Mémoires et dossiers pour les libertés du personnel enseignant en France

Preface by the Manager

Charles Péguy

I reserve for the independent memoir which I shall write when I have spare time the task of saying for what profoundly sad and profoundly grave reason this fifteenth cahier is no more than the fourteenth a memoir or a dossier of the recent movement for liberty in Russia. We have had at the last moment to make of it a cahier — memoirs and dossiers — for the liberties of the teaching staff in France.

Day by day more grave and more general attacks are being made upon the private, — public, — civic, — political liberties — of the teaching staff in France.

Prepared by circulars, these attacks have borne upon persons. At the start of the new term we shall publish a dossier of these circulars. But we did not wish to delay until then in order to present the memoirs and the dossiers which we have ready of the unjust persecutions recently carried out against persons.

The examples abounded. We have chosen a few of them, those which we knew best or which seemed to us the most characteristic.

A particularly grave attack upon the elementary liberties, upon private liberty, was committed by the governmental authority of the Haute-Vienne, where a primary inspector, ordered into service by his prefect, made an unspeakable search in the private library of a schoolmistress. The indispensable information about this outrage is furnished to us by the Journal officiel of Wednesday, July 3rd last:

Discussion in the Senate of M. Lavertujon’s interpellation on the acts of M. the Prefect of the Haute-Vienne: MM. Lavertujon, Leygues, minister of public instruction and of fine arts; Waldeck-Rousseau, president of the council, minister of the interior and of religious affairs. — Withdrawal, by M. Lavertujon, of the order of the day on his interpellation.

In conformity with the historical method we publish the accusations of the interpellator and the defenses of the minister. M. Leygues’s reply will interest those who know what ministerial speech means and what an official inquiry is worth.

Dossier: The Lavertujon Interpellation

Charles Péguy

THE LAVERTUJON INTERPELLATION

M. Lavertujon. — I come now, gentlemen, to the affair called the Cénacle affair, which is the principal motive of this interpellation.

For some years there have been at Limoges courses, literary and scientific lectures for the young ladies and the women of society. This work — I hasten to acknowledge it — is a clerical work, and the place of our schoolmistresses was in no way there, although, however, not all the courses were religious courses and not all the lecturers were ecclesiastics. Among the latter, I note the names of MM. René Bazin, René Doumic, etc.

But, in short, our schoolmistresses, a little curious, as women generally are (Exclamations and laughter), betook themselves to these lectures.

M. The President (1). — That is a quite personal opinion. (Laughter)

M. Lavertujon. — I withdraw it.

Gentlemen, our schoolmistresses or headmistresses of schools were in the wrong to attend these lectures; one of them even had the imprudence to have herself presented to the lecturer, M. René Bazin, who had just spoken with much eloquence on: The Province in the Novel, a subject of the most interesting kind for a provincial woman a little given to romance.

When the affair became known to the primary inspectors, to the academy inspector and to the prefect, these schoolmistresses were severely admonished, their imprudence was pointed out to them and they were invited not to return to the Cénacle. They did not return to it. This affair had made so little noise that nobody had paid any attention to it; it had remained between the academy inspector and the prefect, who had not judged it useful to deal too severely with this matter. Then comes M. Edgar Monteil. Since, since his arrival in the Haute-Vienne, the wives of the officials, terrorized, no longer dare go to mass, he had to revive this old affair in order to make a show of his anticlerical zeal and to strike these unhappy schoolmistresses. But they were numerous and some of them had eloquent and resolute defenders.

(1) The session was presided over by M. Barbey, vice-president.

One of them was very energetically defended by a radical general councillor, and M. Edgar Monteil did not insist. Another defended herself by herself, and it is precisely she who had committed the imprudence of having herself presented to a lecturer: she was the daughter of the worshipful master of the lodge; she was left untouched. (Various movements) And then they fell upon two headmistresses who, for ten or twelve years already, had been at Limoges; they had won, by dint of labor and devotion, this title of headmistress of a school in the chief town of the department, and moreover they were, from the professional point of view, both of them admirably rated, and from the republican point of view, solidly connected within the department itself.

But the one was defended only by an opportunist general councillor (Laughter), and the other by an official, an old servant of the Republic, but who is not a radical. They were sacrificed.

And yet these two ladies had — I was telling you a moment ago — quite remarkable service records. One of them, Mademoiselle Carlux, for two years at the head of the school of the Pont-Neuf, had found 180 pupils when she took over its direction. When she was struck, this number had reached 330, in spite of the competition of neighboring congregationist establishments, which proves quite well, it seems to me, that this schoolmistress was struggling for the secular spirit.

I do not have the figures for the other schoolmistress, but the proportion is the same.

It was then that I announced my intention of interpellating. M. Monteil, somewhat uneasy, felt — for he is not at all a fool, far from it — that the punishment he had inflicted on these schoolmistresses was a little disproportionate to the fault they had committed and which they could so well believe forgotten for a long time.

He sought to give weight to his bill of indictment, and it was then that he committed an act particularly grave for a prefect.

He had M. Gourdon, a primary inspector, summoned to his office; he began by telling him that he was not pleased with him, reproaching him with not instilling the secular spirit sufficiently into his schoolmasters; he invited him to request his transfer. M. Gourdon, who has long been at Limoges where he is esteemed by everyone, was rather astounded by the outburst the prefect made at him. He invoked the infinitely flattering appraisals of M. Monteil’s predecessors and of all the academy inspectors who had succeeded one another at Limoges and who were unanimous in praising him both from the political point of view and from the professional point of view.

“Moreover,” said M. the prefect Edgar Monteil to him, “you have a wife who goes far too much to mass.” — “It is true, monsieur the prefect, my wife goes to mass, but that does not prevent me from seriously fulfilling my duty as a primary inspector.”

“And besides, you have a brother who is a priest.” (Exclamations on the right) — “That too is true, but the day my brother took up this profession, he did not consult me.”

When he saw M. Gourdon thus impressed by these severe words, the prefect added: “Monsieur, my police (for he has a police which he uses, I assure you!) my police informs me that Mademoiselle Marsat, one of the two schoolmistresses struck, possesses two mystical books: the Confession and the Spiritual Life; you must bring me back these two books.”

“Monsieur the prefect, how shall I do that?”

“You will do as you wish, but I must have these books.”

Faced with the prefect’s insistence, M. Gourdon, primary inspector, had the wrong, the great wrong, of obeying. He went to Mademoiselle Marsat’s, he explained to her what was expected of her. Mademoiselle Marsat said that she did not even know the titles of these works, that she had never had them in her house.

“I believe you, but I am obliged to search everywhere.” M. Gourdon did indeed carry out, in the school, a search which gave no result; it was then that he declared himself — still in order to obey the orders he had received — under the obligation to continue his searches in the private apartments of Mademoiselle Marsat. (Exclamations in the center and on the right) He entered the private apartments of the schoolmistress…

M. Gotteron. — Into her bedroom! Call things by their name.

M. Lavertujon. — …without, moreover, finding there the book he was looking for.

When M. Gourdon returned to the prefecture, the prefect told him that he had been duped, and that Mademoiselle Marsat had been more cunning than he.

The next day, Mademoiselle Marsat, anxious about her fate, goes herself to the prefecture. The prefect receives her very well; and as she was speaking of her books, the prefect, with a smile, said to her: “But, mademoiselle, you have the right to have in your house all the books you wish.”

“But then,” replies Mademoiselle Marsat, “why was this search carried out in my house yesterday?” — “That search, it is I who ordered it, it is I who gave the order for it to the primary inspector,” replied M. the prefect.

In this affair called the Cénacle affair, do you approve of the prefect for having so harshly struck two headmistresses of a school, when others, neither more nor less guilty, were not troubled?

Do you approve of the search ordered by the prefect at a schoolmistress’s house to seek there religious books?

Do you approve of M. Edgar Monteil for having lowered an honorable primary inspector to that miserable role of policeman, of inquisitor?

M. The Minister. — Gentlemen, I pass to the incidents which were the true cause of the interpellation which M. Lavertujon has just developed before you.

On the date of March 13th last, there appeared a reshuffle in the staff of the primary teaching of the Haute-Vienne. At once protests arose in certain circles; a certain emotion arose at Limoges, very lively polemics began in the local press and even in the Parisian press.

The prefect and the academy inspector were accused of having signed a reshuffle which had an exclusively political character and of having struck, in order to obey little honorable motives, two schoolmistresses who, by their past and the services they had rendered to teaching, commended themselves to the benevolence of their chiefs.

The honorable M. Lavertujon announced to me that he was going to interpellate me; I believed at first that it was a matter of a sort of upheaval in the primary staff, of numerous transfers or removals. I made inquiries and I learned that the reshuffle bore on eleven names and that among the eleven removals, nine had been pronounced with promotion or for reasons of personal convenience invoked by the persons concerned.

Two schoolmistresses, headmistresses of a school at Limoges, Mademoiselle Marsat and Mademoiselle Carlus, had alone been removed as a disciplinary measure.

However, the situation of the department of the Haute-Vienne did not fail to preoccupy me. The polemics increased in violence and in the exaggeration into which, on all sides, people were being carried away, it was difficult to disentangle the truth.

I charged an inspector general, M. Coûtant, to go and proceed on the spot to an inquiry.

This decision implied a censure neither for the prefect nor for the academy inspector. The inspectors general were created precisely to clear up tangled questions and to inform the Government exactly about the affairs which, like the one with which we are concerned, agitate opinion.

Strangers to the departments and to local questions, the inspectors general cannot be suspected of being subject to the influences of cliques or of parties. It is for that reason that their opinions are precious to us. M. Coûtant therefore set out for Limoges. He questioned, he observed and, on April 3rd, he handed me a report which establishes clearly what follows:

Around 1894, the Jesuit fathers of the Haute-Vienne founded a congregation which established itself in a vast building and opened secondary courses for young ladies.

These courses had a double aim: to group women in gatherings of a character at once scientific and worldly; to depopulate, if possible, the secondary courses for young ladies organized by the University.

The Cénacle attracted a fairly large number of women auditors. But soon it resolved to extend its influence and it addressed itself directly to our schoolmistresses. It invited them by skillful circulars, under pretext of literature, of history or of pedagogy, to attend its courses.

A most active propaganda was carried on in this sense.

It was hoped, after having enrolled our schoolmistresses, to seize hold of our pupils.

The inspirer and the director of the work of the Cénacle is Father Dublanchy, superior of the Saint-Martial college. Now, the Saint-Martial college is the establishment of secondary teaching which competes with our lycée. That says enough as to what is the spirit which animates the Cénacle and its teachers. That says enough also that, even failing other considerations, such a patronage ought to have inspired in the whole primary teaching corps a prudent reserve.

A political aim was evidently being pursued at the Cénacle: one had to be quite ill-advised not to perceive it.

Numerous attempts were made upon the schoolmistresses and the schoolmasters to draw them to the Cénacle.

They did not succeed: almost everywhere they were rebuffed.

I regret to note however that a few mistresses, some perhaps out of curiosity, as the honorable M. Lavertujon said, the others out of another sentiment, responded to the invitations which were addressed to them: they went to the Cénacle.

I say it plainly, their place was not there. In attending these gatherings, these mistresses gravely failed in their duty. (Hear! hear!) If they had to seek counsels or to draw inspirations on the high questions of education, of pedagogy, of philosophy or of history, it was not from the adversaries of our institutions and of our teaching that they ought to have gone to ask them. (Applause on the left)

They had only to look around them within the university family to which they belong to find high and firm minds who would have been disinterested and sure guides.

About thirty schoolmistresses frequented the Cénacle unequally. They were not all struck: Only two of them were struck. Which shows that the measure was rather paternal and did not have the character of persecution which has been attributed to it.

M. Gotteron. — Not for them, assuredly!

M. The Minister. — The evil was not yet deep. The inspector general judged that the removals of Mesdemoiselles Marsat and Carlus were justified as an example in order to cut short abuses which would not have failed to provoke grave difficulties.

After an attentive reading of the dossier and of M. Coûtant’s conclusions, I consider that it was necessary to give a serious warning to the schoolmistresses who were little by little slipping down the slope of the Cénacle and that the reshuffle signed by M. the academy inspector and M. the prefect of the Haute-Vienne deserves no criticism.

