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“The wonder is that he didn’t take a pair of tongs to hand me my paper. He held it towards me with the tips of his fingers in a horrified fashion, full of bourgeois indignation at the idea that the> Père Trimard came to one of his lodgers.”—Journal d’un Anarchiste (Augustin Léger).

“You are not guilty because you are ignorant, but you are guilty when you resign yourselves to ignorance.”—Mazzini.

“What we should try to do is to sow ideas, to force reflection, leaving to time the care of making the ideas which it shall have received blossom into consciousness and deeds.”—Jean Grave.

In 1898-99 Sébastien Faure took advantage of the exceptional chance for agitation offered by the Dreyfus matter to found an anarcho-Dreyfusard daily, Le Journal du Peuple. All other attempts to establish a daily anarchist organ seem to have failed completely,11 and the Journal du Peuple lived—if its feeble panting for existence can rightly be called living—only a few months. After its demise, M. Faure, as if to conceal his defeat, started an anarchist weekly, Les Plébéiennes, the good will of which he was not slow and, apparently, not too reluctant to turn over to another anarchist weekly, Le Libertaire (eight pages, price two sous a copy), which had been printed intermittently at Montmartre for a considerable period, and which M. Faure himself had been instrumental in founding. The public proclamation of the consummation of the fusion between Les Plébéiennes and Le Libertaire, which, being the fusion of two miseries, was at the farthest possible remove from the up-to-date fusion that goes to the forming of a trust, is of interest because it throws a great deal of light on the make-up of an anarchist paper, and on the anomalous and difficult position in the newspaper world of the anarchist press:—

“Because of material difficulties—want of money, to speak frankly—the Libertaire was obliged to suspend publication. It reappears to-day after a very short eclipse, and we have every reason to hope that the regularity of its appearance will be exposed to no fresh interruptions....

“We have profited by this short, obligatory vacation to attempt to group about the Libertaire new forces and more numerous signatures; in a word, to take all the measures necessary to insure it a vigorous life.... You will see elsewhere that our friend Sébastien Faure has interrupted the publication of his excellent Plébéiennes in order to rally as many readers as possible about the Libertaire. It is in the Libertaire, then, that Sébastien Faure will hereafter express his thoughts as often as he shall feel inclined to do so.

“Furthermore, precious and assiduous collaborators have formally promised us regular contributions; namely, Laurent Tailhade, who with his incisive and scholarly pen will treat especially of the vulgarities of Christianity; Paul Ary Cine, who will expose barrack life; Raphaël Dunois, who will chronicle and interpret the labor movement; Georges Pioch, dramatic and literary criticism; J. G. Prodhomme, musical criticism; A. R. Vertpré, art criticism; Alfred Griot, review of the reviews; Fred-Pol, review of the week; Alfred Bloch, scientific chronique; A. Harrent, anti-clerical chronique....

“In a word, we are doing what we can. Let our readers on their side do what they can in making known the Libertaire, in seeking new purchasers for it, in sending us financial aid sometimes, and in establishing in favour of their organ a serious and persevering propaganda.

“In this manner we can be certain that we and ours will have a journal to voice our opinions, our angers, and our hopes, and one which we can depend on to lead the people in the way that is frankly ‘libertaire’ on the fast-approaching day when it is going to be necessary to ‘fight it out,’ when all the political parties are going to fall on each other in order to retain power or usurp it. We are on the eve of important events. It is the moment for all of us to show ourselves, to shake off, some of us, our apathy, others of us our egoism, to silence all our dissensions, to combine with force will, abnegation, and audacity.”—Le Libertaire.

