Pour moi
For Me
Charles Péguy
My friend Pierre Baudouin and my friend Pierre Deloire came to wish me a happy new year. They were anxious. They walked together. They found me in the clutches of the Disgruntled Subscriber.
— My dear Péguy, the Disgruntled Subscriber was saying to me, your cahiers revolt me. I received the third one. They are put together without any care whatsoever. They are riddled with misprints. On page 67, in the running head, you put théatre without an acute accent. On page 43, in the middle of the second line, you put a c in camarades instead of an e. Obviously you are going senile. I am devastated by this, because I am your best friend. On page 50, in the middle of the page, you wrote socialiste with two s’s. But here I suspect you wanted to play a dirty trick on our friend Lucien Herr. Not to mention the misprints I haven’t seen, because I don’t read them, your cahiers. I am cancelling my subscription.
This violence appalled me and I resorted to grovelling.
— My dear Mécontent, I know all too well, unfortunately, that there are misprints in the cahiers. My friend René Lardenois has already pointed this out to me, and his letter was published in the tenth cahier of the first series. As soon as I am able, I shall give him a printed response. In the meantime, I shall give you an oral response to the thirty-five reproaches you have addressed to me — —
— No, my dear Péguy, I have already spent eight quarter-hours of my time making these reproaches to you, among the many reproaches one is obliged to make. I would not have spent eight quarter-hours of my time, were it not for the deep friendship I have always had for you. I do not have the time to listen to your defence. My time is valuable. Certain secular duties call me elsewhere — Farewell.
He left without shaking my hand.
My friend Pierre Baudouin the philosopher and my friend the historian Pierre Deloire had grown more anxious.
— We have come, they said, to wish you a happy new year.
— We have come to wish you a happy new year, Pierre Deloire repeated earnestly. In the days when I still had my grandmother, who could not read, and who was the kindest woman I have ever known, I used to wish her a happy new year by saying to her: Grandmother, I wish you a good year and good health, and paradise at the end of your days. Such was the customary formula among the people of my province. My grandmother is dead, and I do not know whether she is in paradise, because I am a historian and we have no records that inform us about the history of paradise.
— We have come to wish you a happy new year, Pierre Baudouin repeated gravely. In these times in which we live, that means we wish you to be and to remain just and true. We also wish you that many honest people bring you much good copy, that the typesetters make you no misprints and that the printers print you no blunders; and finally I wish you that your subscribers increase and multiply.
— But, said Pierre Deloire, since the history of events shows us that wishes are not enough, I bring you for the month of January the ten francs of monthly subscription that I take from the proceeds of the lessons I sell.
— For the same reason, said Pierre Baudouin, I bring you these fifty francs of extraordinary subscription. My lands in Burgundy have finally been sold. They sold for a fairly good price, because the Burgundians, having produced a great deal of wine, were able to spend some money. They brought me fifteen hundred and some francs, which I need for the sustenance of my family; but I was determined to set aside the fifty francs I wanted to give you.
— Your subscriptions were indispensable to me and your good wishes are welcome. For I am beset by the ill wishes of several.
— We know this, and that is why we have come to wish you a happy new year.
— I am beset by the ill wishes of several. It is a great suffering to know that there are several who wish that my copy be bad and my print run ruined, that subscriptions decline and that the cahiers die.
— And since the history of events shows us that wishes are not enough, they work conscientiously at the demolition of the cahiers. They begin by cancelling their subscriptions. They cancel.
— While I was preparing the third cahier, I received the first cancellation.
— We require you to read us this letter.
Paris, Wednesday morning, 12 December 1900
My dear Péguy
Reading your latest cahier has revolted me.
1° What! You amuse yourself collecting the gossip from the Cri de Paris, discussing it in a manner that is hurtful and disloyal to the comrades you put in question! Herr may have his faults, but one cannot fail to recognise his rare qualities of devotion to the cause! The enterprise he — if not founded, at least kept alive —, the bookshop, is now the meeting-place of all thinking socialists. By failing to recall its qualities and retaining only the man’s faults, I say your criticism is disloyal. I regret finding in it insinuations unworthy of you; for example, when you say: Mutual admiration had no currency among us, you imply that Herr’s friends practise this mutual admiration, etc.
