Compte rendu de congrès

Congress Report

Charles Péguy

During the leisure of the holidays, — It is time, said Pierre Baudouin, that you give us the report you promised us.

— And indeed it is more than time, said my cousin bluntly.

— It is always time, said Pierre Deloire calmly.

Pierre Deloire appeared worried. — Yes, he said to my cousin, I have a friend who is wasting away. One sees him white of skin, hollow-eyed, dark circles under his eyes, sunken cheeks, emaciated, feverish, without appetite, bony and ill. He comes home at midnight, one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock in the morning. I am afraid that bandits will attack him on the way.

— Could it be, asked Pierre Baudouin, that he goes to say goodnight to his lady friend?

— You will tell us his story, said my cousin, as soon as — pointing at me with a shrug of his shoulder — he has finished his report.

— I do not know how to proceed. The first general congress of the French Socialist Organizations was held in Paris from the 3rd to the 8th of December 1899; the second general congress of the French Socialist Organizations was held in Paris from the 28th to the 30th of September 1900; the fifth international socialist congress was held in Paris from the 23rd to the 27th of September 1900. I have not yet returned from Lyon.

— A library, said Pierre Deloire, a monumental library of recent congresses is thus constituted:

I. — General Congress of the French Socialist Organizations, held in Paris from the 3rd to the 8th of December 1899, — official stenographic report, — published by the Societe nouvelle de librairie et d’edition, 17, rue Cujas, Paris.

I continued, as bookseller: one volume in-16 of VIII-502 pages, 3 francs.

Pierre Deloire:

II. — Second General Congress of the French Socialist Organizations, held in Paris from the 23rd to the 30th of September 1900, — official stenographic report, — published by the Societe nouvelle de librairie et d’edition, 17, rue Cujas, Paris.

I continued: one volume in-16 of IX-389 pages, 3 francs.

III. — First National and International Congress of Socialist Cooperation, held in Paris from the 7th to the 10th of July 1900, — official report, — published by the Societe nouvelle de librairie et d’edition, 17, rue Cujas, Paris.

— one volume in-16 of 214 pages, 2 francs 50.

But we leave this congress aside for today, at which I was not present.

IV. — We have of the fifth international socialist congress, held in Paris from the 23rd to the 27th of September 1900, two reports:

a) an official analytical report, — published by the Societe nouvelle de librairie et d’edition, 17, rue Cujas, Paris. — one volume in-16 of 121 pages, 1 franc 20.

b) an unofficial stenographic report, — one cahier of 216 pages, 3 francs.

V. — We have or shall have of the third general congress — should we continue to call it that? — of the French Socialist Organizations, held in Lyon from the 26th to the 28th of May 1901, two reports:

a) an unofficial analytical report prepared by Mademoiselle Louise Levi and published in the fourteenth cahier of the second series. — an ordinary cahier of 72 pages.

b) an official stenographic report announced by the Societe nouvelle de librairie et d’edition, 17, rue Cujas, Paris. — a very thick volume in-16, 3 francs 50. This volume has just appeared: it has 581 pages.

— It seems to me desirable, continued Pierre Deloire, that volunteer publishers should at least have the important socialist congresses stenographed. It seems to me indispensable that volunteer publishers should publish the reports of socialist congresses. If the socialist parties nationally and regionally constituted in France cannot subscribe the funds necessary for these editions, it is good that citizens of good will should substitute themselves for the parties. This sets a fine example and provides a salutary lesson. It matters that people should know that parties which profess to revolutionize the vast world cannot produce a volume at three fifty. Formerly the General Committee, when it was more or less general, and when it needed money to hold the congresses themselves, rent the hall and pay for the lighting, had Jaures, who was willing, give veritable theatrical performances. Well-to-do Jewish bourgeois, so I have been told, paid dearly for many seats. But the Committee is now barely half-general; Jaures would no longer be received to give performances in Paris, at least for some time; and most of the Jewish bourgeois have left to the poor Jews the task of continuing to pay for the liberation of Israel. We historians have a common gratitude toward the citizens of good will who do the work of the parties, toward the Societe nouvelle de librairie et d’edition which produces the official reports, toward the cahiers which produce the unofficial reports. For the former are useful to us, and the latter no less so. We need to have official reports revised by the speakers, as the reports of the Chamber and the Senate published in the Journal officiel de la Republique francaise are revised; we need to have official reports, revised, accepted by the committees and by the governments of the parties, just as we need to have notarized, juridical acts, constitutions, laws, decrees and orders, and contracts: we know there the expressions that the principals and that the contracting parties wish their civil, civic, and familial sentiments and wishes to have —

Here Pierre Deloire hesitated, because so long a sentence, and so ungainly, fell back on a monosyllabic verb. But he affected not to be stopped by the difficulties of the oration. He had pronounced that “have” in a lofty tone, with a strong accent, as though he meant to rest upon it numerous complements. When the complements failed him, he sought no balance except by repeating several times “have” — “have” — “have,” in a descending tone and a diminishing accent, like a lame man falling back in little jolts on the same crutch. This made my cousin laugh a great deal, for he was beginning to be seriously bored.

— We need, Pierre Deloire began again, we need to have official reports. We know there exactly what the speakers expressly wish to have said. A report is official when one communicates to the speakers the stenography of their speeches. The speakers read, reread, work over it according to whether they are more or less negligent, modify according to whether they are more or less honest. We thus have the fixed expression of the idea or the sentiment they wished to have had, an expression at rest, stable, signed, finally determined in the silence of the study, an expression that has the force of an act, an expression framed, bookish, notarized, noted, notable, notarial, bibliothetical, necropolitan, actuarial, certifiable, parliamentary, protocolary, juridical, archival, referential, documentary, monumental, and as they say of Monsieur de Malbrout: dead and buried. According to this report Monsieur Emile Vandervelde speaks in prose:

“Leave the house. It is ours! We are worthy to enter it.” (Prolonged ovations.)

Less solemn, but true, provided that it is true, the unofficial report, not submitted to the authors, to the speakers, to the government of the committees, gives us, as exactly as the stenographers are exact, as impartially as the analysis is impartial, that simple statement of the event, beside which nothing has value.

— All these volumes are for sale at the bookshop of the cahiers. I do not know how to give you this report. The subject matter is confused.

— Sort it out, said my cousin.

— I myself am confused, anxious, embarrassed.

— Sort it out.

— I myself have varied. I am in a state of variation. When I attended the first national congress, the Japy congress, I had of the men and events, of the gestures and the speeches, of the movements, a certain representation, a certain image which doubtless placed itself in my memory in the current of my duration, after the representations of preceding events, before the representations of following events. And so on, the representations or to speak precisely the presentations of the congresses placed themselves in turn in my memory among the representations of events in the current of my duration. And not only they, but between them all the representations of the intercalary events.

My cousin was laughing like a madman. — Never, he said, never has anyone babbled like this at the Salle des Fetes.

— At the Galerie des Machines? asked Pierre Deloire.

— No, the Salle des Fetes, in Orleans. And you say you know geography! That is where they give the reports on mandates.

— But the processional images of processional events which had placed themselves in my memory in the current of my duration did not remain inactive there, since they were not dead there. Living, they worked, acted, reacted upon one another, and therefore modified and altered one another. And incessantly the new images were swollen and for the most part formed from the preceding images. The image of the first congress remained at the heart of the second, and the image of the first and the image of the second, thus swollen with the image of the first, remained at the heart of the third. And incessantly, within each one, every new image was swollen by the preceding ones and continuing the movement was already preparing, so to speak, to swell the following ones. And not only they, but between them there lived, acted, and reacted, and mutually illuminated one another, the far from negligible images of the intercalary events. And in that case, how do you want me to give you a report if to the confusion of the subject matter and to my own weakness there is added this perpetual alteration of the matter by the organ for the purposes of life and for the purposes of action, if to the weakness of the workman there is added the perpetual alteration of the matter by the instrument, by the tool, and if this alteration is not abnormal and of illness, but if on the contrary it is so normal and healthy and so natural that it would be if it did not occur that I would be ill, that I would have some disease of the memory.

— It seems to me, Pierre Baudouin answered me, that your preliminary answers are not unrelated to the philosophy of Monsieur Bergson.

— I confess it, and you may be assured that whatever is good in what I tell you comes from him, and that whatever is bad, if there is anything bad, comes from me.

Pierre Baudouin. — I have seen nothing bad in it.

— I am afraid, said Pierre Deloire, that these are evasions.

Myself. — I have attentively read the rare books of this true philosopher and I assiduously attend his course at the College de France.

Pierre Baudouin. — You have always found me there.

Myself. — On Fridays at a quarter to five; and I am assured that it is the best-employed hour of my week.

— I am not a philosopher, answered Pierre Deloire, and I do not attend that course.

— You are wrong, said Pierre Baudouin somewhat sharply. You are not an honest man, in the sense we carefully preserve for that name, if you have not heard and if you do not hear the lessons, the course, and even the conversation of this true philosopher. I have by no means for him that respectfully hostile friendship with which most of our young agreg holders surround him. I am pained when a sociological candidate for the doctoral in letters feels the need to rather haughtily and rather curtly renounce a teaching that is the greatest beauty of the present time.

Because I maintain toward this rare philosopher the freedom of my critical faculty, I have allowed myself to accompany him scrupulously.

— In thought?

— In step and in thought.

— Not being a philosopher by trade, continued Pierre Deloire, I did not follow well all that you said. But it seems to me that it comes down to what my philosophy teacher used to teach, that in the strictest logical rigor, to remember two years and six months would also take two years and six months.

— That is it, and it is not only that. The discoveries and researches set forth in the Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness and in Matter and Memory cannot be reduced to secondary school courses. But your observation concerns these principal discoveries and researches.

