L’AURORE NEWSPAPER, tr. from French
SEPTEMBER 2, 1881
It has been the duty and the honor of our fledgling little newspaper to report dispatches from the fringes of society. We are not allied to party or government, to money or social status. We are wedded to equality, to justice, to brotherhood, to humanity. We do not flinch at uneasy truth. The law protects us, as it protects you, from the oppression of the state.
We have always our eyes on the dawn, whenever it may break.
Yesterday night, a young revolutionary named Lyon Lumière self-immolated at the altar of the Notre Dame Cathedral, and this morning L’Aurore received a letter in the post from a comrade of Mlle. Lumière, with a request to print it in the late edition of today’s paper. It is to our chagrin that we know no more of Mlle. Lumière than the details of her death and what is contained in this message.
The loyal readers of L’Aurore have no doubt witnessed the fervor for electricity in our fair City of Lights, culminating in this summer’s International Exposition of Electricity and the installation of appallingly harsh electric streetlights. The citizens of Paris were not consulted about this change. The capitalists declared “Let there be light!” and the people were forced to acquiesce. This perpetual daylight has affected us in ways we will not be able to recognize for years, decades, centuries. If we cannot choose between darkness and lightness, what other choices are lost?
If this is progress, we say nay to progress.
But then, let us allow Mlle. Lumière to speak her piece, which we think our readers will find reverberates with the clear peal of truth’s bell:
“They call me vandal, vagrant, revolutionary of one. Just a lamplighter with no lamps to light. I have been called it all, so many times. Lamplighters were once beloved, essential, Prometheus of the people. They lit the darkness while respecting the darkness. A linkboy of Paris carrying his tiny glow from place to place, delivering you safely home.
“More than cities, factories, coal and steam, electricity will change everything, Make us squint at midnight, throw shadows around like sneezes, snuff out the very stars.
“Cézanne says: ‘Your crude electricity destroys the mystery.’
“This manifesto isn’t about my creeping poverty. Well it is, but not only. Be warned: electricity will change how we see, which will change how we think. We will forget how to rest. When there is always light, time does not pass. It malingers, a fetid pool.
“We will think ourselves lesser than the machines electricity can power, because they do not need rest. We will be forever trying to keep up, to show ourselves equal to automatons. Because some day there will be automatons, and we will forget our worthiness in our worship of them.
“Even a lamplighter knows there is a time for darkness. I call upon my ancestors—who carried a tiny flame from candle to candle and in this way lit entire cities. Who carried ladders and lighting sticks, or matches and snuffers, who tenderly wiped soot from glass.
“Hurl your rocks at light bulbs, comrades, position yourself between darkness and those who would electrify the whole world. They are stealing from you just as much as the factory owners, the statesmen, and the ignorant rich. Without darkness, light is just noise.
“The bringing of light to the streets of Paris has been, for all of history, a tribute to life. It has been an honor, the honor of my ancestors, to serve you. I go out in a blaze, making of myself one last candle.”