PIGRITIA IS a terrible word. It encompasses a world: la pégre, for which read robbery, and the hell which is la pégrenne, for which read hunger.
Thus idleness is a mother with two children: a son, who is robbery, and a daughter, who is hunger.
Where have we now got to? To argot.
What is argot? It is at once a nation and an idiom, robbery in its two aspects, the people and the language.
When, thirty-four years ago, the narrator of this grave and sombre history introduced into a work written with the same intention a thief who spoke argot, it was greeted with outrage and indignation – ‘What! Argot! But that is the language of the underworld, of pickpockets and prisons, everything that is most abominable in society!’ etc. etc. etc.
We have never understood this kind of objection.
Later two powerful novelists, the first a profound student of the human heart and the second a fearless friend of the common people, Balzac and Eugène Sue, having made criminals talk their natural language, as the author of Le dernier jour d’un condamné had done in 1828, were similarly castigated – ‘Why do these writers inflict this revolting patois on us? Argot is a disgusting thing!’
No one would deny this. But when it comes to the probing of a wound, an abyss or a social phenomenon, can it be wrong to lead the way and penetrate to the heart of the matter? We had always thought this to be an act of courage, or at least a useful act, worthy of the sympathy that any performance of duty deserves. Why should not everything be explored and studied? Why stop halfway? To stop is the action of the plummet, not of the leadsman who operates it.
Certainly it is not an easy or an attractive task to peer into the lowest depths of the social order, the region where earth ends and mire begins; to burrow into the muck and capture and expose to the public view that debased idiom, that diseased vocabulary of which every word is like a scale of some monster of darkness and the swamp. Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization.
But since when has a horror been debarred from study? When has sickness driven the doctor away? Can one imagine a naturalist refusing to study a scorpion, a bat or a tarantula on the grounds that these things are too ugly? The thinker who turns his back on argot is like a surgeon who shrinks from a suppurating wound; he is a philologist reluctant to examine an aspect of language, a philosopher reluctant to scrutinize an aspect of humanity. For this must be said to those who are unaware of the fact: argot is both a literary phenomenon and a social consequence. The proper definition of the word is this: it is the language of poverty.
At this point we must pause. It can be argued that every trade and profession, one might almost say every accident in the social hierarchy and all forms of intelligence, have their argot, from the lawyer who wraps up an agreement in jargon of his own, the house agent who talks about ‘extensive grounds’ and ‘modern conveniences’, the butcher who talks about ‘prime beef, to the actor who says, ‘I was a flop.’ The printer, the master-at-arms, the sportsman, the cobbler, the cavalry-officer all have their specialized language. At a pinch it can be claimed that the sailor who uses port and starboard for left and right is talking argot. There is an argot of the great and an argot of the little. That duchesses have their argot is proved by the following sentence from a letter written by a great lady at the time of the Restoration, ‘Vous trouverez dans ces potains-là une foultitude de raisons pour que je me libertise.’ (‘You will gather from this tittle-tattle a multitude of reasons why I am talking freely.’) Twenty years ago there was a school of criticism which asserted that, ‘Half Shakespeare is word-play and punning’ – in other words, that he used argot. The poets and artists who label Monsieur de Montmorency a ‘bourgeois’ because he is not well versed in art and poetry are themselves talking argot. Classical scholars have their argot; mathematics, medicine, botany, all have their own language. The splendid language of the sea, resonance of the wind and the waves, the humming of the shrouds, the rolling of the ship, the roar of cannon, and the crash of the boarding-axe, all this is a superb and heroic argot that, compared with the barbaric argot of the underworld, is like a lion compared with a jackal
All this is true, but whatever may be said in its favour this extension of the meaning of the word ‘argot’ is something that not everyone accepts. For our own part, we restrict the word to its old, precise meaning, and for us argot is simply argot. The true argot, argot par excellence (if those words may be used in this context), the immemorial argot which was a kingdom in itself, is, we must repeat, nothing but the ugly, restless, cunning, treacherous, profound and fatalistic language of the outcast and squalid underworld, the world of hunger and pauperism –les misérables. There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime. And for the purpose of this struggle the underworld has its own battle-language, which is argot.
