Octave Mirbeau defender of the Child
Octave Mirbeau's sensitivity toward the child is evident; it runs through his novelistic and dramatic works, and is also expressed through the vigorous stands he takes in the articles he contributes to the press of his time.
The original beauty of the child — is it not that of young Sébastien Roch, the eponymous hero of Octave Mirbeau's novel, before his father, a vain little provincial shopkeeper dreaming of a great destiny for his son whose glory would of course reflect upon himself, decides to send him to a religious boarding school where "the murder of a child's soul" will be accomplished?
"Sébastien, on whose behalf these marvellous plans were being devised, was a handsome child, fresh and fair, with a healthy complexion flushed by sun and open air, and very frank, very gentle eyes whose pupils had until then reflected only happiness. He had the sprightly greenness, the elastic grace of young saplings that have grown, full of sap, in fertile soil; he also had the undisturbed candour of their vegetable life. (…) At an age when children's minds are already stuffed with sentimental lies, superstitions and depressing poetry, he had the good fortune never to undergo any of those habitual deformities that form part of what is called family education. As he grew, far from withering, his skin took on a livelier colour; far from stiffening, his limbs, constantly in motion, grew more supple, and his eyes retained that deep expression which is like the reflection of wide open spaces and which puts infinity into the mysterious gaze of animals." (1)
This child will suffer the fate that is always that of all young victims of pedocriminal assaults and violence as they are still practised throughout the world and particularly in the West, in France, in this civilisational collapse of the 21st century. When Sébastien Roch appeared in bookshops — the first French novel openly denouncing pedocriminality in a religious boarding school — it was met with a deafening silence.
Mirbeau sees this beauty in every child; the poorest can also, in his eyes, be the most touching, like this "little beggar" whom the maid treats roughly and wants to drive away, whom Mirbeau invites in, feeds, and to whom he gives a few provisions and a few coins.
"He might have been thirteen. His sallow face was charming and delicate: his eyes, very black, heavily ringed with blue, had an expression at once mischievous and nostalgic; his hair, also black, long and straight, would have given him the air of a page such as one sees in chivalric romances and on old stained-glass windows, were it not for the poverty of his jacket torn in ten places, and the wretchedness of his patched, too-short trousers that showed the lower calves, the delicate ankles, the bare feet hardened by walking and yellowed in the dust of the roads. He had, moreover, an appearance of good health and strength." (2)
This sensitivity is also expressed in the compassion Mirbeau feels for all abandoned children, those who remain "On the Road" (3) and who die there, like the two little chimney-sweeps, who today remind us of the terrible reality of those whom our "social services" designate under the generic term "the excluded," or better still by the banal acronym "SDF" [homeless]. The pathetic dialogue of these two little boys whose master "died one evening, overcome by drunkenness, by the side of a ditch" (3), first "put in a beggars' depot" (3), then told "to go away, because there were too many poor people and the room was too small" (3), is simply heartbreaking. The emotional power it arouses is equalled only by the simplicity of the words spoken by these two children seized by the extreme cold of a winter night.
"They returned to the road, heavy-hearted; they walked, walked on… Then, broken with fatigue, shivering under their black rags, they stopped… The plain is empty… No light… What are they to do? Where are they to go? They do not know. The terror of the sky crushes them. The cold tears at them… They feel throughout their bodies a sharp pain, as if their skin were raw… The little chimney-sweeps drew closer to one another, pressed against each other, hand in hand, and the tears freeze at the tips of their lashes. (…)
Second chimney-sweep
− I think I no longer have my feet… It seems to me that my feet have been taken away…
First chimney-sweep
− I no longer know where my head is… I can no longer feel my head… And I am sleepy… (…)
Second chimney-sweep (as in a dream)
− Are you speaking to me? … Where are we? … It is all white… It is like flowers that are smiling… It is…
He falls asleep." (3)
Mirbeau also notes the formidable potential for wonder in the small child, his instinctive curiosity, his need to know and understand the secret workings of nature, set against the mediocre answers that adults give to this primordial questioning.
"I had a love, a passion for nature, very rare in a child of my age. Everything in it interested me, everything intrigued me. How many times did I remain for hours on end before a flower, seeking, in obscure and vague gropings, the secret, the mystery of life! I observed spiders, ants, bees, with deep joys, crossed also by those dreadful anguishes of not knowing, of knowing nothing. Often I put questions to my father, but my father never answered them, and always teased me.
