At the beginning of 1960, the public face presented by the Gaullist regime was more ambiguous than ever. The events of the fall would begin to dispel this ambiguity. In the spring, when it became known that the trial of the “Jeanson network” would take place after the summer, Dionys Mascolo felt it necessary to intervene. But what form would this intervention take? That, quickly settled upon, of a collective manifesto, the “Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War.”1
Still, the mask of ambiguity remained: This meant that in Algeria the terror of torture and the desire for indifference, the politicization of military affairs and the militarization of political affairs could continue untroubled. It is true that on September 16, 1969, in an address broadcast on radio and television, De Gaulle did indeed recognize for the first time that Algerians had the right to self-determination, but this was issued in terms unacceptable to the FLN (National Liberation Front). In March 1960, he reaffirmed France’s right to remain in Algeria, while also speaking of an “Algerian Algeria” and preparing for the first secret negotiations. The Jeanson network, which helped the Algerian FLN, had recently been exposed; insubordination and desertion were spreading though the French army. Mascolo’s aim was to give the men concerned a sense of legitimacy and thus to support Jeanson’s cause and his right to do what he had done, as well as to allow writers and thinkers to be insubordinate.
There are at least fifteen versions of this text, which was initially called the “Address to International Opinion.” They were all written between April and June 1960. The way the declaration evolved closely resembled Le 14 Juillet. The first versions were drafted by Mascolo and Schuster, and the overall scheme did not change greatly. Breton looked at version four, Blanchot at the ninth and subsequent ones. The definitive version was shown at the beginning of July to Sartre and Nadeau, who immediately endorsed it.
The changes made by Blanchot make him, along with Mascolo and Schuster, the third author of the Declaration. As Mascolo noted in the margin of the ninth version, these changes “attenuate what was abrupt in the previous versions”: The phrasing was made less clunky, the attacks against the army were moderated. This stylistic and strategic attenuation did not affect the basic intransigence of the text, however: it was Blanchot who replaced “autonomous community” with “independent community,” it was he who, in line with his wish to eradicate nihilism, introduced the last expression “not to be taken in by the equivocal aspect of words and values”; last, it was he who—against Mascolo and with Schuster—restored the word “duty” in place of “right” in the key phrase justifying insubordination: “the refusal to serve is a sacred duty.”2
It was the same Blanchot who, worried about the weakness of the Declaration’s title, proposed in a letter of July 26 a new one that Mascolo immediately accepted and then imposed on all those who had signed the text bearing a more neutral title. Blanchot even wanted to add the phrase “and to desertion” to “Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War,” although he suspected that the formulation would become less clear and that semantically the addition was unnecessary, as insubordination implied desertion. Curiously, the text became both more intransigent and gentler thanks to Blanchot’s new title. The title became a political, provocative, illegal act in itself, responding to the army’s provocations and to the illegitimacy of torture. But restoring the word “right” allowed it to avoid any sense of moral obligation. The title was as subtle as it was authoritative; it placed each reader directly before his or her human responsibility. Removing the references to the French Revolution and to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which had been imposed by Mascolo in the early versions against the wishes of the surrealists, served a similar function: doing so avoided constraining or placing obligations upon one by any system of values which simply by being cited would result in a moralizing effect. The Declaration was proposing a rigorous formulation of a right to recognition with a grace and authority that recalled Robert Antelme’s book. It moved away from a notion of “sacred duty” and imposed itself as an illegal act of refusal, as universal respect, as justified conviction (these were the final three phrases of the Declaration, in which strictly speaking it consisted).3 Blanchot would address this in the interview with Madeleine Chapsal in the fall:
Note that I say Right and not Duty, as some thoughtlessly wanted to hear in the Declaration, undoubtedly because they believe that the formulation of a duty goes farther than that of a right. But this is not so: an obligation refers to an anterior moral that enfolds, guarantees, and justifies it. . . . A right, on the contrary, is a free power for which everyone is responsible, by himself, in relation to himself, and which completely and freely engages him: nothing is stronger, nothing is more serious.4
Later, the authors of the Declaration and those that were close to them would unanimously recognize the good fortune of Blanchot’s reintroduction of the word “right” to the title, instead of any “unreflective” formulation, including also his own initial one. The choice of the title forged another link with Antelme, Duras, and Mascolo, who twenty years later would recall the issue almost aphoristically: “Always a right, never a duty.”5 This link offered recognition based in strength and in gentleness. The singularity of Blanchot’s style and of his face were—as it were—superimposed on to the stormy, interrupted, and collective writing of the text, if the first witnesses of the era are to be believed: for instance Claude Roy, who saw Blanchot as responsible for the shape of the Manifesto’s thinking (“the tone of this enigmatic, crystalline writer had given the affirmation of a principled position the clearness of a calm statement of fact. It now expressed in simple terms the conclusions reached by everybody’s complex reflections”), or Madeleine Chapsal, who after interviewing Blanchot found him to be “the gentlest of men”:
I was touched by their gentleness, by their awkwardness at suddenly finding themselves in the eye of the storm, by their resolve to face up to things. There is Robbe-Grillet who is no fierce revolutionary. . . . There is Simone Signoret, aware and courageous. . . . There is Maurice Blanchot, the writer, the gentlest of men.6
Perhaps the Declaration allowed for the osmosis between public affirmation and personal reserve that Mascolo had spoken of;7 to the writer whose “essential solitude” was the most abyssal fell the task of prizing the text away from belonging to anyone in particular, to any of those who had signed it.
