4
The Intellectual's International
We are in one word—and let this be our word of honor—good Europeans, the heirs of Europe, the rich, oversupplied, but also overly obligated heirs of thousands of years of European spirit.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Romain Rolland's immediate postwar dilemma was to discover a means of struggle against future war that would preserve intact his nineteenth-century conception of the responsibility of the intellectual. His engagement during the Great War did not permit him to be swallowed by postwar ideologies or mass movements. Beginning in 1919 and continuing throughout the 1920s, he tried to salvage a purposeful role for the committed European writer.
Like Freud, Romain Rolland emerged from World War I with an altered and more tragic sense of death.[1] His experience as an antiwar writer reinforced his refusal to support postwar cynicism, violence, or realpolitik. To prevent further war, he urged Europeans to work actively for peace. He cited Spinoza to underscore his point: "For Peace is not mere absence of war, but it is a virtue that springs from force of character."[2] He tried to restore a sense of fellowship, mutual comprehension, tolerance, and authenticity to the intellectual elite of Europe and the world. He aimed his efforts at the literati and the young members of the cultural sector.
The notion of an international of the mind was originally an antidote to all that was retrograde about the war: nationalism, militarism, the uncritical consensus mentality, the mass delirium and destructive frenzy.[3] With the prolongation of the hostilities, Romain Rolland feared that the fundamental fabric and existence of European culture were in jeopardy. In early 1919, he began to mobilize for his dream of an intellectual's international. He did so without having a practical or administrative sense and without the
secretarial or economic resources of existing institutions. It was a one-man venture, expensive in terms of time, money, and energy.
The intellectual's international was to be a voluntary association of artists, scientists, and thinkers organized around universalist, supranational, progressive, and humanistic principles. Romain Rolland's vision presupposed an intelligentsia independent of national institutions or academies, the League of Nations, the Socialist International, or the Communist International inaugurated in March 1919. In crisis situations these free thinkers might retain a dissenting and nonconforming view.
He proposed that the intellectual's international hold regular congresses and conferences to provide stimulating scholarly dialogue. If it were established in conjunction with an international university, the international would create networks of student and educational organizations. He hoped also to link it to a publishing house and to issue a newspaper, a bulletin, and a multilingual journal mixing literature, biography, science, and scholarship. Europeans would extend their knowledge of other cultures through reading excellent translations of non-European classics and through the proliferation of popular biographies of seminal cultural figures.[4] Romain Rolland's proposal took direct aim at cultural nationalism and ethnocentrism, both of which were fostered by ignorance, the stereotyping of national characters, and xenophobia. The war had exacerbated such primitive forms of thought. Both the international publishing house and university, he argued, might better pursue their goals in Russia, Asia, or America—anywhere but Paris.[5] The French writer linked the intellectual's international to the dissemination of Esperanto, the international language for which he propagandized.[6] Moreover, he anticipated monumental collective enterprises, such as an Encyclopedia of the Twentieth Century.[7]
If Romain Rolland's idea of preserving and reinventing high culture was elitist, the elitism was muted by the proposal that writers should mediate between high and popular cultures. Cultural endeavors should be immediately accessible to the masses and not restricted to privileged groups. This international was apolitical in its organization and ideology. It could neither be tied to existing political parties, groups, programs, and electoral strategies nor to mass movements or politicized world views. He insisted that
it be genuinely eclectic in the search for a new politics of truth, world peace, and cross-cultural dialogue. Internationalism was consistent with an intransigent individualism and a sentimental form of socialism. He saw himself as the prototype of the pacifist internationalist intellectual. He proclaimed that the valid role of the intellectual was to synthesize and unify, to set up bridges between peoples.[8]
Romain Rolland reacted ambivalently to the Russian Revolution. It caused him to reflect on modern social revolution and to reappraise his deepest cultural priorities. He was one of the first Western writers to be receptive to developments in the Soviet Union, but his career as a fellow-traveling intellectual remained uneasy. Over the interwar years, he agonized over and reevaluated his pro-Soviet stance.
Romain Rolland's enigmatic position on the Bolshevik Revolution was built on fragmentary and at times contradictory evidence. News was always filtered through the presuppositions of the reporter. Much of his information came from written accounts and from discussion with Russian intellectuals who spent the war in Switzerland. The most important of these were Anatole Lunacharsky, destined to become Soviet minister for enlightenment; Nicholas Rubakin, an encyclopedic scholar and philologist with pro-Kerensky tendencies; and Paul Birukof, a Tolstoyan.[9] Some of his confusions about the Russian Revolution reflect discrepancies in their accounts. He remained in close contact with the French militant trade unionist and radical journalist Henri Guilbeaux, editor of Demain and intermediary between the European Zimmerwaldian left, which was mounting an opposition to the war, and the Bolsheviks.[10] Many first visitors to the USSR (Alfred Rosmer, Jacques Mesnil, Victor Henry) visited Romain Rolland in Switzerland and shared their impressions of the early days of the revolution.[11]
Neither a zealous advocate nor an unyielding opponent of the Russian Revolution, he took the role of a friendly but critical sympathizer. Without enrolling in the Communist Party or its international organizations, he proclaimed an international solidarity with the events in Russia and welcomed some of its goals. One could
offer an empathic understanding of the Russian Revolution without being a Bolshevik, without abandoning one's critical perspective. Throughout his career as an engaged writer, his writings on the Soviet Union remained personal and impressionistic.
