If Vladimir Jankélévitch’s aversion to Germany is well known, his critique of the French spirit is less familiar. After the war he renounced reading and citing German authors altogether, leaving their works high on his shelf to ensure he would never reach them again. French authors did not suffer such a demotion in the philosopher’s thought. And yet the essay “In Honor and Dignity,” first published in 1948 in Les Temps modernes, constitutes, indeed, one among several occurrences of the virulent critique that Jankélévitch never ceased to address to compatriots who forget the tragedy of World War II. It is of course the denial (which does not require negationism to be disastrous) of concentration camps and extermination that exasperates, but it is also the strange desire to move on, that is, to discharge a present of what it contains of past. For Jankélévitch, as for others among his contemporaries, it is precisely the future that memory matters for.
“In Honor and Dignity” thus sounds as an injunction issued from within to a memory-less people who, through their Parliament, had just enacted an amnesty for collaborators on August 16, 1947. The drama would be purification rather than the Shoah. Two years after the war’s end, the moral and judicial debt of the perpetrators could be settled. France—not only the France of “Vichy-shame,” to borrow the essay’s phrase—had, which had delivered some of its citizens to death in order to secure its own tranquility, regained this tranquility by legally guaranteed immunity. It is against this state of mind in France, whose genealogy Jankélévitch traces, that honor and dignity must rise as unshakable ramparts. If the thesis Jankélévitch defends in this essay is not immediately evident, it does not lack precision or virulence once identified: the generalized collaboration of World War II reveals a disposition toward indifference to the minorities exterminated and toward a search for immediate interest, a search that was instrumentalized by the Germans. This double disposition, revealed when the veneer of the myth of France as resistant is peeled away by the dissolving agent of history, reappears in the legal institution of amnesty for the executioners and in the forgetting of the victims of this tragedy. Saying this—and even repeating it—was the task Jankélévitch set for himself in a text that extends beyond the circumstances of its composition. Intellectual rigor demands, as Paul Celan said, to reveal the shadow side of truth and history.
Perhaps this text needs no preface. After all, Jankélévitch’s books begin in medias res, without an introduction. Yet it may be that beyond a thesis that is at first a touch elusive, the text deserves a few clarifications. In a vein parallel to that of Psychoanalysis of Anti-Semitism, disseminated in Toulouse in 1943 under a veil, Jankélévitch approaches the problem of the legal amnesty of collaborators from a psychological point of view. What in the psychology of a people allows the unforgettable to be forgotten? Certainly, the perverse Nazi strategy, which consists of striking at “categories” of the population to secure the adhesion and obedience of a majority that remains indifferent, is not negligible. By selecting a minority and vulnerable enemy while guaranteeing daily life for others, the oppression imposed by the Germans proved almost insensitively to a population that, henceforth, became enlisted in its sinister cause: “how many bourgeois who knew the war only through newspapers and who read the war-news as if we read reports of floods in China!” Yet by revealing the “old German Machiavellianism,” Jankélévitch reveals above all the weakness of a people who did not feel collectively involved by a defeat that changed nothing about their peaceful existence. And it is not so terrible that the flag of the Third Reich adorned the Eiffel Tower so long as life continued as before. Added to Nazi perversity was French indifference. Adapting to all circumstances, as life adapts to its milieu, the French opinion—“margouline,” as Jankélévitch calls it—made its hereditary foe, the now admirable European bulwark against the Soviets. And everything went on as if in the best of worlds: “Ah! How easy it was to fill the Aryanised contents of NRF!” In its deepest mentality, bourgeois France recognized itself in the Occupation and in the Vichy regime, to the extent that this regime under German tutelage deployed “its ideologues, its philosophers.” If common sense is the most widely shared thing in the world, as Descartes put it with a tinge of irony, “the moral obviousness of shame and treason” was, alas, not.
Driven by the same passion for tranquility, the French hurried to join, at the eleventh hour—the hour of the Wehrmacht’s first reversals—the ranks of the Resistance. Then, driven again by self-interest, public opinion recognized the necessity, as early as 1947, to move on. Deprived of the “heavy and anxious complex of guilt” that, as Jankélévitch showed in his Doctoral thesis completed in 1933, characterizes the human condition, the French people endure a moral handicap whose remedy, in the text, is presented as an awakening. But perhaps this “sickness of abasement is incurable.” The price of shame is high. It consists in recognizing one’s own mediocrity and never denying it. To repent of it without ever forgetting it.
