refuse assent to a judgement whose legality appeared to them to be suspect, it is not
because . . . they attribute to themselves any special privileges or any exclusive right of
control over the question. It is rather that, being men, they seek to exercise their entire
right as men and to keep before them a matter which concerns reason alone. It is true
that they have shown themselves more jealous of this right than the rest of society; but
this is simply because, as a result of their professional activities, they have it nearer to
heart. Accustomed by the practice of scientific method to reserve their judgement
when they are not fully aware of the facts, it is natural for them to give in less easily to
the enthusiasms of the crowd or to the prestige of authority.108
Thus, the ‘individualist’ who defended the rights of the individual was at the same
time defending ‘the vital interests of society’ and, Durkheim continued, in no other
country was this cause more ‘truly national’ than in France. To renounce it, he told
his readers, would be ‘to renounce ourselves’, to ‘diminish ourselves in the eyes of
the world’, to ‘commit real moral suicide’.109 It was, in other words, Brunetière
who was speaking against the soul of France. To that extent, according to Dur-
kheim, anti-Semitism in France, if not elsewhere, was ‘the consequence and
symptom of a state of social malaise’.110
Against Barrès stood Lucien Herr, librarian of the École Normale Supérieure and
an Alsatian Protestant.111 Writing in the Dreyfusard La Revue blanche,112 he told
Barrès that ‘your idea is that the French soul, French integrity, is today being
insulted and compromised to the advantage of foreigners, by the infernal machina-
tions of other foreigners, and aided by the complicity of second-rate intellectuals
de-nationalized by a second-rate culture’.113 This, Herr believed, was nonsense.
More tellingly, he also turned his fire against Barrès’s conception of France. ‘At the
heart of your national patriotism’, he continued, ‘you would find not the old
France . . . but a conquering, proud and brutal France, Napoleonic France, the
jingoistic chauvinism of our large cities, the impassioned instinct for warlike glory,
barbarous exaltation, hatred and the arrogance of force.’114 This, he made plain,
was not his France. ‘The French soul’, Herr wrote, ‘has only been truly great and
strong at those moments when it has been welcoming and generous’. Nor was it the
107 Revue bleue, 8–9.
108 Ibid.
109 Ibid. 12.
110 Dagan, Enquête, 59–63.
111 See Charles Andler, Vie de Lucien Herr 1864–1926 (1932) and Robert Smith, ‘L’Atmosphère
politique à l’École Normale Supérieure à la fin du XIXe siècle’, Revue d’histoire moderne et
contemporaine, 20 (1973), 248–68.
112 ‘A M. Maurice Barrès’, La Revue blanche, 15 (1898), 241–5.
113 Ibid. 242.
114 Ibid. 243.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
459
France of the ‘young people’ who had rallied to the Dreyfusard cause. They, like
Barrès himself, did not claim to possess the whole truth but ‘they have within
themselves something which is absolute: the faith in a human ideal’.115
I I
One of the common meeting places of these young people was the tiny bookshop
and office of Charles Péguy, located in the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter in the rue
Cujas.116 It was here that, with passionate intensity, they followed the dramatic
course of events and where, on the rock of the Dreyfus Affair, their friendships were
ultimately to be broken. Quickly disillusioned, in their eyes the triumph of the
Dreyfusard cause had been sullied by the actions of unscrupulous politicians intent
upon reaping their own personal reward and upon punishing both the Roman
Catholic Church and the army for their misdemeanours. This mood of disenchant-
ment was captured well by Georges Sorel, a weekly visitor to Péguy’s bookshop, in
La Révolution dreyfusienne. Published in 1908, it was undoubtedly Sorel’s worst
book, but its clear message was that the policies of the victorious republicans––
especially the anticlerical Émile Combes––had put an end ‘to the passable func-
tioning of the parliamentary regime’ and had brought about the ascendancy of what
he dubbed ‘a philosophy of hypocritical cowardice’. Few were spared from Sorel’s
venomous and scornful bile. Émile Zola, he wrote, ‘was the representative example
of the buffoonery of the time . . . He can be compared to a clown parading before a
fairground stall.’117
By Sorel’s own admission, his volume caused something of ‘a scandal’118 but this
was as nothing compared to the controversy evoked by Daniel Halévy’s ‘Apologie
pour notre passé’.119 The ‘our past’ of the title was the past of a small group of
young men (which included future socialist prime minister Léon Blum and critic
Julien Benda)120 for whom the Dreyfus Affair had acted to define them as human
beings. According to Halévy’s account, they had had no opinions, occupations, or
friendships prior to the Affair but within a short space of time all (and more, their
hatreds) were decided upon. ‘A single and redoubtable crisis’, Halévy wrote, ‘took
hold of us and marked us.’121 He and his friends, Halévy recalled, became involved
in the Dreyfusard cause not just to save an innocent man but to save ‘an innocent
115 Ibid. 244.
116 See Daniel Halévy, Charles Péguy and Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine (London, 1946). See Géraldi
Leroy, Péguy: Entre l’ordre et la révolution (1981) and Alain Finkielkraut, Le Mécontemporain: Péguy,
lecteur du monde moderne (1991).