— In any case I shall read those two books and listen to that course. I ask only to inform myself. I do not forget that the events of the inner life are the foremost of events. Heavy and rather ill-designed examinations have dispersed me in spite of myself among the often less interesting events of the outer world. But life is long, provided one wills it so. While I await the teaching I have lacked, am I incapable of listening to the report that Peguy owes us of these congresses? I have already, in my life, heard many lessons and several reports, ever since the time when my grandmother used to tell me stories of the days when she was young. And I have never noticed that the knowledge of this philosophy was wanting in order to listen well.

— When you do not have it, you do not know that it is wanting; but as you acquire it you know that it was wanting. The discoveries which have marked the stages of humanity have almost never been desired by contemporaries. It is we who now discover that they were wanting. And in general these discoveries have not consisted in superadding to the known world new supplements, but it was the known world that they penetrated, that they animated with a new spirit. Thus the admirable discoveries obtained by the attentive observation of memory illuminate with a new light — new for us, but more ancient than the preceding ones, since it is more faithful to the ancient reality — a known world, less known. Before these discoveries the little children of the schools learned by heart the fables of their fable books, but the grown-ups had little or poorly or had not noted how they learned. Before these discoveries, people engaged in action and in history and, to say it all, humanity lived. But people had little or poorly or less than we can now do noted how action is done and how history is made. By these discoveries we know with a better-advised gaze knowledge and action and the relation of knowledge to action. For me, it is a singularly grave discovery, that the alteration of images in memory is a simple function of health. For historians were tempted to consider as the best witnesses not those who were the best men, the men having the best memory, but on the contrary the men who had the most preserving memory, that is to say the least living, finally the men who were the most convenient, the most conveniently useful to historians. They loved those who served them. And they loved to believe that they were served perfectly. Documents, monuments, and testimonies seemed to them willingly unassailable, when they had satisfied certain rules, resisted certain tests, when the witnesses were impartial and when they agreed with one another. But now we recognize with full evidence that these very witnesses, impartial and concordant, their testimonies were not monuments of stone but living acts, living effects, living monuments, in the sense in which a man is the monument of his race, the living elements of a living consciousness, of a living memory. And dominating, but not annulling them, dominating the old rules of scientific methods, and commanding the old prudences, and subordinating them to itself, there appears to historians this capital law of modesty: that the initial testimony is made, that however honest a man the witness may be, and however upright one may wish him, his testimony is made. If we wished to go a little deeper, not only is his testimony made at the moment when he gives it to you, historians, but the witness makes the primary image to which he will testify when you cite him. Not only is the testimony made, but the model of the testimony, the origin, the fact is made. The witness has not made it all, but he has contributed to it, no doubt principally. He has with all his prior life prepared, surrounded, fomented the fact upon which you throw yourselves, you historians, as upon a piece of dry bread. Thus you are recalled to indispensable modesty. You are presented with the contrariety that exists for you. Do not deny it. It is fundamental and I am going to show it to you on this example.

You, Pierre Deloire, historian, seated calmly on a wooden chair, you ask Peguy, seated before us on a garden chair, for the report of the congresses at which he was present.

Who is Peguy? Did he present himself at the congresses as a reporter, a professional reporter, an automatic reporter? No, he came as a congressist, like everyone else. That is the whole point. If he had gone down to them as a supposedly impartial and cold reporter, as a reporting functionary, as a recording apparatus, indifferent, impassive, inactive, if in a word he had gone down as that historian without any city who has served so many times for Latin dissertations, it is you first of all, Mister Historian, who would not be here to listen to him. For you struggle in vain against this contrariety: when your witnesses are present in the universal labor, you profess to disqualify them as being partial; but when they are absent from the universal labor, when they do not work for their share as men, when they do not do the share they owe of the common work, when they desert, when they are mere onlookers, then you feel, you feel deeply, if you do not always say so, that within yourselves you disqualify them more than ever, because you know well that the worst of partialities is to refuse oneself, that the worst ignorance is not to act, that the worst lie is to evade. That is why I am going to make you leap.

— I do not leap, answered Pierre Deloire calmly, a little curtly.

— Yes, when I tell you that Michelet remains for me the first of historians, the best of historians, the greatest historian, because he entered most deeply into his history, and because he did not remain on the bank. Most of your historians watch their history flow by like fishermen with a rod. Thus your witnesses are never pure witnesses; and it would be precisely if they were pure witnesses that you would disqualify them. I repeat: if Peguy had attended the congresses as a pure witness, if he had attended them only as a witness, you would not have troubled to come today. But you know that he went there as the comrades did, with passions. And you came at once. But if he went there with passions, he is therefore going to give us today a passionate report. He must give us a passionate report. I even say that if he did not give us a passionate report, that is when he would be lying, and we could no longer believe him. I await your way out of that.

— Do not wait, answered Pierre Deloire in a firm and slightly displeased tone. Do not wait. — I ask only to inform myself. I will read what must be read. And I will listen to whomever I must hear. But already you seem to me wrong to be defiant. If I have somewhat understood the contrarieties you oppose to historians, Peguy could not give us the report of the socialist congresses —

a) because he was not a pure witness there but participated;

b) more deeply and no less generally, by that universal infirmity that images live. So that there would be two limits to the narration, to the report, to the testimony, a longitudinal limit, so to speak, and a latitudinal limit:

a) a limit that I call longitudinal if for example Peguy enumerated for us, stated for us, prolonged for us in linear series exactly all the representations, all the images of the congresses that he has received in his memory;

b) a limit that I call latitudinal if for example Peguy proposed to us, spread out for us in cross-section the bundle of images that the linearly recorded images have now become.

Pierre Baudouin was following in the air, like one who would gaze in the distance at an intersection of lines and telegraph poles, the speech of his friend. And one could see that he was profoundly happy that his friend was speaking thus. Pierre Deloire continued laboriously, venturing like a surveyor along poorly established paths:

If Peguy followed the series that I have called longitudinal, we would see unfolding in single file exactly all the images he has had of the congresses. Each would return to its place exactly as it was produced for the first time.

If Peguy on the contrary practiced what I have called the latitudinal cross-section, and which it is better to call the transversal cross-section, we would be placed as if above a cut tree trunk. We would have the map, the plan of the memory that Peguy has today of the congresses.

These two limits seem to me to differ in nature. If Peguy tends toward the transversal, toward the cross-section, he has only to bridge the inevitable gap between any realization, even an interior one, and its limit and in general its mathematical expression, and the second inevitable gap between the spoken expression and the corresponding reality. For this cross-section is the cross-section of a natural reality. Peguy has the real natural memory of the images he has received of the congresses. In the bundle of these images he can make a cross-section. And we would have the report of the images that Peguy has today of the congresses. We would not have the report of the congresses. We would not properly have the report of the congresses. But it is the report of the congresses that we want, that we want above all. By a singular curiosity, moral perversion of memory, beginning of mental perversion, need for rejuvenation, appetite for usurpation — over the lives we have not lived; desire and passion to live them at length as if they were ours; and more profoundly than all else, no doubt, a dull dread of nothingness, an aversion to death; by which not only do we love to go back up the past, but, to give ourselves the enjoyment of a sovereign freedom, sovereign in all, we also love to go back to a point in the past and thence let ourselves flow along in the descending current of the days; at bottom a dull need and a dull passion that we have to begin again the unbeginnable, to re-present the abolished. Do not doubt it, my friend, it is a singular passion, lying low in the deepest strata. It is at the bottom of the ground. And many houses will pass that will be above it. A passion that one feels in sudden bursts after one has passed thirty years, but which can strike much sooner. When I was a little boy and I grew passionate in an old Duruy for the military battles of France — I do not blush for it, I do not blush, I shall never blush for the little boy I was, that I was born, that the primary school made of me, and it is better to have passed from that sincere nationalism to true internationalism, it is better to have enlarged an honest initial nationalism into true internationalism, than to seek in a false internationalism a pretext for not exercising certain duties — when I was a little boy, how many times did I not begin again in my Duruy the battle of Agincourt and the battle of Crecy and the battle of Poitiers, and the battle of Waterloo. How many times since have I not begun again the war, as they called it, the only war no doubt for the people of my region, the war of seventy. How many times have I not begun again the defeats. I did not love the victories. I loved to begin again the defeats. How many times have I not begun again the defeats with that strange impression that each time I began them again they were not yet consummated, they were not yet. Do not doubt it, my friend, it is the same need for recovery that means that instead of asking Peguy for the transversal, it is the longitudinal that we shall ask of him together. For in the longitudinal, at the moment when the French socialist organizations, generally convened, gathered in the hall of the Japy gymnasium, boulevard Voltaire, it was not at all the first general congress of the French Socialist Organizations held in Paris from the 3rd to the 8th of December 1899: it was nothing less than the great Estates-General and the opening of the great revolution. So thought all the good fools. So Peguy saw it. And in the longitudinal we shall truly have the inauguration of the sovereign social revolution. But I greatly fear that in the transversal this first congress may have become merely the first of those parliamentary assemblies in which French socialism is certainly losing its way, in which we may fear that international socialism is losing its way. And historian that you are, I know you, what you ask for is not the transversal section of a present reality, but the artificial reconstitution of abolished realities. Historian that you are, you renounce the humble or the modest assurance of a certainty without thickness to give yourself the troubling enjoyment of a sounding in the thickness of an exhausted time, of an age gone by. I say an age and not a few months, for we have aged rapidly, bitter disappointments have made us rough, a hard apprenticeship has settled us, heavy sorrows have weighed us down, matured us, and we are today more distant from the recent first national congress forgotten behind us than we are distant from the neglected day of death ahead. Whatever work we may do, whatever action we may plow through in the thirty or fifty years we shall try to work, already now we are assured that the last gaze we shall be able to cast on the contemporary world will be far less distant from today’s gaze than today’s gaze is distant from the gaze of two years ago. For those two years remain the years of our apprenticeship.

