Jean Paulhan citizen

(Afterword of Volume V of the Complete Works, Tchou)

Here are brought together for the first time the writings devoted by Jean Paulhan to politics. Institutional problems, the art of governing or enriching nations, of ensuring perpetual peace or of putting an end to class war are not dealt with; nothing in these pages recalls Aristotle, Montesquieu (whom Jean Paulhan appreciated), nor even Charles Fourier (whom he admired despite his style considered detestable) or Karl Marx. These texts, free from any systematization, even have, through their liveliness, their spontaneity, a family resemblance with certain “considerations” that certain courageous writers, strangers to power, dared to publish at the time of the absolute monarchy, when they judged the kingdom to be in danger: thus the authors of the Satire Ménippée, Saint-Evremond in its best pages, Bayle. Faced with governments that are sometimes failing, sometimes abusive, Jean Paulhan affirms the rights of the nation, poorly defended, or those of individuals, flouted; he expresses himself as a citizen, with all that the term took on with sovereign dignity in the mouth of Saint Paul declaring to his judges: “Civis romanus sum”; daring a hyperbole that Jean Paulhan would not have liked, I would say: as a “great citizen”, in the sense that Littré understood it: “One whose objective is the good of the country.”

Jean Paulhan, however, waited until the year preceding the Second World War to directly address “politics” — he was over fifty — but, from then on, and until the advent of the Fifth Republic, his interventions were frequent, rigorous, incisive. Why, during a quarter of a century of literary life, this silence on subjects which would later hold an important and constant place in his concerns? Indifference to the fate of the country? Certainly not; the statements to Robert Mallet, among others, testify to the contrary. When the bulk of his abundant and rich correspondence is published - which, I hope, will not be long - we will be better informed as to the judgments he made on the situation and the politicians up until the events of 1938, perhaps also on the reasons for his reserve. In his youth, he said, he was “anarchist in theory and socialist in practice”, specifying that he “said it more than once like many other simpletons of his age”. What did such designations mean before 1914? At the end of the century, the anti-Semite Edouard Drumont, like the “communard” Séverine, and even Clemenceau himself, had defended the anarchists who carried out attacks against politicians. A little later, Maurice Barrès declared himself a “national socialist” and denounced the omnipotence of capitalist oligarchies; but after the Dreyfus affair, all the talent of the writer will no longer succeed in concealing the stupidity, and sometimes baseness, of the blind chauvinism and anti-Semitism of the “nationalists”. In a France divided into two enemy camps, the opposition seemed irreconcilable between those who refused to dissociate love of country and respect for justice, and the proponents of fanatical militarism; with the university elite, Jean Paulhan was one of those “intellectuals” who fought for respect for law and truth. However, certain “Dreyfusarde” campaigns against the army, with their anti-national boasting and their lack of fairness, displeased him. He never accepted denials of justice, whoever their author; thus, the way in which the gendarmes, guardians of an order from which we all benefit, are generally treated, always seemed revolting to him because it was profoundly unfair, as he was to confide to Robert Mallet. As a child, he explains, he was never amused by the spectacle of Guignol thrashing the Commissioner; he was outraged.

