Maurice Barrès and the Youth of France

by Randolph Bourne

I

Perhaps the most significant experience that comes to one who lives for a time in France is the vivid personal realization that above all the concrete manifestations of industry and religion, politics and letters, there is France, and that her thought and action, politics and poetry, national endeavor and daily life, are woven together into an intimate cultural fabric of a richness and tenacity of which we have little knowledge at home in our heterogeneous America.

In this wondrous city of Paris, where art is the occasion for continual intellectual warfare, and ideas cause debacles, one cannot read the journals or see the play, or even walk the streets, yellow with their flood of books, without seeming to touch everywhere the soul of France. Everything has its style, everything has its spirit characteristically French, and the nation, as a whole, is proudly conscious of it. And, more significant still to the American who watches his language go to pieces under the strain put upon it by the exigencies of the pulsating American life, there is a language here which conserves all these attitudes and nuances of feeling, and may still, unlike our modern English, express both simplicity and ardor with perfect freedom from banality.

But, best of all, one finds in France a true jeunesse, a younger generation, into whose hands the precious fabric of the national culture is given for conservation and use. In France, unlike our Anglo-Saxondom, youth, like woman and democracy, seems to be taken seriously; it is the thinking youth who measure for the nation the direction and force of the spiritual currents of the day, and stamp upon the age its characteristic impress. And the older generation, having played its role of youth, is not averse to devoting itself to discovering what the new jeunes gens are thinking and dreaming. By means of enquetes, or a sort of social introspection, the literary journals keep the public informed as to the intellectual tendencies of youth, even, in these latter days, of the feminine youth as well, and thus seek to make on every side youth articulate. The French education seems to set for its goal, above all things, the achievement of clarity of thought and expression. And the first result seems to be that in French youth introspection is robbed of the morbid terrors which so affright the Anglo-Saxon, destitute as he is of the faculty of expression and thus forced to watch his own thoughts. Because of our less developed social sense, our introspections are forcibly kept individual, while to the Frenchman it is always not what I find in my soul, but what we find in our soul that matters. No writing is so personal as the French; even the philosopher and sociologist will often take the reader along the personal progress of his thought, colored as it may be with emotional reactions. Where the English writer would prefer the oracularly impersonal truth, the Frenchman is not ashamed to exhibit his 'caring' for the truth and effectiveness of his idea.

This faculty of social introspection and self-consciousness of the French genius has luminous results for those minds, both at home and abroad, who would feel the French soul of the moment. For it means that the influential writers of the age, having worked through their own adjustment of youth, their conflict with the issues of the day, leave behind them the record of their progress for the eager youth of the generation pressing on their heels. They portray with incomparable art their emotions and ideas, their weakness as well as their strength, not in egoism, but that these other minds may find themselves in them. And then in turn the writers reflect that reflection in the rising literary youth, thus sensitively reacting to the change of spiritual current, and keeping their own thought ever progressively fresh and young.

Ii

Such has been the course of the thought of Maurice Barres, acknowledged in all circles as the most influential writer of the day in France. In the progress of his romances, which are half essays, and his essays which are half romances, is reflected the trend of the French spirit of the last twenty-five years. The nationalism which is the theme of his delicate works has become, after many twistings and turnings, the gospel of the modern French youth. And his books present the most perfect picture we have of that evolution.

