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Title: The great betrayal (La trahison des clercs)
Author: Julien Benda
Translator: Richard Aldington
Release date: March 16, 2026 [eBook #78218]
Language: English
Original publication: London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd, 1928
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78218
Credits: Sean – @parchmentglow
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT BETRAYAL (LA TRAHISON DES CLERCS) ***
The Great Betrayal
(La Trahison des Clercs)
By
Julien Benda
Translated by
Richard Aldington
London
George Routledge & Sons, Ltd.
Broadway House, Carter Lane, E.C.
1928.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
STEPHEN AUSTIN AND SONS, LTD., HERTFORD.
_Contents_
Translator’s Note
Author’s Foreword
I - The Modern Perfecting of Political Passions
II - Significance of this Movement--Nature of Political Passions
III - The ‘Clerks’--The Great Betrayal
IV - Summary--Predictions
Notes
[Footnotes]
[Transcriber’s Notes]
_Translator’s Note_
The title of M. Benda’s book is _La Trahison des Clercs_. The word
‘Clercs’, which occurs throughout the book, is defined by M. Benda’s
as ‘all those who speak to the world in a transcendental manner’. I
do not know the English word for ‘all those who speak to the world
in a transcendental manner’. But in Chaucer’s time the word ‘clerk’
(‘a clerke of Oxenforde’) meant anyone who was not a ‘layman’, a word
employed by M. Benda as the antithesis to ‘clerk’. We still use the
word in this sense when we speak of a ‘clerk in holy orders’ and retain
its root in ‘cleric’. A ‘cleric’ is the person described by M. Benda as
‘pre-eminently a clerk’. If the words ‘in holy orders’ are subtracted
from ‘a clerk in holy orders’, the remaining ‘clerk’ is roughly what M.
Benda means, though he also uses ‘clerk’ to include ‘a clerk in holy
orders’. Nowadays a clerk is a person who performs sedentary labour in
an office, and the word in England is pronounced ‘clark’. In America a
clerk (pronounced ‘clurrk’) is what the English call a shop-assistant.
In order to avoid a misleading title I have called this translation
_The Great Betrayal_, giving M. Benda’s title in brackets afterwards.
Where the word ‘clerk’ first occurs in the book, I have added the words
‘in the medieval sense’, and throughout the text I have invariably
written the word in inverted commas, ‘clerk’, to avoid any possible
misunderstanding.
I should add that the words ‘real’ and ‘realism’ are nearly always
used in this book as the antithesis to ‘ideal’ and ‘idealism’. Other
abstract words are used in a rather special sense which I hope will be
plain from the context.
R. A.
‘The world is suffering from lack of faith
in a transcendental truth.’
_Renouvier._
_Author’s Foreword_
Tolstoi relates that when he was in the Army he saw one of his brother
officers strike a man who fell out from the ranks during a march.
Tolstoi said to him:--
‘Are you not ashamed to treat a fellow human being in this way? Have
you not read the Gospels?’
The other officer replied:--
‘And have you not read Army Orders?’
This retort will always be thrown back at the spiritual man who tries
to take the direction of the material. To me it seems a very wise one.
Those who lead men to the conquest of material things have no need of
justice and charity.
Nevertheless I think it important that there should be men--even if
they are scorned--who urge their fellow beings to other religions than
the religion of the material. Now, those who should play this part
(to whom I have given the name of ‘clerks’ in the medieval sense of
the word) have not only ceased to do so, but are playing an exactly
contrary part. Most of the influential moralists of the past fifty
years in Europe, particularly the men of letters in France, call upon
mankind to sneer at the Gospel and to read Army Orders.
This new teaching seems to me all the more deserving of serious
attention because it is addressed to a humanity which of its own
volition is now established in materialism with a decisiveness hitherto
unknown. And I shall begin by showing this to be true.
I
_The Modern Perfecting of Political Passions_
We are to consider those passions termed political, owing to which men
rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions,
class passions and national passions. Those persons who are most
determined to believe in the inevitable progress of the human species,
especially in its indispensable movement towards more peace and
love, cannot deny that during the past century these passions have
attained--and day by day increasingly so--in several most important
directions, a degree of perfection hitherto unknown in history.
In the first place they affect a large number of men they never before
affected. When, for example, we study the civil wars which convulsed
France in the sixteenth century, and even those at the end of the
eighteenth century, we are struck by the small number of persons
whose minds were really disturbed by these events. While history, up
to the nineteenth century, is filled with long European wars which
left the great majority of people completely indifferent, apart from
the material losses they themselves suffered,[1] it may be said that
to-day there is scarcely a mind in Europe which is not affected--or
thinks itself affected--by a racial or class or national passion, and
most often by all three. The same progress seems to have taken place
in the New World, while immense bodies of men in the Far East, who
seemed to be free from these impulses, are awakening to social hatred,
the party system, and the national spirit insofar as it implies the
will to humiliate other men. To-day political passions have attained a
_universality_ never before known.
They have also attained _coherence_. Thanks to the progress of
communication and, still more, to the group spirit, it is clear
that the holders of the same political hatred now form a compact
impassioned mass, every individual of which feels himself in touch
with the infinite numbers of others, whereas a century ago such
people were comparatively out of touch with each other and hated in
a ‘scattered’ way. This is singularly striking with respect to the
working classes who, even in the middle of the nineteenth century,
felt only a scattered hostility for the opposing class, attempted only
dispersed efforts at war (such as striking in one town, or one union),
whereas to-day they form a closely-woven fabric of hatred from one
end of Europe to the other. It may be asserted that these coherences
will tend to develop still further, for the will to group is one of
the most profound characteristics of the modern world, which even in
the most unexpected domains (for instance, the domain of thought)
is more and more becoming the world of leagues, of ‘unions’ and of
‘groups’. Is it necessary to say that the passion of the individual
is strengthened by feeling itself in proximity to these thousands
of similar passions? Let me add that the individual bestows a mystic
personality on the association of which he feels himself a member, and
gives it a religious adoration, which is simply the deification of his
own passion, and no small stimulus to its intensity.
The coherence just described might be called a surface coherence,
but there is added to it a coherence of essence. For the very reason
that the holders of the same political passion form a more compact,
impassioned group, they also form a more _homogeneous_, impassioned
group, in which individual ways of feeling disappear and the zeal of
each member more and more takes on the colour of the others. In France,
for instance, one cannot but be struck by the fact that the enemies
of the democratic system (I am speaking of the mass, not the highest
points) display a passion which has little variety, shows very slight
differences in different persons. How little this mass of hatred is
weakened by personal and original manners of hating--one might almost
say that this passion itself is obedient to ‘democratic levelling
down’! How much more uniformity is shown now than a hundred years ago
by the emotions known as anti-Semitism, anti-Clericalism and Socialism,
in spite of the immense number of varieties in the last-named! And do
not those who are subject to these emotions now all tend _to say the
same thing_? Political passions, as passions, seem to have attained the
habit of discipline; they seem to obey a word of command even in the
manner they are felt. It is easy to see what increase of strength they
acquire thereby.
With some of these passions the increase in homogeneousness is
accompanied by an increased _precision_. For instance, we all know that
a hundred years ago Socialism was a strong but vague passion with the
great mass of its supporters. But to-day Socialism has more closely
defined the object it wishes to attain, has determined the exact point
where it means to strike its adversary and the movement it intends to
create in order to succeed. The same progress may be observed in the
anti-democratic movement. And we all know that hatred becomes stronger
by becoming more precise.
There is another sort of perfecting of political passions. Throughout
history until our own days I see these passions acting intermittently,
blazing up and then subsiding. I see that the undoubtedly terrible and
numerous explosions of class and race hatred were followed by long
periods of calm, or at least of somnolence. Wars between nations lasted
for years, but not hatred--even if we may say that it existed. To-day
we have only to look every morning at any daily paper and we shall see
that political hatreds do not cease for a single day. At best some
of them are silent a moment for the benefit of one among them which
suddenly claims all the subject’s strength. This is the period of
‘national unions’, which do not in the very least herald in the reign
of love, but merely of a general hatred which for the moment dominates
partial hatreds. To-day political passions have acquired _continuity_,
which is so rare a quality in all feelings.
Let us consider a moment the impulse which causes partial hatreds to
abdicate in favour of another, more general hatred, which derives a
new religion of itself and hence a new strength, from the feeling of
its generality. Perhaps it has not been sufficiently observed that
this sort of impulse is one of the essential characteristics of the
nineteenth century. Twice during the nineteenth century, in Germany and
in Italy, the age-old hatreds of petty States disappeared in favour
of a great national passion. In the same period (more precisely,
at the end of the eighteenth century) in France, the mutual hatred
of the Court nobles and the country nobles was extinguished in the
greater hatred of both parties for all who were not nobles; the hatred
between the military and legal nobles disappeared in the same impulse;
the hatred between the upper and lower ranks of the clergy vanished
in their common hatred of laicality; the hatred between clergy and
nobility expired to the profit of their mutual hatred for the commons.
And in our times the hatred between the three orders has melted into
one hatred, that of the possessing classes for the working class. The
condensation of political passions into a small number of very simple
hatreds, springing from the deepest roots of the human heart, is a
conquest of modern times.[2]
I also believe that I see a great progress in political passions to-day
in their relation to other passions in the same person. Political
passions undoubtedly occupied more of the attention of a bourgeois
of ancient France than is usually supposed, but less than the love
of money and pleasure, family feeling and the calls of vanity; while
the least we can say of his modern equivalent is that when political
passions take possession of him, they do so to the same extent as
the other passions. Compare, for instance, the tiny place occupied
by political passions in the French bourgeois as he appears in the
Fabliaux, in medieval drama, the novels of Scarron, Furetière and
Charles Sorel,[3] with the same bourgeois as drawn by Balzac, Stendhal,
Anatole France, Abel Hermant and Paul Bourget. (Of course, I am not
speaking of times of crisis, like the Ligue and the Fronde, when
political passions occupied the whole individual as soon as they
touched him at all.) The truth is that to-day political passions are
invading most of the other passions in the bourgeoisie, and weakening
the latter to their own profit. Everyone knows that in our own days
family rivalries, commercial enmities, ambitions and the competition
for public honours are all tainted with political passion. An apostle
of the modern mind clamours for ‘politics first’. He might have
observed that nowadays it is politics everywhere, politics always and
nothing but politics.[4] We have only to open our eyes to see when an
increase of power is acquired by political passion when combined with
other passions, so numerous, so constant and so strong themselves.
Coming to the man of the people, we can measure the increase of his
political passions in relation to his other passions in modern times
by considering, as Stendhal puts it, how long his whole passion was
limited to wishing (_a_) Not to be killed, (_b_) For a good warm coat.
And then we may recollect that when a little less misery permitted him
a few general ideas, how long it was before his vague desire for social
changes were transformed into a passion, i.e. showing the two essential
characteristics of passion: The fixed idea, and the need to put it
into action.[5] I think it may be said that political passions in all
classes to-day have attained a degree of _preponderance over all other
passions_ in those affected such as hitherto had been unknown.
The reader will already have perceived an all-important factor in
the impulses I have been describing. Political passions rendered
universal, coherent, homogeneous, permanent, preponderant--everyone can
recognize there to a great extent the work of the cheap daily political
newspaper. One cannot help reflecting and wondering whether it may not
be that inter-human wars are only just beginning, when one thinks of
this instrument for developing their own passions which men have just
invented, or at least brought to a degree of power never seen before,
to which they abandon themselves with all the expansion of their hearts
every morning as soon as they are awake.
I have now showed what might be called the perfecting of political
passions on the surface, in their more or less exterior aspects. But
they have also become strangely perfected in depth and inner strength.
In the first place they have made an immense advance in consciousness
of themselves. Here again, largely owing to the influence of the
newspaper, it is clear that the mind affected by political hatred
to-day becomes conscious of its own passion, formulates it, sees it,
with an accuracy unknown to the same sort of mind fifty years ago.
There is no need to say how much the passion is intensified by this.
And while I am on this subject I should like to point to two passions,
which have certainly not come to birth in our times but have attained
consciousness of themselves, self-assertion, a pride in themselves.
The first is what I shall call a certain _Jewish nationalism_. In the
past, when the Jews were accused in various countries of forming an
inferior race, or at any rate a peculiar people not to be assimilated,
they replied by denying their peculiarity, by trying to get rid of all
appearance of peculiarity, and by refusing to admit the reality of
race. But in the last few years we see some of them labouring to assert
this peculiarity, to define its characteristics--or what they think
such--taking a pride in it, and condemning every effort at assimilation
with their opponents (see the works of Israel Zangwill, of André Spire,
and the _Revue Juive_). Here I am not trying to discover whether the
impulse of these Jews is or is not nobler than the efforts of so many
others to have their origin pardoned them; I am simply pointing out to
those interested in the progress of peace in the world that our age has
added one more arrogance to those which set men against each other, at
least to the extent that it is conscious and proud of itself.[6]
The other impulse I am thinking of is ‘_bourgeoisism_’, by which I
mean the passion of the bourgeois class in asserting itself against
the class by which it is threatened. It may be said that until our
own times, ‘class hatred’, as a conscious hatred proud of itself, was
chiefly the hatred of the labourer for the bourgeois. The reciprocal
hatred was much less clearly confessed. Ashamed of an egotism they
thought peculiar to their own caste, the bourgeois temporized with this
egotism, would not admit even to themselves that it existed, tried to
convince themselves and others that it was a form of interest in the
common good.[7] The bourgeois replied to the dogma of the class war by
denying that there really are any classes, thereby showing that while
they felt an inalterable opposition to the adverse party, they were
unwilling to admit that they felt it. To-day we have only to think of
Italian ‘Fascism’, of a certain ‘Eloge du Bourgeois Français’, and
numerous other manifestations of the same kind,[8] and we shall see
that the bourgeoisie are becoming fully conscious of their specific
egotisms, are proclaiming and venerating them as such and as though
these egotisms were bound up with the supreme interests of the human
race, that they are proud of this veneration and of setting up these
egotisms against those which are trying to destroy the bourgeoisie. In
our time there has been created the ‘mysticism’ of bourgeois passion in
its opposition to the passions of the other class.[9] Here again our
age enters in the balance-sheet of humanity the arrival of yet one more
passion at full possession of itself.
The progress of political passions in depth during the past century
seems to me most remarkable in the case of national passions.
First of all, owing to the fact that they are experienced to-day by
large masses of men, these passions have become _far more purely
passionate_. When the national feeling was practically confined to
Kings or their Ministers, it consisted chiefly in attachment to some
_interest_ (desire for territorial expansion, search for commercial
advantages and profitable alliances), whereas to-day when this national
feeling is continually experienced by common minds, it consists chiefly
in the exercise of _pride_. Everyone will agree that nationalist
passion in the modern citizen is far less founded on a comprehensive
knowledge of the national interests (he has an imperfect perception
of these interests, he lacks the information necessary and does not
try to acquire it, for he is indifferent to questions of foreign
policy) than on the pride he feels in his nation, on his will to feel
himself one with the nation, to react to the honours and insults he
thinks are bestowed on it. No doubt he wants his nation to acquire
territories, to be prosperous and to have powerful allies; but he wants
all this far less on account of the material results which will accrue
to the nation (how much is he conscious of these results?) than on
account of the glory, the prestige which the nation will acquire. By
becoming popular, national feeling has become national pride, national
susceptibility.[10] To measure how much more purely passionate it has
become, how much more perfectly irrational (and therefore stronger)
one has only to think of Jingoism, the form of patriotism specially
invented by democracies. If, in accordance with current opinion, you
think that pride is a weaker passion than self-interest, you may be
convinced to the contrary by observing how commonly men let themselves
be killed on account of a wound to their pride, and how infrequently
for some infraction of their interests.
The susceptibility developed by national sentiment as it has become
popular makes the possibility of wars far greater to-day than in the
past. Obviously, with the peoples and with the aptitude of these new
‘sovereigns’ to rise up in a rage as soon as they think they are
insulted, peace runs an additional danger which did not exist when it
depended only upon Kings and their Ministers, who were far more purely
practical persons, fully self-controlled, and quite willing to put up
with insults when they did not think themselves the stronger party.[11]
And, in fact, how many times during the last hundred years has the
world almost flamed up in war solely because some nation thought its
honour had been wounded?[12] To this must be added the fact that this
national susceptibility provides the leaders of nations with a new and
most effective method of starting the wars they need, whether it is
employed at home or abroad. They have not failed to see this, which
is amply proved by the example of Bismarck and the means by which he
provoked war with Austria and with France. From this point of view
it seems to me quite correct to say with the French monarchists that
‘democracy is war’, provided that by democracy is meant the attainment
of national susceptibility by the masses, and provided that it is
recognized that no change in the system of government would destroy
this phenomenon.[13]
Another considerable deepening of national passions comes from the fact
that the nations are now conscious of themselves not only as regards
their material existence, their military power, their territorial
possessions, and their economic wealth, but as regards their _moral_
existence. With a hitherto unknown consciousness (prodigiously fanned
by authors) every nation now hugs itself and sets itself up against all
other nations as superior in language, art, literature, philosophy,
civilization, ‘culture’. Patriotism to-day is the assertion of one
form of mind against other forms of mind.[14] We know how much this
passion increases its inner strength in this way and that the wars
it determines are fiercer than those waged by the Kings, who merely
desired the same piece of territory. The prophecy of the old Saxon bard
is completely fulfilled: ‘In those days countries will be something
they have not yet become--they will be persons. They will feel hatred,
and these hatreds will cause wars more terrible than any that have yet
been seen.’[15]
It is impossible to over-stress the novelty of this form of patriotism
in history. It is obviously bound up with the adoption of this passion
by the masses of the populace, and seems to have been inaugurated
in 1813 by Germany, who is apparently the real teacher of humanity
in the matter of democratic patriotism, if by this word is meant the
determination of a nation to oppose others in the name of its most
fundamental characteristics.[16] (The France of the Revolution and the
Empire never dreamed of setting itself up against other nations in the
name of its language or of its literature.) This form of patriotism was
so little known to preceding ages that there are countless examples
of nations adopting the cultures of other nations, even of those with
whom they were at war, and in addition reverencing the culture adopted.
Shall I refer to the profound respect of Rome for the genius of Greece,
though Rome had felt it necessary to crush Greece politically? To the
respect of the conquerors of Rome, such as Ataulf and Theodoric, for
Roman genius? And, nearer to ourselves, shall I mention Louis XIV
annexing Alsace and not for one moment thinking of forbidding the
German language?[17] In the past, nations displayed their sympathy for
the culture of other nations with whom they were at war, or invited
them to adopt their own. The Duke of Alba took measures to protect the
learned men in the towns of Holland, against which he was directing his
army; in the eighteenth century, the small German States, allied with
Frederick the Great against the French, adopted more freely than ever
French ideas, French fashions, French[18] literature; in the midst of
the struggle with England, the Convention sent a deputation there to
urge the English to adopt the French metric system.[19] The notion that
political warfare involves a war of cultures is entirely an invention
of modern times, and confers upon them a conspicuous place in the moral
history of humanity.
Another strengthening of national passions comes from the determination
of the peoples to be conscious of _their past_, more precisely to
be conscious of their ambitions as going back to their ancestors,
and to vibrate with ‘centuries-old’ aspirations, with attachments to
‘historical’ rights. This Romantic patriotism is also a characteristic
of patriotism as practised by popular minds (by ‘popular’ I here mean
all minds governed by the imagination, that is, in the first place,
society people and men of letters). I have an idea that when Hugues de
Lionne desired for the nation the conquest of Flanders or when Sieyès
wanted the Low Countries, they did not think they felt the soul of
ancient Gauls reviving in them, any more than Bismarck thought (I am
not talking of what he said) of reviving the Teutonic Knights when he
coveted the Danish Duchies.[20]
Those who wish to estimate the increase of violence given to national
passion by this solemnizing of its desires have only to observe what
has happened to this feeling among the Germans, with their claim to
be carrying on the spirit of the Holy Roman Empire, and among the
Italians since they have set up their aspirations as the revival of
those of the Roman Empire.[21] There once again the leaders of the
State find in popular sentimentality a new and excellent instrument for
carrying out their practical designs, an instrument they well know how
to use. To mention only one recent example--think of the result the
Italian government was able to obtain from the amazing aptitude of its
compatriots to wake up one fine morning and discover that the claim to
Fiume was a ‘centuries-old’ claim.
Speaking generally, it may be said that national passions, owing to
the fact that they are now exerted by plebeian minds, assume the
character of _mysticism_, of a religious adoration almost unknown
in these passions in the practical minds of the great nobles. It is
unnecessary to add that this makes these passions deeper and stronger.
Here once more this plebeian form of patriotism is adopted by all who
practise this passion, even when they are the noisiest champions of
the aristocracy of the mind. M. Maurras talks of the ‘goddess France’,
just as Victor Hugo does. Let me add that this mystical adoration
of the nation is not only to be explained by the nature of those who
adore, but also by the changes which have taken place in the adored
object. There is first of all the spectacle of the military force and
organization of modern States, which is something far more imposing
than of old. And when these States are seen to make war for an
indefinite period after they have no more men, and go on subsisting
for long years after they have no more money, it is easy to understand
why a man who has some tincture of religion in his mind may be led to
believe that these States are of an essence different from that of
ordinary natural beings.
I shall point out another great increase of power in national sentiment
which has occurred in the last half-century. I mean that several
very powerful political passions, which were originally independent
of nationalist feeling, have now become incorporated with it. These
passions are: (_a_) The movement against the Jews; (_b_) the movement
of the possessing classes against the proletariat; (_c_) the movement
of the champions of authority against the democrats. To-day each one of
these passions is identified with national feeling and declares that
its adversary implies the negation of nationalism. I may add that when
a person is affected by one of these passions he is generally affected
by all three; consequently nationalist passion is usually swelled by
the addition of all three. Moreover this increase is reciprocal, and
it may be said that to-day capitalism, anti-semitism and the party
of authority have all received new strength from their union with
nationalism. (For additional proof of the strength of these unions, see
Note C at the end of this book.)
I cannot drop the subject of the modern perfecting of political
passions without mentioning one more characteristic: In all nations the
number of persons who feel a direct interest in belonging to a powerful
nation is incomparably greater now than in the past. In all the great
States to-day I observe that not only the world of industry and big
business but a considerable number of small tradesmen, small bourgeois,
doctors, lawyers, and even writers and artists, and working men too,
feel that for the sake of the prosperity of their own occupations it
is essential for them to belong to a powerful group which can make
itself feared. Those who are in a position to give an opinion on
this sort of change agree that the feeling did not exist, at least
in the same clearly defined way as to-day, thirty years ago among
the small tradesmen of France, for instance. It seems an even newer
thing among the men who belong to the so-called liberal professions;
it is certainly something new to hear artists constantly girding at
the government of their country because it ‘does not give the nation
enough prestige to impose their art on foreigners’. The feeling that
from a professional point of view they have an interest in belonging
to a powerful nation is also very recent among the working classes.
The party of ‘Nationalist Socialists’, which seems to exist everywhere
except in France, is a quite modern political development. Among the
masters of industry the new development is, not that they feel how
much it is to their interest that their nation should be powerful,
but that the feeling is to-day transformed into action, into formal
pressure on their governments.[22] This extension of patriotism based
on interest certainly does not prevent this sort of patriotism (as I
said above) from being much less wide-spread than the patriotism[23]
based on pride; nevertheless it brings another increase of strength to
nationalist passions.
I shall now point out a last important perfecting of all political
passions to-day, whether of race, class, party or nation. When I
observe these passions in the past, I see them consisting in purely
passionate impulses, natural explosions of instinct, devoid of all
extension of themselves in ideas and systems--at least among the
majority. The revolt of the workers in the fifteenth century against
the possessing classes was apparently not accompanied by any sort
of teaching about the origin of property or the nature of capital.
Those who massacred the Ghettos seem to have had no views on the
philosophical values of their action. And when the troops of Charles V
attacked the defenders of Mezières, it does not appear that the assault
was enlivened by a theory about the predestination of the Germanic race
and the moral baseness of the Latin world. To-day I notice that every
political passion is furnished with a whole network of strongly woven
doctrines, the sole object of which is to show the supreme value of
its action from every point of view, while the result is a redoubling
of its strength as a passion. We must look at the system of ideology
of German nationalism known as ‘Pangermanism’ and at the similar
ideology of the French Monarchists, if we wish to realize the point
of perfection to which our age has carried these systems, with what
tenacity each passion has built up in every direction the theories apt
to satisfy it, with what precision these theories have been adapted to
this satisfaction, with what opulence of research, what labour, what
profound investigation they have been carried on in all directions. Our
age is indeed the age of the _intellectual organization of political
hatreds_. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral
history of humanity.
Ever since these systems have been in existence, they have consisted
in establishing for each passion that it is the agent of good in the
world and that its enemy is the genius of evil. But to-day these
passions desire to establish this not only politically, but morally,
intellectually and aesthetically. Anti-semitism, Pangermanism, French
Monarchism, Socialism are not only political manifestations; they
defend a particular form of morality, of intelligence, of sensibility,
of literature, of philosophy and of artistic conceptions. Our age has
introduced two novelties into the theorizing of political passions, by
which they have been remarkably intensified. The first is that everyone
to-day claims that his movement is in line with ‘the development of
evolution’ and ‘the profound unrolling of history’. All these passions
of to-day, whether they derive from Marx, from M. Maurras or from
Houston Chamberlain, have discovered a ‘historical law’, according to
which their movement is merely carrying out the spirit of history and
must therefore necessarily triumph, while the opposing party is running
counter to this spirit and can enjoy only a transitory triumph. That
is merely the old desire to have Fate on one’s side, but it is put
forth in a scientific shape. And this brings us to the second novelty:
To-day all political ideologies claim to be founded on science, to
be the result of a ‘precise observation of facts’. We all know what
self-assurance, what rigidity, what inhumanity (comparatively new
traits in the history of political passions, of which modern French
monarchism is a good example) are given to these passions to-day by
this claim.
To summarize: To-day political passions show a degree of universality,
of coherence, of homogeneousness, of precision, of continuity, of
preponderance, in relation to other passions, unknown until our
times. They have become conscious of themselves to an extent never
seen before. Some of them, hitherto scarcely avowed, have awakened to
consciousness and have joined the old passions. Others have become more
purely passionate than ever, possess men’s hearts in moral regions
they never before reached, and have acquired a mystic character which
had disappeared for centuries. All are furnished with an apparatus of
ideology whereby, in the name of science, they proclaim the supreme
value of their action and its historical necessity. On the surface
and in the depths, in spatial values and in inner strength, political
passions have to-day reached a point of perfection never before known
in history. The present age is essentially the age of politics.
II
_Significance of this Movement--Nature of Political Passions_
What is the significance of this movement? Of what simple and profound
human tendency does it show the progress and triumph? The question
comes down to inquiring what is the nature of political passions,
of what more general and more essential state of mind are they the
expression, what--as the schools say--is their psychological foundation?
It seems to me that these passions can be reduced to two fundamental
desires: (_a_) The will of a group of men to get hold of (or to retain
a hold on) some _material_ advantage, such as territories, comfort,
political power and all its material advantages; and (_b_) the will
of a group of men to become conscious of themselves as _individuals_,
insofar as they are _distinct_ in relation to other men. It may also
be said that these passions can be reduced to two desires, one of
which seeks the satisfaction of an _interest_, the other of a _pride_
or self-esteem. These two desires enter into political passions in
very different proportions, according to which passion is involved. It
appears that racial passion, insofar as it is not one with national
passion, is chiefly based on the will of a group of men to set
themselves up as distinct from others; the same thing may be said of
religious passion, if we consider it in its pure state. On the other
hand, class passion, at least as we see it in the working classes,
apparently consists solely in the will to obtain possession of material
advantages. The desire to feel himself distinct, which George Sand and
the apostles of 1848 had begun to inculcate in the working man, now
seems to be abandoned by him, at least in his utterances. National
passion contains both factors. The patriot wants to obtain material
advantages and he wants to set himself up as distinct from others. This
is the secret of the evident superiority in strength of this passion
(when it is really a passion) over all other passions, especially over
Socialism. A passion whose sole motive is interest is too weak to
contend with another which combines interest and pride. This too is one
of the weaknesses of Socialism when opposed to class passion as exerted
by the bourgeoisie, for the bourgeois wants both to possess material
advantages and to feel himself distinct from others. I shall add to
this that in my opinion the relative strengths of these two passions
(one based on interest and the other on pride or self-esteem) are very
unequal, and that the more powerful of the two is not that which tries
to satisfy interest.
Now, when I come to ask what is signified in their turn by these
fundamental desires of political passions, I find they appear to me
as the two essential composites of man’s will to situate himself _in
real life_. To want real life is to want (_a_) To possess some material
advantages, and (_b_) to be conscious of oneself as an individual.
Every life which despises these two desires, every life which pursues
only spiritual advantage or sincerely asserts itself in the universal,
situates itself _outside the real_. Political passions, especially
national passions insofar as they unite the two desires mentioned, seem
to me essentially _realist_ passions.
Here many persons will protest: ‘Yes,’ they will say, ‘the desires
which make up political passions are realist desires, but the
individual shifts these desires from himself to the group of which
he is a part. The working man wants to obtain possession of material
advantages for his class, not for his own limited person. The patriot
wants to possess territories for his nation, not for his own narrow
ego; he wants to be distinct from other men through his nation. Do you
apply the term “realist” to passions which imply such a transfer from
the individual to the collective body?’ Is it necessary to reply that
when the individual transfers these desires to the body of which he is
a part, he does not thereby alter their nature? And that all he does is
simply to increase their dimensions immeasureably? To wish to possess
material advantages _in one’s nation_, to want to feel distinct from
other men _in one’s nation_, is still the desire to possess material
advantages, still the desire to feel distinct from other men. It only
means that, if you are a Frenchman, you want to possess Brittany,
Provence, Guyenne, Algeria, Indo-China; and you want to feel yourself
distinct from other men in Jeanne d’Arc, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Racine,
Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Pasteur. Add to this that at the same time
you attach these desires, not to a transitory and precarious single
existence, but to an ‘eternal’ existence, and feel them in that way.
Not only does national egotism not cease to be egotism because it
is national, but it becomes ‘sacred’ egotism.[24] Let me complete
my definition by saying that political passions are realism of a
particular quality, which is an important element of strength in them:
They are _divinized_ realism.[25]
If, therefore, we desire to express this perfecting of political
passions which I have described, in terms of a more profound and
essential order of things, we may say that men to-day are displaying,
with a hitherto unknown knowledge and consciousness, the desire to
situate themselves in the _real_ or practical manner of existence, in
opposition to the _disinterested_ or _metaphysical_ manner. Moreover,
it is remarkable to see how political passions to-day more and more
expressly assert their derivation from this realism and from it alone.
On the one hand we have a Socialism which constantly declares that it
has no interest in universal man, no interest in procuring justice for
him or any other ‘metaphysical phantom’, but solely desires to obtain
possession of material advantages for the benefit of its class. On the
other hand we have the nationalist mind which everywhere takes a pride
in being purely realistic. The French people who fought in the past to
carry to other nations a doctrine they believed would bring happiness
(I say the people, for its rulers never shared in that simple-minded
belief) would now blush to have it even suspected that they would fight
‘for principles’.[26] Is it not suggestive to observe that the only
wars of the past which, to some extent, brought into play passions
that were a little disinterested--the wars of religion--are the only
wars from which humanity has freed itself?[27] And that immense
idealistic upheavals like the crusades (idealistic at least with humble
people) should now be something which makes the modern man smile, like
the spectacle of children at play? Is it not also significant that the
national passions (which I have shown are the most perfectly realist of
all political passions) should be those which I have been able to point
out have most absorbed all other passions?[28] Let me add to this,
that these passions, insofar as they are the will of a group of men to
set themselves up as distinct from others, have attained a hitherto
unknown degree of consciousness.[29] Finally, the supreme attribute we
have discovered in political passions, i.e. the divinization of their
realism, is now openly admitted, with a plainness never seen before.
The State, Country, Class, are now frankly God; we may even say that
for many people (and some are proud of it) they alone are God.[30]
Humanity, by its present practice of political passions, thereby
declares that it has become more realist, more exclusively and more
religiously realist than it has ever been.
III
_The ‘Clerks’--The Great Betrayal_
_‘I created him to be spiritual in his flesh; and now he has become
carnal even in the spirit.’_--(Bossuet, _Élévations_, VII, 3.)
In all that I have said hitherto I have been considering only masses,
whether bourgeois or proletarian, kings, ministers, political leaders,
all that portion of the human species which I shall call ‘the laymen’,
whose whole function consists essentially in the pursuit of material
interests, and who, by becoming more and more solely and systematically
realist, have in fact only done what might be expected of them.
Side by side with this humanity whom the poet has described in a
phrase--‘O curvae in terram animae et celestium inanes’--there existed
until the last half century another, essentially distinct humanity,
which to a certain extent acted as a check upon the former. I mean
that class of men whom I shall designate ‘_the clerks_’, by which term
I mean all those whose activity essentially is _not_ the pursuit of
practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art
or a science or metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession
of non-material advantages, and hence in a certain manner say: ‘My
kingdom is not of this world.’ Indeed, throughout history, for more
than two thousand years until modern times, I see an uninterrupted
series of philosophers, men of religion, men of literature, artists,
men of learning (one might say almost all during this period), whose
influence, whose life, were in direct opposition to the realism of the
multitudes. To come down specifically to the political passions--the
‘clerks’ were in opposition to them in two ways. They were either
entirely indifferent to these passions, and, like Leonardo da Vinci,
Malebranche, Goethe, set an example of attachment to the purely
disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the
supreme value of this form of existence; or, gazing as moralists
upon the conflict of human egotisms, like Erasmus, Kant, Renan, they
preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an
abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions.
Although these ‘clerks’ founded the modern State to the extent that it
dominates individual egotisms, their activity undoubtedly was chiefly
theoretical, and they were unable to prevent the laymen from filling
all history with the noise of their hatreds and their slaughters; _but
the ‘clerks’ did prevent the laymen from setting up their actions as a
religion, they did prevent them from thinking themselves great men as
they carried out these activities_. It may be said that, thanks to the
‘clerks’, humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good.
This contradiction was an honour to the human species, and formed the
rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.
Now, at the end of the nineteenth century a fundamental change
occurred: _the ‘clerks’ began to play the game of political passions_.
The men who had acted as a check on the realism of the people began
to act as its stimulators. This upheaval in the moral behaviour of
humanity operated in several ways.
_First: The ‘clerks’ have adopted political passions_
First of all the ‘clerks’ have adopted political passions. No one will
deny that throughout Europe to-day the immense majority of men of
letters and artists, a considerable number of scholars, philosophers,
and ‘ministers’ of the divine, share in the chorus of hatreds among
races and political factions. Still less will it be denied that they
adopt national passions. Doubtless, the names of Dante, Petrarch,
d’Aubigné, certain apologists of Caboche or preachers of the Ligue
will suffice to show that certain ‘clerks’ did not wait for our era
to indulge in these passions with all the strength of their souls.
