Juifs
We shall not publish the romance of Tristan and Iseut. The first edition, printed in two thousand copies, being exhausted, the publishers were themselves preparing a second, also of two thousand. Finally they are preparing a special edition, with illustrations, of two thousand copies, as a gift book for the coming new year. We have for sale at the cahiers bookshop a few copies, the last ones, of the first edition. We are putting on sale the second edition, a volume at three francs fifty.
As nothing can replace so beautiful a poem, there will be no Christmas cahier in the third series.
We shall put on sale on 10 January, the day of its publication:
JEAN JAURES. — Etudes Socialistes, a volume of LXXVI + 276 pages, published by the Societe d’Editions litteraires et artistiques, librairie Paul Ollendorff, a volume at three francs fifty.
The notice that could be read in the fourth cahier is that of the Ollendorff edition.
The 1 December issue of the Cooperation des Idees is almost entirely a response to the cahier of M. Charles Guieysse, les Universites populaires et le mouvement ouvrier. In accordance with the method we have always followed, we shall publish all that we can of this response.
We have received in manuscript the second novel of Rene Salome: la Clairvoyance automatique.
The sixth cahier will be la Greve, by Jean Hugues.
We have received from Felicien Challaye two dispatches from Indo-China that we shall publish as soon as we can.
To learn what the cahiers are, one may send sixty centimes to M. Andre Bourgeois, administrator of the cahiers, 8, rue de la Sorbonne. One will receive a specimen cahier. For three francs fifty one will receive six specimen cahiers.
We are putting this cahier into commerce: we sell it for one franc.
I shall be at the cahiers on Thursday 2 January 1902 from one o’clock to seven o’clock, and on Friday the 3rd from eight o’clock to eleven o’clock.
Jews
The memoir that follows was first published by Ollendorff, in 1901. The author had written it in 1900, when the affair was at its height, when it was in fact coming to an end. The author is a Jew. He even has a fine Jewish name. But he has had to keep here a customary pseudonym.
This second edition is completely reworked. But we have not been able to remove from it that particular mark of an affair that remains indelible, and that in the memory of humanity will remain great long after the general staffs constituted for it and by it have finished decomposing. The modest Dreyfusards, who form the core of our subscribers, will be happy to find again for an hour a certain tone that we thought would be eternal, and that already dates from the past.
M. Delahache’s memoir is preliminary, in the sense that it clears the ground. At the heart of the affair, under the pressure of antisemitic hatreds, we would reply victoriously, whether in defiance or sincerely, that there is no Jewish question. One always risks saying something foolish when one claims that there is no question. It is the question that is least lacking. We have realized this since. Painful rifts, cowardly defections, grave insults — and, on the contrary, tenacious devotions, faithful friendships have warned us that there is a Jewish question, and doubtless several Jewish questions.
M. Delahache’s memoir clears the ground of this question. It pushes back the crude arguments or the crude calumnies of antisemitism. It presents the first arguments of the Jews. It is thus of primary utility.
This memoir will surprise those persons accustomed to treating questions by starting from certain postulates, certain dogmas, certain words. The author has not transferred into the real a formal Judaism or a formal internationalism. On the contrary, he has started from a reality that he knows well. It is for this reason that his study fits neither with the programs of political parties, nor with the programs of intellectual parties. — For there are intellectual parties, which have veritable programs.
The history of the Jews and their geography has not yet been written. Only the history of the Jewish bourgeoisie has ever been written. And even that has been poorly done. M. Bernard Lazare is preparing a general history of Israel in the Western countries, where the Jewish bourgeoisie will have exactly their place.
One of our very next cahiers will be by M. Bernard Lazare: his memoir on the rights of the Jews in Eastern Europe.
We shall not publish a cahier of the dispute that arose between M. Joseph Reinach and Maitre Labori. This dispute contributes to the decomposition of Dreyfusism in France. But it does not itself have a historical character. It has never been anything but polemic.
Georges Delahache
Jews
After nineteen hundred years, despite the Revolutions, the wandering people pursues its restless course…
On the nearly deserted platform of the station, they wait. The train that will carry them off, at nightfall, will deposit them tomorrow morning, after eight hours of monotonous rolling through the little stations interminably strung along the line, in tumultuous Paris, in the Unknown. There they all are, the five of them, pressed close together, alone: he, with his pointed beard, slightly curved, graying, his cheeks pink, his eyes blinking from myopia, from fatigue and emotion; she, once pretty, now somewhat thickened, her almond eyes lost in a face too flat; the two boys, the little girl, aquiline and curly-haired. A group of Jews, easily made grotesque. At the end of the platform, three old-fashioned trunks, which had long slept without locks in the dust of the attic, and which had been hastily brought out, tied up haphazardly, for the sad exile.
Here is the train… The last time they had thus transported their household, it was some time after the war. The eldest had just been born, over there, in the Maiden City, a step from that Esplanade which overlooks the Moselle and where today a bronze Wilhelm the First turns his back on our Marshal Ney. They did not want the child to be German; they left for France, simply, without patriotic fanfare… Today, a second move, perhaps sadder, since they do not have, to sustain their courage, the idea of a great duty. So it is for nothing that they flee thus, sad as the shepherd of the eclogue, their souls torn, uncertain of the future? Yes, for nothing — because a hurricane of stupidity and iniquity has swept over this land of good sense and justice, carrying in its whirlwind a legion of imbeciles, malcontents, and scoundrels who spread terror in their wake. An Israelite captain is degraded with great pomp, in Paris, at the Champ de Mars, at nine o’clock in the morning: the people, lovers of melodramas and military spectacles, are not treated to such a festival every day! And in the sinister clamors that rose from the Place Fontenoy there was I know not what evil joy… Two years later, France trembles at the voice of a few men of energy and heart who cry out her error. The crowd, alas! continues to howl at the wretch: either because it refuses, out of laziness of mind or diabolical stubbornness, even to examine the question; or because, as happens to each of us in everyday life, it dimly senses that the troublemakers may be right, and stamps its feet all the more frenetically because it must stifle within itself the voice of doubt and the call of conscience… “Down with the Jews!” By this epithet of hatred, howled at crossroads like a rallying cry or sighed like a confession in the warmth of sanctimonious conversations, the worst citizens put themselves right with Honor and Duty, with the Fatherland and Religion.
They create a void around old Levy; they fear being seen entering his shop; the ladies, in the street, no longer dare stop to speak with his wife; the men give him a cold look at the cafe; the boarding-school mistress neglects the little girl; the boys come home from school each evening with a new incident to relate, stories of fistfights, of turned backs, of quarrelsome exchanges, and these adolescents, sickened, already take life in hatred. One resists at first, calm returns…
But each week a new incident serves as pretext for conflicts: the Zola trial, the Versailles trial, the suicide of Henry, the arrest of du Paty, the Criminal Chamber… The windows are shattered, heavy stones crash down upon the counters, old Levy protests, defends his shutters, wields his iron bar… and the next day the police commissioner sends word, for his own good, to be prudent. Not even the right to defend oneself any longer! Come now! “One can stand it no longer!” One “sells the business” at whatever price, one “liquidates” as fast as possible, one goes to seek one’s fortune elsewhere… The train glides, shuddering in small monotonous and dull jolts; the town disappears in the mist, and, pale, they dare not look at one another, for fear of bursting into tears and losing their remaining courage… But tonight the petty masters of the small town will be pleased: the good souls prowled around the station, they saw “the Jews” pressing at the ticket window, on the platform, into the car, with bag and baggage, and the news spreads at once: the Levys have gone!
Now we are masters in our own house! At last!
And yet these Jews are human beings…
It is true that these men are masters of the world. Look! See! They have placed themselves everywhere, everywhere they are the first!…
I look.
In Parliament. — Among the deputies, there are two, one of whom is an old philanthropist who votes occasionally and never speaks, and the other a young man of fashion who, to get himself elected, had to play with his origins and his opinions just like a pupil of the Jesuit Fathers. — In the Senate, three Jews, if I am not mistaken, of whom two will no longer be ministers, and of whom the third would doubtless already have been one if he had not been born an Israelite. A man of talent, a Jew, who wishes to participate actively in the political affairs of the country, has a hundred times more effort to make and obstacles to overcome to be elected in a constituency than the least apothecary of the canton, right-thinking, ignorant, scheming, and empty. And everyone knows that a parliamentarian, even a liberal one, I add: even a courageous one, may have for his private secretary M. Levy or M. Cahen, but he would not dare, if he becomes a minister, to attach him to his cabinet.
The Administration? — Ten years ago, three or four prefects were Jewish. Today, one.
The Administrations? — Among the generals on active duty, I believe there is only a single Israelite; among the colonels, a single one as well. — Two Israelite counselors out of forty-five at the Council of State and two masters of petitions out of thirty-two doubtless do not suffice — at the Court of Cassation, one counselor out of forty-five — at the Court of Appeal of Paris, two counselors out of sixty-two — to make the high justice of France lame and venal. — At the Court of Accounts, not one. — At Foreign Affairs, on principle, no one. — At Public Instruction: look at the directors, the rectors, even the deans: nothing. — Leaf through all the other specialized registers: Agriculture, Finance, Commerce: the same findings everywhere: one may say, in an almost absolute manner, that there are no Jews among the “great chiefs,” nor even immediately below them. — If truly thirty-eight million French Catholics and Protestants were governed by eighty thousand French Israelites, one might wonder by what sorcery this tiny minority “governs” this overwhelming majority.
