A biting satirical essay by Octave Mirbeau examining social inequality in 1890s France. Through Jules Huret’s interviews with capitalists and workers, Mirbeau exposes the willful blindness of the wealthy elite to mounting social tensions, drawing parallels to pre-Revolutionary France.
M. Jules Huret is a magnificent interviewer—and I mean that as no faint praise, for it implies intellectual qualities of the highest order and a profound grasp of the subjects on which, with terrifying bonhomie, our inquisitor goes about questioning people.
No one excels as he does at capturing in bold, characteristic strokes the true moral physiognomy of whoever he has chosen to fix with his soul-confessor’s gaze. Even with those we know least about, we find ourselves saying, once the portrait is complete and with perfect confidence: “Now there’s a man who looks exactly like himself!” Through a thousand insidious questions, he knows how to envelop his subject and lead them to that precise point of confession where one need only extract the intimate essence of their mind. We have them then au naturel, in dressing gown and slippers, startlingly true to life, with their everyday face, thoughts, and soul. And they can protest all they like afterwards, they can deny their own ideas, contradict their own words—denials, disavowals, protests won’t touch us. We will see in them only belated regret or irritated spite at having shown themselves so truthfully.
“Ah! They won’t catch me again!” they cry, furious at having let the most secret drawers of their soul be violated.
In which they are mistaken, for M. Jules Huret always catches them again.
In his Inquiry into Literary Evolution, M. Jules Huret had unveiled the stark naked soul of the man of letters and the poet, and one must admit it wasn’t a pretty sight. With his Inquiry into the Social Question, published today, he shows us through vivid, penetrating portraits—portraits painted by the subjects themselves—what a capitalist and a proletarian really are, and it’s scarcely more consoling. What emerges above all from these spoken studies is that nobody knows exactly how we should understand the social question or where it’s leading us—neither the capitalist, quite comfortable in the fortress of his millions, nor the beaten-down, weary proletarian counting on vague theories from leaders drunk on words who don’t know what they want.
The Inquiry into the Social Question had appeared in fragments three years ago in Le Figaro, not without causing scandal, for M. Jules Huret, concerned solely with truth, had neglected to flatter the newspaper’s preferences or stroke its ideas by prettifying the men who best represent it. There were denials, politely recorded but deceiving no one, which only added to the already delicious comedy of certain figures.
After three years—three centuries—it turns out nothing in this curious book has aged; everything remains, on the contrary, thrillingly current. Besides a foreword where the author establishes and summarises the socialist state of mind in concise, solid pages, the work is preceded by two prefaces: one by M. Jean Jaurès, very vague in his proletarian demands, the other by M. Paul Deschanel, vaguer still in his bourgeois resistance. Neither answers the various questions M. Jules Huret poses. Where we needed a programme, future plans, clear formulas, they content themselves with writing according to their temperament—a page of eloquence that’s often not very eloquent but always very empty. Fundamentally, they resemble each other in their shared preoccupations, which one senses are exclusively political. What I see most clearly in M. Jean Jaurès’s revolutionary spirit, as in M. Deschanel’s conservative spirit, is that both have, through different means, the same devouring ambition for power. When M. Jaurès protests indignantly against being called a “state socialist” as M. Léon Say once dubbed him from the tribune, it really does make one smile a bit. He is merely playing with words. No, M. Jaurès isn’t a state socialist in the arbitrary sense attributed to that sort of politician. But he is something worse. What is collectivism if not a frightful aggravation of the State, if not the violent, dreary tutelage of all a country’s individual forces, all its living energies, all its soil, all its tools, all its intellectual life, by a State more oppressive than any other, by a State discipline more suffocating and which has no other name in our language than State slavery? For I would really like to know how M. Jaurès reconciles his avowed respect for individualism with the servitude of his collectivist doctrines, and how, with all his ideas propped up by the State, he can one day dream of the disappearance of this State which is the sole foundation on which he claims to establish his future society?