M. Gotteron. — Everyone should have been struck!

M. The Minister. — The schoolmistresses who had most compromised themselves were removed, I mean those who had appeared most often in the gatherings organized by Father Dublanchy. These schoolmistresses, I know it, protested their good intentions and affirmed that they had had no design whatever to second the political designs of the organizers of the Cénacle. They had shown themselves in gatherings whose clerical character was not in doubt; that was too much. That could not be tolerated.

M. Lavertujon. — They had frequented the Cénacle a long time ago, before the arrival of M. Monteil, but for some time they had ceased to go there.

One should have waited for a new occasion to strike them and not revive an old affair which was forgotten by everybody!

M. The Minister. — Monsieur Lavertujon, we are not discussing the point of knowing whether the measure ought to have been taken sooner or later; we are discussing the question of fact.

Had Mesdemoiselles Marsat and Carlus gone to the Cénacle? Yes. Did this imprudence deserve a disciplinary measure? Yes again. For here, observe it, the liberty of conscience of these schoolmistresses was in no way engaged. Mesdemoiselles Marsat and Carlus were not made the object of disciplinary measures for having manifested their religious belief or for having followed such or such a religious exercise. They were removed for having attended lectures organized by the enemies of university teaching and of republican institutions.

M. The Minister. — I have to examine one last question.

M. Lavertujon told you that at a given moment M. the prefect of the Haute-Vienne had given the order to M. the inspector Gourdon to proceed to a search at the private domicile of Mademoiselle Marsat.

The press seized hold of the incident which was not slow to be disfigured by the passion of the polemics.

Here, according to the inquiry to which I have delivered myself, is what happened:

The prefect asked M. Gourdon to seek in Mademoiselle Marsat’s library the two books of which M. Lavertujon spoke to you. M. Gourdon, after having presented his objections, betook himself to Mademoiselle Marsat’s. He called her into the room of the school library and examined the works which were there.

M. Gourdon asked Mademoiselle Marsat for permission to see her personal library. Mademoiselle Marsat affirmed that she did not have the two volumes designated by the prefect and proposed to the inspector to lead him into her private apartments. (Murmurs in the center) The inspector proceeded with the greatest reserve. “All that has been recounted,” he says in a letter addressed to his hierarchical chief, “of family furniture, of alcoves turned upside down, is pure invention.”

M. Lavertujon. — Did he, yes or no, enter the private apartments of the schoolmistress?

M. The Minister. — He entered them at the invitation of Mademoiselle Marsat. There was no search as has been claimed. M. Gourdon’s mission was particularly delicate and if he had carried it out with less tact, I do not hesitate to say that he might have seriously engaged his responsibility.

M. Leygues’s declarations are no less precious and no less curious for the theories than for the facts. He continued and concluded thus:

Such are, gentlemen, the incidents which motivated M. Lavertujon’s interpellation. You see, when one squeezes them close, when one reduces them to their true proportion, what remains of them.

But these incidents provoked emotion and gave rise to violent press campaigns. Minds became heated. In order to bring everyone back to a precise idea of his duty and to avoid misunderstandings in the future, I addressed to M. the academy inspector a letter which I ask your permission to read to you. Here it is:

“Following the incidents which occurred recently in the Haute-Vienne, I invite you to watch with the greatest care that the staff of primary teaching strictly fulfills its duties of secular education and does not depart, in any circumstance, nor under any pretext, from school neutrality. In particular, it must not let itself be drawn into leagues or gatherings of any confessional character whatever. Severe measures would be taken against those, men or women, who infringed this rule which can suffer no exception.

“Nor must you tolerate that, in the administrative inquiries with which they are charged by their hierarchical chiefs, the inspectors of primary teaching encroach upon the attributions of the ordinary police. Nor must they take any account either of secret reports, or of indications whose exactness they could not personally verify. Their inquiries must be conducted in such a way that the persons concerned can always have knowledge of the grievances or accusations formulated against them and are put in a position to justify themselves of them.” (Hear! hear!)

I consider that conscience is an inviolable asylum and that respect for all religious and philosophical beliefs is imposed on every truly free and high mind, but we could not tolerate that, under any pretext whatever, the members of the teaching corps should break school neutrality, should enter dwellings directed by unauthorized congregations and should go there to draw inspiration from a spirit violently hostile to the secular spirit which alone must animate our public teaching. (Hear! hear! and applause on the left and in the center)

Jean Jaurès — Truth

Charles Péguy

M. Jean Jaurès, agrégé professor of philosophy, on leave, called into question by his enemies, who are numerous, because he allowed his daughter to make her first communion, has replied very forcefully in the Petite République of Thursday the 11th of this month. We publish this reply. It is very far from satisfying anyone who would examine this conflict in the name of private conscience — and in the regard of that conscience. But it is good in the sense — and in the measure — in which it defends against the social and political authorities the liberties of private life. We hope that the numerous collaborators of Jaurès on the Petite République will read the defense of Jaurès and, consistent with themselves, will cease to denounce the petty officials, the little people who have put themselves in the same situation as he.

TRUTH

Under this title, three years ago, I told the readers of the Petite République who I was, what those who are mine were. I opened to them, if I may say so, my family life. And whatever modesty one may feel at thus delivering up the intimacy of one’s hearth, I believed that the proletarians had the right to know thoroughly the man who was struggling for their cause.

I said that my wife was a Christian and a practicing one, and that for the education of the children, a necessary compromise had intervened between the mother, practicing and Christian, and the father, socialist and freethinker. I thought that I had not the right to forbid the children to participate in worship under the direction of their mother. But I thought also that my duty was, by having them brought up in secular establishments, to assure the liberty of their mind. To that duty I have never failed.

It is at the lycée Molière that my daughter is being brought up. She has not had, she will never have, any other masters than secular masters. And I hope indeed that I shall know how to help her rise without suffering and without crisis to that which is, in my eyes, the truth.

As for those who try to abuse against me of the inevitable and painful conflict of duties which the present discordance of the moral world introduces even into intimate and family life, I pity them still more than I despise them. The Church, and that is its right, triumphs over these contradictions; but perhaps it commits in this some imprudence, for it itself underlines the gravity of the conflicts of conscience which the persistence of the religious tradition arouses. And the implacable political calculation by which it stages these very mysteries of family life which ought to be the most sacred to it, finishes off its condemnation.

Three years ago I said these things, frankly, without reticence and without embarrassment, to the militants with whom I struggle. I did not for a minute take their good faith by surprise. I know what I am: I belong to my party with all my strengths and all my weaknesses. And sure of my entire loyalty, I will never disavow anything of my life. I will never repudiate anything of myself.

Jean Jaurès

Daniel Delafarge — M. Brunetière as Historian

Charles Péguy

Professional liberty borders on private liberty. Thus a lecturer at the École normale can publish what he wishes in a book which concerns his calling. It is therefore through an indiscreet zeal that several of our comrades appealed to the governmental authorities against M. Ferdinand Brunetière for what this university man had freely expressed his opinion in his Manuel of the History of French Literature.

I had asked our friend Daniel Delafarge to be so good as to enlighten us on this debate. We publish today his contribution:

M. BRUNETIÈRE AS HISTORIAN

My dear Péguy,

I was not mistaken when I told you that the Universitaire of the Petite République had written inexact articles about M. Brunetière. I have just reread these articles, I have verified all the citations that I could, and my first impression has become a certitude. This is indeed a certain propaganda built upon accumulated inexactitudes. If the deformation of the truth is indispensable to this kind of propaganda, it is better to work elsewhere.

I will not examine here all the journalist’s citations, although I imposed this rule on myself for my own account. My letter would be inordinately lengthened by it. I will set before your eyes only the most typical confrontations: one will see very clearly what is the method of the polemicist.

The first article is dated Wednesday, December 19, 1900. It has for title Ferdinand the Catholic. The point is to prove that the Manuel of the History of French Literature, which M. Brunetière published in 1898 at Delagrave’s, is a clerical or, more precisely, Jesuit work (see the first column of the article).

The Universitaire studies a few of M. Brunetière’s judgments: but he wants to obtain a conviction. It is therefore a true bill of indictment that he composes, and the procedures that he employs are not without resemblance to those which, every day, the procurators of the Republic or the Government Commissioners employ.

I read, in the first column:

M. Brunetière attacks Rabelais whose easy morality turns out to be the negation of all that the Church had been teaching for more than a thousand years.

Here is an insinuating citation. It lets one understand more than it says. But is it rigorously exact? M. Brunetière writes textually: Manuel, pages 55-56:

He preaches the easy morality of the abbey of Thélème and “in its rule there is but this clause: Do what thou wilt.” Only, this morality, when one examines it, goes further than one would at first believe; it has more import, if not more depth; and the rule of the Thelemites turns out to be finally the contradiction or the very negation of all that, for more than a thousand years then, both manners and the School and the Church had been teaching.

The Universitaire has displaced, tightened, suppressed, without warning us of it: the text he cites is no longer M. Brunetière’s, but the journalist’s. Now, however innocent the incriminated sentence may be in my eyes, it is much less so than the true sentence.

A little lower down, I encounter a new inexactitude.

PETITE RÉPUBLIQUE	MANUEL
first column	page 48, small print
And M. Brunetière adds: It is perhaps a question of knowing whether he always understood himself.	Of the obscurity of Rabelais; — and that there where he is obscure, it is perhaps a question of knowing whether he always understood himself.

Difference of sense: in the one case, one criticizes certain pages of Rabelais; in the other one would be criticizing his entire work.

What follows is less inexact: at least the journalist reproduces exactly the texts that he cites; but we know that cuts give, by their assembling, an idea at least slightly false of the passage where they have been practiced.

Here we are at Descartes. And here I note a suppression which is altogether of a nature to lead us astray as to the true thought of the author cited:

PETITE RÉPUBLIQUE	MANUEL
first column	page 117
No, in truth, the Discourse on Method did not at all make an epoch in the history of our literature! And if literature ended by becoming purely French, it owes this to the awakening of the Christian idea.	No! in truth, the Discourse on Method did not at all make an epoch in the history of our literature. Full of admiration for the geometer, the contemporaries of the “philosopher” almost ignored him as such. And if literature ended by shaking off the yoke of all those influences which seemed conjured against it to prevent it from becoming purely French, it owes this to quite other causes, of which the first and the most important was the awakening of the Christian idea under the form of the Jansenist idea.

Let us neglect all the differences of text: the disappearance of the last words of the sentence is rather disquieting. How to explain it? Could it be that M. Brunetière must at all costs pass for a Jesuit?

I will stop there for the first article.

A second article appears the following Monday, December 24th: but it does not directly follow on from the preceding one; the citations in it are few and exact.

Finally, on Wednesday, January 9, 1901, the Petite République publishes: Ferdinand the Catholic (continued and concluded). In this article, the Universitaire declares, very loyally, in one place, that he limits himself to juxtaposing slight citations. He is not unaware, however, that such juxtapositions never fail to deform the thought of the author — especially when they are taken, as here, from pages rather far apart from one another (1).

Here are the most conclusive examples of this inexactitude which is as though perpetual. It is a question of Voltaire, this time:

PETITE RÉPUBLIQUE	MANUEL
second column, ninth line of the citation in small print	page 348, small print
This first idea leads him to another which is to pursue to the utmost all that he finds irrational or unreasonable in the organization of society.	This first idea leads him to another which is to pursue to the utmost — and unfortunately by all means — all that he finds irrational or only unreasonable in the organization of society.

(1) I have found all of them again, except two. Here, in order, are the pages from which they are drawn, 225, 221, 229, 235, 255 (first column).

PETITE RÉPUBLIQUE	MANUEL
second column, seventeenth line	page 349, small print
Hence his attacks on religion which he considers at once as inhuman and irrational.	Hence his attacks against religion which he considers at once as inhuman, irrational and “good for the rabble.”

PETITE RÉPUBLIQUE	MANUEL
second column, line 20	page 350, small print
That moreover in his injurious and gross polemic against Christianity — he failed not only in justice, but in loyalty by misjudging the superiority of Christianity over Mohammedanism or over paganism.	That moreover, in his injurious and gross polemic against Christianity — he failed not only in justice, but in loyalty; by misjudging the superiority of Christianity over Mohammedanism, for example, or over paganism; — if, from the purely historical and human point of view, Christianity renewed the face of the world, — and if, on the other hand, intolerance and “fanaticism” did not at all wait for it to break loose among men.

