Controversies and Viewpoints Read online

  In the wake of World War I, one was prohibited from saying that responsibility for the conflict did not rest upon a single country. For greater safety, the ones that drafted the treaty of Versailles95 proceeded to turn Germany’s unique responsibility into the very foundation of the resulting damage reparations. One thus thought it necessary to nurture this myth to ensure the payments.

  Fifty years later, ‘Communist censorship strived to conceal the fact that our interwar history had not been a mere historical clash of good guys and bad guys separated by an ideological line. And above all, it forbade us to reveal that Stalin, sheltered by an official policy of support of democracies, had always sought an agreement with Hitler. On its part, Gaullist censorship banned people from saying that the armistice had been justified in some regards and that the Vichy government96 had initially been a legitimate one’.

  In 1966, Alfred Fabre-Luce publishes L’Histoire démaquillée,97 in which he states that ‘such disguising still continues today’.

  Mr Fabre-Luce has declared himself an impassioned anti-Gaullist. An over-passionate one, perhaps. He has devoted several books to de Gaulle: Gaulle deux98 (1958), Le plus illustre des français99 (1960), Haute Cour (1962), Le couronnement du prince100 (1964), and L’anniversaire101 (1971). De Gaulle’s character is still an obsession for him: ‘He is still present or, at least, only vanishing bit by bit. On television, only legendary programmes are dedicated to General de Gaulle, broadcasts that lack any and all serious discussion. We shall pay dearly for this hagiography’. He does remind us, however, that he was in favour of de Gaulle’s return in 1958 and that the 18th of June Appeal was, in his eyes, a ‘noble gesture’.

  A Sexual Policy

  He has travelled a lot; whether over distances, through time or across the realm of ideas. Hence his ‘cosmopolitan’ labelling, one that he does not hesitate to bestow upon himself:

  It is above all Europe which embodies the very cosmos that I inhabit. This is not due to an arbitrary choice, but to the fact that it represents the domain of our most profound affinities and our greatest possibilities for action.

  A pioneering European, Alfred Fabre-Luce has always refrained from ‘confusing patriotism and propaganda’. Prior to the war, he fought against ‘petty’ nationalism, which was but ‘a popular passion aroused and exploited by the bourgeoisie within the scope of what it considered to be its own interest: that is precisely what Poincaré represented’.

  Nowadays, he believes that the ‘Franco-German couple’ which Jules Romains102 spoke of may yet become the dominant element in the European whole.

  The word ‘couple’ is quite appropriate. Having been feminine during the Romantic period, Germany reclaimed its virility with Bismarck.103 Robert Brasillach104 once said: ‘We have slept with Germany’. To which Mr Fabre-Luce adds: ‘One could extend this history to include our time and say, for instance, that placing the burden of guilt upon Germany has been an attempt to feminise the latter and that Brandt had evaded the attempt by combining his kneeling before a Jewish memorial105 (in an attitude of humility) with a domination of the German mark that restored Germany’s virile strength’.

  From page to page, figures emerge as if drawn with a quill: André Malraux,106 Mussolini, Oppenheimer, and also Ben-Gurion:107

  He recited to me the long list of peoples mentioned in the Bible. Save for the Jews, all of them had long since vanished. This fact aroused a legitimate sort of pride in Ben-Gurion. This atheistic man had ensured that the Bible was taught in schools so that all small Israelites could hear the following words uttered by a God that he himself did not believe in: “I shall make the Jews into a great nation”.

  Already in 1929, following a trauma in his youth (namely the death of his brother), Alfred Fabre-Luce took position ‘in favour of a sexual policy’, particularly when declaring his support for the use of contraceptives.

  And this is what he wrote in 1933 in Pamphlet magazine (which he himself had founded):

  A tendency has manifested itself to acknowledge the limitation of births as an ineluctable fact and to humanise it by gradually replacing clandestine abortion with its legal counterpart and legal abortion with contraception. Let us hope that France is not sidelined in this movement, a movement that represents civilisational progress.

  To which he then added that ‘none of the prohibitions based on an absolute respect of life could ever be maintained’. At the time, such audacity was scandalous.

