Réponse brève à Jaurès

Charles Péguy

Brief Response to Jaurès

Pierre Baudouin (Charles Péguy)

When I returned to Pierre Baudouin’s, he was sad. He had in hand, like everyone, the Mouvement Socialiste — the issues of both the first and the fifteenth of May. He had read and had just reread attentively the stenographic account of the lecture given by Jaurès at the Porte-Saint-Martin on art and socialism. Seriously he was walking under the old deflowered pear tree.

— I learned from the newspapers, he said to me, that this account was also appearing in the Revue Socialiste, number 185 of May 1900. I am not happy that the same account should appear in two publications — especially socialist ones — simultaneously. No doubt I recognize by this cordial arrangement mutually concluded that the two great socialist reviews live in good understanding, and good understanding is better than bourgeois competition. But better still is the good economy of labor, by which we avoid duplication. It is bad economy that the same text should appear at the same time in two friendly reviews, that the common readers should have it twice — and that the common printers should have composed it twice, the first time in Didot, the second in Elzevir, and that they should have printed it twice.

There is no reason for this to end and for the Cahiers not to give the same now.

— They will take good care not to.

— I know that you give nothing that is in these two reviews of which you are the complement. It is desirable that these two reviews should thus mutually consider themselves as being complementary, the second to the first and the first to the second. That they should be mutually as the cahiers are with them. Not only can they exist, but they must both prosper. They have their formats, their publications, their aspects, their customs, their habits, their manners, their personal entourages. Let them sincerely give themselves their personal functions. Let them frankly address themselves to the same clientele, to the same readers. Let them usefully welcome the same authors writing at different densities.

If I were the director of the Revue Socialiste and the director of the Mouvement Socialiste, instead of reaching a friendly but accidental understanding to publish the same text at the same time, I would reach an organic understanding to publish complementary articles together.

— I have not always thought thus, but I think now that you are right. That would be true unity, not factitious, artificial, exterior, ecclesiastical unity, but living interior unity, the working unity of good workers preparing and doing good work. Otherwise I am afraid that Jaurès’s lecture may appear to excuse the reader from buying the stenography of the Mouvement. That pains me. Beware of advertisement. And beware even of publicity.

At a pinch I admit, provisionally and by condescension, that a newspaper, crushed by financial burdens, carried away by daily customs, should look after its sales by proposing popular names to its bourgeois clientele. I consent that resounding lectures be organized and that a popular name be put on the program: that is to satisfy loyally and modestly the demands of daily action. But happily reviews are still reviews — and cahiers are still cahiers. Reviews have their customs, and happily the customs of reviews are not daily customs. Let us be conservatives when it is fitting. Let us carefully conserve the customs of reviews. What was the intense article of daily action or the speech vibrating with public emotion becomes in the review and, a little less, in the cahier, a simple contribution to a study.

I await the day when on the first page of the Revue Socialiste there will be: “Read in the Mouvement Socialiste the rapid and attached contribution that our friends furnish to the studies we are pursuing,” and when in the Mouvement Socialiste there will be, on the first page: “Read in the Revue Socialiste the abundant contribution that our friends furnish to the studies that are common to us.” Then I shall be less unhappy. I am afraid that they said to themselves: “Some Jaurès! Excellent sales per issue. Perfect for the subscriber.” Let us beware of these customs. If the firm, possible or dangerous subscriber clings to names, what does it matter to us, then, that he be content.

The unseemliness of commercial calculations — demagogic, in a sense — is still more painful in the life of art. If I had attended the performance I would have applauded; not only those admirable passages, dramatic, pragmatic, where the citizen stenographer gathered the applause; but I would have applauded much more often, for I know myself well, and I would have applauded several times within myself to the point of weeping, for this orator, this man is irresistible. But it is no longer a question of that. I am at home. I receive the Mouvement Socialiste. I am a difficult subscriber, not in a patronly way, but laboriously. I mean by that that I do not have for the Mouvement the authoritarian severity of the patron for his employee, but the free and mutual exigency of the worker for his comrade and his companion the worker. I am at home. I receive the Mouvement. I read Jaurès’s lecture. First part. I wait a fortnight. And second part. I read attentively. I have reread. It left me a great impression of sterilely optimistic uncertainty. It is a ceremonial speech, delivered at a ceremonial ceremony. You know how little these luxurious performances — morally luxurious — interest me, performances, auditions and spectacles where bourgeois come to give themselves the new pleasure of a socialist eloquence. But let us pass for today. All I retain is that the speech is unfortunately made for the audience, and that the speech conforms to the aspect of the hall. The speech is ordered upon the ordering of the theater, and as these society performances are the beginning of our academic sessions, the speech becomes a beginning of an academic speech.

— At once a beginning and a survival.

— In reading this speech, I saw rising again the school exercises from which we have so painfully escaped. There is in it something of the Normalien and the Sorbonnard. There is in it an excellent agrégation lesson, and good elements for the French thesis of a doctorate in letters on a pam-philosophical subject. This symmetrical and easy classification of men and events, this stiff classification of cowardly men and limp events, of unstable men and mysterious events, this clear and false classification of simple ideas reminds me a little of the articulations of Monsieur Brunetière. Finally there are passages there, my friend, where I am afraid that Jaurès let himself go to doing some Jaurès. Listen well to this:

“I have sometimes seen, on our country roads, poor old peasant women who were returning from the forest; they were carrying not on their shoulders, but on their backs, a whole load of green boughs… (Various noises, the voice of a protester is covered by acclamations)”

I suppose this protester was not protesting for the reasons for which I am going to protest. What was awakening, a whole vast rustling of forest that was passing over the foliage of the old peasant woman, and who was walking with a heavy step, she did not hear this song of automatic dream, without understanding the little bit of forest she had carried off…

You have listened well: there are in that at least two representations that are of a great poet, that is to say that are seen: the old peasant women carry the load not on their shoulders, like men, they carry the wood on their backs; — and “the little bit of forest she had carried off.” The whole picture, the whole story is of a great spontaneous poet; but in the thrust of the narration, in the imposition of the picture I know not what dubious arrangements intervene. I seize upon the fact these arrangements in expressions like these: “song of dream,” and above all “green boughs.” But no. She is not carrying green boughs, this woman: she is carrying green wood, green branches, and at worst green boughs. All in all this peasant woman admirably represents what she must represent. But what shall we say of this gratuitous comparison:

“I do not claim, note it well, that the creative fecundity of what I call bourgeois democracy, of that which emerged from the philosophy of the eighteenth century and from the Revolution of 89, I do not claim that this creative fecundity is totally exhausted; new masterpieces can arise before the socialist era is precisely opened. You know that at the end of summer days, when the clouds lying down are illuminated and suddenly extinguished, one believes that this supreme illumination of the sun is ended. Suddenly another peak of clouds lights up, catches fire elsewhere; the horizon has been so gorged with light, in these long summer days, that it does not manage, so to speak, to exhale it, and that the sun, even disappeared, prolongs and sends from afar splendid farewells to the horizon it has just barely left. It may be that the bourgeois revolution continues to illuminate the works of men, even at the hour when the dawn of a new revolution rises! (Prolonged applause)”

I do not claim either to summarize in the brief dryness of a formula the work of creation and beauty accomplished in a hundred and twenty years, under the inspiration of bourgeois revolutionary thought; I take up again my image from just now, and I say that, just as in a summer day each minute has its nuance, its own coloring, so, in this long and brilliant period of creation and art, each minute has had its nuance; and I do not claim to confuse all these diversities and extinguish them in an abstract formula. Yet, we can from today summarize and characterize in broad strokes the work of art of the human period that opened, about a hundred and fifty years ago, with the works of the thinkers who immediately preceded and prepared the Revolution.

It is a fine picture. But I am afraid it may not be indispensable here. And I am afraid that the cosmographic explanation, the horizon so gorged with light, may not be indisputable. Let us beware of literary metaphors.