Is it really for you to set yourself up as censor of comrades whom you can reproach only for differences of opinion! Do you not fear that your censure may be suspect and that people will say it is rancour rather than truth that inspires you? And what purpose do these polemics serve — which are fortunately a dead letter for your provincial readers? Is the clerical and capitalist and militarist peril no longer present, that you amuse yourself this way striking at our friends? Or do you wish to spread scepticism and discouragement in our party? If that is the case, it is impossible for me to follow you.
2° What need have you to gratuitously inform the bourgeois newspapers and the university bigwigs about the identity of whichever of our comrades signs as a university man in the Petite République? By writing that this contributor belongs to a class two years senior to yours, by adding that he is on leave in Paris, you identify him very clearly. And what are these pieces of advice — worse than criticisms — that you take pleasure in giving him? Do you wish to undermine in advance the authority of his articles among the readers of the Petite République? I note once again that this mania for indiscretion and censorship can only serve the interests of our adversaries.
3° Most of the letters you include are of interest only to you, since they contain nothing but reservations addressed to you or advice.
4° What is the point of returning at length to the Journal d’une femme de chambre and giving this filth the proportions of an event? Everything you publish today has already been said last time. It is merely reheated.
5° The announcements from the École des Hautes Études Sociales occupy 16 pages of your cahier! This publication is of no use, neither to provincial readers who will never attend this school, nor to Parisian readers who could have read these notices on every wall. Could you not have filled these 16 pages with something more useful, with a critique of some abuse from which we suffer, for example?
6° Boutroux’s expansion is perfectly insignificant, when it is not infected with metaphysical and bourgeois spirit.
In sum, I find in this cahier nothing that could in any way aid socialist propaganda, nothing that could further the socialist education of your readers. I find in it, on the other hand, attacks that are always misplaced, often unjust, against comrades whose good faith, devotion, and steadfastness in the effort toward the emancipation of humanity I have come to appreciate. I find the expression of secret grudges, which one must know how to sacrifice for the common good. I find again this tone of mockery, this dilettantism that I have already reproached you for, on other occasions. I do not find that vigorous critique of capitalist society that I was expecting. I do not find that summons addressed to the bourgeois to become human beings again. I do not find above all those warm words of encouragement bestowed upon the good people of the provinces who struggle, alone, against the oppression that grips them.
And finally, when we cannot afford to spare any of our efforts, or our meagre resources, to combat the forces of the past, more threatening than ever, you announce that you are going to publish novels! Novels, as if reality were not tragic enough and we had the leisure to interest ourselves in flourishes of prose and in the amusements of aesthetes!
I do not flatter myself that I will convince you. I fear your mind is already made up. But I warn you that if your next cahier is to resemble the last, there is no point in sending it to me.
I am writing this letter for you and not for your readers. I do not wish you to publish it.
Your friend, who regrets that you make such poor use of your natural gifts.
Paris, Friday, 14 December 1900
My dear Péguy
I no longer wish to receive the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, for the following reasons:
1° I do not believe that the announced novels constitute effective propaganda.
2° The general tone of the cahiers is, increasingly, a tone of dilettantism. Little space is given to the questions that matter; too much space is given to incidents, to private impressions; and it is more a species of literature than a species of propaganda.
3° It is good not to be blinded to the faults and weaknesses of those who claim to belong to the same party; but it is not good to recall with implacable persistence minimal errors, and to remain silent about incontestable services rendered.
4° In the early issues, the disagreements that arose at the Bookshop were recalled through allusions that were not too disproportionate to the facts as you conceived them; even so, they were of mediocre interest to rural readers, to schoolteachers, to provincial professors. Today you appear to be beginning, or rather continuing, a polemic of pure personalities; your attacks against Herr exceed anything that, even in your imagination, you could reproach him with. I wish to associate myself, neither closely nor from afar, with this work of disorganisation, for which the dues you receive are being spent, dues offered to you for entirely different battles. Even at the time when I did not assign you all the blame, I stood with those who organise the work against those who disorganise it; today you diminish even the sympathy that attached to your person. All I hope is that you will not continue down this path, and that we shall find you with us again, against the common enemy, whom you serve today indirectly. On that day I shall be happy to see you again.
