Left. This pattern of alternative identity construction on the extreme Right would not end
with the resolution of the Affair, however. It would continue into the next decades when the
crisis of the Nouvelle Sorbonne debates caused intellectuals of the Left and Right to engage
once more.
SECTION III
THE NOUVELLE SORBONNE AND THE INTERNATIONAL THREAT: 1910-1920
The large scale political engagement by intellectuals in Dreyfus Affair had revealed
underlying differences within the intellectual milieu between the Dreyfusard Center and Left and anti- Dreyfusard Right. These differences were not mere political disagreements; they were the result of a veritable abyss between these intellectuals’ understanding of the essence of the nation, the
conceptualization of culture and intelligence, and the responsibilities and values of the intellectual. The separate concepts of intellectual identity did not disappear with the end of the Affair. Instead, the resentments, struggle for legitimacy, and process of differentiation and segregation on the extreme Right would continue into the decades surrounding World War I. The Right’s efforts to construct an alternative model of intellectual identity can be seen once more, almost immediately after the Dreyfus Affair, in the debates over the Nouvelle Sorbonne and the international threat of Germany. In these debates, a new group of intellectuals on both the Left and Right took the reigns from their Dreyfus Affair predecessors. Engagement in the years surrounding World War I was driven by the modernists and internationalists of the Left and the traditionalists and integral nationalists of the Right. The polemic began to take form as early as 1908, and continued until the declaration of War in 1914, when the majority of the intellectuals temporarily put aside their differences in the Union sacrée. Even this union, however, was based on two different rationales, on the Left and Right, for engaging in the war. The separations of the pre-war debate would reappear after the Versailles treaty,
reinvigorated by the new ideological oppositions of the post-war era.
The movement of the intellectual Right against the reforms made to secondary and higher education, dubbed the “Nouvelle Sorbonne” by writers Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, had its
origins in the divisions created during the Dreyfus Affair. In 1871, with the loss of the Franco- Prussian war, many French universitaires demanded reforms to the French system which would model it after Germany’s university system. These German inspired reforms included a new focus on practical sciences, an emphasis on modern languages, scientifically-based methodologies in the humanities, and a new attempt to guide students toward a specialization. However, the reforms were not actually implemented until 1902, and were quickly associated with the dominant Dreyfusard position, since the young universitaires who supported and implemented the new reforms were ardent Dreyfusards.297By 1908, the formerly anti-Dreyfusard Right had rallied its forces to combat this new
left-wing assault on traditional French culture, intelligence, and civilization by promoting the humanities and arts, classical languages, traditional teaching methods, and the benefits of a general education. As one historian of the debate has noted, the old battle lines between Dreyfusard Left and Anti-Dreyfusard Right seem to have simply been redrawn in the decade before World War I around the new issue of French education.298
The 1902 reforms to secondary education introduced four options for the baccalaureate, including one which required only sciences and modern language. Although the traditional option of humanities and classical languages remained an alternative, right-wing men of letters were outraged by the assault on traditional culture. Insult was added to injury in 1903 when the Dreyfusard
universitaires arranged for the integration of the elite ENS into the Sorbonne. The conflation was intended to democratize higher education by making coursework and degrees more accessible to the average student, and also to erode the intellectual elitism of the ENS. The shift was widely
reproached on the Right as an effort to destroy the natural hierarchy of intelligences and to create an unnatural egalitarianism which would only result in widespread mediocrity. The Combes ministry also succeeded, by 1905, in the separation of Church and State. This resulted in the forced resignation
297 Claire-Françise Bompaire-Evesque, Un Débat sur l’université au temps de la Troisième
République: la lutte contre la nouvelle Sorbonne (Paris: Aux amateurs de livres, 1988), 21.
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of many Catholic professors like Brunetière and the elimination of the catholic schools that the Right saw as a mainstay of traditional, conservative education. The final blow came in 1907, when
reformers suppressed the Latin and French composition requirements for the license in letters. Right- wing traditionalists responded by declaring a “crisis of French” and calling for widespread intellectual engagement against the crippling of French education by the Third Republic.
These Republican and left-wing inspired reforms to the education system seemed, to the former anti-Dreyfusards, to be yet another attempt by the Left to dominate society’s concept of culture and the nation by monopolizing the formation of the French youth. The resentment of left- wing hegemony that had festered since the Affair found a new outlet in the Nouvelle Sorbonne debates. Pierre Lasserre and Charles Maurras led the campaign against the reforms for the newly emergent Action Française. The Action Française had been created in 1898 as an anti-republican and anti-Dreyfusard, though not yet monarchist, organization. With Charles Maurras as its theoretician, its core membership slowly shifted toward monarchism while retaining a strong base of nationalist and anti-republican supporters. Due to its large student clientele, the AF necessarily concerned itself with university affairs and in particular the reforms to secondary and superior education. It would play a prominent role in the collective engagement of the Right.