⁂
The Inquiry into the Social Question gives us the opinions of important personages who occupy leading positions in European politics, finance, industry, and science.
We have the opinion of M. de Rothschild and that of M. Guesde, Bebel and the Duke of Doudeauville, John Burns and Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Adolf Wagner and Malatesta, Pastor Stoecker and Paul Brousse, Monsignor Ireland and M. Cousté, M. Albert Christophle and M. de Hauseman, and how many others! Revolutionaries and conservatives, theoreticians, sect leaders and shepherds of peoples, and the crowd too, in the anonymous, symbolic face of the factory worker, the peasant, the sailor. Nothing is missing. We have the port, the village, the industrial town, the factory, and all they must represent in social misunderstandings, demands and struggles, wealth for some, misery for others, consciences marching towards a defined goal. It seems that from all these contradictory testimonies there should emerge, if not a clear idea for social reconstruction, at least the theoretical or emotional expression of the economic malaise in which Europe struggles, and the unanimous certainty that something must be done. Well, no! On one side, blind certainties; on the other, vague violence. Most of them—conservatives and revolutionaries alike—treat these grave, anguishing questions by rehashing, without conviction, ideas repeated a hundred times over, ideas that have been dragging through drawing rooms and streets, newspapers and chatter, since time immemorial. It’s like a gathering of concierges gossiping in the lodge of an evening.
Let’s take the conservatives today. We will study the revolutionaries later.
Baron Alphonse de Rothschild says, whilst smoking a bad cigar to which he draws his mischievous interviewer’s attention:
“But no!… You’re mistaken… Everything’s fine, everything’s perfectly fine… Europe’s situation is admirable; at least it’s not bad… From time to time, little financial crashes… And then everything sorts itself out, everything sorts itself out… The workers?… But they’re good people, the workers, and they’re content with their lot… And why should they complain?… They’re very happy… They have everything—good wages, good housing, even the right to strike when they fancy it… They can save and become capitalists like everyone else… What more could they ask for?… So they ask for nothing, believe me… They work, and you see, work—there’s still nothing like it… It’s the true, the only secret of happiness… Don’t talk to me about some workers’ movement that doesn’t exist, that exists only in perverse imaginations, I assure you. Socialism doesn’t exist either… It’s a scarecrow, and thank God we’re not crows!… Besides, one can’t change what is… In a well-constructed society, there must be rich and poor… What would become of the rich if there were no poor? And the poor, what would they do if there were no rich?… But it’s obvious, it’s obvious!…”
The Duke of Doudeauville also says:
“I don’t believe in the workers’ movement. I don’t believe in socialism… I only believe in the Freemasons… The Freemasons, sir, there’s the contemporary evil!… And where are these people leading us!… Ah! I’d very much like to know… As for your so-called workers’ movement, your so-called socialism… your so-called this or that… let me tell you these are momentary, insubstantial crises that pass!… There’s no need to concern oneself… The workers are good people, and they have great common sense… They know that in a well-constructed society, there must be rich and poor… It’s obvious… And one can turn the question every which way, one must always come back to this: there must be rich and poor!… And look, what I cannot believe is that there are poor people who envy the rich!… Ah! The rich aren’t happy, sir!… They have torments, sorrows unknown to others. Your farms that won’t rent, your forests that burn, your stewards who rob you, your sons running up debts for tarts! Do the poor know these incessant worries?… No, no!… A thousand times no!… So I’ve always dreamed this pretty dream… I’d like to have a little field, a tiny little field, with a tiny little house and a tiny little horse, and a tiny little cow, and two thousand francs income that I’d earn by cultivating this little field, working this little horse and little cow… Two thousand francs… yes, sir, and not a penny more!… To be poor! What a dream!… What a charming, Virgilian idyll!… But I cannot, even in dreams, be this happy, simple poor man… I have too many mansions, too many châteaux, too many forests, too many hunts, too many friends, too many servants! I’m shackled to this ball and chain: fortune!… Ah! I’m very unhappy, I tell you!…”
