To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.
Reciprocal exchanges by which different sorts of environment exert influence on one another are no less vital than to be rooted in natural surroundings. But a given environment should not receive an outside influence as something additional to itself, but as a stimulant intensifying its own particular way of life. It should draw nourishment from outside contributions only after having digested them, and the human beings who compose it should receive such contributions only from its hands. When a really talented painter walks into a picture gallery, his own originality is thereby confirmed. The same thing should apply to the various communities throughout the world and the different social environments. [40]
Uprootedness occurs whenever there is a military conquest, and in this sense conquest is nearly always an evil. There is the minimum of uprootedness when the conquerors are migrants who settle down in the conquered country, intermarry with the inhabitants and take root themselves. Such was the case with the Hellenes in Greece, the Celts in Gaul and the Moors in Spain. But when the conqueror remains a stranger in the land of which he has taken possession, uprootedness becomes an almost mortal disease among the subdued population. It reaches its most acute stage when there are deportations on a massive scale, as in Europe under the German occupation, or along the upper loop of the Niger, or where there is any brutal suppression of all local traditions, as in the French possessions in the Pacific (if Gauguin and Alain Gerbault are to be believed).
Even without a military conquest, money-power and economic domination can so impose a foreign influence as actually to provoke this disease of uprootedness.
Finally, the social relations existing in any one country can be very dangerous factors in connexion with uprootedness. In all parts of our country at the present time — and setting aside the question of the conquest — there are two poisons at work spreading this disease. One of them is money. Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures.
UPROOTEDNESS IN THE TOWNS
There are social conditions in which an absolute and continuous dependence on money prevails — those of the wage-earning class, especially now that piece-work obliges each workman to have his attention continually taken up with the subject of his pay. It is in these social conditions that the disease of uprootedness is most acute. Bernanos [41] has said that our workmen are not, after all, immigrants like those of Mr. Ford. The major social difficulty of our age proceeds from the fact that in a certain sense they are like them. Although they have remained geographically stationary, they have been morally uprooted, banished and then reinstated, as it were on sufferance, in the form of industrial brawn. Unemployment is, of course, an uprootedness raised to the second power. They are unable to feel themselves at home whether it be in the factories, their own dwellings, the parties and trade-unions ostensibly created on their behalf, places of amusement, or in intellectual activities if they attempt to acquire some culture.
For the second factor making for uprootedness is education as it is understood nowadays. The Renaissance everywhere brought about a break between people of culture and the mass of the population; but while abstracting culture from national tradition, it did at least cause it to be steeped in Greek tradition. Since then, links with the national traditions have not been renewed, but Greece has been forgotten. The result has been a culture which has developed in a very restricted medium, removed from the world, in a stove-pipe atmosphere — a culture very strongly directed towards and influenced by technical science, very strongly tinged with pragmatism, extremely broken up by specialization, entirely deprived both of contact with this world and, at the same time, of any window opening on to the world beyond.
Nowadays a man can belong to so-called cultured circles without, on the one hand, having any sort of conception about human destiny or, on the other hand, being aware, for example, that all the constellations are not visible at all seasons of the year. A lot of people think that a little peasant boy of the present day who goes to primary school knows more than Pythagoras did, simply because he can repeat parrot-wise that the earth moves round the sun. In actual fact, he no longer looks up at the heavens. This sun about which they talk to him in class [42] hasn’t, for him, the slightest connexion with the one he can see. He is severed from the universe surrounding him, just as little Polynesians are severed from their past by being forced to repeat: ‘Our ancestors, the Gauls, had fair hair.’
What is called today educating the masses, is taking this modern culture, evolved in such a closed, unwholesome atmosphere, and one so indifferent to the truth, removing whatever it may still contain of intrinsic merit — an operation known as popularization — and shoveling the residue as it stands into the minds of the unfortunate individuals desirous of learning, in the same way as you feed birds with a stick.
Moreover, the desire to learn for the sake of learning, the desire for truth, has become very rare. The prestige of culture has become almost exclusively a social one, as much for the peasant who dreams of having a schoolteacher son, or the schoolteacher who dreams of having a son at the Ecole Normale Superieure as for the society people who fawn upon savants and well-known writers.
The youth of our schools are as much obsessed by their examinations as our workmen engaged in piece-work are by their pay packets. There is something woefully wrong with the health of a social system, when a peasant tills the soil with the feeling that, if he is a peasant, it is because he wasn’t intelligent enough to become a schoolteacher.
The mixture of confused and more or less false ideas known under the name of Marxism, a mixture to which, since Marx’s day, it is, generally speaking, only very ordinary middle-class intellectuals who have contributed, is also for the working-class a completely outlandish [43] doctrine, which they are incapable of assimilating, and which is, besides, devoid of any nutritive value, for it has been emptied of nearly all the truth contained in Marx’s writings. From time to time, a scientific presentation for popular consumption is added. The effect of all this can only be to bring about the most intense uprootedness among the working-class.
Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed, for it is a self-propagating one. For people who are really uprooted there remain only two possible sorts of behavior: either to fall into a spiritual lethargy resembling death, like the majority of the slaves in the days of the Roman Empire, or to hurl themselves into some form of activity necessarily designed to uproot, often by the most violent methods, those who are not yet uprooted, or only partly so.
The Romans were a handful of fugitives who banded themselves together artificially to form a city, and deprived the Mediterranean peoples of their individual manner of life, their country, traditions, past history to such an extent that posterity has taken them, at their own valuation, for the founders of civilization in these conquered territories. The Hebrews were escaped slaves, and they either exterminated or reduced to servitude all the peoples of Palestine. The Germans, at the time Hitler assumed command over them, were really — as he was never tired of repeating — a nation of proletarians, that is to say, uprooted individuals. The humiliation of 1918, inflation, over-industrialization and above all the extreme gravity of the unemployment crisis had infected them with the moral disease to the acute point where irresponsibility takes possession. The Spaniards and Englishmen who, from the sixteenth century onwards, massacred or enslaved colored peoples, were adventurers almost without any contact with the fundamental life of their own respective countries. The same may be said in regard to a part of the French Empire, which moreover was built up at a time when the French tradition was suffering from a [44] decline. Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever is rooted himself doesn’t uproot others.
Under the same name of revolution, and often using identical slogans and subjects for propaganda, lie concealed two conceptions entirely opposed to one another. One consists in transforming society in such a way that the working-class may be given roots in it; while the other consists in spreading to the whole of society the disease of uprootedness which has been inflicted on the working-class. It must not be said or supposed that the second operation can ever form a prelude to the first; that is false. They are two opposite roads which do not meet.
The second conception is nowadays much more frequently met with than the first, both among militants and among the mass of the workers. It is obvious that it tends more and more to gain ground in proportion as uprootedness continues and increases its ravages. It can easily be realized that, from one day to another, the harm may become irreparable.
On the conservative side, a similar ambiguity prevails. A few really want the workers to become rooted again; only this desire of theirs is accompanied by imaginary pictures most of which, instead of having reference to the future, are borrowed from a past which is, moreover, partly fictitious. The rest want purely and simply to see maintained or reinforced that category of human material to which the proletariat has been reduced.
Thus those who really desire the good — and they are not very numerous — weaken their position still further by distributing themselves among two hostile camps with which they have nothing in common.
The sudden collapse of France in June 1940, which surprised every one all over the world, simply showed to what extent the country was uprooted. A tree whose roots are almost entirely eaten away falls at the first blow. If France offered a spectacle more painful than that of any other European country, it is because modern civilization with all its toxins was in a more advanced stage there than [45] elsewhere, with the exception of Germany. But in Germany, uprootedness had taken on an aggressive form, whereas in France it was characterized by inertia and stupor. The difference is due to more or less hidden causes, some of which could no doubt be discovered were one to undertake the necessary search. On the other hand, the country which in face of the first wave of German terror behaved far and away the best, was the one where tradition is strongest and most carefully nurtured, that is to say, England.
In France, the uprootedness characterizing the proletariat had reduced vast numbers of workers to a state of apathetic stupor, and caused others to feel themselves at war with society. The same money which had brutally cut away the roots of the working-class, had at the same time gnawed at those of the middle-classes, for wealth is cosmopolitan; any feeble attachment to the country which these might still retain was very much outweighed, especially since 1936, by fear and hatred of the workers. Even the peasants had almost become uprooted since the 1914 war, demoralized by the role of cannon fodder they had played in it, by money which occupied an increasingly important place in their lives, and by far too frequent a contact with the corruption prevailing in the cities. As for intelligence, it was almost extinct.
This general malady throughout the country took the form of a sort of drowsiness, which alone prevented civil war from breaking out. France loathed the war which threatened to prevent her from continuing her sleep. Half stunned by the terrible blow of May and June 1940, she threw herself into the arms of Pétain in order to be able to continue to sleep with a semblance of security. Since then, enemy oppression has turned this sleep into such a grievous nightmare that she begins to toss about, anxiously awaiting outside help to come and waken her.
Under the effects of war, the disease of uprootedness has taken on such a sharp increase throughout Europe as to leave one legitimately appalled. The only thing which [46] seems to offer any hope is this: that suffering will have to a certain extent restored to life memories which were lately almost dead, as in France those of 1789.
As for the Oriental countries, to which during the last few centuries, but especially in the last fifty years, the white man has carried the disease of uprootedness from which they are suffering, Japan gives ample proof of the intensity reached there by the active form of this disease. Indo-China offers an example of its passive form. India, where a living tradition still persists, has been sufficiently contaminated for even those who speak publicly in the name of this tradition to dream nevertheless of building in their land a nation according to the modern Western type. China remains very mysterious. Russia, which is, as always, half-European, half-Oriental, just as much so; for one cannot be sure whether the vigor that is covering her with glory proceeds, as in the case of the Germans, from uprootedness of an active nature, such as the history of the past twenty-five years would first lead one to expect, or whether it is above all a manifestation of the deep-flowing life of the people, going right back to the remotest times, and having remained subterraneously almost intact.
As for the American continent, since its population has for several centuries been founded above all on immigration, the dominating influence which it will probably exercise greatly increases the danger.
In this almost desperate situation, all we can look to for encouragement here below is in those historical atolls of the living past left upon the surface of the earth. Not that we should approve the fuss started by Mussolini over the Roman Empire, or try to make use of Louis XIV for the same sort of purpose. Conquests are not of life, they are of death at the very moment they take place. It is the distillations from the living past which should be jealously preserved, everywhere, whether it be in Paris or Tahiti, for there are not too many such on the entire globe.
It would be useless to turn one’s back on the past in order simply to concentrate on the future. It is a [47] dangerous illusion to believe that such a thing is even possible. The opposition of future to past or past to future is absurd. The future brings us nothing, gives us nothing; it is we who in order to build it have to give it everything, our very life. But to be able to give, one has to possess; and we possess no other life, no other living sap, than the treasures stored up from the past and digested, assimilated and created afresh by us. Of all the human soul’s needs, none is more vital than this one of the past.
Love of the past has nothing to do with any reactionary political attitude. Like all human activities, the revolution draws all its vigor from a tradition. Marx felt this so strongly that he was determined to make this tradition go back to the remotest times by making class-war the one and only principle by which to explain history.
Up to the very beginning of this century, few things in Europe were closer to the Middle Ages than French trade-unionism, sole reflected ray, with us, of the guild spirit. The feeble remains of this trade-unionism are among the number of embers upon which it is most urgent that we should blow.
For several centuries now, men of the white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad. If in certain respects there has been, nevertheless, real progress during this period, it is not because of this frenzy, but in spite of it, under the impulse of what little of the past remained alive.
The past once destroyed never returns. The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes. Today the preservation of what little of it remains ought to become almost an obsession. We must put an end to the terrible uprootedness which European colonial methods always produce, even under their least cruel aspects. We must abstain, once victory is ours, from punishing the conquered enemy by uprooting him still further; seeing that it is neither possible nor desirable to exterminate him, to aggravate his lunacy would be to show oneself more of a lunatic than he. We must also keep, above all, well to [48] the fore in any political, legal or technical innovations likely to have social repercussions, some arrangement whereby human beings may once more be able to recover their roots.
This doesn’t mean they should be fenced in. On the contrary, never was plenty of fresh air more indispensable. Rooting in and the multiplying of contacts are complementary to one another. For instance, if, wherever technical conditions permit — and as the result of a slight effort in this direction they could easily be made to do so — workmen were dispersed, each one owning his house, a bit of garden and a machine; and if, on the other hand, the Tour de France of former days were revived for the benefit of the young, if necessary on an international scale; if workmen were frequently given the opportunity of filling in periods of attendance at the assembly shops where the parts they make are combined with all the others, or of going off to help train apprentices; with, in addition, some satisfactory safeguard in the matter of wages — then the wretchedness of the proletarian lot would disappear.
We shall never put an end to the proletarian lot by passing laws, whether these be concerned with the nationalization of key industries, the abolition of private property, powers granted to the trade-unions to negotiate collective agreements, representation by factory delegates or the control of engagement. All the measures that are proposed, be they given a revolutionary or a reformist label, are purely legal, and it is not on a legal plane that [49] working-class distress is situated, nor the remedy for this distress. Marx would perfectly well have understood this if he had been intellectually honest with himself, for it is a truth which bursts forth in the best pages of his Capital.
It is no use attempting to discover in the demands put forward by the workers the cure for their misfortune. Plunged in misfortune body and soul, including the imagination, how should they be able to imagine anything which didn’t bear misfortune’s mark? If they make a violent effort to extricate themselves therefrom, they fall into apocalyptic reverie, or seek compensation in a working-class imperialism which is no more to be encouraged than a national imperialism.
What one can look out for in their demands is the sign and token of their sufferings. Now, all, or nearly all, of these demands express the suffering caused by uprootedness. If they want control of engagement and nationalization, it is because they are obsessed by the fear of total uprootedness — that is, of unemployment. If they want the abolition of private property, it is because they have had enough of being admitted into wherever it is they work as immigrants allowed to enter on sufferance. This was also the psychological mainspring behind the workers’ occupation of the factories in June 1936. For some days they experienced a pure, unmixed joy at finding themselves at home there where they spent their working- day; the joy of a child who doesn’t want to think of tomorrow. Nobody could reasonably expect that tomorrow was going to be a particularly happy one.
The French working-class movement which came out of the Revolution was essentially a cry, less one of revolt than one of protest, in face of the pitiless hardship of the lot reserved for all the oppressed. Considering what can be expected from any kind of collective movement, this one certainly contained a relatively very high degree of purity of motive. It came to an end in 1914; ever since, there have been only echoes of it, the toxins generated by society in general having even corrupted the sense of misfortune. [50] We must endeavor to recover its tradition; but nobody could wish to see it revived. However beautiful the sound of a cry of woe may be, one cannot wish to hear it again; it is more human to wish to cure the woe.
The actual list of workmen’s woes supplies us with a list of the things that need changing. First of all, we must do away with the shock experienced by a lad who at twelve or thirteen leaves school and enters a factory. There are some workmen who could feel happy enough, had this shock not left behind it an ever open wound; but they don’t realize themselves that their suffering comes to them from the past. The child while at school, whether a good or a bad pupil, was a being whose existence was recognized, whose development was a matter of concern, whose best motives were appealed to. From one day to the next, he finds himself an extra cog in a machine, rather less than a thing, and nobody cares any more whether he obeys from the lowest motives or not, provided he obeys. The majority of workmen have at any rate at this stage of their lives experienced the sensation of no longer existing, accompanied by a sort of inner vertigo, such as intellectuals or bourgeois, even in their greatest sufferings, have very rarely had the opportunity of knowing. This first shock, received at so early an age, often leaves an indelible mark. It can rule out all love of work once and for all.
We must change the system concerning concentration of attention during working hours, the type of stimulants which make for the overcoming of laziness or exhaustion — and which at present are merely fear and extra pay — the type of obedience necessary, the far too small amount of initiative, skill and thought demanded of workmen, their present exclusion from any imaginative share in the work of the enterprise as a whole, their sometimes total ignorance of the value, social utility and destination of the things they manufacture, and the complete divorce between working life and family life. The list could well be extended. [51]
Apart from the desire for reforms, three sorts of factors come into play in the process of production: technical, economic and military ones. Nowadays, the importance of the military factors in production corresponds to that of production itself in the conduct of war; in other words, it is very considerable. From the military point of view, the crowding together of thousands of workmen into vast industrial prisons where the really qualified ones form a tiny minority is doubly absurd. Modern military conditions require, first, that industrial production should be dispersed; secondly, that the majority of workmen in peacetime should consist of trained professionals, under whose orders can be placed immediately, in an international crisis or during a war, a host of women, boys and old men, so as to increase at once the volume of production. Nothing helped so much to paralyze British war production for so long as the lack of qualified workmen. But since it is impossible to have highly qualified professionals performing the work of machine-minders, this latter function must be done away with, save in time of war. It so rarely happens that military requirements are in accordance, and not in contradiction, with the best human aspirations, that advantage ought to be taken of the fact. From the technical point of view, the relative ease with which energy can be transmitted in the form of electricity certainly makes a high degree of decentralization possible. As for the machines, they are not yet right for a transformation in the system of production; but the examples provided by adjustable automatic machines already in use would no doubt make it possible to effect such a transformation by dint of an effort, if the effort could only be made. Speaking in general terms, a reform of an infinitely greater social importance than all the measures arrayed under the title of Socialism would be a transformation in the very conception of technical research. So far, no one [52] has ever imagined that an engineer occupied in technical research on new types of machinery could have anything other than the following double objective in view: first, to increase the profits of the firm which has ordered the research, and secondly, to serve the interests of the consumer. For in such a case, when we talk about the interests of production, we mean producing more and at a cheaper rate; that is to say, these interests are really identical with those of the consumer. Thus, these two words are constantly being used the one for the other.
As for the workmen who will be spending their energies on this machine, nobody thinks twice about them. Nobody even thinks it possible to think about them. The most that ever happens is that from time to time some vague security apparatus is provided, although, in fact, severed fingers and factory stairs daily splashed with fresh human blood are such a common feature.
But this feeble show of interest is the only one. Not only does nobody consider the moral well-being of the workmen, which would demand too great an effort of the imagination; but nobody even considers the possibility of not injuring them in the flesh. Otherwise one might perhaps have found something else for the mines than that appalling automatic drill worked by compressed air, which sends an uninterrupted series of shocks for eight hours through the body of the man manipulating it.
No one thinks either of asking himself whether some new type of machine, by making capital less fluid and production more rigid, will not aggravate the general danger of unemployment.
What is the use of workmen obtaining as a result of their struggles an increase in wages and a relaxation of discipline, if meanwhile engineers in a few research departments invent, without the slightest evil intent, machines which reduce their souls and bodies to a state of exhaustion, or aggravate their economic difficulties? What use can the partial or total nationalization of economic production be to them, if the spirit of these research [51] departments hasn’t changed? And so far, as far as one can tell, it hasn’t changed in places where nationalization has been introduced. Even Soviet propaganda has never claimed that Russia had discovered a radically new type of machine, worthy of being handled by an all-powerful proletariat.
And yet, if there is one conviction which stands out with irresistible force in the works of Marx, it is this one: that any change in the relationship between the classes must remain a pure illusion, if it be not accompanied by a transformation in technical processes, expressing itself in entirely new types of machinery.
From the workman’s point of view, a machine needs to possess three qualities. First, it should be able to be worked without exhausting the muscles, or the nerves, or any organ whatever — and also without cutting or lacerating the flesh, save under very exceptional circumstances.
Secondly, in relation to the general danger of unemployment, the productive apparatus as a whole should be as flexible as possible, so as to be able to follow the fluctuations in demand. Consequently, the same machine ought to serve a variety of purposes, the more the better, and even to a certain extent indeterminate ones. This also forms a military requirement, for the greater ease in transferring from a peacetime to a wartime footing. Lastly, it is a factor which makes for happiness during working-hours, for it is thus possible to avoid that monotony so much feared by workmen because of the boredom and disgust it engenders.
Thirdly, it should normally be in keeping with the work of which a fully qualified man is capable. This again is a military necessity, and it is, furthermore, indispensable to the dignity and moral well-being of the workmen. A working-class composed almost entirely of competent professionals is not a proletariat.
A considerable development of the adjustable automatic machine, serving a variety of purposes, would go far to [54] satisfy these needs. The first models of this type are already in existence, and it is certain that in this direction lie very great possibilities. Such machines make the work of a machine-minder obsolete. In a huge concern like Renault, few of the workmen look happy as they stand at work; amongst these few privileged beings are those in charge of automatic turrets with movable cam adjustment.
But what is essential is the idea itself of posing in technical terms problems concerning the effect of machines upon the moral well-being of the workmen. Once posed, the technicians have only to resolve them; just as they have resolved countless others. All that is necessary is that they should want to do so. For this reason, the places where new machinery is devised should no longer fall entirely within the network of capitalist interests. It would be natural for the State to exercise some control over them by means of grants. And why shouldn’t the workers’ organizations do the same by giving bonuses? — without mentioning other means of bringing influence and pressure to bear. If the workers’ unions could become really alive, they would be in perpetual contact with the research departments where new technical processes were being studied. Such a contact could be prepared in advance by fomenting a sympathetic atmosphere towards workmen in engineering schools.
Up to now, technicians have never had anything else in mind than the requirements of manufacture. If they were to start having always present before them the needs of those who do the manufacturing, the whole technique of production would be slowly transformed.
This ought to become a part of the instruction given in engineering schools and technical schools generally — but a part with some real substance to it.
There would no doubt be everything to be gained in putting in hand right away investigations concerning this type of problem.
The subject of such investigations would be easy enough to define. A pope once said: ‘Material comes out of the [55] factory ennobled, the workers come out of it debased.’ Marx made exactly the same observation in still more vigorous terms. What is wanted is that all those who endeavor to carry out technical improvements should have continually present in their minds the conviction that among all the deficiencies of all kinds it is possible to detect in the present state of manufacturing, the one for which it is by far the most indispensably urgent to find a remedy is this one: that nothing must be done to make it worse; that everything must be done to make it less. This conception should henceforth form part of the sense of professional obligation, the sense of professional honor, with whosoever holds a responsible position in industry. One of the principal tasks before the workmen’s trade- unions, if they were capable of carrying it out, would be to make this conception sink deep into the universal consciousness.
If the majority of workmen were highly qualified professionals, fairly frequently called upon to show inventiveness and initiative, each responsible for his production and machine, the present discipline in regard to work would no longer serve any useful purpose. Some men could work at home; others in small workshops, which could very often be organized on a cooperative basis. At present, the rule of authority is exercised in an even more intolerable fashion in small factories than in large ones; but that is because they try to imitate the large ones. Such workshops would not be small factories, they would be industrial organisms of a new kind, in which a new spirit could blow; though small, they would be bound together by organic ties strong enough to enable them to form as a whole a large concern. There is about large concerns, in spite of all their defects, a special sort of poetry, and one for which workmen have nowadays acquired a taste.
Payment by the piece would no longer hold any disadvantages, once the herding of the workers into prison- like structures had been abolished. It would no longer [56] involve that obsession with speed at all costs. It would constitute the normal mode of remuneration for work freely carried out. Nor would obedience be any longer a matter of uninterrupted submissiveness. A workman or a group of workmen could have a certain number of orders to fulfill within a given time, and be left with a completely free hand in the actual layout of the work. It would be a different thing altogether from knowing that one had to go on repeating indefinitely the same movement, in obedience to an order, until the precise second when a new command came to impose a different movement for an equally unknown length of time. There is a certain relation to time which suits inert matter, and another sort of relation which suits thinking beings. It is a mistake to confuse the two.
Whether on a co-operative basis or not, these little workshops would at any rate not be like prisons. A workman would be able now and again to show his wife where he works and his machine, as they were all so happy to do in June 1936, taking advantage of the occupation of the factories. The children would come along, after school, to join their father and learn how to work, at an age when work is by far the most exciting of all games. Thus, later on, when they came to start their apprenticeship, they would already be almost qualified in one trade, and could, according to their choice, perfect themselves in that particular one or acquire a second one. Work would be lit up by poetry for the rest of their lives by these wonders experienced in infancy, instead of wearing throughout life the gloomy aspect of a nightmare, simply because of the shock received on initiation.
If, even in the midst of the present demoralization, the peasants have far less need than the workmen of being continually goaded to activity by stimulants, the reason lies perhaps in this difference. A child can already find himself unhappy on a farm at the age of nine or ten; but nearly always there will have been a time when work was for him a marvelous game, reserved for the grown-ups. [57]
If workmen, in their majority, could become reasonably happy, several seemingly essential and burning problems would not only be resolved but actually abolished. Without their having been resolved, people would forget that they had ever existed. Distress is a culture broth for false problems. It creates obsessions. The way to appease them is not to provide what they insist upon, but to bring about the disappearance of the distress. If a man is thirsty because of a wound in the stomach, drink is not what he requires, but to have his wound cured.
Unfortunately it is only the future of the young which can be changed. A great effort will have to be made in order to train working-class youth, and particularly in connexion with apprenticeship. The State will be obliged to take over the responsibility, because there is no other social entity capable of doing so.
