by Paul Nizan
The transmission to its final destination of the information we collect poses a problem that is of an ethical more than a practical nature: I regard it as indispensable that it should be effected anonymously. In no case should it be possible to establish any link between the intended recipients of our consignments, who must not be implicated, and ourselves. Besides, the private value of our actions would be utterly compromised by the expectation of any recognition or importance whatsoever. Virtue is its own reward. Yours.
P.S. Do you remember Simon, who was with us at Louis-le-Grand and went on to the Ecole des Chartes? He is secretary to his colonel at Clignancourt. We might make a trial run. I shall see him: I have always had a certain influence over him, up to now he has done almost everything I have suggested to him.
PHILIPPE LAFORGUE TO BERNARD ROSENTHAL
Strasburg, 28 March 1929
Dear old Rosen,
So that was your Dostoievskyan idea. I find it unbelievably romantic. If it’s a matter of commitment, I somehow have the impression that a metalworker’s commitment in a party cell, a factory cell, goes much further than any mystical – and also sly – demonstration: sly, because it is explicitly understood that fellows like us are never caught, are not catchable. The metalworker risks – and straight away, not in six months or outside time – his freedom, his job and his livelihood. Same thing with the fellows who get themselves nabbed in barracks for Inciting-military-personnel-to-disobey-orders-in-pursuance-of-the-aims-of-anarchist-propaganda. Perhaps, if we were not afraid of political servitude, and if it were not the case that nothing seems more important to us than not choosing, the true solution for us too would consist in joining the party without further ado, although life in it cannot always be easy for intellectuals. We shall have to see . . .
All the same, until such time as we make up our minds to take the plunge, and the Revolution is more visibly imminent than in this bitch of a period, we are having such a damnably tedious time living our young elite existence that I cannot see why we should not have a go at conspiracy, something along the lines of The Possessed or the Narodniks. Your clandestine dreams, though, strike me as more effective for the purposes of your personal perfection than for concretely achieving the conquest of political power by the proletariat.
But you are as you are, you will reply that man has no need, like a horse, for perfection.
It is not impossible that I might come across something to do in the industrial field, thanks to my father with his Polytechnique background who, as is only proper, is in the vanguard of technology. It would astonish me, however, if I found the energy for this at once, because of the atmosphere one breathes here while awaiting Easter.
Strasburg – gloriously reconquered from the enemy, to the great joy of the patriots, who brought out again quantities of little black-and-green ribbons; and also of the German officers of the Rhine flotilla, already sequestered by their rebellious sailors brandishing revolvers in docks filled with red flags, while the admiral paced up and down without a stitch on, at several degrees below – Strasburg, I say, even though its frivolous, musical character has been much weakened during the six years since my father arrived there in the victors’ baggage train, still possesses the enchanting look of a Rhine resort where there is no question of taking things seriously. The time of the great madness is over, when the lieutenants of the French Army were lording it over the Broglie and on Rue de la Mesange, and when the most amazing schemes were within a week making rich men out of petty adventurers only just demobbed, whose wives were soon driving about in Mercedes and Rolls; a romantic trade in contraband currency was carried on by boat between the two banks of the Rhine, which, when all is said and done, was actually contained in Anglo-French glasses; military planes would smuggle bicycles and sewing-machines fastened between the wheels of their landing-gear; the customs men on the Kehl Bridge used to empty women’s bodices stuffed with silk stockings, men’s pockets, the robes of priests, all of them made dizzy by the abysses of the German inflation; powerful families of brewers and bankers would pay unattached young men from the interior to sleep with the daughters-in-law from whom they wished to deliver their sons; the high officials of Millerand and Alapetite’s Commissariat were carrying off whole wagonloads of state property to France for their country houses; the surrealists used to come to Strasburg in quest of the well-springs of German romanticism. That’s over, but one can still spend one’s leisure time wandering along embankments flanked by steeples, bell towers, palaces, latticed gardens, churches and Protestant chapels, where the tourists go to meditate upon death as they peer at glass coffins containing little girls in dresses with farthingales, or stuffed and extremely moth-eaten eighteenth-century generals. There are spots beside the canals and the Ill with trees, grass and silence; and Weinstüben, where waitress-mistresses in black silk dresses reveal their thighs so far up that you want to stroke them, even though their skin has an off-putting salad whiteness: when you know them quite well, they take you into the kitchen to kiss you expertly on the lips and call you Dearest Soul in German. Easter is not bad in Alsace, but nothing equals the snowy season in this town. Then all the brothels have Christmas trees, round which the young bourgeois of the town grow emotional in the company of the girls of the house, while their parents attend Midnight Mass in the Minster. These young men usually have mistresses, as they call them, who are waitresses from some brasserie, in black aprons and with big breasts, who give them a bit of pocket money. On Sundays they go and dance with their sisters’ friends in the ballrooms of the Hôtel Hannong or the Maison Rouge, for it is still rather cool in the restaurants of La Wanzenau and Le Fuchs am Buckel. In a few days’ time, these maidens will begin playing tennis on the courts of La Robertsau, where there will be roses. All the lures of the Family . . . Yours.