Henceforth we shall have nothing more to do than application. More or less hard, more or less bitter, more or less heavy, it will be nothing but application. We are today determined. We are today resolved. But during these last two years we finally determined ourselves, we finally resolved ourselves. These two years remain the years of our apprenticeship. After them we have nothing more to do than application. Before them we never did anything but training. Before them we were soldiers serving under chiefs. After them we shall be workers laboring together. But during them we were truly free young men. We underwent the greatest moral social upheaval. To remain sincere we renounced the vastest immediate hope, we broke the closest friendship.

From the hope they had given us of making in a few decrees the revolution of the world, we have returned to the firm resolve to work as best we can, at what we can find best to do. But by some need or other — might it not be a perverse need — to steep ourselves again in the springs of old pride, you want, historian that you are, and I want, philosopher that I try to make myself, we want to relive for an instant the life that we ourselves have condemned. I do not deceive myself about the moral quality of this need. When the enthusiasm was sincere, it was beautiful, it was good, and doubtless it was just. But now that we know that this enthusiasm was ill-justified, that we should want to feel it again, I am afraid that there is an indelicacy in it.

— No, answered Pierre Deloire, there is no dishonesty in it. You are still letting yourself be carried away by the Christianity you have renounced. You have scruples that are those of a sick man. You always have an old religious strain. When I was little and my grandmother told me stories of the time when she was little, I listened to the stories of the time gone by as she told them to me, without any scruple at all. She was a strong woman, and active, and when she told an old story she did not concern herself with knowing whether she was encroaching on the decree of some Providence. And she even told stories of her grandfather, who was a woodcutter. When therefore she told me the stories of the time when she kept the cows, and how she had fought with the wolf when she kept the sheep, she had fresh joy. And I as a child had fresh joy together, and no more than she did I concern myself with knowing whether with her I was going back up the stream of time. It is that she was profoundly unchristian, as are all the peasants of France and of the Bourbonnais. She had no religious scruples. She loved the fine story. Old and bent in two, as she used to say, she loved to tell the fine story. When young she had loved, in the snowy winter vigils, to listen to the fine story. And I, young and come into the world in less intelligent times, I loved to listen to the fine story. And it is thus that I became a historian. For the best historian — and I will say it at the risk of displeasing a few pedants, but what does it matter, let us say what we think — the best historian is still the one who loves the fine story best. Michelet.

— Michelet.

— Michelet, repeated my cousin to mock them.

— But I shall never be able to tell stories as well as my grandmother. I do not believe it is immoral to rid oneself momentarily of the present, even of present duty, and of present work, in order to represent to oneself the past. No more than my grandmother sinned, no more than I sinned, does humanity sin when it takes pleasure in history. History belongs to it, after all. It is humanity that made it. And even if it took a pleasure in recovering a past that time automatically steals from it, let us not steal from it, we men, the joy of that recovery. When I was in the fifth form, and I began to read in Greek the stories of the time when humanity kept the cows, with a singular impression of enlargement, that is to say of liberation, I knew, for my share of humanity, that unique joy: of knowing that I understood those irreparably dead poets since whose death so many poets had died in layers. Do not doubt it: the popularity of Priam and of Astyanax, and of Andromache, of Oedipus and Antigone, and of Prometheus among us comes from there, and from elsewhere too, from strong causes, and not from the baccalaureate, as they would have us believe, as those who would substitute modern pedantries for the pedantries of the moderns upon antiquity would have us believe, instead of exterminating from the city pedantry and pedants. And lately at last, when our former master, Monsieur Joseph Bedier, had restored to us the unique, the perfect, the admirable romance of Tristan and Iseut, besides all the beauty of the poem, did we not feel the singular joy of receiving as a contemporary that imperishable beauty? That humanity loves stories of three thousand or six hundred and fifty years and that I love a story of two years which has become so distant for us, I do not consent that anyone reproach us for it. The wholesome intoxication of memory and rejuvenation is worth more than the smoky intoxication of Catholic scruple.

Let us therefore rejoice in the youth of humanity. Let us rejoice, let us steep ourselves again in the youth of socialism. And it is here that I catch you on the half-turn, it is here that I close the circuit that you so imprudently opened. At the beginning you were defiant because the perpetual operation of life forbade the chronicler an exact narration. But it is also the operation of life that demands that there should nonetheless be narrations. History is the memory of humanity. As much as individual memory is indispensable not only for tasks, but for the simplest acts, for eating, drinking, and walking, for sleeping, so much is history indispensable to common humanity. The simplest common act, such as buying and paying, singing in chorus, or speaking to children, presupposes a great deal of history. Common life and action demand history. History is therefore older than we are, Mister Philosopher, and stronger than you. And if we historians do not tell it well-made stories, humanity will tell itself badly-made stories. If we do not make it authentic stories, it will make itself false stories. We must therefore make its history for it. The logical impossibility of the method has never prevented scientific discovery. The logical possibility of the method has never instituted scientific discovery. Methodology was made for secondary school courses. It allows young bourgeois doing their philosophy to imagine that one can work in laboratories without being a workman. A true philosopher said in my presence that he did not think the famous tables and methods had ever produced a single physical discovery. He spoke truly. If you are not a chemist, presence and absence and concomitant variation will never make you do chemistry. The scientist works after nature. He hunts nature. If he is a chemist, if he has developed in chemistry the old flair and the old cunning, he will do chemistry. Bacon and Mill come after. Grammar has never produced a single page. Are you a historian? You will do history. If not, it is in vain that you will read all the treatises on the manner of writing.

You may well demonstrate that testimony is rigorously impossible. We have our testimonies and we know how to classify them and use them. You may well demonstrate that history is impossible in rigorous reason. You are right before the dance begins. But when the history is done, it is reason that was wrong. When the history is done, it is well or badly done, or half well or badly, or three-quarters, or approximately; — and not always badly done as it pleases you to imagine. The same action, which dominates knowledge, and which at the beginning demanded that knowledge should not be and not remain pure, demands at this end that with this impure knowledge we should make a history all the same. It demands at the beginning that memory should deviate and at the end that this deviation should disappear.

— Peguy, answered Pierre Baudouin, Peguy will do as he likes. But I maintain that the contrariety I opposed to you seems to me insurmountable.

— No sir, Peguy will do as he can. When he has finished, only then shall we know whether he has surmounted the contrariety, for these contrarieties are truly insurmountable, provided one does not surmount them, on condition that one does not overcome them. Only the result has standing to decide here. They are rigorously insurmountable, until the author has surmounted them. Only the result constitutes proof. The work alone of the workman is stronger than the criticism of the logician, and than the methodology of the philosopher.

Peguy will do as he can. The artist does as he can. The scientist, who is an artist as regards the means of his inquiry, the quests of his investigation, the scientist also does as he can. One asks only that he succeed. The work done, the critic will not be embarrassed to justify it. Some table will provide for it. And even the tables do not always provide. A friend of ours, who we have been told understands physical chemistry, left me not long ago somewhat abruptly, because he was in a hurry: We are going, he said, to the Sorbonne, to the course of Monsieur Geruzez, where we read together German papers, which we explain, on several discoveries they have made. It is not easy. The discoveries are there. One cannot deny them. They are obvious. They are important. But it seems to me that the reasonings do not hold up. They are what Peguy’s cousin would call merry-go-round reasoning.

— You are very kind, said my cousin.

— It is enough, continued Pierre Deloire, it is enough to have frequented a few scientists to retain this impression that critical reason arrives after the battle. You know well how they speak. Their great concern is not that it conform to what critical reason has demanded: their great concern is that it holds together. A hypothesis is not judged according to whether it is more or less reasonable, but it holds together or it does not hold together. That says it all.

So it is with history. When you have irrefutably demonstrated that history is impossible, let a historian come and make a history, and you will be wrong immediately after. Art has shortcuts that reason has not counted. The candidates for various examinations dissertate to determine whether history is an art or a science. Better advised, every historian who has put his hand to the dough knows that the historian must be an artist. I do not care that the reconstitution is artificial, provided it is artistic.

There was a silence.

Pierre Deloire completed thus: — In the sense in which we understand this word.

— I am happy, concluded my cousin, that you have finished. You amused me greatly. But it is time to go to lunch. You, sir of the Loire valley, you spoke of eating and drinking. You are right. All amusement must come to an end. You have made me hungry.

While they were getting up, — Nothing is as amusing, continued my cousin, as seeing two puppets gesticulate whose words are unknown to you. You, sir, who gesticulate broadly, who embrace like a haymaker turning hay. And you, sir, who pretend not to be angry, but who gesticulate in a chopping manner, like a pork butcher making mince. You spoke of intoxication. It is quite true that if I did not know you were not drunk, I would believe it. You argue as though you were trying to achieve socialist unity. And you ended by spiriting away the report like a comrade chairman spiriting away a hostile vote. I am willing to come back next week. Only it is on the condition that we begin with the report.

While they were going in: Otherwise you will once more prevent us from beginning. Discipline is needed. I request that at the next session the accused — my little cousin, you know — speak first, and that not one of you open his mouth before him.

— If that is the way it is, answered Pierre Baudouin, allow me to insist once more today on my desire that the report should be somewhat profound. I said that Peguy had gone to the congresses as a congressist. But what we ask for is not merely the professional report, so to speak, of a congressist. It is the report of a man, interrogating his conscience and not merely his memory.

So many demands ended by revolting me. I allowed myself to intervene, I the principal interested party:

— Gentlemen, leave me be: I will do my best. I came embarrassed about what I would say. Your discussions, however respectable they may be, have only embarrassed me further. It is dangerous to stir up certain questions before beginning to work. It spoils the appetite. Better, I believe, to throw oneself into the work headfirst, without looking so much to the right and to the left. One must not over-refine the commentary. One must begin by beginning. Give me time to forget the nevertheless so pertinent reasons you have opposed to one another. I did not think I was making an affair of it. I did not think I would stir up such great interests. I shall try. I shall simply try to give you the report of what I saw, of what I did, of what I experienced in these wretched congresses. Where have I got myself into?

