Pour ma maison
For My House
Charles Péguy
In January 1898 my friend the eminent historian Pierre Deloire published in the Revue Socialiste, under the usual heading of literature and philosophy, an article which I ask his permission to reproduce in its entirety:
M. Henry Bérenger has opened in the Revue Bleue a very interesting inquiry into the responsibilities of the contemporary Press. Among the responses he has received, that of M. Lucien Marc, director of the Illustration, is to be cited first, because it poses, in fact, the question, in detail.
Let us consider the press from the industrial point of view. Its raw material is white paper, which it transforms into printed sheets. Often the costs of transformation exceed the selling price of the manufactured product, and the profit comes only from the by-products, as happens in many industries. In journalism, the by-product is advertising.
Contrary to common opinion, it is not the cheap newspapers that most need advertisements to balance their budget. The Petit Journal, the Petit Parisien — penny papers — make a profit on their paper. On the other hand, here is the operating account of the Figaro for the financial year 1896:
Subscriptions and single-copy sales: 1,216,612.13 — Advertisements and promotions: 3,326,856.43 — Miscellaneous receipts: — — Total receipts: 4,543,468.56
Production of the newspaper (editorial, paper, printing, postage, etc.): 3,662,611.97 — General expenses: 238,212.59 — Total expenditure: 3,900,824.56
Profit: 642,644.00
The Figaro, a three-penny paper, does not even realise, through sales and subscriptions, enough to cover production costs. The surplus, and the entirety of the profit, comes from advertising.
We are obliged to observe that here M. Lucien Marc’s reasoning is not sound; for if a given newspaper loses on its paper, if it sells its paper at a loss, it is obviously because it sells this paper at too low a price; it matters little that this price is higher than the price of other newspapers. The evil comes, therefore, in large part — as the socialists have pointed out — from the fact that the press, too, is subject to the regime of bourgeois competition: “The mercantile way of looking at things,” replied M. Georges Renard, “was bound to triumph, there as elsewhere, in a society where everything is bought and sold, where everything, from the arm to the brain of man, has become merchandise.”
The evil comes, in large part also — and the Union for Moral Action has pointed this out more vigorously than most of the others consulted — from the fact that the public conscience is corrupted because many individual consciences are corrupted ^(1): “The source of the evil lies further away than the hand of the State can reach; it lies in consciences. Let us hope that these will recover themselves and that the remedy will come from the very excess of the evil… In the world of the workers, one sees dawning toward the newspaper a disdain and even a contempt that augurs well. Recently, the worker members of the advisory commission of the Bourse du Travail had the reading room for daily newspapers closed, because the readers derived from it more disturbance than profit. In England, it is the seriousness of the working population that has most contributed to moralising the press. In France, too, people will end by understanding that it is better to be a worker than a talker; and the real education that everyone desires will have the effect of making people scorn any newspaper, unless it be a positive newspaper, a newspaper that incites to true action.”
We believe that it falls to us, the socialists, to found such a newspaper. M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu contends that “socialism, on the lookout for causes of destruction, rejoices, with a cynical logic, in this corruption which saddens and outrages us, congratulating itself on everything that destroys the cohesion of French society, applauding everything that enervates souls, breaks energies, and prepares the approaching dissolution of the fatherland.” To these ignorant or mendacious words, let us oppose the reality of socialist intentions:
M. Georges Renard proposes, among other things, the following remedy: “1° To found newspapers that would no longer be in the hands of a financier or of anonymous shareholders, but which, sustained by the regular contributions of a party or a group of men who know each other and profess the same opinions, would be the property and the expression of that party or that group. To banish from them carefully all business, all advertising, all paid articles ^(3). It would not be impossible that these honest newspapers, if they were well edited, might succeed, might win authority, and might by their authority react upon the others.”
We know indeed that the socialist city will not be built without materials, and that it is we who must, from this moment, prepare its citizens. To that end, here is how we imagine a socialist newspaper would be, in bourgeois society.
