‘And have you not read Army Orders?’
This retort will always be thrown back at the spiritual man who tries
to take the direction of the material. To me it seems a very wise one.
Those who lead men to the conquest of material things have no need of
justice and charity.
Nevertheless I think it important that there should be men--even if
they are scorned--who urge their fellow beings to other religions than
the religion of the material. Now, those who should play this part
(to whom I have given the name of ‘clerks’ in the medieval sense of
the word) have not only ceased to do so, but are playing an exactly
contrary part. Most of the influential moralists of the past fifty
years in Europe, particularly the men of letters in France, call upon
mankind to sneer at the Gospel and to read Army Orders.
This new teaching seems to me all the more deserving of serious
attention because it is addressed to a humanity which of its own
volition is now established in materialism with a decisiveness hitherto
unknown. And I shall begin by showing this to be true.
I
_The Modern Perfecting of Political Passions_
We are to consider those passions termed political, owing to which men
rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions,
class passions and national passions. Those persons who are most
determined to believe in the inevitable progress of the human species,
especially in its indispensable movement towards more peace and
love, cannot deny that during the past century these passions have
attained--and day by day increasingly so--in several most important
directions, a degree of perfection hitherto unknown in history.
In the first place they affect a large number of men they never before
affected. When, for example, we study the civil wars which convulsed
France in the sixteenth century, and even those at the end of the
eighteenth century, we are struck by the small number of persons
whose minds were really disturbed by these events. While history, up
to the nineteenth century, is filled with long European wars which
left the great majority of people completely indifferent, apart from
the material losses they themselves suffered,[1] it may be said that
to-day there is scarcely a mind in Europe which is not affected--or
thinks itself affected--by a racial or class or national passion, and
most often by all three. The same progress seems to have taken place
in the New World, while immense bodies of men in the Far East, who
seemed to be free from these impulses, are awakening to social hatred,
the party system, and the national spirit insofar as it implies the
will to humiliate other men. To-day political passions have attained a
_universality_ never before known.
They have also attained _coherence_. Thanks to the progress of
communication and, still more, to the group spirit, it is clear
that the holders of the same political hatred now form a compact
impassioned mass, every individual of which feels himself in touch
with the infinite numbers of others, whereas a century ago such
people were comparatively out of touch with each other and hated in
a ‘scattered’ way. This is singularly striking with respect to the
working classes who, even in the middle of the nineteenth century,
felt only a scattered hostility for the opposing class, attempted only
dispersed efforts at war (such as striking in one town, or one union),
whereas to-day they form a closely-woven fabric of hatred from one
end of Europe to the other. It may be asserted that these coherences
will tend to develop still further, for the will to group is one of
the most profound characteristics of the modern world, which even in
the most unexpected domains (for instance, the domain of thought)
is more and more becoming the world of leagues, of ‘unions’ and of
‘groups’. Is it necessary to say that the passion of the individual
is strengthened by feeling itself in proximity to these thousands
of similar passions? Let me add that the individual bestows a mystic
personality on the association of which he feels himself a member, and
gives it a religious adoration, which is simply the deification of his
own passion, and no small stimulus to its intensity.
The coherence just described might be called a surface coherence,
but there is added to it a coherence of essence. For the very reason
that the holders of the same political passion form a more compact,
impassioned group, they also form a more _homogeneous_, impassioned
group, in which individual ways of feeling disappear and the zeal of
each member more and more takes on the colour of the others. In France,
for instance, one cannot but be struck by the fact that the enemies
of the democratic system (I am speaking of the mass, not the highest
points) display a passion which has little variety, shows very slight
differences in different persons. How little this mass of hatred is
weakened by personal and original manners of hating--one might almost
say that this passion itself is obedient to ‘democratic levelling
down’! How much more uniformity is shown now than a hundred years ago
by the emotions known as anti-Semitism, anti-Clericalism and Socialism,
in spite of the immense number of varieties in the last-named! And do
not those who are subject to these emotions now all tend _to say the
same thing_? Political passions, as passions, seem to have attained the
habit of discipline; they seem to obey a word of command even in the
manner they are felt. It is easy to see what increase of strength they
acquire thereby.
