The Conspiracy
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Page 117 André Marty (1886–1956), a prominent Communist leader – who in 1919 had led a mutiny in the French Black Sea fleet; of whom Hemingway was to give an unflattering portrait as a vain and bloodthirsty commissar in For Whom the Bell Tolls; but who would be expelled from the Party in his old age for expressing doubts about the role of the Soviet security police – was convicted in 1929 for articles urging soldiers to resist the imperialist warmongers.
Page 121 Bois-Belleau in the département of the Aisne was the site of fierce battles in October 1914 and again in July 1918.
Urania was the Muse of Astronomy and Geometry.
The church of Sainte-Clotilde is in the 7th arrondissement in Paris.
Page 122 Grande Mademoiselle: Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier (1627–93), niece of Louis XIII, took an active part on the side of Condé in the second Fronde, fell in love at the age of forty-two with a Gascon adventurer named Lauzun. The king initially consented to their marriage, but changed his mind and imprisoned Lauzun for ten years. They may then have been secretly married, but Lauzun, whom she had greatly enriched, abandoned her. She wrote lively memoirs, and a number of less interesting novels.
Pedro I was emperor of Brazil from 1821 to 1831.
Page 124 The Compagnie Général Transatlantique was controlled by the Péreire family and their Crédit Mobilier.
The Crédit du Nord challenged the six national banks from its base in the northern départements.
Eugène Mathon (1860–1935) was a self-made textile manufacturer and proponent of corporatism.
Page 125 Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82), in his novel Les Pléiades (1874), presented his three heroes as ‘kings’ sons’, or alternatively calenders (mendicant dervishes), adrift in a world populated by fools, brutes and rogues.
Auguste Scheurer-Kestner (1833–99) was a notable of the Third Republic, Vice-President of the Senate, uncle to Jules Ferry’s wife, the most eminent of exiled Alsatian politicians after 1870, and one of the foremost defenders of Dreyfus.
Page 126 Pera is a district of Istanbul.
Diana of the Crossways: eponymous heroine of the novel by George Meredith.
Page 131 The Hague Conference on the Young Plan was held from 6 to 31 August 1929. It was designed to provide a final solution to the German post-war reparations problem, and German acceptance was rewarded by the evacuation of the Rhineland by June 1930.
In August 1929 there were major clashes in British-administered Palestine, following a dispute over Jewish use of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
Page 132 Chéron, the French Finance Minister, and Snowden, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, clashed openly over German reparations at the Hague Conference. Henderson was then the British Foreign Secretary, Jaspar the Belgian Premier.
Page 134 Concert Mayol: nightclub similar to the Folies Bergères.
Page 144 Charles Fréminville (1856–1936), engineer, played a large part in introducing Taylorism into France and was President of the first Comité National de l’Organisation Française (1926–32).
Henry le Châtelier (1850–1936) was a chemist and metallurgist, an early French advocate of Taylorism.
The neo-Saint-Simonian movement in France in the twenties was led by such men as Henri Fayol, Ernest Mercier and Eugène Mathon; many of them were graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique, and many of them too had fascist leanings.
Page 155 Perthes-lès-Hurlus: village near Rheims taken by the German army in October 1914, retaken by the French in 1915.
Page 156 Emile Combes (1835–1921), Prime Minister 1902–5, is mainly remembered for his fiercely anti-clerical policies.
At the Tours Congress in December 1920, a majority of the Socialist Party voted to join the Third International, thereafter changing its name to Communist Party.
Page 159 Alfred Jarry monkey: in Jarry’s Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (1911), there is a monkey named Bosse-de-Nage.
Page 162 Stuart Mill: the reference is perhaps to the well-known passage in the second section of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, where the author stresses the need to judge the goodness or evil of actions rather than of their perpetrators.
