The right to be lazy 2022010814, 2022010815, 9781681376820, 9781681376837

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(1842–1911) was born in Santiago, Cuba, and lived there until the age of nine, when his family returned to their hometown of Bordeaux, France. In his early twenties, Lafargue began studying medicine in Paris, but after taking part in a socialist gathering he was barred from the French university system and left the country to pursue his studies in London. There he served as Karl Marx’s secretary and married Marx’s daughter Laura. Moving back to France in 1870, he participated in the Paris Commune and was again forced to flee the country, first to Spain and then to England. In 1882, after the Communards were granted amnesty, he and Laura returned permanently to France, where Lafargue gained notoriety as a writer of pamphlets and articles on politics and literature, founded the country’s first Marxist labor party, and earned his law degree. On the night of November 26, 1911, he committed “rational suicide” with Laura at their home near Paris. Lenin spoke at their funeral. PAUL LAFARGUE

has translated Roberto Bazlen’s Notes Without a Text and two of four projected volumes of François-René de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. He is the editor of The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (published by NYRB Classics) and an associate editor at New York Review Books. ALEX ANDRIESSE

is the author of, among other books, Low Life, Kill All Your Darlings, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and Nineteen Reservoirs. She translated Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines and has written introductions to several other NYRB Classics, including Paris Vagabond by Jean-Paul Clébert, Classic Crimes by William Roughead, and Nada by Jean-Patrick Manchette. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, she teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College. LUCY SANTE

THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY and Other Writings PAUL LAFARGUE Selected and translated from the French by ALEX ANDRIESSE Introduction by LUCY SANTE

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 www.nyrb.com Selection and translation © 2023 by Alex Andriesse Introduction © 2023 by Lucy Sante All rights reserved. Cover image: L.S. Lowry, Going to the Match (detail), 1928; © 2022 The Estate of L. S. Lowry, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS Cover design: Katy Homans Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lafargue, Paul, 1842–1911, author. | Andriesse, Alex, translator. Title: The right to be lazy and other writings / Paul Lafargue; translated from the French by Alex Andriesse. Other titles: Droit à la paresse. English Description: New York: New York Review Books, [2022] | Series: New York Review Books Classics Identifiers: LCCN 2022010814 (print) | LCCN 2022010815 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681376820 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681376837 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Hours of labor. | Labor movement. | Socialism. Classification: LCC HD5106 .L2213 2022 (print) | LCC HD5106 (ebook) | DDC 335 —dc23/eng/20220525 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010814 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010815 ISBN 978-1-68137-683-7 v1.0

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CONTENTS Cover Biographical Notes Title Page Copyright and More Information Introduction The Right to Be Lazy A Capitalist Catechism The Legend of Victor Hugo Memories of Karl Marx Notes

INTRODUCTION I USED to wish that an enterprising publisher would issue Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy in a pocket edition, with a cover photo of someone drowsily fishing on a riverbank, and sell it from checkout endcaps in supermarkets. But books aren’t sold that way anymore, and the target audience has mostly died out. Instead I’m delighted to be writing the introduction to this new edition, with its clear, stately, inviting translation by Alex Andriesse; its useful annexes; and of course its inclusion in the New York Review Books collection of word-of-mouth classics. The Charles H. Kerr edition, translated by its publisher (not bad, if a bit sepia-toned by now), has been continuously available since 1883 but is much harder to find with the demise of the kind of bookstore that used to stock it. Those were the dissident-Left and anarchist bookstores—the latter surviving much longer than the former thanks to punk rock. The Kerr edition, with its yellow card-stock cover, its benday portrait of the author, its IBM Selectric typesetting, its rubber-stamped price ($1.25 in 1975), and its prominent printers’ union logo, would be seen on plywood tables between Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own and Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, the anarchists hedging their bets between the right and left wings of their non-organization. Lafargue, with his long record of battling anarchism in the name of communist orthodoxy, would perhaps be amused by this. He was in fact married to Laura, Karl Marx’s second daughter (of four), and both of them in addition could be said to be children of Friedrich Engels, who gave them financial sustenance and stability throughout his life and left them a portion of his estate. Lafargue was born in Santiago de Cuba, in 1842, of mixed heritage (French Christian, French Jewish, Jamaican Indian, and Dominican mulatto) and educated in France. While pursuing medical studies in the early 1850s, he sought out the Left as it was then understood: the resistance to Napoleon III and the peasant anarchism of PierreJoseph Proudhon. Then he joined the International Working Men’s Association and encountered Marx and the veteran revolutionary

Auguste Blanqui, who together set him on the path of communism, from which he was never to deviate. He may have been the first to use the term “Marxist,” earning him a tongue-lashing from Marx, who quipped, “If there’s one thing for certain, it’s that I am not a Marxist.” Lafargue began to see a lot of Marx in 1865, when his socialist activities got him banned from the French university system and he was forced to move to London to find work. It was then that he met Laura, and they married three years later. Lafargue’s charisma, loyalty, and capacity for work propelled him upward in the International, establishing him as a porte-parole for his father-in-law and an enforcer of the correct line. After moving back to Paris, he was active in the Commune, which got him exiled once again, this time to Spain, where he tried to start a communist mass movement but was unsuccessful because of the country’s primitive industrial development at that time, in addition to the influence of visiting Italian anarchists. He moved back to London, where he and Laura lost all three of their children in infancy, and he gave up his medical practice and earned a pittance running a photo studio; Engels had to help them out financially. In 1880, when the Communards were given a general amnesty, the Lafargues moved back to Paris, where Lafargue became the editor of the socialist paper L’Égalité and found work at an insurance company. His political activities now and then got him jailed; he revised The Right to Be Lazy while in the SaintePélagie prison. Along with Jules Guesde and Gabriel Deville, he founded the Parti Ouvrier Français in 1880. In 1891 he was elected to the parliament, representing Lille, the first socialist to enter that body; he was in prison at the time but was released to take his office. Marx had died in 1883, and Lafargue wrote his hagiographical if vivid reminiscences (included here) in 1890, becoming widely known in the movement as the keeper of the flame. His opposition to the social-democratic tendencies of Jean Jaurès marked the beginning of the split between the communists and the socialists. By then he was aging and had begun to detach himself from political activity, reducing his participation to correspondence with socialists abroad, such as Karl Liebknecht and V. I. Lenin, who with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, came to visit the Lafargues in their village. In 1911, when the money

from Engels finally ran out, the Lafargues killed themselves with injections of cyanide in a “rational suicide pact.” Paul was not quite seventy, Laura sixty-six; both were healthy. The suicide pact provoked furious controversy in the international socialist community, but Lenin told Krupskaya, “If one cannot work for the Party any longer, one must be able to look truth in the face and die like the Lafargues.” The Right to Be Lazy is seldom mentioned in Marxist theoretical literature because as a populist tract it is refreshingly free of theory. In fact it treats aspects of the social question that are too subjective for theory, such as the predilection of power and capital for not merely exploiting the working class but actively punishing it, with malice aforethought. Lafargue frames his argument as a satire, scoring the workers for their self-abnegation and addiction to labor, which forces the capitalists to drive them mercilessly and starve them along the way. He opens on an oracular note: “A strange madness has taken hold of the working class in nations where capitalist civilization reigns”—a note reminiscent of “A specter is haunting Europe . . . ” Quite at variance with the communist line in the twentieth century, he heaps scorn on the soi-disant dignity of labor, proposing that we contemplate the alternative in the form of our old friend the noble savage, who toils not, nor spins. Lafargue’s text is chatty and lively, sometimes parodying vacuous rhetoric of various shades, sometimes engaging in witticisms that unfortunately include anti-Semitic jibes—fully in tune with his times, when “Rothschild” was conceived as a universal boogeyman among the European gentile working class, but odd for someone who is a quarter Jewish. (It should be noted that Marx and Engels both repeatedly employ the N-word when referring to Lafargue in their correspondence.) Lafargue, in his sometimes swift, sometimes lumbering way, makes numerous important points along the course of his argument, some of them quite prescient. He pretends that the working class is so self-denying that manufacturers are forced to destroy their excess stock—with many excruciating examples cited—since redistributing it would do no good. He muses that oversupply is the thing that compels capitalists to colonize poorer nations, so that the inhabitants

will be induced to consume Western goods. “All of our products are adulterated to promote sales and lessen their lifespan,” he writes, calling his era the “Fake Age”—although it never seems to have ended. His panacea for all of this is the machine, which was enjoying its first golden era. If two laborers equipped with a machine can do the work formerly done by a hundred humans, then that should mean—turning the equation around—that each of those hundred would only have to work one-fiftieth of a day, this at a time when the ten-hour day was regarded as a revolutionary improvement in workers’ lives. He imagines that if workers are encouraged to consume the goods they produce, then the bourgeoisie, freed from the onerous burden of consumption, will elbow one another aside to join the already overcrowded labor force. Then the authorities will have no choice but to prohibit work. Echoes of Lafargue’s argument have been made at regular intervals in the years since, mostly by people who never read him. A mere quarter-century ago claims were still circulating that the computer would free humankind from the curse of labor once and for all. And of course it could have, just as much as the spinning jenny could have reduced the work of spinners to one one-hundredth of a day. The hitch in Lafargue’s argument is that, partly for the purposes of his somewhat unruly satire and partly because communism demands it, he has to overlook bad faith and ill will and imagine that rationality will prevail. If humans have not been freed from drudgery, that is largely because drudgery is the most effective way of keeping populations in line. Why do they need to be kept in line? To maintain the power of the powerful. Why do the powerful need power? Why would anyone need to be a billionaire? Why do so many people, some of them powerless, resist the concept of equality? These are questions that cannot be answered by political theory. —LUCY SANTE

THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY

PREFACE MONSIEUR Thiers, at a meeting of the Commission on Primary Education in 1849, said, “The reason I want to make the clergy’s influence supreme is that I am counting on it to propagate that good philosophy which teaches man he is here on earth to suffer, and not that other philosophy which tells him, ‘Enjoy yourself.’” With these words, Monsieur Thiers articulated the morality of the bourgeois class, whose ferocious egotism and narrow-minded thinking he embodied. When the bourgeoisie was struggling against the nobles undergirded by the clergy, they championed atheism and free examination, but now, in their triumph, they have changed their tune, and they intend to promote religion for the sake of their own economic and political supremacy. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they merrily took up pagan traditions and glorified the flesh and its passions, which Christianity had condemned. Nowadays, stuffed to the gills with goods and enjoyments, they reject the teachings of their thinkers—their Rabelais and Diderot—and preach abstinence to their employees. Capitalist morality, a pitiful parody of Christian morality, anathematizes the flesh of the worker. Its dream is to reduce the producer to the smallest number of needs, suppress his pleasures and passions, and sentence him to playing the role of a machine, turning out work without respite or thanks. Revolutionary socialists must take up the struggle against the philosophers and pamphleteers of the bourgeoisie; they must launch an attack against the morals and social theories of capitalism; they must tear down—in the minds of the class called to action—the prejudices erected by the ruling class. They must proclaim, in the face of double-dealers of every moral persuasion, that the earth will cease to be a vale of tears for the worker; that in the communist society of the future, which we will found “peacefully if possible, violently if not,” men’s passions will be given free rein. For “all passions are good by nature; we have nothing to fear except their abuse and excesses,”* and these will be avoided only through

mutual counterpoise and the harmonious development of the human organism, for, as Dr. Beddoe says, “only when a race attains its maximum physical development does it attain its highest energy and moral vigor.” This was also the opinion of the great naturalist Charles Darwin.† This refutation of the Right to Work, which I am reissuing with a few additional notes, first appeared in Égalité, second series, 1880. —P. L. Sainte-Pélagie prison, 1883

*René Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul.” †John Beddoe, Memoirs Read before the Anthropological Society of London; Charles Darwin, Descent of Man.

1. A DISASTROUS DOGMA Let us be lazy in everything except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy. —Lessing1 A STRANGE madness has taken hold of the working class in nations where capitalist civilization reigns. This madness drags in its wake the individual and social sufferings that, for two centuries now, have tormented poor humanity. This madness is the love of work, the moribund passion for work, pushed to the point where the vital forces of the individual and his progeny are exhausted. Instead of taking action against this mental aberration, priests, economists, and moralists have declared work sacrosanct. Hidebound and blind, these men have sought to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible, they have tried to rehabilitate what their God has cursed. I, who do not profess to be Christian, economical, or moral— I appeal against their judgment to the judgment of their God. I ask you to turn a deaf ear to the preachments of their religious, economic, freethinking morality and consider the appalling consequences of work in capitalist society. In capitalist society, work is the cause of every intellectual degeneration and every physical deformation. Compare the thoroughbred in Rothschild’s stables, waited on hand and foot by a retinue of bipeds, with the clomping beast of the Norman farms, who turns the earth, carts the manure, and hauls in the crops. Consider the noble savage whom the missionaries of business and the businessmen of religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis, and the dogma of work, and then consider our own miserable servants of the machine.* If, in our civilized Europe, you want to find some trace of man’s native beauty, you have to go looking for it in nations where economic prejudices have not yet eradicated the hatred of work. Spain, which, alas, is degenerating, can still boast of having fewer

factories than prisons and barracks; but the artist rejoices at the sight of the hardy Andalusian, brown as a chestnut, lithe and straightbacked as a steel rod; and man’s heart thrills at hearing the beggar, superbly draped in his threadbare capa, speaking as an amigo with the dukes of Osuna. For the Spaniard, in whom the primitive animal has not atrophied, work is the worst sort of slavery. † The Greeks, too, in their great era, had nothing but contempt for work. Slaves alone were permitted to work. A free man knew only exercises for the body and games for the mind. These were also the days when Aristotle, Phidias, and Aristophanes walked and breathed among the people; they were the days when a handful of warriors in Marathon crushed the hordes of Asia, soon to be conquered by Alexander. The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of free humanity, and the poets sang of laziness, that gift of the gods: O Meliboe, Deus nobis haec otia fecit‡ Christ, in his Sermon on the Mount, preached laziness: Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Jehovah, the bearded and rebarbative god, gave his worshippers the supreme example of ideal laziness: after six days of work, he rested for eternity. Who, on the other hand, considers work an organic necessity? The Auvergnese; the Scots, those Auvergnese of the British Isles; the Gallegos, the Auvergnese of Spain; the Pomeranians, the Auvergnese of Germany; the Chinese, the Auvergnese of Asia. And in our society, what classes love work for work’s sake? The peasant proprietors hunched over their fields and the petits bourgeois besotted with their shops, wriggling around like moles in their underground tunnels, never poking their heads out to take a leisurely look at nature. And meanwhile the proletariat, the great class embracing all the producers of the civilized nations, the class that by emancipating

itself will emancipate humanity from servile work and transform the human animal into a free creature—the proletariat, betraying its instincts and ignoring its historical mission, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work. Its punishment has been cruel and horrible. All individual and social miseries arise from its passion for work.

*European explorers pause in wonder before the physical beauty and proud bearing of the men of primitive tribes, unsullied by what Poeppig has called the “poisonous breath of civilization.” Speaking of the Aborigines of the Pacific islands, Lord George Campbell writes: “There are no people in the world who strike one at first sight so much as these Friendly Islanders. Their clear, light copper-brown colored skins, yellow and curly hair, good-humored, handsome faces, their tout ensemble, formed a novel and splendid picture of the genus Homo; and as far as physique and appearance goes they gave one certainly an immediate impression of being a superior race to ours.” The civilized people of ancient Rome, among them Caesar and Tacitus, regarded the Germans of the communist tribes that invaded the Roman Empire with the same admiration. Like Tacitus, Salvian—the fifth-century priest known as “the master of bishops”— held the barbarians up as an example to civilized people and Christians: “Among chaste barbarians we ourselves are unchaste. I shall say even more; the barbarians themselves are offended by our vices. Among the Goths no one is permitted to indulge in fornication; only the Romans in their land, by national and titular prerogative, are allowed this vice . . . The oppressed go to the barbarians seeking human kindness and refuge” (De Gubernatione Dei). Old civilization and newborn Christianity corrupted the barbarians of the Old World, just as old Christianity and modern capitalist civilization are corrupting the savages of the New World. M. F. Le Play, whose talent for observation must be recognized even if we reject his sociological conclusions, tainted as they are with philanthropic and Christian Pecksniffery, says in his book The Workers of Europe (1885): “The Bashkirs’ propensity for laziness [the Bashkirs are seminomadic shepherds from the Asian side of the

Urals], the leisure of nomadic life, the habits of meditation that this leisure produces in the more gifted individuals, often lends these people a distinction of manners and a fineness of intelligence and judgment that is rarely observed at the same social level in a more developed civilization . . . The most repugnant thing to them is agricultural work; they will do anything rather than accept the trade of farming.” Agriculture is indeed the first manifestation of servile work in human life. According to biblical tradition, the first criminal, Cain, is a farmer. †So says the Spanish proverb: Descansar es salud (Rest is healthy). ‡Virgil, Eclogues, 1, “O Meliboeus, a god gave me this otium.”

2. THE BLESSINGS OF WORK IN 1770, an anonymous volume called An Essay on Trade and Commerce was published in London. It made quite a stir at the time. Its author, a great philanthropist, was outraged that our populace have adopted a notion, that as Englishmen they enjoy a birthright privilege of being more free and independent than in any country in Europe. Now this idea, as far as it may affect the bravery of our troops, may be of some use; but the less the manufacturing poor have of it, certainly the better for themselves and for the State. The laboring people should never think themselves independent of their superiors. It is extremely dangerous to encourage mobs in a commercial state like ours, where, perhaps, seven parts out of eight of the whole, are people with little or no property. The cure will not be perfect, till our manufacturing poor are contented to labor six days for the same sum which they now earn in four days. Thus, nearly a century before Guizot, work was openly preached in London as a way of curbing the noble passions of man. “The more my people work, the fewer vices they will have,” Napoleon wrote from Osterode on May 5, 1807. “I am the authority. . . and I would be prepared to order that on Sundays, once services are over, the shops should be opened and the laborers put back to work.” To root out laziness and rein in the feelings of pride and independence it engenders, the author of the Essay on Trade proposed incarcerating poor people in “ideal workhouses” that would serve as “houses of terror, where they would be made to work fourteen hours a day, so that, deducting mealtimes, they would still be putting in twelve hours of work all in all.” Twelve-hour workdays were the ideal of the eighteenth-century philanthropists and moralists. How far beyond this ne plus ultra we’ve gone! Modern workhouses have become superlative houses

of correction, where the working masses are incarcerated and sentenced to forced labor for twelve or fourteen hours a day—and not only men but women and children! It’s difficult to imagine how the sons of the heroes of the Terror could let themselves be degraded by the religion of work to the point that, since 1848, they’ve accepted the law limiting factory work to twelve hours a day as a revolutionary victory—how they could proclaim, as a revolutionary principle, the “right to work.” Shame on the French proletariat! Only slaves would have been capable of such baseness. It would take twenty years of capitalist civilization for a Greek of heroic times to think up such a humiliation. And if the miseries of forced labor and the tortures of hunger that have befallen the proletariat outnumber the locusts of the Bible, the proletariat has only itself to blame. This work, which in June 1848 the workers demanded with weapons in hand, they have now imposed on their families; they have turned over their wives and children to the barons of industry. With their own hands, they have demolished their hearths and homes. With their own hands, they have dried up their wives’ milk; woebegone women pregnant and nursing their babies have had to file into mines and factories, straining their backs and racking their nerves. With their own hands, they have destroyed the lives and sapped the strength of their children. Shame on the proletarians! Where are those gossipmongers depicted in our fables and our oldtime tales, brassy and bold and boozy? Where are those buxom girls always on the move, cooking and singing, propagating life and sowing joy wherever they go, giving painless birth to strong ruddy children? Nowadays we have factory girls and women, pale drooping flowers with sluggish blood, ruined stomachs, and listless limbs. They have never experienced a single robust pleasure and wouldn’t know how to tell a cheery tale of how their cherry was popped! And the children? Twelve hours of work for children. What miserable stuff! If all the Jules Simons of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and all the Germinys of Jesuitry put their heads together, they could not have come up with a vice more stultifying to the minds of children, more corruptive of their instincts, more destructive of

their bodies, than laboring in the tainted air of the capitalist workhouse. It has been said that our era is the age of work; in fact, it is the age of pain, the age of misery and corruption. And yet philosophers and bourgeois economists—from the painfully muddled Auguste Comte to the absurdly clear LeroyBeaulieu; the bourgeois writers, from the charlatanically romantic Victor Hugo to the naively grotesque Paul de Kock—have all intoned nauseating songs in honor of the god Progress, Work’s firstborn son. To listen to them, you’d think that happiness was about to reign on earth—that we could already see it coming. They have gone digging in the dirt and feudal depravity of the past to dredge up somber contrasts to the present day’s delights. Do they find us tiresome, these well-fed, self-satisfied men who were until recently members of the great lords’ household staff and are now the scribbling valets of the bourgeoisie? Have they grown bored of us, along with the peasant depicted by the rhetorician La Bruyère?2 Well, here is the glowing picture of proletarian delights in the year of capitalist progress 1840, painted by one of their own, Dr. Villermé, a member of the the Institut de France, the same man who in 1848 was part of that society of scholars (Thiers; Cousin; Passy; and Blanqui, the Academy member among them) who disseminated among the masses the idiocies of bourgeois economy and morality. It is of manufacturing Alsace that Dr. Villermé speaks—the Alsace of Kestner and Dollfus, those paragons of industrial philanthropy and republicanism. But before the doctor draws up his account of proletarian miseries, let us listen to an Alsatian manufacturer, Monsieur Mieg, of the house of Dollfus, Mieg, & Co., describing the situation of the old-time artisan: In Mulhouse fifty years ago [in 1813, when modern mechanical industry was still in its infancy], the workers were all children of the soil, living in the city and the villages nearby, and almost all in possession of a house and often a small field. That was the golden age for the worker. But in those days, Alsatian industry wasn’t inundating the earth with its cotton or

making millionaires of Dollfus and Koechlin. Twenty-five years later, when Villermé visited Alsace, the modern minotaur, the capitalist workshop, had conquered the country; in its hunger for human labor, it had dragged the workers from their hearths the better to crush them between its jaws and suck out the labor they contained. Thousands upon thousands of workers then flocked to the whistle of the machine. A great number [says Villermé]—five thousand out of seventeen thousand—were forced by high rents to seek lodging in neighboring villages. Some of them lived four or five miles from the factory where they worked. In Mulhouse and Dornach, the work began at five o’clock in the morning and ended at five o’clock in the evening, summer and winter alike . . . They were a sight to see, coming into the city each morning and leaving each night. In the crowd there were many pale, skinny women, walking barefoot through the mud and who, having no umbrellas, wore their aprons or skirts turned up over their heads to shield their faces and necks from the rain or snow, and there was an even more considerable number of young children, who were no less dirty or gaunt, dressed in rags, and all greasy from the machine oil that drips on them as they work. These children, though better protected from the rain by their waterproof clothes, don’t even have a hand basket, as the women do, to carry their provisions for the day; they carry in their hands, or secret under their jackets (or wherever else they can), the piece of bread that must nourish them until quitting time. Thus, in addition to the strain of an inordinately long day— fifteen hours at least—these wretches must now suffer very frequent, very arduous comings and goings. It follows that they return home in the evenings weighed down by the need to sleep and then leave the next day before they are completely rested, to get back to the factory by opening time. Here now are the hovels where those who live in town are heaped:

In the Dornach neighborhood of Mulhouse and in houses nearby, I saw those wretched lodgings where two families slept in separate corners atop some straw thrown down on the tiles and held in place by two planks . . . The poverty in which cottonindustry workers in the Haut-Rhin department live is so profound that, while in the families of the manufacturers, traders, clothiers, and factory managers, half of the children reach their twenty-first year, this same half—in the families of a cotton mill’s weavers and workers—die before reaching the age of two. Speaking of the work on the shop floor, Villermé adds: What they do there is not a job or a task, it is a torture, and it is inflicted on children of six . . . It is this prolonged torment, day after day, which is principally responsible for undermining the health of cotton-mill workers. Regarding the duration of the work, Villermé observes that convicts sentenced to hard labor only work ten hours a day and slaves in the Antilles nine hours on average, while in France, with its Revolution of 1789 which proclaimed the pompous Rights of Man, there were factories where the day was sixteen hours long, during which the workers were allotted an hour and a half for meals.* What a miserable abortion of the revolutionary principles of the bourgeoisie! What a lugubrious gift from their god Progress! People who get rich doing nothing, the philanthropists call “benefactors of humanity,” because these people give work to the poor. I say it would be better to spread pestilence and poison the wells than to set up a factory in the midst of a rural population. Introduce factory work, and bid farewell to happiness, health, and liberty. Bid farewell to everything that makes life fine and worth living.† The economists go on repeating to the workers, Work to increase social wealth, and yet an economist, Destutt de Tracy, answers them: It is in poor nations where the people are comfortable; in rich nations, they are typically poor.

