The Conspiracy

by Paul Nizan

  I shall conclude this survey with a recent book by Claudel, which I managed to see by a happy coincidence.36 – On 1 July 1925, the Surrealists issued a flyer ‘Open Letter to M. Paul Claudel, ambassador to Japan’.37 This observed that: ‘For us, there can be no talk of harmony or great art. The idea of the beautiful is long over. Only the moral idea remains undisputed – for example, the knowledge of why one cannot be a French ambassador and a poet at the same time.’ – The jeweller Cartier, 13 rue de la Paix, has just published a ‘Mystique of Precious Stones’, written for him by Claudel. The word ‘published’ is, I suppose, not quite accurate; the text is only being distributed to jewellers, not booksellers. It cannot be purchased. It does not seek to teach the reader about the mystical powers of precious stones as they have arisen across history (the most important source on this, the Byzantine Psellos, is not mentioned38). Claudel saw himself primarily faced with a diplomatic task: to be the ambassador for a jeweller amongst his customers. The question of whether such a thing is permissible might have its charm for casuists. It is a different question to that posed by the Surrealists, and does not necessarily propose a ready-made answer. Unfortunately, however, the contents of the slim volume release the reader totally from the effort to pursue this further. How Claudel approaches the matter – stolidly, without a trace of irony – means that the least agreeable sides of such an undertaking come to the fore, at the expense of all the others. Claudel is well aware of the devices of exegesis, but the circumstances in which these are appropriate pass him by. Earrings as allegory, for example, appear to him in the following way: ‘Right and left of the head, they are . . . the two alerters, sensitive, gently sounding, they are the penetrating counsels of God, which are continuously flanking us humans, the intelligible fire of grace itself’ (p. 38).

  Cartier appears in the book like the patron in old paintings. Here is the passage verbatim: ‘There I was with the greatest jeweller in Paris, with one of the men such as is praised in the Gospels and whose handiwork it is . . . to demand of the sea itself its mystical fabrication – the pearl – the answer . . . to the shudder that arises as God’s gaze glides from one horizon to another . . . A poor devil – blind and deaf he is, the weight of the water’s mass has burst his eardrum – found it by groping in the depths. And now I am holding them, these virginal, angelic creations, in my cupped hand – this holy nothingness’ (pp. 30–1). That is a triptych. If the secret meaning of this advertising brochure is to establish the truly mystical congruence of social and theological hierarchies, it has certainly been achieved in this series of images. There is the dealer, who has his place in the shadow of the Gospels; there is the proletarian whose eardrum has burst in an echo of the curse with which his predecessor, Satan, was once afflicted from God’s throne; and lastly there is the customer, the man toward whom this new Beatitude is directed.

  It ill behoves one to include the parables of Jesus as an extra for the customer. According to these, the mystical mustard seed of the Gospels appears in the pearl.39 It is, to be sure, as Matthew says, the least of all seeds; but once it is full-grown, then it is larger than all the other herbs in the garden and grows into such a tree that the birds of the air come and lodge in its branches. What happens in the garden is child’s play compared to the miraculous feats of the pearl within the life of the economy. After a portrayal of money-grubbing capital, which speaks disgustedly of all the blood that sticks to pennies, yet leaves shares aside as an anachronism, Claudel goes on to say: ‘The penny has its exchange value. The law prescribes it and Lady Justice guarantees it. But the pearl, the spawn of duration and the fruit of the sea, has no other value than that of its beauty . . . Its appearance on the market devalues all other goods; it changes their price; it brings disquiet to the banks, it threatens the equilibrium of their transactions. For it ushers in an element that escapes every number: I am speaking of its spiritual concupiscence, which emerges from contemplation of it’ (pp. 29–30). – Claudel invites the customer into the boutique with sacristan bells. One can no longer deny the idea that the peace we enjoy is named after the Rue de la Paix.

