“Pouget had pillaged nothing, planned nothing, directed nothing. He was simply overheard to say of these poor devils during the pillage: ‘They take bread because they are hungry. They are right.’ He repeated it spiritedly in the assize court, and he was condemned to eight years of prison for ‘incitation to pillage.’ It would have been more precise to condemn him for _approbation_ of pillage, since, in point of fact, he had not committed any other crime.”
During its entire existence the _Père Peinard_ carried on an extensive traffic in brochures, _chansons_, etc., of the same violent nature as itself. It also published an _Almanack_ for 1894, which is now rare and much prized in book-collecting quarters.
The first anarchist _Almanack_ was issued in 1892 by Sébastien Faure, who made the laughable and, from the point of view of sale, disastrous blunder of basing it on the anarchist-hated Gregorian calendar.
Pouget’s _Almanack_, forewarned, avoided this rock of offence. It was a rehash of his paper, supplemented by a lengthy philosophico-historical disquisition on the calendar, appreciations of all the months, allegorical observations on tides and eclipses, an anarchist chronology, and a bundle of fantastic predictions,—all in the paper’s highly coloured _faubourien_ slang.
“If ever,” says Jean Grave somewhere, “the history of this movement is written, if ever it is revealed how the anarchist publications have lived, how they have amassed sou by sou the sums necessary to their appearance, the world will be astounded at the proofs of solidarity and devotion which will thus be brought to light. It will appreciate what a force conviction is, especially among the most disinherited.”
There is something pathetic as well as diverting about the forced preoccupation of the anarchist organs with the question of the money which they consider it a part of their mission to depreciate, something well-nigh cruel in the ironical destiny that compels them to be perpetually harping on the thing which it is one of their pet dreams to abolish,—to plead on their last pages for the same thing their first pages abuse.
This inconsequence between the thought and the deed is not, however, to be confounded with hypocrisy. It is accepted because unavoidable, but accepted sorrowfully and bitterly; and it does not profit individuals.