HOTES AMD REFERENCES
U. Y.I 21 5 ibid 93.
12. ibid 75 13 V.I Ul.
lU. ROLLAND. Mémoires. Paris. A. Michel, 1956. 53-U.
15. CRUICKSHANK, John. Romain Rolland - the content and evolution of his thought. Thesis for Ph.D. (unpubl.) Dublin (Trinity College), 1951. 1U3.
16. Letter of 8.11.1912 (unpubl.) 17. SIPRIOT. op. cit. Ul-2.
18
. Cloître 35U. 19. ibid. 356. 20. loc. cit. 21. ibid. 357. 22. ibid. 363. 23. ibid. 357- 2U. ibid. 358. 25. ibid. 361. 26. ibid. 360. 27. ibid. 361. 28. ibid. 362. 29. ibid. 363.Leaving aside for the moment the possible intellectual sources
of Buch a Ood-eoncept, one is tempted to conclude that one of its
sources is probably relatively unintellectual. This is the position in vhich many sensitive and thoughtful adolescents like Rolland find
62
themselves, i.e. they are torn between a strong feeling of their own separate identity and, perhaps equal1 y strong, the awareness of the emotional and social presence of others. Obviously there is considerable pressure to reconcile these two terms, and in such cases a solution like Rolland’s may recommend itself n.1 1 the more readily.
30. loc. cit. 31. loc. cit. 32. Cloître. 366. 33. ibid. 367.
31*. Strictly speaking of course, it is not just other human beings, but all created things that are apart of the totality and hence must be seen by us as part of the same divine essence. Thus "il n'est rien dans la nature qui ne doive m'être proche: un arbre autant qu'un homme" (Cloître 370). Indeed Rolland was through out his life highly sensitive to the natural world, but always accorded a special plane to his relations with other human beings. One must agree here with J. Cruickshank that this is not con tradicting his idea of a unified cosmos, but simply yielding to the demands of conmon sense.
35. loc. cit. 36. Cloître. 373. 37. ibid. 375.
38. loc. cit. and cf. Mems. 200-01. 39. Cloître. 379.
Uo.
The definition is that of G.D.H. COLE in A History of Socialist Thought. vol. 1. The Forerunners 1789-1850. London. MacMillan, 1953. U.Ul. y.l. 33. U2. ibid. 35.
U3. cf. Mems. 33 and the chapter 'Les Trois Eclairs' in Y.l.
UU. HAMPSHIRE, Stuart. Spinoza. London. Faber and Faber, 1956. 33. 1*5. Y.l. 37-
U6. SPINOZA, (from Tract at us Theologico - Politicus) Oeuvres Completes. Paris. Pléiade, 1951*. 926.
U7. ibid. 921.
1*8. cf. ibid. 952 and 983.
•*9. cf. the bits quoted by Rolland on V.I. 38. 50. SPINOZA, op. cit. 926.
51. Cloître. 200. 52. V.I. U2-3.
For this reason one finds it hard to go all the way with Hemmings when he says simply that "Rolland was and remained a Tolstoi'sant, with the one reserve that he would give art a higher place in the hierarchy of human values than would Tolstoy"
(op. cit. 213). This is, in our view, to presume far too exclusive an influence, and it also neglects the political differences between the two, notably over the problem of violence. 53. TOLSTOY, L.N. War and Peace (trans. Rosemary Edmonds). London.
Penguin Modern Classics, 1957. 1308-9. 5l*. ibid. Ull.
55. ibid. 3Ul.
56. BERLIN, Isaiah. The Hedgehog and the Fox. N. York. Mentor Books, 1957-
57* op. cit. 102 and ff. 58. TOLSTOY, op. cit. 1153. 59. ibid. Ul2.
60. ibid. 1530. 61. ibid. 1153. 62. ibid. 1165.
63. From What I Believe, quoted by ROLLAND in Vie de Tolstoi. Paris. Hachette, 1911. 90.
6k. V.I. k2.
6k.
66. DESCOTES, Maurice . Romain Rolland. Paris. Edns. du Temps Présent. 19^8. 60.
s 67. Cloître. 200
68. ROLLAND, R. Printemps Romain. Paris. A. Michel, 195U. 22k.
69. RENAN, Ernest. Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques. 12th edn., Paris. Calmann-Lévy, 1923. 2Ö3.
70. RENAN. Avenir de la Science. 23rd edn. Paris. Calmann-Levy, 1929. 150.
71. CHARLTON, D.G. Positivist Thought in France During the Second Km-pirp. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1959. 107.
