On Jean Coste

De Jean Coste

What kept me from rejoicing at the fact that the gendarmes were shipping the sisters in third class is that I had received, a little before the beginning of the vacations, the following letter:

Montée de Charente, July 22, 1902 Monsieur Charles Péguy, manager of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine 8, rue de la Sorbonne, Paris Monsieur

My husband has for some time been a member of the French League for the Defense of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and we read the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, which another member of the league is good enough to lend us.

I thought that, given the importance of the publication of which you are the manager, you must be in relation with many men of letters, journalists, publishers, booksellers. The democratic spirit which animates the articles of the cahiers gives me a good idea of the fraternity that must unite authors and readers; this is why I take the liberty of asking a service of you.

We are very poor people. My husband is a tax-collection employee at a salary of 60 francs a month; I earn 80 francs as a public schoolmistress. We have been married for thirty-three months and in a month and a half I shall have my third baby.

So many needs and such slender resources let you guess that we live narrowly. The arrival of a new child, the prospect of the coming expenses, which will be so heavy on our small purse, makes us wish to work a little more in order to increase our resources. Now it is very hard for us to find, in the countryside where we are, supplementary occupations.

I thought that perhaps you might be able to procure us some work with the pen: addresses to write, manuscripts to copy, etc. I hope I have not presumed too much upon your obligingness; I think you will be kind enough to answer me. May your reply bring me good news, I shall be infinitely grateful to you! I take my vacation on August 2nd; I shall have a month and a half of leisure and I should be so happy to be able to employ it usefully!

Be so good, monsieur, as to accept, with my apologies for the trouble I am going to cause you, the expression of my thanks and of my most distinguished sentiments.

Marguerite Meunier, Public primary schoolmistress at the Montée de Charente, Charente

Of course I have altered the proper names, the name of the commune, the signature. A schoolmistress who looks for work to feed her children would be marked down by the great chiefs; such steps would give the impression that the families of instituteurs are not completely happy.

But if any of our subscribers wishes to enter into relations with this family and can procure work for it, we shall be happy to establish the communication. Write to M. André Bourgeois.

This letter reached us a few days before the beginning of the vacations. We receive a fairly large number of letters written by instituteurs; I love that careful, regular, grammatical handwriting, almost always modest, calm, and already conformable to typography; that schoolboy’s paper; that violet ink, which serves to correct homework.

Everything was in this letter: first the distribution of genres between the French League for the Defense of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the cahiers; the League, of which one is a member; the cahiers, which one reads; the League, charged with preparing the ceremonies of the new cults; the cahiers, to which one applies in order to ask for work.

Then this idea, this illusion of the poor that the cahiers are already an important publication, of which I am the important manager, that I am in relation with many men of letters, journalists, publishers, booksellers, and that moreover the cahiers have a democratic spirit; that almost universal confusion, by which the politicians live, between the democratic spirit and the soul of the people; that no less universal confusion between fraternity, socialist solidarity and bourgeois charity, work requested as a favor.

Finally and above all that supreme illusion of the poor: that one can easily find honest work; that it suffices to be courageous, valiant at work, careful, in order to have the right to live by working; that we can save from misery the people we love; that we can save our friends from hunger; that we ourselves are insured against deficit, against misery, against decay and against death.

Singular illusion of the poor, but of which one cause at least is evident. When it is a matter of organizing cult ceremonies, or culinary ceremonies, funerals, banquets, or of building monuments, we read in our newspapers that thousands of francs come in each day; the poor conclude from this that all the more reason will they be able to find the means to live by working; they cannot imagine that the money goes to display, and that it is lacking for the organization of work.

It is, however, what one must picture to oneself; the bourgeois vice of maintaining luxury with what is owed to work has perhaps never raged so ferociously in the bourgeois world as in a certain so-called socialist world. Let it be a question of commemorations, of festivals and banquets, of meetings, of elections, of political demonstrations, of journeys, of dead monuments, of exhibitions, of published lists, of romanticism and of theater, and the money falls into the hands of the innumerable Puechs and the innumerable Barriases. And not only the money of the many bourgeois lost in the so-called socialist movement and remaining snobs, but, alas, the money of the truly little people. For the little people have nothing more pressing to do than to imitate the great ones of their world. Let it be on the contrary a question of living works and of living men, and let one ask for an anonymous devotion: I should fail the numerous and solid friends who work for us and who work for several truly socialist institutions if I said that one finds no one and that one finds nothing; but all those who have tried to prepare or to organize true work know, considering the whole market, by how much the yield which interests work is inferior to the floods that feed display. Far from feeling, having fed display, the customary subscribers bound all the more, with all the greater reason, to nourish work, they argue, on the contrary, from what they have spent on display in order not to spend on work: We are exhausted; one must, as you know, contribute every day; opportunities are not lacking. — We are not the only ones to whom one has been accustomed to hold such language; all those who have wished to organize work without luxury, or boasting, without affectation, without glory, without pose or publicity, have come up against the same refusals, whether they wished to make cooperatives or schools, books or bread, that is to say, in the last analysis, whatever cooperatives of production they wished to make, for we never do anything that is not, in the last analysis, a cooperative of production; and to make books is no less indispensable than to make bread; and so when the initiators, when the founders, when the managers of laborious institutions, their steps finished, and ill-consummated, return into their workshop, into their meager shop, and into their wretched office, let there come the same day an occasion of a great list, they have on the same day the bitter consolation of finding again, affected by variable coefficients, but rather considerable ones, noted for important sums, the names of those who found themselves too poor to furnish means of work. And what must be noted because it is an event of considerable moral importance is that the money of the poor refuses itself to the poor almost as much as does the money of the rich; the poor who emerge from egoism and from misery, instead of acquiring directly a solidarity of class, begin by giving themselves a party pride, an affectation of grandeur, a bourgeois taste for ceremony and for display.

To these aberrations of the poor and of the rich we know there are numerous exceptions; we know that they are much more numerous for the poor than for the rich; we are here better situated than anywhere else to estimate at their just value the anonymous devotions of a few rich and of many poor; we shall return to this distribution; but what I wish to indicate from today on is that in the parties and in the republican, socialist, revolutionary, anarchist, secular companies, and among the corresponding individuals, under the same labels, under the same aspects, two kinds of men coexist, and cohabit: the ones concerned with work, and whom we must name the classics, the others, preoccupied with display, and whom I am quite forced to name the romantics; these two kinds of men interpenetrate everywhere; and everywhere since the beginning of the revolutionary movement the classics are governed by the romantics; those who work are governed by those who display; the introduction of parliamentary government among us, I do not say with all its abuses, but I say: by preference through its abuses, in its forms of abuse, is only a particular introduction of this general government, and save for rare and honorable exceptions, the emancipated workers think of governing rather than they think of working; the romantics and the classics live together everywhere, on good terms, because the classics are good-natured, because the romantics are imposing, because the classics ask only to let themselves be imposed upon; all the romantics are governmental, ministerial, statist, even when they make profession, out of electoral demagogy, of being antigovernmental, antiministerial, antistatist; this is because the military State, totally incapable of organizing work, is sufficiently capable of organizing displays, romantic manifestations. These two kinds of men live together because the classics, good-headed, have accepted romantic enslavement. In reality, there is perhaps more difference between these two kinds than there is between the most bitter political and social enemies. There is perhaps between these two kinds the most profound, and the most serious of contemporary separations. Those who love sincere work and those who love the ritual falsehoods of the romantic cults are perhaps separated by the most profound of contemporary dissensions. It is permitted to hope that one will perceive this some day. Already presages let it be seen that the workers are weary of the government of the theater-folk. And it may be that this most vast enfranchisement will make all the history of the period upon which we are entering.

This letter from a schoolmistress was perfectly written. Those of our subscribers who have never lacked bread cannot imagine how difficult it is to ask for it. To ask for a constituency from the electoral mob is nothing: it suffices, save for rare and honorable exceptions, to be flat; to ask a government from the parliamentary mob is nothing: it suffices, save for rare and honorable exceptions, to be flat; but to ask for bread, even by way of work, when one is well-born, without flatness, without declamation, is a delicate operation.

By chance, and through an intermediary, I was able to put this family in relation with an author who had a piece of copying-work to have done; but most often I have nothing; I cannot procure work for the poor who ask for it; I cannot find lessons for the comrades who need them; I cannot answer their letters, because I am myself overworked; I have remorse for it; and this remorse prevents me from sharing the secular joy of State.

Personalities. Jean Coste is a character. He is not imaginary. He is not literary. He is real. People speak of him as of someone. We know who he is. They began by wishing to ignore him. But he made himself known by his own strength. Today the deputies, the journalists, the chroniclers of education, Téry, speak of him often, as of someone well known.

I have not reproached Téry with having totally stifled Jean Coste. He could not. He did not want to. I reproached him with not having welcomed, sustained Jean Coste at the start with all the justice, with all the force that this work deserved. I persist in believing that Jean Coste, under his own name, was worth a leading article, on the front page of La Petite République. La Petite République makes great use of the instituteurs. It could have launched Jean Coste.

It has been said: I cannot interest myself in Jean Coste; he is pretentious, posed, mawkish.

We know well enough how he is. He is not perfect. He is not a saint. He is a man. He is a village instituteur. He is as he is. By the virtues one demands of the poor, how many critics and how many publishers would be worthy of being schoolmasters?

People want him to be perfect. They do not see that it is the very mark of misery, and its most fearsome effect, that ungrateful alteration, mental and moral; that alteration of character, of will, of lucidity, of mind and of soul. Those who do philanthropy from their armchair, and who are, properly speaking, the pedants of philanthropy, may imagine that misery makes the virtues shine. One may then ask why they combat misery. If it were pumice-stone, or tripoli for making the precious virtues shine, it would have to be carefully developed. In reality misery alters, obliterates the virtues, which are daughters of strength and daughters of health.

It is said that he is weak, and that strong he could escape from his prison-hulk. Those who do moralism from their armchair, that is to say, properly speaking, the pedants of morality, may imagine that misery is an exercise in virtues. It is the very weight and inevitable force of misery that it renders the miserable irremediably weak and that thus it invincibly prevents the miserable from escaping from their very miseries. In reality misery damages the virtues, which are daughters of strength and daughters of beauty.