There is, I know, the Institut, and the Universities. But these are not administrative functions, powerful and golden, in connection with which, on the slightest matter of internal business, the “Aryan” subordinate may groan at being under the hand of a Jewish superior; they are positions of intellectual honor, which one does not reach by the happy chance of political friendships or through the lazy functioning of automatic hierarchies, and no one in this country would yet seriously reproach a Darmesteter for his salary as Professor at the Faculty of Letters, or M. Henri Weil or M. Salomon Reinach for their attendance fees at the Academie des Inscriptions. — And I do not forget the lower ranks either, the young, the crowd of those who have not yet “arrived”: I readily acknowledge that after sometimes having had to deploy, in examinations and competitions, to struggle against strange tendencies, particularly meritorious energies, a number of Jews figure among the lieutenants and captains, the clerks and assistant heads, the auditors at the Council of State, the agreges of the University, the engineers, the lawyers, the physicians.
But one must still ask, regarding these Jews who are so reproached for being there, why they are there. The textbooks in which, as adolescents, we learned the history of our country taught us that in the fifteenth century, under the influence of considerable political events and very complex social causes, a formidable thrust had been made toward intellectual light, that after a long compression of the human mind, suddenly and as if miraculously, from the people lately stupefied, from the bourgeoisie lately sunk in matter, there had been born a brilliant crowd of poets, artists, humanists, philosophers. Now, this gigantic invasion fatally occurs each time that circumstances analogous to those that provoked the Renaissance movement present themselves. The Jews of France had lived, for long centuries, slaves and despised, absolutely separated from the other subjects of the king, without any right to liberal culture, to the intellectual, political, administrative life of the country. They were weary of piling up coins on an obscure counter or of driving cattle from market to market, on the roads of Lorraine and Alsace. The Revolution brought down the barriers: they rushed into the career with an ardor that in all justice we must find praiseworthy and generous. They even displayed in the struggle qualities of energy and intelligence that one would not even think of admiring if one would only apply to this social milieu, as to others, scientific comparisons almost banal today, and notice that in an entirely natural way the sap had to flow all the more vigorous and abundant the longer it had been contained and the more “new” the plant was. And if, for some thirty years, this movement of young Israelites toward the liberal professions has intensified, if each day they are more numerous, those who, sons of drapers, bankers, and peddlers, wish to become officers, physicians, lawyers, whether because that other life appears to them as intellectually higher than that of their fathers, or to escape through a “secure career” the hazards and worries of business, it is not for our democracy to reproach them for it, nor above all for that French bourgeoisie of which the Jewish bourgeoisie is but a very small portion and which sets them the example of the “scramble…”
Finally beware of believing that these petty Jewish functionaries threaten the others and that their career is wide open to their ambitions: they have their leading-strings everywhere; as in the army they are steered away from the Ecole de Guerre, and, when they still entered Saint-Cyr, they were never allowed — not in law, good heavens! but in fact — to graduate “into the cavalry”: all would be lost if Jews without a particle, born in a provincial back-shop, were, by virtue of the equality of the mess, to rub shoulders with the scion of old stock, proud of his ancestors as if he had made them, son of a very noble old gallant or of a dubious and Catholic financier, and, still rough around the edges, were to take it upon themselves to inject into the traditions of that arm, where the essential mission is to be smart, a bit of their serious spirit, their constant application, their tenacity at work.
There remains the world of business. I would not wish to recall the too banal argument: the Jews, settled everywhere precariously, at the mercy of a princely caprice, excluded from territorial property, excluded from the guilds, and obliged to resort, in order to live, to trade, to all sorts of trade, and to that in gold in particular. Unfortunately, present circumstances have given this argument a new force and life: for they make us witnesses to the perpetual new beginning imposed upon the oppressed race. Among those young people who had embraced the liberal professions with enthusiasm, many, after several years of perfect professional conscientiousness, of energetic efforts and tenacious illusions, are obliged to open their eyes to reality: no advancement, insincere camaraderie, a distrustful provincial life, a dreary existence in perpetuity… And after painful struggles, in a moment of vexation, one hands in one’s resignation, one takes advantage of connections not yet lost and of a youth still bold to “look for something else,” a situation less dependent on official administrations, and more lucrative: for now there awaken desires that formerly, in the pride of their mandarinate, these young men despised or blamed in those around them, even in those whose will to “make money” had secured them the means of being mandarins. They have had to realize that money is indispensable for living, that one must acquire it through one’s own activity if one wishes one day to give one’s children the same life one has lived oneself, that one is more independent when one has “some property” behind one, and that the day when those gentlemen should take it upon themselves to give you the cold shoulder in your garrison or to throw stones at your shutters: what does it matter, after all, if tomorrow, without risking throwing your wife and children into destitution, you can close your shop or send your resignation to the minister?… And that is how, instead of resting from father to son on a domain once acquired, on a fortune once made, on a name once established, and degenerating from generation to generation in the nonchalance of a secure existence, nearly all the men of this people, perpetually whipped by violent or underhanded persecutions, are compelled to make their own apprenticeship and their own life, to adapt their faculties to functions always new and to environments always new, without being able in their course ever to stop… And if this perpetual necessity of “getting by” wonderfully keeps their faculties in play, it is by an entirely natural law. Their adversaries have no cause to be astonished at their suppleness, their energy, and their tenacity, and, consequently, at their very wealth: it is they who condemn them to be rich.
A sweet condemnation, no doubt, if it always had its full effect! But from the fact that the Rothschilds are Jewish, and the Cahen d’Anvers, and the Furtados, it would be reasoning too simplistic or too perfidious to conclude that all their coreligionists are “millionaires.” I have before me an interesting statistic compiled by M. Louis Durieu in an article on Le Proletariat juif en Algerie (1), and I note there, for example, that “in Constantine, out of 1,249 households, 208 are counted as comfortable, considering as such those in which one can spend one franc per day per person. There are 1,016 households of extreme indigence; only 364 are assisted; 717 have for lodging a hovel that receives daylight through the door alone; the privileged ones, that is to say those who are assisted, receive on average two francs per week; the others are reduced to begging.”
(1) Revue socialiste, number 173, May 1899.
I do not say that if one could conduct the same inquiry into the Jewish population of the metropolis, one would find exactly the same proportions. It is nonetheless true that there as everywhere the very rich are the fewest, and those who earn their living by the sweat of their brow, the majority. The Jews are not a block. There are as many differences of fortune, habits, and soul between the barons of the Avenue Marigny and the pastry peddler who lives miserably in her hovel on the Rue des Ecouffes, as between Louis XIV and the beggars of Callot, and it is as illogical to make life impossible for the latter because of the former, as it would be to cut off provisions from the miners of Carmaux on the pretext that Baron Reille is a millionaire. I add that if one found, as even ordinarily sensible and fair persons sometimes say, that in proportion to the total number of Jews in France, the number, for example, of comfortable jewelers of Israelite origin is too large, reason obstinately refuses to understand the purpose of this observation and to admit the basis of any right one might have to suppress this supposed inconvenience: why not also complain that the Limousins are too numerous in the building workers’ guild and that among chimney sweeps all the places are taken by Savoyards? — I add finally that, even if all the Jews of France were plump rentiers and powerful financiers, even if there were among them neither those petty clerks who quite simply need to earn their living, nor those “soldiers of fortune” whose only fortune is their pay, nor those sad households that moulder in the lanes of the Marais on four francs a day and a new baby every year, reason obstinately refuses to understand by what right one would establish a difference between Jewish millionaires and the rest: if capital is odious, it is always and everywhere so, whether it be “Jewish” or “Christian”; there is no reason why a Semitic industrialist should be a “leech” if his non-Semitic colleague is a “worthy man”; why the red ribbon should be ridiculous or unseemly on the chest of a couturier, should his name be Isidore, as one of those gentlemen of the right pointed out with witty insistence — if it is not so at the buttonhole of a Catholic maker of spirits who has done “good business” by poisoning his fellow citizens. Why should a group of Jewish stock-jobbers be more suspect than the official brokers’ exchange — which almost absolutely refuses, let us note, to open itself to Israelites? They are, after all, both of them, men of “business,” men of money, men of the Stock Exchange. When, at the news of the disaster of Waterloo, the market rose, there were no Rothschilds, great or small, at the Paris Bourse.
To the crowd of those who, without being antisemites in principle, always suspect the Jew, one may cite the most varied examples of Jewish poverty, from the Algerian fish seller to the cobbler of the Rue des Rosiers: their assurance is unshakable. There are poor Jews? — Perhaps; but they will be rich: “They all know each other, they support each other, they push each other forward.”
Well, here too, when one has studied the men and the facts, one must bring to greater accuracy judgments passed lightly, and deny with energy, however audacious the denial may seem to prejudiced minds, this alleged Jewish solidarity.
That they know one another, certainly! There are about eighty thousand of them in all; they were penned together for centuries in three regions: Jews of Lorraine and Alsace — Jews of Avignon — Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne — and in a single profession: trade. When liberty came, when they dispersed, naturally they “formed currents”: a Jew from Bordeaux who prospered in Paris was bound, by his mere example, to attract to the same city and the same trade another Jew from Bordeaux. I do not believe anyone would think of being astonished that the “Terre-Neuviens” know each other among themselves, or that the “Barcelonnettes” form a French colony in Mexico.
But to believe that they lend one another mutual support, each sacrificing his petty interests for the greater success of the common ambitions of a group, is to misunderstand human nature or to attribute to the Jews a nobility of soul that they could not possess. Why would one wish that two Jewish merchants, dealing in the same goods, should not be as fierce in competition as if they were both Christians? The wits would even say that the struggle must be all the more fierce because they are both Jews.
