DORMER-WINDOW OF JEAN GRAVE’S WORKSHOP
| Office of “Les Temps Nouveaux,” in the rue Mouffetard |
Older, solider, more temperate, more dignified, and—if the word in such a strange connection is permissible—more conservative, indeed so solid, temperate, dignified, and conservative that it has been more than once referred to as the Temps of the anarchist press, is Les Temps Nouveaux, an eight-page weekly, sold, like Le Libertaire, at two sous a copy. Les Temps Nouveaux (formerly La Révolte, and before that Le Révolté), which was founded at Geneva, Switzerland, by Elisée Reclus and Pierre Kropotkine more than a quarter of a century ago, has appeared regularly ever since with only slight interruptions and the few changes of title that commemorate its encounters with the law. It came to Paris soon after its foundation, being forced to emigrate from Switzerland on account of the anarchist attempt against the Palais-Fédéral at Berne. Its most distinguished, and at the same time most distinctive, feature is a literary supplement made up in considerable part of selections from the French and foreign classics and from the writings of contemporary scientists and littérateurs, not avowed revolutionists, which arraign the evils of society or support any one of the articles of the anarchist creed. It also reproduces in full addresses by non-anarchist celebrities in which concessions are made to revolutionary ideals or ideas.
“You may seize our journals, our brochures,” says the editor, Jean Grave, “you will not prevent the camarades from reading what the bourgeois authors have written on the rottenness and abjectness of the present hour. This alone is more terrible than all the revendications and threats we can accumulate.”
From time to time this supplement serves to make public the addresses prepared for prohibited anarchist congresses, as in the year of the last Exposition, when it printed the papers which would have been read at the International Anarchist Congress (euphoniously named Le Congrès Ouvrier Révolutionnaire Internationale) if a frightened or over-prudent ministry had not forbidden the sitting of the congress.
The contents of all the literary supplements thus far issued have been classified under the heads of War, Militarism, Property, Family, Religion, Law, Justice, The Magistracy, Poverty, Wage-earning, etc., and they have been reproduced (with added selections, illustrations, and complete bibliographies) in as many volumes as there are heads.[12]
Thanks, perhaps, to the clever handling of its literary supplement; thanks, perhaps, to the thoughtfulness and relative tolerance of the body of the paper, the Temps Nouveaux has an appreciable circulation among artists, littérateurs, savants, economists, bibliophiles, and various other sorts of cultured people quite outside of anarchist circles.
The present editor, Jean Grave, is one of the most winning personalities in the anarchist or any other contemporary movement for reform. A Lyonnais by origin, a shoemaker and later a printer by trade, Jean Grave came to Paris in his early manhood. He took part in the Commune, and was one of the banished after its downfall, passing most of his exile in Switzerland, where he was intimately associated with Kropotkine and Reclus.