The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  Barrès issued a swift rejoinder to the protest of intellectuals. Currying favor with the working class, he dismissed signatories of the Dreyfusard protests as “aristocrats of thought.” A “demi-culture,” he wrote, was prepared to destroy instinct but not to substitute conscience for it. So-called intellectuals who no longer marched spontaneously in step with their “natural group” were the “destructive dross” of society’s effort to form an elite. Later, Barrès resumed his chronic denunciation of Burdeau (under the fictional guise of Bouteiller): “(B.) is at once an intellectual and an instrument of deracination, whose realm of malfeasance expanded when he left teaching for politics. There is an epigram of Goethe which goes: ‘Every enthusiast should be crucified at the age of thirty. Once a dupe comes to know the real world, he becomes a rascal.’ My Bouteiller, who spoke only of sacrificing everything to justice, would gladly have preferred, along with our Kantian intellectuals, that society be destroyed than that one miscarriage of justice be countenanced.” It served Barrès’s purpose to suggest that their humanistic absolutism was of German inspiration. He could have blamed it on Montesquieu or Voltaire.

  Barrès seldom allowed facts to interfere with a settled opinion. When, in 1899, Dreyfus was brought back from Devil’s Island to be court-martialed again, on appeal, Barrès joined the international throng of journalists at Rennes and stayed there for a month, recording the trial for Le Journal and portraying its cast of characters in unabashedly partisan terms. When military judges upheld the guilty verdict, Barrès wrote, “Let us rejoice.… Contrary to the government’s wishes, public morality and national salvation demanded the condemnation of a traitor exploited by a political faction.” When the president of the Republic immediately pardoned Dreyfus, Barrès railed. When Zola died, in 1902, he debated with himself whether to attend the funeral as a respectful mourner or as the leader of a nationalist demonstration. When the government exonerated Dreyfus, in 1906, Barrès, once again a deputy, mounted the podium to praise General Auguste Mercier, a central figure in the conspiracy against Dreyfus. And when, in 1908, the legislature voted to rebury Zola’s remains in the Panthéon, Barrès voted against his civil consecration.

  Barrès had had his own consecration of sorts two years earlier, when elected to a seat in the Académie Française. Had he counted his blessings, there would have been much else to be thankful for. That same year, 1906, he won election to the Chamber of Deputies from Paris. By then, his son, named Philippe after the hero of Le Culte du Moi, was ten years old and thriving. What he had apparently never felt for his complaisant wife he experienced (to his ultimate chagrin) with the poet Anna de Noailles. As a writer, he had gifted young admirers. And as a lover of the sorrowful, he found a lost cause in tottery country churches starved of government funds after the separation of church and state in 1905. Native Frenchmen living under laws imposed by a secular republic had an inborn government inseparable from “Catholicity.” “The laws of our mind won’t comply with the whims of legislators,” he wrote in La Grande Pitié des Églises de France. “We Lorrainers have been set upon by two hostile bands: Prussians who are destroying our language, and sectarians [the government in power] who would destroy our religion, that is, the language of our sensibility.” In 1914 he succeeded Paul Déroulède as president of La Ligue des Patriotes.4