With some of these passions the increase in homogeneousness is
accompanied by an increased _precision_. For instance, we all know that
a hundred years ago Socialism was a strong but vague passion with the
great mass of its supporters. But to-day Socialism has more closely
defined the object it wishes to attain, has determined the exact point
where it means to strike its adversary and the movement it intends to
create in order to succeed. The same progress may be observed in the
anti-democratic movement. And we all know that hatred becomes stronger
by becoming more precise.
There is another sort of perfecting of political passions. Throughout
history until our own days I see these passions acting intermittently,
blazing up and then subsiding. I see that the undoubtedly terrible and
numerous explosions of class and race hatred were followed by long
periods of calm, or at least of somnolence. Wars between nations lasted
for years, but not hatred--even if we may say that it existed. To-day
we have only to look every morning at any daily paper and we shall see
that political hatreds do not cease for a single day. At best some
of them are silent a moment for the benefit of one among them which
suddenly claims all the subject’s strength. This is the period of
‘national unions’, which do not in the very least herald in the reign
of love, but merely of a general hatred which for the moment dominates
partial hatreds. To-day political passions have acquired _continuity_,
which is so rare a quality in all feelings.
Let us consider a moment the impulse which causes partial hatreds to
abdicate in favour of another, more general hatred, which derives a
new religion of itself and hence a new strength, from the feeling of
its generality. Perhaps it has not been sufficiently observed that
this sort of impulse is one of the essential characteristics of the
nineteenth century. Twice during the nineteenth century, in Germany and
in Italy, the age-old hatreds of petty States disappeared in favour
of a great national passion. In the same period (more precisely,
at the end of the eighteenth century) in France, the mutual hatred
of the Court nobles and the country nobles was extinguished in the
greater hatred of both parties for all who were not nobles; the hatred
between the military and legal nobles disappeared in the same impulse;
the hatred between the upper and lower ranks of the clergy vanished
in their common hatred of laicality; the hatred between clergy and
nobility expired to the profit of their mutual hatred for the commons.
And in our times the hatred between the three orders has melted into
one hatred, that of the possessing classes for the working class. The
condensation of political passions into a small number of very simple
hatreds, springing from the deepest roots of the human heart, is a
conquest of modern times.[2]
I also believe that I see a great progress in political passions to-day
in their relation to other passions in the same person. Political
passions undoubtedly occupied more of the attention of a bourgeois
of ancient France than is usually supposed, but less than the love
of money and pleasure, family feeling and the calls of vanity; while
the least we can say of his modern equivalent is that when political
passions take possession of him, they do so to the same extent as
the other passions. Compare, for instance, the tiny place occupied
by political passions in the French bourgeois as he appears in the
Fabliaux, in medieval drama, the novels of Scarron, Furetière and
Charles Sorel,[3] with the same bourgeois as drawn by Balzac, Stendhal,
Anatole France, Abel Hermant and Paul Bourget. (Of course, I am not
speaking of times of crisis, like the Ligue and the Fronde, when
political passions occupied the whole individual as soon as they
touched him at all.) The truth is that to-day political passions are
invading most of the other passions in the bourgeoisie, and weakening
the latter to their own profit. Everyone knows that in our own days
family rivalries, commercial enmities, ambitions and the competition
for public honours are all tainted with political passion. An apostle
of the modern mind clamours for ‘politics first’. He might have
observed that nowadays it is politics everywhere, politics always and
nothing but politics.[4] We have only to open our eyes to see when an
increase of power is acquired by political passion when combined with
other passions, so numerous, so constant and so strong themselves.
Coming to the man of the people, we can measure the increase of his
political passions in relation to his other passions in modern times
by considering, as Stendhal puts it, how long his whole passion was
limited to wishing (_a_) Not to be killed, (_b_) For a good warm coat.
And then we may recollect that when a little less misery permitted him
a few general ideas, how long it was before his vague desire for social
changes were transformed into a passion, i.e. showing the two essential
characteristics of passion: The fixed idea, and the need to put it
into action.[5] I think it may be said that political passions in all
classes to-day have attained a degree of _preponderance over all other
passions_ in those affected such as hitherto had been unknown.