DORMER-WINDOW OF JEAN GRAVE’S WORKSHOP

Office of “Les Temps Nouveaux,” in the rue Mouffetard

Older, solider, more temperate, more dignified, and—if the word in such a strange connection is permissible—more conservative, indeed so solid, temperate, dignified, and conservative that it has been more than once referred to as the Temps of the anarchist press, is Les Temps Nouveaux, an eight-page weekly, sold, like Le Libertaire, at two sous a copy. Les Temps Nouveaux (formerly La Révolte, and before that Le Révolté), which was founded at Geneva, Switzerland, by Elisée Reclus and Pierre Kropotkine more than a quarter of a century ago, has appeared regularly ever since with only slight interruptions and the few changes of title that commemorate its encounters with the law. It came to Paris soon after its foundation, being forced to emigrate from Switzerland on account of the anarchist attempt against the Palais-Fédéral at Berne. Its most distinguished, and at the same time most distinctive, feature is a literary supplement made up in considerable part of selections from the French and foreign classics and from the writings of contemporary scientists and littérateurs, not avowed revolutionists, which arraign the evils of society or support any one of the articles of the anarchist creed. It also reproduces in full addresses by non-anarchist celebrities in which concessions are made to revolutionary ideals or ideas.

“You may seize our journals, our brochures,” says the editor, Jean Grave, “you will not prevent the camarades from reading what the bourgeois authors have written on the rottenness and abjectness of the present hour. This alone is more terrible than all the revendications and threats we can accumulate.”

From time to time this supplement serves to make public the addresses prepared for prohibited anarchist congresses, as in the year of the last Exposition, when it printed the papers which would have been read at the International Anarchist Congress (euphoniously named Le Congrès Ouvrier Révolutionnaire Internationale) if a frightened or over-prudent ministry had not forbidden the sitting of the congress.

The contents of all the literary supplements thus far issued have been classified under the heads of War, Militarism, Property, Family, Religion, Law, Justice, The Magistracy, Poverty, Wage-earning, etc., and they have been reproduced (with added selections, illustrations, and complete bibliographies) in as many volumes as there are heads.12

Thanks, perhaps, to the clever handling of its literary supplement; thanks, perhaps, to the thoughtfulness and relative tolerance of the body of the paper, the Temps Nouveaux has an appreciable circulation among artists, littérateurs, savants, economists, bibliophiles, and various other sorts of cultured people quite outside of anarchist circles.

The present editor, Jean Grave, is one of the most winning personalities in the anarchist or any other contemporary movement for reform. A Lyonnais by origin, a shoemaker and later a printer by trade, Jean Grave came to Paris in his early manhood. He took part in the Commune, and was one of the banished after its downfall, passing most of his exile in Switzerland, where he was intimately associated with Kropotkine and Reclus.

As editor, despite his comparative moderation, he has not been immune from persecution. Like Kropotkine, his predecessor in the editorial chair, Jean Grave has a fair experimental knowledge of the inside of prison walls. A thorough man of the people, and proud of the fact,—he has always retained his printer’s blouse,—his person and his writings alike are nevertheless instinct with the most perfect urbanity.

There is no more picturesque corner in Paris than that on which, for many years now, the Temps Nouveaux has had its office in the top of an aged and mellow six-story building whose ground floor is a wine-shop and whose wrinkled roof and plant-bedecked dormer-window overlook the sixteenth-century church of St. Médard,—no more intimate and engaging business interior than the paper, book, and brochure bestrewn, flower-and-print-decorated, slanting-walled loft in which Jean Grave (veritable “attic philosopher”) and his assistant make up and administer their sheet. Nothing could be more open and kind than the welcome you get when, having felt your way up a winding stair as damp and dark as a mediæval donjon-keep, you turn the latch-key, hospitably left in the outside of the door, and with a premonitory knock enter the loft; always providing your entry is courteous and your coming well motived. Indeed, I know in all Paris nothing morally finer than the example Jean Grave’s gentle, unassuming life offers of consecration to the ideal.