− What a funny fellow you are, he would say to me… Where do you dig up all the things you tell me! … Bees, well! they are the females of the bumble-bees, just as frogs are the females of toads… And they sting lazy children… Are you satisfied?
I had neither books nor anyone to guide me. Nothing discouraged me, and it was a truly touching thing, this struggle of a child against the formidable and incomprehensible nature." (4)
Yet Mirbeau does not remain at the stage of sensitivity. Above all, he does not confuse sensitivity with sentimentality when he takes up the defence of the child in order to call into question the three institutions that hinder his development, break his momentum, lead his soul astray, alienate his freedom, acting insidiously, compromising his propensity for autonomy and his capacity for happiness: the family, religion, and the school.
The family is first and foremost a suffering from which no one escapes through the inevitable allegiance to the archetype of authority: the age-old institution of the pater familias which, under the odious pretext of obedience, induces the child into every form of subjection, anticipating submission to schoolmasters and other teachers, then to the State and to the intricate machinery of society. Mirbeau puts unambiguous words into the mouth of one of the narrators of his novel Dans le ciel (In the sky) :
"What I wanted was, by giving these memories an animated and familiar form, to make more tangible one of the most prodigious tyrannies, one of the most degrading oppressions of life, from which I have not been the only one to suffer, alas. For everyone suffers from it; everyone bears within himself, in his eyes, on his forehead, on the nape of his neck, on every part of the body where the soul reveals itself, where inner emotion surges in saddened lights, in special deformities, the characteristic and mortal sign, the terrifying thumbprint of this initial, indelible family education." (5)
In truth, Mirbeau does not advocate revolt and disobedience within the family itself. He makes a terrible observation. The child is of course entitled to love those who brought him into the world and who, for better or worse, initiated him into it. And that is precisely the heartbreak that any lucid individual may feel who has become aware of the subtle mechanisms of oppression that society has put in place and of which the family, in spite of itself, despite its good intentions, from generation to generation, makes itself the instrument.
"I loved my father, I loved my mother. I loved them even in their ridiculousness, even in their harmfulness to me. (…) They were what all parents are, and I cannot forget that they themselves suffered, as children, no doubt, what they made me suffer. A fatal legacy that we hand on to one another, with a constant and unalterable virtue." (6)
This is not a matter of excusing the inexcusable, of validating an unfortunate state of affairs, but rather of calling into question what constitutes for Mirbeau an offence, an assault upon life. Once this very real and, alas, still topical observation has been established, how can one still dare speak of the flowering of the individual, except to reassure oneself with the inept pseudo-educational propaganda that society maintains, that sinister charnel-house of consciences?
"Every reasonably well-constituted being is born with dominant faculties, individual forces that correspond exactly to a need or an amenity of life. Instead of watching over their development in a normal direction, the family is quick to depress and annihilate them. It produces only the déclassés, the rebels, the unbalanced, the unhappy, by casting them, with a marvellous instinct, outside their own selves; by imposing upon them, by virtue of its legal authority, tastes, functions, actions that are not theirs, and that become, no longer a joy, which they ought to be, but an intolerable torment. How many people do you meet in life who are adequate to themselves?" (6)
Quite apart from its propagandist action, from a quasi-intrinsic proselytism, from its traditional and secular alliance with the powers and the powerful, religion — which ought to confine itself to "the private sphere" — poses a problem for Octave Mirbeau first of all by its capacity for hold, for the diversion of consciences and particularly of "children's souls," which he denounces and stigmatises, notably in his novel Sébastien Roch.
And it is in an article published in the newspaper L'Aurore on 22 August 1898 that he returns to the education he himself received among the Jesuits, delivering this severe judgement:
"I am at peace. And yet, at the memory of the dreadful years I spent in that great college of Vannes, I feel a hatred that time revives instead of extinguishing, and I wonder, not without dread, how it is that fathers of families are imprudent enough to entrust their children to these deformers of intelligence, these corruptors of souls that the Jesuits are." (7)
In another text published in Le Journal on 16 February 1901, still evoking personal memories, the words are harsh and unsparing:
"I never suffered so much as at the college of Vannes, which is directed by the excellent Jesuit fathers, and where I was brought up — if I may say so — brought up in the most perfect stultification, in the most lamentable and coarsest superstition…" (8)
Finally, in "Reply to an Inquiry on Education," the judgment is unequivocal.
