Petites garnisons

TWELFTH CAHIER OF THE FIFTH SERIES

A CAHIER OF DISPATCHES

SMALL GARRISONS LAVAL — ORLEANS — PARIS

FOREWORD

Charles Péguy

In the fourteenth cahier of the third series, approved for printing on Tuesday, April 22, 1902, we published from our collaborator Félicien Challaye a brief dispatch: Russia Seen from Vladivostok, Journal of an Expelled Man; the first day of this journal was Friday, June 21, 1901, and the last Monday, June 24.

From Vladivostok Challaye returned to teach in Laval, in France. Immediately I asked him for a reciprocal dispatch: France Seen from Laval. By this I meant that there would be good dispatches to write from France and from places we believe we know. The strange is not always in foreign lands; one would make immense discoveries at home; one would obtain singular results if one knew how to look at the familiar country with an unfamiliar gaze — to look at France as if one were not of it. I also meant, in a way, that a France seen from Laval would not be without correspondence to a Russia seen from Vladivostok, because not all servitudes reside in Russia.

I am particularly happy that this new dispatch from Challaye is ready at the time of the municipal elections. How arrondissement and commune elections are conducted is what a dispatch like the one about to be read allows us to picture. How they are prepared is what Challaye himself was recently able to experience. He had agreed to give in Evreux, another small garrison where he had taught and kept friendly connections, a series of popular lectures on socialism. These lectures were organized under the auspices of the Society of Republican Youth; this Society serves there, if you will, as a People’s University. The lectures were fixed on certain dates; they were held on Sundays. The first lecture, The Socialist Critique, went well — it was the first, and people are used to socialists criticizing. It has even become something of their social function in the bourgeois world, by mutual agreement. If they did not criticize, they would look like they wanted to be revolutionaries, like they wanted to change habits. A certain conservative instinct of the republican and reactionary bourgeois is flattered when they see socialists criticize: it is a sign, obviously, that nothing has changed yet.

The second lecture, The Socialist Ideal, stirred hardly any commotion. The bourgeois likes to hear about ideals; on a fine afternoon, talking about ideals warms the heart a little. During the third lecture, The Realization of the Socialist Ideal, the speaker noticed diverse movements. People were looking at one another; a very slightly turbulent hall — for while talking about an ideal after a good meal warms the heart, an ideal that one talks about realizing becomes singularly alarming. Challaye was explaining to his listeners that the social revolution, properly understood, did not foreclose the future, that it did not claim to institute a definitive, stable, fixed state — that progress, which has marched so far, marches and would always march — that for example it was not forbidden to imagine that liberty would grow greater every day and that one might arrive at organizations of increasing anarchism, at increasing anarchies. This word anarchy has, in small garrisons, an extraordinary power of terror. People were looking at each other, embarrassed, pained, ashamed to find themselves there, to have heard this word, in front of so-and-so, who had also heard it, to have been at a lecture where this word had been spoken — in public, in front of everyone. And upon leaving, Challaye could well see that people were still looking at one another, and that something was amiss.

Back in Paris, he received a letter from his friends in Evreux asking him, in the name of their very friendship and in the higher interest of the Republic, not to give his fourth lecture. The municipal elections were approaching, and such lectures would cost the republican slate a tremendous number of votes.

Dedicated to the few sincere socialists who still imagine, today, after so many unhappy experiences, that electoral, political, parliamentary radicalism paves the way to socialism. Notice and information for democrats concerned with studying in reality the functioning of universal suffrage: the whole game of electoral radicalism comes down to doing whatever the voters ask, whatever it may be, to be sure of getting their votes. Let us hasten, republicans, to be reactionary, so that it is not the reactionaries who do it.

Charles Peguy

Félicien Challaye — FRANCE SEEN FROM LAVAL

The Purpose

To write the psychology of a small city of 30,000 inhabitants, situated in western France; to describe its moral, religious, political, and social life by studying the events that occur there over the course of a year; and thus to establish what forces of resistance and what forces of progress contend there — such is the object of this monograph on Laval.

