No longer is there beauty except in battle. Everything that deserves the title of masterpiece has an aggressive character.
—FILIPPO MARINETTI, “Fondation et Manifeste du Futurisme,”
in Le Figaro, February 20, 1909
There I am in a temple, in a sacred place where something sublime, timeless is taking place, the consummate miracle, the great invisible power meeting puny man. [Our soldiers] saw the burning bush. And in evoking this great biblical image … I don’t mean to say that these supernatural favors are reserved for believers. Whatever their rational and reasoned attitude may be toward mystery and dogmas, whatever their prejudices, the moment they enter the heroic zone, our soldiers find themselves in a religious zone.… On these heights, God, fatherland, devotion, sacrifice, forgetfulness of self, all these great summonses intermingle.
—MAURICE BARRÈS, overlooking the battlefield of Vimy in 1916
Boulanger fell, but a bust of Caesar on Barrès’s mantelpiece stayed put and a portrait of Napoleon hung on the wall. After July 1891 these presided over a household that included his bride, the eighteen-year-old Paule Couche, who came from a bourgeois family of high functionaries generally ill-disposed to Boulangism, scornful of journalists, and alarmed by her interest in art and literature. Paule had set her cap for Barrès seven months earlier, when, under the auspices of the Philotechnic Association, he had introduced Molière’s Tartuffe at the Odéon theater with a lecture on “the Jesuit spirit.” And he had responded to the devout, willful adolescent as decisively as he could. The courtship resulted in a marriage whose binding force was said to be affection rather than convenience or passion. What one knows for certain is that they were well matched in their oppositeness—he being the author of Le Culte du Moi and she the spouse who, when asked for biographical details some years later, answered, “Madame Barrès really doesn’t exist; I have always had a keen sense of the relative importance of individuals, thus of the self-effacement that befits me.”
The wedding took place in a church near the Latin Quarter. Present were Gaston Calmette of Le Figaro, Leconte de Lisle, Anatole France, Raymond Poincaré (a fellow deputy, soon to become minister of education and fine arts), Félix Faure (president of the Republic during the Dreyfus Affair), the right-wing polemicist Léon Daudet (Alphonse’s son), and Stanislas de Guaita.
Paule and Maurice—she as fair as he was swarthy—spent their honeymoon in Bavaria, at the Bayreuth Festival, visiting King Louis’s temple of Walhalla near Regensburg and touring Louis’s picture-book castles.1
Barrès’s term had not yet expired when the Chamber of Deputies became a scene of tumult that fortified his anti-parliamentarianism and revived hopes that a fifth revolution might take place before his thirtieth year. The spark to tinder was a scandal associated with the Panama Canal Company. The great dig had begun in 1880 and since then had encountered one daunting obstacle after another, unbeknownst to shareholders receiving false reports of progress authorized by the company’s president, Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal. In truth, investors who had subscribed to the great man’s belief that a sea-level trench like the Suez could be dug across Panama were coming to realize that, after years of futile excavation, nothing flowed between the Atlantic and Pacific but mud and money.
In 1887, Gustave Eiffel was hired to redesign the canal with locks, but it was too late. Thenceforth, attention shifted from the pestilential swamp of Panama to a financial morass in Paris. On March 1, 1888, de Lesseps formally announced that the company would need 600 million francs to complete work by July 1890. When yet another bond issue—the sixth since 1882—yielded only thirty-five million, authorization from the government to lure investors with lottery bonds was strenuously sought. Thousands signed a petition. Five major newspapers—on the canal company payroll, as the public would soon learn—rallied around it. Financiers lobbied. Eiffel displayed his model locks. None of this swayed the prime minister. But in the legislature, where opinion was divided, more and more deputies—also on the company payroll, as it turned out—began to favor a lottery. Some supporters cited the example of the Suez Canal in arguing that a year before that magnificent project reached fruition, “experts” had declared it futile. Others claimed to speak for small investors whose financial well-being was at stake.
In June 1888, the Chamber of Deputies passed a law authorizing lottery bonds, but the public, having heard about the company’s woes, did not invest. Only a third of the bonds issued were sold, and on June 29 de Lesseps attributed this latest, definitive fiasco to a conspiracy. With the whole edifice of Panama collapsing around him, he continued to put a Micawberish gloss on things. The canal would open in July 1890, he assured shareholders in August 1889.
Six months later (shortly after Barrès began his term in the Assembly), the Panama Canal Company was no more. On February 4, 1890, the civil court of the Seine pronounced its dissolution, ordering the company to be liquidated. Its books were audited by a chartered accountant named Henri Rossignol, whose report cast suspicion on certain individuals and financial practices, paving the way for a more detailed inquiry and a trial that exposed a viper’s nest to public view.
The numbers were damning. An exorbitant proportion of the funds raised by the company had been squandered on commissions to underwriters responsible for placing stocks and bonds. Rossignol noted that the relationship between services rendered and commissions charged became, with each successive issue, progressively more tenuous.
Added to these enormities were the sums disbursed to Baron Jacques de Reinach, de Lesseps’s personal financial adviser. The son of a German-Jewish financier with European connections, and a Frenchman by choice, Reinach exemplified the internationalist of anti-Semitic lore. In 1863, when he was twenty-three, he and a brother-in-law had founded the investment bank of Kohn, Reinach & Co., which had prospered. Through his nephew Joseph Reinach, who had been Léon Gambetta’s protégé and had succeeded him as director of the newspaper La République Française, Baron Jacques mingled with leaders of the moderate-left republican majority, the so-called opportunists. This appellation, which was intended to describe the party’s political pragmatism, came, in Reinach’s salon, to signify its venality. Many “opportunists” made it known that they had their price, and pledges of support for the Panama bond lottery were secured with a portion of the millions in Reinach’s account.