This newspaper would deal with the unconvertible bourgeois exactly according to the rules of bourgeois morality. It would deal with socialists and with the convertible bourgeois according to the teachings of socialist morality ^(2). For example, it would be sold to the unconvertible bourgeois exactly like a bourgeois newspaper; and it would be given to socialists and to the convertible bourgeois, for a newspaper is a means of instruction, and instruction must be given.
This newspaper would be nourished by the socialists; they would take from their salary, socialist or bourgeois, to ensure the socialist salary of the socialists who would work at the newspaper.
All the workers who would work at the newspaper — intellectual workers and manual workers, writer-workers and compositor-workers, director-workers and foreman-workers — would receive a socialist salary, that is to say, an equal salary among them, since they would all work to the best of their ability for the good of the newspaper.
This newspaper would be exactly socialist in its text: one would see in it no commercial advertising.
This newspaper would be unified: one would not see in it, in the same issue, on the front page an accurate article against horse-racing and on the fourth page the complete results and tips for the same races; one would not see on the front page accurate articles against the theatres of vice and on the fourth page, faithfully inserted, the announcements of those same theatres.
This newspaper would not be edited by professional journalists, but by the men of each trade; the harvesters would speak in it of wheat, the masons of building; the professors would speak in it of teaching and the philosophers of philosophy; one would not be a journalist — one would be, as the saying went, an honnête homme who had a trade and who, when needed, would write about that trade in the newspaper.
This newspaper would be exactly sincere; it would never embellish the facts; it would never embellish even the hopes.
Finally and above all, this newspaper would be a family newspaper, addressing itself first to women and children, without whom all work is vain; and it would maintain toward all its readers the very greatest reverence, for it is owed also to the grown-up children.
When Pierre Deloire wrote this article, one may say that the Dreyfus Affair was becoming serious. The article appeared on the 15th. Two days before, on the 13th, after a court martial had acquitted Esterhazy, Zola sent his letter to the President of the Republic:
“And it is a crime, furthermore, to have relied on the vile press, to have allowed oneself to be defended by all the riff-raff of Paris, so that this riff-raff now triumphs insolently in the defeat of right and of simple probity. It is a crime to have accused of disturbing France those who would have her generous, at the head of free and just nations, when one is oneself hatching the impudent plot of imposing Error before the entire world. It is a crime to lead opinion astray, to employ for a work of death this opinion that has been perverted to the point of delirium. It is a crime to poison the lowly and the humble, to exasperate the passions of reaction and intolerance by sheltering behind the odious anti-Semitism of which the great liberal France will die, if she is not cured of it.”
Everyone then discovered to what formidable danger the vile press was exposing, in France, justice, truth, humanity, and social health. And yet Pierre Deloire’s article was not an article of the moment. Nor was it the airing of an individual dream. Nor the manifestation of a collective dream. It was the deliberate exposition of a plan of action. Since the first of May 1897, a few young men had been pooling all they could in order to found a proper newspaper, later, when they had become men. I was among them. They had come to socialism sincerely and through a profound inner revolution. I shall give, when I have the time, the history of this revolution. Or rather I shall give the long histories of all these revolutions, for every free man has his own social revolution, and these very young men were already free. Then, when I have the time, I shall give the long history of all the apprenticeships that followed all the revolutions, for I know that long histories are the only ones that are more or less true. And today I would not give the brief history of the common apprenticeship. But I am obliged to speak on behalf of my house.
At the hour when my story begins, these young men had come, then, sincerely and profoundly to socialism. They did not quite know what socialism was. They did not think it was an estate to be divided among several large proprietors. They imagined that socialism was the whole of what prepares the social revolution, and they thought that this social revolution tended to bring about the happiness of humanity. The same historian Pierre Deloire, somewhat neglecting his professional work, had drawn up — not a catechism or a manual, for no one at the time would have dared speak of a socialist catechism or manual — but a convenient summary. He published this summary in the same Revue Socialiste, on the 15th of August 1897. However imperfect this summary may now appear to me, I ought to reproduce it in its entirety:
In the socialist city, the social goods will be well administered. The socialists wish to replace, as far as possible, the government of men in society with the social administration of things, of goods: Indeed, men being infinitely varied — which is, moreover, a good thing — one cannot organise the government of men according to an exact scientific method; whereas, goods not being infinitely varied, one can organise the administration of goods according to an exact scientific method. Now the greater part of the difficulties and sufferings that appear to stem from the bad government of men stem from the bad administration of goods.
