Quatre jours à Montceau

Four Days in Montceau

Andre Bourgeois

Montceau-les-Mines, the city of coal, under snow, its tall chimneys smokeless, its workshops silent, appears to the stranger arriving at the early hour of the first train like a dead city.

Meanwhile, down the rue de la Gare comes the bread detail of an infantry battalion: a driver holds by the bridle a horse hitched to the regimental wagon, brimming with distribution sacks stuffed with loaves; behind, slipping, stumbling in the snow, hands hidden in the raised flaps of their greatcoats, six fatigue men, six armed escorts with rifles slung, three quartermasters and a mess corporal, in campaign dress. A cavalry non-commissioned officer of the dragoons rides up the street at a trot, his yellow revolver case at his belt, going to deliver orders. Below, on the canal wharf, silhouetted in the grayish mist, disappearing into their great-collared cloaks, three mounted chasseurs wait for their mail orderly at the door of the post office. Opposite, on the other bank, a platoon of gendarmes marches on patrol. Montceau-les-Mines is under military occupation. The miners have been on strike for a month.

Montceau-les-Mines, in the valley of the Bourbince, lies on the boundary of the Charolais and the Autunois, at the foot of the hills of Combrailles. It is not a city properly speaking, but rather a territory of about five square kilometers over which the miners’ houses are scattered or clustered. This territory, which includes the large villages of Bois du Verne, Rugny, les Alouettes, Bois Roulot, la Croix des Oiseaux, Vernoy, Lucy, Bois du Leu, and Magny, forms a single commune whose town hall and church stand at the central cluster particularly called Montceau. Montceau presents itself as an elongated grid with parallel and perpendicular streets whose three principal alignments — roughly oriented northeast to southwest — are the Canal du Centre, the railway line from Montchanin to Roanne, and between the two, the most important street in the area, the rue Carnot.

In Montceau, two cities face each other. On the left bank, the residential city: gray houses of at most two stories, topped by pointed roofs of red tiles. On the right bank, behind the canal — a wide and deep ditch — surrounded by its high black enclosing wall, the mine, the city of labor, with its enormous chimneys like towers, its giant machines raised over the shafts, its buildings of all kinds — sawmills, washeries, screens, compressors, coke ovens, brickworks. It is the city of power, the feudal city.

There is war between the two cities.

The war has lasted for several years.

At the morning hour when the residential city awakes, when the military details disappear, from the tops of the iron footbridges thrown across the frozen canal, cluttered with boats bearing the name JULES CHAGOT, MONTCEAU-LES-MINES, one can see, over its enclosing wall, the city of labor, today grim in its solitude.

Yet one of the chimneys begins to smoke: that of the ventilator compressors, where the Company has placed the few men it has retained. It is necessary, indeed, to maintain breathable air in the galleries.

The inhabitants of Montceau are the employees and workers of the Company, the shopkeepers, and the civil servants. The employees and workers comprise the engineers and agents of all grades, the office clerks, the miners — underground workers — and the similar workers, surface workers, for the machines and transport. For a long time already, this entire population has been divided into two parties who now call each other the Reds and the Yellows. The Yellows, partisans of the Company; the Reds, its adversaries.

Jules Chagot — who died in 1876 — was the concession holder who first gave the mine a great development. A convinced Catholic, rather liberal, but in sum a man of his time, philanthropic as one could be in those days, believing he had a mission to fulfill, he loved his workers in his fashion. Concerned for their health, he built a hospital; concerned for their instruction and morality, he built in each of the quarters of the commune a church and a school. He entrusted the hospital and the schools to the only auxiliaries readily at his disposal and whom he could think of: the Sisters and the Brothers. The Sisters and Brothers cared for the sick and educated the children, but, subsidized by Chagot and consequently in his dependence, they quickly became agents of intelligence and domination. Missing church services, the absence of religious observance became black marks. The women and men who are now between twenty and thirty years old, the generation raised in the religious schools, declare they have had enough — more than enough — of the priests. The desire for liberation from clerical surveillance was thus born and grew rapidly. Hence the first cause of the conflict between the workers and the employer’s authority. To this, the arrival of socialist ideas would soon add a second.

