III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal

‘I created him to be spiritual in his flesh; and now he has become carnal even in the spirit.’—(Bossuet, Élévations, VII, 3.)

In all that I have said hitherto I have been considering only masses, whether bourgeois or proletarian, kings, ministers, political leaders, all that portion of the human species which I shall call ‘the laymen’, whose whole function consists essentially in the pursuit of material interests, and who, by becoming more and more solely and systematically realist, have in fact only done what might be expected of them.

Side by side with this humanity whom the poet has described in a phrase—‘O curvae in terram animae et celestium inanes’—there existed until the last half century another, essentially distinct humanity, which to a certain extent acted as a check upon the former. I mean that class of men whom I shall designate ‘the clerks’, by which term I mean all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages, and hence in a certain manner say: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ Indeed, throughout history, for more than two thousand years until modern times, I see an uninterrupted series of philosophers, men of religion, men of literature, artists, men of learning (one might say almost all during this period), whose influence, whose life, were in direct opposition to the realism of the multitudes. To come down specifically to the political passions—the ‘clerks’ were in opposition to them in two ways. They were either entirely indifferent to these passions, and, like Leonardo da Vinci, Malebranche, Goethe, set an example of attachment to the purely disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the supreme value of this form of existence; or, gazing as moralists upon the conflict of human egotisms, like Erasmus, Kant, Renan, they preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions. Although these ‘clerks’ founded the modern State to the extent that it dominates individual egotisms, their activity undoubtedly was chiefly theoretical, and they were unable to prevent the laymen from filling all history with the noise of their hatreds and their slaughters; but the ‘clerks’ did prevent the laymen from setting up their actions as a religion, they did prevent them from thinking themselves great men as they carried out these activities. It may be said that, thanks to the ‘clerks’, humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good. This contradiction was an honour to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.

Now, at the end of the nineteenth century a fundamental change occurred: the ‘clerks’ began to play the game of political passions. The men who had acted as a check on the realism of the people began to act as its stimulators. This upheaval in the moral behaviour of humanity operated in several ways.

First: The ‘clerks’ have adopted political passions

First of all the ‘clerks’ have adopted political passions. No one will deny that throughout Europe to-day the immense majority of men of letters and artists, a considerable number of scholars, philosophers, and ‘ministers’ of the divine, share in the chorus of hatreds among races and political factions. Still less will it be denied that they adopt national passions. Doubtless, the names of Dante, Petrarch, d’Aubigné, certain apologists of Caboche or preachers of the Ligue will suffice to show that certain ‘clerks’ did not wait for our era to indulge in these passions with all the strength of their souls. But, upon the whole, these ‘clerks’ of the forum were exceptions, at least among the great ones. If, in addition to the great masters named above, I evoke the phalanx of Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Galilei, Rabelais, Montaigne, Descartes, Racine, Pascal, Leibniz, Kepler, Huyghens, Newton, and even Voltaire, Buffon and Montesquieu (to mention only a few) I think I may repeat that until our own days the men of thought or the honest men remained strangers to political passions, and said with Goethe: ‘Let us leave politics to the diplomats and the soldiers.’ Or if, like Voltaire, they took these passions into account, they adopted a critical attitude towards them, did not espouse them as passions. Or if, like Rousseau, Maistre, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, even Michelet, they did take these passions to heart, they did so with a generalizing of feeling, a disdain for immediate results, which in fact make the word ‘passions’ incorrect. To-day, if we mention Mommsen, Treitschke, Ostwald, Brunetière, Barrès, Lemaître, Péguy, Maurras, d’Annunzio, Kipling, we have to admit that the ‘clerks’ now exercise political passions with all the characteristics of passion—the tendency to action, the thirst for immediate results, the exclusive preoccupation with the desired end, the scorn for argument, the excess, the hatred, the fixed ideas. The modern ‘clerk’ has entirely ceased to let the layman alone descend to the market place. The modern clerk is determined to have the soul of a citizen and to make vigorous use of it; he is proud of that soul; his literature is filled with his contempt for the man who shuts himself up with art or science and takes no interest in the passions of the State.⁠[31] He is violently on the side of Michaelangelo crying shame upon Leonardo da Vinci for his indifference to the misfortunes of Florence, and against the master of the Last Supper when he replied that indeed the study of beauty occupied his whole heart. The time has long past by since Plato demanded that the philosopher should be bound in chains in order to compel him to take an interest in the State. To have as his function the pursuit of eternal things and yet to believe that he becomes greater by concerning himself with the State—that is the view of the modern ‘clerk’. It is as natural as it is evident that this adhesion of the ‘clerks’ to the passions of the laymen fortifies these passions in the hearts of the latter. In the first place, it abolishes the suggestive spectacle (which I mentioned above) of a race of men whose interests are set outside the practical world. And then especially, the ‘clerk’ by adopting political passions, brings them the tremendous influence of his sensibility if he is an artist, of his persuasive power if he is a thinker, and in either case his moral prestige.⁠[32]

Before proceeding any further, I feel I ought to make myself clear on certain points:—

(a) I have been talking of the whole of the men of thought anterior to our own age. When I say that the ‘clerks’ in the past opposed the realism of the laymen and that the ‘clerks’ of to-day are in its service, I am considering each of these groups as a whole; I am contrasting one general characteristic with another. This means that I shall not feel myself contradicted by a reader who takes pains to point out to me that so-and-so in the former group was a realist, and that so-and-so in the second is not, so long as this reader is obliged to admit that as a whole each of these groups does manifest the characteristic I have indicated. And also, when I speak of a single ‘clerk’, I am thinking of his work in its chief characteristic, i.e. in that part of his teaching which dominates all the rest, even if the remainder sometimes contradicts this dominant teaching. This means that I do not consider that I ought to refrain from looking upon Malebranche as a master of liberal thought because a few lines of his ‘Morale’ seem to be a justification of slavery, or upon Nietzsche as a moralist of war because the end of ‘Zarathustra’ is a manifesto of fraternity which outdoes the Gospels. And I see the less reason for doing so, since Malebranche as a defender of slavery and Nietzsche as a humanitarian have had no influence at all, and my subject is the influence which the ‘clerks’ have had in the world, and not what they were in themselves.

(b) Some will object to me: ‘How can you treat men like Barrès and Péguy as “clerks” and blame them for lacking the true spirit of “clerks” when they are so openly men of action, with whom political thought is obviously occupied solely with the needs of the present hour, solely spurred on by the events of the day, while the former scarcely ever gave expression to his political thought except in newspaper articles?’ I reply, that this thought, which in truth is practically nothing but a form of immediate action, is given out by its authors as the fruits of the highest speculative intellectual activity, the result of the most truly philosophical meditation. Barrès and Péguy would never have consented to be looked upon as mere polemical writers, even in their polemical works.⁠[33] These men, who indeed are not ‘clerks’, gave themselves out to be ‘clerks’ and were considered as such, (Barrès gave himself out to be a thinker who condescended to the arena), and it is precisely as such that they enjoy a particular prestige among men of action. In this study my subject is not the ‘clerk’ such as he is, but the ‘clerk’ such as he is considered to be and as he acts upon the world in that capacity.

I shall make the same answer with regard to M. Maurras and the other instructors of the Action Française, of whom it will be said even more truly that they are men of action and that it is indefensible to cite them as ‘clerks’. These men claim to carry out their action by virtue of a doctrine derived from a wholly objective study of history, from the exercise of the most purely scientific spirit. And they owe the special attention with which they are listened to by men of action entirely to this claim that they are men of learning, men who are fighting for a truth discovered in the austerity of the laboratory. They owe it to their pose as combative ‘clerks’, but essentially as ‘clerks’.

(c) Finally I should like to define my views on another point and to say that when the ‘clerk’ descends to the market place I only consider that he is failing to perform his functions when he does so, like those I have mentioned, for the purpose of securing the triumph of a realist passion, whether of class, race or nation. When Gerson entered the pulpit of Notre Dame to denounce the murderers of Louis d’Orléans; when Spinoza, at the peril of his life, went and wrote the words ‘Ultimi barbarorum’ on the gate of those who had murdered the de Witts; when Voltaire fought for the Calas family; when Zola and Duclaux came forward to take part in a celebrated lawsuit (Dreyfus affair); all these ‘clerks’ were carrying out their functions as ‘clerks’ in the fullest and noblest manner. They were the officiants of abstract justice and were sullied with no passion for a worldly object.⁠[34] Moreover, there exists a certain criterion by which we may know whether the ‘clerk’ who takes public action does so in conformity with his true functions; and that is, that he is immediately reviled by the laymen, whose interests he thwarts (Socrates, Jesus). We may say beforehand that the ‘clerk’ who is praised by the laymen is a traitor to his office.

But let us return to the modern ‘clerk’s’ adhesion to political passions.