Leave me in peace. Leave me my holidays.

— And you, Monsieur Pierre Deloire, asked my cousin, who never lost his memory, is it after lunch that you will tell us the story of your emaciated friend who goes to see his acquaintance?

— Not at all, answered Deloire, raising to the height of his chin, like an abbe who wants to become a bishop, the fingers of his right hand; there is no story; my friend is an honest man who lives with his wife.

— What does he do, then, in the evening?

— He takes part in the sessions of the General Committee. He is on the commission of propaganda and oversight. He is the one who examines the Jaures case.

As of the 31st of August last, the budgetary deficit of the cahiers, defined as the shortfall of receipts against expenses, stood at 9,511 francs 47.

To this must be added the sum of 1,300 francs 45, the printers’ account for the month of August, which regularly does not appear in our books until the month of September. One thus arrives at a total of 10,811 francs 92.

But from this sum one must subtract for the inventory the value of the cahiers we have in stock. We have in stock: approximately 500 copies of the Jeanne d’Arc, the last 100 of which will be sold at 10 francs — 1,000 francs; approximately 700 copies of the Marcel, the last 100 of which will be sold at 2 francs — 200 francs; approximately 500 copies of the Lumiere, the last 100 of which will be sold at 2 francs — 200 francs; approximately 900 copies of Jean Coste, at least 1,800 francs; approximately 200 copies of the Danton, at least 500 francs; a few copies of Vers l’action, at most 50 francs; a few copies of Bacchus, at most 50 francs; 400 copies of the International Congress — 1,200 francs; at most 2,000 ordinary cahiers, at most 500 francs; several complete collections, at least 100 francs; bookshop volumes in stock, approximately 200 francs.

If we value at 5,811 francs 92 the volumes and cahiers we have in stock, the inventory leaves us with a deficit of 5,000 francs, after 21 months of operation. A real deficit of 5,000 francs after the 21 months of launching will seem rather small to those of our subscribers who have done some business. It is less than what could have been foreseen. Instead of a deficit we would have a surplus if we had never provided free subscriptions; we had not had to do the launching; we had founded the bookshop of the cahiers at the same time as the cahiers; we had not suffered, at the beginning of the first and especially at the beginning of the second series, a concerted wave of cancellations.

But our attention must be directed much less to the real deficit than to the budgetary deficit. One may well have saleable goods in stock; if the money is lacking, the business goes into receivership. That is not what we want. We must therefore count, for the third financial year, corresponding to the third series, on an initial deficit of 10,811 francs 92.

It is known that I have pledged myself body and goods to guarantee the debts we have contracted. Now it is not just that one man alone should run all the risks. And it is not wise that a lasting enterprise should increase or maintain its initial debt. We are therefore resolved to begin the amortization this very year. Whatever our receipts, we shall reduce our expenses so that they are at least 2,811 francs 92 less. Thus 8,000 francs at most. What will our expenses be?

Our general costs are more or less invariable, incompressible because we have always kept them to the strict minimum, inextensible because we wish to introduce no luxury into them.

We shall this year have to pay a rent. The very liberal hospitality we received during the recent school year in the building of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales, which was so useful to us for the establishment of our second series, has come to an end. It was bound to end some day. It is normal that a strictly free enterprise should pay its own rent in some building. We were happy, as long as the cahiers were adolescents, to receive this liberal hospitality. But our cahiers have become adults. They must earn their bread, eat their bread, pay their rent.

In the same rue de la Sorbonne, at number 8, a little further down, we have been able to lodge ourselves in a shop for an annual rent of 500 francs. Our subscribers will be grateful to us for having thus kept a central location.

Our expenses will therefore vary according to what we publish.

Monsieur Charles Guieysse, the secretary general of the Society of Popular Universities, 16, rue de la Sorbonne, will write a personal cahier on the Popular Universities. Monsieur Georges Sorel will write a cahier on the Church and the State.

We shall continue this year to follow the method that we have tried to follow, which is to say as much as we can of the truth of what concerns the preparation of the social revolution, in the sense in which we understand this word.

And we shall not only continue to respect the method, which is indispensable, we shall preserve the pertinent manner. We shall continue not to publish what are commonly called articles, productions that are neither document nor work, in which the real is no longer present and in which it is not yet present, in which the matter is sufficiently altered that one no longer recognizes it, in which it is not sufficiently elaborated, sufficiently worked, that one might know it better. We shall continue to publish documents, contributions, and works.

We announced that we would publish, so to speak, the official acts of the French Socialist Party. But while we were preparing to do so, it became clear that this Party was not producing any acts. To remain faithful to our method, we have had to modify our program accordingly. A schism has been officially declared in the Party, and the two halves are not doing much. As soon as the socialist parties nationally and regionally constituted in France begin once more to produce acts, we shall begin once more to record them at full length. In the meantime we shall publish simple analyses. Our subscribers have not forgotten the unofficial analytical report of the Lyon congress so seriously prepared for us by Mademoiselle Louise Levi. Mademoiselle Louise Levi will prepare for us an unofficial analytical report of the Tours congress. She has promised us that she would prepare an analytical report of the Lubeck congress from the official documents. Thus we shall have from the same author a series of French congresses and from next year on a series of unofficial analytical reports of the German congresses. The recent unofficial stenographic report of the fifth international congress has begun a series that we shall try to continue. But we have time. The unofficial stenographic report of the Amsterdam congress is provisionally reserved. This year certain acts or certain refusals to act communicated by the international bureau that might be interesting.

We have from the outset informed our subscribers that those among them who wished to keep abreast of the international socialist movement as it was moving should subscribe to the Mouvement Socialiste. The forthcoming reinstallation of that friendly review, which we shall soon be able to announce in more detail, promises us an even more convenient division between the Mouvement and the cahiers of an enormous labor that exceeds us all.

Nourished on documents will be our memoirs and dossiers. We shall publish as soon as we can: Pierre Quillard, Memoir and dossiers for the defense of humanity in Armenia; Bernard Lazare, Memoir and dossiers for the rights of the Jews in Eastern Europe; Jean Deck, Memoir and dossiers for the defense of freedom in Finland. As soon as we have found a serious author, which is much more difficult than one believes, we shall publish Memoir and dossiers of the recent movement for freedom in Russia. Finally if we find someone who is informed, which is almost impossible, we shall publish Memoir and dossiers for the defense of national freedoms in South Africa.

We shall publish studies and contributions.

The Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales announces for this year a series of lectures on solidarity, a series of lectures on the Popular Universities: we have ensured that we shall publish in one or two cahiers several of these lectures.

The Society of Popular Universities is preparing for us a cahier of documents and information.

Lagardelle has begun to prepare for us the introduction that was to precede the stenographic report of the international congress. We hope that this introduction will become a true essay toward a history of the International.

Monsieur Sorel will give us numerous contributions of all that he knows. Leon Deshairs will continue for us his studies and contributions on art.

As soon as our friend Lionel Landry has returned from China, which cannot be much longer, we shall ask him for a cahier of information on the expedition.

We have requested a memoir for the defense of the Jews in France; but it does not depend on us whether it appears.

We shall publish works.

We shall do everything we can so that our Christmas cahier may be the uniquely admirable romance of Tristan and Iseut recently restored by Monsieur Joseph Bedier. One of the few beautiful books of humanity is passing unnoticed by the stupid public. At least we shall try to see that our subscribers have a copy of it.

Louis Gillet has read to us fine unfinished poems. We beg him to finish them in time so that his Geste du roi may be our Easter cahier.

Rene Salome has finished his Clairvoyance automatique; we impatiently await his bringing it to us.

Jerome and Jean Tharaud have brought us a fine novel, Dingley. They have more or less finished the Orphee. They have begun collecting Hungarian tales.

Romain Rolland will give us the 14 Juillet that Gemier will stage this season.

We have had for a long time the second novel of Antonin Lavergne, Tantoune.

We have had since the beginning of the second series the Greve of Jean Hugues.

We have had since the beginning of the second series several letters signed Moselly, written by a comrade from Lorraine. I had promised that these letters would appear in one of the first cahiers of the series. The unexpected attack we had to sustain rigorously prevented us from publishing them then. They did not fit well into the subsequent cahiers. The same author has long since promised us a whole cahier. I impatiently await his copy. One can no longer think of publishing the letters before having in hand the cahier they foreshadowed.

Finally while they were discussing the Jaures question, the same Jaures was beginning again to discuss the social question. One may have such or such an opinion on the Jaures case, but one cannot neglect the articles of his that have been appearing for two months; we shall publish these articles in a very thick cahier which will form a new series of Socialist Action.

I intend to write several cahiers or half-cahiers. I shall not take up again in them the painful debates that stirred the beginning of the first and the beginning of the second series. I ask our subscribers to note that I closed several months ago that painful conversation and that I closed it by publishing reports that were contrary to me and that I could have refuted.

I have in particular the intention of writing in each series a memento of the preceding year. I shall simply state, at their dates, the facts of each year that interest us. A simple enumeration, thus constantly continued, will become a convenient instrument of work.

In an almanac we shall put the great stupidities of the year, the verses of Monsieur Rostand, and the administrative movement of the cahiers. This movement is already too vast for us to usefully publish its survey every month. In our annual almanacs we shall be able to record longer movements with a meaning. We shall represent these movements by curves, images, everything that constitutes a truly scientific apparatus. Finally we shall publish in each almanac a provisional survey of our publications in the preceding series. It is becoming more and more impossible for us to establish a definitive catalog. The very abundance and flexibility of our editions prevents us. We beg our subscribers to be so good as to establish for themselves tables for the matters that are more particularly the object of their studies.

What will our receipts be?