In order to organise well the administration of goods, the socialists wish to socialise social labour, that is to say, the whole of the labour that is necessary for the city to go on living. To this end, they wish to socialise the material that is necessary for social labour, that is to say, the social means of production: the land insofar as it can serve for social cultivation; the subsoil, mines and quarries; the industrial equipment — machines, workshops, warehouses; the commercial equipment — warehouses, routes and means of communication. The means of production will be socialised, that is to say, they will be restored to the city, to the body of citizens.
Social labour will be socialised, that is to say, it will be performed by the body of citizens. The individual shares of social labour — that is to say, the shares of social labour that will be given to the city by each citizen — will be, not identical to one another, to be sure, for that could not be, but as far as possible equal to one another, in the sense that the differences they will still have will be dictated only by the different needs of the city and by the different individual aptitudes of the citizens as workers, and in the sense that these unavoidable differences of quality, intensity, and duration will be, as far as possible, compensated by other differences of quality, intensity, and duration, so that the individual shares of social labour will be, as far as possible, equal in quantity.
In exchange, the city will assure to its citizens a truly human education, and exact assistance in case of illness or infirmity, and finally full assistance during old age. Education will be equal for all children — not, it goes without saying, in the sense that individual educations would be identical to one another, but in the sense that the differences between individual educations will be dictated only by the different resources of the city and by the different individual aptitudes of the citizens as pupils. The means of consumption will be left at the free disposal of the citizens in quantities as far as possible equal to one another.
The advantages of this regime are to be considered with regard to the city and with regard to the citizens. With regard to the city, this regime will economise human labour, the waste of which is immoral. This economy will be realised by several causes, of which the following three:
Competition will be abolished. Now it is bad. It seems at first sight that it has good effects in the present society, but these good effects are merely the beginnings of repairs to the evils it has begun by causing itself. We do not always recognise how bad it is, because our education, bad too, has trained us to work from a feeling of vain emulation — bad, foreign to the work itself and to the proper end of work. Competition is bad in its principle: it is bad that men should work against one another; men must work with one another; they must work at doing their work as well as they can, and not at using their work to vanquish other workers. Competition is the cause that workers are not paid according to what they have done, which would be just in the narrow sense of the word, nor paid a normal payment, which would be just in the broad or harmonious sense, but chiefly according to what their competitors have not done. Competition often reaches the excess that, when one of the competitors has recognised that he cannot work better than his competitors, he tries to make them work worse, so as to be sure of vanquishing them regardless — hence fraudulent manœuvres. Competition is often distorted by advertising, which tends to give the advantage to the better-known work over the better-made work, and by adulteration, which tends to give the advantage to the better-looking work over the better-made work. Finally, international competition is the cause of war, of the armed peace, of the evils that follow, just as competition between individuals is the cause of lawsuits, of veritable private wars, of most public and private hatreds, and of the evils that follow.
Idleness will be abolished. To calculate the economy of social labour thus realised, one must not merely compare, in the present society, the number of the idle with the total number of citizens; one must add to the number of the idle the number of all the citizens who in the present society work to provide for the individual luxury of the idle.
Production will be centralised as far as is possible; now, if centralisation is bad for the inner life of men and for the higher work of humanity — above all for art and for philosophy — it is good for social production, because it allows citizens to do the social work of production better and more quickly, and, precisely by that means, to be better and sooner free for their inner life and for the higher work of humanity. The socialist city will organise intensive cultivation, intensive industry; it will centralise commerce, so as to draw from the material that is offered to human activity the most of the best means of consumption.