It is concerning national passions that this adhesion seems to me particularly novel and big with results. Once again, of course humanity did not have to wait for the present age to see the ‘clerks’ indulge in this passion. Without mentioning the poets, whose tender hearts have always sighed ‘Nescio qua natale dulcedine solum cunctos Ducit’; and, as regards the philosophers, without going back to antiquity when all, previous to the Stoics, were ardent patriots; we may yet observe in history (since the coming of Christianity and long before our own days) writers, men of learning, artists, moralists, even ministers of the ‘Universal’ Church, who more or less explicitly displayed a special attachment for the group to which they belonged. But this affection among these men was based on reason; it showed itself capable of judging its object, of denouncing its errors when they believed such errors had been committed. Need I recall how Fénelon and Massillon denounced certain wars of Louis XIV? How Voltaire condemned the destruction of the Palatinate? How Renan denounced the violences of Napoleon? Buckle, the intolerance of England towards the French Revolution? And, in our own times, Nietzsche, the brutalities of Germany towards France?⁠[35] It was reserved for our own time to see men of thought, or men giving themselves out as such, professing openly that they would not submit their patriotism to any check on the part of their judgment, proclaiming (like Barrès) that ‘even if the country is wrong, we must think it in the right’, denouncing as ‘traitors to the nation’ those of their compatriots who retain their liberty of mind, or at least of speech, in regard to their country. In France we have not forgotten how, during the last war, so many ‘thinkers’ attacked Renan for the liberty of his judgments on the history of his country.⁠[36] Nor have we forgotten how, a little before that, a whole set of young men (who claimed to share in the life of the spirit) bristled up against one of their masters (Jacob) who tried to teach them a patriotism which did not exclude all right of criticism. After the violation of Belgium and other excesses of the Germans, in October, 1914, a German teacher said: ‘There is nothing for which we need make excuses.’⁠[37] Now, if their own countries had been in a similar position, the same thing would have been said by most of the spiritual leaders of that time; by Barrès in France, by d’Annunzio in Italy, by Kipling in England, if we may judge by his conduct during the attack of his nation upon the Boers, and by William James in the United States, if we recall his attitude when his compatriots seized the island of Cuba.⁠[38] I am quite ready to agree that this sort of blind patriotism makes powerful nations, and that the patriotism of Fénelon or of Renan is not the sort which secures empires. It remains to determine whether the function of ‘clerks’ is to secure empires.

This adhesion of the ‘clerks’ to national passion is particularly remarkable among those whom I shall call ‘pre-eminently clerks’; I mean the Churchmen. In all European countries during the past fifty years, the immense majority of these men have not only given their adhesion to the national feeling⁠[39] and therefore have ceased to provide the world with the spectacle of hearts solely occupied with God—but they seem to have adopted this feeling with the same passion as that I have pointed out as existing among men of letters, and they too appear to be ready to support their own countries in the most flagrant injustices. During the last war this could be most clearly seen in the German clergy, from whom no one could drag the shadow of a protest against the excesses committed by their nation, and whose silence does not appear to have been caused solely by prudence.⁠[40] In contrast to this attitude I refer the reader to that of the Spanish theologians of the sixteenth century, to men like Bartholomew de las Casas and Vittoria, earnestly denouncing the cruelties committed by their compatriots in the conquest of America. I do not claim that similar behaviour was then the rule among Churchmen, but I should like to ask whether there is a single country to-day where they would do likewise, or where they would even wish to be permitted to do so?⁠[41]

I shall point out another characteristic of patriotism in the modern ‘clerk’: xenophobia. The hatred of man for ‘the man from outside’ (the horsain), his rejection of and scorn for everything which is not ‘from his own home’, all these impulses, so constant among peoples and apparently necessary to their existence, have been adopted in our days by the so-called men of thought, and adopted with a seriousness of application, an absence of simple-mindedness, which go far towards making this adoption worthy of notice. We know how systematically the mass of German teachers in the past fifty years have announced the decline of every civilization but that of their own race, and how in France the admirers of Nietzsche or Wagner, even of Kant or Goethe, were treated by Frenchmen who claimed to share in the life of the spirit.⁠[42] You may estimate how curiously new this form of patriotism is among the men of thought in France by thinking of Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Michelet, Proudhon, Renan, to name only patriotic ‘clerks’ in the age immediately preceding that we are considering. Is it necessary to say once again how much the ‘clerks’ have stimulated the passion of the laymen by adopting this xenophobia?

I shall be told that during the past fifty years, and especially during the twenty years before the war, the attitude of foreigners to France was such that the most violent national partiality was forced upon all Frenchmen who wished to safeguard the nation, and that the only true patriots were those who consented to this fanaticism. I say nothing to the contrary; I only say that the ‘clerks’ who indulged in this fanaticism betrayed their duty, which is precisely to set up a corporation whose sole cult is that of justice and of truth, in opposition to the peoples and the injustice to which they are condemned by their religions of this earth. It is true indeed that these new ‘clerks’ declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other ‘metaphysical fogs’, that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances. All these things were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time.

It must be admitted that the German ‘clerks’ led the way in this adhesion of the modern ‘clerk’ to patriotic fanaticism. The French ‘clerks’ were, and long remained, animated with the most perfect spirit of justice towards foreign cultures (think of the cosmopolitanism of the Romantics!), when already Lessing, Schlegel, Fichte, Goerres were organizing in their hearts a violent adoration for ‘everything German’, and a scorn for everything not German. The nationalist ‘clerk’ is essentially a German invention. This, moreover, is a theme which will frequently recur in this book, i.e. that most of the moral and political attitudes adopted by the ‘clerks’ of Europe in the past fifty years are of German origin, and that in the world of spiritual things the victory of Germany is now complete.

It may be said that Germany, by creating for herself the nationalist ‘clerk’ and thereby acquiring the additional strength we know she has acquired, made this species of ‘clerk’ necessary to all other countries. It is undeniable that from the moment when Germany had a Mommsen, France especially was bound to have a Barrès, under penalty of finding herself in a position of great inferiority in nationalist fanaticism, and of seeing her existence seriously menaced. Every Frenchman attached to the continuance of his nation must rejoice that in the last half century France has possessed a fanatically nationalist literature. Yet one would like this Frenchman to rise for a moment superior to his interest, and, faithful in this to the honour of his race, to think it sad that the course of events in the world should force him to rejoice in such a thing.

More generally, it may be admitted that a realist attitude has been imposed on the modern ‘clerks’, chiefly the French ‘clerks’, by exterior and interior political conditions which have arisen in their nations. However serious this may be, it would be much less serious if we found that the ‘clerks’ deplored it while they submitted to it, if they felt how much their own value is diminished by it, how greatly civilization is menaced by it, to what an extent the universe is rendered ugly by it. But this is exactly what we do not see. On the contrary, we see them joyfully carrying out this realism; we see them believing that they are rendered greater by their nationalist fury, that it is a service to civilization, an embellishment to humanity. Then one feels that one is confronted by something different from a function thwarted by the events of the moment, and faced with a cataclysm of moral notions in those who educate the world.

I should like to point out two other characteristics in the patriotism of the modern ‘clerks’ which seem new to me, the second of which has not failed to stimulate this passion greatly among the peoples.

The first can best be brought out by contrast with the lines written by an author of the fifteenth century, lines which are the more remarkable since he who wrote them proved by his deeds how deep was his love for his native country. ‘All cities,’ says Guicciardini, ‘all States, all Kingdoms, are mortal; everything comes to an end, either by accident or by the course of nature. That is why a citizen who witnesses the end of his country cannot feel so distressed at her misfortune with so much reason as he would lament his own ruin. His country has met the fate which in every way she was bound to meet; the misfortune is wholly for him whose unhappy lot has caused him to be born in a time when such a disaster had to occur.’ One wonders whether there is a single modern thinker, attached to his country as the author of that passage was to his, who would dare to form, still less to express, a judgment of her so extraordinarily free in its melancholy. And here we come upon one of the great impieties of the moderns: The refusal to believe that above their nations there exists a development of a superior kind, by which they will be swept away like all other things. The ancients, so completely the adorers of their States, nevertheless placed them beneath Fate. The ancient City was under divine protection, but in no wise believed that she herself was divine and necessarily eternal. All the literature of the ancients shows us that, in their opinion, the duration of their institutions was a precarious thing, solely due to the favour of the Gods, who at any time might withdraw that favour.⁠[43] We have Thucydides contemplating the image of a world in which Athens should have ceased to exist; we have Polybius showing us the conqueror of Carthage meditating over the burning town: ‘And Rome too shall meet her fatal hour.’ We have Virgil praising the peasant of the fields for whom ‘res romanae et peritura regna’ are of no value.

It was reserved for the moderns to make of their City a tower which defies the heavens, and to do it with the aid of their ‘clerks’.

