Mes cahiers rouges

To Our Friends, To Our Subscribers

Charles Peguy

We are vanquished; and we are vanquished by the most thankless of defeats. First, in the first degree, we are defeated. Second, in the second degree, we are historically beaten by a defeat so small, so disagreeable to behold, to the point that it is not even ugly, so petty, so insignificant, so unpleasant, so discourteous, that no one will ever concern themselves with us, except perhaps to judge us, to regard us as the greatest of imbeciles; which will be, let us hasten to say, upon us the true historical point of view.

We are the vanquished. We are so completely, so totally, that I do not know whether history will ever have recorded an example like the one we furnish. I do not know whether this same history, which we take the liberty of having already named, will ever have known defeated men like us, beaten as we are, not shameful, certainly, but shamefully beaten; not by a defeat that brings glory, to which go the supreme honors — (of glory, for a secret instinct, a secret warning, a secret remorse warns us that there is always some impurity in success, a coarseness in victory, a certain impurity, at least metaphysical, a residue, a sediment of impurity, a residual impurity in fortune; and that thus and for the same cause and by the same movement there is nothing truly, totally pure, and thus totally great, but defeat, provided that it be valiantly, gloriously borne, valiantly, gloriously acquired, so to speak; sustained; and that there is, that there can be no true, no total purity save in misfortune; and that it is therefore rightly that the great secret honors of glory, the supreme honors, have therefore always historically gone to misfortune; to the great disasters; and history here, once in its order, and its order admitted, and put in its place, which is great, has never been mistaken) — but by a defeat of the most ill-favored that one can imagine; the most graceless, and disgraced, the most petty that has ever been managed and that has ever been accomplished and managed to be accomplished. To be vanquished is nothing. It would be nothing. It can even be much, on the contrary. It can be everything; the supreme. To be vanquished is nothing: but we have been beaten. We have even been thrashed. In a few years, society, this modern society, before we had even had time to sketch its critique, has fallen to such a state of decomposition, to such a dissolution, that I believe, that I am certain, that never had history seen anything comparable. I do not believe that selfishness especially and the preoccupations of self-interest had ever fallen to this degree of baseness. That great historical decomposition, that great dissolution, that great precedent that we name, in literary fashion, the putrefaction of the Roman decadence, the dissolution of the Roman Empire, and that it suffices to name with you, dear Monsieur Sorel, the ruin of the ancient world, was nothing in comparison to the dissolution of the present society, in comparison to the dissolution and decline of this society, of the present modern society. There was doubtless then far more crime and still somewhat more vice. But there were also infinitely more resources. That putrefaction was full of germs. They did not have this kind of promise of sterility that we have today, if one may say so, if those two words can go together.

We are vanquished. I believe, I am certain, that never has history recorded, had to record, vanquished men like us, defeated to the degree that we are. In less than a hundred and twenty years, the work not of the French Revolution, but the result of the miscarriage of the French Revolution and of the work of the French Revolution under the blows, under the weight, under the pressure of reaction, of universal barbarism, is literally annihilated. Completely. And not only does nothing remain of it. Not a trace of anything. But no traces even of promises, nor of any future fecundity.

We are vanquished before we are born. We were born into a people of the vanquished. We are military vanquished. We were born, shortly after the defeat, after the disaster, after the invasion, into a militarily vanquished people. We are hereditarily and in solidarity the vanquished of a disastrous war. It must be said. For a long time we believed that we would be new generations, that we would do a new work, untainted; that we were not marked, tainted by this disaster; by the trace of this disaster. A work not marked in advance. At least not irrevocably. One must come back to it. One must accept it. One must have the courage to say it. Everything that we do, everything that we have tried to do for fifteen years, is commanded by the memory, by an implacable memory, by the trace of that antecedent disaster, by that antecedent disaster itself. By the situation it has made for us in the world and by the situation it has made within ourselves. The event has recalled to us, as always, somewhat harshly, somewhat bitterly, as always, that reality never admits the as if; that it admits only reality itself; that the as if may be the language of science, that it is even the essential articulation of the language of science, but that it can only be that; that in reality one is permitted to speak only the language of reality itself. And we have learned from the same teaching, contrary to all the teachings of all the modern historians, and notably of the professional antimilitarists; we have learned, we have come to know, we have been taught, the event has recalled to us, as always, harshly, bitterly, as always, that military realities have an importance of the first order, a fundamental importance, as the foundation of other realities, of the greatest number of material realities, of economic realities, of realities of power, and of a very great number of realities of the spirit, of intellectual and mental realities; moral ones, even. I shall dare to say: religious.

