Revolution and the Republic
Page 101
Nizan believed, was to be found in the Leninist idea of the professional revolution-
ary, of the philosopher as ‘the technician of revolutionary philosophy’.238 ‘His sole
mission’, Nizan wrote, ‘will be to denounce all the conditions which prevent
men from being human, to explain and describe these conditions so clearly that
all those who do not yet understand how they live will attain consciousness
of their situation.’239 And this, Nizan argued, would only be possible if the
230 Les Chiens de garde (1998), 59.
231 Ibid. 73.
232 Ibid. 149.
233 Ibid. 52.
234 Ibid. 117.
235 Ibid. 119.
236 Ibid. 116.
237 Ibid. 151.
238 Ibid. 154.
239 Ibid. 152.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
477
philosopher identified himself with both the class and the party which were the
bearers of revolution. ‘Today’s philosophers’, Nizan concluded, ‘are still too em-
barrassed to admit that they have betrayed mankind for the bourgeoisie. If we
betray the bourgeoisie for the sake of mankind, let us not be ashamed to admit that
we are traitors.’240
During the 1930s Nizan continued to betray his own class. Abandoning his
teaching career, he worked as a journalist for the Communist Party press, writing
for both L’Humanité and Ce Soir, and in 1934 made the obligatory visit to the
Soviet Union.241 He wrote three brilliant novels, two of which, Antonin Bloyé
and La Conspiration, explored aspects of betrayal. In the first, Nizan portrayed his
anti-hero’s abandonment of the working class for the comforts of bourgeois life: in
the second, his subject was collaboration with the police by a young member of
the Communist Party. As an opponent of the policy of appeasement, in 1939 he
published Chronique de septembre, a biting denunciation of the Munich accord
signed by Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, and the French premier, Édouard Daladier.
However, he failed to anticipate one further act of betrayal: the signing of the
Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939. Already mobilized into the
French army, Nizan resigned from the PCF immediately. He died near Dunkirk
with the fall of France in May 1940. What Nizan left behind was the first fully
formulated statement of the concept of commitment and engagement and it was
this that was to be taken up by writers in post-war France with such enthusiasm.
But his name was also to be shrouded in controversy. Even before his death, the
PCF had placed him among the opportunists and careerists who had deserted
the Party and to this was added the unfounded rumour that Nizan had been in the
pay of the police. When from the pen of Louis Aragon, recently promoted to
the Académie Française, the PCF persisted in this slander, a small group of writers
felt compelled to defend Nizan’s memory, indicating that the PCF should either
provide proof of its accusation or shut up. Among the signatories of this open letter
of 29 March 1947 were Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and . . . Julien Benda.242
I I I
In 1932 a 19-year-old Albert Camus published an article entitled ‘La Philosophie
du siècle’ in an Algerian journal, Sud.243 It was a review of Henri Bergson’s recently
published Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion. This, Camus began, was a
book that he had been eagerly anticipating. What he had hoped for was an ‘effective
application’ of the Bergsonian method to ethics and, thereby, the exposition of a
240 Ibid. 155.
241 See Cohen-Solal, Paul Nizan, 137–82 and Sophie Curé, ‘Les Récits de l’URSS de Paul Nizan:
A la recherche d’un réalisme socialiste de témoignage’, Sociétés et Représentations, 15 (2002), 97–111.
242 Brochier (ed.), Paul Nizan, 13–17, and Pascal Ory, Nizan: Destin d’un révolté (1980), 237–54.
243 Cahiers Albert Camus (1973), 145–8.
478
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
philosophy that ought ‘to have been able to play the role of religion in our century’.