It seems to me that by cutting the sentence after the word paganism one sensibly alters the idea; one alters it also, though to a lesser degree, by making the two suppressions that I have indicated. Moreover, what makes the cited sentences suggestive is that one is always tempted to lend to a man whom one does not like underhanded intentions. In themselves, they have nothing very striking, and one would assuredly not find them clerical, if one did not know that they are M. Brunetière’s. From one end of the article to the other, I felt this impression. — M. Brunetière is not a Voltairian: but are we all Voltairians? M. Brunetière does not dissimulate the extreme prudence of Rabelais. But is he alone in having noted it?

Are we going to institute new saints, the secular saints, with their legendary biography and their edifying life? Must we piously leave aside all that these great men had of human weakness? To a true and beautiful portrait, because it will be living, shall we substitute a ridiculous Épinal print or an insipid first-communion engraving?

That is, however, where the carryings-away of polemic and the obsession of propaganda can lead. Either one must recognize in M. Brunetière the right to say his thought on Rabelais and on Voltaire; or else one must declare Voltaire and Rabelais intangible. I see no middle term.

And then, what good are these bills of indictment? They are no more true than pleadings. With well-chosen citations and without even making advantageous suppressions in them, I could prove just as well that M. Brunetière is a freethinker.

I read, pages 404-405, small print:

Insulting violence of J. de Maistre in polemic; — and his tendency to paradox. — The apology of the executioner; — of war; — of the Inquisition. — Would he not have rendered more services to his own cause by putting more moderation into it?

Pages 360-361:

The beginning of the affair of the Jesuits preceded the burning of Émile; the affair of the Calas family follows it immediately. Never was emotion more legitimate, if never was a judicial error more deplorable.

The Universitaire writes nevertheless, in the article of January 9th, second column, and the irony is fairly apparent:

Let us pause before this Dreyfusard of a Voltaire, who, with Calas, invented the Affair.

M. Brunetière adds again, a little lower down:

…Once more, the odious procedure of Abbeville and the torture of the chevalier de la Barre put opinion on the side of the philosophers.

Here, finally, but one could cite many other passages, is how he appraises the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Pages 213-214:

If France in mass is unhappily an accomplice of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, it is not only commerce and industry that are dried up in their sources, by expelling the Protestants, but it is public morality which is as though stricken in it even to its foundations.

It is difficult, I imagine, to be more clear in censure, and yet, it is indeed M. Brunetière who wrote these severe lines.

A jest, no doubt, this method of citation: but could one not also say that the articles of the Universitaire are a prolonged jest. Between the two, no doubt, lies the truth, quite simple and even naïve. When M. Brunetière publishes a Manuel of literary history, we may think that he strives to be a historian: it is therefore as a historian or at least as a man of letters that one must criticize his work. When he publishes combat speeches, he gives himself out as an orator or as a Catholic polemicist, and consequently it is as a citizen that we must discuss them and combat them. But why polemicize out of place, why confuse everything? The old distinction of genres had something good about it.

Yet, that is not yet what shocks the most. What shocks above all is that intellectual friends take up without hesitation arms which they have often reproached our adversaries for using. There are clevernesses which one must cast far from oneself, even when they could contribute to what is called victory. The truth suffices.

Daniel Delafarge

Outrages in the Yonne

Charles Péguy

On the outrages committed at Sens and at Auxerre by the governmental authority against the private and civic liberties of the teaching staff, we asked for our information from someone singularly well informed. One will see by the tone of the memoir that the author felt a healthy joy in writing it. Better, when one can, joyous action than sullen action.

OUTRAGES IN THE YONNE

That one must never quarrel with one’s curé

In April 1900, the Socialist Federation of the Yonne brought out at Sens a weekly organ: the Travailleur Socialiste. From the first days, one noticed in it, under the signature: a Stateless Man, articles a little long, a little doctrinaire, but written more or less correctly and of a fairly close argumentation, where not only militarism, war and colonial brigandages were treated with a certain irreverence, but where the idea of the fatherland itself, an idea sacred however above all others, was analyzed, discussed and even condemned with cynicism, as if there ought not to be certain intangible dogmas before which Reason had only to bow humbly. The Stateless Man forgot himself to the point of treating patriotism as an imbecile and bloody religion. He said that the present fatherlands are agglomerations of people gathered under the same laws, by chance or by conquest, themselves or their ancestors, without their consent having been asked of them; that in all the fatherlands there is, whatever be the name of the government, a class of fat men, who enjoy, sometimes without working, all the advantages of a refined civilization, and a class of lean men, very numerous, who live in straitened circumstances or in misery after having accomplished all the dull, repugnant, painful or dangerous tasks of society; that in each fatherland, in consequence of ancient wars made for the fine eyes of the ancient sovereigns at the time when they were absolute, there developed, with regard to neighbors, a sentiment of jealousy and of hatred which is called patriotism; that this patriotic sentiment is not at all made of love and of solidarity for fellow countrymen, for within one and the same fatherland the fat exploit the lean without pity and the hatreds are lively between clericals and anticlericals, employers and workers, conservatives and socialists; he wrote that hateful and jealous patriotism is maintained in each country by the ruling classes, because patriotism serves to justify the existence of standing armies, without which the disinherited would revolt against the privileged; he said finally that the disinherited of all the fatherlands ought to join hands across the frontiers, that they have the duty to oppose henceforth, if need be by force, every international war and that if they must risk their lives, they must do so, not for the interests of the rich and of the rulers of all countries, but to improve their own lot.

He commented on the device of the International: Proletarians of all countries, unite! and he added a thousand other remarks which gave the quite clear impression that he must formerly, at the time of a certain Dreyfus affair, have been sold to the syndicate of the Jews and that he was now sold to the king of England or to the emperor of Germany.

Now, there was at Sens a professor who, outside of his classes, held remarks no less abominable; he called himself a socialist, an internationalist, a revolutionary; he had little enough human respect and little enough self-respect to make his habitual society of manual workers, several of whom were ill clad. It was precisely M. Hervé.

Public rumor was quick to attribute to him the subversive articles of the Stateless Man. M. Hervé let it be said, neither avowing nor disavowing.

Things did not go wrong during the first six months and they would perhaps never have gone wrong, if the Stateless Man had not had the imprudence, in the month of November 1900, to attack the Church.

Sens is a town of an archbishopric: the cathedral, massive, colossal, with its enormous rectangular unfinished bell-towers, without spire, rises gigantic in the middle of the plain, so high and so imposing that from afar all the other houses of the town seem but miserable hovels clinging to the flanks of the house of God: it is there that M. Olivier, curé and archpriest, officiates. The devout women of the place consider him as a thunderbolt of eloquence and a learned theologian: in his leisure hours, he versifies, not without facility nor elegance. The Holy Spirit has heaped on him all its gifts.

Which spoils nothing, in these troubled times when the great principles grow obscure, when the Spirit of evil, not content with attacking the religion of Christ, dares to attack the religion of the Fatherland — beneath that priest’s robe beats the heart of a patriot and of a soldier.

By what aberration, what blindness did the Stateless Man come to confront this light of the Church? God blinds those whom he wishes to ruin!

In November 1900, at the departure of the class of conscripts, M. the abbé Olivier convoked the conscripts of Sens to a solemn mass where he was to pronounce a patriotic sermon. Now on the very eve of this imposing demonstration, here is what the Stateless Man wrote in the Travailleur:

THE ARCHPRIEST AND THE CONSCRIPTS

Several of our friends, conscripts of this year, received the following letter, which they hastened to communicate to me:

Sens, November 9, 1900 Monsieur,

Faithful to its traditions, the conference of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul makes it a pleasure and a duty to inform you that a solemn mass of departure will be celebrated, at the cathedral, on Sunday, November 11th, at nine o’clock precisely in the morning, to draw the protection of Heaven upon all the young conscripts of Sens who are going to join their corps.

Monsieur the Archpriest will pronounce there an address suited to the circumstance.

You are particularly invited, Monsieur, as well as your Family, to attend this religious and patriotic ceremony, where a special place will be reserved for you.

For the Conference: The President: G. Julliot

I betook myself immediately to M. the Archpriest, with whom I am on the best terms, as with all the clergy of Sens, moreover, and he was so good, out of sympathy for the Travailleur socialiste, as to give me a copy of the address which he intends to pronounce at this religious and patriotic ceremony.

I hasten to give the first sight of it to our readers:

My very dear brethren, At the moment when the civil authorities call you to the barracks, it is my duty as a Christian priest to reveal to you what is the pure evangelical doctrine with regard to all violences, and to that violence which is the worst of all: war, which is the end and the aim of military service.

The doctrine of Jesus in this regard is clear and suffers no rejoinder: in his immortal Sermon on the Mount, which Saint Matthew transmitted to us, our divine master expresses himself in these terms:

“You have learned that it has been said: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

“And I say to you: resist not evil, but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, present to him also the other.

“And if anyone wishes to go to law against you and to take away your robe, leave him your cloak too.

“And if anyone wishes to compel you to go with him one league, go two.

“You have learned that it has been said:

“You shall love your neighbor and you shall hate your enemy.

“But I say to you: love your enemies and bless those who curse you; do good to those who hate you and pray for those who strike you and persecute you.”

There, my very dear brethren, is the essence of Christian doctrine.

Now, what is asked of you, when military service is demanded of you?

You are asked to become a killing machine by order; you are asked to become the brute who kills, at the first command of a chief; if some famished strikers stir to demand a rise in wages, you must, if you are ordered to, fire point-blank on unarmed men and women, your brothers in Jesus Christ; if some powerful man needs, for the interests of his commerce, a piece of China or of Africa, you must, if you are ordered to, go, with rifle shots, bring to reason those poor people, your brothers; for a whim of a head of State, it will be necessary, without replying, to hurl yourselves upon poor people born in Germany, in Italy or in England who ask only to live in peace with you and who too are your brothers.

In truth I say to you: the trade of soldier, the trade of killer of men is incompatible with the quality of Christian.

You must renounce the Gospel and your god, or refuse military service.

The powerful, no doubt, will drag you into their convict prisons, into the horrors of Biribi. Ah! is it not a hundred times better for a Christian, to suffer what the martyrs endured before us, than to violate in so cynical a fashion the precepts of Christ.

One is not a Christian, my very dear brethren, know it well, because one mumbles at fixed hours prayers and litanies: he alone is truly a Christian who penetrates himself with the doctrine of the Sermon on the Mount and if need be practices it at the expense of his liberty.

I have freed my conscience as a Christian priest and done my duty as far as I am concerned.

The rest is in the hands of God.

So be it.

If Monsieur the archpriest has not made a mockery of me and of the readers of the Travailleur socialiste, if he truly pronounces the simple and courageous address which I have reproduced above, his confreres of the clergy are going to feel, for the first time, what they have no doubt never suspected: the revolutionary scope of primitive Christianity, in the time when it had not yet become the stupefying fetishism which present-day Catholicism is; will this poor Catholic clergy, so narrow and so given to pleasure, awaken from its intellectual and moral torpor when the archpriest comes for the first time to make ring in its ears the subversive word of the revolutionary Jesus?

A Stateless Man

The polemic began on this presumption. Here is the series of articles published by the Travailleur:

THE ARCHPRIEST AND THE CONSCRIPTS

M. the archpriest Olivier took seriously the jocular address which our comrade the Stateless Man gratuitously lent to him in our last number; none of our readers, we hope, was mistaken about it.

M. the archpriest informs us very seriously that he never made any confidences to the Stateless Man — that is true; — he did not pronounce a single word of the sermon which our friend attributed to him — let us render him that justice too; — he even requires us to insert the authentic text of the true sermon which he pronounced. We are too happy to be able to set, before the teeth of our readers, this blessed slab of bread-and-butter; it proves too well that present-day Catholicism has nothing more in common with evangelical doctrine for us to need M. Olivier’s threats to insert his correction.