The reader will already have perceived an all-important factor in
the impulses I have been describing. Political passions rendered
universal, coherent, homogeneous, permanent, preponderant--everyone can
recognize there to a great extent the work of the cheap daily political
newspaper. One cannot help reflecting and wondering whether it may not
be that inter-human wars are only just beginning, when one thinks of
this instrument for developing their own passions which men have just
invented, or at least brought to a degree of power never seen before,
to which they abandon themselves with all the expansion of their hearts
every morning as soon as they are awake.
I have now showed what might be called the perfecting of political
passions on the surface, in their more or less exterior aspects. But
they have also become strangely perfected in depth and inner strength.
In the first place they have made an immense advance in consciousness
of themselves. Here again, largely owing to the influence of the
newspaper, it is clear that the mind affected by political hatred
to-day becomes conscious of its own passion, formulates it, sees it,
with an accuracy unknown to the same sort of mind fifty years ago.
There is no need to say how much the passion is intensified by this.
And while I am on this subject I should like to point to two passions,
which have certainly not come to birth in our times but have attained
consciousness of themselves, self-assertion, a pride in themselves.
The first is what I shall call a certain _Jewish nationalism_. In the
past, when the Jews were accused in various countries of forming an
inferior race, or at any rate a peculiar people not to be assimilated,
they replied by denying their peculiarity, by trying to get rid of all
appearance of peculiarity, and by refusing to admit the reality of
race. But in the last few years we see some of them labouring to assert
this peculiarity, to define its characteristics--or what they think
such--taking a pride in it, and condemning every effort at assimilation
with their opponents (see the works of Israel Zangwill, of André Spire,
and the _Revue Juive_). Here I am not trying to discover whether the
impulse of these Jews is or is not nobler than the efforts of so many
others to have their origin pardoned them; I am simply pointing out to
those interested in the progress of peace in the world that our age has
added one more arrogance to those which set men against each other, at
least to the extent that it is conscious and proud of itself.[6]
The other impulse I am thinking of is ‘_bourgeoisism_’, by which I
mean the passion of the bourgeois class in asserting itself against
the class by which it is threatened. It may be said that until our
own times, ‘class hatred’, as a conscious hatred proud of itself, was
chiefly the hatred of the labourer for the bourgeois. The reciprocal
hatred was much less clearly confessed. Ashamed of an egotism they
thought peculiar to their own caste, the bourgeois temporized with this
egotism, would not admit even to themselves that it existed, tried to
convince themselves and others that it was a form of interest in the
common good.[7] The bourgeois replied to the dogma of the class war by
denying that there really are any classes, thereby showing that while
they felt an inalterable opposition to the adverse party, they were
unwilling to admit that they felt it. To-day we have only to think of
Italian ‘Fascism’, of a certain ‘Eloge du Bourgeois Français’, and
numerous other manifestations of the same kind,[8] and we shall see
that the bourgeoisie are becoming fully conscious of their specific
egotisms, are proclaiming and venerating them as such and as though
these egotisms were bound up with the supreme interests of the human
race, that they are proud of this veneration and of setting up these
egotisms against those which are trying to destroy the bourgeoisie. In
our time there has been created the ‘mysticism’ of bourgeois passion in
its opposition to the passions of the other class.[9] Here again our
age enters in the balance-sheet of humanity the arrival of yet one more
passion at full possession of itself.
The progress of political passions in depth during the past century
seems to me most remarkable in the case of national passions.