When, in 1914, war broke out, it did not disconcert him like so many pacifists. For three years, Jean Paulhan had published his first works on art and language in Spectateur; however, an absolutely exceptional fact, he had devoted in this review, in January 1912, a study on “The Franco-German Agreement” by which France ceded part of the Congo to William II in order to be authorized to continue the conquest of Morocco, an adventure denounced by Jean Jaurès and the socialists as likely to provoke a world conflict. Mobilized, with the rank of sergeant, in a Zouave regiment, Jean Paulhan took part in the deadly battles of the first months, until the beginning of December when he was seriously injured; he fought with courage, without hatred and without remorse, stoically, as a “diligent warrior”, to use the title he gave to the admirable and brief novel, published in 1917, where he translates his experiences as a combatant at this cruel start to the campaign and where it is possible, as he then wrote to Guillaume de Tarde when presenting the volume to him, to “unravel a metaphysics of war”. The sobriety of these pages contrasts with the emphasis then required and shows in a damning way the absurdity of the conflict. In Jean Paulhan's work, this work will be the only war story. Unlike too many authors, eager to put a lot of heroism into their works (in the absence of a courage of which they will be stingy in their existence), he will be content, discreet in his books, to be heroic in his life. There is no confusion either between his vocation as a writer and his civic or political action, areas that he always wanted to distinguish. He does not assume, as an author, any guiding mission towards his contemporaries; the “clerics” do not seem to him, as Julien Benda thinks, to constitute a lucid and venerable elite in the State; he will even claim for them, in politics, the right to make mistakes. When Jean Paulhan intervenes in public life, it is only as a citizen. News items, famous causes, travel, and even the rules of bridge, provided him with subjects of inspiration for his search for truth, while political events found him indifferent. No echo of public life in his literary works; as in those of so many writers of the N.R.F., Roger Martin du Gard, Benda, Gide, Malraux, Aragon, etc. Jean Paulhan even claimed, responding to Marcel Proust's famous questionnaire, to have had little taste for history; because “how can we be interested in what might not have happened?” In its activity, politics therefore constitutes an exceptional domain, quite apart; it only involves the man, the citizen. This one is not without suspicion; he is in no way the dupe of the parade of ephemeral characters who take center stage; he knows that too often the words they use disguise their thoughts, disguise the truth, betray the reason for the existence of language. He will underline this, cruelly: “I say nothing,” he writes, “of a world where great politicians speak of Peace when they think of War, Order when they think of Massacre and Nobility, Dedication or Chivalry when they think of God knows what.”

However, he does not lose interest in the fate of the city. His youthful convictions were severely tested by the unpreparedness of the war of 1914 and the unnecessary killings which were its consequence; in his reception speech at the French Academy, he was to recall the sacrifice of all these young boys who went into battle in kepis and red pants, offered as easy targets for German machine guns and thus immolated to satisfy the interests of madder producers, a group of all-powerful democratic voters from the South: “I then began to dream of governments which were a little less strictly democratic.” During the years between the two wars, he noted with indignation the thoughtlessness and incapacity of these so-called democratic governments, incapable of ensuring the defense of the country and the preservation of peace, wasting without remorse the results obtained by the sacrifices of the combatants. In the severe pages of Return to 1914 he stigmatizes the incompetence and selfishness of the politicians and ruling classes responsible for the Second World War. Opponent of demagoguery, which has hardly changed since Cleon of the Wasps, he refuses to condemn democracy, that is to say the people, whom he will defend against the theorists of fascism and supporters of elite government.

Democracy, he understands it in the manner of Chesterton: the first principle is that the things possessed in common by men are much more important than what they hold in particular; the second, that the government of the city is precisely the common good of all men. To decide the fate of the community, there is therefore no need to rely on a few specialists, on some particular talent; it is everyone's business, and each individual must take care of it themselves, “like when it comes to taking a wife, raising your children or even blowing your nose”. The day after the Munich agreements, Jean Paulhan affirmed: "Man is worth by what is natural, immediate, naive rather than by what he acquires. Democracy appeals against the aristocrats and especially against the aristocrats of intelligence to the first comer"; and to conclude: “It is obvious that we are not in a democracy.” These first comers: all citizens; but in the quality that “makes the citizen” there is, Paulhan believes, “this something strange and almost insane, an oversight, a gift, a flame that cannot be learned”. Quality such that it authorizes the most insignificant man, “completely modest and ignored in his corner, to look down on kings, ministers and precisely all the glorious people of the earth”.