But, upon the whole, these ‘clerks’ of the forum were exceptions, at
least among the great ones. If, in addition to the great masters named
above, I evoke the phalanx of Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Galilei,
Rabelais, Montaigne, Descartes, Racine, Pascal, Leibniz, Kepler,
Huyghens, Newton, and even Voltaire, Buffon and Montesquieu (to mention
only a few) I think I may repeat that until our own days the men of
thought or the honest men remained strangers to political passions,
and said with Goethe: ‘Let us leave politics to the diplomats and the
soldiers.’ Or if, like Voltaire, they took these passions into account,
they adopted a critical attitude towards them, did not espouse them
as passions. Or if, like Rousseau, Maistre, Chateaubriand, Lamartine,
even Michelet, they did take these passions to heart, they did so with
a generalizing of feeling, a disdain for immediate results, which in
fact make the word ‘passions’ incorrect. To-day, if we mention Mommsen,
Treitschke, Ostwald, Brunetière, Barrès, Lemaître, Péguy, Maurras,
d’Annunzio, Kipling, we have to admit that the ‘clerks’ now exercise
political passions with all the characteristics of passion--the
tendency to action, the thirst for immediate results, the exclusive
preoccupation with the desired end, the scorn for argument, the excess,
the hatred, the fixed ideas. The modern ‘clerk’ has entirely ceased
to let the layman alone descend to the market place. The modern clerk
is determined to have the soul of a citizen and to make vigorous use
of it; he is proud of that soul; his literature is filled with his
contempt for the man who shuts himself up with art or science and
takes no interest in the passions of the State.[31] He is violently
on the side of Michaelangelo crying shame upon Leonardo da Vinci for
his indifference to the misfortunes of Florence, and against the
master of the Last Supper when he replied that indeed the study of
beauty occupied his whole heart. The time has long past by since Plato
demanded that the philosopher should be bound in chains in order to
compel him to take an interest in the State. To have as his function
the pursuit of eternal things and yet to believe that he becomes
greater by concerning himself with the State--that is the view of the
modern ‘clerk’. It is as natural as it is evident that this adhesion
of the ‘clerks’ to the passions of the laymen fortifies these passions
in the hearts of the latter. In the first place, it abolishes the
suggestive spectacle (which I mentioned above) of a race of men whose
interests are set outside the practical world. And then especially,
the ‘clerk’ by adopting political passions, brings them the tremendous
influence of his sensibility if he is an artist, of his persuasive
power if he is a thinker, and in either case his moral prestige.[32]
Before proceeding any further, I feel I ought to make myself clear on
certain points:--
(_a_) I have been talking of the _whole_ of the men of thought anterior
to our own age. When I say that the ‘clerks’ in the past opposed
the realism of the laymen and that the ‘clerks’ of to-day are in
its service, I am considering each of these groups as a whole; I am
contrasting one general characteristic with another. This means that
I shall not feel myself contradicted by a reader who takes pains to
point out to me that so-and-so in the former group was a realist,
and that so-and-so in the second is not, so long as this reader is
obliged to admit that as a whole each of these groups does manifest the
characteristic I have indicated. And also, when I speak of a single
‘clerk’, I am thinking of his work in its chief characteristic, i.e.
in that part of his teaching which dominates all the rest, even if the
remainder sometimes contradicts this dominant teaching. This means that
I do not consider that I ought to refrain from looking upon Malebranche
as a master of liberal thought because a few lines of his ‘Morale’ seem
to be a justification of slavery, or upon Nietzsche as a moralist of
war because the end of ‘Zarathustra’ is a manifesto of fraternity which
outdoes the Gospels. And I see the less reason for doing so, since
Malebranche as a defender of slavery and Nietzsche as a humanitarian
have had no influence at all, and my subject is the influence which the
‘clerks’ have had in the world, and not what they were in themselves.
(_b_) Some will object to me: ‘How can you treat men like Barrès
and Péguy as “clerks” and blame them for lacking the true spirit of
“clerks” when they are so openly men of action, with whom political
thought is obviously occupied solely with the needs of the present
hour, solely spurred on by the events of the day, while the former
scarcely ever gave expression to his political thought except in
newspaper articles?’ I reply, that this thought, which in truth is
practically nothing but a form of immediate action, is given out by its
authors as the fruits of the highest speculative intellectual activity,
the result of the most truly philosophical meditation. Barrès and
Péguy would never have consented to be looked upon as mere polemical
writers, even in their polemical works.[33] These men, who indeed are
not ‘clerks’, gave themselves out to be ‘clerks’ and were considered
as such, (Barrès gave himself out to be a thinker who condescended to
the arena), and it is precisely as such that they enjoy a particular
prestige among men of action. In this study my subject is not the
‘clerk’ such as he is, but the ‘clerk’ such as he is considered to be
and as he acts upon the world in that capacity.
I shall make the same answer with regard to M. Maurras and the other
instructors of the _Action Française_, of whom it will be said even
more truly that they are men of action and that it is indefensible to
cite them as ‘clerks’. These men claim to carry out their action by
virtue of a doctrine derived from a wholly objective study of history,
from the exercise of the most purely scientific spirit. And they owe
the special attention with which they are listened to by men of action
entirely to this claim that they are _men of learning_, men who are
fighting for a truth discovered in the austerity of the laboratory.
They owe it to their pose as combative ‘clerks’, but essentially _as
‘clerks’_.
(_c_) Finally I should like to define my views on another point and
to say that when the ‘clerk’ descends to the market place I only
consider that he is failing to perform his functions when he does so,
like those I have mentioned, for the purpose of securing the triumph
of a realist passion, whether of class, race or nation. When Gerson
entered the pulpit of Notre Dame to denounce the murderers of Louis
d’Orléans; when Spinoza, at the peril of his life, went and wrote the
words ‘Ultimi barbarorum’ on the gate of those who had murdered the de
Witts; when Voltaire fought for the Calas family; when Zola and Duclaux
came forward to take part in a celebrated lawsuit (Dreyfus affair);
all these ‘clerks’ were carrying out their functions as ‘clerks’ in
the fullest and noblest manner. They were the officiants of abstract
justice and were sullied with no passion for a worldly object.[34]
Moreover, there exists a certain criterion by which we may know whether
the ‘clerk’ who takes public action does so in conformity with his true
functions; and that is, that he is immediately reviled by the laymen,
whose interests he thwarts (Socrates, Jesus). We may say beforehand
that the ‘clerk’ who is praised by the laymen is a traitor to his
office.
But let us return to the modern ‘clerk’s’ adhesion to political
passions.
It is concerning national passions that this adhesion seems to me
particularly novel and big with results. Once again, of course humanity
did not have to wait for the present age to see the ‘clerks’ indulge
in this passion. Without mentioning the poets, whose tender hearts
have always sighed ‘Nescio qua natale dulcedine solum cunctos Ducit’;
and, as regards the philosophers, without going back to antiquity when
all, previous to the Stoics, were ardent patriots; we may yet observe
in history (since the coming of Christianity and long before our own
days) writers, men of learning, artists, moralists, even ministers
of the ‘Universal’ Church, who more or less explicitly displayed a
special attachment for the group to which they belonged. But this
affection among these men was based on reason; it showed itself
capable of judging its object, of denouncing its errors when they
believed such errors had been committed. Need I recall how Fénelon and
Massillon denounced certain wars of Louis XIV? How Voltaire condemned
the destruction of the Palatinate? How Renan denounced the violences
of Napoleon? Buckle, the intolerance of England towards the French
Revolution? And, in our own times, Nietzsche, the brutalities of
Germany towards France?[35] It was reserved for our own time to see men
of thought, or men giving themselves out as such, professing openly
that they would not submit their patriotism to any check on the part of
their judgment, proclaiming (like Barrès) that ‘even if the country is
wrong, we must think it in the right’, denouncing as ‘traitors to the
nation’ those of their compatriots who retain their liberty of mind, or
at least of speech, in regard to their country. In France we have not
forgotten how, during the last war, so many ‘thinkers’ attacked Renan
for the liberty of his judgments on the history of his country.[36] Nor
have we forgotten how, a little before that, a whole set of young men
(who claimed to share in the life of the spirit) bristled up against
one of their masters (Jacob) who tried to teach them a patriotism which
did not exclude all right of criticism. After the violation of Belgium
and other excesses of the Germans, in October, 1914, a German teacher
said: ‘There is nothing for which we need make excuses.’[37] Now, if
their own countries had been in a similar position, the same thing
would have been said by most of the spiritual leaders of that time;
by Barrès in France, by d’Annunzio in Italy, by Kipling in England,
if we may judge by his conduct during the attack of his nation upon
the Boers, and by William James in the United States, if we recall
his attitude when his compatriots seized the island of Cuba.[38] I am
quite ready to agree that this sort of blind patriotism makes powerful
nations, and that the patriotism of Fénelon or of Renan is not the sort
which secures empires. It remains to determine whether the function of
‘clerks’ is to secure empires.
This adhesion of the ‘clerks’ to national passion is particularly
remarkable among those whom I shall call ‘pre-eminently clerks’; I mean
the Churchmen. In all European countries during the past fifty years,
the immense majority of these men have not only given their adhesion to
the national feeling[39] and therefore have ceased to provide the world
with the spectacle of hearts solely occupied with God--but they seem to
have adopted this feeling with the same passion as that I have pointed
out as existing among men of letters, and they too appear to be ready
to support their own countries in the most flagrant injustices. During
the last war this could be most clearly seen in the German clergy, from
whom no one could drag the shadow of a protest against the excesses
committed by their nation, and whose silence does not appear to have
been caused solely by prudence.[40] In contrast to this attitude I
refer the reader to that of the Spanish theologians of the sixteenth
century, to men like Bartholomew de las Casas and Vittoria, earnestly
denouncing the cruelties committed by their compatriots in the conquest
of America. I do not claim that similar behaviour was then the rule
among Churchmen, but I should like to ask whether there is a single
country to-day where they would do likewise, or where they would even
wish to be permitted to do so?[41]
I shall point out another characteristic of patriotism in the modern
‘clerk’: xenophobia. The hatred of man for ‘the man from outside’ (the
_horsain_), his rejection of and scorn for everything which is not
‘from his own home’, all these impulses, so constant among peoples and
apparently necessary to their existence, have been adopted in our days
by the so-called men of thought, and adopted with a seriousness of
application, _an absence of simple-mindedness_, which go far towards
making this adoption worthy of notice. We know how systematically the
mass of German teachers in the past fifty years have announced the
decline of every civilization but that of their own race, and how in
France the admirers of Nietzsche or Wagner, even of Kant or Goethe,
were treated by Frenchmen who claimed to share in the life of the
spirit.[42] You may estimate how curiously new this form of patriotism
is among the men of thought in France by thinking of Lamartine, Victor
Hugo, Michelet, Proudhon, Renan, to name only patriotic ‘clerks’ in the
age immediately preceding that we are considering. Is it necessary to
say once again how much the ‘clerks’ have stimulated the passion of the
laymen by adopting this xenophobia?
I shall be told that during the past fifty years, and especially
during the twenty years before the war, the attitude of foreigners to
France was such that the most violent national partiality was forced
upon all Frenchmen who wished to safeguard the nation, and that the
only true patriots were those who consented to this fanaticism. I say
nothing to the contrary; I only say that the ‘clerks’ who indulged
in this fanaticism betrayed their duty, which is precisely to set
up a corporation whose sole cult is that of justice and of truth,
in opposition to the peoples and the injustice to which they are
condemned by their religions of this earth. It is true indeed that
these new ‘clerks’ declare that they do not know what is meant by
justice, truth, and other ‘metaphysical fogs’, that for them the true
is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances. All these
things were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted
all the important thinkers of his time.
It must be admitted that the German ‘clerks’ led the way in this
adhesion of the modern ‘clerk’ to patriotic fanaticism. The French
‘clerks’ were, and long remained, animated with the most perfect spirit
of justice towards foreign cultures (think of the cosmopolitanism
of the Romantics!), when already Lessing, Schlegel, Fichte, Goerres
were organizing in their hearts a violent adoration for ‘everything
German’, and a scorn for everything not German. The nationalist ‘clerk’
is essentially a German invention. This, moreover, is a theme which
will frequently recur in this book, i.e. that most of the moral and
political attitudes adopted by the ‘clerks’ of Europe in the past fifty
years are of German origin, and that in the world of spiritual things
the victory of Germany is now complete.
It may be said that Germany, by creating for herself the nationalist
‘clerk’ and thereby acquiring the additional strength we know she
has acquired, made this species of ‘clerk’ necessary to all other
countries. It is undeniable that from the moment when Germany had a
Mommsen, France especially was bound to have a Barrès, under penalty
of finding herself in a position of great inferiority in nationalist
fanaticism, and of seeing her existence seriously menaced. Every
Frenchman attached to the continuance of his nation must rejoice that
in the last half century France has possessed a fanatically nationalist
literature. Yet one would like this Frenchman to rise for a moment
superior to his interest, and, faithful in this to the honour of his
race, to think it sad that the course of events in the world should
force him to rejoice in such a thing.
More generally, it may be admitted that a realist attitude has been
imposed on the modern ‘clerks’, chiefly the French ‘clerks’, by
exterior and interior political conditions which have arisen in their
nations. However serious this may be, it would be much less serious
if we found that the ‘clerks’ deplored it while they submitted to
it, if they felt how much their own value is diminished by it, how
greatly civilization is menaced by it, to what an extent the universe
is rendered ugly by it. But this is exactly what we do not see. On the
contrary, we see them joyfully carrying out this realism; we see them
believing that they are rendered greater by their nationalist fury,
that it is a service to civilization, an embellishment to humanity.
Then one feels that one is confronted by something different from
a function thwarted by the events of the moment, and faced with a
cataclysm of moral notions in those who educate the world.
I should like to point out two other characteristics in the patriotism
of the modern ‘clerks’ which seem new to me, the second of which has
not failed to stimulate this passion greatly among the peoples.
The first can best be brought out by contrast with the lines written by
an author of the fifteenth century, lines which are the more remarkable
since he who wrote them proved by his deeds how deep was his love for
his native country. ‘All cities,’ says Guicciardini, ‘all States, all
Kingdoms, are mortal; everything comes to an end, either by accident or
by the course of nature. That is why a citizen who witnesses the end of
his country cannot feel so distressed at her misfortune with so much
reason as he would lament his own ruin. His country has met the fate
which in every way she was bound to meet; the misfortune is wholly for
him whose unhappy lot has caused him to be born in a time when such a
disaster had to occur.’ One wonders whether there is a single modern
thinker, attached to his country as the author of that passage was to
his, who would dare to form, still less to express, a judgment of her
so extraordinarily free in its melancholy. And here we come upon one
of the great impieties of the moderns: The refusal to believe that
above their nations there exists a development of a superior kind, by
which they will be swept away like all other things. The ancients,
so completely the adorers of their States, nevertheless placed them
beneath Fate. The ancient City was under divine protection, but in no
wise believed that she herself was divine and necessarily eternal. All
the literature of the ancients shows us that, in their opinion, the
duration of their institutions was a precarious thing, solely due to
the favour of the Gods, who at any time might withdraw that favour.[43]
We have Thucydides contemplating the image of a world in which Athens
should have ceased to exist; we have Polybius showing us the conqueror
of Carthage meditating over the burning town: ‘And Rome too shall meet
her fatal hour.’ We have Virgil praising the peasant of the fields for
whom ‘res romanae et peritura regna’ are of no value.
It was reserved for the moderns to make of their City a tower which
defies the heavens, and to do it with the aid of their ‘clerks’.
The second characteristic of the patriotism of the modern ‘clerks’
is a desire to relate the form of their own minds to a form of the
_national_ mind, which they naturally brandish against other national
forms of mind. We all know how, during the last fifty years, so many
men of learning on both banks of the Rhine have asserted their views in
the name of _French_ science, of _German_ science. We know how acridly
so many of our writers in the same period have vibrated with _French_
sensibility, _French_ intelligence, _French_ philosophy. Some declare
that they are the incarnation of Aryan thought, Aryan painting, Aryan
music, to which others reply by discovering that a certain master had
a Jewish grandmother, and so venerate Semitic genius in him. Here it
is not a question of inquiring whether the form of mind of a scholar
or an artist is the signature of his nationality or his race and to
what extent, but of noting the desire of the modern ‘clerks’ that it
should be so, and noting how new a thing this is. Racine and La Bruyère
never dreamed of setting up their works before themselves and before
the world as manifestation of the French mind, nor did Goethe and
Wincklemann relate theirs to the genius of Germany.[44] Here, chiefly
among the artists, is a very remarkable fact. It is very remarkable to
see men whose activity consists, one might say professionally, in the
assertion of individuality, men who became so violently conscious of
this truth a century ago with the Romantic movement, now (as it were)
abdicating this sort of consciousness and trying to feel themselves
as the expression of some general existence, a manifestation of a
collective mind. It is true that this abdication of the individual in
favour of ‘a great impersonal and eternal Whole’ satisfies another
sort of Romanticism. It is true that this impulse of the artist may
also be explained by the desire (which Barrès does not conceal) to
increase the enjoyment of himself by himself, since the consciousness
of the individual ego is doubled in profundity by consciousness of
the national ego, while at the same time the artist finds new lyrical
themes in this second consciousness. It may also be admitted that
the artist is not blind to his own interest in calling himself the
expression of the genius of his nation, thereby inviting the whole race
to applaud itself in the work he put before it.[45] Whatever their
motives may have been, the great minds or the minds reputed such, by
relating the whole of their value so noisily to their nation, have
laboured in a direction contrary to that expected of them; they have
flattered the vanity of nations, they have fed full the arrogance
with which each nation flings its superiority in the face of its
neighbours.[46]
I cannot better bring out all the novelty of this attitude of the
‘clerk’ than by quoting the remark of Renan, which would be signed
by all men of thought from Socrates onwards: ‘Man belongs neither to
his language nor to his race; he belongs only to himself, for he is
a free being, that is, a moral being.’ To this Barrès replies, amid
the applause of his compeers: ‘To be moral is _not to wish to be free
from one’s race_.’ Here, obviously, is an exaltation of the gregarious
spirit which the nations had heard little of before from the priests of
the spirit.
The modern ‘clerks’ do better still. They declare that their thought
cannot be good, that it cannot bear good fruit, unless they remain on
their native soil, unless they are not ‘uprooted’ (‘_déracinés_’). They
congratulate A on working in _his_ Bearn, B in _his_ Berry, C in _his_
Brittany. And they not only proclaim this law for the poets, but for
critics, moralists, philosophers, the servants of purely intellectual
activity. To declare the mind good to the extent of its refusal to
liberate itself from the earth is something which will make the modern
‘clerks’ certain of a conspicuous place in the annals of the spiritual
life. Obviously, the feelings of this class of men has changed since
Plutarch taught: ‘Man is not a plant created to be immobile and to have
his roots fixed in the soil where he was born,’ and since Antisthenes
replied to his colleagues who boasted that they were native to the
soil, that ‘they shared this honour with the slugs and grasshoppers’.
Need I say that I am only denouncing this desire of the ‘clerk’ to
feel himself determined by his race and to remain fixed to his native
soil to the extent that it becomes in him a political attitude, a
nationalist provocation. The best way for me to define this is by
quoting this hymn of a modern ‘clerk’ to ‘his soil and his dead’, a
hymn completely void of political passion:
‘And the old oak under which I am sitting speaks in its turn, and says
to me:
‘“Read, read in my shadow those Gothic songs whose refrains I heard
in the past mingle with the rustling of my leaves. The souls of your
ancestors are in these songs that are older than I am. Learn to know
those humble ancestors, share their past joys and sorrows. Thus, O
transitory creature, shalt thou live long ages in a few years. Be
pious, venerate the soil of your country. Never take up a handful in
your hand without remembering that it is sacred. Love all those far-off
relatives whose dust mingled with earth has fed me for centuries,
whose minds have passed into you, their Benjamin, the child of better
days. Reproach not your ancestors with their ignorance, nor with the
feebleness of their thought, nor even with the illusions of fear which
sometimes rendered them cruel. As well reproach yourself for having
been a child. Remember that they laboured, that they suffered, that
they hoped for you, and that you owe everything to them!”’[47]
_Second: They bring their political passions into their activities as
‘clerks’._
The ‘clerks’ have not been content simply to adopt political passions,
if by this one means that they have made a place for these passions
side by side with the activities they are bound to carry on as
‘clerks’. They have introduced these passions into those activities.
They permit, they desire them to be mingled with their work as artists,
as men of learning, as philosophers, to colour the essence of their
work and to mark all its productions. And indeed never were there so
many political works among those which ought to be the mirror of the
disinterested intelligence.
You may refuse to be surprised by this in the case of poetry. We must
not ask the poets to separate their works from their passions. The
latter are the substance of the former, and the only question to ask
is whether they write poems to express their passions or whether they
hunt for passions in order to write poems. In either case one does
not see why they should exclude national passion or the spirit of
party from their vibrant material. Our political poets, who are not
numerous however, have only followed the example of Virgil, Claudian,
Lucan, Dante, d’Aubigné, Ronsard, and Hugo. Yet we cannot deny that
political passion, as it is expressed by Claudel or d’Annunzio, a
conscious and organized passion _lacking all simplicity_, coldly
scornful of its adversary, a passion which in the second of these
poets displays itself as so precisely political, so cunningly adapted
to the profound cupidity of his compatriots and the exact point of
weakness in the foreigner--we cannot deny, I say, that this political
passion is something different from the eloquent generalities of the
‘Tragiques of the Année Terrible.’ A work like _La Nave_, with its
national plan as exact and practical as that of a Bismarck, wherein
the lyric gift is used to extol this practical character, seems to me
something new in the history of poetry, even of political poetry. The
result of this new departure on the minds of laymen may be judged by
the present state of mind of the Italian people.[48] But in our day
the most remarkable example of the poets’ applying their art to the
service of political passions is that literary form which may be called
‘lyrical philosophy’, the most brilliant symbol of which is the work of
Barrès. It begins by taking as its centres of vibration certain truly
philosophical states of mind (such as pantheism, a loftily sceptical
intellectualism) and then entirely devotes itself to serving racial
passion and national feeling. Here the action of the lyric spirit is
doubled by the prestige of the spirit of abstract thought (Barrès
admirably caught the appearance of that spirit--he stole the tool, a
philosopher has said of him), and in France as elsewhere the ‘clerks’
have thereby stimulated political passions among the laymen, at least
in that very important section of them who read and believe they think.
Moreover, in regard to poets and especially the poet I have just named,
it is difficult to know whether the lyrical impulse lends its aid to a
genuine and pre-existing political passion, or whether on the contrary
this passion puts itself at the service of a lyrical impulse which is
seeking inspiration. Alius judex erit.
But there are other ‘clerks’ who introduce political passion into
their works with a remarkable consciousness of what they are doing, in
whom this derogation seems more worthy of notice than in the poets. I
mean the novelists and dramatists, i.e. ‘clerks’ whose function is to
portray in as objective a manner as possible the emotions of the human
soul and their conflicts--a function which, as Shakespeare, Molière,
and Balzac have proved, may be carried out with all the purity I have
here assigned to it. One may show how this function has been more than
ever perverted by its subjection to political ends by the example of
many contemporary novelists, not because they scatter ‘tendencious’
reflections throughout their narratives (Balzac constantly does so),
but because instead of making their heroes feel and act in conformity
with a true observation of human nature, they make them do so as the
passion of the authors requires. Shall I cite those novels where the
traditionalist, whatever his errors, always finally displays a noble
soul, whereas the character without religion inevitably, and in spite
of all his efforts, is capable of none but vile actions?[49] Or the
other novels where the man of the people possesses every virtue and
vileness is the exclusive portion of the bourgeois?[50] Or the novels
where the author displays his compatriots in contact with foreigners
and, more or less frankly, gives all moral superiority to his own
people?[51] There is a two-fold evil in this proceeding; not only does
it considerably inflame political passion in the breast of the reader,
but it deprives him of one of the most eminently civilizing effects of
all works of art, i.e. that self-examination to which every spectator
is impelled by a representation of human beings which he feels to be
true and solely pre-occupied with truth.[52] From the point of view
of the artist and of the value of his activity alone, this partiality
indicates a great degradation. The value of the artist, the thing
which makes him the world’s high ornament, is that he _plays_ human
passions instead of living them, and that he discovers in this ‘play’
emotion the same source of desires, joys and sufferings as ordinary
men find in the pursuit of real things. Now, if this accomplished type
of exuberant activity places itself at the service of the nation or of
a class, if this fine flower of disinterestedness becomes utilitarian,
then I say with the poet of the ‘Vierge aux Rochers’ when the author of
_Siegfried_ exhales his last sigh: ‘The world has lost its import.’
I have pointed out that certain ‘clerks’ have put their activities as
‘clerks’ at the service of political passions. These are the poets,
the novelists, the dramatists, the artists, i.e. they are men who may
be permitted to give passion, even wilful passion, a predominant place
in their works. But there are other ‘clerks’ in whom this derogation
from the disinterested activity of the mind is far more shocking,
‘clerks’ whose influence on the laymen is much more profound by reason
of the prestige attached to their functions. I mean the historians.
Here, as with the poets, the phenomenon is a new one on account of
the point of perfection it has reached. Assuredly, humanity did not
await our age to see History putting itself at the service of the
spirit of party or of national passion. But I think I may assert that
it has never seen this done with the same methodical spirit, the same
intensity of consciousness which may be observed in German historians
of the past half century and in the French Monarchists of the past
twenty years. The case of the latter is the more remarkable since they
belong to a nation which has acquired eternal honour in the history
of human intelligence by explicitly condemning pragmatic history
and formulating, as it were, the charter of disinterested history,
through the works of Beaufort, Fréret, Voltaire, Thierry, Renan,
Fustel de Coulanges.[53] Yet the true novelty here is the admission of
this spirit of partiality, the expressed intention to employ it as a
legitimate method. ‘A true German historian,’ declares a German master,
‘should especially tell those facts which conduce to the grandeur of
Germany.’ The same scholar praises Mommsen (who himself boasted of it)
for having written a Roman history ‘which becomes a history of Germany
with Roman names’. Another (Treitschke) prided himself on his lack of
‘that anemic objectivity which is contrary to the historical sense’.
Another (Guisebrecht) teaches that ‘Science must not soar beyond the
frontiers, but be national, be German’. Our Monarchists do not lag
behind. Recently one of them, the author of a _History of France_,
which tried to show that the French Kings since Clovis were occupied in
trying to prevent the war of 1914, defended the historian who presents
the past from the point of view of the passions of his own time.[54] By
his determination in bringing this partiality to historical narrative
the modern ‘clerk’ most seriously derogates from his true function,
if I am right in saying that his function is to restrain the passions
of the laymen. Not only does he inflame the laymen’s passions more
cunningly than ever, not only does he deprive them of the suggestive
spectacle of a man solely occupied by the thirst for truth, but he
prevents the laymen from hearing speech different from that of the
market place, speech (Renan’s is perhaps the finest example) which,
coming from the heights, shows that the most opposite passions are
equally justified, equally necessary to the earthly State, and thereby
incites every reader who has any capacity for getting outside himself
to relax the severity of his passions, at least for a moment.
Let me say, however, that indeed men like Treitschke and his French
equivalents are not historians; they are men of politics who make use
of history to support a cause whose triumph they desire. Hence, it
is natural that the master of their method should not be Lenain de
Tillemont but Louis XIV, who threatened to withdraw Mezeray’s pension
if the historian persisted in pointing out the abuses of the old
monarchy; or Napoleon, who ordered the chief of police to take measures
for the history of France to be written in a manner favourable to his
own throne. Nevertheless, the really cunning ones assume the mask of
disinterestedness.[55]
I believe that many of those whom I am here accusing of betraying their
spiritual ministry, that disinterested activity which should be theirs
by the mere fact of their being historians, psychologists, moralists,
would reply to me as follows, if such a confession did not destroy
their influence: ‘We are not in the least the servants of spiritual
things; we are the servants of material things, of a political party,
of a nation. Only, instead of serving it with the sword, we serve it
with the pen. We are _the spiritual militia of the material_.’
Among those who ought to show the world an example of disinterested
intellectual activity and who nevertheless turn their function to
practical ends, I shall also mention the critics. Everyone knows that
innumerable critics to-day consider that a book is only good insofar
as it serves the party which is dear to them, or as it manifests ‘the
genius of the nation’, or as it illustrates a political doctrine in
harmony with their own political system, or for other reasons of the
like purity. The modern ‘clerks’, I said before, insist that the
just shall be determined by the useful. They also want the useful to
determine the beautiful, which is not one of their least originalities
in history. Nevertheless, here again those who adopt such a form
of criticism are not truly critics, but men of politics, who make
criticism serve their practical designs. Here is a perfecting of
political passion, the whole honour of which must be given to the
moderns. Neither Pius XIV nor Napoleon apparently thought of using
literary criticism in support of the social system in which they
believed.[56] This new departure has brought forth its fruits. For
instance, if you assert with the French Monarchists that the democratic
ideal is inevitably bound up with bad literature, you are dealing that
ideal a real blow in a country like France, which has a real devotion
to literature, at least among those who will consent to believe that
Victor Hugo and Lamartine were mere scribblers.[57]
But the most remarkable thing about the modern ‘clerk’ in his desire
to bring political passion into his work, is that he has done so in
philosophy, more precisely, in metaphysics. It may be said that until
the nineteenth century metaphysics remained the inviolate citadel
of disinterested speculation. Among all forms of spiritual labour
metaphysics best deserved the admirable tribute which a mathematician
rendered the theory of numbers above all branches of mathematics, when
he said: ‘This is the really pure branch of our science, by which I
mean that it is unsullied by any contact with practical application.’
In fact thinkers free from any sort of earthly preference, like
Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, and even thinkers strongly
imbued with the superiority of their class or nation (like Plato
and Aristotle), never thought of directing their transcendental
speculations towards a demonstration of this superiority or the
necessity of this adoption by the whole world. It has been said
that the morality of the Greeks was national, but their metaphysics
were universal. The Church itself, so often favourable to class or
national interests in its morality, thinks only of God and Man in its
metaphysics. It was reserved for our own age to see metaphysicians of
the greatest eminence turning their speculations to the exaltation
of their own countries and to the depreciation of other countries,
fortifying the will to power of their compatriots with all the power
of abstractive genius. Fichte and Hegel made the triumph of the German
world the supreme and necessary end of the development of Being,
and history has showed whether the action of these ‘clerks’ had an
effect on the hearts of their laymen. Let me hasten to add that this
spectacle of patriotic metaphysics is provided by Germany alone. In
France, even in this age of nationalist ‘clerks’, we have not yet
seen any philosopher (at least one who is taken seriously) build up
a metaphysical system to the glory of France. Neither Auguste Comte
nor Renouvier nor Bergson ever thought of making a French hegemony
the necessary result of the world’s development. Need I add what a
degradation this has been for metaphysics, as it has been for art?
It will be the eternal shame of the German philosophers to have
transformed the patrician virgin who honoured the Gods into a harpy
engaged in shrieking the glory of her children.
_Third: The ‘clerks’ have played the game of political passions by
their doctrines_
But where the ‘clerks’ have most violently broken with their tradition
and resolutely played the game of the laymen in their eagerness to
place themselves in the real, is by their doctrines, by the scale
of values they have set up for the world. Those whose preaching for
twenty centuries had been to humiliate the realist passions in favour
of something transcendental, have set themselves (with a science and a
consciousness which will stupify history) to the task of making these
passions, and the impulses which ensure them, the highest of virtues,
while they cannot show too much scorn for the existence which in any
respect raises itself beyond the material. I shall now describe the
principal aspects of this phenomenon.
_A. The ‘clerks’ praise attachment to the particular and denounce the
feeling of the universal_
In the first place, the ‘clerks’ have set out to exalt the will of
men to feel conscious of themselves as distinct from others, and
to proclaim as contemptible every tendency to establish oneself in
a universal. With the exception of certain authors like Tolstoi
and Anatole France, whose teaching moreover is now looked on with
contempt by most of their colleagues, all the influential moralists of
Europe during the past fifty years, Bourget, Barrès, Maurras, Péguy,
d’Annunzio, Kipling, the immense majority of German thinkers, have
praised the efforts of men to feel conscious of themselves in their
nation and race, to the extent that this distinguishes them from
others and opposes them to others, and have made them ashamed of every
aspiration to feel conscious of themselves as men in the general
sense and in the sense of rising above ethnical aims. Those whose
activity since the time of the Stoics had been devoted to preaching
the extinction of national egotism in the interest of an abstract and
eternal entity, set out to denounce every feeling of this kind and to
proclaim the lofty morality of that egotism. In our age the descendants
of Erasmus, Montaigne, Voltaire, have denounced humanitarianism as a
moral degeneration, nay, as an intellectual degeneration, in that it
implies ‘a total absence of practical common sense’; for practical
common sense has become the measure of intellectual values with these
strange ‘clerks’.
I should like to draw a distinction between humanitarianism as I mean
it here--a sensitiveness to the abstract quality of what is human, to
Montaigne’s ‘whole form of human condition’--and the feeling which is
usually called humanitarianism, by which is meant the love for human
beings existing in the concrete. The former impulse (which would more
accurately be called humanism) is the attachment to a concept. It is a
pure passion of the intelligence, implying no terrestrial love. It is
quite easy to conceive of a person plunging into the concept of what
is human without having the least desire even to see a man. This is
the form assumed by love of humanity in the great patricians of the
mind like Erasmus, Malebranche, Spinoza, Goethe, who all were men, it
appears, not very anxious to throw themselves into the arms of their
neighbours. The second humanitarianism is a state of the heart and
therefore the portion of plebeian souls. It occurs among moralists
in periods when lofty intellectual discipline disappears among them
and gives way to sentimental exaltation, I mean in the eighteenth
century (chiefly with Diderot) and above all in the nineteenth century,
with Michelet, Quinet, Proudhon, Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel.
This sentimental form of humanitarianism and forgetfulness of its
conceptual form explain the unpopularity of this doctrine with so many
distinguished minds, who discover two equally repulsive commonplaces in
the arsenal of political ideology. One of them is ‘the patriotic bore’
and the other ‘the universal embrace’.[58]
The humanitarianism which holds in honour the abstract quality of what
is human, is the only one which allows us to love _all_ men. Obviously,
as soon as we look at men in the concrete, we inevitably find that this
quality is distributed in different quantities, and we have to say with
Renan: ‘In reality one is _more or less_ a man, _more or less_ the son
of God ... I see no reason why a Papuan should be immortal.’ Modern
equalitarians, by failing to understand that there can be no equality
except in the abstract and that inequality is the essence of the
concrete, have merely displayed the extraordinary vulgarity of their
minds as well as their amazing political clumsiness.[59]
Humanism, as I have defined it, has nothing to do with
internationalism. Internationalism is a protest against national
egotism, not on behalf of a spiritual passion, but on behalf of another
egotism, another earthly passion. It is the impulse of a certain
category of men--labourers, bankers, industrialists--who unite across
frontiers in the name of private and practical interests, and who only
oppose the national spirit because it thwarts them in satisfying those
interests.[60]
In comparison with such impulses, national passion appears an
idealistic and disinterested impulse. In short, humanism is also
something entirely different from cosmopolitanism, which is the simple
desire to enjoy the advantages of all nations and all their cultures,
and is generally exempt from all moral dogmatism.[61] But let us come
back to this movement of the ‘clerks’ exhorting the peoples to feel
conscious of themselves in what makes them distinct from others.