Misery does not merely render the miserable unhappy, which is serious; it renders the miserable wicked, ugly, weak, which is no less serious; a bourgeois may imagine loyally and logically that misery is a means of cultivation, an exercise of virtues; we socialists know that economic misery is a faultless impediment to moral and mental improvement, because it is a flawless instrument of servitude. It is even for this reason that we are socialists. We are so precisely because we know that any moral and mental enfranchisement is precarious if it is not accompanied by an economic enfranchisement.

It is for this reason that above all we must liberate Jean Coste, like all the wretched, from economic servitudes.

People almost always confuse misery with poverty; this confusion comes from the fact that misery and poverty are neighbors; they are neighbors no doubt, but situated on either side of a limit; and this limit is precisely the one that divides economy with respect to morality; this economic limit is the one beneath which economic life is not assured, beyond which economic life is assured; this limit is the one where the assurance of economic life begins; beneath this limit the miserable man either has the certainty that his economic life is not assured or has no certainty whether it is or is not assured, runs the risk; the risk ceases at this limit; beyond this limit the poor man or the rich man has the certainty that his economic life is assured; certainty reigns beyond this limit; doubt and counter-certainty share the lives that remain below; all is misery below, misery of doubt or misery of miserable certainty; the first zone beyond is that of poverty; then are tiered the successive zones of riches.

Many economic, moral or social problems, even political ones, would be antecedently clarified if one introduced into them, or rather if one acknowledged as due the consideration of this limit. We shall return to it if we can. We shall examine whether this limit exists in fact, whether this limitation holds in right, in what measure, under what conditions.

In fact one would no doubt perceive that this limit does not exist universally, that it is not fixed, that one does not find it in all cases, and that in the cases where one finds it it is variable; but one would recognize that it presents itself in a very great number of cases, even today; that it has a capital importance in strongly constituted societies; that it still has great importance in a disturbed society, such as contemporary society; even today, one would recognize that a very great number of social situations are defined because they are condemned to remain on this side of this limit; and a fairly great number of others are defined because they have crossed this limit without risk of return; a whole social zone is determined because it is situated beyond this limit, just beyond, without overflowing much toward ease, but without any risk of slipping back below; thus one would study that moral and social crisis of the first importance, which arises at twenty-seven, and by which the immense majority of revolutionaries become and remain conservatives, either that they go to do conservation in the conservation parties, or, commonly, that they remain to do conservation in the so-called revolutionary parties, by opportunism or by outbidding, or that they practice this public and private conservation, of no longer engaging in action after having begun by interesting themselves in it; one would recognize that the concern for certainty, the need of security, of insurance, of tranquillity, is a considerable moral factor; one would distinguish that this need enters as a respectable element into many religious vocations; one would feel at last that so long as a man, young or adult, has not passed the age of this crisis, one can neither judge him nor presume of him.

Misery is the whole domain on this side of this limit; poverty begins beyond and ends soon; thus misery and poverty are neighbors; they are more neighbors in quantity than certain riches are to poverty; if one evaluates by quantity alone, a rich man is much further from a poor man than a poor man is from a wretched man; but between misery and poverty there intervenes a limit; and the poor man is separated from the wretched by a gap of quality, of nature.

Many problems remain confused because one has not recognized this intervention; thus one attributes to misery the virtues of poverty, or on the contrary one imputes to poverty the degradations of misery; just as elsewhere one attributes to humility the virtues of modesty, or on the contrary one imputes to modesty the abasements of humility.

Thus as regards consumption the difference between the poor man and the wretched is a difference of quality, of mode, as regards production the difference between the worker and the theater-man was a difference of nature.

In right, in duty, in usual morality one would recognize that the first social duty, or to speak exactly, the antecedent, preliminary social duty, the one that is before the first, the indispensable duty, before the accomplishment of which we have not even to discuss, to examine what would be the best city, or the least bad, for before the accomplishment of this duty there is not even a city, one would recognize that the ante-first social duty is to wrest the wretched from misery, to wrest the wretched from the domain of misery, to make all the wretched cross the fatal economic limit.

As there is between the situations in which the wretched lie and the situation in which the poor live a difference of quality, so there is between the duties that concern the wretched and the duties that concern the poor a difference of quality; to wrest the wretched from misery is an anterior, antecedent duty; as long as the wretched are not withdrawn from misery, the problems of the city do not arise; to withdraw the wretched from misery, without any exception, constitutes the social duty before the accomplishment of which one cannot even examine what is the first social duty.

On the contrary, given that all the wretched, without any exception, were saved from misery, given that all economic lives, without any exception, were assured in the city, the distribution of goods among the different rich and the poor, the suppression of economic inequalities, the equitable distribution of wealth among all the citizens is no more than one of the numerous problems that arise in the city at last instituted. The economic problem of distributing equally, or equitably, the goods among all the citizens is not of the same order as the economic problem of saving all the citizens, without any exception, from misery; to save all the wretched from misery is an imperious problem, anterior to the true institution of the city; to attribute to all citizens equal, or equitable, shares of riches is one of the numerous problems of the city instituted; the problem of misery is an incomparable, indisputable problem, posed, posed in advance, in reality, a problem of the city to be built; we must resolve it and we have not to discuss whether we should resolve it; we have only to discuss how we can resolve it; it is a problem without respite; on the contrary the problem of poverty is so to speak a problem of leisure, a problem of the city inhabited, a comparable, debatable problem, that the citizens will pose to themselves later, if they wish; before examining how they will be able to resolve it, they will be able even to examine whether they ought to pose it to themselves.

Allow me a theological comparison: hell is essentially qualified as the effect of a divine excommunication; the damned is one excommunicated by God; he is put by God outside Christian communion; he is deprived of the presence of God; he undergoes the absence of God; the different and innumerable and lamentable pains over which imaginations have grown excited are dominated by this pain of Absence, which is the capital, incomparable pain; moreover hell is essentially modified as eternal, that is to say as infinite in time, or as infinite in what would be time and which excludes time; in this respect hell is recognized by the fact that it admits no hope; the horizon of the damned is barred by an infinite bar; hell is encircled; absolutely no hope filters through, no glimmer.

On the contrary paradise is essentially qualified as the maintenance of divine communication; the elect is elected by God to abide in Christian communion; he receives the presence of God; the numerous beatitudes upon which the imaginations have rather vainly attempted to exercise themselves are dominated by this reward of Presence, which is the capital, incomparable beatitude; moreover paradise is essentially modified as eternal; therefore it bears no risk; the horizon of the elect is opened by an infinite opening; absolutely no despair, no hesitation filters through.

That being so, purgatory may well resemble hell in that it is a place of pain and of expiation, in that it involves the same Absence; it may well have the same quality; it is enough that the mode be not eternal, and that hope not only pass but be assured, for everything to be otherwise; at the last judgment when Jesus comes in his glory he will come also to deliver, to seek the last souls of Purgatory; the Presence will begin then, for eternity; this opening suffices for purgatory to become, in this regard, totally foreign to hell; it is enough that a glimmer of certainty illumine; two sojourns of pains, hell and purgatory, may seem analogous or of the same order to a superficial observation, because they are two sojourns of pains, and of analogous pains; but it suffices that in these analogous pains a certainty of life have penetrated into purgatory and that a certainty of death dominate in hell for purgatory and hell not to be of the same order; hell is outside communion; purgatory is within communion; the suffering Church, after the militant Church, before the triumphant Church, is of communion; purgatory is of life; hell is of death.

Hell is of eternal death. Now when we speak of social hell or of economic hell the men of letters, the men of government, the deputies, the journalists, the perpetual candidates may sincerely believe, insofar as they can be sincere, that we are employing with them a theatrical, romantic, exaggerated, convenient, inexact, electoral metaphor — to say it all; for it is so indeed that, careless or ignorant of reality, they employ the same expression; they say a social hell as they say of a competitor that he is an unspeakable apostate: these words have no consequence; but it would not be the first time that a profoundly popular expression had been diverted by politicians from its profound and full meaning, used in an insipid and empty use; here once more the exact language, the profound meaning belongs to the people and to the writers, above the empty head of most of the parliamentarians of speech and the parliamentarians of pen; when a candidate speaks of the social, economic hell, he means a situation in which one is not comfortable; when the people says that life is a hell, it preserves to the word its exact, primary meaning.

When with the people, or, truly, in the people, we speak of hell, we mean exactly that misery is in economy as is hell in theology; purgatory corresponds only to certain elements of poverty; but misery corresponds fully to hell; hell is the eternal certainty of eternal death; but misery is for the greater part the total certainty of human death, the total penetration of what remains of life by death; and when there is uncertainty, this uncertainty is almost as painful as fatal certainty.

One would object in vain that our comparison is not founded, on the grounds that the infernal pains are inexhaustibly atrocious; first, they are not all extreme; the attention, as one could foresee, has been carried almost entirely upon those that were extreme, the attention of the poets as much as popular attention, but it is said nowhere that they are all extreme, nor that there are many extreme ones; further, one would only be establishing that our comparison is a comparison; but one would not establish that it is ill-founded; one forgets this first law of psychology, that misfortunes are for us what we feel them to be; sufferings are to us as we experience them; the capacity for suffering having remained at least the same, no doubt, human suffering exercises a no less great damage than could exercise the idea of eternal suffering; all the more that this very idea was an idea, an image, a human representation. One flattered oneself too quickly that in suppressing the gods and the sanctions of the gods one was suppressing the greatest sufferings; firstly one was also suppressing, at least in the same sense, the greatest consolations; and perhaps human nature is so made that, instead of its being the external real causes that measure the suffering experienced, it is on the contrary the inner real capacity that measures the reverberation of causes; it may be that the threat or even the assurance of an eternal dismembering introduced less real suffering into the soul of a trooper than would bring today into a sentimental or gentle soul the most common of sentimental misfortunes. Our first conclusion will therefore be that simple human misery has a supreme importance. Damnation has a supreme importance for the Catholics. Social misery has a supreme importance for us.