Noblesse oblige: the “quality of citizen” involves multiple and imperative duties, Jean Paulhan will assume all responsibilities, even the most modest; he will be a candidate and elected to the municipal council of his commune, Châtenay-Malabry, on the list of Jean Longuet, the friend of Léon Blum, the grandson of Karl Marx. He devoted a lot of time and zeal to this task, managing to overcome a thousand administrative difficulties to have one of the first swimming pools in the Paris suburbs built in his city. I do not believe this concern for the well-being of the most humble is not negligible; it is of the same nature as the patience and kindness granted by Jean Paulhan to young writers to guide them and allow them to get the best out of themselves. This natural benevolence, this lively sense of fraternity, is less, as some have believed, a legacy of the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment than loyalty to the lessons - and the example - of this old teacher, Mr. Lyon, about whom Paulhan spoke to the academicians during his reception. “He was an excellent man,” he said, “a man of Alsatian and Jewish origin, I think, no doubt more patriotic than it is wise to be and whose words subsequently marked my life...” These teachers, those from Jules Ferry's school and the “school battalions”, devotees of the Republic and the homeland, pacifists in principle, but preparing for revenge, “marked” an entire generation, that of “the Marne and Verdun”.

As much and more than a democrat, Jean Paulhan was indeed a patriot. We owe him “one of the most beautiful texts that have been written on the love of the country”, as Roger Caillois aptly puts it, and, each time it was in danger, he intervened, ready to sacrifice everything in its defense. He does not conceive his homeland in the manner of the “reasoner” who reduces it to an abstraction modeled in the image of his prejudices or his interests; he does not see it either, like the “sentimental”, as well as a divinity that must be venerated blindly, this “Notre-Dame la France” of General de Gaulle. Jean Paulhan is wary, without completely dismissing them, “of the patriotic stories and treatises that we commonly read”. Neither the nationalism of Charles Maurras, whose horizon is limited to “the small acre of the Capetians”, nor that of the Jacobins (the Nation, “mother of free thought”), even less the outrageous chauvinism, closed to everything that is foreign, satisfied him. He will even refrain from seeking some precise definition of a truly ineffable feeling. Smiling, as usual when he deals with a serious subject, he was able to highlight this quivering of our whole being suddenly sensitive to communion, to the secret harmony which links each of us to an environment, to beings, to things, to landscapes, to their past, to their future, like Bombillac who finds with inexplicable joy the banister of his staircase, the smoke which rises from the roofs of his city, the door of his apartment... All reasoning can only to distort or betray a feeling so mysterious that Jean Paulhan had to confide to Robert Mallet: “There would only be one way to defend, strictly speaking, patriotism: it would be to show that we are thus made; that our ideas, our reflections are only tenable, finally only stand up, on the condition of containing an element of absurdity, a purely crazy element”; like these other crazy truths that are also love or poetry. After all, don’t Christians (at least those who remain faithful to the apostolic age) claim to be “madness of the Cross”?

The role of Jean Paulhan in the Resistance bears witness to this fervor, it belongs to history. From the first weeks of the occupation, in Paris, when almost everyone gave in to despair or betrayed, without hesitation he resumed the fight, joined one of the very first clandestine networks, published a newspaper. Without the intervention of Drieu La Rochelle, he would not have escaped the firing squad of February 25, 1942 and the fate of his companions Vildé, Letvitsky and the young Sénéchal. Freed, he continues the fight. In difficult conditions. He is monitored by the Gestapo; at the N.R.F. editions, his office is next to that of Drieu and his “collaborators” magazine; the organized Resistance lives in a state of alert, on the alert; Paulhan is reckless, exposed; only the authors of the N.R.F. are authorized to maintain regular contact with him. He was saddened by it at times. He would have liked, he told us, to take part in raids, to blow up trains for example, in short, to take active service. His friendship for Drieu served as a pretext, later, for the legend according to which Jean Paulhan had recruited authors for the review published under German control and played a sort of double game. An unfounded slander, because he felt pain at seeing it reappear in such conditions. Returning from a trip to the free zone, he informed me as follows on November 20, 1940: "Yes, Paris is very good. The (supposedly) unoccupied zone is much less so. The N.R.F. will appear with Gide, M. Jouhandeau, Audiberti, Morand, Chardonne (who wrote to me: “France was dead, Hitler is our providence”!) and also Châteaubriant, J. Boulenger, Bonnard, but without: Bernanos, Claudel, Schlumberger, Queneau, Grenier and (obviously) Suarès, Benda, Wahl, Eluard The radio (the 8:15 a.m. radio) consoles a lot of things.” There is no ambiguity in these lines for those who know the little esteem he had for Châteaubriant, Bonnard, Boulenger... Despite the advice of the “prudent”, Paulhan became the center and animator of the entire “literary resistance”; co-founder of French Letters, of the National Committee of Writers (occupied zone) dependent on the Front National and Editions de Minuit, although Vercors nor Pierre de Lescure wanted, as a precaution, to meet him. He certainly did not err on the side of caution, or even wisdom!