And his disciple Cherbuliez goes further: The workers themselves, by collaborating toward the accumulation of productive capital, contribute to the event that, sooner or later, must deprive them of a part of their salary. But, deaf and dumb from their own shouting, the economists reply, Work, never stop working, in order to generate your own well-being. And, in the name of Christian goodwill, a priest of the Church of England, the Reverend Townshend, intones: Work, work night and day. By working, you increase your poverty, and your poverty spares us having to impose work on you by force of law. The legal imposition of work “is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise. Hunger, on the other hand, is not only peaceable, silent, and unremitted pressure, but, as the most natural motive to industry and labor, it calls forth the most powerful exertions.” Work, work, proletarians, to increase social wealth and your personal poverty; work, work, so that, growing poorer and poorer, you will have more reason to work and be miserable. Such is the inexorable law of capitalist production. Because, heeding the fallacious words of the economists, the proletarians have given themselves over body and soul to the vice of work, they precipitate the whole of society into those industrial crises of overproduction that convulse the social organism. Then, because there is a plethora of commodities and a paucity of consumers, the workshops are closed and hunger scourges the working populations with a thousand lashes. The proletarians, stupefied by the dogma of work, not understanding that the overwork they have inflicted on themselves during the period of pretended prosperity is the reason for their current misery, instead of running to the granary and shouting, “We are hungry and we want to eat! True, we don’t have a red cent, but just because we’re beggars doesn’t change the fact that we’re the ones who harvested the wheat and picked the grapes . . . ” Instead of besieging the warehouses of Bonnet, the inventor of the industrial monasteries in Jujurieux, and protesting, “Monsieur Bonnet, here are your silk workers, your mill women, your spinners and weavers; they are shivering in cotton dresses so patched and tattered they would

bring a tear to the eye of a Jew, yet they are the ones who have spun and woven the silk robes of every cocotte in Christendom.3 The poor wretches, working thirteen hours a day, didn’t have a moment to give a thought to their appearance; now they have nothing to do and plenty of time to flounce around in the silks they’ve made. Since the day they lost their baby teeth, they’ve devoted themselves to increasing your wealth and lived in abstinence; now they are at their leisure and want to enjoy a little of the fruit of their labor. Come on, Monsieur Bonnet, hand over your silks, Monsieur Harmel will supply his muslins, Monsieur Pouyer-Quertier his calicoes, Monsieur Pinet his booties for their dear little cold damp feet . . . Rigged out from top to toe and feeling fine, they’ll be a delight to see. Come on, no hemming and hawing—you’re a friend to humanity, aren’t you, and a Christian to boot? Put the wealth they’ve built up for you with the flesh of their flesh at your working girls’ disposal. You say you’re a friend of commerce? Get your goods into circulation. Here are consumers, right at your doorstep. Give them unlimited credit. You’ve been obliged to do the same for traders you don’t know from Adam —who haven’t given you so much as a glass of water. Your working women will pay off the debt as best they can. When, on the due date, they do like Gambetta and default on their promissory notes, you can declare them bankrupt and, if they have nothing to seize, you can ask them to pay you back in prayers. They’re a sight more likely to send you to paradise than your black-sack padres stuffed to the gills with tobacco.” Instead of taking advantage of periods of crisis to demand a general distribution of products and an all-around good time, the starving workers go beat their heads against the factory doors. With gaunt faces, cadaverous bodies, and piteous words, they assail the manufacturers: “Good Monsieur Chagot, dear Monsieur Schneider, give us work, it isn’t hunger but passion for work that torments us!” And these poor people, who hardly have the strength to stand, sell twelve or fourteen hours of labor for half as much as they did when they had food on the table. And the philanthropists of industry take advantage of these stoppages to manufacture at a better cost. If industrial crises follow periods of overwork as ineluctably as night follows day, bringing with them forced stoppages and

desperate poverty, they just as inevitably lead to bankruptcy. So long as the manufacturer has credit, he gives rein to the rage for work; he borrows and borrows again to furnish raw material to the workers. He goes on producing without considering that the market is being glutted and that, if his goods don’t get sold, his bills still will come due. At his wits’ end, he implores the banker, he throws himself at his feet, offering him his blood and honor. “A bit of gold would be better for my business,” says the Rothschild; “you have twenty thousand pairs of silk stockings in your warehouse. They’re worth twenty cents apiece. I’ll take them for four cents apiece.” Obtaining the stockings, the banker turns around and sells them for six or eight cents apiece, pocketing the extra coins that owe nothing to anybody. But the manufacturer has only postponed the inevitable. Eventually the crash comes and the warehouses spill over. Then so much merchandise is thrown out the window that nobody understands how it came in the door. The merchandise destroyed comes to hundreds of millions; in the last century, it was burned, or dumped in the water.‡ But before reaching this conclusion, the manufacturers scour the world in search of outlets for the goods that are piling up; they force their government to annex the Congo, take possession of Tonkin, and demolish the Wall of China with cannonballs just to unload their cotton. In previous centuries, there were duels to the death between France and England over who would have the exclusive privilege of selling to America and the Indies. Thousands of strong young men reddened the seas with their blood during the colonial wars of the eleventh, sixteenth, and eighteenth centuries. There is an abundance of capital as well as of commodities. The financiers no longer know where to put it. They go to happy nations where the people laze in the sun smoking cigarettes, and they lay railroads, build factories, and import the curse of work. And this exportation of French capital ends, one fine day, with diplomatic complications. France, England, and Germany were on the verge of hair-pulling to determine which usurers would be paid first in Egypt. French soldiers were sent to do the job of bailiffs and collect bad debts in the Mexican wars.§

These individual and social miseries—however immense and innumerable they may be, however eternal they may seem—will vanish like hyenas and jackals at the approach of a lion when the proletariat says, “I want what is mine.” But if they are going to become conscious of their strength, the proletariat must trample underfoot the prejudices of Christian, economic, and freethinking morality. They must return to their natural instincts. They must proclaim the Rights of Laziness, a hundred thousand times nobler and holier than the Rights of Man cooked up by the philosophizing lawyers of the bourgeois revolution. They must hold themselves to working only three hours at a time, lazing about and feasting the rest of the day and night. So far my task has been easy. All I’ve had to do is describe real problems well known to us all, alas! But to convince the proletariat that the talk they’ve been inoculated with is perverse, that the unregulated work they have embraced since the century’s beginning is the most terrible scourge ever inflicted on humanity, that work is going to become a mere condiment to flavor the tasty dish of laziness—an exercise beneficial to the human organism and a passion useful to the social organism—only when wisely regulated and limited to a maximum of three hours a day: this is a difficult task beyond my strength. Only physiologists, hygienists, and communist economists would be equipped to take it on. In the pages that follow, I will limit myself to demonstrating that, given the means of modern production and their boundless productive power, it is necessary to curb the workers’ extravagant passion for work and encourage them to consume the goods they produce.

*L.R. Villermé, Tableau de l’état physique et moral des ouvriers dans les fabriques de coton, de laine et de soie, 1848. It was not because Dollfus, Koechlin, and other Alsatian manufacturers were republicans, patriots, and Protestant philanthropists that they treated their workers in this way. Blanqui, the academician Reybaud (that living image of Jérôme Paturot), and Jules Simon (that political jackof-all-trades) have described the same amenities for the working

class in the ultra-Catholic, ultra-monarchist factories of Lille and Lyon. What we see here are capitalist virtues that harmonize beautifully with all political and religious convictions of every type. †The Indians of the warlike tribes of Brazil kill their infirm and their old people; they show their affection for them by putting an end to a life no longer enlivened by battles, feasts, and dances. All primitive people have shown them a similar affection: the Massageteans of the Caspian Sea (Herodotus), as well as the Wends of Germany and the Celts of Gaul. In the churches of Sweden, until very recently, they still had bludgeons called “familial bludgeons” that were used to emancipate relatives from the sorrows of old age. How low modern proletarians have sunk to accept the dreadful miseries of factory work with forbearance. ‡ At the Industrial Congress held in Berlin on January 21, 1879, it was estimated that the German iron industry lost 568 million francs during the latest crisis. §Monsieur Clemenceau’s La Justice said in its financial section of April 6, 1880: “We have heard it maintained that, even without Prussia, France would ‘still have lost’ the billions spent on the war of 1870—i.e., in the form of loans periodically issued to foreign countries. This is our opinion also.” The English capital lost to loans given to South American republics is estimated at five billion. French workers have not only produced the five billion paid to Bismarck; they continue to pay interest on the war indemnity to Ollivier, Girardin, Bazaine, and other bondholders who caused the war and the defeat. Still, one shred of consolation remains to them: these billions will not provoke a war to recoup the debts.

3. THE CONSEQUENCES OF OVERPRODUCTION ANTIPATER, a Greek poet of Cicero’s time, celebrated the invention of the water mill (for grinding grain), which was going to emancipate female slaves and bring back the golden age: Cease from grinding, ye women who toil at the mill; Sleep late, even if the crowing cocks announce the dawn. For Demeter has ordered the Nymphs to perform the work of your hands, And they, leaping down on top of the wheel, turn its axle which, With its revolving spokes, turns the heavy concave Nisyrian millstones, Learning to feast on the products of Demeter without labor.* Sadly, the leisure the pagan poet envisioned has not come to pass. The blind passion and perverse murderousness of work has transformed the machine from an instrument of emancipation into an instrument that enslaves free beings: its productivity impoverishes them. A good working woman with her bobbin makes only five stitches a minute, while some circular knitting machines make thirty thousand in the same amount of time. Every machinated minute therefore equals a hundred hours of a working woman’s labor or, alternatively, every minute of machine work gives the worker ten days of rest. What is true for the knitting industry is more or less true for all industries renovated by modern machinery. But what do we see? As the machine perfects and eliminates man’s work with ever-increasing swiftness and precision, the worker, instead of extending his periods of rest accordingly, redoubles his ardor, as if he wished to vie with the machine. What an absurd and murderous competition! To encourage free and open competition between man and machine, proletarians have abolished the sensible laws limiting the work of the artisans of the old guilds and put an end to public holidays.† Because the producers of that time only worked five days

out of seven, are we to believe, as the lying economists say, that they lived on nothing but fresh air and water? Come now! They had leisure time to savor the joys of the earth, to make love and laugh, to revel and romp in honor of the joyous god Idleness. Gloomy England, shrouded in Protestantism, was then known as “merry England.” Rabelais, Quevedo, Cervantes, and all the nameless authors of the picaresque novels make our mouths water with their depictions of those monumental repasts ‡ with which the men of that time regaled themselves between battles and devastations, and during which the whole house was “thrown out at the windows.” Jordaens and the Flemish school have inscribed these feasts on their exuberant canvases. What has become of you, sublime gargantuan stomachs? What has become of you, sublime brains that encompass all human thought? We have grown puny and degenerate indeed. Hand-tomouth living, potatoes, fuchsin-dyed wine, and Prussian schnapps, expertly combined with forced labor, have debilitated our bodies and shrunk our minds. And when man’s stomach is cramping and the machine is increasing his productivity—that is when the economists preach the Malthusian theory, the religion of abstinence, and the dogma of work? But it would be better to rip out their tongues and throw them to the dogs. Because the working class, with its simple good faith, has let itself be indoctrinated, because, with its native impetuosity, it has rushed blindly into work and abstinence, the capitalist class has found itself condemned to laziness and enforced merriment, unproductiveness and overconsumption. But if the worker’s overwork bruises his flesh and pinches his nerves, it also leads to no shortage of problems for the bourgeois. The abstinence to which the productive class is condemned obliges the bourgeoisie to pledge themselves to the overconsumption of the products they shambolically manufacture. In the early days of capitalist production, a century or two ago, the bourgeois was an orderly man of reasonable and peaceable habits; he was content with his wife, or very nearly; he only drank when he was thirsty and ate when he was hungry. He left the noble virtues of debauchery to the courtiers and courtesans. Nowadays, no son of

the nouveau riche fails to believe himself compelled to cultivate prostitution and mercurate his body to give purpose to the labor imposed on the workers in the mercury mines; he simply isn’t bourgeois unless he stuffs his face with truffled capons and the Lafite du jour to support the breeders of La Flèche and the winegrowers of Bordeaux. With so much to do, the organism quickly deteriorates, the hair falls out, the teeth come loose, the torso loses its shape, the belly bulges, breathing becomes difficult, all movement grows heavy, joints stiffen, phalanges grow knotted. Others, too frail to endure debauchery’s wear and tear but endowed with the Pecksniffian bump, shrivel up their brains like Garniers with political economy, or like Acollases with juridical philosophy, and concoct fat, somniferous volumes that will devour the leisure hours of the typesetters and printers. Society women live a martyr’s life. Trying on and showing off the bewitching outfits that the seamstresses kill themselves assembling, from evening to morning they squeeze out of one dress and into another. For hours at a time, they surrender their hollow heads to the hairstyle artists who want to satisfy their desire for the construction of false chignons at any cost. Cinched into their corsets, pinched into their booties, with décolleté enough to make a fireman blush, they whirl around night after night at their charity balls to raise a few cents for the poor, the saintly souls. To fill his twofold social role—producing nothing and consuming everything—the bourgeois has not only had to defy his modest appetites, lose his two-hundred-year-old habits of hard work, and give himself over to unbridled luxury, truffled indigestion, and syphilitic debauch; he has also had to take an enormous mass of men out of the workforce to serve as his assistants. Here are a few figures that prove how colossal this loss of productive forces is: According to the census of 1861 for England and Wales, the population of England and Wales was 20,066,244; of these, 9,776,259 males and 10,289,965 females. If we deduct from this population all who are too old or too young for work, all unproductive women, young persons, and children, the

“ideological” classes, such as government officials, policemen, priests, lawyers, soldiers, scholars, artists, etc.; further, all who have no occupation but to consume the labor of others in the form of rent, interest, etc.; and, lastly, paupers, vagabonds, criminals, etc., there remain in round numbers eight million of the two sexes of every age, including in that number every capitalist who is in any way engaged in industry, commerce, or finance. Among these eight million are: Agricultural laborers (including shepherds, servants, and maidservants living in the houses of farmers): 1,098,261 All who are employed in cotton, woolen, worsted, flax, hemp, silk, and jute factories, in stocking-making and lacemaking by machine: 642,607 All who are employed in coal mines and metal mines: 565,835 All who are employed in metal works (blast furnaces, rolling mills, etc.) and metal manufacturers of every kind: 396,998 The servant class: 1,208,648 If we add up the number of people employed in textile factories and mines, we get 1,208,442; if we add up those employed in textile factories and metal industries, 1,039,605: in both cases a number lower than the number of the modern domestic slaves. Here is the magnificent result of the capitalist exploitation of machines.§ To this whole servant class, whose numerousness gives some indication of the stage that capitalist civilization has reached, we must add the enormous class of wretches exclusively devoted to the satisfaction of the vain and expensive tastes of the rich classes: diamond cutters, lace makers, embroiderers, deluxe-book binders, interior decorators, and so on.ǁ Once they had hunkered down in absolute laziness and been corrupted by mandatory merriment, the bourgeoisie made the best of

their new lifestyle in spite of the illness that came with it. They shuddered at the thought of any change. The sight of the miserable living conditions resignedly accepted by the working class—and of the bodily degradations brought about by the depraved passion for work—only increased their repulsion for any imposition of work or restriction of pleasure. This is precisely when, without giving any thought to the corruption the bourgeoisie had declared its social right, the proletarians took it into their heads to foist work on the capitalists. The innocents took the economists’ and moralists’ theories of work seriously and girded their loins to make the capitalists put them into practice. The proletariat hoisted the banner: “He who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat.” Lyon, in 1831, rose up under the slogan “Bullets or work.” The Communards of March 1871 declared their uprising the “Revolution of Work.” Faced with these outbreaks of barbarous fury, damaging to every bourgeois form of pleasure and laziness, the capitalists could only respond with fierce repression, but they knew that, though they’d succeeded in putting down these revolutionary outbursts, they still hadn’t drowned, in the blood of their massacres, the proletariat’s absurd idea of inflicting work on the idle and well-fed classes. And it is to avert this disaster that they surround themselves with troops, policemen, lawyers, and jailers kept in laborious unproductiveness. It is impossible to cherish any illusions about the nature of modern armies, which are maintained on a permanent basis quite simply to suppress “the enemy within.” That is why the forts of Paris and Lyon have been built not to defend the city against outside forces but to overpower it in case of a revolt. If an irrefutable example is needed, consider the army of Belgium, that capitalist land of milk and honey; its neutrality is guaranteed by the European powers, and yet its army is one of the largest in proportion to the population. The glorious battlefields of the brave Belgian army are the plains of the Borinage and Charleroi. It is with the blood of miners and other unarmed workers that Belgian officers stain their swords and earn their epaulets. European nations don’t have national armies, they have mercenary armies; they protect the capitalists from the fury of the

people, who want to sentence them to ten hours a day of mining or spinning. Thus, even as they clench their own bellies, the working class has unduly bloated the bellies of the bourgeoisie condemned to overconsumption. To comfort them in their arduous toil, the bourgeoisie has removed a mass of people from the workforce (people far superior to those still dedicated to useful production) and sentenced them, in turn, to unproductiveness and overconsumption. But this gaggle of useless mouths, despite its insatiable hunger, is not enough to consume all the goods that the workers, drunk on the dogma of work, turn out like maniacs, with no wish to consume them and no thought for whether anyone in the world does wish to consume them. As a result of this twofold madness on the part of the workers— killing themselves with overwork and vegetating in abstinence—the major problem of capitalist production is no longer finding producers and maximizing their efforts but finding consumers, exciting their appetites, and manufacturing false needs. Since European workers shivering with cold and hunger refuse to wear the fabrics they weave or drink the wines they harvest, the poor manufacturers have to run like madmen to the ends of the earth, looking for people who will wear and drink them: Europe exports hundreds of millions and billions of goods every year, all over the world, to people who have absolutely no use for them.¶ But the mapped continents are no longer vast enough. Virgin lands are needed. European manufacturers dream night and day of Africa—a lake in the Sahara, a railroad in Sudan. They anxiously follow the progress of Livingstone, Stanley, Du Chaillu, and Brazza. They listen gapemouthed to the fabulous tales told by these brave travelers. What undiscovered wonders does the dark continent contain? Fields are planted with elephant tusks, rivers of coconut oil ferry flecks of gold, and millions of black asses, bare as the faces of Dufaure and Girardin, await cotton goods to teach them decency, and bottles of schnapps and Bibles to instruct them in the virtues of civilization. But it’s all to no purpose: the bourgeois stuffing himself, the servant class eclipsing the productive class, foreign and barbarous nations gorging themselves on European goods—nothing, nothing

