Expulsion de Nicolas Paouli
The Expulsion of Nicolas Paouli
Charles Péguy
We had announced that this fourteenth cahier would be a dossier on the recent movement for liberty in Russia. But the government of the French Republic having carried out an unjust persecution against a Russian refugee, Nicolas Paouli, the Russian colony in Paris is in turmoil. The Russian comrade who was preparing the cahier was unable to finish it in time. He writes to us:
Saturday
Dear comrade,
I decidedly cannot find an hour for the article. I am sending you all the documents on the Paouli affair. Do with them what you will.
This affair is taking a very bad turn. Waldeck will say nothing. He told Allemane that if the socialist group addresses an interpellation to him, he will declare from the tribune that Paouli was an agent provocateur who received money from both the Russian government (1,000 roubles per year!) and from us.
To address the interpellation under these conditions is impossible, for Waldeck’s bald declaration will cast suspicion on Paouli, and since the interpellator does not know what forgeries the dossier was composed of, he will be unable to reply. It is therefore essential at all costs to find out what is in the dossier. Will we succeed? I do not know.
You need only add a few sentences to the documents I am sending you to make a preliminary article on Paouli.
I have been very careful not to add anything to the documents in the dossier.
DOSSIER
On the evening of June 16, the mail brought a number of Russian political refugees the same letter, which I transcribe verbatim, preserving the spelling of the original:
Paris, June 15, 1901
Sir,
In the month of April of last year, we the undersigned were charged with the surveillance of Paouly, residing on rue Gassendi, reputed to be a “very dangerous” Russian revolutionary. To our great astonishment, two months later we brought our client to the Durand restaurant on the Place de la Madeleine, where in a private dining room he had a fine lunch, tete-a-tete, with one of our chiefs named Alexandre, Muller, Haase, etc., etc. Since then, we have fully realized that Paouly was a black sheep in the Russian revolutionary party. This did not prevent our chief, to our great astonishment, from having us continue the surveillance; among other things, we were charged with surveilling him abroad in January and in March and April of this year. In Germany we were supposed to find out by what means and at what point on the border he was able to smuggle pamphlets into Russia; unfortunately for us, with all his detours we lost him, and the Russian agents who were at the border waited for him in vain for a month.
We learned that despite this surveillance, Paouly was able to enter Russia and went to Saint Petersburg, where he had several meetings with a chief of the political police, by whose orders he returned to Paris via Berlin and Zurich, remaining in the latter city for several days before returning to Paris.
Some time before his return to Paris, we were dismissed from our posts, on the pretext that through our fault we had lost him, and this without taking into account ten or more years of loyal service; worse still, they did not even pay us our last month’s salary.
This ingratitude releases us from professional secrecy and gives us the right to take our revenge by informing you that among you there is a dangerous traitor who, it seems, has sold out not only his coreligionists in Russia but also those here; he seeks to take everything in hand so as to better deceive you. It is to this end that he seeks to gather you around him, the better to take advantage of your naivety and your ignorance. Upon leaving our service, we were able to obtain from our former colleagues the letter addressed to our chief by Paouly, of which enclosed is a traced copy, which will prove to you the treachery of your Dear Friend.
If we could see one of your people, we would certainly have much to say on this subject; however, we would fear seeing this affair hushed up, and for the moment we content ourselves with getting this to you.
E. Boisselier Guillaume
P.S. — At the last moment we learned that it was upon Paouly’s complaint that we were dismissed.
Here is the exact translation of the traced letter mentioned in the missive:
Sir,
Yesterday I addressed you in an anonymous letter; today I write to you under my own signature. Certainly I seek some advantage, but I believe that the benefits I am in a position to offer in exchange will be very considerable. It is for this reason that I hope you will deign to reply to this letter. My address: 15, rue Gassendi.
Your servant,
N. Paouli
The “denunciation” was too grotesque. Paouli has been in the revolutionary movement for more than twenty years. He was a member of the glorious Narodnaïa Volia party, whose titanic struggle against tsarism attracted the attention and admiration of the entire world. Even alongside the militants of that party, Paouli was no weakling. Sent to Siberia for the first time, he escaped — not to seek rest abroad, but to continue the struggle to which he had devoted his life. Arrested again, he was again sent, after two years of preventive detention, to Siberia. He managed once more to escape the surveillance of his jailers, and it was again in order to fight the executioners of the Russian people. Arrested for the third time and sent once more to Siberia, he escaped and came to Paris. This is the man they wanted to present to us as a black sheep.