  Thirty years later, in Six milliards d’insectes108 (Arthaud), he mentioned the limits of demographic expansion (‘the Black Friday when every man will only have one square metre at his disposal’). Published in 1962, the book shocked its readers. Indeed, ecology had not yet become fashionable.

  Rejecting both hypernatalists and Malthusians,109 Mr Fabre-Luce attempts, in matters of familial planning and abortions, to remain faithful to the ‘divine measure’ advocated by the Greeks. Both in China and Latin America, he was struck by the following remark: ‘All women long to have children, but there are none who want to have a child on a yearly basis’. He views reproduction as ‘a tragedy involving four characters: a man, a woman, a child, and the state’.

  He simultaneously denounces both the pan-sexualism pervading modern times (‘A mother grows concerned and seeks counsel because her thirteen-year-old daughter is still a virgin’) and the trend of ‘psychoanalytical and guilt-inducing eroticism’.

  He puts scientism and spiritualism on equal footing for being mere ‘unilateralisms’.

  This, however, does not prevent him from appreciating the perspectives unveiled by science. This is what he states in Six milliards d’insectes:

  We underestimate hereditariness these days. As background differences are reduced through class levelling and communicational progress, we will be driven to recognise its importance. Both in agriculture and animal breeding, eugenics has triumphed around us. The vegetables, fruit, eggs and meat that we consume are all the result of genetical perfecting. To claim that man is forever incapable of such progress is to confine him to a prideful solitude within nature and thus to rise up against the modern scientific movement in its entirety.

  The Power of Confusion and the Voluptuousness of Words

  In 1966, he publishes La mort a changé110 (Gallimard), in which he quotes Valéry’s111 words: ‘Death is basically the impossible: our notion of it is comprised of its certainty and its impossibility’.

  Today, he remarks: ‘I chose to tackle the most taboo subject of all. In this era, death seems more obscene than sex itself’. Whereas during the 19th century, one proceeded to cover up their genitals, the 20th century has led people to exhibit theirs. Hearses, by contrast, are to remain hidden.

  Approaching the issue of voluntary euthanasia, Alfred Fabre-Luce has expressed his wish for mankind to become sufficiently civilised to ‘temper the unavoidable disaster embodied by death’. He writes:

  To shorten someone’s agony is to show respect for an existence that is nearing its end by sparing it an ultimate humiliation that would spoil it. To prolong a state of human degradation and oppose an imminent and ineluctable death by abusing our scientific resources — that is what constitutes an act of impiety, rather.

  On the religious level, Mr Fabre-Luce wrote an Open Letter to the Christians in 1969 (Albin Michel). In it, he explains that his studies of the ancient sources of Christianity have driven him towards a kind of ‘modernism’ and that he is in favour of stripping the Church of all dogma. This standpoint is reminiscent of Julian Huxley’s Religion without Revelation or perhaps even J. M. Guyau’s112 Morale sans obligation ni sanction.113

  He believes that Christianity has been undergoing an irreversible transformation:

  Owing to the sole rarefication of priests, we are heading towards a profound transformation of Catholicism.

  There are four traits which, from his perspective, seem characteristic of this ‘third century’ of ours: the importance of the media, the influence of the United States, the hau
nting presence of the Third World, and the new sexual morality.

  The month of May 1968 saw Alfred Fabre-Luce in the streets of the Latin Quarter. The budding leftist movement aroused contradictory feelings in him, which he expressed in Le général en Sorbonne114 (Table Ronde):

  Those who have not experienced the events of May 1968 in Paris have not felt a genuine passion for life.

  It was also an opportunity to break with ‘the bourgeois milieus that feign to despise an intellectual movement to which they have otherwise yielded by using its vocabulary and imagery on a daily basis’.

  Simultaneously, in Les mots qui bougent115 (Fayard), he denounced the power of confusion and the voluptuousness of words which intellectuals indulge in:

  One imposes one’s own vocabulary so as to take hold of people’s minds, proceeding from one ostentation to another in order to captivate people. One attracts adolescents with slogans, just as one would attract larks using mirror reflections…

  He remarks that ‘an unequal society (moderately unequal and rather mobile) is more dynamic than a rigidly caste-based economy or one that has been levelled at the very bottom’.

