The Conspiracy

by Paul Nizan

  Between the Hôtel des Grands Hommes and the corner of Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, Laforgue said with a sigh:

  — No question about it. One knows which side one should be on.

  — That second cortège was needed, replied Rosenthal who was feeling a bit drunk, to cleanse us of our night of dissimulation . . .

  Nothing is more difficult than the systematic exploitation of an event of the heart, nothing more swiftly damped than the reverberations of love at first sight. Examinations, laziness, literature, curiosity about women, all the false manoeuvres in which the arduous life of adolescents is dissipated, long prevented Laforgue and his friends from drawing from those violent memories of 24 and 25 November all the practical consequences they should have implied: for years, it was merely something they held in reserve.

  It might be thought odd that they were not shaken by certain events in the years ’25, ’26, ’27 and ’28: but that would be to take insufficient account of the diversions into which so many young men are enticed, when at a stroke they discover books and women. In July ’25, Laforgue was going for Sunday excursions out of Paris, and taking out dancing at Saint-Cloud and Nogent-sur-Marne a little salesgirl from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, who seemed to him the most important thing in the world. In May ’26, Rosenthal forgot everything in favour of the revelations in the Ethics. The war in Morocco, the Canton rising, the English general strike were barely anything more to them than great opportunities for a few days of political enthusiasm: they signed manifestos that committed them far less than their parents thought. The interest they took in the world lacked specificity. The Sacco and Vanzetti affair, with all those heads broken in Paris, might have played a role in their lives that would have marked them more severely than the Jaurès ceremonies; but it was the holiday period, none of them was in Paris, the whole business was simply an item of news that they read in the papers, with a forty-eight hour delay, in Brittany or in the Midi.

  Throughout all these years, they would have periods of passion when they would resolve to go to bed at three in the morning: this was more than was needed to pass their examinations, it fell a bit short of forgetting themselves. They would espy a trail and plunge in, less to gain knowledge than with the hope of stumbling upon a mirror or a source. They discovered one after another Mendelssohn, the ‘Unknown Philosopher’ and Rabbi ben Ezra. After a couple of weeks, humour would prevail, they would wake up and return to the cinema almost every evening. They were eager young men, but lazy.

  This superficiality did not prevent them from believing in Revolution: they cared little about appearing truly inconsistent. They sometimes examined their consciences – but only to conclude that they did not incline towards Revolution out of love for humanity, nor out of any strict adherence to events. It is quite true that there was not the least scrap of philanthropy in their natural impulse to revolt: humanitarianism struck them as entirely counterfeit, nor did they view Revolution as a secular rebirth of Christianity.

  — What I like about Revolution, said Laforgue, is that the civilization it promises will be a hard civilization.

  — Agreed, said Rosenthal. The age of ease is coming to an end . . .

  They were stirred more by disorder, absurdity and outrages to logic than by cruelty or oppression, and really saw the bourgeoisie, whose sons they were, less as criminal and murderous than as idiotic. They never doubted for a moment that it was in decline and doomed. But they wished to fight not for the workers – who, fortunately, had by no means waited for them – but for themselves: they viewed the workers merely as their natural allies. There is a great deal of difference between wanting to sink a ship and refusing to sink with it . . .

  The intense family repugnance they felt for the bourgeoisie might have led them to a violent, but anarchist, critique. Anarchism, however, struck them as illiterate and frivolous: their academic studies saved them. They scorned the generation that had immediately preceded them, for having expressed its revolt only in poetic vocabularies and upon poetic sureties: the moment seemed right to endow anger with philosophical guarantors.

  — Let’s start being serious, said Bloyé.

  Rosenthal commented:

  — It will be seen later that a historic change occurred, once Hegel and Marx superseded the Schools of Rimbaud and Lautréamont as objects of the younger generation’s admiration.

  They liked only victors and reconstructors; they despised the sick, the dying, lost causes. No force could more powerfully seduce young men who refused to be caught up in the bourgeoisie’s defeats than a philosophy which, like that of Marx, pointed out to them the future victors of history: the workers, destined for what they somewhat hastily judged to be an inevitable victory. Moreover, they went so far as to convince themselves, with excessive complacency, that the Revolution was accomplished now that they themselves positively no longer identified with the bourgeoisie: a kind of smug pride made them speak of post-revolutionary consciousness. No one would have dreamed of finding them dangerous; they worked less to destroy the present than to define a dreadfully contingent future.

  Civil War took up a great deal of their time during the first months: they had no suspicion at the time that what was most important about the venture was the fact that it gave them opportunities for extensive reading, and their first chance of sustained relations with workers, and that they would later recall, with the surprise which the memory of happiness gives, the hours they used to spend with deft, sardonic compositors in the little book printshop in Rue de Seine where they went to correct their proofs and lay out the journal.

  They were not modest, they compared themselves to famous groupings, to the Encyclopaedists or the Hegelians.

