1899
LE triomphe de la raison is no more than a fragment of the great fresco. But it is inspired with the central thought round which Rolland's ideas turn. In it for the first time there is a complete exposition of the dialectic of defeat—the passionate advocacy of the vanquished, the transformation of actual overthrow into spiritual triumph. This thought, first conceived in his childhood and reinforced by all his experience, forms the kernel of the author's moral sensibility. The Girondists have been defeated, and are defending themselves in a fortress against the sansculottes. The royalists, aided by the English, wish to rescue them. Their ideal, the freedom of the spirit and the freedom of the fatherland, has been destroyed by the Revolution; their foes are Frenchmen. But the royalists who would help them are likewise their enemies; the English are their country's foes. Hence arises a conflict of conscience which is powerfully portrayed. Are they to be faithless to their ideal, or to betray their country? Are they to be citizens of the spirit or citizens of France? Are they to be true to themselves or true to the nation? Such is the fateful decision with which they are confronted. They choose death, for they know that their ideal is immortal, that the freedom of a nation is but the reflection of an inner freedom which no foe can destroy.
For the first time, in this play, Rolland proclaims his hostility to victory. Faber proudly declares: "We have saved our faith from a victory which would have disgraced us, from one wherein the conqueror is the first victim. In our unsullied defeat, that faith looms more richly and gloriously than before." Lux, the German revolutionist, proclaims the gospel of inner freedom in the words: "All victory is evil, whereas all defeat is good in so far as it is the outcome of free choice." Hugot says: "I have outstripped victory, and that is my victory." These men of noble mind who perish, know that they die alone; they do not look towards a future success; they put no trust in the masses, for they are aware that in the higher sense of the term freedom it is a thing which the multitude can never understand, that the people always misconceives the best. "The people always dreads those who form an elite, for these bear torches. Would that the fire might scorch the people!" In the end, the only home of these Girondists is the ideal; their domain is an ideal freedom; their world is the future. They have saved their country from the despots; now they had to defend it once again against the mob lusting for dominion and revenge, against those who care no more for freedom than the despots cared. Designedly, the rigid nationalists, those who demand that a man shall sacrifice everything for his country, shall sacrifice his convictions, liberty, reason itself, designedly I say are these monomaniacs of patriotism typified in the plebeian figure of Haubourdin. This sansculotte knows only two kinds of men, "traitors" and "patriots," thus rending the world in twain in his bigotry. It is true that the vigor of his brutal partisanship brings victory. But the very force that makes it possible to save a people against a world in arms, is at the same time a force which destroys that people's most gracious blossoms.
The drama is the opening of an ode to the free man, to the hero of the spirit, the only hero whose heroism Rolland acknowledges. The conception, which had been merely outlined in Aërt, begins here to take more definite shape. Adam Lux, a member of the Mainz revolutionary club, who, animated by the fire of enthusiasm, has made his way to France that he may live for freedom (and that he may be led in pursuit of freedom to the guillotine), this first martyr to idealism, is the first messenger from the land of Jean Christophe. The struggle of the free man for the undying fatherland which is above and beyond the land of his birth, has begun. This is the struggle wherein the vanquished is ever the victor, and wherein he is the strongest who fights alone.
CHAPTER XVI
THE WOLVES
1898
IN Le triomphe de la raison, men to whom conscience is supreme were confronted with a vital decision. They had to choose between their country and freedom, between the interests of the nation and those of the supranational spirit. Les loups embodies a variation of the same theme. Here the choice has to be made between the fatherland and justice.
The subject has already been mooted in Danton. Robespierre and his henchmen decide upon the execution of Danton. They demand his immediate arrest and condemnation. Saint-Just, passionately opposed to Danton, makes no objection to the prosecution, but insists that all must be done in due form of law. Robespierre, aware that delay will give the victory to Danton, wishes the law to be infringed. His country is worth more to him than the law. "Vaincre à tout prix"—conquer at any cost—calls one. "When the country is in danger, it matters nothing that one man should be illegally condemned," cries another. Saint-Just bows before the argument, sacrificing honor to expediency, the law to his fatherland.
In Les loups, we have the obverse of the same tragedy. Here is depicted a man who would rather sacrifice himself than the law. One who holds with Faber in Le triomphe de la raison that a single injustice makes the whole world unjust; one to whom, as to Hugot, the other hero in the same play, it seems indifferent whether justice be victorious or be defeated, so long as justice does not give up the struggle. Teulier, the man of learning, knows that his enemy d'Oyron has been unjustly accused of treachery. Though he realizes that the case is hopeless and that he is wasting his pains, he undertakes to defend d'Oyron against the patriotic savagery of the revolutionary soldiers, to whom victory is the only argument. Adopting as his motto the old saying, "fiat justitia, pereat mundus," facing open-eyed all the dangers this involves, he would rather repudiate life than the leadings of the spirit "A soul which has seen truth and seeks to deny truth, destroys itself." But the others are of tougher fiber, and think only of success in arms. "Let my name be besmirched, provided only my country is saved," is Quesnel's answer to Teulier. Patriotism, the faith of the masses, triumphs over the heroism of faith in the invisible justice.
This tragedy of a conflict recurring throughout the ages, one which every individual has forced upon him in wartime through the need for choosing between his responsibilities as a free moral agent and as an obedient citizen of the state, was the reflection of the actual happenings during the days when it was written. In Les loups, the Dreyfus affair is emblematically presented in masterly fashion. Dreyfus the Jew is typified by an aristocrat, the member of a suspect and detested social stratum. Picquart, the defender of Dreyfus, is Teulier. The aristocrat's enemies represent the French general headquarters staff, who would rather perpetuate an injustice once committed than allow the honor of the army to be tarnished or confidence in the army to be undermined. Upon a narrow stage, and yet with effective pictorial force, in this tragedy of army life was compressed the whole of the history which was agitating France from the presidential palace down to the humblest working-class dwelling. The performance at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre on May 18, 1898, was from first to last a political demonstration. Zola, Scheurer-Kestner, Péguy, and Picquart, the defenders of the innocent man, all the chief figures in the world-famous trial, were for two hours spectators of the dramatic symbolization of their own deeds. Rolland had grasped and extracted the moral essence of the Dreyfus affair, which had in fact become a purifying process for the whole French nation. Leaving history, the author had made his first venture into the field of contemporary actuality. But he had done this only, in accordance with the method he has followed ever since, that he might disclose the eternal elements in the temporal, and defend freedom of opinion against mob infatuation. He was on this occasion what he has always remained, the advocate of that heroism which knows one authority only, neither fatherland nor victory, neither success nor expediency, nothing but the supreme authority of conscience.