A few weeks before the arrest of Jacques Decour, he had the strange idea of ​​offering to welcome a young poet, who had become, through the misfortune of the times, employed in the services of the sinister Brother de Brinon — the man from Laval in Paris. This young man wanted to “redeem himself”, participate in the Resistance and commit an attack. Naturally, Decour and I recuse ourselves, rightly suspicious. The boy was crazy, and Brinon was within his reach for all intents and purposes. Paulhan did not insist. The next day, a little note in his beautiful handwriting, the text of which is as follows:

“My dear friend, I see clearly how far the difference between us goes. I persist in believing and you do not, that poetry (and politics) are, in part, a way of making the best use of madness...
“But let’s leave it at that. It goes without saying that on the point before us I will only do what you decide.
“J.P.”

I must admit, this post worried our friends a little. Using madness to play hide and seek with the Gestapo did not do us any good. Fortunately, Jean Paulhan, without changing his opinion, stuck to what we had decided.

The divisions that followed the Liberation, the opposition that Jean Paulhan showed to some of us during the purge authorized partisan minds to question his loyalty to the Resistance. They did not experience at his side the interminable evening where we waited in vain for Jacques Decour, always so punctual; they did not share our distress when we learned of the execution of Jean Vaudal. Jean Paulhan's reaction - which I then judged to be excessive - against certain abuses could not surprise any man of good faith. No one was unaware of his feelings, his reservations towards our communist comrades, his desire to see the purge limited to the perpetrators of denunciations. From the beginning of October 1944, he warned me against a certain “unreserved welcome towards communists”.

"Remember also that you have to recreate a unity, a national unanimity where it would still be necessary to begin to admit all people of good will (even if they happened to go astray). Do not let yourself be guided too much by the pride of having been right. It is a question of what France will be tomorrow. If I am like you for the purge it is because it will deliver us, quickly and inflexibly (but on this sole condition), from all worries purification.” On November 15, after an eventful session of the National Council of Writers (the famous “Céné” of his pamphlets), where our communist colleagues had demanded from the government the opening of proceedings against a young essayist and leader of one of the Marshal's organizations, Paulhan protested vigorously: he considered it unacceptable and atrocious that writers could turn into informers. The next day, he sent me this tire: "Completely in agreement. possible, sergeant, will be useful, prisoner, no.”

