Revolution and the Republic
Page 100
executioners of Bolshevism’.202
Ten years later it was the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the threat of sanctions
imposed by the League of Nations against the aggressors that provided the oppor-
tunity for a virtual rerun of the same arguments, although with some new partici-
pants. The right produced a ‘Manifeste des intellectuels pour la défense de
l’Occident’ signed not only by sixteen members of the Académie Française but
also by such luminaries as Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre
Gaxotte, Thierry Maulnier, and Charles Maurras. Condemning what it described
as ‘a false legal universalism which sets the superior and the inferior, the civilized
person and the barbarian, on the same equal footing’, it justified the right of all
European nations to possess colonies in the name of the advancement and protec-
tion of Western civilization.203 The response came first in the form of an appeal
headed by the writer Jules Romains and then a ‘Manifeste pour la justice et la paix’,
penned by philosopher Jacques Maritain and signed by, among others, Emmanuel
Mounier. Both texts supported the League of Nations, but the latter in particular
denied that the ‘mission of the people of the West’ could be accomplished by force
of arms. Casting themselves as ‘the true representatives of French intelligence’, the
signatories called for all governments to respect international law and to work for
peace.204 The following three years––1936–8––saw similar petitions in response to
the Spanish civil war, those for and against Franco, those for or against the Spanish
Republic, those for or against intervention, claiming to defend civilization against
either communism or military dictatorship. Interestingly, and as was the case with
the war in Ethiopia, among those supporting the cause of the Spanish people were
young Catholic writers such as François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos.
The inter-war years, therefore, saw no evidence of de-mobilization on the part of
France’s intellectuals. Indeed, if anything, their involvement in public affairs only
intensified as France limped from one economic or diplomatic crisis to another and
as disenchantment with the political system grew among the electorate. Curiously,
if for the most part the participants in these debates now all seemed happy to
describe themselves as intellectuals, discussion of the proper role of the intellectual
in no way diminished. This was most clearly visible in Julien Benda’s text of 1927,
La Trahison des clercs, and in Paul Nizan’s later polemical riposte, Les Chiens de
garde.205
When the quarrel between Daniel Halèvy and Charles Péguy broke out, one
of the people who had acted as an intermediary was Julien Benda. He had been
202 Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, 64–5.
203 Ibid. 92–4.
204 Ibid. 96–8.
205 See Ray Nichols, Treason, Tradition and the Intellectual: Julien Benda and Political Discourse
(Lawrence, Kan., 1978) and David L. Schalk, The Spectrum of Political Engagement (Princeton, 1979).
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
473
drawn into Péguy’s circle at an early age and like them had thrown his weight
behind the Dreyfusard cause. The mental outlook that had informed this political
commitment was later spelt out by Benda in a volume of memoirs entitled La
Jeunesse d’un clerc. It was this same outlook that informed the argument of his more
famous essay on the betrayal of the intellectuals.
The first two sections of La Jeunesse d’un clerc focused upon Benda’s family
upbringing and his school years. What emerged was a picture of someone whose
Jewishness was felt through an attachment to certain abstract values rather than as a
religion and where those values––civil equality, the elimination of privilege, indi-
vidual liberty, and the religious neutrality of the State––were also the values of the
Republic. His republican education further reinforced his sense of loyalty to these
values, producing a ‘mandarin’ with no sense of ‘the particularity of his nation, his
ancestors, or his race’.206 The result was a vision of the intellectual consciously
modelled upon the medieval cleric withdrawn from the daily realities of the world
and whose function it was to meditate and to reflect, ‘not to act but to think’.207 As
Benda later explained, the task of the ‘true intellectual’ was ‘to think correctly and
to find the truth, without concern with what will happen to the planet as a
result’.208
‘Not everyone’, Benda wrote, ‘has the opportunity at the threshold of their lives
to make an abrupt choice between two very different moralities and to know what
they are.’209 This was what the Dreyfus Affair had enabled him to do. ‘In a flash’,
Benda wrote, he had understood ‘the hierarchy of values’ that formed ‘his very
essence’ and ‘the visceral hatred’ he felt for opposing views. From this point
onwards he had held firm to the belief that truth and justice were ‘abstract values’
separate from the interests of either time or place. He had therefore opposed the
position taken by Barrès not simply because it was ‘profoundly anti-French’ but
also on the grounds that it constituted ‘the systematic destruction’ of everything
since Socrates that had sought to raise human beings above their ‘individual or
group egoisms’.210 Similarly Benda had no time for those Dreyfusards who were
motivated by human compassion for the innocent Dreyfus languishing on Devil’s
Island. His protest, Benda wrote, had been an act of ‘pure intellectuality’, an
affirmation of truth in the face of error.