  And how long will it last? Should it survive the spring, then I really do trust this year will bring us together. I have been thinking that the World Fair will bring a number of important people to New York. Will you still be able to make some time free for Europe? I very much hope so.

  I wish more than anything for you that your nearest and dearest are spared the darkest horrors.40

  Two days ago Germaine Krull came to Paris.41 She seemed to me to be relatively cheerful; in a more confident mood than last time.

  In the next few days, three detailed book reviews42 will be sent to Löwenthal: Hönigswald’s Philosophy and Language, Dimier’s From the Spirit to the Word and Sternberger’s Panorama – I chose an anagram of my name for the publication of the review in the latest issue: J. E. Mabinn.43 I hope that, in conjunction with the statement of place, it turns out to be transparent enough for connoisseurs of the journal.

  In conclusion, my very best wishes,

  Yours

  Walter Benjamin

  PS. Are you really looking into moving the Institute, as could be inferred from your postscript? 44 I don’t suppose you are thinking of Europe.

  Notes

  Page 5 Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale was founded in 1893, and soon established itself as one of the best known French philosophical journals.

  Page 7 The AX was a former Parisian bus route.

  Janson is the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly.

  Odette de Crécy was first the mistress, later the wife, of Charles Swann in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.

  Page 8 Rue Cloche-Perce, etc.: streets in a section of the 4th arrondissement, just behind the Grand Magasin du Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville, settled by indigent Jewish immigrants from Central Europe (and more recently North Africa). Despite gentrification of the Marais, the nearby Rue des Rosiers still retains something of the ambience described by Nizan.

  Page 11 Théodore Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1852–1929) were both best known as society portrait painters.

  Page 12 Irish seminarists: the Collège Irlandais still stands in Rue des Irlandais, off Rue Lhomond.

  Gare: the Gare d’Austerlitz.

  Page 13 Wednesday: a free day in the French educational system.

  Page 21 Henri-Joseph-Eugène Gouraud (1867–1946), a distinguished First World War general, served as military governor of Paris from 1923 to 1937.

  Page 22 The Belfort Lion, commemorating the successful defence of Belfort in 1870–71, was erected in 1880 on Place Denfert-Rochereau, named after the commanding officer during the siege.

  André Tardieu (1876–1945), a minister in Poincaré’s government in 1928, was himself to become Prime Minister for the first of three terms in November 1929.

  Page 29 Poincaré, at this time (1928) Prime Minister, had been President of the Republic from 1913 to 1920.

  Théophile Corret de la Tour d’Auvergne (1743–1800) distinguished himself in the Revolutionary Wars, refused promotion beyond the rank of captain in the grenadiers, and was killed at the Battle of Oberhausen in Bavaria.

  Sadi Carnot (1837–1894), grandson of Lazare C. who organized the armies of the French Revolution, was President of the Republic from 1887 until his assassination by an anarchist at Lyon.

  Marcelin Berthelot (1827–1907) was an eminent chemist and political figure, father of the philosopher René and the politician Philippe C.

  Comte Timoléon de Cossé-Brissac (1775–1848), scion of an old aristocratic family, was created a count of the Empire in 1812.

  Comte Jean-Marie-François Lepaige-Dorsenne (1773–1812) was a Napoleonic general who distinguished himself especially in Spain and died of his wounds.

  The Doctrinaires were a political grouping founded under the Restoration by Pierre-Paul
Royer-Collard and François Guizot. Their aim was to give some philosophical foundation to a middle-of-the-road policy of constitutional monarchism, rejecting both popular sovereignty and divine right of kings. Their ideas found expression after 1830 in the July Monarchy.

  Page 30 Pierre Casimir-Périer (1777–1832), rich banker and politician, Minister of the Interior under the July Monarchy.

  Jean-Paul-Pierre Casimir-Périer (1847–1907), diplomat and politician, President of the Republic 1894–95.