Nothing demonstrates more clearly the essential failure of the capitalist class than the negligence shown by employers in the matter of apprenticeship. It is the sort which in Russia is termed criminal negligence. It would be impossible to insist too much on this point, to bring too much before the public notice this simple truth, easily grasped, incontrovertible. Employers have, during the past twenty or thirty years, forgotten to think about the training of sound professional workmen. The lack of qualified workmen contributed as much as any other single factor to the country’s downfall. Even in 1934 and 1935, when the unemployment crisis had reached its height, when production was at dead-point, engineering and aviation works were looking for good professional workmen and couldn’t find them. The workmen complained that the tests were too difficult; but it was they who hadn’t received the necessary training so as to be able to carry out the tests. How, under such conditions, would it have been possible for us to have had sufficient arms? But, besides, even without a war, the lack of professionally trained men, becoming more serious as the years went by, [58] was bound to end up by rendering economic life itself impossible.
Once and for all, the whole country and the interested parties themselves must be told that the employers showed themselves, in fact, incapable of shouldering the responsibilities which the capitalist system imposes on them. They have a function to fill, but it is not that one, for experience has shown that that one is too heavy and too vast for them. Once that has been thoroughly understood, we shall no longer be afraid of them, and they, for their part, will cease to oppose necessary reforms; they will stay within the modest limits of their natural function. That is their only chance of survival. It is because people are afraid of them that they so often think of getting rid of them.
They would say a workman didn’t know how to look ahead if they caught sight of him taking an aperitif; but their own common sense didn’t extend to the point of looking far enough ahead to see that if no apprentices were trained, in twenty years’ time there would no longer be any workmen, at least any deserving the name. Seemingly they are incapable of looking more than two or three years ahead. Doubtless, too, they were secretly inclined to prefer to have in their factories a drove of unfortunates, rootless individuals without the least claim to any sort of consideration. They didn’t know that, though the submissiveness of slaves is greater than that of free men, their revolt is also a far more terrible one. They have had a certain experience of this, but without understanding what it was all about.
The lack of interest displayed by the workers’ trade- unions in this matter of apprenticeship is just as scandalous from another point of view. They hadn’t to concern themselves with questions of future production; but since their only title to existence lay in the defense of justice, they ought to have been moved to pity by the moral distress of the youngsters. In actual fact, the really wretched part of the factory population — the youths, [58] women, immigrant workers, whether foreign or colonial — was abandoned to its wretchedness. The lump sum of all their sufferings counted for far less in trade-union circles than the problem of salary increases for categories of workmen already amply paid.
Nothing illustrates more clearly how difficult it is for any collective movement to be really set in the way of justice, and for the unfortunate to be really protected. They are unable to protect themselves, because they are prevented by misfortune; and they are not protected from the outside, because it is the tendency of human nature not to pay any attention to those in misfortune.
The J.O.C. alone has concerned itself with the distress among youthful workers, the existence of such an organization being perhaps the only sure sign that Christianity is not dead in us.
Just as the capitalists have betrayed their calling by criminally neglecting not only the interests of the people, not only those of the nation, but even their own; so the workers’ trade-unions have betrayed theirs by neglecting to protect the wretched ones among their ranks, in order to turn their attention to the defense of special interests. It is just as well that this should be known, too, in case the day should ever come when they found themselves in the position and under the temptation to commit abuses of power. Putting the curb on the trade-unions, transformed into single, compulsory organizations, was the natural and inevitable outcome of this change of spirit. In reality, the Vichy Government’s action in this matter has been negligible. The C.G.T. has not suffered rape at its hands. For some time now, the state of the latter has not been such as to make anything of the kind any longer possible. [60]
The State is not particularly well qualified to take over the defense of the unfortunate. It is even well-nigh incapable of doing so, unless obliged to by some clear and urgent necessity in the public interest, and by a movement of opinion.
As far as the training of working-class youth is concerned, such a necessity in the public interest could not be clearer or more urgent. As for the movement of opinion, it must be created, and a beginning made now, by using the nuclei of genuine trade-union bodies, the J.O.C., research groups and youth movements, even official ones.
In Russia, the Bolsheviks have roused the enthusiasm of their people by proposing to them the building up of a vast industry. Couldn’t we likewise rouse our own people’s enthusiasm by proposing to them the building up of an industrial population of a new type? Such an objective would be well in accord with the French genius.
The training of an industrial youth should go beyond a purely professional training. It should, of course, admit of an education, like the training of any kind of youth; and for that reason it is desirable that the apprenticeship should not be done in the schools, where it is always badly done, but should be bathed right away in an atmosphere of production itself. At the same time, it cannot be allowed to be carried out in factories either. The subject requires the display of some inventiveness. Something is needed which combines the advantages of a training school, those of [61] apprenticeship in a factory, those of a chantier de jeunesse on the present model, and many more besides.
But the training of an industrial youth, especially in a country like France, involves also access to a general education, a participation in an intellectual culture. They must be made to feel at home, too, in the world of thought.
What form is this participation to take? And what is this culture to be? That is a dispute which has been going on for a long time. At one time, in certain circles, people used to talk a lot about working-class culture. Others used to say there was no such thing as working-class or non- working-class culture, but just plain culture. The effect of the latter observation has been, on the whole, to cause the same treatment to be meted out to the most intelligent workmen and the ones most anxious to learn as is reserved for semi-imbecile boys in a lycee. Things have sometimes turned out somewhat better than that; but, by and large, that represents accurately enough the principle of vulgarization as it is understood at the present time. The term is as atrocious as the thing itself. When we have something reasonably satisfactory to denote, we shall have to think of another term.
Certainly, truth is one, but error is manifold; and in every culture, save in the case of the perfect one, which for Man can only constitute an extreme case, there is a mixture of truth and error. If our culture were close to perfection, it would be situated above the social classes. But since it is a mediocre culture, it is to a large extent one for middle-class intellectuals, and more especially, for some time now, one for intellectual government employees. [62]
If one wanted to pursue the analysis in this direction, one would find that in some of Marx’s ideas there is far more of truth than appears at first sight; but we need not expect Marxists themselves ever to go in for such an analysis; for they would first of all have to look at themselves in a mirror, which would be too painful an operation, and one for which the specifically Christian virtues alone are able to supply the necessary courage.
What makes it so difficult for our culture to be communicated to the people is not that it is too high, but that it is too low. We apply a strange remedy, indeed, by lowering it still further before distributing it to them in little doses.
There are two obstacles which make the people’s access to culture a difficult matter. One is the lack of time and energy. The people have little leisure to devote to intellectual effort; and fatigue sets a limit to the intensity of such effort.
That particular obstacle is quite unimportant. At least, it would be so, if we didn’t make the mistake of attributing importance to it. Truth lights up the soul in proportion to its purity, not in any sense to its quantity. It isn’t the quantity of metal which matters, but the degree of alloy. In this respect, a little pure gold is worth a lot of pure gold. A little pure truth is worth as much as a lot of pure truth. Similarly, one perfect Greek statue contains as much beauty as two perfect Greek statues.
Niobe‘s sin consisted in disregarding the fact that quantity has nothing to do with virtue, and she was punished for it by the death of her children. We commit the same sin every day, and are punished for it in the same way.
If a workman, in the course of a year’s eager and persevering efforts, manages to learn a few geometrical theorems, as much truth will have entered into his soul as in that of a student who, during the same period, has shown a corresponding ardour in assimilating a portion of higher mathematics. [63]
It is true that such a thing is scarcely believable, and would perhaps not be easy to prove. But for Christians at least it should be an article of faith, if they were to remind themselves that truth is amongst the number of pure blessings which the Gospel compares to bread, and that whoever asks for bread isn’t given a stone.
Material obstacles — want of leisure, fatigue, lack of aptitude, sickness, physical pain — hinder the acquisition of the inferior or more ordinary elements of culture, not that of the most precious treasures it contains.
The second obstacle to working-class culture is that to the workman’s social condition, as to any other kind, there corresponds a certain particular disposition of feeling. Consequently, there is something outlandish about what has been elaborated by other people and for other people.
The cure for that consists in an effort of translation; not of popularization, but of translation, which is a very different matter.
It isn’t a question of taking truths — of already far too poor a quality — contained in the culture of the intellectuals, and then degrading them, mutilating them and destroying all their flavor; but simply of expressing them, in all their fullness, in a language which, to use Pascal’s expression, makes them perceptible to the heart, for the benefit of people whose feelings have been shaped by working-class conditions.
The art of transposing truths is one of the most essential and the least known. What makes it difficult is that, in order to practice it, one has to have placed oneself at the center of a truth and possessed it in all its nakedness, behind the particular form in which it happens to have found expression.
Furthermore, transposition is a criterion of truth. A truth which cannot be transposed isn’t a truth; in the same way that what doesn’t change in appearance according to the point of view isn’t a real object, but a deceptive [64] representation of such. In the mind, too, there is three- dimensional space.
The search for modes of transposition suitable for transmitting culture to the people would be very much more salutary still for culture than for the people. It would constitute an extremely precious stimulant for the former, which would in this way emerge from the appallingly stuffy atmosphere in which it is confined, and cease being merely something of interest to specialists. For that is all it is at present — a thing for specialists, from top to bottom, only more degraded the nearer you approach the bottom. Just as the workmen are treated as though they were rather stupid secondary schoolboys, so the secondary schoolboys are treated as though they were extremely tired students, and the students as though they were professional teachers suffering from amnesia and requiring to be reeducated. Culture — as we know it — is an instrument manipulated by teachers for manufacturing more teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
Amidst all the present forms of the uprooting malady, the uprooting of culture is not the least alarming. The first consequence of this malady, equally affecting all spheres, is generally that, relations being cut, each thing is looked upon as an end in itself. Uprooting breeds idolatry.
To take but one example of the deformation of our culture. The concern — a perfectly legitimate one — to preserve for geometrical reasoning its character of necessity, causes geometry to be presented to lycee boys as something without any relation at all to the outside world. The only interest they can take in it is as in some game, or else in order to get good marks. How could they be expected to see any truth in it?
The majority of them will always remain ignorant of the fact that nearly all our actions, the simple ones as well as the judiciously combined ones, are applications of geometrical principles; that the universe we inhabit is a network of geometrical relations, and that it is to [65] geometrical necessity that we are in fact bound, as creatures enclosed in space and time. This geometrical necessity is presented to them in such a way that it appears arbitrary. Could anything be more absurd than an arbitrary necessity? By definition, necessity is something which is imposed.
On the other hand, when it is sought to popularize geometry and relate it to experience, the demonstrations are omitted. All that remains then is a few formulas totally devoid of interest. Geometry has then lost its savor, its very essence. For its essence lies in being a branch of study devoted to the subject of necessity — that same necessity which is sovereign in this material world.
Both these deformations could be easily avoided. There is no need to choose between demonstration and experience. It is as easy to demonstrate with some wood or iron as it is with a piece of chalk.
There is quite a simple way in which geometrical necessity could be introduced into training-schools, by associating theoretical study and the workshop. One would say to the children: ‘Here are a certain number of tasks to be carried out (constructing objects fulfilling such and such requirements). Some of them are possible, others impossible. Carry out the ones that are possible, and as regards the ones you don’t carry out, you must be able to force me to admit that they are impossible.’ Through this crack, the whole of geometry can be made to pass into the sphere of practical work. Execution is a sufficient empirical proof of the possible; but as for the impossible, there is no empirical proof, and a demonstration is necessary. The impossible is necessity in its concrete shape.
As for the rest of Science, everything that belongs to standard Science — one cannot make Einstein and the quantum theory a part of working-class culture — is derived principally from an analogical method, consisting in transporting into the realm of nature the relations which govern human labor. Consequently, it is far more [66] a natural concern of the workers, if one knows how to present it to them properly, than it is of secondary schoolboys.
This is even truer in the case of that branch of culture which comes under the title of ‘Letters’. For the subject dealt with is always the human condition, and it is the people which has the truest, most direct experience of what this human condition is.
On the whole, and saving exceptions, second-class works and below are most suitable for the elite, and absolutely first-class works most suitable for the people.
For example, what an intensity of understanding could spring up from contact between the people and Greek poetry, the almost unique theme of which is misfortune! Only, one would have to know how to translate and present it. A workman, for instance, who bears the anguish of unemployment deep in the very marrow of his bones, would understand the feelings of Philoctetes when his bow is taken away from him, and the despair with which he stares at his powerless hands. He would also understand that Electra is hungry, which a bourgeois, except just at present, is absolutely incapable of understanding — including the publishers of the Bude Library.
There is a third obstacle to working-class culture; that is slavery. The mind is essentially free and sovereign when it is really and truly exercised. To be free and sovereign, as a thinking being, for one hour or two, and a slave for the rest of the day, is such an agonizing spiritual quartering that it is almost impossible not to renounce, so as to escape it, the highest forms of thought. [67]
If effective reforms were to be introduced, this obstacle would gradually disappear. Nay more, the memory of the recent state of slavery and the remains of it in process of disappearing would act as a powerful stimulant to the mind during the period of liberation.
A condition of any working-class culture is the mingling of what are called ‘intellectuals’ — an awful name, but at present they scarcely deserve a better one — with the workers. It is difficult to make something real out of such a mingling. However, the present situation provides an opportunity. Large numbers of young intellectuals have been driven into slavery to work in the factories and fields of Germany. Others have mixed with young workmen in the comps de compagnons. But it is, above all, the former who have had a vital experience. Many have doubtless succumbed to it, or at any rate been too physically and spiritually weakened by it. Still, there may be some who will emerge having really profited therefrom.
This extremely valuable experience runs the risk of being wasted, due to the almost irresistible temptation to forget humiliation and misfortune as soon as one has left them behind. Now, straightaway, those among such prisoners who have returned should be approached and asked to keep up their contacts with the workers which had been begun by force, think over for themselves what this recent experience has meant, with the idea of effecting a rapprochement between culture and the people, thereby giving culture a new direction.
The trade-union Resistance organizations could at the present time be the means of effecting such a rapprochement. But, generally speaking, if the things of the mind are to play their proper part in the workers [68] unions, the latter will have to have other contacts with the intellectual than those merely consisting in grouping these together in the C.G.T. in professional organizations for the defense of their own material interests. That was the height of absurdity.
A natural relationship would be one whereby a union welcomed as honorary members, but without any right to intervene in discussions on the subject of action, a few intellectuals who would place themselves voluntarily at its disposal for organizing courses of instruction and libraries.
It would be highly desirable for a movement to start amongst the generation which, thanks to its immaturity, has avoided being mixed with the workers under the compulsion of captivity, similar to the one which swept through Russian students fifty years ago, but with clearer objectives, and for students to go and spend voluntary and longish periods as workmen anonymously confounded with the mass, both in field and factory.
To sum up, the abolition of the proletarian lot, chiefly characterized by uprootedness, depends upon the creation of forms of industrial production and culture of the mind in which workmen can be, and be made to feel themselves to be, at home.
Of course, in any such reconstruction, a major part would have to be played by the workmen themselves. But, in the nature of things, this part would go on increasing in proportion as their actual liberation began to take effect. Inevitably, only the minimum participation can be expected of them whilst they remain in the grip of distress.
This problem of the building of entirely new working- class conditions of existence is an urgent one, and needs to be examined without delay. A policy should at once be decided upon. For as soon as the war is over, we shall be busy building in the literal sense of the word — that is, [69] constructing houses, buildings. What is built this time will not be demolished again, unless there is another war, and life will become adapted to it. It would be paradoxical if the stones which will, maybe for several generations, determine the whole of our social life, were allowed to be thrown together just anyhow. For this reason, we shall have to have a clear idea beforehand of the form industrial enterprise is to take in the immediate future.
If by any chance we failed to face up to this necessity, through fear of possible divisions in our midst, this would merely mean that we were not qualified to take a hand in shaping the destinies of France.
It is urgent, therefore, to consider a plan for re- establishing the working-class by the roots. Tentative proposals for such are summarized below.
Large factories would be abolished. A big concern would be composed of an assembly shop connected with a number of little workshops, each containing one or more workmen, dispersed throughout the country. It would be these same workmen, and not specialists, who would take it in turns to go and work for a time in the central assembly shop, and there ought to be a holiday atmosphere about such occasions. Only half a day’s work would be required, the rest of the time being taken up with hobnobbing with others similarly engaged, the development of feelings of loyalty to the concern, technical demonstrations showing each workman the exact function of the parts he makes and the various difficulties overcome by the work of others, geography lectures pointing out where the products they help to manufacture go to, the sort of human beings who use them, and the type of social surroundings, daily existence or human atmosphere in which these products have a part to play, and how big this part is. To this could be added general cultural information. A workman’s university would be in the vicinity of each central assembly shop. It would act in close liaison with the management of the concern, but would not form part of the latter’s property. [70]
The machines would not belong to the concern. They would belong to the minute workshops scattered about everywhere, and these would, in their turn, be the property of the workmen, either individually or collectively. Every workman would, besides, own a house and a bit of land.
This triple proprietorship comprising machine, house and land would be bestowed on him by the State as a gift on his marriage, and provided he had successfully passed a difficult technical examination, accompanied by a test to check the level of his intelligence and general culture.
The choice of a machine would be made to depend in the first place on the individual workman’s tastes and natural abilities, and secondly on very general requirements from the point of view of production. It should be, of course, as far as possible, an adjustable automatic machine with a variety of uses.
This triple proprietorship could be neither transmitted by inheritance, nor sold, nor alienated in any way whatever. (The machine alone could, under certain circumstances, be exchanged.) The individual having the use of it would only be able to relinquish it purely and simply. In that event, it should be made difficult, but not impossible, for him later on to obtain an equivalent one elsewhere.
On a workman’s death, this property would return to the State, which would, of course, if need be, be bound to maintain the well-being of the wife and children at the same level as before. If the woman was capable of doing the work, she could keep the property.
All such gifts would be financed out of taxes, either levied directly on business profits or indirectly on the sale of business products. They would be administered by a board composed of government officials, owners of business undertakings, trade-unionists and representatives of the Chamber of Deputies.
This right to property could be withdrawn on account of professional incapacity after sentence by a court of law. This, of course, presupposes the adoption of analogous [71] penal measures for punishing, if necessary, professional incapacity on the part of the owner of a business undertaking.
A workman who wanted to become the owner of a small workshop would first have to obtain permission from a professional organization authorized to grant the same with discretion, and would then be given facilities for the purchase of two or three extra machines; but no more than that.
A workman unable to pass the technical examination would remain in the position of a wage-earner. But he would be able throughout the whole of his life, at whatever age, to make fresh attempts to satisfy the conditions. He would also at any age, and on several occasions, be able to ask to be sent on a free course of some months at a training- school.
These wage-earners through incapacity would work either in little workshops not run on a co-operative basis, as assistants to a man working on his own, or as hands in the assembly shops. But only a small number of them should be allowed to stay in industry. The majority should be sent to fill jobs as manual laborers and pen-pushers, which are indispensable to the carrying on of the public services and trade.
Up to the time he gets married and settles down somewhere for the remainder of his life — that is to say, depending on the individual character, up to the age of twenty-two, twenty-five or thirty — a young man would be regarded as being still in a state of apprenticeship.
During childhood, enough time should be left out of school to enable children to spend many, many hours pottering about in their father’s company whilst at work. Semi-attendance at school — a few hours’ study followed by a few hours’ work — should then go on for some considerable time. Later, a very varied existence is what is needed: journeys of the Tour de France 9 type, working courses spent, now with artisans working on their own, now in little co-operative workshops, now in assembly [72] shops belonging to different concerns, now in youth associations of the Chantiers or Compagnons 10 type; working courses which, according to individual tastes and capacities, could be several times repeated and further prolonged by attendance at workmen’s colleges for periods varying between a few weeks and two years. The ability to go on such working courses should, moreover, under certain conditions, be made possible at any age. They should be entirely free of charge, and not carry with them any sort of social advantages.
When the young workman, gorged and glutted with variety, began to think of settling down, he would be ripe for planting his roots. A wife, children, a garden supplying him with a great part of his food, work associating him with an enterprise he could love, be proud of, and which was to him as a window opened wide on to the outside world — all this is surely enough for the earthly happiness of any human being.
Naturally, such a conception of the young working- man’s development implies a complete recasting of the present prisonlike system.
As for wages, it would be necessary to avoid, in the first place, of course, that they were so low as to cause actual distress — though there would scarcely be any fear of that under such conditions — since they absorb the workman’s attention and prevent his attachment to the concern.
Corporative bodies, for purposes of arbitration, etc., ought to be created solely with this purpose in view: to function in such a way that no workman has hardly ever to think about money matters.
The profession of manager, like that of medical practitioner, is one whose practice the State, acting in the public interest, should license only after certain conditions [73] have been fulfilled. Such conditions should concern not only capacity, but also moral character.
Capital sums involved would be much smaller than at present. A credit system could easily make it possible for any young man without capital who had the necessary capacity and vocation for such a post to become a manager.
Business enterprise could thus be made again an individual thing. As for incorporated joint-stock companies, perhaps it would be just as well, while arranging for a suitable method of transition, to abolish them and declare them illegal.
Naturally, the variety of business undertakings would involve the consideration of very varied forms of administration. The plan sketched here is only presented as the final stage reached after long efforts, amongst which advances in technical invention would be indispensable.
At all events, such a form of social existence would be neither capitalist nor socialist.
It would put an end to the proletarian condition, whereas what is called Socialism tends, in fact, to force everybody without distinction into that condition. Its goal would be, not, according to the expression now inclined to become popular, the interest of the consumer — such an interest can only be a grossly material one — but Man’s dignity in his work, which is a value of a spiritual order.
The difficulty about such a social conception is that there is no possible chance of its emerging from the domain of theory unless a certain number of men can be found who are fired by a burning and unquenchable resolve to make it a reality. It is not at all certain that such men can be found or called into being.
Yet, otherwise, it really seems the only choice left is one between different, and almost equally abominable, forms of wretchedness. Although such a conception can only become a reality over a long period of time, post-war reconstruction should [74] at once adopt as its rule the dispersion of industrial activity.
UPROOTEDNESS IN THE COUNTRYSIDE
The problem of uprootedness in the countryside is no less serious than that of uprootedness in the towns. Although the disease is not so far advanced, there is something even more shocking about it; for it is contrary to nature that the land should be cultivated by uprooted individuals. Both problems require, therefore, to receive equal attention.
Besides, one should never bestow any public mark of attention on industrial workers, without bestowing another one of corresponding importance on the peasants. For they are ever ready to take offense, very susceptible, and always tortured by the thought that they are being forgotten. It is certain that amidst all this present suffering, they find comfort in the assurance that they are being thought about. It must be admitted that we think much more about them when we are hungry than when we have all we want to eat; and that is so even in the case of people who imagined they had placed their thoughts on a level very much above that of all ordinary physical needs.
Workmen have a tendency which ought not to be encouraged to think that, when one refers to the ‘people’, one is necessarily referring solely to them. There is not the slightest justification for this; unless one chooses to regard as such the fact that they kick up far more of a noise than the peasants. They have succeeded in convincing, in regard to this point, the intellectuals who display an interest in the people. The result has been among the peasants a sort of hatred for what is politically known as the Left, except in places where they have fallen under communist influence, or where anti-clericalism is the ruling passion; and doubtless in a few other cases besides. [75]
In France, the opposition between peasants and workmen goes a long way back. In a complaint made at the end of the fourteenth century, the peasants enumerated in heart-rending accents the cruelties they were made to suffer at the hands of all classes of society, including the artisans.
In the history of popular movements in France, it has hardly ever happened, unless I am mistaken, that peasants and workmen have been found on the same side. Even in 1789, it was doubtless more of a coincidence than anything else.
In the fourteenth century, the peasants were far and away the most wretched among the population. But even when they are materially better off — and when such is the case, they scarcely ever realize it, because the workmen who come to spend a few days’ holiday in the village cannot resist the temptation to boast — they are always tortured by the feeling that everything worth while happens in the towns, and that they are ‘out of it’.
Naturally, this state of mind is aggravated by the setting up of the wireless and cinemas in the villages, and by the sale of newspapers like Confidences and Marie-Claire, compared with which cocaine is a harmless product.
Such being the situation, one must first invent and then put into execution something which will henceforth give the peasants the feeling that they are ‘in it’.
It is perhaps a pity that in the broadcasts officially made over the London wireless, the workmen have always been referred to much more than the peasants. It is true that their part in the Resistance is a far, far smaller one. But this is [76] possibly an additional reason for giving repeated proofs that one is aware of their existence.
It must be borne in mind that you cannot say the French people are behind a movement if this is not true of the majority of the peasants.
One should make it a rule never to promise new and better things to the workmen, without at the same time promising as much to the peasants. The great cunning shown by the Nazi Party before 1933 consisted in presenting itself to the workmen as a specifically working- class party, to the peasants as a specifically peasant one, to the lower middle-class as a specifically lower middle-class one, etc. That was easy enough for it to do, as it lied to everybody. We ought to do as much, but without lying to anybody. It isn’t easy, but it isn’t impossible.