Opportunists and radicals had been on the opposite side of many fences, but lucre established a community of opinion when it came to voting on Panama bond issues, and the associate through whom Reinach swayed Clemenceau’s Radical Party was a strange figure named Cornelius Herz. Like Reinach, Herz had German-Jewish parents. The “doctor,” as he liked to be called (having acquired a dubious medical degree from a school in Chicago), had covered his tracks well. Everyone knew him, but no one knew much about him. “I’ve never witnessed a stranger phenomenon,” the columnist Joseph Montet wrote in Le Gaulois years after the Panama Scandal. “His importance was something specific yet elusive.… In the spheres of industry, finance, and politics, everyone reckoned with him.… Through a cunningly devised web of associations and friendships, he exercised influence everywhere, from ministerial offices to the inner councils of government.”
Most mystifying was Herz’s hold over Reinach, who treated him with uncharacteristic deference. The terms of a contact drawn up between Herz and the Panama Canal Company in 1886 through Reinach were remarkably generous. De Lesseps agreed that Herz should receive 10 million francs for wielding his influence in parliamentary circles if the Assembly approved a lottery bond.
In June 1891, a minister of justice assigned the Panama affair to a sluggish magistrate, but in February 1892, Parliament, having received numerous petitions, instructed the government to act “swiftly and energetically.” A new prime minister, Émile Loubet, took office in February; his minister of justice was less solicitous for the well- being of compromised colleagues than his predecessor, and in September the attorney general, Jules Quesnay de Beaurepaire, concluded that the state should prosecute Panama Canal Company executives. At that point, Loubet panicked—a trial would almost certainly implicate three members of his cabinet—and implored Quesnay de Beaurepaire to reverse his decision, arguing that the Republic itself was in danger. The same position was taken by the president of the Republic, Sadi Carnot, whom an anarchist would assassinate two years later. “The principal participants of the regime … thought it natural that in a liberal political system, regulated by haggling and blackmail, the roost should be ruled by traffickers who knew the exact price of consciences and already possessed a stock of receipts,” Maurice Barrès wrote several years later. “Dominated by fear, an endemic illness at the Palais Bourbon, they concluded that it would be best, in the interests of good social order, not to inspect the sewer into which the excrement of parliamentarianism is flushed.”
By October 1892, much of the waste had already been exposed in a series of articles featured on the front page of La Libre Parole, the newspaper Édouard Drumont (already famous for his best-selling anti-Semitic harangue entitled La France Juive) had launched in April 1892 with the motto “La France aux Français”—France for the French. Written pseudonymously by a banker named Ferdinand Martin, who had formerly drummed up business for Panama lottery bonds, “Les Dessous du Panama” struck terror into the hearts of all concerned. “Thanks to the hospitality of La Libre Parole, the only newspaper independent enough to allow an attack against the Golden Calf of yesterday, I shall state impartially, for the benefit of shareholders, what I saw and noted each day, either at the isthmus of Panama itself or in Paris,” he wrote in the September 6 issue.
Martin’s last article appeared on September 16. Weeks passed before La Libre Parole served up more scandal, and this time the disclosures came from an entirely unexpected source: Baron Jacques de Reinach. Although cited only once by Martin, Reinach lived in fear of all-out assault. To ward off Drumont’s blows, he offered him the names of several deputies whose votes had been bought. La Libre Parole honored its agreement, but another paper, La Cocarde, which would appoint Barrès its director in 1894, was not pledged to the conspiracy of silence and aimed its full battery of execration at Reinach. On November 19, 1892, the minister of justice informed Parliament that five men, including Ferdinand de Lesseps and Gustave Eiffel, faced charges of fraud. Later that day, Reinach, accompanied by Clemenceau and the minister of finance, visited Cornelius Herz, who, for reasons not clear, had been leaking prejudicial information to the right-wing press. They begged him to desist. He refused. The next morning Reinach was found dead in his mansion, having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage (according to the official report) or, more likely, killed himself. “Baron Jacques de Reinach,” wrote Barrès, “calls to mind those large rats that swallow the bait, then go behind a paneled wall to die. Their rotting cadaver poisons the poisoner. One must tear down half the house to get at it. That is what enraged Frenchmen proceeded to do.”
The drama unfolded simultaneously on many stages: in the Palais Bourbon, where denunciations flew like cawing crows across the Assembly chamber and suspect deputies were stripped of immunity; before an enlarged board of inquiry appointed by Parliament; in the courts; and on a field outside Paris, where Clemenceau, who avoided prosecution but lost his seat in the 1893 elections, dueled the Boulangist standard-bearer Paul Déroulède, who invited Barrès to act as his second. De Lesseps was sentenced to five years in prison and Gustave Eiffel to two and a half. Freed on appeal in June, Eiffel was compelled the following year to reimburse Panama bondholders 10 million francs. In due course, the High Court of Appeals annulled de Lesseps’s sentence. He was in his dotage by then and died in 1894.
There were sinners enough to keep magistrates well occupied for years. The sordid tale of Panama illustrated, if nothing else, the democracy of greed. But anti-republican papers intent on exploiting public rage wanted a satanic malefactor into whom all sinfulness could be cast, and three men prominently embroiled in the scandal justified their choice of the Jew. La Libre Parole (along with prominent Socialists) declared Panama to have been a “Jewish disaster” in an article with that name. Tribunals and investigative committees would pass judgment on one French culprit or another, declared La Libre Parole, but no matter: Jews were behind it all. The Jew was the puppet master.
