The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  Well acquainted with the lawyerish adages that recommended obliquity over direct confrontation, Minister of the Interior Ernest Constans, a seasoned veteran of political infighting, attacked Boulanger’s flank with a legal maneuver that justified the dissolution of the Ligue des Patriotes. Then, through agents planted in the Boulangist Comité National, Constans spread rumors that the general himself would soon be indicted on charges of plotting to subvert the legally constituted government, hoping to scare him out of France before holding a trial whose outcome he could not predict. Constans knew his man. After a brief interval, during which Boulanger’s dual privy councils—royalist here, republican there—asked themselves in feverish debate whether he would lead more effectively from exile or from prison, he arranged to flee with his mistress, Marguerite de Bonnemains. On April 1, they boarded a train at the Gare du Nord, and two hours later crossed into Belgium.

  They moved from Brussels to London and finally to the isle of Jersey. Although Boulanger was reelected in absentia to the Chamber of Deputies on September 22, 1889, his party was crushed everywhere except in major cities, and he, having proved useless as a stalking horse for his royalist allies, found himself disavowed by them. “General Boulanger didn’t deceive us,” wrote one. “It was we who deceived ourselves. Boulangism is failed Bonapartism. To succeed it needs a Bonaparte, and Boulanger as Bonaparte was a figment of the popular imagination.”

  During the four years he represented Nancy, Barrès, unnerved perhaps by Burdeau’s presence, seldom rose to speak or question ministers. He observed debate from his bench at the Palais Bourbon and voiced his opinions in print, as a prolific contributor to La Presse, Le Courrier de l’Est, and Le Figaro, commenting on not only political issues of the moment but literary events. While monarchists and Bonapartists who had hoped that Boulangism would answer their dreams of restoration abandoned the general, Barrès stood firm. On November 8, 1889, he joined two dozen fellow loyalists on the isle of Jersey, Boulanger’s new sanctuary, to formulate a legislative program. But toasting Boulanger in a dining hall decked with tricolor flags was their first and last collective act. After hours of equivocation, they agreed on nothing. Barrès despaired. Three days later, Boulanger issued his “Manifesto to the French Nation.” To anyone listening, it must have sounded like a voice from beyond the grave. The wraith of his party struggled on for another season, until April 1890, and breathed its last in Paris’s municipal elections.

  Boulanger’s mistress, Marguerite de Bonnemains, died the following year, in Brussels. The woman whose companionship had been his refuge from the dangers and impostures of public life was now the absence that left him homeless. Sitting beside her empty deathbed and placing flowers at her tomb were the chief rituals of his day. During the last week of September 1891, he put his affairs in order. On the thirtieth he took a coach to the Ixelles Cemetery in Brussels, sat with his back against Marguerite’s tombstone, and committed suicide.

  Several months before Boulanger shot himself, one of his apostates published an article in Le Figaro revealing what he knew of the general’s political, financial, and sexual transgressions. By then, Barrès had become convinced that Boulangism could not survive as a movement (or he as its representative) unless it yoked nationalist ardor to Socialist ideals. In an open letter addressing his working-class constituents, he glorified brotherhood and solidarity: “You are isolated laborers toiling in salt mines and soda-works. Grasp the hands of fellow laborers, your brothers, and despite your wretched wages and endless fatigue, you will dominate the world.” In a more public forum, Le Figaro, he confessed that he envied his forefathers who had witnessed four revolutions in half a century, and that Boulanger had blighted his hopes of witnessing a fifth before his thirtieth year. Greatly to be lamented, he wrote, was the general’s insufficient genius as a hypnotist.

  1One ritual was called “Killing Pilate,” during which the choirboys, after hearing a rattle announce the end of lamentations, were permitted to run amok for a few minutes and beat each other over the head with clogs and prayer books. Another was called “Killing the Jew.” Shopkeepers or country peddlers impersonated members of the “race,” while children danced around them chanting, “Le juif errant / La corde aux dents / Le couteau et le canif / Pour couper la tête au juif!” (With rope between one’s teeth, a butcher knife in hand, and a pocket knife in reserve, to cut off the head of the wandering Jew).