There is something peculiarly significant in the fact that the office of this anarchist organ (whose mission is to be, like the university settlement, a picket of civilisation carrying light into dark places) is located on the line where the university and the industrial districts overlap each other, at the very point where the Quartier Latin ceases and the Faubourgs Coulebarbe and Salpêtrière begin; at the junction of such typical highways as the rue Claude Bernard, passing the Ecole Normale, the rue Monge, in which many students lodge, the broad Avenue des Gobelins, with its evening and Sunday animation as a labourers’ promenade, and the steeply ascending rue Mouffetard, with its motley street market for the poor.13

The Temps Nouveaux, the Libertaire, and the anarchist weeklies of the provinces serve to keep the individual camarades, the “groups,” and the trimardeurs in close touch with each other and with the whole anarchist body, as well as to narrate events, establish the real significance of the casualty columns of the bourgeois press, and expound the doctrine of anarchy. They also lend themselves to mutual relief work,—raising subscriptions for the camarades in distress from lack of employment, and securing comforts for the camarades in prison and for their families. They likewise signal mouchards (police spies), and predict their movements, rehabilitate camarades unjustly accused of espionage, denounce the crookedness of employers, arrange for lectures, and, especially, utilise for the best interests of the movement the varied information gleaned here, there, and everywhere by trimardeurs, who are for them so many unsalaried correspondents.

An anarchist monthly, L’Education Libertaire, has lately been founded by the Bibliothèque d’Education Libertaire of the Faubourg St. Antoine, which is not only the organ of the various Bibliothèques Libertaires14 of Paris and the provinces, but also a review of real solidity and distinction.

Its nature and scope may be judged by a brief excerpt from its first prospectus:—

“L’Education Libertaire will contain:—

“I. One or two articles by the writers of note who have accorded us their literary collaboration. [Follows a list of a score or more collaborators, of whom Pierre Quillard, A. F. Hérold, Urbain Gohier, Charles Malato, Henri Rainaldy, and Laurent Tailhade have a Parisian or more than Parisian reputation.]

“II. Certain of the lectures delivered in the Bibliothèques Libertaires. These lectures will also be printed as brochures, which, the type being already set, will cost nothing but the paper and printing. We shall get thus the brochure at one sou.

“III. Articles upon the different theories of education and the attempts at ‘libertaire’ education, a large subject, which will give rise to interesting discussions.

“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:—

“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.”

The following statement of the review L’Education Libertaire to its subscribers gives a better idea than pages of explanation by an outsider could give of the poverty to which anarchist publications are subject and of their uphill struggle to get the wherewithal to live:—

“TO OUR SUBSCRIBERS

“Those of our readers who have followed our attempt month by month know by what a slow progression we have arrived at the bringing out of this Review.

“We shall continue, as in the past, to publish in each number the accounts of the preceding number. This will enable the readers to appreciate the pecuniary effort that must be made if the publication is to be continued.

“We have received a hundred francs for this number and forty for subsequent numbers. We have lumped the money all together to pay in part for this number. We shall not appear again until we have in the treasury the necessary sum. It is for our readers, if they approve of our attempt, to interest their friends in the Review, and engage them to subscribe.

“We have accepted subscriptions of three months, six months, and one year. By that we mean subscriptions for three numbers, six numbers, and twelve numbers. If the state of our treasury does not permit us to appear every month, our subscribers will, none the less, receive as many numbers as they have subscribed for at the rate of ten sous per number. We formally bind ourselves, having received subscriptions for one year, to print the Review twelve times. As to dates, we guarantee nothing. The camarades who are the administrators of this journal are workingmen, able to dispense very little money; and it would take them long months of self-assessment to get together the 200 francs necessary for the publication of each number.

“To facilitate the diffusion of our Review and the search for new subscribers, we have prepared special propagandist numbers, which we will send, postpaid, for five sous each to readers who are already subscribers. These special numbers have printed on every page in red ink, ‘Read and Circulate.’ They may secure subscribers for us if each of us pass one or two about in his own circle.

“As to the next number, we urge the camarades who have subscribed for only three months or six months to make their subscriptions annual, in which case we shall be able to appear again early in December.”

