Charles Péguy·Cahiers de la Quinzaine

III-2 · Deuxième cahier de la troisième série · 1901-10-20

Les Universités Populaires

Charles Guieysse

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Truly True

Our subscribers have here from M. Charles Guieysse, the general secretary of the Society of Popular Universities, a cahier, which is personal to him, on these same Universities. We will soon publish a cahier of documents and information to be supplied to us by the Society itself. Finally, we will publish some day, from M. Romain Rolland, an entire cahier on popular theater.

There are two kinds of teaching, and only two kinds of teaching. If we keep the usual designations, and we may provisionally keep them, there are, and there are founded in reason and truly distinct, only higher education and primary education. Secondary education, which is socially so considerable, exists, in reason, only because it serves as preparation for higher education and as the continuation, or completion, of primary education.

Higher education, understood roughly in the usual sense, commands primary education, and all the more so secondary education, which forms the connecting link. And from primary education to higher education, passing through secondary education, there is not continuity, not continuous progress, but conversion and revolution, alteration, crisis, formation.

Given that all teaching tends to communicate knowledge to students, one may call higher education that which puts the consideration of knowledge first and foremost, and primary education that which puts the consideration of students first and foremost. Secondary education is the connecting link because, while forming students, it begins to teach them to advance human knowledge.

Higher education receives no command; it commands itself; or rather it is commanded only by the real whose true knowledge it seeks; it tends only toward the search for truth in philosophy and in the sciences; at the limit, and rigorously speaking, it has no need to concern itself with students. It tends only to advance the knowledge that humanity may have of the real offered to its inquiry. The professor at the École des Hautes-Études or at the Collège de France pursues for his part the perpetual and universal investigation of humanity upon the real offered to that investigation. He does not run after students. They come to him, as to the God of Aristotle, follow his course, hear it as best they can, work, and if need be prepare themselves to listen to him. Normally he need not concern himself with their insufficiency. It is for them to provide for it. Speaking rigorously, one may say that they are made for the course, and that the course is not made for them, since it is made for the object of the course. Thus when M. Vidal de la Blache gives a course of higher education on the orographic system of Europe, the point is not that given students should find the course agreeable, convenient, useful, easy; rather the point is, absolutely, that the professor should pronounce the most exact knowledge he can, scientifically, geographically, of the real European heights. When a philologist gives a lesson of higher education on an ancient text, it is absolutely a matter of reconstituting and interpreting, as exactly as one can, the real ancient text. Finally, when a philosopher-historian gives a course of higher education on the philosophy of Epicurus, it is a matter, absolutely, of reconstituting and interpreting, as exactly as one can, the real philosophy of Epicurus. It is for the students to have put themselves, on their own and in advance, in a position to listen to these courses. They must have learned in advance the technique, the vocabulary, geology, cosmography, general physics and chemistry, enough natural history, enough history. They must have learned grammar, vocabulary, metrics. They must know Greek, and at least a little of the history of Greek philosophy before Epicurus.

Let us be clear, and let us leave no pretext for parody. Higher education is not that which would deliberately be unintelligible to its audience. It does not despise its students. It strives to make itself heard, to make itself understood. But such is not its essential end. Its essential end is to contribute to human philosophy and science. It works under the aspect of humanity. That the professor, while safeguarding the wholeness of philosophy and the wholeness of science, should render them intelligible to the audience given him — that is his affair as an artist, but we reserve, in this reasoning and in this schematic classification, the consideration of art and of means.

We examine only intentions and wills. The intention of higher education is philosophical and scientific. The best higher education is that which produces the best philosophy and the best science.

The best primary education is that which produces the best students. Primary education begins by being intelligible. Its intention is pedagogical. It works under the aspect of men. It seeks to form men and citizens.

We know that the distinction we wish to establish is schematic. But we do not believe it to be any less profound. We know that from primary education to higher education, passing through secondary education, from the alphabet to the laboratory, and from the schoolteacher to the professor, there are ranged the innumerable nuances of art and of life. But we also believe that the apparent continuity, that the real organic continuity of these nuances covers a real logical, moral, and perhaps metaphysical rupture. In the life of every interesting man, keeping to the functions of knowledge, there is a moment when one ceases to be a good student. From the history of pedagogy we know that the best students by far have not always become the best philosophers and the best scientists. From the history of philosophy and of the sciences we know that many good philosophers and many good scientists had not been good students. And those who were good students and then became good philosophers and good scientists did so by very different, if not contrary, qualities. There is childhood and adolescence, when one is a student; and there is adult age, when one is a man, a scientist or a philosopher. There is, in passing from the first age to the second, a mental revolution as well, an intellectual and moral crisis, a conversion, a change of gaze. A student is normally a child then an adolescent whom one cultivates and who himself cultivates himself more and more, better and better. An adult, a man, cultivates philosophy or science. With respect to the functions of knowledge, he no longer cultivates himself except for the object of his investigation.

I believe that one would advance considerably toward the solution of important problems if one introduced into research the new consideration of higher education and primary education thus distinguished, if one asked at every moment what in education is made for the student, and what is made for the object of science and for the object of philosophy. The two intentions often conflict. The State University, which certain radicals would make into an infallible monopoly for us, and which so resembles a State Church, has greatly delayed, greatly distorted the passage from primary education to higher education by instituting late examinations and competitions, such as the agrégation. If the Faculties and the École Normale succeed fairly often in producing good results, in forming free minds, it is because most of the professors and lecturers react as much as they can against the institution, reduce cramming as much as they can, and introduce as much as they can genuine work in letters, in sciences, in philosophy.

Many problems would be illuminated if one began by expressly asking what one wishes to do for the student and what one wishes to do for the object: thus the organization of primary education, secular; the elimination of congregational teaching; the composition of programs; the sequence of studies; the university monopoly; the sequence of examinations and competitions; university federalism; literary education and scientific education; classical education and romantic education; education through the ancients and education through the moderns; education through French and education through foreign literatures; education by masters, and education by comrades, and education by friends, and education by oneself; education by emulation and education without emulation; methods; the use or abolition of the great military and university Schools; neutrality; university extension; boarding, day school, or the family.

One would thus perceive that among the difficulties which so happily put the pretentious snobs to flight, beyond the economic, political, and social difficulties that are generally noted, the Popular Universities present the following pedagogical difficulty: they must provide primary education to listeners who have already received the higher education of life itself.

Elsewhere men receive primary education during childhood and adolescence, then they pass normally to higher education, if they pass to it at all. But in the Popular Universities, the listeners who receive a primary education are for the most part no longer children or adolescents; they are adults, often old men. They have all received the master teaching of life. And they have nearly all received the master teaching of poverty. They know, in a sense, as much as their teachers and professors; they know the world and the real as well, if they have themselves known love and death.

In the primary schools, the teacher has over the student the advantage that his advance in knowledge is doubled, authorized by an advance in life. In the Popular University, the teacher, the professor, has the advance in knowledge, but he no longer has the advance in life. He may even have a certain delay of life. The worker and the peasant, if they have been more unfortunate, poorer, may have a harsher, deeper, more valid knowledge of life.

