Money (Continued)

Money (Continued)

M. Lanson as he is praised. — I shall say as much of M. Lanson. In this same issue of this same Revue Critique where M. Langlois finds almost that M. Babut is a great writer, in the issue of January 15, 1913 M. Rudler naturally finds that M. Lanson is quite altogether a very great writer. I would not come back to it, M. Rudler having every right to find as if by chance that M. Lanson is a very great writer and consequently to say so, if what was this time interesting were not on what M. Rudler finds this time that M. Lanson is a very great writer. I read in this issue the following account, of a book by M. Lanson, by his disciple M. Rudler:

G. Lanson. — Three months of teaching in the United States. Notes and impressions of a French professor. — Paris, Hachette, 1912, in-16, 298 pages, 3 francs 50.

Three months, of active teaching, of intense personal observation, of nearly daily contact with the students and their masters, of conversation with informants sure and eminent, is enough to see much, and, according to all appearance, to see rightly, on condition of having a prompt and clean eye, a sharp mind, the thought on the alert, the habit of exact methods, and the powerful love of the true. From his brief stay in the United States, M. Lanson has drawn a book lively, fine, precise, honest, and singularly rich. The color there is sober, voluntarily so, but delicate and sure; the line clean, and as though engraved.

I do not know if you are like me. It seems to me a little stiff that a disciple should write of his master publicly in such terms. For, after all, if one speaks in these terms of M. Lanson, in what terms shall one speak of a writer. I do not know whether it is because I have ideas of the old time. Evidently I am reactionary. But, after all, formerly there was a certain modesty, a certain decency that made it so that never would a pupil have spoken thus of his master. And even today, when one reads these sentences of M. Rudler on M. Lanson everyone is embarrassed. The reader is embarrassed. M. Lanson is embarrassed. There is only M. Rudler who is not embarrassed. It is perhaps that M. Rudler is not easy to embarrass. But it is not this embarrassment that interests us today.

It is certain that it is by these procedures that M. Rudler has rendered M. Lanson so unsympathetic. But we do not have to defend M. Lanson against the procedures of M. Rudler. M. Lanson is great enough to defend himself all alone. That is not what I want to come back to. But let us finish this article:

The first chapters give us images of nature, of the soul and of American life. Here is the entry into New York, the country, the city, other cities and their countryside, some parts of Canada, different types of men and women, some salient traits of the national character and spirit, some forms of life; for every hasty generalization has too many chances of being false. — The bulk of the work describes the system of education, Colleges, Universities, Courses for young girls, Libraries, etc., etc. — A final part, not the least curious, includes a tableau of present-day France. Nisard, Taine, Brunetière have in turn tried to give their own; it would be piquant to compare them with that of M. Lanson. In studying American institutions for themselves, with the disinterested curiosity and the sympathy they deserve, M. Lanson has never forgotten our country. France is everywhere in his book, in the foreground or in the distance, neither disparaged nor overrated, without conventional optimism, without national pessimism; it is not at the moment when the foreigner relearns the path of our Universities and again sets about esteeming our culture that it would be fitting for anyone to depreciate it, and least of all for those who have re-established its prestige. An excellent patriotism, firm and delicate, animates these pages. To the strengths and weaknesses of America correspond, both in the material order and in the moral order, our weaknesses and our strengths. M. Lanson indicates what each of the two peoples can learn from the other, by what they can complete one another, what is asked of us, to what vain hopes we must renounce, what field remains open to our activity; in particular, an inquiry and precise tables show that we are far from having conquered for our language its possible and legitimate place. From this lucid and practical confrontation of the two civilizations there could and should come forth a whole programme of fruitful effort.

To the moral teaching that the United States offers us if we have need to profit from it — an authority always competent and active, a discipline voluntary and active, a power of realization, a cooperation of wills to obtain from a machine exactly conceived and perfectly regulated the maximum of yield — they add a service of another kind, unexpected. It is to take the passion out of our battles. America knows the same crises, tackles the same problems as we do. She treats and resolves them in a different spirit. Having neither our past nor our parties, she has not our preconceived parties and our violences. She teaches us the greater relativity of all things, the cool head, the right detachments. Let us look not from Sirius, distant and out of fashion, but from New York: how many quarrels will be appeased, antinomies will disappear! With his dialectical superiority, M. Lanson gives us some striking examples, in pages of which one may think that they owe nothing to America for their natural equity.

G. Rudler

It is not even a matter of explaining what America’s natural equity is. For this is Rudler; and it is no longer Lanson. America of their natural equity is an America that I shall have to discover. In reality this article by M. Rudler is riddled with mistakes in French. It is to make a mistake in French, Monsieur Rudler, to write: “A final part, not the least curious, includes a tableau of present-day France. Nisard, Taine, Brunetière have in turn tried to give theirs; it would be piquant to compare them with that of M. Lanson.” For one must, Monsieur Rudler, either compare M. Lanson to MM. Nisard, Taine, and Brunetière, or compare the tableau given by M. Lanson to the tableaux given by MM. Nisard, Taine, and Brunetière. But one must not compare an author with three tableaux, nor a tableau with three authors. Not to mention that compare them with, in itself, and I know not why, is extremely doubtful; and there is one of those constructions that a writer never employs; without knowing why. But perhaps it is not a question of asking the writer’s gift and lineage of M. Rudler.

What shall I say of Sirius, distant and out of fashion. What vulgarity. And this use of antinomies is very hazardous and risks being improper and purely literary. And likewise this dialectical superiority, even when it is M. Lanson’s. Dialectic is a very particular science and M. Rudler does not appear to suspect it. But here again I ask what I asked for M. Langlois. I ask: Who is being deceived. I ask: What is the method. And is there a method or is there none. And for whom is the method made. And if our masters are weary of the method, at least let them say so.

It is we imbeciles, we writers, prose-men, poets, chroniclers, (and perhaps philosophers), moralists, publicists, journalists, essayists, pamphleteers, portraitists and animal-painters, it is we who have the right to go and spend three months in America and to come back from it with a three-fifty and to carry 298 pages to Hachette, if Hachette is willing. But M. Lanson is a scientist. M. Lanson follows the method. M. Lanson has not the right. M. Lanson will not have the right to write one word about America until he has exhausted the documentation and the literature on America since the beginning of the Incas and even before, since always, (for everyone knows that North America hangs upon Mexico and, through Central America, upon South America). It is we comedians who have the right to go for three months to America and to look; and to see, and to bring back, and to speak, and to recount. M. Lanson is obliged to strip out beforehand and to exhaust all the documentation and all the literature on America. Otherwise M. Lanson is no longer a scientist, M. Lanson no longer follows the method, M. Lanson makes what M. Lanson terms a superficial book.

Or if our masters have had enough of the method, if this marriage weighs upon them, if they wish to strip themselves of the method, if they wish to escape from it, if they wish to flee from the method, firstly let them warn us, secondly let them not bear us a deadly grudge for having escaped from it into the liberty of our twenty-five years.

For if M. Lanson has the right to speak of America on a direct seizure, I have perhaps the right, I, to speak of Corneille and of Polyeucte on a direct seizure and without having learned and taught the whole history of the French theatre since Adam and Eve and the earthly paradise.

If one single time one single one of our masters makes a book on a subject without having exhausted the documentation and the literature of the subject, well then we too have the right to make a book; and all our books pass by virtue of this example that they have once given us.

So long as they remain in their system, which is a system of one plane, so long as all objects of study without any exception are exactly on the same plane, which is the plane of indefinite detail, so long as all objects of study, exactly equally, without any exception, require the exhaustion of documentation and of literature, all goes well, (I mean all goes well in their system), and, if you like, we have nothing to say. But let a single subject escape; let a single subject have succeeded in slipping away; let a single subject have been attempted by a direct seizure; let a single subject have been stolen away from the method of indefinite exhaustion of detail; let a single subject have been approached without the operator having effected the exhaustion of documentation and of literature; let a single subject have been elected; let a single subject have furnished the matter, have been the object of a choice — at once by that unique choice the whole choice passes through, and the whole system of choice, which is ours. So long as they hold the railing, they can climb their staircase. (Their staircase may lead to nothing, but that is another question). The moment they let go of the railing, they must either fall, or fly. They have no right to skip a step. A single infidelity annihilates the faith. Let them make, let them give a single example against themselves, and at once we pass through. We all pass through and we pass through entire; omnes ac toti. If one makes one single choice, all horizontality is broken. If they admit one single value, the whole system of values rises up again. If they choose once, we choose always. If on their leaden ocean they make one single wave emerge, the whole system of values rises up again; and hierarchy; and order; and dignity; and genius; and the hero; and the saint; and God.

M. Rudler has perfectly perceived it. M. Rudler is not as stupid as M. Lanson concedes. Let one re-read the article of M. Rudler. This article is nothing but an apology. This article is nothing but a justification. It is altogether evident that M. Rudler has very well seen the difficulty. M. Rudler has very well seen that the matter at bottom was to excuse. He has very well seen that it was a question of justifying M. Lanson for having written a book on America after a three-month stay in America. And he got himself out of it by bringing in, to get himself out of it he brought in, to make the difference, to make up for the lack he set in play, he brought in the well-known genius of M. Lanson. But here I stop him. If he lets a single exception pass, he no longer has that horizontal rule; if he lets a single eminence rise, he no longer has that bare plain; if he lets a single bell-tower rise, even were it a secular bell-tower, he no longer has that dismal plain, which is the whole of his system. If he accepts, if he teaches that genius makes up for a single defect, plugs a single lack, he abdicates; he renounces that exhaustion by indefinite detail of second causes, which was the whole of his system, he desists from that integral horizontality, which is his bar.

He thus creates a situation in a mental topography that is exactly the situation in which M. Langlois placed us on the subject of M. Lavisse. The situation of M. Lanson with regard to M. Rudler, (and with regard to M. Lanson), is exactly what the situation of M. Lavisse was with regard to M. Langlois. For us, M. Lavisse could be a historian. For M. Langlois, M. Lavisse could not be a historian. Likewise for us M. Lanson may have genius, (if we wish, such is our power). But neither for M. Rudler nor for M. Lanson can M. Lanson have genius, that is to say precisely what permits one to make a book by direct seizure on a journey of three months and even less, because if only one genius rises on the horizon all this bare plain of science is levelled out of true. If one single genius passes by, were it the genius of M. Lanson, through that breach other geniuses will perhaps pass. If one recognises in M. Lanson a genius that permits him to operate this marvel, to write a book on America after a journey of three months, (where perhaps he had something else to do than to look), who knows, perhaps we shall be forced to recognise a genius in a man like Racine, and in a man like Corneille. Where one genius has passed, others perhaps will pass. If one levels down for M. Lanson, one will perhaps have to level down for Corneille; and the whole system of horizontality falls. If there is a gushing, if there is a spring, the desert is watered. And if there is genius the whole gradation returns; and the little and the great; and the little and the great in saintliness; and the clients and the patrons; and sinners and saints. And the sprinkling of grace. Rorate, caeli, desuper.

Thus we, we can grant to M. Lanson the right to make a book on America after a stay of three months. But neither M. Lanson nor M. Rudler can grant it to M. Lanson. And one feels it very well in M. Rudler’s article. M. Lanson had made this book. M. Rudler wished, once more, to give pleasure to his former master. How to give pleasure to a former master, except by publishing a laudatory review of a book of his. But everything shows that M. Rudler has very well felt the blow. He has very well seen the difficulty. I suspect M. Rudler of being honest. He hurls paving stones, but he is a bear. To say everything, I suspect that M. Rudler has remained the honest fellow whom we knew when, twenty-two years ago, he was our elder by a few years. The world is full of honest folk. One recognises them by the fact that they do their bad blows with more clumsiness. It is beyond doubt that when M. Rudler found himself face to face with M. Lanson’s book he was greatly embarrassed, for he is honest, and that he felt very well that not only did this book escape the method but that it had been obtained by a procedure diametrically contrary to what M. Lanson has never ceased to teach to everyone, particularly therefore to what M. Lanson had taught to him M. Rudler, subsequently to what according to M. Lanson M. Rudler has never ceased to teach to everyone. M. Rudler has very well felt this contradiction; and this reversal. The whole of his article is at bottom an article of excuse, an article to palliate. And he gets out of it only by the eagle’s glance, he gets out of it only by the escape-hatch of genius. But if M. Rudler admits, teaches that one needs genius for M. Lanson, perhaps I have the right to admit that one needs genius for Corneille. And then I ask again: Who is being deceived? Have our masters invented a method to put across our legs and themselves to dodge it as often as it pleases them. But in order to make heard what is to follow, I myself must borrow the method, I must have recourse to the resources that biography offers us.

Before giving this sequel to Plutarch, however, I wish to retain this sentence of M. Rudler, or rather these two sentences of M. Rudler. I have indeed the right to treat an article by M. Rudler as a text. M. Rudler writes: “Three months, of active teaching…” But here every word must be weighed; and we shall perhaps go to three or four sentences, and one will see very well that M. Rudler has very well seen the difficulty: “Three months, of teaching active, of observation personal intense, of contact nearly daily with the students and their masters, of conversation with informants sure and eminent, is enough to see much, and, according to all appearance, to see rightly, on condition of having a prompt and clean eye, the mind sharp, thought on the alert, the habit of exact methods, and the powerful love of the true. From his brief stay in the United States, M. Lanson has drawn a book lively, fine, precise, honest, and singularly rich…”

In this extraordinary fawning there appears very clearly a secret uneasiness. It pierces through every word. This almost violent affirmation of: That is enough answers to an inner uncertainty or rather to the conviction of the contrary. The according to all appearance is the reserve of a timorous conscience. The on condition is a counter-guarantee and a counter-assurance, and warns us that we should not have the right to do as much, because we are not capable of such a tour de force, because we have not the prompt and clean eye, the sharp mind, the thought on the alert, the habit of exact methods, and the powerful love of the true. It is M. Lanson who has all that.

But what is the habit of exact methods. You are playing on words, Monsieur Rudler. The method, Monsieur Rudler, the modern invention, the modern novelty, is not exactitude, it is the exhaustion of indefinite detail, it is the exhaustion of the documentation and the literature on a subject, and even on all subjects. Exactitude had been invented by the Greeks, Monsieur Rudler. Not quite by the Greeks who are fighting with the Turks, but by the ancient Greeks. You have certainly heard of the ancient Greeks, Monsieur Rudler, in the course of your studies of secondary education, in the course of your humanities, when you were doing your classes. You know, Homer,

Hesiod; Aeschylus, Sophocles; Demosthenes; Plato, Aristotle; Plotinus; the Ionians, the Eleatics; Thales and Pythagoras; Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, all those imbeciles who did not know what a literary work is, because they did not have our methods.

I suspect, Monsieur Rudler, that you do not know what exactitude is. You speak soft, Monsieur Rudler, and you speak vulgar. Exactitude is neither truth nor reality. Exactitude is ἀκρίβεια. It is the perfection of discernment. When one says of mathematics that they are exact sciences, or rather that they are the exact sciences, one does not mean that they are true; nor that they are real. One means that they are the exact sciences. One means that they push to the maximum and to the perfect the knowledge or at least the study of the point of discernment. But you are free, Monsieur Rudler, not to be a philosopher. The method certainly dispenses with philosophy.

It is yet another counter-assurance that M. Rudler takes and a counter-guarantee when he writes: “for every hasty generalisation has too many chances of being false.”

Supplement to the Parallel Lives. — Parallel Lives of M. Lanson and of M. Andler. — In our generation, which saw the advent of the method, two men counted and were the introducers of the method. Or rather the authors, the instaurators of the method. Instauratio magna. These two men were not M. Lanson and M. Langlois. These two men were not M. Andler and M. Lanson. These two men were M. Andler and M. Langlois. I do not say that they were of our generation. They were in our generation, in this sense that they were just enough above our generation to act immediately in our generation. These two men were the true authors both of the method and of the advent and of the reign of the method among us. Not that I confound these two men, nor even that I pair them. M. Langlois was a historical head. M. Andler was an almost universal head, I say it without irony and this is not at all the moment to feel like laughing.

I shall no longer speak of M. Langlois. The man who is today director of the National Archives once made himself a pamphleteer for my personal use. It is a great honour that has been done me. M. Langlois was the historical head. Nothing less. Nothing more. All that is thought, being, has always remained foreign to him. M. Andler was a quite different man. He was not only a historical head, he was a philosophical head. His ideas may not be ours. His thought may not be ours. His method may not be ours. His system may not be ours. It is no less true that he promised, that he announced a man of very great value. All those who have known the young Andler know what hopes he gave, how he was at ease in thought, how thought was his matter, his natural element, his climate. This granted, I shall be able to make myself heard and to enter upon my parallel of M. Lanson and of M. Andler.

One may be opposed, one may be diametrically contrary to the ideas of M. Andler, to the thought of M. Andler, to the method of M. Andler, to the system of M. Andler, one must agree that at least he has followed his line, and that it is a life all of a piece. M. Andler has taught us that one has no right to treat a subject, nor even to speak of it, so long as one has not exhausted the documentation and the literature of that subject. It is a question whether one ever exhausts it, and whether it is opportune, and whether it is even possible, and whether it is decent, and whether it is urgent, and whether it is useful. That can be argued. But at least here is a man who follows the teachings he gives. M. Andler will not give us a Goethe before having exhausted the literature and the documentation on Goethe. He will not give us his Nietzsche before having exhausted the literature and the documentation on Nietzsche. That the consequence may be that we shall never see a Goethe and that we shall perhaps never see a Nietzsche, that is another question, that is another matter, that is a debate. That we should regret it, it is our feeling, but it is a debate. That one can, that one ought to regret that so many promises have not been kept, that one can, that one ought to bear a grudge against a method so ungrateful and so sterilising, that one has even come to hate this method, that one does not forgive it for having caused us to lose so much, that is our own situation. But after all, here one has to do with a constant man.

Quite other is the situation, quite other the career of M. Lanson. M. Lanson is like Raphael, he has several manners. Three. Up to forty years of age, one forgets it too much, M. Lanson was a teacher of secondary education, who asked nothing better than to get out of secondary education. Whether he thought of getting out of it through higher education, whether he thought of getting out of it through the administration, that is to say by himself becoming inspector general as well, is one of those points of history that will remain eternally controverted. What is certain is that he did secondary teaching with his thought elsewhere, with the muffled covetousness of being elsewhere. That is a bad condition for doing secondary teaching. It is a bad condition for doing anything. That was his first manner. What must be retained of it is that up to forty he was a teacher of secondary education. He was perhaps a bad teacher of secondary education, but he was a teacher of secondary education. This great love of the method was to come only at forty. He had the patience to wait until forty to sacrifice to the method. He was a teacher of rhetoric A when he was appointed to the École Normale Supérieure. I do not know whether it was not to substitute for Brunetière and I do not know whether he was not called there by Brunetière. But that is a point that ought to be cleared up. Already in secondary teaching he had that taint which for me is inexpiable and which to tell the truth in my system of accounting is the only one that counts: he did not love his pupils. He was already this ambitious sour, anxious, smarmy man. When from this rhetoric class he was appointed to the École Normale he naturally gave his last class. The last class, it is not only a tale by Daudet. He gave his last class, he was about to give his first lecture-course. Which one of us has not felt the shiver of that passage from secondary education to higher education. Which one of us does not remember, as a pupil, as a former pupil, that advent from the last class to the first course. We believed that higher education was still secondary education but that it was no longer secondary. We believed that it was secondary education continued, increased, higher, greater, refined, more human, riper, more manly. They boast enough that it is not that. And we were shown well enough that it is not that. But if this advent, (and also this completion, and this exile, and this day of departure), is so striking for a pupil and for a young man, what must it not be for the master and for the man, when it is really the last time that one does the one and when it is really for the last time that one enters the other, when it is no longer a matter of cutting six or seven years out of four or five years but fifteen or twenty years out of twenty or thirty years and when a man says to himself: I do this for the last time; and I enter into this which shall be my last residence. One must believe that there are men for whom ages do not exist, who do not hear time flow, day succeed day, and for whom these noble resting-places of a long existence are never more than the steps of a staircase. They are always climbing. And they never reside. One must have a very ungrateful nature, and a very poor soul, (if it is still permitted, here and for such a subject, to use that fine word soul), not to feel, at such solemn moments, irreversible time, not at least to register the date that is being marked. M. Lanson gave his last class. He addressed to his pupils a sort of allocution, in such a tone, telling them that they doubtless knew very well that he was quite content to leave them to go to the École Normale, that those lads were so wounded by it that today still, after nearly twenty years, they cannot speak to me of it without flying suddenly into anger at the feeling they had of finding themselves face to face with an ill-bred man.

The second career of M. Lanson, his career in higher education, is too famous for me to insist upon it. It is even more than famous, it is known. And it is just that it be known, for it is typical. But then, if it is a type, one would have to, in order to present it in all its worth, make of it, and at full length, an eminent example in a dialogue. I was just at the École Normale when M. Lanson came to teach there. I still remember as if I were there those long and punctual and serious lessons on the history of the French theatre, which plunged us into a stupor of admiration. I say so without any irony. I do not feel like laughing; and one can believe me. That, that was work. He had read, he knew everything that had been published or played or both or each of theatre in France or in French up to Corneille. And lessons of an admirable composition and succession. A tissue of a tightness. Everything held together. He knew everything. And one knew everything. If this one had made an Iphigénie, it was because he was the great-nephew of the uncle of that one who had sketched one out, and he had just found that sketch in the papers of his brother-in-law. Once it was explained by the authors, once by the players, once by the gazettes, and once by the trestles. Sometimes it was the fault of the court, and sometimes it was the fault of the town. Sometimes it was the fault of the king’s people, (and perhaps of the king himself), and sometimes it was the fault of the bourgeois of the Marais. There was also the Church, and the bishop, who had business with the players. In short it was perfect. The history of the French theatre was known, drilled, tapped. It was a history that unwound like a thread. The event had both arms tied along its body and the legs long-wise and both wrists well bound and both ankles well roped.

There came a catastrophe. It was Corneille. We were going our little hum-drum way all along this long path of the history of the French theatre. We too were taking our poor little steps one after the other. But however slowly one goes one always ends by arriving. We arrived in that country one calls Corneille. How we broke our nose at the foot of that cliff, that is what one would have to manage to show in Confessions. Like a sick man who feels the crisis coming and who tells himself that this time it is certainly not it; and that it is certainly nothing; (and he knows very well the contrary); (and he knows very well that it is it); and he encourages himself; and he tries to think of something else; in vain; so we encouraged ourselves and tried to make ourselves believe that this Corneille was perhaps not Corneille; who knows; that capital city which rose on the horizon, that capital upon which we were debouching, that was perhaps not the capital Corneille. Perhaps in trying to take him as another, in effect he would be like another, in effect we should make him like another. He who has not known the sweetness of M. Lanson does not know what sweetened vinegar is; or gall in jam. I still have in my ear the sweetness with which M. Lanson began to speak of Corneille; tried to speak of Corneille. Everyone clearly understood that if Corneille got angry, it would be he Corneille who would be in the wrong; who would have a bad character; who would have put himself in the wrong. M. Lanson’s sweetness was disarming. He first pronounced this name of Corneille without apparent anger, without resentment, with the same tenderness, as patiently as he had published all the other names. It was indeed the same rosary. Why did this bead have to be so large. One almost felt that M. Lanson was making advances to Corneille. He asked nothing better than to explain Corneille, and to exhaust him, by the same threading of second causes. All the more so since this confounded fellow, (I mean Corneille), at first pretended to let himself be done, the old Norman, (the young Norman). And how cunning he had to be, both as a Norman, and as a lawyer. (I too know how to manoeuvre them, the second causes). He too had pretended to take up the sequel. He too had strewn our path with those first plays which pretend to take up the sequel. He too had pretended to want to enter into a series. He too had pretended to think of only one thing when he was working, which was to enter properly in his place into a good well-made history of the French theatre. You know, those first plays, which come along following, which interpolate themselves nicely into their place in the history of the French theatre; and which gave no hint that their author would turn out so badly; and in favour of which professors forgive Corneille so many things, without however going so far as to forgive him the Cid and Polyeucte; those first plays that had got themselves in single file. Why was it that at this single name of Corneille everything that had preceded vanished. Why was it that at this single name of Corneille suddenly a wind of liberation blew upon us. So this was Corneille. This time we were there. We knew of what we spoke. So it was he, Corneille. One tried again to quarrel with the Cid, by calling Guilhem de Castro to the rescue. But everyone had understood that he who best understands the Cid is he who takes the Cid level with the text; in the abrasion of the text; in the levelling of the ground; and above all he who does not know the history of the French theatre.

A point of testing as serious and doubtless more tragic in the second career of M. Lanson was his renunciation of Brunetière. In this ocean of ingratitude that is the modern world I know, and one perhaps does not know, a second example of such ingratitude; of such turpitude; of such baseness. But it is a whole grave history, and it must be told only in the grave drawing-back of old age.

I began a Brunetière some years ago, when he was alive. I shall be able to finish it, and to publish it, only when ten or fifteen years have passed over the death of that stoic.

They owed everything to Brunetière. And only one remained faithful to him. I do not know whether in all the history of this modern world, which sweats ingratitude, and whose ingratitude is the charter and the natural product, there exists a single history, a second example of so general and so turpid an ingratitude. They were a whole generation, a whole promotion, a whole bench who had been formed by Brunetière, who owed everything to Brunetière, who without Brunetière did not exist. Bédier alone remained faithful to him.

It was a merry story, if it had not been at the same time so tragic, and if death had not already hovered over that great stoic, that day, that time when they undertook to make us believe that Brunetière was not capable of teaching the history of French literature at the Collège de France, and where, for that chair which was I believe the chair of French eloquence, a man dared to stand against Brunetière; and got through. The Collège de France has seen others since; and its virtue has been submitted to harder trials. But in that time it was still a little virginal.

The young men of today, my dear Agathon, no longer know all these stories. Yes, they undertook to make us believe that, in that time, in that generation, (or rather in those generations, in the elder and younger of that time), there was certainly only one man who did not know the history of French literature and who was incapable of teaching it. And this man who did not know the history of French literature and who was incapable of teaching it was naturally Brunetière. And we saw this shame, that the whole official world pretended to believe it and spread this rumour and M. Lanson was already of the official world. But there was a second, or a first question of Brunetière, in short another question of Brunetière. It was that incredible sleight of hand by which Brunetière was put out of the door of the École Normale Supérieure, where he was lecturer, and quite as legitimately, as regularly, as organically, as statutorily lecturer as could possibly be. It was a rather good story, my dear Massis. For at the École Normale, solely in order to get rid of Brunetière, they pulled the trick of discontinuous creation. We did not know that the government of that time was so Cartesian. I shall explain. There was the old École Normale, which was the École Normale Supérieure. The question was to have it continued in this Inferior École Normale, in this new École Normale that we know. And, moreover, (for there are no small benefits), in the operation it was a question of sowing Brunetière. Here is how they proceeded. It was a rather good comedy, if so much injustice, and so much ingratitude, and the first advances of death had not made it as tragic. They had naturally treated with all the personnel of the École Normale, civil servants and lecturers, and one must render this justice to the personnel of the École Normale that they did not at all concern themselves with knowing what was going to become of the École Normale but they greatly concerned themselves with what was going to become of the personnel of the École Normale. It was understood that the personnel of the new École Normale, introduced into the Sorbonne in some fashion, would have a personal situation, if I may say so, at least equal to its former situation; and generally advantaged; and with more future. From then on the reform became excellent. And, as one says, viable. The whole was effected under the heavy moral presidency, (so to speak), and soon effective, of M. Lavisse. That says everything. That name alone was a good guarantee of treachery. But it was still necessary to eliminate this Brunetière. And it is here that they pulled the trick of discontinuous creation. They did not transport the École Normale into the Sorbonne. No. Brunetière would have had to be transported with it. No, my children, they suppressed the École Normale; they annulled, they annihilated the École Normale. Do not turn pale, my children, they were to re-establish it a few moments later.

You may well believe, if they had not re-established it, having suppressed it, we should not see it today.

But in the interval, in the cut between its suppression and its re-establishment it had passed through a time of nothingness and in this nothingness Brunetière had been lost.

I do not know if I make myself well understood. They had not transported the École Normale into the Sorbonne; they had not modified the École Normale: that would still have been to continue it, in the philosophical sense of the word. They plunged it into an absolute nothingness, into a metaphysical nothingness. Ex nihilo ad nihilum. Then out of this absolute nothingness, out of this metaphysical nothingness by an absolute creation, by a metaphysical creation they recreated it new and as we know it. But in that cut of metaphysical nothingness this unhappy Brunetière had fallen. They had plunged the École Normale into nothingness, they had withdrawn it from it. They had plunged it in whole with Brunetière, they withdrew it whole without Brunetière. It was his fault if he had remained in the intersidereal cold. And as there had been found or had to be found someone to stand against Brunetière at the Collège de France, there was likewise found someone, perhaps a former pupil of Brunetière, to have himself then created by an adventitious creation, by a supplementary, and complementary creation, and in short to take Brunetière’s place in the new École Normale.

