During the same year, 1878, without any plot having been formed, four attempts were made against crowned heads in close succession. The workman Hoedel, and after him Dr. Nobiling, shot at the German Emperor; a few weeks later, a Spanish workman, Oliva Moncási, followed with an attempt to shoot the King of Spain, and the cook Passanante rushed with his knife upon the King of Italy. The governments of Europe could not believe that such attempts upon the lives of three kings should have occurred without there being at the bottom some international conspiracy, and they jumped to the conclusion that the anarchist Jura Federation was the centre of that conspiracy.
More than twenty years have passed since then, and I can say most positively that there was absolutely no ground whatever for such a supposition. However, all the European governments fell upon Switzerland, reproaching her with harbouring revolutionists who organized such plots. Paul Brousse, the editor of our Jura newspaper, the ‘Avant-Garde,’ was arrested and prosecuted. The Swiss judges, seeing there was not the slightest foundation for connecting Brousse or the Jura Federation with the recent attempts, condemned Brousse to only a couple of months’ imprisonment for his articles; but the paper was suppressed, and all the printing offices of Switzerland were asked by the federal government not to publish this or any similar paper. The Jura Federation was thus silenced.
Besides, the politicians of Switzerland, who looked with an unfavourable eye on the anarchist agitation in their country, acted privately in such a way as to compel the leading Swiss members of the Jura Federation either to retire from public life or to starve. Brousse was expelled from Switzerland. James Guillaume, who for eight years had maintained against all obstacles the ‘Bulletin’ of the federation, and made his living chiefly by teaching, could obtain no employment, and was compelled to leave Switzerland and remove to France. Adhémar Schwitzguébel, boycotted in the watch trade and burdened by a large family, had finally to retire from the movement. Spichiger was in the same condition, and emigrated. It thus happened that I, a foreigner, had to undertake the editing of a paper for the federation. I hesitated, of course, but there was nothing else to be done, and with two friends, Dumartheray and Herzig, I started a new fortnightly at Geneva, in February 1879, under the title of ‘Le Révolté.’ I had to write most of it myself. We had only twenty-three francs to start the paper, but we all set to work to get subscriptions, and succeeded in issuing our first number. It was moderate in tone, but revolutionary in substance, and I did my best to write it in such a style that complicated historical and economical questions should be comprehensible to every intelligent worker. Six hundred was the utmost limit which the edition of our previous papers had ever attained. We printed two thousand copies of ‘Le Révolté,’ and in a few days not one was left. It was a success, and it still continues, at Paris, under the title of ‘Temps Nouveaux.’
Socialist newspapers have often a tendency to become mere annals of complaints about existing conditions. The oppression of the workers in the mine, the factory, and the field is related; the misery and sufferings of the workers during strikes are told in vivid pictures; their helplessness in the struggle against their employers is insisted upon; and this succession of hopeless efforts, described every week, exercises a most depressing influence upon the reader. To counterbalance that effect, the editor has to rely chiefly upon burning words, by means of which he tries to inspire his readers with energy and faith. I thought, on the contrary, that a revolutionary paper must be, above all, a record of those symptoms which everywhere announce the coming of a new era, the germination of new forms of social life, the growing revolt against antiquated institutions. These symptoms should be watched, brought together in their intimate connection, and so grouped as to show to the hesitating minds of the greater number the invisible and often unconscious support which advanced ideas find everywhere, when a revival of thought takes place in society. To make one feel in sympathy with the throbbing of the human heart all over the world, with its revolt against age-long injustice, with its attempts at working out new forms of life—this should be the chief duty of a revolutionary paper. It is hope, not despair, which makes successful revolutions.
Historians often tell us how this or that system of philosophy has accomplished a certain change in human thought, and subsequently in institutions. But this is not history. The greatest social philosophers have only caught the indications of coming changes, have understood their inner relations, and, aided by induction and intuition, have foretold what was to occur. Sociologists have also drawn plans of social organizations, by starting from a few principles and developing them to their necessary consequences, like a geometrical conclusion from a few axioms; but this is not sociology. A correct social forecast cannot be made unless one keeps an eye on the thousands of signs of the new life, separating the occasional facts from those which are organically essential, and building the generalization upon that basis.
