was a ‘literary and intellectual’ tradition. Great literature had given the French soul
a ‘truthful expression, a durable expression, an immortal expression’. In Le Génie
latin he made clear his view that the particular genius of the French was to be
‘Latins in sentiment, Latins in morals, Latins in taste, Latins in spirit, Latins in
language, and Latins in thought’. If we cease to be Latins, he wrote, ‘we will cease
at the same time to be French’.76 The third tradition, and by far the most
important, was religion. Specifying that he spoke as ‘neither believer nor moralist
but simply as a historian and an observer’, Brunetière’s conclusion was unequivocal:
‘What I determine in both fact and history is that . . . in the same way that
Protestantism is England and “orthodoxy” is Russia, so France is Catholicism.
What I determine, in both fact and history, is that for twelve centuries the role of
acting as a protector and propagandist of Catholicism has belonged to France.’77
This, therefore, was Brunetière’s conclusion: ‘everything that we do, everything
that we allow to be done, against Catholicism, we allow to be done and we do it to
the detriment of our influence in the world, against the grain of our history, and at
72 Brunetière, L’Idée de patrie (1896).
73 Brunetière, Les Ennemis de l’âme française (1899).
74 See Brunetière, Discours de combat (1920), 249–91.
75 See also ‘La Nation et l’armée’, ibid. 215–48.
76 ‘Le Génie latin’, ibid. 289–90.
77 Les Ennemis de l’âme française, 57–8.
454
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
the expense of the qualities which are those of the “French soul”’.78 You could not,
Brunetière concluded, be ‘French and anti-Catholic’.79
It was these traditions, Brunetière resumed, that had made France what she was
and to that extent they were ‘neither monarchical nor republican, but were French,
uniquely French’. However, he was in no doubt that ‘the best of governments’
would always be the one which most respected French traditions and that ‘the best
of institutions’ would be those which allowed these traditions to develop and to be
renewed. Similarly, in a long footnote to his published text, Brunetière was careful
to specify that being a Protestant or a Jew or a Muslim or even a ‘Free-thinker’ was
not what he meant by being anti-Catholic: what he had in mind, he assured his
readers, was the ‘militant and active’ anti-Catholicism of groups such as the Free-
masons. He also made it clear in L’Idée de patrie that he did not believe that races
formed nations. ‘The French race’, he wrote, ‘is not the producer but rather the
creation or, if I dare say so, the created being of the history of France.’80 Neverthe-
less, and despite Brunetière’s attempt to portray French history as one long
unbroken continuum, it is clear that the Catholic religion was to be considered a
fundamental dimension of the identity and meaning of France and that those who
were not Catholics could scarcely be considered full members of the nation.
In Brunetière’s view, the French soul was under attack and France was internally
weakened. By whom? By politicians, intellectuals, and freethinkers was his answer.
By all those who, ‘in their desperate assault on all our traditions, confound a liberty
of spirit with an independence of the heart’. All these had worked ‘to denature the
French soul’, to turn the ‘essentially sociable’ French towards individualism. This
was to be the central theme of the numerous articles that Brunetière published in
the Revue des Deux Mondes as well as the essays that appeared in the series of
volumes entitled Discours de combat. In these pieces can be discerned a consistent
and loud objection to subjectivism, scepticism, rationalism, moral relativism, and
what was repeatedly characterized as intellectual dilettantism. This translated itself
into a hostility towards literary Romanticism, the theory of art for art’s sake, the
naturalism of Émile Zola’s novels, the errors of the philosophy of the eighteenth
century, Protestantism as a form of ‘individual salvation’, and what was described as
a Nietzschean ‘aristocracy of intelligence’. These texts endorsed not only the merits
of tradition over novelty and the future triumph of idealism over materialism in
science, art, and politics but also the idea of solidarity as ‘a Christian and, above all,
Catholic idea’.81 Brunetière was equally of the opinion that there were reasons to
believe in God and, moreover, that we needed to believe in God. Before this
mystery, he avowed, all one could do was yield.82 Given the universality of the
Catholic faith, he did not believe in the need for a national church.83
78 Les Ennemis de l’âme française, 58.
79 Ibid. 67.
80 L’Idée de patrie, 19.
81 See esp. ‘L’Idée de solidarité’, in Discours de combat (1903), 49–83; L’Action sociale du
Christianisme (Besançon, 1904); and ‘La Renaissance de l’idéalisme’, Discours de combat (1920), 3–57.
82 ‘Le Besoin de croire’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 150 (1898), 702–20, and ‘Les Raisons actuelles de
croire’, Discours de combat (1903), 1–48.