It seems that all of Jewry, high and low, congregated beneath the udder of this cow. In the disaster that cost so many French their savings and so many good deputies their reputations, one encounters Jews wherever one turns. They were the authors of this foul mess. It was they who organized the siege of consciences, who finally strangled the enterprise. And while they divvy up the fruit of their rapine with impunity, the unfortunate administrators of the Society, Lesseps first of all, are being dragged before tribunals.
The author challenged any man capable of seeing beyond his political prejudices to deny that the collapse of the venture was “a flagrant instant of the Jewish peril to which we have so often drawn attention.”
The Panama affair confirmed Barrès in the belief that the soul of France could not long endure parliamentary government. It also prepared the ground for a view of French society hospitable to the xenophobia preached by Drumont and others. Barrès’s earlier writing did not distinguish him from Socialists such as Jaurès, who, before the Dreyfus Affair, equated Jewry and capital. A more vehement Barrès emerged in 1894, one year after losing his bid for reelection, when he became director of the Parisian daily La Cocarde and honored Drumont in his first editorial as a “combination moralist and historian” whose exposés were “a very important element in the social history of this age.” Having recruited collaborators who did not often see eye to eye, he herded them all together on a platform of comprehensive recrimination.2 Odious were industrial society, the centralized state, high finance, a traditional curriculum imprisoning schoolchildren, Jews, the Enlightenment, parliamentarianism, and specifically his old philosopher professor Auguste Burdeau, who had meanwhile become president of the Chamber of Deputies. Barrès would soon be heard sanctifying “the earth and the dead,” but, as his editorial manifesto suggested, not all French earth and not all its inhabitants were eligible for his benediction. He set aside plots of unhallowed ground for “barbarians,” meaning, above all, bourgeois rationalists convicted of squelching the instinctual life of the young. “They continue to impose their conception of the Universe and of the social order upon us,” he wrote. “Their system no longer has anything whatever to do with our real nature. They oppress us and prevent us from being ourselves.”
Ideologically, the most important name associated with Barrès at La Cocarde was that of Jules Soury, professor of “physiological psychology” at the Sorbonne. Soury’s magnum opus, Le Système Nerveux Central, is a monograph almost two thousand pages long tracing the history of Western thought as it applied to man’s central nervous system. But he wrote much else besides and wandered into other fields, always with “physiological psychology” as his compass. About human nature, race, society, and politics he abounded in theories, which Barrès, who attended Soury’s lectures between 1893 and 1897, recorded as gospel. This was a threshold that skepticism never crossed. General Boulanger may have been—as long as his hypnotic influence lasted—the mortal embodiment of Barresian nationalism. Soury, on the other hand, provided Barrès with a conceptual framework apparent in the formulation of almost everything he wrote after the mid-1890s, when, as he lost elections and attended funerals (Stanislas de Guaita’s among others), the future looked bleak.
Soury’s worldview was predicated upon a determinism that held everything of nature and humankind to be governed by “iron laws” irreconcilable with free will, individual reason, or moral being. In Freudian terms, the ego counted for nothing while the id—a collective version of it—had acquired transcendent status. And over this quasi-scientific dogma, like the Idea reflected in Plato’s cave, fell the distorted shadow of Charles Darwin. What identifies humans, according to Soury, are “hereditary instincts” born of “useful variations mechanically acquired during the many phases of their long struggle for existence.” By natural selection, ancestral habits become organic traits, making the individual the impersonal specimen of an ethnic personality. Soury might have embellished his argument with Arthur Rimbaud’s famous solecism “I is another.” Instead he looked to the well-known Austrian physiologist Sigmund Exner: “How is this conscious self related to that other self, impersonal in a way, which Exner designates by the neuter pronoun ‘it’ in this sentence: ‘Es denkt in mir’ [It thinks in me]? The ‘thinking It,’ unknown to the ‘thinking I,’ determines the nature of our feelings and our ideas and predestines our vocations.” No longer on speaking terms are “cogito” and “sum.” What makes us who we fundamentally are is as unrelated to intellect and consciousness in Soury’s scheme as the operations of original sin are inaccessible to reason in Augustinian theology. We are our dead forebears’ living puppets. They think through us. Our nerves, which encode their gestures, habits, and “hereditary reactions,” are the strings they pull from beyond the grave. Soury continued: “Ethnic and national traits born of age-old variations, which distinguish the Frenchman of France from the foreigner, are not metaphors but phenomena as real as our neurons, the only elements of our anatomy that never renew themselves in an individual’s lifetime, that endure without proliferating.”
Subverted from without by the introduction of foreigners and mined from within by the prevalence of ideas foreign to her nature, France the colonial power was herself a country possessed, in Soury’s view. Preachers of “peace, fraternity, and human solidarity” had spawned degenerate cosmopolites. The influence of Jews, Protestants, and Freemasons made itself felt in the self-forgetfulness—the “oubli de soi”—afflicting the secular Republic. And this loss or abuse of identity extended to the borders of France, which had become porous. The argument was not new. Alexandre Dumas fils had presented something like it in the preface to The Lady of the Camellias fifty years earlier, where society’s ills were blamed on “the invasion of women from abroad, the glorification of courtesans, the daily trainload of exotic mores that enter the city on every line, hastening local degenerations.” By 1936, the foreign horde would be seen as an invasion of Jews who had elected a coreligionary to high office.
For Soury as well, the modern world promised alienation, with international railroad lines replacing the ganglia of organic France—la France profonde—whose nature was inherently rural, inward, and bellicose. Doomsday impended unless France armed herself for war, he would declare in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, vowing never to exculpate the Jewish traitor. Salvation lay in “eternal war, the source of all superior life, the wellspring of all progress on earth.”3 Published in 1902—the year Zola died and Barrès bundled his own professions of anti-Dreyfusism into a volume—Soury’s Campagne Nationaliste was appallingly prophetic.
