A Dance Insider/Arts Voyager May Day exclusive: Michel Ragon’s The Book of the Vanquished (“La mémoire des vainçus”) (Extracts, in newly revised translation, with new introduction)

by and copyright Michel Ragon
Translation copyright Paul Ben-Itzak
Original French-language novel copyright Éditions Albin Michel

Editor’s note: On this May Day 2020, with Donald Trump abusing the Military Production Act to potentially send workers to their deaths by asserting he has the right to pre-empt state decisions to close the meat-packing plants which are loci for virus contamination (where’s Upton Sinclair when you need him?), and with the governors of Iowa and Nebraska insisting that those who refuse to return to hazardous working conditions will see their unemployment benefits cut off, we thought the moment propitious to revise and share our translated excerpts of Michel Ragon’s “La mémoire des vainçus” (literally, “the memory of the vanquished”), as proof that if the struggle is still not over, the battles of the vanquished are never really in vain. And can still serve as inspiration for the labor and human rights struggles to come. (To read the Paris Tribune / Arts Voyager serialized publication of Michel Ragon’s “Trompe-l’Oeil,” click here. )

“The ideal is when one is able to die for one’s ideas. Politics is when one can live for them.”

— Charles Péguy, cited on frontispiece, “The Book of the Vanquished.”

“Books can also die, but they last longer than men. They get passed on from hand to hand, like the Olympic flame. My friend, my father, my older brother, you have not entirely slid into oblivion, because this book of your life exists.”

— Michel Ragon, Prologue, “The Book of the Vanquished.”

Part One: “The little girl in the fishmongers’ wagon” (1899-1917)

(Excerpt, 1911-1912.)

“As for me, I’m just a poor sap! For those of us at the bottom of the heap, there’s nothing but bad breaks in this world and the one beyond. And of course, when we get to Heaven, it’ll be up to us to make sure the thunder-claps work.”

— Georg Büchner, “Woyzeck,” cited on the frontispiece of Part One of “The Book of the Vanquished.”

“Sometimes it’s better to be the vanquished than the victor.”

— Vincent Van Gogh, cited in Lou Brudner’s preface to “Büchner, Complete Works,” published by Le Club Français du livre, Paris, 1955.

Translator’s note: With the exception of Fred and Flora, who may be real, may be fictional, or may be composites, all the personages cited below and in Michel Ragon’s novel are based on real historical figures, notably Paul Delesalle (1870-1948), the Left Bank bookseller. Later adopting the pen name Victor Serge, Victor Kibaltchich (1890-1947) would become a noted Socialist theorist who, like Fred in “The Book of the Vanquished,” eventually broke with the Bolsheviks. Rirette Maîtrejean was his actual companion. Raymond-la-Science, René Valet, and Octave Garnier were real members of the Bonnot Gang, the details of their denouement recounted by Ragon as translated below accurate. For the other personalities evoked, including leading figures in the European Anarcho-Syndicaliste milieu in its heyday, as well as certain events alluded to, I’ve included brief footnotes, as these personalities and events may not be as familiar to an Anglophone audience as to Ragon’s French readers, for whom they represent markers in the national memory, notably the infamous “Bande à Bonnot,” whose exploits still resonate in a contemporary France wracked by youthful alienation and haunted by the terrorism in which this is sometimes manifest.