In the liberal professions especially, in all the “milieus” where the Jew was still an exception, the one who had arrived would readily adopt an attitude toward the newcomer. Those Jews who had succeeded, twenty-five or thirty years ago, in escaping the commercial world, were still very few in number, and they had acquired this exceptional position only thanks to the relative “aristocracy” of a family that had already been able to give them the education necessary to attain it: first motive for vanity. Add that the great ambition of these parvenus was naturally to escape the general suspicion, to detach themselves as clearly as possible from the despised group, to mingle as intimately as possible with the group they were proud to enter, to burn their bridges behind them; and the cases I could cite are numerous, where, instead of welcomingly receiving the young man who was striving to be judged dignus intrare in his turn, they received him with a willingly hostile coldness: perhaps rough around the edges, still imbued no doubt with old habits, he might compromise, by recalling through his mere presence the old milieu, a position well established in the new milieu — like those relatives from the provinces, old-fashioned homebodies, who turn up one evening at a very Parisian grand dinner… One wishes to appear all the more impartial because one always feels suspected of partiality, and to keep one’s distance because one feels threatened by easily audacious familiarities. And it is perhaps for these reasons that among their coreligionists, Jewish officers were the slowest to become “Dreyfusards”: clique for clique, they preferred the new one, which glorified, to the old one, which humiliated, and to appear less Jewish, wished to appear all the more soldierly — M. Jourdain as prime minister would be more royalist than the king.
Alongside this error, which stems from insufficient psychological observation, there is another that rests on too superficial a knowledge of the facts. One imagines Jewish society as forming a whole whose tight cohesion is due to an absolute community of origin, tastes, and habits. Nothing is less accurate.
The Israelite society of Paris, for example, was composed, ten years ago still, of two very different elements that hardly sympathized with one another, whatever those who know it only from afar may think or say. Among these Jews of Paris, in fact, there are first those one might call the old French: some, having come from their province to Paris in the middle of this century, with a few francs in their pockets, served their apprenticeship in Paris as clerks and employees, then, by dint of work, initiative, and perspicacity, rose to fortune, just like simple Catholic Auvergnats, and, old today, have remained faithful to the tastes, habits, simple ways, and friendships of the beginning; others, perhaps even more destitute at the outset, without the least support in the capital, had to expatriate themselves, roam the Americas to try their fortune there, spend long years in hazards and perils, before returning to France, establishing the “commission house” there, growing old in the contentment of the country rediscovered and the comfort conquered. Their names are Levy, Cahn, Dreyfus.
The other category is much less autochthonous. Originating from beyond the Rhine and the Danube, born into families that had for the most part already acquired some fortune on the exchanges of Frankfurt or Vienna, they came to France only fairly late: their arrival must have coincided with the great expansion of financial business under the Second Empire. Richer from the start, and thus more widespread in high society, many bore names more foreign perhaps, but less specifically Jewish, and thus, though foreigners, they sometimes encountered fewer obstacles than the others.
Between these two elements of Parisian Israelite society, relations were rather correct than truly cordial; they classified each other reciprocally, in Jewish jargon, under special epithets; they did not readily intermarry from one clan to the other; the snobbery of the Boulevard Malesherbes looked down on the commonness of the Pointe Rivoli; the Sentier, vibrant with its Lorrainer or Alsatian origins, was repelled by the exoticism of the Plaine Monceau. And when the affair broke out in 1894, I rather think the Boulevard Malesherbes did not feel all the sadness one readily imagines: not grieved doubt, rather smiles and insinuations: “He is not one of ours, this fellow, one of those your narrow patriotism has always distrusted: no mixture in this Dreyfus, he is entirely from your people, a real old Frenchman without suspicious alliances or origins, a bourgeois, a man from Mulhouse…”
Four years later, everything had changed. One had had, with a soul in distress, to note that if, with a strange rapidity of deduction, Captain Dreyfus, from being disagreeable, had become suspect; if, with a strange rapidity of execution, one had passed, in his case, from suspicion to accusation, from accusation to arrest, from arrest to conviction, it was because he was a Jew; that if, three years later, from the first words, a void had been made around Scheurer-Kestner, it was not because Scheurer-Kestner wanted to rehabilitate a convict — for less courage, Senator Marcou had become famous and Pierre Vaux had been elected deputy — it was indeed because, this time, the rehabilitable convict was a Jew. The lieutenants could no longer despise the merchants; the elegant Jews could no longer boast of their fine connections; alas! the old French could no longer draw themselves up with pride in their quality as Frenchmen: all equally Jews, enveloped in the same general suspicion, those of the liberal professions and those of trade, those of the Rue Laffitte and those of the Rue de la Lyre, those from Frankfurt and those from Strasbourg, they were thrown back toward one another, through the fault of their enemies, pell-mell, in a miserable and bewildered crowd, a mob of pariahs, as in the time of the exoduses whose memory, hitherto pale and cold, took on a strange intensity of life in the infamous light of the Great Iniquity.
One knows the saying: “Orthodoxy is my doxy; heterodoxy is the other fellow’s doxy.” So “Solidarity” — good, praiseworthy, generous, useful to individuals and to the State, universal panacea when it is practiced by a grouping of sympathetic persons — is fundamentally bad and dangerous, a ferment of dissolution, when those who help one another are our adversaries. Thus the alleged solidarity of the Jews has contributed to making them suspect: since they have names, origins, habits, and connections in common, one must distrust this active and ambitious minority that forms a State within the State, a little foreign fatherland hostile to the great fatherland.
I need not recall that it was on this particular point that the energy of the campaign was concentrated. France for the French! — an admirable formula because it is sonorous and has the look of meaning something… And it is — supreme logic — the same people who accuse the Jews of “worming their way in” everywhere, of occupying in all branches of French activity eminent positions, who also reproach them for holding themselves apart from the “milieu,” for making themselves conspicuous: which is to say that they assimilate without assimilating.
It is this denial of their assimilation to the milieu, it is this perpetual questioning of their patriotism that has most moved the Jews of France, because these attacks seemed to their reason insane and to their hearts outrageous.
It would be quite amusing, if the observation were not so sad and if the affair were not heavy with hatreds, to catch our fellow citizens in perpetual flagrant absurdity. Some claim that what they detest in the Jew is the foreigner. But I do not know that, in the most elegantly antisemitic salons, one is so exclusively and so fiercely French. French society as a whole reminds me of that great lady who received in her circle, with marked favor, a suspicious fellow who presented himself as a Romanian captain, and made an icy face, all one day, to someone who wanted to introduce to her a polytechnicien named Levy… Read the society notices of the Gaulois, the Figaro, the Echo de Paris: you will find there the most dazzling titles of the old French nobility coupled with the most heteroclite coats of arms from abroad. There is much high talk of French blood, of pure race, and, among the most ardent nationalists, one exchanges one’s name for American millions and does not blush to mingle the blue blood of the old race with the gilded blood from overseas… And this is very well regarded, since they are right-thinking Catholics who thus ally themselves, from the nobility to the million, sons of knights and daughters of dollars, heedless of borders. Those, then, have the privilege of remaining French, when a Jew of Paris who might marry a Jewess from Geneva, Brussels, or even Strasbourg, is a “cosmopolitan”? — And if one truly is indignant that there are Jews beyond as well as on this side of the border, why not also be indignant to see Protestants likewise in every camp, and Catholics? Who are very capable of killing one another when the occasion arises, heedless of the shared religion? They even say that the military aristocracies of very foreign countries, sometimes enemies, count among their ranks very authentic little cousins, and I readily believe that there are more ties of kinship, education, and habits, for example, between the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, the Prince of Wales, the Duc de Chartres, and Grand Duke Vladimir, than between any one of those gentlemen and their fellow countrymen of the popular estate — the brewer of Nuremberg, the bargeman of the Thames, the muzhik, and the street hawker…
We are not going to say, however, that they would not know very well, if need be, how to charge saber in hand against one another, for the idea of duty toward their respective fatherlands.
It is appropriate to note, moreover, that out of ten million French citizens, there are not two million, I imagine, who know with certainty their lineage beyond the third or fourth generation. What their great-grandfather was doing, in the time of Louis XV or the Revolution, where he lived, where he came from, whether he was Burgundian or Norman, Basque or Piedmontese, English, Italian, German — Dupont knows as little of it as of the history of the Revolution of ‘48, and Durand cares as little about it as about the Declaration of Rights. An amusing application of the proverb about the mote and the beam: while suspecting in others the quality of their title as Frenchmen, one is not very sure of not being a little less French than they. Note even that the inhabitants of the cities are certainly, if not the only ones, at least the most agitated by these quarrels, that they show themselves, in the heat of the dispute, the most unjust and the most fierce, and that it is precisely they whom doubt would render more circumspect if they considered for a single instant how precarious their “nationality” is, being the product of heterogeneous elements that the chance of social life has coupled without asking where they came from…
No doubt, a hundred years ago, the Jews did not count in the French nation, and the names they bear are in themselves like indelible historical testimonies, outward marks that denounce to the first comer their past of enslavement: for they were not even, like the other French, attached to a lord by those bonds of vassalage and clientage that make of superior and inferior members of a single body, collaborators, mutual supports. They were simply outside the nation, outside the law. To refuse them today the quality of Frenchmen because they did not have it in 1789 is as ridiculous as if one undertook to deny Mounet-Sully and Coquelin the possibility of being good citizens and good territorials, on the pretext that actors too were outside the law… before 1789. And this illogicality is even more striking in a “democracy” that has been intoxicating itself for a hundred years with pompous flattery, that hears every day that it gave liberty to the world and marches at the vanguard of humanity: “Words! Words!” all of it, if French democracy, amid the perfumes of vainglory with which it is incensed, comes to reproach those it has emancipated for its own generous act of emancipation.