The second characteristic of the patriotism of the modern ‘clerks’ is a desire to relate the form of their own minds to a form of the national mind, which they naturally brandish against other national forms of mind. We all know how, during the last fifty years, so many men of learning on both banks of the Rhine have asserted their views in the name of French science, of German science. We know how acridly so many of our writers in the same period have vibrated with French sensibility, French intelligence, French philosophy. Some declare that they are the incarnation of Aryan thought, Aryan painting, Aryan music, to which others reply by discovering that a certain master had a Jewish grandmother, and so venerate Semitic genius in him. Here it is not a question of inquiring whether the form of mind of a scholar or an artist is the signature of his nationality or his race and to what extent, but of noting the desire of the modern ‘clerks’ that it should be so, and noting how new a thing this is. Racine and La Bruyère never dreamed of setting up their works before themselves and before the world as manifestation of the French mind, nor did Goethe and Wincklemann relate theirs to the genius of Germany.⁠[44] Here, chiefly among the artists, is a very remarkable fact. It is very remarkable to see men whose activity consists, one might say professionally, in the assertion of individuality, men who became so violently conscious of this truth a century ago with the Romantic movement, now (as it were) abdicating this sort of consciousness and trying to feel themselves as the expression of some general existence, a manifestation of a collective mind. It is true that this abdication of the individual in favour of ‘a great impersonal and eternal Whole’ satisfies another sort of Romanticism. It is true that this impulse of the artist may also be explained by the desire (which Barrès does not conceal) to increase the enjoyment of himself by himself, since the consciousness of the individual ego is doubled in profundity by consciousness of the national ego, while at the same time the artist finds new lyrical themes in this second consciousness. It may also be admitted that the artist is not blind to his own interest in calling himself the expression of the genius of his nation, thereby inviting the whole race to applaud itself in the work he put before it.⁠[45] Whatever their motives may have been, the great minds or the minds reputed such, by relating the whole of their value so noisily to their nation, have laboured in a direction contrary to that expected of them; they have flattered the vanity of nations, they have fed full the arrogance with which each nation flings its superiority in the face of its neighbours.⁠[46]

I cannot better bring out all the novelty of this attitude of the ‘clerk’ than by quoting the remark of Renan, which would be signed by all men of thought from Socrates onwards: ‘Man belongs neither to his language nor to his race; he belongs only to himself, for he is a free being, that is, a moral being.’ To this Barrès replies, amid the applause of his compeers: ‘To be moral is not to wish to be free from one’s race.’ Here, obviously, is an exaltation of the gregarious spirit which the nations had heard little of before from the priests of the spirit.

The modern ‘clerks’ do better still. They declare that their thought cannot be good, that it cannot bear good fruit, unless they remain on their native soil, unless they are not ‘uprooted’ (‘déracinés’). They congratulate A on working in his Bearn, B in his Berry, C in his Brittany. And they not only proclaim this law for the poets, but for critics, moralists, philosophers, the servants of purely intellectual activity. To declare the mind good to the extent of its refusal to liberate itself from the earth is something which will make the modern ‘clerks’ certain of a conspicuous place in the annals of the spiritual life. Obviously, the feelings of this class of men has changed since Plutarch taught: ‘Man is not a plant created to be immobile and to have his roots fixed in the soil where he was born,’ and since Antisthenes replied to his colleagues who boasted that they were native to the soil, that ‘they shared this honour with the slugs and grasshoppers’.

Need I say that I am only denouncing this desire of the ‘clerk’ to feel himself determined by his race and to remain fixed to his native soil to the extent that it becomes in him a political attitude, a nationalist provocation. The best way for me to define this is by quoting this hymn of a modern ‘clerk’ to ‘his soil and his dead’, a hymn completely void of political passion:

‘And the old oak under which I am sitting speaks in its turn, and says to me:

‘“Read, read in my shadow those Gothic songs whose refrains I heard in the past mingle with the rustling of my leaves. The souls of your ancestors are in these songs that are older than I am. Learn to know those humble ancestors, share their past joys and sorrows. Thus, O transitory creature, shalt thou live long ages in a few years. Be pious, venerate the soil of your country. Never take up a handful in your hand without remembering that it is sacred. Love all those far-off relatives whose dust mingled with earth has fed me for centuries, whose minds have passed into you, their Benjamin, the child of better days. Reproach not your ancestors with their ignorance, nor with the feebleness of their thought, nor even with the illusions of fear which sometimes rendered them cruel. As well reproach yourself for having been a child. Remember that they laboured, that they suffered, that they hoped for you, and that you owe everything to them!”’⁠[47]

Second: They bring their political passions into their activities as ‘clerks’.

The ‘clerks’ have not been content simply to adopt political passions, if by this one means that they have made a place for these passions side by side with the activities they are bound to carry on as ‘clerks’. They have introduced these passions into those activities. They permit, they desire them to be mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers, to colour the essence of their work and to mark all its productions. And indeed never were there so many political works among those which ought to be the mirror of the disinterested intelligence.

You may refuse to be surprised by this in the case of poetry. We must not ask the poets to separate their works from their passions. The latter are the substance of the former, and the only question to ask is whether they write poems to express their passions or whether they hunt for passions in order to write poems. In either case one does not see why they should exclude national passion or the spirit of party from their vibrant material. Our political poets, who are not numerous however, have only followed the example of Virgil, Claudian, Lucan, Dante, d’Aubigné, Ronsard, and Hugo. Yet we cannot deny that political passion, as it is expressed by Claudel or d’Annunzio, a conscious and organized passion lacking all simplicity, coldly scornful of its adversary, a passion which in the second of these poets displays itself as so precisely political, so cunningly adapted to the profound cupidity of his compatriots and the exact point of weakness in the foreigner—we cannot deny, I say, that this political passion is something different from the eloquent generalities of the ‘Tragiques of the Année Terrible.’ A work like La Nave, with its national plan as exact and practical as that of a Bismarck, wherein the lyric gift is used to extol this practical character, seems to me something new in the history of poetry, even of political poetry. The result of this new departure on the minds of laymen may be judged by the present state of mind of the Italian people.⁠[48] But in our day the most remarkable example of the poets’ applying their art to the service of political passions is that literary form which may be called ‘lyrical philosophy’, the most brilliant symbol of which is the work of Barrès. It begins by taking as its centres of vibration certain truly philosophical states of mind (such as pantheism, a loftily sceptical intellectualism) and then entirely devotes itself to serving racial passion and national feeling. Here the action of the lyric spirit is doubled by the prestige of the spirit of abstract thought (Barrès admirably caught the appearance of that spirit—he stole the tool, a philosopher has said of him), and in France as elsewhere the ‘clerks’ have thereby stimulated political passions among the laymen, at least in that very important section of them who read and believe they think. Moreover, in regard to poets and especially the poet I have just named, it is difficult to know whether the lyrical impulse lends its aid to a genuine and pre-existing political passion, or whether on the contrary this passion puts itself at the service of a lyrical impulse which is seeking inspiration. Alius judex erit.

But there are other ‘clerks’ who introduce political passion into their works with a remarkable consciousness of what they are doing, in whom this derogation seems more worthy of notice than in the poets. I mean the novelists and dramatists, i.e. ‘clerks’ whose function is to portray in as objective a manner as possible the emotions of the human soul and their conflicts—a function which, as Shakespeare, Molière, and Balzac have proved, may be carried out with all the purity I have here assigned to it. One may show how this function has been more than ever perverted by its subjection to political ends by the example of many contemporary novelists, not because they scatter ‘tendencious’ reflections throughout their narratives (Balzac constantly does so), but because instead of making their heroes feel and act in conformity with a true observation of human nature, they make them do so as the passion of the authors requires. Shall I cite those novels where the traditionalist, whatever his errors, always finally displays a noble soul, whereas the character without religion inevitably, and in spite of all his efforts, is capable of none but vile actions?⁠[49] Or the other novels where the man of the people possesses every virtue and vileness is the exclusive portion of the bourgeois?⁠[50] Or the novels where the author displays his compatriots in contact with foreigners and, more or less frankly, gives all moral superiority to his own people?⁠[51] There is a two-fold evil in this proceeding; not only does it considerably inflame political passion in the breast of the reader, but it deprives him of one of the most eminently civilizing effects of all works of art, i.e. that self-examination to which every spectator is impelled by a representation of human beings which he feels to be true and solely pre-occupied with truth.⁠[52] From the point of view of the artist and of the value of his activity alone, this partiality indicates a great degradation. The value of the artist, the thing which makes him the world’s high ornament, is that he plays human passions instead of living them, and that he discovers in this ‘play’ emotion the same source of desires, joys and sufferings as ordinary men find in the pursuit of real things. Now, if this accomplished type of exuberant activity places itself at the service of the nation or of a class, if this fine flower of disinterestedness becomes utilitarian, then I say with the poet of the ‘Vierge aux Rochers’ when the author of Siegfried exhales his last sigh: ‘The world has lost its import.’