So long as Jules Chagot lived, he represented, in the workers’ eyes, the legitimate owner with his faults and his qualities. He had made great efforts, done considerable individual work, shown great energy; he had created the enterprise. The miner, who does not have, like the city worker, only his tools and the knowledge of his trade to live on, but who furthermore is very often a property owner — since in Montceau-les-Mines, out of a figure of fifteen thousand miners, a good third own their house and the small garden surrounding it — the worker-proprietor perfectly well accepted the employer’s ownership. But when Jules Chagot and his successors had disappeared and a joint-stock company was formed, the worker began to ask himself why, when he owned his house, his garden or his field, he could not equally be the owner of what lay beneath the soil of his house and his field, owner of the mine where he worked with hard labor, where he spent most of his time, where several generations of his forebears had worked, over which he found he had rights of first occupancy, of seniority of possession and exploitation. How could it be that some random gentleman, having bought a piece of paper on the Stock Exchange or in a bank, could come not only to claim a share of the fruit of his labor but to take from him, without any fatigue, the largest share of the enterprise’s profits, in the form of dividends?

He who was consulted about nothing, who was never asked for an opinion, whatever changes were made to the technique of exploitation or the marketing of the products, came to think that he had been played for a fool, that he had been cheated, and that in selling the mine, they had also sold the miners. He then found himself, more than ever, attached to the land, a slave condemned to change masters without knowing it, to be exploited without mercy by indifferent parties, without hope of seeing his lot improve, bent under the yoke no longer of an individual easy to identify, but of a thing without name, without definite form, suddenly face to face with the formidable and irresponsible power of Capital.

Then the idea of struggle came.

The strike was the weapon found.

It was the only one that could hit Capital in its vital forces. The first great strike of an economic character dates back about two years. It resulted in the recognition of the Union of Miners and Similar Workers of Montceau-les-Mines: these were the first steps toward workers’ organization; the strike lasted about a month; the workers had chosen their moment well — they did not suffer too much, having just received a month’s back pay owed to them. Partial strikes of eight to ten days have occurred since. But the Reds’ great victory was the municipal elections of May 1900.

Until then the Company had been master of the town hall; the mayor and the municipal council were entirely devoted to it. For the first time, after a fierce struggle, despite all the electoral frauds that the Company’s agents could commit (deceased or absent voters made to vote, etc.), the Reds carried the day all along the line and elected a council entirely composed of workers from the Union; citizen Bouveri, a miner between thirty-eight and forty years of age, was elected mayor. That day and the days following, it was the people’s triumph; their anxiety had been great, their joy was immense. The women were even more excited than the men. Gendarmes had been brought in from all the brigades in the department, for there were fears of disturbances, and the prefect himself was stationed permanently at the Hotel du Commerce, next to the Company offices, on the canal quay.

The enthusiastic workers marched in masses through the city streets. The women, armed with brooms, went in turn to mischievously sweep the bottoms of the doors and windows of all the former councilors who had not been reelected and of avowed adversaries; then a certain number of them, having conferred among themselves, crossed the canal and headed toward the prefect’s residence, and there, in a row, lining the sidewalk, their backs turned to the hotel, at a given signal raised their skirts and showed their behinds to the representative of the government’s authority.

One of the first acts of the new municipality, being unable to secularize the hospital itself, a property of the Company, was to demand its secularization: it obtained only the reduction of the number of nursing Sisters and the reduction of the salary of those who remained. It also demanded verification of the accounts of the Relief Fund and asked the Company for explanations regarding a deficit of several hundred thousand francs it had reportedly found there. The requested explanations had allegedly not yet been provided at the time of writing.

Meanwhile the Company, defeated at the elections, cut to the quick, struck in its means of influence and information, to combat the Red Union favored the formation of an opposing union, which was immediately called the Yellow Union, to which it enlisted all the partisans it could muster, approximately three thousand members, the Reds being, for their part, about twelve thousand. The two parties thus constituted could only excite each other, and a conflict was bound to arise at the first opportunity.

Of the various shafts the Company possesses, not all yield coal of the same quality. The Company pays its workers, by shaft, according to the value of the coal extracted from each shaft. It follows that workers performing the same kind of work suffer, under this payment system, significant wage differences. The miners, underground workers, who work by the task and are consequently paid by quantity, do not suffer from this system; but the surface workers at certain shafts find themselves paid less than their comrades performing the same jobs at other, higher-yielding shafts. Those workers therefore applied, through their Union, to the Company, and pointed out that they had no part in the quality of the coal extracted, and that for them their work had, in toil and in time, the same value as that of their comrades at the other shafts; consequently, they demanded equal pay for equal work.

The Company refused to change anything in its system. The surface workers declared a strike, and the miners joined them. The strike was thus declared as a matter of fact on January 19, 1901, by the cessation of work at Montmaillot, followed in succession from the 20th onward by the workers of Magny, Lucy, and the other shafts.

Under what conditions would the strike be sustained?

Pay is fortnightly; it takes four to five days to prepare the pay lists. The workers had received between the 15th and 20th the pay for the first fortnight of January. On February 8 they received wages for the four working days from the 15th to the 19th, which had preceded the strike; since the 8th, they have received nothing more from the Company, and they know that when they resume work, they will still have to work some twenty days before receiving anything.

