by Paul Nizan
‘Was it then necessary to risk death in order to be a man?’
Everything was beginning, there was no longer a second to lose before existing passionately. The great game of abortive attempts had come to an end, since it is really possible to die.
‘I’m going to have to choose. Dreams about the duration of life have had their day . . . I’m going to have to look for intensity . . . Sacrifice what is of little consequence . . .’
What perhaps best gave Philippe the sense of the change that had just transformed his life was the dreadful debt of gratitude that his mother required him to pay off, once she could reckon he was out of danger. She harshly reproached him for his silence, his distance and his selfishness, and claimed from him the marks of gratitude he owed to the person who had watched over him for nights, who had no doubt torn him from death’s clutches. He at once found himself back in that world where the people who love you best call you to account for your existence: do not forgive you for the solitary nature of happiness. Since he really had almost died, there were grounds for mistrust for the rest of his life. But he was still too weak to rebel, he could scarcely move. He began to weep silently. His mother thought these tears were signs of remorse.
But he was crying only for himself: everyone was mistaken.
Appendix:
WALTER BENJAMIN TO MAX HORKHEIMER
Paris XVe
10 rue Dombasle
24 January 1939
Dear Mr Horkheimer,
The main purpose of this letter is to present a politically oriented overview of a few of this winter’s literary publications. It elucidates a package containing four new publications, which is making its way to you right now.
Before I start on this round-up, I’d like to thank you for your letter of 17 December, and also for sending the Institute’s report.1 It would seem that a fortunate coincidence has taken place between the publication of this report and Roosevelt’s foreign political turn.2 The report gives voice to the genuine solidarity that, apparently, exists at the moment between the Institute’s future projects and those of American democracy. I don’t need to tell you how much I hope that the agenda pursued with this publication will be broadly realized.
I was very glad to find in your report the first bibliographic survey of my things. Of the several publications that the Institute has announced for the spring, the theme explored by Kirchheimer is the one I particularly look forward to.3 And it is also gratifying to see that the plan to do a philosophical primer, which I thought had been somewhat put in the shade, has stepped back out into the light.4 It has come back to life for me in relation to something else. When the time comes, I hope to be able to hand you a few fine passages from Turgot for this assortment.5
I have been occupying myself with Turgot and a few other theorists, in order to track the history of the concept of progress. I am working through the whole plan of the Baudelaire (about whose revision I advised Teddie Wiesengrund in my last letter) from the perspective of epistemology. From this standpoint, the concept of history becomes an important issue, as well as the role that progress plays in it. Shattering the idea of a continuum of culture, as postulated in the essay on Fuchs,6 must have epistemological consequences, amongst which one of the most important appears to me to be the designation of limits set on the use of the concept of progress in history. To my surprise I found trains of thought in Lotze that offer some support to my considerations.7
I will begin the report I mentioned earlier with Nizan’s The Conspiracy. That Nizan, who writes for L’Humanité, has, for now at least, abandoned his attempts to portray proletarian milieus in order to try out a bourgeois one, has been greeted with a sigh of relief. 8 The hapless figure that the workers presented in Nizan’s earlier novels is not solely responsible for that. – Nizan was named as one of the candidates of the Prix Goncourt; he was actually awarded the Prix Interallié.9 Should one wonder what might procure a communist journalist such multilateral sympathies, one would need to look beyond the formal merits of the book. Its composition is skilful, artistic even, and the formulations are often felicitous. But something else was crucial for its success: the book takes the political novel back to the Bildungsroman as executed in the French mode. It is an éducation sentimentale of the vintage of 1909. This disenchanting book reveals that, in the opinion of the author (which can be seen as typical of the party hack), the circumstances that inspired the founding of the Popular Front and, above all, the factory occupations, belong in the past.