Experience has shown us, once again, the event has recalled to us, harshly, bitterly, once again, that the vanquished cannot speak like the victor, or at least like the one who is, who has been neither vanquished nor victor; that he cannot speak the same language, nor maintain the same tone, try as he may, that he cannot, that he has no right to the same tone; that he has no physical right to it, so to speak, that it is irrevocable; that a military defeat lasts as long as it has not been repaired; that a situation of military vanquished lasts as long as it has not been revoked; that there may well be amnesties for civil wars, amnesties which are moreover generally, especially today, parliamentary games, games of parliamentary politics; but that there is, that there can be neither amnesia nor military amnesty, for antecedent military events, for situations born of military events. For situations that have been made military. In the severe accounting of military forces, of events, of military situations. Because military force is not merely a brutal force, but above all a kind of pure force, I mean a force more purely force. It is here a question of savor. Try as one may; try as one may to make oneself believe it: the taste of defeat is not the taste of victory, as the resonance is not the same, and it is not even the taste of neither one nor the other. He who swallows his defeat, he who is vanquished, the saliva he swallows does not have the same taste as that of the victor or of the one who is neither the one nor the other. It is an irrevocable taste, until the defeat itself has been revoked.

Not only can the vanquished irrevocably no longer speak to the world in the same language as the victor or even as the one who is neither one nor the other; but within himself and in his own country, in his own blood, in his own people, the vanquished, the vanquished people, cannot speak to itself the same language as the victorious people. For the rest of the world is there, listening, intervening. At least as a witness, dully, silently, tacitly, presently, by its mere presence, even and especially when it does not intervene. Our great-grandfathers of the French Revolution realized this well enough, who, having wished to speak another language, a new language, simply to substitute one language for another, a new one for an old one, the new-regime language for the old-regime language, soon almost all of Europe interposed itself, ended by interposing itself; opposed itself; and there was trouble. Our lesser contemporaries will perhaps soon realize it too, if, as everything leads one to suppose, they intend to change language once again, to substitute once again one language for another, a new one for an old one, the syndicalist language for the parliamentary language. Our fathers could not speak to themselves (to themselves nonetheless) the revolutionary language, the new-regime language, without war intervening, and victory or defeat. And it was necessary to choose. Our lesser contemporaries (and when I say lesser I do not really know, and I say it out of habit, for after all those great revolutionaries were not so great before the Revolution, a few years before the great one, and even at the threshold of the great one, and even some time after the beginning of the great one, and we do not know at all, no one can augur, even by habit, no one can conjecture, no one knows what tomorrow will be, what order of magnitude will arrive for us tomorrow), our contemporaries will not be able, tomorrow, to speak to themselves the revolutionary language, the syndicalist language, without the same war intervening, who knows? a war greater still, if possible, and yet again to be victor or vanquished. To choose. Our master M. Sorel (master being here in good French not, naturally, the one who commands, but the one from whom one has learned much, the one from whom one has received essential teachings), our master M. Sorel had not only long since predicted (for this was already several years ago) what might be and what would be the socialist future of the syndicates, but he saw very well, and said very well, and I believe he wrote somewhere, that there would truly be only one difficulty, that there was only one obstacle perhaps to the triumph of a socialist and revolutionary syndicalism: (it is first of all the limitation of human nature, as we have just seen; but this is constant, henceforward established, is of full right, and therefore no longer needs even to be said) it was to know what Europe would do (one says Europe out of habit and because it is the nearest) (but step by step it will soon be the world); that is to say, it was to know exactly, and perhaps and no doubt on a grander scale, what it was to know a hundred and twenty years ago; and that for the syndicalist Revolution which is ready, and which will be an economic and incidentally political Revolution, as for the French Revolution which was made, and which remained almost purely a political Revolution, there is but one residue, one thickness, one difficulty: the world; the rest of the world; the other world; to know only what the world will say, as one came to know what it said. To know what the others will do. How Europe will react. And since the others are not us, and have never been us, and that they have no desire nor any possibility of becoming us, despite certain deceptive appearances and the words of our humanitarians, there is every chance that it will not speak as we do, no more than the first time; that, being other, it will speak otherwise than we, and that it will easily come to speak and act against us. And then all