The Declaration had a number of other singular points about it. For instance, Blanchot observed that “for the first time, words have arisen from the depths of a people to lay claim to the right not to oppress, with the same strength that has previously led all peoples to claim the right not to be oppressed.”8 He believed that this conscience could only belong to the post-Auschwitz period. The words of Robert Antelme, “anything that resembles, even vaguely, what we saw there literally destroys us” now forms the basis for Blanchot’s thinking. This analogy raises the stakes of intellectual, political, and legal responsibility. For example, the Manifesto explicitly compares the “institution” of torture in Algeria to the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.9 Blanchot recalled that the military court in Bordeaux in 1953 had condemned German soldiers for not having disobeyed their superiors’ orders to perform terrifying acts, and used this precedent to legitimize “the right to military disobedience.” He also invoked Nuremberg and confirmed that the end of the history of patriotism had come, an ideology that was essentially perverse and blind. “The principle that recommended serving one’s country, whether it was just or unjust, was buried in the concentration camps alongside the victims of those who were not able to choose disobedience and reason over obedience and madness.” This reasoning, fundamental to the Declaration, legitimized the right to refusal, this “ultimate recourse to the ability to say no.” What it did not do was to blindly condone all revolutionary ideologies or strategies. Thus Blanchot refused to explicitly support the FLN, just as he said that he was reserving judgment on the emerging revolutionary power of China.10
Reversing the official interpretation of events and attributing the responsibility for the anarchic situation to French politico-military power, the call for illegal action had a profound effect, for it broke from the innumerable intellectual declarations and petitions that appeared after the Liberation.11 Initially, it disturbed a number of potential signatories contacted by Mascolo, Schuster, Nadeau, Pouillon, Péju, and Leiris during the summer. Some refusals to sign were surprising: not without prevarication, close friends such as Barthes, Duvignaud, and Morin refused to support illegal action and ended up drafting their own resolutely pacifist “Appeal to Public Opinion,” which was published by the Fédération de L’Éducation Nationale (a trade union group) on October 5, a month after the Declaration had appeared. Led by several members of the Arguments group, with Claude Lefort and Colette Audry, a few dozen intellectuals signed it, including Domenach, Étiemble, Merleau-Ponty, and Prévert.
The summer was therefore spent collecting signatures. A few dozen by the end of July became, just by chance, 121 by the end of August: This number would remain almost as a fetish, and the Declaration almost immediately came to be known as the “Manifesto of the 121.” The number and diversity of intellectuals committed was impressive.12 Some of the writers contacted wanted to modify aspects of the text, and Blanchot, like Mascolo, was extremely attentive to this desire to write collectively. While it was too late to modify the Declaration, for a number of weeks both contemplated adding a section that would allow either certain figures to speak in their own names, or allow all to signal that there was no consensus and that each signatory was able to retain an individual position. But ultimately the idea was abandoned, in the name of a unified effect. It is true that it would have made the Manifesto much less effective. But the care that Blanchot took over this question would not be without consequences. He was completely sold on the idea of writing as a community, enthusiastic about the way that the Declaration was drafted (with as many versions as there had been authors, texts constantly going back and forth, the series of “countless, almost daily meetings”).13 When in September the judicial system would call the signatories to appear before it, he based his thinking on the collective and anonymous authority of the Manifesto for reasons going beyond simple defense. In July, he proposed to Mascolo that the undertaking should be continued after the Declaration was published. Mascolo accepted immediately, but on condition that the roles be reversed, with Blanchot having the task of defining this new project for which he declared himself available.14 Blanchot replied evasively that concerning “this Algerian thing” one day it would be necessary to “bring together, around a text, writers in all languages, on condition—it is true—that this text should not simply be vague, but that it should express why their shared truth of being writers also obliges them to participate in such a project.”15
The project of the International Review was born.
