M. Gustave Téry
We shall put on sale on January 10th, the day of its publication:
JEAN JAURES. — Etudes Socialistes, a volume of 276 pages, published by the Societe d’Editions litteraires et artistiques, librairie Paul Ollendorff, a volume at three francs fifty.
The notice that one could read in the fourth cahier announced the Ollendorff edition.
Just published at the librairie Jacques, on sale at the bookshop of the cahiers:
GEORGES SOREL. — La ruine du monde antique, Materialist Conception of History, a volume of 284 pages, 3 francs 50.
From the first of January 1902 the Mouvement Socialiste will be located at 10, rue Monsieur-le-Prince; it will appear every Saturday, in 48 pages: the issue will cost 20 centimes, for France and Belgium, 25 centimes for other countries, the subscription 10 francs for France and Belgium, 12 francs for other countries.
We hold freely at the disposal of our subscribers:
Marcel and Pierre Baudouin: Jeanne d’Arc, a drama in three acts;
Jerome and Jean Tharaud: la lumiere;
Pierre Baudouin: Marcel, first dialogue of the harmonious city.
Send one franc for shipping costs.
To learn what the cahiers are, one may send sixty centimes to M. Andre Bourgeois, administrator of the cahiers, 8, rue de la Sorbonne. One will receive in return a specimen cahier. For three francs fifty one will receive six specimen cahiers.
We accept that our subscribers pay their subscription in monthly installments of one or two francs.
We gave the press authorization after corrections for two thousand six hundred copies of this sixth cahier on Saturday, December 28th, 1901.
We are putting this cahier into commerce; we sell it for one franc.
For group sales we sell six copies for five francs, twelve copies for nine francs, twenty copies for thirteen francs.
We published a dossier on the Herve affair in the fifteenth cahier of the second series. — Memoirs and dossiers for the freedoms of teaching personnel, 1 franc.
CHARLES GUIEYSSE. — Les Universites populaires et le mouvement ouvrier, 1 franc.
Our Cahiers are published by regular monthly subscriptions and by extraordinary subscriptions; the subscription confers no authority over the editorial direction nor over the administration: these functions remain free. We offer:
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It goes without saying that there is not a single difference of service between these different subscriptions. We simply wish that our cahiers be accessible to everyone equally.
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POLEMICS AND DOSSIERS
CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE
appearing twenty times a year
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We have on sale at the bookshop of the cahiers the roman de Tristan et Iseut, second edition, a volume at three francs fifty, or rather second printing, since publishers have the bad habit of counting editions by a certain number of copies printed rather than by the recommencement, by the order of printings, by the number of printings.
Lucky are those among us who thought in time to procure the first edition. For the publishers have since had the unfortunate idea of placing on the first page of the cover, for the second printing, a green frontispiece, supposedly artistic, depicting the faces of Tristan and Iseut. The publishers were doubtless unaware that Tristan and Iseut seem to us quite well enough drawn in the author’s French.
M. Bedier has patiently, faithfully restored for us the worn image left by the old poets. I picture this image from the text. By what right does an illustrator come to interpose, between the original image and the representation I have of it, an image of his own, more or less. One must respect this freedom of the reader. Naturally the author knew nothing of it and only noticed when the book appeared at the galleries of the Odeon. One must, however, respect the freedom of the author.
I recommend purchasing the second printing in good time. One never knows how far the zeal of a publisher may go, when he is a publisher of art.
I congratulate myself daily, faced with such examples, on having wanted to produce editions, on having continued to produce them after an unsuccessful first attempt. It is more and more indispensable that there exist institutions expressly designed to safeguard the full freedom of the author and the reader.
M. Gustave Tery
Response
The response that follows was sent to us by M. Gustave Tery after he received the fifth cahier of this third series, where we spoke of him; but he had not yet received the sixth.
You are going off the rails, my dear Peguy. The other day you publicly congratulated me for having bought a second copy of the fifteenth cahier of the second series, where M. Daniel Delafarge took up the defense of M. Brunetiere against me. You drew from this the superb conclusion that the habits of true liberty were spreading among us and that this was a beginning of revolution far more important than all the parliamentarisms. (1)
I am still flabbergasted. To tell the truth, when I went to fetch that other copy, I had totally forgotten that it contained anything about me. I simply wanted to obtain a duplicate of the articles where Gustave Herve so neatly gives the reply to the archpriest of Sens. Now, these articles happen to be in the same cahier
(1) I quote exactly: “For six months the expression I am canceling my subscription has completely disappeared from our vocabulary. Having received the fifteenth cahier, Gustave Tery neglected to cancel his subscription. He even bought a second copy. If the habits of true intellectual liberty can be introduced, maintained, and expanded among us, I declare it again, this is a beginning of revolution far more important than all the parliamentarisms.”
as the letter from M. Delafarge. I am therefore not so magnanimous as you were pleased to imagine.
For a moment, I had intended to write to you. Not to correct — one does not correct flowers — but to say a few words in reply to M. Delafarge. Certainly, when he observes that we must recognize M. Brunetiere’s right to speak his mind about Rabelais and Voltaire, he speaks gold. But in his meticulous critique, he forgot two things: the first is that we were dealing with a manual for classroom use, not a work intended for the general public. Since your contributor rightly reminded me to respect the “old distinction of genres,” I think it is unnecessary to dwell on that one. What I reproach M. Brunetiere for is precisely having disregarded it, teaching history as a polemicist, forgetting that he addresses students of rhetoric and offering them, under a scholastic label, a fighting speech.
In the second place, to justify my method of quotation, it would have sufficed to note that in la Petite Republique my space is strictly rationed. When my articles exceed two hundred lines, our very amiable editorial secretary, citizen Lejeune, no longer seeks to conceal his despair. Had I allowed myself to quote two or three sentences of M. Brunetiere in full, I would have had no room left to comment on them — or I would have outrageously exceeded the limit.
I did not write this to you for two reasons.
The first is that the very collations of M. Delafarge demonstrated my good faith. If, in obedience to the demands of page layout and so as not to needlessly sadden the best of comrades, I had been compelled to simplify somewhat the many-legged periods of Ferdinand the Catholic, if I had had to compress or suppress, your attentive readers were able to convince themselves that, at least, in my quotations, I had omitted nothing essential.
The second reason is that in a squib in la Petite Republique I had just answered the main objection of your contributor. I had the luck to find that article again — which never saw the light of day. Why? Because Lejeune told me: “If we publish this, all our fault-finders will cry out tomorrow that we are forbidding schoolteachers from doing socialist propaganda.” I was thunderstruck. “But I never wrote any such thing!” The honest Lejeune, who has experience of professional perfidy, started to laugh. “That makes no difference, you’ll see… Ah! you don’t know them.” In vain I reworked my copy to forestall any ambiguity. The article was not inserted: it was still too liberal. Here it is, as it stands. You will easily find my first draft beneath the crossings-out. And you will suspect at the same time how much I enjoy myself when you call me a Jacobin or a dictator.
So, my dear Peguy, I had not earned the good mark you awarded me last month. Nor do I deserve the punishment you are inflicting on me today.
On the evening of the session at which the Superior Council of Public Instruction had condemned Herve, the one among the judges who from the start of the affair and throughout the debates themselves had defended the accused with the greatest patience, exactitude, seriousness, and sureness, leaving the session, encountered M. Gustave Tery.
— Well? asked Tery.
— Well! he is condemned, and you may congratulate yourself for having contributed a great deal to it.
— So much the better, replied Tery, that is what we wanted.
You attribute to me there, my dear Peguy, an abominable remark. Before showing you that I am incapable of having made it, allow me to recall to you the first Cartesian precept: “…never to accept anything as true that I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid haste and prejudice…”
Until this day I had every reason to believe us friends. You proposed to me not long ago to reserve twenty pages of the Cahiers for me to finish saying what I thought about the Denis-Deherme incident. I shall explain to you presently why I did not do so. Just last week, still on that same subject, Charles Guieysse having written in his excellent study on the popular universities that I had fulminated against Deherme, that I was simply an authoritarian, a demagogue, and that I had howled, I thought I should send a few lines of protest to M. Guieysse. I had to tell him that one could not in justice call a demagogic howl the article in which I commented in very measured, very academic terms on the fine letter that M. Gabriel Seailles had done me the honor of writing to me. M. Guieysse replied most courteously that “every judgment for him was always revisable.” On your side, my dear Peguy, spontaneously and with a good grace for which I thank you, you offered to insert a correction in your next cahier. I did not send it to you. I had at that time multiple concerns — civil and military — I was doing my twenty-eight days of military service. And besides, what is the use of affirming one’s liberalism? Better to prove it. The enclosed article is perhaps a beginning of proof.
I know very well that we do not share the same conception of liberalism; from M. de Mun to M. Aulard, so many different things are put under that word! At the least, the first way of showing one’s liberalism, my dear Peguy, is to admit that our neighbors may understand liberty differently.
If I recall these two recent memories to you, it is to make you understand fully what was my… surprise on leafing through your latest cahier. I pass over our prior relations and limit myself to noting that only the day before you were giving me a token of friendship. All at once, bang! without warning, you fall upon me, and not only do you accuse me of a dirty trick, but in sibylline terms you let the worst suspicions weigh upon me and, deliberately, you roll up your sleeves to settle my case.
I shall not speak, O fierce Alceste, of the small duties that friendship commands. It will suffice me to invoke your rationalism and to observe that by thus accepting, without criticism, without verification, a terrible remark and printing it raw, you did not employ a good method.
At the very least, before going to war, you owed me this simple question:
— Is it true that you used that language?
And I would have answered:
I want still to believe that M. X. — you will name him, if you please — is an honest man, but it is incontestable that his memory has betrayed him. For two months the circumstances have set us against one another; there is between us a misunderstanding that I strive in vain to dispel. Do not ask me what this misunderstanding is, nor what its origin may be; I should be obliged to commit certain indiscretions which no doubt would finish clearing me but which might cause damage to an excellent enterprise of which we are both collaborators. If M. X. — as your reticences seem to indicate — wishes to take responsibility for these indiscretions, I am ready to answer him; but for now, I do not need to resort to them to justify myself.
In collecting my memories, my dear Peguy, here is the sense of the words we exchanged. I say the sense, for I was a thousand leagues from supposing that you would be charged with giving a destiny to this indifferent dialogue.
With a few journalists, I had been waiting for an hour at the ministry for the judges to come out. As soon as the doors of the room where the council was deliberating were opened, we entered and I went straight to Gustave Herve. Halfway there, I met M. X. and stopped him in passing to ask him — you can imagine with what emotion —
— Well?