This was the position that underpinned the argument advanced in La Trahison
des clercs. Restated in more polemical terms he here defined the clercs as ‘all those
whose activity in essence is not the pursuit of practical ends and who, seeking their
joy in the pursuit of an art or a science or in metaphysical speculation, in short, in
the possession of non-temporal advantages, say in a certain manner: “My kingdom
is not of this world”’.211 This was not intended as a purely prescriptive account of
how the intellectual ought to act, as this, Benda believed, was precisely how the
clercs had operated in the past. ‘Thanks to them’, Benda wrote, ‘it might be said that
if, for over thousand years, humanity did evil it had honoured the good.’212
206 La Jeunesse d’un clerc (1936), 50.
207 Ibid. 121.
208 Précision (1930–1937) (1937), 19.
209 La Jeunesse d’un clerc, 203–4.
210 Ibid. 198.
211 La Trahison des clercs (1977), 194.
212 Ibid. 195.
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France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
Moreover, it was precisely in this manner, according to Benda, that men such as
Zola and Duclaux had acted during the Dreyfus Affair. ‘They had been’, Benda
argued, ‘the officiants of abstract justice and had not been sullied by any passion for
a worldly objective.’213
Benda’s complaint, however, was that ‘at the end of the nineteenth century’ the
clercs had ceased to exist as ‘a class of men’ separate and distinct from the multitu
de
and that they had subordinated their mission to the service of political passions. In
so doing, they had abased the values of knowledge before the values of action and
the cult of success. Doing nothing to resist the passions of race, class, and
nationality, Benda affirmed, the ‘modern clercs . . . had set about proclaiming that
the intellectual function is respectable only to the extent that it is connected to the
pursuit of concrete advantage and that the intelligence which is disinterested in
these ends is to be scorned’.214 The list of culprits was extensive and was not
exclusively French––both Rudyard Kipling and Friedrich Nietzsche were cited by
Benda, for example––but among the French writers accused of proclaiming the
superiority of instinct, the unconscious, and the will over intelligence were Brune-
tière, Barrès, Maurras, Georges Sorel, and Péguy.
How could this ‘great betrayal’ be explained? Benda proffered three principal
explanations. The first, and most important, was that the present age was the age of
politics, the ‘century of the intellectual organization of political hatreds’.215
‘Today’, Benda wrote, ‘political passions possess a degree of universality, of coher-
ence, of homogeneity, of precision, of continuity, of preponderance over other
passions, not previously known.’216 The clercs had come to share these passions and
hatreds and to embrace what Benda termed ‘the realism of the masses’. The second
cause identified by Benda was ‘the decline in the study of classical literature’ and
with that a lesser appreciation of what was ‘human in its universal aspect’.217 In
effect, the charge was one of a loss of intellectual discipline. The third explanation
drew upon an altogether different conjecture, and one that has since informed
many critiques of the intellectual’s supposed autonomy: the clercs had descended to
the market place ‘in the interests of their careers’.218 Rather than the pursuit of
knowledge as an end in itself, their goals were now fame, honours, and social status.
‘The Bohemian man of letters’, Benda wrote, is ‘a figure who has practically
disappeared’.219 In similar vein, elsewhere Benda wrote that ‘one of the great
treasons of the modern clerc is marriage’.220
La Trahison des clercs was a deeply flawed book. It was also a self-serving book,
designed not only to justify the position taken by Benda during the Dreyfus Affair
but also his support of the French war effort in 1914. Roman Rolland, for example,
was criticized for his ‘mystic pacifism’. It also proved to be a controversial book and
one to which Benda himself had to return on numerous subsequent occasions as he
sought to steer a course through the turbulent political environment of the 1930s
and 1940s. To the end, he believed that he had remained true to his original
213 La Trahison des clercs (1977), 200.
214 Ibid. 293.
215 Ibid. 180–1
216 Ibid. 182.
217 Ibid. 312.
218 Ibid. 303.
219 Ibid. 306.
220 ‘Le Clerc et la famille’, Précision, 9.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
475
principles, writing in the preface to the 1946 edition of La Trahison des clercs that
‘when injustice becomes master of the world and the entire universe kneels before
it, the clerc must remain standing and confront it with the human conscience’.221 It
was, on the other hand, precisely this argument that provoked the blistering attack
directed against Benda by Paul Nizan in Les Chiens de garde.