"I was in a religious establishment, with the Jesuits of Vannes. From that education, which rests solely on lies and fear, I long retained all the terrors of Catholic morality. And it was only after many struggles, at the cost of painful efforts, that I succeeded in freeing myself from those abominable superstitions by which the child's mind is chained in order better to dominate the man later on. I have but one hatred in my heart, yet it is deep and enduring: the hatred of religious education." (9)
Beyond the stigmatization directed at a particular religion and a particular religious order from which the young Mirbeau personally suffered, one can hear the universal revolt of individuals of sound mind and reason against all the obscurantist burdens that dogmas and beliefs exert within the dense conditioning imposed on childhood and which ruin the future and the lives of adults.
As for that other institution which shapes and claims to construct the child under the principle of authority : the school, Mirbeau has essential words with which the bankrupt educational systems of today urgently need to confront themselves. "Nothing lasting can be hoped for unless one puts enormous energy into revolutionizing teaching… One must first put the child in a state to understand life." (10)
Indeed, in those places where the child is taught and supposedly educated, one is thoroughly bored, one languishes, one also suffers… Have things really changed? How many pupils today would not still take up as their own the disenchanted observation Mirbeau made of his own school experience at the college of Vannes?
"And yet I was bored, I was bored… I was bored at not feeling comrades in my schoolmates and at feeling enemies in my teachers. At that time I could not have specified the cause or even the form of this feeling… But the feeling was all the stronger for being more vague. I had only one desire, one will, one ambition: to leave that college where everything, men and things, was foreign and hostile to me." (11)
Why do adults apply themselves with such diligence to constraining youth within the reductive schemes they themselves have known and undergone? Why are so few of them convinced of the absolute necessity of emancipating consciences? Why this age-old conformism and this abdication of the self? History has nevertheless taught us where that leads…
Does not the generic judgment Mirbeau passes on religious colleges in Sébastien Roch apply equally well to the "public" schools, the state colleges? For Mirbeau mistrusted the "black hussars of the Republic" just as much…
"Colleges are universes in miniature. They contain, reduced to their childhood expression, the same dominations, the same crushings as the most despotically organized societies." (12)
In such an atmosphere, unable to revolt, certain children mark themselves out for the vindictiveness of the teaching and educational fraternity; these are the "bad pupils," the "dunces." "In ardent, passionate, curious childhood natures, what is called laziness is most often only a bruising of the sensibility, a mental impossibility of bending to certain absurd duties, the natural result of the disproportionate, inharmonious education they are given. This laziness, which resolves itself into invincible disgusts, is on the contrary sometimes the proof of an intellectual superiority and the condemnation of the master." (13)
Today the "troublemakers," the "little savages" of our modern suburbs, all those who have recently been lumped under the contemptuous term "scum" and who are in fact mostly young people from poor backgrounds, may not all display intellectual superiority over the "master," but they bear witness to an absolute and dramatically violent rejection of the one place where, still somewhat sheltered from the ordinary social exploitation of the destitute, a faint chance of positive development remained for them: school… There, moreover, they poison the lives of the teachers, the professors—those professors of whom one of the narrators of the novel In the Sky retains such a bad memory and on whom he passes a more than severe judgment.