It was then that M. X., shaking my hand, had the rudeness to reply:
— Well! he is condemned, and you may congratulate yourself for having contributed a great deal to it.
I transcribe his reply, as he reported it to you. M. X. had indeed already told me, on several occasions, that I had poorly served the cause of Herve and that I had committed imprudences. He is free to think that our tactics were clumsy; but others — and the man himself — judged otherwise. It does not please me to investigate here the secret motives of certain prudences. What is certain is that it was not the moment to say this injurious thing to me: Your friend is condemned, and it is your fault.
Perhaps he even added — and if I cannot vouch for it, since I did not attach the same importance to his words, this is indeed what lay at the bottom of his thought, this is indeed the meaning of the insinuations you bring up —
— Gustave Herve is condemned, as you wanted.
Then, with a movement of vexation quite excusable at that moment and before that reproach, I must have replied:
— So much the better! Now we know where we stand.
— The situation is clear; the problem is posed.
— War is declared.
Or… something of the sort.
Once again, you cannot require me to remember exactly this brief reply. All I can affirm is that I did not say, that I could not have said, what I am made to have said. It would not only be an infamy, it would be a stupidity.
And here now is why I could not have said it. I leave aside what I did or tried to do to come to the rescue of Herve, my earlier articles, my testimony at the assize court and multiple steps, of which I shall give you the detail someday. Know only that it was not solely against our adversaries that it was necessary to defend Gustave Herve. I confine myself to this remark, which, I hope, will suffice to enlighten you. If I had said: That is what we wanted, it would have to be translated: It is Herve himself who wanted it.
And I do not know whether the Herve affair was closed, as you maintain, from the day when Gustave Herve “set foot in the editorial offices of la Petite Republique.” What I know well is that I did nothing to draw him there, nor even to keep him there. He came to see us, as he went to l’Aurore, no doubt judging that he would find, as at the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, friends and defenders. What I also know well is that my last articles — the very ones M. X. did not approve — were drafted on the instructions of Gustave Herve; and finally that my last article, Rabier-Boisdeffre, published the very morning of the day the superior council met, was written in collaboration with Gustave Herve. He drew up the plan on my table the day before the session; and I read him my column the next day, to make quite sure I had faithfully developed his “argument.” I was ready to cross out, in the manner of a docile schoolboy, all the sentences he might judge inopportune. Is it not precisely that article which earned me the rebuff from M. X.?
And you, on top of all that, now you call me:
Dictator! At that word, Lapicque exclaimed:
— Tery, a dictator? It’s true: he writes very well under dictation.
From this witticism, you are free to draw a jest: I still prefer that to a calumny.
I come to your threatening commentary. It seems I owe you an accounting, and you are preparing to demand it. So be it. Allow me to take the initiative, without awaiting the bizarre delays you assign me. When one accuses someone, one takes care to formulate clearly what one accuses him of. If your method is ill-considered, I do not insult you by believing it has any kinship with that of Basile. Say all you know, right away. What? What is there?
As far as I am able to judge from your tenebrous pretentions and the few reflections Herve has shared with me, you are apparently proposing to summon me to appear before the upright Peguy under the charge of careerism? I watch for the word at the edge of your lips, the word of suspicion and ostracism that discourages the best intentions. I would make quick work of answering, and I easily suspect — for I am beginning to know the dear comrades — that I shall have to answer someday, but I never would have imagined that you would be the first to hurl this imbecile outrage at me.
Arrive at what, my poor Peguy? At a seat in Parliament? Set your mind at rest: I shall not be a deputy; I shall not be a candidate. I have been approached, sounded out; I said: no. And it is not that I despise parliamentarism. It is first of all that I do not yet feel up to holding my role in the Chamber with dignity. It is also perhaps — and this is not contradictory, despite appearances — that I have higher ambitions. I shall explain that to you when we have time. You may infer from this, if you like, that I have my eye on the Presidency of the Republic.
Are you satisfied?
No, not yet. I hear clever people who say: “There are other forms of careerism. Tery wants to make himself a brilliant position in the press.” And it is for that, no doubt, go ahead and say it! that I treated the Herve affair not as a “university man” but as a journalist, thirsting for publicity. — See above.
Here then is my “brilliant position.” Since the last holidays, I have been on regular salary at la Petite Republique. For an almost daily collaboration, I receive 200 francs — two hundred francs — per month. I was earning three hundred when I began as a sixth-form teacher at the lycee of Carcassonne.
— And his wife? the clever ones resume. There are two of them putting black on white.
For some months my wife has been unwell and earns nothing, or almost. Besides, we are not two; we are four — and even a little more.
Fortunately, Les Cordicoles brought me in eight hundred francs. We have enough to get through the winter. And after?
Truly, I do not pose as hero or martyr. But I have the pride of believing that I apply myself to following my path straight ahead, my “chimera.” I could, like others, devote myself to alimentary literature. I shall have to resign myself to it, one day or another, and renounce my proud dream of free life and free thought. In the meantime, I have the right to be treated with more consideration.
I had wanted to write you a letter you could insert. I notice on rereading this one that it would be painful for me to confide these personal details to your readers. I content myself with the hope that you will recognize your error. Insert therefore in your next cahier a few lines of correction — I do not say apology — and I shake your hands.
GUSTAVE TERY
On reflection, it seems to me indispensable to place before your readers the explanations above. I only ask you — by a feeling of elementary modesty — not to publish the end of my letter starting from: “Are you satisfied?” It is unnecessary, I think, to invoke these budgetary details, and above all to bring my wife into it. But I wanted to hide nothing from you, certain of your discretion. I want to see you.
Particular Responses
Charles Peguy
When Tery’s response reached me, I had begun to draft the testimony I wish to contribute to the clarification of the Herve case. I shall continue that drafting. But I want to clear the ground of my testimony by replying point by point to Tery’s response. However I shall not let myself be led today into putting Tery on trial.
I shall not imitate the bantering tone of my comrade. I am incapable of it. And my heart is not light.
§. — Tery was wrong to have forgotten that the collations of Daniel Delafarge were in the same cahier as the beginning of the Herve story. It was not by chance that we brought together in the fifteenth cahier of the second series: memoirs and dossiers for the freedoms of teaching personnel in France, the attacks committed against those freedoms by M. Monteil, by the slanderers of Jaures, by Tery, by M. Leygues. Nor was it to make a witticism. It was a curve of interesting cases where the common liberty, under various serial aspects, was at stake.
§. — I did not say that Tery was magnanimous in this matter. But I said, hoped, that he was becoming or once more becoming liberal. If he now wishes to diminish the esteem we had for his act, I consent. Why play at humility? That is another form of pride.
§. — Superb conclusion. A conclusion that consoled me a little. A hope that was being born. I did not draw it from the Tery case alone. I considered his act as a reassuring symptom. I warn our subscribers once and for all that I am often mistaken about men. I extend to most men a credit far more considerable than what they have a right to. Besides my natural imbecility, I do it on purpose: it is better to misplace credit with many people than to risk refusing credit to a single person who might deserve it.
§. — Daniel Delafarge plies his trade as a professor in the provinces. He will allow me to answer for him. Delafarge did not take up the defense of M. Brunetiere against Tery. He defended the professional freedom of M. Brunetiere.
Several of our subscribers told me at the time that Delafarge’s confrontations had not seemed to them decisive. Nothing is so difficult to make people grasp as slippages. But the confrontations seemed exemplary to those who had read all of Brunetiere before reading Tery. Jean Deck, whose cahier in defense of national liberty in Finland we await impatiently, told me that, having worked with the Manual of M. Brunetiere, the articles of his comrade Gustave Tery had seemed to him a perpetual falsification. I myself found that Delafarge’s confrontations yielded grave results.
Tery plays — crudely? — on the word manual. Everyone knows that there are manuals of anatomy or physiology, manuals of administrative law, that weigh kilos. It was out of a respectable scruple that M. Brunetiere named his manual a manual of the history of French literature. A manual so large — 532 pages octavo for five francs — is already a considerable work. Let it be combated, if one will, by other manuals, by the excellent Histoire of M. Lanson. I do not accept that one combats a manual by a secular interdict, by an index. And besides, rhetoric students run far greater dangers than working with M. Brunetiere’s manual. I demand for the rhetoric students, and even for the philosophy students, the salutary freedom that M. Tery is willing to grant the general public.
In the second place, that Tery’s space is strictly rationed in la Petite Republique is a matter between them. As a reader I must say to M. citizen Lejeune that the long articles of Jaures interest me much more in the paper than the dust of the news column. On the length of the sentences Tery ought to quote, a slightly hackneyed normalien joke. As an attentive reader, I believe the abridgment was badly done, that it is tendentious.
§. — Ferdinand the Catholic. Ferdinand the Tala? One must not live one’s whole life on School slang.
§. — We are happy to publish here the article by Tery that la Petite Republique refused. We put in italics what had been suppressed from the first draft. The original italics have been placed in quotation marks.
But how right I am to think that one is not free in the newspapers.
Speak Reason: Reply to a Schoolteacher
Gustave Tery
One of our comrades, a schoolteacher, asks me:
Would you be so kind as to indicate in one of your articles whether there exist any works of “socialist morality,” history, civics, or elementary socialist readings, from which schoolteachers might take inspiration and which are within the reach of our modest purses?
We would very much like to put in the hands of our pupils books conceived in a socialist spirit, but we have none. Let our socialist writers make us good books: that will be the best propaganda.
My correspondent will perhaps be surprised by my reply, which I want to make publicly, for perhaps many socialist schoolteachers are asking themselves the same question.
No, my dear comrade, I know of no “socialist” textbooks; I do not believe there are any, and, if they existed, I do not hesitate to say that I would not recommend them to you, for, from a pedagogical standpoint, they would seem to me detestable. Should we deplore this? At the risk of seeing my intransigent liberalism interpreted unfavorably — is socialism not always and everywhere liberty? — I dare to say that this lack of manuals, of socialist catechisms for children, honors our party.
Understand me well.
Like several of our colleagues, I have thought it my duty to point out a certain number of manuals infected with clericalism and nationalism. And I have not finished dissecting them. But we would lose the right to affirm that their authors lack spiritual probity, if, were it with the best intentions in the world, we followed their example and sought to exert some pressure on the minds and consciences of our pupils.
Will you tell me that socialism and nationalism are not the same thing? No doubt, but you understand the meaning of my comparison. It must not be possible for anyone to accuse us of doing at school and at the lycee what we very justly reproach our adversaries for. We must not teach a socialist catechism; our duty is to teach reason. And that suffices well enough, if you are convinced as I am — I am sure of it — that reason must necessarily lead us to socialism. And as I wrote the other day, if it is otherwise, it is not reason that will be wrong, it is socialism.