What will especially amaze history in this movement of the ‘clerks’
is the perfection with which they have carried it out. They have
exhorted the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in what makes them
_the most distinct_ from others, in their poets rather than in their
scientists, in their legends rather than in their philosophies, since
poetry (as they perfectly well perceived) is infinitely more national,
more separating than the products of pure intelligence.[62] They have
exhorted the peoples to honour their poets’ characteristics insofar
as they are peculiar to them and are not universal. Recently a young
Italian writer praised his language because it is only used in Italy,
and poured scorn on French because it is employed universally.[63]
They have exhorted the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in
_everything_ which makes them distinct from others, not only in their
language, art, and literature, but in their dress, houses, furniture,
and food. During the past half century it has been a common experience
to see serious writers (to go no further than France) exhorting
their compatriots to remain faithful to French fashions, French
hair-dressing, French dining rooms, French cooking, French cars. They
have exhorted the peoples to feel themselves distinct even in their
vices. The German historians, says Fustel de Coulanges, urge their
nation to be intoxicated with its personality, even to its barbarity.
The French moralist does not lag behind and desires his compatriots
to accept their ‘national determinism’ in its ‘indivisible totality’,
with its injustices as well as its wisdom, with its fanaticism as
well as its enlightenment, its pettiness as well as its grandeur.
Another, (Maurras) declares: ‘Good or bad, our tastes are ours and
it is always permissible to take ourselves as the sole judges and
models of our lives’. Once again, the remarkable thing here is not
that such things should be said, but that they should be said by the
‘clerks’, by a class of men whose purpose hitherto has been to urge
their fellow-citizens to feel conscious of themselves in what is common
to all men, that they should be said in France by the descendants of
Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, and Renan.
This glorifying of national particularism, so unexpected among
all ‘clerks’ is especially so among those whom I described as
‘pre-eminently clerks’--the Churchmen. Those who for centuries have
exhorted men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their
differences in order to take cognizance of each other in the divine
essence which brings all men together, have now come to praise them,
according to where the sermon is given, for their ‘fidelity to the
French soul’, for ‘the immutability of their German consciousness’,
for the ‘fervour of their Italian hearts’.[64] The sight is indeed
surprising and remarkable! What would be thought by him who, by the
mouth of his apostle, declared: ‘There is neither Greek nor Jew nor
barbarian, but Christ is in all things,’ if to-day he entered one of
his churches and saw offered to the veneration of his faithful, a
national heroine with a sword on her thigh and a flag in her hand?[65]
This glorification of national particularisms, at least with the
precision observable to-day, is undoubtedly something new in the
history of the Church. It is not necessary to go back as far as
Saint Augustine, who preached the extinction of all patriotisms in
the embrace of ‘the City of God’; nor even to Bossuet, who shows us
the indignation of Jesus at observing ‘that because we are separated
by a few rivers or mountains, we seem to have forgotten that we are
all of one nature’. So recently as 1849 a lofty assembly of prelates
asserted that ‘this movement of nationalities is a relic of paganism,
differences of language are a consequence of sin and the fall of man’.
Certainly this declaration was an interested one, since it was provoked
by the Most Catholic Francis Joseph to check the separatist tendencies
among the peoples of his Empire; but I dare to assert that the Church
would no longer make such a declaration, even for motives of interest.
I shall be told that even if the Church wished to do so, she could
only do it under penalty of delivering up her ministers to a terrible
unpopularity among their respective peoples. As if the ‘clerk’s’
function were not to tell the laymen truths which are displeasing to
them, and to pay the price at the expense of his own peace!
I do not ask so much. Is there a single prelate in any pulpit of Europe
who would now dare to pronounce: ‘The Christian is both a cosmopolitan
and a patriot. These two qualities are not incompatible. The world
indeed is one common fatherland, or, to speak in more Christian terms,
one common exile.’ (Pastoral letter ‘On the pretended philosophy of
modern infidels,’ by Le Franc de Pompignon, Bishop of Puy, 1763.
The ‘infidels’ here are those who refuse the Church the right to be
cosmopolitan.)
Some ‘clerks’ do better, and assert that by extolling national
particularisms they are in complete harmony with the fundamental spirit
of the Church, especially with the teaching of the great Doctors of
the Middle Ages. (This is the thesis which opposes Catholicism to
Christianity.) Need I recall the fact that the most national of these
Doctors limited themselves to considering national particularisms as an
inevitable condition of an earthly and inferior world, which must be
respected like everything else which is the will of God? Or that they
never exhorted men to intensify this feeling in their hearts, still
less did they ever think of putting this intensification before them as
an exercise in moral self-perfection?
When the Church in past times did approve of something in patriotism,
it was fraternity among fellow-citizens, like love of man for other
men, but not his opposition to other men. She approved of patriotism as
an extension of human love, and not as a limitation of it.[66]
But the most remarkable thing in all this is that recently--precisely
since the time when Benedict XV was reproached during the last war for
not having denounced the arrogance of German nationalism--there has
arisen a school in the bosom of the Church which tries to prove that
by acting in this way the Holy Father had simply obeyed the teaching
of his Divine Master, who is supposed to have preached explicitly the
love of a man for his own nation. Could anything better symbolize the
determination of the modern ‘clerks’ to place their credit and their
activities at the service of lay passions than these Churchmen making
Jesus an apostle of nationalism?
These strange Christians express themselves thus:
‘Jesus does not look beyond the frontiers of his own country with the
idea of bestowing his benefactions upon other nations. He declares to
the Canaanitish woman, whose daughter he heals against his own wish,
that “his mission is only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”
(Matt. xv, 24). He sent his first disciples among the Israelites. And
notice how he insists that they shall not go elsewhere. “Go not on the
paths of the Gentiles, and enter not the cities of the Samaritans, but
go first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matt. x, 6.) Later
on, it will be time enough to announce the good news to foreigners,
but first of all we must bring it to our own people. This is what he
means by the words, so full of patriotic meaning and love: “the house
of Israel.” A group of human beings possessing the same blood, the same
language, the same religion, the same tradition, form “a house”. These
particularities are so many dividing walls.’[67]
They also say:
‘The most striking thing about Jesus when he consents to pay tribute
to Caesar and refuses the crown which the people offer him in the
desert, is not so much his prudence and his disinterestedness, as his
patriotism ... One of the most important characteristics of Jesus’s
teaching is its absolutely national character....’[68]
If the reader desires, he will himself go and find out the solidity
of the proofs on which these teachers base their thesis (one of these
proofs is that Jesus was strongly attached to the institutions of his
nation, which he showed by accepting circumcision eight days after he
was born). The point I wish to insist on is the eagerness of these
Christians to make their Master a supporter of national egotism, at
least at one period of his life.
These views on the attitude of the Church towards nationalism seem to
me to remain unmodified by the recent declarations of the Holy See
concerning a certain type of French nationalism, for these declarations
only condemn an openly anti-Christian nationalism (hence a very
exceptional form of nationalism) and do not utter a word of blame for
the desire of the peoples to set themselves up as distinct from others
and to reject universalism. Moreover, this is how a universalist is
answered by a publication which is to some extent the official organ of
Pontifical views:
‘Yes, all men are sons of one Father; but they were divided in the
beginning and have never been brought together again. The family was
broken up and never joined up again. On the contrary. Certainly, I am
glad to recognize the fraternity of all living beings; but are all
the dead our fathers? Have they all loved us? Have they all suffered
and laboured for us? Some lived on the other side of the globe, and,
so to speak, in another world. Some laboured against us, or, if
they supported our ancestors, it was in the hope of safeguarding or
enriching their own bequest to others, not to us. Where is the debt?
If the home is open to all comers, it is no longer a home but an
inn.’[69]
It appears that we must look among those who have left the Church,
to find Christian ministers who proclaim the true teaching of their
Master, and who declare with no beating about the bush: ‘The Gospel of
Jesus does not imply any country, but obliterates the fatherland.’[70]
The modern ‘clerk’ denounces the feeling of universalism, not only
for the profit of the nation, but for that of a class. Our age has
beheld moralists who have declared to the bourgeois world (or to the
working classes) that, far from trying to check the feeling of their
differences from others and to feel conscious of their common human
nature, they should on the contrary try to feel conscious of this
difference in all its profundity and irreducibleness, and that this
effort is fine and noble, whereas every desire for union is here a
sign of baseness and cowardice, and also of weakness of mind. This,
as everyone knows, is the thesis of the ‘Reflections on Violence’,
which has been praised by a whole galaxy of apostles of the modern
soul. There is certainly something more novel in this attitude of
the ‘clerks’ to class differences than in their attitude towards
national differences. To discover the results of this teaching and the
additional hatred (hitherto unknown) which it has given to either class
in doing violence to its adversary, you have only to look at Italian
Fascism for the bourgeois class, and at Russian Bolshevism for the
working class.[71]
Here again we see realism trying to shelter under cover of the Church.
We see certain Catholic teachers striving to prove that, by encouraging
the bourgeois class, _in the name of morality_, to feel conscious of
themselves as distinct from the opposing class, to plunge religiously
into consciousness of the characteristics which are proper to their
own class, and especially (Johannet) to _intensify their feeling of
property_, these teachers are merely acting in conformity with the
teaching of the Church.[72]
It is easy to point out the equivocation upon which this claim is
based. The Church does indeed admit class distinctions. She exhorts the
faithful to recognize and even to respect them, as something imposed
by God upon a fallen world. She also exhorts the privileged to accept
their situation, to carry out the activities it implies, and to
perform ‘the duties of their state of life’. She even tells them that
by performing these duties they are pleasing God and ‘making an act of
prayer’. But the Church never exhorted them to glorify in themselves
the feeling of this distinction, still less did she ever do so in the
name of morality. On the contrary, she exhorted them in the name of
morality to extinguish (beneath this privileged life) all belief in
a particularity of essence in their persons, and told them to feel
conscious of themselves in that humanity which is common to all men
beneath the inequality of ranks and states of life.[73] Jesus Christ,
the Church states explicitly and constantly, _only accepts the man who
is reconciled_, i.e. the man who has obliterated from his heart every
feeling of difference between himself and other men. (See Bossuet’s
_Sermon on Reconciliation_.) It seems unnecessary to insist further on
the unimpeachable character of this Christian teaching--I am speaking
of teaching, not of practice. But one cannot meditate too much on the
eagerness of so many modern Church teachers to try to find some means
of sanctifying bourgeois egotism through the words of the Gospels.[74]
Let me point out another and remarkable form of this extolling of
particularism by the ‘clerks’: the extolling of particular systems
of morality and the scorn for universal morality. During the past
half century a whole school, not only of men of action but of serious
philosophers, has taught that a people should form a conception of its
rights and duties from a study of its particular genius, its history,
its geographical position, the particular circumstances in which it
happens to be, and not from the commands of a so-called conscience of
man in all times and places. Moreover, this same school teaches that
a class should construct a scale of good and evil, determined by an
inquiry into its particular needs, its particular aims, the particular
conditions surrounding it, and should cease to encumber itself with
such sensibilities as ‘justice in itself’, ‘humanity in itself’ and
other ‘rags and tatters’ of general morality. To-day with Barrès,
Maurras, Sorel, even Durckheim[75] we are witnessing the complete
bankruptcy among the ‘clerks’ of that form of soul which, from Plato
to Kant, looked for the notion of good in the heart of eternal and
disinterested man. The example of Germany in 1914 shows the results of
this teaching which exhorts a group of men to set themselves up as the
sole judges of the morality of their actions, shows what deification of
their appetites it leads to, what codification of their violence, what
tranquillity in carrying out their plans. One day perhaps we shall see
the same thing throughout Europe exemplified by the bourgeois class,
unless the doctrines of that class are turned against itself and we see
it exemplified by the working classes.[76]
I dare to say that the indignation of certain French moralists at
the action of Germany in 1914 surprises me, when I reflect that some
sixteen years earlier, during the famous ‘affair’ which I have already
mentioned, these moralists preached to their compatriots exactly the
same doctrines, urging them to reject the concept of absolute justice,
and to desire only a form of justice ‘adapted to France’, to its
particular genius, its particular history, its particular, eternal, and
present needs.[77] For the honour of these thinkers--I mean for the
honour of their consistency--one likes to think that their indignation
in 1914 was not the result of any moral conviction, but only of the
desire to place the enemy of their nation in the wrong with a naïve
universe.
This last-named activity of the ‘clerks’ seems to me one of those
which best display their determination and skill in serving the
passions of the laymen. If a man exhorts his compatriots to recognize
only a personal morality and to reject all universal morality, he is
showing himself a master of the art of encouraging them to want to be
distinct from all other men, i.e. of the art of perfecting national
passion in them, at least in one of its aspects. The desire to take
none but oneself as a judge of one’s actions and to scorn every opinion
of other people is undoubtedly a source of strength to a nation, as
every exertion of pride is a source of strength to an institution,
whose fundamental principle--whatever may be said to the contrary--is
the assertion of an ego against a non-ego. What ruined Germany in the
last war was not its ‘irritating arrogance’, as is asserted by certain
visionaries who have made up their minds that malevolence of soul
must be an element of weakness in practical life, but the fact that
its material strength was not equal to its arrogance. When arrogance
finds an equivalent material power at its disposal, it is very far from
ruining nations; witness Rome and the Prussia of Bismarck. The ‘clerks’
who, thirty years ago, exhorted France to make herself the sole judge
of her own actions and to despise eternal morality, showed that
they possessed in the highest degree the perception of the national
interest, insofar as that interest is wholly realist and has nothing
to do with disinterested passion. It remains to be seen, once more,
whether the function of the ‘clerks’ is to serve this sort of interests.
But the modern ‘clerks’ have held up universal truth to the scorn
of mankind, as well as universal morality. Here the ‘clerks’ have
positively shown genius in their effort to serve the passions of the
laymen. It is obvious that truth is a great impediment to those who
wish to set themselves up as distinct; from the very moment when they
accept truth, it condemns them to be conscious of themselves in a
universal. What a joy for them to learn that this universal is a mere
phantom, that there exist only particular truths, ‘Lorrain truths,
Provençal truths, Britanny truths, the harmony of which in the course
of centuries constitutes what is beneficial, respectable, _true in
France_’[78] (the neighbour similarly speaks of what is _true in
Germany_), that in other words Pascal had the mind of a clown, and that
what is true on one side of the Pyrenees may perfectly well be error
on the other side! Humanity hears the same teaching about the classes
and learns that there is a bourgeois truth and a working-class truth;
better still, that the functioning of our minds should be different
according to whether we are working men or bourgeois. The source of
your troubles (Sorel teaches the working classes) is that you do not
think in the mental way suited to your class. His disciple, Johannet,
says the same thing to the capitalist class. Perhaps we shall soon see
the results of this truly supreme art of the ‘clerks’ in exasperating
the feeling in their differences among the classes.
The cult for the particular and the scorn for the universal is a
reversal of values quite generally characteristic of the teaching
of the modern ‘clerks’, who proclaim them in a far higher sphere of
thought than politics. The metaphysics adopted in the last twenty
years by almost all those who think or pretend to think, set up as the
supreme state of human consciousness that state--‘duration’--where we
succeed in taking cognizance of ourselves in what is most individual,
most distinct from everything not ourselves, and in freeing ourselves
from those forms of thought (concept, reason, habits of speech) through
which we can only become conscious of ourselves in what is common to
us and others. These metaphysics put forward as a superior form of
cognizance of the world that which grasps each thing by what is unique
in it, distinct from every other, and is full of scorn for the mind
which seeks to discover general states of being. Our age has seen a
fact hitherto unknown, at least from my point of view; and this in
metaphysics preaching adoration for the contingent, and scorn for the
eternal.[79] Nothing could show better how profound is the modern
‘clerk’s’ desire to exalt the real, the practical side of existence,
and to degrade the ideal, the truly metaphysical side. In the history
of philosophy this veneration for the individual comes from the German
thinkers (Schlegel, Nietzsche, Lotze), while the metaphysical cult of
the universal (added to a certain contempt for the experimental) is
pre-eminently a legacy of Greece to the human mind. So here again, and
moreover in its profoundest part, the teaching of the modern ‘clerks’
shows the triumph of Germanic values and the bankruptcy of Hellenism.
I should like to point out another form, not the least remarkable,
which this preaching of particularism assumes among the ‘clerks’. I
mean their exhortations to consider everything only as it exists _in
time_, that is as it constitutes a succession of particular states, a
‘becoming’, a ‘history’, and never as it presents a state of permanence
beyond time under this succession of distinct cases. I mean especially
their assertion that this view of things in their historical aspect is
the only serious and philosophical view, and that the need to look at
them in their eternal aspect is a form of the child’s taste for ghosts,
and should be merely smiled at. Need I point out that this conception
inspires the whole of modern thought? It exists among a whole group
of literary critics, who, on their own showing, inquire far less
whether a work is beautiful than whether it expresses ‘the present’
aspirations of ‘the contemporary soul’.[80] It may be seen in a whole
school of moralist-historians who admire a doctrine, not because it
is just or good, but because it embodies the morality _of its time_,
the scientific spirit _of its time_. (This is the principal reason why
Sorel admires Bergsonism and why Nietzsche admires the philosophy of
Nicolas de Cuse.) It may be seen especially in all our metaphysicians.
Whether they put forward _Entwickelung_ or _Duration_ or _Creative
Evolution_ or _Pluralism_ or _Integral Experience_ or the _Concrete
Universal_, they all teach that the absolute is developed _in time_,
in the circumstantial, and proclaim the decadence of that form of
mind which, from Plato to Kant, hallows existence as conceived beyond
change.[81] If, with Pythagoras, we assume that the Cosmos is the place
of regulated and uniform existence, and the Ouranos the place of the
becoming and the moving, we may say that all modern metaphysics place
the Ouranos at the top of their scale of values and hold the Cosmos in
very slight esteem. Is it not remarkable to see the ‘clerks’, even in
the lofty function of metaphysicians, teaching the laymen that the real
alone is worthy of consideration, and that the supersensible is only
worthy of derisive laughter?[82]
(_B_) _The ‘clerks’ praise attachment to the practical, and denounce
love of the spiritual_
But the ‘clerks’ with their doctrines have inflamed the realism of the
laymen in other ways besides praising the particular and denouncing the
universal. At the very top of the scale of moral values they place the
possession of concrete advantages, of material power and the means by
which they are procured; and they hold up to scorn the pursuit of truly
spiritual advantages, of non-practical or disinterested values.
This they have done, first of all, as regards the State. For twenty
centuries the ‘clerks’ preached to the world that the State should be
just; now they proclaim that the State should be strong and should
care nothing about being just. (Remember the attitude of the chief
French teachers during the Dreyfus affair.) Convinced that the strength
of the State depends upon authority, they defend autocratic systems,
arbitrary government, the reason of State, the religions which teach
blind submission to authority, and they cannot sufficiently denounce
all institutions based on liberty and discussion.[83] This denunciation
of liberalism, notably by the vast majority of contemporary men of
letters, will be one of the things in this age most astonishing to
History, especially on the part of the French. With their eyes fixed
on the powerful State, they have praised the State disciplined in the
Prussian manner, where everyone has his post, and under orders from
above, labours for the greatness of the nation, without there being
any place left for particular wills.[84] Owing to their cult of the
powerful State (and also for other reasons I shall mention later),
they want the military element to preponderate in the State, they want
it to have a right to privileges and they want the civil element to
agree to this right. (See _L’Appel au Soldat_, and the declarations of
numerous writers during the Dreyfus affair.) It is certainly something
new to see men of thought preaching the abasement of the toga before
the sword, especially in the country of Montesquieu and Renan. And
then they preach that the State should be strong and contemptuous of
justice, above all in its relations with other States. To this end
they praise in the head of the State the will to aggrandisement, the
desire for ‘strong frontiers’, the effort to keep his neighbours under
his domination. And they glorify those means which to them seem likely
to attain these ends, i.e. sudden aggression, trickery, bad faith,
contempt for treaties. This apology for Machiavellianism has inspired
all the German historians for the past fifty years, and in France it is
professed by very influential teachers, who exhort France to venerate
her Kings because they are supposed to have been models of the purely
practical spirit, exempt from all respect for any silly justice in
their relations with their neighbours.
The novelty of this attitude among the ‘clerks’ can best be displayed
by quoting the famous answer of Socrates to the realist in the
_Georgias_:
‘In the persons of Themistocles, Cimon and Pericles, you praise men who
made their fellow citizens good cheer, by serving them with everything
they desired without caring to teach them what is good and right in
food. They have enlarged the State, cry the Athenians, but they do not
see that this enlargement is nothing but a swelling, a tumour filled
with corruption. This is all that has been achieved by these former
politicians by filling the city with ports, arsenals, walls, tributes,
and the like follies, and by not adding Temperance and Justice.’
Up to our own times, in theory at least (but it is with theories I
am dealing here) the supremacy of the spiritual proclaimed in those
words has been adopted by all those who, explicitly or otherwise,
have proposed a scale of values to the world, whether through the
Church, or the Renaissance, or the eighteenth century. One can guess
the derisive laughter of a Barrès or any Italian moralist (to speak
only of the Latin races) at this disdain of power for the benefit of
justice, and their severity for the manner in which this son of Athens
judges those who made his city materially powerful. For Socrates, in
this respect the perfect model of the ‘clerk’ who is faithful to his
essential function, ports, arsenals, walls are ‘follies’, and the
serious things are justice and temperance. Those who to-day should
perform the duties of a Socrates consider that it is justice which is a
folly--‘a cloud’--and the serious things are the arsenals, the walls.
To-day the ‘clerk’ has made himself Minister of War. Moreover, one of
the most revered modern moralists definitely approves of the judges who
condemned Socrates, as good guardians of worldly interests.[85] And
that is something which has not been seen among the educators of the
human soul since the evening when Crito closed his master’s eyelids.
I say that the modern ‘clerks’ have _preached_ that the State should be
strong and care nothing about being just; and in fact the ‘clerks’ do
give this assertion the characteristic of preaching, of moral teaching.
I cannot insist too often that in this lies their great originality.
When Machiavelli advises the Prince to carry out the Machiavellian
scheme of action, he invests those actions with no sort of morality
or beauty. For him morality remains what it is for everyone else,
and does not cease to remain so because he observes (not without
melancholy) that it is incompatible with politics. ‘The Prince,’ says
Machiavelli, ‘must have an understanding always ready to do good,
but he must be able to enter into evil when he is forced to do so’;
thereby showing that for him evil, even if it aids politics, still
remains evil. The modern realists are the _moralists_ of realism. For
them, the act which makes the State strong is invested with a moral
character by the fact that it does so, and this whatever the act may
be. The evil which serves politics ceases to be evil and becomes
good. This position is evident in Hegel, in the Pangermanists and in
Barrès; it is no less evident among realists like M. Maurras and his
disciples, in spite of their insistence in declaring that they profess
no morality. Perhaps these teachers do not profess any morality, at
least expressly, in what concerns private life, but they very clearly
profess a morality in the political order of things, if by morality is
meant everything which puts forward a scale of good and evil. For them
as for Hegel, the practical in politics _is the moral_, and if what
the rest of the world calls moral is in opposition to the practical,
then _it is the immoral_. Such precisely is the perfectly moralist
meaning of the famous campaign of ‘false patriotism’. It seems as if
we might say that for M. Maurras the practical is the divine, and that
his ‘atheism’ consists less in denying God than in shifting Him to man
and his political work. I think I can describe the work of this writer
accurately by saying that it is the _divinizing of politics_.[86] This
displacement of morality is undoubtedly the most important achievement
of the modern ‘clerks’, and the most deserving of the historian’s
attention. It is a great turning-point in the history of man when those
who speak in the name of pondered thought come and tell him that his
political egotisms are divine, and that everything which labours to
relax them is degrading. The results of this teaching were shown by the
example of Germany a decade ago.[87]
The extent to which the modern ‘clerks’ have made innovations may be
judged by the fact that up till our own times men had only received two
sorts of teaching in what concerns the relations between politics and
morality. One was Plato’s, and it said: ‘Morality decides politics’;
the other was Machiavelli’s, and it said: ‘Politics have nothing to
do with morality.’ To-day they receive a third. M. Maurras teaches:
‘Politics decide morality.’[88] However, the real departure is not
that this doctrine should be put before them, but that they should
accept it. Callicles asserted that force is the only morality; but the
thinking world despised him. Let me also mention that Machiavelli was
covered with insults by most of the moralists of his time, at least in
France.
The modern world also hearkens to other moralists of realism, who are
not lacking in influence as such; I mean the statesmen. Here I shall
point to the same sort of change as above. Formerly, leaders of States
practised realism, but did not honour it; Louis XI, Charles the Fifth
of Spain, Richelieu, Louis XIV, did not claim that their actions were
moral. They saw morality where the Gospel had showed it to them, and
they did not attempt to displace it because they did not apply it.[89]
With them morality was violated, but moral notions remain intact; _and
that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb
civilization_. Signor Mussolini proclaims the morality of his politics
of force and the immorality of everything which opposes it. Like the
writer, the man of government, who formerly was merely a realist, is
now the _apostle_ of realism; and the majesty of his function--if not
of his person--gives weight to his apostleship.
The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is
compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with
a system of morality, a metaphysics, a mysticism. Richelieu, who need
account only to his King, is able to talk only of the practical, and
leaves visions of the eternal to others. Mussolini, Bethmann-Hollweg,
Herriot, are condemned to these heights.[90] Moreover, this shows how
great to-day is the number of those whom I can call ‘clerks’, since by
that word I mean all those who speak to the world in a transcendental
manner. Consequently, I have a right to demand that they give an
account of their acts _as ‘clerks’_.
The preachers of political realism often claim to base themselves
on the teaching of the Church, and call her a hypocrite when she
condemns their theses. This claim has little foundation as regards the
teaching of the Church before the nineteenth century, but has much more
foundation if we consider the present age. I doubt whether one could
now find from the pen of a modern theologian any passage so brutally
denunciatory of a war of aggression as the following:--
‘Glaringly unjust is the war of him who declares war only from ambition
and from the desire to extend his dominions beyond their legitimate
boundaries, from the desire to possess a more commodious country
in which to establish himself, from the fear of the great power of
a neighbouring prince with whom he is at peace, or from the desire
to despoil a rival solely because he is thought unworthy of the
possessions or States he holds or of a right which legitimately belongs
to him, because a ruler is inconvenienced by him and wants to get rid
of this inconvenience by force of arms.’[91] On the other hand, there
are an immense number of works to-day which need only a little twisting
to make them justify every attempt at conquest. For instance, the view
that a war is just ‘if it can invoke the necessity of safeguarding
the common good and public tranquillity, the recapture of things
unjustly carried off, the repression of rebels, the defence of the
innocent’.[92] And the view which asserts that ‘war is just when it
is necessary to a nation either to defend itself against invasion, or
_to overthrow the obstacles thwarting the exercise of its rights_.’[93]
At the beginning of the last century the Church still taught that war
could only be just for one of the two belligerents.[94] It is heavy
with consequences that she has now abandoned this position and to-day
asserts that war may be just on both sides at once, ‘from the moment
when each of the two adversaries, without being certain of its right,
considers it as simply probable after having taken the opinion of its
counsellors’.[95] Here is another serious thing: In the past, war
would only be declared just when it was against an adversary who had
committed an injury _accompanied by a moral intention_, whereas to-day
it may be declared just if it is directed against a material injury
caused without any malice,[96] for instance, an accidental violation of
frontier. It is certain that to-day Napoleon and Bismarck could find
in the teaching of the Church more justification than ever for their
incursions.[97]
The modern ‘clerks’ have preached this realism to the classes as well
as to the nations. They say to the working class as well as to the
bourgeois class: ‘Organize yourselves, become the stronger, seize
on power or exert yourself to retain it if you already possess it;
laugh at all efforts to bring more charity, more justice or any other
“rot”[98] into your relations with the other class, you have been
cheated long enough by that sort of thing.’ And here again they do not
say: ‘Become so, because necessity demands it,’ they say, and that is
the novelty of it: ‘Become so, because morality, aesthetics demand it;
to wish to be powerful is the sign of an elevated soul, to wish to be
just the sign of a base soul.’ This is the teaching of Nietzsche,[99]
of Sorel, applauded by a whole thinking (so-called) Europe; this is
the enthusiasm of Europe, when it is attracted by Socialism, for the
doctrines of Marx, its scorn for the doctrines of Proudhon.[100] The
‘clerks’ have said the same thing to the parties contending within the
same nation. ‘Make yourself the stronger,’ they say to one or other,
according to their own passion, ‘and do away with everything which
obstructs you; free yourself from the foolish prejudice which exhorts
you to make allowances for your adversary, to establish with him a
system of justice and harmony.’ We all know the admiration professed by
a whole army of ‘thinkers’ in all countries for the Italian government,
which simply outlaws all citizens who do not approve of it. Until our
own times the educators of the human soul, disciples of Aristotle,
urged mankind to denounce as infamous any State which was an organized
faction. The pupils of Signor Mussolini and M. Maurras learn to
reverence such a State.[101]
This extolling of the ‘strong State’ by the modern ‘clerks’ appears
also in certain teachings which, it may be asserted, would greatly have
amazed their ancestors, at least the great ones:--
(_a_) _The affirmation of the rights of custom, history, the past_ (to
the extent, be it understood, that they support the systems of force)
in opposition to the rights of reason. I say the affirmation of the
_rights_ of custom. The modern traditionalists do not simply teach,
like Descartes or Malebranche, that custom is upon the whole quite a
good thing, and that there is more wisdom in submitting to it than
opposing it. They teach that custom has a right, _the_ right, and
consequently that custom should be respected not only from the point
of view of interest, but of justice. The arguments in favour of the
‘historical right’ of Germany to Alsace, the ‘historical right’ of the
French monarchy, are not purely political positions, they are moral
positions. They claim to be accepted in the name of ‘true justice’,
of which (they say) their adversaries have a false conception.[102]
To determine what is just by the ‘accomplished fact’ is certainly a
new sort of teaching, especially among the peoples who for twenty
centuries derived their conception of what is just from the companions
of Socrates. Here again, the soul of Greece has given place to the soul
of Prussia among the educators of mankind. The spirit which speaks
here--and from all the teachers of Europe, Mediterranean as well as
Germanic--is the spirit of Hegel: ‘The history of the world is the
justice of the world.’ (_Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht._)
(_b_) The extolling of _policy founded on experience_--by which is
meant that a society should be governed on principles which have proved
that they can make it strong, and by ‘illusions’ which would tend to
make it just. It is in this narrowly practical sense that the cult
of experimental politics is a new thing among the ‘clerks’. For if
we mean by the phrase the respect for principles which have showed
that they are fitted to make a society not only strong but just, the
recommendation of such a policy in opposition to a purely rational
policy appeared in the thinking world long before the disciples of
Taine or Auguste Comte.[103] Long before our ‘organizing empiricists’
Spinoza wanted political science to be an experimental science, and
desired that the conditions under which States endure should be sought
from observation at least as much as from reason. (See his attack
on the Utopians, _Treatise_, I, i.) But he believed he learned from
observation that these conditions do not solely consist in States
possessing good armies and obedient peoples, but in their respecting
the rights of citizens and even of neighbouring peoples.[104] The
cult of experimental politics to-day is accompanied in those who
adopt it by a posture which they evidently mean to be striking, and
which in fact is so. We all know with what fatalistic visages, what
scornful inflexibility, what dark certainty of grasping the absolute,
they declare that in matters of politics ‘they consider only the
facts’. Here, especially among the French thinkers, is a new kind of
Romanticism, which I shall call the _Romanticism of Positivism_, the
chief representatives of which will rise up in the imagination of my
readers without its being necessary for me to name them. Moreover,
this cult brings out a silliness of mind which to me seems wholly an
acquisition of the nineteenth century,[105] i.e. the belief that the
teachings to be drawn from the past (supposing that they exist) will
come straight out of an examination of the _facts_, viz. desires which
have been realized. As if the desires which have not been realized were
not as important, and perhaps more important, if you reflect that they
may quite well come to fill the world’s stage now.[106] Let me add that
this cult of fact also claims to be the sole discoverer of ‘the meaning
of history’ and ‘the philosophy of history’, which there again shows
a weakness of mind from which the preceding ages seem to have been
free. When Bossuet and Hegel built up philosophies of history they were
certainly no more metaphysicians than Taine or Comte or any of their
noisy disciples, but at least they knew that they were so, that they
could not be otherwise, and were not so naïve as to think themselves
‘pure scientists’.
(_c_) The assertion that political forms should be adapted to ‘man
as he is and always will be’ (viz. unsocial and bloody, therefore
eternally needing systems of coercion and military institutions).
This effort of so many modern teachers to assert the imperfectability
of human nature appears as one of their strangest attitudes, if you
realize that it tends towards nothing less than asserting the complete
uselessness of their function, and proving that they have completely
ceased to realize its very essence. When we see moralists, educators,
professional providers of spiritual guidance, assert at the spectacle
of human barbarism that ‘man is thus’, that ‘he must be taken thus’,
that ‘you will never change him’, we are tempted to ask them what is
their reason for existing. And when we hear them reply that ‘they are
positive minds and not Utopians’, ‘that they are concerned with what
is, not with what might be’, we are staggered to see that they do not
know that the moralist is essentially a Utopian, and that the nature
of moral action is precisely that it creates its object by affirming
it. But we recover when we notice that they are in no wise ignorant
of this, and know perfectly well that by affirming it they will
create that eternity of barbarism necessary to the maintenance of the
institutions which are dear to them.[107]
The dogma of the incurable wickedness of man has another root among
some who profess it. This is a Romantic pleasure in picturing the human
race as walled in by an inevitable and eternal woe. From this point
of view we may say that there has grown up among certain political
writers of our time a real _Romanticism of Pessimism_, as false in its
absoluteness as the Optimism of Rousseau and Michelet, in hatred of
whom it has arisen, while its haughty and so-called scientific attitude
is most impressive to simple souls.[108] This doctrine has undoubtedly
borne fruits outside the world of literature, and at its voice there
has arisen a humanity which believes in nothing but its egotisms and
merely laughs at the naïve persons who still think that it might become
better. The modern ‘clerk’ has accomplished a truly new work--he has
taught man to deny his divinity. The import of such a work is obvious.
The Stoics claimed that pain is abolished if it is denied; the thing
is disputable in the matter of pain, but it is absolutely true in the
matter of moral perfectability.
I shall point out two more teachings inspired in the modern ‘clerks’,
by their preaching of the ‘strong State’, and it will not be necessary
to add that they are new in the ministers of the spiritual:--
The first is the teaching whereby they declare to Man that he is great
to the extent that he strives to act and to think as his ancestors,
his race, his environment thought, and ignores ‘individualism’. Thirty
years ago many of the French teachers hurled anathemas against the man
who ‘claimed to seek truth for himself’, to arrive at his own opinion,
instead of adopting the opinion of his nation which had been told what
it ought to think by its vigilant leaders. Our age has seen priests
of the mind teaching that the gregarious is the praiseworthy form of
thought, and that independent thought is contemptible. It is moreover
certain that a group which desires to be strong has no use for the man
who claims to think for himself.[109]
The second is the teaching whereby they declare to men that the fact
that a group is numerous constitutes a right. This is the morality
which the over-populated nations hear from many of their thinkers,
while the other nations hear from many of theirs that if their low
birth-rate continues they will become the objects of a ‘legitimate’
extermination. The rights of numerousness admitted by men who claim to
belong to the life of the mind--that is what modern humanity sees. But
it is certain that if a nation is to be strong, it must be numerous.
