The Spectrum of Political Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre

by David L. Schalk

Overview

Why do artists, poets, philosophers, writers, and others who are usually classified as intellectuals leave the ivory tower to "dirty their hands" in the political arena? In an effort to illuminate the intellectual's struggle to come to grips with the issues raised by political involvement, David Schalk examines the life and thought of five intellectuels engagés in France during the period between 1920 and 1945. From communist to fascist, these figures—Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Mounier, Julien Benda, and Robert Brasillach—cover the full political spectrum, and Professor Schalk studies their diverse reactions to the social, political, and economic tensions of the interwar period.

Broadly defining "engagement" as political involvement that is voluntary, conscious, and freely chosen, usually by intellectuals, the author poses the intellectual's dilemma in the following terms: "When we are engagé," he writes, "we fear that we are debasing our highest values; when we are not, we worry that we have become, in Paul Nizan's trenchant phrase, mere chiens de garde [watchdogs]." He then investigates the origins and the popularization of the concept of engagement in the early 1930s, the arguments used to denounce it and to defend it, its different manifestations, and finally its effects on the socio-political actuality of the world.

Originally published in 1979.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691603810
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1618
Pages:	202
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

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The Spectrum of Political Engagement

Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre

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By David L. Schalk

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05275-5

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CHAPTER 1

What Was Engagement?

INTRODUCTION

We are not the bearers of consciousness. We are the whores of reason.

Jan Myrdal

The perennial modern controversy over intellectuals in politics has perhaps never been more succinctly articulated than in this passage from the autobiography of Gunnar Myrdal's brilliant and disaffected son. Are those who remain uninvolved in truth the "whores of reason," or are they the "bearers of consciousness"? Probably this controversy will continue as long as there is a social group which can, with some degree of legitimacy, be termed the intellectual class. The issue is fraught with potential for ideological conflict. By considering the word "engagement" we should be able to circumvent, or at least suspend, this conflict. "Engagement" was first used in scholarly studies after its importation from France, but has now gained wide enough acceptance to find its way into the New York Times, Time Magazine, and Newsweek. The vaguer term "commitment" is sometimes used, but "engagement" most closely describes the political involvement that elicits so much debate in intellectual circles.

The primary aims of this chapter will be to examine both the origins and the definition of "engagement." By pursuing these goals rather single-mindedly we can minimize polemics while clarifying our understanding of some of the difficult questions relating to intellectuals in politics. If we can satisfactorily answer the question "What was Engagement?" we should be able to appreciate better the arguments for and against it.

Turning first to official definitions, a review of French dictionaries and encyclopedias dating from the nineteenth century to the 1920s shows that as many as thirteen different definitions of engagement were delineated, but that none had any political bearing. With the 1961 edition of the Grand Larousse encyclopédique, however, two of the fourteen definitions given are political. The first is a simple statement: "Action of taking sides in political or social matters: The engagement of a writer." (It is interesting that the Larousse editor chose as a specific example a member of an intellectual profession.) A sentence from Cocteau is selected to illustrate the proper use of the word. "I am a neutralist. I hesitate when confronted with engagement."

In a second paragraph, the Larousse encyclopedia expands its definition by asserting that engagement is both contemporary and universal. One could argue, the editor adds, that there has always been a conflict of duties provoked by political, social, and ideological struggles, and that in this sense one could speak of the engagement of Antigone. (Another example would be Socrates, and a case could be made that he was the first engagé intellectual about whom much is known.) The word engagement, the Larousse editor continues, has been given a certain metaphysical content because of its adoption by existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre's contribution is mentioned, but no reference is made to Paul Nizan or Emmanuel Mounier, the other two writers most responsible for defining and popularizing the concept. The article on engagement concludes by noting that the word is "usually applied to intellectuals (thinkers, writers, artists), because it seems that their taking a position is more willed [voulue] than that of other social categories." The second reason the editor gives for applying engagement preferably to intellectuals is that they are always free to move off onto a track of "art for art, gratuitous literature, disinterested thought," and that if they do not, it is because they have chosen engagement.

It would seem that following Larousse we can accept the basic definition of engagement as the action of intellectuals, primarily in the political sphere. Other social groups, such as the workers (in Europe at least) would be automatically engaged, and applying the term to workers would be pleonastic. The word seems to suit best groups which do not normally feel obliged to speak out on public issues, to take action in one form or another. An ingredient of will and of thought and thus freedom is involved in the response to events, rather than a visceral reaction of immediate self-defense. In other words, engagement cannot occur when one is literally, physically, forced to be involved.