Here it is then, in all its spirit of charity and of meekness:

My dear friends, In responding eagerly to my appeal, you testify that you have understood the profound, patriotic, moving sentiment which gathers us in the temple with you and that you prefer this pious rendezvous to all the punches of honor, I congratulate you on it. Avow that it is beautiful, touching, admirable, the religion which thus seizes hold of the most legitimate emotions of the human heart to transfigure them and to add to them, by raising them up to itself, sweetnesses, hopes, infinite consolations. Behold then that on the eve of your departure for the barracks, it invites you with all those who love you, at the foot of the altars, saying to you: it is here that one must make one’s farewells when one wishes to see one another again; saying to us: pray for those who are going to leave, for the days of absence will have their fatigues, their sorrows, their perils perhaps. Ask the God of armies that these sons of France triumph on all the battlefields where they will be called to fight tomorrow.

The first victory which must be asked for them is that of health, for life is already a soldiery, militia est vita, it is the struggle of every day against that enemy which threatens the most robust and which is called death. Many, alas! succumb before their time, in the full blossoming of youth, struck down by sickness, or mown down by bullets: witness those dear children of the land of Sens fallen on the field of honor in 1871, to whom our city will soon raise the monument of remembrance, witness those young volunteers stricken by fever in that twice murderous China, where they went to protect our nationals and our missionaries, those Catholic missionaries to whom all our consuls render such glorious homage and whom Frenchmen have had the sad courage to accuse of avidity and of exactions, when they give their lives gratuitously to extend afar the influence of Christian and French civilization.

But more than the victory of the body, one must ask for them the victory of the soul, so that they remain pure and believing in order to keep themselves valiant and strong, invulnerable and unwounded; for, though I be accused of preaching, in my turn, the alliance of the saber and the aspergillum, I proclaim it, with history in hand, it is religion that makes complete soldiers, that inspires and sustains chivalrous fidelity, that is like a ray of sun on the national flag, that casts over the whole army I know not what magnificent purple, what solemn pomp which nothing equals, which nothing replaces, which nothing eclipses. It is faith, indeed, that teaches that patriotism is a virtue, that the God who wept over his city, who died for the world with his arms on the cross, his heart open, commands us to love like him our fatherland even unto blood, that whoever since then lives and fights in the service of his country is a sacred being; he does not only ply the trade of soldier, he plies the trade of christ, of savior, and if he comes to die, it is not a victim simply, it is a martyr, for he fought for the hearths and the altars, pro aris et focis. You then, dear young men, who, when the angel of France, leafing through the registers where are inscribed the holy reserves of the nation, made the roll call, did not imitate those who hide, who burrow and slink away, nor those who blaspheme the fatherland, out of vexation at serving it, but who answered with a single voice, with a single heart, quivering with ardor and with enthusiasm: present! remain faithful to your double flag. On the one, you read: Honor and valor! on the other: Religion and virtue! Serve your country, serve your God, it is all one, without weakness, without cowardice, in the manner of the Bayards, the Du Guesclins, the de Lamoricières, the Mac-Mahons, the de Sonis, the Courbets. Be, like them, everywhere and always, Frenchmen without fear and Christians without reproach. So be it!

The letter of M. the abbé Olivier reached us too late for us to have been able to communicate it to our comrade the Stateless Man; the abbé Olivier will lose nothing by waiting: our friend will comment in our next number on the word of the holy man.

THE ARCHPRIEST AND THE CONSCRIPTS

We have received from M. the archpriest Olivier a new missive of which he demands the insertion as well as of the one containing the commentaries which framed his sermon to the conscripts. This publication can in no way embarrass us although it contains a charitable and very Christian denunciation which will not strike home — no offense to M. the archpriest; — if we have not inserted it in extenso, it is because the smallness of the format of the Travailleur socialiste obliges us to show ourselves parsimonious of its columns even for the correspondents who, like M. the archpriest Olivier, are so good as to put themselves gratuitously at our disposal. However, as we are anxious to be agreeable to the very end to M. Olivier, we publish below, in conformity with his desire, his two letters, cutting from the one of November 14th the text of the sermon published in our last number. We wish to hope that M. the archpriest will accept this manner of proceeding. Here are these two letters:

Sens, November 17, 1900

Monsieur the Administrator-Manager of the Travailleur socialiste

Thanks for your new and gracious dispatch. It nonetheless makes me note with regret that you have believed it your duty and within your power to leave out the explanatory letter which accompanied and framed my address to the conscripts. I come again to ask of your justice, of your impartiality, still and always in the name of my right once recognized, thanks be to God, to publish it with this one in their exact and complete text, before the commentary which your comrade is to make of it in the next number of the journal. His loyalty will lend itself to this without difficulty, I am sure of it; his reply, moreover, will gain in clarity and in relief, and your readers, our witnesses and our judges, will find perhaps, in the presence of this blessed slab of bread-and-butter, as you so atticly qualify it, that the holy man who always signs, he, is a little less naïve and far less threatening than you have depicted him. If I have the naïveté, indeed, to believe in the sincerity of all opinions, — shall I therefore be wrong? — I consider on the other hand that threats are not in place between well-bred people who know and always observe the mutual consideration which they owe each other. In this I am surely right; so be so good as to accept the assurance that on my side, unless I am constrained to it, I will not depart from the spirit of charity and of evangelical meekness which excludes all provocation, — and you know whether it came from me — but never forbids replying to it: I am ready for it, resigned rather, to the very end.

Emile Olivier Archpriest of the cathedral of Sens

Sens, November 14, 1900

Monsieur the Administrator-Manager

In receiving the number of the Travailleur socialiste which you had the amiable delicacy to address to me, I indeed thought that there was within its folds an article which would interest me personally; but I was far from expecting the good fortune of finding there, under this suggestive title: the archpriest and the conscripts, with a sermon unpublished in substance and in form, the declaration of friendship of an unknown man, much too modest, who really ought to name himself in order not to leave my heart in suspense.

The pseudonym under which he hides tells me nothing; on the contrary, it throws me off the scent absolutely; for it indicates that the author is not of my country. If he is a stateless man indeed, I flatter myself that I have one, that I have two: Lorraine and France, of which I am equally proud.

Any initials whatever: R. V. X. Y. for example, would have been more revealing than these three words which designate an empty dreamer, totally a stranger to the lessons of national history.

The discourse which he puts in my mouth denotes nevertheless a professional accustomed to the pulpit, but to another pulpit than that of truth; and that is why, although his too free and very fanciful translation of the evangelical text has, at first sight, no truthful air, I see myself obliged, because it might mislead your readers, to disavow the paternity of it.

If your correspondent had interviewed me as he says, here is the exact, authentic text, which he would have transmitted to them, which I beg you and require you if need be to transmit to them with these explanations in virtue of and within the measure of the right of reply, of which your courtesy will have no difficulty, I want to be sure of it, in recognizing for me the benefit.

Moreover, the reporters whom I saw in my audience, easily recognizable by the wild rose which bloomed in their buttonhole, will be able to confront it with their notes taken on a holy-water font much surprised at serving them for a desk. Under the reservation of this control which I accept, loyally practiced, be so good as to publish, in extenso, in the place which you believed it your duty to give to an anonymous falsification, this first article of a new correspondent who signs and remains, as long as you wish, gratuitously at your disposal:

(Here the address to the conscripts published in our last number)

There, if not complete, at least faithful in its summary, is the text of an address which has nothing in common, as you see, with the one which your correspondent lent to me. His friendship, since friendship there is, will forgive me this contradiction which was necessary: Amicus Plato, magis amica Veritas.

Emile Olivier Archpriest of the cathedral of Sens

M. the abbé Olivier will not complain, this time, that we have not given him good measure. We give him more of it than he had the right to demand. Our comrade the Stateless Man has moreover asked us insistently to print all this prose, we now leave the word to him:

CHRISTIANITY AND CATHOLICISM

Who am I?

No doubt a wage-earner, a wage-earner of the State, of a Company or of a private individual, to whom his employer forbids, under pain of being suspended, to write under his signature what he thinks of the present social state and of the powerful men of the day. Ah! if I too wished to preach to the poor resignation and respect for all authorities and for all established powers, if I wished to sing the praises of the capitalist regime and of its props, the Catholic Church and the army, then I would have license to say everything, to write everything with impunity. It is never dangerous to howl with the wolves. Yes, I know it, it would be braver, more chivalrous, to brave all dangers, to let oneself be thrown out into the street and to sign all the same; there is no lack, among our adversaries, of good apostles to give us these disinterested counsels. These counsels, I find them excellent ones not to follow; my poltroonery — since poltroonery there is — has moreover its limits: if my articles ever contained a defamation with regard to a private individual, or subversive and immoral remarks liable to fall under the blow of the just laws, let them prosecute me; it will be seen that I will not burrow away, that I will not slink behind our comrade the manager. I know an anarchist whom I esteem and whom I respect as much as I pity him, who, since 1894, is in a convict prison for not having said any more at length than I say each week in this journal. I have therefore the consciousness of still risking something, even sheltered under a pseudonym; and I am not naïve, nor M. the abbé Olivier either, to the point of not knowing that I am at the mercy of a violent reaction in no way impossible, at the mercy of a search at the offices of the journal or at my domicile, of an open and frankly blackguardly denunciation by a political adversary, or rather of a veiled, discreet, Jesuitical denunciation by some good priestly soul. To have done with this question, foreign, in short, to the subject which I must treat today, I wish for M. the archpriest that he may show in the service of his ideas, if there be for him one day some danger in doing so, the courage and the audacity which I put from this very day, in spite of my pseudonym, in the service of mine.

What does it matter, moreover, who I am, if I tell the truth, if I prove what I advance.

In lending to M. the archpriest the sermon which I attributed to him, with an evident irony, in our number of a fortnight ago, my manifest intention was, not at all to seek a personal quarrel with M. the abbé Olivier, whom I then knew neither by sight nor by name, but to show in a striking and gripping fashion to our readers how profoundly present-day Catholicism differs from evangelical Christianity.

In support of my thesis, I cited significant passages of the famous Sermon on the Mount: “You have learned that it has been said: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.

“And I say to you: resist not evil, but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, present to him also the other.

“And if anyone wishes to go to law against you and to take away your robe, leave him your cloak too.

“And if anyone wishes to compel you to go with him one league, go two.

“You have learned that it has been said:

“You shall love your neighbor and you shall hate your enemy; but I say to you: love your enemies and bless those who curse you: do good to those who hate you and pray for those who strike you and persecute you.”

I could add that at the arrest of Jesus, one of his disciples, putting his hand to his sword, struck one of the policemen and carried off his ear, which seeing, Jesus said to him, according to the testimony of Matthew: “Put back your sword into its place, for all those who shall have taken the sword shall perish by the sword.”

Either the Gospel signifies nothing, or these passages signify clearly that Jesus formally forbade riposting to violence by violence.

But perhaps, like a mere forger of the second bureau of the general staff, have I knowingly altered the sacred text to make it say the contrary of what it says? Perhaps have I cited Saint Matthew according to a Protestant Bible which will have deformed the authentic text? This empty dreamer of a Stateless Man, “totally a stranger to the lessons of national history,” knows perhaps nothing either of the things of Holy Scripture! M. the archpriest is not far from believing it and saying it. He finds that my translation, “too free and very fanciful,” of the evangelical text has, “at first sight, no truthful air.”

Really! though I have long been convinced that Catholicism and Christianity have nothing more in common, I did not expect that a Catholic priest, and not one of the least, should be so little familiar with the Gospel as not to recognize at first sight the authentic text of the Sermon on the Mount. My translation, “too free and very fanciful,” which has, “at first sight, no truthful air,” is the exact, faithful, literal translation of a Latin text which M. the abbé Olivier could not challenge without danger for his salvation in the other world. In fact, M. the abbé Olivier perhaps does not know it. Perhaps has he never heard speak of a certain text, commonly called the Vulgate, which is the only text of the holy books that the Catholic Church recognizes as authentic and guarantees as such; perhaps is he unaware that a certain council of Trent, gathered in the sixteenth century to check the progress of Protestantism, decided the publication of a definitive edition of the Vulgate; that on the morrow of the council, in order to conform to its decisions, a pope, Sixtus V, had this edition prepared which appeared under one of his successors, the pope Clement VIII. Well! it is this Catholic edition that I have before my eyes, the edition of 1859, approved by the late D. Auguste, archbishop of Paris. (Biblia Sacra, Vulgatae editionis, Sixti V, Pontificis maximi, jussu recognita et Clementis VIII auctoritate edita) It is the text of this edition that I have translated literally, scrupulously. Let M. the archpriest above all take care, now that he knows he is dealing with the true evangelical text, not to misjudge it: at the head of my edition is found a decree of the council of Trent which fulminates the anathema against whoever shall permit himself to doubt the authenticity of this text.