Peasant uprootedness has been, over the course of the last few years, as mortal a danger for the country as working-class uprootedness. One of the most serious symptoms was, seven or eight years ago, the desertion of the land in the very middle of an unemployment crisis.
It is obvious that a depopulation of the countryside leads, finally, to social death. We can say it will not reach that point. But still, we don’t know that it won’t. So far, there seems to be nothing which is likely to arrest it.
With regard to this phenomenon, two things require to be noted.
The first is that the white man carries it about with him wherever he goes. The disease has even penetrated into the heart of the African continent, which had for thousands of years, nevertheless, been made up of villages. These black people at any rate, when nobody came to massacre them, torture them, or reduce them to slavery, knew how to live happily on their land. Contact with us is making them lose the art. That ought to make us wonder whether even the black man, although the most primitive [77] of all colonized peoples, hadn’t after all more to teach us than to learn from us. The benefits we have conferred on them resemble the one conferred by the financier on the shoemaker. Nothing in the world can make up for the loss of joy in one’s work.
The second thing to be noted is that the apparently unlimited powers of the totalitarian State are unavailing against this evil. In Germany, formal and official admissions of failure have been made over and over again regarding this matter. In one way, that is all to the good, since it gives us the chance of doing better than them.
The destruction of stocks of wheat during the economic crisis had a profound effect on public opinion — and rightly so; but if one thinks it over, the desertion of the land in the middle of an industrial crisis has something about it of a still more shocking character, if such were possible. It is obvious that there is no hope of solving the workmen’s problem separately from the peasants’. There is no means of preventing the working-class population from turning into a proletariat if it is constantly being increased by an afflux of peasants who have broken away from their past.
The war has shown how serious are the ravages of this disease among the peasants. For the soldiers were young peasants. In September 1939, one used to hear peasants say: ‘Better to live as a German than die as a Frenchman.’ What had been done to them to make them think that they had nothing to lose?
It is important to realize one of the greatest difficulties in the political sphere. If it is true that the workmen suffer cruelly through feeling themselves to be exiles in our present type of society, the peasants, for their part, are under the impression that in this society it is, on the [78] contrary, only the workmen who are really in their element. In the eyes of the peasants, the intellectuals who champion the cause of the workmen don’t appear as defenders of the oppressed, but as defenders of a privileged class. The intellectuals are far from suspecting the existence of such an attitude.
The inferiority complex in the countryside is such that you see peasant millionaires who find it natural to be treated by retired petits bourgeois with the sort of arrogance shown by colonials towards natives. An inferiority complex has to be very great for money not to be able to wipe it out.
Consequently, the more one sets about satisfying the moral needs of the workmen, the more necessary it is to take steps to make the same provision for the peasants. Otherwise the resultant disequilibrium will be dangerous for society and have unpleasant repercussions on the workmen themselves.
The need to feel rooted, with the peasants, takes first of all the form of a hunger for property. This is a real hunger with them, and a healthy and natural one. One is certain to make an impression on them by seriously putting forward hopes of this kind. And there is no reason why one should not do so, once it is the need of property which is recognized as sacred, and not the legal title laying down the form for holding property. There are any number of possible legal dispositions which would enable, little by little, the land not yet owned by peasants to be transferred to them. Nothing can justify the property rights of a townsman over a piece of land. Large agricultural estates are only justifiable in certain cases, for technical reasons; and even in such cases, one can well imagine peasants cultivating vegetables and similar products intensively, each on his own little strip, and at the same time, with modern equipment, applying extensive methods of cultivation co-operatively over vast areas owned by them in common. [79]
A measure which would go straight to the heart of the peasants is one whereby land came to be regarded as raw material for carrying on work, and not as an asset in the distribution of an inheritance. In this way, we should no longer witness the shocking spectacle of a peasant in debt throughout the whole of his life to some brother in the government service doing less work and earning more money.
Pensions — even the smallest ones — for the old on retirement would doubtless have a great effect. The word ‘pension’ has, unfortunately, magic properties which attract young peasants to the towns. The humiliation suffered by the old is often great in the country, and the drawing of a little money, under honorable conditions, would bolster up their prestige.
Through the force of contrast, too great a stability produces in the peasant an uprooting effect. A youngster begins plowing by himself at about the age of fourteen. The work is then pure poetry, an intoxicating pleasure for him, although he is barely strong enough to manage it. A few years later, that boyish enthusiasm has been exhausted, the job is familiar, the physical energy is overflowing, and far in excess of what is required for the work; and yet there is no more to do than what has been done day after day for several years. So the young man starts to spend the week dreaming about what he is going to do on Sunday. From that moment he is lost.
A peasant boy’s first complete contact with work, at the age of fourteen, this initial rapture of his, ought to be hallowed by a solemn ritual celebration of a kind to leave an indelible impression in the depths of his soul. In the more Christian villages, this celebration should bear a religious character.
But besides this, three or four years later, some draught ought to be supplied to assuage his thirst for something new. For a young peasant, it can only take one form: travel. All young peasants should be given the opportunity to travel free of charge in France, or even abroad; not about [80] the cities, but about the countryside. It would involve organizing for the peasants something resembling the Tour de France. Cultural and educational facilities could be added. For very often the best among these young peasants, after having, at thirteen, abandoned school with a sort of violence in order to throw themselves into work, feel again towards eighteen or twenty a desire to learn. The same thing happens, by the way, to young workmen. Systems of exchange could make it possible for even young men regarded by their families as indispensable to go away. It goes without saying that such travels would be purely voluntary. But parents would not have the right to veto them.
It is difficult to realize how strong the travel obsession is with peasants, and what a moral effect such a reform could have, even before it became a fact, at the promissory stage, and all the more so once the thing had come to be a part of ordinary habit. The young man, after knocking about the world for a few years, but without ever ceasing to be a peasant, would return home, his longings appeased, to found a family.
Something of a similar nature is doubtless necessary for girls too. They certainly need something to take the place of Marie-Claire, and they certainly cannot be left with Marie-Claire.
Life in barracks has been a terrible source of uprooting for young peasants. So contrary was the final effect of military training to the one intended, that young men, after learning military exercises, were in less of a condition to fight than they were before having learned them; for whoever left a barracks left it as an anti-militarist. This provides the practical proof that you cannot, in the interests of the military machine itself, allow the military authorities to have the sovereign disposal of two years out [81] of each life, or even only one year. Just as you cannot leave Capitalism in sole charge of the professional training of youth, so you cannot leave the Army in sole charge of its military training. The civil authorities must have a share in the latter, and in such a way as to make it a source of education instead of a source of corruption.
Contact between young peasants and young workmen in the course of military service is not at all desirable. The latter seek to impress the former, which is bad for both of them. Contacts of this sort don’t really have the effect of bringing people together. Only a course of action pursued in common can do that; and, in the nature of things, there can be no common action in barracks, since you are getting ready for war there in time of peace.
There is no reason why barracks should be installed in towns. For the use of young peasants, one could very well have barracks far away from any town.
It is true that the owners of brothels would suffer. But it is useless even to consider any kind of reform, unless one is absolutely determined to put a stop to the collusion between the public authorities and people of that sort, and to abolish an institution which is a disgrace to France.
It may be mentioned, by the way, that we have paid dearly for this disgrace. Turning prostitution into an official institution, in the way this has been done in France, largely contributed towards demoralizing the army, and completely demoralized the police, which was bound to bring about the ruin of democracy. For it is not possible for a democracy to subsist when the police, who represent the law in the eyes of the citizens, are an open target for public contempt. People in England cannot imagine any true sort of democracy in which the police are not regarded with an affectionate respect. But their police [82] haven’t got a drove of prostitutes to amuse themselves with.
If it were possible to reckon up exactly the factors which have contributed to our defeat, it would doubtless be found that all these things which have been our shame — like that one, and our colonial greediness, and our ill- treatment of foreigners — have each brought their individual and effective weight to bear in our general undoing. A lot of things can be said about our misfortune, but not that it is undeserved.
Prostitution is a typical example of that natural ability possessed by this malady of uprootedness to propagate itself to the second power. The condition of professional prostitute constitutes the extreme degree of uprootedness, and, in connexion with this particular malady, a mere handful of prostitutes is sufficient to spread a tremendous amount of infection. It is clear that we shall never have a healthy peasant population so long as the State persists in bringing about of its own accord the meeting together of young peasants and prostitutes. And as long as our peasantry is unhealthy, our working-class cannot be healthy either, nor the rest of the population.
Moreover, nothing could be more popular with the peasants than a scheme for reforming the system of military service, paying special attention to their moral well-being.
The problem concerning culture of the mind presents itself in the case of the peasants, as it does in that of the workmen. They also need to be provided with a translation suitable for them, and not the same as the one for the workmen.
In all matters connected with things of the mind, the peasants have been brutally uprooted by conditions in the modern world. In the past they had everything which a human being can require in the way of art and thought, in a form which was their own, and was of the highest quality. When you read all that Restif de la Bretonne has written about his childhood, you can only conclude that [83] the lot of the most unfortunate peasants of that time was infinitely preferable to that of the most fortunate ones of today. But it is impossible to return to the past, however close. Means must be devised to prevent the peasants from remaining unresponsive to the culture of the mind which is offered them.
Science should be presented to peasants and workmen in very different ways. In the case of workmen, it is natural that mechanics should occupy the foremost place. In that of peasants, everything should be centered around the wonderful cycle whereby solar energy, poured down into plants, is retained in them by the action of chlorophyll, becomes concentrated in seeds and fruits, enters into Man in the form of food or drink, passes into his muscles and spends itself on preparing the soil. Everything connected with Science can be situated around this cycle, for the notion of energy is at the heart of everything. Were the thought of this cycle to sink deep into the minds of peasants, it would permeate their labor with poetry.
Generally speaking, the main object of all education in the villages should be to increase the feeling for the beauty of the world, the beauty of nature. Tourists have, it is true, discovered that peasants are not interested in landscapes. But when you spend whole days doing exhausting work side by side with peasants — which is the only way of being able to have heart-to-heart talks with them — you hear some of them regretting their work is so hard as to leave them no time to enjoy the beauties of nature.
Naturally, it isn’t simply by exclaiming: ‘Look, how beautiful it is!’ that their feeling for beauty will be increased. It isn’t quite so simple as that.
The movement in connexion with folk-lore which of late has been started in cultured circles should try to help the peasants to feel at home again in human thought. Under the present system, they are made to regard everything connected with thought as the exclusive property of the towns, in which one is willing to grant [84] them a small, a very small, share, because they are incapable of conceiving for themselves a large one.
It is the colonial mentality again, only in a less acute form. And just in the same way as a native from the colonies, who has a smattering of European education, can be brought to despise his own people more than would a cultured European, so the same thing often happens with a schoolteacher who comes from a peasant family.
The first condition necessary for bringing about a moral rerooting of the peasantry in the country is that the profession of rural schoolteacher should be something distinct, specific; not merely partially, but totally different from that of a schoolteacher in the towns. It is in the highest degree absurd to form in the same mold teachers for Belleville and for some little village. It is one of the many absurdities of an age whose salient characteristic is stupidity.
The second condition is that the rural schoolteachers should know the peasants and not look down on them, which will not be obtained simply by recruiting them from among the peasantry. A very large part of their training ought to be devoted to the folk-lore of all countries, presented not as an object of curiosity, but as something superb. They should be told about the part played by shepherds in the first speculations made by the human mind, those concerning the stars, and also — as the comparisons which continually occur in ancient texts indicate — those concerning good and evil. They should be made to read peasant literature — Hesiod, Piers Plowman, the complaints of the Middle Ages, the few contemporary works which are of authentically peasant inspiration; all this, of course, without forgetting the claims of general culture. After such a preparation, they could be sent to serve for a year as farm-hands, anonymously, in some [85] other part of the country; then assembled again in training- colleges to help them to see their own experience in proper perspective. Schoolteachers going to working-class and factory districts should be given an appropriate course on the same lines. But such experiences must be morally prepared for beforehand; otherwise they arouse disdain and repulsion instead of compassion and love.
It would be of great advantage, too, if the Churches were to turn the role of village priest or pastor into something specific. It is shocking to observe to what extent, in a French village which is wholly Catholic, religion can be divorced from daily life and reserved for a few hours only on Sunday, when one remembers what a preference Christ showed for taking the theme of his parables from country scenes. But a great many of these parables don’t figure in the liturgy, and the ones that do don’t excite any attention. In just the same way as the sun and stars the schoolteacher talks about inhabit the text- books and exercise-books and have nothing to do with the sky, so the vine, the corn, the sheep to which reference is made in church on Sundays have nothing in common with the vine, the corn and the sheep which are in the fields and to which every day one has to sacrifice a little part of one’s life. The peasants who are Christians are also uprooted so far as their religious life is concerned. The idea of showing a village without a church in the Exhibition of 1937 was not so absurd as many people said it was.
Just as the young Jocistes feel exalted at the thought of Christ as a working-man, so the peasants should take a similar pride in the part devoted in the New Testament parables to the life of the fields and in the sacred function ascribed to bread and wine, and derive therefrom the feeling that Christianity is something which belongs to them. [86]
Polemics on the subject of laicization have constituted one of the chief sources responsible for the poisoning of peasant life in France. Unfortunately, they are far from having neared their end. It is impossible to avoid taking up a definite attitude in this matter, and at first sight it appears almost impossible to light on one which is not extremely unsatisfactory in itself.
It is certain that neutrality is a lie. The laic (anti-clerical) system is not neutral. It inculcates in children a philosophy which is on the one hand very superior to religion of the Saint-Sulpice type, and on the other hand very inferior to genuine Christianity. But the latter is, nowadays, extremely rare. Many schoolteachers evince a zeal in their attachment to this philosophy comparable to religious fervor.
Liberty of instruction is not a solution. The expression is meaningless. No one has any proprietary rights over the spiritual formation of a child: neither the child, for he is not in a position to act in the matter; nor the parents; nor the State. The rights of the family, so often invoked, are nothing but a handy weapon in the argument. Any priest who refrained from talking about Christ to a child belonging to a non-Christian family, when given a perfectly normal opportunity of doing so, would be one who had lost his faith. To keep the lay schools just as they are, and allow or even encourage, next door, competition on the part of the religious schools, is an absurdity, both from a theoretical and a practical point of view. Private schools, whether religious or not, should be authorized, not in virtue of any principle of liberty, but for reasons of public utility in every individual case where the school is a good one, and be subject only to public inspection.
To let the clergy have a share in public education is not a solution either. Even if it were possible, it would not be desirable, and it is not possible in France without a civil war.
To order the schoolteachers to talk about God to the children — as happened for some months under the Vichy [87] Government, upon the recommendation of M. Chevalier — is a joke in extremely bad taste.
To allow laic philosophy to preserve its official status would be an arbitrary measure, and an unjust one, seeing that it fails to correspond to a true scale of values, and one which would hurl us straight into totalitarianism. For although laicization has produced a certain amount of fervour of an almost religious kind, it is, by the very nature of things, a strictly limited amount; and we are living at a time when passions are fanned to white heat. Totalitarianism’s idolatrous course can only be arrested by coming up against a genuinely spiritual way of life. If children are brought up not to think about God, they will become Fascist or Communist for want of something to which to give themselves.
We perceive more clearly what justice demands in this matter, once the notion of right has been replaced by that of obligation related to need. The soul of a child, as it reaches out towards understanding, has need of the treasures accumulated by the human species through the centuries. We do injury to a child if we bring it up in a narrow Christianity which prevents it from ever becoming capable of perceiving that there are treasures of the purest gold to be found in non-Christian civilizations. Lay education does an even greater injury to children. It covers up these treasures, and those of Christianity as well. [88]
The only attitude public education can adopt, in France, with regard to Christianity, which is at once legitimate and practically realizable, consists in looking upon it as one treasury of human thought among many others. It is too absurd for words that a French university graduate should have read poetry of the Middle Ages, Polyeucte, Athalie, Phedre, Pascal, Lamartine, philosophical doctrines impregnated with Christianity like those of Descartes and Kant, the Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost, and never once have opened a Bible.
Future professional teachers and schoolmasters should simply be told that religion has at all times and in all countries, save quite recently in certain parts of Europe, played a dominant role in the development of human culture, thought and civilization. An educational course in which no reference is made to religion is an absurdity. Furthermore, in the same way as when studying history little French children are told a lot about France, so it is natural that, being in Europe, when you talk about religion you should refer primarily to Christianity.
Consequently, we ought to include in the teaching of the bigger children, at every stage, courses which could be described as, for example, religious history. The children would be made to read passages from the Bible, and above all the Gospels. Comments would be made in the spirit of the text itself, as should always be the case.
One would talk about dogma as something which has played a role of the highest importance in our countries, and in which men of the very greatest eminence have believed wholeheartedly; without hiding the fact either that it has been the pretext for inflicting any number of cruelties. But, above all, one would try to make the children feel all the beauty contained therein. If they ask: ‘Is it true?’, we should answer: ‘It is so beautiful that it must certainly contain a lot of truth. As for knowing whether it is, or is not, absolutely true, try to become capable of deciding that for yourselves when you grow up.’ It would be strictly forbidden to add, by way of commentary, [89] anything implying either a negation of dogma or an affirmation of it. Any teacher or schoolmaster who wished and who had the necessary knowledge and teaching ability would be free to talk to the children not only about Christianity, but also, though laying far less stress on it, about no matter what genuine current of religious thought. Religious thought is genuine whenever it is universal in its appeal. (Such is not the case with Judaism, which is linked to a racial conception.)
If such a solution were applied, religion would cease by degrees, it is to be hoped, being something one takes sides about for or against, in the same way as one takes sides in politics. Thus, we should abolish those two opposing camps — the schoolmaster’s and the cure’s — which foster a sort of latent civil war in so many French villages. Contact with the beauty of Christianity, presented simply as a beautiful thing to be savoured, would imperceptibly imbue the mass of the population with spirituality, if it is still capable of being so imbued, far more effectively than any amount of dogmatic teaching of religious beliefs.
The use of the word beauty doesn’t in the least imply that religious questions should be considered after the manner of the aesthetes. The aesthetes’ point of view is sacrilegious, not only in matters of religion but even in those of art. It consists in amusing oneself with beauty by handling it and looking at it. Beauty is something to be eaten; it is a food. If we are going to offer the people Christian beauty purely on account of its beauty, it will have to be as a form of beauty which gives nourishment.
In rural schools, the careful and regular reading, with frequent commentaries and repetitions, of those parts of the New Testament describing scenes of rural life, could do a lot to give back to the life of the fields its lost poetry. If on the one hand the whole spiritual life of the soul, and on the other hand all the scientific knowledge acquired concerning the material universe, are made to converge upon the act of work, work occupies its rightful place in a man’s thoughts. Instead of being a kind of prison, it [90] becomes a point of contact between this world and the world beyond.
For example, surely there is no reason why a peasant engaged in sowing shouldn’t have at the back of his mind, without shaping words — even unspoken ones — on the one hand certain similes drawn by Christ, such as: ‘Unless the seed die….’, ‘The seed is the Word of God… ‘, The grain of mustard seed… which is the least of all seeds…’, and on the other hand the double mechanism of growth; the one whereby the seed, by consuming itself and with the aid of bacteria, reaches the surface of the soil; and the other whereby solar energy pours down in rays of light, is captured by the green coloring matter of the plant-stalk, and rises upward in an irresistible ascending movement. The analogy which makes the mechanism of this world a reflection of the supernatural mechanism, if one may use that expression, then becomes luminously clear, and the fatigue induced by work, to use ordinary popular speech, gets it into the body. The toil always more or less associated with the work effort becomes the pain which makes the beauty of the world penetrate right to the very core of the human being.
A similar method could charge the workman’s labor with a similar significance. It is just as easy to conceive.
Thus only would the dignity of work be fully established. For, if we go to the heart of things, there is no true dignity without a spiritual root and consequently one of a supernatural order.
The popular school’s job is to give more dignity to work by infusing it with thought, and not to make of the working-man a thing divided up into compartments which sometimes works and sometimes thinks. Naturally, a peasant who is sowing has to be careful to cast the seed properly, and not to be thinking about lessons learnt at school. But the object which engages our attention doesn’t form the whole content of our thoughts. A happy young woman, expecting her first child, and busy sewing a layette, thinks about sewing it properly. But she never [91] forgets for an instant the child she is carrying inside her. At precisely the same moment, somewhere in a prison workshop, a female convict is also sewing, thinking, too, about sewing properly, for she is afraid of being punished. One might imagine both women to be doing the same work at the same time, and having their attention absorbed by the same technical difficulties. And yet a whole gulf of difference lies between one occupation and the other. The whole social problem consists in making the workers pass from one to the other of these two occupational extremes.
What is required is that this world and the world beyond, in their double beauty, should be present and associated in the act of work, like the child about to be born in the making of the layette. Such an association can be achieved by a mode of presenting thoughts which relates them directly to the movements and operations peculiar to each sort of work, by a process of assimilation sufficiently complete to enable them to penetrate into the very substance of the individual being, and by a habit impressed upon the mind and connecting these thoughts with the work movements.
We are not, at present, either intellectually or spiritually capable of such a transformation. We should be doing well if we were able to set about preparing for it. Naturally, schools alone would not be enough. All sections of the community in which something resembling thought still operates would have to take part: the Churches, trade-unions, literary and scientific circles. One hardly dare mention in this category political circles.
Our age has its own particular mission, or vocation — the creation of a civilization founded upon the spiritual nature of work. The thoughts relating to a presentiment of this vocation, and which are scattered about in Rousseau, George Sand, Tolstoy, Proudhon and Marx, in papal encyclicals, and elsewhere, are the only original thoughts of our time, the only ones we haven’t borrowed from the Greeks. It is because we have been unequal to this mighty [92] business which was being conceived in us that we have thrown ourselves into the abyss presented by totalitarian systems. But if Germany is beaten, possibly our moral bankruptcy will not be final. Maybe we still have a chance. One cannot think about it without anguish…. If indeed, we have a chance, mediocre as we are, how shall we do so as not to miss it?
Such a vocation is the only thing great enough to put before the peoples instead of the totalitarian idol. If it is not put before them in such a way as to make them feel its grandeur, they will remain in the grip of the idol; only it will be painted red instead of brown. When men are offered the choice between guns and butter, although they prefer butter so very much more than guns, a mysterious fatality compels them, in spite of themselves, to choose guns. There isn’t enough poetry about butter — at least, when you have some; for it does take on a certain poetry when you haven’t any. But we dare not admit our preference for it.
At the present moment, the United Nations, particularly America, spend their time saying to the starving populations of Europe: With our guns, we’re going to give you butter. This produces only one reaction, the thought that they don’t seem to be in any particular hurry about it. The day they are given this butter, the people will literally throw themselves upon it; and immediately after that will turn towards whoever has some lovely guns, all nicely wrapped in their coverings, to show them, to no matter what ideology they may belong. Don’t let us imagine that being worn out, all they will ask for is a comfortable existence. Nervous exhaustion caused by some recent misfortune makes it impossible for those concerned to settle down to enjoy a comfortable existence. It forces people to seek forgetfulness, sometimes in a dizzy round of exacerbated enjoyment — as was the case after 1918 — at other times in some dark and dismal fanaticism. When misfortune bites too deeply, it creates a disposition towards misfortune, which makes people plunge headlong into it [93] themselves, dragging others along with them. Germany is an example of this.
The unhappy peoples of the European continent are in need of greatness even more than of bread, and there are only two sorts of greatness: true greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old, old lie of world conquest. Conquest is an ersatz greatness.
The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded upon the spirituality of work. It is a conception that can be propagated without running the risk of promoting the slightest discord. The word spirituality doesn’t imply any particular affiliation. Even the Communists, in the present state of things, would probably not reject it. Besides, it would not be difficult to find in Marx quotations that can all be brought back to the reproach of a lack of spirituality leveled at capitalist society; which implies that there ought to be some in the new society. The conservative parties wouldn’t dare to reject such a conception; nor would radical, laical or masonic circles either. Christians would seize on it with joy. It could create unanimity.
But one can only lay hold of such a conception in fear and trembling. How can we touch it without soiling it, turning it into a lie? Our age is so poisoned by lies that it converts everything it touches into a lie. And we are of our age, and have no reason to consider ourselves better than our age. To bring discredit on words like these, by launching them among the general public without taking infinite precautions beforehand, would be to cause irreparable harm; it would amount to killing all remaining hope that the thing itself should ever materialize. They must not be attached to a cause or a movement, nor even to a regime, nor to a nation either. We must not do them the sort of harm Petain has done to the words ‘Work, Family, Country’ 22 , nor the harm either which the Third Republic has done to the words ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. They must not be made a slogan. [94]
If they are presented to the public, it must be solely as the expression of a thought which reaches very far beyond the men and the societies of today, and which one proposes in all humility to keep ever before the mind as a guide in all things. If such modesty has less power to carry the masses with it than more ostentatious attitudes have, it cannot be helped. It is better to fail than succeed in doing harm.