To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost – that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization – is to extend the scope of social observadon and to serve civilization. It is a service rendered consciously or unconsciously by Plautus when he made a Phoenician talk to Carthaginian soldiers, and by Molière with his Levantine and the varieties of patois which he put into the mouths of so many of his characters. To this it may be replied that patois is a different thing – it is a language that has been used by a whole people or province. But what is argot? What purpose is served by ‘rescuing’ it? Our answer is simply that if there is one thing more deserving of study than the language spoken by a people or province it is the language spoken by misery; a language that has been spoken in France, for example, for more than four centuries: the language not merely of one particular misery, but of misery itself, all possible human misery.
Moreover we must insist upon the fact that the examination of social failings and deformities is ordained so that they may be recognized and cured, an inescapable task. The vocation of the historian of mores and ideas is no less strict than that of the historian of events. The latter deals with the surface of life, with battles and parliaments and the birth of princes, while the former is concerned with what goes on beneath the surface, among the people who work and wait upon the outcome of events, weary womenfolk and dying children, ignorance and prejudice, envy and secret rivalries between man and man, the vague tremors running through the mass of the impoverished, the unfortunate, and the infamous. He must descend in a spirit of both charity and severity to that secret region where the destitute are huddled together, those who bleed and those who strike, those who weep and those who curse, those who go hungry and those who devour, those who endure evil and those who cause it. Are the duties of the historians of hearts and souls less exacting than those of the historians of external fact? Has Dante less to say than Machiavelli? Is the under side of civilization less important than the upper side because it is darker and goes deeper? Can one know the mountain without also knowing the cave?
From the foregoing it might be inferred that a gulf exists between these two kinds of historian, but we have no such thought in mind. One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other. All the features traced by providence on the surface of a nation have their sombre but distinct counterpart in the depths, and every stirring in the depths produces a tremor on the surface. True history being a composite of all things, the true historian must concern himself with all things. Mankind is not a circle with a single centre but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.
Argot is nothing but a changing-room where language, having some evil end in view, adopts a disguise, reclothing itself with masked words and tattered metaphors, a process which renders it horrible.
It can scarcely be recognized. Is this really French, the great human language? It is ready to enter the stage, to put words into the mouth of crime, to act out the entire repertory of ill-doing. It no longer walks but shuffles, limps on a crutch that can be used as a club; it bears the name of vagrancy and has been daubed with makeup by ghostly dressers; it crawls and rears up its head, two characteristics of the reptile. It is prepared to play any part, made fraudulent by the forger, tainted by the poisoner, blackened by the soot of the incendiary; and the murderer has daubed it with red.
When, from the honest side of the fence, we listen on the fringe of society, we may hear the speech of those who are outside. We distinguish questions and answers. Without understanding it we catch a horrid murmur, resembling the human accent but nearer to growls than to words. That is argot. The words are misshapen, distorted by some kind of fantastic bestiality. We might be hearing the speech of hydras.
It is the unintelligible immersed in shadow; it grunts and whispers, adding enigma to the encircling gloom. Misfortune is dark and crime is darker still, and it is of these two darknesses put together that argot is composed. Obscurity is in the atmosphere, in the actions and in the voices: a dreadful toad-language which creeps and skips and monstrously moves in that vast fog of hunger, vice, lies, injustice, nakedness, asphyxia, and winter which is the bright noontide of the underworld.
Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere.
Are you what is known as a happy man? Yet you experience sadness every day. Every day brings its major grief or its minor care. Yesterday you trembled for the health of someone dear to you, today you fear for your own; tomorrow it will be money trouble, the next day the slander of a calumniator, and on the day after that the misfortune of a friend; then there is the weather, or some possession broken or lost, or some pleasure which leaves you with an uneasy conscience; and another time it is the progress of public affairs. All this without counting the griefs of the heart. And so it goes on; as one cloud is dispelled another forms. Scarcely one day in a hundred consists of unbroken delight and sunshine. Yet you are one of the small number who are called happy! As for the rest of mankind, it is lost in stagnant night.
Thoughtful persons seldom speak of happiness or unhappiness. In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge. To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
But to talk of light is not necessarily to talk of joy. One may suffer in the light; its excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing. To burn without ceasing to fly, that is the achievement of genius. When you have reached the stage of knowing and loving you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The enlightened weep, if only for those still in darkness.
Argot is the language of the shadows.