In this, however, he had been disappointed. Whilst Bergson’s was still ‘the most
beautiful’ of all philosophies, the ‘sublime conclusion’ to his work had not been
provided. Given Bergson’s ‘advanced age’, Camus surmised correctly, it was
doubtful that he would ever complete this task. ‘But’, Camus concluded, ‘perhaps
another philosopher will come along, younger, more daring, who will declare
himself Bergson’s heir. He will turn Bergsonism into an established fact and then
move towards its immediate realization. Then perhaps we will have the philosophy-
religion, that gospel of the century, for lack of which the contemporary mind
wanders so painfully. Is this, in truth, too much to ask?’244
Camus, we might assume, probably imagined that he would be that young and
daring philosopher. Certainly his later writings returned again and again to the
questions he had been hoping that Bergson would answer. But was Camus right in
his assessment of Bergson’s text? Was it a failure or was Camus himself asking too
much? Bergson’s starting point was a discussion of the role of habit in social life and
of the way in which people came to think of social norms as having such an
unquestionable force that we felt obliged to obey them. As a consequence, for the
greater part of our existence we acted unthinkingly, automatically, in state of
passive lethargy, simply accepting the social rules that society had imposed upon
us out of a sense of self-protection. ‘Obedience to duty’, Bergson wrote, ‘means
resistance to self.’245 Bergson developed this argument by next suggesting that,
corresponding to this state of mind, there existed both a ‘closed morality’ and a
‘closed society’. A closed morality was one firmly rooted in our daily habits and one
which called for an unthinking discharge of our duties. It was an impersonal
morality, one imposed upon us from the outside and which we ourselves did not
create. A closed society was characterized by the dominance of these social norms
and obligations. Such a society, Bergson contended, was an inward-looking society,
a society which could not transcend its own norms and values and one, conse-
quently, where there existed a gap between itself and humanity. ‘The closed
society’, Bergson wrote, ‘is one whose members stand together, indifferent to the
rest of humanity, always ready for attack or self-defence, one compelled, in short,
to adopt an attitude of combat’.246 Such, Bergson added, was ‘human society when
it emerged from the hands of nature’. It was the human equivalent of an ant-hill or
a bee-hive.
The full force of this argument only became apparent when Bergson introduced
the comparison with an open morality and an open society. An open morality was
a form of morality based not upon habit but upon moral awareness and personal
decision, a morality that was dynamic and creative. It was outward-looking and
turned its gaze not towards family, party, or nation but towards humanity as a
whole. As for an open society, it would rest not upon hierarchy and authority but<
br />
upon democracy. ‘Of all political conceptions’, Bergson wrote, democracy was ‘the
244 Cahiers Albert Camus (1973), 147.
245 Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (1932), 14.
246 Ibid. 287.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
479
furthest removed from nature, the only one which transcends, at least in intention,
the conditions of the “closed society”’.247 Such a vision, Bergson conceded, had to
be considered only as an ideal or, more accurately, as a direction in which humanity
might be travelling, but it was nevertheless a vision which ‘proclaims liberty,
demands equality, and which reconciles these two hostile sisters by reminding
them that they are sisters and by placing fraternity above everything else’.248
Bergson, in short, offered a philosophically sophisticated defence of the Republic
(and, as it turned out, the League of Nations).
However, there was far more to the argument of Les Deux Sources de la morale
et de la religion than this. In his text, Bergson repeatedly emphasized that the
difference between a closed and an open morality was not one of degree but of kind,
and therefore that we would not pass from one to the other by a process of the
expansion of the self or by a progressive widening of the bounds of the city to
include humanity. Rather, what amounted to a leap from one to the other would
arise from a powerful and joyous liberation of the soul from the grip of nature and
through this would emerge an intuition into the unity of humanity. For Bergson
this amounted to a mystical experience. Furthermore, in his view, the most
‘complete mysticism’ was to be found among the Christian mystics. To be clear,
Bergson’s conception of what he described as a dynamic religion was far from
Catholic orthodoxy but, in specifying that religion was a crystallization of what
mysticism ‘had poured, white hot, into the soul of man’, he opened up the way for
a new moral aspiration which would have God firmly fixed at its centre and which
would contradict the ideas, customs, and institutions of a closed society.
One can readily imagine Camus’s dissatisfaction when he saw that Bergson’s
conclusion to what he unhesitatingly categorized as a ‘long series of brilliant works’
amounted to letting God back in through the philosophical back door. ‘We already
knew’, Camus wrote, ‘that instinct could render the whole truth. We all knew
the advantages of the intuitive method. We were simply waiting for its conse-
quences.’249 Bergson’s embrace of the Catholic faith was probably not one of the
consequences that Camus had anticipated and it was certainly a step that he himself
was not prepared to contemplate. Such a course of action was to require a faith that
was no longer possible. Nevertheless, perhaps the young student was being unduly
dismissive of both Bergson’s achievement and of his conclusions; for, in a very real
sense, Bergson had laid down the philosophical agenda that was to preoccupy the
post-war generation. By turning away from intellectualism, Bergson had shown
that morality could not be deduced from first principles and in doing so he had
posed anew the question of the rationality of our ethical (and therefore political)
commitments.
Although they were to disagree with Bergson’s own answer and its religious tone,
it was this question with which Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone
de Beauvoir, Camus, and others were to grapple at great length, and with fateful
consequences. Bergson’s emphasis upon the superiority of an open morality in
247 Ibid. 304.
248 Ibid.
249 ‘La Philosophie du siècle’, 147.
480
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particular was to find a powerful echo in the important distinction between a
habitual and impersonal morality and one that was authentic and creative of values.
