CP 03862/en
Marcel Proust to Daniel Halévy [Saturday evening, 19 July 1919]
(Click on the link above to see this letter and its notes in the Corr-Proust digital edition, including all relevant hyperlinks.)
My dear Daniel
When for so long I have had some very helpful things to write to you (it requires being in a state close to death for me to have not yet written to you all that I think about your admirable novel[2], so that the booklet you were so kind to lend me[3] is still next to my bed, not being able to find the first editions of my books that I have been searching for in vain for a few weeks (the editions hoarded by an unknown bookstore), and I am still not resigned to send you the more ordinary editions but which at least allow you to read my work if you would like) I must tell you this evening how much I disapprove of your manifesto in Le Figaro[4]. Disapproval of a manifesto, is an even greater vanity than the manifesto itself. The positive excuse for this is that it responds, you say, to another “bolshevist” manifesto[5]. I have not read the first, I do not know where one can find it and I do not doubt that it is not absurd.
But even if I were less tired, how many other absurdities I could point out in the Figaro manifesto. No fair minded person would deny that by denationalising a work one makes it lose its value, and that it is at the very height of the particular that the general blossoms. But, is it not a truth of the same order, that one removes their general value and even national value to a body of work by seeking to nationalise it. The mysterious laws presiding over the blooming of the aesthetic truth as well as the scientific truth are falsified, if a foreign reasoning intervenes at the beginning. The expert who gives the greatest honour to France by bringing the laws to light, would cease giving honour if he searched for it and not for the only truth and he would no longer find this unique correspondence which is what a law is. I am embarrassed to say such simple things but I cannot understand how a mind like yours seems not to take this into consideration. That France must watch over the literatures of the whole world is a mandate that we would cry with joy to learn that has been entrusted to us, but that is a bit shocking to see us taking this upon ourselves. This “hegemony”, born of the “Victory”[6], makes one think involuntarily about “Deutschland über alles”[7] and because of this, it is slightly unpleaseant. The character of “our race”[8] (is it good french, to speak of a “French” “race”?) was to know how to combine such pride with even more modesty.
No one admires the Church more than I do, but to take the counter view to Homais, so far as to say that it has been the guardianship of the progress of the human spirit, at all times, is a bit strong[9]. It is true that there are “non-believing” catholics. But those “non-believers” who I suppose are led by Maurras, did not bring great support for French Justice at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. Regarding other countries, why choose such a cutting tone when discussing such disciplines like the arts where one can only prevail through persuasion. On many occasions, you say “we are listening” (meaning “we demand without permitting a response”). This is not the tone of the “Defenders of the Faith”. And, even in a manifesto, despite wanting to be French at all costs, you have adopted a Germanic tone. I do not need to tell you that if I was familiar with the “Bolshevik” manifesto I would certainly have found it a thousand times worse than yours. But the primary fault of the latter was being a manifesto in the first place. There cannot be anyone who honours France and serves it as well as your works.
Your admirer and friend
Marcel Proust
Notes
- ↑ This letter may be dated [Saturday evening 19 July 1919]: allusion to "your manifesto in Le Figaro" (see note 4 below), to which Proust is responding "this evening." [PK]
- ↑ Daniel Halévy's book, Charles Péguy et les Cahiers de la Quinzaine, had gone on sale 13 October 1918. [PK]
- ↑ This refers to the booklet that the recipient had made up of Proust's article "Sentiments filiaux d'un parricide" (appeared in 1907) and which Proust had had to ask him for in December 1918 for inclusion in Pastiches et Mélanges, the N.R.F. publishing house having mislaid the only copy that Proust had of that article. See the letter to Berthe Lemarié [Thursday 5? December 1918] (CP 03651; Kolb, XVII, no. 211) and that to Daniel Halévy [shortly after 5 December 1918] (CP 03654; Kolb, XVII, no. 214). [PK, FL, FP]
- ↑ The article appeared in Le Figaro, Supplément littéraire of Saturday 19 July 1919, under the title "Pour un parti de l'intelligence" [For a party of the intelligence] on the front page. This manifesto drawn up by Henri Massis bore the signatures of Paul Bourget, André Beaunier, Jacques Bainville, Binet-Valmer, Henri Ghéon, Daniel Halévy, Edmond Jaloux, Charles Maurras, Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, etc. [PK, FP]
- ↑ The manifesto "Pour un parti de l'intelligence" [For a party of the intelligence] was a response from the right to the "Déclaration de l'indépendance de l'Esprit" [Declaration of the independence of the mind] by Romain Rolland, which had appeared three weeks earlier in L'Humanité of Thursday 26 June 1919, on the front page, signed by Henri Barbusse, Benedetto Croce, Georges Duhamel, Albert Einstein, Auguste Forel, Hermann Hesse, Pierre Jean Jouve, Jacobus Kapteyn, Max Lehmann, Georg Friedrich Nicolaï, Bertrand Russell, Paul Signac, Jules Romains, Léon Werth, Stefan Zweig, etc. — The Figaro manifesto described the article in L'Humanité as "Bolshevism of ideas." [ChC, FP]
- ↑ "Rebuilding public spirit in France by the regal means of the intelligence and by classical methods, an intellectual federation of Europe and the world under the aegis of a victorious France, guardian of all civilization" ("Pour un parti de l'intelligence", Le Figaro, Supplément littéraire of Saturday 19 July 1919, p. 1). [PK]
- ↑ "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" (Germany above all others) is the first line of the first couplet of Deutschlandlied (Song of Germany), an Austro-Hungarian hymn of the XIXth century. This song, popular among the German soldiers of the First World War, became Germany's national anthem in 1922. [FP]
- ↑ "We believe - and the world believes with us - that it is in the destiny of our race to defend the spiritual interests of mankind. Victorious France wishes to resume her sovereign place in the order of the spirit, which is the only mandate through which a legitimate domination may be exercised." ("Pour un parti de l'intelligence", Le Figaro, Supplément littéraire of Saturday 19 July 1919, p. 1). [PK]
- ↑ "One of the clearest missions of the Church, over the centuries, has been to protect the intelligence against its own follies, to prevent the human spirit from destroying itself, to prevent doubt from attacking reason, thus preserving for mankind the right and the prestige of thought." ("Pour un parti de l'intelligence", Le Figaro, Supplément littéraire of Saturday 19 July 1919, p. 1). [PK]
- ↑ Translation notes:
- ↑ Contributors: Garmstrong, Yorktaylors.