With regard to the citizens, the socialist regime will have at least two advantages over the present society:
It will establish between and for all citizens a real and living fraternity, a real and living solidarity; a real and living justice, a real and living equality; a real liberty — in place of a fictitious fraternity; a fictitious justice; a fictitious liberty.
It will cushion, as far as possible, the individual shocks. In the present society, individual misfortunes are allowed to fall with their full weight upon those citizens who happen to be in their path, and who are often crushed by them. And since there are, despite everything, in fact, indefinite individual solidarities, these misfortunes have indefinite, incalculable repercussions. So that even progress itself is, when all is reckoned, costly. For example, when a machine is invented that does away with half the labour in a trade, the consumers in general derive a certain benefit because prices fall, but half the producers are laid off, and these individual misfortunes most often have such extensive and far-reaching repercussions that the sum of the evil thus caused to citizens is worse than the benefit given to consumers is advantageous. In the socialist city, on the contrary, when such inventions are made for a trade, it will suffice to reduce without shock the number of workers concerned, either by training fewer apprentices for that trade or by giving certain workers the time to learn a new trade; meanwhile, until the measures taken have their full effect, one will simply reduce the number of hours that the workers of that trade work, which will be a misfortune to no one in the city.
Thus constituted, the socialist city will be perfect insofar as it is socialist. Insofar as it is a human city, it may still be imperfect. But it will be the least imperfect possible of possible human cities, in the sense that all the difficulties, all the sufferings, will at worst be equal to what they must be in any individualist society. Take for example the difficulties that pertain to the choice of trade and to laziness:
How will you be able, we shall be asked, to ensure in the socialist city the service of the most arduous trades, or the most boring — in a word, the sacrificed trades?
Let us first observe that as mechanisation continues to grow, trades will come more and more to resemble one another, and there will be fewer and fewer sacrificed trades. Let us observe next that in the socialist city, one will always be able to compensate by advantages of duration for whatever the sacrificed trades may still have of the arduous or the boring. And finally, if despite this compensation the voluntary workers were to desert certain trades, it will suffice, to ensure the service of these trades, to make them a commanded service — obligatory, universal, and personal. — But, it will be said, that is constraint! — No doubt that is constraint, but it is a just and official constraint. Whereas in the present society there rages a universal constraint, all the more formidable for being at once unjust and underhand: unjust in that it is not exercised equally upon all citizens; underhand, for no one wishes to admit that certain citizens are constrained to do certain trades, but everyone is perfectly content that the general misery should be such that there are citizens who fall so low that to climb back up to those trades seems to them a stroke of good fortune. And it is upon this that the whole of the present society rests. For want of being willing to make of certain trades, certain social functions, certain services, commanded services, one squanders human suffering: instead of bringing workers down, if need be, from the middling trades to the sacrificed trades, one lets them fall — without wishing to appear to notice — much lower, low enough for them still to be very lucky, as the saying goes, to climb back up to those very trades.
And what will you do, we shall be asked, with the lazy?
Let us first observe that there will be far fewer lazy people when all citizens have received a normal education. Let us observe next that there will be far fewer lazy people in a city where most trades will be constantly open to all, because there will be far fewer false vocations, because there will be no forced vocations, because lives badly embarked upon will not be so without the possibility of return. Finally, if in a city where three or four hours at most of easy work will suffice to ensure the daily life — if, in such a city, there are still found lazy people who refuse every kind of work, these sick people will not die of hunger in a city that will be so rich in means of consumption, but they will be reduced to the strict necessary. — They will therefore, it will be said, be maintained at the city’s expense? — No doubt, but what does the present society do, if not maintain them too, and very dearly, in its asylums, its hospitals, its prisons, its penal colonies, or in its most sumptuous hotels — parasites who beg or parasites of luxury, or else the workers of the worst trades?
By this method of exact analysis and comparison, one will always see that it is precisely the supposed worst cases of the socialist city that are the usual, real rule of the present society.