First of all, owing to the fact that they are experienced to-day by
large masses of men, these passions have become _far more purely
passionate_. When the national feeling was practically confined to
Kings or their Ministers, it consisted chiefly in attachment to some
_interest_ (desire for territorial expansion, search for commercial
advantages and profitable alliances), whereas to-day when this national
feeling is continually experienced by common minds, it consists chiefly
in the exercise of _pride_. Everyone will agree that nationalist
passion in the modern citizen is far less founded on a comprehensive
knowledge of the national interests (he has an imperfect perception
of these interests, he lacks the information necessary and does not
try to acquire it, for he is indifferent to questions of foreign
policy) than on the pride he feels in his nation, on his will to feel
himself one with the nation, to react to the honours and insults he
thinks are bestowed on it. No doubt he wants his nation to acquire
territories, to be prosperous and to have powerful allies; but he wants
all this far less on account of the material results which will accrue
to the nation (how much is he conscious of these results?) than on
account of the glory, the prestige which the nation will acquire. By
becoming popular, national feeling has become national pride, national
susceptibility.[10] To measure how much more purely passionate it has
become, how much more perfectly irrational (and therefore stronger)
one has only to think of Jingoism, the form of patriotism specially
invented by democracies. If, in accordance with current opinion, you
think that pride is a weaker passion than self-interest, you may be
convinced to the contrary by observing how commonly men let themselves
be killed on account of a wound to their pride, and how infrequently
for some infraction of their interests.
The susceptibility developed by national sentiment as it has become
popular makes the possibility of wars far greater to-day than in the
past. Obviously, with the peoples and with the aptitude of these new
‘sovereigns’ to rise up in a rage as soon as they think they are
insulted, peace runs an additional danger which did not exist when it
depended only upon Kings and their Ministers, who were far more purely
practical persons, fully self-controlled, and quite willing to put up
with insults when they did not think themselves the stronger party.[11]
And, in fact, how many times during the last hundred years has the
world almost flamed up in war solely because some nation thought its
honour had been wounded?[12] To this must be added the fact that this
national susceptibility provides the leaders of nations with a new and
most effective method of starting the wars they need, whether it is
employed at home or abroad. They have not failed to see this, which
is amply proved by the example of Bismarck and the means by which he
provoked war with Austria and with France. From this point of view
it seems to me quite correct to say with the French monarchists that
‘democracy is war’, provided that by democracy is meant the attainment
of national susceptibility by the masses, and provided that it is
recognized that no change in the system of government would destroy
this phenomenon.[13]
Another considerable deepening of national passions comes from the fact
that the nations are now conscious of themselves not only as regards
their material existence, their military power, their territorial
possessions, and their economic wealth, but as regards their _moral_
existence. With a hitherto unknown consciousness (prodigiously fanned
by authors) every nation now hugs itself and sets itself up against all
other nations as superior in language, art, literature, philosophy,
civilization, ‘culture’. Patriotism to-day is the assertion of one
form of mind against other forms of mind.[14] We know how much this
passion increases its inner strength in this way and that the wars
it determines are fiercer than those waged by the Kings, who merely
desired the same piece of territory. The prophecy of the old Saxon bard
is completely fulfilled: ‘In those days countries will be something
they have not yet become--they will be persons. They will feel hatred,
and these hatreds will cause wars more terrible than any that have yet
been seen.’[15]
It is impossible to over-stress the novelty of this form of patriotism
in history. It is obviously bound up with the adoption of this passion
by the masses of the populace, and seems to have been inaugurated
in 1813 by Germany, who is apparently the real teacher of humanity
in the matter of democratic patriotism, if by this word is meant the
determination of a nation to oppose others in the name of its most
fundamental characteristics.[16] (The France of the Revolution and the
Empire never dreamed of setting itself up against other nations in the
name of its language or of its literature.) This form of patriotism was
so little known to preceding ages that there are countless examples
of nations adopting the cultures of other nations, even of those with
whom they were at war, and in addition reverencing the culture adopted.
Shall I refer to the profound respect of Rome for the genius of Greece,
though Rome had felt it necessary to crush Greece politically? To the
respect of the conquerors of Rome, such as Ataulf and Theodoric, for
Roman genius? And, nearer to ourselves, shall I mention Louis XIV
annexing Alsace and not for one moment thinking of forbidding the
German language?[17] In the past, nations displayed their sympathy for
the culture of other nations with whom they were at war, or invited
them to adopt their own. The Duke of Alba took measures to protect the
learned men in the towns of Holland, against which he was directing his
army; in the eighteenth century, the small German States, allied with
Frederick the Great against the French, adopted more freely than ever
French ideas, French fashions, French[18] literature; in the midst of
the struggle with England, the Convention sent a deputation there to
urge the English to adopt the French metric system.[19] The notion that
political warfare involves a war of cultures is entirely an invention
of modern times, and confers upon them a conspicuous place in the moral
history of humanity.
