The Conspiracy (7 page)

VII

BERNARD ROSENTHAL TO PHILIPPE LAFORGUE

Paris, 26 March 1929

Dear Philippe,

It is time I finally put you in the picture about the project you have all no doubt suspected me of having – I am writing to Bloyé and Jurien as well. Let's say nothing for the time being to Pluvinage.

We have opted for Revolution as our reason for living. A reason for living is not just an element of spiritual comfort to use at night in order to fall asleep in the obscene embrace of good conscience. We must reflect deeply upon the consequences which this reason entails: this is how the totality of life may be arrived at. Without totality, we shall not endure ourselves. Spinoza says:
acquiescentia in se ipso
.
That is what we shall demand. The essential lies in accepting oneself.

Nothing appeals to me more than the idea of irreversible commitment. We must invent the constraints that will bar us from inconstancy; opting for Revolution must not be a promise for a term, which it might one day be legitimate to reconsider. Let us beware of our future infidelities . . .

A man who believes in God is a victim of the most squalid sentiment in the world, yet his whole life is condemned, he is seamless, there is not the fragment of belief and the fragments of normal life: it is impossible for him to retrace his steps and reverse his decision, without feeling destroyed. The Revolution demands deeds of us that are as effective as the Christian's, as far removed from inner life, and which compromise us enough for us never to be able to
go back.
What strikes me in Christian life is that it basically concerns itself only with works and demonstrations – good intentions are Protestant claptrap. That is how we shall understand commitment: as a premeditated system of rigorous constraints.

Anarchism was particularly favourable to works of this kind. Throwing a bomb, killing somebody important: after that, it was really impossible to go on living as before the bomb or the murder; never again was there a status quo; the lines of retreat were severed; one was in history up to one's neck; one could only plunge in, from the moment one had placed oneself
outside the normal bounds.
But anarchism has been killed off by history, by the revolutions of the twentieth century, by the masses the latter have brought into play and by the revolutionary's certain conviction that he will not, through a terrorist act, succeed in seriously frightening the enemy. Politics stripped of terrorism and its pure commitments confronts the individual with problems of another order, the highest of which is that of effectiveness. We must take a stand against excessive profundity that evades questions; we must simply aim for truth and Being, which are simple.

It was against quite remarkable government and police techniques that the old passions of anarchism shattered. The Revolution will be technical. The difficult part is to devise acts that serve the Revolution and at the same time constitute for
us
irreversible events. We must no longer believe that once the truth about evil is known, evil is abolished. It is necessary to destroy evil. To philosophize with hammer blows. To devise irreparable things.

It is clear, and you must feel it like me, that the articles we have published and the speeches we shall not fail to deliver do not commit us dangerously – at least, not for long. Just as there exist female accomplishments, these are scarcely more than youthful accomplishments, characterized by skilful artistry and self-satisfaction.

It seems to me – and François Régnier, with whom I have spoken at length since our abortive visit to Carrières, has said some really important things to me about this – that espionage might
at this moment
constitute the simultaneously
effective and irremediable
activity which I have so passionately in mind. The legendary baseness of espionage has entirely to do with the temporal interests that motivate spies and with the ignoble aims their imperialist paymasters harbour. Espionage has not yet been considered as one of the forms of intellectual activity. An act of espionage absolutely disinterested in its motives, or whose deeply
interested
nature is of a concrete and metaphysical order and entirely pure in its aims, does not strike me as unworthy of us: no means is impure.

There are two revolutions: one has been made, the other remains to be made. The period of reconstruction from which the October Revolution has yet to emerge places technical information in the first rank of its needs. The USSR's watchword is to catch up with and surpass the most advanced capitalist countries. We have the good fortune to live in one of these. You can see that I am thinking here of a form of industrial espionage, which does not seem to me impossible from a practical point of view, inasmuch as we live within the bourgeoisie, where no one would dream of mistrusting us on that particular terrain. They do not alter their habits of ‘thought' so quickly, they will never mistrust anyone except traditional foes, traitors dressed for the part.