This cult of the strong State and the moral methods which ensure it
have been preached to mankind by the ‘clerks’ far beyond the domain
of politics, and on a wholly general plane. This is the preaching of
_Pragmatism_ whose teaching during the past fifty years by nearly
all the influential moralists of Europe is one of the most remarkable
turning points in the moral history of the human species. It is
impossible to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who
for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality of
an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason
insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral if it seeks
its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral
act is the act whereby he secures his existence against an environment
which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will ‘to
power’, that the part of his soul which determines what is good is
its ‘will to live’ wherein it is most ‘hostile to all reason’, that
the morality of an act is measured by its adaptation to its end, and
that the only morality is the morality of circumstances. The educators
of the human mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates, a
revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all
political upheavals.[110]
I should like to point out certain particularly remarkable aspects of
this preaching, which are probably not sufficiently realized.
I said that the modern ‘clerks’ teach man that his desires are moral
insofar as they tend to secure his existence at the expense of an
environment which disputes it. In particular they teach him that his
species is sacred insofar as it is able to assert its existence at the
expense of the surrounding world.[111] In other words, the old morality
told Man that he is divine to the extent that he becomes one with the
universe; the new morality tells him that he is divine to the extent
that he is in opposition to it. The former exhorted him not to set
himself in Nature ‘like an empire within an empire’; the latter exhorts
him to say with the fallen angels of Holy Writ, ‘We desire now to feel
conscious of ourselves in ourselves, and not in God.’ The former,
like the master of the _Contemplations_, said: ‘Believe, but not in
ourselves’; the latter replies with Nietzsche and Maurras: ‘Believe,
and believe in ourselves, only ourselves.’
Nevertheless, the real originality of Pragmatism is not in that.
Christianity exhorted man to set himself up against Nature, but did so
in the name of his spiritual and disinterested attributes: Pragmatism
exhorts him to do so in the name of his practical attributes. Formerly
man was divine because he had been able to acquire the concept of
justice, the idea of law, the sense of God; to-day he is divine because
he has been able to create an equipment which makes him the master of
matter. (See the glorifications of the _homo faber_ by Nietzsche,
Sorel, Bergson.)
Moreover, the modern ‘clerks’ extol Christianity insofar as it is
supposed to have been pre-eminently a school of practical, creative
virtues, adjusted to the support of the great human institutions. This
amazing deformation of a doctrine which in its precepts is so obviously
devoted to the love of the spiritual alone, is not only taught by
laymen, who are quite within their rights in trying to place their
practical desires under the patronage of the highest moral authorities;
it is also professed by the ministers of Jesus themselves. Pragmatist
Christianity, as I mean it here, is preached to-day from all Christian
pulpits.[112]
This exhortation to concrete advantages and to that form of soul which
procures them, is expressed by the modern ‘clerk’ in another very
remarkable teaching: By praise of the military life and the feelings
which go with it, and by contempt for civil life and the morality it
implies. We know the doctrine preached in Europe during the past fifty
years by its most esteemed moralists, their apology for war ‘which
purifies’, their veneration for the man of arms ‘the archtype of moral
beauty’, their proclamation of the supreme morality of ‘violence’ or
of those who settle their differences by duels and not before a jury,
while they declare that respect for contracts is the ‘weapon of the
weak’, the need for justice the ‘characteristic of slaves’. It is
not betraying the disciples of Nietzsche or Sorel--that is, the great
majority of contemporary men of letters who attempt to set up a scale
of moral values for the world--to say that according to them Colleoni
is a far superior specimen of humanity to l’Hôpital. The estimates of
the _Voyage du Condottiere_ are not peculiar to the author of that
work. Here is an idealization of practical activity, which humanity had
never before heard from its educators, at least from those who speak
dogmatically.
I shall be told that Nietzsche and his school do not extol the military
life because it procures material advantages, but on the contrary,
because it is the type of disinterested realism, and in opposition to
the realism which in their opinion is the characteristic of civilian
life. Yet it is none the less true that the way of life praised by
these moralists is in fact that which pre-eminently brings material
advantages. Whatever may be said by the author of _Reflections on
Violence_ and his disciples, war is more profitable than the counting
house; to take is more advantageous than to exchange; Colleoni
possesses more than Franklin. (Naturally, I am speaking of the
successful military man, since Nietzsche and Sorel never speak of the
merchant who goes bankrupt.)
Moreover, no one will deny that the irrational activities, of which
the military instinct is only one aspect, are extolled by their great
modern apostles for their practical value. Their historian has put
it admirably: The Romanticism of Nietzsche, Sorel, and Bergson is a
_utilitarian_ Romanticism.
Let me insist that what I am pointing to here, is not the modern
‘clerk’s’ extolling of the military spirit, but of the warlike
instinct. It is the cult of the warlike instinct, outside all social
spirit of discipline or sacrifice which is meant by the following
assertions of Nietzsche, glorified by a French moralist whom himself
has numerous followers:--
‘The values of the warrior aristocracy are founded on a powerful
bodily constitution, excellent health, without forgetting all that is
necessary to the upkeep of that overflowing vigour--war, adventure,
hunting, dancing, physical games and exercises, and in general
everything which implies a robust, free and joyous activity.’
‘That audacity of noble races, a mad, absurd, spontaneous audacity ...
their indifference and scorn for all safety of body, for life, comfort
...’
‘The superb blond beast wandering in search of prey and carnage ...’
‘The terrible gaiety and profound joy felt by heroes in all
destruction, in all the pleasures of victory and cruelty.’
The moralist who quotes those remarks (Sorel, _Reflexions sur la
Violence_, p. 360) adds, in order to leave no doubt about his
recommendation of them to his fellow human beings: ‘It is quite evident
that liberty would be seriously compromised if men came to look upon
the Homeric values’ (which, for him, are the values just praised by
Nietzsche) ‘as being characteristic of the barbarous peoples only.’
Is it necessary to observe how, here again, the moral presentation
dominant among the world’s educators is essentially Germanic, and
shows the bankruptcy of Graeco-Roman thought? Before our times you do
not find in France a single serious moralist (including de Maistre)
or even a poet (if you consider only the great ones) who praises the
‘pleasures of victory and cruelty’.[113] And it is the same for ancient
Rome, among the nations to whom war had given world supremacy. I do
not find a single passage which puts forward the instincts of prey
as the supreme form of human morality in Cicero, Seneca, or Tacitus,
or even in Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Claudian. On the other hand, I
find a great many which attribute this rank to the instincts on which
civil life is based.[114] Moreover, in primitive Greece, long before
the philosophers, the myths very soon give an important place to
civil morality. In a poem of Hesiod the tomb of Cycnus is engulfed
in the waters by Apollo’s command, because Cycnus was a brigand. The
defence of warlike instincts by Mediterranean moralists will be one
of the amazements of history. Some of them, moreover, seem uneasy
about it, and feel they ought to claim that the Homeric values (we
have seen what they mean by that) ‘are very close to the values of
Corneille’[115]--as if the French poet’s heroes, with all their sense
of devotion to duty and the State, had anything in common with lovers
of adventure, prey, and carnage!
It will be observed that these passages from Nietzsche praise the
military life apart from any political aim.[116] And, in fact, the
modern ‘clerks’ teach men that war implies a morality _in itself_
and should be exercised even apart from any utility. This thesis, so
familiar in Barrès, has been defended in its full splendour by a young
hero who is an educator of the soul for a whole French generation:
‘In my country we love war and secretly desire it. We have always made
war. Not to conquer a province, not to exterminate a nation, not to
settle a conflict of interests.... We make war for the sake of making
war, with no other purpose.’[117]
The old French moralists, even the soldiers (Vauvenargues, Vigny),
looked upon war as a sad necessity; their descendants recommend it as
a noble inutility. Yet, here again, the cult preached as apart from
the practical and as an art happens to be eminently favourable to the
practical--useless war is the best preparation for useful war.
This teaching leads the modern ‘clerk’ (we have just seen it in
Nietzsche) to confer a _moral_ value upon physical exercise and to
proclaim _the morality of sport_--a most remarkable thing indeed among
those who for twenty centuries have exhorted man to situate good in
states of the mind. The moralists of sport, moreover, do not all
shuffle over the practical essence of their doctrine. Young people,
Barrès clearly teaches, should be trained in physical strength, for the
greatness of the country. The modern educator goes for his inspiration,
not to those who strolled in the Lyceum or to the solitaries of
Clairvaux, but to the founder of a little town in the Peloponnesus.
Moreover, our age has seen this new thing: Men who claim to belong
to the spiritual life teaching that the Greece to venerate is Sparta
with her gymnasiums, not the city of Plato or Praxiteles, while others
maintain that in antiquity we should honour Rome and not Greece. All
these things are perfectly consistent in those who desire to preach to
humanity nothing but strong constitutions and solid ramparts.[118]
The preaching of realism leads the modern ‘Clerk’ to certain teachings,
whose novelty in his history is not sufficiently noticed, nor what a
break they form with the teaching which his class has given to men for
the past two thousand years.
(_a_) _The extolling of courage_, or more precisely the exhortation to
make the supreme virtue Man’s aptitude to face death, while all other
virtues, however lofty, are placed below it. This teaching, openly the
teaching of Nietzsche, Sorel, Péguy, Barrès, was always the teaching
of poets and generals, but is entirely new among the ‘clerks’, I mean
among men who put before the world a scale of values in the name of
philosophical reflection, or who are willing to be considered as such.
From Socrates to Renan they had considered courage as a virtue, but
on a lower plane. All, more or less openly, teach with Plato: ‘In the
first rank of virtue are wisdom and temperance; courage only comes
afterwards.’[119] The impulses they exhort man to venerate are not
those whereby he strives to quench his thirst for placing himself in
the real, but those whereby he moderates it. It was reserved for our
time to see the priests of the spiritual placing in the first rank of
forms of soul that which is indispensable to man if he is to conquer
and to lay foundations.[120] However, this practical value of courage,
plainly expressed by Nietzsche and Sorel, is not equally so expressed
by all the modern moralists who praise this virtue. This brings another
of their teachings before us:--
(_b_) _The extolling of honour_, by which is meant all those impulses
which cause a man to risk his life for no practical interest--to be
precise, from desire of glory--_but which are an excellent school of
practical courage_, and were always extolled by those who lead men to
the conquest of material things. In this connection, let the reader
think of the respect in which the institution of the duel has always
been held in armies, in spite of certain repressions inspired solely by
practical considerations.[121]
Here again, the position attributed to these impulses by so many modern
moralists is something new among them, especially in the country of
Montaigne, Pascal, La Bruyère, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Renan, who,
when they extol honour, mean something very different from man’s
cult of his own glory.[122] Nevertheless, the most remarkable thing
about all this is that the cult of man for his own glory is currently
preached by the Churchmen as a virtue which leads Man to God. Is it
not amazing to hear words like the following from a Christian pulpit?
‘The love of grandeurs is the path to God, and the heroic impulse which
fully coincides with the search for glories in their cause, permits
him who had forgotten God or who thought he knew not God to re-invent
Him, to discover this last summit after temporary ascents have rendered
him accustomed to the dizziness and air of altitudes.’[123] One cannot
forebear quoting the lesson given by a true disciple of Jesus to a
Christian teacher who had also strangely forgotten his Master’s word:--
‘Have you noticed that the eight Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount,
the Gospels, the whole of primitive Christian literature, contain not
one word which sets military virtues among those which lead to the
Kingdom of Heaven?’ (Renan, _First Letter to Strauss_.)[124]
Let me observe that I am not reproaching the Christian preacher for
giving their due to glory and other earthly passions, I am only
reproaching him for trying to pretend that he is in harmony with his
institution when he does so. We do not ask that the Christian shall not
violate the Christian law; we only ask him to know that he is breaking
it when he does break it. This seems to me admirably brought out by
the remark of Cardinal Lavigerie who was asked: ‘What would you do,
Eminence, if someone slapped your right cheek?’ and who replied, ‘I
know what I ought to do, but I do not know what I should do.’ _I know
what I ought to do_, and therefore what I ought to teach. A man who
speaks in that way may give way to every species of violence, and yet
maintain Christian morality. Here actions are nothing; the judgment on
the actions is everything.
Must I repeat that I am not deploring the fact that the cults of honour
and courage should be preached to human beings; I am deploring the fact
that they are preached _by the ‘clerks’_. Civilization, I repeat, seems
to me possible only if humanity consents to a division of functions, if
side by side with those who carry out the lay passions and extol the
virtues serviceable to them there exists a class of men who depreciate
these passions and glorify the advantages which are beyond the
material. What I think serious is that this class of men should cease
to perform their office, and that those whose duty was to quench human
pride should extol the same impulses of soul as the leaders of armies.
I shall be told that this preaching is imposed on the ‘clerks’, at
least in war-time, by the laymen, by the States, who to-day intend to
mobilize all the moral resources of the nation for their ends.[125]
But what amazes me is not so much that I see the ‘clerks’ preaching in
this manner, as to see them do it with such docility, such absence of
disgust, such enthusiasm, such joy.... The truth is that the ‘clerks’
have become as much laymen as the laymen themselves.
(_c_) _The extolling of harshness_ and the scorn for human love--pity,
charity, benevolence. Here again, the modern ‘clerks’ are the
_moralists_ of realism. They are not content to remind the world
that harshness is necessary in order ‘to succeed’ and that charity
is an encumbrance, nor have they limited themselves to preaching to
their nation or party what Zarathustra preached to his disciples: ‘Be
hard, be pitiless, and in this way dominate.’ They proclaim the moral
nobility of harshness and the ignominy of charity. This teaching,
which is the foundation of Nietzsche’s work, need not surprise one
in a country which has not provided the world with a single great
apostle,[126] but it is very remarkable in the land of Vincent de Paul
and the defender of the Calas. Lines like the following, which might be
an extract from the _Genealogy of Morals_, seem to me something wholly
new coming from the pen of a French moralist: ‘This perverted pity has
degraded love.[127] It has been given the name of charity, and the weak
have received its dew. Night after night the seed of this calamity has
been scattered. It conquers the earth. It fills the solitary places. In
whatever country you go, you cannot go about for a single day without
meeting this withered face with its commonplace gestures, inspired by
the sole desire of prolonging its shameful life.’[128] There again
we can observe how the modern realists have advanced beyond their
predecessors. When Machiavelli declares that ‘a Prince in order to
maintain his power is forced to govern in a manner contrary to charity
and humanity’, he is simply saying that to act contrary to charity
may be a practical necessity, but he does not in the least vouch that
charity is a degradation of the soul. This teaching is the contribution
of the nineteenth century to the moral education of mankind.
Sometimes the modern ‘clerks’ claim that in preaching inhumanity
they are only continuing the teaching of their great ancestors,
particularly of Spinoza on account of his famous proposition: ‘Pity in
itself is bad and useless in a soul which lives according to reason.’
Is it necessary to point out that here pity is depreciated, not to
the benefit of inhumanity, but to the benefit of humanity _guided by
reason_, because reason alone ‘enables us to give aid to others with
certainty’. And Spinoza, determined to stress the fact that for him
pity is only inferior to reasoned kindness, adds: ‘It must be fully
understood that I am here speaking of the man who lives by reason. For
if a man is never led by reason or by pity to go to the assistance
of others, then assuredly he deserves the name of inhuman, since he
retains no resemblance to a man.’ Let me add that the apostles of
harshness cannot claim either that they are supported by the fanatics
of justice (Michelet, Proudhon, Renouvier) who, by sacrificing love to
justice, do perhaps end up in harshness, but not in a joyous harshness
which is precisely the harshness preached by the modern realists, who
say--perhaps rightly--that it is the only fertile kind.[129]
This extolling of harshness seems to me to have borne more fruit than
any other preaching by the modern ‘clerks’. It is a commonplace that
among the great majority of the (so-called) thinking young men, in
France for instance, harshness is to-day an object of respect, while
human love in all its forms is considered a rather laughable thing.
These young men have a cult for doctrines which respect nothing but
force, pay no attention to the lamentations of suffering and proclaim
the inevitability of war and slavery, while they despise those who are
revolted by such prospects and desire to alter them. I should like
these cults to be compared with the literary aesthetics of these young
men, their veneration for certain contemporary novelists and poets in
whom the absence of human sympathy reaches a rare pitch of perfection,
and whom they plainly venerate, especially for that characteristic.
And I should like you to observe the gloomy gravity and arrogance with
which these young men subscribe to these ‘iron’ doctrines. It seems
to me that the modern ‘clerks’ have created in so-called cultivated
society a positive _Romanticism of harshness_.
They have also created a _Romanticism of contempt_, at least in France,
and notably with Barrès, and indeed since Flaubert and Baudelaire.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that in recent times contempt has been
practised in France for reasons quite other than aesthetic. These
peoples have come to see that by feeling contempt for others they are
not only obtaining the pleasure of a lofty attitude, but that when
they are really expert in expressing contempt they harm what they
despise, do it a real damage. And in fact the kind of contempt which
Barrès expresses for the Jews and which certain royalist teachers have
displayed for democratic institutions every morning for the past twenty
years, do really harm their victims, at least among those very numerous
artistic minds for whom a superbly executory gesture is as good as
an argument. The modern ‘clerks’ deserve a place of honour in the
history of realism; they have come to understand the practical value of
contempt.
It may also be said that they have created a _cult for cruelty_.
Nietzsche proclaims that ‘every superior culture is built up on
cruelty’, a doctrine which is explicitly proclaimed in many places
by Barrès, author of _Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort_.
Nevertheless, the cult of cruelty, which may also be thought necessary
‘to succeed’[130] has remained limited to a few particularly artistic
sensibilities, at least in France. It is very far from becoming the
cult of a school, like harshness and contempt. Here again we may
notice how new this cult is in the land of those who said ‘Cowardice,
the mother of cruelty’ (Montaigne), or, to quote a military moralist,
‘a hero does not feel proud of carrying hunger and misery among
foreigners, but of enduring them for the State; nor of giving death,
but of risking it.’ (Vauvenargues).[131]
(_d_) _The cult of success_, I mean the teaching which says that when a
will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the
will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt. This
philosophy which is professed by many a modern teacher in political
life (it may be said, by all in Germany since Hegel, and by a large
number in France since de Maistre) is also professed in private life,
and has borne its fruits there. In the so-called thinking world to-day
there are innumerable people who think they are demonstrating their
aristocratic morality by declaring their systematic esteem for all
who ‘succeed’ and their scorn for all who fail. One moralist places
to the credit of Napoleon’s greatness of soul his contempt for ‘the
unlucky’; others do the same thing in regard to Mazarin, Vauban,
Mussolini. It cannot be denied that the ‘clerks’ are thereby keeping
an excellent school of realism, since the cult of success and the
contempt for misfortune are obviously admirable moral conditions for
obtaining material advantages. Nor can it be denied that this teaching
is entirely new among them, especially among the ‘clerks’ of the Latin
races, I mean those whose ancestors had taught mankind to honour merit
apart from its achievements, to honour Hector as much as Achilles, the
Curiatii more than their successful rivals.[132]
We have just seen that the modern moralists extol the warrior at the
expense of the man of justice. They also extol him at the expense of
the man of learning and, there again, they preach to the world the
cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life. We
all know Nietzsche’s hue and cry against the man of the study, the man
of erudition, ‘the mirror man,’ whose only passion is to understand.
And also Nietzsche’s esteem for the life of the mind solely insofar
as it is emotion, lyricism, action, partiality; his derisive laughter
at ‘objective’ methodical research devoted to ‘the horrible old woman
known as truth’. And we know Sorel’s denunciations of societies which
‘give a privileged place to the amateurs of _purely intellectual
things_’;[133] those of Barrès, Lemaître, Brunetière, thirty years ago,
intimating to the ‘intellectuals’ that they are a type of humanity
‘inferior to the soldier’; those of Péguy, who admires philosophies to
the extent that ‘they are good fighters’, and admires Descartes because
he was in the army, and the dialecticians of French monarchism solely
because they are ready to be killed for the sake of their views.[134]
I shall be told that most often this is the mere wild talk of men of
letters, the posturing of lyricists, to which it is unjust to attribute
a dogmatic meaning; that Nietzsche, Barrès and Péguy denounce the life
of study on account of their poetic temperaments, their aversion from
everything lacking in picturesqueness and the spirit of adventure, and
not their resolution to abase disinterestedness. To which I reply that
these poets give themselves out as serious thinkers (notice their tone,
_quite free from_ naiveté); that the immense majority of their readers
accept them as such; that, even if it were true that in depreciating
the man of study their motive is not to abase disinterestedness, it
is none the less true in fact that the manner of living they hold
up to the laughter of mankind happens to be the very type of the
disinterested life, while the life they extol at its expense is the
very type of practical activity (at least more practical than that
of the man of study, for it will be admitted that the activity of du
Guesclin and Napoleon is more likely to acquire material advantages
than the activity of Spinoza and Mabillon); that, moreover, what these
thinkers despise in the man of study is precisely the man who lays no
foundations, who does not conquer, who does not predicate the capture
of its environment by the species, or who, if he does predicate it,
as the scientist does by his discoveries, retains for himself only
the joy of knowledge and abandons the practical exploitation of his
discoveries to others. In Nietzsche, the scorn for the man of study to
the benefit of the warrior is only an episode in a desire which nobody
will deny inspires the whole of his work as well as the work of Sorel,
Barrès and Péguy: _The desire to abase the values of knowledge before
the values of action._[135]
To-day this desire inspires not only the moralist, but another kind
of ‘clerk’ who speaks from much higher ground. I am referring to that
teaching of modern metaphysics which exhorts man to feel comparatively
little esteem for the truly thinking portion of himself and to honour
the active and _willing_ part of himself with all his devotion. The
theory of knowledge from which humanity has taken its values during
the past half century assigns a secondary rank to the mind which
proceeds by clear and distinct ideas, by categories, by words, and
places in the highest rank the mind which succeeds in liberating itself
from these intellectual habits and in becoming conscious of itself
insofar as it is a ‘pure tendency’, a ‘pure will’, a ‘pure activity’.
Philosophy which formerly raised man to feel conscious of himself
because he was a thinking being and to say, ‘I think, therefore I am’,
now raises him to say, ‘I am, therefore I think’, ‘I think, therefore
I am not’ (unless he takes thought into consideration only in that
humble region where it is confused with action). Formerly philosophy
taught him that his soul is divine insofar as it resembles the soul of
Pythagoras linking up concepts; now she informs him that his soul is
divine insofar as it resembles that of the small chicken breaking its
eggshell.[136] From his loftiest pulpit the modern ‘clerk’ assures man
that he is great in proportion as he is practical.
During fifty years, especially in France (see Barrès and Bourget)
a whole literature has assiduously proclaimed the superiority of
instinct, the unconscious, intuition, the will (in the German sense,
i.e. as opposed to the intelligence) and has proclaimed it in the name
of the practical spirit, because the instinct and not the intelligence
knows what we ought to do--as individuals, as a nation, as a class--to
secure our own advantage. These writers have eagerly expatiated on
the example of the insect whose ‘instinct’ (it appears) teaches it
to strike its prey precisely in the spot which will paralyse it
without killing it, so that its offspring may feed on the living prey
and develop better.[137] Other teachers denounce this ‘barbarous’
extolling of instinct in the name of ‘the French tradition’ and preach
‘the superiority of the intelligence’; but they preach it because
in their opinion it is the intelligence which shows us the actions
required by our interests, i.e. from exactly the same passion for the
practical. This brings us to one of the most remarkable and certainly
the most novel forms of this preaching of the practical by the modern
‘clerks’.
I mean that teaching according to which _intellectual activity is
worthy of esteem to the extent that it is practical and to that extent
alone_. It may be said that since the Greeks the predominant attitude
of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as
(like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart
from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers
would have agreed with Plato’s famous hymn to geometry, where that
discipline is venerated more than all others because for him it
represents the type of speculative thought which brings in nothing
material; and with Renan’s verdict which declares that the man who
loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against
that divinity.[138] By this standard of values the ‘clerks’ put before
the laymen the spectacle of a class of men for whom the value of life
lies in its disinterestedness, and they acted as a check on--or at
least shamed--the laymen’s practical passions. The modern ‘clerks’
have violently torn up this charter. They proclaim that intellectual
functions are only respectable to the extent that they are bound up
with the pursuit of a concrete advantage, and that the intelligence
which takes no interest in its objects is a contemptible activity.
They teach that the superior form of the intelligence is that which
thrusts its roots into ‘the vital urge’, occupied in discovering
what is most valuable in securing our existence. In historical[139]
science especially, they honour the intelligence which labours under
the guidance of political interests,[140] and they are completely
disdainful of all efforts towards ‘objectivity’. Elsewhere they
assert that the intelligence to be venerated is that which limits its
activities within the bounds of national interests and social order,
while the intelligence which allows itself to be guided by the desire
for truth alone, apart from any concern with the demands of society, is
merely a ‘savage and brutal’ activity, which ‘dishonours the highest
of human faculties.’[141] Let me also point out their devotion to
the doctrine (Bergson, Sorel) which says that science has a purely
utilitarian origin--the necessity of man to dominate matter, ‘knowledge
is adaptation’; and their scorn for the beautiful Greek conception
which made science bloom from the desire to play, the perfect type of
disinterested activity. And then they teach men that to accept an error
which is of service to them (the ‘myth’) is an undertaking which does
them honour, while it is shameful to admit a truth which harms them. In
other words, as Nietzsche, Barrès and Sorel plainly put it, sensibility
to truth in itself apart from any practical aim is a somewhat
contemptible form of mind.[142] Here the modern ‘clerk’ positively
displays genius in his defence of the material, since the material has
nothing to do with the truth, or rather to speak more truly--has no
worse enemy. The genius of Callicles in all its profundity lives again
in the great masters of the modern soul.[143]
Then the modern ‘clerks’ have preached to men the religion of the
practical _by means of their theology_, through the image of God they
have set before them. First, they determined that God, who since the
Stoics has been infinite, should once more become finite, distinct,
endowed with a personality, that He should be the affirmation of a
_physical_ and not a _metaphysical_ existence. Anthropomorphism, which
in the poets from Prudentius to Victor Hugo existed mingled with
pantheism without troubling to define the frontiers between them,
since God was personal or indeterminate according to the direction of
the emotion and the needs of the lyric impulse, rose up in Péguy and
Claudel with the most violent consciousness of itself, the clearest
desire to be distinguished from its acolyte and to express contempt
for him. At the same time the political teachers attacked the religion
of the Infinite with a precision of hatred, a skill in depreciation,
unparalleled even in the Church, which consisted in denouncing this
religion precisely because it is not practical, because it saps away
the feelings which found the great earthly realities: the City and the
State.[144] But the modern ‘clerks’ have above all endowed God with
the attributes which secure practical advantages. It may be said that,
since the Old Testament, God was far more just than strong, or rather
that, as Plato thought, His strength was only a form of His justice;
and His power, as Malebranche and Spinoza put it, had nothing in common
with the power of kings and Empire-builders. The desire to increase was
implicitly excluded from His nature, as well as the moral attributes
necessary to the satisfaction of that desire--energy, will, the love
of effort, the attraction of triumph. This was an inevitable result
of His perfect and infinite state of being, which at once constituted
the whole of possible reality. Even in creation, the idea of which is
essentially inseparable from the ideas of power and increase, these
ideas were avoided--the world was far less a result of God’s power than
of His love; it came out of God as a ray comes out of the sun, without
God feeling any increase of Himself at the expense of anything else.
God, to speak in terms of the schools, was far less the transcendent
cause of the world than its immanent cause.[145] On the other hand,
for the modern teachers (Hegel, Schelling, Bergson, Péguy), God is
essentially something which increases; His law is ‘incessant change’,
‘incessant novelty’, ‘incessant[146] creation’; His principle is
essentially a principle of growth--Will, Tension, Vital Urge. If He is
Intelligence, as with Hegel, He is an intelligence which ‘develops’,
which ‘realizes itself’ more and more. The Being situated immediately
in all His perfection and knowing nothing of conquest is an object of
contempt; He represents (Bergson) an ‘eternity of death’.[147] So the
believers in an initial and single creation to-day strive to present
this act in its purely practical aspect. The Church condemns with a
hitherto unknown clearness every doctrine of immanence and preaches
transcendence in all its strictness.[148] God, in creating the world,
no longer witnesses an inevitable expansion of His nature; through
His power (some, to diminish the arbitrariness, say ‘through His
benevolence’) he sees the arising of something clearly distinct from
Himself, something on which He sets His hand. His act, whatever may be
said to the contrary, is the perfect model of material aggrandisement.
Like the prophet of Israel of old, the modern ‘clerk’ says to mankind:
‘Display your zeal for the Eternal, the God of battles.’
For half a century, such has been the attitude of men whose function is
to thwart the realism of nations, and who have laboured to excite it
with all their power and with complete decision of purpose. For this
reason I dare to call this attitude ‘The Great Betrayal’. If I look
for its causes, I see profound causes which forbid me to look upon
this movement as a mere fashion, to which the contrary movement might
succeed to-morrow.
One of the principal causes is that the modern world has made the
‘clerk’ into a citizen, subject to all the responsibilities of a
citizen, and consequently to despise lay passions is far more difficult
for him than for his predecessors. If he is reproached for not looking
upon national quarrels with the noble serenity of Descartes and Goethe,
the ‘clerk’ may well retort that his nation claps a soldier’s pack
on his back if she is insulted, and crushes him with taxes even if
she is victorious. If shame is cried upon him because he does not
rise superior to social hatreds, he will point out that the day of
enlightened patronage is over, that to-day he has to earn his living,
and that it is not his fault if he is eager to support the class which
takes a pleasure in his productions. No doubt this explanation is
not valid for the true ‘clerk’, who submits to the laws of his State
without allowing them to injure his soul. He renders unto Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s, i.e. his life perhaps, but nothing more.
The true ‘clerk’ is Vauvenargues, Lamarck, Fresnel, who never imbibed
national patriotism although they perfectly performed their patriotic
duty; he is Spinoza, Schiller, Baudelaire, César Franck, who were never
diverted from single-hearted adoration of the Beautiful and the Divine
by the necessity of earning their daily bread. But such ‘clerks’ are
inevitably rare. So much contempt for suffering is not the law of human
nature even among the ‘clerks’; the law is that the living creature
condemned to struggle for life turns to practical passions, and
thence to the sanctifying of those passions. The ‘clerk’s’ new faith
is to a great extent a result of the social conditions imposed upon
him, and the real evil to deplore is perhaps not so much the ‘great
betrayal’ of the ‘clerks’ as the disappearance of the ‘clerks’, the
impossibility of leading the life of a ‘clerk’ in the world of to-day.
One of the gravest responsibilities of the modern State is that it has
not maintained (but could it do so?) a class of men exempt from civic
duties, men whose sole function is to maintain non-practical values.
Renan’s prophecy is verified; he foretold the inevitable degradation
of a society where every member was forced to discharge worldly tasks,
although Renan himself was the very type of those whom such servitude
would never have prevented--in the phrase of one of his peers--‘from
breathing only in the direction of Heaven’.
It would be very unjust to explain the existence of national passion
in the modern ‘clerk’ by self-interest alone. This is also to be
explained, and in a more simple manner, by the love, the impulse which
naturally inspires every man to love the group from which he derives,
more than the other groups which share the earth. There again, it may
be argued that the ‘clerk’s’ new faith is caused by the changes of
the nineteenth century, which by giving national groups a consistency
hitherto unknown furnishes food to a passion which in many countries
before that period could have been little more than potential.
Obviously, attachment to the world of the spirit alone was easier for
those who were capable of it when there were no nations to love. And,
in fact, it is most suggestive to notice that the true appearance of
the ‘clerk’ coincides with the fall of the Roman Empire, i.e. with the
time when the great nation collapsed and the little nations had not yet
come into existence. It is equally suggestive to notice that the age of
the great lovers of spiritual things, the age of Thomas Aquinas, Roger
Bacon, Galilei, Erasmus, was the age when most of Europe was in a state
of chaos and the nations were unknown; that the regions where pure
speculation endured longest seem to be Germany and Italy,[149] i.e.
the regions which were the last to be nationalized; and practically
ceased to produce pure speculation from the moment when they became
nations. Of course, here again the vicissitudes of the world of sense
do not affect the true ‘clerk’. The misfortunes of their country, and
even its triumphs, did not prevent Einstein and Nietzsche from feeling
no passion but the passion for thought. When Jules Lemaître exclaimed
that the wound of Sedan made him lose his reason, Renan replied that he
perfectly retained his, and that a true priest of the mind could only
be wounded in other than earthly interests.[150]
In the cases I have just mentioned, the ‘clerk’s’ devotion to his
nation or class is sincere, whether it is from interest or from love.
I admit I think this sincerity is infrequent. The practice of the life
of the spirit seems to me to lead inevitably to universalism, to the
feeling of the eternal, to a lack of vigour in the belief in worldly
conventions. The sincerity of national passion especially, in men of
letters particularly, seems to me to assume the virtue of naiveté,
which everyone will admit is not characteristic of this body of men,
apart from their own self-esteem. It will also be hard to convince
me that the motives of their public attitudes in artists are such
simple things as the desire to live and to eat. I therefore seek--and
find--other reasons for the realism of the modern ‘clerk’, and these,
although less natural, are none the less profound. They seem to me
particularly valid for men of letters, especially in France, the
country where the attitude of writers in the past half century differs
most from that of their fathers.
First of all, I see the interests of their careers. It is an obvious
fact that during the past two centuries most of the men of letters who
have attained wide fame in France assumed a political attitude--for
instance, Voltaire, Diderot, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo,
Anatole France, Barrès. With some of them, real fame dates from the
moment when they assumed that attitude. This law has not escaped the
attention of their descendants, and it may be said to-day that every
French writer who desires wide fame (which means every writer endowed
with the real temperament of a man of letters) also desires inevitably
to play a political part. This desire may arise from other motives. For
instance, in Barrès and d’Annunzio, from the desire ‘to act’, to be
something more than ‘men at a desk’, to lead a life like that of the
‘heroes’ and not like that of ‘scribes’; or, more ingenuously, as no
doubt happened with Renan when he stood as a Parliamentary candidate,
from the idea that he could perform a public service. Let me add that
the modern writer’s desire to be a political man is excused by the fact
that the position is to some extent offered him by public opinion,
whereas the compatriots of Racine and La Bruyère would have laughed
in their faces if they had thought of publishing their views on the
advisability of the war with Holland or the legality of Chambres de
réunion. There again, it was easier to be a true ‘clerk’ in the past
than to-day.