  The Chapelle Expiatoire in Boulevard Haussmann was erected under the Restoration, on the site of a small cemetery that had received the bodies of 1,343 victims of the guillotine on Place de la Concorde during the French Revolution, including those of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

  Page 31 Albi is the provincial capital and main railway centre of the Tarn département, where Jaurès was first buried at his birthplace, Castres. Les Aubrais is a railway junction near Orléans.

  Lucien Herr (1864–1926), librarian, from 1888 until his death, of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. A socialist, he influenced successive generations of normaliens, and among others Jaurès and Blum. A prominent supporter of Dreyfus, in 1904 he was among the founders of L’Humanité, then an organ of the Socialist Party.

  Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1935), philosopher and social theorist, whose best-known works are concerned with the thought systems of ‘primitive’ societies.

  Palais-Bourbon: seat of the National Assembly.

  Page 37 Rodin’s Thinker, now in the Musée Rodin in Hôtel Biron, in the twenties stood in front of the Panthéon.

  Page 38 The Unknown Philosopher: Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803), a mystical (and often obscurantist) ‘illuminist’ philosopher influenced by freemasonry and theosophy.

  Rabbi ben Ezra: Abraham ben Meir Ibn Ezra (1098–1164) Jewish poet, philosopher, grammarian, astronomer and biblical critic, born in Spain, the inspiration for Robert Browning’s poem ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’.

  Page 41 Clarté was a novel published in 1919 by the pacifist socialist Henri Barbusse, who in November of that year founded a journal with the same title, with an associated international committee including such well-known names as Anatole France, Georges Duhamel, Jules Romains, Upton Sinclair, H.G. Wells and Stefan Zweig.

  Page 42 See Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 113.

  Page 44 Doktorklub: graduate discussion club at Berlin University in the 1830s and ’40s which formed the focal point of the Young Hegelian movement, and in which Marx worked out his early views on philosophy and society. The epigram is taken from a satirical poem by Friedrich Engels and Bruno Bauer’s brother Edgar, ‘The Triumph of Faith’, and reads: ‘Our actions are just words, and long they so shall be./ After Abstraction, Practice follows of itself.’ (Marx/Engels, Collected Works, vol. 2, p. 338).

  Page 45 La mobilisation n’est pas la guerre: these words are taken from the proclamation accompanying the order of general mobilization on 1 August 1914, signed by President of the Republic Raymond Poincaré, but drafted by Premier René Viviani.

  The Gazette du Franc was a financial weekly founded in 1925, which collapsed in 1928.

  Page 46 Jean Chiappe (1878–1940) was Prefect of Police in Paris from 1927 to 1934. Known for his far-right sympathies, in 1940 he was appointed High Commissioner in Syria by the Vichy regime, but the plane taking him there was shot down by the RAF.

  Page 49 Dolgoruky is the main character in Dostoievsky’s A Raw Youth.

  Page 51 The Vexin was a historic French province, overlapping the border between the modern départements of Seine-et-Oise and Eure: Pontoise was the centre of Vexin Français, Gisors of Vexin Normand.

  Page 54 Edouard Herriot (1872–1957), leader of the Radical-Socialists, had lost in 1925 a premiership he was not to regain until 1932.

  Philippe Berthelot (1866–1937) was Secretary-General of the Foreign Ministry 1920–33, exerting great influence over successive ministers.

  Page 56 ‘Acquiescence in oneself’ is a principal theme of the last two. books of Spinoza’s Ethics.

  Page 61 The Broglie: Place Broglie.

  Page 61 Anglo-French glasses: the allusion to a couplet from Alfred de Musset’s ‘Le Rhin allemand’:

  Nous l’avons eu, votre Rhin allemand;

  Il a tenu dans notre verre.

  Gabriel Alapetite (1854–1932) was Commissioner-General of the Republic (or de facto Governor) in Alsace-Lorraine, from the time of its transfer from Germany in 1918 until 1924.

  Etienne-Alexandre Millerand (1859–1943) was War Minister from 1915 until the Armistice, and became Prime Minister briefly in 1920, before becoming President of the Republic (1920–24).

