Hope and silence

These pages are not talking about France's dictatorship over the French today. And our hope needs explanations less than ever, in these severe days when it becomes a flame. Who, however, would refuse the reasons that can assure and nourish him?

Certainly, one of the greatest forces the world has seen has risen against us. Beware, however, that it is a joyous force, bred for plunder and for victory. A failure must disconcert her: everything suggests that her resistance is unequal to her attack, her defense to her offense.

But here we are, facing it, with this abyss behind us: the penal colony and slavery equal for the worker, for the peasant, for the bourgeois. Driven by invention and genius. This is not there to worry us. “Let the generals,” said Moréas, “do their job as I do mine.” Luckily, we know the job of our current generals. He still passes that of Moréas. Forced to hope, it would be little. Forced also to resemble this other hope that ten tortured peoples place in us, some of whom suffer silently, and others who fight as heroes. Ten peoples tortured, and twenty peoples still free. From Pope Pius XII to President Roosevelt, and from Spanish America to Latin America, a second Alliance of the Righteous was formed around the Allies. A little inert still, no doubt. But have we not ourselves been inert for a long time? Here at least is the undeserved reward for too much patience or laziness: finally our enemy had to take all the wrongs upon himself - the violence, but the hypocrisy; deceitfulness, but cruelty. And the very people who might have his strength recoil from his bad faith. What hope should we refuse? I would say one of the biggest, which is political. Certainly, our republic seems to have admitted, for twenty years, all the vices with which its adversaries accuse it. Yet we are fighting for something that resembles the Republic: for the freedom of people, against voluntary servitude. In truth, the problem has such clear terms that it would be crazy not to hope for a French reconciliation, if each of us, today, poses it and tries to resolve it, in our own secret. In his silence.

This silence is no less due to our friends who are fighting in the flames, and for whom, there is no other word, we pray.

June 1940.
(Jean Paulhan, O.C., Tchou)