One would object in vain that our comparison is not founded, on the grounds that the infernal pains are eternal, infinite in time or in what would be time; one would forget this first law of psychology, that sufferings are great to us only insofar as we experience them; the capacity for suffering being given, human life undergoes a damage no less great than would undergo an eternity, since this eternity, for us at least, would never be more than represented. We are told: The wretched who believed in hell believed in an eternity of suffering; they had therefore an infinite, total suffering, barring all life, through which no glimmer passed; on the contrary the most wretched of unbelievers has at least among us this consolation, that he knows that death closes everything, including misery. — This is to misinterpret a rather simple phenomenon. It is to bring from outside to this sentimental phenomenon an interpretation such as is furnished by the intellectuals who have begun by not placing themselves in the requisite situation. The extrinsic observer holds the following reasoning, which he does not avow: given a man who suffers from a human suffering and, in addition, from an infinite suffering, if we begin by ridding him of the second, that will be so much gained, so much acquired, and even one will have rid him of the most serious suffering by a great deal, all the more so as the fear of hell, an infinite suffering, is more serious than simple human suffering, a finite suffering. — This reasoning of mathematical aspect is incomplete, gross: it neglects the almost automatic reaction of the sentiments. It treats the consciousness and the unconscious of the sentiments as an inert vessel, which would not wake, which would not react; it falsely introduces the mathematical, the arithmetical, into the living; it verifies itself, and ill, only in the first times of the liberation; when a man, when a people, when a generation liberates itself from a religious dread, from a religious fear, at the moment of enfranchisement there occurs a sentimental void, an airing; the result is a respiration, an impression of ease and of happiness. “He whom neither the renown of the gods, nor the thunderbolts, nor the threats of celestial uproar have stopped.” But this impression does not last; the place left empty is soon occupied; the human sentiments which the religious sentiments compressed give or give themselves back volume; human suffering relaxes, dilates, occupies the location previously occupied by religious fear and dread and suffering. And human suffering often fills this location. For religious suffering could have an infinite, eternal, superhuman object: it was none the less a human suffering, limited in the subject, finite, limited to the subject.

When a religious liberation is accomplished, humanity breathes, as after a finished labor; it is a moving-out of fact; this impression does not last long; it is for this reason that there is so much youth, so much intoxication, but also so much naïveté, sometimes some cruelty in the generations which enfranchise themselves, so much sadness, but also more seriousness and often depth, and goodness in the generations immediately following them; one recognizes then that nothing is done, as long as everything is not done; in this respect at least; that we must renounce the religions because they are not rationally founded, because they are not true, not to give ourselves room in our sentiments.

It is for this reason that the radicals are not men of our generation; far from being in advance, as it is said, of the intellectual situation of present humanity, they are a generation behind; they are, literally, retroactionaries, that is to say, in a sense, already reactionaries; they have, when they strike at the priest, a naïve joy, sincere or feigned, which a man informed of our generation, concerned for the immense renascent problems, can no longer have.

[Today even I read in la revue blanche of the first of November this paragraph of M. Michel Arnauld, criticizing M. Barrès’s book: Scènes et Doctrines du Nationalisme. It is the critic’s concluding paragraph:

“It is not on this impression that I wish to end, but in citing a fine passage from a letter that the very liberal Ernest Havet wrote, on August 23, 1880, to the very Catholic Barbey d’Aurevilly…: ‘I do not wish you to suspect me of the silliness of reducing you to what is called style. Style and thought are one and the same; it is therefore well in your thought that your strength lies. But thought is not the same thing as thesis; otherwise, given for example Bossuet and Voltaire, one of the two would necessarily be only an imbecile. An erroneous thesis can be an occasion for thinking very strongly and for spreading truths by the handful; and this is precisely what you do and what your great men have also done. Like them, in my view, you are at once powerful and impressive. You will not succeed in making us monarchists and Catholics, but you succeed superlatively in making us feel that, when one has said one is no longer such, all has not been said, and one has not for that found the solution of all problems nor the remedy for all ills.’ No, all is not said, when one has said that one is not a nationalist; and even without Barrès, we already suspected as much.”

I read by the same author in the same review this concluding paragraph to the review of: Marius-Ary Leblond, les Vies parallèles:

“In their prefatory letter to M. Léon Bourgeois, MM. Leblond take up not without ardor the defense of the neologism. They had no need to justify themselves and I have, in their book, noted no excess of new words. But their thesis calls for objections, which are not peculiar to ‘purists’ alone. Without even recalling that our language reveals itself richer the more one uses it, one must admit that the neologism diverts from analysis, and favors only rather large syntheses. To give a special name to each sentiment dispenses one from distinguishing it by fine and ceaselessly changing nuances. It no longer lives, behold it classified, pinned, stuffed forever. Science has need of neologisms; that is because at each of its advances it posits a law, a fixed relation, that it has henceforth the right to designate, without defining it. In art, — especially when it is a matter of describing sentiments, — the sobriety of vocabulary and the suppleness of syntax better let one see the return of the same simple elements under varied forms. It is moreover a question of measure, which cannot be settled in a word.”

Everyone will regret that the author of these two paragraphs does not form the firm resolution of working himself; these two paragraphs have a capital importance, each for what it wishes to be; the reading of the first would be of the greatest importance for M. François Daveillans, of la revue blanche; the reading of the second would be of great utility for M. François Simiand, and for a fairly great number of sociologists; there are in this brief paragraph, only indicated, the most useful distinctions, and also the best-founded, between science and social art. When a young man comes to set on foot, almost in passing, two paragraphs as firm as these, when he is as much master of his form and of his thought, it no longer suffices that he speak apropos of the books that appear, and which often are not worth the criticism. It is time that he himself produce a work, and give us a cahier.]

So long as there is misery, misery takes and holds the place of misery.

It is a matter of experience that for liberated individuals and for liberated peoples simple human suffering often reaches the same gravity that religious suffering reached, as human courage reaches where religious courage reached, as human dignity reaches where religious dignity reached. Analysis allowed one to foresee the results of experience: man having remained no doubt the same, his capacity for suffering being no doubt about the same, the wretched receives in his misery the same total impression of despair; the wretched does not receive from his misery the same partial impression that the non-wretched who sees the misery of the wretched receives; the wretched does not see the world as the sociologist sees it; the wretched is in his misery; the perpetual gaze he casts upon his misery is itself a wretched gaze; misery is not a part of his life, a part of his preoccupations, which he examines in turn, and without prejudice to the rest; misery is his whole life; it is a servitude without exception; it is not only the known cortège of privations, of illnesses, of ugliness, of despairs, of ingratitudes and of deaths; it is a living death; it is the perpetual torment of Antigone; it is the universal penetration of death into life, it is an aftertaste of death mingled with all life; death was for the ancient sage the last liberation, an undoable enfranchisement. But for the wretched it is only the consummation of bitterness and of defeat, the consummation of despair. If Jean Coste cornered kills himself one day with his wife and his children, his last day will be his most terrible day. Dies irae, day of wrath.

For death to be a liberation that one savors, one needs a whole civilization, a whole culture, a whole philosophy, all that misery, precisely, forbids.

The wretched is in his misery, at the center of his misery; he sees only wretchedly; precisely because he does not believe in eternal life, in an infinite survival, the wretched whom we know, the wretched as the elimination of religious belief has made him, has only a single compartment of life and all this compartment is henceforth occupied for him by misery; he has only a single domain; and all this domain is irrevocably for him the domain of misery; his domain is a prisoner’s yard; wherever he looks, he sees only misery; and since misery can obviously receive a limitation only from a hope at least, since all hope is forbidden it, his misery receives no limitation; literally it is infinite; there is no need for its cause or its object to be infinite for it to be infinite; a cause, an object that is not infinite for external science, for physics, can determine in a soul an infinite sentiment if this sentiment fills the whole soul; not in this sense that it would exterminate from the soul every other sentiment, conscious, subconscious, unconscious, but in this sense that it affects without exception, that it nuances and qualifies the whole sentimental, intellectual life, the whole life of the soul and of the mind; little matter what events take place inside misery; it suffices that they be inside misery for them to be wretched; when a man is like Jean Coste in full misery, in the hell of misery, the last event which finishes him may be an extrinsically little considerable event, an event to which someone who was not wretched would easily resist; but for him who undergoes it in misery, that is to say for him who matters, in the last analysis, this so-called little considerable event is a capital event, an event of infinite consequence. Our second conclusion will be that simple human misery has an infinite importance. Damnation has an infinite importance for the Catholics. Social misery has an infinite importance for us.

One would object in vain that our comparison is not founded, on the grounds that the infernal pains are definitive for Christianity, but that misery is only temporary and, so to speak, provisional in the history of humanity; the wretched, we are told, can at least console themselves with the thought that across their particular provisional miseries humanity is marching deliberately, assuredly, toward an era of definitive happiness; this preoccupation often appears in Zola’s last books; the honorable M. Buisson said to me: What Jean Coste lacks, what could perhaps sustain him a little, lighten his misery, and even lend him a point of support for his recovery, is the idea he ought to have of the grandeur of his mission; this idea would sustain him; many instituteurs, who are unhappy, hold themselves up by this idea; truly Jean Coste has not the vocation. Thus spoke the honorable M. Buisson when he was a simple citizen. Since then M. Buisson having become a deputy does all he can to reach by economic sanctions simple citizens who have had or who are supposed to have had, who juridically have had vocations; for it is to be noted that the law aims at the religious vows themselves; moreover it is true that M. Buisson, principal organizer of primary instruction in France, and the principal of his collaborators, have very often appealed to the devotion and to the vocations of their very numerous subordinates; but I do not believe that society can appeal to devotions or to vocations; humanity can appeal to devotions and to vocations; humanity can appeal to anything; it can freely appeal to free sacrifice; society can proceed only by way of just requisition; it must appeal only to justice; finally and above all one forgets this first law of psychology, that the universe is for us what we know of it. When one asks of Jean Coste in his misery to forget his misery and to work with a light heart for the advent of universal happiness, firstly one asks him to preserve, for the convenience of secular society, certain sentiments which are properly Catholic sentiments, renunciation, abnegation, devotion under this form, resignation, patience and in a general way all the sentiments which belong to charity; now it is not loyal to ask this of him while one is persecuting Catholicism; secondly one asks of him a pretense; one asks him, being wretched, to act as if he were not; and thirdly one asks of him an impossibility; the wretched cannot abstract himself from misery; everything is tinged with it; not only all his sentiments, but all his knowledge; seen through misery, all humanity is wretched; perhaps it is wretched all over, provided one looks at it well; when the wretched asks himself whether it be quite true, whether it be quite assured that humanity marches infallibly toward a definitive era of perpetual happiness, when he asks himself whether this perpetual adjournment is not an imitation of the eternal Catholic adjournment, when he asks himself whether one is not sending him back to the earthly Paradise to be rid of him, as the Catholics sent him back to the heavenly Paradise, with this aggravation that he will not personally enjoy this beatitude; when he asks himself whether the optimists are simpletons or rogues, when he notes that the optimists always take care to begin by perching themselves in the situations that are the most remote from misery, when he believes that humanity is wicked, who would blame him for it, knowing misery and knowing humanity?

