Chapter XVII: The Revolutionary Spirit in Prose Literature & the Drama (2)

The unlettered protagonist of Augustin Léger’s novel _Le Journal d’un Anarchiste_ appreciates the review conducted by one Hector de la Roche-Sableuse, of which _L’Endehors_ may well have been the model, in the following fashion:—

“After all, in spite of their gibberish, these reviews of the
_jeunes gens_ lent me by Roche-Sableuse are sometimes
interesting. They shed crocodile tears over the lot of the
people? It is possible. They do not believe a word of what
they write? I do not say no. All this does not prevent them
from seeing clearly at times, and from putting their fingers
often on the truth. Besides, although these fine little
_messieurs_ are not in the least anxious at heart for the
triumph of the proletariat, because they know very well that
it would remove several cushions from under their elbows, they
understand and they expound perfectly the legitimacy of our
claims. And I applaud with both hands the eulogiums they
pronounce on the noble victims our cause already counts. In
short, they have interested me, and I have learned not a
little from them.”

_L’Endehors_ was publicly praised by Georges Clemenceau, Henri Bauer, Laurent-Tailhade, and Jean de Mitty. The last-named said of it:—

“This little sheet so modest in appearance and at the same
time so fastidious in make-up that it might easily have been
taken for a club periodical or for the exclusive organ of a
few æsthetes, raised more tempests and provoked more passions
than a riot in the street. Violent it certainly was, and
violent with a violence which, for wearing always a literary,
subtile, and complex form, penetrated no less deeply, and
gained no less to its object the scattered energies and wills
that were craving definite guidance. Opportune or not, the
influence of _L’Endehors_ was exerted effectively.... But,
aside from its action on public affairs, the journal of Zo
d’Axa realised an incontestable intellectual effort; and it is
for the beauty of this effort that it pleases me to invoke
it.”

It is to be noted that Emile Henry, in whose pontifical attitude before his judges even his bitterest antagonists found “something atrociously superior and disquieting,” and in whom the sympathetic Albert Delacour discerns, or thinks he discerns (by reason of his solitary meditations, his perpetual ratiocination, his hatred of action up to the moment of supreme action, his disgust with life,[115] and his brooding on death), a modern Hamlet, is the only member of the _Endehors_ group who has committed an overt act of violence.

Of the rest, some have since identified themselves closely with socialism, some with Boulangism and nationalism, and some with anarchism; some have given themselves to the creation of the humorous or the beautiful without too obvious a destructive prepossession; and some have held themselves scrupulously “_endehors_.”

Most have remained _révoltés_ of one sort or another. Only a few have conformed, and a part of these only outwardly. Thus Paul Adam, who has seemed several times, by reason of the enormous range of his interests and the disconcerting agility of his intelligence, to be utterly lost to revolution, has written, nevertheless, a number of novels of revolutionary trend. He published in 1900 a defence of Bresci which might have been written the very same day as his “_Eloge_” of Ravachol, and he reaffirmed his essential anarchism as late as the spring of 1904.

Of those who have remained strictly “_endehors_,” Zo d’Axa,[116] uncorrected by hard experiences of prison and exile, resumed in 1898 his assault upon the abuses of society in his now famous _Feuilles_ with a fierceness, a versatility, an independence, a finesse, a facility in anathema, and a redundance in disdain that have rarely, if ever, been matched in revolutionary pamphleteering—and privateering. It was as if Mirbeau, with all the withering force of his mighty scorn, had descended into the street, or as if _Père Peinard_ had attained the level of literature.

The _Feuilles de Zo d’Axa_ appeared irregularly in the form of placards, as events invited, during the troubled years of 1898 and 1899, and created an enormous sensation. Nothing was exempt from the sharpshooting of this guerilla of the asphalt,—this handsome, red-bearded “_mousquetaire chercheur de justes aventures_,” whom all Paris knows by his picturesque brown cape and felt.

“To the argument of the multitude,” he wrote in his
salutatory, “to the catechism of the crowds, to all the
_raisons-d’état_ of the collectivity, behold the personal
reasons of the Individual oppose themselves!... He goes his
way, he acts, he takes aim, because a combative instinct makes
him prefer the chase to the nostalgic siesta. On the borders
of the code he poaches the big game,—officers and judges,
bucks or _carnivori_. He dislodges from the forests of Bondy
the herd of politicians. He amuses himself by snaring the
ravaging financier. He beats up at all the cross-roads the
domesticated _gent de lettres_, fur and feathers; all the
debauchers of ideas, all the monsters of the press and the
police.”