It would seem, from the speeches and acts of these people, that no one could be a patriot except themselves and their friends. In their determination to circumscribe patriotism within narrow limits and to regard as bad sons of the French fatherland those who are not of their club, their circle, and their parish, they end up granting or refusing the quality of Frenchman according to the caprice of purely formal and contingent circumstances. They doubtless do not know Michelet’s fine definition: “The fatherland is a great friendship”; they take no account of moral conditions, of the laws of habit and education; they suppress, in short, what is the very soul of the fatherland. For, be he grandson of Eskimos and Sudanese, the babe who rolls his hoop on the gravel of the Tuileries, the urchin who plays hopscotch on the flagstones of the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, when he has worn out his trousers on the benches of the “secular school” or the “bazaar,” and sung, pack on back, on the road to Louviers or to Saint-Nazaire, the song of the foot-sloggers between Pitou and Dumanet bumping shoulders beside him — that one has some chance of being as French as any man in France. I imagine, after all, that the royalists, who form one half of militant nationalism, are not going to disown Cardinal Giulio Mazarini, and that the imperialists who form the other half do not refuse the quality of Frenchman to the artillery lieutenant Napoleone Buonaparte…
The illustrious composer about whom the most “French” epithets have been exhausted, a spirit sparkling like champagne, diabolical fancy of a Parisian in verve — was he not Jacques Offenbach, a German Jew? And this man, of French spirit above all in elegance, discretion, and amiable, fine irony, is his name not Ludovic Halevy, an old Frenchman, but a Jew? He was a Jew, “the chivalrous Franchetti,” (1) commander of the Press Scouts, who was killed at Champigny. They were Jews, Sergeant Dennery who perished twenty years ago with the Flatters mission, and Captain Braun who just died in the Bretonnet mission. He was a Jew, Eugene Manuel, the poet “of the School and the Hearth,” who so often, after the war, was the moved singer of the sorrows and hopes of the fatherland… At the very moment when the Jews were being reviled, other men were raised upon the shield. One, charged with rendering justice “in the name of the French people” and of the French army, lets the Esterhazy trial drift at the hearing into a Picquart trial, throws the doors wide open to the crowd while the accused is being charged and abruptly shuts them as soon as the accused takes the floor to defend himself. That is not just, and that is not French. The other, accused of having communicated certain documents to the judges outside the presence of the defendant or his counsel, denies it at first energetically, then, cornered, intimidated, trembling, in a monstrous sentence of which the commentators will illustrate future editions of the Provinciales, confesses: ”…I read only one document, but I did not say: only one document was read… After that document was read, I passed the file to my neighbor, saying: ‘I am tired.’” That is not frank, and that is not French. This one, in his newspaper, published in bold type all the peremptory and proofless assertions that overwhelmed the convict, and miserably truncated or tortiously interpreted everything that might provoke doubt in the minds of his readers. That is not loyal, and that is not French. That one made the distant prisoner suffer the repercussions of every effort made here to save him, aggravating double walls with double shackles. That is not humane, and that is not French.
(1) Arthur Chuquet, Histoire de la Guerre de 1870-1871.
Let us set aside particular cases. We have a more general testimony to what education can do, to the ineluctable force with which contact with the surrounding society and the habits of one’s first life transform the residues of atavism: it is precisely this fact, that all the young men of the petty, middle, and great “Jewry” were in the process of losing the qualities of initiative and individual energy of their fathers. Look in this Jewish world: you will see mature men and old men who, emerging from destitute families, setting out from insignificant villages, have traversed the world and crossed through life with the fever of a tireless activity — to make of their sons men of perfect repose who distinguish themselves as little as possible from their non-Jewish comrades — good little pupils at the lycee, good little employees, good little functionaries, regular, orderly, and mediocre, who will be able to live only thanks to the fortune acquired by their parents and in-laws. Another generation or two, and all of that will melt into the universal torpor… For it is an observation that has not been made: these Jews who are vilified represented a little among us that Anglo-Saxon spirit that is exalted. And M. Jules Lemaitre, who “launched” the book by Demolins and the Bonvalot committee, M. Jules Lemaitre sees nothing of it!
The Jews of France, whose natural sense was further sharpened by the pinpricks of daily insult, were bound to suffer painfully from so many inconsistencies. But for them it was something other than an intellectual and theoretical suffering: in doubting their patriotism, one was perhaps touching the most sensitive chord of their inmost being.
The “old French” Jews had indeed an excellent reason for loving France: it was that, without France, they were nothing. If they are something, they owe it to the France of ‘89. And this attachment to the fatherland, in which there entered as a fundamental element gratitude for a precise benefit, has always been very keen even among the most ignorant and the most humble. They all always felt a somewhat proud satisfaction, before foreign Jews, at the recital of some odious persecution, to say that in France “things did not happen like that,” that they were equal to the non-Jews, that they could aspire as they did to the highest positions. I recall a page by J.-J. Weiss, a little forgotten perhaps, that he wrote fifteen years ago on returning from a trip to Alsace. The witty and sagacious writer amuses himself, to sum up in a vivid way his observations on the state of mind of our lost fellow citizens, by staging four important personages of a small town (1), who, gathered in the cool of the brewery garden, chat while emptying their mugs. The notary, son of the former justice of the peace, does not like the Germans, but he finds that “not everything is so bad in German law… it has certainly shortened the ceremonies in our offices.” Mathias, the bourgeois, is in the same simultaneously hostile and conciliatory frame of mind: ”…Damn Germans! Still, they did send us from Paderborn an excellent justice of the peace…” As for the forest ranger, who has returned from the regiment, he acknowledges that in the Jaeger battalion, at Greifswald, one finds oneself rather far from Bischwiller. “But if you ask my opinion as an Alsatian, they did not treat me any worse there than if I had been from Pomerania like the others.” There remained the Jew. When his turn to speak came, he “looked around him prudently, and, lowering his voice, expressed himself as follows: ‘And I, I hate them! They raised the salary of our rabbi, just as they did for the schoolmaster, the priest, and the pastor. Oh! they are clever and they do everything they can to seduce and win over the leaders of the Alsatian people. But me, they do not pay me like my rabbi, who tries to wheedle me. I will never get used to them. Long live France! You amuse me, Herr Mathias, with the justice of the peace. It is a policy they have to win us over… I have worked hard for a long time; I now have some means; I would like to do something with my sons… How? If my youngest son, who always has his nose in books, were to study to become a professor at the University of Strasbourg or of Heidelberg, even if he had all the learning in the world, the professors would refuse to vote for him; the Rector Magnificus and the curator would say: It cannot be done, he is a Semite. — What gibberish! Semite! Their philologists invented this mumbo-jumbo. I ask you whether, in French times, one heard of philologists and Semites. All French, in France! All equally of society when one was well bred. Did not the Bezirks-Praesident of Lower Alsace cut off the subsidy that the department had always given to our orphanage in Strasbourg? He told us: Why should the German government pay for the apprenticeship of your orphans? No sooner are they sixteen than they leave Alsace to go work in Nancy, in Epinal, in Paris. — Well! What of it? Those young people are right to leave… In Paris, the Jew is the equal of everyone…’”
(1) J.-J. Weiss, Au Pays du Rhin, Charpentier, 1886.
And in fact, I know of these Israelites of Alsace acts of patriotic delicacy and tenacious fidelity that would deserve to be told. And I know what bitterness the old ones feel rising again in their hearts when they cross back today, on holiday, the new border, when they see again the villages of their childhood, unknown in the good old days, today lugubriously famous — the Froeschwillers and the Wissembourgs — for the enemy boot is fixed there and French bones have hardened that soil. And I know of touching pilgrimages that the young have made to see again, guided by the memories of their fathers, those village corners, those old city quarters where one had been so happy in French times. And now, still “of the people” to the marrow, despite the injustices, the hatreds, and the humiliations, they cannot hear without that shiver that makes the skin bristle and sets the nerves on edge, with the distant vision of the pink sandstone spire, the din of “Sambre-et-Meuse” or “Sidi-Brahim.” (1)
(1) These Israelites of Alsace — upon whom I insist because it is they who, on account of certain entirely outward peculiarities, have most lent themselves to “mockery” and calumny, and who have suffered from it most — are always, even scattered across the world, French above all, nervously and noisily French. Go through the lists of the Alsatian-Lorraine Societies that were formed in various places after the war, and ask Deroulede whether they had not enrolled in droves, at its founding, in his League of Patriots.
As for the others, those whom pious Frenchmen suspected, one had to reflect and understand that they could be French all the same, for analogous reasons and with as much sincerity. Pursued, suspected, hated, hunted in their countries, they had come to France because France, it was said, was welcoming and generous. And indeed, for many long years, they could believe they had not been lied to. And they loved France from the bottom of their hearts, as the shipwrecked love the hospitable shore, as men have always loved the country that gave them, when they arrived trembling from the perils of persecution and weary of the roads of exile, security and peace. There is even, in the history of our country, an example that it would not be unseemly to recall today. In the seventeenth century, when the passion for unbridled unification, further inflamed by the interested adjurations of preachers more Catholic than Christian, had led the King to sign the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the French Protestants had to seek elsewhere an adoptive country that would be less harsh to them than the country of their fathers. Taken in by the Margrave of Brandenburg, they were for him grateful and loyal subjects; they gave themselves body and soul to their new fatherland; they loved it with all the more fervor, no doubt, because there mingled with their love a kind of bitterness toward the brothers of old who had no longer wanted them, and perhaps an acrid desire, very human, to put forth with ever more energy all their qualities as men and citizens, so as to provoke in their persecutors, along with remorse for a crime, the regret of a bad calculation. Well then! Why should all those Jews driven from Russia, from Poland, from Romania, not have loved, not love the France that welcomes them, as the French driven out two centuries ago by religious aberration loved, out of gratitude at first, then out of love, the country that made them its own? Such a young physician, a Jew from Austria, a refugee in France who does honor to our laboratories, has other reasons, deeper and more conscious, for loving France, than many good people who merely took the easy trouble of being born there and the equally easy pleasure of crying Long live the army!
