Les élections

Cahiers de la Quinzaine

APPEARING TWENTY TIMES A YEAR

PARIS

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It goes without saying that the note published in the fourteenth cahier in no way committed Romain Rolland. That note was the expression of my personal feeling. As reader, as spectator, as publisher, as manager, I had to say, at least in brief, what I thought of the suspension. I must declare that a fairly large number of subscribers had come to tell us or had written that they intended to go or return to the theater and had asked us why the performances were suspended. For the rest I remain silent. If I said all I think, I would say of Rolland and his dramas more good, and of certain of his critics more ill, than would be agreeable to him.

And it goes without saying that the fourteenth cahier of the third series should have reached our subscribers by Sunday morning at the latest, for the first round of the legislative elections. For two weeks the authors, the manager, the administrator, the printers had been working diligently for this cahier to fall just right. The binder was punctual. No copy was mailed later than Saturday. Many of our subscribers however did not receive their cahier until late Sunday or Monday morning. We must suppose that the postmen, overloaded with electoral circulars and programs, thought that this cahier was not election mail and put it off until the next day.

THE ELECTIONS

We shall publish in a cahier before the end of the third series or at the very beginning of the fourth the official census of the legislative elections. We shall add to it an unofficial census of electoral qualifications. Our old subscribers know and we ask our new subscribers kindly to note that our cahiers are above all cahiers of record.

Some of our subscribers have been troubled, in a friendly way, by what we published in the fourteenth cahier. If one will kindly reread my text, one will recognize that this concern is not founded. Some elections are cited whose campaign was honorable. And so I wrote: save for rare and honorable exceptions. I know for example that the electoral campaign of Jaures at Carmaux was honorable.

The elections have proved that the nationalist push is much more compact, much more dense, much more tight, much more solid than one expected. The individual quarrels of the principal antisemites and principal nationalists cannot mask from us the antisemite and nationalist danger. On the contrary, if the nationalist parties, as badly led by rival chiefs, obtained nevertheless the results we know, who does not see that these parties must have at their service compact passions in compact masses. One does not fabricate by stratagem such extensive, such profound, such durable movements.

I am told: “The elections are good, because one could have dreaded far worse than what happened.” I reply that nothing proves the gravity of the ill as well as this consolation.

First it is a grave symptom for the health of the Republic and for the health of the country that the decennial repetition of the same crises. Even if the crises were not growing worse, even if they remained equal, their simple repetition would be an evidently grave symptom. For there to be improvement of the general state, of health, it would not suffice that the periodic crises were not increasing; they would have to be diminishing. One who has quartan fever, firstly one does not say he has good health on the pretext that he is well three days out of four, secondly one knows that he is worse once the crises recommence regularly as strong. The forces of a man and of a country are limited forces.

We must ask ourselves, mutations being made, whether the nationalist and reactionary crises will not behave toward the Republic as the Estates-General behaved toward the old regime. Similarly one lectures us well on the crises that periodically assail the Third Republic. But what worries me is precisely that one must lecture us. The Seize-Mai, we are told, Boulangism and nationalism are equally inoffensive because we beat them regularly every ten years. --- No, they are more and more dangerous because we have to beat them periodically every ten years. By dint of having perfectly regular crises, there will end up being a crisis that will not resemble the others, and that would carry the Republic away. Thus do volcanoes and earthquakes proceed.

Which amounts to saying, and we arrive at it thus by a first route, that if we use as badly and as little the coming decade as the decade that has gone, we shall be great fools before the country and great culprits.

THE ELECTIONS

Through the effort of the anti-ministerialists, and above all the nationalists, the battle ended up being waged almost everywhere between the ministerialists and the anti-ministerialists. Thus engaged, it ended with a certain enlargement of the ministerialists and a certain diminishment of the anti-ministerialists. A classification thus obtained has moreover a marked political meaning. But these gross results are not everything.

Let us say it loudly: what is good in the two ballots has only a suspensive power, and what is bad in these same ballots has the power of an indication. What is bad in the ballot, the anti-ministerial, anti-republican votes, truly represent what they indicate: discontents, insanities, angers, interests, ready hopes. On the contrary what is good in the two ballots, the ministerial and republican votes, the votes of the left, has only the power of a suspension. They do not represent people who are content with this ministry, content with this republic. They mean that this country grants us, grants the republic, a credit much greater than that which we have merited. They mean that this country has a fund not yet exhausted of confidence and resignation, of calm and wisdom, of patience, of endurance.

We still benefit today from the immense effort accomplished by our fathers for the invention, for the propaganda and for the establishment of the Republic. This effort is still near enough to us for the people to have kept the deep, but increasingly obscure memory of it. If therefore during the four or six years to come the republican parties recommence the political babblings of these last years, they will have reason to dread the awakening of this people and its turning.

The elections were particularly cowardly with respect to what profoundly commanded them, the Dreyfus affair. The cowardice of 1898 recommenced, aggravated by distance, repetition, habit, gratuitousness. I persist in believing that if the Dreyfusards had pushed to the very end the advantage they had begun to gain for the recovery of justice and for the recognition of the truth; if they had pushed to the very end, without reserve, without fear, and without measure; in a word if they had totally refused any kind of amnesty, that is to say amnesia, to universal laziness; I persist in believing that if four hundred Dreyfusard candidates, honestly, frankly, cleanly, brutally Dreyfusard, had relentlessly continued the campaign of demonstration that we began, but that they abandoned, if not repudiated, there would be four hundred Dreyfusards elected. And the Republic would not be in as bad shape. It is a fact that the pure Dreyfusards, Jaures, Pressense, Paul Guieysse, Vazeille, impenitent and insolent Dreyfusards, passed well or very well. Triumph does not go to the uncertain and the weak.