  To be successively liked and disliked by everyone — such seems to have been the fate of this bourgeois liberal, who wanted to act as a witness to his own age. As an introverted person, he has never lost his taste for navigating across still waters; yet he has never ceased to launch ‘fiery attacks that were never meant to last’. And there he is now, having already lived through three quarters of a ‘chronological’ century. Is he too young? Or too old, perhaps? Here is his answer:

  A certain tension between the young and the old is desirable. It helps young people desist infantilisms, while enabling the elderly to maintain their combativeness.

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  J’ai vécu plusieurs siècles, an essay by Alfred Fabre-Luce. Fayard, 405 pages.

  Les cent premiers jours de Giscard, an essay by Alfred Fabre-Luce. Laffont, 275 pages.

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  Roger Caillois

  The Académie française includes at least one stone and insect lover among its ranks: sixty-three-year-old Roger Caillois, who was elected in 1971 to replace Jérôme Carcopino.

  Displaying a strong neckline akin to that of a Spanish feria bull, thick eyebrows and black, straight hair, Roger Caillois was born in Reims, yet his appearance is more suggestive of the South of France. His vocation ripened in Latin America. A translator of both Jorge Luis Borges’116 and Pablo Neruda’s117 works, he runs the Croix du Sud118 collection at Gallimard publishing.

  ‘Ibero-American authors will become the great literatures of tomorrow’, he says.

  As a shy nineteen-year-old adolescent, he participated in the ‘surrealist insurrection’ and adhered to André Breton’s119 group. Three years later, he reacted to the bewilderment triggered by the ‘jumping beans’ affair.

  Someone had brought Breton some ‘jumping beans’ from Mexico. At the sight of the ‘hazardous movements that these objects spontaneously made’, Breton was ecstatic. Caillois, whose surrealism had not affected his common sense, took it upon himself to open the beans up, discovering the tiny worms that made them swirl. This manifestation of ‘vulgar rationalism’ caused him to be ‘excommunicated’.

  A Mastered World

  Caillois’ whole career alternated between two different levels: that of an instinctive attraction to anything marvellous and that of his wilful reaction against irrationalism. We are indebted to him for establishing the logical and perhaps even scientific analysis of the great categories of imaginative life: the poetic, the fantastical, and the sacred.

  In 1938, while working as a professor in Beauvais, he contributed to the founding of the Collège de sociologie, in cooperation with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. A year later, he left France for Argentina, where he ended up trapped following the onset of hostilities. Soon, he proceeded to establish the French Institute of Higher Studies in Buenos Aires and began publishing the Lettres françaises120 magazine, before initiating his traveling and meeting with Pablo Neruda and Georges Bernanos.121 In 1944, he returned to France with the Pasteur Vallery-Radot mission.

  Then, in 1952, he launched a magazine called Diogène, which focused on ‘diagonal sciences’ (meaning philosophy and human sciences) and whose editor-in-chief he remains. He is also the head of the cultural development division at the UNESCO, having previously been in charge of literature. His main works include Les impostures de la poésie122 , L’homme et le sacré,123 Babel, Le rocher de Sisyphe,124 Poétique de Saint-John Perse,125 Au coeur du fantastique,126 and L’écriture des pierres127 (1970).

  His work on Saint-John Perse128 is proof of his great interest in the kind of poetry that is fraught with order, splendour and hierarchy and that acts as a perfect response to Julien Gracq’s129 definition: ‘The poetry of a mastered world, arranged in a noble fashion; the poetry of Achilles’ shield and the enumeration of ships’.

  Keeping his distance from any symbolism defined as an ‘attempt to achieve absolute unrealism, an obstinate propensity for reducing things to a more or less flawed representation of some transcending entity’ (Jacques Delort, L’étique européenne à travers l’oeuvre de Saint-John Perse,130 in Etudes et recherches131 number 2, May 1975), Perse had always preferred to embrace and glorify ‘the tragic ruins of what is real’. In his work, in which he simultaneously proclaims the nobleness of the flesh and the ‘innocence of the senses’, he never ceases to underline the twofold power of heroism and nostalgia.

