all ideas save the strictest Republican orthodoxy, he has, despite much
talk of 'clearing France of superstition' a mechanical belief that the
nation, "highest of all truths", cannot err. And he is, almost by
definition, rabidly anti-clerical. It should be made quite clear that
Rolland has no sympathy at all for this 'Combiste' avant la lettre. The
author of Jean Barois may have thought that such men were the 'gros
bataillons', ignorant but willing, whose brute strength and devotion were
as vital to the pursuit of progress as the intellectual stimulus and
leadership provided by the truly enlightened. Rolland, with his ingrained
mistrust of Radical philosophy, sees such men as bigots, just as
reactionary as the 'cléricaux' whom they so despise, or as any other
section of the French bourgeoisie.
The last type of bourgeois we see is the 'rallié' Gaudery, and the
way in which he is treated shows us how far Rolland has swung from his
neo—Catholicism of two years before. Perhaps Rolland overestimated
the social strength of the 'ralliement' (there is a passage where he seems
• - 18»
socialism ). But, this apart, Gaudery is an interesting character. A factory-owner also, he is a capitalist before he is a catholic (and
Rolland in any case shows his Catholicism to be based on hatred and violence, rather than Christian love); and in the last act it is he who takes the crucial initiative in leading bourgeois forces to crush the strike. The system must be protected, even if Jews and masons form part of it; economic ties are stronger than ideological differences.
The thing that all these figures have in common is their faith in the nation. Mayer uses it to justify his armaments, the sous-préfet his existence, and even Gaudery finds it useful. "La patrie" is, as Berthier
19 claims, "une excuse de tous les crimes et de toutes les bassesses." 7
Against this bourgeois order, whose every prop - army, money, family, nation, bureaucracy - he has thus demolished, Rolland sets the forces of revolt. Frankly, it is not easy to define these forces. We know we are dealing with members of the working class, but it is necessary to describe them more adequately than this. A close look at the play would seem to suggest that, in political vocabulary, there are two possible definitions of the workers' revolt; it is either anarchist or socialist.
Let us first consider the evidence for anarchism. In the 1921 preface to the work, Rolland says that the original version of the work was to have ended in a scene of 'anarchie révolutionnaire', where students and bourgeois were to sack the homes of immigrant workers, as a reprisal for the murder of the head of state by an Italian, and workers in their turn would attack bourgeois property. This would seem to mean that
17 8 .
Rolland is using the word 'anarchy' not in a political sense hut in the commonly accepted one of 'chaos for its own sake'. The only other time the word is used in the play is by Gaudery, who speaks of "notre époque de dilettantes anarchistes". But firstly, we cannot tell whether he refers to the workers or to society at large. Secondly, the word probably has no more precise meaning for him than it did for Rolland in the preface. And thirdly, his sentiments and behaviour, especially in the last act, prove that he cannot in any way be the author ' s mouthpiece, and hence qualified to define the revolt.
Against such negative evidence, though, one could set the comment of one of the café bourgeois in Act 2: "Et si la sociale triomphait une bonne fois, s'il n'y avait plus de gouvernement?". This looks promising; the idea of 'no state' is the hard core of anarchist thought, indeed the very meaning of the word (an-arche * without government); and it is this aspect of anarchism which marks it off best from other types of socialism. But again the speaker's evidence is suspect, for he would naturally see in the extremest light a revolt that threatened his own position. And, significantly, no insurgent ever demands the suppression of the state thus. One concludes that there is no real evidence for Anarchism.
We must next enquire if the workers can be called 'socialist'. Old Boehmer, an impartial figure whose central position might give his views some authority, refers to the movement as 'socialisme révolutionnaire'. Certainly the revolutionary part of the definition is correct, as the insurgents show the greatest contempt for any kind of parliamentary or
reformist socialism. But this need not necessarily imply that the revolutionaries are socialists.
Firstly, the revolutionaries do seem to insist on one doctrine dear to the 'scientific' variety of socialism, the identification of the state with capitalism. For them the state is merely a disguise which capital assumes to further its operations. Thus one of them says of Mayer:-
"Vieux coquin! Partout où est le gouvernement, on est sûr de le trouver!" 21
But there is also the idea of class-struggle, which we associate above all with Marxian socialism. The antagonism of worker and capitalist is clear-cut; the 1897 preface speaks of "L'état de lutte aigue où se trouve la société d'aujourd'hui" . Indeed this class- conflict seems to be seen as an eternal historical process, the pro letarian revolution of 1900 being a development of the bourgeois one of 1789; the workers agree with Marx that the bourgeoisie was the revolutionary class par excellence in its day:
"leurs grands-pères avaient du poil au cul...ils ont eu autant de — i que nous dans le temps pour vaincre les aristos. Ne soyons pas impatients."2 3
The workers also seem to uphold the Marxist precept that the worker has no country; Jarnac agrees with Berthier that national feeling prevents
'international workers' u n i o n A n d finally, we do seem to see within the play that kind of polarisation which, in Marx's view, takes place vhen economic contradictions become acute in any one society; Gaudery provides an example of this, being forced, as we saw, to submerge ideological differences when his class interests are threatened.