The accounts referred to in the second paragraph of the above are exceedingly suggestive reading. They recorded one subscription of twenty francs. The remainder of the subscriptions ranged from two sous to two francs. The total receipts were fr. 57.10. The expenses of printing and mailing the number were fr. 73.60, and the incidental expenses were fr. 11.55. The deficit for this number was, therefore, fr. 28.05; but, the deficit on the two preceding numbers having amounted to fr. 32.80, the review at the end of its third number showed a deficit of fr. 60.85.

Very trifling seems this deficit to those of us who are accustomed to read the balance sheets of large journals, but very real and very embarrassing are the difficulties which it presents to the publishers of an anarchist periodical. The financial statement is followed by this notice:—

“To cover this deficit and reimburse the camarades who advanced us money, we offer for sale at ten sous, postpaid, the one hundred and thirty copies of the Preparatory Series which we still have left (3 numbers with covers, 18 pages each).”

The acknowledgment of subscriptions and contributions through the columns of the papers is theoretically for the sake of saving the labour and expense of correspondence and postage; and, when the names of the contributors are given by initials only, as is sometimes done, the device may stand for what it claims to be. But when, as too frequently happens, the names are printed in full, it is impossible not to suspect the editors of catering to precisely the same sort of vanity as that which lies back of bourgeois subscription lists.

These account columns are further utilised by the camarades—but here at least the taint is scarcely a bourgeois one—for the launching of pleasantries (more or less astute) and for the expression of sentiments, the affirmation of brotherhood, the declaration of principles, and the utterance of prophecies or threats.

In a recent subscription list of Le Libertaire these signatures appeared: Nemesis, fr. 0.50; L’Alouette, 0.50; Ni Dieu ni Maître, 0.50; Un Evadé du Bagne Schneider, 0.50; Trois Mètres de Corde pour le Roussin D——, 0.50; Un Va-nu-pied, 0.25; Un Coopérateur Communiste-anarchiste, 0.30; Trois Semeurs à Lille, 0.25; Après la Conférence de Sébastien Faure, 2 fr.; Trois Coopérateurs, 0.30; Un Miséreux, 0.10; Un Garçon de Café Ennemi de la Tyrannie, 0.30; Deux Trimardeurs, 2 fr.; Un Camarade Dévoué, 1 fr.; A Bas la Lâcheté Humaine, 1 fr.; Vive l’Energie Individuelle! 1 fr.; Trois Copains Rochefortais, 4 fr.; Le Breton du Jardin des Plantes, 0.30.

A recent device for raising funds, which is at the same time an additional means of propaganda, PIERRE JOSEPH PROUDHON15 is the sale of anarchist pictures. Up to 1886 a portrait of Louise Michel was the only picture published under anarchist auspices. In that year La Révolte (now Les Temps Nouveaux), having become convinced of the proselyting value of pictures, attempted to buy for reproduction such of the plates of the illustrated weekly L’Illustration as had or could be given a revolutionary meaning. This attempt failing, it set about producing a series of pictures of its own called Images de Propagande, to be sold at prices ranging from ten to twenty-five sous. These Images de Propagande are all genuine works of art by artists of renown, and the complete collection is much sought by amateurs. The Temps Nouveaux has also turned to the advantage of the propaganda the illustrated postal card fever, and has prepared a series of anarchist pictures especially for children.

The pictorial propaganda has gained even the provinces. The following is an excerpt from an anarchist periodical:—

“The camarades of Roubaix will soon enter into possession of their little press. For a long while they have ardently desired a press, but some efforts still remain to be made. If we make a pecuniary appeal to the camarades, it is that we may get together more quickly the sum necessary for the purchase.... To hasten matters, if possible, a Roubaisien camarade has had the idea of photographing on a plaque of good size (18 by 24 centimetres) the engraving representing the Chicago martyrdom and a drawing with the portraits of Emile Henry,16 Caserio,17 and Angiolillo on a plaque of 9 by 12 centimetres. Price, Martyrs of Chicago, fr. 1.40, postpaid; Henri, Caserio, Angiolillo, 85 centimes, postpaid. Send orders to,” etc.