P.S. Boutroux, whom the Catholics regard as one of their best allies, must not be, in any degree, the director of people like us.
Toulouse, Monday morning, 26 November 1900
My dear Péguy
To fix ideas, I maintain that if you had been at the general committee to support Jaurès and old Longuet, you would have said aloud what you felt; I maintain that it would have been better to change the historical scene through active and real intervention, than to idealise it and preserve it through a typical and dramatic reproduction. Be that as it may, I have not given up.
My dear Péguy
Allow me to repeat that action seems to me more urgent than criticism, above all than the immediately post-contemporary history you announce, not contemporary enough to direct the movement, not distant enough to be truly history and to become interesting once more.
If you knew how indifferent the enormous mass is to all of this, especially the enormous mass of professors, to whom you address yourself, and who are, in great majority, bourgeois and clerical reactionaries, and of whom 99 out of 100 think only of their profession, their livelihood, their advancement. If here and there one of them shares our ideas — or makes use of them —, he may first of all be more troublesome than useful to us, and in any case cannot accomplish a great deal, seeing that he has enough to do not to be transferred by the enemies or the defenders of the Republic.
As far as I know your readership, there are not many of your readers who do not regret their eight or their twenty francs, which interest them more than the divisions and discussions among socialists.
Besides, you are already forced to make concessions to your readership: you are launching yourself, willingly or not, into competition, into advertising, directly or by preterition, voluntarily or otherwise, but inevitably. By announcing the stenographic record of the International, you depreciate commercially and morally the analytical version from the Bellais firm; by announcing Pressensé and Duclaux, you compete with the Mouvement. In other words, your Cahier de la Quinzaine is becoming at once a semi-movement, semi-historical review, and a semi-socialist, semi-literary Library of editions. You are repeating in miniature the experiment of the bookshop.
You are losing — or devoting, which is the same thing — your time, your strength; you are exhausting the strength of your friends like Bourgeois; you are losing your credit with those of your friends who are less immediate and less faithful.
I wanted, though I know how thankless the role of Cassandra is, to tell you once more what many think in less charitable terms than I. I believe there is always time to stop or change direction. I ask you to believe moreover that I ask only to be a false prophet, and that in any case I shall always be your friend.
My dear Péguy
Yesterday morning I wrote in one sitting the enclosed letter; on reflection it no longer quite renders my thinking on certain points. On the other hand I did not state an opinion that seems to me essential:
It seems to me that you dogmatise too much in the sense that you elevate to types individuals who are often very particular, and above all insignificant. I fear this may stem from the fact that, knowing well a limited number of individuals — and living little, moreover, on varied ground whether in books or in society — you have a tendency to deepen and to generalise at the same time. For example, you simplify and you aggravate at once. This works very well for Pascal, but for others…
For example, I know in the provinces numerous varieties of Guesdists among whom some very good ones — this or that Allemanist who is a pure scoundrel — etc., university men of very unequal worth and very different from what is attributed to them in Paris. I believe the best course is to enter resolutely into action, which alone dispels misunderstandings.
Now it is understood that all of this is merely precaution, reservation, correction, and that in arguing with this or that adversary of yours, I would say to him many of the things that you will no doubt reply to me.
Believe me your friend.
— This letter, said Pierre Deloire, seems to me from a true friend.
— Is that all? asked Pierre Baudouin.
— That is all. I have one cancellation without explanation. I expect several more, but from people I do not know.
— Well then, I now give you our word that the pedants who read what I intend to say today will not write to tell you that we are a dilettante.
I perceived that a slow and deep anger had risen in him. But Pierre Deloire intervened coldly:
— The ten francs, he said to me, that I give you each month are not levied from my surplus, but taken from my necessities. You are accountable to me. I am conversely responsible for you. I formally require you to give us, fully and with documentary evidence, the narration of the relations you have had, as manager of the cahiers, with the Société Nouvelle de Librairie et d’Édition. Let us begin with the facts.
— Begin with the facts, said Pierre Baudouin. You shall not prevent me from saying today what I intend to say today.