Thus the Popular University accumulates, along with the pedagogical difficulties of primary education and the difficulties of higher education, difficulties all its own.

Many questions would be illuminated, beyond narrowly university questions, if one introduced into research the distinction between primary education and higher education, for one must consider many questions, at least in part, under the aspect of education: the press, newspapers, cahiers and reviews; serial novels; announcements; polemics; the theater; electoral campaigns; books; politics; posters.

We will modestly examine these questions in the cahiers as we are able. Today we will introduce the distinction between primary education and higher education only to ask not the indulgence but the patience of our new subscribers and our prospective subscribers.

I have often said that Pages libres is a periodical of primary education. One might specify that its institution corresponds exactly to that of the Popular Universities. Like the Popular Universities, Pages libres provides primary education in the sense that the consideration of readers, the formation of students, is placed in the foreground. Like the Popular Universities, Pages libres provides primary education to a public, to an audience that has already received the higher education of life. Thus the collaborators of Pages libres have over the subscribers an advance in knowledge, but they do not have an advance in life. And all the difficulties of primary education, the difficulties of higher education, the particular difficulties of the Popular Universities accumulate for the editing and administration of Pages libres.

And it is not by chance that M. Guieysse, having worked in the Popular Universities, subsequently founded this popular periodical.

I have never said, but I can say, now that we have defined our terms, that our cahiers provide higher education. Whether we succeed more or less, it is for events to say. But such are our intentions. We endeavor to do for the preparation of the social revolution, in the sense in which we understand it, exactly what higher education does for the orography of Europe, the ancient text, or the philosophy of Epicurus. We publish truly what we believe to be the truth, without favor and without disfavor, without accommodation, facility, or pleasantry.

We believe that it is indispensable that this higher education be produced somewhere. In the rising melee of demagogic lies, it is indispensable that a periodical freely publish all the truth it can, free truth, without any concern for partiality, without any concern for base utilization — without any concern for primary education, for making things accessible.

The generation for whom we work is not worth the preceding generation. Let us know how to say it. Let us know how to tell them. The republicans of the eve, who prepared the Republic for us, so badly, under the Empire, were in the presence of a public much more intelligent, and more hardworking than ours. I knew in my childhood several of these old provincial republicans, workers or very small employers. These men read a great deal, attentively, with zeal, with perseverance. They worked. Their authors, somewhat uneven, were not always their equals, and did not always merit this zeal. They were Michelet, Quinet, Hugo, Raspail, Eugène Sue, Gambetta, Paul Bert, Thiers, Louis Blanc. These republicans were passionate about the history of the Revolution and the Empire. They made efforts. They worked. If the present republic is no more habitable, it is by no means their fault, but this is due to the bourgeoisification of their leaders.

We authors, publishers, and managers, are less favored today. People no longer read. Not only is the public bad, but there is no longer a public. For causes that we will examine later, in particular through the invasion of the pedagogy of pleasure, or complaisant pedagogy, the old public has disintegrated. The new public is yet to be formed. We are working at it as much as we can, without any servility or complaisance. May our subscribers help us in this. At the moment we publish this second cahier, we cannot yet know how well the third series will be read. We receive the testimony and the proof of deep friendships. If this movement continues steady, we will have advanced one step in this indispensable preliminary work: securing that a free public sustain and read a free periodical.

At the moment we go to press, the most revolting cowardice is on display.

I ask that one be willing to note that I am one of the greatest — loyal — enemies of Jaurès. Indeed I am his greatest enemy, if it is true that there is no socialist in France who has like him the love of mystical unity, and if it is true that there is no true anarchist who has more than I the passion for liberty. I criticized Jaurès at a time when innumerable swarms of flatterers surrounded him. I told him what I believed to be the truth at a time when nearly everyone cultivated his errors.

It is not enough to read only what follows to form an idea of the Popular University. The position of general secretary of the Society of Popular Universities is less important than that of founder of a Popular University. One must not read only the one who has watched others work attentively and without passion; one must also read those who have worked passionately.

One should therefore read:

La Coopération des Idées; a Tentative of Popular Education and Organization, by Georges Deherme, published at the Union pour l’Action morale. — 0 franc 50.

La Fondation universitaire de Belleville, by Jacques Bardoux, published by F. Alcan. — 1 franc 50.

Quelques réflexions sur les Universités Populaires, by Dick May, in the Revue Socialiste, January and February 1901 issues.

Les Annales de l’Université Populaire lyonnaise, three pamphlets published by Storck et Cie.

One should also concern oneself with the ideas of Gabriel Séailles, Buisson, Duclaux…

Ch. G.

The Popular University is a product of the workers’ movement.

The Popular University is a workers’ association, just as is the union, the socialist cooperative, and also the group for political action or social studies.

It is from this point of view that it is important to consider it, without being arrested by the fact that a certain number of institutions bear the name of Popular University and are by no means a product of the workers’ movement. These institutions are simply societies of instruction and education that operate in working-class environments, as many others operate in the milieux of small commerce, of the petite bourgeoisie; they are not Popular Universities as they are about to be defined here.

The Popular Universities, however, at their birth did not appear as a product of the workers’ movement. They were born, in fact, from the rapprochement that occurred between the liberal bourgeoisie and the working class during the Dreyfus affair. The working class, through its attitude in Paris, having, all things considered, done more than the government to defend the Republic, the grateful liberal bourgeoisie founded the Popular Universities; and there it spoke a great deal of the fusion of classes, when it did not go so far as to deny that classes existed.

This state of amiable peace did not last long. On the one hand, the liberal bourgeoisie grew tired of frequenting the Popular Universities where it was naturally ill at ease, and, on the other hand, the working class quickly manifested its desire to take the direction of the Popular Universities itself, which could scarcely please the liberal but timid bourgeoisie.

A year after the beginning of the Popular Universities, it was manifest that soon they would draw their strength only from the working class; and the withdrawal of the bourgeoisie accelerated. Certainly, in the Popular Universities one still encounters numerous persons belonging to the bourgeoisie, but these persons have a rather exceptional spirit: they love liberty for its own sake and not for the advantages they selfishly derive from it; enjoying liberty, they wish to give its enjoyments to the working class. At first they represented the bourgeoisie in an impossible attempt at fusion with the working class; they have become allies of the working class working itself toward its own emancipation.

Through the natural play of social factors, the Popular Universities have become workers’ institutions; and what is now clearly their reason for being is the class struggle and not the fusion of classes.

The Class Struggle for Liberty

But let us be clear about the meaning of the phrase “class struggle,” which bears only a very distant analogy to the caricatured idea of the struggle between the cap and the soft hat against the bowler or the top hat.

One generally sees in the class struggle only a struggle for equality and nothing more; it would be the struggle of the poor man against the rich man whom he envies.

Without denying that equality is truly and strongly desired by socialist workers, one may conceive that the class struggle is above all a struggle for liberty and that it is organized by the desire for liberty of those who do not possess it today. The existence of the Popular Universities, as institutions of the autonomous working class, comes to justify this way of seeing.