83 ‘Voulons-nous une église nationale?’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 6 (1901), 277–94.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
455
For all the ambiguities and contradictions in Brunetière’s position––always the
acute observer, Georges Sorel was to comment after Brunetière’s death that ‘this
man who was so perceptive in his study of texts displayed considerable naivety in
matters concerning practical life’84––he nevertheless provided a formidable and
powerful combination of ideas of great appeal to the nationalist right. Deployed by
Brunetière at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, this anti-individualist and Catholic
vision of France challenged many of the basic presuppositions of republican politics
and culture at the turn of the century. Where these meanings of France could lead
was best illustrated by Brunetière’s fellow member of the Ligue de la patrie
française, Maurice Barrès,85 author of Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme and one
of the most popular writers of his day.
Here too there was an attempt to transcend and to encompass all aspects and
features of French history, be they Catholic, revolutionary, or Bonapartist. ‘Let us
leave these tales’, Barrès wrote, ‘we find greater profit in merging ourselves together
with all the moments of the history of France, in living with her dead, in not placing
ourselves beyond any of her experiences.’86 All these conflicting experiences, he
continued, ‘proceed from the same source and lead to the same goal: they are the
development of the same seed and the fruits of the same tree’.87 No conception of
France could prevail over ‘the France of flesh or blood’. Yet, this generosity of spirit
and of vision quickly vanished when Barrès came to speak of Protestants, and
especially of Jews. The ‘Catholic world’, Barrès wrote, ‘is where my forebears grew
to maturity and prepared the way for me. As a consequence I find it the least jarring
&nb
sp; to my nature. It can best accommodate my various roles and best promote the life
suited to my nature.’88 This was why he felt able to celebrate ‘the destruction of the
Protestant forces’: ‘I intend to preserve the benefits of this victory with all the power
at my command, for it enables the tree of which I am one leaf to continue to exist.’
Barrès pointed out that in Alsace and Lorraine it was the Protestants who were most
likely to accept German rule.
The Jew, as a member of ‘a race antagonistic to my own’, fared even worse in the
Barrèsian scheme of things. The Jews, Barrès argued, had no patrie in the way the
French understood it. For them, it was not a matter of their native soil and of their
ancestors but ‘only a place where they find greatest profit’. Thus, Barrès had no
difficulty comprehending the nature of Dreyfus’s crime. ‘In psychological terms’,
Barrès wrote, ‘it is sufficient for me to know that he is capable of treason’ and this he
was able to ‘deduce from his race’.89 On this view, the actual guilt or otherwise of
Dreyfus appeared almost irrelevant and of secondary importance. What mattered,
as Barrès never tired of repeating, was that the question should be resolved ‘in
light of the interests of France’. And by these standards Dreyfus was guilty. Indeed,
84 Review of V. Giraud, Ferdinand Brunetière, Notes et Souvenirs, in Le Mouvement socialiste, 22
(1908), 93–4.
85 See Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français (2000).
86 Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme (1906), 82.
87 Ibid. 83.
88 Ibid. 60.
89 Ibid. 152.
456
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
the ‘worst crime’ of Dreyfus and his supporters in their ‘anti-French campaign’ was
that for the past five years they had weakened the army and the nation.90
This, according to Barrès, was an argument that the intellectuals, with their
passion for metaphysics and abstract truth, could not understand. An intellectual,
he announced, is ‘an individual who convinces himself that society should be
founded on the basis of logic and who fails to see that it rests on past exigencies
that precede and are perhaps foreign to individual reason’.91 Such was the case with
the central figure in Barrès’s famous novel Les Déracinés,92 the professor of philos-
ophy Paul Bouteiller. The charge was that he, and those in real life like him who
taught what Barrès regarded as the official Kantian doctrine of the educational
system, approached man as ‘an abstract universal entity’ and encouraged their
students to become ‘citizens of humanity, free spirits, initiates of pure reason’. As
a result, all were ‘uprooted’ from their race and from their land. All became
incapable of bearing witness to ‘French truth and French justice’.93 The intellectual
thus functioned as ‘the enemy of society’, producing a decadence that derived from
‘a lack of moral unity’ and the absence of a ‘common understanding of our goal, our
resources, our centre’. They were ‘the anarchists of the speaker’s platform’.94 ‘As
for ourselves’, Barrès commented, ‘we are happier to be intelligent than to be
intellectual.’95
Nationalism, therefore, was defined by Barrès as the acceptance of a form of
determinism.96 It was a ‘sense of descent’, a way of seeing things deeply rooted in
the soil of France, her history, and her ‘national conscience’. Correctly understood,
it provided a series of ‘fixed points’ and ‘landmarks’ that ‘over the preceding
centuries have educated our reflexes’. So Zola’s defence of Dreyfus could be
explained by the fact that he was not French but rather ‘an uprooted Venetian’.97
The outrage with regard to occupied Alsace and Lorraine was that little French
children were being prevented from thinking and speaking like Frenchmen.
Those ‘too recently’ accepted into the French nation had troubled the ‘national
conscience’ precisely because they bore the blood of their non-French ancestors.
