“Let us begin at the beginning. Let us lay the corner-stone of a social edifice which shall shelter our children FREE AND RECONCILED IN THE COMMON HAPPINESS.
“Let us silence the ambitious who see in the suffering of the people only a means of attaining their ends. Let us replace the politics of personalities (so remote from the interests of the masses) by a finely human organisation of things. Let us vote for the idea which cannot betray us.
“LET US VOTE FOR FREE BREAD!
“Victor Barrucand.”[107]
In Avec le Feu, a novel whose action is placed in the troubled period of the execution of Vaillant and the overt act of Emile Henry, M. Barrucand has given an exceedingly subtle and suggestive study of the disgust with society of a certain element of the intellectual élite, and of the reasons for their espousal of the anarchist cause.
The principal character, one Robert, is a good type of the cultured, semi-neurasthenic anarchist of a period chiefly characterised by its restlessness and yearning:—
“On certain evenings he descended into the street, and saturated himself with the crowd. On the benches he breathed the mortality of the squares. He suffered for these miserable cattle who bleed no more under the goad of conscience. He roamed entire nights as chance led, hunting the débris of souls, exploring with his emotions, as with a dark lantern, the pavements of the drowsy city. At daybreak he came back shivering, coughing, weary with over-walking, drunk with pity, his stomach steeped in bad drinks. He concluded then that labour had brutalised the species, and he sought the secret of lifting it up. On these mornings he speculated daringly, dreamed of sacrifices, of revolts, of noble disdains, of ferocious protests against philanthropy and respectability. A savour of death blended with his charity and perfumed his heroic sleep.”
The novel ends dramatically, not with bomb-throwing, but with suicide, which this strange anarchist hero, who aspires to bomb-throwing, without having the necessary force of character to achieve it, chooses in its stead.
It would be unfair to class M. Barrucand as an anarchist, or even as a revolutionist, on the strength of this book, in spite of the generally sympathetic tone which pervades it. In fact, M. Barrucand’s philosophy as displayed therein is of so cynical and, at times, of so flippant an order, his temperament so weary and so buoyant, his moral outlook so severe and lackadaisical, his style so lurid and simple, his appreciations so morbid and sane, and his literary method so impressionistic, realistic, and symbolic, by turns, that it would be rash to draw any conclusions from it whatsoever, did not his attitude in his other works—notably in his two historical biographies, La Vie Véritable du Citoyen Rossignol, Vainqueur de la Bastille, and Mémoires et Notes de Choudieu, Représentant du Peuple—and his identification with the movement for Free Bread enroll him definitively in the ranks of revolt.