THE ROOTS OF ENGAGEMENT

The definition we have derived is still only operational and descriptive, and to expand it further we shall first have to turn to a closely related question, "When and how did the term engagement come to be used?" Of course the phenomenon we now describe as engagement occurred long before the twentieth century. As far as individuals are concerned, Antigone and Socrates have already been mentioned, and one could add Dante, Machiavelli, St. Thomas More, and many others. Groups of intellectuals such as the philosophes and the romantics have been shown to have been engagé. For our purposes, however, the best place to begin is with the Dreyfus Affair, where the roots of so many crucial twentieth-century developments have been located. The significance of the Dreyfus Affair specifically for intellectual history has been widely recognized, and Michel Winock's claim that "the Dreyfus Affair was the epic genesis of the French intellectuals" is not exaggerated.

Julien Benda once wrote, "For the clerc, the Dreyfus Affair is the palladium of history." It is but one of the paradoxes surrounding engagement that Benda, whose most famous work, La Trahison des clercs (1927), is usually interpreted as a polemic against engagement, began his long public career by plunging ardently into the Affair on the side of the Dreyfusards. Benda was by no means an isolated case, for the Dreyfus Affair marks the first systematic and organized political involvement on the part of a group of individuals possessing a self-conscious identity as intellectuals. In fact it was not until the Dreyfus crisis reached a sort of climax with the publication of Emile Zola's J'Accuse, in January 1898, that the noun intellectuel became a part of everyday French vocabulary. As David L. Lewis has written, "After J'Accuse the role of the man of letters in France and eventually in Western society was irrevocably altered." The collective action on the part of the intellectual supporters and opponents of Dreyfus may have been "Engagement Willy-Nilly," or "Engagement in Spite of Oneself," as the Dutch scholar H. L. Wesseling has argued in a provocative essay. But it was engagement nonetheless, as Wesseling amply documents through a careful statistical evaluation of three thousand individuals who signed the "Manifeste des Intellectuels" in Clemenceau's Dreyfusard newspaper L'Aurore.

In his excellent introductory study of the Dreyfus Affair, Pierre Miquel takes a slightly different approach to the roots of engagement. Miquel credits the intellectuals with transforming the "Case" into the "Affair" and then into a "Myth." Great journalists like Clemenceau and Rochefort could utilize the press to serve their own ends, but they were unable, Miquel claims, to raise the level of the debate.

Only the entry into the lists of men like Péguy, Jaurès (sic), Lucien Herr, Barrès, Brunetière, could transform a quarrel into an extraordinary confrontation of ideas. ... Those who were called, with a new name, the "Intellectuals," knew how to confer to the debate a formal moral dignity which it had lacked.

An important positive result of the Dreyfus Affair was, Miquel believes, to establish the role of intellectuals in public life, to drive them from their libraries. "The massive and spontaneous engagement of professors, of writers, of artists, made it brilliantly clear that it had become impossible to govern men while betraying the laws of the spirit. Thought itself took on the awareness of having real power in a democracy."

Both Wesseling and Miquel have broadened the encyclopedia definition of engagement by adding the element of group involvement. They have also, from a strict etymological point of view, made a technical error, in that they have linked the very notion of "intellectual," just as it was coming into existence during the Dreyfus Affair, with the concept of "engagement." As will be shown in the third part of this chapter, "engagement" began to be used in its modern sense of political involvement only in the 1930s. Worrying about this anachronism could be dismissed as pedantic quibbling, and indeed engagé intellectuals would be especially prone to do so. They would find it more tempting to examine Miguel's intriguing assertion that the Dreyfus Affair proved that the engagement of intellectuals can have an actual influence on events. However, such an inquiry, fascinating as it might become, would quickly bog down in polemic, if we do not attempt to set engagement in its proper historical context and search for a more precise definition. Should we include all political involvement of intellectuals, acting both as individuals and in groups, in all historical periods under the rubric of engagement, or should we look for more specific kinds of behavior?

A way to approach engagement historically is suggested by Louis Bodin, who has written a valuable survey of the intellectual class. Bodin observes, quite correctly, that during the 1930s and especially in 1944-1945, many authors insisted on "the necessity of the engagement of the intellectual." More recently, opposition has developed, and some writers have advocated dégagement. Bodin, writing in 1964, viewed the quarrel over engagement as no longer fruitful, since it is now widely recognized that "there exists no intellectual who does not hold explicit or implicit positions toward the society in which he lives, and that it does not suffice for a person to adopt political positions to be qualified as an intellectual." In any case, Bodin believes, the debate over engagement marks an "important episode in French cultural history."