Every morning the cold awoke the boy at dawn. Long before the street-lanterns dimmed, in the pale gray light he shook off the dust and grime of his hovel at the end of a narrow alley flanking the Saint-Eustache church. Stretching out his limbs like a cat he flicked off the fleas and, like a famished feline, took off in search of nourishment, flairing the aromas wafting down the street. With Les Halles wholesale market coming to life at the same time, it didn’t take long for him to score something hot. The poultry merchants never opened their stalls before debating over a bowl of bouillon, and the boy always received his share. Then he’d skip off, hop-scotching between the trailers loaded with heaps of victuals.  Every Friday he’d march up the rue des Petits-Carreaux to meet the fishmongers’ wagons arriving from Dieppe, drawn by the aroma of seaweed and fish-scales surging towards the center of Paris. The sea — this sea which he’d never seen and which he pictured as a catastrophic inundation — cut a swathe through the countryside before it descended from the heights of Montmartre. He could hear the carts approaching from far away, like the rumbling of thunder. The churning of the metallic wagon wheels stirred up a racket fit to raise the dead, amplified by the clippety-clop of the horseshoes. Numbed by the long voyage, enveloped in their thick overcoats, the fishmongers dozed in their wagons, mechanically hanging onto the reigns. The horses knew the way by heart. When the first carriages hit the iron pavilions of the market, the resultant traffic jam and grating of the brakes rose up in a grinding, piercing crescendo that reverberated all the way back up to the Poissonnière quartier. The drivers abruptly started awake, spat out a string of invectives, and righted themselves in their seats. Those farther back had to wait until the first arrivals unloaded their merchandise. The horses pawed the ground and stamped their feet. The majority of the men jumped off their carts to go have a little nip in the bistros just raising their shutters.

On this particular Friday, at the rear of one of the wagons sat a small girl. Her naked legs and bare feet dangled off the edge of the cart, and the boy noticed nothing more than this white skin. He drew near. The girl, her head leaning forward, her face hidden by the tussled blonde hair which fell over her eyes, didn’t see him at first. As for the boy, he only had eyes for those plump swinging gams. By the time he was almost on top of them, he could hear the girl singing out a rhymed ditty. He approached his hand, touching one of her calves.

“Eh, lower the mitts! Why, the nerve!”

For the rest of the lengthy excerpt, subscribers e-mail paulbenitzak@gmail.com . Not yet a Dance Insider / Arts Voyager subscriber? Subscriptions are $59 or Euros / year, or $36/students, teachers, artists, dancers, and the unemployed. Just designate your payment via PayPal to paulbenitzak@gmail.com , or write us at that address to learn how to pay by check. Exceptionally for this excerpt, even non-subscribers can can write us before May 7 and receive a free copy.

Fénéon a l’ordre du jour toujours: Au revoir Paris, a très bean toe New York

Paul Signac, “Opus 217. Sur l’émail d’un fond rythmique des mesures et d’angles, de tons et des teintes, portrait de M. Félix Fénéon en 1890.” Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 92.5 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller. © Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. (For more on Signac and his relationship to Fénéon, as described by Guillaume Apollinaire — and more art — click here.)

Text by Michel Ragon
(from “Dictionnaire de l’Anarchie,” published by and copyright Editions Albin Michel, 2008)
Translation by Paul Ben-Itzak

As the exhibition “Félix Fénéon: Les temps nouveaux, de Seurat à Matisse,” migrates across the Atlantic from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to the Museum of Modern Art in New York — with a tweaked title for the Spring show that emphasizes the critic, editor, and modern art promoter’s status among French anarchists — we thought we’d commemorate the occasion with (justement) Michel Ragon’s sketch, as featured in “Dictionnaire de l’Anarchie,” published and copyright Editions Albin Michel, Paris, 2008: (To read our previous coverage of this transatlantic extravaganza — and see more art — start here, then follow the additional links at the end of that article. Click here to read more from Michel Ragon on Anarcho-Syndicalisme,  in translation, and here to read translated excerpts from Monsieur Ragon’s “Trompe-l’Oeil.”)

Fénéon, Félix (1861 – 1944): Anarchist intellectual, dandy, eminent critic of the art of Neo-Impressionism (Seurat, Signac, Lautrec), employee (highly-regarded) of the War Ministry, Félix Fénéon was also an important anti-militarist, suspected of posing a bomb at the Foyot restaurant. Incarcerated [in 1894] during the ‘Trial of 30,’ judged, and acquitted (Mallarmé testified in his favor), he directed [the anarchist artistic journal] L’En Dehors until 1895.

Alphonse Bertillon, “Fénéon Félix,” in “Album des anarchistes,” 1994. Albumin silver print after glass negative, 10.5 x 7 cm. Gilman Collection, Museum Purchase, 2005. © New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bertillon is typically regarded as the father of forensic science — the man who made the various CSIs possible.

Secretary of “La Revue Blanche” (1895-1903), he glorified Bonnard, Vuillard, Matisse.