  ‘Neither the situation of the dead nor that of the weak is any of our concern’, he declares (Vents,132 I, 6).

  In a letter to Roger Caillois, Saint-John Perse wrote: ‘It seems to me that the very philosophy of the poet could perhaps be essentially reduced to the old, elementary “rheism” of ancient thought; just like that of our pre-Socratics in the West’. Poetry must embody ‘a powerful chanting for men, like a shivering that spreads through an ironwood’ (Anabase,133 VI).

  Alain Bosquet134 writes: ‘At the start of the book that he dedicated to it, the relationship between Roger Caillois and poetry is that of a man falling prey to a demon’. The demon is, however, quickly tamed. Caillois is the enemy of disorder, so much so that he longs to extend the empire of reason to the heights where imagination had hitherto been alone to roam, and a little too comfortably at that. For it is up to poetry to prove itself so as to justify its own existence.

  ‘Yes indeed, I was so intolerant that I felt that it was not enough for a thing to exist to have the right to be present’, Roger Caillois once wrote.

  Poetry = Equilibrium + Effort

  In contrast to the poet-prophets who ‘attempt to dazzle people’, he mentions the example of Saint-John Perse, the poet of grandeur and reality. He declares: ‘Poetry is not merely a matter of words but, above all, a question of things’. What things, then? Rocks, insects, nature; life, basically.

  A crucial stage: Caillois discovers the ‘periodic table of elements’ developed by Russian scientist Mendeleev. It serves as evidence of the fact that if the world is indeed infinite, the number of elements it comprises is not. And just like in the theory of sets, these elements only acquire their respective meaning in relation to each other: they only exist through interaction. Genuine novelties are simply new combinations. Using simple series-based logical deduction, Mendeleev incidentally succeeded in designating the elements that were already known, as well as those that remained to be discovered (which, indeed, they were). Mr Caillois writes:

  Lifting the psychedelic veil of the goddess of Sais135 , Mendeleev was able to show that it concealed neither disorder nor a swarm of larvae, nor the rising of saps, yeast and delirium; it was, instead, a network of quantifiable relations, a more severe sort of drunkenness. (Cases d’un échiquier,136 Gallimard, 1970)

  Roger Caillois then defines poetry using a single formula: equilibrium and effort, meaning the opposite of verbal ‘gesticulation’. He targets those who confuse the avantgarde with the breach
ing of syntactic rules:

  Poetry is both the art of verses and the art of image. It could be either one of the two, or both at the same time. Through the use of verse, it strives to be unalterable, while using images in an attempt to be inexhaustible. When the two virtues coincide, the grandest poetry is attained. (L’art poétique137 )

  Having taken it upon himself to clarify poetic discourse, Roger Caillois ‘purges’ another key domain: that of the fantastical. Paradoxically, he demonstrates that the latter cannot be felt as such by a strictly rational mentality. ‘In a world of miracles, the extraordinary loses its potency’. What the domain of fantasy requires is the presence of Dionysus and Apollo, side by side. In the preface to the first edition of his beautiful Anthologie du fantastique138 (Club français du livre, 1958), Mr Caillois remarks:

  The fantasy of terror comes across as an absolute and relatively late invention of scholarly literature. […] Fantastical literature is, above all, synonymous with playing with fear. Any certitude displayed by the adepts only serves to exacerbate the readers’ critical mindset.

  Roger Caillois has never forgotten about the ‘jumping beans’. His entire work is a justification of the following statement by Mme du Deffand:139 ‘Do you believe in ghosts? — No, but I dread them’.

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  Roger Caillois, an essay by Alain Bosquet. Seghers, 182 pages.

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  Raymond Abellio

  A life only allows one to genuinely self-reflect once its meaning has become clear to one, when the veils of naïveté, ignorance and activism have fallen and it has thus experienced its second birth, in the same way that Buddha is said to have been born twice.

  Raymond Abellio

  Nietzsche once said: ‘The man of the future is the one that shall be endowed with the longest memory’. With his bald temples and rough accent, seventy-year-old Raymond Abellio believes that he has experienced two births. His darkly framed and thick glasses give him the look of a debonair mutant.