72. Cloître. 25.
73. In this connexion, Renan once remarked that: "ce qui est de l'humanité, ce qui peu: conséquent sera éternel comme elle, c'est le besoin religieux, la faculté religieuse". (Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques. 309)
7b. RENAN. Act 1 of "L'Abbesse de Jouarre" in Oeuvres Complètes d 1 Ernest Renan, (lovols.) Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 19^9. III» 623. 75. Cloître. 376.
76. Letter to Marcel Martinet of January l8th, 1925 (unpubl.). 77. Cloître. 319-20.
78. dated July 1912; unpubl.
Although there is little doubt that Rolland had read same Rousseau when a student it is hard to say exactly which works. Notes in Le Cloître de la Rue d'Ulm would seem to show that he knew of Rousseau's vritings on the arts (187) and his auto biographical works (319-20). I think that it is also reasonable to suppose that he would have read in the classe de philosophie or in the preparatory classes for the Ecole Normale Supérieure the more explicitly philosophical writings such as Etoile, the Contrat Social and the second Discours.
79. BAST AIRE, Jean. "A Propos de RR." in Esprit, vol XXII. no. 3., March 1951». U60.
81. ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques. Emile (ed. F and P. Richard). Paris. Garnier, 1961. 320.
82. ibid. 339. 83. ibid. 3U8. 8U. loc. cit.
85. to Louise Cruppi, October 17th, 1910. (unpubl.)
86. ALEXANDER, I. Henri Bergson. London. Bowes and Bowes, 1957. **5 87. Cloître. 360.
88. loc. cit. 89. Cloître. 362. 90. ibid. 351».
91. v. CAIN, Seymour. Gabriel Marcel. London, Bowes and Bowes, 1963. 30. 92. MOUNIER, Emmanuel. Introduction aux Existentialismes. Paris, NEF.
(coll. Idées), 1962. ~S=9.
93. Marcel believes in fact that there does exist "a universal epistemological basis for the interpretation of religious and existential experience in our common human adventure, our undergoing of the basic human condition and situation, our fraternal wayfaring and destiny" (CAIN op. cit. 108); in fact that there is a common fund of human experience that Can be spoken about meaningfully, despite eachhnoi1 having its own unique characteristics. Rolland believed this too, and we shall be speaking about it in the next chapter, in connexion with his first works.
9*t. cf. in this context an article by R.H. THOMAS: "Dm Ich und die Welt - Expressionismus und Gesellschaft" in ROTHE, W. (ed.) EypreHnioniBrnus als Literatur. Bern and Munich. Francke Verlag, 1969. 19-36.
95. This distinction of 'moi' and 'persona' is very like Rolland'8 good and bad egoisms. Marcel sees the moi as being basically the individual's urge to self-expression and preservation, and does not deny its legitimacy as such. It can however become shut in on itself or else operate at the expense of others; true individuality, however, is outer-directed, and best expressed not in introverted sterility but in communion with others. When a moi does this, Marcel accords it the status of a 'persona'. "La personne ne peut pas non plus être regardée comme un élément ou comme un attribut du moi ...Elle est une exigence (qui) ne prend conscience de soi qu'en devenant une réalité.
66
.
Je m'affiime comme personne dans la mesure où je crois réellement à l'existence des autres et où cette croyance tend à informer ma conduite." (MARCEL, Gabriel. Homo Viator. Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 191*1*. 25.)
96. ibid. l6. 97. ibid. 18.
98. MOUNIER, E. (from Le Personnalisme) in Oeuvres Complètes (U vols.) Paris, Seuil, I9U9. Ill, 1*52.
99. ibid. 1*53. 100. loc. cit. 101. ibid. 1*55.
CHAPTER TWO
The Early Years - Formation of a Consciousness
Towards the end of his life Romain Rolland writes in his Goethe and Beethoven the following words, à propos of Bettina von Brentano, confidante of both Goethe and Beethoven
"car, lorsqu'on décrit une âme, il faut bien distinguer, d'abord, l'heure où on la saisit: nul ne reste le même au cours de toute une vie; et moins qu'une autre, une femme toute livrée à son coeur tendre et fou, comme Bettine...
Men are creatures that change constantly and subtly, in fact; and thus any analysis that ignores this fact is likely to be invalid.