There is probably no greater obstacle to the progress of the written propaganda than the perpetual petty annoyances that arise from an inadequacy of funds. It is by no means the only one. The anarchist who has already in hand the means to pay for having his journal printed is often unable to find a printer who will undertake the work. “The copains of Grenoble,”—the item is from a trimardeur’s report,—“after having done everything in their power to launch their paper, rebuffed by all the printers (downright refusal, exorbitant charge, etc.), have decided to buy a mimeograph and to autograph manifests, which they will sow broadcast.”

Supposing his journal printed, however, the anarchist editor is still far from the end of his troubles. He has to get it properly distributed; and in this undertaking, likewise, he encounters numerous difficulties.

It is so compromising in every way LITTLE ANARCHISTS to be known as a reader of an anarchist publication that few even of the sympathetically inclined, unless they have a pronounced taste for martyrdom, care to lower themselves in the eyes of their postman, their concièrge, and their neighbours, and to run the risk of being black listed in all quarters by receiving an anarchist paper regularly through the post. Besides, they have a perfectly natural reluctance to pay in advance the subscription price of three months, six months, or a year, for a paper that may not be able to keep alive two months. They prefer to buy the numbers at the news-stands as they come out,—a procedure which not only considerably diminishes the publisher’s net returns, but keeps him in a highly inconvenient uncertainty with regard to his budget. In some years the news-stand sale of the Temps Nouveaux, for instance, has been nine-tenths of the whole circulation.

This very news-stand sale is lessened by the indifference or positive ill-will of the newsdealers, who either decline to handle anarchist papers at all; or, if they do handle them, contrive to keep them well out of view. Furthermore, the railway and post-office authorities take a mischievous or malignant delight in delaying the delivery of anarchist printed matter when they cannot find pretexts for holding it up altogether.

“We receive frequent complaints, which we know are justified for the most part,” says Le Libertaire, “on account of tardiness in the arrival of our paper. We assure our dealers and subscribers that the journal is sent out regularly every Thursday, barring the weeks when money is lacking. Consequently, it is to the malice of the railroads and the post-office that the delay must be ascribed.”

To counteract these and other hindrances to the sale of their wares, anarchist editors have to resort to numerous devices. These devices may be in the form of stereotyped requests to readers to secure other readers, and to force the hands of the dealers, of which the following are good examples:—

“Friends and Readers,

“If you would be useful to the Journal du Peuple, and serve the ideas which it defends, buy several copies and distribute them to the persons whom you judge capable of buying it later for themselves.”

“We urge our friends in Paris to keep demanding our paper of the newsdealers in order to compel them to handle it. A bit of determination on the part of each, and ça ira.”

Often the advertisement appears as a more presuming and exacting appeal to loyalty, as, for example:—

“Our liquidation of the end of the year permits us to spare a quantity of back numbers. We beg those of our friends who are willing to take upon themselves their distribution, either in the meetings or at the doors of the factories, to let us know how many copies to send them.”

At other times, resort is taken to such original and audacious schemes as the following:—

“Journals for All

“The reactionary press penetrates into the rural districts, while many of the libertaire journals are unknown there. We remind our readers that the enterprise ‘Journals for All,’ 17 rue Cujas, holds itself at their disposition to give them the addresses of poor provincials who would be delighted to receive their papers once they have been read. It will cost them a stamp of two centimes each day and the trouble of wrapping and addressing. In thus sending away their papers, our readers will be doing a work highly advantageous to the propaganda. Write the secretary for fuller particulars.”

“Here is a means of circulating our paper which, employed upon a certain scale, would be highly efficacious: All the camarades who can make the sacrifice of a certain number of copies should roll them into a more or less tempting small package, wrap them well to protect them, and then throw them into the doorways of houses, slip them into the baskets of women on their way to or from market, or give them to the children in the street to take home to their parents.”

