On the Situation Made for the Intellectual Party in the Modern World

De la situation faite au parti intellectuel dans le monde moderne

Renan was not ignorant of all that. I mean that he was not ignorant of what the scientific apparatus of modern sanctions is. He had known no doubt those seminary enmities, which must in no way yield to enmities of the École Normale, both being enmities of boarding schools. He had known no doubt some of those priestly enmities, which must in no way yield to enmities of savants, both being priestly enmities. It must be noted however that the Church had generally handled him with care, handled him so to speak constantly, at least in personal relations. In modern times the Church has so to speak never roughly mistreated any of those who have left her decently. She has often put a sort of courtesy, of politeness, almost of coquetry and of worldliness, into handling them, into speaking of them honorably, sometimes into treating them almost favorably. They are still her children, though they have made themselves prodigal. They are her former children. She has for them the sentiments of a sort of ancient and honorary maternity. A somewhat dry maternity, milky maternities always having as it were a pagan back-thought. Thus she is bound to them, she remains attached to them by a sort of secret understanding, a particular, unique, rare quality of preserved ancient intelligence, aromatic, essential, a little heady, a connivance, of incense, of sacristy, of tabernacle, of cupboard and at the same time of altar, of fresh pure white linen and of poor old yellowed lace, of old cupboard of a great family, a common memory which from the furnishing and usual convenience of the sacristan up to the divine authority of the priest, a collusion, a particular understanding over the head of the public, of the vulgar, of third parties, particularly over the head of those who are the most vulgar of all these third parties, and who certainly understand no longer anything at all of it, over the head of those who have made themselves loftily the partisans, the protectors, the improvised enthroners of the deportee in his new religion.

To what point the Church handled Renan, I mean of course the true Church, the only one which is qualified, the dotal, in short the only one which is authorized, and not at all of course all those demagogic bands of clerical journalists, who are still worse, if it were possible, than the symmetrically demagogic bands of anticlerical and today anti-Catholic journalists, — to what point the only true Church handled Renan, the departure of Renan, the evacuation of Renan, the transition and the arrangement of Renan, the first steps and the first establishments of Renan in lay life, all his installation in the life of everyone, — together so that there might be no scandal, or at least so that there might be only the least scandal, and also by an effect of that sort of continued affection of which we have spoken, in short all together by an application of a wise policy and of a sentimental affection wisely political, and also of an affectionate policy, it must be said, and even by a sincere affection sincerely continued, — to what point in short the only true Church and the only one which counts and which must be judged or which it is important or interesting to judge handled Renan and almost protected him, we know it by the confidences of Renan himself whenever they are a little sincere, — and for whoever knows how to read him there is no doubt on this point, the proofs of it are abundant to the point that there would be almost too many of them, — we know it by all the texts and by good tradition, — we know it by all the testimonies of third parties whenever those third parties have not been blinded by political passion or, blindness still more grave, by that so particular sort of mental hebetude, or of habit, intellectual, which makes one believe that everything is friend among apparent friends, and that everything on the contrary is enemy among apparent and official and classified enemies, and that one does not see either the fissures which are born at the heart of apparent friendships, nor the deep correspondences which bind from underneath apparent enmities.

In doing which the Church had moreover no particular merit with regard to Renan, for she was only following with regard to him, and in that regard, her general policy, at least her general policy as it appears to us in modern times, perhaps her oldest and traditional general policy. We see by all the scandals which the journalists and the newspapers and the State try to raise against her today, today when the government of the State, if not this very ministry functioning as such, has undertaken to persecute her, and when the journalists and the newspapers and together the government of the State have by demagogic means undertaken to dishonor her, — we see how much all her policy is on the contrary a policy of appeasement, I say in this particular order, a policy of wisdom and of pacification, of stifling rather and of passing entries by profits and losses, a policy of effacement of the scandal and of let it be well understood that this is a settled affair, and that no more shall be said of it, a policy of mutual honor and of modesty and of silence, with the minimum of thunderbolts and of excommunications, minor, of fulminations, as Clemenceau used to name them.

So that one might rather reproach her with lacking dignity, than with goodness, with human goodness, as people bleat today, reproach her with lacking a certain sense and the claim of her own grandeur.

It is in sum today, and in a word, it is properly the policy of Néarque. Such indeed is the resonance of those great works of the French genius, at all distances, at infinite distances, that no more just and more legitimate naming, today as yesterday as tomorrow as always, than simply to take up again a proper name of one of those eternal personages. And even and as much one of the lesser personages, one of the minor personages.

The minor personages suiting still better, perhaps, the minor and base situations. Such as are the situations of today.

The God of Polyeucte and that of Néarque Of earth and of heaven is the absolute monarch.

But all the same there is the policy of Néarque, and to speak so, and one will pardon me what I am going to say, the policy of Polyeucte. In this particular order of individual scandal and of individual apostasy, at least modern, the Church, at least the modern Church, today evidently no longer proceeds except by the policy of Néarque.

He does not command that one should hurl oneself there.

One cannot evidently say that she hurls herself there. And again:

It suffices, without seeking, to wait and to suffer. But in this temple in the end death is assured.

And again:

By a holy life it must be merited.

And the policy quite precisely put into method:

Spare your life, to God himself it matters: Live to protect the Christians in these places.

The religious policy. The fear of persecution:

I cannot disguise that I have difficulty in following you. Beneath the horror of torments I fear to succumb.

Nothing seems singular, when one stops at it, like this mixture of policy and of the religious. But one must indeed live. And the actors of these divine dramas are men. Modesty; argument of psychology, ordinary, and of morality, and of usual morals, daily, very profound, very striking, reaching far; the famous argument of modesty and of humility against pride; of ordinary duties, of family duties, ordinary, and as it were secular, of duties of state against the extraordinary duties or of election:

Whoever fears nothing presumes too much of himself.

The theology; culminating argument, particularly well placed, at the culmination of the debate:

God himself has feared death.

For the effacement of scandal at least individual at least modern the Church today no longer proceeds except by the policy of Néarque. We see it by all those scandals which are made against her, by all those scandals machinated, faked, which they want to throw under her feet, which they sometimes succeed in throwing under her feet, which a demagogic press and a no less demagogic and crafty and facetious sub-government want to throw upon the road of her destination.

Garnished with a few sowings of veritable swindlers.

I say sub-government because everyone knows that all these gross machinations of scandals do not come so much from the government, especially from the one we almost had, as from a sub-entourage, from an occult government, which works underneath, from a sub-personnel of intrigue and of basenesses which everyone names.

In the order of individual scandal and of individual apostasy, the Church today answers only by the policy of Néarque. We see it by the response which she makes to all those artificial scandals. We have had it eminently by the response which she made to the last or to the next-to-last of those scandals, while awaiting the next, which was also the most resounding. Far from proceeding by anathemas and resounding excommunications, which would have been homothetic responses, equal or equivalent in scandal, which perhaps were her duty, it is evident on the contrary that immediately one negotiated, paid no doubt, for one immediately obtained this singular result, one arrived immediately at this singular result, convenient for all, and for everyone, and also, as was needed, for the curiosity of the crowd, of everyone, for frivolity, for the curiosity of scandal, but in short convenient for all except, as if by chance, for the sole demagogy, anti-Catholic, even anticlerical, at this singular result that the memoirs of a scandal formed a quite particularly edifying narrative, a feuilleton generally written in a pious language.

Thus everyone, except them, found his account in it. There was indeed journalism, feuilleton, reportage, interview, testimonies, and sensational confessions. But all that was pious, very exactly edifying, the fault and the repentance, the sin then the contrition, the desolation and the disarray of the sinner, the distress, the consolations, in short altogether a story for boarding schools. And the repentance even within the fault, a little inept, perhaps a little conventional, but very traditional, very as it should be, there is only this word: very edifying. Without however giving the alarm.

I say paid, because all that is wound up in combinations with a journal of which one must not say that it is venal, but of which one must write that it is venality itself, perpetual and total sale, in wholesale and at retail.

The policy of Polyeucte. I mean by this that far from reproaching the Church with having mistreated this Renan, and so many others, a truly believing Catholic, and generally a Christian would be much more grounded in reproaching the Church for having for this same Renan, more than for so many others, for having shown, manifested I shall not say too many considerations, — one never has enough of them, when one is a government, — but too great an esteem, in the etymological sense, where esteem implies measure, I mean an esteem too much, pluris, an esteem at too much worth, too great an estimation. I maintain that all the ulterior conduct of the Church with regard to Renan and even her immediate conduct, and even anticipated, anterior, I mean her conduct at the moment of the separation and even in the slow preparations of the estrangement, that all this conduct supposes an admitted hypothesis, a granted postulate, which by a singular reversal happens to be precisely this one: that history, lay, modern, has an importance, a truth, absolute, a reality, metaphysical, a primacy, a supremacy, a primateship, a primate, a principate, and Renan as prince of historians an entire principality of absolute government which in our present and ulterior researches we shall see precisely that they do not have.

And it is perhaps not the first, but assuredly it will not be the only time that we shall encounter, throughout these long researches, that the modern Church in these debates has a position much more modern than Christian, sometimes wholly modern, and in no way Christian, and that this is the whole secret of her present weakness.