If things were different, the web that gets torn in the course of the story need not have presented itself as quite so threadbare from the very start. The story tells of a conspiracy between a handful of intellectuals, of whom none is older than twenty-five. The spying activities, which the group undertake in military and industrial organizations, remain chimerical, indeed they are of hardly any interest. The political level of the country prevents the problem of specialists, such as emerged in the Russian Revolution, from developing in any sort of adequate way.
The psychological subject of Nizan’s book is the state of the left intelligentsia as represented mainly by their petty-bourgeois offspring. The main character in the story is less the leader of the conspiracy, Bernard Rosenthal, descendant of a Grand Bourgeois, but rather Pluvinage, whose family was hard up. While the former puts an end to his existence, the latter finds his route into life as an informer. The conspiratorial activity is just an interlude for him. If the best part of the book is the part devoted to him, then the reason for this may be sought in the fact that it is only from the perspective of this profligate that we get a good view of the proletarian movement. (Just as one can get a glimpse of the outside world through a broken window, when all the panes are covered with a thick layer of ice.) The book’s high point comes in Chapter 21: the informer, who sorrowfully parts from his former comrades, reveals something of their ties. As for him, he returns to the realm that Nizan characterizes as ‘a life that unfolds behind the scenes of life’.10 From now on, he belongs to the family of those whose secret paths, along which they circumnavigate a world built by others, are preordained. ‘ “The police’s secret,” Massart resumed, “is that there is no history . . . Little accidents and little men manufacture great events . . . Everybody’s unaware of chance working away behind the scenes, and of the secret of little men.” ’ Everybody, that is, except for the police and some professions connected to it. On one remarkable page the author describes the complicities that exist between these ostracized professional groupings – informers, prison officials, funeral-bidders – and certain parts of Paris, which are chiefly inhabited by poor people.11
Pluvinage’s decision to place himself at the disposal of the police is made in the winter of 1931, just as the government began a campaign of intimidation against the Communist Party. Justifying his change of allegiance, Pluvinage observes: ‘I had joined an organization destined for victory; it seemed impossible to me to associate myself with a defeat.’ Placed at the start of the book, these words are telling. There Nizan characterizes the constitution of the young people he is following. He says of them: ‘They liked only victors and reconstructors; they despised the sick, the dying, lost causes. No force could more powerfully seduce young men . . . 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.’ The tendency expressed in this trait is that same one that asserts itself in Pluvinage.
Over ten years ago, when young people still surfed a revolutionary wave, Aragon, incidentally, vindicated the label of traitor as an honourable one for comrades stemming from the bourgeoisie.12 Nizan interweaves a short history of Surrealism into his text. There are passages that could take their place effortlessly in an intellectual biography of Aragon. ‘It will be seen later that a historic change occurred, once Hegel and Marx superseded the Schools of Rimb
aud and Lautréamont as objects of the younger generation’s admiration.’ This is how Bernard Rosenthal presents the situation; Aragon had once thought the same way. If it was Nizan’s intention to insinuate correspondences between this highly problematic origin of the Surrealists’ theoretical position and the far more legitimate origin of their moral position, then he went for an all-too-convenient thesis. Certainly, communis opinio from right to left finds it an easy one to adopt.
A well-meaning reviewer wrote recently: ‘There is a breakdown of youth for Nizan as there is a breakdown of childhood for Freud.’ 13 It would not be possible to be more wrong. If the elite of bourgeois youth seeks its way to the proletariat in vain, it is not the ‘constitution’ of youth that is to blame. (That would suit the bourgeoisie – and in the end the proletarian leadership too.) The crucial thing is that the campaigns of the working class have forfeited their powers of attraction for the best elements of the bourgeoisie. The isolation of the proletariat is one of the facts that allowed defeat to be predicted and reinforced that defeat. To have taken account of this isolation is the book’s achievement, to falsify its analysis is its function. It should be appraised with as much reservation as corresponds to its championing in the bourgeois press.