Born in 1905 into a petit-bourgeois provincial family,222 Paul Nizan entered
the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1924 to study for the agrégation in
philosophy. One of his fellow students (and soon to be a close friend) was Jean-
Paul Sartre.223 Unlike his more famous colleague, Nizan was quickly attracted
to Marxism and in 1927 he joined the French Communist Party, subsequently
writing for La Revue Marxiste and a series of other left-wing publications.224 In
1931 he published Aden Arabie and then, a year later, Les Chiens de garde. The
former drew upon his experiences in the British colony of Aden where, in 1926,
he had secured a post working for Antonin Besse.225 Nizan’s first-hand experience
of colonial exploitation did much to confirm his hostility towards capitalism but
the early chapters of Aden Arabie also provided a vivid, and unreservedly hostile,
portrayal of his own education. It was an account that differed markedly from
that provided by Benda in La Jeunesse d’un clerc. Of his fellow students at the École
Normale Supérieure, he wrote that they were ‘exhausted by their years at the lycée,
were corrupted by the humanities and by the bourgeois morals and cooking of their
families’.226 They were nothing else, in Nizan’s opinion, than elitist hypocrites. As
for his professors, they were men who believed that ‘problems will no longer exist
when the terms of debate are conveniently defined’ and that the Good amounted to
keeping the people in a position of subservience.227 They acted, Nizan wrote, as
‘watchdogs of vocabulary’.
The starting point of Les Chiens de garde was that all philosophies had a bearing
upon the world. ‘Every philosopher,’ Nizan argued, ‘though he may consider that
he does not, participates in the impure reality of his age.’228 Moreover, all philo-
sophies were either beneficial or detrimental to the interests of humankind. There
was, therefore, ‘a philosophy for the oppressors and a philosophy for the op-
pressed’.229 Thus, to speak of the abstract and eternal notions of Truth and
Justice––which, in any case, did not exist––was to divert attention from the things
that really mattered to the inhabitants of the earth––‘war, colonialism, the rational-
ization of industry, love, the varieties of death, unemployment’––and was to put up
a smokescreen before the economic, social, and political realities constituting the
everyday oppression of ordinary people. If, then, as Nizan believed, the proper
221 La Trahison, 135–6.
222 On Nizan see W. D. Redfern, Paul Nizan: Committed Literature in a Conspirational World
(Princeton, NJ, 1972) and Annie Cohen-Solal, Paul Nizan, communiste impossible (1980).
223 When Nizan married in 1927 his two witnesses at the ceremony were Sartre and Raymond
Aron.
224 See Jean-Jacques Brochier (ed.), Paul Nizan: Intellectuel Communiste 1926–1940 (2001).
225 Besse subsequently provided the money to establish St Antony’s College, Oxford.
226 Aden Arabie (1931), 16.
227 Ibid. 14, 18.
228 Les Chiens de garde (1998), 34.
229 Ibid. 57.
476
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
function of philosophy was to serve the real interests of real people, to adopt a
position of ‘impartiality or indifference’ was to take sides. From this he concluded
that ‘the desire to be a clerc and only a clerc is less a choice made by an eternal man
than the decision of a partisan. To abstain is to make a choice and to express a
preference.’230
This was the charge levelled against those Nizan described as ‘the fraternal
enemies’ who made up the world of French philosophy: Benda certainly, but also
Bergson and Émile Boutroux, and, above all, Léon Brunschvicg from the Sor-
bonne. ‘The audacity of their philosophy’, Nizan affirmed, ‘consists in identifying
human society, all possible human societies, with bourgeois society, and human
reason, all possible forms of human reason, with bourgeois reason.’231 Nor did
Nizan leave his readers in any doubt as to the consequences of such hollow
bourgeois rhetoric. Arguing that to have defended Dreyfus was to have supported
the bourgeoisie, he claimed that ‘when the victim of a violation of justice is a
proletarian there is no reaction at all from philosophy’.232 More than this, it had
been these very same men who had provided the philosophical justification for
France’s war against Germany. ‘These clercs’, Nizan fumed, ‘simply emulated the
crowd and followed the orders of the generals and the politicians. These men, most
of whom were not subject to mobilization, meekly went along with the forces of
ignorance and exhorted those who had been mobilized to give up their lives. Every
one of their students who fell in battle was a martyr to their philosophy.’233
Nizan’s explanation of this duplicity demolished any claim to autonomy on the
part of the bourgeois intellectual. ‘It is especially worthy of note’, Nizan observed,
‘that, generally speaking, our thinkers are salaried employees of the State, that the
leading opinions in this country are produced in exchange for public monies and
are backed by government sanctions.’234 The Republic, in other words, had
successfully replaced the spiritual guardians of the old monarchical and ecclesiasti-
cal order with a ‘secular clergy’. This new clergy, Nizan continued, now discharged
exactly the same functions as its predecessor, generating ‘all the forms of moral
suasion, all the spiritual propaganda which the State might require’.235 Intellec-
tuals––and specifically France’s humanist philosophers––were nothing else but the
purveyors of ‘the philosophy of the State’.236
Nizan’s claim therefore was that it was in their attachment to the world of the
bourgeoisie that lay the real ‘trahison des clercs’.237 For that reason an alternative
model to the ‘contemplative clerc’ of ‘bourgeois thought’ was required and this,