Lucien Descaves compares the series of Zo d’Axa’s writings to “a beautiful road bordered with pity and hatred and paved with wrath and revolt.”

He says further of him: “Zo d’Axa’s phrase is rapid. The fuse of his articles is short. When a match is approached to them, something is bound to explode; and D’Axa is quite capable of sacrificing himself, if need be, in the explosion. He has proved it.”

The suppression of _L’Endehors_ (whose complete file is now one of the rarities of the book-mart) and the consequent dispersion of the _Endehors_ band were soon followed by the formation of another revolutionary coterie of young poets, men of letters, and sociologists, called “_Le Groupe de l’Idée Nouvelle_.” This group (of whom Paul Adam, A. Hamon, Victor Barrucand, and Jean Carrière were the most prominent figures) organised a series of _soirées-conférences_, which were given at the _Hôtel Continental_, during the winter of 1893-94, with great success.

_L’Idée Nouvelle_ (somewhat tamed by time, it is true) still exists. The following announcement, which appeared in 1900 in the anarchist journal _Les Temps Nouveaux_, explains its more recent activities and aims:—

“L’ARGENT CONTRE L’HUMANITÉ”]

“_L’Idée Nouvelle_ informs the public that hereafter it adds
to its title _La Rénovation Sociale par le Travail_, and
announces that the first _conférence_ of the year will be
given at the _Hôtel des Sociétés Savantes_, Sunday, November
18, at three o’clock, by the poet and _chansonnier_ Xavier
Privas.[117] Subject, ‘_L’Argent contre l’Humanité_.’ The
second, to be given early in December by the sculptor Jean
Baffier, will treat ‘_La Corporation Autonome et l’Entreprise
Capitaliste_.’”

To the former committee of _L’Idée Nouvelle_, composed of men of letters, among whom were Paul Adam, Jules Cazes, Lucien Descaves, Louis de Grammont, Georges Lecomte, and Léopold Lacour, the artists Eugène Carrière, Jules Dalou, and Steinlen, and the geographer Elisée Reclus, consented to join themselves at the time of the adoption of its new name.

Here is the text of the declarations by means of which _La Rénovation Sociale par le Travail_ quickly rallied to its support many of those of the intellectual _élite_ who are thinking and acting along the lines of the better aspirations of humanity:—

“Believing that the action of money as a medium of exchange is
universally injurious, that it is the source of all the
turpitudes and all the infamies of society; that almost all
the crimes, the enmities, the divisions, have for their
initial cause a question of interest,—namely, money; believing
also that money, far from being, as some pretend, a stimulus
to production, is rather an obstacle to it; that venality and
mercantilism dishonour and paralyse art, kill noble dreams and
generous ambitions; that too often, in the actual condition of
society, we propose to ourselves as the end of life, not an
ideal of beauty, of truth, of justice, but money; believing,
further, that there is no other means for counteracting such a
situation than by glorifying, rehabilitating, and equitably
apportioning labour, and by insisting strenuously on this law
of nature, that every consumer should be a producer, the
consumption being proportioned to the need, and the production
to the faculty and the aptitude,—the members of the committee
for _La Rénovation Sociale par le Travail_ pledge themselves
to spread these ideas by every means in their power,—by the
pen, by word, and by example.”

This group is at present preparing a fête, to be held in the fall of 1904, for the “glorification of all the innovators to whom humanity is indebted for advancement along the line of integral emancipation.”

The _Noël Humaine_ (Human Christmas) is celebrated annually by another group of emancipated men of letters, under the auspices of Victor Charbonnel’s journal, _La Raison_.

The revolutionary fervour of a considerable portion of the intellectual _élite_ has found further expression during the last ten years in a score or more of reviews (”_jeunes revues_” or “_revues des jeunes_”) “which,” says Paul Adam, “have created, promulgated, sustained, and caused to triumph almost two-thirds of the ideas upon which the new century is beginning its life.” “In each,” says the same writer, “a group of disinterested spirits, extraordinarily erudite, indifferent to success and fortune, eager for knowledge and proud in its acquisition, have cultivated the most beautiful garden of mentality which has been seen in France since the Pléïade and Port-Royal. Poets, sociologists, romancers, and critics have disseminated thereby marvellous beauties.”