The current process of decomposition of French literature is even stifling those embryos that appeared designed for a long-lasting development. I am thinking of Apollinaire’s aims, which, arguably, could have had an effect beyond Surrealism. Apollinaire found a gripping way to connect the chercheur et curieux type with an intelligentsia that was innately immune to indoctrination by cultural inheritance. Queneau evokes this dimly. The brashness that combines in him with broad erudition, presented through the medium of fantasy, would not mar the line of succession emanating from Apollinaire, but Queneau is unable to advance beyond the mere rudiments. His Gueule de pierre, the first work of his I came across, intimidated me with its incomprehensibility. Children of Clay, which I am sending you, afforded me a rather more comfortable entry point. Of course, I doubt that it will win readers for whom it does not open up so readily. I can certainly imagine that it would prompt you into a digressive reading, provided, that is, that you too share some interest in the subject matter. If you check out the seventh book (p. 223), you will find the material that is of the most informational interest. If, following that, you take a look at the first book up to Chapter 10, you will get a good idea of the most diverting part of the volume.14
The genre that is being founded here is a most outlandish one. One might label it romantic bibliography. I am impressed by the author’s documentation, some of which I can verify. His hero draws up an inventory of books by the mentally ill. He calls it: Encyclopaedia of the Inexact Sciences. – If I was left perplexed by the book I mentioned earlier, I am now able to see why the author had good reason not to show all his cards. He learnt bluffing from Apollinaire, but his trumps are not all out yet. As before, the book fits in with just that sort of material that Paulhan, editor of the N.R.F., whom you know from Mesures, is keen on.
You will not be surprised to hear that the N.R.F., which has proven itself to be impermeable to our cause,15 is putting out a special issue on the College of Sociology16 with Bataille, Leiris and Caillois.17 We met Michel Leiris a few years ago socially at Landsberg’s. Under the title ‘The Sacred in Everyday Life’, Leiris clumps together some of his childhood memories. Caillois continues to romp about in ambiguities. His contribution ‘Winter Wind’ celebrates the ‘cold wind’ under whose frosty breath all that is weak must perish and in which the fit link together to form a master caste, recognizing each other by their pink cheeks, a shade not induced by shame.18 Not a single word situates these declarations in any reality. Clearly this silence informs much better than any confession. – With this special issue the N.R.F. is declaring what political orientation is the cost of the peremptoriness of its stance against French pacifism in the European crisis in September. At the same time, it legitimates any doubts one might have about the soundness of this decision.
You will have received the latest issue of the Gazette des Amis des Livres, in which Adrienne Monnier takes on anti-Semitism.19 Clearly, while reading it what springs to mind, first and foremost, is the well-established bourgeoisie of the quartiers and a section of Faubourg St-Germain who make up her clientele. These are people who do not want to know and who would have felt indisposed by any passion in the language or vividness in the reports. After reading it, however, I was left with a peculiar uneasiness. More than anything the weakened moral consciousness of humanity needs nourishment – not medication. Here the words are so precisely measured, the arguments just the right dosage. But the writing lacks any stuff that could be assimilated by a larger circle of readers. It might be the case that the holy writings of the Indo-Germans20 highly revere earthly goods – with such an allusion, though, one won’t eradicate from people’s minds the image of the eternal Jew of the stock exchange, roaming the earth with a sack of gold.
Nevertheless one should not lose sight of the fact that Monnier’s text serves as a holding place in the fight against anti-Semitism. Its chief service is the attempt to make Jules Romains’ position on the matter useable, for it is currently of considerable importance. It is written in close liaison with him. And Romains is Daladier’s directeur de conscience. For this reason, the series of lectures, which Romains published at the same time as the journal I mentioned, is valuable as a source of information.21 The first thing that strikes one about the four speeches, which stem from the period 30 October to 10 December, is the shift in the author’s own position. What appears in the first address, to war veterans, to be a bearable arrangement becomes, by the last one, in front of a sophisticated audience, a vast anticlimax (p. 120). This reflects a corresponding change in public opinion. The focus on empire, which is the chief object of the last lecture, signals, in a passage on French immigration policy (p. 128), the dovetailing of Romains’ position and Monnier’s text. All the same, when it comes to the excesses of the National Socialists against the Jews, the wilful and audible silence of the latter demonstrates a different attitude to that expressed in the grisly euphemisms with which Romains (p. 70) thinks he can dodge these matters.22 Romains’ wife is a Jewess.23 His presence at the reception held here by the German foreign minister was noted.24 (The invitations to this reception were composed in German, which was grounds enough for Valéry not to appear.)