can clear the mountain range of merchandise that is piled higher and wider than the Egyptian pyramids. The productivity of European workers defies all consumption and gluttony. The crazed manufacturers no longer know which way to turn, they can no longer find the raw material to satisfy the wild, depraved passion their workers have for work. In our textile districts, soiled, half-rotten rags are raveled out and made into “revived” cloths that last about as long as promises made to voters. In Lyon, instead of leaving the silk fiber in its natural simplicity and suppleness, they overload it with mineral salts that, by weighing it down, make it friable and almost useless. All of our products are adulterated to promote sales and limit their lifespan. Our era will be called the Fake Age, just as the earliest eras of human life have been called the Stone Age and the Bronze Age to characterize their productions. The ignorant accuse our pious industrialists of fraud, when in fact the motive that drives them is providing work for the workers, who can’t bring themselves to kick up their heels and live. Though these fakeries (made only out of humanitarian feeling, even if they do rake in superb profits for the manufacturers who perpetrate them) are detrimental to the quality of merchandise—and though they are the cause of no end of human labor going to waste—they also serve as evidence of the philanthropic ingenuity of the bourgeois and the horrible perversion of the workers who, to slake their decadent thirst for work, compel the industrialists to stifle the cries of their conscience and violate the laws of commercial honesty. And yet despite the overproduction of goods, despite the industrial fakeries, the workers glut the market, pleading for work, work, work! You’d think their outsize numbers would make them curb their passion, but instead they bring it to a head. If there is even the slightest opportunity for work, they swarm upon it. Then they ask for twelve or fourteen hours to sate them, only to find themselves tossed out on the sidewalk again the next day with nothing to feed their vice. Every year, in every industry, stoppages occur with seasonal regularity. After the periods of overwork lethal to the body, there come two- or four-month periods of total inactivity; and the more they work, the more they starve. Since the vice of work is diabolically drilled into the heads of the workers, since its demands destroy all

their natural instincts, since the quantity of work required by society is necessarily limited by consumption and the amount of raw material available, why use up the work of a whole year in six months? Why not distribute it evenly over twelve months and force every worker to be satisfied with five or six hours a day, the whole year long, instead of wolfing down twelve hours a day for six months? Guaranteed their daily share of work, laborers will no longer be jealous of each other, no longer fight to rip the work from each other’s hands and the bread from each other’s mouths. And then, once they are no longer exhausted in body and mind, they will begin to practice the virtues of laziness. Stultified by their vice, the workers have not been able to see that in order to have work for everybody, it must be rationed like water on a ship in distress. Meanwhile the industrialists, in the name of capitalist exploitation, have long been demanding a legal limitation of the workday. Before the 1860 Commission on Professional Education, one of the biggest manufacturers in Alsace, Monsieur Bourcart, declared: The twelve-hour day is excessive and ought to be cut down to eleven hours, while work on Saturdays ought to be stopped at two o’clock. I advise the adoption of this measure, although it may seem onerous at first. We have experimented with it in our industrial establishments for four years now and have found ourselves better off, while the average rate of production, far from having diminished, has gone up. In his study of “machines,” Monsieur F. Passy quotes the following letter written by a major Belgian industrialist, Monsieur M. Ottavaere: Our machines, although they are the same as those of the English spinning mills, do not produce what they are supposed to produce and what these same machines would produce in England, although the spinners there work two hours a day less . . . We all work two good hours too many. I am convinced that if we were to work eleven hours instead of thirteen, we would

generate the same amount of product and would therefore produce more economically. Even Monsieur Leroy-Beaulieu affirms that “it has been observed by a major Belgian manufacturer that weeks shortened by a holiday do not result in less product than ordinary weeks.”** What the people, duped in their simplicity by the moralists, have never dared to do, an aristocratic government has done. Dismissing the lofty moral and industrial opinions of economists, who, like birds of ill omen, croak that cutting factory workdays by a single hour would spell disaster for English industry, the English government has passed a law, strictly observed, prohibiting a workday of more than ten hours. Now, as before, England remains the premier industrial nation in the world. The great English experiment and the experience of a few intelligent capitalists cannot be denied. These things demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that to increase human productivity, we need to reduce work hours and multiply paydays and holidays. The French people are not convinced. But if reducing the workday by a mere two hours has grown English production by a third in ten years, what dizzying effect would legally limiting the workday to three hours have on French production? Can’t the workers understand that by overtaxing themselves with work, they exhaust not only their own strength but that of their progeny; that by wearing themselves out the way they do, they make themselves prematurely unfit for any work; that, obsessed and oppressed by a single vice, they are no longer men but fragments of men; that they are murdering the beautiful capacities within themselves and leaving nothing alive and flourishing except the fuming madness for work? Like the parrots of Arcadia, they repeat the teaching of the economists: “Work, work to grow the nation’s wealth.” Oh, you fools! It’s because you work too much that industrial equipment is being developed so slowly. Stop braying and listen to an economist’s own words. He’s no genius; he’s only Monsieur Louis Reybaud, whom we were fortunate enough to lose a few months back:

It is generally the conditions of handwork that lead to revolutions in working methods. As long as handwork provides its services at a low price, it is doled out in abundance. Efforts are made to avoid it when its services become more costly.†† To force capitalists to perfect their machines of wood and iron, we must raise the salaries and reduce the working hours of machines of flesh and bone. What proof is there? We can furnish examples by the hundreds. In spinning, the self-acting mule was invented and implemented in Manchester because the spinners were refusing to work the long days that they had before. In America, the machine is invading every branch of agricultural production, from the churning of butter to the weeding of wheat. Why? Because the free and lazy American would rather die a thousand deaths than live the bovine life of the French peasant. Plowing—so abundant in aches and pains for the plowmen of our glorious France—is, in the American West, a pleasant, open-air pastime performed while sitting back and casually smoking your pipe.

*Antipater of Thessalonica, “On the Water-Mill,” in The Greek Anthology, translated by W.R. Paton (1916) † Under the ancien régime, the laws of the Church guaranteed workers ninety days of rest (fifty-two Sundays and thirty-eight public holidays), during which they were strictly prohibited from working. This was the great crime of Catholicism and the principal cause of irreligion among the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie. After the Revolution, as soon as they were in charge, this same bourgeoisie abolished public holidays and replaced the seven-day week with a ten-day week. It freed the workers from the yoke of the Church only to make them submit to the yoke of work. The hatred for holidays does not appear until the modern industrial and commercial bourgeoisie takes shape, between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Henri IV petitioned the pope to have them reduced; the pope refused because “one of the heresies now

running rampant concerns feast days” (Letter from Cardinal d’Ossat). But in 1666, Péréfixe, the archbishop of Paris, rescinded seventeen in his diocese. Protestantism, which is the Christian religion adapted to the new industrial and commercial needs of the bourgeoisie, was less concerned with days of rest for the people. It banished the saints from heaven in order to do away with their feast days on earth. Religious reform and freethinking philosophy were only pretexts that allowed the Jesuitical, rapacious bourgeoisie to get rid of the people’s holidays. ‡These Pantagruelian feasts lasted for weeks. Don Rodrigo de Lara wins his bride by driving the Moors out of old Calatrava, as the Romancero relates: “And the wedding is at Burgos, / There is noble feasting there. / When the nuptials all are ended, / Then to Salas they repair. / And at Burgos and at Salas, / Seven weeks in feasts were past.” [Shasta M. Bryant, The Spanish Ballad in English.] The men at these seven-week weddings were the heroic soldiers of the wars of independence. §Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 15, Section 6. ǁ“The percentage of a country’s population employed as domestics in the service of the well-off classes is an indication of its progress in national wealth and civilization” (R. M. Martin, Ireland before and after the Union with Great Britain). Gambetta, who has ignored the social question ever since he stopped being a poor lawyer debating at the Café Procope, was doubtlessly alluding to this ever-increasing domestic class when he claimed the advent of new social strata. ¶Two examples: The English government, to include the Indian countries that, in spite of periodic famines desolating the land, persist in growing poppy instead of rice or wheat, has had to start bloody wars in order to impose on the Chinese government the free introduction of Indian opium. The savages of Polynesia, in spite of the deaths that ensue, go on dressing and getting drunk in the English fashion, in order to consume the products of Scottish distilleries and Manchester textile mills. **Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, La Question ouvrière au XIXe siècle, 1872.

††Louis Reybaud, Le Coton, son régime, ses problèmes, 1863.

4. A NEW TUNE, A NEW SONG If MODERATING work hours harnesses new mechanical forces for social production, then encouraging workers to consume their own products will harness an immense army for the workforce. The bourgeoisie, discharged from their duty to be the universal consumers, will be quick to fire the mob of soldiers, lawyers, journalists, procurers, etc., whom they’ve pulled away from useful work to help them consume and waste. Then the labor market will burst its bounds and an ironclad law will be passed to prohibit work: it will be impossible to find any drudgery to do for those formerly unproductive members of society now more numerous than wood lice. And in addition to them, there will be all those people who see to their pointless and profligate needs and tastes. When there are no more lackeys and generals to decorate, no more free and married prostitutes to dress in lace, no more cannons to bore, no more palaces to build, there will have to be strict laws compelling the men and women now working in trimming, lace-making, ironworks, and construction to take up hygienic canoeing and choreographic exercises so as to restore their health and the perfection of the race. Once European products are consumed locally—instead of shipping them off to who knows where—the sailors, dockhands, and haulers will have to sit down and learn how to twiddle their thumbs. The happy Polynesians will then be able to practice free love without fearing the kicks of the civilized Venus or sermons about European morality. But there’s more. To find work for all the unproductive people in society today, to let industrial equipment go on being developed indefinitely, the working classes, like the bourgeoisie, will have to prevail over their taste for abstinence and develop their consumer capacities indefinitely. Instead of eating one or two ounces of leathery meat a day, when they eat meat at all, they will chow down on glorious one- or two-pound steaks; instead of drinking bad wine in moderation, more Catholic than the pope, they will drink big, deep

gulps of Bordeaux and Burgundy unbaptized by industry, and they’ll leave water to the animals. The proletarians have taken it into their heads to inflict ten hours of forge and refinery on the capitalists. But this is a huge mistake—a spur to social conflicts and civil war. Work ought to be prohibited, not imposed. The Rothschilds and the Says, too, will be eligible to give proof that they have, their whole lives long, been perfect good-fornothings, and if they swear to want to go on being perfect good-fornothings despite the ubiquitous proclivity for work, they will be registered and receive five francs’ pocket money every morning at their respective city halls. Social discord will vanish. Landlords and capitalists will be the first to rally to the people’s party, once they are convinced that, far from wanting to do them harm, it wants to relieve them of the work of overconsumption and waste they’ve been saddled with since birth. As for the bourgeois incapable of furnishing valid proof of their good-for-nothingness, they will be allowed to follow their instincts: there are quite enough disgusting jobs to accommodate them—Dufaure could wash public toilets; Galliffet could stab mangy pigs and glandered horses to death.4 Members of the Pardons Board, sent to Poissy, could mark cattle and sheep for slaughter. Senators, hired on at funeral homes, could serve as undertakers. And suitable jobs could be found for others, too. Lorgeril and Broglie could cork champagne bottles, though they would have to be muzzled to keep them from getting drunk. Ferry, Freycinet, and Tirard could exterminate bugs and vermin in the ministries and other public houses. It would, however, be necessary to keep the public moneys out of reach of all the bourgeoisie, for fear of their ingrained habits. But vengeance, harsh and prolonged, will be wreaked on the moralists who have perverted human nature, the pharisees, the double-dealers, the hypocrites, “and other such sects of men, who disguise themselves like maskers to deceive the world. For, whilst they give the common people to understand that they are busied about nothing but contemplation and devotion in fastings and maceration of their sensuality—and that only to sustain and aliment the small frailty of their humanity—it is so far otherwise that, on the contrary, God knows what cheer they make; Et Curios simulant, sed

Bacchanalia vivunt.* You may read it in great letters in the coloring of their red snouts, and gulching bellies as big as a tun, unless it be when they perfume themselves with sulfur.”† On days of great public rejoicing, instead of eating middle-class dust as on August 15 and July 14, communists and collectivists will drink bottles dry and eat their fill of ham, while the members of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, the long- and short-robed priests of the economic, Christian, Protestant, Jewish, positivist, and freethinking churches, the propagators of Malthusianism and of Christian, altruistic, independent, or dependent morality, dressed in yellow, will hold the candle till it burns their fingers, will starve as they stare at Welsh women and tables laden with meats, fruits, and flowers, will die of thirst mere feet from unstoppered casks. Four times a year, when the seasons change, they’ll be shut up in big wheels like the knife-grinders’ dogs and be condemned to grind for ten hours straight. Lawyers and jurists will suffer the same punishment. In the regime of laziness, in order to kill the time that kills us all, second by second, there will be plays and shows forever and always. Just the right kind of work for our bourgeois lawmakers! They will be organized into troupes and go around to fairs and villages putting on legislative performances. The generals in riding boots, their chests richly brocaded with aiguillettes, gobs of spit, and Legion of Honor crosses, will parade through streets and squares, drumming up a crowd. Gambetta and his partner Cassagnac will do a song-and-dance routine at the door. Cassagnac, in full Drawcansir regalia, rolling his eyes, twisting his mustache, blowing on a knot of flaming rope, will threaten everyone with his father’s pistol and vanish down the hatch the moment he’s shown a picture of Lullier.5 Gambetta will give speeches about foreign affairs—about little Greece, which makes a doctor of him and would be willing to set fire to Europe to swindle Turkey; about mighty Russia, which makes a fool of him with the mincemeat it promises to make of Prussia, and which is stirring up trouble in western Europe to feather its nest back east and stifle the nihilism within; about Mr. Bismarck, who was good enough to allow him to express his opinion on amnesty. . .6 then, baring his big paunch painted red, white, and blue, he will hammer

out a beat on it and enumerate the delicious little animals, the ortolans, the truffles, the glasses of Margaux and Yquem, he has gulped down to encourage agriculture and keep the voters of Belleville cheering. In the playhouse, the entertainment will begin with the Electoral Farce. Before the voters’ eyes, the bourgeois candidates, dressed in straw and fitted with wooden heads and donkey ears, will dance the dance of political freedoms, wiping themselves fore and aft with their electoral programs smeared with promises, and talking with tears in their eyes of “the miseries of the people,” and in resonant tones of “the glories of France”; and the heads of the voters will bray solidly in chorus: Hee-haw! Hee-haw! Then the main performance will begin: The Theft of the Nation’s Goods. Capitalist France, an enormous, hairy-faced, bald-headed, slumpshouldered female with loose, swollen, pasty flesh, her eyes vacant, sleepy and yawning, is stretched out on a velvet couch. At her feet, industrial Capitalism, a huge iron organism with a monkey face, is mechanically devouring men, women, and children whose lugubrious and heartrending cries fill the air. The Bank, with its weasel nose, hyena body, and harpy hands, is neatly making pennies disappear into its pockets. Hordes of poor, emaciated proletarians in rags, escorted by policemen with sabers drawn, pursued by Furies lashing them with the whips of hunger, are bringing piles of merchandise, casks of wine, and sacks of gold and wheat to the feet of capitalist France. Langlois, with his underpants in one hand and Proudhon’s testament in the other, the budget book clenched between his teeth, is encamped at the head of the defenders of national property, standing guard. When the workers, beaten with gunstocks and pricked with bayonets, have laid down their burdens, they are driven away and the door is opened to the manufacturers, merchants, and bankers. They hurl themselves pell-mell upon the pile, gulping down the cotton, the sacks of wheat, and the gold ingots, emptying the casks; unable to continue, revoltingly covered in filth, they collapse in their vomit and waste . . . Then the thunder rolls, the earth trembles and cracks open, Historical Destiny comes forth and with her iron

foot crushes the heads of the men who hiccup, stagger, fall down, and cannot flee, and with her huge hand she topples capitalist France, stupefied and sweaty with fear. If the working classes would root out the vice that domineers them and debases their nature, they would rise up in all their terrible strength and call not for the Rights of Man, which are only the rights of capitalist exploitation, or the Right to Work, which is only the right to be poor, but for the passage of an ironclad law prohibiting any man from working more than three hours a day, and the Earth, the old Earth, trembling with joy, would feel a new universe of life leaping within her . . . But how can we ask such manly resolution of a proletariat corrupted by capitalist morality? Like Christ, the doleful personification of ancient slavery, the men, women, and children of the proletariat have been hauling themselves up the hard Calvary of sorrow for a century; for a century, forced labor has broken their bones, bruised their flesh, and pinched their nerves; for a century, hunger has twisted their entrails and warped their brains! Oh, Laziness, take pity on our long destitution! Oh, Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm to heal human sufferings!

*Juvenal’s Satire 2. “They pretend to be Curii but live like Bacchanals.” † Rabelais, Pantagruel, book 2, chapter 34, translated by Thomas Urquhart and Peter Le Motteux (1900).

APPENDIX OUR MORALISTS are very modest people. Though they have invented the dogma of work, they still have doubts about its ability to tranquilize the soul, elevate the mind, and maintain the healthy functioning of the kidneys and other organs; they want to test it out on the people in anima vili before turning it against the capitalists, whose vices it is their mission to license and excuse. But why, you twopenny philosophers, do you drive yourselves crazy trying to concoct a morality that you wouldn’t dare advise your masters to put into practice? Do you want to see your dogma of work, the apple of your eye, scoffed at and scorned? Let us turn to the history of the ancients and the writings of their philosophers and legislators: Whether the Greeks borrowed from the Egyptians their notions about trade, like so many others, I cannot say for certain. I have remarked that the Thracians, the Scyths, the Persians, the Lydians, and almost all other barbarians, hold the citizens who practice trades, and their children, in less repute than the rest . . . These ideas prevail throughout the whole of Greece, particularly among the Lacedaemonians.* In Athens, the citizens were true nobles whose only occupation was the defense and administration of the community, as had been true of the uncivilized warriors that were their ancestors. So it was that, in order to be free to devote all their mental and physical powers to looking after the interests of the Republic, they tasked slaves with all forms of work. Likewise, in Lacedaemon, not even the women were supposed to spin or weave, so as not to subtract from their nobility.† The Romans recognized only two free and noble professions: farming and soldiering. Every citizen lived by rights at the expense of

the treasury and could not be forced to provide for himself by any of the sordidae artes (which is what they called trades) that rightfully belonged to the slaves. Brutus the Elder, to stir up the populace, accused the tyrant Tarquin of having turned free citizens into artisans and masons.‡ Ancient philosophers argued over the origin of ideas, but they agreed when it came to the abhorrence of work. Plato writes that, in his social utopia, his model Republic: Nature has made no cobbler or smith; such occupations degrade the people who practice them, vile mercenaries, nameless wretches who are excluded by their very state from political rights. As for the merchants accustomed to lying and cheating, they will only be tolerated in the city as a necessary evil. The citizen who sullies himself with shopkeeping will be prosecuted for this offense. If he is convicted, he will be sentenced to a year in prison. The punishment will be double for every repeat offense.§ In his Oeconomicus, Xenophon writes: People who engage in manual labor are never raised to higher offices, and with good reason. Most of them, condemned to sitting all day long, and some even spending the whole day before a fire, are bound to have their bodies deformed, and more than likely their minds are affected, too. “What honorable thing has ever come out of a shop?” asked Cicero, “and what honorable thing can commerce ever produce? Anything that goes by the name of a shop is unworthy of an honest man . . . Merchants can earn no profit without lying, and what is more shameful than falsehood? Thus, the trade of all those who sell their toil and industry must be regarded as something base and vile; for whoever gives away his work for money sells himself, and lowers himself to the station of a slave.” Proletarians stultified by the dogma of work, listen to these philosophers’ words, which have been concealed from you with

jealous care. A citizen who gives away his work for money degrades himself and turns himself into a slave; he commits a crime, which merits years in prison. Christian hypocrisy and capitalist utilitarianism had not yet perverted the philosophers of the ancient republics. Speaking on behalf of free men, they said what they thought in all innocence. Plato and Aristotle, those colossal thinkers to whose ankles Cousin, Caro, and Simon can’t reach even if they stand on tiptoe, wanted the citizens of their ideal republics to live in the greatest leisure, for, as Xenophon said, “work takes up all our time, leaving us no leisure to devote to the republic or our friends.” According to Plutarch, Lycurgus, the “wisest of men,” was best remembered by posterity for having granted leisure to the citizens of the republic by forbidding them to practice any trade whatsoever. But Bastiat, Dupanloup, Beaulieu, and all the other members of the Christian and capitalist morality brigade will reply that these thinkers and philosophers advocated slavery. Which is perfectly true, but could it have been otherwise, given the economic and political conditions of their era? War was the norm for ancient societies. A free man had to devote his time to debating the affairs of the state and seeing to its defense. Trades were in those days too primitive and crude for a person to practice them and also be able to fulfill his role as a soldier and a citizen. In order to have warriors and citizens at all, philosophers and legislators had to tolerate slaves in the heroic republics. But don’t capitalist moralists and economists advocate the modern slavery of wage labor? And to what men does capitalist slavery give leisure? To the useless and pernicious Rothschilds and Boucicauts, who are themselves slaves to their vices and their servants. It has been disdainfully written that “the prejudice of slavery dominated the minds of Pythagoras and Aristotle.” Yet Aristotle foresaw that “if every tool could perform its own work when ordered, or by seeing what to do in advance, like the statues of Daedalus in the story, or the prophetesses of Hephaestus whom the poet says ‘enter self-moved the company divine’—if thus shuttles wove and quills played harps of themselves, master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves.”ǁ

Aristotle’s dream is our reality. Our machines breathe fire, have limbs of steel, never grow weary, never need to sleep. They are marvelously productive and behave docilely—even as they go about their sacred work. And yet the minds of the great capitalist philosophers continue to be dominated by the prejudice of wage labor, the worst sort of slavery. They still don’t understand that the machine is humanity’s savior, the god who will redeem man from the sordidae artes and the payroll, the god who will give him leisure and liberty.

*Herodotus, Histories, translated by George Rawlinson (1909). † Édouard Biot, De l’abolition de l’esclavage ancien en Occident (1840). ‡Livy, Ab Urbe Condita. §Plato, The Republic. ǁAristotle, Politics.

A CAPITALIST CATECHISM

QUESTION: What is your name? ANSWER: Wageworker. Q: Who are your parents? A: My father was Wageworker, like my grandfather and my greatgrandfather; but the fathers of my fathers were serfs and slaves. My mother’s name is Poverty. Q: Where do you come from, and where are you going? A: I come from poverty and I am going to penury by way of the hospital, where my body will serve as a testing ground for new medicines and as a subject of study for the doctors who tend to those privileged by Capital. Q: Where were you born? A: In an attic room, under the eaves of a house that my father and his fellow workers had built. Q: What is your religion? A: The religion of Capital. Q: What duties does the religion of Capital impose upon you? A: Two principal duties: the duty of renunciation and the duty of work. My religion orders me to renounce my rights to the earth, our common mother, to the riches of her loins, the fertility of her surface, her mysterious fertilization by the heat and the light of the sun. It orders me to renounce my rights to the work of my hands and my brain. It orders me further to renounce my rights to my own body. The moment that I cross the threshold of the factory, I cease to belong to myself; I am a thing belonging to the owner. My religion orders me to work from childhood to death, to work in sunlight and gaslight, to work day and night, to work on the earth, beneath the earth, and on the sea, to work everywhere and always.

