Personnalités. Monographies

PERSONALITIES

CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE

appearing twenty times a year

PARIS

8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor

We published in the thirteenth cahier of the second series:

Dossier. --- Jean Grave and Urbain Gohier, by Ludovic Marchand.

This dossier brought us a brief rectification from Urbain Gohier, which we published in the fifteenth cahier of the second series, and a fairly long letter from Jean Grave to Ludovic Marchand, which we shall use some day. We shall no doubt be led at the beginning of the fourth series to make the honest liquidation of several old debates that we have no right to leave without conclusion.

When we bar the road to a young ambitious man without scruples, we run a chance of saving twenty million of our natives a Governor General without scruples.

To what extent this general proposition applies to Tery, that depends on him; it does not depend on us. I do not despair of his civic salvation. What is established in the debate from now on is that he exercises among us socialists the old radical anti-clericalism, coarse, joking, unintelligent. When I was small M. Pichon, M. Doumer, M. Lockroy pursued Catholics with the same sarcasms and the same puns. It is an undeniable fact of recent contemporary history that these anti-clerical campaigns above all led their authors to fat secular sinecures and the betrayals that ensue. It is indispensable that as socialists we do not let the adventures of the radicals begin again among us.

DOSSIER

M. URBAIN GOHIER

M. Urbain Gohier has left the Aurore. This departure is morally a considerable event. M. Gohier represented a whole spirit, a whole method. The circumstances of this departure are particularly instructive.

Our old subscribers have not forgotten that our cahiers are cahiers of record. We reproduce below, for the record, several documents from this case.

The Aurore of Friday April 11 had published this article by Vaughan:

ELECTORAL CONSULTATION

In January 1881, when I took over from Theiz at the Intransigeant for the Socialist Chronicles, I had no illusions about my merit and very sincerely wondered whether I was up to holding the position that I had not sought.

I was the friend of Malon, of Guesde, of Lafargue, of De Paepe, of Hector Denis, etc. This friendship, flattering for me, but did it authorize me to profess in turn?

I doubted it so much that I thought I should, before committing myself formally, take the advice of Malon. Malon encouraged me and fraternally promised his assistance. He placed, however, one condition on this assistance whose rightness I appreciated and to which, since that time, I have conformed as best I could.

Here is what he wrote me on January 12, 1881:

--- I very much regret the death of that good and noble character that was Theiz. There you are, ordained a socialist publicist. You will be up to your task, if you wish to rid yourself of that myopia which consists in always savaging those who are near us…

I shall never belong to this school of savaging allies. --- You have two paths before you: that of X… and Z…: let us treat as personal enemies those who do not think entirely as we do. That of Brousse, De Paepe and myself: let us demonstrate ceaselessly and reserve our attacks for the real reactionaries.

It is for you to choose.

Each person has his way of looking at things and it may well be that mine is not the best; but I consider that the advice Malon gave me twenty-two years ago can be submitted today to the reflections of all socialist voters.

Does it not seem to them, as to me, that the hour of acrimonious discussions is past? Is this not, on the contrary, the moment to set aside --- reserving the right to resume positions later --- angers and rancors?

ERNEST VAUGHAN

The Aurore of Sunday April 13 published, from the same, the following article:

THE DEPARTURE OF URBAIN GOHIER

Friday evening, Urbain Gohier brought to the newspaper an article on the Carmaux election, for which he demanded immediate insertion. The precedents, beside this one, can pass for innocent pastorals. I would have liked to see my collaborator to try to demonstrate to him that his exaggerations went rather against his goal. Perhaps, however, I would have let the article through, when I found, addressed to me, the letter of resignation that follows:

Paris, April 11, 1902

My dear Vaughan,

As you so well write, it is necessary that everyone be able to say what he thinks.

But it is not proper that, having thought and said up to now approximately the same thing on socialist politics and personnel, we suddenly begin to publish contradictory opinions.

After your article of Friday morning, if you had been the writer and I the director, I would have given you your notice.

You are the director and I the writer: I am leaving.

URBAIN GOHIER

M. Gohier sent us shortly after the following reply:

What I would have to answer?

Here it is.

