Robert Hertz, a disciple of Durkheim, fell at the front on April 13, 1915. His correspondence with his wife Alice allowed Nicolas Mariot to follow his path to the supreme sacrifice day by day. Hertz puts forward his reasons: he is Jewish, a socialist, a sociologist. But they are not enough to understand how the trap closes on him.
François Simiand, Hertz’s elder at the École Normale Supérieure and leader of the “Durkheimists” group, was very firm on this point: there is no science of the singular, because “the individual phenomenon has no cause.” No doubt sociology has since taken various paths, but it is clear that the one on which Nicolas Mariot ventured with Story of a sacrifice diverges greatly from the approach of a Simiand. Because the work aims to account for what could have led an individual, Robert Hertz, to make a very singular decision: that of a sacrifice, on the front of the Great War, which strongly resembles an “altruistic suicide”.
A Durkheimist non-commissioned officer
Robert Hertz (1881-1915), a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure who was too wealthy to need to teach philosophy to schoolboys, an Anglophile rentier, mountaineer, hygienist and loyal member of the Socialist Study Group, author of various works on religious facts, was a completely atypical member of the “sociological school”. Stéphane Baciocchi and Nicolas Mariot recently published his “Saint Besse, study of an alpine cult”, based on observations from 1912, and “Tales and sayings” collected from soldiers in 1915 – these texts being accompanied by rigorous and fascinating investigations into the conditions of their production. The second study already attempts an ethnography of the trenches on the Meuse front, where Hertz fell on April 13, 1915.
Story of a sacrifice is presented in an unusual way for a sociology book: it tells a story, there are no footnotes, it is pleasant to read. Above all, the author does not impose any “objectivation” on his subject from above. The main source of the study is the correspondence between Robert, who was mobilized, and his wife Alice, who remained behind with their little boy and the imposing Hertz family. The work can be described as “a long walk in a forest of words feverishly thrown on paper” (p. 37). Crucially, the wife’s letters have been preserved and, this time, they are read – whereas they were neglected in the edition of Hertz’s war letters in 2002. This choice of method was decisive, because it is what opens the way to a new interpretation, based not only on the sociologist’s ideas or convictions, but on the dense network of social relationships in which he was caught:
The choices he makes, those he rejects, can only be understood in the dialogue, real or imaginary, that he maintains with all those he has left behind him. (p. 42)
If letters are only exceptionally given in fullthey are constantly and abundantly quoted: we learn from the author that 56% of the text of Hertz’s letters has been quoted (p. 371). Thus, both the enigma and the clues that can make it intelligible are placed before the reader’s eyes.
A puzzle construction
The construction of the book deserves attention: it begins with a series of flashbacks, each time from an archive document. In other words, the course of events is restored only to propose an answer to a question posed by the sources: a surprise to contemporaries, an interpretative problem of today. We then return to a wiser chronological order, the parts being cut up like the three acts of a drama: the choice of flight forward, the answers to the questions, the abandonment to the inevitable. This cutting is, says the author, “the main result of (his) work” (p. 376). But above all, each chapter is designed to add a new question and provide material to shed light on it: a “puzzle” construction inspired by The House of Wittgenstein by Alexander Waugh (p. 369).
Because it is indeed a question of reporting on a mystery, of making it account for itself. The book opens with the death of the hero, inevitable, in a fight “lost in advance”. In Paris, a few days later, the family and friends gather for a final tribute and Alice reads some of Robert’s letters in which he affirms, in a boundless patriotic exaltation, that he desires the supreme sacrifice. Émile Durkheim and the student of the École Normale Supérieure Paul Dupuy come out of it troubled: but why this “exaggerated detachment” (in Durkheim’s words, quoted on p. 34)? N. Mariot takes up this question: thus begins the investigation. At the same time, a problem is discreetly posed: Hertz, a student of the École Normale Supérieure and a sociologist, is not understood by some of his peers. What makes him different?
Three keys
The letter of April 2, 1915, in which, a few days before the end, Hertz states his reasons, constitutes one of the hinges of the study (p. 133). He had requested his assignment to a company that was going into combat and had just obtained it. When Alice learned of this, she weakened: forgetting the warlike fervor that had animated her until then, she questioned the merits of her husband’s decision and urged him to be cautious. She would soon recover, silencing her anger and fear, but Robert deemed it necessary to explain to her—perhaps to strengthen his own determination—why he wanted to “give a little more than (his) due”: as a Jew—born German and naturalized at the age of 12—as a socialist, as a sociologist. Authorized by the person concerned himself, Nicolas Mariot then seizes these three keys to undertake a retrospective journey into these various dimensions of Hertz’s biography. He practices a parsimonious description of the formation of ways of being and thinking, which spares us the expositions of “context”.