A strike committee was appointed which immediately set about finding resources.

Of the miners, a good third, as we have already said, enjoy a certain comfort; they own their house, their garden from which they draw vegetables and fruit, some rabbits, a dozen hens, seven or eight ducks, four or five geese. The eight-hour days they put in at the mine bring them ten to twelve francs. Those say themselves they can hold out six months.

But the others, who, earning sometimes barely three francs a day, have never been able to save the smallest sum, would find themselves, once their fortnight’s pay was spent, in the most absolute poverty. It was then that the idea of soup kitchens was born.

They began operating about ten days after the declaration of the strike. The idea quickly gained ground and was everywhere admirably received. The Union had in its treasury 60,000 to 70,000 francs; it was calculated that 1,800 to 2,000 francs per day were needed to feed all the needy. Donations in money or in kind flooded in from all sides and the shipments have not yet ceased. The more prosperous miners sent eggs, bacon, flour, and one even sent a goat, which the strikers that day paraded triumphantly through the streets; in short, the whole district gave. The movement was immense.

The Union, since its founding, has been divided into thirty-three sections. Each of these sections set up one or more kitchens according to its number of members; thus certain sections, like that of Bois-du-Verne, organized five or six kitchens.

The Union supplies the kitchens with meat and bread for the soup. Certain butchers have extended it large credits; bread is provided by the cooperative bakeries. The Union gives vegetables only to those kitchens which, by the situation of their quarter, receive very few donations in kind. The Union issues vouchers to its members which it then pays to the suppliers.

The Union headquarters is installed above a cafe, on the second floor of the building at the corner of the Salle Pezerat, a dance hall where public meetings are generally held and lectures given. On the wall of the building, near the entrance to the hall, posters are pasted up, including this one:

CITY OF MONTCEAU-LES-MINES. Revolutionary Socialist Party. GROUP OF THE REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST YOUTH. SOCIALIST CHRISTMAS. Adoption Celebration. Free-Thinking Comrades!

The rulers of every era have never known how to take any measure to destroy clericalism.

We must, through imposing demonstrations, show our leaders that we intend to do the job ourselves. Therefore the group of the revolutionary socialist youth, in agreement with the Free Thought group of Montceau and surroundings, invites you to an ANTICLERICAL CELEBRATION to be held on Monday, December 24 (Christmas Eve), at the Salle Pezerat, at eight o’clock in the evening.

PROGRAM: 1. Lecture by an elected representative of the party; 2. Monster punch offered to all holders of a card (socialist hymns will be sung by several members of the Socialist Youth while the punch burns in the darkness); 3. Grand ball.

N.B. — Children may be brought to this celebration.

Cards are on sale at the price of 0 fr. 50, from all collectors of the Socialist Youth group, from citizens…

The Socialist Youth group of Montceau-les-Mines.

Behind the building occupied by the Union, the kitchen of the first section is set up in the courtyard opening onto the rue de la Cantine. Next to the door of worm-eaten planks surmounted by a large red flag, a long strip of red cloth has been hung at the top of the wall. On the red strip, a white sign bearing in large letters the inscription:

KITCHEN — FIRST SECTION — CARMAGNOLE SOUP

Push the door open and you find yourself in a small courtyard nearly filled by a shack of planks and old canvas. This is the kitchen. A large semicircular window with a shutter and a shelf has been fitted for the distributions; beside it, a small door simply closed with an old curtain, once red.

Two small tricolors, a few signs. On the left, handwritten: “No unauthorized person is permitted to loiter.” Above the window, printed, a white poster framed with a red border:

“Starting February 14, only union members will have the right to the soup kitchen. They will be distributed, along with the soup, 100 grams of meat per person per meal. The entire family included. All members will supply their own bread, except those who can furnish a certificate of need signed by their baker. The unemployed will have the right to soup only if there is any left over. The Union Office.”

Below, on the right, handwritten: “This morning, meatless soup without a portion. This evening, stew with a portion.”

Let us lift the curtain and enter the shack. About ten sturdy fellows are bustling about in the steam. “Come to taste the soup?” “Of course.” And at once they hand you the spoon. “Excellent, but put in a little more salt…” And the acquaintance is quickly made. Five enormous pots are singing over wood fires; together they contain three hundred portions. A rectangular wooden table occupies the middle of the tent; large ladles hang on the walls. On strings stretched near the ceiling, a few rags and an old tricolor flag, used for wiping the pots, are drying more or less.