I can guarantee, moreover, to M. the archpriest, without being very strong in Latin, that my translation contains no contradiction of sense, not even the slightest false sense. Our administrator-manager, the comrade Duporc, holds my text at the disposal of M. the abbé Olivier, or of any other reader knowing a little Latin. If my translation is not, as I affirm, exact, faithful, literal, I consent to put twenty sous in the alms-box of Saint Peter or of Saint Anthony of Padua and to give as much for the work of masses in favor of the souls of Purgatory.

(To be continued) A Stateless Man

THE ARCHPRIEST AND THE CONSCRIPTS The third letter from M. the Archpriest We receive from M. the abbé Olivier the following letter:

Sens, November 27, 1900

Monsieur the Administrator-Manager

Yes, you have said it, I am satisfied, twice satisfied, both with your second insertion and with your third dispatch, and I want your readers to be informed of it as quickly as possible; I therefore beg you and require you if need be to tell them so by publishing this letter in your next number, in the name of my gratitude, of which you will consent to accept anew the homage, in the name of my right, of which you will have no difficulty in imposing on yourself once more the respect. Your print-run, moreover, has nothing to lose by it, I think I know: it will even gain from the point of view of appearance and of the equality of procedures, if you grant my prose the same type of print as that of my honorable interlocutor.

By favor of your amiable complicity, I want to say also to all those who read us that I find myself heaped, arch-heaped with favors by your correspondent. I make him only one reproach, a reproach of a friend; it is to accuse me of having denounced him Jesuitically, I, who “know him neither by sight nor by name,” when he denounces himself in every line, so much so that his name is on every lip, mine alone hesitating to pronounce it. In truth, he would do better to sign boldly. It would be, as he says, “braver and more chivalrous,” and, in short, he would find in it still more honor than peril.

Whoever he be, I cordially thank him for being so good as to open, in favor of the ignorance of which he gratuitously grants me a diploma, as if he were a faculty professor, the treasures of his vast and inexhaustible erudition. Oh! I make no difficulty, — it is justice, — in admiring without reserve this vessel of science, this living and writing encyclopedia. Much more, I ask myself, astonished, by what patient researches, those of a lay Benedictine, he was able to learn what had always been unknown before him, what I would still be unaware of without him, namely “that the Catholic Church has recognized as authentic and guaranteed as such a certain text of the Holy Books, commonly called the Vulgate; that a certain council of Trent, gathered in the sixteenth century to check the progress of Protestantism, decided its publication, that one pope was called Sixtus V and another Clement VIII.”

Ought not a scholar of this stature to occupy the chair of history at the Sorbonne?

I ask myself, stupefied, how, at what price, by how many investigations he was able to procure for himself a volume as rare, as undiscoverable as the Biblia sacra, Vulgatae editionis, Sixti V Pontificis maximi jussu recognita et Clementis VIII auctoritate edita; especially in the editio princeps of 1859, approved by a certain late D. Auguste, archbishop of Paris, who has deigned, he at least, to deliver up to us his first name.

God! how necessary it is, Monsieur the Administrator-Manager, that you should have the confidence of your learned comrade for him to leave it in your hands; how necessary it is that you should yourself have confidence in me and in the public to put at our disposal… such a find! and how generous your correspondent is in consenting not to stop at so fine a stage on the road of his discoveries, in promising to your readers, of whom I am one, of whom I have the hope of being one still, if your benevolence remains faithful to me, a continuation of his first and so precious revelations. But, now I think of it, since you have the good fortune of possessing those pages “which are too little familiar to me,” where the learned commentator read, in a translucent text, translated by his care, “without false sense, without contradiction of sense,” that the Gospel of Christ invites “the conscripts to refuse military service,” that it teaches “the incompatibility of the trade of arms with the quality of Christian”; beg him then to translate for the gallery, with the clarity which distinguishes him, a text which he will apparently find in the same volume, if it is complete, in Saint Matthew, chapter xxii, verse 21 — in Saint Mark, chapter xii, verse 17 — in Saint Luke, chapter xx, verse 25, Reddite quae sunt Caesaris, Caesari; and another, which he will find in Saint Paul, epistle to the Romans, chapter xiii, verses 2 and 4: qui resistit potestati, Dei ordinationi resistit… non enim sine causa gladium portat. Dei autem minister est, vindex in iram ei qui malum agit. Beg him to reread in Saint Matthew, chapter viii, the story of the centurion who flatters himself, if I understand the Latin, on having soldiers under his orders: Habens sub me milites; on commanding them and on being obeyed by them: and if he finds, in his texts, in this episode, a single word of the “revolutionary Jesus” or of the most qualified of his disciples and of his interpreters, which authorizes, which engages one not to draw lots, to refuse to bear arms and to use them if need be, to condemn the recruitment of regular militias; if he does not find there quite the contrary, ten times more generous than he, I engage on my honor, in my turn, to go and pour in person twenty francs into the alms-box of the widow at the next solemn meeting of the masonic lodge. A fine and unique occasion, of which he will wish to take advantage, in favor of the brethren and friends, to make an unexpected manna rain down upon the temple and to levy from a profane person, in favor of the dear affiliates, an extraordinary tribute.

Emile Olivier Archpriest of Sens

We note first that M. the archpriest no longer contests the authenticity of the evangelical texts, cited by our comrade the Stateless Man, nor the exactness of his translation. We take note of it.

M. the archpriest falls back on his second line of entrenchments: he opposes to our friend new texts. The Stateless Man, to whom we communicate the new letter of M. the archpriest, tells us that he foresaw the objection and that he replies to it lower down. Let M. Olivier therefore be so good as to await the end of the demonstration of our comrade.

M. the archpriest, “who is more generous” than our friend, he says, and who no doubt also is richer (does not M. the abbé follow in all things the precepts of Jesus, his precepts on poverty as his precepts on non-resistance to evil by violence?), M. the archpriest offers, if the occasion arises, if he is proved to be in the wrong, to pour twenty francs for the Alms-box of the Widow at the next solemn meeting of the masonic Lodge; our friend the Stateless Man, who has not the honor of belonging to freemasonry, in spite of his sympathies for it, would prefer that M. the abbé Olivier make his payment to the fund of the Travailleur socialiste. The Stateless Man, who is a very interested fellow, preaches for his own saint. We respectfully transmit his request to M. the archpriest.

The word is now with our comrade:

CHRISTIANITY AND CATHOLICISM (continued)

In a new letter, of which I will not amuse myself by underlining and bringing out the insinuations (insinuation is decidedly a genre in which ecclesiastics succeed fairly well), nor the heavy malices, M. the abbé Olivier renounces contesting the authenticity of my evangelical text and the exactness of my translation. The latter, “too free and very fanciful,” which had “at first sight no truthful air,” at a second more minute reading by M. the abbé Olivier, will have seemed to him, as I affirmed, exact, faithful and literal. M. the abbé says not another word of it. I should have wished that frankly, squarely, he avowed that on the first point it is I who am right.

It matters little, moreover, since M. the abbé Olivier beats a retreat. He beats a retreat, but he returns to the charge with new texts of which I do not dream of denying the existence. The point is to know whether they truly invalidate the text of the Sermon on the Mount.

M. the archpriest opposes to me, or rather opposes to Jesus Jesus himself, and not only Jesus, but the apostle Paul. Let M. the archpriest take care that if the master and the disciple are in absolute contradiction on a point, it will be so much the worse for the disciple. Is it Jesus the son of God, for the Catholics, or is it the apostle Paul, who did not even personally know Jesus, and who may not have understood the whole thought of the master? But what then does Paul say in the passage cited? He says in substance that one must obey the powers, for they all come from God; that to resist them is to resist the order of God himself. If Paul means by this that one must kill, massacre the foreigner and the enemy of the State when the government orders it, he simply puts himself in manifest, absolute contradiction with the formal, imperative order, emanating from Jesus Christ himself, and expressed in the clearest fashion in the Sermon on the Mount. If on the contrary he wishes to say by this that one must be submissive and resigned to the powers, understanding implicitly on condition that they command nothing contrary to the law of God, then this text proves nothing either against the evangelical text.

But in the Gospels themselves, M. the abbé Olivier believes he finds four texts which destroy or attenuate the rude and formal words of the Sermon on the Mount.

I regret to declare to M. the abbé Olivier that these four texts prove still less than the texts of Paul.

The one where there is question of the centurion (Matthew, viii) proves absolutely nothing; let our readers judge of it. It is a matter of an officer who comes to beg Jesus to cure one of his servants stricken with paralysis in his house. Jesus says to him: “I will go and cure him.” But the impatient officer replies to him in substance: “When I tell one of my soldiers to obey me, he obeys at a sign; a sign from you, and without your displacing yourself, without making me wait, my servant will be cured.”

That, in substance, is what the passage in question contains. What can M. the abbé Olivier possibly draw from it for the needs of his cause? Will he tell me that if Jesus had wished to condemn the military trade he would not have relieved this officer in his distress or that he would have taken advantage of it to make a speech to this soldier against the military state. To this man who puts himself out to address to him a pressing prayer, M. the abbé Olivier finds it strange that Jesus did not reply by a charge against military service. I like to believe that Jesus had too much heart and too much good sense to place his speeches so badly.

There remain the three texts of Matthew (xxii, 21), of Mark (xii, 17), of Luke (xx, 26), which all three report the same scene and the same remarks of Jesus. Here is this scene exactly summarized: Some devout men, Jews, enemies of the new doctrines of Jesus, tried to ruin him by wresting from him by surprise an imprudent word, some subversive remark against authority. They came to him saying:

“Master, we know that you are truthful, that you teach the way of God in truth and that you care for nobody: for you do not look to the appearance of men.

“Tell us then what seems to you of this: Is it permitted to pay tribute to Caesar or not? And Jesus, knowing their malice, replied to them: Hypocrites, why do you tempt me? Show me the coin of the tribute; and they presented him a denarius.

“And he said to them: Of whom are this image and this inscription?

“They replied to him: Of Caesar.

“Then he said to them: Render then to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God those that are God’s.

“And having heard this, they were astonished at it and leaving him, they went away.”

The abbé believes he embarrasses me by the famous “Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.” That can mean, according to my learned contradictor, but one thing: it is that one must obey the government, even when it demands military service.

One must really have understood nothing of all this scene, so dramatic, of the religious innovator at grips with good apostles who wish to ruin him, to dare draw from this passage such conclusions. The enemies of Jesus who, they, saw better than M. the abbé Olivier the subversive sides of his preaching, wished to make him let slip a word that one could interpret as a remark of a social disturber. But Jesus knows them, he is on his guard: he does not moreover come to rouse the Jews against Caesar nor against Herod; without replying directly, frankly to the question put to him, on the subject of the tax, he replies cunningly — by a remark very vague and very little compromising: “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

But what is God’s, Jesus precisely took care to tell us elsewhere: the Sermon on the Mount has no other aim. It is there that are found, at full length, the commandments of God and among those the formal commandment not to kill, not to resist evil by violence, to love even one’s enemies. As long as M. the abbé Olivier shall not have established that the text of the Sermon on the Mount which I objected to him is inexact, as long as he shall not have found words of Christ approving violence and massacre, in certain determined cases, I have the right to say that primitive Christianity is indeed a gentle religion, an enemy of all violence, condemning them all without exception, the religion of universal brotherhood.

Do not the beauty and the honor of evangelical Christianity, its superiority over the narrow, local, national religions of paganism, consist precisely in this affirmation that all men, without distinction of country, are sons of one and the same god, that they must treat each other as brothers, curb by love and brotherhood their egoistic and violent passions? Remove from Christianity this admirable Sermon on the Mount which, even in the eyes of atheists enamored of the ideal, is one of the most beautiful pages of the history of humanity, because it marks a capital stage in its evolution toward universal brotherhood, and tell me what remains great in Christianity?

