Place de Grève

“ Few anarchists see in the grève générale, as he does, a purely passive revolution, which will prevail without the shedding of a drop of blood or any other violence whatsoever. Most of its anarchist advocates regard it, “not as a strike of folded arms, but as a general revolt of the proletariat, outside of all political lines, for the conquest of the means of production and for complete emancipation.” ”

“ The details which reach us of the extraordinary contest which has just taken place at Paris are equally horrible and curious. Hitherto we have been struck by the absence of that ferocity which distinguished the first Revolution, and the little taste there seemed for shedding blood; but the ferocity of the people broke out upon this occasion in the most terrible examples. There was a savage rancour about this exceeding the usual virulence of civil contests; the people not only murdered, but tortured, their prisoners. ”

“ Many of these great and dusty galleries were silent avenues of machinery, endless raked-out ashen furnaces testified to the revolutionary dislocation, but wherever there was work it was being done by slow-moving workers in blue canvas. The only people not in blue canvas were the overlookers of the work places and the orange-clad Labour Police. And fresh from the flushed faces of the dancing halls, the voluntary vigours of the business quarter, Graham could note the pinched faces, the feeble muscles, and weary eyes of many of the latter-day workers. ”

“ If they are compelled to sacrifice the little ones of the world, their number must at least make amends for their quality. The flames of the Grève struck terror into Paris and the whole of France; but a new pile, kindled on another spot, will redouble that terror. It will be talked of at court, in the colleges, and in the workshops of the people; and such proofs will show more clearly than any edicts, that Louisa of Savoy, the Sorbonne, and the parliament, are resolved to sacrifice the very last heretic to the anathemas of Rome. ”

“ These men, however, working in the great yards, eating their meals near them in an irregular and restless way, form clubs and associations which lead not seldom to strikes—blunders which we call placing ourselves en Grève. ”

“ The waiting hundreds of citizens who, for the last hour, had lined the curbs about the open place, began [284] to withdraw. They did not care to be caught between the clubs of the rioters and the bayonets of the militia.
The mob, filling the main street from wall to wall, entered the plaza like a rushing stream which, confined between barriers at the side, is powerful and resistless, but, spreading out over the broad lowland, loses its momentum and its destructive force. It was so with the marchers. ”

“ If it were necessary, a single ouvrier, or terrassier, could have half a dozen soldiers or police to protect him against the violence of those of his fellows en grève, and the city was dotted with pickets of infantry and cavalry, sergents de ville, sentinels before all unfinished buildings, railway stations, etc. The arts of the demagogue are by no means unknown in this land of universal suffrage, and frantic appeals were made to them on this occasion, but the government remained entirely unimpressed, to its praise be it said. ”

“ Men were singing, shouting, waving clubs, demanding justice for their fellow-workers, and the recognition of the rule of the proletariat. At the junction of every street and alley their members had been swelled by the angry and resentful Industrialists of Fairweather. The cordon of police that had attempted to block their way was swept down as though it had been a rope of straw. Now, five hundred strong, reckless and determined, they were bearing down on the center of the city’s industries. ”

“ The riots at Homestead, at Chicago, at Lattimer are but skirmishes between the picket lines, informing us that a general conflict is imminent. Let us thank God that we are not in the struggle. Let us thank Him that our labor problem is no worse than it is. ”

“ At the time of the insurrection of 1839, in the Rue Saint-Martin a little, infirm old man, pushing a hand-cart surmounted by a tricolored rag, in which he had carafes filled with some sort of liquid, went and came from barricade to troops and from troops to the barricade, offering his glasses of cocoa impartially,--now to the Government, now to anarchy.
Nothing can be stranger; and this is the peculiar character of uprisings in Paris, which cannot be found in any other capital. To this end, two things are requisite, the size of Paris and its gayety. ”

“ All the way down Regent Street she had peeped out from the cab windows, hoping to catch sight of familiar faces or fascinating wares in the shopping paradise of the late nobility; but, though the stores still stood, few passers were to be seen, and the filthy, smoky aspect of the sidewalks told that anarchy was rampant even here. Revolution is silent in England. The people uprising in their might do not overturn monuments and lop the limbs from statues. ”

“ It is evident, further, that street demonstrations can turn into a popular revolution only when [Pg 42] they are a manifestation of masses, i.e., when they embrace, in the first place, the workers of factories and plants. To make the workers quit their machines and stands; to make them walk out of the factory premises into the street; to lead them to the neighboring plant; to proclaim there a cessation of work; to make new masses walk out into the street ”

“ The news of the strike had spread through the two cities, and large numbers of the more turbulent class of the population, together with many workmen from the factories who sympathized with the strikers, hastened to Twenty-eighth Street, and there was soon gathered a formidable mob in which the few striking railroad employees were an insignificant quantity. ”

“ The next step was to proclaim a general strike, but even then there was so little idea among the working classes that anything like violence was intended, that women and children strolled out to the meeting-place as for an outing, with the men [168] who were unconsciously being led into action which was to brand them as revolutionaries and assassins. ”

“ Behind its doors, swinging as easily between the street and the liquor-fumed halls as the soul swings between right and wrong, the disturbed minds of the working-men become clouded, heated, and wrothily ready for deeds of violence. ”

“ The shattering of the partition, the noise of splitting and ripping boards, the sharp crash caused by the shivering of the office door, the loud and angry outcries of the rioters warn the serene occupant of the office that his position has become one of extreme peril. ”

“ Revolutionary syndicalism keeps alive in the minds of the masses the desire to strike, and only prospers when important strikes, accompanied by violence, take place. ”