BERNARD ROSENTHAL TO PHILIPPE LAFORGUE
Paris, 30 March 1929
Dear Philippe,
I can overlook your epithet ‘romantic’: we’ll have to argue it out, because it seems to me to indicate a serious misunderstanding between us. This is not the first time I have suspected you of a kind of casual lack of passion. Watch out for the gardens of Ile de France, for the speech of Touraine, for moderation, for useless moderation, for Common-sense-the-most-widely-shared-thing-in-the-world, for the idiocy of Anatole France, for the chicanery of Voltaire. Sometimes you are terribly French.
We shall also have to speak further about joining the party, because that is serious. Our function consists in inventing or deepening beliefs, but not in dissolving them into politics. It must be possible to play an important role as irregulars. As old Uncle Spinoza says, there can never be too much liberty.
Thanks, whatever happens, for your acceptance in principle of my project: I would not have done anything without you, or without the others. Bloyé agrees too, with some objections in the caution department, and Jurien, which surprises me more. I did not have such high hopes of that future university lecturer, who will lose his taste for Revolution at the same time as his virginity, which by now cannot be long delayed. I have met Simon, much affected by military service. I have told him nothing as yet. It is obvious that there is not much to be discovered from his colonel’s office, apart from the list of men in the regiment classified as PR. But he has independently conceived the ambition of getting himself posted as secretary to one of the offices of the Paris garrison, and has told me that he has asked to be transferred from the 21st Colonial at Clignancourt to the 23rd at Lourcine, where a job is about to fall vacant in the office of Area 2 of the garrison. He sees in this transfer, to which I have vigorously encouraged him, merely the advantages of indolence and the attractions of the locality. He has few Parisian contacts. But when we meet in a few days, we shall have to find a way of getting him recommended by Mr So-and-so, who knows Mrs X, who just so happens to be on ever such intimate terms with the supreme commander of the colonial troops. Are you yourself not more or
less stabled with a filly from the Gouraud circle? Cheerio.
PHILIPPE LAFORGUE TO PAULINE D.
Strasburg, 2 April 1929
Dear Pauline,
I have a tiny favour to ask of you, which you must be in a position to do for me thanks to the bad company you keep. One of my friends, who is a private in the 21st Colonial at the Clignancourt barracks, wants to come across to the Left Bank, and specifically to the 23rd Colonial at the Lourcine barracks. He has entirely serious reasons which are none of your business, as they are none of mine. Since you are up to your neck in generals, you might perhaps ask one of those fellows decked out in oak leaves how the matter should be tackled. I should add that my friend is particularly desirous of being assigned to a post which is about to fall vacant and which he says is a cushy number, that of secretary to Area 2 of the Paris Garrison, which is housed precisely in the Lourcine or Port-Royal barracks. He is called André Simon, private in the 21st Colonial Infantry Regiment, Headquarters Wing, Clignancourt Barracks, 18th.
P.S. After the Easter break is over, dear Pauline, if the notion takes you to come back to Rue d’Ulm, I should like it to be after nine at night. Given the house customs, there is no doubt about the porter letting you past, he has seen even nigger-women come in.
PAULINE D. TO PHILIPPE LAFORGUE
Paris, 9 April 1929
Philippe dear,
I do a favour for you! It is too diverting for me to refuse. As you can imagine, your conduct does not deceive me and I am too fond of our reprehensible little sessions at Rue d’Ulm to hold your bad manners against you. I found the right general, of course, he was an old friend of my uncle’s and a telephone call was all it took. Your friend will be appointed to the post he set his heart on. Apparently this was not one of those ambitions that cannot be satisfied. Do not thank me, I detest written expressions of gratitude. I shall come and see you. After nine at night, since that is what you want. Till then.
PHILIPPE LAFORGUE TO BERNARD ROSENTHAL
Paris, 9 April 1929
My dear old Rosen,
It is all settled. Simon will go to Port-Royal. I arrived in Paris yesterday evening and think we shall see each other soon. Nothing is simpler than the beginning of a Great Conspiracy. Yours.
VIII
André Simon was a rather weak young man. He was the son of rich tradespeople from Nantes, who brought up their children admirably, but who had ended up respecting only the Spirit, without thinking that this ludicrous veneration for the most disinterested activities of life ruined everything, and that it was merely the mark of their commercial decadence and of a bourgeois bad conscience of which as yet they had no suspicion. They had plenty of excuses: never had the values of commerce and status attached themselves more powerfully to writers, artists and diplomats – to all creators of alibis.
This gifted boy – who would no doubt have settled for managing the purchases and sales of his father’s silk business in Rue Crébillon, while consoling himself for having above him only the shipowners of Boulevard Delorme and the great maritime brokers of the Fosse – had entered the Ecole des Chartes. What an adventure!
There are few social movements more remarkable than the fate of certain great Nantes houses in the years following the War: the deviation which led Simon out of the paths of commerce towards the little curiosities of Diplomatics was at the same time propelling young men from his background – whom he may have known at the Lycée Clemenceau, in the years when old men and young women were replacing teachers away at the front or dead on the field of honour – towards the Ecole des Sciences Politiques and the little secrets of diplomacy.
