Of the rest, some have since identified themselves closely with socialism, some with Boulangism and nationalism, and some with anarchism; some have given themselves to the creation of the humorous or the beautiful without too obvious a destructive prepossession; and some have held themselves scrupulously “endehors.”
Most have remained révoltés of one sort or another. Only a few have conformed, and a part of these only outwardly. Thus Paul Adam, who has seemed several times, by reason of the enormous range of his interests and the disconcerting agility of his intelligence, to be utterly lost to revolution, has written, nevertheless, a number of novels of revolutionary trend. He published in 1900 a defence of Bresci which might have been written the very same day as his “Eloge” of Ravachol, and he reaffirmed his essential anarchism as late as the spring of 1904.
Of those who have remained strictly “endehors,” Zo d’Axa,[116] uncorrected by hard experiences of prison and exile, resumed in 1898 his assault upon the abuses of society in his now famous Feuilles with a fierceness, a versatility, an independence, a finesse, a facility in anathema, and a redundance in disdain that have rarely, if ever, been matched in revolutionary pamphleteering—and privateering. It was as if Mirbeau, with all the withering force of his mighty scorn, had descended into the street, or as if Père Peinard had attained the level of literature.
The Feuilles de Zo d’Axa appeared irregularly in the form of placards, as events invited, during the troubled years of 1898 and 1899, and created an enormous sensation. Nothing was exempt from the sharpshooting of this guerilla of the asphalt,—this handsome, red-bearded “mousquetaire chercheur de justes aventures,” whom all Paris knows by his picturesque brown cape and felt.
“To the argument of the multitude,” he wrote in his salutatory, “to the catechism of the crowds, to all the raisons-d’état of the collectivity, behold the personal reasons of the Individual oppose themselves!... He goes his way, he acts, he takes aim, because a combative instinct makes him prefer the chase to the nostalgic siesta. On the borders of the code he poaches the big game,—officers and judges, bucks or carnivori. He dislodges from the forests of Bondy the herd of politicians. He amuses himself by snaring the ravaging financier. He beats up at all the cross-roads the domesticated gent de lettres, fur and feathers; all the debauchers of ideas, all the monsters of the press and the police.”
Lucien Descaves compares the series of Zo d’Axa’s writings to “a beautiful road bordered with pity and hatred and paved with wrath and revolt.”
He says further of him: “Zo d’Axa’s phrase is rapid. The fuse of his articles is short. When a match is approached to them, something is bound to explode; and D’Axa is quite capable of sacrificing himself, if need be, in the explosion. He has proved it.”
The suppression of L’Endehors (whose complete file is now one of the rarities of the book-mart) and the consequent dispersion of the Endehors band were soon followed by the formation of another revolutionary coterie of young poets, men of letters, and sociologists, called “Le Groupe de l’Idée Nouvelle.” This group (of whom Paul Adam, A. Hamon, Victor Barrucand, and Jean Carrière were the most prominent figures) organised a series of soirées-conférences, which were given at the Hôtel Continental, during the winter of 1893-94, with great success.