But this thought would not have to be trumpeted about in order to permeate little by little people’s minds, because it is an answer to the uneasy feelings of all people at the present time. Everybody is busy repeating, in slightly different terms, that what we suffer from is a lack of balance, due to a purely material development of technical science. This lack of balance can only be remedied by a spiritual development in the same sphere, that is, in the sphere of work.
The only difficulty lies in the painful mistrust — alas, only too well founded — of the masses, who look upon any slightly elevated proposition as a snare set to trap them. A civilization based upon the spirituality of work would give to Man the very strongest possible roots in the wide universe, and would consequently be the opposite of that state in which we find ourselves now, characterized by an almost total uprootedness. Such a civilization is, therefore, by its very nature, the object to which we should aspire as the antidote to our sufferings.
UPROOTEDNESS AND NATIONHOOD
There is still another kind of uprootedness to be considered so as to be able to have a rough idea of our [95] principal disease. It is the kind one might call geographical, that is to say, concerned with human collectivities occupying clearly defined territorial limits. The actual significance of these collectivities has well-nigh disappeared, except in one case only — that of the nation. But there are, and have been, very many other examples; some on a smaller, sometimes quite a small, scale, in the shape of a town, collection of villages, province or region; others comprising many different nations; and yet others comprising bits of many different nations.
The nation, single and separate, has taken the place of all that — the nation, or in other words, the State; for there is no other way of defining the word nation than as a territorial aggregate whose various parts recognize the authority of the same State. One may say that, in our age, money and the State have come to replace all other bonds of attachment.
For a long time now, the single nation has played the part which constitutes the supreme mission of society towards the individual human being, namely, maintaining throughout the present the links with the past and the future. In this sense, one may say that it is the only form of collectivity existing in the world at the present time. The family doesn’t exist. What nowadays goes by that name is a minute collection of human beings grouped around each of us: father and mother, husband or wife, and children; brothers and sisters being already a little remote. Latterly, in the midst of the general distress, this little nucleus has developed an almost irresistible force of attraction, to the extent sometimes of making people cast aside every kind of duty; but that is because there alone people could find a little living warmth against the icy cold which all of a sudden had descended on them. It was an almost animal reaction.
But no one thinks nowadays about his ancestors who died fifty or even only twenty or ten years before his birth; nor about his descendants who will be born fifty or even [96] only twenty or ten years after his death. Consequently, from the point of view of the collectivity and its particular function, the family no longer counts.
Looked at from this point of view, a profession doesn’t count either. A corporation, or guild, was a link between the dead, the living and those yet unborn, within the framework of a certain specified occupation. There is nothing today which can be said to exist, however remotely, for the purpose of carrying out such a function. French trade-unionism, around 1900, may possibly have shown a certain tendency in this direction, but it never came to anything.
Finally, the village, district, province or region — all the geographical units smaller than the nation — have almost ceased to count; as have all geographical units composed of many nations or bits of many nations, too. When one used to say, for example, a few centuries ago, ‘Christendom’, the word had quite a different affective implication from that of the present-day ‘Europe’.
To sum up, Man has placed his most valuable possession in the world of temporal affairs, namely, his continuity in time, beyond the limits set by human existence in either direction, entirely in the hands of the State. And yet it is just in this very period when the nation stands alone and supreme that we have witnessed its sudden and extraordinarily rapid decomposition. This has left us stunned, so that we find it extremely difficult to think clearly on the subject.
The French people, in June and July 1940, were not a people waylaid by a band of ruffians, whose country was suddenly snatched from them. They are a people who opened their hands and allowed their country to fall to the ground. Later on — but after a long interval — they spent themselves in ever more and more desperate efforts to pick it up again; but some one had placed his foot on it.
Now a national sense has returned. The words ‘to die for France’ have again taken on a meaning which they hadn’t possessed since 1918. But in the movement of opposition [97] which has seized hold of the French people, hunger, cold, the always hateful presence of foreign soldiers exercising complete authority, the breaking-up of families, for some exile, captivity — all these sufferings have at least played a very large part, most likely a decisive one. The best proof of this lies in the difference in spirit distinguishing the occupied from the unoccupied zone. Nature has not dispensed any greater amount of patriotic fervor to those living north than to those living south of the Loire. Different situations have simply produced different states of mind. The example set by England, hopes of a German defeat, have also been important contributory factors.
France’s only reality today consists in memories and hopes. The Republic never seemed so beautiful as under the Empire; one’s native land never seems to beautiful as when under the heel of a conqueror, if there is hope of seeing it again intact. That is why one shouldn’t take the present intensity of national feeling for a guide as to its actual efficacy, once liberation has been effected, for ensuring the stability of public life.
The memory of the sudden dissolution of this feeling in June 1940 is one so charged with shame, that one prefers not to think about it, to rule it out altogether and only to think about how to set things to rights again for the future. In private life also, each of us is always tempted to set his own failings, to a certain extent, on one side, relegate them to some attic, invent some method of calculation whereby they turn out to be of no real consequence. To give way to this temptation is to ruin the soul; it is the one that, above all, has to be conquered.
We have all succumbed to this temptation, on account of the public shame which has been so deep that each one of us has felt wounded to the quick in his own feelings of personal honor. Without this temptation, reflections concerning so extraordinary an event would already have given rise to some new patriotic doctrine, some new patriotic conception. [98]
From the social point of view, more especially, it will be impossible to avoid considering the notion of patriotism. Not considering it afresh, but considering it for the first time; for, unless I am mistaken, it never has been considered. Strange indeed, for a notion which has played and still plays so important a role, isn’t it? That just shows what sort of a place we really accord to thought.
The idea of patriotism had lost all credit among French workmen during the last quarter of a century. The Communists put it into circulation again after 1934, to the accompaniment of plentiful tricolor flags and singing of the Marseillaise. But they hadn’t the least compunction in withdrawing it and placing it on the shelf again a little before the war. It is not in the name of patriotism that they started setting up a resistance. They only began adopting it again about nine months after the defeat. Little by little they have adopted it entirely. But only simpletons would take that to mean a veritable reconciliation between the working-class and the country. Workmen are dying for their country — that is only too true. But we live in an age so impregnated with lies that even the virtue of blood voluntarily sacrificed is insufficient to put us back on the path of truth.
For very many years, workmen were taught that internationalism was the most sacred of all duties, and patriotism the most shameful of all bourgeois prejudices. Then more years were spent teaching them that patriotism was a sacred duty, and anything that wasn’t patriotism a betrayal. How, at the end of all that, could they be expected to react otherwise than crudely and in obedience to propaganda?
A healthy working-class movement is out of the question, unless it be given a doctrine assigning a place to the idea of patriotism, and a clearly defined, that is, a limited, place. Moreover, this need is only more evident in working-class circles than elsewhere because the problem of patriotism has been so much discussed in them for so long. But it is a need common to the whole country. It is [99] unpardonable that a word which nowadays is almost always to be found coupled with the word duty should hardly ever have been made the subject of any investigation. As a rule, all people can find to quote in connexion with it is a mediocre page of Renan’s.
The nation is a recent innovation. In the Middle Ages, allegiance was owed to the lord, or the city, or both, and by extension to territorial areas not very clearly defined. The sentiment we call patriotism certainly existed, often to a very intense degree; only its object was not set within territorial limits. The sentiment covered variable extensions of land, according to circumstances.
Actually, patriotism has always existed, as far back as we can go in history. Vercingetorix really died for Gaul; the Spanish tribes which resisted conquest by the Romans, sometimes to the point of extermination, died for Spain, knowing they were doing so, and declaring it; those who died at marathon and Salamis died for Greece; at a time when Greece, not having yet been reduced to a province, was in relation to Rome in the same position as Vichy France is to Germany, children in the Greek towns used openly to pelt collaborators with stones and call them traitors, with the same indignation which we feel today.
What had never existed right up to recent times was some definite, circumscribed thing, permanently installed as an object of patriotic devotion. Patriotism was something diffuse, nomadic, which expanded or contracted according to degrees of similarity and common danger. It was mixed up with different kinds of loyalty — loyalty to other men, a lord, a king, or a city. The whole formed something very complicated, but also very human. To express the sense of obligation every one feels towards his country, people would usually talk about ‘the public’ or ‘the public good’, an expression which can serve equally well to indicate a village, town, province, France, Christendom or Mankind.
People also talked about the kingdom of France. In the latter expression, the sense of obligation towards the [100] country was mingled with that of fidelity to the king. But two obstacles have prevented this sentiment from ever being a pure one, not even in the time of Joan of Arc. It must be remembered that the population of Paris was against Joan of Arc.
The first obstacle was that, on the death of Charles V, France, to use Montesquieu’s words, ceased to be a monarchy and fell into the state of despotism from which she only emerged in the eighteenth century. Nowadays, we find it so natural to pay taxes to the State, that we have difficulty in imagining the moral upheaval in the midst of which this custom was first introduced. In the fourteenth century, to pay any taxes other than exceptional levies acquiesced in for war purposes was looked upon as dishonorable, a disgrace reserved for conquered countries, and the manifest sign of slavery. The same feeling is found expressed in the Spanish Romoncero, and also in Shakespeare: ‘That England… hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Charles VI, during his minority, aided and abetted by his uncles, by using corruption and the vilest cruelty, brutally compelled the people of France to accept a perfectly arbitrary tax, renewable at will, which literally reduced the poor to starvation, whilst the noblemen frittered away the proceeds. It is for this reason that the English of Henry V’s day were first of all welcomed as liberators, at a time when the Armagnacs represented the side of the rich and the Burgundians that of the poor.
The French people, brutally and at one fell swoop made to submit to the yoke, thereafter, right up to the eighteenth century, gave only spasmodic signs of independence. Throughout the whole of this period they were looked upon by other Europeans as the perfect example of an enslaved people, a people who could be treated like cattle by their sovereign.
But, meanwhile, there arose deep down in the heart of this people a suppressed hatred of the king — all the more bitter for remaining unexpressed — a traditional hatred [101] never to be extinguished. One senses it already in a heartrending complaint by the peasants under Charles VI. It must have played a part in the mysterious popularity of the League in Paris. After Henry IV’s assassination, a child of twelve was put to death for having publicly declared that he would do as much to the little Louis XIII. Richelieu began his career by a speech in which he called upon the clergy to proclaim that all regicides would be damned, giving as his reason the fact that those nursing such a design were filled with far too fanatical an enthusiasm to be restrained by any temporal penalty.
This hatred reached its climax at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. Having been repressed by a terror of like intensity, it exploded, in accordance with the disconcerting time lags of history, eighty years later; and it was the unfortunate Louis XVI who received the full blast. This same hatred made it impossible for a monarchical restoration really to take place in 1815. Even today, it makes it absolutely impossible for the Comte de Paris to be freely accepted by the French people, in spite of the example set by a man like Bernanos. In some respects, this is a pity: a number of problems could be solved in this way; but so it is.
Another source which has poisoned the love of Frenchmen for the kingdom of France lies in the fact that at all times, among the lands owing obedience to the king of France, there were some that regarded themselves as conquered territory and were treated as such. It must be admitted that the forty kings who in a thousand years made France, 23 did so often with a brutality worthy of our own age. If a natural correspondence exists between the tree and its fruit, we mustn’t be surprised if the fruit is, in fact, very far from being perfect.
For example, history can show us deeds of an atrocity equal to, but not greater than — save perhaps a few rare exceptions — that of the conquest by the French of the lands situated to the south of the Loire, at the beginning of the thirteenth century. These lands, where a high level of [102] culture, tolerance, liberty and spiritual life prevailed, were filled with an intensely patriotic feeling for what they termed their ‘language’ — a word which, for them, was synonymous with native land. To them, the French were as much foreigners and barbarians as the Germans are to us. In order to drive terror immediately into every heart, the French began by destroying the town of Beziers in toto, and obtained the results sought. Once the country had been conquered, they installed the Inquisition there. A muffled spirit of unrest went on smoldering among these people, and later on induced them to embrace with fervor the Protestant religion, which, according to d’Aubigne, in spite of very great divergencies in doctrine, is directly traceable to the Albigenses. We can judge how strong the hatred of the central power was in these parts, by the religious devotion manifested in Toulouse in connexion with the remains of the due de Montmorency, beheaded for plotting against Richelieu. The same latent sense of protest caused them to throw themselves enthusiastically into the French Revolution. Later on, they became Radical-Socialists, anti-clericals. Under the Third Republic, they no longer hated the central power; they had largely acquired control of it and were exploiting it. We may note that on each occasion their protest has been characterized by a more intense uprootedness and by a lower spiritual and intellectual level.
We may also note that since they were conquered, these lands have made a rather feeble contribution towards French culture, whereas before they were so brilliandy alive culturally. French thought has been more enriched by the Albigenses and troubadours of the twelfth century, who were not Frenchmen, than by the entire output from this part of [103] France in the course of succeeding centuries.
The dukedom of Burgundy was the home of an original and extremely brilliant culture, which didn’t survive the dukedom’s disappearance. The Flemish cities were secretly, at the end of the fourteenth century, on the friendliest terms with Paris and Rouen; nevertheless, wounded Flemings preferred to die rather than be looked after by the soldiers of Charles VI. Some of the latter went on a pillaging expedition into Holland, and brought back some rich burghers whom they decided to kill. In a sudden access of pity, they offered them their lives if they would only become subjects of the French king. They replied that, once dead, their very bones would protest, if they were able, at being subjected to the authority of the king of France. A Catalan historian of the same period, in telling the story of the Sicilian Vespers, writes: ‘The French, who, wherever they exercise power, are as cruel as it is possible to be …’
The Bretons were in despair when their sovereign Anne was forced to marry the king of France. If these same Bretons could return today, or better have returned some years ago, would they find or have found very strong reasons for thinking they had been mistaken? However discredited the Breton autonomist movement may be by the type of people manipulating it and the sinister ends they pursue, there is no doubt that this propaganda stands for something real both in fact and in the minds of the population concerned. There are hidden treasures in these people which have never managed to see the light of day. French culture doesn’t suit them; their own is unable to put forth shoots; hence they find themselves, as a people, relegated to the very bottom of the lower social strata. A large proportion of illiterate soldiers are Breton men, and, so it is said, a large proportion of Parisian prostitutes are Breton women. Autonomy would not be a remedy; but this doesn’t mean that the disease doesn’t exist. [104]
Franche-Comte, which lived freely and happily under the very distant suzerainty of the Spanish, fought in the seventeenth century in order not to become French. The people of Strasburg wept when they saw the troops of Louis XIV entering their city in time of peace, without a previous declaration of any kind, through a violation of a solemn undertaking worthy of Hitler.
Paoli, the last Corsican hero, battled heroically to prevent his country from coming under French rule. There is a monument to his honor in a church in Florence; in France he is hardly remembered. Corsica is an example of the danger of infection involved in uprootedness. After having conquered, colonized, corrupted and debased the people of that island, we have now had to put up with them in the shape of prefects of police, police narks, sergeant-majors, pions 24 and other functions of a like nature, in pursuit of which they, in their turn, have treated the French like a more or less conquered people. They have also contributed towards giving France in the minds of numerous natives belonging to the colonies a reputation for cruelty and brutality.
Although the kings of France are praised for having assimilated the countries they conquered, the truth is that they to a large extent uprooted them. This is an easy method of assimilation, within the reach of anybody. People who have their culture taken away from them either carry on without any at all, or else accept the odds and ends of the culture one condescends to give them. In either event, they don’t stand out individually, so they appear to be assimilated. The real marvel is to assimilate populations so that they preserve their culture, though necessarily modified, as a living thing. It is a marvel which very seldom takes place.
It is true that, under the Ancien Regime, the French showed themselves to be intensely conscious of their French-ness in all periods of particular splendor for France: in the thirteenth century, when the whole of Europe flocked to the University of Paris; in the sixteenth [105] century, when the Renaissance, already extinguished or not yet lighted elsewhere, had its seat in France; in the early part of Louis XIV’s reign, when arms and letters enjoyed a dual prestige. It is none the less certain that it was not the kings who welded together these disparate territories. It was solely the Revolution.
Already during the eighteenth century there existed in France, in very different ranks of society, alongside the grossest forms of corruption, a bright, pure flame of patriotism. Take for example the brilliantly gifted young peasant, brother of Restif de la Bretonne, who was hardly more than a child when he became a soldier out of pure love for the public weal, and was killed at the age of seventeen. But that was already the Revolution at work. People felt a presentiment of it, waited for it, longed for it, right throughout the century.
The Revolution melted all the peoples subject to the French Crown into one single mass, and that by their enthusiasm for national sovereignty. Those who had been Frenchmen by force, became so by free consent; many of those who were not French wanted to become so. For to be French, thenceforward, meant belonging to the sovereign nation. If all the peoples, everywhere, had become sovereign — as was hoped — none could take away from France the honour of having been the first to begin. Besides, frontiers no longer counted. Foreigners were only people who went on being the slaves of tyrants. Foreigners of a genuinely republican spirit were willingly accepted as honorary Frenchmen.
Thus, in France, there has been this paradox of a patriotism founded, not on love of the past, but on the most violent break with the country’s past. And yet, the Revolution had a past in the more or less underground [106] part of French history: everything connected with the freeing of the serfs, liberties of the towns, social struggles; the revolts in the fourteenth century, the beginnings of the Burgundian movement, the Fronde; and then writers like d’Aubigne, Theophile de Viau, Retz. Under Francois I, a project for creating a people’s militia was set aside, because the noblemen objected that if it was put into operation the militiamen’s grandsons would find themselves noblemen and their own grandsons serfs. So great was the dynamic force thrusting beneath the surface of this people.
But the influence of the Encydopedistes, all of them uprooted intellectuals, all obsessed with the idea of progress, killed any chance of inspiration being sought in a revolutionary tradition. Besides, the prolonged terror under Louis XIV had left a gap difficult to bridge. It is because of this that, in spite of Montesquieu’s efforts in a contrary sense, the liberating current of the eighteenth century found itself without historical roots: 1789 really was an open break.
The sentiment which then went by the name of patriotism was solely concerned with the present and the future. It was the love of the sovereign nation, based to a large extent on pride in belonging to it. The quality of being French seemed to be not so much a natural fact as a choice on the part of the will, like joining a party or church in our own day.
As for those who remained attached to the past history of France, their attachment took the form of a personal and dynastic fidelity to the king. They saw nothing wrong in looking to foreign kings to send them armed help. They were not traitors. They remained faithful to what they thought they owed faithfulness, exactly like the men who brought about the death of Louis XVI.
The only people at that time who were patriots, in the sense that word took on later, were those who appeared in the eyes of their contemporaries — and have since appeared in those of posterity — as arch-traitors; men like Talleyrand, [107] who served, not, as has been said, every regime, but France behind every regime. But for such men France was neither the sovereign nation nor the king; it was the French State. Subsequent events have shown how right they were.
For, when the illusion of national sovereignty showed itself to be manifestly an illusion, it could no longer serve as an object of patriotism; on the other hand, kingship was like one of those severed plants one doesn’t replant again. Patriotism had to change its meaning and turn itself towards the State. But thereby it straightaway ceased to be popular. For the State was not something brought into being in 1789; it dated from the beginning of the seventeenth century, and shared some of the hatred nursed by the people against the monarchy. Thus it happened that, by an historical paradox which at first sight seems surprising, patriotism changed to a different social class and political camp. It had been on the Left; it went over to the Right.
The change-over was completed following upon the Commune and the inauguration of the Third Republic. The May massacre of 1871 was a blow from which, morally, French workmen have perhaps never recovered. And it is not so long ago as all that. A workman of fifty at the present time can well have listened to horrified accounts of it from the lips of his father, then a child. The nineteenth-century French army was a specific creation of the Revolution. Even soldiers in the service of the Bourbons, Louis-Philippe or Napoleon III must certainly have fired on the people very much against their own inclination. In 1871, for the first time since the Revolution, leaving out the brief interlude of 1848, France possessed a republican army. This same army, composed of decent young fellows from the French countryside, set about massacring workmen with an extraordinary display of sadistic pleasure. It was enough to produce a considerable shock. [108]
The principal cause of this was doubtless the need of compensation for the disgrace of the defeat, that same need which led us a little later on to conquer the unfortunate Annamites. Everything points to the fact that, unless supernatural grace intervenes, there is no form of cruelty or depravity of which ordinary, decent people are not capable, once the corresponding psychological mechanisms have been set in motion.
The Third Republic was another shock. It is easy to believe in national sovereignty so long as wicked kings or emperors hold the nation in thrall; people think: if only they weren’t there! … But when they are no longer there, when democracy has been installed and nevertheless the People is indubitably not sovereign, bewilderment is inevitable.
The year 1871 was the last year of that particular sort of French patriotism born in 1789. Frederick, the German Prince Imperial — afterwards Frederick II — a humane, reasonable and intelligent man, was very much surprised by the intensity of this patriotism, which he encountered everywhere throughout the course of the campaign. He couldn’t understand why the Alsatians, hardly knowing a word of French, speaking a dialect closely allied to German, brutally conquered at a relatively recent date, refused to have anything to do with Germany. He discovered that the motive for this was the pride felt in belonging to the country which had produced the French Revolution, to the sovereign nation. Their annexation, by separating them from France, doubtless helped them to preserve this state of mind, at any rate partially, right up to 1918.
The Paris Commune was not, to begin with, a social movement at all, but an outburst of patriotism and even of extreme chauvinism. All through the nineteenth century, moreover, the aggressive turn taken by French patriotism had alarmed the rest of Europe. The war of 1870 was the direct outcome of this; for though France had not made preparations for war, she had none the less declared it [109] without any plausible reason. Dreams of imperial conquest had remained alive among the people right throughout the century. At the same time, toasts were drunk to world independence. Conquering the world and liberating the world are, in fact, two incompatible forms of glory, but which can be easily reconciled with one another in reverie.
All this bubbling-up of popular feeling died away after 1871. Two things, nevertheless, caused an appearance of patriotic continuity to be maintained. One was the resentment at being defeated. There was not yet at that time any real reason for bearing the Germans a grudge. They had not been the aggressors; they had pretty well refrained from committing atrocities; and it was not our place to reproach them with violating the rights of peoples in connexion with Alsace-Lorraine, whose population is largely Germanic, from the moment we began sending our first expeditions into Annam. But we bore them a grudge for having beaten us, just as though they had violated some divine, eternal, imprescriptible right to victory on the part of France.
In our present hatred of them, for which, unfortunately, there exist only too many legitimate reasons, this curious sentiment also plays its part. It was also one of the motives behind the action of certain collaborationists right at the beginning. If France found herself on the side of the vanquished, they thought, it could only be because of some faulty deal, some mistake, some misunderstanding; her natural place was on the side of the victors; therefore, the easiest, least arduous, least painful method of bringing about the indispensable rectification was to change sides. This state of mind was very prevalent in certain circles at Vichy in July 1940.
But what above all prevented French patriotism from disappearing altogether under the Third Republic, after losing nearly all its vital sap, was the fact that there was nothing else. The French had nothing except France to which to remain faithful; and when they abandoned her for [110] a while, in June 1940, one saw how hideous and pitiful could be the spectacle of a people no longer attached by bonds of fidelity to anything whatever. That is why, later on, they once again clung on exclusively to France. But if the French People recovers its sovereignty — at least, what nowadays goes by that name — the same difficulty as before 1940 will reappear, namely, that the reality designated by the word France will be above all a State.
The State is a cold concern which cannot inspire love, but itself kills, suppresses everything that might be loved; so one is forced to love it, because there is nothing else. That is the moral torment to which all of us today are exposed.
Here lies perhaps the true cause of that phenomenon of the leader which has sprung up everywhere nowadays and surprises so many people. Just now, there is in all countries, in all movements, a man who is the personal magnet for all loyalties. Being compelled to embrace the cold, metallic surface of the State has made people, by contrast, hunger for something to love which is made of flesh and blood. This phenomenon shows no signs of disappearing, and, however disastrous the consequences have been so far, it may still have some very unpleasant surprises in store for us; for the art, so well known in Hollywood, of manufacturing stars out of any sort of human material, gives any sort of person the opportunity of presenting himself for the adoration of the masses.
Unless I am mistaken, the idea of making the State an object of loyalty appeared for the first time in France and in Europe with Richelieu. Before his time, people used to talk in religious-like tones about the public weal, the country, the king or the local lord. It was he who first adopted the principle that whoever exercises a public function owes his entire loyalty, in the exercise of that function, not to the public, or to the king, but to the State and nothing else. It would be difficult to give an exact definition of the State. But it is, unfortunately, only too obvious that the word stands for something very real. [111]
Richelieu, who possessed the intellectual clarity so common at that time, defined in luminous terms the difference between politics and morals, over which there has subsequently arisen so much confused thinking. Here is more or less what he said: We should beware of applying the same rules to the welfare of the State as to that of the soul; for the welfare of souls is attended to in the world above, whereas that of States is only attended to in this world.