Romain Rolland stressed what was universal and liberating about this world-historical development. Writing optimistic accounts primarily to a French and European audience, he quickly anticipated that the Russian Revolution might counter Western political stalemate and obsolete social structures. Revolution could become a viable alternative to decadence. The Russian Revolution could free human beings from the futile sense that history could not be made or understood. On the pessimistic side, he warned the Bolsheviks to avoid the distortions, isolation, and arrogance of their eighteenth-century French predecessors. He specifically counseled the Russian Communists and their European followers against gratuitous violence and internal factionalism. The Soviet mission transcended Russian borders: it was to bring the world peace, liberty, fraternity, and a heightened awareness of the historical possibilities for freedom. "Let your Revolution be that of a great, healthy, fraternal, human people, avoiding the excesses into which we fell!"[12]
Writing contemporary history was a risky undertaking; advising revolutionaries about revolution was no less so. His critical support for the revolution left him vulnerable to attacks from the communists, the center, and the right. Romain Rolland's writings stressed the process of perception, the proper spirit in which to receive information about the Soviet Revolution. He urged his audience to confront the social upheaval in Russia with an open and nonpartisan attitude, to put aside their received and pejorative notions about communist insurrectionaries. He distrusted interpretations of Russian events that were emotional, demagogic, and uninformed and that fueled the anticommunist hysteria from European right-wing and middle-class circles, including the press. He insisted on making distinctions among the various groupings and parties on the left.[13] Throughout the interwar years, he never embraced a one-dimensional anti-Soviet standpoint, but carefully differentiated himself from those unnuanced vilifiers of the Soviet Union who, he believed, always served reactionary interests.
He realized that the Soviet Union was surrounded by hostile enemies and needed distinguished defenders, individuals of con-
science, who were clearly non-Bolshevik. In October 1919, Romain Rolland penned a dramatic piece of humanitarian propaganda, entitled "For Our Russian Brothers: Against the Starvation Blockade." He linked the war mentality to counterrevolutionary politics. He bitterly denounced the Allied invasion of Russian territory. The crusade by the bourgeois democracies of America and Europe against the Soviets was a "hideous crime." Above all, this invasion revealed the class interests of the revolution's opponents.[14] The Russian Revolution belonged to those "chaotic and grandiose ventures of renewing the old and corrupted order." He portrayed it as a symbol of human potentiality, representing the unextinguishable possibilities of liberation.
To posturing critics who equated the Soviet Union with bloody anarchism, Romain Rolland replied that it was premature to discuss the results of the recently initiated social experiment. No European could dismiss the Russian Revolution as destructive given Europe's dismal record in four and a half years of total war: twenty to thirty million people killed or maimed, economies wrecked, land and industry devastated. In contrast, the Soviet Revolution arose from the debacle of the war, posed itself as a corrective to empire and to militarism, and promised an era of vast industrial and agricultural planning. "Bolshevism is not disorganized; it has attempted to organize chaotic disorder; it has attempted to provide new social formulas in the midst of the moral and material ruin of Europe."[15]
However much he praised the Russian Revolution, he refused to accept the mechanical exportation of Bolshevik leadership, party discipline, political agitation, or social analysis to the West. Toward the Bolshevik leaders and the Marxist-Leninist ideology, he adopted a mixed but on balance negative attitude. Russian revolutionaries were different from the democratic socialists or socialist humanists he admired. He viewed Lenin and Trotsky as honest, driven, faithful, and energetic leaders and never doubted that they were high-minded and self-effacing. Both were motivated by an ideal of a just social order. Both had well-articulated ideas about internationalism and had lived abroad. Yet he felt that Lenin and Trotsky had an unusual capacity for violent discourse and actions. Their tempers were fanatical and despotic; they acted out of political expediency; they repeatedly displayed doctrinal intransigence and personal authoritarianism. Class consciousness and class struggle, he pre-
dicted, would not inaugurate a peaceful world. He was alarmed that the Bolsheviks wanted to "revolutionize the world" and resorted to force to accomplish their goals. His initial impressions of Marxism-Leninism were equally negative. He saw Leninism as a vulgarization of socialism, an amoral ideology that systematically eliminated a spiritual or psychological component of human endeavor. Its iron law of economic development stemmed from a narrow view of productive relations and political economy. It cynically justified a provisional class dictatorship to legitimize new forms of tyranny. Its view of historical process appeared deterministic and reductionistic.[16]
Romain Rolland fundamentally disagreed with the Bolshevik ideas of a minority dictatorship, centralization, secrecy, and regimentation of intellectual and artistic life. He found Leninism too politicized, dogmatic, intolerant of opposing political views, and blind to alternative methods of critical analysis and intuition. Leninists, he learned from his friendship with Gorky, were suspicious of intellectuals, if not anti-intellectual. The vanguard party had no tolerance for other avant-gardes. Lenin, in wanting to transform world war into revolutionary class warfare, dismissed all antiwar positions during the war as simpleminded, dangerous, petit-bourgeois "bacilli."[17] Despite the revolution's successes, Romain Rolland would never condone the Bolsheviks' centralizing opinion and curtailing individual or democratic freedoms. He refused to sanction any limits imposed from above on political opposition from workers' unions, artists, or thinkers. These groups had to conduct their affairs without harassment or party discipline.[18]
Romain Rolland's idea of an intellectual's international in 1919 was diametrically opposed to Lenin's view of the Communist International. Yet he appreciated the grandeur of the Soviet experiment from its beginning. The Bolsheviks had organizational power and were initiating worthwhile economic, scientific, educational, and cultural endeavors. They faced considerable internal and external obstacles in the gigantic project of social reconstruction, including the hostility to their successes by the bourgeois countries of the world.[19]
The end of the First World War and the successful Russian Revolution sparked revolutionary activity in central European countries. The repression of the European revolutions left a profound impact on him.[20] Romain Rolland summarized his attitudes toward these