Let there emerge from your rationalist teaching, from your impartial exposition of facts and doctrines, the conclusion that socialism is truth: nothing better. But it is not for you to draw this conclusion; it is for your pupils alone to form freely, with full knowledge, through the critical examination of ideas in contention, a reasoned, solid conviction. Strive to put in their hands all the documents of the social trial, but do not believe that your role consists of judging in last resort. You would serve the socialist idea badly if you sought to impose it.
The essential defect of clerical education is its dogmatism. Now, what constitutes precisely our superiority over the cassocked pedagogues is that we are not, that we must not be, that we do not wish to be dogmatic, that is to say that we do not claim to bring our pupils ready-made truths. We do not accept the principle of authority, in whatever form it presents itself. Let us therefore not abuse our authority as educators, even were it to hasten the triumph of a cause we judge good. There is only one authority, that of reason. Let it have the last word: that is our sole concern.
There is no socialist morality, there is no socialist history. And Jaures, who leaves all his collaborators entire freedom, who leaves us all the right to say here our whole thought, will permit me to observe that, of the fine work of which he is the principal collaborator, one thing alone seems to me regrettable: the title.
Moreover, it is not a question of a publication “for schoolchildren.” And on this subject, I think I should reply in passing to another of our comrades, that if I took the liberty of underscoring the reactionary tendencies of the “Manual of the History of French Literature” published by M. Brunetiere, it is precisely because it is a “manual.” Certainly, I do not dispute M. Brunetiere’s right to say his mind about Rabelais and Voltaire; what I dispute is his right to conduct, under color of education, a clerical propaganda, sly or cynical.
That is to say that it seems to me just to distinguish between the pupil and the teacher. And if I do not believe it useful, nor even honest, to put in the hands of our schoolchildren works inspired by a party spirit, whatever the party, in contrast, my dear comrade, with that reservation made, I recover all my freedom to answer your first question and to advise you to read attentively the Histoire socialiste.
The catalogues of the “Bibliotheque socialiste” and the Societe nouvelle de librairie et d’edition (17, rue Cujas), the Librairie de propagande socialiste (31, rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs), the Bibliotheque ouvriere socialiste (12, rue du Commandeur), the Librairie des Cahiers de la Quinzaine (16, rue de la Sorbonne), the Librairie Cornely (101, rue de Vaugirard) will offer you the wherewithal to satisfy the most voracious appetite for reading.
You will also find in some of these catalogues a too-short list of good textbooks, whose authors, socialist or not, had in writing for young people only scientific preoccupations.
I especially recommend to our comrade schoolteachers two excellent collections of popular lectures published by the librairie Cornely: Pour l’Ecole laique, by Jacob; — Pour la democratie francaise, by C. Bougle.
Charles Peguy
§. — It is entirely regrettable that Tery did not bring this article to the cahiers when la Petite Republique had refused it.
§. — It seems to me that there is a notable gap between this article by M. Tery and his habitual conduct.
§. — I do not award any good marks. I inflict no punishments. Tery never sees me at the socialist prize-giving ceremonies where he goes, where he speaks.
This remark: So much the better, that is what we wanted — is not abominable, but very dangerous. It is customary. See my testimony.
I return to Tery the Cartesian precept. I have almost too carefully avoided haste in this affair. Every time I saw Herve at the cahiers, I told him: Here is the mistake you are about to make. He answered me more or less invariably: I know it as well as you; but one must not displease friends. I foresaw and announced in good time every mistake. They were committed automatically. I held my tongue. I let Herve freely direct his whole affair in the cahiers by himself. I somewhat compromised the cahiers for him. I owe above all to him the loss of M. Driault’s subscription and somewhat to him the loss of M. Dorison’s subscription. I held my tongue. I even obeyed. I carried out the steps I was asked to carry out. I intervene today when the defeat is already accomplished. Perhaps I did not act hastily enough.
Has Tery carefully avoided haste?
I have no prejudice against Tery; he himself furnishes several proofs of this in the following paragraphs.
§. — I have never done anything that would authorize Tery to believe himself my friend or to believe me his. We have always been good comrades, which means practically nothing. We were at the rue d’Ulm together for a year, two graduating classes apart. We therefore address one another as tu. Must this confer a reciprocal immunity in civic battles? Shall we step out from the lines and send one another these winged words:
— Is it not you, the valiant Tery, who dwelt at the Palais while my class was thinking of the examination?
— Is it not you, Peguy the Corsican, who was thinking of the examination while I soared in the heights?
No, is it not so, my comrade. We cannot bank our whole lives on shared memories. We cannot all our lives spend the currency of our school friendships. Serious difficulties await us. Let us approach them, let us approach one another, without prior camaraderie.
I have friends. I have fewer since I was unfortunate. But I believe they are better. They know one another and I know them by the fact that at every moment they tell me what they believe to be the truth about what I do. I know them and they know one another by the fact that at every moment I tell them what I believe to be the truth about what they do. If Tery were my friend, I would not have waited so long to attack him in the cahiers. I did not wait for Jaures, of whom I believe I may call myself a friend, in the sense in which a young man of my situation may call himself the friend of so great an orator. Indeed, for Jaures I almost went out to meet the criticisms to be made. I made, I believe, preventive criticisms.
§. — For me too, every judgment is revisable.
§. — Yes, the article we reproduced would demonstrate liberalism. I do not believe that Tery has conducted himself and conducts himself in accordance with that article.
§. — I believe that I have a conception of liberalism and that Tery does not have a conception of liberalism. He has a conception of government. That is the opposite.
I would not ask for a lesson in liberalism from the Comte Albert de Mun, nor would I ask one from M. Aulard.
No, the best way of demonstrating one’s liberalism is not to admit — intellectually — that our neighbors may understand liberty differently, to admit in particular that they understand liberty as the liberty to exercise a commanding authority. — Moreover, even if that were the case, you would still not be liberal. — But it is to admit — socially — that our neighbors freely understand their liberty. Let us not confuse intellectual cowardice with the sense of liberty. One is not a libertarian because one approves a false argument. But one is a libertarian when to arguments one believes false one refuses to oppose economic sanctions.
§. — No, on the day before he was still not giving me a token of friendship. I have never given him a token of friendship. He believes that friendship manifests itself through a privilege which itself amounts to what we call simple justice. When I offered him ample facility of response in the cahiers themselves, I was only doing my duty as editor. It was justice, not friendship nor charity. Journalists are so accustomed to the abuse of their power that, in granting a right, they believe they are bestowing a favor. It is through a misreading of what he would have done in my place that he was led to a misunderstanding of the meaning of what I was doing.
§. — Our prior relations. Tery has always been cordial with me in manner, and I have returned the same, as much as I can be amiable, which is to say little. Must this confer a reciprocal immunity in civic battles? The immunity would come cheaply. He would have the right to hit everyone and we would not have the right to hit him, because he knows how to shake hands warmly, because his gaze is warm? He himself does not believe it, since at the same time that he was giving me his best handshakes he was stifling the cahiers as much as he could in la Petite Republique. One is invited to calculate how much space reviews of our cahiers occupy in la Petite Republique. Even Jean Coste, which was such a major university event, which was at the heart of the column Tery ran in the newspaper, was spirited away. If Tery was obeying orders, where is his freedom? If he was stifling of his own accord, where is his friendship? When he explained in several columns that he did not have room to publish that response of ours — where is his sincerity? He accuses me of haste, me, who having been the one attacked, did not demand that my response be inserted, who waited ten months, who would have waited forever had they not started again.
§. — Have we reached the point where we judge our comrades, our friends, our collaborators, men, by their affability? He is very amiable, one says of people who must have the gravest concerns. And with that, madam? As if the qualities that make a good shop clerk were also those we ask of our leaders.
§. — Without warning. I did not wait to alert those concerned. I did not play, I do not play, the prophet after the fact. I pointed out to Herve every mistake being made as it was being prepared.
§. — For six months I have been watching us be defeated. And for six months I have kept silent, and obeyed, in the ranks. It is always the same story. I do not believe we are lions, although there are among us unsuspected acts of devotion. But it would be a shame if we were led by donkeys.
§. — I did not accuse him of a dirty trick. I did not say, no one heard me say, that he was in the pay of M. Leygues to make us lose the battle. I accuse him, and not in sibylline terms, at least of recklessness.
Fortunately for us, we do not have in these cahiers the traitor mentality, as we named it at the time of the Affair. We do not see Bazaines everywhere. But we are forced to observe that there is an incredible number of Mac-Mahons, Dukes of Magenta, among our leaders.
§. — I said that our leaders were making us lose with a light heart. This is evident in the very tone of Tery. So this was not sibylline. This affair so consumed me that I was saddened by the defeat to the point of falling ill. Our leaders did not lose their banter over it.
§. — Fierce Alceste: a joke already old.
§. — Tery plays — crudely? — on the word affair. I said the Tery affair as he himself says the Herve affair.
§. — Friendship does not command small duties. It commands great duties, or nothing.
§. — My rationalism is satisfied by the full hospitality we give to Tery’s response. I would have been happy if his rationalism had led him to do as much.
§. — I was certain that M. Gallouedec is an honest man. It is idle to say so, because everyone knows it. M. Gallouedec is a professor. I knew him for several years at the lycee of Orleans, where I was a student. He taught history there. He was my teacher for a year. No reference on a man is worth the kind of reference one can have in this way. M. Gallouedec is the elected representative of the agreges in history on the Superior Council.
§. — I believe that M. Gallouedec is separated from Tery by a misunderstanding comparable to the one that separates me from Tery. Some people used to tell us as well that the Dreyfus Affair was a misunderstanding. What Tery here calls a misunderstanding, I call in plain French profound divisions and total incompatibilities of action. M. Gallouedec, from whom the Societe Condorcet was born, wanted it to remain, wants it to become again, university-based. Tery dragged it down and wants to keep it in politics.
§. — I was not charged with making a big deal of anything. I am never charged with anything by anyone. I charge myself, all alone. To produce the cahiers, and also because it is my right and my duty as a citizen, as a socialist, I seek to inform myself about public action. The Herve affair had become, in the first place, a matter of public action. I carry out by proxy the steps that the subscriber in Sisteron cannot take, nor always the one in Paris. M. Pierre-Felix Pecaut reported the remark to me exactly as I myself reported it. I requested an appointment with M. Gallouedec. He repeated the remark identically. He did not authorize me to report it. He could not forbid me. I am old enough to make whatever citations are necessary.
§. — Indifferent dialogue: that is a good one from the leader. Immediately after the consummation of the defeat, in a swift duel of words, brief, two methods confront one another, two defeated men face off, the deep contrariety erupts in two striking formulas. He calls that an indifferent dialogue. He is no man of the theater.