Young people, men of letters, artists, asked me to tell you this evening what, for us, in our socialist conception, the idea of art represented. I stop at once, and I protest against these young people, and against him who welcomed them well. These words: “what, for us, in our socialist conception, the idea of art represents,” have for me no meaning. Or if they had a meaning they would give to think that we have, as socialists, a particular representation of art. Whereas we have an idea of art uniquely because we are men — and besides we are preparing the social revolution so that art may appear — free — to the knowledge of men. There would be danger in letting it be believed that we have a socialist conception of art. Not only would we risk bankruptcy, but we would institute bankruptcy. We would give ourselves a fraudulent reputation. For we do not have in the coffers a socialist conception of art. We have a human conception of it — or several human conceptions — unless we have no conception of it at all: that depends on the species. The conception we have runs up against bourgeois servitudes, bourgeois social servitudes, bourgeois economic servitudes; let us carefully watch that it does not fall back under patronly authoritarian bourgeois demagogic supposedly socialist servitudes. The social revolution, in the sense in which we understand it, will give us the liberation of the conception we have of art. Still more there would be danger in letting it be believed that there can be a socialist art. There can no more be a socialist art than there can be a socialist history. Let us be socialists, and, if we are historians, let us make history. Let us be socialists, and, if we are artists, let us make works of art. Let us not be socialist historians. Let us not be socialist artists. Or rather these last words and these next-to-last words have no meaning. Contemporary art creation runs up against bourgeois servitudes. As socialists, we work with all our strength to free it from all servitudes. The social revolution will give us the liberation of art. It will give us a free art, but not a socialist art. When we say that there was a Christian art or a pagan art, we thus name the representation in art of Christian humanity and of pagan humanity. Now humanity will not be socialist as it was Christian and pagan, in the sense in which it was ancient humanity and modern humanity. It will be free. Even and especially free of us. Free through our efforts, but free of our history, free of our histories, free of our tales, free of the history of our efforts. That is why in the history of the world this importance is unique: for we are not beginning, we are not beginning again, we are not new men to consider as men who are preparing history; we are not men who are preparing men so that they may be made like us, but we are socialists who are preparing men so that they may be free of all servitudes, free of everything, free of us. In particular we are preparing humanity so that artists may be free, not so that there may later be artists who are made like us.

I continue: I joyfully responded to their call, and I am beginning a dialogue with them, for I fully hope that if not today, at least a little later, they will respond to me; they are tempted to go toward militant life, to seek there a new principle, a new force of beauty.

Singular militants, my friend, those who would be tempted to go seek in militant life a new principle, a new force of beauty. Singular militants, and about whom I am a little worried. Good people no doubt, and men of good will, but all the same a little related to those we call snobs and those we call hams. Unhappy those who go to seek in militant life what it is not made to give, to give us. Unhappy those who do not seek there simply the realization of the modest ideal. Unhappy first because no doubt they are immoral. Unhappy next because no doubt they will be disappointed.

Let us continue: they saw, in a recent drama that convulsed the human conscience, that the conflict of social forces, the conflict of iniquity and right, of falsehood and truth aroused in souls emotions so full, so strong, so vehement, that all others beside them seemed mediocre and futile — and it is to renewed life that they want to ask a renewal of art and of beauty itself. This first movement of consciences awakened such and such noble emotions, that they sensed that, from a complete renewal, from a complete transformation of society, in the direction of justice, new forms of art could arise.

Unhappy because no doubt they are immoral. Singular Dreyfusards, and about whom I am much worried, my friend, singular Dreyfusard he who would have had only the suspicion that this appalling drama could give matter for literature. I too was a Dreyfusard, and you are not unaware that I am one of the fifteen or twenty notable Dreyfusards who remain in the world. You are a second. Remember what Dreyfusist action was. Why did Jaurès himself give in the Preuves an incomparable monument? Because there is not a word of these Preuves that does not tend simply to the demonstration of truth and to the realization of justice. When we observe that this ensemble is an incomparable monument, no monument is comparable to it in the ensemble of the first series; but in certain respects these proofs are comparable to the beauty of knowledge, they are comparable to the beauty of dialectic, to the beauty of history. Incomparable ensembles. But I ask you, who have read them so passionately, I ask you: would we have given to the Preuves this sincere, spontaneous, free, efficacious, entire assent, if we had not had at every instant this impression that the author was not thinking for a single instant of asking from the conflict of social forces, from the conflict of right and iniquity, of falsehood and truth, full or strong or vehement emotions — to say everything, that he was not seeking in the reality of action the matter of the masterpiece he gave us? That the author had these emotions at an unheard-of intensity and communicated them to the reader, that is incontestable, but there is not the question. I maintain that it is precisely because not a word of the text tended except to the realization of justice and to the demonstration of truth that everything in us, efficacious reason and nourishing passion, accompanied the operation. There even was, in a sense, the virtue of the operation. There was the cause and the condition of its incomparable success. Not that there are not in the Preuves, once gathered in a volume, several hesitations of writing and several uncertain metaphors. Only the uncertainty and the hesitation came from the action itself, rapid, warm and heavy, they did not come then from an arrangement. Thus the awkwardnesses of Zola’s admirable Letters. And I ask Jaurès: it is not true that he would not forgive himself, if he had had for a single instant the imagination of asking from life what he never accorded himself. Let us beware of the snob and the false artist. Let us beware of the false man of action. Let us separate the functions. Let us distinguish the separated functions. I admit that dramatic action gives certain enjoyments of passionate emotion to great poets, and to the little boys who are beginning. It is permitted to quite young people to imagine that action is a combat, that it is a battle, that it is a war, and to have there the mixed sentiments of militarist military men. But we have long since renounced, my friend, these comparisons and these militarist assimilations. We know for certain that contemporary action is a perpetual effort, a perpetual labor, a perpetual essay of the cure of a sick majority by a healthy minority. Action is a perpetual remediation, a perpetual reparation. I do not ask that the doctor be fascinated by the painful contemplation of suffering and illness and evil to the point of becoming a tired doctor, that is to say a bad doctor. But I ask that at least the doctor keep some memory of this: that he is instituted to care for the sick. We do not willingly accept that the sick be sacrificed to the beauty of the operation. And I ask Zola, I ask all those who have entered deeply or entirely into Dreyfusist action: what did we see there, except facing us such a mass of filth and ugliness that unless we made ourselves its accomplices we had to desire with all our strength that this had never taken place in the history of the world and of deplorable humanity. There is the first profound difference that presents itself to us between art and life: and it is immoral to divert the acts of life, to seduce acts for the ends of art, as it is unseemly to want to enslave the works of art to the ends of life. We too were Dreyfusards. We have remained so. This word had for us no extraordinary meaning. We wanted all justice to be recovered in the Dreyfus affair. Quite simply. Quite plainly. We did not put malice in it. We gave ourselves to this action. But we asked nothing of it. Neither reward of power nor promise of art. No reward of enjoyment. Because we are not merchants. We did not seek to make a good deal. What enjoyment of life or art would we have asked of it? Not being militarists, war brings us no enjoyment. And no more civil war than foreign war. Civil war is no less odious to us than foreign war. That is why we have deplored that many antimilitarists had military or militarist customs. That if we sometimes received the impressions of an admirable civic beauty, this happiness, or rather this consolation was given us in addition, without our having asked it either of men or of events. And I am assured that Zola, and I am assured that Jaurès did as they had to, that is to say that they made these masterpieces of action, so to speak, in spite of themselves. They morally did all they could not to have to give us, the first his Letter to the President of the Republic and the second his immortal Preuves. Again recently be assured that Zola did not write his Letter to the Senators for the pleasure, if I may speak thus, for the eloquence, or for anything whatever, but simply for the action. That is why such acts are efficacious. For they are efficacious, more than the politicians and the politicals imagine. Or rather these are truly the only acts that are efficacious. The rest weighs little. It is the property of action that what citizens do most beautifully in it nevertheless is not desirable, because it is remediation of evil, because it is reparation. Citizen Jaurès and citizen Zola did everything so that neither Jaurès the orator nor Zola the writer would make the masterpieces of action they proposed to us. Unhappy those who do not seek simply in action the realization of the modest ideal, because no doubt they will be disappointed.