180.
So, if there is nothing to connect the worker's revolt with any kind of anarchism, (or anarcho-syndicalism), or reformism, can we say that it is Marxist? After all, it seems to believe fairly and squarely in the class-struggle as an inevitable historical process.
Unfortunately, this would be too convenient an explanation; and there is much evidence against it. Firstly, it would suppose that Rolland in 1897 knew something about Marxism. This was not the case in 1895, as we saw; and there is no reason to suppose that the situation
25
had changed in the intervening two years. But secondly, the play itself does not support a Marxist interpretation. Class-struggle may be its theme; but the classes are not presented as fitting into a Marxist scheme. This statement needs some qualification.
To begin with, Rolland never defines class in Marxian terms. We are never given any idea of classes being a result of the development of contradictions in the process of production; or of such classes being fatally bound to conflict until the lower one triumphs and suppresses by its victory the very notion of classes. In short Rolland does not accept a materialist view of history; and this is hardly surprising.
What Rolland does accept, though, is something that is very near to a Darwinist view of history; and this is why at first sight the play might seem to be Marxist. It is always a hazardous enterprise to guess the influence which 'Darwinism' - that complex and often con tradictory ensemble of doctrines drawn from the application of Darwin's biological principles to fields such as sociology and international politics — exerted on intellectuals at the close of the nineteenth
century. And indeed, less is known about Darwin's influence in France than is the case for other countries. All one can say is that Darwinistic ideas, or ideas which seem to have their roots in Darwin, turn up
everywhere; often, one suspects, without their authors' having read Darwin. We do know that Rolland had read Darwin, for he prefaces a passage of his Diaries for 1895 with the following
"Tous les bruits de la nature, depuis le bourdonnement de l'insecte jusqu'au fracas du tonnerre et aux accents de l'homme, peuvent être rattachés à une victoire ou à une défaite dans le combat de la vie" - DARWIN.2 6
It seems to me from this that what struck Rolland in Darwin was what struck most of his contemporaries - the idea that life is one huge struggle for survival. Darwin saw this struggle as going on in the animal and vegetable world between the same or different species and between these species and their environment. From this it was a brief, albeit totally unjustified step for other thinkers to transfer the conflict on to the plane of human society, national and international. Now Rolland seems on the basis of his own experience to have been
27
hypersensitively aware of conflict in life, and one can only suppose that Darwin confirmed his impressions at a key moment. Certainly the notion of class-struggle in this play seems very Darwinian, and the language in which it is expressed has a strong biological turn.
In the preface Rolland says that his sympathies are:
"toujours du côté où est le mouvement et la vie. Une classe sociale qui est neuve, vivante, pleine de sève a le droit et le devoir de supprimer une classe vieillie, apathique et bassement vautrée dans la réaction."28
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play abounds in oppositions between 'fort et faible', 'sain et malade', and so on. Thus for Jarnac the class-struggle revolves less round control of the means of production than round the strength and fitness to survive of the classes involved: one is reminded here of Etienne in Zola's Germinal. J a m a c ' s idea of justice is simply: "la force et la vie; et tout ce qui peut l'augmenter dans le monde est juste et bienfaisant. Bourgeois dominance is less a matter of economics than "l'abdication des forts entre les mains des faibles".^
Not that this strength, though, is always rationally controlled by those whom it inhabits; if anything, the reverse is the case. "La vie se
O l
fabriquera la beauté dont elle aura besoin", (my itals.) says Jarnac, when asked about the future course of the revolution. With this we are almost on Bergsonian territory, for it implies some kind of evolutionary process advancing and taking its shape almost independently of the human beings involved in it.
For Rolland, then, the workers' revolt in this play is not a coherent force acting in accord with a recognised socialist doctrine in pursuit of a precise social goal; it is rather the manifestation of some blind life-force, violent and anarchic in the worst sense of the word. This doubtless explains why the hero Berthier cannot give his assent to the revolt. Like his author, he is caught between what he sees to be the irreconcilable ■ .egoisms of two conflicting halves of society• He looks in vain for:
"une voie de salut, qui n'était ni l'acceptation de la violence ni le renoncement à la vie, mais l'affirmation de l'âme libre."32
"A quoi bon une revolution? Tout se fait de soi-mSme. II n'y a qu'a attendre."33
Quiet acceptance of 'the way of the world' would seem to be the order of the day. This is a conservative and disappointing conclusion.
