“The chanson, like the bayonet,” says Jules Claretie, “is a French weapon.... We are afraid of the chanson. It is a dishevelled personage who tells the truth. We exile it, we pursue it. M. Javert pursued not otherwise Fantine.... We are afraid of it because it is necessarily, fatally, of the opposition. It has no reason for existence, if it is not factious.... From the Mazarinades to the amusing Chansons Rosses of Fursy, the chanson has administered fillips to the powers. It is its lot. I add, it is its right.... Vive la chanson! even the cruel chanson, when it is a sort of Daumier!”
Only a small percentage of the songs heard in the cabarets artistiques et littéraires of Montmartre are frankly revolutionary or even “of the opposition,” in the narrow partisan sense of that phrase; but they nearly all “tell the truth to people,” they are nearly all satirical and captious to the last degree—“of the opposition,” that is, in the broader sense of the phrase. They assail all the existing institutions,—army, state, church, property, and marriage,—not with the direct invective which would put them at the censorship’s mercy, but with the ridicule which in Paris, as in perhaps no other spot on the globe, is more potent than invective, and before which the censorship, though it turn pale and tear its hair with rage, is powerless.
Jules Jouy,[100] one of the bright particular stars of the Chat Noir and of several of its successors and imitators, was at once a veritable Gavroche for saucy wit and a fervent pleader for the poor. He was a regular contributor to several socialistic sheets; and his Chansons de Bataille—La Terre, Les Enfants et les Mères, La Veuve, Fille d’Ouvrier, Les Inconnus, La Grève Noire, Pâle Travailleur, Victimes du Travail, Le Sang des Martyrs, La Carmagnole des Meurts-de-Faim, etc.—are superb examples of the chanson of social revolt and reclamation.
The manager of the Casino des Concièrges, Le Cabaret des Pommes-de-terre Frites, and La Purée Sociale, was an ancient revolutionist, Maxime Lisbonne, who had distinguished himself on a barricade of the Place du Panthéon during the Commune.
In the supper-rooms of the Clou the anarchist poet Paul Paillette was wont to recite his anarchist poems, and the Clou is still a favourite meeting-place for revolutionary groups.
At the Quat’z’ Arts Marcel Legay varies his répertoire of sentimental and patriotic ballads with the stirring revolutionary chansons of Maurice Boukay and J. B. Clément; Gaston Couté recites his subversive “Les Conscrits” and “Le Christ en Bois”; Eugène Lemercier with genial malice, Gaston Sécot with waggery, and Yon Lug with Chinese imperturbability ridicule officialism in its every phase; Xavier Privas (Prince of Chansonniers by formal election), in his highly individual and snappy fashion, renders—between two idyls—his fine socialistic song Les Résignés or exalts poverty with his Noël or Testament de Pierrot; and Jehan Rictus intones his heart-breaking Soliloques du Pauvre.
The Quat’z’ Arts has also had courses of Sunday afternoon lectures on the chanson by the socialist deputies Clovis Hugues and Maurice Boukay.
The Boîte à Fursy, though catering palpably to the snobs, is shut up nearly every season by an irate censorship, and this more often for reasons of politics than from any consideration of public morality.
“I have been allowed this merit, and it is the sole one I claim,” says Fursy, in the introduction to his Chansons Rosses, “of never letting pass, or rarely letting pass, a salient happening without singing it immediately, and attempting to draw from it, in a refrain, the morality—or immorality—which the worthy man called Monsieur Tout-le-Monde assigns it in his talk. I do my utmost not to lose time, and to serve actuality piping hot. I am really satisfied only when I manage to sing, in the evening, couplets inspired by that morning’s event; and I have had the luck almost always to succeed.”
Even the Cabarets du Ciel, de l’Enfer, and du Néant—which, being mainly dependent for their effects upon machinery, hardly