Notre jeunesse. Les Milliet

Our Youth

Charles Péguy

A family of Fourierist republicans. — The Milliets. — After so many happy encounters, after the Vuillaume cahiers, it is a veritable stroke of good fortune for our cahiers to be able to begin today the publication of these archives of a republican family. When M. Paul Milliet brought me his first proposals concerning them, with that incurable modesty of people who really are bringing something, he did not fail to begin by excusing himself, saying: You will see. There are letters in there from Victor Hugo, from Béranger. (By that he meant first of all to excuse himself for the fact that there were, among the papers he was bringing me, documents about the great men, coming from great men, historical documents, about historical men, and, naturally, unpublished documents.) There are letters from the conquest of Algeria, from the expedition to Mexico, from the Crimean War. (Or perhaps rather from the war in Italy.) (By that he meant to excuse himself, to allege that there were, among these papers, historical documents, about the great events of history, coming, coming directly from the great events, and naturally authentic documents, and naturally unpublished documents.) I answered him no.

I told him no, you understand. Do not excuse yourself. Glorify yourself, on the contrary. Letters of Béranger, letters of Victor Hugo, the room is full of them. We have had them up to our necks. The libraries are full of them, and it is even for that (and for that purpose) that the libraries are made. It is even of that that the librarians too are made. And we others as well, the friends of the librarians. We have them, we have them, we have them. They are still publishing them for us every day. And when there are no more of them, they will publish still more. Because, in case of need, we will make them. What am I saying, we do make them, they are made. And the family will help us make them. Because it will always mean royalties to collect.

But what we want to have, what we cannot make, is precisely the letters of people who are not Victor Hugo. Quinet, Raspail, Blanqui, — Fourier, — that is all very well. But what we want to know is exactly, is precisely what troops they had behind them, what admirable troops, those thinkers and those republican leaders, those great founders of the Republic.

That is what we want to have, what no one can make, what no one can fabricate.

About the great masters, about the leaders, history will always inform us, after a fashion, rather badly than well, that is its trade, and in default of history the historians, and in default of the historians the professors (of history). What we want to know and what we cannot invent, what we want to be acquainted with, what we want to learn, is not the leading roles, the great masks, the great game, the great marquees, the theater and the spectacle; what we want to know is what there was behind, what there was underneath, how this people of France was made; in short, what we want to know is what was, in that heroic age, the very tissue of the people and of the republican party. What we want to do is, properly, ethnic histology. What we want to know is of what tissue this people and this party were woven, woven; how an ordinary, average, so to speak obscure republican family lived, taken at random, so to speak, taken from the ordinary tissue, taken and cut from the full cloth, in the very cloth itself; what was believed there, what was thought there, — what was done there, for they were men of action,

— what was written there; how people married there, how they lived there, on what, how they raised the children there; — how people were

born there, to begin with, for people were born, in those days;

how people worked there, how people spoke there, how

people wrote there; and whether verses were made there, what verses were made there; in what soil, in short, in what common soil, in what ordinary soil, on what loam, on what ground, in what terroir, under what skies, in what climate, the great poets and the great writers grew up. In what soil of the open ground this great Republic grew up. What we want to know is what it was, what was the very tissue of the bourgeoisie, of the Republic, of the people, when the bourgeoisie was great, when the people was great, when the republicans were heroic and the Republic had clean hands.

To say everything: when the republicans were republicans and the republic was the republic. What we want to see and to have is not a history dressed up in its Sunday best, it is the history of all the days of the week; it is a people in the texture, in the weave, in the tissue of its daily existence, in the acquisition, in the earnings, in the labor of the daily bread, panem quotidianum; it is a race in its reality, in its profound flowering.

Now, if there are letters of Victor Hugo and verses of Béranger, we will not deliberately set out to eliminate them. To begin with, Hugo and Béranger came out of those people. But with those families one must always beware of lawsuits.

How did these men live who were our ancestors and whom we recognize as our masters. What they were profoundly, commonly, in the laborious train of ordinary life, in the laborious train of ordinary thought, in the admirable train of the devotion of every day. What the people was in the time when there was a people. What the bourgeoisie was in the time when there was a bourgeoisie. What a race was in the time when there was a race, in the time when there was that race, and when it was growing. What were the conscience and the heart of a people, of a bourgeoisie and of a race. What the Republic was, in short, in the time when there was a Republic: that is what we want to know; that is, very precisely, what M. Paul Milliet brings us.

How did this people work, this people that loved work, universus universum, that entirely loved work entirely, that was laborious, even more, hard-working, that delighted in working, that worked all together, bourgeoisie and people, in joy and in health; that had a veritable cult of work; a cult, a religion of well-done work. Of finished work. How a whole people, a whole race, friends, enemies, all adversaries, all profoundly friends, was swollen with sap and with health and with joy: that is what one will find in the archives, let us speak modestly, in the papers of this republican family.

There one will see what a culture was, how it was infinitely other (infinitely more precious) than a science, an archaeology, a teaching, an item of information, an erudition and naturally a system. There one will see what culture was in the time when the professors had not yet crushed it. There one will see what a people was in the time when the primary [schoolteaching] had not yet obliterated it.

There one will see what a culture was in the time when there was a culture; how it is almost indefinable, a whole age, a whole world of which today we no longer have the idea.

There one will see what the very marrow of our race was, what the cellular and medullary tissue was. What a French family was. There one will see characters. There one will see all that we no longer see, all that we do not see today. How the children pursued their studies in the time when there were studies.

In short, all that we no longer see today.

There one will see in the very tissue what a cell, a family, was; not one of those families which founded dynasties, the great republican dynasties, but one of those families which were like republican dynasties of the people. The dynasties of the common tissue of the Republic.

Those families which precisely count for us because they are of the common tissue.

A certain number, a small number perhaps of these families, of these common dynasties, generally allying themselves with one another, weaving themselves into one another like threads, by filiation, by alliance, made, furnished the whole history not only of the Republic, but of the people of the Republic. It is these families, almost always the same families, that have woven the history of what the historians will call the republican movement and what we will resolutely call, what must be called, the publication of the republican mystique. The Dreyfus Affair will have been the last start, the supreme heroic spasm of this heroism and of this mystique, the start above all of all; it will have been the last manifestation of this race, the last effort of heroism, the last manifestation, the last publication of these families.

Halévy would readily believe, and I would very gladly believe with him, that a small number of faithful families, having founded the Republic, have thus maintained and saved it and maintain it still — do they maintain it still as much? — across a whole century and more, in a certain sense almost since the second half of the eighteenth century. I would very gladly believe with him that a small number of familial, dynastic, hereditary fidelities have maintained, do maintain the tradition, the mystique and what Halévy would very justly call republican conservation. But where I would perhaps not believe with him is that I believe that we are literally the last representatives of it, and, unless our children take it up, almost the posthumous survivors of it. And our Dreyfus Affair will have been the last of the operations of the republican mystique.

We are the last. Almost the after-last. Immediately after us begins another age, a wholly other world, the world of those who no longer believe in anything, who make of it their glory and their pride.

Immediately after us begins the world that we have named, that we will not cease to name the modern world. The world that plays the clever fellow. The world of the intelligent, of the advanced, of those who know, of those whom one cannot teach anything more, of those whom one cannot deceive. The world of those to whom there is nothing more to teach. The world of those who play the clever fellow. The world of those who are not dupes, imbeciles. Like us. That is to say: the world of those who believe in nothing, not even in atheism, who devote themselves, who sacrifice themselves to nothing. Exactly the world of those who have no mystique. And who boast of it. Let there be no mistake about it, and consequently let no one rejoice, neither on the one side nor on the other. The movement of de-republicanization of France is profoundly the same movement as the movement of its de-Christianization. It is together one same, one single profound movement of de-mystication. It is by the same profound movement, by a single movement, that this people no longer believes in the Republic and no longer believes in God, that it no longer wishes to lead the republican life, and no longer wishes to lead the Christian life, (that it has had enough of it); one might almost say that it no longer wishes to believe in the idols and no longer wishes to believe in the true God. The same unbelief, one single unbelief, reaches the idols and God, reaches together the false gods and the true God, the ancient gods, the new God, the old gods and the God of the Christians. One same sterility dries up the city and Christendom. The political city and the Christian city. The city of men and the city of God. It is properly the modern sterility. Let no one then rejoice, seeing the misfortune that comes upon the enemy, upon the adversary, upon the neighbor. For the same misfortune, the same sterility comes upon him. As I have put it so many times in these cahiers, in the time when no one read me, the debate is not properly between the Republic and the Monarchy, between the Republic and Royalty, above all if one considers them as political forms, as two political forms; it is not only, it is not exactly between the old regime and the new French regime; the modern world is not opposed only to the old French regime, it is opposed, it sets itself against all the old cultures together, against all the old regimes together, against all the old cities together, against all that is culture, against all that is city. It is in fact the first time in the history of the world that a world lives and prospers, appears to prosper, against all culture.

Let me be clearly understood. I do not say that it is forever. This race has seen many another. But in short it is for the present time.

And we are in it.

We even have very profound reasons to hope that it will not be for long.

We are extremely badly situated. We are in fact historically situated at a critical point, at a point of discernment, at this point of discrimination. We are situated just between the generations which have the republican mystique and those which do not have it, between those which still have it and those which no longer have it. So no one wishes to believe us. On both sides. Neutri, neither the one nor the other of the two. The old republicans do not wish to believe that there are no more young republicans. The young men do not wish to believe that there were old republicans.

We are between the two. No one therefore wishes to believe us. Neither the one nor the other. For both we are in the wrong. When we say to the old republicans: Take care, after us there is no one, they shrug their shoulders. They believe that there will always be some. And when we say to the young men: Take care, do not speak so lightly of the Republic, it has not always been a heap of politicians; it has behind it a mystique, it has within it a mystique, it has behind it a whole past of glory, a whole past of honor, and what is perhaps still more important, closer to the essence, a whole past of race, of heroism, perhaps of sanctity — when we say that to the young men, they gently despise us and would already treat us as old fogeys.

They would take us for maniacs.

I repeat that I do not say that it is forever. The most profound reasons, the gravest indications, force us on the contrary to believe, force us to think that the following generation, the generation that comes after the one that comes immediately after us, and which soon will be the generation of our children, will at last be a mystic generation. This race has too much blood in its veins to remain for the space of more than one generation in the ashes and in the moulds of criticism. It is too living not to reintegrate itself, at the end of a generation, into the organic.

Everything makes one believe that the two mystiques are going to flower again at once, the republican and the Christian. By the same movement. By a single profound movement, just as they were disappearing together (momentarily), just as together they were being obliterated. But in short what I say holds for the present time, for the whole present time. And in the space of a generation many events can nevertheless come to pass.

Misfortunes can happen.

Such is our meager situation. We are meager. We are thin. We are a lamina. We are as it were crushed, as it were flattened between, on the one hand, all the antecedent generations, and on the other hand an already thick layer of the following generations. Such is the principal reason for our meagerness, for the smallness of our situation. We have the thankless task, the meager task, the small office, the meager duty of making communicate, through us, the ones with the others, of assuring communication between the ones and the others, of warning the ones about the others, of informing the ones about the others. We shall therefore generally be hooted at from both sides. It is the common lot of whoever tries to speak a little truth (or truths).

We are charged, as if by chance, with making communicate through us, with one another, people who precisely do not wish to communicate. We are charged with informing people who precisely do not wish to be informed.

Such is our thankless situation.

Turning therefore toward the elders, we can nevertheless say and do, we can only repeat to these antecedent republicans: Take care. You do not suspect, you cannot imagine to what point you are not followed, to what point we are the last, to what point your regime is hollowing itself out within, hollowing itself out from the base. You hold the head, naturally, you hold the summit. But every year that comes, every year that passes pushes you up a notch, makes of your summit a more attenuated point, more trembling, more all-alone, more hollowed out underneath. And already ten, fifteen, soon twenty annuities, annual installments of young men are lacking to you at the base.

You hold the point, you hold the summit, you hold the head, but it is only a position in time, a situation that is as it were geographical, historical, temporal, temporary, chronological, chronographical. It is only a situation by the fact of the situation. It is not, it is in no way an organic situation. The situation at the point, the point-situation of the bud which organically, vegetally leads the tree, draws the whole tree to itself. And where it has passed, the whole tree will pass.

I am terrified when I see, when I simply observe what our elders do not wish to see, what is the very evidence, what it suffices to be willing to look at: to what point our young men have become strangers to all that was the very thought and the republican mystique. That is seen above all, and naturally, as that is always seen, by the fact that thoughts which for us were thoughts have become for them ideas, by the fact that what was for us, for our fathers, an instinct, a race, thoughts, has become for them propositions, by the fact that what was for us organic has become for them logical. Thoughts, instincts, races, habits which for us were nature itself, which went without saying, on which one lived, which were the very type of life, of which consequently one did not even think, which were more than legitimate, more than undisputed, unreasoned, have become what there is of the worst in the world: theses, historical, hypotheses, I mean to say what there is of the least solid, of the most non-existent. Underpinnings of theses. When a regime, from organic, has become logical, and from living, historical, it is a regime that is on the ground.

The Republic is proved today, is demonstrated today. When it was living, no one proved it.

It was lived. When a regime demonstrates itself, easily, conveniently, victoriously, it is because it is hollow, it is because it is on the ground.

Today the Republic is a thesis, accepted by the young men. Accepted, refused; indifferently; that has no importance; proved, refuted. What matters, what is grave, what signifies, is not that it be supported or upheld, more or less indifferently; it is that it be a thesis.

That is to say, precisely, that it must be supported or upheld.

When a regime is a thesis, among others, (among so many others), it is on the ground. A regime that is standing, that holds, that is living, is not a thesis.

— What does it matter, the politicians say to us, the professionals. What is it to us, the politicians reply, what can it matter to us. We have very good prefects. So what can it matter to us. It goes very well. We are no longer republicans, that is true, but we know how to govern. We even know how to govern better, much better than when we were republicans, they say. Or rather, when we were republicans we did not know how at all. And at present, they add modestly, at present we know a little. We have unlearned the Republic, but we have learned how to govern. Look at the elections. They are good. They are always good. They will be better. They will be all the better because it is we who make them. And because we are beginning to know how to make them. The right has lost a million votes. We could just as well have made it lose fifty and a half million. But we are moderate. The government makes the elections, the elections make the government. It is one good turn for another. The government makes the electors. The electors make the government. The government makes the deputies. The deputies make the government. We are nice. The populations look on. The country is requested to pay. The government makes the Chamber. The Chamber makes the government. It is not a vicious circle, as you might believe. It is not at all vicious. It is a circle, plain and simple, a perfect circuit, a closed circle. All circles are closed. Otherwise they would not be circles. It is not quite what our founders had foreseen. But our founders did not already manage so well. And then, after all, one cannot found forever. It would be tiring. The proof that it lasts, the proof that it holds, is that it has already been lasting for forty years. There is enough for forty centuries. It is the first forty years that are the hardest. It is the first forty years that cost. After that one is used to it. A country, a regime has no need of you, it has no need of mystiques, of mystique, of its mystique. It would rather be embarrassing. For so great a journey. It has need of a good policy, that is to say of a thoroughly governmental policy.

They are mistaken. These politicians are mistaken. From the height of this Republic forty centuries (of future) do not look down upon them. If the Republic has been going for forty years, it is because everything has been going for forty years. If the Republic is solid in France, it is not because the Republic is solid in France, it is because everything is solid everywhere. There are in modern history, and not in all history, there are for the modern peoples great waves of crisis, generally set out from France, (1789–1815, 1830, 1848) which make everything tremble from one end of the world to the other end. And there are landings, more or less long, calms, fair weather, which appease everything for a more or less long time. There are the epochs and there are the periods. We are in a period. If the Republic is settled, it is not because it is the Republic, (this Republic), it is not by its own virtue, it is because it is, because we are in a period, of settledness. The duration of the Republic no more proves the durability of the Republic than the duration of the neighboring monarchies proves the durability of the Monarchy. This duration does not signify that they are durable, but that they have begun, that they are in a period, a durable one. That they happened to find themselves, just like that, in a period, of duration. They are contemporary, they are steeped in the same time, in the same bath of duration. They are bathing in the same period. They are of the same age. That is all that it proves.

When therefore the republicans argue from the fact that the Republic lasts in order to say, to propose, to make a point of it, to make this proposition that it is durable, when they argue from the fact that it has been lasting for forty years in order to infer, to conclude, to propose that it is durable, for forty years, and more, that it was at least durable for forty years, that it was valid, that it had a warrant good at least for forty years, they have the air of pleading the very evidence. And yet they make, they commit a petitio principii, an overstepping of attribution. For in the Republic, which lasts, it is not the Republic, which lasts. It is the duration. It is not it, the Republic that lasts in itself, in its own self. It is not the regime that lasts in it. But in it, it is time that lasts. It is its time, it is its age. In it what lasts is all that lasts. It is the tranquillity of a certain period of humanity, of a certain period of history, of a certain period, of a certain historical landing.

When therefore the republicans attribute to the proper force of the regime, to a certain virtue of the Republic, the duration of the Republic, they commit, to their profit and to the profit of the Republic, a veritable overdraft of credit, a moral one. But when the reactionaries, on the contrary, the monarchists, show us, make us see with their habitual complaisance, equal and contrary to that of the others, represent to us, by way of an argument, the solidity, the tranquillity, the duration of the neighboring monarchies, (and even, in a certain sense, their prosperity, although here, in a certain sense, they are sometimes much more in the right), they do, on their side, exactly not even only a reasoning of the same order, but the same reasoning. They make, they commit the same anticipation, a contrary anticipation, the same, an anticipation, a usurpation, a diversion, an overflow, an overstepping of credit, symmetrical, antithetical, homothetic: the same anticipation, the same usurpation, the same diversion, the same overflow, the same overstepping of credit.

When the republicans attribute to the Republic, (to the republicans), (to the people, to the citizens), to the settledness, to the tranquillity, to the solidity, to the duration of the Republic the duration of the Republic, they attribute to the Republic what is not of it but of the time in which it moves. When the monarchists attribute to the neighboring monarchies, (to the monarchs), (to the monarchists, to the peoples, to the subjects), to their settledness, to their tranquillity, to their solidity, to their duration, their duration, they attribute to those monarchies what is not of them but of the time in which they move. Of the same time. Which is the time of everybody. And this central double-revolution staircase, this symmetry, this homothetic antithetism of the situations, this pairing of the attributions, has nothing in it that ought to astonish us. The republicans and the monarchists, the republican governing men and the monarchist theorists make the same reasoning, commit the same attribution, contrary attributions, complementary, homothetic, the same false attribution, because both of them have the same conception, the ones and the others they are intellectuals, both of them together and separately, both of them contrarily and together they are political men, they believe in a certain sense in politics, they speak the political language, they are situated, they move on the plane (of) politics. They therefore speak the same language. Together, the ones and the others. They therefore move on the same plane. They believe in regimes, and that a regime makes or does not make peace and war, strength and virtue, health and sickness, the settledness, the duration, the tranquillity of a people. The strength of a race. It is as if one believed that the châteaux of the Loire make or do not make the earthquakes.

We believe on the contrary (contrary to the ones and the others, contrary to both of them together) that there are forces and realities infinitely more profound, and that it is the peoples on the contrary who make the strength and the weakness of regimes; and much less the regimes, of the peoples.

We believe that the ones and the others together do not see, do not wish to see, those forces, those realities infinitely more profound.

If the Republic and the neighboring monarchies enjoy the same tranquillity, the same duration, it is because they are steeped, because they are bathing in the same bath, in the same period, because they are traversing together the same long landing. It is because they lead the same life, at bottom, the same diet. Upon that the republicans and the monarchists make contrary reasonings, the same contrary reasoning, they make conjugated reasonings. We, on the contrary, we others, placing ourselves on a wholly other ground, descending onto a wholly other plane, trying to reach wholly other depths, think, believe, on the contrary, that it is the peoples who make the regimes, the peace and the war, the strength and the weakness, the sickness and the health of regimes.

The republicans and the monarchists together, firstly make reasonings, secondly make conjugated reasonings, paired, coupled, geminate.

Turning therefore toward the young men, turning on the other hand, turning to the other side, we can only say and do, we can only say to them: Take care. You treat us as old fools. Very well. But take care. When you speak lightly, when you treat lightly, so lightly, the Republic, you risk not only being unjust, (which is perhaps nothing, at least you say so, in your system, but which, in our system, is grave, in our ideas, considerable), you risk more, in your system, even in your ideas; to enter into your system, into your very language: you risk being foolish. You forget, you fail to recognize that there was a republican mystique; and to forget it and to fail to recognize it will not make it not have been. Men died for liberty as men died for the faith. These elections today seem to you a grotesque formality, universally lying, rigged on all sides. And you have the right to say so. But men have lived, men without number, heroes, martyrs, and I shall say saints, — and when I say saints I perhaps know what I am saying, — men have lived without number, heroically, in saintly fashion, men have suffered, men have died, a whole people has lived, so that the last of the imbeciles today might have the right to accomplish that rigged formality. It was a terrible, a laborious, a redoubtable childbirth. It was not always of the most utterly grotesque. And peoples around us, whole peoples, races labor under the same painful childbirth, labor and struggle in order to obtain that derisory formality. These elections are derisory. But there was a time, my dear Variot, a heroic time when the sick and the dying had themselves carried in chairs in order to go and deposit their ballot in the urn. To deposit one’s ballot in the urn, that expression seems to you today of the most utterly grotesque. It was prepared by a century of heroism. Not of botched heroism, of a heroism in the literary manner. By a century of the most incontestable, of the most authentic heroism. And I shall say of the most French. These elections are derisory. But there was an election. It is the great partition of the world, the great election of the modern world between the Old Regime and the Revolution. And there was one sacred ballottage, Variot, Jean Variot. There was that little ballottage which began at the mill of Valmy and which ended barely upon the heights of Hougoumont. Moreover it ended as all political affairs end, by a sort of compromise, of split difference between the two parties that were present.

These elections are derisory. But the heroism and the sanctity with which, by means of which, one obtains derisory results, temporally derisory, that is all that there is of the greatest, of the most sacred in the world. It is all that there is of the most beautiful. You reproach us with the temporal degradation of these results, of our results. Look at yourselves. Look at your own results. You are always speaking to us of republican degradation. Is not the degradation of the mystique into politics a common law?

You speak to us of republican degradation, that is to say, properly, of the degradation of the republican mystique into republican politics. Have there not been, are there not other degradations? Does not everything begin in mystique and end in politics? Everything begins by the mystique, by a mystique, by its (own) mystique, and everything ends by politics. The question, an important one, is not — it is important, it is interesting that — but the interest, the question is not that such a politics prevails over such or such another and to know which one will prevail of all the politics. The interest, the question, the essential thing is that in each order, in each system the mystique not be devoured by the politics to which it has given birth.

The essential thing is not, the interest is not, the question is not that such or such a politics triumph, but that in each order, in each system each mystique, this mystique, not be devoured by the politics issued from it.

In other terms it matters perhaps, it matters obviously that the republicans prevail over the royalists or the royalists over the republicans, but that importance is infinitely little, that interest is nothing in comparison with this: that the republicans remain republicans; that the republicans be republicans.

And I shall add, and it will not be only for the symmetry, complementarily I add that the royalists be, remain royalists. Now that is perhaps what they are not doing at this very moment, when most sincerely they believe themselves to be doing it the most, to be it the most.

You are always speaking to us of republican degradation. Has there not been, by the same movement, is there not a monarchist degradation, a royalist degradation parallel, complementary, symmetrical, more than analogous? That is to say, properly speaking, a degradation of the monarchist, royalist mystique into a certain politics, issued from it, corresponding, into a, into the monarchist politics, into the royalist politics. Have we not seen for centuries, do we not see every day the effects of that politics? Have we not been present for centuries at the devouring of the royalist mystique by the royalist politics? And even today, although that party is not in power, in its two principal newspapers we see, we read every day the effects, the miserable results of a politics; and even, I shall say more, for whoever knows how to read, a continual rending, a combat almost painful, even to see, even for us, a debate almost touching, truly touching, between a mystique and a politics, between their mystique and their politics, between the royalist mystique and the royalist politics, the mystique being naturally at the Action française, under rationalist forms which have never deceived anyone but themselves, and the politics being at the Gaulois, as usual under worldly forms. What would it be if they were in power? (Like us, alas.)

People are always speaking to us of republican degradation. When one sees what the clerical politics makes of the Christian mystique, how is one to be astonished at what the radical politics makes of the republican mystique. When one sees what the clerics have generally made of the saints, how is one to be astonished at what our parliamentarians have made of the heroes. When one sees what the reactionaries have made of sanctity, how is one to be astonished at what the revolutionaries have made of heroism.

And then one must be just, all the same. When one wishes to compare one order to another order, one system to another system, one must compare them by planes and on planes of the same story. One must compare the mystiques among themselves and the politics among themselves. One must not compare a mystique to a politics; nor a politics to a mystique. In all the primary schools of the Republic, and in some of the secondary ones, and in many of the higher ones, one tirelessly compares the royalist politics to the republican mystique. In the Action française everything comes back to one’s comparing almost tirelessly the republican politics to the royalist mystique. That can last a long time.

People will never come to an understanding. But that is perhaps what the parties ask for.

It is perhaps the game of the parties.

Our masters of the primary school had masked from us the mystique of old France, the mystique of the old regime, they had masked from us ten centuries of old France. Our adversaries of today wish to mask from us that mystique of the old regime, that mystique of old France which the republican mystique was.

And namely the revolutionary mystique.

For the debate is not, as people say, between the Old Regime and the Revolution. The Old Regime was a regime of old France. The Revolution is eminently an operation of old France. The discriminating date is not the first of January 1789, between midnight and one minute past midnight. The discriminating date is situated around 1881.

Here again the republicans and the royalists, the governments, the republican governing men and the royalist theorists make the same reasoning, a reasoning in two parts, complementary, two conjugated reasonings, complementary, conjugated. Coupled; geminate. Our good masters of the primary school told us, more or less: up to the first of January 1789 (Paris time) our poor France was an abyss of darkness and of ignorance, of the most frightful miseries, of the most gross barbarisms, (in short they made their lesson), and you cannot even form an idea of it; on the first of January 1789 the electric light was installed everywhere. Our good adversaries of the School opposite say to us, more or less: up to the first of January 1789 the natural sun was shining; since the first of January 1789 we are no longer under anything but the regime of electric light. The ones and the others exaggerate.

The debate is not between the Old Regime and the Revolution and all that barbarism, which is properly barbarism.

The debate is not between the heroes and the saints; the combat is equally against the intellectuals, against those who despise equally the heroes and the saints.

The debate is not between those two orders of grandeur. The combat is against those who hate grandeur itself, who hate equally the one and the other grandeur, who have made themselves the official upholders of smallness, of baseness, and of vileness.

That is what one will see, what bursts forth with a striking evidence in the papers of this Fourierist republican family. Or rather, for it is a little less compact, a little less packed, in the cahiers of this family of Fourierist republicans. My God, if there are letters of Victor Hugo, well, yes, we shall publish them. We shall not be malicious. We shall not deliberately set out to annoy that great memory. But what we shall publish above all is the dossiers, is the papers of the Milliets. There one will see how the very tissue of the republican party was heroic, and what is almost more important, how cultivated it was; how classical it was; in a word, for whoever knows how to see, for whoever knows how to read, how much it was old France, and, at bottom, old regime.

There one will see what the very dough was of which the bread was made.

Our collaborator M. Daniel Halévy has very well indicated, in these same cahiers, in his last cahier, he has marked it only, but he has very well marked, that the history of this century does not go, so to speak, straight off. That it is not simple, single, unilateral, univocal, blocked off, bloc-minded, in short itself, that it is not a bloc, that it does not go entirely and always in the same direction; that it is not all of one piece. There was not an old regime which lasted for centuries, then one day a revolution which overthrew the old regime; then offensive returns of the old regime; and a struggle, a combat, a debate of a century between the revolution and the old regime, between the old regime and the revolution. The reality is much less simple. Halévy has very well shown that the Republic had, was a tradition, a conservation, it too, (it above all perhaps), that there was a tradition, a republican conservation. The difference, the distance between the two hypotheses, between the two theories, is seen above all, springs up as it were of itself naturally at certain critical points, for example at the coups d’État. In the first theory, in the first hypothesis, in the hypothesis of the bloc and of rigidity, the two coups d’État are movements of the same order, of the same direction, of the same gauge, of the same content. It is one movement, the same movement in two installments. The second coup d’État is the recommencement, the double, the reduplication of the first. The taking-up again of the first. December is like a second edition of Brumaire. Brumaire was the first edition of December. That is what they teach by a double teaching, conjugated, by the same teaching, by a conjugated, geminate teaching, on the one hand the schoolteachers, on the other hand the reactionaries. For the schoolteachers and in the teaching of the schoolteachers (notably of Victor Hugo) the two coups d’État are two crimes, one same crime, redoubled, the same crime, in two stages. For the reactionaries and in the teaching of the reactionaries the two coups d’État are two police operations, two happy police operations, renewed one from the other, recommenced one from the other, redoubled one from the other. Recommended one from the other.

A movement in two stages. Brumaire and December. It is the double idea of Hugo and of the Bonapartists.

The reality is much less simple, much more complex and perhaps even much more complicated. The French Revolution founded a tradition, already begun for a certain number of years past, a conservation, it founded a new order. That this new order was not worth the old one, that is what many good minds have been led today to think. But it certainly founded a new order, not a disorder, as the reactionaries say. That order then degenerated into disorder(s), which under the Directory attained their greatest gravity. From then on, if we name, as one ought to, restorations the restorations of order, whatever it be, of a certain order, of one or the other order, and if we name perturbations the introductions of disorder(s), the 18th Brumaire was certainly a restoration (together, inseparably republican and monarchist, which confers upon it a quite particular interest, a proper tone, a proper meaning, which makes of it an operation really very singular, comparable to no other, and which one would have to study closely, to which above all one must compare nothing in all the history of the nineteenth century in France, and even and equally in all the history of France, to which in short one must refer, compare no other French operation, to which one would find analogies only in certain operations perhaps of other countries); (and above all to which one must above all take good care not to compare the 2nd of December); 1830 was a restoration, a republican one; ah, I was forgetting, one always forgets Louis XVIII; the Restoration was a restoration, a monarchist one; 1830 was a restoration, a republican one; 1848 was a republican restoration, and an explosion of the republican mystique; the June Days themselves were a second explosion, a redoubled explosion of the republican mystique; the 2nd of December, on the contrary, was a perturbation, an introduction of a disorder, the greatest perturbation perhaps that there was in the history of the nineteenth century in France; it brought into the world, it introduced, not only at the head, but in the very body, in the nation, in the tissue of the political and social body, a new personnel, in no way mystic, purely political and demagogic; it was properly the introduction of a demagogy; the 4th of September was a restoration, a republican one; the 31st of October, even the 22nd of January, was a republican day; even the 18th of March was a republican day, a republican restoration in a certain sense, and not only a movement of temperature, a fit of obsidional fever, but a second revolt, a second explosion of the republican and nationalist mystique together, republican and together, inseparably patriotic; the May Days were certainly a perturbation and not a restoration; the Republic was a restoration up to about 1881, when the intrusion of intellectual tyranny and of primary domination began to make of it a government of disorder.