Jaures, scarcely back in Carmaux, conducted his entire electoral campaign exactly as if there had never been an amnesty in the Dreyfus affair. Scarcely returned to his old constituency, Jaures said: my dear fellow citizens, I was unable four years ago to give you an account of my mandate as I should have, because there were the gendarmes and the reactionary gangs; today that there are no more gendarmes and the reactionary gangs are no longer the strongest, I am going to begin by explaining to you what the Dreyfus affair is. You will see by that whether I was right to act as I did. And he loudly gloried before them in having been one of the Dreyfusard promoters. He literally treated his election, conducted his campaign in the following mode: Glory to me. Glory to me because I was and remain a Dreyfusard. Thus the great orator practiced for his own account and under his own responsibility the method that he had not wished to keep for the whole country.

The third reactionary crisis of the Third Republic is more grave than the two preceding ones. The comparison being thus limited to Boulangism and nationalism, it seems to me that the second crisis is much graver than the first.

There was in Boulangism a great number of misguided republicans, and the honest career they have furnished since in the republican parties has proved that numerous misunderstandings had advantaged Boulangism. Today on the contrary, precisely because it is the second time the case presents itself, precisely because the first trial has served, precisely because the country has received a first warning, because political education, at least in this respect, has been done, we must count more or less without any exception the forces of the nationalist coalition as being today’s reactionary forces.

Nationalism is so alive that the political situation is sensibly the same as it was two years ago. The ministerial quantities are more numerous; but the ministerial qualities are no better; the availabilities are no more abundant; one is just as embarrassed to form a ministry; gazes still turn toward the same man.

The nationalists have gained a great deal. We are told: So much the better! since it is at the expense of the progressives. But the nationalists are much more dangerous than the progressives; a nationalist majority would be much more dangerous than a progressivist majority; the nationalists are ungovernable; nationalists would go off half-cocked; the nationalists are madmen, sincere for the most part, I mean the troops; with the nationalists the threat of a war against England is no longer an altogether implausible imminence.

The socialists have lost a great deal, at least the socialist parties; they have suffered a veritable moral disaster.

Long divided into two rival hatreds, into two contrary envious jealousies, French socialism --- candidates, newspapers, committees, most of the voters --- presented itself at the ballot in two contrary formations locked in combat.

The Revolutionary Socialist Unity, the Socialist Party of France, Guesdists-Blanquists, had resolved to present class candidates in all constituencies.

In many constituencies the Guesdists-Blanquists did their duty as republicans in the second round; in a very great number of constituencies in the first round, and above all in the second, they played, unconsciously or, almost always, consciously, often with a bad and tenacious and growing joy, the game of the nationalist reaction. They thus incurred before the country and before international peace a redoubtable responsibility.

The inter-federals, Federal Unity, French Socialist Party, have lost much morally. Gravely contaminated by radicalism, the inter-federals gravely participated in the weakness and cowardice of radicalism.

Personal testimony. As much as anyone I esteem the calm courage of Pressense. Since the beginning of the Affair we know all his cool bravery. None of us will ever forget the expeditions that Mirbeau, Quillard and Pressense made in most of the provinces; none will forget the meetings held in Paris.

But it is here that I return to my decomposition of Dreyfusism in France. One wants to limit the effect of my research. One wants to oppose the decomposition of Dreyfusism to the Dreyfusards who became partisans of the amnesty. I consent. But first this must not be to the advantage of citizens who were not Dreyfusards at all. We who were Dreyfusards from the second hour can call to account those of us who became partisans of the amnesty; those of us who were never truly Dreyfusards are not qualified to do so.

Reciprocally it is not enough, to have remained Dreyfusard, to have kept in the affair itself and in its consequences an exactly Dreyfusist attitude. One must also have extended to all the operations of life, to all actions, the methods that in the Dreyfus affair received their eminent application. To keep in the affair and in the narrow consequences of the affair an effigial attitude and for all the rest to conduct one’s life exactly as if there had never been an affair, as if one had never received the teachings of the affair, properly speaking, is not to have remained Dreyfusard.

The first time after the affair I saw a Dreyfusard lie, I had a sickening feeling.

I felt in a flash at that instant that the affair would never begin again, that it was dead.

And then one gets used to it. I have seen so many lie since that one gets accustomed. Only I classify them as anti-Dreyfusards, partisans of the amnesty.

This is the great amnesty. One votes it for oneself. And then one goes about launching accusations against others.

The candidacy of Pressense had this initial fault that it was a breach of word. When Vaughan presented the Aurore to us, it was formally understood that this newspaper would never be a party newspaper, and to give this commitment a particularly marked expression, it was formally understood that the collaborators of the newspaper would never solicit any political mandate. They would never be candidates.

More and more I believe profoundly that there is nothing in the world that for action equals the force of an institution. Nothing therefore is as grave as the rupture of an institution.