I maintain, going further, at least in the direction of the social, that a true Catholic, truly believing, generally a true Christian, — for there is also what I shall allow myself also to name the policy of Pascal, — would be much more grounded in reproaching the Church for having for this same Renan, for having shown, for having manifested for this same Renan, besides all the effects of this policy of Néarque, much too much of that respect which in modern times at least, and perhaps in all times, she has never ceased to have for the temporal powers. Or rather and together and without even separating them much, Renan was for her both an intellectual power, and a temporal power; both an intellectual principality, and a temporal principality; all that summed itself up, gathered itself, intersected in the chair of the Collège de France and in the situation, no less official, more official still perhaps, in those times, of great author with a numerous seven-fifty grandly of a great public through the ministry of a great publisher.

In those times the Collège de France had a situation of intellectual and temporal principality together, a power of mind and a power of State together, and of institution, and of tradition, and of antiquity, a grandeur of mental, moral, and social government, of which we can have no further idea. As in those times a great author, a seven-fifty, — there had been far less abuse made of them, — a great public, — there was one, — a great publisher, — there were such, — exercised a sort of spiritual and temporal magistracy which we cannot even any longer imagine.

The proof of it is today that, all in all, the different manifestations of Catholics and particularly of the different authorities of the Church against Renan have diminished him much less than in a few years his memory has been diminished by the absurd manifestations organized around his name by the politicians of anti-Catholicism.

The Church, she, had not, at bottom, ceased to treat him as a Christian.

Because the Church and he, at bottom, continued to work in the same field. And they on the contrary were so foreign to all that.

Tu es christianus aeternum: Renan repaid her well for it. Persons who know how to read a text, — they become more and more rare since the invasion of so-called scientific methods, — persons in particular who still know how to read the so difficult texts of Renan, I mean particularly the texts, much less numerous than is generally believed, where he lets us glimpse a little of his thought, and even some glimpse of his back-thought, have no hesitation on the question of knowing to whom Renan was thinking when he wrote a little of his thought. Was he thinking of his new friends, of his partisans, vulgar and gross men for an ecclesiastic as ancient as he, as refined, men down-to-earth above all, and truly incapable of any metaphysics, for a man remained as profoundly religious as he? Renan was not writing for them. At bottom they were not, they never were to be of his mental and sentimental family. They were foreigners, as too gross and too vulgar and too immetaphysical for him; his new life, continuation, much more than these gross partisans could believe, of his ancient and of his first life, much too gross for him, new, vulgar and immetaphysical. He wrote for them only his superficial and gross writings, his histories. And even, in those gross writings themselves, in those histories, how many precautions, how many implicit understandings, how many warnings, how many glances of intelligence addressed to the others, to the Catholics, and to the former Catholics, generally to the Christians. As if he were saying to them: You see what I write, because one must indeed write for everyone, and for the world, but you who know me, by this sign, unperceived by the others, who understand nothing of it, by this sign, pay attention that profoundly I have remained one of yours and that the meditations of the interior life have not become unsuspected by me. I live in the world and I appear to write for the world. Everyone must eat his temporal bread. But you who know me and who know how to read me, you are not deceived by it. I do not deceive you in it.

We have not been deceived in it: the redoubtable Pan-Boeotians of the Prayer that I made on the Acropolis, we have recognized them: they are very exactly the inaugurators of the monument of Renan at Tréguier. Everyone has understood it so. And the league of all stupidities, O Eurythmia, what indeed was the ulterior league of which the prophet Renan could be thinking?

That is for whom precisely he wrote, I mean that he wrote profoundly and interiorly, a perpetually underlying writing, that is for whom precisely he sub-wrote perpetually, for whom sometimes he wrote en clair: Catholics, former Catholics, and generally Christians. Jews also, primarily Jews, anteriorly Jews, and subsidiarily, who are the witnesses and the figurators, the servants of the first law. Servants of the first and of the second Covenant, of the ancient and of the new Law, that is for whom precisely he wrote. In no way for the moderns, as such, and performing their function of moderns. Such is the secret of his life and the secret of his work, so disquieting, otherwise, — so disquieting thus already, — and so incomprehensible. Altogether incomprehensible otherwise, so incomprehensible already thus. The secret of his very style, of the style which of him as much as of anyone is of the man himself. I defy anyone, modern, reading as a modern and pretending to hear only in the modern sense, to affirm that he holds at each instant all the thought of Renan, the exterior thought and together and as well the anterior thought. It is evident on the contrary, if modern one wishes to read in modern and to pretend to hear only in the modern sense, that one does not hear everything, that one has lacks unceasingly, and, as if by chance, precisely at the places where one ought not to have lacks, because they are the most interesting points, the capital points, the essential passages. Which amounts to saying that one realizes rather rapidly, if one is sincere, that reading thus, one hears no more anything at all.

I draw upon this point all the attention of the sincere reader: in all the work of Renan, without any exception, there runs all beneath the work as a perpetual implicit. And this perpetual implicit comes out from time to time to the surface as at points of emergence. And it happens, as if by chance, that these points of as it were involuntary apparition are recognized at once as essential, capital points, as being, alone, those points of discernment where a forewarned reader awaits a work and a man.

How much all that is not still more true, and more verified, no longer of passages, but of the few works where Renan almost professes to tell us, to unveil to us, to reveal to us a little of what he thinks, of what he back-thinks, in his dialogues and philosophical fragments, in his dramas, and notably, mounting from degree to degree, in his certitudes, probabilities, dreams; for one has not been deceived there either, and beneath the decreasing disguises of the personages, it is some of his back-thoughts that unmask themselves more and more, at levels of planes more and more elevated, the superior becoming inferior in his turn as he advances and as he rises and yielding at once to a still superior one, and far from its being the certitudes which decrease, on the contrary it is the certitudes which increase from certitudes into probabilities and from probabilities into dreams. I defy anyone, non-Catholic, non-former-Catholic, and generally non-Christian, and anteriorly or subsidiarily non-Jewish, to hear anything, to intercept anything whatever, as a modern, reading as a modern, in short receiving only in the title of modern, of those confessional works.

And, moreover, one recognizes easily that those truly confessional works are in the end the works of the proper confession of Renan.

The very style: there are in all the work of Renan phrases, words, forms of phrases, expressions which run underneath and which sometimes come to the surface, which are of the very language of Catholicism and generally of Christianity, which can address themselves only to Catholics themselves and generally to Christians, which can be understood only by Catholics themselves and generally by Christians.

Particularly those works which are literally confessional are crammed with these expressions.

He despises the moderns. One feels that he despises the moderns. By a certain tone, which is his and which is deliberate. He is full of expressions, willed, of forms, intentional, which pass over their heads, which in any case remain inaccessible to them. Which are to them and remain to them ungraspable, and, as one says, literally, unthinkable. Being of the style of the interior life, and even, technically, and particularly, of the style of the spiritual life.

By this style, by the uses he makes of this style, by the idea, by the technique of this use, by the slow ascent, and by the abrupt surging of certain words, one feels that those moderns are for him gross partisans, he who was not gross, at least in the same sense.

Our moderns, who have never been ignorant of anything, of all that they had to know, and together of all the rest, could not have been ignorant of the contempt in which Renan their founder has always held them. But, even though one be modern, it is always painful to take cognizance, even were it scientific, of a contempt, even were it justified, of which one is the object. How much more disagreeable it is not, for the sectators of a sect, even a lay sect, to take cognizance of the authorized contempt, of the paternal and inaugural contempt, of the originary, initial contempt, in short of the contempt in which its inventor has held it. Our moderns, who are naturally not clear-sighted, have done everything here, all they could, to blind here still their natural sight.

Our moderns could naturally not be ignorant of those compromising works of Renan, and in all his other works of those compromising passages. But as the moderns explain everything, they did not fail to explain works and passages which did not precisely enter into their politics, not being uniquely works and passages of republican defense. And as the moderns are naturally very clever, they had no trouble in finding these explanations, which are naturally definitive explanations. And as the explanations we give of the world always resemble us, our moderns have given of these works and of these passages modern explanations. That is to say gross, primary, notoriously, grossly insufficient. They said:

Sometimes they said that it was by habit; and this explanation by habit would be perfectly receivable, at least for a part, and for a good part, if this very word habit they had not understood in a gross modern sense, in the sense of a scholarly habit, of an intellectual fold, of a sort of mania, professional, more than professional, professorial, university, at the extreme limit, and doing him, Renan himself, much honor, of a mania of a man of the study, of a man of the library and a writer, in the sense of a third and perhaps of a fifty-first nature, in no way, as they ought, in the deep sense of the naturalists, of the physiologists and of the moralists, in the sense, which would have been truly modern, being truly scientific, of an organic and mental habit, of a second and perhaps of a first nature. And perhaps as a habitual fantasy of a man of letters. For it does not suffice to say that if habit is a second nature, nature is perhaps only a first habit: one must perhaps go so far as to say that habit itself is a first nature. We shall be pardoned for employing here a gross expression, but to mark a gross explanation it is inevitable, it is just, — for it is fitting, — to employ a gross expression itself: they thought naively, and grossly, that their inventor-founder was, — let us say the word, — a defrocked priest who had kept some folds of his frock. They have a certain habit, themselves, since we are at what they call habits, — they have a certain habit, today, since the beginning of their triumph, and at this hour, since the beginning of the great temporal misery of their enemy the Church, of having with them, among them, aspiring to government, obtaining the places of command, a growing contingent of those whom they commonly, and grossly, name defrocked.