Q: Does it impose upon you any other duties? A: Yes. To fast year-round; to lead a life of deprivation; to satisfy my hunger no more than halfway; to restrain every need of my body and to subdue every hope in my heart. Q: Does it forbid certain foods to you? A: It forbids me from touching game, poultry, or beef of the first, second, or third grade, to taste salmon, lobster, or fine-fleshed fish; it forbids me from drinking undoctored wine or wine spirits, or milk in the state such as it is when it leaves the udder of the cow. Q: What foods does it permit you? A: Bread, potatoes, beans, cod, pickled herring, the butcher’s leavings, cow meat, horse meat, mule meat, and smoked meat. To restore my exhausted strength on the quick, it permits me to drink doctored wine, potato brandy, lemon brandy, and beet brandy. Q: What duties does it impose upon you in regard to yourself? A: To cut down on my expenses, to live with filth and vermin; to wear torn, patched, and repatched clothes; to go on wearing them until they are so threadbare they fall off in strips; to walk around without socks, in broken shoes, flooded with the filthy, freezing water of the streets. Q: What duties does it impose upon you in regard to your family? A: To forbid my wife and children any elegance, refinement, or flair; to clothe them in cheap fabrics—just enough not to shock the prudish cops; to teach them not to shiver in calicoes in winter and not to suffocate in attic rooms in summer; to inculcate in my little ones the sacred principles of work, so that they, from their tenderest years, can earn their living and not be a burden on society; to teach them to go to bed without supper or light, and to resign themselves to the poverty that is their lot in life. Q: What duties does it impose upon you in regard to society?

A: To increase social wealth—first of all through my work, second of all through my savings. Q: What does it require you to do with your savings? A: To bring them to a state-run savings bank so that they may be used to make up the deficits of the budget, or to entrust them to societies founded by philanthropists of finance, so that they can be loaned to our bosses. We must always make our savings available to our superiors. Q: Does it permit you to touch your savings? A: As little as possible: it urges us not to insist when the state refuses to give them back, and to resign ourselves when philanthropists of finance, forestalling our requests, tell us that our savings have gone up in smoke. Q: Do you have political rights? A: Capital accords us the innocent distraction of electing the legislators who forge the laws that punish us; but it forbids us from getting involved in politics or listening to socialists. Q: Why? A: Because politics is the privilege of the bosses, and because socialists are scoundrels who despoil and mislead us. They tell us that the man who doesn’t work shouldn’t be allowed to eat, that everything belongs to the wageworkers because they have produced everything, and that the boss is a parasite to be done away with. The holy religion of Capital teaches us, on the contrary, that the wastefulness of the rich creates the work that gives us food to eat; that riches keep the poor alive; and that if there were no more riches, the poor would perish. It teaches us, further, not to be stupid enough to believe that our wives and daughters would be able to wear the silks and velvets they weave, these women who would not want to dress in anything other than wretched calicoes, and that we would not know how to drink undoctored wines and eat decent food, we who are used to cheap cuts and adulterated drinks.

Q: Who is your God? A: Capital. Q: Has he always existed? A: Our most learned priests, the official economists, say that he has existed since the beginning of time. As he was quite little back then, Jupiter, Jehovah, Jesus, and the other false gods reigned in his place and name; but since the year 1500 or so, he has grown and never ceased growing in size and power. Today, he rules the world. Q: Is your God all-powerful? A: Yes. His grace can grant every earthly happiness. When he turns his face away from a family or a nation, they languish in poverty and sorrow. The power of the god Capital increases as his size increases. Every day he conquers new countries. Every day he multiplies the number of wageworkers who, their whole lives long, devote themselves to increasing his size. Q: Who are the elect of the god Capital? A: The bosses, the capitalists, and the landlords. Q: How does your god Capital reward you? A: By giving me work forever and always, for me, my wife, and all my little children! Q: Is that your only reward? A: No. God permits us to satisfy our hunger by feasting our eyes on mouthwatering window displays of meats and provisions that we have never tasted, that we never will taste, and that go to feed the elect and the holy priests. His goodness allows us to warm our limbs, numbed by cold, gazing at the warm furs and thick fabrics the elect and the holy priests use to clothe themselves. It accords us, further, the fine pleasure of delighting our eyes in contemplation of the holy tribe of landlords and capitalists going by in carriages on boulevards and public squares, plump and lustrous, potbellied and posh, surrounded by a whirlwind of tasseled servants and painted

courtesans. We take pride, then, in pondering how, though the elect enjoy wonders of which we are deprived, these same wonders are the work of our hands and brains. Q: Are the elect of a race different from yours? A: Capitalists are molded from the same clay as wageworkers, but they have been chosen from among thousands and millions. Q: What have they done to merit this elevation? A: Nothing. God proves his omnipotence by bestowing his favors on those who have not earned them. Q: Is Capital then unjust? A: Capital is the very picture of justice, but its justice is beyond our feeble understanding. If Capital were obliged to bestow its grace upon those who deserved it, it would not be free, its power would be limited. Capital can affirm its omnipotence only by choosing its elect, the bosses and the capitalists, from among the incompetent, the wastrels, and the scoundrels. Q: How does your God punish you? A: By condemning me to idleness; then I am excommunicated; I am forbidden to touch meat, wine, and fire. I die of hunger, along with my wife and children. Q: What transgressions must you commit to merit the excommunication of idleness? A: None. It is Capital’s pleasure to decree idleness without our feeble minds being able to grasp the reasons why. Q: What are your prayers? A: I do not pray with words. Work is my prayer. Every spoken prayer interferes with my practical prayer, which is work, the only prayer that brings pleasure, because it is the only useful one, the only one that benefits Capital, the only one that creates profit.

Q: Where do you pray? A: Everywhere: on the sea, on the earth, and beneath the earth, in the fields, in the mines, in the factories, and in the shops. So that our prayer may be heard and rewarded, we are duty bound to lay our freedom, our dignity, and our will at the feet of Capital. At the ringing of the bell, at the whistling of the machine, we must run; and, once we are at prayer, we must, like automatons, move our arms and legs, our feet and hands, must breathe and sweat, tax our muscles and exhaust our nerves. We must be meek in spirit, tamely endure the anger and insults of the boss and the foremen, for they are always right, even when they seem to be wrong. We must thank the boss when he cuts our salary and lengthens the workday, for everything that he does is just and for our own good. We must be honored when the boss and his foreman fondle our wives and daughters, for our God, Capital, grants them the right to decide whether wageworkers live or die, as well as the right to extract sexual favors from their employees. Rather than allow a word of complaint to fall from our lips, rather than allow our blood to boil in anger, rather than ever go on strike, rather than revolt, we must endure every suffering, eat our spit-slathered bread and drink our contaminated water; for, to punish us for our insolence, Capital arms the boss with guns and sabers, prisons and labor camps, the guillotine and the firing squad. Q: Will you receive a reward after death? A: Yes, a very great one. After death, Capital will let me kick back and take it easy. I will no longer suffer cold or hunger; I will no longer have to worry about scrounging bread for today or tomorrow. I will enjoy the eternal rest of the grave.

THE LEGEND OF VICTOR HUGO

VICTOR Hugo now belongs to the impartiality of History. With the coup d’état of 1852, legend took hold of Hugo. During the Empire, in the interest of anti-Bonapartist and antirepublican propaganda, no one dared object to this crystallization of the imagination seeking demigods, and after May 161 there was no reason to disturb the last days of an elderly man who had already played his role. But now that the poet—celebrated by the press, acknowledged and proclaimed the “great man of the century”—sleeps in the Pantheon (“the colossal tomb of geniuses”), criticism resumes its rights. It can, without fear of compromising political interests or pointlessly wounding a harmless old man, study the life of this person with the resounding name. Its duty is to extract the truth buried beneath lies and exaggerations. Hugolaters will be scandalized that an impious critic has had the nerve to lay hands on their idol. But let them stand up for themselves. Historical criticism does not seek to please and is unafraid to displease. This study, written from notes compiled in 1869, does not claim to exhaust its subject but simply to shed light on the true character of Victor Hugo, who has been so bizarrely misunderstood. —P.L. Sainte-Pélagie, June 23, 1885

1. ON JUNE 1, 1885, Paris celebrated the most magnificent funeral of the century: it interred Victor Hugo, il poeta sovrano. For ten days running, every newspaper laid out the public opinions of France and Europe. Paris—momentarily distracted by the red-flag procession and the onslaughts of the police in Père Lachaise, which brought back memories of the Bloody Week—returned its attention to “the most illustrious representative of the human conscience.” The papers did not have enough room in their three pages (the fourth being taken up by advertisements) to exalt “the genius in whom the human idea lived.” The moment the language Victor Hugo had enriched with so many laudatory turns of phrase was called upon to convey the journalists’ admiration for “the hugest thinker of the universe,” however, it seemed to fail them, and they soon resorted to images. The front page of one evening edition, lost for words, printed a picture of the sun sinking into the ocean. Hugo’s death was the death of a star. “Art is over!” The nation, stirred up by journalistic enthusiasm, threw three hundred thousand men, women, and children behind the pauper’s carriage that conveyed the poet to the Pantheon, and a million more onto the squares, streets, and sidewalks along the route. A black shroud veiled the Arc de Triomphe’s imperial glory; the light of gas lamps and electric streetlamps filtered lugubriously through the crêpe. There were crowns made of flowers and crowns made of plush, portraits of Hugo on his deathbed, bronze medallions engraved with the words: National mourning . . . In short, all the symbols of desperate grief were requisitioned, and yet the huge crowd had no regrets about the death of the man, and no memories of the poet. Hugo was irrelevant to them. They appeared not to realize that the person being brought to the Pantheon was “the greatest poet who had ever lived.” The boisterous and convivial crowd loudly expressed their satisfaction with the weather and the parade. They asked about the names of the celebrities and the delegations from the different cities

and countries filing past for their pleasure. They admired the monumental bouquets fitted on the roofs of the carriages. They applauded the rifle clubs’ fife players whose discordant songs agonized their ears. They greeted Déroulède and his green-frocked solemnity with ironic laughter. And to put the finishing touches to their happiness, there was the blazon of the Benni-bouffe-toujours bringing up the rear with a sautéed rabbit and their heraldic arm—a colossal cardboard baster.2 Both the actors and spectators were on top of the world. It is true that the inhabitants of the grand boulevards, disappointed that the corpse wasn’t being paraded past their doors, speculated bitterly about the tidy sums they might have pocketed. Sick at heart, they told each other how windows and balconies could have been rented out for hundreds or thousands of francs—how in three turns of the clock they might have made more than twice the next six months’ rent. But the sourpusses’ displeasure was drowned out by the general rejoicing. The brasseries à femmes on the Boulevard SaintMichel spilled out in heaps on the sidewalk; it cost an arm and a leg to be baked in the sun while you wet your lips with adulterated beer.3 Common folk, who had claimed the good spots at dawn with a chair or a table, a bench or a ladder, rented them out to the curious in exchange for two days of fun and easy living. Greedy hoteliers, cabaret owners, and odd-jobbers smiled gleefully as they fished in their pockets, fingering the five-franc coins the festivities yielded. One of them said, with great intensity, “A Victor Hugo would have to die every week to keep business up!” And business was indeed booming! The business of flowers and mortuary emblems; the business of newspapers, lithographs, and bronze, gold, and silver zinc lyres, electrotype medallions, and pictures mounted on pins; the business of black crêpe and armbands, scarves, and tricolor and multicolor ribbons; the business of beer, wine, and smoked meat (the hungry people were eating and drinking, standing in the street in front of counters wherever they happened to be and whatever the price); and the business of love—provincials and foreigners, come from the four corners of the earth, were honoring the dead by feasting in horizontal positions.

The funeral services of the first of June were worthy of the dead man being led to the Pantheon and worthy of the class who escorted the corpse. Neither French nor foreign revolutionary socialist organizations, which are the conscious party of the proletariat, sent representatives to Victor Hugo’s funeral. The anarchists made an exception and, to distinguish themselves yet again from the revolutionary socialists, sought to raise their black flag among the multicolored flags of the cortege. Elisée Reclus, their notable man, begged his friend Nadar to inscribe his name in the mortuary register. However, the government forbade the unfurling of the red flag: Monsieur Vacquerie4 said that, in exile, Hugo had always walked behind the red flag, every time one of the victims of the coup d’état was lowered into the ground. The radical press demanded the right to carry the flag of the Commune through the streets, recalling that in 1871 the outcast of the Empire had opened his house in Brussels to the vanquished of Paris. Everyone seemed to want to invite the revolutionaries to gather around Victor Hugo’s coffin, as if it were the rallying point of all republican parties. But the revolutionary socialists refused to take part in the carnivalesque pageant of June 1. The City of London, though invited, did not send a delegation to the poet’s funeral. Members of its council claimed they hadn’t been able to make head or tail of his work. To explain their refusal in this way was indeed a gross misunderstanding of Victor Hugo. There is no doubt that the honorable Michelin, Ruel, and Lyon Allemand of London imagined the writer who had just died was one of those proletarians of the pen who rent out the brains of the Hachettes of the editoriat and the Villemessants of the press with weekly or yearly leases. But if they’d only been told that the dead man kept his account at Rothschild; that he was the largest shareholder in the Bank of Belgium; that, being a farsighted man, he had stashed his money outside of France, where revolutions were raging and there was talk of the general ledger being burned; and that he only threw caution to the wind and paid five million to help liberate his homeland because the investment would turn a 6 percent profit; if they had only known that the poet had amassed five million by peddling sentences and words; that he’d been a clever literary dealmaker, a master in

the art of haggling and drawing up contracts in his favor; that he’d gotten rich by ruining his publishers (a thing that had never happened before); if they’d been familiar with the dead man’s credentials, certainly the honorable representatives of the City of London, the commercial heart of both worlds, wouldn’t have traded their attendance at this important ceremony for anything. On the contrary, they would have insisted on honoring the millionaire so adept at wedding poetry with double-entry bookkeeping. The French bourgeoisie, better informed, saw in Victor Hugo one of the most perfect and brilliant personifications of their own instincts, passions, and thoughts. The bourgeois press, intoxicated by the hyperbolic praise it was heaping in thick columns upon the decedent, neglected to emphasize the representative side of Victor Hugo, which will perhaps be his most meaningful credential in the eyes of posterity. I am going to try to rectify this omission.

2. LEGITIMISTS do not forgive Victor Hugo, an ultraroyalist and ardent Catholic until 1830, for having gone over to the republican party. They forget that a son of the Vendean insurrection fighter, Monsieur de la Rochejaquelein, having enrolled in the Senate of the Second Empire, cavalierly replied to similar reproaches, “Only fools never change.” The poet, incapable of such aristocratic disdain, never gave the party he’d deserted such an impertinent excuse, but he did seek to explain to the republicans why he had been a royalist. “My mother was a ‘brigand’ from the Vendée. At fifteen, she fled through the woods, like Madame Bonchamp and Madame de la Rochejaquelein,” he wrote in 1831, in the preface to Autumn Leaves. “My father, a soldier of the Republic and the Empire, was bivouacking somewhere in Europe; I was living with my mother and was subjected to her opinions. For her, ‘the Revolution was the guillotine, Bonaparte the man who led sons to the slaughter, and the Empire the sword.’”5 Her influence, not balanced out by any other, planted a vigorous hatred in Hugo’s young heart for Napoleon and the Revolution, for he was “subject to his mother in every way and ready to follow her wishes, whatever they were.” Hugo’s royalism was nothing but filial piety, and we all know there has never been anyone more deserving than he of the epitaph “a good son, a good husband, a good father.” Carried away by his imagination, Hugo, the convert of 1830, depicted his mother’s opinions not as they were but as the circumstances of his explanation required. In fact, this brigand who had traveled far and wide for the king fell head over heels for a lunk, the republican J.-L.-S. Hugo, who, following the fashions of the day, had renamed himself Brutus. She had made his acquaintance in Nantes, where there was a military commission that in a single day sometimes sentenced and put before the firing squad batches of ten or twelve brigands of both sexes. Brutus Hugo worked as a clerk for this commission. In 1796, in a civil ceremony, the brigand married the republican soldier, who, more Brutus-like than ever, was then

and would remain until 1797 the court reporter for a council of war that expeditiously passed judgment on royalists: without any further due process, it condemned them to death as soon as their identity and registration on the list of suspects had been confirmed. The brigand followed her husband to Madrid, adorned the court of Joseph Bonaparte (who had replaced the legitimate king on the Spanish throne), and allowed her eldest son, Abel, to don the Bonapartist livery as a page. Madame Hugo’s royalism—if she had any political opinions whatsoever—must have been extremely platonic. Otherwise it would have to be admitted that this woman who was so courageous, and so loyal in her friendships (for eighteen months, running a thousand risks, she hid General Lahorie from the imperial police at the Feuillantines),6 had denied her faith and made a pact with her party’s cruelest enemies. Hugo must not have known what excuse to give, to be reduced to lending his dead mother opinions in such flagrant contradiction to her actions and publicly portraying her as a turncoat and a traitor to the king she’d been willing to die for. It must have pained him, the pious son, to have to sully the reputation of a mother so devoted to her children, a woman who raised them and nursed them so tenderly after their father had abandoned them, who allowed them to grow up in freedom and obey the impulses of their own natures. But he had to find someone, at any cost, to blame for his royalist odes, which were impeding his progress no less surely than the ball and chain interfere with the convict’s attempt to flee across the fields: he chose his mother.* He can plead extenuating circumstances. In those days, mothers were being used in every way imaginable. They were already the great movers and shakers on the stage: it was the memory of his mother that stayed the murderer’s arm poised to strike, and it was the mother’s cross—exhibited at the pivotal moment—which prevented rape and incest, and generally saved the heroine. It was the death of his mother that, in the space of three years, transformed the skeptical, Rousseau-reading Chateaubriand of 1797 into the mystagogic Chateaubriand of Atala and The Genius of Christianity. Victor Hugo, who was never so much as twenty-four hours ahead of public opinion but always knew how to follow suit, aped his master,

Chateaubriand,7 and put the trick that never failed at the theater to his own private use. That Hugo’s royalism was circumstantial or of maternal origin matters little. There is no question he was handsomely paid, and it was a good thing, too, because the public was buying his books very sparingly. The publishers of Hans of Iceland wrote him in 1823 that they were at a loss as to how to dispose of the five hundred copies of the first edition still in the warehouse. Louis XVIII granted the poet, in September 1822, a pension of 1,000 francs from his private coffer and, in February 1823, a second pension of 2,000 francs from the literary funds of the Ministry of the Interior. Victor Hugo and his two brothers, Abel and Eugène, laid siege to these literary funds with courage and tenacity. In 1821, they complained bitterly that the ministry had not subsidized their bimonthly journal, Le Conservateur littéraire. † They fiercely defended the den of snakes even as they voraciously attacked it. And so Le Conservateur railed against Benjamin Constant, the “former man of letters who had the Chamber refuse a sum of 40,000 francs intended to provide encouragement to literary people. The liberal deputy claims he wants to keep this sum from serving as bribe money for ministerial pamphleteers.” To cut the minister’s secret funds was to lay hands on Hugo property. At the end of 1826, Victor asked the Vicomte de la Rochefoucauld for an increase in his share of these funds: “since my pension was granted,” he wrote, “four years have passed, and if my pension has remained what it was, at least I have had the joy (which has not been enjoyable) of seeing the good king increasing the pensions of many other men of letters who are my friends, and some of these more than doubled. My pension alone having stayed what it was, I think, Monsieur le Vicomte, I am not without some right to an increase . . . I put my request faithfully in your hands, imploring you to put it before that king who wishes to make the fine arts the most brilliant jewel in his crown.” But no one paid any attention to the loyal servant’s eminently pressing and reasonable request, and to console himself he poured out his disappointment in a piece of verse in which he called Charles X “King Log”8 and his ministers scoundrels who “would sell France to the Cossacks and their souls to the owls.” But to hold on to the pensions he had already acquired, he kept his

verses in a folder until 1866: they were published in Les chansons des rues et des bois under the title: “Written in 1827.” It is too bad that Victor Hugo, instead of lending his opinions to his mother to palliate his royalist sins, didn’t simply tell the truth, which was so honorable! Indeed what could be more honorable than making money? Hugo sold his lyric talent to the king and his ministers the way engineers and chemists lease their mathematical and chemical knowledge to the capitalists. He meted out his intellectual merchandise in stanzas and odes like haberdashers and grocers measure out their cotton goods by the meter and their oil by the bottle. If he had confessed that, while composing the ode on the birth of the Duc de Bordeaux or the ode on his baptism, or whatever other odes, he had been inspired and sustained by the hope of financial gain, he would have immediately won the high esteem of the bourgeoisie, who only understand “give and take” and “equal exchange,” and who don’t accept that anyone hands out poems, maggots, or old shoes gratis pro deo. Convinced that Victor Hugo did not make “art for art’s sake” but was producing verses for sale, the bourgeoisie would have shushed the envious scribblers who, under Louis Philippe, criticized the writer for his royalist gratifications. If the poet had spelled out the real reason for his royalist conduct with no beating around the bush, he would have rendered French poetry a more genuine service than he did by writing Hernani, Ruy Blas, and especially his preface to Cromwell: he would have supplied France with several Hugos, although a single Hugo more than suffices for the glory of an age. Baudelaire—that evil spirit come into this age of mercantilism, that uncivilized sprite who loathed business—lamented how, when the Poet enters this indifferent world, his mother, spurred to blasphemy by shame, clenches her fists at a condoling God‡ Why, in bourgeois families, do curses and fits of rage greet the poet at his birth? Because it has so often been repeated that poets live in penury and die in the hospital, like Gilbert and Malfilâtre, that mothers and fathers couldn’t help but end up believing poetry was

synonymous with poverty. If, on the other hand, they had been shown that, in this age of Progress, the romantics had domesticated the vagrant muse, taught him the art of “swinging a censer (just for show) to earn his nightly bread”;§ if they had been shown the twentyyear-old chieftain of the romantic school receiving a three-thousandfranc pension for “soporific” verse,** these same parents—seeing that poetry brought in more than the raising of rabbits or the keeping of books—would have encouraged, rather than suppressed, their children’s poetic pipe dreams. The industrial and commercial bourgeoisie would not have waited until he was dead to rank Victor Hugo among the great men of his age if they had known the heroic sacrifices he imposed on himself and the mental tortures he suffered to acquire his two pensions.