§. — Rudeness. He is demanding, the leader. For six months we have been sustaining a university battle for the defense of our rare freedoms, and we feel ourselves beaten day by day by the meddling of the politicians. And on the last evening, at the last moment, when it is over, as the soldiers say, we do not have the right to tell them their truths. We must still look pleased?
§. — M. Gallouedec was very kind to call imprudences what I call usurpations, through incompetence or negligence. Your tactics were not merely clumsy. They were wrong.
§. — Others judged otherwise. The perpetual incompetents. Events have judged as we did.
§. — The interested party himself judged otherwise. But who was the interested party? We were all the interested parties. It was liberty that was the great interested party. It was not only a matter of saving Herve, but of saving, in Herve, our common freedoms. If Herve wished to commit judicial suicide, he did not have the right to commit suicide on behalf of liberty.
The interested party himself judged otherwise. This affirmation is capital in Tery’s response. I have no right to call it into question. Herve came to the cahiers at the beginning of his affair. He spoke of la Petite Republique a little more severely than I. He spoke of Tery a little more provisionally than I. He by no means shared Tery’s policy. Shortly after, when I asked him why he was rallying to the policy of Tery and la Petite Republique, he gave me the impression that he was following out of weakness, not out of assent. If at the same time he was giving the politicians, Tery, the impression that he was with them, Tery’s responsibility diminishes, but Herve’s responsibility grows by that much. I therefore provisionally withdraw what I said that might have implied that Tery’s responsibility was total, and I shall discuss in my testimony the shares of responsibility. Herve is not above discussion. None of us is above discussion.
§. — I urgently ask Tery to investigate the secret motives of certain prudences. If we are cowards, or politicians, let it be said.
§. — Your friend is condemned, and it is your fault — is not an insult, but historically true.
§. — These words were worth their weight, both in themselves and because they came at the culmination of a capital affair.
§. — There was no insinuation, but a formal accusation, formulated long since.
§. — I call upon those of our subscribers, Tery included, who have done textual criticism, who have tried to establish a text. If a manuscript a gave this reading:
So much the better! Now we know where we stand.
If a second manuscript b gave us:
The situation is clear; the problem is posed.
If a third c gave:
War is declared.
If there were still many manuscripts d, e, f… giving something of the sort, and if these manuscripts were as uncertain as Tery’s memory, every philologist would suppose that these variable, floating, literary-sounding readings were the literarized deformations of a primitive non-literary reading. And the non-literary primitive reading that one would suppose in the unknown parent manuscript A would no doubt be the brief and well-struck phrase: that is what we wanted.
A. — So much the better, that is what we wanted.
a. — So much the better! Now we know where we stand. / b. — So much the better! The situation is clear; the problem is posed. / c. — So much the better! War is declared. / d. — Something of the sort.
I do not claim that this method suffices to give historical certainty. If I had only Tery’s readings, I would not affirm that the primitive reading is the one I give. It would be the most plausible of conjectures, but it would be only a conjecture. I say merely that in the discussion of my text, brought from elsewhere, all the value that conjecture can have tends to corroborate this text, and not to discredit it. Philologically, I therefore maintain my text.
At equal hypothesis, my primary text embraces Tery’s secondary texts. None of his secondary texts embraces the other secondary texts, nor the primary text.
Tery recalls a brief reply. My text is brief; his are not. At an equal number of syllables, mine is brief; his are not. Mine is of the brief genre; his are of the long genre. It is a matter of genre and of speed, not merely of quantity.
§. — Tery is willing to have had a movement of vexation, before that reproach. He had had emotion, belated. Why should we not have a movement of anger, before this disaster?
§. — I do not require that Tery remember his text exactly. I ask that he not use his inexact memory against my exact memory.
§. — I did not say, I could not have said, what I am made to have said. I would prefer him simply to affirm he did not say it. Could not have said adds a reinforcement of justification that on the contrary undermines the simple justification, by demonstrating it incomplete, uncertain. He could so well have said my text that his own versions are the literary dilutions, the fragmentary literary refractions of this text.
§. — No, it would not have been an infamy, since there was no treason by felony. Yes, it was a stupidity. The perpetual political stupidity. The perpetual treason by incompetence or negligence.
§. — My text fits perfectly into the fabric of the affair, and of all political affairs. The socialist party, to my knowledge, has never suffered a single defeat, electoral or otherwise, that was not greeted by songs of victory. Someday I shall publish the stenographic record of the speeches delivered at the inauguration of the Socialist Cooperative, the great workers’ bakery, immediately after the heavy blow of the Paris municipal elections. It will be my introduction to the legislative elections.
§. — I believe precisely that one should not have rushed to the rescue of Herve, that Herve did not need rescue. Generally speaking, there is always too much rescue. I believe that Tery’s rescue of Herve did much harm to Herve. See testimony.
§. — I believe precisely that it was Tery’s articles that ruined us.
§. — I have always wondered what Tery could possibly have testified about before the jury of the Yonne.
§. — I believe very readily that Tery carried out multiple steps. But what if they were bad ones? Tery is very active. I would prefer him to be a man of action.
§. — Herve had to be defended against himself, against his own momentum.
§. — I perfectly accept the translation: It is Herve himself who wanted it. It does not contradict my text. It is literally true that in one sense Herve too wanted it.
§. — Yes. Herve received at la Petite Republique heavy praises, by which he did not seem sufficiently inconvenienced. At the famous banquet, he received a sonnet in the stomach. Like a sub-prefect on an inspection tour. It is not the author of the sonnet I blame. It is the recipient.
§. — L’Aurore. Pressense praised Herve greatly, without crushing him. I am not suspected of liking Gohier. But Gohier knew how to tell Herve the few hard truths that were needed, when he, the fierce anti-ministerial, let himself be corralled, managed, displayed by a ministerial newspaper.
§. — Cahiers de la Quinzaine. As soon as I had read Herve’s articles, I told him once that he had talent. I believe it. I shall speak here of his talent. I did not repeat to him that he had talent. Congratulation is not the currency of our offices.
§. — This is almost entirely to the exoneration of Tery. It is entirely to the charge of Herve. It is very serious.
§. — The remark by Lapicque is very witty. Scientists have no equal when it comes to witticisms. If Lapicque dictated much to Tery, Tery is discharged by that much. But we shall be forced to examine even Lapicque’s responsibilities. None of us is above discussion.
I have for the vivacious tenderness of Lapicque the respectful affection we all have. He must remember how few of us went together to Versailles, on a day when it was not to see the fountains. But none of us is above discussion.
I have not seen Lapicque for at least eight months. He told me then that he thought as badly as I did of journalists and politicians. He judged la Petite Republique as severely as I.
§. — I do not believe that I am nasty, as they say. Even if I wanted to be, I would not be clever enough for that. And besides, it is tiring. The severity for which I am reproached is precisely a safeguard against calumny. Calumny often comes from suppressed severities. If one had been severe with Jaures in time, and if one had been a little less cowardly at the right moment, one might have blocked the road to calumny.
§. — My commentary is not threatening. I had to announce my intervention, as today I announce my testimony. I was thus repairing, as much as I could, the mistake I believe I made in not intervening sooner. I do not maneuver as easily in the cahiers as in a daily paper. That is why I often take note in a few words, reserving the right to set forth when I can. It was therefore not a commentary but an announcement. It was not threatening. It was tight, dense.
§. — You owe me an accounting as we all owe one incessantly, as I render one whenever I can. You have deliberately taken charge of our freedoms. What have you done with them? What have they become in your hands? Yes, you owe us this accounting.
§. — Yes, I demand it and have waited too long. If those concerned were more studious, the agents would be more serious.
§. — Bizarre delays. No, but excessive delays, I believe. What would Tery have said if I had demanded this accounting sooner?
§. — My formulations were clear, for anyone who understands French.
§. — Basile. We must leave this method of polemic to the dailies.
§. — What I know is the subject of the testimony I am preparing.
§. — There were no tenebrous pretentions, but a clear announcement.
§. — I am happy that Herve shared with Tery reflections I made in the cahiers. I published several of these reflections. I shall publish the rest. I am opposed to closed sessions.
Has Herve also reported to Tery and to la Petite Republique everything he told me at the cahiers about la Petite Republique and Tery, and if he reported everything, did he do so in the tragic or playful tone, which do not wound, like the buffoonery of the ancient slave, or in the serious tone, which touches?
§. — To summon me to appear before the upright Peguy. If this vicious expression comes from Herve, that fellow has committed a wicked action. Herve knows what we use the little time remaining to us at the cahiers for, once we have done the management and the administration. If it comes from Tery, Tery is wrong to want to make me ridiculous. I know it is easy to make me ridiculous. I know all the reproaches one can make against my cravat. But it is a lie to represent me as someone before whom one appears. It is true that the cahiers are upright. No jester shall make me ashamed of that. But I hate posing as a vice and flattery as filth. Tery knows it. It is not at the cahiers that one says: my dear master, or my dear and great friend, nor that one shakes hands with a reversed, broken wrist.
§. — I hate the fear of ridicule as a great cowardice.
§. — The charge of careerism. I long said that I wondered whether Tery was a careerist. I now affirm that he was one, and that he is arriving, that he has arrived. What! In an affair where the gravest freedoms were at stake, instead of doing his duty in his place, like us, among us, he splashed his fancy across a hundred thousand copies, and he wonders what it means to arrive. Instead of doing his share of the common labor, modestly, among us, he alone, or nearly alone, wrecked the whole common effort, and he asks me arrive at what? He was for six months the anti-minister of public instruction. And he asks me, my poor Peguy.
§. — Suspicion. Let Tery be reassured. It is not yet by suspicion of its leaders that this people sins. It sins by its mistrust of disagreeable truth.
§. — Ostracism. Let Tery be reassured. One could ostracize a Jaures. One cannot ostracize a journalist who practices anticlerical demagoguery. In France, clericalism and anticlericalism are the only ones that feed their men. Pure socialism and pure anarchism let their modest workers starve. And besides, ostracism presupposes a certain state of glory that Tery has not yet reached. Tery is a young man. — One only ostracizes the great.
§. — Which discourages the best intentions. Let us not grow sentimental.
Common friends — one always has common friends — have assured me that Tery was profoundly affected by my attack. They are extraordinary. For eighteen months they hit everyone. He was ferociously insolent to Deherme, whom one may love or not love, approve or blame, but who at least had behind him a body of work and upon him heavy administrative cares, heavy financial embarrassments, who finally was alone against nearly everyone, who did not have a large newspaper. Then when the victims turn around, these journalists discover, for their personal use, that blows are painful.