A Stateless Man

(To be continued)

THE ARCHPRIEST AND THE CONSCRIPTS The fourth and last letter from M. the Archpriest

We receive from M. the abbé Olivier the following letter:

Sens, December 3, 1900

Monsieur the Administrator-Manager

Confiding anew my right to your loyalty, sure in advance of not having need to have recourse to other means, I beg you and require you to publish in extenso, in your very next number, the letter which follows, my last reply, direct this time, to your comrade.

Monsieur Stateless Man

Only a word more, it is surely the last, and it will be brief, brief as a conclusion.

I wished to oblige you to declare aloud that I was not at all your friend, your emulator, your accomplice, as you had more than insinuated; that I had not, far from it, committed the crime of high treason against the fatherland in a public discourse.

It is done, and your ironies do not wash you of an indelicate procedure, judged such by all, be sure of it.

I wished to prove that the evangelical texts, invoked by you in favor of your thesis and falsely put in my mouth, do not authorize you to say, to make me say above all that Christ, my Master, become suddenly yours, to his great surprise and to that of the public, invites “the conscripts to refuse military service,” nor that he proclaims “the incompatibility of the trade of arms with the quality of Christian.” For there, textually, is your translation or your commentary, as you wish, which I persist in finding, in declaring frankly, squarely too free and very fanciful. It is done and all your evasions have not thrown our readers off the scent, be sure of it.

I wished to establish that other evangelical texts prescribe obedience to the established powers, save in what is contrary to the law of God, as you say quite rightly, that they impose the payment of all tributes, that they authorize the power of the glaive, that they justify the recruitment of public militias. It is done, and your Chinese subtleties and your Byzantine discussions throw nobody off the scent, rest assured of it.

In short, provoked, I replied. — It was my right. — Shall I tell you, provoked anew, I would reply no more, for it would be my dishonor. It cannot suit me, indeed, to pour my prose any longer (even facing a courteous adversary), into a sheet where I sincerely pity you for writing, when you are exposed, as in the last number, to find, following on from your article, under the apparent cover of your pseudonym, a paragraph without signature, the only one which has none, as if to leave the responsibility of it to you, where one announces seriously and for the second time — it is a relapse — “the sudden departure of a vicar of the cathedral of Sens with Mademoiselle B…” Judge of the credit which the neighborhood of a truth like that one gives to your diffuse and embarrassed demonstrations.

You accused me of insinuations, when, fighting with visor raised, I tried, in order to know my adversary, to see through the mask under which he hid to the very end. How will you qualify this kind of anonymous accusations? Perhaps you will call them “a procedure of loyal discussion,” at most “a heavy malice” as you say so finely. Well! I, I call that, in good French, and in all evangelical truth: a lie, a cowardice, an infamy. So it is the tribunal, if I am to believe the persons concerned, which will take care to settle our dispute, which will undertake to comment itself on this text really too free and very fanciful, and to apply the law which protects up to the present, thanks be to God, the honor of citizens.

In laying down the pen, I therefore leave the word to it, and, in addressing you my card p.p.c. I give you a coming rendezvous within the precincts of justice, where there will assist us both our respective friends, seated on different benches, mine on that of the slandered, yours on that of the slanderers.

Emile Olivier Archpriest of Sens

This time, it is no longer a retreat, it is a rout: M. the Archpriest, who already was sketching a prudent backward movement and no longer breathed a word of the evangelical text which the Stateless Man set under his nose, today flees as fast as his legs will carry him, hurling at the head of our friend offensive epithets which M. the abbé Olivier perhaps takes for arguments, but which our friend, with his customary good nature and his customary indulgence, will quite simply take for heavy malices.

But admire the Jesuitism of the holy man! Throughout his polemic with our comrade, you have seen his clumsy insinuations and his painful efforts to make a purely theoretical discussion degenerate into a question of persons. Today, to cover his pitiful defeat, does he not imagine grafting onto his polemic with the Stateless Man a discussion about a paragraph to which the latter is entirely a stranger and which, moreover, has absolutely nothing to do with the debate instituted on primitive Christianity and present-day Catholicism.

The administrator-manager of the Travailleur Socialiste is alone responsible for the unsigned paragraphs which he publishes.

He moreover makes no difficulty about acknowledging that an error of fact slipped into the paragraph which puts M. the abbé Olivier into so great an anger.

The marriages of priests which we announced are quite real, but it is inexact that a vicar of the Cathedral disappeared with Mademoiselle B… We confused him with another priest of another town of the diocese, at present curé of V… We rectify our error further on and we express to MM. the Vicars of the cathedral all our regrets at having mixed them up in a story to which they have remained strangers.

But we hope that, in spite of our correction, MM. the Vicars will not renounce their intention of prosecuting us for defamation or, failing them, M. the Curé of V… On that day, we shall have no difficulty in proving to the tribunal that there is really defamation only there where there is defamatory intention and that, in our thought, there entered no intention of defaming the two lovers in question.

Far from casting the stone at the young priest who becomes infatuated with one of his penitents and runs away with her to marry her, we highly congratulate him on having renounced an unnatural celibacy, source of all corruptions for so many cassock-wearers who have remained faithful to the frock. That is what we shall say to the tribunal and many other things still more precise and more spicy, if the suit with which we are threatened comes to light.

Alas! we tremble that the persons concerned, the slandered ones, may, like M. Olivier, be only braggarts who threaten at first to go all the way and who, at the right moment, prudently slink away. Come, Messieurs the Vicars, come, Monsieur the Curé of V…, drag us before the tribunals, without fear of the splashes and above all without dread of advertising the Travailleur Socialiste.

M. the Archpriest — toward whom we wish to be just — has not been afraid to do a little of it for us in writing in our columns: as soon as the public of Sens learned that it could read in our journal an authentic sermon of M. the Archpriest, it rushed upon this piece of high eloquence and at once our print-run increased in unhoped-for proportions. So it is with a true sorrow that we see ourselves henceforth deprived of so precious a collaboration. M. the abbé Olivier has not obliged ingrates: in losing him, may he permit us to give him here the assurance of our long gratitude.

OPEN LETTER FROM THE STATELESS MAN TO M. THE ARCHPRIEST

Monsieur the Archpriest

Indelicacy is not saying enough; it is a true forgery that I committed in attributing to you ironically a sermon of my own composition: the forgery of colonel Henry — whom we all mourn — was venial beside mine. For the first time, I understand today your holy and legitimate anger.

So, I am in haste to offer you a striking reparation.

For my confusion, I beg you to grant me the authorization to publish in a pamphlet your letters so frank, so loyal and so finely witty alongside my diffuse and embarrassed prose. My conscience will be at rest only when I see, in a little pamphlet easy to circulate among your flock, my Chinese subtleties, my Byzantine discussions and my poor demonstrations at grips with your powerful logic and your solid documentation.

I am convinced that your inexhaustible spirit of charity, which I feel overflowing from all your letters, will not refuse me, nor your modesty either, I hope, to make use of the only means which I see of repairing, as far as it is in me, the truly monstrous indelicacy of which I feel myself guilty toward you.

In concluding, permit me, monsieur the Archpriest, to put at the bottom of my letter the simple formula of politeness which you omitted at the bottom of yours and of which the most elementary courtesy makes a duty for all well-bred people; permit me, I say, to salute you with all the respect that I owe you.

A Stateless Man

Have I need to tell you, Monsieur, as well as our readers, that I am not the author of the unsigned paragraph which is to be found after my last article?

All that I write is signed — with a cowardly and shameful pseudonym, it is true, — but in short it is signed

A Stateless Man

CHRISTIANITY AND CATHOLICISM (continued)

In his letter of today — his last letter, alas! — M. the abbé Olivier, instead of trying to refute the grave objections which I made, a week ago, to the texts which he invoked, limits himself for all reply to qualifying my last article as “Byzantine discussions” and as “Chinese subtleties.” M. the abbé Olivier will permit me not to take these bitter qualifiers for serious arguments: the slightest attempt at refutation would have better suited our readers and would have seemed to them more worthy of my distinguished contradictor. — I do not know whether these same readers, little acquainted with the cunning tricks and the distinguo of ecclesiastical writers, have savored, as it deserved, the sentence where M. the abbé Olivier declares to me that he persists in finding inexact “my translation” or if I wish “my commentary.” This sentence is a pure masterpiece of casuistry. In good French, this elaborate and entangled sentence simply signifies that my translation is exact, but that my commentary, my interpretation of the evangelical text is not so. In other words, the Gospel does indeed say: “Resist not violence, but if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, present to him also the other”; the Gospel does indeed say again: “Love your enemies and bless those who curse you; do good to those who hate you and pray for those who strike you and persecute you,” the Gospel does indeed say all that, but I have not the right, according to M. the abbé Olivier, to conclude from it, to draw from it that commentary, that interpretation that all violence, all the more reason war, the worst of all violences, is contrary to the evangelical spirit; that the trade of soldier, of killer of men is incompatible with the dignity of Christian. At last! M. the archpriest, ceasing to quibble and to deny the evidence, comes to the heart of the question. What a misfortune that just at the psychological moment, he suddenly renounces the controversy!

I will continue all the same my demonstration, for our readers, and after having shown the opposition of primitive Christianity and of present-day Catholicism on the question of non-resistance by violence, I will show shortly their contradictions on other points just as fundamental.

But let us return to my commentary “too free and very fanciful” of the Sermon on the Mount.

Whether M. the archpriest wishes it or not, there are only two admissible commentaries of the text which I invoke; I defy him to find a third tenable and plausible one.

There is first the narrow, literal, rigorous interpretation: “Christ formally forbade replying to violence by violence and ordered loving one’s enemies; therefore a Christian cannot lend himself to any act of violence by armed force: he cannot kill; he cannot be a soldier, for the end of the military trade is war.” This interpretation is the only one which seems to me truly logical for a sincere Christian. It is the one which I attributed ironically to M. the abbé Olivier in the fanciful sermon which I lent him with so ugly an indelicacy. Ah! certainly, this interpretation is not within reach of vulgar souls nor of people of little faith, as Jesus would say. It is easier to recite a whole rosary or to read with the tip of the lips, for two consecutive hours a day, litanies and prayers, than to do violence to one’s instincts of pleasure-seeking and of combativeness and to sacrifice oneself entirely to the triumph of such an ideal. It is nonetheless true that this thirst for the ideal, men have had it to the point of practicing to the letter the principle of non-resistance to evil by violence.

During the first three centuries of Christianity, Christians, true disciples of Christ, those ones, let themselves be persecuted, tortured, amidst the mockeries of the populace of that time, without attempting the slightest resistance. In the sixteenth century, when the Protestant Reformation set a part of European society face to face with the evangelical text withdrawn from the eyes of the faithful for twelve centuries by the Roman Church, there was found in Germany a sect, that of the Mennonites, idealist enough and Christian enough to refuse, without violence, passively, to contribute to the armed defense of the country; in the seventeenth century, the Quakers, another Protestant sect still numerous in America, obstinately refused and still refuse military service; finally, in our century, in Russia, entire villages refused in the name of the Gospel to serve in the army of the tsar. These gentle recalcitrants, the Doukhobors, replied to the policemen and to the soldiers of the tsar: “Do with us what you will; we will render to the tsar what is due to the tsar and to God what is due to God; strike us; kill us; but we will not be soldiers, we will not learn to kill men, for all men are our brothers.” They were persecuted; the ringleaders were sent to Siberia, these gentle peaceful people were put to death under the knout, before their wives and their children; nothing succeeded; being unable to exterminate all these people, whose heroic attitude found admirers in all the classes of Russian society, the government of the tsar had to leave them in peace.

Last year, however, taken by remorse or fearing the contagion of the example, it gave the order to expel them from its empire, and 8,000 of them, wandering and fugitive, abandoned their hearths and their tombs to go and seek afar a land where compulsory military service does not exist, where one is not obliged to kill and in killing to violate the law of Christ. Today, after horrible sufferings, they are settled in Canada.

Who are the true Christians? The Doukhobors or the archpriests who gather credulous and ignorant children at the foot of the altars to sing to them the glory of the saber?

A Stateless Man (To be continued)

CHRISTIANITY AND CATHOLICISM (continued and concluded)

There remains the other permitted commentary, the interpretation less logical, but more easily acceptable, more human. It consists in saying this: “In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus only wished to propose to us a high, sublime ideal, but one which he knew very well to be out of reach for the common run of men; one must not therefore take the evangelical word to the letter; we must interpret it in this sense that we must strive to be gentle, human and peaceful. Jesus could not bear a grudge against good and just men who, without attacking others, content themselves with repelling with moderation the violent invader who threatens their hearths and their altars. Thus interpreted, the evangelical doctrine will be more within reach of our weak humanity and it will nevertheless still exert a beneficent action upon the earth.”

