III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal — First: The ‘clerks’ have adopted political passions — Second: They bring their political passions into their activities as ‘clerks’.
‘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 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]
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.
Notes — Note A ( Page 1 ) — Note B ( Page 15 ) — Note C ( Page 19 ) — Note D ( Page 28 ) — Note E ( Page 33 ) — Note F ( Page 37 ) — Note G ( Page 53 ) — Note H ( Page 56 ) — Note I ( Page 62 ) — Note J ( Page 82 ) — Note K ( Page 91 ) — Note L ( Page 94 ) — Note M ( Page 95 ) — Note N ( Page 98 ) — Note O ( Page 118 ) — Note P ( Page 122 ) — Note Q ( Page 138 )
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.)
... 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,
10e 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.’
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.)
... 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.)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
... 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.)
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.
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.)