It is in this sense, and in this sense only, that the 2nd of December was the Chastisement, the Expiation of the 18th Brumaire, and that the Second Empire was the Chastisement of the First. But far from being the replica of the first, the Second Empire was in a sense all that there was of the most contrary to the first. The First Empire was a regime of order, of a certain order. It was even, beneath many indisciplines, even military ones, like a sort of apotheosis of discipline, eminently of military discipline. It was a regime of a very great order and of a very great history. The Second Empire was a regime of all the disorders. It was really the introduction of a disorder, of a certain disorder, the introduction, the installation in power of a certain band, discredited, very modern, very advanced, in no way old France, in no way old regime. Or again one may say that the Second Empire is the biggest Boulangism that we have had, and also the only one that succeeded.

The Revolution on the contrary, the great one, had been an instauration. An instauration more or less [pure], but in short an instauration.

An instauration, that is to say that of which any restoration itself is already no longer anything but a repetition, a weakened one, an attempt at recommencement.

In other terms again, in another term, the first Empire was not what we call a Caesarism. The second Empire was what we call a Caesarism. Boulangism was a Caesarism. There was much Caesarism in anti-Dreyfusism. There was none in Dreyfusism. The Combist domination was very really a Caesarism, the most dangerous of all, because it was the one that presented itself as republican. The radical and radical-socialist domination is properly a Caesarism, namely a multi-Caesarism of electoral committees.

One must so little follow the names, the appearances, the aspects, one must so much beware of the names, that just as the Second Empire, historically, really, does not continue the first Empire, so likewise the Third Republic, historically, really, does not continue itself. The sequel, the continuation of the Third Republic does not continue the beginning of the Third Republic. Without there having been, I mean to say, in 1881 any great event, any indescribable event, at that date the Republic began to discontinue itself. From republican it became, namely, Caesarian.

One must not only say: Everything is explained, I shall say: Everything is lighted up thereby. The incredible difficulties of public and private action are suddenly lighted up, by a great daylight, by a great light, when one is willing to give an audience, so to speak, when one is willing to consider, when one is willing only to pay attention to that distinction, to that recrimination, I mean to say to that discrimination, that ascending discrimination which we have just recognized. All the sophisms, all the paralogisms of action, all the para-pragmatisms, — or at least all the noble ones, all the dignified ones, the only ones precisely into which we can fall, the only ones that we can commit, the only innocent ones, — so guilty nevertheless, — come from the fact that we unduly prolong into political action, into politics, a line of action duly begun in mystique. A line of action had been begun, had been pushed into the mystique, had sprung up in the mystique, had found there, had taken there its source and its point of origin. That action was well lined out. That line of action was not only natural, it was not only legitimate, it was due. Life follows its course. Action follows its course. One looks out the carriage door. There is an engineer who is driving. Why concern oneself with the driving? Life continues. Action continues. The thread threads itself along. The thread of action, the line of action continues. And continuing, the same persons, the same game, the same institutions, the same surroundings, the same apparatus, the same furniture, the habits already taken — one does not notice that one is passing over that point of discernment. On the other hand, elsewhere, externally, history, the events, have gone on ahead. And the switch is passed. By the game, by the history of the events, by the baseness and the sin of man the mystique has become politics, or rather the mystic action has become political action, or rather politics has substituted itself for the mystique, the politics of events has devoured the mystique. By the game, by the baseness, by the sin of man, who thinks of something else, who attends to something else, the matter which was matter of mystique has become matter of politics. And it is the perpetual and ever-recommencing story. Because the same committees, the same matter, the same men, the same surroundings, the same apparatus, the same game, the same mechanism, already automatic, the habits already taken, we see nothing in it. We do not even pay attention to it. And yet the same action, which was just, becomes, starting from that point of discernment, unjust. The same action, which was legitimate, becomes illegitimate. The same action, which was due, becomes undue. The same action, which was this one, starting from this point of discernment becomes not only another, it generally becomes its contrary, its own contrary. And it is thus that one becomes innocently criminal.

The same action, which was clean, becomes dirty, becomes another action, a dirty one.

The same action, which was innocent, becomes criminal, becomes perhaps the most dangerous of all. It is thus that one continues. An action begun upon the mystique is continued upon the politics, and we do not feel that we are passing over that point of discernment. The politics devours the mystique and we do not jump when we pass over that point of discontinuity.

When by an impossibility a man stops at the point of stop, at the point of discernment, refuses to molt at that point of mutation, turns back at that point of turning-back, refuses, in order to remain faithful to a mystique, to enter into the political games, into the abuses of that politics which is itself an abuse — when a man of heart, in order to remain faithful to a mystique, refuses to enter into the game of the corresponding politics, of the politics issued from it, of the parasitic politics, of the devouring politics — the politicians today are accustomed to name him willingly by a little word much worn out: they would name us traitor.

Moreover they would name us traitors without conviction, for the record, for the electors. Because one must indeed put some word in the programs and in the polemics.

Let it be well known that it is this traitor that we have always been and that we shall always be. It is this traitor, namely, eminently, that we have always been in the Dreyfus Affair and in the Dreyfusism. The veritable traitor, the traitor in the full sense, in the strong sense, in the ancient sense of that word, is he who sells his faith, who sells his soul, who delivers up his very being, who loses his soul, who betrays his principles, his ideal, his very being, who betrays his mystique in order to enter into the corresponding politics, into the politics issued from it, passing complaisantly over the point of discrimination.

I am not the only one. The subscribers of these cahiers, even today, after twelve years of deaths and of annual renewals, are still composed today, for two-thirds of them, are still for two-thirds the old Dreyfusards, the new Dreyfusards, the perpetual Dreyfusards, the impenitent Dreyfusards, the mystic Dreyfusards, men of heart, little people, generally obscure, generally poor, some of them very poor, so to speak wretched, who have sacrificed twice their career, their future, their existence and their bread: a first time to struggle against their enemies, a second time to struggle against their friends; and how much more difficult is not the latter; a first time to resist the politics of their enemies, a second time to resist the politics of their friends; a first time so as not to succumb to their enemies, a second time so as not to succumb to their friends.

It is this traitor that we intend to be.

A first time so as not to succumb to the demagogy of their enemies, a second time so as not to succumb to the demagogy of their friends; a first time so as not to succumb to enmity, a second time so as not to succumb to the more difficult friendship.

We all know what it has cost us. And it is for that reason that we shall always exact from our friends a respect that our enemies have never refused us.

The politicians want us to endorse their politics, to march in their politics, in their combinations, to enter into their views, their politics, to betray our mystiques for their politics, for the corresponding politics, for the politics issued from them. But we are not under their orders.

Then the politicians want to confer honor and right. But they are perhaps not masters of it.

They want to confer obedience and obediency, to confirm the firm, to distribute honor, to declare the rule. But they are perhaps not masters of it.

They are not our masters. Not everybody is under their orders. They are not even their own masters.

Let us speak more simply of these great men. And less harshly. Their politics has become a merry-go-round of wooden horses. They say to us: Sir, you have changed, you are no longer in the same place. The proof of it is that you are no longer facing the same wooden horse. — I beg your pardon, Monsieur the deputy, it is the wooden horses that have turned.

One must moreover render this justice to these unfortunate men, that they are generally very nice with us, except most of those who, issuing from the teaching personnel, constitute the intellectual party. All the others, the deputies properly speaking, the politicians properly so called, the professional parliamentarians, have indeed something else to do than to concern themselves with us, and above all than to bore us or to be disagreeable to us: the competitors, the rivals, the electors, re-election, the competitions, the affairs, life. They like better to leave us in peace. And then we are so small (in volume, in mass) for them. In political and social mass. They do not even perceive us. We do not exist for them. Let us not puff ourselves up so far as to believe that we exist for them, that they see us. They despise us too much to hate us, even to hold it against us that they are unfaithful to us, I mean for the fact that they are unfaithful to us, to us and to our mystique, their mystique, the mystique that is common to us, supposedly, really common, (to us because we nourish ourselves on it and because inseparably we live for it, to them because they profit from it and because they are parasites upon it). When we solicit them, in our turn like beasts, they even often put into it a sort of liking, a secret one, a certain point of honor, of a certain honor, a coquetry to render us service. They have the air of saying: You see clearly. We pursue that trade. We know very well what it is worth. One must indeed earn one’s living. One must indeed make a career. At least render us still this justice, that when it is necessary, when one can, when the occasion presents itself, we are still competent, we are still capable of taking an interest in the great spiritual interests, of defending them.

They are right. And we must render them that justice. It is a sort of coquetry that they have, a highly laudable one, a liking, (a remorse), a sort of inner guarantee that they take for themselves, a regret that they form, a secret warning. Those who are intractable, those who are tightly closed, are only the old schoolteachers become deputies, namely the old professors, namely the old normaliens. Those bear a grudge, really, against culture. They have against it a sort of hatred really demoniac. One must take good care. When one speaks of the invasion of the intellectual party and of the domination of the primary, one must take care. It does not suffice to say primary, primary, primary. One must indeed see today that the primary is not everything, (the whole) — far from it. It is not so much in the primary. Far from it, and it is not even there that it is most. One must take care that it is without any doubt in the higher [teaching] today that there is the most of the primary, of primary contamination, of primary domination. For my part I have the conviction that there is distributed much more veritable culture, today even still, in most of the primary schools, in most of the schools of the villages of France, between the squares of vines, in the shade of the plane trees and of the chestnut trees, than is distributed between the four walls of the Sorbonne. Here is roughly what is, today, in reality, the hierarchy of the three teachings: A very great number of schoolteachers still, even radical and radical-socialist ones, even Freemasons, even freethinking professionals, for all sorts of reasons of situation and of race, still continue to exercise, generally without their knowledge, in the schools of the provinces and even of the towns, a certain ministry of culture. They are still, often in spite of themselves, ministers, masters of the distribution of culture. They exercise that office. Secondary teaching gives an admirable example, makes an admirable effort to maintain, to safeguard, to defend against the invasion of barbarism that antique culture, that classical culture of which it had the deposit, of which it keeps against all comers the tradition. It is an admirable spectacle that so many professors of secondary teaching give, poor men, little people, little functionaries, exposed to everything, sacrificing everything, struggling against everything, resisting everything in order to defend their classes. Struggling against all the powers, the temporal authorities, the constituted powers. Against the families, those electors, against opinion; against the headmaster, who follows the families, who follow opinion; against the parents of the pupils; against the headmaster, the deputy-headmaster, the inspector of the Academy, the rector of the Academy, the inspector general, the director of secondary teaching, the minister, the deputies, the whole machine, the whole hierarchy, against the political men, against their future, against their career, against their (own) advancement; literally against their bread. Against their chiefs, against their masters, against the administration, the great Administration, against their hierarchical superiors, against their natural defenders, against those who ought naturally to defend them. And who on the contrary abandon them. When they do not betray them. Against all their own interests. Against the whole government, namely against the most redoubtable of all, against the government of opinion, which everywhere is wholly modern. Why? By an indestructible probity. By an indestructible piety. By an invincible, an insurmountable attachment of race and of liberty to their trade, to their office, to their ministry, to their old virtue, to their social function, to an old classical and French civism. By an unshakable attachment to the old culture, which in fact was the old virtue, which was all one with the old virtue, by a continuation, by a sort of heroic attachment to the old trade, to the old country, to the old lycée. Why? In order to try to save a little of it. It is by them, by a certain number of masters of secondary teaching, by a still rather great number of them, happily, that all culture has not yet disappeared from this country. I know, I could cite, I all by myself, I, all little, a hundred and fifty professors of secondary teaching who do everything, who risk everything, who brave everything, even and above all boredom, the greatest risk, the little end of a career, in order to maintain, in order to save all that can still be saved. One would find with difficulty fifty masters of higher teaching, and even thirty, and even fifteen, who propose to themselves anything else (besides a career, and advancement, and to begin with precisely being part of the higher teaching), who propose to themselves anything else than to ossify, than to mummify reality, the realities which are imprudently confided to them, than to bury in the tomb of the index-cards the matter of their teaching.

I would cite a hundred and fifty professors of secondary teaching who do all that they can, and even more, in order only to try to safeguard a little, in this old country, a little of good taste, a little of bearing, a little of the old taste, a little of the old manners of the mind, a little of that old spirit of the liberty of the mind.

The schoolteachers do not so much form part of the intellectual party. Neither so much as they believe. Nor so much as they would readily wish. They have so many other attachments still in the real country, whatever they do. They are much more the agents of culture than they would wish. The professors of secondary teaching form, so to speak, no part of it at all, except the politicians, the few who have hastened their advancement, their rapid forwarding toward Paris. Otherwise, for all the rest, for all the others, for the whole body, one may say, one must say, that secondary teaching, dismantled though it be, undone though it has been made, is still the citadel, the redoubt of culture in France.

People sometimes make much, in the higher teaching, at least in the beginning, must I say to overawe the new ones, the young men, of the fact that the professors of secondary teaching teach classes, whereas messieurs the masters and professors of higher teaching, on the contrary, give courses. One must unfortunately tell them so: In the present state of teaching it is in the classes that much culture is still distributed, and it is in the courses that there is no more of it.

Those who are above all relentless, as a political party, as an intellectual party, those who are frenzied, are those young men who pass directly from the old and from the new École Normale into the Unified Socialist Party. The latest elections have just sent us yet another whole packet of these pretty boys. The choir-boys, namely the one who is so pretty and chubby-cheeked. As it is his duty as a choir-boy.

Our first rule of conduct, then, or, if one prefers, the first rule of our conduct, will be, being in action, never to fall into politics, that is to say, very precisely, following a line of action, to distrust, to beware of ourselves and of our own action, to pay extreme attention to discerning the point of discernment, and that point recognized, to turn back indeed at that point of turning-back. At the point where politics substitutes itself for the mystique, devours the mystique, betrays the mystique, he alone who lets go, who abandons, who betrays politics is also the only one who remains faithful to the mystique; he alone who betrays politics is also the only one who does not betray the mystique.

At the point of turning-back one must keep nothing of the old analysis, of the old idea. Of habit. One must be ready to begin again, one must begin again the analysis de plano.

If our first rule of action, of conduct, will be not to continue blindly, over the point of discernment, an action begun in mystique and which ends in politics, in the same way, in parallel, our first rule of knowledge, of judgment, of cognizance will be not to continue blindly, over the point of discernment, a judgment, a cognizance about an action begun in mystique and which ends in politics. One must above all and over everything distrust, beware of oneself, of one’s own judgment, of one’s own cognizance. One must above all be on one’s guard against continuing. To continue, to persevere, in that sense, is all that there is of the most dangerous for justice, for intelligence itself. To take one’s ticket at the departure, in a party, in a faction, and never again to look how the train rolls and above all upon what the train rolls, is, for a man, to place oneself resolutely in the best conditions for making oneself criminal.

All the farrago of talk and of conversations, the embarrassments, the apparent contradictions, the entanglements, the inextricable difficulties of judgment, the apparent incomprehensions and impossibilities of understanding and of following, the contrary good faiths and the interlaced bad faiths, the good and the bad faiths in opposition, the perpetual and tiring recommencement of the vanity of the same talk, the repetition, the execrable repetition of the same incoherent and indefatigable talk, would be much lighted up if one only paid attention to what one is speaking of, if, upon every action, in each action, in each order, one is speaking of the mystique or, more generally, of the politics. Thus is explained that in so many polemics, in so many debates, the two adversaries, the two enemies appear to be equally in the right, equally in the wrong. One of the principal causes of it is that the one speaks of the mystique, and the other answers concerning the corresponding politics, the politics issued from it. Or the one speaks of the politics, and the other answers concerning the anterior mystique. It is not only justice, in the order of moral judgment, that demands that one always compare two actions on the same stories and not on two different stories, the mystique to the mystique and the politics to the politics, and not the mystique to the politics nor the politics to the mystique; it is also correctness, in the order of mental judgment, which has exactly the same requirement.

When our schoolteachers incessantly compare the republican mystique to the royalist politics and when every morning our royalists compare the royalist mystique to the republican politics, they make, they commit the same failing, two mutually complementary failings, two mutually contrary failings, mutually inverse, mutually reciprocal, two contrary failings, the same, a conjugated failing; together they fail in justice and in correctness together.

A first consequence of this distinction, a first application of this recognition, of this discernment, of this redistribution, is that the mystiques are much less enemies among themselves than the politics, and that they are so in a wholly other manner. One must not therefore make the mystiques bear the penalty of the dissensions, of the wars, of the political enmities; one must not carry back upon the mystiques the ill-temper of the politics. The mystiques are much less enemies among themselves than the politics are among themselves. Because they have not, like the politics, to share out among themselves unceasingly a matter, a temporal one, a temporal world, a temporal power unceasingly limited. Temporal spoils. Mortal spoils. And when they are enemies, they are so in a wholly other manner, at a depth infinitely more essential, with a nobility infinitely more profound. For example, never has the antique mystique, the mystique of the city of the antique supplication, opposed itself, been able to oppose itself to the mystique of salvation, as the pagan politics opposed itself to the Christian politics; as grossly, as basely, as temporally, as mortally as the pagan emperors opposed themselves to the Christian emperors, and reciprocally. And the mystique of salvation today cannot oppose itself to the mystique of liberty as the clerical politics opposes itself for example to the radical politics. It is easy to be at once a good Christian and a good citizen, as long as one does not engage in politics.

The politicians, at the moment when they change the mystique into politics, a mystique into a politics, if one does not follow them, then it is they who accuse you of having changed.

We have had an eminent example of it in the Dreyfus Affair continued into the affair of Dreyfusism. One may say that the politicians introduce both into action and into knowledge (where there are already so many, where there are already so many natural ones) artificial difficulties, supplementary difficulties, supererogatory difficulties, the difficulties [that arise] more than there are. And there are already so many. They always want, sometimes out of policy, but generally out of natural incomprehension, out of insufficiency, out of incapacity to go profoundly, the servants of the mystiques to become the agents of the politics. They introduce everywhere, they cut out gratuitous temporal rendings, artificial political rendings. As if the great mystic rendings were not already enough. They thus create entanglements.

We have had an eminent example of it in that immortal Dreyfus Affair continued into the affair of Dreyfusism. If there was one which jumped over its point of discernment, it was that one. It offers, with a perfection perhaps unique, like a success perhaps unique, like a unique example, almost like a model, a unique epitome, generally, of what the degradation, the lowering of a human action is; but not only that — particularly, properly a unique epitome, (like) a culmination of what the degradation of a mystic action into a political action is, passing (blindly?) over its point of rupture, over its point of discernment, over its point of turning-back, over its point of discontinuous continuity.

Must one note once more that there was, that there is in this Dreyfus Affair, that there will be in it for a long time, and perhaps eternally, a singular virtue. I mean to say a singular force. We see it clearly today. Now that the affair is finished. The more this affair is finished, the more it is evident that it will never finish. The more it is finished the more it proves. And first one must note that it proves that it had a singular virtue. In both senses. A singular virtue of virtue as long as it remained in the mystique. A singular virtue of malice as soon as it had entered into the politics. It is one of the greatest mysteries that there is in history and in reality, and naturally also, naturally therefore one of those upon which one passes the most blindly, the most easily, the most inattentively, the most without jumping: that this sort of absolute difference, (irrevocable, irreversible, as it were infinite), which there is in the price of events. That certain events should be of a certain price, should have a certain price, a proper price; that events different, of the same order or of neighboring orders, having the same matter or matters of the same order and of the same value, having the same form or forms of the same order and of the same value, should nevertheless have prices, values infinitely different; that each event, operating upon one same matter, making one same matter become, under one same form, in one same form — that every event should nevertheless have a proper price, a mysterious one, a proper force in itself, a proper value, a mysterious one; that there should be wars and peaces which have a proper value, that there should be affairs which have a proper, absolute value; that there should be heroisms which have a proper value; that there should even be sanctities which have a proper value — that is assuredly one of the greatest mysteries of the event, one of the most poignant problems of history: that there should be not only men (and gods) who count more than others, infinitely more, but that there should be peoples, who are as it were marked, that there should be as it were a destination, as it were an evaluation, as it were a measure, not only of men and of gods, but of the peoples themselves; that there should be peoples wholly entire who have a price, a proper value, who are marked for history, for all temporal history, and (consequently) perhaps no doubt for the other; and that whole peoples, so many other peoples, the immense majority of peoples, the near-totality, should be marked on the contrary for silence and for shadow, for night and for silence, to fall into a silence, to rise only in order to fall — that is a mystery that we do not see, as we do not see all the greatest mysteries, precisely because we are bathing in it, as in all the greatest mysteries; in short, that there should be not only men and so to speak gods temporally elect, but whole peoples temporally elect and perhaps more, that is certainly perhaps the greatest mystery of the event, the most poignant problem of history. That there should be as it were even elect events. It is the greatest problem of creation. We shall not fail, we shall not avoid considering it, meditating it at length in the studies that we have begun upon the situation made for history and for sociology in the general philosophy of the modern world.

One must therefore say it, and say it with solemnity: the Dreyfus Affair was an elect affair. It was an eminent crisis in three histories themselves eminent. It was an eminent crisis in the history of Israel. It was an eminent crisis, evidently, in the history of France. It was above all an eminent crisis, and this dignity will appear more and more, it was above all an eminent crisis in the history of Christendom. And perhaps of several others. Thus by a cross-section, by an election perhaps unique, it was triply critical. It was triply eminent. It was properly a culminating affair. For my part, if I can continue these studies that we have begun upon the situation made for history and for sociology in the general philosophy of the modern world, following that method which we keep, of never writing anything except about what we have ourselves experienced, we shall certainly take that great crisis as an example, as a reference for what a crisis is, an event which has an eminent proper value.

That price, that proper value of the Dreyfus Affair appears still, appears constantly, whatever one will, whatever one does. It returns in spite of everything, like a revenant, like a female revenant. What doubles the proof, or rather what makes the proof, is that it manifests itself not only in one sense, in one of the two senses, but — what makes the proof (nothing proves so much as evil) — it is, alas, that it proves, that it manifests itself equally in both senses. It has in the good sense, in the mystic sense, an incredible force of virtue, an incredible virtue of virtue. And in the bad sense, in the political sense, it has a force, an incredible virtue of vice. Today still, today as always, today more than ever, one cannot speak of it lightly, one cannot treat of it lightly, one cannot speak of it with a detached air. One cannot speak of it without becoming impassioned, at once. Today as never, every speech that is held, every review or newspaper article, every book, every cahier that is written about the Dreyfus Affair has in it, carries in it some virus or other, some point of virus which works upon us indefatigably. One cannot touch a word of it that is not noxious and sacred. We suffer from it only too much, sometimes, at the cahiers, on Thursdays. But it is the very mark and the sign of the value, of the proper price, the sign of the election.

For my part, if, having achieved a work infinitely graver, I come to the age of the Confessions, which is, as one knows, fifty years completed, at nine o’clock in the morning, that is what I shall certainly propose to myself to represent there. I shall try, taking up again, achieving my old decomposition of Dreyfusism in France, to give not an idea, but I shall try to give a representation of what that immortal Dreyfus Affair was in reality. It was, like every affair that respects itself, an affair essentially mystic. It lived by its mystique. It died of its politics. It is the law, it is the rule. It is the level of lives. Every party lives by its mystique and dies of its politics. That is what I shall try to represent. I confess, I begin to believe that it will not be useless. I suspect that there are about that Dreyfus Affair numerous misunderstandings. I confess that I do not recognize myself at all in the portrait that Halévy has traced here itself of the Dreyfusist. I do not feel myself at all to have that hangdog look. I consent to having been a victor, I consent (which is my own judgment) to having been vanquished (that depends on the point of view at which one places oneself), I do not consent to having been beaten. I consent to having been ruined, (in the temporal, and much exposed in the intemporal), I consent to having been deceived, I consent to having been hoaxed. I do not consent to having been drenched. I do not feel myself to have that look of a drenched dog. I do not recognize myself in that portrait. We were proud in another way, upright in another way, haughty in another way, infinitely proud, holding our heads high, infinitely full, infinitely swollen with the military virtues. We had, we maintained a wholly other tone, a wholly other air, a wholly other bearing of the head; we carried, at arm’s length, a wholly other discourse. I do not feel myself in any way to have the humor of a penitent. I hate a penitence that would not be a Christian penitence, that would be a sort of civic and lay penitence, a penitence laicized, secularized, temporalized, deconsecrated, an imitation, a counterfeit of penitence. I hate a humiliation, a humility that would not be a Christian humility, the Christian humility, that would be a sort of civil, civic, lay humility, an imitation, a counterfeit of humility. In the civil, in the civic, in the lay, in the profane I wish to be stuffed with pride. We were so. We had the right to it. We had the duty of it. Not only have we nothing to regret. But we have done nothing, we have done nothing for which we have not reason to glorify ourselves. For which we cannot, for which we ought not to glorify ourselves. One may begin tomorrow morning the publication of my complete works. One might even add to it the publication of my talk, of my complete words. There is not, in all these old cahiers, one word that I would change, except four or five words that I know well, seven or eight words of theology which might give matter for a misunderstanding, might be interpreted in a contrary sense, because they are in indirect style and one does not see clearly enough in the sentence that they are in indirect style. Not only have we nothing to disavow, but we have nothing for which we have not reason to glorify ourselves. For in our most ardent polemics, in our invectives, in our pamphlets we have never lost the respect of respect. Of respectable respect. We have, we are to have neither regret nor remorse. In those confessions of a Dreyfusist which will make up an important part of our general Confessions, there will be, I have promised it, numerous cahiers which will be entitled Memoirs of an Ass, or perhaps, more flatly, memoirs of an imbecile. There will be none which will be entitled memoirs of a coward, or of a poltroon (we shall leave these for M. Jaurès to do, and they will certainly not be badly done). (He is such a good horse-trader.) There will be none which will be entitled cahiers, memoirs of a weakling; of a repentant man. There will be none which will be entitled memoirs of a political man. They will all be, at bottom, the memoirs of a mystic man.

One may publish tomorrow morning our complete works. Not only is there not a comma that we have to disavow, but there is not a comma for which we have not reason to glorify ourselves.

It is indeed Halévy’s idea, that in fact I should not recognize myself in it. Several times he tells us so expressly. But I do not know whether his reader always sees clearly that it is his idea. Our collaborator has well marked, in his whole cahier, that in fact it is not a question of us. What he wished to do, what he has so perfectly succeeded in giving us, is rather the history of Dreyfusism, the portrait of Dreyfusism, than the portrait of the Dreyfusist; than the history or the portrait of a Dreyfusist; or again, it would be, I believe, in his thought, the portrait, the history and the portrait of an average Dreyfusist; or rather it is the history and the portrait of a party, of the Dreyfusist party; or more exactly of a Dreyfusist who was in the Dreyfusist party. But I believe that there is an abyss between the history and the portrait of a Dreyfusist who was in the Dreyfusist party and the history and the portrait of a Dreyfusist who was not in the Dreyfusist party. It is for that reason that when I was reading in proof our collaborator’s cahier, I saw this misunderstanding coming, I saw this contrary sense taking shape. I saw this double meaning dawning and the confusion of this double meaning. It is for that reason that I had a sullen revolt, a sullen one naturally because I am not eloquent. I grumbled, I muttered, I mumbled, all the while reading my proofs, and the more I found that the cahier is beautiful, the more I found that it is good, the more I revolted. Because the more I thought that it would be listened to. The more I thought that it would carry. That is why what I wish to contest with our collaborator is the proportion, it is the very quota, the respective quota, in the whole of Dreyfusism and of the Dreyfusist party, of those whom his cahier clothes, and of those whom it does not clothe. Of those whom his cahier suits, and of those whom it does not suit. He has indeed thought of it himself, he makes a reservation, he has made a useful distinction in marking well that one must set apart those of the Dreyfusists who had not entered into the political demagogies, namely into the Combist demagogy. But where I contest with our collaborator is when he appears to admit that we do not represent Dreyfusism and that the others represent it, when he classes us and sets us apart as an exception, as a sort of exception, when all his attention bears upon the others, upon those whom we are authorized to name the politicians. We claim on the contrary that we the mystics are and were, that we have always been the heart and the center of Dreyfusism, and that we alone represent it.

Halévy sometimes has the air of saying that the others would have, as it were, followed a legitimate curve and that we others would be savages, almost like fanciful men, that we would have made a rupture, an abrupt one, an illegitimate leap. It would be the others who would be, so to speak, in the right, and we who would be as it were askew. It would be the others who would be the rule, the common, the ordinary, the natural, and we who would be not only the extraordinary, but the exception, and above all an artificial exception. People always want it to be weakness and degradation that is the rule, the ordinary, the common, that is as it were of right, that goes without saying. It is precisely what I contest in all the orders, at least for this French race. In France courage and uprightness go very well without saying.

No doubt the appearances would give Halévy his reason, the apparent ones would be for him. I mean to say that if one considers (only) the apparent Dreyfusists, the men in view, journalists, publicists, lecturers, Popular Universities, parliamentarians, candidates, political men, all that talks and all that chatters, all that writes and all that publishes, the immense majority of the men in view, the near-totality of the apparent ones hastened to enter into the Dreyfusist demagogies, I mean to say into the political demagogies issued from the Dreyfusist mystique. But what I contest precisely, what I deny, is that those who are apparent for history (and whom history, in return, seizes with so much eagerness) had a great importance in the depths of reality. Reaching therefore profound realities, the only important ones, I claim that all the mystic Dreyfusists have remained Dreyfusists, that they have remained mystics, and that they have remained with clean hands. What does it matter that all the apparent ones, all the phenomena, all the official ones, all the advantageous ones have abandoned, have mocked, have renounced, have betrayed that mystique for the politics issued from it, for all sorts of politics, for all the political demagogies? That, my dear Halévy, you said it yourself. It is the level of lives. What does it matter that they mock us. We alone represent and they, they do not represent. What does it matter that they turn us into derision. They themselves, they live only by us, they are only by us. The vanities themselves that they are, they would not be it without us.

And not only do I claim that the mystic Dreyfusists have remained Dreyfusists and that they have remained mystics. But I attest, what is more, what is over and above, that they were the number and that they have remained the number. Even from the gross point of view, no longer of quality, of virtue, but of the very quota and of the quantity, it is they who counted, it is they who count.

Politics mocks the mystique, but it is still the mystique that nourishes politics itself.

For the politics catch up, believe they catch up, by saying that at least they are practical and that we are not. Here itself they are mistaken. And they deceive. We shall not even grant them that. It is the mystics who are even practical and it is the politics who are not. It is we who are practical, who do something, and it is they who are not, who do nothing. It is we who amass and it is they who pillage. It is we who build, it is we who found, and it is they who demolish. It is we who nourish and it is they who are parasites. It is we who make the works and the men, the peoples and the races. And it is they who ruin.

The little even that they are, they are it only by us. The misery, the vanity, the void, the infirmity, the frivolity, the baseness, the nothingness that they are, that even they are it only by us.

It is for that reason that there is no question of their regarding us as inspectors (as if they themselves were inspectors). There is no question of their examining us and judging us, of their passing us in review and in inspection. That they should ask us for accounts, they of us, truly that would be laughable. All the right that they have, with us, is to keep silent. And to try to make themselves forgotten. Let us hope that they will use it amply.

What I claim is that the whole mystic body of Dreyfusism has remained intact. What does it matter that the politicians have betrayed that mystique. It is their very office.

Afterward you will tell me that neither the General Staffs nor the committees nor the leagues were then of that mystique. Naturally they were not of it. You would not all the same have wished them to be of it. What does it matter that the whole League of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, all together, what does it represent, in the face of a conscience, in the face of a mystique. What does it matter what one politics, a hundred politics, are worth, against the price of a mystique. Detestable as they may be, they are still and always only by us, they are still our debtors. Every mystique is the creditor of all politics.