In one corner, a small table holds two liters of absinthe mixed with water; from time to time, soldiers’ cups circulate among those present. Since it snowed all night and the tent is poorly sealed, the floor has the greasy mud one too often finds in barracks kitchens. The cooks are jolly fellows of excellent humor; they lovingly tend their soup, and indeed make it truly good; and then, these people have in spite of everything retained a sort of military spirit; they are cooks as in the regiment; one wag, lou Crassou, wears an old forage cap; in short, delighted to be playing soldier again.

Meanwhile the hour has passed and the strikers’ wives crowd at the street door. One of the cooks goes to open it and the head of the line arrives at the window. These women, always neatly dressed, are rather the mothers of families, the young ones scarcely coming to the detail; under the white kerchief or the headscarf with which they cover their heads, they generally have tired and aged looks; worn down by motherhood, by insufficient nourishment over several generations, and also by the use of alcohol, they give the sense of a very ancient misery. They bring under their arms, in napkins of irreproachable whiteness, frequently changed, a tureen, or a vegetable dish, a salad bowl, a milk jug, a saucepan, a kettle — in short, some utensil whose capacity corresponds to the ration they must carry away in the napkin whose four corners they will have knotted, which they will then take by the knot as by a handle so as not to burn themselves. “I say, ladies, you’d better come peel the truffles this evening,” commands lou Crassou, “and try to tell your men to come on the wood detail at two o’clock, eh.”

The wood detail — if you only knew how simple it is! There is at the port the entire cargo of a barge destined for a lumber merchant in Chalon. Well, this cargo is certainly abandoned since there is never anyone to protest when they draw from it every day! In the countryside, it is just as uncomplicated. The other day, at Saint-Vallier, the cooks were short of wood; about thirty men with axes and two wagons went into the woods of the neighboring great landowner, and under the noses of the gamekeepers, who contented themselves with watching, brought back the two wagons full to the village.

When nearly everyone has arrived, one of the cooks, a former Zouave, takes a bugle adorned with regulation tassels of tricolor cord, goes out into the street and stops in the middle of the crossroads, caresses the mouthpiece of the instrument with his lips for a moment, then, bell in the air, sounds with sharp tonguing the familiar refrain: “God damn it, you’re never satisfied,” which he immediately follows with the regulation call:

It’s not soup, It’s stew, It’s not soup, It’s stew.

And since he is a wag, the Malgache, and his “customers” have been waiting for half an hour stamping their feet in the snow, he hastens to add at the top of his lungs, turning on his heels, to the four corners of the horizon, the “Double-time” refrain — you know the one, impossible to transcribe. And satisfied, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, goes back inside, his bugle under his arm.

Then the distribution begins.

“Step up.” And all this is done in order, without jostling, without apparent authority, everyone doing their part willingly. When all the union members have passed, the truly destitute arrive: bargemen whose boats are locked in by the ice, unemployed, involuntary strikers, beggars, tramps; if soup remains, they are given some; otherwise, “Well, you’re only at the first section here; you still have thirty-two more to visit — it would be the devil if… Only hurry up.” And the others hunch their backs and scurry off.

The great occupation of the striker is to demonstrate. The demonstration is the parade through the whole district; in columns of four and by sections, with brass bands, drums, and bugles, red or tricolor flags; it is also the assembly on the Place de Greve, beneath the balcony of the town hall. It is, in short, a kind of review to which the men go only carefully shaved and very neatly dressed. It is very common to hear in the morning, in the groups or in the kitchens: “Come on, are you coming for a shave tonight? I have to go get a shave.”

For these maneuvers, the cooks put on their dress uniform. Most wear the classic costume of the cooks of fine houses: a round cap, short jacket, and trousers of immaculate whiteness; in a few sections only, the headgear is a white canvas skullcap in the shape of an inverted flowerpot with a big red pom-pom like those sailors wear. A few old bearded fellows add to their costume a large white apron, which, together with the axe on the shoulder, gives them the look of old pioneers; some of these have even sewn on the upper left sleeve of their jacket the red chevron of re-enlistees. The most skilled cook wears private first class stripes; his comrades call him the Colonel.

All the strikers, women and men, wear pinned to their chest the miners’ badge: a red ribbon with the inscription in gold letters: Union of Miners and Similar Workers of Montceau-les-Mines, and below, in a sheaf, in yellow metal, the hat, the lamp, the miner’s pick, and the similar worker’s hammer. These badges are issued by the Union only to its members or to recognized militants. So any unknown person without this decoration is scrutinized from head to foot.

The Company has always maintained a very numerous secret police; it is certain that informers are numerous at Montceau; the strikers are therefore extremely suspicious, and any suspicious individual who did not give sufficient explanation of his presence or his comings and goings could well draw some unpleasantness upon himself.