The little Jew of Oran who, from the depths of his shop, by the uncertain light of his poor man’s lamp, dreams, while preparing his examinations, of the glory of one day being a French officer or a French engineer — that one forms of France an idea loftier, more in keeping with her traditional role, more worthy of her, than the rioters of the Algiers tramways…
I have been able to show that the “supremacy of the Jews” is only a word, that one exaggerates in speaking of their solidarity, that one slanders in denying their patriotism — and I have perhaps convinced no one, I mean of those who hold a contrary opinion. Even if their conviction is shaken by these arguments, our adversaries will acquiesce only with pursed lips, like those timid souls from whom, after having pleaded, debated, insisted for hours, one finally wrests a commitment contrary to their dearest routines, and who, as soon as one has turned one’s back, regain their composure and dispatch an embarrassed note to retract. — Yes, you are right, everything you say is fair. But they are Jews, and I distrust them. It is the sans dot, the tarte a la creme, the eternal refrain, tenacious, obstinate, absurd, of those who have neither reasons nor reason… The old Demos has an overexcited imagination, a heart and reason perverted by a passion — military music — and by a hatred — the Jew — and the question having one day, before him, thanks to skillful sophisms, been posed between “the Army” and a certain Dreyfus, it was no longer possible for him to be just.
His feeling is rooted in deep sources: first, the hatred of the man enslaved by an old intellectual, moral, and social discipline for the man who, more independent, more capable of initiative and energy, more desirous of achieving something in this world, seeks to “succeed” with more perseverance and ingenuity; the hatred too of one who leads a mediocre life with difficulty for a group of men, many of whom, poor also at the outset, have risen to comfort, and whose very distinctive names do not allow him to ignore their origin and religion; the need not to look within oneself, not to seek within oneself the causes of the evil and the possibilities of remedy, but, directly, conveniently, to accuse others, to throw the responsibility for one’s personal evil and for social evil upon a man or a group of men: this deliciously relieves the conscience: it is Voltaire’s fault — it is Rousseau’s fault — it is the fault of the Jews — and, when these ideas have penetrated his mind, the honest worker who earns five or six francs a day imagines that he would have been a millionaire boss long ago if the Rothschilds had always stayed in the ghetto of Frankfurt.
But there was in the violence of the dispute a reason deeper and more intimate still. The Dreyfus affair is perhaps only an episode of a very old struggle — old as France. Augustin Thierry, Taine, Michelet have said it again and again: in this country more perhaps than in any other subsists the antagonism between the conquerors and the conquered, between the lords who for centuries were the masters, and the humble who for centuries lived only by and for the lords. Shattered by ‘89, the former have never consoled themselves for their fall. Emancipated and exalted by ‘89, the latter have never completely satisfied their desire for absolute liberty. Among the descendants of the powerful and rich old nobility, some have preserved their fortunes intact through political and economic revolutions. They possess a town house and a country house, entire districts, entire mines, infinite estates in France and abroad, and the figure representing their wealth would be no less stupefying to the imagination of petty bourgeois and proletarians than that of the fortune of the Jew Rothschild. But if they still have wealth, they no longer quite have power: other powers have risen beside theirs, born of nothing, and they see with regret these plebeian powers, since by their very existence they diminish the importance of their own, and over them the “privilege of ancient nobility,” the “purity of blood,” the “long devotion to the kings,” the brilliance of the title assure them only a very vain and very illusory superiority. They were the first of old, even when poor; today, even when rich, they are no longer the first by right. In ordinary life, political and social necessities, social relations, the community of habits and opinions have been able, among Catholics, to attenuate certain aversions — although the fire always smolders and the slightest sparks of a somewhat heated discussion risk reigniting the conflagration. But the chances of disaster are much more numerous between Catholics and Jews. For, even — or especially — in “high society” where great Jews and great Christians seem to fraternize, the former are for the latter, by the sole fact of their existence, I repeat, the symbol of the great upheaval that raised the ones and brought down the others. The Jews may puff themselves up as much as they like to affect an air of the old regime: they are democracy, the product of the Revolution. Add that this Jew, even a baron and living the elegant life of the Faubourg, escapes “by definition” from the memory of ancient traditions that are a consolation for the nobility and by which even fallen nobles always hold over the “parvenus” of their world: the memory of the old tutelage, of the relations between suzerain and vassal, of that submission whose necessity the Church for centuries inculcated in the souls of the faithful, thus translating the sublime idea of resignation into social language in order to make of it a very practical method of governance. Finally, antisemitism constituted for them an easy means of restoring their virtue by casting upon a scapegoat the responsibility for all crimes and all shames, of diminishing their own unpopularity by speculating on that of others, and of pointing to other insolent fortunes so that their own might perhaps more easily escape public envy.
But if those who possess, along with an illustrious name, the pecuniary means to worthily sustain its brilliance according to the honor of the world, see with this ill humor new men carving out a place beside their own, what feelings of rancorous and base jealousy must ferment in the soul of the impoverished and ruined nobility! The ancestral properties, for a century, have melted away; the family has divided endlessly, and the fortune with it; one, to recover, has made unlucky speculations; another, for entertainment, has spent at gambling and on women more money than was fitting. The springs of body and soul have slackened in festivity or in inertia. And now the young vegetate, happy to still accept some administrative or military post at ten louis a month. And if one has been obliged, in order to subsist all the same, to sell to some Jewish parvenu, who had nothing to do with the debacle, a hunting preserve, an estate, precious collections, you must admit that the insult is too tempting, and that to observe the dignity of silence would require too fine a soul.
That is the psychological process and the social modifications by which the “aristocrats” have been naturally antisemitic, carrying with them the army, the high clergy, Catholic high finance, all that wishes to draw close to the nobility, to espouse its traditions, its prejudices, its passions, its fashions, as if to profit from the antiquity of its glory — all that has always lived by the principle of authority, and wishes today, however shaken it may be, to revive it against the Jew. Facing them then the others have risen, and not only those who to the principle of absolute authority would willingly oppose the principle of absolute liberty, but those who simply do not accept without discussion and without examination the word of command, the hierarchical opinion, the traditional interpretation, all those who perhaps regret the tranquillity of soul and conscience that Faith gives, but who will never resolve to strangle Reason within themselves. The day when Captain Alfred Dreyfus received the order to report to the Ministry of War, on October 15, 1894, in civilian dress, for a general inspection session, it was nothing but a petty quarrel of jealous bureaucrats — it was nothing but the two halves of France coming apart from one another, the furious awakening, in broad daylight, of two interests and two spirits eternally in muffled struggle, and the “great uproar” rendered all the more inevitable and perhaps brought forward by fifty years.
When, two hours after the captain’s arrest, the director of the Cherche-Midi went to visit him, he found him “all distraught in his room: Captain Dreyfus had the look of a madman, his eyes bloodshot, and, at my first words, he responded only with hoarse sounds”… (1) He struck his head against the walls, he paced “like a caged lion” (2), bewildered, mad with grief and surprise, searching, unable to understand…
(1) Testimony of Commandant Forzinetti before the Court of Cassation, 24 December 1898.
(2) Letter from Captain Dreyfus to his wife, December 1894.
This mad rage of the prisoner against the walls of his prison was in advance like a symbol of the equally legitimate and natural, equally senseless and impotent angers that were to rise, on several occasions, between the Scheurer-Kestner incident and the Rennes conviction, in generous and just souls. When President Delegorgue let fall in his pale voice, with the consciousness of a quietly brutal authority, those words: “The question will not be put”; when M. Cavaignac, in his ministerial office, holding before him the dismayed Colonel Henry, had the discretion not to press the interrogation further than was fitting to the secret desires of an embarrassed general staff — or, on leaving this interview, the skill to communicate to the agencies only a summary sufficient to explain Henry’s arrest, but not to explain his conduct; when, out of feelings of dignity and reserve that are moreover understandable, the judges of Rennes refused to interrogate Schwarzkoppen, and Schwarzkoppen, not interrogated, decided not to speak — we all understood, dismayed, to what sad impotence the man who wishes to know is reduced in the face of the man who will say nothing, and shuddered with rage before that leaden hand of Material Impossibility which, unfailingly, came crashing down upon Truth each time that, leaning forward, Truth was about to make the decisive leap.
The Jews are and remain French citizens. If the Jews of France can understand that they have committed, by the sole fact of being right, a fault that is never forgiven; that they can no more count than before on the benevolent fairness of their fellow citizens; that they must be more rigorous toward themselves than their harshest adversaries; and that in the end they are condemned to virtue, like the Protestants of the seventeenth century, like the Jansenists, like all persecuted minorities — then neither the epilepsy of M. Drumont and M. Rochefort, nor the sophistry of M. Maurras and M. Lemaitre will prevent them from living their life in France. For their cause is, whether one likes it or not, an essentially French cause: when, speaking of the Dreyfus Affair, it was said that France had its case of conscience, what did that mean, if not that the soul of France was being disputed between a passion and an idea, between a prejudice and a principle, between a caprice of suspicious and jealous democracy, and that role of champion of justice she boasted of having played in humanity? The Jews are the Armenians of Europe. They are, before a sort of democratic absolutism of which the “divestiture law” was the most significant and most odious manifestation, what the men of 1789 were before monarchical absolutism. They are what France herself has been since 1871. They represent, in the face of Force and Number, ineluctable Right.
The Herve Affair
It may now be published that the Herve affair has long been over. It was over from the day M. Gustave Herve, who was a professor, set foot in the editorial offices of La Petite Republique.
On the evening of the session in which the Higher Council of Public Instruction had condemned Herve, the one among the judges who from the beginning of the affair and in the proceedings themselves had defended the accused with the most patient exactitude, with the most seriousness, with the most sureness, leaving the session, encountered M. Gustave Tery.
— Well? asked Tery.
— Well, he is condemned, and you may boast of having contributed a great deal to it.
— So much the better, Tery replied, that is what we wanted.