Renan, in this hypothesis, as one says, would be a defrocked.

Not only a defrocked, but he would be the prince and the orderer, the ordainer of the defrocked, the first of all, the first in date and the first in dignity, the inventor of the genre and at the same time, of the same genre, the greatest illustration, the most illustrious example, for he would be in short Renan the founder, the initiator, the establisher, instauratio magna, the one who first performed the greatest lay operation, which is naturally the greatest also of all human operations, which is naturally, given a clerk, to make of him a layman, the one who first made the great renunciation, the one who first performed, and that upon himself, the greatest operation, the one who therefore was recompensed for it, as is just, with the greatest recompense temporal, with the most glory, with the most government, with the most intellectual posterity.

Let us not believe, let us not go imagining that in enthroning Renan as the prince, as the Defrocked-in-Chief, they have in any way the intention of diminishing him. On the contrary. Intellectual sons of Renan, innumerable posterity, they have among them growing and beautifying such a power, such a numerous contingent, such a race of defrocked authentic, official, and so to speak confessional, in lay life, they have those invading and rising defrocked receiving or taking such a government, such a command among the political and parliamentary powers, which are in their eyes the essential powers, that they believe on the contrary they have greatly augmented Renan when they have done this great historian the honor of considering him as the author and as the initiator, as the father and the editor of this brood. The editor being, of course, responsible. And all this being an operation of reverence and of veneration.

In making thus of Renan the chief of the defrocked, — one had not yet invented the schismatics, and I avow that at present that one has set the schismatics functioning, one feels oneself seized with an old respect for those old still-naive defrocked, for those former defrocked of the former generation, who at least, in going away from the house, did not claim to carry off the furniture, — they believe well to attribute to him, to restore to him a part, the best, of his temporal salary, that which is worth more than glory itself, and which moreover is confounded for its greatest part with glory, because it forms an integral part of it: a share in the government of men and societies, a share in the parliamentary political government. It is as if, retrospectively, one named him minister. Ambassador of the Republic to the Reactionary Powers, principally to the Ecclesiastical Powers. A sort of extraordinary ambassador and minister plenipotentiary of the great Republic of the Modern World and of Science: infallible and definitively reassured, to the occult Powers, definitively vanquished, secretly dreaded, to the reactionary Governments, to the Catholic Commands, to the Dominations of the religious life, to the Thrones and Powers, to the Virtues, to the Intuitions, Domains and all the Royalties of right of all the interior Life. He shall be received also in the world of Principalities, but in the title of stranger, of the Republic in arms. He shall be their grand representative, their grand authority, the one under whom they shall cover themselves against the redoubtable Powers. He is the patron of the great modern Village against the always new Enemy. I would say that he is the great Totem, if it were not a word here of which we have experienced that one must never use it except with the greatest circumspection. By this investiture they in no way intend to diminish him. But they wish to restitute him, on the contrary, to confer upon him the greatest honor which exists among them, in their country, in the country of Science. They have the subsidiary defrocked attaining among them and among themselves such fortunes that they believe they can imagine nothing better, more flattering, more popular, for the ancestor, the great man, than to represent him as the chief of the defrocked. Such was exactly the sense and the value of the inauguration of the monument of Renan at Tréguier. And this inauguration itself was only the point of arrival of a long and lay enthronement, introduction, of an entire procession itself.

It was entirely, integrally, in this order of thoughts and of celebration. It was literally an enthronement, rather, much more than a commemoration. Or at the very least it was a question of making the memory of Renan attain a capital fortune, a fortune which would be the first in the order of fortunes attained by those whom one cared to consider as his disciples, as his simple imitators.

One was making up upon his memory and upon the glorification of his memory, since he had unfortunately died in his person before the triumph and before the festival. It was moreover safer, for one could make him, his memory, those apotheoses which, living, he perhaps would not have let pass all the same. One could attribute to him remarks and meanings which, living, he doubtless would not have admitted.

One could say to him, and make him say, what one wanted. One was sure, at least, that he would not answer back.

This idea, particularly, was that of those imitators themselves, who often, — and very often in all conscience, in all sincerity, — authorized themselves by his example, by this illustrious, by this first precedent.

I do, they said naively, I do the same thing as Renan. Thus spoke these poor children. Does a priest perceive that his faith is suppressed with the suppression of the budget of cults, with the same gesture and with a single movement, quick I am doing the same thing as Renan. He has thus become the patron of those who no longer want to have patrons. Saint Renan, — not the old one, the Catholic, but the new, — Saint Renan, pray for us: it is an understood affair, and understood for eternity. As long as there shall be a France, and a French clergy, every time that a clerk shall go out of the clergy, for whatever reason, there shall always be an imbecile who shall open his mouth and say: He is doing the same thing as Renan.

And yet there are today two reasons why they are not doing the same thing: the first, the old one, is that they are not Renan; the second, the new and recent, is that neither Renan nor the men of his time and of his formation would have ever even imagined making themselves schismatics. So true is it that as one ages, and as the world ages, one always discovers that the event is stronger than you, becomes always stronger than what one imagined, redoubles itself, beats itself, multiplies itself.

So true is it that Renan and the men of his time and of his formation, when they put themselves outside, did not claim at the same time to be inside.

As they have noted, which was not difficult to see, that a very great number of these resigning ones and almost of these furloughed ones had kept certain habits, certain folds of their former ministry, one might almost say of their former trade, certain professional folds, certain expressions, a certain style, a certain taste for command, certain manias, a passion of authority, an appetite for government, or, on the contrary, or rather on the contrary all together, and the one carrying the other, the one masking the other, a certain meekness, a certain ecclesiastical suppleness, a certain velvetiness, a certain soft tenderness, a certain dough, a certain episcopal confectionery, a singular continuation, these are those former slight defects of trade which they quite quietly imagine themselves to find again in Renan; as they have not ceased to find them in the happy successors, they do not cease either to find them again in Renan the father; and they do not fail to pardon him for them, for they are good children, gay, jovial, and they are secretly honored to have in their world persons as well brought up as priests, which makes a change for them, as they are accustomed to pardon, for they are good fellows, as they have pardoned many others to his unequal heirs. Is it not moreover and is it not very good that an ambassador should have the tone of the foreign powers to which he is accredited. And must one not show one’s enemies that one is as well brought up as they. What would become of all the old French politeness if we did not have at least the defrocked.

Such is what one may call the explanation of Renan ecclesiasticized. Renan, in this hypothesis, is no more than an example, a particular, first, eminent case, of what one may name, according to them, the persistence of the ecclesiastical character among the defrocked, among the priestly gentlemen, among the former ecclesiastics.

Renan, who was not only the initiator of this operation, but who owed to this operation the becoming of a great lord according to the world, a prince of Science, who without this operation would assuredly have become a prince of the Church, had some right to remain a prelate.

Such is their explanation which one may name the explanation by habit. It is an excuse as much as an explanation.

They have said sometimes, they have also said, — and this will be the excuse and the explanation by interest, — that if Renan had preserved in many of his passages and in some of his works those certain ecclesiastical forms, it was through prudence, by the effect of an elementary prudence, of a wisdom god-daughter of that of old Ulysses, that other navigator, that Greek-Breton crossed with Norman, that it was in sum to safeguard his simplest interests. They know their dates. They know their filiations. They do not forget that if Renan is their initiator, that means by definition that he had begun before them, before all the others, in a time when it did not yet pay, when it scarcely began insensibly to pay, before all the others themselves, that he was the first, in a difficult time. Given these great examples of prudence which we ourselves have given, they think, in a time when our domination appears from all sides assured, considering these noble examples of wisdom, which we have furnished, these precious examples of restraint, of our precious persons, some of which rose as high as cowardice, notably that great example of circumspection that we gave in that illustrious affair where we abandoned justice and truth only rigorously during the time when they ran a true danger, free to hurl ourselves to their succor, to their defense with frenzy, with a true savagery, as soon as we had acquired the assurance that some fools had definitively pulled them out of difficulty, it is not astonishing that our master, in less favorable times, should have preserved certain forms which pleased the old clienteles of his time, certain forms which were necessary to his life itself, at least to his social and professorial security, that these old clienteles, — clerical and no doubt reactionary, but one must indeed live, — should cover him at least with their indifference and almost with a remnant of fidelity.

Thus they spoke, misunderstanding their master. They may believe that they are doing the same thing as Renan, but we have, we also, an assurance; we have the assurance, we, that Renan was not doing the same thing as they, or at least that he was not doing only the same thing as they.

