The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  If Aragon, who now cut the figure of French Stalinism’s tenor voice, had not stayed to hear himself belittled late at night in an almost empty hall, he learned about it soon afterward and made his own speech a diatribe against the movement from which he had divorced himself. Echoing Zola’s prosecutorial “J’accuse” with the refrain “I call for a return to reality,” he denounced Breton’s Marxism as a shell in which the Surrealists smuggled their poetic “baggage.” They were impostors bending Marxism to the theories of Sigmund Freud without regard for economic or social truths.10 “It’s laughable, the scorn these woolgatherers have for the ‘baseness’ of social reality, and their fear of the subject in poems, they who are inspired by a woman’s farewell or the flight of time, but who marshal all their abstract energies against the establishment of the new world in poetry.”

  Aragon’s speech chimed with the Soviet party line presented by delegates of the Union of Writers, whose shibboleth was the word “new.” The bourgeoisie, proclaimed Ivan Luppol, a professor at Moscow University, had lost its title to the cultural heritage of the past, having shown itself unworthy of it. He averred, “The working class, which is also the creator of a new culture, has been appointed by History as sole heir.” Clearly outside the realm of doctrinaire pretensions, if not of revolutionary tropes, were two Russians who had come from the USSR under guard, and only after Gide and Malraux insisted upon it: Boris Pasternak and Isaac Babel. Pasternak received thunderous applause when he rose to say,

  I wish to talk here about poetry, not about sickness. Poetry will always be at our feet, in the grass. One will always have to stoop to perceive it. It will always be too simple to discuss in assemblies. It will forever remain the organic function of a happy being, brimming over with the felicity of language. It will be clenched in the heart from birth. And the more happy men there are, the easier it will be to be an artist.

  He then read a love poem about poetry growing in him from wild melody to words and meter, to “thee are not thee, I am not I,” to his face buried in the grass for “nights of the universe” and eyes “dawning to splendid suns.”

  The last word might have belonged to E. M. Forster, who saw twilight rather than dawn for writers such as himself—writers bred in a liberal tradition and sworn to defend the literary métier against political and religious bondage. “My colleagues probably agree with my account of the situation in our country,” he said,

  but they may disagree with my old-fashioned attitude over it, and may feel that it is a waste of time to talk about freedom and tradition when the economic structure of society is unsatisfactory. They may say that if there is another war writers of the individualistic and liberalizing type, like myself and Mr. Aldous Huxley, will be swept away. I am sure that we shall be swept away, and I think furthermore that there may be another war. It seems to me that if nations keep on amassing armaments, they can no more help discharging their filth than an animal, which keeps on eating, can stop from excreting. This being so, my job, and the job of those who feel with me, is an interim job. We have just to go on tinkering as well as we can with our old tools, until the crash comes. When the crash comes, nothing is any good. After it—if there is an after—the task of civilization will be carried on by people whose training has been different from my own.

  Forster’s speech, as far as it was heard, did not sit well with members of the audience who had just heckled the historian Julien Benda for defending a Western tradition that understood the life of the mind to be independent of material or practical ends.11 One witness, Katherine Anne Porter, found the scene deeply disturbing: “I think it was just after André Malraux—then as dogmatic in Communism as he is now in some other faith—had leaped to the microphone barking like a fox to halt the applause for Julien Benda’s speech, that a little slender man with a large forehead and a shy chin rose, was introduced and began to read his paper carefully prepared for this occasion.” Forster paid no attention to the microphone, she remembered,

  but wove back and forth, and from side to side, gently, and every time his face passed the mouthpiece I caught a high-voiced syllable or two, never a whole word, only a thin recurring sound like the wind down a chimney as Mr. Forster’s pleasant good countenance advanced and retreated and returned. Then, surprisingly, once he came to a moment’s pause before the instrument and there sounded into the hall clearly but wistfully a complete sentence: “I DO believe in liberty!”