our pacifists and our antimilitarists will know the price of war. Defending a new order, or a new disorder, they will, moreover, wage marvelous wars. At least one must hope so. These pacifists and these antimilitarists always make, when the time comes, admirable soldiers. Is it not, moreover, a war that they are waging perpetually against us, against the nation, a beginning of civil war; already a war; preparations, military exercises, apprenticeships, great maneuvers of civil war. Which give them a certain training. What people was more peaceable, more pacifist, officially and really, formally and intentionally, than the French people on the eve of that great military upheaval? One half was so spiritually, alas, with Voltaire; the other half was so sentimentally, with Rousseau. Never had one been so given to tears and to the bleating of peace. A few years had not passed before that people inscribed the most marvelous military epic the world has ever had to record. Today we are led back to the same situation, to a very analogous situation. God grant that it have at least the same grandeur, lacking the success, which, temporal, is never given as final. The same situation will recur: France on one side, the world, represented by a great part of the world, on the other. In fact there is nothing left indeed in France between the regime and I do not say a syndicalist revolution, but the triumph of a syndicalist revolution; there is no longer a thickness, no longer a sheet of paper. But there is that external thickness, that outer skin: the world. At the moment of passing from one language to another, at the moment of substituting for the democratic and parliamentary language the syndicalist and statutory language, our syndicalists, who face no more internal opposition, will learn, our antipatriots will discover, that in the carnal system and even in a temporal mystical system, in every temporal system, a body is needed, a temporal flesh that is the support, the material, that makes itself the foundation, the matter of an idea. It is, very precisely, in the political and social order, in the historical order, the problem of the relation of body to spirit. As in natural creation we do not naturally know of any spirit that does not have the support of some body (generally any memory that does not have the support of some matter), that is not in some way incorporated and incarnated (and this is indeed perhaps the only somewhat serious definition one can give of natural creation), in the same way, or rather by the same movement, by the same consideration, by the same definition, in this same natural creation, we do not naturally know of any idea, any political or social spirit — I shall dare say religious — any historical spirit, finally, that has been realized, that has even been able to appear, without a certain corpus, without a body of people, without a support, without a foundation, without a mechanism, without a basis of a people, without a matter, without a people that was all that, without a people-body, in a word, without a fatherland. The sage needed the Hellenic city; the prophet needed the race and the people of Israel; the saint needed the Christian people. And certain peoples of the West, at least to begin with. And there is nothing, even to that sort of temporal preformation of the Roman Empire in and for the advent of Christianity, so important, that carnal, corporeal, material, does not indeed seem to us of an importance that is as it were excessive, very truly disquieting. Our positivists will learn metaphysics as our pacifists will learn war. Our positivists will learn metaphysics at gunpoint. Mutual. I mean that they will give and that they will receive. They will even learn psychology. They will learn the relation of the body of a people to the spirit of a people. Our antimilitarists will learn war, and will wage it very well. Our antipatriots will learn the price of a carnal fatherland, of a city, of a race, of a communion even carnal, and what is worth, to support a Revolution, a bit of earth.

Sons of the vanquished, born into a people of the vanquished, we have ourselves been vanquished. And personally, if I may say so. Vanquished in our people and as a people, a first time, in the first degree, we have been so a second time, in the second degree, in a redoubt, an interior one, in an interior and concentric circle, in all our action within our people. Vanquished a first time in race, so to speak, in our race and in our stock and in our people and as in effigy and in anticipatory representation, by a kind of prior delegation, in image and more than in likeness; then inwardly, in an interior concentric circle, we ourselves have been so, without image this time, and without delegation. Without any deputation. Defeat begets defeat, and until the revocation of defeat, it is a vicious circle of linked compromises, of progressions, of descending circular regressions. It is not only external communication that is cut off from a vanquished people, remaining vanquished; it is not only outward conversation that is denied it: it is, as our revolutionaries will discover, even internal communication, conversation even among themselves, even with themselves. At the fireside. Fire, hearth. The first of goods: freedom; the simple, the intimate, the true, the free talk at the chimney corner. At the corner of that old national chimney. Marked for us with such arms. And conversation even in the secret of the heart, for defeat, the taste of defeat, reaches even the intimate voice, alters even the resonance of the most secret inner voice. We have been personally vanquished.