These observations explain why the contemporary French writer so
frequently desires to assume a political attitude, but they do not
explain why this attitude is so inevitably in support of arbitrary
authority. Liberalism is also a political attitude; and the least
which can be said is that the modern French ‘clerk’ has very seldom
adopted it in the past twenty years. Another factor comes in here. That
is the practical writer’s desire to please the bourgeoisie, who are the
creators of fame and the source of honours. It may even be argued that
for this sort of writer the necessity to treat the passions of this
class with deference is greater than ever, if I may judge by the fate
of those who in recent times have dared to defy them, i.e. Zola, Romain
Rolland. Now, the bourgeoisie of to-day, terrified by the progress
of the opposing class, solely anxious to retain the privileges which
are left them, feel nothing but aversion from liberal dogmas; and the
man of letters who displays any political flag is bound to wave the
flag of ‘Order’ if he wishes to obtain favours. The case of Barrès
is particularly instructive from this point of view. He began as a
great intellectual sceptic, and his material star waxed a hundredfold
greater, at least in his own country, on the day when he made himself
the apostle of ‘necessary prejudices’. This sort of thing makes me
believe that the present political fashion of French writers is going
to last a long time. A phenomenon which is caused by the uneasiness of
the French bourgeoisie does not seem likely to disappear quickly.[151]
I have mentioned the lot of those writers who in quite recent times
have dared to thwart the passions of the bourgeoisie. This is only one
aspect of a very general novelty, of supreme interest to the subject
I am discussing. I mean the consciousness of their sovereignty felt
by the herd of laymen, and the resolution they display to bring to
his senses any writer who dares to say anything but what they wish to
hear. This propensity of the layman appears not only in his relations
with his writers (and with his press--a newspaper which does not
supply its readers with the exact errors they cherish is immediately
dropped), but, which is far more remarkable, in his relations with
his truly ‘clerical’ teachers, whose voice speaks to him in the name
of the Divine. The pulpit-orator who really presumed to censure
nationalist passion, who really mortified bourgeois arrogance, would
soon (particularly in France) see his flock disperse. He can no
longer terrify such a gathering with the fear of punishment, and they
no longer believe in anything but the real; consequently they feel
stronger and more important than he, and only consent to listen to
his preaching on condition that he treats with deference--not to say
sanctifies--the egotisms they venerate.[152] Modern humanity is fully
determined that those who call themselves its teachers, shall be its
servants and not its guides. And most of the teachers understand this
admirably.[153]
To come back to the modern writer and the causes for his political
attitude--I shall add that he is not only in the service of a
bourgeoisie which is in a state of anxiety, but that he himself has
become more and more of a bourgeois, endowed with all the social
position and respect which belong to that caste. The Bohemian man of
letters has practically disappeared, at least among those who engage
public interest. Consequently, he has more and more come to possess the
bourgeois form of soul, one of those most conspicuous characteristics
is an affectation of the political feelings of the aristocracy--an
attachment to systems of arbitrary authority, to military and priestly
institutions, a scorn for societies founded upon justice, upon civic
equality, a cult for the past, etc.... How many writers in France
during the past fifty years, men whose names are on everyone’s lips,
obviously think they are ennobling themselves by expressing disgust for
democratic institutions![154] In the same way I explain the adoption
by many of them of harshness and cruelty, which they think are also
attributes of the souls of the nobility.
The reasons I have just mentioned for the new political attitude of
men of letters arise from the changes in their social status. Those I
am about to mention arise from changes in the structure of their minds,
in their literary desires, in their aesthetic cults, in their morality.
These reasons seem to me even more worthy of the historian’s attention
than those which have gone before.
First of all, we have their Romanticism, taking that word to mean the
desire which arose in the writers of the nineteenth century (but which
has become greatly perfected in the last thirty years) to treat themes
which lend themselves in a literary manner to striking attitudes. About
1890 the men of letters, especially in France and Italy, realized with
astonishing astuteness that the doctrines of arbitrary authority,
discipline, tradition, contempt for the spirit of liberty, assertion
of the morality of war and slavery, were opportunities for haughty and
rigid poses infinitely more likely to strike the imagination of simple
souls than the sentimentalities of Liberalism and Humanitarianism.
And as a matter of fact, the so-called reactionary doctrines do lend
themselves to a pessimistic and contemptuous Romanticism which makes
a far deeper impression on the common herd than enthusiastic and
optimistic Romanticism. The pose of a Barrès or a d’Annunzio strikes
naïve persons far more than that of a Michelet or a Proudhon. Moreover,
these doctrines are to-day given forth as founded upon science, upon
‘pure experience’, and thereby permit a tone of calm inhumanity (the
Romanticism of Positivism) whose effect on the herd has not escaped
the sagacious eye of the man of letters. (Of course, I am only speaking
of the elegant herd; Romantic pessimism has no value whatsoever for the
people.)
There is another transformation of the literary soul in men of letters,
wherein I think I see a cause of their new political creed. This is,
that recently the only one of their faculties they venerate is their
artistic sensibility, on which to some extent they base all their
judgments. Until the last thirty years it may be said that men of
letters, at least in Latin Europe, disciples in this of the Greeks,
were determined in their judgments--even their literary judgments--far
more by their sensibility to reason than by their artistic sensibility,
whereof moreover they were scarcely conscious as something distinct
from the former. This remark is true for the men of the Renaissance
and their direct descendants (the French writers of the seventeenth
and succeeding century) and, despite appearances, it is also true
of those who lived at the beginning of the nineteenth century. If
the weakening of sensibility to reason and, more generally, of lofty
intellectual discipline, is indisputably one of the characteristics of
the Romanticism of 1830, the contempt for this sensibility makes no
appearance. Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Michelet never prided themselves
on despising the values of reason in things in order to esteem only
their art values. Now, towards 1890, there occurred a revolution whose
influence cannot be exaggerated. Enlightened by philosophical analysis
(Bergsonism), the men of letters became conscious of the fundamental
difference between intellectual sensibility and artistic sensibility;
and ardently chose the latter. This is the epoch when they were heard
to assert that a book is great as soon as it achieves a literary and
artistic success, that its intellectual content is of no interest,
that all arguments are equally defensible, that error is no more false
than truth, etc.[155] This great change affected their political
attitudes. Obviously, as soon as we think things are good only
insofar as they content our artistic needs, the only good political
systems are those of arbitrary authority. Artistic sensibility is far
more gratified by a system which tends to the realization of force
and grandeur than by a system which tends to the establishment of
justice, for the characteristic of artistic sensibility is the love
of concrete realities and the repugnance for abstract conceptions and
conceptions of pure reason, the model of which is the idea of justice.
Artistic sensibility is especially flattered by the spectacle of a
mass of units which are subordinated to each other up to the final
head who dominates them all, whereas the spectacle of a democracy,
which is a mass of units _where no one is first_, deprives this
sensibility of one of its fundamental needs.[156] Add to this that
every doctrine which honours Man in the universal, in what is common
to all men, is a personal injury to the artist, whose characteristic
(at least since Romanticism)[157] is precisely to set himself up as an
exceptional being. Add also the sovereignty the artist now attributes
to his desires and their satisfaction (the ‘rights of genius’) and,
consequently, his natural hatred for systems which limit each person’s
liberty of action by that of others. And finally add the artist’s
aversion from everything which is general, everything which is only
the object of conception, not of sensation.[158] The determination of
men of letters to pass judgment only in accordance with their artistic
sensibility is only one aspect of their desire (since Romanticism) to
exalt feeling at the expense of thought, a desire which itself is one
among the thousand results of the decline of intellectual discipline
among them. The new political attitude of the ‘clerks’ seems to me to
be here the result of a serious modification of their state of mind.
This attitude also seems to me to result from the decline of the
study of classical literature in the formation of their minds. The
humanities, as the word implies, have always taught the cult of
humanity in its universal aspect, at least since the time of the
Portico.[159] The decline of Graeco-Roman culture in Barrès and his
literary generation, in comparison with that of Taine, Renan, Hugo,
Michelet, even Anatole France and Bourget, is undeniable. Still less
will it be denied that this decline is considerably more noticeable
in Barrès’s successors. However, this decline does not prevent these
writers from extolling classical studies, but they do not do this
with the idea of reviving the cult for what is human in its universal
aspect, but on the contrary to strengthen the ‘French’ mind, or at
least the ‘Latin’ mind, in the grasp of its own roots, in consciousness
of itself as distinct from other minds. Notice that this decline of
classical culture in the French writers coincides with the discovery of
the great German realists, Hegel and especially Nietzsche, whose genius
had the more effect on these Frenchmen because their lack of classical
discipline deprived them of the one real barrier which can be opposed
to that genius.[160]
Among the causes of this new attitude among men of letters I must point
to their thirst for sensations, their need to experience things, which
in recent times have grown stronger and have caused them to adopt a
political attitude which gave them emotions and sensations. Belphegor
is not the only star in the literary heavens. A French writer, who
was taken seriously as a thinker as early as 1890, was reproached for
having joined a party whose inconsistency will long be an amazement to
History; and he replied, ‘I followed Boulangism, as a man follows a
fanfare of trumpets.’ The same thinker gives us to understand that his
chief motive in ‘seeking contact with national minds’ was to ‘throw
more fuel under his sensibility, which was beginning to run down’.[161]
I do not think I am mistaken when I say that numbers of our moralists
who sneer at pacific civilization and extol a warlike life, do so
because the former seems a dull sort of a life to them and the latter
an opportunity for sensations.[162] You will recollect the remark of a
young thinker, quoted by Agathon in 1913: ‘Why not a war? It will be
amusing.’ I shall be told that this is the mere extravagant saying of
a young man. But what of this remark from a man of fifty, and what is
more, a scientist (R. Quinton), who saw the tragedy of 1914 coming,
and exclaimed: ‘We shall picnic on the grass!’? This scientist was
certainly a good soldier, but no more so than Fresnel and Lamarck, of
whom I dare to say that they may have approved of war, but not because
it satisfied their taste for the picturesque. All who frequented the
author of _Reflexions sur la Violence_ know that one of the greatest
attractions of any idea for him was that it was ‘amusing’ and likely
to exasperate so-called reasonable people. There are many thinkers of
the past fifty years whose ‘philosophy’ has one fundamental motive--the
pleasure of throwing off irritating paradoxes; while they are only
too happy if their rockets fall like swords and satisfy that need for
cruelty which they profess as the sign of noble minds. This prodigious
decline of morality, this sort of (very Germanic) intellectual sadism,
is usually and quite openly accompanied by a huge contempt for the true
‘clerk’, whose joy comes from the exercise of thought and who disdains
sensation, particularly the sensations of action. Here again the new
political cult of the men of letters is the result of a modification
in the most intimate part of their mind, the very same modification we
have been discussing, i.e. a decline of intellectual discipline, which
does not mean a decline in intelligence.[163]
On their own showing, many modern ‘clerks’ have adopted these realist
doctrines because they want to have done with the moral disarray into
which they are thrown by the spectacle of philosophies, ‘none of which
bring certainty,’ and which all collapse upon each other as they cry
to heaven their contradictory absolutes. There again the ‘clerk’s’
political attitude is the result of a great decline in his intellectual
discipline, whether we consider that this decline is shown by his
belief that any philosophy can bring certainty, or whether we think
that it lies in his inability to stand upright on the ruins of the
schools, devoting himself to reason, which is above all the schools,
and is their judge.
I shall also admit as one other cause of realism in the modern ‘clerks’
the irritation produced in them by the teaching of some of their
predecessors--I mean certain masters of the year 1848, with their
visionary idealism, their belief that justice and love were suddenly
about to become the essence of the soul of nations, an irritation
greatly increased by seeing the dreadful contrast between these idyllic
prophecies and the events which followed them. Nevertheless, the point
to remember is that the modern ‘clerks’ replied to these errors by
hurling anathemas at every sort of idealism, whether visionary or not,
thereby showing incapacity to distinguish between species, inability
to rise above passion to judgment. And this is but one other aspect of
their loss of the good manners of the mind.
Let me recapitulate the causes for this change in the ‘clerks’: The
imposition of political interests on all men without any exception;
the growth of consistency in matters apt to feed realist passions;
the desire and the possibility for men of letters to play a political
part; the need in the interests of their own fame for them to play
the game of a class which is daily becoming more anxious; the
increasing tendency of the ‘clerks’ to become bourgeois and to take
on the vanities of that class; the perfecting of their Romanticism;
the decline of their knowledge of antiquity and of their intellectual
discipline. It will be seen that these causes arise from certain
phenomena which are most profoundly and generally characteristic of
the present age. The political realism of the ‘clerks’, far from being
a superficial fact due to the caprice of an order of men, seems to me
bound up with the very essence of the modern world.
IV
_Summary--Predictions_
To sum up: If I look at contemporary humanity from the point of
view of its moral state as revealed by its political life, I see
(_a_) A mass in whom realist passions in its two chief forms--class
passion, national passion--has attained a degree of consciousness and
organization hitherto unknown; (_b_) A body of men who used to be in
opposition to the realism of the masses, but who now, not only do not
oppose it, but adopt it, proclaim its grandeur and morality; in short,
a humanity which has abandoned itself to realism with a unanimity,
an absence of reserve, a sanctification of its passion unexampled in
history.
This remark may be put in another form. Imagine an observer of the
twelfth century taking a bird’s-eye view of the Europe of his time. He
would see men groping in the obscurity of their minds and striving to
form themselves into nations (to mention only the most striking aspect
of the realist will); he would see them beginning to succeed; he would
see groups of men attaining consistency, determined to seize a portion
of the earth and tending to feel conscious of themselves as distinct
from the groups surrounding them. But at the same time he would see a
whole class of men, regarded with the greatest reverence, labouring
to thwart this movement. He would see men of learning, artists and
philosophers, displaying to the world a spirit which cared nothing for
nations, using a universal language among themselves. He would see
those who gave Europe its moral values preaching the cult of the human,
or at least of the Christian, and not of the national, he would see
them striving to found, in opposition to the nations, a great universal
empire on spiritual foundations. And so he might say to himself:
‘Which of these two currents will triumph? Will humanity be national
or spiritual? Will it depend on the will of the laymen or of the
“clerks”?’ And for long ages the realist cause will not be completely
victorious; the spiritual body will remain faithful to itself long
enough to our observer to be uncertain of the result. To-day the game
is over. Humanity is national. The layman has won. But his triumph
has gone beyond anything he could have expected. The ‘clerk’ is not
only conquered, he is assimilated. The man of science, the artist, the
philosopher are attached to their nations as much as the day-labourer
and the merchant. Those who make the world’s values, make them for
a nation; the Ministers of Jesus defend the national. All humanity
including the ‘clerks’, have become laymen. All Europe, including
Erasmus, has followed Luther.
I said above that the humanity of the past, more precisely the humanity
of Europe in the Middle Ages, with the values imposed upon it by the
‘clerks’, acted ill but honoured the good. It may be said that modern
Europe with teachers who inform it that its realist instincts are
beautiful, acts ill and honours what is ill. Modern Europe is like
the brigand in one of Tolstoi’s stories, who made his confession to a
hermit, and the hermit said in amazement: ‘Others were at least ashamed
of being brigands; but what is to be done with this man, who is proud
of it?’
Indeed, if we ask ourselves what will happen to a humanity where
every group is striving more eagerly than ever to feel conscious of
its own particular interests, and makes its moralists tell it that it
is sublime to the extent that it knows no law but this interest--a
child can give the answer. This humanity is heading for the greatest
and most perfect war ever seen in the world, whether it is a war of
nations, or a war of classes. A race of which one group exalts one of
its masters (Barrès) to the skies because he teaches: ‘We must defend
the essential part of ourselves as sectarians,’ while a neighbouring
group acclaims a leader because, when he attacks a defenceless small
nation, he says, ‘Necessity knows no law’--such a race is ripe for the
zoological wars Renan talks about, which, he said, would be like the
life and death wars which occur among rodents and among the carnivora.
As regards the nation, think of Italy; as regards class, think of
Russia; and you will see the hitherto unknown point of perfection
attained by the spirit of hatred against what is ‘different’ among
a group of men, consciously realist and at last liberated from all
non-practical morality. And my predictions are not rendered less
probable by the fact that these two nations are hailed as models
throughout the world by those who desire either the grandeur of their
nation or the triumph of their class.
These dark predictions do not seem to me to need as much modification
as some people think, on account of certain actions resolutely directed
against war, such as the setting up of a supernational institution
and the agreements recently made by the rival nations. Imposed upon
the nations by their Ministers rather than desired by them, dictated
solely by interest (the fear of war and its ravages) and not at all
by a change in public morality, these new institutions may perhaps
be opposed to war but leave intact the _spirit of war_, and nothing
leads us to suppose that a nation which only respects a contract for
practical reasons, will not break it as soon as breaking it appears
more profitable. Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the
fear of war but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining
from an act, but the coming of a state of mind.[164] In this sense
the most insignificant writer can serve peace where the most powerful
tribunals can do nothing. And moreover these tribunals leave untouched
the economic war between the nations and the class wars.
Peace, it must be repeated after so many others have said this, is
only possible if men cease to place their happiness in the possession
of things ‘which cannot be shared’, and if they raise themselves to
a point where they adopt an abstract principle superior to their
egotisms. In other words, it can only be obtained by a betterment of
human morality. But, as I have pointed out above, not only do men
to-day steel themselves entirely against this, but the very first
condition of peace, which is to recognize the necessity for this
progress of the soul, is seriously menaced. A school arose in the
nineteenth century which told men to expect peace from enlightened
self-interest, from the belief that a war, even when victorious, is
disastrous, especially to economic transformations, to ‘the evolution
of production’, in a phrase, to factors totally foreign to their moral
improvement, from which, these thinkers say, it would be frivolous to
expect anything. So that humanity, even if it had any desire for peace,
is exhorted to neglect the one effort which might procure it, an effort
it is delighted not to make. The cause of peace, which is always
surrounded with adverse factors, in our days has one more against
it--the pacifism which pretends to be scientific.[165]
I can point to other sorts of pacifism, whose chief result I dare to
say is to weaken the cause of peace, at least among serious-minded
persons:--
(_a_) First, there is the pacifism I shall call ‘vulgar’, meaning
thereby the pacifism which does nothing but denounce ‘the man who
kills’, and sneer at the prejudices of patriotism. When I see certain
teachers, even if they are Montaigne, Voltaire, and Anatole France,
whose whole case against war consists in saying that highwaymen are no
more criminal than leaders of armies, and in laughing at people who
kill each other because one party is dressed in yellow and the other in
blue, I feel inclined to desert a cause whose champions over-simplify
things to this extent, and I begin to feel some sympathy for the
impulses of profound humanity which created the nations and which are
thereby so grossly insulted.[166]
(_b_) _Mystic pacifism_, by which I mean the pacifism which is solely
animated by a blind hatred of war and refuses to inquire whether
a war is just or not, whether those fighting are the attackers or
the defenders, whether they wanted war or only submit to it. This
pacifism is essentially the pacifism of the people (and that of all the
so-called pacifist newspapers) and was strikingly embodied in 1914 by
a French writer who, having to judge between two fighting nations one
of which had attacked the other contrary to all its pledges while the
other was only defending itself, could do nothing but intone ‘I have
a horror of war’ and condemned them both equally. It is impossible to
exaggerate the consequences of this behaviour, which showed mankind
that mystic pacifism, just like mystic militarism, may entirely
obliterate the feeling of justice in those who are smitten with it.
I think I see another motive in the French writers who in 1914 adopted
the attitude of M. Romain Rolland--the fear that they would fall into
national partiality if they admitted that their nation was in the
right. It may be asserted that these writers would have warmly taken up
the cause of France, if France had not been their own country. Whereas
Barrès said, ‘I always maintain my country is right even if it is in
the wrong,’ these strange friends of justice are not unwilling to say:
‘I always maintain my country is in the wrong, even if it is right.’
There again we see that the frenzy of impartiality, like any other
frenzy, leads to injustice.
I have also a word to say about the severities of these ‘justiciaries’
towards France’s attitude immediately after her victory, towards her
desire to force the enemy to make good the damage done to her, and to
seize on pledges if he refused. The motive which here animated these
moralists without their perceiving it, seems to me very remarkable;
it was the thought that the just person must inevitably be weak and
suffer, that he must be a victim. If the just man becomes strong and
comes to possess the means of enforcing justice towards himself, then
he ceases to be just to these thinkers. If Socrates and Jesus make
their persecutors disgorge, then they cease to embody justice; one step
more and the persecutors, having become victims, would embody right.
In this the cult of justice is replaced by the cult of misfortune,
a Christian Romanticism which is somewhat unexpected in a man like
Anatole France. No doubt the events of 1918 upset all the habits of the
advocates of right. Outraged right became the stronger, the assailed
toga triumphed over the sword, the Curiatii were victorious. Perhaps
some coolness of mind was needed to recognize that right remained
right, even when thus invested with force. The French pacifists failed
to remain cool. In short, their attitude in the past ten years has been
inspired by sentiment alone, and nothing could show better the degree
of weakness to which intellectual discipline has now fallen among our
‘princes of the mind’.[167]
(_c_) _Pacifism claiming to be patriotic_, by which I mean the pacifism
which claims to exalt humanitarianism, to preach the abatement of the
militarist spirit and of national passion, and yet not to harm the
interests of the nation nor to compromise its power of resistance to
foreign nations. This attitude--which is that of all Parliamentary
pacifists--is the more antipathetic to upright minds in that it is
inevitably accompanied by the assertion (which is also nearly always
contrary to the truth) that the nation is not in the least threatened
and that the malevolence of neighbouring nations is a pure invention
of people who want war. But that is merely an aspect of a very general
fact, which is of supreme importance to the matter under discussion.
By this I mean the ‘clerk’s’ determination to put forth his principles
as valid in the practical order of things, as reconcilable with the
safeguarding of the sword’s conquests. This determination, which has
affected the Church for twenty centuries and almost all the idealists
(give me the names of those since Jesus who have declared themselves
incompetent in the practical order of things), is the source of all the
‘clerk’s failures’. It may be said that the ‘clerk’s’ defeat begins
from the very moment when he claims to be practical. As soon as the
‘clerk’ claims that he does not disregard the interests of the nation
or of the established classes, he is inevitably beaten, for the very
good reason that it is impossible to preach the spiritual and the
universal without undermining the institutions whose foundations are
the possession of the material and the desire to feel distinct from
others. A true ‘clerk’ (Renan) says excellently: ‘The mother-country
is a worldly thing; the man who wants to play the angel will always
be a bad patriot.’ Thus we see that the ‘clerk’ who claims to secure
the works of the world has a choice between two consequences. Either
he secures them and transgresses all his principles, which is the case
with the Church supporting the nation and property; or he maintains
his principles and causes the ruin of the institutions he claimed he
was supporting, which is the case with the humanitarian who claims to
safeguard what is national. In the first case the ‘clerk’ is despised
by the just man, who denounces him as cunning and strikes him out of
the rank of ‘clerk’; and in the second case he collapses under the
hooting of the nations who call him inefficient, while he provokes a
violent and loudly acclaimed reaction on the part of the realist, which
is what is now happening in Italy. From all this it follows that the
‘clerk’ is only strong if he is clearly conscious of his essential
qualities and his true function, and shows mankind that he is clearly
conscious of them. In other words he declares to them that his kingdom
is not of this world, that _the grandeur of his teaching lies precisely
in this absence of practical value, and that the right morality for
the prosperity of the kingdoms which are of this world, is not his, but
Caesar’s_. When he takes up this position, the ‘clerk’ is crucified,
but he is respected, and his words haunt the memory of mankind.[168]
The need to remind the modern ‘clerks’ of these truths (for everyone of
them is angry at being called Utopian) is one of the most suggestive
observations in connection with our subject. It shows that the desire
to be practical has become general, that the claim to be so has now
become necessary in order to obtain an audience, and that the very
notion of ‘clerkdom’ has become obscured even in those who still tend
to exercise that function.
It will be seen that I entirely dissociate myself from those who want
the ‘clerk’ to govern the world, and who wish with Renan for the ‘reign
of the philosophers’; for it seems to me that human affairs can only
adopt the religions of the true ‘clerk’ under penalty of becoming
divine, i.e. of perishing as human. This has been clearly seen by all
lovers of the divine who did not desire the destruction of what is
human. This is marvellously expressed by one of them when he makes
Jesus say so profoundly to His disciple: ‘My son, I must not give you a
clear idea of your substance ... for if you saw clearly what you are,
you could no longer remain so closely united to your body. You would
no longer watch over the preservation of your life.’[169] But though
I think it a bad thing that the ‘clerk’s’ religion should possess the
lay world, I think it still more to be dreaded that it should not be
preached to the layman at all, and that he should thus be allowed to
yield to his practical passions without the least shame or the least,
even hypocritical, desire to raise himself however slightly above them.
‘There are a few just men who prevent me from sleeping’--that was what
the realist said of the teachers of old. Nietzsche, Barrès, and Sorel
do not prevent any realist from sleeping; on the contrary. This is the
novelty I want to point out, which to me seems so serious. It seems to
me serious that a humanity, which is more than ever obsessed by the
passions of the world, should receive from its spiritual leaders the
command: ‘remain faithful to the earth.’
Is this adoption of ‘integral realism’ by the human species permanent,
or merely temporary? Are we, as some people think, witnessing the
beginning of a new Middle Ages (and one far more barbarous than the
former, for though it practised realism, it did not extol realism),
from which, however, will arise a new Renaissance, a new return to
the religion of disinterestedness? The elements we have discovered
as forming the new realism scarcely allow us to hope so. It is hard
to imagine the nations sincerely striving not to feel conscious of
themselves as distinct from others, or, if they do so, having any
other motive than that of concentrating inter-human hatred into that
of class. It is hard to imagine the clergy regaining a real moral sway
over the faithful and being able (supposing they desired to do so) to
tell them with impunity unpleasant truths. It is hard to imagine a
body of men of letters (for corporative action becomes more and more
important) attempting to withstand the bourgeois classes instead of
flattering them. It is still harder to imagine them turning against the
tide of their intellectual decadence and ceasing to think that they
display a lofty culture when they sneer at rational morality and fall
on their knees before history. Nevertheless one thinks of a humanity
of the future, weary of its ‘sacred egotisms’ and the slaughterings to
which they inevitably lead, coming as humanity came two thousand years
ago, to the acceptance of a good situated beyond itself, accepting it
even more ardently than before, with the knowledge of all the tears and
blood that have been shed through departing from that doctrine. Once
more Vauvenargues’ admirable saying would be verified. ‘The passions
have taught men reason.’ But such a thing only seems to me possible
after a long lapse of time, when war has caused far more woes than
have yet been endured. Men will not revise their values for wars which
only last fifty months and only kill a couple of million men in each
nation. One may even doubt whether war will ever become so terrible as
to discourage those who love it, the more so since they are not always
the men who have to fight.
When I set this limit to my pessimistic outlook and admit that such
a Renaissance is possible, I mean no more than that it is just
possible. I cannot agree with those who say it is certain, either
because it happened once before, or because ‘civilization is due to
the human race’. Civilization as I understand it here--moral supremacy
conferred on the cult of the spiritual and on the feeling of the
universal--appears to me as a lucky accident in man’s development. It
blossomed three thousand years ago under a set of circumstances whose
contingent character was perfectly perceived by the historian who
called it ‘the Greek miracle’. It does not appear to me in the least to
be a thing due to the human race by virtue of the data of its nature.
It seems to me so little such a thing that I observe large portions
of the species (the Asiatic world in antiquity, the Germanic world in
modern times) who showed themselves incapable of it and quite likely
to remain so. And this means that if humanity loses this jewel, there
is not much chance of finding it again. On the contrary there is every
chance that humanity will not find it again, just as a man who should
find a precious stone in the sea and then drop it back in the water
would have little chance of ever seeing it again. Nothing seems to me
more doubtful than Aristotle’s remark that it is probable the arts
and philosophy have several times been discovered and several times
lost. The other position which maintains that civilization, despite
partial eclipses, is something which humanity cannot lose, seems to
me quite worthless except as an act of faith--though it is valuable
as a means of preserving the good we wish to keep. I should not think
it a serious objection to what I have said if someone should point
out that civilization, lost once with the fall of the ancient world,
nevertheless had its Renaissance. Everyone knows that the Graeco-Roman
form of mind was far from being wholly extinguished during the Middle
Ages and that the sixteenth century only brought to life what was not
dead; to which I add that even if that form of mind had been ‘reborn’
_ex nihilo_, the fact that this is the only instance would make it
insufficient to reassure me, although the fact that it had occurred
would disturb me.
Let me point out in this respect that insufficient attention is perhaps
paid to the fact that there are always only a very tiny number of
instances in history on which are built up a ‘law’, which claims to be
valid for the whole past and future evolution of humanity. Vico says
that history is a series of alternations between periods of progress
and periods of retrogression; and he gives _two_ examples. Saint-Simon
says history is a series of oscillations between organic epochs and
critical epochs; and he gives _two_ examples. Marx says history is a
series of economic systems, each of which casts out its predecessor by
means of violence; and he gives _one_ example! I shall be told that
these examples could not be more numerous, owing to the fact that
history, at least known history, is so short. The truth, implied by
this very reply, is that history has lasted too short a time for us
to be able to deduce laws from it to enable us to infer the future
from the past. Those who do so are like a mathematician who should
decide the nature of a curve from the form he finds it has at its
very beginning. True, a somewhat uncommon turn of mind is required to
confess that human history, after several thousands of years, is only
beginning. I cannot sufficiently admire the rare mental value displayed
by La Bruyère (in my opinion) when he wrote the following lines in a
century which was strongly inclined to think it was the topmost summit
of human development: ‘If the world lasts only a hundred million years,
it will still be in all its freshness and only beginning; we ourselves
are almost contemporary with the first men and the patriarchs, and who,
in those far-off ages, will be able to avoid confusing us with them?
But if we judge of the future from the past, what new things are we
ignorant of in the arts, in the sciences, in Nature, and, I dare say,
in history? What discoveries will be made! What different revolutions
will occur in our Empires all over the world! How ignorant we are! And
how slight is an experience of six or seven thousand years!’
I shall go further and say that even if an examination of the past
could lead to any valid prediction concerning man’s future, that
prediction would be the contrary of reassuring. People forget that
Hellenic rationalism only really enlightened the world during seven
hundred years, that it was then hidden (this _a minima_ verdict will
be granted me) for twelve centuries, and has begun to shine again for
barely four centuries; so that _the longest period of consecutive time
in human history on which we can found inductions is, upon the whole,
a period of intellectual and moral darkness_. Looking at history, we
may say in a more synthetic manner that, with the exception of two or
three very short, luminous epochs whose light, like that of certain
stars, lightens the world long after they are extinct, humanity lives
generally in darkness; while literatures live generally in a state of
decadence and the organism in disorder. And the disturbing thing is
that humanity does not seem to mind these long periods of cave-dwelling.
To come back to the realism of my contemporaries and their contempt
for a disinterested existence, I must add that my mind is sometimes
haunted by a dreadful question. I wonder whether humanity, by adopting
this system to-day, has not discovered its true law of existence and
adopted the true scale of values demanded by its essence? The religion
of the spiritual, I said just now, seems to me a lucky accident in
man’s history. I shall go further, and say it seems to me a paradox.
The obvious law of human substance is the conquest of things and the
exaltation of the impulses which secure this conquest. Only through an
amazing abuse were a handful of men at desks able to succeed in making
humanity believe that the supreme values are the good things of the
spirit. To-day humanity has awakened from this dream, knows its true
nature and its real desires, and utters its war-cry against those who
for centuries have robbed it of itself. Instead of waxing indignant at
the ruin of their domination, would it not be more reasonable for these
usurpers (if there are any left) to wonder that it lasted so long?
Orpheus could not aspire to charm the wild beasts with his music until
the end of time. However, one could have hoped that Orpheus himself
would not become a wild beast.
It is scarcely necessary to say my remarks on realist desires and
their violent perfecting do not blind me to the immense growth of
gentleness, justice, and love written to-day in our customs and laws,
which would certainly have amazed our most optimistic ancestors.
There is an immense improvement in the relations between man and man
within the groups which fight each other--especially within the nation
where security is the rule and injustice is a scandal. But to keep
more closely to our subject, perhaps we do not sufficiently realize
the incredible degree of civilization implied by the good treatment
of prisoners, and the care of enemy wounded in wars between nations,
and by the institution of public and private charity in the relations
between the classes. The denial of progress, the assertion that
barbarity of heart has never been worse, are natural themes for poets
and those who are discontented, and perhaps they are even necessary
to progress. But the historian, whether he looks at national or class
warfare, is amazed at the transformation of a species which only four
centuries ago roasted prisoners of war in baker’s ovens, and, only two
centuries ago forbade the workers to establish a pension fund for their
aged members. Nevertheless I must point out that these improvements
cannot be credited to the present age. They are the results of the
teaching of the eighteenth century, against which the ‘masters of
modern thought’ are in complete revolt. The establishment of war
ambulances, the wide development of State charities are the work of the
Second Empire, are connected with the ‘humanitarian clichés’ of Victor
Hugo and Michelet, which are immeasureably despised by the moralists
of the past half century. They exist to some extent _despite of_ these
moralists, not one of whom has conducted a truly humane campaign, while
the chief of them--Nietzsche, Barrès, Sorel--would blush to be able
to say like Voltaire: ‘I have done a little good, ’tis my best work.’
I must add that these good works are now merely customs, i.e. actions
performed from habit, without the will taking any part in them, without
the mind reflecting on their meaning. And if the mind of our realists
ever came to think of them, I think there is every possibility that
it might prohibit them. I can well imagine a future war when a nation
would decide not to look after the enemy wounded, a strike where the
bourgeoisie would make up its mind not to support hospitals for the
benefit of a class which was ruining it and anxious to destroy it. I
can imagine both priding themselves on getting free from a ‘stupid
humanitarianism’, and finding disciples of Nietzsche and Sorel to
praise them for it. The attitude of the Italian Fascists and the
Russian Bolshevists towards their enemies is not calculated to give me
the lie here. The modern world still displays certain failures in pure
practicality, a few stains of idealism from which it might well cleanse
itself.
I said above that the logical end of the ‘integral realism’ professed
by humanity to-day is the organized slaughter of nations or classes.
It is possible to conceive of a third, which would be their
reconciliation. The thing to possess would be the whole earth, and they
would finally come to realize that the only way to exploit it properly
is by union, while the desire to set themselves up as distinct from
others would be transferred from the nation to the species, arrogantly
drawn up against everything which is not itself. And, as a matter of
fact, such a movement does exist. Above classes and nations there
does exist a desire of the species to become the master of things,
and, when a human being flies from one end of the world to the other
in a few hours, the whole human race quivers with pride and adores
itself as distinct from all the rest of creation. At bottom, this
imperialism of the species is preached by all the great directors of
the modern conscience. It is Man, and not the nation or the class,
whom Nietzsche, Sorel, Bergson extoll in his genius for making himself
master of the world. It is humanity, and not any one section of it,
whom Auguste Comte exhorts to plunge into consciousness of itself
and to make itself the object of its adoration. Sometimes one may
feel that such an impulse will grow ever stronger, and that in this
way inter-human wars will come to an end. In this way humanity would
attain ‘universal fraternity’. But, far from being the abolition of the
national spirit with its appetites and its arrogance, this would simply
be its supreme form, the nation being called Man and the enemy God.
Thereafter, humanity would be unified in one immense army, one immense
factory, would be aware only of heroisms, disciplines, inventions,
would denounce all free and disinterested activity, would long cease
to situate the good outside the real world, would have no God but
itself and its desires, and would achieve great things; by which I mean
that it would attain to a really grandiose control over the matter
surrounding it, to a really joyous consciousness of its power and its
grandeur. And History will smile to think that this is the species for
which Socrates and Jesus Christ died.