The Traité des vertus, which would appear a year after this essay, describes this difficult yet necessary demand for the purity of intention in the form of sincerity, the end of all lies—with others and with oneself. And if the chance of a new beginning, a new “spring” for France after the war was not seized, it is not forbidden to think that it may be possible today.
To the lack of dignity (of opinion and Parliament) response logically, but also instinctively, the indignation whose heart Frédéric Worms has rightly placed at the center of Jankélévitch’s thought. How, once the war was over, could those who enjoyed and benefited from defeat be fully rehabilitated as citizens of the republic they had trampled? How to explain that amnesia led to amnesty, or amnesty to amnesia? How to understand that either could be morally contemplated from the standpoint of honor? Lacking understanding of how this sentiment that pushes toward uprightness and loyalty seems to have deserted indifferent consciences, one must reopen history books and contend with the temptation of forgetting so that a spring of conscience becomes possible.
The Traité des vertus, published a year after this essay, thus marks the beginning of a long line of works devoted to a necessary awakening—whose essence Françoise Schwab has collected in L’Esprit de résistance. “In Honor and Dignity” announces a struggle that would continue until Jankélévitch’s death, notably in the fight for imprescriptibility, for hunting down Nazis, and for the memory of the countless martyrs as well as for the memory of genuine resistants. It is in this sense, moreover, that the text was republished almost forty years later in a collection titled The Imprescriptible. Four more decades separate us today from that republication, and Jankélévitch’s text, in which philosophical discourse becomes political speech, has certainly not lost its interest, nor its vigor, and perhaps has not lost its timeliness either.
Jankélévitch’s polemical tone thus finds its raison d’être. The aim is not to re-fight the war with words within the semi-peaceful frame of political debate, but to prolong the memory of the war in the fragile memories that are still ours today. Precisely so that the war may never occur again. Misunderstood, Jankélévitch was certainly. The French University, which had stripped him of his post because of the 1940 racial laws, probably did not recognize him at his proper value. Even after his appointment to the Chair of Moral Philosophy in 1953 at the Sorbonne. But this adversity did not shake his determination. Memories of the tragedy, of the Resistance, of the clandestinity (of which the text itself bears witness) were preserved by Jankélévitch. He never refused to publicly speak out to defend that memory, as when he assumed the presidency of the Union for French University (Union universitaire française).
Paradoxically, it was he, the one who merely denounced the haste with which the French Parliament and public opinion had amnestied antisemitism (whether structural or circumstantial makes no difference), who became the racist villain of history — incapable of pardoning Germans with no remorse and unable to understand French people without memory. It is the paradox: the victim (and the spokesperson for victims) became the executioner of poor little consciences that felt faced with their own moral weakness, that is, faced with their dishonor and their indignity.
At a time when antisemitism still disguises itself—presenting itself as legitimate and justifying hatred of Jews—as anti-Zionism, we must hope that we have not grown too accustomed to this infinite winter, without spring on the horizon, in which the Jew is always in the wrong. Wrong to speak, wrong to defend oneself, wrong to exist, in short. It is true that today Jankélévitch has become a thinker admired and celebrated by the general public. And that is a good thing. But one should not forget that his philosophical work still struggles to cross the threshold of the French University and that the definitive lessons he offered on antisemitism and memory have not yet been fully taken up. Eighty years after its publication, “In Honor and Dignity” thus remains our examination of conscience.
It is, in the end, a question of whether “national catastrophes” are recognized by decisive and unequivocal marks. On the surface, the events from 1940 to 1944 that erased France from the world map appear to typify the very thing we call a “national catastrophe”; scarcely is there in all of our history a military defeat more devastating and complete; the capital subjected for four years to foreign occupation, two-thirds of the colony territories under enemy control and plundered by its armies, the entire country subjected to German laws… who would have dared imagine in 1939 such monstrous humiliation, such inconceivable debasement? For four shameful years the swastika fluttered over the Eiffel Tower, insulting a landscape as venerable, in its own way, as the Acropolis of Athens…
And yet it remains true that the catastrophe touched, in their fate and private life, only the resistant and patriotic masses of the population. So numerous they were, the Nazi victims represented merely “categories”: the Jews, the leftists, the fighters, the Freemasons, etc.; the bourgeois mass was not affected. This was one of the ordinary themes of the propaganda “française,” of its posters and tracts: the Germans want only the bad and the métèques; those who have nothing to reproach themselves, that is, the immense majority of this country, honest people, born French, privileged by good conscience and original nationality, those people have nothing to fear from an enemy so correct as he is chivalrous.