*From 1817 to 1826, no happy or unhappy event could befall the royal family without him lurching for his best goose quill; sometimes it’s a birth, a baptism, or a death, sometimes an accession or a coronation that sets him going. Hugo is the Belmontet of Louis XVIII and Charles X; he is the official poet, committed to the personal service of the royal family. †The complaint of these interesting and interested young people is touching. “Le Conservateur has not received any encouragement from the government,” they said. “Other publications have found ways of benefiting from the favor of the king’s minister, yet these publications remind one of the advantages of thrift in cases where it is a matter of encouraging rather maladroit work for a show of royalism and independence” (preface to the third volume of Le Conservateur littéraire). Yet on page 361 of the same volume, we read: “The ode written on the death of the Duc de Berry, included in the seventh installment, was submitted by the Comte de Neufchâteau to the Duc de Richelieu, president of the council of ministers and passionate about literature, who judged it worthy of being put before the eyes of the king, and His Majesty deigned to order that a gratification [sic] of five hundred francs be remitted to the author, Monsieur V. Hugo, as a token of his august satisfaction.”

‡ Baudelaire, “Consecration,” The Flowers of Evil, translated by Richard Howard (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982). §Baudelaire, “La Muse vénale,” The Flowers of Evil, translated by Richard Howard. **This impertinent epithet belongs to Stendhal, who didn’t understand the business of literature any better than Baudelaire. “The Edinburgh Review,” he writes, “is quite mistaken in supposing that Lamartine is the poet of the ultra party . . . the real poet of the party is Monsieur Hugo. This Monsieur Hugo has the same sort of talent as Young, the author of Night Thoughts; he is always coldly over the top . . . There is no denying that he knows how to write French verse, but unfortunately it is soporific” (March 1823).

3. MADAME Hugo didn’t like Napoleon, she chose his enemies as her friends, and after the defeat at Waterloo, to have the pleasure of trampling the Empire’s color underfoot, she took to wearing green boots (this simple fact characterizes the violent nature of her feelings).* Hugo’s uncle and father harbored numerous grievances against the emperor, who refused to confirm the latter in the rank of general, conferred on him by Joseph. Lahorie—the man who, during his eighteen-month reclusion in the Feuillantines, taught young Victor to “read Tacitus,” which he also wasn’t supposed to do— inculcated in him a love of Bonaparte, against whom he had conspired. Hugo thus had to espouse his mother’s hatred for Napoleon (a hatred her husband and friends shared) in addition to taking on her royalist opinions. But he was resistant to any influence. No one could impose his feelings on him. Neither father nor mother nor uncle nor friends. Napoleon and his extraordinary wealth captivated Hugo’s imagination; his image “constantly troubled his thoughts.” Every man of Hugo’s generation experienced these same disturbing symptoms. One must read The Red and the Black to understand how thoroughly Napoleon captivated the imaginations of willing and able men. He obsessed Hugo all his life, but in childhood he was his idol. When his schoolmates put on plays written by him or his brother Eugène, the “usual subjects were the wars of the Empire . . . and it was always Victor who played Napoleon. He would cover his chest with glittering gold and silver eagles.” In those days, he gave very little thought to the Vendée and its virgin martyrs or Henry IV and the virtues of legitimate kings. Napoleon consumed him. Forgetting all about adolescent games, he studied the great man’s campaigns and traced the march of his armies on the map. But let Hugo’s hero, defeated at Waterloo, be imprisoned on Saint Helena; let Hugo’s father be accused of treason for having refused to surrender the fortress of Thionville to foreigners; let Louis XVIII make his triumphal entry into Paris escorted by “enormous Cossacks rolling their ferocious eyes under shaggy fur hats, brandishing lances

red with blood, and wearing necklaces of human ears around their necks, together with watch chains,” † and behold: the young poet decorates “his buttonhole with a silver lily,” chooses a Restoration for the subject of his first tragedy, and vilifies Bonaparte as “that tyrant who ravaged the earth.” And for ten years, without a moment’s lassitude, he made his “execration of the dead man thunder through his verses like an echo of the general’s fatal glory.” It is not until 1827, with his “Ode à la Colonne,” that we see an indirect attempt to glorify Napoleon’s marshals—but Hugo had an excuse for deviating from the mode of conduct he had imposed on himself and so strictly followed. The insult the Austrian ambassador leveled at Marshal Soult and Marshal Oudinot outraged the military and the court to such a degree that both Les Débats and the royalist newspaper came to their defense. By writing “Ode à la Colonne,” Hugo was obeying the order given by the royalist party to the letter. Les Débats printed it on page three. It would be difficult, if you were unfamiliar with the mores of the era and the characteristics of the Hugo family, to understand how a young man—genius or not—could be in such perfect possession of the art of controlling himself and dissimulating his feelings. After 1789, political regimes succeeded each other with such dizzying rapidity that the art of disavowing one’s opinions and saluting the rising sun was cultivated as a necessity in the struggle for existence. ‡ The Hugo family excelled at this precious art. A few biographical details concerning General Hugo and his eldest son, Abel, will perhaps diminish the Hugolaters’ admiration for the Machiavellian genius of their hero, but they will also allow the psychologist to explain how so much diplomacy could be lodged in such a young brain. Brutus Hugo, the savage republican of 1793 who supplied Chouans and royalists to the firing squads and the guillotine, ejected from the legislative body after the Coup of 18 Fructidor with Augereau, is taken into service in Joseph Bonaparte’s palace as a majordomo, swaps his Roman name for the title of Spanish count, pledges allegiance to Louis XVIII (who pins a Croix de Saint-Louis on his breast), sides with Napoleon, disembarks in Cannes, offers to repledge his allegiance to Louis XVIII, who is back from Ghent but

who puts him out to pasture and imprisons him in Blois, where, to pass the time, he writes his memoirs. Abel, his eldest son, livens them up with a historical summary, beginning with this declaration of loyalty: “Committed to constitutional monarchy, thoroughly imbued with the legitimist dogma, vowed by our feelings to the august family that has given us,” etc. Victor Hugo could not help but admire the examples of loyal conduct that the man formerly called Brutus bequeathed to his children. He said to him: Go, your sons are satisfied with your noble heritage, The finest patrimony is a venerated name. —Odes, Book II, VIII Abel, who died in 1873, lived almost always with his father until 1815. He therefore could not make his mother responsible for the ultraroyalism that will suddenly be revealed in his writings after the fall of the Empire. Like Victor, he was specially attached to the royal family’s personal service. While Victor celebrates the coronation of the king, he publishes, in prose, La Vie anecdotique du comte d’Artois, aujourd’hui Charles X: “No prince has ever been more charming than the Comte d’Artois . . . he is full of grace, frankness, nobility,” etc. (and it continues in this vein for dozens of pages). He tells us that the lauded king kicks at that revolution “which was immersed in every crime and groveled at the feet of every master.” He hurls insults at Bonaparte and swoons at the reading of the proclamation to the army delivered by the Comte d’Artois, the lieutenant general of the kingdom, sent to Lyon to stop Napoleon in his tracks, commenting on it as follows: “The more noble and delicate the language, the less likely it was to make an impression on minds that seemed inaccessible except through seductive language. The only opposition the traitors could raise against it was mocking laughter.” His father, General Hugo, was among these traitors. Later, when Charles X was exiled, Abel, who had been decorated by Louis Philippe for “services rendered by the pen,” writes the Histoire populaire de Napoléon (1853), which earns him the warm compliments of Prince Napoleon.

In addition to such remarkable flexibility of conduct, Abel had a sound business mind, rich in resources. He published—responding to the public’s crazes and satisfying its tastes—essays on Spanish theater, an edition of the Romancero, a pamphlet entitled Guano: Its Value as Manure, an oft-revised guide to Paris (The Whole of Paris for 12 Sous), a study of “the period of Scarcity, which threatens France,” and an Illustrated History of France. In collaboration with Romieu, he composed a light comedy show; he studied Africa from an agricultural point of view, founded the Journal du Soir and various illustrated periodicals, published in installments, and so on. Abel was a clever manufacturer of letters. But what is really surprising to find in a soldier of the imperial wars is that humanitarian spirit which, on Victor’s lyre, would eventually replace the king and Catholicism.§ General Hugo, in 1818, under the pseudonym Genty, published a pamphlet that nicely blends the concerns of the industrialist and the philanthropist.ǁ In it, he solves two problems at a stroke—how to provide fortunes to foundlings and how to procure white workers for planters who could no longer, as in times past, go procure black workers on the African coast. The white workers should be taken from the foundling hospital. The government, since it is raising these children at its own expense, can dispose of them as it sees fit: “it would be charged with providing girl children of nine or ten and boy children of ten or eleven to the colonists. The period of service for all of these children would begin from the date of their embarkation and would not exceed fifteen years, at the expiration of which it would cease by law. The administration would then pay out 600 francs to the men and 500 francs to the women.” This plan would satisfy everyone, and tightly bind the colonies to the metropolis. Colonists were buying their pickaninnies for two or four hundred francs; the mother country would provide them with little white children for free. The white children who withstood the planters’ regime of lashings and forced labor would, after fifteen years, receive a fortune of five hundred or six hundred francs. The bourgeois philanthropy that has invented the prison cellblock and hard labor for women and children in workshops, that waltzes and minces about at charity balls to placate

the hunger of the starving, ought to take up General Hugo’s plan as a complement to the recidivist law.9

*Adèle Hugo, Victor Hugo raconté (1863). †Adèle Hugo, Victor Hugo raconté (1863). ‡ Connoisseurs of political acrobatics will discover, in Prosny and Eppe’s Dictionnaire des Girouettes and in the Nouveau Dictionnaire des Girouettes of 1831, something to excite even their demanding admiration. They will be as surprised as Chateaubriand “that there were men who, after having pledged allegiance to the one and indivisible Republic, to the five-person Directorate, to the threeperson Consulate, to the one-man Empire, to the first Restoration, to the Charter of 1815, and to the Second Restoration, still have anything left to pledge to Louis Philippe.” “Ha ha,” said Talleyrand, smiling, after pledging allegiance to Louis Philippe, “Sire, this is my thirteenth time!” §Monsieur Belton, who has researched the Hugo family, discovered that the old general wrote and rhymed like the devil. At his death, he left a list of manuscripts: La Duchesse d’Alba, Le Tambour Robin, L’Hermite du lac, L’Épée de Brennus, Perrine ou la Nouvelle Nina, L’Intrigue de cour, a comedy in three acts, La Permissions, Joseph ou l’Enfant trouvé, and so on. These works are lost or have not been found. Although Victor never mentions his father’s poetic and novelistic productions, he admired them a great deal. In a letter addressed to the general, quoted by Monsieur Belton, he speaks of a play that has “penetrated to the very depths of my soul,” in another he mentions a poem, “Lucifer,” which “transported” him. If one weren’t familiar with the tones of filial piety, one would be surprised that he never bothered to rescue his father’s “remarkable” works from oblivion, he who collected and carefully preserved even his most minor literary excretions, which, for their sins of Hugolatry, Messieurs Vacquerie, Meurice, and Lefebvre have condemned to be published, if not to be read.

ǁ Mémoire sur les moyens de suppléer à la traite des nègres par des individus libres, d’une manière qui garantisse pour l’avenir la sûreté des colons et la dépendance des colonies, by Genty, in octavo, January 1828, Blois: Verdier.

4. THE REVOLUTION of 1830 disconcerted Victor Hugo, but it didn’t stop him for a moment from accessing the three-thousand-franc pension he had so honorably earned. The preface to Autumn Leaves, published in 1831, shows him wavering; he had forged relationships with young and ardent republicans who were flattering him, hoping to coax him over to their party. That was why Rabbe, in the Biographie des contemporains, said that “Hugo had written of the three glorious days in the finest verses these days had inspired.” But republican doctrines, which could not give weight to their admiration in gold, took a long time sinking into Hugo’s brain. He did not need to climb the barricades and be wounded, like Marius in Les Misérables, to be cured of his neo-republicanism. The moment he understood that Louis Philippe’s accession was a sure thing, he declared: “we need a republic in fact and a monarchy in name.”* This remark—which appears to be a plagiarism of a famous phrase of Béranger’s—was a profession of faith: what it meant was that he was going to accept the graces and favors of the monarchy while remaining a republican in his heart. Under Louis XVIII and Charles X, he worshipped Napoleon in his heart and insulted him in published verses to please his legitimist patrons. The republican flattered Louis Philippe in order to become a peer of France, just as the Napoleonist had adulated the Bourbons in order to extract his pensions. On July 21, 1842, he had the courage to throw phrases of this caliber in Louis Philippe’s face: “Sire, you are the august and indefatigable guardian of the nation and the civilization . . . Your blood is the blood of the country, your family and France have the same heart . . . Sire, you will live a long time yet, for God and France need you.” Victor Hugo was always cosmopolitan: he united all the kings of Europe in his adulation. Later, after 1848, he would speak of the “United States of Europe.” But he had previously “blessed the advent” of Queen Victoria and celebrated Czar Nicholas, “the noble and pious emperor.” † In 1846, he begged Baron von Humboldt to deliver one of his academic speeches “to his august king, for whom

you know my sympathy and admiration.” This much-admired majesty was Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia and brother of the German emperor, crowned in Versailles. ‡ History does not reveal whether the poet received any gratuities from the United Majesties of Europe. Finally the big day arrives: Hugo, regaining his freedom of thought, is no longer obliged to flatter kings in public while cherishing the Republic in his heart. The revolution of 1848 drives out “the august guardian of civilization” and perches the republicans of Le National in power. For a moment, a regency seems possible and Victor Hugo hastens to seek it out in the Place des Vosges; then the Republic is proclaimed, and Victor Hugo, without losing a minute, transforms himself into a republican. People who dwell on appearances will accuse him of having changed, because he was by turns a Bonapartist, a legitimist, an Orleanist, and a republican; but a slightly more attentive study shows, on the contrary, that under all these regimes he never modified his conduct, that he always, never letting himself be distracted by the comings and goings of government, pursued a single goal—his personal interest, which was always Hugoist, or what is worse egoist, according to that coldhearted caviler Heine, whom Victor Hugo, incapable of appreciating genius, could never admire.10 Can the poor man be blamed if, in order to make money—the only serious objective of bourgeois life—he had to stick all sorts of different feathers in his cap? If anybody’s to blame, it’s the bourgeoisie who cheered and overturned all these governments one after the other. Hugo suffered from these political changes: until 1830, he had to stifle his ardent admiration for Napoleon, and until 1848, he had to hide his republicanism while flattering the king, just as Harmodius hid his tyrannical dagger beneath flowers. Those who saw Hugo as a man dedicated to the realization of an idea misunderstood him. In this light, his life would seem to be a tapestry of intransigent contradictions. He left this role to ideologues and crackpots who daydream their lives away; he was satisfied to be a reasonable man—not getting too worked up over whose face was on his money or the form of government keeping order in the street, greasing the wheels of commerce, and handing out pensions and positions. In his autobiography, he explicitly says that the form of the

government seemed to him a “secondary matter.” In the preface to Les Voix intérieures (1837), he had taken as his motto: “To be on the generous side of every party” (i.e., the profitable side) “and not to be on their bad side” (i.e., the side that occasions losses). Hugo was a friend of order: he never conspired against any government, aside from Napoleon III’s; he accepted and supported them all with his pen and voice, and did not abandon them till the day after they fell. His conduct was that of any businessman who knows his trade: a company doesn’t prosper unless its owner sacrifices his political opinions and accepts that what’s done is done. Weren’t the model republicans of Mulhouse, a free city until 1793, accepting of all the regimes that, for nearly a century, followed one after another in Alsace? Didn’t they receive subsidies from the Empire? And didn’t they demand exemption from customs duties for their industry and repressive measures against their workers? Business first, politics later. From 1848 to 1885, Hugo behaved as a “decent and moderate republican,” and we defy his adversaries to find a single momentary lapse during these many years. In 1848, the most compromised conservatives and reactionaries declared themselves in favor of the future republic just proclaimed: Victor Hugo did not hesitate for a minute to follow their noble example. “I am ready,” he said, in his profession of faith to the voters, “to dedicate my life to the establishment of a Republic that will expand the railroads . . . increase the value of the soil . . . put down riots . . . establish order, the law of the citizens . . . enlarge France, and conquer the world . . . will in a word be the majestic encompassment of the human race in the eyes of a satisfied God.” This republic is the good and true business republic, which displays the “generous side” mentioned in his motto of 1837. “I am ready,” he continued, “to dedicate my life to preventing the establishment of the Republic that will take down the tricolor flag and hoist the red flag, that will make big money with the colonies, topple the statue of Napoleon and raise the statue of Marat, destroy the Institut de France, the École Polytechnique, and the Légion d’Honneur; the Republic that will add to the famous motto, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, the sinister option: ‘or Death’; the Republic that

will go bankrupt, ruin the rich without enriching the poor, wipe out the budget that is the wealth of all and the work that is our daily bread, abolish prosperity and the family, put heads on pikes, fill the prisons by sowing suspicion and empty them by committing massacres; the Republic that will set Europe ablaze and reduce civilization to ashes, make France a country of darkness, cut liberty’s throat, strangle the arts, decapitate thought, deny God.” This Republic is the social republic. Victor Hugo was true to his word. He was one of the men who shut down the National Workshops, who chucked the workers out into the streets hoping to drown social ideas in blood, who fired on and deported the insurgents of the June Days uprising, who voted for the prosecution of parliamentarians suspected of socialism, who supported Prince Napoleon, who wanted a strong authority to contain the masses, terrorize socialists, reassure the bourgeois, and protect the family, religion, and property threatened by the communists, those barbarians of civilization. With heroic courage and no pity for the defeated, no feeling for the justice of their cause, Victor Hugo, the worthy son of the Brutus Hugo of 1793, voted with the majority, mistress of power. His glorious votes and eloquent words are well known; they are recorded in the annals of the reaction that gave birth to the Empire; but the no less admirable conduct of his journal, L’Événement, founded on July 30, 1848, with the help of Vacquerie, Théophile Gautier, and Hugo’s sons, is unknown and deserves to be reported. L’Événement took as its motto: “Hatred for anarchy—deep and tender love for the people,” which, after the events of June, was all the rage. And, to ensure we’re on the same page about the meaning of the second half of the motto, the issue under discussion states that L’Événement “exists to speak to the poor about the rights of the rich and to every man of his duties.” The issue of November 1 announced that “it is all very well that Le National, which addresses the aristocracy of the Republic, is sold for fifteen cents, but L’Événement, which wants to speak to the poor, is sold for five.” It had begun to dawn on the poet that there were better annuities to be had from the little purses of the poor than the secret funds of governments or the strong-boxes of the rich.

Following the example provided by Thiers and his friends on the rue de Poitiers11 (for Victor Hugo was always imitating someone), L’Événement indoctrinates the people, disseminating among the working masses the healthy and consolatory theories of political economy, refuting Proudhon, and combating “the language of the flatterers of the people, who defame them. The people are happier to heed those who maintain their principles and rights than those who speak to them of their interests and rights” (November 1). He has become an apostle of liberalism, that bourgeois religion which keeps the people entertained with “principles,” inculcates them with “duties,” and distracts them from their rights and interests—which throws them off the scent of their prey and leaves them chasing shadows. After the June uprising, there was only one way, according to Hugo, to save the republic—to hand it over to its enemies. Thiers thought the same thing in the days after the Commune. La Réforme, incapable of raising itself to the level of this Machiavellian tactic, complained that “republicans are being blacklisted. They are being shunned and denied, whereas there is not a single legitimist or Orleanist in France, no matter how disparaged, whose ignorance isn’t now being propped up, and whom we aren’t trying to rehabilitate at all costs.” L’Événement drove its point home with this striking reply: “If the republicans are now under suspicion, isn’t this the fault of the republicans? . . . Christianity was only truly powerful when the priests lost control of it” (August 1). And in an effort to protect the republic against republicans, Victor Hugo’s paper launches campaigns against Caussidière because he is not “the head but the hand”; against Louis Blanc because “his crimes are his ideas, his books, and his speeches; his accomplices are his three hundred thousand readers and listeners!” (August 27); against Proudhon because he is “a little man with a common face—a wretched advocate for the people”; against Ledru-Rollin because “his publications plunged civilization into a four-day civil war. From February 24 until June 24, Monsieur Ledru-Rollin was one of the men who most contributed to clearing the path toward the abyss” (August 6).