The youth of Barres himself was spent in the years of disenchantment which followed the great war, the war that was a spiritual as well as a physical defeat. The almost mystical confidence in the power of the French genius to triumph over brute force had disappeared before the mailed fist of the Prussian. Even the Utopian flame, the revolutionary enthusiasm which might have rejuvenated the spirit of the people, was utterly stamped out in the ferocity of the suppression of the Commune. The apathy and torpor of the younger generation in this atmosphere of defeat are faithfully pictured in Les Deracines, based on Barres's own days at the Lycee. Here he found an education, built upon the philosophy of Kant and his German followers, as if France were making a pathetic attempt, in the same way in which the Orientals are acting to-day with regard to the Western world, to absorb the ideas which had made the strength of her victor. But in these ideas, 'les plus hautes et les plus desolees,' the youth of Barres's day found no fortification of soul. The atmosphere of detached rationalism, the divorce of pure reason and pure sensibility, so uncongenial to the personal and artistic French spirit, could only tear up the youth from their French soil, without transplanting them into the rich German ground. Such philosophy could only make those who absorbed it candidates for nihilism. Abjuring this, the thought of Barres set itself, almost unconsciously, the task of re-acclimatizing the French spirit, of restoring its faith in itself.

But the difficulty of this task was aggravated by the scientific skepticism which was raging at the time. Taine had been hammering home, in a detached Anglo-Saxon way, the truths of scientific determinism, while Renan had been questioning, with destructive irony, the spiritual values upon which the established order had founded its codes and impressed them upon the soul of youth. These two masters with their disciples held the field between them, and what idealism did show itself among the literary youth, desolated by national defeat and materialistic skepticism, found a forced refuge in an unreal world of symbolistic poetry, an artificial and dilettante world of sensuality which was as foreign to the French spirit of clarity and grace as was the philosophy of Kant.

But Barres's own thought took a different road. Instead of turning to a world of mystical sensation, like Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarme, he turns, like Descartes before him, to find what he has in his own soul that has escaped the wreck of things. In dilettante fashion indeed, and in somewhat insincere imitation of the introspective methods of the old Church fathers, he submits his reactions to minute analysis, and works out a quaint sort of sensuous stoicism, a wistful, half-mocking cult of the individual, the 'moi,' the power of being 'un homme libre,' a free man.

But such individualism in a soul which was searching for the French genius, always incorrigibly social, could only be unstable and ephemeral, and it is because Barres's thought felt the wider appeal of the nation's soul that he is the most eagerly read French writer to-day, while the symbolist contemporaries of his youth have passed like their own fleeting sensations. Already in Le Culte du Moi, with its pictures of his native Lorraine countryside into which he withdraws with his friend to meditate, one feels the suggestion of the larger collective life to which he must soon be sensitive. In a phrase which only a French mind, perhaps, can understand, he says, 'Be skeptical - and ardent!' That cause which is to excite his ardor is to be the life of Lorraine with its quiet beauty, its recovered peace, its procession of passing generations; and through Lorraine, the national collectivity of France. With that precise and beautiful social intuition of the French genius, this 'moi' of Barres, unsatisfied with itself, reaches out and finds itself not an individual in a fortuitous collection, but a link in a great chain, a focus of innumerable rays of culture, tradition, and race. He recognizes that he 'represents a moment in the development of a race, an instant in a long culture, a gesture among a thousand gestures, of a force which preceded him and will survive him.' And with Lorraine as the text, a theme which at once calls to his own mind a rich treasury of tradition and stirs in the mind of the French reader the feelings of assertion and revenge, Barres proceeds, after the insufficiency of the 'cult of himself has been established in Le Jardin de Berenice, and Sur l'CEil des Barbares, to a reconstruction of French nationalism. In Au Service de l'Allemagne, Les Amities Francaises, La Colline Inspiree, the virtues of his Lorraine - the pathos of its immemorial labor, the fidelity of its soldiers and priests, the design and balance of its city, Nancy, the sober order of its old society - all give a text for the exposition under a thousand forms of the French genius in its purity and vigor.

III

In his later articles and speeches, this exposition develops into a genuine philosophy of nationalism, - a nationalism which shall mean the defense and conservation of French art and ideas and manners as well as her military reorganization and defense; a patriotism which shall define a Frenchman as 'one who has come to a consciousness of his own formation,' 'who has put himself at the single point of view of the French life,' and feels within himself all the thousand strands of the past and present which make him what he is. He preaches a return of art to the old principles of clarity, balance, and design, the art of 'la continuity francaise,' and a new Catholicism, recognizing the social meaning of the 'communion of saints,' - the ideal collective life where the hunger of the 'moi individuel' is satisfied by the 'moi social.' And finally, a cult of France, symbolized in 'la terre et les morts,' - the land and its dead, - with its worshipers bound together in interwoven links of amities, a consciousness of a common background of living truth.