Another strengthening of national passions comes from the determination
of the peoples to be conscious of _their past_, more precisely to
be conscious of their ambitions as going back to their ancestors,
and to vibrate with ‘centuries-old’ aspirations, with attachments to
‘historical’ rights. This Romantic patriotism is also a characteristic
of patriotism as practised by popular minds (by ‘popular’ I here mean
all minds governed by the imagination, that is, in the first place,
society people and men of letters). I have an idea that when Hugues de
Lionne desired for the nation the conquest of Flanders or when Sieyès
wanted the Low Countries, they did not think they felt the soul of
ancient Gauls reviving in them, any more than Bismarck thought (I am
not talking of what he said) of reviving the Teutonic Knights when he
coveted the Danish Duchies.[20]
Those who wish to estimate the increase of violence given to national
passion by this solemnizing of its desires have only to observe what
has happened to this feeling among the Germans, with their claim to
be carrying on the spirit of the Holy Roman Empire, and among the
Italians since they have set up their aspirations as the revival of
those of the Roman Empire.[21] There once again the leaders of the
State find in popular sentimentality a new and excellent instrument for
carrying out their practical designs, an instrument they well know how
to use. To mention only one recent example--think of the result the
Italian government was able to obtain from the amazing aptitude of its
compatriots to wake up one fine morning and discover that the claim to
Fiume was a ‘centuries-old’ claim.
Speaking generally, it may be said that national passions, owing to
the fact that they are now exerted by plebeian minds, assume the
character of _mysticism_, of a religious adoration almost unknown
in these passions in the practical minds of the great nobles. It is
unnecessary to add that this makes these passions deeper and stronger.
Here once more this plebeian form of patriotism is adopted by all who
practise this passion, even when they are the noisiest champions of
the aristocracy of the mind. M. Maurras talks of the ‘goddess France’,
just as Victor Hugo does. Let me add that this mystical adoration
of the nation is not only to be explained by the nature of those who
adore, but also by the changes which have taken place in the adored
object. There is first of all the spectacle of the military force and
organization of modern States, which is something far more imposing
than of old. And when these States are seen to make war for an
indefinite period after they have no more men, and go on subsisting
for long years after they have no more money, it is easy to understand
why a man who has some tincture of religion in his mind may be led to
believe that these States are of an essence different from that of
ordinary natural beings.
I shall point out another great increase of power in national sentiment
which has occurred in the last half-century. I mean that several
very powerful political passions, which were originally independent
of nationalist feeling, have now become incorporated with it. These
passions are: (_a_) The movement against the Jews; (_b_) the movement
of the possessing classes against the proletariat; (_c_) the movement
of the champions of authority against the democrats. To-day each one of
these passions is identified with national feeling and declares that
its adversary implies the negation of nationalism. I may add that when
a person is affected by one of these passions he is generally affected
by all three; consequently nationalist passion is usually swelled by
the addition of all three. Moreover this increase is reciprocal, and
it may be said that to-day capitalism, anti-semitism and the party
of authority have all received new strength from their union with
nationalism. (For additional proof of the strength of these unions, see
Note C at the end of this book.)
I cannot drop the subject of the modern perfecting of political
passions without mentioning one more characteristic: In all nations the
number of persons who feel a direct interest in belonging to a powerful
nation is incomparably greater now than in the past. In all the great
States to-day I observe that not only the world of industry and big
business but a considerable number of small tradesmen, small bourgeois,
doctors, lawyers, and even writers and artists, and working men too,
feel that for the sake of the prosperity of their own occupations it
is essential for them to belong to a powerful group which can make
itself feared. Those who are in a position to give an opinion on
this sort of change agree that the feeling did not exist, at least
in the same clearly defined way as to-day, thirty years ago among
the small tradesmen of France, for instance. It seems an even newer
thing among the men who belong to the so-called liberal professions;
it is certainly something new to hear artists constantly girding at
the government of their country because it ‘does not give the nation
enough prestige to impose their art on foreigners’. The feeling that
from a professional point of view they have an interest in belonging
to a powerful nation is also very recent among the working classes.
