Octave Mirbeau’s scathing reflection on journalism exposes the degradation of truth in Parisian media—cronyism, sensationalism, and lost integrity—calling for a radical rebirth of sincerity, bold criticism, and moral courage.
I spent eight months away from Paris, living in a Breton village amongst farmers and fishermen, somehow absorbed into their hardy existence and rough labour. It does you good, I assure you—soothes frayed nerves, eases swollen hearts. After battles too fierce, one needs to plunge into a bath of solitude and silence. My thoughts drifted away without a single regret for what I had left behind, and my only melancholy came from knowing that before long, I would have to take up that thankless grind again.
I did nothing but walk by day along the shores, join the fishermen at sea, scramble across rocks and moors, and in the evenings, reread beloved books. I read few newspapers—only those that chance washed up on these wild coasts—but the little I did read left me thoroughly dejected. From a distance, in these calm surroundings never troubled by the fevers and clamour of the great city, one judges better; impressions feel more naive, more accurate and powerful, because one has time to reflect and understand. And I was genuinely horrified to see what malignant work I had so often contributed to, and what journalism churns out daily.
Politics despised and scorned, literature shrunk to the shabby dimensions of the shop counter, art dragged down to the basest trade, generous aspirations smothered, disbelief paraded about, triumphant advertisements paid for in cash or handshakes that trump truth and silence honesty, cowardice genuflecting before money bags. So this was journalism—this thing the public devours each morning without revolt, this thing that shapes their thoughts and feeds their intelligence, that forms their opinions, their admirations, their disgusts.
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Yet for years now, the public has been served this same meal of indigestible pap and poisonous lies. Won’t they ever notice they are being duped, robbed, degraded? When will they demand sincerity from journalism—that is, what they find nowhere else, what’s missing from everything: from art, from theatre, from social inquiry? When will they seek in it some relief from the revolting spectacle of parliamentary horse-trading, political abdications, hatreds that once killed each other and now sit side by side, drinking from the same glass and fraternising merrily? Some bold protest—violent if necessary—against the enervating influence of Paris, cosmopolitan Paris, Paris “city of uprooted multitudes,” Paris that grinds down souls, bludgeons integrity, emasculates energy, reduces all life and thought to mean, base things? When will they call for a revolt against cronyism—that thief of success—which clips the wings of talents trying to soar, only to strap them to the backs of mediocrities crawling sadly in the common dust? Anaemic from the adulterated fare offered to their minds, sickened by the stench wafting from the vents of every literary kitchen, wracked with nausea at the sight of spreading rot, won’t the public expand their lungs and demand from the passing wind a whiff of honesty? Don’t they hope that above the idols wallowing in filth with their worshippers, bold hands will restore their crumbling respect, their dethroned glories, and raise before all searching eyes something grand: a flag, a colossus, or a God? I don’t know.
They must be weary of everything thrown at them in these papers where every rhetorical flourish conceals a trap for their gullibility, where every column masks a blunderbuss aimed at their wallet, where every line dangles bait for their eternal minnow appetites; where everything belongs to the highest bidder and serves the greatest scoundrel, where unhealthy greed and dodgy interests jostle each other from top to bottom of the social ladder. They must be tired of these puppets that society gossip columns endlessly parade before their eyes alongside accepted powers—these buffoonish royalties of theatre and town, whose slightest exploits at club, sport, or boudoir, whose tiniest whims, changes of costume, horses, or mistresses, clutter the Parisian horizon and leave no room for anything worth attention. And then what?