But what is a “national” catastrophe that strikes certain classes of citizens while sparing others? It is not a national catastrophe. The paradox of the 1940 disaster lies in this slight contrast between an almost unprecedented politico-military collapse and the relatively lenient destiny toward a large portion of the nation. When in 1917 Russia capitulated after a defeat incomparably less total and less humiliating than ours, the catastrophe was written on every face; famine, the poverty of the state spoke with eloquence of the upheaval that was unraveling Russia’s deep structure. France would not experience this universal and radical tragedy at the level where public affairs become the private matter of each person. Who among us does not recall those Sunday afternoons in the so-called free zone between 1941 and 1943, with their public gardens full of peaceful strollers and children’s laughter? Decent overcoats, new shoes, conversations whose news seemed strangely absent… one might have believed nothing was happening in the world; and the criminal on his bench wondered if he was the plaything of a bad dream, if the tragedy of which he believed himself a victim did not hinge on some misunderstanding, or on his own bad luck. How many families, after all, knew the terrible adventure only through what no one could ignore—the night alerts and a few shortages of rations!—how many bourgeois who knew the war only through newspapers and who read the conflict’s news as we read the account of floods in China! No, they had not staked their entire fate on the adventure! No, victory over fascism was not for them, as for the résistants, a matter of life or death; it was not “their all.” If Germany had won, they would have lived anyway, and most of them would have adapted quite well to that eventuality too predictable.
One finds this again in the camp of Vichy-shame, and more and more strongly as the capitulationists resume greater assurance. The France-hobble of the Marshal was viable. Trains ran. The bourgeois took vacations and went skiing. Lecturers lectured. Our famous conductors directed with gusto, to sustain the prestige of French music, cycles of Wagner that would make the skilful German baton jealous. Each week brought to the elegant public their ration of Master-Singers, of Panzer-Walkyries, and other forest whispers. Ah, the beautiful Franco-Aryan Sundays at the Palais de Chaillot! and the glorious European music then played for the French!… From time to time an explorer returning from the capital brought us a sheaf of Parisian newspapers in our caverns, and we learned with astonishment that Paris had its literary events, its theatre, its Hegelian waiters, and all that a great country needs to maintain its rank. The republic of letters in 1944 was indeed beautiful. For it was the good time. A few more years, and I tell you M. Abetz would have had, like everyone else, his left-wing intellectuals, his metaphysical bistros, and avant-garde journals. The good times, I tell you. France looked fine. Barely recovered from its disaster, the France of Petain dressed in white gloves, with belt, white stockings. You remember the “crispin” gloves, the guard changing at the Majestic and the Compagnons de France? It was then the madness of whiteness. It is surprising today what they were so proud of… There was only filaments, spears, and franciscans, Roman profiles, undaunted youths—because they knew military valor, the champions of Montoire! Certainly, it was the Liberation that undone it all, and one can understand the nostalgia of the Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin parishioners lamenting the good old days: everything was better under the Occupation. Of course, life was cheaper and advancement faster in the administrations. As for the foreign occupation, that is a detail of little consequence except for Jews and for the “red” Spaniards.