I too, my friend, if you permit, was a militant. And one must not tell me stories about militancy. It is a hard trade. As soon as it is permitted me to look at some great hopes or some small hopes, we shall begin again to militate. If the word militate is disagreeable to us, you know well that the trade is the same. It is permitted to young soldiers to imagine glory. We know, we, the fatigues and the pains and the disgusts. And it is because we know them that we shall begin again the best we can the soonest we can. I seem to you to exaggerate, my friend. Hope so. I am mistrustful because I am unhappy. I am so also because I have bought some experience. Let us beware. What is inexactly called the anarchist party was not long ago invaded by a quantity of people who were not seeking there simply the realization of universal liberty. I am afraid that what is a little less inexactly called the socialist party may one day be invaded by many people who would not be seeking there simply the tearing away of everyone from economic servitudes. I am told that there are young people who go to the people. That is good. But let us be of the people, simply. That will be better.

I continue: they did not ask themselves, they do not ask me to say in what form, in what measure, by what means, artists will be remunerated for their efforts in the socialist order we want to found. They could ask it, if they did not know. There is no shame in asking one’s way, even from a policeman. Above all there is no shame in asking for one’s bread. I go further, my friend: one must ask one’s bread from society, from the city, as one must work for the city. One asks for bread for one’s neighbors, and it would be Christian virtue or else it would be false elegance not to ask for it for oneself. But it is in conformity with socialist solidarity as we represent it to ourselves, as we love it, as we feel it, that the city give to all citizens the daily bread. And we are included among all citizens. Because we are reciprocally, mutually, the neighbor of the neighbor, the neighbor of the neighbors, the fellow citizen of our fellow citizens.

I continue: they do not have this preoccupation; first because they are at the happy age when the burden of material needs and social habits does not yet weigh upon life.

These young people are wrong; or rather they are not yet socialists. One becomes a socialist not the day when one would imagine that only material needs determine universal life, but truly the day when one perceives that material needs weigh like a burden of servitude on all life. These young people, whom I do not know, dwell, eat and drink, like everyone, since man does not live only by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. And even they can only give works of art, if they are artists, on this condition that they dwell, eat and drink. For people who work well without eating, my friend, that is bourgeois romantic legend. Either the burden of material needs weighs directly, loyally on their person and on their production, or they have carefully dissimulated it; or they make the burden of material needs weigh on their neighbor, as has been seen through their families among those of these young people who are still fed. If they are no longer fed by their families, the same problem will pose itself to them, if it has not already posed itself.

I continue: and then because they saw that through the successive forms of societies, art always found the means of making its place. They know that, when a society attaches to the idea of beauty the price it must put on it, that is to say the sovereign price, it always finds the means of assuring broad elements of work and life to the workers of beauty become the brothers and friends of the others.

Let us avoid here a misunderstanding: the author did not say that in all ages of humanity art had found the means of making its place. He did well not to say it, because truly that would be a bit much. The author only said that: through the successive forms of society, of societies, art always found the means of making its place. We thus fall back from history, which, thus affirmative, would be inexact, to sociology, which is, by definition, inexact. I am not haunted, as the poet Alfred de Vigny evidently was, by the legend and by the history of unhappy artists, poets and thinkers. But I am forced not to forget that the majority of great artists lived miserably. And when they were not miserable, it was not always because they were great artists. They often succeeded in the measure of their mediocrity, or by the simple softening of fortune at the price of their best qualities. Let us leave that, which would require a whole exposition.

— So to speak.

— So to speak. But I cannot let pass without a brief protest the old sophism. On the pretext that we know the artists who survived, badly or well, we are going vaguely to imagine that artists live and survive. Gross imagination. I do not know if Vigny did not strongly rise up against this. I no longer remember. But after all it is the old sophism of the ex-votos; and it was already ancient in the time of the ancients: we see the oars and the pieces of canvas hung on the walls of the temples by those of the faithful who escaped the peril of the sea. Do we know for that how many faithful underwent their bad fortune to the end? It is painful that the old sophisms should reappear so indefatigably. That denotes a bad economy of human labor. Diagoras having come to Samothrace, Diagoras whom they call the Atheist: “You who think,” a friend said to him, “that the gods neglect human affairs, at so many pictures do you not remark how many men owed to their vows their escape from the force of the tempest and their arrival safe in port?” — “You are right,” replied Diagoras, “since nowhere are painted those who were shipwrecked and who perished in the sea.” This sophism is so gross that you, who have kept for the people the respect that Jaurès does not keep for it, would hesitate to dismantle it. It is already old in Cicero’s time.

Let us leave to the bourgeois the care of saying: “Genius always breaks through,” as they say: “Talent always breaks through,” speaking thus as if they had some idea of what the artist, talent and genius are. In speaking thus, the bourgeois are wrong, but they are bourgeois. Their whole life is upon that. By what gratuitousness of false complaisance should we grant them their false postulates? Always this clumsiness of complaisance. Skill is disagreeable to me. But clumsiness is no less disagreeable to me, when it is false. Of all men, artists are the most difficult to keep alive. In this sense notably that, bad crazes set aside — and bad crazes never go to good artists — it is for artists that it is most difficult to earn the daily bread. The two principal causes of this commercial inferiority are the singular preoccupation with work and the particular apparent uselessness of the work. If therefore artists succeeded in earning their bread in the present bourgeois society, as Jaurès seems to imagine, a fortiori the others would succeed in it. And then we would not have to prepare the social revolution.

In this whole speech Jaurès seems to treat the question of knowing how the socialist city will maintain for artists the advantages that bourgeois society has conferred on them. Whereas the only question that arises is that of knowing how we shall give respiration to artists, presently stifled. But we shall return to this. Let us also leave the identification, which Jaurès seems to suppose granted, of art with the work of beauty. I would not at all grant the identity. But the distinction would require a long explanation.

The author of the Mouvement Socialiste, M. Hubert Lagardelle, was no doubt struck as we were by the eloquent optimism that Jaurès proposed to his audience, and he inserted as a useful corrective a little piece of text, which seems all the more old-fashioned because it is much newer. He cited fragments of Renan, in the Future of Science:

“Suppose a man instructed and noble of heart exercising one of those trades that require only a few hours of work, far from the superior life being closed to this man, he finds himself in a situation much more favorable — no, I am reading badly: — in a situation a thousand times more favorable to philosophical development than three-quarters of those who occupy so-called liberal positions. Most liberal positions, in fact, absorb all the moments, and, what is worse, all the thoughts; whereas the trade, requiring no reflection, no attention, leaves him who exercises it to live in the world of pure spirits. For my part, I have often thought that, if I were offered a manual trade which, by means of four or five hours of occupation per day, could suffice me, I would renounce for this trade my title of agrégé in philosophy.”

— Happy man: he could renounce this title.

— I warn you that your interruptions displease me.

“…for this trade, occupying only my hands, would divert my thought less than the necessity of speaking for two hours about what is not the actual object of my reflections. It would be four or five hours of delicious promenade, and I would have the rest of the time for the exercises of the mind that exclude all material preoccupation. These trades that should be the reserved trades of philosophers, like tilling the earth, pushing the weaver’s shuttle and others that absolutely demand only material attention…”

Lagardelle has added here a note of little interest. I continue the text:

“All complication, everything that would require the least attention, would be a theft from his thought. The work of manufactures would even in this respect be much less advantageous. Do you think that a man, in this position, would not be freer to philosophize than a lawyer, a doctor, a banker, a functionary? Every official position is a more or less narrow mold; to enter it, one must break and forcibly bend all originality. Teaching is now almost the unique recourse of those who, having the vocation for works of the mind, are reduced by necessities of fortune to take an exterior profession; now teaching is very prejudicial to the great qualities of the mind, teaching absorbs, wears out, occupies infinitely more than a manual trade would.”

I pass over several historical examples and some dubious hypothetical explanations. Several men devoted to works of the mind impose on themselves daily a number of hours of hygienic exercises, sometimes rather little different from those that workers accomplish by necessity, which, apparently, does not brutalize them.