The best way for our expenses to remain limited to 2,811 francs 92 less than our receipts is still, if our subscribers are willing, that our receipts should rise to 2,811 francs 92 more than our expenses.

We sent the sixteenth and last cahier of the international congress to twelve hundred firm subscribers. This number may be considered definitive. Given the great value of this cahier, we sent it only to truly serious subscribers.

We continue to seek subscribers ourselves. We send the cahiers of the third series on a trial basis to all persons potentially capable of subscribing. We search in the Official Bulletin of the League of the Rights of Man for the active republicans who have founded new sections in Paris and in the provinces.

We count above all on our former subscribers to find us new ones. We know for certain, having proved it, that the subscription is made above all by gradual spread, ramification, propaganda, and personal introduction. If our 1,200 subscribers each bring us half a subscriber, we shall have 1,800 subscribers. Let us not forget that we began the second series with 50 or 60 subscribers. It is much easier and more normal to rise from twelve to eighteen hundred than to rise from 50 to 1,200. To get people to subscribe to the cahiers one must never say: Subscribe to the cahiers, you will see that they will please you. But one must say: Subscribe to the cahiers because they are serious, sincere, modest, and because life is difficult for them.

I continue not to accept that one should not be subscribed to the cahiers. Not that I wish to subscribe all of humanity. But I myself have always subscribed to everything. I subscribed again last year to the Socialist Library begun by the Societe nouvelle de librairie et d’edition, and I paid my subscription, like everyone else. I shall always continue. I do not accept that among honest people the deepest disagreements should have economic sanctions. Men like Jaures, Vandervelde, Leon Blum, Georges Renard, Pressense, Rouanet, Fourniere, Edgar Milhaud, whom we have not flattered, or whom we have sometimes not spared, or whose ideas we have not spared, have perfectly understood this. Let us avoid among ourselves everything that resembles boycotting. Let us not aggravate the severity of events by economic executions. Let us accustom ourselves to this idea that what is most bourgeois in the world is to cut off supplies instead of convincing or persuading. Let us know that if socialism introduces something new into the world, it will be the separation of the economic from the personal conscience; it will be to free the conscience by liberating it from economic servitudes. I do not accept that anyone should be my friend if he is not subscribed to the cahiers. Sometimes former comrades, and a few old friends, write me touching letters, or meeting me in the street shake my hand energetically: Hey, it’s you, Peguy; how are you? What are you doing? You’re well? But they neglect to subscribe. I declare that I hate these insincere rites as much as I hate the insincere rites of religious hypocrites. When poor men, as are two-thirds of our subscribers, as Bourgeois is, as I am, risk everything they have in strength, time, money, everything, to publish, in the almost universal falsehood, everything they know to be true, and when they are abandoned, one must at least have the courage not to call oneself their friend.

Finally I am forced to repeat that it is parasitical not to subscribe to the cahiers when one wishes to read them. And that if several comrades regularly read the same copy, they are not honestly in order with us, even if they are students at the premier Ecole of France.

Several of our former canceled subscribers are receiving on a trial basis the first cahiers of the third series. We beg them not to see in this either an insistence, which would be out of place, or a game. But the refusal to subscribe pertains to morality, and we prefer to leave to the interested parties all the responsibility. We consent to being abandoned — one must consent to it — but we do not consent to abandoning ourselves. A certain number of former objections, for example that our cahiers could not succeed, having fallen by the event, we wish to know whether they were presented sincerely, seriously, or not.

Many of our subscribers, on the contrary, to procure new subscriptions for us, send their own copies to their friends and acquaintances. We cannot urge them too much then to ask us for the copies they are missing. It is important to our subscribers that their collections be complete. Our series are not composed haphazardly. And the person who in fifty years has the fifty complete series will be happy to have them. But for that they must be complete as they go along, for having no capital we print just enough for subscription needs, and our own collections run out very quickly. We hardly have today in our offices two or three collections of the first and of the second series.

For the same reason we urgently beg that new subscriptions reach us without any delay. We shall thus be able to regulate the print run of the beginning series. And our new subscribers will at least have this series complete.

By way of exception we are printing this first cahier at three thousand copies. We beg our friends to distribute it usefully. We sell it at sixty centimes a copy.

We urgently beg all our subscribers, old and new, to send us without any delay, that is to say as soon as they have read this first cahier, everything concerning their subscription to the third series: first, changes and additions of address; sound administration requires that the addresses on our labels be exactly and completely written out. We have an interest in our cahiers not going astray. It is therefore necessary that immediately after the floating of the holidays and the changes of the new term our registers be punctually up to date.

We especially beg our subscribers, old and new, to send us without any delay the money order. Let those who prefer to pay in a single payment send us without delay the global money order. Let those who are forced to stagger their payments send us at least the first money order.

Those of our subscribers who do us the friendship of frequenting our office somewhat mock me a great deal because my first glance in a letter I open is to look for the money order. The care I have had for twenty-one months, not counting the preceding ones, of asking myself every day how I shall make my bill at the end of the month permits me to have these innocent manias. Thus I have to pay at the end of October a bill of 1,200 francs of which I have not the first sou, because I counted on the money orders for resubscriptions and new subscriptions. For indeed if I have had to contract loans under my personal guarantee to pay previous bills, it has seemed to me impossible to contract them for the months following the beginning of the series.

When we ask our subscribers to send us at the beginning of the series at least the first money order, we are asking them to conform to custom. When one wishes to subscribe to the Revue de Paris or to the Revue des Deux Mondes, one pays one’s subscription in advance. There is no reason for our cahiers, poor as they are, to be treated more onerously than these rich reviews. One must not make us work for a starvation wage. One must treat us justly. We must accustom ourselves among ourselves to the regularity of functions. We must believe that a regularly remunerated action is alone effective, modest, honest.

What will the amount of our receipts be?

We had five or six subscription-level subscriptions in the second series. We can have, if our friends make the necessary efforts, eighteen or twenty.

We can have at least eight hundred ordinary subscriptions. I take the liberty of reminding our subscribers that the ordinary subscription, and that is why we call it that, is the only one that is commercially equal to the cost price. Let one line up on the shelf of one’s bookcase the sixteen cahiers of the second series and one will have twenty francs worth of publications. All the more so the third series, if our subscribers furnish us the means to publish it complete. I take the liberty of insisting because an examination of our books shows us that if several subscribers have not taken out an ordinary subscription, it is obviously for the sole reason that they have not thought about it. Every time our subscribers have thought about the commercial value of their subscription, they have themselves classified themselves with admirable exactitude in the budgetary region that suited them. When we decided that for eight francs, or for twenty francs, or for a hundred francs our propaganda subscribers, our ordinary subscribers, and our subscription-level subscribers would receive the same cahiers, the clever ones said laughingly: Of course, everyone will subscribe for eight francs. The clever ones were wrong. The clever ones are always wrong. Thence comes their assurance and the reputation they have. I repeat, and this conforms to what we had foreseen: every time our subscribers asked themselves the question, they themselves placed themselves in the class where they belonged. And if we insist today, it is so that all may be good enough to ask themselves the question.

Since we are in a complimentary mood I shall say without further delay how profoundly happy we were at the humane liberality with which our subscribers received the fifteenth cahier of the preceding series: Memoirs and Dossiers for the Freedoms of the Teaching Staff in France. Like its predecessors, this cahier stirred up movement, thought, work. But not a single threat. One subscriber, from Toulouse, had a friend tell us that he did not accept that Jaures should be defended. As he sent us by the same mail the amount of his subscription, we are reassured about his mentality. We receive in our mail affectionate sentiments and sometimes severe sentiments. But for six months the expression “I cancel my subscription” has completely disappeared from our vocabulary. Having received the fifteenth cahier, Gustave Tery did not see fit to cancel his subscription. He even bought a second copy. If the mores of true intellectual freedom can be introduced, maintained, and expanded among us, I declare it again, that is a beginning of revolution much more important than all the parliamentarisms they are imposing on us.

We can have at least a thousand propaganda subscriptions. I have said before that the propaganda subscription is onerous for us, but that, precisely because of that, we have a great interest in multiplying propaganda subscriptions. Those of our subscribers who have managed some business understand us. The general costs remaining the same, the composition, the page setting, the imposition, the make-ready remaining the same, the cost price of each copy diminishes as the print run rises. Thus a propaganda subscription is onerous for us, but zero propaganda subscriptions would ruin us, and many propaganda subscriptions save us.

We cannot accept propaganda subscriptions except for France and Belgium.

I come to the regular monthly subscriptions, which preceded by a long time the birth of our cahiers, which furnished the first funds, which have not diminished, which still today furnish a considerable contingent, which have even increased. Ranging from fifty centimes to one franc per month, these regular subscriptions have for us the foremost moral importance. Not only, as calculation could foresee and experience has confirmed, do those of our friends who send us regular monthly subscriptions thus more easily send us larger sums — and we do not have the means to neglect this consideration — but the laborious punctuality of the friends who think of us at the beginning of each month, as soon as they have received their salary, brings us a principally homogeneous comfort. To the sustained work that we maintain, the best help, the most effective collaboration, the most fitting contribution is the one that is also sustained. The friends who send us regularly continued monthly subscriptions are assuredly those who enter most profoundly into the preparation of the common work. And they are also those who have the best method, since they conform the regular feeding to the regular demands of daily work and modest living. I repeat that the regular monthly subscription, whatever its amount, and all other conditions being equal, is for us the most fruitful financial operation, the most advantageous administrative operation, the most comforting moral operation, and that it is for our subscribers the most methodical, the most realistic, the truest form of collaboration. Continuity is here truer, because it is deeper, than discontinuity. Financially, moreover, our budgets, almost all of them, are not annual budgets but monthly budgets.

