“The organisers of this meeting of the unemployed simply had in view to bring together on the Esplanade des Invalides the greatest number possible of hungry persons. They intended it to be less a revolt than a demonstration. They had no thought whatever of marching on the Elysée or on the Ministry of the Interior. They merely wished to say to the bourgeoisie: ‘Look at us. We are 20,000 without means of existence.’ And the Esplanade des Invalides had been chosen in order that they might not be accused of impeding circulation. The police, disturbed at the idea of so large a number of men assembling in one place, took every precaution to prevent it. They closed the Esplanade, and forced those who came to the meeting into the streets adjacent, where disorders naturally arose. Certain individuals, who really had eaten nothing since the night before, invaded three bake-shops. The bake-shops were cleaned out in five minutes as if by enchantment.
“Pouget had pillaged nothing, planned nothing, directed nothing. He was simply overheard to say of these poor devils during the pillage: ‘They take bread because they are hungry. They are right.’ He repeated it spiritedly in the assize court, and he was condemned to eight years of prison for ‘incitation to pillage.’ It would have been more precise to condemn him for approbation of pillage, since, in point of fact, he had not committed any other crime.”
During its entire existence the Père Peinard carried on an extensive traffic in brochures, chansons, etc., of the same violent nature as itself. It also published an Almanack for 1894, which is now rare and much prized in book-collecting quarters.
The first anarchist Almanack was issued in 1892 by Sébastien Faure, who made the laughable and, from the point of view of sale, disastrous blunder of basing it on the anarchist-hated Gregorian calendar.
Pouget’s Almanack, forewarned, avoided this rock of offence. It was a rehash of his paper, supplemented by a lengthy philosophico-historical disquisition on the calendar, appreciations of all the months, allegorical observations on tides and eclipses, an anarchist chronology, and a bundle of fantastic predictions,—all in the paper’s highly coloured faubourien slang.
“If ever,” says Jean Grave somewhere, “the history of this movement is written, if ever it is revealed how the anarchist publications have lived, how they have amassed sou by sou the sums necessary to their appearance, the world will be astounded at the proofs of solidarity and devotion which will thus be brought to light. It will appreciate what a force conviction is, especially among the most disinherited.”
There is something pathetic as well as diverting about the forced preoccupation of the anarchist organs with the question of the money which they consider it a part of their mission to depreciate, something well-nigh cruel in the ironical destiny that compels them to be perpetually harping on the thing which it is one of their pet dreams to abolish,—to plead on their last pages for the same thing their first pages abuse.
This inconsequence between the thought and the deed is not, however, to be confounded with hypocrisy. It is accepted because unavoidable, but accepted sorrowfully and bitterly; and it does not profit individuals.
In choosing to depend for their sinews of war on the contributions of the camarades rather than on the advertising which would contaminate and enslave them, the anarchist journals have certainly chosen the lesser moral evil. There is even a certain Quixotic heroism in this choice, which is the more apparent since it is at the price of this inestimable, if incomplete, moral independence that the socialists are able to carry on a propaganda of a wider range. By way of compensation for their sacrifice in refusing bourgeois advertising, it sometimes happens that the anarchist journals are supported, without running the slightest moral danger, by bourgeois funds. So it was that in the Faubourg St. Antoine several years ago the anarchist cabinet-makers preached the annihilation of their employers during several months. The cabinet-makers founded an organ entitled Le Pot-à-colle (The Glue-pot), in the first number of which they chanced to give one of the manufacturers a terrible castigation. The relatively small edition printed was sold so fast that the camarades most interested barely managed to get copies. A watch was set on the news-stands of the faubourg, and it was discovered that it was the business rivals of the attacked manufacturers who had snapped up the papers. The discovery was utilised to such good purpose that the phenomenal popularity of the Glue-pot continued just as long as there was a manufacturer left in the district to “roast.”