The first number of L’Endehors appeared in May, 1891, immediately after the massacre of Fourmies,—in which old men, women, and children, among them a young girl bearing a hawthorn sprig by way of a flag of truce, were shot down by the troops of the government,—and dealt bravely and scathingly with this horrible incident; and the last number was issued in January, 1893, when the paper was forcibly suppressed.
The staff of L’Endehors defended and even glorified Ravachol. Mirbeau’s “Apologie de Ravachol” (referred to above) is one of the finest bits of impassioned writing he has ever done. Paul Adam’s “Eloge de Ravachol” is also noteworthy. Here is a brief extract:—
“Politics would have been banished completely from our preoccupations, had not the legend of sacrifice, of the gift of a life for the happiness of humanity, suddenly reappeared in our epoch, with the martyrdom of Ravachol.... At the end of all these judicial proceedings, chroniques, and calls to legal murder, Ravachol stands as the unmistakable propagator of the great idea of the ancient religions, which extolled the seeking of death by the individual for the good of the world,—the abnegation of one’s self, of one’s life, and one’s good name by the exaltation of the humble and the poor. Ravachol is plainly the restorer of the essential sacrifice....
“He saw suffering round about him, and he has ennobled the suffering of others by offering his own in a holocaust. His incontestable charity and disinterestedness, the energy of his acts, his courage before inevitable death, lift him into the splendours of legend. In this time of cynicism and of irony A SAINT IS BORN TO US. His blood will be the example from which new courages and new martyrs will spring. The grand idea of universal altruism will bloom in the red pool at the foot of the guillotine. A fruitful death is about to be consummated. An event of human history is about to be inscribed in the annals of the peoples. The legal murder of Ravachol will open a new era.”
L’Endehors prophesied (or rather supposed), in an article entitled “Notre Complot,” Vaillant’s attempt against the Chamber;[114] and the ex-members of its staff participated, after its supposition had become a fact, in the phenomenal demonstrations at Vaillant’s tomb. The indignation in literary circles over the execution of Vaillant was so intense that M. Magnard in Le Figaro uttered a vigorous protest against “la Vaillantolâtrie”; and the most orthodox writers in the most orthodox journals suddenly proclaimed the necessity of stemming this tide of anarchistic heresy in high places (to which L’Endehors had, so to speak, first given a habitation and a name) by the accomplishment of a number of necessary but long-delayed legal and social reforms.
The unlettered protagonist of Augustin Léger’s novel Le Journal d’un Anarchiste appreciates the review conducted by one Hector de la Roche-Sableuse, of which L’Endehors may well have been the model, in the following fashion:—
“After all, in spite of their gibberish, these reviews of the jeunes gens lent me by Roche-Sableuse are sometimes interesting. They shed crocodile tears over the lot of the people? It is possible. They do not believe a word of what they write? I do not say no. All this does not prevent them from seeing clearly at times, and from putting their fingers often on the truth. Besides, although these fine little messieurs are not in the least anxious at heart for the triumph of the proletariat, because they know very well that it would remove several cushions from under their elbows, they understand and they expound perfectly the legitimacy of our claims. And I applaud with both hands the eulogiums they pronounce on the noble victims our cause already counts. In short, they have interested me, and I have learned not a little from them.”
L’Endehors was publicly praised by Georges Clemenceau, Henri Bauer, Laurent-Tailhade, and Jean de Mitty. The last-named said of it:—
“This little sheet so modest in appearance and at the same time so fastidious in make-up that it might easily have been taken for a club periodical or for the exclusive organ of a few æsthetes, raised more tempests and provoked more passions than a riot in the street. Violent it certainly was, and violent with a violence which, for wearing always a literary, subtile, and complex form, penetrated no less deeply, and gained no less to its object the scattered energies and wills that were craving definite guidance. Opportune or not, the influence of L’Endehors was exerted effectively.... But, aside from its action on public affairs, the journal of Zo d’Axa realised an incontestable intellectual effort; and it is for the beauty of this effort that it pleases me to invoke it.”
It is to be noted that Emile Henry, in whose pontifical attitude before his judges even his bitterest antagonists found “something atrociously superior and disquieting,” and in whom the sympathetic Albert Delacour discerns, or thinks he discerns (by reason of his solitary meditations, his perpetual ratiocination, his hatred of action up to the moment of supreme action, his disgust with life,[115] and his brooding on death), a modern Hamlet, is the only member of the Endehors group who has committed an overt act of violence.