Thirdly, there is expediency. Argot lives on the language, drawing upon it and making use of it as fancy directs, and sometimes, in case of need, arbitrarily and coarsely changing it. Sometimes, with ordinary words distorted in this fashion and interlarded with words of pure argot, it produces picturesque figures of speech in which one may find both original invention and metaphor. Le cab jaspine, je marronne que la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabin – ‘The dog is barking, I suspect that the Paris coach is passing through the wood.’ Le dab est sinve, la dabuge est merloussière, la fée est bative – ‘The man (gentleman) is stupid, the wife is sly, the daughter is pretty.’ Most frequently, in order to baffle any eavesdropper, argot simply adds an uncouth tail to the word, some such suffix as aille, orgue, iergue or uche. For example, Vousiergue trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche? – ‘Do you think this mutton’s good?’ A phrase addressed to a prison warder by a prisoner offering a sum of money for his escape. Mar is another suffix that has been recently added.
Argot, being the dialect of corruption, is itself soon corrupted. Moreover, as its purpose is always concealment, it changes as soon as it feels that it is being understood. Unlike every other form of vegetation, it is killed by any ray of light that falls upon it. So it is in a state of constant flux, evolving more in ten years than the everyday language does in ten centuries. Larton (bread) becomes lartif, gail (horse) becomes gaye, fertanche (straw) becomes fertille, momignard (child) becomes momacque, les siques (clothes) becomes frusques, la chique (church) becomes l’égrugeoir, le colabre (neck) becomes le colas. The devil is first gahisto, then le rabouin and then le boulanger ; the priest is le ratichon and then le sanglier ; the dagger is le vingt-deux, then le surin and then le lingre ; the police are in turn raliles, rousses, marchands de lacets, coqueurs and cognes ; the gaoler is le taule, Charlot, l’atigeur, and le becquillard. To fight in the seventeenth century was se donner du tabac ; in the nineteenth, se chiquer la gueule – and there have been twenty different variants between those two. The words of argot are constantly in flight, like the men who use them.
But at the same time, and indeed because of this constant movement, old argot constantly re-emerges and becomes new. There are centres in which it survives. The Temple preserved the argot of the seventeenth century, and the argot of Thunes was preserved in Bicêtre when it was a prison. The old Thunes suffix of anche was heard in, for example, Boyanches-tu? (Want a drink?) and il croyanche (he believes). But constant change is nonetheless the rule.
If the philosopher decides to spare the time to examine this language that ceaselessly evaporates, he is led to painful but useful reflections. No study is more efficacious or fruitful in instruction. There is not a metaphor or etymological derivation of argot that does not contain a lesson
Among those people battre (to fight) means to sham – on bat une maladie (one shams an illness), for tricking is their strength. The idea of ‘man’ is inseparable from the idea of darkness. Night is la sorgue, and man is l’orgue: man is a derivation of night. They are accustomed to think of society as a climate that destroys them, and they talk of their freedom as other people talk of their health. A man who has been arrested is un malade (sick), and a man under sentence is un mort (dead).
What is most dreadful for the man enclosed within the walls of a prison is a sort of icy chastity: he calls the prison le castus. It is always the gayer side of life outside that he recalls when he is in that dismal place. He wears leg-irons but does not think of walking on his feet: he thinks of dancing; and if he manages to saw through his irons, dancing is his first thought and he calls the saw a bastringue (cheap dance-hall). A noun is un centre – a profound assimilation. A criminal has two heads, the one which thinks and plans, and the one which he loses on the block: he calls the first la sorbonne and the second la tronche * When a man has nothing left but rags on his body and viciousness in his heart, when he has sunk to the state of material and moral degradation which is summed up in the word gueux, he is then ripe for crime; he is like a well-sharpened, double-edged knife, one edge being his state of need and the other his depravity. Argot in this case does not call him un gueux but un reguise (re-shaped). What is a gaol but a furnace of damnation, a Hell? The inmate calls himself un fagot (faggot). Finally, they call the prison le collège, a word which sums up the whole penitentiary system. And to the thief his prospective victims – you or I or any passer-by – are le pantre, from the Greek pan, meaning everyone.