Thought moves to its most sombre depths, social philosophy leads to the most poignant conclusions, when confronted by this enigmatic dialect which is at once blighted and rebellious. It is here that chastisement is visible; every syllable bears the brand. The words of this language of the people seem seared and shrivelled, as though by a red-hot iron; some, indeed, seem to be still smoking, and there are phrases which put one in mind of the swiftly bared and branded shoulder of a thief. Ideas are almost inexpressible in the language of the outlaw, of which the metaphors are sometimes so outrageous that one feels that they have worn manacles. But despite all this, and because of it, this strange patois is entitled to its place in that vast, impartial assemblage which finds room for a worn halfpenny as well as for a gold medal and which is known as literature. Argot, whether we like it or not, has its own grammar and its own poetry. If there are words so distorted that they sound like the muttering of uncouth mouths, there are others in which we catch the voice of Villon.
‘Mais où sont les neiges d’antan’ is a line of argot. Antan – ante annum – belongs to the argot of Thunes and signifies‘ last year’ and, by extension, ‘the past’. It was possible thirty-five years ago, at the time of the departure of the great chain-gang of 1827, to read the following words scratched with a nail on the wall of one of the cells in Bicêtre prison by a leader of the Thunes mob condemned to the galleys: ‘Les dabs d’antan trimaient siempre pour le pierre du Coëscne’, which means, ‘The old-time kings always had themselves consecrated’ – consecration, in this case, being the galleys
From the purely literary point of view few studies can be more interesting and fruitful than that of argot. It is a language within a language, a sort of sickly excrescence, an unhealthy graft producing a vegetation of its own, a parasite with roots in the old Gallic trunk whose sinister foliage covers half of the language. That is what one might term the first aspect, the vulgar aspect of argot. But for those who study the dialect as it should be studied, that is to say, in the way a geologist studies the earth, it is more like an alluvial deposit Examining it one finds, buried beneath the old colloquial French, Provençal, Spanish, Italian, Levantine – that language of the Mediterranean ports – English, German, the French, Italian and Roman varieties of Romance, Latin and finally Basque and Celtic. A profound, weird conglomeration; a subterranean edifice erected by all outcasts. Each accursed race has contributed its layer, every heart and every suffering has added a stone. A host of souls, evil or lowborn or rebellious, who have lived through life and passed on to eternity, are almost wholly present and in some sort still visible in the form of a monstrous word.
Do you wish for Spanish? The old Gothic argot is full of it: for example boffette, for which the French is soufflet, meaning a bellows, a puff of wind (blow) or a buffet, derived from bofeton ; vantarne (later vanterne) meaning a window; gat, meaning cat, derived from gato ; acite, oil, derived from aceyte. Or Italian? There is spade, sword, derived from spada ; carvel, boat, derived from carvella. English? There is bichot, bishop; raille, a spy, derived from rascal; pilche, a case, derived from pilcher, a sheath. German? There is caleur, from the German Kellner, a waiter; Herr, the master, from Herzog, the duke. Latin? Franjir, to break (Latin frangere) ; affurer, to steal (fur) ; cadène, a chain (catena). There is a word which appears in all the continental dialects with a sort of magical power and authority. It is the word magnus (great). In Scotland it becomes mac, meaning head of the clan,* such as Macfarlane or Macdonald; French argot turns it into meck, later meg, meaning God. Do you look for Basque? There is gahisto, the devil, derived from gaiztoa, evil; sorgabon, good night, derived from gabon, good evening. Celtic? There is blavin, handkerchief, derived from blavet, a spurt of water; menesse, woman (derogatory) derived from meinec, full of stones; barant, a stream, from baranton, fountain; goffeur, locksmith from goff, a smith; guedouze, death, which is derived from guenn-du, white-black. Finally, do you want history? Argot calls a crown-piece a maltaise, recalling the money which circulated in the Maltese galleys.
Apart from its philological origins, of which a few examples have been given, argot has other, more natural roots, emerging, so to speak, from the very spirit of man. First there is the actual creation of words, which is the mystery of all language – the depiction of objects by the use of words which, no one can say why or how, bear a countenance of their own. This is the primal basis of all language, what one might call the bedrock. Argot teems with such words, spontaneous words, created all of a piece no one can say where or by whom, words without etymology, analogy or derivation; solitary, barbaric, sometimes hideous words, which are nevertheless singularly expressive and which live. Le taule, the gaoler; le sabri, the foreuist; taf, meaning fear of flight; le larbin, the lackey; pharos, the general, prefect or minister; le rabouin, the devil. Nothing can be more strange than these words which both conceal and reveal. Some, such as rabouin, are at once grotesque and terrible, conveying the effect of a Cyclopean grimace.
