Letters to Émile Armand

PARIS, FEBRUARY 12, 1917

For insertion[58]

My dear Armand,

I have just left prison. I spent five years there. The comrades know why and under what circumstances. I had to answer for the triple crime of being a foreigner, an anarchist, and not wanting to become a fink. But that’s all in the past now. I return to life with the same ideas that formerly guided me. I was harshly struck—unjustly, but does social prosecution ever do otherwise? I was tortured for years. Experience thus confirmed me in our criticisms and resolutions. And yet my concept of our fight has changed quite noticeably. I no longer believe that the anarchist formula can be contained in one formula alone; I grant much less importance to words than realities, to ideas than to aspirations, to formulas than to sentiments and acts. I am thus ready to collaborate with all those who will show a fraternal goodwill without attributing great importance to secondary divergences in ideas.

This is how I would have been happy to cooperate in your work, insofar as it was within my strength, even though I have many and serious criticisms of it. But a moral reason prevents me from doing so. I request that you seriously weigh it and make it known to our friends. Among you current collaborators there is a militant[59] whose strange attitude during the tragic affair of “illegalism” contributed in no small measure to my being buried alive for years. And perhaps it did more harm to some others.

As soon as it will be possible for me to completely elucidate this affair I will do so. In the meanwhile I cannot agree to collaborate in any way with a man upon whom such serious suspicions weigh and who, in any case, was fickle in the saddest meaning of the term to my companion and me.

I don’t name him. I don’t want to open a polemic on this subject. Those who know of these affairs that are already ancient for so many will understand. As for the others, unless it’s absolutely necessary I don’t want to initiate them into these dismal stories. If you can offer me conditions for collaboration that are morally acceptable I would be only too happy to do so.

I take this occasion to thank you for the many services you have rendered me since the first hour of my incarceration. And I shake your hand in friendship.

V.S. Le Rétif

MARCH 19, 1917

My Dear Armand:

I ask that you publish these few lines, which are addressed both to you and the comrades who remembered me and assisted me in the present circumstances. I am infinitely touched by their gesture. I thank them.

You prefer not to publish the letter from Toulouse, where I explained the reasons that prevent me from collaborating in your work, though fully one of you. As you wish. In any case, I don’t want to cause a polemic on this troublesome theme. I prefer to completely abstain. Before certain moral situations there is only one thing to do: leave. I’m leaving.

But I want to say to our comrades that it’s not due to discouragement nor is it the result of a divergence in ideas. In this time of contrary winds that throw weathervanes into a panic, it’s necessary to specify things in this way. I have lost the sectarian intransigence of the past. I now attribute less importance to words than to ideas, to ideas than sentiments, and much less importance to casuistry than to good will. I feel myself capable of working with all those who, animated by the same desire for a better life—one clearer and more intelligent—advance toward their future, even if their paths are different from mine, and even if they give different names I don’t know to what in reality is our common goal.

And so I am still one of you, confirmed by harsh personal experience, by my desire for combat and the opinion that our effort, however feeble it might be, is necessary. If I currently abstain from your work it’s only for the reasons I already laid out and that I ask you to make known to the friends of Par-delà la Mêlée.

Yours,

V.S. Le Rétif

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