Paris and the Social Revolution Part 37

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'Idee Nouvelle_." This group (of whom Paul Adam, A. Hamon, Victor Barrucand, and Jean Carriere were the most prominent figures) organised a series of _soirees-conferences_, which were given at the _Hotel Continental_, during the winter of 1893-94, with great success.

[Ill.u.s.tration: XAVIER PRIVAS DELIVERING HIS LECTURE

_L'Idee Nouvelle_ (somewhat tamed by time, it is true) still exists.

The following announcement, which appeared in 1900 in the anarchist journal _Les Temps Nouveaux_, explains its more recent activities and aims:-

"L'ARGENT CONTRE L'HUMANITe"]

"_L'Idee Nouvelle_ informs the public that hereafter it adds to its t.i.tle _La Renovation Sociale par le Travail_, and announces that the first _conference_ of the year will be given at the _Hotel des Societes Savantes_, Sunday, November 18, at three o'clock, by the poet and _chansonnier_ Xavier Privas.[117] Subject, '_L'Argent contre l'Humanite_.' 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'Idee Nouvelle_, composed of men of letters, among whom were Paul Adam, Jules Cazes, Lucien Descaves, Louis de Grammont, Georges Lecomte, and Leopold Lacour, the artists Eugene Carriere, Jules Dalou, and Steinlen, and the geographer Elisee 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 Renovation Sociale par le Travail_ quickly rallied to its support many of those of the intellectual _elite_ 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 n.o.ble 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 apt.i.tude,-the members of the committee for _La Renovation 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 fete, 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 emanc.i.p.ation."

The _Noel Humaine_ (Human Christmas) is celebrated annually by another group of emanc.i.p.ated men of letters, under the auspices of Victor Charbonnel's journal, _La Raison_.

The revolutionary fervour of a considerable portion of the intellectual _elite_ 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 Pleade 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_," "_beaute sociale_," "_vie feconde et humanite forte_," "_devoiler les intrigues_, _combattre les abus_,"

"_tribune ouverte_," "_idees hardies et genereuses_," "_l'ame purement desinteressee des futurs Etats-Unis d'Europe_," "_l'art existe pour la vie_," "_la cite radieuse ou l'humanite 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 _soirees litteraires_ 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 _elite_ 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'Epidemie_, and _L'Acquitte_, 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 inst.i.tution 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 role), 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 ma.s.sacre and a procession of coffins.

_L'Epidemie_ (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 munic.i.p.al council a.s.sembles 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 p.r.o.nounces a panegyric of the bourgeois victim.

_L'Acquitte_, 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 Menages_ (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, ent.i.tled _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 apostles.h.i.+p. "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 dest.i.tute 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 censors.h.i.+p[119] very early in its career. Descaves, who dedicated his work "_Aux desesperes pour qu'ils choisissent_," foresaw and publicly predicted its interdiction. "Let me try," he said, "to put on the stage, instead of adulteries and embarra.s.sing _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 censors.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sion and the admirable soul of Descaves, to dare to ring out in dramatic dialogue this conclusion, _On n'ameliore pas la societe, 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 Manes des Bourgeois de Calais nous sacrifions ce specimen de leur pitoyable descendance_"), and with Maurice Donnay of _La Clairiere_ and _Oiseaux de Pa.s.sage_. _La Clairiere_, which was one of the notable features of the theatrical season of 1898-99, pictures the life of an anarchist _phalanstere_, 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 const.i.tute 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 Pa.s.sage_ 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 _revolte_, 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 a.n.a.lyses of which explode merrily with the welcome noise of popping champagne corks."

In _Amants_, _La Douloureuse_, _La Bascule_, _Le Retour de Jerusalem_, 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 denouement; but its general method and att.i.tude do not differ essentially from the method and att.i.tude 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 Lemaitre.

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 a.n.a.lyses, he who, without ceasing, unravels the meshes of this complicated network of ideas which const.i.tutes 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 Fete_,[120] a one-act piece by Louis Marsolleau. A financier, a politician, a bishop, a general, a judge, a d.u.c.h.ess, 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, impa.s.sive 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 Andre 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 censors.h.i.+p).

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

_La Paque 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 Detour_ 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 Pet.i.ts Pieds_ by Henry de Saussine, which employs a similar device to ridicule French education.

_Le Ressort: Etude de Revolution_, mystic and ominous, by Urbain Gohier; _Barbapoux_, savagely anti-clerical, by Charles Malato; _En Detresse_, with a conclusion akin to that of Descaves' _Cage_, by Henri Fevre; _L'Ami de l'Ordre_, by Georges Darien; _La Greve_, by Jean Hugues; _Conte de Noel_ 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 Herold, Pierre Valdagne, and Georges Lecomte.

These performances have been supplemented by revivals of De Maupa.s.sant's _Boule de Suif_, which portrays the sacrifice made by a prost.i.tute for the bourgeois and her ostracism by them when they have no further need of her a.s.sistance; 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 Revolte_ of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam; and by the importation of the princ.i.p.al works of the Russian, Belgian, Scandinavian, German, Italian, and Spanish innovators.

Alfred Capus, the princ.i.p.al 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_, _Annees d'Aventures_, _Les Pet.i.tes 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 circ.u.mstance 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 Courteline, 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'Idee Nouvelle_. Jules Renard is the bitterest of social philosophers, under the thin disguise of a charming, impeccable style.

Courteline, whose comic genius is so strong, so pure, and so fine that he is called, without too gross exaggeration, "_le pet.i.t-fils de Moliere_"; Courteline, who will be read and played, in the opinion of many, long after every other contemporary French dramatist has been forgotten; Courteline, 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 Courteline, 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.

Eugene Brieux is the most prolific producer of the "_piece a these 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 Resultat 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 Avaries_,[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 _Menages d'Artistes_, the rights of the poor against the rich in _Les Remplacantes_, and the rights of the _fille-mere_ in _Maternite_.