The intellectual party was very proud of this invention. If there had been any honour in the personnel of the École Normale, (but one does not see very well what honour would have gone to do under the presidency of M. Lavisse), these lecturers would not have suffered that such an iniquity be committed with regard to Brunetière and in the person of Brunetière. They had been very content, some years before, to appeal to Brunetière and to the uncontested glory of Brunetière to give lustre to the old École Normale. The simplest decency required that they keep him, (since they had asked for him), now that they had changed policy. There is such a lack of the most elementary decency in asking a man to come and illustrate a house and then afterwards to manoeuvre slyly to eliminate that man. That is so to give and to take back. But I go further. Even had M. Brunetière not been the man he was, even had M. Brunetière not been Brunetière, even had he not illustrated the house, even had they not asked for him, even had they not called for him, even for an ordinary man, even for an ordinary lecturer it is always a shame that a body abandon one of its own. These professors who have so often shown corporate spirit when it was a question of exercising or installing a spiritual government, and a temporal government of minds, could perhaps show a little corporate spirit this time too, this one time when by a sleight of hand they had resolved to make one of their own be jettisoned. It is evident that they ought not to have lent themselves to this procedure, which was a procedure of conjuring away. It was easy for them to seize opinion; and opinion, only warned, only awakened, would not have let it be done. One must admit that those bourgeois and those civil servants and those great intellectuals and those certified socialists singularly lacked, this time, syndicalism. There is something shameful in a company letting one of its members fall; even were it not Brunetière; even had it been the most ordinary lecturer. But there is a double shame in letting him fall by such a sneaky conjuring away. Bédier alone remained faithful to him.

M. Lanson was one of Brunetière’s nurslings; and one of those who owed Brunetière the most; and one of those who owed Brunetière everything. One must not believe that M. Lanson is an ungrateful nature. As long as M. Brunetière was powerful, M. Lanson did not conceal from the lagging populations the admiration, the cult, the gratitude he had for M. Brunetière. But when the star of M. Brunetière began to sink in the intellectual heavens and in the political heavens, and when this great critic and this great historian had entered into that half-light, into that great stoic solitude of suffering and of heroism which made round his end and his death as it were a halo and as it were a retreat, M. Lanson did not conceal from the peoples that he had just noticed that this Brunetière was not exactly a critic and a writer of republican defence. Truth above all.

I shall not say that M. Lanson had made his fortune as a reactionary. It is a word of which I am wary; and which I do not like to use. But I am forced to say that M. Lanson had made a first fortune in the role of what M. Lanson today would call a reactionary. It is not I, it is he, if he were to make a return, who would name himself thus. And as soon as it was necessary, that is to say a little after the danger had finished disappearing, he remade his fortune, or he made a second fortune, in republican defence. After that, little matters it to me whether the man is strong or whether he is not strong. What does it matter, to be strong. For me nothing counts beside this base and this sneaky ingratitude, and this renunciation of a master become unhappy. What matter cleverness; and the successes of cleverness. What matters temporal advancement. What matters that a man make or not make a great career. What matters even the work, (I mean for those who make works). It is in envy and ingratitude that a being is measured. Everything disappears before these crossings of ingratitude and before this renegation of a master and of a father become unhappy. What does it matter after that, talent and crowned ambitions.

This renunciation of Brunetière was all the more foolish, and this disowning, in that, as one cannot repeat too often, Brunetière was one of their own. That is what I had tried to mark in this Brunetière that I am not about to give. Only, he was honest; and that is what bothered them.

One cannot even say, it would be a bad defence but at least it would be a defence, they cannot even say that in slyly combating Brunetière, in slyly ousting Brunetière they were combating, they were ousting an adversary and an enemy. They were renouncing their author and their father. Brunetière was a man of theirs, a man of theirs; or rather and more exactly still they were men of Brunetière. That is what I had shown in this work, and what it was easy to show. This great Christian, this great Catholic, and above all this great stoic was originally and at bottom and always remained a man of the scientific mentality. For after all it is he, with his evolution of genres, who had invented the placing of genius in natural history. Now it is not only that this is false, it is that it is dangerous. There are profound kinships between genius and grace. They, (genius and grace), they have not only the same mode, the same incalculable unforeseen, and the same gushing forth. They have the same origin, being of two creations, being two creations very closely related. They have two related sources and that same mode of springing and of re-springing. They have this same gratuity. They have this same flowing-down. They have this same arbitrariness. They have this same thrust. They have in humanity, and sometimes in man, this same beating of intermittence. They have the same range of throw. I have said it often, their quarrels are the same, or at least they are very conjoined quarrels. When one places genius in natural history, conjointly one places saintliness in natural history. And one enters the kingdom of malacologies.

When therefore they combated, when they were slyly ousting Brunetière, they did not even have this excuse of combating and of slyly ousting an adversary and an enemy. Neither an enemy of their ideas, nor an enemy of their persons. They combated their own father, and their own author, and the man of their camp who had more talent than they. That is to say that it was envy in its purest form. To combat an enemy, even an intellectual enemy, can be great. To combat an enemy for the salvation of all. But they combat friends too, and sometimes friends above all, when it is a matter of their own advancement.

Now it is evident that today and even already for some years, (this formula, or rather this syntax is a little German, but M. Lanson will pardon me), M. Lanson is no longer content with this second double career he was carrying on in science and in higher education. (For these two, which so often go socially together, are still two). After this first career which he pursued up to forty in secondary education, after this second double career which he pursued up to fifty-five in science and in higher education, M. Lanson is evidently resolved to try a third career. After twenty years of secondary education, after fifteen years of science and of higher education, he has begun two or three years ago a career as journalist, and as publicist, and as chronicler, and as critic; and as a writer for the world; and for everyone.

He is free in it. Everyone is free. But here we come to the little that I wished to say. We come to a second Langlois case, to a second Lavisse case. Or rather we return to the same Langlois case, to the same Lavisse case under a new form. And as we had to defend M. Lavisse against M. Langlois, just so we have now to defend M. Lanson both against M. Lanson and against M. Rudler. But here I must open a parenthesis.

If I were a professor at the Sorbonne and consequently if I were resolved like everybody to vote for M. Lanson at the next decanal elections, I should not be very proud of what M. Lanson has been doing for some years. And there is no need to listen at double doors to know that a certain number of professors of the Sorbonne, future electors of M. Lanson, are in fact not very proud of what M. Lanson has been doing for some years. I shall explain.

Weary of secondary education M. Lanson had made himself a man of science and of higher education. Weary of science and of higher education M. Lanson has set himself for some years to do a little of every trade. His activities are overflowing. He has made himself a lecturer, he has made himself a journalist, he has made himself an exporter. One would wonder when these men work, if one did not know that they are all like Napoleon.

Among new trades, (and among other trades on top), M. Lanson has made himself, M. Lanson has undertaken two trades that are no sinecures and that generally fill each its man. M. Lanson has taken on both. He has made himself a dramatic chronicler. And he has made himself a literary chronicler. Twice a month he gives an account of the theatre in the Grande Revue. Every week he gives an account of literature in the Matin.

Of what he does in the Grande Revue I have nothing to say here yet, I mean in this parenthesis. Not only is the Grande Revue a most honourable house, but M. Lanson holds there the place he should have. He holds a regular column there, in its place, and he holds it most honourably, and this column is itself in its place, and considered. I really see nothing there that could shock the Sorbonne.

I shall not say as much of what has happened at the Matin. When the Matin had announced to us a little pompously that it was going to attach M. Lanson to itself, we all understood that M. Lanson was going to create at the Matin a literary column, a whole feuilleton like all the great feuilletons of the newspapers. It was an attempt that promised to be interesting. And we are so little ill-natured that we promised ourselves to follow it with interest. To introduce into a newspaper of enormous circulation and very large public, or rather of the entire public, a literary feuilleton. I think it would not be impossible. What was not our astonishment when we found on the fourth page, or on the fifth page of the Matin, or on the sixth, or on the seventh, or on the eighth, because there is no ninth, those sorts of goat-droppings lost in the communiqués of the little theatres and in the announcements of dressmakers and in the paid insertions of publishers. There is in this an unceremoniousness, an injurious confusion, if M. Lanson could be injured, and which has certainly very much injured the Sorbonne. There is in it a will to relegation. I myself, and you know whether I do not love M. Lanson, and perhaps the Sorbonne, I am injured, both for him, and for her, when I see him mingled with the divas and the dressmakers, and assimilated to the divas and the dressmakers. And that he tries his hand there at a few meagre graces. They have done their best, and added political dealings to political dealings, and derogations to derogations, and forfeitures to forfeitures, we have kept in spite of everything a certain idea of what the Sorbonne is and of what a professor at the Sorbonne is. We have kept in our heads a certain resonance, a certain memory of resonance of what a professor (and soon the dean) at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Paris is. We are injured that a man who has these titles (or who is going to have them), and who has so great a university volume, and who represents us after all in a certain sense, who is in a certain sense and really our mandatary toward the great public, our representative, our solicitor toward the gross public, toward the common public, and all the more so since he himself, going there, with his title, solemnly, announced as such, going to that newspaper, under all his title, has there officially set himself up as the representative of letters and of the University. Then we feel injured, that he lets himself be treated thus, in this great newspaper that we all read every morning, and that in him he lets us be treated thus, (for whatever he does, in this newspaper he is all the same an ambassador of the spiritual realms), and even that in him he lets the Sorbonne be treated thus.

There are involuntary representations; and fatal ones; and natural ones. There are unconscious delegations. There are responsibilities which lie in the fact. Whatever our divergences in the intellectual republics, whatever even the contrarieties between us, it is evident that in the face of a certain great public, and in the face of a newspaper like the Matin we are all in solidarity, we are all of the same trade, I am not suspect in what I am going to say: we are all intellectuals and M. Lanson is and has become and he is in fact the representative of us intellectuals in this newspaper. Now, by the ministry, by the mechanism of this representation we are really too maltreated there. Under this figure, under this signature one shows us a little too much disrespect there. I know that a rather large number of professors of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Paris are extremely injured not so much that their colleague and soon their dean has made himself a journalist as that he has made himself a petty journalist and that he has not made himself respected as a journalist. There is at the Sorbonne a certain number of professors, and it is almost the majority, who work. Naturally these are not the ones one knows; these are not the ones who make a noise; but after all these are the ones who are, and who make the Sorbonne. They are not only deafly discontent, they are extremely injured that their colleague and soon their dean, that their representative be treated like a little boy in sight of everyone in so great a newspaper. They are not all Andlers. There is only one. But, in default of his talent, in default of his worth, all have that probity proper to Andler. They work as he does, each to his measure. Their method is good, or it is bad, that is quite another question, which we have treated, on which we shall perhaps return. That is their business, and that is business between them. If they do not succeed, or if they succeed at results far removed from what they believe, and far inferior to what they believe, that is a question of method, at least they are faithful to their method. In the first degree they are scandalised that their colleague and soon their dean has made himself a journalist. But in the second degree they are injured that, having made himself a journalist, he has let himself be treated to that point like a little boy and with so much offhandedness. It is true that for some time they have made him a ground-floor. But this ground-floor full of art nouveau typographical flourishes, full of modern style embellishments, at the bottom of the great page of Saturday for the woman, or another like it, is itself the object, and as it were the residence, of a perpetual typographical insult. There is in this a derision, a contempt of the spiritual, unbearable. And a typographical contempt, the worst of all, of what a professor, and a critic, and even what a newspaper article is. And what especially makes a bad effect is that they put at the bottom of his article, and in the same columns, the paid announcements of the publishers. We all feel hoaxed by this unceremoniousness, by what it has of the common, of the gross, by this off-handedness, by this manner of treating, and on the other hand by this manner of letting oneself be treated. They do us injury, to all of us, to all who in a certain sense and in face of the great public, are of the same trade, to all of us who are of the spiritual, to the Sorbonne and to us together, and that is what one did not expect.

I close here this parenthesis. It is enough to have defended the honour of the Sorbonne. I open another immediately. In citing all these names I notice, and this is altogether characteristic of the present situation, that not all sections have patrons at the Sorbonne, and it is very interesting to see which are the sections that have patrons and which are those that do not have any. The patrons are worth what they are worth, but at least they are the patrons. They are what they are. We can love them. We can not love them. But it is already very notable that there be any, and it is a still greater misery that in some sections there are none even. They are worth what they are worth, but in this enumeration that we were establishing little by little one may say that Lanson, as he is, is the patron of French, that Lavisse, (as he is), is the patron of history, that Brunot is the patron of grammar, and eminently that Andler is the patron of German, and already one sees a little one pushing up who will be the patron of English. And there are other disciplines, on the contrary, that have no patrons. And the queen of all the disciplines has no patron at the Sorbonne. It is an extremely remarkable fact that philosophy is not represented in the assembly of the gods, that philosophy has no patron at the Sorbonne. For it is evident that M. Durkheim is not a patron of philosophy, but a patron against philosophy. Nothing betrays better, nothing could better express this aversion, and not only this indigence, this terror that the Sorbonne currently has of all that is of thought. And I close it, (my parenthesis).

Here I discover that I am rather embarrassed. For my algebra. In a previous cahier I had innocently named L M. Langlois. (Because he was not unknown to me). (He was even given to me). And to his L I had attached literal indices. But if I designate by L and even by La M. Langlois, how to designate M. Lanson; and how to designate M. Lavisse. There are great complications. There must certainly be some sociological law in this. That all those of our masters who command our attention should begin with La. There is another subject, Monsieur Durkheim, for a complementary thesis.

Here we come to all that I wished to say. Here we find again, here appears the same reversal of situations which appeared in the case of M. Lavisse (and of M. Langlois) submitted to the judgment of M. Langlois. Just as for us M. Lavisse can be a historian and he cannot be one for M. Langlois, just as for us M. Langlois can be a pamphleteer, and he cannot be one for M. Langlois, so for us M. Lanson has perfectly the right to make a third career, and we wish him a good one, but he does not have the right to it for M. Lanson and for M. Rudler.

We must here defend M. Lanson against M. Lanson and against M. Rudler.

We are quite willing that M. Lanson make a third career. It is M. Lanson second career, it is M. Rudler who is not willing.

We are quite willing that M. Lanson be a chronicler and a dramatic and literary critic. It is M. Lanson the scientist, and it is M. Rudler who are not willing.

For M. Lanson, when he makes every fortnight his dramatic chronicle and every week his literary chronicle, does as everyone, M. Lanson: he has not exhausted all the literature and all the documentation on each of these plays and on all this theatre, nor on each of these books and on all this literature. He does as everyone, he does what he can. I do not say that this is wrong. But it is we who do not say that this is wrong. His method says that it is wrong; and that it is not that at all.

M. Lanson does not exhaust the literature and the documentation of all this. He goes to see the plays performed. That is already very honest. Not everyone could say as much. He evidently reads these volumes he speaks of. In short he reads as one reads for a review. It is good. It is honest. But it is as far as possible from what we have been told is the method.

That there be another competence than that which would result from the method of exhaustion, who denies it, this is our very thesis, but it is M. Lanson who denies it. It is M. Rudler who denies it. That M. Lanson may have acquired this competence, I am quite willing. It is they who are not willing. Or rather they would perhaps like to. But they cannot well like to. That reflection, talk, social exchange, meditation and a whole certain intellectual climate, (and a simple good reading of the texts), do more than an exhaustion of documentation and than an exhaustion of literature which moreover one never attains, which moreover one never obtains, this is what is our thesis, and we are quite willing that M. Lanson benefit from it. But it is M. Lanson, and M. Rudler who forbid him from it.

We are quite willing that M. Lanson work as an honest man and as a man of good company. It is M. Lanson, it is M. Rudler who wish to force him to work as a scientist.

Only, and it is always the Langlois case, if M. Lanson comes among us, let him be welcome there, but let him be like us. If he does as we do, let him be as we are. If it is understood that there is only one more Frenchman in France, all will rejoice at it. But if he comes among us let him be a man like us. If he comes into this free city, let him be there a simple citizen. If he comes into this confraternity, let him be there our confrère.

We shall be all the happier to receive him in that we see clearly that he has already gained much, as a confrère, on what he was as a scientist. It must be said: he has become friendly. He has notably become very friendly toward all the members of the French Academy. Whether they make theatre, whether they make novels, they find the dramatic critic and the literary critic equally benevolent. Corneille had not always found the second M. Lanson benevolent. M. Rostand, M. Donnay will always find the third M. Lanson benevolent.

It is evident that, from the second, M. Lanson has greatly amended himself in becoming the third. One always speaks ill of the public. And that it is frivolous. Granted. But, as it is, it saves us all the same, for it imposes on those who face it a certain bearing of good company, a certain good will, and the first of the virtues, a certain good humour. Since M. Lanson confronts the real public he has become much more a man of company. He is much more agreeable to read and moreover here he takes little by little the care of common interests, of general interests which, hitherto, escaped him.

For it is yet another benefit of this access to the public, of this direct address to the great public that one perceives directly also, abruptly, almost brutally these great necessities, these imperious needs, these general interests to which the scientist in his study may remain indifferent. The third M. Lanson, that of the dramatic chronicles and of the literary chronicles, is much more a partisan of culture, and of Latin, than the second was, and especially he is much more patriotic. We can only congratulate him for it.

All that we ask, and it is quite simple, and I think he will be the first to grant us it, since, in order to become a writer, he was forced to renounce the scientific method, as everyone, all that we ask is that at the same time one should not try to make us believe that he has become a writer in keeping the scientific method and by the ministry of the scientific method, and so that generally one may become a writer in keeping the scientific method and by the ministry of the scientific method.

That we should have a new confrère, who would not rejoice at it. All that I ask is not to be forced to call him: monsieur le doyen.

And all that we ask is that he come to us as another, and that he not transport himself there in a block with that sequel of young people who treat him as a university superior. In letters there may be masters and there are certainly patrons. There are no university superiors.

This Revue Critique des Livres Nouveaux puts on its cover the following bundle of names and in the following arrangement:

PRINCIPAL CONTRIBUTORS MM. Charles Andler, professor at the Sorbonne. — L. Blaringhem, lecturer at the Sorbonne. — Camille Bloch, inspector general of Archives and Libraries. — E.-Ch. Babut, professor at the University of Montpellier. — E. Brucker, professor at the Lycée of Versailles. — Raoul Blanchard, professor at the University of Grenoble. — J. Bury, professor at the Lycée of Lyon. — L. Cazamian, lecturer at the Sorbonne. — A. Cahen, inspector of the Academy of Paris. — L. Gallois, professor at the Sorbonne. — L. Houllevigne, professor at the University of Aix-Marseille. — Ch.-V. Langlois, professor at the Sorbonne. — G. Lanson, professor at the Sorbonne. — J. Marsan, professor at the University of Toulouse. — D. Mornet, professor at the Lycée Carnot. — D J. Philippe. — E. Pottier, member of the Institute. — S. Reinach, member of the Institute. — G. Renard, professor at the Collège de France. — Ch. Seignobos, professor at the Sorbonne. — etc.

When a review puts on the front page of its cover such a bundle of names, presented thus, it is evidently because it wishes to create an impression of a bundle of guarantees. All that we ask is that this bundle and this impression and these guarantees do not accompany each one of these names into the freest adventures. All that we ask is that this apparatus do not accompany each one of these authors into all his manifestations. And when M. Lanson makes in three months a book on America, all that we ask is that in this review M. Rudler not try to make us believe that this too is method.

If M. Lanson has the right to see America instead of exhausting the literature and the documentation on America, I have the right to read Corneille and to read Polyeucte, instead of exhausting the literature and the documentation on Corneille and on Polyeucte.

If M. Lanson has the right to treat America directly, I have the right to treat Corneille and Polyeucte directly.

If M. Lanson has the right to discover America, I have the right to discover Corneille and Polyeucte.

It will be at his and our risks and perils. But risk and peril are the rule in our method.

§. — I have done many trades. It is certain that there is a malice proper, of which one has no idea elsewhere, which one cannot even imagine elsewhere, which flourishes in a certain world of the Sorbonne. One does not find it in the people, one does not find it in the rest of the bourgeoisie. One finds it neither among peasants, nor among workers, nor among journalists, nor among politicians. One finds it neither among typesetters nor among master printers. One finds it neither among publishers nor among booksellers. One does not find it among shopkeepers; nor among manufacturers. One finds it only among the doctors. Since M. Lanson has been plying a trade of common law, since he has been addressing himself to a public of common law, it is notorious that he has already stripped himself much of the professorial malice.

§. — I think back upon the method of M. Langlois and of M. Babut. All they need is that there be no heroes and no saints. Moderns, they are equally contrary to pagan greatness and to Christian greatness. All they ask is that the two ancient greatnesses, pagan greatness and Christian greatness, heroic greatness and the greatness of saintliness, be equally diminished, be equally undermined, be equally rendered suspect. It is greatness itself that wounds them; that pains them. If they were sincere, they would disaggregate our heroes and our saints, granted, but they would discover for us other greatnesses; which perhaps we do not suspect. And they would even discover for us heroes and saints whom we ourselves perhaps do not suspect. But there is no danger. It is greatness itself which they cannot bear. They are willing always to take away from the idea we have of man and of the world and never to add. They disaggregate the greatnesses there are. But there is no danger of their discovering for us greatnesses we do not know. They are willing that man and humanity should always lose, but they do not wish her ever to gain. How does it come about, in the time that they have been working, that they have never found a hero or a saint whom we had forgotten to observe.

If they were sincere, if they worked, so to speak, blindly, without any underthought of iniquity and of levelling-down, it would fatally come about, by the automatic play of the law of large numbers, that equally sometimes they would discover that we are mistaken, (in their system), in this sense that we should have taken for heroes and for saints men who were not, and sometimes they would discover that we are mistaken, (still in their system), in this contrary sense that there would have been heroes and saints whom we should not have known. I place myself here in their system. We know well enough that it is not ours. But what I wish to demonstrate here is that within their very system they are not sincere, within their very system they hold only one of the two parts, the one that answers to their instinct, to their taste for baseness.

Here is what I say: Their system is a system of constant revision of all trials of heroism and of all trials of saintliness by a method which is the method of the indefinite exhaustion of historical detail. That their method can succeed, and that it itself seizes reality, and that it itself gives exhausting results, we have said enough that we do not think so. But that is not the question today. That is not the debate today. I pursue them at the second degree. I pursue them at home, in their own system. I say that at home and in their own system they lie to themselves (and that thus to us they lie at the second degree), I say that at home and in their own system they only hold up on one side, they do only one of the two parts; and they constantly neglect the counter-part; and they know very well why.

If at home in their system they were constant, if at home in their system they were sincere with themselves, chance would not always play in the same direction, the law of large numbers would not always play in the same direction. Sometimes they would demolish a hero or a saint for us. And sometimes they would discover for us, they would institute for us as hero or saint some unknown person. Chance would play in both directions. The law of large numbers would play in both directions. Sometimes they would diminish for us these. But sometimes they would exalt for us those. We should lose on one side. But we should gain on the other. There would be balancings. Now what they want is that we should always lose and that we never gain. We, that is to say man, the world, humanity; creation. Or again: price, value, hierarchy. Or again: the sacred.

M. Babut, M. Langlois are quite willing to demolish Saint Martin. But how does it come about that in all their immense labours they have never found, on the other hand, a saint we do not know.

They are willing to diminish Saint Martin, (to diminish him in saintliness). How does it come about that in all their immense labours they have never been led to augment anyone. How is it that they, who know everyone, have never found themselves put on the path of some increase.

The quarrel of saints and the quarrel of heroes with regard to them is the same quarrel. (And it is also the quarrel of genius). It is the quarrel of lineage and of grace. And it is the very quarrel of greatness.

Against them and their modern world it is the joint quarrel of saintliness and of heroism; the joint quarrel of communion and of the city.

For them their system is one of constant disaggregation. They always work in the same direction, which is the direction of diminution. All that humanity loses, is so much gained for them. All that humanity lets go, is so much they put in their granaries. All that dignity loses, is so much gained for their indignity. They play all the time at the loser-takes-all game, but they are two in the game. For all that humanity loses, (by their care), it is they who gain.

All they want is that one lose value. It is a perpetual decantation. It is a continuous abrasion. They are like the waters. They effect a continual erosion. Anything that sticks out, they are occupied only with levelling it down. And out of their marsh they naturally make nothing emerge.

Always one loses and never does one gain. Always they take and never do they give back. Always they remove and never do they put back. They have created a kind of special irreversibility, of irreversibility for their use. By them the world descends and never goes back up. The absolute quantity of moral matter, the absolute quantity of value, the absolute quantity of dignity always diminishes and never receives any increase.

The mechanism is simple; and they have an easy game. As it is in history heroes and saints, (and geniuses), who have possession-of-estate, they are like mountains all ready before these perpetual depredations. Heroes and saints (and geniuses) are like great beautiful unarmed citadels before these perpetual incursions. They are great beautiful defenceless beings. All occupied in producing they keep none of their strength to ensure their own security. They have no taste for pleading their own greatness. They would be clumsy at it. They are unwilling to spend any of their greatness in pleading their own greatness. They are there on their base, unshakeable, apparently inert, and the others climb, and do what they want.

All the rains of the world will not add a millimetre (in height) to a mountain; but quite insignificant rains can take from it at the summit metres and metres of height.

Waters cannot increase a greatness. But the slightest waters can erode.

No glosses can increase a text. But the slightest glosses can erode among the populations the intelligence of the texts.

No commentaries can increase a life. But the slightest commentaries can erode among the peoples the intelligence of a great life.

Their work goes always in the same direction. They have made themselves the archivists of the world, but it is in order to squander the archives. They have made themselves the treasurers of the world; but it is to squander the treasure. They have made themselves the accountants of humanity. But it is in order to increase continually the debit and to diminish fraudulently the assets.

§. — They hope that by dint of eroding all that is great they will succeed perhaps, they will end perhaps by succeeding in bringing everything down to their flat level. And who knows, perhaps it is they who would end by appearing great. All that heroes and saints lose, (and geniuses), it is the doctors who gain it. The doctors are interested only in the diminution of the world. All that is lost for the text is gained for the gloss. All that is lost for this fine cut stone is gained for the commentary and for the commentator.

Wednesday, February 19, 1913. — I open the Matin of this morning. I end by finding this week’s Lanson in it. Who would recognise him in this extraordinary page. It is one of the fourth, or sixth, or fifth pages, in short a sacrificed page. And then a page altogether harum-scarum. It is a great picture in art nouveau of the fatal man and the fatal woman. And there is there above all a fatal woman who takes a third or a quarter of the page, (in photograph), and who does not come from the Academy of Inscriptions. In all these fatal men, in all these fatal women I ask whether that is the place of a dean. All the more so since his feuilleton, all beribboned with art nouveau, is one with this page and is typeset exactly in the same tone. And for this feuilleton itself what an extraordinary title, running above in art nouveau characters: Literary Movement, the ideas of yesterday and of tomorrow. All that in letters perfectly dislocated.

Literary Movement, the ideas of yesterday and of tomorrow. I ask whether that is a scientific title. And what it resembles. And whose title it is. If it is M. Lanson’s, how could he have invented a title so full of ballyhoo. But if it is the Matin’s how could M. Lanson have let it be imposed on him. How does he not respect himself. Or how does he not make himself respected.

§. — The astonishment, in this little world, that one dare speak of M. Langlois, of M. Lanson, of M. Lavisse, is comical, but it is boundless. What, one dares speak of them. What, one dares treat them like everyone. They are quite willing, themselves, to speak of everyone. But they do not wish that one speak of them. Babut is quite willing that one speak of Saint Martin, but he does not wish that one speak of Babut.

§. — And then they take refuge in respect, which is rather comic. These beings whose whole career is founded on disrespect, these beings to whom disrespect has brought fortunes, they call respect to the rescue. These beings who have made their whole career by more or less slyly mocking heroes, and saints, and geniuses, they wish that one respect only one thing; and that this be precisely their disrespect.

§. — All that is lost for Saint Martin is at bottom gained for Babut. But after that they no longer wish that anything be lost for Babut.

§. — They are quite willing to despoil everyone. But they do not wish that one despoil them.

§. — They are quite willing to speak of great men as if they were little boys. But they themselves wish to be treated as considerable men.

§. — They are quite willing to erode all that is standing. But they themselves, who are temporally standing, do not wish that one erode them.

§. — They are quite willing to diminish every greatness. But they themselves, who hold temporal greatnesses, do not wish that one diminish them.

§. — They are quite willing that one comment upon everything. But they do not wish that one comment upon the commentary. They are quite willing that one criticise everything. But they do not wish that one criticise the criticism. They do not wish that one write the pamphlet of the pamphlets.

§. — And they do not wish that one make the history of historians. They are quite willing to exhaust the indefiniteness of historical detail. But they do not wish, they, to enter into account in this indefiniteness of historical detail. They do not wish to be in the historical rank. They are as though physicians did not wish to be sick and to die.

§. — We, we can neglect them. And we shall perhaps not deprive ourselves of doing so. But they, in their system, cannot neglect themselves. Nor even suffer that one neglect them. If they were constant with themselves, if they remained within their system, it is they who would ask to enter, to remain in the account, it is they who would require us to consider them in historical account, to comment upon their commentaries, to criticise their criticisms. To erode their erosions.

But they are quite willing that everyone be enclosed in their system, except they themselves. They are quite willing that everyone be submitted to their method, except they themselves, and the results of their method.

