his was a rhetorical inclusiveness that placed France’s soldiers in the traditions of
both Jeanne d’Arc and the Revolution.169 France, he told his audience in April
1915, had always identified herself with ‘the double ideal of liberty and justice’.170
Many other philosophers joined the fray, the pages of France’s philosophical
journals being littered with articles comparing the national psychologies and
philosophies of France and Germany.171 The land of Descartes and of reason was
unfailingly thought superior to a country where from Hegel, if not from Kant, to
Nietzsche, philosophy had corrupted the national conscience.172 A typical example
164 Les Diverses familles spirituelles de la France (1917), 93.
165 Les Traits éternels de la France (1916), 44–5.
166 See Eric Thiers, ‘Droit et culture de guerre 1914–1918: Le Comité d’études et documents sur la
guerre’, Mil Neuf Cent, 23 (2005), 23–48.
167 Philippe Soulez, Bergson politique (1989).
168 ‘La Philosophie’, La Science française, 1 (1915), 15–37.
169 ‘Discours en séance publique d’académie des sciences morales et politiques’, in Bergson,
Mélanges (1972), 1129.
170 ‘Allocution avant une conférence sur la guerre et la littérature de demain’, ibid. 1156.
171 See Philippe Soulez, Les Philosophes et la guerre de 14 (1988) and Yaël Dagan, ‘«Justifier
philosophiquement notre cause»: La Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 1914–1918’, Mil Neuf
Cent, 23 (2005), 49–74.
172 On the controversy surrounding Kant see Hanna, Mobilization of the Intellect, 106–41.
468
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
of this genre was Émile Boutroux’s L’Idée de liberté en France et en Allemagne.173
A member of the Académie Française, Boutroux had no hesitation in putting
forward the argument that the two countries operated with opposed conceptions
of liberty. The Germans, he wrote, had removed any sense of individual judge-
ment from their definition, equating liberty with ‘the power, expansion, and
domination of Germany’. By contrast, the French idea of liberty drew upon the
twin traditions of Graeco-Latin civilization and Christianity and therefore em-
phasized free will and the capacity of each individual to be ‘master of himself ’. To
the charge that this made France a country of ‘ungovernable individualism’, his
response, like that of so many of his colleagues, was that, through the use of
reason, the French acknowledged their duties towards their fellows and towards
humanity as a whole. ‘Our flag’, Boutroux affirmed, ‘signifies patrie and liberty,
duty and right, in equal measure.’174
For his part, Durkheim––who was to lose a beloved son in fighting
in Macedonia––concentrated on vituperation of the enemy. For the Comité
d’études et documents sur la guerre, for example, he wrote a pamphlet entitled
‘L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout’: La Mentalité allemande et la guerre.175 Its central
thesis was that ‘the conduct of Germany during the war springs from a certain
mental attitude’ and that this mentality could best be discerned by examining the
writings of Heinrich Treitschke. The Germans believed that the State was above
international law and that the defining element of the State was power. They also
believed that the State was above morality and that the sole duty of the State was
to be strong. Accordingly, they embraced the doctrine that the ends justified the
means. Finally, they believed that the State was above civil society and thus that it
was the duty of the citizen to obey. For them, the ideal statesman was someone of
limitless ambition and inflexible will. ‘Germany’, Durkheim concluded, ‘cannot
fulfil the destiny she has assigned to herself without preventing humanity from
living in freedom.’176
For good measure, Durkheim also co-authored another pamphlet firmly attri-
buting blame for the war to the Germans.177 This was a line pursued by others of
his colleagues. For example, Charles Andler––as a Germanist someone seemingly
well-placed to pass expert judgement––argued in Le Pangermanisme178 that from
the accession of Wilhelm II in 1888 German diplomacy and military planning had
turned their thoughts to territorial expansion and continental domination. Andler
also published a lengthy historical study of the doctrines of the German military
high command, castigating their readiness to disregard civilized and humane
173 Émile Boutroux, L’Idée de liberté en France et en Allemagne (1916). By Boutroux see also
‘Germanisme et Humanité’, La Grande Revue, 19 (1915), 145–65, and ‘L’Allemagne et la Guerre’,
Revue des Deux Mondes, 33 (1916), 241–63.
174 L’Idée de liberté, 36.
175 Émile Durkheim, ‘L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout’: La Mentalité allemande et la guerre (1915).
176 Ibid. 47.
177 Émile Durkheim and Ernest Denis, Qui a voulu la guerre? Les Origines de la guerre d’après les
documents diplomatiques (1915).