I continue the text:

Here a precise sentiment:

“Gymnastics, for example, is considered by several as a useful diversion from interior work. Now would it not be more useful and more agreeable to exercise for two or three hours the trade of carpenter or gardener, taking it seriously, that is to say with a real interest, than to tire oneself thus with insignificant and purposeless movements? In this state that I dream, the manual trade would be the recreation of the work of the mind. That if one objects to me that there is no trade one can suffice with four or five hours of occupation per day, I would answer that, in a wisely organized society, where the useless losses of time and the unproductive superfluities would be eliminated, where everyone would work efficaciously, and above all where machines would be employed not to do without the worker, but to relieve his arms and shorten his hours of work; in such a society, I say, I am persuaded (although I am in no way competent in these matters) that a very small number of hours of work would suffice for the good of society, and for the needs of the individual; the rest would be for the mind. ‘If each instrument, says Aristotle, could, on an order received or even divined, work by itself, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods of Vulcan, which went by themselves, says the poet, to the assemblies of the gods, if shuttles wove all alone, if the bow played the cithara all alone, masters of workshops would no longer need workers, nor masters slaves.’ One can say that then slavery, after having educated humanity, will have ceased to be necessary and will by that very fact become an iniquity. The goal of society is not to make individuals live at the expense of one another, but to make individuals happy through one another, by discharging them as much as possible of the burdens that weigh on humanity, so that there may no longer remain to man but the burdens of the mind.”

Renan cites us in a note his exactitude at choir as canon of the Church: the Benedictines of the seventeenth century lived on ancient foundations having in view only monastic practices. In our days, the thinker and the scholar live by teaching, a social employment that has almost nothing in common with science.

At the risk of not seeming to you less ignorant than I appear to most of our contemporaries, I shall confess to you that I know in these few pieces if not all socialism at least the indication of all socialism as I understand it. You ask me why M. Renan did not become or remain socialist, as we are. I see for that many reasons, and you see them too, coming from his character and his history. But the proximate reason is, it seems to me, that the author misheard what he himself had pronounced, he heard in a failing sense what he had pronounced in a suitable language — or rather he did not hear well personally as spectator the character he had dramatically proposed to us. You know that this was not the first time that it happened thus in the history of thought. You know in particular that it was not at seventy years of age that Pierre Corneille heard his tragedies as the old Corneille forgot his very genius. The Cornelian characters have nonetheless kept their interior life. It was long since Pierre Corneille had become again a man of talent, that his son Polyeucte remained the son of a man of genius. And it is long since Pierre Corneille, it is almost long since Renan became what I know not. But the characters they bequeathed us are still living among us, acting among us. It seems incontestable to me that this representation of socialism, that this approbation of socialism, which could not determine M. Renan to participate in socialist action, determined many of what you permit me to call socialist vocations. Many of those men we call socialists became so by the example and by the lessons of this unforgotten character. The republic thus represented by M. Renan is also my republic. We all have our republics, cities that we love and whose birth and life we are preparing. Those of us who pretend not to have a republic, those of us who are asked what their ideal city is and who answer negligently, passing their hand over the pockets of their vest: “No sir, I do not have that on me,” — those, my friend, have all the same a republic, but they have a dissimulated republic. Those who go to ask sociology and history for the laws of their new city also. But it is factitious and exterior.

My republic, it will be left in peace as much as possible. I am building the city of Tranquility, as the ancient philosophers built the city of the perfection of ataraxia. I ask for ataraxia. I shall leave everyone in peace, provided, of course, that one does no harm to one’s fellow citizens. And it is here that I shall reproach Jaurès for having given or for having at least indicated a bad solution because he had badly posed the question. It is not at all a question of knowing if artists will have nourishment and welcome in the socialist city. That would be to suppose that there will be men who will not have nourishment and welcome in the socialist city. It is not at all a question of knowing how artists, as artists, will have from the city the means of their existence. We would suppose by that alone that there would be men who would not have from the city the means of their existence. But the city whose birth and life we are preparing will take care of all men. All men, without any exception, will be the citizens of my city. At the time when they are in the strength of their age, they will give to the city the indispensable, what I call social work, that is to say the work to be done to assure the corporeal life of the city. My city will give them the means of their existence. But during all the time of their childhood and their adolescence, during all the time of their old age, during all the time of their leisure, which will be the most considerable — much more considerable, my friend, be reassured — they will be tranquil citizens. In the sense in which I presently understand this word of tranquility, for whom is knowledge and enjoyment of human liberty, I believe that what man has naturally and morally most need of, what would naturally and morally be best for man, what man has a right to first, is the exercise of his tranquility. My city will therefore give to citizens the means of their tranquility with the same gesture as the means of their existence, of their corporeal life. My city will not even have to encourage the arts, for they will have no need of any encouragement there. As it will never need to command any requisition for the exercise of social work, so it will never have the intention of commanding any requisition for the work of science or for the work of art, which, in the sense in which we understand them, are in no way social work, but human work. We fall back here on the initial confusion. Let us know how to distinguish humanity from society. Let us know how to consider men and events sometimes under the aspect of society, which is particular, and often under the aspect of humanity, which is general. Let us prepare my city or society will organically do the business of citizens so that citizens may quite freely do the business of humanity.

It is not a question of giving artists means of existence, but we must rid them of the causes of oppression. It is bourgeois society that starves them. It is bourgeois society that kills them. I read in Renan, a little further on:

“What kills is the division. The philosopher is possible in a state that requires only the cooperation of the hand, like the work of the fields. He is impossible in a position where one must spend of one’s mind and occupy oneself seriously with petty things, like commerce, banking, etc. Effectively, these professions have not produced a single man who marks in the history of the human mind.”

I do not want to close this book without citing you some passages from the table, simply, where I fell while seeking the indication of what we have read. I find in the analytical table of contents, in chapter XVII: “No more barbarians! Dangers of universal suffrage with barbarians. Intrigue and falsehood at auction. The sovereign by divine right is reason. The majority does not make reason.” I pass the idea of a scientific government. I continue: “The suffrage of an ignorant people can only bring demagogy or noble aristocracy.” I pass that the people does not love sages and scholars. But I still retain these fragments: “There is only one thing to do, what one will do before that will be fatal. Institutions have meaning only with an intelligent people. Right to culture that makes man.”

I stop, my friend. You forgive me for having suspended my commentary for a moment to make room for sad preoccupations no less profound. Jaurès wants to give our artists what they will have no need of. Or rather he sells to artists what my city will give to men. I read my text:

“They are not at all frightened at the idea that the works of art, ceasing to be the individual property of a few privileged amateurs, will become the collective, common property of all men admitted to contemplate and admire them; they are not at all frightened for it is toward collective property, toward common property, that the work of beauty naturally goes. A masterpiece is diminished by being possessed only by a few! Like a mirror that would eternally reflect only the same face, and that would itself contract the wrinkles of this obstinate and irksome face, the masterpiece is shrunk by being admired only by a few: the human masterpiece wants all humanity to come and mirror in it its changing soul! (Applause) For me, I know no emotion more beautiful, more broad, more august and sacred than that which seizes the soul at certain hours in the great museums where are gathered for all the works of the masters. Recall the fall of day and those undecided minutes preceding the dismissal that the brutal guard signifies to us; recall the emotion that seizes the mind before all these masterpieces assembled and offered to the admiration of all men; one would say an Olympus where there are only Gods filling the sacred space with their dreams. Yes, that is the great beauty, that which is made for all; and I do not fear that those of our party may be afraid of communism, for glory is the supreme communism! It is the supreme communism since it supposes that the artist, the creator, leaving the narrow and miserable limits of his individuality, knew how to give his work an impersonal and eternal value; it is communism since by it all humanity appropriates to itself the highest riches of the human mind, and that at each generation the minds that pass draw a new meaning, a new force and a new joy from the eternal work, immutable and always renewed! (Lively applause)”

This piece of my text is so copious that I do not know where to begin. I leave the comparison of the mirror, which is false: one has never seen a mirror contract the wrinkles of an obstinate and irksome face. That is even what is extraordinary: that every living thing contracts habit, and that in a sense no non-living thing contracts any habit. It is a pity that for the vanity of the literary comparison one should efface the mysterious distinction of the living and the non-living. I leave the brutal guard and these arrangements of expression. It would be fitting that my commentary should be ordered upon the ordering of the paragraph. But I do not hold myself back from protesting against the inevitable invasion of glory. Unhappy the artist who loves glory. And unhappy the man of action who loves popularity. No less ignominious and no less cowardly and no less base than popularity, glory is always the reflection of some demagogy. Unhappy the artist who loves glory. He loves what the human soul has prostituted to the vice of all regards. Unhappy the artist who loves glory. Far from it being the supreme communism, glory, in the sense in which we know it, is only a singular combination of all that bourgeois emulation has been able to communicate to us of jealous authority and envious servitude. No, my friend, hear me well: no, I do not ask that the man of action make a point of remaining unknown or of becoming unpopular, I do not quite ask that the artist make a point of remaining inglorious or of becoming unpopular. But I am like that ancient orator: when the man of action begins to become popular, I beg him to be good enough to begin to distrust, because no doubt he has done at least some stupid thing, and when the artist begins to become popular, I beg him amicably to be good enough to begin to distrust, because no doubt he has said some foolishness, which is his way of doing stupid things.