This is the nationalism which has called the youth of the rising generation back to a defense of' l'esprit francais,' and surely traditionalism has never been preached in such seductive terms! A traditionalism from which all the blind, compressing forces of the social groups have been withdrawn, so that one feels only the nourishing influences of a rich common culture in which our individual souls are steeped, and which each generation carries on freely, consciously, gladly, because of its immortal power to express the traits of the race's genius, - this is a gospel to which one could give one's self with wistfulness and love!

And to such an appeal, touching with a subtle and delicate style all the chords of the French soul, Barres would have found the youth of France responding en masse during those early years of the nineties when his doctrines of nationalism were first taking shape, if the astounding drama of French thought had not provided an intermediate scene, which, bursting like a bombshell upon the nation in the Dreyfus affair, showed in its ugliest forms the actual obscurantism of these national institutions of church and army and race which Barres was beginning to present in his lovely colors of idealization. The affaire, Which seemed to the outside world simply a matter of the triumph of individual justice, was for France a colossal combat of ideas, and as a result the national storehouses of tradition were revealed as lodging-places for the basest of prejudices and blind injustices, rather than for the rich common culture of France. While the reconstruction of the national genius had been going on in minds like that of Barres, an international socialism had been growing up by its side. The exiled Communards had been filtering back; industrial development had made the working-classes restless; Paris was reasserting her position as the cosmopolitan capital of Europe; and the blind fury with which the military and ecclesiastical circles pursued the unfortunate Jew threw all these new elements of internationalism and humanitarianism into one solid block.

The victory of the humanitarian party was so overwhelming that Church and Army were almost as effectually erased from the spirit of France as had been the revolutionary socialism after the sanguinary reprisals of the Commune. And in the debacle of traditional institutions, this new spirit of nationalism, which Barres had been so carefully constructing, went down. France entered upon a decade of secular democracy, a golden age of internationalist and socialist feeling. The middle-class political parties leaned toward socialist action, the syndicalist organization of the workers made rapid progress, the peace movement became popular, the Church was denationalized, the age of l'Humanite seemed to have come. The new nationalism had developed at a bound into internationalism.

The great prophets who emerged from the devastating conflict were Anatole France and Emile Zola. France, with his metaphysical skepticism and humanitarian socialism, seemed to combine that disillusionment and ardor which Barres had preached in his ' cult of himself.' Zola, on the other hand, satisfied the hunger for realism which represented the reaction against the dreamy symbolism of the poets who went down too in the wreck of traditionalism, while in his dogged battle for justice he struck a new and profounder sincerity into the hearts of the French youth. Together, these two writers seem to have held the field between them for more than a decade, expressing the wider aspirations of the time, and yet, in the case at least of Anatole France, not losing the delicate touch of irony and grace which is perhaps the finest and most subtle quality of the French genius.

IV

To the visitor to-day in France who asks what the younger generation is thinking and dreaming, it seems that that golden age has passed. The reaction has occurred, the nationalism of Barres, checked by the affaire, has at last asserted itself, and the youth of France find their spirit called home to defend the national spirit against the enemies within and without. For suddenly the golden age was struck by the electrifying menaces of Germany at Agadir, and in a flash the whole situation seemed to be revealed. 'While you have been indulging,' reaction said,'in these dreams of social Utopias at home and perpetual peace abroad, you have left the nation undefended, you have weakened her so that her hereditary enemy does not fear to flout her in the face of Europe.'