Their detestation itself is of us, is our work, is parasitic upon us.

You will add that the victim itself was not of a mystique. Of its own mystique. That has therefore become evident. We would have died for Dreyfus. Dreyfus did not die for Dreyfus. It is a good rule that the victim should not be of the mystique of his own affair.

It is the triumph of human weakness, the crowning of our vanity, the greatest proof; the greatest effort, the masterpiece, the demonstration the highest, supreme, culminating, of our infirmity.

It had to be thus, in order that the masterpiece of our misery should be achieved, in order that all the bitterness should be drunk, in order that the ingratitude should be truly crowned.

In order that it should be complete. In order that the disabusement should be achieved.

The Dreyfus Affair, Dreyfusism, the mystique, the Dreyfusist mysticism was a culmination, a cross-section in culmination of three mysticisms at least: Jewish, Christian, French. And, as I shall show, those three mysticisms did not rend one another there, did not bruise one another there, but on the contrary concurred there by an encounter, by a cross-section, in an encounter, a cross-section perhaps unique in the history of the world.

I am in a position to affirm that all the mystic Dreyfusists have remained mystics, have remained Dreyfusists, have remained with clean hands. I know it; I have the list of them at the cahiers. I mean to say that all that there was of the mystic, of the faithful, of the believing in Dreyfusism took refuge, gathered itself at the cahiers, from the beginning and always, guided by a sure instinct, by the most profound of instincts, as in the only house that had kept the sense and the tradition, the deposit, sacred for us, and perhaps for history, of the Dreyfusist mystique. Such was the first foundation, the first body of our friends and of our subscribers. Many of them are already dead. All those who are not dead have remained invariably faithful to us. Or rather it was that first foundation, that first body, all that there was of the mystic, of the faithful, of the believing in Dreyfusism, that was, that became not only our friends and our subscribers, but our cahiers themselves, the body and the institution of our cahiers. I can therefore say it. The men who keep silent, the only ones who matter, the silent ones, the only ones who count, the tacit ones, the only ones who will count, all the mystics have remained invariable, uninflectable. All the little people. We, in short. I have had the proof of it again and received the testimony of it at the Easter holidays, at the last ones, and at these holidays of Pentecost, when so many of our friends and of our subscribers from the departments, namely professors, did us the friendship of coming to see us at the cahiers. They are as they were, what they were; they are the same men as ten years ago. As twelve years ago. As fifteen years ago. And I too, I dare say that they found me the same man as ten years ago. Twelve years. Fifteen years. Which is perhaps more difficult.

Those who keep silent, the only ones whose word counts.

There is what was the heart and the strength of Dreyfusism. That heart, that center, that strength has remained intact.

There had even been created a Dreyfusist honor, which is the very mark and the consecration of a mystique, of the creation of a mystique. When a mystique comes to create an honor, its honor, a proper, particular honor, it is because it really exists, as a mystique. It has given, it has found its mark. That honor, the Dreyfusist one, has remained intact.

That very fidelity which our friends and our subscribers have kept for us for fifteen years across so many trials, across all the miseries, all the distresses, across, beneath all the political misunderstandings, all the political shames, that impeccable friendship, that fidelity of another age, that fidelity ancient, antique, of another time, that friendship, that fidelity unique in all the modern world, is explained itself only as a friendship, a fidelity of the mystic order. It rewards us ourselves for a wholly mystic fidelity to our mystique.

He did not die for himself, but several died for him. That makes, that consecrates, that sanctions a mystique.

Others died for him.

He did not ruin himself for himself. He will ruin himself for no other. But many ruined themselves for him. Many sacrificed for him their career, their bread, their very life, the bread of their wives and of their children. Many threw themselves for him into an inexpiable misery. That makes, that consecrates, that sanctions a mystique.

Misery, the only incurable one of the evils.

Others ruined themselves, temporally lost themselves for him.

The greatest of all, Bernard-Lazare, whatever has been said of it, whatever one will, more licentiously, let it be said, lived for him, died for him, died thinking of him.

What there is of the strongest is that that mystique, which our friends ignored, more than failed to recognize, ignored, (our friends — I take this word here in the political sense, in the sense of political combats, our political friends, our politicians, our parasites), our adversaries themselves suspected it. M. Barrès has very well noted several times that the Dreyfusist movement was a religious movement. He has even written, and long ago, that it was to be regretted that that religious force should be lost. Upon that point at least we are in a position to reassure him. That religious force will not be lost. To the reconstructions that impose themselves, to the restitutions, we have said the word; to the restorations that are announced we come, head high, proud and quite full of our past, beaten by so many trials, forged by our miseries themselves. To the restorations that are announced we come with the memory full, the heart full, the hands full and pure.

I myself, if for nearly fifteen years now (counting everything), badly endowed with resources, badly endowed with forces of every order, badly endowed with talents, across difficulties of all sorts, across mishaps without number, I have been able to hold out, if I have been able to continue this work, to persevere in this work, in this incessant operation, it is certainly because I am attached to these cahiers, to this institution, to this work, by an attachment, by a bond which is of the mystic order.

I was saying it precisely to Isaac during the Easter holidays. We were lunching together, once a year. I was saying to him: You believe, you say that we are pure, that we have clean hands. You believe it, you say it. But you do not know what you are saying. You cannot measure what you believe. One must live in Paris, in what people have made of the Republic, in order to know, in order to measure what it is to be pure.

I have the certainty, in fact, that our friends in the provinces have confidence in us. But they cannot know, they cannot suspect of what they have confidence in us, what is the matter, the ground of the confidence that they place in us.

The Dreyfus Affair was a cross-section, a culmination of three mystiques at least. Firstly it was upon the path of the Hebraic mystique. Why deny it. It is the contrary, on the contrary, that would be suspect.

There is a Jewish politics. Why deny it. It is the contrary, on the contrary, that would be suspect. It is foolish, like all the politics. It is pretentious, like all the politics. It is invasive, like all the politics. It is unfecund, like all the politics. It does the affairs of Israel as the republican politicians do the affairs of the Republic. It is above all occupied, like all the politics, in stifling, in devouring, in suppressing its own mystique, the mystique from which it is issued. And it scarcely succeeds at anything but that.

Far therefore from one’s having to consider the Dreyfus Affair as a combination, a political one, a contrivance, as an operation of the Jewish politics, one must on the contrary consider it as an operation, as a work, as an explosion of the Jewish mystique. The politicians, the rabbis, the communities of Israel, during centuries and centuries of persecutions and of trials, had only too much taken the habit, the political habit, the inclination, of sacrificing some of their members in order to have peace, the peace of the political household, the peace of the kings and of the great, the peace of their debtors, the peace of the populations and of the princes, the peace of the antisemites. They asked only to begin again. They asked only to continue. They asked only to sacrifice Dreyfus in order to conjure away the storm. The great majority of the Jews is like the great majority of the (other) electors. It fears war. It fears trouble. It fears disquiet. It fears, it dreads more than everything perhaps the simple disturbance. It would like better the silence, a low tranquillity. If one could come to an arrangement by means of an understood silence, buy peace by delivering up the scapegoat, pay by some delivering-up, by some betrayal, by some baseness for a precarious tranquillity. To deliver up the innocent blood, it knows what that is. In time of peace it fears war. It is afraid of blows. It is afraid of trouble. It is forced to its own grandeur. It is led to its great painful destinies only forced by a handful of seditious men, an acting minority, a band of fanatics and energumens, a band of frenzied men, grouped around a few heads that are very precisely the prophets of Israel. Israel has furnished innumerable prophets, heroes, martyrs, warriors without number. But in short, in ordinary times, the people of Israel is like all peoples, it asks only not to enter into an extraordinary time. When it is in a period, it is like all peoples, it asks only not to enter into an epoch. When it is in a period, it asks only not to enter into a crisis. When it is in a good plain, a thoroughly rich one, where flow the streams of milk and of honey, it asks only not to climb back up onto the mountain, though that mountain were the mountain of Moses. Israel has furnished innumerable prophets; more than that, it is itself a prophet, it is itself the prophetic race. Wholly entire, in a single body, a single prophet. But in short it asks only this: not to give matter to the prophets to exert themselves upon. It knows what that costs. Instinctively, historically, organically so to speak it knows what that costs. Its memory, its instinct, its very organism, its temporal body, its history, its whole memory tell it so. Its whole memory is full of it.

Twenty, forty, fifty centuries of trials tell it so. Wars without number, murders, deserts, takings of cities, exiles, foreign wars, civil wars, captivities without number. Fifty centuries of miseries, sometimes gilded ones. Like the modern miseries. Fifty centuries of distresses, sometimes anarchist ones, sometimes masked with joys, sometimes masked, made up with voluptuousnesses. Fifty centuries perhaps of neurasthenia. Fifty centuries of wounds and of scars, points always painful, the Pyramids and the Champs-Élysées, the kings of Egypt and the kings of the Orient, the whip of the eunuchs and the Roman lance, the Temple destroyed and not rebuilt, an inexpiable dispersion have told them the price of it for their eternity. They know what it costs, they, to be the carnal voice and the temporal body. They know what it costs to carry God and his agents the prophets. His prophets the prophets. So, obscurely, they would like it better that one should not begin again. They are afraid of blows. They have received so many. They would like it better that one should not speak of it. They have so many times paid for themselves and for the others. One may indeed speak of something else. They have so many times paid for everybody, for us. If one spoke of nothing at all. If one did business, good business. Let us not triumph. Let us not triumph over them. How many Christians have been driven with lashes of the whip into the way of salvation. It is everywhere the same. They are afraid of blows. All humanity is generally afraid of blows. At least before. And after. Happily it is sometimes not afraid of blows during. Were not the most marvelous soldiers perhaps of the great Napoleon, those of the end, generally drawn from bands of deserters and of recalcitrants whom the imperial gendarmes had driven, with handcuffs on their wrists, had herded like a flock as far as that island of Walcheren. Yet from there came Lützen, Bautzen, the Beresina, the glorious Walcheren-Infantry, 131st of the line.

They have fled so much, so many flights and such flights, that they know the price of not fleeing. Encamped, entered into the modern peoples, they would so much like to find themselves at ease there. The whole politics of Israel is to make no noise, in the world (enough of it has been made), to buy peace by a prudent silence. Save for a few pretentious scatterbrains, whom everybody names, to make themselves forgotten. So many bruises still bleed in them. But the whole mystique of Israel is that Israel should pursue in the world its resounding and painful mission. Hence incredible rendings, the most painful interior antagonisms that there has been perhaps between a mystique and a politics. A people of merchants. The same people of prophets. The one knows for the other what calamities are.

The one knows for the other what ruins are, always and always ruins; a heaping-up of ruins; to dwell, to pass in a people of ruins, in a city of ruins.

I know this people well. It has not upon its skin one point that is not painful, where there is not an old bruise, an old contusion, a dull pain, the memory of a dull pain, a scar, a wound, a bruise of the Orient or of the Occident. They have their own, and all those of the others. For example one has bruised, as Frenchmen, all those of annexed Alsace and Lorraine.

It is to know the Jewish politics very ill, at the very moment when one speaks of it, to suppose that it was the Jewish politics and the Jewish party that ever raised an affair like the Dreyfus Affair. On the contrary. It is never they who raise the tumults. They ask, they seek only the silence. They ask only to make themselves forgotten. Save for a few scatterbrains, they seek only the shadow and the silence.

In fact and in the very detail it is not to know a word of the Dreyfus Affair and of Dreyfusism and namely of the manner in which it began, to believe, to imagine that it is like an invention, a fabrication, a forgery of the Jewish party, of the Jewish politics, that the Jewish party, the Jewish politics saw with a good heart the beginning of that affair dawn. It is very exactly the contrary. They did not know clearly, but they were mistrustful. They were right to be mistrustful. From the point of view of the interests. That affair, all in all, and beneath apparent victories, beneath aspects of conquest(s), beneath surfaces of triumph, does them (much) more harm than good.

At the point to which the curve of the history of that affair has fallen today, we can in fact say today that a first time we were victors over the antidreyfusist antidreyfusists; that a second time we were vanquished by the antidreyfusist Dreyfusists; that today, in short, we are in the course of being vanquished by the two together.

They set about it. Did they foresee that enormous tumult, that enormous upheaval? One never foresees everything. In any case they do not like to raise tumults.

When therefore the family of M. Dreyfus, in order to obtain an individual reparation, envisaged a total upheaval of France, and of Israel, and of all Christendom, not only did it go against the French politics, but it went no less against the Jewish politics than it evidently went against the clerical politics. A mystique can go against all the politics at once. Those who learn history elsewhere than in the polemics, those who try to follow it in the realities, in reality itself, know that it was in Israel that the Dreyfus family, that the nascent Dreyfus Affair, that nascent Dreyfusism met first the liveliest resistances. Wisdom too is a virtue of Israel. If there are the Prophets there is Ecclesiastes. Many said: What is the good of it. The wise saw above all that one was going to raise a tumult, to institute a beginning of which one would perhaps never see the end, of which above all one did not see what the end would be. In the families, in the secret of the families, this attempt was commonly treated as folly. One time more, folly was to prevail, in that race elect of disquiet. Later, soon all of them, or almost all, marched, because when a prophet has spoken in Israel, all hate him, all admire him, all follow him. Fifty centuries of the sword in the back force them to march.

They recognize the trial with an admirable instinct, with an instinct of fifty centuries. They recognize, they salute the blow. It is once more a blow of God. The city again will be taken, the Temple destroyed, the women carried off. A captivity is coming, after so many captivities. Long convoys will drag through the desert. Their corpses will mark out the roads of Asia. Very well, they know what it is. They gird up their loins for that new departure. Since they must pass through it they will pass through it again. God is hard, but he is God. He punishes, and he sustains. He leads. They who have obeyed, with impunity, so many exterior masters, temporal ones, they salute at last the master of the most rigorous servitude, the Prophet, the interior master.

The prophet, in that great crisis of Israel and of the world, was Bernard-Lazare. Let us salute here one of the greatest names of modern times, and, after Darmesteter, one of the greatest among the prophets of Israel. For my part, if life leaves me the space for it, I shall consider as one of the greatest rewards of my old age to be able at last to fix, to restitute the portrait of that extraordinary man.

I had begun to write a portrait of Bernard-Lazare. But for these men of fifty centuries one needs perhaps indeed a recoil of fifty years. Enormous quantities of imbeciles, both in Israel and in Christendom, believe still that Bernard-Lazare was a young man, a young man, one does not know clearly, a young writer, come to Paris like so many others, in order to push himself there, in order to make his fortune there, in letters, as one still said then, in the theater, in the tales, in the short stories, in the book, in the novella, in the collection, in the tale, in the farrago, in the newspaper, in politics, in all the temporal misery, come to the Quarter, like all the young men of those countries, a young Jew of the Midi, of Avignon and of the Vaucluse, or of the Bouches-du-Rhône, or rather of the Gard and of the Hérault. A young Jew of Nîmes or of Montpellier. I would not be surprised, I even have the certainty, that the young Bernard-Lazare believed it himself. The prophet at first does not know himself. One would still find people who would make a whole study about Bernard-Lazare the symbolist and the young poet, or the friend of the symbolists, or the enemy of the symbolists. One no longer knows. And in the Dreyfus Affair itself I would not be surprised that the Dreyfusist General Staff, the entourage of Dreyfus, the family of Dreyfus and Dreyfus himself always considered Bernard-Lazare as an agent, whom one paid, as a sort of juridical or judicial counsel, not only in juridical matters, as a maker of memoranda, salaried, as a publicist, as a pamphleteer, for hire, as a polemist and a polemicist, as a journalist without a newspaper, as an unofficial advocate, an honored one, as an unofficial man, as a non-pleading advocate. As a maker, as an establisher of memoranda and dossiers, as a sort of consulting advocate in juridical matters and above all in political matters, in short as a hack writer. As a professional writer. Consequently as a man whom one despises. As a man who worked, who wrote upon a theme. Which one gave him, which one had given him. As a man who earned his living, who earned what he could, who earned what he earned. Consequently as a man whom one despises. As a man in attendance. Perhaps as an agent of execution. Israel passes beside the Just, and despises him. Israel passes beside the Prophet, follows him, and does not see him.

The failure to recognize the prophets by Israel and yet the leading of Israel by the prophets, that is the whole history of Israel.

The failure to recognize the saints by the sinners and yet the salvation of the sinners by the saints, that is the whole Christian history.

The failure to recognize the prophets by Israel has no equal, has nothing comparable, although very different, except the failure to recognize the saints by the sinners.

One may even say that the failure to recognize the prophets by Israel is a figure of the failure to recognize the saints by the sinners.

When the prophet passes, Israel believes that it is a publicist. Who knows, perhaps a sociologist.

If one could make a situation for him at the Sorbonne. Or rather at the École (practical (?) (!)) of the Higher Studies. Fourth section. Or fifth. Or third. In short, section of the religious sciences. At the Sorbonne, at the end of the Gallery of the Sciences, staircase E, on the first floor. One will always be able to. One is so powerful in the French State.

One of the most frightful documents of human ingratitude, (here it was particularly Jewish ingratitude, but generally too it was the ingratitude of so many others, if not our own, a common ingratitude), was the situation made for Bernard-Lazare immediately after the launching and the apparent triumph, the false triumph of the Dreyfus Affair. The total failure to recognize him, the very ignorance of him, the solitude, the forgetting, the contempt into which he was let fall, into which he was made to fall, into which he was made to perish. Into which he was made to die.

— It is his own fault too if he is dead, they say in their incredible, in their incurable baseness, in their gross revolting promiscuity. One must never die. One is always in the wrong to die. — One must therefore say, one must therefore write, one must therefore publish that, as he had lived for them, literally he died by them and for them. Yes, yes, I know, he died of this. And of that. One always dies of something. But the terrible evil of which he died would have left him a respite, ten, fifteen, twenty years of reprieve, without the frightful overwork that he had assumed in order to save Dreyfus. Frightful nervous tension and one that lasted for years. Frightful overwork of body and of head. Overwork of the heart, the worst of all. Overwork of everything.

One always dies of some attack(s).

I shall make the portrait of Bernard-Lazare. He had, undeniably, parts of a saint, of sanctity. And when I speak of a saint, I am not suspect of speaking by metaphor. He had a gentleness, a goodness, a mystic tenderness, an evenness of temper, an experience of bitterness and of ingratitude, a perfect digestion of bitterness and of ingratitude, a sort of goodness which one could not teach anything to, a sort of goodness perfectly informed and perfectly learned, of an incredible depth. Like a goodness to spare. He lived and died for them like a martyr. He was a prophet. It was therefore just that he should be buried prematurely in silence and in forgetting. In a manufactured silence. In a concerted forgetting.

One must not allege his death against him. For his very death was for them. One must not reproach him with his death.

People bore him a grudge above all, the Jews bore him a grudge above all, despised him above all because he was not rich. I believe even that people said that he was a spendthrift. That meant that one had no more need of him, or that one believed that one had no more need of him. Perhaps in fact he cost them a little; perhaps he had cost them a little more. He was a man who had an open hand.

Only one would perhaps have to consider that he was without price.

For he was dead before being dead. Israel one time more, Israel was pursuing its temporally eternal destinies. It is extremely remarkable that the only newspaper where our friend was ever treated worthily, I mean to say according to his dignity, according to his grandeur, according to his measure, in his order of grandeur, where he was treated as an enemy no doubt, violently, harshly, like an enemy, but in short to his measure, where he was considered to the measure of his grandeur, where it was said, in enemy terms, but in short where it was said how much he loved Israel and how great he was, was the Libre Parole, and that the only man who said it was M. Édouard Drumont. It is a shame for us that the name of Bernard-Lazare, for five years, seven years now that he has been dead, has never figured except in an enemy newspaper. I do not speak of the cahiers, of which he remains the interior friend, the secret inspirer; I shall say very willingly, and very exactly, the patron. Outside of us, I say it very limitatively, as one says in law, outside of us, of the cahiers, there is only M. Édouard Drumont who has known how to speak of Bernard-Lazare, who has been willing to speak of him, who has given him his measure.

The others, our own, kept silent already before his death, have kept silent since with a care, a shamefaced one, with a perfection, with a patience, with an extraordinary success.

And he was dead before being dead.

They were as it were ashamed of him. But in reality it was they who were ashamed of themselves before him.

It was the politicians, it was politics itself that was ashamed of itself before the mystique.

How many times have I not climbed that rue de Florence. There is for all the quarters of Paris not only a constituted personality, but that personality has a history like ourselves. It is not very long ago, and yet everything dates. Already. The proper character of history is that very change, that generation and corruption, that constant abolition, that perpetual revolution. That death. It is only a few years ago, eight years, ten years, and what failure to recognize already, what real-estate failure to recognize. — Old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes more quickly, alas! than the heart of a mortal); — People dwelt then in that upper part of Paris where no one today dwells any longer. People are building so many houses everywhere, boulevard Raspail. M. Salomon Reinach must have still dwelt at 38 rue de Lisbonne. Or another number. But in short Bernard-Lazare passed by there, could pass by as a neighbor, in passing. The Saint-Lazare quarter. The rue de Rome and the rue de Constantinople. The whole quarter of Europe. All Europe. Resonances of names which secretly flattered their need to travel, their ease in traveling, their European residence. A railway-station quarter which flattered their need of the railway, their taste for the railway, their ease on the railway. Everybody has moved. Some of them into death. And even many. Zola dwelt rue de Bruxelles, 81 or 81 bis or 83 rue de Bruxelles. First hearing. — Hearing of the 7th of February. — Your name is Émile Zola? — Yes, sir. — What is your profession? — Man of letters. — What is your age? — Fifty-eight years. — What is your domicile? — 21 bis, rue de Bruxelles. — Did not M. Ludovic Halévy dwell rue de Douai, which must be in the same quarter. 22, rue de Douai, and again today 62, rue de Rome, 155, boulevard Haussmann, these were addresses of that time. Dreyfus himself was of that quarter. Labor/i still dwells at 41 or 45 rue Condorcet. I am told that he has only just emigrated to 12, rue Pigalle, Paris IXth. A whole population, a whole people dwelt thus on the heights of Paris, on the flank of the heights of Paris, in that upper, crowded Paris, a whole people, friends, enemies, who knew one another, did not know one another, but felt one another, knew themselves to be country neighbors in that immense Paris.

How many times have I not climbed, in the painful days, up to that rue de Florence. Days painful for him and for me, together, equally, for we felt together, equally, that all was lost, that politics, our politics, (I mean to say the politics of our own), was beginning to devour our mystique. He felt it, if I may say so, with more information, I felt it with more innocence. But he still had a disarming innocence. And I already had much information.

I can say, so that there should be no misunderstanding, I ought to say that during those last years, during that last period of his life I was his only friend. His last and his only friend. His last and his only confidant. To me alone he said then what he thought, what he felt, what he knew, in short. I shall report it some day.

I am forced to insist on it: I was his only friend and his only confidant. I insist on it because some contraband friends that he had, or rather that he had had, literary friends in short, undertook to make themselves believe, and to make the world believe, that they had remained his friends, even after they had sabotaged, denatured, failed to recognize, not known, made into politics his mystique.

Friends of the Quarter, in short, old student friends, perhaps of the Sorbonne. Friends who use the familiar form of address.

And he was so good that by that incurable, by that inexhaustible goodness he let them too believe it, and he let the world believe it. But he spoke to me of it wholly otherwise, because I was his only confidant, because he confided to me all the secrets, all the secret of his thought.

He had of friendship not a mystic idea only, but a mystic sentiment, but an experience of an incredible depth, a trial, an experience, a mystic knowledge. He had that mystic attachment to fidelity which is at the heart of friendship. He made a mystic exercise of that fidelity which is at the heart of friendship. Thus was born between him and us that friendship, that eternal fidelity, that friendship that no death was to break, that friendship perfectly exchanged, perfectly mutual, perfectly perfect, nourished by the disillusionment of all the others, by the disabusement of all the infidelities.

That friendship that no death will break.

He had in the highest degree, in the most profound, that morality of the band, which is perhaps the only morality.

Now for his mystique itself he had that mystic fidelity, that mystic friendship.

That friendship, that morality of the band.

He had that fidelity to himself which is all the same the essential thing. Many can betray you. But it is much, it is already much not to betray oneself. Many politics can betray, can devour, can absorb many mystiques. It is much that the mystiques do not betray themselves.

Many marshals were able to betray Napoleon. But at least Napoleon did not betray himself. The marshal Napoleon did not betray Napoleon the emperor.

One may say that his last joys, as long as he walked, as long as he still went about, were to come as it were to warm himself again among us at the Thursdays of the cahiers, or, to speak more exactly, on Thursday at the cahiers. He liked very much to converse with M. Sorel. I must say that their talk was generally stamped with a great disabusement.

He had a secret taste, very marked, very profound, and almost very violent, for M. Sorel. A common taste of disabusement, of people whom one could not deceive. When they laughed together, when they burst out, at the same moment, for both of them had the spurting laugh, it was with a depth of agreement, an incredible complicity. That striking agreement of the mind, of the laughter, which does not wait, which does not calculate, which at one blow reaches the most profound, the last point, bursts out and reveals. Which by one word reaches the last word. All that M. Sorel said struck him so much that he spoke to me of it again every other morning of the week. They were like two great accomplices. Two great enfants terribles. Two great accomplice children who would have known men very well.

The friendship that he had for these nascent cahiers, for me, had something disarming. It was all the solicitude, all the tenderness, all the information, all the warning of a great elder brother who has seen much.

Who has been very much tried by life. By existence.

From then on he was suspect. From then on he was isolated. The honor of having made the Dreyfus Affair clung to his shoulders like an inexpiable cope. Suspect above all, solitary above all in his own party. Not one newspaper, not one review accepted, tolerated his signature. One would perhaps have taken, at a pinch, a little of his copy, in disguising it, in making it spineless, in sugaring it. Above all in removing, in effacing that devil of a signature. He returned naturally toward us. There was no longer anywhere but at the cahiers that he could speak, write, publish, — even converse. When negotiations were being held to create a great daily (in those days one was always negotiating to create a great new daily) and when one asked money of the Jews (they gave it then, they let it be torn from them much too much, M. Jaurès knows something about it) the capitalists, the Jewish backers scarcely put any condition except one: it was that Bernard-Lazare should not write in it.

People organized themselves very neatly on all sides so that he should die quite quietly of hunger.

He returned toward us as if by his natural slope. He was as it were sacred, that is to say that one counted him at his own account, one measured him to his measure, one prized him at his value, and at the same time and above all one no longer wished to hear of him. Everybody kept silent about him. Those whom he had saved kept silent about him more obstinately, more silently than all the others, sank him into a more muffled, a more obstinate silence. Some of them, in the criminal penumbra of the afterthought, began to let it think itself in them that he was perhaps quite happy, that he was dying perhaps just in time for his glory. Some of them thought it perhaps, some of them thought it no doubt. The fact is — one must render him this justice — that he was dying opportunely, conveniently for many. Almost for everybody. Some persons whom he had made subscribe to the cahiers during the crisis of the Dreyfus Affair were waiting impatiently for him to die in order to send us their unsubscription, to rid themselves of that enormous tribute of twenty francs a year which he had imposed upon them during the Dreyfus Affair, as one already said. We received the unsubscription of M. Louis Louis-Dreyfus in the fortnight or in the month, perhaps in the week, that followed the death of Bernard-Lazare.

Those whom he had saved were the most hurried. He himself knew it very well. One may know also that it is the rule. Each time it is always new. And it is always hard to swallow.

He himself made no illusion to himself about the men he had defended. He saw everywhere the politics, the political men arrive, devour everything, devour, dishonor his work. I shall say all that he said to me. He reached, he obtained a depth of sentiment(s), a depth of regret incredible. He attained those depths of gentle goodness, incredible ones, which can be only based on disabusement.

A small minority, a small group, an immense majority of poor Jews (there are some, many), of wretched ones (there are some, many), remained faithful to him, were attached to him by an attachment, by a love, a fanatic one, which the approaches of death exasperated from day to day. Those loved him. We loved him. The rich already loved him no more.

I shall say therefore what his funeral was.

I shall say what his whole end was.

I shall say how much he suffered.

I shall say, in those confessions, how much he kept silent.

I still see upon me his nearsighted gaze, so intelligent and at the same time so good, of so invincible, so intelligent, so enlightened, so enlightening, so luminous a gentleness, of so untiring, so informed, so enlightened, so disabused, so incurable a goodness. Because a man wears an eyeglass well planted on a fat nose barring, glazing two good big nearsighted eyes, the modern man does not know how to recognize, he does not know how to see the gaze, the fire lit fifty centuries ago. But I, I approached him. I alone lived in his intimacy and in his confidence. One had to listen to, one had to see that man who naturally believed himself a modern. One had to look at that gaze, one had to hear that voice. Naturally he was very sincerely an atheist. It was not then the dominant metaphysics only, it was the ambient metaphysics, the one that one breathed, a sort of climacteric, atmospheric metaphysics; which went without saying, like being well brought up; and besides it was understood, positively, scientifically, victoriously, that it was not, that it was not a metaphysics; he was a positivist, a scientificist, an intellectual, a modern man, in short all that is needful; above all he did not wish to hear talk of metaphysics. One of his favorite arguments, the one that he always served up to me, was that Israel being of all peoples the one that believed least in God, it was evidently the one that it would be easiest to rid of the old superstitions; and thus it would be the one that would show the road to the others. The excellence of the Jews was, according to him, came from the fact that they were as it were in advance the freest thinkers. Even with a hyphen. And underneath that, and within that, a heart that beat to all the echoes of the world, a man who jumped upon a newspaper and who, over the four pages, over the six, eight, over the twelve pages, with a single glance like the thunderbolt, seized a line, and in that line there was the word Jew; a being who blushed, blanched, an old journalist, an old hand of journalism who turned pale over a paragraph that he found in that newspaper, over a piece of an article, over a snippet, over a dispatch, and in that paragraph, in that piece of an article, in that snippet, in that dispatch there was the word Jew; a heart that bled in all the ghettos of the world, and perhaps still more in the broken ghettos, in the diffuse ghettos, like Paris, than in the conclusive ghettos, in the foreclosed ghettos; a heart that bled in Roumania and in Turkey, in Russia and in Algeria, in America and in Hungary, everywhere where the Jew is persecuted, that is to say, in a certain sense, everywhere; a heart that bled in the Orient and in the Occident, in Islam and in Christendom; a heart that bled in Judaea itself, and a man at the same time who jested at the Zionists; thus is the Jew; a trembling of anger, and it was for some injury suffered in the valley of the Dnieper. So, what our Powers did not wish to see, that he was the prophet, the Jew, the chief — the lowliest Jewish peddler knew it, saw it, the most wretched Jew of Roumania. A trembling, a perpetual vibration. All that is needful to die at forty. Not a muscle, not a nerve that was not tense for a secret mission, perpetually vibrated for the mission. Never did a man hold himself to that point chief of his race and of his people, responsible for his race and for his people. A being perpetually tense. A back-tension, an under-tension inexpiable. Not a sentiment, not a thought, not the shadow of a passion that was not tense, that was not commanded by a commandment fifty centuries old, by the commandment fallen fifty centuries ago; a whole race, a whole world upon the shoulders, a race, a world of fifty centuries upon the bent shoulders; upon the round shoulders, upon the heavy shoulders; a heart devoured by fire, by the fire of his race, consumed by the fire of his people; the fire at the heart, an ardent head, and the ardent coal upon the prophet lip.