abortive revolutions in a piece documenting the crushing of the Spartacist revolt. "Bloody January in Berlin" narrated and interpreted the events of the Spartacist uprising from 5 January to 11 January 1919, which culminated in the double assassinations of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on 15 January. Once again contemporary Germany demonstrated its worship of naked force, the drunkenness of its ruling-class establishment, and the obsequious mentality of its people.[21]
Romain Rolland defended the revolutionary socialists against the savage repression. He wrote as an independent intellectual concerned with historical accuracy and disgusted by the monstrousness of the murders. He sensed that the suppression of this uprising would have calamitous consequences for both the German revolution and the cause of world peace. He dramatized these issues to alert progressive French opinion in general, French socialists in particular, to the moral and political danger of the situation.[22]
Romain Rolland viewed Liebknecht and Luxemburg as attractive, impeccably sincere champions of revolutionary and Marxist democratic socialism. They were thinkers of stature and activists who had condemned the Great War and worked for Franco-German reconciliation, beginning with the fraternal contacts between the working classes of both countries. He contrasted the kind, disinterested quality of their commitment to working people with the ruthless smashing of their movement.[23]
This bloody repression clarified the depth of the militaristic and conservative reaction in Germany, characterized by its nationalistic rage, visions of revenge against France, and the fiction of the stab in the back. The establishment of the Weimar Republic had not substantially changed the German people. German capitalists, with the bourgeois press, seized on such emergencies as the Spartacist uprising to defend their class interests and material possessions. The Spartacist revolt became an opportunity to eliminate revolutionary Socialists, while retarding "the progress of the Socialist idea."[24]
Right-wing Social Democrats thus established a dreadful historical precedent, which they legitimized in the name of democracy. A majority of German socialists had supported the German Sacred Union and allowed the war to domesticate and bureaucratize the structure of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). In 1919 socialist heads of government behaved no differently in crises from liberals
or reactionaries. German socialists had no scruples against calling in the imperial army and the Freikorps to crush the revolution with force. Nor did the Socialists Scheidermann or Ebert show remorse for their murderous deeds: "The fratricidal victors rejoiced without shame."[25]
The organized working class, Romain Rolland concluded, would have to be educated by this catastrophic turn of events to unite around its own interests. Spontaneous revolution was a dead end that only facilitated political repression. More significant, worker movements had to be on guard against the divisive, treacherous, and opportunistic actions of their former leaders. Socialists in power would use the instruments of state violence against the organized working class. "But it was the first time that Socialism found itself on the side of power and against the proletariat."[26] He predicted that it would not be the last such incident.
Reacting to the betrayal and deception by socialists of socialists, Romain Rolland distanced his intellectual's international from the Socialist International. Throughout the interwar years, he maintained a skeptical, even distrustful, posture toward European socialist parties and politics. He supported neither the extreme left wing of socialism, which believed revolution was imminent, nor the right wing and center, which were reformist, legalistic, and double-dealing. Postwar socialism, including French socialism, lacked leadership, ideological direction, faith, and the ability to distinguish itself from the establishment.[27]
Romain Rolland's attitudes toward Woodrow Wilson shifted during the period from October 1914 to the spring of 1919. He first imagined Wilson to be a moderate and disinterested man of good will. He was captivated by the American president's language, which appeared generous and enlightened while it camouflaged his class interests. But Romain Rolland's hopes were dashed by Wilson's refusal to intervene to end the hostilities during the war and his inability to assert himself as an arbiter for a just peace. After the Armistice, Wilson did not curb the appetites of the Allies for revenge.[28] By the opening of the Peace Conference on 18 January 1919, Romain Rolland saw that Wilson was a fraud and that the treaty being negotiated would lay the foundation for a future world war.[29]
Romain Rolland never accepted the credibility of Wilsonian democratic ideologists. The Treaty of Versailles and the League of Na-
tions represented the final apotheosis of liberal idealism, the collapse of the expectations raised by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Wilson's betrayal was unusually harsh because it trampled so many of Romain Rolland's immense hopes. He remained critical of such false prophets, distrusting parliamentary politicians, including the French Radicals, who preached Wilson's brand of legalistic internationalism and democratic humanitarianism. Just as the intellectual's international stood in neither the Bolshevik nor the socialist camp, so too it rejected any official allegiance with postwar liberalism:
The moral abdication of President Wilson, abandoning his own principles without having the frankness to admit it, signals the ruin of that great bourgeois idealism that for a century and a half insured the ruling class of its prestige and its strength, in spite of its many errors. The consequences of such an act are incalculable.[30]
Clarté was initiated in 1916–1917 by four young French writers and journalists: Henri Barbusse, Victor Cyril, Raymond Lefebvre, and Paul Vaillant-Couturier. Barbusse and Lefebvre were inspired by Romain Rolland's antiwar position and were sympathetic to his form of pacifistic left-wing intellectualism. Their original conception of Clarté coincided with Romain Rolland's principles of intellectual independence and the regeneration of cultural life. Under its umbrella, Clarté attempted to assemble war veterans, antimilitarists, republicans, Radicals, protocommunists, socialists, pacifists, academics, and even nationalistic intellectuals.[31]
In 1919, Romain Rolland expressed deep misgivings about the recruits to the Clarté movement. Its members lacked literary and intellectual authority, were arrivists, and resembled "the fashionable world of Paris at a dress rehearsal."[32] A collection of journalists and theatrical celebrities, such as Colette and Edmond Rostand, might produce some glitter and some "facile camaraderie" in times of relative calm, but in a crisis they would prove unreliable. The Parisian tone of the Clarté movement disturbed him. Its parochialism suggested an evanescent commitment to peace and internationalism. Many of Clarté 's members (J. H. Rosyn, Paul Fort, Anatole France) had taken self-serving and plainly chauvinistic positions.
