PROS AND CONS

We are waging war on bullying almost everywhere and we are even told that it has just been dislodged from one of its last entrenchments, from the School of Fine Arts... That's so much the better... .. Nothing is more stupid than bullying. Bullying is never witty or elegant. It is always an abuse of force, and therefore cowardice, always. It is always brutality, and therefore always stupidity.
These schoolboy abuses carried out by “old hands” on newcomer comrades are without humor and without generosity.
At the "school", at the barracks, at Saint-Cyr, at the Beaux-Arts, these pranks are always bad pranks and too often risk degenerating into bad actions... Not everyone, in fact, is cut out to endure with the same philosophy or the same endurance crude bullying. There are sensitive, timid, delicate, proud characters who cringe or panic in the face of these imbecilities; and this is how, deep in the barracks and schools, there were so many dark and lamentable tragedies...
It would be high time to rigorously and severely ban this nasty teasing. “Wax a comrade” or “paint him with oil”
or throwing him out of his bed in the middle of the night or forcing him to endure endless annoyances is neither beautiful, nor generous, nor funny. It's stupid and it's cowardly....
Yes. The “elders”, even if they have three more beard hairs on their chin than the “blues”, must give up bullying the young people.
At school, in the barracks, we must kill bullying... We should also kill bullying in the city.
In the city too, and in the world, and in all worlds, there is bullying... But it's not like in Saint-Cyr... In the city, it's the young people who bully the old ...These bullies are not more courageous nor more intelligent than the others...
Wickedly, unconsciously, young people bully all those of their elders who have reached situations to which they themselves will one day reach....
The young writers, ferociously, bully the old masters, blowing away twenty, thirty years of effort, labor, conscience... The young rapists "wax" the reputation or the glory of their elders, without suspecting the harm they are doing... Young actresses bully their elders, laughing at their wrinkles, their fatigue, their weakness, sometimes tearing their hearts apart.
And
All bullying is permitted against “old people” if they have succeeded, if they are famous, if they have worked a lot...
All the bullying!... The young people spare them no malice, no annoyance... They don't only attack their works. They sometimes ransack their homes, harass them in their private lives, in their dearest affections... The "old" people must endure everything in silence... They are "old"! And those who outrage them are “young”. Their youth, it seems, gives them all the rights, allows them to trample on real glories, to sully good masters, to injure, sometimes mortally, poor women...
And in the suburbs, and in the village, and in the workshop, and in the factory, the “young” also bully, sometimes, too often the “old” the poor
old without fame, these, nor fortune... Let's kill the bullying which always starts from a base feeling, which is a cowardly pleasure and a dangerous pleasure the ugly pleasure of annoying one's neighbor to cause him pain and harm. wrong...

Maurice Prax.