  The exclamation received polite applause, for which she was thankful. “It covered the antics of that part of the audience near me,” she recalled, “a whole pantomime of malignant ridicule, meaning that Mr. Forster and all his kind were already as extinct as the dodo. It was a discouraging moment.”

  In the April 1936 issue of the NRF, Jean Grenier, Albert Camus’s professor of philosophy at the University of Algiers, commented upon the congress in much the same spirit as Katherine Anne Porter and E. M. Forster. “One is a Marxist in 1935 as one was a Republican in 1880,” he wrote. “We have witnessed the paradox of a Congress for the Defense of Culture initiated by a regime that terrorizes intellectuals, allowing no ‘deviation’ from established doctrine whether on the Right or the Left, and tolerating scholars and artists only if they remain rigorously ‘neutral,’ or rather, if they passively adhere to the catechism of the country. They may be honored and revered on that condition, and that condition alone.”

  In one of the closing speeches, Malraux expressed the hope that in the future, when all the differences at play during the congress were reconciled in the “fraternal beyond,” history would chronicle only the common will that had brought everyone together for five days in June.

  At the Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, from left to right: André Malraux, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Boris Pasternak.

  His optimistic eulogy could have been repeated, several weeks later, to announce the birth of a political coalition called the Front Populaire—the Popular Front. On Bastille Day 1935, Socialists, Communists, and Radicals stood side by side, under an anti-Fascist banner, with an eye to legislative elections scheduled for April 1936. Communists (whose cues came from the Kremlin), Socialists (whose economic program, for lack of an absolute electoral mandate, was more Rooseveltian than revolutionary), and Radicals (whose constituency was a middle class of entrepreneurs, artisans, doctors, and lawyers generally averse to government regulation) made a motley crowd. Bending more to the left or right than was their wont, they squeezed together on a platform that included the dissolution of paramilitary leagues, the defense of unions and the secular school system, the nationalization of the aviation industry, ambitious public works, unemployment insurance, a forty-hour work week, paid vacations, and an agency charged with protecting the grain trade against speculation.12 Their slogan, “Bread, peace, and liberty” required drastic accommodation, especially on the part of the PCF, which had endorsed the Franco-Soviet pact and tacitly subscribed to the Stalinist imperative that rearmament proceed apace.

  Although the victory of the Popular Front in April 1936 was not overwhelming, it gained a decisive legislative majority, and its leader, Léon Blum, became premier.

  Being Jewish and in former days an astute literary critic, Léon Blum resembled no one else in the higher reaches of French politics. Born in 1872, a year after France ceded Alsace, from which his father had emigrated, Blum grew up in bourgeois comfort and distinguished himself at the Lycée Henri IV, one of France’s elite institutions, where André Gide was a schoolmate. He gained admittance to the École Normale Supérieure, ranked first in philosophy, but dropped out to study law, despite his literary and philosophical ambitions. Those ambitions persisted. During the 1890s, Blum led a double life, earning his livelihood in government service as a member of the Council of State which exercised judicial review over decisions of the executive branch, while regularly contributing to La Revue Blanche, a magazine founded by the Natanson brothers, graduates of the Lycée Condorcet, and destined during its brief run (1889–1903) to mark the l
iterary and intellectual life of fin-de-siècle Paris. In politics, it addressed such issues of the moment as the Dreyfus Affair, from a Dreyfusard perspective, and the massacre of Armenians. It opened its pages to writers as incongruous as Alfred Jarry, Paul Claudel, André Gide, Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Proust, and the anarchist Félix Fénéon. It featured the art of the Nabis and the Neo-Impressionists; Bonnard, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vallotton, and Cappiello illustrated books published under its imprint.