I have pointed out that certain ‘clerks’ have put their activities as ‘clerks’ at the service of political passions. These are the poets, the novelists, the dramatists, the artists, i.e. they are men who may be permitted to give passion, even wilful passion, a predominant place in their works. But there are other ‘clerks’ in whom this derogation from the disinterested activity of the mind is far more shocking, ‘clerks’ whose influence on the laymen is much more profound by reason of the prestige attached to their functions. I mean the historians. Here, as with the poets, the phenomenon is a new one on account of the point of perfection it has reached. Assuredly, humanity did not await our age to see History putting itself at the service of the spirit of party or of national passion. But I think I may assert that it has never seen this done with the same methodical spirit, the same intensity of consciousness which may be observed in German historians of the past half century and in the French Monarchists of the past twenty years. The case of the latter is the more remarkable since they belong to a nation which has acquired eternal honour in the history of human intelligence by explicitly condemning pragmatic history and formulating, as it were, the charter of disinterested history, through the works of Beaufort, Fréret, Voltaire, Thierry, Renan, Fustel de Coulanges.⁠[53] Yet the true novelty here is the admission of this spirit of partiality, the expressed intention to employ it as a legitimate method. ‘A true German historian,’ declares a German master, ‘should especially tell those facts which conduce to the grandeur of Germany.’ The same scholar praises Mommsen (who himself boasted of it) for having written a Roman history ‘which becomes a history of Germany with Roman names’. Another (Treitschke) prided himself on his lack of ‘that anemic objectivity which is contrary to the historical sense’. Another (Guisebrecht) teaches that ‘Science must not soar beyond the frontiers, but be national, be German’. Our Monarchists do not lag behind. Recently one of them, the author of a History of France, which tried to show that the French Kings since Clovis were occupied in trying to prevent the war of 1914, defended the historian who presents the past from the point of view of the passions of his own time.⁠[54] By his determination in bringing this partiality to historical narrative the modern ‘clerk’ most seriously derogates from his true function, if I am right in saying that his function is to restrain the passions of the laymen. Not only does he inflame the laymen’s passions more cunningly than ever, not only does he deprive them of the suggestive spectacle of a man solely occupied by the thirst for truth, but he prevents the laymen from hearing speech different from that of the market place, speech (Renan’s is perhaps the finest example) which, coming from the heights, shows that the most opposite passions are equally justified, equally necessary to the earthly State, and thereby incites every reader who has any capacity for getting outside himself to relax the severity of his passions, at least for a moment.

Let me say, however, that indeed men like Treitschke and his French equivalents are not historians; they are men of politics who make use of history to support a cause whose triumph they desire. Hence, it is natural that the master of their method should not be Lenain de Tillemont but Louis XIV, who threatened to withdraw Mezeray’s pension if the historian persisted in pointing out the abuses of the old monarchy; or Napoleon, who ordered the chief of police to take measures for the history of France to be written in a manner favourable to his own throne. Nevertheless, the really cunning ones assume the mask of disinterestedness.⁠[55]

I believe that many of those whom I am here accusing of betraying their spiritual ministry, that disinterested activity which should be theirs by the mere fact of their being historians, psychologists, moralists, would reply to me as follows, if such a confession did not destroy their influence: ‘We are not in the least the servants of spiritual things; we are the servants of material things, of a political party, of a nation. Only, instead of serving it with the sword, we serve it with the pen. We are the spiritual militia of the material.’

Among those who ought to show the world an example of disinterested intellectual activity and who nevertheless turn their function to practical ends, I shall also mention the critics. Everyone knows that innumerable critics to-day consider that a book is only good insofar as it serves the party which is dear to them, or as it manifests ‘the genius of the nation’, or as it illustrates a political doctrine in harmony with their own political system, or for other reasons of the like purity. The modern ‘clerks’, I said before, insist that the just shall be determined by the useful. They also want the useful to determine the beautiful, which is not one of their least originalities in history. Nevertheless, here again those who adopt such a form of criticism are not truly critics, but men of politics, who make criticism serve their practical designs. Here is a perfecting of political passion, the whole honour of which must be given to the moderns. Neither Pius XIV nor Napoleon apparently thought of using literary criticism in support of the social system in which they believed.⁠[56] This new departure has brought forth its fruits. For instance, if you assert with the French Monarchists that the democratic ideal is inevitably bound up with bad literature, you are dealing that ideal a real blow in a country like France, which has a real devotion to literature, at least among those who will consent to believe that Victor Hugo and Lamartine were mere scribblers.⁠[57]

But the most remarkable thing about the modern ‘clerk’ in his desire to bring political passion into his work, is that he has done so in philosophy, more precisely, in metaphysics. It may be said that until the nineteenth century metaphysics remained the inviolate citadel of disinterested speculation. Among all forms of spiritual labour metaphysics best deserved the admirable tribute which a mathematician rendered the theory of numbers above all branches of mathematics, when he said: ‘This is the really pure branch of our science, by which I mean that it is unsullied by any contact with practical application.’ In fact thinkers free from any sort of earthly preference, like Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, and even thinkers strongly imbued with the superiority of their class or nation (like Plato and Aristotle), never thought of directing their transcendental speculations towards a demonstration of this superiority or the necessity of this adoption by the whole world. It has been said that the morality of the Greeks was national, but their metaphysics were universal. The Church itself, so often favourable to class or national interests in its morality, thinks only of God and Man in its metaphysics. It was reserved for our own age to see metaphysicians of the greatest eminence turning their speculations to the exaltation of their own countries and to the depreciation of other countries, fortifying the will to power of their compatriots with all the power of abstractive genius. Fichte and Hegel made the triumph of the German world the supreme and necessary end of the development of Being, and history has showed whether the action of these ‘clerks’ had an effect on the hearts of their laymen. Let me hasten to add that this spectacle of patriotic metaphysics is provided by Germany alone. In France, even in this age of nationalist ‘clerks’, we have not yet seen any philosopher (at least one who is taken seriously) build up a metaphysical system to the glory of France. Neither Auguste Comte nor Renouvier nor Bergson ever thought of making a French hegemony the necessary result of the world’s development. Need I add what a degradation this has been for metaphysics, as it has been for art? It will be the eternal shame of the German philosophers to have transformed the patrician virgin who honoured the Gods into a harpy engaged in shrieking the glory of her children.

Third: The ‘clerks’ have played the game of political passions by their doctrines

But where the ‘clerks’ have most violently broken with their tradition and resolutely played the game of the laymen in their eagerness to place themselves in the real, is by their doctrines, by the scale of values they have set up for the world. Those whose preaching for twenty centuries had been to humiliate the realist passions in favour of something transcendental, have set themselves (with a science and a consciousness which will stupify history) to the task of making these passions, and the impulses which ensure them, the highest of virtues, while they cannot show too much scorn for the existence which in any respect raises itself beyond the material. I shall now describe the principal aspects of this phenomenon.

A. The ‘clerks’ praise attachment to the particular and denounce the feeling of the universal

In the first place, the ‘clerks’ have set out to exalt the will of men to feel conscious of themselves as distinct from others, and to proclaim as contemptible every tendency to establish oneself in a universal. With the exception of certain authors like Tolstoi and Anatole France, whose teaching moreover is now looked on with contempt by most of their colleagues, all the influential moralists of Europe during the past fifty years, Bourget, Barrès, Maurras, Péguy, d’Annunzio, Kipling, the immense majority of German thinkers, have praised the efforts of men to feel conscious of themselves in their nation and race, to the extent that this distinguishes them from others and opposes them to others, and have made them ashamed of every aspiration to feel conscious of themselves as men in the general sense and in the sense of rising above ethnical aims. Those whose activity since the time of the Stoics had been devoted to preaching the extinction of national egotism in the interest of an abstract and eternal entity, set out to denounce every feeling of this kind and to proclaim the lofty morality of that egotism. In our age the descendants of Erasmus, Montaigne, Voltaire, have denounced humanitarianism as a moral degeneration, nay, as an intellectual degeneration, in that it implies ‘a total absence of practical common sense’; for practical common sense has become the measure of intellectual values with these strange ‘clerks’.

I should like to draw a distinction between humanitarianism as I mean it here—a sensitiveness to the abstract quality of what is human, to Montaigne’s ‘whole form of human condition’—and the feeling which is usually called humanitarianism, by which is meant the love for human beings existing in the concrete. The former impulse (which would more accurately be called humanism) is the attachment to a concept. It is a pure passion of the intelligence, implying no terrestrial love. It is quite easy to conceive of a person plunging into the concept of what is human without having the least desire even to see a man. This is the form assumed by love of humanity in the great patricians of the mind like Erasmus, Malebranche, Spinoza, Goethe, who all were men, it appears, not very anxious to throw themselves into the arms of their neighbours. The second humanitarianism is a state of the heart and therefore the portion of plebeian souls. It occurs among moralists in periods when lofty intellectual discipline disappears among them and gives way to sentimental exaltation, I mean in the eighteenth century (chiefly with Diderot) and above all in the nineteenth century, with Michelet, Quinet, Proudhon, Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel. This sentimental form of humanitarianism and forgetfulness of its conceptual form explain the unpopularity of this doctrine with so many distinguished minds, who discover two equally repulsive commonplaces in the arsenal of political ideology. One of them is ‘the patriotic bore’ and the other ‘the universal embrace’.⁠[58]

The humanitarianism which holds in honour the abstract quality of what is human, is the only one which allows us to love all men. Obviously, as soon as we look at men in the concrete, we inevitably find that this quality is distributed in different quantities, and we have to say with Renan: ‘In reality one is more or less a man, more or less the son of God ... I see no reason why a Papuan should be immortal.’ Modern equalitarians, by failing to understand that there can be no equality except in the abstract and that inequality is the essence of the concrete, have merely displayed the extraordinary vulgarity of their minds as well as their amazing political clumsiness.⁠[59]

Humanism, as I have defined it, has nothing to do with internationalism. Internationalism is a protest against national egotism, not on behalf of a spiritual passion, but on behalf of another egotism, another earthly passion. It is the impulse of a certain category of men—labourers, bankers, industrialists—who unite across frontiers in the name of private and practical interests, and who only oppose the national spirit because it thwarts them in satisfying those interests.⁠[60]

In comparison with such impulses, national passion appears an idealistic and disinterested impulse. In short, humanism is also something entirely different from cosmopolitanism, which is the simple desire to enjoy the advantages of all nations and all their cultures, and is generally exempt from all moral dogmatism.⁠[61] But let us come back to this movement of the ‘clerks’ exhorting the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in what makes them distinct from others.