They alone wish to be infallible; and to establish temporally eternal results.

§. — Nothing would be acquired, except what they obtain.

§. — In our system, which is a system of dignity, (and thus of indignity), in our system which is a system of value we can neglect them. We can find, we can declare that they are too small to touch this armour. But they, the wretches, in their system, which is a one-plane system, cannot even find themselves too small; to escape us. They must require us to occupy ourselves with them. They are condemned to treat themselves, and to let themselves be treated, and to get themselves treated as badly as mere great men.

§. — No, they say, playing the modest. We graciously occupy ourselves with heroes, with saints, with men of genius. But do not occupy yourselves with us. — Your servants. In their system they must be of the same (historical) tissue as great men. They have not the right to be small. They have not the right to slip away as small. No one is small in their system. In their system they must be treated and let themselves be treated and get themselves treated as great men and it must be they themselves who require us to do so. And after all, if they are so small, when it comes to being attacked, to being commented upon, to being criticised, why have they made themselves such big places in the State.

Why have they made for themselves, and for their criticisms, (I mean the criticisms they make), and for their commentaries, such big temporal places, such big official places.

§. — They are quite willing to be big in order to collect from the budget, in order to collect honours, in order to weigh with all their big mass on acquired glories, on established reputations. But afterwards they wish to be small in order not to be exposed.

§. — Without even going as far as heroes and saints, in our system we have the right not to treat M. Langlois like the Estiennes and M. Lavisse like Colbert. But in M. Langlois’s system we must treat them all on the same plane.

§. — For thirty years they have set themselves on the footing of ruining all that was standing in France and France herself. And today we should not have the right to ruin this ruin. We should not have the right to corrode this corrosion, to erode this erosion.

They have been willing for thirty years, for thirty years past, to level God, the Church, France, the army, customs, the laws; and we today should not have the right to level M. Lavisse.

§. — For thirty years, for thirty years past, they have been occupied only in eroding all that has greatness in France. And we should not have the right to occupy ourselves with their pettiness.

§. — Thirty years long they have been willing to try to put into deliquescence all that was the strength and the sinew of this people. They have tried everything. And we should not have the right merely to point out their own deliquescence.

§. — And I add that their surprise is not feigned. They are very really scandalised that one dare speak of M. Lavisse. They are quite willing that one speak of God, of the Gospels, of the faith, of France. They are quite willing that one speak (one knows how) of heroes and of saints, and of men of genius. But to dare say a word of Lavisse: they lift their arms to heaven.

§. — First of all they have no right to lift their arms to heaven. This gesture is an outmoded gesture, a survival of ancient superstitions. I point out, (as I should), this survival to M. Durkheim. It is a purely sociological survival. One will never see me fail in one of the duties I have toward M. Durkheim. One will never see me fail to make my report to M. Durkheim.

§. — A very young professor, hardly out of Normale, writes to me on the Lavisse case to recommend Christian charity and the pardon of injuries. My young comrade, I have Christian charity for the victims. I have none in the same operation, I have none in the same time and under the same relation for the executioners.

You exclaim that this name of executioners is perhaps a little too big for our men; that particularly this name of executioner is perhaps a little too big for M. Lavisse. But, my young comrade, there are soft executioners. There are not only executioners of torture, my young and dear comrade. Misery too is a torment, we have said it enough; and it is unfortunately true enough. M. Lavisse evidently does not shed blood. But he spreads ruin, but he pours forth softness; and shame; and slackening; and common relaxation; and the common and the base misery. Without counting that blood is all the same at the end of it. For if M. Lavisse and the generation of M. Lavisse had succeeded in making of France what they wanted, that is to say folk like them, soft folk like them, and if profiting from this universal cowardice and this common softness and this common baseness eight hundred thousand Germans had got inside us, there would perhaps have been blood shed, my young comrade.

§. — It is a mistake to believe that a man is harmless because he is apparently a man of the study. The greatest disasters, and consequently the greatest torments can be prepared in the silence of the study. He who demoralises a people may be, is even certainly the direct author and the exhausting cause of the disasters that may befall that people. If M. Lavisse and if the generation of M. Lavisse had succeeded in making of France a base and soft prey, ought we to have thought, my young comrade, ought we to have continued to think that M. Lavisse is a harmless office-man, an innocent pedagogue.

§. — I do not like, my young comrade, and to say the truth I will know nothing of a Christian charity that would be a perpetual capitulation before the powerful of this world. I will know nothing of a Christian charity that would be a constant capitulation (of the spiritual) before the temporal powers. I will know nothing of a Christian charity that would be a constant capitulation before the princes, and the rich, and the powers of money. I will know nothing of a Christian charity that would be a constant abandonment of the poor and the oppressed. I recognise only one Christian charity, my young comrade, and it is the one which proceeds directly from Jesus, (Gospels, passim, or rather ubique): it is the constant communion, both spiritual and temporal, with the poor, with the weak, with the oppressed.

§. — There is no question here of the pardon of injuries, my young comrade, because there is no question here of injuries. The pardon of injury comes into play only when injury comes into play. There is no question here of injury, there is question of a war which we are sustaining. All this is acts of war, my young comrade. Purely and simply. Neither more; nor less. You have certainly learned in the regiment what war and the state of war are; and the act of war. I have seen you as a young officer. You have done two years, I think, of which six months as second-lieutenant of the reserve. You know your theory. You know therefore what war is; and an act of war. All this, my young comrade, is war and these are acts of war. It is even a war of liberation. I confess it is one of the wars of liberty. It is the old resistance to oppression. It is a matter of not letting oneself be crushed, and of not letting this country be crushed, and of not letting this people be crushed under the basest spiritual and even intellectual and even mental tyranny that has ever wished to exercise itself by means of force and notably by means of a temporal government. My young comrade will perhaps grant me that if France were today, all things in proportion, exactly in the state in which the École Normale currently is, we should perhaps not be in fine condition. And there might be for some time the Prussians at Suresnes. And that, my dear comrade, would not have come to pass perhaps without some disturbance and without bloodshed.

§. — Unless you apply to these spiritual wars, the most precious, the most poignant of all, (and which engage the temporal wars so much, which are so much the roots of temporal wars), unless you apply to them the pacifist sophism at the very moment when everyone renounces it in diplomatic and military matters. At the very moment when one renounces it universally in international commerce. If it is a matter of disarmament, let the German gentlemen begin. Let M. Lavisse cease to occupy that post from which he can organise the disaster. We do not even ask that he renounce all his honours. We ask only that he renounce his command, this command. Let him afterwards be heaped with honours, if you like; all that we ask is that the most unworthy not be placed, and left, at the head, and that afterwards he not be replaced by a man like him.

§. — Let these gentlemen begin. But to occupy a situation like that of director of the École Normale when one is M. Lavisse and one has made of the École Normale what he has made of it, is not only a defiance, is not only a wager, it is a constant act of war. It is a situation of fact, it is a lasting state which decomposes at every instant into acts of war, into incessantly renewed instants of war. To occupy such a situation, by that very thing, in that very thing, and even were one to do nothing more, even were one to do nothing in particular, is to make at every instant a certain war. To occupy such a state situation. To exercise, I may say, such a magistracy. To be at the head. To hold such a command, both spiritual and temporal. To occupy this precise point of command over all the young people who come, as these waves arrive. That is a constant fact, that is a constant act which decomposes instantaneously into a multitude of aggressions. By the mere fact that he is there, he attacks us; and constantly. By the mere fact that he is there, he does us harm; and constantly. Even were he not to lift his little finger, (and in effect this effort must cost him much), even were he not constantly to seek us out, he seeks us out, since he is there.

§. — Moreover he does seek us out. What is this ceremony of the Sorbonne where, playing the modest, he received in his august face the most flatulent congratulations. What an example for youth this apotheosis of disaster, this crowning of all disorganisations.

§. — And you know very well, my dear comrade, all that is done, and all that is attempted, at the École Normale, against France, under the cover of M. Lavisse.

§. — But as it is said that all that comes from this man and all that is addressed to this man shall be falsified, we must indeed acknowledge that this very ceremony was falsified in its principle, being falsified in its apparatus. They had M. Poincaré come, in fact, to give to the ceremony and to the jubilarian the lustre of a high national manifestation. And also to cover both M. Lavisse and the Sorbonne with the high authority of a man who was already noticeably more than an ordinary president of the Republic. I mean more than an ordinary president of the Republic. M. Poincaré came to this last. It was evidently very clever, on the part of M. Lavisse and on the part of the Sorbonne. For having parasitised so many movements, they were parasitising in addition, they were also parasitising, they were then parasitising the unanimous movement that has produced itself against them. Having profited from everything they were profiting still and in order to crown all from the deep movement that has produced itself against them. And one must confess that for a last blow it was a supreme blow; and a very fine stroke of politics. And a fine stroke of play.

§. — Let me explain. We perhaps still have the right to explain ourselves. Neither this cleverness will disconcert us. Nor so much cover and the authority of so great a personage will make us draw back. If it sufficed to invite M. Poincaré to a ceremony for it to become sacred, and for it to be removed from analysis, many ceremonies would be sacred today, and we should not even have the right to speak of the little pigs of the Agricultural Show.

§. — We shall therefore dare to speak. We shall therefore dare to pronounce this very name. When then M. Lavisse and the Sorbonne were calling M. Poincaré to the Sorbonne to bring to the Lavisse ceremony a consecration that it could receive from nowhere else, I say that it was a fine stroke of politics. For the politics that has elected M. Poincaré is diametrically the contrary of the politics that had prolonged M. Lavisse for these fifty years.

This Lavisse ceremony, known by chance, fell exactly on the first Sunday following the Wednesday or the Friday of the presidential election. M. Poincaré was in the full youth, in the full fervour of the very first days of the designation of his presidency.

The question is not whether M. Poincaré was the pupil of M. Lavisse and whether M. Lavisse received M. Poincaré into the Academy. The question is that the movement of national energy which carried M. Poincaré to the presidency of the Republic was diametrically the contrary of the movement, or of the repose of national abandonment and of general disorganisation that made M. Lavisse last all through his prudent career. There is no doubt on this point. M. Poincaré has come to power and stays there by a profound popular movement, by a continued rebound of national energy which is indeed all that one can imagine most diametrically contrary to the intellectual and Jaurèsist movement of capitulation, of abandonment, of disorganisation that constantly made M. Lavisse grow during the fifty years of swelling of his fructuous career. Well I say that to make brought, in a solemn ceremony, for the crowning of so august a career, precisely the highest result, the highest consequence, the highest thrust, the highest culmination of the disgust that one has oneself raised, I lay down my arms and I say that this is a fine stroke of reversal.

§. — For what one reproaches M. Lavisse with is not being of a certain party, it is having successively and at the same time betrayed all parties. It is never having been at bottom anything but of the party of capitulation, and of abandonment, and of cowardice, and of disorganisation. At bottom, if you wish, he was perhaps rather Bonapartist, and he had to be so reasons that for any other would have been honourable. That did not prevent him from extracting from the Republic everything she can confer of honours. I say honours in the plural. Otherwise, in the singular, applied to M. Lavisse, this word would make a word struck out as null.

§. — M. Poincaré moreover was quickly rewarded for what he had done for the Sorbonne by going to the Sorbonne to attend and against his will to preside over the fiftieth anniversary of M. Lavisse. Four weeks had not passed when out of this same Sorbonne came, as usual, the first and the most dangerous movement directed not only against the presidency of M. Poincaré but against the three-year service, and thus, as usual, against France, and also, as usual, against the Republic.

§. — I do not wish to enter incidentally into so large a debate as that of the military law. My sentiments are well enough known. And my repulsions and my disquiets. I wish only to dismantle, and in a few words, a certain mechanism of the domination of the intellectual party.

§. — We are made here to go to precise points, to the articulations of mechanisms. For the great currents and for generalities the dailies suffice. We are bound here to say something, and not to speak of just anything. The whole secret of the invention, of the intrusion, of the domination of the intellectual party is in the extremely suspect liaison of Herr and of Lavisse.

§. — I shall speak of Herr only with extreme reserve. He was one of the masters of our youth, certainly the purest and the most confiding. And there is in apprenticeship such a virtue that I shall remember all my life that it is Herr who taught me to correct proofs. What I can say of him, and what all those who know him will grant me, friends, enemies, partisans, adversaries, is that he is a fanatic and essentially, einseitig, a unilateral. And on the other hand Lavisse is the very type of the weak and of the double and of the deceitful and of the bilateral.

§. — That Herr have liaisons with other fanatics, with other unilaterals, that is entirely his right, I can say it. But I also have the right to say that there is nothing as suspect as so long and, it must be said, so faithful a liaison as the one that has been established between this fanatic and this weak man, between this unilateral and this bilateral.

§. — The whole secret of the invention and of the intrusion and of the domination of the intellectual party is there, in this singular liaison. So long as Herr works in fanaticism and in unilateralness, it is his right, so to speak. At least it is his right at the first degree. But when Herr governs under the name of Lavisse, then I am forced to register my protest, because the two of them, they play double. The Sorbonne and the École Normale, under the figure and under the name of M. Lavisse, call M. Poincaré to the Sorbonne and have themselves clothed in all the official greatnesses, and during this time the same Sorbonne and the same École Normale, under the action of M. Herr, make themselves once more the focus of the German party.

§. — It is this duality that weighs upon us. It is this duality that we shall not bear, that we shall not let remain joined. We are quite willing, (at the first degree), we are quite willing to be combated by M. Herr, we are quite willing to be governed by M. Lavisse. We are not willing to be combated by M. Herr under the name of M. Lavisse. We are not willing to be governed by M. Herr under the name of M. Lavisse.

§. — There is here an unbearable duality, a duplicity that we shall not bear. Herr is a man who cannot see a soldier. It is a sickness, it is a fixed idea. It is a phobia, a psychosis. And M. Dumas is going to have to occupy himself with it. M. Lavisse on the contrary surrounds himself with soldiers. Then why are they conjoined.

§. — The whole problem is there. There is the knot of the difficulty. When Herr sees a soldier, he suffers. When he sees two, he is ill. And if these two soldiers are merely commanded by a corporal, he suffers martyrdom, for he has recognised the dreadful military authority. And he will tell you that it is an authority of command. The Prussian army is perhaps their adversary, but the French army is certainly their enemy. They have only one idea, which is to wrest victims from her. The victims are us; it is you, it is me; it is the excellent private of the second class. They know the dreadful military tyranny. When he sees soldiers dancing with little maids, he suffers another martyrdom. For it is evidently a contamination of the civil by the military. But the little maids cannot dance solely with M. Langlois and solely on the evening of the 14th of July. And M. Langlois cannot waltz solely with me. M. Lavisse on the contrary adores soldiers. He has conducted his career in such a way that at his funeral he shall have an incalculable number of batteries of 75. Then why does M. Herr form a couple with M. Lavisse.

§. — There is the danger. There is the pernicious. If Herr’s virus were reserved for external use, it would be harmless. But M. Lavisse is the syringe, which introduces this virus into the very tissue of the State’s teaching.

§. — As long as fanaticism is fanaticism, there is nothing to say, in short there is nothing to say at the first degree. And even at the second degree it may be respectable. But when fanaticism, remaining inwardly the same, remaining the same in its content, slips itself under the opportunist and liberal mode, and under the opportunist and liberal volume, then it can be dangerous, then it can penetrate the organism.

§. — And moreover this is always what I call falsifying the game, playing double, playing with both hands. Playing on both tables.

§. — I naturally take this word couple in the sense in which I think it is used in the sciences of mechanics. These two men are everything most contrary to one another. One is a fanatic and the other is supposedly a liberal. One is supposedly a socialist and the other is really a bourgeois. And even a fat bourgeois. And a great civil servant. And a great personage. One is an anarchist and the other is in all the honours. But under the cover and under the volume of the bourgeois, of the liberal, of the great civil servant, of the great pseudo-liberal, of the great personage, it is always the anarchist who propagates himself and it is always the anarchist who makes his way.

§. — Anarchy has the right. Or rather I mean it has the right at the first degree. But what has not the right, what we do not wish, is that anarchy should wish to govern us clothed with the authorities of the State.

§. — This is the whole case of the Sorbonne, I mean of the present Sorbonne, and it is the whole affair of the present Sorbonne and of the New École Normale. When the present Sorbonne and when the new École Normale began a sudden action, at once dazzling and sly against the three-year service, one must pay close attention. It is always the same double game. They did not tell us only, they did not mean to tell us only that they were against the three-year service, (they who at the same time and otherwise were professors at the Sorbonne and at the new École Normale or who in short were of the personnel of these two houses). No, they proceeded with ensemble, they made a demonstration, they put a whole apparatus into it that said: Attention, we are a body and we act as a body. We are the guardian of intellectual interests and the conservatory of French thought. It is by this title and with this solemnity that we all enter into play, that we engage ourselves as a body against the three-year law. Thus they turn against the State, against the Republic, against France, the very authority and the temporal that they hold from the Republic, from France, from the State. It is always exactly the same double game. They are always anarchists of government. They are against the State, they declare themselves as a body against the State, they rise up as a body against the State, but this very declaration, but this very insurrection, they make it only as a body of the State, and by title of a body of the State. They are anarchists of State. They patronise, they enthrone, they introduce, they create anarchy, but for this they put on funny garments, garments of State, togas, caps, simarrs, disguises, masquerades, and on the shoulder some thingamajigs of rabbit fur the name of which I do not even know.

§. — The Sorbonne has a horror of soldiers, granted, (unless perhaps they be German soldiers). But when she travels, or when madame receives, and when madame has her ceremonies, she does not move only the government, she also moves some French Republican guards on horseback, or if you prefer Republican guards French on horseback, or if you prefer French Republican guards on horseback, or if you prefer Frenchmen Republican guards on horseback. Or if you prefer Frenchmen on horseback Republican guards. And one must bring out the gauntlets.

§. — There is at the (present) Sorbonne and in the new École Normale a nucleus of people who do not want nationalism, unless it be German; and militarism, unless it be German; and capitalism, unless it be German; and imperialism, unless it be German; and colonialism, unless it be German. We ask only that these people and this nucleus do not constitute a body of the French State.

That is perhaps not asking too much.

§. — And when they pass through the streets in their processions, firstly let them not prevent me from passing, (me the man in a jacket, who go about my business), with their escorts, of honour, and their ceremonies and their cortèges and their soldiers and their service of order. And secondly, if they are anarchists, let them not have themselves governed by the decree of Messidor, and above all by the modified decree of Messidor. I am extremely humiliated, I, not to be governed by the decree of Messidor. All the rights that the decree of Messidor confers on me, and still by preterition, is to be stopped in the streets by hedges of soldiers, when the Sorbonne must be allowed to pass.

§. — They are anarchists, but they are quite willing to be, as much as they can, in the Legion of Honour. And as high in it as they can climb.

§. — They are anarchists, but they let fall nothing of the prerogatives that the State confers on them. And notably that, (evidently negligible), of going every month to the cash desk.

To our cash desk.

§. — They are not only anarchists of government, they are anarchists of treasury.

§. — They are not only anarchists of treasury, they are anarchists of magistracy. In the name of the State they deliver diplomas that command almost all careers and notably so to speak all the liberal careers. These anarchists make it so that by a decree of State a man is or is not exposed or condemned to die or not to die of hunger.

§. — These anarchists are great civil servants.

§. — And they never divest themselves of their authority, of their honours, of their ceremonies, of their magistracy, of their functions. One must see in a company how they look at him who is not a universitarian, civil servant, decorated.

§. — And they have not yet enough of it. One must see what they do to add to all these spiritual and temporal commands what an armchair at the Institute gives of spiritual and temporal command, in whichever of the sections. Everything disappears then, the greatest interests, all is nothing, all is nothing more before an academic election.

§. — The sections of the Institute, there is their fatherland, their hearth, their flag. France does not count, but it was a great question whether M. Séaille or Séailles would or would not be of the Academy of Moral Sciences.

That was an affair, and an affair of State.

§. — They are anarchists, but they are quite willing to enter into large marriages of money, into large bourgeois marriages, into large marriages of the university dynasties, into large marriages of republican defence. And they have made of the Sorbonne a nursery of sons-in-law.

§. — On the deceit of M. Lavisse. — M. Lavisse naturally did not sign the manifesto of the professors against the three-year law. For these sorts of manifestations it is, in the couple, Herr who functions. But he gave an interview to the Temps or a consultation or in any case he let one be taken from him. This interview is full of the protestations, of the declarations familiar to the personage. Liberal, patriotic, as much as you like. Democratic, nationalist, anything you want. Voluminously balanced. We know the fellow. But what is firm in this interview, in these declarations. It is solely this, and at the end of the article, as always, that one more year must still be cut from secondary education, that one more year must still be taken from and out of secondary education, that secondary education must still be diminished, truncated, decapitated of a year; the only education where currently one learns anything, the only education where one still gives and where one still receives culture. It is indeed for that they bear it so much ill will. And that for fifteen years they have been doing everything they can, more or less brutally, more or less slyly, to reduce it to nothing. To dismember it. One recognises there their old hatred of secondary education. For all these reasons and together because it is still a little free, because it still escapes them greatly, because free young people there still listen to free masters.

§. — These great anarchists, who absolutely do not know social ranks, one must see in a company how they ignore their own rank; and how they look at the man who is not in place, who is not rich, who is not a universitarian, who is not a civil servant, who is not in the government; the writer.

§. — Such is the point of mechanism, such is exactly the articulation. When one knows on the other hand the liaison of Herr and of Jaurès, when one knows well all this little world, greatly dangerous, for it is dangerous precisely in the manner of a virus, one knows that all these movements proceed from Herr and from his immediate entourage. They are therefore, in their same origin, in their point of origin in liaison with Lavisse. Articulated upon him. Now we are quite willing, in short we are quite willing at the first degree, to have facing us anarchists who are free men, anarchists who are mere citizens. But we are not willing, neither at the first nor at the second degree, to have above us anarchists who oppress us lodged in the greatest means of government and even lodged in the greatest men of government.

§. — I was wrong to find that this liaison of Herr and of Lavisse was suspect. It is singular, but it is not suspect. It is singular from the point of view of uprightness, and for a simple soul, and for a sound geography of parties, and for a sound topography of minds. But it is very well explained by the most usual psychology of weakness. Herr discovered twenty-five years ago that his patron was a great weakling. Since that time he has dominated him. Nothing is simpler. Herr who has big arms, big hands, a big forehead, big ears, a big head impressed Lavisse, seized hold of Lavisse, who is only big. Let us say it, Lavisse loves him above all for his great bravery and for his high stature. Moreover Lavisse, who knows nothing, has been mesmerised by this kind of polybioandbibliography of Herr and of his school. I am mistaken, I mean polybioundbibliographie.

§. — There is no doubt that the Sorbonne, in this demonstration against the three-year service, wished to present itself to the peoples as the thinking body, as the receptacle and as the tabernacle of work and of thought. She wished to present herself as the casket and as the temple. And as being responsible for eternal thought. They who despise the sacred so much, and who have constituted themselves against the sacred, they know that thought is sacred, and they wish to install themselves in this sacred, and they wish to represent this sacred, and they wish to govern us in the name of this sacred. As if all the laboratories of thought were not outside them and as if they were not against all the laboratories of thought. As if all that is thought in this country were not thought outside of them. And against them. As if all that is elaborated of thought in France were not elaborated outside of them (and against them) and under their surveillance and under their malevolence anxious, and sour, and sly. Far from being the authors, and the fabricators of thought, they are not even what they could be of it, the depositaries, the conservators, the archivists, the chambers of registration. They are only the gravediggers of it, and even gravediggers who are not even merry, contrary to the usages of that noble corporation. Then it is not even worth the trouble to be gravediggers. And they give themselves airs of succumbing under the burden, and of being the priests and the magi of thought, and of being crushed under the weight of their brow, and of bending under the load, under this frightful responsibility of being the representatives and the chargés d’affaires and the proxies of thought. As if in this great Paris, in this laboratory of thought unique in the world, it were they who made thought. Everything is made outside of them, and they are against everything that is made and they jealously watch over and they scold everything that is done.

§. — In this great Paris which is the most marvellous hive, in this great Paris where everyone works, they alone do nothing, but look at others work. And even then they look badly, they do not even know how to look.

§. — They wish to make themselves the conservatory of thought, the laboratory of thought, the bearers of the interests of thought. Let them go just to the Secret. There is more thought in four words of M. Bernstein than in eighty lectures at the Sorbonne.

§. — Evidently the man of forty who shakes the man of seventy looks like he is rebelling against his father. But everything I could say of it would not be worth that admirable and incredibly profound word, and at the same time so intelligent, of Ernest Psichari, and I entirely reassure myself with this word of Ernest Psichari, and let one pay attention to it, it is a word of a great writer, and all that I could say is nothing beside it: Nangès, who was thinking of his young disciple Maurice Vincent, could not keep himself from speaking to him again of the schoolmaster’s son who had taken the side of his fathers against his father.

§. — Who had taken the side of his fathers against his father, everything is there, all is said, and such is the programme and the hard destiny of our generation.

§. — But it is also what justifies us, and what authenticates us, and what makes us re-enter into nature, and into order and law. It is we thus who are the most ancient and the most legitimate authority, it is we who are tradition, it is we who are continuity, it is we who are the fathers, truly, since it is we who are the lineage, since it is we who are the grandfathers and the ancestors. It is we who are the highest authority. It is we who are the oldest right. We pass over their heads. Such a word lights everything up. It is we who are their fathers. And they are very bad sons.

§. — M. Lavisse therefore had the three section heads called in (or the six) and asked them, in short dissuaded them, (they representing all their comrades), (who, moreover, did not all have a wish for it), (and far from it), from signing as a body and officially this protest against the three-year service which has taken root, which has set out from the Sorbonne and from the New École Normale and which has fizzled, if it is still permitted to use this military expression. It is always the same duplicity. M. Lavisse does not sign and does not wish that one sign this petition. But he is its eminent author, he is its author at the second degree, for he is the author, he is the endorser, he is the representative both real and responsible and before the public and before the power of this new kind of École Normale from which afterwards the manifesto naturally came forth.

§. — When one knows on the other hand the liaison of Herr with Jaurès, and all the reality of that world, one knows that it is only rigorously true to say, and that it is reality itself, that Lavisse is in constant liaison with Jaurès. And when one knows his character, it is to say at the same time that he is at the orders of Jaurès.

§. — I am confused at lingering so long on M. Lavisse and on the case of M. Lavisse. But he is very representative. He represents a whole generation, and a whole system of government. It is not a question of getting lost in generalities. One must take the finest case, the most representative, the most eminent, and analyse it to the bursting. We too can attempt an exhausting analysis. Moreover and as I have said he is situated at the very point of articulation of the danger that we shall not cease to run.

§. — If one did not know to what degree the Sorbonne does not know a word of history, (and where would she have learned it, history is not learned in studies), one would be stupefied to see with what lightness they deny the work of the French soldier. As if the quantity of temporal earth where one speaks French were not measured first, and were not incessantly measured, by the soldier. And as if their own teaching and their own radiance, so to speak, were not measured first, were not constantly measured, by the quantity of temporal earth where one speaks French. As if it were not Caesar who had determined the quantity of earth where the world would be intellectually and spiritually Roman.

§. — An Augustus may easily make Virgils. No, but it is an Augustus, a Caesar who makes the quantity of temporal earth where a Virgil makes himself heard, where a Virgil is not dead, where a Virgil may hope for a temporal spiritual immortality. For it is an Augustus, (and it is an Octavius), and it is a Caesar who makes the quantity of Roman earth, and the quantity of Latin earth, and the quantity of Virgilian earth. The military framework is the temporal cradle where mores and laws and arts and even religion and language and lineage can then, but only then, and only then, lay themselves down to grow.

§. — There is a temporal. And the temporal is essentially military. When one says that the forces of powers are solely financial, firstly one is mistaken, for they are not solely financial, and far from it, secondly one must come to an understanding, for when one says that the forces of powers are financial, one understands money itself as a military power, as a munition of war, as a power that one mobilises.

§. — It is the Roman legion and it is the soldier and it is in the end Caesar who has made the quantity of the world where the Latin declension has rung, and the conjugation, and Nisus and Euryalus, and the descent into hell. And moreover they have borne the Greek declension, and the conjugation, and this immense treasure. And, at bottom, they have not borne the Jewish declension, and the conjugation, but they have borne the tabernacle and the God of Israel.

§. — There is nothing to be done about it. And there is nothing to say. The soldier measures the quantity of earth where one speaks a language, where customs, a spirit, a soul, a worship, a lineage reign. The soldier measures the quantity of earth where a soul can breathe. The soldier measures the quantity of earth where a people does not die. It is the soldier who measures the prison-yard of the temporal prison. It is the soldier who measures the quantity of earth where a language, where a soul flourishes. It is the soldier who measures the temporal cradle. It is the soldier who measures the quantity of temporal earth, which is the same as the spiritual earth and as the intellectual earth. The legionary, the heavy soldier has measured the earth for what one names so improperly Virgilian sweetness and which is a melancholy of a bottomless quality.