If it is possible to decree equality by seizing the government, the political administration of today which, being strongly hierarchical, allows all acts of authority, it is impossible to truly decree liberty, which must be conquered, man accustoming himself to it little by little, conceiving it each day more clearly than the day before. In the eyes of anyone who truly loves liberty, the class struggle may thus appear as absolutely logical, and absolutely desirable.

Until now, it scarcely appears thus either to the propertied bourgeoisie, or to the mediocre and false intellectuals who have seized the direction of the socialist movement. But I maintain that, as I present it, it is beginning to appear, still confusedly, to workers.

The class struggle is waged, it is constantly and justly said, with the aim of conquering “public powers.” This term must be defined.

By this one generally means the governmental powers of the current State, Parliament, the Ministries. That is a naive and incomplete understanding. Public powers exist independently of the form under which they appear at any given time; and when one speaks of the “ruling class,” this is precisely what one affirms. Currently the ruling class is the totality of property owners; the class struggle has as its aim to substitute the working class for it, or more exactly to give the class of workers, of producers, the general direction of society. (1)

And, thus presented, the class struggle indeed seems a historical necessity. Since what men have always needed is the products of labor, the history of workers successively improving their condition toward greater liberty constitutes something like the structure of political history. And it is justly permissible to suppose that workers arriving at liberty, that is, becoming the ruling class — for positive liberty manifests itself through the just part one takes in the management of general interests — this would be the establishment of liberty as the very principle of Politics. (2)

(1) At public meetings, on posters, in propaganda pamphlets, the words “proletarian” and “worker” are constantly used interchangeably. This is a regrettable confusion. Proletarians, the poor, the destitute, cannot unite to take the direction of society, for they fulfill no social function; they are merely the products of a condemnable social organization; having awareness of their condition, they constitute a force of revolt against the present state, but not a revolutionary force directed toward another social organization. Workers, on the contrary, producers, fulfill a social function that can never cease, and they constitute a revolutionary force that sets as its goal that their functions will be fulfilled in liberty and not in the servitude of the current wage system. That pauperism should disappear when workers — generally proletarians — have become the “ruling class,” this is possible, even probable if you like. But the class struggle implies the union of workers and not of proletarians, the union of producers and not of the poor.

(2) One generally conceives that the goal of the workers’ movement is the expropriation of capitalist property, and the formation of a collective property…

The Catholics understood well that the Popular Universities pursue exclusively liberty.

When, two years ago, the Popular Universities presented the spectacle of a social peace concluded between bourgeois and workers, they kept to a wait-and-see attitude. They know that wherever social peace is established, wherever the idea of struggle and of self-emancipation disappears, they can usefully introduce themselves to lull the sufferings of servitude into devout submission, to justify them by the spectacle of the supernatural joys of which the Church has made itself mistress. And the watchword was to infiltrate the Popular Universities by the usual tactic, in the name of liberty. (1)

They therefore handled the Popular Universities with care. And some of them gave lectures there, without protest from the audience. This was the time when the working class had not yet taken possession of the institution that the liberal bourgeoisie had founded, when it came only to listen to the lectures that the delegates of the bourgeois founders organized for it.

But in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, (1) a priest, Abbé Denis, spoke one day. There were very lively protests; audience members made a violent and indecent noise.

There was much debate over the “Denis affair”; all the newspapers concerned themselves with it. Deherme, in his weekly, wrote articles against the sectarians, and had the audience of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine hear lectures on liberty, free discussion, tolerance.

I would readily believe that people constantly debated beside the point.

That Urbain Gohier in the Aurore, and the university correspondent of the Petite République should have thundered against Deherme for having allowed a priest to speak before his audience — this is not surprising, and contributes no element to an examination of the situation; they are simply authoritarians, demagogues who howled because another “word of truth” than their own was pronounced in the faubourg. That Deherme defended himself energetically is entirely natural, but he too does not matter extremely; having been constituted, having been constituted educator without oversight by the audience of the faubourg, he employed the method that seemed good to him; it was his duty as absolute director. That Maurice Bouchor should have protested in the name of reason against the presence of Abbé Denis — he forcefully repeated what he goes about repeating everywhere in educating those who listen to him, but from him, no more than from Deherme, does the solution depend. That Séailles, Buisson, Wagner, Le Foyer (1)… should have pleaded the cause of liberty, this teaches us nothing about the regime of the Popular Universities, for they remained in the abstract, they spoke for the glory of abstract liberty.

Having thus eliminated all those whose names have been mixed into the debate, what remains to settle the question? There remain those whom no one thought to consult publicly, the audience members themselves of the Popular Universities.

These people, it is quite evident that a priest’s robe frightens them, like all the symbols of the servitude they wish to vanquish. But when they protested brutally against the abbé, do not believe that their protests were addressed to him alone; they were also addressed to Deherme who had imposed this presence upon them, and in this circumstance they did what all those who struggle against something do: they personalized that something, the struggle against someone being easier.

In a meeting of secretaries of Popular Universities, which took place some time after the disrupted lecture of the abbé, there was no further discussion of the affair except to note the scant practical interest in examining it.

But from that day, the audience members of Popular Universities sensed that to attain liberty, they had to take the direction of the Popular Universities themselves and no longer leave it to the bourgeoisie and its delegates; that they had, in a manner of speaking, to break the social peace.

A swarm detached itself from the Coopération des Idées to settle in another part of the faubourg. And everywhere the secretariats of Popular Universities elected by the audience members were constituted more firmly.

The Denis affair had as its result the hastening of the takeover of the Popular Universities by the working class.

And then the Catholics, the partisans of the Church, understood that they could not penetrate the Popular Universities, no more in lay clothing than in clerical garb.

They were beginning to organize yellow unions; factory owners had long been operating company stores. They still needed to found institutions that would directly oppose the Popular Universities; they did so, they opened “Popular Institutes.”

(1) The Coopération des Idées (157, Faubourg Saint-Antoine), the first truly constituted Popular University, was founded by several hundred personalities of the liberal bourgeoisie (Society of Popular Universities) who grouped around Deherme and entrusted him with the absolute direction of the institution.

(1) Read in the Association catholique of April and May 1900 two articles by M. Sangnier-Lachaud.

(1) Le Foyer published a pamphlet: La Tolérance dans les U. P. — 0 franc 10 at the Coopération des Idées.

The study of the Popular Universities is therefore valuable for studying the class struggle for the conquest of liberty.

One must not envisage liberty here as an abstraction whose conception affords the purest intellectual enjoyments, but consider it only in its successive realizations by those who struggle to attain it, and to realize a liberty is to take a just part in the direction of the institutions to which one freely submits.

Through the Popular University — and also through the cooperative in a certain manner — workers constitute environments where they pursue real liberties, and logically from these environments they banish all those who, instead of wanting liberty, want authority. That they might allow, for a moment, someone who will extol the beauties of authority to enter — that they might do out of curiosity; in a Popular University that they effectively direct, perhaps an abbé will one day be invited to speak for a few hours; but it is because, then, being masters of the institution, they can find it dangerous in no way; holding liberty themselves, they will dare to let themselves be led by it.