The French Revolution that is being prepared, despite all appearances and all signs of stability, must place in the forefront of its concerns the issues of the seizure of power and the resistance that may be put up in the first weeks of armed conflict. So there exists a necessity to work politically in the Army, and a
conspiratorial
necessity to gain possession, before the decisive days, of various items of military information: security arrangements, protective plans, arms dump locations, mobilization centres, etc. If I still cannot see in detail the real conditions for the success of industrial espionage – it will obviously be necessary to create a complex network of absolutely reliable technicians, only a few of them in the Centrale and Polytechnique milieux, perhaps a rather larger number in Arts et Métiers, in the technical schools for the poor – I find it easier to imagine the fairly swift and widespread success of military espionage. We are all destined to carry out our military service as infantry or artillery officers, or as soldiers occupying (thanks to the virtues of Culture) privileged jobs. (Actually, we have been following a stupid policy up to now in systematically opposing higher military training and, like the
normaliens
of Quimper, organizing at the Ecole a struggle against the draft.) What defines military secrets is not so much profundity as repetition: nothing is more Kierkegaardian than a military headquarters. So a quite small number of comrades would be enough at the beginning to transmit what is really important, and to start organizing a network of informers which will not need to be of limitless dimensions. We shall speak again soon at our leisure about the concrete details: please do give the matter some thought.

The transmission to its final destination of the information we collect poses a problem that is of an ethical more than a practical nature: I regard it as indispensable that it should be effected anonymously. In no case should it be possible to establish any link between the intended recipients of our consignments, who must not be implicated, and ourselves. Besides, the private value of our actions would be utterly compromised by the expectation of any recognition or importance whatsoever. Virtue is its own reward. Yours.

P.S. Do you remember Simon, who was with us at Louis-le-Grand and went on to the Ecole des Chartes? He is secretary to his colonel at Clignancourt. We might make a trial run. I shall see him: I have always had a certain influence over him, up to now he has done
almost
everything I have suggested to him.

PHILIPPE LAFORGUE TO BERNARD ROSENTHAL

Strasburg, 28 March 1929

Dear old Rosen,

So that was your Dostoievskyan idea. I find it unbelievably romantic. If it's a matter of commitment, I somehow have the impression that a metalworker's commitment in a party cell, a factory cell, goes much further than any mystical – and also sly – demonstration: sly, because it is explicitly understood that fellows like us are never caught, are not catchable. The metalworker risks – and straight away, not in six months or outside time – his freedom, his job and his livelihood. Same thing with the fellows who get themselves nabbed in barracks for Inciting-military-personnel-to-disobey-orders-in-pursuance-of-the-aims-of-anarchist-propaganda. Perhaps, if we were not afraid of political servitude, and if it were not the case that nothing seems more important to us than not choosing, the true solution for us too would consist in joining the party without further ado, although life in it cannot always be easy for
intellectuals.
We shall have to see . . .

All the same, until such time as we make up our minds to take the plunge, and the Revolution is more visibly imminent than in this bitch of a period, we are having such a damnably tedious time living our young elite existence that I cannot see why we should not have a go at conspiracy, something along the lines of
The Possessed
or the Narodniks. Your clandestine dreams, though, strike me as more effective for the purposes of your personal perfection than for concretely achieving the conquest of political power by the proletariat.

But you are as you are, you will reply that man has no need, like a horse, for perfection.

It is not impossible that I might come across something to do in the industrial field, thanks to my father with his Polytechnique background who, as is only proper, is in the vanguard of technology. It would astonish me, however, if I found the energy for this at once, because of the atmosphere one breathes here while awaiting Easter.