Since our General Staffs continue to make us suffer defeat with a light heart, since in this affair, where so many and such great liberties were at stake, M. Gustave Tery made himself a general-in-chief at thirty and a dictator, when we have suffered the final defeat, we shall ask him for the accounting he owes us. When the last court of justice has rendered the last sentence, we shall tell everything we know of the Tery affair.
We publish below the articles by Herve that remained on our composing stone.
Gustave Herve
Down with War
A delegation of English workers, representing several hundred trade unions and cooperatives, was received at the Bourse du Travail in Paris by several thousand French workers. The English workers came to declare to their French comrades that despite the incitements of the jingoist press across the Channel, there are over there, on the other side of the strait, a good number of workers who detest war and who feel for the rest of the proletariat nothing but sentiments of fraternity. These good and heartening words were acclaimed as they deserved.
It is a sign of the new times, which are near, this nausea at blood that seizes the healthiest and most conscious part of the universal proletariat, at the precise moment when our ruling classes, those of France, England, and other countries, are committing in the Transvaal, in China, in the Philippines, in the Sudan, and elsewhere the atrocities that you know. “Enough blood! Down with war!” — that is what this simple and touching gesture of a part of the English proletariat means!
A day will come — everyone senses it today — when the proletarians will not content themselves with these eloquent but platonic demonstrations.
A day will come when, as troops of soldiers set off to go slaughter Boers, Chinese, or blacks, on their route, at every station along the railway, right to the very dock of embarkation, organized and conscious workers will cry in their faces: “Down with war! Long live the Chinese! Long live the Boers!”
A day will come when workers, instead of merely striking to defend their wages, will proclaim the strike to impede the departure of these filibuster expeditions, and when the stokers and engineers of the steamships will refuse to convey to the Asian or African battlefields this wretched cannon fodder.
A day will come when, at the threat of a declaration of war in Europe, in every country the proletariat will rise up and cry in the face of its masters: “If you declare war, we begin civil war, the Social Revolution! If we must risk our skins, if we must make war, we will not make it against the proletarians of other countries, our brothers; we will make it against the class that exploits us!”
On that day, the war of nation against nation will be finished.
And when will that day come?
It will come, proletarians of the countryside and of the cities, when you will it, when an energetic minority among you resolves to will it.
Our Interests in China
French worker, the newspapers and the right-thinking people will tell you:
— Let us go to China; let us compel the Chinese to let us build railways in their country and exploit their mines. The more we bring into China in the way of railway equipment, the more rails, locomotives, machines of all kinds we import, the more work you will have in the factory, the more your wages will rise.
And I tell you:
— There are over there, in China, 400 million inhabitants accustomed to content themselves for all nourishment with a handful of rice and a pinch of tea; a wage of a few sous can keep them alive; the capitalists of Europe, if they establish themselves as masters over there, will find a cheap labor force, at a vile price. They will build factories over there that, before long, will flood the markets of Europe with cheap products: machines, tools, textiles. And the manufactures of Europe, killed by the competition, will close one by one; and the layoffs will begin for you and the meager wages. French worker, do you want France to make war on the Chinese?
French peasant, the newspapers and the right-thinking people will tell you:
— It is in your interest too that France should create outlets in China; the richer the great French financiers and manufacturers become, the more the urban workers will have employment and comfort, the greater the general well-being will be, and yours with it.
And I tell you:
— The great factory owners and the great financiers can grow rich and you will not have one more sou in your pocket. A war in China, far from enriching you, can only increase the taxes, already so heavy, that weigh upon you: all wars are expensive, all end in loans and tax increases. Do you not already feel burdened enough? French peasant, do you want France to make war on the Chinese?
Embarkation for China
French worker, French peasant, the newspapers and the right-thinking people will tell you:
— France, alone among the great nations, cannot disengage from the China question; if the others expand over there, she too must claim her share; France must maintain her rank in the world: noblesse oblige.
And I tell you:
— When the European troops have vanquished the Chinese, the English, Russian, German, French, and Japanese governments will each want the best pieces of the cake; they will not easily agree and then they will fight; sooner or later, be sure of it, perhaps soon, these China affairs will bring about terrible wars in Europe, and it is you who, in your turn, will be led to the slaughter. French worker, French peasant, do you want France to make war on the Chinese?
So, on Sunday, cannon fodder was being loaded at Marseille for the Chinese slaughterhouse. There were four hundred wretches there, who, from their earliest childhood, from primary school, had their moral sense corrupted by the exaltation of every swashbuckler of the Napoleon type who had bloodied Europe in a French uniform; at eighteen, they enlisted as volunteers in the marine troops to imitate, as best they could, these heroes of the old days; unless they were simply poor proletarians, ignorant and unconscious, who, starving at home, had entered the barracks, which at least provided them with regular rations. At their head, a few dozen officers, each more decorated and plumed than the last, who embraced the noble profession of arms for the same reasons, or more often still to have an honored trade, a brilliant uniform, and one that is well regarded by women.
You think perhaps they were embarked discreetly, without noise, at night, like executioners going to carry out the dirty work of bringing to heel people who are not in the wrong? Not at all. The whole city was celebrating in their honor; the women threw them packets of tobacco and cigarettes; the men bellowed, with their southern accent, formidable “Long live the army!” The President of the Republic himself, assisted by the Minister of the Navy, had come all the way from Paris expressly to bring them the farewell of the nation, and what a farewell! He speaks just as well as Emperor Wilhelm, our president! The refrain that the German Kaiser had struck up at the departure of the German troops, with ferocious words that scandalized so many, the august Loubet took it up in a more paternal manner, but at bottom he did not speak differently: he too came to speak to us of our rights violated! Of the essential laws of civilization violated by the Chinese! He too felt the need to incite to vengeance these soldiers who have so little need of being incited to violence. “They will not return,” he cried, “without having inflicted upon them an exemplary punishment.” Alone, in the midst of all these deluded souls, the socialist mayor of Marseille, Citizen Flaissieres, came to speak a few words of truth and humanity, but with what discretion and what timidity still!
With the immense candor and the great naivety that our readers must be beginning to know in me, I had dreamed of something else; I had dreamed, in the mouth of the first magistrate of the French Republic, of a language other than that of the German emperor. I had dreamed that he would hold before the troops roughly this language: “My children, our fathers had grave wrongs toward the Chinese; they committed against them great crimes; they entered their country by force, by arms, and they violated them. The Chinese ended by revolting against our methods; truth obliges me to confess that their insurrection is holy and legitimate.
“In their legitimate anger, they besiege in Peking the French embassy, where there are men and women who are not responsible, any more than we, for the brigandage of our ancestors. You are going there only to deliver them.
“The government of the Republic is moreover in negotiations to obtain a safe-conduct for our nationals. In exchange, we shall commit ourselves to no longer entering China against the will of the inhabitants; the government of the Republic hopes in this manner to render your intervention unnecessary and to spare you the sad task of fighting against people who are merely defending themselves against our violence.
“If, unfortunately, we should not succeed in avoiding an armed conflict, remember that even in Asia you must respect the lives of women and children; remember that you fight against men toward whom we have grave wrongs.”
Failing the official head of the bourgeoisie, I had dreamed that it would be the mayor of Marseille, the elected representative of the socialist party, who would give France and the whole world a great lesson in international morality. I had dreamed that he would refrain from appearing in the official procession and that he would explain his attitude to his electors in a proclamation conceived roughly thus: “Citizens, the socialist party, the great party of the oppressed, who dream of establishing here and everywhere the reign of social justice, cannot accept that under the pretext of civilization the armies of the Republic should compel the Chinese people to accept by force our products and our customs.
“It feels nothing but pity and shame for the human machines who are going over there, by order, to shoot Chinese who are in their own country, just as on an order from their chiefs they would pitilessly shoot any one of your comrades on strike.
“The municipality of Marseille will therefore abstain from appearing in the official procession.
“It invites the Marseille socialists to cry out on the passage of the soldiers: ‘Long live the Chinese! Down with war!’”
Alas! These were only dreams! I forgot that M. Flaissieres, who is an arrived man, had to speak and act with all the reserve and all the prudence of arrived men, and that he does not like scenes. I forgot that M. Loubet, who is even more arrived, has only one ambition: to keep peacefully in the Elysee, by disarming the nationalists with his overtures; I forgot that he was going to Marseille only to court them, to persuade Baron Christiani henceforth to respect his hat, and above all to persuade the officers of Montelimar not to recommence their collective urination against his house.
At the General Council of the Yonne
Our General Council is composed of radicals for whom the entire social question is confounded with the clerical question. A radical, in these times, is simply an anticlerical, sometimes even nothing more than a priest-eater. Take away from the clergy the right to teach, expel the congregations, and you will see that all will be for the best in the best of republics: that is the whole radical solution! These reflections are prompted in me by the last anticlerical demonstration of our General Council. For our councilors, the sole cause of the China war is the missionaries: therefore let the missionaries sort things out as best they can with the natives they wish to convert, and in no case should they be given armed support for their propaganda.
“Considering that the present war is taking on the character of religious wars that are the shame of humanity, and that the heaviest burden is borne by the democracy that pays with its blood and with disproportionate taxes for the fanaticism and greed of the missionaries, the Council requests that the missionaries be left to themselves and expelled from all French colonies where, amid credulous populations, they are an element of disturbance and discord even more dangerous than in the metropole.”
Excellent! Let the missionaries, who are often very brave men and very courageous men whom I respect despite their credulity, go to far-off lands at their own risk. They claim — and many speak truly — that they do not fear martyrdom: if in their apostolate they encounter it, well then! Let them go straight to heaven; we see no objection whatsoever, but for heaven’s sake, let them die in peace and not come asking us for either our money or our skin to get them out of trouble! On this we all agree with the General Council.