Page 166 Eteocles and Polynices: sons of Oedipus and Jocasta, joint heirs to the kingdom of Thebes, they agreed to serve alternate years, but at the end of the first year Eteocles refused to surrender the throne. Polynices turned for help to Argos, and returned with an army led by seven generals. Eventually the brothers slew each other in individual combat.
Page 178 Mur des Fédérés: site of the mass shooting of 147 survivors of the last resistance put up by the Paris Commune in May 1871.
Page 188 Place du Combat: now renamed Place du Colonel Fabien. Bellevilloise: the Association Bellevilloise, a large cooperative enterprise.
Page 192 Joseph Fouché (1759–1820): politician, member of the Mountain in the Convention, responsible for the Lyon massacres in 1793; he became Minister for Police and Duke of Otranto under the Empire, but betrayed Napoleon after the Hundred Days and kept his post under the Restoration; later ambassador to Dresden and, after his removal from this post, naturalized an Austrian, dying in Trieste.
Raoul Rigault (1846–1871), son of a sub-prefect of the Second Empire, after the latter fell on 4 September 1870 took over the Prefecture of Police and devoted his energies to uncovering the police intelligence techniques of the Empire, making long lists of its police spies. Under the Commune he continued to occupy what was now known as the Ex-Prefecture and became Procureur de la Commune, playing an important role in the final resistance, in which he was killed (in Rue Gay-Lussac).
Police powers in Paris are roughly divided between the police administrative or générale, and the police judiciaire – a plain-clothes criminal investigation force. The Prefect of Police in Paris has an exceptional position, with full police powers, autonomous police forces under his control and a large measure of responsibility in the Département de la Seine, in which Paris is situated.
Page 194 Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle Adam (1838–1889), novelist and playwright, symbolist, extravagantly romantic – at times almost Gothic.
Page 195 Duke of Otranto – title awarded to Fouché under the Empire.
Page 196 Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles (1759–1794), President of the Convention, died on the guillotine with the Dantonists. Perhaps a reference to Une visite à Montbard, in which Hérault quotes Buffon as saying: ‘Genius is merely a greater capacity for patience.’
Page 198 Seine Prefecture: adjoining the Hôtel de Ville, it had authority over the Département de la Seine in which Paris was located – smallest but most populous of the French départements until it was split up in 1964.
Page 200 Noyau de Poissy is a drink flavoured with cherry kernels. Centre Psychiatrique Sainte-Anne: large mental hospital in Rue Alésia.
Page 210 There was a bloody battle between Berlin workers and the police on 1 May 1929, after a ban on all open-air demonstrations by the Social-Democrat police chief Zörgiebel. Police fire killed 25 and severely wounded 36 workers.
Page 212 The Parc de Bagatelle forms a westward extension of the Bois de Boulogne.
Page 213 Secours Rouge: French section of the Comintern’s International Red Aid organization.
Page 218 Georges Dumas (1866–1946), experimental psychologist. Nizan himself was sympathetic to psychoanalysis, and was one of the first to express an interest in the work of the young Jacques Lacan.
Page 219 The Faubourg Montmartre district stretches along the Rue Montmartre, between Les Halles and the grands boulevards.
The Croix-Rousse district of Lyon lies on a hill just to the north of the city centre.
Page 220 The Prefecture de Police is situated on Place du Parvis Notre-Dame.
Page 221 Anatole Deibler (1863–1939) was public
executioner, like his father and grandfather before him, from 1899 until his death, during which time he supervised over 350 guillotinings.
Page 223 Fauxpasbidet, Peudepièce: derisive names indicating that the foundling in question was the result of an ineffective contraceptive douche, or had been discarded because of overcrowded family accommodation.
Page 225 Cartesian diver: scientific toy consisting of a hollow figure filled partly with water and partly with air, floating in a flexible airtight vessel nearly filled with water. Pressure on the vessel compresses the air within and forces more water through an aperture into the figure, which sinks, to rise again when the pressure is removed.
