Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

Art And Anarchy /215
want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage
mutilation. In fa ct, it does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally
and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the
differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every
mode oflife, and towards which every mode of life quickens. And so Individualism
exercises no compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should
suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not tty to force people to be
good. It knows that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop Individualism
out of himself.
62. Bernard Lazare: Anarchy and Literature (1894)
During the 1890's in France a wide variety of artists became associated with anarchism, including
painters sucl1 as Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac, Charles Maurin and Maximilien Luce, and
writers and poets such as Paul Adam, Adolphe Rette, alld Octave Mirbeau. Bernard Lazare
(1865- 1903), who later played an important role in the Dreyfus Affair, was a French writer and
journalist who edited, with Paul Adam, the avant-garde literary journal, Les Entretiens
Politiques et Litteraires. Lazare identified himselfas an anarchist at this time and testified as
a clwracter witness on behalf ofjean Grave at his February 1894 trial. The following excerpts,
translated by Paul Sharkey, are taken from his contemporaneolls article, "Anarchy and Literatllre,
" published in La Revolte's Literary Supplement, shortly before the French government
fo rced its closure ill March 1894. Lazare refers to Auguste Vaillant (1861-1894) who was executed
in February 1894for bombing the French Chamber of Deputies (causing only minor injuries),
Ravachol (Franrois Koeningstein, 1859- 1892), who was executed in 1892 for a series of
crimes, including bombings to avenge the police killings of peaceful demonstrators, and Louis
Jules Leauthier (1872- 1894), who stabbed a Serbian diplomat because he was a "bourgeois"
and was later executed along with several other anarchist prisoners following a fa iled uprising
at the notorious French penal colony, Devil's Island.
WE HAD THE AUDACITY TO BELIEVE THAT not everything was fo r the best in the best
of all possible worlds, and we stated and state still that modern society is despicable,
founded upon theft, dishonesty, hypocrisy and turpitude. One of us attacked the voracious
ogre of militarism, one that other bloody idol that goes under the name of fatherland,
another committed the abomination of rejecting war, butchery, ceaseless
looting, hatred of peoples and races and issued a call to universal brotherhood, and
somebody else again spoke ill of the oppressive State, the heartless rule oflaw, the
narrowness and wrong-headed basis of justice, vanity and property, villainy and conventional
morality.