I have faith in the regenerative virtue of steel and fire for peoples who are fallen, debased, resigned to having a history no longer; if they die in the process, so much the better! They are thus saved from themselves, from the shame of surviving. Above all, we must continue the interrupted duel, recommence the age-old struggle against our Germanic brothers, our hereditary enemies, who are destined perhaps in coming centuries to master the Gauls, but with whom it is a duty and a joy, an heroic joy, to fight for the sake of fighting!
In the 1890s, Soury anticipated the fatal dictum of European general staffs in 1914. A Frenchman must always attack if he means to conquer. “So forward!” he exhorted. “To the Rhine this time, across the territory of Helvetians and the fields of Flanders.”
Still straddling nationalism and Socialism, but more mindful of race than social justice, Barrès turned Soury’s dogma to account in lectures, in Le Figaro, in pamphlets, and in Le Roman de l’Énergie Nationale, a trilogy for which he did extensive research on Boulanger and the Panama Scandal. Volume 1, entitled Les Déracinés (The Uprooted), was serialized by La Revue de Paris between May and August 1897. It opens in Nancy, where seven young Lorrainers destined to set out on different paths, all leading to Paris and all but three to bad ends, fall under the spell of a philosophy professor named Bouteiller, whose encyclopedic mind flies in wide circles but nests in the work of Immanuel Kant. What becomes of them individually once they graduate matters less here than the general harm Barrès attributes to Bouteiller’s pact with the devil of Kantian universalism. The professor is described as “the modern national spirit” personified, relating “humanity’s dreams” and divulging “the world’s laws” to a class of entranced students whose roots in Lorraine are deemed irrelevant. “He preached the truth according to his master. The world is so much wax on which our mind, which perceives the world in light of certain abstract categories—space, time, causality—impresses its seal.” Gifted teacher though he is, only at the peril of his pupils can he ignore the land that shaped them: “Does [Bouteiller] not recognize special needs, manners and mores that call for tolerance, qualities or defects that can be put to good use?” A multitude of indefinable cultural traits influence the young Lorrainers in their judgment and reasoning. Were the Kantian to give them their due, the spontaneity and range of human energy would gain by it. Instead, he uproots his followers, tearing them from the soil and the social group to which they are attached by every fiber of their being, and resettling them in a Germany of abstract reason.
The Dreyfus Affair, which truly became an affair with the publication of Zola’s “J’accuse” several months after Les Déracinés appeared, was a pivotal event for Barrès. It completed his radicalization. By 1902 he looked back at Le Culte du Moi as a youthful delusion. Relegating the “I” of that work to his nineteenth-century past, he entered the twentieth century pledged so single-mindedly to the principle of a collective unconscious or a “thinking It” that certain rebarbative passages in Scènes et Doctrines du Nationalisme parrot Jules Soury almost word for word. “The sands gave way beneath me as I scrutinized the ‘Self’ after the fashion of novelists, and I descended deeper, ever deeper until I found firm footing in the collectivity,” he wrote.
The individual! His intelligence, his ability to grasp the laws of the universe! We must reject all that. We are not the masters of the thoughts born in us. They do not originate in our intelligence; they are ways of reacting that translate very old physiological dispositions. How we judge and reason depends on the milieu in which we are immersed. Human reason is so bound to the past that we all walk in the steps of our predecessors. There are no personal ideas; even the rarest notions, the most abstract judgments, the most self-infatuated metaphysical sophisms are general modes of feeling, to be found in all organically kindred beings exposed to the same images.… We continue our parents.… They think and speak in us. The whole cortège of descendants constitutes a single being.
Was the dogmatic fervor with which Barrès embraced Lorraine and the collective identity of his forefathers proportionate to the loneliness of the schoolboy who still inhabited him and to the son whose father seldom spoke at all, except to propose alien ambitions? These were ghosts best kept under lock and key, or projected into a scapegoat. “Jews,” he wrote in Scènes et Doctrines, “have no fatherland in the sense we ascribe to that word. For us, the fatherland is the soil of ancestors, the earth of our dead. For them, it is wherever they find their greatest interest. Thus, their ‘intellectuals’ conclude famously that ‘the fatherland is an idea,’ the idea being whichever one serves them best—for example, that nationality is a prejudice to be overcome, that military honor reeks of blood, that we must disarm (and leave money in charge).”
· · ·
Word of a Jewish captain named Dreyfus facing a court-martial for treason reached Barrès in November 1894, when he was still editor in chief of La Cocarde. In his initial response he declared that the man, if found guilty, should be shot for treason rather than for the “innate wrong” of being “an Israelite,” but no sooner did the army try Dreyfus behind closed doors with bogus evidence and render its verdict than Barrès baptized him Judas and entered the camp that blamed Dreyfus’s treason as well as the skulduggery of Panama on a Jewish “Syndicate.” His gall earned him a prominent place among journalists invited to witness Dreyfus’s public mortification in the courtyard of the École Militaire. He recalled that at the stroke of nine, a mounted general drew his sword and commands were shouted, whereupon four gunners marched toward the middle of the square, escorting Dreyfus and a helmeted officer of gigantic stature delegated to tear off his braid, pluck out his buttons, and break his sword. “[Dreyfus] walked with a firm step, holding his chin high and his left hand on the pummel of his saber.… This sinister group stopped only a few paces from the general, who sat frozen in his saddle. The four artillerymen stepped backward, the court clerk spoke, the rigid silhouette didn’t budge, except to raise an arm and loudly proclaim his innocence.… Until then, Judas had been a small, motionless clew battered by all the winds of hatred.”