Many adherents were virulently anti-Soviet. Rather than turn the intellectual's international into a meaningless gathering of French literati, he suggested a more democratic, more international organization. Such associations were better located outside Paris, where "foreign thought and action" were received more openly.[33]
Romain Rolland found the organizational structure of Clarté to be misconceived, overly eclectic, and diffuse. "Above all, the present situation demands the constitution of a closed, solid, resistant nucleus of intransigent souls who carry the new faith."[34] He advocated a smaller, more carefully selected group of thinkers, earnestly prepared for permanent opposition to war. As apostles of peace and internationalism, they would be inflexible on key issues, personally honorable, and undeflected by practical considerations of career, reputation, or political affiliation. The experience of the Great War would have taught the value of refusal. The postwar context would confront intellectuals with sharp choices: "Prudent silence, the amiable neither yes nor no, must be interpreted 'No.'"[35]
He objected to Clarté 's equivocation on contemporary events in 1919. Not speaking out suggested either ideological confusion at Clarté or, worse still, a desire not to offend centrist or nationalistic members of the advisory board. This implied that Clarté lacked the resolve to emerge as an oppositional voice.[36] Privately, Romain Rolland feared that Clarté was too much under the moral patronage of Anatole France. He had condemned the French Voltairean for his xenophobic outbursts during the war and for his calculated silence about the unjust peace treaty.[37]
Before he resigned from the Clarté committee on 23 June 1919, Romain Rolland took sharp issue with its deceptive editorial structure, consisting of two parallel committees: an ornamental but impotent committee composed of recognizable international names (Anatole France, Thomas Hardy, Upton Sinclair, Stefan Zweig) and an invisible but powerful central committee dominated by the Parisian inner circle of Clarté . He felt it was antidemocratic and irresponsible to make decisions without consultation.[38] He was further alienated by the bungling bureaucratic mediocrity of Victor Cyril, the least talented of Clarté 's founders.[39]
Romain Rolland's refusal to stay with the Clarté group demonstrated the heretical and puristic nature of his ideals. His pursuit of the intellectual's international was without tactical finesse, flexibil-
ity, or the spirit of compromise. He was stubbornly prepared to risk becoming the "one against all." Clarté would not accept Romain Rolland's assumptions or his need for absolute moral decency.
Romain Rolland's intransigent individualism, his desire to complete ongoing cultural projects (novels, plays, biographies), and his efforts to reorient European cultural life to the sacred, all made his rupture with Clarté inevitable. Yet he could not tolerate total breaks. He remained friendly with Barbusse, Lefebvre, and Vaillant-Couturier, hoping still to collaborate with them on joint endeavors. In late 1919 and early 1920, such an opportunity presented itself. Along with Barbusse and the French writer Georges Duhamel, Romain Rolland attempted to prepare for the first in a series of International Congresses of Intellectuals. This congress was never held.[40]
About the same time, he wrote to E. D. Morel, secretary of the Union of Democratic Control, an English-based pacifist and internationalist organization, that he was unwilling to become an active member of that organization.[41] He could be at once committed and nonaligned; joining an association might be a full-time affair, distracting him from his art and his reflective solitude. His work for an intellectual's international went forward without the aid of political and ideological associations such as the Union of Democratic Control, even when he agreed with their goals and esteemed their leaders:
I, too, have arrived at the stage of integral internationalism, and I believe in the necessity for human evolution of a radical transformation for the benefit of the world of Labor. But essentially I limit myself to my own task as "worker of the mind." That is considerable enough to demand all of my energies. I would like to introduce the great intellectuals of diverse nations who have conserved the independence of their thought, posing to them principles of an International of the Mind, which struggles against the disastrous work of intellectuals formed into regiments serving the enemy nationalisms.[42]
Romain Rolland opened his postwar career with a forceful, highly visible proclamation of intellectual autonomy and liberty, "The Declaration of Independence of the Mind." He unequivocally asserted the dignity of the intellectual's vocation. First published in Paris in the French Socialist newspaper L'Humanité on 26 June 1919, two days before the signing of the Treaty of Versailles; translated into the major languages of the day; read in the newspapers and
journals of France, Switzerland, England, Italy, Germany, Austria, and America; cosigned by a select circle of the world's intellectual personalities, his manifesto received both attention and some measure of legitimacy.[43] The controversy triggered by the Declaration illustrated that he had touched a sensitive nerve in Europe.