M. Vaughan reproaches me for my “intolerance” and the “violence” of my polemics.

I understand tolerance perfectly well. Religious tolerance, for example, consists in letting the Catholic priest pray in Latin in his church, the Protestant pastor pray in French in his temple, the Jewish rabbi pray in Hebrew in the synagogue, and the revolutionary tribune sing the Carmagnole on the tables at the end of banquets. But it is not tolerance, it is absurdity, to bring all these people together to preach together, in their diverse languages, from the top of the same pulpit. And, in a political newspaper, it is worse than absurdity.

One could accuse me of intolerance if I demanded a gag for my contradictors. One cannot accuse me of intolerance because I find it contrary to the dignity of a newspaper, and suspect in a political newspaper, to warmly recommend, on the eve of elections, the official candidacies and candidates that one has violently and constantly combated for six months.

Moreover, I have said it a hundred times in the course of my polemics, tolerance must apply to questions of doctrine or tactics. In matters of pure and simple probity, it is inadmissible. It takes the name of complicity.

As for the “violence” one reproaches me with, it was found worthy of admiration and above all very useful during the great battle. One said then, in the Aurore editorial office: “We are going to set Gohier loose on the generals.” I was apparently considered a fighting beast, that one unleashes and chains at will, in the service of politico-financial combinations or syndicates of justice and business.

Now, it is a misapprehension. I am neither a blind instrument nor a dupe. I intend to combat the red Jesuits with the same vigor as the black Jesuits.

M. Vaughan declares that he could not accept my latest article on the Jaures candidacy at Carmaux. This article merely summarized six months of polemics. But by adding that one must vote for M. Jaures or else vote for M. de Solages, the director of the Aurore let it be believed that I had advised voting for M. de Solages rather than for M. Jaures.

Urbain Gohier

The book of M. Urbain Gohier, A Bas la Caserne, has been published in the editions of the Revue Blanche; a volume at three francs fifty, 306 pages.

We do not wish to intervene in a dossier. Yet we must record that a friend of Gohier told us: What is honorable and even beautiful in this regrettable conflict, what would not be found among the reactionaries, is the perfect disinterestedness of the two adversaries: Gohier has always worked with a perfect disinterestedness, and Vaughan has put all his possessions, at least, into the enterprise he administers. He has sold his books and pledged his assets.

I do not wish to return to my cahier on personalities. But I ask that one compare to the speech of Anatole France for liberty, which we published in the fifteenth cahier, the manifesto posted before the first ballot by the Central Committee of the French League for the Defense of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen; we reproduce this manifesto below; our subscribers will see which is better, when one wants to say something, to ask someone, a great writer --- or to have it elaborated by a committee composed of the most eminent persons.

FRENCH LEAGUE FOR THE DEFENSE OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND OF THE CITIZEN

MANIFESTO

When, in the month of June 1898, shortly after the election of the Chamber whose powers are about to expire, the League for the Defense of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was founded, very few understood the profound import of the work it proposed to undertake.

Today no one can contest our honor of having been among the first to discern, behind a judicial crisis born of the most extraordinary intrigues, the imminent peril of a counter-revolutionary plot; to have denounced its instigators; to have opened finally the ways to the organization of republican defense.

In the first line, we shall grant our confidence only to those who think and declare clearly with us that the Declaration of the Rights of Man, that immortal preface to the Revolution, must remain the charter of republican government.

THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE

On one side a numerous assemblage of the most eminent names; on the other side a single name, a single signatory, a single author; no longer the members of a central committee, but the simple president of the section of the quarter of the Porte-Dauphine, sixteenth arrondissement. And yet to insist on the comparison of the two texts would be fierce.

BEAUREGARD ELECTION

Paul BEAUREGARD, TO HIS VOTERS

MY DEAR FELLOW CITIZENS,

I present myself again for your votes. It is my duty.

Firmly REPUBLICAN, I wish to defend LIBERTY equal for all. Above all, I am a PATRIOT. Which is to say that I am resolutely ANTI-MINISTERIAL.

I want the working class emancipated, put in possession of all its rights.

I admit no State within the State. --- The Freemasons and the Jews must be brought back to occupying in public functions only a share proportional to their number. The naturalization law must be revised to halt the cosmopolitan invasion that risks being fatal to us.