The party of ‘Nationalist Socialists’, which seems to exist everywhere
except in France, is a quite modern political development. Among the
masters of industry the new development is, not that they feel how
much it is to their interest that their nation should be powerful,
but that the feeling is to-day transformed into action, into formal
pressure on their governments.[22] This extension of patriotism based
on interest certainly does not prevent this sort of patriotism (as I
said above) from being much less wide-spread than the patriotism[23]
based on pride; nevertheless it brings another increase of strength to
nationalist passions.
I shall now point out a last important perfecting of all political
passions to-day, whether of race, class, party or nation. When I
observe these passions in the past, I see them consisting in purely
passionate impulses, natural explosions of instinct, devoid of all
extension of themselves in ideas and systems--at least among the
majority. The revolt of the workers in the fifteenth century against
the possessing classes was apparently not accompanied by any sort
of teaching about the origin of property or the nature of capital.
Those who massacred the Ghettos seem to have had no views on the
philosophical values of their action. And when the troops of Charles V
attacked the defenders of Mezières, it does not appear that the assault
was enlivened by a theory about the predestination of the Germanic race
and the moral baseness of the Latin world. To-day I notice that every
political passion is furnished with a whole network of strongly woven
doctrines, the sole object of which is to show the supreme value of
its action from every point of view, while the result is a redoubling
of its strength as a passion. We must look at the system of ideology
of German nationalism known as ‘Pangermanism’ and at the similar
ideology of the French Monarchists, if we wish to realize the point
of perfection to which our age has carried these systems, with what
tenacity each passion has built up in every direction the theories apt
to satisfy it, with what precision these theories have been adapted to
this satisfaction, with what opulence of research, what labour, what
profound investigation they have been carried on in all directions. Our
age is indeed the age of the _intellectual organization of political
hatreds_. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral
history of humanity.
Ever since these systems have been in existence, they have consisted
in establishing for each passion that it is the agent of good in the
world and that its enemy is the genius of evil. But to-day these
passions desire to establish this not only politically, but morally,
intellectually and aesthetically. Anti-semitism, Pangermanism, French
Monarchism, Socialism are not only political manifestations; they
defend a particular form of morality, of intelligence, of sensibility,
of literature, of philosophy and of artistic conceptions. Our age has
introduced two novelties into the theorizing of political passions, by
which they have been remarkably intensified. The first is that everyone
to-day claims that his movement is in line with ‘the development of
evolution’ and ‘the profound unrolling of history’. All these passions
of to-day, whether they derive from Marx, from M. Maurras or from
Houston Chamberlain, have discovered a ‘historical law’, according to
which their movement is merely carrying out the spirit of history and
must therefore necessarily triumph, while the opposing party is running
counter to this spirit and can enjoy only a transitory triumph. That
is merely the old desire to have Fate on one’s side, but it is put
forth in a scientific shape. And this brings us to the second novelty:
To-day all political ideologies claim to be founded on science, to
be the result of a ‘precise observation of facts’. We all know what
self-assurance, what rigidity, what inhumanity (comparatively new
traits in the history of political passions, of which modern French
monarchism is a good example) are given to these passions to-day by
this claim.
To summarize: To-day political passions show a degree of universality,
of coherence, of homogeneousness, of precision, of continuity, of
preponderance, in relation to other passions, unknown until our
times. They have become conscious of themselves to an extent never
seen before. Some of them, hitherto scarcely avowed, have awakened to
consciousness and have joined the old passions. Others have become more
purely passionate than ever, possess men’s hearts in moral regions
they never before reached, and have acquired a mystic character which
had disappeared for centuries. All are furnished with an apparatus of
ideology whereby, in the name of science, they proclaim the supreme
value of their action and its historical necessity. On the surface
and in the depths, in spatial values and in inner strength, political
passions have to-day reached a point of perfection never before known
in history. The present age is essentially the age of politics.