I do not deny this explanation by interest. I believe it is true in itself. Moreover it is true, because it has been said, because it has been given, because it has been said that it was true, because it is they who have said it and given it: thus it is true in the much more interesting sense, in the sense and in the measure where the most miserable defects of the descendants are represented, are included, exist in fact, are in germ in the works of the ascendants, even were it in the greatest works of the greatest ascendants, proceed from them, all the same, and consequently in the sense and in the measure where the fathers in reality are responsible for the sons, where all the ancestors are responsible for all the descendants, the founders for the heirs, the masters for the pupils. The founders, of empires; and the masters, of paltry schools. It is evident in effect that when a son speaks ill, thinks ill of his father, a pupil of his master, a school of its scholarch, an empire of its founder, they are right, they say true. Whatever it may be, or appear to be otherwise, in truth. In reality. For in one sense it is inevitable, it is automatic, it is infallible that they should be right, that they should say true. They are right, even though they should be wrong. They say true, even though they should lie, or even though they should err, even though they should be mistaken, and even though they should deceive. It is a question which has been much agitated to know to what point and in what sense the father is responsible for the son, the master for the pupil, generally the first, the inventor for his imitators, and every author for all his filiation. Without entering into this debate, which would lead us to other studies, and from this controversy retaining only the few parts which find themselves on the path of our progress, I maintain that when a son speaks ill, thinks ill of his father and mother, a pupil of his master, they must indeed be right, in a certain sense, even though they should be wrong, they must indeed say true, in a certain sense, even though, unconsciously or knowingly, they should say false, they should make or commit error. For if they say false, if they are mistaken or if they deceive in this sense that their author was not as they represent him to themselves or as they represent him to us, consequently in this sense that the representation, that the image they have or that they give of their author is not exact, conformable to the reality, when a son speaks, thinks ill of his carnal father or of his intellectual father, in the last analysis he is right, he says true, in this much more interesting sense, much more profound, infinitely more real, being infinitely more living, that this father and that this author deeply deserves that we should have of him, really, this image and this representation, and that notably his sons and that his products should have of him this image and this representation, since precisely he has this defect, profound, since precisely he has truly committed this crime, of having a descendance which would come to speak ill, to think ill of him. In this sense every accusation brought against a father by his sons carries, for he is guilty at least of this most grave crime, the most essential of all: precisely from the point of view of paternity, of descendance, of generation, of filiation: of having produced sons who would bring this accusation against him, who would bring the word against him, or obscurely who would bring the thought. To raise the hand against one’s father, the old people used to say. To raise the word against one’s father, we shall say, and simply to raise the thought. Every father against whom his son raises his hand is guilty: of having made a son who would raise his hand against him. Reserving therefore, leaving therefore aside this general question of knowing to what point and in what sense the author shall be generally responsible for his products, we shall hold to, for this study which we have begun, this observation which we have made that, in the sense which we have said, every charge taken by a descendant against an ascendant is valid, by itself and by that very fact, and that it is in this sense an eternal charge. Very exactly and limitatively in this sense that the author is guilty, accountable and responsible for the fact that there should have issued from him a product which would not respect him. In this sense, every allegation come from the descendance mounts back infallibly into the ascendance, to the heart of the ascendance, and counts.

It has a value of interpretation, of signification, of sign, of symbol, and also and above all of representation, a symbolic value infinitely more important, more interesting, more dangerous than a direct value, and, for whoever knows, more redoubtable. It has a delegated value, which mounts back to the author of its delegation. Nothing is mortal for an ascendance like those testimonies of interior defect which issuing so to speak from the very interior of the race mount back toward the past from unknown depths of the future. From a future which for them was the future and which for us has rapidly become the present. For one ages, fast. Nothing is mortal for a memory like those leprosies which starting from the supposedly most distant bud come back out, having mounted back by an interior path in reverse, even under the bark of the trunk. Singular, mysterious browsing of the arborescence which by the canalization of the sap mounts back obscurely from the smallest bud the most distant, the most unperceived, even to the master arteries of the trunk, primary, of the great roots, primary, bursting and breaking out of the bark, as a skin disease of the tree would burst and break out, manifestation and witness of the inexpiable interior defect. This sort of disavowal at a distance, and by oneself, this sort of disavowal by oneself at a distance, by oneself represented by another, oneself, by another doubtless, but in short by him who at that date will perhaps or will perhaps appear alone qualified to represent you, to speak in your name, to be you, at that time, by him who perhaps will alone have, at that time, the word, and who will carry it, this renegation is the most appalling chastisement, temporal, which can reach an author, worm-eaten; it is an automatic, mechanical chastisement, a proof, by the ulterior posthumous fact, that he is worm-eaten, indeed, that he had a secret interior defect, that he had succeeded in masking from the eyes of his contemporaries, that he had perhaps not seen, that he perhaps did not know himself, that those nearest to him did not know, that he perhaps succeeded in masking from himself, unconsciously or consciously, innocently or not, but which, by the sole event of time, by the sole flowing of duration, by the sole development, by the sole flowering, by the sole budding, by the sole arborescence and by the sole bursting of the race like a poison not inoculated but indigenous and which reveals itself at last, which discloses itself, opens at last the stem, splits open on the exterior, opens to the outside the ancient secrets, abruptly bursts forth into a posterity, into a people of accusers. There is a singularly poignant phenomenon, a sort of response, modern, to that operation, which was capital among the ancients, of the paternal malediction. It is a sort of filial malediction, which mounts back. It is truly a reciprocal, homothetic, antagonistic operation of the ancient paternal malediction. That ancient paternal malediction was an operation which summarily consisted in this, that the father made appeal, against his own descendance, and with an authority all the more powerful that it was he the father and that it was his own descendance, by an application, by a reversal of his paternal authority, by a reversed application, in the insufficiency of his proper paternal means, to exterior powers. Symmetrically this new filial malediction, this modern reprobation is an operation which consists in this, that the son proves, and reproves, against the father, and with an authority all the more poignant and all the more monstrous that it is the very one who is his own father and consequently it is to that, precisely to the powers which are common to him by his birth, to which he is bound by the profound communion, since they are those of his generation, that he turns against him, by a monstrous betrayal, without intention, without will, without effort even, without malicious intention, without will perhaps, it suffices that he act by a simple manifestation of his being. And it is this which makes this filial malediction so terrible, that it has no need of being willed in order to triumph. That it has only to be.

There, from the ancient to the modern, an entire reversal of the sense of responsibilities. It is no longer the blood of the fathers which falls back upon the children; it is the blood of the children, which mounts back, reversed, to the originary sources, and which accuses, which denounces its source, which reproves the reproved in his third and even unto the twentieth generation. But it is the contrary which mounts back, and from this generation to that of the author this counter-malediction, this counter-indication is mortal.

When a son speaks ill, thinks ill of his father and mother, I am wounded in my deepest sentiments, I have the impression of an indecency, perhaps the gravest of all, and of an indecency; but modernly I believe them on it: for they are guilty, of having this son, who would say that. It is always a bad note, for a house, to be divided against itself, and to receive perpetually internal denials. But no note is as bad as for a father to have introduced into the world his own condemnation, itself interior. For if a house divided against itself shall perish, what shall it be of this division at a distance which animates against an abolished author descendances of defects and survivals of responsibilities, which animates against an author, at the very hour when he can no longer defend himself and protest, protestations from then on indisputable and which never more shall be disputed.

There is a moral phenomenon troubling of the same order as the moral phenomenon so well known and so to speak parallel to that moral phenomenon so well known, on which we cannot dwell today, by which a benefactor is always, in a profound sense, responsible for a consecutive ingratitude. As he has made the benefit, he has made the ingratitude also, within the benefit; he has made a worm-eaten benefit, already wholly gnawed inside by the worm of ingratitude, at the very originary moment, at the moment when it was being born a benefit. And, to tell the truth, the responsibility of the ulterior ingratitude is itself only a particular case of that sort of general responsibility which we have encountered upon our way, for the benefactor, the author of a benefit, is also, is in that very thing the author of the one who receives the benefit, that I believe I have recognized in a saying of the famous word, of Author, that I believe I have recognized in one.

They are guilty, of having this son, who would speak thus. In this sense and in this measure when the moderns, innumerable heirs of Renan, themselves introduce into the debate a certain idea of Renan, which they have or which they pretend to have, — and which moreover is in itself true or false, — by the play of that singular equivalence which we have said, by the operation of that singular transfer of responsibility, which we have deepened a little, we can, we must believe them in it, and the author himself Renan is responsible for this idea, gross though it be, which they have of him or which they at least manifest. The grossnesses which the moderns have lent to Renan, which they have seen or which they have put into Renan, even though they should not be there textually, — even though they should not be there textually, officially and presently, — they are there all the same, they are there profoundly, all the more really, this is equivalent, this makes an equivalence, comes back to the same as if they were there, or, as the scientists say, but in a much more real sense, everything happens as if they were there, or rather they are there really, more really than if he had put these grossnesses in epigraph, being more profound than an epigraph, for it must be, in order that today they should issue and manifest themselves, that he should have done, that he should have had, that he should have committed this grossness much more profound, this essential grossness, this mother grossness of having given birth to this people of gross ones who would attribute to him one day these grossnesses, who would be gross enough to attribute them to him; in this sense and in this measure the very ceremony of the inauguration of the monument of Renan at Tréguier itself, although it is in one sense all that one can imagine most foreign, most hostile even and most contrary to the character, to the style, to the very personality of Renan, in this other sense moreover it is only the crowning of an entire life and of an entire memory, of an entire posterity, the memory prolonging the life and the posterity prolonging the memory, it is only the point of arrival of a continuous progress whose point of origin was inside Renan himself and which was not to burst forth fully until that date; after him in this sense and on this point Renan is responsible for the ulterior modern grossnesses, including all those which culminated in that governmental ceremony; in this sense and in this measure, proposing to analyze, to interpret, to read this book of the foundation of the superstition of modern science which was the Future of Science, we shall not be able to neglect, we must not for a single instant lose sight of the explanations, the readings, the interpretations, gross though they be, which assail us mounting from all sides from those ulterior moderns.