What will especially amaze history in this movement of the ‘clerks’ is the perfection with which they have carried it out. They have exhorted the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in what makes them the most distinct from others, in their poets rather than in their scientists, in their legends rather than in their philosophies, since poetry (as they perfectly well perceived) is infinitely more national, more separating than the products of pure intelligence.⁠[62] They have exhorted the peoples to honour their poets’ characteristics insofar as they are peculiar to them and are not universal. Recently a young Italian writer praised his language because it is only used in Italy, and poured scorn on French because it is employed universally.⁠[63] They have exhorted the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in everything which makes them distinct from others, not only in their language, art, and literature, but in their dress, houses, furniture, and food. During the past half century it has been a common experience to see serious writers (to go no further than France) exhorting their compatriots to remain faithful to French fashions, French hair-dressing, French dining rooms, French cooking, French cars. They have exhorted the peoples to feel themselves distinct even in their vices. The German historians, says Fustel de Coulanges, urge their nation to be intoxicated with its personality, even to its barbarity. The French moralist does not lag behind and desires his compatriots to accept their ‘national determinism’ in its ‘indivisible totality’, with its injustices as well as its wisdom, with its fanaticism as well as its enlightenment, its pettiness as well as its grandeur. Another, (Maurras) declares: ‘Good or bad, our tastes are ours and it is always permissible to take ourselves as the sole judges and models of our lives’. Once again, the remarkable thing here is not that such things should be said, but that they should be said by the ‘clerks’, by a class of men whose purpose hitherto has been to urge their fellow-citizens to feel conscious of themselves in what is common to all men, that they should be said in France by the descendants of Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, and Renan.

This glorifying of national particularism, so unexpected among all ‘clerks’ is especially so among those whom I described as ‘pre-eminently clerks’—the Churchmen. Those who for centuries have exhorted men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences in order to take cognizance of each other in the divine essence which brings all men together, have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon is given, for their ‘fidelity to the French soul’, for ‘the immutability of their German consciousness’, for the ‘fervour of their Italian hearts’.⁠[64] The sight is indeed surprising and remarkable! What would be thought by him who, by the mouth of his apostle, declared: ‘There is neither Greek nor Jew nor barbarian, but Christ is in all things,’ if to-day he entered one of his churches and saw offered to the veneration of his faithful, a national heroine with a sword on her thigh and a flag in her hand?⁠[65]

This glorification of national particularisms, at least with the precision observable to-day, is undoubtedly something new in the history of the Church. It is not necessary to go back as far as Saint Augustine, who preached the extinction of all patriotisms in the embrace of ‘the City of God’; nor even to Bossuet, who shows us the indignation of Jesus at observing ‘that because we are separated by a few rivers or mountains, we seem to have forgotten that we are all of one nature’. So recently as 1849 a lofty assembly of prelates asserted that ‘this movement of nationalities is a relic of paganism, differences of language are a consequence of sin and the fall of man’. Certainly this declaration was an interested one, since it was provoked by the Most Catholic Francis Joseph to check the separatist tendencies among the peoples of his Empire; but I dare to assert that the Church would no longer make such a declaration, even for motives of interest. I shall be told that even if the Church wished to do so, she could only do it under penalty of delivering up her ministers to a terrible unpopularity among their respective peoples. As if the ‘clerk’s’ function were not to tell the laymen truths which are displeasing to them, and to pay the price at the expense of his own peace!

I do not ask so much. Is there a single prelate in any pulpit of Europe who would now dare to pronounce: ‘The Christian is both a cosmopolitan and a patriot. These two qualities are not incompatible. The world indeed is one common fatherland, or, to speak in more Christian terms, one common exile.’ (Pastoral letter ‘On the pretended philosophy of modern infidels,’ by Le Franc de Pompignon, Bishop of Puy, 1763. The ‘infidels’ here are those who refuse the Church the right to be cosmopolitan.)

Some ‘clerks’ do better, and assert that by extolling national particularisms they are in complete harmony with the fundamental spirit of the Church, especially with the teaching of the great Doctors of the Middle Ages. (This is the thesis which opposes Catholicism to Christianity.) Need I recall the fact that the most national of these Doctors limited themselves to considering national particularisms as an inevitable condition of an earthly and inferior world, which must be respected like everything else which is the will of God? Or that they never exhorted men to intensify this feeling in their hearts, still less did they ever think of putting this intensification before them as an exercise in moral self-perfection?

When the Church in past times did approve of something in patriotism, it was fraternity among fellow-citizens, like love of man for other men, but not his opposition to other men. She approved of patriotism as an extension of human love, and not as a limitation of it.⁠[66]

But the most remarkable thing in all this is that recently—precisely since the time when Benedict XV was reproached during the last war for not having denounced the arrogance of German nationalism—there has arisen a school in the bosom of the Church which tries to prove that by acting in this way the Holy Father had simply obeyed the teaching of his Divine Master, who is supposed to have preached explicitly the love of a man for his own nation. Could anything better symbolize the determination of the modern ‘clerks’ to place their credit and their activities at the service of lay passions than these Churchmen making Jesus an apostle of nationalism?

These strange Christians express themselves thus:

‘Jesus does not look beyond the frontiers of his own country with the idea of bestowing his benefactions upon other nations. He declares to the Canaanitish woman, whose daughter he heals against his own wish, that “his mission is only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. xv, 24). He sent his first disciples among the Israelites. And notice how he insists that they shall not go elsewhere. “Go not on the paths of the Gentiles, and enter not the cities of the Samaritans, but go first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matt. x, 6.) Later on, it will be time enough to announce the good news to foreigners, but first of all we must bring it to our own people. This is what he means by the words, so full of patriotic meaning and love: “the house of Israel.” A group of human beings possessing the same blood, the same language, the same religion, the same tradition, form “a house”. These particularities are so many dividing walls.’⁠[67]

They also say:

‘The most striking thing about Jesus when he consents to pay tribute to Caesar and refuses the crown which the people offer him in the desert, is not so much his prudence and his disinterestedness, as his patriotism ... One of the most important characteristics of Jesus’s teaching is its absolutely national character....’⁠[68]

If the reader desires, he will himself go and find out the solidity of the proofs on which these teachers base their thesis (one of these proofs is that Jesus was strongly attached to the institutions of his nation, which he showed by accepting circumcision eight days after he was born). The point I wish to insist on is the eagerness of these Christians to make their Master a supporter of national egotism, at least at one period of his life.

These views on the attitude of the Church towards nationalism seem to me to remain unmodified by the recent declarations of the Holy See concerning a certain type of French nationalism, for these declarations only condemn an openly anti-Christian nationalism (hence a very exceptional form of nationalism) and do not utter a word of blame for the desire of the peoples to set themselves up as distinct from others and to reject universalism. Moreover, this is how a universalist is answered by a publication which is to some extent the official organ of Pontifical views:

‘Yes, all men are sons of one Father; but they were divided in the beginning and have never been brought together again. The family was broken up and never joined up again. On the contrary. Certainly, I am glad to recognize the fraternity of all living beings; but are all the dead our fathers? Have they all loved us? Have they all suffered and laboured for us? Some lived on the other side of the globe, and, so to speak, in another world. Some laboured against us, or, if they supported our ancestors, it was in the hope of safeguarding or enriching their own bequest to others, not to us. Where is the debt? If the home is open to all comers, it is no longer a home but an inn.’⁠[69]

It appears that we must look among those who have left the Church, to find Christian ministers who proclaim the true teaching of their Master, and who declare with no beating about the bush: ‘The Gospel of Jesus does not imply any country, but obliterates the fatherland.’⁠[70]

The modern ‘clerk’ denounces the feeling of universalism, not only for the profit of the nation, but for that of a class. Our age has beheld moralists who have declared to the bourgeois world (or to the working classes) that, far from trying to check the feeling of their differences from others and to feel conscious of their common human nature, they should on the contrary try to feel conscious of this difference in all its profundity and irreducibleness, and that this effort is fine and noble, whereas every desire for union is here a sign of baseness and cowardice, and also of weakness of mind. This, as everyone knows, is the thesis of the ‘Reflections on Violence’, which has been praised by a whole galaxy of apostles of the modern soul. There is certainly something more novel in this attitude of the ‘clerks’ to class differences than in their attitude towards national differences. To discover the results of this teaching and the additional hatred (hitherto unknown) which it has given to either class in doing violence to its adversary, you have only to look at Italian Fascism for the bourgeois class, and at Russian Bolshevism for the working class.⁠[71]

