An exemplary resister

Why mention the figure of Octave Mirbeau here? The journalist, novelist, and playwright was also a man of commitment and struggle, outraged by the economic and social order of his time, and he proclaimed his revolt loudly and unequivocally. It was a revolt against every form of misery—those very forms that still prevail today: poverty, the extreme poverty of those who are described, with a distinctly sociological solemnity, as living below the poverty line; moral deprivation, social deprivation, the failings of the education system, the hardships of a certain kind of childhood...

Octave Mirbeau, who felt a deep sense of solidarity with society's outcasts and the oppressed, was a passionate advocate for children. The treatment endured today by young foreigners on French soil would certainly not have left him indifferent. To revisit his work is to recognize the enduring relevance of a testimony and a struggle whose universal significance lies in its continued ability to pierce and trouble our consciences.

Born on February 16, 1848, in Calvados, Octave Mirbeau came from a modest background; his father was a medical practitioner. From the ages of eleven to fifteen, he attended the Jesuit school in Vannes, a painful experience that would later inspire the novel of the "murder of a child's soul": Sébastien Roch (1890).

After an undistinguished secondary education, he worked for a time in the office of a Norman notary before moving to Paris, where he became involved in political and literary circles and began his career in journalism. At that time, he was what Pierre Michel (1) called a "proletarian of the pen." His journalistic contributions during the 1880s often carried the scent of scandal.

His tireless advocacy for Monet, Rodin, and Van Gogh; his passionate defense of anarchist intellectuals as well as Oscar Wilde; his support for Zola and his public stance in favor of Dreyfus; together with an exceptionally prolific literary output—including remarkable novels and short stories (Le Calvaire, L'Abbé Jules, Sébastien Roch, Dans le ciel, The Torture Garden, The Diary of a Chambermaid, Twenty-One Days of a Neurasthenic, Cruel Tales)—and a distinctive body of dramatic works, among them a masterpiece that entered the repertoire of the Comédie-Française and was performed on stages throughout Europe (Business Is Business), all testify to a genius and a level of commitment rarely matched in the world of letters.

Octave Mirbeau was among those who refused to submit—one of those exemplary resisters who could not accept the perpetual falsehood in which we are all compelled to live, weighed down by conformity and the corrosive influence of the self-righteous. The most vulnerable are always left at the mercy of exploiters, under the cover of respectable institutions that effectively protect only those who hold power or capital, whether economic, familial, or social.

Mirbeau embodied this spirit of resistance in his own life, but above all he sought to communicate it, to make it contagious, through his work as a polemical journalist, critic, playwright, and novelist. His was a resistance to every form of domination—psychological, religious, and ideological—to all the forms of conditioning that imprison the individual within a web of prejudice, and to every distortion of what he called the "natural, instinctive human being, brimming with life."

Indeed, Octave Mirbeau never ceased to denounce the insidious powers that corrupt consciences and devastate lives: religion, which alienates and instills guilt; the school system, whether denominational or secular, which breeds passivity and submission to authority, pits individuals against one another, and casts them into the "calvary" of mediocre lives that is the fate of the great majority—the masses of the dominated; and finally the family, itself so deeply conditioned that, despite its apparent goodwill and good intentions, it helps complete this process of dismantling intelligence and stifling sensitivity. As Mirbeau wrote, "Society (...) has found nothing better to legitimize its thefts and consecrate its supreme power—above all, to keep humanity in a state of complete stupidity and utter servitude—than to establish this admirable mechanism of government: the family." (2)

Today, are the "stagnant larvae" of which Octave Mirbeau speaks not those masses numbed by overconsumption, media-induced stupefaction, and television-induced lethargy, but also threatened by the growing precariousness that an alarming globalization imposes upon the poor, foreigners, and even the middle classes—a globalization whose avowed horizon would be a "New World Order" of domination, dispossession, and the enslavement of peoples? This senseless pursuit of profit, whose devastating effects are already being felt throughout ecosystems—a term that was not in use in Mirbeau's day, but one that his passionate love of Nature would surely have led him to embrace in support of the struggles now demanded by the very survival of the human species—struggles that, in the author's view, have nothing to do with the current propagandistic orthodoxy surrounding the alleged health and climate scams.

To read Octave Mirbeau is to accept seeing society as it truly is—and therefore to accept being disturbed by it, even today...

1 Pierre Michel, with Jean-François Nivet, Octave Mirbeau, l'imprécateur au cœur fidèle (Octave Mirbeau: The Imprecator with a Faithful Heart), Paris: Librairie Séguier, 1990.

2 Octave Mirbeau, Dans le ciel (In the Sky), in Combats pour l'enfant (Struggles for the Child), Vauchrétien: Ivan Davy Éditeur, 1990, p. 126.