Thus provisionally informed about what the coming socialist city would be, these young men did not hesitate. There was nothing left but to prepare the birth of this city; there was nothing but to prepare, and then to make, the social revolution.
To prepare the social revolution, one would not call upon the elders; one would not go and seek out the men of thirty to eighty, who were in immense majority contaminated with the bourgeois vice; but one would appeal only to young men. And that would suffice. If one carefully converts the rising generations to socialism, if one honestly wins over the young men, the new men, as they pass their fifteenth, their eighteenth, or their twentieth year — after eight years of practice, one is regularly an imposing minority; after twenty years, a respectable majority; after forty years, without risk and without bad violence, one has become humanity itself — humanity at last saved from the bourgeois evil, from all evil, and established as a harmonious city. So arithmetic wills it.
Now it is simple to convert the rising generations. One has only, so to speak, to divert them from bourgeois contamination. The excellence of socialism is such that socialism commends itself. It has an autonomous, automatic, and prior self-evidence. It needs no advocate. It asks only for a demonstrator. It suffices that one make it visible. If an exactly and morally socialist newspaper were to appear, the simple demonstration, the simple proposition of socialism would introduce the rising generations to socialism. There was nothing left but to make a socialist newspaper, the socialist newspaper. This would be easy. For these young men were more or less entirely ignorant of the personnel already rampant under the name of socialist. They had indeed been subjected to the deplorable methods of rearing that we see practised around us everywhere — upon all the weak by all the strong, upon the simple by the clever, upon the ignorant by the learned, upon children, upon soldiers, upon workers, upon voters, upon the people of animals with inarticulate speech, upon the people of men. They were lied to for their own good. This is the method practised upon most adolescent souls by most adult souls. This method has everything in its favour. Suited to laziness and convenient for the management of feelings, it remains the most formidable form of the universal lie. Our masters, then, gave us a happy image of the French socialist world, a blissful image of the universal socialist world, an image at least rigorously severe of the bourgeois world. In France, the old socialist parties, the old schools and the old sects were eliminating themselves by the natural demands of old age. It was not even necessary to have oneself taught their names. Guesde and Vaillant were already disappearing, and the incompatible Allemane with them, into the advantageous distance of history. The rising generations would at last be fresh from old insults, clean of old filth. There was nothing left but to make the socialist newspaper for the rising generations.
Moreover, these young citizens had, of their own, in themselves and coming from themselves, a few simple ideas. Ideas they had not asked of their masters, but which those good masters willingly encouraged, for they were at bottom decent people, and they did not know that simple ideas were so formidable. At times I even wonder whether these masters had not ended by accepting as true the image of the world and the information they were kind enough to communicate to their pupils and friends. For no doubt they subjected themselves to the same methods of rearing that they imposed on those below them. This simple and hardy idea was that we must begin by living as socialists, that we must begin the revolution of the world with the revolution of ourselves, that all the theories and all the phrases are not worth one socialist act, that each person must begin by socialising his own life, that conversion to socialism presupposes an unreserved gift of interests under the full maintenance of rights, an unreserved abandonment of sentiments under the full independence and liberty of reason.
It is for this reason that not only did we draw up, after so many others, the plan for a socialist newspaper, but — if one is willing to look closely — the plan for a socialistically socialist newspaper. Formed almost instantaneously, so clearly was it indicated, this plan was repeated from man to man until Pierre Deloire set it down in writing. I shall not develop it. Everyone knows it, having more or less already drawn it up themselves. In France more than elsewhere, it is the plan that is least lacking.
To realise it, a personnel and a capital were needed — a personnel that would furnish the capital. Five hundred persons and five hundred thousand francs would suffice, especially as the five hundred persons would be effective collaborators, especially as the five hundred thousand francs would be refreshed by regularly flowing subscriptions. And ten years would suffice for the preparation. The five hundred persons could be found in a few years, from one to the next, from friend to friend, by that personal propagation which alone is fruitful. The new adherents sought still newer ones. One was always winning people over. Each person answered for those he had won, introduced. This was the well-known method of indefinite ramification. It would be invincible as a vegetation if men were vegetables. But they are at least animals. It is in the history of Blanqui. It is everywhere else. In this regard, my function was to administer the central communication to be established among the first adherents. I provided the communication. I exercised no authority. I had nothing of command. I was the citizen telephonist. It was moreover understood that they would do without me as much as they could, that the activity of the company would be spontaneous, that there would be no central congestion and cooling at the extremities, but that everything would run by itself.