But it is in its insistence on insulting, affronting, and denouncing the defeated of the June Days that L’Événement gives the best indication of its deep love for the republic. Listen! It is the author of Les Châtiments who speaks: Yesterday, in the aftermath of the most grievous corruption, what was unleashed was greed; those who had been poor men had only one idea—to despoil the rich. It was no longer a question of life; it was a question of money. Property was treated as theft, the State was ordered to feed men for doing nothing at great expense; the first task the rulers took up was distributing, not the power of the king but the millions of francs paid to those on the civil list, all the while talking to the people, not of thoughts and ideas but of food and stomachs . . . Yes, we have come to that point where every decent person, with heavy heart and pale brow, is reduced to accepting sitting war councils, sentences of exile and hard labor, clubs closed, newspapers suspended, and the impeachment of the representatives of the people. (August 28) The harsh necessity that weighed heavy on the hearts of decent people and toughened them up for pitiless repression obliged Hugo to lie impudently. On August 28, 1848, urging the war councils to sentence them mercilessly, Victor Hugo denounced the defeated as “poor men who had only one idea—to despoil the rich.” Two months earlier, the looters of June had invaded his home. They were aware that he was “one of the sixty representatives sent by the constituent assembly to quell the uprising and direct the lines of attack.” They searched his rooms for weapons and saw hanging on the wall “a Turkish yataghan, whose handle and scabbard were made of solid silver . . . jewels and precious gold and silver seals set out on the table . . . when they were gone, we noticed that those powder-blackened hands had not touched anything. Not one precious object was missing.” These are the words of Victor Hugo himself, narrating the sack of his house by the looters of June. But he waited for the war councils to finish their work of repression before telling this story; he

was then exiled. Victor Hugo is always the same, no matter the circumstances: during the legitimist restoration, he insults Napoleon, who excites him; during the bourgeois reaction, he slanders the insurgents, whose acts of delicate probity he admires. A strange fate oppressed Victor Hugo: all his life he was condemned to say and write the opposite of what he thought and felt. In exile, to please his entourage, he perorated on the freedom of the press, speech, and many other freedoms; yet he hated nothing more than that freedom which let “foolish demagogues sow foolish dreams, perfidious theories, and revolutionary ideas in the minds of the people” (L’Événement, November 3). With the insurrection put down, the Chamber voted for the law that ordered “Silence to the poor!” as Lamennais put it. L’Événement, like Les Débats, Le Constitutionnel, and Le Siècle, hastened to approve this measure “so favorable to the serious press. We consider it . . . necessary . . . Society had a gangrenous freedom; this dreaded surgeon has just operated on the social body” (November 11). The libertarian Hugo was not one to hesitate before the amputation of any freedom that upset property owners and disturbed the course of the Bourse. It was at this point that Victor Hugo committed the great blunder of his political life. He took Prince Napoleon for an imbecile whom he hoped to use as a footstool. But it was not for nothing that Rochefort nicknamed Hugo “the melancholy parrot.” For even in error, Hugo was unoriginal; even when he made mistakes, he was imitating someone else. He was so caught up in his ambition to settle into a Bonapartist office that he didn’t notice that Morny, Persigny, and all the other Cassagnacs of the group had monopolized the imbecile and intended to reserve the right to exploit him. These gentlemen, with a brazenness that greatly shocked and astonished Hugo, sent him away to gossip in his annex off the rue de Poitiers and made the ministry he so ardently coveted disappear before his very eyes and beard. Instead of sweeping his disappointment under the rug and containing his indignation as usual, he forgot himself and impetuously went over to the opposition. The republicans of the Chamber, who were short of men, welcomed him despite his

compromising past and crowned him their leader. Intoxicated, he dreamed of the presidency. The coup d’état, which took the republican leaders by surprise, spoiled his plans, and he had to follow his partisans into exile, since they’d appointed him leader. The rascals who had seized control of the government overnight were so unhinged, their power seemed so precarious, that the bourgeois republicans expulsed from France didn’t think the Empire could endure. Every morning for weeks and months afterward, trembling with emotion, they unfolded their newspapers expecting to read of the collapse of the December government and their own triumphant recall; they kept their trunks packed for the journey. These bourgeois republicans, who had massacred and deported workers en masse, and who were naive enough, as election day approached, to call for social reforms that were supposed to make up for the three months of poverty that had been so useful to the Republic, didn’t understand that December 2 was the logical consequence of the June Days. They had not yet figured out that, while they thought they were only firing on communists and workers, they had killed the most energetic defenders of their republic. Victor Hugo, who was incapable of seeing to the bottom of any political situation, shared their blindness; in prose and verse, he insulted the people because they did not immediately overthrow the Empire that he and his friends had founded and consolidated in the people’s blood. Yanked away from his ambitious dreams and made frantic by incessantly expecting the imminent downfall of Napoleon III, Hugo, for the first and only time in his life, gave free rein to the turbulent passions that tore at his heart. His personal ambitions having been disappointed, he lividly attacked the people who upset his plans: he went at them head-on, covered them with spittle, bit them, hit them, laid them low, and trampled them with epileptic fury. The poet is sincere in Les Châtiments: he is there, with his wounded vanity, his disappointed ambition, his jealous anger, and his seething desire. His poems, which pointless amplifications and vertiginous comparisons usually render so cold, come alive and vibrate with passion. From beneath cartloads of romantic rubbish, lines as sharp as daggers and burning like red-hot irons emerge—lines that history

will repeat. Les Châtiments, Victor Hugo’s most popular work, taught the youth of the Empire to hate and scorn the men of the Empire. There are Hugolaters of good society, monarchists, and even republicans who are alarmed by the tongue-lashings of Les Châtiments. They never mention them, or if on occasion they do, it is with oratorical precautions and endless reticence. Their prudishness prevents them from recognizing the services that this rabid pamphlet rendered and is still rendering to conservatives of every stripe. Hugo hurls insults at Canrobert and Saint-Arnaud and the rest of the Bonapartist crew of December, but he doesn’t fire a single line at Cavaignac, Bréa, Clément-Thomas, or any other members of the bourgeois band of June. To massacre socialists in overalls seems to him in the order of things, but to charge over the boulevard Montmartre, storm the Hôtel Sallandrouze, and ambush a few bourgeois in top hats and tails? Oh, what abominable crimes! The poems of Les Châtiments ignore June and denounce only December; they heap forgetfulness upon June. In his preface to The Eighteenth Brumaire, Karl Marx says of Napoléon le Petit: “Victor Hugo confines himself to bitter and witty invective against the responsible publisher of the coup d’état. The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative such as would be without parallel in world history.” But by unconsciously magnifying the little Napoleon into the great Napoleon and charging him with the crimes of the bourgeois class, Hugo exonerates the bourgeois republicans who paved the way to the Empire and lets off the social institutions that create antagonism between the classes, foment civil war, call for shows of strength against the socialists, and allow coups d’état against the parliamentary bourgeoisie. By directing his anger against individuals —Napoleon and his acolytes—he diverts the public’s attention from the search for the causes of social misery, which are the holding of social wealth by the capitalist class, and he diverts popular action from its revolutionary goal, which is the expropriation of the capitalist class and the socialization of the means of production. Few books

have been more useful to the property-owning class than Napoléon le Petit and Les Châtiments. Other Hugolaters—maladroit panegyrists who take the poet’s declarations of devotion and disinterest seriously—represent him as a hero of self-denial and ingenuously strip him of his bourgeois prestige. To listen to them, you’d think he must have been one of those dangerous maniacs so infatuated with social and political ideas he would have sacrificed material interests to them. They want to make him the equal of Blanqui, Garibaldi, or Varlin—those madmen who had only one aim in life: the realization of their ideal. But no, Victor Hugo was never foolish enough to put even a few thousand francs of his millions in the service of republican propaganda. If he had sacrificed anything for his ideas, such a huge procession of bourgeois would never have accompanied him to the Pantheon. Jules Ferry, wishing him a happy birthday two years after his death, would never have called him “Master.” If Victor Hugo had made a policy of being a daredevil, he would have departed from the bourgeois tradition. For the defining feature of political evolution in civilized counties is to rid politics of the dangers they used to present and the sacrifices they used to require. In France, England, and the United States, the ministers in power and the officials elected to the parliament and the municipal councils no longer ruin themselves; they get rich. In these countries, ministers are no longer condemned for fiddling with the stock market, embezzlement, and other abuses of power; their parliamentary responsibility makes up for their transgressions and shields them from prosecution. Republican France gave a memorable example of this fine and reasonable policy the day she elevated Broglie and Buffet to the rank of senators as a consolation prize for having failed at a monarchist coup. Being a parliamentary politician is a lucrative career. It offers none of the pecuniary risks of trade and industry. A small amount of start-up money, a good supply of glibness, a bit of luck, and plenty of friends in high places will ensure success. This was the only positive policy Hugo knew. As soon as he became convinced that the Empire was going to go on existing for a good long while, he doused his righteous thunderbolts and concentrated

all his energy on the business of adjectives and rhymed and measured phrases. Unfortunately for him, he had made some categorical statements during his fit of blind passion which carried sizable repercussions. He had described the men of the coup d’état with words so stinging it was impossible to make them forget. He had no choice but to remain a republican and renounce politics. He thought it best to accept the role of Martyr of the Republic and Victim of the Cause bravely. Besides, the role appealed to his vanity. If he had not been born on an island, like Napoleon, he would live exiled on an island, as he did. The desire to imitate Napoleon—to become the Napoleon of literature—fed his ambition his whole life long. Exiles shoulder every misery, said the great Florentine. But Hugo was smarter than Dante. With an artfulness unequaled even by Barnum, he made the most resounding advertisements for exile. Exile was the garish and blinding sign hanging outside the bookshop of his Hauteville House. The kings had only paid him a pension of three thousand francs, but now his bourgeois clientele were earning him fifty thousand francs a year. He had traded up! He found that the Empire had something good about it after all. “Napoleon made my fortune,” he admitted in one of those rare moments when he laid down his crown of thorns. How could the upward-striving bourgeoisie not rave about this man, who had managed to make exile so nice and profitable? Other geniuses have only been able to find sorrow in exile. Traders who expatriate themselves to Senegal or the Indies— those countries of fever and hepatitis—come back after ten or twenty years of exile with no more than a few hundred thousand francs under their belts. Whereas he, Victor Hugo, the modern Prometheus, lives on a delectable island where doctors send their patients for rest cures; he is surrounded by an entourage of eager adulators who fall all over him; he travels serenely through Europe; he stockpiles millions; and he gets the palm branch of the martyrs! Out of admiration and fear, Victor Hugo’s friends and enemies have leveled reckless judgments against him. For the sake of his glory, these judgments need to be revised. Hugo’s stormy phraseology over the last thirty-five years gives goose bumps to milksops who fear the power of language—to the

Pecksniffs of the world, for whom every mountebank juggling the words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Humanity, Cosmopolitanism, the United States of Europe, Revolution, and other liberal lullabies is a revolutionary, a socialist fit to be locked up, if not shot. But Hugo— and this is his most serious claim to glory—has set his words in such contradiction with his actions that there is still no politician in Europe or America who more brilliantly demonstrates the perfect innocuousness of the truculent expressions of liberalism. As we feed ourselves on bread and meat, so Hugo feeds himself on Humanity and Fraternity. On August 14, 1848, eight days after the departure of the first convoy, which took 581 insurgents to forcedlabor camps, he founded the Brotherhood Meetinghouse, right next door to the meetinghouse on the rue de Poitiers. The fear of losing their precious money—which the Empire’s financiers would later confiscate so blithely—had enraged the petits bourgeois of 1848. The decent and moderate press told terrible stories about the insurgents: houses looted, soldiers sawed in half between two planks, skulls filled with wine and drained while obscenities were sung . . . Yet Hugo knew that, though the insurgents were invading houses, they were not looting them; he had seen them fight like heroes. Simple human decency demanded that he protest this idiotic slander and try to appease the frightened bourgeoisie who were calling for a merciless crackdown. But the members of the Hugoist Brotherhood were not so humanly decent; they had no intention of suspending the proceedings of the war councils but merely of “softening the judge’s eye with a brother’s tears . . . and attempting to make the assembly feel, even when it came to the sentencing, the fraternity of all assembled” (L’Événement, no. 14). And, in almost every one of its issues, L’Événement continued to incite hatred and fear of the defeated. Freedom was one of the winged horses that Hugo mounted. But you would have to be the most Pecksniffian person alive not to see that the Hugoist Pegasus was too full of hot air to take the bit between his teeth and go off farting at a gallop. Hugo’s frisky mount Freedom was but a humble cob, which he put in the stable of every government. Ever since the immortal Revolution of 1789, Freedom, precious Freedom, has been the fashionable refrain. Every politician

from Polignac to Little Napoleon has repeated it in every tone of voice imaginable. Hugo sung it at the top of his lungs when he endorsed the law that amputated the “gangrenous freedom” of the press from the social body. Hugo stuck the red feather of Equality in his poet’s cap. But there is equality and then there is equality, as there are poets and then there are poets: there are as many versions of them as there are of morality. Every social body manufactures a special morality for the use of its members. The morality of the businessman permits him to sell his merchandise for ten or twenty times more than it is worth, if he can get away with it. The morality of the examining magistrate prompts him to use cunning and falsehood to corner the accused into accusing himself. The morality of the vice cop obliges him to have the women he suspects of selling their sex medically violated. The morality of the landlord exempts him from obeying the biblical command: “You shall earn your bread by the sweat of your brow. . .” Death, in its way, establishes one kind of equality. Smallpox and syphilis create others. Social inequalities have given rise to two very comely equalities: the equality of heaven, which for Christians compensates for the inequalities of society, and civic equality—that sublime conquest of the Revolution—which serves the same purpose. This civic equality, which leaves the Rothschilds with their millions and private parks, and the poor with their rags and communal lice, is the only equality Hugo knows. He loved his annuities and antitheses too much to want equality of property, which would have deprived him of his millions and robbed him of the easiest and most striking contrasts of his poetry. On the contrary, L’Événement of September 9, 1848, took up the defense of the “luxury denigrated by the false philanthropy of our days” and triumphantly demonstrated why poverty was necessary for maintaining social equilibrium. “Idle opulence is the best friend of hardworking indigence,” the Hugoist journal expounds. “What is it that supplies this ruinous excess, these airs and graces, these useless affections called fashion and pleasure, to the wealthy? Work, industry, and art, which is to say: poverty. Luxury is the surest of alms in that it is involuntary. The caprices of the rich bring in the biggest revenues for the poor. The more pleasure is had in the salon,

the better the factory will be. Mysterious balances that weigh the heavier necessities of one part of society against the lighter frivolities of the other! Strange equilibrium that is established between the fantasies up high and the needs down below!” The most pointless and ridiculous waste becomes one of the mysterious ways in which divine providence creates social harmony, founded on impecunious misery and idle wealth. Never has luxury been more magnificently glorified! When L’Événement, the organ of the Hugoist Brotherhood, published its apology for luxury, barely two months had gone by since the June uprising, that “protest of poverty,” and the blood of civil war was still red on the cobblestones of the streets. The words with which Hugo enriched his vocabulary after 1848 harmed his reputation among the Pecksniffs. They were bewildered into mistaking glitter for gold and the writer for a socialist, a sharer. Victor Hugo, a sharer! But before he shared anything with anyone, he would have sacrificed all of his executors with his own hand—and his dear, beloved Vacquerie first of all, Vacquerie who, not being permitted to kill himself on his catafalque like an ancient hero’s servant on the funeral pyre, wanted to be buried in effigy in his master’s tomb. The poet was worthy of such a sacrifice: Hugo was indeed a hero of phraseology. The revolution of 1848 introduced a new populace of words into the decent and moderate language. Ever since the literary reaction commenced under the Consulate, these words had slumbered in the speeches, pamphlets, newspapers, and proclamations of the great revolutionary epoch, venturing out into the daylight only timidly, in the language of the people. Romantic blusterers like Janin and Gautier recoiled from them in horror. But Hugo didn’t bat an eye. He picked up the horrifying nouns and adjectives invading the language written in newspapers and spoken from the rostrums at public gatherings. A marvelous conjurer, he managed to hoodwink his audience with the immortal principles of 1789 and the still-bloodstained words of the nobles and the priests. He blazed a path for romanticism that he alone went down. His literary companions of 1832, more timid than the bourgeois whom they mocked, did not dare follow in the footsteps of the man they called their master.

Victor Hugo himself seems to have been intimidated by the revolutionary language he used and whose meaning he didn’t fully understand. He wanted to make sure he hadn’t accidentally committed, even in thought, any socialist sins. He examined his conscience in his autobiography and was persuaded that he, who had written about poor people, poverty, and other subjects of rhetorical compositions, not to mention enough screeds to pave the Palais Bourbon, had rallied for only one social reform: the abolition of the death penalty “first and foremost, perhaps.”§ And still he could tell himself that he had merely followed the example of all the apostles of humanitarianism from Guizot to Louis Philippe, and that, from the first, he had considered the death penalty only from a literary and imaginative point of view, as an excellent theme for verbose declamation, to be added to “my mother’s cross” and “the voice of the blood” and the other tricks of the romantic trade that were beginning to lose their luster, as well as their power over the general public. A socialism limited to this one practical social reform—the abolition of the death penalty—is only likely to worry executioners, whose vested rights it threatens. And it should come as no surprise if, at the time of the publication of Hugo’s “socialist bible,” Les Misérables, only the elderly Lamartine was scandalized that, thirty years after Eugène Sue, “the one man who,” according to Théodore de Banville, “had something to say,” Hugo dared to take pity on a man sentenced to hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread and a poor girl prostituting herself to feed the bastard child of the bourgeois who’d knocked her up. It was indeed old-fashioned and childish stuff! But where Victor Hugo most coarsely shows his bourgeois mind is when he personifies those two preeminent institutions of bourgeois society, the police and exploitation, in two ridiculous types: Javert, the sneak who is a model of virtue, and Jean Valjean, the convict who rehabilitates himself by amassing a fortune, in a few years’ time, on the backs of his workmen. Wealth washes away all sins and takes the place of all virtues. Hugo, like every other bourgeois, cannot imagine the existence of a society without police or the exploitation of workers.

The worship of the god Property is Victor Hugo’s religion. In his eyes, the confiscation of the property of the Orléans family is one of Napoleon III’s most dreadful crimes. And if he had been a member of the National Assembly, he would, on Monsieur Thiers’s motion, have voted for the fifty million in damages to be paid to the d’Orléans, out of respect for property. His hatred of socialists, whom he denounced so fiercely in 1848, is so intense that, in his classification of people who disturb society, he places Lacenaire, the murderer, on the bottom rung, and immediately above him, Babeuf, the communist.ǁ People, who would be atrociously dishonest if they were not simply ignorant and forgetful, claimed that the man who, in November 1848, wrote that “the insurrection of June is criminal and will be condemned by history as it was by society. . . if it had succeeded, it would not have consecrated work, but looting” (Événement, no. 94) had deserted the holy cause of property and defended the insurrection of March 18. And they claimed this because he had opened up his house in Brussels to refugees from the Commune. But in his showy letter, everything chez Hugo is publicity, and later in L’Année Terrible didn’t he indignantly protest the Commune’s acts of war? Didn’t he insult the Communards as violently as he had the Bonapartists, stigmatizing them by calling them shooters of fifteen-year-old children, thieves, assassins, and incendiaries? The radicals and the Hugolatrous Camille Pelletan must have felt that Victor Hugo compromised them when he let loose such an incontinence of insults and defamations against the defeated men of the Bloody Week. What was so extraordinary about Victor Hugo’s action that it should ruffle the feathers of the Versailles press? Is it because, despite the pressing solicitations of Thiers and Favre, the ministers of Queen Victoria of England and King Amadeo of Spain didn’t open up their countries to the defeated—whom they never insulted as Victor Hugo did? No one will accuse these politicians of making a pact with the socialists and the enemies of property. In Switzerland, Belgium, and England—everywhere in fact—didn’t the bourgeois, the most bourgeois of the bourgeois, open their purses to help those exiles without bread or work? Something that Victor Hugo, the erstwhile exile millionaire, could never bring himself to do.

• That the legitimists who nurtured, cherished, praised, and devoutly honored Victor Hugo should hold a bitter grudge against the young Eliacin,12 who dropped them as soon as the 1830 revolution tore the key to the cash box from their hands, is only natural. That they accuse him of desertion and treason is only just. However, the Orleanist peer of France who made his mother bear the burden of his royalism might have explained away his Orleanism more persuasively by citing his love of morality, saying: “I, a man who am always loyal to duty, had to obey the commandments of a morality higher than gratitude: I obeyed the logic of practical morality—‘it takes money to make money,’ and to make poetry, too.” But the writer’s former patrons go too far when, in an effort to interfere with the circulation of his merchandise among pious people, they slander him and call him a nonbeliever. Nothing could be further from the truth. Victor Hugo had the misfortune to be born to nonbelievers and to be brought up by nonbelievers. His mother did not allow him to partake of the Good Lord’s flesh,¶ but on the other hand she did hire skeptical priests to tutor him—men who during the Revolution had cast away their cassocks and breviaries. And yet: an ardent faith awakened in his soul on the very day the throne and the altar, supporting each other, were set back on their feet. Then he stifles his Voltaireanism and writes poems about Catholicism’s pomp and pensions.** Do the legitimists not recognize the unmistakable signs of a sincerely opportunistic faith? They show themselves to be demanding in the extreme when they ask that this circumstantial Catholicism survive the causes that gave rise to it. If they had only held on to their power, Hugo would have kept his faith in God and the priests until his eighty-third year. But as it was, he had to face facts and leave off worshipping this deity who’d stopped revealing his real presence through the payment of pensions. It’s the same way a banker would cut off credit to his ruined client, and make off with whatever money was left. The 1830 revolution made Voltaire and freethinking fashionable again. Victor Hugo, that sunflower whose nature condemned him to

follow the course of the daystar, put down his legitimism and his Catholicism the way a cook puts down his apron. He took to worshipping Béranger’s “God of the good people” and burned Jehovah, the fierce dark God who was, however, much better suited to his romantic brain. This change of God proves the sincerity of Hugo’s deism. He needed a God at any cost. He needed Him for his own personal use—in order to be a prophet, a seer.†† He rose to the level of his readers’ coarse irreligion without any trouble. For no one was asking him to sacrifice the banal poetic effects that romanticism derived from the idea of God and Christian charity, which relieves freethinkers of the burden of easing the miseries they create through their exploitation. He can even go on praising priests and nuns, those moral police that the bourgeoisie pay to do the repressive work of sergeants and soldiers.‡‡ Victor Hugo died with no priests or prayers, no confession or communion, and the Catholics are scandalized. But the Good Lord’s people can’t accuse him of ever having had an impious thought. His gigantic brain remained hermetically sealed against the demolishing criticism of the Encyclopedists and the philosophical theories of modern science. In 1831, a scientific debate held intellectual Europe spellbound: Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were debating the origin and formation of creatures and worlds. The aged Goethe, whom Hugo disdainfully calls “the poet of indifference,” his soul filled with sublime enthusiasm, listened to the arguments of these two mighty geniuses. Hugo, indifferent to philosophy and science, dedicated his “immense genius”—which “embraced in its immensity the visible and the invisible, the ideal and the real, the monsters of the sea and the creatures of the earth”—to tipping the “hemistichal balance” and rhyming nombril with avril, juif with suif, gouine with baragouine, and Marengo with lumbago. Thirty years later, Charles Darwin took up G. Saint-Hilaire and his teacher Lamarck’s theory again. He fertilized it with his vast knowledge and his important discoveries, and triumphantly implanting it in the natural sciences, he renovated the human understanding of creation. Hugo, “the thinker of the nineteenth century,” which the Hugolaters call “the century of Hugo”; Hugo, who carried in his cranium “the human idea,” lived his life indifferent to

this prodigious movement of ideas. Il poeta sovrano, who spent most of his time leafing through sales catalogs and dictionaries of history and geography looking for rich rhymes, did not deign to notice that Lamarckism, Darwinism, and Transformism rhymed much more richly than faim and génovéfain.