§. — One must go further. Not only is it the Roman soldier who has borne the Roman vault and who has measured the quantity of earth, but he has borne the temple and he has not only measured the earth for Virgilian melancholy, he has measured the earth for the only two great inheritances of man; for philosophy and for faith; for wisdom and for faith; for the ancient world and for the Christian world; for Plato and for the prophets; for thought and for faith; for the idea and for God.

§. — The Roman soldier has measured the earth and divided the peoples in two. There are those who were of it and those who were not of it and eternally there shall be those who were of it and those who were not of it. What makes Virgil be in Racine and in Hugo, and Homer in Racine, and the Virgilian in the Racinian, not as a foreigner learned, but as a brother and as a father, it is not Virgil himself, it is the Roman soldier who made it so.

§. — But he did not make only the Romance

languages, and the earth measured to the Romance languages; he did not make only the Romance peoples, and the earth measured to the Romance peoples; he did not make only Romania and Romanity and the Roman world and the Latin world. Within they bore the Greek world. That is to say the first half of the ancient world. And ancient thought would not have inserted itself into the world and it would not have commanded the thought of the entire world if the Roman soldier had not proceeded to this temporal insertion, if the Roman soldier had not measured the earth, if the Roman world had not proceeded to this kind of graft unique in the world, unique in the history of the world, where Rome furnishes the force and the Greeks the thought, where Rome furnishes the order and the Greeks the invention, where Rome furnishes the empire and the Greeks the idea, where Rome furnishes the earth and the Greeks the point of source, where Rome furnishes the matter and the temporal and the Greeks the spiritual and even what one might name the spiritual matter. Where Rome furnishes the wild stock, and the Greeks the point of culture.

§. — One must go further. It is one of the greatest mystical mysteries, — let me be permitted to join these two words, — the necessity of Rome in the temporal destination of God. It was necessary that there be the vault and the empire and the tortoise-shield and the vallum for the Christian world to take that temporal form which it had to receive and to keep. It is the form of the dry-dock. It is the exterior cradle, the wooden cradle, the prior cradle, that espouses the forms of the ship, and whence the ship shall be launched. The prefect had to be there for there to be the bishop. It is certainly one of the greatest mysteries of the world, and is perhaps the greatest of it, this disquieting, this mysterious place left to the temporal in the total mechanism and thus in the government, in the lot of the spiritual. How great must this importance not be, how great must this gravity not be that the greatest spiritual creation that has ever been in the world should have been poured thus into a temporal mould which the soldier had previously established.

§. — Not only Virgil, not only the Greek world have been poured into that figure of the earth that the Roman soldier had previously established, but the apostles themselves have been poured into it.

§. — Not only Latin spirituality, not only the Latin world has had to take the form of the Roman world, but the whole Greek world has had to take the form of the Roman world; and the Christian world has had to take the form of the Roman world. And the other half of the ancient world, the prophets, for a very large part, and perhaps for all, has been forced to take the form of the Roman world.

§. — Everything has been forced to clothe itself with the Roman mantle. And thus in a certain sense everything has been forced to clothe itself with the military mantle.

§. — It is an incredible destination. It was already a first incredible destination, the destination of Rome in force and of Romance force in the force of the world and of Rome temporal in the temporal world. It was already to have furnished a fine career. But what is infinitely more striking is the destination of Rome temporal in the spiritual world, I mean this incredible need of the temporal that has been left to the spiritual, this incapacity, absolute, of the spiritual to do without the temporal. The ancient city had to be the temporal cradle of the city of God, the empire had to be the world and the temporal cradle of Christendom. And not only that but the greatest spiritual creation that has ever taken place in the world had to undergo constantly not only this support but this kind of proper retardation, of friction which is the mark of the temporal, of the temporal mould, of the temporal bed, of the temporal cradle. That kind of irreversibility which has gained the spiritual because the spiritual itself slips but rubs in the irreversibility of the temporal. So that the temporal has a proper and imprinting irreversibility and the spiritual receives from it an imprinted irreversibility. And the spiritual is in the end like a river that glides but rubs in its own bed, like a river that flows but all the same rubs at the bottom and at the edges.

§. — A single exception would perhaps present itself, if one did not know that this exception never means anything, because it is a people that is always and in everything an exception. The Jews since the dispersion seem to present an example, and the only one, of a spiritual lineage pursued, prolonged, pushed forward without the support of a temporal framework and particularly military, without the support of a State and particularly of an army.

§. — It is perhaps true. That the race of Israel has pursued its destination without framework and particularly without military framework. And that since the dispersion no soldier has measured the earth for the spirit of this lineage. But firstly the dreadful mark and the dreadful spiritual destination of this people and I will say its dreadful mark and its dreadful theological destination is such that one would vainly seek another comparable to it even from afar. This devouring of disquiet and this vocation of trouble and this election of misfortune. There is something so evidently unique in the destination of the people of Israel that it would not be astonishing that it had pushed so far as not to have any need of a temporal cradle, and to say the word, so far that its spirit had no need of a body. But when one knows them well, and when one sees them push forward among the peoples, and from generation to generation, their fatal obstinacy, their stubbornness of an inexhaustible disquiet, and their inexhaustibility of an inexhaustible misfortune, one knows that one must never conclude from them to any other, for no other people bears so evidently a mark, and in this particularly, I mean in the reference of the spiritual to the temporal, one should perhaps not conclude from them to any other.

§. — However and secondly one would have to examine whether these witnesses from without have not benefited in some way from temporal Christendom and from temporal Rome and from the empire and even from military Rome. I mean the Jews at the dispersion and since and even before, have they not spread themselves into all the lands of the empire as upon the rim of an already prepared vessel. Was not this diffusion in this sense both Mediterranean, and Roman, and imperial. And was not the Judaic diffusion very like, and very kindred, and very bound up with the Christian diffusion. Was it not of the same form, of the same process, of the same molecular routing. Has it not often and for a long time been confounded with it. In this sense and in this measure the Jewish diffusion has still taken this form which the whole world took, it has still entered into this world which the whole world entered. Israel in the end and at the same time and by a kindred movement took for its diffusion and for its very dispersion the very temporal cradle which nascent Christendom took for its communion.

§. — Israel in the end took for its dispersion and had to take the world that Rome had made, the world that all the world has taken. And it is not bold to say that Israel continued a spiritual city of temporal dispersion in the same form of world, in the same mould of world, in the same cradle of world where Christendom was founding a spiritual city of temporal compaction. Or at least of temporal condensation. As in sum the sea and the sands of the sea espouse all the same the same shores.

§. — And since then these witnesses from without have lived on the margin of Christendom. But in one sense they have not lived outside Christendom, (for a historian of the world, for a historian of universal history), since they have lived in the margin. They had flowed differently into the same temporal mould, into the same world, into the same measured earth, the ones to bear witness there in communion, and the others to bear witness there in dispersion. And as a margin of in octavo is essentially not the same as a margin of in-18, that is to say, as the margin is essentially bound to the text in the format and commanded by the text in the format and commanded by the format, so and in this sense and in the same book they are the margin of Christendom. Which amounts to saying that it is still the Roman soldier who has staked out the dispersion of Israel.

§. — Whether the Sorbonne wishes it or not, it is the French soldier who measures the earth for her. It is the French soldier and it is the 75 cannon and it is the temporal force that have staked out, that have measured, that measure at every instant the quantity of earth where one speaks French. If the lieutenant of colonial artillery Ernest Psichari had not fought in French as far as the Adrar, (or thereabouts), (forgive me this imprecision, my faithful friend), the writer Ernest Psichari wrote in vain an admirable novel. The temporal constantly keeps, and constantly commands, the spiritual. The spiritual is constantly laid in the camp-bed of the temporal. It is in definitive, or rather it is at the origin and it is all the time the soldier, (and his enemy that other soldier), who makes it so that one speaks or that one does not speak French here or there. It is the soldier who makes it so that one speaks French from Dakar to Bizerte and from Brest to Longwy. It is the soldier who makes it so that one speaks French at Maubeuge and at Liège and in short at Mulhouse and at Colmar. And it is the soldier who makes it so that one speaks French in Paris.

§. — So that in last definitive the soldier serves not only to prevent passage when the Sorbonne has ceremonies in the street, he serves also to prevent everyone from passing when the Sorbonne exercises her government in the world. Passive obedience, so reviled by the Sorbonnards, makes it so that the soldier blindly defends the Sorbonne against all her enemies.

§. — Is it then only by lightness, by lack of gravity, by lack of reflection, by lack of mind and of consistency of mind and of philosophy that the Sorbonne thus bears ill will to the protecting soldier. And to the soldier always pioneer, (pioneer, pawn, pedo, foot-soldier, infantryman). Ignorant as they are, they still suspect a little all that I have just said. I should be tempted to think that it is rather that they really all have the temperament of their friend Jaurès, the same character, if one may name that a character, this baseness, this taste for affront, and what goes with it, this base envy, this profound need of ingratitude for whoever serves them.

§. — One wonders whether there is not more, (I who know them well): that secret thought that a Professor is more than a professor, and a Doktor more than a doctor. And there I know not what obscure design, to become Professor from the professor that one was, that would be rising; in grade. And Doktor, from doctor.

§. — One must confess that there is something truly monstrous in a people being thus betrayed by its head. Since they are pan-Germanists, and since one must do everything in the German manner, then why do they not imitate the Germany of 1813. An opportune centenary, and the Germans have celebrated it with ostentation enough, could perhaps have given them the idea. Even in the manuals of M. Seignobos we have learned that the German Universities were in 1813 at the head of a Germany that wished to free itself. Why must it be that in 1913, and under the half-presidency of M. Seignobos, the University of Paris should rebel against a France that does not wish to fall into servitude. After all M. Seignobos perhaps knows what is in his manuals.

§. — Shall I say a few words of M. Seignobos. But I shall say them only with extreme reserve. For I have known M. Seignobos in memorable circumstances.

§. — They are memorable for me, they are perhaps not for him. These historians forget so quickly.

§. — It was, I think, in 97 or thereabouts. 1897. For 1797 was the first Directory, (the present one being the second), and we touch 1797 only precisely through the books of the historians. 1897, which is very far also, we touch it inside our memory. One day of those times, in 1897, the anti-Semitic and anti-Dreyfusist bands had, by some ruse of war, and I suspect by some violence, invaded the Sorbonne.

§. — It was a great affair. These anti-Semitic and anti-Dreyfusist bands were very brave, they were very well led, they were very forward and took the most vigorous offensives, in conformity with the principles of modern war. You are too young, my children, to have known all that. And we too were very brave, we the anti-anti-Semitic and Dreyfusist bands, and we were very well led, (for we led ourselves), and we practised the most vigorous offensives, in conformity with the principles of modern war. There were only the radicals, in that time, who were not brave. In that time.

§. — Everyone fought, in that time. (There were only the radicals who did not fight. They were full of a strange political fright redoubled with a strange parliamentary fright and complicated with a strange electoral fright). All the rest of us fought like dogs and I can say it, in these street battles nothing on either side was ever committed against honour.

§. — There was no question of being a pacifist, in that time. Everyone was at war, everyone was making war. It is true that it was civil war and it has always had charms. War has sweetnesses like no other. There were only the radicals who did not make war. They waited in a kind of senile, political, parliamentary, electoral trembling, for everyone to be worn out so as to despoil everyone. That is what happened and that is the whole history of these last fifteen years. We have known a Chamber where there was only one Dreyfusard deputy and it was Vazeille. Vazeille is what he is, but he is the only deputy who marched straight from one end to the other of the Dreyfus affair. So at the last elections, or the one before the last, he was nearly unbolted from Montargis, I say unbolted as a deputy, by an extremely rich Jew, and naturally radical. And the radicals called him that curé Vazeille.

§. — Everyone in that time was military, and militarist. We formed two ardent armies. Equally honourable from the point of view of war. Equally honourable from the point of view of sport. There were only the radicals who had not found a place in these two immense armies. They were preparing only to ravage the field of battle, to despoil the wounded and the dead.

§. — It is truly a great mystery this kind of ligature of the spiritual to the temporal. One could almost say that it is like a kind of operation of a mysterious graft. The temporal furnishes the stock and the spiritual, if it wishes to live, if it wishes to produce, if it wishes to continue, if it wishes to pursue, if it wishes to flower and leaf, if it wishes to bud and to button, if it wishes to point forth and to fructify, the spiritual is forced to insert itself into it. Force furnishes the stock and the idea is forced to insert itself into it. The body furnishes the stock and the spirit is forced to insert itself into it. Rome furnishes the force and the ancient idea is forced to insert itself into it.

§. — The anti-Semitic bands therefore had invaded the Sorbonne. — Well, you say to me, that was not difficult. You had only to rush to the Chamber and the three hundred radical deputies came running to your aid. Was that not already the bloc. This bloc would have made a fine battalion all along the boulevard Saint-Germain.

§. — My little friend, you do not follow me. They were one, in 97, the radical deputies who flew to the defence of the Republic. My friend the radical deputies are quite willing to be Dreyfusards in 1913, and one must do them this justice that in 1913 they are frenzied Dreyfusards, fanatical Dreyfusards. But in 97 they preferred not to be Dreyfusards. Each to his taste. And in 1913 the radicals jostle each other like little madwomen, so they all throw themselves together to the rescue of the Republic. But in 97 they preferred to look toward their constituencies.

§. — Be reassured however, my little lambs, and do not tremble so in your smocks. M. Seignobos was not destroyed that day by the anti-Semitic bands. The proof is that he still exists. And that is a historical proof. Or else there are none. No, he was not massacred. For I was on watch.

§. — I ran to his rescue. That is one of those minor incidents that historians neglect but that chroniclers do not forget. Chroniclers omit nothing. It is solely for that reason that the historians cannot stand the chroniclers. I was young in that time, and a normalien, (the two are not incompatible). I was not as today a weary pamphleteer. The École Normale in that time was marvellously equipped from the military point of view. Not as today for making officers of the reserve, but in that time for making soldiers of that civil war. We were, we formed a little band of an extraordinary suppleness, of an extraordinary mobility, but of an extraordinary firmness. Our speed of mobilisation had been brought to an unheard-of point of precision. In less than a few minutes, (let us say six or seven in all), we could, setting out from 45 rue d’Ulm, carry our effectives to the threatened points of the Sorbonne. It must be said that conscripts, squares, cubes, we were soldiers of three years. There were even a certain number of re-enlisted men, under the names of bisquares, archicubes, and preparators. The most justly celebrated of these preparators was the preparator of mathematics.

§. — Shall I confess it, in that time I was a sort of chief. One must forgive everything to youth. One has the right to be a chief until twenty-four, twenty-five. Twenty years of a growing solitude that shall do nothing but grow give me perhaps the right to recall that in that time I was so to speak the military chief of the old École Normale. Or rather there were two chiefs. I was the military chief on the days when there was fighting to be done. Herr was the military chief on the days when there was not fighting to be done. And as the capacity of a same man never varies much, I had in sum in this civil military substantially the same command that I have since had in the military military. That is to say I had a good section.

It was, very nearly, the same effective.

§. — My God I shall not say that I saved M. Seignobos’s life, for my own entry into life, and for my debut in existence, and for my opening of the subject, and for my entry into relation. It is much simpler. We only prevented him from having his mug, (as we say), broken by what the newspapers used to call the anti-Semite cudgels, (and one should say anti-Semitic), and which were simply vigorous bludgeons. Let us say in a word that we succeeded in veiling his face. Or in saving his face.

§. — A whole attitude of M. Seignobos toward me over the last few years and the latest letter I received from him give me to think that he has completely forgotten those heroic times. That is in order. But Labiche, Eugène Labiche would not be what he is, the greatest psychologist who ever was before the Eternal, if I, for my part, had not vowed an imperishable gratitude to M. Seignobos. In that Journey to Switzerland which was the Dreyfus affair, M. Seignobos played M. Perrichon. And it was we who saved M. Seignobos from a purely imaginary danger. How then not to become attached to him, and not to wish him well till the cessation of animal warmth.

§. — I shall therefore render him, and this very day, a certain number of services. How indeed to speak of anything of all that is happening and not occupy oneself with him. He has been very active these last six or seven weeks. He has been truly conspicuous. (I take this word not in the sense of Victor Hugo and of Leconte de Lisle, where a seer means a prophet, but in the sense in which one says of a fabric, of a colour, of a dress that it is conspicuous). In this sense M. Seignobos has been truly very conspicuous for six or seven weeks, and one really cannot speak of what is going on without saying a word about him.

§. — M. Seignobos is in the process of losing, in a few weeks, the oldest, the best, the most authentic popularity there was in all the Latin Quarter. I shall perhaps astonish M. Seignobos by revealing to him that this popularity was in no way founded either on his work as a historian or on his trade as a professor of history. It was founded on this kind of promptness, in repartee, on this kind of abruptness, and a little raw, of impulsive, of sincere and brave, of natural, of unconventional, of unartificial, of unconventional, of unsolemn, of unofficial, of unfaked, of un-academic, (of academic all the same), of un-professorial, (of professorial all the same), and of un-civil-servant and of un-Sorbonnard and of Sorbonnard all the same. It was founded on that brusqueness short and cut off, green, on that greenness, on that humour a little crazy but all the more singular, all the more attaching, all the more taking and sympathetic, unexpected, coming out in the most unforeseen sallies, the most cheering, the most raw; the most baroque; supposedly the newest; the most material; often the most down-to-earth and the most realistic; always the most contrary to what one expected at that moment from a professor of history, and from a university man, and from a Sorbonnard. The whole served up by a stammering so perfected that not only is this stammering prodigious in a professor but no one shall ever make me believe that it is not willed. Stammering, (one knows it), is the greatest (temporal) mark of sincerity.

§. — I really cannot not speak of M. Seignobos. He has shown himself so much in this meeting, in all this action. It would be childishness to pretend not to have seen him. It would be to do him an injury not to take him into account. And he himself would certainly be injured by it.

§. — I shall therefore say to him, my dear master. My dear master, do not then write, and long articles, in German newspapers, neither in the Gazette of Frankfurt, nor in the Gazette of Cologne, nor in the Gazette of Pomerania, nor in any other Zeitung. Firstly I do not understand that you do not feel that there is here, at this moment, a question of the most elementary decency. Even M. Maximilien Harden does not write in the Dépêche of Toulouse. Secondly these sallies which are evidently excellent at number 16 and at the hour of tea are unrecognisable, become quite other in a German newspaper. This sally so ingenious, that there shall not be war, because war destroys armies. We know, we, how to savour all the charm of such an invention. But will the Germans savour it. These Germans are so stupid, and so accustomed to the document, (if anyone knows it, my dear master, it is you): they are quite capable, when they find in a German newspaper an article, and a long article by M. Seignobos, professor of history at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Paris, of believing that they have facing them, both a professor, and a historian, and a university man, and a civil servant, and an official, (especially given what a professor is among them); to say everything their tendency is certainly to believe that they have facing them someone authorised, and to say everything finally they are so silly that what they expect of an old man and a man in place is perhaps not childish pranks.

§. — Even in France, may M. Seignobos permit me to tell him so, not everyone knows him as we know him. Not everyone is like us in the key of F. I know well that all these meetings are scarcely full of any but professionals. But after all into these meetings there may slip by error a few elements of the real people. When M. Seignobos speaks in a meeting, with the authority we have given him elsewhere, the people may be tempted to make this imprudent reasoning: that he knows history, since he teaches it. (For we, we are debating the question of knowing whether there is history or whether there is none, but the people knows very well that there is history, since it is taught to them; and since it is in the curricula). The people listens to M. Seignobos as he is officially, as he himself is on the curricula. The people does not know what a spoiled child we had ended by making of our master.

§. — When M. Seignobos officially and publicly stands guarantor that there shall not be war, he certainly loses sight of the fact that the trade of the historian in the Republic is not to predict the future, it is to predict the past. And even then they set about it so badly to predict the past, and they succeed at it evidently so little, that they would do a little better to try to find their way in their own domain, rather than to wish to encroach on the reserved domain.

§. — One would also wish that M. Seignobos predict the present with a little more exactitude, that he not affirm at this moment, that he not declare ex officio and if I may say ex cathedra, (since the rostrum of meetings has become for them a sort of chair, of professorial chair, of magisterial chair), that at this moment and for some years and for these few years to come Germany is in no way increasing either her armaments or her effectives. Because he thus makes himself the laughing-stock of everyone. And we who know him can know that it is a hazing and a canular and we can find that it is exaggerated (the canular). But those who do not know him, (who do not know M. Seignobos), (the public), could believe that he is mad: or that he lies.

§. — I am the most liberal man in the world; provided that liberalism not be ignavia. I am more liberal than all these liberals and all these libertarians who make such ceremonies of it. I do not say that one is forced to believe that one will have the war, but I say that it is folly to guarantee that one will not have it.

§. — There is here, on the part of this historian, an unawareness, an ignorance, an incredible forgetting of what is the very reality of the event, and of the properly historical event. One may at a pinch hold the opinion that nothing will happen, although it is extremely difficult to think that all this will end without something ending by happening. But after all this is at a pinch and so to speak at the limit an opinion. What is mad, what is a wager, in a situation like this one, is to guarantee that nothing will happen. One must be a professor, and a professor of history, to hold to such a wager. The habit they have taken of knowing war better than Napoleon and peace better than Augustus and Napoleon has given them this assurance.

§. — One must be a professor, and a professor of history, and (believe oneself to) have grasped in the past the morrows of all the eves and the bindings of all the morrows to all the eves to believe that one will also grasp the binding of this unique morrow to this unique eve that is today. One grasps the morrow well, monsieur le professeur, monsieur our master, but one does not grasp tomorrow.

§. — I confess that I am rather wounded by this idea of M. Seignobos to bet a lunch with M. Marcel Prévost that we shall not have war and I understand the bewilderment of M. Marcel Prévost and I am surprised that M. Seignobos does not understand it. M. Seignobos ought to know enough history to suspect that all this will perhaps not end and in any case will not be settled by a lunch. We do not know what tomorrow will be. But we know very well what we shall do tomorrow, in all hypotheses. We know very well that we shall make it so that we are resolved not to fall into the ridiculous as in 70. None can boast that he will not be defeated. But we, we boast that we shall not be defeated in the category of the ridiculous. And as much as we can we shall make it so that it resemble neither 70 nor 71 and we shall make it so that it resemble 93. We do not know what tomorrow will be. And different hypotheses can be envisaged. If there is nothing, (which is difficult), all goes well. If there is something, and we are conquerors with sufficient ease, all goes well. If there is something and in this balancing of forces if not of speeds we are conquerors with difficulty, perhaps all will go well. But if situations, from difficult become critical or merely grave, it would be a folly, (a second folly, and this one would cost more dear), to believe that we shall not catch the enemy of the interior. We are resolved at any price not to fall back into the ridicule of 1870. All the examples are there. And all the revolutionary examples and all the republican examples. And it is a great happiness that here and in this our old revolutionary blood and our old republican blood only kindle still our old French blood and that they find themselves in agreement so fully and work together and that does not happen every day. It is such a rare happiness, we shall therefore profit by it. All the examples are there, all the examples instruct us. If the Communards, that is to say the Parisians who had the taste for combating beyond the last extremity, that is to say in a word if the Communards, that is to say the Parisians who wished to die, had begun by getting rid of the politicians, of the intellectuals and of the traitors who prevented them from fighting, thirty-five or forty thousand of them would not afterwards have been shot. Woe to the party that does not reduce the enemies of the interior. All my old revolutionary and republican blood comes back to me here and I confess that in such times I set nothing above those excellent institutions of the old regime which are called the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Committee of Public Safety and even I think the Committee of General Security. They saved France, that is all that is asked of them. And in such moments I set nothing above Robespierre in the old regime and nothing above Richelieu in the revolutionary regime. Our masters (of history) have perhaps heard tell of a man called Robespierre and of a man called Richelieu, and of a Revolutionary Tribunal, and of a Committee of General Security, and of a Committee of Public Safety. And under those governments not everything is paid with a lunch one has lost, and one does not play a lunch but one plays one’s head, or one plays one’s skin, according as one prefers to address oneself to the civilian suppliers, or to the military suppliers.

§. — There is perhaps not a man in France who is so much as I the enemy of M. Hervé. But one must acknowledge that he is not a coward like Jaurès, and far from it, (he makes Jaurès tremble enough), and that he is not a deceitful man like Jaurès, and far from it, and that he is not, like Jaurès, a coarse horse-dealer from the South, and that there is in his system, (in his false systems), at times a certain logical rigour, and pieces that hold together, (that is already something), and flashes and bursts of a certain uprightness. He scarcely ever knows what one ought to say, but he almost always knows what he is saying, and above all he often enough knows of what one is speaking, in what plane one is, in what play of values, in what order of greatnesses one moves. It is undeniable that he knows a little history. And it is all the more marvellous that he holds the agrégation in history, or that he is agrégé in it, as one pleases. Some years ago, when he was beginning his exercises, Hervé modestly declared that he was the best pupil of M. Seignobos. That was not saying enough and we for our part would say that Hervé was and is the best pupil that M. Seignobos. Or again I would prefer to say that M. Seignobos is the worst pupil of Hervé. He (Hervé) advocated some years ago a little operation that I am forced to call of mobilisation itself by which on the first day of the other mobilisation, (ours), and during the first hour the militants would shoot the militaries, that is to say the army of General Hervé, (as he is called today not without some appearance), would shoot all the officers, non-commissioned officers, corporals and soldiers of the military army, plus all the officers, non-commissioned officers, corporals and soldiers of the Paris firemen, plus all the officers, non-commissioned officers, brigadiers and cavalrymen, plus all the officers, non-commissioned officers, brigadiers and gunners, plus all the officers, non-commissioned officers, corporals and sappers, and not only that but all those of the reserve of the active army and all those of the territorials and all those of the reserve of the territorial army, and the younger volunteers, and the older volunteers, and the recruits, and the veterans, and moreover that it would massacre the pontoneers, the telegraphists, all those services that I forget. They would spare only the health services. And even then. It is permitted to treat such an imagining with contempt. I wish to retain from it only this, that he knows very well of what one speaks, and in what plane one moves. He, he knows very well that it is not a question of a lunch, and that it is a question of life or death.

§. — His only error was to believe that we would let it be done, and that, we being gone, our wives and our children would let them do it. In time of peace those who go to the meeting are always right, because the others work. But in time of war everyone is at the meeting.

§. — The greatest hypocrite of all the band is our old friend the vidame Francis de Pressensé. One believed that he had perished, but here they say that he has woken up at Brest, transatlantic port. This puffed-up man, (and one knows well enough that this word is not an insult when applied to M. Francis de Pressensé), this barrel, has for ten years resolved to occupy the only position perhaps that is untenable. Here is what I mean.

§. — But first I wish to note that M. Francis de Pressensé is perhaps the finest example I know of how, (how to say, here one would need a Latin conjunction, and an adverbial conjunction, and a Latin conjunction of indirect style), (of indirect interrogation), of how much, quanto, he is the finest example and perhaps the finest witness of how much the virtues of war are easier than the virtues of peace. And that is rather a successful result for a pacifist. It does not (I was about to say unfortunately) admit any doubt that during the two or three years of the war of the Dreyfus affair M. de Pressensé was a sort of hero. And when I say a sort, I am wrong. I let myself be carried away by a movement of bad humour, by a movement of restriction perfectly idiotic. He was a hero of every sort, and particularly of the military sort. Those who have kept the memory of the Mirbeau-Pressensé-Quillard conferences and of the implausible tours in the provinces know, and we shall always bear witness, that Quillard, who is dead, that Mirbeau, whom I execrate, and that Pressensé, whom I decidedly can no longer abide, comported themselves as heroes. The misfortune is that one obviously cannot always fight and that one day one must sign peace. The peace in this war, the peace which ended this war was what was called the amnesty, against which we never ceased to rise up. When this lame peace had been signed, when M. de Pressensé had become a half-pay of Dreyfusism, he completely lost the north. And notably the north of Dreyfusism. First he believed that it was not subscribing to the amnesty constantly to violate its clauses by forfeitures, by withholdings, by fraudulent inventions, forgetting that a falsified peace is not great war and that on the contrary it accumulates in a contradictory assemblage the vices of a bad peace and the vices of a bad war. But it is a sophism of reason and a sophism of conduct that has remained very frequent. We shall try to analyse it a little if I manage to speak one day of the case or as one says of the affair of du Paty de Clam and of another case that I know. Ever since he was given back to the leisures of peace M. de Pressensé, with a kind of jealous care, has not ceased to hold the most untenable positions of imbalance and of internal contradiction. It was a kind of wager so tirelessly held that one would call it an amusement. But it is an amusement that costs a people dear, and even a party, and a doctrine. By this kind of unsustainable wager tirelessly sustained, this fat cask has constantly held positions and situations of intellectual and even mental imbalance in which a most square cubic metre would not manage to set itself on its rear end. Here is what I mean.

§. — I grant that a syndicalist may say: I do not wish to hear of Alsace-Lorraine. When I say that I grant it, one understands well that I grant it at the second degree. Or if one wishes to count otherwise, at the first. I grant it once one is in syndicalism. A syndicalist is a man who says: I do not occupy myself with peoples, I do not occupy myself with lineages. I occupy myself only with classes. I do not occupy myself with political oppressions, with the oppressions undergone by peoples, I occupy myself only with economic oppression, with the oppression undergone by the working class. I repeat, such a conception, such a doctrine may be execrable, it may be hateful, and what is more serious it may be incomplete, but at least in itself it holds together, in sum in itself it is constant. But Pressensé.