To write with Dupin and Char, who during the summer both wanted to rework the text, opened this political undertaking up to the demands of poetry, the infinite attentiveness to language that also infinitely welcomes the speech of the other. In mid-July, Blanchot met René Char, who revealed his main objection to the text: that it asked young conscripts to become insubordinate without providing them with any collective or judicially valid support. Robert Antelme had already expressed the same concern a few weeks earlier. Char said that he was struck by the collapse in morale of some deserters and by the lack of responsibility of certain leaders of underground networks. “We are encouraging them to take this extreme path by saying to them: Here is the truth, but without doing anything to make it viable in practice,” Blanchot added when he related the meeting to Mascolo.16 This infinite attentiveness, which was immediately adopted by Mascolo, would remain as an open wound in the demands made by a publication that could no longer be delayed, although it is true that it proposed no less a risk than the trauma of battle or death, not to mention that of being forced to inflict torture. Nonetheless, the indirect effect of publishing it—magnified by Sartre’s support during the trial—was precisely to put an end to a war that the very person who was both president and a general had declared absurd—“a statement that ought to have destroyed him there and then” (“can a people be mocked in any crueler a fashion?”).17
Between July and September, there followed correspondence with the two poets about which Blanchot kept Mascolo informed, sending him copies of the letters. But Char and Dupin would not sign the Declaration. This dialogue raised the possibility of a Review; their refusal to sign already provided a glimpse of its failure. Blanchot and Mascolo would never truly get over this failure, having together set in motion this infinite writing with the questionnaire, with the Declaration, with their correspondence which was sometimes doubled and repeated in other correspondences, other articles or other books. They would always insist on the “collective character of the Declaration”: “The version made public is rigorous in having no identifiable author,” Mascolo told L’Autre Journal in 1985; and when Gramma was considering republishing it in a special issue on Blanchot, Mascolo would ask Christian Limousin to remember that “its collective responsibility must be preserved.”18
The text of the Manifesto was printed on September 1. It immediately fed into the trial of the Jeanson network, which began on September 5 without the accused party, who was still hiding from the law. Mascolo mailed more than two thousand copies of it; among those to receive it were government ministers and the president. Under the threat of censorship, no mainstream press outlet dared to publish it.19 Only its final phrases appeared in Le Monde, on September 7—the part that was, strictly speaking, “declarative.” The Manifesto was creating waves. It provoked other intellectuals, who assembled to publish two countermanifestos a month later, which were also opposed to one another: the Appeal of the FEN, and the “Manifesto of French Intellectuals for Resistance to Desertion,” which was in favor of French Algeria and was published by Le Figaro with 185 signatures, including Thierry Maulnier’s (in fact the final number of signatures was closer to five hundred, including those of Andreu, Boutang, Massis, and Paulhan). Thierry Maulnier was among the fiercest opponents of the original Declaration, contrasting “the real France” to “the France of Sartre,” whose provocative authority he could not stand.20 It was an irony of history that by strongly attacking the latter, Maulnier was attacking Blanchot’s vision, was attacking what he saw as a betrayal of his own past and his own authority.
Above all, it was the Manifesto’s presence in the trial that gave it its notoriety. On September 14, the defense demanded that the 121 be called as witnesses in solidarity with the accused. The signatories were initially interrogated and painted as guilty. The day’s proceedings on September 20 were given over to them. Immediately after Claude Lanzmann appeared as a witness, the defense lawyer, Roland Dumas, interrupted proceedings to read a letter that he claimed he had just received from Sartre, who was in Brazil at the time. In fact it was a text written by Péju, in agreement with Lanzmann and Pouillon, that already had Sartre’s blessing when he had left at the beginning of August. The letter made explicit the previously missing link between the Jeanson affair and the Manifesto. “If Jeanson had asked me to pass on materials or to host Algerian militants, and if I had been able to do it without risk for them, I would have done so without hesitating,” read the letter which ended with a diatribe against the French government and its notion of justice, “an ephemeral power that . . . already represents nothing.”