It must be said: the regime of the “French State” matched the desires of a portion of France which instantly recognized itself in it. The word “decadence” would sum up its essence quite well. A group of precocious decadents gathered around a helmet with an oak leaf, the spirituality of Jacques Chevalier and M. de Genoude infusing the political philosophy of MacMahon—such was the authoritarian, agricultural, and elusive State of the “Marshal.” It is hard today to grasp what fidelity to the “Marshal” could represent in terms of incurable decadence and provincial narrow-mindedness among all those Vichy diplomats who, in Asia or America, were in contact with the free world and who, able to understand which side held the truth and to put themselves at its service, nonetheless preferred the pretension of the Marshal and the Christian civilization according to Chevalier. For this regime had its writers, its ideologues, its philosophers, and even its “mystique.” The “prisoner mystique” is well the image of a regime that made shame a duty and made surrender normative. We have the mystique we can. The idea of a mystical value conferred upon the captivity of one hundred and fifty thousand poor souls who became prisoners simply because they happened to be there, as in the monstrous roundup, this idea is historically inseparable from a regime whose defeat is not only its origin but its purpose and its glory. A mystique of defeat, resignation, and surrender to foreign will—within the natural history of impostures there was perhaps no such imposture! This explains the quasi-instant adaptation to defeat observed among the educated classes the day after the armistice. One could imagine that France, a nation of masters, used to dominating Europe and commanding the world’s respect by its arms, had for ever lost the conduct of defeat… Alas! the nation of masters, a victim of an unimaginable aberration and blinded by the monstrous inversion of heroic values, adopted in a few days the “honor” and the “mystique” of the vanquished. One of the first astonishments of the demobilized was to hear the hawkers, on the bustling streets of the southern cities, cheerfully offering the new map of France, divided by the “line of demarcation.” Ah! it was beautiful to see, France with its ugly wound in the belly… And how much there was to be proud of! It was the time when our blond companions began to learn German, just in case. Ausweis here, Kommandantur there. The entire hooded elite of the country, eager to return to the Champs-Élysées and Boulevard Malesherbes, besieged the gate of the Feldkommandant, exulted at the courtesy of the great blond Aryans. On this point there was only one cheer from Auteuil to the Plaine Monceau: the hooded gentlemen were correct and, at times, quite worldly; never before had MM. de Châteaubriant and de Brinon seen such grand dolichocephalus company.
Vichy is the equivocation and confusion. The old German Machiavellian tactic, forever specialized in inverting contradictions, played virtuoso in stirring up doubt and continues to weigh heavily on French life and to impede the nation’s moral recovery. Here you recognize the sophism of the “double game.” They all played a double game. No rogue lacked his alibi, no collaborator failed to hide his Jewish neighbor in a cupboard or to procure a false ID card for a maquisard. There are no longer any guilty or innocent people—trials for collaboration crumble as the moral certainty of shame and treason dissolves. Since 1944 the Croix de Lorraine decorates many hooded lapels where the Légion’s emblem bloomed when Vichy seemed eternal; it passes along the boulevard many résistants in fur and rabbit skin who, at the last hour, rushed to aid victory: for justice, when it is strongest, never lacks friends. One might even venture that in 1942, events permitting, a kind of “Vichy resistance” existed, and that the RPF today—six years late—represents the success of the Giraud operation, an operation that De Gaulle had wisely prevented at the time. For it is the same devilish ambiguity that nowadays allows the high bourgeoisie hooded, capitulationist and Munich-leaning to join the party of France’s first resistance. The hooded ones turned Gaullists against us — a voir dire, is it not true? And yet this masquerade we allowed to take hold is in its turn a sequel to the Pétain equivocation. This equivocation boils down to the monster of the “free zone.” Worthy heirs of the Munichians of 1938 who, not content with betraying an ally, had made that very betrayal a duty and a badge of honor, the Munichians of 1940 knew how to render dishonor bearable and even honorable.