That is cruelly exact. A Christian ought to be able to draw therefrom but one conclusion: that whereas to the welfare of the soul, or in other words to God, a total, absolute and unconditional loyalty is owed; the welfare of the State is a cause to which only a limited and conditional loyalty is owed.
But although Richelieu believed himself to be a Christian, and no doubt sincerely, his conclusion was a totally different one, namely, that a man responsible for the welfare of the State, and the men under him, must employ to this end all useful means, without any exception, and, if necessary, sacrifice thereto their own lives, their sovereign, their people, foreign countries, and any and every species of obligation.
It represents — but in a much nobler form — Maurras’ doctrine: ‘Politique d’ abord‘. But Maurras, with perfect logic, is an atheist. The Cardinal, in postulating something whose whole reality is confined to this world as an absolute value, committed the sin of idolatry. Nor, in this connexion, is it metal, stone or wood which are really dangerous. The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State. It was this sin which the devil wanted Christ to commit when he offered him the kingdoms of this world. Christ refused. Richelieu accepted. He had his reward. But he always believed himself to be acting solely out of devotion, and in a sense it was true.
His devotion to the State uprooted France. His policy was to kill systematically all spontaneous life in the [112] country, so as to prevent anything whatsoever being able to oppose the State. If certain limits seem to have been set to his action in this sense, that is only because he was beginning and was astute enough to proceed gradually. All one needs to do is to read Corneille’s dedicatory prefaces to realize to what vile depths of servility he had managed to reduce people’s minds. Later on, to shield our national glory from shame, some people hit on the idea of saying that all this was merely the polite language of the time. But it’s a lie. To convince oneself of the fact, all one has to do is to read what Theophile de Viau has written. Only, Theophile died prematurely as a result of an arbitrary imprisonment, whereas Corneille lived to a grand old age.
Literature is only useful to us here as a sign; but it is a sure sign. Corneille’s servile language shows that Richelieu wanted to enslave people’s very minds; not for his own benefit, for in his self-abnegation he was probably sincere, but for that of the State he represented. His conception of the State was already totalitarian. He applied it as much as he was able to by subjecting the country, to the full extent the means of the time allowed, to a police regime. He thus destroyed a considerable part of the moral life of the country. If France submitted herself to be gagged in this way, it is because the nobility had so laid her waste by nonsensical and atrociously cruel civil wars that she consented to buy civil peace at that price.
After the Fronde outburst, which in its beginnings, from many points of view, was a forerunner of 1789, Louis XIV set himself up in power far more in the spirit of a dictator than in that of a legitimate sovereign. That is what his phrase ‘L’Etat, c’est moi‘ indicates. It is not a kingly conception. Montesquieu has explained all this very clearly, in roundabout terms. But what he couldn’t yet perceive in his time was that there have been two stages in the decline of the French monarchy. After Charles V, the monarchy degenerated into a personal despotism. But from Richelieu onwards, it was replaced by a State machine [113] with totalitarian tendencies, which, as Marx points out, has not only outlasted all changes of regime, but has been strengthened and perfected by each succeeding change.
During the Fronde and under Mazarin, France, in spite of the general distress, was morally able to breathe. Louis XIV found her full of brilliant men of genius whom he recognized and encouraged. But at the same time he carried on, to a much higher degree of intensity, the policy of Richelieu. In this way he reduced France in a very short time to a desert from the moral point of view, not to mention one of fearful material poverty.
If one reads Saint-Simon, not as a literary and historical curiosity, but as a document dealing with the lives of human beings who actually lived, one is overcome with horror and disgust at such a turgid atmosphere of mortal ennui, such widespread spiritual, moral and intellectual baseness. La Bruyere, the letters of Liselotte — all the documents of the time, read in the same spirit, leave the same impression. Going back even a little further, one should certainly realize, for example, that Moliere didn’t write his Misonthrope just for fun.
Louis XIV’s regime was really already totalitarian. The country was ravaged by terrorism and denunciation. The idolizing of the State in the person of the sovereign was organized with an impudence which was an outrage to all Christian consciences. The art of propaganda was already thoroughly understood, as is shown by that ingenuous admission by the chief of police to Liselotte regarding the orders received not to allow any book on any subject to appear which didn’t contain an extravagant eulogy of the king.
Under this regime, uprootedness in the French provinces, the suppression of all local life, reached a far higher degree of intensity. The eighteenth century provided a lull. The operation whereby national sovereignty was substituted for royal sovereignty under the Revolution had only this drawback, the nonexistence of national sovereignty. As in the case of Orlando’s mare, that was [114] the only defect to be found. In point of fact, there existed no known means of creating something concrete corresponding to these words. Thenceforward, there remained only the State, which naturally reaped the benefit of the strong desire for unity — ‘unity or death’ — which had developed around the belief in national sovereignty. Whence, further destruction in the sphere of local life. With the aid of war — war having been from the very start the mainspring of all this business — the State, under the Convention and the Empire, became ever more and more totalitarian.
Louis XIV had debased the Gallic Church by associating it with the cult of his own person and by imposing obedience on it even in matters of religion. This servile attitude of the Church towards the sovereign was very largely responsible for the anti-clericalism of the following century.
But when the Church committed the irreparable mistake of making common cause with the monarchy, it thereby cut itself off from the general life of the nation. Nothing was better able to serve the totalitarian designs of the State. The only result could be the laical system, prelude to that open adoration of the State as such which is now so much in favor.
Christians are defenseless against the laical spirit. For either they must throw themselves entirely into political action, party politics, to put temporal power back again into the hands of the clergy, or the supporters of the clergy; or else they must resign themselves to being irreligious, in their turn, in all that appertains to the secular side of their own lives, which is what usually happens today, to a far greater extent than those concerned realize themselves. In either case, they set aside [115] the proper function of religion, which is to suffuse with its light all secular life, public or private, without ever in any way dominating it.
During the nineteenth century, the railways caused frightful havoc from the point of view of uprootedness. George Sand was still able to see in her native Berry customs which maybe went back for several thousand years, the very memory of which would have been entirely lost but for the hasty notes she took down concerning them.
Loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy, and we have thrown ours away just like a child picking off the petals of a rose. It is above all to avoid this loss that peoples will put up a desperate resistance to being conquered.
Now, the totalitarian phenomenon of the State arises through a conquest carried out by the public authorities of the people under their care, without being able to spare them the evils necessarily accompanying all conquests, in order to possess a better instrument for carrying out foreign conquest. This is what happened formerly in France and has happened more recently in Germany, not to mention Russia.
But the development of the State exhausts a country. The State eats away its moral substance, lives on it, fattens on it, until the day comes when no more nourishment can be drawn from it, and famine reduces it to a condition of lethargy. That was the condition France had reached. In Germany, on the other hand, the centralization of the State is quite a recent development, consequently there the State possesses all the aggressiveness supplied by a superabundance of food of high energizing content. As for Russia, popular life is so intensely strong there, that one wonders whether, in the end, it isn’t the people that will devour the State, or rather re-absorb it.
The Third Republic, in France, was a very curious affair; one of its most curious features being that its entire structure, outside the actual arena of parliamentary life, [116] was derived from the Empire. The love Frenchmen have for abstract logic makes it very easy for them to be deceived by labels. The English have a kingdom with a republican content; we had a republic with an imperial content. Moreover, the Empire itself was linked, over and beyond the Revolution, back in an unbroken chain to the monarchy; not the ancient French monarchy, but the totalitarian, police-ridden one of the seventeenth century.
The personality of Fouché is a symbol of this continuity. The repressive apparatus of the French State continued on throughout all changes without being troubled or interrupted, with an ever-increasing power of action. That is why the State, in France, remained a target for people’s resentment, hatred and aversion, which, in the past, had been aroused by royal government turned tyrannical. We have actually lived through this strange paradox, so strange that one couldn’t even be aware of it at the time: a democracy in which all public institutions, and all things connected with them, were openly hated and despised by the entire population.
No Frenchman had the slightest qualms about robbing or cheating the State in the matter of customs, taxes, subsidies or anything else. We must except certain ranks of civil servants; but they formed part of the State machine. If the middle-classes went much further than anybody else in the country in dealings of this sort, it was solely because far more opportunities came their way. The police, in France, are held in such profound contempt that many Frenchmen regard this attitude as one necessarily built into the everlasting moral structure of the respectable citizen. Guignol forms part of genuine French folk-lore, which goes back to the Ancien Regime and has never grown out of date. The epithet ‘policier‘ constitutes in French one of the most scathing insults, and it would be interesting to know if exact equivalents exist in other languages. But, of course, the police are really nothing other than the active instrument at the service of the authorities. The feelings of the French people with regard [117] to this instrument have remained the same as they were in the days when peasants were obliged, as Rousseau noted, to conceal the fact that they had a piece of ham in the house.
Similarly, the whole series of political institutions were the object of disgust, derision and disdain. The very word politics had taken on a profoundly pejorative meaning incredible in a democracy. ‘Oh, he’s a politician,’ ‘all that, that’s just polities’: such phrases expressed final and complete condemnation. In the eyes of a number of French people, even the parliamentary profession itself — for it was a profession — had something ignominious about it. Some Frenchmen prided themselves on keeping away from all contact with what they termed ‘la politique‘, except on the day of the elections, or even on that day too; others looked upon their local deputy as a sort of servant, a being created and put into the world specially to serve their own private interests. The only feeling which tempered the contempt for public affairs was the party spirit, at any rate among such as had caught this disease.
One would seek in vain to find a single aspect of public life that was able to arouse in the French the remotest feelings of loyalty, gratitude or affection. In the heyday of laical enthusiasm, there had been public education; but for a long time now education has ceased to be anything, both in the eyes of parents and children alike, except a machine for producing diplomas, in other words, jobs. As to items of social legislation, never had the French people, to the extent to which their appetite in that direction was satisfied, regarded them as other than concessions extorted [118] from niggardly authorities as a direct result of bringing violent pressure to bear.
No other interest replaced the one lacking for public affairs. Each successive regime having destroyed at an ever- increasing rate local and regional life, it had finally ceased to exist. France was like a dying man whose members are already cold, and whose heart alone goes on beating. Hardly anywhere was there any real throb of life except in Paris; but even there, as soon as you reached the suburbs, an atmosphere of moral decay began to make itself felt.
In those outwardly peaceful days before the war, the ennui of the little French provincial towns constituted perhaps as real a form of cruelty as that of more visible atrocities. Isn’t it as cruel to condemn human beings to spend those unique, irreplaceable years between the cradle and the grave in a dismal atmosphere of ennui, as to have them starved or massacred? It was Richelieu who started throwing this pall of ennui over France, and since his time the atmosphere has only grown stuffier and stuffier. When war broke out, a state of asphyxiation had been reached.
If the State has morally killed everything, territorially speaking, smaller than itself, it has also turned territorial frontiers into prison walls to lock up people’s thoughts. As soon as one examines history a little closely, and outside of the ordinary manuals, one is amazed to see to what extent certain periods almost without material means of communication surpassed ours in the wealth, variety, fertility and vitality of their exchanges of thought over the very widest expanses. That is the case with the Middle Ages, pre-Roman antiquity, the period immediately preceding historical times. In our day, with our wireless, aeroplanes, latest developments in transport of all kinds, printing and the press, the modern phenomenon of the nation keeps shut up in separate little compartments even so naturally universal a thing as Science. Frontiers, of course, are not impassable; but just as they subject the traveler to an unending series of irritating and laborious formalities, so in the same way all contact with foreign [119] ways of thinking, in no matter what sphere, demands a mental effort in order to get across the frontier. The effort required is considerable, and quite a number of people are not prepared to make it. Even in the case of those who do, the fact that such an effort has to be made prevents the formation of organic links across the frontiers.
It is true that there are international Churches and parties. But as for the Churches, they offer us the supreme scandal of clergy and faithful asking God at the same time, with the same rites, the same words, and it must be supposed, an equal amount of faith and purity of heart, to grant a military victory to one or other of two warring camps. This shocking spectacle has been going on for a long time; but in our century religious life has been subordinated to that of the nation as never before. And as for parties, their internationalism is either a pure fiction, or else it takes the form of a total subservience to one particular nation.
Lastly, the State has also broken all the bonds which could, outside the sphere of public life, provide a goal for the exercise of loyalty. Much as the French Revolution did, by suppressing the trades-corporations, to encourage technical progress, morally speaking it created a corresponding amount of evil, or at any rate finally sealed an evil already partly accomplished. It cannot be too often repeated that nowadays, whenever people refer to such organizations, in no matter what circles, the last thing they have in mind is anything resembling the old trades-corporations.
Once the trades-corporations had disappeared, labor became, in the individual lives of men, a means whose corresponding end was money. There is somewhere in the Charter of the League of Nations a sentence declaring that henceforth labour shall no longer be regarded as a commodity. It was a joke in the worst possible taste. We live in an age when a host of worthy people, who judge themselves to be very far removed from what Levy-Bruhl called the pre-logical mentality, have believed in the [120] magical efficacy of words far more than any savage from the depths of Australia ever did. When you take some indispensable commercial product off the market, you have to arrange for it to be distributed in some other way. Nothing of the kind was attempted in connexion with labor, which, naturally, has continued being a commodity.
Hence, professional loyalty becomes merely a form of commercial honesty. In a society founded on exchange, the heaviest form of social reprobation falls on robbery and swindling, and especially swindling by a dealer who sells poor quality goods guaranteeing them all the time to be first-class. Accordingly, when one sells one’s labor, honesty demands that one should furnish goods of a quality corresponding to the price paid. But honesty is not the same as loyalty. A wide distance separates these two virtues.
A strong current of loyalty flows through working-class association, which was for a long time the dominant impulse behind trade-union activity. But several obstacles have prevented this loyalty from forming a solid buttress to moral life. On the one hand, the commercial side of social life has penetrated into the working-class movement, by wage questions being given first place; and the more questions of money dominate, the quicker the spirit of loyalty disappears. On the other hand, to the extent to which the working-class movement is a revolutionary one, it has escaped from this drawback, but has acquired the weaknesses inherent in all forms of rebellion.
Richelieu, some of whose observations are so extraordinarily lucid, declares having learned from experience that, all other things being equal, rebels are always half as strong as the defenders of official power. Even if people think they are upholding a good cause, the feeling that they are in rebellion weakens them. Without some psychological mechanism of this sort, there could be no stability about human societies. This mechanism explains the firm hold obtained by the Communist Party. [121] Revolutionary workmen are only too thankful to have a State at the back of them — a State which gives an official character, legitimacy and reality to their actions that only a State can confer, and which at the same time is situated too far away from them, geographically, to be able to disgust them. In just the same way, the Encyclopedistes, feeling deeply uncomfortable at finding themselves in conflict with their own ruler, showed desperate anxiety to obtain the favor of the rulers of Prussia and Russia. One can also understand, making use of this analogy, why more or less revolutionary workmen who had resisted the attraction of Russian prestige were not able to prevent themselves succumbing to the German variety.
Apart from those who have given themselves entirely to the Communist Party, workmen cannot find in loyalty towards their own class a sufficiently concrete, sufficiently clearly defined aim to satisfy their need of inner stability. Few notions are so vague as that of social class. Marx, who built up the whole of his system upon it, never attempted to define it, nor even simply to investigate it. The only information to be extracted from his works on the subject of social classes is that they are things which engage in strife. That is not enough. Besides, it is not one of those notions which, without being able to be defined in words, are clear to the mind. It is even harder to conceive it or feel it without some definition than it is to define it.
The loyalty implicit in adherence to some religious form also counts little enough — strange though this may be — in modern life. In spite of great and obvious differences, a result which is in a sense analogous is produced by the English system of a national Church and the French system of the separation of Churches and State. Only the latter seems the more destructive.
Religion has been proclaimed a private affair. According to present-day habits of mind, this doesn’t mean that it resides in the secret places of the soul, in that inner sanctuary where even the individual conscience doesn’t penetrate. It means that it is a matter of choice, opinion, [122] taste, almost of caprice, something like the choice of a political party, or even that of a tie; or else that it is a matter to do with one’s family, education, personal surroundings. Having become a private concern, it has lost the obligatory character associated with public manifestations, and consequently can no longer lay claim to loyalty unchallenged.
A number of revealing remarks show that this is so. How often, for instance, we hear the following commonplace repeated: ‘Whether Catholics, Protestants, Jews or Free-Thinkers, we’re all Frenchmen,’ exactly as though it were a question of small territorial fragments of the country, as who should say: ‘Whether from Marseilles, Lyons or Paris, we’re all Frenchmen.’ In a document promulgated by the Pope, one may read: ‘Not only from the Christian point of view; but, more generally, from the human point of view …’, as though the Christian point of view — which either has no meaning at all, or else claims to encompass everything in this world and the next — possessed a smaller degree of generality than die human point of view. It is impossible to conceive a more terrible admission of religious bankruptcy. That is how the anathema sit have to be paid for. To sum up, religion, degraded to the rank of a private matter, reduces itself to the choice of a place in which to spend an hour or two every Sunday morning.
What is comical about the situation is that religion, that is to say, Man’s relationship to God, is not nowadays regarded as too sacred a matter to be interfered with by any outside authority, but is placed among the things which the State leaves to each one’s own particular fancy, as being of small importance from the point of view of public affairs. At least, that has been the case in the recent past, and that is die contemporary meaning attached to the word ‘tolerance’.
Thus there exists nothing, apart from the State, to which loyalty can cling; which is why up to 1940 loyalty had not been withdrawn from it. For men feel that there is [123] something hideous about a human existence devoid of loyalty. Amidst the general debasement of all words in the French vocabulary which have anything to do with moral concepts, the words traitre and trahison have lost none of their forcefulness. Men feel also that they are born for sacrifice; and the only form of sacrifice remaining in the public imagination was military sacrifice, that is, a sacrifice offered to the State.
Indeed, all that was left was the State. The ideal of the Nation, in the sense in which the men of 1789 or 1792 understood the word, which then used to bring tears of joy to people’s eyes — all that belonged irremediably to the past. Even the word nation had changed its meaning. In our day, it no longer denotes the sovereign people, but the sum total of peoples recognizing the authority of the same State; it is the political structure created by a State and the country under its control. When one talks about national sovereignty nowadays, all it really means is the sovereignty of the State. A conversation between a contemporary of ours and a man of 1792 would lead to some highly comic misunderstandings. For not only is the State in question not the sovereign people, but it is the very self-same inhuman, brutal, bureaucratic, police-ridden State bequeathed by Richelieu to Louis XIV, by Louis XIV to the Convention, by the Convention to the Empire, and by the Empire to the Third Republic. And what is more, it is instinctively recognized and hated as such.
Thus we have witnessed this strange spectacle — a State, the object of hatred, repugnance, derision, disdain and fear, which, under the name of patrie, demanded absolute loyalty, total self-abnegation, the supreme sacrifice, and obtained them, from 1914 to 1918, to an extent which surpassed all expectations. It set itself up as an absolute value in this world, that is, as an object of idolatry; and it was accepted and served as such, honored with the sacrifice of an appalling number of human lives. A loveless idolatry — what could be more monstrous, more heartrending? [124]
When anybody goes much further in his devotion than his heart prompts him to do, a violent reaction, a sort of revulsion of feeling sets in later on inevitably. This is frequently observable in families where an invalid requires things to be done for him which exceed the affection he inspires. His relatives harbor a resentment which is suppressed as too unworthy to admit, but which is ever- present, like some secret poison.
That is exactly what happened between Frenchmen and France, after 1918. They had given too much to France, more than they had it in them to give to her.
All the flow of anti-patriotic, pacifist and internationalist ideas after 1918 claimed to be in the name of those killed in the war and the veterans; and in the case of the latter, a good deal of it really had its source among themselves. There were also, it is true, extremely patriotic veterans’ associations. But the expression of their patriotism had a hollow ring, and was lacking altogether in persuasive force. It reminded one of the language of people who, having suffered too much, continually feel the need to remind themselves that they haven’t suffered in vain. For too high a degree of suffering in relation to what the heart prompts can produce one or other of two attitudes: either the violent rejection of the object to which too much has been sacrificed, or else the clinging to it in a sort of despair.
Nothing did more harm to patriotism than the reminder, repeated ad nauseam, of the part played by the police behind the battle front. Nothing was more calculated to wound the susceptibilities of Frenchmen, by pointing out to them, standing behind their country, that police-ridden State, the traditional object of their hatred. At the same time, extracts from the sensational press during the war years, read over again later on quite calmly and with appropriate feelings of disgust, and connected up with the role of the police, left them with the impression that they had been hoaxed. There is nothing that a Frenchman is less able to forgive. Since the very words which expressed [125] patriotic feeling had become discredited, the feeling itself became relegated, in a sense, to the category of feelings one is ashamed to talk about. There was a time, not so long ago either, when to have expressed patriotic sentiments in working-class circles — at least, in some of them — would have seemed to those present like a breach of propriety.
All the evidence points to the fact that the most courageous soldiers in 1940 were veterans of the previous war. One can only conclude that their post-1918 reactions had a deeper influence over the minds of their children than over their own. This is a very frequent phenomenon and quite easy to understand. Those who were eighteen in 1914 had had their characters formed in the years preceding the war.
It has been said that the schools at the beginning of the century had formed a generation for victory, and that those after 1918 turned out a beaten one. There is undoubtedly a lot of truth in this. Still, the schoolmasters from 1918 onwards were mostly veterans, and very many children who reached the age of ten between 1920 and 1930 must have had such men as teachers.
If the effect of this reaction was felt in France more than in other countries, this was because of a far more acute form of uprootedness there, resulting from a far older and more intense form of State centralization, the demoralizing effects of victory, and the complete license allowed in the field of propaganda.
The balance was also upset in regard to the notion of patriotism, but compensated in an inverse sense, this compensation taking place in the realm of pure speculation. Owing to the fact that the State had remained, in the midst of a total void, the only reality entitled to demand of Man his loyalty and sacrifice, the notion of patriotism presented itself to the mind as an absolute value. The country was beyond good and evil. It is what is expressed in the English saying: ‘Right or wrong, my [126] country’. But people often go farther. They refuse to admit that their country can ever be wrong.
However small the inclination of men of all classes may be for making an effort of critical examination, a patent absurdity, even if they refuse it conscious recognition, throws them into a state of uneasiness which weakens the spirit. In reality, nothing is more mixed up with ordinary, daily human affairs than philosophy, but it is an implied philosophy.
To posit one’s country as an absolute value that cannot be defiled by evil is manifestly absurd. Country is merely another name for nation; and the nation is a self-contained unit composed of various territorial areas and peoples assembled together as a result of historical events in which chance has played a great part, so far as human intelligence is able to judge, and where good and evil are always mingled with one another. The nation is a fact, and a fact is not an absolute value. It is just one fact amongst other similar facts. More than one nation exists on the earth’s surface. Ours is certainly unique. But each of the others, considered by itself and with affection, is unique in the same degree.
It was the fashion before 1940 to talk about ‘eternal France’. Such words are a sort of blasphemy. One is compelled to say the same about the moving pages which have been written by great French Catholic writers on the vocation of France, the eternal salvation of France and other similar themes. Richelieu showed a much clearer perception when he said that the salvation of States was only brought about in this world. France is something which is temporal, terrestrial. Unless I am mistaken, it has never been suggested that Christ died to save nations. The idea of a nation being chosen by God for itself simply belongs to the old Mosaic law.[127]
So-called pagan antiquity would never have blundered into so gross a confusion. The Romans regarded themselves as specially chosen, but solely for world dominion. They were not concerned with the next world. Nowhere does it appear that any city, or people, should have thought itself chosen for a supernatural destiny. The Mysteries which represented, to a certain extent, the official road to salvation, as the Churches do today, were local institutions, but recognized as being on an equal footing among themselves. Plato describes how Man, assisted by the power of grace, passes out of the cavern of this world; but he doesn’t say that a whole city can pass out of it. On the contrary, he depicts the collectivity as something animal, which hinders the soul’s salvation.
Antiquity is often accused of having only been able to recognize collective values. In fact, this mistake was only made by the Romans, who were atheists, and by the Hebrews; and in the latter case, only up to the time of the Babylonian exile. But if it is wrong to attribute this mistake to pre-Christian antiquity, it is also wrong not to recognize that we are continually committing it ourselves, corrupted as we are by the dual Roman-Hebrew tradition, which all too often carries the day with us as against pure Christian inspiration.
Christians today find it awkward to have to recognize that, if the word patriotism is used in its strongest possible sense, its complete sense, a Christian has only one country that can be the object of such patriotism, and which is situated outside this world. For he has but one Patros, who lives outside this world. ‘Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven … for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ It is therefore forbidden to have one’s heart on this earth.
Christians today don’t like raising the question of the respective rights over their heart enjoyed by God and their country. The German bishops ended one of their most courageous protests by saying that they refused ever to have to make a choice between God and Germany. And [128] why did they refuse to do this? Circumstances can always arise which make it necessary to choose between God and no matter what earthly object, and the choice must never be in doubt. But the French bishops would not have expressed themselves any differently. Joan of Arc’s popularity during the past quarter of a century was not an altogether healthy business; it was a convenient way of forgetting that there is a difference between France and God. Yet this lack of inward courage to challenge the accepted notion of patriotism didn’t make for greater energy in patriotic performance. Joan of Arc’s statue was occupying a prominent place in every church throughout the country, all through those terrible days when Frenchmen abandoned France to her fate.
