Paris and the Social Revolution / A Study of the Revolutionary Elements in the Various Classes of Parisian Society

by Alvan F. Sanborn

In the view of the larger-minded anarchists—the Reclus, the Kropotkines, the Graves—the betterment of society must be preceded by the betterment of the individuals that make up society. Education is the corner-stone of the structure their hope has builded. They realise that they have undertaken a moral and intellectual labour of long reach, calling for infinite energy and patience, for years and perhaps generations of scattered, seemingly bootless initiative, exhortation, and example. So far as these leaders are concerned, no charge could well be falser than the one that is daily being brought against them of ignoring the calendar in all their calculations, juggling with an abstract social man,—very much as the elder economists juggled with their “economic man,”—and expecting with childlike naïveté to make human nature and the world over in a twinkling.

“For the establishment of the anarchist society,” says Jean Grave, “it is necessary that each individual taken separately be able to govern himself, that he knows how to make his autonomy respected while respecting the autonomy of others, and that he succeeds in liberating his volition from the tyranny of surrounding influences....

... “Now for individuals to dispense with authority, for each one to be able to exercise his autonomy without coming into conflict with his fellows, it is essential that we all acquire a mentality appropriate to this state of things.”

The thoughtful anarchist is well aware that, for the production of this appropriate mentality, his placards, posters, and hand-bills, his pictures and chansons, his weeklies, monthlies, and annuals, are ludicrously inadequate and inapt. He is far from despising these agencies. He recognises their value as popularisers and as ferment; but he is struggling towards a propaganda of a deeper, more compelling nature as rapidly as he is able. He would (like the devout Catholic) assume complete control of the mental training of his children, taking them out of the public schools, which impose respect for his two bugbears—authority and property—along with other bourgeois commonplaces and superstitions, in order to give, in schools of his own, the complete, well-rounded education which he calls l’éducation intégrale.

M. Paul Robin, who made a passably successful experiment with this éducation intégrale at the Prévost Orphanage, Cempuis,[19] during the years 1880 to 1894, has expounded the meaning of the phrase in an article which it would be a real pleasure to quote entire. A few paragraphs will suffice, however, to reveal the loftiness, the sweetness, and the eminent sanity of his ideas:—

“The word intégrale, applied to education, includes the three epithets, physical, intellectual, and moral, and indicates further the continuous relations between these three divisions.

“L’éducation intégrale is not the forced accumulation of an infinite number of notions upon all things: it is the culture, the harmonious development, of all the faculties of the human being,—health, vigour, beauty, intelligence, goodness....

“L’éducation physique embraces muscular and cerebral development. It satisfies the need of exercise of all our organs, passive as well as active,—a need given the authority of law by physiology. To note this development and to learn to direct it with prudence, anthropometric observations should be made and anthropometric statistics continuously kept.

“The exercise of the senses, the calculations necessary in sports and in physical exertion of every sort,—races, workshop labour, etc.,—have their influence on the intellect, and render attractive certain tasks often considered repulsive because of the awkward manner in which they have been approached.

“L’éducation intellectuelle has to do with two totally distinct matters,—matters of opinion, variable, debatable, the cause of quarrels, antagonisms, rivalries; and matters of fact, of observation, of experience, whose solutions are identical for all beings. The old teaching occupied itself almost entirely with the first matters to the neglect of the second. The new teaching, on the contrary, should diminish as much as possible the number and prominence of the first in favour of the second. In whatever of the first is of necessity retained, notably the acquisition of languages, it should limit itself to the purely practical side, and reserve the study of the complicated, illogical evolution of language for a small, selected group of adults who are well grounded in the sciences....