M. Albert Christophle, then governor of the Crédit Foncier, says likewise:
“Nonsense!… Nonsense!… Socialism doesn’t exist, and there are no crises, no troubles, no malaise, there’s only contentment and joy. The workers are good people who understand their duty and who work cheerfully, singing… Say what you like, do what you will. In a well-constructed society, there must be rich and poor. It’s always been thus; it will always be thus. Social equilibrium depends on it… Besides, listen to this little fable. It’s characteristic… Here goes… I’m a hunter. In the past, when I was poor, I couldn’t accept that there should be private hunting grounds, and I sincerely resented that everyone wasn’t granted the right to hunt on State property. Well, when I became rich, I changed my mind all at once. I immediately admired the economic utility of grand hunts where one sees very fine people spending two hundred thousand francs a year feeding pheasants… Come now! Hand on heart, could a poacher spend two hundred thousand francs feeding pheasants on a hunting ground? That’s the whole question!… And it’s also this: my example proves it’s very easy to become rich… As for your so-called socialism, it’s nothing, nothing at all!… At most it’s a German fog, a beer-drinker’s and pipe-smoker’s fog… We, sir, we drink wine and smoke delicious cigars… That’s how one should understand socialism!”
M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu says:
“I’m an economist; consequently, I know what I’m talking about. Well, I say that in a well-constructed society, there must be rich and poor; poor to make the rich feel more keenly the value of their riches, and rich to give the poor the example of all the social virtues… You tell me ideas have changed, or are changing, or will change one day. I know nothing of it, and it’s indifferent to me. What matters is establishing that interests are immutable. Now, interest demands that I enrich myself by all means and as much as possible… I don’t need to know this and that. I enrich myself—that’s the fact!… As for the workers, they receive their wages, don’t they?… What more do they want? Come now! You’re not going to establish a comparison, I hope, between a distinguished economist such as myself and the stupid worker who knows nothing, who doesn’t even know who J. B. Say is… The worker, sir, is the living field I plough, that I break up, that I turn over in great human clods to sow the seeds of fine louis d’or that I’ll harvest, that I’ll store in my safes… As for social emancipation, equality, what do you call it—solidarity? My God! I see no objection to their being established in the next world… But in this world, I say! Policemen, more policemen, always policemen!”
They all say the same thing, with more or less candour, with more or less ferocity. And their faces take on a strange tragic grandeur through the painful, picturesque contrast with the miseries and human abjections that M. Jules Huret knew how to arrange very skillfully, without exaggeration or declamation, throughout his striking book. And thus appears the face of M. Henry Schneider, so combative, so imperious, so cutting, rather sinister really, against that infernal backdrop of Le Creusot, where in smoke and flames one sees herds of men bustling about, sweating, groaning with effort, burning their gaunt faces at the furnace mouths, twisting their arms on glowing bars, vainly seeking amongst the sulphurous vapours, through the toxic atmosphere, a little breathable air for their poison-eaten chests.
And they see nothing, hear nothing, understand nothing of what rumbles in the depths of the social body. Their blind certainty has something astonishing and irritating about it. Anarchism, socialism, feminism, anti-Semitism, all the preparatory forms of the ineluctable revolution—so many negligible accidents that mean nothing and should be laughed at.
Ah! It would have been curious if someone before ’89 had had the idea, like M. Jules Huret, of interviewing the important personages of the time—the Turgots, the Malesherbes, the Neckers, and Louis XVI, and the fine lords always celebrating, and the fat financiers always usuring. All of them, certainly, would have shown the same maddening confidence and demonstrated the same tragic blindness. And when the Revolution was already upon them, when it was sinking its claws into their skin and breathing its breath of hatred and blood in their faces, they would have said with the same smiling tranquillity:
“But no… but… no! It’s nothing… it’s always been thus… it will always be thus… And the poor really are very happy and charming people.”
1896.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 