Charles Péguy

Translation

If I wanted, as is commonly done, to launch the second series of these cahiers, I would begin by announcing that I have obtained the most considerable interview in the world — and that would be true, since I have in hand the stenography of the international socialist congress recently held in Paris, since I am the only publisher, official or not, who has in hand and can and will give this stenography. But no more than last year shall we speak this year a new language.

The second series of these cahiers will comprise twenty cahiers no doubt, spaced approximately a fortnight apart throughout this school year. More and more, and very opportunely, the school year becomes the working year, at least for intellectual work. As is fitting we shall work at our cahiers while most of our subscribers work at their trades. Then in the time when our subscribers rest from their work we shall rest from this work too. The first cahier of the second series will appear no doubt a fortnight after this twelfth and last cahier of the first series; the last cahier of the second series will pass no doubt at the end of June, not only before the beginning of the holidays, but before the beginning of the examinations and the competitions, because the examinations and the competitions are also, in a sense, a vacancy from serious work. To situate twenty cahiers in eight months, from November to June, we shall even have to crowd them a little. — These cahiers will be from eighty to a hundred and twenty pages.

In these cahiers we shall continue to tell entirely the truth.

We shall tell entirely true. We shall continue to give documents and information impartially chosen from what we shall have seen and from what we shall know that interests the social revolution in the sense in which we are preparing it when we are preparing the birth and the life of the harmonious city. Men and especially events have of themselves more or less determined a past period of socialist action in France — included from the first national congress to the second. The Société nouvelle de librairie et d’édition, 17, rue Cujas, Paris, has given us the official stenographic account of this first congress. The same Society is preparing for us and is going to give us the official stenographic account of this second congress. But congresses are only the ceremonial manifestations of profound and lasting movements. And if it is indispensable to keep the traces of the manifestations, it is no less indispensable that the profound and lasting movements be preserved for the historian. Under this running title: “from the first congress to the second,” these cahiers will publish the documents and the information that we think the historian must have of the socialist action included between the two first national congresses. We shall do in particular all we can to publish in cahiers the accounts of the sessions held by the singular general committee that our readers have not forgotten.

While we shall gather and publish the documents and the information that we think the historian must have of the preceding period, the present period will march on. And here we would be very embarrassed, forced as we would be to live at once in two periods, as historian of the preceding and as citizen of the contemporary, if from the beginning of last year Hubert Lagardelle had not founded the Mouvement Socialiste with the sole aim of producing for the reader the information he may ask for on socialist action while it is being made, while it is moving. Leaving therefore to our comrades and to our friends the care of producing as best they can this information on action that is so to speak contemporary, we shall be all the freer to publish our documents and our information of history on action done a little after it is done.

When we shall have published the documents and the information that will lead us by the paths of history from the first congress to the second, then, but only then, at its historical hour and only at that hour, without care for advertisement and without any zeal for competition, we shall publish this stenographic account of the international socialist congress that we alone have, that we alone can publish. It is particularly painful for me to declare it, but it is indispensable that I declare it: any analytical or synthetic account, official or semi-official, even if a new general committee, and even if a new congress invested and sanctioned it — no new account can furnish of the international congress a historical text. However powerful committees and congresses may be they cannot decree or vote that a fabricated text will henceforth be the historical text. This impotence is common to them with courts-martial. And just as we shall have made the bridge from the first national congress to the second, so we shall make a plan of access to the international congress. Under this running title: “the preparation of the international congress,” we shall publish as introduction the census of preparatory documents, since the London congress.

When spring has come, it is probable that the nationally constituted socialist organizations and the departmental and regional federations will hold their third congress. Whether this congress be, as Jaurès and several citizens hope, a constituent congress, or whether it be, like the first two, a parliamentary congress, it will no doubt mark the end of another period in the history of socialist action. Under this running title: “from the second congress to the third,” these cahiers will publish immediately after the documents and the information of the period thus determined. In particular, just as we published the responses given by socialist militants to the international consultation opened in the Petite République on the Dreyfus affair and the Millerand case, so we shall publish the usefully serious responses given by socialist militants to the national consultation opened at the Congresses on the best means of constituting the French socialist party.

Finally under this title “the ministry of Millerand” we shall publish as much as we can the textual census of ministerial decrees signed, of presidential decrees countersigned, and of laws voted on labor questions by M. Millerand or on his proposal or with his collaboration.

We reserve the right to publish all documents and information that there would be occasion for on particular subjects that would not enter into these major headings.

Distinct and free commentaries will accompany this year again our documents and our information.

Among the contemporary documents, that is to say among those of the period in which we appear, we shall publish only those that are at once of an evidently immediate use and useful to preserve. In particular we shall continue impartially to publish all the information that is asked of us on the accessible forms of evidently good action, whether these forms are or are not officially classed among the recognized forms of socialist action.

By a new arrangement and to facilitate the work of our subscribers, every time the documents and the information form a body, instead of scattering them in several cahiers, we shall leave them together, and if need be we shall keep them isolated from all contamination. And then the cahier will be for work a collection and a true independent volume. And it will no longer be a cahier in this sense except for the administration. We can for example hope that we shall have a cahier that will be entirely of the national consultation, cahiers that will be entirely of the international socialist congress.