Sons of wholesale grocers, brought up beneath the bell-towers of Sainte-Croix, in about 1925 discovered golf at La Baule, horses in Paris, and plunged into proud but obscure careers in the French legations of this Europe of Versailles, Saint-Germain and Trianon in which treaties with the names of châteaux and parks cannot conceal the blood and violence to come. Others, echoing Parisian appeals or Alsatian voices, hurled themselves blindly into poetical activity. Yet others, at a loose end thanks to easy money and the dispersal of their schoolfellows, with frivolous enthusiasm collected the records of the American hot jazz greats, played poker, chased married women impelled by boredom into provincial adulteries; they learned to find cocaine and ether in the shady chemist shops of the town, and borrowed one-hundred-franc notes from the antiquated whores of Place Royale and Place Graslin, who demanded them back with insults on the pavement of Rue Crébillon or beneath the white arcades of the Passage Pommeraye, which still displays its braces, etchings, jokes and novelties, sheaths, trusses, and the outdated model of the battleship Jauréguiberry. Jewellers’ sons end up burgling their fathers’ shop-windows, sparing neither First Communion medals, nor betrothal salvers, nor wedding rings, nor christening baubles. Youths, huddled behind the Quai de la Fosse or the embankments of the Ile Gloriette, in mouldy cellars which must remind them of London warehouses and the literary quaysides of Hamburg, organize secret societies bound by childish rituals and the practices of an eroticism as antiquated as the kept women of their native town.
This unruliness of youth commenced after the peace of ’19 in the large provincial towns, at Nantes as at Rheims, Nancy, Bordeaux, Rouen or Lille, when the time came for the provincial grandes bourgeoisies to entertain anxious doubts about their future. It seemed that their heirs could choose only between two temptations: the son of a Bordeaux wine merchant, who on leaving the Ecole Normale goes off to Athens to prepare for digs in the Chersonese or at Delos, is perhaps no less wayward than the Rouen notary’s son hauled before the assizes for a motor theft, a swindle or trafficking in drugs.
Eight or nine years later, when the time of Leagues, arms deals and plots came, people thought everything would be settled by political adventures: the unruliness of the sons then seemed to protect their fathers’ Ledger.
What André Simon feared most of all was to be despised by Rosenthal, with whom he had graduated from Louis-le-Grand and whom he admired, as Bernard from time to time thought he admired François Régnier, but in a different way. What a concatenation of influences, what an interplay of mirror reflections, in the lives of young men who feel themselves still somewhat too spineless to walk without companions, confidants and witnesses. One day Simon wrote in a letter to his father:
My friend Rosenthal is perhaps the only living philosopher there exists at present in France. People do not know this, and he probably does not know it either. But when he has published, or delivered, his first lectures, people will realize the truth, realize that they have a philosopher as important as Bergson.
These rhapsodies, however, were based only on a few sentences from Bernard.
The first effect of this admiration was that André Simon was doing his military service as a private. He could have been a second lieutenant, he even should have been if he had obeyed the laws on the military training of students; but Rosenthal had forbidden him to submit to those rules, against which many young men put up a violent resistance in ’27 and ’28.
— If you agree to become a reserve officer, said Rosenthal, I shall never speak to you again. We must remain in the ranks. They would like us to become their accomplices, utterly their accomplices; they believe almost sincerely, in any case, that this is our due, as it is theirs to command. But we shall give ourselves all the opportunities we can to be against them and with their enemies. Military service is the first chance we have to find ourselves mingling with peasants, workers and bank clerks. To separate ourselves from our class. Are we going to miss our first chance!
Now a private, Simon could never accustom himself to so inhuman a condition. Everything depressed him. The barbarous world which, at Clignancourt, extended between the walls of the outer boulevard and the muddy villages of the periphery was subjected to rules and customs of an astonishing violence, which would be given vent in its way
s of eating, sleeping, washing, speaking about women, or passively receiving orders which had been passed down so many times that they seemed absurd by the time they reached the men.
Obscure passwords and an omnipresent wish to humiliate governs military life: on his arrival at the barracks, Simon had little idea of the refinements an NCO in a colonial regiment can achieve in the debasement of man.
The young Paris workers of the 21st Colonial – who used to defend themselves against army life with inimitably dexterous puns, jokes and ripostes; who in town had mistresses or wives, children, a profession which they sometimes continued to pursue between supper and lights out . . . in short, a life; who managed to ward off Breton sergeants and Corsican sergeant-majors by dint of levity, irony and a disdainful knowledge of men – to Simon appeared like heroes. This young archivist, barely emerged from the warmth of provincial life and from a kind of old bourgeois distinction, was possessed by the same hopeless love of freedom as young miners from the Pas-de-Calais whom war and the ravages of invasion had kept from learning to read; or as farm boys from the Vendée, dazed by their first weeks in the Army, who grew thin and at once fell ill.