Disappointing because, for all his protestations of socialism, Rolland is incapable of committing his art to any meaningful kind of socialism. This many be explained in several ways of course. Firstly, he still knew comparatively little about contemporary socialism. We have seen his lack of reading and there is no reason to suppose, given his work and the circles in which he moved, that he knew any socialist militants personally. More seriously than this, though, we know that Rolland, despite his ignorance, had none the less elaborated an idea of contemporary socialism, viz. that it was violent and materialistic, and redolent of those nineteenth-century philosophies that he so disliked. As such it could not win his approval. These fears are still apparent enough in this pity, especially in the tendency to see socialist revolt as some kind of biological foment. This, with its Darwinian overtones, is the really interesting element in the play, and it would seem to imply something fairly new in Rolland's thought. I shall attempt shortly to discuss Darwinism and its consequences for Rolland, but we will note for the moment that Rolland could not in Les Yaincus commit his art to any kind of socialism - not even to his own special kind. He remains
181*.
in a limbo between a society he detest« and an alternative too fearful to contemplate; and so long as he remains in this dilemna he will be unable to write successful committed plays.
For all that, though, the play is a brave and fairly original
attempt. Comparatively little drama dealing with revolutionary socialism had appeared by then. The anarchist Octave Mirbeau wrote the then
famous Mauvais Bergers only in 1897, the year in which Curel's Repas du Lion also was put on. Although Paul Adam’s L'Automne and Veyrin's La P&que Socialiste were played in 189!*, and Quillard's L'Errante in 1896, there is no evidence to show that Rolland had read or seen these. After 1900 though, plays on such subjects increase considerably in number; which goes to show that on this score at least, Rolland was more than abreast of contemporary feeling.
While Rolland was languishing in something of an impasse, the pressure of external events once more came to provoke him into action. Alfred Dreyfus had been sentenced to prison for treason in 189^*, and attempts to have his case revised, led mainly by his brother and the writer Bernard Lazare, had been going on ever since. In 1896 Colonel Picquart, head of the Deuxieme Bureau, had begun to have his doubts about the verdict, and in November of that year, Rolland was told by Gabriel Monod (his history teacher at the rue d ’Ulm) that Hanotaux,
the then Foreign Minister and also an ex—pupil of his, was quite convinced that the conviction was an error and that General Mercier, who had been instrumental in convicting Dreyfus by the ‘evidence* he gave as War Minister, was wrong. There followed the unsuccessful appeal for revision
in the Palais Bourbon by the old senator Scheurer-Kestner, and, on January 13th, 1898, Zola joined Revisionist ranks with the famous J'Accuse.
As is well known, the result of the Dreyfus affair was to split France, politically and emotionally, into two camps. Few - • , least of all, men of letters - escaped this polarisation, which revealed w.11 the tensions long latent in French society. In order to put Rolland's stance more accurately into context, I shall recall briefly the main elements in the revisionist and anti-revisionist camps.
Apart from the army, whose interest in maintaining the fiction of Dreyfus' guilt was most obvious, the anti-revisionist camp came increasingly to be identified with the political right, the conservative forces in
French society. The opponents of Dreyfus thus included the aristocracy, most of the grande bourgeoisie and a good number of the petite bourgeoisie, and, most significantly, the Church. Formal political groups such as the 'moderate' republicans, the 'ralliés', same ultra-patriotic Radicals
(Rochefort and Anatole France's M. Mazure) and the nationalists (whose movement in fact gained coherence, articulacy and, as it were, a raison d'être thanks to the affair) also gravitated to the anti-revisionist camp. With them went most of the advocates of authoritarian régimes (monarchist, Bonapartist or Boulangist), who formed a sizeable minority of French opinion. The argument of all these people was simple. France was in a precarious position, thus none of her institutions must be weakened, least of all the army, instrument of national security. The army would in fact be weakened if it could be shown to have erred. Thus
186.
whether Dreyfus was guilty or innocent, the best thing to do was simply to forget him. Many able intellectuals - Barres and Bourget, Maurras, Valery, de Mun - took this line and lent their support to the anti- Dreyfus movement.
By contrast the Dreyfusards became increasingly identified with the left. Initially few in number and weak in influence, their numbers and strength grew rapidly after 1898 when Esterhazy's acquittal and Zola's J'Accuse speeded up the tempo of the affair. From being a few relatives of Dreyfus and a few liberal or socialist intellectuals, the revisionists grew to embrace an increasing amount of intellectuals - writers, teachers, students - and later the organised left, Radicals and socialists. The latter ha d originally kept out of the affair, either arguing that it was a quarrel among different factions of the bourgeoisie and as such of no interest to workers, or saying nothing and thus pandering to that section of anti— semitic opinion extant among their followers. (These apparently thought that as Dreyfus was a Jew and as Jew was synonymous with
capitalist, then support for Dreyfus meanfc support for capitalism). After 1898, though, as the affair revealed the deep rifts in French society and as representative democracy seemed increasingly threatened by the right, republicans and socialists joined in the defence of Dreyfus - either to save the republic from 'clericalism' or 'cesarism' or, as the socialists hoped in the long term, to make the republic a socialist one. Thus among the Dreyfusards could be found left-wing intellectual sympathisers like Anatole France, Mirbeau, Gabriel Monod, Clemenceau and Jaurès.