Stendhal said that to know France one must spend eight to ten months in a small provincial city unaccustomed to seeing strangers. Laval fits this definition.

It would be false to say that all of France suffers, like Laval, under the tyranny of a Catholic and reactionary state of mind. But the word tyranny must be understood broadly. When it is not Catholic clericalism that oppresses consciences, it is radical anticlericalism, or nationalist patriotism, or Protestant moralism, or the verbal socialism of certain revolutionaries. Everywhere hidden tyrannies limit the liberty of individuals. Everywhere public opinion, mediocre and cowardly, seeks to crush interesting initiatives. Men who dare to will are rare everywhere. What small towns need to awaken, what the nation needs to prosper, what humanity needs to progress, what socialism needs to fulfill itself, is a growing number of audacious consciences.

The City

Laval, capital of the department of the Mayenne, is a city of 30,374 inhabitants on the Mayenne River, at 74 meters altitude. Geographies say that Laval is 301 kilometers from Paris; the Lavalois think that Paris is 301 kilometers from Laval.

The city stretches along a double hillside at the foot of which flow the slow waters of the Mayenne. One can have a harmonious panoramic view from the top of the viaduct, 28 meters high, over which passes the Paris-Brest rail line. On autumn mornings especially, the landscape evokes reveries and reflections. A light fog envelops the city, veiling the detail of streets and rooftops; one sees clearly only the spires of numerous churches and the ruins of an old castle. Mystic bell sounds traverse the gray mists. One senses a city faithful to the past, living on memories, pious and feudal. A melancholy impression, which Rodenbach would have known how to savor: it is Laval-the-Dead.

The Inhabitants

What strikes one upon arriving in Laval is the slowness with which life unfolds. In Paris, in London, in Chicago, people hurry through the streets, on foot, by carriage, by bicycle, by tramway, by omnibus. Each person runs to work, to pleasure, to the satisfaction of needs, to the realization of dreams. Carried along in this formidable agitation, one is, as if necessarily, swept into action. And watching the most diverse beings succeed one another in the crowd — so many costumes, so many attitudes, so many expressions — one feels one’s intelligence expand; one senses the complexity of souls; one pities their thousand ways of suffering.

In Laval, no movement in the streets, except at the hours when workers go to their work or return. People walk slowly, slowly. One draws attention to oneself by walking fast. It is always the same people one meets in the same places; always the same posters one sees at the same crossroads; always the same shop fronts one looks at in the same stores. No work is urgent: they take weeks to pave a small street; they ask for several days to fill the slightest order. In this somnolent life, immobility prevails over movement. All conservation seems good; all change seems odious.

In the somnolent small city, most people are bored. Astonishing malady, boredom: it would be so easy not to be bored, by working and by loving. Work gives the certainty of being useful; love calls forth love. The joy of being useful, the joy of being loved would suffice to fill a life. And there is still all of science and all of art; there is the joy of taking an interest in all the complexities of humanity and of the universe. In the small city, people are not cultivated enough to take great pleasure in these intellectual enjoyments; not generous enough to devote themselves to a great cause that would be at every moment a new reason to live.

Public Opinion

In the small city, everyone knows everyone, and each constantly seeks to know what all the others are doing. At home, behind the window curtains, one watches the passersby, and from their dress and bearing, one tries to guess where they are going. Behind the curtains, one notes with care the people you greet, those you stop in the street, those you walk with. One interprets the amplitude of hat-tippings, the tenderness of smiles; one tries to guess sympathies and antipathies.

If a young man and a young woman talk together in the street — with that good Anglo-Saxon familiarity which must eventually be introduced into our French customs — immediately one imagines a marriage or an adultery.

The fundamental sentiment of the inhabitants, the one that orients their entire psychological life, is the concern, the fear, the respect, the obsession with opinion.

