octave mirbeau, foreword to jean grave, "moribund society and anarchy"
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8/3/2019 Octave Mirbeau, Foreword to Jean Grave, "Moribund Society and Anarchy"
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Octave MIRBEAU
FOREWORD
to Jean GRAVE, Moribund Society and Anarchy
I have a friend who shows a strong desire, a truly touching desire, to understand
things. Naturally, he aspires to that which is simple, great and beautiful. But his
education, fouled with the prejudices and lies inherent in all the education called
"higher," almost always stops him in his dash towards spiritual deliverance. He would
like to free himself completely from traditional ideas, from the ancient routines where
his mind is bogged down, despite himself, but he cannot. Often, he comes to see me and
we have long talks. The doctrines of anarchism, so maligned by some, so misunderstood
by others, greatly concern him; and his honesty is great enough, if not to embrace them
all, at least to understand them. He does not believe, as so many people believe in his
circles, that those doctrines consist solely in blowing up houses. He glimpses, on the
contrary, in a fog that will perhaps dissipate, some beauties and harmonic forms; and he
takes an interest in them as we do in a thing that we like, but which seems still a bit
terrible to us, and which we dread because we do not understand it well.
My friend has read the admirable books of Kropotkin, and the eloquent, fervent
and wise protestations of Elise Reclus, against the impiety of governments andsocieties based on crime. Of Bakunin, he knows what the anarchist journals, here and
there, have published. He has labored through the uneven Proudhon and the aristocratic
Spencer. And recently, the declarations of Etivant have moved him. All of that sweeps
him along, for a moment, toward those heights where the intelligence is purified. But
from those brief excursions through the realm of the ideal, he returns more troubled than
ever. A thousand obstacles, purely subjective, detain him; he loses himself in an infinity
of ifs, ands and buts, an inextricable forest, from which he sometimes asks me to
extricate him.
Just yesterday, he confided in me the torment of his soul, and I said to him:
Grave, whose judicious and manly spirit you know, is going to publish a
book: Moribund Society and Anarchy. This book is a masterpiece of logic. It is full of
light. This book is not the cry of a blind and narrow-minded sectarian; nor is it the tom-
tom beat of an ambitious propagandist; it is the considered, reflective, reasoned work of
one who is passionate, it is true, of one "who has faith," but who knows, compares,
questions, analyzes, and who, with a singular lucidity of critique, glides among the facts
of social history, the lessons of science, the problems of philosophy, in order to reach
those infrangible conclusions of which you are aware, and of which you can denyneither the greatness nor the justice.
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My friend sharply interrupted me:
I deny nothing... I understand, indeed, that Grave, whose ardent campaigns I
have followed in La Rvolte, dreams of the suppression of the State, for example.
Myself, I do not have all his boldness, but I dream of it too. The State bears down on the
individual with a weight that is greater, more intolerable each day. Of the man it
unnerves and exhausts, it makes only a bundle of flesh to tax. His sole mission is to live
for it, as a louse lives on the beast on which it has fixed its suckers. The State takes from
the man his money, pitifully acquired in this prison: work; it filches from him at every
minute his liberty, already shackled by the laws; from his birth, it kills his individual
and administrative faculties, or it distorts them, which amounts to the same thing.
Assassin and thiefyes, I am convinced that the State is indeed this sort of double
criminal. As soon as a man walks, the State breaks his legs; as soon as he stretches out
his arms, the State busts them; as soon as he dares think, the State takes his head, andtells him: "Walk, take, and think."
Well? said I.
My friend continued:
Anarchy, on the contrary, is the winning back of the individual, it is liberty
of development for the individual, in a normal and harmonic sense. We can define it, in
short, as the spontaneous utilization of all the human energies, criminally squandered by
the State! I know that... and understand why all sorts of young artists and thinkers,
the contemporary elite look forward impatiently to rising to that long-awaited dawn,
where they glimpse not only an ideal of justice, but an ideal of beauty.
Well? said I anew.
Well, one thing concerns and troubles me, the terrorist side of Anarchy. I
detest violent means; I have a horror of blood and death, and I want anarchy to await its
triumph from the coming justice alone.
Do you believe then, I replied, that the anarchists are drinkers of blood? Don't
you feel, on the contrary, all the immense tenderness, the immense love of life, with
which the heart of a Kropotkin swells. Alas! Those are struggles inseparable from all
human struggles, and against which we can do nothing... So!... do you want me to give
you a classical comparison? The earth is parched; all the little plants, all the little
flowers are burned by a blazing, by a persistent, deadly sun; they blanch, wilt, and they
will die... But then a single cloud darkens the horizon, it advances and covers the
blazing sky. Lightning and thunder burst forth, and the waters stream over the shaken
earth. What matter if the lightning has broken, here and there, an oak grown too tall, if
the little plants that would have died, the little plants watered and refreshed, straighten
their stems, and again raise their flowers in the newly calm air?... We should not, you
see, be moved too much by the death of the ravenous oaks... Read Graves book...
Grave has said, in this regard, some excellent things. And if, after having read this book,
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where so many ideas are turned over and clarified, if after having thought through it, as
befits a work of such intellectual stature, you cannot manage to reach a stable and calm
opinion, you would be better off, I warn you, to give up becoming the anarchist that you
want to be, and remain the good bourgeois, the inveterate and hopeless bourgeois, the
bourgeois despite himself, that perhaps you are. . .
Octave MIRBEAU
May 1893
(Translated by Shawn Wilbur)
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