The demonstrations pass off without the slightest disorder. The strikers are very quiet people who in no way desire collisions with the armed forces. The shopkeepers, whom the strike hits in their interests and who are rather sympathetic to the Yellows, prudently stay home. The Yellow workers, who are enduring a forced shutdown, do likewise. The two hundred or so who are still working — foremen, overseers, supervisors of every kind who have stayed at the mine precisely so as not to lose their rank — those do not leave the Company’s territory and sleep at the shafts; some have been able to bring their wives, but there are those who have not seen theirs since the beginning of the strike, satisfied merely to be earning good wages; for, supervisors of various degrees in ordinary times, they now do all the jobs, barely managing even to keep the mine in working order. It is claimed moreover that the Company pays them double; in any case, they receive generous allowances, and such-and-such are cited, employed in the stables, who are paid at the rate of five hundred francs per month.

If in the morning a few military details come into town, during the day not a soldier is seen. There are no posts in the people’s city. Only one squadron of dragoons is quartered at the other end of the district, next to the hospital, in the Sisters’ schools; but the battalions of the 13th, 27th, 29th, 56th, and 134th infantry regiments, the mounted chasseurs, and the gendarmes — the latter numbering about six hundred — are all on the other side of the Canal, the boundary between central authority and communal authority. Never, during the day, are there patrols in the streets. And on both sides, all causes of conflict are avoided. In the evening, at nightfall, if behind the platoons of gendarmes passing impassively on their horses one sometimes hears a few isolated cries raised by women or boys — “Get rid of them… Bunch of murderers… Hey, coppers… Would you look at that mug!” — immediately there are reproaches from the groups: “So what… Oh, that’s clever, what you’re doing there… Oh yes, that’s really worth it…” It does seem moreover to be the government’s tactic to leave the strikers to themselves and to leave the Red mayor full responsibility for whatever may happen in the city. It is an idea accepted by everyone that if there were a “dust-up,” the strike would be over the next day; from there to admitting that certain people desire said “dust-up,” there is obviously but one step. So the Red municipality and the Red Union, the only directing forces in Montceau, wanting to keep the strike at full strength and to maintain it until the Company submits, understand perfectly that their true strength lies in passivity alone — without disturbances, without riots, without attacks — and they are immediately tempted to see in the hotheads, in the anarchists, mere agents provocateurs subsidized by the Company or even by the government, meant to bring about the desired “dust-up.”

There are, in fact, anarchists in Montceau. How many are they? Not many. A band of young men from sixteen to twenty-one, more or less members of the gymnastics societies, and a few fearsome old-timers. This is what all the orators who call themselves socialists call down there the “Unconscious Ones,” and the word has passed into the masses. And then, the miners, who claim for themselves the ownership of the mine, are far from being anarchists. They say that the peasant can, as he likes and without peril, cultivate his field without concerning himself with anyone, but that the miner cannot individually work his mine. The exploitation of the mine, which presents great dangers, demands the association of a large number of workers and, moreover, a management, a responsible authority, individual or otherwise, possessing the greatest possible scientific and technical credentials, capable of preventing catastrophes and of watching over the worker’s safety by demanding of all the observance of rigorous rules of public safety. The miner therefore accepts, in the mine, from personal experience, the discipline of safety: and that for him is the very opposite of anarchy. Anarchy therefore means, at Montceau, only immediate violence against non-Reds and their property. Now the strikers of Montceau, without having a religious respect for other people’s needless property, feel in no way the need to violate it for pleasure; when it is necessary, why not take what is there under the sun, but when there is no hurry…? And in fact, there has not been a single violation of private property since the beginning of the strike.

So, everything having gone up to that point as peacefully as could be, the anarchists of Montceau resolved to show themselves.

It was on Sunday, February 17, the day after the riot at Chalon-sur-Saone, which had resulted in the arrest of fifty workers, that they resolved to test the ground. They had been reinforced by six of the principal leaders from Chalon, who had taken care not to get themselves arrested, and who, feeling that things were going badly for them in their own city, had left that very evening of the disturbances at high speed, on bicycles, to seek refuge in Montceau; and finally, on Sunday morning, by a dozen others, equally uneasy, who arrived by railway; naturally, under the pretext of tasting the soup, all these brave fellows went immediately into the sections to preach revolt. Only it did not take: the Montceau strikers thought very poorly of them for having “appeared” to flee Chalon. They were, however, giving more complete accounts of “the day” than those in the newspapers, which had barely arrived, and people listened to their stories.