But the equivocation goes further still. France has remained the land of the republic with a single voice of majority, and its anti-democratic minority has made its presence felt. In this land of middle-classers there is a large and highly evolved bourgeoisie that has shown its vitality in a thousand circumstances and, by changing labels, could adapt to the most critical situations; surviving revolutions and catastrophes, it forms a largely incompressible bloc whose consistency under the political volatility represents an extraordinary stability. Until 1933, this bourgeoisie had been, in words, traditionally nationalist and Germanophobic. But once Germany became Hitlerian, class instinct overriding national reflex and the defense of social privileges over patriotism, French nationalism naturally found an ally in him whom the old classic, cockade-waving patriotism, from Déroulède to Barrès and Poincaré, regarded as the hereditary enemy; the mortal danger that Nazi pangermanism posed to France now ranked after the danger Soviet Russia posed to the privileges of the international bourgeoisie; the threat that the hereditary enemy posed to the very existence of the nation mattered little compared to the aid that this enemy might lend one day against the only real enemy—the enemy of vaults and social privileges. The rupture of nationalist tradition, corrupting all political positions, marks in France this terrifying reversal of extremes, this universal vertigo, this cynical imposture that allowed fascism to appropriate the language of socialism and the role of pacifism; since democracies were becoming “belligerent,” there was indeed a role to be played, and it is at that moment that the styluses of the most infamous Gringoire and l’Action française journalists grew used to writing the words, new to them, of “plutocracy,” “trusts,” “international finance,” “high Jewish banking,” etc., finance not being condemnable in itself but only as Jewish; the professors of confusion, who would later profit from the shame, even acquired a certain virtuosity in that racist transposition of Marxism. In the wake of this regrouping, the antinational bourgeoisie could at last throw off its mask; what it had never forgiven the Weimar Republic (not because it was German, but because it was democratic), it deemed excusable and even legitimate for the Hitler dictatorship. The pathological admiration of German militarism, German order, German science, which lay at the heart of the old Germanophobic complex and explained its ambivalence, could thus express itself openly. This morbid Germanophilia extended to generate contempt for Italy, even fascist; those who ridiculed themselves during the Italian-Greek campaign of 1941, because they believed they had finally found someone more cowardly than themselves, were precisely the admirers of German power. This admiration reached its most brazen militancy in Paris’ haut bourgeoisie, which is indeed the most intelligent, the most vicious, the most aggressive, and the most corrupt bourgeoisie in Europe. The bite of the “camelots du roi,” the virulence and ingenuity of the demonstrations of Action française, the insolence of its hooligans, the verve of the journalists of Gringoire, all of it presupposed a knowledge of the enemy’s weak spots and a talent to humiliate or strike just enough to spread. No one remembers without shame this awful era of the Franco-Ribbentrop flirtation where the elegant crowd in Champs-Élysées cinemas cheered Hitler for twenty francs a seat. The flirtation began already in 1937, at the German Pavilion’s social whirl, where the hooded elite of the fashionable districts gathered for dinner. Rather than in 1940, perhaps the nadir of ignominy was reached in 1938, along those hooded Champs-Élysées where the beautiful ladies cheered the atrocious triumph of Daladier and cried: “The communists, bag on their back! The Jews to Jerusalem!” Georges Bernanos lambasted this scum in unforgettable pages that are not mere literature! We, alas, mobilized since the first funny war, clowns of the Marbeuf garage and unwitting witnesses to this Munich hysteria, saw what we saw. Who does not remember those well-fed rascals who did not want to “die for Dantzig,” who sneered at the word “Czechoslovak,” and spoke of reducing England to slavery because she fought “to the last Frenchman”? No, our memory does not deceive us: these were not the words of a few rascals and louts; everyone in the bourgeois milieu and a great many officers spoke thus; the unnameable words of mess and billets were to forge, during the 1940 campaign, a heavy and anxious complex of bad conscience.
In the light of these horrible and all too real memories, it becomes easier to understand the eager consent to defeat, to servitude, to the flagellation by which the country of Foch and Guynemer did not fear to betray itself. The Nazi hypnotist, keen to have the French do for themselves what they could do, thus found all the Quislings he wanted in a country where, between 1914 and 1918, aside from a few rated traitors, he had found not a single journalist worthy of the name, not a single professor, not a single writer to collaborate with traitor sheets, to glorify treason, to teach the philosophy of treason in the pedantic tartuffery with which German metaphysics had infused our own Nazis. How many were the conductors, painters, sculptors who refused any contact, even indirect, with the occupier? Ah! how easily the Aryanised NRF contents could be filled! For those who saw occupied France not through New York or London imagery, but, like us, from the bottom of a nauseating jar, it is clear that outside the popular masses and an heroic, disinterested and convinced elite, bourgeoisie rallied to the Resistance under the pressure of the following three factors:
1° The first major reverses of the German army at the end of 1942, and notably Stalingrad, which shattered the myth of German invincibility among the bourgeois, shopkeepers, and shopgirls; doubts arose about the certainty of German victory and the new “European order,” and it proved prudent to seek assurances for the opposite eventuality.
2° At the same time, the brutal dissolution of the “armistice army,” a few weeks after the invasion of the free zone by the Germans; officers not soured by the armistice, who would have made a career as military functionaries in the Marshal’s glorious army, found themselves reluctantly cast into dissidence. It was the era when career officers, Saint-Cyriens, former Croix-de-Feu, even royalists began to seek, like ordinary Jews, the unguarded passages of the Pyrenees, to reach Spain, then Algeria.
