de Mitty. The last-named said of it:—

“This little sheet so modest in appearance and at the same time so fastidious in make-up that it might easily have been taken for a club periodical or for the exclusive organ of a few æsthetes, raised more tempests and provoked more passions than a riot in the street. Violent it certainly was, and violent with a violence which, for wearing always a literary, subtile, and complex form, penetrated no less deeply, and gained no less to its object the scattered energies and wills that were craving definite guidance. Opportune or not, the influence of _L’Endehors_ was exerted effectively.... But, aside from its action on public affairs, the journal of Zo d’Axa realised an incontestable intellectual effort; and it is for the beauty of this effort that it pleases me to invoke it.”

It is to be noted that Emile Henry, in whose pontifical attitude before his judges even his bitterest antagonists found “something atrociously superior and disquieting,” and in whom the sympathetic Albert Delacour discerns, or thinks he discerns (by reason of his solitary meditations, his perpetual ratiocination, his hatred of action up to the moment of supreme action, his disgust with life,[115] and his brooding on death), a modern Hamlet, is the only member of the _Endehors_ group who has committed an overt act of violence.

Of the rest, some have since identified themselves closely with socialism, some with Boulangism and nationalism, and some with anarchism; some have given themselves to the creation of the humorous or the beautiful without too obvious a destructive prepossession; and some have held themselves scrupulously “_endehors_.”

Most have remained _révoltés_ of one sort or another. Only a few have conformed, and a part of these only outwardly. Thus Paul Adam, who has seemed several times, by reason of the enormous range of his interests and the disconcerting agility of his intelligence, to be utterly lost to revolution, has written, nevertheless, a number of novels of revolutionary trend. He published in 1900 a defence of Bresci which might have been written the very same day as his “_Eloge_” of Ravachol, and he reaffirmed his essential anarchism as late as the spring of 1904.

Of those who have remained strictly “_endehors_,” Zo d’Axa,[116] uncorrected by hard experiences of prison and exile, resumed in 1898 his assault upon the abuses of society in his now famous _Feuilles_ with a fierceness, a versatility, an independence, a finesse, a facility in anathema, and a redundance in disdain that have rarely, if ever, been matched in revolutionary pamphleteering—and privateering. It was as if Mirbeau, with all the withering force of his mighty scorn, had descended into the street, or as if _Père Peinard_ had attained the level of literature.

The _Feuilles de Zo d’Axa_ appeared irregularly in the form of placards, as events invited, during the troubled years of 1898 and 1899, and created an enormous sensation. Nothing was exempt from the sharpshooting of this guerilla of the asphalt,—this handsome, red-bearded “_mousquetaire chercheur de justes aventures_,” whom all Paris knows by his picturesque brown cape and felt.

“To the argument of the multitude,” he wrote in his salutatory, “to the catechism of the crowds, to all the _raisons-d’état_ of the collectivity, behold the personal reasons of the Individual oppose themselves!... He goes his way, he acts, he takes aim, because a combative instinct makes him prefer the chase to the nostalgic siesta. On the borders of the code he poaches the big game,—officers and judges, bucks or _carnivori_. He dislodges from the forests of Bondy the herd of politicians. He amuses himself by snaring the ravaging financier. He beats up at all the cross-roads the domesticated _gent de lettres_, fur and feathers; all the debauchers of ideas, all the monsters of the press and the police.”

Lucien Descaves compares the series of Zo d’Axa’s writings to “a beautiful road bordered with pity and hatred and paved with wrath and revolt.”

He says further of him: “Zo d’Axa’s phrase is rapid. The fuse of his articles is short. When a match is approached to them, something is bound to explode; and D’Axa is quite capable of sacrificing himself, if need be, in the explosion. He has proved it.”

The suppression of _L’Endehors_ (whose complete file is now one of the rarities of the book-mart) and the consequent dispersion of the _Endehors_ band were soon followed by the formation of another revolutionary coterie of young poets, men of letters, and sociologists, called “_Le Groupe de l’Idée Nouvelle_.” This group (of whom Paul Adam, A. Hamon, Victor Barrucand, and Jean Carrière were the most prominent figures) organised a series of _soirées-conférences_, which were given at the _Hôtel Continental_, during the winter of 1893-94, with great success.