When I come into relation with someone of our old adversaries (it is a phenomenon more and more frequent, inevitable, desirable even, for a people must indeed remake itself, and remake itself with all its forces), I begin by saying to him: You do not know us. You have the right not to know us. Our politicians have made such a Fair on the Square that you could not see what was happening in the house. Our politicians have not only devoured, absorbed our mystique. They masked it completely, at least from the public, from what one names the great public. You were not a subscriber to the cahiers. It is quite natural. You had something else to do. You did not read the cahiers. But that mystique of which we speak, we do not invent it today for the needs of the cause, we do not improvise it today. It was for ten and fifteen years the very mystique of these cahiers in all these matters and we have manifested it often enough. The only difference there was, is that, masked by the politicians, our cahiers did not then reach the great public, and that today, in the disarray of the politicians, and no doubt for another cause, and at least even for two, they do reach it.

The only difference there is, is that one did not read us and that one is beginning to read us.

And on the other hand it is certain that we are the only ones, that there is no one but us who for fifteen years have held rigorously, impeccably, infallibly to that mystique. There was our strength. And today, obscure with us, ignored with us, conserved with us, by our care, today by our care, with us that mystique naturally appears.

It was our strength, ours, the strength of us others, the weak, of us others, the poor. The mystique is the invincible force of the weak.

But all the difference there is, is that it was unknown; and that today, with us, in us, it is known.

It is for that reason that I am quite willing that there should be an apology for our past, and that I find it very well made, provided only that it be well understood that it is not a question of our past, our own, but of the past of the others. My past has need of no apology. Otherwise there would be, there would be produced an effect, an optical illusion, extremely injurious for us; and unjust; and foolish. A certain number, a small number of Dreyfusards, the upper layer, made, underwent demagogies, a whole demagogy, a whole Dreyfusist politics. A certain number, a very great number of others, we, the lower layers, the depths, the fools, we did everything, exposed everything in order to remain faithful to our mystique, in order to oppose the establishment of the domination of that politics. It is we who count. It is we who represent. It is we who bear witness. It is we who are the proof. We are quite willing that the others should make defenses and apologies, remorses, regrets and cares, that they should make repentances and penances, lay ones, that they should ask for and obtain absolutions, lay ones, civic, civil and obligatory. We shall even give them the formulas of them. But we ask that they should not ask for them and not obtain them for us; that they should not exercise them for us; and secondly that they should not ask for them and not obtain them and not exercise them for the Dreyfus Affair itself and for Dreyfusism. I do not want an apology for Péguy nor for the past of Péguy, nor an apology for the cahiers nor for the past of the cahiers. I do not want anyone to defend me. I have no need to be defended. I am accused of nothing.

I dread nothing so much as this: that anyone should defend me. There is the whole disavowal that I have the courage to inflict upon myself.

I am not accused. We are not accused. Our Dreyfus Affair is not accused. Under that common name of the Dreyfus Affair, as so often happens in history, under that almost generic name there have been at least, in reality, two affairs perfectly distinct, extremely different. Two affairs ran their course, pushed their career, followed their fortune. Pushed their way. Ours has nothing to reproach itself with. There have been pure Dreyfusists and impure Dreyfusists. It is the level of humanity. There has been a pure Dreyfus Affair and an impure Dreyfus Affair. It is the level of the event. We shall not suffer that the first should make excuses, give penances for the second. Or if one prefers, that the second should make and give them for the first. With the first. Together. We have nothing for which we need to be pardoned. We shall not suffer that those who have to ask pardon, or who have the taste for asking pardon, should ask pardon also together for us.

We do not at all want anyone to pardon us.

We who have sacrificed everything in order to oppose ourselves namely to the Combist demagogy, issued from our Dreyfusism, a politics issued from our mystique, we are not at all in Dreyfusism a negligible quantity, which need be or which one could neglect in the accounts, eliminate and despise in and for the operations of history. It is we on the contrary who are the center and the heart of Dreyfusism, who have remained so; it is we who are the soul. The axis passes through us. It is by our watch that one will have to read the hour.

There has been, there is a Dreyfusist honor. Those who have not been faithful to that honor, those who have not followed that honor, have no pardon to ask for those who have followed it, who follow it.

When from time to time I come into relations with someone of these old adversaries, I say to him: You do not know us. You do not suspect us perhaps. You have the right to it. So many of our own do not know us. Our politicians have done everything to hide us from you, to mask us from you, to disavow us, to renounce us, to betray us, our mystique and us. It is quite natural that, placed facing them in the battle, you should have seen only the upper layer, the politics, which was manifesting itself, and that you should not have seen us, that you should not have seen the lower layers, the depths, which were nourishing. You saw the manifestations, and while we were following the rules of our honor you did not see the forces. It is the very law of combat. Today you cannot read everything. Backward, going back up. You cannot know all of us. One does not catch up, one does not remake oneself, one does not recover from ten, twelve or fifteen years. Take only this. And then I give them, or I send them, a copy of the III-21, the Finland, by Jean Deck, not only so that they may read that big and beautiful work of our collaborator, at the very moment when Finland, which had all the same resisted a little pure autocracy, parliamentary bureaucratic autocracy, can no longer resist autocratic autocracy, can no longer defend itself against autocratic bureaucracy sobered up, masked with a vague parliamentary apparatus — but because at the end of that cahier, in that disastrous month of August 1902, we had grouped hastily, in the disaster and in the disarray of our zeal, in the mourning of our disaster, at the end of that cahier all that we had been able to group hastily of the Dreyfusist, all that we had been able to gather against the politics, against the demagogy of the law of the congregations. Read only, I say to them, at the end of the cahier, that dossier of thirty or forty pages for and against the congregations. Read even only, at the end of that dossier, that consultation of Bernard-Lazare dated the 6th of August 1902, entitled the Law and the Congregations. Twenty-five pages. The last he ever gave. A year afterward he was dead or was dying.

One must render them this justice, that they come out of that reading generally stupefied. They did not suspect who we were. And above all they did not suspect that we were so from the beginning. That we had been so for such a long time, since the beginning. They did not suspect that long, that initial, that impeccable fidelity. That fidelity of a whole life. Namely, eminently, they did not suspect what a man like Bernard-Lazare was.

One must think that in that dossier, in that consultation, which must be read, which is not only an admirable monument but an unforgettable monument, Bernard-Lazare opposed himself with all that he had still of strength to the degeneration, to the deviation of Dreyfusism into politics, into Combist demagogy. Let those who have succumbed, who have yielded, however little it was, to the worst of all the demagogies, to the Combist demagogy, make apologies, or let apologies be made for them. But for those who have been unshakable, for those who have not yielded by a line, for pity’s sake, let none be made. When one rereads that admirable memorandum of Bernard-Lazare, one is as it were shocked, a blush comes at the mere idea, that the idea should come, that such a man should be lumped in, could be lumped in inconsiderately by third parties, by the public, by the ignorant, among the pardoned, among the beneficiaries of an apology.

Operating, working upon the same matter, evolving in the same matter, there have been at least two Dreyfus Affairs, elaborating the matter of the same history. That of Bernard-Lazare, ours, was innocent and has no need to be defended. And in another sense again there were very namely two Dreyfus Affairs, the one that had issued from Bernard-Lazare, and the one that had issued from Colonel Picquart. The one that had issued from Colonel Picquart was very good. The one that had issued from Bernard-Lazare was infinite.

One must think that, namely in that consultation, which was literally his mystic testament, he did not oppose himself only to Combism, which was the abuse, the demagogy of the system. He had opposed himself, no less vigorously, to Waldeckism, which was supposed to be the use of it and the norm. He had not gone only to the abuse, but he had gone back up to the very root of the use. He had gone, he had gone back up to the root, all the way to the root. Naturally, by a movement, a request, a requisition that was natural, like every man of profound thought. He had discerned the effect in the cause, the abuse in the use. One must think therefore that he had opposed himself, with all his forces, with all that remained to him of forces, not only to the development, and to the promises of development, but to the very origin, to the principle of the Dreyfusist politics. One must reread that dossier, that consultation, that eloquent adjuration to Jaurès, almost that putting on notice, certainly already that threat.

One must think that he was a man — I have said very precisely a prophet — for whom all the apparatus of the powers, the reason of State, the temporal powers, the political powers, the authorities of every order, political, intellectual, mental even, did not weigh an ounce in the face of a revolt, in the face of a movement of his own conscience. One cannot even have any idea of it. We others, we cannot have any idea of it. When we revolt against an authority, when we march against the authorities, at least we lift them. In short we feel the weight of them. At least in us. It is at least necessary that we should lift them. We know, we feel that we are marching against them and that we are lifting them. For him they did not exist. Less than I tell you. I do not even know how to represent to what point he despised the authorities, temporal ones, how he despised the powers, how to give an idea of it. He did not even despise them. He ignored them, and even more. He did not see them, he did not consider them. He was nearsighted. They did not exist for him. They were not of his grade, of his order of grandeur, of his grandeur. They were totally foreign to him. They were for him less than nothing, equal to zero. They were like ladies who were not received in his drawing-room. He had for authority, for command, for government, for force, temporal force, for the State, for the reason of State, for the gentlemen dressed in authority, clothed in reason of State, such a hatred, such an aversion, a resentment so constant, that that hatred annulled them, so that they did not enter, so that they had not the honor of entering into his understanding. In that affair of the congregations, of that law of the congregations, or rather of those successive laws and of the application of that law, where it was so evident that the government of the Republic, under the name of the Combes government, failed in all the engagements which, under the name of the Waldeck government, it had taken — in that affair, that other affair, that new affair where it was so evident that the government was falsifying the word of a government and consequently of the government, was falsifying in short the word of the State, if it is permitted to put those two words together — Bernard-Lazare had judged naturally that one had to honor the word of the Republic. He had judged that the Republic had to keep its word. He had judged that one had to apply, to interpret the law as the government, the two Chambers, the State in short had promised to have it applied, had engaged themselves to apply it, to interpret it themselves. Had promised that one would apply it. That was for him the very evidence. The Court of Cassation, naturally too, did not hesitate to range itself to the opinion (of those gentlemen) of the government. I mean to say of the second government. A friend (as one says) came to tell him, triumphant: You see, my dear friend, the Court of Cassation has judged against you. The Dreyfusards become Combists were already bursting with pride, and playing the clever fellows, and with politician rottenness. One had to have seen then his eye sparkling with malice, but a gentle one, and with information. He who has not seen his black eye has seen nothing, his nearsighted eye; and the fold of his lip. A little fat. — My dear friend, he answered gently, you are mistaken. It is I who have judged otherwise than the Court of Cassation. The idea that one could for an instant compare to him, to him Bernard-Lazare, the Court of Cassation, all its chambers deployed, seemed to him buffoonish. As the other man was all the same a little suffocated: — But, my boy, he said to him very gently, the Court of Cassation, it is men. He had the sovereign air of speaking very gently, very delicately, as to a little imbecile of a pupil. Who would not have understood. Think that it was the time when every politician Dreyfusard was hobnobbing with the Court of Cassation, spoke of the Court of Cassation puffing out his cheeks, was bursting with pride at having been historically, juridically authenticated, justified by the Court of Cassation, rolled his eyes, assured himself at the bottom of himself, upon the Court of Cassation, that Dreyfus was indeed innocent. He had remained a street-urchin, of an invincible street-urchinhood, of that street-urchinhood which is the very mark of grandeur, of that noble street-urchinhood, of that easy street-urchinhood which is the mark of ease in grandeur. And above all of that manly street-urchinhood which is rigorously reserved for pure hearts. Never have I seen an ease such, so sovereign. Never have I seen a spiritual man despise so sovereignly, so healthily, so easily, so evenly a temporal company. Never have I seen a spiritual man annul thus a temporal body. One felt very well that for him the Court of Cassation did not overawe him at all, that for him they were old men, old fellows, that the idea of opposing them to him, Bernard-Lazare, as a judicial authority, was purely baroque, burlesque; that he, Bernard-Lazare, was a wholly other judicial authority, and political, and everything. That he had a wholly other mainspring, a wholly other jurisdiction, that he pronounced a wholly other law. That he saw them perfectly and constantly stripped of their magistracy, despoiled of all their apparatus and of those very robes which prevent one from seeing the man. That he could not see them otherwise. Even putting good will into it, all his good will. Because he was good. Even forcing himself to it. That he did not even conceive that one could see them otherwise. That he himself could see them only as old monkeys all naked. In no way, as one might believe, at first, as a first examination, a superficial, a hasty one, might at first lead one to suppose, as old monkeys clad in the simarre and in the ermine. One felt so well that he knew that he, Bernard-Lazare, had made those people walk, that one would make them walk again, and that he, Bernard-Lazare, one would never make him walk, that those people above all would never make him walk. That he had temporally made everybody walk and that everybody would never make him spiritually walk. For him it was not, it never would be the highest authority of the realm, the highest judicial authority, the highest jurisdiction of the realm, the highest magistrate of the Republic. They were old judges. And he knew well what an old judge is. One felt so well that he knew that he had made those people walk, and that they would never make him walk. When the other man had gone: You have seen him, he said to me laughing. He was funny with his Court of Cassation. Note that he was, and very deliberately, against the Waldeck laws themselves. Against the Waldeck law. But in short, since there was a Waldeck law, he wished, it was necessary that one should keep to it juridically. And even loyally. That one should apply it, that one should interpret it as it was. He did not like the State. But in short, since there was a State, and since one could not do otherwise, he wished at least that the same State that made a law should be also the one that applied it. That the State should not slip away and should not change name and statute between the two, that it should not do this under one name and undo it under another, under a second name. He wished at least that the State should be, at least for a few years, constant with itself. The other man meant evidently that it was of a very great price, of a supreme price, of a price of supreme court, that the Court of Cassation should have cleared Dreyfus. For him it was of no price. He considered that sort of juridical consecration as a purely judicial consecration, and uniquely as a temporal victory, above all no doubt as a victory of him, Bernard-Lazare, over the Court of Cassation. It did not come to his thought that a Court of Cassation could make or not make, made or did not make the innocence of Dreyfus. But he felt, he knew perfectly that it was he, Bernard-Lazare, who made the authority of a Court of Cassation, who made or did not make a Court of Cassation itself, because he made the nourishment and the matter of it, and that thus and besides he made the very form of it. That in a sense, that in that sense he made the magistracy of it. It was not the Court of Cassation that did him a great honor. It was he who did a great honor to the Court of Cassation. Never have I seen a man believe, know to that point that the greatest temporal powers, that the greatest bodies of the State hold, are only by interior spiritual powers. It is well enough known that he was wholly opposed to making article 445 come into play as it was made to come into play (Clemenceau too was opposed to it), and all the embarrassments that we have had from the play of that article, the insurmountable embarrassments that have been produced, that have resulted from the play of that article, or rather from that play of that article, would have been avoided if one had left him the government of the affair. There is no doubt that he considered that play as a forfeiture, as an abuse, as a coup of judicial force, as an illegality. Besides, with his clear good sense, thoroughly French, that Jew, thoroughly Parisian, with his clear juridical gaze, he foresaw the inextricable difficulties into which it would throw us, that it would eternally reopen the affair, or rather that it would eternally prevent the affair from closing. He said to me: Dreyfus will pass before fifty courts-martial, if need be; or again: Dreyfus will pass before courts-martial all his life. But he must be acquitted like everybody else. The bottom of his thought was moreover that Dreyfus was quite foolish to give himself so much trouble to have his innocence consecrated by the constituted authorities; that those people add nothing to the affair; that since he had been torn from an iniquitous persecution the principal thing was done, everything was done; that the coatings of authority, the judicial consecrations are quite superfluous, do not exist, coming from negligible bodies; that it is to do much honor to those gentlemen; that one is quite good, when one is innocent, in addition to it to have it ascertained. That one thus brings, to those authorities, an authority of which they have great need. But then, in the second degree, if one had recourse to it, one had to have recourse to it straightforwardly, one had not to shuffle, one had not to cheat, above all no doubt because it was to give oneself the appearances, and perhaps the reality, of bowing before them, of dreading them. Since one was going to it, since one was using it, one had to use it, and to go at it straightforwardly. It was still a means of commanding them. If it was politics, it had at least to be straight. He had an incredible taste for uprightness, above all in what he did not like, in politics and in the judicial. He caught himself up, so to speak, thus, for going at it in spite of himself, by being upright at it in spite of them. I have never seen anyone know so well how to keep his distances, be so distant, so gently, so learnedly, so horizontally so to speak. I have never seen a spiritual power, someone who feels himself, who knows himself a spiritual power, keep so interiorly so to speak horizontal distances so contemptuous toward the temporal powers. And so he had a secret affection, a friendship, a profound affinity with the other spiritual powers, even with the Catholics, whom he combated deliberately. But he wished to combat them only with spiritual arms in spiritual battles. His profound interior and manifested opposition to Waldeckism itself thus came from two origins. Firstly, by a sort of equilibrium, of balancing, of equity, of equality, of justice, of health, political ones, of equitable distribution, he did not want one to do to the others what the others had done to you, but what one did not want them to do to you. The clericals annoyed us for years, he said, and still more energetically, it is not a question now of annoying the Catholics. One has never seen a Jew so little a partisan, so little thinking, so little conceiving of the talion. He did not want to render precisely good for evil, but very certainly the just for the unjust. He had also that idea that really it was not clever, that one had scarcely to feel oneself strong to have recourse to such forces. Now he felt himself strong. That one had scarcely to have confidence in oneself. Now he had confidence in himself. Like all the truly strong. Like all the truly strong he did not like to employ easy arms, to have easy successes, diminished successes, degraded ones, successes that were not of the same order of grandeur as the combats that he wished to sustain.

Secondly he had certainly a secret sympathy, an interior understanding with the other spiritual powers. His hatred of the State, of the temporal, was found there wholly entire. One cannot prosecute, he said, by laws, people who assemble to make their prayer. Even though they should assemble five hundred thousand. If one finds that they are dangerous, that they have too much money, let one prosecute them, let one reach them by general measures, like everybody (that same word, that same expression, like everybody, which he always used, which he used precisely for Dreyfus), by laws, economic general ones, which prosecute, which reach all those who are as dangerous as they, who have money like them. He did not like the political parties, the State, the Chambers, the government to take from him the glory of the combat that he wished to sustain, to dishonor in advance his combat.

In a general manner he did not like, he could not bear that the temporal should meddle with the spiritual. All those temporal apparatuses, all those organs, all those hoisting apparatuses seemed to him infinitely too gross to have the right to put their gross paw not only into the rights but even into the spiritual interests. That organs as gross as the government, the Chamber, the State, the Senate, as foreign to all that is spiritual, should put the fingers of their hand into the spiritual, was for him not only a gross profanation, but more still, an exercise of bad taste, an abuse, the exercise, the abuse of a singular incompetence. He felt on the contrary a secret, a singular complicity of spiritual competence, at need, with the pope.

Never have I seen a man — I do not say believe, I say know to that point — I do not say only that a conscience is above all the jurisdictions, but that it is, that it itself exercises in reality a jurisdiction, that it is the supreme jurisdiction, the only one.

If one had followed him, if one had at least followed his teaching and his example, if one had continued in his sense, if one had only followed the respect that one owed to his memory, today the revision itself of the Dreyfus trial would not be in danger, as it is. It would not be exposed, as it is.

So we have seen his funeral. I shall say what his funeral was. Who we were, how few in that cortege, in that convoy, in that faithful gray accompaniment descending and passing through Paris. In full holidays. In that month of August or rather in that beginning of the month of September. A few of them, the same frenzied men, the same fanatics, Jews and Christians, a few rich Jews, very rare, a few rich Christians, very rare, poor and wretched Jews and Christians, themselves in fairly small number. A small troop, all in all, a very small troop. Like a sort of reduced company that was crossing Paris. Wretched foreign Jews, I mean to say foreign to the French nationality, for there was not one Roumanian Jew, I mean to say a Jew of Roumania, who did not know him to be a prophet, who did not hold him for a veritable prophet. He was for all those wretched ones, for all those persecuted ones, a flash still, a relighting of the torch which eternally will not go out. Temporally eternally. And as all these very marks are of family, as all that is of Israel is of race, as those things remain in the families, how is one not to recall, how is one not to see that old funeral when one saw so few people, a few weeks ago still, at the funeral of his mother. Relatively few people. And yet they knew many people. I shall say his death, and his long and his cruel illness, and all the slow and so prompt forwarding of his death. That sort of ferocious illness. As it were relentless. As it were fanatic. As it were itself frenzied. Like him. Like us. I know nothing so poignant, so striking, I know nothing so tragic as that man who, stiffening himself with all that remained to him of strength, set himself athwart his victorious party. Who in a desperate effort, in which he broke himself, tried, undertook to climb back up that surge, that wave, that terrible surge, the insurmountable surge of victory and of abuses, of the abuse of victory. The only surge that one will never climb back up. The insurmountable surge of acquired victory. Of victory made. Of the carrying-along of victory. The insurmountable, the mechanical, the automatic surge of the very game of victory. I see him again in his bed. That atheist, that professionally atheist man, that officially atheist man in whom resounded, with a force, with an incredible gentleness, the eternal word; with an eternal force; with an eternal gentleness; which I have never found again equal anywhere else. I have still upon me, in my eyes, the eternal goodness of that gaze infinitely gentle, that goodness not launched, but laid down, informed. Infinitely disabused; infinitely informed; infinitely insurmountable itself. I see him again in his bed, that atheist streaming with the word of God. In death itself all the weight of his people weighed upon his shoulders. One had not to tell him that he was not responsible for it. I have never seen a man thus charged, so charged with a charge, with an eternal responsibility. As we are, as we feel ourselves charged with our children, with our own children in our own family, just as much, exactly as much, exactly thus he felt himself charged with his people. In the most atrocious sufferings he had but one care: that his Jews of Roumania should not be artfully omitted, in order to make the movement succeed, in that movement of reprobation that some European publicists were undertaking then against the excesses of the Oriental persecutions. I see him in his bed. One climbed up to that rue de Florence so much on the right bank, for us, so far from the quarter. The autobuses did not yet run. One climbed by the rue de Rome, or by the rue d’Amsterdam, cour de Rome or cour d’Amsterdam, I no longer know which of the two is named which, up to that climbing crossroads that I see again. That house rich, for the time, where he lived poor. He excused himself for his rent, saying: I have an enormous lease on my back. I do not know whether I shall be able to sublet as I would wish. When I took that apartment, I believed that I would make a great newspaper and that one would work here. I had plans. He was far from it, from making a great newspaper. The newspapers of the others were being made, of the others themselves, on condition that he should not be in them. I see again that great room, rue de Florence, 5, (or 7) rue de Florence, the room of the bed, the room of suffering, the room of lying-down, the room of heroism, (the room of sanctity), the mortuary room. The room of the bed from which he did not rise again. Have I then so much forgotten it myself that that 5, (or that 7), no longer answers mechanically to the call of my memory, that that 5 and that 7 fight like rag-pickers in the storehouse of my memory, that each one tries itself out and asserts its titles. And yet I went there. And we said familiarly among ourselves: Have you been to the rue de Florence. In the great rectangular room, I see the great rectangular bed. One, or two, or three great rectangular windows gave great oblique rectangular lights from the left; falling, descending slowly; slowly inclined. The bed came from the back, not from the back opposite the windows, where the doors were, and, I think, the corridors, but from the back that one had before one when one had the windows on the left. From that back the bed came right into the middle, quite squarely, the head toward the back, joined to the back, the feet toward the middle of the room. He himself just in the middle of his bed, on his back, symmetrical, like the axis of his bed, like an axis of equity. The two arms well to the left and to the right. It was in the last days. The illness was approaching its consummation. A profound, a vigilant fraternal affection, the diligence of a fraternal affection was thinking already of making for him, of preparing for him a death that should not be the consummation of that cruelty, that should be gentler, a little softened, that should not have all the cruelty, all the barbarism of that frenzied illness. That should not be the crowning of that cruelty. People had told him stories about his illness, stories and stories. What did he believe of it? He made, like everybody, a show of believing them. What did he believe of it, it is the secret of the dead. Morientium ac mortuorum. In that incurable cowardice of the modern world, where we dare to say everything to a man, except what interests him, where we do not dare to say to a man the greatest piece of news, the news of the only great term, we have lied ourselves so many times, we have so much lied to so many dying men and to so many dead men, that one must indeed hope that when it is our turn we shall not ourselves quite believe the lies that are told to us. He therefore made a show of believing them. But in his beautiful gentle eyes, in his great and big clear eyes it was impossible to read. They were too good. They were too gentle. They were too beautiful. They were too clear. It was impossible to know whether it was by a miracle of hope (a temporal one) (and perhaps more) that he hoped still, or whether it was by a miracle of charity, for us, that he made a show of hoping. His very eye, his clear eye, of a childlike limpidity, was like an eyeglass, like a second lens, like a second pane, like a second eyeglass of gentleness and of goodness, of light, of clearness. Impenetrable. Because one read in it as one wished. It was the last days. Few people could still see him, even relatives. But he loved me so much that he kept me on the last lists. I was seated along his bed on the left at the foot. At his right consequently. He spoke of everything as if he were to live a hundred years. He asked me how I came. He told me, with much pride, a childish one, that the metro Amsterdam was open. Or some other. He grew passionate ingenuously for all that was ways and means of communications. All that was comings and goings, geographical, topographical, telegraphic, telephonic, going and returning, circulations, displacements, replacements, voyages, exoduses and deuteronomies caused him an inexhaustible heaping-up of childish joy. The metro particularly was for him a personal victory. All that was rapidity, acceleration, fever of communication, displacement, rapid circulation filled him with a childish joy, with the old joy, with a joy of fifty centuries. It was his affair, his own. To be elsewhere, the great vice of that race, the great secret virtue; the great vocation of that people. A going-back-up of fifty centuries did not set him on a railway without its being some caravan of fifty centuries. Every crossing for them is the crossing of the desert. The most comfortable houses, the best settled ones, with hewn stones as big as the columns of the temple, the most real-estate houses, the most immovable, the most crushing buildings are never for them anything but the tent in the desert. The granite replaced the tent with the canvas walls. What does it matter, those hewn stones bigger than the columns of the singular temple. They are always on the back of the camels. The singular temple. How many times have I not thought of it. They for whom the most immovable houses will never be anything but tents. And we on the contrary, who have really slept under the tent, under real tents, how many times have I not thought of you, Lévy, you who have never slept under a tent, otherwise than in the Bible; at the end of a few hours those tents of the camp of Cercottes were already our houses. How beautiful are your pavilions, Jacob; how beautiful are your tents, O Israel. How many times have I not thought of it, how many times have I not thought of you, how many times did not those words come back up to me dully like a coming-back-up of a glory of fifty centuries, like a great secret joy of glory, with which I dully burst by a sacred remembrance when we returned to the camp, my dear Claude, through those hard nights of May. A people for whom the stone of houses will always be the canvas of tents. And for us on the contrary it is the canvas of tents that was already, that will always be the stone of our houses. Not only had he therefore not had for the metropolitan railway that aversion, that distance which at bottom we always keep for it, even when it renders us the greatest services, because it transports us too quickly, and at bottom because it renders us too many services, but on the contrary he had for it a proper affection, a wholly prideful one, like an author’s pride. They were then boring it through, only the line number 1, I believe, was in operation. He had a local pride, a quarter pride, that it had reached, already, all the way to him, one of the first, that it had been bored through all the way to him, that it had begun to climb up toward those heights. He had told me so, a few months before, when one had tried to send him, like everybody, toward the repairs of the Midi. He had gone from hotel to hotel. He was happy as a child. Until he found a sort of little peasant house, which he presented to me in a letter as paradise realized. And from which naturally he returned quickly, he returned to Paris. He had told me so then, in one of those words that light up a man, a people, a race. You see, Péguy, he said to me, I begin to feel at home only when I arrive in a hotel. He said it laughing, but it was true all the same.

In short, in action, in politics, since one of them is needed, since one had to descend into it, he was a partisan of the common law. Common law in the Dreyfus Affair, common law in the affair of the Congregations. Common law for Dreyfus, common law against the congregations. That seems nothing, that can lead far. That led him as far as isolation in death.

He was essentially for justice, for equity, for equality (not naturally in the democratic sense, but in the sense of perfect equilibrium, of perfect horizontality in justice). He was against the exception, against the law of exception, against the measure of exception, whether it was for or against, persecution or grace. He was for the level of justice.

I looked at him therefore that morning. 7, rue de Florence. And I listened to him. I was seated at the foot of his bed on the left like a faithful disciple. So much gentleness, so much mansuetude in so cruel a situation disarmed me, overpassed me. So much gentleness, so to speak inexpiable. I listened in a piety, in a half-silence respectful, affectionate, furnishing him only the discourse to sustain himself. The Beethoven of Romain Rolland had just appeared. Our subscribers still recall what a sudden revelation that cahier was, what an emotion it raised from one end to the other, how it spread suddenly, like a wave, as it were underneath, so to speak instantaneously, how it was suddenly, instantaneously, in a revelation, before the eyes of all, in a sudden understanding, in a common understanding, not only the beginning of the literary fortune of Romain Rolland, and of the literary fortune of the cahiers, but infinitely more than a beginning of literary fortune, a moral revelation, a sudden one, a presentiment unveiled, revealed, the revelation, the bursting-forth, the sudden communication of a great moral fortune. But all that movement was swelling, had not yet had the time to manifest itself. The cahier, I repeat it, had only just appeared. Bernard-Lazare said to me: Ah, I have read your cahier of Romain Rolland. It is really very beautiful. One must admit that the Jewish soul and the Hellenic soul have been two great pieces of the universal soul. I manifested nothing, because I have said that when one goes to see a sick man one is resolved to manifest nothing. One is therefore guarded by a cuirass, an invincible one, by an impenetrable mask. But I was seized, I felt myself pursued even into the vertebrae. For I had come to see, I had expected to see the advances of death. And that is already much. And I saw abruptly the advances of the beyonds of death. To measure the depth, the novelty of such a word, the eternal soul, and even the Jewish soul, and the Hellenic soul, one must know to what point, with what religious scruple those men, the men of that generation, avoided employing the least word of the mystic jargon. One spoke then of beginning again the Dreyfus Affair, of taking up again the Dreyfus Affair. One must recall that between the Dreyfus Affair itself and the second Dreyfus Affair there was a long time of dead calm, of silence, of a total solitude. One did not know then, at all, during all that time, whether the affair would ever begin again. It would have been better that it should not begin again. We would not have been acquitted by the Court of Cassation. But we remained what we were, we remained pure before the country and before history. But all panting from that great Affair, from that first great history, all sweating and all boiling from the battle, all disconcerted by the repose, by the calm, by the flatness, by the muffled peace, by the suspicious repose, by the suspicious treaty, by inaction, by the peace of dupes, all anxious at not having obtained, attained all the temporal results that we hoped for, that we awaited, that we counted upon, at not having realized the kingdom of justice upon the earth and the kingdom of truth, all anxious above all at seeing our mystique escape us, we thought in the secret of our hearts only of a taking-up again of the affair, of what we named among ourselves, like conspirators, the taking-up again. We did not foresee, alas, that that taking-up again would be only the lowest degradation of it, a total diversion, a gross diversion of the mystique into politics. We spoke of it. He, in his bed, spoke to me of it gently. I saw quickly that he spoke to me of it as of a conspiracy, but as of a foreign conspiracy, to which he himself remained a stranger. Willingly, by force. I said to him: But after all, what are they going to do? Did they not even ask your advice? He answered me gently: They preferred to apply to Jaurès. They are so happy to do something without me.