“If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” If it is commanded to hate all that, using the word ‘hate’ in a certain sense, it is certainly forbidden also to love one’s country, using the word ‘love’ in a certain sense. For the proper object of love is goodness, and ‘God alone is good’.
Such facts are self-evident, but, by some magic spell or other, go altogether unrecognized in our age. Otherwise it would have been impossible for a man like Father de Foucauld — who, out of charity, had chosen to bear witness to Christ among non-Christian populations — to consider that he had the right at the same time to supply the Deuxieme Bureau with information on the subject of these same populations.
It would be salutary for us to ponder the devil’s terrible words with reference to the kingdoms of this world, as he showed them all to Christ: ‘All this power … is delivered unto me…’ Not a single kingdom is excepted.
What didn’t shock the Christians shocked the workmen. A tradition still sufficiently recent so as not to be quite dead, makes the love of justice the central inspiration behind the French working-class movement. [129] During the first half of the nineteenth century it was a passionate love, which took the side of the oppressed all over the world.
As long as the People constituted as a sovereign nation were synonymous with the Country, no problem arose concerning their relationship to justice. For it was agreed — quite arbitrarily, and on the flimsiest interpretation of the Contrat Social — that a sovereign nation doesn’t commit acts of injustice towards either its members or its neighbors; it being supposed that the causes making for injustice were all bound up with the non-existence of the sovereign nation.
But as soon as, behind the country, there stands the old State, justice is far away. In the modern form of patriotism, justice hasn’t much of a part to play, and above all nothing is said which might encourage any relationship between patriotism and justice to be drawn. One dare not assert that there is an equivalence between the two conceptions; one wouldn’t dare, in particular, make such an assertion before a gathering of workmen, who, beneath their social oppression, feel the State’s cold, metallic touch, and realize in a confused sort of way that the same cold touch must prevail in international relations. When a lot is talked about patriotism, little is heard about justice; and the sense of justice is so strong amongst workmen, even if they are materialists, owing to the fact that they are always under the impression they are being deprived of it, that any form of moral education in which justice hardly figures cannot possibly exercise any hold over them. When they die for France, they always need to feel that at the same time they are dying for something very much greater, taking part in the universal struggle against injustice. For them, to use a now famous expression, patriotism is not enough.
The same thing applies wherever a flame, a spark, however indistinct, of truly spiritual life burns. By its light, patriotism is not enough. And for those in whom this light is absent, patriotism, in its highest aspects, is far [130] too exalted; it can then only constitute a sufficiently strong incentive in the form of the blindest national fanaticism.
It is true that men are capable of dividing their minds into compartments, in each of which an idea lives a sort of life of its own, undisturbed by other ideas. They don’t care for either critical or synthetical effort, and won’t submit to making either, unless obliged.
But in situations of fear, anguish, when the flesh draws back before the prospect of death, or too great a degree of suffering or danger, in the mind of every man, even if he is completely uneducated, a manufacturer of arguments suddenly stands forth, who elaborates proofs to demonstrate why it is legitimate and right to avoid that particular death, suffering or danger. Such proofs can be either good or bad, depending on the particular case. At all events, at the time, the body’s disturbed condition gives them an intensity of persuasive force that no orator has ever succeeded in acquiring.
There are people to whom things do not happen in this way. That is either because their natures protect them from fear, that their flesh, blood and bowels remain unaffected by the presence of death or suffering; or else because their minds have attained such a degree of unity that this manufacturer of arguments has no opportunity of getting to work in them. With others, again, he is able to get to work, and makes his arguments felt, but they are scorned nevertheless. That in itself presupposes either an already high degree of inward unity, or else powerful outward incentives.
Hitler’s profound remark on the subject of propaganda, namely that brute force is unable to prevail over ideas if it is alone, but that it easily manages to do so by taking unto itself a few ideas of no matter how base a nature, provides also the key to the inner life. The tumults of the flesh, however violent they may be, cannot prevail over a thought in the mind, if they act alone. But their victory is an easy one if they communicate their persuasive force to some other thought, however inferior it may be. That is [131] the important point. No thought is of too inferior a quality for this role of ally of the flesh. But the flesh needs thought of some kind as an ally.
That is why, whereas in normal times people — even cultured ones — live, without the slightest inconvenience, with the most colossal inward contradictions, in times of supreme crisis the least flaw in the realm of consciousness acquires the same importance as if the most lucid of philosophers were at hand, maliciously ready to take advantage of the fact; and this happens to everybody, however ignorant he or she may be.
In times of greatest stress, which are not necessarily those of greatest danger, but those when Man finds himself, in face of the tumult raging in his flesh and blood and bowels, alone and bereft of all outward support, those whose inward lives depend entirely on one idea are the only ones capable of resisting. Which is why totalitarian systems form men able to withstand anything.
Patriotism can only become a single idea of this sort in a regime of the Hitlerian type. This could easily be proved, in detail, but it isn’t worth while since the evidence is so overwhelming. If patriotism is not such an idea, and yet, all the same, has a part to play, then either there must exist disorder in the inward consciousness, and some hidden weakness of the spirit, or else there must be some other idea, dominating all the rest, and in relation to which patriotism has a perfectly clearly recognized role, but a limited and subordinate one.
This latter was not the case under the Third Republic — not in any class of society. What there was everywhere was moral incoherence; which is why a pet argument manufacturer was busy in everybody’s mind between 1914 and 1918. Most people resisted by making a supreme effort, thanks to that sort of reaction which often encourages men to rush blindly, through fear of bringing dishonor upon themselves, to the opposite extreme to that to which fear urges them. But when the mind is exposed to danger and suffering as a result of obeying this [132] impulse alone, it quickly becomes worn out. The agonized arguments which were unable to bring their influence to bear on personal conduct, go gnawing away all the more surely in the very depths of the mind, and make their influence felt retrospectively. That is what happened after 1918. And those who had not made any sacrifice and were ashamed of it were very quick, for other reasons, to catch the infection. In such an atmosphere were children brought up who, a little later on, were to be asked to go out and die.
One can realize how far this inward disintegration had proceeded with the French, when one reflects that even today the idea of collaboration with the enemy is not entirely out of favor. On the other hand, if encouragement is sought in the spectacle of the Resistance, if one tells oneself that the resisters find no difficulty at all in deriving inspiration from patriotism and from a host of other motives, one must at the same time go on reminding oneself that France, as a nation, finds herself at the moment on the side of justice, the general good and things of that kind, that is to say, among the beautiful things which don’t exist. The allied victory will take her out of this category, and put her back into the realm of facts; many difficulties which seemed to be disposed of will reappear. In a sense, affliction simplifies everything. The fact that France entered along the path of resistance more slowly, later than most of the other occupied countries, shows that it would be a mistake to be without apprehensions as to the future.
One can see clearly to what a point of moral incoherence our regime had attained if one considers the schools. Moral philosophy forms part of the curriculum, and even those teachers who didn’t care to make it the subject of dogmatic teaching, taught it inevitably in a diffuse sort of way. And the central conception of morals is justice and the obligations it imposes towards one’s neighbor.[133]
But when it is a question of history, morals ceases to play any part. The question is never raised as to France’s obligations abroad. Sometimes she is referred to as being just and generous, as though that were something supererogatory, a feather in her cap, a crown to her glory. The conquests she has made and then allowed to slip from her grasp can, perhaps, be regarded with a certain doubt, like those of Napoleon; but never the ones she has managed to hold on to. The past is nothing else but the story of France’s growth, and it is considered that this growth must necessarily be a good thing from every point of view. No one ever asks himself whether in the course of her growth she hasn’t brought about destruction. To look into the possibility of her having at some time or another destroyed things which were worth as much as she would seem the most appalling blasphemy. Bernanos says that the people of Action Francaise look upon France as a prime baby who has only to grow and put on flesh to satisfy his parents’ every wish. But there are others besides them. It is the general opinion which, without ever being expressed, is always implied in the way in which the country’s past history is regarded. And, besides, the comparison with a baby is too flattering. The living things that are only asked to put on flesh are rabbits, pigs and chickens. Plato found the right expression when he compared the collectivity to an animal. And those who are blinded by its prestige, which means every one except for a few predestined individuals, ‘call just and beautiful the things that are necessary, being incapable of discerning and teaching what a distance separates the essence of what is necessary from the essence of what is good’.
Everything is done to make children feel — not that they don’t feel it naturally — that things concerning the country, the nation, the nation’s growth have a degree of importance which sets them apart from other things. And [134] it is precisely in regard to those things that justice, consideration for others, strict obligations assigning limits to ambitions and appetites — all that moral teaching one is trying to instill into the lives of little boys — never get mentioned.
What conclusion is there to be drawn other than that morals are among the number of less important things, which, like religion, a trade, the choice of a doctor or a grocer, belong to the lower plane of private life?
But with morals, properly speaking, thus relegated to a lower plane, no other system is advanced as a substitute. For the superior prestige of the nation is bound up with the exaltation of war. It furnishes no motives for action in peacetime, except in a regime which constitutes a permanent preparation for war, like the Nazi regime. Save in such a regime as the latter, it would be dangerous to remind people too much that this country of theirs which asks its children to lay down their lives has a reverse side — the State, with its taxes, customs, police. This is carefully avoided, and so it never occurs to anybody that to hate the police or defraud the customs and income-tax authorities is to display a lack of patriotism. A country like England forms to a certain extent an exception, on account of a centuries-old tradition of liberty guaranteed by the authorities. Thus, this dual system or morals, in time of peace, weakens the power of the unchanging moral law, without putting anything in its place.
This duality is present at all time, everywhere, and not only in the schools. For nearly every day, in normal times, when a Frenchman reads the paper, discusses things at home or in the local bistro, he is moved to think for France, in the name of France. From that moment, and [135] until he enters again into his own private self, he loses even all recollection of the virtues which, in a more or less vague and abstract way, he recognizes it is his personal duty to practice. When it is a question of oneself, and even of one’s family, it is a more or less recognized thing that one mustn’t be too boastful; that one must beware of one’s judgments when one is at the same time judge and prosecutor; that one must ask oneself whether opposition on the part of others may not be at least partly justified; that one mustn’t try to occupy the whole stage, or think solely of oneself; in short, that limits must be set to egoism and pride. But when it comes to national egoism, national pride, not only is the field unlimited, but the highest possible degree of it seems to be imposed by something closely resembling an obligation. Regard for others, recognition of one’s own faults, modesty, the voluntary limitation of one’s desires — all are now turned into so many crimes, so many sacrileges. Among several sublime sentiments which the Egyptian Book of the Dead puts into the mouth of the just man after death, perhaps the most moving is the following: ‘I have never turned a deaf ear to just and true words’. But in international affairs, every one regards it as a sacred duty to turn a deaf ear to just and true words, if they go contrary to the interests of France. Or else, do we admit that words contrary to the interests of France can never be just and true ones? That would come to exactly the same thing.
There are certain errors of taste which good breeding, in the absence of morality, prevents people from falling into in private life, and which seem perfectly natural on a national scale. Even the most odious of patronesses would hesitate to assemble together all their protégées to remind them of the huge benefits they had received and of the corresponding gratitude they owed in return. But a French Governor of Indo-China doesn’t hesitate, in the name of France, to talk in that fashion, even immediately after the most atrocious acts of repression or the most scandalous [136] famines; and he expects to hear himself echoed, and, indeed, insists upon it.
This is a custom inherited from the Romans. They never committed any acts of cruelty, never granted any favors, without boasting in each case of their generosity and clemency. No one was ever received in audience, no matter what the subject might be, even a simple alleviation of some terrible form of oppression, without first beginning by the familiar catalog of praise. In this way they brought dishonor upon entreaty, which before then had been an honorable act, by burdening it with lies and flattery. In the Iliad, you never find a Trojan on his knees before a Greek and imploring for his life, putting the remotest trace of flattery in his words.
Our patriotism comes straight from the Romans. That is why French children are encouraged to seek inspiration for it in Corneille. It is a pagan virtue, if these two words are compatible. The word pagan, when applied to Rome, really possesses the significance charged with horror which the early Christian controversialists gave it. The Romans really were an atheistic and idolatrous people; not idolatrous with regard to images made of stone or bronze, but idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism.
This duality in the moral sphere is a far more appalling scandal if, instead of lay morality, one thinks of the Christian virtues, of which lay morality is in any case simply an edition for general public use, a diluted solution. The essential fact about the Christian virtues, what lends them a special savor of their own, is humility — the freely accepted movement towards the bottom. It is through this that the saints resemble Christ. ‘Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God. … He humbled himself. … Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered. [137]
But when a Frenchman thinks about France, pride, for him, is a duty, according to present notions; humility would be a betrayal. It is this betrayal which is perhaps what the Vichy Government is most bitterly reproached with. People are right in that, for its humility is of a debased kind; it is that of the slave who cringes and lies to avoid receiving blows. But in matters of this sort, a humility of a really high order is something unknown to us. We cannot even conceive such a thing possible. In order merely to be able to conceive it, we should have to make a special effort of the imagination.
In the soul of a Christian, the presence of the pagan virtue of patriotism acts as a dissolvent. We received it from the hands of Rome without giving it baptism. It is strange to reflect that the barbarians, or those who were so named, were baptized almost without any difficulty at the time of the invasions; but the heritage of ancient Rome never was, no doubt because it was impossible for it to be, and that in spite of the fact that the Roman Empire turned Christianity into a State religion.
It would be difficult, moreover, to imagine a more cruel injury. As for the barbarians, it is not surprising that the Goths accepted Christianity without difficulty, if, as their contemporaries thought, they were of the same blood as those Getae, the noblest of the Thracians, whom Herodotus calls immortalizers because of their intense faith in eternal life. The barbarian heritage became mingled with the Christian spirit to form that unique, inimitable, perfectly homogeneous product known as chivalry. But between the spirit of Rome and that of Christ there has never been any fusion. If fusion had been possible, the Apocalypse would have lied in representing Rome as the woman seated on the beast, the woman full of the names of blasphemy. [138]
The Renaissance was first of all a resurrection of the Greek spirit and then of the Roman spirit. It is only in this second stage that it acted as a dissolvent of Christianity. It is in the course of this second stage that there came into being the modern form of nationality, the modern form of patriotism. Corneille was right to dedicate his Horace to Richelieu, and to do so in terms whose baseness provides a suitable accompaniment to the almost delirious pride which permeates this tragedy. Such baseness and such pride are inseparable: we see that well enough in Germany today. Corneille himself is an excellent example of the sort of asphyxia which seizes Christian morality when it comes into contact with the Roman spirit. His Polyeucte would seem to us comical if habit had not blinded us. Polyeucte, according to his version, is a man who suddenly realizes that there is a far more glorious kingdom to conquer than any of a terrestrial kind, and that a particular technique exists for doing so. He immediately feels obliged to set out on this conquest, without giving a thought to anything else, and in the same frame of mind as when he used formerly to wage war in the service of the Emperor. Alexander wept, we are told, because he had only the terrestrial globe to conquer. Corneille apparently thought Christ had come down to earth to make up for this deficiency.
If patriotism acts invisibly as a dissolvent of morality, whether Christian or lay, in time of peace, the contrary takes place in wartime; and this is perfectly natural. Where there is a moral duality, it is always the morality the actual circumstances require that suffers injury. The line of least resistance naturally gives the advantage to the type of morality which, in point of fact, there is no need to exercise: a war morality in peacetime, a peace morality in wartime.
In peacetime, justice and truth, because of the water- tight compartment separating them individually from patriotism, are degraded to the rank of purely private virtues, such as for example politeness; but when the [139] country demands the supreme sacrifice, this very separation deprives patriotism of that total validity which alone can call forth a total effort.
When one has got into the habit of considering as an absolute good, free of any shadow of doubt, this growth in the course of which France devoured and digested so many lands, is it surprising that propaganda inspired by precisely the same idea, and only substituting the name of Europe in place of that of France, should be able to penetrate into a corner of the mind? Present day patriotism consists in an equation between absolute good and a collectivity corresponding to a given territorial area, namely France; any one who changes in his mind the territorial term of the equation, and substitutes for it a smaller term, such as Brittany, or a larger term, such as Europe, is looked upon as a traitor. Why? It is all perfectly arbitrary. Habit makes it impossible for us to realize how exceedingly arbitrary it is. But at a time of supreme crisis, this arbitrary notion offers a hold to the manufacturer of sophistries inside us.
The present collaborators have as regards the new Europe which a German victory would create the same attitude the inhabitants of Provence, Brittany, Alsace and Franche-Comte are expected to have towards the past, so far as the conquest of their country by the king of France is concerned. Why should the difference between these two historical periods change what is good and what is bad? Between 1918 and 1919 one would frequently hear worthy people who looked forward to peace argue as follows: ‘Formerly, provinces used to go to war with one another, then they became united and formed themselves into nations. In the same way the nations are going to unite in each continent, then throughout the whole world, and that will be the end of all war’. It was a very widely held platitude, and derived from that type of reasoning by extrapolation which exercised such an influence in the nineteenth century and was carried over into the twentieth. The good people who talked thus had a general idea of the [140] history of France, but they didn’t pause to think, when they were speaking, that the national unity had been brought about almost exclusively by the most brutal conquests. Yet if they did remember this in 1939, they must also have remembered that those conquests had always seemed to them a good thing. Is it surprising, therefore, that with a part at least of their mind they should have thought: ‘For the purposes of progress and the fulfillment of History, it may be we have to pass through this experience’? They can well have said to themselves: ‘France was victorious in 1918; she was unable to bring about European unity. Now Germany is trying to do so; we mustn’t interfere with her’. The cruelties accompanying the German system ought, it is true, to have stopped them. But they may either not have heard anything about them, or supposed them to have been invented by a lying propaganda, or regarded them as of little importance, because the victims were peoples of inferior category. Is it not just as easy to be ignorant of the cruelties of the Germans towards the Jews or the Czechs as it is of those of the French towards the Annamites ?
Peguy used to say: Blessed are they who die in a just war. It must follow that those who kill them unjustly are cursed. If it is true that the French soldiers of 1914 died in a just war, then it must certainly also be true, to at least the same extent, for Vercingetorix. If one thinks thus, what must one’s feelings be towards the man who kept him chained up in a dungeon, in complete darkness, for six years, and then offered him as a public spectacle to the Romans before finally cutting his throat? But Peguy was a fervent admirer of the Roman Empire. If one admires the Roman Empire, why be angry with Germany which is trying to reconstitute it on a vaster scale by the use of almost identical methods? This didn’t stop Peguy from going to his death in 1914. But it is this contradiction, [141] though unformulated, unrecognized, which stopped a good many young men in 1940 from facing the enemy fire in the same spirit as Peguy.
Either conquest is always an evil thing, or it is always a good thing, or again it is sometimes a good, sometimes an evil thing. In this last case, a criterion is needed for judging. To suggest as a criterion that conquest is a good thing when it increases the power of the nation to which one belongs by the accident of birth, an evil thing when it diminishes this power, is something so entirely contrary to reason that it can only be acceptable to people who, of their own accord and once and for all, have banished reason altogether, as is the case with Germany. But Germany is able to do this, because she lives by a romantic tradition. France is not, because her attachment to reason forms part of the national heritage. A certain proportion of Frenchmen may well declare themselves hostile towards Christianity; but, before as after 1789, all movements in the realm of ideas which have taken place in France have claimed to be based on reason. It is impossible for France to set aside reason in the name of patriotism.
That is why France feels uncomfortable in her patriotism, in spite of the fact that it was she who, in the eighteenth century, invented the modern form of patriotism. It must not be imagined that what has been called the universal vocation of France renders a conciliation between patriotism and universal values easier for Frenchmen than for other people. It is, indeed, the contrary which is true. It is more difficult for Frenchmen, because they are unable completely to succeed in either suppressing the second term of the contradiction, or separating the two terms by a water-tight compartment. They find this contradiction within their own patriotism. But because of this they are as it were obliged to invent a new sort of patriotism. If they do so, they will be fulfilling what has been up to a point, in the past, the function of France, namely, to think out what it is the world requires. The world requires at the present time a new patriotism. [142] And it is now that this inventive effort must be made, just when patriotism is something which is causing bloodshed. We mustn’t wait until it has become once more just a subject for conversation in drawing-rooms, learned societies and open-air cafes.
It is easy to say, with Lamartine: ‘Ma patrie est partout ou rayonne la France … La verite, c’est mon pays.’ Unfortunately, this would only make sense if France and truth were synonymous. France sometimes resorts to lying and committing injustice; this has happened, is happening and will happen again. For France is not God, not by a long chalk. Christ alone was able to say: ‘I am the truth’. No one else on this earth has the right to say that, whether speaking as an individual or in the name of a collectivity, but with far less reason still in the latter case. For it is possible for a man to attain such a degree of holiness that it is no longer he who lives, but Christ in him. Whereas there is no such thing as an holy nation.
There was once a nation which believed itself to be holy, with the direst consequences for its well-being; and in connexion with this, it is strange indeed to reflect that the Pharisees were the resisters in this nation, and the publicans the collaborators, and then to remind oneself what were Christ’s relations with each of these two national groups.
This would seem to oblige us to consider that our resistance would be a spiritually dangerous, even a spiritually harmful, position, if amidst the motives which inspire it we did not manage to restrain the patriotic motive within the necessary bounds. It is precisely this danger which, in the extremely clumsy phraseology of our time, is meant by those who, sincerely or not, say they are afraid this movement may turn into something Fascist; for Fascism is always intimately connected with a certain variety of patriotic feeling.
France’s vocation in the universe cannot, unless we lie to ourselves, be recalled with unmixed pride. If we lie to ourselves, we betray it in the very words with which we [143] seek to recall it; if we remind ourselves of the truth, shame should always temper our pride, for every historical example of it which is offered to us has its embarrassing side. In the thirteenth century, France was a centre of inspiration for the whole of Christendom. Yet it was, nevertheless, at the beginning of this century that she utterly destroyed, south of the Loire, a budding civilization which already shone with a remarkable splendour; and it was in the course of this military operation, and in co- operation with the military power, that the Inquisition first became established. That is certainly an ineradicable blot on her reputation. The thirteenth century was the one in which Gothic replaced Romanesque, polyphonic music the Gregorian chant, and, in theology, constructions derived from Aristotle replaced Platonic sources of inspiration, hence one is at liberty to doubt whether French influence in this century amounted to any real progress. In the seventeenth century, once more, France shed her light over Europe. But the military prestige connected with this spiritual radiance was obtained by methods which any lover of justice is ashamed to mention; besides, just in the same degree as the French classical conception produced marvelous works in the French language, so was its influence destructive in other countries. In 1789, the hopes of all peoples were centered on France. But three years later she started going to war, and from her earliest victories onwards, her liberating expeditions became transformed into conquering ones. Without England, Russia and Spain to oppose her, she would have imposed on Europe a unity perhaps hardly less stifling than the one Germany is seeking to impose today. In the latter half of the last century, when people began to realize that Europe was not the whole world, and that there were quite a few continents on this planet, France was again seized with the desire to play a universal role. But all she managed to do was to carve out for herself a colonial empire copied from the British model, and in the hearts of not a few colored peoples her name [144] is now linked with feelings which it is unbearable to have to think about.
Thus the contradiction inherent in French patriotism is visible also throughout the whole of French history. It must not be concluded from this that just because France has gone on living so long with this contradiction, she can go on doing so indefinitely. In the first place, once one has recognized a contradiction, it is disgraceful to put up with it. Then, as a matter of brute fact, France very nearly died from a crisis in French patriotism. Everything leads one to suppose that she would have died from it, but for the fact that British patriotism was, fortunately, made of sterner stuff. But we cannot transfer the latter over to France. It is our own kind we have to remake. It is waiting to be remade. It is again showing signs of life because German soldiers on French soil are the very best propaganda agents for French patriotism; only they won’t always be there.
A terrible responsibility rests with us. For it is nothing less than a question of refashioning the soul of the country, and the temptation is so strong to do this by resorting to lies or half-lies that it requires more than ordinary heroism to remain faithful to the truth.
The patriotic crisis took on a double aspect. In political parlance, one might say that there was both a Leftist and a Rightist crisis.
On the Right, amongst the younger middle-class generation, the break between patriotism and morals had, in conjunction with other causes, completely discredited all morality; but the prestige of patriotism was scarcely any greater. The attitude of mind expressed in the phrase ‘Politique d’ abord‘ had spread considerably further than the actual influence of Maurras. The phrase was, of course, absurd; for politics are simply a technique, a specialized method of procedure. It is as if one were to say: ‘Mechanics first’. The question which immediately poses itself is this: ‘Politics for what?’ Richelieu would answer: ‘For the greater glory of the State’. And why for [145] this purpose and not for some other one? To this question, no answer is forthcoming.