  As for Léon Blum, La Revue Blanche welcomed reviews by the young lawyer, who moved in the wide circle of intellectuals associated with Thadée Natanson. Thus did he meet Jean Jaurès. The year was 1897, two months before Zola published “J’accuse,” and the meeting proved fateful. “Léon Blum behaved toward his elder [Blum was twenty-five, Jaurès thirty-eight] like a disciple who would consent to know nothing for the pleasure of learning everything from a master such as he,” wrote Natanson. “Their age difference was about the same as that between Socrates and Alcibiades when Alcibiades avidly sought the teaching and favor of the philosopher. As long as Jaurès lived, Blum listened to him. He never thought that he had anything more or better to do.” The Dreyfus Affair created new mentors and discredited old ones, notably Maurice Barrès. It clouded Blum’s youthful admiration for the author of Le Culte du Moi, whom he vainly petitioned to join Zola in righting a scandalous miscarriage of justice.

  Blum wrote for L’Humanité when Jaurès launched the paper in 1904, one year after La Revue Blanche ceased publication. But he wrote much else besides, notably a book entitled Le Mariage, which sparked controversy by pleading the case for women’s emancipation from the pieties, myths, and legal strictures that assigned them a juvenile role in society. Conservatives bristled. Caricatures depicting a bespectacled old suffragette with Blum’s features abounded in the right-wing press and never went out of fashion: Blum the Jew, or Blum the subversive, upon whom Vichyites blamed France’s debacle thirty years later, in 1940, was seen as effeminate.13

  Having established his expertise in administrative law, he was appointed principal private secretary in 1914 to Marcel Sembat, the minister of public works, and observed at first hand the dysfunction of government in a republic whose executive was constitutionally handicapped. Out of that experience came a book entitled Letters on Government Reform, which foreshadowed Blum’s commitment to an active political life.

  Whether or not an active political life was yet what he had in mind or wanted unambivalently (there were financial and domestic impediments), it was what came to pass. In 1919, he drafted a party program. He then stood for election from Paris and won. A year later, the Socialists convened in the city of Tours to consider the demand of a large delegation that the party cast its lot with the Bolsheviks and accept twenty-one conditions prescribed by Grigory Zinoviev, executive director of the Comintern.14 Blum, who did not recognize greater virtue in the dictatorship of the proletariat than in dictatorship pure and simple, presented the case for social democracy. The SFIO would ultimately achieve social justice, he argued, as a party among parties, subject to universal suffrage within the bounds of a functioning republic. Incompatible with republicanism were the statutes of the Comintern, which threatened to make deputies in Paris straw men answerable to an “occult” central committee in Moscow. Blum said that he could not tolerate “a doctrine that I consider … intrinsically false, at odds with the entire theoretical and historical tradition of Socialism, and in any event radically inapplicable to action in France.” He published this credo in L’Humanité on October 27 and voiced it two months later at Tours. By then, December 27, it sounded like the parting words of a castaway to his shipwreck. At Tours, the party split in two. After 1920, L’Humanité would no longer publish Blum. The newspaper founded by Jean Jaurès had become the organ of a Communist party, the PCF, distinct from the SFIO, which considered itself Jaurès’s true heir. At the rump meeting of loyalists at Tours, Blum called upon his colleagues to save another daily, Le Populaire. The paper had served him well during the late 1920s, when he became its editor in chief and emerged as leader of the faction in Parliament.

  Léon Blum

  Until the mid-1930s, however, the party’s best brain could not help the SFIO resolve the contradiction between its chartered purpose, which was revolutionary, and its modus operandi, which was reformist. While consenting to negotiate successful electoral alliances with the cautiously leftist Radicals in 1924, 1928, and 1932, it would not accept responsibility for executive action by sharing power with them (except briefly, during the “sacred union”) or vote on budgets. It thus sacrificed its muscle to its doctrinal virtue. As much may be said of the pacifism a majority advocated in the face of German rearmament, spurning opponents who preached Vegetius’s adage Si vis pacem, para bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

  Hitler’s rise, the riots of February 1934, and the Comintern’s sudden disposition to befriend parties it had hitherto stigmatized as Fascist or “Social-Fascist” did not immediately raze barriers. Blum hesitated longer than most before yielding to the necessity of creating a common front with the heterogeneous Left and seeking power. By Bastille Day 1935 he had reconciled himself to both. “Short of repudiating parliamentary participation itself, I see no way of absolutely escaping the possible obligation [of ruling],” he wrote. “A proletarian party obligates itself willy-nilly when it gains a majority or is the preponderant element within a majority.” The view of some colleagues that an electoral victory should lead right away to the dismantling of the economic and political institutions upon which a capitalist society rested did not comport with his understanding of events. The Popular Front’s priority was not to destroy and construct but to defend France against military rule. Fascist coups had succeeded in three countries, and shadows of a fourth hung over republican Spain.

