(La Trahison des Clercs)
By
Julien Benda
Translated by
Richard Aldington
London
George Routledge & Sons, Ltd.
Broadway House, Carter Lane, E.C.
1928.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
STEPHEN AUSTIN AND SONS, LTD., HERTFORD.
_Contents_
Translator’s Note
Author’s Foreword
I - The Modern Perfecting of Political Passions
II - Significance of this Movement--Nature of Political Passions
III - The ‘Clerks’--The Great Betrayal
IV - Summary--Predictions
Notes
[Footnotes]
[Transcriber’s Notes]
_Translator’s Note_
The title of M. Benda’s book is _La Trahison des Clercs_. The word
‘Clercs’, which occurs throughout the book, is defined by M. Benda’s
as ‘all those who speak to the world in a transcendental manner’. I
do not know the English word for ‘all those who speak to the world
in a transcendental manner’. But in Chaucer’s time the word ‘clerk’
(‘a clerke of Oxenforde’) meant anyone who was not a ‘layman’, a word
employed by M. Benda as the antithesis to ‘clerk’. We still use the
word in this sense when we speak of a ‘clerk in holy orders’ and retain
its root in ‘cleric’. A ‘cleric’ is the person described by M. Benda as
‘pre-eminently a clerk’. If the words ‘in holy orders’ are subtracted
from ‘a clerk in holy orders’, the remaining ‘clerk’ is roughly what M.
Benda means, though he also uses ‘clerk’ to include ‘a clerk in holy
orders’. Nowadays a clerk is a person who performs sedentary labour in
an office, and the word in England is pronounced ‘clark’. In America a
clerk (pronounced ‘clurrk’) is what the English call a shop-assistant.
In order to avoid a misleading title I have called this translation
_The Great Betrayal_, giving M. Benda’s title in brackets afterwards.
Where the word ‘clerk’ first occurs in the book, I have added the words
‘in the medieval sense’, and throughout the text I have invariably
written the word in inverted commas, ‘clerk’, to avoid any possible
misunderstanding.
I should add that the words ‘real’ and ‘realism’ are nearly always
used in this book as the antithesis to ‘ideal’ and ‘idealism’. Other
abstract words are used in a rather special sense which I hope will be
plain from the context.