Secondly, there is metaphor. The characteristic of a language that seeks both to say everything and to conceal everything is its abundance of imagery. Metaphor is a riddle behind which lurks the thief planning a robbery and the prisoner plotting an escape. No dialect is more rich in metaphor than argot – devisser le coco, to twist the neck; tortiller, to eat; être gerbé, to be judged; un rat, a stealer of bread; il lansquine, it is raining, an ancient, striking image which in some sort reveals its own date, relating the long, oblique lines of rainfall to the couched weapons of sixteenth-century pike-men, and also encompasses the popular saying, ‘it’s raining halberds’. Sometimes, as argot progresses from its first stage to the second, words also pass from the savage, primitive stage to the metaphorical. The devil ceases to be le rabouin and becomes le boulanger (baker), ‘he who puts in the oven’. It is more amusing but less impressive, something like Racine after Corneille, or Euripides after Aeschylus. And there are certain sentences of argot, belonging to both stages, which have a phantasmagoric quality. Les sorgueurs vont sollicer des gails à la lune (rustlers are going to steal horses tonight). This presents itself to the mind like a company of ghosts. One does not know what one is looking at.
Thirdly, there is expediency. Argot lives on the language, drawing upon it and making use of it as fancy directs, and sometimes, in case of need, arbitrarily and coarsely changing it. Sometimes, with ordinary words distorted in this fashion and interlarded with words of pure argot, it produces picturesque figures of speech in which one may find both original invention and metaphor. Le cab jaspine, je marronne que la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabin – ‘The dog is barking, I suspect that the Paris coach is passing through the wood.’ Le dab est sinve, la dabuge est merloussière, la fée est bative – ‘The man (gentleman) is stupid, the wife is sly, the daughter is pretty.’ Most frequently, in order to baffle any eavesdropper, argot simply adds an uncouth tail to the word, some such suffix as aille, orgue, iergue or uche. For example, Vousiergue trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche? – ‘Do you think this mutton’s good?’ A phrase addressed to a prison warder by a prisoner offering a sum of money for his escape. Mar is another suffix that has been recently added.
Argot, being the dialect of corruption, is itself soon corrupted. Moreover, as its purpose is always concealment, it changes as soon as it feels that it is being understood. Unlike every other form of vegetation, it is killed by any ray of light that falls upon it. So it is in a state of constant flux, evolving more in ten years than the everyday language does in ten centuries. Larton (bread) becomes lartif, gail (horse) becomes gaye, fertanche (straw) becomes fertille, momignard (child) becomes momacque, les siques (clothes) becomes frusques, la chique (church) becomes l’égrugeoir, le colabre (neck) becomes le colas. The devil is first gahisto, then le rabouin and then le boulanger ; the priest is le ratichon and then le sanglier ; the dagger is le vingt-deux, then le surin and then le lingre ; the police are in turn raliles, rousses, marchands de lacets, coqueurs and cognes ; the gaoler is le taule, Charlot, l’atigeur, and le becquillard. To fight in the seventeenth century was se donner du tabac ; in the nineteenth, se chiquer la gueule – and there have been twenty different variants between those two. The words of argot are constantly in flight, like the men who use them.
But at the same time, and indeed because of this constant movement, old argot constantly re-emerges and becomes new. There are centres in which it survives. The Temple preserved the argot of the seventeenth century, and the argot of Thunes was preserved in Bicêtre when it was a prison. The old Thunes suffix of anche was heard in, for example, Boyanches-tu? (Want a drink?) and il croyanche (he believes). But constant change is nonetheless the rule.
If the philosopher decides to spare the time to examine this language that ceaselessly evaporates, he is led to painful but useful reflections. No study is more efficacious or fruitful in instruction. There is not a metaphor or etymological derivation of argot that does not contain a lesson
Among those people battre (to fight) means to sham – on bat une maladie (one shams an illness), for tricking is their strength. The idea of ‘man’ is inseparable from the idea of darkness. Night is la sorgue, and man is l’orgue: man is a derivation of night. They are accustomed to think of society as a climate that destroys them, and they talk of their freedom as other people talk of their health. A man who has been arrested is un malade (sick), and a man under sentence is un mort (dead).