We must not lose sight of the explanation by interest. On the one hand it is an explanation which is true in itself. On the other hand, and this is almost more interesting, it is an explanation which is true as representation of an ancestral interior defect. Thus understood, in these two senses, in the intrinsic sense, and in the sense of a representation of responsibility, this explanation by interest is necessary, but it does not suffice. It is even far from being sufficient.

We must not lose sight of the explanation by habit. On the one hand it is an explanation which is true in itself, even in the gross sense in which the people who are its instigators propose it to us. On the other hand, and this is decidedly more interesting, it is an explanation which is true as representation of an ancestral interior defect. Thus understood, in these two senses, in the narrow intrinsic sense, and in the narrow sense of a representation of responsibility, this explanation by habit is necessary, but it does not suffice. It is even far from being sufficient.

But in their common general accuracy in these two senses, in their common general necessity in these two senses, in their common and general insufficiency in these two senses, in their narrowness and in their very weakness, these two explanations, the explanation by habit and the explanation by interest differ profoundly, bring forth, present in themselves a profound difference in this sense that the second, the explanation by interest remains, as was to be expected, since it is an explanation by interest, a narrow and infertile explanation, while the first, the explanation by habit, being an explanation of organic and particularly psychological origin, opens, to whoever wishes to mount back to its source, an entire current, an entire river of explanation much more interesting and much more profound.

I retain this explanation by habit. But I do not retain it only, I do not understand it only in this double narrow sense, in the sense of a direct exactitude, and in the sense of a representation of responsibility by equivalence. We shall not understand it only in this double narrow sense, but I restore to it all its first force, all its power and its original singularity. Yes it is by habit that Renan continued, it is by habit that Renan put or left in his works so many expressions of the spiritual life, and that he even expressly made several works which are properly works of the spiritual life, it is by habit that he continued as he had begun; but it was not only by a professional habit, by a habit of trade; it was by a habit much more profound, by an intellectual habit, interior itself, moral, mental, psychological habit of all his psychology, by an organic habit, itself ancestral. By a sentimental habit in short, of all habits the most profound, and the most essential. Those mutual meeknesses of the Church and of Renan, those exchanges and those communications of meeknesses, and not only of politenesses, over our heads, cannot receive another explanation. Renan, since the beginning of his ancestors, and a fortiori since his own beginning, or to speak exactly, since his beginning, since his ancient, since his first beginning in his ancestors and since his own second beginning in himself had received, had conceived this indelible habit of speaking, of thinking a certain language of the spiritual life; not only since some Breton seminary, since some little curacy of a departmental village, since his baptism and since some destination for the ecclesiastical state, but from much farther, since his barbarian parents and the most ancient ancestors Cimmerians. No one detaches himself entirely from such habits, thus understood, thus received, thus conceived, so profound, so organic, so adhering to life itself, no one, without cutting his life, this same life itself, the roots of his thought, of his consciousness, of all his life, of all his existence, of all his being and of all his reason of being, of his person and of what is much more profound than even the person. Admitting even that this should be possible, which no one will believe. Renan in no way cared to detach himself entirely thus, This would be a properly monstrous operation; and Renan had taste enough to love the natural in what it is wholly enemy to a monstrous operation. And then in short he was thinking of himself, of his future, of his interest, of his utilization, of his progress, of his interests, of his success. He had for all that, for himself Renan, an anxious attention, a sweet and good and soft pity, a piety even, a pity-piety ecclesiastical with soft and flabby and redoubled cheeks, a pious tenderness, a moved affection. It would have done harm to Renan, and he had no such taste for injustice that he would have consented to do harm to Renan. Who was so good a man, and so interesting. This operation also hurts, a great deal. And not having an insensible soul, he would have done many other things, rather than harm to M. Renan. Renan had no desire whatever to cut the roots which would nourish the life of Renan, the glory and the talents of Renan. His good and his bad qualities, which were equally numerous, and which he loved equally, defended him equally, conspired to keep him against any temptation to proceed to so entire an operation. One must see, one must consider a little what was then Renan’s situation, his mental situation and above all his sentimental situation. Conservative, profoundly and natively conservative, not at all conservative of the revolution, like those others, but conservative of conservation, enemy of all novelty, of all that is modern, — for it is singular, but it is true, and moreover it would not be the first time that this phenomenon would have presented itself in history, — that this father of all the moderns was the man in the world the most enemy of all that resembled the modern, conservative by habit itself and by birth, born, remained conservative, timid, not to say fearful of any change, a fortiori of any revolution, social or simply political, and even moral or mental, Breton certainly and in no way already Blue of Brittany, he conserved, he loved every habit; and as he loved Renan a great deal, by modesty, among all habits, with a singular predilection he loved, he conserved his own. And even if he had not loved and conserved them naturally and by habit, he was too intelligent not to do so by reflection, in his own interest. He saw, he knew, he understood that this alimentary religion, which he was going to leave or which he had just left, would continue to furnish to the consumption of his talent and thus to the preparation of his glory.

The soldiers, said sensibly the ancient theory, procure their success and prepare their glory, (of their military chiefs). The Church, in this system, Catholicism, Christianity received the honor of continuing to be charged with procuring the success and preparing the glory of the exegetical chief.

On the one hand he was intelligent enough, he had enough sense of realities, of conservations, of origins and of alimentations to know that generally it is extremely dangerous for a talent and for a glory to cut itself off from its ancient roots; this operation being radically impossible, by definition, for a genius; he particularly was intelligent enough, he had enough sense of himself, of his talent, of his worth, of his means, of his conservation, of his origins, of his alimentation, of his continuation, of his glory to prepare, of his limits also, to know that for him more than for anyone it was extremely dangerous to cut his alimentary roots. For no man as much as he was nourished by his most ancient roots. And he did not ignore it. For he was intelligent. On the other hand he knew perfectly all the advantage, all the immense superiority that the maintenance of a certain spiritual life in his back-operation mental, in his back-thought, translated, expressed by the maintenance of a certain language of the spiritual life in his back-style, in his back-writing, in his back-language, would give him over his new friends, over his new partisans, over his new disciples, and also over his survivors successors.

And it is not certain, the malicious old man that he had always been, that of all the superiorities which he claimed to obtain it might not be that one, that superiority over his disciples and over his friends, and also over his survivor successors, that secretly was not for him the most agreeable. Let one think back on a certain tone, pretendedly detached, in which he speaks of his own death, and of the continuation of the others. I said to myself that the old manuscript would be published after my death, and that perhaps there would come for me one of those recalls to the attention of the world of which the poor dead have need in the unequal competition that the living offer them, in this regard.

There are two sorts of friends: those who want to prevail over their friends, to make themselves superior to their friends, to command their friends, to take precedence, to dominate, to exercise over their friends an authority of command, to command in glory and to command in domination: these are friends according to the world, and, to tell the truth, they do not even merit, in any sense or in any fashion, the name of friends; for they are enemies on the contrary, infinitely more enemies than the true and the simple enemies; the others do not even think to compare themselves with their friends, because they know that emulation even is bad and that what one names by this name of emulation is never anything but the disguise of original envy and of old jealousy; these do not think to make themselves superior, to exercise an authority of command, a glory of domination: they do not even think of it; for they think to rejoice in the happiness of their friends; or rather they do not even think of it and it is wholly naturally and spontaneously, unconsciously and goodly, without thinking of it, wholly commonly that they are happy in the happiness of their friends; wholly innocently; these are the interior friends, the friends according to the rule of friendship, the true friends, the simple and the only ones who are worthy of receiving this name of friends.

It is unfortunately certain that Renan belonged to the first sort; as he had become a clerk according to the lay, he had always been a friend according to the world; and that is what one must never forget when one approaches, as a book full of teachings and of information, the Future of Science.

There are two sorts of men, those who wish to have partisans and those who do not wish to have partisans, or at least who do not propose to themselves uniquely to have partisans; the first wish to exercise an authority of command, a glory of domination over men who thus become partisans and through them over the rest of the world; these are the chiefs of party; and there are intellectual parties as there are political parties; and the intellectual parties, — political themselves, — are much more dangerous than the political parties, — proper, — because they reach man much more profoundly; the others dread nothing so much as to become party men, except what they dread much more still, what they dread the most: to become chiefs of party.

It is unfortunately certain that Renan belonged to the first sort; the ceremony of the inauguration of the monument of Renan at Tréguier, accomplished essentially as a party festival, as a governmental ceremony, has only, in this sense, translated, as a crowning of fact, as a supreme exterior arrival, in a particularly gross language, an originary interior invincible tendency, spirit. Renan was profoundly a party man and asked only to become a chief of party, of intellectual party and perhaps indeed, God helping, of political party, — one has not forgotten his independent liberal candidacy under the Empire, in May–June 1869, in a certain district of Seine-et-Marne, I believe it was in the district where Lagny is, — and one never knows to what point the men of that time and of that generation, the intellectuals before the word, the founders and the intellectual fathers, after and during the resounding examples of Lamartine and of Hugo, of so many others, were ambitious, covetous not so much perhaps of intellectual power as of all power.