"I pass over my college years. Besides, I can characterize in a single word the moral effect they had on me. They stupefied me. The education I received there was an aggravation of that begun in my family. At home it is rare that the child has not felt a kind of warmth, of affection, together with a kind of intimate security which take the place of ideas and precise notions of life. It is often something vague and yet it is a support to him. Love is so strong that, even when unintelligent, even when mediocre, it opens to the soul a whole horizon of moral beauties. At college, nothing of the kind. The child is handed over to the indifferent and heavy hands of mercenaries to whom nothing binds him—neither interest, nor tenderness, nor vanity. They arrive, hurry, and leave. And then I know not what intolerable boredom emanates from that collection of absurdities, lies and ridiculous diplomas that is a teacher. Far from interesting us in the duties he teaches by giving them charm and life, the teacher disgusts you with them as with an ugliness. Everything about him takes on an aspect of stiff and starched gravity, of prudhommesque dogmatism, which kills curiosity in the child's mind instead of developing it. With marvelous sureness, with miraculous precision, the teacher coats youthful intelligences with so thick a layer of ignorance, he spreads over them so corrosive a scum of prejudices, that it is almost impossible ever to get rid of it. There are some among these young souls who rebel against this frightful discipline of mediocrity. I admire them, but how I pity them! What difficulties, what unhappiness does life not hold in store for them?" (14)
Does this rejection which today can border on hatred find any other explanation than this acute awareness of being mired in an ineluctable mediocrity, with at the end a clever process of selection that can lead to failure and social exclusion—a miring against which a growing number of young people struggle desperately? It is also a form of disgust, as the same narrator expresses when recalling the memory of a little plaster statuette that his mother was fond of but that the flies regularly soiled without it being possible to clean it properly. Developing the metaphor, Mirbeau has him say: "Those fly-droppings represented exactly to me the teacher's lessons, and I was conscious that my little personality was disappearing little by little under that daily excremental deposit." (14)
An "excremental deposit" that can also include dubious and dangerous valorizations. When one measures the importance assumed today by mass sports and the recurrent violence of the excesses to which they give rise, one cannot help wondering what founds the social cult of such passions: parental influence, media bombardment against a background of economic interests? Is not everything done to keep youth in the exaltation of competition? Today teachers who are still a minority are becoming aware of its devastating character. They seek to distance themselves from it, but can they succeed once it is institutionalized? In Mirbeau's novel the narrator's remark is worth taking into account.
"My teachers taught me that physical strength alone is beautiful and enviable, and I was weak; they forced me to revere coarse virtues, cowardly acts, animal passions, the superiority of brutes and the heroism of boxers." (15)
So what is the individual who has undergone such an "education" destined for? The observation falls, implacable.
"I no longer had desires, inspirations toward great things; I was ripe to become a soldier, a notary, or whatever larval functionary it might please my father that I should be… And I did not dream of discussing the subsequent decisions he would take against my honor." (15)
It is to Octave Mirbeau's honor that he waged these "Battles for the Child," whose echo remains always relevant and always capable of shaking consciences.
- * underlined by us
1 Octave Mirbeau, Sébastien Roch, chapter 1 of Book One, in Octave Mirbeau, Combats pour l'enfant, edition established, presented and annotated by Pierre Michel, Vauchrétien, Ivan Davy Éditeur, 1990, pp. 66-67.
2 Id., Le Petit Mendiant, La France, 16 August 1885, collected in Les Lettres de ma chaumière (November 1885) and in Les Contes cruels (1990), in ibid., p. 27.
3 Id., Sur la route, L'Écho de Paris, 23 January 1891, collected in La Vache tachetée (1919), in ibid., pp. 107-108.
4 Id., Dans le ciel, L'Écho de Paris, 8 and 15 November 1892, in ibid., pp. 126-127.
5 Id., Dans le ciel, L'Écho de Paris, 8 and 15 November 1892, in ibid., p. 125.
6 Id., Dans le ciel, L'Écho de Paris, 8 and 15 November 1892, in ibid., p. 126.
7 Id., Souvenirs !, L'Aurore, 22 August 1898, in ibid., p. 157.
8 Id., Pétrisseurs d'âmes, Le Journal, 16 February 1901, in ibid., p. 159.
9 Id., Réponse à une enquête sur l'éducation, Revue Blanche, 1 June 1902, in ibid., p. 165.
10 Id., Une Loi d'amour, Interview of Octave Mirbeau by René de Chavagnes, Gil Blas, 16 October 1905, in ibid., pp. 219-220.
11 Id., Pétrisseurs d'âmes, Le Journal, 16 February 1901, in ibid., p. 163.
12 Id., Sébastien Roch, chapter 3 of Book One, in ibid., p. 71.
13 Id., Sébastien Roch, chapter 3 of Book One, in ibid., p. 76.
14 Id., Dans le ciel, L'Écho de Paris, 8 and 15 November 1892, in ibid., pp. 128-129.
15 Id., Dans le ciel, L'Écho de Paris, 8 and 15 November 1892, in ibid., p. 130.