They — that meant everyone, that meant all the others, that meant Dreyfus, whom he loved like a younger brother.

There is no doubt that for us the Dreyfusist mystique was not merely a particular case of the Christian mystique, but that it was an eminent case of it, an acceleration, a crisis, a temporal crisis, a sort of example and of passage that I shall call necessary. How can one deny it, now that we are twelve and fifteen years removed from our youth, and that at last we see clearly into our hearts? Our Dreyfusism was a religion — I take the word in its most literally exact sense — a religious surge, a religious crisis; and I would even strongly advise anyone who wished to study, to consider, to know a religious movement in modern times, one well characterized, well delimited, well cut out, to seize upon this unique example. I add that for us, with us, in us this religious movement was Christian in essence, Christian in origin, that it pushed up from a Christian source, that it flowed from the ancient spring. We can today bear ourselves this witness. The Justice and the Truth that we so loved, to whom we gave everything, our youth, everything, to whom we gave ourselves entirely throughout the whole time of our youth, were not justices and truths of concept, they were not dead justices and truths, they were not justices and truths of books and of libraries, they were not conceptual, intellectual justices and truths, justices and truths of an intellectual party, but they were organic, they were Christian, they were in no way modern, they were eternal and not temporal only, they were living Justices and Truths, a Justice and a Truth. And of all the sentiments that together drove us, in a trembling, in that unique crisis, today we can confess that of all the passions that drove us in that ardor and in that seething, in that swelling and in that tumult, one virtue was at the heart, and that it was the virtue of charity. And I do not wish to reopen an old debate, today henceforth historical, but in our enemies, with our enemies, with our adversaries of that time, historical like ourselves, become historical, I see a great deal of intelligence, a great deal of lucidity even, a great deal of acuity. What strikes me most is certainly a certain lack of charity. I do not wish to anticipate what belongs properly to confessions. But it is incontestable that even in all our socialism there was infinitely more Christianity than in all of the Madeleine together with Saint-Pierre de Chaillot, and Saint-Philippe du Roule, and Saint-Honoré d’Eylau. It was essentially a religion of temporal poverty. It is therefore, it is assuredly, the religion that will ever be the least celebrated in modern times. By far, by infinitely the least observed as a feast-day. We were marked by it so harshly, so ineffaceably, we received from it an imprint, so hard a mark, so indelible, that we shall remain marked by it for all our temporal life, and for the other. Our socialism was never either a parliamentary socialism or a socialism of the rich parish. Our Christianity will never be either a parliamentary Christianity or a Christianity of the rich parish. We had received from then onward such a vocation of poverty, of misery even, so profound, so interior and at the same time so historical, so contingent, so dependent on events, that since then we have never been able to extricate ourselves from it, and I am beginning to believe that we shall never be able to extricate ourselves from it.

It is a sort of vocation.

A destination.

What may have been deceptive is that all the political forces of the Church were against Dreyfusism. But the political forces of the Church have always been against the mystique. Notably against the Christian mystique. It is the most eminent application there has ever been of that general rule which we laid down above.

One might even say that the Dreyfus affair was a new case of religion, of religious movement, of beginning, of the origin of a religion, a rare case, perhaps a unique case.

The Dreyfusist mystique, finally, was for us essentially a crisis of (the) French mystique. That affair was for us and by us very exactly within the French line. As it had been very exactly for us and by us within the Christian line. We ourselves were in it very exactly within the French line, as we had been in it very exactly within the Christian line. We were in it of French quality, as we had been in it of Christian quality.

We displayed there, properly speaking, the virtues, the French qualities, the virtues of the race: clear valiance, rapidity, good humor, constancy, firmness, an obstinate courage, but of good tone, of fine bearing, of good bearing, fanatical and at the same time measured, frenzied together and fully sensible; a gay sadness, which is the very mark of the Frenchman; a deliberate purpose; a resolution hot and cold; an ease, a constant well-informedness; a docility and together a constant revolt against the event; an organic impossibility of consenting to injustice, of resigning oneself to anything. A suppleness, a fineness of blade. A keenness of point. It must simply be said that we were heroes. And more precisely heroes in the French manner. (The proof is that we have not recovered from it, that we have not retired from it.) (All our life, perhaps, we shall be half-pay veterans.) For one must indeed see how the question was posed. The question was in no way then, for us, of knowing whether Dreyfus was innocent or guilty. But of knowing whether one would or would not have the courage to declare him so, to know him innocent.

When we shall write that history of the Dreyfus affair which will properly be the memoirs of a Dreyfusist, there will be occasion to examine, to study very closely, and we shall establish very attentively, in the greatest detail, what I shall call the curve of public belief in the innocence of Dreyfus. That curve has naturally undergone the most extraordinary variations. Naturally too the anti-Dreyfusists did everything to make it rise, and one must render this justice to the Dreyfusists, that they generally did everything to make it descend. Starting from somewhere near zero in 1894 (the family and a very few rare persons excepted), one may say that it rose, that through jolts of every kind, through political and historical fluctuations such as never fail to occur for these sorts of curves, it rose constantly until the day when the ship that brought Dreyfus back to France introduced among us the very body of the debate. From then on, despite appearances, despite an apparent plateau, despite an appearance of horizontality, in reality it began to descend slowly, regularly. Despite varied fortunes, despite appearances of fortune, in reality it began to fall. This descent, this fall, this decline is halted today; one may believe it is halted forever, because it can hardly go any further, fall any lower, because a great many people today are wholly indifferent to it, and above all because we have fallen back to a certain equilibrium, into a certain equilibrium very tempting, very solid, very common, the same one in which we were halted for so long during the ascent: France, the world, history cut in two, we ourselves cut into two parties well distinct, well separated, well fixed, believing professionally, officially, the one in guilt and the other in innocence, making profession of believing the one in guilt and the other in innocence. It is the situation, it is the position common, usual, familiar, so to speak classic, it is the known situation, the world cut in two over a question. It is the convenient situation, for it is the situation of war, the situation of mutual hatred. It is the situation to which everyone is accustomed. It is therefore the one that will last, the one that already came near to lasting during the ascent of our curve, the one that has found itself again, that has recovered itself, that has gathered itself again at the same level in the descent, the one that will lose itself no more, that will be definitive. With the successive damping effects, naturally, through the successive arrival of new generations; with the increasing damping effects and the final extinction, the historical extinction. What is remarkable is how convenient this situation is, this intermediate plateau of the country cut in two, how complacently, how conveniently we halted there during the ascent, how easily, how rapidly we found ourselves there again during the descent. Conveniently. How easily, how naturally we moved about there during the ascent, in the very midst of battle, how easily, how naturally we battled there, as if at home, and how we even lingered there. And how on the return, during the descent, we found it again easily, how rapidly we found ourselves at home there again. But what is incontestable is that this curve, in those jolts, at the issue of that ascent, attained several times a maximum that was even a universum. I mean that in those fluctuations, in those agitations, in that crisis, in those leaps, in those acts of force and in those dramatic turns of events, there were at least two or three times forty-eight hours when the whole country (our adversaries themselves, and I say even their leaders) believed in the innocence of Dreyfus. For example, notably in that thunderclap, instantaneously after that dramatic turn of Colonel Henry at Mont-Valérien (death or simulation of death, assassination, murder, suicide or simulation of suicide). (In short, disappearance.) How we fell back, descended again from that summit, which on that day, in that flash of lightning, seemed definitively acquired, how we were made to descend from it, how one thus succeeded in making this curve descend again so far, that is the secret of the politicians. It is the secret of the politicals. It is the secret of politics itself. It is the secret of Dreyfus himself, in the measure — and it is total — in which, leaving us, he handed himself over entirely into the hands of the politicals. How one succeeded in carrying off this wager, in making us fall from that total maximum, that is the great skill, that is the secret of the politicians. How one loses a battle that was won — ask Jaurès. Today we are condemned to perpetual contestation, until that blunting, that stupor, that obliteration, inevitable, which comes from time, from succeeding generations, which is properly called history, the position, the acquisition of history. When our enemies, when our adversaries reproached us with being the party of the foreigner, they were totally wrong, absolutely wrong about us and against us (about our mystique and against our mystique); they were partially right about and against our General Staff, which precisely masked us from them, which even did everything it could to mask us, before the world, and which succeeded so perfectly, so completely; they were partially right (perhaps for a third, in proportion) about and against our leaders, about and against our politics, about and against our politicians — the adhesion to Hervé and to Hervéism, the flattery toward Hervé and toward Hervéism, the cowardice, the trembling of Jaurès, the platitude, the flattening before Hervé and before Hervéism, more than that the eagerness, the eager solicitude for Hervé and Hervéism amply proved it; but, in short, they had the right not to know us, in the confused mass of the battle they could, strictly speaking, historically, by historical rigor, fail to know us; the Fair on the Square could mask from them the interior of the house; they could see only the political parade; but in short, at the worst, at the extreme, at the limit, by extreme rigor, when our enemies, when our adversaries accused us of being the party of the foreigner, they could never do us anything but a temporal harm; an extreme temporal harm, a capital temporal harm, but in the end a temporal harm. They could not dishonor us. They could make us lose our goods, they could make us lose our liberty, they could make us lose our life, they could make us lose the very soil of the fatherland. They could not make us lose our honor. On the contrary, when Jaurès, through a suspect, through a cowardly complaisance toward all of Hervéism, and toward Hervé himself, toward Hervé personally, on the one hand, for the fatherland, let it be said and let it be done that France must be repudiated, betrayed, and destroyed — thus creating that political illusion that the Dreyfusist movement was an anti-French movement; and when on the other hand, for the faith, when, moved by the basest electoral interests, pushed by the most cowardly, by the basest complaisance toward demagogies, toward radical agitations, he said, he brought it about, that the Dreyfus affair and Dreyfusism entered, as an integral part, into demagogy, into the radical, anticlerical, anti-Catholic, anti-Christian agitation, into the separation of Church and State, into the law on the Congregations, the Waldeckist law, into the singular application, into the Combist application of that law — thus creating that political illusion that the Dreyfusist movement was an anti-Christian movement; he did not merely betray us, he did not merely make us deviate, he dishonored us. One must never forget that Combism, the Combist system, the Combist tyranny, from which all those evils came, was an invention of Jaurès, that it is Jaurès who, by his detestable political force, by his oratorical force, by his parliamentary force, imposed this invention, this tyranny upon the country, this domination, that he alone maintained it and was able to maintain it; that during three and even four years he was, under the name of M. Combes, the true master of the Republic. “When Jaurès,” Bernard-Lazare already said, in that admirable dossier, in that admirable memorandum, in that admirable consultation, dated Paris, 6 August 1902 — when one wished the Waldeck law to have a global effect, and to have a retroactive effect — “When Jaurès presents himself before us to support a work that he approves, in which he wishes to collaborate, he must, because he is Jaurès, because he has been our companion in a battle that is not finished” — (what was admirable, indeed, even from the political point of view, from the political point of view alone, and Bernard-Lazare, with his great political lucidity, had perceived it instantaneously, was that one had not even waited for the end of the Dreyfus affair, for the conclusion, in order to carry out the contamination, the degeneration, the dishonor, the deviation, the degradation from mystique into politics, but it was between the two Dreyfus affairs themselves that one was preparing to commit it, to accomplish it, even before having liquidated the affair, at the very moment when one was preparing to reopen it, to take it up again), (that is to say, one had begun to carry out the degeneration from mystique into politics at the very moment when one was preparing to appeal anew to all the forces, to the incalculable forces of the mystique).

It is for this that our politicians, that our politicals were the lowest of criminals, that they were criminals in the second degree. If they had only carried on their politics, so to speak professionally, if they had only practiced their trade of politicians, they might have been guilty only in the first degree, criminal only in the first degree. But they wished at the same time to preserve all the advantages of the mystique. And it is precisely that which constitutes the second degree. They wished indeed at the same time to betray the mystique and at the same time not merely to lay claim to it, not merely to clothe themselves in it and make use of it and appear with it, but to continue to excite it. They wished, they intended to play a double game, they wished to play together the two games, contrary games — both the mystical game and the political game, which excludes the mystical; they were preparing to play the double game, they intended to play together with their politics and with our mystique, to accumulate the advantages of their politics and of our mystique, to take advantage at once of their politics and of our mystique, to play always at once the temporal and the eternal.

To play the temporal with the powerful of this world, and at the same time to appeal to the mystique and to the money of poor folk, to draw always upon the heart and upon the purse of poor folk.

That is what makes the responsibility of Jaurès in this crime, in this double crime, in this crime in the second degree, culminating. He among all, he at the head of the operation — he was a politician like the others, worse than the others, a sly fellow among the sly, a knave among knaves, but he, he made a pretense of not being a politician. Hence his culminating noxiousness. Hence his culminating responsibility. When the nationalists, the professionals, said that we were the party of the foreigner, they could only slander us, they could only do us a temporal harm, at the limit a temporal harm at its limit, at the extreme an extreme temporal harm. When Jaurès, on the contrary, spoke for us, avowed himself for us, when in that capacity, in our capacity, he inserted Dreyfusism and the Dreyfus affair on the one hand into political antipatriotism, into Hervéist antipatriotism, into the antipatriotic, Hervéist politics, into the agitation, into the antipatriotic, Hervéist demagogy, when he inserted it on the other hand into that other political demagogy, into the anti-Christian demagogy, he reached, he touched, he wounded Dreyfusism itself at the heart.

What gives Jaurès, in this double crime, in this crime in the second degree, a culminating responsibility, is that he among all was a political, a politician like the others, and that he, he said that he was a mystic. He would naturally quibble with me over that word, for he is a man of bargaining, the most horse-trading man I know. But he knows very well what we mean.

By his university past, his intellectual past, by his beginning of a university, intellectual career, by his relations, by his whole tone, by the great number, by the sheaf of ardent friendships that mounted toward him and that he encouraged, complaisantly, that he constantly excited to mount toward him — friendships of poor people, of humble folk, of professors, of ourselves, and which he recapitulated, so to speak, in himself, which he gathered up as a hearth gathers up a sheaf of light and of warmth — Jaurès cut the figure of a sort of professor delegated into politics, but who was not political, of an intellectual, of a philosopher (in those days all the agrégés of philosophy were philosophers, as today they are all sociologists). Of a man who worked, who knew what it is to work. Who had a trade. He cut essentially the figure of a non-political man, of a man who was as if charged with representing us, with transmitting us into politics. On the contrary, it was a politician who had made a pretense of being a professor, who had made a pretense of being an intellectual, who had made a pretense of working and of knowing how to work, of having a trade, who had made a pretense of being one of us, who had made a pretense of everything. When the politicians, when those who make a trade and a profession of politics ply their trade, exercise their profession, when they play, when they function professionally, officially, under their own name, those who are known as such, there is nothing to be said. But when those who make a trade and a profession of being non-political make politics under that name, there is the double crime of that perpetual misappropriation. To make politics and to call it politics — that is well and good. To make politics and to call it mystique, to take the mystique and to make politics of it — that is an inexpiable misappropriation. To rob the poor is to rob twice. To deceive the simple is to deceive twice. To rob that which is most dear, belief. Confidence. Trust. And God knows whether we were simple souls, poor folk, humble folk. That is precisely what makes them laugh today. What are they, he says, who are those imbeciles who believed what I said? Let him be reassured, let him wait. Lives are long, movements contrary; let him never fall into our hands. He might perhaps not always laugh.

What is more poignant than this testimony, than this adjuration of Bernard-Lazare condemned, of Bernard-Lazare destined; what is more formidable than this testimony, formidable by its very measure. “When Jaurès,” wrote Bernard-Lazare, “presents himself before us to support a work that he approves, in which he wishes to collaborate, he must, because he is Jaurès, because he has been our companion in a battle that is not finished, give us other reasons than theological reasons.” (He saw very clearly how much coarse theology there was in Jaurès, in all that modern mentality, in that political and parliamentary radicalism, in that pseudo-metaphysics, in that pseudo-philosophy, in that sociology.) “Now it is a theological reason that is given us when we are told” — (Here I give notice that this is from Jaurès, cited by Bernard-Lazare): — “‘There are political and social crimes that adorn themselves, and the great collective crime committed by the Church against truth, against humanity, against right and against the Republic is at last going to receive its just wages. It is not in vain that it has revolted consciences by its complicity with falsehood, perjury and treason.’” (End of the Jaurès, of the citation of Jaurès. Bernard-Lazare said more simply: One may not pester men because they say their prayers.) He had them, that man, the manners of liberty. He had liberty in his skin; in the marrow and in the blood; in the vertebrae. Not at all, again, an intellectual and conceptual liberty, a bookish liberty, a ready-made liberty, a library liberty. A liberty of registration. But a liberty, also, of source, a liberty wholly organic and living. I have never seen a man believe, to that degree, have to that degree the certainty, have consciousness to that degree, that a man’s conscience was an absolute, an invincible, an eternal, a free thing, that it opposed itself, victorious, eternally triumphant, to all the grandeurs of the earth. “One must not receive justifications of that kind,” wrote Bernard-Lazare further, “even and above all when they are given by Jaurès, for, below, others are ready to interpret them in a worse sense, to draw from them consequences formidable for liberty.” He enumerated, on a few striking examples, in a striking style, cutting, brief, some of those antinomies, the capital ones, some of those antagonisms. He foresaw you, Bernus, and the resistance of the Polish people to the exactions of Prussian Germanization. From then on he wrote, indeed, and these words are clear, as on the first day: they are capital, they are as current as they were then. “If we are not careful, tomorrow we shall be put under obligation to applaud the French gendarme who will take the child by the arm to oblige it to enter the secular school, while we must reprove the Prussian gendarme constraining the Polish schoolboy of Wreschen.” There is the man, there is the friend whom we have lost. He wrote further, and these words are to be considered, they are to be meditated today as yesterday, today as then, they will be always to be meditated, for they are of a loftiness of views, of an incalculable bearing: “Let tomorrow be proposed to us the means of resolving the question of education, and we shall discuss them. From today one may say that the university monopoly is not the solution of it. We shall refuse just as well to accept the dogmas formulated by the teaching State as the dogmas formulated by the Church. We have no more confidence in the University than in the Congregation.” But I must stop citing. I cannot, however, cite this whole admirable consultation, cite a whole cahier within a cahier, remake cahiers within cahiers, put the whole of III-21 into XI-12.

There is the man, there is the friend whom we have lost. For such a man we shall never make an apology; we shall never suffer that anyone make one.

It is such men who count, and who alone count. It is we who count, we alone. Not only have the others nothing to say for us. But it is we who have to speak, for everything.

He was a hero, and besides he had great parts of sainthood. And with him we were, obscurely, heroes.

How can one not note, in the few words that we have cited, in those few sentences only that we have reported — I do not refrain from noting not only that sense of liberty, and that ease in liberty, in the handling of liberty, but that sense, much more curious, much more unexpected, apparently more unexpected, of theology, that warning given by theology. Instantaneously he saw it appear everywhere where, indeed, it does appear, itself or some imitation, some counterfeit, itself or counterfeited.

How can one not note also his exact, his perfect internationalism — Israel excepted — the exactitude, the ease, the self-evidence of his internationalism, which was far too simple, far too natural, in no way learned, in no way forced, in no way bookish, far too easy, far too self-evident ever to be an anti-nationalism. When he spoke of the Poles for the Bretons, it was in no way an amusement, a piquant comparison. It was in no way a play of wit, made to play a good trick. It was naturally that he saw the Bretons and the Poles on the same plane. He really saw Christendom as he saw Islam, which none of us, even those who would most wish it, can attain. Because he was indeed really equally outside the two. A view, an angle of regard which none of us can attain. At the moment when one was doing, even and perhaps above all around him, everything one humanly could to oust his Jews of Romania, out of policy, so as not to compromise, so as not to burden the Armenian movement, and when he saw very clearly into it, in that deafening din, an old friend of the Quarter had just left him. He said to me gently, gently shrugging his shoulders, as he used to do, showing him to me, so to speak, with his shoulders, over the top of his shoulders: He wants to take me in again with his Armenians. It is always the same thing. They attack the Grand Turk because he is a Turk, and they will not have a word said about the king of Romania because he is a Christian. It is always the collusion of Christendom.

How can one not note, finally, how well it is written, set down, measured, clear, noble, French. “One must not receive justifications of that kind.” A certain proposition, a certain purpose. A certain deliberation. A certain tone, a certain resonance even Cartesian.

Apology for Bernard-Lazare. — Nourished, watered with our mystique, deforming it, degrading it at once, turning it instantaneously aside into politics, our politicians, Jaurès at their head, Jaurès the first, created that double political illusion: firstly, that Dreyfusism was anti-Christian; secondly, that it was anti-French. One must stop a few moments at the second.

Our socialism itself, our antecedent socialism — I scarcely need to say it — was in no way anti-French, in no way antipatriotic, in no way antinational. It was essentially and rigorously, exactly international. Theoretically it was in no way antinationalist. It was exactly internationalist. Far from attenuating, far from effacing the people, on the contrary it exalted it, it made it healthier. Far from weakening, or attenuating, far from effacing the nation, on the contrary it exalted it, it made it healthier. Our thesis was on the contrary, and it is still, that it is on the contrary the bourgeoisie, bourgeoisism, bourgeois capitalism, capitalist and bourgeois sabotage that obliterates the nation and the people. One must indeed think that there was nothing in common between the socialism of that time, our socialism, and what we know today under that name. Here again politics has done its work, and nowhere as much as here has politics undone, denatured the mystique. Politics — I mean the politics of the politicals, the professionals, the politicians, the parliamentary politicals. But still more, without any doubt, by the invention, by the intervention, by the insertion of sabotage, which is a political invention, in the same degree as the vote, even more than the vote, worse, I mean more political, more profoundly political — still more, without any doubt, the professional anti-politicals, the anti-politicians, the syndicalists, the anti-political, antiparliamentary ones. We thought then, we think still, but fifteen years ago everyone thought as we did, thought with us, or affected to think with us — there was on this point, on this very principle, not the shadow of a hesitation, not the shadow of a debate. It is wholly evident that it is the bourgeois and the capitalists who began. I mean that the bourgeois and the capitalists ceased to do their social office before the workers ceased to do theirs, and long before. There is no doubt that the sabotage from above is by far anterior to the sabotage from below, that bourgeois and capitalist sabotage is anterior, and by far, to workers’ sabotage; that the bourgeois and the capitalists ceased to love bourgeois and capitalist work long before the workers had ceased to love workers’ work. It is exactly in this order, beginning with the bourgeois and the capitalists, that this general disaffection from work was produced, which is the deepest blemish, the central blemish of the modern world. Such being the general situation of the modern world, it was in no way a question — as our syndicalist politicians invented — of inventing, of adding a workers’ disorder to the bourgeois disorder, a workers’ sabotage to the bourgeois and capitalist sabotage. It was on the contrary a question — our socialism was essentially and moreover officially a theory, a general theory, a doctrine, a general method, a philosophy of the organization and of the reorganization of work, of the restoration of work. Our socialism was essentially and moreover officially a restoration, and even a general restoration, a universal restoration. None then contested it. But for fifteen years the politicians have been at work. The double politicians, the politicians proper and the anti-politicians. The politicians have passed over it. It was on the contrary a question of a general restoration, of a total restoration, of a universal restoration, beginning with the workers’ world. It was a question of a total restoration founded on a prior restoration of the workers’ world; on a prior total restoration of the workers’ world. It was very exactly a question — and none then contested it, all on the contrary taught it, all declared it — it was on the contrary a question of effecting a general making-healthy of the workers’ world, a remaking, a molecular, organic making-healthy, and, beginning with that making-healthy, of effecting from step to step a making-healthy of the whole city. It was already that morality, that general method, that philosophy of the producers which was to find in M. Sorel, moralist and philosopher, its highest expression, its definitive expression. I even add that it could be nothing but that.

And that there could in no way, in no manner, be any question of its being anything else. Let us say it: for the philosopher, for every man who philosophizes, our socialism was, and was no less than, a religion of temporal salvation. And today still it is no less than that. We sought nothing less than the temporal salvation of humanity through the making-healthy of the workers’ world, through the making-healthy of work and of the world of work, through the restoration of work and of the dignity of work, through a making-healthy, through an organic, molecular remaking of the world of work, and through it of the whole economic, industrial world. It is what we call the industrial world, opposed to the intellectual world and to the political world, to the scholastic world and to the parliamentary world; it is what we call the economy; the morality of the producers, the industrial morality; the world of the producers; the economic world, the workers’ world, the economic, industrial (organic, molecular) structure; it is what we call industry, the industrial regime; it is what we call the regime of industrial production. The intellectual world and the political world, on the contrary, the scholastic world and the parliamentary world go together. By the restoration of industrial customs, by the making-healthy of the industrial workshop we hoped nothing less, we sought nothing less than the temporal salvation of humanity. Those alone will mock at this who do not wish to see that Christianity itself, which is the religion of eternal salvation, is mired in that mud, in the mud of bad economic, industrial customs; that itself it will not get out of it, that it will not extricate itself from it short of an economic, industrial revolution; that, finally, there is no place of perdition better made, better arranged, better equipped, so to speak, that there is no instrument of perdition better adapted, than the modern workshop.

And that all the difficulties of the Church come from there, all its real, profound, popular difficulties — from the fact that, despite a few so-called workers’ undertakings, under the mask of a few so-called workers’ undertakings and of a few so-called Catholic workers, the workshop is closed to it, and it is closed to the workshop; from the fact that it has become, in the modern world, undergoing, itself too, a modernization, almost solely the religion of the rich, and thus that it is no longer socially, if I may say so, the communion of the faithful. All the weakness, and perhaps one must say the growing weakness of the Church in the modern world comes, not, as is believed, from Science having raised against Religion supposedly invincible systems, not from Science having discovered, having found against Religion arguments, reasonings presumably victorious, but from the fact that what remains of the Christian world socially today profoundly lacks charity. It is not at all reasoning that is lacking. It is charity. All those reasonings, all those systems, all those pseudo-scientific arguments would be nothing, would not weigh heavy, if there were an ounce of charity. All those airs of the head would not carry far if Christendom had remained what it was, a communion, if Christianity had remained what it was, a religion of the heart. It is one of the reasons for which the moderns understand nothing of Christianity, of the true, the real Christianity, of the true, the real history of Christianity, and of what Christendom really was. (And how many Christians still understand it. How many Christians, on this very point, on this point too, are not modern.) They believe, when they are sincere — and there are some — they believe that Christianity was always modern, that is to say, exactly, that it was always as they see it to be in the modern world, where there is no longer any Christendom, in the sense in which there once was one. Thus in the modern world everything is modern, whatever one may do about it, and it is no doubt the finest stroke of modernism and of the modern world to have, in many senses, almost in every sense, rendered modern Christianity itself, the Church and what there still was of Christendom. It is thus that when there is an eclipse, everyone is in the shadow. Everything that passes through an age of humanity, through an epoch, into a period, into a zone, everything that is in a world, everything that has been placed in a place, in a time, in a world, everything that is situated in a certain situation, a temporal situation, in a world, a temporal world, receives the tint of it, bears the shadow of it. Much noise is made about a certain intellectual modernism that is not even a heresy, that is a sort of modern intellectual poverty, a residue, a dregs, a bottom of the vat, a bottom of the cask, a bottom of the barrel, a modern intellectual impoverishment for the use of moderns, of the ancient great heresies. That poverty would have wrought no ravages, it would have been purely laughable, if the ways had not been prepared for it, if there were not that great modernism of the heart, that grave, that infinitely grave modernism of charity. If the ways had not been prepared for it by that modernism of the heart and of charity. It is through it that the Church, in the modern world, that in the modern world Christendom is no longer a people, what it was, that it is so no longer at all; that thus it is no longer socially a people, an immense people, a race, an immense one; that Christianity is no longer socially the religion of the depths, a popular religion, the religion of a whole people, temporal, eternal, a religion rooted in the very greatest temporal depths, the religion of a race, of a whole temporal race, of a whole eternal race, but that it is no longer socially anything but a religion of the bourgeois, a religion of the rich, a sort of superior religion for the superior classes of society, of the nation, a wretched sort of distinguished religion for presumably distinguished people, consequently everything that is most superficial, most official in a certain sense, least profound; most non-existent; everything that is most poorly, most wretchedly formal; and on the other hand and above all everything that is most contrary to its institution; to sanctity, to poverty, to the most formal form even of its institution. To the virtue, to the letter and to the spirit of its institution. Of its own institution. It is enough to refer to the least text of the Gospels.

It is enough to refer to all that, in one single piece, it is better to name the Gospel.

It is that poverty, that spiritual misery and that temporal wealth that has done everything, that has done the evil. It is that modernism of the heart, that modernism of charity that has made the failing, the decay, in the Church, in Christianity, in Christendom itself, that has made the degradation from mystique into politics.

Great noise is made today — I see that a great point is made — of the fact that since the separation Catholicism, Christianity, is no longer the official religion, the religion of the State, of the fact that thus the Church is free. And one is right in a certain sense. The position of the Church is evidently quite other, wholly other under the new regime. Under all the hardnesses of liberty, of a certain poverty, the Church is otherwise itself under the new regime. Never under the new regime will one obtain bishops as bad as the Concordat bishops. But one must not exaggerate either. One must not conceal from oneself that if the Church has ceased to be the official religion of the State, it has by no means ceased to be the official religion of the bourgeoisie of the State. It has lost, it has let go politically, but it has scarcely lost, it has scarcely let go socially, all the burdens of servitude that came to it from its official character. It is for this that one must not triumph. It is for this that the workshop is closed to it, and that it is closed to the workshop. It makes, it is the official religion, the formal religion of the rich man. There is what the people, obscurely or formally, very assuredly feels very well. There is what it sees. It is therefore nothing — there is why it is nothing. And above all, and it is nothing, it has, having become, everything that is most contrary to itself, everything that is most contrary to its institution. And it will not reopen the workshop to itself, and it will not reopen the people to itself, unless it makes, it too, it like everyone, unless it bears the cost of an economic revolution, of a social revolution, of an industrial revolution, to say the word, of a temporal revolution for eternal salvation. Such is, eternally, temporally (eternally temporally and temporally eternally), the mysterious subjection of the eternal itself to the temporal. Such is properly the inscription of the eternal itself into the temporal. One must bear the economic costs, the social costs, the industrial costs, the temporal costs. None can escape it, not even the eternal, not even the spiritual, not even the interior life. It is for this that our socialism was not so stupid, and that it was profoundly Christian.

It is for this that when one puts before their eyes the old Christendom, when one sets them face to face with what in reality a Christian parish was, a French parish at the beginning of the fifteenth century, in the time when there were French parishes, when one shows them, when one makes them see what in reality Christendom was, in the time when there was a Christendom, what a great female saint was, the greatest perhaps of all, in the time when there was a sanctity, in the time when there was a charity, in the time when there were female saints and male saints, a whole Christian people, a whole Christian world, a whole people, a whole world of saints and of sinners — at once some of our modern Catholics, modern without their knowing it, but profoundly modern, even to the marrow, intellectuals without their knowing it and who boast of not being so, intellectuals all the same, profoundly intellectual, intellectuals even to the marrow, bourgeois and sons of bourgeois, rentiers and sons of rentiers, pensioners of the government, pensioners of the State, functionaries, pensioners of others, of other citizens, of other electors, of other taxpayers, and who very ingeniously have beforehand had inscribed on the Great Ledger of the Public Debt the moreover modest assurances of their daily bread — thus armed, some of these Catholic contemporaries, before a sudden revelation of the ancient, of the old, of the ancient Christendom, hasten to utter a few cries, as of outraged modesty. At a pinch they would repudiate Joinville, as too coarse, as too of-the-people. The Sire de Joinville. They would perhaps well repudiate Saint Louis. As too much a king of France.