Today, they do not wish to be led in the name of a liberty they do not possess. Their attitude seems wise.

From the foregoing we deduce two consequences proven by experience and observation:

  1. The Popular Universities do not form where there does not exist a proper movement of the working class toward its emancipation;

  2. In the Popular Universities, at their birth, considerable errors are committed, outrages against reason, repeated attacks of mysticism.

Very often people of excellent intentions want to found Popular Universities. They think it suffices to create the very organs of the institution for workers, until then completely isolated from one another, to group together for the purpose of educating themselves and attaining freedom of mind. I have no knowledge that a single foundation of this kind has lived in the slightest.

What led to this error about founding a Popular University is the ease with which the first Parisian Popular Universities were constituted. But one must not forget the very special conditions of Paris, with its multitudes of workers long since awakened to the desire for liberty by continuous political agitations; one must not forget the Parisian’s curiosity, his taste for everything new, his instincts of wandering, his mobility, which cause him to enter any house that opens its doors. In Paris, at the beginning, it sufficed that a dozen workers associate to form a Popular University, and immediately the crowd arrived. Only, the crowd does not easily stay where it goes; it now knows what a Popular University is. It is no longer interested. The Parisian Popular Universities, quickly formed, are less solid than those which have been painfully formed in the provinces; and the very last ones founded recruited their members with some difficulty; they are only the better for it, moreover.

For a Popular University to survive, to live with strength, the working class must clearly see the use of it. The Popular Universities founded by Labor Exchanges, by Unions that political authoritarianism has not reached, are certainly the best. When class consciousness has not created the workers’ movement in a working-class population, and when one wants to found a Popular University by establishing friendly relations between intellectuals and workers, one either only manages to found an educational society that gives public lectures, or one drifts into a petit-bourgeois grouping. The results are good in themselves, but there is no Popular University. (1)

In the Popular Universities, I say, outrages against reason are continually committed at the beginning; people give in to attacks of mysticism. This has done much to drive away the bourgeoisie, which has taken fright.

Those who, truly loving liberty and having confidence in its educative virtues, have followed the Popular Universities, know that mysticism diminishes there, that reason enters little by little.

Because there is progress, this does not mean the situation is entirely satisfactory.

But one must note here the character of revolutionary mysticism to give a proper image of the Popular University, a workers’ organization entering into the bloc of class institutions waging the struggle for liberty. This mysticism has entirely natural causes; it does not in any way testify to a grave and dangerous epidemic; one must consider it as one of the real and active moral factors in the struggle for liberty.

It comes as from a dazzlement that strikes the man who has until now been continuously bowed down by the wage system, when for a moment he raises his head. Many songs, many poems tell of the “prisoner’s song” in which the world is depicted in the most vivid and radiant colors, in a supernatural beauty, because the prison is grim, because light enters only through a skylight. Likewise the wage-earner idealizes to the point of the supernatural the world in which he must one day work free, and the more he toils and is wretched, the more beautiful is his City of the future; the workers for whom life is hardest — navvies, for example, or isolated workers, the cobbler in his stall, etc. — are often anarchists, because anarchy, more than collectivism, encourages mystical reverie.

I think one must be very careful not to combat this exasperated idealism brutally, although it is bad, even unhealthy in a certain way: it is only with great precautions that one must touch this dream that is not only consoling amid the reality of life, but also creative of a real force. One must only, with frank sympathy, without destroying the very principle of this force, transform it, and bring the revolutionary mystics to become men of action.

(1) This is equally the result one arrives at when the movement is artificial, in the purely political mode, under the influence of the French Workers’ Party for example.

This educating role belongs to a well-defined category of people, whom I have already named several times and whose role I will now study in detail: people who love liberty for its own sake — intellectuals.

Through the role that intellectuals must play in the Popular Universities, through their comradeship with workers, it seems that we might fall back into the first notion one had of the Popular University; that we might arrive at demonstrating a fusion of classes.

One could say that only by remarking that the intellectual often wears a frock coat and top hat, and by concluding that he is a bourgeois.

In reality, the intellectual in himself is independent of any social class; the regime and form of production have no direct relation to the existence of people who know how to rise to freedom of mind. What is true is that intellectuals, producing no material necessity of existence, are and have always been dependent on the ruling class of their time. They have lived only thanks to the noble lords of the Middle Ages, thanks to the kings of the administrative monarchy; they live today only thanks to the bourgeoisie, to which they belong economically, or which buys their books, reads their articles in reviews and newspapers, listens to their plays, charges them with a certain number of public functions, in particular with teaching and the disinterested study of the sciences. Tomorrow they will live only thanks to the workers, constituted as the ruling class; how? we do not know, and it matters little.

And I think that if, just as in the eighteenth century intellectuals went toward the bourgeoisie, the future ruling class, the intellectuals of today are going toward the workers, this is an important sociological indication of the not very distant arrival of the workers at the general direction of society. The Popular Universities are strongly attacked by the doctors of the Revolution, who cannot open their mouths without energetically hurling the words “class struggle, socialization, etc.,” as if all their thoughts were contained in a few formulas. These ardent and narrow theoreticians seem to me to be poor observers of social phenomena; and despite their assurance of having fixed everything that matters to fix so that popular desires may be satisfied, they cannot prevent intellectuals and workers from drawing closer through the simple logic of things.

The true intellectual must be considered independently of his profession: he is writer, professor, philosopher, sociologist, economist, artist, physician, civil servant, lawyer, engineer, industrialist — whatever you like. He must equally be considered independently of his economic situation; it matters little whether he is rich, comfortable, poor, or destitute; his action is always the same. He is a man who, loving freedom of mind for its own sake, very naturally wishes to give it to others. His value varies, but his will is always the same.

A few true intellectuals, not numerous, sure of their intellectuality, have been strong enough to maintain the idea of justice through several years of political turmoil; the working class honors them, and asks them to appear at its celebrations to present forcefully the few simple ideas of which it feels it must be imbued to carry out its work well. The others, fairly numerous, still seek themselves, devoting their lives methodically to it, that freedom of mind which the working class confusedly and instinctively desires; they are “apprentice intellectuals,” if one may say so, who replace the sureness of masters with a firm will, and whose example is eminently suited to arouse will in the working class. From their time in the Popular Universities they derive personal profit through the disinterested efforts they expend there.

Teaching

The intellectuals intervene principally through teaching. Let us determine their method and the program they follow.

Almost always the question has been how volunteer professors could draw up a methodical teaching program, and on this subject scarcely anyone has debated publicly except the professors themselves. This is not the right way to see things. If the Popular University is a workers’ institution organized for the class struggle, for the conquest of a public power, that of teaching — and this is what it is — then it is quite evident that the responsibility for teaching must belong not to the professors, but to the working class, that is, to the administrators (workers) of the Popular Universities, delegates of their comrades.

