It is only a round fifteen years since the students, taking into their own hands the punishment of the souteneurs of the Quartier, ducked a number of them in the frog-pond of the Luxembourg.
It is only ten years since the students set all Paris and all France by the ears because the government had interfered—unwarrantably, as they believed—with the immemorial usages of the Quat’z’ Arts ball. The Quartier was flooded with soldiers, blood was shed, and there was one life lost. The students carried their point. Parliament intervened, and the proceedings begun in the courts against the organisers of the ball were dropped. What the consequences might otherwise have been no one can tell; but it is almost certain they would have been not local, but national.
It is only six or seven years since it took a strong force of police to defend against the wrath of the students the director of the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, whose offence was nothing more heinous than favouring the sale, under school auspices, of the drawing materials, by dealing in which a medical student had hitherto earned the money to pursue his studies; and this state of things lasted several days. And only a little over two years ago the students protested as vigorously against the condemnation of Tailhade for his incendiary article in Le Libertaire as they had against the condemnation of Richepin for his Chansons des Gueux a quarter of a century before.
It was in a café of the Left Bank that French volunteers for the Boer war were recruited; and it was most of all from the students, when Kruger came to Paris, that the ministry feared the anti-British demonstrations that might bring international complications,—demonstrations which it craftily diverted by allowing the student pro-Boer enthusiasm the fullest scope.
The persecution of the Russian students by the Russian government aroused among the students of Paris no little sympathy, which was given expression in indignation meetings. It was probably quite as much the dread of the student displeasure as of the anarchist bomb that kept the czar on his last visit to France from entering Paris.
The above illustrations of the students’ irritability are the proverbial straws that show which way the wind blows, and they might be multiplied indefinitely.
There is no possible doubt of the student’s growing disgust with the corruption and hypocrisy of the present republic,—this nominal democracy that is in reality a plutocracy,—nor of his slowly crystallising resolution to have either something better than a republic or a better republic; and, in the long run, he always gets what he wants. The student strength is out of all proportion to the student numbers. Let the students take their old place in the streets of the Quartier to-morrow—5,000 or 500 strong—with a real rallying cry, and thrills of joy and shudders of apprehension will traverse the length and breadth of France.