Elevated from a verdict rendered in a military courtroom to the status of biblical villainy, Dreyfus’s treason was placed beyond the reach of facts proving his innocence. When inconvenient evidence came to light, Barrès dismissed it as the confabulation of “the Syndicate.” Judas was eternally Judas. The Dreyfus case was a res judicata, a case adjudicated once and for all.
Not until Clemenceau’s paper L’Aurore published Zola’s “J’accuse,” on January 13, 1898, did Barrès give further consideration to the matter of Dreyfus’s alleged treason. The open letter electrified France. Around this manifesto gathered the disparate energies that became a coherent Dreyfusard movement, and almost instantly Zola acquired the political role urged upon him five years earlier, when he was finishing Les Rougon-Macquart. “The party of justice had been born,” declared Joseph Reinach. “Dreyfusism was reinvigorated” … “We could feel the confidence boil and rise within us,” wrote Léon Blum, who called “J’Accuse” a polemical text of “imperishable beauty.” High-minded youths—students at the École Normale Supérieure, young writers associated with the avant-garde literary magazine La Revue Blanche, young Socialists alienated by official party doctrine—sprang forward in response to this clarion call and marshaled signatures, among them Anatole France’s, for a “Protest of Intellectuals” (giving that nineteenth-century term its full, modern sense for the first time). During the following weeks their numbers multiplied, along with the protests. “We the undersigned,” read one, which appeared in L’Aurore on January 16, “struck by the irregularities in the Dreyfus trial of 1894 and by the mystery surrounding Commandant Esterhazy’s trial, persuaded furthermore that the whole nation is concerned with the maintenance of legal guarantees, which are the citizen’s sole protection in a free country, astonished by the search of Lieutenant Colonel Picquart’s residence and by other, no less illegal searches visited upon that officer … demand that the Chamber uphold the legal guarantees of citizens against all arbitrary conduct.” After that, readers of L’Aurore seldom opened the paper without encountering statements of this kind or collective tributes. On February 2, a group of writers, artists, and scientists lauded Zola’s “noble, militant attitude” even as they promised support “in the name of justice and truth.” On February 6 support came from attorneys who offered him heartfelt thanks “for service rendered to the cause of Law, which touches all civilized nations.” On his editorial rostrum Clemenceau declared, “It redounds to the honor of thinking men that they have bestirred themselves before everyone else. Not a negligible thing. In the great movements of public opinion, one doesn’t often see men of pure intellectual labor occupy the front rank.”
Barrès issued a swift rejoinder to the protest of intellectuals. Currying favor with the working class, he dismissed signatories of the Dreyfusard protests as “aristocrats of thought.” A “demi-culture,” he wrote, was prepared to destroy instinct but not to substitute conscience for it. So-called intellectuals who no longer marched spontaneously in step with their “natural group” were the “destructive dross” of society’s effort to form an elite. Later, Barrès resumed his chronic denunciation of Burdeau (under the fictional guise of Bouteiller): “(B.) is at once an intellectual and an instrument of deracination, whose realm of malfeasance expanded when he left teaching for politics. There is an epigram of Goethe which goes: ‘Every enthusiast should be crucified at the age of thirty. Once a dupe comes to know the real world, he becomes a rascal.’ My Bouteiller, who spoke only of sacrificing everything to justice, would gladly have preferred, along with our Kantian intellectuals, that society be destroyed than that one miscarriage of justice be countenanced.” It served Barrès’s purpose to suggest that their humanistic absolutism was of German inspiration. He could have blamed it on Montesquieu or Voltaire.
Barrès seldom allowed facts to interfere with a settled opinion. When, in 1899, Dreyfus was brought back from Devil’s Island to be court-martialed again, on appeal, Barrès joined the international throng of journalists at Rennes and stayed there for a month, recording the trial for Le Journal and portraying its cast of characters in unabashedly partisan terms. When military judges upheld the guilty verdict, Barrès wrote, “Let us rejoice.… Contrary to the government’s wishes, public morality and national salvation demanded the condemnation of a traitor exploited by a political faction.” When the president of the Republic immediately pardoned Dreyfus, Barrès railed. When Zola died, in 1902, he debated with himself whether to attend the funeral as a respectful mourner or as the leader of a nationalist demonstration. When the government exonerated Dreyfus, in 1906, Barrès, once again a deputy, mounted the podium to praise General Auguste Mercier, a central figure in the conspiracy against Dreyfus. And when, in 1908, the legislature voted to rebury Zola’s remains in the Panthéon, Barrès voted against his civil consecration.