This idea that the direction of teaching in the Popular University belongs to the worker-administrators, few people resolve to adopt deliberately. One is generally afraid of the uses of the liberty that corresponds to a newly recognized responsibility.

The facts are there to answer; in the Popular Universities where this is recognized, and this is the very great majority, programs are improving; they are tending toward something definite; and this definite, stable something is very different from what exists wherever the direction of teaching has remained in the hands of the professors. There is truly a beginning of conquest, and consequently proof of a suitable use of liberty.

What will put us on the track for determining the program tending to emerge in the Popular Universities is the examination of the revolutionary mysticism that I have noted and of which I said it could be transformed into a creative force.

Workers desirous of liberty, meeting to study, will naturally take as the basis of their education anticlericalism; (1) they will ask their professors to very clearly affirm that the Church is their eternal enemy; and when they have felled it in what they will call a discussion and what will in reality be only a series of affirmations, when at the same time they have evoked a future social state outdoing one another to make it more beautiful, they will have an excellent impression, an hour of real happiness; they will have the illusion of being free.

True intellectuals do not like to lend themselves to this somewhat ridiculous game. If they refuse for fear of offending reason, for fear of lowering themselves, the Popular University is compromised forever; nothing will remain of it but the memory of a few private meetings exactly like public meetings. But if they know how to hold firm, and gently accustom the audience to the language of reason, then with great speed the Popular University will form as it should.

What they must be convinced of is that they are called to be asked questions, and that to these questions, however disagreeable some of them may be, one must answer, even if one is nearly booed sometimes for being too frankly brutal, even if one is not understood at other times for being timid in one’s responses. The important thing is that every question receive a direct answer.

There have been in the Parisian Popular Universities memorable hours; the slightest lecture ended with a call to the social revolution, the audience always demanding a conclusion in accord with its mystical ideal. The intellectuals held firm; now one discusses properly there, and freedom of mind appears.

The teaching program is therefore fixed by the fact that reason is gradually introduced into negative anticlericalism and into revolutionary mysticism.

From negative, anticlericalism becomes positive, that is, the teaching of the natural sciences and of philosophy takes on great extension. Instead of denying the religious beliefs of the Church because they are those of the Church, one replaces them with scientific affirmations and tries one’s hand at philosophical affirmations.

From mystical, the revolutionary idea becomes reasonable, that is, one studies with some method the various social problems, the diverse workers’ organizations of yesterday and today; one approaches politics, social economy, history.

This fact that from the chaos of anticlerical and revolutionary ideas there emerges a homogeneous program of popular education seems to me extremely important, and I see no better argument in favor of liberty than the transformation taking place in the Parisian Popular Universities, however slow it may seem to impatient people.

I do not claim that this program, absolutely logical, appears clearly when one leafs through the lists of lectures given: the disorder is still great today, for often the hunt for a lecturer replaces all method. (1) One must not forget that only two years have passed since the Popular Universities were founded. But I do maintain that the evolution of programs, the evolution in liberty, is indeed proceeding in the direction I indicate.

Unfortunately, we must make a painful observation. It is that while one finds relatively easily lecturers possessing the requisite qualities of intellectuals, to teach the natural sciences and philosophy, to practice positive anticlericalism, one does not easily find them to approach politics and social economy, to present history — that is, in the Popular Universities, the history of social institutions. And then the false intellectual hungry for equality, the demagogue, has an easy time maintaining the state of revolutionary mysticism that secures him personal and selfish successes, and preparing the revolution as he conceives it in his poor brain.

For one part of the program, then, lecturers are lacking.

This is explained by comparing this program of the Popular Universities to that of the University, according to which, despite everything, most intellectuals draw up the plan of their personal work. Lecturers are lacking where there is divergence. And why is there divergence? Because the current programs of the University are those that the Church established long ago, with only the modifications brought by the progress of the natural sciences and philosophy.

Politics, economics, the history of social institutions — the University does not teach them; (1) and since, in teaching them, it would bring into discussion the very principles of society, it will remain silent until the day when the class of workers has become the ruling class. One perceives this: instead of the Popular Universities modeling themselves on the State University that holds the power of public instruction, it will be the University that will draw inspiration from what is done in the Popular University, that will subscribe to the wishes of the class of workers.

There will then have been a conquest of a public power through the class struggle.

By reaction against the ordinary disorder of programs, in one Popular University the rational method of teaching was adopted from the very first day. Naturally the worker-administrators could not fix this method, having no experience of educational matters. It was professors chosen with care and good fortune who determined it. They then adapted university programs to the working-class environment; they organized regular courses extending from the beginning to the end of the school year.

The audience members appreciate this way of doing things, in the sense that a very suitable number among them have committed themselves to the very hard, very voluntary, and very noble duty of coming every evening to work by listening to the words of esteemed masters justly known as pure intellectuals.

Seeing the directly appreciable result, one might therefore approve this course organization, although not all Popular Universities can find professors committing themselves in this way to preparing each week a lesson following a formally established plan.

But does it not seem that by acting in this way, the result achieved will be to separate the best workers from the working class, giving them the sensation that they are becoming of an intellectuality very different from that of their comrades? Under pretext of emancipation, of liberty, one will create a new hierarchy, an intellectual aristocracy among the workers.

In the Popular Universities where teaching is not given in the form of courses, and where the program is always varied with the concern to satisfy potential audience members, there is continual movement in a constantly renewed audience; each person takes away from the Popular University some idea that he has assimilated without any difficulty, and this idea he can circulate among his comrades. There is thus a very slow education of the working class, and the imperceptible formation within it of a superior intellectuality. This intellectuality will manifest itself only in individuals, it is true, but these individuals will not for a single instant have lost contact with their comrades, and that is what matters. In the Popular Universities, on the contrary, where teaching is given by means of regular courses, the audience becomes fixed in an immutable manner; those who listen assimilate new ideas with such speed that they immediately differentiate themselves from their comrades, who will fall into the contempt in which the ignorant are held when one is on the way to believing oneself learned; the “students” of Popular Universities can only feel developing within them a desire for command, in the name of the reason they are beginning to possess without having had time to spread it around them; they will indeed form the intermediary level between the intellectuals and the crowd, according to the rationalist hierarchy.

In the Popular Universities without an a priori program, workers rise slowly toward liberty with the help of intellectuals; in those where professors have themselves formulated a program, there are only workers who are, by the intellectuals, rapidly raised toward liberty.

The former prepare a change of the ruling class, the intellectual being absorbed by the class of workers. The latter prepare a rationalist theocracy, if one may say so.

One may fear with dread an intellectual dictatorship that would suppress all the rare sensations one experiences in conquering for oneself the feeling of liberty through the errors and sufferings of the mind, and it seems to me that the working class must beware of the university and rationalist socialism that is being elaborated, being organized, although it is far superior to that of the demagogues. The true disinterestedness of people is not a sufficient reason to entrust them with the care of conducting one’s affairs; one must, with all useful assistance, conduct one’s affairs oneself.