Where have you seen that the great philosophers, the great poets, the great artists, the great thinkers — I say the great, you hear me well — were popular? I do not speak of the great scholars, because then my interrogation would seem to you an index of my dementia. One poorly sees Descartes glorious, Kant glorious. Let us reason. One day when you have some time, run through the memory you have acquired of the history of humanity, from Socrates to Renan, and ask yourself if the men we love and those we do not love, who had some existence, were popular, were glorious. Do not make me say what I do not think. I know that several true and truly great artists were glorious. I do not hold it against them. I know that many artists had from their lifetime a more or less broad accompaniment of celebrity. But when you have distinguished from proper glory the demagogic glory, the glory I deny, a certain aristocratic or public reputation, almost professional, that I admit, with the prince, with artists, with connoisseurs, with an entourage, with a chosen people, with a native people, but with the crowd, never — you will tell me what remains to glory. And among our moderns and contemporaries you will tell me what you think of those who became glorious in their lifetime. Naive as you still are, and as little documented as I am, we know now what there is of filth and platitudes under a well-built glory. We know how much there was of demagogic falsehood and cowardice under a scaffolded glory like that of Victor Hugo. We know how to assimilate editorial advertising to all electoral advertising, or rather we recognize the identity of the two. We know that one must not have committed fewer uglinesses to obtain a print run of a hundred and forty thousand than to obtain a hundred and forty thousand votes. That does not prevent the author or the deputy from having talent; but it can often prevent the honest man from being elected or from being published. The buyer is no better than the voter, because it is the same man who is a buyer in the galleries of the Odéon, or who buys a pit seat, and who goes off to vote.

We know above all that in the state in which we live, my friend, one does not become popular without having contributed a little to it. We know enough so that one can no longer play the fool with us. One does not become popular without noticing it. One does not become popular in spite of oneself. No more than one is decorated in spite of oneself. Popularity is only the decoration of demagogy. We know the tricks of this elevation. We know for certain that it is always possible for the honest man to become unpopular. I did not much like Zola, because the regular piling up of his bad qualities, rather than the slow increase of his good qualities, was little by little giving him an immense popularity. Happily this man suddenly recovered himself, and with a great civic gesture he threw himself back without return into salutary unpopularity. For he is marked for life, do not doubt it, and his memory alone will be able to save itself from it.

Ask yourself among the ancients, among the moderns and contemporaries who were and who are glorious, ask yourself if it was for their best qualities that they became most glorious. And if it was not often for the bad ones, for the worst ones. Ask yourself what in Pasteur seduced the crowd and what in Renan seduced the bourgeois. Of course I omit the inverse test, I omit all the glories that burst at the death of the glorious ones. There would be too many. Unhappy the artist who loves glory. That if one wants to give one and the same name, this name of glory to the celebrity of a Tolstoy and to that of a Victor Hugo, I protest. I am like this inglorious Pascal, I ask for the prior definition of names. To the artists who would have openly or slyly contrived the design of replacing Napoleon first military man by Napoleon first poet in the imagination of peoples, we shall leave this word of glory. Unhappy the artist who loves his art. If the artist does not love his art, who will love it?

I know well that Jaurès would object to me that glory is thus contaminated in our eyes because it is elaborated in contaminated bourgeois society; but that in the socialist city glories will be pure as men will be pure, that, by an enlargement extended to the universal, in the socialist city glory will be precisely what the professional reputation I admit will have become. One holds this language also about emulation; and one strives to imagine emulations that would be pure. Vanity of these arrangements. It is not only because glory is exercised in bourgeois society that it disgusts me and that I dread it, it is also and above all because it is profoundly bourgeois. It is bourgeois in itself. And the revolution will no more consist in replacing the old bourgeois glory by a socialist glory patented with the guarantee of a new government than in replacing the old bourgeois competition by a socialist emulation cleverly beribboned. Glory is in a sense the authority of reputation. My revolution will suppress all authority. Otherwise it would not be definitive, it would not be the revolution.

I return to the beginning of my paragraph: Jaurès seems to imagine that the social revolution on art would be made because works of art, ceasing to be the individual property of a few amateurs, would become the collective, common property of all men admitted to contemplate and admire them. It seems to me that there is some confusion there. The important thing, the interesting thing is not that all men be admitted to contemplate these works and to admire them. The suitable thing is that the works of art be freely accessible to the men to whom they are suitable. I assure you that the difference is capital. If I understand myself well, I am working so that the works of art, ceasing to be the individual property of a few privileged amateurs, may no longer finally be the object of any property, of any social possession, of any social property. Let us not forget that collective, common property is still social property. We ask for the declassification of art and of science. We ask that the work of science and the work of art be free, that is to say withdrawn from social action as well. We ask that scholars, as scholars, and artists, as artists, be in the city freed from the city. We ask that science, art and philosophy not be socialized, precisely because the socialization of the great means of production and exchange, or rather of the indispensable work to assure the corporeal life of the city will have given this city the leisure and the space not to socialize what does not belong to it, but belongs to humanity itself. It is only because we have not yet socialized the indispensable work that social servitudes weigh today on art and on science. My city will not socialize art. For it will have no need of it. Men, on the contrary, if the city is as they will have decided it, but freely, if society is as they will have desired it, willed it, had it, men artists will well know how to free art from human servitudes. Presently all social servitudes weigh with all their weight on all the production of art as they all weigh on all human work. We ordinarily notice only the exterior or accidental manifestations of this weight. But the constant interior enslavements are much more formidable. We do not have to retell here the incredible stories you know about the sale and purchase of the works of painting and statuary. But, as Renan felt so profoundly and so delicately, what more deplorable trade for the artist than to teach drawing like a mercenary worker to the often ill-gifted pupil, except the lamentable trade of executing pictures and busts for the bad-paying bourgeois? What more deplorable trade for the composer than to teach music and even the piano, except the lamentable and dishonoring trade of composing for the bourgeois crowd? And what decadence to fall from the bad-paying bourgeois crowd to the even more degrading snobs! The painful stories come back to memory and you picture the crushing of bourgeois fashion and of the crowd and of snob fashion on the deplorable production of art. You picture the temptations that assail the best, and the capitulations of conscience. But picture the perpetual oppression of the writer under his reader. I consent that an insincere drama be hissed, because an insincere drama is in a sense a bad action and that to the bad action we must oppose an energetic act. But such is not the intention of the usual severities. Such is not the meaning of the usual complaints. It is not the insincere dramas that fall or that are not played. The gentleman who has paid for his seat intends that the artists please him, flatter him, and the spectator perched in the gallery, if it is permitted to speak thus, is not a less tyrannical patron than the spectator seated in the usual armchair; both have feelings closely related to the vile feelings of my enemies the Romans sitting on the oval benches of the amphitheaters. And the gentleman who buys a one-sou newspaper fully intends that this newspaper also please him. The newspaper must be amusing, interesting, exciting at least for one sou. Hence the ignominies of the newspapers we love best. As for the subscriber, especially the subscriber to the big newspapers, to the reviews, to the big reviews, his subscription becomes for him above all a means of domination. The expression “I unsubscribe” is the expression of a perpetual blackmail. What becomes in all that, under this oppression, of the liberty of the writer? You know as well as I that it is null, since it is not entire and often it is imperceptible.