It would be easy to enlarge upon Bodin's conclusion since the debate over engagement has clearly not been limited to the boundaries of France. One could even argue that because of its growing sophistication the debate over engagement was one of the most important new developments in European, perhaps also American, cultural and intellectual history of the period 1920-1945. The intensity and duration of engagement, and the number of intellectuals involved, increase dramatically in these years. This was the generation of "Writers on the Left," "The God that Failed," and "The Appeal of Fascism," not to mention "The Intellectual Migration," and many facets of this unusually high level of intellectual political involvement have already been studied. This involvement was in large measure a response to the rise of totalitarianism, with its concomitant violence, persecutions, and heightened ideological conflict. In the context of intellectuals in politics, the Spanish Civil War emerges as probably the single most crucial event, what Stuart Samuels has called a "central force and a cohesive symbol," a "rallying point for all on the left. ... Spain lifted the intellectual anti-fascist cause into a cause for justice." Intellectuals on the right, though far fewer in number, were also drawn into the conflict in Spain. It would be appropriate to turn from Spain to the period of the German Occupation and the Resistance, 1940-1944, which could be seen as the peak of engagement, at least in France and the rest of Occupied Europe. "We were never freer than under the German Occupation," wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. This was the moment when "each of our gestures carried the weight of an engagement." François Mauriac, for once rather close to Sartre, spoke of the Resistance as a time "of true communion, I would also say a time of great hope. Never have I hoped so much as at that moment."

In examining engagement from this more limited perspective, one might note the irony that by the time Sartre theorized about it in 1948 in his famous Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (Situations, n) , its reality if not its necessity had faded. Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950), the founder of the periodical Esprit and an early proponent of engagement, remarked after the Second World War that it is "because people do not engage themselves enough that there is today so much discussion of engagement...."

Following the more narrowly historical approach suggested by Pierre Miquel leads to the conclusion that since 1945 the phenomenon of engagement has been on the decline, save for occasional spurts of activity, for example in France during the Algerian War (1954-1962), or in America in the late 1960s.

How then did "engagement" come to be used in its modern sense? Can we trace the concept itself back to its roots? In examining these questions one soon discovers that there is substantial disagreement over priorities, a kind of quérelle de précédence. Academics love such disputes, and have thrived on them at least since the Renaissance. There is an added complication here because engagé intellectuals often dismiss these kinds of arguments as sterile, myopic, and irrelevant. They might, however, feel obliged to make an exception for this particular case, since it touches them so directly.

Two points can be resolved fairly quickly, after which complications develop. First, engagement as a term describing certain kinds of behavior was delineated by left-leaning intellectuals, and has more frequently, though by no means uniquely, been used to designate political involvement on the left. Secondly, the rather widely held opinion that Jean-Paul Sartre in What is Literature? and other writings of the immediate postwar period initiated the discussion of engagement cannot be sustained. The British author Maxwell Adereth represents this common view clearly when he states that What is Literature?, the "Bible of French commitment," is the "first serious attempt to define 'engagement.'" In fact, Sartre drew heavily in What is Literature? from a work by his close friend and former roommate at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paul Nizan. The work in question is Les Chiens de garde (The Watchdogs), published in 1932. The complex and fascinating relationship between these two intellectuals, who were frequently mistaken for each other by third parties, and were sometimes called "Nitre et Sarzan," has been astutely analyzed by W. D. Redfern. The degree of influence Nizan has had on Sartre is very striking and is not yet widely recognized, though Sartre performed a sort of mea culpa in his long introduction to the new edition of Nizan's Aden Arabie (1960). Jean-Albert Bédé, a classmate of the two men at the Ecole Normale and later a professor at Columbia University, wrote in 1967, almost thirty years after Nizan's death, that Nizan's career "precedes and, in an important measure, governs that of Sartre-through the effect of an emulation which still continues and of which there are few examples in the history of ideas."

One example of the lack of general awareness of the degree of Nizan's influence on Sartre comes from Adereth's book, Commitment in Modern French Literature. Adereth writes that "Sartre even says that abstention is a form of commitment because it implies acceptance of the status quo." This argument, often used to defend engagement, is stated at least three times in Les Chiens de garde, perhaps most succinctly as "Abstention is a choice." And further, to show how difficult it is to trace an idea to its origins, Romain Rolland, in an open letter to Gerhart Hauptmann, dated August 29, 1914, writes urging his German colleague to join him in a public protest against the German invasion of Belgium, "... in such a moment, silence itself is an act" (en un pareil moment, le silence meme est un acte).

Sartre is also predated by the Catholic personalists, who had been using the term engagement, again since 1932, when Esprit was founded under the editorship of Emmanuel Mounier. Mounier and the other contributors to Esprit de serve credit for persistent reference to engagement, and for a number of efforts to delineate its significance. By 1943-1947, it had become one of the favorite terms in the writings of the worker-priests. However, we must be careful not to assign all the honor (or blame, and there are to be sure many academics, not to mention clerics and politicians, who oppose engagement) to Mounier and the personalists.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. ix
• I. What Was Engagement?, pg. 3
• II. The Case against Engagement: Julien Benda and La Trahison des Clercs, pg. 26
• III. The Marxist Rebuttal: Paul Nizan and the Professors, pg. 49
• IV. Fascist Engagement, pg. 76
• V. Conclusions: Why Engagement?, pg. 110
• Epilogue: A Note on Jean-Paul Sartre, pg. 117
• Notes, pg. 119
• Selected Bibliography, pg. 161
• Index, pg. 177