octave mirbeau, foreword to jean grave, "moribund society and anarchy"

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)

octave mirbeau, foreword to jean grave, "moribund society and anarchy"

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