M. Adam exaggerates, as he is very apt to do. Nevertheless, in spite of a great deal that is immature, amateurish, intemperate, and fantastic about most of them, the _revues des jeunes_ are one of the most significant phenomena of these latter years.

They have been an appreciable disturbing force. The names of most of the writers mentioned in this chapter are repeatedly appearing in their tables of contents; and their prospectuses abound in such tell-tale phrases as these: “_art libre_,” “_beauté sociale_,” “_vie féconde et humanité forte_,” “_dévoiler les intrigues_, _combattre les abus_,” “_tribune ouverte_,” “_idées hardies et généreuses_,” “_l’âme purement désintéressée des futurs Etats-Unis d’Europe_,” “_l’art existe pour la vie_,” “_la cité radieuse où l’humanité affranchie vivra enfin dans l’harmonie, dans la justice, et dans la force_.”

Furthermore, such publications as _Le Mercure de France_, _La Grande Revue_ (edited by Fernand Labori, defender of anarchists and of Dreyfus), _La Plume_ (whose _soirées littéraires_ have enjoyed an international renown), _La Revue de Paris_, _La Revue_, _La Contemporaine_, _La Vogue_, _L’Hermitage_, and _La Grande France_, by extending the hospitality of their columns to the exploitation of the most advanced theories and ideas, have—without claiming to be revolutionary or, at any rate, without limiting themselves to propaganda—effectively supplemented the efforts of the propagandist mediums.

The revolutionary sentiments prevalent among the intellectual _élite_ of France have found abundant expression in the French drama, as was to be expected in a country which has a literary stage and in which nearly every man of letters is something of a playwright. Indeed, it would not be surprising if the stage, by reason of its superior capacity for giving vividness to ideas, were quite as efficacious an instrument of revolutionary propaganda as the press, the _chanson_, or the novel.

Octave Mirbeau is the author of several plays, three of which, _Les Mauvais Bergers_, _L’Epidémie_, and _L’Acquitté_, teem with caustic, uncompromising anarchism.

_Les Mauvais Bergers_ was successfully produced by Bernhardt’s company in 1897. Its hero, Jean Roule, is a young, thoughtful, aspiring workman, who has suffered so much at the hands of the capitalists and the authorities and has seen so much suffering imposed on others from the same sources that he is possessed with a colossal, implacable hatred of everybody and everything that has to do with power. On the other hand, his heart is full to bursting with unselfish love for the unfortunate proletariat. “I want to live,” he cries, “to live in my flesh, in my brain, in the expansion of all my organs, of all my faculties, instead of remaining the beast of burden that is flogged and the unthinking machine that is turned for others. I want to be a man, in short,—a man in my own eyes.... We also need some poetry and some art in our lives; for, poor as he may be, a man does not live by bread alone. He has a right, like the rich, to things of beauty.... These flames, this smoke, these tortures, these accursed machines which every day and every hour devour my brain, my heart, my right to happiness, my right to life,—these—these yawning mouths of ovens, these fiery furnaces, these caldrons which are fed with my muscles, with my will, with my liberty, by the shovelful,—to make out of them the wealth and the social puissance of a single man! Extinguish all that, I entreat you! Blow up all that! Annihilate all that!”

His most complete abhorrence is the politician. The employer is white beside him. “The employer is a man, like you. You have him before you. You speak to him, you move him, you threaten him, you kill him! At least, he has a visage,—a chest in which to sink a knife. But go move this being without a visage called politician! Go kill this thing called politics,—this slimy, slippery thing which you think you hold and which always escapes you, which you believe dead and which always comes to life again,—this abominable thing by which everything has been debased, everything corrupted, everything bought, everything sold,—justice, love, beauty!—which has made venality of conscience a national institution of France; which has done worse still, since with its filthy slaver it has befouled the august face of the poor! worse still, since it has destroyed in you your last ideal,—faith in Revolution!”

Aided and inspirited by a working-girl, Madeleine (Bernhardt’s rôle), this Jean Roule, who would kill as much from excess of love as from hate, leads the workmen in a revolt against their employers. But the latter are sustained by government troops, and the play ends with a massacre and a procession of coffins.