What is most dreadful for the man enclosed within the walls of a prison is a sort of icy chastity: he calls the prison le castus. It is always the gayer side of life outside that he recalls when he is in that dismal place. He wears leg-irons but does not think of walking on his feet: he thinks of dancing; and if he manages to saw through his irons, dancing is his first thought and he calls the saw a bastringue (cheap dance-hall). A noun is un centre – a profound assimilation. A criminal has two heads, the one which thinks and plans, and the one which he loses on the block: he calls the first la sorbonne and the second la tronche * When a man has nothing left but rags on his body and viciousness in his heart, when he has sunk to the state of material and moral degradation which is summed up in the word gueux, he is then ripe for crime; he is like a well-sharpened, double-edged knife, one edge being his state of need and the other his depravity. Argot in this case does not call him un gueux but un reguise (re-shaped). What is a gaol but a furnace of damnation, a Hell? The inmate calls himself un fagot (faggot). Finally, they call the prison le collège, a word which sums up the whole penitentiary system. And to the thief his prospective victims – you or I or any passer-by – are le pantre, from the Greek pan, meaning everyone.
Should you wish to know where the greater number of the prison-songs were born, those ditties which prison argot calls lirlonfa, the following is for your enlightenment.
There existed in the Châtelet in Paris a large, long cellar some eight feet below the level of the Seine. It possessed neither windows nor ventilators, its only outlet being by way of the door: men could enter it, but air could not. It had a vaulted stone ceiling and for floor ten inches of mud, the original tiling having disintegrated under the seeping of water. A massive beam ran from end to end of the cellar, eight feet above floor level, and from it, at regular intervals, hung chains three feet long ending in iron collars. It was here that men condemned to the galleys were housed before being sent on to Toulon. They hung here in darkness chained by the neck, unable to lie down because of the shortness of the chains, up to their knees in mud, legs soiled with their own excrement, unable to rest except by hanging on to the chains and, if they dozed off, constantly awakened by the stranglehold of the collar – and there were some who did not wake. In order to eat they had to use their feet to retrieve their portion of bread, which was dropped on the mud in front of them. How long were they left like this? One or two months, sometimes six months, in one case a year. They had been sentenced to the galleys for as little as poaching one of the king’s hares. And what did they do in that hellish tomb? They did what can be done in a tomb – they died – and what can be done in Hell – they sang. Where there is no hope there is still song. In the sea round Malta when a galley was approaching one heard the sound of singing before one heard the sound of oars. The poacher Survincent, who survived that Châtelet cellar, said, ‘It was the rhymes that kept me going.’ Here it was that nearly all the argot ditties were born, including the melancholy refrain that was particular to the Montgomery galley – Timaloumisaine, timoulamison. Most of these songs were sad, but some were gay and one was tender:
Icicaille est le théâtre
Du petit dardant*
Do what you will, you cannot destroy that eternal remnant of the heart of man which is love.
In that world of dark deeds one keeps one’s secrets. Secrecy is the privilege of everyman, the faith held in common which serves as the basis of union. To break secrecy is to rob every member of that savage community of something of himself. To inform is to manger le morceau (eat the piece) as though the informer had stolen something of the substance of his fellows and fed on the flesh of all of them.
What is recevoir un soufflet (to get your ears boxed)? The commonplace French expression is voir trente-six chandelles (to see thirty-six candles; English equivalent ‘to see stars’). Argot here makes use of the word camoufle, which also means ‘candle’ and adds the ‘et’ from the word soufflet, establishing a new word on the academic level, and Ponlailler, saying, ‘J’allume ma camoufle’ causes Voltaire to write, ‘Langleviel la Baumelle mérite cent camouflets’(Langleviel la Baumelle deserves to have his ears boxed a hundred times).
Burrowing into argot leads to countless discoveries. It leads us to the point of contact between respectable society and that of the outcasts; it is speech become a felon, and it is dismaying to find that the obscure workings of fate can so distort men’s minds and bring them so low. The meagre thinking of the outcast! Will no one come to the rescue of the human souls lost in that darkness? Must they wait for ever for the liberating spirit, the rider upon the winds, the radiant champion of the future? Are they condemned for all time to listen in terror to the approach of the Monster of Evil, the dragon with foaming lips, while they remain without light or hope, a defenceless Andromeda, white and naked in the murk?
