The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  1In Degeneration (1892), Max Nordau observed of the Wagner cult prevalent throughout Europe, “The pilgrimage to Bayreuth became a mark of aristocracy, and an appreciation of Wagner’s music, in spite of his nationality, was regarded as evidence of intellectual preeminence.… It was with [Parsifal] that Wagner chiefly triumphed among his non-German admirers. Listening to it … has become the religious act of all those who wish to receive the Communion in musical form.”

  2Fifty years later, Charles Maurras, one of Barrès’s young collaborators, recollected, “The paper’s tendencies were indefinable and even contradictory in the extreme. Not a trace of doctrinal unity. But one great rallying point: the man, I won’t say the chief, because he never took the trouble to command, but the admired, adored, loved man who served as the funnel of this whirlwind. One was ‘barrésien’: that meant everything in those days.”

  3In 1911, with the publication of Germany and the Next War, the great German military historian, Friedrich von Bernhardi, declared that war and conquest are a biological necessity, echoing Heinrich von Treitschke.

  4The Ligue des Patriotes is not to be confused with La Ligue de la Patrie Française. Barrès had also been a director of the latter but resigned from it in 1901.

  5On August 5, an infantry officer reported from one of Paris’s railroad stations, where crowds had gathered to see off soldiers departing for the front: “At six in the morning, without any signal, the train slowly steamed out of the station. At that moment, quite spontaneously, like a smoldering fire suddenly erupting into roaring flames, an immense clamor arose as the Marseillaise burst from a thousand throats. All the men were standing at the train windows, waving their képis. From the track quais and the neighboring trains, the crowds waved back …, behind every barrier, and at every window along the road. Cries of ‘Vive la France! Vive l’armée!’ could be heard everywhere, while people waved handkerchiefs and hats. The women were throwing kisses and heaped flowers on our convoy. The young men shouted ‘Au revoir! À bientôt!’ ”

  6Barrès’s efforts on Joan’s behalf did not come to fruition until 1920, two years after the war.

  7After the war, Georges Valois, an early member of the the Action Française movement, who began political life as an anarcho-syndicalist and ultimately moved into the neighborhood of Italian Fascism, propagated the idea of a corporate state to be led by an elite of war veterans.

  In Germany, a Nazi prominent in the early years of the movement asserted, “Only by understanding the Fronterlebnis [front experience] can one understand National Socialism.” Another declared, “National Socialism is, in its truest meaning, the domain of the Front.” And in Italy, Mussolini spoke of trincerocrazia, “trenchocracy,” as the model for Italian society led by a Fascist elite.

  8Barrès liked to quote the remark Napoleon was supposed to have made after reading Goethe’s Werther: “On doit vouloir vivre et savoir mourir” (One must want to live and know how to die).

  9About suffering in the trenches, one historian writes: “Le Crapouillot, the only trench paper whose title still exists, described the hardship caused by the cold thus: ‘[To appreciate it] you need to have remained for six days and six nights of this winter sitting tight, your belly frozen, your arms hanging loosely, your hands and feet numb, you need to have felt despair, convinced that nothing could ever thaw you out again.’ Rain was even worse than the cold. According to L’Horizon this simple word encapsulates all the horror experienced by a soldier during a campaign. ‘To sum up, the only thing which made me really feel wretched during the war was the rain.’ Rain led inevitably to the formation of the infamous mud in the trenches which became cesspits where stagnant water mingled with earth from the crumbling parapets. This liquid mass sometimes came up to knee-level. ‘Sticky, liquid mud,’ ‘oily tide,’ ‘an enormous octopus with vile slaver dripping from its mouth,’ these are the terms used by the fighting men in their newspapers to conjure up the scourge of the mud. ‘Hell is not fire’ affirms La Mitraille, ‘it would not be the worst form of suffering. The real hell is the mud.’ ”

  Some historians have argued that even the mutineers, for the most part, did not question the patriotic justification of the war, or the messianic mission imputed to it (it was called “la fin des fins,” the war to end all wars), only the way it was being waged.

  10The reforms included better food and shelter, plus more regular and longer leaves.

  11The draft age in France was eighteen to forty-nine.

  12Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country—provides the title of a powerful antiwar poem by Wilfred Owen, who denounces it as “the old lie.”