Barrès had had his own consecration of sorts two years earlier, when elected to a seat in the Académie Française. Had he counted his blessings, there would have been much else to be thankful for. That same year, 1906, he won election to the Chamber of Deputies from Paris. By then, his son, named Philippe after the hero of Le Culte du Moi, was ten years old and thriving. What he had apparently never felt for his complaisant wife he experienced (to his ultimate chagrin) with the poet Anna de Noailles. As a writer, he had gifted young admirers. And as a lover of the sorrowful, he found a lost cause in tottery country churches starved of government funds after the separation of church and state in 1905. Native Frenchmen living under laws imposed by a secular republic had an inborn government inseparable from “Catholicity.” “The laws of our mind won’t comply with the whims of legislators,” he wrote in La Grande Pitié des Églises de France. “We Lorrainers have been set upon by two hostile bands: Prussians who are destroying our language, and sectarians [the government in power] who would destroy our religion, that is, the language of our sensibility.” In 1914 he succeeded Paul Déroulède as president of La Ligue des Patriotes.4
War was as therapeutic for depressed spirits as it was for economic stagnation. If Barrès wanted, above all, a reprieve from tedium and from himself, salvation came on August 4, 1914, when the bell tolled an end to creeping tomorrows.5 A new day had dawned. In the hundreds of “chroniques” he wrote between 1914 and 1918, he made it known, with frequent obeisances to self-sacrifice, that bourgeois France had entered the era of heroes and saints. Where years had been mere time, hours were now apocalyptic. “At this moment, the fullness of which will surely spread over all the days of our life,” he wrote in L’Écho de Paris on September 13, 1914, after the German army advancing toward Paris had been repulsed at the Marne, “a single thought animates us: ‘What hideous beings are these assassins we have on the run! The French soul is superior to them. And although things may have appeared otherwise in recent weeks, we are still charged, after so much sacrifice and bloodshed, with the lofty task [of saving the world].’ ” It pleased him to report that France’s sacred flame had not after all been extinguished by a “learned, skeptical age.” Still alive in his countrymen, under the mass of textbooks and scholarly editions churned out year after year, was a marvelous “primitive” bent on winning back the lost provinces, on dispelling the pall of inferiority that had hung over France since her defeat in 1870–71, on “cleaning French thought of Germanism,” on restoring to preeminence “the sentiment of honor and the idea of self-sacrifice.” In France, 1914 had brought forth a generation whose heroism revived the spirit of Joan of Arc. Well might Germans wanting models for the virtues they exalted hallow the King of the Vandals in their temple of Walhalla, but France, wrote Barrès, marched to war with the chivalrous sentiments that had armed her God-sent maiden. “While the Germans deify disloyalty and cruelty, and—licensed by their ideal—propose to crush the weak and enslave the world, let us assemble around a virgin who was valiant, good, righteous, and self-sacrificing to the core of her being.” In December 1914, the erstwhile Wagnerian, or Wagnerian malgré lui, proposed an annual national holiday in Joan’s honor.6 As we shall see, he was not the first to do so.
In September 1914, a French army fortified by five thousand reserves transported to the front in Paris taxicabs launched a surprise attack on German infantry pouring into France from Belgium and stopped them at the Marne, forty kilometers from Paris. General Alexander von Kluck retreated and dug in, initiating trench warfare. The ironic caption reads: “The triumphant entry into Paris deferred … for strategic reasons.”
Barrès toured the ravaged countryside of the Marne valley five days after the German army had retreated to high ground beyond the Aisne and dug trenches. In subsequent years he visited the front as often as he could, up and down the line. The Comité du Secours National, responsible for providing embattled civilians with basic necessities, sponsored his trip to Lorraine in November 1914. He returned to Lorraine in April 1915 and looped through the valleys of the Meurthe and the Mortagne from Lunéville to Nancy, where German shells burst a few miles away. The property in Charmes, which had become his in 1901 when his mother died (three years after her husband), had been deliberately shorn of trees that had blocked the aim of French riflemen but remained otherwise intact. Also shorn was the densely wooded countryside outside town, at the Charmes Gap, where General Noël de Castelnau had repulsed Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria in a ferocious battle waged between August 23 and August 26, 1914. In June, Barrès traveled farther north, to fields near Arras scored with half-abandoned trenches, strewn with barbed wire, and pocked with shell holes. Everything lay in ruins. Thousands had died there even before General Robert Nivelle’s strategy for breaking through the German lines doomed tens of thousands more on the chalky ridge of the Chemin des Dames in 1917. What Barrès saw and felt in June did not pass his lips when, on October 11, 1915, he bade farewell to his nineteen-year-old son. Bound for a regiment of armored cavalry under heavy fire in Champagne, Philippe, who had earned a lieutenantcy at Saint-Cyr, was, according to his father, “radiantly happy.” (He survived the war, twice wounded, with commendations for bravery.)
Maurice Barrès visiting the front with several other dignitaries.
French trench diggers.
Neither did the horror of what Barrès saw find its way into print. He exercised a self-censorship that lightened the task of government functionaries who closely vetted every issue of every paper. Being sanguine was more important than keeping readers of L’Écho de Paris informed. “I am reproached for my optimism, for my confidence,” he noted in March 1917. “Well yes, I am fully confident! … Every article I write speaks of my certainty that we are not to be conquered.” But optimism in the service of patriotism colored everything he wrote, even notes not intended for immediate publication. About life at the northern front he wrote:
These soldiers coming and going in the trenches and access corridors as in a walled town, these dug-outs where candles gutter and the cadaverous odor of catacombs, of misery exhaled by lives lived in such close quarters create an atmosphere in which physical anguish mingles with emotional distress. Then the soul girds itself. Each of these men feels subordinated, wretched, a mere straw near the furnace, but with incredible vibrancy of inner life. Ah! How alive are the hearts!
Readers were assured that half-buried soldiers yearning for the family hearth found their consolation in the source of their misery, in the trench itself, with comrades who formed a collective soul stronger than the individual. Born in the trenches, he wrote, was “a new being—the combat unit.” The larger the unit, the braver its constituents. “A regiment is a new being. The commanding officer is its head; the men are its muscles; the cadre is its nervous system.” If it worked as it should, it moved autonomously, without commands but always in accordance with the will of the leader and “the spirit of the war.”7
So much for trenches. Unlike his young compatriots underground, Barrès was free to stand above the mêlée when it suited him. Looking out toward Flanders from a hilltop not far from Arras, like the hero of Sous l’Oeil des Barbares contemplating the barbarians below from his Paris garret, he waxed lyrical.