Page 246 Max Horkheimer Archive at the City and University Library, Frankfurt am Main.
1 See International Institute of Social Research. A Report of Its History, Aims and Activities, 1933–1938. This report contained a short selected bibliography of works by Benjamin. Horkheimer wrote in his letter: ‘In view of the fact that the Institute’s funds are partly eroded and partly fixed, we are now reliant on gaining, in whatever ways we can, new endowments for individual members and, where possible, for the Institute as a whole. You can well imagine how hard this activity is for me, in the light of the peculiar nature of our work, which here, even more strongly than elsewhere, at any rate, is considered to be a luxury, plus through the medium of this language. As a part of this undertaking, a new brochure has recently appeared, which I enclose. May I request you do not make any use of what I have revealed above.’
2 The Declaration of Lima initiated by Roosevelt at the Pan-American Conference at the end of December 1938 announced the inviolability of the American states and their solidarity in the face of any external aggression.
3 The publication of Otto Kirchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure, by Columbia University Press, was announced for January 1939. The jurist Otto Kirchheimer (1905–1965), who was a member of the SPD and an intellectual adversary of Carl Schmitt, belonged to the Institute of Social Research from 1934 to 1942.
4 It was listed under the title A Text and Source Book for the History of Philosophy, on p. 19f of the brochure.
5 Benjamin incorporated his excerpts from Turgot into File N of the Arcades Project.
6 See his essay on ‘Eduard Fuchs, The Collector and Storyteller’.
7 See Arcades Project, File N.
8 The novel appeared in Paris in 1938. Paul Nizan (1905–1940), a boyhood friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and member of the PCF until September 1939, had previously written the novels Antoine Bloyé (1933) and Le Cheval de Troie (1935).
9 The critics’ prize (30 jurors) was founded in 1930 and was awarded every year in November.
10 See The Conspiracy, Chapter 23.
11 The Conspiracy, pp. 200–201.
12 Benjamin is thinking no doubt of Aragon’s article ‘Surrealism and Revolutionary Becoming’, which appeared in Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution in December 1931. In this article Aragon, along with Georges Sadoul, attempted to reconcile his Surrealist past with the attitude that he adopted at the Second International Congress of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkov in 1930: ‘Not because we are denying our bourgeois origin, but because the dialectical movement of our development has already placed us in opposition to this origin itself. It is this that, strictly speaking, constitutes the position of revolutionary writers, who, if they are of bourgeois origin, present themselves essentially as traitors to their original class.’ (Louis Aragon, Chroniques 1, 1918–1932, edited by Bernard Leuillot, Paris, 1998, p. 441.)
13 Jean-Paul Sartre’s review appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française on 1 November 1938.
14 At that time, the writer Raymond Queneau (1903–1976) was an employee at Gallimard, where he was responsible for English literature; up until 1929 he was close to the Surrealists. The novel Gueule de pierre appeared in 1934. Les Enfants du limon (Children of Clay) appeared in 1938; Book 7 comprises a presentation of what is supposed to make up the fourth part of the Encyclopaedia of the Inexact Sciences: ‘History from the coronation of Napoleon I to the abdication of Napoleon III’.
15 The plan to get a collection of Horkheimer’s essays published in France.
16 The July 1938 issue of the N.R.F. published the texts by Leiris and Caillois mentioned in the letter, plus an Introduction by Caillois and Bataille’s ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, with the title ‘For a College of Sociology’. A few copies appeared – with their own cover – in a special printing.
17 Purely as a matter of curiosity, I’ll add: the same goes for Johannes Schmidt’s undertaking. Groethuysen also insisted on making this affair his own, that is to say he defanged it [author’s note].