Although the AF gained rapid popularity, it was the work of “Agathon” in articles for L’Opinion that first declared educational reform the new divisive issue for intellectuals. The series of articles by right-wing intellectuals Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde brought the moderate,
conservative, and extreme-right wing presses as well as the majority of the men of letters to the support of the humanities and classical languages and forced the socialist and republican press and the left-wing universitaires to defend the reforms. The articles were a condemnation of the university’s failure to achieve its goals of a French national education. The cause of this failure, they claimed, was the heavy influence of German philosophy, pantheism, and the utilitarian and scientific methods so revered by the Republican and left-wing intellectuals. The success of these articles spawned a 1913
enquête published as Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui in which Agathon outlined the new right-wing model of the intellectual.
The years of the educational debate were also those of increased fears among the public of a second war with Germany. In 1906, the Kaiser, who had watched the defeat of France’s ally Russia at the hands of the emergent Japanese power, took the opportunity to travel to French Morocco to express his support for Moroccan independence. This undeniable threat increased the latent fears of Germany that had lingered since 1870 and increased public support for nationalist groups, including the anti-German AF.299In response to this increased nationalism and militarism on the French Right,
the French Left, and particularly the recently united SFIO, emphasized its message of
internationalism and anti-militarism. The clash between nationalist right-wing and socialist left-wing intellectuals during this time of international tension was made public in the debates over the “law of three years” which required three years of mandatory military service. The socialist Left considered this excessive militarism while the nationalist Right considered it essential for the preservation of the nation in view of Germany’s increased military strength.300 However, with the declaration of war on August 3, 1914 and the call by Raymond Poincare for a Union Sacrée, the intellectual gap, even on this issue, seemed to close temporarily in a united effort to defend France.
This union of the intellectuals can be considered something of a victory for the intellectual Right, since it was their values and worldviews that were affirmed. There were several instances in which the entire intellectual community seemed united in these values such as the response to the German intellectuals’ “Appeal to the Civilized World.” Only marginalized intellectuals like Romain Rolland refused to enter the “fray” and withheld their support. However, the Union sacrée did not remove the underlying causes of intellectual incompatibility, and when the crisis of war passed, the two camps returned to their separate sides. The nationalist Right, and particularly the AF, emerged
299 David Drake, French Intellectuals and Politics from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 44.
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from the war stronger than ever, reinforced by their apparent victory in the Union sacrée. Right-wing intellectuals like Massis saw the war as proof of the need for a continued right-wing intellectual engagement in a defense of “civilization” against the forces of barbarism represented now not only by German philosophy but also by Bolshevism. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the increasing popularity in Europe of the communist movement had simply broadened the scope of the intellectual Right’s concerns about foreign threats to French cultural identity.
In contrast, the intellectual Left would revert, with even greater fervor, to its pre-war anti- militarist, internationalist, and philo-German ideas and programs. Intellectuals of the Left had quickly been made ashamed of their excessive nationalism by writers, like Rolland, who had remained “above the fray.” This contributed to an increasingly strong movement on the intellectual Left in favor of pacifism.301By 1920, the PCF had emerged from the Socialist party as a new alternative on the Left
and had taken with it the valuable organ L’Humanité. The two distinct trajectories after the war, one on the extreme Right in favor of continued intellectual vigilance against the international threat, and the other on the Center and Left in favor of a return to internationalist values, renewed the old divisions over foreign influence that had first divided intellectuals in the debates over the Nouvelle Sorbonne.
The decade 1910 to 1920 was therefore a period of great transition for intellectuals. They saw their debates shift from internal quarrels over French education to externally influenced divisions over international ideologies. The intellectual Right believed it was more excluded and marginalized in the intellectual world than it had been during the Affair, since now they were denied not only the right to engage as intellectuals, they were also increasingly marginalized in the education of the youth. They would respond by taking a new interest in guiding the student population and developing new socio- professional alternatives to the university for the next generation of intellectuals. Yet, despite these evolutions, the pattern of right-wing intellectual identity construction would remain. The intellectual of the Right continued to be distinguished by a resentment of left-wing hegemony, a distinctive
mentality of engagement created by their struggle for legitimacy, and a desire to differentiate their intellectual values and segregate their communities from those of the dominant Left. This would result in a distinctive experience of intellectual life that prevents the right-wing intellectual of the Nouvelle Sorbonne debates and World War I years from being explained by the traditional model on the Left.
CHAPTER 5
LEFT-WING INTELLECTUAL IDENTITY DURING THE NOUVELLE SORBONNE AND WORLD WAR I ERA
Questions of education have always been grounds for passionate debate in France, yet in the period between the Dreyfus Affair and World War I, the discussions of education carried implications beyond the specific institutional reforms. The reaction by the intellectual Right to the Nouvelle Sorbonne reformers revealed two fundamentally opposed concepts of French culture and society and two corresponding visions of the responsibility of the university, the educator, and the intellectual. These underlying divisions could not be mended by the Union sacrée, and reappeared after the war in a new debate over intellectual responsibilities in the post-war world. The distinctly left-wing
approach to engagement and the values and worldviews that united the otherwise disparate Republican, socialist, and communist intellectuals against the intellectuals of the Right would contribute to a dominant model of intellectual identity that intentionally excluded the engagés of the Right.
