A round decade later (1894) A. Hamon, a friend of anarchy, wrote:—
“Read in the sheets which are the most hostile to the anarchists—such as the Figaro, the Journal, the Gil Blas, the Echo de Paris—the short stories, sketches, and chroniques of the Mirbeaus, the Bauers, the Descaves, the Paul Adams, the Bernard Lazares, the Ajalberts, the Sévérines, etc., and you will perceive that anarchist tendencies throng them. Follow the ‘jeunes revues,’ and you will observe that there is not, to speak in the large, a piece of verse, a story, a study of any sort whatsoever, which does not tend towards the destruction of what the anarchists qualify as social prejudice,—la patrie, authority, family, religion, courts of law, militarism, etc.
“All the thinking men of this epoch,—savants, littérateurs, artists, etc.,—one may almost say all, so rare are those who imprison themselves in the ‘tour d’ivoire’ or who profess doctrines commendatory of the existing order,—all the relatively young men, I mean, who have attained their majority since 1870, have libertaire inclinations. The result is a fervent propaganda under the most varied forms and in the most dissimilar milieux.”
Still later (1899) a declared opponent of anarchism, M. Fierens-Gevaert, wrote in his admirable social study, La Tristesse Contemporaine: “There are, to begin with, the militant anarchists,—a handful of wretched starvelings and lunatics, whose doctrine consists solely in listening to the instincts of the brute within them. There are, next, the unwitting or dilettante anarchists. These latter are legion. They are to be found in the highest grades of society. They even compose the intellectual élite of their time. Every philosopher, novelist, poet, dramatist, and artist is to-day a latent anarchist; and very often he boasts of it.”
Just how far this surprising situation is an heirloom of the four revolutions which France traversed during the last century, and just how far it is traceable to forces which have entered from without,—to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Darwin and Spencer, Leopardi and the pleiades of Russian and Scandinavian innovators,—it is not necessary to determine. The really significant thing is that the intellectual and social conditions which have produced Anatole France, Descaves, and Mirbeau in France have likewise produced Björnson, Brandès, and Strindberg in Scandinavia, Maxim Gorky in Russia, Hermann Heijermanns in the Netherlands, Gerhardt Hauptmann in Germany, Camille Lemonnier in Belgium, Gabriel d’Annunzio in Italy, and José Echegaray in the Biscayan Peninsula; and it is only by keeping well in mind the intensity and the scope of this world-movement of revolt that the dynamic value of French revolt can be properly estimated.
LA COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE