136 Notre Jeunesse, 643.
137 Œuvres en prose 1898–1908, 801–53.
138 Ibid. 812–14.
139 Ibid. 851.
140 See p. 428 above.
141 A more detailed discussion of these developments can be found in my Syndicalism in France:
A History of Ideas (London, 1990), 99–113.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
463
publish a journal called La Cité française. Another, more successful, project was the
launch of the periodical L’Indépendance. The message hammered home in both was
that France’s classical and Christian traditions were being overturned by Protes-
tants, by Catholic modernists, parliamentary socialists, feminists, Jews, and Free-
masons. This is not the place to rehearse the arguments of Zeev Sternhell to the
effect that it was here that the origins of fascism were to be found,142 but there can
be no doubt that Sorel’s post-Dreyfus Affair loathing of politicians and of bourgeois
intellectuals focused his attention upon the rootless and messianic Jew as the
antithesis of everything that had brought greatness to France. This was most clearly
evident in a 60-page article devoted to exploring ‘Quelques prétentions juives’.143
The Dreyfus Affair, Sorel contended, had shown that ‘Jewish particularisms had
not in any way disappeared’ and that the Jews wanted to control everything. The
article ended, therefore, in a menacing tone. Having praised Charles Maurras for
his ‘defence of French culture’, Sorel commented that ‘Action Française seeks to
inculcate its ideas among the youth of our universities; if it succeeds in attracting a
sizeable minority of students to its cause, the Jewish intellectuals will experience
bad times. But perhaps the Jews will be wise enough to gag their intellectuals?’ That
Sorel should have drawn such conclusions from the Dreyfus Affair was all the more
worthy of remark given that, at the outset, this was an aspect of the Affair upon
which he had scarcely passed comment.144
The fact was that anti-Semitism now flourished among sections of left-wing
opinion where previously it had not existed. A similar evolution, for example, was
apparent in the writings of Sorel’s closest associate, Edouard Berth. His Dialogues
socialistes, published in 1901, had not only defended socialism as a ‘superior civiliza-
tion’ but had also denounced anti-Semitism as ‘the protest of the petite bourgeoisie
against big capital’. After the Affair he argued that France, ‘the most plutocratic of
nations’, was the subject of the ‘Jewish Empire’. The Jews, he believed, were the
enemies of the concrete realities of the French nation.145
These views, and others similar to them, were expressed by Berth in the
pages of the Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon. It was here, moreover, that Berth was
to develop an argument which allowed him both to endorse a Maurrasian vision
of a monarchy that was traditional, hereditary, anti-parliamentary, and decentra-
lized and to maintain that this was ‘perfectly convergent’ with his own earlier
endorsement of revolutionary syndicalism. The curious logic behind this position
was by no means self-evident but it had much to do with Berth’s conviction that
parliamentary democracy was irredeemably corrupt and that bourgeois society
offered little possibility for the development of an ethics of moral seriousness.
Democracy, Berth opined, was ‘nominalist, subjectivist, individualistic, atomis-
tic’: it was a regime without a memory and one which scorned the bonds of
142 See esp. Ni droite ni gauche: L’Idéologie fasciste en France (1983).
143 L’Indépendance, 3 (1912), 217–36, 277–95, 317–36.
144 See Christophe Prochasson, ‘Georges Sorel: itinéraire d’un Dreyfusard antisémite’, in Michel
Dreyfus (ed.), L’Affaire Dreyfus (1998), 235–43.
145 ‘Satellites de la ploutocratie’, Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon, 5–6 (1913), 177–213.
464
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
‘blood, race, history, the land, and profession’.146 This argument gains further
significance when we realize that Berth was here saying nothing that could not be
found in the articles written by the other contributors to the Cahiers du Cercle
Proudhon, most of whom were drawn from the ranks of the anti-parliamentary
and nationalist right. Its opening editorial––a text signed by Berth under the
pseudonym of Jean Darville––argued that it was ‘absolutely necessary to destroy
democratic institutions’ in order to preserve ‘the moral, material, and intellectual
capital of civilization’. Democracy, it continued, was ‘the greatest error of the past
century’ and, when combined with the establishment of the capitalist regime, was
substituting ‘the law of money for the law of blood’.147
The Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon, like the Cercle Proudhon which spawned it,
never had more than a tenuous existence. It limped on into early 1914, securing no
more than 200 regular subscribers.148 Neither its importance nor its influence
should be exaggerated. However, in bringing together such young men as Georges
Valois, Henri Lagrange, Edouard Berth, and others, and in doing so under the joint
patronage of Charles Maurras, Georges Sorel, and, of course, Pierre-Joseph Proud-
hon, it provided evidence of the disillusionment with democratic politics felt in
some quarters at the time. For these young men the heady idealism of the heroic
days of Dreyfus Affair had little purchase. They saw nothing to admire in ‘l’État
judéo-républicain’. Everything around them appeared to be in a state of decline,
degeneration, and decadence. Accordingly, they longed for an as yet unattained
national reawakening and renaissance. And, by the same token, they believed
fervently, in Berth’s own words, that this would not take the ‘nauseating’ form of
the ‘humanitarian, pacifist, and rationalist ideal’ purveyed by the ‘Intellectuals’ who
now controlled the State.149 They were to be by no means alone.