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§. — If there is a doctrine in which there is a question of Alsace-Lorraine and in which it is eternal and in which the claim is imprescriptible it is the doctrine of the Rights of Man and it is the doctrine of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and consequently I think, (but it is here perhaps that I am mistaken), it is the doctrine of the League of the Rights of Man. M. de Pressensé is the president of the League of the Rights of Man or in short he is the president of the Central Committee or in short he is the big shot and the largest personage of the League of the Rights of Man. Not only that, but he is essentially the League of the Rights of Man. He is its head, he is its marrow, he is its nucleus, he is its magus, he is its body and the whole volume. It is even rather amusing that this old great supposedly democratic league and to say everything that a League of the Rights of Man should in reality be monarchised to this point. But that is their business. What I wish to say is that it would be monstrous, if it were not above all sovereignly ridiculous, so contradictory it is, that it should be precisely a League of the Rights of Man which declares that there is no question of Alsace-Lorraine.

§. — There are systems in which there is no question of Alsace-Lorraine. But the system of the Rights of Man is perhaps the one in which on the contrary if I may say the question of Alsace-Lorraine beats at its peak; the one in which it is so to speak the purest; the one in which it certainly yields the most. It is the one in which it is, in which it exists the most. It is perhaps even the only one in which it exists integrally.

§. — I would not wish to speak a slightly philosophical language, but after all if there is a system in which the right of peoples to dispose of themselves is an absolute; and a primacy; and a given; immediate, it is indeed the system of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

§. — We have seen it abundantly for fifteen and twenty years by the simple enumeration of the peoples in whose favour the League of the Rights of Man and the personnel of the League of the Rights of Man have asked our concurrence. I know it all the better in that each time we have made a cahier. I too am for the liberty of peoples. The only difference is that the politicians of the League of the Rights of Man live off it whereas we on the contrary we live and work and spend ourselves for it. Cahier of our collaborator Jean Deck for Finland; cahier of our collaborator Pierre Quillard for Armenia; cahier of our collaborator Bernard-Lazare for the Jews of Romania; cahier our collaborator Bernard-Lazare was preparing for us for the Jews of Russia and which was written by our collaborators Henri Dagan and Élie Eberlin; and by our collaborator Georges Delahache; cahiers of our collaborator Edmond Bernus for the Poles made German and Prussian; cahiers of our collaborators Pierre Mille and Félicien Challaye for the negroes of the French Congo and of the former Leopoldine Congo; and at this very moment I believe they are preparing for us a cahier for the negroes of the Portuguese possessions.

§. — Certes I regret nothing and if these cahiers were to be redone I would redo them all. And I hope that we shall do many more, of the same kind. But I ask: Why are we asked to be moved for all oppressed peoples, except for one alone, which is as if by chance a French people.

§. — I ask it particularly and in a few words of our collaborator Félicien Challaye, who works a great deal among oppressed peoples and who has become a kind of professional in it. Challaye has found here every latitude to defend the oppressed peoples who are his clients. Does he admit or does he not admit that one must also defend the oppressed people of Alsace and the oppressed people of Lorraine.

§. — I shall say as much, or rather I shall ask as much, of our master M. Gabriel Séaille or Séailles, (forgive me, I do not have his Complete Works at hand and I no longer know whether he takes an s or whether he does not take one). Has M. Séailles not presided over enough meetings for oppressed peoples. Then how does it come about that he presides over a meeting against the Alsatians-Lorrainers.

§. — I ask very little. I ask only that one be constant. Either let them not speak to us of other peoples, and then I consent that they not speak to us of the Alsatians-Lorrainers; or let them speak to us of other peoples, and then I ask that they also speak to us of Alsace-Lorraine. By the same title.

§. — I shall say more, and I shall say all my thought. I no more love to speak of the Alsatians-Lorrainers, (it shows enough in my complete works), and I do not like that one speak of them to me. When one has sold one’s brother, it is better not to speak of him.

§. — There are in families such shameful secrets. And then it is better to keep silent.

§. — It is already not so brilliant, what we have done with them, what we have made of them. And there is no being proud of it.

§. — The bottom of my thought, on the question of Alsace-Lorraine, is that I do not blame the Prussians for having taken them. I blame those wretched French who let them go. The Prussians were only soldiers, victors, and conquerors. They brought into play force, the force of war, of victory, of conquest. But I despise and I hate, but I blame these wretched Frenchmen who to have peace sold two provinces and afterwards went to weep at the Assembly of Bordeaux. Here is the case: To moan, to weep, to pray…

§. — Instead of continuing the war. It was not only the right, and the duty, to continue the war; and a necessity of pact stronger than anything. We know today, we know very well, and even the historians, the last informed, confess that the Prussians were exhausted and that it was the victory.

§. — And we know also that it was economy, that it was thrift, that it was what cost the least, both in men, and in money. They were sparing first a civil war, the thirty thousand men, the thirty thousand dead of the Commune; and if one had spent against the common enemy first all that these two halves of France spent one against the other. And they were sparing those forty years of armed peace, and of denatality.

§. — That is why, monsieur Seignobos, one must be on guard and we shall never begin again 70; nor consequently 71. We shall not begin civil wars again. We shall not begin again this stupidity, this crime, of massacring thirty or forty thousand Frenchmen. Neither shall we commit this stupidity, this contrary crime, of letting ourselves, us, be massacred thirty or forty thousand by the pacifists. And by the humanitarians. At no price shall we let these idiocies begin again. At no price shall we massacre nor let be massacred thirty or forty thousand men of the flock. For on both sides it is always the French flock. But precisely to prevent it happening, to avoid such a catastrophe, we are quite capable of suppressing in due time a few bad shepherds.

§. — I am a good republican. I am an old revolutionary. In time of war there is only one policy, and it is the policy of the National Convention. But one must not disguise from oneself that the policy of the National Convention is Jaurès in a cart and a drum-roll to cover that great voice.

§. — I am an old republican. I am an old revolutionary. In time of peace I am a good fellow, like everyone. And I would not touch a hair of M. Caillaux. And I would not even pluck the little beard of M. d’Estournelles de Constant. But in time of war one must indeed think that it will be serious. And we do not know whether we shall be happy, but we know that we shall not be small.

§. — In time of peace we let ourselves be done, granted. Because we work and we cannot hold out against them who do not work. But in time of war one no longer works.

§. — In time of peace granted, all goes well. And all that will end in posters and meetings and speeches in the Chamber. But in time of war, in a Republic, there is only the policy of the National Convention. I am for the policy of the National Convention against the policy of the Assembly of Bordeaux, I am for the Parisians against the rurals, I am for the Commune of Paris, for both Communes, against peace, I am for the Commune against capitulation, I am for the policy of Proudhon and for the policy of Blanqui against the dreadful little Thiers. He who does not surrender is right against him who surrenders, that is the only measure, and he is absolutely right, I mean that the rightness he has of it is an absolute, and that the excess so to speak that he has over the other, the deviation, the carrying away that he has over the other is an absolute. As for what a man like Proudhon would have done with a wretch like Jaurès, if the voluminous lout had fallen into his hands, it is better not to think of it.

§. — We shall ask Mathiez what was going on, under the National Convention, and how the enemies of the interior were treated. The policy of the National Convention was to strike heads, (bad heads). One does not remark enough that this policy is not only the only one, but in addition it is a policy of economy and even the only policy of economy, that it is the one which is the pacifist policy and the humanitarian policy. It is the one which costs least. It is the one that spares the most. It is the one that comes out cheapest; both in men, and in money. All the regimes of weakness, all the regimes of capitulation before the enemy are also those of the greatest massacres of the military population and of the civilian population. Nothing is murderous like weakness and cowardice. Nothing is humane like firmness. It is Richelieu who is humane literally and it is Robespierre who is humane. The regimes of cowardice are those that cost the world the most, and in definitive they are those that can end and the only ones that really end in atrocity. And moreover it is an atrocity of turpitude. There are only two policies. In time of war the regimes that do not immediately reduce the enemies of the interior are inevitably led to massacre entire and considerable portions of the people; or if you wish the regimes that do not begin by putting the enemies of the interior in step, that is to say, to name them, a few wretched intellectuals and politicians always end by massacring the people, the regimes that do not begin by annulling the bad shepherds always end by massacring the flock itself.

§. — It is the National Convention that is in time of war the regime of sweetness and of tenderness. And it is the Assembly of Bordeaux and the government of Versailles that is the brutality of the brute and the horror and the cruelty.

§. — The Convention did not cost dear, for what it had to do, and for what it did.

§. — And moreover it is the National Convention that is the old regime and it is the regime of Robespierre that is the regime of our kings, being the regime of Richelieu.

§. — In time of war there is only one regime and it is the Jacobin regime. Louis XVI was rightly displaced since for this war which was coming, which was begun, he was out of place, he was replaced by more Jacobin, by more royal, by more old-regime, by more Richelieu men than he. And this other fat man Jaurès would perhaps not be humiliated by this historical precedent, and by being displaced in the same forms of this royalty of servitude that he exercises today over some misguided people, and that it should be Santerre’s drum that covered his great voice.

§. — In time of war there is only the State. And it is Vive la Nation.

§. — In time of war he who does not surrender is my man, whoever he be, wherever he come from, and whatever be his party. He does not surrender. That is all that is asked of him. And he who surrenders is my enemy, whoever he be, wherever he come from, and whatever be his party. And I hate him all the more, and I despise him all the more in that by the games of political parties he would claim to be related to me.

§. — Whatever the parties, he who does not surrender a French place is the lawful heir of all those who have not surrendered French places. Rochereau in Belfort (and Masséna in Genoa) are the lawful heirs of her who lifted the siege of Orleans. They are her spiritual heirs as they are her temporal successors. They are of her spiritual filiation and of her spiritual communion and not only of her lineage. And Trochu, with all his capuchinades, is not of it.

§. — I go further. Of all the bad uses one can make of prayer and of the sacraments, of all the abuses, of all the perversions of prayer and of the use of the sacraments none is so odious as this abuse of laziness which consists in not working and in not acting and afterwards and during and before bringing in prayer to make up for the lack. There is here a baseness, an odious abuse of prayer and of the sacrament. For it is to bring into play, it is to bring in, it is to employ prayer and the sacrament not only to mask laziness, but properly to disobey the law of work, which is I think a law. It is to employ them to sustain, to nourish, to compensate laziness. It is to betray at once prayer, the sacrament, and the law of obedience, since it is to wish to establish a fraudulent compensation, it is to wish to make prayer and the sacrament serve to sin, to commit the sin of laziness. It is to wish to make prayer and the sacrament serve against the commandment of obedience, against the commandment of work, which is I think one of the oldest commandments if not the oldest, being bound to the first law and to original sin and to the chasing-out of the earthly paradise.

§. — He who brings into play prayer and the sacrament in order to be dispensed from working and from acting, that is to say in time of war to be dispensed from fighting, breaks the order of God himself and the most ancient commandment, and he breaks it by three monstrous ruptures, for he turns against the law of work, against the commandment of work, prayer and the sacrament which I think were not given to us for that; to encourage us, to prepare us to disobey; and to commit the sin of laziness; and to engage us in it; by a fraudulent balancing of the accounting of responsibilities; and to permit us to make up the difference when we prepare to disobey, and to commit the sin of laziness. It is properly a diversion of the sacrament and of prayer not even merely for a foreign end, not even merely for a temporal end, but to commit by a top-up compensation the sin of disobedience to the most ancient commandment. And I knew well that I had a reason for which I bore so much ill will to that Trochu and to all that army of Versailles and to all those residues and to all that following of the bigots of the capitulations of 1870. As much as it is permitted, as much as it is fine, as much as it is profound to ask by prayer, to ask in prayer for the crowning of fortune and that fate of battles which resides only in the event, so much it is stupid, and it is of disobedience, to wish that the good God should work in our place, and to have the gall to ask it of him. To ask for victory and not to have the desire to fight, I find that ill-bred.

§. — The crusaders, above all Saint Louis, who made a holy war, who fought literally for the body of God, for the temporal of God, since they were fighting for the recovery of the tomb of Jesus Christ, did not however trust to it. They did not pray like geese, who wait for their mash. They prayed, better than we, and afterwards, and if I may say in execution of their prayer, and almost already in crowning of their prayer, they fought, themselves, as much as they could, with all their body, and themselves with all their temporal. For in the temporal and for the conquest of the temporal one must also engage the temporal. Help yourself, heaven will help you, it is not only a proverb, of ours, and a fable of La Fontaine, it is a theology, and the order of march, and the very form of command. And the only theology that is orthodox. The others would be heretical.

§. — Likewise Joan of Arc who certainly did not make holy war but who certainly had thought of the holy war, of a continuation and a crowning of the crusade, and who made not only a sacred war but a war of vocation, and of proper vocation, a war commanded to her personally and formally. And yet those folk prayed better than we. But when they had prayed they buckled their sword-belts, for the very crowning of their prayer and also obeying thus the law of work.

§. — Which is to say that the more a military battle is beautiful, militarily beautiful, the more it is kindred to the battles of Joan of Arc. He who defends France is always he who defends the kingdom of France. He who does not surrender a place may be as republican as he likes and as secular as he likes. I grant even that he be a freethinker. He will none the less be a little cousin of Joan of Arc. And he who surrenders a place will only ever be a swine, even were he a churchwarden of his parish. (And even were he to have all the virtues. And then we don’t give a damn for his virtues. What is asked of the man of war, is not virtues. And what Joan of Arc asked of her men, was not virtues, it was a Christian life. And that is infinitely another thing. Morality was invented by the sickly. And the Christian life was invented by Jesus Christ). And then, in that case, he is twice hateful, twice execrable, twice contemptible, as false Frenchman and as false Christian. And on the contrary Valmy and Jemmapes are the lawful daughters of Patay. They are not only her temporal daughters, which is altogether evident, they are also her daughters and almost her god-daughters spiritual. They are of the same lineage, of the same family spiritual, of the same tone, of the same procedure, of the same élan, of the same movement, of the same quality spiritual.

§. — The place that His Majesty has entrusted to me. It is always the king who entrusts them with the same places.

§. — All this history of France is so simple. Louis XVI, no longer being king enough, was displaced by a Republic more king. This Louis XVI was good. That is not what one asks of a government. What one asks of a government is to be firm. This Louis XVI was a fat, a gentle, a good, a pacifist, a debonair, a humanitarian. A philosopher. He was made to see it well enough. He was displaced by those who followed. A do-nothing king, he was displaced by the young Republic just as the last Merovingians, having become do-nothings, were displaced by the young Carolingians, just as the last Carolingians, having become do-nothings, were displaced by the young Capetians. The Republic was the fourth dynasty; strong in its youth.

§. — I have a horror of lyricism and of romanticism always. I have still more horror of it when it is a matter of Alsace-Lorraine. I do not even understand that one should dare to speak of it. I do not even understand that one can speak of it. There is something shameful in always speaking of those unfortunates whom we have abandoned. The question is not to speak of them, but to free them. Or since one has had the courage to deliver them up, and since one has not had the courage to liberate them, it is better to keep silent.

§. — I have a horror of eloquence always. But what to say of those who make eloquence in this unhappy affair where everyone is guilty and certainly criminal, in this unhappy affair where at the origin it was uniquely a matter of keeping the weapons or of not keeping them, where since then it is uniquely a matter of taking up the weapons or of not taking them up.

§. — I have a horror of eloquence always, and of metaphor. When I say that there is a German party and that Jaurès is a pan-Germanist, this is not an invective. All that I try to do is to sketch a map of the intellectual parties and of the political parties. All that I want to do, all that I propose to do, is intellectual and political geography and topography. And I really speak of this question of Alsace-Lorraine only against my will.

§. — What I ask of doctrines, of systems, of parties, above all is to be consistent, is to hold with themselves. Afterwards naturally we shall be able to ask something else of them. But at the first degree what we ask of them is not to play upon two tables and not to play two contrary games.

§. — I therefore forget my race and my country. I transport myself into the historical and as these imbeciles say into the objective. Into the pure objective; into the impersonal objective; into the serene objective. I say that even upon this plane, even in this register, even in this system and perhaps above all in this system the position, the situation of M. de Pressensé is untenable.

§. — Either let them go on speaking to us of all the oppressed peoples, (it is my system and I do not need to say that for me it is much more than a system), and then let them speak to us also of the Alsatians-Lorrainers. Or let them not speak to us of the Alsatians-Lorrainers, (it is the system of M. Francis de Pressensé), but then let them not speak to us either of the other peoples. And let them not even in theory speak to us of oppressed peoples.

§. — But what is not tenable is the position of M. Francis de Pressensé, of coming always to speak to us of all the peoples, (he has made his career out of that, and his political fortune), and of not wishing that one speak of the Alsatians-Lorrainers.

§. — Here is what I mean to say: One has read here the cahier of our collaborator Georges Delahache entitled the Map with the Green Border and this cahier afterwards obtained a great success with the public. It was a study one can say extremely measured. Perhaps even a little too measured. What I say is that for me, even placing myself at the historical point of view, even placing myself at the celebrated impersonal point of view, even placing myself at the objective point of view, this cahier of Georges Delahache for Alsace-Lorraine enters exactly into homogeneous and continuous series with the cahier of Jean Deck for Finland, with the cahier of Pierre Quillard for Armenia, with the cahier of Bernard-Lazare for the Jews of Romania, with the cahier that Bernard-Lazare had begun to make for the Jews of Russia, with the cahiers of Dagan and of Eberlin and of Delahache for the Jews of Russia, (and why not say it with the old cahier of the same Delahache for the Jews of France), with the three cahiers of Bernus for the Poles of Germany, — and mutatis mutandis, (for oppression is always oppression), with the cahiers of Pierre Mille and of Félicien Challaye for the negroes of the Congo, and with that cahier that is being prepared for us for the negroes of the Portuguese possessions. But it is evident that the cahier of Delahache is quite particularly akin to the three cahiers of Bernus.

It is the brother and the symmetrical of the three cahiers of Bernus. The oppressor is the same, the method of oppression is the same, the oppression is the same.

§. — In the sense in which one says that Finland, in the sense in which one says that Poland is oppressed, it is rigorously true to say that in this same sense Alsace-Lorraine is oppressed. Then how does it come about that they always speak to us of the others and that they never speak to us of those who remain our brothers.

§. — For Jaurès the explanation is extremely simple. He is a pan-Germanist. (One would have to congratulate him on it, if he had been born a German subject). He is an agent of the German party. He works for the greater Germany. But for Pressensé the explanation is much less simple.

§. — I have never said that Hervé was a pan-Germanist nor an agent of the German party. The case of Hervé, while being baroque, is also much less simple. It is a case of fanaticism. And a case of frenzy.

§. — One could rather well sum up this trio in the following forms: Jaurès is a dishonest man. Hervé is an honest man, (and anything one likes, a fanatic, a frenetic, a madman, but an honest man), who has often done foolish things, who perhaps may commit crimes, but whom I believe incapable of a dishonesty. Pressensé is an honest man who constantly does dishonest things.

§. — Ever since he was dispossessed and disarmed of the war of the Dreyfus affair, there is in Pressensé a need of incoherence truly extraordinary and which has often made people believe him dishonest. This incoherence began in a resounding manner. It was just after that amnesty of the Dreyfus affair against which we had risen up together. Pressensé every morning was making in the Aurore a furious article against the amnesty, against the ministry, against the government, against the policy, against Waldeck and perhaps did not even spare Jaurès. Unhappily there happened at that time legislative elections. Pressensé suddenly left Paris a fiery antiministerialist or if you prefer a fiery antiministerial. But one must believe that he changed trains at Les Laumes. For he arrived in Lyon an official candidate, elected by the prefect. Then he returned to Paris.

§. — I believe that Pressensé has carried this incoherence to the maximum in what he will allow me to name the Alsace-Lorraine affair. When one sees all the peoples of whom they have spoken to us and when one sees that there is only one people of which they do not wish that one should speak and that this sole people of which they do not wish that one should speak is a French people, one asks oneself: How does this come about?

§. — At bottom I believe that Pressensé is afraid of force. This man who was personally of an unheard-of courage has become a sort of fat cockroach in everything that is of general politics, whether interior or exterior. His case is not at all that of Jaurès. It is much less simple, much deeper, much more interesting. Jaurès defends the oppressed peoples provided it be against France. If one pressed M. de Pressensé hard he would confess that he defends the oppressed peoples on this condition that the oppressor not be strong; and if one sought a little to analyze what an oppressor who is strong is, one would find in the last resort, in final analysis, that it is an oppressor who can make war. (On the pretext, or on the motive precisely of an attempt at liberation).

§. — So that in final analysis one would find that M. de Pressensé is for the liberty of peoples on condition that there be no risk of war, on condition that the liberation of oppressed peoples does not entail, does not involve risks of war.

§. — Which comes back finally to saying that Pressensé is for right against force when force is not strong.

§. — It is always the same story that one told of him. They used to tell some years ago that Pressensé was going off all bulky through the buffet of the Chamber when a hand struck him on the shoulder. Whose was this hand. No one ever knew but we shall say that it was Clemenceau’s. When one does not know whose a remark is one says it is Clemenceau’s. — Well, said Clemenceau to him, you saw the dispatch from Rome. — What, said Pressensé. — Well, the kaiser is putting five hundred thousand men at the disposal of the pope. — Good God, (said Pressensé), the separation is done for.

§. — It is a very well-known system, and that has always been named the system of peace at any price. It is a scale of values in which honor is less dear than life. One can determine it in a word by saying that it is a system that takes exactly the opposite of the Corneillian system; and of the Corneillian doctrine; and of the Corneillian scale of values. But inasmuch as honor is dearer than life. But inasmuch as honor is dearer than the day: There is the Corneillian formula; the Corneillian system; the Corneillian doctrine; the Corneillian scale of values. The Pressensé system is the system diametrically contrary. It is essentially the system in which honor is less dear than the day.

§. — If it is a system of fear, my God I am willing, but let it be said. Let it be said: There is no question of Alsace-Lorraine because we are afraid of Germany, of German force. And there is a question of the negroes of Angola because we are not afraid of Portuguese force.

§. — It is a pacifism at any price, a system of peace, at any price. I consent to it, but what is preposterous, what is untenable, is to put a pacifism, and if I may say so an integral pacifism, under the aegis, and under the invocation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. I am not charged with putting order into the brain of M. de Pressensé, but in the end the Declaration of the Rights of Man was precisely made, it was precisely introduced into the world to explain that right came before everything, and consequently notably before peace. Even historians know this.

§. — The Republic one and indivisible, there is what came out of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It is of that Republic that we are republicans. The more so as nothing is so monarchic, and so royal, and so ancien France as that formula. M. de Pressensé, formerly vidame, (it has never been known whether he was a vidame, or whether he had been one, and indeed I should very much like someone to tell me a little what a vidame is), (and it suits him so well, to be treated as a ci-devant), (next time we shall affirm in addition that he was lieutenant of wolf-hunting), (and the time after that we shall affirm that he was ban of Temesvar), M. de Pressensé, president of the League of the Rights of Man, has he never heard of the Republic one and indivisible.

§. — The Republic one and indivisible, that is our kingdom of France.

§. — It is a folly to wish to attach pacifism to the Republic, and to the Revolution, and to the Rights of Man. Nothing is more contrary. Pacifism here is dismemberment. It is dismemberment perpetrated and dismemberment maintained. The Republic of pacifism is the dismembered Republic. It is the plural and divided Republic.

§. — I go further and obviously I would not wish to enter into general ideas and especially to be charged with putting general ideas into the head of M. Francis de Pressensé, but in the end one must be what is called a simpleton when one wishes to be polite and what is called an imbecile when one has not the same concern in order to believe that one can present and wish to introduce any right whatever, a point of right upon the surface of the earth without at once there being born of it, there coming of it, at the same time, in that itself, by that itself, indivisibly, a point of war.

§. — If M. de Pressensé has ever read the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, (and in fact why should he not have read it), he will perhaps have seen there that insurrection is or can be the most holy or the most sacred of duties. (There now, here it is I who no longer know it). But in their system it is understood that insurrection is not a war, that insurrection is not war. Insurrection for them is the height of peace. Civil war for them is not war; it is the very crowning of pacifism. When a people tears itself, when a people dismembers itself, then all is well, one is in full peace. The battles of civil war are battles of peacetime. The dead and the wounded of civil war are not cut up by the same surgeons. The massacres of civil wars are obviously massacres of nursing homes.

§. — I do not wish today to enter into the critique of syndicalism, which would require a whole cahier. But in the end, and in the same order of ideas, it is rather amusing to see peace preached in two newspapers, one of which is named War Social, and the other the Battle Syndicalist.

§. — What folly, to wish to bind to the Declaration of the Rights of Man a Declaration of Peace. As if a Declaration of Justice were not in itself and instantaneously a Declaration of war. There is but one Lady in the world who has caused more wars to be made than injustice: and that is justice.

§. — As if it were not enough to speak of justice, for everything at once to be troubled.

§. — What imbecility. What silliness. As if a single point of right, as if a single point of claim could appear in the world and not become at once a point of trouble and a point of origin of war. As if every point of justice, every point of claim of right were not in itself and instantaneously a point of breaking of equilibrium.

§. — I came not to bring peace but the sword. As if every apparatus of claim were not in itself and instantaneously a mounted machine, an apparatus of war; and what is the Declaration of the Rights of Man if not an immense program, an immense apparatus of a constant claim.

§. — With the Declaration of the Rights of Man one could make war all the time, all life long, as much as one wished.

§. — Not only justice but charity itself is full of war. Or rather one must say: Without going even as far as justice, as far as claims, as far as reparations, as far as the exigencies of right and of rigorous justice, from charity itself we know well that charity is a source of war. Such is precisely the temporal lot. Such is the lot of man and of the world.

§. — There is in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, if M. de Pressensé knew how to read, the wherewithal to make war upon everyone for the duration of everyone.

§. — The proof is that it could not appear in the world without raising there a wave of the greatest war that there has ever been in the world. I know well that our historians of the Barbaric school have demonstrated to us that the wars of the Revolution and of the Empire did not result, did not proceed from the Empire and did not result from the Revolution. There is also the Discourse on Method, which does not result from Descartes.

§. — The pax Germanica is hard, says M. de Pressensé, but it is all the same a peace. By this reckoning the Russian peace too is a peace; and the Turkish peace was a peace; and the Belgian peace in Africa and the Portuguese peace. The League of the Rights of Man is not charged with teaching us the pax Germanica. Nor the pax Teutonica. It is charged with teaching us the pax juridica.

§. — If the Alsatians-Lorrainers, says Pressensé, want their autonomy, they have only to procure it for themselves. If it is a pleasantry, and if it is a jest, I must say that I know nothing more monstrous and more odious than this derision. And nothing more stupid. And nothing more imbecilic. And nothing so slyly and so savagely cruel. And nothing so bourgeois, of a cruelty so intellectual, so bourgeois. And of so bitter a derision of executioner. Or rather of the only derision more cruel still than the derision of the executioner: of the derision of the spectator. Has anyone told us that Finland should do it itself, and Armenia itself, and Poland itself. Are we asked that the oppressed negroes do it themselves.

§. — The idea of peace at any price and of the policy of M. de Pressensé, the central idea of pacifism, (for I give it a center), is that peace is an absolute, is that peace is even the first of absolutes, is that peace has a unique price to the point that a peace in injustice is worth more than a war for justice. It is diametrically the contrary of the system of the Rights of Man in which a war for justice is worth more than a peace in injustice.

§. — Or again in the system peace justice is nothing, beside order. (One sees that I give to that system at least everything that it can claim). (I treat it itself in right and in justice). (I make no war upon it). And in the system Rights of Man order is nothing, beside justice.

§. — In the system peace, justice is nothing, that one must buy at the price of a war. In the system Rights of Man peace is nothing, that one must buy at the price of an injustice.

§. — In the system peace, justice is nothing, that one must buy at the price of a disorder. In the system Rights of Man order is nothing, that one must buy at the price of an injustice.

§. — In the system peace peace is worth so much that it is not buying it too dear, to pay for it with no matter what iniquity. In the system Rights of Man justice is worth so much, right is worth so much, that it is not buying it too dear, to pay for it with no matter what war.

§. — In the system peace order is worth so much that it is not buying it too dear, to pay for it with no matter what iniquity. In the system Rights of Man right is worth so much that it is not buying it too dear, to pay for it with no matter what disorder.

§. — An injustice costs nothing in the system peace. And it is a disorder that costs nothing in the system Rights of Man.

§. — Order, (I mean material order), has an infinite price in the system peace. And it is right that has an infinite price in the system Rights of Man.

§. — In the system Rights of Man, (and I have no need to say it in the Christian system), an order founded on iniquity is not an order; a peace founded on iniquity is not a peace.

§. — In the system Rights of Man nothing is nothing, beside injustice.