His short stories in three lines for Matin (1905-1906) are miniature masterpieces. He paraded alcoholic clergymen and syphilitic soldiers and denounced universal suffrage and the right to vote.

In January 1893, in a period when the winter was particularly severe, he wrote, “The moment is propitious for the extinction of pauperism. In a few days, if the frigorific acceleration progresses, the dying-of-hunger race will have completely disappeared.”

He liked to say that the Fatherland is “an entity entirely empty and hollow, like God, like Society, like the State, like Nature, like Morality, etcetera.”

Art critic at Père Peinard, he adopted the tone of [Emile] Pouget [the journal’s publisher, a labor militant and comrade of Paris Communard Louise Michel]: “And merde to the Ecole des Beaux Arts, it’s just a run-down jalopy that needs a good kick in the ass like all the academies, all the institutes and the other bureaucratic machines of the precious pigsty of governance. Therefore no jury, for the independent artists. That’s good that, my God.”

Jean Paulhan, in his preface to Fénéon’s works, wrote: “The anarchist attacks had their reasons, good or not; it’s not for me to judge. Societies have their defects; it seems that French society of the post-War period was particularly ignoble and lack-luster at the same time: detestable and as if disgusted with itself. Even if their only ambition was to provoke precise, explainable, and intelligent crimes, this is enough for the anarchists to warrant our sympathy.”

Bye-bye Paris, a bean toe New York: Georges Seurat (1859-1891), “Marine avec des ancres,” 1890. Oil on canvas, 65.4 × 81.9 cm. New York, the Museum of Modern Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. William A. M. Burden, 1963. Photo ©John Wronn. Félix Fénéon was the first to champion Seurat, Signac, and the Neo-Impressionists.

This is what a real witch-hunt looks like, Mr. President

by I.F. Stone
Copyright 1963 I.F. Stone

First published in I.F. Stone’s Weekly on December 21, 1953 with the headline “Bleak Landscape of the Resistance” and collected in Stone’s “The Haunted Fifties,” published in 1964 by the Merlin Press, Ltd., in the chapter “A Few Who Fought Back.” Above headline ours, as is the selection of the two citations below. Our publication dedicated to Lewis Campbell, who had his students, of whom  PB-I  was later one, performing Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” in 1975.

“‘It’s the worst witch-hunt in political history.”

— President Donald Trump, responding to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat, San Francisco)’s announcement yesterday that the chamber would be launching a formal inquiry into the possibility of impeaching him.

“Have we learned so little?”

— I.F. Stone

CHICAGO — Walsh’s Hall at 104 Noble Street might have been the scene of the Hunky wedding in Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle.” The hall lies in the Polish area, one of those incomparably dreary Chicago working-class districts which sprawl out across the bare plain, miles away from the opulence of Lakefront and Loop. The building is a three-story walk-up, on the top floor of which is the “hall,” a barn of a place, with a stage at one end and a small, faintly and grotesquely Moorish balcony at the other. High columns intended to be ornamental line the wall on either side; they appear to be ordinary cast-iron waterpipe stood on end by some plumber aspiring in his spare time to architecture. The windows are long and narrow. Through them, even under a cloudless sunny sky, the wintry Chicago landscape managed to look gray and bleak — row on row of ill-matched dirty brick and unpainted façades with gaps of dismal backyard in which stood a few forlorn trees.

The hall was freshly hung with blue and white banners — “The Bill of Rights Belongs to All,” “Stop Police State Terror Against Foreign Born Americans,” “Public Hearings on the Lehman-Celler Bill.” On the stage, against the faded green trees of what appeared to be a set left over from some forgotten performance of “As You Like it,” a big benevolent Brünhilde of a woman, six feet tall with gray hair, grandmotherly expression, and one of those round unmistakable Russian Jewish faces, was reading aloud Eisenhower’s campaign pledge to revise the McCarran-Walter [Immigration & Nationality] Act. The woman was Pearl Hart, a Chicago lawyer famous through the Midwest for a lifetime of devotion to the least lucrative and most oppressed kind of clients.

This was the opening session of a National Conference to Repeal the Walter-McCarran Law and Defend Its Victims, sponsored by the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, one of the last functioning Popular Front organizations.