Should you wish to know where the greater number of the prison-songs were born, those ditties which prison argot calls lirlonfa, the following is for your enlightenment.
There existed in the Châtelet in Paris a large, long cellar some eight feet below the level of the Seine. It possessed neither windows nor ventilators, its only outlet being by way of the door: men could enter it, but air could not. It had a vaulted stone ceiling and for floor ten inches of mud, the original tiling having disintegrated under the seeping of water. A massive beam ran from end to end of the cellar, eight feet above floor level, and from it, at regular intervals, hung chains three feet long ending in iron collars. It was here that men condemned to the galleys were housed before being sent on to Toulon. They hung here in darkness chained by the neck, unable to lie down because of the shortness of the chains, up to their knees in mud, legs soiled with their own excrement, unable to rest except by hanging on to the chains and, if they dozed off, constantly awakened by the stranglehold of the collar – and there were some who did not wake. In order to eat they had to use their feet to retrieve their portion of bread, which was dropped on the mud in front of them. How long were they left like this? One or two months, sometimes six months, in one case a year. They had been sentenced to the galleys for as little as poaching one of the king’s hares. And what did they do in that hellish tomb? They did what can be done in a tomb – they died – and what can be done in Hell – they sang. Where there is no hope there is still song. In the sea round Malta when a galley was approaching one heard the sound of singing before one heard the sound of oars. The poacher Survincent, who survived that Châtelet cellar, said, ‘It was the rhymes that kept me going.’ Here it was that nearly all the argot ditties were born, including the melancholy refrain that was particular to the Montgomery galley – Timaloumisaine, timoulamison. Most of these songs were sad, but some were gay and one was tender:
Icicaille est le théâtre
Du petit dardant*
Do what you will, you cannot destroy that eternal remnant of the heart of man which is love.
In that world of dark deeds one keeps one’s secrets. Secrecy is the privilege of everyman, the faith held in common which serves as the basis of union. To break secrecy is to rob every member of that savage community of something of himself. To inform is to manger le morceau (eat the piece) as though the informer had stolen something of the substance of his fellows and fed on the flesh of all of them.
What is recevoir un soufflet (to get your ears boxed)? The commonplace French expression is voir trente-six chandelles (to see thirty-six candles; English equivalent ‘to see stars’). Argot here makes use of the word camoufle, which also means ‘candle’ and adds the ‘et’ from the word soufflet, establishing a new word on the academic level, and Ponlailler, saying, ‘J’allume ma camoufle’ causes Voltaire to write, ‘Langleviel la Baumelle mérite cent camouflets’(Langleviel la Baumelle deserves to have his ears boxed a hundred times).
Burrowing into argot leads to countless discoveries. It leads us to the point of contact between respectable society and that of the outcasts; it is speech become a felon, and it is dismaying to find that the obscure workings of fate can so distort men’s minds and bring them so low. The meagre thinking of the outcast! Will no one come to the rescue of the human souls lost in that darkness? Must they wait for ever for the liberating spirit, the rider upon the winds, the radiant champion of the future? Are they condemned for all time to listen in terror to the approach of the Monster of Evil, the dragon with foaming lips, whi
le they remain without light or hope, a defenceless Andromeda, white and naked in the murk?