  That Léon Blum had his own person to defend against violence became shockingly clear during the electoral campaign of 1936. On February 13, the funeral cortège of the historian Jacques Bainville, a pillar of L’Action Française, was proceeding along the Boulevard Saint-Germain when onlookers, widely believed to include Camelots du Roi, recognized Blum caught in a traffic jam. They smashed the windows of his automobile, unhinged the doors, beat him bloody, molested his companions, and shouted, “Finish them off!” They might have done so if not for the intervention of several policemen and construction workers who witnessed the attack from their scaffolding. L’Action Française, which made light of Blum’s injuries and blamed him for impudently exposing himself to the fury of a crowd paying its last respects to a great royalist, was denounced in Parliament by the premier. On February 16, thousands protesting the attack marched from the Panthéon to the Bastille, with red and tricolor flags held high. Later that year, Maurras was sentenced to eleven months in prison for incitement to murder.

  On the cover of the March 9, 1936, issue of Time magazine, Léon Blum is pictured in bandages after a savage beating by right-wing thugs. He became premier three months later.

  Léon Blum convalesced during an ominous month. Hitler marched into the Rhineland with seventeen infantry battalions, in violation of the Locarno Treaty of 1925, whose other signatories—France, Belgium, England, and Italy—did nothing to oppose him. Keeping faith with his memories of Jean Jaurès in July 1914, and judging prudence to be the better part of valor on the eve of an election, Blum supported nonintervention.

  The Popular Front emerged victorious from the election of 1936, which made Socialists the single largest party in Parliament, benefiting from a misguided monetary policy that had crippled production and thrown multitudes out of work. L’Action Française might have regretted the likelihood that outrage at Blum’s mugging added votes to the winning margin, if regret ever clouded Léon Daudet’s and Charles Maurras’s self-righteousness. Their verbal assaults on him in L’Action Française became more vicious. They lost whatever they still possessed of a civil tongue after the Popular Front’s victory and vented their anti-Semitism w
hen Blum took office. “France Under the Jew” ran across the front page in bold print on June 5, 1936. Two days later it reported the first appearance before Parliament of the cabinet appointed by “Blum the Jew,” derisively noting its female and Jewish ministers.

  L’Action Française was not the only propagator of virulent anti-Semitism.15 Politicians could be relied upon by the right-wing press to provide quotable copy. On June 4, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who later reached the acme of his career as Vichy’s commissioner for Jewish questions, proposed that the General Council of the Seine, on which he sat, urge unspecified “public powers” to combat what he called Jewish tyranny by reconsidering the enfranchisement of Jews and challenging their right to run for office. Given the fact that certain politicians owed their success to an electoral clientele of foreigners imported en masse and hastily transformed into French citizens by a complicit administration, it behooved the state, he argued, to declare null and void all naturalizations approved since November 11, 1918. Unless measures were taken to neuter the alien within, Frenchmen—real Frenchmen, whose “personal destiny” was bound up with that of the nation—faced destruction.

  More widely reported was a statement made in the Chamber of Deputies the next day, when Léon Blum presented himself to Parliament for his formal confidence vote and entertained challenges from the Assembly. One such challenge, or interpellation, came from Xavier Vallat, representing the Ardèche region, whose tirades against Jews, Freemasons, and foreigners were notorious. Vallat declared that Blum himself was the reason he could not vote for the new administration, and he explained why in a speech frequently interrupted by remonstrances on the Left, applause on the Right, and words of caution from the Speaker.