  2Binet wrote prolifically in the field of developmental psychology. He is famous for inventing the IQ test.

  3A monument of Romanesque inspiration called “le monument Barrès” was erected in Vaudémont in 1928, with money raised by public subscription. It stands fifty feet high, on the brow of the hill.

  4By Cousinians, the author, Henri Brémond (an ex-Jesuit and a friend of Barrès’s), refers to followers of Victor Cousin, who championed a philosophical system called eclecticism, the cardinal principle of which is that truth lies in the conglomeration of partial truths distilled from various philosophies. Eclecticism greatly influenced American transcendentalists and during the 1850s and ’60s became the established teaching in French lycées.

  5The notaire’s domain was voluntary private civil law.

  6The caul is the thin, filmy membrane, or amnion, sometimes covering a newborn’s head. It was thought to be a good omen, that the child born with one was destined for greatness.

  7Barrès included it in his first novel, Sous l’Oeil des Barbares.

  8Inverted snobbery took elaborate forms, one example being a costume ball at which guests, many of them titled, had to dress as characters in L’Assommoir, Zola’s novel about life in a slum neighborhood of Paris.

  9On occasion Maurice himself cut an extravagant figure, sporting lilac-colored pants. But the pants didn’t fit, figuratively speaking; he came to eschew company that prized extravagance for its own sake and weary mandarins, as he described the Symbolists, who played “complicated literary games.”

  10On the verge of World War I, he noted in his Cahiers: “I see how it was Wagner who dominated our youth.” Sâr Péladan appeared at Bayreuth wearing a burnoose and hoping to meet Siegfried and Winifred Wagner, but he was not granted an audience.

  11Barrès owed his modest renown less to Sous l’Oeil des Barbares than to an imaginary dialogue, published in pamphlet form, with the famous author of Vie de Jésus, Ernest Renan. Readers mistook it for reportage. Renan’s son challenged Barrès to a duel for putting words in his father’s mouth. This brouhaha called attention to Sous l’Oeil and to the second volume of the trilogy, Un Homme Libre.

  12The conflict between selfhood and philistine society had a chorus of voices in fin-de-siècle Europe. William Butler Yeats was thirty-six and in the throes of occultism when he noted, “The borders of our minds are ever-shifting, … and many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy” (1901). Later, in his autobiography, he recounted his own inner flight from the world of rational barbarians. The religious myths of his childhood having been stolen from him by those “detestable” glorifiers of science, John Tyndall and Thomas Huxley, he created for himself “a new religion, almost an infallible church, of poetic tradition … passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters, with some help from philosophers and theologians.”

  13Barrès still preferred to think of himself as a “cosmopolite.” In Les Taches d’Encre he declared, “We have intellectual fathers in all countries” and praised the virtue of “intellectual hospitality.” That door would close when the word “cosmopolite” became synonymous with “Jew.”

  14His anti-Semitism may not have been unrelated to an abortive love affair in 1887 with Madeleine Deslandes, whose mother belonged to the wealthy Jewish banking family of Oppenheim.

  15In Un Homme Libre, the sequel to Sous l’Oeil des Barbares, Philippe, after liberating his Self from society, proceeds systematically to reengage the world on his own terms. Barrès describes this exertion as “the effort of in
stinct to realize itself,” or as an embrace of the collective unconscious. “In expanding, the Self merges with the Unconscious, not to be swallowed up by it and disappear but to feed upon the inexhaustible forces of humanity.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The Nightingale of the Carnage

  No longer is there beauty except in battle. Everything that deserves the title of masterpiece has an aggressive character.

  —FILIPPO MARINETTI, “Fondation et Manifeste du Futurisme,”

  in Le Figaro, February 20, 1909

  There I am in a temple, in a sacred place where something sublime, timeless is taking place, the consummate miracle, the great invisible power meeting puny man. [Our soldiers] saw the burning bush. And in evoking this great biblical image … I don’t mean to say that these supernatural favors are reserved for believers. Whatever their rational and reasoned attitude may be toward mystery and dogmas, whatever their prejudices, the moment they enter the heroic zone, our soldiers find themselves in a religious zone.… On these heights, God, fatherland, devotion, sacrifice, forgetfulness of self, all these great summonses intermingle.