‘It is quite certain’, Merleau-Ponty was later to write, ‘that Bergson, had we read
him carefully, would have taught us things that ten or fifteen years later we believed
to be discoveries made by the philosophy of existence itself.’250 Contrary to
Camus’s opinion, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion should be seen as
one of the most significant and portentous philosophical works of the last century.
The fact of the matter, however, was that, although Bergson continued to have
his admirers,251 his work largely fell from philosophical favour during the 1930s.
This was so for a variety of reasons, but one of the most important was his frequent
characterization as the philosopher of the bourgeoisie. In 1928, for example, Robert
Louzon published an article in La Révolution prolétarienne entitled ‘Henri Bergson,
philosophe de l’homme d’affaires’252 in which this very charge was forcefully
articulated and, as we know, something very similar was argued by Nizan in Les
Chiens de garde. The accusation received its clearest and most articulate expression
in Georges Politzer’s La Fin d’une parade philosophique. A young and enthusiastic
Marxist, Politzer did not pull his punches.253 Bergson, he wrote, ‘has always been
the enthusiastic ally of the State and of the class for which it is the instrument’. He
had openly supported the war, had been against the Russian Revolution, and had
not shown the slightest interest in rebellion. ‘His entire life’, Politzer concluded,
‘enables us to see that he has given himself over entirely to the values of the
bourgeoisie.’254
There was, however, a more original and interesting thesis contained within
Politzer’s attack. Bergsonian philosophy, he argued, could be refuted in a number
of different ways. Its claims to be in accord with the findings of science could be
challenged. Its theory of knowledge could be subjected to criticism. But, above all,
it could be asked whether Bergsonism had understood ‘the concrete’. ‘If the answer
is yes’, Politzer wrote, ‘Bergsonism is a great philosophy; if the answer is no, there
must be a scandalous artifice at the heart of Bergsonism.’255 Politzer’s reply was
inthe negative and he therefore concluded that his task was ‘to show what was
hidden in the elegant box of the conjuror’.256 What was hidden, in his view, was a
new form of Pharisaism, a new form of hypocrisy, designed to hide ‘the daily
comedy of the bourgeoisie’.
The force of this argument derived from the fact that, in Politzer’s words,
everyone was talking about the concrete: it was, as he put it, ‘la tarte à la crème’.
To fail to talk about or to take into account the concrete was, therefore, automati-
cally to invalidate a body of ideas. In this assessment of the thinking of the day,
Politzer was undoubtedly correct and this became ever more the case as the 1930s
250 Quoted in Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2001), 114.
251 See e.g. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Bergson (1931).
252 La Révolution prolétarienne, 69 (1928), 1–2.
253 Born in Hungary, in 1929 Politzer had been one of the founders of the Revue Marxiste. As a
member of the Resistance he was executed in May 1942.
254 La Fin d’une parade philosophique (1932),
10.
255 Ibid. 12–13.
256 Ibid. 97.
France, Intellectuals, and Engagement
481
progressed. To that extent, the debate which came to dominate this decade was not
one between left and right but one between those who persisted in clinging to what
was castigated as the abstract individualism of bourgeois society and those
who sought a moral and political renewal through the rediscovery of what was
frequently referred to as either l’homme réel or l’homme concret. It is in this context
that Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle has spoken of les non-conformistes des années
trente,257 meaning by this the generation of young intellectuals who, from a variety
of different perspectives and in a plethora of new and often short-lived reviews,
sought to escape from what they regarded as a crisis of civilization. Often critical
of Communism and of the Soviet Union, they were similarly hostile towards what
was seen as the cancer of productivism and materialism typical of modern American
society. In both cases, man was being crushed by the tyranny of the machine. The
prevailing mood, then, was anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and also anti-parliamentary.
It was also one unsympathetic to the ideology of 1789.
No publication perhaps better exemplified this mood than Esprit, the review
founded by Emmanuel Mounier in 1932.258 Drawn largely from Catholicism, its
contributors focused their ire upon what most commonly they referred to either as
‘bourgeois and individualist civilization’ or as the ‘established disorder’. This was
the society born of 1789, one in which individuals had been distanced and
abstracted from their communal bonds and where the activity of work had become
a burden and source of exploitation. It was a society in decline, one dominated by
avarice and the power of money and characterized by the spiritual impoverishment
and ‘depersonalization’ of its citizens. By way of reply, Esprit called for a new
economic order giving primacy to work over capital, to personal responsibility over
bureaucracy, to service over profit, and to decentralization over centralization. But
more than this, Esprit called for a spiritual renovation and moral revolution. A
political revolution, Mounier and his colleagues believed, would serve no purpose if