Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, politicians, and priests, artists, authors, dancers of death; inwardly you are all full of decay and dead men’s bones.  Truly you are the sons of them that slew Christ, and like them you lay on men’s shoulders burdens grievous to be borne, which you yourselves would not touch with the end of your fingers.  Crucifiers are you like them, and those who come among you to help the suffering peoples, bringing blessed peace in their hands, you imprison and insult them, and as the Scripture says, persecute them from city to city until all the righteous blood shed upon the earth shall fall upon your heads.

You work only to provide food for Death; your countries are made to subdue the future to the past, and bind the living to the putrifying corpses of the dead.  You condemn the new life to perpetuate the empty rites of the tomb....  Let us rise!  The resurrection, the Easter of the living, is at hand!

Sons of men, it is not true that you are, the slaves of the dead and are chained by them like serfs to the earth.  Let the dead past bury its dead, and itself with them; you are children of the living, and live in your turn.  Souls who are bound to the countries of the past, shake off the neurasthenic torpor, wracked by outbursts of frenzy, which weighs you down.  Shake it off, my brothers, you who are young and strong; be masters of the present and the past, fathers and sons of your works.  Set yourselves free!  Each one of you is Man;—­not flesh that rots in the tomb, but the blazing fire of life which purifies corruption and renews long-dead corpses, the flame ever new and young which circles the earth with its burning arms.  Be free!  Conquerors of the Bastille, you have not yet opened the dungeon within you, the falsely called Fatality.  It was built as a prison-house for you centuries ago, by slaves or tyrants.  They were all convicts of the same stamp, who were afraid that you would discover that you were free.  Religions, races, countries, materialistic science, the heavy shadows of the past, are between you and the sun; but go forward!  Liberty is there, behind those ramparts and towers, built of prejudices, dead laws, and consecrated falsehoods.  They are guarded by the interests of some, the opinion of the drilled masses, and your own doubting spirit.  Dare to will; and behind the crumbling walls of this spurious Destiny, you will once more behold the sun and the illimitable horizon.

Insensible to the revolutionary heat of this appeal, the staff of the newspaper only fastened its attention on the few lines where Clerambault seemed to lump all violences together, those of the “left” along with those of the “right.”  What did this poet mean by giving lessons to the socialists in a party paper?  In the name of what theory?  He was not even a socialist.  He was nothing but a Tolstoyian anarchist; let him go back to his exercises in style, and his middle-class where he belonged.