Finally, the wily stratagems of a determined and not over-scrupulous secret police and the special rigour of a body of more or less biased judges in applying Draconian laws of exception must be reckoned with. In no department of their work do the former display more cunning or the latter more severity. Nevertheless, they have never been able, combined, to prevail over the intensity of the anarchist proselyting spirit far enough to prevent for any length of time the spread of the written word. Trick has been matched by trick and audacity by audacity. The defiance with which the authorities are met is well typified by the following manifesto:—

“Readers and Subscribers of L’Insurgé, take notice!

“We announce to our readers that we shall not be able to appear this week; but, in spite of all the rascalities of the government, we intend to appear in the breach again very soon. Vive l’homme libre dans l’humanité libre! Vive l’Anarchie!

“Santaville

“[Managing Editor of L’Insurgé].”

Previous to 1881 the press law was such that a condemned journal was forced to change its name, if it wished to reappear; and the tradition survives of an anarchist sheet at Lyons which suffered eighteen successive condemnations (involving for the managing editors imprisonment for terms varying from six months to two years), and which, therefore, bore successively eighteen different names.

After 1881 until the passage of the special anarchist restrictive acts popularly known as the Lois Scélérates, a journal could pass through any number of condemnations without losing its identity; the guilt of the responsible editor being held as purely personal. It was during this golden age of relative liberty that the Père Peinard saw ten of its managing editors condemned within three years—as a cavalry officer leading a charge may see horses shot out from under him—without having its advance materially impeded.

“Once the condemned editor was out of the way,” says a writer familiar with the administration of this curious journal, “it was as if no condemnation had intervened. There was somewhere on the trimard in France or abroad an anarchist who owed to the state two years of Ste. Pélagie and a 3,000-franc fine,18 but the journal was not touched. Le Père Peinard remained unassailable....

“From the number and the gravity of the sentences imposed it would seem that the Père Peinard must have experienced great difficulty in the recruitment of its editors or that it must have paid them enormous salaries. Quite the reverse. The fanaticism of the anarchists was such that they vied with each other in imploring of Pouget the favour of a chance to be condemned. At any given moment several were impatiently awaiting their turn. Never did the Père Peinard pay one of its editors. Never did it even allow him a free subscription. The editor of the Père Peinard was a special type, a volunteer of the assize court, who went to the prison as water goes to the river, and who pushed his disinterestedness to the point of buying his own paper—two sous out of his pocket—every Sunday.”

Under the present laws it would be more difficult for so saucy and reckless a sheet as the Père Peinard to keep up its laughter over the discomfiture of the authorities; that is, if it were printed in France.

To-day a paper of this sort, to appear here with anything like an approach to regularity, would have to be printed in some foreign town that is tolerant towards anarchists, and smuggled through the mails inside of other journals or in covers with unsuspicious titles. This propaganda at long range is too expensive to be carried on in a wholesale fashion. It has its periods of favour, however, and is never totally neglected. Apropos of unsuspicious cover titles, it is on record that the journal L’Internationale, which used to be printed in the French colony of London, regaled the prying eyes of the French post-office employees and the police with such more than reputable inscriptions as these: Mandement de S. E. le Cardinal Manning, Petit Traité de Géographie, Rapport sur la Question du Tunnel Sous-Marin, Contes Traduits de Dickens, Lettres d’un Pasteur sur la Sainte Bible.

Once, at least,—more than once, it is probable,—anarchist doctrines have been preached in a journal founded and supported by the prefecture of police,—an ideal arrangement, it would seem, since both parties thereto find their account therein, the anarchists in having a chance to say their say without grubbing for funds, and the police in having large occasion for self-felicitation over their shrewdness in keeping the anarchists under strict surveillance.