The discourse affirmed his sense of the intellectual's "Rights of Man." Romain Rolland emphasized the intellectual's right and obligation to think, research, write, publish, and communicate honestly, without the shackles of censorship, nationalism, or political allegiances. After five years of conflict, he called for intellectuals to stand up against destitute moral relations and the silence, acquiescence, and embitterment among themselves. He asked them to clean up their own affairs, then make fraternal alliances with the democratic masses.
The final draft of the Declaration read:
Declaration of Independence of the Mind
Workers of the Mind, comrades scattered throughout the world, separated for five years by armies, censorship, and the hatred of nations at war, we address an Appeal to you at this hour when barriers are falling and frontiers are reopening, to revive our fraternal union, but as a new, more secure and reliable union than that which previously existed.
The War threw our ranks into confusion. The majority of intellectuals put their science, their art, their reason at the service of governments. We wish to accuse no one, to direct no reproach. We know the weakness of individual souls and the elemental force of great collective currents: the latter has swept aside the former in an instant, for nothing had been prepared to help in the work of resistance. Let this experience at least help us for the future!
And let us first of all acknowledge the disasters that have been brought about by the almost total abdication of the intelligence of the world and its voluntary enslavement to unchained forces. Thinkers and artists have added an incalculable sum of poisonous hatred to the plague that devours Europe's flesh and spirit; they sought in the arsenal of their knowledge, their memory, their imagination, old and new reasons, historical reasons, scientific, logical, and poetic reasons to hate; they worked to destroy comprehension and love between men. And thus they have disfigured, debased, lowered, degraded Thought, of which they were the representatives. They made Thought the instrument of passions and (without knowing it, perhaps) of the selfish interests of a political or social clan, a state, a country, or a class. At present, out of this savage battle from which all the involved countries, victorious or vanquished, emerge battered, ruined, and in the bottom of their heart (though they do not admit it)
ashamed and humiliated by their excess of madness, Thought, compromised with them in their struggle, emerges with them, fallen.
Stand up! Let us disentangle the Mind from its compromises, its humiliating alliances, its hidden bondage. The Mind is the slave of no one. It is we who are the servants of the Mind. We have no other master. We exist to uphold, to defend its light, to rally around it all misguided men. Our duty is to maintain a fixed point, to point to the polar star, in the midst of the swirling passions in the night. Among these passions of pride and mutual destruction, we make no choice. We reject them all. We honor Truth alone, free, frontierless, limitless, without prejudices of nations or castes. Assuredly, we are not uninterested in Humanity. It is for Humanity that we work, but for it as a whole . We do not know peoples. We know the People—unique, universal—the People that suffers, that struggles, that fails, and that constantly rises to its feet again, and that always marches along a rough road drenched in its blood—the People of all men, all equally our brothers. And it is in order that they may, like us, become conscious of this fraternity, that we raise above their blind conflicts, the Arch of Alliance—the free Mind, one and manifold, eternal.[44]
The first paragraph emphasized fraternal unity between intellectuals and a reopening of the frontiers of the mind coinciding with the reopening of national borders. By referring to the intellectual as a "comrade" and a "worker of the Mind," he affirmed the principle of labor's fundamental significance, while raising the elusive issue of the link between workers and intellectuals. Intellectual solidarity might stem from negatives: opposition to the forces of militarism, nationalism, censorship, and hatred that had divided them during the Great War. Prewar cultural and scientific associations were anachronistic and insufficient; he pressed for a new model of intellectual dialogue.
In paragraph 2, he criticized Europe's intellectuals for allowing their intelligence and imagination to be manipulated by warring governments. He muted his censorious thrust, however, by a vague proposal for planned resistance to war in the future. To prevent a repetition of the catastrophe, he exhorted intellectuals to remember how subjective principles and expectations had been betrayed. Conscience was as crucial as consciousness and memory.
Romain Rolland's third paragraph indiscriminately attacked European intellectuals for contributing to the atmosphere of universal hatred during the war. Knowledge had been mobilized and twisted into an instrument of war. Thinkers had lost their perspective on events and on their own proper responsibilities in an emergency.
Intellectuals had shamelessly produced war propaganda and disseminated racist and chauvinistic slander. They colluded with the lies of ruling governments, Allied as much as Central Powers.
"Abdication of intelligence" meant the surrender of rational and ethical bearing in a moment of frenzy. European intellectuals had violated their authority. They had renounced their prerogative to defend culture, reason, and human values. The war had repeatedly negated the true foundations of creativity and critical inquiry; these freedoms extended to the right to resist warfare, oppression, and one-dimensional opinion. The mind, Romain Rolland insisted, had no master, no privileged hierarchy, no set of standards to which it must submit. The mind and the spirit were ends in themselves: pure, sacred, indivisible, inalienable.
If European intellectuals had degraded thought, they had degraded their own characters in the process. His repetition of scathing adjectives ("disfigured, debased, lowered, degraded") revealed the depth of his fury at the betrayal. Intellectual life would remain unhealthy unless intellectuals demonstrated their capacity for selfcriticism and discovered effective, conscious ways to combat passion by reason and to struggle against murderous collective currents.
In the final paragraph, Romain Rolland triumphantly called for intellectuals to rise from the debris of a war in which there was no winner. To redeem their own bad faith and to revitalize cultural production, thinkers should refrain from any contributions to death and destruction. They should avoid all entangling alliances, including those of nation, state, party, group, or class.