“_L’Idée Nouvelle_ informs the public that hereafter it adds to its title _La Rénovation Sociale par le Travail_, and announces that the first _conférence_ of the year will be given at the _Hôtel des Sociétés Savantes_, Sunday, November 18, at three o’clock, by the poet and _chansonnier_ Xavier Privas.[117] Subject, ‘_L’Argent contre l’Humanité_.’ The second, to be given early in December by the sculptor Jean Baffier, will treat ‘_La Corporation Autonome et l’Entreprise Capitaliste_.’”

To the former committee of _L’Idée Nouvelle_, composed of men of letters, among whom were Paul Adam, Jules Cazes, Lucien Descaves, Louis de Grammont, Georges Lecomte, and Léopold Lacour, the artists Eugène Carrière, Jules Dalou, and Steinlen, and the geographer Elisée Reclus, consented to join themselves at the time of the adoption of its new name.

Here is the text of the declarations by means of which _La Rénovation Sociale par le Travail_ quickly rallied to its support many of those of the intellectual _élite_ who are thinking and acting along the lines of the better aspirations of humanity:—

“Believing that the action of money as a medium of exchange is universally injurious, that it is the source of all the turpitudes and all the infamies of society; that almost all the crimes, the enmities, the divisions, have for their initial cause a question of interest,—namely, money; believing also that money, far from being, as some pretend, a stimulus to production, is rather an obstacle to it; that venality and mercantilism dishonour and paralyse art, kill noble dreams and generous ambitions; that too often, in the actual condition of society, we propose to ourselves as the end of life, not an ideal of beauty, of truth, of justice, but money; believing, further, that there is no other means for counteracting such a situation than by glorifying, rehabilitating, and equitably apportioning labour, and by insisting strenuously on this law of nature, that every consumer should be a producer, the consumption being proportioned to the need, and the production to the faculty and the aptitude,—the members of the committee for _La Rénovation Sociale par le Travail_ pledge themselves to spread these ideas by every means in their power,—by the pen, by word, and by example.”

This group is at present preparing a fête, to be held in the fall of 1904, for the “glorification of all the innovators to whom humanity is indebted for advancement along the line of integral emancipation.”

The _Noël Humaine_ (Human Christmas) is celebrated annually by another group of emancipated men of letters, under the auspices of Victor Charbonnel’s journal, _La Raison_.

The revolutionary fervour of a considerable portion of the intellectual _élite_ has found further expression during the last ten years in a score or more of reviews (”_jeunes revues_” or “_revues des jeunes_”) “which,” says Paul Adam, “have created, promulgated, sustained, and caused to triumph almost two-thirds of the ideas upon which the new century is beginning its life.” “In each,” says the same writer, “a group of disinterested spirits, extraordinarily erudite, indifferent to success and fortune, eager for knowledge and proud in its acquisition, have cultivated the most beautiful garden of mentality which has been seen in France since the Pléïade and Port-Royal. Poets, sociologists, romancers, and critics have disseminated thereby marvellous beauties.”

M. Adam exaggerates, as he is very apt to do. Nevertheless, in spite of a great deal that is immature, amateurish, intemperate, and fantastic about most of them, the _revues des jeunes_ are one of the most significant phenomena of these latter years.

They have been an appreciable disturbing force. The names of most of the writers mentioned in this chapter are repeatedly appearing in their tables of contents; and their prospectuses abound in such tell-tale phrases as these: “_art libre_,” “_beauté sociale_,” “_vie féconde et humanité forte_,” “_dévoiler les intrigues_, _combattre les abus_,” “_tribune ouverte_,” “_idées hardies et généreuses_,” “_l’âme purement désintéressée des futurs Etats-Unis d’Europe_,” “_l’art existe pour la vie_,” “_la cité radieuse où l’humanité affranchie vivra enfin dans l’harmonie, dans la justice, et dans la force_.”

Furthermore, such publications as _Le Mercure de France_, _La Grande Revue_ (edited by Fernand Labori, defender of anarchists and of Dreyfus), _La Plume_ (whose _soirées littéraires_ have enjoyed an international renown), _La Revue de Paris_, _La Revue_, _La Contemporaine_, _La Vogue_, _L’Hermitage_, and _La Grande France_, by extending the hospitality of their columns to the exploitation of the most advanced theories and ideas, have—without claiming to be revolutionary or, at any rate, without limiting themselves to propaganda—effectively supplemented the efforts of the propagandist mediums.