The public—that credulous soul—no longer believes; they have been deceived so often that—this trusting soul—they have become suspicious of everyone. They lump together in their contempt and disgust both the businessmen who live by exploiting them, their passions and instincts, and the brave souls who pass by speaking truth. They want to hear nothing more of honesty or protest. Frivolity, disloyalty, venality—such are the ordinary virtues they attribute to that fine institution called the Parisian Press. To the public, the journalist sells himself to whoever pays; he has become a machine for praise and demolition, like the prostitute a machine for pleasure. He walks his beat in his narrow columns—his pavement—showering caresses and sweet words on those willing to go with him, insulting those who pass by indifferent to his calls, unmoved by his provocations. And this is so well established—that journalists are like this—that one can no longer display admiration in a paper without it being immediately suspected of cash payment, nor hatred without it being treated as blackmail. On pain of having filthy accusations flung in his face, many interesting subjects are forbidden him; he cannot touch, even lightly, on vital questions, those that flow directly from social movements and bind intimately to the physical and moral mechanisms of societies and peoples. That’s a matter for the financial bulletins, whose independence and rates are well known.
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Thanks to this opinion held of him—an opinion he hasn’t known how or wanted to defend himself against—and thanks also to the clique of café, theatre, and gambling den in which he shuts himself away and from which he has grown accustomed to viewing the world as an enemy, forgetting that the world welcomes and respects talent and integrity, the journalist has taken up the position of an outsider in society. He consoles himself by daily souring his bitterness, sharpening his grudges, telling himself that since he doesn’t always receive the respect accorded to life’s regular citizens, he is not bound to practise their bourgeois virtues and duties either. And despite the internal quarrels that sometimes put insults on his pen and swords in his hand, he sinks deeper into this freemasonry of mutual admiration, into this cronyism that gives him the mirage of success, popularity, and consideration.
I have already said a word or two about cronyism, that hypocritical form of indifference, that Tartuffe mask of scepticism. It’s what makes us all, from the first to the last line of a newspaper, construct a vain and often criminal work, for publicity passes as quickly as the reputations it raises, and it smothers conscience. Strange times when it seems a writer’s first merit should be not talent but literary probity, and when one should be more astonished to meet an honest man on one’s path than a genius. With cronyism, everything rises to the same level of blessed praise and honeyed flattery: men and works alike. There’s no longer any separation between genius and mediocrity. Victor Hugo is confused with M. Déroulède, Baudelaire with M. Rollinat, Musset with M. Richepin. Its aberration is such that it slaps the great alongside the small, Molière with M. Buguet, Delacroix with M. Cormon, Gounod with M. Varney.
It’s cronyism that, through incessant proximity and daily elbow-rubbing, has gradually stripped us of our literary enthusiasms, our political convictions, and consequently our fighting fever. It’s what extinguishes hatreds—those fertile hatreds in whose sunlight great things bloom and immortal works grow. Beauty comes from love, and from hatred—that wounded, aching love—comes the ideal and the tenderness that makes the poet, the artist, the patriot. Indifference, that creed of cronyism, is impotent and sterile. It produces only small works that die as soon as they are born, and for which tomorrow won’t remember today.
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This is what journalism is today, what it must be under the regime of press freedom. Yet we lack neither serious talents, nor true courage, nor unassailable integrity. I see them in every paper and every party, as many as there were before, perhaps more. But all this disappears, gets lost and drowned in the midst of the immense newspaper fair that has suddenly brought surging from the earth a howling, swarming crowd of adventurers of every sort, failures of every stripe: financiers without capital, writers without spelling, doctors without diplomas, vaudevillists without rhymes, politicians without parties, inventors without patents, artists without souls, preachers without faith, dandies without shirts.
Under the Empire, when the press was gagged, the voices of Weiss, Veuillot, Prévost-Paradol, Grenier, Hervé, Rochefort rang out superbly and boldly, like trumpet fanfares. The journalist was something and someone. He truly had a resounding platform and a passionate public, sometimes terrible influence, and always the respect that wit and courage command. Today, not a single voice cuts through the dull clamour. A confused buzzing, a gesticulation, and that’s all.
When will they decide, for the reputation, for the consideration, for the honour of journalism, to tear from us this diseased liberty that’s killing it? One less freedom—it’s no great matter for the Republic: she has taken more useful and dear ones from us already.
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Léon Hennique Novel 