Others, everyone, all our masters, have consoled themselves for this failure; more than for this failure, infinitely more; infinitely more than for a defeat: for this fraudulent miscarriage of the Dreyfus affair. By dint of consoling themselves, some, alas, are soon rejoicing; secretly. Almost publicly. But I shall never console myself. Because I insist on being ridiculous, and alone, and deplorable. And because I insist on being ridiculous, I shall always speak of it. A unique opportunity had presented itself to regenerate this people. A stroke of fortune. An occasion that will never come again. As there are not two of them in the life of a man. In the life of a people. As it does not happen twice. As not two are given to the same person, man or people. To the same history. To the same adventure. This crime inaugurated our public life, our civic life. In reality it inaugurated our entire life; and one cannot rid oneself of one’s inauguration. Irrevocably it will command our entire life of this time; not only our public and civic life; but our entire intellectual and moral, mental life; and even physical life. For there is a physical consequence of all these consequences, a carnal consequence, a physical inscription of all former crimes. It inaugurated also, and together, and as a whole, from decline to decline, from demagoguery to demagoguery, it commanded, it produced this decline in which we find ourselves; it has placed us where we are.

I shall never be silent about it. I shall remain, I shall continue, I shall let myself remain forever inconsolable about it. I have never felt so keenly, so clearly, what a historical event is, what a once-and-for-all thing it is, and that it is always a historical monument; I have never experienced it so much; but once; it was a lad of eighteen who had come; and to whom I came, I do not know how, to speak of the Dreyfus affair. A lad. I remember very well that it is only a few years since a man of eighteen was a man. I was speaking, speaking before this lad as before myself, as to myself, as to someone of my age, of my time; of my class. He answered me quite honestly. I continued, I went on, I went on. I told him a little of what I have just written here, and of what I certainly hope I shall finish writing one day or another. I went along my grand way. When once he answered me so politely, so honestly, so smallly, so submissively; so full, so carried with respect, so carried with goodwill: Yes, sir; that all at once, by a sudden recovery, I saw; I measured that he was not in it at all, and that he would never be; that he was not in it at all and that they would never be, that all of them would never temporally eternally be in it, they, the posterity, posteri, and posteri posterorum.

He was so docile. He had his hat in his hand. He was turning his hat in his fingers. He listened to me, listened. He drank in my words. He was learning. He was finding things out. Alas, he was learning history.

He was educating himself. Never did I understand as well as then, in a flash, as instantaneously feel, what history is; and the unbridgeable abyss that there is, that opens between the real event and the historical event; the total, absolute incompatibility; the total foreignness; the non-communication; the incommensurability: literally the absence of any possible common measure.

As I spoke, he listened to everything, he heard everything, he drank in all my words; and as I spoke, he did not hear me. Not a word; he did not hear me at all. I was saying, pronouncing, enunciating, transmitting a certain Dreyfus affair, the real Dreyfus affair, in which I was steeped, in which I had never ceased to bathe; in which we have never ceased to be steeped, we of this generation; that was what I call the Dreyfus affair. He heard, he received a certain system, a certain arrangement, a certain theory, a certain construct, homothetic to the first; or rather, no, not homothetic to the first; nor in any way superimposable upon the first, really and molecularly, histologically superimposable; nor elementarily substitutable; but roughly, practically, conveniently, finally and definitively good enough to be put in its place for whoever is willing, for whoever has an easy heart and easy contentment, for whoever is resolved in advance to be satisfied with it; as in an old French church one can always replace the abolished rose window, in need, with a few panes of plaster. It occupies the same place; and even, for whoever will be satisfied with it, by the very substitution it has approximately the same shape.

Only it does not perform the same office.