_L’Epidémie_ (1898) is an extravagant one-act comedy,—almost a farce,—caricaturing the culpable indifference of the bourgeois politician to the welfare of the humble and his extreme solicitude for the welfare of the rich. Typhoid fever has made several victims in the military barracks of a provincial city. The municipal council assembles for the purpose of taking measures to arrest it. When the council learns, however, that the disease has attacked no one outside the barracks, and within the barracks only the private soldiers, whose duty, whose glory it is to give their lives for their country, it decides to do nothing, to the accompaniment of enthusiastic cries of “_Vive la France!_” The decision has scarcely been made when a messenger arrives with the news that a bourgeois has died of the plague. Thereupon the council reconsiders its former action, votes to erect a statue to the dead bourgeois, to name a street in his honour, to demolish the city’s unsanitary quarters, to open up boulevards, and to introduce a water system, and makes an appropriation of 100,000,000 francs therefor. Finally, each councillor rises in turn, and pronounces a panegyric of the bourgeois victim.

_L’Acquitté_, another one-act comedy, presents the adventure of a vagabond, Jean Guenille, who, having carried to the police station (in an access of honesty) a purse of 10,000 francs which he found in the street, is browbeaten and put under lock and key by the _commissaire_ because he has no legal domicile. M. Mirbeau’s other plays, _Vieux Ménages_ (1900), _Le Portefeuille_ and _Scrupules_ (1902), and _Les Affaires sont les Affaires_ (1903),—the last-named[118] an exposition of the power of money to destroy natural sentiments,—are only a shade less subversive in tone.

Lucien Descaves has to his credit a one-act anarchistic play, entitled _La Cage_. The Havenne family (consisting of father, mother, a son Albert, aged twenty-one, and a daughter Madeleine, aged twenty-six), threatened with eviction and unable to pay their rent or find work, are in black despair. The father and mother, in the temporary absence of Albert and Madeleine, drink a vial of laudanum and light a brazier of charcoal. The children return, find their parents dead, and, desiring to die likewise, submit themselves to the poisonous fumes of the brazier, which is still burning. They bethink themselves in time, however, decide that it is less cowardly to steal than to die, and set out together for a career of outlawry and revolutionary apostleship. “Are we quite sure, Madeleine, that there is nothing better to do than to kill ourselves?” queries Albert. And then he quotes the famous letter of Frederick of Prussia to D’Alembert: “If there should be found a family destitute of all resources and in the frightful condition you depict, I should not hesitate to decide theft legitimate.... The ties of society are based upon reciprocal services; but, if this society is composed of pitiless souls, all engagements are broken.”

_La Cage_ was suppressed by the censorship[119] very early in its career. Descaves, who dedicated his work “_Aux désespérés pour qu’ils choisissent_,” foresaw and publicly predicted its interdiction. “Let me try,” he said, “to put on the stage, instead of adulteries and embarrassing _liaisons_, the distress of a bourgeois family at the end of its resources, its illusions, and its courage,—the parents reduced to suicide and the children precipitated into revolt. Ah! you’ll hear a fine clatter!”

The severity of the censorship towards _La Cage_ called out numerous protests, notably this from Alexander Hepp (in his _Quotidiens_), little suspected of doctrinal sympathy with Descaves: “As soon as we show to the gallery the reality of the miseries, the despairs, the injustices of society, a fragment of real life, of the true cross people carry, our delicate sensibilities are shocked; and it is always before that which is truest that we cry out improbability. The innovating tendencies, the harsh accent of retribution, the virile sincerity of Descaves, who puts on the boards a family driven to suicide, have disturbed the digestions of the orchestra.”

The critic Henri Bauer, commenting on _Les Mauvais Bergers_ and _La Cage_, wrote: “An anti-social dramatic literature is born in France.... It required authors of the power and eloquence of Mirbeau, of the devouring passion and the admirable soul of Descaves, to dare to ring out in dramatic dialogue this conclusion, _On n’améliore pas la société, on la supprime_.... Society is a lie, social progress a lure, the social pact is broken: nothing is left but the individual,—his temperament, his law, his conscience, and his will.”

Descaves’ _Tiers Etat_ is an eloquent plea for the faithful mistress who is debarred from marriage by legal technicalities. He is also joint author with Georges Darien of _Les Chapons_ (to which this legend was prefixed: “_Aux Mânes des Bourgeois de Calais nous sacrifions ce spécimen de leur pitoyable descendance_”), and with Maurice Donnay of _La Clairière_ and _Oiseaux de Passage_. _La Clairière_, which was one of the notable features of the theatrical season of 1898-99, pictures the life of an anarchist _phalanstère_, which succeeds admirably until the members send for their _compagnes_, when it is demoralised and disintegrated by petty intrigues and jealousies.