One of them was recounting how, when the strikers, leaving a factory they had just sacked, tried to march in mass upon another, they ran into a strong barrier of police and troops assembled there by the sub-prefect. He ordered them to stop, but they would hear nothing of it. Then a drummer stepped forward from the ranks to make the official warnings. At the first drumroll, one of the strikers leaped upon the drummer and with a furious kick from below burst the drumhead; but the blow had been so violent that his foot remained stuck, and the unfortunate man, caught in the trap, was freed only by the police.

By noon, the strikers begin to fill the rue Carnot, the main street, and to head toward the Place de Greve, which slopes gently from the town hall to the canal. The sections arrive one after another, cooks in the lead in full dress, with drums, bugles, trumpets, and the brass band l’Echo des Travailleurs playing the Internationale. A great many red flags, some reaching the first floor of the buildings. Groups soon form around two black flags, one entirely black, the other bearing the red inscription: “Neither God nor Master, Long Live Anarchy,” framed in red. These are the anarchists claiming their place. A bugle sounds assembly: “Come on, men of the guard, quick, packs on your backs…” The entire crowd presses toward the square. All the cooks and flag-bearers mass on the steps of the town hall, the two black flags in the middle, between two men armed with rifles, one with bayonet fixed, the bright blade above the heads. Three shots ring out — blank rounds say some, mere firecrackers say others. The crowd packs in, curious, with the feeling that perhaps there is going to be a bit of a “ruckus.” From time to time shouts are heard: Long Live Anarchy, Long Live the Revolution. There are surely five hundred people there, but no more. The snow moreover falls thick upon a turtle-shell of umbrellas. All the doors of the town hall are open; the people occupy their house.

Then the orators come to the balcony. Very few speak with ease, and their speeches, rather brief moreover, are little more than a string of effect-words, without connection, thrown to the crowd, which applauds indiscriminately. One demands the general strike throughout France and finishes by shouting: Long Live the Revolution. Another cries: “Comrades, in the name of Le Creusot, I bring you a fraternal and rrrevolutionary greeting.” (You must hear this “rrrevolutionary” and on what a shrill note.) “Comrades, do not let yourselves be duped by the offer of government arbitration.” (Shouts: No, no.) “The comrades of Le Creusot and those of Montceau will do their duty. We are the force; we must act. We tried to start a movement at Le Creusot, only it failed. The comrades of Montceau will hold firm and fly high the flag of the Revolution.”

Yet another: “Comrades, the time for patience is past. At this moment, in the prisons of the bourgeois Republic, fifty unfortunate brave citizens have, just yesterday, done their full duty. Comrades, are you going to tolerate any longer the crimes of Capital? Are you going to let yourselves be chained? Are you going to let yourselves be slaughtered? Comrades, the hour is for action; you will march behind the black flag, for it is the flag of mourning and misery.”

There is loud applause; the crowd visibly grows excited, and then, it is so convenient to shout under an umbrella!

Finally the habitual orators of the strike appear on the balcony, those most listened to by the strikers until now: Goujon, Chalmandrier, secretary of the union, and Maxence Roldes; they oppose violence, appeal to unity, defend the red flag. But the expression “mourning and misery” has struck the crowd; it remains favorable to the black flag.

Bouveri arrives on the balcony. Of medium height, barely stooped, his long blond mustache drooping on each side of his mouth, his left eye slightly veiled, giving his face an expression of sadness, at once mayor and worker, he has the difficult role of resisting the excesses of those who elected him, his fellow workers, over whom he would like to have only a friendly authority. He risks being caught between two fires, the designated scapegoat in every case. He has the city police; he has at his disposal a police commissioner and five or six constables; but Red himself, his officers are Red by definition: they represent extreme measures he would rather not employ. He feels that he must compromise, that if he resists otherwise, it will mean conflict, perhaps the desired “dust-up.” He knows perfectly well that the miners, since the Martin attack (that Yellow who fired revolver shots at one of the deputies a fortnight ago), each have a revolver in their pocket. Now there is no doubt for him that this day is a trial day. He speaks: “Of course we must desire the Revolution; but if we want to make the Revolution, we do not want bloody brawls: to do revolutionary work there is need of neither frenzy nor exasperation. Today is for us a day of mourning, since we are about to escort to the cemetery our comrades, victims of a sad accident. Let us therefore follow, if you will, the black flag, the one without inscription; we do not have to affirm a doctrine, but simply to attend to the triumph of our legitimate demands. Comrades, you will do yourselves honor by peacefully accompanying our dead to their last rest.”

And since it is four o’clock and they have been stamping in the snow for more than three hours, everyone has had enough. They more or less vote a vague resolution, many hands staying in pockets: “Oh, to hell with it, it’s too cold to raise them.” All the flags, the black ones in the lead, return inside the town hall; the cooks too. The crowd disperses, most of the strikers heading to the homes of the dead comrades.