This salutary warning is one that can and must apply to any study of Romain Rolland. His ideas on any subject - not merely the political ideas that form the base of this thesis - do not remain static throughout his career; nor indeed do they evolve uniformly and without interruption towards some higher or more lucid form of expression. Rather, there sure times when Rolland seems actually to go back from positions he has previously attained, or to contradict himself.
All these factors mean that the analyst of his political thinking must tread very carefully; and in fact it seems to me that the only fair way to gain a clear view of what he thought is to adopt a ruthlessly chronological approach, starting with Rolland's earliest recorded utterances on politics, and following the developments of and changes in these minutely across his career, phase by phase or even year by year when necessary.
68.
period of Holland's development (insofar of course as it is ever
legitimate to divide an author's life into such specific 'periods') runs roughly from the beginning of his career at the rue d'Ulm (1886) to about 1901 when he embarked successfully on Jean-Christophe. Certainly the author himself felt that this year marked some kind of watershed in his career, for he does speak of "mes années de formation et de combat, qui vont jusqu'à la trente-cinquième année". But it seems to me that even within this period an important division must be made. For the political comments of Rolland after about 1895, the time at which he first shows any interest in socialist thought, are radically different from anything he had written before. Hence I shall use this chapter solely to establish the nature of Holland's thought before this key date, leaving the developments in his thinking between then and 1901 for a separate chapter.
Going back then to 1886, the year in which the twenty-year old Holland entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure, what sort of man do we find? The answer to this question is that Romain Rolland was during his student days an extremely complex and disturbed figure. His health was poor, he had already had one contact with death (the loss of his elder sister when he was five), and he had been uprooted from the sleepy and rather
claustrophobic atmosphere of Clamecy (where his father had been a lawyer) and thrown into the stiffly competitive world of the Parisian lycées, with the aim of gaining admission to one of the Grandes Ecoles and ensuring thereby security for himself and his dependents. This intellectual
pressure to which he had been subjected had helped to further his religious doubt, with the results that we have already seen. Hence the young
Rolland was an uncertain and rather harassed man. Yet even at this confused stage of his development we can, X think, distinguish two fairly stable characteristics that seem to be present throughout his life. One of these is the desire for action, arising almost certainly out of an impatience with the uncertainty and confusion that we have just seen. In this context Rolland's remarks on the play Hamlet, which seems to have fascinated him in his youth as m u c h as it did so many of his contemporaries (Laforgue being one noteworthy example), are most interesting.
"Shakespeare remet à l'homme d'action la succession de l'homme de pensée, et tous ses droits et ses pouvoirs que l'homme de pensée inactive n'a jamais pu ni su exercer. La rêverie inféconde conduit Hamlet au néant après une existence de dégoût et de mélancolie. Le seul homme digne de ce nom est celui qui agit..."3
These observations, dating from 1885-6, confirm that fierce anti
intellectual strain in Rolland that we saw in the previous chapter (and which is surely the reaction of one who has been forced to learn too much too soon), and show him looking to action as an antidote.
But there was another possible antidote, and indeed another dimension to Rolland's being. Alongside the man thirsting for action existed the ' âme religieuse', capable of seeing the divine pattern behind the limited and often repellent human order, and ready to concentrate exclusively on the former
"et cependant un autre homme en moi n'a jamais cessé de soupirer après l'oubli de l'action, le rêve en Dieu, le doux sonmeil au bord du ruisseau!"1*
"je ne suis pas un caractère aventureux, tu le sais bien, et je n'aime pas agir.. . .C'est toujours l'idéede^ la tranquillité future, de 1 'inaction reveuse et artistique qui me soutient....Mon but, c'est ce doux isolement plus
70.
tard avec des personnes chères en Dieu et en 1 ' art
This fundamentally escapist tendency often found expression im music, which was always for Rolland a means of contact with the divine. In a note of 188U we find:-
"le temps que j'ai passé là (i.e. listening to music), je l'ai vécu dans un monde plus beau que la terre inmonde: je le revis encore par le souvenir quand je veux m'arracher à la réalité qui m'étouffe. L'amour de la musique console de toutes peines... "°
Incidentally, it is probably this tendency to find in music not just the expression of the divine, but also a universe far 'superior' to the earthly one that explains Rolland*s liking for Richard Wagner, whose name figures everywhere in his writings of this period.
