Translation:The Socialist little Rats

Goddammit, you need to open your eyes! Good folks need to be on their guard; the little rats are bustling about like thirty-six devils in a holy water font. You can never kill off this vermin; you have to kill them every day and not trust them!

For years, these pigs have infiltrated, without fanfare, the suburbs and the cities. Everywhere, goddammit, they've founded workers' Catholic circles!

First-class suffocators, a thousand bombs! The poor workers who have the misfortune to get caught in their trap don't keep their intellect for long. In these wasps' nests, they teach the simpletons to be submissive to their bosses, to respect the rich, and to stick their noses between the cleric-pigs' buttocks. Ah, thunder, you can ask those suckers what the backside of the cassocked ones smells like! They'll swear to you by the horns of Joseph and the virginity of his whore of a wife that it smells of incense and roses!

Really, damn it! You have to be utterly stupid to fall for such tricks. The little rats are more cunning than they appear; they feel they're done for, it pisses them off; so they're bustling about to repaint their popularity.

For the occasion, they put on a socialist mug; but damn it, you don't need to scratch very hard to find the Jesuit.

Listen to these bandits! They tell you that a hundred years ago, the workers didn't know their happiness; it was the Revolution that shattered everything. Back then, the poor were much happier than the kings and archbishops; they lived like fighting cocks in gravy. The workers weren't under the absolute thumb of the bosses; they had good priests and divine right to defend them.

After having tucked away all these lies in their Catholic circles for about fifteen years, they got cocky, believing that the time had come to shove this nonsense down the common people's throats in public meetings.

There's a hothead, Martinet, who agreed to debate them. And it was with no small amazement that the good folks saw posters like this on the walls of the Latin Quarter:

Goddammit, it was something to see, the anarchists peacefully debating with the priests! What! Had these fierce fellows, whose very name strikes terror into the hearts of the annuitants and property owners, been castrated then?

Isn't there any more hatred in your guts, goddammit, against the greatest enemies of the common people?

I counted more than twenty of those nasty black birds, sitting quietly next to anarchists. It's a bad sign, damn it, when crows circle around you! Could Anarchy be smelling of carrion?

You'd think you were in a church; maybe there was even a chamber pot at the entrance, with priest's piss to make the sign of the cross. And the speaker in the black frock, who spoke from the altar—I mean, from the platform—had put on a pious face for the occasion, clean-shaven as the moon—a pale, sickly look of a sacristan, no less!

Next to him, Abbot Garnier, in his cassock, with a smile wider than a poor man's arse that doesn't shit thick, seemed to be the head of the show. He must have been laughing at our gullibility and taking us for little Chinese or savages from Paraguay—we were so well-behaved!

The anarchist speaker joked about religion, especially the ceremonies, got sentimental, gently scratched the backside of Abbot Garnier, who smiled and didn't give a single fuck.

But! Good God, since we went so far as to want to debate instead of hitting, we should have shoved the little rats' noses in their own shit and shown that the current misery is their own doing and the result of the stupefaction they've made us endure for centuries!

Isn't it them who even today raise the youth and stuff their heads with idiotic ideas that teach us servitude?

And the Inquisition? Not a word was said about it, for goddammit! Yet it was timely: three centuries isn't a day!

Quite the opposite, alas, the speakers treated the papist as a sincere and courageous man, etc., and lapped up sweet water from the same glass—damn it, you have to have no sense of disgust!

Ah, damn it all! We've sunk below the freethinkers who, for fifty years, have stammered against religion and given it an appearance of life with these squabbles!

Do you debate with the plague, thunder of Brest! With harmful animals, with the absurd, with the worst enemies of humanity, who lead and stupefy it from its very beginning?

You crush them immediately, if you can, goddammit! And if not, you wait, sharpening your knife and keeping the hatred of the common people warm.

How do you expect us, at the next uprising, to eliminate them, to set fire to their churches, if in the meantime we fraternize with them?

Isn't religion dead, especially in Paris?

So why bother with little rats, if not to punch them?

Their Christian socialism doesn't hold water, a thousand bombs! The real way to launch it is to stupidly provide it with a field of propaganda among the common people. By this mess, we would simply end up growing bad seed; something in the vein of Boulangism—and instead of a social revolution, we'd go and break our noses on religious nonsense.

Haven't these birds annoyed and abused us enough when we were kids? Personally, I've had my fill, and I want nothing to do with these scoundrels!

The only dealings I want with them are with my bootjack; or to tighten the screws on them, damn it!

The bastards know exactly what they're doing by coming to popular meetings. They preach appeasement; for fuck's sake, they couldn't ask for anything better than to stay as they are: they're sizing up our worth and our weaknesses, and making friends in the area, especially since they have money.

And you know, those camels, once they get one foot in the door, they quickly have all four in. It's a joke to think of converting their supporters: those guys are as stubborn as mules, fanatics or cunning.

Since the little rats are so conciliatory, so sweet, so devoted to the worker, why don't they allow contradiction in their churches, and why don't they allow good folks to climb into the pulpit to have a little chat with the attendees?

Oh no, they'll never do that, goddammit! Because they know that the day they allow discussion in their churches, they'll be finished.

Hey, damn it, to get back to Monday's meeting, it seems to me, a thousand bombs, that the only way to deal with the little rats is to grab the bastards by the legs and rub their arses until they smoke!