178 Charles Andler, Le Pangermanisme: Ses plans d’expansion allemande dans le monde (1915).
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
469
behaviour,179 as well as another pamphlet, co-written with Ernest Lavisse, purport-
ing to document the authenticity of German military atrocities.180 Entitled Pra-
tique et doctrine allemandes de la Guerre,181 it detailed the murderous brutality and
cruelty of the German soldiers. To great effect, the Comité d’études et documents
sur la guerre also published Joseph Bédier’s Les Crimes allemands d’après des
témoignages allemands182 and his Comment l’Allemagne essaye de justifier ses crimes.183
With no difficulty whatsoever, it would be possible to cite many more brochures,
pamphlets, lectures, speeches, and articles written and given by eminent and not
so eminent writers supporting the French war effort. Indeed, enthusiasm for the
war even stretched as far as the aesthetes of André Gide’s La Nouvelle Revue
Française.184 Despite the huge loss of life and despite the vivid description of the
carnage provided by Henri Barbusse’s Goncourt prize-winning novel Le Feu of
1916, there were very few defeatists or pacifists. However, at least one more text
merits our attention: Alphonse Aulard’s La Paix future d’après la Révolution.185
Given as a lecture at the Sorbonne in March 1915, the great historian of the
Revolution of 1789 solemnly affirmed that ‘the present war, the war that we are
fighting against Prussian militarism . . . is nothing else but the continuation of
the French Revolution’. The victory at Valmy, he told his audience drawn from
the Amis de l’université de Paris, had had the victory on the Marne in 1914 as
‘a distant but direct consequence’. ‘Our soldiers’, he went on, ‘are the sons of the
soldiers of Year II; they are risking their lives for the same ideal, with the same
energy and with the same high spirits.’
To this extent, the Nobel prize-winning novelist Romain Rolland186 was correct
in his observation that ‘since the beginning of the war, [the intellectuals] have
brought so much violence and passion to bear upon it, that it might almost be
called their war
’.187 Exiled in Switzerland, Rolland himself remained, as the title of
his famous essay indicated, Au-dessus de la mêlée, producing a series of articles, open
letters, and appeals which not only condemned German militarism––he was
especially outraged by the damage inflicted upon the cathedrals of Louvain and
Rheims––but also criticized the intellectuals of both sides for spreading ‘the warlike
contagion’ and for an abdication of responsibility before a ‘blind and menacing’
public opinion.188 The highest duty of the intellectuals, he proclaimed in February
1915, was ‘to safeguard the spiritual unity of civilized humanity’ but this they had
179 Les Usages de la Guerre et la Doctrine de l’Etat-Major Allemand (1915).
180 See John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven,
Conn., 2001), 229–90.
181 Andler and Ernest Lavisse, Pratique et doctrine allemandes de la Guerre (1915).
182 Joseph Bédier, Les Crimes allemands d’après des témoignages allemands (1915).
183 Joseph Bédier, Comment l’Allemagne essaye de justifier ses crimes (1915).
184 See Yaël Dagan, La NRF entre guerre et paix, 1914–1925 (2008).
185 Alphonse Aulard, La Paix future d’après la Révolution (1915).
186 See David James Fisher, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, Calif., 1988).
187 Au-dessus de la mêlée (1915). This appeared in English as Above the Battle (London, 1916), 152.
188 For a discussion of the role played by German intellectuals see Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘German
Artists, Writers and Intellectuals and the Meaning of War, 1914–1918’, in John Horne (ed.), State,
Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge, 1997), 21–38.
470
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
abandoned before the idols of ‘Kultur and Civilization, of the Germanic races and
of Latinity’.189 Never before, Rolland wrote, ‘have we seen humanity throwing into
the bloody arena all its intellectual and moral reserves, its priests, its thinkers, its
scholars, its artists, the whole future of the spirit––wasting its geniuses as food for
cannon’.190 Nevertheless, not even Rolland could resist indulging in some familiar
rhetoric. Speaking of ‘the true France, the France of work and of faith’, he admitted
that he could never distinguish the cause of France from that of humanity, adding
‘I wish France to be loved, I wish her to be victorious not only by force, not only by
right . . . but by that warm and generous heart which is pre-eminently hers.’191
All hope that the spirit of unity forged during the war would endure after the end
of hostilities was quickly dashed.192 The signs were already there in the favourable,
if understandably naïve, reception given to the Russian Revolution by large sections
of the French left and the subsequent creation of the French Communist Party in
1920. Solidarity with the Russian people was often matched by a sense of alienation
from domestic politics and the growing sentiment that the intellectuals who had
embraced the union sacrée should be held to account for their actions. Certainly, the
terms of post-war political debate had been set by the mid-1920s, with Bolshevism,
colonialism, the renewed threat of war, and, later, the rise of fascism galvanizing
intellectuals into action. On all sides, ‘vigilance’ became the watchword.
In January 1919 Henri Barbusse published his Manifeste des intellectuels
combattants and later that year, in May, he launched Clarté, described as ‘A league
of intellectual solidarity for the victory of the international cause’.193 Barbusse’s
launch of Clarté in its turn provoked the publication by Romain Rolland of another
manifesto, subsequently known as the ‘Déclaration d’indépendance de l’esprit’.