As we see, argot as a whole, whether it is the dialect of four hundred years ago or that of today, is pervaded by a sombre symbolism which is at once an expression of grieving and of threatening. One may catch something of the old, wild sadness of those outlaws of the Cour des Miracles who played card-games of their own devising, some of which have come down to us. The eight of clubs, for example, was a big tree with eight large clover-leaves, a sort of fanciful representation of the forest; at the foot of the tree was a fire over which a hunter was roasting three hares on a spit, while behind, suspended over another fire, was a steaming pot from which a dog’s head protruded. One may picture smugglers and counterfeiters seated round this idyllic and melancholy conception of their world as depicted on playing-cards. All the diverse expressions of thought in the kingdom of argot, whether song or jest or threat, had this quality of helpless despair. All the songs, of which some of the tunes have been retrieved, were heartrendingly piteous and humble. The thieving rabble, le pègre, was always le pauvre pègre, always the hare which hides, the mouse which scuttles, the bird which takes flight. It utters few but simple sighs, and one of its sighs has been preserved – ‘Je n’entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron des orgues, peut atiger ses mômes et ses momignards et les locher criblant sans être atigé lui-même’ (I don’t undertsand how God, the father of men, can torture his children and grandchildren and hear them cry without being tortured himself). The outcast, whenever he has a moment to think, makes himself small in the eye of the law and puny in the eye of society; he goes on his knees and begs for pity. One feels that he knows the fault is his own.
Towards the middle of the last century there was a change. Prison songs and thieves’ refrains acquired as it were a flavour of jovial insolence. In nearly all the galley and prison songs of the eighteenth century there is a diabolical, enigmatic spirit of gaiety which puts one in mind of the dancing light cast by a will-o’-the-wisp in the forest.
Mirlababi, surlababo,
Mirliton ribon ribette,
Surlababi, mirlababo,
Mirliton ribon ribo.
This was being sung while a man’s throat was being cut in a cellar or a corner of the woods.
It was symptomatic. In the eighteenth century the ancient melancholy of this oppressed class was dispelled. They began to laugh, mocking the powers that be. Louis XV was known as the ‘Marquis de Pantin’. They were almost cheerful, glowing with a kind of lightness as though conscience no longer weighed upon them. Not merely did they perform acts of desperate daring, but they did so with a heedless audacity of spirit. It was an indication that they were losing the sense of their own criminality, finding among the thinkers of the day a kind of unwitting moral support, an indication that theft and robbery were beginning to infiltrate doctrine and current dogma, and thereby losing something of their ugliness while adding greatly to the ugliness of the latter. Finally it was an indication that, if nothing happened to prevent it, some tremendous event was on the way.
Let us pause for a moment. What are we now accusing – the eighteenth century? – its philosophy? By no means. The work of the eighteenth century was healthy and good. The encyclopaedists, led by Diderot, the physiocrats, led by Turgot, the philosophers, led by Voltaire, and the Utopians, led by Rousseau, these are four noble bodies. The immense advance of mankind towards enlightenment was due to them. They were the advance-guards of the human race moving towards the four cardinal points of progress, Diderot towards beauty, Turgot towards utility, Voltaire towards truth, and Rousseau towards justice. But at the side of the philosophers and below them came the sophists, a poisonous plant intertwined with healthy youth, hemlock in the virgin forest. While authority burned the great liberating books of the century on the steps of the Palais de Justice, writers now forgotten were publishing, with the king’s sanction, books of a strangely subversive kind, avidly read by the outcasts. Some of these publications – patronized, astonishingly enough, by a prince – are to be found in the Bibliothèque Secrète, the Secret Library. These facts, profoundly significant though they were, passed unperceived. Sometimes it is the very obscurity of a fact that renders it dangerous. It is obscure because it is underground. Of all those writers, the one perhaps who had the most harmful effects on the masses was Restif de la Bretonne. Work of this kind, which was being produced all over Europe, did more damage in Germany than anywhere else. During a certain period, which is summarized by Schiller in his play, Die Räuber, theft and robbery were paraded under the guise of protest against property and work. They embraced certain specious, elementary notions, correct in appearance but absurd in reality, and, thus dissimulated and invested with names denoting abstract theories, permeated the mass of hard-working, honest people, without the knowledge of the rash chemists who had concocted the mixture and even of the masses who absorbed it. Hardship engenders anger; and while the well-to-do classes close their eyes – or slumber, which comes to the same thing – the less fortunate, taking their inspiration from any spirit of grievance or ill-will what happens to be lurking in the background, proceed to examine the social system. Examination in a spirit of hatred is a terrible thing!
