Eugène Protot

At the beginning of 1866 he was arrested at a gathering in the Café de la Renaissance in the Place Saint-Michel, together with Gustave Tridon, Raoul Rigault, the Levraud brothers, Gaston Da Costa, Alfred Verlière, Longuet, Genton, Largilière, and Landowski.

However, he had first to overcome the disruption caused by the departure of many officials to Versailles occasioned by the creation of a Chamber of Summary Judgements (Chambre des référés) (26 April) and the appointment of justices of the peace (juges de paix) (3 May) and of examining magistrates (juges d'instruction) (7 and 16 May), pending the complete reconstruction of the civil courts caused by universal suffrage.

Lucien Descaves in his novel Philémon (1913) describes his life of exile in Switzerland:[4] "Protot, former delegate to the Justice, who lodged, with André Slomszynski, with Pastor Besançon, received a tiny pension from his relatives, did his washing in a basin and assiduously perfected himself in the study of foreign languages, while Slom drew for the Suisse illustrée."

After unsuccessfully seeking the nomination of the Parisian Blanquistes (who preferred Frédéric Boulé) for the legislative by-election of 27 January 1889 he was a candidate a few months later in Marseille for the seat of Félix Pyat.

His judgement of Paul Lafargue was severe:[5] Social democracy has made a place for a son-in-law of the Prussian Karl Marx, the heimatlos Lafargue, a Cuban during the 1870 war so as not to fight his German family, naturalized French by M. Ranc to support the politics of the radicals, elected a French député by the clerical lobby of Lille in order to make an alliance with the papists of the extreme right, introducer of anti-patriotism in France, author of "La Patrie, keksekça?"

In 1892, he wrote in Chauvins et réacteurs:[6] Under the inspiration of the Social Democrats in Berlin, Marxism has failed French socialism in a well-meaning and contemptuous philanthropy, good treatment of the workers, the concern of the government for the working classes [...] The leaders of this neo-Christian socialism - oligarchs, former officials of the Empire, graduates of Humanities and Sciences - share this insolent prejudice of their caste, that the people are composed of individuals of a lower species [...] The idea of washing people is a monomania of the Marxists.Protot was also a renowned orientalist, a graduate of the École spéciale des langues orientales in the Arabic and Persian languages, his knowledge of which helped him to gain a living in his last years, and to which he would have liked to have given more time.