III
Argot that weeps and argot that laughs
As we see, argot as a whole, whether it is the dialect of four hundred years ago or that of today, is pervaded by a sombre symbolism which is at once an expression of grieving and of threatening. One may catch something of the old, wild sadness of those outlaws of the Cour des Miracles who played card-games of their own devising, some of which have come down to us. The eight of clubs, for example, was a big tree with eight large clover-leaves, a sort of fanciful representation of the forest; at the foot of the tree was a fire over which a hunter was roasting three hares on a spit, while behind, suspended over another fire, was a steaming pot from which a dog’s head protruded. One may picture smugglers and counterfeiters seated round this idyllic and melancholy conception of their world as depicted on playing-cards. All the diverse expressions of thought in the kingdom of argot, whether song or jest or threat, had this quality of helpless despair. All the songs, of which some of the tunes have been retrieved, were heartrendingly piteous and humble. The thieving rabble, le pègre, was always le pauvre pègre, always the hare which hides, the mouse which scuttles, the bird which takes flight. It utters few but simple sighs, and one of its sighs has been preserved – ‘Je n’entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron des orgues, peut atiger ses mômes et ses momignards et les locher criblant sans être atigé lui-même’ (I don’t undertsand how God, the father of men, can torture his children and grandchildren and hear them cry without being tortured himself). The outcast, whenever he has a moment to think, makes himself small in the eye of the law and puny in the eye of society; he goes on his knees and begs for pity. One feels that he knows the fault is his own.
Towards the middle of the last century there was a change. Prison songs and thieves’ refrains acquired as it were a flavour of jovial insolence. In nearly all the galley and prison songs of the eighteenth century there is a diabolical, enigmatic spirit of gaiety which puts one in mind of the dancing light cast by a will-o’-the-wisp in the forest.
Mirlababi, surlababo,
Mirliton ribon ribette,
Surlababi, mirlababo,
Mirliton ribon ribo.
This was being sung while a man’s throat was being cut in a cellar or a corner of the woods.
It was symptomatic. In the eighteenth century the ancient melancholy of this oppressed class was dispelled. They began to laugh, mocking the powers that be. Louis XV was known as the ‘Marquis de Pantin’. They were almost cheerful, glowing with a kind of lightness as though conscience no longer weighed upon them. Not merely did they perform acts of desperate daring, but they did so with a heedless audacity of spirit. It was an indication that they were losing the sense of their own criminality, finding among the thinkers of the day a kind of unwitting moral support, an indication that theft and robbery were beginning to infiltrate doctrine and current dogma, and thereby losing something of their ugliness while adding greatly to the ugliness of the latter. Finally it was an indication that, if nothing happened to prevent it, some tremendous event was on the way.
Let us pause for a moment. What are we now accusing – the eighteenth century? – its philosophy? By no means. The work of the eighteenth century was healthy and good. The encyclopaedists, led by Diderot, the physiocrats, led by Turgot, the philosophers, led by Voltaire, and the Utopians, led by Rousseau, these are four noble bodies. The immense advance of mankind towards enlightenment was due to them. They were the advance-guards of the human race moving towards the four cardinal points of progress, Diderot towards beauty, Turgot towards utility, Voltaire towards truth, and Rousseau towards justice. But at the side of the philosophers and below them came the sophists, a poisonous plant intertwined with healthy youth, hemlock in the virgin forest. While authority burned the great liberating books of the century on the steps of the Palais de Justice, writers now forgotten were publishing, with the king’s sanction, books of a strangely subversive kind, avidly read by the outcasts. Some of these publications – patronized, astonishingly enough, by a prince – are to be found in the Bibliothèque Secrète, the Secret Library. These facts, profoundly significant though they were, passed unperceived. Sometimes it is the very obscurity of a fact that renders it dangerous. It is obscure because it is underground. Of all those writers, the one perhaps who had the most harmful effects on the masses was Restif de la Bretonne. Work of this kind, which was being produced all over Europe, did more damage in Germany than anywhere else. During a certain period, which is summarized by Schiller in his play, Die Räuber, theft and robbery were paraded under the guise of protest against property and work. They embraced certain specious, elementary notions, correct in appearance but absurd in reality, and, thus dissimulated and invested with names denoting abstract theories, permeated the mass of hard-working, honest people, without the knowledge of the rash chemists who had concocted the mixture and even of the masses who absorbed it. Hardship engenders anger; and while the well-to-do classes close their eyes – or slumber, which comes to the same thing – the less fortunate, taking their inspiration from any spirit of grievance or ill-will what happens to be lurking in the background, proceed to examine the social system. Examination in a spirit of hatred is a terrible thing!