The revolutionary sentiments prevalent among the intellectual _élite_ of France have found abundant expression in the French drama, as was to be expected in a country which has a literary stage and in which nearly every man of letters is something of a playwright. Indeed, it would not be surprising if the stage, by reason of its superior capacity for giving vividness to ideas, were quite as efficacious an instrument of revolutionary propaganda as the press, the _chanson_, or the novel.

Octave Mirbeau is the author of several plays, three of which, _Les Mauvais Bergers_, _L’Epidémie_, and _L’Acquitté_, teem with caustic, uncompromising anarchism.

_Les Mauvais Bergers_ was successfully produced by Bernhardt’s company in 1897. Its hero, Jean Roule, is a young, thoughtful, aspiring workman, who has suffered so much at the hands of the capitalists and the authorities and has seen so much suffering imposed on others from the same sources that he is possessed with a colossal, implacable hatred of everybody and everything that has to do with power. On the other hand, his heart is full to bursting with unselfish love for the unfortunate proletariat. “I want to live,” he cries, “to live in my flesh, in my brain, in the expansion of all my organs, of all my faculties, instead of remaining the beast of burden that is flogged and the unthinking machine that is turned for others. I want to be a man, in short,—a man in my own eyes.... We also need some poetry and some art in our lives; for, poor as he may be, a man does not live by bread alone. He has a right, like the rich, to things of beauty.... These flames, this smoke, these tortures, these accursed machines which every day and every hour devour my brain, my heart, my right to happiness, my right to life,—these—these yawning mouths of ovens, these fiery furnaces, these caldrons which are fed with my muscles, with my will, with my liberty, by the shovelful,—to make out of them the wealth and the social puissance of a single man! Extinguish all that, I entreat you! Blow up all that! Annihilate all that!”

His most complete abhorrence is the politician. The employer is white beside him. “The employer is a man, like you. You have him before you. You speak to him, you move him, you threaten him, you kill him! At least, he has a visage,—a chest in which to sink a knife. But go move this being without a visage called politician! Go kill this thing called politics,—this slimy, slippery thing which you think you hold and which always escapes you, which you believe dead and which always comes to life again,—this abominable thing by which everything has been debased, everything corrupted, everything bought, everything sold,—justice, love, beauty!—which has made venality of conscience a national institution of France; which has done worse still, since with its filthy slaver it has befouled the august face of the poor! worse still, since it has destroyed in you your last ideal,—faith in Revolution!”

Aided and inspirited by a working-girl, Madeleine (Bernhardt’s rôle), this Jean Roule, who would kill as much from excess of love as from hate, leads the workmen in a revolt against their employers. But the latter are sustained by government troops, and the play ends with a massacre and a procession of coffins.

_L’Epidémie_ (1898) is an extravagant one-act comedy,—almost a farce,—caricaturing the culpable indifference of the bourgeois politician to the welfare of the humble and his extreme solicitude for the welfare of the rich. Typhoid fever has made several victims in the military barracks of a provincial city. The municipal council assembles for the purpose of taking measures to arrest it. When the council learns, however, that the disease has attacked no one outside the barracks, and within the barracks only the private soldiers, whose duty, whose glory it is to give their lives for their country, it decides to do nothing, to the accompaniment of enthusiastic cries of “_Vive la France!_” The decision has scarcely been made when a messenger arrives with the news that a bourgeois has died of the plague. Thereupon the council reconsiders its former action, votes to erect a statue to the dead bourgeois, to name a street in his honour, to demolish the city’s unsanitary quarters, to open up boulevards, and to introduce a water system, and makes an appropriation of 100,000,000 francs therefor. Finally, each councillor rises in turn, and pronounces a panegyric of the bourgeois victim.