Here again we see realism trying to shelter under cover of the Church. We see certain Catholic teachers striving to prove that, by encouraging the bourgeois class, in the name of morality, to feel conscious of themselves as distinct from the opposing class, to plunge religiously into consciousness of the characteristics which are proper to their own class, and especially (Johannet) to intensify their feeling of property, these teachers are merely acting in conformity with the teaching of the Church.⁠[72]

It is easy to point out the equivocation upon which this claim is based. The Church does indeed admit class distinctions. She exhorts the faithful to recognize and even to respect them, as something imposed by God upon a fallen world. She also exhorts the privileged to accept their situation, to carry out the activities it implies, and to perform ‘the duties of their state of life’. She even tells them that by performing these duties they are pleasing God and ‘making an act of prayer’. But the Church never exhorted them to glorify in themselves the feeling of this distinction, still less did she ever do so in the name of morality. On the contrary, she exhorted them in the name of morality to extinguish (beneath this privileged life) all belief in a particularity of essence in their persons, and told them to feel conscious of themselves in that humanity which is common to all men beneath the inequality of ranks and states of life.⁠[73] Jesus Christ, the Church states explicitly and constantly, only accepts the man who is reconciled, i.e. the man who has obliterated from his heart every feeling of difference between himself and other men. (See Bossuet’s Sermon on Reconciliation.) It seems unnecessary to insist further on the unimpeachable character of this Christian teaching—I am speaking of teaching, not of practice. But one cannot meditate too much on the eagerness of so many modern Church teachers to try to find some means of sanctifying bourgeois egotism through the words of the Gospels.⁠[74]

Let me point out another and remarkable form of this extolling of particularism by the ‘clerks’: the extolling of particular systems of morality and the scorn for universal morality. During the past half century a whole school, not only of men of action but of serious philosophers, has taught that a people should form a conception of its rights and duties from a study of its particular genius, its history, its geographical position, the particular circumstances in which it happens to be, and not from the commands of a so-called conscience of man in all times and places. Moreover, this same school teaches that a class should construct a scale of good and evil, determined by an inquiry into its particular needs, its particular aims, the particular conditions surrounding it, and should cease to encumber itself with such sensibilities as ‘justice in itself’, ‘humanity in itself’ and other ‘rags and tatters’ of general morality. To-day with Barrès, Maurras, Sorel, even Durckheim⁠[75] we are witnessing the complete bankruptcy among the ‘clerks’ of that form of soul which, from Plato to Kant, looked for the notion of good in the heart of eternal and disinterested man. The example of Germany in 1914 shows the results of this teaching which exhorts a group of men to set themselves up as the sole judges of the morality of their actions, shows what deification of their appetites it leads to, what codification of their violence, what tranquillity in carrying out their plans. One day perhaps we shall see the same thing throughout Europe exemplified by the bourgeois class, unless the doctrines of that class are turned against itself and we see it exemplified by the working classes.⁠[76]

I dare to say that the indignation of certain French moralists at the action of Germany in 1914 surprises me, when I reflect that some sixteen years earlier, during the famous ‘affair’ which I have already mentioned, these moralists preached to their compatriots exactly the same doctrines, urging them to reject the concept of absolute justice, and to desire only a form of justice ‘adapted to France’, to its particular genius, its particular history, its particular, eternal, and present needs.⁠[77] For the honour of these thinkers—I mean for the honour of their consistency—one likes to think that their indignation in 1914 was not the result of any moral conviction, but only of the desire to place the enemy of their nation in the wrong with a naïve universe.

This last-named activity of the ‘clerks’ seems to me one of those which best display their determination and skill in serving the passions of the laymen. If a man exhorts his compatriots to recognize only a personal morality and to reject all universal morality, he is showing himself a master of the art of encouraging them to want to be distinct from all other men, i.e. of the art of perfecting national passion in them, at least in one of its aspects. The desire to take none but oneself as a judge of one’s actions and to scorn every opinion of other people is undoubtedly a source of strength to a nation, as every exertion of pride is a source of strength to an institution, whose fundamental principle—whatever may be said to the contrary—is the assertion of an ego against a non-ego. What ruined Germany in the last war was not its ‘irritating arrogance’, as is asserted by certain visionaries who have made up their minds that malevolence of soul must be an element of weakness in practical life, but the fact that its material strength was not equal to its arrogance. When arrogance finds an equivalent material power at its disposal, it is very far from ruining nations; witness Rome and the Prussia of Bismarck. The ‘clerks’ who, thirty years ago, exhorted France to make herself the sole judge of her own actions and to despise eternal morality, showed that they possessed in the highest degree the perception of the national interest, insofar as that interest is wholly realist and has nothing to do with disinterested passion. It remains to be seen, once more, whether the function of the ‘clerks’ is to serve this sort of interests.

But the modern ‘clerks’ have held up universal truth to the scorn of mankind, as well as universal morality. Here the ‘clerks’ have positively shown genius in their effort to serve the passions of the laymen. It is obvious that truth is a great impediment to those who wish to set themselves up as distinct; from the very moment when they accept truth, it condemns them to be conscious of themselves in a universal. What a joy for them to learn that this universal is a mere phantom, that there exist only particular truths, ‘Lorrain truths, Provençal truths, Britanny truths, the harmony of which in the course of centuries constitutes what is beneficial, respectable, true in France’⁠[78] (the neighbour similarly speaks of what is true in Germany), that in other words Pascal had the mind of a clown, and that what is true on one side of the Pyrenees may perfectly well be error on the other side! Humanity hears the same teaching about the classes and learns that there is a bourgeois truth and a working-class truth; better still, that the functioning of our minds should be different according to whether we are working men or bourgeois. The source of your troubles (Sorel teaches the working classes) is that you do not think in the mental way suited to your class. His disciple, Johannet, says the same thing to the capitalist class. Perhaps we shall soon see the results of this truly supreme art of the ‘clerks’ in exasperating the feeling in their differences among the classes.

The cult for the particular and the scorn for the universal is a reversal of values quite generally characteristic of the teaching of the modern ‘clerks’, who proclaim them in a far higher sphere of thought than politics. The metaphysics adopted in the last twenty years by almost all those who think or pretend to think, set up as the supreme state of human consciousness that state—‘duration’—where we succeed in taking cognizance of ourselves in what is most individual, most distinct from everything not ourselves, and in freeing ourselves from those forms of thought (concept, reason, habits of speech) through which we can only become conscious of ourselves in what is common to us and others. These metaphysics put forward as a superior form of cognizance of the world that which grasps each thing by what is unique in it, distinct from every other, and is full of scorn for the mind which seeks to discover general states of being. Our age has seen a fact hitherto unknown, at least from my point of view; and this in metaphysics preaching adoration for the contingent, and scorn for the eternal.⁠[79] Nothing could show better how profound is the modern ‘clerk’s’ desire to exalt the real, the practical side of existence, and to degrade the ideal, the truly metaphysical side. In the history of philosophy this veneration for the individual comes from the German thinkers (Schlegel, Nietzsche, Lotze), while the metaphysical cult of the universal (added to a certain contempt for the experimental) is pre-eminently a legacy of Greece to the human mind. So here again, and moreover in its profoundest part, the teaching of the modern ‘clerks’ shows the triumph of Germanic values and the bankruptcy of Hellenism.

I should like to point out another form, not the least remarkable, which this preaching of particularism assumes among the ‘clerks’. I mean their exhortations to consider everything only as it exists in time, that is as it constitutes a succession of particular states, a ‘becoming’, a ‘history’, and never as it presents a state of permanence beyond time under this succession of distinct cases. I mean especially their assertion that this view of things in their historical aspect is the only serious and philosophical view, and that the need to look at them in their eternal aspect is a form of the child’s taste for ghosts, and should be merely smiled at. Need I point out that this conception inspires the whole of modern thought? It exists among a whole group of literary critics, who, on their own showing, inquire far less whether a work is beautiful than whether it expresses ‘the present’ aspirations of ‘the contemporary soul’.⁠[80] It may be seen in a whole school of moralist-historians who admire a doctrine, not because it is just or good, but because it embodies the morality of its time, the scientific spirit of its time. (This is the principal reason why Sorel admires Bergsonism and why Nietzsche admires the philosophy of Nicolas de Cuse.) It may be seen especially in all our metaphysicians. Whether they put forward Entwickelung or Duration or Creative Evolution or Pluralism or Integral Experience or the Concrete Universal, they all teach that the absolute is developed in time, in the circumstantial, and proclaim the decadence of that form of mind which, from Plato to Kant, hallows existence as conceived beyond change.⁠[81] If, with Pythagoras, we assume that the Cosmos is the place of regulated and uniform existence, and the Ouranos the place of the becoming and the moving, we may say that all modern metaphysics place the Ouranos at the top of their scale of values and hold the Cosmos in very slight esteem. Is it not remarkable to see the ‘clerks’, even in the lofty function of metaphysicians, teaching the laymen that the real alone is worthy of consideration, and that the supersensible is only worthy of derisive laughter?⁠[82]

(B) The ‘clerks’ praise attachment to the practical, and denounce love of the spiritual

But the ‘clerks’ with their doctrines have inflamed the realism of the laymen in other ways besides praising the particular and denouncing the universal. At the very top of the scale of moral values they place the possession of concrete advantages, of material power and the means by which they are procured; and they hold up to scorn the pursuit of truly spiritual advantages, of non-practical or disinterested values.