Romain Rolland connected his totalizing notion of humanity to his oceanic conception both of the people and of the intellectual's mission to embrace the universe. This mystical idea worked against the nationalist, liberal democratic, socialist, and Bolshevik notions of popular and concrete historical struggle. The ideal intellectual worked fraternally for the miserable or exploited. Romain Rolland's idea of freedom was highly abstract, but it permitted him to link mental and manual labor. To reemphasize the necessity for intellectual autonomy, to overcome the taint of intellectual submission, his manifesto closed on a note of transcendence. Freedom, truth, and fraternity could only be attained if the thinker rose above the petty, blinding conflicts of everyday life. Still echoing the
slogan "Above the Battle," he urged the writer to act as a detached, universalist, humanistic, morally uncorrupted individual.
The published manifesto was virtually identical to the first draft Romain Rolland penned on 16 March 1919.[45] Only one sentence, strategically located in the final paragraph, which affirmed the intellectual's mission, was changed. The original read: "We are engaged to serve only free Truth." (Nous prenons l'engagement de ne servir jamais que la Vérité libre .) The published version deleted the word "engagement ": "We honor Truth alone."[46] Romain Rolland implied that moralists could be engagés , but their overriding concerns, obligations, promises, pledges (all synonymous with the French term engagement ) must be to discover deeper layers of meaning in human life and its relationship to the world.
Romain Rolland elaborated on the Declaration in August 1919 in E. D. Morel's English pacifist journal, Foreign Affairs .[47] To justify his initiating the dialogue between workers and intellectuals, he reminded his audience of his minority stance during the war. To advocate universal brotherhood, social justice, and mutual comprehension among the warring nations was necessary, but not sufficient. In addition, intellectuals must coordinate their efforts against conservative ideas and political forces, to struggle against the reassembled forces of tyranny. Romain Rolland hoped to use his prestige to mediate between the cultural sector and the working classes, or at least to prevent an increase in existing misunderstandings.
He urged the organized working class not to dismiss the intelligentsia out of hand. Just as he could not sanction intellectual contempt for the people, so Romain Rolland refused to countenance worker anti-intellectualism. He was particularly upset about developments in the Soviet Union, where intellectuals were distrusted and actively harassed, where latent Bolshevik paranoia about artists was coming into the open.[48]
Although he opposed intellectual censorship by the Soviets, Romain Rolland praised the Russian experiment in social reconstruction and the effort to eliminate material scarcity. The Bolshevik Revolution was a model of participatory social and economic development with enormous global significance.[49] To separate intellectuals from the working class at this juncture was to cut labor off from the natural creativity and critical perspective crucial to the construction of a durable society. Workers needed intellectual ex-
pertise and vision; intellectuals would grow enervated and antiquated without meaningful contact with workers. Even more dangerous was the precedent of intellectuals' turning against socially conscious workers to become an ideological "tool of oppression in the hands of the exploiters."[50]
Romain Rolland predicated the proposed dialogue on two notions: first, that the goals of manual and mental workers were equally dignified, despite the division of labor; and second, that fraternity was best implemented outside of political parties or mass movements. For the moment, Romain Rolland worked to lay bare unexamined biases, including those stereotypes accepted by the working class and its representatives.[51]
For Romain Rolland the very future of the world depended on collaboration between workers and intellectuals. He concluded his commentary on the Declaration by echoing Marx's rousing Communist Manifesto of 1848:
Manual and intellectual workers, let us unite. Let us unite all who believe in the possibility of a freer, dignified, and happier world, in which the forces of production and of creation would be harmoniously associated rather than working toward their mutual destruction, as they are doing now, in part through our mutual opposition, which is absurd and criminal. Let us not weary of hope and of action: let the intellectuals illuminate the road that the workers have to construct. There are different labor gangs. But the object of labor is the same.[52]
In an appendix to the Declaration published in L'Humanité in August 1919, Romain Rolland reiterated his critical support for the Soviet Union. He regretted that "our Russian friends" were prevented from signing his manifesto, condemned the Allied military intervention and the blockade of the Soviet Union, and proclaimed that "Russian thought is the avant-garde of the world's thought."[53] "Russian thought," in Romain Rolland's context, meant not Leninism but rather the Russian literary heritage or Soviet artistic developments.[54]
Romain Rolland composed an impassioned revolutionary dedication to a second volume of his antiwar essays, Les Précurseurs . He dated the dedication August 1919:
In Memory
of the Martyrs of the new Faith:
the human International.
To Jean Jaurès, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg,
Kurt Eisner, Gustav Laundauer,
victims of ferocious stupidity
and of the murderous lie,
liberators of the men who killed them.[55]
In this dedication, Romain Rolland voiced his solidarity with the assassinated martyrs of European socialism, communism, and anarchism—particularly with revolutionary militants. The five celebrated persons he hailed in the dedication were devoted to revolution, internationalism, and socialist humanism. They were at once revolutionaries and intellectuals of high caliber. In moving closer to the proletariat, Romain Rolland seemed to imply that he saw socialism as the only method of eradicating the material roots of world war and social repression and establishing internationalism. Romain Rolland connected violence to ignorance, insincerity, and class mystification. Socialism, on the contrary, appeared to be the all-embracing ideology of "the human International"—and thus the universal road to peace and to both collective and individual freedom.