Rather he was all the more willingly a party man because that is the good means to become what he asked only to be: a chief of party: that is what one must never forget when one approaches the Future of Science: that this book is a book of party, a book of a party man, and, dully, a book of a party man who himself asked only to make partisans for himself, only to become chief of party. Who asked not only to become himself a partisan, but who asked only to recruit partisans for himself, to found a party, to make himself the founder and the chief, statutory, of a party. To enroll young men, the oldest and dearest ambition, the most secret ecclesiastical covetousness.

There is much more resemblance, much more, a quite close, a tight kinship between intellectual ambition and political ambition, between the intellectual parties and the political parties, between the passion of intellectual command and the passion of political command; or rather there are not only affinities, a general affinity between the authority of intellectual command and the authority of political command, there is not only between these two that singular taste, that common covetousness, that common appetite for every authority of command, so widespread in our democracies, but we see by all that today is happening around us that the covetousness of intellectual domination is the same as the covetousness of political domination, and of government. Not only that it is a particular case of it, but that it is the same, deeper still, infinitely more disquieting and more dangerous, being inquisitorial and so to speak more interior, being more essential and penetrating to the very roots of interior liberties, in order to reach them. Whoever would doubt this would only have to look a little at what is happening around us. For this is why, by an effect of that kinship, of that unity, of that continuity, of that identity, between the authority of intellectual command and the authority of political parliamentary and governmental command, that so many young men around us, and so many grown men, pass so easily, and with a continuous gait, from their attempts at intellectual domination, to realizations of political dominations. The whole Jauresist party notably is thus made of old young intellectual men, particularly of old celibate normaliens, old young intellectual men well preserved who would sell their souls firstly in order not to have to teach their class, in some department, secondly in order to exercise, to pilfer a parcel of political power over the servile French. One must believe that there is in the exercise of political domination a pleasure, a sort of delight unknown to the men of work and of works. The proof of it would be still in the facility, in the continuity with which we see that everywhere around us the intellectual parties themselves, considered globally and as parties, the intellectual parties ready-made, the intellectual parties in bloc become political parties, transform themselves into political parties, or rather, for it is their true, their interior and their final form, they form themselves, in-form themselves into political parties. And particularly in short, and individually, it is for this reason that we have for some years and that we see all the days around us more and more so many intellectuals, — so many university men, notably, — as easily, as continuously becoming politicians, notably putting themselves forward as candidates in the parliamentary elections, and sometimes succeeding in them, — I do not speak of municipal elections, — which would never happen to them, and of which they would run no risk, if they were properly, purely intellectuals. One believed, they perhaps believed themselves to be intellectuals, pure intellectuals; they spoke of politics with a certain disdain, in a certain tone; they were intellectual gentlemen, professionals of intellectuality: at the first use, at the first voyage one discovered them, one recognized them and they themselves discovered themselves, recognized themselves, saluted themselves politicians in the soul, politicians of old date and of old stock, familiars and old troops of politics, politicians at home and at ease, politicians from forever and not even only by vocation, but politicians born, — strayed, passing, truly strangers to the countries properly intellectual. Without having ever learned anything of politics, by instinct they knew it all, politics. For it is not by a conversion, nor by a leap, but it was by an immediately continuous passage, or rather it was by a return upon themselves, by a re-entry into themselves and into their true nature, by a re-finding of themselves that they betook themselves from their pretended countries of intellectual work to their true political fatherlands.

Of that connection of intellectual domination and of political domination, parliamentary, governmental, come from their profound unity, exterior manifestation, already gross, and a little superficial, of their very identity, of their community of deep source as being a community of vice, we have just precisely had a most striking illustration. It had been a thousand times understood, promised, sworn, put on the programs, which is nothing, put on the posters, in the newspapers, in the brochures, in the reviews, in the books, in the declarations and in the pacts, the most solemn, that as soon as the intellectual party should have attained the government of the Republic, the domination of the State, its first care would be to assure neutrality, philosophical, religious, metaphysical, of the State of this Republic. There was to be no longer either State philosophy, or State religion, or State metaphysics. Just as after the triumph of Dreyfusism there was to be no longer any raison d’État.

One must in this regard consider as one of the greatest events of the present time not at all the speech of M. Viviani, the new minister of labor, recently posted upon our walls, but a whole passage of this speech.

A little disaccustomed to the tribune after, I believe, eight years of absence, remained juvenile, very dashing, and friend of the oratorical period and of the eloquent parliamentary literature, if need be flowery, the new minister of the new ministry did what would not have done many of his new colleagues, many of his friends, political or amicable, what would not have done a man infinitely more advised like his colleague of Public Instruction and of Cults, a man infinitely more deft like his colleague of the Interior and president of the council.

What neither Briand nor Clemenceau would have ever done, that is precisely what M. Viviani began by doing, hastened to do for the beginning of his ministry, for his installation, and also for his re-entry into the tribune: to unmask his batteries, speaking in the name of the intellectual party, to reveal, to denounce, victoriously to announce the back-thought of the intellectual party.

A very great number of intellectuals had already let the cat out of the bag. But none of them had ever yet spoken in the name of the government, officially and as being a member of the government.

The Catholics had often said that such was the back-thought of the intellectual party, and even a thought which was no longer back at all. But they had so much lied, as an authoritarian political party, when they were themselves the party of government, that one could not believe that they were saying true since they had become not so much a minority, at least electoral, persecuted, as a minority, at least electoral, destined, in the intention of the intellectual party, to undergo persecution.

For the first time since Renan threw, posed the very first tracings of the statutes of the domination of the intellectual party a minister of the Republic, a secretary of State, speaking officially and formally in his name and in the name of the Government from the tribune of the Chamber, to the applause of an immense majority, in the badly informed silence of the whole minority, applause ratified and silence underscored by a posting itself voted by an enormous majority, for the first time a member of the Government has mounted the tribune to proclaim, solemnly, not only that the intellectual party proposed to base upon the world an entire metaphysics, an entire religion, but even that it had succeeded in this fully.

This declaration, official, this solemn proclamation is all the more interesting, if it was no more unexpected, because M. Viviani not being properly, originarily, an intellectual, one may consider this annunciation as the manifestation, as the manifesto of a rallying, all the more significant. M. Viviani really bore the word for the intellectual party, really made himself the spokesman of the intellectual party.

This did not suffice, said the new minister, and then we devoted ourselves to a work of anticlericalism, we tore from the soul of the people the belief in another life, in heavenly visions deceptive and unreal.

“It is here,” says in turn Le Matin, “that the talent of M. Viviani found its proof, if indeed it had need of proof. For not a protest arose on the right when the minister of labor said this formidable thing, formidable if one thinks that it is a minister who said it, even after the law of separation.”

I believe you, O Matin, that it was formidable. You have the tongue too long, you also, like a minister of labor, O parliamentary court-reporter, simple officious journalist. Yes I believe you, O newspaper and journalist, that it was formidable, even and above all after the law of separation. For this announcement makes quite the contrary of a separation. We cannot too much applaud ourselves here that the great morning newspaper has been more perspicacious than our parliamentary deputies. Who do not seem to have perceived then, then or since, that it was formidable. Not even those of the right, who have protested only by tired habit, without conviction. They are so awkward and so ill accustomed to no longer having the government that they no longer know how to reproach the government with anything.

A ministerial declaration so officially, so sovereignly made from the tribune, in a session so full, so attentively awaited and followed, a proclamation made by a minister in these circumstances and in these conditions, in the whole full exercise of his ministry, has by all that itself a first solemnity, a first value of solemnity.

A ministerial declaration made for the creation of a ministry, in all the full and solemn inauguration of a ministry, of a new ministerial department, has as a second solemnity, a second value of solemnity. Because it marks a commencement.

A ministerial declaration so solemnly posted, — so prodigal of postings has the Chamber shown itself in these latter times, and as ordinarily it shows itself at the beginning of a session, — by the fact of a vote so marked, by the parliamentary effect of the suffrages of so important a majority, has as a second double solemnity, a second double value of solemnity. It engages no longer only the ministerial, governmental authority and the responsibility. It engages all together, all equally, the parliamentary and legislative authority and the responsibility. The Chamber engages itself in it, formally, and no longer only the ministry.

M. René Viviani, minister of labor. — We said to the man who stops at the decline of day, crushed beneath the daily labor and weeping over his misery, we said to him that there was, behind the clouds which his sorrowful gaze pursues, only celestial chimeras, and with a magnificent gesture we extinguished, in the sky, lights which shall not be relit.

Now, the work begins today; for what will you reply to the man, from whom we have torn his faith, for whom we have made the sky empty, who remains humiliated every day by the contrast which makes of him at once…

I do not put the words in his mouth. And in short further on:

To those who say that a country without religious ideal is on its way to decadence, reply that a country is not in decline if it increases the moral and social worth of the individual.

I take this text in Le Matin of Friday the 9th of November, and I believe that I can take it there without danger, if it is true that Le Matin has become the officious organ of this new government to a point that perhaps had never been reached. It is therefore not suspect of having wished to play a bad trick on the new minister. It tends on the contrary, all its effort tends, in this issue and in the surrounding issues, all its effort, all its combination, all its presentation, only to make him froth, as they say. They lean in his own sense. Everything therefore allows us to believe that we have here, in Le Matin, the originary text, the first text and the most exact.