_L’Acquitté_, another one-act comedy, presents the adventure of a vagabond, Jean Guenille, who, having carried to the police station (in an access of honesty) a purse of 10,000 francs which he found in the street, is browbeaten and put under lock and key by the _commissaire_ because he has no legal domicile. M. Mirbeau’s other plays, _Vieux Ménages_ (1900), _Le Portefeuille_ and _Scrupules_ (1902), and _Les Affaires sont les Affaires_ (1903),—the last-named[118] an exposition of the power of money to destroy natural sentiments,—are only a shade less subversive in tone.

Lucien Descaves has to his credit a one-act anarchistic play, entitled _La Cage_. The Havenne family (consisting of father, mother, a son Albert, aged twenty-one, and a daughter Madeleine, aged twenty-six), threatened with eviction and unable to pay their rent or find work, are in black despair. The father and mother, in the temporary absence of Albert and Madeleine, drink a vial of laudanum and light a brazier of charcoal. The children return, find their parents dead, and, desiring to die likewise, submit themselves to the poisonous fumes of the brazier, which is still burning. They bethink themselves in time, however, decide that it is less cowardly to steal than to die, and set out together for a career of outlawry and revolutionary apostleship. “Are we quite sure, Madeleine, that there is nothing better to do than to kill ourselves?” queries Albert. And then he quotes the famous letter of Frederick of Prussia to D’Alembert: “If there should be found a family destitute of all resources and in the frightful condition you depict, I should not hesitate to decide theft legitimate.... The ties of society are based upon reciprocal services; but, if this society is composed of pitiless souls, all engagements are broken.”

_La Cage_ was suppressed by the censorship[119] very early in its career. Descaves, who dedicated his work “_Aux désespérés pour qu’ils choisissent_,” foresaw and publicly predicted its interdiction. “Let me try,” he said, “to put on the stage, instead of adulteries and embarrassing _liaisons_, the distress of a bourgeois family at the end of its resources, its illusions, and its courage,—the parents reduced to suicide and the children precipitated into revolt. Ah! you’ll hear a fine clatter!”

The severity of the censorship towards _La Cage_ called out numerous protests, notably this from Alexander Hepp (in his _Quotidiens_), little suspected of doctrinal sympathy with Descaves: “As soon as we show to the gallery the reality of the miseries, the despairs, the injustices of society, a fragment of real life, of the true cross people carry, our delicate sensibilities are shocked; and it is always before that which is truest that we cry out improbability. The innovating tendencies, the harsh accent of retribution, the virile sincerity of Descaves, who puts on the boards a family driven to suicide, have disturbed the digestions of the orchestra.”

The critic Henri Bauer, commenting on _Les Mauvais Bergers_ and _La Cage_, wrote: “An anti-social dramatic literature is born in France.... It required authors of the power and eloquence of Mirbeau, of the devouring passion and the admirable soul of Descaves, to dare to ring out in dramatic dialogue this conclusion, _On n’améliore pas la société, on la supprime_.... Society is a lie, social progress a lure, the social pact is broken: nothing is left but the individual,—his temperament, his law, his conscience, and his will.”

Descaves’ _Tiers Etat_ is an eloquent plea for the faithful mistress who is debarred from marriage by legal technicalities. He is also joint author with Georges Darien of _Les Chapons_ (to which this legend was prefixed: “_Aux Mânes des Bourgeois de Calais nous sacrifions ce spécimen de leur pitoyable descendance_”), and with Maurice Donnay of _La Clairière_ and _Oiseaux de Passage_. _La Clairière_, which was one of the notable features of the theatrical season of 1898-99, pictures the life of an anarchist _phalanstère_, which succeeds admirably until the members send for their _compagnes_, when it is demoralised and disintegrated by petty intrigues and jealousies.

The moral? Not the obvious and absurd one that men alone will constitute the society of the future; but this, that women have not been enfranchised long enough to have developed the maturity of character necessary to the practice of anarchist precepts. _Oiseaux de Passage_ deals with the experiences of anarchists in exile. “I am proud,” says M. Descaves, apropos of the piece, “to have been able to transfer to the stage the theories of a Bakounine, and to introduce them to the public thus.”

Maurice Donnay is a railing nihilist, subtle, graceful, and gracious, somewhat after the Anatole France pattern,—a smiling _révolté_, a refined recalcitrant, whose recipe for a play is said to be “a little love, much adultery, an enormous amount of _esprit_, a pinch of politics, and a gramme of sociology,” and whose psychology is “a sparkling, effervescing affair, the analyses of which explode merrily with the welcome noise of popping champagne corks.”