And it was a long procession that followed the two coffins, each borne uncovered on the shoulders of four miners, preceded by two black flags without inscription, accompanied by all the societies with brass bands, drums, and bugles, and all the red flags. There were a few farewell speeches at the cemetery, then a collection was taken up on the spot for the two families; it raised some fifty francs, and everyone went home commenting on the events of the day, which they agreed to regard as not yet decisive.

The next day, Monday, four meetings were held at the Salle Pezerat by members of the Red Union alone; only union members carrying their workbooks were admitted. The question of the black flag and libertarian principles were discussed, and it was decided that the anarchist maneuvers, which everyone regarded as designed to lead the strikers into a trap, would be openly resisted.

On Tuesday, which was Mardi Gras, the arrival of Guesde and Lafargue from Chalon was announced. Many people went to the station to meet them. They arrived in the evening on the 3:47 train and, preceded by a single tricolor flag, escorted by the strikers, made their way to the town hall. The crowd was waiting below on the square. The anarchist Broutchoux unfurled on the steps a black flag bordered with red. Bouveri shouted to him from the balcony: “I urge the one called Broutchoux to withdraw with his black flag.” The other did not budge. It was then that a stout old woman in a white bonnet, followed by several other determined women, pushing aside the demonstrators, slowly climbed the steps of the town hall, and reaching Broutchoux, pressed in the crowd, tore from him, after a brief resistance, his black flag, which they ripped to pieces and whose staff they broke to the applause of the audience. The constables watched from the first-floor windows as spectators. Then the excellent fellow that Lafargue seems to be came and cried at the top of his voice from the balcony that the black flag was merely the flag of the bourgeois, that the tricolor had been soiled in too many criminal attacks upon humanity, that there was only one possible flag, the red flag, and: “Long live the red flag!” Guesde and the regular orators added a few words of conciliation and gave a rendezvous for the same evening at the Salle Pezerat, at 8 o’clock.

By 6 o’clock the galleries were packed, and by 8 the hall was full. After a long delay, the orators finally arrived. Lafargue spoke first; he gave a great eulogy of the women of Montceau who had chased the priests from the sacristy, and even found a way, on this occasion, to quote Saint Paul; he pitied his female audience and flattered them in every way; he was loudly applauded. Guesde then painted the picture of the future city, the one where people would work three to four hours, and perhaps even barely an hour a day, and where all the rest of the time one could give oneself over to the joys of nature; “well, to achieve this result, you have everything you need right in your hand! The ballot! With the ballot and a little patience you will achieve everything!” But scarcely had he finished this sermon when he felt something like a pang of remorse, and returning to the platform, added that he feared he had perhaps not been quite understood; that he had meant to say one should use the ballot and legal means as long as possible, but that the day when there was only a small shove to give to enter into the new legality, one should not hesitate to give it.

A rather cold reception, all in all. Maxence also came to say his piece, mocking those he calls the knights of the aperitif and the digestif, always ready to fan the tempest and foment disorder, but “always finding a way to disappear when it comes time to reap.” Finally, at Chalmandrier’s request, Bouveri, who was presiding, struck up the Internationale, which he did not in fact know, and which was whispered to him word for word by Maxence and the others seated behind him; this was an enormous success and the evening ended as gaily as could be, singing revolutionary songs.

It had been clearly agreed and announced the day before to the people from the balcony of the town hall that on Wednesday at one o’clock there would be a demonstration to hear Guesde and Lafargue. At one o’clock, the five or six hundred strikers who never miss a meeting were gathered in the vicinity of the town hall on the square and in the rue Carnot. Snow was falling; it was very cold; a whole hour was spent stamping in the mud, for it had thawed a little that morning, and still nothing. The strikers began to grow impatient. “Probably Guesde has never been kept waiting himself; otherwise he’d know what it’s like.”

Near the town hall there is a cafe called the Cafe de l’Hotel-de-Ville, but which is known only as Fort-Chabrol, because that is where the Yellows meet. Now, while waiting for Guesde and Lafargue, they were watching Fort-Chabrol out of the corner of their eye, when suddenly they saw two of the most notorious Yellows enter, following closely on each other’s heels and taunting the crowd. Then there was a surge; the women arrived, wanting to see: “The nerve of those Yellows! Just let them try to come back out!” But Bouveri arrives with two officers whom he stations near the cafe door, and himself, paternally, dressed down the crowd. Swearing in a very gentle tone: “Come now, for God’s sake! Come on, get down to the square. And anyway, when you’ve seen them, that’ll have done you a lot of good! Come on, good God! Get going.” And he succeeds thus, aided by one or two deputies or councilors, in pushing the strikers back a few steps. “Come on, for the love of God! You’re filling up the whole street now; no one can get through; are you going to block traffic? Look, there’s a carriage stuck. Come on, get going. Look, you know them well; you know perfectly well they’re not worth looking at…” And he thus gains a little more ground.