Similarly every time free collaborators do us the friendship of bringing us cahiers, we shall do all we can so that the author may be truly free in his free cahier. The whole cahier, text and cover, will belong to him.

The typographical liberty of the writer will represent the moral liberty of the author. And the cahier will be for work and for action truly an independent and free book. And in this sense it will no longer be a cahier except for the administration. There will never be among us any relation of author to director, of employee to employer, any subordination, but correlation of free man to free man, of author to manager without commercial intermission of bourgeois authority. The author will write under his personal responsibility sincerely and freely, truly. He will not engage his neighbor. His neighbor will not engage him. He will not engage the administration of the cahiers. The administration of the cahiers will not engage him. He will only be required to use his liberty.

It is under these conditions that we have asked citizen Francis de Pressensé for cahiers of international politics and action. Not only has he promised us that in the course of the year he will give us two or three, but he has promised us that he will have ready for this autumn an overall cahier on the international politics of socialism, a subject to which he himself was thinking.

It is also under these conditions that we have asked Hubert Lagardelle for cahiers of socialist theory and action. He will give us in a month a whole cahier entitled: “the intellectuals before socialism — the problem of the petty bourgeoisie.” Two months later he will give us at least a whole cahier on municipal socialism in France. Lagardelle’s cahiers will enter as pamphlets in series in the library of the Mouvement Socialiste.

Under the same conditions we shall ask, when there is occasion, for cahiers from several citizens.

Similarly finally when we shall give works of science or works of art — unclassifiable or classed dramas, novels or poems — the cahier will be truly for work and for beauty an independent, pure and free work. Free of us. And in this sense it will no longer be a cahier except for the administration. For being assured that we must begin the social revolution with the revolution of ourselves, with the moral social revolution of ourselves, it is for our cahiers first that we have replaced the government of authors by the administration, the sane and free and truly socialist administration of their works. If therefore I had still to publish the Light of Jérôme and Jean Tharaud, instead of cutting it in three pieces as I did, I would give it all similar to the admirable separate printing we made of it. When in the spring we shall publish from the same Tharauds “Orpheus in Friuli,” we shall make of it a very beautiful book entirely free in the hands of the authors.

Under these conditions we shall publish before Lagardelle’s first cahier a novel, if we can so name it, the first published work of René Salomé: “Toward Action” will be the second cahier of the second series.

Under these conditions we shall soon publish a satyr play: the “Bacchus” of our friend Lionel Landry. Our friend has recently left for China. He has obtained in the French expeditionary corps an evidently inoffensive post. By his very profession he is qualified to send us dispatches. He will send us dispatches from China. A short note he sends me from the ship promises me a dispatch on the transport of expeditionary troops. This first dispatch may pass in January.

Our friend Henri Genevray, happily returned among us after two years of intercontinental travel, will give us cahiers of travel. He will begin by giving us an overall cahier on colonial expansion before socialism.

Léon Deshairs will give us this year at least one cahier of art.

Finally and above all I must mysteriously announce that an excellent company formed of elders we have — to say the very beautiful word a team of good literary workers — is preparing to enter as a body into these cahiers.

But the work we shall publish with a singular cordiality will be from M. Antonin Lavergne a long novel: “Jean Coste, or the Village Schoolteacher.” The author is himself a former schoolteacher, a primary man of culture and of profession. He has become a professor at a primary normal school. He could like everyone have made his little cosmosociography. But this honest man has made the novel, the story of what he knows. Jean Coste will pass no doubt in three cahiers.

We are sending these cahiers firm to all our former subscribers. Their subscription, having begun last January first, is valid until next December 31. We only beg those among them who have not yet paid us their subscription to be so kind as to consider that since the beginning we pay our ordinary printers. It would be an error to imagine that one should not pay us because we are socialists. We are assured that most of our comrades the compositor workers, the proofreaders and the printers are socialists too. But it is precisely because they are socialists that the printing house of Suresnes pays them in cash at the union rate. For today we beg those of our former subscribers who have not yet thought to do it to be so kind as to bring us or send us in a money order the amount of their subscription. — We earnestly beg those of our former subscribers who may have moved during the holidays to be so kind as to give us without any delay their new address, so that our files and the directory may be rectified before the beginning of the second series.

Our former subscribers know that we regularly have three hundred free subscribers, for the most part schoolteachers, whose names and addresses had been communicated to us by the administration of “Newspapers for All,” 17, rue Cujas, Paris. Eight months of patient exercise and active correspondence have allowed this administration to communicate to us more than five hundred new names. We have accepted them. However heavy such a service may be for us financially, we shall therefore regularly send the cahiers of the second series to more than eight hundred free subscribers, for the most part schoolteachers, pertinently chosen.