In _Amants_, _La Douloureuse_, _La Bascule_, _Le Retour de Jérusalem_, and _Georgette Lemonnier_, Donnay is prodigal of _bons mots_ and malicious pleasantries, by which he gives the most piquant conceivable flavour to the social and political infamies of the time. _Le Torrent_, his most ambitious work, has this much of the serious, that death is its dénouement; but its general method and attitude do not differ essentially from the method and attitude of his other plays.

To those who expressed surprise that the flippant Donnay should collaborate with the truculent Descaves, Donnay himself said: “A young man, I produced at the _Chat Noir_ my piece _Pension de Famille_, which won me the honour of being called ‘joyous anarchist’ by Jules Lemaître. I remained an anarchist in _La Douloureuse_. And, without doubt, I have always been an anarchist; more, it is true, for sentimental than for sociological reasons, but also from a point of view exclusively philosophical. He who analyses, he who, without ceasing, unravels the meshes of this complicated network of ideas which constitutes the social order, is more or less of an anarchist necessarily, is he not?”

Other works of unequivocal revolt produced within the last fifteen years are:—

_Mais Quelqu’un Troubla la Fête_,[120] a one-act piece by Louis Marsolleau. A financier, a politician, a bishop, a general, a judge, a duchess, and a courtesan (so many types of the powerful and privileged of the world) partake hilariously of a sumptuous banquet. Their revels are interrupted by the apparition first of a peasant, then of a city labourer, and are finally put an end to by a mysterious and terrible unknown, who causes a general explosion.

_Sur la Foi des Etoiles_, by Gabriel Trarieux,—an esoteric symbolistic effort, a groping towards the society of the future: “I say to myself: The stars up yonder, with their fixed, impassive air, the stars which have mounted guard for centuries, are living worlds.... They die and are born. I compare them to the truths which guide us.... For there are several truths,—... some very ancient, almost extinguished, to which we submit by force of habit, and some—oh! just emerging—which will not be true before to-morrow.”

_Le Cuivre_, by Paul Adam and André Picard, which exposes and explains the tyranny exercised by money over persons and governments; and _L’Automne_, by Paul Adam and Gabriel Mourey (forbidden by the censorship).

_Le Domaine_, by Lucien Besnard, which recounts the progress of socialism in the rural districts, and defines the antagonism between the decadent nobility and the rising fourth estate.

_La Pâque Socialiste_, by Emile Veyrin, which describes a practical experiment in Christian socialism.

_La Sape_, by Georges Leneven, the hero of which is an anarchist dreamer of a highly intellectual type, _Le Détour_ by Henry Bernstein, and _Le Masque_ by Henri Bataille.

_Le Voile du Bonheur_, by Georges Clemenceau, which employs Chinese personages and a Chinese setting to explain the manner in which Frenchmen are fooled and ruled by their “mandarins”; and _Les Petits Pieds_ by Henry de Saussine, which employs a similar device to ridicule French education.

_Le Ressort: Etude de Révolution_, mystic and ominous, by Urbain Gohier; _Barbapoux_, savagely anti-clerical, by Charles Malato; _En Détresse_, with a conclusion akin to that of Descaves’ _Cage_, by Henri Fèvre; _L’Ami de l’Ordre_, by Georges Darien; _La Grève_, by Jean Hugues; _Conte de Noël_ and _Des Cloches du Cain_, by Auguste Linert; _Le Chemineau_, by Richepin; Jean Ajalbert’s adaptation of De Goncourt’s _La Fille Elisa_;[121] and the pieces of Hérold, Pierre Valdagne, and Georges Lecomte.

These performances have been supplemented by revivals of De Maupassant’s _Boule de Suif_, which portrays the sacrifice made by a prostitute for the bourgeois and her ostracism by them when they have no further need of her assistance; of the stage version of Zola’s _Germinal_ in the theatres of the working faubourgs; and of certain precursors, such as Henri Becque’s _Les Corbeaux_ (probably the most terrible arraignment of law and lawyers ever written) and _L’Evasion_ and _La Révolte_ of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam; and by the importation of the principal works of the Russian, Belgian, Scandinavian, German, Italian, and Spanish innovators.