The same text in Le Petit Temps dated the same day in the evening, which much more simply makes me believe that this text is quite simply the analytical text distributed to the newspapers, by the official services I believe, the same text, — with this reservation however, and this detail interests me, that after the phrase of the gas lamps that will not be relit, after the prolonged applause on the left, the text of Le Petit Temps carries Lively protests on the right. I dare conjecture that it is not Le Petit Temps that invented these Lively protests on the right, that they were indeed in the text, that the right all the same perceived that a few words had just been said to it, and that it is Le Matin that suppressed them, no doubt because they took up space, perhaps because they obscured the magnificence of the extinguisher’s gesture. For in short:

As in short an innovation in the movement can never go without an innovation in the corresponding form, and reciprocally, it must be noted that here it is also the first time since the world has existed that a romantic presents to us as being magnificent a gesture which consists in extinguishing lights. and with a magnificent gesture we extinguished, in the sky, lights which shall not be relit. This is new, in the verb, and this novelty in the verb only underscores, represents, as always happens, a corresponding novelty in the gesture, an innovation of the gesture itself. The old father Hugo and following him an incalculable number of romantics had made profession of drawing for the joy of our gazes and for the dazzlement of our eyes an incalculable number of metaphors from the pacific trade of lamplighter of street-lamps, become in time and by the progress of civilization the trade of lighter of gas-jets. Hugo leading the great band and saraband of the romantics had well accustomed us to this specialty of metaphors. And in the great metaphorical shop he had a whole department of them. But they had accustomed us also to distinguish clearly between the two equally honorable parts of this honorable trade. The lighters of gas-jets light when one must. But they also extinguish. When the hour has come. The great romantics had carefully distinguished, sorted between these two operations, these two parts of the trade of this honorable corporation. Retaining for themselves the functions of lighters of those gas-jets which in their metaphors they generally named stars, suns, beacons, and other glorious rhymes, on account of fanfares, they reserved disdainfully and hatefully, with at least a romantic hate, the second operation, the contrary operation, of extinguisher of those same jets, for kings, priests, popes, and other princes of the night. It is then that Hugo made ombre rhyme with sombre, and then ombres with sombres, and sometimes, more happily, with décombres, for he was not like our young men, whom I do not wish to call young men, in order not to get myself assassinated, and he respected the rule of the plural. It is then that he brought out and that he set going the rhymes of the ténèbres. Les escadrons volants des hussards de la mort. Hugo, he personally, had he lit enough, of lights, and his damned enemies had they extinguished enough. He thus followed good sense moreover, as he did wind, the vulgar sense, the common sense; which made his strength; for these men, these functionaries, these municipal workers, these honorable union members our masters, who equally light and equally extinguish, ourselves, we name them lighters only, lighters of gas-jets; by a sort of modesty and of reverence; and we have no thought of naming them on the contrary extinguishers; though it would be just and though it would be equally their trade, the other part, the contrary part of their trade; nor at full length their title messieurs the lighters then extinguishers of gas-jets; as a healthy, equitable logic would demand; we would be ashamed, for them, to name them extinguishers of gas-jets; we prefer, if I may say, to leave that in the shadow. For the first time in the history of the verb, in the history of French metaphor, and perhaps of all metaphor, the old and always good old and young romantic metaphor has been reversed. There has been found a man bold enough, a revolutionary enough to do that. And it is the contrary, it is the gesture of the extinguisher which has been loftily claimed by the poet as a gesture which he has proclaimed magnificent. There is an event of incalculable bearing.

We said to him that there was, behind the clouds which his sorrowful gaze pursues, only celestial chimeras, and with a magnificent gesture, we extinguished, in the sky, lights which shall not be relit.

But we ourselves today, let us be historians. To us the confrontation of texts. Let us set going the critical apparatus. Let us refer to the Journal officiel, issue of the same Friday the 9th of November. Not that the text of the Journal officiel is in itself a more authentic text. Often on the contrary it is less authentic, being the text which the orator has reviewed more at leisure, which he has corrected on proofs, which he has established with a calmer head. Thus the text of the Journal officiel, which is the one that is posted in case of posting, far from giving authentically, in the sense of really, what was said in session, gives it only authentically in the sense of officially and not in the sense of really. We do not have what was really said in session, but what in the evening, reading his proofs at the printer’s, or in an office, the orator wishes it to be published officially that he has said.

But the text of the Journal officiel, for the passage which we have retained, is not only more complete, which is natural, but more explicit still and more marked than this text which I have conjectured to be a simple analytical text. And for this explicitation and for this marking one must congratulate equally both the orator and the minister. One must also thank him for it. With him at least we know I will not say only even where we are going, for he himself speaks only in the past, but where we have gone, where we are.

This did not suffice. All together, by our fathers, by our elders, by ourselves, we devoted ourselves in the past to a work of anticlericalism, to a work of irreligion. We tore human consciences from belief. When a wretch, fatigued by the weight of the day, bent his knees, we raised him, we told him that behind the clouds there were only chimeras. Together, and with a magnificent gesture, we extinguished in the sky lights which shall not be relit! (Lively applause on the left and on the extreme left)

The applause has become lively, instead of prolonged as it was, and it has extended to the extreme left; but the lively protests on the right have fallen, as in the version of Le Matin. It is a compensation.

What will you reply, I ask you, to the child become a man who has profited from primary instruction completed moreover by the postscholastic works of the Republic, in order to confront his situation with that of other men? What will you reply to a man who is no longer a believer, thanks to us, whom we have torn from faith, to whom we have said that the sky was empty of justice (Applause on the extreme left and on the left) when he seeks justice here below?

M. Lasies. — Very good! very good!

To those who say that boldness in social reforms hurls a country into economic and financial decadence, that a country is never in decline when it increases the moral worth and the social worth of its children! (Applause)

Here the variant is important. But the declaration of the taking of power by the intellectual party is then sufficiently acquired. That it is the intellectual party that has entered into power, or rather, here at least, that power has entered into the views of the intellectual party. One understands that M. Lasies found that it was Very good! very good!

In the great great speech of the next day, the same Friday, and which received equally the honors of the posting, although it said very exactly the contrary, and even though it was made very expressly for that, which received all the same the honors of the same posting, for parliamentary posting upon parliamentary posting is worth, a statesman infinitely more a statesman, a man of government infinitely more concerned about his responsibilities, a man also infinitely more skillful and more advised, if not more supple, a man whose prodigious parliamentary talent we had measured for ten years in the socialist congresses, but which the bourgeois parties have known only for a few years, a man who is reserved perhaps for the highest parliamentary fortunes, and perhaps, in this kind, the most merited, a man who from being firstly rapporteur of the law of separation has become by the fact and by his own taking-possession as the author, at least general, to the point that one will perhaps say the Briand law as one says the Waldeck-Rousseau law, a man who moreover measured thus, he also, his own responsibility, a man who handles the future, who measures the future, who reckons the future, a man who in short works for today, and for later, and for much later, and not only for today, who that day also was working in his own field and in the domain of his own responsibility where he has become competent, who had no more to speak in the air and in the zone of metaphors and lights, but who had the responsibility of acting in the gray region of realizations and of facts, on the morrow Friday the minister of cults was trying to catch up, as much as he could, the declamatory declaration of M. Viviani. On the administration of the different cults, and notably of the Catholic cult, on the formal neutrality of the State in matters of cults and more profoundly on what is represented by this formal neutrality, on the material neutrality of the State in matters of religion, of metaphysics and of philosophy, the minister of the-treatment-that-the-State-will-make-prayer-undergo, I mean prayer which will not be said upon the Acropolis, pronounced excellent words. Speaking in the name of the whole government, and no longer only, like the preceding minister, on this point, in his personal name, and also speaking on resolutions of imminent policy, for decisions of immediate government, he sensibly succeeded in disengaging the government.

He renailed to the wall the old declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which the preceding orator, in his impulse, proceeding like a simple congreganist and like a Vendean, had, in sum, trampled underfoot. Unhooked from the other side, trampled by the left foot, but in short unhooked also, trampled also underfoot.

But considered as a declaration by adoption, by endorsement, as a proclamation of the taking of power of the intellectual party, this speech of Viviani, in this passage that we have retained, remains entire.

Everything is there in this speech, in this passage; nothing is lacking there, and not even the destination, in the intention of the modern intellectual party, of primary instruction and of the postscholastic works. Of the third Republic, to finish speaking like them.

Must one recall here, one more time, must one recall again one more time in this country, and will our Frenchmen never recall to themselves, never wholly alone that the metaphysical negations are metaphysical operations on the same footing as the metaphysical affirmations, often more precarious, or, to speak exactly, that the negations being, generally, and generically, affirmations, reversed, being a particular sort of affirmations: the negative affirmations, particularly the metaphysical negations are metaphysical affirmations, reversed, a particular sort of metaphysical affirmations: the negative metaphysical affirmations, often more precarious, if possible, than the pure metaphysical affirmations, than the metaphysical affirmations properly so called, affirmative, affirmant. Positive.