A fairly large number of our subscribers, especially schoolteachers, have very intelligently combined the regular monthly subscription with the propaganda subscription: they send regularly one or two francs per month from the beginning of the series; when they have thus paid the eight francs that have become indispensable, either they stop, or they continue, deciding themselves freely according to their means.

Several of our subscribers, poorer still, have formed collective subscriptions. They get together and subscribe for a propaganda subscription that one of them, the titular subscriber, pays regularly by monthly subscriptions of one or two francs. We cannot encourage them too much to proceed in this way. As much as groups are odious when they are constituted to chatter and to command, so much is it indispensable that solidarities should form without any formality, to read, study, work.

Not only do we beg our subscribers to be so good as to send us without delay the first money order, but we beg them to be so good as to always spontaneously send us the money orders they wish to send us. Collections through the post are very onerous for us.

A fairly large number of our subscribers nonetheless prefer this method for the quite legitimate reason that their occupations, without diminishing their good will, impair their punctuality, divert their attention. We beg these subscribers to be so good as to make their intentions known to us at the beginning of each series; we note carefully, as is our business, and we shall follow up punctually.

We beg our subscribers to have people around them buy the independent cahiers. We must fight tirelessly against the stupidity of the public. We must not conceal from ourselves that everything is against us, because we disturb old comforts. The League of Education has not asked us for a Jean Coste. We wrote to citizen Serwy, secretary of the international bureau, to offer him a few copies of the Stenographic Report: we did not even receive a reply.

Finally we are assured that our subscribers will use their first October mailing to send us by the same post the first bookshop order, the one for the new term. But here we insist that there should be no misunderstanding.

It is an old principle of commerce that one must serve first and well one’s enemies or strangers, and that friends come after, because they are friends. Because this principle is contrary to the morality of solidarity, which we have adopted provisionally, and because all our bookshop clients are our friends to some degree, we disobey the old habit as much as we can. As we supply books at the lowest price in the trade, we also supply them with the greatest speed in the trade. The few delays that occurred were accidental, stemmed from the difficulties of the beginning, stem from the difficulties of moving in. Every new business encounters these difficulties. But normally we deliver our orders with the greatest speed in the trade. French books go out by the mail of the same day; foreign books go out by a mail of the same week.

What has several times delayed the sending of orders — and I must warn of this, because one would not suspect it — is that they included some socialist publication. By a particular application to the book trade of that lamentable law that those who wish to revolutionize the world are still those who least know how to organize their own world, socialist publications are by far the most difficult to find on the market. Pamphlets in particular almost all require the longest searches. And it is here that we distinguish ourselves from ordinary commerce: to procure for our subscribers pamphlets that earned not a sou for the bookshop of the cahiers, that sometimes cost us more, postage included, than we were paid for them, Bourgeois has often run around Paris for half-days. We shall continue to do so. But our subscribers must not forget how long this search is. When therefore they send us mixed orders, they must not forget to specify whether the ordinary bookshop orders should go at once, or whether they should wait for the socialist bookshop orders. We can supply in twenty-four hours the complete works of Michelet, Renan, France, Tolstoi, and Leconte de Lisle; but it almost always takes several days to find a few pamphlets on the general strike or on the definitive city.

All the more so do our clients risk a delay when their order requires some work from us, engages our responsibility, for example when they leave the choice to us, or when they ask us for bibliographical information. In general Bourgeois answers at once himself and sends all the information pertaining to ordinary administration and current bookshop matters. But I cannot pledge myself to answer as punctually when I must intervene. One may count on all my diligence, but bibliography is not always easy, and I am continuing in it an apprenticeship begun rather recently, and, the cahiers always going on, the cares of regular production can delay the irregular work.

This delay can become rather considerable when we are consulted on socialist publications. Not only have the socialists not produced much that is worth reading, but what they have produced, they have almost never produced for information, education, learning. Some subscribers asked us at the beginning: Be sure to send us a book in which one can see what socialism is. One cannot give the same answer to such a request. One of our most serious subscribers asked us for the books in which the theories of value were set forth: Monsieur Sorel, to whom we referred the matter, had to write him a long letter. One of our good subscribers, himself familiar with socialist literature, asked us from Orleans for a few small plays, dramas or popular comedies, with few characters, to perform this winter before a workers’ audience. I am quite embarrassed about it. There is the Greve of Jean Hugues. But we have not yet been able to print it.

Some of my friends, especially the younger ones — I am old enough to have younger friends — embarrass me more still by asking me personally for advice. I wish people to know well that I hate what the Catholics call direction, and whether one submits to it or exercises it, direction is equally hateful. One may believe that the books announced by the cahiers are never announced without good reason. But our subscribers must always criticize these announcements themselves. For we must always criticize ourselves. We always need to criticize ourselves.

We prefer to send only impersonal information. We are particularly happy when we are asked for this information for popular libraries. We have not given up the idea we have of making a cahier of libraries giving well-prepared lists for specific audiences and budgets. We have secured for this cahier the most qualified collaborations. While awaiting its appearance we have ourselves prepared a list. We shall copy it in several copies and communicate it upon request. We can also complete libraries, that is to say, given poorly composed popular libraries, nationalist and militarist, send, for specific budgets, the list of books that can somewhat straighten out the catalog.

Last year the profits of the bookshop were integrally paid into the cahiers’ budget. Henceforth, and this innovation will give the greatest pleasure to our subscribers, we shall deduct from the bookshop profits a percentage allocated to our associates.

The little shop where we are going to set up, 8, rue de la Sorbonne, required a total rent of fifteen hundred francs. We have divided the shop into three. We occupy one of the compartments. It is this compartment that by habit we shall continue to call our offices. One of the two remaining compartments is from the outset occupied by Pages libres. This weekly, which has grown great more rapidly than we, and for which the finest future of useful work is reserved, has never needed my recommendation or my confirmation. I must however say here that I am subscribed to it, that I receive it regularly on Sunday, and that I learn a great deal from it. I must say that the cover of number 38, the last I have today Saturday, seemed to me particularly firm, that I impatiently await number 39 for tomorrow Sunday. I repeat that one is no more justified in reproaching Pages libres for being primary than in reproaching the cahiers for not being properly primary. Each to his trade. — Address all inquiries to Monsieur Charles Guieysse, 8, rue de la Sorbonne.

The last compartment is occupied in common by the Journaux pour tous and by Jean-Pierre.

We showed in the advertising cahier of the second series how the Journaux pour tous offered citizens of good will the means of a daily, serious, effective, free action. I may be permitted to recall that on the recommendation of Monsieur Lucien Herr I introduced the organization of the Journaux pour tous, almost before its birth, into the Bellais bookshop at the time when I had the management of it. Since I had left that house, the organization, having grown great, had continued to receive there a wholly liberal hospitality. Today it returns to us because the Societe nouvelle de librairie et d’edition needs to occupy all its premises to ensure the extension of its services. We are happy that the friendly organization returns with us. We are happy that its transfer gave rise to a few first friendly conversations between the representatives of the Societe nouvelle and the manager who represented the cahiers. — Address all inquiries to Monsieur Emile Boivin, 8, rue de la Sorbonne.

Jean-Pierre, a journal for children from seven to thirteen years of age. The young men who had constituted the university committee of protest for Russian students had there begun their apprenticeship in real action, often difficult, always severe, sometimes disappointing. They had known there their first difficulties, suffered their first disillusions, exercised their first critical faculty. But because criticism, in the sense in which we understand it, leads tirelessly to better action and prevents one from falling back into cowardly inaction, as soon as they had a little less to work for their Russian comrades, they found a permanent, laborious, urgent means of action. The first number of Jean-Pierre appears at the beginning of October. That young men of sixteen to twenty-five, instead of nursing some departmental constituency, should resolutely take upon themselves the heaviest task, but also the most indispensable: to make a journal for children; that these young men should dare to assume an enterprise before which I know bold men who would recoil: that, if you please, is what I take the liberty of calling a symptom. To those who wonder, not without anguish, in the face of so many failures and so much resoling and so much old-new, whether the same stupidities are going to start all over again, an initiative like that of Jean-Pierre makes it possible at least to wait, and to hope that the coming generation will do truly new work. — Address all inquiries to Monsieur Emile Boivin, secretary of the administration, 8, rue de la Sorbonne.

I do not believe that a journal like Jean-Pierre can operate for its writing like any ordinary review, with several devoted contributors. It needs stories, many fine stories, and what man would be gifted enough to suffice for the production? An enterprise like Jean-Pierre must rest on a very large number of occasional contributors. I mean by that, that if one says to oneself: I am going to work for Jean-Pierre, one will find nothing. But if two to three hundred persons, continuing their usual work, doing their trade, continuing their reading, have only this thought in the back of their minds, that the first fine story that passes before their eyes, they will not forget to send it to Jean-Pierre, this journal can become, will become an admirable, unique collection. — Send all information and references to Mademoiselle Jeanne Maritain, 8, rue de la Sorbonne.

Thus in this modest shop, somewhat transformed into offices, four nascent and growing enterprises will live in good friendship. We shall not call this shop a people’s house nor a house of the good Lord. We shall not call it the Palace of the People. (1) We shall call it a shop, the shop, or the house, familiarly. Without formula and without protocol we shall practice exact federalism. Each of the four will be entirely free of himself, free in his own place. But the four together will lend one another mutual support. We have often repeated that the social revolution would have no meaning unless it were the liberation of conscience by the better economic understanding. We begin the revolution with ourselves. Each of the four federated parties will have a spirit

(1) We have received for a long time from Monsieur Deherme an interesting letter that we shall publish as soon as we can. I have never wished to charge his Palace of the People with pride. And events have been so severe for Monsieur Deherme that one may be assured that he is not presumptuous.

and work all the freer in that the economic understanding will diminish the economic demands. Not only has this understanding allowed us to diminish considerably the general costs, so important in any enterprise, but it has allowed us to reorganize the bookshop of the cahiers. Henceforth Pages libres, the Journaux pour tous, and Jean-Pierre will work indistinctly to expand the clientele of the bookshop, and from the total amount of business a certain percentage will be directly attributed to Pages libres, to the Journaux pour tous, and to Jean-Pierre. The four enterprises have so many friends in common that it was becoming vain, and impossible, to distinguish the contributions of each in the bookshop that has become common. Thus every order placed with the bookshop of the cahiers is advantageous to everyone.