Alfred Capus, the principal rival of Maurice Donnay in his peculiar _genre_, holds in completest but most amiable detestation whatever has to do with regular living. Less sardonic than M. Donnay, lighter, brighter, and more _spirituel_, if that is possible, he is equally nihilistic, though not, so far as I am aware, by personal avowal. In _Rosine_ he ventures to depict a _union libre_ receiving a father’s benediction; and in _Qui Perd Gagne_, _Années d’Aventures_, _Les Petites Folles_, _Mariage Bourgeois_, _La Veine_, _La Bourse ou la Vie_, and _Beau Jeune Homme_ he holds up to ridicule, one after another, all the traditional bourgeois ideals.

Reformers being notoriously deficient in the sense of humour, it is a curious and piquant circumstance that not only a majority of the brilliant school of stage humourists, currently known as the “_Auteurs Gais_,” but the four most admired of the group,—Georges Courtéline, Pierre Veber, Jules Renard, and Tristan Bernard,—are frankly revolutionary, either in their personal opinions or in their writings, or in both.

Pierre Veber and Tristan Bernard were charter members of the revolutionary band _L’Endehors_, and have been affiliated latterly with that of _L’Idée Nouvelle_. Jules Renard is the bitterest of social philosophers, under the thin disguise of a charming, impeccable style.

Courtéline, whose comic genius is so strong, so pure, and so fine that he is called, without too gross exaggeration, “_le petit-fils de Molière_”; Courtéline, who will be read and played, in the opinion of many, long after every other contemporary French dramatist has been forgotten; Courtéline, who makes you laugh till you weep over what you ought to weep over without laughing, who promotes reflection and rouses the conscience while dispelling melancholy,—this prodigious Courtéline, truth-loving joker and humane mountebank as he is, has probably done more than any single individual in any sphere to bring into disrepute the brutality of the army, and to expose the perpetual contradiction between essential justice and the texts of the law.

Eugène Brieux is the most prolific producer of the “_pièce à thèse sociale_” and the most indefatigable corrector of abuses connected with the Paris stage. He has attacked the race-course and the police station in _Le Résultat des Courses_, public and private charity in _Les Bienfaiteurs_, physicians in _L’Evasion_, current methods of instruction in _Blanchette_, popular ignorance of and prejudice against venereal diseases in _Les Avariés_,[122] the law and the administrators of the law in _La Robe Rouge_ (”_C’est donc la loi qui rend criminel?_”), and the Chamber of Deputies in _L’Engrenage_; and he has defended the rights of children against parents in _Le Berceau_, the rights of the artistic temperament in _Ménages d’Artistes_, the rights of the poor against the rich in _Les Remplaçantes_, and the rights of the _fille-mère_ in _Maternité_.

M. Brieux is not easy to locate doctrinally or otherwise. He is not an “_auteur gai_,” far from it, and is not, in the strict sense of the term, perhaps, a revolutionist. But his mania for the correction of abuses has surely beguiled him more than once into an attitude towards society that is, to all intents and purposes, revolutionary.

The rugged, poetic, weird, and philosophical François de Curel is as difficult to locate doctrinally as M. Brieux. There are times when he seems to be as irreverent a nihilist as M. France, M. Donnay, or M. Richepin, and times when he seems to be as reverently ecclesiastical and reactionary as M. Paul Bourget or M. le Comte de Mun. All his plays—_Les Fossiles_, in which he pictures the pathetic impotence of the exhausted nobility; _La Nouvelle Idole_, in which he alternately exalts and belittles science; _La Fille Sauvage_, in which he studies the demoralising effect of civilisation upon the mind of the savage; and _Le Repas du Lion_, in which he confronts orthodox economy with the socialist’s dream—admit of different and absolutely contradictory interpretations.

But _Le Repas du Lion_ is claimed, with at least a show of reason, by the socialists, because of its dénouement. One of its wealthy characters elucidates the conflict between labour and capital by means of a parable, “The Lion and the Jackal.” The lion hunts for himself. The jackal, too feeble to hunt for himself, follows the lion. The lion gorges himself with his prey. The jackal eats what the lion leaves. If there were no lion to hunt for him, the jackal would starve. Ergo, the lion is the benefactor of the jackal.