Reality, the event of reality, the real event, is that real rose window with its infinitely worked rose flowers. History, the event of history, is those panes of plaster which, as soon as the rose window is abolished, we put in the same place, each of us according to our small understanding, our small means, and our small capacity. According to our small trade. After the abolished rose window, and only then, and in default of the abolished rose window, when we are correct. Even before, and if need be by demolishing it ourselves, when we are in a hurry, when we are overzealous, which is the more frequent case.

The world is the real rose window, infinitely worked, the rose window of stone, the real roses of stone, infinitely pushed forth, marvelously, more than marvelously, mysteriously hollowed out anew. History is the poor panes of plaster that in need, in universal need, in poverty, we put approximately in the same place.

I was giving him reality, and he was receiving history. In what mysterious intercalary abyss the loss, the disappearance, the defection occurred, was produced, was obtained; in what abyss of memory itself; in what abyss the vessel, precious above all others, the vessel that makes only one voyage, sank; in that abyss intercalated everywhere; everywhere between the question and the answer; between departure and arrival; between every question and every answer; between every departure and every arrival; in that mysterious abyss where one puts in something, reality: and without apparent rupture, under the appearances of continuity, there comes out something quite other; an imitation; a counterfeit; almost always a parody; a substitution; a substitute; a replacement; a thing quite foreign: an intellectual operation: a history.

I was giving him reality, as to myself, as with myself, as before a friendly heart of the same age, as before someone who would have been part of it, as before someone from within, (and this is exactly the meaning of communion, of every communion), as to and with a contemporary. Immediately and as if instantaneously, in the same form, in the same words, in the same mold, he heard history. In the same time, he already heard me as a man of another time. (In the same time for me, for that time, which was the same time for me, for him on the contrary, strangely broke apart at once, decomposed into another time, into a foreign time; into another language, into a foreign language.) He heard me in a foreign language. Which means, alas, that he did not hear me at all.

And even less. And what is marvelous, and what means that one will never escape from it, is that this perfectly foreign language corresponds naturally down to its smallest elements. To the language of reality. It corresponds word for word. And down to its punctuations. So that as we live a discourse in the language of reality, step by step one can play, the same discourse, equally well, if not better, and even better, and one plays it, in the language of history. What I called the Dreyfus affair, with a certain intonation, he too called it the Dreyfus affair, not with another word, you may be sure, with the same intonation, only transposed into the register of respect.

So that what is marvelous is that the conversation can continue all the time, without anyone ever understanding each other, and that in fact all conversations continue all the time, and one pretends to understand; and death swiftly ousting the real, there is soon nothing left but history speaking; but it speaks all alone, entirely substituted; element for element; piece for piece; only it is inorganic piece for organic piece, dead calcareous element for living animal or vegetable element. It is a petrification. But we have too great an interest in not noticing the substitution.

Never did I understand as much as in that seizure, in that flash, what is the gaping, the invincible internal contradiction of history; and that as soon as one has only resolved to learn it, by that very fact and through that very fact one has already condemned oneself, in that mental attitude and by that mental attitude alone, never to know it; I mean to never again know the event of reality.

Never did I measure, in such a flash, in such a seizure, that there is the real, and there is the historical; that there is reality, the event of reality, and that there is history.

They are offset from one another, shifted from one upon the other. Between the real event of reality and the feigned, imagined, imitated event of history, an abyss is instantaneously hollowed out everywhere, at every instant, step by step, automatically; a fissure, intercalary, an intercalation runs everywhere. A shudder, a shiver, a frisson of secret rupture runs everywhere. A crack. An irreducible trembling. — A perpetual degradation. And what is on the other side has nothing more in common with what is on this side.

Never did I see, in such a flash, in such a seizure, that there is the present, and that there is the past. The present, whatever its length of time, in which one moves. The past, wherever it reaches, already, wherever it advances, wherever it rises, wherever it has gained ground, whenever it begins at every moment, in which one does not move; and in which one has good reasons for not moving.

For every man and for every event, for every elementary event, for every element, for every molecule of event, there comes a minute, an hour falls, an hour when it becomes historical; there tolls a certain stroke of midnight, at a certain village clock, when the event, from real, falls historical.