I admit this opportunist interpretation, although the prohibition of resisting evil by violence is categorical and although Jesus, if he had wished to make an exception in favor of the fatherland, would have taken care to do so in clear and indisputable terms. But, then, what must be, at the moment of the levy of the conscripts, the role of the opportunist priest who finds the pure evangelical doctrine too radical and too subversive, but who nonetheless wishes to make heard some echo, however weakened it be, of the word of the Galilean master? His duty is all traced. He must remind these young men that the ideal to be attained is the end of all national hatred, of all war, of all violence; that the defense of the territory alone can justify a violation of the principles of the Gospel; but that all offensive war, all war which tends to destroy by violence the hearths and the altars of another people is an abomination to which a Christian, however degenerate he be, must not submit, even under the threat of prison or of death. With the credulity of the Catholic flocks, so trusting in the word of their priests, in fifty years of such preachings, the Catholic Church would have created within our societies, crushed under military burdens and poisoned with chauvinism to the very marrow, in France and abroad, a peaceful current which would have swept away forever the barbarous cult of brutal force and the idolatry of the saber, it would have stifled international conflicts in their germ and it would have repaired, in a certain measure, by this great service rendered to humanity, all its past violences and all its past crimes.

This opportunist, down-to-earth interpretation has been found still too elevated for the mind and the heart of the curé-archpriest of Sens. Even in this restricted and elementary duty, M. the abbé Olivier has gravely failed: let our readers rather reread his sermon. Without letting themselves be dazzled by the beauty of the form, by those grandiose images which reveal in M. the abbé Olivier a new Bossuet (I recommend to them quite particularly “the angel of France leafing through the registers where are inscribed the holy reserves of the nation”), let our readers go straight to the bottom. Let them judge the wretched thought of the Catholic priest by comparing it with the sublime word of Jesus.

For M. the abbé Olivier “whoever, since (since Jesus), lives and fights in the service of his fatherland is a sacred being; he does not only ply the trade of soldier, he plies the trade of christ, of savior and if he comes to die, it is not a victim simply, it is a martyr, for he fought for the hearths and the altars.” And all the rest of the sermon is an enthusiastic glorification of the trade of killer of men. “Serve your country,” cries the learned and eloquent preacher (it is M. the abbé Olivier whom I mean), “serve your God, it is all one, without weakness, without cowardice, in the manner of the Bayards, the Du Guesclins, the de Lamoricières, the Mac-Mahons, the de Sonis, the Courbets. Be, like them, everywhere and always, Frenchmen without fear and Christians without reproach.”

Well! I maintain that when a Catholic priest is capable of holding such language, in such a circumstance, he no longer has the right to call himself a disciple of Christ, or at the very least, if he has the right to deck himself out in any name whatever, he gives to all those in whom the critical sense has not been atrophied by the mechanical practices and the teaching of words of the seminary, the manifest proof that he has remained completely closed to the spirit of primitive Christianity.

If I were not, according to the happy find of M. the abbé Olivier, “totally a stranger to the lessons of national history,” I would add that the sermon of M. the archpriest gives the impression that at the seminary he learned history only in the manual of Father Loriquet. Does not my distinguished contradictor seem to believe, indeed, that the heroes whom he proposes to the admiration of the conscripts never fought except for the defense of the fatherland, of the hearths and of the altars? Does he not believe in good faith that armies have served and serve only for this defensive role? Come now? were they defending their hearths and their altars, the Napoleonic soldiers who invaded and sacked Prussia in 1806, who robbed and massacred the Spaniards, from 1809 to 1813, who unleashed against themselves, by the march on Moscow, the national and religious insurrection of the Russian people? And the Lamoricières, the Mac-Mahons, the Sonises who won so many stripes and crosses by smoking the Arabs out in the caves of the Dahra, by cutting their fruit trees, by burning their harvests throughout Algeria, — in an Algeria where piracy had no longer existed for a long time, — were they defending their hearths and their altars or rather did they not come to attack the hearths and the altars of the Arab people? Perhaps M. the abbé Olivier imagines too that it is the Chinese who came to attack our hearths and our altars! The Hovas too, no doubt, and the negroes of the Soudan?

If M. the abbé Olivier feels the force of the objections which I have submitted to him since the beginning of this polemic, I beg him to reassure his conscience. He has against him the Gospel no doubt, but he has for him the whole Catholic Church which, for centuries, misjudges and cynically violates the evangelical precept of non-resistance to evil by violence. Already in the eighth century, the missionaries who evangelized the Germans called upon the Catholic warriors of the France of that time against the recalcitrant pagans and one of their chiefs, Charlemagne, had 4,500 Saxon prisoners decapitated in a single day. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century, the Church hurled millions of Catholics against the Mussulmans who occupied Jerusalem: these were the Crusades. At the time of the first one, there was such a carnage of infidels that in one of their temples, the blood rose up to the bridle of the horses, a few steps from the spot where had been crucified he who had brought to the world the Gospel of universal brotherhood. Shall I recall the massacres of the Albigenses, the thousands of victims of the Inquisition, the horrors of Saint Bartholomew kindled by the preachings of the monks? What good, since there is not a single one of our readers — except M. the abbé Olivier perhaps — who does not know that each page of the history of the Catholic Church is red with blood? M. the curé and archpriest, in exalting the trade of killer of men, has therefore remained in the good and pure Catholic tradition.

O Jesus, since you formerly accomplished the tour de force of rising again three days after your death — at least M. the abbé Olivier teaches it to his flock — it would not cost you much more to rise again a second time after nineteen centuries. Come back among us, gentle Galilean; but come, I beg you, without the whip with which you one day drove out the pharisees and the merchants of the temple, M. the abbé Olivier would believe that by this contemptuous gesture you have justified the employment of violence against the miscreants. This time, so that there be no possible error on the subject of your sentiment about all violences, when you renew your fine gesture against the pharisees and the merchants of the temple, I will put at your disposal a solid broom.

A Stateless Man

In the service of a thesis truly untenable, the Stateless Man had deployed such resources of a sophist that he had given, to the very flock of M. the abbé Olivier, the impression that the eminent curé-archpriest might well not be the eagle he had been believed until then.

To crown the impertinence, for two months, the polemic once finished, the Stateless Man dedicated all his articles to M. the abbé Olivier and he had them preceded by epigraphs borrowed from the authentic sermon of the curé of Sens. Here is a specimen of these unbecoming jests:

OUR GLORIOUS ARMY IN CHINA

To M. the abbé Olivier, curé-archpriest of the Metropolitan church

Whoever, since (since Jesus) lives and fights in the service of his fatherland is a sacred being: he does not only ply the trade of soldier, he plies the trade of christ, of savior and, if he comes to die, it is not a victim simply, it is a martyr, for he fought for the hearths and the altars.

(Gospel according to Saint… OLIVIER)

Finally, since then, hardly a week passes without one seeing, in the body of the journal, appearing and presenting himself at every turn the man whom the socialist sheet calls with an obsequious politeness our former collaborator, the eminent and distinguished curé-archpriest of Sens, M. the abbé Olivier.

Everyone knows that priests and Catholic clericals ordinarily have treasures of humility, of resignation and of Christian charity which permit them to endure affronts with a perfect serenity: M. the abbé Olivier and his flock, by an anomaly difficult to explain, are on the contrary irascible and vindictive: their heart overflows, not with meekness for their enemies, but with gall.

In the course of his polemic with the Stateless Man, the curé-archpriest had already found a way to denounce M. Hervé as being the Stateless Man. The polemic finished, he loosed his whole pack on the one whom he suspected of being his adversary.

The chaplain of the Lycée got involved: questioned one day at his course of religious instruction by a young pupil who had heard his history teacher expound the ideas of Renan on Jesus, the chaplain called the young questioner into his room and declared to him point-blank that Renan and M. Hervé were two blackguards and two imbeciles.

Then it was the turn of the abbé Talva, director of the Saint-Edme boarding school, which sends its pupils as day-boys to the lycée: M. the abbé came to complain to the headmaster that the history teacher had, in his course on the Middle Ages, on the subject of the mass, held heretical remarks; verification made, the history teacher had presented the mass in the most orthodox fashion, such as the Church itself presents it in its catechisms. The abbé Talva knew the sacred canons about as well as the abbé Olivier knew the Sermon on the Mount.

The sacristy sheets gave tongue in their turn: one of them even went so far as to advise the pupils to rag their teacher. They did not budge.

Finally two fathers of families, chiefs of the clerical and antisemitic party of Sens, came and handed to the headmaster of the lycée a letter which they begged him to transmit to M. Hervé; these gentlemen summoned M. Hervé to reply whether he was the Stateless Man. M. Hervé replied to the headmaster, then to these gentlemen, that the teacher’s teaching being in no way criticized, the teacher had no reply to make to them; but that the citizen would make it a pleasure to receive them at his private domicile, where he would give them the explanations which he judged suitable.

As for the university authority, it had not waited so long to set itself in motion: the headmaster of Sens and the rector of Dijon pass for clericals and conservatives; moreover, like the good officials that they are, they detest fusses, from wherever they may come, and M. Hervé was drawing very disagreeable ones upon them.

They were not unaware that the history teacher did not engage in politics in class; that he had kept over all his pupils, amidst all these incidents, a great moral authority; but the clericals cried scandal. The officials of the University are good soup-merchants who have to manage above all the rich and clerical clientele. Of republicans, they care very little, knowing well that they will not withdraw their children from the lycées to put them into the Jesuit dens. There is no competition on the left; there is competition only on the right; it is therefore the clerical clientele that a good soup-merchant must above all strive to please.

So, the headmaster, in the name of the rector, invited M. Hervé to reply whether he was, yes or no, the Stateless Man who was polemicizing in so untimely a fashion with the curé-archpriest. M. Hervé replied, in polite but categorical terms, that he was incontestably dependent on the university authority for all that he could say and do during his service; but that outside of his functions, he had the pretension of being answerable only to his conscience and to the ordinary tribunals; in consequence, he did not recognize in his chiefs the right to concern themselves with his political life outside the lycée.

The university authority, for this once, contented itself with this reply. It thought no doubt that the department of the Yonne is the most anticlerical of France; that it would be a scandal to strike a teacher at the very moment when he had against him all the clericals and uniquely the clericals of the region; one must not, out of fear of a fuss with the clericals, draw down upon oneself another more grave one with the anticlericals.

The affair rested there, a better occasion was awaited.

II The affair of the Pioupiou of the Yonne

The occasion soon offered itself and it was not let slip this time.

The groups of socialist youth of the Yonne had decided to publish, with the assistance of the socialists of the department, an annual sheet, the Pioupiou, which would be sent gratuitously to all the conscripts of the department at the time of the drawing of lots. Three to four hundred francs were collected, by means of a subscription opened in the Travailleur, and at the right moment, the Pioupiou was ready; 4,000 copies of it were distributed.

Never was an antimilitarist sheet better adapted to the aim: the Pioupiou addressed itself above all to young peasants, often little instructed; so no grand phrases, nothing abstract, clear and lively narratives, familiar dialogues, a true masterpiece of pedagogy, as if it were written, horror! exclusively by members of the teaching profession, accustomed to speaking to children and to young people.

There were even a few engravings speaking to the eyes; nothing was lacking in it, not even verses:

Here is a sample of them:

SONG

I

Not long ago, I was a peasant; I gaily pushed the plough Beneath the scorching sun Or the surly north winds, And I was quite happy, down there! But at present, I am a soldier.

A soldier of France; I have the fine madder-red trousers, The kepi of red cloth too And my rifle.

Refrain Rifle that I caress, That I burnish with tenderness, I make here this oath: Never, good and compassionate, Will we make the blood of the poor people flow. If you launch brutal Bullets, They will be, my good friend, I know for whom!