That is why I love the institution of your cahiers. You have subscribers at twenty francs, subscribers at a hundred francs, subscribers at eight francs, subscribers at zero francs; you have ordinary monthly subscribers and you have extraordinary subscribers, when one of your student comrades, when a professor, when a manual worker, when a schoolteacher disapproves of an article, a commentary, he writes to you and bawls you out, or, what is better, he comes to find you and you both chat; you both present your reasons; you discuss reasonably; you discuss as free men; you are equals. But your friend does not say to you: “My dear Péguy I gave you ten francs for the month of May, you pleased me only for forty sous: you owe me eight francs.” Your friend sincerely and strongly presents his reasons to you. You sincerely and strongly present your reasons to him. Then at five o’clock your friend takes you to the station and leaves you. He leaves you free. Going away he leaves you free. Abandoning your reasons you freely adopt his, or if it pleases you you hold to the judgment you had first formed, or finally you compose the two judgments, or you do what you want. Your friend in leaving left you free. Because he knows well that you are an honest man, an ordinary man, that you work the best you can. Besides, and without having any illusion about the value you may have, he knows for certain that a Péguy stupefied by objurgations is worth even less than a Péguy left free and alone with his work, as a Durand and a Dupont stupefied by objurgations are worth less than a free Dupont and a free Durand. I say to you in truth: the liberty of the institution is what is truly new in your cahiers. You do not yet use it enough, in my sense. You still occupy yourself too much with your public. But in sum, you are free. In universal servitude, my friend, that interests me much more than all the prose you can insert in it.

It is a servitude still, an intimate servitude that one hardly thinks of. It is a servitude, no longer that holds to universal authority, but that holds to universal solidarity; no longer of superior crushing, but of tightening, of mutual lateral crushing. We did not much like Zola’s Mathieu Froment because he was making children almost indefinitely without considering that he was thus instituting a beginning of an invading race, a beginning of a conquering people, a beginning of a nation. What shall we say of the childbirth of art? Instead of the work of art pushing free beside the free work of art, together with the work of art — by the implacable organization of bourgeois competition it pushes now against the work of art. The newspaper kills the newspaper, as the review kills the review, and despite all the precautions you have taken do not be so assured that your cahiers may not be a little murderous. The drama kills the drama, and the poem the poem, and the poet the poet. The book kills the book. The artist kills the artist. Having sprinkled Paris with rapid monuments, M. Denys Puech has not only encumbered our ways and our crossroads like a wood repaving, he has not only encumbered our lawns and unjustly diminished the kingdom of flowers, he has not only broken our finest old perspectives: he has no doubt killed before their blooming monuments that would have belonged to what I permit myself to call the statuary of art. The artist truly kills the artist, and I pity the unfortunate in whom this observation would not have had a profound resonance of art.

Not only does the artist kill the artist, he kills all his fellow citizens. For everyone being made solidary with social work and with human work, without distinction of the social and the human, force being besides at every instant limited, all force given to the work of art is directly a force taken from insufficient social work. All force given to the work of art is directly a force taken from social action. I pity every artist in whom this observation would not have had a profound resonance. A great poet, who truly died a few years ago, M. Sully-Prudhomme, having keenly felt how formidable it is to found a race, felt no less justly how formidable it is to give one’s time, one’s life and one’s strength to the work of art. It is even admirable that it was precisely apropos of this Louvre, of which Jaurès is going to speak to us, that the most clearly keen scruple of conscience came to the poet. You have not forgotten this poem where he is moved that statues should have palaces when deplorable human flesh is abandoned to the injurious climate. Such a scruple does not come spontaneously to optimists. But it is impossible that it should not have come to every profound artist having a certain sense of life and of moral antinomies. This poet, who never attained to the establishment of the only peremptory answers, had then an assured critical sense of questions. He never knew the solutions, but he was hardly ignorant of problems. All that there is in this admirable poem of Justice is the painful position of the social question of art. It is therefore not surprising that the poem ends with the position of the very question that Jaurès’s article proposed to us:

I invoke you, O Chénier, for judge and for model!… Teach me — for I still doubt if I betray, Patriot, my art, or singer, my country — That to these two great loves one can be faithful; That art itself deposits a generous leaven By the cult of beauty in all that it expresses; That a heroic call sounds better in rhyme; That there is no better bugle than a numerous verse; That the cause of beauty is never deserted By the cult of truth for the reign of good; That one can be at once poet and citizen And founder, Orpheus, Amphion and Tyrtaeus; That to sing is to act when one makes on one’s steps Bow at one’s voice and line up the trees, The wild beasts grow gentle, and the marbles be moved, And heroes arise for all the good combats! O Master, by turns so tender and so robust, Reassure, help, and defend, by your great memory, Whoever on his tomb dares dream of uniting The poet’s laurel with the palm of the just.

You ask yourself, my friend, why this unhappy poet let slip the finest occasion one has ever had to thus associate the poet’s laurel with the palm of the just. It does not seem to me that he did it on purpose, that is to say that he was conscious of this vanishing. He was expecting the opposition of the city of art to civism and to justice, but he was not expecting an opposition of justice to patriotism, having prudently confused justice and patriotism at the heart of civic action. In the verses I have recited to you reside the elements of a nationalism. Finally it was reserved to act for the realization of the modest ideal to citizens who have long since renounced palms, renounced laurels, renounced even the tomb. It is no less true that the question posed here by M. Sully-Prudhomme is, making the suitable changes, exactly the question that Jaurès proposed to us. Let us extend M. Sully-Prudhomme’s fatherland until it has become the human city, the universal city. At once the problem poses itself again, but with a universal extension. To this universalized problem Jaurès answers only by giving the present answer universalized: artists will be good citizens because they will be good artists. That is to speak with Sully-Prudhomme. I ask for the declassification, which seems to me new, which seems to me suitable, which seems to me indispensable, which seems to me due: Artists will be good citizens like all citizens. Period. Dash. — Artists will freely be artists.

Do not imagine, my friend, that I am spending myself in inapplicable dialectics. All the reasons I am proposing to you, bearing on the depths of our human contrarieties, are applicable and apply directly to the details scaffolded on these profound contrarieties. Jaurès speaks to us of the more beautiful, more broad, more august and sacred emotion of the Museums where the works of the masters are gathered for all. You remember the fall of day and those undecided minutes that precede the dismissal. You remember the emotion that seizes the mind before all these masterpieces assembled and offered to the admiration of all men, one would say an Olympus where there are only Gods filling the sacred space with their dreams. Yes, that is the great beauty, that which is made for all.

Attention, young man, attention. We too have kept some memory of these sentiments. When from our respectful provinces we arrived in Paris, pupils at the Lycée Lakanal, at the risk of seeming foolish to those of our comrades who had less heavy pastimes, we went to the Louvre. You have not forgotten, for it is unforgettable, with what religious emotion we saluted the new whiteness of the statues, the application of the canvases and the silence of the monument. I do not know if ever living we had a religious emotion comparable to that which invaded us at the first of these visitations. But after all we know the human sentiments of love only somewhat long after we have anxiously crossed its religious threshold. Similarly we knew the human sentiments of art rather long after we had religiously crossed its majestic threshold. When I want to represent to myself the mysterious religious initiation to the beauty of art, I succeed rather willingly for the religious initiation gives me sentiments that follow one another, and behind these sentiments I see them again by transparency. When I want to analyze them, as much as analysis can illuminate a religious sentiment, it seems to me that I perceive there an irreducible religious nucleus corresponding to the passage from an inferior life to a superior life, corresponding to the initiation itself to all superior life. But this mysterious sentiment of promotion in being rested incontestably on many secondary sentiments that have become enemies to me because they seem to me bad. There was no doubt in me something like a servile or serf admiration with regard to these masters obscurely contemplated as authorities of art and as social authorities. Mysteriously, religiously submissive and flattered like an introduced faithful, I admired, I adored, I prayed, I served. I did not see. If any human respect had remained to me now, I would blush within myself at the sole memory of several of these pictures before which we knelt a religious admiration. There is the danger of religious sentiments. The faithful risks adoring some imbecile god, and that suffices for the adoration to become a little imbecile too. Truly, I was then a little boy. You have not forgotten how we ran to the Museum, transporting ourselves for whole days, covering kilometers of halls, going back up from the rectangular Egyptians to the honors of the square salon. And vespers descended until the hour when we obeyed the guard, eternalizing the painful farewell, to go off, drunk with art, our legs broken, our heads heavy, buzzing with images, to fall asleep in the dormitory like beasts. We were two little boys.