That is the question which mustn’t be asked. So-called realist politics, handed down from Richelieu to Maurras, not without being seriously impaired on the way, only make sense if this question is not put. A simple condition exists for it not to be. When the beggar said to Talleyrand: ‘Milord, I’ve got to live somehow’, Talleyrand replied: ‘I don’t see that that is necessary’. But the beggar himself saw the necessity for it all right. In just the same way, Louis XIV saw well enough how necessary it was that the State should be served with blind devotion, because the State was, in fact, himself. Richelieu only looked upon himself as being the State’s servant No. I; all the same, in a sense he possessed it, and for that reason identified himself with it. Richelieu’s political attitude only makes sense for those who, whether individually or collectively, feel either that they are masters of their country or else capable of becoming so.
The younger middle-class generation could no longer, from 1924 onwards, have the feeling that France was their domain. The working-classes made far too much noise for that. Besides which, it suffered from that mysterious exhaustion that swept over France after 1918, the causes of which were no doubt largely physical. Whether the fault is attributable to alcoholism, the nervous condition of the parents at the time their children were born and during their upbringing, or some other factor, the fact remains that for a long time now French youth has shown every indication of fatigue. German youth, even in 1932, when the authorities were doing nothing for them, gave evidence of an incomparably greater vitality, in spite of the very hard and long-drawn-out privations they had been through.
This fatigue prevented the middle-class youth in France from feeling in a condition to impose themselves on the country. Hence, to the question: ‘Politics for what?’ the necessary answer was: ‘For the purpose of being placed in [146] power in this country by other people’ — that is to say, people from abroad, foreigners. There was nothing in the moral code of these young people to stop them having such a desire. The shock they received in 1936 only sharpened this desire in them to an irreparably acute degree. Nobody had done them any harm; but they had received a nasty fright, been made to eat humble pie, and, what was an unpardonable crime in their eyes, precisely by those whom they regarded as their social inferiors. In 1937, the Italian press quoted an article from a French students’ review in which a French girl expressed the hope that, surrounded as he was by innumerable cares of State, Mussolini would somehow find time to come and restore order in France.
Whatever antipathy we may feel towards people of this class, however criminal their subsequent attitude may have been, they are human creatures, and unhappy human creatures too. The problem in their case presents itself in these terms: how to reconcile them with France without delivering her into their hands?
On the Left, that is to say, above all among the workmen and the intellectuals who lean in their direction, there are two absolutely distinct currents of opinion, although occasionally, but by no means necessarily, the two currents are found in the same person. One of these is the current emanating from French working-class tradition, which can clearly be traced back to the eighteenth century, when so many workmen read Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but which maybe has underground connexions linking it up with the first movements on behalf of communal freedom. Those who are influenced by this current alone, devote themselves entirely to the thought of justice. Unfortunately, nowadays, such a thing is rare enough among the workmen and extremely rare among the intellectuals.
There are people of this sort to be found in all so-called Leftist groups — Christian, trade-unionist, anarchist, socialist, and particularly among Communist workmen, [147] for Communist propaganda talks a lot about justice. In this it carries out the teachings of Lenin and Marx, strange as this may seem to those who have not studied all the ins and outs of the doctrine.
These men all feel profoundly internationalist in time of peace, for they know that justice recognizes no national boundaries. They often feel the same even in wartime, so long as their country escapes being defeated. But their country’s defeat immediately causes a pure, steady flame of patriotism to light up in the depths of their consciousness. Men like this will be permanently reconciled with their country if they are offered a type of patriotism subordinated to the cause of justice.
The other current is a retort to the middle-class attitude. Marxism, by offering to the working-class the supposedly scientific certainty that they will shortly become the lords and masters of the terrestrial globe, has created a working- class imperialism very similar to the nationalist imperialism. Russia has provided, as it were, the experimental proof of this, and furthermore she is being relied upon to undertake the most arduous part of the action which is to result in the overthrow of established institutions.
For people who are morally exiled and in the position of immigrants, in contact above all with the repressive side of the State, and who for generations have found themselves on the border line of those social categories which provide fair game for the police, and are themselves treated as such each time the State swings over towards reaction, this offers an irresistible temptation. A huge, powerful, sovereign State, governing a territory much vaster than that of their own country, says to them: ‘I am yours, I am your possession, your property. I exist only to serve you, and before long I will make you the undisputed masters in your own country’.
On their side, to refuse such a friendly offer would be just about as easy as to refuse a cup of water when you haven’t had anything to drink for two days. Some, who [148] made a terrific effort of self-control in order to do this, so exhausted themselves in the process that they immediately succumbed to the first exercise of pressure on the part of Germany. Many of the others are only resisting in appearance, and in reality are simply standing on one side, for fear of the risks which action necessarily brings in its train once a formal engagement has been entered into. Such people, whether numerous or otherwise, can never make up a force.
The U.S.S.R., outside Russia, is really the spiritual home of the working-class, their ‘country’. In order to realize this, all one had to do was to watch the French workmen’s eyes as they gathered round the newspaper stalls and scanned the headlines announcing the first big Russian reverses. It was not the thought of the repercussions these defeats might have on Franco-German relations which filled their eyes with despair, for British reverses never affected them in this way. They felt they were threatened with the loss of more than France. They felt rather in the same way as the early Christians would have felt if some one had supplied them with material proofs showing Christ’s resurrection to have been a fiction. In a general way, there is no doubt quite a lot of resemblance between the state of mind of the early Christians and that of many Communist workmen. The latter, too, are looking forward to some approaching Day of Judgment which shall establish absolute righteousness at one single stroke and forever on this earth, and at the same time their own glory. Martyrdom came easier to the early Christians than to those of succeeding centuries, and infinitely easier than to Christ’s immediate disciples, who, at the moment of supreme crisis, were unable to face it. So today, sacrifice is easier for a Communist than for a Christian.
Since the U.S.S.R. is a State, patriotic feeling for it is subject to the same contradictions as is patriotic feeling anywhere. But it doesn’t result in the same weakening. Quite the reverse. The presence of a contradiction, when it is felt, even in a dull sort of way, wears down the feelings; [149] when it isn’t felt at all, the feelings are thereby intensified, since they derive benefit at the same time from incompatible motives. Thus the U.S.S.R. has all the prestige attaching to a State, and to that cold brutality which permeates the politics of a State, especially a totalitarian one; while at the same time it has all the prestige attaching to a champion of justice. If the contradiction is not felt, this is partly because of its remoteness, partly because it promises absolute power to all who faithfully love it. Such an expectation doesn’t diminish the need for justice, but renders it a blind one. As each of us considers himself sufficiently capable of practicing justice, each of us naturally thinks that a system under which he wielded power would be a reasonably just one. This is the temptation Christ underwent at the hands of the devil. Men are continually succumbing to it.
Although these workmen, animated by working-class imperialism, are very different from young middle-class Fascists, and make up a finer variety of humanity, the problem they pose is a similar one. How are they to be made to love their country sufficiently, without handing it over to them? For it can’t be handed over to them, nor can they be given a privileged position in it; this would be a crying injustice towards the rest of the population, and more especially the peasants.
The present attitude of these workmen towards Germany must not blind us to the gravity of the problem. Germany happens to be the enemy of the U.S.S.R. Before she became so, agitation was already rife amongst them, it being a vital necessity for the Communist Party always to maintain agitation; and it took the form of agitation ‘against German Fascism and British Imperialism’. France didn’t appear in the picture at all. Furthermore, throughout a whole year which was a decisive one, from the summer of 1939 to the summer of 1940, Communist influence in France was entirely directed against the country. It will not be an easy thing to induce these workmen to turn their hearts towards their country. [150]
Among the rest of the population, the crisis in the matter of patriotism has not been so acute; it hasn’t gone so far as a renunciation in favor of something different; there has merely been a sort of melting away. In the case of the peasants, this was no doubt due to the fact that they felt they were of no account in the country, except in the shape of cannon fodder to serve interests which were alien to theirs; in that of the petits bourgeois, it must have been above all due to ennui.
To all such individual causes of want of patriotism there was added a very general cause which forms as it were the reverse side of idolatry. The State had ceased to be, under the tide of nation or country, something infinitely valuable in the sense of something valuable enough to be served with devotion. On the other hand, it had become in everybody’s eyes of unlimited value as something to be exploited. The quality of absoluteness which is bound up with idolatry remained with it, once the idolatry had ceased, and assumed this new aspect. The State appeared like an inexhaustible horn of plenty, pouring out its treasures in direct proportion to the pressure put upon it. So people always had a grudge against it for not providing more. Whatever it didn’t supply seemed to be as a result of a deliberate refusal on its part. When it made demands, such insistence appeared paradoxical. When it imposed its will, this became at once an intolerable act of coercion. People’s attitude towards the State was that of children, not towards their parents, but towards adults who are neither loved nor feared; children always demanding something and never wanting to obey.
How could people be expected to pass straightaway from such an attitude to that of unlimited devotion demanded by war? For even after war had begun, the French believed that the State had victory tucked away somewhere in a safe place, side by side with other treasures which it wasn’t going to give itself the trouble to bring out. Everything was done to encourage this idea, as [151] a slogan of the time testifies: ‘We shall win because we’re the stronger’.
Victory is going to liberate a country in which every one will have been almost exclusively occupied in disobeying, from either good or bad motives. People will have listened- in to London, read and distributed forbidden literature, traveled without a permit, hidden away supplies of corn, worked as badly as possible, done some black-marketing, and will have boasted about all this to their friends and relations. How are people going to be made to understand that all this is finished, that henceforward they have to obey?
People will also have spent these years dreaming about eating their fill. Such dreams are the kind indulged in by beggars, in the sense that all one thinks about is receiving plenty of good things without giving anything in return. In point of fact, the authorities will have to guarantee proper distribution; how are we then to avoid this cheeky beggar’s attitude, which already before the war was that of the public towards the State, becoming infinitely more accentuated? And if this attitude is adopted towards a foreign country, America for example, the danger becomes very much more serious still.
Another dream, and a very widespread one, is to kill; to kill invoking the highest possible motives, but in an underhand way and without any risk. Whether the State breaks up under the pressure of this diffused terrorism, as is to be feared, or whether it attempts to control it, in either case the repressive and police-ridden aspect of the State, which traditionally is so hated and despised in France, will occupy the forefront.
The government which arises in France after the liberation of the country will have to face a triple danger caused by this blood lust, this mendacity complex and this inability to obey. As for a remedy, there is only one: to give French people something to love; and, in the first place, to give them France to love; to conceive the reality corresponding to the [152] name of France in such a way that as she actually is, in her very truth, she can be loved with the whole heart.
The essence of the contradiction inherent in patriotism is that one’s country is something limited whose demands are unlimited. In times of extreme peril, it demands everything. Why should one accord everything to something which is limited? On the other hand, not to be resolved to give it everything in case of need is to abandon it entirely, for its preservation cannot be assured at any lesser price. So one always seems to be either on the debit or the credit side of what is due to it, and if one remains too long on the credit side, one swings later on with all the greater force back on to the debit side, through a process of reaction.
The contradiction is only one in appearance. Or, to be more precise, it is a real one, but when thoroughly examined is seen to be one of those basic contradictions belonging to our human condition, which must be recognized, accepted and used as a foot-board for hoisting oneself above what is simply human. Never in this world can there be any dimensional equality between an obligation and its subject. The obligation is something infinite, the subject of it is not. This contradiction presses down upon the daily lives of all men, without exception, including those who would be quite incapable of formulating it even confusedly in words. All the devices men have thought they had discovered for avoiding it have turned out to be lies.
One of them consists in only being prepared to recognize obligations towards what is not of this world. One variety of this particular device is spurious mysticism, spurious contemplation. Another is the practice of good works carried out in a certain spirit, ‘for the love of God’, as they say, the unfortunate objects of compassion being but the raw material for the action, an anonymous means whereby one’s love of God can be manifested. In either case there is a lie, for ‘he who loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how should he love God whom he hath not [153] seen?’ It is only through things and individual beings on this earth that human love can penetrate to that which lies beyond.
Another device consists in admitting that there are on this earth one or more objects enshrining this absolute value, this infinitude, this perfection which are essentially bound up with the obligation as such. That is the lie propagated by idolatry.
The third device consists in denying any sort of obligation. You cannot prove this by a mathematical demonstration to be an error, for obligation belongs to an order of certainty very superior to that of formal proof. Actually, such a negation is impossible. It amounts to spiritual suicide. And Man is so made that in him spiritual death is accompanied by psychological diseases in themselves fatal. So that, in fact, the instinct of self-preservation prevents the soul from doing more than draw closer to such a state; and even so it is seized with a tedium vitae which turns it into a desert. Almost always, or rather, almost certainly always, he who denies all obligations lies to others and to himself; in actual fact, he recognizes some amongst them. There isn’t a man on earth who doesn’t at times pronounce an opinion on good and evil, even if it be only to find fault with somebody else. We have to accept the situation provided for us, and which subjects us to absolute obligations in regard to things that are relative, limited and imperfect. So as to be able to discern what these things are and the form in which their demands upon us are likely to be made, we need only to see clearly what their actual relationship is to goodness.
So far as our country is concerned, the conceptions of rootedness, of vital medium, suffice in this connexion. They have no need to be established by documentary proof, for of late years they have been verified experimentally. Just as there are certain culture-beds for certain microscopic animals, certain types of soil for certain plants, so there is a certain part of the soul in every [154] one and certain ways of thought and action communicated from one person to another which can only exist in a national setting, and disappear when a country is destroyed.
Today every Frenchman knows what it was he missed as soon as France fell. He knows it as well as he knows what is missing when one is forced to go hungry. He knows that one part of his soul sticks so closely to France, that when France is taken away it remains stuck to her, like the skin does to some burning object, and is thus pulled off. There is something, then, to which a part of every Frenchman’s soul sticks, and is the same for all, unique, real though impalpable, and real in the sense of something one is able to touch. Hence, what threatens France with destruction — and in certain circumstances an invasion is a threat of destruction — is equivalent to a threat of physical mutilation for all Frenchmen, and for their children and grandchildren, and for their descendants to the end of time. For there are peoples which have never recovered after having once been conquered.
That is sufficient for the obligation owed to one’s country to impose itself as something self-evident. It co- exists with other obligations. It does not require that we should give everything always; but that we should give everything sometimes. Just as a miner has sometimes to give everything, when an accident happens in the mine and his companions are in danger of death. It is an accepted, a recognized thing. The obligation owed to one’s country is every bit as clear, once the country is actually felt as something real and tangible — as it is being felt today. All Frenchmen have come to feel the reality of France through being deprived of her.
People have never ventured to deny the obligation towards one’s country otherwise than by denying the reality of the country. Extreme pacifism of the type advocated by Gandhi is not a denial of this obligation, but a particular method for discharging it. This method has never yet been applied, so far as we know; it has certainly [155] not been applied by Gandhi, who is far too much of a realist. If it had been applied in France, the French would not have used any armed force to resist the invader; but they would never have been prepared to do anything, of any kind, which might assist the army of occupation; they would have done everything possible to hinder it, and they would have persisted indefinitely, inflexibly in that attitude. It is clear that, in so doing, far greater numbers would have perished, and in far more frightful circumstances. This would be an imitation of Christ’s passion realized on a national scale.
If there were any nation, in the aggregate, sufficiently close to perfection for one to be able to suggest to it that it should imitate Christ’s passion, such a thing would certainly be well worth doing. As a nation it would disappear; but this disappearance would be worth infinitely more than the most glorious survival. However, it isn’t that way these things are done. Most likely, almost certainly, they cannot be done that way. It can only be given to the individual soul, in its most secret manifestations, to follow the path leading to such perfection.
At the same time, if there are men whose vocation it is to bear witness to this unattainable perfection, the authorities are in duty bound not to obstruct them, and, in fact, to give them every assistance. In England, conscientious objectors are recognized.
But that is not enough. For men like these, we should go to the trouble of inventing something which, without constituting any direct or indirect participation in strategic operations, would involve being present in some way at the actual scene of war, and present in a much more arduous and more perilous fashion than is demanded of the soldiers themselves.
That is the unique remedy for the inconveniences arising out of pacifist propaganda. For that would make it possible, without being unjust, to bring discredit on those who, while professing an out-and-out pacifism, or what [156] amounts to the same, refused to stand up for their principles in this way. Pacifism is only capable of causing harm when a confusion arises between two sorts of aversion: the aversion to kill, and the aversion to be killed. The former is honorable, but very weak; the latter, almost impossible to acknowledge, but very strong. When mixed together, they supply a motive force of extraordinary power, which is not restrained by any feeling of shame, and where the latter sort of aversion is alone operative. French pacifists of recent years had an aversion to being killed, but none to killing; otherwise they would not have rushed so hastily, in July 1940, to collaborate with Germany. The very few who were amongst them out of a real aversion to killing were sadly deceived.
By separating these two aversions, we eliminate all danger. The influence of the aversion to kill is not dangerous; in the first place, it is a good influence, for it has its origin in goodness; secondly, it is weak, and, unfortunately, there is no chance that it should ever be otherwise. As for those whom the fear of death renders weak, they should be treated with compassion, for every human being, unless he has been turned into a fanatic, is, at any rate at times, liable to this weakness; but if they turn their weakness into a doctrine to be propagated, that is criminal, and it is then necessary, and not difficult, to discredit them.
In defining one’s native country as a certain particular vital medium, one avoids the contradictions and lies which corrode the idea of patriotism. There is one’s own particular vital medium; but there are others besides. It has been produced by a network of causes in which good and evil, justice and injustice have been mixed up together, and so it cannot be the best possible one. It may have arisen at the expense of some other combination richer in vital properties, and if such has been the case, it would be right to regret the fact; but past events are over and done with; the particular medium happens to be in [157] existence, and, such as it is, deserves to be guarded like a treasure for the good it contains.
The peoples conquered by the soldiers of the king of France in many cases suffered a wrong. But so many organic ties have grown up in the course of centuries that a surgical operation would but add a further wrong to the wrong already done. It is only possible partially to repair the past, and this can only be done through a recognized local and regional life receiving the unreserved encouragement of the authorities within the setting of the French nation. Moreover, the disappearance of the French nation, far from repairing in the slightest bit the wrong resulting from past conquest, would aggravate it in a far more serious manner. Admitting that certain peoples underwent, a few centuries ago, a loss of vitality as a result of French aggression, they would be altogether morally destroyed by a further wound brought about by German aggression. In this sense only is the commonplace true, according to which no incompatibility exists between the love for one’s native heath and that for one’s native land. For in this way a man from Toulouse can passionately regret the fact that his city should some centuries ago have become French; that so many marvelous Romanesque churches should have been destroyed to make way for a second-rate imported Gothic; that the Inquisition should have cut short a spiritual blossoming there; and can still more passionately vow never to permit that this same city of his should ever become German.
The same thing applies to relations with foreign countries. If one’s native land is regarded as a vital medium, there is no need for it to be protected from foreign influences, save only in so far as that may be necessary for it to be able to remain such, that is to say, not in any rigorous fashion. The State could cease to be the absolute ruler by divine right over the territories under its control; and a reasonable and limited authority over these territories exercised by international organizations [158] dealing with essential problems whose scope is an international one would cease to wear the appearance of a crime of lese-majeste. Nuclei could also be established for the free circulation of ideas, on a vaster scale than France and incorporating France, or connecting certain bits of French territory with certain bits of non-French territory. For instance, wouldn’t it be a natural thing for Brittany, Wales, Cornwall and Ireland to feel themselves, in regard to certain things, to be parts of the same environment?
But once again, the more attachment one shows for such non-national nuclei, the more one will want to preserve the national liberty; for this sort of intercourse over frontier boundaries doesn’t exist for enslaved peoples. That is why the cultural exchanges between Mediterranean countries were incomparably greater and more vital before than after the Roman conquest; whereas all these countries, when reduced to the unfortunate state of provinces, fell into a dull uniformity. Exchange is only possible where each one preserves his own genius, and that is not possible without liberty.
In a general way, if the existence of a great number of lifegiving nuclei is recognized, one’s own particular country only constituting one among them, nevertheless, should the latter be threatened with annihilation, all the obligations implied by loyalty towards all these separate nuclei unite in the single obligation to go to the assistance of one’s country. For the members of a population which is enslaved to a foreign State are deprived of all these nuclei at once, and not merely of the national nucleus. Thus, when a nation finds itself in peril to this extent, the military obligation becomes the unique way of expressing all one’s loyalties in this world. This is true even for conscientious objectors, if sufficient trouble is taken to find for them an equivalent to actual participation in fighting.
Once this is recognized, certain modifications in the manner of considering war ought to follow, where peril threatens the nation. In the first place, the distinction [159] between soldiers and civilians, which the pressure of circumstances has already almost obliterated, should be entirely abolished. This was what had, to a large extent, brought about the anti-patriotic reaction after 1918. Every individual in the population owes his country the whole of his strength, his resources, and his life itself, until the danger has been removed. It is desirable that the sufferings and perils should be shared by all categories of the population, young and old, men and women, the healthy and the sick, to the full extent to which this is technically possible, and even a bit more besides. Lastly, personal honor is so intimately bound up with the performance of this obligation, and external means of compulsion are so contrary to principles of honor, that all those who desire to escape it should be allowed to do so; they would be made to lose their nationality, and, in addition, either banished and forbidden ever to set foot in the country again, or be made to suffer some permanent form of indignity as a public mark that they had forfeited their right to personal honor.
It is shocking that want of personal honor should be punished in the same way as robbery or assassination. Those who don’t want to defend their country should be made to lose, not life or liberty, but purely and simply their country.
If the state of the country is such that for a great many the latter is but a trifling punishment, then the military code also proves itself to be without efficacy. We cannot be ignorant of the fact.
If at certain times the military obligation comprehends all earthly loyalties, the State is under the reciprocal duty, at all times, to protect every nucleus, whether in or outside national territory, from which a part of the population, large or small, draws some of its spiritual life.
The State’s most obvious duty is to keep efficient watch at all times over the security of the national territory. Security doesn’t mean absence of danger, for in this world danger is ever-present; it means a reasonable chance of [160] being able to weather any storms which should arise. But that is only the State’s most elementary duty. If it does no more than that, it is as though it did nothing at all; for if that is all it does, it cannot even succeed in doing that.
The State’s duty is to make the country, in the highest possible degree, a reality. The country was not a reality for very many Frenchmen in 1939. It has again become one as a result of deprivation. It must be made to remain so in possession, and for that to happen it must really become, in fact, a life-giving agent, really be turned into good, root- fixing ground. It must also be made a favorable setting for participation in and loyal attachment to all other sorts of environmental expression.
Today, whilst Frenchmen have recovered the feeling that France is a reality, they have at the same time become far more conscious than before of local differences. The dividing up of France into separate portions, the censorship of correspondence which limits exchanges of thought to a restricted area, have each played their part, and paradoxically enough, the forcible throwing together of the population has also greatly contributed to this. People have now in a much sharper, more permanent form than before the feeling that they belong to Brittany, Lorraine, Provence or Paris. There is an element of hostility in this feeling which we should try to get rid of; just as it is urgent also to get rid of xenophobia. But this feeling in itself ought not to be discouraged; on the contrary. It would be disastrous to declare it anti- patriotic. In the atmosphere of anguish, confusion, solitude, uprootedness in which the French find themselves, all loyalties, all attachments are worth preserving like treasures of infinite value and rarity, worth tending like the most delicate plants.
That the Vichy Government should have put forward a regionalist doctrine is neither here nor there. Its only mistake in this connexion has been in not applying it. Far from always preaching the exact opposite of its various [161] battle-cries, we ought to adopt many of the ideas launched by the propaganda services of the National Revolution, but turn them into realities.
In the same way, the French, because of their isolation, have come to realize that France is a small country, that shut up inside her it is stifling and they require a wider range. The idea of Europe, of European unity, contributed a good deal towards the success of collaborationist propaganda in the early days. We cannot do too much to encourage, nourish such sentiments as these. It would be disastrous to create any opposition between them and patriotic sentiments.
Lastly, we cannot do too much to encourage the existence of progressive associations not forming wheels within the wheels of public administration; for that is the only condition on which they won’t just become corpses. The trade-unions are a case in point, when they are not burdened with day-to-day responsibilities in the matter of economic organization. The same can be said of Christian associations, Protestant or Catholic, and particularly of organizations like the J.O.C. 33 ; but should the State allow itself to be influenced the least little bit by clerical wishes, it would assuredly kill them on the spot. The same can also be said of associations which arose after the defeat in 1940, some of them officially, like the chan tiers de jeunesse and comps de compagnons, 34 others clandestinely, like the resistance groups. The former possess a certain amount of life, in spite of their official character, thanks to an exceptional conjunction of circumstances; but if their official role were to be maintained, they would just lose every spark of vitality. The latter have arisen in opposition to the State, and if one were to yield to the temptation to grant them an official existence in the public life of the country, such a thing would ravage them morally to a terrible degree. [162]
On the other hand, if associations of this sort are out of contact with public affairs, they cease to exist. It is necessary, therefore, that while not forming part of the public administration, they should yet at the same time not lose all contact with it. A method of effecting this might be, for example, for representatives of such associations to be frequently chosen by the State to carry out special missions on a temporary basis. But the State would, on the one hand, have to select these representatives itself, and, on the other hand, all their associates would have to regard their having been selected as a matter for pride. Such a method could gradually develop into an institution.
