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— It will be seen later that a historic change occurred, once Hegel and Marx superseded the Schools of Rimbaud and Lautréamont as objects of the younger generation’s admiration.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 . . .
— That’s just inverted romanticism, and pretty low quality too, Rosenthal replied. Victory in thought must precede victory in reality.
— If only it could, said Laforgue. That’s exactly why you strike me as idealist. Doesn’t it really come down to the fact that reality strikes us as rather hard to shift?
— I don’t agree, Rosenthal interrupted. The function of philosophy consists exclusively in