  War was as therapeutic for depressed spirits as it was for economic stagnation. If Barrès wanted, above all, a reprieve from tedium and from himself, salvation came on August 4, 1914, when the bell tolled an end to creeping tomorrows.5 A new day had dawned. In the hundreds of “chroniques” he wrote between 1914 and 1918, he made it known, with frequent obeisances to self-sacrifice, that bourgeois France had entered the era of heroes and saints. Where years had been mere time, hours were now apocalyptic. “At this moment, the fullness of which will surely spread over all the days of our life,” he wrote in L’Écho de Paris on September 13, 1914, after the German army advancing toward Paris had been repulsed at the Marne, “a single thought animates us: ‘What hideous beings are these assassins we have on the run! The French soul is superior to them. And although things may have appeared otherwise in recent weeks, we are still charged, after so much sacrifice and bloodshed, with the lofty task [of saving the world].’ ” It pleased him to report that France’s sacred flame had not after all been extinguished by a “learned, skeptical age.” Still alive in his countrymen, under the mass of textbooks and scholarly editions churned out year after year, was a marvelous “primitive” bent on winning back the lost provinces, on dispelling the pall of inferiority that had hung over France since her defeat in 1870–71, on “cleaning French thought of Germanism,” on restoring to preeminence “the sentiment of honor and the idea of self-sacrifice.” In France, 1914 had brought forth a generation whose heroism revived the spirit of Joan of Arc. Well might Germans wanting models for the virtues they exalted hallow the King of the Vandals in their temple of Walhalla, but France, wrote Barrès, marched to war with the chivalrous sentiments that had armed her God-sent maiden. “While the Germans deify disloyalty and cruelty, and—licensed by their ideal—propose to crush the weak and enslave the world, let us assemble around a virgin who was valiant, good, righteous, and self-sacrificing to the core of her being.” In December 1914, the erstwhile Wagnerian, or Wagnerian malgré lui, proposed an annual national holiday in Joan’s honor.6 As we shall see, he was not the first to do so.

  In September 1914, a French army fortified by five thousand reserves transported to the front in Paris taxicabs launched a surprise attack on German infantry pouring into France from Belgium and stopped them at the Marne, forty kilometers from Paris. General Alexander von Kluck retreated and dug in, initiating trench warfare. The ironic caption reads: “The triumphant entry into Paris deferred … for strategic reasons.”

  Barrès toured the ravaged countryside of the Marne valley five days after the German army had retreated to high ground beyond the Aisne and dug trenches. In subsequent years he visited the front as often as he could, up and down the line. The Comité du Secours National, responsible for providing embattled civilians with basic necessities, sponsored his trip to Lorraine in November 1914. He returned to Lorraine in April 1915 and looped through the valleys of the Meurthe and the Mortagne from Lunéville to Nancy, where German shells burst a few miles away. The property in Charmes, which had become his in 1901 when his mother died (three years after her husband), had been deliberately shorn of trees that had blocked the aim of French riflemen but remained otherwise intact. Also shorn was the densely wooded countryside outside town, at the Charmes Gap, where General Noël de Castelnau had repulsed Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria in a ferocious battle waged between August 23 and August 26, 1914. In June, Barrès traveled farther north, to fields near Arras scored with half-abandoned trenches, strewn with barbed wire, and pocked with shell holes. Everything lay in ruins. Thousands had died there even before General Robert Nivelle’s strategy for breaking through the German lines doomed tens of thousands more on the chalky ridge of the Chemin des Dames in 1917. What Barrès saw and felt in June did not pass his lips when, on October 11, 1915, he bade farewell to his nineteen-year-old son. Bound for a regiment of armored cavalry under heavy fire in Champagne, Philippe, who had earned a lieutenantcy at Saint-Cyr, was, according to his father, “radiantly happy.” (He survived the war, twice wounded, with commendations for bravery.)

  Maurice Barrès visiting the front with several other dignitaries.

  French trench diggers.

  Neither did the horror of what Barrès saw find its way into print. He exercised a self-censorship that lightened the task of government functionaries who closely vetted every issue of every paper. Being sanguine was more important than keeping readers of L’Écho de Paris informed. “I am reproached for my optimism, for my confidence,” he noted in March 1917. “Well yes, I am fully confident! … Every article I write speaks of my certainty that we are not to be conquered.” But optimism in the service of patriotism colored everything
he wrote, even notes not intended for immediate publication. About life at the northern front he wrote:

  These soldiers coming and going in the trenches and access corridors as in a walled town, these dug-outs where candles gutter and the cadaverous odor of catacombs, of misery exhaled by lives lived in such close quarters create an atmosphere in which physical anguish mingles with emotional distress. Then the soul girds itself. Each of these men feels subordinated, wretched, a mere straw near the furnace, but with incredible vibrancy of inner life. Ah! How alive are the hearts!