One may also consider intellectuals from the point of view of the specialty of their work, when they fulfill a public function.

One can easily guess the importance of the category of “professors,” especially in the provinces. It is absolutely unnecessary for us to concern ourselves with them specifically; it suffices to say that one always turns to them everywhere, and rarely in vain.

But among the intellectuals of the liberal professions, do the Popular Universities ask for all the assistance that is ready to be given them? No. And there is an observation to note.

Physicians are in demand; they speak of hygiene and are listened to with interest. For two reasons: first, they bring, like the professors of natural sciences, scientific certainties, and the man pursuing his emancipation likes to encounter an absolute authority that allows him to better grasp the relativity of the authority he is in the process of breaking; then, as the rules of hygiene are very difficult to follow in the working-class population, through lectures on alcoholism, tuberculosis, care for children, there is an indirect demonstration that all is not for the best in the best of all societies.

Lawyers speaking about laws, especially so-called workers’ laws, are not willingly heard, nor are engineers speaking of industrial technique. This often surprises people; I find it absolutely natural. All these workers who come to the Popular Universities have no taste for learning the laws of a society in which they see themselves in servitude, and they would rather study the spirit of the laws that the ruling class has written into the civil code to establish its liberties than study those that seem to them conceded to maintain servitude by softening it. As for industrial technique, they absolutely do not care about it, for the good reason that constituting themselves as the ruling class does not at all mean transforming themselves all into enterprise managers.

As for State functionaries (magistrates, financial administrators, officers, etc.), one does not conceive of them speaking about their current functions in a popular milieu, when it is they who transmit to the working class the full weight of current society, and who are qualified as direct agents of servitude.

Artistic Education

Intellectuals act in the Popular Universities in ways other than as teaching professors, in ways other than to give the sense of intellectual freedom, of reason.

They also act as intellectuals of art, to educate sensations, to give the sense of beauty.

They have there an important and necessary role, symmetrical to that of the teaching lecturer who educates reason.

How will the program to be followed take shape? In the same manner as the teaching program, that is, by considering the state of the working class from this particular point of view, and not by determining it a priori. Revolutionary mysticism contains a considerable portion of emotion, of sensation; one must know how to take advantage of this emotional and sensitive state to transform it, purify it, bring it closer to the reality of what is beautiful. This way of proceeding is so natural that it seems to have been followed everywhere.

However, one observation can be made. Nearly all those who wish to go into the Popular Universities, without knowing the working class very well, to make it appreciate the beauty of a work of art (poetry, music), readily imagine that they play a kind of consoling role, that they come among those who live amid ugliness to give them the first joys of beauty. This way of understanding things seems to me completely false.

The working class has by no means waited for the coming of art-intellectuals among it to conceive the beautiful, any more than it waited for the intellectuals of reason to desire liberty; it has long been anticlerical, just as it has long known artistic emotion, impure if you will, through songs, through the dramas of faubourg theaters, etc. The truth is that it feels more vivid sensations at the words and music of the Internationale than at verses by Hugo and a symphony by Beethoven — and also that in its dreams of the city of the future, with its mysticism, it conceives a more perfect beauty than even the greatest artists can realize.

It is the sense of the reality of beauty that one will give to the Popular University, but not the sense of beauty; this, the working class already has.

If therefore the problem posed is to give the sense of real beauty, the art portion of the Popular University programs must be based on criticism, that is, all things considered, on a form of teaching. (1) A poem must not be read there, a song must not be sung there without having been presented, critiqued, without the real beauty found in it, which must be discovered, having been connected in one way or another to the abstract beauty the worker carries in his dreams.

And this is indeed how things generally proceed. (2)

There is no need to show at length how complete submission to art-intellectuals would be as bad as submission to intellectuals of reason. Instead of arriving at servitude, one would arrive at incoherent revolt through the exasperation of sensations; that would be just as bad. But the danger does not seem likely to arise.

Here is where one must note a tendency in the Popular Universities, an interesting tendency but one that must be combated in a certain way.

The audience members of the Popular Universities have, for example, manifested the desire that the great celebrations take place solely with the resources found among them, as is done for the evenings they organize for themselves in the intimacy of their respective halls, periodically.

Now it is certainly excellent that people who constantly meet together find within themselves the means to satisfy their desires, and the more the Popular Universities bring forward individuals capable of bringing healthy joy among their comrades, the better. But from this to conclude that a celebration must take place without the help of true artists, there is a great difference.

The truth, one cannot say it often enough, is that the artist, who is an intellectual if he is a true artist, is independent of his economic situation, that one finds him in proletarian environments, and that it is natural to favor the one found there, but that the proletarian character of an artist gives absolutely no particular value to the presentation of any given work.

Otherwise we replace the struggle of the class of producers for liberty with the struggle of all the poor against the rich or simply economically independent, with the jealous struggle of manual workers against non-manual workers.

That in the Popular Universities one tries to interpret works as best one can — one cannot do more useful work for the diffusion of the beautiful, for the education of aesthetic sensations; that choral groups and theater troupes form there — this is excellent in every way. But let no one imagine thereby creating a new art that must replace an old art, “bourgeois art.”

The success of these attempts clearly shows the progress of education, but by no means the necessity or utility of making those who are already educated disappear. And a play or a piece of music performed by people who have acquired a sure talent will always be worth more for a Popular University than when they are performed by Popular University members full of good will but without talent.

Likewise, it is excellent that workers give lectures to their comrades in the Popular Universities, teach them the realities of the struggle, speak to them of the unions, the cooperatives that they direct or are apt to direct, but it would be deplorable if general ideas were the province of workers alone. To each his trade.

We have arrived at the following conclusions, which I believe necessary to set down here:

The Popular University is an organization which, through the logic of things, has rapidly become essentially a workers’ institution, directing the class struggle toward liberty.

It has given proofs of its capacity to conquer the public power of teaching (and of artistic education) by arriving fairly rapidly at a program of instruction adapted exactly to the conditions of the working class, without for all that submitting to the effective direction of intellectual circles.

(1) Consult the works of Maurice Bouchor on popular readings.

(2) One could develop the point that readings and hearings of poems and music have a real influence in transforming negative anticlericalism into positive anticlericalism; that is, in showing, through the religious and Catholic inspiration of past poetry and music, how the Church is detestable principally because it is contrary to the social state one wishes to realize today.

These are the moral elements that enter into the composition of a Popular University that I have just presented and analyzed; the real elements must be presented and analyzed, that is to say, it must be shown how the institution lives and functions according to the principles set forth.

Immediately the question arises of how workers and intellectuals can meet, the former being formed through contact with the latter, and how nonetheless the direction of the institution belongs to the working class. And this question arises curiously, because we have arrived at such a demagogic state of mind, under the influence of political struggles, that we conceive of universal suffrage as the only principle of all democratic government, and also because, before the habitual spectacle of the struggle of individuals to acquire individual property, we define the working class as the sum of workers.

