The labourer’s objection is given force by the shooting of the capitalist of the piece. “The reply of the jackal to the lion,” comments one of the minor characters.
Jean Jullien considers himself, if rumour speaks true, in no sense a revolutionist. All the same, his robust drama La Poigne, which depicts vividly the moral ravages wrought by authority in and about a humanitarian soul, was received enthusiastically by both the socialistic and the anarchistic press. “Socialists will take notice,” remarked a socialist organ, “that it behooves them to lavish their money and their bravos on this attempt at ‘L’Art Social.’” And the theatrical critic of Le Libertaire said: “The piece of Jean Jullien pleased us by its frankness and its human interest. Rarely has an author so stirred our minds and hearts. It is only just to say that the personages exemplify the sentiments and the ideas which are familiar to the anarchists, and that we find in La Poigne an echo of our passions.”
The same author’s L’Ecolière, which denounces the hypocrisy of petty provincial functionaries and narrates the conflict of a high-minded, warm-hearted woman with the bourgeois system of morals, was accorded a similar welcome in similar quarters. So also was his Oasis, which preaches that Humanity should create for itself, remote from “egoisms, prejudices, mutually hostile religions, and the disgraceful tumults of injustice and war, the basis of peace, of association, and of love.”
As a féministe who flouts and defies the marriage code, Paul Hervieu lays himself liable to be classed as a revolutionist, at least a partial revolutionist, however little such a classification may please him. Whatever else they are, La Loi de l’Homme, L’Armature, Les Tenailles, Les Paroles Restent, L’Enigme, and Le Dédale are works of revolt. The first-named, La Loi de l’Homme, evoked the following sweeping but not unsympathetic judgment from the critic Emile de St. Auban, who, lawyer as well as critic, should know whereof he speaks: “The contemporary theatre occupies itself a great deal with the laws. The code appears often on the boards, and the dramatist-jurists abrogate it in prose or in verse. But never was this abrogation so passionate, so brusque, never was it so radical, so total, as in La Loi de l’Homme. I will add so concise, since three very short acts, two of which make one, suffice to erase not a text, but the text, not a law, but the law, and with the law the cortège of egoisms and hypocrisies which have given it birth, and have assured it its full expansion and the calm and sure perpetration of its outrages; to erase, I say, an entire jurisprudence, written or traditional, promulgated against the weak for the strong.”
To the category of partial, unwilling, or unwitting revolutionists to which Jullien, Brieux, Hervieu, and De Curel belong may be assigned also Jules Case in La Vassale, Gaston Dévore in La Conscience d’un Enfant, Georges Ancey in Ces Messieurs and La Dupe, Emile Fabre in L’Argent, Le Bien d’Autrui, La Vie Publique, and Comme Ils sont Tous, Rostand in La Samaritaine, Abel Hermant in Le Faubourg, La Carrière, and La Meute, Albert Guinon in Décadence,[123] Alexandre Bisson in Le Bon Juge, Emile Bourgeois in Mariage d’Argent, and Bruyerre in En Paix. Indeed, it is even permitted to query whether the reputed reactionaries, Jules Lemaître and Henri Lavedan, are not really (at least so far as certain of their pieces are concerned) in the same boat.
Revolutionary and semi-revolutionary plays were for a considerable period well-nigh a monopoly of the Théâtre Libre, where unconditional literary form and unconventional acting were the handmaids of unconventional ideas. Latterly they have invaded every legitimate stage of Paris, not excepting the august and supposedly inhospitable Comédie Française; and they may be said to be the specialty of four houses: the Théâtre Antoine (founded by Antoine after he abandoned the Théâtre Libre); the Grand Guignol, the nearest existing counterpart to the Théâtre Libre; and the Gymnase and the Renaissance, which are now copying the general policy of the Antoine. Maurice Maeterlinck and his company have latterly made their headquarters in Paris. Maeterlinck’s Monna Vanna was applauded by the revolutionary organs.
The various free stages, or théâtres à côté, which give private performances at irregular intervals, also reserve a modicum of space in their répertoires for pieces of social revolt.
The revues of the variety theatres and concert halls, in which the events of the year are criticised and caricatured with a freedom that often calls down the wrath of the censorship, particularly at Montmartre, are also far from a negligible influence in the direction of revolution.
In 1883 the socialist Clovis Hugues wrote, in an introduction to a volume by the refractory Léon Cladel: “The petrification of the republic in the bourgeois spirit does not prevent literature from being socialistic. It is unconsciously so, perhaps; but it is so. And this is the essential thing for the future.... Open a romance, no matter what one, attend a theatrical representation, no matter what one, and, so that you have the slightest aptitude for combining details, for surprising the idea in the fact, for following a philosophical train through an intrigue, you will be amazed at the quantity of socialism which emerges from this romance and that play. Has the author felt himself responsible towards the Revolution in writing his work? Not the least in the world. He has yielded to the mighty pressure of events, he has submitted to the historic fatalities of his time, the permanent influence of humanity in travail.... What signifies this transformation? It signifies that the philosophies soak down into literature; it signifies that the hour is at hand, since the idea incarnates itself involuntarily in the form; it signifies that the fourth estate is mounting, that justice is near.”