The moral? Not the obvious and absurd one that men alone will constitute the society of the future; but this, that women have not been enfranchised long enough to have developed the maturity of character necessary to the practice of anarchist precepts. _Oiseaux de Passage_ deals with the experiences of anarchists in exile. “I am proud,” says M. Descaves, apropos of the piece, “to have been able to transfer to the stage the theories of a Bakounine, and to introduce them to the public thus.”

Maurice Donnay is a railing nihilist, subtle, graceful, and gracious, somewhat after the Anatole France pattern,—a smiling _révolté_, a refined recalcitrant, whose recipe for a play is said to be “a little love, much adultery, an enormous amount of _esprit_, a pinch of politics, and a gramme of sociology,” and whose psychology is “a sparkling, effervescing affair, the analyses of which explode merrily with the welcome noise of popping champagne corks.”

In _Amants_, _La Douloureuse_, _La Bascule_, _Le Retour de Jérusalem_, and _Georgette Lemonnier_, Donnay is prodigal of _bons mots_ and malicious pleasantries, by which he gives the most piquant conceivable flavour to the social and political infamies of the time. _Le Torrent_, his most ambitious work, has this much of the serious, that death is its dénouement; but its general method and attitude do not differ essentially from the method and attitude of his other plays.

To those who expressed surprise that the flippant Donnay should collaborate with the truculent Descaves, Donnay himself said: “A young man, I produced at the _Chat Noir_ my piece _Pension de Famille_, which won me the honour of being called ‘joyous anarchist’ by Jules Lemaître. I remained an anarchist in _La Douloureuse_. And, without doubt, I have always been an anarchist; more, it is true, for sentimental than for sociological reasons, but also from a point of view exclusively philosophical. He who analyses, he who, without ceasing, unravels the meshes of this complicated network of ideas which constitutes the social order, is more or less of an anarchist necessarily, is he not?”

Other works of unequivocal revolt produced within the last fifteen years are:—

_Mais Quelqu’un Troubla la Fête_,[120] a one-act piece by Louis Marsolleau. A financier, a politician, a bishop, a general, a judge, a duchess, and a courtesan (so many types of the powerful and privileged of the world) partake hilariously of a sumptuous banquet. Their revels are interrupted by the apparition first of a peasant, then of a city labourer, and are finally put an end to by a mysterious and terrible unknown, who causes a general explosion.

_Sur la Foi des Etoiles_, by Gabriel Trarieux,—an esoteric symbolistic effort, a groping towards the society of the future: “I say to myself: The stars up yonder, with their fixed, impassive air, the stars which have mounted guard for centuries, are living worlds.... They die and are born. I compare them to the truths which guide us.... For there are several truths,—... some very ancient, almost extinguished, to which we submit by force of habit, and some—oh! just emerging—which will not be true before to-morrow.”

_Le Cuivre_, by Paul Adam and André Picard, which exposes and explains the tyranny exercised by money over persons and governments; and _L’Automne_, by Paul Adam and Gabriel Mourey (forbidden by the censorship).

_Le Domaine_, by Lucien Besnard, which recounts the progress of socialism in the rural districts, and defines the antagonism between the decadent nobility and the rising fourth estate.

_La Pâque Socialiste_, by Emile Veyrin, which describes a practical experiment in Christian socialism.

_La Sape_, by Georges Leneven, the hero of which is an anarchist dreamer of a highly intellectual type, _Le Détour_ by Henry Bernstein, and _Le Masque_ by Henri Bataille.

_Le Voile du Bonheur_, by Georges Clemenceau, which employs Chinese personages and a Chinese setting to explain the manner in which Frenchmen are fooled and ruled by their “mandarins”; and _Les Petits Pieds_ by Henry de Saussine, which employs a similar device to ridicule French education.

_Le Ressort: Etude de Révolution_, mystic and ominous, by Urbain Gohier; _Barbapoux_, savagely anti-clerical, by Charles Malato; _En Détresse_, with a conclusion akin to that of Descaves’ _Cage_, by Henri Fèvre; _L’Ami de l’Ordre_, by Georges Darien; _La Grève_, by Jean Hugues; _Conte de Noël_ and _Des Cloches du Cain_, by Auguste Linert; _Le Chemineau_, by Richepin; Jean Ajalbert’s adaptation of De Goncourt’s _La Fille Elisa_;[121] and the pieces of Hérold, Pierre Valdagne, and Georges Lecomte.