Each of us is at the center of the world for the knowledge, for the presentation that he has of it; Jean Coste does not see the world as a radical-socialist deputy does; he has his reasons for this; let us believe that reciprocally a radical-socialist deputy has his reasons for not seeing the world as a Jean Coste does; when one wishes Jean Coste to see the world as fine, as one coarsely says, one wishes him no longer to be Jean Coste, but a benevolent spectator, a good fellow, comfortably watching the world and Jean Coste in his little place within it. This is to alter totally the data of the problem. Jean Coste has an image of the world; if we wish that this image be no longer the same, that it be modified, it is not a matter of taking it, separately from the world, and of altering it, for it would be modified, but it would no longer be an image; we must modify the world itself; this is the only way for it to be a modified image, of a modified world.

I beg pardon for insisting so much on misery; it is an ungrateful subject; a general conspiracy of silence would let us believe that misery does not exist; only the third and the fourth pages of the newspapers signal to us, in order grossly to move us or to distract us, the interesting, exciting, amusing miseries, remade at will for the pleasure of the eyes; most of those who speak of misery do so out of interest, by emphasis and demagogy; the socialist parties celebrate by so many banquets and by so many festivals the deviation of their recent action that one asks oneself what festival they would imagine on the day when the revolution should be done. But Jean Coste is in his misery. He is not only at the center of his misery for the knowledge he has of his life; Jean Coste is at the center of his misery for the knowledge he has of the world. The pains of other men make for him a multiplication, a redoubling of his pains. The joys of other men push him back into his pain; the joys of other men leave him an aftertaste of bitterness and of ingratitude, because they awaken in him the knowledge of universal egoism. Seen by him, the universe is wretched. Our third and last conclusion of fact will be that simple human misery has a universal importance. Damnation has a universal importance for the Catholics. Social misery has a universal importance for us. A particular fact can cause a total suffering. A particular absence can cause a total privation:

A single being is wanting to you, and all is depopulated.

We cannot, it would be convenient, but we cannot believe that there is no misery because we do not look at it; it is there all the same, and looks at us. We cannot invoke the sentiments of solidarity to ask misery to leave us in peace; we are forced to go as far as the sentiments of charity; but it suffices to have solidarity for misery to be able to summon us.

Serious Catholics have always been preoccupied with hell; however important the gradation of beatitudes might be, it does seem that the constant preoccupation of serious Catholics has been to know whether the soul would or would not enter into the kingdom of beatitudes; the entry, the participation, the to-be-or-not-to-be of eternal life had a capital importance: for serious Catholics the degree of participation, whether they avowed it to themselves or feared to avow it to themselves, in order not to offend the divine munificence and not to scorn its gifts, appears to have had as it were an adjourned importance; however important the gradation of pains might be, it seems that the constant preoccupation of serious Catholics has been to know whether the soul would avoid precipitation or not, whether it would be damned or not; the preoccupation of salvation was capital: to be or not to be saved; hence so many serious efforts to suppress hell; whether, becoming heresiarchs, they taught the caducity of the infernal pains; whether, remaining faithful and penetrating even to the depth of faith, they tried to save souls, that is to say tried, literally, to suppress hell at least for those souls; whether in our day, becoming resolutely infidels, they abandoned the Catholic faith in order not to accept hell; and in our day it is quite certain that the faith due to the eternity of pains has been for most serious Catholics the gravest cause of revocation; many serious Catholics have felt the need, the insurmountable need to suppress hell; they have begun by suppressing it in their soul; several old men would have returned to Catholicism, who were prevented from doing so by this article alone: descended into hell, and the interpretation that the Church gives it; a very great number of young people, serious, have renounced the Catholic faith primarily, uniquely, or above all, because they did not admit the existence or the maintenance of hell.

There is no need for them to find this maintenance again among us; when society resigns itself cravenly to the maintenance of misery, the city of men becomes once more as evil as on this account was the city of the Catholic God. The price of life has not fallen since the diminution, since the elimination of the Catholic faith. The value of suffering has not diminished. The value of the effort to be made has not diminished; as serious Catholics are preoccupied above all with salvation, we must preoccupy ourselves above all with wresting the wretched from misery; the effort by which we must wrest the wretched from misery is not of the same order, does not receive the same measure as the effort by which we must or may have to equalize situations of fortune; serious Catholics employ a given quantity of prayers to multiply the individual saints and not to make certain elect rise in rank, so to speak; we must employ a certain quantity of action to save from misery the greatest number of citizens we can, and not to make certain poor rise in economic rank; a given quantity of social action, a given economic expenditure can assure the economic salvation of many; the same quantity of expenditure would only make several half-rich; with a hundred thousand francs well administered one can organize, emancipate a fairly great number of workers; with a hundred thousand francs well administered one can make only a very small rentier; a modest increase makes one pass from misery to poverty; a great increase is needed to rise from poverty to wealth; thus the most important is what demands the least; the most important is to make as many citizens as one can cross the fatal limit; and what costs least, by a great deal, is in fact to make this limit be crossed; a slight increase of budget almost always suffices for it; considering only quantity, there is much less distance between the misery from which a citizen is saved and the poverty in which he settles, than between poverty itself and the different degrees of wealth.

The duty of wresting the wretched from misery and the duty of distributing the goods equally are not of the same order: the first is a duty of urgency; the second is a duty of fitness; not only are the three terms of the republican device, liberty, equality, fraternity, not on the same plane, but the two latter themselves, which are closer to each other than they are both close to the first, present several notable differences; by fraternity we are bound to wrest from misery our brothers the men; this is an antecedent duty; on the contrary the duty of equality is a much less pressing duty; as much as it is impassioning, troubling, to know that there are still men in misery, so much is it indifferent to me to know whether, outside misery, the men have larger or smaller pieces of fortune; I cannot manage to become impassioned over the famous question of knowing to whom, in the future city, will fall the bottles of Champagne, the rare horses, the châteaux of the valley of the Loire; I hope they will always arrange themselves; provided there is truly a city, that is to say provided there is no man who is banished from the city, held in exile in economic misery, held in economic exile, it matters little to me whether such or such has such or such a situation; many other problems will no doubt solicit the attention of the citizens; on the contrary it is enough that a single man be knowingly kept, or, what comes to the same thing, knowingly left in misery for the whole civic pact to be void; as long as there is one man outside, the door closed in his face shuts a city of injustice and of hatred.

The problem of misery is not on the same plane, is not of the same order as the problem of inequality. Here again the ancient preoccupations, the traditional, instinctive preoccupations of humanity find themselves on analysis much more profound, much more justified, much truer than the recent, and almost always factitious, manifestations of democracy; to save the wretched is one of the most ancient cares of noble humanity, persisting across all the civilizations; from age to age fraternity, whether it take the form of charity or the form of solidarity; whether it be exercised toward the guest in the name of Zeus Hospitable, whether it welcome the wretched as a figure of Jesus Christ, or whether it have a minimum wage established for workers; whether it invest the citizen of the world, whether by baptism it introduce to universal communion, or by economic recovery it introduce into the international city, this fraternity is a vivacious, imperishable, human sentiment; it is an old sentiment, which maintains itself from form to form across the transformations, which bequeaths itself and is transmitted from generations to generations, from culture to culture, which from long anterior to the ancient civilizations has maintained itself in Christian civilization and remains and no doubt will blossom in modern civilization; it is one of the best among the good sentiments; it is a sentiment at once profoundly conservative and profoundly revolutionary; it is a simple sentiment; it is one of the principal among the sentiments that have made humanity, that have maintained it, that no doubt will enfranchise it; it is a great sentiment, of great function, of great history, and of great future; it is a great and noble sentiment, old as the world, which has made the world.

Beside this great sentiment the sentiment of equality will appear small; less simple too; when every man is provided with the necessary, with the true necessary, with bread and with the book, what matters to us the distribution of luxury; what matters to us, in truth, the attribution of two-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower automobiles, if there be any; the sentiments of fraternity must be formidable to have held in check since the beginning of humanity, since the evolution of animality, all the sentiments of war, of barbarism and of hatred, and to have prevailed over them; on the contrary the sentiment of equality is not an old sentiment, a perpetual sentiment, a universal sentiment, of every grandeur; it appears in the history of humanity at determined times, as a particular phenomenon, as a manifestation of the democratic spirit; it is always, in some sense, the sentiments of fraternity that have animated the great men and the great peoples, animated, troubled, for the preoccupation with misery never goes without a bitterness, a disquiet. On the contrary the sentiment of equality has inspired only particular contestable revolutions; it brought about that English revolution, which bequeathed to the modern world an England so nationalist, imperialist; it brought about that American revolution, which instituted a republic so imperialist, and capitalist; it has not instituted humanity; it has not prepared the city, it has only set up democratic governments. It is a composite, mixed, often impure sentiment, into which vanity, envy, cupidity contribute. Fraternity disquiets, moves, impassions deep, serious, laborious, modest souls. Equality often reaches only the men of theater and of display, and the men of government; or again the sentiments of equality are manufactured sentiments, obtained by formal constructions, bookish, scholastic sentiments; when violent, deep and broad passions, human and popular, are moved for equality, as at the beginning of the French Revolution, almost always it is that formal equality covers for the greater part libertarian realities or realities of fraternity. It is a fact that, save for rare exceptions, the men who have introduced into politics the preoccupations of equality were not, had not been wretched; they were petty bourgeois or poor, notaries, lawyers, prosecutors, men who had not received the indelible investiture of misery.