We remind our subscribers that we supply books at the lowest price in the trade. We reproduce our terms on the fourth page of the cover of the present cahier. We urgently beg our subscribers to send us their orders on well-made cards, with all the information they have. If they write at the same time to the editorial office and to the administration, we beg them, for the good administration of the work, to separate the two letters in the same envelope. All the more so if our subscribers give us commissions for Pages libres, for the Journaux, or for Jean-Pierre, it is good that there should be as many distinct cards.

Everything suggests that I shall not be able to write a personal correspondence. Better that I devote to the common work all the writing I can. But I beg our friends and correspondents to continue to write to me. I read attentively everything that is sent to me, letters, local newspapers, local reviews. Nothing is as useful as correspondence from everywhere, provided it is not a reverberation of Paris. I trust the judgment of our correspondents to send me exactly what I need and not to overwhelm me with paper.

With what passion as publisher, typographer, proofreader, manager, author, I desire that the third series should be amply complete, I need not say here. No one expects that at the foot of the work I should end with pathos. Enough candidates in a few months are going to move the populations. Let us leave them that eloquence.

Let us work.

All our subscribers must have the fifteenth cahier, Freedoms of the Teaching Staff in France, in which under the title: Outrages in the Yonne, we began to publish the story of Monsieur Herve. We publish the continuation today, in the middle of the chapter, as it was written for us before the beginning of the holidays by someone singularly well-informed.

It would be an exaggeration to claim that the Pioupiou was a militarist and patriotic sheet, but in truth it contained hardly anything other than what is commonly found in anarchist sheets, what was found in socialist sheets ten years ago, at the time when socialism concerned itself less with petty politics and more with the propagation of principles. But what seemed intolerable was that anyone should dare to send it to conscripts.

The sacristy sheets of the department immediately went on the campaign: the major reactionary and nationalist press in its turn entered the fray: the Autorite and the Patrie at the head.

General Andre took fright — if a French general can take fright — and requested prosecutions against the Pioupiou de l’Yonne.

The public prosecutor’s office of Auxerre, seized with a fine zeal, examined the newspaper with a magnifying glass and discovered a dozen articles — only a dozen! — liable to the court of assizes; the article by Sans-Patrie was naturally among the articles incriminated; two lines insulting to the army had been noted in it:

“Because it repels me to let myself be decked out in a buffoon’s costume; because I have no taste for playing the puppet in streets and squares;”

Always the admirable procedure — old as justice — that consists of cutting out two lines from a work or an article in order to hang a man!

The manager was known to the law: he is a young peasant, exercising in a village of the Yonne the trade of clog-maker. His name is Thomas. Citizen Thomas is hunchbacked, but precisely because of his infirmity, he claimed the perilous honor of being the responsible manager of the Pioupiou; he risked, as a discharged man, only ten or twelve months in prison, whereas the other young men of the Socialist Youth, once their imprisonment was over, were sure to be sent to the military penal battalions. Citizen Thomas devoted himself in this way, without drum or trumpet, as if he were accomplishing the most natural thing in the world.

Citizen Monneret, typographer, who presided over the composition of the newspaper, not wishing to let an infirm man bear all the weight of such a trial, without any more noise or speeches, put his name at the bottom of the newspaper, at the end of a short notice: it is for this act of courage, accomplished so simply, that he too will sit on the benches of the court of assizes.

Investigations which succeeded thanks to the denunciation of an amateur policeman, a country pharmacist by profession, uncovered another writer, a young schoolteacher, now resigned: citizen Rousseau.

Of the other writers, only one seems to have preoccupied the public prosecutor’s office of Auxerre: the Sans-Patrie; he was the big fish that it was above all a matter of catching in the net.

Monsieur Herve was first called as a witness, then questioned as a suspect; whether as witness or as suspect, he refused to give any clarification to the justice of his country.

The Abbe Olivier was brought to the prosecutor’s office; he had clearly identified Monsieur Herve as the Sans-Patrie; the Abbe Olivier claimed that he had the fact from a certain Monsieur N*****, a former associate of Monsieur Herve; Monsieur N***** was summoned, confronted with the Abbe Olivier, but formally denied having made the statement attributed to him by the churchman; the chivalrous abbe, who was striving so generously to uncover a courteous and doctrinaire adversary, had to acknowledge that his memory had no doubt served him badly. He had to beat a retreat, declaring that public rumor at least accused Monsieur Herve.

The headmaster of the lycee, Monsieur Germain, was then heard. He had never had anything but courteous and cordial relations with the history professor under investigation, but as a good functionary not only did he declare that public rumor accused Monsieur Herve: he added that he believed he recognized in the articles of Sans-Patrie the cast of mind and even the very expressions of his subordinate.

The two fathers of families, clerical, nationalist, and anti-Semitic, who had taken an active part in the campaign directed against Monsieur Herve, came in their turn to depose that public rumor formally accused Monsieur Herve; of proof, naturally, they brought none.

The searches carried out on all sides to find in the offices of the Travailleur, at the home of the manager of the Pioupiou, manuscript copy in Monsieur Herve’s hand, produced absolutely nothing.

At the end of three months of investigation, the public prosecutor’s office of Auxerre found itself no further along than on the first day.

It was about to close the investigation when it received two letters that were not designed to enlighten it; they came, one from the radical group, the other from the socialist group of Sens: the secretaries of these two groups expressed their surprise that only the public rumor of Monsieur Herve’s enemies had penetrated into the office of the examining magistrate: the political enemies of Monsieur Herve affirmed that they believed he was the Sans-Patrie. The secretaries of the two progressive groups of Sens declared that the public prosecutor still had to lend an ear to the public rumor of Monsieur Herve’s friends: they claimed to be able to find several hundred citizens each who would come in their turn to declare that they did not believe that Monsieur Herve was the author of the prosecuted article.

The Minister of Public Instruction, as is known, did not wait as long as Justice to take a firm decision concerning Monsieur Herve. Even before the examining magistrate had finished his investigation, before the indictment chamber had ruled, when in any case Monsieur Herve was only an accused man, not a condemned one, Monsieur Leygues summoned him to answer whether he was or was not the Sans-Patrie; the minister received the same answer as the rector of Dijon. The professor claimed, for the acts of his political life, to have to deal only with Justice and to be in no way dependent on the minister.

Monsieur Leygues took against Monsieur Herve the most serious measure he could take without giving rise to the university tribunals: he suspended him with pay.

A bad business for the ministerial socialists. At the very moment when Monsieur Leygues pronounced the suspension of Monsieur Herve, he struck even more severely another socialist of the Yonne dependent on his administration: he pronounced the exclusion from the Ecole Normale of Auxerre of Monsieur Fradet, a third-year student. This measure, which broke a young man’s career, threatened to throw Monsieur Fradet’s father onto the street, from whom were demanded the 1,200 francs owed to the State for his son’s maintenance at the Ecole Normale for three years; Monsieur Fradet the father, a simple worker, being too poor to find such a sum, was threatened with seizure. Monsieur Fradet’s crime? He had several on his conscience: 1) The Ecole Normale of Auxerre had become, for several months, three-quarters socialist, and Monsieur Fradet, who exercised a great moral authority over his comrades, was thought not to be unconnected with this truly alarming result; 2) He was a member of the Socialist Youth group of Auxerre, which had taken the initiative of publishing the Pioupiou; 3) He devoted his Sunday liberties to expounding, in the rural communes around Auxerre, socialist and internationalist doctrine. All these crimes were revealed by private letters written by Monsieur Fradet to one of his friends, a worker in Chalon-sur-Saone, letters seized during a search at the latter’s home; they showed, moreover, in their author, a regrettable state of mind: did not Monsieur Fradet refer to the act of Bresci as “the execution of the King of Italy”?

No doubt it is wretched to violate a private correspondence and to use it to strike a political adversary; but when reason of State speaks, all other reasons must be silent. And then, where would we go if the State had to subject itself to the practices of vulgar honesty that it makes a duty for mere private individuals?

The prosecutions against the Pioupiou, the suspension of Monsieur Herve, the exclusion of Monsieur Fradet, were the work of the ministry of Republican Defense of which “citizen” Millerand is a member, as they say at the Petite Republique; and the Pioupiou, like Messieurs Herve and Fradet for that matter, had done nothing but support the doctrines that one of the members of the government is supposed to share.

What is more: the Socialist Federation of the Yonne, at the recent split of the socialist party, had remained with the General Committee; it had followed the ministerial fraction of the party.

Struck in the persons of two of its most active militants, the Federation of the Yonne made a show of being angry.

The ministerial socialists of Parliament and of the Petite Republique got wind that it was preparing to go over with arms and baggage to the anti-ministerial fraction. This defection had to be prevented. The parliamentary socialist group charged citizen Pastre, deputy of the Gard, with interpellating the ministry; in a very successful meeting, Pastre, Jaures, Allemane, and many others came to announce energetic resolutions; finally the Petite Republique appeared, for several days, to become anti-ministerial: the University correspondent of the Petite Republique, under the title “An Apostle,” published at the head of the newspaper, in moving terms, a fine defense of Monsieur Herve; Gerault-Richard himself, for eight days, charged not only against Monsieur Leygues but against the entire ministry.

All the socialists who love Jaures, despite the errors of his opportunist tactics, who have retained sympathy for the Gerault-Richard of former days, the Gerault of the Chambard, all those who have had enough of the Waldeck-Millerand ministry, who deplore seeing the most read of socialist newspapers transform itself into a pale radical rag, rejoiced in their hearts at this awakening and this change of attitude by the ministerial socialists.