Assuming that five hundred persons subscribe ten francs each per month on average, one channels a monthly affluent of five thousand francs. Sixty thousand francs per year. Even allowing generously for the inevitable wastage, one amasses the five hundred thousand francs before the ten years are up, compound interest. In this regard I was the accountant. At the end of ten years the newspaper would launch. The affluent of monthly subscriptions would continue, inexhaustible. And when the public had in its hands, for the first time in its life, an honest newspaper, a well-made newspaper, it would give us such a welcome that the newspaper would be uproutable.
I administered the accounts. I fashioned registers — simple school exercise-books. I kept a mysterious accounting. At once scrupulous and mysterious. The movements of funds were marked by amount, by date, and by initials only. In the event that the police had stuck their nose in, they would have learned from it only numbers and the alphabet. These precautions have become amusing. They were serious. M. Méline and M. Dupuy — not M. Waldeck-Rousseau — were then betraying the Republic.
This institution of youth did not prosper. I would give pleasure to many persons if I attributed to human weakness the withering of this institution. But I perceive causes, which I distinguish as internal and external.
I do not quite know whether I had been the initiator of this institution, for it had been born more or less spontaneously. The first growth was rapid. My friends from Orléans, my new friends from Lakanal and from Sainte-Barbe welcomed the common idea and subscribed. They have not ceased since to subscribe their monthly sum, without weariness.
The second growth was fairly rapid. I was at the École Normale. It was a favourable place, despite apparent resistances. A company of young men — interned students — all ready-made, lent itself to an attentive propaganda and to the formation of a company of action. The common institution swelled with numerous and for the most part considerable normaliens.
The third growth, which would have overflowed the old friendships and the new comradeships, for all practical purposes did not occur. Public events were against us. Our short finances were draining elsewhere, into strikes and subscriptions; they were not flowing into the common fund. The great French public kept its money for the mountebanks. The socialist public exhausted itself elsewhere. The socialist personnel was then becoming what it has become. The additions of the second growth were beginning, for the most part, to grow weary. They had almost all misunderstood the institution. What was becoming seemingly impracticable was the simple communication of the original intention. And people would not give money for ten years hence.
The remedy came. To give the common institution the base surface it lacked, a committee was needed. Alone, I did not present a sufficient guarantee. But a committee would guarantee the institution to distant persons. This committee would perform the transfer of confidence, the mutation of confidence, the indispensable transmission of confidence. This committee would have in me that entire confidence which is founded upon personal knowledge and friendship. Moreover, this committee would have sufficient breadth and weight to guarantee me to distant persons.
The fourth growth, which would have formed around the committee, for all practical purposes did not occur. The spirit of the public and events resisted us. An inner weariness followed. And disintegration came.
The Dreyfus Affair caused us incredible damage. During the whole time it lasted, neglecting not only our affairs and our interests but our very rights and the action that was particular to us, all the time, all the care, all the work, all the efforts, all the action were in the service of an individual vindication.
At the beginning of the Affair, in the last months of the year 1897, a private event placed at my disposal, for the first and for the last time in my life, a rather considerable sum. These forty-odd thousand francs were not mine but my family’s. My new family was in agreement with me that I ought to launch into socialist action these forty thousand francs. My family thought with me that a socialist cannot keep an individual capital. It was then that I committed an unpardonable error, the repercussions of which will no doubt weigh long upon my life. I sinned by humility. I distrusted myself. Humility is no less culpable and no less dangerous than pride, and no less contrary to exact modesty. I neglected to found these cahiers de la quinzaine then and there. If I had at once founded these very cahiers, with more than forty thousand francs intact behind me, and if these cahiers had published during the thirty months of the Affair the equivalent of what they have published since, I am certain that they would now have a solid reserve fund and a solid body of subscribers.