Thus must one recall pell-mell and in brief, to take date, once more, that the belief in God is an operation, a metaphysical, religious opinion; that even to count justly there is the belief in God, in one sole God, which is a metaphysical, religious belief. To believe in one sole God, that there is a God, but that there are not several of them, is to perform a metaphysical, religious operation, variable itself and different, different from itself, it is in reality to perform already several of them, according to who is this God, unique. And there are as many of them, of these operations, as one can imagine of Gods, unique. Reciprocally to believe that there is not one God, but several, is again to perform a metaphysical, religious operation, different from the first, although it is perhaps a little of the same family, variable itself and different from within itself, it is in reality to perform a multitude of metaphysical, religious operations, as many as you will make a multitude not only of those plural gods within each polytheistic mythology but of those polytheistic mythologies themselves. Contrarily to believe that there is neither one God nor several, is to perform face to face, in contrary, in reply, a metaphysical, religious operation, or rather it is to perform in one alone, under the garment of one alone, a multitude of metaphysical, religious operations, as many as there are positive operations of which one thus makes the negatives, as many as there are affirmative operations of which you thus make the replies.

To speak the language of the school, must one then recall that atheism is a philosophy, a metaphysics, that it can be a religion, a superstition even, and a world, a system, or rather, and to speak exactly, that it is or that it can be several and many of all that, on the same footing and neither more nor less than so many theisms and so many deisms, so many monotheisms and so many polytheisms, and so many mythologies, and so many pantheisms, that it is a mythology, it also, like the others, and, like the others, a language, and that since it must be done and since there must be one, there have been more intelligent ones.

Similarly with the belief in eternal life. To believe in a future life, of reparatory justice or of beatitude, or of any other indication, is to perform a metaphysical, religious operation. To believe in several future lives, as so many humanities have believed, and also in several anterior lives, which is the natural complement of it, and which makes as it were the expected balance of it, to believe in an indefinity of other lives, anterior and ulterior, is to perform another, is to perform innumerable other metaphysical, religious operations.

But to believe on the contrary that this temporal death has an absolute, essential, total, metaphysical, religious value, perfectly annulling, is to perform yet another, yet a multitude of other operations. Infinitely more unintelligible, more inconceivable, more impossible to represent to oneself even. Infirm hypotheses, like all the others, because they are, like all the others, poor human operations. Hypotheses still infinitely more infirm.

Must one then recall that the metaphysics and the philosophy and that the intellectual religion and that the superstition of the modern intellectual party is a metaphysics, a religion, a superstition more, like so many others, after so many others, — before so many others, — in the history of so many humanities.

I do not say only and globally in the history of humanity. Do they then believe, after so many others, like so many others, — before so many others, — that they have said the last word of the history of humanity, that they have put the final period to the history of all human thought?

Must one here recall so many metaphysics and so many philosophies, so many religions and so many superstitions, must one cite so many humanities abolished or living, must one foresee so many possible humanities, or some of those humanities, must one ask back again from a minister of labor and from a President of the Council a few elementary, summary recapitulations of histories of four years?

For myself I would ask back of him two or three more, to begin with, because it is very agreeable to read in proofs, much more than the best of speeches.

One may think personally, as I think, that this metaphysics of the modern intellectual party is one of the grossest that humanity will have ever known, that it is infinitely more summary and more barbarous, in the Hellenic sense of the word, than the very first Hellenic cosmogonies, or rather that it is, and that they were not, that it mounts back as reactionary very far beyond the first Eleatics, and that it would have seemed wholly gross and unintelligent and summary and backward to Thales the Milesian, as to all those first Ionians, not to refer me to those admirable Pythagoreans. One may think, as I think personally, that the authors and that the sectators of this base and gross metaphysics of the modern intellectual party, unintelligent, would have been denounced, despised as barbarians, as having not only no sense of beauty, but as having not even, at bottom, the sense of nature, not only in the schools of Athens, as having not even an idea of the questions that pose themselves, and snorting in questions that do not pose themselves, but before the beginning of the grandeur of Athens in all the colony cities of the Ionian coasts, and at the other end of the world, of this Greek world, in all the colony cities of the coasts of Greater Greece, of the Sicilian coasts and already of the Italian coasts. I do not speak of the ancient Jews, who would have begun, as a way of entering into the matter, by putting them to the edge of the sword, as impure, and disagreeable to the Lord. For one will never know to what point this old Israel was a military people. But that is not the debate.

The modern intellectuals, the modern intellectual party have infinitely the right to have a metaphysics, a philosophy, a religion, a superstition as gross and as stupid as is necessary to please them, I mean if not the civic right, at least the social right, political, in short the legal right. That does not regard us, I mean if not as citizens, at least as taxpayers, as voters. Being set aside beforehand, and by definition, to what point that regards us as men, as philosophers, and as metaphysicians ourselves. But what is at stake and what is at issue, what is the debate, is to know whether the State, modern, has the right and whether it is its trade, its duty, its function, its office to adopt this metaphysics, to assimilate it to itself, to impose it upon the world by putting into its service all the enormous means of governmental force.

There are so many other humanities, so many other metaphysics, so many other philosophies, so many other religions, so many other superstitions. Must one recall only that the intellectual metaphysics, that the modern intellectual philosophy, that the religion, that the superstition of the modern intellectual party goes directly more or less against the whole world, against the whole acquired world and which has made its proofs, different, against all the humanities truly worthy of this name, against all the interesting humanities and which have truly lived, going directly against the whole destination of the people of Israel, — and through it going also much against the Jews, — for it is quite difficult, whatever certain modern appearances may wish to make believe, — it is quite difficult to go directly against the destination of the people of Israel and not to go expressly against the Jews; going directly against all the Hellenic cities and schools; going directly against all the Christian peoples; going equally against the Jews and against the Christians; among the Christians going equally against the negligible schismatics, but going equally against all sorts of Protestants and against the Catholics; going equally against those who are of several sorts and against those who are of only one sort; and among the philosophers, a contemptible race perhaps, and negligible because they are not peoples, going equally against the Platonists, against the Cartesians, and against the Kantians; not counting the philosophy that one sees prepared upon the head of M. Bergson.

In the language of the school, going equally against all the theists and against all the deists, of which the sorts are innumerable, against all the monotheisms, all the polytheisms, all the mythologies, all the pantheisms.

That is to say going more or less against the whole world, against all that one has and known a little proper, since there has been a world, and a little intelligent, going certainly against pieces of humanity which are at least large pieces and of which the least one can say is that no one can treat them as negligible. And that all the same one cannot count to spirit away with a turn of the hand.

The modern intellectual party has a hundred times the right to have thus a metaphysics, however base it may seem to us, and to go thus, as intrepidly, against so many considerable humanities. What it is only a question of knowing, what is only at stake and in debate, is whether they will succeed in founding by the use and by the abuse of governmental means the sovereign reign of this metaphysics.

It is not a question of knowing what this metaphysics and this religion is worth. It is not a question of knowing it here. Even though it were excellent, — and there is no excellent metaphysics, in this sense, there is not, by definition, a metaphysics universally demonstrable, and thus politically and socially valid, — even though, which is impossible, this metaphysics were excellent, which is impossible of every impossibility, by right and in fact, in this regard, and in this sense, — even then the State absolutely would not have the right to impose it upon us by the means which are proper to it, nor to make of it an integral and constitutive part of the State, nor to make itself the executive minister and the secular arm of it.

When then shall we have at last the separation of Metaphysics and of the State; but for good, this time, the real, the good separation; not always the separation of the Metaphysics electorally, politically the weakest, in parliamentary politics, for the profit and for the governmental establishment of the Metaphysics electorally, politically the strongest, in parliamentary politics, but definitively the separation of metaphysics, strong or weak, without distinction, and without exception, even electoral, even political, and even parliamentary.

When then will our Frenchmen ask of the State and accept of the State only the government of temporal values? which is already a great deal, and perhaps too much; when then will they refuse to receive from the hands of the State what is in no way of the domain of the State? When then will the State itself perform its trade, which is already so vast, and so difficult, and so heavy for modern societies, and which it acquits so badly, and will hold itself rigorously, honestly, to the limits and to the conditions of its trade.

When then will our State, which has already so many trades, which fabricates matches and which fabricates laws, which fabricates transport by railroads and regulations of public administration, not without difficulty and often not without some embarrassment, which they perceive, leave in peace definitively the consciences and understand that it is not its affair to fabricate metaphysics for us.

When then will the State, fabricator of matches and of summonses, understand that it is not its affair to make itself philosopher and metaphysician.

There are already quite enough of us who are metaphysicians.

We have the disestablishment of the Churches. When shall we have the disestablishment of metaphysics. What eleventh or twelfth of December, since one speaks to us so much, in this matter, of an eleventh or twelfth of December, of what year of time will bring us the disestablishment of metaphysics.

When will a minister at the tribune at last understand that it is not his affair, as minister, to make for us a teaching nor an imposition of metaphysics; and that he has so many other things, useful, to tell us and to do.

We no longer have a State catechism. Not very long ago, and we must congratulate ourselves on it without any reservations. Must it be, Pulligny, that this World without God which together we edited in good accord, you translator because such were sensibly your opinions, I editor as the most interesting attempt in this genre by private initiative, must it be that this World without God, by a reversal that doubtless you did not reckon on, become in its turn a new governmental catechism, taught by the gendarmes, with the benevolent collaboration of the gentlemen guardians of the peace?