These performances have been supplemented by revivals of De Maupassant’s _Boule de Suif_, which portrays the sacrifice made by a prostitute for the bourgeois and her ostracism by them when they have no further need of her assistance; of the stage version of Zola’s _Germinal_ in the theatres of the working faubourgs; and of certain precursors, such as Henri Becque’s _Les Corbeaux_ (probably the most terrible arraignment of law and lawyers ever written) and _L’Evasion_ and _La Révolte_ of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam; and by the importation of the principal works of the Russian, Belgian, Scandinavian, German, Italian, and Spanish innovators.

Alfred Capus, the principal rival of Maurice Donnay in his peculiar _genre_, holds in completest but most amiable detestation whatever has to do with regular living. Less sardonic than M. Donnay, lighter, brighter, and more _spirituel_, if that is possible, he is equally nihilistic, though not, so far as I am aware, by personal avowal. In _Rosine_ he ventures to depict a _union libre_ receiving a father’s benediction; and in _Qui Perd Gagne_, _Années d’Aventures_, _Les Petites Folles_, _Mariage Bourgeois_, _La Veine_, _La Bourse ou la Vie_, and _Beau Jeune Homme_ he holds up to ridicule, one after another, all the traditional bourgeois ideals.

Reformers being notoriously deficient in the sense of humour, it is a curious and piquant circumstance that not only a majority of the brilliant school of stage humourists, currently known as the “_Auteurs Gais_,” but the four most admired of the group,—Georges Courtéline, Pierre Veber, Jules Renard, and Tristan Bernard,—are frankly revolutionary, either in their personal opinions or in their writings, or in both.

Pierre Veber and Tristan Bernard were charter members of the revolutionary band _L’Endehors_, and have been affiliated latterly with that of _L’Idée Nouvelle_. Jules Renard is the bitterest of social philosophers, under the thin disguise of a charming, impeccable style.

Courtéline, whose comic genius is so strong, so pure, and so fine that he is called, without too gross exaggeration, “_le petit-fils de Molière_”; Courtéline, who will be read and played, in the opinion of many, long after every other contemporary French dramatist has been forgotten; Courtéline, who makes you laugh till you weep over what you ought to weep over without laughing, who promotes reflection and rouses the conscience while dispelling melancholy,—this prodigious Courtéline, truth-loving joker and humane mountebank as he is, has probably done more than any single individual in any sphere to bring into disrepute the brutality of the army, and to expose the perpetual contradiction between essential justice and the texts of the law.

Eugène Brieux is the most prolific producer of the “_pièce à thèse sociale_” and the most indefatigable corrector of abuses connected with the Paris stage. He has attacked the race-course and the police station in _Le Résultat des Courses_, public and private charity in _Les Bienfaiteurs_, physicians in _L’Evasion_, current methods of instruction in _Blanchette_, popular ignorance of and prejudice against venereal diseases in _Les Avariés_,[122] the law and the administrators of the law in _La Robe Rouge_ (”_C’est donc la loi qui rend criminel?_”), and the Chamber of Deputies in _L’Engrenage_; and he has defended the rights of children against parents in _Le Berceau_, the rights of the artistic temperament in _Ménages d’Artistes_, the rights of the poor against the rich in _Les Remplaçantes_, and the rights of the _fille-mère_ in _Maternité_.

M. Brieux is not easy to locate doctrinally or otherwise. He is not an “_auteur gai_,” far from it, and is not, in the strict sense of the term, perhaps, a revolutionist. But his mania for the correction of abuses has surely beguiled him more than once into an attitude towards society that is, to all intents and purposes, revolutionary.

The rugged, poetic, weird, and philosophical François de Curel is as difficult to locate doctrinally as M. Brieux. There are times when he seems to be as irreverent a nihilist as M. France, M. Donnay, or M. Richepin, and times when he seems to be as reverently ecclesiastical and reactionary as M. Paul Bourget or M. le Comte de Mun. All his plays—_Les Fossiles_, in which he pictures the pathetic impotence of the exhausted nobility; _La Nouvelle Idole_, in which he alternately exalts and belittles science; _La Fille Sauvage_, in which he studies the demoralising effect of civilisation upon the mind of the savage; and _Le Repas du Lion_, in which he confronts orthodox economy with the socialist’s dream—admit of different and absolutely contradictory interpretations.