§. — The dear comrades. Who more than Tery, as much as Tery, except Lumet, has used the dear comrade? When Lumet writes a big front-page article about Les Cordicoles, what is that?
§. — The first. Here is why. At the cooperative restaurant, in small company, while eating, while talking, at the hour when one says what one thinks, everyone, the citizens, tell the absent authorities what they think of them. But when it comes to writing, they let old Peguy march alone. I know the routine.
I was very pained to see on the third page of the cover of the Mouvement Socialiste, first issue of the new formation, the announcement of Les Cordicoles. This book is in no way suited to the readership of the Mouvement, to the broader public we hope it will reach.
§. — Imbecile. Thank you.
§. — Outrage. No: a judgment, for me; or a hypothesis, for him.
§. — The deputyship. They think they have said everything when they have promised us they will not be candidates in the next legislative elections. The parliamentary disease is not limited to the Chamber. It does not coincide with the Chamber. There are some deputies who are hardly afflicted with the parliamentary disease, at least in this sense: M. Paul Guieysse, M. Vazeille. And there are innumerable quantities of parliamentarians who are not deputies.
§. — He does not despise parliamentarism. He is healthy. So am I. I only fear the parliamentary disease.
§. — He does not yet feel up to holding his role in the Chamber with dignity. Why did he feel up to holding with dignity a more considerable and more difficult role in the country, in public action? It is easier to be, and it is better to be, a modest deputy who works in the committees than a journalist-captain.
§. — He has higher ambitions. I await impatiently his explanation. I readily believe they are higher. But if they are only bigger, vaster, I am worried. High ambitions do not begin their life as his has.
What worries me is precisely that he believes he has not arrived, having what he has.
I am willing for one to be president of the Republic. The presidents of the Republic trouble us less than our own leaders.
§. — I did not wish to make of Tery a stolen quotation. I know that there would be moral and even intellectual disloyalty in transporting into print, into publication, a surprised witticism, a fragment of private conversation. But Tery’s remark is not that. It is a public remark uttered in a public crisis, and above all this remark expresses, gathers admirably, exactly, Tery’s entire policy. In quoting it I committed no deviation, no usurpation, no alteration.
§. — We were able in these cahiers to publish without indiscretion the end of the response as well. We do not have the wide circulation, the mixed readership, of a daily. Our subscribers are discreet themselves, by situation, by culture, by method. They know how to read. They understand well.
I kept this ending because it would have been missed even by Tery. It is in my view very important. We socialists know how much the establishment of a budget matters — public budget, social, national, the budget of an institution, a private budget. We do not despise the economic. We know, on the contrary — because we wish to deliver the world from economic servitudes — everything that the consideration of economics is worth.
I myself raised these questions in their time. One must know how to speak of money when the time comes. There is a kind of hypocrisy in keeping silent about it.
§. — Tery does not want to make himself a brilliant position in the press. He wanted to make and has made himself a brilliant position in the press and in politics. There are positions that are not brilliant financially and that are brilliant socially. There are positions that are not brilliant financially, and that are the indispensable passage, the inevitable introduction to the great, or the brilliant, financial positions. These are apprenticeships. In administrations, there are very large positions that required poorly paid, if not unpaid, apprenticeships. In politics one is secretary to an influential man. In journalism too. In the beginning one gives one’s prose for almost nothing, or even nothing. Let us be clear. Nothing in money. But a great deal of publicity, of renown, of power. A young author, a young journalist considers himself paid when he receives publication in a newspaper. How many authors have paid their publishers for the printing of their first volumes, of all their volumes, often at inflated prices. I would not be surprised if there were in newspapers authors who pay. That must happen. It is a change of order. The newspaper leaves the order of labor it pays for and enters the order of publicity it is paid for. The author leaves the order of labor he is paid for and enters the order of publishing, of publicity that he pays for.
§. — The forms of careerism are innumerable.
§. — It is true, I say it, that he treated the Herve affair not as a university man but as a journalist.
§. — It is true that he is, that they are, thirsting for publicity.
§. — This proves, as I have long said, that the contributors to la Petite Republique, or certain of these contributors, are not paid enough. Tery provides the newspaper with more than three hundred francs’ worth of copy per month. I would prefer he were paid three hundred francs and that his work were serious, good, well done. I would prefer he were paid three hundred francs in money per month, and that he did not pay himself such a considerable supplement in publicity.
§. — Yes, from Carcassonne to Paris Tery has lost a hundred francs a month. But from Tery, sixth-form teacher at the lycee of Carcassonne, to the Tery we know, what rapid advancement in reality.
§. — I have left in the passage concerning Madame Tery. I was able to do so without indiscretion. Madame Tery is a well-known journalist. And only recently she was named to the Condorcet committee together with Tery.
§. — Of all the ways of earning money, writing Les Cordicoles is not the most honest.
§. — I am not qualified to draw up Tery’s budget. But I would be happy to know whether his collaboration with la Raison is unpaid.
§. — We have enough to get through the winter. I have personal reasons for greatly appreciating this kind of argument. That is why I kept this last part of the defense.
§. — That is all we need.
§. — No, he does not follow his path straight. I do not know if his path is crafty. But I know well that it is crooked. Even among the politicians and the journalists, Tery is scandalous for the tortuousness of his ways.
§. — It is not a matter of following one’s chimera. I did not think we had chimeras.
§. — One must not despise alimentary literature. Everything that is alimentary, nourishing, everything that saves honest people from final starvation, is by that very fact respectable. I was hoping precisely, for Tery’s sake, that Les Cordicoles was alimentary literature. If it is literary literature, that is serious.
Correcting a publisher’s proofs, writing a good article for an encyclopedia, putting a doctoral thesis into Latin, as they say is done, is in no way dishonorable.
§. — Proud dream of free life and free thought. Come, come, calm down.
§. — Which of his adversaries or enemies has he ever treated with consideration? And yet, not being for the law of retaliation, we treated him, we treat him, with a just consideration.
§. — What wavering in his very response. I believe I served his interest well by publishing the whole of this response, by not suppressing the end, which is its strongest part.
We publish today the Wagram article, which has drawn attention. Our subscribers asked us for it. I asked Herve for it. A subscriber sends it to us from the Yonne. This article was published in the Travailleur Socialiste de l’Yonne, Organ of the Federation of Socialist Workers of the Department, appearing Saturday mornings, issue of Saturday, July 20th, 1901.
The Anniversary of Wagram
Gustave Herve
The regiment garrisoned at Auxerre and many other regiments of our invincible army have just celebrated the anniversary of Wagram.
Wagram! A day of shame and mourning!
A great nation that had just proclaimed the rights of man and of the citizen had been for ten years madly in love with a bandit in uniform. Having risen to greatness through war, he judged war indispensable to the maintenance of his throne; it had become for him an imperious need, a true passion — a gambler’s passion. He had succeeded in communicating his murderous madness to France by the lure of fine plumes, of gaudy and garish uniforms, by the lure of decorations, stripes, endowments; everything that was young and vigorous in the country rushed at a signal from the master now upon Germany, now upon Austria, upon Spain or upon Russia.
In 1809, without letting go of agonizing Spain, it was Austria they were hounding, an Austria already dismembered, carved up, amputated of provinces larger than Alsace. 240,000 men were face to face on the plains of Wagram, 120,000 Austrians, 120,000 Frenchmen. For twelve hours, rifle fire and cannonade raged; these two herds, with nothing human left in them, sprang at one another’s throats, let go, returned to the carnage, drunk on brandy, gunpowder, and blood.
“When a battle takes place during the summer,” recounts General Marbot, one of the heroes of Wagram, “it often happens that shells and gun wads set fire to the wheat already ripe; but Wagram was, of all the battles of the Empire, the one in which the most fires of this kind were seen. The year was early; the heat was dreadful, and the terrain on which we fought was an immense plain entirely covered with grain.
“On the eve of being harvested, the crops caught fire very easily; and when fire broke out at one point, it spread with a frightening rapidity for both armies, whose movements were often impeded by the necessity of avoiding the destructive scourge. Woe to the troops that let themselves be caught! The powder contained in the cartridge boxes and the caissons would ignite and carry death into the ranks. One saw then battalions and even entire regiments rush forward at a run to escape the fire and reach positions where the wheat had already been burned; but only the able-bodied could profit from this refuge. As for the seriously wounded, A GREAT NUMBER PERISHED IN THE FLAMES, and, among those whom the fire did not reach, many spent several days on the battlefield, where the great height of the crops prevented their being seen. They lived during this time on grains of wheat. But those over whom the fire had passed nearly all succumbed, which led the soldiers to say that the straw fire had killed almost as many men as the battle fire.” (Memoirs of Marbot)
In the evening more than 20,000 men remained lying on the field, disemboweled, decapitated, roasted, or wounded — 20,000 young men full of life, who had fathers, mothers, sisters, friends, mown down in twelve hours for the whim of a brute in uniform!
The carnage over, the debauch began. For two days there was a general binge in the French camp. “The heat was excessive; wines were plentiful in the villages,” writes M. Thiers, the passionate admirer of these fine feats of arms; “the soldiers were enjoying their victory with a certain disorder.” You can picture that! 100,000 victorious men, masters of a country, feasting and getting drunk on wine! the officers overwhelmed, or as drunk as their men! Can you picture these 100,000 brutes set loose among the peaceful and disarmed populations where there are women and girls?
It is all this that was glorified some ten days ago in Auxerre!
It is this Napoleonic victory, this victory of the man who strangled the first Republic, that the third Republic has its soldiers glorify!
It is this carnage, this roasting of the wounded and the dying, this burning of crops, that the French Republic, in the twentieth century, has celebrated by the sons of peaceful workers and young industrious peasants, decked out for three years in a ridiculous pair of red trousers!
It is this drunken orgy of an entire army, emptying the cellars of the Austrian peasants before violating their daughters!
When shall we see the glorification of Cartouche, of Pranzini, and of Vacher?
It is with celebrations like these that this unhappy country maintains the cult of the saber, the love of colonial and international slaughter, and that it turns an army of citizens into an army of praetorians capable one day of repeating a 18th Brumaire or a 2nd of December!
And the evil goes deeper than one thinks.
The nation is poisoned to the marrow. I want no other proof than the account published in the Travailleur Socialiste itself, of the anniversary celebration of Wagram at Auxerre.
The comrade who wrote that account is a good socialist, a militant who has already given proofs of his hatred of militarism and of present-day fatherlands; it is all the more painful to find under his pen an enthusiastic eulogy of the bandits of the Grande Armee. Our comrade, who forgot himself, or perhaps who did not sufficiently forget the poisoned slices of the little history of France they made him learn by heart at school, calls without irony the anniversary of Wagram “a glorious anniversary.” He deplores that the heroism of our elders was turned to ridicule by the masquerades and clowneries of the regimental celebration at Auxerre. “If the old grumblers of Wagram,” he adds, “could have, for a few hours, come back among us, how they would have swept the barracks courtyard clear, with kicks of their boots, of all the cotillons and all the bedizened puppets.”