One could spend hours looking at this battlefield: hours following the story of our splendid efforts to smash the eight army corps the Germans brought in one after another and recapture the Vimy heights, which would have opened to us the plain of Lens; hours catching sight of our projectiles being launched with a sudden flash from beneath shelters arranged for artillery pieces here and there across the countryside; and then, far off, the cloud of their explosion in enemy ranks. It is an immense symphony which, strangely, inspires less horror of its abominations than respect and admiration for these men who know how to die. It seems as if a mystery were taking place beneath our very eyes in this corner of the earth.
His morbid paean, which resonates with the image of music emanating from a rotting corpse in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, abundantly justifies the title “nightingale of the carnage” bestowed upon him by Romain Rolland. There was carnage galore at Vimy, where generals—one of whom, Philippe Pétain, gained a brief foothold on the summit—sent wave after wave of infantry uphill into German machine-gun fire. The corpses of men “who knew how to die” piled up along the Artois front in May 1915.8 Many more fell four months later on the ridge angling across Champagne toward Lorraine at its southeastern extremity. In command once again was Philippe Pétain, who deployed a thousand heavy cannons. Some regiments, according to John Keegan, attacked “with colors unfurled and the brass and drums of their bands in the front trench.” Barrès’s son arrived soon after the climactic moment of fighting, when an odor of chlorine gas still hung in the air and Germany still held the heights. At no point did French troops gain more than two miles of ground, paying for them with 144,000 casualties. A soldier named Louis Mairet wrote from the front, “It is preposterous to talk about reason when unreason holds sway. Despite everything it is necessary that the struggle continue until one of the two parties surrenders.”
A charge of French infantry during World War I.
In April 1917, an ill-conceived attempt to break through German entrenchments not far from Champagne, along the Aisne River, resulted not only in defeat—with legions dying on a muddy slope beneath a ridge road whose genteel name, the Chemin des Dames, came to signify futile bloodshed—but in mutiny. “Acts of collective indiscipline” is how the army described the refusal of thirty or forty thousand men to risk their lives until something was done about the suffering endured in the trenches.9 Pétain, the new army chief of staff, took measures that some colleagues found excessively lenient. Reforms were introduced, and order was restored before Germany (which had its own desertions) could exploit the strike.10 Courts-martial were held. Though 629 mutineers were condemned to death, fewer than one in ten were executed.
A surviving mural in the bombed-out market hall of Ypres.
Barrès laid blame for the mutiny on unnamed officials raising false hopes that the war would be of short duration, on German agents demoralizing the home front and infiltrating the front lines, on the Russian Revolution of February 1917, and on the prospect of French Socialists endorsing a pacifist manifesto at a conference of the Second International to be held in Stockholm (the conference never took place; no manifesto was ever issued). “The maneuvers of German agents” in Stockholm would distract France from the business at hand, he wrote in his chronicle of June 1. “We must reinforce government authority, maintain and strengthen still further our martial spirit. It would be a huge mistake to let Slav mysticism mingle with our martial spirit and dispossess our government of the right that belongs to it alone.” Nothing made him question the solidarity he attributed to men in the trenches: neither reports that peasants speaking thick patois could hardly make themselves understood, nor the persistence of class resentments, nor “the collective acts of indiscipline,” which may in fact have best expressed his ideal of brotherhood. Letters from officers and ordinary soldiers who, after three years of unspeakable deprivation, still “considered one another brothers fighting for the same cause” urged him to air their grievances. This he did, and fully, but always with the caveat that France must not flinch on the verge of reaping the rewards for her “courage,” her “good sense,” and her highest virtue: energy. “It isn’t because they are fighting the good fight that the French have commanded world admiration; it is because they are fighting with sublime energy.”
Furthermore, the Americans had already arrived and would soon lighten the burden borne by war-weary veterans.11 Hadn’t President Wilson declared that his country wanted its share of “the privilege of sacrifice”? This declaration was to be repeated every day like a mantra, Barrès wrote in L’Écho de Paris on June 10, 1917.
When guns fell silent on the western front seventeen months later with the signing of an armistice agreement at Compiègne, Barrès felt the satisfaction of life coming full circle. He had been born early enough to remember German troops strutting through Charmes-sur-Moselle and lived long enough to see that humiliation avenged. Now that Metz and Strasbourg had been reconquered, France would make her influence felt east to the Rhine in “a beautiful marriage of French and Celto-Rhenish thought,” he asserted. Always more disposed to glorify the dead than to love the living, he celebrated the restoration of France’s integrity at cemeteries in Alsace and Lorraine. He might have been heard to recite Horace’s line “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”12
The halt and the lame being decorated in the courtyard of the Invalides.
Barrès was an official witness to the ceremonial repatriation of Strasbourg by French troops on November 26, 1918. Spectators had arrived from the countryside in horse-drawn calèches. Women wore costumes that evoked Alsace of yore. Every scrap of red, white, and blue cloth became a flag. Trumpets blared and drums rolled as gorgeously uniformed spahis and Zouaves paraded past a reviewing stand on which seven or eight generals flanked Marshal Pétain. Later, an enormous crowd gathered on a square in front of city hall to hear the marshal proclaim that France’s task of restoring the beautiful provinces ravished by Germany had been accomplished, that right and justice had triumphed. Thousands sang “La Marseillaise” before moving toward Notre Dame de Strasbourg, the great cathedral beloved of Goethe, where the archpriest embraced Pétain and led him down a nave draped with republican flags and royal oriflammes for a “Te Deum” of thanksgiving. Barrès exulted in the marriage of church and army. Never would he forget, he declared, how the marshal of France and the eldest of the canons walked hand in hand, like a child with his father. “The holy familiarity, the inexpressible simplicity of heroism! Organ music swelled, light crowned the cortège of infantrymen, voices scaled up to heaven, everyone sobbed. The immense multitude loved and thanked those who had fallen in battle and their families, and united them in spirit to the surviving sons of France. All the war dead and all the survivors filled the nave, which for once happily contained a soul worthy of its beauty.”