*Victor Hugo, “Journal of a Revolutionary of 1830,” Littérature et philosophie mêlées, 1834. †Victor Hugo, Le Rhin. ‡These biographical details, which out of misplaced modesty Victor Hugo deleted from the autobiography he dictated to his wife, have been reestablished in the very erudite and witty study written by Monsieur Biré, Victor Hugo Before 1830 (1883). We cannot recommend this book enough to those Hugolaters who wish to know their hero more intimately. §Adèle Hugo, Victor Hugo raconté (1863). ǁ“Lower than Marat, lower than Babeuf, lower, much lower, there is the last passage . . . Lacenaire issued from this cave.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862). ¶The Vendean brigand was a staunch Voltairean. **In a verse epistle of 1818, not published until 1863, Hugo says, in speaking of himself, “. . . I am sixteen years old . . . I read The Spirit of the Laws and I admire Voltaire.” Adèle Hugo, Victor Hugo raconté (1863). ††“The poet himself is a prophet. He is God’s prophet” Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare (1864).. ‡‡“No one gets on as well or becomes as close as an old priest and an old soldier. Deep down, they are the same man. One has dedicated himself to the homeland here below, the other to the homeland up above; there is no other difference.” “There is, perhaps, no work more sublime than the work these souls [nuns] do. And we

would add: there is, perhaps, no work more useful.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862). Victor Hugo has had the good fortune to have his books bought in abundance (which is what he wanted more than anything) and read very sparingly. Indeed, they will be read more and more sparingly, or else the day will come when Le Siècle and Léo Taxil will have to concede him to the Catholics.

5. THE TEN-DAY orgy of hyperbole conducted by the Parisian press will be recalled. Already we are beginning to emerge from that ebullience of enforced admiration, and soon we will come to regard those days of enthusiasm and apotheosis as a period of inexplicable madness. It would be pointless to discuss whether, in the near future, the works of Victor Hugo will live on in human memory—like the works of Molière and La Fontaine in France, Heine and Goethe in Germany, Shakespeare in England, Cervantes in Spain—or whether they will sleep the sleep of the dead beside the poems of Giambattista Marino, wearily skimmed by a handful of scholars studying the origins of conventional literature. Seventeenth-century readers declared that L’Adone would forever blot out Orlando Furioso, the Divine Comedy, and The Iliad, and frenzied crowds waved banners saying that the illustrious Marino was “the soul of poetry, the spirit of the lyre, the king of poets . . . the most miraculous of geniuses . . . the man whose glorious pen gives poems their true value, speeches their natural color, verses their proper harmony, prose its perfect artifice . . . admired by scholars, honored by kings, object of the world’s acclaim, celebrated by envy herself,” etc., etc. Shakespeare died forgotten. Sometimes future generations do not ratify the judgments of contemporaries. But historical criticism, which neither admires or condemns but attempts to explain, adopts the popular axiom: there is no smoke without fire. Historical criticism says that the writer acclaimed by his contemporaries only won their applause because he knew how to flatter their tastes and passions—how to express their thoughts and feelings in language they could understand. Every writer who earns the approval of the public, whatever his literary merits and demerits, acquires a great historical value by this fact alone, and becomes what Emerson called a “representative man” of a class and an era. The question then is how Hugo managed to win the admiration of the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, the sovereign masters of social power, wanted a literature that reproduced their ideas and feelings, and spoke in the language they loved. Classical literature devised to please the aristocracy wouldn’t do. When romanticism is studied critically (the studies done so far have been nothing but rhetorical exercises in praise or denigration, rather than analysis, comparison, and explication), we will see how precisely romantic writers satisfied—in form and content—the demands of the bourgeoisie, even if many of these writers were unaware of the role they were so conscientiously performing. Hugo is not remarkable for his ideas or feelings, but for his use of form. He was aware of this. For him, form was the most important thing. “Take away that simple little thing, style,” he said, “from all those great men—from Voltaire, Pascal, Boileau, Bossuet, Fénelon, Racine, Corneille, La Fontaine, Molière, and all the other masters— and what remains? What remains of Homer after being bowdlerized by Bitaubé.” The truth of an observation or the force and originality of a thought are secondary things, which do not matter. “Form is more important than has been imagined . . . All art that wishes to survive must begin by asking itself questions about form and language and style . . . Style is the key to the future . . . Without style, you can have a momentary success, applause, fame, fanfare, prizes, the intoxicated acclaim of the multitudes, but you will not have true triumph, true glory, true conquest, true laurels, as Cicero says: insignia victoriae, non victoriam.”* Victor Cousin, the romantic philosopher, and Victor Hugo, the philosopher of romanticism, served the bourgeoisie with the kind of philosophy and literature they asked for. In the eighteenth century, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Alembert, and Condillac had made them think too much; now they just wanted to kick back and enjoy serene philosophy and sentimental poetry without any headaches. They didn’t want writing that required them to reflect anymore, only writing that entertained the reader, transporting him into cloudy dreamlands, charming his eyes with bold and beautiful images, charming his ears with its pomp and the harmony of its syntax. The Revolution of 1789 transplanted the center of social life from Versailles to Paris, from the court and salons to the streets, cafés,

and popular meeting halls. Newspapers, pamphlets, and speeches were the literature of the day. Everybody spoke and wrote and without any embarrassment trampled on the rules of taste and grammar. A rabble of words, neologisms, idioms, and images, streaming in from every province and every social level, invaded the polished language that had been devised over two centuries of aristocratic culture. The day after Robespierre’s death, the grammarians and purists took back the ferule snatched from their hands and set to work expelling the intruders and repairing the breaches of eighteenth-century language opened up by the sansculottes. They were partway successful and, imitating the fops of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, they castrated the spoken and written language of several thousand words and expressions that haven’t yet been restored to it. Fortunately, Chateaubriand, following the example given by the royalists of the Actes des Apôtres, who had supported the throne and the altar using the language of the street, defended, to the great scandal of the purists, reaction and religion with the language and rhetoric born of the revolution. The success of Atala, The Genius of Christianity, and The Martyrs was immense. The honor of having not only created but literally consecrated this century’s romantic language belongs to Chateaubriand, who was Victor Hugo’s master. But Chateaubriand, with the exception of one well-known little song and one justly unknown play, wrote exclusively in prose. No one had yet broken the mold of classical verse, softening up the old metrics to suit a new harmony, enriching it with images, expressions, and words already being used in contemporary prose, and resuscitating the old forms of French poetry. Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, Vigny, Gautier, Banville, Baudelaire, and others undertook this task. Hugo, in the eyes of the general public, monopolized the glory of the romantic pléiade not because he was the greatest poet but because his poetics embraced every genre and subject, from ode to satire, from love song to political lampoon, and because he was the only one who versified charlatanic screeds about philanthropy and bourgeois liberalism. He showed himself to be a virtuoso in everything. As milliners and seamstresses adorn the mannequins in their shopwindows with the brightest clothes to catch

the eyes of passersby, so Victor Hugo costumed the ideas and feelings that the bourgeois supplied him with a dizzying phraseology calculated to stun and bewilder—a grandiloquent verbiage harmoniously punctuated and rhymed, bristling with vivid and dazzling antitheses and spectacular epithets. He was, after Chateaubriand, the century’s greatest window dresser of words and images. But his talents as a literary designer were not enough to assure him universal and unguarded admiration; his actions, even more than his writings, earned him the high esteem of the bourgeoisie. Hugo was bourgeois even down to his smallest gestures. He genuflected before romanticism’s sacramental slogan “art for art’s sake,” but like any bourgeois thinking of nothing except how to make a bundle, he dedicated his talent to flattering the tastes of the paying public and, depending on the circumstances, celebrated royalty or the Republic, trumpeted freedom or approved gagging the press; and when it was necessary to arouse the public’s attention, he fired pistol shots: “The beautiful is the ugly” is the loudest of them. He boasted that he was the immutable man, fastened to his duty like the mollusk to his rock. But, like any bourgeois seeking to make his way in the world at any cost, he adjusted himself to every circumstance and eagerly welcomed whatever powers and opinions were on the rise. Having frivolously embarked on a poorly planned political mission, he quickly did an about-face, left his friends to conspire and spend their time and money on republican propaganda, and set out to exploit his fame. And while he suggested that he was eating the traditional black bread of exile, he was selling his prose and poetry for their weight in gold. He said he was simplehearted, speaking as he thought and acting as he spoke. But like every businessman trying to lure customers into his shop, he was not above smoke and mirrors, and was constantly putting one over on the public. The staging of his death was the crowning achievement of his career as an actor, so rich in carefully engineered effects. Everything was weighed and planned— from the pauper’s carriage intended to exaggerate his greatness with its simplicity and win the sympathy of the always gullible crowd, down to the rumors about the million he bequeathed for the building

of a hospital, and the fifty thousand francs for this, and the twenty thousand for that, all intended to cajole the government into generosity and get a triumphal funeral without having to loosen his purse strings. The bourgeois put great stock in Hugo’s shrewd behavior and thrifty management of his wealth: these qualities are so rare in a man of letters. † They recognized in Hugo, crowned with the halo of martyrdom and ablaze with rays of glory, a man of their own stripe— and the more they exalted his devotion to Duty, his love of the idea, and the depth of his thought, the more they took pride in observing that he was made of the same stuff as they were. They contemplated and admired themselves in Hugo, as they would in a mirror. Indeed, the bourgeoisie gave one extremely important sign of their identification with “the great man” whom they interred at the Pantheon. Even as they were inviting every earthly nation to his funeral on June 1, they did not close the stock market or in any way suspend commercial and financial life, because June 1 was the day that bills of exchange and dividends came due. They knew in their hearts that Victor Hugo, il poeta sovrano, would have disapproved of such a measure—he who would never, not for anything in the world, have delayed the cashing of his annuities and claims for twenty-four hours.

*Cicero, “For the Manilian Law”: “the trophies of victory, not victory itself.” †A snippet of conversation overheard in the crowd on June 1. First bourgeois: Hugo must have been as rich as the devil for the state to have given him such a funeral: they wouldn’t go to such lengths for a poor genius. Second bourgeois: You’re right. They say he’s leaving five million. First bourgeois: Put it at three then, because they always exaggerate, and it’s still pretty good. You have to admit he was more intelligent than those men of genius who never know what’s up and never leave any kind of fortune.

Le Temps of September 4, 1885, furnished the following information about Hugo’s fortune: The estate of Victor Hugo comes to the amount of approximately five million francs. It can be seen how rapidly the master’s fortune grew if you consider that, in 1884, he took in eleven hundred thousand francs in royalties. Let us add that the will that contains a clause about donating fifty thousand francs to the poor of Paris is written completely in Hugo’s handwriting, and is finished and dated, but it is not signed. To give fifty thousand francs to the poor, even after his death, was too much for the generous and charitable soul of Victor Hugo. When the moment came to pen his signature, his heart failed him.

MEMORIES OF KARL MARX He was a man, take him for all in all: I shall not look upon his like again. —Shakespeare, Hamlet

1. IT WAS in February 1865 that I saw Karl Marx for the first time. The International Workingmen’s Association had been founded on September 28, 1864, at the meeting in St. Martin’s Hall, and I was coming to inform him of the progress of our budding organization in Paris. Monsieur Tolain, who is now a senator of the bourgeois Republic and one of its representatives at the conference in Berlin,1 had given me a letter of introduction. I was then twenty-four years old. As long as I live, I will never forget the impression this first meeting made on me. Marx was unwell and hard at work on the first volume of Capital, which would not appear until two years later, in 1867. He feared he would not be able to bring his book to a satisfactory conclusion and always greeted young people with open arms because, he said, “it is important for me to train those who will carry on communist propaganda after me.” Karl Marx was one of the rare personalities who are capable of occupying a prominent position both in the sciences and in public life: the two were so intimately interlinked in him that it is impossible to get a clear sense of who he was if we separate the scholar from the socialist fighter. Though he believed that every science must be pursued for its own sake and that one must never fear the conclusions to which scientific research may lead, he was also of the opinion that every self-respecting scholar should actively participate in public affairs, and not stay holed up in his study or laboratory like a worm in its cheese, holding himself aloof from life and the social and political struggles of his contemporaries. “Science should not be an egotistical pleasure,” Marx used to say. “Those who have the opportunity to be able to dedicate themselves to scientific study must be the first to place their knowledge at the service of humanity.” “Work for humanity” was one of his favorite sayings.

He had not come to communism out of sentimental considerations, although he was profoundly sympathetic with the sufferings of the working class, but through the study of history and political economy. He maintained that every impartial mind not tainted by private interests or blinded by class prejudices would necessarily come to the same conclusions he had. But if he studied the economic and political development of human society without any preconceived ideas, he wrote only with the resolute intention of disseminating the results of his research far and wide, and with the firm wish to give a scientific basis to the socialist movement, which had up to then been drifting in utopian mists. He publicized his views only to support the triumph of the working class, whose historic mission is to establish communism as soon as it has taken control of the political and economic direction of society. . . Marx did not limit his activity to the country where he was born. “I am a citizen of the world,” he used to say, “and I work wherever I happen to be.” And indeed, no matter where events and political persecutions led him—France, Belgium, England—he participated actively in the revolutionary movements that were developing around him. But it was not the indefatigable and incomparable socialist agitator but the scholar that I first saw in his study on Maitland Park Road, where comrades used to flock from every corner of the civilized world to ask questions of the master of socialist thought. That room has become historic, and one must know something about it to fathom Marx’s private intellectual life. It was on the second floor, flooded with light from a big window that overlooked the park. Opposite the window and on either side of the fireplace, there were shelves crammed with books, and on top of these shelves stacks of newspapers and manuscripts mounting to the ceiling. Opposite the fireplace on one side of the window, there were two tables strewn with books, newspapers, and documents. In the middle of the room, in the best-lit spot, was a small, very simple worktable, three feet long and two feet wide, with a wooden armchair. A leather sofa was set between the armchair and the bookshelves, facing the window, where Marx would lie down for a rest from time to time. On the mantel, more books were mixed in

among cigars, matches, boxes of tobacco, paperweights, and photographs of his daughters, his wife, Wilhelm Wolff, and Friedrich Engels. Marx was a heavy smoker. “No matter how many copies it sells, Capital will never cover the cost of the cigars I smoked while writing it,” he told me. But he was an even heavier user of matches. He was always forgetting his pipe or cigar and had to relight them so often that he burned through matchboxes with incredible speed. Marx did not allow anyone to put his books and papers in order, or rather, in disorder. For their apparent chaos was deceiving: in reality everything was in its place, and he never had any trouble finding the book or notebook he needed. Even in the course of a conversation, he would often interrupt what he was saying to pull down a book and show you the passage or the figure he had just quoted. He was at one with his study, and the books and papers there obeyed him like the limbs of his body. He spurned any formal symmetry in the arrangement of his books: quartos, octavos, and pamphlets were crowded together. He shelved them not according to their dimensions but according to their contents. They were his work tools, not luxury items. “They are my slaves,” he said, “and they must serve me as I see fit.” He mauled them with no regard for their size, their binding, the beauty of their paper or print; he dog-eared pages, covered the margins with pencil marks, underlined passages. He didn’t make notes in them, but he did scribble exclamation points or question marks in places where the author had gone too far. His habit of underlining made it easy for him to find the passages he was seeking. He read and, every few years, reread his notebooks and the passages he had underlined in books to preserve them in his memory, which was extraordinarily clear and precise. He had cultivated it in his youth, following Hegel’s advice, by memorizing poems in languages he did not know. He knew Heinrich Heine and Goethe by heart and often quoted them in conversation. He read the poets of every European literature. Every year he reread Aeschylus in the original Greek. He thought highly of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, whom he considered the two greatest dramatic geniuses that humanity had produced. He had devoted himself to detailed studies of Shakespeare, who filled

him with boundless admiration and all of whose characters he knew, down to the most minor. The whole Marx family formed a veritable cult around the great English playwright. His three daughters knew his work by heart. Sometime after 1848, in an effort to perfect his knowledge of English, which he read very well, Marx researched and classified all the expressions unique to Shakespeare. He did the same with some of the polemical writings of William Cobbett, whom he held in very high esteem. Dante and Robert Burns were among his favorite poets, and he took great pleasure in listening to his daughters recite or sing the Scottish bard’s satires and love poems. Cuvier, a tireless worker and one of the great masters of science, had fitted out a certain number of workrooms at the Museum of Paris, where he was the director, for his own personal use. Each room was set aside for a specific activity and contained the necessary books, instruments, and anatomical material. When he felt himself getting weary of one task, Cuvier would go into the next room and turn his attention to another. This simple change of intellectual activity, it is said, was rest enough for him. Marx was just as tireless as Cuvier, but he did not have the means to fit out several workrooms in his home. He used to rest by pacing his room, and his passage from door to window was marked on the threadbare rug by a stripe as well defined as a path across a meadow. Now and then he would lie down on the sofa and read a novel. He read two or three at a time, switching from one to another. Like Darwin, he was a great reader of novels. He especially loved those of the eighteenth century, and above all Fielding’s Tom Jones. The modern authors he read the most were Paul de Kock, Charles Lever, Alexandre Dumas père, and Walter Scott, whose Old Mortality he considered a superlative work. He had a special liking for adventure stories and amusing tales. He ranked Cervantes and Balzac above all other novelists. In Don Quixote, he saw the waning age of chivalry, whose virtues were going to become, in the emergent bourgeois world, an object of ridicule and mockery. And he had such admiration for Balzac that he made plans to write a critical study of the Human Comedy as soon as he had finished his book on economics. Balzac, the historian of

the society of his day, was also the creator of “types,” which in the age of Louis Philippe only existed in embryonic form and would not be completely developed until the time of Napoleon III, after the novelist’s death. Marx read European languages fluently and wrote well in three: German, French, and English—so well that native speakers of these languages were astonished. “A foreign tongue is a weapon in the battle of life,” he was in the habit of saying. He had a great facility for languages and his daughters inherited it. At the age of fifty, he took up the study of Russian and, although that language had no etymological connection with the ancient and modern languages he knew, he understood enough of it that after six months he took pleasure in reading some of the Russian poets and writers he loved most: Pushkin, Gogol, and Saltykov-Shchedrin. But the reason he undertook the study of Russian was to be able to read the documents drafted by the official boards of inquiry suppressed by the czarist government because of the terrible things they revealed. Devoted friends sent these documents to him, and he was certainly the only economist in western Europe capable of examining them. Apart from reading the poets and novelists, Marx had a remarkable way of amusing himself—with mathematics, for which he had a special liking. Algebra even brought him some degree of solace and sustained him in the most distressing moments of his turbulent life. During his wife’s last illness, it was impossible for him to concentrate on his usual scientific studies; he could only emerge from the deep sorrow his companion’s suffering caused him by immersing himself in mathematics. It was in this period of psychological pain that he wrote a work on infinitesimal calculus, a work of great value according to mathematicians who know about these things . . . In higher mathematics, Marx found dialectical movement in its simplest and most logical form. A science, he said, is not truly developed until it is able to make use of math. His library, which contained more than a thousand volumes carefully collected during a long life of study, was not enough for him: he was for years a regular patron of the British Museum, whose catalog he rated highly. Even his opponents have been obliged to recognize the breadth and depth of his knowledge, which embraced not only his own

domain of political economy but also history, philosophy, and international literature. Although he went to bed very late at night, he always got up between eight and nine o’clock in the morning. He gulped his black coffee, browsed through the papers, and went to his workroom, where he worked until two or three o’clock at night. He broke off only to eat meals and, in the evenings, weather permitting, to go for a walk along Hampstead Heath. During the day, he slept an hour or two on his couch. When he was a young man, he had often worked through the night. For him, work had become a passion so all-consuming it made him forget his meals. He often had to be called several times before he came down to the dining room, and he had hardly swallowed the last mouthful before he was on his way back upstairs to his office. He ate little and attempted to overcome his lack of appetite by eating extremely flavorful dishes, such as smoked fish and ham, caviar, and cornichons. His stomach paid dearly for his formidable cerebral activity. He sacrificed the body to the mind. Thinking was his greatest joy. I often heard him repeat what Hegel (his philosophical master when he was young) had said: “Even the criminal thought of a delinquent is greater and nobler than all the wonders of heaven.” It took a vigorous constitution to lead such an unusual life and to bear such exhausting intellectual work. Marx was indeed solidly built: above average in height, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, he had a well-proportioned body, although his torso was a bit too long relative to his legs, as is often the case with Jews. If he had practiced gymnastics in his youth, he would have become extremely strong. The only physical exercise that he did regularly was walking; he could walk or climb hills for hours, chatting and smoking, without feeling tired in the least. It might be said that, in his office, he worked while walking, only sitting for a few brief moments to jot down what his brain had concocted as he paced back and forth in the room. Even during conversation he liked to walk, pausing now and then whenever the discussion grew heated or the talk turned serious. For many years, I accompanied him on his evening walks on Hampstead Heath. It was in the course of these strolls through the

fields that he gave me my education in economics. In my presence, perhaps without noticing it, he elaborated the whole first volume of Capital as he wrote it. Every night, the moment I walked in the door, I did my best to transcribe what I had just heard. In the beginning I had to make a huge effort to follow Marx’s arguments, they were so complex and profound. Unfortunately, I lost these precious notes; after the Commune, the police looted my papers in Paris and Bordeaux. I especially regret the loss of the notes written one night when Marx had expounded—with the richness of examples and reflections that was his specialty—on his brilliant theory of the development of human society. I felt as if a veil were being lifted before my eyes! For the first time, I clearly sensed the logic of world history and could trace the seemingly contradictory phenomena of social development and human thought back to their material causes. I felt dazzled, and the feeling remained with me for years. The socialists of Madrid had this same feeling when, in my own feeble way, I laid out this theory for them, the most brilliant of Marx’s theories and, without any doubt, one of the most brilliant theories that has ever been conceived by a human brain. Marx’s brain was armed with a stock of facts drawn from history and the natural sciences, as well as philosophical theories, information, and observations amassed in the course of long intellectual labor—all of which he could deploy with great skill. You could question him on any subject at any time and you were sure to receive the most satisfying answer you could wish for, complete with philosophical reflections of general application. His brain was like a warship still in port but under steam, always ready to set off in any direction on the ocean of thought. There is no doubt that Capital reveals a mind of astonishing vigor and extraordinary knowledge, but for me, as for all those who were close with Marx, neither Capital nor any of his other writings manages to reveal the full scope of his genius and knowledge. He vastly exceeded his works. I worked with Marx. I was merely the secretary to whom he dictated, but I therefore had the opportunity to observe his way of thinking and writing. For him, the work was both easy and difficult.

