Maurice Barrès, who is at present an apostle of nationalism, was at one time classed as a “sentimental anarchist,”—an anarchist “with a rebel’s brain and a voluptuary’s nerves, who would wear purple and fine linen.” “I am an enemy of the laws,” he said at that time.
Among other French novelists and short-story writers of a certain reputation who are more or less revolutionary in tone may be mentioned:—
Georges Darien, author of Biribi-Armée d’Afrique, a novel of the convict-legion, which has proved a potent factor in lessening the rigours of the companies of discipline; Dubois-Dessaulle,[108] author of Sous la Casaque, who, after being released from the convict-legion to which he had been consigned (because a brochure by Jean Grave and an article by Sévérine were found in his knapsack), had the superhuman courage to soak his left arm in kerosene and set fire to it in order to avoid ever being sent back into this inferno; Jean Ajalbert, author of Sous le Sabre; Marcel Lami, author of La Débandade; Louis Lamarque, author of Un An de Caserne; Paul Brulat, author of La Faiseuse de Gloire, Le Nouveau Candide, La Gangue, and Eldorado, books replete with generous indignation against social abuses; Jean Lombard, one of the makers of the programme of the Congrès Régional of Paris (1880) which declared for class candidates, whose untimely death was a great loss to French literature; Camille Pert, author of En l’Anarchie; Henri Rainaldy, author of Delcros, an exposure of the cowardices and murderousness of society; Adolphe Retté, author of Le Régicide; Marcel Schwob, author of Spicilege; Mme. Sévérine, author of Pages Rouges; Frantz Jourdain, author of L’Atelier Chanterel; Zéphirin Raganasse, author of Fabrique de Pions; Louis Lumet, author of La Fièvre; M. Reepmaker, author of Vengeance; Théodore Chèze, Henri Fèvre, Jules Cazes, Pierre Valdagne, and the feuilletoniste Michel Zevacco.
A number of the revolutionists who are primarily public agitators have made attempts of varying merit to propagate their pet ideas through the medium of fiction. Such are Sébastien Faure with his romans-feuilletons and Jean Grave with his Malfaiteurs, his military romance, La Grande Famille, and his book for boys, Les Aventures de Nono.
The most thorough single-volume study that has as yet appeared of the psychology of the different varieties of contemporary revolutionary types, and of their aims and methods, is unquestionably J.-H. Rosny’s[109] romance, Le Bilatéral. But M. Rosny, although he has appeared on a public platform in company with professed révoltés, to protest against “La Cruauté Contemporaine,” is primarily a scientific observer, who cannot reasonably be classed as an agitator.
Like the hero of this romance (Hélier, the “Bilatéral,” who habitually looks at all sides of a subject, and then looks at them again), Rosny is impassive, impartial, tolerant, eclectic. Far from excusing the crimes and errors of the capitalistic state, he is equally far from throwing in his lot with those who would incontinently overturn it.
“To think,” says the Bilatéral to his doctrinaire socialist and anarchist friends, “that there are multitudes of brave souls like you who, like you, see only white and black. Nothing but white and black! Why, citoyens, the complex is grey, all shades of grey.”
Again he says: “You see, my dear” (he is speaking to an ardent socialist girl), “that in the things of the social order we meet rarely a problem simple enough to make it possible to assert;—‘it is this’ or ‘it is that.’ Generally, between this and that there are an endless number of points to elucidate.... There is a high civilisation with plenty of grain, with immense unemployed forces, with a science already so large that it can resolve the problem of giving to all a nest and nourishment; ... and those above are stupid, and those below are stupid, and all so evilly disposed! My God! dear child, if the people were not a brutal instinct, we might indeed hope for a consoling solution.”
Still, again, speaking to a group upon the Bourse: “‘History, science, daily observation, demonstrate to us that nothing durable is elaborated without the aid of the great collaborator, Time. Did this horse-chestnut-tree grow in a day? And you would have the humanity which has evolved so slowly—oh, so slowly!—through myriads of years, humanity bounded by prejudices, by predispositions against progressive ideas, humanity which includes a hundred social sects ready to combat each other,—you would have this humanity change by means of a lousy, bloody, revolution? Granted that once, after centuries of patience, a cataclysm like that of ‘93 occurred. (And, even so, France, properly speaking, has no reason to felicitate itself over Jacobinism.) But you pretend to establish as a normal condition these cataclysms which can be only the exception in the social life; and it is this that I am powerless to conceive.’
“‘Bravo!’ exclaimed the bourgeois.