One must bear the temporal costs. That is to say that none, were it the Church, were it any spiritual power whatsoever, will extricate itself short of a temporal revolution, of an economic revolution, of a social revolution. Of an industrial revolution. Short of paying that. In order not to pay, in order not to bear them, a singular concert has come to an agreement, a singular collusion has been instituted, has been played, is played between the Church and the intellectual party. It would even be amusing, it would be laughable, were it not also so profoundly sad. That concert, that collusion consists in shifting, in displacing the debate, the very ground of the debate. The object of the debate. In hiding away in a corner the modernism of the heart, the modernism of charity, in order to put in value, in false value, in light, in false light, in order to put on the surface, in view, over the whole surface, the intellectual modernism, the apparatus of intellectual modernism, the solemn, the glorious apparatus. Thus everyone gains by it, for it costs nothing more, it costs no economic, industrial, social, temporal revolution any longer, and our bourgeois of the one side and of the other, our capitalists of the one bank and of the other, of the one and of the other confession, the clericals and the radicals, the clerical radicals and the radical clericals, the intellectuals and the clerics, the intellectual clerics and the clerical intellectuals, want nothing so much, want only this: not to pay. To bear no costs. Not to bear the costs. Not to loosen the purse-strings. I shall be pardoned this coarse expression. But one is needed, it is needed in this coarse situation. Marvelous concert, marvelous collusion. Everyone gains everything by it. Not only does it cost nothing, but also, into the bargain, naturally, the glory, which never comes to any but those who deserve it. Everyone finds his account in it, and even ours. Once more two contrary parties are in agreement, have found each other, have come to an agreement, not merely to falsify the debate that divides them or seems to divide them, but to falsify, to transport the very ground of the debate there where the debate will be most advantageous to them, will cost both the one and the other the least, pushed by the sole consideration of their temporal interests. The operation consists in effacing, in keeping in the shadow that frightening modernism of the heart and in putting in the first place, in the only place, intellectual modernism, in attributing everything, all that happens, to the feigned omnipotence, to the frightening, to the presumably frightening power of intellectual modernism. It is a shifting, a substitution, a transfer, a transport, a marvelous transposition. A perfected displacement. The intellectuals are delighted. See, they cry, how powerful we are. We have a head on our shoulders. We have found arguments, reasonings so extraordinary that by these reasonings alone we have shaken the faith. The proof that it is true is that it is the curates who say so. And the curates together with the good clerical bourgeois, presumed Catholics, supposed Christians, forgetful of the anathemas upon the rich man, of the frightening reprobations upon money with which the Gospel is as if saturated, softly seated in the peace of the heart, in the social peace, all our good bourgeois cry out: All that too, they cry out, is the fault of those wretched professors, who have invented, who have found arguments, reasonings so extraordinary. The proof that it is true is that it is we, curates, who say so. Then all goes well, and not only is everyone in the Republic, but everyone is content. The purses remain in the pockets, and the moneys remain in the purses. One does not put one’s hand to the purse. That is the essential. But I say it again in truth: all those reasonings would not weigh heavy, if there were an ounce of charity.

The clerical bourgeois world affects to believe that it is the reasonings, that it is cerebral modernism, that is solely important, so as not to have to expend an industrial revolution, an economic revolution.

Such being our socialism — and that then was no secret, as it was no doubt — it is evident that not only did it bear no attack and could bear no attack against the legitimate rights of the nations, but that, being, that making a general making-healthy, and by that very fact, within that very thing, a making-healthy of nationalism and of the nation itself, it served, it saved the most essential interests, the most legitimate rights of the peoples. The most sacred rights, the most sacred interests. And that there was none but it that did so. It was in no way violating, effacing the nations and the peoples, it was in no way falsifying them, doing violence to them, obliterating them, forcing them, giving them a sprain, but on the contrary, working to replace, by a substitution, by an organic, molecular replacement, a closed field, an anarchic competition of frenzied, frantic peoples, by a healthy forest, by a growing forest of prosperous peoples, by a whole people of flourishing peoples. Mounting in their sap, in their essence, in the uprightness and the lineage of their vegetal race, free of the crushing of economic servitudes, free of the organic, molecular corruption of bad industrial customs. It was in no way annulling the nations and the peoples. On the contrary it was founding them, seating them at last, making them be born, making them and letting them grow. It was making them. We had from then on the certainty that we have, that the world suffers infinitely more from bourgeois and capitalist sabotage than from workers’ sabotage. Not only is it bourgeois and capitalist sabotage that began, but it became rapidly almost total. And it has, if I may say so, entered into the bourgeois world like a second race. It is far on the contrary from having penetrated as deeply into the workers’ world, to that depth, as totally. And above all it is not at all there in the same way. It is far from having entered there like a race. Contrary to what is generally believed, to what writers, publicists, sociologists, who are intellectuals and bourgeois, commonly believe, sabotage in the workers’ world does not come from the depths of the workers’ world; it does not come from the workers’ world itself. It is in no way of the workers. It is, essentially, bourgeois. It does not come from below, by a rising of the mud, of the workers’ lower depths. It comes from above. It is socialism that alone could avoid it, avoid that contamination. It is bourgeois sabotage, the same, the only one, that by contamination from step to step descends in horizontal sheets into the workers’ world. It is in no way the workers’ world that exasperates vices of its own. It is the workers’ world that grows bourgeois gradually. Contrary to what is believed, sabotage is in no way innate, born in the workers’ world; it is learned there. It is taught there dogmatically, intellectually, like a foreign invention. It is a bourgeois invention, a political, parliamentary invention, essentially intellectual, that penetrates by contamination and teaching, intellectual teaching, from above into the workers’ world. It encounters there resistances that it had never encountered in the bourgeois world. It has there no battle won. It has there no town taken. It is there, all in all, artificial. It collides there with unforeseen resistances, with resistances of an incredible depth, with that age-old love of work that enriched the laboring heart. The bourgeois and capitalist world is almost wholly, so to speak wholly, consecrated to pleasure. One would still find a very great number of workers, and not only old ones, who love work.

Such being our socialism, it is evident that it was, that it made a making-healthy of the nation and of the people, a reinforcement still unknown, a prosperity, a flowering, a fructification. Far from conjuring up, from conspiring its loss. We had already the certainty, that we have, that the people that should enter first upon that way, that should have that honor, that should have that courage, and in one sense that skill, would receive from it such a force, such an organic and molecular, constitutional, histological prosperity, such a reinforcement, such an increase, such a making-healthy of all the orders of its force, that not only would it march at the head of the peoples, but it would have nothing more to dread ever, neither in the present nor in the future, neither from its economic, industrial, commercial competitors, nor from its military competitors.

Thus the embourgeoisement through sabotage follows a course exactly inverse to the one that we wished to follow. And to make followed. We wished that a making-healthy of the workers’ world, rising from step to step, should make healthy the bourgeois world and thus the whole society, the whole city itself. And there has been produced on the contrary — in fact there has been produced — a demoralization of the bourgeois world, in economic matters, in industrial matters and in every other matter, in the order of work and in every other order, descending from step to step, which has demoralized the workers’ world, and thus the whole society, the city itself. Far from adding, from wishing to add a disorder to a disorder, we wished to institute, to restore an order, a new order, an ancient one; a new one, an antique one; in no way modern; a laboring order, an order of work, a workers’ order; an economic, temporal, industrial order; and by the so-to-speak rising contamination of that order to reorder disorder itself. By a descending contamination it is disorder that has disordered order. That has disorganized the organization of the organism. But we have the right to say that this disorder, that this bad example was introduced into the workers’ world by a sort of intellectual insertion, by an operation in one sense as artificial as could have been, for example, that other invention of the Popular Universities.

It would be an error to believe that there is only the good, the effort toward the good, morality, that is artificial. Evil, above all in a race like ours, the effort toward evil, the effort of debasement, of contamination, can just as well be artificial. Learned.

As much as anyone I know how much those efforts of instruction and of moralization, those Popular Universities and all others, and all other things, as much as anyone I know how much those bourgeois, intellectual efforts, distilled from above upon the workers’ world, were factitious, empty, vain; hollow; how much they did not yield and could not yield. How much they were artificial, superficial. But what I wish to say is that, on the contrary, conversely, the teachings of sabotage were just as much bourgeois and intellectual teachings, that they were just as much teachings, given, received, poured out, received; taught, learned. Teachings and apprenticeships. They yielded more, they bore better, they entered more and better, they entered much more deeply, because evil always enters more than the good; but what I wish to say, and what is not said, what I am intent on saying, what must be said, is that they were indeed teachings of the same order, come, descended from the same place, from the same world. Just as bourgeois, just as intellectual, just as artificial. Perhaps a little less superficial, because evil is always less superficial than the good. At bottom just as foreign to the workers’ world.

They were teachings of the same kind. Given what the workers’ world was, it was an error to believe that evil was natural there and that the good alone, by a sort of disgrace, was artificial there.

Thus in this whole modern world strained toward money, wholly given over to the tension toward money, that tension toward money, contaminating the Christian world itself, makes it sacrifice its faith and its customs to the maintenance of its economic and social peace.

It is there properly that modernism of the heart, that modernism of charity, that modernism of customs.

There are two kinds of rich men: the atheist rich, who, being rich, understand nothing of religion. They have therefore taken to the history of religions, and they excel at it (and moreover one must render them this justice, that they have done everything not to make of it a history of religion). It is they who have invented the religious sciences;

and the devout rich, who, being rich, understand nothing of Christianity. So they profess it.

Such is — one must indeed see, one must indeed measure — such is the frightening modernism of the modern world; the frightening, the wretched efficacy. It has made an inroad upon, succeeded in making an inroad upon, it has modernized, made an inroad upon Christendom. It has rendered worm-eaten, in charity, in customs it has rendered worm-eaten Christianity itself.

Have I need to say, for the record, to note and to make noted how much that socialism itself was in the pure French tradition, how much it was in the line, in the lineage of France. The making-healthy, the clarification of the world has always been the destination, the vocation of France, the very office of France. The making-healthy of what is sick, the clarification of what is troubled, the ordering of what is disorder, the organization of what is raw. Must one note how much that socialism founded on generosity, how much that clear generosity, how much that full and pure generosity was in the French tradition — more than in the French tradition itself, more profoundly, in the French genius. In the sap and in the race itself. In the sap and in the blood of the race. A generosity at once abundant and sober, generous and yet well-informed, full and pure, fecund and clean, full and fine, abundant without silliness, well-informed without sterility. A heroism, in short, full and sober, gay and discreet, a heroism in the French manner.

Such being our socialism, a French socialism, what was our Dreyfusism to be — an eminently French Dreyfusism. The greatest error on this point, the greatest illusion, on this head of the fatherland, came without any doubt from the Hervé affair. From Hervéism, from the Hervéist demagogy. And above all, and without any doubt, much more from the suspect complaisance toward the Hervéist demagogy. I shall speak only with a great respect of a man who has just gone back to prison for the third or fourth time, perhaps more. At least he goes to prison. One could not say as much of M. Jaurès, who has always arranged matters so as not to go to prison. And yet it is not so much Hervé who made the virus of Hervéism, of the Hervéist demagogy. It is without any doubt M. Jaurès, none other; it is the shady conversations, the intrigues, the compromisings, the negotiations of groups and of congresses, of party and of unification, it is the troubled understandings, the advances, the platitudes, the flat capitulations of Jaurès to Hervé and to all of Hervéism. What was dangerous in Hervé and in Hervéism, mortally dangerous, was not so much Hervé himself, it was not so much Hervéism. It was Jaurès and Jaurèsism, for it was that incredible perpetual capitulation of Jaurès before Hervé, that flattening, that indefatigable platitude. That capitulation in some sort authorized, official, clothed with a great name and with the name of a great party, which alone consequently could give him some authority and did give it him, some clothing, some consecration. That constant capitulation which not only swelled Hervé with pride, but which clothed him very authentically with a moral authority, with a political authority, with a social authority. For the man who thus authorized him, and with the best of authorizations, by perpetually capitulating before him, and almost solemnly, by even conversing with him, himself had a high moral authority, precisely the one we had conferred upon him; he had a great political authority, a great social authority. One must never forget that during all that period that man, through that invention he had made of Combism, and which he maintained, patronized, protected, represented the very government of the Republic. There was thus here one of the finest cases there ever was of a misappropriation of moral, political and social authority. And thus of a transfer of responsibility. Without Jaurès, Hervé was nothing. Through Jaurès, with Jaurès he became authorized, he became authentic, he became (as) a member, and secretly by far the most dreaded, of the government of the Republic. Through Jaurès, through Jaurèsism, through Combism, it was the government itself, so to speak, that received, that took upon itself Hervé.

That being so, one must come closer, a little closer, one must come as close as possible to this Hervé affair. One must indeed see what it means, what there was in it. And, coming close to it, one must indeed say that those who made and took upon themselves Hervé, made and took upon themselves Hervéism, are those who dealt a mortal blow, who struck an incalculable blow, a mortal blow at the public belief in the innocence of Dreyfus. It is through them, above all through them, through Jaurès in the measure in which he authorized Hervé, through Dreyfus himself in the measure in which he authorized Jaurès, that we have fallen back upon that middle plateau, upon that endless plateau, halfway up the slope, of which we have said that we should never rise again, that history would never rise again.

For one must at last, in a few words, dismantle the mechanism of this dangerous, of this mortal demagogy. It seems to me indeed, if my memory is good, if my recollections are correct, that during the whole Dreyfus affair we strove to demonstrate that Dreyfus was not a traitor. As far as I recall, it was our adversaries who strove to demonstrate, or in any case who claimed, that he was a traitor. It was not we. As far as I recall. We, we claimed that he was not a traitor. The one party and the other, as far as I remember, we had a common postulate, a common ground; it is what made our dignity, our common dignity, it is what made the dignity of all that battle, it is what soon made our force; and that common initial proposition, which went without saying, over which one did not even argue, over which everyone was, fell into agreement, of which one did not even speak, so much did it go without saying, which was understood everywhere, which one is ashamed to state, so much did it go without saying, was that one must not betray, that treason — namely military treason — was a monstrous crime. Everything has changed its face since, in these latitudes. The whole mechanism has been dismantled, turned aside, reassembled the wrong way round, since Hervé came, from the fact that Hervé came. Hervé is a man who says the contrary.

The anti-Dreyfusists and we the Dreyfusists, we spoke the same language. We spoke on the same plane. We spoke exactly the same patriotic language. We spoke on the same patriotic plane. We had the same premises, the same patriotic postulate. Whether in fact they or we were the better patriots, that was precisely the object of the debate; but that this was the object of the debate is precisely what proves that the one party and the other, we were patriots. That by right, in intention, this was the object of the debate. We, on this side here, we were so not merely sincerely, we were so profoundly first, all the more in that it was contested to us. We were so afterward frenziedly, perhaps with a sort of rage, because it was denied to us publicly, and above all perhaps because our geographical situation in the mental and sentimental map, because the circumstances, the historical events had several times given us the appearances of not being so.

Founded on the same postulate, setting out from the same postulate, we spoke the same language. The anti-Dreyfusists said: Military treason is a crime, and Dreyfus has betrayed militarily. We said: Military treason is a crime, and Dreyfus has not betrayed. He is innocent of that crime. Everything has changed its face since Hervé came. The same conversation seemed to be carried on. The affair continues. But it was no longer the same affair, the same conversation. It was no longer the same. It was a wholly other one, an infinitely other one, because the language itself was other, infinitely other, because the very plane of the debate was no longer the same. Hervé is a man who says: One must betray.

Namely, one must betray militarily.

The professional anti-Dreyfusists said: One must not be a traitor, and Dreyfus is a traitor. We the professional Dreyfusists, we said: One must not be a traitor, and Dreyfus is not a traitor. Hervé is one who says, and Jaurès lets Hervé say it, and Dreyfus himself lets Jaurès let Hervé say it, and in one sense, and in that sense at least Dreyfus himself lets Jaurès himself say: One must be a traitor.

Namely, one must be a military traitor.

By that gradual drawing-along from step to step, by that sort of skidding from step to step, by that derivation, by that misappropriation, by that knocking-out-of-joint, Jaurès has entered into the crime of Hervé; by that reversion, by that reversibility of responsibilities; and in the basest fashion in which one could enter into it, not even by an active complicity, which has its risks, which has its efficiency, which can even have, so to speak, its grandeur, but obliquely, but basely, by a deaf and silent complicity, by a tacit, sly complicity, by a complicity of letting-do and letting-pass, by a complicity with lowered eyes. The basest of all. And Dreyfus, for failing to mark the beats, entered, let himself enter into the crime of Jaurès.

What was the repercussion of that double derivation, of that double decadence, of that double misappropriation, of that misappropriation in two beats upon the efficacy of our Dreyfusist demonstrations — it was easy to foresee it. When one strives to demonstrate that a man is not a traitor, thinking profoundly that one must not be a traitor, one is at least listened to. But when one strives to demonstrate that a man is not a traitor, while letting it be said and saying that one must be a traitor, the operation, the demonstration becomes extremely suspect. For then, in the Hervéist hypothesis, that one must betray, that one must be a traitor, if he has not betrayed, he has been gravely at fault, this Dreyfus. And then why defend him. By a sort of wager, of supreme elegance, one would be defending him for having committed a crime which precisely one ought to commit, one would be defending him for having done what precisely it was needful to do: it is fine courtesy indeed, it is fine politeness. It is too polite to be honest. If one must be a military traitor, Dreyfus was gravely at fault not to be one. And one would be defending him precisely for having done what one must do. One would say: He has not betrayed. He was at fault, for one must betray. So we defend him. It would be, it would make a turning-about of politeness very acrobatic, a gallantry very French, a diagonal, diametrical turning-about of politeness. A very suspect operation. These people had not accustomed us to these wagers of politeness. So much politeness becomes extremely suspect. In the Hervéist reasoning, indeed, if one may name it thus, Dreyfus, so long as he does not betray, is a very great culprit. He is a great criminal. All the more criminal and all the more guilty in that he was better situated, militarily, in that he had an admirable situation for betraying. Militarily. Hervé, he, had not that honor, he had not that good fortune of having, of being able to have at his disposal the timetable charts of the railways. What! here is a man, Dreyfus, who could have in his hands the timetable charts of the railways, and he would not instantaneously have sabotaged them. What a being. One must not forget that Hervé is a gentleman who, on the first day of mobilization, more precisely in the first hour of the first day, that is to say, I think, from 12:01 to 1:00, will shoot the five hundred and thirty-seven thousand men of the active (French) army; plus the thirteen hundred and fifty-seven thousand men of the reserve of the active army, who form with it the first ban; then the five hundred and seventy-six thousand men of the territorial army; then the seven hundred and fifty-one thousand men of the reserve of the territorial army, who form with it the second ban; without counting the first and the second ban of the volunteers; and if he is not stopped he will also shoot the black troops, of recent formation, the celebrated, the famous black division, the Toucouleurs, Wolofs, Sarakollés, Malinkés, and the other populations, Djermas, Bellas, Baribas, Baoulés, Bobos, Soussous, and Nagos, and the Tourelourous and their ladies their wives. All that with American revolvers, for he does not wish to encourage national production. I shall take care not to say that they are Brownings — they have already been given enough publicity. Under that brand-name. Alongside that great massacre, well known under the name of the massacre of the two bans, what does the tradition of a railway timetable chart weigh? Hervé often speaks of the Dreyfus affair, he writes of it in his newspaper. If he were consistent, constant with himself, if he were logical — and a logician, but the most rigorous, the most cruel logicians, toward others, are not always those who are the most pitiless toward themselves — if he were logical with himself, he would say: We defended this Dreyfus, we were wrong. For just think: He was a captain; a captain of the General Staff; in short he worked in the offices of the General Staff of the army. He was marvelously equipped, marvelously situated to betray. And unfortunately he did not betray. This inadequate man did not betray.

There is what Hervé would say, if he were logical and if he were free. There is what the events, what reality says for him. One sees well enough what is for us the consequence, what is upon our historical situation the repercussion of this change of geographical situation. When I say we, naturally I mean our party, our politicians. For it is not a question of ourselves. It is a turning-back, a repercussion backward, a rising repercussion, carried backward, reversible, reversed, carried back upon all that we had said, upon all that we had done, upon all that we had been. When we repulsed the accusation of being a traitor, repulsing profoundly the very idea of being a traitor, one could combat us, but at least we made ourselves listened to. When on the contrary we repulse the accusation of being a traitor, welcoming profoundly the idea of being a traitor, how can one not see that we become instantaneously suspect. That we lose the very audience.

And even the audience that we had already had, obtained. The old audience.

An audience that seemed acquired.

An audience today annulled.

One can dishonor oneself backward.

Jaurès here intervenes in the debate, and defends himself. If I remain with Hervé, he says, in the same party, if I have remained in it constantly, always, so long, despite the innumerable bitter pills that Hervé has made me swallow, it is for two reasons equally valid. Firstly, it is precisely, it is because of those innumerable bitter pills themselves. For one must indeed bear in mind that Hervé is the man in the world who has administered to me the most kicks in the behind. In public and in private. In congresses and in meetings. In his newspaper. Publicly and privately, as Péguy says. He must be praised for it. And how well he knows me. He must be rewarded for it. So much zeal must be rewarded. Since he knows that I never march except with those who maltreat me. Who push me. Who pull me. Who jostle me. And that I never march with the imbeciles who loved me. Since he knows so well the bottom, if I may say so, of my character. So much perspicacity also must be, must indeed be rewarded. He knows me so well. He knows me as I know myself. He knows that when someone loves me and serves me — the fool — lavishes upon me the most incontestable proofs of the most devoted friendship, of the most absolute devotion, at once I feel rising in what serves me for a heart, first, a beginning, an invincible contempt for that imbecile. How stupid he must indeed be, to love an ingrate like me, to attach himself to an ingrate like me. How I despise him, that fellow. Moreover, in the second place, together, at the same time, a sentiment of jealousy, of the basest envious hatred against a man who is capable of conceiving the sentiments of friendship. In short a heap of other fine sentiments, flowers of mire, plants of slime, that grow in the political mud like a blessing of republican defense. Hervé knows all that so well that I admire him for it myself. How well he knows my psychology, if you will allow me. And how on the contrary, when I receive a good kick in the behind, I turn round instantaneously with a sentiment of profound respect, with an innate respect for that foot, for that kick, for the leg that is at the end of the foot, for the man who is at the end of the leg; and even for my behind, which earns me that honor. A good kick in the Hinterland, in my Hinterland. And when I think that there are people who say that I have no bottom. I hate my friends. I love my enemies. One could make a fine comedy of my character. I hate my friends because they love me. I despise my friends because they love me. Because they love me I have within me, against them, I feel mounting within me against them a basely envious jealousy, the invincible sentiment of an incurable hatred. I betray my friends because they love me. I love, I serve, I follow, I admire my enemies because they despise me (they do not even hate me), because they maltreat me, because they do violence to me, because they know me, in short, because they know me, therefore. And they know so well how one makes me march. When one betrays me, I love him doubly, I admire him, I admire his competence. He resembles me so much. I have a secret taste for cowardice, for treason, for all the sentiments of treason. I am double. I am expert at it. I am at home there. I am at ease there. One could make a great tragedy, a sad comedy of my character. Hervé would perhaps not make it badly. He knows me so well. There are innumerable examples that I have betrayed my friends. In the thirty years that I have been functioning, there is not one example that I have betrayed my enemies. That is to tell you that I excel in all the political sentiments. One could make a fine novel of the history of the submissions that I have made to our comrade, to citizen Hervé.

That vice, secret, that secret taste that I have for the affront. I pocket it, I pocket it. That infamous taste that I have for the affront. For the dishonor, of the affront. I am the man in the world who receives, who pockets the most affronts. At my bench. In my own newspaper. At my bench Guesde does not miss one. He does not fail, he never fails to address the Chamber along the length of my ears. So how I respect, how I admire, how I esteem, how I venerate that great Guesde, that hard Guesde. With that veneration which is for me the same sentiment as fright. How I feel a little boy beside those men, beside a Guesde, beside above all a Hervé.

And that taste for ingratitude, that I have, which is at bottom the same as the taste for the affront. See how today I treat and let be treated (or have treated) Gérault-Richard, who for eight years fought for me.

Thus speaks Jaurès. Secondly, he says, if I have remained with Hervé, it is precisely in order to weaken him, to wear him down, to obliterate his virulence for him. It is my method. When I see a doctrine, a party becoming pernicious, dangerous, as far as possible I make myself one of it. But generally, since I am of it, I remain in it. But then I remain in it complaisantly. I adhere to it. I stick myself to it. I speak. I speak. I am eloquent. I am an orator. I am oratorical. I am redundant. I inundate. I receive precisely those kicks in the somewhere-or-other that you so ungratefully reproach me with. (Why do you reproach me with them, you to me, since I myself do not reproach with them those who give them to me.) But those kicks, that does not prevent one from speaking, on the contrary. That gives a start for speaking. In short, or rather at length, after a certain time of this exercise — (and I do not merely speak, I act besides, I act underneath), (I excel in the work of committees, in the (little) plots, in the combinations, in the play of the orders of the day, in the little machinations, in the commissions and compromisings and understandings, in all the subterranean work, under the hand, under the cloak. In the play, in the invention of majorities, factitious ones, made, obtained by a learned compartmenting of the ballots. In all that is the small and the great political and parliamentary mechanism) — in short, at the end of a certain time of this exercise, there is no more program, there is no more principle, there is no more party, there is nothing more, there is no more any of those virulences. When I have stuck myself well to them for a certain time, bearing for that the affronts that are needed, when I have remained in a party for a certain time, for the required time, at the end of that time one sees, one perceives, everyone understands that I have betrayed them. Do you understand at last, you big fool, he says to me, nudging me with his elbow.

When I am, when I put myself into a party, it is known at once, almost at once, by the fact that it is a party that becomes sick. When I put myself somewhere, it is seen, it is recognized by the fact that things go badly. Things no longer work. When I put myself into an idea, it becomes worm-eaten.

I did it to Dreyfusism; I had done it and I have done it to socialism; I did it and I do it to Hervéism; I did it and I do it to syndicalism. It is still radicalism that I have betrayed the least. There is only Combism that I have never betrayed at all.

I believe Jaurès very capable of betraying everyone, even the traitors themselves. But here again he will suffer that we do not accompany him. For two reasons, we too. The first is rather base, and I excuse myself for it in advance. It is political. It is that, however much one may be Jaurès, in such a matter one never knows where one is going, how far one enters, how far one succeeds, or on the contrary how far the event succeeds against you, how far the others, those into whom one enters, succeed against you, upon you, in you yourself. I understand well that it is a sort of counter-espionage. But precisely one knows well enough how much the services of counter-espionage (one has known it notably through the Dreyfus affair itself, one has seen it through so many others) are bizarrely but naturally entangled, imbricated in the contrary services of straightforward espionage. One never knows well how far one betrays the traitors. How far one succeeds at it. And how far on the contrary treason, the habit, the taste for treason infiltrates, penetrates into the very veins. One sees well what one does for them. One sees less well what one does against them. When one goes officially, formally with them, among them, one sees well the force that one brings them. One sees much less well the harm that one does them.

The betrayal of all that one carries out with them, after their example, in their company — one sees well what it yields, what it brings them of real treason. One sees well what it is of treason. On the contrary the betrayal of them that one is supposed to carry out — one does not always see at all what it ends in, what it yields. What it is.

Once one has let go, once one has given up the rein, one no longer knows how far it gives way.

Secondly — and this one is a reason of good company, drawn from the old morality, and I am happy to state it: One has not the right to betray the traitors themselves. One never has the right to betray, anyone. The traitors, one must combat them, and not betray them.

Hervé himself, who plays the swashbuckler so much since it pays him, were it months of prison, and years, four years today, but it is always a return — Hervé, on the contrary, who makes a profession of saying everything, he, and of fearing nothing, Hervé was on the contrary of a sort of consummate prudence, even cautious — one must not say Breton — during the whole time of his introduction. All would have been so simple, so direct, if he had said to us directly: Ladies and gentlemen, citizenesses and citizens, I arrive from Sens. You see in me the traitor. What Dreyfus unfortunately was not, I am. What Dreyfus unfortunately did not do, I wish to do, I have come to Paris to do it. I had myself sent for from Sens in order to be a traitor. I am the one who shall henceforth teach military treason, technically speaking. One had been mistaken hitherto. One must be a traitor, and namely a military traitor. As our masters said, our common masters, I have renewed the question. If he had said to us quite simply that.

But in that time I knew him a great deal. That pacifist advanced with an extraordinary prudence along the path.

Hervéism has thus denatured in return, deformed backward, disqualified by going back up, Dreyfusism, by a retroactivity, a retroaction, a retro-reversibility, a retrospectivity, a retroversion, a retrospection, a rising responsibility. A retro-responsibility.

One can give oneself the lie backward. It is even what one does most often. In the decomposition of Dreyfusism this retroaction, this retroversion was at least triple, it was perhaps quadruple. By his taking-upon-himself, by his invention, by his imposition of Combism, Jaurès created backward that illusion that Dreyfusism was anti-Catholic, anti-Christian. By his taking-upon-himself of Hervéism he created backward that illusion that Dreyfusism was antinationalist, antipatriotic, anti-French. By his taking-upon-himself (in Combism) of the primary and secular demagogy he created backward that illusion that Dreyfusism was barbarous, was against culture. By his taking-upon-himself (in socialism) of demagogic syndicalism — I mean of what is demagogic in syndicalism, in the invention and in the teaching of sabotage — he created backward that illusion that Dreyfusism was an important element, perhaps a capital element, of disorder, of industrial disorganization, of national disorganization.

We were heroes. It must be said very simply, for I well believe that it will not be said for us. Here, very exactly, is wherein and wherefore we were heroes. In all the world in which we moved, in all the world in which we were then completing the years of our apprenticeship, in all the milieu in which we moved, in which we operated, in which we were still growing and in which we were completing our formation, the question that posed itself, during those two or three years of that rising curve, was in no way to know whether in reality Dreyfus was innocent (or guilty). It was to know whether one would have the courage to recognize him, to declare him innocent. To manifest him innocent. It was to know whether one would have the double courage. Firstly, the first courage, the exterior courage, the coarse courage, already difficult, the social, public courage of manifesting him innocent in the world, in the eyes of the public, of avowing him to the public, (of glorifying him), of avowing him publicly, of declaring him publicly, of bearing witness for him publicly. Of risking thereupon, of staking upon him all that one had, a whole sum of money wretchedly earned, a whole sum of money of the poor man and the wretched man, a whole sum of money of humble folk, of misery and of poverty; all the time, all the life, all the career; all the health, all the body and all the soul; the ruin of the body, all the ruins, the rupture of the heart, the dislocation of families, the repudiation by kinsfolk, the turning-aside (of the looks) of eyes, the reprobation mute or frenzied, mute and frenzied, the isolation, all the quarantines, the rupture of friendships of twenty years, that is to say, for us, of friendships begun since always. All the social life. All the life of the heart, in short everything. Secondly, the second courage, more difficult, the interior courage, the secret courage, of avowing to oneself in oneself that he was innocent. Of renouncing for that man the peace of the heart.

No longer merely the peace of the city, the peace of the hearth. The peace of the family, the peace of the household. But the peace of the heart.

The first of goods, the only good.