At that early morning hour the seats beside the long wooden tables set up in the hall were but half filled. That such a meeting should be held at all was something of a miracle. The American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born is on the Attorney General’s list. It is now involved in proceedings before the Subversive Activities Control Board to compel the Committee’s registration under the McCarran Act as a Communist-front organization. Its devoted executive secretary, Abner Green, a tall, lean man with the kind of long cavernous face El Greco painted, served six months in jail after refusing to hand over the organization’s records to a federal grand jury in July, 1951. The Secretary of the local Los Angeles committee, Rose Chernin, was unable to attend because she is under bond in denaturalization proceedings. The secretary of the Michigan committee, Saul Grossman, who was present in Chicago, goes on trial in Washington this week for contempt of Congress in refusing to hand his records over to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Despite this, about 300 delegates from 16 states had arrived, some from as far as Seattle and Los Angeles, and 150 more were to follow. They seemed, considering the circumstances, an extraordinarily cheerful lot. But looking at them during the day one was fascinated by several observations. The first was that the audience was a forest of gray heads, almost entirely made up of elderly folk — those who appeared young in that gathering were, when one looked at them more closely, seen to be middle-aged. This is unfortunately true of most radical meetings in America nowadays; it is as if those with their lives still ahead of them are too cautious or cowed to appear at such affairs. What struck one next about the gathering was the absence of foreign accents — with few exceptions one heard American speech indistinguishable from that of the native-born. Assimilation has done its work and relatively few new immigrants are coming in. One has also began to notice that though the deportation drive hits the labor unions hard, there were no labor union representatives present, other than men from a few so-called “progressive” locals. The left labor leaders were conspicuous by their absence; the Taft-Hartley oath made their appearance at the meeting of a blacklisted organization too hazardous.

Not so many weeks ago the case of an Air Force officer named Radulovich attracted national attention. He was about to be blacklisted as a security risk because his father and sister were supposed to have Communist views or connections. Edward Murrow put the case into a brilliant TV show and the Secretary for Air finally cleared Radulovich. But this comparative handful of elderly folk in Chicago were fighting a last-ditch battle for a thousand and one other Raduloviches arrested — as the elder Radulovich may be — for deportation. This Committee, just 21 years old, is the only one of its kind.

On the eve of the conference, the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born was given the treatment. The local Hearst paper published a smear attack and telephoned the Committee’s various sponsors and scheduled speakers in an effort to frighten them off. The campaign failed. Among those who spoke at the banquet in that same hall that night were Professor Louise Pettibone Smith, Professor Emeritus of Biblical History at Wellesley; Professor Robert Morss Lovett, and Professor Anton J. Carlson, the University of Chicago’s famous physiologist, who had not intended to speak but changed his mind after a call from the Hearst press. The sight of these three aged academic Gibraltars of liberalism was inspiring, but again it was sad to note that the distinguished speakers — like the audience — were elderly.

An amazingly large proportion of the victims, too, are elderly. In his comprehensive report, Abner Green pointed out that of 300 non-citizens arrested in deportation proceedings, almost one third — 93 in all — are over the age of 60 and have lived in this country an average of 40 to 50 years. The kind of sick and aged folk being hauled out of retirement for deportation as a political menace to this country would be ludicrous if it did not entail so much tragedy. Two cardiac patients, Refugio Roman Martinez and Norman Tallentire, died of heart attacks in deportation proceedings. The economist and writer, Lewis Corey, long an anti-Communist, died September 16 at the age of 61 in the midst of deportation proceedings begun against him because he was a Communist 30 years ago. In California, a Mrs. Mary Baumert of Elsinore, now 76 years old, was arrested last month for deportation although she had lived here 51 years. In Los Angeles on November 4, Mr. and Mrs. Lars Berg, 69 and 67 respectively, were locked up on Terminal Island for deportation to their native Sweden; they have been American residents since 1904. One Finn arrested for deportation has lived here since he was three months old!