But I distrusted myself. A little overawed by the formidable appearance of science that most sociologists know how to distribute around them, I seemed to myself even more ignorant than I am. And above all I feared that I would become authoritarian. People had already so often called authority the care I have always taken to guard my liberty against the nearest authorities, and a certain indiscreet zeal from which I have been unable to free myself in propaganda — I had been so often told that I was an authoritarian, that I was becoming an authoritarian, that I had almost ended by believing it. Now I hated authority firmly. As I came to know the socialist personnel a little, the abuses of individual authority became apparent to me. I was determined to do nothing that resembled Guesdism. I did not know that anonymous collective authority is still more formidable than individual authority.
On the first of January 1898 I was therefore entirely invaded by these imaginings, and on the following first of May, instead of founding these cahiers, I founded a bookshop. I devoted all my care to publishing the copy of my comrades, not imagining that I should become a supplier of copy myself. My friend Georges Bellais was kind enough to lend me his name, for I was still a scholarship student at the Sorbonne, and I loved anonymity. It is known that this bookshop did not prosper greatly. I would give pleasure to many persons if I attributed to my temerity or my stupidity, my negligence, my ineptitude, so notorious a failure. But I distinguish causes. The principal one is still the Dreyfus Affair.
It was the passion of the world when the bookshop was able to begin to function, to work. It did considerable harm to commerce — to Parisian commerce. In particular it was harmful to the book trade, because people kept all their time and all their money for reading the multiplied newspapers. It was singularly harmful to the Bellais bookshop, which declared itself Dreyfusard, which was rapidly marked, before which the anti-Semites demonstrated, where the Dreyfusards fomented their demonstrations. The time and strength employed in demonstrating for Dreyfus was stolen from the work of the bookshop. The fatigue accumulated in Dreyfusard action fell back upon the bookshop. The only Dreyfusard edition the house produced was a financial burden to us. Thus an affair which no doubt enriched in finance or clientele or authority the newspapers and the Stock bookshop impoverished the Bellais bookshop.
I distinguish causes. The secondary ones are numerous. The manager did not manage with the necessary intensity. It is probable that if my friend André Bourgeois had then been available, and if he had done for the bookshop work equivalent to what he has just done for the cahiers, events would have turned toward a happy success. — All the editions the house produced were costly, either because the book sold little or because the selling price, to encourage propaganda, was scandalously lowered. Even when the work was published partly by subscription, the calculation of costs did not include the general expenses of the house. — I put all my last finances, all my last work into the book by Jaurès, L’Action socialiste. I thought that this book would be a marvellous instrument of morally socialist propaganda. There are pages in it that are truly imperishable and definitive. The book did not sell. Incredible event: people were ashamed of it. At the beginning of the two paths that form this first series, at the threshold of the two avenues, the opening pages are not of an exactly fixed socialism. Nothing could be more historical, more natural, more proper, more inevitable — and I shall say more indispensable — since it is precisely a matter here of the explication of a socialism that is at first implicit, since it is here a matter of a socialism in movement, in action. As if propaganda did not consist precisely in placing oneself at the beginning of the paths in order to travel with the reader or the listener to their end. As if conversion were not a movement, a journey in the mind. But the concern for fixed orthodoxy, for orthodoxy at rest, which has invaded the whole of French socialism, was already conspiring to stifle this book. Jaurès, out of humility or embarrassment, has never, at least to my knowledge, said or written a word about it. The Petite République never gave it serious publicity. It fell back with its full weight upon the publisher’s back.
I distinguish causes that are, so to speak, foundational. The first year of an enterprise is always costly. Whatever I may have been told, it is a heavy occupation to find premises and to live with wet plaster.