The true wretched, once he has succeeded in escaping from his misery, generally does not ask for more; the true wretched, once withdrawn, are so glad to have escaped that, save for rare exceptions, they are glad for the rest of their lives; willingly poor, they are so happy to have acquired certainty that this happiness contents them; the contemplation of this happiness nourishes them; optimists, satisfied, henceforth submissive, gentle, conservative, they love this dwelling of quietude; they do not ask for an equalization of riches, because they feel or because they know that this equalization would not go without new adventures, that it would reopen the era of uncertainties, that it would give or leave a place for the recommencement of risk; they may thus dread this equalization as a recommencement of misery; they are hardly partisans of it; they love political and social conservation, because they love the conservation of certainty; the parties of conservation have no more numerous contingent, more compact, and solid, than that of the poor escaped from misery, insured against misery; former wretched, they have preserved of misery a memory so dreaded that what they dread most is risk. The modest non-reactionary conservatives are the most conservative conservatives. They have not at all the passion of equality. They are not at all rebels. They too often ignore, or unlearn, the sentiments of fraternity.

A few of the wretched, on the contrary, have kept of their misery so anxious a memory that they cannot hold themselves in those regions of poverty, quantitatively, geographically near misery; they flee in height into the economic regions farthest from misery; they become immensely rich, much less from cupidity for riches than from dread of the old misery; these unfortunates can find rest, peace of soul again only in economic situations so far from their first situation that the return journey appears impossible ever; thus appear singular ambitious men, singularly formidable, ambitious for government in whom the passion for government is not the first, ambitious for banking, commerce, industry in whom the passion for financial, commercial, industrial government, in whom the passion for work, in whom the passion for accumulating is not the first; ambitious men of whom the times of great mechanical inventions, of great industrial adventures would present many examples; ambitious men of whom the advents of American kings would present particularly numerous examples; ambitious men whose economic campaigns were, themselves too, flights forward; and even in the ambition of Napoleon Bonaparte one would recognize this persistent dread, the fear of falling back into misery, into risk, into adventure; the proclamation of the Empire seems to have been for him above all an insurance, more an insurance than an aggrandizement; he was thinking of fixing fortune, of consolidating; he no doubt did not have then, with respect to certainty, a mentality very remote from that of a good civil servant who thinks of the regularity of advancement, of the security of the situation, of the tranquillity of retirement. He wanted to have his office.

Such indeed is the prolongation of the mark of misery: those who escape from misery do not escape from the memory of their misery; either by continuation, or by an effect of reaction, their whole subsequent life is qualified by it; the ones, by far the most numerous, fall silent in the conservation of poverty; they are not revolutionaries; they are not equalitarians; they remain below equality; the others, a few, are revolutionaries only for themselves; they are not equalitarians either; they flee above equality. These are two contrary procedures, but they have the same cause: the ones flee the memory of risk in the assurance of poverty; the others flee the memory of straitness in the abundance of riches. One would count that the immense majority of former wretched takes refuge thus in voluntary amnesias; one would note in many writers very characterized cases of this amnesia, for many writers have really known misery in their beginnings, and few writers have known how to give us an exact representation of misery; this amnesia would prove if need be how grave misery is, since on the one hand the memory of misery remains so living in the hearts of former wretched, and since on the other hand they make such desperate efforts to escape this remembrance. This amnesia is for them like an amnesty.

There remain those who having of themselves the knowledge of present misery or having had the knowledge of misery do not dread to analyze the misery thus known; wretched or former wretched, they have the courage to look misery in the face, they have the courage not to take refuge in amnesia; when they are engaged in action, these wretched and these former wretched are recognized by constant characteristics; but these characteristics are scarcely perceptible save to those who have them themselves: they are profoundly revolutionary, that is to say they work as much as they can to bring about that revolution of society which would consist in saving from misery all the wretched without any exception; they are profoundly socialist, that is to say they know that one cannot save from moral or mental miseries so long as one does not save from economic misery; they are not equalitarians; they are not bellicose; they are not military; they are not authoritarian; they do not undergo authority; they are not enthusiasts; they have rare admiration; they avoid ceremonies, official, officious; they distrust eloquence; they dread pomp; they are accused, not without apparent reason, of being sad, often sullen; they do not appear at banquets; they do not propose nor sustain the toasts; the communicative warmth does not communicate itself in them; the resounding votes leave them cold; the orders of the day of victory leave them indifferent and perpetually beaten; the flags, even red, hurt their eyes; the fanfares, even socialist revolutionary, dizzy them; the joy of public festivals appears coarse to them; the pompous inaugurations do not bring them the deep joy of beginnings and of births; the funerals and the commemorations do not bring them the perfect plenitude complete achieved of death; they are very severe; they do not delude themselves about the value of men and of events; having once measured the world by the immense measure of misery, they no longer measure by other measures; the usual measures, success, majority, sale, appear small to them; the misfortunes that are not misery, lack of success, minority, poor sale, do not appear to them serious misfortunes; the misfortunes which do not make one fall or fall back into misery do not appear to them misfortunes for good; the joys which, in the order of economy, are not the joy of escaping from misery do not appear to them joys properly so called: they are no more than advantages, conveniences; the men who have not known like them misery and who speak and who are eloquent always appear to them not to have reached the adult age, give them the impression of chattering children; the conscious wretched and the former conscious wretched are not loved by their enemies, nor by their comrades, but they are loved by their friends. The conscious wretched have many enemies, above all among their comrades. But they have several friends.

It is that they are spoilsports. Haunted by the knowledge they have of misery, anxious to know that there is so much present misery, they can neither nor wish to forget this existence nor this knowledge, for the space of a banquet, for the time of drinking to the most recent definitive triumph of the social Revolution. Therefore they are hated. They know that misery does not enter into life as an element of the liabilities in the establishment of a balance-sheet. Those who have not known misery may imagine loyally and logically that in the life of the individual the elements of assurance and the elements of misery are elements of the same order, that they receive the same measure, that they can therefore oppose each other, balance each other, weigh each other; we know that nothing of the sort is the case; the elements of misery have a total reverberation upon the elements of certainty; the elements of uncertainty qualify the elements of certainty; but so long as certainty is not complete the elements of certainty do not qualify the elements of uncertainty; so long as certainty is not complete, it is not certainty; a life assured on all sides save one is not an assured life; a true misfortune, a true misery poisons a whole life; a true happiness cannot even occur in misery; it becomes there at once misery itself and misfortune; it is not, then, a question of establishing a balance-sheet of the individual life where happiness and misery would be balanced; even if one succeeded in establishing this balance-sheet, in vain would the elements of happiness exceed the elements of misery, for the elements of happiness do not reach the elements of misery, and the elements of misery reach the elements of happiness; but one cannot even establish this balance-sheet, because the elements of happiness and the elements of misery are not of the same order; and one cannot compare what is not of the same order. For an individual life, with respect to misery, so long as one has not done all, one has done nothing.

Those who have not known misery may imagine loyally and logically that in the life of society the individual lives assured and the individual lives of misery are units of the same order, that they receive the same accounting, that they can therefore oppose each other, balance each other, weigh each other; we know that nothing of the sort is the case; the lives of misery may have or not have an individual reverberation upon the assured lives; the fact remains that the misery of individual lives has a reverberation upon all social life, upon society, upon humanity; a city assured on all sides save one is not a city; a true individual misfortune, a true individual misery poisons a whole city; a city is not founded so long as it admits an individual misery, even if the individual concerned should consent to it; such a consent, such a renunciation, recommended in the morality of charity, is incompatible with the morality of solidarity; it is not, then, a question of establishing a balance-sheet of social life where individual lives of assurance and individual lives of misery would be balanced; even if one succeeded in establishing this balance-sheet, in vain would the lives of happiness exceed in number, in quotient, the lives of misery, for the lives of happiness do not reach the lives of misery and the lives of misery reach the lives of happiness; but one cannot even establish this balance-sheet, because the lives of happiness and the lives of misery are not of the same order; one cannot compare them. For social life, with respect to misery, so long as one has not done all, one has done nothing.

In intensity, no happiness is more intense than misery.

The conscious wretched and the former conscious wretched know this; and those who do not wish to forget do not perpetually manifest a public joy of State, gratuitous, secular and obligatory. When one celebrates by uninterrupted festivals a doubtful advance, they think of the undoubted misery; when one celebrates a precarious advance, they think of all that is not done; in the midst of joy they think of the exterior misery; they are spoilsports: they are hated; they are esteemed and they are hated; they do not hate; they do not esteem.

They are hated above all in the socialist revolutionary parties nationally and regionally constituted; a fairly great number of bourgeois admit that Christians or that socialists think of the miseries of bourgeois society; the socialist revolutionary comrades do not admit that one not commune indefatigably with them in the apotheoses of the punches. The party of suffering is wholly given to joy. It is therefore wholly given to hardness. Nothing renders one ferocious like a false, unfounded joy. It is here properly the mystery of parliamentary representation. Since the representatives represent, and they are content, the represented must be so also. Since the power of the representatives represents supposedly the power of the represented, everything of the representatives must represent the represented; the contentment of the representatives can represent only the contentment of the represented.

When a wretched or a conscious former wretched makes a book, he can make a Jean Coste.