This emotional identification with socialist revolutionaries was incompatible with Romain Rolland's more moderate and apolitical commitment to freedom of thought. Significantly, he opened Les Précurseurs with this engaged dedication but closed with the idealist Declaration. In between were articles published between 1916 and 1919 that supported the ideals of an intellectual's international. But the tension between the dedication and the Declaration remained unresolved. Whether the real forerunners of the future were embattled working-class leaders or pacifist intellectuals was undecided. The contradiction between outright allegiance to socialist revolution and the duty to exercise one's free spirit colored all of Romain Rolland's committed writings in the 1920s. In offering unsolicited advice to workers while not being a worker, in praising martyrs of the European socialist movement while remaining outside socialist organizations or revolutionary discipline, in urging an end to the antagonisms between workers and intellectuals while rejecting political struggle, he found himself entangled in a maze of contradictions. To soften the paternalistic ring of his writings, he formulated an image of the future harmonious mingling of all
forms of productive labor. He opted again for an ideal of totality and transcendence.
On 25 April 1919, Romain Rolland sent George Bernard Shaw a copy of the Declaration, requesting his signature.[56] This move was consistent with his original plan of securing signatures from a distinguished independent writer, artist, and scientist from every major country in the world.[57] The invitation triggered a private controversy that recapitulated his stormy relations with Shaw during the war.[58]
Romain Rolland told Shaw that the manifesto would not only help restore intellectual autonomy interrupted by the war, but also reverse the disillusionment of the young and silent members of the cultural sector. In an attempt to disarm Shaw's caustic wit, he confessed that such appeals were romantic attempts to take a stand against an apparent evil; their authors were Don Quixotes, attacking windmills. Instead of swords, idealist intellectuals employed their pens. Yet he wanted Shaw's support to reinforce the shaken confidence of an "intellectual youth which waits, disoriented, anguished, for its elders to rally it and render it confident in the power of the liberating Mind. . . . I have taken account of the Quixotism of this appeal. But once in his life Don Quixote did unhorse his adversary."[59]
Shaw replied in French on 7 May 1919, adamantly refusing to sign and returning paragraphs of the Declaration with unsolicited editorial corrections. He deflated Romain Rolland's unsubstantiated claims of virtue for the thinker while poking fun at his own linguistic deficiencies:
We must have a confession rather than a reproach: without that we will have the air of being Pharisees, even snobs. To avoid this I have dared to correct your draft a little. What do you think of it? Naturally you will know how to edit my gibberish: I am a vile linguist.[60]
Shaw's revision stressed the necessity of national defense and the impossibility of detached neutrality in times of war. Survival took precedence over intellectual opposition or detachment: "Search as we might to soar above the battle. Useless: in war the first duty is to
the home, to the neighbor, the supreme task is to divert death from them."[61]
Romain Rolland found that Shaw's changes distorted the spirit of the discourse. Shaw the entertainer, playing semantic games, simply caricatured his stance "above the battle." He, in turn, accused Shaw of offering an apology for the patriotic excesses of intellectuals during the war. Through his irascible sarcasm, Shaw justified the sacrifice of all forms of resistance to national defense and brute survival. Romain Rolland retorted: "I do not put the nation, the country, the home, before everything. Above all, I put the free conscience." Shaw guaranteed the future warmongers a "blank check." Romain Rolland's vigilance, however, would not politicize intellectual commitment: "I see no future in the efforts of free thought adapting itself to political necessities. . . . If it [thought] wants to save others, let it begin by saving itself. Let it make it its business to constitute, over and above nations, an International of thought, a world conscience."[62]
Shaw's reply ridiculed Romain Rolland's seriousness as an idealistic mystification of free thinking. Shaw bluntly reminded him of the material and biological needs of the ordinary man and soldier, as well as the imperative to "muddle through," especially in times of military emergency. He considered the advocacy of an intellectual's international excessively pompous and self-righteous, even hypocritical. With humorous self-deprecation, Shaw mocked Romain Rolland's ideas about the omnipotence of Thought. The man of thought was a linguistic construct, not a historical reality:
You flatter war and man. "The man of thought" does not exist. I am not thought. I am Bernard Shaw. You are Romain Rolland. We eat, and eight hours after, we forget our philosophy, and only feel hungry. . . . All that you say of Thought is true. Therefore, let Thought sign your manifesto. But John Smith and Pierre Duval cannot sign. They have fought for us; and we at least paid the taxes. No man has been above the battle. Such a pretension would be repugnant to the world and would break our influence. Excuse my bluntness: in writing English I have enough tact; but in a foreign language one writes as one can.[63]
Romain Rolland rejected Shaw's dichotomies as false and cynical. Material necessity required neither the abandonment of vision nor the renunciation of rational conduct. He defended his antiwar
position and affirmed charitable principles. Intellectuals ought to use their ideas and their ethical sensitivity to emphasize communion, not distinctions, between people and nations:
It is not strictly necessary to forget ideas when one feels hunger. In all times there are men who die for their ideas. There are some who have died for them in this war. There will be some in this peace. . . . I am not above the battles—all battles. I have been, I am, I will always be "above the battle" of nations and countries. I am struggling against nations, countries, castes, against all barriers that separate men.[64]
Romain Rolland's next letter, in which he included a copy of his acerbic antiwar play Liluli (1919), was the turning point of this exchange. Shaw immediately appreciated the caustic irony of Liluli , lavishing praise on it with German adjectives: "Liluli is kolossal, grossartig, wunderschön , magnificent. I have tasted it enormously, boundlessly, with ecstasy."[65] Under Shaw's aegis, it was performed before the British public. Romain Rolland finally decided that Shaw's jabs were aimed at form, not content. Shaw's satire also worked to "brand the servile aberration of unregimented thought during the war."[66] But Shaw did not sign the manifesto; the debate ended as it began, deadlocked.