  13In public and private, Barrès heralded the transcendent virtue of poilus, foot soldiers dead and alive. “France’s churches need saints.… They are to be found in the trenches. For the Christian every day of our armed struggle renews the passion of Christ,” he noted in 1916.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Battle for Joan

  Since the eighteenth century, Joan of Arc had ridden under every political color. For militant royalists and Catholics, she bore the cross of Lorraine and the oriflamme of French kings; for anticlericals who did not want it forgotten that the church had burned her at the stake, she memorialized religious hypocrisy; for republicans who associated her victory over the English with the triumphant campaign of revolutionaries against the monarchical regimes invading France in 1792, she hoisted the flag of freedom. Joan came into her own as the darling of rival cults after Waterloo, when a resurgent church called upon her to wield Napoleon’s fallen sword against France’s own revolutionary past.

  In due course, historians dismissive of the supernatural but sworn to the Romantic idea of heroes and heroines embodying a collective identity dated the birth of the nation to Joan’s advent. Like the Semitic scholar Ernest Renan, who caused outrage with his Vie de Jésus by denying Jesus Christ’s divinity, the historian Jules Michelet portrayed Joan in his Histoire de France (1855–67) not as a heaven-sent emissary but as a luminous patriot from France’s peasant heartland. “This living enigma, this mysterious creature whom everyone considers supernatural, this angel or demon who wouldn’t have surprised some people if she had flown away one day, was a young woman, a wingless girl fastened to a mortal body, who suffered and died a frightful death!” he wrote. Elsewhere, he exhorted, “Always remember, Frenchmen, that our nation was born of a woman’s heart, of her tenderness and tears, of the blood she shed for us.” During the 1840s, his disciple Jules Quicherat brought to light, in five octavo volumes, with much erudite commentary, the complete archival record of Joan’s trials, thus contributing greatly to her humanization. A professor of philosophy named Joseph Fabre subsequently translated all five volumes from Latin into French.

  Undaunted by this scholarship was Bishop Félix Dupanloup of Orléans, a magisterial figure in the French episcopate, who, two decades after Quicherat published his magnum opus, petitioned Pius IX to recognize the miraculous nature of Joan’s deeds and dignify her appropriately. There were several reasons to urge her beatification in 1867. During the summer of that year, a widely read liberal newspaper, Le Siècle, rallied groups in opposition to Napoleon III with plans for a monument honoring Voltaire. Beatifying Joan would be the church’s rejoinder. It would lead people who had distanced themselves from religion in desperate times to see that “Christian sanctity informs patriotic and civic virtues they admire.” Furthermore, the bishop argued, a pro-Gallic gesture by Pius was certain to thwart French republicans demanding the withdrawal of the French auxiliary force garrisoned in Rome for the pope’s protection since 1848.

  But Joan was not to be beatified until 1909. In 1870, events dismissed all thought of it. Soon after the Franco-Prussian War broke out, France recalled its Roman garrison. (A Piedmontese-led army then entered Rome, installing Victor Emmanuel II as king of a united Italy and confining Pius IX—Pio Nono—to the compound now called Vatican City).1 By January 1871, when a
n armistice agreement with Prussia was negotiated, 150,000 French soldiers had been killed. In March, left-wing insurgents dead set against the armistice and scornful of the provisional government, with its conservative country squires wanting peace at all costs, had proclaimed Paris an independent commune. A new French army raised by the government, which now met in Versailles, having moved north from its seat of exile in Bordeaux, besieged the capital. On May 21 it broke through the gates and crushed the rebellion. During one week in which French were slaughtered by fellow French—the so-called semaine sanglante—blood colored the Seine red and fires blazed out of control, including one that left city hall, with all its civil records, a smoldering shell.

  Among other equestrian statues that sprang up around Paris after the war, like dreams in stone and bronze of the victory that had eluded flesh and bone, was Emmanuel Frémiet’s figure of Joan of Arc on the Place des Pyramides, opposite the Tuileries.

  Although she held high the battle flag of French kings, this Joan was not born of deeply sectarian feeling. Jules Simon, the liberal minister responsible for commissioning it, had had in mind a monument to national consensus. The statue would stand where it could best express France’s valor and resilience, looking south beyond the rubble of a royal palace burned during the “bloody week.”