§. — It is in the system of the Rights of Man, (and in this I make it totally mine), the right of peoples to dispose of themselves, that the question of Alsace-Lorraine exists so to speak most, that it is in its fullness, that it is so to speak the most pure and almost the most schematic, and theoretical, that it is so to speak carried to its maximum, that it is literally carried to its point of perfection. It is in the system of the Rights of Man that the question of Alsace-Lorraine is undeniably and irrevocably resolved, and for eternity, by the declaration read at the Assembly of Bordeaux.

§. — The Declaration of the Rights of Man is anything one wishes. But it will never be the charter of opportunism. It is even statutorily the charter of the protester.

§. — Hervé, the only one who has courage in all this band, told them very well at Brest that, from their point of view, there is a question of Alsace-Lorraine. And that it was not factitious, and imaginary, and arbitrary, and that it was not gratuitous, and that it was not an invention, an imagination of the nationalists. It is evidence itself.

§. — As long as it is the ignorant who speak, all is well. Those who do not know are made to show the others. But one has a kind of shame, a modesty, when one sees instructed men, who know something, or in the end who have learned it, a Jaurès, a Delaisi, a Pressensé, come always to tell the people, to tell the militants, the same three or four cock-and-bull stories. (Men in the end who have learned geography, and even history).

§. — This first cock-and-bull story of the militias. When instructed men come to say that there must be no army, that one must arm the people, I ask myself what can possibly be going on in their heads. What can it possibly mean, arm the people. I really ask myself what it can possibly represent. And especially represent for them. As if arming the people were not precisely to constitute classes of active, classes of reserve and of territorial.

§. — This second cock-and-bull story, that war has no importance. And that it gives no result. If this war of the Balkans has precisely shown something, it is how much war has a power of decision. The Cretan question and the Macedonian question had been dragging on long enough. In three weeks, they drag on no longer.

§. — This third cock-and-bull story that wars are artificial inventions, and that they are invented by capitalists, by governments, by kings to bother the peoples. By the leaders, as they say. And that kings have only one idea, between meals, which is to bother the peoples. This old story, which furnished so much literature to Hugo, had for fifty years been making everyone smile. One is grieved to see it today and constantly taken up again by instructed men, speaking nonetheless to the people. If this war of the Balkans has shown something, it is that there were also races; and that there were wars that came out of the very entrails of the peoples. The same Hervé had told them again, some months ago, in a congress or I no longer know where, that it was rather time to renounce these ready-made ideas, these old habits, these sort of old carcasses of ideas, which are no more than the old carcasses of former fireworks. Hervé is the only one of all the band who looks a little at what is really happening, today, instead of mechanically repeating what is said in meetings; what has always been said; what one must say so that the citoyennes and citoyens shall in no way be changed in their habits. For when the citoyennes and citoyens are changed in their habits, however little it may be, it can become dangerous for the speaker. He can lose by it a mandate as deputy; a mandate as municipal councillor; a mandate as general councillor; a mandate as delegate somewhere; he can lose by it a good part of his capital of popularity, his only, his precious fortune, (for all these socialists are great capitalists of popularity); he can even lose by it this: that he receives blows of the fist on the snout.

§. — These great revolutionaries are quite willing to revolutionize the world. But they do not wish to revolutionize a meeting, nor to revolutionize themselves. It is too dangerous. And simply perhaps it is too tiring. One can say that today and in all the bourgeois world and of all the ceremonies of the bourgeois world a revolutionary meeting is without any doubt the most and the best regulated ceremony, the most traditional, the most conservatory, the most as-usual, the most conformed to precedents, the most always the same. It is much better regulated than a day at Auteuil, and than any opening night of theater. And than the 14th of July at Longchamp; and even than the spring review at Vincennes. One can say that of all the publics that one can assemble in Paris in any hall whatever the public of a revolutionary meeting is the only one which is absolutely sure of not being jostled. It goes at the same hours, on the same days, to the same places, to listen to the same men say scrupulously the same things. No tradition is so solidly established as the revolutionary tradition. No conservation is so solidly established as the revolutionary conservation. The public of a meeting goes there with this idea, always justified, that it will receive there certain excitations. It knows everything in advance, to a centigram. And there is no danger that one will frustrate it. And that one will dose otherwise. For it is the master, and the client. At bottom it is very simple. It is he who pays, in popularity, in power, in mandate, in money. Hervé is the only one of the whole band who sometimes has the courage to say things that are not expected. He is one of the men in the world who thinks most awry. But he is the only one of the band who thinks for himself, who looks at what is happening, and who says what he thinks, and who has this courage, and who says what is happening.

§. — How speak of Lavisse at present. But how not speak of him when one knows that he is precisely the low door by which all this disorder entered into order, all this anarchy into the government, notably into the university government, and into the honors. When one knows that he is the point of articulation, the point of insertion of disorder into order. As long as the disorder remained in the disorder, in its kingdom of disorder, there was only half an evil, or rather there was only a full evil, just an entire evil; and when anarchy remained outside the councils of the government. There was not an evil and a half. Sesquipedalia verba. But the liaison of Herr with Lavisse, the ascendancy of Herr over Lavisse, the government of Herr over Lavisse was the mechanism-liaison, the mechanism-couple that bound disorder to order, that made a certain disorder penetrate even into the councils of the university government. One shall never know what a frown of Herr’s brow will have done, what influence it will have had upon the destinies of the third Republic. For Herr easily knits his thick eyebrows; and he readily inflates his thick voice; and he swears and he curses: and the Nom de Dieus make his most modest punctuation; and M. Lavisse, who does not know much about it, believes that this is force, and that this is courage, and that this is energy.

§. — How keep silent, on the other hand, and how pass them over in silence, when one knows that on the other side, by the liaison of Herr with Jaurès, and with others, this little Normalien group has become the point of political infection, the point of contamination, the point of origin of virulence which has corrupted, which has poisoned Dreyfusism, socialism, the revolutionary spirit itself. So that the couple Herr-Lavisse, playing at will, by one or the other of its two terms, in the socialist world or in the bourgeois world, has obtained there on the whole the following few results. In these sorts of liaisons it is always the vices that pass, and never the virtues. They found the means of inoculating Dreyfusism with the vices of raison d’État, socialism with bourgeois vices, the government with the vices of disorder. And all three with the vices of intellectual bureaucracy. Instead of pushing each order in its sense and in its nature and toward its point of perfection, they denatured each of these orders by inserting into it the vices of the enemy order. The few results have been the following:

a). — Dreyfusism, which was a system of absolute liberty, of absolute truth, of absolute justice, and of a profound spiritual order, has become under the name of Combism and of Jauresism a system of constraint and of raison d’État, a system of political lying, a system of favor, of oppression, of iniquity; a system also of corruption; and a system of fraud and a system of turpitude;

b). — socialism, which was an economic system of the healthy and the just organization of social labor, has become under the name of Jauresism and under the identical and conjoint name of sabotage a system of the disorganization of social labor and moreover and in that an excitation of bourgeois instincts in the working world, a training of workers to become in their turn dirty bourgeois;

c). — on the other hand they have infected the State, the government of the State, the functionary government, the university government and a sort of spiritual government and temporal government of minds with a sort of virus of anarchy and of taste for a certain disorder, of a particular disorder which may be in its place in a revolutionary world, but which is in its place neither in the administration nor in the government of the State. There is a certain foam, a certain trouble which can be perfectly excusable and even perfectly in its place in a party in a revolutionary world and which is entirely out of place, entirely disastrous for everyone when it is in the world that is in power;

d). — laicism, which was a system of neutrality in matters of faith and of metaphysics and in sum a system of liberty of conscience, has become under the name of sociology a metaphysical system the most grotesque without any doubt that has ever been seen in the world but all the same and at the same time one of the most dangerous systems, one of the most ill-suffering, one of the most tyrannical, one of the most sunk in the temporal, one of the most formidable systems of oppression of consciences; and which one wishes to spread throughout the three orders of teaching;

e). — the Republic, which was the object of a mystique and which was an ancien régime system of government founded on honor, and on a certain proper honor, and an ancien France government, has become in their hands the matter of a politics, modern, and generally of a low politics, and a system of government founded on the satisfaction of the lowest appetites, on the contentment of the lowest interests. And all that still remains standing and that still remains clean of the old Republic is what has not yet been contaminated by Jauresism;

f). — the revolutionary force, which was the honor and the grandeur of this people, the honor of this country and of this race, and which consisted essentially in wishing that things go well and in doing more than one’s share, the revolutionary spirit, which was essentially generous, the revolutionary instinct has become in their time and under their government and in their hands a low spirit of sabotage and of denigration and of rancor which consists essentially in rejoicing that things go badly and in willing and in making things go badly and in doing less than one’s share; and even in doing not at all;

§. — internationalism finally, which was a system of political and social equality and of temporal justice and of mutual liberty between peoples, has become in their hands a sort of vague vicious bourgeois cosmopolitanism and on the other hand and very particularly and very properly a pan-Germanism, a total enslavement to German politics, to German capitalism, to German imperialism, to German militarism, to German colonialism.

§. — We touch here upon their fourth cock-and-bull story, unless it be the fifth: that in this equilibrium of force between Germany and France, in this military equilibrium there would be in Germany a socialist party which would counterbalance them, which would do the same thing in Germany as they in France, and an action of that socialist party which would counterbalance their own action. Everyone knows the contrary. And they themselves as much as we and better than we they know the contrary. They say it nevertheless. They say, they teach, they proclaim, in their newspapers, in meetings, that it is balanced, that they march in accord with a German socialist party which does as much. Everyone knows the contrary. Never perhaps had one lied so systematically; and so solemnly; and so consciously. One shudders, and one is struck oneself with a modesty, when one sees instructed men, and charged with so heavy a responsibility, (for in the end they have taken charge of their people), lie so deliberately to their people. Pressensé is perhaps still more culpable than the others, who professionally ought to know, or at least to have studied questions of international politics, since he did so many years at the Temps the Bulletin of foreign politics.

§. — One must see how they treated Andler because he had publicly noted what everyone knows: that out of the four million German socialist votes there are three million which are not serious, which will refuse nothing either to militarism, or to imperialism, or to colonialism, or consequently to capitalism. Three million which are only a filling, a stuffing of more or less of discontent. (And of the million that remains there would be much to say, and many reservations to make). (And much waste still). In sum l’Humanité refused copy from Andler, which is rather scandalous, and rather grotesque, and rather farcical, for one who knows a little of all this. Whether this copy was a letter or an article or whether it was only a draft, it is a little stiff and rather unforeseen that l’Humanité refuses an Andler paper, that Jaurès refuses to publish a text of Andler. And what does Herr do in all this? Does he go with Andler, who is his friend, or with Jaurès, who is his creature; or does he remain with Lavisse, whom he despises.

§. — It is also a rather unforeseen spectacle, and which would be rather diverting, were it not, were it not at bottom a sad spectacle, to see the fat Thomas say at the tribune of the Chamber, pronounce these simple words: “My comrade Andler has been heavily mistaken.” What is this jargon. What is this my comrade. Why not also the citizen Andler. Do I say my comrade Bergson. What are these manners: when one knows Andler and when one knows Thomas. First Thomas has not the right to speak of heavily. He would do better to keep silent on that. (There are decidedly too many fat ones, in the party of the lean). And then at least he could say our comrade. The king says We will. My comrade, one would say that Andler is his comrade all by himself, this fat one’s. This unifié is not for sharing. A well-bred man of my generation, of my promotion, who has nevertheless five years of age, (and perhaps five years of service), more than the Thomas promotion, considers Andler, measures the distance, the difference of age and of situation, (and, for Thomas, of character), measures what we owe him, (Andler, not Thomas), and what he has been for us, and what he has not ceased to be, and says: Our master M. Andler.

§. — As for the insurrectional force and the revolutionary force, as for the revolutionary marrow and blood, as for the revolutionary instinct and race, everyone knows, and Hervé as much as anyone, that there is not as much in all German Social-Democracy as there was in the last trumpeter of the squadron of the Cent-Gardes.

§. — In this very manifesto which they are supposed to have made in common with the Germans and in which they supposedly share the responsibility with the German socialist party, who has not on the contrary at once felt the disparity, and this sly tone, and this suspect tone, and this barely suspect precaution that the Germans have introduced into it, of letting it be known that they would vote the taxes of military reinforcement because these taxes would furnish an excellent occasion to assess a more democratic tax. And to make the bourgeois pay.

§. — I think back on this formula, peace through right, which appears so short, so simple, so convenient, so lucid. Because it is as if geometrical, and equilateral. What childishness, as soon as one thinks of it. Right does not make peace, it makes war. And it is not often made by war, but it is still less often made by peace. As soon as a point of right appears in the world, it is a point of origin of war.

§. — We are wrong to be astonished that l’Humanité should have refused copy from Andler. Or should have refused copy of Andler. Personally I believe l’Humanité capable of everything. But one must hold oneself in bounds and I shall say the reasons another time.

§. — What is strongest is that they betray not only our interests and our rights; in addition and in that itself they betray as much the interests and the rights of which they have so to speak professionally taken charge. That they betray France, everyone knows it, and it is understood, and they almost boast of it, and it is even hardly interesting any more. But in betraying France in that itself and within it they betray no less the Revolution. For they diminish to that extent what I shall name the total of civism in the world, and they even behead civism and they discrown liberty in the world, they diminish to that extent, they do all they can to annul, to annihilate the only matter and the only temporal instrument, in short the only temporal point of support that liberty has in the world. There is no doubt that France has two vocations in the world and that if she is sometimes tired in the temporal and even in the spiritual and diminished and sometimes poor in forces it is because she is doubly faithful, it is because she is faithful twice, it is because she has to provide for two tasks, and for two fidelities, for her vocation of Christendom, and for her vocation of liberty. France is not only the eldest daughter of the Church, (and this appears constantly and with a surprising fidelity); she has also in the lay a sort of singular parallel vocation, she is undeniably a sort of patroness and witness, (and often a martyr), of liberty in the world. In the Christian, in the sacred she has the guard of faith; and perhaps still more of charity; and certainly still more of hope. And it appears every day undeniably that she is the eldest daughter. But in the lay, (I do not say in the profane), in the lay and perhaps in another sort of sacred, in the civic, in a sacred of the exterior law, it is undeniable that she has the guard of that liberty which is the very condition of grace, which has with grace a kinship so profound, a connection so singular and so obstinately mysterious. Such is our double charge. Such is our double guard. And it is evident that we have constantly remained faithful to it and we know well that we shall remain faithful to it. And we know well why we are sometimes tired. But when these men betray France and in France the Republic I have the right to say that they betray not only France, I have the right to say that they betray the Revolution itself and liberty. For as much as they can they strive to annul the only temporal point of support of liberty in the world.

§. — Topping all the rest they betray at last all that in the most disagreeable manner in the world, by a morose and sly treason, of a disagreeable, bothersome, solemn, bookish, pedantic, pretentious, savant, tedious, ingrate, flat treason, trying to submit everything to the flat oppressions of the most obtuse intellectual bureaucracy.

§. — If the League of the Rights of Man wants peace, let it begin by giving it to us; if M. de Pressensé wants peace, let him begin by giving it to us; but let them not play this double game of peace and war: of refusing to occupy themselves with a whole oppressed people, and afterwards, and at the same time, of constantly wanting to shake a whole people, and to overturn a whole government, and to upset the world for no matter what rural postman.

§. — This idea, this stupidity that kings make war to amuse themselves. It is always the King amuses himself. We know very well what would have happened to the king of Serbia and to the emperor of Bulgaria and to the king of Montenegro if they had not marched. It even happened to the king of Greece while marching.

§. — For two years I had not been permitted to occupy myself with M. Lavisse. But during that time he was occupying himself with me. I mean to say that he was occupying himself with us. I mean to say that he remained in place and in functions. And in charge. And that he continued to make in the circles of the university government the policy of Jaurès and of Herr.

§. — Paris is full of unilateral friends. They are unilateral common friends. Do not speak then of Lavisse, they say, he is my friend. But they have not said to Lavisse: Do not speak then of Péguy, he is my friend. Or else one must believe that Lavisse did not much follow their counsels that time, or that generally he is quite insensible to their counsels. It is always the same system of government that we undergo, government of minds and temporal government. They are friends of Lavisse to prevent Lavisse from receiving our blows, but they are not friends of Péguy to prevent Péguy from receiving the blows and the government of Lavisse. It is a duel in which all the seconds cover with their bodies one of the two adversaries. They are friends on one side and they too are irreversible. They are friends of Lavisse to defend Lavisse not even against our blows, not even against our attacks, but against our defenses and against our ripostes. They are not friends of us to defend us from undergoing, under the command of M. Lavisse, the government of Herr and of Jaurès.

§. — Let us go further and the bottom of their thought is that absolutely one does not reply to a man like Lavisse, that one does not attack a man like Lavisse. It is only in the modern world that a certain degree of platitude can reign and establish itself which would have raised the ancien France, and one must come to a democracy to attend this spectacle, of a taste so profound, so general, so common, and which appears so natural, so legitimate, and which is no longer even perceived, so much it is, so much it seems natural, of the turpitude that there is in platitude. The ancien régimes on the contrary, the regimes of hierarchy were full of revolts on the contrary and of the taste of liberty. One can say that never have the great ones of this world been as much at shelter against uprising as today, for today they are no longer only at shelter against material uprising, they are surrounded, they are adulated, they are sustained by a respect such as had never been known, they are at shelter against the very idea that there could be a liberty, and, against them, a dignity.

§. — That is indeed their idea in effect that against the big personages there is no right, (and that one is even ill-bred to think that there would be one), (that one knows ill one’s world), no recourse, no justice, no claim, and even no conversation, no remark. No communication, no equilibrium. That we are not grandeurs of the same order. That there is between them and us no common measure. That they are the rich and that we are the poor. That we must submit to the reign of money. That they are the great functionaries, the great academics, the princes of the Republic, and that we other writers shall never be anything but poor wretches and folliculaires.

§. — These common friends are friends of the great to prevent the people from saying a word to them, to the great. But they are not friends of the people to prevent them from being exposed to the caprices of the great.

§. — Likewise one can say that never have the great been so surrounded; never, under any regime, in any system have the great been so covered against the people, and the people so uncovered against the great.

§. — And never has money been to this point the only master and the God. And never has the rich been so covered against the poor and the poor so uncovered against the rich.

§. — And never has the temporal been so covered against the spiritual, and never has the spiritual been so uncovered against the temporal.

§. — And never has the powerful been so covered against the weak, and never has the weak been so uncovered against the powerful. Reposuit potentes in sede.

§. — One cannot say that I am persecuting Lavisse. If he had something to say, that one, he had the means of saying it. He has had the time, and the volume, and the power, and the chances, and the situations, and the money. If he has said nothing, it is because he had nothing to say. If he has said nothing let him continue, but let him continue more cheaply. Let him continue at less expense. At less of our expense.

§. — They say to me But no, you must not speak of him, you see, he is ill. — If he is ill, let him take his retirement. The budget of the State provides him a pension of retirement. Not everyone could say as much. But their illness is like their friends, it is unilateral. And it is irreversible. It plays only against us, it does not play against them. They are ill so that we do not address the word to them, they are not ill so as to exercise the great commands. He is ill so that I do not put him in the cahiers, he is not ill to govern the École Normale.

§. — I too respect illness and the ill, and I have no taste for finishing off the wounded. But I live in a world and in a class where the dearest invalids cannot even afford the minimum of care. I have the right to be a little skeptical about the illnesses of men who remain in power.

§. — I too respect illness and the ill. On one condition however, that the ill respect themselves and respect illness. But when illness itself is a means of government?

§. — The good use of illnesses is certainly not what M. Lavisse makes of them. We know what M. Lavisse’s illnesses were. I do not say that M. Lavisse is not ill. He must indeed be like everyone. But in the end throughout a whole career M. Lavisse was ill and withdrew to care for himself at Le Nouvion en Thiérache every time there were responsibilities to take or even a single responsibility and he came back from there solid as the Pont-Neuf every time the responsibilities had vanished. One must believe that the Thiérache is a particularly healthy country, and that a stay at Le Nouvion en Thiérache is particularly restorative. One would make not perhaps quite all the history of the Third Republic, but certainly all the history of the responsibilities that there were to take under the Third Republic for the people who frequented the regions of power, by the table of the presences and absences of M. Lavisse. When the sky, I mean the political sky, was clear, our master was in Paris, in good health. When the sky darkened, M. Lavisse, suddenly feeling tired, who knows, ill, left for Le Nouvion. As long as the weather remained obscure, our master remained at Le Nouvion. It must be a famous station, this Nouvion. And I do not wish to say only a railway station. I wish to say a station of convalescence. When the sky cleared at last, M. Lavisse, hale, came back from Le Nouvion en Thiérache. He was like a ludion, like one of those little fellows whom a pressure of the finger makes go up or down. There will be a fine thesis to be made later on, but will it be for the Faculty of Letters or for the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris. During the Dreyfus affair notably, one would have made graphs of it. There must be some in a thesis. This man had become a barometer if not quite of the political situation at least of the difficulties, of the gravities of the political situation, (of the heavinesses, that is the property of a barometer). One would have made tables of concordance, and diagrams, (whether they had been historical, whether they had been geographical), of the variations of the political situation by and according to the displacements of the index Lavisse.

§. — I attended, when I was little, the following scene: In a house frequented much by the professors of the University who wished to have advancement and notably by provincial academics who wished to come to Paris, I heard a dean of a Faculty of Letters of a University, (but you are too curious, you shall know neither which dean, nor which Faculty, nor which University), say before seven or eight academics: Lavisse is certainly going to be ill. And all to laugh, I really do not know why. It is not laughable, to be ill. Then a fool, (I think it was your servant), and who did not know, opened his mouth and said: Ah, has he something. — Yes, said the dean, pursing Attic lips, there is a bothersome affair at the Higher Council of Public Instruction, Lavisse is surely going to be ill.

§. — It is no secret for anyone that during years every time there was at the Higher Council of Public Instruction an embarrassing affair, that is to say an affair in which one had to take one’s responsibilities, M. Lavisse was ill and at Le Nouvion. It was a fable. He was seen in twenty affairs. And when he was there he was at Le Nouvion all the same. He was seen notably in the Hervé affair. Hervé is what he is, but as a professor he was an honest man and a good professor, and he knew all the same more history than Lavisse.

§. — They say to me: He is not wicked. He is a good fellow. They add softly: He is a weak one. I do not like a good fellow, who is in power. God grant that our masters be firm, it is all we ask of them. Nothing is dangerous for the one underneath, like the bonhomie of the one above.

§. — I have never said that he was an ogre. I have said that he was a prodigy of weakness, a monster of softness. And, in the one who is in power, that is the worst.

§. — You did them, my lord, in crunching them much honor. The bottom of their thought, their idea behind the head, is that, when a poor man is exposed to the calumnies of a rich man, and a weak man to the calumnies of a powerful, and a writer to the calumnies of a great academic, and a folliculaire to the calumnies of a great functionary and of a great personage, he must find himself very honored by this look, and respectfully say thank you.

§. — The École Normale, writes my young comrade to me, is not so low as you believe. You know that for several years there has been a strong contingent of good Catholics, and you must rejoice at it. (I do not know if I have said that my young correspondent was Catholic).

§. — My young comrade, the future will teach you that unfortunately it is not enough to be Catholic. One must still work in the temporal, if one wants to wrest the future from temporal tyrannies.

§. — My young comrade, since you are Catholic, it is a great mystery that it should not be enough to be Catholic, and that one must still, and that one must in addition, and that one must furthermore toil all his life, all his temporal, in the temporal. But, my young comrade, Jesus himself, who was I think the prince of the spiritual, founded a Church which has not ceased to be combated in the spiritual and in the temporal and which shall not cease to militate in the spiritual and in the temporal. Or if you wish under a form perhaps still more striking, we have with the most atheist Frenchman a bond of communion unique in the world and irreplaceable and not interchangeable, and which nothing in the world can replace. For from a French atheist there can come a French saint. And from all the German Center and from all those Austrians there will never come a French saint.

§. — It is the very mystery of the carnal and of the temporal, my young comrade, and of the insertion of the spiritual into the carnal and of the insertion of the eternal into the temporal, and to say all it is the very mystery of the incarnation. We rejoin here what we were saying just now of prayer and of work, of prayer and of war. We shall find this mystery again in our Clio, dialogue of history and of the pagan soul, and in our Véronique, dialogue of history and of the carnal soul. All that we shall retain of it today is a lesson of modesty for ourselves, and of work, and that it is not enough to be Catholic. And that one must still do everything. Piece by piece. Day by day.

§. — First of all, my dear comrade, if there are Catholics at the École Normale, perhaps one must not attribute the benefit of it to M. Lavisse, nor to Herr nor to Jaurès, nor to the policy of M. Lavisse, which is the policy of Herr and of Jaurès. For it would be a singular bookkeeping. If there are Catholics at the École Normale, it is not the fault of Lavisse, and of Herr, and of Jaurès, unless it be by an effect of repulsion and of reaction, and in that case still it would be perhaps to mix the active and the passive in a singular way, to attribute the benefit of it to M. Lavisse.

§. — Understand well, my young comrade, the sentiment which makes me answer you. I fear that we too may not fall into sophisms of laziness. It is not enough to say: I am Catholic. There is still everything to do. It is not enough to say: There are Catholics. Catholics have hermetically the truth in matters of faith. They have not the monopoly of the raising up of a people. In 1813 Prussia was not Catholic. And it is not yet.

§. — I am very content that there should be good Catholics at the École Normale. I am very content also that there should be good Protestants, and good Jews, and good freethinkers. You know it, my young comrade, I have never hidden my preferring a good Protestant to a bad Protestant, and even my loving a good Protestant and not loving a bad Protestant. For from a bad Protestant one never makes a good Catholic and we have had recently and not far from us a resounding example.

§. — And it is with good atheists, my young comrade, and those who do not expect it, that grace makes good Christians. And the reserve and the secret and the temporal mystery is precisely that we know well that with bad atheists it will never make good Christians. That with good atheists it makes good Christians, there is the miracle and the share of grace and the share of the spiritual. But that with bad atheists it has never made good Christians, there is the secret, there is the reserve, there is the mystery, and the share of the temporal and of administration. And we know very well that it will not make of Félix a Christian like Polyeucte and Pauline and we even know very well that it will not make of Félix a Christian as it would have made one of Sévère.

§. — I rejoice greatly that there should be Catholics at the École Normale, my young comrade, (especially when I know that these young Catholics are good Christians). On one sole condition: It is precisely that these Catholics do not pact with M. Lavisse. And that they do not treat with him, and that they do not even enter into conversation with him. I should not be surprised, when M. Lavisse saw that there was at the École Normale a strong contingent of Catholics, that he resolved to play the gentleman and the gallant with them. It is the a b c of the art of governing; and these liberals are all thus. But let our young comrade believe my old experience: First, Lavisse, who has deceived everyone, will deceive the Catholics too. We know, we, how he goes about deceiving. As he deceived us in Dreyfusism, when we were young, so he will deceive these young people in Catholicism. Secondly, (and this is altogether general), secondly Catholics have never gained anything and will never gain anything from pacting, treating, conversing with politicians. And it is well done for them. And it is their very mark. And it is one of the greatest signs of their vocation. It is with the Christian mystique as with any mystique and in this sense things go with the Republic as with the Church. What is dangerous, for us, my young comrade, is not the Jacobins, (the worst they can do is martyrs), is not the Combisms, is not the harsh persecutions: we have seen far others. But the dirty pelolage with the liberals: there is the turpitude.

For that is what makes the renegades.

§. — One opposes to me everything Lavisse has done well, of happy choices, notably of happy choices of collaborators, a few nominations. We have of our masters, in this democracy, and of the magistery, and of the magistrature, an idea such that as soon as they do not commit a felony we cry miracle, and eminence. Instead of keeping a regular account of them, in which one would put on their active what they do well, and on their passive what they do ill, we have of them and of their administration and of their government and of their command and of their tyranny an idea so extraordinary, (and so just), that we begin by putting nothing on their passive, whatever they may do, because we find that when they do ill it is their very office; and we so much expect it; and on their active we count, first the little good they do, secondly all the ill they do not do, and which they could so well do.

§. — Whereas if one wanted to count as one ought, one would have to count yet otherwise. One would have to put on their passive the ill they do, and not to put on their active the little good they do, because they are in place for that.

§. — You write to me, my dear comrade, that the École Normale is not as I represent it to myself. There is not, if you please, the question. I have spoken of what a certain party has made of the École Normale. After that we should be quite unfortunate if French youth, put under a certain regime, did not react and did not generally do the contrary. It would indeed be the first time that this had happened. It is indeed this same people in which all those who are appointed, praefecti, commis, all those who are charged with governing and foreseeing, and providing, never do their trade, and which provides for everything itself, and which makes its salvation itself alone, itself alone under its patron saints, without its governments, without its bureaus, without any of its authorities.

But I always come back to my bookkeeping. This is neither an excuse nor above all a title for its governments, for its bureaus, for its authorities.

