“‘I have nothing to do with your bravos!’ cried the Bilatéral, with a shade of nervousness. ‘If their ignorance saddens me, your rottenness exasperates me; and it is not of protecting the rich that I think, but of preventing a generous minority of the poor from getting themselves butchered to no purpose or from casting France into the maw of the rival powers. As to the vile and cowardly cormorants, the whole race of big and little parasites, the vermin that swarm in this pseudo-republic alongside of the Orleanist penny-scrapers and the pests of imperialism, if I had only to press a button to annihilate them all, I would not hesitate a second.’”
Other fiction writers who have shown an understanding of the gravity of the revolutionary issue, a familiarity with revolutionary tenets and the workings of the revolutionary mind, but whose points of view are either neutral, like Rosny’s, or frankly hostile, are Rachilde, Jane de la Vaudère, Augustin Léger, Paul Dubost, and Adolphe Chenevière. These have aided the propaganda, in their own despite, by rendering the revolutionary types familiar and comprehensible, and so lifting them out of the category of monsters.
It seems that Emile Henry’s favourite book, his “livre de chevet,” the book which he contrived to secrete in his cell during a part of his imprisonment, and which his jailers, when they pounced upon it, imagined to be of the most incendiary nature, was Cervantes’ Don Quixote. And it is not infrequently the case, in this matter of literature, that the most potent revolutionary agents are those which make the least pretence of being so. The masterpieces of the humourists Meilhac, Halévy, Tristan Bernard, Jules Renard, Pierre Veber, and Georges Courtéline, which hold up to ridicule rather than to reprobation the emptiness and baseness of society; such books of pity and of pardon as Daudet’s Jack, Goncourt’s Fille Elisa, and Loti’s Livre de la Pitié et de la Mort; books of aspiration, like Prévost’s Confessions d’un Amant and Bourget’s Terre Promise; of wrath, like Léon Daudet’s Morticoles; of “revolt against Puritanism,” like Pierre Louys’ Aphrodite; of energy, like Barrès’ Déracinés; of searching, like Huysmanns’ Cathédrale; of regret, like Bazin’s Terre qui Meurt; of unmoral pessimism, like De Maupassant’s Bel-Ami; and the whole range of disquieting feminist fiction,—may turn out to be the most active social ferments and the real forerunners (little as their authors would wish it) of violent change,—of revolt and revolution!
All contemporary fiction, in fact, has in it something of the doubt, the trouble, and the protest of the period; and, once upon this tack, nothing less than a minute examination of every novel and volume of short stories that has appeared since the Franco-Prussian war would be imposed.
Of the essayists, critics, and philosophers[110] who are more or less militant iconoclasts and révoltés, the most important are:—
A. Ferdinand Hérold, who expounds his attitude as follows: “From the time I was able to think a little for myself, I have had an anarchist mind. I mean that I have always had a horror of undisputed authority, of dogmatism, and of conventional ideas,—ideas which, the greater part of the time, one does not attempt to justify to himself”; Camille Mauclair, who says: “If anarchy is primarily the reform of ethics, in accordance with the principles of individualism, I can declare squarely that anarchy was born in me, with the study of metaphysics and the awakening of sensibility in the period when I began to know myself.... Furthermore, pity for the disinherited and execration of the spoliators is a point of honour for the few clean and upright people who are still to be found in the world”; Bernard Lazare,[111] who says: “Authority, its value, and its raison d’être are things which I have never been able to comprehend. That a man arrogate to himself the right to domineer over his fellows, in any fashion whatsoever, is still inconceivable to me. At first I regarded myself as the only victim of baneful circumstances and vicious wills. Later I came to consider mankind at large; and from my own sentiments I divined the feelings of those who more or less continuously, or at some moment of their existence, are slaves. Then what had appeared to me odious for myself appeared to me odious for all”; Gustave Geffroy, who devoted a decade to his biography of the Communard Blanqui, entitled L’Enfermé; Henry Mazel, who exclaimed in the Mercure de France, “We are all anarchists, thank God!” Alfred Naquet, a convert from nationalism; Urbain Gohier, author of L’Armée contre la Nation; Victor Charbonnel, ex-priest and editor of La Raison, and Henri Bérenger, editor of L’Action, who have acted together in exciting the masses to anti-clerical rioting; the socialist-anthropologist Charles Letourneau; the bacteriologists Melchnikoff, Roux, and Duclaux;[112] Charles Albert and Armand Charpentier, apostles of l’amour libre; Christian Cornélissen, Georges Pioch, Jean Jullien, G. Bachot, Léopold Lacour, Jules Laforgue,[112] B. Guineaudau, Auguste Chirac, Albert Delacour, E. Fournière, Jacques Santarelle, Louis Lumet, Maurice Bigeon, A. Hamon, Camille de St. Croix, Félix Fénéon, Han Ryner, Alex. Cohen, Henri Bauer,[112] Charles Vallier, Gabriel de la Salle, Emile Michelet, Laurent Tailhade, Francis de Pressensé, Maurice Le Blond, Saint-Georges de Bouhélier, G. Lhermitte, Paul Robin, Eugène Montfort, and Gustave Kahn.
In the first months of 1891 a weekly publication called L’Endehors[113] (The Outsider) was founded by a band of young literary men. They were Zo d’Axa, Roinard, Georges Darien, Félix Fénéon, Lucien Descaves, Victor Barrucand, Arthur Byl, A. Tabarant, Bernard Lazare, Charles Malato, Pierre Quillard, Ghil, Edmond Cousturier, Henri Fèvre, Edouard Dubus, A. F. Hérold, Georges Lecomte, Etienne Decrept, Emile Henry, Saint-Pol-Roux, Jules Méry, Alexandre Cohen, J. LeCoq, Chatel, Cholin, Ludovic Malquin, Camille Mauclair, Octave Mirbeau, Lucien Muhlfeld, Pierre Veber, Victor Melnotte, A. Mercier, Tristan Bernard, Paul Adam, Charles Saunier, Jean Ajalbert, Emile Verhaeren, Henri de Regnier, and Francis Vielé-Griffin.
The journal bore by way of epigraph this phrase of its leading spirit and director, Zo d’Axa: “Celui que rien n’enrôle et qu’une impulsive nature guide seule, ce hors la loi, ce hors d’école, cet isolé chercheur d’au delà, ne se dessine-t-il pas dans ce mot, L’Endehors?”
It explained its purpose as follows: “We belong neither to a party nor to a group. We are outsiders. We go on our way, individuals, without the Faith which saves and blinds. Our disgust with society does not engender convictions in us. We fight for the pleasure of fighting without dreaming of a better future. What matter to us the to-morrows which in the centuries shall be! What matter to us the little nephews! It is endehors, outside of all laws, of all rules, of all theories, even anarchistic; it is now, from this moment, that we wish to give ourselves over to our compassions, to our transports, to our gentleness, to our wrath, to our instincts, with the proud consciousness of being ourselves.”