Finally, the bugle sounds assembly, and everyone goes off to the other side of the town hall.

Then it was necessary to announce that there had been a mistake, and that neither Guesde nor Lafargue had any intention of speaking that day. It was Maxence who took charge of saving the situation. Maxence is the favorite orator of the women of Montceau. He has such a fine beard. The gossips go so far as to say that the jewelers cannot keep up with supplying lockets to their customers who keep a hair from Maxence’s beard as a relic. Young, with an agreeable face, tall, well-built, his soft hat with broad brim and pointed crown, “artist-style,” always elegantly dressed, in a greatcoat with a double cape, the tails thrown back over his shoulders, a white handkerchief puffing out of his breast pocket, Maxence Roldes “sweeps away” the crowd, for unlike his less brilliant friends, he expresses himself with the greatest ease, never searching for words; the people say: he speaks well.

Maxence is therefore very popular. All the newborns are named Maxence. There are, it is said, now three hundred little Maxences in Montceau. Maxence arrives at the balcony, leans on it with one hand, and with the other removes his hat, saluting the crowd. As it is snowing, they shout to him: “Hat, Maxence, put on your hat!” Maxence smiles a broad smile. The crowd laughs, delighted. Maxence puts on his hat. And he speaks. “Citizeness, citizens. It is not by smashing windows, breaking gates, sacking a few workshops that we will make the Revolution. No. It is on the contrary by calm, by self-mastery that we shall triumph, because then we are unassailable and nothing can be done against us. See what happened at Chalon. The very day after the strike, they rioted. Fifty of our best comrades are now in prison. The day after the riot, they went back to work. On the contrary, you, citizeness, citizens, have had the true tactic; for more than a month you have held in check the gang of your exploiters. We are going to appeal to all of France, and we shall have the victory.”

That is roughly what Maxence said; then they applauded.

That is how one spends one’s days in Montceau.

But on the other side of the canal, the anxious Company sees its idle machines deteriorating, the timbering buckling, the galleries filling with water, unbreathable gases, or fire. The Saint-Francois, Sainte-Eugenie, Jules-Chagot, and Maugran shafts are on fire. The Saint-Louis, Sainte-Marie, and Magny shafts have a hundred feet of water. At the Sainte-Marie shaft, the pumps that drew one cubic meter of water per piston stroke are broken and have not yet been repaired. The water is being removed with buckets, but that is wholly insufficient. The two hundred men the Company has managed to keep cannot do everything. It cannot even call upon its office employees, the clerks, whom the strikers know to be so incapable of any mine work that they leave them perfectly alone, outside the conflict; and it is a rather curious sight to see every day at eleven o’clock these bands of employees emerging from the office — where they evidently can have spent their morning only keeping warm — going home to lunch, universally considered harmless.

Meanwhile the miner, in his countryside, enjoys, contrary to his habit, his hearth. He stays in his little two-room house where he lives with his elderly parents, his wife, and his children; on the whitewashed walls the old pictures have been left: a chromolithograph of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, two crucifixes, and a holy water font. Since it is built on the mine, with almost no foundations and no cellar, it follows the movements of the ground, the little house; inside, the furniture is all askew; the old linen cabinet and the antique clock seem to be bowing to each other; from time to time the walls crack open and through a gap as wide as a hand reveal the sky; the roof curves and recurves, giving it the look of a pagoda. Like the idle soldier in the barracks, the miner amuses himself by eating; while his wife hems a handkerchief, he watches the stew. Whatever the hour of the day, there is something on the stove. They eat fried potatoes at three o’clock.

So who will win? Who knows? It is not of great interest. It is not even of any interest at all whether the similar workers of Montmaillot obtain or do not obtain this time the same pay as their comrades at the other shafts. Everyone knows that this concession, if made, will change nothing in the workers’ condition. There is no doubt that after this strike, other strikes will come. For all this is merely one episode of a long struggle now irrevocably joined.

We ask those of our subscribers who send us documents and information to be good enough to write very legibly and on one side of the page only. When their studies are comprehensive and somewhat long, they may write them up. But whenever they send us information that is, so to speak, instantaneous, it is better to write to us privately and to leave the citizen editor the task of practicing his trade.

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We authorized printing after correction of sixteen hundred copies of this ninth cahier on Tuesday, March 19, 1901.

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