— When in December 1899 I emerged, sickened, from the Paris congress, from the first national congress, sickened by the lies and the new injustice that would be imposed in the name of a new party, the resolution came to me, in a flash of spontaneous revolt, to publish what my friends felt, said, thought, wanted, believed, knew. It was a singularly audacious resolution, since the full power of old and new authority alike was about to fall upon my back, since I had not a sou to my name, since I was exhausted, since I did not know if I would write or what I would write. My finances were exhausted since the three-fifths that remained to me were immobilised for at least two years in the founding of that very same Société Nouvelle. My strength was exhausted by the work I had done in the ranks since I had become a socialist and a Dreyfusard. I did not know how I would write, because for twenty months, wholly occupied with publishing my comrades and my friends, I had neglected to write, and because I had never written anything that resembled what I wanted to write. But I believed that my friends would not abandon me, since I would be, so to speak, nothing more than their manifestation.
I presented myself without delay before the board of directors of the Société Nouvelle. I requested, a simple formality, that the firm publish the periodical I was preparing. I expected this to be granted without debate. The purpose of this publication was in keeping with the conscience of my five friends and comrades. I was asking of the Société only the administrative work, which I proposed to pay for. Any eventual deficit from the edition would revert to me. I was still speaking, rapidly outlining the plan of the operation, when the board members interrupted me. And from the tone of their interruption I had the sudden and indelible impression that these five administrators were no longer my comrades and were not my friends. And not only that, but they were no longer the same men, the men I had known, whom I thought I knew, whom I had loved, whom I had defended, whom I had installed, whom I had elected by acclamation — for indeed I had been present at that admirable general assembly where twenty-some members had elected with enthusiasm five of their number to become the administrators of the common Société. But the mere fact that these men exercised an authority, an anonymous authority, one fifth of the total authority in a closed world, the mere fact that they were a council, a committee, that they deliberated and voted, that they sat in session, had made them unrecognisable.
The execution was swift. They belied their language of the day before and their innermost thought; they belied their entire prior action; they belied their lives. I became stupid instantaneously and defended myself badly. They asked me what would be in it, what I would put in the first issue. I stammered. You know, my friends, how painful and awkward it is to explain in advance, to construct for a violent and mocking judge the scaffolding of forms yet to come. Léon Blum, very courteously, said to me: Péguy, I do not wish to address the question on its merits with you. What you are preparing seems to me inopportune. You come either too late or too early. — This was a respectable opinion, well-founded or not, that called for a friendly discussion. Simiand intervened, and confusing his functions as administrator of the Société Nouvelle with his position as a sociological critic, he said to me: I see what it is: you want to make a review for imbeciles. — Said with that thin, cold smile that makes its author so formidable to the imbeciles that we are, this remark cut my breath short. I have told myself since, by way of consolation, that no doubt he called imbeciles all citizens who had not studied sociology, just as I have been told that the ancients called stulti those citizens who were not philosophers. But at first this word, thus pronounced, cut off my breathing. Herr finished me off: Up to now, he told me forcefully with the assent of the board, we have too often followed you out of friendship into ventures that displeased us. Now it is over. You are going against what we have been preparing for several years. You are an anarchist. — I replied that this word did not frighten me. — That is precisely it, you are an anarchist: we shall march against you with all our forces. Mario Roques was good enough to assure me afterwards that Herr was too good-natured to have kept his word, and that his declaration of war had cost him a great deal to pronounce. But it cost me far more to receive it. I withdrew, dazed.
I composed the first cahier in that anguish and in that bitterness. Resolved all the same to work for the firm I had founded, I gave it the best place in that first cahier of the first series. I carefully recalled therein the Prince de Bismarck, by Charles Andler. I recalled the Histoire des Variations de l’État-Major. I announced the edition of the “Official Stenographic Record of the General Congress of French Socialist Organisations held in Paris in December 1899.” You are my former subscribers. You have at home this first cahier of 5 January 1900. You have read these studious references and these announcements. And finally, and above all, wishing to give to the firm I had founded, to a book I had made, the fourth page of my cover, I arranged it as follows. Permit me to place it exactly before your eyes once more.