  Readers were assured that half-buried soldiers yearning for the family hearth found their consolation in the source of their misery, in the trench itself, with comrades who formed a collective soul stronger than the individual. Born in the trenches, he wrote, was “a new being—the combat unit.” The larger the unit, the braver its constituents. “A regiment is a new being. The commanding officer is its head; the men are its muscles; the cadre is its nervous system.” If it worked as it should, it moved autonomously, without commands but always in accordance with the will of the leader and “the spirit of the war.”7

  So much for trenches. Unlike his young compatriots underground, Barrès was free to stand above the mêlée when it suited him. Looking out toward Flanders from a hilltop not far from Arras, like the hero of Sous l’Oeil des Barbares contemplating the barbarians below from his Paris garret, he waxed lyrical.

  One could spend hours looking at this battlefield: hours following the story of our splendid efforts to smash the eight army corps the Germans brought in one after another and recapture the Vimy heights, which would have opened to us the plain of Lens; hours catching sight of our projectiles being launched with a sudden flash from beneath shelters arranged for artillery pieces here and there across the countryside; and then, far off, the cloud of their explosion in enemy ranks. It is an immense symphony which, strangely, inspires less horror of its abominations than respect and admiration for these men who know how to die. It seems as if a mystery were taking place beneath our very eyes in this corner of the earth.

  His morbid paean, which resonates with the image of music emanating from a rotting corpse in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, abundantly justifies the title “nightingale of the carnage” bestowed upon him by Romain Rolland. There was carnage galore at Vimy, where generals—one of whom, Philippe Pétain, gained a brief foothold on the summit—sent wave after wave of infantry uphill into German machine-gun fire. The corpses of men “who knew how to die” piled up along the Artois front in May 1915.8 Many more fell four months later on the ridge angling across Champagne toward Lorraine at its southeastern extremity. In command once again was Philippe Pétain, who deployed a thousand heavy cannons. Some regiments, according to John Keegan, attacked “with colors unfurled and the brass and drums of their bands in the front trench.” Barrès’s son arrived soon after the climactic moment of fighting, when an odor of chlorine gas still hung in the air and Germany still held the heights. At no point did French troops gain more than two miles of ground, paying for them with 144,000 casualties. A soldier named Louis Mairet wrote from the front, “It is preposterous to talk about reason when unreason holds sway. Despite everything it is necessary that the struggle continue until one of the two parties surrenders.”

  A charge of French infantry during World War I.

  In April 1917, an ill-conceived attempt to break through German entrenchments not far from Champagne, along the Aisne River, resulted not only in defeat—with legions dying on a muddy slope beneath a ridge road whose genteel name, the Chemin des Dames, came to signify futile bloodshed—but in mutiny. “Acts of collective indiscipline” is how the army described the refusal of thirty or forty thousand men to risk their lives until something was done about the suffering endured in the trenches.9 Pétain, the new army chief of staff, took measures that some colleagues found excessively lenient. Reforms were introduced, and order was restored before Germany (which had its own desertions) could exploit the strike.10 Courts-martial were held. Though 629 mutineers were condemned to death, fewer than one in ten were executed.

  A surviving mural in the bombed-out market hall of Ypres.

  Barrès laid blame for the mutiny on unnamed officials raising false hopes that the war would be of short duration, on German agents demoralizing the home front and infiltrating the front lines, on the Russian Revolution of February 1917, and on the prospect of French Socialists endorsing a pacifist manifesto at a conference of the Second International to be held in Stockholm (the conference never took place; no manifesto was ever issued). “The maneuvers of German agents” in Stockholm would distract France from the business at hand, he wrote in his chronicle of June 1. “We must reinforce government authority, maintain and strengthen still further our martial spirit. It would be a huge mistake to let Slav mysticism mingle with our martial spirit and dispossess our government of the right that belongs to it alone.” Nothing made him question the solidarity he attributed to men in the trenches: neither reports that peasants speaking thick patois could hardly make themselves understood, nor the persistence of class resentments, nor “the collective acts of indiscipline,” which may in fact have best expressed his ideal of brotherhood. Letters from officers and ordinary soldiers who, after three years of unspeakable deprivation, still “considered one another brothers fighting for the same cause” urged him to air their grievances. This he did, and fully, but always with the caveat that France must not flinch on the verge of reaping the rewards for her “courage,” her “good sense,” and her highest virtue: energy. “It isn’t because they are fighting the good fight that the French have commanded world admiration; it is because they are fighting with sublime energy.”