§. — I go further and in a general way I confess that I do not like Catholics who pact with the Sorbonne; or who treat with the Sorbonne; or who converse with the Sorbonne; or who flirt with the Sorbonne; and even those who marry with the Sorbonne. There is no doubt that the Sorbonne, to give itself the airs of being liberal, has been seeking for some years, how shall I say, Catholics whom it could officially respect, and even Catholics whom it could officially protect. The Sorbonne is not so silly as that, when it is a matter of its temporal interests, and it has often conducted them very well. They ended by finding. And it is naturally Bergson and the philosophy of Bergson who has paid the costs of this little operation. May I warn the Thomists who have found a good reception at the Sorbonne that they are loved against someone, and that it is not, if I may say so, for the fine eyes of Saint Thomas that the Sorbonne suddenly felt tendernesses for Thomist philosophy; and that nothing is suspect like a tenderness of the Sorbonne; and that nothing is suspect like an alliance, were it officious, and were it occult, of the Catholics and of the Sorbonne; and that in these sorts of fires it is always the Catholics who are duped; and that it is well done for them; and that they are execrable in any politics; and that what is not forgiven to Bergson is to have broken our irons.

§. — Let Catholics know it well, and our young comrade ought to suspect it a little, the quarrel of the Sorbonne is not a gratuitous quarrel, it is not an insignificant quarrel. And it is not an arbitrary quarrel, it is not an added quarrel. It is the very quarrel of the heroes and the saints against the modern world, against what they call sociology, against what they call psychology, against what they call science. And a chair at the Sorbonne will always be for him who declares that the saints were fit to be put in Charenton.

§. — All the debate is there, all the mystery of this doubtful operation. The Sorbonne would be rather disposed to make alliance with the doctors, and perhaps even to make a place for the doctors, provided it were against the heroes and the saints. It would even be, let us avow it, a rather good and certainly the best manner of authenticating its inventions against the heroes and the saints. For thus it would appear liberal, equitable, what do I say, objective.

§. — It remains to know whether the doctors will be disposed to drop the heroes and the saints, in order to be themselves honored with the favors of the Sorbonne, or, if one prefers, in order to be favored with the honors of the Sorbonne. The whole question is to know whether the doctors, of whom personally I get along very well without, will throw overboard the saints, of whom no one can do without. It would be to know them ill, (the doctors), not to hope that in effect they will throw overboard the saints. The doctors have not only condemned Jesus Christ, they have not only condemned Joan of Arc, that would still be nothing: Nolite judicare, they have judged Jesus Christ, they have judged Joan of Arc, they will continue.

§. — Upon what I have said of this modesty we ought to have in speaking of Alsace-Lorraine, there is nothing so odious as these stage plays which they set themselves to making, in which excellent actors, made up as soldiers, take back the annexed provinces.

It is like those nursemaids, and those wet nurses, whom one dresses up as Alsatians. Even if they were so, that is no reason.

§. — Monsieur de Pressensé, Constitution of the Year I. — The Year I, monsieur de Pressensé, for the League of the Rights of Man, is so to speak the beginning of the world. In the first Declaration, monsieur de Pressensé, there was resistance to oppression. In the Constitution of the Year I there was what resistance to oppression is.

33. — Resistance to oppression is the consequence of the other rights of man.

34. — There is oppression against the social body when a single one of its members is oppressed: there is oppression against each member when the social body is oppressed.

35. — When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people, and for each portion of the people, the most sacred and the most indispensable of duties.

Monsieur de Pressensé I do not say that all that makes the government convenient. But I ask you, is all that means of having peace.

§. — One must not accuse me of persecuting M. Lavisse. It is he who provokes us with his fiftieth anniversary. There are quite others who entered the School fifty years ago and who do not make so much fuss.

§. — Moreover, my young comrade, be reassured on one point. All that I can say is perfectly indifferent to M. Lavisse, because M. Lavisse knows very well that I am nothing.

In the metric system of M. Lavisse I am nothing and the values that I try to defend against the disintegrations of M. Lavisse are nothing.

He knows well that he is the State, and the temporal, and everything.

§. — They say to me: He is an old man. I say beg pardon. Old men have the right to respect. They have not the right to command.

They have the right to command if they know how to command, if they are good for commanding. But they have not the right to command for the sole reason that they are old men.

Old men, as such, because they are old men, have perhaps the right to respect, to honors; they have, as such and in that itself, no right to command. Otherwise it would suffice to become supremely old, in any order whatsoever, to attain, in that order, supreme command.

§. — One does admit, in the military, and everyone admits, for the military, that nothing is dangerous like tired generals. And far from giving the aged generals the supreme commands one has created the age limit. And one speaks only of rejuvenating the cadres. And one believes oneself to have done well, and one congratulates oneself, and one believes oneself almost to have carried off a victory when one has succeeded in rejuvenating the cadres, when one has succeeded in lowering the age limits. And one is right. Why must it be here again, and must it be then once more, that the military institutions, so reviled, are once more given as an example to our civil institutions, so triumphant. If M. Lavisse were a soldier, the general Ernest Lavisse could command neither the School of Saint-Cyr nor the Polytechnic School. But why is M. Lavisse the civilian fit to command the École Normale Supérieure. It is also a command, the command of the École Normale Supérieure. Why is M. Lavisse fit to keep the command of the École Normale Supérieure. Does one believe that it is without inconvenience to leave at the head and at the command of all this youth a general aged, and a general tired. And that there be not in the civil inconveniences as in the military. Or else, if really the post of director of the École Normale is such that one can hold it aged and tired, then let this post be suppressed and with this money let some Rimailho guns be bought. The general secretary of the School will do the “work” very well. Especially since he himself has a little coadjutor. M. Lavisse is not a great writer, nor a great poet to whom the State must assure the bread of his old days. First he would have an excellent retirement. Next he has received all his life sufficient salaries and from publishers, generally for the work of others, royalties which certainly have permitted him to take a passbook at the savings bank. We are so good, my young comrade, that all we ask is that one politely beg M. Lavisse to go enjoy in peace his retirement, that one send M. Lavisse to enjoy in peace his retirement, at Le Nouvion en Thiérache, that one send M. Lavisse back to his dear studies. And he shall have the right to pronounce prize-distribution speeches all year long.

§. — Such is our cruelty, my dear comrade; and such is also our audacity. What we ask is quite simple. We ask that the generals who would lead us to defeat and to capitulation not be maintained at the head of the army.

Is it asking too much. We ask that those who have led ill no longer lead.

We ask how long M. Lavisse is yet to be left at the head of the École Normale Supérieure. When the doctor has cared ill, one changes him. It is quite simple. When the governor has governed ill, one changes him. When the director has directed ill, one changes him. Why make so much fuss. All this is simplicity itself. We ask only that M. Lavisse go to taste a just repose. We ask simply that M. Lavisse go to rest himself. And by the same occasion that we may rest a little from him.

There is no doubt that M. Lavisse has not succeeded at the École Normale. That is the least one can say.

§. — What makes one enrage is that in private everyone agrees. Everyone has the same opinion formed. Not only does everyone declare that it is indeed thus but they even reproach those who still occupy themselves with it, those who speak of it for being a little heavy, and for lacking elegance, and for dwelling on it, and for still speaking of it. So much is it known. So much is it evident. So much is it understood. Only, in public, it at once appears that one must not speak of it.

§. — It is a good comedy to see all these Dreyfusards of the day after tomorrow plead secrecy, the closed doors, and precisely in matters of nomination to a public function; and to a public function so important. And not even to plead it, but to establish it, but to admit it, to find it, to declare it altogether natural and altogether admitted, to establish a universal connivance.

§. — As there is a military bearing or a military softening, so there is a civic bearing or a civic softening; and at bottom they are the same. When a people is strong civically, it is strong militarily. It is the same strength; or it is the same weakness. A generation which finds itself civic is the same also which finds itself military. Strength is strength. One must therefore beware of believing that it is without danger to entrust to the aged and to the tired and to the masters of weariness and to the masters of renegation and to the masters of fluctuation and to the masters of dismemberment the great civic commands.

§. — These men have so taken the habit of possessing power and of having as a domain France and the government of France and the prebends and the pensions that one has the air of persecuting them when one asks simply that they no longer exercise their commands; and then one has the air of wanting to dispossess them.

§. — I am even convinced that they are so accustomed to being flattered, adulated, incensed that they sincerely believe that it is true, that it is well thus; that it is legitimate; since it is established.

§. — I am convinced that in effect they sincerely believe that we persecute them.

§. — They are so accustomed to counting on power, as on a legitimate good, as on a family good, that I am convinced that it is we who appear to them persecutors, and, who knows, thieves.

§. — I am convinced that, drawn on by this long habit of being courted, they believe that it is we who seek them. They no longer even perceive, so much is the habit taken, that it is they who seek us, automatically, since they occupy positions of command and as long as they occupy positions of command, as long as they exercise commands which decompose at each instant into times of command.

§. — The situation is quite simple and what we ask is quite simple. We are undeniably witnessing in this time a profound and violent French rebirth, a profound restoration, in the very fine sense of this word so imprudently discredited, a profound and violent revolt and reintegration of the race. Now what we ask is simply this: To all this youth are we going to leave the same old chiefs. To all this great and beautiful exuberance are we going to leave this same old aulic council. To all this ardor and to all this exuberance and to all this innocence are we going to continue to impose the same aged, the same tired, the same old personnel which had precisely created this situation of weariness and of decrepitude, and of disarmament and of denial against which this country and this race and this youth have ended by revolting. Shall one leave so much fine youth in the hands of these old men. And such excellent troops in the hands of unworthy chiefs. And always those who do not want to capitulate in the hands of those who have never thought of anything but capitulation; and of preparing capitulation. And always these fine recruits under the command and the government of these Mac-Mahons. It is to go to meet defeat, it is to want deliberately defeat and capitulation to put and to leave at the highest posts of command, at the highest situations of government, men who have in the very marrow the taste and the instinct and the inveterate habit of defeat and of capitulation.

§. — To put, to leave young troops under old chiefs: the very formula of disaster.

§. — And old chiefs well known, who have given proof of weakness and of softness and of slackness and of the taste of defeat and of capitulation.

§. — What then to say of these solemn ceremonies, of these apotheoses of the Sorbonne where one turns the situations around so perfectly that he who has never worked but in slackness has himself crowned with the very revolt that this regime of slackness has aroused. What teaching and what example for youth.

§. — I was forgetting. We ask not only that M. Lavisse go to rest himself. We ask also that one do not put in his place this young politician they are preparing for us.

Wednesday April 9, 1913. — In the issue of the Guerre sociale, seventh year, number 15, dated April 9 to 15, 1913, and under this title: the chancellor’s speech, M. Hervé publishes an article that I make it my duty to cite entire. One will make, if I may say so, allowance for the madman. And besides it is quite small:

The speech of the German chancellor was hissed by the elected of 4,200,000 socialist electors.

But the chancellor will have his 850,000 men on active duty.

As for us, we have not yet our three years; but we already hold the 500 million of supplementary expenses that Étienne has asked for the army, the 500 million that Baudin claims for the navy, without prejudice to what will be asked of us tomorrow.

Here we are then condemned more than ever, on each side of the Rhine — even if we escape the three years! — to sweat out each year new hundreds of millions to throw into the bottomless gulf of militarism, when money is lacking for so many urgent works of life and of solidarity, with the joyous prospect, after having been sheared and bled, of being sent one of these fine mornings to the slaughterhouse.

Russian pan-Slavism is there, proud, insolent, given an appetite by the Balkan victories, ready to devour Austria, the new sick man whom a Slavic cancer is gnawing. And he has behind him the enormous masses of the Slavic race whose sons are as numerous as the grains of sand of the desert.

And, chorusing with him, French nationalism which is beginning again, since the English friendship and the Balkan victories of the Slav ally, to rise upon its spurs and to utter cock-a-doodle-doos.

All this, the German chancellor has seen and seen well. He is perfectly right to believe that the Franco-Russian entente has become a veritable menace for Germany and for European peace.

But whose fault is it if this alliance exists and persists? Whose fault is it if French gold subsidizes the Russian armies, and if the development of Slavic power sustains all the hopes of our chauvinists? Whose fault is it if, with the great press helping, the cock-a-doodle-doos and the wing-beatings of our war-mongers are capable, at an hour of passion and of panic, of dragging the country into the worst follies?

Whose, if not the pan-Germanist cretins who, in ‘71, committed against the right of peoples a monstrous outrage — monstrous in Europe, 80 years after the French Revolution? Whose, if not the German governments which, for 42 years, have stupidly repeated that the question of Alsace-Lorraine no longer exists since the treaty of Frankfurt? Whose, if not the four great political parties which represent the totality of German public opinion and which have not the courage or the clearsightedness — the German socialist party, no more than the liberal party, no more than the Catholic center, no more than the party of the squireens — to say that the question exists, that it exists so much that it has poisoned all the European organism for 42 years!

The hearth of infection, it is in Alsace. How can there be in France and in Germany people blind enough not to see it?

It is from there, and not elsewhere, that the Franco-Russian alliance has come.

It is there and not elsewhere that French nationalism is nourished.

All that there are of idiots in France and in Germany will not fail to cry that I am becoming nationalist and revanchist.

I am more antirevanchist and more antinationalist than ever. But I am a physician who, bent over his patient, notes that all his organism is poisoning itself, becoming anemic, that the seat of the evil is a purulent abscess and I say that this pocket must be emptied as quickly as possible under pain of the worst catastrophes.

The purulent abscess that poisons Europe — the most serious, if one wishes, of the purulent abscesses that poison Europe — is Alsace-Lorraine.

Most socialists of France and of Germany persist in not seeing it: or, if they see it, in not saying it.

They combat the armaments and the follies of armed peace, like the physician who would combat fever with quinine, without seeing or without operating on the purulent abscess which is the cause of the fever.

And this blindness or this lack of decision, on the part of the party which should be the most clearsighted and the most audacious, is indeed what there is of saddest in the crisis Europe is passing through.

Ah! we can demand the limitation of armaments, the end of the regime of armed peace!

As long as, French and German socialists, we shall not have dared to pose frankly before the public opinion of our two countries, the question of Alsace-Lorraine, which is the insurmountable obstacle to Franco-German reconciliation, all that we shall say and nothing, will be the same thing.

We can hiss the militarist speeches of our governors.

It is as if we were singing!

G. H.

§. — On old men. — I find it very well that one respects old men. And no one respects them as much as I. But all the same one must agree a little. First, we have said it, respect is not command, and the right to respect is not the right to command. That we be bound to respect them, however much one wishes. But it does not follow from this that we are bound to deliver over to them all the commands. Otherwise one would have only to become old to have the right to do all the foolish things, and to exercise instantaneously all the powers. And a whole people would fall under the government of senility. Evidently such a proposition does not hold.

De senectute, old men have certainly the right to respect, and especially to repose. But to say that they have the right to retirement, that is precisely to say that they have no longer to exercise the great commands.

§. — Let messieurs the old men begin. And let them begin by not effecting or trying to effect the following transfer: they claim respect; and when one asks them what this respect is, they specify that it is to remain in power and to exercise the great commands.

§. — On another point, which would easily come back to the same, I consent that one try to soften my heart over the deplorable lot of M. Lavisse. And above all over the still more deplorable lot that would be made for him if he were constrained to take a just retirement. But all the same when one knows a little the misery of the honest man in the modern world and when one sees so many honest people, notably in the University, working like convicts from morning to night, and even more, and even beyond, and not succeeding in feeding their wives and their children, one takes to supposing that there are perhaps miseries worse than the misery of M. Lavisse and lots more deplorable than the lot that an opportune retirement would make for M. Lavisse.

§. — To respect old men, it is understood, but a condition is required all the same: that the old men respect themselves. But if the old men give themselves to the worst of debaucheries, perhaps the only debauchery, which is disrespect, if they respect nothing, neither laws nor mores, and if thus they do not respect themselves, must we then respect this disrespect; and these disrespectful ones. Must we respect this derision.

§. — Here again let messieurs the old men begin. Respect is one. There is between the one who respects and that or him who is respected, between the one who respects and that or him who is the object of respect by respect itself, by the ministry of respect such a liaison, organic, sentimental, and almost sacramental, that the respectful alone can boast of being respectable.

§. — It is with old men as with women. The more a being receives from nature and from his situation of state a natural respect, the more there is scandal and baseness when this same being himself first lacks this same respect, when this same being first fails to respect himself; and to respect the world; and thus again to respect himself. Just as a drunken woman makes an infinitely more painful spectacle than a drunken man, (and a spectacle that touches us at that very point of scar where the pain is intolerable), so a derisive old man makes a frightful scandal, whereas the mockeries of the young man are so often full of grace and of a secret love.

§. — So near to judgment and to play the buffoon still, what a frightful misery.

§. — Or again it is the situation, it is the grandeur of the magistrate and of the priest. There is no doubt that there is in the old man a mysterious magistracy and a mysterious priesthood temporal and certainly spiritual. But as the scandal is so much the greater that comes from the magistrate and from the priest, so the scandal is so much the greater that comes from the old man.

§. — And as a magistrate and a priest are the only men who can give the most frightful spectacle, so the old man is also the only man who can give the most frightful spectacle.

§. — Otherwise, in their system, in the other system it would suffice to be an old man to have the right to do every kind of nonsense and to clothe oneself and to clothe them with this cloak of respect.

§. — As there is the man of forty, my young comrade, there is also the man of seventy. It is incontestable that there is today a party of men of seventy. And that we are not only commanded: that we are barred by this party. It bars us before us. It masks our fire. If they were our enemies, things would go well: we should fire upon them. But they are supposedly our chiefs, and they prevent us from firing.

It is incontestable that there is today, before us, a rank, a barrier of men of seventy who occupy all the bridgeheads and who prevent us from debouching not upon the honors: we would readily leave those to them; not upon the commands: we will readily leave those to others; but upon the action of the battle and upon the action of work.

§. — Nothing is great like the old man. The old man is Boaz and the old man is Nestor. And above all the old man is old Simeon. And he is old Horace and he is old Don Diègue. But the greater the old man is, the more he risks. For if so much grandeur turns to the bad side, that old man is no more than a doddering fool.

§. — It is in the University above all that there is this party, this rank, this barrier of men of seventy, masking all the avenues. We have already seen that the army would not tolerate them. And no one would tolerate that there should be such in the army. For one is so made that one dreads military defeats. And one is right. And that one does not dread civic defeats. And one is wrong.

Masking all the avenues: it is well understood that they are not only the avenues of honors: those would be left to them. But that they are also and above all the avenues of power and thus of action and thus all the future.

There is notably a university party of men of seventy and older notably a promotion of the old École Normale which comes to the surface at all the outlets of all the avenues. Is it asking too much to ask that they retire at last,

Enjoy the rest the master gives you.

§. — They are supposed to command us. Or rather they are not supposed to command us. They are supposed to be our chiefs. As they do Greek, ex officio, one believes that they are the chiefs of Greek. And of Latin, the chiefs of Latin. And of French, the chiefs of French. And then they prevent us from firing. If it had to last too long, my God I do not say that we should fire upon them. We are quite incapable of such a misdeed, as to fire upon our chiefs. But we should fire upon the enemy through them. And they would manage as they could, with our bullets.

§. — It is incontestable that there is in the old man an incomparable grandeur. But if the effect is missed, so much grandeur only causes a more frightful smallness to appear.

§. — If the effect is of grandeur, so much the better; and this grandeur is incomparably reinforced. But if unfortunately it is an effect of smallness, it is this smallness so to speak that then appears great and so to speak one no longer sees then anything but the grandeur of this smallness.

§. — It is a unique grandeur, provided and on this sole condition: that it not be a unique smallness.

§. — The old man who returns toward the first source. There is such an incomparable grandeur in the apparatus of death and in the apparatus of justice, (and in the apparatus of secrecy and in the apparatus of the unknown), that he who is to appear is lit by the most profound reflection. There is in the apparatus of justice such an incomparable grandeur that the most insignificant accused is heightened, is clothed, as such, as accused, with all this same grandeur.

§. — The grandeur of the day of death, which is the same day, and which is the same grandeur, as the grandeur of the day of judgment, is such that the most insignificant accused, that the most insignificant addressee is entirely clothed with this grandeur. And every man who from day to day makes his stages to arrive at this day is clothed with this incomparable grandeur. And we are not of those barbarous races, and we are not of those romantic races and we have no need of skulls, previously defatted, to think eternally of the day of death. And neither Joan of Arc nor Saint Louis felt the need to walk about with a skull. And Jesus on the Mount of Olives did not make his meditation upon a skull. The meditation without accessory was enough for him.

§. — But also all this turns around and this incomparable grandeur retorts. The greater the day of death is, the greater the day of justice is, the greater also is the lack and the more frightful is the constraint if the old man has no air of suspecting it for a single instant. The more solemn the day of death is, the more solemn the day of justice is, the more also one feels at heart the sentiment of a frightful constraint, and of a frightful default, when one sees an unhappy old man entirely occupied with our miserable quarrels. How one wants to cry to him: That is good for us. But you, do you not know then. What distress, to see an old man occupied with our same miserable vanities. What disaster to see an old man entangled in our smallnesses, as small as we. An old man as small as we is incomparably smaller. And quite foolishly smaller. It is for this that the greater the day of death is and the greater the day of justice is the more there is no spectacle so frightful in the world as to see an old man occupied in our pettinesses. And the more you defend them against me by saying that they are old men, the more on the contrary you condemn them, for at this hour the profound nature appears and there is nothing so petty as a petty old man, for a being must really be at the most profound and incurably petty to remain petty on the eve of the double day. And thus when you excuse them on the ground that they are old men and when you defend them on the ground that they are old men, you on the contrary charge them, and with the most terrible charge.

§. — Well I consent to it. Let us not go so far. Let us stay, dear Œnone. Let us not go so far, if it is to charge them so. Let us remain pagan. If they are indefensible, if their cause is unsustainable in the Christian language, let us remain in the pagan reign. Let us stay with Nestor, horseman of Gerenia. He too was a great old man. There are only two Testaments, but there are five reigns: the mineral reign, the vegetable reign, the animal reign, the human reign and the Christian reign; or if one prefers for the last two the reign of man and the reign of the Christian. And there is no less of a gap and there is no less of an advent and there is no less of discontinuity from the third to the fourth and from the fourth to the fifth than between any of the other three. Man is as much a creation in the animal and the Christian in man as the animal or the vegetable are a creation in raw matter. I consent, let us remain in the pagan, let us remain in Nestor, and in the council of old men. None is great like the old man in pagan prosody, none is great like the old man in the ancient city. And it would be too long to enumerate the reasons for it. It is wisdom; and it is antiquity itself. It is that they know stories of the old time. It is also the advance of the great death, so great in the ancient city. It is the imminence of a judgment all the same and the last instance and Charon and Virgil and the obol and the bark and Minos and Racine and Theseus and the descent into the pale Underworld. And it is the race and it is the altars of the ancestors and it is what will never begin again, and that youth that one will see no more. And it is the council of the elders. And it is this long history, the history of the city, the history of the race, their own history. It is this long memory full and rising like an ear of grain. Golden like an ear. Ripe like an ear. Blond like an ear. Warm like an ear. And to be listened to by the young men.

Which comes back to saying, and one expected it, that just as the ancient world is like a mold and a temporal prefiguration of the Christian world, just as the ancient city is like a vase and a temporal prefiguration of the city of God, so the ancient old man is a temporal prefiguration of the Christian old man and the grandeur of the ancient old man is a temporal prefiguration and certainly already spiritual of the grandeur of the Christian old man.

§. — You exclaim upon that, and you say to me: Langlois was quite right. You are mad. What an idea to invoke for an unhappy man like Lavisse all these ideas and the apparatuses and the ideas of so many grandeurs. What can there be in common between a poor ordinary man like this Lavisse and the ideas of so many grandeurs that you evoke. What bad taste, to put together only and in the same paper this unhappy Lavisse and the grandeur of the old man; and your grandeur of the ancient old man prefiguration of the grandeur of the Christian old man. What can all that have to do with Lavisse. And what can Lavisse have to do with all that. You create artificially, you create arbitrarily, you create gratuitously the most coarse, the most foolish of disparities. You too speak on another plane. You too speak at bottom of another man. You too speak another language. You too in the end speak of something else. What a mania to make rapprochements. Which cannot be made. Which defend themselves, I mean which forbid themselves of themselves. Which cannot go together. Which protest of themselves. It is always your mania of going to look for grandeurs everywhere, and there where there are the least. What an idea to go mixing Lavisse with grandeur, and with the ancient, and with the Christian. And to mix grandeur with Lavisse. As if all that could have any relation together. You create on purpose the most grotesque disparity.

§. — We are going to be entirely in agreement, my young comrade. But if our masters have nothing in common with grandeur, why do they not renounce the grandeur of their commands. And you will accuse me again of being coarse, but why do they not renounce the grandeur of the salary they receive; and that we pay them. They are quite willing to renounce the grandeurs which would confer responsibilities. They are quite willing to renounce the moral grandeurs, and the spiritual ones. But as soon as it is a matter of temporal grandeurs they will no longer renounce the grandeurs. They are quite willing to renounce the grandeurs that engage man, they do not want to renounce those which disengage him. They are quite willing to renounce the grandeurs of the master, and of the father, and of the old man. They do not want to renounce the grandeurs of the functionary. And the solemnities, and the incensings, and the grandeurs of the ceremonies at the Sorbonne. And the apparatuses, and the displays, and all the garlandings of the political grandeurs, of the university grandeurs. And they are quite willing not to renounce the grandeur of their authority. Nor the grandeur of their power. Nor the grandeur of their fortune. Nor the grandeur of their clientele.

There is only the grandeur of their duty, and the grandeur of their office, and the grandeur of their age that they are willing to renounce.

They are quite willing to renounce the grandeur of the responsibility of command, but they do not want to renounce the grandeur of command itself.

And step by step and year by year they fully intend not to renounce the government.

They readily renounce the government of themselves; but the government of others, never.

§. — I go further, my young comrade, and you fall into laudettism. You certainly remember that we have named laudettism, from the name of a young man of about fifty, a very widespread, very sly and at the same time very characterized spiritual heresy, very curious in any case and extremely characteristic and extremely important, which flourished some years ago. It had been put into form by a young man by the name of le Gris or Legris or le Grix or Legrie or le Gril or Legril. But it is one of the greatest injustices of this world that inventions never bear the name of their inventor and thus this America was not named after this Christopher Columbus. This little fellow had worked so well that I had to put it a little back into form. (Not America, the heresy). And I name it here a spiritual heresy and I would willingly name it simply an intellectual heresy. So as not to make trouble for myself. And to flee in my turn the responsibilities. For as for heresies in matters of faith I have neither the taste nor the authority to denounce them or simply to make myself the censor of them and all kinds of delations or of censures suit neither my nature, nor my humor, nor my temperament, nor my character. This heresy then, but this spiritual and intellectual heresy, this graspable heresy and which falls back within our competence came back essentially to this and could be reduced to this extremely dangerous proposition and of a capital gravity that we other Frenchmen of this time, Frenchmen of the beginning of the twentieth century, Frenchmen of the first third of the twentieth century live a life of an inferior price to the lives that Christians of other times could live. The idea of this laudettism, (and I confess I had helped them a little to bring it out), is that we here and today live a diminished life, a life which would not be of the same price as the lives of the old times. This heresy in spiritual matters and in intellectual matters enveloped all the same a heresy in matters of faith because it enveloped this proposition that the price of salvation would have diminished and that the salvation of a soul would no longer be worth the salvation of a soul and that Jesus would no longer have died for saints of the same price and that redemption itself would go as if diminishing in the later centuries. It was then not only a heresy in matters of faith, but one of the central heresies, one of the capital heresies in matters of faith, since it was this heresy which one could name par excellence the temporal heresy, which consists in proposing that the temporal, as it passes, and from temporal year to temporal year, would end by wearing out the eternal, by diminishing the sacramental. For it is understood that all event is irreversible, but precisely the eternal and the sacramental is not event, the eternal and the sacramental is and remains equal and the same throughout the ages and is removed from event and the corpus Christi and the salvation of a soul are and remain the same and of the same price. But I have engaged myself not to enter today into the examination of the heresy in matters of faith and what I wished only to recall is the spiritual heresy and the intellectual heresy. And so to speak the lay heresy. My young comrade when you reproach me for citing M. Lavisse, for bringing in and so to speak for making M. Lavisse play in considerations on the grandeur of the old man and for effecting this rapprochement and for creating thus and creating at once a coarse disparity, when you do not want, my young comrade, that I bring M. Lavisse near to these considerations, you fall into laudettism, my young comrade, for this repulsion that you have, this kind of interdict that you make for us is founded more or less obscurely on this proposition that all the considerations to which we can give ourselves; and notably the considerations upon grandeur; and more notably the considerations upon the grandeur of the old man; can very well find their matter in other times, in the men of other times, but that these considerations, founded in other times, no longer find their matter, no longer find any matter in our time, in the men of our time. And that consequently they are foreign there and even a little ill-bred. That they would do better not to show themselves there. That they are no longer of their company there. And consequently that they are of bad company there. That they are out of place there. That they are out of their place there. And consequently and finally that it is a little incongruous to want even to put them there.