Accordingly, it was among the people, among those uncontaminated by the
aberrations of rationalism, that was to be found the authentic expression of the
nation’s true instincts in all their vigour and vitality.
These views carried with them a clear political programme. Nationalism, Barrès
argued, necessitated a series of ‘protectionist’ measures designed to defend the
French people. The nationality laws were to be tightened in order to reduce ‘the
interference of the foreigner into our politics’. Laws on the ownership of property
were to be designed so as to prevent foreigners possessing ‘the soil of France’ and to
limit their commercial and industrial activities. The ‘financial feudality’ comprised
of Protestants and the ‘kingdom of Israel’––described by Barrès as ‘the dangerous
plutocracy of exotics from which France might perish’––was to be challenged and
90 Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme (1906), 209.
91 Ibid. 45.
92 Barrès, Les Déracinés (1897).
93 Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme, 13.
94 Ibid. 220.
95 Ibid. 45.
96 Ibid. 8–10.
97 Ibid. 40.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
457
defeated through a series of measures designed to secure the economic interests of
French workers. The union of the race and of the earth was to be sealed by granting
‘a corner of the land’ to every French family. There was to be no room for either
cosmopolitan socialism or economic liberalism. ‘Our salvation’, Barrès concluded,
‘lies in ceasing to be uprooted and scattered individuals.’98
To the opinions voiced by both Brunetière and Barrès, the Dreyfusard camp
made an immediate reply. Against Brunetière’s Après le Procès was lined up Émile
Duclaux’s Avant le Procès,99 Alphonse Darlu’s M. Brunetière et l’individualisme,100
and, thirdly, Émile Durkheim’s L’Individualisme et les intellectuels.101 If Duclaux
again defended the liberty, impartiality, and competence of the ‘scientific spirit’ and
therefore the duty of ‘intellectuals’ to make use of their expertise on matters of
public concern,102 Darlu, one of the founders of the Revue de métaphysique et de
morale, was quick to point out that Brunetière had misconceived the nature of the
individualism he so deplored and as a result had exaggerated its dangers. Of greater
force and interest was the response of Durkheim. Like Darlu, Durkheim was of the
opinion that Brunetière had mistaken individualism for ‘the utilitarian egoism’ of
Herbert Spencer and of liberal political economy. This, Durkheim conceded, did
amount to an ‘egoistic cult of the self’ but it was in decline and had, in any case, to
be placed alongside ‘another individualism’, one derived from Kant, Rousseau, and
the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme of 1789. This form of individualism, he
countered, saw all actions carried out for personal gain ‘as the very source of evil’
and saw the human person as sacred. It also held that ‘there was no reason of State
which can excuse an outrage against the person’.103 So, Durkheim argued, turning
&n
bsp; the tables upon his opponents, ‘not only is individualism not anarchy but hence-
forth it is the only system of beliefs which is able to ensure the moral unity of the
country’.104 This was so because, as societies grew in size and complexity, it was
impossible to ‘prevent men from becoming increasingly differentiated from one
another’ or ‘to bring them back to the conformism of earlier times’. In those
circumstances, the only viable alternative was to ‘complete, extend, and organize’
the individualism bequeathed by the eighteenth century, to pass beyond the
‘negative ideal’ of freeing the individual from the political fetters that bound him,
such that we might learn properly to make use of our liberty. ‘All moral education’,
Durkheim wrote, ‘should be directed to this end.’105
What of Brunetière’s case against the intellectual? What, as Durkheim put it, of
his argument that ‘intellectual and moral anarchy would be the inevitable conse-
quence of liberalism?’106 ‘Respect for authority’, Durkheim replied, ‘was in no way
98 Ibid. 425–77.
99 Émile Duclaux, Avant le Procès (1898).
100 Alphonse Darlu, M. Brunetière et l’individualisme (1898).
101 Revue bleue, 10 (1898), 7–13.
102 A year later Duclaux showed himself to be far less eager to express a view on anti-Semitism. ‘It is
not my habit’, he explained, ‘to make prophecies that scarcely fall within my field of competence’: see
Henri Dagan, Enquête sur l‘antisémitisme (1898), 52.
103 Revue bleue, 8–9.
104 Ibid. 10.
105 Ibid. 13.
106 Ibid. 10.
458
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
incompatible with rationalism provided that authority itself was rationally ground-
ed.’107 However, the case of Dreyfus was ‘one of those questions which, by
definition, pertained to the common judgement’ of men. To know whether a
court of justice might try a man without hearing his defence, Durkheim continued,
there was no need of any ‘special knowledge’. It was a matter of ‘practical morality’
upon which everyone of good sense was competent and about which no one could
be indifferent. If, Durkheim concluded,
a certain number of artists, but above all scientists, have believed that they ought to
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