Strasburg – gloriously reconquered from the enemy, to the great joy of the patriots, who brought out again quantities of little black-and-green ribbons; and also of the German officers of the Rhine flotilla, already sequestered by their rebellious sailors brandishing revolvers in docks filled with red flags, while the admiral paced up and down without a stitch on, at several degrees below – Strasburg, I say, even though its frivolous, musical character has been much weakened during the six years since my father arrived there in the victors' baggage train, still possesses the enchanting look of a Rhine resort where there is no question of taking things seriously. The time of the great madness is over, when the lieutenants of the French Army were lording it over the
Broglie
and on Rue de la Mesange, and when the most amazing schemes were within a week making rich men out of petty adventurers only just demobbed, whose wives were soon driving about in Mercedes and Rolls; a romantic trade in contraband currency was carried on by boat between the two banks of the Rhine, which, when all is said and done, was actually contained in
Anglo-French glasses
; military planes would smuggle bicycles and sewing-machines fastened between the wheels of their landing-gear; the customs men on the Kehl Bridge used to empty women's bodices stuffed with silk stockings, men's pockets, the robes of priests, all of them made dizzy by the abysses of the German inflation; powerful families of brewers and bankers would pay unattached young men from the interior to sleep with the daughters-in-law from whom they wished to deliver their sons; the high officials of
Millerand
and
Alapetite's
Commissariat were carrying off whole wagonloads of state property to France for their country houses; the surrealists used to come to Strasburg in quest of the well-springs of German romanticism. That's over, but one can still spend one's leisure time wandering along embankments flanked by steeples, bell towers, palaces, latticed gardens, churches and Protestant chapels, where the tourists go to meditate upon death as they peer at glass coffins containing little girls in dresses with farthingales, or stuffed and extremely moth-eaten eighteenth-century generals. There are spots beside the canals and the Ill with trees, grass and silence; and
Weinstüben
, where waitress-mistresses in black silk dresses reveal their thighs so far up that you want to stroke them, even though their skin has an off-putting salad whiteness: when you know them quite well, they take you into the kitchen to kiss you expertly on the lips and call you Dearest Soul in German. Easter is not bad in Alsace, but nothing equals the snowy season in this town. Then all the brothels have Christmas trees, round which the young bourgeois of the town grow emotional in the company of the girls of the house, while their parents attend Midnight Mass in the Minster. These young men usually have mistresses, as they call them, who are waitresses from some brasserie, in black aprons and with big breasts, who give them a bit of pocket money. On Sundays they go and dance with their sisters' friends in the ballrooms of the Hôtel Hannong or the Maison Rouge, for it is still rather cool in the restaurants of La Wanzenau and Le Fuchs am Buckel. In a few days' time, these maidens will begin playing tennis on the courts of La Robertsau, where there will be roses. All the lures of the Family . . . Yours.

BERNARD ROSENTHAL TO PHILIPPE LAFORGUE

Paris, 30 March 1929

Dear Philippe,

I can overlook your epithet ‘romantic': we'll have to argue it out, because it seems to me to indicate a serious misunderstanding between us. This is not the first time I have suspected you of a kind of casual lack of passion. Watch out for the gardens of Ile de France, for the
speech of Touraine
, for moderation, for useless moderation, for
Common-sense-the-most-widely-shared-thing-in-the-world
, for the idiocy of Anatole France, for the chicanery of Voltaire. Sometimes you are terribly
French.

We shall also have to speak further about joining the party, because that is serious. Our function consists in inventing or deepening beliefs, but not in dissolving them into politics. It must be possible to play an important role as irregulars. As old Uncle Spinoza says, there can never be too much liberty.

Thanks, whatever happens, for your acceptance in principle of my project: I would not have done anything without you, or without the others. Bloyé agrees too, with some objections in the caution department, and Jurien, which surprises me more. I did not have such high hopes of that future university lecturer, who will lose his taste for Revolution at the same time as his virginity, which by now cannot be long delayed. I have met Simon, much affected by military service. I have told him nothing as yet. It is obvious that there is not much to be discovered from his colonel's office, apart from the list of men in the regiment classified as PR. But he has independently conceived the ambition of getting himself posted as secretary to one of the offices of the Paris garrison, and has told me that he has asked to be transferred from the 21st Colonial at Clignancourt to the 23rd at Lourcine, where a job is about to fall vacant in the office of Area 2 of the garrison. He sees in this transfer, to which I have vigorously encouraged him, merely the advantages of indolence and the attractions of the locality. He has few Parisian contacts. But when we meet in a few days, we shall have to find a way of getting him recommended by Mr So-and-so, who knows Mrs X, who just so happens to be on ever such intimate terms with the supreme commander of the colonial troops. Are you yourself not more or less stabled with a filly from the Gouraud circle? Cheerio.