The Forerunner of the French Protest

In the organ of the "Understanding of the Left", L'Ere Nouvelle ("The New Era"), of 5/V, three articles by the well-known Paris publicist Séverine (her real name is Mme Gebhart) have been printed in the section "Free Thoughts", under a general title characteristic of our "times and peoples": "The Triumph of Hatred"…

The first "sketch" of this "triptych" and the second concern this "triumph" in France; the last is devoted to Poland.

In the first, entitled "Without Mercy", the authoress cites, as an example of this "triumph" of the barbarization of war, a fact from the older history of France: the legate (plenipotentiary) of the Roman Pope, directing the siege of the town of Béziers, when asked how to sort the prisoners, piously answered: "Kill them all, one after another; God Himself will recognize and take His own."

"Has our glorious civilization changed anything in all this?" the authoress asks. "Not very much," she answers herself. And in confirmation she cites present-day France and present-day Poland, which boast so much of their "civilization"…

And so, within such a general frame, Mme Séverine offers Poland a lyrical little article entitled "Other Sorrows".

"A sharply painful reproach reaches me from Poland… It is a matter of the daily torture of hundreds of prisoners in Poland…

This Poland, so beloved by us, so beautiful under the tsarist yoke! So noble when she was shackled in triple chains, Poland, in whose defence France sacrificed so many of her generations. And now it was enough for her, this Poland, noble in bondage, to attain her liberation to turn from a victim into a hangman. But this is simply impossible!..

And yet it is so… It is not Poland, but only her government.

Such is always the fate of those states which we ourselves have dressed in soldiers' caps and adorned with sabres, which we appointed the "gendarmes of Europe"!..

A (military) cap trimmed with braid always changes the arrangement of thought in the brain it covers…

And so, as a result, more than one thousand five hundred political prisoners are rotting in loathsome, infected prisons, without light, without air, eaten by lice, worn down by hunger, beatings and torture. Among them are women, one of whom, Olga Bessarabova, has died.

I shall return to this. But even now I wish to protest against it, as the deputies Królikowski and Łańcucki are doing there on the spot.

Wherever this abomination may be committed, whoever the hangmen and the victims may be, if only it is really done and not invented for the purposes of "propaganda", all this can only fill the heart with indignation."

Thus the noble French publicist, already at the beginning of April, long before the rest who signed the well-known protest, responded to what is happening in Poland, "noble under triple bondage"…