By general agreement something quite profound had changed in the intellectual
mood of the time. For long the view has been that, from around 1905 onwards, a
whole generation of writers and scholars was exclusively preoccupied by the military
threat of Germany and by the thought of impending war.150 It was this that gave
rise to the notion of ‘the generation of 1914’, of an iconoclastic generation only too
ready to be seduced by the charms of violence and irrationalism.151 In truth, this has
been to see events retrospectively. When war did break out, the French intellectual
community was as surprised as anyone.152 The threat posed by Germany, in other
words, was only part of the picture.
146 ‘Le Procès de la démocratie’, Revue critique des idées et des livres, 13 (1911), 9–46.
147 Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1912), 1–2.
148 See Georges Navet, ‘Le Cercle Proudhon (1911–1914): Entre le syndicalisme révolutionnaire et
l’Action française’, Mil Neuf Cent, 10 (1992), 46–62.
149 Les Méfaits des intellectuels (1914), 19.
150 See Elizabeth Fordham, The Adventure Years: French Intellectuals, 1905–1914 (Ph.D. thesis,
European University Institute, 2006). More broadly see Michel Winock,
‘Les Générations
intellectuelles’, Vingtième Siècle, 22 (1989), 17–38.
151 See Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (London, 1980). See also Roland Stromberg,
Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914 (Kansas, 1982).
152 See Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 1914–1918 Understanding the Great War
(London, 2002), 94–112. The authors state that: ‘For Europeans, the beginning of the war was rapid
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
465
The broader picture was most famously captured by Henri Massis and Alfred
de Tarde. As we know, enquêtes were now extremely fashionable, and Massis and
Tarde, writing under the pseudonym of Agathon, had already cut their teeth with
an inquiry entitled ‘L’Esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne’ devoted to an examination of
recent reforms in higher education.153 At issue were a series of measures imposed by
the Republic which, it was claimed, downgraded the French classical tradition and
gave pride of place to a Germanized vocational training. The ‘secte sorbonnique’––
Massis and Tarde’s version of Péguy’s ‘parti intellectuel’––was held to blame.
Flushed with success and satisfied with the controversy they had aroused, Massis
and Tarde quickly moved on to produce a survey of the opinions of those they
described as ‘la jeunesse cultivé’ and as ‘le jeune élite intellectuelle’. Les Jeunes Gens
d’aujourd’hui was published in the early summer of 1912 and met with immediate
approval,154 being reprinted several times and receiving the prestigious Prix Mont-
yon from the Académie Française the following year.
From start to finish, the point of comparison was with those Massis and Tarde
defined as ‘the generation of 1885’. This, Massis and Tarde decided, had been a lost
generation, ‘une génération sacrifiée’. It had been pessimistic, wracked by self-
doubt and scepticism, consumed by an inability to act, afflicted by a distaste for life,
a prey to dilettantism and an over-refined egoism. Its intellectual masters had been
Taine and Renan. The new generation, by contrast, had turned its back on doubt,
was guided by a spirit of affirmation and had a taste for action. It was no less
intelligent but was less in love with intelligence. Scorning relativism, it sought a
morality of heroism, virility, sacrifice, and discipline. In the activity of war it saw the
possibility of ‘an aesthetic ideal of energy and strength’.155 Accordingly, it was a
generation not without ‘patriotic faith’ and through it could be discerned ‘a revival
of national instinct’.156 Nor was it a generation lacking religious aspiration or
sentiment. Having witnessed the revival of metaphysics––the reference was to
Bergson––it was ready to accept the legitimacy of religious belief and to participate
in a ‘Catholic renaissance’.157 Finally, it was a generation imbued with ‘political
realism’.158 It had foregone ‘the cosmopolitan culture’ of its predecessors and no
longer thought of humanity and of the universal but of the nation. It judged
political questions from the perspective of France and was unanimous in its
assessment of the causes of national decline. These, it believed, were to be found
in the parliamentary democracy of the Republic. What was required, however, was
less a change of institutions than a reform of ‘political morals’. Interestingly, Massis
and Tarde conceded that both ‘the intellectual amoralism’ and the ‘implacable
logic’ of Charles Maurras and the Action Française movement held little appeal for
these political realists.
and unexpected, and its speed was the determining factor in the way the groundwork was laid for
support of the war. The evidence suggests that the groundwork was established in a few hours, perhaps
even less.’ Ibid. 94.