And since it was very clear, I profited by that great clarity to see, with the same gaze, in the same light, to see that one never has, one never makes, one can never make friends except of the same time and the same age, of one’s own same time, only contemporary friends; friends of the same time, of the same age, aequales, friends of the same company, the same formation, the same society, the same world. Friends of the same call, of a single and same muster, of the sole and same class. Friends of one time, the only friends. And I observed that one never begins again. Friends born, formed together, the only true friends. Friends from childhood, friends of the family; friends from school, from little school, from primary school; friends from the lycee; friends from the regiment; friends from the cahiers; together, the only ones who are truly friends, literally; the only ones to whom that name applies, is exact. The only ones whom that name can ever clothe. The others do not understand.

I naturally place the friendships of the Dreyfus affair, so secret, together within and among the friendships of the cahiers. Immediately after, those who follow no longer understand us and will never understand us. Everything that follows is highly honorable, and useful, and often beautiful; and there will even be pupils, alas, and there must be. All that is not friendship. Friendship is a carnal operation that is performed once in a lifetime. And that is not begun again. I mean that it is essentially an earthly operation, an operation of date, a temporal operation that is performed, that is inscribed once, in a certain earth, at a certain date in the time of life. It is one of those operations that it is not given to man to begin again, to do twice, to imitate, to feign, to fabricate, to forge, to act as if. It is one of those operations that have in the life of man, in the career of man, a unique value, a non-commutable and non-interchangeable price, a unique price, an incalculable price, without equivalent, without any possible counter-part, and so to speak a price without price. It is an operation of the order of the cradle, of the family, of the race, of the fatherland, of time, of date, of that entire temporal order, of a unique, irreplaceable importance, where the operation is performed only once.

For its determination requires a crossing, an intersection: between the ascending, vertical line of race and the horizontal line of time.

Every friendship, for every man, is like a promotion. It is obtained by cutting a certain race, a certain history, that rises, each time by a certain time, by a certain date, that bars.

And when one misses it, and to the degree that one misses it (and one always misses it to some degree, like every human operation), one does not begin it again any more; it counts as played; one had only that one chance.

It is given to man several times to save his soul, because that is neither essentially, nor above all effectively, nor even originally, no doubt, of the earthly and the carnal, of the temporal and the terrestrial. And this is indeed one of the signs by which it is best seen that it is a quite different operation, for one who has a little laboratory experience. But of everything that is temporal, of everything that is destined to fall into history, of that entire contrary order, of everything that falls under date and under place, nothing is repeatable or commutable, nothing is interchangeable. It is not given to man to repeat or change anything of the temporal. Nothing of time and place can be displaced. Friendship is a once-only operation. Everything temporal is a once-only operation. An operation not invented, not imaginary. It is not here that one can catch up, that a flash of genius or of grace pays for the whole length of a life. The greatest genius in the world does not replace having had such a cradle, such a fatherland, having come from such an earthly race. The greatest genius in the world also does not replace having had such a friendship, at such a date, in such a place, such a cradle of friendship. Every man has, by his temporal birth, by his temporal situation, by his place, by his temporal time, by his fixing of a date, a certain zone of friendship, and no other, a certain zone where he works, where he can work, where the event works, for or against him. A narrow zone, a sort of cross-section. It is given to man to make a friendship, to bind friendship, only in a single generation, in a single promotion, in a single zone. The rest is other. It is not given to man to make himself another cradle, nor to remake the same, nor finally to make himself a second one of whatever sort, nor to extend beyond measure, beyond the appointed time, the use of that wicker.

CHARLES PEGUY

I also profited by the great clarity to see also and thereby that, as I have had the honor of setting forth, we of the Dreyfus affair, we shall never be, for those who come after us, anything but old fools. And those who come after us, my friends, are soon everyone.

It is also for this reason that the gaps that death cuts in the ranks of friendship have this character of irrevocable thinning and of precedence over one’s own death. This definitive and already final character. These clearings are not like clearings in the forest, like dark and light cuttings, that will grow again, that will push up again from the root. Contrary to what happens in other orders, in the orders of life and vegetation and teeming fecundity, in friendship we do not have to hold the places of those who disappear. They keep themselves quite well on their own. No one comes to replace those who are missing. It is not like in military battles where behind the veterans there are the recruits, where it therefore suffices to close ranks, where behind the line regiments and the marching divisions there are the depot battalions. And it is truly here that a night in Paris makes up for nothing at all.