§. — Now it is not we who put them there, my young comrade, they are there, and one remembers perhaps all this. This lay laudettism is not less dangerous and it is not less capital than a laudettism and than the laudettism in matters of faith. Why diminish ourselves, my young comrade. We are the same men. There may be in the history of the world strata, unequal layers. Generations of unequal worth. But the matter on which they work is not of unequal worth. And in this sense we are the same men. The matter in which we operate, the matter of salvation and of penalty, has always the same price, because it has always the same resistance. Neither life and death, my young comrade, nor love and nor hatred, nor laws and mores, nor fatherland and race, nor marriage nor children, nor salvation and penalty and above all misery and nor poverty have fallen in price on the market of values. We can, we, be inferior to our matter. That is another question. But our matter is always as serious, that is to say it is always and as comic and as tragic. And as ingrate and as difficult and as painful. We can be different footsoldiers. But we always climb the same path. Your twenty-five years, my young comrade, are worth all twenty-five years. They are in no way diminished. And permit me to say it to you, but then this entirely between us, the stroke of passing forty and of beginning to redescend the slope is as serious in our days as in the time of Fabius Cunctator.

§. — Believe well, my young comrade, that old age has the same price and that respect has the same price and that grandeur is the same and has the same price. When then you refuse me to make this rapprochement, when you refuse me to put together the very name of M. Lavisse and any consideration upon the grandeur of the old man and when you accuse me of creating thus the most coarse disparity and when you are right, all that you say is then you who accuse M. Lavisse and who diminish him so much, for you accuse him of nothing less than this: of not even being an old man.

§. — And then we cross again. We come back exactly to what we were saying. They are quite willing to be old men in the sense that they have behind them big temporal careers which push them and which carry them. But they do not want to be old men so as to be great at least with the grandeur of old men. They are quite willing to be old men for the ceremonies and for the triumphs; and for the retirements; (and they do not draw workers’ retirements). But they no longer want to be old men so as to be confronted with the grandeur of the old man. For the grandeur due to the old man is also the grandeur that the old man owes. And the respect due to the old man is also the respect that the old man owes.

§. — They no longer play the proud when it is a matter of being old men so as to be confronted with the grandeur of the old man. Oh then they are modest. They are too humble folk. They no longer want to be confronted with the grandeurs of humanity. The grandeurs of humanity are literature and eloquence. But they are quite willing to be conferred with the grandeurs of power.

§. — They no longer play the modest. And they are quite willing to play the proud again when it is a matter of triumphs and of ceremonies and of oratorical compliments, and of university perorations. They do not find, then, that this is eloquence.

§. — It is always the same modern vice of duplicity. They want to play twice. They want to play two foreign and at will contrary games. They want to play upon two tables. They want to play with both hands. They want indeed to be great for temporal situations. And they want indeed not to be great for the responsibilities that temporal situations should confer.

§. — The respect of old men is only a particular case of the respect of the fatherland. It is nested in the respect of the fatherland. If then old men corrode the respect of the fatherland, they corrode by that very fact and within and a fortiori the respect that one asks us to have for them.

§. — Destroying the fatherland, they destroy themselves.

§. — Or if one wishes to speak the ancient language, and the pagan language, the council of old men is there only for the city. It is the city that is most ancient. And it is the city that is most solemn. It is the city that goes back furthest, that will descend furthest. If the council of old men works against the city, it destroys itself and thus and within and a fortiori it ruins the respect that one wishes us to have for it.

§. — When one asks us to respect an old man, so to speak automatically, without examining whether he is respectable, and above all without examining whether he himself respects respect, one wants to play automatically in a particular case a general rule and this general rule wants to play in sum and in any case the sentiments and the law of filial respect. At bottom what one wants us to respect in a particular old man is the old man in general and then and on the other hand what one wants us to respect in the old man, (in general), is paternity, it is the father. What one above all makes play, what one above all wants to make play, are the sentiments of paternity. But then we too are fathers. And consequently we too have the right to speak. And these sentiments turn around. It is precisely because we have sons, and because we are clothed with paternal responsibility that we do not want our sons after us to remain eternally commanded by this generation of capitulators. They have done enough with us. We do not want them to begin again and to continue indefinitely with our sons. We already, it is enough, it is too much that we have borne them so long. We too are fathers. We want precisely that our experience serve our sons. Since we have this happiness, if it is permitted to speak thus, that we have suffered, precisely for that we do not want our sons to suffer; in their turn; and from the same men; and from the same abuses; and from the same betrayals; and from the same flabby need of the same capitulations. Since at least we have had this happiness, if it is permitted to name it thus, of having known these fellows, these bad fellows, and of having borne with them for thirty years, and of having suffered from them for thirty years, and of having been governed by them for thirty years, and of having been betrayed by them for thirty years, it must at least be that this experience should serve some purpose; and someone. And we want precisely that it serve our sons.

§. — We too are scientific. We too are for the scientific method. Since an experience of thirty years, perfectly conducted, has been made, this experience must at least be registered; and one must not begin it indefinitely; and the results of this experience must be registered. We at the end must have served something; and so much pain must have served something; and so much default must have served something. At least so much misery must not be lost; and so much abandonment must not be lost. Since against our will we have made this long experience of these men, we are like everyone, like every man arrived at the beginning of decline, we want at least that our life not be wholly lost, we want that so cruel an experience serve at least something, the experience of so much bad faith and of so much misappropriation. We do not wish to have been entirely useless, in our pain itself, and in our foolishness, and in our foolish trust toward unworthy masters. We mean to make serve at least something the very abuses of which we have been the object. And the victims. And the foolish half-conscious half-accomplice authors. We do not wish, in our errors themselves, to have been entirely useless. Man is thus. We mean to make serve at least something these very misappropriations of the most holy trust to which we benevolently lent our hands. We do not wish our children to begin again, to continue after us being commanded by these residues of abandonment, by these debris of the most ancient capitulations. We do not wish our children to begin again, to continue after us being duped, being betrayed, being deceived, being governed in the end by these men and by their sequel.

§. — We do not wish our children to begin again, to continue after us and like us to miss their lives for having been delivered up as we have been by the flabby capitulations of the same General Staff. When a man has missed his life, he has only one idea. It is a quite foolish idea. But in the end he has it all the same. He has only this idea, that at least his children should not miss their lives. That his children should not begin again, and should not continue the same thing as himself. He lives only for his children; and in his children. He sees only for them. All that so many deceptions, so many disabusings, or if one prefers so many abuses have accumulated, have repressed in him of force, returned, and of will, missed, he reports upon his children. So much the more imperious, and with that force of command, irrevocable, that a human sentiment takes when one knows that it is the last time one plays.

§. — Such is our situation. We are, I have said it enough, and this verifies itself more and more, a sacrificed generation. We have been constantly betrayed by our masters and by our chiefs. At no price will we suffer that our children should be betrayed in their turn, and by the same masters, and by the same chiefs. We will not suffer, at no price will we endure that a Jaurès, that a Lavisse begin again upon the following generation the same abuses.

§. — We shall be more courageous for our children than we have been for ourselves and we shall go to extremities rather than let our children be deceived and tricked and betrayed and abused by the same men as we have been ourselves.

§. — Let it be known, we shall be less patient for our children than we have been for ourselves. We are resolved that this irrevocable experience shall at least serve something.

§. — For thirty years we have been betrayed. Of our socialism, which was a system of economic and social justice, of economic and social truth, of economic and social health, in a word of temporal justice and truth and health and a system of the good and the true and the just and the healthy organization of economic and social labor, of temporal labor, they have made a renunciation of everything, a low politics, an ignoble sabotage, properly a military treason against the French people. Of our Dreyfusism, which was a system of juridical justice, and truth, and health, and again social, and very properly national, they have made a low politics, and a low demagogy. It is understood. They congratulate themselves on it and M. Langlois coarsely mocks us about it. And of our Republic itself what had they made up to the moment when we began to push them back. But they shall perhaps not always laugh. And this corruption that they spread around them, this betrayal that a Jaurès still spreads around him, we have begun to push them back. What we have not succeeded for ourselves, what we have not obtained for ourselves, of being delivered from this dreadful band, we shall succeed in, we shall obtain perhaps for our children. We shall perhaps be more courageous. And once finally we shall perhaps be fortunate. And as much as we have been unhappy for ourselves, so much perhaps by some compensation shall we be happy for our children.

§. — First we shall perhaps be less cowardly. Let each return upon himself, and within himself make again the long history of these sorrows. Let each see again, let each remember the long history of these sad years. How many times have we not been cowards. How many times have we ill, or little, or not defended ourselves against this band. And how many times have we ill, or little, or not defended our country. Not so much by cowardice no doubt as by a relaxation. One had to follow a man like Jaurès to the trail, one had to follow him on the trace and harass him constantly and not let him go and remain faithful to him and not let pass a single of his misdeeds without signaling it at least and without doing all we could to try to compensate for it, and to annul it, and to repair its effects. Did we do it. How few times. What considerations have we not had for this Jaurès; what delays; what disarmaments of ourselves. What respites have we not granted him. What remissions; what adjournments. How many times have we left him in peace, he who has never left his country in peace. We had to follow him step by step; and mark all the points; and mark all the blows. Did we do it. We let him operate in the greatest tranquillity and we incessantly accorded him silences which were like connivances and almost complicities. We had so much to do. But one had to do more still. One had to suffice for everything. And to invent being still stronger; and still more active; and still more studious. Our children shall never know how many currents we had to climb back up, and to tell the truth that we had to climb back up all the currents. May they never know it; and may they not even be able to suspect it, that is our dearest wish; for it will be a sign that they cannot even suspect the state of servitude and the state of baseness in which we had been put. And as remorse itself is still nourished by the crime and as repentance is still nourished by the fault, and as contrition is nourished by sin and as regret is wholly nourished by misfortune, so this knowledge our children would have of our baseness would still be nourished by this baseness itself. And it would be a prolongation and a heritage of this baseness. May they then eternally ignore it and may they not even suspect what we have been. And what we have done. And notably what we have done for them.

§. — How many times have we not left Jaurès unpunished. How many times have we not left him in peace. How few times have we said what he was. Other duties asked us too. And if one detests this word duty as much as I detest it, other offices, other days, other labors, other ordeals, other pains, other miseries, works. Other disciplines. But this cowardice that we have perhaps so often had for ourselves, we certainly shall not have it for our children. This insistence, this constant application of which we have perhaps been lacking for ourselves, we certainly shall not be lacking in for our children. Let it be well known, nothing will stop us. All that we have precisely of remorse will flow back into courage, and perhaps into energy. At no price shall we let ourselves be stopped. It is a well-known case. At any price, at no matter what price we shall wrest our children from this baseness, from this shame, from this servitude. What we have not done for ourselves we shall perhaps do for them.

§. — We shall spare nothing. It is a well-known case. When a man, (and when a generation), has evidently missed his career, he puts an incredible bitterness, and to say all a sort of woman’s bitterness, (they are the only ones who count), into saving at least his children, into saving at least the following generation, into preventing his children, into preventing the following generation from pursuing the same failure, the same missing of career, from undergoing the same abuse, from being victim of the same misappropriation. It is a well-known case. Everything turns around then. All that has failed with the one, one wants at least to do with the other. And all that one shall not see, one wants at least that the children see it. And all that one knows well one shall not do, one wants at least that the children do it. One is quite willing to have been unhappy oneself, one does not want one’s children to be unhappy. One is quite willing to have been unhappy once, one does not want to have been so twice. It is in quite another order, but with profound affinities, it is always the woman of thirty and the man of forty. One does not want it to be said that a whole youth has been lost. One does not want that so much hope, that so naïve an innocence should have been totally played, should have remained totally vain. And totally unfruitful. One does not want that so much candor, that so beautiful a youth, that the vast hopes should have been to this point abused. One revolts then, and let our masters know it well, this revolt can be singularly dangerous because evidently it is the last, because one feels well, because one knows well that it is the last. And of having served nothing, one wants at least that it serve something. All that has been repressed comes back the more strongly, and the more imperious, and the more irresistible. And so much the stronger also that one feels well that it will be for the last time. All that there is of serious and capital and uniquely great in the extreme and in the last appears here and finally springs forth. All that has been repressed flows back, in a last seizure, in a last courage. I myself who have constantly defended myself so badly and who to tell the truth so to speak have never defended myself, I measure very well to what point we shall defend our children, and that we shall defend them to the end; and that we shall hold out; and that we are resolved to carry the piece. It is singular indeed how one can not be courageous for oneself and not be so for one’s very honor and be so for one’s children. A proper remorse, a singular honor, a singular remorse pushes us then, unknown to any man who is not a father.

§. — We touch here upon one of the deepest sentiments of man, and upon one of the most singular, and upon one of the most mysterious; and upon one of the most given; consequently upon one of those that the finest imagination in the world would not invent; and of which the finest imagination in the world would not even have and would not even give any idea. There would need a novel, and perhaps several, to begin to clear a little, expedire, this sentiment so singular, so mysterious, so troubling. But who would write this novel; and is this not precisely one of those secrets of which Halévy spoke, which are more secret than all the others, because everyone knows them and no one says them, and they are the only secrets of the world. I wish to speak of that sort of shame, and not so much perhaps of modesty as of despair, and of that frightful sentiment of responsibility that there is in paternity. It is so frightful a responsibility, (both toward ourselves and toward everyone), to have brought children into the world. When one sees a little what existence is. And when one knows what is in store for them. It is a troubled sentiment, and ashamed of itself, which is of a sort of remorse, which is not of regret, an afterthought sentiment, but of which one no longer rids oneself. One wishes then to make up for it, and by a deep need of compensation, and no doubt of having oneself forgiven, one becomes hardy, one becomes courageous, everything flows back, remorse, pain, the ancient and irrevocable deception. And one would do everything so that at least these children should not be unhappy. It is like the only manner we have of repairing toward them. From there a sort of unique point of application, an obstinacy, almost a monomania; this fixed idea that one will save at least the children; from there finally, who knows, perhaps courage. Let one not therefore trust our mansuetude and so to speak let our masters not trust our cowardice. We have let much pass for us that we shall perhaps not let pass for our children. And what we have not done for ourselves we shall perhaps do to prevent our children falling, remaining in the same servitude, being exposed to the same tyrannies, being victims of the same abuses.

§. — No sentiment perhaps is so poignant of all the sentiments of man. Because no sentiment perhaps is so irrevocable, so penetrated with the irrevocable. One has the impression of touching the very point, not so much only the point of connection, but the point of articulation, the very point of insertion where for the last time the temporal comes to articulate itself, comes to insert itself into the eternal. If this last battle is lost, all will then be lost. And the man will sacrifice everything to this obstinate idea, to this fierce idea that at least his son’s life shall not be the same as his own, shall not begin again, shall not continue his own; shall not be his own end to end. It is a revenge and a catching-up. Or again it is a criminal’s virtue. (The only ones). It is an idea of despair, an idea of remorse, the only indelible ones perhaps of all. And the only ones perhaps which amass at a point of the irrevocable so much eternity in time.

§. — All that has come to us, may it at least serve this youth which rises. It is the first active, it is the beginning of the active, to have cleared one’s passive. It is the first thing gained, to know, to have measured all that one has lost. To have cleared the ground. And it is the greatest misfortune but it is also the greatest arming to know upon whom one cannot count. It is a great operation done, an inventory, and a balance sheet. And to have settled one’s accounts. And to start at least from a clean slate. It is much already to know that Bazaine is Bazaine, (I say nothing more), and that Mac-Mahon is Mac-Mahon, and that Trochu is Trochu. Likewise it is already much to know that Jaurès is Jaurès and that Lavisse is Lavisse. When one has been delivered up by one’s governor, it is quite agreeable, because at least one knows that one must no longer entrust him with the great commands. Is this then at last too much to ask.

§. — Nothing is as poignant, I know, as the spectacle of a whole people which rises again and wants its raising and pursues its raising. And nothing is as poignant as the spectacle of a youth which revolts. I know it. If I do not say it more often, it is that I have a horror of all that is excitation and of all that is romanticism and of an enthusiasm that is not girt about. But in the end one may speak of it, provided one speak of it severely. Nothing is as anxiously beautiful as the spectacle of a people which rises again of an interior movement, by a profound resourcing of its ancient pride and by a springing back of the instincts of its race. But the more poignant this retortion is, the more tragic it would be to deliver it over to the same masters of the same capitulations. The more precious it is, the more vile it would be to deliver it over. The more unique and almost unexpected it is and the more it surpasses all hope, the more also it would be despairing to deliver it over. The more young and necessarily naïve and ignorant and innocent it is the more criminal, the more iniquitous, the more mad it would be to deliver it over. Yes the hour is poignant, it is understood, and no one knows it more than we. But it would easily become tragic if all this newness were entrusted to the old hands of all these old shames.

All that we ask is so simple. We ask that they go to rest. And that they not be replaced by their like. We ask that the same ones not be kept, and that one not begin again.

Same Wednesday April 9, 1913. — There are not only happy days. There are double days. In the Matin of this morning, still under this rubric Literary Movement, the ideas of yesterday and of tomorrow, and still under the same flourishes of typography, M. Lanson has just published, apropos of the same book, which is Four Years at the Court of Saxony, (1904-1908), by M. Guy Balignac, (why not also Péguy Balignac, really these amateurs deny themselves nothing), both a large stupidity, and a happy repudiation. I think that the stupidity is for the ideas of yesterday, and the repudiation for the candidacy of tomorrow.

The stupidity holds in a few lines:

One will see there moreover also, in the paradoxical pages where Greek genius is debased, the true sense and all the scope, for a certain party, of the campaign in favor of Latin, and by what equivocations one tries to make the cult of ancient Rome serve the restoration of the authority of another Rome. All this passage, of a naive malice and full of illusion, is most instructive and truly savory.

Thus, if I understand correctly, when we do de Viris, it is perhaps to reestablish the States of the pope; and who knows to introduce fraudulently into France pieces of the pope; it is at least to assert in France the authority of the pope. I did not suspect that we were so criminal. I begin to ask myself whether against Latin M. Lanson is not a little monomaniac, and as M. Langlois says a little mad. (So that, as our comrade Rudler liked to repeat, there is the monkey who is quadrumanous, man who is bimanous, and M. Lanson who would be monomanous). I would rather like M. Lanson to be monomaniac, and a little mad about Latin. For then I could give him back my esteem. What I reproached him with precisely was not being mad enough all the same.

The repudiation is important, for it is nothing less than the repudiation of Jauresism, (and thus the repudiation of Herr, and of the couple Herr-Lavisse, and thus of Lavisse, and of Jauresism at the Sorbonne, and an evident manifestation against the Sorbonnian manifestation against the three years’ service). M. Lanson has taken the text of his author to make the following declaration. It is a most intelligent declaration. One will see there that not only does M. Lanson declare that there is a question of Alsace-Lorraine, but that he discovers very well that it is no longer today anything but a first stage, a first step of reason and of reality. That there is for the whole world a German question. And that the question of Alsace-Lorraine for France opens the German question for France and for the world. But I could not say it as well as he. And it is even well written. And when I say that M. Lanson writes well, one may believe me:

I prefer to leave the reader under the impression of what there is of true, of useful for all Frenchmen in this picture of Germany. The testimony of M. Guy Balignac, confirming other observations, permits one to resolve the equivocation of the pacific dispositions of our neighbors. The French socialists pretend that Germany and its emperor desire peace. The majority of the country believes that the guarantee of peace lies uniquely in our military force. The contradiction of these two affirmations resolves itself without difficulty in the remark that Germany is not warlike by temperament, out of love of adventures and of glory. War, for Germany, is a last resort: she prefers to have without war the profits of war. It is profit that she wants: she will take it, by peace preferably, by war, if there is no other means. It is therefore true that it is in view of peace that she constantly reinforces her armaments: she wishes to have a superiority of force which would always discourage the other nations, and particularly France, from tempting the chance of arms. The German peace, the peace that the people and the kaiser sincerely want, is a peace in which no resistance would be opposed to the economic ambitions of Germany; in which the permanent display of her force, dispensing her from using it, would assure her without peril universal domination. It is for us to decide whether we are ready to yield everything, and to yield always, whether we wish to descend little by little to the condition of Saxony, or at least of Luxembourg. If we do not wish it, it is evident that we must make ourselves as strong as possible: we shall not diminish the chances of peace, but we shall change the character of peace. We shall remove the servitude from it and render it equitable. Germany, under Prussian direction, is realist: she carefully makes the balance of risks and gain; the less she will be assured of conquering, the less she will be disposed to combat, and the more she will reduce, in consequence, her pretensions, when she sees in us the will and the means to say to her some quite firm “noes.”

The work of M. Balignac adds itself further to other testimonies to warn us of the illusion there would be in thinking that there is between France and Germany only the question of Alsace-Lorraine. This was perhaps true in the time of Bismarck, and as long as the generation that had made the war of ‘70 was at the head of affairs. But ever since the young generations raised in the pride of victory have entered the scene, what is between France and Germany is the empire. The German empire, by its existence, renders true peace, the peace which is friendship, impossible, because the empire, for all the peoples that it groups in its unity, signifies: domination of the Germanic race over all the other nations. The Slavs and the English are only beginning, just as we are, to suspect it. The United States, one day or another, will perceive it, when they see German emigration, contrary to what it was in the past, remaining German. This remark does not diminish the interest that the question of Alsace-Lorraine offers for us. It uncovers, on the contrary, all its depth.

Gustave Lanson

§. — I shall not close this cahier without saying a word to the party of the men of forty, (but altogether between us). It is certain that the young people have made many manifestations, especially in the last seven or eight weeks. And even in the last three or four months. And I hear it said a little everywhere around me: these young people make quite a noise. These urchins of fifteen, they still say. My children, my children we must get used to there being urchins of fifteen and even below. All one can say is that there are not enough of them. An urchin has the right to speak, provided he has the age of Viala, and to make a hussar of the Republic. And we know very well that at fifteen we knew that we were men.

§. — It is here that we rejoin laudettism and that we shall conclude against laudettism this second cahier. Not only is it not true, and is it contrary to all truth, that we live a life which has less price than the lives of the men of old times, which is diminished, effaced and as if blurred, not only do we live a life which is of the same price as the lives of the men of old times, not only does the price of a life, the price of a soul, the price of a salvation remain eternally the same, but in temporal reckoning even it is permitted to say in speaking objectively, as they say, that in the history of all the world one would find difficultly an epoch as serious as that in which we live since 1905, and consequently an epoch and consequently a time of as much price.

Or to speak exactly and to keep to words their proper sense, what is new, what characterizes our time, is that we are in an epoch which is becoming a period. I mean to say that since 1905 we have all the tension and all the suspension of an epoch but that this suspension, that this epoch continues and lasts and comes into length and takes the dimension of a period. We are suspended and one does not see the end of it.

Since we are under the German menace, that is to say since 1905, we have all the tension of a crisis extremely serious and besides we have its duration. It is a one-time tax that we pay always. Or if one prefers we have tension but we have it in extension and we have it in spread. We are bidden to set ourselves at a high potential and to remain there all the time and that it should serve always and that it should never diminish.

I shall not say that we are going, or that we are arriving at a turning point of history, first because that is a little of a metaphor, second because it is a metaphor of carousel horses, third because it is not at a turning point of history that we are in effect arriving, but we have the very clear impression that we are arriving at a tumble. And we are indeed holding the blow since 1905 and it will be necessary to pull ourselves together and to hold it still better and to hold it perfectly to the end.

§. — We are bound to put ourselves, or rather to have put ourselves at a point of maximum exasperation and to hold firm there, and so to speak comfortably, and so to speak easily as in a state which would not be of tension. Without ever, without in any way relaxing. Without ever resting ourselves.

§. — It is the triumph of as if. We are bidden to be tensed to the maximum and to do all the rest and to live all the rest as if we were not tensed.

§. — I do not know, to continue to speak objectively, whether ever a people has been submitted to this regime. It is properly a regime of war in time of peace. One must not say that it is the regime of armed peace. One must rather say that it is the regime of loaded war. It is certain, and it is evident that on the one hand this regime is much more untenable than the regime of peace. But I would not be surprised that it should be more untenable than the regime of war itself. A war has all the same relaxations and so to speak shots gone off and falls of potential. I wish to speak of war only with extreme precautions. But in the end I imagine that a war has supervenings, incidences. Events. We are since 1905 in this regime that event itself is suspended. We accumulate the crisis of war and the duration of peace. We carry into length and into habit what hitherto had been only a point of crisis. Or again we have been bidden to climb to certain summits and afterwards it turned out that these supposed summits were immense plateaus.

§. — I was speaking just now of that sentiment a father has that at least his son’s life should not begin again his own, that at least his son’s life should not be a second life of himself, that at least his son’s life should not be his own, end to end, and end against end. Such a sentiment must particularly exasperate itself in a time like ours. And reach this same point of tensed exasperation maintained. It seems to me that I do not believe that since the beginning of the world there has ever been seen a situation like the one in which we move. To be constantly loaded for war, in the sense in which a rifle is loaded; and to be constantly loaded with the works called of peace, in the sense in which a donkey is loaded, such is the double lot to which we must answer.

§. — I admire here to what point all this is against laudettism. All that is happening. All that we see. Far from our time being of a lesser price than any of the old times, I see on the contrary that we have been given an entirely unique situation, entirely new, entirely unknown. And consequently of a unique price, of a new price, of an entirely unknown price.

Far from our time being a time of second zone and of a lesser price and far from the price of life and the price of man and the price of the soul and the price of salvation having diminished, it appears on the contrary that we are situated upon a testing-bench entirely new, more than of first zone; and where we must hold ourselves without any sort of presumption upon the future.

We have been given a situation of an entirely new price and literally of an incomparable price. One would seek in vain a precedent and perhaps even a point of comparison that would be useful. We are asked to be constantly tense, to be constantly rigged for war and during all this time to keep the perfect equality of peace. It is no longer even a vigil of arms, the old vigil of arms. It is a vigil of arms which prolongs itself indefinitely and which sustains itself in duration.

§. — War is war and peace is peace. But what to say of this situation that has been made for us, in which we are asked constantly the two together, in which we are asked constantly to accumulate, in which we are asked to bear as far as the eye can see the flat miseries of peace and at the same time to be constantly tense, to be constantly ready for the eminent miseries of war.

§. — War is war and peace is peace. However frightful the miseries of war may become, at least they can be compensated. There is the honor of war. And there is the grandeur of war. But we this time it is really and literally war and peace. We have all the burdens of peace and so to speak all the burdens of war. And we have neither the honor nor the grandeur of war nor the rest and at least the relaxation of peace. We are asked the virtues of tension and cumulatively the virtues of relaxation. I do not believe that ever a people has been submitted to such a regime.

§. — We are asked to play at heads and tails. It is if one wishes armed peace, but then and by these words not only peace in arms. It is armed peace in the sense in which one says of a rifle that it is cocked. Or again we are all like those soldiers of the engineering corps who plow and maneuver the earth, on one sole condition: that they always have their rifle within reach.

§. — It is of all evidence that we are witnessing events such as had never been seen and that we have the impression that we are going to tumble upon events of an unheard-of amplitude. It is indeed the old quarrel of the ancient world against the barbarians but by a sort of perhaps infinite growth in depth the ancient world has become the Latin world and the Roman world and the Christian world and the Catholic world. But what there is certainly altogether new in this situation that has been made for us, in this situation with which we have been honored, is its amplitude, and is its very newness.

§. — It is permitted to say that since the creation of the world there had never been seen a people keep eight or nine hundred thousand men under arms in time of peace. And one might as well say a million. And one had no doubt ever seen a people, in the modern sense of this word, impose upon itself in time of peace a war contribution of more than a billion.

§. — Such are the conditions that have been made for us. I had begun to indicate some traits of this situation, new in all the history of the world, in a cahier, or rather in a few pages that I had entitled Louis de Gonzague. This situation has not ceased since to hold so to speak its plenitude and to bring forth its full effect.

§. — Taking up this Louis de Gonzague again after this flat ordeal of eight years we may say, we may render ourselves this justice that we have borne ourselves well. We have worked as if nothing were the matter. And everyone has borne himself well. Situations, known to everyone, which could burst within twenty-four hours, which once would have made the three percent fall to 47, painfully made it lose three-quarters of a point. For weeks the banks refused gold, (I mean that they refused to give any, let us understand each other), and one went off with silver, when one had any. And not the smallest crease on the surface of the populations.

§. — What I admire most is the devout, who worry about this, who worry about that, and who have only one fear: that the operator be found at fault. They know ill these marvelous compensations of spiritual quantities. It is true that since the beginning of the world the modern world is what one has ever been able to find as most contrary to the rules of salvation. But by one of these marvelous compensations which never astonish anyone but the devout, in the same time that the modern world was forming itself as a system the most contrary that one had ever found to the rules of salvation, in this same time it was the very forms of the modern world, I mean its physiological forms and its mold so to speak, that were becoming the very rules of salvation. One asks for disciplines: here is one. Never had a world risen up to this point against the voluntary rules of salvation. And never had a world been so narrowly placed within these same involuntary rules. All that it had been necessary to invent in other times is today given to us as the very form within which we are constrained to move. And if one life suffices to make one’s salvation, what will it be to have two. Now we have two to sustain. And we are required, and we are bound to provide for two. Because we are under the reign of money and by that growing economic tightening of which I spoke in the last cahier we are so constrained to the virtue of poverty that to tell the truth we have come to be constrained to the super-virtue of misery. And it is our virtue of peacetime. And at the same time we are bound to the highest virtue of wartime, which is the unknowing of tomorrow.

Charles Péguy