  Furthermore, the Americans had already arrived and would soon lighten the burden borne by war-weary veterans.11 Hadn’t President Wilson declared that his country wanted its share of “the privilege of sacrifice”? This declaration was to be repeated every day like a mantra, Barrès wrote in L’Écho de Paris on June 10, 1917.

  When guns fell silent on the western front seventeen months later with the signing of an armistice agreement at Compiègne, Barrès felt the satisfaction of life coming full circle. He had been born early enough to remember German troops strutting through Charmes-sur-Moselle and lived long enough to see that humiliation avenged. Now that Metz and Strasbourg had been reconquered, France would make her influence felt east to the Rhine in “a beautiful marriage of French and Celto-Rhenish thought,” he asserted. Always more disposed to glorify the dead than to love the living, he celebrated the restoration of France’s integrity at cemeteries in Alsace and Lorraine. He might have been heard to recite Horace’s line “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”12

  The halt and the lame being decorated in the courtyard of the Invalides.

  Barrès was an official witness to the ceremonial repatriation of Strasbourg by French troops on November 26, 1918. Spectators had arrived from the countryside in horse-drawn calèches. Women wore costumes that evoked Alsace of yore. Every scrap of red, white, and blue cloth became a flag. Trumpets blared and drums rolled as gorgeously uniformed spahis and Zouaves paraded past a reviewing stand on which seven or eight generals flanked Marshal Pétain. Later, an enormous crowd gathered on a square in front of city hall to hear the marshal proclaim that France’s task of restoring the beautiful provinces ravished by Germany had been accomplished, that right and justice had triumphed. Thousands sang “La Marseillaise” before moving toward Notre Dame de Strasbourg, the great cathedral beloved of Goethe, where the archpriest embraced Pétain and led him down a nave draped with republican flags and royal oriflammes for a “Te Deum” of thanksgiving. Barrès exulted in the marriage of church and army. Never would he forget, he declared, how the marshal of France and the eldest of the canons walked hand in hand, like a child with his father. “The holy familiarity, the inexpressible simplicity of heroism! Organ music swelled, light crowned the cortège of infantrymen, voices scaled up to heaven, everyone sobbe
d. The immense multitude loved and thanked those who had fallen in battle and their families, and united them in spirit to the surviving sons of France. All the war dead and all the survivors filled the nave, which for once happily contained a soul worthy of its beauty.”

  After the war, when Joan of Arc was canonized, Barrès, arguing that her sainthood reflected upon the holiness of every French warrior, resumed his campaign to honor her with a national holiday.13 The marriage of church and army may have been sanctified, but it remained for France herself, fourteen years after the official separation of church and state, to celebrate, in Joan, the French soul. “Joan of Arc … obeyed an impulse of the unconscious when she obeyed what is not reasonable,” he wrote. “It is not reasonable for a woman to want to command an army.… It was a vital surge, a dream …, [the upwelling] of profound forces.” Joan exemplified the truth by which he set store, as an apostle of Jules Soury’s, that “intelligence is a very small thing on the surface of ourselves.” In June 1920, the Chamber of Deputies decided without debate that Joan of Arc be given a feast day.

  Gratifying though it was for Barrès, the victory did nothing to silence his private demons. Kept at bay by the boom and brass of war, they returned afterward with a vengeance. “I don’t long to be young again but to be someone else, someone other than my spent self.” It had always been thus, and the “cult of the self” prefigured that of the virgin warrior.