1924-1927.
_Notes_
Note A (Page 1)
_That political passions affect a large number of men they never before
affected ..._
It is very difficult to know to what extent crowds are moved by the
political events of their time (of course, I am leaving on one side all
truly popular movements). Crowds do not write their memoirs, and those
who write memoirs scarcely ever speak of the crowds. However, I do not
think my proposition will be seriously disputed. To limit ourselves to
France and the two examples I quoted--suppose we had another upheaval
like the Religious Wars, I do not think we should see the immense
majority of country districts possessed by no other passion than a
hatred for soldiers, whatever party they belonged to.[170] Nor should
we see cultivated bourgeois who keep diaries giving a couple of lines
to such events as Luther’s preaching, along with the thousand little
facts they relate.[171] Nor do I think that a month after an event like
the taking of the Bastille we should find a foreigner on his travels
in France, writing: ‘13th August, 1789. Before I leave Clermont I must
remark that I have dined or supped five times at the table d’hôte with
some twenty to thirty merchants and tradesmen, officers, etc.; and it
is not easy for me to express the insignificance--the inanity of the
conversation. Scarcely any politics, at a moment when every bosom ought
to beat with none but political sensations.’ (Arthur Young.)[172]
The attitude of populations towards wars between States long seems to
have been that described by Voltaire in the following lines: ‘It is
indeed a deplorable evil that this multitude of soldiers should always
be kept up by all Princes. But, as we have pointed out, this evil
produces a good. The peoples take no part in the wars carried on by
their masters; the citizens of besieged towns often pass from the power
of one to another without having cost the life of a single inhabitant;
they are simply the prize of the King who possesses most soldiers,
cannons and money.’ (_Essai sur les Moeurs_, towards the end.) Again,
in 1870, a Prussian servant girl said to a French prisoner employed
on the farm where she was working: ‘When the war is over I will marry
you. Don’t be surprised at what I say, patriotism doesn’t mean much to
us, you know.’ I imagine that in 1914, many servant girls, Prussian or
otherwise, felt in their hearts and put into practice, this absence of
patriotism; but I dare to assert that very few would have formulated
it, even to themselves. The really new fact to-day is not perhaps that
the peoples feel political passions, but that they claim the right to
feel them. This claim is sufficient to make them act and therefore
furnishes a magnificent opportunity for their leaders to exploit them.
Note B (Page 15)
_Louis XIV annexing Alsace and not for one moment thinking of
forbidding the German language ..._
It was not until 1768 that the Monarchy thought of setting up schools
in Alsace, ‘where French is to be taught’. Vidal de la Blanche, who
relates this (_La France de l’Est_, 1, vi) adds: ‘This indifference
(to the language question) must not shock us too much. Let us rather
learn a lesson from it. It raises us above the narrowly jealous
conceptions which since then have set nation against nation, under this
language pretext. It takes us into an age when another spirit presided
over human relations. There was then no language question. Fortunate
eighteenth century, when war bred no lasting hatred, when the poison of
national animosities was not inoculated and fostered by all the means
now at the disposal of the State, including the schools.’ The eminent
historian forgets that the State has these means at its disposal, _with
the consent of the peoples_. The peoples, or at least the cultivated
classes among them, at the bidding of their men of letters, during the
past century have set themselves up arrogantly against one another in
their languages and cultures, even though they one day come face to
face with the unexpected results of this attitude, as is happening
to-day to France in its difficulties with Alsace.
Note C (Page 19)
_The Union of capitalism, anti-semitism, anti-democracy with
nationalism._
I am under no illusion concerning the solidity of certain among these
unions. Although the conservative passions fully comprehend their
immense interest in identifying themselves with national passion and
thereby benefiting by its popularity, although one may even admit
that they have been caught in their own net and have become sincere
in this feeling, yet it is none the less true that conservatism
(chiefly capitalism) is essentially something entirely different
from patriotism, and that this difference, whose manifestations in
the course of history have been innumerable (how many times have the
bourgeoisie treated with foreigners when they thought it was to their
interests!) may once again display itself. It is easy to imagine that
the French bourgeoisie would turn against France if they thought their
patrimony was being too seriously threatened by the legislation of
the Republic. This may already be seen in the case of families who,
in recent years, have exported their capital abroad. I may say the
same thing of monarchist passion. It is easy to imagine that certain
followers of that passion might one day decide to work against a nation
which decisively and finally rejects the system they propose. I think
I observe this when I see monarchist writers publishing that ‘from the
Spree to the Mekong, the whole world knows that France is in a state of
weakness bordering upon disintegration’. However, such things are still
exceptional, and those who are responsible for them would refuse to
admit--perhaps sincerely--that they meant to harm their nation.
Moreover, the bourgeoisie have another interest in keeping up
nationalism and the fear of war. These feelings create a sort of
permanent military spirit in a nation. More precisely, they create in
the people a disposition to accept the existing hierarchy, to obey
orders, to recognize superiors, i.e. the very things required of
them by those who wish them to continue in a state of service. The
confused perception of this truth inspires the bourgeoisie with that
curious ill-humour they display towards every attempt at international
agreement, in whatever form this may be presented by the governments.
This ill-humour (they declare) arises from the fact that they consider
it simple-minded and imprudent to believe in the extinction of national
hatreds. At bottom, it arises from the fact that _they do not want this
extinction to occur_. They know that the maintenance of these hatreds
will cost the lives of their children, but they do not hesitate to
make the sacrifice, if by doing so they retain possession of their
property[173] and their power over their servants. Here is a grandeur
of egotism which is perhaps insufficiently appreciated.
Note D (Page 28)
_On the attitude of the modern Catholics towards Catholicism when it is
in opposition to their nationalism._
A good example is the attitude of the German Catholics in the past
twenty years. It has been described with all desirable detail by
M. Edmond Bloud in his great study: _Le nouveau Centre et le
catholicisme_.[174] It will be seen that it strangely resembles the
attitude of many a non-German Catholic.
The ‘Centre’ began by declaring itself ‘a political party which has
assumed as its duty the representation of the interests of the whole
nation in all domains of public life, in accordance with the principles
of Christian doctrine.’ (_Katholische Weltanschauung_: Catholic
conception of the world.) Soon they announced political action founded
on ‘a Christian basis’ (christliche Basis), the spirit of which is thus
defined by one of its apostles (Doctor Brauweiler, April, 1913): ‘In
the domain of practical action, _concepts are determined by the end
in view_. The formation of political concepts is comparable with the
formation of juridical concepts. The jurist forms his concepts _with
no other consideration than that of what is needed, in relation solely
to the required end_. But no one can say that the juridical concept
thus formed is a false one. In the same way, one may speak in politics
of Christianity or Christian doctrine.’ In 1914, Doctor Karl Bachem of
Cologne, published a pamphlet entitled: _Centre, Catholic Doctrine,
Practical Politics_, where he declares that the doctrine of ‘universal
Christianity’ is only a political formula intended to render possible
the collaboration of Catholics and Protestants, chiefly in Parliament;
that from the religious point of view this formula has only a negative
meaning, and only means the determination to struggle against
materialism, atheism and nihilism; that its positive content is defined
by the Prussian Constitution which in paragraphs 14 and 18 lays down
that ‘the Christian religion’ is the ‘foundation of the institutions of
the State’.
Thus, as M. Edmond Bloud justly remarks, Doctor Bachem makes the
Prussian Constitution the Rule of Faith. Put ‘national interest’ in
place of ‘Prussian Constitution’ and you will have the state of mind of
many a modern French Catholic.
The attitude of the German Catholics seems to me also representative of
a certain Catholicism common to-day to other nations, in declarations
of this sort:
‘The Catholic members of the “Centre” remain Catholics individually,
_but the party, as a party, does not necessarily accept the Catholic
conception of the world_.’
And again:
‘The Pope and the Bishops have authority in matters of religion, but
wherever political matters are concerned we shall not allow ourselves
to be influenced by the authority of the Pope or by that of the
Bishops.’ (M. Edmond Bloud alludes to a conversation reported in the
_Frankfurter Zeitung_, April, 1914, where one of the chief of the
‘syndicats mixtes’ declared that, ‘The German Catholics have had enough
of the Pope.’)
What M. Bloud calls the ‘declericalization of the Centre’ is not a
thing peculiar to our neighbours, nor is the joy of the great German
nationalist organ (the Prussian Annals) when it observes that ‘the
Catholic idea of the State is ceasing to be ultramontain and is
becoming nationalist’.[175]
The attitude common to German Catholics and to certain Catholics of
other nations seems to me well brought out by two protests which M.
Bloud quotes.
The first is from Father Weiss:
‘There exist,’ says the eminent theologian, ‘several kinds of political
Catholicism.... The worst of all consists in looking upon pure
politics, social politics, national politics, not only as something
wholly independent of religion, but _as being the standard by which we
should determine the degree to which Catholicism or Christianity may be
utilized in public life_.’
The other is from Cardinal Kopp (then Bishop of Fulda) in a letter
written in 1887:
‘Unhappily a gust of madness is blowing over us. Formerly we held
to the principle: Faith first, politics afterwards. Now they say:
_Politics first!_ The Church and the Faith afterwards.’
Our Catholics of the _Action Française_ have not invented much.
Note E (Page 33)
_The ‘clerk’, by adopting political passions, brings them the
tremendous influence of his sensibility if he is an artist, of his
persuasive power if he is a thinker, and in either case his moral
prestige._
This prestige itself is something new in history, at least from my
point of view. The results produced in France by the intervention
of the ‘intellectuals’ in the Dreyfus affair, and those produced by
the manifesto of the German Intellectuals in 1914, not only in their
own country but throughout the world, are things to which I find no
equivalent in the past. One cannot imagine the Roman Republic feeling
that the moral support of Terence and Varro was of value to it during
the war with Carthage, or the government of Louis XIV finding that
the approbation of Racine and Fermat, gave it additional strength in
the war with Holland. This increase of strength which a cause to-day
receives from the approbation of the men of thought (or those who are
considered such) does great honour to the modern world. It is an homage
to the mind hitherto unexampled in humanity.
Naturally, this prestige has a double result. Though the modern ‘clerk’
fortifies a cause by giving it his approbation he can also seriously
harm it by refusing his approbation. If in 1915 men like Ostwald and
Mach had refused to approve the acts of their nation, they would have
seriously harmed it. The ‘clerk’ who to-day condemns the realism of
the State to which he belongs does really harm that State.[176] Hence
it follows that the State, in the name of its practical interests, to
defend which is its function, has a right--perhaps a duty--to punish
them. This appears to me to be the true order of things: The ‘clerk’,
faithful to his essential duty, denounces the realism of States;
whereupon, the States, no less faithful to their duty, made him drink
the hemlock. The serious disorganization in the modern world is that
the ‘clerks’ do not denounce the realism of States, but on the contrary
approve of it; they no longer drink the hemlock.[177]
Let me point to another disorganization. That is when the State does
not punish the ‘clerk’ for denouncing its realism. This occurred
in France during the Dreyfus affair. The order of things demanded
that the ‘clerks’ should demand abstract justice, as they did; but
perhaps it also demanded that the State, weakened in strength by their
idealism, should throw them into prison. When the ‘clerk’ performs the
layman’s task, the result is anarchy; but there is also anarchy when
the layman acts and speaks as a ‘clerk’, when those whose duty is to
defend the nation display their cult for the abolition of frontiers,
universal love, or other spiritual things.[178] When I see philosophers
concerning themselves with the safety of the State and Ministers
striving to bring about love among mankind, I think of what Dante says:
‘You turn to religion him who was born to wear the sword, you make a
King of one who was born to preach. Thus all your steps are out of the
true way.’ However, this second disorganization of orders has been
denounced by others, and it is not my function to combat it.
Note F (Page 37)
_Think how willingly the ecclesiastics now accept military service._
I think this willingness is worthy of the historian’s attention.
Obviously, it implies some sincere attachment to their country in those
who display this willingness, although their law is to be dead to all
worldly attachments. Moreover, it appears that in the last war most of
the ministers of Jesus Christ able to bear arms were glad to defend
their country, whatever that country was, and whatever notion they
may have had of the justice of its cause. Here is a most suggestive
fact: Certain Belgian monastic orders (and others as well, I am told)
established abroad at the declaration of war, and authorized by the
government to remain abroad, insisted upon returning to the capital to
perform their military duties. True, the behaviour of these monks may
be explained, not on grounds of patriotism, but from the fear that they
would be severely criticized by their fellow-citizens if they acted
otherwise; for the modern ‘clerks’ have ceased to understand that the
sign of an attitude truly in harmony with their function is that it
should be unpopular with the laymen.
But the most remarkable thing here for the historian, is that the
imposition of military service on ecclesiastics does not appear to
arouse any protest from the Church. Certain Church teachers even assert
(Mgr Battifol, _L’Eglise et le Droit de la guerre_): ‘There is no
further doubt about the legality of military service.’[179] It is also
curious to see in the _Dictionnaire apologétique de la foi catholique_
(Art. ‘Paix et Guerre’) the strenuous efforts of the author (Father de
la Brière) to prove that bearing arms, even by ‘clerks’ in holy orders,
is in no sense contrary to Christian law. However, the opinion of these
theologians does not seem to be shared, at least publicly, by the
higher ecclesiastical authorities; for every ‘clerk’ who bears arms is
laid under an interdict, as he was in the past--only the interdict is
taken off a few minutes after it has been declared.
The modern laymen (Barrès for example) praise this patriotism of the
ecclesiastic and his willingness to fight. The laymen of the past tried
to make him ashamed of it, and liked to exhort him to sentiments which
they considered more in harmony with his sacred ministry. The warlike
ardours of John XII and Julius II were severely condemned by their
contemporaries. Apart from Erasmus--the type of the man of letters
fully aware of the ‘clerk’s’ high function, who was continually saying:
‘Their tonsure does not warn them that they ought to be free from all
the passions of this world and think only of the things of Heaven’--the
Italian Tizio wrote: ‘It is astonishing that the Pontiffs, whose part
is to be pacific and independent, should take part in the shedding of
Christian blood.’ The French poet Jean Bouchet shows the weeping Church
imploring Julius II to end the war (though it is true that Julius II
was fighting France):
‘Your patron is my Lord Saint Peter,
Who never warred for worldly goods.’
In _Le Songe du Verger_, a kind of summary of moral doctrines current
in France in the fourteenth century, there is a dialogue between a
Knight and a Clerk, when the Clerk claims for his caste the right to
make war, and the Knight tells him that ‘the arms of the “clerks” are
prayers and tears’. It is suggestive to see a soldier urging a minister
of the spiritual to perform his true function and seeming to think that
the performance of this function is necessary to the good order of the
world. Here is a feeling for ‘clerkdom’ and its social value which is
very seldom to be found among the modern laymen, even the non-military
ones--I nearly said, especially the non-military ones.[180]
Note G (Page 53)
_That self-examination to which every spectator is impelled by a
representation of human beings which he feels to be true and solely
pre-occupied with truth._
Let me quote the following passage concerning the civilizing effects of
such representation:--
‘This spectacle of man offered to man has considerable moral effects.
First, a valuable exercise of the intelligence, an increase of
reflection, a widening of the view in every direction, result from the
habit thus set up of getting out of oneself and entering into others,
to understand their actions, to share in their passions, sympathize
with their sufferings, appreciate their motives. This faculty of the
artist communicated to the spectator or the listener, this faculty of
participation and assimilation, is something set up in opposition to
egotism and is a condition of tolerance and benevolence, frequently
even of justice. Then, lessons of virtue, frequently not the least
effective, are given to the spectator, from the very fact that he
is placed in a position to praise or condemn acts or thoughts which
are set before him relative to cases where his own interests are not
involved. He recognizes his own image in the actor of the epic, a man
like himself, a voluntary and impassioned agent, whose dangers though
perhaps magnified are not foreign to his own experience. Then the
essential phenomena which characterize conscious humanity and morality
occur in him who thus witnesses himself in the person of another,
i.e. disinterested objectivity of himself to himself, generalization
of passion, motive and maxim, judgment founded on the universal,
self-examination to arrive at what is duty, clear and defined sentiment
of the direction of the will.
‘_But this must not lead us to think that the poet’s object is utility
or morality. If it were, he would be lacking in the true feeling of
art._ Teaching, moralizing--this object of the artist is indirect, i.e.
does not exist systematically for him. He must only attain it without
having sought it, and sometimes he attains it when he seems to have
departed from it. What he desires to do, is to touch the feelings,
to arouse emotions. But it happens that by doing so he elevates,
purifies, moralizes. The poet (I am especially speaking of him) does
indeed address himself to everyone. _That means he can only sing the
universal_, however curious such an assembly of words may appear. He
may indeed sing it under the form of the particular, without which
his fictions would be lacking in life, he none the less excludes the
pure, incomprehensible, inexplicable individual, shorn of all truth
if he does not express a relationship.[181] He generalizes passion,
therefore ennobles it and renders it at once the object of observation,
reflection and disinterested emotion. The listener, carried away from
his own relatively base private preoccupations and transported without
hope or fear (at least, too personal and too present hope and fear)
into the superior sphere of humanity’s common passion, feels the
benefit of an elevation of soul; his consciousness is temporarily freed
from egotism.’ (Renouvier, _Introduction à la philosophie analytique de
l’Histoire_, p. 354.)
Note H (Page 56)
_... Napoleon, who ordered the chief of police to take measures for
the history of France to be written in a manner favourable to his own
throne._
Here are some portions of a note on this subject dictated by Napoleon
at Bordeaux in 1808. It promulgates the conception of history as
practised, mutatis mutandis, by many of our historians of the past:--
‘I do not approve the principles laid down in his note by the Minister
of the Interior. They were true twenty years ago, they will be true
sixty years hence, but they are not true to-day. Velly is the one
fairly detailed author who has written on the history of France. The
abridged chronology of the President Hénault is a good classical book.
It is useful to have them both continued. _It is of the greatest
importance to make certain of the spirit in which these continuations
are written._ I ordered the Minister of Police to look after the
continuation of Millot, and I desire the two Ministers will consult
over the continuation of Velly and the President Hénault....
‘They are to be just to Henri IV, Louis XIII, Louis XIV and Louis XV,
but without adulation. The September Massacres and the horrors of the
Revolution must be painted in the same colours as the Inquisition
and the massacres of the Sixteen. They must take care to avoid all
reaction in speaking of the Revolution, no man could have opposed it
successfully. No blame attaches either to those who perished or to
those who survived. There was no individual power capable of changing
the elements and foreseeing the events which arose from the nature of
things and circumstances.
‘They are to point out the perpetual disorganization of the national
finances, the chaos of the provincial assemblies, the claims of the
Parlements, the lack of regulation and resort in the administration.
This checkered France, without unity of laws and administration, was
rather a union of twenty Kingdoms than a single State, so that one
breathes freely on coming to the period when the benefits of unity
of laws, administration and territory are enjoyed.... The opinion
expressed by the Minister, which, if followed, would result in
abandoning this task to private enterprise and the speculation of some
publisher, is wrong and could only produce regrettable results.’
Of course, the champions of authority are not the only persons who make
history serve their own interests. Condorcet (_Tableau historique_,
10^e Epoque) says that history should serve ‘to maintain an active
vigilance in recognizing and crushing under the weight of Reason the
first germs of superstition and tyranny, if they ever dare to appear
again.’
Note I (Page 62)
_Humanitarianism and Humanism._
Here, on this subject, is a curious passage from one of the ancients:--
‘Those who created the Latin language and those who spoke it well
do not give the word _humanitas_ the vulgar meaning which is
synonymous with the Greek word _philanthropia_, which means an
active kindness, a tender benevolence for all men. But they give
the word the meaning which the Greeks attach to _paideia_, which we
call education, knowledge of the fine arts. Those who show the most
taste and disposition for these studies are the most worthy to be
called _humanissimi_. For man alone among all living beings is able
to devote himself to cultivating a study which for that reason has
been called _humanitas_. Such is the meaning given to this by the
ancients, particularly by Varro and Cicero. Almost all their works
show examples, so I shall content myself with quoting one only. I
have chosen the opening of the first book of Varro “Concerning human
things”: “Praxiteles, qui propter artificium egregium nemini est paulum
modo humaniori ignotus (Praxiteles, whose excellent talent as an
artist has made him known to every man at all skilled in the arts)”.
Here _humanior_ does not bear the vulgar meaning of easy, tractable,
benevolent even though lacking in knowledge of letters. That meaning
would not express the author’s thought. It means an educated, a learned
man, one who is acquainted with Praxiteles through books and history.’
(Aulus Gellius, _Noctes Atticae_, Book XIII, XVI.)
Note J (Page 82)
_... they cannot sufficiently denounce all institutions based on
liberty and discussion._
Note that the novelty here lies in the passion, the fury with which
they condemn liberty of discussion. Otherwise, we see most of the
so-called liberal thinkers in history themselves recognize the
necessity for submission to the sovereign’s judgment. Spinoza declares
that ‘there is no possible government if every man makes himself the
defender of his own rights and the rights of others.’ The _Letters of
Descartes_ contain passages in favour of the ‘reason of State.’
It is perhaps not sufficiently noticed how frequently the old French
absolute monarchists say that justice is the chief function of the
sovereign. ‘The most important of the King’s rights,’ says one of
these theorists (Guy Coquille, _Institution du droit des Français_,
1608) ‘is to make _the laws and general statutes for the good order of
his Kingdom_.’ Another (Loyseau, _Des Seigneuries_, 1608) says: ‘The
usage of public _lordship must be regulated by justice_ ...’ Bossuet
(_Instruction à Louis XIV_) says: ‘When the King administers justice or
has it exactly administered in accordance with the laws, _which is his
principal function_ ...’ The modern absolute monarchists, even French,
seem to be inspired by the German theorist, who says: ‘The State has
two functions to perform: the administration of justice and the waging
of war. _But war is by far the principal._’ (Treitschke.)
Note this famous passage from Bossuet (_Pol._, Book VIII, art. II, par.
I):
‘It is one thing for it (the government) to be absolute, another for
it to be arbitrary. It is absolute in relation to constraint, there
being no power which is capable of compelling the sovereign, who in
this sense is independent of all human authority. But it does not
follow that government is arbitrary; because, apart from the fact that
all things are subject to God’s judgment (which applies also to the
government we have called arbitrary), there are laws in empires, and
everything which is done contrary to them is void of right.’
It will be seen that the defence of arbitrary government is a new thing
among French teachers, even in regard to Bossuet. (I am speaking of
Bossuet’s _doctrines_, not of his practical advice.)
Note K (Page 91)
_This is the teaching of Nietzsche._
I must repeat that throughout this work I am considering the teaching
of Nietzsche (and Hegel’s too) insofar as it has become the pretext
for a great moral preaching, though I know perfectly well that in
reality this teaching is something far more complex. I shall quote
the following judicious observation, in connection with the fact
that certain philosophers have only themselves to blame for ‘the
misunderstanding of their true thought’:
‘Nietzscheism has been subjected to the same test as Hegelianism. And
no doubt here and there philosophical themes have served especially as
pretexts to cover up a new offensive on the part of barbarism. _But
the fact that they have been utilized, the manner in which they have
been utilized, have a significance which must not be overlooked._ Is
it not the criterion of a philosophy which may be called rational
without reserve and equivocation, that it should remain incorruptibly
faithful to itself? On the other hand, _the systems which begin by
accepting contradictions, reserving the right to add that they are
capable of surmounting them or of “living” them, lodge their enemy in
their midst_. Their punishment is that their antithesis still resembles
them; and that is what has happened to Nietzsche.’ (L. Brunschvicg, _Le
Progrès de la Conscience dans la philosophie occidentale_, p. 431.)
This book contains an excellent exposition of ‘Hegelian themes’ and
‘Nietzschean themes’, precisely insofar as they have become political
breviaries.
Note L (Page 94)
_Long before the disciples of Taine and Auguste Comte._
When this book appeared in a periodical, certain persons declared
that the whole of my attack on the modern ‘clerk’ went astray because
I did not give more space to the author of _Origines de la France
Contemporaine_. He, they said, was the ‘great realist “clerk” of the
past fifty years, while those I attacked were only his small change.’
(This sudden contempt for the thought of Barrès and Maurras of the part
of certain people is certainly surprising.)
There is here a manifest abuse of the word _realism_. Taine threw
light on the true nature of the real, or rather the political real,
and reminded the universalist that this domain is not under his
jurisdiction. He never _exalted_ this real at the expense of the
universal, which is the realism I am denouncing here. He plainly
taught, on the contrary, that the universalist who stays in his own
domain (see his admiration for Spinoza and Goethe) is the great human
model. Compare this with Maurras for whom the universalist, even
when non-political (the infinitist, the pantheist) is profoundly
contemptible. It is also difficult for me to see Taine as the godfather
of those who glorify the soldier at the expense of the man of justice
and the man of study,[182] who exhort the nations to cultivate their
prejudices where they are ‘totally foreign to reason’ (Barrès) and who
declare that the intelligence which cares nothing about what is social
is the activity of a savage. I think Taine would cheerfully say of
those who claim to derive from him the same thing that M. Bergson is
reported to have said of some of his ‘disciples’: ‘These gentlemen are
most original.’
Nevertheless, Taine seems to me to be the initiator of the modern
realists in two points. The first is his condemnation of individualism,
more exactly, of the moral liberty of the citizen (for this, at
bottom, is the meaning of his regret for the old corporations, and,
more generally, of his exhortation to form groups, which shape the
individual’s soul, instead of allowing it to be autonomous as against
the State); and the second, which is far more novel than the first
among French teachers, is his condemnation of idealist education. The
peroration of the ‘_Régime moderne_’ obviously establishes the whole
educational argument of the _Déracines_ and _L’Étape_:--
‘Sometimes when he is with his intimates, as bitter and as overfatigued
as he is, the young man is tempted to say to us: “By your education
you induced us to believe that the world is made in a certain way.
You deceived us. It is much uglier, stupider, dirtier, gloomier and
harsher, at least to our sensibility and our imagination. You think
they are over-excited and out of gear; well, if they are, it is your
fault. That is why we curse and despise the whole of your world, and
reject your pretended truths, which for us are lies, including those
elementary and primary truths which you say are evident to common
sense, and upon which you build your laws, your institutions, your
society, your philosophy, your sciences and your arts.” That is what
contemporary youth have been telling us aloud for fifteen years by
their tastes, their opinions, their inclinations in literature, the
arts and life.’
Against this manifesto in favour of a practical education, let me set
this protest of a true descendant of Montaigne, Pascal and Montesquieu:
‘In his diatribe for the classical spirit and the primary truths of
reason and philosophy which direct literary education of all kinds,
Taine comes to use words similar to those of the adversaries of ancient
literature,[183] of the general ideas which are inseparable from them,
and of disinterested culture even. The only object would then be to
prepare persons for an empirical world,[184] people taught to know the
world as it is, and trained to make it continue as it now is. However,
the school laws are too recent for one to be able decently to blame
them for the evils of the age, and make them the cause of the hatred
and scorn poured on society by those who are bored, enervate and out of
their class. However, even if it were true that the comparison between
the general principles of reason, morality and beauty, and empirical
life engendered more disgust with the realities than it has done in
the past, it would be a sad paradox to ask that this danger should
be averted by banishing from education all elevated views and all
idealism.’ (Renouvier, _Philosophie analytique de l’Histoire_, tome iv,
p. 541.)
Note M (Page 95)
_This cult brings out a silliness of mind which to me seems wholly an
acquisition of the nineteenth century._
This silliness of mind assumes another form, i.e. the belief (rigidly
formulated by Maurras) that in politics you can find laws of cause
and effect as certainly valid as those of weight or electricity.
(‘Politics are a _science_.’) This is the superstition of science,
held to be competent in all domains, including that of morality; a
superstition which, I repeat, is an acquisition of the nineteenth
century. It remains to discover whether those who brandish this
doctrine believe in it or whether they simply want to give the prestige
of a scientific appearance to the passions of their hearts, which they
perfectly well know are nothing but passions. It is to be noted that
the dogma that history is obedient to scientific laws is preached
especially by partisans of arbitrary authority. This is quite natural,
since it eliminates the two realities they most hate, i.e. human
liberty and the historical action of the individual.
Note N (Page 98)
_Our age has seen priests of the mind teaching that the gregarious
is the praiseworthy form of thought, and that independent thought is
contemptible._
Note that what is new in this crusade against individualism (the great
apostle of which is M. Maurras) is not the recognition that ‘the
individual is only an abstraction’, that to a great extent, he is
formed by his race, his surroundings, his nation, a thousand things
which are not himself. The novelty is the cult for this servitude, the
order given to mankind to submit entirely to it, the contempt shown
for any attempt to get free from it. Once again this is the cult (so
strange in French thinkers) for the _inevitable_ part of the human
being, the hatred for its free part.
Note that those who to-day preach obedience of the mind, not only
demand it from the uncultured masses but from the men of thought,
_especially_ from the men of thought. The anti-individualists of the
Dreyfus affair particularly opposed the independence of scientists,
writers, and philosophers--‘the mad vanity of a few intellectuals’.
Nevertheless, the most curious thing is not that they require this
obedience, but that they obtain it. When M. Maritain declares that
‘everyone cannot philosophize and that, for men, the essential thing
is to choose a master’, and when M. Maurras asserts that the function
of most minds is to be ‘servants’ and to reflect the thought of some
leader, these teachers find a number of men of thought to applaud and
abdicate their liberty of mind in their favour. The thinkers of the
eighteenth century said: ‘A religion is needed for the people.’ Those
of our age say: ‘A religion is needed for ourselves.’ What Barrès
wrote: ‘The part of the masters is to justify the habits and prejudices
of France, so as best to prepare our children to take their place in
the national procession,’ he certainly meant that he and his colleagues
were to walk in this procession. Here we again come upon that thirst
for discipline which I spoke of above and which seemed to me so worthy
of remark in the descendants of Montaigne and Renan. The cause, I said,
was their desire to belong to a ‘strong group’. In them it also arises
from a feeling for the artistic value of regimenting a collection of
men in a beautiful ‘procession’, and also from the joy felt by so many
souls in being governed, if not having to make the effort to think for
themselves--a most curious joy in so-called men of thought.
The cult for the collective soul, with all its violation of human
consciousness, seems to me admirably denounced by a passage of Maine
de Biran, quoted by M. L. Brunschvicg (op. cit., _La Sociologie de
l’ordre_, p. 526):--
‘... According to M. Bonald, it is not the human mind, it is not
the individual understanding which is the seat, the true subject of
inherence of the nations or (universal) truths under discussion; but
it is society, which, gifted with a kind of collective understanding
different from that of individuals, was from its origin imbued with
them through the gift of speech and by virtue of a miraculous influence
exerted on the mass alone, independent of its parts. The individual,
the man, is nothing; society alone exists; society is the soul of
the moral world, it alone exists, while individual persons are only
phenomena. Let those who can, understand this social metaphysics. If
the author himself understands it clearly, then I am in the wrong.
Then we must cease to talk of philosophy and recognize the nothingness
of the science of intellectual and moral man, we must admit that all
psychology based on the primitive fact of consciousness is simply
false, and we must consider science itself as an illusion which
perpetually deceives and misleads us by showing us everything, even our
own existence, in a false and fantastic light.’
M. Brunschvicg very rightly adds: ‘The antithesis could not be stated
more clearly. Either the primary fact of consciousness, or the primary
fact of language; either Socrates or Bonald.’
Either Socrates or Bonald. Barrès and Maurras made their choice.
Note O (Page 118)
_... Péguy who admires philosophies to the extent that ‘they are good
fighters.’_[185]
This determination to praise philosophers for their virtues of action
rather than for their intellectual virtues is very frequent among
men of thought to-day. In his _Souvenirs concernant Lagneau_, Alain,
wishing to give as favourable a picture of his master as possible,
praises his energy and his resolution at least as much as his
intelligence. It is also very remarkable--although here literature
only is in question--to see a professor of moral science (M. Jacques
Bardoux) setting a special value on those French literary men who were
soldiers, i.e. Vauvenargues, Vigny, Péguy. As to the men of letters
themselves, I shall content myself with pointing out that one of
them who is most applauded by his own colleagues recently declared
that he chiefly admired d’Annunzio for his attitude as an officer,
and expressed regret that he had returned to literature.[186] The
Emperor Julian praised Aristotle for having said that he felt prouder
of being the author of his _Treatise on Theology_ than he would have
felt if he had destroyed the power of the Persians. One might still
find soldiers in France who would agree with this judgment, but very
few men of letters. Elsewhere (_Les Sentiments de Critias_, p. 206)
I have attempted to give the history and the explanation of this
desire (so curious in men of the pen) to exalt a warlike life and to
scorn a sedentary life. Note that this characteristic is to be seen in
contemporary writers long before the war of 1914, and that those who
talk most about a warlike life are not always those who lead it.
The new thing, I repeat, is not that we see men of letters praising
an active life and scorning a sedentary life; it is _the absence of
naiveté, the dogmatic tone_. When Ronsard exclaims: ‘Good Gods, who
would praise those who let life go by bent over books’;[187] when
Bertrand de Born wishes that ‘no man of high lineage should have any
thought but cutting off heads and arms’; when Froissart sings the
glories of chivalry and casts his scorn in the faces of the bourgeois,
no one will take these candid lyre-players, who like noble poses and
do not even know that the word doctrine exists, for the ancestors of
our grave professors of belligerent aesthetics. Moreover, I doubt
whether the author of _Scenes and Doctrines of Nationalism_ would have
condescended to be a descendant of these simple-minded persons.
I find scorn for the life of the mind clearly professed in a dogmatic
tone, in a writer of the seventeenth century who frequently reminds one
of certain modern authors by his efforts to humiliate the toga before
the sword. (It is true that this writer was a gentleman of the very
minor nobility.)
‘Certainly, there is no better way of relaxing the vigour of men’s
courage than to occupy their minds with peaceful and sedentary
exercises, and idleness cannot enter civilized States in a more subtle
or dangerous disguise than that of literature. Lazy and idle persons
have in part ruined commerce and agriculture, which are the cause
of the weakness of our condition and the cowardice of our age.’ (J.
L. de Balzac, _Le Prince_, 1631. He then admits literature and the
sciences to the State insofar as ‘they strengthen and embellish the
Mother-country’.)
On the other hand, a master from the great period of French literature
writes a eulogy of the life of the mind at the expense of the active
mind, which I hardly think would be accepted by many of the moderns who
venerate that period (I am especially thinking of those who admire the
thought of Georges Sorel).
‘In France great strength of character and width of mind are needed if
a man is to reject offices and employments and thus consent to remain
at home and do nothing. Scarcely anyone possesses sufficient merit to
play this part with dignity, nor sufficient resources to fill up the
void of time without what the vulgar call “business”. But the wise
man’s idleness needs only a better name, and we ought to say that one
who meditates, talks, reads and is calm, is working.’ (La Bruyère, _Du
Mérite personnel_.)