On the realism of Jean Coste one could not say better than what M. Sorel has said, — an article from le Mouvement Socialiste, reproduced in the eighth cahier of the third series, — and I myself have explained myself several times. Well read, Jean Coste is rigorously realist. When people said: It is too black, they did not mean only: It is too black; they meant, what is at least as important: With blacknesses one would put in, anyone could do as much. — Let them undeceive themselves. It is not with black spread romantically upon black that one makes a Jean Coste; nothing is so remote as a Jean Coste from the romantic and the melodramatic; nothing is so hard to make as a Jean Coste; it is a gross artistic error to imagine that it is needed and that it suffices to stuff in some black to obtain an effect of misery or an effect of sadness; there could happen to Jean Coste a fairly great number of events much more serious than those that happen to him, and his life be less wretched; conversely there could not happen to him all the serious events that happen to him, and his life be no less wretched; it is not external events alone that make assurance or misery; misery is not mathematically proportioned to the gravity of external events; if the sole ingenuity of imaginary torments made the terror of a hell M. Mirbeau would suffice for it; but what precisely makes M. Octave Mirbeau not Dante is that a hell is not entirely constituted by the imagination of literature alone. It requires either genius or what alone can replace genius and often is confounded with it: to have lived a life oneself, or to have seen it lived oneself from very close, in sympathy, in love.

I said it myself to Lavergne and he will allow me to say it again: Jean Coste is so strong a book that it is not a serial book; it is not the beginning of a series; it is not one of those first books which assuredly announce a whole library, natural and social history of a whole family under the third Republic; it is not one of those first books of which one can say after reading them: the author has forty-five in his belly and we shall have one every year; it is on the contrary one of those books so strong that they seem to have come out of the author much more than he made them; when one has read them there remains an impression so strong that one asks oneself whether the author will ever be able to begin again; I do not say this to diminish Lavergne, on the contrary, nor to limit the field of his eventual work; I expect much from what he will do; but it has been given to few men to produce thus a first book, a single book, standing like a pillar, and which gives rise to this kind of preoccupation; this is here an Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a don Quixote, a Robinson Crusoe, one of those books that rise isolated from a whole work or from a whole life or even from a time and which live indefinitely in memories; it is for this reason that the name of Jean Coste has become a common name; this name will no doubt never be as widespread as the names of those famous characters, because the subject of the book is much less vast, less broadly human, because the book interests a much more restricted humanity, because it is a little strictly professional; but, with these reservations made, or rather these measures taken, in proportion Lavergne’s book is a book of the family of those traditional books; it is a dangerous book for those that follow, and a formidable one for the author himself.

One perceives this if one knows how to read in the least, and if one had some hesitation, it would suffice to compare Lavergne’s work to certain volumes of Zola; I do not wish to enter incidentally into the criticism of so colossal a monument, but let one compare the miseries so frequently described by Zola in his novels to the misery of a Jean Coste; the miseries of Zola are almost always much darker than the misery of Jean Coste; the events are much more serious, much more dramatic; and yet the impression is not the same; the miseries of Zola are miseries of description, miseries seen by a laborious tourist, often conscientious, by an inspector of miseries, by an excursionist; the miseries of Jean Coste are seen from the inside, lived by a wretched man; when one reads Zola the accumulated horrors frequently produce a terrible impression; but as the physical reading recedes the impression, which was literary, diminishes, fades, gives place to an impression of manufacture or of information; when one reads Jean Coste one has no impression as terrible; one has rather a sad, common impression, and that so deceptive impression that one could do as much; one closes the book, with that impression that it has taught us nothing new; time passes; the images work in memory; the images of literature fade; the images of reality elaborate themselves; Jean Coste, his wife, his mother, his children take shape, live, gain ground; the very framework of the novel appears to us, simple, great, robust, solid, loyal; this image of Jean Coste and of his misery pursues us, haunts us; he is a familiar wretched; he lives among us; and we suffer at not being able to give him of our bread: such is the difference between a classical, realist book and a romantic construction, called naturalist or realist.

I shall be objected that Lavergne did not look so far in order to make his Jean Coste; I quite hope so; but that is the property of classical probity, of classical sincerity; putting the real itself to work, it sustains the same examination as the real; like the real itself it inexhaustibly exhausts science, criticism, analysis; for the same reason that one walks before knowing the anatomy and the physiology of muscular movement, for the same reason Jean Coste instituteur, living a real life, furnishes the inexhaustible matter of a study which he may not be capable of doing; and for the same reason Lavergne, working out a real work, furnishes, like and after his living model, the inexhaustible matter of a study which he is not forced to have done; neither life under the form of action, nor life under the form of operation, waits upon science; science can illumine it, watch over it, oversee it, corroborate it; but science does not make life; it is to fail to recognize at once life and science, the imperious necessity of life and the total liberty of science, thus to confound the functions of knowledge and the functions of action; it is precisely this confusion that has prepared the usurpation of romanticism and of display; instead of living a real life in the order of action, the romantic lives an image, a representation of life while thinking of the spectators; when he has no spectators, he himself makes himself a spectator; he does not act considering the acted reality; but he acts as on a stage; he is in perpetual display; he thinks only of the effects produced; he conducts himself in the order of action in function not of action, but of the knowledge that he wishes the spectator to have of this action; to say the word, he is wholly invaded by ham-acting; instead of having a reality such as is reality, material, recalcitrant, obscure, difficult, and overflowing on all sides knowledge and science, a reality such as the true savants know it and recognize it, they have a pseudo-reality formal, rational, clear, submissive, false, easy, convenient to knowledge, of the same magnitude as it, non-mysterious; and this is not surprising, since in them the functions of knowledge have had the complaisance to manufacture for themselves a reality to be known: instead of attaching the functions of knowledge to reality, to the vestiges of reality, they have had manufactured by these functions a reality made expressly for them; thus the romantics go round the world only because they have begun by manufacturing themselves a little circumnavigable world.

People have reproached Jean Coste with a certain grandiloquence; they were right to note it; they were wrong to reproach him with it: he speaks as he can; they were wrong to reproach the author with it: the author saw well; it is a fact that the wretched take some pleasure in what seems to us grandiloquence; they are too often oratorical, and sometimes rhetorical; this does not derive only from common vanity, exacerbated, embittered by misery; this does not derive only from the vice of literature, of phrasing, from the invasion of political jargon; there is a much finer cause, much nobler and much more profound, much more human: misery is a grandeur; so great that the other human grandeurs in comparison appear small; when one knows well true wretched, what strikes most in them, in their very abasement, is a certain tone of haughtiness; their humility is often only haughtiness, interiorly possessed; they always seem to say when speaking to other men: you who do not know life, because you do not know misery; it is precisely this grandeur, of which they are conscious, that they cannot always carry, and that goes to their heads; they fall into grandiloquence only because they have a need to rise to grand eloquence, and they do not always know how; it is the property of this grandeur which is misery never to have been, so to speak, chosen, elected, willed, prepared; it is an involuntary grandeur, come from destiny, unprepared: hence this haughty awkwardness, this pretentious insolence of the designated heads; the wretched are invested with a grandeur they had not asked for; they are condemned by the force of events to play life in the tragic mode without having the tragic temperament or genius; they play falsely; they play melodramatic instead of playing tragic: and one believes that their life is melodramatic; but it is tragic all the same: it is the expression that is wanting. Even there occurs among the wretched a phenomenon rather analogous to that which occurs among the great: just as the hereditary great have an ease that the parvenus do not have, just so the hereditary wretched have an ease that the shipwrecked of life do not have; the families of the wretched bear themselves better before misery. I do not speak of the fatalists; and how much pride still, and of haughtiness, in fatalism.

He has been reproached for having a precious language. The author has heard well. I know the primaires. Not only was I brought up at the primary school, from seven to eleven, but this school was the primary school annexed to the primary École Normale, to the École Normale of instituteurs of the department. Under the direction of a particularly chosen instituteur, the pupil-teachers came each week, each in turn, to teach our class. They taught me Franklin’s whistle, and the straight line if one cut France from Liège to Bayonne.

Most of the people who today flatter the instituteurs in order to make of them a clientele are bourgeois of secondary origin.

I loved my primary teachers very much. I have kept personal, respectful, affectionate relations with most of them. Come to the lycée, we had with the primary normaliens excellent relations. We made, without phrases, the famous fusion of the two educations. It was the time when physical exercises were being restored. There were teams from the lycée, teams from the École Normale. We competed. We arranged rallies, parties, festivals.

I found again in the regiment many instituteurs and in that camaraderie without apparatus I had with several of them relations of true friendship. These relations have been continued. Since I began making editions, through the cahiers or, outside the cahiers, through the Journaux pour tous, today through l’œuvre du Livre pour tous, through Pages libres, I continue to communicate with instituteurs, more and more numerous. We have many fewer instituteurs propaganda-subscribers or ordinary subscribers than we served in the first year of free subscriptions to instituteurs. But in the regularly slow growth of our cahiers, the instituteurs figure for an increase superior to the average increase. The instituteurs write to us at length; and I read scrupulously all that is written to us.

I therefore know the instituteurs. I know them as a general inspector does not know them. I know them as the honorable M. Buisson, who made them, who knows them so much, does not know them. Above all I know them as the politicians who today wish to make use of them do not know them. Save for exceptions, fortunately numerous, they think, they speak exactly like Jean Coste. Far from going, in passing from primary to higher education by way of the secondary, from the simple to the complicated, it is on the contrary higher education that is simple, and it is in the primary, and too often in the secondary, that there is complication. Save for exceptions, fortunately numerous, when the instituteurs write, they are tempted to write a little as Jean Coste speaks, a little stiff, a little mawkish, a little pretentious, a little precious.

Let us understand each other: there are everywhere men who escape their trade, their class, their surroundings. We wish, and we can speak here only of the instituteurs who have received the imprint of their trade, who are characterized by their trade, not by their trade in general, but by their trade as that trade has been made. What is free escapes this kind of observation. There are fortunately many instituteurs who have remained people, workers or peasants. There are several who have of themselves a spirit of science, or of art, or of philosophy. But the instituteurs who have undergone without resistance the properly primary imprint have unlearned to speak people and have not yet learned to speak French.