From this, if the times are sufficiently awry, emerge those ferocious upheavals at one time known as jacqueries, compared with which purely political agitation is child’s play, and which are not the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor but rather the revolt of the deprived against the comfortably off. Everything then collapses, for jacqueries are the tremors of the people. This peril, which was perhaps imminent in Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century, was harshly averted by the French Revolution, that immense act of probity. The French Revolution, which was nothing but idealism in arms, broke out and with a single decisive gesture slammed the door on evil and opened the door to good. It posed the question, promulgated the truth, dispelled the fogs, cleansed the century, and crowned the people.
The nineteenth century has inherited and profited by its work, and today the social disaster which seemed to be foreshadowed is quite simply impossible. Only the blind still rage against it, and only fools are afraid of it. Revolution is the antidote to jacquerie!
Thanks to the Revolution, social conditions have changed and we have got the feudal and monarchic sicknesses out of our system. There is no longer anything medieval in our constitution. We have come past the time when those ugly interior convulsions burst into daylight, when we heard the muffled sound of stirring beneath our feet, when the surface of civilization was littered with molehills, when crevasses suddenly yawned and monstrous heads emerged from the earth.
Revolutionary feeling is a moral feeling. The feeling for what is right, once it has matured, develops a sense of duty. The law for every man is liberty, which ends, in Robespierre’s admirable definition, where the liberty of others begins. Since 1789 the populace as a whole is expressed in the sublimated individual; no man is so poor that, having rights, he has not his place. The starving man feels in himself the honesty of France; the dignity of the citizen is an inner armour; the man who is free is scrupulous; he who votes rules. Hence the incorruptibility, the suppression of unhealthy aspirations, the eyes heroically averted from temptation. Revolutionary cleansing is such that on a day of liberation, a 14 July or a 10 August, there is no longer a populace. The first cry of the enlightened crowds as they grow in stature is, ‘Death to thieves!’ Progress is honourable; the Ideal and the Absolute do not pick pockets. It was the scavengers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine who in 1848 escorted the carts filled with the treasures of the Tuileries; rags and tatters mounted guard over riches. In those carts there were chests, some half open, containing among a hundred dazzling adornments the ancient, diamond-studded crown of France surmounted by the royal carbuncle of regency, worth thirty millions. Those barefoot men preserved it.
So jacquerie is at an end. I am sorry for the clever men, haunted by an age-old fear which has found its last expression and now can only be serviceable in politics. The mainspring of the red spectre is broken, and everyone knows it. The scarecrow scares no longer. Birds perch on it, beetles nest in it and the bourgeois laughs at it
Does this mean then that all social dangers are over? Certainly not. There will be no more jacqueries, of this society can be assured; the blood will no longer rush to its head. But it has got to consider the way in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer a threat, but there is still consumption. Social consumption is simply poverty. One can the from wasting away as well as from being struck by lightning.
We never weary of repeating that we must before all else think of the disinherited, suffering masses, care for them, comfort and enlighten them, widen their horizon by bringing to them all forms of education. We must set them the example of toil, never of idleness, lessen the burden on the individual by increasing that borne by society as a whole, reduce poverty without reducing wealth, create great new fields of public activity, possess, like Briareus, a hundred hands to reach out to those who are in distress, use our collective power to set up workshops, schools, and laboratories open to men of all kinds, increase wages and decrease working hours, effect a balance between rights and possessions, that is to say, make the reward proportionate to the effort and the fulfilment to the need – in a word, derive more light and well-being from the social system for the benefit of the ignorant and oppressed. This is the first of fraternal obligations and of political necessities.
But all of this, we must emphasize, is no more than a beginning. The real question is, can work be the law without also being a right? We shall not pursue the matter, since this is not the place for it. But if the name for Nature is Providence, then the name for Society must be Provision.
Intellectual and moral growth is no less essential than material betterment. Knowledge is a viaticum; thought is a primary necessity; truth is as much a source of nourishment as corn. Argument lacking knowledge and wisdom grows thin. We must pity minds, no less than stomachs, that go unfilled. If there is anything more poignant than a body dying for lack of food it is a mind dying for lack of light.
All progress points in this direction, and the day is coming when we shall be amazed. As the state of the human race improves, its lowest layers will rise quite naturally above the zone of distress. The abolition of poverty will be achieved by a simple raising of the level. This is a blessed solution, and we shall be wrong to doubt it.