The author of this dossier published in the Petit Sou of Saturday, June 29, this
OPEN LETTER TO CITIZEN JEAN JAURES
Most honored citizen Jaurès,
I address you through the press because you must explain publicly, before the socialists of the entire world, your conduct and that of your Party toward the Russian Socialist Party.
The government of which M. Millerand is a member, a member “on leave” from your party, has just committed a new infamy: at the instigation of the Russian police, they have just arrested and expelled our excellent friend, Nicolas Paouli.
Paouli is a revolutionary. Now forty-two years old, he has already devoted more than twenty years — of which fifteen were spent in Siberia — to the struggle against tsarism and for the socialist ideal. Two years ago he managed to escape and came to Paris. He has not ceased to be a revolutionary. But here, in France, he has done nothing that could serve as a pretext for the measure taken against him by the government of which M. Millerand is a member. Paouli asked the minister, by telegram, to give him a day or two to settle his affairs. The minister categorically refused, and Paouli was escorted to the border and abandoned there without money to continue his journey, without belongings, and without having been able to notify his friends.
Why this measure? To give the Russian government the satisfaction of avenging itself for the enormous progress that the cause of revolution is making in Russia; to satisfy the police agent of the tsarist government in Paris, the man named Ratchkovsky, whom M. Millerand so often receives at his table — a sad necessity of the application of the theory of class collaboration.
What is more, a search was carried out at Paouli’s home and all his papers and letters were seized, which will certainly be handed over to the Russian police. There will therefore be victims in Russia who will be imprisoned, thrown into the fortresses of Peter and Paul, of Schlisselburg, sent to Siberia.
This is only a first attempt. If it succeeds, they will continue. But you can warn your friend, the “on leave” socialist, that his agents will find nothing at our homes: we all spent last evening burning our papers and the letters of our friends and our parents, not wishing that filthy police hands should defile what is dear to us.
This is not the first infamy that M. Millerand has committed against our party. When the tsar came to Paris, Pierre Lavroff sent an article to La Petite République in which he told the French proletariat, so blinded by chauvinism, in moderate terms what the tsars mean for the Russian people. M. Millerand, then editor-in-chief of La Petite République, refused to publish the article and went, with several other French socialists, to salute our tyrant at the Place de la Concorde. Then came the moment when M. Millerand sacrificed himself for socialism by accepting the post of minister in the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet. A few comrades, momentarily led astray, praised in enthusiastic articles before the Russian proletariat the immense importance of this historic event. Then there occurred a series of blows that are terrible coming from a socialist, even one on leave. Witte, the principal architect of reaction in Russia, responsible for so many massacres of Russian proletarians, is received with great ceremony by M. Millerand, who toasts “the great sovereign and his august family” — the executioners of our people.
Not one member of this “august family” can come to Paris without M. Millerand rushing to bow before him like a consummate courtier. Then, at the time of the recent massacres of Petersburg, Moscow, and Kharkov, when everyone in Europe — I do not say socialists and revolutionaries, but simply honest and progressive people — was trembling with indignation against the barbarous methods of the barbarous government, when thousands upon thousands of our comrades lay in prison, when our journals and reviews were being suppressed, when we were concentrating all our efforts in the supreme struggle — it was at that moment that M. Millerand accepted a decoration from our executioners, some Saint Anne or Saint Stanislaus. And the blow was all the more terrible because the reactionary newspapers underlined the fact. Ah, citizen Jaurès, what disgust this cowardice of your friend and comrade, a member of your party, inspired not only in us revolutionaries but even in our most timid liberals!
But until now M. Millerand had only shown moral solidarity with tsarism. By arresting Paouli, by expelling him, by seizing his papers to hand them over to the Russian police, the ministry of which he is a member and with which he is in solidarity is giving the Russian government material proof of its devotion, becoming the agent of tsarism in its struggle against our party.