The courage of entering, for that man, into the kingdom of an incurable disquiet.

And of a bitterness that will never be healed.

Our adversaries will never know, our enemies could not know what we sacrificed to that man, and with what heart we sacrificed it. We sacrificed to him our whole life, since that affair has marked us for life. Our enemies will never know — we who overturned, who turned over this country — our enemies will never know how few we were, and under what conditions we fought, under what thankless, precarious conditions, under what conditions of misery and of precariousness. How much consequently, in order to conquer — since after all we did conquer — we had to deploy, to manifest, to recover in ourselves, in our race, the most ancient, the most precious qualities of the race. The very technique of heroism, and namely of military heroism. One must not be caught by words. The discipline of the anarchists, for example, was notably admirable. It does not escape any well-advised man that it was in us that the military virtues were. In us and not at all, in no way in the General Staff of the army. We were, once more we were that handful of Frenchmen who under a crushing fire break through masses, lead an assault, carry a position.

How should our enemies, how should our adversaries know it, when our friends (I mean those of our party, of our side, the politicals, the historians of our side), when our friends themselves do not even perceive it. On that particular point of the anarchists, for example, do not ask them themselves for information about themselves. They would swear to you by their great gods, if I may say so, that they were never so undisciplined. People are all, and so profoundly, intellectualists that they prefer to betray, to betray themselves, to betray, to abandon, to repudiate their history and their own reality, to repudiate their own grandeur and all that makes their worth, everything rather than renounce their formulas, their tics, their intellectual manias, the intellectual idea that they wish to have of themselves and that they wish others to have of them.

The theoreticians of the Action française wish that the Dreyfus affair should have been, in its very principle, in its origin, not merely a pernicious affair, a worm-eaten affair, but an intellectual affair, an invention, an intellectual construction; an intellectual plot. I shall permit myself to say in my turn, and in return, that that very idea seems to me to be the result of an intellectual construction. If one engaged in conversation, I mean a somewhat sustained conversation, with the men of that party, one would perhaps easily demonstrate, one would come, I believe, rapidly to lay down that they are, and above all that they believe themselves to be, the great enemies of the intellectual party and of the modern world, but that in reality they are themselves a certain strong kind of intellectual party and of modern party. Very notably a party of logicians, a logical party. That is what there would be to say about them that is most conclusive. If not most profound. So one does not say it. That is seen notably in the very form of their battle, notably in the idea that they have, that they make for themselves of the intellectual party, of their intellectual adversaries of the intellectual party. They make for themselves of it an idea, a wholly intellectual representation. That representation itself — they sustain against them, one would be tempted to say with them, a combat, an intellectual battle, on a plane, on the intellectual plane, in intellectual language, with intellectual arms. Thus generally they make for themselves of their adversaries an intellectual idea, because, being themselves intellectuals, they make for themselves an intellectual idea of everything; and secondly, by a cross-checking, by a secret accord of the mechanism of mentalities, they make for themselves of the intellectuals, of the intellectual party, an idea as if doubly intellectual; intellectual in its body and in its mode; in its matter and in its form; in its author and in its object; in its point of origin and in its point of application; in all its transport, in all its trajectory.

On this particular historical question of the origin of the Dreyfus affair, when I read in the Action française the recollections notably of M. Maurice Pujo, I see that he believes (and naturally that he believes he remembers, but I, I believe that it is a purely intellectual operation, a phenomenon very well known, in this century of intellectual domination, a sort of carrying-back of the intellectual upon the memory itself, an introduction of the intellectual into the memory, of obumbration, a shadow cast, upon the memory, by intellectual ideation), he believes he remembers that the Dreyfus affair was prepared from all the parts, that it was as if assembled from the origin, from the principle, by the intellectual party.

He thus obeys, he obeys here the greatest intellectual illusion perhaps — I mean the one that is the greatest in number, in proportion, the most numerous, the one that is exercised most frequently, and the one that is the greatest in quantity, whose effect is the greatest, the gravest; not merely that intellectual illusion, so to speak general, of substituting everywhere, in the whole historical event, the intellectual formation for the organic formation; but very particularly that illusion of intellectual historical optics which consists in carrying back incessantly the present upon the past, the later incessantly upon the earlier, all the later incessantly upon all the earlier; an illusion so to speak technical; and organic itself, I mean organic of the intellectual; an illusion of perspective, or rather a total substitution, an attempt at total substitution of perspective for thickness, for depth, an attempt at total substitution of the regard of perspective for real knowledge, for the regard in depth, for the regard of depth; an attempt at total substitution of the regard of perspective, in two dimensions, for the real knowledge in three dimensions of a real thing, of a reality in three dimensions; an illusion of optics, an illusion of regard, an illusion of research and of knowledge that I try to deepen itself, among all the illusions (for it is capital, and of a capital importance), in my thesis of the situation made for history in the general philosophy of the modern world; an illusion which consists in substituting constantly, for the real organic movement of the event of history, which moves perpetually from the past toward the future, passing, falling perpetually through that fringe of the present, a sort of hard angular shadow cast at each instant of the present upon the past, the shadow of the corner of the wall and of the corner of the house, of the gable that we believe we have upon the street.

When one effects this carrying-back, it seems indeed that the intellectual party assembled the whole Dreyfus affair. But when one does not effect it, one recalls that it assembled nothing at all. First of all, generally in history one assembles nothing at all. Or in any case one does not assemble so much as all that. What is most unforeseen is always the event. It is enough to have lived a little oneself outside the books of the historians to know, to have experienced, that all that one assembles is generally what arrives the least, and that what one does not assemble is generally what arrives. No doubt there are preparations, but they must be general, there are hardly particular assemblings, assemblings of detail. And when there are assemblings of detail, they must be quite immediate, almost instantaneous, must precede the effect by very little. Otherwise disappointment slips in. Napoleon no doubt assembled Austerlitz well. But he was not assembling it on the day of the 18th Brumaire. And yet he was another preparer, another assembler than the intellectual party. It is the most frequent, the most general intellectual error, and it comes precisely from that carrying-back of the present upon the past, to believe that everything has been assembled and that it is what has been assembled that has succeeded. If the intellectual party had been so clever, (so strong), as to make so great an affair as the Dreyfus affair, as to assemble it, then it would have precisely the virtues that we deny it, and there would no longer be anything, gentlemen, but to lay down arms before it. Be reassured, it has none of them. It came to profit, as all the profiteers come afterward. It came as a parasite, as a follower. It had not come to combat, it had not come to found. It is precisely the common historical error, the common intellectual error in matters of history, to carry back, in every historical affair, upon the virtues of the founders, the shadow cast by the abuses of the profiteers.

The founders come first. The profiteers come afterward.

One can prepare a whole career, a whole life; one cannot assemble it. One can prepare a war, a revolution (and even then), (one must be many, and even then), one cannot assemble it. At the other extremity of the line, of the series, as always, in the detail one can assemble a day, a battle, a riot, a street-battle, and even then. But in the middle of the line, of the series, as always, one cannot assemble at a distance, in the detail, an affair. One can assemble a day, a coup d’État, a riot, an act of force. By an immediate preparation, an immediate assembling. One cannot assemble at some distance, in the middle, from afar, all together, so great an affair. Or if one assembled it, it would not arrive.

It is scarcely possible already to assemble an affair, in the industrial and commercial sense of that word.

It is precisely that which is at issue. If the intellectual party had been clever enough, strong enough, penetrating enough into reality to have assembled, to have known how, to have been able to assemble so great an affair, if it had been of a stature and of a depth to raise thus a great movement of reality, so great a movement, if it had been capable of kneading thus, of working over, of handling, of elaborating, of moulding so great a piece of reality, just then, then precisely they would not be what we call the intellectual party, they would not have those defects, those vices that we name precisely those of the intellectual party, that sterility, that incapacity, that debility; that dryness, that artificiality, that superficiality, that intellectuality. They would on the contrary be people who had worked, known, kneaded, moulded reality. They would be people who had been steeped in reality itself. And for having worked over so great a piece of reality they would be singularly great men, men of action, of a rough caliber, of a rough gauge, of a rough volume, great realists, masters. In short everything that precisely we deny them. They would be Richelieus and Napoleons. They would perhaps, no doubt, be tyrants still. But they would be great tyrants, considerable tyrants, masters, realists. Everything that precisely we deny them. They would be tyrants like Richelieu and Napoleon. They would bathe, they would be steeped, they would command in reality.

We are much deceived, by the historians, about the value of historical preparations. In 1870 itself, in the month of August, if a French army, such as it was, had been handed over into the hands of a Napoleon Bonaparte, all the drawers and all the preparations, all the files and all the registers of a Moltke would today be the laughingstock of the historians themselves.

They commit an error of the same order, more than an analogous error, an inverse and parallel error, when they name us the party of the foreigner. They carry back upon us the abuses of Hervé. Or rather they commit a parallel error and one not at all of a contrary sense, but of the same sense, for in one sense Hervé too is a profiteer. He is a parasite. He is even a parasite of ours. On this particular point it is still we who were founders, the founders, and it is Hervé who in one sense was a profiteer. He would not have attained in a few days, in forty-eight hours, that sort not merely of reputation, of celebrity, but of glory proper that he has, if he had not founded himself upon our own, upon our slow foundations, if he had not profited, abused our great preparations. Our adversaries would do well, they would have the right, and even the duty, they would be right to name Hervé the party of the foreigner. They generally do not do so, for reasons quite honorable, such as respecting a prisoner, and also for a quite honorable companionship of prison, for having been in prison together; for others too, that are perhaps less so, such as a sort of sympathy of disturbance, a secret friendship of disorder, a secret complaisance of demagogy. A complaisance toward opposition, whatever it be, even when it is at bottom still more an opposition to themselves; a complaisance toward all that disturbs a detested regime. Toward all that annoys a hated government. Then they make up for that indulgence and for that companionship and for that sympathy and for that complaisance by naming us, us, the party of the foreigner. It is a sort of transfer. It is also the same carrying-back. One carries back upon us, the founders, the treason of Hervé the profiteer. One carries back upon us, the antecedents, the treason of Hervé the follower, of Hervé the successor. It is a transfer. One carries back upon us, the founders, the treason of Hervé the parasite. The attention that one prefers not to grant to Hervé, one grants it to us generously. Only, passing from Hervé to us his contrary, it changes sign. For it passes to the contrary while keeping the same sign. Whereas, passing to the contrary, it ought to take the contrary sign. It must therefore, by an interior, purely arbitrary operation, change sign. One makes it arbitrarily change sign. The grievance that one ought to have against Hervé is precisely the one that is made against us, his contrary.

They commit an error not merely of the same order, but of the same tribe, of the same kindred, an error neighboring, allied, an akin error, an error of the same family, when they attribute, when they represent to us the Dreyfus affair as assembled by the Jewish party. It would not take much pushing of me to make me declare what I think, that the Dreyfus affair, in the measure in which it was assembled, was assembled against the Jewish party. Of all the resistances that Bernard-Lazare had to thrust back, to begin with, in the principle, the first were naturally the Jewish resistances, since they were those of his own milieu. But they were not merely the first, they were also perhaps the most energetic. The most profound, I believe. No doubt the most active. And afterward those who pardoned him the least were still the Jews. I mean the Jewish politicians, the Jewish (political) party. Just as on the intellectual side, in the camp, in the intellectual clan, even in the university clan, that Dreyfus affair was begun, was engaged by a few frenzied men against the resistance, against the reprobation of the party, against the resistances mute or avowed, against the silence and the fear and the political activity of the party. The intellectual (political) party engaged itself in it only when it believed that the hour of the spoils had come.

It is certain that there has been at least one treason in the Dreyfus affair, and it is the treason of Dreyfusism itself. But it is to commit a total error to imagine that this treason was assembled, deliberately committed, deliberately exercised by Jews upon Christians. In the General Staff of that treason there was Jaurès, who is not a Jew; there was, there came Hervé, who is not a Jew. Jaurès is a man of Toulouse, Hervé is a Breton. In the party of the foreigner I see Hervé; if Hervé had any courage (not at all moral and sentimental courage, if I may say so, of which I am sure that he has, but mental and intellectual courage even, consistency, he would say: See, I am in fact the party of the foreigner) — in the party of the foreigner I see Hervé; by the taking-upon-himself by Hervé we have seen Jaurès. By the taking-upon-himself by Jaurès we should reach, I am much afraid, some other one. But in short I see in that party, in that General Staff, no Jew who has the stature, the social volume of Jaurès.

What, on the other hand, our adversaries cannot know, what sincerely they cannot imagine, what they cannot reckon, what they do not know, what they cannot represent to themselves, what they do not suspect, what they cannot even suppose, is how many Jews have been irrevocably enveloped in the disaster of the Dreyfus affair, how many Jews have been the victims, the real victims, and have remained the victims of the Dreyfus affair, of that treason, of that handing-over of the Dreyfus affair. How many careers, how many Jewish lives have been irreparably ruined, broken — that, we know it; how many Jewish miseries, we know it, we who were on this side of the battle, and to know it one had to be on this side of the battle; how many have remained marked by misery for their whole life; without recounting the one who is dead, without counting those who are dead, like our own. For after all it is a pretension that makes one smile, that pretension of the antisemites, that all the Jews are rich. I do not know where they get it, how they make their reckoning. Or rather I know it too well, when they are sincere. Let us say that I know it well. The explanation is quite simple. It is that in the modern world, as I have indicated so often in these very cahiers, no power exists, is, counts beside the power of money; no distinction exists, is, counts beside the abyss that there is between the rich and the poor; and those two classes, despite appearances, and despite all the political jargon and the great words of solidarity, ignore each other as by far they have never ignored each other. Infinitely otherwise, infinitely more they ignore and misknow each other. Beneath the appearances of the parliamentary political jargon there is an abyss between them, an abyss of ignorance and of misknowledge, of the one toward the other, an abyss of non-communication. The lowest of serfs was of the same Christendom as the king. Today there is no longer any city. The rich world and the poor world live, or in short make pretense, like two masses, like two horizontal strata separated by a void, by an abyss of non-communication. The bourgeois antisemites therefore know only the bourgeois Jews; the worldly antisemites know and hate only the worldly Jews; the antisemites who do business know and hate only the Jews who do business. We who are poor, as if by chance we know a very great number of poor Jews, and even wretched ones. In that region of the poor Jews the Dreyfus affair, the political and politician treason, the parliamentary treason, the fraudulent bankruptcy of the Dreyfus affair and of Dreyfusism, has caused frightful ravages, ravages that will never be repaired. Ravages of money, of work, of situations, of career — of health — but also ravages of the heart, a disabusing that came to join itself to the eternal disabusing of the race.

They are like us, they are among us; they are our friends, they have been tried, they have suffered, they have been maltreated as much as we, more than we. For they recover from it still more uneasily.

Like us they are half-pay veterans; they are and they will be all their life in that thankless situation of half-pay veterans who would have made no great historical campaigns.

What must be said is that a General Staff of Jews and of Christians betrayed excellent troops of Jews and of Christians. And what must be said also is that it is always like that.

Here is exactly what I wish to say of Bernard-Lazare. In the Temps of Friday, 27 May 1910, I read this simple paragraph, in the small type of the last-hour news:

— Last hour. — The expulsion of the Jews of Kiev. — Saint Petersburg, 26 May. The authorities of Kiev have proceeded to the expulsion of 1,300 Israelite families condemned by a recent circular of the ministry of the interior to leave the city. — The misery of the expelled is very great. (Havas) —

What there is of poignant in this dispatch is not merely its dryness and its brevity. It is the point to which such dispatches pass unnoticed today. What I wish to say is that under Bernard-Lazare they would not pass unnoticed.

The same Temps — of Wednesday, 15 June 1910: The works of the Duma. — There has been laid upon the desk of the Assembly a bill tending to abolish the sequestration of the Jews in special quarters. This bill has the support of 166 deputies of the opposition and of some Octobrists.

In the Matin of Sunday, 12 June 1910 — for there is some of it almost every day: The electoral rights of Russian Poland. — Saint Petersburg, 11 June. — Special dispatch of the Matin. — The Duma has voted today a law creating elective zemstvos in six provinces of the south-west and assuring to the peasants a minimum of a third of the councilors, and to the Polish proprietors a maximum which is also fixed at a third. The Poles are eligible as members of the executive committees and recognized as qualified to serve as employees of the zemstvos. The Jews, on the other hand (it is I who underline), the Jews on the other hand are entirely excluded, save as employees. The bill presented by the government deprived the Poles of the greater part of these rights; but the opposition, supported by the Octobrists, imposed these amendments.

In the Matin of Monday, 13 June 1910: Six thousand Israelites are expelled from Kiev. — Saint Petersburg, 12 June. — According to the Rietch, nearly six thousand Israelites have been expelled from Kiev. Most of them are poor people. Many of them, without a home and in the greatest misery, wander about the environs of the city. A scarcely credible fact is that their expulsion took place in virtue of M. Stolypin’s circular of 1906, a circular which accorded to all the Israelites then at Kiev without legal right of residence the permission to remain there. All the Israelites able to prove that in 1906 they were residing legally at Kiev are left in peace; but those on the contrary who found themselves there then illegally fall under the blow of decrees of expulsion. Each day new groups of victims are driven from the city. (Times.)

And in the same number of the Matin, that it may be complete, this extraordinary piece of news, this extraordinary announcement from Salonika: the Jewish boatmen exercising a Turkish boycott of Greek merchandise. It is fairly good. The anti-Greek boycott at Salonika. — Constantinople, 12 June. — The boatmen of Salonika, who for the most part are Israelites (it is again I who underline), have decreed the boycott of the Greek steamers. Here, however, the anti-Greek agitation seems to be becoming less violent and it is hoped that the government will take the measures necessary to prevent any new propagation of the movement. (Times.) Singular people, who have all their quarrels, their own, and who espouse the quarrels of others, who have all their misfortunes, their own, and who espouse the fortunes and the misfortunes of others.

By a parallel, comparable, analogous movement, assimilable to several movements that we have already found, in this very matter, on this very point the antisemites are far too modern. They are much more modern than we. They are much more modern than they wish. They are much more modern than they believe. They are much more sunk in the modern world than they wish and than they believe and than we are; they are much more tinged with it. It is to do much honor to the modern world, it is also so to speak in a certain sense to misknow it, to misknow precisely its modernism, its modernity, what it is, it is to misknow the virus of it, to say: The modern world is an invention, a forgery, a fabrication; the modern world is invented, has been invented, assembled, from all the parts, by the Jews, upon us and against us. It is a regime that they have made with their hands, that they impose upon us, in which they dominate us, in which they govern us, in which they tyrannize us; in which they are perfectly happy, in which we are, in which they render us perfectly unhappy.

It is to know the modern world very ill, to speak thus. It is to do it much honor. It is to know it, it is to see it, very superficially. It is to misknow very gravely, (very lightly), the virus of it, all the noxiousness. It is indeed to misknow all the misery and the distress of it. Firstly, the modern world is much less assembled. It is much more a natural malady. Secondly, that natural malady is much graver, much more profound, much more universal.

None profits by it and everyone suffers from it. Everyone is afflicted by it. The moderns themselves suffer from it. Those who boast of it, who glory in it, who rejoice in it, suffer from it. Those who love it best love their malady. Those even whom one believes do not suffer from it suffer from it. Those who act the happy ones are also unhappy, more unhappy than the others, more unhappy than we. In the modern world everyone suffers from the modern malady. Those who act those whom it profits are also unhappy, more unhappy than we. Everyone is unhappy in the modern world.

The Jews are more unhappy than the others. Far from the modern world particularly favoring them, being particularly advantageous to them, having made them a seat of repose, a residence of quietude and of privilege, on the contrary the modern world has added its own modern dispersion, its interior dispersion, to their secular dispersion, to their ethnic dispersion, to their antique dispersion. The modern world has added its trouble to their trouble; in the modern world they accumulate; the modern world has added its misery to their misery, its distress to their antique distress; it has added its mortal disquiet, its incurable disquiet to the mortal, to the incurable disquiet of the race, to the disquiet proper, to the antique, to the eternal disquiet.

It has added the universal disquiet to the disquiet proper.

Thus they accumulate. They are at the intersection. They cross themselves upon themselves. They cross the Jewish disquiet, which is theirs, with the modern disquiet, which is ours and theirs. They undergo, they receive together, at that intersection, the vertical disquiet and the horizontal disquiet; the descending vertical disquiet and the level horizontal disquiet; the vertical disquiet of the race, the horizontal disquiet of the age, of the time.

In that bitter, in that mortal competition of the modern world, in that compromising, in that perpetual competition they are more heavily laden than we. They accumulate. They are doubly laden. They accumulate two burdens. The Jewish burden and the modern burden. The burden of the Jewish disquiet and the burden of the modern disquiet. The mutual support that they lend one another (and which has been much exaggerated, for there are also, naturally, interior disquiets, hatreds, rivalries, competitions, interior resentments — and to take at once a striking example, the culminating example: the person and the so great philosophy of M. Bergson, which will remain in history, which will be counted among the five or six great philosophies of the whole world, are detested, hated, combated by none, in the intellectual party, as much as by certain men, by a few Jewish professors notably of philosophy) — the mutual support that they lend one another is amply compensated, more than compensated, by that frightening, by that growing thrust of antisemitism that they receive all together. That they have constantly to thrust back, to refute, to retort, all together. How many careers of Jews have I not known, of poor people, functionaries, professors, that have been broken, that are still broken, forever, by the following double mechanism: during the whole thrust of victorious and governmental antisemitism their career was broken because they were Jews; (and the Christians because they were Dreyfusists). And immediately afterward, during the whole thrust of victorious but governmental Dreyfusism, their careers were broken because one was a Combist and because with us they had remained pure Dreyfusists. It is thus, by that double mechanism, that they share with us fraternally a double misery, a double inexpiable misfortune.

In that race of the modern world they are like us, more than we they are heavily, doubly laden.

The antisemites speak of the Jews. I give notice that I am going to say an enormity: The antisemites do not know the Jews. They speak of them, but they do not know them. They suffer from them, evidently a great deal, but they do not know them. The rich antisemites know perhaps the rich Jews. The capitalist antisemites know perhaps the capitalist Jews. The business antisemites know perhaps the business Jews. For the same reason I scarcely know any but poor Jews and wretched Jews. There are some. There are so many of them that one does not know the number of them. I see them everywhere.

It shall not be said that a Christian will not have borne witness for them. It shall not be said that I shall not have testified for them. As it shall not be said that a Christian will not testify for Bernard-Lazare.

For twenty years I have tried them, we have tried one another mutually. I have always found them solid at their post, as much as anyone, affectionate, solid, of a tenderness of their own, as much as anyone, of an attachment, of a devotion, of an unshakable piety, of a fidelity proof against everything, of a friendship really mystical, of an attachment, of an unshakable fidelity to the mystique of friendship.

Money is everything, dominates everything in the modern world to such a point, so entirely, so totally, that the horizontal social separation of the rich and the poor has become infinitely graver, more cutting, more absolute, if I may say so, than the vertical separation of race of the Jews and the Christians. The hardness of the modern world upon the poor, against the poor, has become so total, so frightening, so impious at once upon the ones and upon the others, against the ones and against the others.

In the modern world acquaintanceships are made, are propagated, only horizontally, among the rich among themselves, or among the poor among themselves. In horizontal strata.

Poor, I shall bear witness for the poor Jews. In the common poverty, in the common misery, for twenty years I have found them of a sureness, of a fidelity, of a devotion, of a solidity, of an attachment, of a mystique, of a piety in friendship unshakable. They have all the more merit in it, they have all the more virtue in it, in that at the same time, in addition to us, they have without cease to struggle against the accusations, against the inculpations, against the calumnies of antisemitism, which are precisely all the accusations of the contrary.

What do we see? For after all one must speak only of what we see, one must say only what we see; what do we see? In that galley of the modern world I see them rowing at their bench, more than others, as much and more than we. As much and more than we undergoing the common lot. In that temporal hell of the modern world I see them like us, as much and more than we, toiling like us, tried like us. Exhausted like us. Overworked like us. In the maladies, in the fatigues, in the neurasthenia, in all the overworkings, in that temporal hell I know hundreds of them, I see thousands of them who, as uneasily, more uneasily, more wretchedly than we, painfully earn their wretched living.

In that common hell.

Of the rich there would be much to say. I know them much less. What I can say is that for twenty years I have passed through many hands. The only one of my creditors who behaved with me not merely as a usurer, but, which is a little more, as a creditor, as a usurer out of Balzac — the only one of my creditors who treated me with a Balzacian hardness, with the hardness, the cruelty of a usurer out of Balzac — was in no way a Jew. He was a Frenchman, I am ashamed to say it, one is ashamed to say it, he was alas a “Christian,” thirty times a millionaire. What would one not have said if he had been a Jew.

To what point do their rich help them? I suspect that they help them a little more than ours help us. But in short one ought perhaps not to reproach them with it. It is what I was saying to a young antisemite, joyous but who listens to me, in a form that I permit myself to find striking. I was saying to him: But after all, think of it, it is not easy to be a Jew. You always make them contradictory reproaches. When their rich do not support them, when their rich are hard, you say: It is not astonishing, they are Jews. When their rich support them, you say: It is not astonishing, they are Jews. They support one another. — But, my friend, the rich Christians have only to do as much. We do not prevent the rich Christians from supporting us among ourselves.

It is not easy to be a Jew. With you. And even without you. When they remain insensible to the appeals of their brethren, to the cries of the persecuted, to the complaints, to the lamentations of their brethren bruised throughout the whole world, you say: They are bad Jews. And if they only lend an ear to the lamentations that mount from the Danube and from the Dnieper, you say: They betray us. They are bad Frenchmen.

Thus you pursue them, you overwhelm them without cease with contradictory reproaches. You say: Their finance is Jewish, it is not French. — And French finance, my friend, is it French? Is there a finance that is French?

You overwhelm them without cease with contradictory reproaches. At bottom, what you would wish is that they did not exist. But that, that is another question.

What would one not have said if he had been a Jew. They are the victims of an optical illusion very frequent, very well known in the other orders, in the order of optics itself. Of optics proper. Since one always thinks of them, at present, since one thinks only of them, since the attention is always borne upon them, since the question of antisemitism was raised (and on that very question of antisemitism one would have to make a whole history of it, one would have to make the history of it, see how it comes for a third from them, for a third of the antisemites, the professionals, and for the two other thirds, as a professor said, for the two other thirds from mechanisms) — since the question of antisemitism is thus posed, since one thinks only of them, since all the attention is always upon them, since they are always in the beam of light, since they are always in the white of the regard, they are very exactly the victims of that well-known optical illusion which makes us see a white square on black much larger than the same square black on white, which appears quite small. Every white square on black appears much larger than the same square black on white. So too every act, every operation, every square Jewish upon Christian appears to us, we see it much larger than the same square Christian upon Jewish. It is a pure illusion of historical optics, of so to speak geographical and topographical optics, of political and social optics, which there will be occasion someday to examine in greater detail.

In order to measure all the value, all the grandeur, all the amplitude, all the angle of that illusion, in order to correct that angle of error, in order to make the correction, the necessary corrections, in order to give ourselves back, in order to recover the line, the direction, in order to give ourselves back, in order to recover justice and rightness, there is a salubrious exercise, excellent for justice, for rightness, for good intellectual and moral health, excellent for intellectual and mental hygiene, a salutary exercise, a sort of Swedish gymnastics of the mind, a mental Müller. It consists in making the best of proofs, which is the proof by the contrary. Is it Pesloüan, is it I who invented it? Questions of origin always lose themselves in the night of time. It is rather the two of us. What I do know is that we practice it often together, in our experimental discussions. The results are always marvelous. It consists in doing the contrary. It is an exercise of suppling, of rectification, marvelous. It consists in retaining certain facts, numerous ones, as they pass, and in saying, in asking oneself, of the author, what we have for example just been asking ourselves once: What would one say if he were a Jew? Not only does this exercise always yield, but one is surprised to see how it yields, how it rectifies. How much it yields. One sees quickly then, one reckons easily that the greatest scandals and the most numerous are in no way Jewish scandals. And far from it.

Without delivering ourselves over here deliberately to that exercise, is it not striking already, at first sight, that our great shames, our national shames, Jaurès, Hervé, Thalamas, are in no way Jewish, are in no way Jews. It is even very remarkable on the contrary, once one reckons thus, how few of our shames are Jewish; it is remarkable that among the protagonists of our national shames there is no Jew. What would one say if Jaurès were a Jew. What would one say, above all, if Hervé were a Jew. That is to say, precisely, if a Jew had been cowardly the twentieth part of what Jaurès has been, if a Jew had said against the fatherland, the French fatherland, had uttered, against our fatherland, the twentieth part of the monstrosities that our compatriot Hervé has so superbly brought out, what would have been said. And likewise, what would one say if Thalamas were a Jew.

To take an example of an episode, quite small, but for that very reason perhaps better outlined, better characterized, better delimited, all the easier, all the more easy to seize, what would have been said in a recent debate, in a very special world, if it had been M. Bataille who had been a Jew and Madame Bernhardt who had not been one.

In the Dreyfus affair itself, without coming back to it, or rather without entering into it, in the very General Staff of Dreyfusism and of the Dreyfus affair it is quite notable that it is the Jews, the great Jews who still weakened the least. The example of M. Joseph Reinach is characteristic. One may say that in the Dreyfus affair, in the General Staff of the Dreyfus affair and of the Dreyfusist party, he represented in a certain sense, and even so to speak officially, what has been named the Jewish party. In the Dreyfusist political party he represented so to speak the Jewish political party. Alone, moreover, he was of a political and social volume, of an order of grandeur at least equal to that of a Jaurès. Now what do we see? One must always say what one sees. Above all one must always — what is more difficult — see what one sees. We see that of all our General Staff he is the only one who did not weaken before the Dreyfusist demagogies, before the political demagogies issued from our Dreyfusist mystique. He is the only one notably who did not weaken, who did not bend before the Combist demagogy, before the demagogy of the Combist tyranny. He is the only one namely — and this is all the more remarkable in that he is by his whole career a political man — he is the only one who, among the first, resolutely opposed denunciation at the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, as one sees in the dossier that we constituted at that time. If one would take the trouble to read the six or seven big volumes of his History of the Dreyfus Affair, and if one did not leave to M. Sorel alone all the care of reading them, one would see at once that no (historian) was as severe as he toward all the Dreyfusist demagogies, issued from Dreyfusism, toward all the political deviations, toward all the degradations of Dreyfusism. One is even surprised by it. There is there as a sort of political stoicism rather curious. And even sometimes as a kind of wager. One is surprised — and it is indeed the greatest praise that I know of a man — one is surprised that this political man, rich and powerful, had several times the political virtues of a poor man. Of what non-Jew could one say as much.

Of Dreyfus himself, to go to the heart of the debate, to the object, to the person itself, of Dreyfus it is evident that I have wished to say nothing, that I have said nothing nor have been able to say anything that touched the private man. I am well aware of all that there is of tragic, of fatal in the life of that man. But what there is of most tragic, of most fatal is precisely that he has not the right to be a private man. It is that we have incessantly the right to demand of him an account, the right, and the duty, to demand of him the most severe accounts. The most rigorous.