Most seek to disarm criticism, to avoid being talked about, by conforming to all customs, by doing, as they say, what is done. The same word condemns gross dishonesty and generous initiative alike: people would talk about it; it is not done. What is done is a monotonous succession of small, selfish, petty, and flat acts. What is done is to be contemptuous toward the small and groveling before the strong. Life in the small city is a daily education in cowardice.

And it is also a daily education in vanity. People seek less to be happy than to be envied. To appear rich or influential — that is everything.

The most powerful man in the world is the one who is most alone. (Ibsen, An Enemy of the People)

The economic movement is not yet sufficiently developed in Laval for classes to be sharply differentiated. Large industry, large commerce are still unknown; medium industry is barely making its appearance. Workers can still fairly easily become small merchants; small merchants can still fairly easily become small employers. Almost all Lavalois, whatever their social group, were born Catholic; many are practicing Catholics.

The Newspapers

The newspapers in Laval, as elsewhere, are commercial enterprises designed to support a few journalists and to bring income to a few capitalists. The group of reactionary newspapers is by far the most important. La Mayenne is the Catholic-clerical journal, resolutely hostile to the secular Republic. Le Courrier du Maine, a weekly, is the royalist journal. The only republican newspaper of any standing is L’Avenir de la Mayenne, which supports a policy of republican union with much diplomacy. Its editors are personally advanced republicans, but its readers include Catholics and moderates alongside radicals, and great tact is needed to maintain agreement among these opposing elements.

Remarkable fact: the editors of L’Avenir know the historical fact of Dreyfus’s innocence; and yet they write: “L’Avenir de la Mayenne has never been Dreyfusard, and we consider this epithet an insult.” (Avenir, March 22, 1903)

Religious Life

In the small city, populated almost exclusively by Catholics, many of them practicing, it is religious questions that first command attention. Not that religious feeling is sincere and deep here; not that it penetrates hearts and creates new ways of living. In Laval, as elsewhere, there are few Christian souls. But religion is one of those generally accepted conventions to which individuals owe obedience. It is proper to be Catholic.

Everything in Laval reveals the importance of Catholicism: the great number of churches and chapels; the frequency of priests in the streets, their proud and domineering manner; the multiplicity of saints’ niches in the houses of the old quarters. On Sundays, men and women go to mass and vespers in their fine clothes, proud to exhibit their provincial luxury, happy to humiliate the poor. It is an inferior, petty, sad paganism. In the churches, in the front rows, the rich triumph — the worldly, the idle, the powerful, the well-placed — all the enemies of Jesus. Nothing in common between the Catholicism of the well-dressed Lavalois and the Christianity of the ragged followers of Jesus along the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

[Challaye’s monograph continues at great length through sections on: the struggle between the bishop and the religious congregations; the education system and its politics; the military garrison and its moral influence on the city; the working class and its conditions; the courts and justice system; the local political dynamics around Dreyfus, nationalism, and socialism; and an extended analysis of how provincial opinion-making works. The text is a remarkably detailed sociological portrait of Third Republic provincial France.]

Georges Clemenceau — SAVONAROLE

[The cahier concludes with an essay by Georges Clemenceau on the play Savonarole from Gabriel Trarieux’s dramatic trilogy The Vanquished.]

Let us stop here. On this word of hope, I wish to close the beautiful book of M. Trarieux. It is a great thought of this young man to have offered us, at the precise hour where we stand, high meditations on the great vanquished of History. Others presented themselves in abundance. I would have wished to show the deep bond of souls in the three dramas he has chosen. The reader would tire of so many articles on the same subject. I shall know how to limit myself. It suffices me to have suggested that all these accumulations of defeats are victories in the making, and that there are never any historically vanquished except those who are wrong. Let M. Trarieux, above all, be thanked for having given us the strong joy of his poetry, of his thought. There is still a youth in France. Let us hope.

GEORGES CLEMENCEAU