The indefatigable time passed. We became men. We went to the regiment. We came back to the Collège Sainte-Barbe. As we advanced in the knowledge of colors and forms the initial religious sentiment gently and dearly effaced itself, or rather it receded: passing to planes of knowledge and sentiment more and more distant, it ended by becoming like the background of our sentiments, like an immovable background where the new variations of our human sentiments stood out freely. Our visitations became somewhat more frequent and much shorter visits. Our admirations were no longer global and universal, but they distinguished. It was the hour also when our apparently most unshakeable childhood friendships were declassified or receded, leaving introduction free to friendships of election, well or badly chosen, but freely. As at our human risks and dangers we have little by little, and almost involuntarily, but spontaneously and always freely chosen those of our comrades who became our friends, abandoning for the affinities of election the religious fatalities of natural contiguities, roughly thus we chose the works of art that became for us, so to speak, friends. That we chose badly or well, such would be the question to which we would have to give an established answer if we were treating of art; but we are chatting uniquely about the social question of art. As we advanced in the knowledge of works, we ceased to transport ourselves to the Louvre to pace kilometers there. But, by a perambulation, numbness or renovation or recommencement, seeking the finished, the finishing or the impression of art, or all simple impression of beauty, or of truth, or of newness, we went to see certain works and we did not want to see certain works. A commerce properly and purely human of equal admiration, of equal esteem, of intelligence, of comprehension, of mutual understanding, of not unequal recognition, of enlightened acquiescence, of liberated consent was born from the artist to us by the consideration of the works. As we advanced in the knowledge of lines and colors the works we had globally and confusedly adored classified and declassified themselves among us, or rather, for this expression could imply an intention of command, of authority, of meritorious priority, the works did not classify themselves, but they situated themselves among us, they disposed themselves, composed themselves, habituated themselves, freely chose themselves the situation that suited them among our sentiments and our occupations. How many disillusions accompanied this involuntary and little by little willed work, and how many painful eliminations. The Louvre was no longer an Olympus where there were only Gods filling the religious space with dreams, but it became again for us what you know well it has always been, a museum, a human monument where resided, welcomed and placed more or less intelligently by the curators, filling the human halls and garnishing the humanly masoned walls, the productions, the attempts at work and the works of many artists. As we advanced thus the initial art clericalism disappeared. As it rose and advanced the examination was born. As advanced the interior apprenticeship, the apprenticeship of seeing, for far from our being of those who know everything without ever having learned anything, we are like everyone, we are of those who do not know much having tried to give themselves much knowledge. And the science and art of seeing, like everything that is human, on one side is never invented or supplied by teaching, but on one side never prospers without the care of teaching. Whereas the religious can push like a wild stock, I mean above all the pagan religious, which is the most profoundly religious. As the apprenticeship advanced, space became for us no longer religious but properly artistic. We dared think and feel humanly before the pictures, and before the statues of the cool halls. As we advanced, the expression of masterpiece, with what it implies of capital inclination, became foreign to us and as if unintelligible, while the simple word, the simple name of work advanced before us with the plenitude and under the aspect of a new meaning. The consideration of the work one sees pushed back to the last plane the contemplation of the masterpiece one adores. And our attentions more and more ignored this last plane. The expression of master, which one must pronounce yawning and bleating a little with an oval mouth and all the teeth in the air, disappeared from our conversations.

We were at that point of this revolution when the movement of it was singularly reinforced at the moment of the Affair. We were then attending the courses of the École Normale. For very little these courses seemed monuments to us. We attended the conferences, listening to what pleased us, hearing what suited us. We had read the two books of M. Henri Bergson. Happy that he had finally been named maître de conférences at the school, happy finally to have this personal impression that nothing can replace, we heard everything he said. He spoke during the whole conference, perfectly, surely, indefatigably, with an untiring and minute exactitude, with an appearance of weakness incessantly contradicted, with the audacious, new and profound tenuity that has remained proper to him, without negligence and yet without any affectation, composing and proposing, but never displaying an idea, were it capital, and were it profoundly revolutionary. You therefore remember what he told us one day calmly, and that I cannot retell us as well. It may be, he said roughly, that there are not between the different productions of art, between the different literary productions the relations we imagine. We commonly imagine that between the most beautiful works and the most vulgar productions there is, so to speak, continuous diminution of beauty, continuous uglification or impoverishment, we willingly imagine that by insensible transitions, and on condition of making a rather long journey, we could pass as in series from the works we qualify as genius to those in which we recognize talent, and from these to those in which we recognize some talent. According to this imagination rather commonly admitted, from genius to talent there would be only degrees, a gradual passage, a gradation, a seriation. But it may also be that the progress of a serious psychology will lead us one day to modify this judgment. There would then be from genius to talent a difference of nature and not only a distance of degree, a difference comparable for example to that which can separate life from non-life. The works of genius, badly or well, would be living, and the productions of talent, well or badly, beautiful or ugly, would be, so to speak, like inanimate decorations. Thus would be explained certain presentiments we have as readers, auditors or spectators; thus would be explained certain sentiments avowed or manifested by certain authors; thus would be explained the frequent lack of talent in genius, the apparent big awkwardnesses of most men of genius. — This glimpse, or, if you prefer, this hypothesis, which can make the revolution of literary criticism and of art criticism, of literary history and of the history of art, but no doubt not the revolution of art itself, for art hardly waits, and has not waited for art criticism and the history of art — this considerable hypothesis came in its time and passed calmly before us among the innumerable new ideas and hypotheses. We welcomed it. And we hear it in two powerful senses, if we were chatting about art. We retained it because it gives the indication of the social question. I remind you only that the acceptance of this hypothesis precipitated the disaggregation of the sentiments that had invaded us on the threshold of our initiations. It was like a new ferment of dissociation; it gave us the sense of human leveling; it produced a profound rupture; it contributed more than anything to break the museum.

Thus were born and grew in us the human sentiments of art. And we had little by little the audacity to avow to ourselves these sentiments. The pictures became familiar to us, in a sense, and the statues became familiar to us. We dared look. We dared see. We dared, capital audacity, inevitable audacity, indispensable audacity, love or not love, as in life. The artists became men for us, the works became human for us. Voluntarily, spontaneously and happily forgetting the little we had been taught of ready-made classificatory history, acquiring as much as we could of well-made narrative explanatory history, we put ourselves before the works themselves. And we dared discern. How many works then died to our regards! But how many works were born or reborn from the religious ecstasy, which is affiliated with death — to the living human life. And among these works that attained to us for the first time, we dared choose. Without condemning those that were not friends to us, for a growing experience taught us that it was good that the world be varied, we dared frankly desert them, abandon them, no longer make them any religious politeness of passage. As we thought that it was good that the world of works be varied, we observed that it also appeared more and more varied. Our successive, and so to speak laborious discoveries, led us to observe at once profound coordinations and indefinite variations. We went frankly to those we loved. We lived with them. Among them. Familiarly. We had the still greater audacity to avow to ourselves that in those we loved there were parts we did not love. But, from then on, we had renounced demanding that men and works please us entirely. We no longer went to the Louvre as to mass, regularly, but just when we had need of it or when this visit suited us. And we stayed there not very long, because we were less young, and above all because, since we were looking, fatigue came quickly. And night had never fallen when we left again in the city, carrying in our memories disputed images.