From this, if the times are sufficiently awry, emerge those ferocious upheavals at one time known as jacqueries, compared with which purely political agitation is child’s play, and which are not the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor but rather the revolt of the deprived against the comfortably off. Everything then collapses, for jacqueries are the tremors of the people. This peril, which was perhaps imminent in Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century, was harshly averted by the French Revolution, that immense act of probity. The French Revolution, which was nothing but idealism in arms, broke out and with a single decisive gesture slammed the door on evil and opened the door to good. It posed the question, promulgated the truth, dispelled the fogs, cleansed the century, and crowned the people.
The nineteenth century has inherited and profited by its work, and today the social disaster which seemed to be foreshadowed is quite simply impossible. Only the blind still rage against it, and only fools are afraid of it. Revolution is the antidote to jacquerie!
Thanks to the Revolution, social conditions have changed and we have got the feudal and monarchic sicknesses out of our system. There is no longer anything medieval in our constitution. We have come past the time when those ugly interior convulsions burst into daylight, when we heard the muffled sound of stirring beneath our feet, when the surface of civilization was littered with molehills, when crevasses suddenly yawned and monstrous heads emerged from the earth.
Revolutionary feeling is a moral feeling. The feeling for what is right, once it has matured, develops a sense of duty. The law for every man is liberty, which ends, in Robespierre’s admirable definition, where the liberty of others begins. Since 1789 the populace as a whole is expressed in the sublimated individual; no man is so poor that, having rights, he has not his place. The starving man feels in himself the honesty of France; the dignity of the citizen is an inner armour; the man who is free is scrupulous; he who votes rules. Hence the incorruptibility, the suppression of unhealthy aspirations, the eyes heroically averted from temptation. Revolutionary cleansing is such that on a day of liberation, a 14 July or a 10 August, there is no longer a populace. The first cry of the enlightened crowds as they grow in stature is, ‘Death to thieves!’ Progress is honourable; the Ideal and the Absolute do not pick pockets. It was the scavengers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine who in 1848 escorted the carts filled with the treasures of the Tuileries; rags and tatters mounted guard over riches. In those carts there were chests, some half open, containing among a hundred dazzling adornments the ancient, diamond-studded crown of France surmounted by the royal carbuncle of regency, worth thirty millions. Those barefoot men preserved it.
So jacquerie is at an
end. I am sorry for the clever men, haunted by an age-old fear which has found its last expression and now can only be serviceable in politics. The mainspring of the red spectre is broken, and everyone knows it. The scarecrow scares no longer. Birds perch on it, beetles nest in it and the bourgeois laughs at it
IV
The two duties; to watch and hope
Does this mean then that all social dangers are over? Certainly not. There will be no more jacqueries, of this society can be assured; the blood will no longer rush to its head. But it has got to consider the way in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer a threat, but there is still consumption. Social consumption is simply poverty. One can the from wasting away as well as from being struck by lightning.
We never weary of repeating that we must before all else think of the disinherited, suffering masses, care for them, comfort and enlighten them, widen their horizon by bringing to them all forms of education. We must set them the example of toil, never of idleness, lessen the burden on the individual by increasing that borne by society as a whole, reduce poverty without reducing wealth, create great new fields of public activity, possess, like Briareus, a hundred hands to reach out to those who are in distress, use our collective power to set up workshops, schools, and laboratories open to men of all kinds, increase wages and decrease working hours, effect a balance between rights and possessions, that is to say, make the reward proportionate to the effort and the fulfilment to the need – in a word, derive more light and well-being from the social system for the benefit of the ignorant and oppressed. This is the first of fraternal obligations and of political necessities.
But all of this, we must emphasize, is no more than a beginning. The real question is, can work be the law without also being a right? We shall not pursue the matter, since this is not the place for it. But if the name for Nature is Providence, then the name for Society must be Provision.
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