The practical impossibility of carrying on a journal successfully without a permanent and known office, subscription lists, and the assistance of the newsdealers, has made the anarchist resort to the secret issue by unknown presses of placards and hand-bills whenever he has anything very special or very incendiary to say,—particularly at election time, when he is exceedingly active in preaching abstention from the polls, and during the enrolment and departure of the conscripts. The police will tear down the placards, of course, but rarely before they have been read; and they may arrest the distributors of the fliers, but this does not recall the fliers which have been put forth. More than this they cannot do, since either there is no printer’s mark to guide them or, if one appears, it is false or fantastic, such as “117 rue de la Liberté, ville de la Fraternité, Etats-Unis de l’Humanité, Département de l’Egalité.”

The tantalising documents float into the streets quietly and gently like snowflakes, before the very eyes of the police, and are irresponsible as snowflakes, having nothing more than these about them to indicate their itinerary or origin.

Here is an election placard which may serve as a sample:—

“A BAS LA CHAMBRE!

“People, retake your liberty, your initiative, and keep them. The Government is the valet of Capital. Down with the Government! Down with the king, Loubet! To the sewer with the Senate! To the river with the Chamber! To the dunghill with all this ancient social rottenness! Away with the Chamber! Away with the Senate! Away with the Presidency! Away with Capital!

“Vive la Révolution Sociale! Vive l’Anarchie!

“(Signed) An Anarchist Group.”

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....

... “On the other hand, the study of nature, of industry (by its practice in workshops), of the sciences (in laboratories and observatories), gives to the brain a harmonious development, makes it well balanced, and imparts a great justness of judgment. Theoretical study in books should only come after the excitation given by real practice, to supplement and co-ordinate the elements which the practice has furnished. From this concordance in the knowledge and appreciation of real facts results inevitably a tendency to concord upon all other matters; that is to say, veritable social peace....

“It should not be forgotten that the éducation intégrale, physique, and intellectuelle, must combine knowledge and art, the knowing and the doing.

“A genuine intégral is at once theorician and practician. He unites the two qualities systematically separated by the official routine, which maintains, on the one side, primary and professional instruction, and, on the other, secondary and higher instruction. His is the brain that directs and the hand that executes. He is at one and the same time artisan and savant.

“There is no need of detailing at length a programme of moral education. Morality, like reason, is a resultant: it depends on the ensemble. The part of teaching in it is slight. The child assimilates in the measure of his intellectual development ideas of social reciprocity and of goodness; but moral education is especially a work of influence, the consequence of a normal existence in a normal environment. The physiological régime and the general direction given to the thoughts by the teaching as a whole are its principal elements.

“Great care should be taken to exclude false, demoralising ideas, narrowing prejudices, dismaying impressions, everything that can throw the imagination out of the true into trouble and disorder, morbid suggestions and excitation to vanity; to suppress occasions of rivalry and jealousy; to assure the continual view of calm, ordered, and natural things; to organise a simple, occupied, animated, varied life, divided between play and work. The progressive usage of liberty and of responsibility should be developed, preaching should be done mainly by example, and, above all, an effort should be put forth to make happiness prevail....

“As to the inferior, backward, degenerate children,—sad consequences of a succession of hereditary blights, aggravated by deplorable, haphazard births and a heels-over-head education,—these are moral invalids, for whom it is necessary to care with compassion and of whom almost nothing should be demanded. It is necessary, doubtless, to take, with all possible humanity, precautions to prevent their injuring or contaminating the others; but one must guard one’s self well against believing that he has the right to punish them because of a nature for which they are not responsible.”

Apart from this one notable experiment, little or nothing has as yet been done in Paris or elsewhere in France towards the systematic application of l’éducation intégrale. The anarchist school, rather pretentiously called a college (le Collège Libertaire), opened in 1901 on the edge of the university quarter of Paris, has only succeeded so far in establishing a few evening courses for adults, the lack of funds that handicaps every anarchistic enterprise being supplemented in this case by the difficulty of securing proper teachers, because of the danger, amounting almost to a certainty, of loss of position, if regularly employed teachers lend themselves to a revolutionary enterprise. The recent foundation by the anarchists of a child’s paper, Jean-Pierre, is an interesting experiment along this educational line.

