Letter to a young supporter

I see too much,
my dear friend,
that there is truth in your reproaches.
“What is your doctrine?” you ask. And I would be embarrassed to answer you. We have sometimes been accused of being too advanced, and sometimes of being late. Sometimes unbelieving and sometimes clerical. Sometimes too scientific and other times not scientific enough. We are in the strange situation of a man who some would criticize for being too fat, others too thin.
To make things better, we sometimes replied that we defended the best literature, whether reactionary or advanced, fat or thin, it doesn't matter — but that was very pretentious. That we maintain, outside of schools, a certain frankness of expression, a certain literary autonomy — but that remains a little vague. Then, it is obvious that we are attached to a thousand other things than Letters. It would be little: and that in the Letters themselves we are interested obliquely, rather than straight. There has never been any question, in these pages, of the slightest literary truth, we have never attempted to set a standard. We never took sides. Being neither surrealist, nor neo-classical, nor fanciful, nor realistic, it may seem in the end that we are nothing at all. Then, what benefit can be expected, in these matters, from an orthodoxy, so close to indifference or emptiness - what revelation, what salvation?...
Here you add a few words, which I read wrong. Did you mean to say that the review risked being too clever? You are perhaps thinking of this sort of competition, to which François Mauriac recently invited us. Rest assured in this case. We have always been clumsy: it took no less than twenty to forty years and a few wars for Gide or Saint-John Perse (among others) to be, I do not say recognized, seen by the Academies and the great critics, and the orthodoxy of which I spoke to you has this trait at least: it is not obvious. We had the patience we needed, we will have it again. If we have to take part in the Mauriac competition, we are happy to lose. “Besides, you still say, my Party did not admit…” This is clearer. About it...

1 - The wedding, the fire and other incidents

I imagine you got married this morning. This is not a marriage of convenience. You are marrying the woman you wanted to marry. She seems charming to you: as charming as one can be. GOOD. In the afternoon you take him to the theater. You didn't choose the room wrong; it's Shakespeare (not to offend anyone). There is only one misfortune: in the second act the theater catches fire. The police headquarters forgot to check if the wood was fireproof. They are not: they burn like little matches, they sow confusion among the spectators, who flee in chaos and begin to flatten each other. Fortunately, there is a gentleman - who does not seem particularly brilliant or clever (or even, between us, very well dressed), really the first to come. Well, it turns out that this first comer is decisive. He begins by knocking out the evil spectator who was already trampling his neighbor to get away faster. He puts the others in a row, it feels like an exercise. Finally he organizes, as they say, the evacuation. There will only be two or three charred ladies, we'll get away with it. In any case, yours (lady's) is not.
I seem to remember, my dear friend, that you called me an old liberal the other day. And what the hell do you want me to be? So in five hours - if I put myself in the place of the newlywed - I had to successively be a democrat, a partisan of the aristocracy and a royalist (or fascist, if you prefer - it's all one here). Royalist, if there are dangers where the only resource is to blindly obey those who are not the most eloquent, nor the best dressed, nor undoubtedly the most intelligent. Aristocrat, because you have finally chosen, to go see his play, the best (in your opinion) of playwrights. Democrat, since you desire, and even demand if necessary, that your wife is not chosen by your old parents - even if you have for them the affection they deserve - nor by your doctor, even if he is the best in the neighborhood. No, you want to choose it yourself. You don't ask her to have won a beauty award or to be able to write a collection of poems. No, you take it for a host of subtle and personal reasons, which you would be hard-pressed to justify, or even to explain. And even that you insist on not explaining. What to do there? Such is life. So we are glad she is going. The day when the evacuation of the theater is organized by votes and discussions, following the wise principles of democracy, there will not be four ladies burned, but four hundred. The day when your wife is imposed on you by the family doctor, and when the only well-regarded authors of the government will see their plays performed, you will discover to your surprise the pleasure that there can be in living without a theater, and without a wife.
No, life is not simply — as politicians would have it — a marriage. Nor a spectacle. Nor a fire. She is all of these, in turn. And I'm not sorry that I have to be a democrat in the morning, an aristocrat in the afternoon and a royalist in the evening. Which can, of course, on the whole be called liberal. But my liberalism is not made of lukewarmness or indifference. It is the simple liberty that I take to be, depending on the case, violently royalist, vigorously aristocratic, ardently democrat.

