More than a century before dissecting the phenomenon of casseroles, Le Figaro was already looking at the palette often of militant tumults. On May 1, 1892, the daily published a rather special “exceptional supplement” for Workers’ Day. Entitled Le Figaro-Graphic, this free issue (which can be consulted on Gallica, the digital library of the BNF) intends, according to the admission of Antonin Périvier, then co-manager and editorial secretary of the newspaper, to make known to its readers “the socialist propaganda and the “popular” or even “revolutionary” imagery that animates the workers’ camp.
Perhaps infatuated with this popular tune, a veritable “hit” of the late 19th century, the former co-director of Le Figaro pushes the envelope to reproduce, on page 3, the text of La Chanson du 1er mai, by Charles Gros . This is the latest fashionable version of Pierre Dupont’s Song of the Workers. Subscribers to the newspaper thus discover a few awakened verses instead of forums opposed to the eight-hour day. “Capital is making hell / Of this poor world where we are”, thus strike two lines. “And on our forehead slaps in the wind / The great thrill of the red flag”, claim two others.
Founder of the literary supplement of Le Figaro and Le Figaro illustré, Antonin Périvier does not indulge in simple editorial coquetry with this supplement. He scrutinizes a still new phenomenon of society: the songs of May Day which flourish and are distributed, from 1890, in the wake of the Workers’ Day.
This creative practice is part of a long tradition of revolutionary songs, from La Marseillaise to La Carmagnole, from the Time of Cherries to the Red Flag. “These May songs are not ‘weapons of propaganda’, they often play the role of revealing popular aspirations and sensitivities – in their diversity and their evolution”, wrote in 1981 the historian of the labor movement Robert Brécy, in an article in the Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine.
In order to perfect the culture of 1892 readers, Le Figaro-Graphic also devotes a good part of its pages to a “sample” of socialist press cartoons. An excerpt translated from a Dutch pamphlet boasts – with the help of pigs – the healthy fairness of the social republic over other forms of government – including the bourgeois republic dominated by free competition.
Another drawing, Spanish this time, illustrates the Basque miners’ strike in the years 1890-1892. Struggling bodies, dressed in rags and armed with odds and ends, rush angrily from a mining site towards the radiant Bilbao. “It is no longer the idyll. It’s a real drawing of social war, ”comments Antonin Périvier.
In the midst of an anarchist panic that will culminate in France with the assassination of President Sadi Carnot in 1894, Le Figaro warned against social movements, especially the days of May Day. The day before, the newspaper evokes Labor Day which is emerging as “the day of great unemployment” and a “farce”. An important device not police, but military is deployed (“the 6th cuirassiers will guard the Elysee; the 27th dragoons the Ministry of the Interior; the 28th dragoons the Palais Bourbon”).
On D-Day, however, the last page of Le Figaro-Graphic devotes its columns and prints to another topical event. “It is the day of the anarchist demonstrations. But it is also the day of the Salon”, signs Claire de Chancenay, who assumes that she prefers “much, we understand, the social gathering to the emotions of the street”. Funny step aside. In the May 2 newspaper, editor-in-chief Francis Magnard observes that “May Day ended without an incident.” The Figaro-Graphic had already given enough to see.