  On both banks of the Seine, three more Joans joined Frémiet’s before World War I, but Frémiet’s gilded bronze beauty would remain prima inter pares. Hundreds attended its unveiling in 1874. With or without votive tributes, every political creed was represented. “Everyone had something to say about [the recent war],” a police observer reported. “One individual shouted that Garibaldi was nothing but a brigand, whereupon others made him retreat.”2 Republicans confronted monarchists, tempers flared, and a ceremony on which officialdom kept close watch, lest it offend Bismarck only fifteen months after the German army of occupation had left France, ended with gendarmes dispersing the crowd.

  By 1878, the republicans, who had won a substantial majority in elections held the previous year, were setting their mark on public life. The legislature, no longer fearful of convening amid the incendiary populace, would reoccupy the Palais Bourbon—its traditional seat in Paris. “La Marseillaise” would become the national anthem and July 14 national independence day. The Église Sainte-Geneviève would become a Panthéon dedicated to “great men of the fatherland,” and a government program facetiously referred to as “statuemania” would populate the capital with republican paragons. Streets would be named or renamed. Education would soon be made “free, compulsory, and secular,” but a secular bias already imbued new schoolbooks, particularly the one most widely assigned to children learning French history and geography, Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants: Devoir et Patrie. In it Joan is portrayed as a sublime innocent who “thought” she heard voices commanding her rather than as a supernaturally guided instrument of salvation. The verb “thought,” implying doubt, was to be a terrible bone of contention between schoolmasters and village priests.3

  Beaten back by a force that took proprietary liberties with time and space, Catholic royalists made their stand at Frémiet’s statue, treating the square over which Joan cast a shadow as consecrated ground. Rituals of the Left demanded counterrituals, and in 1878 the Right laid plans to commemorate Joan’s martyrdom on May 30. A more symbolically pointed month than May 1878 can hardly be imagined, for it also marked the centenary of Voltaire’s death. Voltaire, whom the church anathematized, had in fact lauded Joan in the Dictionnaire Philosophique. But his revilers knew him only as the author of La Pucelle d’Orléans, a mock-heroic poem in which Joan, besieged on all sides by lustful males, including the donkey she rides, is hard-pressed to preserve her virginity. Rumor had it that freethinkers, after a commemorative ceremony at Voltaire’s statue on the Place Monge, planned to march across town and taunt devotees as they proceeded from a mass at Notre Dame to the Place des Pyramides. With such lively prospects of an ideological clash marring the Universal Exposition of 1878, which had just opened, the police intervened. There would be no mourners for Joan, nor wreaths, nor royal fleurs-de-lis discreetly sewn into the border of tricolor flags, like fingers crossed under the table to nullify a public oath. The entire ceremony was forbidden, and gendarmes guarded against clandestine tributes. “This prohibition will enter the annals of French history,” a Catholic newspaper exclaimed. “Let it be noted that in May 1878, paying homage to the heroine who saved the country and died a martyr was deemed a public danger by the government. Let it also be noted that what provoked the measure was fear of Voltaire’s godless disciples, who, on that day, honored him, much to the delight of the Prussians who had just crushed us!”

  Several days earlier, La Lanterne, an aggressively anticlerical paper, had also supported a commemoration, for its own quite different reasons. It was high time, the commentator wrote, that the church doused with tears of penitence the fire it had lit under Joan’s feet after her inquisition.

  Better late than never, and today’s clericals are well advised to make due apology at the feet of that glorious girl whom clericals of yesteryear so piously burned. As for us, we can only applaud this demonstration and we urge all republicans to lay wreaths bearing the following inscription: “To Joan of Lorraine, To the French heroine, To the victim of clericalism.”4

  Irony was lost on the devout ladies who formed the Jeanne d’Arc Committee. Cheated of the ceremony that their president, the Duchesse de Chevreuse, had organized in Paris, they betook themselves to Domrémy, Joan’s native village in Lorraine, with fifty crates of wreaths originally intended to festoon Joan and her mount. To no avail. The republican subprefect vetoed a procession through the village.