Certainly the influence of the past is very strong at the present time; it is reviving, and this rejuvenation of a corpse is surprising. It is on the march, and it seems to be winning – a dead thing yet a conqueror! It comes with its army of superstitions, its sword, which is despotism, its banner, which is ignorance, and in recent years it has won ten battles. It advances, laughs, and threatens; it is at our door. But we do not despair. Let us sell the field on which Hannibal is encamped. We who believe, what have we to fear? Ideas can no more flow backwards than can a river.
But those who do not welcome the future should consider this: in denying progress it is not the future that they condemn, but themselves. They are inoculating themselves with a fatal disease, the past. There is only one way of denying tomorrow, and that is to die.
The riddle will disclose its answer, the Sphinx will speak, the problem will be solved. The People, having burst their bonds in the eighteenth century, will complete their triumph in the nineteenth. Only a fool can doubt it. The coming achievement, the imminent achievement of universal well-being, is a phenomenon divinely preordained.
The immense pressure of events indicates that within a given time human society will be brought to its logical condition, that is to say, into equilibrium, which is the same as equity. A power comprising earth and Heaven emanates from humanity and directs it; it is a power that can work miracles, to which miraculous accomplishments are no more difficult than extraordinary deviations. Aided by the knowledge which comes from man, and the event which comes from another source, this power is undismayed by contradictions arising out of the problem it poses, which to the common mind seem impossibilities. It is no less adroit in producing solutions out of the conjunction of ideas than it is in producing lessons out of the juxtaposition of facts. One may expect anything of this mysterious power of progress which on one occasion caused East and West to meet in a sepulchre, and the Imams to treat with Bonaparte in the interior of the Great Pyramid.
Meanwhile there must be no pause, no hesitation, in the forward march of minds. Social philosophy is essentially the science of peace. Its purpose is, and its outcome should be, to dissipate anger by studying the reasons for antagonism. It scrutinizes and analyses, then reshapes. It proceeds by a process of reduction, eliminating the element of hatred.
That a society should be destroyed by the winds that assail human affairs is by no means unknown; history is filled with the shipwreck of nations and empires. The day comes when the hurricane, that unknown factor, bears custom, law, religion, everything away. One after another, the civilizations of India, the Chaldees, Persia, Assyria, and Egypt have perished, and we do not know why. We do not know the cause of these disasters. Could those societies have been saved? Were they at fault? Did they persist in some fatal vice which destroyed them? How great is the element of suicide in the death of a nation or a race? They are questions without answer. The condemned civilizations are lost in darkness. They were not seaworthy and so they sank and there is nothing more to be said. It is with a sort of horror that we peer into the depths of that sea which is the past, through the great waves of the centuries, at the huge wrecks which are Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, and Rome. But if they are buried, we exist in the light of day. We are ignorant of the sickness of ancient civilizations, but we know the infirmities of our own. We are able everywhere to throw light upon it, to admire its beauties and lay bare its deformities. We probe it to see where it hurts, and when we have found the pain-centre our examination of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy, Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is at once their monster and their prodigy; it is worth saving. And it will be saved. To doctor it is to do a great deal; to enlighten it is to do still more. All the work of modern social philosophy should bear this end in mind. To auscultate civilization is the supreme duty of the thinker of today.
Let us repeat it, this auscultation is encouraging; and it is with emphasis on the note of encouragement that we wish to end these few pages of austere digression from our sombre narrative. Beneath social mortality we are conscious of human imperishability. The earth does not the because there are lesions on its body, craters and volcanoes out of which it pours its pus. The sickness of a nation does not kill Man.
Nevertheless, those who study the health of society must now and then shake their heads. Even the strongest-minded and most clear-thinking must have their moments of misgiving. Will the future ever arrive? The question seems almost justified when one considers the shadows looming ahead, the sombre confrontation of egoists and outcasts. On the side of the egoists, prejudice – that darkness of a rich education – appetite that grows with intoxication, the bemusement of prosperity which blunts the sense, the fear of suffering which in some cases goes so far as to hate all sufferers, and un-shakeable complacency, the ego so inflated that it stifles the soul; and on the side of the outcasts, greed and envy, resentment at the happiness of others, the turmoil of the human animal in search of personal fulfilment, hearts filled with fog, misery, needs, and fatalism, and simple, impure ignorance.
Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.