This they have done, first of all, as regards the State. For twenty centuries the ‘clerks’ preached to the world that the State should be just; now they proclaim that the State should be strong and should care nothing about being just. (Remember the attitude of the chief French teachers during the Dreyfus affair.) Convinced that the strength of the State depends upon authority, they defend autocratic systems, arbitrary government, the reason of State, the religions which teach blind submission to authority, and they cannot sufficiently denounce all institutions based on liberty and discussion.⁠[83] This denunciation of liberalism, notably by the vast majority of contemporary men of letters, will be one of the things in this age most astonishing to History, especially on the part of the French. With their eyes fixed on the powerful State, they have praised the State disciplined in the Prussian manner, where everyone has his post, and under orders from above, labours for the greatness of the nation, without there being any place left for particular wills.⁠[84] Owing to their cult of the powerful State (and also for other reasons I shall mention later), they want the military element to preponderate in the State, they want it to have a right to privileges and they want the civil element to agree to this right. (See L’Appel au Soldat, and the declarations of numerous writers during the Dreyfus affair.) It is certainly something new to see men of thought preaching the abasement of the toga before the sword, especially in the country of Montesquieu and Renan. And then they preach that the State should be strong and contemptuous of justice, above all in its relations with other States. To this end they praise in the head of the State the will to aggrandisement, the desire for ‘strong frontiers’, the effort to keep his neighbours under his domination. And they glorify those means which to them seem likely to attain these ends, i.e. sudden aggression, trickery, bad faith, contempt for treaties. This apology for Machiavellianism has inspired all the German historians for the past fifty years, and in France it is professed by very influential teachers, who exhort France to venerate her Kings because they are supposed to have been models of the purely practical spirit, exempt from all respect for any silly justice in their relations with their neighbours.

The novelty of this attitude among the ‘clerks’ can best be displayed by quoting the famous answer of Socrates to the realist in the Georgias:

‘In the persons of Themistocles, Cimon and Pericles, you praise men who made their fellow citizens good cheer, by serving them with everything they desired without caring to teach them what is good and right in food. They have enlarged the State, cry the Athenians, but they do not see that this enlargement is nothing but a swelling, a tumour filled with corruption. This is all that has been achieved by these former politicians by filling the city with ports, arsenals, walls, tributes, and the like follies, and by not adding Temperance and Justice.’

Up to our own times, in theory at least (but it is with theories I am dealing here) the supremacy of the spiritual proclaimed in those words has been adopted by all those who, explicitly or otherwise, have proposed a scale of values to the world, whether through the Church, or the Renaissance, or the eighteenth century. One can guess the derisive laughter of a Barrès or any Italian moralist (to speak only of the Latin races) at this disdain of power for the benefit of justice, and their severity for the manner in which this son of Athens judges those who made his city materially powerful. For Socrates, in this respect the perfect model of the ‘clerk’ who is faithful to his essential function, ports, arsenals, walls are ‘follies’, and the serious things are justice and temperance. Those who to-day should perform the duties of a Socrates consider that it is justice which is a folly—‘a cloud’—and the serious things are the arsenals, the walls. To-day the ‘clerk’ has made himself Minister of War. Moreover, one of the most revered modern moralists definitely approves of the judges who condemned Socrates, as good guardians of worldly interests.⁠[85] And that is something which has not been seen among the educators of the human soul since the evening when Crito closed his master’s eyelids.

I say that the modern ‘clerks’ have preached that the State should be strong and care nothing about being just; and in fact the ‘clerks’ do give this assertion the characteristic of preaching, of moral teaching. I cannot insist too often that in this lies their great originality. When Machiavelli advises the Prince to carry out the Machiavellian scheme of action, he invests those actions with no sort of morality or beauty. For him morality remains what it is for everyone else, and does not cease to remain so because he observes (not without melancholy) that it is incompatible with politics. ‘The Prince,’ says Machiavelli, ‘must have an understanding always ready to do good, but he must be able to enter into evil when he is forced to do so’; thereby showing that for him evil, even if it aids politics, still remains evil. The modern realists are the moralists of realism. For them, the act which makes the State strong is invested with a moral character by the fact that it does so, and this whatever the act may be. The evil which serves politics ceases to be evil and becomes good. This position is evident in Hegel, in the Pangermanists and in Barrès; it is no less evident among realists like M. Maurras and his disciples, in spite of their insistence in declaring that they profess no morality. Perhaps these teachers do not profess any morality, at least expressly, in what concerns private life, but they very clearly profess a morality in the political order of things, if by morality is meant everything which puts forward a scale of good and evil. For them as for Hegel, the practical in politics is the moral, and if what the rest of the world calls moral is in opposition to the practical, then it is the immoral. Such precisely is the perfectly moralist meaning of the famous campaign of ‘false patriotism’. It seems as if we might say that for M. Maurras the practical is the divine, and that his ‘atheism’ consists less in denying God than in shifting Him to man and his political work. I think I can describe the work of this writer accurately by saying that it is the divinizing of politics.⁠[86] This displacement of morality is undoubtedly the most important achievement of the modern ‘clerks’, and the most deserving of the historian’s attention. It is a great turning-point in the history of man when those who speak in the name of pondered thought come and tell him that his political egotisms are divine, and that everything which labours to relax them is degrading. The results of this teaching were shown by the example of Germany a decade ago.⁠[87]

The extent to which the modern ‘clerks’ have made innovations may be judged by the fact that up till our own times men had only received two sorts of teaching in what concerns the relations between politics and morality. One was Plato’s, and it said: ‘Morality decides politics’; the other was Machiavelli’s, and it said: ‘Politics have nothing to do with morality.’ To-day they receive a third. M. Maurras teaches: ‘Politics decide morality.’⁠[88] However, the real departure is not that this doctrine should be put before them, but that they should accept it. Callicles asserted that force is the only morality; but the thinking world despised him. Let me also mention that Machiavelli was covered with insults by most of the moralists of his time, at least in France.

The modern world also hearkens to other moralists of realism, who are not lacking in influence as such; I mean the statesmen. Here I shall point to the same sort of change as above. Formerly, leaders of States practised realism, but did not honour it; Louis XI, Charles the Fifth of Spain, Richelieu, Louis XIV, did not claim that their actions were moral. They saw morality where the Gospel had showed it to them, and they did not attempt to displace it because they did not apply it.⁠[89] With them morality was violated, but moral notions remain intact; and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization. Signor Mussolini proclaims the morality of his politics of force and the immorality of everything which opposes it. Like the writer, the man of government, who formerly was merely a realist, is now the apostle of realism; and the majesty of his function—if not of his person—gives weight to his apostleship.

The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with a system of morality, a metaphysics, a mysticism. Richelieu, who need account only to his King, is able to talk only of the practical, and leaves visions of the eternal to others. Mussolini, Bethmann-Hollweg, Herriot, are condemned to these heights.⁠[90] Moreover, this shows how great to-day is the number of those whom I can call ‘clerks’, since by that word I mean all those who speak to the world in a transcendental manner. Consequently, I have a right to demand that they give an account of their acts as ‘clerks’.

The preachers of political realism often claim to base themselves on the teaching of the Church, and call her a hypocrite when she condemns their theses. This claim has little foundation as regards the teaching of the Church before the nineteenth century, but has much more foundation if we consider the present age. I doubt whether one could now find from the pen of a modern theologian any passage so brutally denunciatory of a war of aggression as the following:—

‘Glaringly unjust is the war of him who declares war only from ambition and from the desire to extend his dominions beyond their legitimate boundaries, from the desire to possess a more commodious country in which to establish himself, from the fear of the great power of a neighbouring prince with whom he is at peace, or from the desire to despoil a rival solely because he is thought unworthy of the possessions or States he holds or of a right which legitimately belongs to him, because a ruler is inconvenienced by him and wants to get rid of this inconvenience by force of arms.’⁠[91] On the other hand, there are an immense number of works to-day which need only a little twisting to make them justify every attempt at conquest. For instance, the view that a war is just ‘if it can invoke the necessity of safeguarding the common good and public tranquillity, the recapture of things unjustly carried off, the repression of rebels, the defence of the innocent’.⁠[92] And the view which asserts that ‘war is just when it is necessary to a nation either to defend itself against invasion, or to overthrow the obstacles thwarting the exercise of its rights.’⁠[93] At the beginning of the last century the Church still taught that war could only be just for one of the two belligerents.⁠[94] It is heavy with consequences that she has now abandoned this position and to-day asserts that war may be just on both sides at once, ‘from the moment when each of the two adversaries, without being certain of its right, considers it as simply probable after having taken the opinion of its counsellors’.⁠[95] Here is another serious thing: In the past, war would only be declared just when it was against an adversary who had committed an injury accompanied by a moral intention, whereas to-day it may be declared just if it is directed against a material injury caused without any malice,⁠[96] for instance, an accidental violation of frontier. It is certain that to-day Napoleon and Bismarck could find in the teaching of the Church more justification than ever for their incursions.⁠[97]

