“Enlevez l’homme tonneau!!”
a hundred, five hundred, a thousand voices caught up the derisive cry.
“ENLEVEZ L’HOMME TONNEAU!!!”
the whole two thousand interlopers bawled.
And, bawling thus, they seethed on to the platform like a wave, lifted the frantically gesticulating “homme-tonneau” and his two hundred of avoirdupois clean off his feet, and, receding with multitudinous laughter, swept him down the aisle and out through the door as if he were a chip, and all his satellites and followers in the wake of him.
The new broom of the proverb never swept one-half so clean. Not a nationalist, at least not a nationalist who dared to raise a nationalist cry, was left in the hall. The socialists and anarchists were in complete possession; but the real scrimmage of the evening was yet to come.
A bureau was chosen in which the two parties were about equally represented, and a resolution was passed branding the nationalists as tools of the bourgeois and as royalist reactionaries more dangerous than the royalists themselves. Then a socialist, in an excess of zeal, made the blunder of introducing a resolution committing the meeting to the support of a certain socialist candidate for the municipal council. The anarchists, holding to their cardinal principle of non-participation in elections, vigorously dissented. Hot words followed; the crucial differences between the doctrines were evoked and emphasised; old injuries were recalled; old disputes were raked up; old sores were probed and laid open. Plainly, the hall was much too small for both.
From furious debate the meeting went to still more furious shouts and counter-shouts. Vive l’Anarchie, which had so lately locked arms with Vive la Sociale, now confronted it and hissed threatenings and curses in its teeth. And from shouts (there being no “homme-tonneau” to kindle saving laughter) the meeting went to blows. Fists, canes, umbrellas, chairs, and benches cleaved the air; shoes battered shins and heads concaved stomachs; clothes were torn, hats crushed in and trampled under foot; furniture was dismembered, and mirrors, windows, and gas globes were shattered. The field days of the French Chamber were left far in the rear, so was even the legendary South Boston Democratic caucus. The pushing, pulling, pounding, kicking, scratching, biting, and butting, the oaths and calls for help, the howls, growls, and yelps of baffled rage and pain, would need the pen of a French Fielding to describe and transcribe.
Finally, the socialists passed out by the same door as the nationalists, and in very much the same fashion. But the anarchists had barely time to catch their breath and to pronounce the socialists “the tools of the bourgeois and the most dangerous of reactionaries, because the most disguised,” when the police arrived, and with their fateful “Messieurs, la réunion est dissoute,” backed up by the extinction of the gas, evacuated the hall.
Once in the street, the anarchists were solidaire again with the socialists against their common bourgeois enemies, the nationalists. What is more, all three were solidaire against their common enemy, the police; and the latter were forced to call on their reserves and a body of the Garde Républicaine to disperse the rioters.