As editor, despite his comparative moderation, he has not been immune from persecution. Like Kropotkine, his predecessor in the editorial chair, Jean Grave has a fair experimental knowledge of the inside of prison walls. A thorough man of the people, and proud of the fact,—he has always retained his printer’s blouse,—his person and his writings alike are nevertheless instinct with the most perfect urbanity.
There is no more picturesque corner in Paris than that on which, for many years now, the Temps Nouveaux has had its office in the top of an aged and mellow six-story building whose ground floor is a wine-shop and whose wrinkled roof and plant-bedecked dormer-window overlook the sixteenth-century church of St. Médard,—no more intimate and engaging business interior than the paper, book, and brochure bestrewn, flower-and-print-decorated, slanting-walled loft in which Jean Grave (veritable “attic philosopher”) and his assistant make up and administer their sheet. Nothing could be more open and kind than the welcome you get when, having felt your way up a winding stair as damp and dark as a mediæval donjon-keep, you turn the latch-key, hospitably left in the outside of the door, and with a premonitory knock enter the loft; always providing your entry is courteous and your coming well motived. Indeed, I know in all Paris nothing morally finer than the example Jean Grave’s gentle, unassuming life offers of consecration to the ideal.
There is something peculiarly significant in the fact that the office of this anarchist organ (whose mission is to be, like the university settlement, a picket of civilisation carrying light into dark places) is located on the line where the university and the industrial districts overlap each other, at the very point where the Quartier Latin ceases and the Faubourgs Coulebarbe and Salpêtrière begin; at the junction of such typical highways as the rue Claude Bernard, passing the Ecole Normale, the rue Monge, in which many students lodge, the broad Avenue des Gobelins, with its evening and Sunday animation as a labourers’ promenade, and the steeply ascending rue Mouffetard, with its motley street market for the poor.[13]
The Temps Nouveaux, the Libertaire, and the anarchist weeklies of the provinces serve to keep the individual camarades, the “groups,” and the trimardeurs in close touch with each other and with the whole anarchist body, as well as to narrate events, establish the real significance of the casualty columns of the bourgeois press, and expound the doctrine of anarchy. They also lend themselves to mutual relief work,—raising subscriptions for the camarades in distress from lack of employment, and securing comforts for the camarades in prison and for their families. They likewise signal mouchards (police spies), and predict their movements, rehabilitate camarades unjustly accused of espionage, denounce the crookedness of employers, arrange for lectures, and, especially, utilise for the best interests of the movement the varied information gleaned here, there, and everywhere by trimardeurs, who are for them so many unsalaried correspondents.
An anarchist monthly, L’Education Libertaire, has lately been founded by the Bibliothèque d’Education Libertaire of the Faubourg St. Antoine, which is not only the organ of the various Bibliothèques Libertaires[14] of Paris and the provinces, but also a review of real solidity and distinction.
Its nature and scope may be judged by a brief excerpt from its first prospectus:—
“L’Education Libertaire will contain:—
“I. One or two articles by the writers of note who have accorded us their literary collaboration. [Follows a list of a score or more collaborators, of whom Pierre Quillard, A. F. Hérold, Urbain Gohier, Charles Malato, Henri Rainaldy, and Laurent Tailhade have a Parisian or more than Parisian reputation.]
“II. Certain of the lectures delivered in the Bibliothèques Libertaires. These lectures will also be printed as brochures, which, the type being already set, will cost nothing but the paper and printing. We shall get thus the brochure at one sou.
“III. Articles upon the different theories of education and the attempts at ‘libertaire’ education, a large subject, which will give rise to interesting discussions.