This was the method of thought with which I endeavoured to familiarize our readers—using plain comprehensible words, so as to accustom the most modest of them to judge for himself whereunto society is moving, and himself to correct the thinker if the latter comes to wrong conclusions. As to the criticism of what exists, I went into it only to disentangle the roots of the evils, and to show that a deep-seated and carefully-nurtured fetishism with regard to the antiquated survivals of past phases of human development, and a widespread cowardice of mind and will, are the main sources of all evils.
Dumartheray and Herzig gave me full support in that direction. Dumartheray was born in one of the poorest peasant families in Savoy. His schooling had not gone beyond the first rudiments of a primary school. Yet he was one of the most intelligent men I ever met. His appreciations of current events and men were so remarkable for their uncommon good sense that they were often prophetic. He was also one of the finest critics of the current socialist literature, and was never taken in by the mere display of fine words, or would-be science. Herzig was a young clerk, born at Geneva; a man of suppressed emotions, shy, who would blush like a girl when he expressed an original thought, and who, after I was arrested, when he became responsible for the continuance of the journal, by sheer force of will learned to write very well. Boycotted by all Geneva employers, and fallen with his family into sheer misery, he nevertheless supported the paper till it became possible to transfer it to Paris.
To the judgment of these two friends I could trust implicitly. If Herzig frowned, muttering, ‘Yes—well—it may go,’ I knew that it would not do. And when Dumartheray, who always complained of the bad state of his spectacles when he had to read a not quite legibly written manuscript, and therefore generally read proofs only, interrupted his reading by exclaiming, ‘Non, ça ne va pas!’ I felt at once that it was not the proper thing, and tried to guess what thought or expression provoked his disapproval. I knew there was no use asking him, ‘Why will it not do?’ He would have answered: ‘Ah, that it not my affair; that’s yours. It won’t do; that is all I can say.’ But I felt he was right, and I simply sat down to rewrite the passage, or, taking the composing stick, set up in type a new passage instead.
I must own that we had also hard times with our paper. No sooner had we issued five numbers than the printer asked us to find another printing office. For the workers and their publications the liberty of the Press inscribed in the Constitutions has many limitations beside the paragraphs of the law. The printer had no objection to our paper—he liked it; but in Switzerland all printing offices depend upon the government, which employs them more or less in issuing statistical reports and the like; and our printer was plainly told that if he continued to harbour our paper he need not expect to have any more orders from the Geneva government. I made the tour of all the French-speaking part of Switzerland and saw the heads of all the printing offices, but everywhere, even from those who did not dislike the tendency of the paper, I received the same reply: ‘We could not live without orders from the government, and we should have none if we undertook to print “Le Révolté.”’
I returned to Geneva in very low spirits, but Dumartheray was only the more ardent and hopeful. ‘It’s all very simple,’ he said. ‘We buy our own printing plant on a three months’ credit, and in three months we shall have paid it.’ ‘But we have no money, only a few hundred francs,’ I objected. ‘Money? nonsense! We shall have it! Let us only order the type at once and immediately issue our next number and money will come!’ Once more he had judged quite right. When our next number came out from our own Imprimerie Jurassienne, and we had told our difficulties and issued a couple of small pamphlets besides—all of us helping in the printing—the money came in, mostly in coppers and silver, but it came. Over and over again in my life I have heard complaints among the advanced parties about the want of money, but the longer I live the more I am persuaded that our chief difficulty does not lie so much in money as in men who would march firmly and steadily towards a given aim in the right direction and inspire others. For twenty-one years our paper has now continued to live from hand to mouth, appeals for funds appearing on the front page almost in every number; but as long as there is a man who sticks to it and puts all his energy into it, as Herzig and Dumartheray did at Geneva, and Grave has done for the last sixteen years at Paris, the money comes in and the printing expenses are more or less covered, mainly by the pennies of the workers. For a paper, as for everything else, men are of an infinitely greater value than money.