117 La Révolution dreyfusienne (1908), 35.
118 ‘Lettres de Georges Sorel à Edouard Berth: Deuxième Partie: 1909–1910’, Cahiers Georges Sorel,
4 (1986), 86.
119 Daniel Halévy, ‘Apologie pour notre passé’, Cahiers de la quinzaine, 10th cahier of the 11th series,
1910. See Pierre Guiral, ‘Daniel Halévy, esquisse d’un itinéraire’, Contrepoint, 20 (1976), 79–95.
120 Both were to write at length about this experience: see Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l’Affaire (1935)
and Julien Benda, La Jeunesse d’un clerc (1936).
121 Halévy, ‘Apologie pour notre passé’, 8.
460
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
France’ whose honour was being betrayed by ‘a small group of men poisoned by
fear, by hate’. At issue, then, had been ‘the salvation of the French spirit’.122 Yet,
from within their own number and as a result of their own efforts, a ‘demagogic
bloc’ had emerged and had taken control of the State.
The potency of Halévy’s text lies in the way it combined reflection and memory
to turn a recent event into history––‘our memories are already our masters’, he
wrote123––but if it remains known today it is largely because it elicited one of
Charles Péguy’s greatest works, Notre Jeunesse, published in 1910.124 Here was a
text that pushed eloquence and lyricism to the point where the recovery of history
played little part. ‘I am shocked’, Sorel wrote to Halévy, ‘to see the extent to which
Péguy sacrifices reality (which does not seem to interest him at all) to the require-
ments of oratorical development.’125 Pèguy himself did not see it that way. ‘My
past’, he wrote, ‘has no need of apology . . . I have no need of being defended.’126
Nor did he have the intention of writing ‘the memoirs of a weakling, of a penitent’.
Specifically, he did not recognize himself as the ‘downtrodden dog’ of Halévy’s
account. He had been mistaken and he had been fooled but he had not been
beaten. Nor, he asserted, had he been a victim of an ‘illusion of youth’. Rather the
defence of Dreyfus––a man, Péguy believed, who would not have died for his own
cause––had been something akin to a religion. A single crime, a single injustice, had
been sufficient to break the social compact and thus theirs had been a struggle to
restore ‘the historic honour of our people, the entire historic honour of our entire
race, the honour of our ancestors, the honour of our children’. ‘Deep down’, he
wrote, ‘we were men concerned with eternal salvation and our adversaries with
temporal salvation. That is the true, the real division of the Dreyfus Affair.’127
Halévy’s mistake had been to presume that it was the politicians who represented
the Dreyfusard movement and therefore he had forgotten the fervour and ardour
that had inspired their own original commitment.
Where did what Halévy later described as Péguy’s ‘glorious memory of the event’
lead him?128 First, he placed Bernard Lazare at the centre of his account. A
‘prophet’ and ‘one of the great names of the modern age’, his reward had been
solitude and to be forgotten.129 Next, to explain the decline of the Dreyfusard
movement into careerism and cynicism he forged his famous distinction between
mystique and politique. As Péguy expressed it, one died for a mystique but one lived
off a politique: the first was principled; the second was self-interested. Politique was
the devouring of the mystique that gave the movement its original force. Moreover,
in Péguy’s view, all movements began as mystiques and ended as politiques.130
Péguy, therefore, believed that he and his friends had been ‘the mystics’; that
they had always been ‘the heart and the centre’ of the Dreyfusard cause; and that, if
122 Halévy, ‘Apologie pour notre passé’, 38–9.
123 Ibid. 8.
124 See Péguy, Notre Jeunesse, in Œuvres en prose, 1909–1914 (1961), 501–655.
125 ‘Lettres de Georges Sorel à Daniel Halévy’, Mil Neuf Cent, 12 (1994), 184.
126 Péguy, Notre Jeunesse, 563.
127 Ibid. 648.
128 Halévy, Charles Péguy, 110.
129 Péguy, Notre Jeunesse, 551–3.
130 Ibid. 518.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
461
their enemies had spoken the language of raison d’état, their concern had been that
‘France should not fall into a state of mortal sin’.131
This was only the springboard for a broader digression about the condition
of France. On Péguy’s account, the Dreyfusard mystique had been inspired by
the virtues of justice, charity, courage, perseverance, and self-sacrifice. These
virtues, he wanted to argue, were not simply ‘republican’ virtues: they were also
Christian virtues. The Dreyfusard movement, in other words, encompassed both
the republican and Christian mystiques. Péguy’s simple point here was that the
Catholic Church, instead of opposing the Dreyfusard cause, should have recog-
nized its religious character. His broader point was that both mystiques were part
of what he constantly referred to as l’ancienne France. It was for this reason that
Péguy refused to see ‘the 1st January 1789 (Paris time)’ as the great divide in French
history.