I'm afraid I've chosen somewhat flashy examples. Let's forget them. So, you get dressed to go to a friend's house for lunch. You put on your blue tie, which you definitely like better than the green one. Your collar button slips away, and you rush after it, to catch it before it rolls under the wardrobe. In the meantime, you blew your nose. You have passed in three minutes through the aristocratic state (the best tie), royalist (energetic decision to throw all your arms and legs on the ground in pursuit of the button), democratic (you do not at all call on some specialist in blowing your nose, nurse, social worker or other). The old philosophers said that man is made of a head, a heart and a stomach. They added, I believe — in any case they could have added — that the head is royalist, the heart communist and the stomach rather fascist and totalitarian, with what follows.
Every man is a universal man. Who knows how to judge, but who is completely capable of thinking. Who knows how to invent, and who also knows how to adapt to the inventions of others. Capable of tenderness or violence; both fairness and injustice; of interest, but of detachment. That would be little: gifted, on top of that, with who knows what stubborn, difficult, elusive spirit. Thus in turn lion, turtle, hydra or unicorn. Universal to make you dizzy. But our business for us who meddle in politics (as the laws make us duty to do) is all the same to agree between this hydra and this turtle, this revolutionary and this fascist. This is not so easy. So, of course, political parties seem more like a joke to me.
It's a joke that has its charm (like most jokes), but which still becomes excessive when you are required to choose a party. Excessive and even tragic when you are punished for having taken the wrong side, I mean the one that did not succeed. While wisdom would undoubtedly consist, for the citizen concerned about the smooth running of society, in stubbornly taking, in order to re-establish a balance at any compromised moment, the party which is not “the right one”: democratic in the triumph of dictatorships, but royalist in the triumph of democracies. (We know, moreover, that a good citizen spends most of his life in prison.)
Note that I am not commenting on parties. They may be effective, they may be necessary. And in any case it is enough for there to be just one for the others to become desirable. A nation that we know well was divided, until very recently, between the party of leavers and the party of returners who occupied power in turn: some held that the great business for man was to know how to leave his house, others to know how to return. (And I don't need to add that the leavers were rather progressive, but the returnees rather reactionary.)
One day a little boy happened to observe that one could only go out if one had first gone in, nor come in unless one had first gone out. But little attention was paid to an obviously stupid remark.