A labourer objects: “In that case, Monsieur, there is a lion; and we are the jackals. Since you choose to have the business settled between wild beasts, we will follow you on to your own ground. When the jackals find that the remnants left by the lion do not garnish their paunches sufficiently, they get together in great numbers, surprise the king, and devour him alive.”

The labourer’s objection is given force by the shooting of the capitalist of the piece. “The reply of the jackal to the lion,” comments one of the minor characters.

Jean Jullien considers himself, if rumour speaks true, in no sense a revolutionist. All the same, his robust drama _La Poigne_, which depicts vividly the moral ravages wrought by authority in and about a humanitarian soul, was received enthusiastically by both the socialistic and the anarchistic press. “Socialists will take notice,” remarked a socialist organ, “that it behooves them to lavish their money and their bravos on this attempt at ‘_L’Art Social_.’” And the theatrical critic of _Le Libertaire_ said: “The piece of Jean Jullien pleased us by its frankness and its human interest. Rarely has an author so stirred our minds and hearts. It is only just to say that the personages exemplify the sentiments and the ideas which are familiar to the anarchists, and that we find in _La Poigne_ an echo of our passions.”

The same author’s _L’Ecolière_, which denounces the hypocrisy of petty provincial functionaries and narrates the conflict of a high-minded, warm-hearted woman with the bourgeois system of morals, was accorded a similar welcome in similar quarters. So also was his _Oasis_, which preaches that Humanity should create for itself, remote from “egoisms, prejudices, mutually hostile religions, and the disgraceful tumults of injustice and war, the basis of peace, of association, and of love.”

As a _féministe_ who flouts and defies the marriage code, Paul Hervieu lays himself liable to be classed as a revolutionist, at least a partial revolutionist, however little such a classification may please him. Whatever else they are, _La Loi de l’Homme_, _L’Armature_, _Les Tenailles_, _Les Paroles Restent_, _L’Enigme_, and _Le Dédale_ are works of revolt. The first-named, _La Loi de l’Homme_, evoked the following sweeping but not unsympathetic judgment from the critic Emile de St. Auban, who, lawyer as well as critic, should know whereof he speaks: “The contemporary theatre occupies itself a great deal with the laws. The code appears often on the boards, and the dramatist-jurists abrogate it in prose or in verse. But never was this abrogation so passionate, so brusque, never was it so radical, so total, as in _La Loi de l’Homme_. I will add so concise, since three very short acts, two of which make one, suffice to erase not a text, but _the_ text, not _a_ law, but _the_ law, and with the law the cortège of egoisms and hypocrisies which have given it birth, and have assured it its full expansion and the calm and sure perpetration of its outrages; to erase, I say, an entire jurisprudence, written or traditional, promulgated against the weak for the strong.”

To the category of partial, unwilling, or unwitting revolutionists to which Jullien, Brieux, Hervieu, and De Curel belong may be assigned also Jules Case in _La Vassale_, Gaston Dévore in _La Conscience d’un Enfant_, Georges Ancey in _Ces Messieurs_ and _La Dupe_, Emile Fabre in _L’Argent_, _Le Bien d’Autrui_, _La Vie Publique_, and _Comme Ils sont Tous_, Rostand in _La Samaritaine_, Abel Hermant in _Le Faubourg_, _La Carrière_, and _La Meute_, Albert Guinon in _Décadence_,[123] Alexandre Bisson in _Le Bon Juge_, Emile Bourgeois in _Mariage d’Argent_, and Bruyerre in _En Paix_. Indeed, it is even permitted to query whether the reputed reactionaries, Jules Lemaître and Henri Lavedan, are not really (at least so far as certain of their pieces are concerned) in the same boat.

Revolutionary and semi-revolutionary plays were for a considerable period well-nigh a monopoly of the _Théâtre Libre_, where unconditional literary form and unconventional acting were the handmaids of unconventional ideas. Latterly they have invaded every legitimate stage of Paris, not excepting the august and supposedly inhospitable _Comédie Française_; and they may be said to be the specialty of four houses: the _Théâtre Antoine_ (founded by Antoine after he abandoned the _Théâtre Libre_); the _Grand Guignol_, the nearest existing counterpart to the _Théâtre Libre_; and the _Gymnase_ and the _Renaissance_, which are now copying the general policy of the _Antoine_. Maurice Maeterlinck and his company have latterly made their headquarters in Paris. Maeterlinck’s _Monna Vanna_ was applauded by the revolutionary organs.