The authority and prestige that the Dreyfusard intellectuals had garnered for their camp during the Affair would give them an added advantage in the new debates over French cultural identity and provide them with a distinctly left-wing mentality of engagement. They were proposing drastic and even initially unpopular changes to the traditional university that were characterized by the Right as an imitation of German structures foreign to the French mind. But the intellectuals of the Left presented them as a continuation of the Dreyfusard, Republican, and Enlightenment spirit and of the universal, abstract truths that had gained great intellectual authority.302 In contrast, the extreme
302 The break with the church and the new focus on science and modern language was promoted as
Right would quickly be identified with some of its more prominent, if not entirely representative, catholic and monarchist elements and their “anti-intellectual” stigma. The reformers would also benefit from the post-Affair association of intellectual authority with the person and role of the universitaire. Although the traditionalists of the Right enjoyed numerical advantage in the debates, the left-wing reformers would enjoy positions of dominance in the university and, therefore, in the battle for intellectual authority. Republican and socialist reformers from Lavisse to Croisset to Durkheim held prominent and powerful positions in the university system, and they effectively implied that the new reforms were backed by the university as a whole. This portrayal was reinforced by the young universitaires who dominated the scientific and modern disciplines that received the most public attention in the debate. Most importantly, however, the reforms of the Nouvelle Sorbonne had been in place for several years before the protest of Agathon ignited right-wing engagement. 303
As it had with the Dreyfus Affair, the delayed reaction of the intellectual Right would damage the effectiveness of its engagement. The reformist Left engaged in the debates as the confident defenders of a functioning program rather than its external challengers.
Because the left-wing reformers enjoyed pre-existing public authority, positions of power in the institution, a numerical majority in the modern disciplines, the support of the Republican regime, and the absence of any initial opposition, their engagement in defense of the Nouvelle Sorbonne was done with confidence and the expectation of success. After a momentary lapse during the Union sacrée, the Left’s return to its values of universalism and internationalism would allow it to regain quickly its lost intellectual authority and its confident claim to represent French intelligence.
Intellectuals of the Left displayed no compulsion to legitimize themselves as authorities and displayed no concern that the intellectual Right dominated public opinion.
individuals freed from clerical traditionalism. And, institutional changes to the Sorbonne and ENS were presented as steps toward true democratization, egalitarianism, and the foundation for an education in republican citizenship.
303 Even the 1907 suppression of the Latin and French composition requirement had been
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Paired with these distinctive approaches to engagement was an equally distinctive set of socio-cultural values and worldviews that held important implications for the intellectuals’ concept of role, responsibility, and identity. The Nouvelle Sorbonne that was under attack in Agathon’s articles, and in the right-wing press campaign which followed, was not so much the institution itself or even a series of reforms, but rather a collection of intellectual values that Agathon referred to as a “spirit.” The reaction certainly targeted the tangible reforms of 1902 and 1907, but these specific attacks developed from the Right’s rejection of the general principles of education and culture that were shared by the republican and extreme left-wing reformers. Although the reformist Left included a diverse range of political ideologies from liberal republicanism to socialism to, after 1917, a small contingent of Communists, they all identified with certain general values, worldviews, and concepts of the intellectual that would separate them, as a bloc, from the intellectual Right. Their tendency toward the university led them to envision the role of the intellectual as that of the university
professor and the erudite, and identified intellectual responsibility and practice with objective science, specialization, and international cultural exchange. They specified the essential values of the true intellectual as those of rationalism, democratic egalitarianism, progressive modernism, and
internationalism. This concept of the role, responsibilities, and values of the intellectual that emerged from the debates would be essential to the model of intellectual identity created on the Left; one that by its very nature, excluded the Right.
Perhaps most essential to the reformist concept of the intellectual was the devotion to Rationalism and the scientific methodologies it engendered. This value and the roles and
responsibilities it implied for the intellectual as educator would become one of the main sources of division between the Left and Right during the debates. In a speech before the Ligue de
l’Enseignement, Alfred Croiset, doyen of the Sorbonne, specifically attacked Agathon and drew a clear line of division between the intellectual values of the two camps. The opponents of the
Sorbonne, he summarized, were “the enemies of Rationalism.”304 According to the republican and
left-wing intellectual reformers, to be a true intellectual and educator required that one be a
Rationalist who valued logical deduction, fact driven research, and the consistency of the scientific method. Facts, procedures, and steps of analysis were all able to be taught uniformly across the particular discipline and did not vary according to the taste, preferences, or particularities of the instructor. This uniform consistency and verifiable results, according to the reformers, meant that scientific rationalism brought one closer to “the Truth” than irrational methods based on traditional interpretations, personal taste, or irrational analyses. Rationalism and science therefore became