Nothing throws a gloomier light on this field than the fact that it is Duhamel who emerges as Romains’ antagonist.25 No genuine political contradiction exists between the two of them. (The narrowness of Duhamel’s cultural political horizon, in particular, was something I mentioned in passing in my essay on the artwork in the age of its technical reproducibility.) But at least Duhamel does confront the acute danger for France that goes along with keeping silent about National Socialist misdeeds. Up till now, the accord de presse, planned by the two governments, has found an irreconcilable adversary in Duhamel. Romains does not even mention this issue. The passage in which he alludes to the German wish to see a ‘strong government’ at the helm in France (p. 78) can scarcely be read as a spirited rejection of the invitation that fascism is issuing to the country.
As a writer, Romains has shifted in the same one-way direction as was pioneered by the likes of Clemenceau. That he has moved from the left, and how far he has moved, is best understood by rereading his Vin blanc de La Villette.26 This story arose in connection with a crisis in the pre-war years, when, in response to a threatened general strike, troops were amassed in the capital city. It portrays what happens as a result in the head of a common soldier, who belongs to one of the relevant detachments. What the Popular Front might have been can be better gleaned from this book than from any one of those that appeared three years ago as the vanguard for this political formation.
Considering how hopeless the situation of France in Europe is, maybe Romains’ foreign political programme – outbuilding w
ithin the empire – cannot be opposed. I do not know if it is irreconcilable with the interests of the working class. Given that these interests never get voiced anywhere, not to mention the significance that they have for the salvation of European civilization, the text stays within the orbit of the cabinet from which it emerged. It is an airless atmosphere, not that of the galleries of the Quai d’Orsay,27 but rather the offices in the prefecture.28 Thérive noted of the philosophy of the police secretary in Nizan’s novel that it is not that far removed from that of the author of Men of Good Will.29 This claim is certainly not repudiated in this little volume. It is no coincidence that it is this mode of thinking that found the most universal expression in France, in the fourteen volumes of that novelistic work. For all its skill, it is highly parochial and, for all its logic, thoroughly deceptive.
A purer wine can be poured from Jacques Madaule, who has published an essay titled ‘French Prefascism’ in the December edition of Esprit.30 I will convey some of its most trenchant formulations. On Daladier: ‘His intentions are perhaps exemplary; Brüning too possessed great qualities. But that cannot distract from the fact that Daladier is the opposite of a leader; his lack of resolution compares only with the energy of his formulations.’ 31 On the CGT congress in December, just before it took place: ‘Jouhaux will perform the impossible, in order to save the unity of syndicalism. We have to assume that it will be successful. Then we will have one more cracked façade.’ 32 On Flandin: ‘A fascism that has no other programme than to continuously capitulate, in order to continue enjoying certain possessions, would be a fairly original fascism.’ 33 On the domestic political situation: ‘France does not exist alone in the world . . . its borders are not impenetrable. Fascism could very well be imposed on the country from the outside. That need not necessarily happen as a result of war.’ 34 And: ‘The French proletariat is in less of a position than that of other countries to sustain a coalition with the middle classes and the big bourgeoisie in its own right.’35 The closing sentences of the essay: ‘The fatal indecisiveness, which we perceive in France at this moment, shows that the country is still hoping for a solution other than fascism. We, who know what we want, and know even better what we do not want, must summon such energy that the coming spring does not witness the collapse of the last Free State for humans in continental Europe.’