  Rosenthal thought their principal undertaking should be an encyclopaedic critique of values, and a sort of general reduction of ideas to their true motives: no study seemed to him more important than the critique of mystification and the exposure of mendacity. Laforgue dreamed of a kind of generalization of Marx’s analyses on the fetishism of commodities – some universal charactery of deception.

  It was, after all, the morrow of the War and the first peacetime disorders. They were emerging from a prodigiously mendacious time, when the entire education of the young had been accompanied by solemn twaddle, fuelled in turn by the requirements of prosecuting the War, then by the success of the grand machinations of the Peace. They realized they had been deceived no less at school than their fathers or elder brothers had been at the front. Their mothers, lonely and glibly heroic like all wives of men who will die in wars, had themselves lied with a disconcerting civic ease. Ten years after Versailles, almost all the men who had returned from the front, saved at the last instant when the clarion of the Armistice sounded, still hesitated to unmask the meaning of the rhetorical inventions for which they had fought: rarely does a person have the courage to retract and cry from the rooftops that he once took the word of liars; it is necessary to be strong indeed for such public confessions – people would rather have been accomplices than dupes. It will easily be understood why Laforgue and his comrades despised no one more deeply than War Veterans. The voices that had been raised after the last day of the War still seemed few in number: they did not compel the young men’s recognition. Everything depended upon the chance of an encounter that did not always occur. By about a year Laforgue and Rosenthal had missed the Clarté movement, which was already disintegrating.

  Behind the closed shutters of the shop in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, or in their lecture-rooms in Rue d’Ulm, they spent hours mulling over these matters. Comrades who did not form part of the team would come to visit them; they would talk till very late, drinking coffee that Bloyé handed round, until they were tipsy with words and smoke. For example, Rosenthal would say:

  — A modern encyclopaedia could only be based on the sincerity of insolence. Nobody expects anything of us other than insolence. We must announce, with suf
ficiently prophetic means of expression to unsettle the smug, the decline of the age of mendacity. Such an annunciation will not be achieved without a system: that’s why our special mission in philosophy consists in giving a new tone, and the accents of our age, to all the denigratory systems – Spinoza, Hegel, Marx . . . Our undertaking will thus be more like the Hegelian Encyclopaedia than the Encyclopaedia of d’Alembert, which has all the defects of the bourgeoisie’s compromises . . . If people are at death’s door, that’s because they’re suffocating inside shells of mendacity. We shall tell those hermit-crabs why they’re dying! They’ll be furious with us, nobody likes truth for its own sake. Marx said that men must be given consciousness of themselves, even if they don’t want it. They don’t like consciousness, they like death . . . For a certain time, my friends, our sole task will be to denigrate their ideas and disaccustom them to flattery . . . There’s no phrase I admire more than Lenin’s about the profanation of gold, do you remember? ‘When we are victorious on a world scale, I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.’

  Then Laforgue said:

  — What I’m a bit worried about is the possible duration of this mission . . . Do you know whom I compare us to?

  — No, Rosenthal replied.

  — I compare us to that brilliant group of Young Hegelians, such as Bruno Bauer and his ilk, who definitely preferred revolutions in consciousness to the rough and tumble of actual revolutions. Don’t you know that little epigram on the Doktorklub?

  Unsere Täten sind Worte bis jetzt und nock lange

  Unter die Abstraktion stellt sich die Praxis.

  There are days when I wonder if it wouldn’t be more worthwhile sticking posters up on walls, with the chaps in some party cell . . .

  — That’s just inverted romanticism, and pretty low quality too, Rosenthal replied. Victory in thought must precede victory in reality.

  — If only it could, said Laforgue. That’s exactly why you strike me as idealist. Doesn’t it really come down to the fact that reality strikes us as rather hard to shift?

  — I don’t agree, Rosenthal interrupted. The function of philosophy consists exclusively in the profanation of ideas. No violence is equal in its effects to theoretical violence. Later comes action . . .

  — It comes, said Laforgue, when theory has penetrated the masses. Do you think it’s our theory which the masses are just waiting to be penetrated by?

  — We shall see, replied Rosenthal.

  Yet Bernard was more impatient than all the rest. But nothing then seemed to him more urgent than to utter a few cries which he usually called messages – and which lacked simplicity. In December and again in February, Rosenthal published pages in Civil War that had no serious chance of shaking capitalism.

  V

  His first cries uttered, his first cries written, Bernard wanted action.

  Civil War had been going for three months, it had five hundred subscribers and eight hundred single-copy purchasers, three publishing houses were giving it advertising. This was a great deal, it was a success, but it could not be called a historic upheaval in French thought. Rosenthal would no doubt have been content with talking about anger or the depreciation of values, or the ruses of bourgeois Reason, if such arguments had provoked legal actions – but with this absurd freedom of the press, the Public Prosecutor was still making no move. It was impossible to view the exercise of philosophy as an act.