While waiting for the éducation intégrale to win its way, the more intellectual anarchists are making a strong effort to increase the study of the masters and of the forerunners and disciples of the masters. To this end the principal anarchist organs, especially the Temps Nouveaux, keep on sale and persistently recommend the reading of the works of the principal dead and living authors, native and foreign, who have expounded anarchy or who tend—or are claimed to tend—towards anarchy: Proudhon, Stirner, and Bakounine; Darwin, Büchner, Herzen, Godwin, and Herbert Spencer; Ibsen, Björnson, Tolstoy, Leopardi, and Nietzsche; Louise Michel, Elisée Reclus, Jean Grave, and Kropotkine; the anti-militarists Richet, Dubois-Dessaule, Vallier, and Urbain Gohier; the sociologists Charles-Albert and Jules Huret; the philosophers Guy and Letourneau; Lefèvre, the student of comparative religions; Guyau, the moralist; the novelists and dramatists Marsolleau, Darien, Descaves, Chèze, Raganasse, Lami, Lumet, and Ajalbert; the Italian Malato, the German Eltzbacher, the Hollander Nieuwenhuis, the American Tucker, and the Spaniard Tarrida del Marmol.

Furthermore, selected portions from nearly all these writers and from Hamon, Saurin, Malatesta, Tcherkesoff, Janvion, Chaughi, Darnaud, Sébastien Faure, Lavroff, Paul Delasalle, and Cafiero, are published, as brochures in editions running as high as sixty thousand and at prices ranging from one sou to fifteen sous (usually two sous) each, so that for a total outlay of two or three francs those who have not the means to buy or the application to read the fr. 3.50 volumes may familiarise themselves with anarchist thought in all its most important bearings. The real nature of the contents of some of the brochures is disguised by the use of innocuous titles. Thus a certain appeal to desertion from the army bears on its cover this inscription: “Pour la Défense des Intérêts Typographiques.”

Unlike the placards, posters, and hand-bills, most of the brochures are restrained in tone. Now and then, however, an anonymous brochure is issued from nobody knows what printing establishment that startles the public and puts the policy on its mettle. The most famous of these (worth its weight in gold now to bibliophiles for its rarity) is the Indicateur Anarchiste: Manuel du Parfait Dynamiteur (40 pages, published 1887).

The Indicateur Anarchiste was practically a reprint of a series of articles that had appeared in the London journal, L’Internationale,20 under the rubric “Un Cours de Chimie Pratique,” which articles were in their turn practically a reprint of a series that appeared in La Lutte of Lyons under the rubric “Produits Anti-Bourgeois.” They included minute directions for the fabrication and use of several explosives and of Greek fire, the common and scientific names and the prices of their ingredients, and a detailed description of the tools and vessels best adapted to the various necessary processes. The announcement of the original series in La Lutte was as follows:—

“Produits Anti-Bourgeois

“Under this heading we shall put before our friends the inflammable and explosive materials which are the best known, the easiest to handle and prepare,—in a word, the most useful. These preparations are not classical. If we point them out to the camarades notwithstanding, it is because we have discovered that they are superior to others and offer less danger.

“We shall mention only the most indispensable products, and yet these are unknown to many of the camarades. In the approaching conflict each one must be a bit of a chemist. This is why it is high time to take matters into our own hands, and demonstrate to the bourgeois that what we want we want in earnest.”

The excitement aroused by the publication and general circulation of this ominous brochure proved to be well-nigh gratuitous. Experience has demonstrated that in France, where the most scholarly anarchists are little inclined to participate in the propagande par le fait,21 the majority of dynamiters are forced (like Salvat in Zola’s Paris), to steal their explosives. They are not capable of putting the precepts of this so-called popular manual, rudimentary as they appear, into practice; the required manipulations, even when reduced to their simplest terms, being too dangerous and delicate for any but laboratory trained hands to execute.