The old feelings began to be renewed, the burden of Lorraine began again to reverberate through the French soul. On top of Agadir came the great railway strike with its threat of syndicalist revolution. To the frightened bourgeoisie, alarmed at the power they had been giving to the workers, the golden age suddenly revealed itself as the criminal idleness of fantastic reverie. To-day, after four years, one finds the reaction in full swing. Military service, which had seemed a bitter and barely tolerable evil, is actually increased by one-half, and is hailed as the sacrifice which the youth of France must be prepared to make for the nation. The pacifist internationalism now assumes the guise of a chimerical dream, and the old national antagonisms loom again. The Church, whose fall was viewed almost with indifference, now begins to seem lovely in her desolation; her political and social power shattered, the thoughtful youth begin to respond to her aesthetic appeal. Even royalism, under the leadership of some of the most able intellects of the day, begins to raise its head, and to preach a cult of the crown as the symbol of the social order and spiritual cohesion, without which a true nationalism is impossible.

In the numerous symposiums of the journals, the 'social introspections' of the day, one sees the trend of these tendencies and the influence of Barres, whose position, one is told, is almost without a parallel since Chateaubriand. Physically and spiritually the youth of France seem to be setting themselves to the defense of 'l'esprit Francais.' The hard and decivilizing life of the caserne is accepted for its long three years as a necessary sacrifice against the threats of the foe to the east. Politically, a restlessness seems to be evident, a discontent with the feebleness and colorlessness of the republican state, and a curious drawing together of the extreme Left and the extreme Right, in an equal hatred, though from opposite horizons, of the smug capitalism of the day, - a rapprochement for the founding of the Great State, which shall bind the nation together in a sort of imperial democracy, ministering to the needs of all the people and raising them to its ideals of splendor, honor, and national defense.

Spiritually one finds a renaissance of religious faith, - mystical and social, however, rather than dogmatic; for a new prophet, Bergson, has arisen to justify the intuitional approach to the reality of the life-force, unmediated by the cold concepts of science. Yet, while he shelters mystical appreciation, he seems to glorify the life of action, at whose service he puts the intelligence. So that the youth of the day, following him, are both more mystical than the realistic followers of Zola and the rationalistic followers of Anatole France, and at the same time more resolute and active, more eager for the combat with life, than were the humanitarians of the preceding decade. This taste for action finds expression in the new popularity of sports, and the expressed admiration which one finds for the individualism of the Anglo-Saxon. All these tendencies seem to mark the reappearance of a fusion of thought and action, of intelligence and feeling, which is the characteristic charm of the French genius. In the midst of what seems like reaction, this new spirit is searching for a national self-consciousness which shall clearly see, strongly feel, and sanely act. In the search for the naiionalisme integrale of Barres, the youth of to-day, one feels, are seeking the nourishing qualities of the traditional trait, the richness of a common culture which, has a right to make traditionalism seem seductive and beautiful.

For this new cult of nationalism is a very different thing from what it would have been if it had succeeded when first preached by Barres, unpurified by the humanitarian socialism of the golden age. The new national consciousness is not a mere chauvinism, but sounds deeper notes of genuine social reform at home. Social work, of the sort that is testifying to a generally awakened social consciousness in America, is attracting great numbers of the youth of both sexes in France to-day. The sociological philosophy has made great advances in the last decade in France, and is influencing an important younger school of writers, who call themselves unanimistes. Much of the more youthful writing of the day bears witness to the enthusiastic discovery of William James, and of our divine poet of democracy, Walt Whitman.

So, if the French youth of the present day, inspired by the traditionalist Barres, are coming to know their own national genius anew, they are coming to a knowledge of it immensely enriched and fertilized by the liberation of those years of socialism and a broadly ranging humanism. A traditionalism, rich and appealing like that of Barres, but colored by this new social and pragmatic feeling, seems the best of guaranties that the younger generation in France, no matter what the dread exigencies of national circumstance, will not go very permanently or very far along the path of obscurantism and reaction.