Note P (Page 122)
_The ‘Manifesto of the Party of Intelligence’ (Figaro, 19th July,
1919)._
This manifesto, signed by fifty-four French writers, several of whom
are among the teachers most respected by their fellow-citizens, is
of the greatest importance to the present inquiry. In addition to
the strange passage on the Church’s mission which I quoted above, it
contains things like this:--
‘Nationalism, which the conceptions of the intelligence impose
on political conduct as well as on the order of the world, is a
reasonable, humane system, and French in addition.’
And further on:--
‘When a literature becomes national does it not acquire a more
universal significance, a more humanly general interest?’
And again:--
‘We believe--and the world believes with us--that it is part of the
destiny of our race to defend the spiritual interests of humanity....
We are solicitous for Europe and all the humanity remaining in the
world. French humanity is the sovereign protector of this.’
And above all:--
‘Victorious France means to take her place again in the order of the
mind, the only order whereby a legitimate domination may be exercised.’
Hence the desire to found (the manifesto itself underlines the words):
‘_The intellectual Federation of Europe and the world under the aegis
of victorious France, the guardian of civilization._’
Victory under arms conferring the right to command in the intellectual
order--that is professed to-day by French thinkers! One remembers the
Roman writers, from whom these thinkers claim descent, who took as the
leader of their minds Greece, which had been conquered by force of
arms; one also remembers the German teachers of 1871 who also claimed
intellectual hegemony for their ‘victorious’ nation, which they too
claimed as ‘the guardian of civilization’.[188]
When this manifesto was published, somewhat similar reflections seem
to have occurred to the mind of one of our great writers. In a letter
concerning this document,[189] Marcel Proust deplores the proclamation
of ‘a kind of “Frankreich ueber alles”, the policeman of the literature
of all nations.’ As a true priest of the mind, he goes on: ‘Why take
this peremptory attitude towards other countries in such matters as
literature, where a man only reigns by persuasion?’ I am happy to take
this opportunity to do homage to this true ‘clerk’, and to say that I
know that there are still other writers in France beside those who only
believe in the virtue of cold steel.
Note Q (Page 138)
_Those who base their judgments on their artistic sensibilities._
This artistic origin of the political attitudes of so many men of
letters has been pointed out with great ability by M. Daniel Halévy in
the case of M. Maurras. In an old article (_La Grande France_, 1902) M.
Halévy quotes this beautiful passage from M. Maurras’s _Anthinéa_ on
the walk of women carrying a clay pot balanced on their heads:--
‘The bosom swells and is modelled like a vase, it opens like a flower.
The neck settles, the loins strain nervously. Their walk becomes
graver and more supple, is measured with an inestimable sobriety; it
unrolls in the mind like a piece of music. This living pillar moves,
glides, advances, without being interrupted by any sudden jerk or any
break. It follows the undulations of the ground, adapts itself to the
slightest rises, and thus resembles the stem of a beautiful young tree
set free from its roots, moving over the ground without leaving it for
a fraction of an inch. An infinite multitude of half-pauses make the
jerks imperceptible, or one is only conscious of their succession, a
continual harmony which leaves its curves in the air....’
M. Daniel Halévy adds:--
‘I quote the whole passage because it gives the very idea of Charles
Maurras. For his classical way of thought, things are beautiful, not
from the shocks of feeling and passion, but from the form and rhythm
which give them continuity, or rather existence in the human sense of
the word. M. Charles Maurras applies this taste for form to the study
of history, and that is the whole of his “sociology”.’
There could be no better definition of the type of man for whom things
are good insofar as they satisfy his artistic sensibility. Let me place
in opposition to him the exactly contrary type, leaving the reader to
judge which of the two may claim to belong to ‘the intelligence’:--
‘... For the perfection of things should be measured by their nature
alone, and things are not more or less perfect because they flatter or
wound our senses.’ (Spinoza.)
_Footnotes_
[1] See Note A at the end of this book.
[2] It is to be noted that a little more than a century ago French
working-men from different provinces frequently engaged in desperate
fights among themselves. (See Martin Nadaud, _Mémoires de Léonard_, p.
93.)
[3] See Petit de Julleville, _La Comédie et les Moeurs en France au
moyen age_, and André Le Breton, _Le Roman au XVIIe Siècle_.
[4] The great novelty is that to-day people accept the position that
everything should be political, that they should proclaim it and take a
pride in it. Otherwise it is perfectly obvious that men, shopkeepers,
or poets, have not waited for the present time to try to get rid of a
rival by political means. Remember how La Fontaine’s rivals kept him
out of the Académie for ten years.
[5] As de Tocqueville profoundly remarks, these only occurred when a
first improvement in his condition encouraged the man of the people to
want more; i.e. towards the end of the eighteenth century.
[6] I am here speaking of Western Jews of the bourgeois class. The
Jewish proletariat did not await our time to plunge into the feeling of
its racial peculiarity. However, it does so without giving provocation.
[7] This was the notion expressed by Benedict XV when he told the poor
‘to take delight in the prosperity of elevated persons and to expect
confidently their assistance’.
[8] For example, M. Paul Bourget’s _La Barricade_, where the author, a
disciple of Georges Sorel, exhorts the bourgeoise not to leave to the
proletariat the monopoly of class passion and violence. See also André
Beaunier, _Les Devoirs de la Violence_ (quoted by Halperine-Kaminski
in the preface to Tolstoi’s book, _The Law of Love and the Law of
Violence_).
[9] ‘The phrase, _the sublime bourgeois_, which would have caused
so much laughter twenty years ago, has now acquired for the French
bourgeoisie a mystic plenitude owing to its fusion with the highest
social and national values.’ (_Eloge du Bourgeois Français_, p. 284.)
[10] Let me define more precisely what is new here. In the seventeenth
century the citizen already had the notion of national honour; Racine’s
Letters would be sufficient to prove it (see a significant page in
the _Mémoires_ of de Pontis, Book XIV); but he left it to the King to
decide what this honour demanded; indignation like Vauban’s against the
peace of Ryswick ‘which dishonours the King and the whole nation’, is
a very exceptional emotion under the old _régime_. The modern citizen
claims to feel for himself what is demanded by the national honour, and
he is ready to rise up against his leaders if they have a different
conception of it. This new development is not peculiar to the nations
living under democratic systems; in 1911 the citizens of the German
monarchy thought that the concessions made to their country by France
in exchange for German abstention in Morocco were insufficient, and
they were extremely angry with their Sovereign who had accepted these
conditions which, in their opinion, were an insult to German honour. It
may be asserted that the same thing would be true of France if she ever
became a monarchy again and if the King took it upon himself to feel
the interest of national honour in a different manner to his subjects.
Moreover, this actually happened throughout the reign of Louis-Philippe.
[11] For example, the humiliation of Olmüts in 1805. It may be asserted
that no democracy would have endured it, at least with the philosophy
displayed by the King of Prussia and his government. On the other hand,
is it necessary to stress the other dangers to peace which existed
under the Kings? It is sufficient to quote Montesquieu’s remark: ‘The
spirit of the Monarchy is war and aggrandisement.’
[12] In 1886, the Schnaebele affair; in 1890, the incident in Paris
where the King of Spain in the uniform of a Colonel of Uhlans was
hooted; in 1891, the incident of the Empress of Germany passing through
Paris; in 1897, Fashoda; in 1904, the incident of the British trawlers
sunk by the Russian Fleet, etc. Of course, I do not claim that the
Kings only waged practical wars, although with them the allegation of
‘wounded honour’ was very often a mere pretext. Louis XIV obviously
did not make war on Holland because the Dutch struck a medal insulting
him. Moreover, I shall grant that from time to time the Kings indulged
in military invasions, a type of elegance which appears to be less and
less tempting to the democracies; one cannot now imagine the peace of
the world disturbed by excursions like those of Charles VIII into Italy
or Charles XII into the Ukraine.
[13] Is it necessary to point out that wars started by public
passion against the will of the government have often occurred under
monarchies? And not only under constitutional monarchies, like the
war of France with Spain in 1823 and with Turkey in 1826, but under
absolute monarchies. For instance, the War of the Austrian Succession
imposed on Fleury by an uprising of public opinion; the War of American
Independence under Louis XVI; in 1806 the war of Prussia against
Napoleon. In 1813 the war of Saxony. It seems probable that in 1914 war
was imposed on absolute sovereigns like Nicholas II and Wilhelm II by
popular passions which they had been exciting for years and then found
themselves unable to restrain.
[14] ‘But what is much more important than material facts is the soul
of nations. Among all races a kind of effervescence it to be noticed;
some defend certain principles, others the opposing principles. By
becoming members of the League of Nations, the different peoples do
not abandon their _national morality_.’ (Speech of the German Minister
for Foreign Affairs at Geneva, on the occasion of the entry of Germany
into the League of Nations, 10th September, 1926.) The orator went on:
‘Yet this should not result in raising up nation against nation.’ One
is surprised that he did not add: ‘On the contrary.’ How much nobler,
and at the same time more respectful of the truth, is the language
of Treitschke: ‘This consciousness of themselves which the nations
are acquiring and which can only be strengthened by culture, this
consciousness means that war will never disappear from the earth, in
spite of the closer linking up of interests, in spite of the growing
uniformity of customs and the exterior forms of life.’ (Quoted by
Charles Andler in _Les Origines du Pangermanisme_, p. 223.)
[15] This is what Mirabeau seems to have foreseen when he announced
to the Constituent Assembly that the wars of the ‘free nations’ would
cause the wars of the Kings to be regretted.
[16] The religion of the ‘national soul’ is obviously and logically
an emanation of the popular soul. Moreover, it has been sung by an
eminently democratic literature: Romanticism. It is to be observed that
the worst enemies of Romanticism and of Democracy have adopted it; it
is constantly to be found in the Action Française. To such an extent
is it now impossible to be a patriot without flattering democratic
passions.
[17] See Note B at the end of the book.
[18] See Brunot, _Histoire de la Langue Française_, t. v, liv. iii.
[19] On this topic see some excellent remarks of Auguste Comte, _Cours
de Philosophie Positive_, 57^e leçon.
[20] As a matter of fact, the peoples do not believe either that their
ambitions go back to their ancestors; they are ignorant of history and
do not believe it to be so even when it is true; they believe they
believe, or, more exactly, they want to believe that they believe.
However, that is enough to make them ferocious, perhaps more so than if
they really believed it.
[21] France is here in a position of manifest inferiority in regard
to her neighbours. The modern French feel very slight inclinations to
claim that they reincarnate the ambitions of Charlemagne or even of
Louis XIV, despite the proclamations of certain men of letters.
[22] For instance, the address of the ‘six great industrial and
agricultural associations of Germany’ to Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg in
May, 1914, which was not very different from that drawn up in 1815
by the Prussian metallurgists to point out to their government what
annexations should be made in the interests of their industry. (See
Vidal de La Blache, _La France de l’Est_, chap. xix.) Moreover, some
Germans are urgent in boldly proclaiming the economic character of
their nationalism. ‘Let us not forget,’ says a well-known Pangermanist,
‘that the German Empire, which is generally considered abroad as a
purely military State, is in its origin (Zollverein) chiefly economic.’
And again: ‘For us war is only the continuation of our commercial
activity in times of peace, with other means but the same methods.’
(Naumann, _L’Europe Centrale_, pp. 112, 247; see the whole book.)
Germany seems to be not indeed the only country to practise commercial
patriotism (England has done so just as much and for a much longer
time) but the only country to boast of it.
[23] And to build up a much less passionate patriotism. Think, for
instance, of the agreements with foreigners accepted by patriotism
based on interest (such as the Franco-German iron cartel), against
which the patriotism based on pride rises up in revolt.
[24] ‘Love of country is a real love of oneself.’ (Saint-Evremond.)
[25] The divinizing of realism, of which patriotism specially consists,
is expressed with all desirable candour in the ‘Addresses to the German
People’ (Eighth Address); Fichte attacks religion for its claim to
situate the superior life outside all interest in earthly matters: ‘It
is an abuse of religion to force it, as Christianity has so often done,
to extol complete indifference to the business of the State and the
nation as the true religious spirit. Men,’ he declares, ‘are determined
to find heaven on earth and to impregnate their earthly labours with
something durable.’ He then shows, with great warmth, that this desire
is the essence of patriotism, and it is evident that for him earthly
labours become divine by becoming durable. This, indeed, is the only
means men have discovered for divinizing their institutions.
[26] It is necessary to recall that the United States did not enter the
last war ‘in defence of principles’, but with the very practical object
of safeguarding their prestige, which had been lowered by the facts
that the Germans had torpedoed three of their ships? Nevertheless,
their desire to pose as having been purely idealistic in this affair is
noteworthy.
[27] It may be said that religious passions, at least in the West, only
exist as a reinforcement to national passions; in France, a man sets up
as a Catholic in order to pose as being ‘more French’; in Germany as a
Protestant in order to declare himself ‘more German’.
[28] Here are two remarkable cases of idealistic passions which in the
past successfully opposed national passion and are now submissive to
it: (_a_) In France, the monarchic passion, which in 1792 was stronger
than national feeling in many people, whereas in 1914 it was completely
effaced by national feeling. (Everyone will agree that attachment to a
certain form of government, i.e. at bottom, the attachment to a certain
metaphysical conception, is an infinitely more idealistic passion than
nationalist passion; however, I do not claim that all the Emigrés were
inspired by this idealism.) (_b_) In Germany, the religious passion,
which only fifty years ago was stronger than national feeling in more
than fifty per cent of Germans, and to-day is entirely subject to
national feeling (in 1866 the German Catholics desired the defeat of
Germany; in 1914 they ardently desired it to be victorious). The Europe
of to-day, compared with the Europe of the past, seems to contain many
less chances of civil wars and many more chances of national wars;
nothing could show better how much Europe has lost in idealism. (See
Note D at the end of this book for additional matter on the attitude of
the modern Catholics towards Catholicism when it is in opposition to
their nationalism.)
[29] For example, in words like the following, uttered at Venice on
the 11th December, 1926, by the Italian Minister of Education and
Fine Arts: ‘Artists must prepare themselves for the new imperialist
function which must be carried out by our art. Above everything, we
must categorically impose a principle of _Italianita_. Whoever copies
a foreigner is guilty of _lèse-nation_ (an insult to the nation) like
a spy who admits an enemy by a secret doorway.’ These words have to be
approved by every adept of ‘_integral_ nationalism’. Moreover, we hear
much the same thing in France from certain adversaries of Romanticism.
[30] ‘Discipline from the lowest to the highest must be essential and
of a religious type.’ (Mussolini, 25th October, 1925.) This is new
language in the mouth of a statesman, even of the most realist kind;
it may be asserted that neither Richelieu nor Bismarck would have
applied the word ‘religious’ to an activity whose object is exclusively
materialistic.
[31] Notably for Renan and ‘speculative a-moralism’. (H. Massis,
_Judgments_, i.)
[32] See Note E at the end of this book for further information on this
prestige, and what is new about it in history.
[33] In 1891 Barrès wrote to the editor of _La Plume_: ‘If these
books have any value, it is from the logic, the continuity of thought
I have put into them during five years.’ (‘These books’ included
his Boulangiste campaign.) And, in the preface to his collection of
articles entitled ‘Scènes et Documents du nationalisme’, he says: ‘I
think that if Doumic will examine it from a greater distance he will
find a development, and not contradictions, in my work.’
[34] I shall be told of ‘clerks’ who, apparently without degradation,
have at some time or other taken the part of a race or a nation, even
of their own race or nation. That is because they believed that the
cause of that race or nation coincided at that time with the cause of
abstract justice.
[35] Similar occurrences may be observed among the ancients. For
instance, Cicero denounced his fellow-citizens for having destroyed
Corinth merely to avenge an insult to their ambassador (De off., I, xi).
[36] Already in 1911, when a writer quoted this sentence: ‘It is
impossible to accept the situation that humanity should be bound
for indefinite centuries by the marriages, battles, treaties of the
narrow-minded, ignorant, egotistic creatures who during the middle
ages were at the head of affairs in this world,’ he felt it necessary
to add: ‘Fortunately these lines were written by Renan; one could not
write them to-day without being called an unpatriotic Frenchman.’ (G.
Guy-Grand, _La Philosophie Nationaliste_, p. 165.) Without being called
so _by the men of thought_--that is the curious part of it.
[37] Quoted by Mgr. Chapon in his admirable study, ‘La France et
l’Allemagne devant la doctrine chrétienne.’ (_Correspondant_, of 15th
August, 1915.)
[38] See his _Letters_, ii, p. 31.
[39] Consider how willingly they now accept military service. See Note
F at the end of this book.
[40] Here are the reasons given by a German Catholic for this attitude
among those of his religion: ‘(_a_) Their incomplete knowledge of the
facts and opinions in the belligerent and neutral countries; (_b_)
_Their patriotism, which could not be allowed to separate itself from
the union binding together the German people_; (_c_) The fear of a
second Kulturkampf, which would be doubly dangerous if the German
Catholics had even appeared to agree with the campaign carried on in
France against German methods of waging war.’ The second reason will
be noted, i.e. the desire to be at unity with the nation, whatever the
moral aspect of its cause. Here, at least, is one reason which Bossuet
did not allege when he screened the violences of Louis XIV.
Let me recall that when, in 1914, the Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in
the Reichstag hinted at a sort of apology for the violation of Belgian
neutrality, he was sharply reproved by the Christian minister von
Harnack ‘for having tried to excuse what did not need excusing’. (See
A. Loisy, _Guerre et Religion_, p. 14.)
[41] The clergy of the allied nations are eager to throw in the faces
of the German clergy their union with injustice in 1914. They abuse
their own good fortune in belonging to nations whose cause happened
to be just. When Italy, in 1923, at the time of the Corfu incident,
adopted towards Greece an attitude as unjust as that of Austria towards
Serbia in 1914, I am not aware that the Italian clergy expressed
indignation. Nor do I remember that in 1900, when a European army
intervened in Chinese affairs (the Boxer affair) and excesses were
committed by the soldiers, any strong protests were uttered by the
clergies of the respective nations.
[42] A particularly remarkable attitude was that of the philosopher
Boutroux. You will find an admirable denunciation of it from the pen of
Charles Andler, _Les Origines du Pangermanisme_, p. viii.
[43] This may be seen especially in the chorus of the Seven against
Thebes: ‘Gods of our City, let it not be destroyed with our houses and
our hearths.... O ye who have dwelt therein so long, will ye betray
this land?’ Six centuries later this may be seen in the ‘Aeneid’, where
the preservation of the Trojan City across the seas is plainly due
solely to the protection of Juno, and in no wise to any inward notion
of Trojan blood giving it an assurance of eternal duration.
[44] Although the Germans appear to have been the inventors of the
passion I am denouncing, Lessing and Schlegel seem to have been the
first to brandish their poets as the expression of the national
soul, from a feeling of exasperation with the universalism of French
literature. The men of the French Pléiade (who will certainly be
brought up against me) wished to give their sensibility a national
mode of expression, a national language; they never claimed to give
a national character to that sensibility, to oppose it to other
national sensibilities. The systematic nationalization of the mind
is undoubtedly an invention of modern times. As regards the men of
learning, this nationalizing has undoubtedly been favoured by the
disappearance of Latin as the scientific language; and no one will ever
be able to say to what an extent this disappearance was an element of
arrest in civilisation.
[45] In Nietzsche’s opinion, this was the case with Wagner, who, when
he gave himself out to his compatriots as the Messiah of German art,
saw that there was ‘a good vacant place to take’, while the whole
of his artistic formation as well as his profound philosophy, was
essentially universalist. (See _Ecce Homo_, p. 58. ‘What I have never
forgiven Wagner is his condescending to Germany.’) One wonders whether
the same might not be said of a certain apostle of ‘Lorrain genius’ or
of ‘Provençal genius’.
[46] The nationalization of the mind sometimes has results whose savour
is not sufficiently enjoyed. In 1904, during the centenary celebrations
of Petrarch, the nations of Goethe and Shakespeare were not invited,
because they are not Latins; but the Roumanians were invited. We do not
know whether Uruguay was invited.
[47] Anatole France, _La Vie Littéraire_, tome ii, p. 274. The
nationalist desires in French writers which I have been pointing out
have had other than political results; no one will ever be able to
say how many among them in the past fifty years have falsified their
talents, mistaken their true gifts in their endeavours to ‘feel in the
French manner’. A good example is the _Voyage de Sparte_, where so
many pages show what a beautiful piece of work it might have been if
the author had not _forced_ himself to feel his Lorrain soul under a
Greek sky. Here we come upon one of the most curious characteristics
in the writers of this age; the rejection of freedom of mind _for
themselves_, the thirst for ‘a discipline’ (the whole fortune of MM.
Maurras and Maritain comes from this), a thirst which in most of them
is the result of a fundamental intellectual nihilism. (On this nihilism
in Barrès, see Curtius, ‘Barrès and the intellectual foundations of
French nationalism,’ extracts in _Union pour la Vérité_, May, 1925;
in Maurras, see Guy-Grand, op. cit., p. 19; and L. Dimier, _Vingt Ans
d’Action Française_, p. 330: ‘I have never seen a more unhappy soul
than his.’) But the psychology of contemporary writers in itself and
apart from its political action is not my subject here.
[48] I think it novel that a poet should give rise to a demonstration
so essentially practical as the address of the Naval League of Venice
to d’Annunzio after the publication of _La Nave_. ‘On the day when your
genius radiates with new splendour over the ancient ruler of “our sea”,
over Venice, to-day disarmed against Pola, the Naval League of Venice
thanks you with emotion, hoping that the third Italy may at last arm
the prow and set sail towards the world.’ (_Translator’s Note._--I have
rendered the French version as quoted; its meaning or lack of meaning
is no doubt inherent in the genius of the original, which I have not
before me.)
[49] Compare with Balzac, who, though a Conservative, never hesitates
to show his Conservatives and particularly his Catholics in an
unfavourable light, if he thinks that the true light. See the examples
quoted by E. Seillière (_Balzac et la morale romantique_, pp. 27
onwards, and 84 onwards), who sharply reproaches Balzac.
[50] ‘_Resurrection_,’ ‘_Jean-Christophe_’ (derived in this respect
from the procedure of George Sand). On the other hand, I seem to find a
great deal of justice done the bourgeois in _Les Miserables_, which is
nevertheless a most ‘tendencious’ novel.
[51] For instance, pre-war French novels showing the French in
Alsace-Lorraine. We may be quite certain that since 1918 the Germans
have written novels which are the exact counterpart to these.
[52] See Note G at the end of this book.
[53] See, for instance, Fustel de Coulanges’s study _De la manière
d’écrire l’histoire en France et en Allemagne_. It will be observed
that this author’s denunciation of the German historians exactly
applies to certain French historians of recent years, with this
difference: That the German alters history to exalt his nation and the
Frenchman to exalt a political system. In general it may be said that
the ‘tendencious’ philosophies of the Germans lead to national war, and
those of the French to civil war. Is it necessary to repeat, after so
many others, how much this proves the moral superiority of the latter?
[54] _Revue Universelle_, 15th April, 1924. Here is that very curious
desire of the moderns to yield to subjectivism, whereas their elders
made every effort to combat it.
[55] See Note H at the end of this book.
[56] Yet the Jesuits thought of doing so to combat the Jansenists. (See
Racine, _Port-Royal_, pt. i.)
[57] On the matter of the lack of literary sensibility which
accompanies this political criticism among its adepts, see a paragraph
of L. Dimier, _Vingt Ans d’Action Française_, p. 334.
[58] The distinction between these two humanitarianisms is well
expressed by Goethe when he relates (Dichtung und Wahrheit) the
indifference of himself and his friends to the events of 1789. ‘In our
little circle, we took no notice of news and newspapers; our object
was to know Man; as for men, we left them to do as they chose.’ Need
I recall that the ‘humanities’, as instituted by the Jesuits in the
seventeenth century, the ‘studia humanitatis’, are ‘the study of what
is most essentially human’, in no sense altruistic exercises. See
further Note I at the end of this book for a curious quotation from one
of the ancients.
[59] This the Church has understood so well, and the corollary to
this truth: That love between men can only be created by developing
in them the sensibility for abstract man, and by combatting in them
the interest for concrete man; by turning them towards metaphysical
meditation and away from the study of history (see Malebranche). This
is exactly the contrary direction to that of the modern ‘clerks’ but,
once again, these ‘clerks’ have not the slightest desire to create love
among men.
[60] Thus they adopt the national spirit if it seems to serve their
interests; for instance, the party of ‘nationalist-socialists’.
[61] Certain nationalists, desirous of honouring cosmopolitanism,
whose full value their intelligence perceives, and yet not wishing
to sacrifice nationalism, declare that cosmopolitanism represents
‘enlightened nationalism’. M. Paul Bourget, who gives this definition
(_Paris-Times_, June, 1924), quotes Goethe and Stendhal as examples,
‘the former of whom remained so profoundly German while striving
to understand the whole movement of French thought, and the
latter remained so profoundly French while he devoted himself to
understanding Italy.’ One wonders how these two masters showed the
least, even enlightened, ‘nationalism’ by remaining profoundly German
and profoundly French. Obviously M. Bourget confuses national and
nationalist.
[62] Almost all works of national propaganda among the small nations
of Eastern Europe are anthologies of poetry. Very few are works of
thought. See the words uttered by E. Boutroux in August, 1915, to the
Committee of the Entente Cordiale, against the peoples who attach too
much importance to the intelligence, which ‘of itself tends to be one
and common to all beings capable of knowledge’.
[63] _Les Nouvelles Littéraires_, 25th September, 1926.
[64] Here is a specimen of the acrobatics which these teachers are
compelled to perform in order to conciliate Christian doctrine with
the preaching of national particularisms: ‘We wish to set the ideal of
universalism in positive relation to the contemporary reality of the
national form, which is that of all life, even the Christian life.’
(Pastor Witte, quoted by A. Loisy, _Guerre et Religion_, p. 18.) Here
are minds for whom the squaring of the circle is obviously mere child’s
play.
[65] Is it not suggestive to note that the Church in the last twenty
years has replaced the commandment ‘Homicide shalt thou not be, in fact
or by assent’ with ‘Homicide shalt thou not be, without right, nor
voluntarily’?
[66] For example in this passage of Bossuet: ‘Since we are obliged to
love all men and since in truth no man is a foreigner to a Christian,
there is all the more reason for loving our fellow citizens. All the
love a man feels for himself, for his family, and for his friends is
united in the love he feels for his country....’ (_Politique tirée de
l’Ecriture Sainte_, I, vi. Notice the phrase ‘All the love a man feels
for himself....’ It wholly justifies Saint Evremond’s phrase: ‘Love
of country is really love of oneself.’) It appears that the Church
would prefer to go on presenting patriotism under this one aspect of
love (see the inquiry of ‘les Lettres’ on the Church and Nationalism,
1922-3), which would allow her to exalt this passion (as its
popularity requires) without violating the principles of Christianity.
Unfortunately for the Church, positive men come along and remind her
that patriotism is something more than love, and includes ‘hatred for
the foreigner’. (Maurras, _Dilemme de Marc Sangnier_.) Who will deliver
us from the truth-tellers?
[67] A. Lugan, _La grande loi sociale de l’amour des hommes_, liv. ii,
chap. iii.
[68] Père Ollivier, _Les Amitiés de Jesus_, p. 142.
[69] _Dictionnaire apologétique de la foi catholique_ (1919), in
the article headed ‘Patrie’. The reader will note the extraordinary
practical spirit of this article, and the desire to love only those who
have done something for us.
[70] Loisy’s _Guerre et Religion_, p. 60. Nevertheless, a certain
number of practising clergy speak in the same way; see Guillot de
Givry, _Le Christ et la Patrie_, towards the end.
[71] It is current knowledge that Italian Fascism and Russian
Bolshevism both derive from the author of _Reflections on Violence_.
He did, indeed, preach class egotism to some extent in a universal
manner, but without any explicit preference for the interest of one
class rather than that of another. In his preaching of egotism there
is a kind of impartiality which does not lack grandeur, a quality not
inherited by his disciples.
[72] And even the teaching of Jesus Christ. R. Johannet says (op. cit.,
p. 153), ‘I have tried to show what a vast amount of Christianity
is contained in the bourgeois type, when it is pure. To condemn the
bourgeois, because he is a bourgeois, in the name of Christ, seems to
me a somewhat daring paradox.’ But this author does not quote a single
text of the Gospels. He only quotes a few interpreters of Saint Thomas
Aquinas, whom he praises for their ‘extra-realist sense of affairs’,
and who apparently for him incarnate the thinking of Jesus Christ. This
work is one of the most perfect examples of the modern ‘clerk’s’ desire
to idealize the practical spirit. (On the subject of Christian doctrine
in the matter of property, see Father Thomassin, _Traité de l’aumône_.)
[73] It might be said that in Christian theology the bourgeois state is
a _function_, and not a rank.
[74] The essential position of the Church on this point (I say
essential; for, by close search, one can find texts supporting the
opposite thesis, but once more the curious thing is the fact that
this search should be made) seems to me defined in these lines:
‘Malebranche inclines, like Bossuet, to look upon social inequalities
and injustices as the results of sin, which must be endured as such,
and to which exterior conduct must conform.... We must not even attempt
to remedy these injustices except by charity, for we should simply
disturb the peace of the world, probably without any result. Only, _we
should not in our own souls attach any sort of importance to these
circumstances and conditions, for the true life is not there_’ (H.
Joly, _Malebranche_, p. 262).
[75] On the relation between Durckheim’s theses and those of the French
traditionalists, see D. Parodi, _La Philosophie contemporaine en
France_, p. 148.
[76] ‘Germany is the sole judge of her methods.’ (Major von Disfurth,
November, 1914.) The philosophy of national moralities seems
essentially German. Is it not very remarkable to see Hegel and Zeller
desiring at all costs to prove that Plato in his _Republic_ defined
a state of good which was only valid for the Greeks, and not for all
peoples? (See P. Janet, _Histoire des idées politiques_, tome 1, p.
140.)
[77] Barrès wrote in 1898: ‘The professors are still arguing about
justice and truth, when every self-respecting man knows that he must
limit himself to inquiring if there is justice in the relations between
two given men, at a given time, under specified circumstances.’ That is
exactly what the Germany of 1914 said in answer to those who brought
accusations against her. Not a single moralist in France before
Barrès--not even de Maistre or Bonald--would have asserted that ‘every
self-respecting man’ can conceive of no justice but one specially
arranged for the circumstances.
[78] _L’Appel au Soldat._ Compare this with the traditional French
teaching, of which Barrès claims to be the heir: ‘Whatever your country
may be, you should only believe what you would be disposed to believe
if you were in another country.’ (_Logique de Port-Royal_, iii, xx.)
It must not be thought that dogma of national truths aims only at
moral truth. Recently certain French thinkers waxed indignant that the
doctrines of Einstein were accepted by their compatriots without more
resistance.
[79] The adoration of the contingent _for its own sake_; otherwise,
and as a step towards the eternal, the knowledge of ‘strange things’
is highly recommended by Leibniz, and even by Spinoza. Renouvier, so
hostile to a certain kind of universalism, never bestows philosophical
value on a knowledge of what is ‘unique and inexpressible’ in the
object. (See G. Séailles, ‘Le Pluralisme de Renouvier,’ _Revue de
Métaphysique et de Morale_, 1925.) He would never have signed this
charter of modern metaphysics: ‘That the philosophers since Socrates
should have contended as to which should most scorn the knowledge of
the particular and should most adore knowledge of the general, is
something which passes understanding. For, after all, must not the most
honourable knowledge be the knowledge of the most valuable realities!
And is there a valuable reality which is not concrete and individual?’
(William James.)
[80] An important literary review recently reproached a critic
(M. Pierre Lasserre) for his supposed inaptitude to understand
‘contemporary literature’.
[81] Curiously enough, these metaphysics of the historic may also be
found among the poets. We all know Claudel’s cult of ‘the present
minute’ (because it differs from all other minutes in that it is not
the extremity of the same quantity of the past); Rimbaud before this
said: ‘One must be absolutely modern.’ Moreover, for certain Christians
dogma is only valid _relative to a time_. There again particularism
seems to have been started by the Germans: ‘No exposition of morality
can be the same for all periods of the Christian Church; each possesses
full and complete value for a certain period only.’ (Scheiermacher.) On
the Germanism in this desire to see everything in its ‘becoming’, see
Parodi, _le Problème moral et la Pensée contemporaine_, p. 255.
[82] These views on the modern cult of the particular do not seem to
me to be invalidated by the arrival of a recent school (Neo-Thomism)
which opposes the cult of Being to that of Becoming. According to the
leaders of this school, it is clear that, despite certain universalist
declarations, human Being really belongs only to them and their group,
although in this case the group is wider than the nation. One of them
would quite willingly say with a Christian of the second century: ‘We
are men; the rest are pigs and dogs.’ Nor do I think I need take into
account those particularisms which claim that by working for themselves
they are working for the universal, seeing that for them their own
group represents the universal. ‘I am Roman, I am human’ (Maurras). ‘I
am German, I am human’ (Fichte) and so on.... However, these claims
show the prestige of the universal in despite of doctrines.
[83] See Note J at the end of this book.
[84] On the cult of the ‘Prussian model’ even among the English
‘clerks’, see Elie Halévy, _Histoire du Peuple anglais_, Epilogue,
livre ii, ch. i.
[85] Sorel, _Le procès de Socrate_.
[86] This has been perfectly obvious to all those guardians of the
spiritual who have condemned it, whatever their motives may have been.
More precisely, Maurras’s work makes the passion of man to found the
State (or to strengthen it) an object of religious adoration; it
is really the worldly made transcendental. This displacing of the
transcendental is the secret of the great influence exerted by Maurras
on his contemporaries. These persons, especially in irreligious
France, were plainly eager for such a doctrine, if one may judge by
the outburst of gratitude with which they greeted it, and which seems
to say: ‘At last we are delivered from God; at last we are allowed to
adore ourselves in our will to be great, not in our will to be good; we
are shown the ideal in the real, on earth and not in heaven.’ In this
sense, Maurras’s work is the same as Nietzsche’s (‘be faithful to the
earth’), with this difference, that the German thinker deifies man in
his anarchic passions, and the Frenchman in his organising passions.
It is also the same as the work of Bergson and James, inasmuch as it
says like them: the real is the only ideal. This _secularizing of the
divine_ may be compared with the work of Luther.
[87] Machiavellian morality is plainly proclaimed in the following
lines, where every open-minded person will recognize, except for the
tone, the teaching of _all_ the present teachers of realism, whatever
their nationality: ‘In his relations with other States, the Prince
should know neither law nor right, except the right of the strongest.
These relations place in his hands, under his responsibility, the
divine rights of the Destiny and government of the world, and raise
him above the precepts of individual morality into a higher moral
order, whose content is enshrined in the words: Salus populi suprema
lex esto.’ (Fichte, quoted by Andler, op. cit., p. 33.) The advance on
Machiavelli is obvious.
[88] The teaching of this writer may be put in this form: ‘All that
is good from the point of view of politics is good; _and I know no
other criterion of good_.’ This enables him to say that he makes no
pronouncement in matters of private morality.
[89] In Richelieu’s _Testament politique_ and the _Mémoires de Louis
XIV pour l’Instruction du Dauphin_, the catalogue of good and ill might
be signed by Saint Vincent de Paul. We read in them: ‘Kings should
take care in making treaties, but once the treaties are made, _they
must observe them religiously_. I know that many politicians teach the
contrary; but, without taking into consideration all that the Christian
Faith provides us with against these maxims, I maintain that since
the loss of honour is greater than the loss of life itself, a great
Prince should hazard his person and _even the interest of his State
rather than break his word_, which he cannot violate without losing his
reputation, and consequently _the greatest strength_ of a Sovereign.’