2 - The parties against the first comer

Will you tell me that it is not entirely accurate, that it is imprudent in any case to speak of a society - a country, a nation - as if it were a person: any person, you, me, the first person to come. That the United States is not an uncle, nor England a lion, nor France a Marianne. Either. At least observe that they must behave as if they were a person, and even (most often) an exceptional person, an independent, thoughtful and yet determined person.
Between the various regimes – there have been no less than sixteen! – that we have known since the Revolution, we easily distinguish those which relate more to marriage, those to the play, those to fire. It even happened that France was all of these at once. It was between 44 and 45 that it had at the same time a king (or, if you prefer, a dictator), Charles de Gaulle; of an elected Parliament, the first Constituent; of a Council of the Best, the National Committee of the Resistance (which prepared the decrees and ensured their application). So at the same time aristocrat, democrat, royalist, uniting in a single bloc, from the extreme right to the extreme left, all the parties.
The experience, you say, hardly lasted. Either. But she can start again tomorrow. But for a few months it formed only one person from France. Then it is from men that societies are made, it is through men that we hold them, it is to men that everything comes back in the end. What is Plato's Republic? It is a treatise on government — yes indeed, on the government of man by himself. Jean-Jacques' Social Contract? A treatise on obedience — yes, from the citizen to other citizens who are his equals. Karl Marx's Capital? A treatise on liberation — yes, of man enslaved by man. We do not come out of it, no one has ever come out of it. It is vast enough to contain the whole world if there is not, in these matters, a word that does not relate to it, nor a thought that does not concern it. As for the parties...
So do you think I don't see their merits? First, they interest us in men. They give us an opening on them, a shot. Partial certainly, and partial. But seeing these men in their entirety, who wouldn’t lose their head? and it is from vertigo that we must first escape. There are subjects so serious and complex—subjects that never end—that the wisest course is undoubtedly to approach them in fragments. Again, this is on the condition of considering the fragment for what it is: a piece of the truth, not the whole truth. Here is the danger.
This is because a regular illusion shows us as a whole the small fragment that we know, however thin it may be, all the more so the thinner it is. We naturally judge the entire medical profession on the two or three doctors we are given to know, and the entire immense China on the only Chinese we have as a friend - the entire social body on a marriage (or a spectacle, or even a fire) and the information we possess on a given subject behaves in the balloon of our mind, not like a liquid whose constant volume shows the free space that remains to be filled, but like a gas which immediately occupies all the space.
Who said: “Our party in power, the other parties in prison”? But of course all the supporters. And the least that must be said of the parties is that they do not take long to take a side themselves. But it's always the same thing that they take: totalitarian, devouring. And therefore much closer to each other than it seems. We readily dwell on the opposition of the parties, on the gulfs that separate them, on the impossibility for a man of the right to understand a man of the left. We notice less how much they resemble each other, agree: and, if I may say so, are one. It is every time that it is a question of offending the man in the street, the first comer, this surprising man who has the answer to fire as well as to the theater, to the theater as to marriage: this man who has the answer (and question) to anything - all of us.
There is no normal man who would not like to have his own house, preferably different from the neighboring houses, with furry trunks in an attic and slightly broken chairs. With a roof he can climb on. With a small garden that he adorns in his own way with sidewalks of shells and earthenware snails. But that’s what he doesn’t have. This is clearly what he is not close to having. Who is opposed to it? On one side, the Conservative party, the large landowners who prefer to keep their land – even if it is fallow – than to give it away. On the other, the Communist Party which does not want to let a single one of its members escape its proletarian class, and thus its party.
There is not a normal man who does not think that he works too much and that he could use a little more leisure time - if only to dig the garden or sit on the ground and have dinner with his wife and children. But these are the leisure activities that people on the right and on the left violently refuse him. These are because they demand performance and fear, perhaps, the reflections that we make in moments of leisure. In short, some rather stupid workers arrange them very well. But these, as soon as the revolution was made, were in no hurry than to abolish public holidays, proclaiming the Right to Work. The rebels of 1848 only demanded (with rifle fire) the right to spend twelve hours a day in the factory. The Federals of 1871 called themselves the Labor Revolution. We have all heard of Stakhanov. In short, slightly stupid workers suit them very well. There is no normal man who does not find that the rich take up too much space in this world and usurp too much authority. But who can make up for them? The parties spend big. They have their advertising costs, their propaganda, their posters and their banquets. In short, a hundred thousand expenses, and no revenue. It costs a lot to elect a deputy, more expensive for a minister. Who will give the money, if not the Rich? Now they will demand to be paid, if not in money, in honors, in monopolies, in influence. And until L'Humanité, as we know, was founded by twelve great capitalists.
Should we still be surprised that the people, for one hundred and sixty years, have never had a voice? It is enough to listen to the Parties. There is not one, whether reactionary or revolutionary, who does not declare, in his moments of frankness, that we need to profoundly change - the institutions, yes, but the people! to obtain a passable political state. Now what anyone with reliable knowledge knows is that, on the contrary, we must make good policy with the man in the street as he is, stubborn, a little lazy, passionate, not at all stupid, a friend of equality and rather an anarchist, with his own head and his heart and his stomach - such as he has always been, such as he knows very well how to cope with being.
But it is this man that the parties begin by eliminating. He comes to doubt his existence. Stalin, in agreement with the Ironworks Committee, told him that he must work as well as a machine. He believes it. He will imitate the machine. He has forgotten what he is. He forgot that he has the answer to everything. He forgot that he questions everything. When the Greeks invented the water mill, the poet Antipatros wrote: “Sleep your mornings in peace, young millers, the water nymphs work for you.” But the young millers these days get up at three in the morning, to do better than nymphs.

