The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  Martin’s last article appeared on September 16. Weeks passed before La Libre Parole served up more scandal, and this time the disclosures came from an entirely unexpected source: Baron Jacques de Reinach. Although cited only once by Martin, Reinach lived in fear of all-out assault. To ward off Drumont’s blows, he offered him the names of several deputies whose votes had been bought. La Libre Parole honored its agreement, but another paper, La Cocarde, which would appoint Barrès its director in 1894, was not pledged to the conspiracy of silence and aimed its full battery of execration at Reinach. On November 19, 1892, the minister of justice informed Parliament that five men, including Ferdinand de Lesseps and Gustave Eiffel, faced charges of fraud. Later that day, Reinach, accompanied by Clemenceau and the minister of finance, visited Cornelius Herz, who, for reasons not clear, had been leaking prejudicial information to the right-wing press. They begged him to desist. He refused. The next morning Reinach was found dead in his mansion, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage (according to the official report) or, more likely, killed himself. “Baron Jacques de Reinach,” wrote Barrès, “calls to mind those large rats that swallow the bait, then go behind a paneled wall to die. Their rotting cadaver poisons the poisoner. One must tear down half the house to get at it. That is what enraged Frenchmen proceeded to do.”

  The drama unfolded simultaneously on many stages: in the Palais Bourbon, where denunciations flew like cawing crows across the Assembly chamber and suspect deputies were stripped of immunity; before an enlarged board of inquiry appointed by Parliament; in the courts; and on a field outside Paris, where Clemenceau, who avoided prosecution but lost his seat in the 1893 elections, dueled the Boulangist standard-bearer Paul Déroulède, who invited Barrès to act as his second. De Lesseps was sentenced to five years in prison and Gustave Eiffel to two and a half. Freed on appeal in June, Eiffel was compelled the following year to reimburse Panama bondholders 10 million francs. In due course, the High Court of Appeals annulled de Lesseps’s sentence. He was in his dotage by then and died in 1894.

  There were sinners enough to keep magistrates well occupied for years. The sordid tale of Panama illustrated, if nothing else, the democracy of greed. But anti-republican papers intent on exploiting public rage wanted a satanic malefactor into whom all sinfulness could be cast, and three men prominently embroiled in the scandal justified their choice of the Jew. La Libre Parole (along with prominent Socialists) declared Panama to have been a “Jewish disaster” in an article with that name. Tribunals and investigative committees would pass judgment on one French culprit or another, declared La Libre Parole, but no matter: Jews were behind it all. The Jew was the puppet master.

  It seems that all of Jewry, high and low, congregated beneath the udder of this cow. In the disaster that cost so many French their savings and so many good deputies their reputations, one encounters Jews wherever one turns. They were the authors of this foul mess. It was they who organized the siege of consciences, who finally strangled the enterprise. And while they divvy up the fruit of their rapine with impunity, the unfortunate administrators of the Society, Lesseps first of all, are being dragged before tribunals.

  The author challenged any man capable of seeing beyond his political prejudices to deny that the collapse of the venture was “a flagrant instant of the Jewish peril to which we have so often drawn attention.”

  The Panama affair confirmed Barrès in the belief that the soul of France could not long endure parliamentary government. It also prepared the ground for a view of French society hospitable to the xenophobia preached by Drumont and others. Barrès’s earlier writing did not distinguish him from Socialists such as Jaurès, who, before the Dreyfus Affair, equated Jewry and capital. A more vehement Barrès emerged in 1894, one year after losing his bid for reelection, when he became director of the Parisian daily La Cocarde and honored Drumont in his first editorial as a “combination moralist and historian” whose exposés were “a very important element in the social history of this age.” Having recruited collaborators who did not often see eye to eye, he herded them all together on a platform of comprehensive recrimination.2 Odious were industrial society, the centralized state, high finance, a traditional curriculum imprisoning schoolchildren, Jews, the Enlightenment, parliamentarianism, and specifically his old philosopher professor Auguste Burdeau, who had meanwhile become president of the Chamber of Deputies. Barrès would soon be heard sanctifying “the earth and the dead,” but, as his editorial manifesto suggested, not all French earth and not all its inhabitants were eligible for his benediction. He set aside plots of unhallowed ground for “barbarians,” meaning, above all, bourgeois rationalists convicted of squelching the instinctual life of the young. “They continue to impose their conception of the Universe and of the social order upon us,” he wrote. “Their system no longer has anything whatever to do with our real nature. They oppress us and prevent us from being ourselves.”