3° The Service du travail obligatoire (compulsory work service) at last and above all, which for the first time mobilized the mass of young bourgeoisie without distinction; until then, the “Resistance” had been a political opinion, uniting clandestine Jews by necessity, patriots by vocation, leftists by antifascist conviction, and of course the métèques, all terrorist by birth. Under the threat of the STO, Dupont and Durand too found themselves forced, like ordinary Levi’s, to seek false identity cards and enter the ignominious illegality of the proscribed and outlaws. The country’s misfortune thus became, forcibly, the misfortune of all and of each—of the student who planned to take his exams in peace, of the civil servant who dreamed of advancement; those who believed that the numerus clausus was not for them, nor exceptional laws, learned clandestinity, adventure, commitment. The first true maquis date from this era, which also witnessed the birth of the “secret army.”
We should be less surprised, after that, by the ease with which France allowed itself to be deprived of the fruits of Liberation. The impurity of patriotic motives, the half-will toward victory, the absence of any firm conviction, the fortuitous and belated character of the conversion to the right cause prepared again the obfuscation of the revolution by the bourgeoisie. If Anglo-Saxon pressure contributed so much since 1944 to accelerate this obfuscation, it is perhaps because there was almost nothing to obscure. Everything was done from that moment to shrink the Liberation, to reduce what should have been the fall of international fascism to the proportions of a simple victory over Germany, as if this war, unlike others, pitting two ideologies of collective existence and personal life against one another, had been just another war. In American democracy, the Azul division found, and tomorrow probably the LVF will find, its best new friends, so that, with class interest to aid, this democracy does not fear renouncing its own victory. The liberator of France offered himself, and this from the first day of the national insurrection, to be its suffocator and extinguisher; the fear that the movement might go too far and that democracy might take its own victory too seriously immediately overrode every other concern; the horror with which we began to speak of the “reds,” of the “Republic of Toulouse,” and of the FFI erased quickly in bourgeois memory the memory of Hitler’s atrocities—assuming that all these fine people so convinced of Yugoslav atrocities ever believed in Oradour and the extermination camps. When they understood that nothing would indeed happen, that Liberation, neutralized, slackened, made trivial, and made insignificant would end in a wet sponge, our Versailles residents breathed a sigh; they had finally found their essential enemy—though not hereditary, nonetheless number one: communism; finally one regained the right to speak openly of the Komintern, as in the happy days of Goebbels and the “Bolshevism against Europe” exhibition. Everything returned to order. The holy alliance against the USSR, there you have what France offered itself as a renewal.
Friends of Dr. Goebbels thus quickly recovered from their fright. They were not so proud three years earlier! After having nuzzled the door slightly open, then the whole head, they are now in the street, on the platform of public meetings, on theater stages, on the contents pages of journals; after having for a while faked a clandestinity that nothing, alas!, required, they crowded the windows of booksellers with their publications; they are back in force, with a furious itch to accuse, to discuss, to pontificate; they are already respectable again; tomorrow the Resistance will have to justify having resisted. These well-fed families regained all their old confidence of the good old times, the times when the Champs-Élysées, the seaside, and the Côte d’Azur belonged to them; but they would have been afraid. He who has fear is wicked. Now that we are back to being guilty in turn, with our old perpetual bad conscience, now that the dynamic goons have taken possession of the boulevard, it is no longer surprising the disproportion that monstrously grows between the immensity of the events we lived through and the trivial insignificance of the transformations these cataclysms imposed on French manners, on the French social structure, on the economic relations between classes and among citizens. It is almost without example that so much suffering has altered so little the destiny of men, that such gigantic convulsions have produced a post-war so mediocre. No, it is not on scale: this is the sense of the anger that rises within us when we see on theater columns the names of clowns, cabotinists, and suitors of collaboration. What we live is not on the same scale as what we suffered… “Four years of occupation,” as they say… indeed, their “occupations” resemble so little the life that was ours, that of our friends and of our missing, that we must frankly admit: what happened did not have the same significance for them and for us. They did not live all of that. Too many tadpoles and buffoons are today invested in mediocrization of heroic impulse; too many approximate patriots, for whom the 1940 armistice was a day of celebration, have an interest in forgetting, in confusion, and in getting bogged down…
