There have been brief seasons when the whole university world—students and faculties alike—has been afflicted with intellectual snobbishness, indifference, discouragement, disillusion, fatigue, and even despair.
The present has its share of disillusion and discouragement, but it is primarily a period of search. In the faculties, alongside of those figure-heads—in which faculties always and everywhere have been rich—who cling tenaciously to whatever is ancient, respectable, and commonplace, are men who are looking up and out.[70] M. Lavisse, for instance, with his recurring emphasis on the necessity of a closer union of the university with the people, is a sort of second (and a more scientific) Michelet; and M. Lavisse has several colleagues who are little, if any, behind him in large suggestiveness. The thought-stirring influence of the disinterested, investigating zeal of Pasteur (and his successors, Roux and Duclaux) and of Berthelot is also profound. A provincial professor, M. Hervé, has recently been disciplined for unblushing anti-patriotism.
The Collège Libre des Sciences Sociales (subsidised by the state) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales have flung their doors wide open to socialism. Furthermore, this once descried doctrine has a hold on the university itself. Just what the following of socialism is among the students, it is not possible, in the complete absence of reliable statistics, to determine; but it is safe to say that it is large and fervent, since student socialists appear in convincing force at every important socialistic demonstration.
At the last anniversary of the “Bloody Week” of the Commune, in Père-la-Chaise I chanced upon two students wearing red eglantines in their buttonholes, with whom I had taken my meals for several weeks previous without having been given the slightest intimation that they were interested in social or political problems, to say nothing of being socialists. The talk that resulted from this chance meeting revealed to me that they were actively affiliated with an important socialistic organisation, and that their convictions had marched fearlessly and far. There are many such unproclaimed and unsuspected socialists in the Quarter.
Anarchy also—that is, the philosophical type of anarchy so much in favour in certain literary and artistic and even in certain scientific groups—has an indefinite and fluctuating but extensive student penumbra.
No, the student’s noble aspirations have not all forsaken him. He abhors, as he has always abhorred, the prudish, the prudent, the politic, the hypocritical, and the mean. He has not become hopelessly subservient any more than he has become hopelessly morbid or hopelessly unsentimental. He can still resent dictation, as he can still laugh and love. If he truckles to his professors in the matter of Greek and Latin roots, it is that Greek and Latin roots are subjects of supreme indifference to him. When his honest thinking and his deeper emotions are concerned, he is as recalcitrant as ever. He recognises no authority, neither president nor prelate, general nor judge, nothing but his own sense of truth and right.
He is thinking. What is more, he is ready to accept the logical consequences of his thinking. When the time comes that these consequences tally with action, he will act. He has the same imperious need to act that he has to romp and to love. He looks to action—direct action, street action—for redress of wrong. He cannot help it: it is his nature. Intensity is the primal law of his being and will out, though he is merely telling a story, playing a joke, kissing a cheek, or singing a song. He is not fifty, and he is French. He has the Quixotism, the fine rashness, the sublime foolhardiness, of his years and of his race.
With a mobility impossible for the Teuton or Anglo-Saxon to understand, but which may be, notwithstanding, the highest form of self-control, he passes from vigorous frolic to vigorous work and vice versa instantaneously. For him it is no farther from a laugh or a kiss to a barricade than it is from a laugh to a kiss; and why should it be, when the laugh, the kiss, and the barricade are (as they are with him), co-ordinate assertions of liberty? “Frivolous as a pistol bullet,” he flashes to his mark. Given the impact of provocation, he does not know what veering or wabbling means.
Some contemporary—De Vogüé, I think—has said, “The student always rules those who think they are ruling him,” in which he resembles a womanly woman; “and, when the critical moment comes, he resumes his liberty of action.”
If he has not been on a barricade in thirty years, it is because neither Boulangism, Dreyfusism,[71] Déroulèdism, nor anti-Combeism, though he played some part in each, won, or deserved to win, his full allegiance. He has not taken the traditional chip off his shoulder, however, nor given any one permission to tread on his toes. On the contrary, he has shown flashes of his old temper, even in the tranquil third of a century just passed, often enough to leave no doubt of its persistence. It is only a little more than twenty years since the Quartier was in an uproar by reason of a slanderous article on the students published in the Cri du Peuple the day after the death of Jules Vallès.