He is also concerned about certain rumors concerning the special courts. If justice seems to him to be properly done in Paris, he would like a rapid investigation to be carried out in the South where, from all sides, reports of torture are being reported to him: “We should still be able to continue to speak honestly about German atrocities.” It was not late, as unrepentant collaborators and disappointed resistance fighters reproached him in chorus, that he disavowed the purge; before the Liberation, in the midst of the clandestine battle, he had already formulated most of the reservations that he would develop in Straw and Grain. The astonishment shown by some was not justified; to blame Jean Paulhan, on this subject, for variations, betrayal, ambiguity, is unfair; he had never concealed his thoughts, hence the legitimate irritation he showed against fellow soldiers who had become disloyal adversaries. He could not bear the hypocrisy of sanctions pronounced in the name of service to the homeland and public safety when they too often tended to eliminate political adversaries and serve partisan interests. Put, at his request, “in sleep”, he no longer participated in the C.N.E. sessions, then publicly expressed his reservations. It was then against him a real unleashing; without any illusions about the future of French Letters after the clandestine period, he did not believe it was possible to be attacked there with such violence, sectarianism and without regard for the past. These campaigns decided him to publish, in 1952, his famous Letter to the Directors of the Resistance, whose vehement tone contrasts with his usual manner. This little book had the effect of a bomb. I reread the dedication he addressed to me, a quote from Sophocles first: “Justice is not in the habit of sleeping with the victors”, then: “I would like us to agree”; finally followed this post: "You must have received my little Letter to the Resistance. Ah, I wish it seemed fair to you. There is a mystique of the Resistance that we will never defend enough against the profiteers and the Pharisees. But perhaps I defended it a little too strongly. This was, I believe, the General's opinion."

And five days later, to specify:
“All I say in this little Letter is that our resistance mystique has been betrayed by the politicians and people in power. This is designed to make all the Pharisees scream. They scream well enough?”

Either; Paulhan, however, by adopting the thesis of the legality of the Vichy government, condemned not only the abuses of the Resistance, but its legitimacy, which delighted the Pétainists and displeased General de Gaulle. Surprised and saddened by this disavowal, Paulhan was able to explain it; the interview was cordial, hence these three lines the next day: “I must say that the General enchanted me: I found him simple and warm, intelligent and full of common sense. Very happy to know him.”

The Algerian war will bring us the last political pages of Jean Paulhan, testimony to the permanence of his convictions. So here are supporters of negotiation with the fellagha, ready to abandon Algeria, so many opponents of the Munich agreements and intransigent purgers of 1944! Jean Paulhan underlines the contradiction, not without recalling once again, with some nostalgia, the lessons of Mr. Lyon, the image of a powerful and colonizing France because it is fraternal, of a France champion of progress and human rights; but it was pure mirage; he will agree. These pages, written in 1956, are precious, because Jean Paulhan reaffirms this deep and mysterious love which attaches us to the homeland as soon as it is threatened, to this “secret France” for which the Resistance fighters fought, which we spontaneously cherish and serve; this faith to which he remained faithful, which he lived and managed to expound with fervor and sober clairvoyance. Civil war soon threatens. A group of Resistance fighters from 1940, at the beginning of 1958, launched an appeal for the return to power of General de Gaulle; it was about “peacefully resolving the Algerian problem, in the liberal spirit of the Brazzaville speech and safeguarding republican freedoms”; responsible for asking Jean Paulhan for his support for this manifesto, I received this immediate response:
“I sign of course. With some reservations (between us); it seems to me that paragraphs 2 and 41 come close to saying: Let's quickly take a dictator to avoid dictatorships. (But after all why not?)...”

This rallying – his acceptance speech at the French Academy, which caused some political upheaval, is proof of this – he never regretted.
I do not think that I can be blamed for having misused quotations from his letters here. Was there a better method to discover citizen Jean Paulhan without betraying him, despite too many legends? Democratic, but without illusions about the weaknesses of regimes always under the threat of demagoguery; patriotic, but opposed to any nationalist narrowness and curious about the most distant civilizations; heroic resistance fighter, but opponent of repression deemed excessive and always inclined to understand and justify the adversary's reasons; a convinced Gaullist, but without passion, Jean Paulhan escapes the classic but easy division of our political terminology: he did not allow himself to be monopolized by any clan. There as elsewhere, faithful to what was his reason for being, Jean Paulhan is in love with truths which must be sought and discovered beyond all that betrays and disfigures them, but to which, once tested, whether it is justice or love of the homeland, he does not hesitate to sacrifice everything, giving us the rare example of a citizenship as generous for men as it is inflexible in terms of principles, as pure as his work.