Wrong, comrade: they were themselves bedizened puppets; they would have swept away nothing at all; they would have come to get drunk with their grandsons, and they would have found that the French army since their time had not degenerated.
I even find that buffooneries followed by a binge are not sufficient to commemorate the memory of infamies like those of Wagram. I see only one truly fitting and symbolic way of celebrating such an anniversary.
As long as there are barracks, for the edification and moral improvement of the soldiers of our democracy, to dishonor militarism and wars of conquest in their eyes, I would like them to gather in the main courtyard of the quarters all the rubbish and all the manure of the barracks, and that, solemnly, in the presence of all the troops in dress uniform number one, to the sound of the military band, the colonel, in full plume, should come and plant the regimental flag in it.
In respectfully submitting this plan for a new kind of celebration to the minister of war, I offer, for the first such solemnity, to provide a commentary, before the troops, in an appropriate address, on the golden book of the French army.
A MAN WITHOUT A FATHERLAND
We publish below a recent article by Herve, published in the same newspaper, issue of Saturday, December 14th, 1901. This article is particularly useful to the testimony we shall publish.
To Our Friends of the Yonne
Gustave Herve
It is a strange and long war, that in which violence tries to oppress truth. All the efforts of violence cannot weaken truth and only serve to elevate it further.
Pascal
Here I am condemned by the university tribunals, permanently dismissed, and this time without the slightest salary.
As at eighteen, I am in search of a social position.
What to do?
Take up a manual trade? When one has lived in books since the age of ten and has ruined one’s eyesight at them, one is not good for much.
Live by my pen in journalism? The very rare socialist newspapers where I would consent to work have their staff fully complete, and the others either are obliged, in order to survive, to resort to financial schemes I condemn, or else do not feed their men. As for the radical newspapers that can pay their editors, I could only enter them, not being a radical, if I were offered “a free tribune,” like Briand at La Lanterne, where I could set forth, under my own responsibility and in complete independence, our socialist doctrines: and I am far from finding that rare bird.
Accept a lucrative office, become a professional politician, seek a seat as deputy? The proposal has been made to me from several quarters. It seems there are at least five electoral districts disputing the honor of electing me… or of blackballing me next May. I am extremely flattered by the high opinion certain electoral committees have of me, but, in truth, I have no taste for the trade: with all the respect I owe our honorable members, I would rather saw wood at twenty-five sous a day than be a deputy at twenty-five francs; and besides, I have not the stuff for it; I have neither the qualities nor perhaps the defects that are indispensable for playing the role decently; finally, there are in this world enough university men who have broken with the lecture hall, left the University in a blaze, to carve out a little publicity for themselves and climb onto one of the armchairs at the Palais-Bourbon, that I should not contribute, for my part, to increasing the demoralization of the people and making them see careerists and ambitious men everywhere.
What to do then?
I have found the answer.
I am becoming a traveling professor of socialism, or if you prefer, a traveling salesman in socialism. I shall place here an antimilitarist lecture, there an anticlerical sermon, elsewhere an exposition of our economic doctrines, and almost everywhere, I hope, a few subscriptions to the Travailleur Socialiste. At the call of the socialist groups, the workers’ or agricultural unions, the Masonic lodges or the free-thought societies of the Yonne, I shall come running with my merchandise and, without being a thunderbolt of eloquence, I flatter myself that I shall find takers. I shall go into our countryside, so neglected by all our propagandists, to study the agricultural question on the ground, to question large and small landowners, tenant farmers and day laborers, vine-growers and woodcutters; I shall listen to their grievances, I shall tell them the remedies that socialism brings, I shall dispel their prejudices against us, and I hope, by dint of patience, to move our country folk gently — already so democratic and so anticlerical — toward antimilitarism and socialism.
Let the groups or individuals who believe that by this propaganda I can do useful work write to our friend Dupore, at the offices of the Travailleur Socialiste; I shall set out on my campaign at the start of next month, after having established a rational itinerary. I ask only in return, from the friends who will call me for lectures, to find a venue, to arrange for admission to be free — as far as possible — and to take care of all the material details for which I do not believe I have much aptitude.
I warn them only that I do not wish to do anyone’s electoral cooking, neither Pierre’s, nor Paul’s, nor Tartempion’s. So much the better if my propaganda benefits to some extent a good republican or a socialist, to the detriment of a reactionary or a republican in the Villejean mold: but I mean to remain a stranger, as a lecturer, to the electoral struggles that are about to begin.
Let no one worry! I have not forgotten the important question of provisions; I do not set sail without biscuit, as the Breton sailors say. The minister of public instruction and the theaters having had my salary suppressed, colleagues have had the idea, at once delicate, ingenious, and bold, of paying it to me anyway. On the initiative of my friend Lapicque, lecturer at the Sorbonne, one of the four university men who came so bravely to testify for me at the assize court, a Mutual Aid Fund is being established among members of the teaching profession to guarantee their salary to professors or schoolteachers struck, for political reasons, by administrative caprice; each member contributes per month one hundredth of his earnings. It seems I am to be the first pensioner of the coup d’etat… of the administrative coup d’etat that would deprive members of the teaching profession of a part of their civic rights.
When the Travailleur Socialiste has made its fortune and can pay its editors, or when, the socialist groups having multiplied in our department, the Socialist Federation of the Yonne is rich enough to ensure me a regular salary — all work deserves a wage, even that of traveling salesman in socialism — I shall cease having recourse to the Resistance Fund my friend Lapicque is organizing. Until then, I shall accept the pension it will give me — for wounds received in the service of the good cause — I shall accept it with gratitude, no doubt, but without the slightest embarrassment.
It is now that I truly understand the fine parable of Jesus the Galilean, of that Jesus whom I wish to cite once more in the Travailleur Socialiste — I, who am an atheist — for the edification of our former contributor, the eminent and distinguished archpriest of Sens: “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Behold the fowls of the air: they sow not, neither do they reap; they gather nothing into barns: yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field: they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these… Take therefore no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the Gentiles seek. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”
GUSTAVE HERVE
Charles Peguy
I have drafted the beginning of the testimony I wish to contribute to the clarification of the Herve case. This testimony will appear in its entirety in a single cahier. I shall try to go a little deeper there.
We published a dossier on the Herve affair in the fifteenth cahier of the second series. — Memoirs and dossiers for the freedoms of teaching personnel, 1 franc.
The four cahiers together, three francs.
Brief Summary
We have too much work, Bourgeois and I, to be able to devote much time to the indispensable search for new subscribers. We count on our old subscribers to help us, to stand in for us. We receive approximately one new subscription per day. That is not much, but the very regularity of this movement reassures us. It depends on our subscribers whether this movement continues, grows, and reaches its goal. I do not wish to make any pitch here, but I take the liberty of insisting. I refer to the summary we have published.
We are making a considerable industrial and commercial effort. May our subscribers support us. This cahier is obviously much more costly, administratively, than an ordinary cahier.
Besides, it suffices to read our cahiers a little to perceive that we do nothing, editorially, to obtain the backing of recognized powers.
I remind you that what is at stake is no longer the existence of our cahiers, but their fullness. Their existence is assured. But according to our means, the third series will be established between a maximum limit and a minimum limit. The maximum series would be a series of twenty cahiers where the large cahiers like the Jaures would count only as one. The minimum series would be an equivalent of twenty ordinary cahiers, where the large cahiers would count for their equivalence, where the Jaures for example would count as five and a half cahiers. Already we are assured that we shall not fall to the minimum limit. I passionately desire that we may rise to the maximum limit.
On request we will send any specimen cahiers desired, except the Jaures, which has a significant administrative value, which is not in commerce, and which we reserve for our firm subscribers.
It is very useful to us for people to buy the independent cahiers. Thus M. Charles Keller ordered from us for Nancy twenty copies of la Greve.
If I can, I shall publish before Easter a new summary, not only financial, but of persons. I passionately desire that the third series be complete. Many honest people have brought us copy. I am particularly grateful to them, for the authors we publish know the balance sheet of the operation as regards themselves. Assets: they are published in at least two thousand copies, sent immediately to more than thirteen hundred subscribers, serious readers patiently selected, read by at least three thousand persons. Liabilities: the respectable press maintains a total silence about this publication.
Our old subscribers have not forgotten the rare dispatches our friend Lionel Landry sent us from China. Today we publish from Felicien Challaye two dispatches from Indochina.
Dispatch from Indochina
November 1901
Felicien Challaye
My dear Peguy,
As you asked one of our friends to inform the subscribers of the Cahiers about the way European troops have treated the Chinese, you also ask me to say what I know of the way the French treat the natives in Indochina. This is not a general study I am sending you; it is a simple enumeration of things seen or heard.
If one wishes to form a complete idea of the legal relations established between the natives and the Europeans, to know what taxes, what corvees, what requisitions, what legal vexations crush the natives, to understand how enormous sums, raised by taxation of the natives, are spent by the French with no concern for native welfare, solely in the interest of certain Frenchmen or of general French policy, one will find a great number of exact and significant facts in a book I must recommend: L’Indo-Chine, by Captain Fernand Bernard (Bibliotheque-Charpentier, Fasquelle, Paris).
The first native of Indochina I encountered was a Cambodian, with whom I chatted occasionally on a French ship going from Colombo to Egypt. He was in raptures. “Everyone,” he explained, “treats me so well on this ship: what a difference from the French back home! When they meet us in the street…” Since he spoke French poorly, he could not find the right word, and completed his sentence by launching a tremendous kick into the air.
When I traveled from Marseille to Saigon, on the Oceanien, there was among the passengers an intelligent, cultivated Annamite official who spoke very good French; he had just been made a Knight of the Legion of Honor in Paris. On the arrival of the ship at Saigon, an old man, a woman, and two Annamite children came aboard to see one of the passengers; while searching, they entered — they dared to enter — the second-class salon; indignant, the stewards rushed forward, chased them out with flicks of their napkins, amused themselves by pursuing them through the corridors. They were the father, the wife, and the children of the high Annamite official, wishing to see their long-absent relative sooner. Everyone on board greatly enjoyed this adventure, which seemed very droll.