Paul BEAUREGARD, outgoing Deputy

It is particularly grave that a professor at the Faculty of Law should so deliberately leave the juridical domain to lapse on one side into antisemitic barbarism and on the other into business.

M. Emile Terquem, student enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris, asks us to insert this:

OPEN LETTER TO M. PAUL BEAUREGARD

Monsieur le Professeur,

You recently made, in the course of your electoral campaign, a very grave declaration. You said: “The Freemasons and the Jews must be brought back to occupying in public functions only a share proportional to their number.”

I am willing to accept that it is the deputy or rather the candidate who speaks and not the professor. But is it permissible for a pupil to suppose in his master such a splitting of personality that the politician can affirm a certain program of action that the professor and the judge at competitions must repudiate with indignation?

I shall not interrogate the politician; he belongs to his voters. But being enrolled at the Faculty of Law of Paris, that is to say having to form my inexperience to the scientific rigor of your teachings, having moreover to submit to the impartiality of your judgments if I face the examinations of the Faculty, I have the right to ask you some explanations about how the professor intends to interpret, in the current practice of his profession of professor, the principles of confessional selection that he has affirmed in his electoral program.

For the Jews, will you establish your calculations on historical origins, and will you introduce only the grievance of race, as I presume, since you declare clearly that you wish: “the French free to believe as they please”?

Recognize, Monsieur le Professeur, that these are questions one of your potential students had the right to ask you.

Your friends pursued with implacable ardor Professor Herve, because, under cover moreover of a very discreet anonymity, he had, you said, revealed a mentality incompatible with his functions as professor, by attacking, in a socialist newspaper, the established social order.

Why do you want your students to accept, without further information, the teaching of a professor who places outside common law a portion of the nation?

Emile Terquem Former student of the Ecole Polytechnique

ELECTIONS IN THE YONNE

Fradet, that former student at the normal school for teachers of Auxerre, who was illegally and unjustly struck by M. Leygues, and who has been too much forgotten, writes to us from the Yonne, where he provisionally exercises an honest trade:

You asked in your cahiers for interesting documents on the electoral period. Of course, what you needed were not ordinary posters. I believe that these two specimens of nationalist coarseness and socialist coarseness will interest you.

FROM THE “MOUVEMENT SOCIALISTE”

We have received the following letter. It is not from Lagardelle.

Le Mouvement Socialiste, Paris, April 30, 1902

My dear and upright Peguy,

Accustomed as your subscribers are to hearing you proclaim the great betrayal of citizen X.. or Y…, the reading of your latest cahier did not fail to astound me.

It is not, I know well, the first swipe you extend at the Mouvement with that harsh severity --- and also, let us say, with that ingenuous clumsiness, which belong only to impeccable moralists.

Today, my old Conscience, you really go beyond all measure. I am not charged with answering you, but you have personally inflicted a blame on me, and I insist on appearing before Your Austerity.

For it is I, my dear Peguy --- Lagardelle is already black enough without loading him with my crimes --- who gives our readers an account of the labors of the parliamentarians.

My God, you know, I do not make a profession of it. And although I know, O Peguy, your suspicious honesty, I do not think I need tell you that I have no connection with the secret police, and that Zevaes does not cover me with gold.

I assure you, Peguy, you worry me. You wonder what we shall be in fifteen or sixteen years from now? It is very probable that we shall be socialists. But you, Peguy, where will you be? You will be as today, a Peguyist. That is very dangerous, beware. Pride is a capital sin, and pushed to a certain point, hypertrophy of the self belongs to pathology.

You too will become useless, you who could have been so good. Think of Gohier, Peguy! Peguy, think of Gohier!

Cordially yours, Andre Morizet

I add, which is not superfluous, that I am not unsubscribing: if I must figure in the pillory of the Cahiers, it will not be in this capacity. One unsubscribes from a review without interest, and I was very tempted to do so in the time when you regaled us with your quarrels with the bookshop. But one does not boycott; that is reserved for industrialists who put socialism in bottles or in trousers. Only, give us something worth the trouble, between two lists of suspects.

Andre Morizet