But _Le Repas du Lion_ is claimed, with at least a show of reason, by the socialists, because of its dénouement. One of its wealthy characters elucidates the conflict between labour and capital by means of a parable, “The Lion and the Jackal.” The lion hunts for himself. The jackal, too feeble to hunt for himself, follows the lion. The lion gorges himself with his prey. The jackal eats what the lion leaves. If there were no lion to hunt for him, the jackal would starve. Ergo, the lion is the benefactor of the jackal.

A labourer objects: “In that case, Monsieur, there is a lion; and we are the jackals. Since you choose to have the business settled between wild beasts, we will follow you on to your own ground. When the jackals find that the remnants left by the lion do not garnish their paunches sufficiently, they get together in great numbers, surprise the king, and devour him alive.”

The labourer’s objection is given force by the shooting of the capitalist of the piece. “The reply of the jackal to the lion,” comments one of the minor characters.

Jean Jullien considers himself, if rumour speaks true, in no sense a revolutionist. All the same, his robust drama _La Poigne_, which depicts vividly the moral ravages wrought by authority in and about a humanitarian soul, was received enthusiastically by both the socialistic and the anarchistic press. “Socialists will take notice,” remarked a socialist organ, “that it behooves them to lavish their money and their bravos on this attempt at ‘_L’Art Social_.’” And the theatrical critic of _Le Libertaire_ said: “The piece of Jean Jullien pleased us by its frankness and its human interest. Rarely has an author so stirred our minds and hearts. It is only just to say that the personages exemplify the sentiments and the ideas which are familiar to the anarchists, and that we find in _La Poigne_ an echo of our passions.”

The same author’s _L’Ecolière_, which denounces the hypocrisy of petty provincial functionaries and narrates the conflict of a high-minded, warm-hearted woman with the bourgeois system of morals, was accorded a similar welcome in similar quarters. So also was his _Oasis_, which preaches that Humanity should create for itself, remote from “egoisms, prejudices, mutually hostile religions, and the disgraceful tumults of injustice and war, the basis of peace, of association, and of love.”

As a _féministe_ who flouts and defies the marriage code, Paul Hervieu lays himself liable to be classed as a revolutionist, at least a partial revolutionist, however little such a classification may please him. Whatever else they are, _La Loi de l’Homme_, _L’Armature_, _Les Tenailles_, _Les Paroles Restent_, _L’Enigme_, and _Le Dédale_ are works of revolt. The first-named, _La Loi de l’Homme_, evoked the following sweeping but not unsympathetic judgment from the critic Emile de St. Auban, who, lawyer as well as critic, should know whereof he speaks: “The contemporary theatre occupies itself a great deal with the laws. The code appears often on the boards, and the dramatist-jurists abrogate it in prose or in verse. But never was this abrogation so passionate, so brusque, never was it so radical, so total, as in _La Loi de l’Homme_. I will add so concise, since three very short acts, two of which make one, suffice to erase not a text, but _the_ text, not _a_ law, but _the_ law, and with the law the cortège of egoisms and hypocrisies which have given it birth, and have assured it its full expansion and the calm and sure perpetration of its outrages; to erase, I say, an entire jurisprudence, written or traditional, promulgated against the weak for the strong.”

To the category of partial, unwilling, or unwitting revolutionists to which Jullien, Brieux, Hervieu, and De Curel belong may be assigned also Jules Case in _La Vassale_, Gaston Dévore in _La Conscience d’un Enfant_, Georges Ancey in _Ces Messieurs_ and _La Dupe_, Emile Fabre in _L’Argent_, _Le Bien d’Autrui_, _La Vie Publique_, and _Comme Ils sont Tous_, Rostand in _La Samaritaine_, Abel Hermant in _Le Faubourg_, _La Carrière_, and _La Meute_, Albert Guinon in _Décadence_,[123] Alexandre Bisson in _Le Bon Juge_, Emile Bourgeois in _Mariage d’Argent_, and Bruyerre in _En Paix_. Indeed, it is even permitted to query whether the reputed reactionaries, Jules Lemaître and Henri Lavedan, are not really (at least so far as certain of their pieces are concerned) in the same boat.