Easy because facts and ideas concerning the subject at hand came to him immediately in droves. Difficult precisely because of these droves, which complicated and protracted the total exploration of his ideas. Vico wrote: “A thing is a substance only for God, whose knowledge is infinite; for man, whose knowledge is limited to externals, it can be no more than a surface.” Marx grasped things after the fashion of Vico’s God. He saw not only the surface but what lay beneath it, studying all the elements in their reciprocal actions and reactions, isolating each of these elements, and tracing the history of its development. Then he went on from the thing to its surroundings and observed the effect of one upon the other, and vice versa. He traced the origin of the thing, the changes, evolutions, and revolutions it had undergone, and finally proceeded to its remotest effects. He did not see a thing singly, as a phenomenon in and of itself unconnected with its surroundings: he saw a complex world in perpetual motion. And he wanted to disclose the whole of that world in its varied and constantly changing actions and reactions. Writers of the Flaubert and Goncourt school complain of the difficulty of rendering exactly what they see, and yet what they seek to describe is only the surface, the impression they have of things. Their literary work is child’s play compared with Marx’s work. It required extraordinary intellectual powers for him to discern what was real, and a no less extraordinary art to render what he saw and wanted to make others understand. Yet Marx was never satisfied with his writing, he was always making changes to it, and always found that the expression was inferior to the conception . . . Marx had the two qualities of a genius. He was second to none at breaking down an object into its constituent parts, and a master at reconstituting this object in its every detail and various stages of development, revealing how it all fit together. His demonstrations did not depend on abstractions, as some harebrained economists have said. He did not use the method of the geometer, who takes his definitions from the world around him but makes a complete abstraction of reality when drawing his conclusions. In Capital you

will find not a single definition or formula but a series of analyses of the greatest delicacy, conveying even the subtlest nuances and gradations. Marx begins by stating the obvious fact that wealth in a society dominated by the capitalist means of production appears as an immense accumulation of commodities. The commodity— understood as a concrete object, not a mathematical abstraction—is therefore the unit, or cell, of capitalist wealth. Marx then takes the commodity, turns it inside out and upside down, holds its inner workings up to the light of day, and uncovers all its secrets, whose existence the official economists never suspected in the least, though these secrets were more numerous and profound than the mysteries of the Catholic religion. Having examined the commodity from every angle, he reveals its connections with other commodities by means of exchange, and then goes back to its production and the historical conditions of this production. He considers the different forms the commodity assumes and shows how it passes from one form to the next, how one form necessarily produces another. The logical development of phenomena is presented with such perfect art that one might believe that Marx were imagining it, and yet it is drawn from reality: it is the expression of the actual dialectic of the commodity. Marx’s work was always conscientious in the extreme. He referred to the best authorities for each fact and figure he gave. He did not settle for secondhand information but always went to the source, no matter how much effort it cost him. He would run to the British Museum library just to verify a secondary fact. His critics have never been able to find the smallest inaccuracy in his work, or to prove that his demonstrations relied on facts that did not stand up to the most serious scrutiny. This habit of returning to sources led him to read lesser-known authors whom he is the only one to cite. Considering the number of these citations in Capital, one might be tempted to think Marx took pleasure in showing off his reading. But that was not the case. “I am administering historical justice,” he said, “I am giving everyone his due.” He considered himself under an obligation to name the writer who had been the first to express an idea, or who had expressed it

most exactly, even if that writer was of little importance and scarcely known. His literary conscientiousness was just as strict as his scholarly conscientiousness. He never based his findings on a fact he was not completely sure of, and he never allowed himself to deal with any subject he had not examined down to the roots. He never published anything until he had rewritten it several times and hit upon the most appropriate form. He shuddered to think of letting a study appear before it was ready. It would have been a martyrdom to show his manuscripts before he had given them the finishing touch. He felt so strongly about this that he would have preferred, he once told me, to burn his manuscripts rather than leave them unfinished. His method of working forced him to do things that may be difficult for the reader to imagine. For example, to write the twenty or so pages on English legislation relating to the protection of work in Capital, he had to read a whole library of Blue Books containing the reports of the inquiry commissions and factory inspectors of England and Scotland. He read them from cover to cover, as the many pencil marks he made in their margins show. He considered these reports among the most substantial and important documents for the study of the regime of capitalist production, and he had such a high opinion of the people who wrote them that he doubted anyone could find, in any other European country, “men as competent, impartial, and clear as English factory inspectors.” He was not shy about expressing his gratitude to them in his preface to Capital. Marx drew a good deal of information from these Blue Books. Many members of Parliament, to whom these books are distributed, use them as shooting targets, measuring the percussive force of their guns by the number of pages the bullet clears. Others sell them by the pound, and it’s good they did, since this was what allowed Marx to buy them cheap at a junk shop on Long Acre, where he sometimes went to sift through the old books and papers. Professor Beesly once said that Marx had made the best use of anyone of the official inquiries of England and brought them to the attention of the world. Probably Professor Beesly was unaware that, before 1845, Engels had drawn extensively from the Blue Books when writing his book on the condition of the working class in England.

2. TO GET to know and love the heart that beat beneath Marx’s scholarly carapace, you had to see him after he had closed his books and notebooks and was surrounded by his family, or on Sunday evenings with his friends. He was then the most pleasant, wittiest, and most cheerful of companions. He laughed heartily, and in his black eyes, shadowed by thick brows, there was a glimmer of joy and mocking irony whenever he heard a clever remark or some strongly worded repartee. He was a tender, gentle, and indulgent father. “Children should educate their parents,” he used to say. He never brought the weight of paternal authority down upon his daughters, who loved him madly. He never gave them orders but asked them to do what he wanted them to do as a favor, or persuaded them not to do what he didn’t want them to do. And yet he was obeyed as few fathers are. His daughters saw him as a friend and treated him as a companion. They did not call him “Father” but “Moor,” a nickname he’d been given because of his dark complexion and his ebony-black beard and hair. The members of the Communist League, on the other hand, called him “father Marx” even before 1848, when he was not yet thirty. He sometimes played with his daughters for hours at a time. They still remember the naval battles and the burning of whole fleets of paper boats, which he made for them and then set on fire, to their great joy, in a tub. On Sundays his daughters would not let him work. He was theirs the whole day. When the weather was fine, the entire family went for a long walk through the fields. They would stop along the way at an inn to drink ginger beer and eat bread and cheese. When his daughters were still small, he would make the walk seem shorter by telling them fairy tales that went on and on—tales he made up as they walked and that he drew out or hurried along depending on the distance they still had to go. And the girls, listening to him, forgot all about their weariness.

Marx had an incomparably rich poetic imagination. His first literary works were poems. Mrs. Marx held on to these youthful works of her husband’s, but she never showed them to anybody. Marx’s family had dreamed that he would have a career as a literary man and a professor. They thought he was debasing himself with socialist agitation and political economy, a science that was not much valued, at the time, in Germany. Marx had promised his daughters he would write a play about the Gracchi for them. Sadly, he was unable to keep his word; it would have been interesting to see how the man who was called the “knight of the class struggle” would have dealt with this magnificent and tragic episode in the class struggle of the ancient world. Marx nurtured a host of plans that he was not able to carry out. He was thinking of writing, among other things, a book on logic and a history of philosophy (the latter having been his favorite subject in his youth). He would have needed to live a hundred years to carry out all his literary plans and present the world with a portion of the treasures sealed up in his brain. His wife was his companion in the truest and fullest sense of the word, all his life. They had known each other as children and grown up together. Marx was only seventeen at the time of their engagement. After waiting seven years, they married in 1843 and were never apart again. Mrs. Marx died shortly before her husband. No one ever had a greater sense of equality than she, although she was born and brought up in an aristocratic German household. For her, social differences and classifications did not exist. In her house and at her table, she received laborers in work clothes with the same politeness and attentiveness she would have shown to princes. A great number of workers from every country have enjoyed her friendly hospitality, and I am convinced that not one of them ever suspected that the woman who received them with such simple and straightforward cordiality descended, on her mother’s side, from the family of the Dukes of Argyll, or that her brother had been a minister of the King of Prussia . . . She had left everything behind to follow her Karl, and never, even in the days of extreme destitution, did she regret what she had done.

She had a merry spirit and brilliant mind. Her letters to her friends, written with a light hand, are really miniature masterpieces and bear witness to her sharp and original wit. It was a treat to get a letter from Mrs. Marx. Johann Philipp Becker has published several of them. Heine, the pitiless satirist, feared Marx’s irony, but he was full of admiration for the fine and penetrating intelligence of his wife. When the Marxes were living in Paris, he was one of their regular guests. Marx had such a high opinion of his wife’s intelligence and critical sense that, he told me in 1866, he always showed her his manuscripts and attached great importance to her opinion. It was she who copied out her husband’s manuscripts before they were sent to the printer. Mrs. Marx had many children. Three died at a young age during the period of privations that the family experienced after the revolution of 1848, when, as refugees in London, they lived in two little rooms on Dean Street, off Soho Square. I only knew the three daughters. When I was introduced to Marx for the first time, in 1865, the youngest, who became Madame Aveling, was a charming tomboy. Marx used to say his wife had got the child’s sex wrong when bringing her into the world. The other two daughters formed the most charming and harmonious contrast one can imagine. The eldest, Madame Longuet, had her father’s healthy bronzed complexion, dark eyes, and crow-black hair. Her younger sister, Madame Lafargue, was blond and rosy-cheeked. Her rich curly hair shone like gold, as though the setting sun had taken refuge there: she looked like her mother. The Marx family included one other important member: Mademoiselle Helene Demuth. The daughter of a peasant family, she had entered the service of Mrs. Marx when she was very young, almost a child, long before Mrs. Marx had married. After her mistress’s wedding, she did not want to leave her and devoted herself to the Marx family with complete self-effacement. She accompanied Mrs. Marx and her husband on all their wanderings through Europe and went with them when they were deported. She was the good spirit of the house and could find ways out of the most difficult situations. It was thanks to her sense of order, economy, and skill that the family never lacked for the bare

essentials. There was nothing she could not do: she cooked, kept house, dressed the children, cut clothes for them and sewed them with the help of Mrs. Marx. She was both the housekeeper and the majordomo. The children loved her like a mother, and the maternal feelings she had for them gave her a maternal authority. Mrs. Marx considered Helene to be a very close friend, and Marx showed a special affection for her; he played chess with her and, more often than not, he lost. Helene loved the Marx family blindly. Anything they did was good and could not be otherwise. Anyone who criticized Marx had to deal with her. She took whoever was admitted into the intimacy of the family under her maternal wing. She had, so to speak, adopted the whole Marx family. Helene outlived Marx and his wife. She then brought to the house of Engels, whom she had known in her youth, the affection that she had for the Marxes. Besides, Engels was a member of the family. Marx’s daughters called him their second father. He was Marx’s alter ego. For a long time the two names were as inseparable in Germany as they will remain in history. Marx and Engels were the modern embodiment of the ideal of friendship depicted by the ancient poets. From their youth, they had grown up side by side; they lived in the most intimate fellowship of ideas and feelings; they shared in the same revolutionary agitation; and they worked together for as long as they were able to remain with each other. And they would probably have gone on working together, if events had not separated them for nearly twenty years. But after the defeat of the 1848 revolution, Engels had to leave for Manchester, while Marx was obliged to stay in London. Even so, they continued to have a shared intellectual life by writing to each other almost daily about their opinions of political and scientific events, and their works in progress. The moment Engels was able to break free, he made haste to leave Manchester for London, where he settled only ten minutes away from his dear Marx. From 1870 until his friend’s death, not a day went by when the two men didn’t visit each other at one’s house or the other’s. There was great jubilation in the Marx household when Engels announced he was coming from Manchester. They discussed his

visit for weeks in advance, and on the day of his arrival Marx was so impatient he could not work. The two friends stayed up all night smoking and drinking, talking over everything that had happened since their last encounter. Marx respected Engels’s opinion more than any other. He recognized him as a man capable of being his collaborator—an entire public embodied in one person. No effort would have been too great for Marx to persuade Engels and win him over to his ideas. Once I saw him browsing through book after book searching for the facts he needed to change Engels’s opinion about a secondary point, which I cannot now remember, concerning the political and religious Cathar Crusade. It was a triumph for Marx to bring Engels around to his way of thinking. He was proud of Engels. He took pleasure in enumerating to me his friend’s moral and intellectual qualities, and once took me to Manchester expressly to introduce me to him. He was filled with admiration for the extraordinary variety of Engels’s knowledge and never stopped worrying that he would be the victim of an accident. “I am always afraid,” he told me, “that something will happen to him during one of these fox hunts he’s so wild about. The way he goes galloping over fields at breakneck speed and leaping over everything in sight . . .” Marx was as good a friend as he was a husband and father. And it must be said that, in his wife and daughters, in Helene and Engels, he found people who were worthy of being loved by a man such as he.

3. MARX, who had started out as one of the leaders of the radical bourgeoisie, found himself abandoned as soon as his opposition became resolute, and treated as an enemy as soon as he became a communist. After he was insulted and slandered, then hunted down and deported from Germany, a conspiracy of silence was organized against him and his works. The Eighteenth Brumaire, which proves that, of all the historians and politicians of 1848, Marx was the only one who understood the causes and foresaw the consequences of the coup d’état of December 2, 1851, was completely ignored. Despite its timeliness, not a single bourgeois paper mentioned it. The Poverty of Philosophy, a response to Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty, and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy met the same fate. But the First International and the appearance of the first volume of Capital broke this conspiracy of silence, which had lasted almost fifteen years. Marx could no longer be brushed aside. The International grew and filled the world with the reverberations of its actions. Marx kept to the background, directing others’ actions, but soon no one could ignore that he was the man behind the scenes. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party had been founded and quickly became enough of a force that Bismarck courted it before proceeding to suppress it. Schweitzer, a follower of Lassalle, published a series of articles, much admired by Marx, that brought Capital to the attention of the working public. On a motion by Johann Philipp Becker, the congress of the International adopted a resolution calling the attention of the socialists of every country to that book they called “the bible of the working class.” After the insurrection of March 18, 1871, in which people wished to see the hand of the International, and after the defeat of the Commune, which the General Council of the International defended against the campaign of calumnies launched by the bourgeois press of every country, the name of Marx became famous throughout the world.

He was recognized as the irrefutable theoretician of scientific socialism and the organizer of the first international workers’ movement. Capital became the manual of the socialists in every country: every socialist and workers’ newspaper propagated his theories, and in America, during a big strike that broke out in New York, excerpts from the book were printed as leaflets to encourage the workers to resist and assure them that their demands were just. Capital was translated into the main European languages— Russian, French, and English—and excerpts were published in German, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch. And every time the opponents of Marx’s theory in Europe or America tried to refute its theories, socialist economists came up with an answer that shut their mouths. Today, Capital has truly become the bible of the working class, as the congress of the International claimed. But the active part that Marx played in the international socialist movement took time away from his scholarly work. The death of his wife and of his eldest daughter, Madame Longuet, must have made things even more difficult. Marx’s attachment to his wife was deep, and it bound them very closely. Her beauty was his pride and joy; her gentleness and devotion had eased his turbulent life as a revolutionary socialist unavoidably exposed to deprivations. The illness that carried Mrs. Marx away also shortened the life of her husband. During this long and painful illness, the vigils, the emotions, the lack of exercise and fresh air took their toll on Marx’s body and mind. He contracted bronchitis, which was the end of him. On December 2, 1881, Mrs. Marx died as she had lived, as a communist and a materialist. Death did not make her fear. When she felt the end approaching, she cried, “Karl, my strength is gone!” These were her last intelligible words. She was buried on December 5 in Highgate Cemetery, in the section for the “damned” (unconsecrated ground). Her funeral services were not announced: this was in keeping with her and her husband’s lifelong habits . . . Only a few close friends accompanied her to her final resting place . . . Before parting ways, Engels gave a speech at the graveside. After this, Marx’s life was no more than a series of physical and psychological sufferings which he stoically endured and which were

still worsening when, a year later, his eldest daughter, Madame Longuet, died suddenly. He was laid low by her death, and never recovered. He died at his worktable on March 14, 1883, in his sixty-fifth year.

NOTES THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY

“The Right to Be Lazy,” subtitled “A Refutation of the ‘Right to Work’ of 1848,” was first composed as a newspaper article in 1880. In 1883, while Lafargue was serving time in the political wing of SaintePélagie prison, he expanded it into a pamphlet, which was published later that year. 1. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Die Faulheit” (Laziness). 2. La Bruyère, Les Caractères, “De l’Homme,” character 128: “One sees certain wild animals, male and female, scattered throughout the countryside, black, livid, and burned by the sun, bound to the soil they dig and turn over with unconquerable stubbornness; they have an articulate voice, and when they stand up they exhibit a human face, and in fact they are men. At night they retreat to their lairs, where they live on black bread, water, and roots; they spare other men the trouble of sowing, plowing, and reaping to live, and thus deserve not to be deprived of the bread they have sown.” 3. Repeatedly called “the nigger” in the correspondence of both Marx and Engels, Lafargue had a complicated relationship with the racial, and frequently racist, thinking of his time. His paternal grandfather was a French-born Christian, his paternal grandmother a Haitian-born mulatto, his maternal grandfather a French-born Jew, and his maternal grandmother a Jamaicanborn Indian. He often boasted, as Leslie Derfler writes in Paul Lafargue and the Flowering of French Socialism, that “the blood of three oppressed races ran in [his] veins” and that he was an “internationalist of the blood before [he] was one of ideology.” He was a vocal opponent of political anti-Semitism and a committed Dreyfusard. But he was nonetheless viciously anti-Semitic and often used the word Jew as a metonym for banker.

4. Gaston Galliffet, “the Butcher of the Commune,” was the general responsible for the deaths of more than three thousand political prisoners captured in June 1848. He selected his victims with a decisive arbitrariness—based on hair color, facial features, and so on—that was as despicable as it was bound to be repeated. 5. Paul de Cassagnac (1843–1904) was a conservative politician, journalist, and recidivist duelist. In his poem “You Dead of ’92,” Arthur Rimbaud deplored him and his father, Adolphe, who was also fond of dueling. In 1868, Cassagnac refused to fight a duel with the socialist military man Charles Lullier—yet another unbalanced duelist. 6. Léon Gambetta gave a long speech in favor of a bill granting amnesty to the Communards (a bill that Cassagnac fiercely denounced), which was passed in parliament in July 1880.

A CAPITALIST CATECHISM

“A Capitalist Catechism” is excerpted from Lafargue’s satirical pamphlet The Religion of Capital, published in 1886.

THE LEGEND OF VICTOR HUGO

“The Legend of Victor Hugo” was published as a pamphlet in 1885 one month after Hugo’s death. It was republished in 1891 in La Revue socialiste. 1. On May 16, 1877, the monarchist president of the Republic, Patrice de Mac-Mahon, dismissed the republican prime minister Jules Simon, then dissolved the parliament. 2. Benni-bouffe-toujours is portmanteau slang for a glutton. It is also the name of a dining club that made its debut in Hugo’s funeral procession, “arousing much mirth,” according to contemporary accounts.

3. Brasseries à femmes, where young women served the drinks, appeared in Paris in the 1860s. These establishments were condemned for encouraging various vices among the young, including prostitution, with the help, if help were needed, of the doctored beer the waitresses were said to serve. The deeper anxiety about the brasseries seems to have derived from the fact that the waitresses actively flirted with customers and, “unlike in cafés that hired barmaids ( filles de comptoir), no ‘protective counter,’ as one moral commentator called it, separated the server from her customer . . . [The serving girls] sat with—and sometimes on—the customers while moving to and fro in the raucous café.” See Andrew Israel Ross, “Serving Sex: Playing with Prostitution in the Brasseries à femmes of Late NineteenthCentury Paris,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 24, no. 2 (May 2015): 288–313. 4. The writer Auguste Vacquerie (1819–1895), Hugo’s son-in-law, lived with Hugo in exile. 5. A slightly distorted quotation of a text written in December 1820, when Hugo was eighteen, contrasting the experience of his generation’s Bonapartist fathers and royalist mothers. 6. Victor Lahorie, Hugo’s godfather and namesake, was accused of and eventually sentenced to death for having conspired against Napoleon Bonaparte. From 1809 to 1810, he took refuge with the Hugo family in the former Feuillantine convent in Paris’s fifth arrondissement. 7. In 1816, Hugo had written in his diary: “I want to be Chateaubriand or nothing.” 8. Allusion to La Fontaine’s fable “The Frogs Who Desired a King.” 9. In the early 1880s, bills were passed allowing repeat offenders to be sentenced to serve, in addition to their periods of incarceration in French prisons, an “accessory” life sentence in the French colonies. 10. Heinrich Heine loved to nettle Hugo (who was prone to being nettled) and once famously said that the word Hugoïste was the

“superlative form of égoïste.” 11. In 1848, the “Party of Order,” uniting Bourbon legitimists and Orleanists, including Adolphe Thiers, François Guizot, and Alexis de Tocqueville, met in the Académie de Médecine on the rue de Poitiers. 12. Allusion to Victor Séjour’s play The Jew of Seville (1844), whose protagonist, Eliacin, is attempting to pass as a gentile in fifteenthcentury Spain.

MEMORIES OF KARL MARX

Lafargue composed “Memories of Karl Marx” in 1890, seven years after Marx’s death. It was published in Die Neue Zeit, the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. 1. The International Labor Conference, organized by Wilhelm II and held at the Chancellor’s Palace in March 1890.