“ Finally, the senseless cry of "Every man to his arrondissement! when every man ought to have been out of his arrondissement at strategical points, settled matters. An immense number of barricades were thrown up, without system, in each arrondissement, and heroically defended, without method, with the inevitable sequel of capture and massacre, and thus was the Paris of the Revolution annihilated piecemeal. ”

“ At the bottom of the blind alley were more constables, ready in case of the mob of unemployed making a rush round from the front of the Town Hall. But at present it surged, a human sea lashed to fury by the whip of hunger and the voice of Socialism, in the square outside the long row of first-floor windows where the sumptuous luncheon was laid for a hundred guests. ”

“ Mother knits contentedly in her seat, with a smile on her face that was not born of the Ludlow Street tenement. Over yonder a knot of black-browed men talk with serious mien. They might be met any night in the anarchist café, half a dozen doors away, holding forth against empires. Here wealth does not excite their wrath, nor power their plotting. In the roof garden anarchy is harmless, even though a policeman typifies its government. ”

“ Suddenly at noon, these streets are all astir with an 281 industrial, unarmed mob, and the whole quarter is given over to an insurrection, peaceful and unoffending. These workers are making their way to restaurant or rôtisserie or cabaret; some of them saunter along, taking their breakfast "sur le pouce." The men, in stained blouses, are alert, earnest, and self-respecting ”

“ This was the 25th of April, an editorial in the New York Times, written in view of the contemplated strike on the 1st of May for eight hours. The New York Tribune, now no longer the oracle of the great American tribune, Horace Greeley, that defender of oppressed humanity, but the servile organ of the most oppressive forms of monopoly, said just about this time in an editorial: "The best policy would be to drive workingmen into open mutiny against the law." ”

“ On the very day after the Congress, the Moabit riots broke out, which sounded like the overture to an era of trouble. The labor unions, the great federations of workingmen, hitherto so measured in their movements and actions, now ostensibly incline to harsher tactics. And the militant organizations of the employers likewise confederated take the initiative and answer the threats of strike with the declarations of a lockout, throwing hundreds of thousands of men on the street and carrying the social struggle to a degree of exasperation it never before reached in Germany. ”

“ But it was the following day, the 25th, that probably the most notable event of the insurrection took place. "The next day, Sunday, was employed," Guillaume says, "in the drawing up and printing of a great red placard, containing the program of the revolution which the Central Committee of Safety of France proposed to the people...." (5) The first article of the program declares: "The administrative and governmental machinery of the State, having become powerless, is abolished. The people of France once again enter into full possession of themselves." ”

“ Already the revolution was an accepted fact; already business was being resumed throughout the city. Abroad the downfall of the Council had been received for the most part with delight. Nowhere was the Council popular, and the thousand cities of Western America, after two hundred years still jealous of New York, London, and the East, had risen almost unanimously two days before at the news of Graham's imprisonment. Paris was fighting within itself. The rest of the world hung in suspense. ”

“ Labour stood out as the strongest party in opposition, and its parliamentary leaders took their places on the Front Opposition Bench. [139] The opening took place under ominous signs of civil strife. The unrest of labour, restrained by patriotic motives during the war, had already broken out into open flame. A general strike on the Underground Railways held London in a grip of paralysis, made harder by a bitter February frost. Mr. Lloyd George attended Parliament before going to the Peace Conference in order to utter a grave warning against the dangers of those social strifes. ”

“ And the proletariat will accomplish its revolution by the organisation, both in the political and economic world, of strong class representation and class action, which will penetrate and bind together all phases of their life. Division is a return to feudalism. The stoppage of transportation proposed by the supporters of the general strike would force society to revert to the conditions of an inferior civilisation. ”

“ The riots and general disturbances of 1905 were largely confined to the cities and to workers on the various railways who had been in sufficiently close touch with urban life to make them quicker to feel the need of change and progress. ”

“ Whole streets of the city are suddenly deserted and the business houses closed, for this or that lightly given reason, and the next 292hour that street, under obscure leaders may be filled with a howling mob, that seems to be howling about nothing. ”

“ A. In the first place, the strike originated here with the railroad employés—firemen and brakemen ostensibly. Miners and mechanics, generally, and workmen generally were working on quietly, and with no demonstration of any sort, apparently reasonably well satisfied. There had been, from time to time, reductions in the wages, which are always accompanied, as every one knows, with more or less feeling of dissatisfaction on the part of those whose pay is reduced; but this strike here, it occurred to me, was a sympathetic movement in accord with the strike of the firemen. ”

“ These immense enclosures alone can contain at the same time civil war and an odd and indescribable tranquillity. Ordinarily, when an insurrection commences, when the shop-keeper hears the drum, the call to arms, the general alarm, he contents himself with the remark:--
"There appears to be a squabble in the Rue Saint-Martin." ”

“ When unusual needs arose for them, such as the building of the great highways and air-lines, of canals, tunnels, subways, and fortifications, levies were made on the labor-ghettos, and tens of thousands of serfs, willy-nilly, were transported to the scene of operations. Great armies of them are toiling now at the building of Ardis, housed in wretched barracks where family life cannot exist, and where decency is displaced by dull bestiality. In all truth, there in the labor-ghettos is the roaring abysmal beast the oligarchs fear so dreadfully—but it is the beast of their own making. ”

“ We must furnish work for the strong, a hospital for the invalids, and a house of detention for those who resist the benefits of the law.”
The Revolution, like every violent social or political movement, had a disturbing effect on the regular industries, and threw upon the streets of Paris vast numbers of workmen whom want of occupation plunged into a misery rendered still deeper by the prevailing scarcity of bread. ”