Revolutionary and semi-revolutionary plays were for a considerable period well-nigh a monopoly of the _Théâtre Libre_, where unconditional literary form and unconventional acting were the handmaids of unconventional ideas. Latterly they have invaded every legitimate stage of Paris, not excepting the august and supposedly inhospitable _Comédie Française_; and they may be said to be the specialty of four houses: the _Théâtre Antoine_ (founded by Antoine after he abandoned the _Théâtre Libre_); the _Grand Guignol_, the nearest existing counterpart to the _Théâtre Libre_; and the _Gymnase_ and the _Renaissance_, which are now copying the general policy of the _Antoine_. Maurice Maeterlinck and his company have latterly made their headquarters in Paris. Maeterlinck’s _Monna Vanna_ was applauded by the revolutionary organs.

The various free stages, or _théâtres à côté_, which give private performances at irregular intervals, also reserve a modicum of space in their répertoires for pieces of social revolt.

The _revues_ of the variety theatres and concert halls, in which the events of the year are criticised and caricatured with a freedom that often calls down the wrath of the censorship, particularly at Montmartre, are also far from a negligible influence in the direction of revolution.

In 1883 the socialist Clovis Hugues wrote, in an introduction
to a volume by the refractory Léon Cladel: “The petrification
of the republic in the bourgeois spirit does not prevent
literature from being socialistic. It is unconsciously so,
perhaps; but it is so. And this is the essential thing for the
future.... Open a romance, no matter what one, attend a
theatrical representation, no matter what one, and, so that
you have the slightest aptitude for combining details, for
surprising the idea in the fact, for following a philosophical
train through an intrigue, you will be amazed at the quantity
of socialism which emerges from this romance and that play.
Has the author felt himself responsible towards the Revolution
in writing his work? Not the least in the world. He has
yielded to the mighty pressure of events, he has submitted to
the historic fatalities of his time, the permanent influence
of humanity in travail.... What signifies this transformation?
It signifies that the philosophies soak down into literature;
it signifies that the hour is at hand, since the idea
incarnates itself involuntarily in the form; it signifies that
the fourth estate is mounting, that justice is near.”

A round decade later (1894) A. Hamon, a friend of anarchy, wrote:—

“Read in the sheets which are the most hostile to the
anarchists—such as the _Figaro_, the _Journal_, the _Gil
Blas_, the _Echo de Paris_—the short stories, sketches, and
chroniques of the Mirbeaus, the Bauers, the Descaves, the Paul
Adams, the Bernard Lazares, the Ajalberts, the Sévérines,
etc., and you will perceive that anarchist tendencies throng
them. Follow the ‘_jeunes revues_,’ and you will observe that
there is not, to speak in the large, a piece of verse, a
story, a study of any sort whatsoever, which does not tend
towards the destruction of what the anarchists qualify as
social prejudice,—_la patrie_, authority, family, religion,
courts of law, militarism, etc.

“All the thinking men of this epoch,—savants, littérateurs,
artists, etc.,—one may almost say all, so rare are those who
imprison themselves in the ‘_tour d’ivoire_’ or who profess
doctrines commendatory of the existing order,—all the
relatively young men, I mean, who have attained their majority
since 1870, have _libertaire_ inclinations. The result is a
fervent propaganda under the most varied forms and in the most
dissimilar _milieux_.”

Still later (1899) a declared opponent of anarchism, M. Fierens-Gevaert, wrote in his admirable social study, _La Tristesse Contemporaine_: “There are, to begin with, the militant anarchists,—a handful of wretched starvelings and lunatics, whose doctrine consists solely in listening to the instincts of the brute within them. There are, next, the unwitting or dilettante anarchists. These latter are legion. They are to be found in the highest grades of society. They even compose the intellectual _élite_ of their time. Every philosopher, novelist, poet, dramatist, and artist is to-day a latent anarchist; and very often he boasts of it.”

Just how far this surprising situation is an heirloom of the four revolutions which France traversed during the last century, and just how far it is traceable to forces which have entered from without,—to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Darwin and Spencer, Leopardi and the pleiades of Russian and Scandinavian innovators,—it is not necessary to determine. The really significant thing is that the intellectual and social conditions which have produced Anatole France, Descaves, and Mirbeau in France have likewise produced Björnson, Brandès, and Strindberg in Scandinavia, Maxim Gorky in Russia, Hermann Heijermanns in the Netherlands, Gerhardt Hauptmann in Germany, Camille Lemonnier in Belgium, Gabriel d’Annunzio in Italy, and José Echegaray in the Biscayan Peninsula; and it is only by keeping well in mind the intensity and the scope of this world-movement of revolt that the dynamic value of French revolt can be properly estimated.