153 La Nouvelle Sorbonne (1911).
154 First serialized in L’Opinion between 13 Apr. and 30 June, it was publ. in book form in 1913.
155 Ibid. 31.
156 Ibid. 28–31.
157 Ibid. 65.
158 Ibid. 94.
466
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
The picture presented by Massis and Tarde, therefore, was of a young generation
which had turned its back on the scientism and positivism of the past and which
exuded a sense of moral and spiritual idealism. For all its methodological limita-
tions––only a small number of individuals were actually cited as evidence and many
of these were Massis’s own contemporaries––few people appeared to doubt the
accuracy of their portrayal of the new representatives of French youth. Nor did they
have reason to, as this was a description for which supporting evidence could be
found.
To take but one example, these years saw an extraordinary number of conver-
sions to Catholicism among the younger intellectual generation. If these were to
include Massis himself and Charles Péguy, they were also to include such important
figures as Jacques Maritain, undoubtedly one of the most prominent Catholic
philosophers of the twentieth century, and many others.159 Another development
was the remarkable vogue for real-life adventure, be it in the form of the early
aviators160 or the colonial soldier. The latter was exemplified by Ernest Psichari,
author of two novels161 loosely based upon his experiences with the French army
in Africa. Although dreadfully written, they were read avidly by his many admirers
and did much to foster the image of military life as a source of moral grandeur.
That Psichari was the grandson of Ernest Renan and that he too converted to
Catholicism in 1913 only served to enhance his reputation as someone who had
overcome the spiritual crisis and moral anarchy of the age. Christophe Prochasson
and Anne Rasmussen are therefore correct to suggest that these years saw the appear-
ance of ‘a new type of intellectual, no longer the washed-out figure of the Dreyfusard
intellectual, converted into the guardian of democracy and taken naturally to be
cowardly and feminine, but rather that of the fervent defender of the values of
civilization constantly threatened by the corrosion of decadence and barbarism’.162
Consequently, the outbreak of the First World War saw an immediate self-
mobilization of the intellect behind France’s war effort.163 For those writers and
scholars prepared to take this course of action––many volunteering for active
service––there was more to this cause than the defence of the nation and the
liberation of the lost territories of Alsace and Lorraine. France again figured as a
land unlike any other, as a country whose fate was of universal significance. France’s
defeat would be humanity’s loss.
This, for example, was the case with Maurice Barrès. Rallying to the French
nation, he portrayed it, in all its diversity, as united against a common enemy
and in common sacrifice. All––Catholics, Protestants, socialists, traditionalists, and
Jews––merged ‘their religion and their philosophy with France’. ‘The old rabbi’,
159 See Hervé Serry, Naissance de l’intellectuel catholique (2004).
160 See Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918 (New
Haven, Conn., 1994).
/>
161 Ernest Psichari, Terres de soleil et de sommeil (1908) and L’Appel des armes (1913).
162 Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la patrie: Les Intellectuels et la première
guerre mondiale (1910–1919) (1996), 9.
163 See Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of the Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great
War (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
467
Barrès wrote, ‘offering a dying soldier the immortal sign of Christ on the cross is an
image that will never perish.’164 It was for an ‘eternal France’ and ‘a more beautiful
France’ that the war was being fought. ‘The French’, Barrès concluded, ‘are fighting
for a land filled with their graves and for a sky where Christ reigns. . . . They are
dying for France, and do so to the extent that the ends of France can be identified
with the ends of God and even the ends of humanity. And it is in this way that they
are making war with the passion of martyrs.’165
The extent and unanimity of the intellectual mobilization effected in 1914 can
perhaps best be judged by looking at the composition of the Comité d’études et
documents sur la guerre.166 The intended purpose of the committee was to combat
German propaganda by giving lectures and publishing pamphlets directed at
neutral countries. Amongst its eleven executive members were to be found Henri
Bergson, Émile Durkheim, Charles Andler, the philosopher Émile Boutroux, and
two of France’s most eminent historians, Charles Seignobos and Ernest Lavisse.
The other five members were only slightly less distinguished and were for the most
part drawn from either the Sorbonne or the Collège de France. Leading the way was
Bergson. Bergson politique, as the late Philippe Soulez showed in a book of that
title,167 was a man deeply committed not just to the Republic but also to France.
A fluent English speaker, he led several diplomatic missions to America designed
to secure US entry into the war. Beyond this, he used his immense prestige as the
world’s most famous living philosopher to trumpet France’s cause and to portray
her ‘idealism’ as ‘the essence of the French spirit’. When, as he did in a collective
volume devoted to praising La Science française,168 he spoke of the deepest aspira-
tions of the ‘soul of France’, he spoke also of ‘the need to philosophize’. Moreover,
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