(_Testament Politique_, part 2, ch. vi.)
[90] Similarly with the writer--Machiavelli, who writes for his
peers, can allow himself the luxury of not being a moralist; Maurras
who writes for crowds cannot do so. No one writes with impunity in a
democracy. Moreover, a political activity which is supported by moral
activity proves that it understands the true conditions of its success.
A master in these matters says: ‘There can be no profound political
reform unless religion and morality are also reformed.’ (Hegel.)
Clearly the particular influence of the _Action Française_ among
all other conservative organs is due to the fact that its political
movement is supported by a moral teaching, although other interests
oblige it to deny this.
[91] _Dictionnaire des Cas de Conscience_ (ed. 1712), article ‘Guerre’.
With such a morality the territorial formation of any European State
would become impossible. This is the type of non-practical teaching,
i.e. of what I mean by the true ‘clerk’. (See Note F at the end of
this book on the subject of the welcome given to this teaching by the
material world.) In the opinion of Vittoria as well, the extension of
empire is not a just cause.
[92] This is the thesis of Alfonso Liguori which to-day prevails in the
Church’s teaching over that of Vittoria.
[93] Cardinal Gousset (_Théologie morale_, 1845).
[94] This is the Scholastic doctrine of war, formulated in all its
rigidity by Thomas Aquinas. According to this doctrine, the Prince
(or the people) who declares war, acts as a magistrate (minister Dei)
under whose jurisdiction a foreign nation falls, owing to an injustice
it has committed and which it refuses to repair. From this it follows,
in particular, that the Prince who has declared war ought solely
to punish the guilty, if he is victorious, and not to acquire any
personal benefit from his victory. This high moral doctrine is entirely
abandoned by the Church to-day. (See Vanderpol, _La Guerre devant le
Christianisme_, titre ix.)
[95] Apparently this was the view adopted by the Holy See in 1914
towards the Franco-German war, Germany benefiting by what theology
calls ‘invincible’ ignorance, i.e. implying that one has used all
the diligence of which a man is capable in trying to understand the
explanations of an adversary. Obviously, one may feel that some
goodwill was needed to think that Germany had a right to this benefit.
[96] Like the thesis of war being just on both sides, this is the
doctrine of Molina, which in matters of law in war has entirely
replaced Scholastic doctrine in ecclesiastic teaching.
[97] In the _Dictionnaire théologique_ of Vacant-Mangenot (1922,
article ‘Guerre’), I find the following passage, which I recommend to
all aggressors desirous of sheltering under a high moral authority: ‘It
is not only the right but the duty of the leader of a nation to adopt
this method (i.e. war) to safeguard the general interests committed to
his care. This right and duty apply not only to a strictly defensive
war, but also to an offensive war rendered necessary by the actions
of a neighbouring State whose ambitious intrigues constitute a real
danger.’ In the same article will be found a theory of colonial wars
identical to Kipling’s when he calls them: _the white man’s burden_.
[98] This expression (i.e. ‘la blague’) is Sorel’s (see Julien Benda,
_Les Sentiments de Critias_, p. 258); and again (_Reflexions sur la
Violence_, ch. ii): ‘You cannot sufficiently execrate those who teach
the people that they should carry out some alleged superlatively
idealistic injunction of a justice moving towards the future.’
Moreover, Sorel professes a similar hatred for those who preach this
injunction to the bourgeoisie.
[99] See Note K at the end of the book.
[100] See _Reflexions sur la Violence_, ch. vi: ‘The morality of
Violence.’ We shall be told that the justice denounced by Sorel is the
justice of tribunals, which according to him is a false justice, a
‘violence with a judicial mask’. There is no indication that a justice
which was a true justice would receive any more respect from him.
[101] In this respect one cannot stress too much in certain political
teachers a defence of intolerance, carried out with a consciousness and
arrogance which hitherto had only appeared sometimes in the mandatories
of a revealed religion. A specimen is quoted by G. Guy-Grand (_La
Philosophie nationaliste_, p. 47). See also one of these defences in L.
Romier, _Nation et Civilisation_, p. 180.
[102] ‘Modern science has established as the measure of truth, not the
deductive demands of its understanding, but the observed existence
of the fact.’ (Paul Bourget.) The ‘truth’ here is evidently moral
truth; for scientific truth the phrase would be a tautology. Once
more, here the ‘fact’ is solely the fact which happens to suit the
author’s passions. When M. d’Haussonville points out to M. Bourget that
democracy is a fact, and an unavoidable fact, he is told that this
belief is a ‘prejudice’ and one suddenly learns that ‘boats are made to
row against the stream’. This is exactly what revolutionaries say.
[103] See Note L at the end of this book.
[104] Another thinker to whom our empiricists are strangely ungrateful
is the author of these words: ‘Consider the danger of one stirring up
the enormous masses which form the French nation. Who could restrain
the disturbance set up, or foresee all the results it might produce?
Even if all the advantages of the new scheme should be indisputable,
what man of good sense would dare to undertake to abolish old customs,
to change old maxims, and to give a new form to a State other than that
it has reached after an existence of 1,300 years?’ (J. J. Rousseau.)
[105] See Note M at the end of this book.
[106] ‘A truly scientific mind,’ says one of these devotees of fact,
‘feels no need to justify a privilege which appears as an elementary
and irreducible datum of the social world.’ (Paul Bourget.) But this
same ‘truly scientific’ mind is scandalised at an _insurrection_
against this privilege, which is also an ‘elementary and irreducible
datum of the social world’. I shall be told this that insurrection is
not a datum of the social world, but of the world of passion where it
is most anti-social. And that indeed is the position of this dogmatism:
It considers the social _independent of the passionate_, whether the
latter has been made social (by Catholic education), or has been
reduced to silence by force (school of Maurras) or by skill (school
of Bainville). The strangest part of it all is that those who argue
in this way about the social _in itself_ accuse their adversaries of
dealing in abstractions.
[107] The position I am here denouncing has nothing in common with that
of a recent school of moralists (Rauh, Lévy-Bruhl) who also desire ‘to
take man as he is’, but in order to discover how he may be made better.
[108] This pessimism, whatever some of its heralds may say, has nothing
in common with the pessimism of the masters of the seventeenth century.
La Fontaine and La Bruyère attribute nothing inevitable or eternal to
the ills they portray. Let me also point out that in their efforts
to discourage hope, the Romantics of Pessimism cannot claim (as M.
Georges Goyau has pointed out to them) that they are based on Catholic
tradition.
[109] Such a group logically comes to declarations like the following,
which every supporter of ‘integral nationalism’ is bound to admire:
‘From to-night onwards let there be an end to the silly Utopia where
everyone thinks with his own head.’ (Impero, 4th November, 1926.) See
Note N at the end of this volume.
[110] On Pragmatism, especially Nietzschean pragmatism, and the place
it holds (whether they confess it or not) in almost all the moral
and political teachings really characteristic of this time, see R.
Berthelot, _Un Romantisme Utilitaire_, tome i, page 28 onwards. I can
best show the novelty of the pragmatist attitude, especially among the
French moralists, by quoting a remark of Montaigne which they all,
before Barrès, would have ratified: ‘The honour and beauty of an action
cannot be argued from its utility.’ Let us not forget, however, that
Nietzsche, always unfaithful to his disciples, declares that ‘in the
long run, utility, like everything else, is simply a figment of our
imagination, and may well be the _fatal stupidity by which we shall one
day perish_’.
[111] That it why Pragmatism is also called Humanism. (See F. Schiller,
_Protagoras or Plato_.)
[112] We know how the two are reconciled. Jesus, they say, preached
the spirit of sacrifice, which is the basis of all human institutions.
As if Jesus preached the spirit of sacrifice which wins battles and
secures empires!
[113] ‘The true warrior remains human in the midst of the blood he
sheds.’ (De Maistre.)
[114] For example, when they make a soldier say in heaven: ‘You must
know, my friends, that among all things done upon earth, nothing
is more agreeable to the eyes of those who rule the universe than
societies of men founded upon respect for laws, which we call cities.’
(Cicero, _Scipio’s Dream_.)
[115] Sorel, loc. cit.
[116] And from any patriotism. Nietzsche and Sorel prove that love of
war is something totally distinct from love of country, although most
often they coincide.
[117] Ernest Psichari, _Terres de Soleil et de Sommeil_. And, in
_L’Appel des armes_, through the mouth of a character who obviously has
all the author’s sympathies; ‘I think it necessary that there should be
in the world a certain number of the men who are called soldiers and
who place their ideal in fighting, who have a taste for battle, not for
victory but for the contest, as hunters have a taste for hunting, not
for game!... The part we have to play, or otherwise we lose our reason
for existing and have no more meaning, is to maintain a military ideal,
not a nationally military ideal, but a militarily military ideal, if
I may so express it.’ The religion of this moralist is, according
to his own expression, _integral militarism_. ‘Big guns,’ he says,
‘are the most real realities which exist, the sole realities of the
modern world.’ And obviously these realities are divinities for this
‘spiritual’ person and his followers.
[118] This depreciation of Greece, to be seen in many French
traditionalists since de Maistre, is constant among the Pangermanists.
(See notably Houston Chamberlain, _Genesis of the Nineteenth Century_,
tome i, page 57.) In a periodical with dogmatic claims (_Notre Temps_,
August, 1927), under the suggestive title ‘Towards a Practical
Idealism’, I read: ‘A young generation trained in this way, _more
sporting than ideological_, supports those who ask whether we are
not at the dawn of a great age.’ Here again the Churchmen do not
lag behind. In _La Vie Catholique_ (24th September, 1927) I find a
warm eulogy of a champion boxer. It is true that this eulogy ends up
with the words: ‘Finally, let us add that Tunney is a convinced and
practising Catholic, and that two of his sisters are nuns.’
[119] Laws, Book I. The exact text of Plato is: ‘In the order of
virtues, wisdom is first, temperance comes next, courage occupies the
last place.’ Plato here means by courage (see the context, notably the
passage about those soldiers who ‘though insolent, unjust, immoral,
know how to fight’) Man’s aptitude for facing death. It seems that he
would not have given the first place to the courage which is strength
of mind, a resistance to misfortune, as the Stoics afterwards did.
With him strength of mind always comes after justice--according to his
doctrine, it is a consequence of justice. Moreover, the courage placed
in the supreme rank by Barrès is not Stoic patience but the active
defiance of death. For Nietzsche and Sorel it is essential audacity,
where audacity is irrational--a form of courage depreciated by all
ancient moralists and their disciples. (See Plato, Laches; Aristotle,
Ethics, VIII; Spinoza, Ethics, IV, 69; even the poets--‘Our reason
which commands our fire,’ Ronsard.)
It seems that facing death, even on behalf of justice, was not so much
the object of praise among the ancient philosophers as it is among the
moderns. In the Phaedo, Socrates is praised for his justice; he is not
very loudly praised because he died for justice. Moreover, the views
of the ancients on this point seem to me well expressed by Spinoza:
‘Death is a thing of which the free man thinks least of all,’ a thought
which does not imply much admiration for those who face death bravely.
One wonders whether the veneration of courage, at least among the
moralists, has not been created by Christianity, with the importance it
attaches to death, and the subsequent appearance before God.
I cannot leave this point without recalling a passage where Saint-Simon
speaks of a nobility ‘accustomed to be good for nothing except to get
itself killed’, _Mémoires_, t. xi, page 427, ed. Cheruel. It may be
asserted that there is not one modern writer, even a Duke of France,
who would speak of courage in such a tone.
[120] And to hold.
[121] There will be found in Barrès (_Une Enquête aux pays du Levant_,
chap. vii: ‘Les derniers fidèles du Vieux de la Montagne’) a striking
example of admiration for the cult of honour inasmuch as this cult,
when ably exploited by an intelligent leader, gives practical results.
[122] This is especially the case with Montaigne who, as everyone
knows, extols honour insofar as it is man’s sensitiveness to the
judgment of his conscience, but very little insofar as it is a desire
for glory--‘put off with other pleasures that which comes from the
approbation of others.’ Barrès believes he sees in that ‘a foreigner
who does not share our prejudices’. Barrès confuses the moralists and
the poets. Before him I do not know one French author with dogmatic
claims who has attributed a high moral value to the love of glory; the
French moralists before 1890 are very unmilitary, even the soldiers
like Vauvenargues and Vigny. (See the excellent study of G. Le Bidois,
_L’Honneur au miroir de nos lettres_, especially on Montesquieu.)
[123] The Abbé Sertillanges, _L’Héroisme et la Gloire_. Compare this
with Bossuet’s two sermons on ‘The Honour of the World’. You can
measure the advance made by the Church during three centuries in its
concessions to lay passions. See also Nicole: ‘On the true idea of
valour.’ The sermons of the Abbé Sertillanges (‘la Vie Héroïque’)
should be read entire, as a monument of a Churchman’s enthusiasm for
warlike instincts. It is positively the manifesto of a helmed ‘clerk’.
You can find in them such emotions as the following which, mutatis
mutandis, might be an extract from the Regimental Orders of a Colonel
of the Death’s Head Hussars: ‘Behold Guynemer, the young hero, the
simple soul with the eagle glance, the slim Hercules, the Achilles who
does not retire to his tent, the Roland of the clouds and the Cid of
the French sky: was there ever a wilder and more furious paladin, more
careless of death, whether his own or that of an enemy? This “kid”, as
his comrades called him, only enjoyed the savage pleasure of attack, of
the hard fight, of the clear victory, and in him the arrogance of the
conqueror was at once charming and terrible.’
[124] Let me recall Thomas Aquinas’s definition of honour, which is not
exactly the definition of the honour extolled by the Abbé Sertillanges:
‘Honour is good (like the love of human glory) on condition that
charity is its principle, and the love of God or the good of one’s
neighbour as its object.’
[125] See the recent Bill to amend Martial Law, known as the Paul
Boncour Bill.
[126] This suggestive remark is Lavisse’s, _Etudes d’Histoire de
Prusse_, page 30. See the whole passage.
[127] Love here is obviously love for the superior species--to which
the preacher naturally belongs. Doubtless it is this love also which
permits of a pity which is not ‘perverted.’
[128] Charles Maurras, _Action Française_, tome iv, page 596. One
thinks of Nietzsche’s exclamation: ‘Humanity! Was there ever a more
horrible old woman among all horrible old women!’ and the German master
adds, always in agreement with many a French master as we shall see
later, ‘unless perhaps it is truth.’
[129] Their harshness has obviously nothing in common with the
harshness implied by these fine words: ‘The man of justice subordinates
passion to reason, which seems regrettable if his heart is cold, but
will appear sublime if he is capable of love’ (Renouvier).
[130] This is the opinion of Machiavelli (chap. xviii) who, there
again, does not therefore consider cruelty as a proof of a high state
of culture.
[131] I find this from the pen of a hero of the First Empire: ‘I was
afraid of feeling _pleasure_’ (the author himself underlines the word)
‘in killing with my own hand some of these scoundrels’ (he is speaking
of some Germans who murdered French prisoners after the battle of
Leipzic). ‘I therefore sheathed my sabre and left the extermination
of these assassins to the troopers.’ (_Memoirs of General Marbot_,
tome iii, page 344.) There is a condemnation of the joy of killing
which would be scorned by many a contemporary writer. In France the
glorification of warlike instincts is much less common among the
soldiers than among the authors. Marbot is far less bloody-minded than
Barrès.
[132] ‘And the honour of virtue consists in contending, not in winning’
(Montaigne).
[133] _La Ruine du monde antique_, page 76. See also in _Les Illusions
du progrès_ (page 259) Sorel’s derisive amusement at a thinker who
said that the preponderance of intellectual emotions is the sign of
superior societies. We may take up Sainte-Beuve’s famous distinction
and say that modern thinkers extol _sword-intelligence_ at the expense
of _mirror-intelligence_. On their own showing it is the former they
admire in Nietzsche, Sorel, Péguy, and Maurras. (See R. Gillouin,
_Esquisses littéraires et morales_, page 52.) Let me observe that
contempt for ‘mirror-intelligence’ implies contempt for Aristotle,
Spinoza, Bacon, Goethe, and Renan. Nor does it seem to me that M. Paul
Valéry is exactly a ‘sword-intelligence’.
[134] _Victor Marie, Comte Hugo_, towards the end. See Note O at the
end of this volume.
[135] This it the only reason why Nietzsche extols art, and declares
(along with all modern moralism) the supremacy of the artist over the
philosopher, because art seems to him to possess the value of action.
Apart from this point of view, it seems just to say with one of his
critics: ‘At bottom Nietzsche despised art and artists.... In art he
condemns a feminine principle, the mimicry of the actor, the love of
dress and all that glitters.... Remember the eloquent page where he
praises Shakespeare, the greatest of poets, for having abased the
figure of the poet, whom he treats as a stage-player, before Caesar,
_that divine man_.’ (C. Schuwer, _Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale_,
April, 1926.) For Sorel art is great because it is an anticipation of
intense production, as it tends to manifest itself more and more in our
society.
[136] _Evolution Créatrice_, page 216. The true formula of Bergsonism
should be, ‘I grow, therefore I am.’ Notice also the tendency of modern
philosophy to make the practical character of thought its essential
characteristic and to make its consciousness of itself a secondary
characteristic: ‘Perhaps thought must be defined as the faculty of
combining means towards certain ends rather than by the sole property
of being clear to itself.’ (D. Roustan, _Leçons de Psychologie_, page
73.)
[137] The Sphex. The example is given in _L’Evolution Créatrice_, and
has had an immense success in the literary world. (It is, moreover,
imaginary. See Marie Goldsmith, _Psychologie Comparée_, page 211.) The
defence of the practical value of instinct, with the same Romantic
contempt of the rationalist as in Barrès, existed with J. J. Rousseau:
‘Conscience never deceives us; it is to the soul what instinct is
to the body.... Modern philosophy, which only admits what can be
explained, takes care not to admit the obscure faculty called instinct
which, without acquired knowledge, seems to guide animals towards some
end.’ (_Confession de foi du vicaire savoyard._)
[138] ‘If the utility which results from a man’s occupations determined
our praise, the inventor of the plough would deserve the praise of
being a great mind far more than Aristotle, Galilei, and M. Descartes.’
(Bayle.) Fontenelle and Voltaire have pointed out the utility of
certain studies which were considered useless; they never meant that
those who cultivated these studies while they thought them useless were
therefore contemptible.
[139] See above, page 54.
[140] Or moral. Barrès denounces the ‘immorality’ of the scholar who
shows the part played by chance in history. Compare Michelet’s remark,
‘respect kills history.’
[141] As is well known, this is the argument of the ‘Avenir
de l’intelligence’. It allows followers to say (‘Manifeste de
l’Intelligence,’ _Figaro_, 19th July, 1919; on this manifesto, see Note
P at the end of this volume) that ‘one of the most obvious missions
of the Church during the ages has been to protect the intelligence
against its own errors’--an irrefutable saying from the moment that the
errors of the intelligence are everything it says without reference to
social order (whose basis is to be the teaching of the Church). This
practical conception of the intelligence leads to definitions of this
sort: ‘True logic is to be defined as the normal union of feelings,
images and signs, to inspire in us the conceptions suited to our moral,
intellectual and physical needs.’ (Maurras.) Compare this with the
tradition teaching of the French masters: ‘Logic is the art of guiding
reason properly in the knowledge of things.’ (_Logique de Port-Royal._)
The wish to esteem intelligence according to its practical results
appears again in this astounding formula: ‘A critical mind is of value
_through the influence it exerts_ by means of the enlightenment it
bestows.’ (Maurras.) See also how severe is M. Massis (_Jugements_, i,
87) for Renan when he says: ‘The useful is what I abhor.’ Elsewhere
(_Jugements_, 107) the same thinker speaks of a spiritual freedom
‘whose disinterestedness is merely a refusal of the conditions of life,
of action, _and of thought_!’
[142] They add ‘and unscientific’, which is irrefutable as soon as
science means ‘practical’. ‘Bringing up children religiously,’ says M.
Paul Bourget, ‘is bringing them up scientifically’--a very defensible
saying as soon as ‘scientifically’ means (as the author here wants it
to mean) ‘in conformity with the national interest’.
[143] The French traditionalists condemn the truth in itself in the
name of ‘social’ truth. This is the _glorification of prejudices_,
a new thing indeed in the descendants of Montaigne and Voltaire. It
may be said that certain contemporary French masters show a zeal in
defending the interests of society never seen before in those whose
business was to defend the interests of the mind.
The condemnation of disinterested intellectual activity is plainly
laid down in this command of Barrès: ‘All questions must be solved in
relation to France,’ to which a German thinker replies in 1920, ‘All
the conquests of ancient and modern culture and of science are looked
at by us from the German point of view before everything.’ (Quoted by
C. Chabot, Preface to the French translation of _Speeches to the German
Nation_, page xix). For the cult of the ‘useful error’, see an amazing
page in the _Jardin de Bérénice_, quoted and commented on by Parodi.
(_Traditionalisme et Democratie_, page 136.)
[144] Here M. Maurras separates from his Master, de Maistre, who speaks
of ‘the ocean which will one day welcome everything and everyone to
its bosom’. However, the author of the _Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg_
quickly adds: ‘But I refrain from touching on personality, without
which immortality is nothing.’
[145] On the existence of this doctrine of immanence among almost all
Christian teachers until our own times, see Renouvier: ‘l’Idée de Dieu’
(_Année Philosophique_, 1897), and also _Essai d’une Classification des
doctrines_, 3: _l’évolution_; _la création_.
[146] According to Hegel, God constantly grows at the expense of His
opposite; His activity is essentially that of war and victory.
[147] Let me note a keen protest against this conception in
‘Neo-Thomism’.
[148] Compare, for instance, the condemnation of Rosmini with that of
Maître Eckart, where such propositions as ‘Nulla in Deo distinctio
esse aut intelligi potest’ and ‘Omnes creaturae sunt purum nihil’
are declared to be, not heretical, but only ‘ill-sounding, rash and
suspected of heresy’.
[149] Remember that in 1806, immediately after Jena, Hegel’s one
thought was to find a corner in which to philosophize. In 1813
Schopenhauer was completely indifferent to the up-rising of Germany
against Napoleon.
[150] ‘No one has the right to be indifferent to the disasters of his
country; but the philosopher, like the Christian, always has reasons
for living. The Kingdom of God knows neither conquerors nor conquered;
that Kingdom resides in the joys of the heart, the mind, and the
imagination, which the conquered enjoys more than the conqueror if he
is morally on a higher plane and has more mind. Your great Goethe, your
admirable Fichte have taught us, have they not, how to lead a noble and
consequently happy life, when our country is humiliated abroad.’ (First
Letter to Strauss.)
Need I say that Nietzsche, who seems to me a bad ‘clerk’ from the
nature of his teaching, seems to me one of the finest from his entire
devotion to the passions of the spirit alone?
[151] Of course, I am not doubting the sincerity of all the
‘right-thinking’ men of letters. Some persons are so fortunate that
the most profitable attitudes are precisely those which they adopt
sincerely.
[152] This may be clearly seen by the ill-will displayed by the French
bourgeoisie towards the order of their ‘spiritual leader’ forbidding
them to read a publication whose doctrines they like. The change may be
estimated if you remember that when, a century ago, the Pope ordered
the French Catholics to accept the law against the Jesuits voted by the
government of Charles X, they all bowed to his will.
[153] At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession when the north of
France was invaded, Fénelon delivered several sermons in which he told
the invaded population that their sufferings were the just punishment
for their sins. Imagine the reception of anyone who dared to preach
such a sermon to the French in August, 1914! For the manner in which
the ‘taught’ Church to-day treats the ‘teaching’ Church if the latter
does not say what it wants to hear, think of the reception thirty years
ago of Father Ollivier’s sermon on the victims of the fire at the
charity bazaar.
[154] Similar observations may be made about the philosophers, most of
whom--and not the least famous--do not live to-day like Descartes and
Spinoza, but are married, have children, occupy posts, are ‘in daily
life’. All of which seems to me to have a relation with the ‘pragmatic’
character of their teaching. (On this point, see my book: _Sur le
Succès du Bergsonisme_, page 207.)
[155] This is the reign (which seems eternal in France) of the ‘wit’,
with his attribute so admirably denounced by Malebranche in this
delicious phrase: ‘The stupid person and the wit are equally blind to
truth; with this difference, that the stupid person respects truth
while the wit despises it.’
[156] The spectacle of democracies may satisfy another sort of artistic
sensibility, i.e. the sort which is moved, not by the spectacle of
order, but by the spectacle of an equilibrium between forces which
are naturally in opposition. (On this distinction, see the great book
by M. Hauriou, _Principes de droit public_, chap. i.) Nevertheless,
a sensibility to equilibrium is far more intellectual than truly
artistic. See Note Q at the end of this book.
[157] More precisely, since the haughty Romanticism I mentioned above.
The artist’s desire to set himself up as an exceptional being dates
from Flaubert. Hugo and Lamartine never expressed it.
[158] This aversion is particularly strong in Nietzsche. (See _Le
Gai sçavoir_, loc. cit., where generalization becomes a synonym for
platitude, superficiality, stupidity.) Like a true artist, Nietzsche
is incapable of understanding that the apperception of a common
characteristic may be an act of genius--for instance, the apperception
of the common characteristic between the movement of the planets and
the fall of an apple.
[159] So much so that the true champions of ‘sacred egoism’ definitely
condemn them. Bismarck, Wilhelm II, Naumann, Houston Chamberlain, all
argue against classical teaching.
[160] Remember that Nietzsche only truly esteems the thought of the
ancients up to Socrates, i.e. up to the time when it begins to teach
the universal.
[161] This same Barrès is quoted as having said to a ‘Dreyfusist’ in
1898: ‘Why do you talk of justice and humanity to me! What do I care
for? A few pictures in Europe and a few cemeteries!’ Another of our
great political realists confessed one day to his fundamental necessity
to ‘enjoy’. Socrates long ago told Protagoras that the basis of his
doctrine was a thirst for sensation.
[162] It seems to me difficult to deny that pacifism, humanitarianism,
and altruism are _boring_. No doubt, art, science, and philosophy offer
sufficient opportunities for ‘amusement’ without one asking of it
doctrines which set the world on fire. But that is the view of a man
who is not wildly eager for sensation.
[163] The realists are not the only people to-day who find
opportunities for sensation in their political attitudes. It is certain
that the humanitarianism of Victor Hugo and Michelet is far from having
the pure intellectual resonance it had in Spinoza and Malebranche. (See
above, my distinction between humanitarianism and humanism.)
[164] ‘Peace it not the absence of war, but a virtue born from strength
of soul.’ (Spinoza.)
[165] Here is an example: ‘Universal peace will come about one day, not
because men will become better (one cannot hope for that) but because
a new order of things, new science, new economic needs, will impose a
state of peace on them, just as the very conditions of their existence
formerly placed and maintained them in a state of war.’ (Anatole
France, _Sur la Pierre blanche_.) Note the refusal, mentioned above, to
believe in any possible betterment of the human soul.
[166] This observation applied to nearly all anti-militarist literature
up to our own times. We have to come to Renan and Renouvier (at least
among writers not of the Church) to find authors who speak of war and
national passions with the seriousness and respect due to such dramas.
[167] I am not to say whether the claims of France after her victory
might have been _impolitic_, for the thinkers I am discussing here
only speak of what they consider their _immorality_. Notice that the
pacifism of the Church, at least among the great teachers, is not
at all inspired by sentimental considerations, but by pure moral
education. ‘What do we condemn in war?’ says Saint Augustin. ‘Is it
the fact that they kill men who have all one day to die? Only cowards,
not religious men, would bring this accusation against war. What we
condemn in war is the desire to do harm, an implacable soul, the fury
of reprisals, the passion for dominion.’ (This is taken up by Thomas
Aquinas in the _Summum_, 2, 2, xl, art. 1.)
[168] I consider that ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ may be said by
all whose activity is not directed to practical ends: the artist, the
metaphysician, the scientist _insofar as he finds satisfaction in the
practice of science and not in its results_. Many will tell me that
they and not the Christians are the true ‘clerks’, for the Christian
accepts the ideas of justice and charity only for the sake of his
salvation. No one will deny, however, that men, even Christians, exist,
who accept this idea with no practical end in view.
[169] Malebranche, _Méditations chrétiennes_ (ix, 19).
[170] See Babeau, _Le village sous l’ancien régime_, iv, iii; L.
Gregoire, _La Ligue en Bretagne_, chap, vi; Roupnel, _La Ville et
la Campagne au xvii siècle_, i, 1. ‘The peasants,’ says M. Roumier,
‘were only really converted where it was to their interests to be
so, and especially where the local landlords put their influence at
the service of the new religion, and where the Catholic clergy had
completely deserted the parishes. We must be careful not to consider as
Protestants all the “rustics” who took part in pillaging the abbeys and
castles during the civil war’ (_La Royaume de Catherine de Médicis_,
tome ii, page 294). M. Romier quotes the remark of a contemporary: ‘The
whole of the Low Countries scarcely knows what this new doctrine is.’
[171] ‘Le livre de raison de M. Nicolas Versoris’ (_Mémoires de la
Société de l’Histoire de Paris_, tome xii). The author, avocat au
Parlement de Paris, similarly gives two lines to events like the
Connétable de Bourbon’s treachery, and the signing of the treaty of
Madrid. The same attitude exists in the _Journal d’un Bourgeois de
Paris_, 1515-1536; the public misfortunes sketched by the author leave
him completely indifferent. He makes no comment on the disaster of
Pavia. Apropos the treaty of Madrid, ‘it is to be noted,’ writes a
contemporary, ‘that there were no bonfires or rejoicings when the news
of the peace was published, because no one understood anything about
it.’ (Lavisse, _Histoire de France_, v, 49.) Contemporaries mention the
indifference of the people of Paris to the Peace of Westphalia, the
battle of Rossbach, even the battles of Valmy and Navarino. ‘The affair
at Valmy made very little stir at first.’ (Kellerman.)
[172] Michelet relates that in his youth he questioned an old man on
the impressions left upon him by 1793, and the only answer he got was:
‘It was the bad paper year.’
[173] Admire the profundity of Machiavelli, when he advises his Prince:
‘Above everything, avoid taking your subjects’ property; _for men will
more easily forget the deaths of their fathers than the loss of their
patrimony_.’
[174] Inserted in the collection of studies entitled ‘L’Allemagne et
les Alliés devant la conscience chrétienne’. (Bloud et Gay, 1915.)
[175] M. Edmond Bloud quotes this remark of a German nationalist,
which might have been made on the French side of the Rhine: ‘The
Catholic world must be nationalized to re-Catholicize it.’ He adds
that in Germany it is common to hear ‘German Catholicism’ spoken of in
opposition to Roman Catholicism.
[176] And therefore it requires much more courage to do so now than in
the past.
[177] Nevertheless, Zola, Romain Rolland, and Einstein have drunk the
hemlock.
[178] When they allow themselves to be told, as Louis XVI was told by
Turgot: ‘Sire, your kingdom _is of this world_.’ There also exists ‘_a
betrayal of the laymen_’.
[179] Mgr Battifol’s writings support my argument so beautifully that I
hesitate to quote an author who plays so perfectly into my hands. For
example, he spends much time in proving that the spirit of Christianity
‘has resulted, without contradicting itself, in a doctrine of the
morality of war’.
[180] Here is a passage which, except for its violence, seems to me
to express the feelings of most modern laymen on the subject of the
patriotic loyalty of the priests: ‘The clergy of France is ardently
patriotic; it serves gallantly under fire; it absolves and glorifies
every action of the soldier; it regards the accusation of having
deserted military duty as infamous, and does it justice. It is not
for me to say whether it is in accord with the Gospels. We are simply
Frenchmen and patriots; we can only approve and admire the French
patriotic monks and priests. The French priest has no pardon for a
German, the German priest and pastor have no pardon for a Frenchman.
Mother-country first! Kill! Kill! In the name of the God of the
Christians, we absolve you, we glorify you for killing Christians!’
(Urbain Gohier, ‘La Vieille France,’ quoted by Grillot de Givry, _Le
Christ et la Patrie_, page 12.)
[181] This clearly shows in what sense Renouvier is an ‘individualist’.
[182] See his hymn to the mathematician Franz Woepfke.
[183] Jules Lemaître was explicitly this adversary.
[184] ‘For an empirical France,’ say Barrès and Bourget.
[185] ‘Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne,’ Cahiers de
la Quinzaine. See my book, _Sur le Succès du Bergsonisme_, page 158.
[186] The same thing is to be found in Lamartine when he says of Byron:
‘There is more true, imperishable poetry in the tent at Missolonghi
where he lies prostrate with fever, under arms, than in all his works.’
(_Commentaire de la 2e Meditation._) This is precisely the teaching
adopted by Barrès, Suarès, Péguy (the last preached it by his example,
however), which comes down to saying: ‘There is more poetry in a heroic
death than in all the activities of the mind.’ Note that this position
is by no means common to all the Romantics. Hugo, Vigny, Michelet, felt
all the poetry of action, but they never appear to think it superior to
the poetry of the lofty forms of intellectual life. Hugo never thought
of sacrificing Homer or Galilei to Napoleon, or even to Hoche--to take
a disinterested hero such as Lamartine praises in Byron.
[187] Note that Ronsard is the very type of the man ‘bent over books’.
[188] ‘Germany is the protector and the support of European
civilization’ (Lamprecht.) ‘After the war Germany will again take up
her historic task, which is to be the heart of Europe and to prepare
European humanity.’ (Wilhelm II, _Temps_, 14th September, 1915.)
[189] See Robert Dreyfus, _Souvenirs sur Marcel Proust_, page 336.
_Transcriber’s Notes_
This transcription is based on the English edition of Aldington’s
translation. Some corrections have been applied in consultation with
both the French original (‘La trahison des clercs’, B. Grasset, 1927)
and the American edition of the same translation (‘The treason of the
intellectuals’, William Morrow & Company, 1928). Here are the main
revisions.
• A text comparison with the American edition incorporated these
changes from that edition:
• page 28, footnote 28: ‘more idealistic passion than national[+ist]
passion’;
• page 44: ‘One wonders whether [+there is] a single modern
thinker’ (grammatically necessary);
• the fourth section, ‘Summary--Predictions’, is now correctly
numbered ‘IV’, not a duplicated ‘III’;
• The following changes were made with reference to the original
French:
• numerous instances of unbalanced quotation marks have been fixed;
• page 117: removed an unclosed parenthesis beginning ‘(those of’
in favor of parallel phrases with semi-colons, as in the original
French;
• page 173: added balanced em-dashes after ‘Apart from Erasmus’ as
in the original, to clarify sentence structure;
• page 176: ‘the chaos of the provincial assembles → assemblies’
(original: ‘le chaos des assemblées provinciales’);
• page 181, note 179: ‘with contradicting → without contradicting’
(‘a abouti sans se déjuger à une doctrine de la moralité de la
guerre’);
• A simple table of contents has been added.
• The book cover image accompanying some versions of this text is
original and placed in the public domain.
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