II

It may be, one day, that miners, Weary of the labor of which they die, Quit the depths And decide on the strike: It is the recourse of the wretched! One may throw me upon the spot

Heavy with cartridges; In order to subdue these fierce ones, The chiefs may command “fire”

“For a bit of a laugh”;

Rifle, that I caress, That I burnish with tenderness, I make here this oath: Never, good and compassionate, Will we make the blood of the poor people flow.

If you launch brutal Bullets, They will be, my good friend, I know for whom!

III

It may well happen also That they wish to lead me to war To slaughter without mercy Other men, my brothers, Or else to receive death from them. To defend the strong-box Of our vampires! Come, bourgeois, that is enough laughing; Among thieves tear yourselves to pieces, But as for us,

Rifle that I caress, That I burnish with tenderness, I make here this oath: Never, good and compassionate, Will we make the blood of the poor people flow. If you launch brutal Bullets, They will be, my good friend, I know for whom!

Do you prefer these ten commandments of the soldier?

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF THE SOLDIER

The great god Saber thou shalt worship, Flat on thy belly very humbly.

All the great chiefs thou shalt venerate, And thou shalt be, for them, full of devotion.

On Sunday at mass thou shalt sit, If thou desirest advancement.

Thy father and mother thou shalt murder, If they are on strike, joyously.

Negroes, Chinese, Germans thou shalt bleed, Their brats, their womenfolk, the whole shooting-match.

Of saint Flamidien the morals thou shalt take, And thou shalt practice them gallantly…

The kit of others thou shalt respect, When thou canst not do otherwise.

The work of the flesh thou shalt accomplish, At the brothel, very regularly.

To making forgeries thou shalt train thyself, If thou aimest at the high commands.

Thy three years done, thou shalt clear off Home to miss the regiment.

A Discharged Man

The Stateless Man of the Travailleur had naturally contributed his article to it, or rather the manager of the Pioupiou had reproduced one of his articles which had recently appeared in the Travailleur and which he no doubt found edifying enough to be set before the eyes of the conscripts. The article was moreover written for their benefit, as its title indicates:

TO THE CONSCRIPTS

— Little conscript, child of the people, why do you go to the barracks?

— For fear of the gendarmes who would send me to Biribi in case of refusal of service.

— Little conscript, child of the people, why do you flee the barracks?

— Because it repels me to let myself be decked out in a buffoon’s costume; because I have no taste for playing the puppet in the streets and on the squares; because I fear not being able to bear without flinching and without riposting the rebuffs of a foul-mouthed non-com; because I have something else to do more useful than to serve as a flunkey, a groom, a coachman, a stable-boy, a cook, a furniture-mover or a children’s nurse to my officers and to their wives; because it displeases me to be the dupe who does three years, while the sons of the rich, who have had the means to wear out the seats of their breeches up to the age of twenty-six on the benches of the schools, do only one year; because I know that at our doors, in Switzerland, by an intelligent, economical and democratic organization, they have succeeded in organizing a solid army of citizen-soldiers, by asking of all only six to eight weeks at most of military service; because I have the consciousness that with such an organization we would be unfit for any offensive war — and of offensive war, I want none — while remaining still formidable if it were necessary, against an unjustified aggression by a neighboring despot, to defend the Republic and our slender liberties, the only things that I am resolved to defend even unto death. I hate the barracks finally, because if one day I am under the painful necessity of using a rifle, I want it to be against my true enemies; for, above all, what I hate is to become a killing machine by order.

— Little conscript, child of the people, what will you think at the barracks, when your officers tell you that you owe them passive obedience, that you must execute their orders, all their orders, without examination and without discussion.

— I will let them say it, but I will think within myself or else aloud before my comrades that there are circumstances where I recognize only one chief, only one master: my conscience.

— Little conscript, child of the people, what would you think if some plumed fellow, led by some Déroulède or other, wished to draw you, you and your comrades, against the Chamber of Deputies, the ministries or some prefecture to overthrow the Republic?

— I would think that twice already the army has destroyed the Republic; that it imposed a first time on the country a soldier named Napoleon who led France to Waterloo; that a second time, on the Second of December, it shot down the people to install in power a second Napoleon who too led the country to ruin and to invasion; I would think that these two experiences suffice; that the general who would wish to debauch his troops to attempt a third experiment would by that very fact set himself outside the law; I would think that my duty is to take respectful aim at him and to shoot him down like a mad dog.

— Little conscript, child of the people, what will you do if your chiefs one day lead you, rifle loaded, against the workers on strike?

— I will bear with patience the insults and the few stones which the famished strikers may throw at our heads and I will tell my comrades that in case of a command to fire the duty of cowards is to shoot in the air, that of men of heart to refuse to fire on their brothers, the workers in smocks.

— Little conscript, child of the people, what will you do if your chiefs ask for volunteers to go to Madagascar, to Tonkin, to China or elsewhere to defend “our interests” and “the honor” of the flag?

— I will first try not to burst out laughing in their faces when they come to spout their patriotic tirades to us, then I will say to the hot-heads or to the poor in spirit who might be tempted to enroll: one must be stupid, when oneself one is a wretch and an exploited man, to go and die down there of fever or of dysentery in order to permit a few stripe-wearers to fish in blood for stripes and decorations, some big commercial house to gain millions by the exploitation of the natives, a handful of missionaries to introduce at the other end of the world stupefying and dangerous dogmas. I will tell them that it is the lowest of trades, the one which consists in introducing oneself, armed with repeating rifles and with melinite cannon, among ill-armed peoples incapable of defending themselves in order to rob them of their country, that all these expeditions, by whatever hypocritical pretext one tries to justify them, are only acts of brigandage unworthy of civilized peoples.

— Little conscript, child of the people, what will you do, if in a few months, the affairs of China bringing about a conflict between the European nations, there is question of leading you to the slaughterhouse, to defend our glorious ally, the Tsar of all the Russias? What will you do if then, in the town where you are in garrison, you see thousands of workers, republicans and socialists, run through the streets crying: “Down with war!” What will you do if they wish to lead you against these people, whom they represent to you as traitors, sold to the Prussians and to the English?

— I will tell my comrades that these men are right not to want to be led to the slaughterhouse for the fine eyes of the Tsar or to preserve for him a big share of the Chinese cake; that they are right to refuse to fire, for such interests, against the English or German workers, our brothers of labor and of misery; and like the demonstrators, I too will cry: “Long live peace, long live universal peace! Down with war!”

A Stateless Man

We are forced to interrupt the history here in the middle of a chapter. The following chapters were

III. — A bad affair for the ministerial socialists;

IV. — Where the university administration, having believed it was raising a hare, raised a wild boar.

The continuation in the third series.

Correction: Jean Grave and Urbain Gohier

Charles Péguy

CORRECTION

JEAN GRAVE AND URBAIN GOHIER

We have received the following letter:

Paris, July 4, 1901 Monsieur,

In your “Thirteenth cahier,” you make use of your right as a journalist as it pleases me to make use of mine: that is perfect.

I will nonetheless observe to you that, under pretext of deploring a quarrel already long past, you draw it out of oblivion: which is an ingenious way of pouring oil on the fire.

I will point out to you next that, in spite of your affectation of high impartiality, you have omitted a few pieces of the “dossier”… notably the most odious accusations directed against the Aurore.

Finally I beg you to dissipate a possible equivocation, according to the citation which you make of the pontifical theory on “bastards.” You seem to apply it to me. The regularity of my civil status inspires in me no pride and procures for me no advantage. But I have a mother who does not care for a misunderstanding of this kind, and that is enough for me to send you the present correction.

Receive, Monsieur, my salutations.

Urbain Gohier

This correction interests, among others, the manager of these cahiers; the author of the memoir; and Jean Grave himself. Since it reached us, we have received from Jean Grave a letter to Ludovic Marchand, where he sheds light on several points of the debate.

The Manager: Charles Péguy

This cahier was composed and printed at the union rate.

Printing-house of Suresnes (G. Richard, administrator), 9, rue du Pont. — 4718

We hold gratuitously at the disposal of our subscribers:

Marcel and Pierre Baudouin: Jeanne d’Arc, drama in three acts;

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Send one franc for the costs of dispatch.

Address to M. André Bourgeois, administrator of the cahiers, 16, rue de la Sorbonne, Paris, the correspondence of administration and of the bookshop: subscriptions and renewals of subscription, corrections and changes of address, missing cahiers, money orders, indication of new subscribers. Do not forget to indicate in the correspondence the number of the subscription, as it is inscribed on the label, before the name.

Address to M. Charles Péguy, manager of the cahiers, 16, rue de la Sorbonne, Paris, the correspondence of editorship and of institution. All correspondence of administration addressed to M. Péguy may entail for the reply a considerable delay.

M. André Bourgeois, administrator of the cahiers, receives for the administration and for the bookshop every day of the week, Sunday excepted, — from eight o’clock to eleven o’clock and from one o’clock to seven o’clock.

M. Charles Péguy, manager of the cahiers, receives for the editorship on Thursday evening from two o’clock to five o’clock.

As we have announced, the sixteenth and last cahier of the second series will be the unofficial stenographic account of the fifth international socialist congress, held in Paris in September last. Not only is this account a unique monument, but the annotations of Lagardelle and of M. Sorel make of it an indispensable instrument.

We gave the bon à tirer after corrections for two thousand copies of this fifteenth cahier on Tuesday, July 23, 1901.

Bloody socialist battle

THE CORRIDA OF ROUBAIX

We read in the Réveil du Nord, socialist journal, number dated Tuesday, July 9:

Although the weather is somewhat overcast, twelve to fifteen thousand persons crowd into the vast arenas of the bullring of Roubaix.

The presidency of the lidia is allotted to M. Bouzanquet de Balestrier, president of the U.T.V.

The bull Quincaillero having perished assassinated by its fellows, the lidia will comprise only five bichos.

1st bull. — The first bull Rumbon, dark red, avoids the picadors; the first picador misses him with his vara, then the bull takes a few pikes which are applauded by the crowd. The cape passes, the placing of the banderillas, all that excites the general enthusiasm.

The bull, which has been wounded in the right leg, is rather calm; Reverte has made his brindis to the presidency and, with a very fortunate sword-thrust, kills the bull amidst an enthusiastic ovation. The Toro-Club offers him a palm of gold.

2nd bull. — The second bull, Alegrito, light red, very fiery, gravely wounds a picador’s horse which remains in the arena.

The second picador is also unhorsed; furious, he climbs back into the saddle, while the bull returns to the first horse which it strikes again.

The first picador comes back into the arena with a horse which the bull attacks vigorously, then to flee before a kick which the nag applies to it.

On various occasions, the bull attacks the horses and takes numerous pikes.

The placing of the banderillas is done to perfection. Valentin “addresses his toast” to the aficion of France.

The first two thrusts of the Spada are badly given, the sword leaps out of the wound. The third thrust is well applied; but the bull, still running, the sword comes out of the wound. A fourth thrust, attempted by Valentin, is very unlucky; but the bull, already touched, lies down and the puntillero finishes it off at once.

3rd bull. — Here is Ballerio, a superb beast, which, instead of putting all the fire of the others into it, walks about like a curious onlooker, with a very calm air. It flees the picadors, and nevertheless takes two superb pikes which render it somewhat cowardly; it flees henceforth and it is with great difficulty that one succeeds in making it take two more pikes bringing about two horn-wounds to the horses.

Valentin, in making a cape pass, falls down before the bull which is immediately diverted.

To be noted are some fine placings of banderillas by Curite, Currinche and some very bold cape passes by Bonifa.

Revertito, who is to dispatch the bull, makes fine passes with the muleta, but he misses the first thrust; the second thrust is thwarted by a movement of the head of the bicho and the sword leaves the wound.

Finally, at the third thrust, the bull, gravely touched, lies down after five minutes of resistance; it is finished off by the puntillero.

4th bull. — Campanero, a bicho, red, dark head, enters with impetuosity into the redondel and hurls itself upon the partition, — talanquera, — which it strikes with its tapering horns. Then it attacks the first picador, whose vara breaks under the effort; the horse escapes the horn-thrust.

The bicho takes six fine pikes and the picadors succeed in arresting its effort without the horses being seriously stricken.

At this moment, the sun, which was sulking, makes a rapid appearance which gives the arenas a southern appearance. It is a true magical stroke: the pu— [text breaks off]

Note for the cowards: To flatter the vices of the people is still more cowardly and more filthy than to flatter the vices of the great.