The Conspiracy. Paul Nizan

people had said, he seemed to know all Paris:

      — Herriot was saying to me only last week, he began, ‘My dear Régnier . . .’

      Or:

      — Philippe Berthelot was telling me that the day the Briand–Kellogg Pact was signed . . .

      The name of Plato launched him into a brilliant variation on the theme of painting, about which as a matter of fact Berthelot had never understood a thing: however, these specialists fresh from their Sophist and Politicus judged it fallacious. Bloyé explained this to him with a certain insolent severity. They were not sorry to catch out in error such odious fluency, and to show Régnier that, even if he knew Berthelot, Herriot and Léon Blum, he was at any rate ignorant of Plato.

      — It’s quite possible, he replied, laughing in a careless manner, baring his teeth. What a time it has been since I construed the Republic at the Sorbonne, before the war! That isn’t the least bit important, in any case. When you’re my age, you won’t give a fig for textual fidelity.

      He went on explaining painting to them, which in those years played the role that the theatre had filled twenty years earlier, and since he was mentioning the names of painters they did not know, they found him vulgar.

      A little later, he asked them:

      — How old are you all?

      — Twenty-two.

      — Twenty-three.

      — Twenty-three.

      — Rosenthal I know, said Régnier.

      — And you? asked Laforgue.

      — Thirty-eight, he said. How young they are!

      Régnier began to laugh once again with his disagreeable laugh.

      At around half past five, they left. It was quite dark; beneath a ceiling of clouds, a vast jumble of winking lights stretched to the ends of the earth, far beyond Paris. As soon as Rosenthal accelerated, under the rotting trees in the forest of Saint-Germain, the cold cut into their cheeks. The wind smelled of moss, fungus and mould.

      — What do you think of him? asked Rosenthal. How did you find Régnier?

      — Not bad, said Bloyé weakly.

      — Extraordinarily boring, said Laforgue.

      — He wasn’t on form, said Rosenthal. One shouldn’t catch him on a working day, I’m afraid we may have disturbed him a bit, then he says any old thing, just banalities. But I wanted you to make his acquaintance, for later. Now it’s done, you’ll have other opportunities to know him better . . .

      — Don’t apologize, said Laforgue. The weather might have been even filthier.

      Rosenthal was upset and fell silent. But near Bougival he suddenly said, in a defiant tone of voice:

      — Régnier’s the most intelligent man I know, all the same.

      — Why not? said Laforgue. Perhaps he’s keeping his cards close to his chest . . .

      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.