Sartre’s letter provoked a national outcry and accusations of guilt began to rain down. In the following days, Antelme, Duras, Frénaud, Lanzmann, Mascolo, Nadeau, Pouillon, Schuster, and Geneviève Serreau were charged with inciting insubordination and desertion. On September 22—for his fifty-third birthday, or the day after—Blanchot too was charged via a letter. He had been cunning when being interrogated: patiently, insolently, hiding an anger that he would say was the greatest of his entire life, Blanchot had constantly irritated Judge Braunschweig, criticizing his arbitrary power and systematically opposing the imprecise, indirect transcriptions of his own statements.21
On the same day of September 22, government ministers increased the punishment for inciting insubordination and for hiding deserters; the FLN put out a communiqué supporting the 121. On September 29, an order allowed the provisional suspension of state employees who supported insubordination or desertion or who encouraged soldiers to disobey orders. The signatories were banned from being cited on radio or television. On October 3, one of them, Robert Barrat, was arrested; this caused all the signatories to claim that they were authors of the text in an individual capacity and to demand that they be arrested too. Finally, on October 4, a new charge—encouraging soldiers to disobey orders—was applied to the 121, and initially to Nadeau and Blanchot, who seems to have been chosen as a main activist and a main writer, respectively, linked to the Declaration.
The charges led to further signatures; the number rose to 246 by October 29, the day the third and final version of the Manifesto was published.22 Their primary effect was to outrage the majority of newspaper, radio, and television journalists, the worlds of teaching, trade unions and associations, and even the assembly of cardinals and archbishops who, although they did not always support the Declaration, resolutely defended the victims of government repression (this was the moment when De Gaulle abandoned his prime minister, Michel Debré, by publicly recalling his attachment to freedom of speech for major intellectual figures: “Voltaire must not be thrown in jail,” he said to his prime minister). Added to this was fact that Simone Signoret, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, and their works disappeared from the airwaves: The whole of public opinion was affected. The media coverage of the Manifesto succeeded in attracting public attention where Le 14 Juillet had failed. It also made clear its limitations, for instance in the huge change brought about by Sartre’s intervention. The reading in court of a letter at least attributed to Sartre—even when he was out of the country—meant sections of the press erupted in anger, with veterans’ associations marching in the streets to demand that the philosopher be shot and the signatories found guilty. When Sartre returned from Brazil at the start of November, the charges were dropped and the new sentences not applied. There was no way Blanchot and Mascolo could not write to him, which they did a month later, trying to involve him in their new project.
On October 27, the meeting called by UNEF (National Union of Students in France)—which had supported the Manifesto—protesting against the war in Algeria brought nearly twenty thousand people to the Mutualité building in the Latin Quarter. The fact that the meeting had officially been banned led to police intervention—a rather heavy-handed one. In what would turn out to be a rehearsal for 1968, Nadeau, Blanchot, Mascolo, Monique and Robert Antelme, and Paule Thévenin left the meeting together and were chased into the Rue des Bernardins and violently beaten on the shoulders or the head.23 We should also remember that eight years later, Blanchot would take part in all the demonstrations. “Step up the pace” was what Mascolo and those close to him often had to ask him, and it was what he could not do, being ill and short of breath; and yet sometimes he managed it, as he knew that the march of refusal requires a patience that does not exclude its step beyond, and even calls for it to hasten on to the end.
The manifesto accelerated the shift in public opinion and Algeria’s march toward independence; it played a key role in the trial, which little by little became less Jeanson’s than the army’s. Above all, it had changed the position of intellectuals and the extent to which they were listened to. Sartre had become “the Untouchable one.” The affair had been compared to those of Calas and of Dreyfus. Thinking men had discovered that they had an authority, Mascolo would write in 1985:
It was a truly inaugural moment when a right claimed back from the void of values was loudly declared, and whose energy, which had seemed to dissipate, would reconvene, infinitely diversified, in the happy effervescence of 68, from which nothing positive or tangible would ultimately come, as has been clearly said—from which nothing less was to be expected than a general renewal of sensibility whose effects are still being felt.24
Twelve years after even this statement, the continuing influence of this moment saw a collective of 121 people with “difficult to pronounce” names calling for disobedience against a proposed law on immigration presented by a government led by Jean-Louis Debré. Among the 155 writers who supported the initiative were Edgar Morin, Maurice Nadeau, and Maurice Blanchot.
After the failure of Le 14 Juillet, the latter had written to Mascolo that a new era had begun. Jean-Paul Sartre would be the first to remind Blanchot of the meaning of those words.