But precisely we can call into question the excellence of universal suffrage for managing the interests of a group, a category, a class, even a nation. And the interests of the working class are by no means the sum of the personal interests of each worker, for the personal interest of a worker today is to acquire property.

Take a professional union for example; until the moment when a few demagogues will have made it compulsory, it will never contain more than a limited number of the workers of the trade; yet it does represent their whole, because it knows how to represent professional interests independently of the interests of each. And since it does not act by virtue of the law of majorities, its force is above all moral; it disappears in all enterprises where it seeks to apply itself against what is the truth. When a union is numerically too weak, it can do nothing, that is obvious. But when it grows too rapidly, when it forms for a strike, when during a strike its direction passes from the conscious minority of the slow struggle for liberty to the unconscious and mystical crowd, then it becomes authoritarian, and, being able to do too much, it achieves nothing, because it applies its force against the truth.

There is a first example that there is something other than universal suffrage for managing general interests: it is the free grouping of the best, the capable.

It will be the Popular Universities that provide the second example. (Do not forget that unions and Popular Universities are the institutions that alone truly represent today the class struggle for liberty, for the direction of society.)

I have shown how it is from the revolutionary mysticism itself that permeates the working class that the programs tending to impose themselves in the Popular Universities have emerged. They are therefore not determined to satisfy the personal needs of a few individuals belonging to the working class, but to adapt to the general state of mind. Those who come to the Popular Universities do so because they wish to; they are those who have the greatest desire to develop their intellectuality, which is that of the working class; they are in a manner of speaking delegates who delegate themselves to public instruction; they are those whose desire creates the capacity; they determine, according to truth, the subjects it is good to teach and the methods that should be applied, not by an authoritarian act, but by the very fact that they desert the Popular University and flee the professor, if in the Popular University the professor does not do what must be done.

I see no example that better proves how individual liberty is capable of forming social institutions.

Internal Organization

But there must be a link between the workers who freely pass through the Popular Universities and the intellectuals who come to exercise their influence. The Popular University must be given a somewhat administrative form.

Several methods have been tried; they respond exactly to diverse situations, since they have all succeeded. In certain places, there is absolute liberty, organized by custom and mores, and maintained by tradition; an initial group of individuals formed who direct the common work for all those who come afterward; and the group renews itself through the natural play of life; those who fulfill the specific functions of secretary and treasurer are designated by the general will without this manifesting itself through a vote. This way of doing things corresponds to a superior state of mind that one truly finds only in anarchist or union milieux, always limited in scope. No real distinction is made between teaching intellectuals and audience members, because the latter have already arrived at a great intellectual freedom. The Popular Universities that live in this way are unknown to the general public.

Opposed to them are the Popular Universities that bring together workers strongly engaged in the political socialist movement. Parliamentary mores reign there with brilliance, and also with the slight ridiculousness of things that are not in their place. An administrative council is elected by suffrage — that is fine; but one also seeks to overthrow it like a simple ministry; the Popular University constantly resounds with corridor gossip. There is a strong tint of demagoguery; the dogma is that the majority is always right, and the majority changes constantly. Yet these Popular Universities live, and by gradually gaining other mores, they prove that the use of liberty is salutary, even among fools; almost always demagogic authority has yielded before reason, at the precise moment when the danger appeared that the Popular University was about to annihilate itself. The noise made in these Popular Universities reaches the public.

In certain ones, the organization is complex. The founders have coolly examined the social forces present, which, depending on how they went about it, would raise the institution or cause it to fall. First of all, the administrative council therefore includes delegates of intellectuals and delegates of workers. Then the Unions, the Cooperatives, and the Municipality will also have their delegates, in order to win them over. Without wishing to say anything absolute and denying local circumstances, one can criticize the presence of these last delegates: if it was thought good to win over certain local powers, it is because they are authoritarian in spirit, and then their delegates introduce bad mores into the Popular University.

Here is how things proceed in the Popular Universities whose conduct seems to me the best, and which realize the general ideas previously presented:

It is the audience members whose attendance is real (1) who alone elect an administrative council whose members are chosen from among them, and by no means from among the intellectuals. The direction of the Popular University is thus solely in the hands of audience members. One then understands how programs pass gradually from incoherence to method, without being formulated in an absolute manner, remaining continually attuned to the state of mind of the audience. But at the same time as the powers are thus in the hands of audience members, a few intellectuals, two, three, four at most, come regularly, keep abreast of what is happening, are consulted, and generally are exactly heeded.

The consultative role of intellectuals — there is what seems to be the truth.

The number of administrators is quite variable. If it is small, the work distributes itself freely, and administrative formalities do not appear. If it is considerable, the council appoints officers, in particular a secretary in whose hands all powers quickly centralize, and whose individual worth matters extremely; the fate of the Popular University depends on the choice of secretary. It should be noted that until now, the secretaries of Popular Universities have always been designated according to capacity, and that their election takes place at the second degree.

(1) Generally in a Popular University there are two kinds of members: adherents, who are all the audience members who present themselves, and active members, who, chosen according to certain formalities, alone have the right to a share of direction, to the electorate of administrators.

Let us come to the question that for the Popular Universities is perhaps the most current of all: finances, the budget.

At the outset I said that the Popular Universities were born from a rapprochement between the bourgeoisie and the working class. This is the origin of many disappointments for them, that is, for those who direct them by delegation of the working class. For the bourgeoisie, having withdrawn rather abruptly, has withdrawn its financial resources; now these are necessary, at least with the original type of Popular University. For we had defined the Popular University thus, two years ago:

A secular association, which proposes to develop higher popular education, which pursues the mutual education of citizens of all conditions, which organizes meeting places where workers may come, their work accomplished, to rest, educate themselves, and enjoy themselves.

This definition, it was among bourgeois dreaming loyally and without ulterior motives of class fusion that we had drafted it. It has become absolutely false, since, through the simple logic of things, the bourgeoisie has abandoned the Popular Universities to the working class, which uses them as I have described.

If I had today to give a definition of the Popular University in a few lines, which is certainly not absolutely necessary, I would say:

A workers’ association, (1) which proposes to determine the teaching suited to free workers, which pursues the education of the working class to make it capable of conceiving and realizing liberty.

And I would say nothing at all about meeting places. One must absolutely differentiate the Popular University from the meeting places for workers who come, their work accomplished, to rest, educate themselves, and enjoy themselves.

These meeting places are of bourgeois conception, highly loyal, that is obvious, but nevertheless contrary to the true interests of the working class; they clearly imply the idea of patronage, because of the financial resources they require; and thus they break the unity of the free working class, establishing a transition between it and the Catholic working class. The liberal bourgeoisie gently returns to M. Méline with Cornély; it is unnecessary for it to take along a part of the working class, giving it the habit of wiping the slate clean on individual or social miseries, on the crimes or injustices that engender them.

The Popular University has a perfectly defined function through teaching and education. It does not directly itself, as a Popular University, have to concern itself with rest and entertainment.

But this being established, it must not prevent us from seeking where the Popular Universities will be held, and noting the interest they have in having their own premises.