3 - Small architectural project

A certain young man I knew one day decided to live in a green world: he had learned, at the Color Information Center, that the color green gives peace and hope. (As we have seen a thousand examples on American chickens and members of boards of directors.) But he was, by nature, in a difficult mood. So here he is rubbing his pen, his typewriter and his blotter. (Secretary, by trade.) Then the covers of his books, the tapestry of his room, the walls of his little house. By chance he found himself an heir and a small owner.
Then came the shipments abroad, the colonization attempts: the neighbor's cat, which we dipped in a pot of paint, the school bags (green) which we gave to the little girls at school; coats, to the ladies in the street. He sometimes had bad words said to him, he sometimes had words that were too tender. More than once he was taken to the station, a station that was gray in color, and even grayish: discouraging. He held on. He had opted for green, and all in all he was rewarded for it, since every day he saw this green extending a little further, gaining one more paving stone, a new tree, a tree grate. In short, he was totalitarian, like all partisans. Totalitarian, and satisfied with it. It was then that the accident happened.
It was a horrible accident, and (in his opinion) improbable. Certainly, he had already suspected, on his walls, more than one suspicious reflection. The excellent coat, which he had just given to an old lady, had transformed slightly before his eyes: he quickly closed them.
He had happened to fly in a dream over suspicious grass: not green at all, on the contrary. He quickly opened his eyes. When he woke up, he happened to become furious, in an inexplicable way. No more doubt at the end: he saw red, with all that followed. No matter how hard he closed his eyes or widened them, he was always pursued by some trail of purple or pink. It was in anger that he painted his last paving stone, and in despair his last tree trunk. For he soon stopped. The green was still there, it was the reason for the green that he had lost.
Do not tell me, my dear friend, that he was playing here the simplest of physiological laws (induction, unless I am mistaken) and that yellow no less regularly calls blue (or green, red) in our eye than timidity in our mind does extreme pride; or democracy, fascism. We know all this, and it is not the least striking feature of a party that it is ready at any moment to become the opposite party. It is the fierce revolutionaries who make the great conservatives, and the fascists who make the best communists. (And the word dialectic, if you take it carefully, does not mean anything else.) I am not thinking of these opinions, to which we sometimes rally without adopting them, out of opportunism. (Thus Sartre sides with the communists, although he sees dialectical materialism as a trap; and Maurras the unbeliever supports the Catholic party; or Benda the pantheist, opponent of Marx, Marxism.) No, these opinions hardly change. It’s that they are on the surface, and, not believing in them, how could we stop believing in them? But the others!
Alain proposed, around 1920, to regroup the combists. But there was no longer a single one: some of them had become communists, the others nationalists. Father Combes himself, long before his death, had changed parties.
As early as 1914, at the head of the conscientious objectors and die-hard pacifists, Remy de Gourmont, formerly dismissed for antipatriotism, but who was to write the worst nonsense during the war; Anatole France, but who asked to get involved; Romain Rolland, but who was to decide in 1938 for a merciless war. Later came Jean Prévost, but who died a hero in the battles of the Vercors; André Chamson, but who became a colonel and Resistance fighter; André Malraux, but who violently took part from 1935 to 1944, from China to Spain, in all the wars that arose. When the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, they were surprised to find only one newspaper there, called La Victoire. It was the diary of Gustave Hervé, well known for having vomited war and the army, and planting the French flag in the muck.
Germany, which was entirely socialist in 1920, found itself entirely fascist (or almost) in 1938. What is it today? Democrat and Christian, it seems. As for France, we know that it has been governed for fifty years by Marxists. This is what no one would guess about the effect. However Viviani was a Marxist, and Briand. Jules Guesde was a Marxist: he was even a purely observant Marxist. Millerand was a Marxist and Augagneur, and Pierre Laval (who replied in the Chamber to some adversary: ​​“You had better go read Marx”). Léon Blum was also (with some reservations) and Félix Gouin and Vincent Auriol. As we see, French Marxists have very regularly become ministers of state, presidents of the Council, presidents of the Republic. It is strange to think that it took nothing less than the methodical analyzes and enumerations, the anticipations, the flashes of genius and the naive confusions, the methodical accommodation of Hegelian monism to materialist ontology and the faith in a golden age, the rigorous reflection of poor Marx (and the great needs of his heart) to support so many honest and timid governments - but also to allow the most dictatorial ruthless that has been seen today, the man fiercer than Genghis khan and more cruel than Nebuchadnezzar, who killed his women, tortured his friends, exterminated by the millions Russian kulaks and Polish resistance fighters, social democrats and Trotzkyists, and created slow death camps the size of one of his republics - moreover, not without genius. What, we saw very close to us the party of justice sink, as soon as it was victorious, into injustice, spoliation, torture. Who did he get his good conscience from? From an Emmanuel Mounier, who rejoiced in 1941 at the German victory over the Russians; of an Astier de La Vigerie, in 1935 anti-Semitic and supporter of Doriot, and should we cite Paul Eluard, André Marty, Maurice Thorez? The editorial board of the best communist newspaper, Lettres françaises, brought together around 1945 Claude Morgan, the king's camelot, Claude Roy, formerly still a royalist, Aragon, who came from anarchy. Who is leading today, with inflexible rigor and a strange deployment of efforts, the Algerian war? The same socialists who were elected with cries of “Stop Algerian repression”. And me, should I trust the Mounier of 41 or that of 44; to Aragon of 30 or to that of 32; to Guy Mollet of December 1955 or to that of January 1956? Strange truths, which are at the mercy of a few years of war, of a season, of an equinox.
I will be told that they all spoke without knowing, haphazardly. In that case shouldn’t they have kept quiet? No, their honesty is obvious. I prefer to assume that it was partisanship that played one of the tricks on them that we know about.
Because we know them, and I am surprised that this science has not yet entered, as they say, into the domain of realities - that the slightest practical application has not been made of it. Can I suggest one to the architects? I am thinking of this absurd arrangement of our Parliaments in a hemicycle, from which a good part of our ideas concerning politics come from. Instead that a complete cycle, a perfectly circular monument, such as the Arena of Nîmes or the town hall of Ambert, would give each citizen the best lesson, I am not saying of concord or kindness - because it would remain to be seen whether concord and kindness are desirable things -, but in any case of intelligence, and the deputies would quickly lose the deplorable habit they have acquired of fighting, at the start of each session, to who will not be to the right of the president. But if this president, with his secretaries, his quaestors and his orator, were placed in the center of the arena, on a tower, or revolving platform (rotating slowly, so as not to daze anyone), it would be obvious to all eyes that we must consider in the communist the reactionary that he will be tomorrow, in the royalist the revolutionary, and the man of excesses in the moderate republican, all things which we certainly know. But it is very different to know (as you say in your party) the objective data of the world, and to be caught in them - to find yourself stuck in them. About as different as studying how bodies fall, and being the body that falls from a fifth floor yourself.
And what to do in this case? you will tell me. Yes, that's the whole question. By the way, have I told you what happened to our young man?