Here again, whilst every effort is made to eliminate violent antagonisms, differences should be encouraged. In a country like ours, the perpetual stirring of ideas can never do any harm. It is mental inertia which is fatal to it. The duty which falls to the State to ensure that the people are provided with a country to which they really feel they belong can never be regarded as a condition precedent to the carrying out of the military obligation by the population in times of national peril. For if the State fails in its duty, if the country is allowed to fall into ruin, nevertheless, whilst national independence subsists, there is always hope of a resurrection; if we look closely, we find in the history of all countries the most surprising ups and downs, sometimes following quite swiftly upon one another. But if the country is subdued by foreign arms, there is nothing left to hope for, save the possibility of a rapid liberation. Hope alone, it is worth dying to preserve, when nothing else is left.
Thus, although one’s country is a fact, and, as such, subject to external conditions, to hazards of every kind, in times of mortal danger there is none the less an [163] unconditional obligation to go to its assistance. But it is obvious that, in fact, the people will show all the greater ardor in its defense the more they will have been made to feel its reality.
The patriotic conception as defined above is incompatible with present-day views about the country’s history, its national grandeur, and above all with the way in which one talks at present about the Empire.
France possesses an empire, and consequently, whatever attitude one may adopt with regard to it, it poses certain factual problems which are highly complex and vary considerably according to the different localities. But we mustn’t mix everything up together. First of all, there is a question of principle, and even something less definite than that, a question of sentiment. On the whole, has a Frenchman the right to be proud that France possesses an empire, and to think and talk about it with pride and joy, and in the tones of a legitimate owner?
Certainly, if he happens to be a French patriot after the style of Richelieu, Louis XIV or Maurras. But not if the Christian ethic and the spirit of 1789 are indissolubly mixed into the actual substance of his patriotism. Every other nation might possibly have had the right to carve out an empire for itself, but not France; for the same reason which made the temporal sovereignty of the Pope a scandal in the eyes of Christendom. When one takes upon oneself, as France did in 1789, the function of thinking on behalf of the world, of defining justice for the world, one may not become an owner of human flesh and blood. Even if it be true that if we hadn’t done so, others would have got hold of these unfortunate native peoples and would have treated them still worse, that was not a legitimate motive; when all is said and done, the total amount of harm would have been less. Motives of this kind are more often than not bad ones. It is not for a priest to become the owner of a brothel on the supposition that its inmates would be worse treated by some bully. It was not for France to surrender her self-respect out of [164] compassion. Besides, that is not what she did. Nobody would seriously venture to claim that she went out to conquer these peoples to prevent other countries ill- treating them: all the less so since it was she who, in the nineteenth century, was largely responsible for bringing these colonial adventures back into fashion.
Amongst those she has reduced to submission, there are some who feel very keenly how scandalous it is that she of all countries should have done this; their resentment towards us is aggravated by a terribly grievous kind of bitterness and by a sort of bewilderment.
It may be that France now has to choose between her attachment to her Empire and the need to have a soul of her own again; or, in more general terms, between having a soul of her own and the Roman or Corneille-esque conception of greatness.
If she chooses wrongly, if we ourselves force her to choose wrongly, which is only too likely, she will have neither the one nor the other, but only the most appalling adversity, which she will undergo with astonishment, without anybody being able to discover any reason for it. And all those who are now in a position to get up and speak, or to wield a pen, will be eternally responsible for having committed a crime.
Bernanos has understood and declared that Hitlerism is a return to pagan Rome. But has he forgotten, have we forgotten, what an influential part Rome has played in our history, our culture, and still plays today in our everyday thoughts? If, out of horror for a certain form of evil, we have taken the terrible decision to make war, with all the atrocities war necessarily involves, can we be forgiven if we make less pitiless war against that same form of evil in our own hearts? If all the grandeur after the style of Corneille attracts us by its heroic glamour, Germany can equally well attract us too, for the German soldiers are undoubtedly ‘heroes’. In the present confusion of thought and feeling over the subject of patriotism, is there any guarantee at all that a French soldier in Africa is inspired [165] by a purer ideal of sacrifice than a German soldier in Russia? Actually, there isn’t any. If we do not feel what a terrible responsibility this places on us, we cannot remain innocent in the midst of this unleashing of crime throughout the world.
If there is one thing for which it is necessary to face everything, set everything at naught for love of the truth, it is that one. We are all brought together in the name of patriotism. What is the use of us, what scorn shall we not deserve, if in our thoughts on this subject the least vestige of a lie is found?
But if feelings of a Corneille-esque type don’t inspire our patriotism, one may well ask what motive there is to replace them.
Yet, there is one, no less vital, absolutely pure, and corresponding exactly to present circumstances. It is compassion for our country. We have a glorious respondent. It was Joan of Arc who used to say she felt pity for the kingdom of France.
But we can quote an infinitely higher authority. In the Gospels, there is not the least indication that Christ experienced anything resembling love for Jerusalem and Judaea, save only the love which goes wrapped in compassion. He never showed any other kind of attachment to his country. But his compassion he expressed on more than one occasion. He wept over the city, foreseeing, as it was not difficult to do at that time, the destruction which should shortly fall upon it. He spoke to it as to a person. ‘Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem … how often would I have gathered… ‘Even as He was carrying the cross, He showed once again the pity He felt for it.
Let no one imagine that compassion for one’s country excludes warlike energy. It fired the Carthaginians to perform one of the most prodigious deeds of heroism in the whole of history. After being conquered and reduced to very little by Scipio Africanus, they subsequently underwent over the course of fifty years a process of [166] demoralization compared with which the French capitulation at Munich is as nothing at all. They were mercilessly exposed to whatever injuries the Numidians cared to inflict on them, and, having renounced by treaty the right to go to war, they vainly implored Rome for permission to defend themselves. When they finally did so without permission, their army was utterly wiped out. They then had to implore the pardon of the Romans. They agreed to hand over three hundred children of the nobility and all the arms they possessed. Then their delegates were ordered to evacuate the city entirely and definitively, so that it could be razed to the ground. They burst into cries of indignation, then into the bitterest tears. ‘They called upon their native city by name, and, addressing it as though it were a person, uttered the most heartrending things.’ Then they begged the Romans, if they were determined to do them injury, only to spare their city, its stones, its temples, to which no possible guilt could be attached, and instead, if necessary, exterminate the entire population; they declared that such a course would bring less shame upon the Romans and would be infinitely preferable for the people of Carthage. The Romans remained inflexible; whereupon the city rose in rebellion, although devoid of resources, and it took Scipio Africanus, at the head of a large army, three whole years to reduce it and lay it waste.
This poignantly tender feeling for some beautiful, precious, fragile and perishable object has a warmth about it which the sentiment of national grandeur altogether lacks. The vital current which inspires it is a perfectly pure one, and is charged with an extraordinary intensity. Isn’t a man easily capable of acts of heroism to protect his children, or his aged parents? And yet no vestige of grandeur is attached to these. A perfectly pure love for one’s country bears a close resemblance to the feelings which his young children, his aged parents, or a beloved wife inspire in a man. The thought of weakness can inflame love in just the same way as can the thought of strength, [167] but in the former case the flame is of an altogether different order of purity. The compassion felt for fragility is always associated with love for real beauty, because we are keenly conscious of the fact that the existence of the really beautiful things ought to be assured for ever, and is not.
One can either love France for the glory which would seem to ensure for her a prolonged existence in time and space; or else one can love her as something which, being earthly, can be destroyed, and is all the more precious on that account.
These are two distinct ways of loving; perhaps, most probably, incompatible with each other, although in speech they become mixed up together. Those whose hearts are made so as to experience the latter way can yet find themselves sometimes, through force of habit, using forms of speech which are really only suitable in the case of the former.
But the latter is alone legitimate for a Christian, for it alone wears the Christian badge of humility. It alone belongs to that species of love which can be given the name of charity. Nor should it be supposed that the object of such love need necessarily be confined to an unhappy country. Happiness is as much an object for compassion as unhappiness, because it belongs to this earth, in other words is incomplete, frail and fleeting. Moreover, there is, unfortunately, always a certain amount of unhappiness in the life of any country.
Let no one imagine either that a love of this nature would run the risk of ignoring or rejecting what there is of pure and genuine grandeur in the past history of France, or in the country’s present hopes and ideals. Quite the opposite. Compassion is all the more tender, all the more poignant, the more good one is able to discern in the being who forms the object of it, and it predisposes one to discern the good. When a Christian represents to himself Christ on the Cross, his compassion is not diminished by the thought of the latter’s perfection, nor the other way [168] about. But, on the other hand, such a love can keep its eyes open on injustices, cruelties, mistakes, falsehoods, crimes and scandals contained in the country’s past, its present and in its ambitions in general, quite openly and fearlessly, and without being thereby diminished; the love being only rendered thereby more painful. Where compassion is concerned, crime itself provides a reason, not for withdrawing oneself, but for approaching, not with the object of sharing the guilt, but the shame. Mankind’s crimes didn’t diminish Christ’s compassion. Thus compassion keeps both eyes open on both the good and the bad and finds in each sufficient reasons for loving. It is the only love on this earth which is true and righteous.
Just now it is the only sort of love that is suitable for the French. If the events we have recently been living through are not sufficient warning to us of the need to change our way of loving our country, what sort of lesson is there which could teach us? What more can one receive to awaken one’s interest than a heavy blow with a club on the head?
Compassion for our country is the only sentiment which doesn’t strike a false note at the present time, suits the situation in which the souls and bodies of Frenchmen actually find themselves, and possesses at once the humility and dignity appropriate to misfortune, and also that simplicity which misfortune requires above everything else. To call up before people’s minds at this time France’s historic greatness, her past and future glories, the splendor which has surrounded her existence, none of that is possible without a sort of inward contraction which gives something forced to one’s tone. Nothing that in any way resembles pride can be suitable for those in misfortune.
For the French who are suffering, recollections of this sort fall into the category of compensations. To seek compensations in misfortune is a bad thing. If the past is recalled too often, if it is turned into the unique source of [169] comfort, such proceedings can cause immeasurable harm. The French are being starved of greatness. But for the unfortunate, greatness after the Roman manner is not what is wanted; for either it seems to them a mockery, or else their minds become poisoned by it, as was the case in Germany.
Compassion for France is not a compensation for, but a spiritualization of, the sufferings being undergone; it is able to transfigure even the most purely physical sufferings, such as cold and hunger. Whoever feels cold and hunger, and is tempted to pity himself, can, instead of doing that, from out of his own shrunken frame, direct his pity towards France; the very cold and hunger themselves then cause the love of France to enter into the body and penetrate to the depths of the soul. And this same compassion is able, without hindrance, to cross frontiers, extend itself over all countries in misfortune, over all countries without exception; for all peoples are subjected to the wretchedness of our human condition. Whereas pride in national glory is by its nature exclusive, non- transferable, compassion is by its nature universal; it is only more potential where distant and unfamiliar things are concerned, more real, more physical, more charged with blood, tears and effective energy where things close at hand are concerned.
National pride is far removed from the affairs of daily life. In France, its only means of expression is through the resistance; but there are many who either have not the opportunity to take any effective part in the resistance, or can only devote some of their time to it. Compassion for France is an incentive charged with at least as much active value for the purposes of the resistance; but one which can besides find daily, uninterrupted expression, on every possible sort of occasion, in a fraternal note marking the relations between Frenchmen. Fraternal feelings flourish readily in the midst of compassion for misfortune, which, while inflicting on each his share of suffering, endangers something far more precious than the well-being of each. [170] National pride, whether it be in good times or in bad, is incapable of creating any real, ardent sense of fraternity. This didn’t exist among the Romans. They didn’t know what really tender feelings were.
A patriotism inspired by compassion gives the poorest part of the population a privileged moral position. National glory only acts as a stimulant among the lower orders of society at times when every one can, while looking forward to his country’s glory, look forward at the same time to having as large a personal share therein as he can wish for. Such was the case at the beginning of Napoleon’s reign. Any little French lad, no matter where he hailed from, could legitimately carry in his heart any sort of dreams as to the future; no ambition could be regarded as great enough to be absurd. Every one knew that all ambitions would not be realized, but each one in particular had a chance of being, and many of them could be partially so. A noteworthy document of the period states that Napoleon’s popularity was due, less to the devotion Frenchmen felt for his person, than to the possibilities of advancement, the opportunities of carving out a career for themselves which he offered them. That is exactly the feeling which appears in Le Rouge et le Noir. The Romantics were children who felt bored because they no longer had before them the prospect of unrestricted social advancement. They sought literary glory as a substitute.
But this particular stimulant is only found in times of upheaval. Nor can one say that it ever takes the form of an invitation to the people as such. Every man of the people who partakes of it, dreams of emerging from amongst the people, leaving behind him the anonymity which characterizes humanity in the mass. This ambition, when it is widely held, is the result of a disturbed social condition, and the cause of more serious disturbances to follow; for it sees in social stability an obstacle. Although it happens to be a stimulant, it cannot be said that it is a healthy one, either for the individual soul or for the [171] country. It is quite likely that this stimulant plays a large part in the present resistance movement; for as far as France’s future is concerned, hopes are readily entertained; and as for the individual’s own future, any one, no matter who it is, who has proved his mettle in the midst of danger, can look forward to no matter what in the state of latent revolution in which the country finds itself. But if this is so, it presents a terrible danger for the period of reconstruction, and another stimulant needs to be discovered immediately.
In times of social stability, in which, save in exceptional cases, those who form part of the anonymous mass remain in it more or less, never even seeking to emerge therefrom, the people cannot feel themselves at home in a patriotism founded upon pride and pomp-and-glory. It is as strange and unfamiliar to them as are the salons of Versailles, which constitute one of its expressions. Glory is the reverse of anonymity. If to military glory we add literary, scientific and other sorts of glory, the people will continue to feel themselves strangers. The knowledge that certain Frenchmen who have covered themselves with glory have come out of their ranks will not, in stable periods, afford the people any comfort; for if the former have come out of the people, they have ceased to form part of the people.
On the other hand, if their country is presented to them as something beautiful and precious, but which is, in the first place, imperfect, and secondly, very frail and liable to suffer misfortune, and which it is necessary to cherish and preserve, they will rightly feel themselves to be more closely identified with it than will other classes of society. For the people have a monopoly of a certain sort of knowledge, perhaps the most important of all, that of the reality of misfortune; and for that very reason, they feel all the more keenly the preciousness of those things which deserve to be protected from it, and how incumbent it is on each of us to cherish and protect them. Melodrama reflects this popular state of feeling. Why it happens to be such a dreadful literary form would be worth while taking [172] the trouble to examine. But far from being a false form of expression, it is very close, in a certain sense, to reality.
Were such a relationship to be established between the people and the country, the former would no longer regard their own personal sufferings as crimes committed by the country against themselves, but as ills suffered by the country in and through themselves. The difference is immense. In another sense, it is slight, and very little would be required to effect the change. But that little would have to come from another world. This presupposes a dissociation between the country and the State. Which is possible if grandeur in the Corneille style is abolished. But it would involve anarchy if, to compensate for this, the State were unable to manage to inspire of its own accord an increased public esteem.
To do that, it ought certainly not to return to the old methods of parliamentary life and party struggle. But what is most important of all, perhaps, is a complete overhaul of the police system. Circumstances would lend themselves to this. The English police system might be studied with advantage. At all events, the liberation of the country will, it is to be hoped, bring with it the liquidation of the personnel composing the police force, except for those who have taken a personal part against the enemy. They must be replaced by men who enjoy public esteem, and since that is, unfortunately, chiefly founded nowadays on money and diplomas, a fairly high standard of education must be demanded even beginning with ordinary policemen and inspectors, and further up really high qualifications, with correspondingly high pay. It would even be necessary, if the vogue for having Grande Ecoles continues in France — which is perhaps not to be desired — to have one for the police, candidates being selected by examination. These are certainly clumsy methods; but something of the kind is indispensable. Furthermore — and this is still more important — we must do away entirely with social categories like those of prostitutes and ex-convicts, which play officially the part [173] of a defenceless herd delivered over to the whims of the police, and providing the latter at the same time with both victims and accomplices; for a mutual contamination is under such conditions inevitable, collaboration having a debasing effect on both sides. We must abolish, in law, both these two categories of persons.
Criminal dishonesty in matters connected with the State on the part of men in public life must also be effectively punished, and more severely so than armed robbery.
The State in its administrative function should appear as the manager of the country’s resources; a more or less capable manager, who is expected to be on the whole rather less capable than otherwise, because his task is a difficult one and carried out under morally unfavourable conditions. Obedience is none the less obligatory, not because of any particular right to issue commands possessed by the State, but because obedience is essential for the country’s preservation and tranquillity. We must obey the State, however it happens to be, rather like loving children left by their parents, gone abroad, in the charge of some mediocre governess, but who obey her nevertheless out of love for their parents. If the State happens not to be mediocre, so much the better; besides, the pressure of public opinion must always be exercised in the manner of a stimulant encouraging it to leave the path of mediocrity; but whether mediocre or not, the obligation of obedience remains the same.
It is certainly not an unlimited obligation, but its only valid limit is a revolt on the part of conscience. No criterion can be offered indicating exactly what this limit is; it is even impossible for each of us to prescribe one for himself once and for all: when you feel you can’t obey any [174] longer, you just have to disobey. But there is at least one necessary condition, although insufficient of itself, making it possible to disobey without being guilty of crime; this is to be urged forward by so imperious an obligation that one is constrained to scorn all risks of whatever kind. If one feels inclined to disobey, but one is dissuaded by the excessive danger involved, that is altogether unpardonable, whether it be because one contemplated an act of disobedience, or else because one failed to carry it out, as the case may be. Besides, whenever one isn’t strictly obliged to disobey, one is under the strict obligation to obey. A country cannot possess liberty unless it is recognized that disobedience towards the authorities, every time it doesn’t proceed from an overriding sense of duty, is more dishonorable than theft. That means to say that public order ought to be regarded as more sacred than private property. The authorities could popularize this way of looking at things by means of education and other suitable methods which would have to be thought out.
But it is only compassion for our country, the watchful and tender concern to keep it out of harm’s way, which can give to peace, and especially to civil peace, what civil or foreign war possesses, unfortunately, of itself — something stirring, touching, poetic and sacred. This compassion alone can give us back that feeling we have lacked for so long, and so rarely experienced throughout the course of history, and which Theophile expressed in the beautiful line: ‘La sainte majeste des lois’.
When Theophile wrote that line, it was perhaps the last time such a feeling was deeply experienced in France. Afterwards came Richelieu, then the Fronde, then Louis XIV, and so on. Montesquieu vainly sought to re-establish it in the public imagination by means of a book. The men of 1789 laid claim to it, but they didn’t really feel it in their hearts, otherwise the country wouldn’t have slithered so easily into war, both domestic and foreign.
Since then, even our language has become unsuitable to express it. It is, nevertheless, this sentiment which people [175] are trying to revive, or its pale counterpart, when they talk about ‘legitimite’. 37 Butgivinga sentiment a name is not sufficient to call it to life. That is a fundamental truth which we are too apt to forget.
Why lie to ourselves? In 1939, just before the war, under the regime of decree-laws, republican legitimite already no longer existed. It had departed like Villon’s youth ‘qui son partement ni’a cele’, noiselessly, without any warning, and without any one having done or said anything to stop it. As for the feeling for legiti-mite, it was completely dead. That it should now reappear in the thoughts of those in exile, that it should occupy a certain place, in company with other feelings in fact incompatible with it, in dreams for curing a sick people, all that means nothing at all, or very little. If it was dead in 1939, how should it suddenly become effective again after years of systematic disobedience?
On the other hand, the Constitution of 1875 can no longer serve as a basis for legitimite, after having come crashing down in 1940 amid general public indifference and even contempt, after being abandoned to its fate by the French People. For that is exactly what they did do. Neither the resistance groups nor the French in London can do anything about it. If a shadow of regret was expressed, it was not by any section of the people, but by parliamentary men in whom their profession kept alive an interest in republican institutions, elsewhere non-existent. Once again, it makes no difference that some considerable time afterwards the feeling for legitimite should have reappeared to a certain extent. At the present moment, hunger invests the Third Republic with all the poetry associated with a time when there was enough to eat. It is [176] a fugitive kind of poetry. Moreover, the disgust felt for so many years and which attained its maximum in 1940 still persists.
It is nevertheless certain that as and when the Vichy business falls to pieces, and to the extent to which revolutionary, possibly Communist, institutions don’t arise, a return will be made to the political structure of the Third Republic. But that will only be because there is a void which has to be filled with something. That is a question of necessity, not of legitimite, and corresponds to the people’s attitude, which is not one of loyal enthusiasm, but of dull resignation. On the other hand, the date 1789 certainly awakens a really deep echo; but all there is attached to it is an inspiration, there are no institutions. Seeing that we have, in fact, recently experienced a break in historical continuity, constitutional legality can no longer be regarded as having an historical basis; it must be made to derive from the eternal source of all legality. The men who offer their services to the country to govern it will have to publicly recognize certain obligations corresponding to essential aspirations of the people eternally inscribed in the depths of popular feeling; the people must have confidence in the word and in the capacity of these men, and be provided with means of expressing die fact; they must also be made to feel that, in accepting these men, they give an undertaking to obey them.
Since the people’s obedience towards the public authorities is a necessity for the country, this obedience becomes a sacred obligation, and one which confers on the public authorities themselves, seeing that they form the object of it, the same sacred character. This doesn’t mean an idolizing of the State in association with patriotism in the Roman style. It is the exact opposite of this. The State is sacred, not in the way an idol is sacred, but in the way common objects serving a religious purpose, like the altar, the baptismal water or anything else of the kind, are sacred. Everybody knows they are only material objects; [177] but material objects which are regarded as sacred because they serve a sacred purpose. That is the sort of majesty appropriate for the State.
If we are unable to inspire the people of France with a conception of this nature, they will have only the choice between anarchy and idolatry. Idolatry might take a communist form. That is probably what would happen. It might also take a nationalist form, in which case it would presumably have as its object the pair of idols so characteristic of our age, composed of a man acclaimed as leader and at his side the iron-bound machine of State. But we mustn’t forget that, first, publicity is able to manufacture leaders, and secondly, if circumstances place a man of genuine ability in such a situation, he rapidly becomes a prisoner of his role. In other words, in the language of today, the absence of a pure source of inspiration would leave the French people no other alternatives than anarchy, Communism or Fascism.
There are some people, in America for example, who ask themselves whether the French in London might not have leanings towards Fascism. That is not putting the question in the proper way. Intentions, by themselves, are not of any great importance, save when their aim is directly evil, for to do evil the necessary means are always within easy reach. But good intentions only count when accompanied by the corresponding means for putting them into effect. St. Peter hadn’t the slightest intention of denying Christ; but he did so because the grace was not in him which, had it been there, would have enabled him not to do. And even the energy, the categorical tone he employed to underline the contrary intention, helped to deprive him of this grace. It is a case which is worth pondering in all the trials life sets before us.
The thing is to know whether the French in London possess the necessary means to prevent the people of France from sliding into Fascism, and at the same time stop them from falling into either Communism or anarchy. Fascism, Communism and anarchy being all [178] scarcely different, almost equivalent, expressions of the self-same evil, what we want to know is whether they have any remedy for this evil.
If they haven’t one, their raison d’etre, which is to keep France in the war, is brought entirely to an end by victory, which will then plunge them back again among the mass of their fellowcountrymen. If they have one, they should already have begun applying it to a great extent, and efficiently so, long before victory. For a treatment of this description cannot be started in the midst of all the nervous tension which will, both in each individual and in the mass, necessarily accompany the liberation of the country. Still less can it be started once people’s nerves have quietened down again — supposing one day such a thing to happen; it would be much too late: any sort of treatment would then be entirely out of the question.
The important thing, then, is not for them to assert before the world their right to govern France; any more than it is for a doctor to publicly assert his right to prescribe treatment for a patient. The essential thing is to have rightly diagnosed the case, conceived a cure, chosen the right medicaments, and made sure the patient is supplied with them. When a doctor knows how to do all that, not without a certain risk of making mistakes, but with a reasonable chance of being right, then, if other people try to prevent him exercising his function, and to put a charlatan in his place, it is his duty to oppose them with all his might. But if, in some place where there isn’t a doctor, a lot of ignoramuses busy themselves about the bedside of a sick man whose condition calls for the most precise, most up-to-date form of treatment, what does it matter in whose particular hands among that lot he happens to be when it comes to dying, or else being saved by a stroke of luck? No doubt, it must in any case always be better that he should find himself in the hands of those who love him. But those who love him won’t inflict on him the additional suffering of a battle royal raging at his [179] pillow, unless they know themselves to be in possession of a likely means of saving his life. [180]