But truly it is to make a mockery of the world to attribute to the missionaries all the responsibility for the present crisis! Come now! The work of Catholic missions in China dates from the sixteenth century and wars against the Chinese date at most from the middle of the nineteenth century! Thus, for three centuries, the missionaries criss-crossed China, coolly received, sometimes martyred, without the old monarchy ever thinking of intervening. And you seriously believe that it is in our century of growing unbelief that modern governments would have flown to the rescue of the poor martyrs! Come now! It is a bad joke.
The protection of missionaries was for them only a pretext for intervention: if they had not had that one they would have found ten others. The true cause of this sudden enthusiasm on the part of the rulers of modern Europe for flying to the rescue of missionaries and avenging them is simply the arrival in power, over the last century, of the capitalist bourgeoisie, mistress of big industry, big commerce, and most of the major daily newspapers. Under the regime of fierce competition that grips us, our masters need distant outlets for their manufactured products, created at vile prices by mechanization; they need raw materials at vile prices to manufacture cheaply and sustain competition with their rivals; so these gentlemen seize every opportunity — when they do not create them — to extend their field of exploitation by force: the China wars have no other reason. They are therefore caused, at bottom, by the present regime of production, a regime of murderous competition for all, a regime of all-out struggle between producers, masters and workers, a regime of armed struggle for the opening of new markets. Nothing better demonstrates the urgency of a true organization of labor than these continual acts of brigandage that are the fatal consequence of the disorder and anarchy of the present mode of production.
But these acts of brigandage would be much more difficult to perpetrate if the public conscience were not poisoned by a religion as imbecile and as bloody as the Catholic religion — I mean the new religion of modern peoples: the religion of the fatherland. This religion, which the child learns at school and which the bourgeois newspapers maintain in adulthood, teaches this stupidity: that all French people form one great family, that one must love and defend all the members of this great family, that their interests are common, that they have a common patrimony of glory to defend, that one must always be ready to die for the honor of the flag and other nonsense; that we must maintain our rank in the world — no doubt our rank among predatory peoples. After this fine education, there is nothing left but to deck our glorious soldiers and their illustrious chiefs in trousers of garish colors and showy plumes: after intoxicating the eye with carnival spectacles, one need only flatter the ear with music, trumpets, cymbals, and drums; when one has thus inculcated, through all the senses, through every pore, the respect and admiration of the army, the masters need only make a sign when their interest is at stake; the soldiers to whom they have put a lethal weapon in hand are ready for all dirty work: shootings of unarmed workers and women workers as at Fourmies and Le Francois, extermination of blacks and Chinese guilty of defending themselves against their invasion.
And the mothers whose sons are sent to far-off slaughterhouses shriek “Long live the army!” And the workers against whom the same soldiers will fire tomorrow if ordered to do so shriek “Long live the army!” And the General Council of the Yonne — radical, naturally — sends to our heroic soldiers who have just entered Peking the expression of its affection and admiration. Bah!
What Standing Armies Are For
We already knew of many ways of using the army.
We knew the army that our masters unleash upon defenseless blacks or peaceful Asians, to steal their country when they need to create new outlets or new markets for their commerce.
We knew the army, a school of discipline and stupefaction, stifling the spirit of initiative, of free inquiry, and of revolt by an iron discipline and mechanical exercises, completing or advantageously replacing the education of the Church, maker of the resigned, of slaves, or of machines.
We knew the army that fires point-blank at unarmed strikers, to intimidate the working class — the glorious army of Fourmies or of Le Francois.
It fell to the ministry of “republican defense” — as the dupes call it — to popularize, if not to discover, another use for the troops: the other day, the stokers and firemen of the Compagnie Transatlantique went on strike at Le Havre; the Company was about to be obliged to capitulate: quick, the fleet arrives at Le Havre and state sailors are embarked by force on the liners; in Bastia, the port dockworkers go on strike: this time it is one hundred fifty infantry soldiers who come to rescue the Fraissinet company and carry out the unloading of its ships.
How long will the slaves in uniform continue to serve as the shooters or the starvers of their fathers in work clothes? How long will they serve as their masters’ watchdogs? When will we have militias as in Switzerland, formidable for defense, capable of defending us against the soldiers and kings next door better than our professionals did in 1814, in 1815, in 1870, but impossible to use against workers, either to shoot them or to starve them?
Two Cases of Refusal of Military Service in Holland
The anarchist newspaper Les Temps Nouveaux tells the story of two Dutch conscripts who refused to enter the barracks and serve the fatherland.
One of them, Wendt, is a Christian who has adopted the doctrines of Tolstoy, the great Russian philosopher, on non-resistance to evil through violence; unlike the Abbe Olivier, the brilliant preacher of the cathedral of Sens, Wendt does not believe that since Jesus, whoever lives and fights in the service of his country is a sacred being, that the soldier’s trade is a “trade of Christ”; he believes on the contrary, as I had the honor of maintaining recently, with evidence in support, before the Cure-Archpriest of Sens, that Christ formally forbade killing and that one cannot be both a true Christian and a practitioner of the trade of killing men. Consistent with himself, Wendt refused to let himself be trained to kill his fellow men. To prove to him that he was wrong, a court-martial sentenced him to a year in prison.
His sentence begun, his pastor — Wendt is a Protestant, I believe — came to see him and explained — what I also had the honor of explaining here to the Abbe Olivier — that there are two ways of interpreting the Sermon on the Mount; that the radical interpretation is neither the only nor the best one; that one can, more humanely and as logically, interpret the commandment of Jesus condemning violence and murder in the sense that one must never provoke or attack anyone, but that it is not forbidden to use force to repel violence; that the case of legitimate defense is perhaps not irreconcilable with the divine word; that, consequently, one can, while being a Christian, accept being a soldier, on condition of not letting oneself be used for aggression against others.
Wendt let himself be convinced; he then addressed a petition to the queen requesting his pardon, but as he decidedly could not overcome his Christian repugnance for the noble profession of arms, he requested and obtained the favor of being assigned to the medical corps.
I wish for Christianity, degenerate and falsified in our day, many adherents of the temper and moral worth of this Dutch Christian.
The other case of refusal of military service is even more worthy of our admiration. The second objector, named Bruin, is a true anarchist. Many people imagine that an anarchist is a species of raving lunatic who spends his life manufacturing bombs for the use of constituted authorities and even for the use of private individuals who displease him; as for anarchy, it is quite simply, in the eyes of these well-informed persons, an abominable doctrine that preaches theft, rape, and murder. Those who judge anarchy and anarchists in this way remind me of the pagans of old who believed that the first Christians were people who gathered to engage in orgies and to eat little children.
The anarchists are simply socialists, revolted against the stupidity and iniquity of the present organization, and who believe, like the socialists, that the true remedy for the near-universal suffering or hardship is a new organization of labor that would place capital in land, capital in machinery, and in a word all the instruments of labor in the hands of the associated producers; but unlike the socialists properly so called, they count, in order to bring about this social revolution, very little on the regimentation of the working masses and a great deal on the individual energy of elite men, bold enough to denounce squarely, without mincing words, the miseries and ignominies of present society, and above all to act, from now on, in conformity with their socialist ideal: by the contagion of example, by resounding acts of individual revolt, they hope to attract the attention of the masses to the shames of the present regime, to give them virile lessons in energy, to awaken in them the spirit of revolt and solidarity, and one fine day to carry them along to throw off, with one formidable heave of the shoulder, the present social organization.
Such a doctrine, incontestably, does not produce the resigned, and it has happened in recent years that several anarchists, who had particularly suffered in their flesh or their minds from the vices of our society, who had found that society particularly harsh, left life by slamming doors and breaking windows. But terrorist methods are not peculiar to anarchists: all parties — Catholics, royalists, republicans — have had fanatics who resorted to them on occasion.
What is peculiar to anarchy is the confidence its adherents have in individual action, their passion for conforming their acts to their ideal: “Do not expect your salvation,” say the theorists of anarchy, “from an eloquent tribune, nor from a clever politician, nor from a Parliament; salvation is within you.” In this journal, which is not anarchist, I am not afraid to say that the finest intelligences, the highest consciences, the finest activities of the socialist world — it is in anarchist circles that I have found them.
Bruin is one of these great hearts: convinced that our social organization is bad and that the army is its firmest support, he found it noble to refuse, even at the peril of his liberty, military service. Condemned with Wendt to a year in prison, he held firm. He was released last May, but they were quick to ask him if he was now disposed, after this lesson, to complete his service; he refused again and was condemned this time, as a repeat offender, to a heavier sentence. We learn that in a fit of delirium, no doubt provoked by the isolation of solitary confinement, our poor comrade attempted to open an artery with his pen. He has just been transferred from prison to the military hospital, where there are fears for his sanity and his life.
Let our friends rest assured: I am not going to propose that they follow Bruin’s example. One has no right to give such advice when one has oneself managed to escape military service by less heroic means; moreover, I am not sure that our poor Dutch comrade’s heroism would not have been better employed organizing, in freedom, anti-militarist groups with a view to a collective movement; finally, to give such advice, one risks penal servitude in the French Republic, and I wish to go there as late as possible. That is the wish I offered myself on the first of January last, early in the morning, before going to present my good wishes to friends.
But if I have no right to encourage anyone to imitate Bruin’s example, I have the duty to make known to all our friends the heroism of our Dutch brother, so that they may all draw from it a lesson of energy and devotion; I have the duty to say out loud, in the face of the bourgeoisie, that far from disowning him, we consider Bruin a martyr of the great socialist cause, and that his sublime act exactly expresses the sentiments that all true socialists profess for present-day fatherlands.
Homeless men without a fatherland
These articles give the exact measure of what Herve was doing when he was working in the Yonne.