For you, is it not so, citizen Jaurès, these are trifles not even worth concerning yourself with. And indeed, La Petite République never breathes a word about the decorations that the “citizen minister” accepts from the hands of every tyrant. M. Millerand is fulfilling a lofty historic mission, “has taken a great step forward for socialism” — is there any reason to dwell on these facts, sad it is true, painful even, but, all in all, so harmless?
But please, I beg you, citizen Jaurès, consider more closely with me this aspect of the new method. What must our attitude be, we Russian socialists, in the face of such facts? For us, for the working class in Russia, tsarism is the mortal enemy, the hideous executioner that must be annihilated, the canker that must be cut out, the enemy with whom there can be no compromise.
Until now we always told the Russian workers that tsarism is also an obstacle to international socialism, that consequently the socialists of the entire world stand with them in their struggle against tsarism, that in fighting against it they fight not only for the liberty of the Russian people but for international socialism, that they are therefore fulfilling, so to speak, an international mission. On the other hand, they were told that in France the socialist party was so strong that one of its members had become a minister.
But now this minister receives their enemy Witte at his table, bows cravenly before their executioners, accepts decorations from their hands, and the ministry of which he is a member arrests and expels their comrades and hands over to the Russian police papers found at their homes. What should we tell them? That French socialists, in order to obtain a few reforms — oh, how problematic! — must participate in a government that has become an agent of tsarism in its struggle against our party? That internationalism is an empty word?
We are therefore obliged to reject all solidarity with the socialist minister and, since his party does not wish to break with him, since it does not wish to separate itself from him, with his party itself. Yes, citizen Jaurès, your tactics oblige us to reject all solidarity with your party. Those who remain with Millerand without leaving the ministry, even when it commits such infamies against our party, cannot be our friends.
Do you remember, citizen Jaurès, the speech that Guesde delivered at the Paris congress against the new method? “Can you imagine,” he said, “a Millerand in England, a Millerand in Italy, a Millerand in Germany added to the French Millerand and setting the proletarians against one another? What would remain, I ask you, comrades, of international working-class solidarity? The day the Millerand case became a general fact, we would have to say goodbye to all internationalism and become the nationalists that neither you nor I would ever consent to be.”
Today, after all the facts I have just recounted, you must admit that Guesde saw clearly. You know that Millerand acts in this manner not only toward us but also toward other foreign parties.
Five years ago, only the French Workers’ Party and the Revolutionary Socialist Party were known abroad. Then your brilliant and revolutionary stance in the Dreyfus affair, and the mistaken tactics of the old organizations, produced a change of opinion. You were admired and deeply respected. But your persistence in supporting Millerand, despite all his faults and all his betrayals, is gradually opening the eyes of socialists the world over to the true meaning of your new method. Soon there will not be a single socialist left to support your policies.
A member of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party
Finally, the newspapers of Monday, July 1, published this
PROTEST
The Russian refugees residing in Paris, meeting yesterday, voted the following protest:
The Russian political refugees residing in Paris, meeting on June 30, protest with the utmost energy against the expulsion of their friend, Nicolas Paouli, and the seizure of his papers;
Denounce with indignation, to the contempt of all honest people, the political maneuvers and base calumnies by which the attempt is being made to justify the odious act committed against their comrade;
Declare that they have known Paouli for a long time as a man of honorability above all suspicion and as a revolutionary socialist always devoted to his ideas, for which he suffered twenty years of prison and deportation to Siberia;
Hope that all socialists, as well as honest people of all parties, will join their indignant protest and demand with them complete justice for Paouli.
For the meeting, and by order:
Boris Kritchevsky, E. Rubanovitch, L. Chichako.
We published in the tenth cahier of this series the first elements of a dossier on the recent movement for liberty in Russia.
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I had, like everyone else, begun my reply to M. Bjornstjerne Bjornson. Greater lords — M. Gustave Larroumet, M. Georges Clemenceau, M. Pierre Mille — preceded me. M. Bjornstjerne Bjornson replied to the replies. The conversation became general. I had asked our friend Léon Deshairs to kindly enlighten us on the part of the debate concerning Böcklin. His contribution may be read below.