In Saigon, upon my arrival, I went to see a judge for whom I had a letter of introduction. This judge happened to be a friend of the Societe nouvelle de librairie et d’edition and a reader of the early Cahiers: immediately he spoke to me openly. I naively expressed before him the opinions current in France: the Frenchman more intelligent than the Englishman, taking more interest in the native, protecting him, loving him; the native happy to live under French law, etc. The judge looked at me with stupefaction: he assured me that the French in Indochina treat as savages these Annamites who belong to one of the most intelligent, the most refined, the most cultivated races. Everything I have seen since in Indochina has confirmed this judgment.
The more I saw the Annamites close up, the more sympathy I had for them. They have their faults, Oriental faults, a certain lack of sincerity, of virile dignity. But what qualities in exchange! First these three virtues of the first order, common to all peoples of Chinese civilization: the love of learning, the contempt for death, the respect for ancestors; then other charming qualities, very Far Eastern as well: a delicate politeness, a perfect tolerance for the philosophical or religious ideas of others. Even their adversaries acknowledge that they are astonishingly intelligent, that they grasp with a rare vivacity everything one takes the trouble to explain to them. Very good students, I was told of them in every school; good workers, I was told in the factories; very good soldiers, all their officers told me. No Oriental people recalls the Japanese as much: the marvelous development of Japan seems also promised to the Annamite race. And as for its past, it suffices to say that many of its age-old institutions are, without any doubt, superior to our European institutions; what the boldest among us demand, the Annamites accomplished centuries ago: children have always been equal before education; government has always been reserved for the most educated without distinction of origin; the development of collective communal property, together with laws imposing in certain cases a social use on individual property, has always prevented the least wealthy from dying of hunger, without removing from each person’s initiative the encouragement of the betterment of well-being.
Now, this people of such fine intelligence, such delicate sensitivity, such advanced civilization, our French in Indochina treat as badly as they would treat any black tribe from the center of Africa. Black or yellow, no matter: no differences between these “savages,” is that not so? — I have constantly seen the Frenchman vex, insult, brutalize the native. I have constantly seen the Frenchman — often maddened by the heat, absinthe, opium — beat the native servant who has badly executed an order, badly given in a poorly understood language. I have very often seen the Frenchman strike with a blow of his cane or riding crop the native who in the countryside forgets to remove his hat before him. I have often seen the Frenchman threaten or strike to silence the rickshaw driver asking to be paid at the fixed rate. I have even often seen many Frenchmen rough up the natives with whom they were in contact, without any motive, without any pretext, for pleasure, or, as they say, to maintain the prestige of the White Man. The stupidest, most vile soldier of the marine infantry considers himself superior to the most refined Annamite scholar; he will horsewhip him if he does not doff his hat fast enough; he will insult or rough him up for no reason, for fun.
A few more particular examples. In a village in Tonkin, I see a colonist summon the village headman, an old man, and, because the village was somewhat slow in carrying out certain works, pull his ear and slap him across the face. One may judge the effect produced by such a gesture in a land of instinctively polite people who hold old age sacred! — In Hue, a young Frenchman lives in a private pavilion of the hotel with a native woman; one day she gathers a few friends for tea; the hotel owner passes by, asks which is the Frenchman’s mistress, does not touch her, but chases the other women out with punches and kicks; “There are some of them, very mean,” the young Frenchman’s mistress told me that evening. — In Hon Gay, two Annamite women carry my luggage from the port to the hotel; one of them, a very young girl, out of weariness or curiosity, stops for a moment standing on a step of the staircase in front of the house; the hotel owner throws himself upon her and with punches and kicks hurls her down the stairs; very gentle, faced with this brutality, the little Annamite girl simply smiles. Never did I feel, as at that moment, that I was blushing with shame — blushing with the shame of being European. — Meanwhile two young Frenchmen, very chic, arriving with me at the hotel, are astonished at my indignation: “those women — they’re not women,” they say.
Naturally the worst violence does not take place in public. I have good reason to believe that many non-commissioned officers and guards of the militia behave as true tyrants in the posts they command, in the villages placed under their protection. Tyrants too, no doubt, many residents in their provinces, many colonists on their concessions, many industrialists in those factories where Annamite women and children work seventeen hours a day for less than 50 centimes. — Of these hidden tyrannies, only a few echoes reach the traveler’s ears. It became known to everyone that one of the colony’s highest officials, the lieutenant-governor of Cochinchina, had, for a trifling theft, his entire domestic staff tortured. I heard, at the club in Hue, a militiaman recount how he had, by order, tortured accused persons to make them confess, by suspending them by their thumbs. A judge, in whom I have full confidence, told me of this monstrous fact: a resident, to punish his servants, would stick pins under their fingernails, pushing them in slowly.
What is perhaps most frightening in Indochina is that the French there are almost unanimous in despising the native, in justifying or at least accepting without protest the brutalities committed against the Annamite. — At the beginning of the conquest, people wanted to “assimilate” the Annamites, to “confer on them the blessings of civilization”: our civilization, our customs, our institutions — are they not the best absolutely, rationally, for all the peoples of the world?
Later, observing the failure of assimilationist attempts, and maintaining the principle of the absolute superiority of European civilization, the French regarded as contemptible barbarians these Annamites incapable of rising to the level of that civilization. Two contrary errors, arising from the same false idea: that the races are identical, that there are between them only differences of education, that a good education must succeed in Europeanizing, Frenchifying the world. Our French in Indochina do not suspect that there are more dead than living, and that the dead lead the living; that heredity is stronger than education; that there are differences of race; unchangeable moral differences between races; that different civilizations suit different races; that different civilizations can be of equal educational value. — The only natives most of the French see up close are the servants (the “boys”), the most servile, the most mendacious of the whole population; by them they judge all the others: Annamites rich or poor, cultivated or ignorant, all dress more or less alike; our French make no distinction between them, treat them all the same, that is to say equally badly. Besides, generally not knowing the language of the country, how would they distinguish the scholar from the “boy”? — As much as they despise the Annamite, so much do they mock the rare Frenchmen who take an interest in Annamite beings and things. To protest against the cruelties one sees committed is to show foolish humanitarianism, sickly idiocy; to try to enter into intimacy with certain natives is to grovel, to dishonor oneself; it is even to betray. An official who was trying, out of a psychologist’s curiosity, to know the educated natives of his city, told me he had had to break off these relations, so much had his superiors blamed and penalized him. I myself appeared a grotesque figure, in the eyes of the pretty French ladies of Hanoi, for having said in a salon how moved I had been to be received with a delightful cordiality at the table and in the family of the Huyen (native sub-prefect) of Tam Ky. The adventure seemed so ridiculous that it made the rounds of the city.
From the standpoint of relations between Europeans and natives, officials seem to me in general less bad than colonists; new officials (who know or are learning the language) less bad than the old ones. The governor-general Doumer scandalizes everyone by having his Annamite interpreter dine at his table; he sets a good example. Young women recently arrived from France are gentle enough to be firm and resist the general opinion; one of them told me: “If my husband cannot administer his province without tyrannizing the natives, if I cannot manage my house without beating the servants, we shall leave the country and return to France.” Needless to say, these provinces, these households are as well and better managed than the others; that firm gentleness succeeds better, here as everywhere, than maniacal brutality. — The judges, above all, generally show themselves just and benevolent toward the natives: hence it is commonly affirmed that they “are losing the colony” by condemning the European who ostentatiously steals from or kills a native; are they not harming the prestige of the White Man, the honor of France? For having said at the tribunal that the Frenchman who strikes the native, because he knows the latter will not defend himself, is a coward, the judge who reads the Cahiers was dragged through the mud by the vile Indochinese press. — Yet the insults, the hatreds, do not prevent these good men from doing their duty. It was above all judges who worked to have the cadouille — with which natives were constantly flogged, whether convicted, accused, or innocent — abolished. One of those who took part in this campaign told me that it was Dreyfusards who had joined the battle, encouraged by the great fight waged in France; without the Dreyfus Affair, they would still be cadouilling the Annamites in the French concessions. Thus, my dear Peguy, when we were all working together to deliver the innocent captain, to deliver the people of France, which the nationalist and clerical reaction was preparing to crush, we were also working, without knowing it, to save the wretched Annamites from inhuman punishments. There is a solidarity of all just and humane causes: in fighting for one of them, it is all the others too that one advances.
Certainly each Frenchman can do something for the oppressed Annamites. A public opinion well informed about colonial matters must be created in France. A general and, so to speak, verbal condemnation of colonization does not suffice: colonization is a fact, perhaps (this is my feeling) an inevitable fact; one must take all the facts into account. To act upon reality, one must take all of reality into account. Those who accept the colonial system with all its train of horrors are guilty of nationalist brutality; but those who believe they can solve the colonial problem with a congress vote condemning in general all colonial enterprise seem to me guilty too, in their way, guilty of dangerous impracticality. Sterile verbal protestations too easily dispense with precise studies, with practical and fruitful reform proposals. By recognizing as necessary, and therefore accepting, the fact of colonization, one can effectively work to mitigate its horrors, to increase its favorable consequences. To deliver the Annamites from the brutalities they endure, we can act through public opinion on Parliament, through Parliament on the Ministry, through the Ministry on the Government-General, the officials, and the colonists of Indochina.
November 1901
For anyone who has lived in the Far East, even for only a few months, nothing is as irritating as hearing the eternal apology for the role played there by the missionaries. Many republicans still believe, many republican newspapers still say, that if the religious associations are dangerous in France because of their opposition to civil authority, they at least serve the cause of the French nation abroad. I return from the Far East with the very strong impression that the harm done by the religious associations in France is minuscule compared to the harm they do in Indochina. I want, my dear Peguy, to cite a few facts, little known or even unknown in France. What I shall say, I heard repeated by everyone in Indochina — Catholics, non-Catholics, officials, colonists, natives — without any exception; I received the testimony of absolutely reliable men; I had, in certain cases, the material proof in hand. I shall not, however, cite any names: the Mission is powerful in Indochina; those who oppose it or reveal its doings are quickly broken.
It is the Society of Foreign Missions of the rue du Bac that has, together with the Spanish missionaries in Tonkin, the monopoly of Catholic propaganda in Indochina. By everyone’s admission, the missionaries of this Society set themselves, above all, the task of enriching the community, by various means, notably by working the land and certain forms of commerce. In this there is no objection in principle: the missionary, born of peasant stock, is often an excellent colonist; at Phan-Ran, for example, missionaries have developed, through skillful irrigation, previously uncultivated land. But one must look closely at the way they gather workers and acquire land.