Upon this occasion, the target was those intellectuals who, during the war, ‘had put
their science, their art, their reason in the service of governments’. In so doing, the
manifesto proclaimed, ‘they had disfigured, debased, cheapened, and degraded
thought’. Intellectuals, it argued, should be servants only of the ‘mind’ and should
serve no other master, be it a state, a country, or a class. ‘Our duty, our role’, the
signatories affirmed, ‘is to preserve a fixed point, to reveal the pole star in the midst
of the disorder of the passions of the night.’194
Although Barbusse signed this manifesto (along with Benedetto Croce, Bertrand
Russell, Heinrich Mann, Albert Einstein, and many others) it was soon clear that he
was out of sympathy with its ethos. In the years that followed he and his group
canvassed for active support of the Russian Revolution whilst Barbusse195 sought
to redefine the role of the intellectual, emphasizing not just the need for ‘lucidity’
189 Above the Battle, 119.
190 Ibid. 167.
191 Ibid. 100.
192 For an example of the way in which the extreme right quickly abandoned the spirit of the union
sacrée see Charles Maurras, Les Chefs socialistes pendant la guerre (1918). Maurras specifically challenged
the attempt to paint Jaurès as a patriot.
193 See Jean Ralinger, Henri Barbusse, écrivain combattant (1994).
194 The text of this manifesto can be found in Rolland, Quinze Ans de combat (1919–1934)
(1935), 1–6.
195 See Barbusse, Le Couteau entre les dents (1921).
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
471
but for intellectuals, the ‘workers of the mind’, to be prepared to subordinate
themselves to the needs and political will of the masses. Whoever is not with us,
Barbusse intoned, is against us; whoever wills the ends wills the means; the use of
violence by the oppressed was ‘the reality of social justice’.196
Barbusse sought political commitment from intellectuals––as exemplified by his
own membership of the Communist Party in 1923––and in so doing he made it
clear that he had little sympathy for the abstract humanitarianism and pacifism he
labelled derogatively as ‘Rollandism’. The disagreement came to a head in 1921–2,
when Rolland refused to support the new journal of the Clarté group and Barbusse
in turn declined to participate in Rolland’s planned international congress of
intellectuals. What followed was a heated exchange of open letters between the
two men, with Rolland asserting that he looked for a form of commitment that
allowed the intellectual to act as an independent moral conscience.197 As Rolland
specified in a letter to the Communist Party daily, L’Humanité: ‘I am with the
proletariat when they respect truth and humanity. I am against the proletariat every
time they violate truth and humanity. There are no class privileges, either high or
low, in the face of supreme values.’198 The clash between Barbusse and Rolland was
to foreshadow a debate about the commitment of the intellectual that was to
flourish for decades to come.
Only a matter of weeks after the publication of Rolland’s manifesto the nation-
alist (and, for the most part, Catholic) right published its own manifesto on 19 July
1919. ‘Pour une parti de l’intelligence’, written by Henri Massis,199 proclaimed the
necessity of defending the
intellectual and spiritual heritage of the Christian West
from the forces of ‘liberal and anarchic disorder’. Against ‘the Bolsheviks of
literature’ and against ‘the party of organized ignorance’, the ‘guardians of civiliza-
tion’ proposed a principle that was straightforward and simple: ‘national intelli-
gence in the service of the national interest’. With this in mind, the following
year saw the launch of the Revue universelle under the editorship of Massis and
monarchist historian Jacques Bainville. Defining its goal as the achievement of
an ‘intellectual and national Renaissance’ and as placing France at the head of
‘a civilizing mission’, its opening statement made clear that no distinction was to be
made between the ‘service of France and the service of humanity’.200
Left and right clashed again in 1925 over the Rif war in North Africa. Once more
Barbusse was in the vanguard, publishing an anti-colonialist manifesto entitled
‘Aux travailleurs intellectuels: Oui ou non, condamnez-vous la guerre?’ which
proclaimed ‘the right of peoples, of all peoples, of whatever race they belong, to
govern themselves’.201 Aligned by the side of Barbusse and his Clarté group were
writers from La Révolution surréaliste (including Louis Aragon and André Breton)
and the group of young philosophers associated with Georges Politzer. The right
196 Ibid. 36, 46, 47.
197 See Rolland, Quinze Ans, 33–58.
198 Quoted in Fisher, Romain Rolland, 101.
199 The text is repr. in Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, 43–7.
200 ‘Notre Programme’, Revue universelle, 1 (1920), 1–4.
201 Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions françaises, 62–4.
472
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
responded with ‘Les Intellectuels aux côtés de la patrie’, a petition addressed ‘to the
French troops who fight in Morocco for Law, Civilization and Peace’ and which
specifically condemned those ‘who have the audacity to disfigure the lofty and
generous duty towards progress and humanity displayed by France on the soil of
Africa’. The same people, it pointed out, had not thought fit to raise their voices in
defence of the thousands of people who had been ‘tortured and executed by the
Revolution and the Republic Page 99