The Conspiracy (5 page)

An empty space opened up, then voices in the ranks of the crowd said:

— There they are!

The boulevard filled up: it was the workers from the outlying districts, the masses from the city's densely populated eastern and northern neighbourhoods; they held the carriageway from one bank to the other bank, the river had finally begun to flow. The people in the first cortège, who were respectable people, did not sing, but these ones were singing, and since they were singing the Internationale, the tenants in Rue Soufflot and Boulevard Saint-Michel, who had never seen anything like it and who were beginning to feel rather small behind their looped drapes and their half-curtains, started shouting out insults and shaking their fists – but since no one heard their shouts, these demonstrations by the residents were of no particular importance.

The spectators on the pavements opened their eyes wide and craned their necks to read the inscriptions on the banners, which were along the lines of: ‘Jaurès, a victim of war, is being glorified by his murderers', and which protested against the Dawes Plan, the Left Cartel, fascism and war, and called for Revolution and the arraignment before a revolutionary Tribunal of those responsible for the War: perhaps these were slightly Utopian slogans, but no doubt could be entertained as to the fresh truth of these rallying cries when people told themselves how the socialist deputies had just voted through the Interior Ministry's secret budget.

One could not help thinking of vigorous forces, of sap, a river, the flow of blood. The boulevard suddenly merited the appellation ‘artery'. The men and women on the pavements had perhaps from the outset wanted to remain calm, because they had come here with their families, out of curiosity, or out of gratitude, or to see famous people pass by, or out of loyalty to the sentimental images Paris retained of Jean Jaurès and his boater and his old tailcoat and his fists uplifted against war, there beneath the wide skies of the Pré Saint-Gervais: but there was no way of remaining calm. It is of no avail being a Parisian and accustomed to great funerals – what with all the ministers and cardinals and academicians and generals who die – and to parades and cortèges; there is no fever that spreads faster than the flames of great processions, and since it had never crossed the minds of the demonstrators coming from the Champs-Elysées to assume suitable expressions, those on the pavements told themselves that if Jaurès were all at once to return, he would probably be rather pleased to see people happy at being two hundred thousand in his honour, and that the crowd filling the carriageway was in the right: this is why the pavements allowed themselves, after hesitating for a moment, to be seduced. The motionless men no longer resisted the moving men, nor the spectators the spectacle, nor the silent ones the singers; they stepped down to experience the river's movement. Laforgue, Rosenthal and Bloyé lost what deference to convention they had left, they too plunged in and began to sing.

Later, the Prime Minister slowly climbed the steps of the Panthéon, between two lines of miners who were still playing a decorative and symbolic role, and began to speak: he could be seen extending his arms, puffing out his chest, laying his hand on his heart, but not a word of his speech could be heard amid all the bursts of cheering and booing that were erupting from all sides on the black-and-grey square. The demonstrators, moving forward as slowly as lava, threw their placards against the railings; and the
Thinker
, who had never looked greener or more hungry, gazed vaguely with his eyes of bronze at that pyre of wood, calico, cardboard and everlasting flowers that rose up before Jaurès's coffin, like the crutches, votive offerings and sticks before a miraculous site. The whole crowd was drifting away via Rue Valette, Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, Rue Clovis and Rue de l'Estrapade: darkness began to fall and yellow lamps were lit over its dispersal.

Between the Hôtel des Grands Hommes and the corner of Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, Laforgue said with a sigh:

— No question about it. One knows which side one should be on.

— That second cortège was needed, replied Rosenthal who was feeling a bit drunk, to cleanse us of our night of dissimulation . . .

Nothing is more difficult than the systematic exploitation of an event of the heart, nothing more swiftly damped than the reverberations of love at first sight. Examinations, laziness, literature, curiosity about women, all the false manoeuvres in which the arduous life of adolescents is dissipated, long prevented Laforgue and his friends from drawing from those violent memories of 24 and 25 November all the practical consequences they should have implied: for years, it was merely something they held in reserve.

It might be thought odd that they were not shaken by certain events in the years '25, '26, '27 and '28: but that would be to take insufficient account of the diversions into which so many young men are enticed, when at a stroke they discover books and women. In July '25, Laforgue was going for Sunday excursions out of Paris, and taking out dancing at Saint-Cloud and Nogent-sur-Marne a little salesgirl from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, who seemed to him the most important thing in the world. In May '26, Rosenthal forgot everything in favour of the revelations in the
Ethics.
The war in Morocco, the Canton rising, the English general strike were barely anything more to them than great opportunities for a few days of political enthusiasm: they signed manifestos that committed them far less than their parents thought. The interest they took in the world lacked specificity. The Sacco and Vanzetti affair, with all those heads broken in Paris, might have played a role in their lives that would have marked them more severely than the Jaurès ceremonies; but it was the holiday period, none of them was in Paris, the whole business was simply an item of news that they read in the papers, with a forty-eight hour delay, in Brittany or in the Midi.

Throughout all these years, they would have periods of passion when they would resolve to go to bed at three in the morning: this was more than was needed to pass their examinations, it fell a bit short of forgetting themselves. They would espy a trail and plunge in, less to gain knowledge than with the hope of stumbling upon a mirror or a source. They discovered one after another Mendelssohn, the
‘Unknown Philosopher'
and
Rabbi ben Ezra
. After a couple of weeks, humour would prevail, they would wake up and return to the cinema almost every evening. They were eager young men, but lazy.

This superficiality did not prevent them from believing in Revolution: they cared little about appearing truly inconsistent. They sometimes examined their consciences – but only to conclude that they did not incline towards Revolution out of love for humanity, nor out of any strict adherence to events. It is quite true that there was not the least scrap of philanthropy in their natural impulse to revolt: humanitarianism struck them as entirely counterfeit, nor did they view Revolution as a secular rebirth of Christianity.

