La Grève des électeurs

La Grève des electeurs (The Voters strike) is the title of a clearly anarchist chronicle by French writer Octave Mirbeau, First appearing in Le Figaro on November 28, 1888, the text was subsequently published on numerous occasions in the form of a brochure, often associated with another chronicle, « Prélude », that also appeared in Le Figaro on July 14, 1889. The first edition appeared in 1902, in issue 22 of an anarchist newspaper, Les Temps nouveaux, and has since been translated into over a dozen languages and widely disseminated by anarchist groups throughout Europe.

Like all anarchists, Mirbeau regarded universal suffrage and the electoral system as nothing more than a form of trickery by which the powerful obtained at little cost the support of the very people they oppressed and exploited. Mirbeau addresses an average voter, « a thinking biped who was endowed with free will – or so he was told – and who went away, proud of his rights, convinced he was doing his duty, having dropped off some kind of a ballot in some kind of a ballot box ». Mirbeau tasks himself with demystifying, discrediting, and delegitimizing the so-called “right to vote” by which the oppressed, alienated and made into idiots, “freely” choose those who exploit them : « Sheep go to the slaughterhouse. They say nothing. They hope for nothing. But at least they don’t vote for the butcher who will slaughter them or the bourgeois who will eat them. Stupider than animals, more sheep-like than sheep, the voter names his butcher and selects his bourgeois. » And as Mirbeau adds with bitter irony: « He has undergone revolutions to attain this right. »

Instead of assuming his freedom, the voter – this « unutterable imbecile » – does nothing more than choose a master, one who dazzles him with impossible promises and has not the least care for the interest of the masses: in so doing, he acquiesces to his own servitude. Mirbeau therefore calls on voters to boycott the ballot box, not to act blindly as sheep, but to act lucidly as citizens.