We have then evidence of two basically contradictory traits in Romain Rolland. On the one hand there is his tendency to rest, to seek imnobility in God (though this is of course in contradiction to what he implies in his metaphysical credo) ; and on the other is the thirst for movement and action, involvement in the world and not escapism out of it. In following his career we shall see much evidence of the constant inter action of these forces.
But now it is time to turn to questions of a specifically political nature. So far as interest in or knowledge of politics goes, there is no evidence to show that Romain Rolland cared anything at all before going to the rue d'Ulm. Also, if he had read writers who dealt with political matters (Spinoza, Tolstoy, Rousseau, etc.) then it is fair to say that he had read them for their literary or philosophical interest first of all, and that their politics would at best be but an adjunct to this in
his eyes. At any rate, the absence of exclusively political writers from his early reading is conspicuous. But if Rolland knew nothing about politics before he vent to university, then he certainly did not remain ignorant for long. Politics forced themselves on him, in the shape first of all of Andre/ Suarès, and then, much more significantly, in that of General Georges Boulanger.
The friendship, profound but turbulent, that united Rolland and Suarès throughout their life was formed in the first year at the rue d'Ulm, when both had just arrived. Rolland has told hov much anti- Semitic feeling there was in this strange 'monastère de l'humanisme' with its tight atmosphere of intellectual competition and sexual frustration. Indeed there was nothing less than a plot to have Suarès expelled simply because he was a Jew. Rolland and one or two others denounced this and offered Suarès their friendship, thereby incurring a good deal of unpopularity. Now this tells us a good deal about Rolland. It shows that instinctively he was against any kind of racialism or discrimination; and although he never used the tenu himself (and indeed he never attempts to present this event in any sort of political light at all), both these attitudes are finnly rooted in the classical tradition of liberalism. The Suarès incident shows us in fact that Rolland'8 reflexes vere instinctively liberal. For the moment we shall deduce no more than this; but it is important, I think, to remember this small incident carefully, because later on I shall have to say a great deal about Remain Rolland and anti-Semitism, and we must not forget that his first reaction to this problem was unequivocally fair-minded and liberal.
72
'Liberal* might also be the best word to describe Rolland's reaction to another crisis whose scope extended far beyond the walls of the
'cloître de la rue d'Ulm' - the advent of Boulangism.
In order to evaluate the importance of General Boulanger for the development of Rolland's political thought, we must consider briefly the rise to eminence of this somewhat incongruous figure. A career soldier who had risen steadily and unspectacularly to the rank of general,
Boulanger first attracted attention when Freycinet made him War Minister in his cabinet of January 1886. This was a curious appointment, for when in Tunisia as a garrison conmander the previous year Boulanger had shown his complete lack of diplomatic skill and responsibility by becoming involved in a quarrel with the Governor over a minor incident, and behaving with extreme petulance. It was thought, doubtless with some foundation, that the noisy and skilful backing of the general's journalist friends. Rochefort of L 'Intransigeant and Clemenceau of La Justice.may have influenced the appointment. Once in office, Boulanger proceded to gain notoriety by taking deliberately controversial actions. He quarrelled publicly and noisily with the governor of the Paris garrison, and in June 1886, when Radical pressure forced Freycinet to expel from the country all Royalist and Bonapartist claimants, he seized the chance to purge several of their distinguished relatives from the army in a most vindictive way. Such blatant Republican sentiment went down well with the masses, as was proved by the warm welcome given Boulanger at the annual War Review soon after.
had cleverly been using Boulanger's well-known belligerent sentiments as a bogey so as to frighten the Reichstag into war credits, and he now secured the call-up of 72,000 reservists. Boulanger riposted by building hutted camps on the eastern frontier of France; there was a Bourse panic, and President Grevy had to step in and prevent Boulanger from calling up French reserves. In April came the Schnaebele incident, when a French spy of that name was caught fomenting dissent within German Alsace with the proven complicity of Boulanger. As it happened the Germans kept their tempers and let Schnaebele go, so that nothing came of this or the preceding incident, both of vhich could easily have started a war. But word got around that somehow 'le brave Général' had frightened off the Germans, and from this point all shades of ultra-patriotic opinion swung in behind the general, including Déroulède's Ligue des Patriotes.
At this point Romain Rolland enters the story, for on May lUth Boulanger paid a visit to Ecole Normale Supérieure. There can be few more graphic illustrations of how history is in the habit of forcing itself upon a writer's attention, and I will, let Rolland himself tell the story. His diary records a dislike of Boulanger for both personal