18 Benjamin is describing the concluding sentence of ‘Winter Wind’: ‘Those whose circulation is good will be recognized in the exceeding cold by their pink cheeks, their clear skin, their ease, their exhilaration at finally enjoying what they require of life and the great quantity of oxygen their lungs demand. Returned then to their weakness and driven from the scene, the others shrink back, shrivel, and curl up in their holes. The bustlers are paralyzed, the fancy talkers silenced, the comics made invisible. The coast is clear for those who are most able: no obstructions on the roads to impede their progress, none of the countless, melodious warbling to cover up their voices. Let them number and acknowledge each other in this rarefied air, and may winter leave them closely united, shoulder to shoulder, conscious of their strength; then the new spring will be the consecration of their destiny.’ In Dennis Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology, 1937–39, trans. Betsy Wing, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988, p. 32.
19 See Adrienne Monnier, ‘À propos de l’antisémitisme’, in Gazette des Amis des Livres, year 1, no. 5, December 1938, pp. 75–88.
20 Adrienne Monnier quotes the Hindu Vedas, particularly the Rig Veda and the ancient Persian Zend-Avesta (the commentary on the Avesta, or ‘Holy Text’).
21 Edouard Daladier (1874–1970), a member of the Radical Socialist Party, formed a government on 10 April 1938 without the Socialists. His appeasement policies vis-à-vis Hitler, which were reflected in the Munich Accord, were intended to avoid war. Romains’ lectures appeared in 1939 in a book titled Cela dépend de vous. The first lecture, ‘Discourse on Toulouse’, states the following: ‘For the first time perhaps in history, with such a degree of urgency and with so tragic a shortcut, men existed who struggled until the last possible minute to avoid that which their conscience refused to believe was inevitable. These men are called Chamberlain, Daladier, Georges Bonnet.’ (Paris: Flammarion, 1939, p. 7).
22 The passage in Romains’ ‘How to view the Franco-German Pact’– published in Paris-Soir on 6 December 1938, the date of the signing of the non-aggression pact between France and Germany – states: ‘Without me having to underline it – you sense that, though having hoped for this friendship and having worked for it, it was with no great enthusiasm that I welcomed the pact that we signed today with a steely Germany that is puffed up with power, bristling with military excitement, aggravated and perhaps intoxicated by fresh annexations; with a Germany that displays its scorn for idealistic values, such as those we hold, a bit too much, and that, in its conduct in respect of the Germans whose forefathers do not correspond to the official doctrine, abuses a bit too much the law that everyone is master in his own house.’
23 Lise Dreyfus was Romains’ second wife.
24 The reception was held on 8 December.
25 Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) was a friend of Romains until 1921. In 1935 he was elected to the Académie Française. He wrote regularly in Le Figaro. The edition of 9 November 1938 carried his essay opposing the Munich Accord, ‘From a Diplomatic Seda
n to an Intellectual Sedan’. In 1939, Duhamel published his essays from this period under the title The White War of 1938.
26 Appeared in Paris in 1914, originally titled On the Quays of La Villette.
27 Metonym for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs [trans].
28 The body responsible for law enforcement in Paris [trans].
29 A reference to Jules Romains. This discussion by André Thérive (pseudonym of Roger Putheste, 1891–1967), which is meant to have appeared in Temps, could not be located.
30 The teacher Jacques Madaule (1898–1993), who was influenced by Claudel’s work and by Jacques Maritain, was also a member of the Popular Front and a regular political and cultural chronicler for the magazine Esprit; his contribution ‘French Prefascism’ is in the volume mentioned, which was devoted as a whole to this theme – his essay is on pp. 327–42.
31 See ibid., p. 337.
32 See ibid., pp. 341f. Léon Henri Jouhaux (1879–1954) was general secretary of the CGT from 1909 to 1947. In 1951 he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
33 See ibid., p. 330; Madaule does not mention the name Pierre-Étienne Flandin (1889–1958) in this passage. Flandin was a deputy of the national and state parliament and a minister. Pétain made him foreign minister on 13 December 1940; he held the post until 9 February 1941.
34 See ibid., p. 338.
35 See ibid., p. 334.