Otherwise I should know well all that there is of tragic, of fatal in the private life of that man. What I know of most touching about him is certainly that profound, almost paternal attachment that he has inspired in our old master M. Gabriel Monod. M. Monod was telling me of it still at the cahiers only a few weeks ago. Scarcely that. Dreyfus had just had another bereavement, a very near one, a very sorrowful one, a very fatal one, in his family. M. Monod reported it to us, recounted it to us with tears in his voice. He told us at the same time, or rather he did not tell it us, but he told us much more eloquently than if he had told it us, how much he loved him; we were present, a little surprised, a little caught unawares, a little overpassed — because one does not believe it, one does not expect it — at that profound affection, at that sentimental affection, at that private affection, at that quasi-paternal affection, paternal even, that he has for Dreyfus. We were almost a little embarrassed by it, as by a discovery, always new, and as if one were opening to us new horizons, as if one had made us enter into a family without quite asking our opinion, a little inconsiderately, a little indiscreetly, so much have we taken the habit of wishing to know in Dreyfus only the public man, of wishing to treat him only as a public man, hardly, like a public man. Leaving aside, not merely before a reality, but before so striking, so tragic, so poignant a reality, leaving aside all the apparatus of the so-called scientific methods, the presumably historical ones, leaving aside all the apparatus of the meta-historical metaphysics, our old master, seated, said, with interior tears: One would say that he has a fatality upon him. One would say that he is a man who is marked by a fatality. He does not emerge constantly from misfortune. I have just left him again. (And he recounted to us that last interview, that last bereavement, that sort of embracing, that family, that private bereavement.) I have seen him, he told us, that hero, that great stoic, that sort of antique soul. (It is thus that he speaks of Dreyfus, an inflexible soul, a hero, a sorrowful one, but an antique one.) I have just seen him. That heroic man, that stoic soul, that stoic whom I have seen impassive and never weeping in the greatest trials. I have just seen him. He was bowed, he was weeping over that death. He said to me: “I believe that there is a fatality upon me. Every time that we attach ourselves to someone, that we see a little happiness, that we might begin a little to be happy, they die.” We were seized, in that little shop, by that sudden revelation. “When we might begin a little to be happy” — was that not the very word, the cry of Israel, more than a symbol, the very destination of Israel? And moreover we saw passing, coming from a historian, passing over a historian, over the shoulders of a historian, breaking all the methods, breaking all the positivist metaphysics, breaking all the modern disciplines, breaking all the histories and all the sociologies, we saw passing the beyond of history. The hidden thought, the hidden intention, the mysterious hidden disquiet, the hidden thought of so many peoples, of the antique peoples was brought back to us, the same, intact, integral, all new, was conducted back to us entire by the oldest living master of our modern historians, by the most respected, by the most considered. And it was always history, more than history, the destination of the people of Israel. The emotion of the others was multiplied tenfold for me by that sort of almost filial affection, by that sort of secret piety that since my years as a normalien I have always kept for our old master. An affection, a piety a little rough, one has seen it. But all the more secretly profound for that. All the more filial, all the more as if personal, all the more jealously kept. I felt myself, in his affection, a little a brother in thought of Dreyfus, a brother in affection, and that embarrassed me much. We were there. We were men. The same breath bowed us, that bowed the antique peoples. The same problem raised us up, that raised up the antique peoples. That problem, that anxious problem of fatality, which poses itself for every people, for every man not of the books. And associating in his thought, in his speech, without even perceiving it, so natural was it, so much did one see that it was the habit, his habit, associating the man and the work, the hero and the history, the object and the enterprise, departing already he said to us as he went off: What an affair. What a disaster. When one thinks of all the good that could have come out of that affair for France. And in fact one no longer knew whether it was Dreyfus or the Dreyfus affair that was unhappy, that was fatal, that was ill endowed for happiness, incapable of happiness, marked by fatality. For it was indeed both of them together, inseparably, unseparatedly, undividedly, indivisibly, the one bearing the other, the one within the other. And already he was departing (he had come to buy an Antoinette, in the edition of the cahiers), and we shook hands, departing again toward our different works, toward our different cares, toward our different preoccupations. And we shook hands indeed as at a burial. We were the kinsfolk of the deceased. And even the poor kinsfolk.

The greatest fatality is precisely that that man should have been that affair, that he should have been thrown irrevocably into public action, and even the most public. He had perhaps all the private virtues. He would no doubt have made so good a man of business. What did he go and become a captain for? What did he go and do in the offices of the General Staff? There is the fatality. What did he go and do in a reputation, in a celebrity, in a worldwide glory? Victim in spite of himself, hero in spite of himself, martyr in spite of himself. Glorious in spite of himself, he betrayed his glory. There is the fatality. Invitus invitam adeptus gloriam. Because he had become a captain, because he had entered among the captains, because he had entered into the offices of the General Staff, that man was constrained to clothe himself with a charge, an unexpected glory, a charge, an inexpiable glory. Mysterious destination of the people of Israel. So many others, who would wish for glory, are forced to keep quiet. And he, who would wish indeed to keep quiet, he is forced to the vocation, he is forced to the charge, he is forced to the glory. There is his fatality itself. Here is a man who was a captain. He thought to mount to colonel or perhaps general. He has mounted to Dreyfus. How do you expect him to find his bearings in it? And yet he had to find his bearings in it, he was obliged after all to find his bearings in it. He has been improvised pilot, governor, gubernator of an enormous ship that he did not know how to steer, that he did not know how to govern. And yet he is responsible for it. There is the fatality. There is the mysterious destination of Israel. Abruptly clothed, clothed in spite of himself with an enormous magistracy, with a capital magistracy, with the magistracy of victim, with the magistracy of hero, with the magistracy of martyr, he came out of it lamentably. And what there is of fatal, what there is of sorrowful, what there is of tragic, is that we cannot but demand of him an account of it.

He who is designated must march. He who is called must answer. It is the law, it is the rule, it is the level of the heroic lives, it is the level of the lives of sanctity. Invested as a victim in spite of himself, invested as a hero in spite of himself, invested as a victim in spite of himself, invested as a martyr in spite of himself, he was unworthy of that triple investiture. Historically, really unworthy. Inadequate; below it; incapable. Unskillfulness and carelessness. Profound incapacity. Unworthy of that triple consecration, of that triple magistracy. And what there is of worst, what there is of fatal, what there is of most tragic, is that, short of entering into his crime and under pain of participating in his unworthiness, in that very unworthiness, we cannot but demand of him an account of it. Whoever has had the world in his hand is responsible for the world. We cannot enter into his game. We have not the right to enter into his reasons, were they legitimate; privately legitimate. And it is above all if they are legitimate that we must beware of them. For they would tempt us. We must forget everything, the good that we know of him, the affection that we should have for him, that we should be tempted to have for him, the touching, the paternal affection of that old man for him; of that old man whom we ourselves respect so much, whom we love so much. We must forget everything and we can only demand of him an account. An account of that immense battle that he lost. He found himself engaged without wishing it as general in chief — more than that, as flag of an immense army in an immense battle against an immense army. And he lost that immense battle. And we can speak to him only of that. We have the right only to speak to him of that. We have not the right to engage, to accept from him, with him any other conversation, any other interview. No other discourse.

We must keep silent, we must make silent all our other sentiments. He has been constituted a public man. He has been constituted a man of glory, of a universal resounding. We can only demand of him an account of his public action, of his public sentiments, of that public disaster. He who loses a battle is responsible for it. And he lost that immense battle. We can only demand of him an account of all that was engaged in that battle, in that public action. We can only demand of him an account of the public customs, of France, of Israel itself, of humanity of which he was for a moment.

Singular destiny. He was invested, instituted in spite of himself a public man. So many others have wished to become public men, and have set the price upon it, and have been implacably thrust back from it by the event. He was invested, instituted in spite of himself a man of glory. So many others have wished for glory, and have set the price upon it, and have been implacably thrust back from it by the event. And he, he has had all that. He has had everything in spite of himself. He has had all that he did not wish for. But it is needful that he who is invested should march.

So many men, thousands and thousands of men, soldiers, poets, writers, artists, men of action, (victims), heroes, martyrs, so many men, thousands and thousands of men have wished to enter into public action, to become, to make themselves public men, and they have set the price upon it. So many men have sought after glory, temporal glory, thousands and thousands of men, and to be immortal, temporally immortal in the memory of men. And they have set the price upon it. They have set upon it genius, heroism, efforts without number, incredible efforts, frightening efforts; frightening sufferings; whole lives, and what lives, veritable martyrdoms. And nothing, never anything. And he, without doing anything, in spite of himself, in a few weeks he has become the man with whom all humanity has most resounded, his name has become the name, he has become the man whose name everyone has most repeated, most celebrated, since the death of our master Napoleon. What a hundred battles had given to the other, he has had it in spite of himself. And he was no prouder for it. It is indeed for this that we can write and speak of him only as we have done in the first two thirds of this cahier.

That tragic situation reminds me of a saying of Bernard-Lazare. One must always come back, one always comes back to a saying of Bernard-Lazare. This saying here will be the decisive saying of the affair. Since it comes, since it bears, from its greatest prophet upon the victim itself. It is therefore culminating by its point of origin and by its point of arrival. Bernard-Lazare, born at Nîmes the 14th of June 1865; died at Paris the first of September 1903. He was therefore thirty-eight years old. Because a man wears a lorgnon, because he wears a pince-nez set crosswise barring a fold of the nose before the two big eyes, the modern believes him modern; the modern does not know how to see, does not see, does not know how to recognize the antiquity of the prophet’s regard. It was the time when, when he met Maurice Montégut, he said. The other had a stomach-ache, like everyone, like every poor intellectual mercenary. And he too, he believed he had a stomach-ache, like everyone. He said to Montégut, laughing — for he was profoundly gay, interiorly gay — Eh, Montégut, well now, Montégut, eh, things go well before lunch, when one has nothing in the stomach. One is light. One works. But afterward. One ought never to eat. Dreyfus had just come back. Dreyfus had returned, and almost instantaneously, at the first steps, at the first parleys, at the first contact, everyone had suddenly had the impression that there was a flaw, that this was not the thing, that he was as he was, and not at all as we had dreamed him. Some already were complaining. Some, deafly, soon publicly, accused him. Deafly, publicly Bernard-Lazare defended him. Bitterly, obstinately. Tenaciously. With that admirable voluntary blindness of those who really love, with that obstinate, invincible relentlessness with which love defends a being who is wrong, evidently wrong, publicly wrong. — I do not know what they want, he said, laughing but not laughing, laughing on the surface but underneath not laughing, I do not know what they ask. I do not know what they want of him. Because he has been condemned unjustly, they ask everything of him, he would have to have all the virtues. He is innocent, that is already much.

Not only were we heroes, but the Dreyfus affair at bottom can be explained only by that need of heroism that seizes periodically this people, this race, by a need of heroism that then seized us, a whole generation. It is with these great movements, with these great trials of a whole people, as with those other great trials, wars. Or rather there is for peoples only one sort of great temporal trials, which are wars, and these great trials here are themselves wars. In all these great trials, in all these great histories, it is much rather the interior force, the violence of eruption that makes the historical matter, than it is the matter that makes and that imposes the trial. When a great war breaks out, a great revolution, that sort of war, it is because a great people, a great race needs to come out; because it has had enough of it; namely because it has had enough of peace. It is always because a great mass experiences a violent need, a great, a profound need, a mysterious need of a great movement. If the people, if the race, if the French mass had had a desire for a great war forty years ago, that wretched, that unhappy war itself of 1870, however ill begun, however ill engaged it was, would have become a great war, like the others, and in March 1871 it would have done no more than begin. A great history, I say a great military history like those wars of the Revolution and of the Empire, can in no way be explained except by this: a seizing of need, a very profound need of glory, of war, of history that at a given moment seizes a whole people, a whole race, and makes it make an explosion, an eruption. A mysterious need of an inscription. A historical one. A mysterious need of a sort of historical fecundity. A mysterious need to inscribe a great history into the eternal history. Every other explanation is vain, reasonable, rational, infecund, unreal. Likewise our Dreyfus affair can be explained only by a need, the same, by a need of heroism that seizes a whole generation, ours, by a need of war, of military war, and of military glory, by a need of sacrifice and even of martyrdom, perhaps, (no doubt), by a need of sanctity. What our adversaries could see only face on, from the other side, head on, what they could receive only in the hollow, what our leaders themselves have always been ignorant of, is to what point we marched like an army, a military one. How so much hope, so much enterprise was broken without obtaining, without effecting a historical inscription, that is precisely what I have tried not merely to explain, but to represent to our friends and to our subscribers in a cahier of last year at sensibly the same date. That if we were, once more, an army of lions led by asses, it is then that we remained, very exactly, in the purest French tradition.

We were great. We were very great. Today those of whom I speak, we are people who earn poorly, wretchedly, miserably our living. But what I do not see is that the poor Jews, here again, should separate themselves from us, that they should earn their living with a turn of the hand, that they should have no trouble, that they should have less trouble than we to earn their living. Perhaps on the contrary, for if they support one another a little — less than is believed, less than is said, and sometimes they combat one another, and betray one another — in return they collide with an antisemitism today come back, today growing. What I see is that Jews and Christians together, poor Jews and poor Christians, we earn our living as we can, generally badly, in this dog’s life, in this dog’s, in this beggar’s modern society.

But in that very misery, and because of that very misery, we wish to have been great, we wish to have been very great. Precisely because we shall never have a historical inscription. If we had, like so many others, a historical inscription, if we had, like some, a great historical inscription, if only we had a historical inscription tolerably measured to our effort, to our intention, to what we were in reality, then we should know how to pay the price of it, then we should be ill-graced to insist upon the consideration that is owed us. We are so attached, we set such a price upon the historical registration in the temporal memory of humanity, that the consideration of history would dispense us from every other consideration. And we should gain by it still. We should believe still that we gained by it. But precisely because we are poor, poor in goods and poor in history, precisely because we have upon us the contempt and the misknowledge of the rich, and of that great rich woman, history, it must be well understood for us and among us that we know that we were very great. We may not say it to the others, we know that the others, if they wish, have not to concern themselves with us; we may not say it to history, we know that history, if it wishes, has not to concern itself with us. But if we do not say it among ourselves, and in the secret of our discourse, it is because it is well understood that we know it. And above all we have not to say the contrary either to the others or to history.

We are willing to have been hoodwinked, but we wish to have been great.

There, dear Halévy, is the point at which we have arrived; there, my dear Halévy, is what I call an examination of conscience. There is what I call expressing regrets, making my excuses. There is what I call an honorable amend, making honorable amend. Inflicting upon myself a disavowal. It is what I call being timorous. It is my manner of being timorous. It is thus that I wear the long shirt, and the cord at the neck, the cord of hemp. It is thus that I hold my taper. One always speaks as if, into a society of order, we had come to introduce a disorder. Arbitrarily. Gratuitously. But one must all the same see that there are apparent orders that cover, that are the worst disorders. We find here again what we have said of the egoism of the rich in the modern world, of the rich class, of the bourgeois egoism. That egoism bears upon their very understanding. Upon their view. Even upon their political view of the political world. There was an order under Méline. It was a rotten order, a soft order, an apparent order, a purely bourgeois order. Our collaborator Halévy has very well marked it: it was an order as under Louis-Philippe, as under Guizot, as in the eight, ten, twelve last years of Louis-Philippe. An order of surface (as today, moreover), a gangrened, mortiferous, dead order, a dead flesh (as today). In any case a crisis was coming, as it is coming today.

An order mortal for fecundity, for the deep interests, for the durable interests of the race and of the people, of the fatherland.

In reality the true situation of the people whom we had before us was for a long time not to say and to believe Dreyfus guilty, but to believe and to say that, innocent or guilty, one did not trouble, one did not overturn, one did not compromise, one did not risk for a man, for a single man, the life and the salvation of a people, the enormous salvation of a whole people. One understood thereby the temporal salvation. And precisely our Christian mystique culminated so perfectly, so exactly with our French mystique, with our patriotic mystique in our Dreyfusist mystique, that what one must indeed see, and what I shall say, what I shall put into my confessions, is that we placed ourselves at nothing less than the point of view of the eternal salvation of France. What did we say, indeed? Everything was against us, wisdom and the law — I mean human wisdom, human law. What we were doing was of the order of folly or of the order of sanctity, which have so many resemblances, so many secret accords, for human wisdom, for a human regard. We were going, we were against wisdom, against the law. Against human wisdom, against human law. Here is what I wish to say. What did we say, indeed? The others said: A people, a whole people is an enormous assemblage of the most legitimate interests, of the most legitimate rights. The most sacred. Thousands, millions of lives depend upon it, in the present, in the past, (in the future); thousands, millions, hundreds of millions of lives constitute it, in the present, in the past, (in the future), (millions of memories), and through the play of history, through the deposit of history, the keeping of incalculable interests. Of legitimate, sacred, incalculable rights. A whole people of men, a whole people of families; a whole people of rights, a whole people of interests, legitimate ones; a whole people of lives; a whole race; a whole people of memories; all the history, all the mounting, all the thrust, all the past, all the future, all the promise of a people and of a race; all that is inestimable, incalculable, of an infinite price, because it is made only once, because it is obtained only once, because it will never be begun again; because it is a success, a unique one; a people, and namely, specifically this people here, which is of a unique price; this old people; a people has not the right — and the first duty, the strict duty of a people is not to expose all that, not to expose itself for a man, whoever he be, however legitimate his interests or his rights may be. However sacred even. A people never has the right. One does not lose a city, a city is not lost for a (single) citizen. It was the very language both of true civism and of wisdom, it was wisdom itself, antique wisdom. It was the language of reason. From that point of view it was evident that Dreyfus ought to devote himself for France; not merely for the repose of France but for the very salvation of France, which he was exposing. And if he did not wish to devote himself, in case of need one ought to devote him. And we, what did we say? We said: a single injustice, a single crime, a single illegality, above all if it is officially registered, confirmed, a single offense to humanity, a single offense to justice and to right, above all if it is universally, legally, nationally, conveniently accepted, a single crime breaks and suffices to break the whole social pact, the whole social contract; a single prevarication, a single dishonor suffices to lose, in honor, to dishonor a whole people. It is a point of gangrene, that corrupts the whole body. What we defend is not merely our honor. It is not merely the honor of all our people, in the present, it is the historical honor of our people, all the historical honor of all our race, the honor of our forefathers, the honor of our children. And the more past we have, the more memory we have, (the more thus, as you say, we have responsibility), the more thus also here we must defend it thus. The more past we have behind us, the more (precisely) we must defend it thus, keep it pure. I shall render back my blood pure as I received it. It was the rule and the honor and the Cornelian thrust, the old Cornelian thrust. It was the rule and the honor and the Christian thrust. A single stain stains a whole family. It stains also a whole people. A single point marks the honor of a whole family. A single point marks also the honor of a whole people. A people cannot remain upon an offense, suffered, exercised, upon a crime, so solemnly, so definitively taken upon itself. The honor of a people is of one single piece.

What is this to say, unless one does not know a word of French, save that our adversaries spoke the language of reason of State, which is not merely the language of political and parliamentary reason, of the contemptible political and parliamentary interest, but, much more exactly, much more loftily, which is the language, the very respectable language of the continuity, of the temporal continuation of the people, and of the race, of the temporal salvation of the people and of the race. They went to nothing less. And we, by a profound Christian movement, by a very profound revolutionary and at the same time traditional thrust of Christianity, following in this a Christian tradition of the most profound, of the most vivacious, of the most within the line, in the axis and at the heart of Christianity, we, we went to nothing less than to raise ourselves, I do not say (so far as) to the conception but to the passion, to the care of a saint for the eternal salvation of this people; we attained nothing less than to live in a constant care, in a preoccupation, in a mortal, eternal anguish, in a constant anxiety for the eternal salvation of our people, for the eternal salvation of our race. At the very bottom we were the men of the eternal salvation, and our adversaries were the men of the temporal salvation. There is the true, the real division of the Dreyfus affair. At the very bottom we did not wish that France should be constituted in a state of mortal sin. There is only the Christian doctrine, in the world, in the modern world, in any world, that puts to that point, so deliberately, so totally, so absolutely temporal death as nothing, as an insignificance, as a zero beside eternal death, and the risk of temporal death as nothing beside sin, mortal sin, beside the risk of eternal death. At the very bottom we did not wish that, by a single mortal sin, complaisantly accepted, complaisantly taken upon itself, complaisantly acquired, so to speak, our France should be not merely dishonored before the world and before history, that it should be properly constituted in a state of mortal sin. One day, at the most sorrowful point of that crisis, a friend came to see me, who fortuitously was passing through Paris. A friend who was a Christian. — I do not know this affair, he said to me. I live in the depths of my province. I have trouble enough earning my living. I know nothing of this affair. I did not suspect the state in which I find Paris. But after all one cannot sacrifice a whole people for a man. I had nothing to answer him but to take a book from my cupboard, a little book in boards, a little Hachette edition. — 27, I said to him. “Now I ask you, said he, which you would liefer, that you were a leper, (lepers, that is, leprous), or that you had done a mortal sin?” And I, who never lied to him, answered him that I would liefer have done thirty than be a leper. And when the friars were departed, (they were two friars whom he had called), he called me all alone, and made me sit at his feet and said to me: “How said you to me yesterday this?” And I said to him that still I said it him. And he said to me: “You spoke like a hasty fool; for you ought to know that no leprosy is so hideous as to be in mortal sin, for the soul that is in mortal sin is like to the devil: wherefore no leprosy can be so hideous.

28. — And well is it true that when a man dies, he is cured of the leprosy of the body; but when the man who has done mortal sin dies, he knows not nor is he certain that he had in his life such repentance that God has pardoned him: wherefore great fear he ought to have lest that leprosy endure for him so long as God shall be in paradise. So I pray you, said he, as much as I can, that you set your heart upon this, for the love of God and of me, that you would liefer that all mischiefs befell the body, of leprosy and of every malady, than that mortal sin should come to the soul of you.” One sees that if, for a presentation, in a recent presentation, I referred to that great chronicler — to that great chronicler of another great saint, and of another great French saint — I had, in order to do so, multiple authorities of reason.

But such is the game of the parties. The political parties, the parliamentary parties, all the political parties can hold no discourse save in the political, parliamentary language; they can engage, sustain no action save upon the ground, upon the plane political, parliamentary. And above all, and besides, and naturally they wish that we should do as much. That we should be constantly with them, among them. Of all that we do, of all that makes the life and the force of a people, of our acts and of our works, of our operations and of our conduct, of our souls and of our lives, they effect incessantly, automatically, almost innocently a translation into political, parliamentary language, a reduction, a beating-down, a projection, a carrying-back upon the plane political, parliamentary. Thus they understand nothing of it, they comprehend nothing of it, and they prevent the others from comprehending anything of it. They break us down, they denature us incessantly, both in themselves, in their own imagination, and with those who follow them, who are of their party, in the imaginations of those who follow them. All that we say, all that we do they translate, they betray. Traducunt. Tradunt. One never knows whether they do you more harm, whether they denature you more, when they combat you or when they support you, when they combat you or when they adopt you; for when they combat you, they combat you in political language upon the political plane, and when they support you — it is perhaps worse — for they support you, they adopt you in political language upon the political plane. And in those contrary tuggings they are equally and contrarily wrong; they are equally and contrarily inadequate. They are equally and contrarily denaturers. They present, they represent to themselves, they conceive equally and contrarily only a diminished life, a denatured life. A phantom, a skeleton, a plan, a projection of life. When they are against you, they combat you and would do you a mortal harm. When they are for you, and when they believe that you are for them, they monopolize you and certainly do you a mortal harm. They wish then to take you upon themselves, and that one should take them upon oneself. They protect you. When they combat you, they combat your mystiques by political basenesses, by base politics. When they support you, they translate — which is infinitely worse — they translate your mystiques into political basenesses, into base politics. And what we have done for our mystiques, having interpreted it for their politics, for the corresponding politics, for the politics issued from them, it is precisely upon that that they found themselves, it is upon that that they argue in order to bind us to their politics, to those politics, in order to forbid us the other mystiques, transferring thus, transferring arbitrarily into the world of the mystiques the oppositions, the contrarieties that exist, that are produced, that come into play only upon the political plane.

It is thus that the parties reward you for what you have done for them in the moments when they were in danger; I mean for what you have done for the mystiques from which they are issued, for the mystiques on which they live, for the mystiques that they exploit, that they parasitize. It is precisely of that that they take hold, of which they wish to take hold over you; it is setting out from that that they wish to bind you to their politics, to forbid you the other mystiques.

Because, since the degradation of the Dreyfusist mystique into Dreyfusist politics, going back up all the currents of all the powers, going back up upon the shoulders all the powers of tyranny, all the demagogies of all our (political) friends, we have at our own risk, we have undergone fifteen years of misery for the defense of the private liberties, of the deep liberties, of the Christian liberties, for the defense of the Christian consciences — to reward us the politicals, the reactionary politicians would willingly forbid us to be republicans. And because we have set, not, like those workers, weeks and months, but fifteen years of misery at the service of the Republic, to reward us the politicals, the republican politicians would willingly forbid us to be Christians. Thus the Republic would be the regime of liberty of conscience for everyone, except precisely for us, precisely to reward us for having defended it for fifteen years, for defending it, for being going to defend it still. To reward us for having set fifteen years of misery at the service of the Republic, for having defended, for having saved a regime which is the regime of liberty of conscience, one would accord liberty of conscience to everyone, except only us. We shall do without the permission of those gentlemen. We do not live, we do not move upon the same plane as they. Their debates are not ours. The sorrowful debates that we have, that we sustain sometimes, have nothing in common with their easy, with their superficial polemics.

The Republic would be the regime of liberty of conscience for everyone, except precisely for the republicans.

We shall ask those gentlemen for permission to do without their permission. Our cahiers have become, not at all by chance, but they have constituted themselves by a slow elaboration, by powerful, by secret affinities, by a sort of long evaporation of politics, like a company perfectly free of men who all believe in something, beginning with typography, which is one of the finest arts and crafts. In spite of the parties, in spite of the (men) political, in spite of the contrary politicians (contrary to us, contrary among themselves), it is that that we shall remain.

There, my dear Variot, are some of the discourses that I should have held at the cahiers on the Thursday, if one spoke there less loudly, and if one sometimes let one have the word. In these cahiers of M. Milliet you will find what that republican mystique was. And you, sir, who ask me that one ought indeed to define a little, by way of demonstrative reasoning, by way of ratiocinating reasoning, what mystique is, and what politics is, quid mysticum, et quid politicum — the republican mystique, it was when one died for the Republic; the republican politics, it is at present that one lives by it. You understand, do you not.

The papers of M. Milliet that we shall publish will give immediately the impression of having themselves been chosen from an enormous heap of papers. One cannot naturally give everything. From the moment when M. Milliet brought me the first packets of his copy, a great debate arose between us. He always wished, out of discretion, to suppress some of it. But I have always kept everything, because it was the best. One had suppressed enough of it to pass from the texts to the copy, to constitute the copy itself. — This letter is too intimate, he said. — It is precisely because it is intimate that I keep it. He had marked in pencil the passages that he thought one could suppress. I bought an eraser on purpose to efface his pencil. He wished to efface himself. I said to him: Appear, on the contrary. A man who proposes to himself no more than to recall exactly, faithfully, really his life and to represent it is, becomes himself the best of papers, the best of monuments, the best of witnesses, the best of texts; he brings infinitely more than the best of papers; he is infinitely more than the best of papers, he brings, by an infinite approximation, the best of testimonies.

You will remark, Variot, you will hear the tone of those memoirs. It is the very tone of the time. I should not be surprised if an imbecile, and one who lacked the historical sense, found that tone a little ridiculous. It is past. Those men, who had that tone, did great things. And we?

Civism too appears today ridiculous. Civic is an adjective today that fares very ill. It rings in -ic. Civic seems to rhyme with bourrique and with atavique. And even with ataxique. That old men, that sick men, that dying men should have themselves carried to the polls, evidently that is not the cuirassiers of Morsbronn. And yet all those who saw Coppée have himself carried, dying, to the Academy in order to assure the election of M. Richepin found that it was very great.

The sole value, the sole force of royalism, my dear Variot, the sole force of a traditional monarchy, is that the king is more or less loved. The sole force of the Republic is that the Republic is more or less loved. The sole force, the sole value, the sole dignity of everything is to be loved. That so many men should have so much lived and so much suffered for the Republic, that they should have so much believed in it, that they should have so much died for it, that for it they should have borne so many trials often extreme — there is what counts, there is what interests me, there is what exists. There is what founds, there is what makes the legitimacy of a regime. When I find in the Action française so many derisions and so many sarcasms, often so many insults, I am pained by it, for it is a question of men who wish to restore, to restitute the most ancient dignities of our race, and one does not found, one does not refound any culture upon derision; and derision and sarcasm and insult are barbarisms. They are even barbarisms of speech. One does not found, one does not refound, one does not restore, one does not restitute anything upon derision. Puns do not make a restitution of culture. I avow that I do not arrive at understanding all that one puts, all that there evidently is of wit in that spelling of Respubliquains that is repeated to us to satiety. That seems to me a little of the same order as the fools on the other side who always write the roy. With a y. That s and that qu seem to me of the same alphabet as that y. I am afraid that it is almost equally foolish to mock at the one and at the other. The king has for himself all the majesty of the French tradition. The Republic has for itself all the grandeur of the republican tradition. If one puts that s into Respubliquains one does nothing, one can do nothing but confer upon it a little of the Roman majesty. I am plunged at this moment, for particular reasons, in the de Viris. I avow that respublica is there a word of an extraordinary grandeur. Of an amplitude, of a Roman vault. As for the change of c into qu, in the feminine of public into publique, it seems to me no more dishonoring than the feminine of Turc into Turque, and of Grec into Grecque, and of sec into sèche as the (French) grammar teaches it us. One has the feminine that one can. When I find in the Action française, in Maurras, reasonings, logics of an implacable rigor, explanations impeccable, invincible, as to how royalty is worth more than the republic, and monarchy than the republic, and above all royalism better than republicanism and monarchism better than republicanism, I avow that if I wished to speak coarsely I should say that it does not take. One sees well what I mean. It does not take as a mordant takes or does not take upon a varnish. It does not enter. Explanations — all our education, all our intellectual, university, scholastic formation has so much taught us to give of them, to make of them, explanations and explanations, that we are saturated with them. At need we would make his. We go to meet his, and it is precisely that that blunts them for us. We have just had a surfeit of them. We know how to do it. At need we would make them. But that, in the running of the pen, and perhaps, no doubt without his having thought of it, in an article of Maurras, I find, as happens, not at all as an argument, presented as an argument, but as if forgotten on the contrary, that simple sentence: We would be ready to die for the king, for the reestablishment of our king — oh then one tells me something, then one begins to converse. Knowing, of such a man, that it is true as he says it, then I listen, then I hear, then I stop, then I am seized, then one tells me something. And the other day at the cahiers, that other Thursday, when one had discussed quite abundantly, when one had committed quite abundantly that sin of explanation, when all of a sudden Michel Arnauld, a little as if exasperated, a little as if at the end of his tether, in that grave and serene voice, gentle and profound, fair-haired, slightly veiled, serious, anxious like everyone, scarcely mocking and ready for the combat that we know in him, that we have loved in him for eighteen years, interrupted, concluded almost brusquely: All that is very well because they are only an imprecise and theoretical menace. But the day when they should become a real menace, they would see what we are still capable of doing for the Republic — everyone understood that at last one had just said something.

CHARLES PÉGUY

[Closing colophon of the original printing: the twelfth cahier of the eleventh series, dated Tuesday, 12 July 1910, a yellow cahier of 228 pages, large-jésus octavo, sold at three francs fifty; manager Charles Péguy; composed and printed by Julien Crémieux. A catalogue of the cahiers of the ninth series follows in the original.]