  Ideologically, the most important name associated with Barrès at La Cocarde was that of Jules Soury, professor of “physiological psychology” at the Sorbonne. Soury’s magnum opus, Le Système Nerveux Central, is a monograph almost two thousand pages long tracing the history of Western thought as it applied to man’s central nervous system. But he wrote much else besides and wandered into other fields, always with “physiological psychology” as his compass. About human nature, race, society, and politics he abounded in theories, which Barrès, who attended Soury’s lectures between 1893 and 1897, recorded as gospel. This was a threshold that skepticism never crossed. General Boulanger may have been—as long as his hypnotic influence lasted—the mortal embodiment of Barresian nationalism. Soury, on the other hand, provided Barrès with a conceptual framework apparent in the formulation of almost everything he wrote after the mid-1890s, when, as he lost elections and attended funerals (Stanislas de Guaita’s among others), the future looked bleak.

  Soury’s worldview was predicated upon a determinism that held everything of nature and humankind to be governed by “iron laws” irreconcilable with free will, individual reason, or moral being. In Freudian terms, the ego counted for nothing while the id—a collective version of it—had acquired transcendent status. And over this quasi-scientific dogma, like the Idea reflected in Plato’s cave, fell the distorted shadow of Charles Darwin. What identifies humans, according to Soury, are “hereditary instincts” born of “useful variations mechanically acquired during the many phases of their long struggle for existence.” By natural selection, ancestral habits become organic traits, making the individual the impersonal specimen of an ethnic personality. Soury might have embellished his argument with Arthur Rimbaud’s famous solecism “I is another.” Instead he looked to the well-known Austrian physiologist Sigmund Exner: “How is this conscious self related to that other self, impersonal in a way, which Exner designates by the neuter pronoun ‘it’ in this sentence: ‘Es denkt in mir’ [It thinks in me]? The ‘thinking It,’ unknown to the ‘thinking I,’ determines the nature of our feelings and our ideas and predestines our vocations.” No longer on speaking terms are “cogito” and “sum.” What makes us who we fundamentally are is as unrelated to intellect and consciousness in Soury’s scheme as the operations of original sin are inaccessible to reason in Augustinian theology. We are our dead forebears’ living puppets. They think through us. Our nerves, which encode their gestures, habits, and “hereditary reactions,” are the strings they pull from beyond the grave. Soury continued: “Ethnic and national traits born of age-old variations, which distinguish the Frenchman of France from the foreigner, are not metaphors but phenomena as real as our neurons, the only elements of our anatomy that never renew themselves in an individual’s lifetime, that endure without proliferating.”

  Subverted from without by the introduction of foreigners and mined from within by the prevalence of ideas foreign to her nature, France the colonial power was herself a country possessed, in Soury’s view. Preachers of “peace, fraternity, and human solidarity” had spawned dege
nerate cosmopolites. The influence of Jews, Protestants, and Freemasons made itself felt in the self-forgetfulness—the “oubli de soi”—afflicting the secular Republic. And this loss or abuse of identity extended to the borders of France, which had become porous. The argument was not new. Alexandre Dumas fils had presented something like it in the preface to The Lady of the Camellias fifty years earlier, where society’s ills were blamed on “the invasion of women from abroad, the glorification of courtesans, the daily trainload of exotic mores that enter the city on every line, hastening local degenerations.” By 1936, the foreign horde would be seen as an invasion of Jews who had elected a coreligionary to high office.

  For Soury as well, the modern world promised alienation, with international railroad lines replacing the ganglia of organic France—la France profonde—whose nature was inherently rural, inward, and bellicose. Doomsday impended unless France armed herself for war, he would declare in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, vowing never to exculpate the Jewish traitor. Salvation lay in “eternal war, the source of all superior life, the wellspring of all progress on earth.”3 Published in 1902—the year Zola died and Barrès bundled his own professions of anti-Dreyfusism into a volume—Soury’s Campagne Nationaliste was appallingly prophetic.