We earnestly beg our friends not only to be so kind as to subscribe themselves, but also to be so kind as to present us and honestly procure us the most subscribers they can. We know for certain that many persons innocently imagine that they have done enough for these cahiers when they have read them by communication. We permit ourselves to draw their attention to what there would be of the parasitical in using indirectly this publication without participating in the costs of its establishment.

We are sending these cahiers tentatively to more than two thousand eight hundred persons automatically chosen among those who may be interested in them.

We are sending them first tentatively to the subscribers of the Mouvement Socialiste. The direction of this friendly review has been so kind as to have communicated to us the administrative list of its subscribers. We hope that having through the Mouvement pragmatic knowledge of international socialist action while it is moving they will ask our cahiers for this indispensable historical knowledge of action that one can only give a little after the times of rest have taken shape.

We are sending our cahiers tentatively to all the subscribers of the bulletin of the Union for Moral Action. The administration of this review has been so kind as to communicate to us the list of its subscribers. We are sending them our cahiers tentatively. We are in fact of those who can in no way distinguish the social revolution from the moral revolution, in this double sense that on one side we do not believe that one can profoundly, sincerely, seriously operate the moral revolution of humanity without operating the whole revolution of its social habitat, and that inversely we believe that any formal revolution would be vain if it did not involve the plowing and the profound eversion of consciences.

We are sending our cahiers tentatively to all the correspondents of the French League for the Defense of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The administration of this league has been so kind as to communicate to us its last bulletin. We have found printed there the names of the active republicans who have constituted in Paris and especially in the provinces sections of the league. We think that we have thus obtained a serious list of former Dreyfusards. Now it will not escape our readers that we are the only ones in a certain region who have exactly kept the just methodical rigor of the former Dreyfusist action. While the different Dreyfusist General Staffs, like most General Staffs, were forsaking the consideration of rights for the contemplation of advantages, we alone in a certain region — and we are in no way happy about it — continued ourselves to rigorously respect the method we had asked to be respected. We also think that we shall succeed in demonstrating to these new subscribers that the social revolution, in the sense in which we are preparing it, can alone give to all men the true exercise of all their human rights, can alone institute a human city where all men are welcomed as true citizens.

We are sending our cahiers tentatively to many university people, professors of higher education and of secondary education, schoolteachers and professors of primary education and of higher primary education, whether they were already subscribers to the bulletin of the Union for Moral Action, or whether we asked their name from the directory. We hope that their teaching can be nourished by the documents and the information, the commentaries, the works and the works that they will have in these cahiers. We hope that they will not hesitate to avow us as one of their own, to see in these cahiers the work of teaching that we put there above all.

We are sending our cahiers tentatively to the secretaries and to the delegates of the socialist groups who at the recent congresses constituted more or less a party opposed to the party of authoritarian domination. We regret that the secretariat of the Revolutionary Socialist Workers’ Party refused us communication of its lists. We shall always regret anything that is behind closed doors. We could not have a serious list of the principal syndicalists. We are sending our cahiers tentatively to the citizen secretaries and delegates of the groups adhering to the Revolutionary Socialist Federation, and to the departmental and regional Federations. We are sending them tentatively to the Socialist Cooperatives.

As much as we could we are sending our cahiers tentatively to the popular universities, to the serious societies of lay education and of post-school culture. To these institutions above all are suited the principal elements of which our cahiers are formed. If free thought did not imply an impartial and attentive audience indefatigably accorded to the impartial proposition of documents and information, of commentaries, of works and of works, it would be no more than a lamentable counterfeit of dogmatic thought, of serf thought.

We are sending our cahiers tentatively to several visitors of the poor. We know that an intelligent and constant charity does not take long to perceive that present society is mechanically organized to make the poor and poverty.

When we shall have finished publishing the second series of our cahiers, we shall publish an index, become indispensable, of these two series.

Our friend Charles Amey, professor of English at the college of Bonneville, died Tuesday September 11, in his twenty-sixth year. Of Protestant family, he loved sentimentally, faithfully and profoundly what we want to do. Of modest and solid work he did without personal ambition and without tumult his part of the moral revolution. Loving above all the work of teaching, far away in the provinces, he expected much of popular education. He thought with many of our friends that these cahiers are not conveniently enough composed for a directly popular teaching. But knowing for having experienced it how difficult it is to do anything whatsoever he presented his very criticisms to me as an encouragement, a help, and truly as an indispensable collaboration.

He came to see me at the beginning of the holidays, as was his habit. Nothing in his robust aspect foreshadowed the misfortune that was already threatening him. He had only remained overwhelmed by an appalling family bereavement, recent. He came to see me. He expounded very strongly and minutely his criticisms. I presented my defense. Then we discussed our reasons. He ended by giving me this proof: “I myself,” he said, “who know you well, after all, and who know how to read what you write, I myself do not comfortably read your cahiers. They force me to work.” — Then suddenly perceiving that this formidable criticism was if you will an incomparable praise he recovered for an instant his broad old smile.

I did not see him again. An angina pectoris felled him in half an hour. He had already suffered its first attacks in Savoy, but he thought he had rheumatism and did not otherwise take heed of it.

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