To speak people and to speak French is to speak the same language, a language of nature and of art, on two different parallel planes of culture. Nature and art work on two different planes; but these planes are parallel and the results conform. To speak primary is to speak a language a little learned, a little conventional, a little contrived. The speech of the people, worker or peasant, laborer or soldier, derives from human culture. The primary speech belongs to State training.

That it be highly desirable that the primaires speak people and French, yes. But so long as they are in majority as they are, the historian must represent them as they are, make them speak, or rather listen to them speak, as they speak. We have to mask from ourselves no reality. We must know what primary instruction is, like the rest. We must know it in a time when State politicians wish to make us believe that higher primary instruction is the culmination of a people and of a humanity.

On the quotity of misery I do not believe that the author has exaggerated; there is at least as much misery in the world as appears, that is to say, exactly, that there are at least as many miseries that hide themselves out of vanity, out of pride, out of conceit, out of sadness, out of duty, out of grandeur, out of nobility, out of necessity, out of good and bad sentiments, as there are false miseries displayed out of cupidity.

Press someone a little on Jean Coste. I mean someone sincere and serious, someone who will not take refuge behind the conventional phrases of discourses. He will reply: No doubt, but he puts a little of his own into it. We know many instituteurs who are very happy. — The author has never said the contrary. He himself has said how many there are of them happy, of poor, of unhappy, of wretched in a given company. — They marry as they wish. — I know nothing of it. — The peasants esteem them; in the villages the largest dowries are for them; they make good marriages. — Let us not forget that the author has had Jean Coste miss a marriage prepared by his parents to be a good marriage. — Ah, indeed! if they wish to make marriages of inclination! And then also why does he have so many children? — Four. — That is to wish to be unhappy.

— Be it so; but since it is thus that sincere and realist men reply, established and serious men, one must know whether behind the apparatus of the official discourses the whole ideal of life that the third Republic proposes to a fairly great number of its loyal servants is the marriage of business or perpetual celibacy.

I shall not return today to the history of Jean Coste before its publication; the most relentless campaigns of calumnies will not make me come back upon old incidents; I recall only, and Lavergne loves to recall, that without our cahiers Jean Coste would never have seen the light of day. The book was for a long time as wretched as the character, and, at bottom, of the same misery. The history of Jean Coste after its publication presents a considerable interest.

This book succeeded; it had not been made to please, but it succeeded; by this simple book a very great number of readers were simply moved; a very great number of critics gave this book important publicity.

The men engaged in the anticlerical political parties neglected to do as much. I had foolishly thought that this book would be welcomed in the republican parties. I had forgotten that the parties do not love the book. Everywhere around us they spoke only of the instituteurs; they protected the instituteurs; they vaunted the instituteurs; they cherished the instituteurs; I thought that they would welcome this book of instituteur; I was mistaken; they made me see it well. The great accredited orators kept silent; the people who speak of everything did not speak of Jean Coste; in l’Aurore itself the book had only a few lines from Geste, a post-scriptum, I believe.

On the advice of our friend Pierre Félix, who then took an interest in the cahiers, and whom Jean Coste had profoundly moved, I made the most pressing approaches to the Ligue de l’Enseignement. I asked that the League should so to speak adopt this book, that it should buy and distribute a certain number of copies. Since the League, at its origin a private institution, born of individual initiative, formed of individual efforts, tends more and more to become a State institution, an organ of government, since moreover one wishes to come to fixing responsibilities, I must say that my approaches were not, as they say, rewarded; today I ask myself, anxiously, whether I was not played upon, drowned in holy water.

This unsinkable Coste today reappears. The Ollendorff bookshop publishes it in a volume at three francs fifty, 314 pages, illustrated cloth-bound cover red and black by H. Goussé. When I was told that there would be a painted image, I was mistrustful; I dread nothing so much as images for a text; today that the book is there, bound in its green cloth, I must declare that this red and black drawing seems to me beautiful; it is simple, it is sober, it is worth the book, it expresses the book: that says it all.

I do not cease to ask of our subscribers; but it is because there is much to ask; the work to be done is immense; I ask them instantly to make for this new edition of Jean Coste the greatest fortune they can. The book deserves this fortune.

The author deserves it. We have here exposed our administrative and financial situation frankly enough to have the right to speak finance. One must always speak finance. False financial discretion is the most insupportable of bourgeois hypocrisies. Lavergne went into debt to write his book. Besides, Lavergne has, like all authors, like all workers, the right and the duty to live by working. Our cahiers are unfortunately too wretched themselves to pay author’s royalties; the time has not come when in this institution, at last flourishing, all the workers shall have a normal wage, a minimum wage.

Lavergne has not received a sou from the cahiers; in the new edition he receives, for the first time of his life, author’s royalties; a normal contract has intervened; now it is just that Lavergne and his family live; we must have much affection for those among us who, instituteurs or professors, leave their trade and come to exercise upon us among us their little fraction of socialist and revolutionary government; we must have no less friendship for the instituteurs and for the professors who in pain and in work continue to exercise their modest trade.

Lavergne did more; at my request, and most cordially, he was willing to share with the cahiers his author’s royalties; for every copy bought of the new edition, half of the author’s royalties comes to Lavergne, half of the author’s royalties comes to the cahiers; I know that this revelation will suffice for several to extend to the new Jean Coste the boycott from which our cahiers benefit; but the boycotters are less numerous than they like to believe themselves, and less powerful.

Finally the commercial convention passed between the publishers, the author and the cahiers is such that the copies of the new edition ordered from the bookshop of the cahiers bring us in more than the ordinary bookshop. — I recall that we ask our subscribers to order all their books and periodicals from the bookshop of the cahiers.

We ask our subscribers to make for the new Jean Coste the greatest fortune, the greatest publicity, to buy it and to have it bought, to have it placed in the public, scholastic, communal libraries, in the libraries of groups; they will no doubt meet with some resistance; they will see by themselves whence it comes, what it signifies.

This book can furnish an excellent serial novel for the provincial newspapers and even for the Paris newspapers; we must not neglect the serial novel; bad, it is one of the most pernicious agents of demoralization; good, it can become one of the most efficacious means of culture, and not only for the people; when I open la Petite République, it is to read or to run through the extraordinary novels of M. Michel Zévaco; he is an author who has gained much; le Matin has done much, by giving Erckmann-Chatrian; l’Aurore has done much, by giving Stendhal and a great deal of Balzac.

Jean Coste makes an excellent serial; it is up to our friends to see to it. They will meet the same resistance. A great republican newspaper of a Breton military port which is not Brest refused to publish Jean Coste as a serial; the situation of the instituteurs is already not so brilliant in Brittany, the secular primary school is strongly attacked there, one must not depreciate the school work of the third Republic, one must not discourage the recruitment of the primary Écoles Normales.

It is always the same aberration of method; to mask reality to oneself, instead of seeing it and working at it.

We thus came to know, late, the crimes of Lavergne: wholly concerned to make a book, a realist novel, he had neglected to make an anticlericalist volume; he had made a village priest as he had seen one, a priest a fine fellow, an honest man, instead of making a priest as they must all be in order for radical anticlericalism to be founded; having an election to depict, instead of putting in presence a wholly filthy reactionary party and a wholly sublime radical party, he had put in presence two political parties about equally false, about equally cowardly.

Others, very numerous, especially since the book has succeeded, have on the contrary, — but that comes to the same thing, — been seized for Jean Coste with an unexpected love. I believe that Téry today is mistaken about the sentiments it is proper to have for Jean Coste. People love Jean Coste too much. They love him against someone. We must love him for himself. He is worth being loved for himself. They wish to love him on the condition that in the commune he be an anti-priest. We must love him for himself, as a free man; he has the right and the duty to exist for himself, by himself, for and by humanity, not only in opposition, in prepared perpetual conflict with another man, whoever that man be.

People wish to love Jean Coste on the condition that he be in the commune a representative of the government, an agent of the State, an emissary of the parties.

Jean Coste does not want so much: he asks for bread; he asks for liberty; not as a favor, but as his right. He has the right to bread, he has the right to liberty, unconditionally. He is a man, he has the rights of a man, unconditionally.

It is not a question of making Jean Coste enter, willingly or unwillingly, into political combinations; it is not a question of selling him what one ought to give him; he has imprescriptible rights; it is not a question of selling him his bread, his liberty, for political services; it is not a question of making him the plaything of the political parties. He would lose all authority, moral, social, professional, all dignity, all value of life and all value as a man.

People wish to delegate to Jean Coste a parcel of governmental authority, a piece of State. They wish to make of him one more who will weigh upon us. He shall proceed from the prefect by way of the sub-prefect. He shall be a fragment of the government of State. He was asking for his bread and his liberty, what we have named his economic liberty. By the most widespread sophism of action that exists in France he is answered by proposing to him authority, by imposing upon him the exercise of an authority. Let us note provisionally this paralogism of action, this parapragmatism become capital in France. He was asking for liberty, to which he had a right; it is refused him; but, in exchange for the fact that it is refused him, he is invited to exercise for his share an authority, to refuse for his share liberty, to be an agent of universal refusal, to encroach for his share upon the common liberties, upon the liberties of simple citizens; at need he is constrained to it; that is to say that there is added to his old servitude this new servitude, this increase of exercising an authority of command. It seems that by a political barter the liberty he takes from simple citizens compensates the liberty that has not been restored to him; I speak only of legitimate liberties. It is by an effect of this reasoning that the enslaved peoples take their revenge in helping the invader to subdue a neighboring third, who is specially subordinated to these brokers of servitude.

This immoral barter is among the most frequent in contemporary society; the effects of this barter multiply; it is by the universalization of this game that modern society constitutes itself more and more as an immense, as a total mutuality of servitude: each one sells his share of just liberty for a share of unjust authority that he shall exercise. There is even a market of these barters, there is a rate of values: so much authority for so much liberty lost. It is the very foundation of universal suffrage. It was not the theoretical foundation. It has become the practical foundation.