  I have faith in the regenerative virtue of steel and fire for peoples who are fallen, debased, resigned to having a history no longer; if they die in the process, so much the better! They are thus saved from themselves, from the shame of surviving. Above all, we must continue the interrupted duel, recommence the age-old struggle against our Germanic brothers, our hereditary enemies, who are destined perhaps in coming centuries to master the Gauls, but with whom it is a duty and a joy, an heroic joy, to fight for the sake of fighting!

  In the 1890s, Soury anticipated the fatal dictum of European general staffs in 1914. A Frenchman must always attack if he means to conquer. “So forward!” he exhorted. “To the Rhine this time, across the territory of Helvetians and the fields of Flanders.”

  Still straddling nationalism and Socialism, but more mindful of race than social justice, Barrès turned Soury’s dogma to account in lectures, in Le Figaro, in pamphlets, and in Le Roman de l’Énergie Nationale, a trilogy for which he did extensive research on Boulanger and the Panama Scandal. Volume 1, entitled Les Déracinés (The Uprooted), was serialized by La Revue de Paris between May and August 1897. It opens in Nancy, where seven young Lorrainers destined to set out on different paths, all leading to Paris and all but three to bad ends, fall under the spell of a philosophy professor named Bouteiller, whose encyclopedic mind flies in wide circles but nests in the work of Immanuel Kant. What becomes of them individually once they graduate matters less here than the general harm Barrès attributes to Bouteiller’s pact with the devil of Kantian universalism. The professor is described as “the modern national spirit” personified, relating “humanity’s dreams” and divulging “the world’s laws” to a class of entranced students whose roots in Lorraine are deemed irrelevant. “He preached the truth according to his master. The world is so much wax on which our mind, which perceives the world in light of certain abstract categories—space, time, causality—impresses its seal.” Gifted teacher though he is, only at the peril of his pupils can he ignore the land that shaped them: “Does [Bouteiller] not recognize special needs, manners and mores that call for tolerance, qualities or defects that can be put to good use?” A multitude of indefinable cultural traits influence the young Lorrainers in their judgment and reasoning. Were the Kantian to give them their due, the spontaneity and range of human energy would gain by it. Instead, he uproots his followers, tearing them from the soil and the social group to which they are attached by every fiber of their being, and resettling them in a Germany of abstract reason.

  The Dreyfus Affair, which truly became an affair with the publication of Zola’s “J’accuse” several months after Les Déracinés appeared, was a pivotal event for Barrès. It completed his radicalization. By 1902 he looked back at Le Culte du Moi as a youthful delusion. Relegating the “I” of that work to his nineteenth-century past, he entered the twentieth century pledged so single-mindedly to the principle of a collective unconscious or a “thinking It” that certain rebarbative passages in Scènes et Doctrines du Nationalisme parrot Jules Soury almost word for word. “The sands gave way beneath me as I scrutinized the ‘Self’ after the fashion of novelists, and I descended deeper, ever deeper until I found firm footing in the collectivity,” he wrote.

  The individual! His intelligence, his ability to grasp the laws of the universe! We must reject all that. We are not the masters of the thoughts born in us. They do not originate in our intelligence; they are ways of reacting that translate very old physiological dispositions. How we judge and reason depends on the milieu in which we are immersed. Human reason is so bound to the past that we all walk in the steps of our predecessors. There are no personal ideas; even the rarest notions, the most abstract judgments, the most self-infatuated metaphysical sophisms are general modes of feeling, to be found in all organically kindred beings exposed to the same images.… We continue our parents.… They think and speak in us. The whole cortège of descendants constitutes a single being.