— What I like about Revolution, said Laforgue, is that the civilization it promises will be a hard civilization.

— Agreed, said Rosenthal. The age of ease is coming to an end . . .

They were stirred more by disorder, absurdity and outrages to logic than by cruelty or oppression, and really saw the bourgeoisie, whose sons they were, less as criminal and murderous than as idiotic. They never doubted for a moment that it was in decline and doomed. But they wished to fight not for the workers – who, fortunately, had by no means waited for them – but for themselves: they viewed the workers merely as their natural allies. There is a great deal of difference between wanting to sink a ship and refusing to sink with it . . .

The intense family repugnance they felt for the bourgeoisie might have led them to a violent, but anarchist, critique. Anarchism, however, struck them as illiterate and frivolous: their academic studies saved them. They scorned the generation that had immediately preceded them, for having expressed its revolt only in poetic vocabularies and upon poetic sureties: the moment seemed right to endow anger with philosophical guarantors.

— Let's start being serious, said Bloyé.

Rosenthal commented:

— It will be seen later that a historic change occurred, once Hegel and Marx superseded the Schools of Rimbaud and Lautréamont as objects of the younger generation's admiration.

They liked only victors and reconstructors; they despised the sick, the dying, lost causes. No force could more powerfully seduce young men who refused to be caught up in the bourgeoisie's defeats than a philosophy which, like that of Marx, pointed out to them the future victors of history: the workers, destined for what they somewhat hastily judged to be an inevitable victory. Moreover, they went so far as to convince themselves, with excessive complacency, that the Revolution was accomplished now that they themselves positively no longer identified with the bourgeoisie: a kind of smug pride made them speak of post-revolutionary consciousness. No one would have dreamed of finding them dangerous; they worked less to destroy the present than to define a dreadfully contingent future.

Civil War
took up a great deal of their time during the first months: they had no suspicion at the time that what was most important about the venture was the fact that it gave them opportunities for extensive reading, and their first chance of sustained relations with workers, and that they would later recall, with the surprise which the memory of happiness gives, the hours they used to spend with deft, sardonic compositors in the little book printshop in Rue de Seine where they went to correct their proofs and lay out the journal.

They were not modest, they compared themselves to famous groupings, to the Encyclopaedists or the Hegelians.

Rosenthal thought their principal undertaking should be an encyclopaedic critique of values, and a sort of general reduction of ideas to their true motives: no study seemed to him more important than the critique of mystification and the exposure of mendacity. Laforgue dreamed of a kind of generalization of Marx's analyses on the fetishism of commodities – some universal charactery of deception.

It was, after all, the morrow of the War and the first peacetime disorders. They were emerging from a prodigiously mendacious time, when the entire education of the young had been accompanied by solemn twaddle, fuelled in turn by the requirements of prosecuting the War, then by the success of the grand machinations of the Peace. They realized they had been deceived no less at school than their fathers or elder brothers had been at the front. Their mothers, lonely and glibly heroic like all wives of men who will die in wars, had themselves lied with a disconcerting civic ease. Ten years after Versailles, almost all the men who had returned from the front, saved at the last instant when the clarion of the Armistice sounded, still hesitated to unmask the meaning of the rhetorical inventions for which they had fought: rarely does a person have the courage to retract and cry from the rooftops that he once took the word of liars; it is necessary to be strong indeed for such public confessions – people would rather have been accomplices than dupes. It will easily be understood why Laforgue and his comrades despised no one more deeply than War Veterans. The voices that had been raised after the last day of the War still seemed few in number: they did not compel the young men's recognition. Everything depended upon the chance of an encounter that did not always occur. By about a year Laforgue and Rosenthal had missed the
Clarté
movement, which was already disintegrating.

Behind the closed shutters of the shop in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, or in their lecture-rooms in Rue d'Ulm, they spent hours mulling over these matters. Comrades who did not form part of the team would come to visit them; they would talk till very late, drinking coffee that Bloyé handed round, until they were tipsy with words and smoke. For example, Rosenthal would say:

— A modern encyclopaedia could only be based on the sincerity of insolence. Nobody expects anything of us other than insolence. We must announce, with sufficiently prophetic means of expression to unsettle the smug, the decline of the age of mendacity. Such an annunciation will not be achieved without a system: that's why our special mission in philosophy consists in giving a new tone, and the accents of our age, to all the denigratory systems – Spinoza, Hegel, Marx . . . Our undertaking will thus be more like the Hegelian Encyclopaedia than the Encyclopaedia of d'Alembert, which has all the defects of the bourgeoisie's compromises . . . If people are at death's door, that's because they're suffocating inside shells of mendacity. We shall tell those hermit-crabs why they're dying! They'll be furious with us, nobody likes truth for its own sake. Marx said that men must be given consciousness of themselves, even if they don't want it. They don't like consciousness, they like death . . . For a certain time, my friends, our sole task will be to denigrate their ideas and disaccustom them to flattery . . . There's no phrase I admire more than Lenin's about the profanation of gold, do you remember?
‘When we are
victorious on a world scale, I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.'

Then Laforgue said:

— What I'm a bit worried about is the possible duration of this mission . . . Do you know whom I compare us to?

— No, Rosenthal replied.

— I compare us to that brilliant group of Young Hegelians, such as Bruno Bauer and his ilk, who definitely preferred revolutions in consciousness to the rough and tumble of actual revolutions. Don't you know that little epigram on the
Doktorklub
?

Unsere Täten sind Worte bis jetzt und nock lange
Unter die Abstraktion stellt sich die Praxis.

There are days when I wonder if it wouldn't be more worthwhile sticking posters up on walls, with the chaps in some party cell . . .