In these conditions it is not difficult to understand why there has been no purification, there will be none, there cannot be any purification. Here the cabotinists and the buffoons are right in their own way, and they triumph in this very confusion: it would be necessary to purify everyone; it would be necessary to judge the judges—for the judges were as mediocre as their accused. And there is no need either to search for the causes of defeat, since those causes operate and prosper again in the slackening of victory, in the triumphant return of incivics, in the little price that France attaches to its liberation. All that happened happened because the “elites” were mediocre: the writers, putting at the service of anything—collaboration, a new Europe, anti-Bolshevik crusade—their stylistic virtuosity and that sort of literary brio so widespread in Paris; the artists, accepting for a few childish flatteries of shameful invitations and dishonorable travels; the civil servants, taking advantage of the facilities offered by countless evictions and degrading laws! One and all, they let the opportunities for courage pass, even the easiest; we remained mute, in the land of Jules Simon, of Michelet, and of Victor Hugo, where a protest, or at least the humblest gesture, would have proven that there were still free men, not merely rhetoricians and buffoons; when dramatic and passionate circumstances should have revealed in every “intellectual” a moral conscience, critical reflection, and an active civic spirit, all that appeared was a vain man of letters. Where one expected a citizen’s reflex, writers, concerned above all with playing their plays or founding journals, showed only literary reflexes. All of this would be nothing if France were Afghanistan. But France is France, the guide of Europe and the conscience of all free men of the world; what happens on the banks of the Seine, between the City Hall and the Place de la Concorde, has a particular significance for mankind in general. No, France does not reduce to MacMahon, Henri Béraud, and Tino Rossi; France means something exceptional and irreplaceable in the eyes of the world, something that makes the mediocrity of these recent years even more shameful. It is, alas, necessary to accept it: the evident shame is not evident to everyone. And just as the bourgeois did not vomit spontaneously, in that refusal of the whole being that Mauriac once spoke of, capitulation and servitude, so they continue to not renounce, with all their soul, all their strength, all their intelligence, this past of our shame. This confirms that. For it is a fact: the Franzose milieu—distinguished, speaks of Vichy not only without disgust but with gratitude, with nostalgia… It seems we must explain to them why collaborators and providers for M. von Stülpnagel were traitors? Do they not understand it themselves? Is this cause of France not their own cause? If some French people lack this immediate national sensitivity to dishonor, if we must argue endlessly with them to make them understand that the competence of a rogue, however indispensable, is of little importance compared to his roguishness, one can say that the malady of abasement remains incurable. For that is the problem of “purification,” and nothing else. Physical purification would not by itself carry as much weight if the will to purification were stronger: then the impunity of traitors would cease to weigh as an obsession on our post-war life, and the painful, ridiculous, demoralizing controversies that recur around each individual case would be without object; then perhaps, above all, forgiveness would become possible, which today has no meaning: for as long as the inexpiable is not expiated, as long as France is not redeemed, amnesty can only be amnesia and forgiveness mere indulgence or scandalous excuse, complicity in betrayal. Purity is like love: something one must want; and just as love knows what it must do in every case, and acts immediately without seeking advice from anyone, and invents for each circumstance the most original, delicate, and ingenious solution, so too would the will for purity, if it existed, be our only truly necessary and sufficient inspiration—our only truly eloquent demonium; and it is because this will does not exist that the Hitleophile casuistry became possible again and that, journalists wrangling miserably about what remains, after all, the honor or dishonor of every Frenchman, M. Sacha Guitry could become a great man again and Ferdonnet a patriot.
France missed in 1944 its greatest chance for renewal and rejuvenation. In those unique days everything was possible; we had promised ourselves then that everything would be new and true, that everything would start again from the beginning, as if Vichy-shame and its terrible cutthroats had never existed, that Liberation’s bright morning would be our rebirth, that the lawn would grow over the grave of the odious past. Yet we did not begin this new life that the national uprising promised us; for the first time perhaps in our history, the miraculously saved France did not renounce the regime that had made its defeat agreeable, its defeat a source of joy, its organization and political exploitation of defeat, its eagerness to use that defeat to liquidate the Republic, its raison d’être and its proudest title to glory. Our spring was missed. But perhaps all of that was for the better for us? Perhaps this stagnation of all generosity and all creative heroism rests on a grand metaphysical law that, while it sometimes allows man to reach the summit of himself, forbids him to hold onto it? Many springs still lie in the furrows and in the trees; it is for us to prepare them through new struggles and new trials.