  —MAURICE BARRÈS, overlooking the battlefield of Vimy in 1916

  Boulanger fell, but a bust of Caesar on Barrès’s mantelpiece stayed put and a portrait of Napoleon hung on the wall. After July 1891 these presided over a household that included his bride, the eighteen-year-old Paule Couche, who came from a bourgeois family of high functionaries generally ill-disposed to Boulangism, scornful of journalists, and alarmed by her interest in art and literature. Paule had set her cap for Barrès seven months earlier, when, under the auspices of the Philotechnic Association, he had introduced Molière’s Tartuffe at the Odéon theater with a lecture on “the Jesuit spirit.” And he had responded to the devout, willful adolescent as decisively as he could. The courtship resulted in a marriage whose binding force was said to be affection rather than convenience or passion. What one knows for certain is that they were well matched in their oppositeness—he being the author of Le Culte du Moi and she the spouse who, when asked for biographical details some years later, answered, “Madame Barrès really doesn’t exist; I have always had a keen sense of the relative importance of individuals, thus of the self-effacement that befits me.”

  The wedding took place in a church near the Latin Quarter. Present were Gaston Calmette of Le Figaro, Leconte de Lisle, Anatole France, Raymond Poincaré (a fellow deputy, soon to become minister of education and fine arts), Félix Faure (president of the Republic during the Dreyfus Affair), the right-wing polemicist Léon Daudet (Alphonse’s son), and Stanislas de Guaita.

  Paule and Maurice—she as fair as he was swarthy—spent their honeymoon in Bavaria, at the Bayreuth Festival, visiting King Louis’s temple of Walhalla near Regensburg and touring Louis’s picture-book castles.1

  Barrès’s term had not yet expired when the Chamber of Deputies became a scene of tumult that fortified his anti-parliamentarianism and revived hopes that a fifth revolution might take place before his thirtieth year. The spark to tinder was a scandal associated with the Panama Canal Company. The great dig had begun in 1880 and since then had encountered one daunting obstacle after another, unbeknownst to shareholders receiving false reports of progress authorized by the company’s president, Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal. In truth, investors who had subscribed to the great man’s belief that a sea-level trench like the Suez could be dug across Panama were coming to realize that, after years of futile excavation, nothing flowed between the Atlantic and Pacific but mud and money.

  In 1887, Gustave Eiffel was hired to redesign the canal with locks, but it was too late. Thenceforth, attention shifted from the pestilential swamp of Panama to a financial morass in Paris. On March 1, 1888, de Lesseps formally announced that the company would need 600 million francs to complete work by July 1890. When yet another bond issue—the sixth since 1882—yielded only thirty-five million, authorization from the government to lure investors with lottery bonds was strenuously sought. Thousands signed a petition. Five major newspapers—on the canal company payroll, as the public would soon learn—rallied around it. Financiers lobbied. Eiffel displayed his model locks. None of this swayed the prime minister. But in the legislature, where opinion was divided, more and more deputies—also on the company payroll, as it turned out—began to favor a lottery. Some supporters cited the example of the Suez Canal in arguing that a year before that magnificent project reached fruition, “experts” had declared it futile. Others claimed to speak for small investors whose financial well-being was at stake.

  In June 1888, the Chamber of Deputies passed a law authorizing lottery bonds, but the public, having heard about the company’s woes, did not invest. Only a third of the bonds issued were sold, and on June 29 de Lesseps attributed this latest, definitive fiasco to a conspiracy. With the whole edifice of Panama collapsing around him, he continued to put a Micawberish gloss on things. The canal would open in July 1890, he assured shareholders in August 1889.

  Six months later (shortly after Barrès began his term in the Assembly), the Panama Canal Company was no more. On February 4, 1890, the civil court of the Seine pronounced its dissolution, ordering the company to be liquidated. Its books were audited by a chartered accountant named Henri Rossignol, whose report cast suspicion on certain individuals and financial practices, paving the way for a more detailed inquiry and a trial that exposed a viper’s nest to public view.