The various free stages, or _théâtres à côté_, which give private performances at irregular intervals, also reserve a modicum of space in their répertoires for pieces of social revolt.

The _revues_ of the variety theatres and concert halls, in which the events of the year are criticised and caricatured with a freedom that often calls down the wrath of the censorship, particularly at Montmartre, are also far from a negligible influence in the direction of revolution.

In 1883 the socialist Clovis Hugues wrote, in an introduction to a volume by the refractory Léon Cladel: “The petrification of the republic in the bourgeois spirit does not prevent literature from being socialistic. It is unconsciously so, perhaps; but it is so. And this is the essential thing for the future.... Open a romance, no matter what one, attend a theatrical representation, no matter what one, and, so that you have the slightest aptitude for combining details, for surprising the idea in the fact, for following a philosophical train through an intrigue, you will be amazed at the quantity of socialism which emerges from this romance and that play. Has the author felt himself responsible towards the Revolution in writing his work? Not the least in the world. He has yielded to the mighty pressure of events, he has submitted to the historic fatalities of his time, the permanent influence of humanity in travail.... What signifies this transformation? It signifies that the philosophies soak down into literature; it signifies that the hour is at hand, since the idea incarnates itself involuntarily in the form; it signifies that the fourth estate is mounting, that justice is near.”

A round decade later (1894) A. Hamon, a friend of anarchy, wrote:—

“Read in the sheets which are the most hostile to the anarchists—such as the _Figaro_, the _Journal_, the _Gil Blas_, the _Echo de Paris_—the short stories, sketches, and chroniques of the Mirbeaus, the Bauers, the Descaves, the Paul Adams, the Bernard Lazares, the Ajalberts, the Sévérines, etc., and you will perceive that anarchist tendencies throng them. Follow the ‘_jeunes revues_,’ and you will observe that there is not, to speak in the large, a piece of verse, a story, a study of any sort whatsoever, which does not tend towards the destruction of what the anarchists qualify as social prejudice,—_la patrie_, authority, family, religion, courts of law, militarism, etc.

“All the thinking men of this epoch,—savants, littérateurs, artists, etc.,—one may almost say all, so rare are those who imprison themselves in the ‘_tour d’ivoire_’ or who profess doctrines commendatory of the existing order,—all the relatively young men, I mean, who have attained their majority since 1870, have _libertaire_ inclinations. The result is a fervent propaganda under the most varied forms and in the most dissimilar _milieux_.”

Still later (1899) a declared opponent of anarchism, M. Fierens-Gevaert, wrote in his admirable social study, _La Tristesse Contemporaine_: “There are, to begin with, the militant anarchists,—a handful of wretched starvelings and lunatics, whose doctrine consists solely in listening to the instincts of the brute within them. There are, next, the unwitting or dilettante anarchists. These latter are legion. They are to be found in the highest grades of society. They even compose the intellectual _élite_ of their time. Every philosopher, novelist, poet, dramatist, and artist is to-day a latent anarchist; and very often he boasts of it.”

Just how far this surprising situation is an heirloom of the four revolutions which France traversed during the last century, and just how far it is traceable to forces which have entered from without,—to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Darwin and Spencer, Leopardi and the pleiades of Russian and Scandinavian innovators,—it is not necessary to determine. The really significant thing is that the intellectual and social conditions which have produced Anatole France, Descaves, and Mirbeau in France have likewise produced Björnson, Brandès, and Strindberg in Scandinavia, Maxim Gorky in Russia, Hermann Heijermanns in the Netherlands, Gerhardt Hauptmann in Germany, Camille Lemonnier in Belgium, Gabriel d’Annunzio in Italy, and José Echegaray in the Biscayan Peninsula; and it is only by keeping well in mind the intensity and the scope of this world-movement of revolt that the dynamic value of French revolt can be properly estimated.