I distinguish causes that at a distance still give me great pleasure. I took in as publisher the Mouvement Socialiste at its birth and procured it as many subscribers as I could. I took in the initiator of the Journaux pour Tous and procured for him, as far as I could, the means of his success.
The disintegration of the community came about not by scattering but by separation. A group was gradually forming within it around M. Lucien Herr. I permit myself to cite this name because the Cri de Paris cited it before me, because this signature was formerly printed in the Volonté, because this name appears in the Notes Critiques, because the Société Nouvelle de Librairie et d’Édition announces from M. Herr a volume, La Révolution sociale.
I shall not conceal the great and often profound impression M. Herr made on me when at last I came to know him at the École. His perfect disinterestedness, his enormous capacity for work, his great anonymous labour, his no doubt universal and total erudition, and above all his brutal sincerity gave me for him a deep and faithful attachment. I was in a sense truly his pupil. He taught me sometimes how one works and often how one acts. He furnished me with much sincerely accurate information about a whole world of which I was ignorant — a literary, scientific, political world. Above all, he unravelled for me the insincerities and conventions in which I would have entangled myself. He put me abreast of the Dreyfus Affair, gave me the indications without which one could not follow it intelligently.
This fidelity lasted until the end of the Affair. As it was ending, it seemed to me that it had unfortunately modified the mentality of several of our comrades. It had given several of them a certain taste for power, for authority, for command. Such is the danger of these crises. For several months, the smallest professeur de collège or the worst-paid répétiteur, so feeble in ordinary times against the feeblest ordinary local tyrannies, had weighed heavily upon the general destinies of the country. By the sole fact of giving his feeble and poor name to the list that was circulating — petition to the public powers, subscription, address — the poor university man of Coulommiers or of Sisteron pressed with a relatively heavy moral and material weight upon the destinies of France and of the world. For they were at a junction, and the opposing forces were in balance. All the more reason that the initiators of these lists exercised an extraordinary pressure. A name placed at the beginning of the first list had at once an immense surplus value. Now one has only to go back to the first Zola lists to read there the name of M. Herr and the names of most of his friends, of whom I was one.
As the Affair advanced, two tendencies, two mentalities became visible, then manifest, among the former Dreyfusards. Having commonly exercised a powerful action for the realisation of justice and for the public manifestation of truth, some continued to seek everywhere the realisation of justice and the manifestation of truth; but the greater number began to prefer the action, the power, the realisation itself, and the manifestation. The first — Picquart, Zola — continued as they could their true trades. Picquart is still an officer who asks to go before a court martial. Zola is still what he was — a novelist, and a free citizen. But the great majority could not renounce the singular temptation of exercising an enormous, intense, concentrated, condensed influence — an alcohol of influence, having a considerable effect in a small volume and for a small initial effort. Now the old political action was precisely a game devised for the sole purpose of satisfying these old ambitions. The old political action is a game of illusions, designed to make one believe that one can exercise a great deal of action without taking a great deal of trouble and care, that the useful effect is out of proportion with the energy expended, with the effort. The old political action is a game of feigned crises devised to make one believe that critical action is habitual, ordinary action. The Dreyfusards who let themselves be seduced by this illusion became partisans of the amnesty. All of them, and among them Jaurès, they fell back or they fell into the old political action. They have dragged French socialism down with them.
Having reached this point in my story, I perceive that I cannot continue it without entering into the general problems of present and recent socialist action. I do not forget, moreover, that I owe a faithful account to the citizens who were kind enough to entrust me with the mandate of representing them at the three congresses of Paris. This account will be rendered in the fifth cahier. The fourth cahier will be entirely by Lagardelle. We shall rest during the New Year holidays. We shall publish eight cahiers from January to Easter.
^(1) Reread in the Revue Socialiste of 15 July 1897 the excellent article by Charles Henry on the Union for Moral Action and Socialism. — Note by Pierre Deloire.
^(2) One will forgive this expression to the inadvertence of our friend.
^(3) That is to say: all mercantile articles, and not, it goes without saying, all remunerated articles.