A short treatise on pacifism

There is something weak and ineffective in the arguments with which we usually want to overwhelm pacifists. “Just wait, they are told, until the Germans are in France; until they rob you and beat you; until they treat you like simple Jews...” To which Georges Duhamel added, last month: “...Let them make you soldiers. You did not want to serve France. You will shed your blood for the glory of Germany.” (Because everyone knows that it is part of the habits of conquerors to raise troops in conquered countries. And the French do not have such a bad reputation that they should be neglected.) This is the strong argument.
Now this is not at all a strong argument. And although the moralists who hold it are, usually, former pacifists, it must be admitted that they know almost nothing about the question.

There may be pacifists out of cowardice - or selfishness - or even out of disgust and rage. I don't worry about those: because the same selfishness or the same rage will make them warlike tomorrow. This has been seen in every war.

I think of the true pacifist, the fierce, the objector — the one who went on the attack in 1914 with a jammed rifle. Well, first of all it turns out that this pacifist is not a coward. We must not try to frighten him with kicks, or despoliation, or torture. And it is no coincidence that the writers who pledged, around 1928, never to hold a weapon again, all wore the war cross, and more than one palm. What this pacifist refuses is not to hold a gun. He once held a gun. It is, first of all, to use it. Above all, it's about being kind to the people who put a gun in his hand. It's about being complicit. The pacifist will not feel dishonored if he becomes a German soldier, because it is obvious that he becomes one by force. He finds himself dishonored if he is a French soldier, because he could be so on purpose. What he fears is not pain or even death: it is participation in war, in the mystical sense of the word.
But the question goes far beyond the quarrel over pacifism.

The extreme perfection that war machines had reached in his time made Philippe de Commynes think, around 1500, that the end of wars was near. This is a feeling that has remained very common: sometimes we hear the café man lamenting about some new explosive which exterminates, according to him, five hundred thousand men at once; and sometimes rejoice at the thought that the war will not survive there. “Or (he adds) a European war would bring about the death of all civilization: pure barbarism.”
I don't know if this brave man wants to be reassured, if he doesn't harbor some filthy hope - if he doesn't secretly consent to the death of France, provided that Europe dies too (we encounter such wishes among the dying). But ultimately the truth requires reassurance. No, civilization is not about to die. No, she continues to provide proof of her vitality every day. Among other evidence, this:
Frankly speaking, I do not see any institution in our societies that is better regulated, better obeyed, than war. Let us instead think of the immunity that it grants, to a fairly large extent, to prisoners; often, to children and women; always to doctors. Let us consider for a moment with a foreign eye the care given to enemy wounded, the taboo granted to certain places (staff houses, mines, etc.), the game of double spies, the exchange of foodstuffs between belligerent countries, the persistence of intellectual relations, the harshness with which the victor demands that the vanquished recognize his wrongs. Every war has remained an ordeal: a test by steel, by fire and by hunger. And if the word did not evoke for us (quite foolishly) a meeting of astrologers, it would be called rite. Because there are bloody and horrible rites. The soldier who goes to the front feels very good that he is entering a consecrated place and a secret society.
The fact remains that we refuse the rite and the mystery. The pacifist has all the traits of the heretic: fierce like him and intractable, to the point of burning. “But, dear friend, you will be a martyr,” Duhamel told him. But he precisely chose to be a martyr.
I am not saying that pacifists are without fault.

The league against vivisection from time to time puts up posters where we see, depicted in detail, the tortures that physiologists are accustomed to inflicting on animals. These posters are very successful, and the neighborhood kids practice playing scientist on the cats they can catch. But it's not the kind of success the league expected. It is so difficult in certain cases to express — without certainly compromising them — feelings, which are indeed very noble.
It is no less noble that a child decides to return good for evil in the future and turn the left cheek to those who hit him on the right. But it would be wrong to publish his decision. Because her boyfriends will want to try, and the experience will be false.
Cimon despises the police and judges. We can rob him, he thinks, he's not the one who's going to file a complaint. Either. But if Cimon goes around repeating right and left that he will not file a complaint, this will inevitably happen: Cimon will be robbed.
So do pacifists.

Italy, as we know, today demands Tunis and Corsica from us. And it is likely - if I judge by the precedents - that we will shortly give them to him (or even let him take them, thanks to a ministerial interregnum). We still have in the government, fortunately, a minister famous for his belligerent declarations of the past. GOOD. But I imagine that Mr. Sarraut, carried away by his good nature, declares on the contrary that he will not fight under any pretext. Our neighbors will immediately demand Savoie, Provence and even Manosque. And I don't see at all how this time we would avoid war. In short, everything happens as if they were secret opinions by nature; and heresies, which the expression makes infinitely favorable to the very rite which they condemn. The fault of the pacifists we know could well be this: we know them. (But perhaps this is the trait that is the most difficult to make understood - as we are accustomed to admit that the word adds nothing to the thing, nor the expression to the thought.)

January 1939.
(Jean Paulhan, O.C., Tchou)