As workers, they have those called the converts. Now it is a fact that the Catholic converts in Indochina, like the Protestant converts in India, like the Protestant and Catholic converts in China, are the dregs of the population. Too different in race to be susceptible to metaphysical or moral arguments, it is solely for material and base reasons that they convert: to receive certain relief, above all to have, in case of difficulties or trouble with the law, a French advocate before the French authorities. All the disreputable individuals, all the beings vile enough to renounce the age-old traditions of their race, the cult of the family, gather around the mission. It is impossible to cross a Catholic quarter or village without noticing the enormous proportion of horrible faces, of villainous countenances. — The missionaries put all these people to work building the church or cultivating the rice paddy. They pay for the work and assure themselves the fidelity of this clientele by defending them in every case, with every lie, before all the authorities, over which they have mysterious means of influence. “Out of ten troublesome cases,” the resident H. told me, “nine come from the missionaries, from the stubbornness with which they defend against all justice the material interests of their clients.” — I had in my hands a forgery committed by Father M., one of the best-known fathers in Indochina: it was a matter, by means of a backdated bill of sale, of wresting from a Buddhist Annamite a rice paddy that belonged to him, in order to give it to a Christian Annamite; a chance occurrence led the judge to discover the forgery, and he warned the Father of the “error” he had committed; the Father apologized and did not press the matter. In another case, the judge had to threaten a missionary with arrest in open court for perjury: the missionary confessed the lie.
In their zeal to defend the scoundrels gathered around them, the Fathers create difficulties everywhere. I know a school for natives in a large city where, for this reason, every effort is made to avoid having Christian pupils. The same embarrassments in the hospitals, where the sisters give highly preferential treatment to Catholic Annamites, to the detriment of the other patients.
When the resident, the judge, or the doctor is weak enough to blindly side with the missionary, the non-Christian Annamite sees all his rights disregarded. And it is courageous and meritorious to resist the pressure of the good Father: officials who oppose the Mission are quickly transferred or broken; a strange chance disperses to the four corners of the colony the few Freemasons who, if grouped, would be dangerous.
The Mission enjoys an incomprehensible, real, and terribly dangerous power in the upper reaches of Indochinese society. It seems that people there are afraid of it; that, out of fear, they do everything it wants. Was it not the Mission that, by unleashing a violent press campaign in France against Laroche, had him recalled from Madagascar? In Indochina, as in Madagascar, it is better to have the Mission on one’s side than against one.
In one special, very characteristic case, the Fathers recruit their labor by force. It is an extraordinary story, scarcely believable, yet true; I collected decisive, indubitable testimony on the matter. The Fathers of the Bahnar Mission and the Lower Laos Mission buy from the savage Mois the Annamites that the latter go and steal from the plains; they make the Annamites thus purchased work by force, keeping them at the Mission supposedly to convert them; then they send them back, old or incapable of work, to their families, in exchange for a heavy ransom. I do not know whether it is accurate, as is affirmed in the regions of Annam bordering the Mois territories, that the Fathers organize these expeditions themselves: it suffices that they indirectly encourage them, by rewarding at a good price (a buffalo and two cooking pots, it is said) the Mois who engage in this trade. The Fathers call this purchase of slaves by a softer, more evangelical name: the redemption of captives.
As for the way the missionaries extend their lands, it is also edifying. I do not speak of the dirty tricks of which certain European colonists complain: it would appear that sometimes the missionary, whose rice paddy borders a concession, obligingly lends the concessionaire his docile Christian labor force, then abruptly withdraws it, thus forcing the colonist to sell the land he has developed, and finding himself there, as if by chance, to buy it back at an advantageous price. — It is above all at the expense of the natives and through usury that the missionaries extend the goods of the Mission. The Father lends at heavy interest to an Annamite village the sums necessary to pay the heavy taxes; the guarantee of the loan is the alienable portion of the communal rice paddies, or the rice produced by the inalienable portion; when the sums lent and the interest on these sums come to equal the value of the alienable part of the communal lands, the missionary seizes them. Thus the Fathers succeed in annihilating the admirable benefit that the vast extension of collective communal property provides to the natives, which allows the poorest to live. That is their goal: when the native knows he will die of hunger without the relief of the good Fathers, he becomes a Christian.
In Cochinchina, the Society of Foreign Missions enjoys legal personhood; in Tonkin and Annam, the Fathers bequeath by will, from individual to individual, the goods of the Mission. This amusing story even happened in Annam: Father D. had acquired lands for the Mission; one day he defrocked and refused to return the land; dying, he bequeathed it to his native mistress. The Mission would have lost its property; but the Fathers so threatened the poor woman (with eternal punishments in the next world, perhaps with a sudden death in this one) that she decided to return everything. — It is affirmed that, whether directly or indirectly under the names of European missionaries or native Fathers, the Mission owns a great part of the colony.
In any case, the Fathers “make money,” as they say in Indochina. From time to time, a specially chosen Father goes to deposit the large sum at the rue du Bac. A few months before the elections, for example. The rice paddies of the colony that France conquered at a price of gold and blood pay for part of the campaign waged in France against the Republic.
In Indochina, as moreover in China, the missionaries form a state within the state. The Catholic quarters are separate villages, or a city within the city: at Phnom Penh, it is by a drawbridge that one enters. Moreover, the Fathers often also own, at Haiphong for example, part of the non-Christian city. — In the Catholic quarter, the Fathers sometimes stockpile weapons, supposedly against pirates. It is said that they levy veritable taxes there. They have their seal: “French Indochina: Mission of —,” and they use this seal to give an official appearance to their proclamations to the natives. They also have their flag. Arriving in Tonkin, the first thing I saw was, on a sampan, a tricolor flag with a cross on the white part: the flag of the Mission. — Under this Mission flag, strange things must take place, more suspected than known. In the Christian villages where Spanish Fathers evangelize, travelers have been astonished to encounter small Annamites of an astonishingly Castilian type: “What do you expect?” a Spanish missionary said to a resident of my acquaintance; “our Fathers are not always proper.” — To maintain their domination in their villages, the Fathers, it seems, do not overlook the advantages of the whip or the cadouille. The authenticity of a remark by Monsignor Puginier, famous out there, has been affirmed to me: “God does well what he does: he made rattan grow next to the Annamite: it is for using it.”
What is serious is that the missionaries introduce among an eminently peaceful population a dangerous spirit of civil war. The Annamite is naturally of an admirable religious tolerance. The scholars adhere to the purely philosophical morality of Confucius; the common people mix a vague Buddhism with varied superstitions. In my presence, one of my friends asked his “boy” why he burned, in the chapels, pieces of gilded paper; it is so that Buddha, believing that his faithful one has burned gold for him, will give him back, after his death, in gold, what he will have burned in paper: “You understand,” said the “boy,” “you don’t believe; Buddha, him, very stupid, him don’t understand, him believe.” — The Annamite, naturally so little religious, is perfectly tolerant. But, because of the doings of the missionaries, he comes to detest the Christian Annamite, for reasons of an economic order: always supported by the missionary, often by the authorities, the Christian Annamite wrongs him in every way, steals his goods, his rice paddy. One of the least bad newspapers in Tonkin published, in December 1900, an article expressing the fear that a Boxer movement of Annamites might soon break out in Tonkin, provoked, like the Chinese Boxer movement, by the doings of the Mission. It is the representatives of the religion of love who introduce this violent current of hatred into a pagan population exceptionally gentle and peaceful.
I do not forgive, my dear Peguy, the missionaries for the harm they do to France by thus provoking an uprising of the natives. I do not forgive them the harm they do to the Annamites. Nowhere is one as harsh and contemptuous toward the native as at the Mission. To a resident I am friends with, active and devoted, a missionary said he did not understand why measures were being taken to save the natives from smallpox: “It is,” he said, “a providential means intended to prevent too great an increase of the population.” No doubt, in creating smallpox, God did well what He did, just as in creating rattan. Nowhere as much as at the Mission is one a determined partisan of direct administration, a decided adversary of agreement with the native courts, pagan, with the mandarins, inconvertible. If our administrators committed from the outset the immense mistake of trying to replace loyal protectorate with European-style government, it is often because, in their ignorance, they followed the advice of the missionary, interested in creating hostility between the French official and the native scholar. — The Mission continues to support with its very powerful forces all the attempts directed against the freedoms, the dignity, the traditional civilization of the Annamites.
The most urgent task that the French Republic has to accomplish in Indochina is to put an end to the brutalities of the Europeans there and at the same time to the dishonest and hateful doings of the missionaries. Only on this condition will the motto posted on the walls of native schools cease to appear ironic, ridiculous, and cruel: “Love France, which protects you.”
Felicien Challaye
We shall publish by the same author in a forthcoming cahier: Russia as Seen from Vladivostok, diary of an expelled man.
On La Greve
Several textual errors slipped into the sixth cahier. In particular:
Page 16, third line, instead of with the artilleryman, one should read with the toolmaker.
Same page, line 19, a little thrown off is part of the text and is not a stage direction. Thus:
LANTIER. — A little thrown off, I don’t know what to answer.
Same page, last word, and beginning of page 17, instead of simplem, one should read simplet.
Page 23, fifteenth line, instead of at the hillside, one should read at the quotation.
The author was very displeased. He was right. I like it when an author is passionate about his text.
One must only share out the responsibilities.
The artilleryman was in the manuscript. I let it pass because I assumed it was a nickname, a workman nicknamed the artilleryman.
A little thrown off was not a stage direction. It was in the text. It is the compositor who, in distributing the copy to the typesetters, turned it into a stage direction with a stroke of his blue pencil.
Simplet, in the text. It is the proofreader who put simplem. He thought it was not a matter of simplet, an old French word, but of the slang word simplem, abbreviation of simplement. He told me that the general tone of the play indicated, demanded, this correction. He thought that Lantier would not know or use simplet. I yielded to his reasons.
One must know that if the compositor did not touch the copy brought to him, the most extraordinary results would be obtained; and if the proofreader did not touch the proofs, the most improbable errors would remain.
The copy is never absolutely clean, the copy never absolutely suffices unto itself. However well established it may be, there always remain mistakes, often the most egregious spelling errors. Not that the authors do not know their spelling. They almost always know it. But they make slips. There are manuscript misprints just as there are typographical misprints. They often escape the reader. How many of our subscribers noticed that Tery writes sibylline as sybilline? I do not conclude from this that Tery does not know his spelling, nor that our subscribers cannot read. I conclude that one must be prudent.
Maurice Kahn is kind enough to point out to me that in the letter from Maurice Bouchor one should read, line 5 of the letter, instead of scene des Bavards, scene des Bavardes;
line 12 of the letter, instead of ou, lu;
line 13 of the letter, instead of Gregoire, Gringoire.
Kahn is more familiar than I am with the handwriting of Maurice Bouchor, which is not easy to read. I confess that I did not know the scene des Bavardes. But everyone at the printing house, myself included, knew Gringoire. We all believed we had composed, read, and corrected Gringoire. One must pay attention.