As the human sentiments were born and grew in us, we began to distinguish the innumerable families of artists, and the perpetual utility or at least the final suitability appeared less to us of a monument where the Victory of Samothrace remains a few landings from the Vincis and the Rembrandts. The improbable juxtapositions of the square salon no longer seemed to us as at the beginning to constitute the chamber of the superior gods. An unease came to us from these unexpected gatherings. Analyzing then a little further the religious sentiments of initiation we resolutely perceived certain dubious elements. Many of our first sentiments at the Louvre were nationalist sentiments that came to us there from the Lavisse history and the Foncin geography. The Louvre was the first museum in the world as the Bibliothèque Nationale was the first library in the world. Paris was the capital of the world. France was still the capital nation. Truly there was in the species communication from the nationalist sentiment to the religious sentiment, but these communications have become less astonishing to us. There was also in the religious sentiment much vanity and much emulation. Vanities of upstarts. We were admitted, we little people, to the contemplation of the great works. We were introduced, we, poor and sons of the poor, to the contemplation, almost to the frequentation of unique treasures, of incomparable riches. We were introduced to the magisterial. We were introduced to the temple. We were introduced to the palace. We were introduced to the contemplation of what is not elsewhere, of what so many men are ignorant of, of what so many men we knew would not see, of what so many men would be forever foreclosed from. This analysis made our first sentiments less venerable to us and made all the more estimable to us the second sentiments in which we shall definitively remain. By these second sentiments we are led to distinguish among the works. We distinguish formidable, or powerful, or rough personalities. We distinguish docile personalities and rebellious personalities, few personalities are indifferent to us. We distinguish families. We dispose and situate individual and familial personalities, far from our composing a divine ensemble. We restore the human diversities a little confused in the divinity of the mixture, in the sublimity of the gathering.

The suitability of a Universal Museum appears less to us. The profound repulsion we have for the Exposition, without our being classifiable in the categories of M. Julien Benda, we have already had, and we have, less strongly, for the Universal Museum. Attention, my friend, pay attention not to make me say what I do not think. I do not at all want our museums demolished. No more than you am I unaware that in the universal pain and ugliness, our museums remain the last asylums of true art and true beauty. I am not at all for demolishing consolations and refuges. But after all we are precisely preparing the birth and life of a city that will have need of no refuge, since it will have not even any knowledge of pain and ugliness. I shall never forget all we owe to museums. To say everything in a word, I shall never forget the profound and copious goodness of the Louvre. But I believe there would be a very great danger in letting it be imagined that the Louvre or that a Louvre still better than the Louvre is the definitive human ideal. Is it not Michelet who strongly rose up against the old bourgeois institution of museums, against the institution by head, against the piling up and the brutality of cohabitation? Michelet had for this two reasons, of which one was that Michelet was a visionary and of which the second was that Michelet was a historian. Visionary and visionary historian. You know what a visionary is. When I was in the regiment, the day they made the famous evaluation of distances, along the kilometered road, I explained to my corporal, a brave and gentle fundamentally anarchist Solognot, that I was hypermetropic, that is to say that I saw normally at infinity, like everyone, but that I accommodated badly at small distances. Hence my pince-nez for reading. My corporal listened to me at length. Then he answered me, seriously, gently: “I hear you well. You are a good visionary at a distance. But from near you tire yourself.” This corporal was right. Definitively, those we call visionaries are those who see. Michelet was a good visionary at a distance. Because he was a good historian. The time has passed when superficially exact criticisms prevented us from loving Michelet as much as we had the interior desire to, from avowing in him no doubt the most profound, in a sense the most exact and the most truly historian of our historians. It is precisely the good historians who make the good visionaries. Because they have seen profoundly in the past, because they see profoundly in the present, with the same regard they see profoundly in the future. It would be a gross imagination to believe that those who understand nothing of the present understand nothing of the past are as if freed from it, and believe themselves morally new because they had had exactly old ideas.

As a historian, he keenly felt the artistic and historical insufficiency of museums for two reasons. He knew how museums are made. He knew how artificial they are, and how military they are. When we contemplate the aligned pictures and the planted statues, we willingly forget their history. More moved by tenderness, Michelet no doubt remembered the history of the acquisitions. From the wars of Italy and the conquests of Francis the First to the wars of the Empire passing through the conquests of Louis XIV, all this history is admirably summarized in a symbol. During his glorious campaign of Italy General Bonaparte was feeding his army, feeding the Directory, feeding his colleagues. He was also feeding our museums. When by the force of French arms, become undecidedly authoritarian, from free that they had begun, he entered victorious into some Italian principality, he carefully stipulated that the vanquished hand over to him fourteen thousand florins, eight large pictures, fifty-five horses, seventeen medium pictures, eighteen hundred bales of straw, forty small pictures, thirty-nine statues and five hundred sacks of wheat. It was by such means that this non-commissioned officer imagined one cultivates the arts. It matters little to me that the allies re-stole from us at a stroke in 1815 all we had raided from them in twenty years. This history of raiding and of financial violences is no less enemy to us than military violences, it displeases us that rich merchant nations should have thus plundered poor artist peoples. Ashamed as we are that the victorious French armies raided the treasures of the Italian Renaissance under General Bonaparte, we are no less so that victorious French finances raided the Dutch, the Italians or the Flemish — that French negotiations utilized the barbarous crushing of Greece. We admit that modern Italians have taken measures against the speciously free play of the law of supply and demand, against the sale and purchase of the masterpieces of which they are provisionally and nationally the proprietors, of which they are regionally the depositaries. We cannot dissimulate from ourselves that without the invasion of the barbarian Romans, of the Christian crusaders, of the Turks, the Venus de Milo would not be in Paris. We therefore associate ourselves in ourselves with Renan’s wish. We foresee the modern nations, in expiatory procession, having disaggregated their national museums, carrying back the works of Hellenic art to the maternal region and to the climate. There has no doubt been some remorse in the recent regional exhibitions. You know that they are going to multiply. It must not be that this movement of exhibitions deceive us. It can designate two inverse intentions. As much as it seems to me unintelligent and immoral to pile up in Paris disparate productions of art like limbs at the Museum of Natural History, so much the exhibition is deconstitution, disorganization.

By this same sentiment of remorse we have been led to install in the Louvre a hall of Rubenses, a gallery of the Life of Marie de Medici. We ourselves tend to disaggregate our old halls, our old museums. We make amends. We inaugurate receptions for the works we have of a same artist. Who does not see that this leads us internationally to restore regional receptions for all the works that humanity has received from a same artist? We begin by putting together in our house the works that were born of the same artist. Who does not see that we shall not have finished as long as we have not liberated, as long as we have not put together in their house all the works that are of a same art, that were born of the same artist, and of the same artist people? Only then shall we have effaced the criminal traces of our conquests. It is in this sense too that we are internationalists. We are abandoning the national inheritance no less than we have abandoned the family inheritance. And it is interesting that what can oppose the first remodelings are precisely the rights of bourgeois inheritance, the rights for example that the heirs of M. Lacaze could claim, demanding that all the bequeathed works remain united.

We are led to liberate art by this same sentiment we have of nepenthes: Michelet must have profoundly felt how much things are uprooted from their land, displaced from their climate, by that alone undone, altered. A true work of art is not born a museum piece. But it is born in a country among men and customs. The ideal is not that the works be laid somewhere in a universal cemetery, but the ideal is that flowers and works be born, push, grow, remain free in the native land, and that they there welcome the visitor on his travels. Today on the contrary it is the inert visitor who makes the works travel. But I do not insist, for we shall be led to the same resolutions, and much more broadly, by the extended commentary we are going to begin now on the end of this paragraph.

— I would very much like to go away.

— Go away. When you are pleased to come back, you will come back. When you are pleased to begin again, we shall begin again at the very place where we stopped. I am rebellious to dispersions.

I went away by the rural roads. My head was thick with the insistence and the instance with which Pierre Baudouin had introduced me to his personal ideas. Of all these ideas, which I promised myself to review, one was floating. Remembering my unhappy childhood it seemed to me in fact that, except for honorable exceptions, the people who had raised me had always raised me for themselves. Whereas truly we do not raise our pupils and our children for ourselves.