Hertz’s “desire for sacrifice” (as Alice, quoted on p. 190, puts it) is not, however, the product of biographical factors that would determine an inexorable process: it is formed and kept alive by constant social interactions. There is a world of difference, in fact, between the speeches that were given in Paris before the war and the experience that Hertz had after his mobilization: the waiting, the boredom, the disappointment during the long months when he was confined to the rear, accompanied by the first victims close by. The correspondence allows Nicolas Mariot to describe the subtle interactions that keep the flame alive and, in a way, prevent him from retreating.
First, there is Alice’s constant pressure for her hero to remain what he has told her he is from the beginning. Some sentences are chilling: “I gave you to France” (quoted p. 265); or, in hindsight: Robert “died without regret, fully accepting, with perfect happiness, his destiny” (quoted p. 31). The position initially taken within the family, the fervor of the women, the warlike rhetoric of the relatives hidden in Paris, all prevent Hertz from weakening.
But there is also something else: the graduate of the École Normale Supérieure expected his love of his country to be shared by the troops. This was not the case: not all were “united in the trenches”. Not only did the men take the war, at best, with resignation, but they looked at their sergeant – this slightly excited bourgeois – with suspicion. The class distance was immense. Nicolas Mariot here draws on an investigation into a vast corpus of correspondence and accounts from the front, which allowed him to describe the constrained and difficult relationships between intellectuals and common men mobilized side by side in the Great War. For Hertz, as for the others, this reality leads the intellectual, a high-ranking officer to boot, to a painful isolation. The sociologist tried to overcome it by observing certain aspects of the “folklore” of these uncouth peasants, but, deep down, more human than the literature of the social reformers would have us believe. It was also necessary to give meaning to this immense difference between him and them: the solution found by Hertz involved a redoubled patriotic affirmation.
Thus, the “reasons” for sacrificing himself put forward by Hertz are not enough to account for the passage to action: it was also necessary to set up a tight network of real interactions and spoken words that were no less so, to the point of irreversibility. N. Mariot here uses his previous work to discreetly serialize Hertz’s correspondence. He, like most other bourgeois patriots, went through moments of hesitation: would he not have served better as an interpreter for the British, rather than leading his men into battle? These doubts surface more than once, in both Robert and Alice, before and after the decision, with no possibility of going back, to go to the front. Thus, this careful procedural description of the march towards the abyss establishes that forks in the road presented themselves. But the family commitments said and repeated, redoubled by the need to convince oneself of an uncertain moral superiority over the men of the people, ended up closing the trap.
Sociology and microhistory
This story, which reproduces as much as possible the daily life of the protagonists, avoids resorting to effects of reality, which are nevertheless very tempting, despite a few exceptions: “the children were already in bed” (p. 153) or “Alice tirelessly rereads the musty-tasting pages from the front” (p. 314). Above all, it was confronted with a major trap: “reconstructing the experience” to the point of imagining what the actors thought, on subjects or at crucial moments, when traces of these thoughts are lacking. There are many examples of this temptation throughout the book, but the author is, each time, cautious and skillful. He suggests that it is possible that this was the case, that this would support the reasoning, but that there is no certainty. Thus, the effect of conviction is produced without falling into one of the classic traps of biography: the omniscience of the historian.
The book concludes with an exposé of the “behind the scenes of the story”, where the researcher, finally, shows himself and explains the way he proceeded and how his choice of method is situated in the current debates of the social sciences. This is how, it seems to me, a scientific work is recognized: it lets see the scaffolding that allowed the house to be built, it reveals the way in which the painter is in the painting. Here we see a sociologist traveling among the authors of micro-history to glean more than ways of doing things: rules of method. Nothing to do with a pious discourse on interdisciplinarity, but simply the observation of the unity of the social sciences when they strive to be reflexive. Historical material is made of singularities and sociology has not given up on confronting them – thus moving away from the nomothetic convictions of Simiand and his friends, with which Robert Hertz the sociologist had also had a run-in. Under what conditions can we relate immediate experience to “the invisible structures according to which this experience is articulated”? The question, posed by Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Ponti, two micro-historians cited by Nicolas Mariot (p. 380), is now shared by a fertile current of sociology. The latter gains a lot from maintaining, on this crucial point, a sustained conversation with them. This, in any case, is one of the lessons suggested by Story of a sacrificea very beautiful social science book.