  The numbers were damning. An exorbitant proportion of the funds raised by the company had been squandered on commissions to underwriters responsible for placing stocks and bonds. Rossignol noted that the relationship between services rendered and commissions charged became, with each successive issue, progressively more tenuous.

  Added to these enormities were the sums disbursed to Baron Jacques de Reinach, de Lesseps’s personal financial adviser. The son of a German-Jewish financier with European connections, and a Frenchman by choice, Reinach exemplified the internationalist of anti-Semitic lore. In 1863, when he was twenty-three, he and a brother-in-law had founded the investment bank of Kohn, Reinach & Co., which had prospered. Through his nephew Joseph Reinach, who had been Léon Gambetta’s protégé and had succeeded him as director of the newspaper La République Française, Baron Jacques mingled with leaders of the moderate-left republican majority, the so-called opportunists. This appellation, which was intended to describe the party’s political pragmatism, came, in Reinach’s salon, to signify its venality. Many “opportunists” made it known that they had their price, and pledges of support for the Panama bond lottery were secured with a portion of the millions in Reinach’s account.

  Opportunists and radicals had been on the opposite side of many fences, but lucre established a community of opinion when it came to voting on Panama bond issues, and the associate through whom Reinach swayed Clemenceau’s Radical Party was a strange figure named Cornelius Herz. Like Reinach, Herz had German-Jewish parents. The “doctor,” as he liked to be called (having acquired a dubious medical degree from a school in Chicago), had covered his tracks well. Everyone knew him, but no one knew much about him. “I’ve never witnessed a stranger phenomenon,” the columnist Joseph Montet wrote in Le Gaulois years after the Panama Scandal. “His importance was something specific yet elusive.… In the spheres of industry, finance, and politics, everyone reckoned with him.… Through a cunningly devised web of associations and friendships, he exercised influence everywhere, from ministerial offices to the inner councils of government.”

  Most mystifying was Herz’s hold over Reinach, who treated him with uncharacteristic deference. The terms of a contact drawn up between Herz and the Panama Canal Company in 1886 through Reinach were remarkably generous. De Lesseps agreed that Herz should receive 10 million francs for wielding his influence in parliamentary circles if the Assembly approved a lottery bond.

  In June 1891, a minister of justice assigned the Panama affair to a sluggish magistrate, but in February 1892, Parliament, havi
ng received numerous petitions, instructed the government to act “swiftly and energetically.” A new prime minister, Émile Loubet, took office in February; his minister of justice was less solicitous for the well- being of compromised colleagues than his predecessor, and in September the attorney general, Jules Quesnay de Beaurepaire, concluded that the state should prosecute Panama Canal Company executives. At that point, Loubet panicked—a trial would almost certainly implicate three members of his cabinet—and implored Quesnay de Beaurepaire to reverse his decision, arguing that the Republic itself was in danger. The same position was taken by the president of the Republic, Sadi Carnot, whom an anarchist would assassinate two years later. “The principal participants of the regime … thought it natural that in a liberal political system, regulated by haggling and blackmail, the roost should be ruled by traffickers who knew the exact price of consciences and already possessed a stock of receipts,” Maurice Barrès wrote several years later. “Dominated by fear, an endemic illness at the Palais Bourbon, they concluded that it would be best, in the interests of good social order, not to inspect the sewer into which the excrement of parliamentarianism is flushed.”

  By October 1892, much of the waste had already been exposed in a series of articles featured on the front page of La Libre Parole, the newspaper Édouard Drumont (already famous for his best-selling anti-Semitic harangue entitled La France Juive) had launched in April 1892 with the motto “La France aux Français”—France for the French. Written pseudonymously by a banker named Ferdinand Martin, who had formerly drummed up business for Panama lottery bonds, “Les Dessous du Panama” struck terror into the hearts of all concerned. “Thanks to the hospitality of La Libre Parole, the only newspaper independent enough to allow an attack against the Golden Calf of yesterday, I shall state impartially, for the benefit of shareholders, what I saw and noted each day, either at the isthmus of Panama itself or in Paris,” he wrote in the September 6 issue.