It happened that he became a painter. Not one of those great specialists who occupy the Galleries. He painted on Sundays: one of those painters for themselves, who are enchanted by their paintings, but do not try too hard to delight the neighbors. A painter like each of us is a writer in his own way.
What had happened? Perhaps he had found the key - I mean the point of reflection, from which he had, and even abused if it must be said, red and green, yellow and blue; if you like better (to return to our subject), democracy and fascism. Perhaps he simply assumed that by waiting for this reflection, and making room for it, one day it would happen that the reflection would finally come to occupy him. Philosophers have sometimes dreamed of a grammar of ideas which would establish from one thought to another the same links that grammar itself establishes between words. Well! it seems to me that such a grammar would begin by making room, between extreme opinions, for I don't know what void and what absence, what state of extreme environment, much closer to a secret than to an admission, to an ignorance than to a doctrine. And of which it is easier to form a presentiment than a clear idea: all in all, no less mysterious than a man — and we, in front of her, in fact, quite clumsy.

Let's leave it at that. You must fill your pen, my dear friend, and use capital letters from time to time. Reading you again with a magnifying glass, I definitely believe that you wrote to me, not that the review risked being too clever, but too much to the Right (to the Right, in the sense of the parties). But, on this, I keep answering you. I'm not finished.

November 1956
(Jean Paulhan, O.C., Tchou)