Octave Mirbeau’s scathing 1894 defence of Félix Fénéon, arrested without evidence during France’s anarchist trials. A masterpiece of satirical journalism exposing judicial abuse and political persecution in Belle Époque Paris.
We must return to the case of Félix Fénéon.
You don’t violently tear a man from his life; you don’t cast mourning into his home; you don’t reduce him to poverty by snatching away the livelihood that sustains three innocent souls who depend on his love. This man of quiet demeanour, elevated mind, and rare cultivation—you don’t drag him between guards from the vile cells of Mazas to the sinister antechambers of examining magistrates. You don’t subject him, like some thief or murderer, to the degrading measurements of the anthropometric service, that recruiting office for the prison hulks. You don’t turn his body, stripped by the heavy hands of gendarmes, into an experimental object for the manipulations and calculations of some official criminologist. You don’t, in short, commit this whole series of human violations without superior reasons, without an immediate right of public interest and social defence. Fénéon’s crime must therefore be well-established, well-defined, and horrific.
What is Fénéon’s crime? Who or what does he threaten? What frightful dangers will his mere presence among the living bring about—what cataclysms? How is this charming and overly modest writer, this precious artist, this faithful friend, this curious observer of life’s comedies, a disturbance, an impediment to M. Rouvier’s digestion, to M. Cornelius Herz’s honour, to M. Joseph Reinach’s legislative and denunciatory mania, to all the sacred prestige of the Republic and the prebends that flow from it?
One would like to know.
M. Félix Fénéon has a family that weeps, friends who grieve his absence. It seems to me that this family and these friends have the right to know why he is suddenly torn from them; why they are condemned—the family to lose its sole support, the friends perhaps to doubt their companion. For justice always has strange and deep roots in our souls. Despite the numerous blows that have tarnished its prestige, we cannot easily accept that it tortures someone for pleasure, that it makes a game of others’ pain. We want to believe it stands, with its great name and symbol, as a dam of honour and peace against the evil encroachments and wicked works of politics. To explain such severity, to justify such attacks on a citizen’s liberty and honour, it must have gathered not merely grave suspicions but undeniable certainties, and gathered them from pure sources.
Yet we know nothing, they want to tell us nothing, they can tell us nothing. Before the anxious questions of friends, before the mother’s inexpressible martyrdom, the police are silent, justice is silent. The police have accomplished their work of darkness and wash their hands of it; justice investigates. It investigates based on newsmongers’ chatter and concierges’ denunciations, rejecting the testimony of those who have lived with the prisoner, who know his soul’s depths and vouch for his innocence. And meanwhile, a man is there, stripped of everything; a man is there, between four walls heavier on his skull than the four sides of a coffin; a man is there, ignorant of what they want from him, what awaits him beyond the walls, and who, to rest his eyes from the dreadful suggestion of misfortune that seeps from the prison stones, has only his guards’ indifferent faces and the judge’s eye. Now, whoever has seen the judge’s eye has seen the depths of human despair.
There are things we must not forget and must repeat ceaselessly, so they penetrate the minds of those who still believe in justice and also believe in the infamy of those it has marked with its seal. When M. Laurent Tailhade, struck down by the bomb, bloody, skull split, flesh torn by shrapnel, lay gasping on the floor of Restaurant Foyot, justice rushed in and, interrupting his treatment, subjected the wounded man to the torture of a formal interrogation. At the mere name of M. Laurent Tailhade—ignorant that he was one of our finest poets and knowing him only as the anarchist he is not—justice, with its customary flair, had sniffed out the criminal in him. During those minutes of savage imbecility, it accused him of having lit the bomb and, for good measure, of having “sat on it.”
I imagine the mistake regarding Fénéon equals that one, minus a few wounds.
Is Fénéon an anarchist? I don’t know and don’t want to know. And no one has the right to ask him, since through writing, speech, or deed, he has shown no political preference and engaged in no propaganda work. A scrupulous and punctual employee, he fulfilled his duty and expressed no opinion—unconstitutional or otherwise—before his colleagues: all are there to testify to it. As a writer, he confined himself by choice to questions of art and literature, the only areas where he showed any passion, tempered with irony. His friendships were all exclusively among young poets and painters of various tendencies. Certainly, he must have formed particular conceptions about society, of an aristocratic and free philosophy, as he had about literature and art. That was his right, I should think. It’s nobody’s business, and even the prosecutor general has no jurisdiction over them, since they are printed nowhere. Even in these times, when we are determined to violate all modesty, repudiate all generosity, erase from our social life the noble customs inherited from our ancestors—going so far as to criminalise that admirable right of asylum, which remained intact and respected by human brutes in history’s most savage and bloodiest epochs—how can we punish unexpressed thought?
So what do they reproach Fénéon with?
The day they spoke of expelling Alexandre Cohen from France—he too displeased his concierge—M. Émile Zola, yielding to friends’ solicitations, went to see M. Raynal. He asked him his reasons for such an act of violence. M. Raynal had none. He stammered some vague gossip. Pressed by M. Zola, who kept repeating, “Give me a reason, any reason, and I’ll be satisfied,” M. Raynal, greatly embarrassed, finally said: “It seems he’s a German spy.”
When you have nothing to say about someone arrested by error or simple dilettantism, you accuse them of being a spy. It’s vague, it’s sovereign over the crowd’s mind, and it satisfies everyone.
They have tried this classic method on Fénéon. It hasn’t worked, any more than the others. If, as police notes insinuated, Fénéon had been selling our military secrets to the Germans since 1884, he would probably be rather richer than he is. But this sort of joke has an undeniable merit: it allows them to keep a prisoner longer when they don’t know what to do with him and daren’t release him for fear of mockery from some, indignation from others. The police have their modesty and fear ridicule. Because of the essentially vague nature of such accusations, because of the difficulties and delays such judicial investigations generally entail, they are always well-placed to say: “We’re on a trail… we’ve got the real trail…” until the day when, having tried everything, attempted everything, turned everything over, they are obliged to open the prison doors to their victim… Oh, out of pure delicacy, and for lack of serious proof…
Either release Fénéon or specify his crime. Tell us what he has blown up, whom he has killed, what he has sold.
Enough of this gossip.
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