It was a fine fire, but a straw fire.

After a few days it was out: instead of fighting, they negotiated; whether because they found that a friendly understanding with the ministry would be more profitable to the struck academics, or because they feared to topple a ministry that was at the same time making a great swordstroke in the water to frighten the congregations or amuse the anticlerical voters. They went to see Messieurs Waldeck and Leygues. At first they thought they were about to get the satisfactions demanded: Monsieur Leygues had more or less promised the immediate reinstatement of Messieurs Fradet and Herve. But the news leaked out too soon; the nationalist evening newspapers violently attacked the Minister of Public Instruction; the Temps, for its part, exhaled its indignant astonishment in a note that had probably seen the light of day in the offices of the rue de Grenelle: the next day Monsieur Leygues was no longer cooperating. He consented only to have Monsieur Fradet the father granted a stay for the payment of the 1,200 francs the treasury was demanding of him; he vaguely promised that Monsieur Fradet the son would be placed as a schoolteacher, in October, in a department other than the Yonne; that he would give a position to Monsieur Herve if he was the object of a dismissal of charges — it would have been the last straw if he refused him one! —; he swore by all that was holy, Gascon’s honor, that he was not persecuting socialist academics — on the contrary! He would make declarations, at the tribune, that would calm the anxieties of the progressive republicans.

They were far from the concessions of the day before: so citizen Pastre did not believe he should give up interpellating; but in the face of the minister’s declarations, however insufficient they seemed to him, he resolved to show himself at the tribune more conciliatory than he had at first decided: they would produce an order of the day that would allow the ministry to save itself.

The deputy of the Gard pushed his conciliatory spirit so far as to consent successively to two postponements of his interpellation: he had moreover the formal promise of Monsieur Waldeck-Rousseau himself that the ministry would not spirit the affair away.

It was fixed for the last Friday of the session, at the afternoon sitting. In the morning, the Chamber discussed the question of import duties on wheat. A deputy of the majority requested and the Chamber granted him…

The groups are agitated, pass threatening resolutions: if the General Committee does not take toward the Waldeck-Millerand ministry an intransigent, clearly hostile attitude, there is no doubt that the entire Federation will break away from it.

It would not take many affairs like these to reduce the ministerial socialist party to a staff without soldiers.

Where the university administration, having thought to flush a hare, flushed a boar.

The Herve affair, with all the affair to which it is linked, is curious from the socialist point of view; it has another interest: it raises the so important question of the rights and duties of civil servants in political matters.

Monsieur Herve was struck for political acts imputed to him outside his functions; for in his service, by the admission of his superiors themselves, he is irreproachable and has never engaged in politics.

Well! the question is whether civil servants are deprived of a portion of their rights as citizens, in particular of the right to express and propagate their political opinions; the question is whether the educators of the youth of this country, which boasts of being a republic, whether the teachers whose mission is to fashion free citizens, must themselves, in political matters, be slaves.

The question is clearly posed in a recent article, published in the Travailleur socialiste under the signature of Sans-Patrie:

“Most of our contemporaries have a singular idea of the rights of civil servants: according to the wisdom of nations, that good old wisdom which, two centuries ago, refused freedom of conscience to minorities, fifty years ago refused the right of suffrage to those who had no fortune, the civil servant is a citizen castrated of half his political rights. They do not go so far as to refuse him the right to vote (only the soldier-civil-servant is deprived of it for entirely special reasons); they even concede him the right to think in his innermost heart differently from the government — and I should very much like to know how they could prevent him from doing so. — But what they energetically deny him is the right to say in public or to write in newspapers, even under a pseudonym, things disagreeable to the government or to the majority of the moment; for, of course, if the civil servant is governmental, he can say anything and write anything: he can sing in verse and in prose the beauties of the existing regime, flatter the ministers, exalt the disinterestedness of a Monis or the high morality of a Leygues, prove by demonstrative reasons that the reigning regime is eternal, calumniate the doctrines or the men of the opposition — none of his superiors will find anything to object to. In his service, he may be clumsy, negligent, unintelligent; no one will dare touch him, if he is covered by an influential deputy of the majority.

“And the wisdom of nations finds this very natural, very equitable, and very reasonable; if a civil servant is not happy with the government that pays him, well! let him leave! Besides, he should be ashamed to speak ill of the government whose money he accepts.

“Who has not heard these fine reasons? The most lamentable thing is that this imbecile refrain is not only served up to us by nationalists and clericals. How many times have I had to correct good republicans, even socialists, who in my presence expressed astonishment that the government kept in its service civil servants who were notoriously clerical. So true is it that in our country, which bears the weight of ten centuries of monarchy, even the avant-garde parties have in their blood the monarchical virus and the authoritarian spirit of the old despotic governments; as for the government of the Republic, after the example of the old monarchies, it would like to have in its administrations nothing but a staff of flunkies.

“You say, good people, that the government can rid itself of the civil servants who fight it, since it pays them? But your government itself, who pays it? Is it not maintained, paid by all the taxpayers? Are the taxpayers of the majority parties the only ones who pay taxes? Is it not paid by the reactionaries and the revolutionaries, just as by the governmental republicans? Do the civil servants themselves not contribute to maintaining the government? If I am a civil servant, the government pays me, but I too pay it, as a taxpayer.

“Besides, if the State pays me, it does not pay me for nothing; it pays me because I furnish it a certain labor; I do not beg from the State; if I am a post office employee, an employee of the state railways, a member of the public education service, the government has only one right over me: to demand that I discharge my service conscientiously and competently, that I do not rob it, that I am not insolent with the public, and that I do not use the chair it has given me to do militant politics in the classroom. As for the fine gentlemen whose mail I carry, whose precious persons I transport, whose progeny I educate, I do not recognize their right to conduct inquiries into my political opinions or writings, any more than I recognize the right of my superiors to question me about what I do or do not do, once my service is over.

“With your fine principles, good people, the employer would have the right, because he pays, to restrict the political freedom of his employees, clients would have the right to monitor the political opinions of the shopkeeper they keep in business, so that in our democracy only rentiers, along with a few professional politicians or journalists, would have the right to give their opinion openly on political and social questions.

“But we should all be agreed, whatever party we belong to, in demanding entire political freedom for civil servants! All republicans worthy of the name, on liberal and democratic principle; the others, the reactionaries of the right and the socialists of the far left, out of personal interest, since all republican ministries, which practice seesaw politics, strike, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, the civil servants of the opposition parties.

“Only unprincipled governors, solely concerned with keeping themselves in power, and the established men who from their desks run all the public administrations, will always reject the principle of the absolute independence of civil servants in political matters; for once this independence is proclaimed, it would be several hundred thousand more citizens in the country, several hundred thousand serfs and flunkies emancipated, free henceforth to judge and to criticize, in all security, the acts of the government and the arbitrariness of their superiors.

“But if the governments will never accept it, it does not follow that it cannot be wrested from them: civil servants will, like other citizens, have only the freedoms they know how to conquer by struggle; it is up to them to accustom their superiors and the public to respecting their political rights, and they will train the public and their superiors by resisting oppression, as a body or individually, each time the government violates in one of them — whatever his heretical opinions — the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, from whose Declaration of 89 no civil servant was excluded.

“The history professor at the lycee of Sens who has just been suspended has given for his part the example of resistance, by energetically refusing to answer the minister who questioned him about acts of his political life outside the lycee; by fighting for his own independence, whether people realize it or not, he fought for the dignity of the entire teaching body and for the political emancipation of humbler and more defenseless civil servants than the prefects hold in a veritable servitude.

“Ordinarily, when a minister commits an act of arbitrariness against one of his subordinates, the latter keeps silent, gnaws his bit and meditates in silence on the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot, unless he flattens himself to return to grace and not be thrown out on the street. Most civil servants, having no serious guarantee against the despotism of their superiors, have hardly any other alternative.

“It happens, for once, that a minister has violated the right of an energetic, stubborn civil servant — a true Breton! — who stands on principle and is quite determined not to let himself be pushed around; it happens that this civil servant is very well rated from the professional point of view, that his moral worth is doubted by no one, that he is neither a vulgar politician nor an arriviste in quest of publicity; finally, an appreciable advantage! it happens that this civil servant belongs to a body that enjoys precious guarantees, refused to many civil servants: Monsieur Herve, in his capacity as an agrege of the University, cannot be deprived of his salary without the approval of the university tribunals, the academic council and the higher council of Public Instruction, and everyone knows that since the fine awakening of consciences and energies produced in the University by the Dreyfus affair, there is perhaps not in France, at the present hour, any jurisdiction offering as many guarantees of independence, intelligence, and high morality.

“Now, in the event of a general dismissal of charges in favor of the collaborators of the Pioupiou, or in the event of acquittal by the court of assizes, Monsieur Herve is determined to demand his reinstatement at Sens, and to refuse any other position: it will then be necessary to bring him before the university tribunals, and the question of law, the question of the right of civil servants to political independence, will be posed there, whether the minister wishes it or not.”

We wished to reproduce the narration that has been read exactly as it was written before the beginning of the holidays by a perfectly informed author. It is known that Monsieur Herve has since kept what he had promised. It is known that the indictment chamber rendered a ruling of dismissal in his favor, but that the prosecution was maintained against his comrades, that immediately he denounced himself to the public prosecutor by a letter that we shall publish. How Monsieur Herve was then implicated in the prosecution, how the affair was referred to another session of assizes, how it will be judged, what will be the university consequences of the verdict, how many more times the Pastre interpellation will be postponed before it comes up, and how at the prize-giving of the Concours General Monsieur Leygues eloquently defended against us the freedoms of the teaching staff — this is what we shall relate as our contributor sends us his copy.