As in the days of the Inquisition, the Immigration and Naturalization Service [the predecessor to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE] and the FBI are engaged in using fear to recruit informers, even informers against their own kin. A striking case was that of Francesco Costa of Rochester, New York, arrested for deportation to Italy at the age of 83 because he refused to provide information to the Justice Department that could be used to deport his son, Leonard, to Italy. A triple squeeze play was brought to bear on Clarence Hathaway, once editor of the Daily Worker. When he declined to be used as an informer, denaturalization proceedings were brought against his wife, Vera. Her brother, William Sanders, 55, an artist who had never engaged in politics, was himself arrested after he refused to give testimony against his sister. Sophie Gerson, wife of Simon W. Gerson, one of those acquitted in the second Smith Act trial of New York Communist leaders, was arrested for denaturalization to punish her husband.

By a political Freudian slip, no mention was made at the conference of one of the worst cases of this kind. In the fall of 1952, Earl Browder and his wife were indicted for perjury in her original immigration proceedings and in February of this year Mrs. Browder was arrested for deportation. These punitive actions followed a warning from Bella Dodd to Earl Browder that he had better show some sign of “cooperation.” Though the ex-Communist leader in lonely poverty has withstood the temptations of the rewards which would be his were he to sell his “memoirs” to the FBI and the magazines, little consideration has been shown him. This reflects the savage unfairness with which the left treats its heretics, however honorably these heretics behave.

The deportations drive cuts across every basic liberty. 15 editors associated with the radical and foreign language press have been arrested for deportation or denaturalization, including Cedric Belfrage of the National Guardian, Al Richman of the West Coast People’s World, and John Steuben of The March of Labor. The foreign language editors arrested are elderly folk editing papers which are dying out as the process of assimilation steadily cuts into the number of Americans who still read the language of “the old country.” Almost one third of those arrested for deportation are trade union members or officials. Ever since the [labor leader Harry] Bridges cases began (the government shamelessly is about to launch a fourth try), the use of deportation as a weapon against labor militants has been overt and obvious. Cases are pending against James Matles and James Lustig of the United Electrical Workers and against the wife of William Senter, of St. Louis, another U.E. official, now up on Smith Act charges.

One of the leading victims of the current drive, Stanley Nowak, was present in Chicago. After 10 years as a Democratic member of the Michigan State Legislature, part of this time as floor leader, he is facing denaturalization proceedings. This Polish-born legislator played a role in the organization of the automobile industry and was first elected to the legislature in 1938 from the West Side area of Detroit, a Ford worker constituency. Similar charges 10 years ago (“Communist and anarchist sympathies”) were dismissed with an apology by then Attorney General Biddle but have been revived under the McCarran-Walter Act.

The most numerous and widespread abuses have occurred in the treatment of Mexican-Americans. Reports to the conference from Los Angeles pictured terror and lawlessness — the use of roadblocks and sudden raids on areas in which persons of Mexican origin live, the invasion of their homes without warrants, the exile to Mexico of native-born Americans of Mexican parentage. The Mexican-American community is kept steadily “churned up” to maintain it as a source of cheap labor in constant flux. Green reported that during the first six months of 1953 more than 483,000 persons were deported to Mexico — while almost half a million others were being brought in for low paid agricultural work.

The government is using “supervisory parole” to harass and intimidate radicals who cannot be deported because no other country will accept them. Three Communist leaders convicted under the Smith Act, Alexander Bittelman, Betty Gannett, and Claudia Jones, out on bail pending appeal, were summoned to Ellis Island recently. They were told that they were being put under supervisory parole, must report once a week, submit to physical and psychiatric examination, abandon all political activity and give information under oath as to their associations and activities. They are challenging the order in the courts.

Last March 17 Attorney General Brownell made a particularly vulgar St. Patrick’s Day speech to the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick — their parents once the target of similar anti-alien hysteria. In this he announced that 10,000 citizens were being investigated for denaturalization and 12,000 aliens for deportation as “subversives.” Action on this scale would dwarf the notorious deportation raids of the early twenties.

The suffering in terms of broken families and disrupted lives is beyond the most sympathetic imagination. As serious is the moral degradation imposed by spreading terror. People are afraid to look lest they be tempted to help, and bring down suspicion on themselves. This is how good folk in Germany walked hurriedly by and shut their ears discreetly to telltale screams. The American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born is fighting to keep America’s conscience alive.