A professor in a primary normal school in the Southwest recently wrote to us that he would not subscribe to the third series of our cahiers because these cahiers seemed to him less indispensable than Pages libres and other publications. I am thus led to publish here the open letter that I addressed to M. Charles Guieysse at the beginning of the school year and that he himself very liberally published in Pages libres.
Letter to M. Charles Guieysse
Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 8, rue de la Sorbonne
Saturday, 12 October 1901
My dear Guieysse,
We have subscribers in common. One of them hesitates to subscribe to the third series of the cahiers, which he likes very much, because the cahiers, he says, profit only himself.
You know him; we shall call him for convenience’s sake Doctor Durand: a physician in a small village of the Brie, a subscriber to Pages libres, he came to see you at 16 rue de la Sorbonne, where we were living. In the small village where he practices, among the peasants, the cahiers interest absolutely no one but him.
Is that a reason for him to discontinue a subscription begun during the second series? I fear that he is deluding himself, like most of our common friends, about the possible extent of genuine propaganda.
That in a small village there should be one man whom the cahiers benefit is a result that my modesty already finds considerable. And if there were many villages where the cahiers would benefit even a single man, such a result would surpass our hopes of today. Finally, if our cahiers were suddenly read in every village of France, we would begin to be suspicious; we would be the first to be suspicious, because that would doubtless mean that we had said foolish things. And not only would we be suspicious, but we would be afraid that this sudden universal success might become dangerous for liberty, for the variety of the French mind.
Let us henceforth leave behind these dreams of disguised despotism. Let us renounce attempting the coup de grace. Let us recognize that sudden mass conversion is, in the present time, always crude and caused by misunderstandings. Let us know that propaganda is subject to the ordinary laws of labor, that one gains nothing without effort — and without slow effort. Let us know that the formation of a mind is not the application of a label. Let us accustom ourselves to the idea that to have contributed to forming a single mind in the world is already a considerable result. We are not great capitalists of minds and consciences. We are not great proprietors of men. Let us know how to proceed by laboriously slow elaboration. Let us know how to address ourselves to individual minds, to personal consciences. Let us be modest.
Our common subscriber cannot give his cahiers for the peasants to read. First, he can, he must give them Jean Coste to read. He could give them the Courriers de Chine to read, the story of Herve, even the Danton, helping them a little, if need be helping them a great deal. He can give them our Memoires et Dossiers to read. I confine myself to these few examples, not wishing to redo my catalogue here.
But I wish to go with him to the heart of the debate. I know that indeed most of our cahiers serve only him, in the sense that he alone in his village can read them. And I maintain that these cahiers of limited reach are no less indispensable.
When a schoolteacher has placed his higher certificate over his basic certificate, when a professor has placed his agregation over his licence, the first time he finds himself before an actual audience of pupils, he begins a new apprenticeship, the apprenticeship of reality. When he then continues his profession, everyone knows that he must constantly refresh his mind. One may have been ranked first in the higher certificate; one may have passed the agregation amply; one may even have scrupulously prepared one’s curricula: the man who would live his whole life on his first professional preparation, who would perpetually redo the same lessons, perpetually re-serve the same courses, the same notes, even if these courses originally had been those of the best masters — that man would soon give lessons that were increasingly bad, rigid, dry, dead. That man would become encrusted.
It is the very condition and law of freedom that the mind cannot repeat itself identically, that it must always transform, elaborate, begin again, that mere stagnation for it is already degeneration. The living mind thus obeys the general law of life. The mind cannot escape the law of life; and teaching cannot escape the laws of the mind.
But among all forms of teaching, if there is one that cannot escape the general laws of the mind, it is precisely the teaching whose subject matter is variable humanity. That a mathematics professor should keep rather poorly up to date is less serious. But that a teacher in action should not renew himself regularly is inadmissible.
I go further: would there not be some pride — coming from Catholicism? — in our imagining that we can teach our neighbor without first having taught ourselves, cultivate the person next door without first having cultivated ourselves, instruct the fellow citizen without first having instructed ourselves? It is a dangerous illusion to believe that one can publish without receiving, write without reading, speak without listening, produce without nourishing oneself, give of oneself without remaking oneself.
Everything we know, on the contrary, of biology and in particular of psychology tends to demonstrate, to confirm what simple reasoning would predict: that the perpetual expenditure of life and work requires a perpetual restoration. One cannot give even a decent lesson if one does not think about it beforehand, each time. We all know that honest professors prepare, at least in this sense, all their lessons. A middling lesson, expressly prepared, is better than a former, better lesson that one serves up without thinking about it. But preparation is rigorously indispensable when one wishes to speak to the people, because this audience is new to us. The most competent, because they are the most honest, feel the need to reprepare themselves in this way. Neither M. Gustave Lanson would speak of Corneille, nor M. Gabriel Monod of the Crusades, nor M. Duclaux of rabies, in any Universite Populaire whatsoever, without having thought about it. We all know how disagreeable, in a lesson one is listening to, is the reading of old notes, and how they feel like dead weight in it.
The organic repair, the mental reconstitution, is especially necessary for those of us who live in isolation. In company, conversation already communicates the elements of an automatic and unnoticed repair. But it is precisely because Doctor Durand has no one around him to whom he can communicate the cahiers that I know he also has no one around him from whom to receive what might provisionally serve him in place of the cahiers. I ask him in all sincerity: did he receive in the years of his apprenticeship a teaching vast enough, abundant enough, eternal enough, and to say all surhumanly enough; or does he have in himself an original spring sufficiently inexhaustible, sufficiently superhuman too, to speak usefully to the peasants, to the workers, without keeping, through the intermediary of our cahiers, communication and conversation with you and with M. Sorel, with Antonin Lavergne or Romain Rolland, with Lagardelle or Bernard Lazare, with Deshairs or Lionel Landry, with Jean Deck or Pierre Quillard, with Jaures or the adversaries of Jaures?
There must be no misunderstanding among us about what is urgent. What is urgent is to know what one is saying. Let us not repeat the bourgeois in a hurry who cries to his coachman: Come, drive, coachman, at full speed. — But, sir, where are we going? — Drive, drive on, we shall see presently, I shall tell you on the way. What is urgent is to take one’s time, not to fumble, to reflect, to think, to see, to foresee. What is urgent is to do an hour of metaphysics and two hours of morals per week. It is to make retreats within oneself, before and after speaking to the peasants. To know what one says, to know what one does, to know where one is going. To turn one’s tongue before using it. To cultivate one’s mind, so that it may bear fruit, because one must speak in order to say something, and not say something in order to speak.
There must be no misunderstanding among us about what is bourgeois. Let us not practice false economy. Let us avoid false savings that come dear. Not to read before speaking, in order to save time; not to buy the solid book in order to save money for the propaganda pamphlet — that is to mismanage one’s time, to mismanage one’s finances. At bottom it is a bad calculation. Let us not eliminate the three-fifty. Let us not forget that one sou of newspaper per day makes eighteen francs twenty-five at the end of the year. Above all, let us not allow it to be said that serious books are good only for the bourgeoisie, for then, my dear doctor, one would have to be bourgeois, seeing that humanity is not made in order to realize socialism, and that it is we on the contrary who make socialism in order to realize humanity.
I no longer believe, my dear doctor, in men in a hurry. All the busy men, all the frantic men, all the fast men I have known have never produced anything to my knowledge; but it has been given to me to approach some of the men who produce the most workable work. Rest assured, doctor, that they do not run at double time. To stay with the same examples, M. Lanson speaks with gentleness and slowness, M. Gabriel Monod with slowness and gravity; M. Duclaux, if he speaks a bit fast, it is his natural delivery, and not in order to spare himself the trouble of thinking about what he says.
Above all let us avoid letting people believe that art, philosophy, and science are made for the bourgeoisie, and that propaganda alone is made for the socialists. Before propagandizing, one must know a little what one will propagandize. If we leave to the bourgeoisie all the higher work of humanity, that work will be done in a bourgeois manner, that is, badly, and we shall have kept for ourselves only a decapitated work. The common interest of laboring humanity and of the human working class demands on the contrary that it should be the socialists who do, as much as they can, the higher work of humanity.
It is therefore precisely we who must read the documents, the studies and contributions, the works that would bore the peasants and the workers. If only the bourgeoisie reads them, besides the fact that they will not be good readers, since they will keep for themselves what they have read, nothing of the best in humanity will reach the peasants, the workers. If we read, some good will always pass through. Let us not believe that mere transcription, mere copying of knowledge produces results. Let us have a freer mind. It is not indispensable that the knowledge received should have its immediate application. The nourishment of the mind is on a longer timescale. It is also of more supple elaboration. It is not a matter of receiving in one’s mind items of knowledge about art, philosophy, or science and pouring them, raw, into the mind of the peasant. Neither the operations of corporeal life, nor still less the operations of mental life, are so crude. An element received will not reemerge for fifteen years, and when it does reemerge, who would recognize it? The mind has decanted it, analyzed it, composed it, worked it, filtered it, because the mind lives.
I do not wish, my dear Guieysse, to treat here questions of method that the cahiers are precisely made to treat, insofar as one treats questions. But we would be pained, you and we, if the friendly understanding so happily established between our two administrations were not reflected, as it were, among our common friends.
I remain
Your subscriber,
Charles Peguy
We shall publish in a forthcoming cahier the open reply that I received from M. Charles Guieysse to the distinction that I recognized between primary and higher education.
We have obtained, through the care of Leon Deshairs, a photograph of Tolstoy and Gorky walking together at Yasnaya Polyana. This photograph was taken by one of Tolstoy’s daughters. It was communicated to Deshairs by Doctor Schlepianoff. We have had it reproduced in three hundred copies. We sell it for two francs.
We shall soon publish an unpublished letter from Tolstoy, addressed to Romain Rolland.
Le Gerant: Charles Peguy
This cahier was composed and printed at the rate of unionized workers.