  Was the dogmatic fervor with which Barrès embraced Lorraine and the collective identity of his forefathers proportionate to the loneliness of the schoolboy who still inhabited him and to the son whose father seldom spoke at all, except to propose alien ambitions? These were ghosts best kept under lock and key, or projected into a scapegoat. “Jews,” he wrote in Scènes et Doctrines, “have no fatherland in the sense we ascribe to that word. For us, the fatherland is the soil of ancestors, the earth of our dead. For them, it is wherever they find their greatest interest. Thus, their ‘intellectuals’ conclude famously that ‘the fatherland is an idea,’ the idea being whichever one serves them best—for example, that nationality is a prejudice to be overcome, that military honor reeks of blood, that we must disarm (and leave money in charge).”

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  Word of a Jewish captain named Dreyfus facing a court-martial for treason reached Barrès in November 1894, when he was still editor in chief of La Cocarde. In his initial response he declared that the man, if found guilty, should be shot for treason rather than for the “innate wrong” of being “an Israelite,” but no sooner did the army try Dreyfus behind closed doors with bogus evidence and render its verdict than Barrès baptized him Judas and entered the camp that blamed Dreyfus’s treason as well as the skulduggery of Panama on a Jewish “Syndicate.” His gall earned him a prominent place among journalists invited to witness Dreyfus’s public mortification in the courtyard of the École Militaire. He recalled that at the stroke of nine, a mounted general drew his sword and commands were shouted, whereupon four gunners marched toward the middle of the square, escorting Dreyfus and a helmeted officer of gigantic stature delegated to tear off his braid, pluck out his buttons, and break his sword. “[Dreyfus] walked with a firm step, holding his chin high and his left hand on the pummel of his saber.… This sinister group stopped only a few paces from the general, who sat frozen in his saddle. The four artillerymen stepped backward, the court clerk spoke, the rigid silhouette didn’t budge, except to raise an arm and loudly proclaim his innocence.… Until then, Judas had been a small, motionless clew battered by all the winds of hatred.”

  Elevated from a verdict rendered in a military courtroom to the status of biblical villainy, Dreyfus’s treason was placed beyond the reach of facts proving his innocence. When inconvenient evidence came to light, Barrès dismissed it as the confabulation of “the Syndicate.” Judas was eternally Judas. The Dreyfus case was a res judicata, a case adjudicated once and for all.

  Not until Clemenceau’s paper L’Aurore published Zola’s “J’accuse,” on January 13, 1898, did Barrès give further consideration to the matter of Dreyfus’s alleged treason. The open letter electrified France. Around this manifesto gathered the disparate energies that became a coherent Dreyfusard
movement, and almost instantly Zola acquired the political role urged upon him five years earlier, when he was finishing Les Rougon-Macquart. “The party of justice had been born,” declared Joseph Reinach. “Dreyfusism was reinvigorated” … “We could feel the confidence boil and rise within us,” wrote Léon Blum, who called “J’Accuse” a polemical text of “imperishable beauty.” High-minded youths—students at the École Normale Supérieure, young writers associated with the avant-garde literary magazine La Revue Blanche, young Socialists alienated by official party doctrine—sprang forward in response to this clarion call and marshaled signatures, among them Anatole France’s, for a “Protest of Intellectuals” (giving that nineteenth-century term its full, modern sense for the first time). During the following weeks their numbers multiplied, along with the protests. “We the undersigned,” read one, which appeared in L’Aurore on January 16, “struck by the irregularities in the Dreyfus trial of 1894 and by the mystery surrounding Commandant Esterhazy’s trial, persuaded furthermore that the whole nation is concerned with the maintenance of legal guarantees, which are the citizen’s sole protection in a free country, astonished by the search of Lieutenant Colonel Picquart’s residence and by other, no less illegal searches visited upon that officer … demand that the Chamber uphold the legal guarantees of citizens against all arbitrary conduct.” After that, readers of L’Aurore seldom opened the paper without encountering statements of this kind or collective tributes. On February 2, a group of writers, artists, and scientists lauded Zola’s “noble, militant attitude” even as they promised support “in the name of justice and truth.” On February 6 support came from attorneys who offered him heartfelt thanks “for service rendered to the cause of Law, which touches all civilized nations.” On his editorial rostrum Clemenceau declared, “It redounds to the honor of thinking men that they have bestirred themselves before everyone else. Not a negligible thing. In the great movements of public opinion, one doesn’t often see men of pure intellectual labor occupy the front rank.”