  The conflict festered, with would-be healers of the Left proposing ineffective balms every few years. In 1884, Joseph Fabre—the translator of Joan’s trial records—had resigned his professorship at the University of Bordeaux, written The Liberators; or, Civic Heroism in Action, entered the National Assembly as a senator, and now urged “believers and free-thinkers alike” to celebrate their civic duties every year on a holiday for Joan of Arc. Was this “daughter of the People” not, after all, as much a liberator as Harmodius, Brutus, Cato, and Washington? Whether or not her mission had been dictated to her by voices, had it not also sprung from the heart? Conservatives, many of whom smelled a Rousseau or Robespierre in Fabre and an attempt to exorcise the nation’s Catholic past in his proposed bill, would have none of it.

  The idea of a commemorative day was not taken up again in great earnest until 1894. In January of that year the Sacred Congregation of Rites dubbed Joan “Venerable,” thus launching her toward beatification and sainthood. Leo XIII had meanwhile shown himself to be a different kind of pope. In the encyclical Rerum Novarum he inveighed against the iniquity of capitalist greed and called upon industrial economies to develop a social conscience. Another papal pronouncement advised French Catholics that they could in good conscience swear allegiance to a republic whose revolutionary antecedents were drenched in blood, provided it abide by “Christian, civilized” principles. The altar need not be absolutely wedded to the throne.

  What came to be called the “Ralliement”—hostile Catholics rallying to the Republic, with papal blessings—boded well for a patriotic festival in Joan’s name and honor. At Vaucouleurs, where a national monument was to rise, the local bishop laid the first stone with fighting words: “Like her, let us say to those who dare threaten us, wherever they come from, and no matter that they come a million strong, let us say to them: never will you lay hold of this beautiful country of France.”5 Raymond Poincaré, the future prime minister, who was then minister of public instruction and fine arts, celebrated Joan’s universality: “She was the dawn of the Fatherland.… She soars above parties, she is the prisoner of no sect, no group, no school.… Every one of us has the same right and the same duty to admire and love her, for she embodies and resumes what is common to our feelings as French of all parties: our inalterable devo
tion to the homeland and our passion for national independence.” It was appropriate that she have star billing on Patriots’ Day.

  But before long, the idol was dragged off her horse into the bastions of anachronistic royalism and militant Catholicism. The Bourbon pretender warned that while memories of “the great liberator” belonged to all Frenchmen, “sectarians” threatened to strip her of her “supernatural mission” and deny the royalist and Catholic character she herself ascribed to it. “Jehanne leads us to the king,” one of his champions, General de Charette, declared at a royalist rally in April. Catholic orders, notably the Assumptionists, whose newspaper reached every presbytery in France, were no less determined to preserve her sanctity. It was a special mark of God’s favor, La Croix told its readers, that He heard “the popular outcry” for a day celebrating “God’s envoy” and chose thus to raise patriotic Frenchmen from their despondency. The church, and Assumptionists in particular, who built the Sacré-Coeur in Paris as a penitential monument after the Franco-Prussian War, had been blaming France’s defeat on its wicked ways. Now they preached reparation. France was presented with a golden opportunity to make amends for ignoring Joan’s example and forgetting the divine mission assigned to her. On May 8, the canon of the Sacré-Coeur prayed that the memory of her victory over the English at Orléans in 1429 inspire a victory over Freemasons and their ilk. “May you disappear forever, century of Revolution, and sleep in your historic sepulchre with dishonor, amidst the wreckage you have left behind.… Christians, let us advance toward the twentieth century as Joan of Arc advanced toward the English, under the banner of the King of Heaven.”

  A Joan of Arc born to sanctify the cult of energy. Jules Roulleau’s monumental statue in Chinon.

  Word having reached the War Ministry that army officers in full dress were a conspicuous presence at religious ceremonies honoring Joan, an executive memorandum instructed soldiers to leave their uniforms at home.6 Alarmed by the zeal of their “tenebrous enemies,” Freemasons declared that the church sought to “strangle our young national festival,” the better to promote another, which would celebrate neither Joan of Arc nor the fatherland but “only the spirit of clerical domination and perhaps, alas, monarchical ideas.” On May 30, the anniversary of her death, Freemasons laid a commemorative wreath “to Joan of Arc, relapsed heretic, abandoned by royalty and burned by the Church,” at the foot of her statue on the Place des Pyramides. Flailed with canes and umbrellas, they were rescued by gendarmes as the crowd chanted, “Long live Jeanne!,” “Down with Freemasons!,” and “Down with Jews!”