The modern ‘clerks’ have preached this realism to the classes as well as to the nations. They say to the working class as well as to the bourgeois class: ‘Organize yourselves, become the stronger, seize on power or exert yourself to retain it if you already possess it; laugh at all efforts to bring more charity, more justice or any other “rot”⁠[98] into your relations with the other class, you have been cheated long enough by that sort of thing.’ And here again they do not say: ‘Become so, because necessity demands it,’ they say, and that is the novelty of it: ‘Become so, because morality, aesthetics demand it; to wish to be powerful is the sign of an elevated soul, to wish to be just the sign of a base soul.’ This is the teaching of Nietzsche,⁠[99] of Sorel, applauded by a whole thinking (so-called) Europe; this is the enthusiasm of Europe, when it is attracted by Socialism, for the doctrines of Marx, its scorn for the doctrines of Proudhon.⁠[100] The ‘clerks’ have said the same thing to the parties contending within the same nation. ‘Make yourself the stronger,’ they say to one or other, according to their own passion, ‘and do away with everything which obstructs you; free yourself from the foolish prejudice which exhorts you to make allowances for your adversary, to establish with him a system of justice and harmony.’ We all know the admiration professed by a whole army of ‘thinkers’ in all countries for the Italian government, which simply outlaws all citizens who do not approve of it. Until our own times the educators of the human soul, disciples of Aristotle, urged mankind to denounce as infamous any State which was an organized faction. The pupils of Signor Mussolini and M. Maurras learn to reverence such a State.⁠[101]

This extolling of the ‘strong State’ by the modern ‘clerks’ appears also in certain teachings which, it may be asserted, would greatly have amazed their ancestors, at least the great ones:—

(a) The affirmation of the rights of custom, history, the past (to the extent, be it understood, that they support the systems of force) in opposition to the rights of reason. I say the affirmation of the rights of custom. The modern traditionalists do not simply teach, like Descartes or Malebranche, that custom is upon the whole quite a good thing, and that there is more wisdom in submitting to it than opposing it. They teach that custom has a right, the right, and consequently that custom should be respected not only from the point of view of interest, but of justice. The arguments in favour of the ‘historical right’ of Germany to Alsace, the ‘historical right’ of the French monarchy, are not purely political positions, they are moral positions. They claim to be accepted in the name of ‘true justice’, of which (they say) their adversaries have a false conception.⁠[102] To determine what is just by the ‘accomplished fact’ is certainly a new sort of teaching, especially among the peoples who for twenty centuries derived their conception of what is just from the companions of Socrates. Here again, the soul of Greece has given place to the soul of Prussia among the educators of mankind. The spirit which speaks here—and from all the teachers of Europe, Mediterranean as well as Germanic—is the spirit of Hegel: ‘The history of the world is the justice of the world.’ (Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht.)

(b) The extolling of policy founded on experience—by which is meant that a society should be governed on principles which have proved that they can make it strong, and by ‘illusions’ which would tend to make it just. It is in this narrowly practical sense that the cult of experimental politics is a new thing among the ‘clerks’. For if we mean by the phrase the respect for principles which have showed that they are fitted to make a society not only strong but just, the recommendation of such a policy in opposition to a purely rational policy appeared in the thinking world long before the disciples of Taine or Auguste Comte.⁠[103] Long before our ‘organizing empiricists’ Spinoza wanted political science to be an experimental science, and desired that the conditions under which States endure should be sought from observation at least as much as from reason. (See his attack on the Utopians, Treatise, I, i.) But he believed he learned from observation that these conditions do not solely consist in States possessing good armies and obedient peoples, but in their respecting the rights of citizens and even of neighbouring peoples.⁠[104] The cult of experimental politics to-day is accompanied in those who adopt it by a posture which they evidently mean to be striking, and which in fact is so. We all know with what fatalistic visages, what scornful inflexibility, what dark certainty of grasping the absolute, they declare that in matters of politics ‘they consider only the facts’. Here, especially among the French thinkers, is a new kind of Romanticism, which I shall call the Romanticism of Positivism, the chief representatives of which will rise up in the imagination of my readers without its being necessary for me to name them. Moreover, this cult brings out a silliness of mind which to me seems wholly an acquisition of the nineteenth century,⁠[105] i.e. the belief that the teachings to be drawn from the past (supposing that they exist) will come straight out of an examination of the facts, viz. desires which have been realized. As if the desires which have not been realized were not as important, and perhaps more important, if you reflect that they may quite well come to fill the world’s stage now.⁠[106] Let me add that this cult of fact also claims to be the sole discoverer of ‘the meaning of history’ and ‘the philosophy of history’, which there again shows a weakness of mind from which the preceding ages seem to have been free. When Bossuet and Hegel built up philosophies of history they were certainly no more metaphysicians than Taine or Comte or any of their noisy disciples, but at least they knew that they were so, that they could not be otherwise, and were not so naïve as to think themselves ‘pure scientists’.

(c) The assertion that political forms should be adapted to ‘man as he is and always will be’ (viz. unsocial and bloody, therefore eternally needing systems of coercion and military institutions). This effort of so many modern teachers to assert the imperfectability of human nature appears as one of their strangest attitudes, if you realize that it tends towards nothing less than asserting the complete uselessness of their function, and proving that they have completely ceased to realize its very essence. When we see moralists, educators, professional providers of spiritual guidance, assert at the spectacle of human barbarism that ‘man is thus’, that ‘he must be taken thus’, that ‘you will never change him’, we are tempted to ask them what is their reason for existing. And when we hear them reply that ‘they are positive minds and not Utopians’, ‘that they are concerned with what is, not with what might be’, we are staggered to see that they do not know that the moralist is essentially a Utopian, and that the nature of moral action is precisely that it creates its object by affirming it. But we recover when we notice that they are in no wise ignorant of this, and know perfectly well that by affirming it they will create that eternity of barbarism necessary to the maintenance of the institutions which are dear to them.⁠[107]

The dogma of the incurable wickedness of man has another root among some who profess it. This is a Romantic pleasure in picturing the human race as walled in by an inevitable and eternal woe. From this point of view we may say that there has grown up among certain political writers of our time a real Romanticism of Pessimism, as false in its absoluteness as the Optimism of Rousseau and Michelet, in hatred of whom it has arisen, while its haughty and so-called scientific attitude is most impressive to simple souls.⁠[108] This doctrine has undoubtedly borne fruits outside the world of literature, and at its voice there has arisen a humanity which believes in nothing but its egotisms and merely laughs at the naïve persons who still think that it might become better. The modern ‘clerk’ has accomplished a truly new work—he has taught man to deny his divinity. The import of such a work is obvious. The Stoics claimed that pain is abolished if it is denied; the thing is disputable in the matter of pain, but it is absolutely true in the matter of moral perfectability.

I shall point out two more teachings inspired in the modern ‘clerks’, by their preaching of the ‘strong State’, and it will not be necessary to add that they are new in the ministers of the spiritual:—

The first is the teaching whereby they declare to Man that he is great to the extent that he strives to act and to think as his ancestors, his race, his environment thought, and ignores ‘individualism’. Thirty years ago many of the French teachers hurled anathemas against the man who ‘claimed to seek truth for himself’, to arrive at his own opinion, instead of adopting the opinion of his nation which had been told what it ought to think by its vigilant leaders. Our age has seen priests of the mind teaching that the gregarious is the praiseworthy form of thought, and that independent thought is contemptible. It is moreover certain that a group which desires to be strong has no use for the man who claims to think for himself.⁠[109]

The second is the teaching whereby they declare to men that the fact that a group is numerous constitutes a right. This is the morality which the over-populated nations hear from many of their thinkers, while the other nations hear from many of theirs that if their low birth-rate continues they will become the objects of a ‘legitimate’ extermination. The rights of numerousness admitted by men who claim to belong to the life of the mind—that is what modern humanity sees. But it is certain that if a nation is to be strong, it must be numerous.

This cult of the strong State and the moral methods which ensure it have been preached to mankind by the ‘clerks’ far beyond the domain of politics, and on a wholly general plane. This is the preaching of Pragmatism whose teaching during the past fifty years by nearly all the influential moralists of Europe is one of the most remarkable turning points in the moral history of the human species. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality of an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral if it seeks its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral act is the act whereby he secures his existence against an environment which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will ‘to power’, that the part of his soul which determines what is good is its ‘will to live’ wherein it is most ‘hostile to all reason’, that the morality of an act is measured by its adaptation to its end, and that the only morality is the morality of circumstances. The educators of the human mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates, a revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all political upheavals.⁠[110]