The misfortune is that most citizens take pleasure in these usual immoral barters; it is a market that has two advantages: firstly it rids the party concerned of the care, of the worry of exercising his just liberty; for to exercise justly a just liberty is of the order of work; and it is a difficult work; on the contrary to exercise an unjust authority is not of the order of work; it is tiring to say, to state a proposition, then to give freely the history and the demonstrations of it; it is not tiring to say: I am right because I say so, or: I am right because that is the law. Secondly this operation confers upon the party concerned the enjoyment of exercising authority over someone. And it appears that this is an irresistible enjoyment.

Disquieting symptoms force us to ask ourselves whether many instituteurs will find within themselves the courage to resist the temptation; civic modesty is rare; the temptation is great: they are offered to enter into the system of government; everything in our ideas, in our mores, in our education, pushes us to enter as much as we can into governments; the instituteurs today undergo the temptation to which so many socialist revolutionaries have not resisted. At bottom, it is always the ministerial temptation.

People wish them to be the magistrates of reason. Whence comes this new magistracy? We have only too many Magistracies of State, civil and military. It is not indispensable that all our schools be transformed into courts-martial or into correctional tribunals, as one chooses. Let us know how to read l’affaire Crainquebille. Téry reproaches me with having pinned to l’affaire Crainquebille a citation that I nevertheless believed made expressly. Téry reproaches me with not having pinned the whole article. Let him be reassured. We shall publish the whole article in question, for his trouble; and I shall comment on it; we shall publish the whole article in which he complains; and I shall comment on it, for his misfortune; and our subscribers shall see that I could not and that I must not have pinned the whole article and that by pinning just the sentence that he today regrets I still gave him the larger share, and that my citation was fair game; if Téry wishes to set against these wretched cahiers new demagogies, anticlerical ones, I am ready to begin the conversation again; I do not fear his puns; since he dares to speak of General Staff, speaking to my person I shall ask him where he was and what he was doing when we were exhausting our forces, our finances, our health, for the defense of the free republic against the encroachments of the military General Staff; since he wishes to regulate the relations I may have with Anatole France, since he wishes to regulate the friendship I have with the two Tharauds, — already State regulation? my comrade, — since he wishes to regulate the relations Tharaud may have with France and the predilection France may have for a book of Tharaud, I shall be precise, I shall ask him what he was doing exactly, he, in the cabinet of M. Lemaître at the date when M. Clemenceau had to defend the Court of Cassation against the nationalist calumnies.

Let Téry know it: in these debates where he stakes only his reputation as a talented entertainer, we have staked our whole life, and we shall know how to defend ourselves in consequence.

I confine myself today to the incriminated citation. Téry compares the masters of education to the judicial magistrates. It is a comparison of a public meeting. It does not hold. If it holds, we fall into l’affaire Crainquebille. But it does not hold. The pupils are not the accused. The masters are not judges. Education is not a magistracy. It is a culture. We shall return to this article, since the author requests it.

When Téry assimilates or compares the masters of education to the magistrates, he seems to wish to insist on the duty we should have of conferring upon the former the irremovability of the latter; but, firstly, irremovability is not the only form nor the only guarantee of liberty, of independence; it is in no way demonstrated that one must confer irremovability upon civil servants to guarantee their liberty; it is in no way demonstrated that it suffices to confer irremovability upon civil servants to guarantee their liberty; it is not demonstrated that one must assimilate the members of education to the judicial magistrates to assure their liberty; we are witnessing here a new effect of the already-noted parapragmatism; to assimilate the members of education to the judicial magistrates is not to guarantee their liberty, but it is to confer upon them an authority; I do not insist; we shall return to this dangerous assimilation. Secondly Téry forgets that he officially belongs to a party in which the removability of the judicial magistrates is an essential part of the program; when Téry not only vaunts irremovability but wishes to extend it from the judicial magistrates to the masters of education, he forgets that he is part of a party named the Parti Socialiste français, that he is part of a government named the inter-federal committee, that this government was constituted little by little in the congresses of this party, that the last congress took place at Tours, and that the constitutional program of Tours involves the election of the magistracy, which no doubt would render it removable.

We shall begin this debate over again from the principle as much as we can as soon as we can. I wish to retain today only the procedure. It is the most dangerous procedure of demagogy. The negligent and grand-seigneurial demagogue is the most dangerous. To launch false ideas, and to hold to them, is dangerous. But to launch a false idea and negligently to withdraw it, without otherwise attaching importance to it, is much more dangerous. The indispensable criticism no longer knows where to take hold. The author is of your opinion. You have nothing more to say. Nevertheless the false idea continues its way, pushes its fortune. The author was able to withdraw his idea: he has not withdrawn the image, the memory that the poor people have formed, have kept of this idea. At the first discussion the false idea reappears, flourishing; the inconsiderate comparison imposes itself; it is convenient.

Five years ago, at the beginning of the affair, two years ago, when one thought falsely that the affair was consummated, every time the conversation of the Dreyfusards and of the republicans returned upon the instituteurs, there was but one cry and one indignation: The first measure to take, was said everywhere and without any exception, the indispensable, immediate measure, will be to liberate the instituteurs; they are today at the appointment of the prefects; it is inadmissible that civil servants belonging to the ministry of public instruction, it is inadmissible that members of the university body should be responsible not before their hierarchical superiors, not before their inspectors, their masters and their friends, but before the agents of the ministry of the interior. — Such was then the indignation of all. The amnesty passed.

We know what has happened. There came M. Combes’s circular, the first, the one in which for the first time a head of government, a president of the council of ministers, a minister of the interior dared to speak officially of governmental favors, the one which officially extended to all the civil servants of the Republic the disastrous practice of the political file, that circular against which almost everyone kept silent, which was to my knowledge the first solemn violation of the civic charter instituted by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and against which the French League for the Defense of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was not seriously moved, — I do not speak of the sections that approved, — that circular which submitted to the prefects all the civil servants of the territory, which submitted to the ministry of the interior all the ministries of the Republic; far from liberating the instituteurs, it is the old enslavement of the instituteurs that has been extended to all the civil servants. It is not toward the independence and the irremovability of the magistrate that one tends, but toward the enslavement and the removability of the civil servant.

I have nothing against M. Combes. When he was in question for forming a ministry, his friends said: He was utterly null as minister of public instruction; but, you will see, he will make an excellent president of the council. Jaurès explained to us in his newspaper that with a Chamber as well made, after such good elections, with a majority so well-seated, one had no need of someone very strong to govern. I do not recall whether he did not even explain to us that someone not very strong was worth more.

People exaggerated. M. Combes had not been null as minister of public instruction. Informed persons assure that he is intelligent. Awkward and clumsy, heavy-handed at the beginning of his ministry, he rapidly became witty, easy; he has revealed himself a quite good orator; he handles the tribune well; he has lively and good ripostes. Everyone agrees in repeating that he is an old honest man; and I know that in politics that is rare and precious.

I have nothing against M. Combes. He has courageously assumed a crushing task. This crushing task is not to combat the Church. To vanquish the Church would be a crushing task. To combat the Church is this year in France easier than to do nothing. A government that does nothing and that does not combat the Church falls. A government that does nothing and that combats the Church holds.

The crushing task which M. Combes has courageously assumed, the task for which he is entitled to all the indulgence of good citizens, is to constitute a government, and consequently a little an administration with elements borrowed from the radical parties.

We have nothing against M. Combes. He has acquired much in dexterity since he has been exercising government. And I do not omit to distinguish between the two strata, between the two generations of radicals. The republicans, radicals and opportunists, who are of M. Combes’s age founded the Republic. That was not done all by itself. Nothing is done all by itself. And forcibly there remains some worth to the men of that time. No, I do not confound the radicals of forty, fifty or sixty years with that crowded multitude of young radicals, — young men of from twenty to thirty years, — who from everywhere press forward to the occupation of the places.

All that we have declared, but I maintain this declaration, is that we refused to engage ourselves, that we refused to engage our responsibility in the policy improperly named anticlerical of the radicals of government, because it was unjust, and because it was vain. That it was unjust, this is what I hope to be able to show one day, and I ask that credit be given me until then. That it is vain, this is what one begins to recognize a little everywhere. Even those who wished to drag us into the company of this majority begin to ask themselves what is preparing itself. Jaurès and Pressensé in their newspapers begin to perceive that the radical parties are not solid. Jaurès speaks of failing and thinks of betrayal. This majority which was to swallow everything, — appropriate style, — breaks up before the home-distillers and has just borne M. Doumer to the presidency of the budget commission.

We have never said anything but that. But we said it in time.

If before long M. Combes’s ministry becomes formally an anti-Doumer ministry, a ministry of peace against the ministry of war, in this respect, and in this measure, we shall be, as much as we can, its firmest supports.

The instituteur must not be in the commune the representative of the government; it is fitting that he be there the representative of humanity; it is not a president of the council, however considerable a president of the council may be, it is not a majority that the instituteur in the commune must represent: he is the born representative of less transitory personages, he is the only and the inestimable representative of the poets and of the artists, of the philosophers and of the savants, of the men who have made and who maintain humanity. He must assure the representation of culture. It is for this reason that he cannot assume the representation of politics, because he cannot cumulate the two representations.

But for that, and we must have the courage to repeat it to the instituteurs, it is indispensable that they cultivate themselves; it is not a question of teaching at random; one must know what one teaches, that is to say one must have begun by teaching oneself; the most eminent men do not cease to cultivate themselves, or rather the most eminent men are those who have not ceased, who do not cease to cultivate themselves, to work; one has nothing without pain, and life is a perpetual labor. In order to assure the clientele of the instituteurs, they have been allowed to believe too much that education was conferred. Education is not conferred: it is worked at, and communicated. They have been inundated with republican catechisms, secular breviaries, formularies. That was advantageous for the authors of these volumes, and for the publishing houses. But it is not by reciting breviaries that a man forms himself, it is by reading, by looking, by listening. Let one read Rabelais or Calvin, Molière or Montaigne, Racine or Descartes, Pascal or Corneille, Rousseau or Voltaire, Vigny or Lamartine, it is by reading that a man forms himself, and not by reciting manuals. And it is, also, by working, modestly.