  Spring was about to arrive. People had been through hard months, but the ice was melting, winter was dying in showers of rain, one felt like rising early, the days were lengthening like the plants you see tremulously growing and unfolding on the cinema screen. In Rue de la Paix, the shop-girls came out in droves and crossed Place Vendôme and Rue de Rivoli arm in arm. From time to time the weather would be fine, as though summer, autumn or late-spring days that had not made their appearance months earlier – stifled by rain or a storm – were now dispensing their warmth upon still-numbed hands and still-chapped lips. There were still hoarfrosts on the lawns of the Luxembourg, but between two spring showers the sky would come back into view.

  Apart from this oncoming spring, it was a bad time for impatient young men. Things seemed generally to be calming down, in economics and politics alike. There was a moment when the history of Europe appeared as slack as a neap-time sea, when people forgot war and peace, the Ruhr, Morocco and China. The season at Deauville had never been as brilliant as that year – indeed people would still be speaking of it during the summer of ’37, not such a bad summer itself in terms of race-meetings and casinos. At Rosenthal’s parents’ house, ladies who had had their belle époque during the period of Mobilization-is-not-war would say:

  — Don’t you think, my dear, this spring has a little whiff, as it were, of pre-war days?

  There really was not much happening. People were on the whole amused by the Gazette du Franc affair, Prime Minister Poincaré had hundred-vote majorities, the Briand–Kellogg Pact was perhaps going to make people feel a bit safer. There were a few strikes, of course, but Halluin and the textile industry of the Nord were far away, and the taxi strike was really quite pleasant for the private cars, which could at last drive about in Paris. People might perhaps have been moved by the thirty deaths in the Rhine Army during the month of March: how dreadful those epidemics are, mowing down young soldiers in faraway countries during the showery season – not so far away as Indochina or Madagascar, but all the same a long way from their mothers! Thereupon Marshal Foch had died, in the same month as the Rhine Army soldiers, to whom people had given rather less thought. What an opportunity to go and queue up at the end of Rue de Grenelle – in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, with Englishmen, nannies from the Champ-de-Mars, old ladies and priests – to see what the funerals of illustrious families are like, and how old victorious marshals settle into death wearing their chinstraps! But in April, when soldiers fraternized in the Gard with the striking miners they were actually supposed to evict from the pits, people were fed up with all these stories about servicemen whereas only marshals – at most – were really tolerable. Eventually, however, the ladies felt easier in their minds. They were the same ones who, a few years later, would talk about pre-crash days as in ’28 they had talked of pre-war days, and who could be heard in drawing-rooms saying that in the last war their sons had been taken, which for France’s sake they could accept, but that in the next war their money would be taken too. Their minds had to be set at rest. Luckily, that year Prefect Chiappe showed that with him public order was in no danger: after 1 May and 1 August, people told themselves it would be a long while before the communists had bandaged all their wounds.

  It was indeed a difficult year to get through, for young men who placed all their hopes in the aggravation of disorder, and for whom the only desirable future consisted in not having one. Already their parents, forever paved with good intentions, were reviving career plans for them about which they had long been doubtful, bearing in mind what this strange, tottering world of the twenties held in store. Laforgue’s father, who had quite some time ago consoled himself for his son’s refusal to enter the Ecole Polytechnique, spoke to him about doing a doctoral thesis, after his agrégation:

  — Who do you take me for? Philippe exclaimed.

  Was it all going to start up again, then? Were they finally going to be compelled, after invoking all the shipwrecks befitting great ornamental centuries, to sail upon the level waters of bourgeois life, observing nautical regulations and all the red signals on bridges?

  The prosperity of ’29, those Markets that were so healthy despite their ups and downs and any check in the contango rate, appeared as oppressive to them as the celebrated failed Revolution of ’19, ten years earlier, had seemed to their elders.

  They had lived amid such thrilling uncertainty, since the time when, at school, their
classes had been interrupted by air raids and shellbursts and every door that banged had made them think of an explosion, that it seemed impossible to them that the sad age of indolence miraculously suspended by the four years of the War could ever resume its course.

  Laforgue and Rosenthal dated history from nineteen hundred and fourteen: they would have liked to be able to call ’29 Year XV, numbering the dates of a new era in the same way that the Russians spoke of Year XIII of the October Revolution. Were they now going to have to remain in the continuation of the Christian era, and feel themselves bound in perpetuity to Jesus, Charlemagne, Henri IV, Louis XIV, Voltaire, Napoleon and M. Thiers? For several months they foresaw the advent of an age of regress and boredom, such as had not been seen since the Restoration or the first years of the Third Republic, when they would lament the warlike and peaceful exploits of their elders, just as the young men of eighteen hundred and twenty had lamented the Revolutionary Wars, the Italian Campaign and Napoleon’s anabases from one end of Europe to the other, or the young men of eighteen hundred and eighty had lamented the Burning of Paris and the Commune with its sixty days of great innovations. Would they then be reduced to writing poems?