M. Adam exaggerates, as he is very apt to do. Nevertheless, in spite of a great deal that is immature, amateurish, intemperate, and fantastic about most of them, the revues des jeunes are one of the most significant phenomena of these latter years.
They have been an appreciable disturbing force. The names of most of the writers mentioned in this chapter are repeatedly appearing in their tables of contents; and their prospectuses abound in such tell-tale phrases as these: “art libre,” “beauté sociale,” “vie féconde et humanité forte,” “dévoiler les intrigues, combattre les abus,” “tribune ouverte,” “idées hardies et généreuses,” “l’âme purement désintéressée des futurs Etats-Unis d’Europe,” “l’art existe pour la vie,” “la cité radieuse où l’humanité affranchie vivra enfin dans l’harmonie, dans la justice, et dans la force.”
Furthermore, such publications as Le Mercure de France, La Grande Revue (edited by Fernand Labori, defender of anarchists and of Dreyfus), La Plume (whose soirées littéraires have enjoyed an international renown), La Revue de Paris, La Revue, La Contemporaine, La Vogue, L’Hermitage, and La Grande France, by extending the hospitality of their columns to the exploitation of the most advanced theories and ideas, have—without claiming to be revolutionary or, at any rate, without limiting themselves to propaganda—effectively supplemented the efforts of the propagandist mediums.
The revolutionary sentiments prevalent among the intellectual élite of France have found abundant expression in the French drama, as was to be expected in a country which has a literary stage and in which nearly every man of letters is something of a playwright. Indeed, it would not be surprising if the stage, by reason of its superior capacity for giving vividness to ideas, were quite as efficacious an instrument of revolutionary propaganda as the press, the chanson, or the novel.
Octave Mirbeau is the author of several plays, three of which, Les Mauvais Bergers, L’Epidémie, and L’Acquitté, teem with caustic, uncompromising anarchism.
Les Mauvais Bergers was successfully produced by Bernhardt’s company in 1897. Its hero, Jean Roule, is a young, thoughtful, aspiring workman, who has suffered so much at the hands of the capitalists and the authorities and has seen so much suffering imposed on others from the same sources that he is possessed with a colossal, implacable hatred of everybody and everything that has to do with power. On the other hand, his heart is full to bursting with unselfish love for the unfortunate proletariat. “I want to live,” he cries, “to live in my flesh, in my brain, in the expansion of all my organs, of all my faculties, instead of remaining the beast of burden that is flogged and the unthinking machine that is turned for others. I want to be a man, in short,—a man in my own eyes.... We also need some poetry and some art in our lives; for, poor as he may be, a man does not live by bread alone. He has a right, like the rich, to things of beauty.... These flames, this smoke, these tortures, these accursed machines which every day and every hour devour my brain, my heart, my right to happiness, my right to life,—these—these yawning mouths of ovens, these fiery furnaces, these caldrons which are fed with my muscles, with my will, with my liberty, by the shovelful,—to make out of them the wealth and the social puissance of a single man! Extinguish all that, I entreat you! Blow up all that! Annihilate all that!”
His most complete abhorrence is the politician. The employer is white beside him. “The employer is a man, like you. You have him before you. You speak to him, you move him, you threaten him, you kill him! At least, he has a visage,—a chest in which to sink a knife. But go move this being without a visage called politician! Go kill this thing called politics,—this slimy, slippery thing which you think you hold and which always escapes you, which you believe dead and which always comes to life again,—this abominable thing by which everything has been debased, everything corrupted, everything bought, everything sold,—justice, love, beauty!—which has made venality of conscience a national institution of France; which has done worse still, since with its filthy slaver it has befouled the august face of the poor! worse still, since it has destroyed in you your last ideal,—faith in Revolution!”
Aided and inspirited by a working-girl, Madeleine (Bernhardt’s rôle), this Jean Roule, who would kill as much from excess of love as from hate, leads the workmen in a revolt against their employers. But the latter are sustained by government troops, and the play ends with a massacre and a procession of coffins.
L’Epidémie (1898) is an extravagant one-act comedy,—almost a farce,—caricaturing the culpable indifference of the bourgeois politician to the welfare of the humble and his extreme solicitude for the welfare of the rich. Typhoid fever has made several victims in the military barracks of a provincial city. The municipal council assembles for the purpose of taking measures to arrest it. When the council learns, however, that the disease has attacked no one outside the barracks, and within the barracks only the private soldiers, whose duty, whose glory it is to give their lives for their country, it decides to do nothing, to the accompaniment of enthusiastic cries of “Vive la France!” The decision has scarcely been made when a messenger arrives with the news that a bourgeois has died of the plague. Thereupon the council reconsiders its former action, votes to erect a statue to the dead bourgeois, to name a street in his honour, to demolish the city’s unsanitary quarters, to open up boulevards, and to introduce a water system, and makes an appropriation of 100,000,000 francs therefor. Finally, each councillor rises in turn, and pronounces a panegyric of the bourgeois victim.