What is the reason the Popular Universities seek to have their own premises? It is to create, apart from all teaching, a center of comradeship, a place where one will come not with the immediate aim of resting and entertaining oneself, but where one will come to talk, in calm and tranquility, about the events of the day, where a permanent conversation will be established suited to bringing, through liberty, a certain unity of mind.

This reason is powerful. The Workers’ Circle (1) seems an institution at least as good as the Popular University; and it is natural that the Popular University and the Workers’ Circle — which are two different things, distinguished by the fact that the intellectual plays a direct role in one and does not appear in the other — should unite and lend each other mutual support, that the Circle should normally offer its premises to the Popular University for it to hold its sessions there instead of holding them, as happens, in municipal premises or Labor Exchanges.

There exist Workers’ Circles: one for example in the department of the Loire, where articles from reviews and newspapers are discussed among workers, and obviously many others.

At Saint-Claude, at the headquarters of that most interesting Jura Federation, there exists a Circle of Labor on the one hand, and on the other a Popular University, that is, a special body charged with organizing lectures of general instruction. There is a perfectly rational separation there, which proves that one cannot distinguish the Popular University from the Circle by a mere effort of analysis.

And then, to satisfy those who cannot conceive of installing a Popular University elsewhere than in a Circle, who consequently assimilate the teaching institution to the premises where it is preferable and natural that it function, who keep the original definition of the Popular University while interpreting it only with the proper spirit, I come to asking myself how a Circle can normally live when a fixed subscription does not suffice, which is the general case.

In every association, there is a subscription. In the Popular Universities, the subscription is generally 50 centimes per month; the budget is therefore not considerable: 200 members provide 100 francs per month; this is amply sufficient for necessary expenses (printed matter, correspondence, organization of celebrations, general expenses of collective outings, subscriptions to newspapers and reviews, library…), but normally insufficient to bear in addition the payment of rent for suitable premises. (1)

If, then, they want to pay rent, they must seek supplementary resources. It is then that there can intervene either suitably wealthy persons who love liberty for its own sake and do not fear to financially help the working class without claiming to direct it, or workers’ associations such as consumer cooperatives that can make the necessary sacrifice and do so out of understanding of the general interests of the working class. (2)

The first method does not seem to me to be considered normal; and on the other hand one can perhaps do better than obtain the help of large or small cooperatives. What would truly be suitable is the autonomous life of Workers’ Circles taking the place of taverns.

It has long been noted that the financial power of the working class is not in the direct tax, but in the indirect tax, that it lies only in its power of consumption. Let us note it in our turn, after the politicians who wish in France to ask cooperatives for the means to rise to power, after the Belgian Socialist Party which through its cooperatives has known how to so remarkably organize the patronage of the working class by the working class itself (theaters, circles, sickness and unemployment relief, pensions, etc., etc.). And since we are in France, that is, in a country where the desire for liberty is such that one instinctively fears the vast political or economic associations like those of Belgium, where one prefers small groupings independent of all central authority, let us seek how each Circle can live by relying individually on the consuming power of the working class.

We find immediately: a Popular University-Circle in the Parisian suburbs finds suitable resources in the operation of a (temperance) canteen; a large Parisian Popular University lives in a premises annexed to that of a cooperative restaurant.

In my view, the canteen and the cooperative restaurant have a great future; it is they, and not directly the Popular University as has been said through confusion with the Circle, who will be able to realize that great progress of the working class: the conquest and destruction of the wine merchant. (1)

And now that the Popular Universities have taken their place among workers’ organizations, after I personally have insisted so much — through an error that I do not regret too much — that everywhere the Popular University should possess its own premises, I am tempted to say that the works to be done are the canteens and cooperative restaurants that will support the Popular Universities, all tottering for lack of the financial resources that their initial conception requires. (2)

Just as all cooperative institutions, the Circle, canteen or restaurant, appears as an institution of patronage of the working class by the working class itself; and this kind of patronage seems absolutely good; it safeguards the liberty of workers, facilitates the class struggle by bringing workers together in excellent conditions from the economic, hygienic, and moral point of view, and, founded on real and positive equality, gives firm support to institutions which, like the Popular University, wish to pursue the struggle for liberty.

(1) Not to be confused with the Catholic or employer-run workers’ circle.

(1) Certain Parisian Popular University-Circles live on their subscription, with difficulty, it is true, but they live. Only they expend a considerable amount of gratuitous labor by their administrators, who do not hesitate, for example, to pursue members at their homes to collect overdue subscriptions, and they successfully invite those who can do so to increase their subscription.

(2) Until now it is suitably wealthy persons who intervene, who have intervened. There are Popular Universities around which have formed something like circles of truly liberal protection, several persons giving their financial guarantee; in a great city of the East, in a great Norman city, two men were found who had premises built or fitted out, and collect only a modest rent because the Popular University insisted on it. I know of only one cooperative that houses a Popular University. How much there would be to say about workers’ cooperatives, or rather against them, what rigor could one show in pointing out the sadly selfish or vilely politicking tendencies that alone exist there! Two Parisian Popular Universities were led, in order to balance their budgets, to found cooperatives themselves. Many Popular Universities share lodgings with unions. Some come to agreements with other local societies to have premises in common.

(1) Several cooperative restaurants exist; unfortunately a great deal of trade-union absinthe is consumed there; they will improve.

(2) The consumption of food and drink is not the only thing that can sustain the Circles and thus favor the action of the Popular Universities. There is also the consumption of reading, which is great, and which is very interesting to consider in the lamentable state of the socialist or simply democratic press. It is interesting to envision the Circle-Restaurant-Canteen-Bookshops that could be installed at every crossroads of Paris and the great cities. Already in some Popular Universities a pamphlet-selling service has been organized.

It is very delicate to speak of the future of the Popular Universities.

What will become of the Popular Universities that exist today, both in Paris and in the departments? A good number will die, that is certain, either because financial resources fail them and they cannot pay the rent of the Circle deemed necessary, or because the reasonable influence of intellectuals is not felt. This is of only mediocre importance for us here; examining the formation of a new institution whose purpose and destiny one is only beginning to glimpse, we cannot be surprised that there have been errors committed in local organizations, and pause to deplore them.

For we are entitled to affirm that the institution itself will endure, because it does not come from the mere caprice of a few men, because it responds to a real historical movement, that of the working class rising toward the direction of society, toward liberty.

The Popular University will evolve; it will finish losing the characteristics given it by the bourgeoisie; it will adapt itself better than today to the mode of workers’ life. How? Experience alone will show us, and for this evolution a great number of factors will intervene, only some of which we can foresee.

(1) The word secular becomes unnecessary from the moment there is no longer a fusion of classes. It was formerly necessary to mark that the cooperating bourgeoisie was sincere.

(1) I am not speaking naturally of the programs of the Faculties; these having become independent of the State, free, that is to say secular, have developed teaching in the same manner as the Popular Universities do. Hence the phrase “higher popular education” given as if by instinct to the teaching of the Popular Universities in the early days.