  Page 62 The speech of Touraine is commonly regarded as providing the closest thing to standard French (mutatis mutandis roughly equivalent to Hanover German, Tuscan Italian or Oxford English).

  Common sense . . . a quotation from Descartes’ Discourse on Method.

  Page 66 The Fosse: Quai de la Fosse.

  At the Ecole des Chartes for librarians and archivists, Simon would have studied diplomatics or the science of documentary analysis – in contradistinction to the diplomacy which, for the sake of the pun, Nizan ascribes to the curriculum of the Ecole des Sciences Politiques.

  Page 72 ‘Alain’: pen-name of Emile-Auguste Chartier (1868–1951), a product of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the most influential philosophy teacher in France during the inter-war years, especially thanks to his prolific essays. His main emphasis was on education of the will, creating a personality for oneself that is the product of self-conscious and rational effort.

  Page 78 MENE TEKEL PERES: the reference is to the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast, see Daniel, 5, vv. 25–8: ‘And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing; MENE – God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it. TEKEL – Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. PERES – Thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.’

  Page 89 Italians: by analogy with the post-war chambers in Italy, which had given their support after 1922 to Mussolini and his fascist movement, fuelled by the resentful aspirations of demobilized officers.

  Page 92 Georges Duhamel (1884–1966), poet, novelist and playwright; his war novels give an unsparing picture of the horrors of war itself, but a highly sentimentalized one of its victims.

  Max Scheler (1874–1928), German phenomenological philosopher and sociologist of knowledge, published the collection of essays Vom Umsturz der Werte in Leipzig in 1919.

  Page 93 Henri Massis (1886–1970) and Alfred de Tarde (born 1880), under the joint pseudonym Agathon, published a series of influential surveys of public opinion in the years immediately preceding the First World War, notably L’esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne and Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui. They identified a new generation of French youth, breaking with fin de siècle nihilism and narcissism, more open to the appeal of patriotic virtues, indeed specifically more ready to combat Germany – both on the cultural and on the military planes. In the case of Massis, at any rate, the conclusions of the survey were to a large extent tailored to a prewritten script.

  Page 101 Auteuil, etc. – fashionable racecourses.

  The Company is the Company of Stockbrokers, rough equivalent of a London city guild.

  1927 was the year in which Julien Benda’s influential La Trahison des clercs (Treason of the Intellectuals) was published.

  Page 103 Camelots du Roi: youth organization attached to Action Française, a far-right grouping founded in 1899 and led by Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet. Originally republican, after 1908 Action Française became increasingly royalist, Catholic and anti-Semitic, drawing many of its themes from the writings of Edouard Drumont (1844–1917), a prominent anti-Semitic and anti-Dreyfus propagandist, founding editor
of La Libre Parole. The Jeunesses Patriotiques formed by Pierre Taittinger represented a proto-fascism which by the twenties had more appeal in France than the royalist nostalgia of Action Française.

  Page 103 Rue Saint-Guillaume: site of the then Ecole Nationale des Sciences Politiques.

  Page 104 Conciergerie: play on words – the Conciergerie is in fact a famous prison, forming part of the Palais de Justice.

  Page 109 Otto I sat on the Greek throne from 1832 to 1862.

  Page 112 The Hecatonpylus or ‘hundred gates’ was Homer’s designation for Thebes on the upper Nile.

  Page 110 Hédiard’s is a luxury food store on Place de la Madeleine in Paris.

  Page 111 Palikars: irregulars in the Greek War of Independence, in which Byron, Admiral Andréas Miaoulis, Marcos Botsaris and General Theodoros Kolocotronis played greater or lesser roles. The interior of the Erechtheum dates from the period when it was used as an Ottoman harem.

  Page 116 Emile Bréhier (1876–1952) taught philosophy at the Sorbonne 1919–46 and wrote the standard French history of philosophy in seven volumes.

  The Power of a Lie, play by the Norwegian author Johan Böjer (1872–1959), published in 1903.