After the war, when Joan of Arc was canonized, Barrès, arguing that her sainthood reflected upon the holiness of every French warrior, resumed his campaign to honor her with a national holiday.13 The marriage of church and army may have been sanctified, but it remained for France herself, fourteen years after the official separation of church and state, to celebrate, in Joan, the French soul. “Joan of Arc … obeyed an impulse of the unconscious when she obeyed what is not reasonable,” he wrote. “It is not reasonable for a woman to want to command an army.… It was a vital surge, a dream …, [the upwelling] of profound forces.” Joan exemplified the truth by which he set store, as an apostle of Jules Soury’s, that “intelligence is a very small thing on the surface of ourselves.” In June 1920, the Chamber of Deputies decided without debate that Joan of Arc be given a feast day.
Gratifying though it was for Barrès, the victory did nothing to silence his private demons. Kept at bay by the boom and brass of war, they returned afterward with a vengeance. “I don’t long to be young again but to be someone else, someone other than my spent self.” It had always been thus, and the “cult of the self” prefigured that of the virgin warrior.
1In Degeneration (1892), Max Nordau observed of the Wagner cult prevalent throughout Europe, “The pilgrimage to Bayreuth became a mark of aristocracy, and an appreciation of Wagner’s music, in spite of his nationality, was regarded as evidence of intellectual preeminence.… It was with [Parsifal] that Wagner chiefly triumphed among his non-German admirers. Listening to it … has become the religious act of all those who wish to receive the Communion in musical form.”
2Fifty years later, Charles Maurras, one of Barrès’s young collaborators, recollected, “The paper’s tendencies were indefinable and even contradictory in the extreme. Not a trace of doctrinal unity. But one great rallying point: the man, I won’t say the chief, because he never took the trouble to command, but the admired, adored, loved man who served as the funnel of this whirlwind. One was ‘barrésien’: that meant everything in those days.”
3In 1911, with the publication of Germany and the Next War, the great German military historian, Friedrich von Bernhardi, declared that war and conquest are a biological necessity, echoing Heinrich von Treitschke.
4The Ligue des Patriotes is not to be confused with La Ligue de la Patrie Française. Barrès had also been a director of the latter but resigned from it in 1901.
5On August 5, an infantry officer reported from one of Paris’s railroad stations, where crowds had gathered to see off soldiers departing for the front: “At six in the morning, without any signal, the train slowly steamed out of the station. At that moment, quite spontaneously, like a smoldering fire suddenly erupting into roaring flames, an immense clamor arose as the Marseillaise burst from a thousand throats. All the men were standing at the train windows, waving their képis. From the track quais and the neighboring trains, the crowds waved back …, behind every barrier, and at every window along the road. Cries of ‘Vive la France! Vive l’armée!’ could be heard everywhere, while people waved handkerchiefs and hats. The women were throwing kisses and heaped flowers on our convoy. The young men shouted ‘Au revoir! À bientôt!’ ”
6Barrès’s efforts on Joan’s behalf did not come to fruition until 1920, two years after the war.
7After the war, Georges Valois, an early member of the the Action Française movement, who began political life as an anarcho-syndicalist and ultimately moved into the neighborhood of Italian Fascism, propagated the idea of a corporate state to be led by an elite of war veterans.
In Germany, a Nazi prominent in the early years of the movement asserted, “Only by understanding the Fronterlebnis [front experience] can one understand National Socialism.” Another declared, “National Socialism is, in its truest meaning, the domain of the Front.” And in Italy, Mussolini spoke of trincerocrazia, “trenchocracy,” as the model for Italian society led by a Fascist elite.
8Barrès liked to quote the remark Napoleon was supposed to have made after reading Goethe’s Werther: “On doit vouloir vivre et savoir mourir” (One must want to live and know how to die).
9About suffering in the trenches, one historian writes: “Le Crapouillot, the only trench paper whose title still exists, described the hardship caused by the cold thus: ‘[To appreciate it] you need to have remained for six days and six nights of this winter sitting tight, your belly frozen, your arms hanging loosely, your hands and feet numb, you need to have felt despair, convinced that nothing could ever thaw you out again.’ Rain was even worse than the cold. According to L’Horizon this simple word encapsulates all the horror experienced by a soldier during a campaign. ‘To sum up, the only thing which made me really feel wretched during the war was the rain.’ Rain led inevitably to the formation of the infamous mud in the trenches which became cesspits where stagnant water mingled with earth from the crumbling parapets. This liquid mass sometimes came up to knee-level. ‘Sticky, liquid mud,’ ‘oily tide,’ ‘an enormous octopus with vile slaver dripping from its mouth,’ these are the terms used by the fighting men in their newspapers to conjure up the scourge of the mud. ‘Hell is not fire’ affirms La Mitraille, ‘it would not be the worst form of suffering. The real hell is the mud.’ ”
Some historians have argued that even the mutineers, for the most part, did not question the patriotic justification of the war, or the messianic mission imputed to it (it was called “la fin des fins,” the war to end all wars), only the way it was being waged.
10The reforms included better food and shelter, plus more regular and longer leaves.
11The draft age in France was eighteen to forty-nine.
12Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country—provides the title of a powerful antiwar poem by Wilfred Owen, who denounces it as “the old lie.”
13In public and private, Barrès heralded the transcendent virtue of poilus, foot soldiers dead and alive. “France’s churches need saints.… They are to be found in the trenches. For the Christian every day of our armed struggle renews the passion of Christ,” he noted in 1916.
