“IV. Communications or articles from the Bibliothèques Libertaires.
“V. A concise summary of the month’s happenings, social, economic, foreign, scientific, etc.
“VI. Criticisms of the books of which we shall receive two copies,—one for the library of the review, the other to circulate among the libraries which have given in their adherence to the review.”
The number of camarades who are afflicted with the cacoethes scribendi being almost as great as those who are afflicted with the cacoethes loquendi, many of the groups have little amateur papers of their own. These amateur papers sometimes remain in manuscript, and are read aloud in the meetings (very much as in the old-fashioned American lyceums); are sometimes mimeographed for distribution among the members; and sometimes are printed, to be sold, by a camarade who has a hand-press at his disposition,—rarely by a professional printer. When a group which is ambitious for a paper does not feel sufficient unto itself in literary talent, it solicits outside assistance, thus:—
“The group Les Résolus is going to print a journal in the form of a brochure. The ‘copains’ call upon the camarades who are willing to collaborate to communicate with the camarade Rodor.”
The number of anarchist papers in existence is as nothing to the number that has disappeared. Le Riflard, L’Attaque, La Lutte, Le “Ça Ira,” Le Forçat, L’Insurgé, Le Droit Social, L’Etendard Révolutionnaire, Le Défi, Le Drapeau Noir, L’Affamé, Terre et Liberté, L’Audace, L’Hydre Anarchiste, L’Idée Ouvrière, L’Homme Libre, La Révolution Sociale, L’Emeute, La Liberté Sociale, Le Droit Anarchique, La Misère, Le Deschard, Le Falot, L’Idée Libre, Le Père Jean Chiffonier de Paris, Le Père Peinard, and scores of others have lived and died in Paris and the provinces within the last thirty years. Of them all, the most famous, not because the most violent, but because the most violent with talent and wit (indeed, the most famous incendiary sheet in France since the Père Duchêne of Eugène Vermesch), was the Père Peinard. While its circulation was never enormous (8,000-15,000 copies), it came to the knowledge of the bourgeois, and gave them such a turn that it seems likely to remain in the public consciousness for at least a generation.
With no display of philosophy (which is not saying it had no philosophy), it played openly upon the appetites, prejudices, and rancours of the proletariat. Without reserve or disguise, it incited to theft, counterfeiting, repudiation of taxes and rents, killing, and arson. It counselled the immediate assassination of deputies, senators, judges, priests, and army officers. It advised unemployed workingmen to take food for themselves and their families wherever it was to be found, to help themselves to shoes at the shoe-dealers’ when the spring rains wet their feet and to overcoats at the clothiers’ when winter winds nipped them. It urged employed workingmen to put their tyrannical employers out of the way, and to appropriate their manufacturing plants; farm labourers and vintagers to take possession of the farms and vineyards, and turn the landlords and vine-owners into fertilizing phosphates; miners to seize the mines and to offer picks to the stockholders, in case they showed a willingness to work like their brother men, otherwise to dump them into the disused shafts; conscripts to emigrate rather than perform their military service; and soldiers to desert or shoot down their officers. It glorified poachers and other deliberate breakers of the law. It recounted the exploits of the olden-time brigands and outlaws, and exhorted moderns to follow their example.
Citations from the Père Peinard are impossible, less because of a constantly recurring broadness that is more than broadness (since this might easily be dodged in extracts) than because it was written in the picturesque slang of the faubourg, which can no more be rendered into English than Chimmie Fadden, for instance, could be rendered into French. The very titles of the articles are untranslatable.
Whatever exception to its morals one may take, one is forced to admit that the Père Peinard was a remarkable production in its way. For blended drollery and diabolism, camaraderie and cynicism, gaminerie and gruesomeness, it would be hard in contemporary writing to find its counterpart. Like the unmatched narrative of the shipwreck in the second canto of Don Juan, it was at once rollicking and horrible, flippant and terrible, ribald and sublime. In it there was no distinguishing between the antics, grimaces, and piquant impudence of the buffoon and the imprecations of the tragedian or the anathemas of the prophet; and, while there were times when the sight of this grinning fury was merely grotesque, there were others (seconds, at least) when it was magnificent.
The Père Peinard was even more a one man’s paper than is Drumont’s La Libre Parole or Rochefort’s L’Intransigeant. Apart from the illustrations, which were the work of obscure caricaturists now thrice famous,—a fact which gives the file a high value with collectors,—it was practically all written by its editor, Emile Pouget. Pouget is by general consent one of the “best fellows in the world.” Nevertheless, he is no dilettante revolutionist. His grievances against society are very real ones. He was forced out of his original occupation as a dry-goods clerk because he tried to organise his fellow-employees; and he was condemned (along with Louise Michel) on disgracefully insufficient evidence for a misdemeanour in connection with a meeting of the unemployed, of which he was not guilty. The following account of the affair is so fully substantiated by the official record of the trial that it may be accepted as practically authentic:—