In this Péguy was fortified by a provincial and rural education in which, as he
recounted, his schoolmasters and priests, for all their ‘metaphysical’ differences, had
taught the same morality and the same discipline, had taught the virtues of ‘the
French race’. Yet his argument was that this France was coming to an end. The
Dreyfus Affair, he believed, represented the ‘last operation of the republican
mystique’. This was so because France was entering a period of ‘demystification’.
To that extent, ‘de-republicanization’ went hand in hand with ‘de-Christianization’.
The same ‘sterility’ was afflicting ‘the city of men and the city of God’. For the first
time we were living in a world ‘opposed to all culture’.132
So, for Péguy, the dividing line came not in 1789 but ‘around 1881’.133 Up to
that moment the Republic had been a ‘restoration’ (it had, in actual fact, been a
republic of the notables, a republic without republicans) but after this, according
to Péguy, it lapsed into ‘cæsarism’ and demagogy. Worse still, the Republic had
fallen under ‘the domination of the intellectual party’.134 In Notre Jeunesse, and in
many other texts,135 Péguy’s denunciation of this ‘tyranny’ knew almost no
bounds. It was a system of oppression, of corruption, of depravity, of lying that,
for over thirty years, had tried to overthrow God, the Church, France, the army,
morality, and the law. The unfortunate Jaurès was singled out for particular
condemnation and reproach as the ‘bourgeois intellectual’ who had subverted
and corrupted the workers’ movement. Péguy, in short, was perhaps the first to
suspect that the intellectuals had betrayed their calling, and his bitterness was all
the greater for the lofty conception he had had of their almost-sacred role. The
intellectuals, he believed, had sold their souls for ‘temporal domination’, for riches,
for honours, for privileged positions, for political power, for earthly glory.
Péguy’s text contained another theme of great resonance. Péguy repeatedly stated
that he and his friends had been inspired by ‘warlike virtues’. And this he explained
in terms of ‘a need for heroism, which seized an entire generation, our generation,
131 Ibid. 648.
132 Ibid. 508–9.
133 Ibid. 520.
134 Ibid. 521.
135 See esp. ‘De la Situation faite au parti intellectuel dans le monde moderne’, in Œuvres en prose
1898–1908 (1959), 1031–78 and ‘De la Situation faite au parti intellectuel dans le monde moderne
devant les accidents de la gloire temporelle’, ibid. 1115–1214.
462
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
a need for war . . . a need for sacrifice to the point of martyrdom’.136 When the
young Péguy had arrived from Orléans to pursue his studies at the École Normale
Supérieure he had quickly converted to socialism and in his earliest writings had
provided a description of the ‘cité socialiste’ as the ‘cité harmonieuse’. Then his
hero had been Jean Jaurès. In the cheerless aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair Péguy
held fast to the purity of his earliest convictions but he there began the journey that
was later to see his pilgrimage to the cathedral of Chartres and his own death in the
first battle of the Marne in September 1914. In many respects the contours of this
journey can best be discerned by comparing his two treatments of the figure of
Jeanne d’
Arc. The first, a dramatic trilogy published in 1897, ended with a plea for
the ‘establishment of the Universal Socialist Republic’; the second, a long prose
poem entitled Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc published in 1910, focused
upon the possibility of eternal life and salvation.
For our purposes, however, we might also briefly consider Péguy’s essay of 1905,
Notre Patrie.137 In its composition, it was typical of so many of Péguy’s lyrical
outpourings. It opened with a description of the sorry plight of French politics
under the premiership of Émile Combes but then used the state visit of the king of
Spain as a pretext for a series of reflections about the people of the Paris and the
city’s ‘imperishable monuments’. In effect, what Péguy sought to portray was the
patrie as a physical and enduring reality, as something at once both eternal and
immortal.138 But Péguy also saw that what was imperishable ‘will inevitably perish’.
Here, the political context was not unimportant. In March of that year, Kaiser
Wilhelm II had made a provocative and unexpected landing at Tangiers. The
intention was to humiliate France by demonstrating the hollowness of her preten-
sions in North Africa. To many––including Péguy––war with Germany again
seemed inevitable. Convinced that invasion was imminent, he now wrote that ‘a
new period had begun in the history of my own life, in the history of this country,
and assuredly in the history of the world’.139 He was not to be mistaken. ‘Happy’,
he was later to write in a premonition of his own death, ‘are those who die for an
earthly land, when a just war calls.’
Péguy’s erstwhile friend and colleague, Georges Sorel, also believed that ‘a great
foreign war’ might renew France’s ‘lost energies’. His preferred solution to France’s
ills,140 however, was a renewed bout of proletarian class struggle directed against a
timorous and humanitarian bourgeoisie. In much the same way as he became
disillusioned with the ‘Dreyfusard Revolution’, he quickly became disenchanted
with the workers, and thus from 1909 to 1914 found himself participating in a
series of publishing initiatives that brought together thinkers from the extremes of
both the left and the right.141 One such initiative was the short-lived plan to
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