Every convulsion Paris has undergone has proved the truth of Vallès’ mordant sentences. What was the Commune, indeed, but the joint self-assertion of the déclassés?
“Déclassés,” wrote Richepin of the leaders of the Commune shortly after its suppression, “from the unrecognised general, Cluseret, to the unappreciated caricaturist, Pilotell; from the intelligent deputy, Millière, to the lunatic, Allix; from the great painter, Courbet, to the ex-monk, Panille, and tutti quanti; déclassés of politics, like Delescluze and Pyat, of journalism and of literature, like Vallès, Vermesch, Vermorel, Grousset, Vésinier, Maroleau; of the army, like Rossel, of the workshop, like Assi, of the brasserie, like Rigault, of lower still, like Johamard.”
Not all these starving, suiciding, freakish, jesting Latin Quarter Bohemians are conscious socialists and anarchists, though there is a good proportion of them who are,—a greater proportion probably than among the students proper, by as much as their situations are more precarious; but they nearly all hold vaguely subversive humanitarian views, and they are all, even the Bohemians by choice, réfractaires and révoltés. Like the Thélémites of Rabelais, they all recognise but the one law which is no law,—“Fay ce que vouldras.”
Their way of living is a species of the propagande par l’exemple from which it is a quick and easy step to the propagande par le fait. Given a crisis, réfractaire, révolté, and révolutionnaire spell very much the same thing. They are all ripe for disorder.
The victims of the misère en habit noir—the poor doctors, teachers, lawyers, petty functionaries, and clerks—are, in the nature of the case, more submissive to their fate than the free-living freaks, littérateurs, and artists; but there are evidences that they, too, are beginning to think of stepping over the bounds within which patience is a virtue.
M. Paul Webre, one of a group of young men of means and education—evolutionists, not revolutionists—who have pursued the laboratory method of studying the conditions, the psychology, and the relations to society of various employments, has given the following testimony to the expectant, if unaggressive, attitude of the small clerks:—
“My relatively frail health forbidding me work in a factory, I sought a place as a clerk. After twenty ineffectual applications I succeeded in crossing the threshold of an insurance company. I earn there 100 francs a month, on which I manage to live without resorting to my income. I carry with me in the morning a lunch of bread, cheese, and a slice of ham or sausage, and I talk with my comrades of the office. Some are married. These are the most unfortunate; but they reflect that, if they quit their meagre situations, there are innumerable persons in the streets ready to vie with each other to obtain them, and they cling to them for dear life. Nevertheless, their hatred is brooding. While taking cold bites during the hour of respite which the avaricious administration accords us, we pass our chiefs in review, and compare their profits with our own. The director has a salary of 100,000 francs, the president is several times a millionaire; while we, morbleu! Oh, the monotonous days! the repulsive work! the ominous end of the month! and the certainty of plodding along for twenty years in the same fashion, only to be sent away at last without resource! It is poverty in the frayed frock-coat, the worst poverty. I have tried to organise the discontented, but they have a terror of compromising themselves and of making themselves marks for the Company’s blows. So, bending over their documents, they spy the growlings in the street, ready to descend there, in their turn, when the revolution asserts itself. The atmosphere in which these petty clerks stagnate is saturated with bitterness, with rancours, with regrets, with deceived ambitions. Terrible eruptions are being prepared therein. And I cry to the capitalists: ‘Take care! Transform these enemies into friends, these anarchists into conservators! Share your profits with them. Throw them a honey-cake while there is still time.’”
THE SECOND-HAND BOOK MARKET OF THE LATIN QUARTER