Romain Rolland's Declaration offended many postwar Marxist intellectuals, most of whom looked instead to the Communist International. He sent Max Eastman, the American bohemian and antiwar writer, a copy of the Declaration, extending the amicable exchange he had enjoyed with young American left-wing writers during the war. Eastman published the manifesto in the New York City periodical The Liberator , but he offered a Marxist critique in the very same number.[67]
Eastman considered Romain Rolland's view of intellectuals a grandiose self-deception, shrouded in Platonic rhetoric that blurred the real choice for intellectuals: to opt for or against the proletariat. "We must place ourselves and all our powers unreservedly upon the side of the working class in its conflict with the owners of capital. We must adapt—at least so far as we are engaged upon this social quest—a fighting mentality and we must engage in a conscious class struggle." Romain Rolland's notions were effusive and sentimental. Eastman doubted the real possibility of individual autonomy in a class society. The French writer overestimated intellectual activity,
thereby giving his manifesto "the flavor of self-conscious superiority or importance." He lacked any sense of how to apply ideas in practical circumstances and failed to devise an instrumental view of human knowledge.[68]
Eastman argued that the current struggle for liberty and democracy was synonymous with the global mission of communism. Just as Marxism was the best scientific method for unraveling the complicated economic roots of social relations, so the international communist movement had become the key agency of social change. The truly committed intellectual joined with the proletariat to wage total class struggle against the bourgeoisie. Most intellectuals could not be counted on to participate in these revolutionary struggles. Eastman praised Romain Rolland's moral courage during the war, but he expected little from writers who proudly held themselves apart from the revolutionary venture. Eastman reaffirmed his general suspicion of intellectuals while repudiating the metaphor "Above the Battle" as a pretense of Olympian detachment and cosmic independence.[69]
Romain Rolland answered Eastman's public denunciation privately: "The disagreement between us is, in effect, complete. So complete that I will not try to discuss it here. I prefer to expose these two theses in a more objective fashion in a work that I am now writing." He denied that his idealism was a religion, insisting that it was an experimental, open-ended strategy of discovery, which stemmed from radical doubt: "I am not a believer in a faith, religious or Marxist. I am from Montaigne's country that doubts eternally but that searches eternally. I search for the truth. I will never reach it."[70] Against the injunction to intellectuals to work actively in proletarian social struggles or join communist organizations, he argued that happiness, social justice, and the general will of the people had never been served by minority dictatorships or dogmatic theories. "A social community that could only be saved by a renunciation of the free intelligence will not be saved in reality, but lost. For it would rest on corrupted bases." He ironically noted that Eastman wanted to subordinate free intellectual inquiry and individual conscience to the service of the "new science," Marxism. This was a naive form of intellectual arrogance.[71]
Eastman's attack was the first in a series of confrontations with Marxist intellectuals that would punctuate Romain Rolland's career
as an engaged intellectual. It anticipated his celebrated debate with Henri Barbusse in 1921–1922. Romain Rolland welcomed dialogue with twentieth-century Marxist intellectuals. In the framework of these controversies, he always distinguished personalities from issues. He retained personal esteem for Eastman and respected his review despite their irreconcilable dispute.[72]
During the war, Romain Rolland's relations with Albert Einstein had been cordial.[73] In 1919, he fully expected Einstein to join his campaign for intellectual freedom and to help secure followers for his Declaration in Germany. On the fifth of June 1919, he recorded Einstein's "consent."[74]
Einstein's motives for supporting the Declaration were mixed. He viewed signing as the lesser of two evils, although collective appeals were risky at that moment. They might simply provoke counterappeals, or they might confuse the basic issues. Einstein suggested that quiet diplomacy through one's private connections might be more efficacious than open protests against the international climate of distrust and revenge. He urged the exploration of German war guilt:
I was not among the authors who drafted the appeal [the Declaration]. Being only too well aware of the bitterness prevalent in the various countries, I do not believe that such efforts toward international reconciliation hold out much promise of success at present. I gave my signature because it would have been worse to withhold it; but I was convinced that the appeal would not produce much of a response.[75]
Romain Rolland had been generally sympathetic to Heinrich Mann's efforts during the war to promote Franco-German reconciliation, and to his controversy with his brother, Thomas Mann. In 1919, Heinrich Mann was one of Germany's most celebrated men of letters. Although he signed the Declaration, he carped at the phrase "We know nothing of peoples. We know the People." Romain Rolland regarded Mann's suggested revision as too great a concession to nationalism.[76]
Georg Frederick Nicolai, professor of biology at the University of Berlin and pacifist author of The Biology of War (1917), emerged as the earliest and most energetic supporter of the Declaration. Romain Rolland had praised Nicolai's "great Europeanism" during the war, and in 1919 Nicolai catalyzed the French writer's idea of
composing his manifesto.[77] Nicolai circulated the appeal all over central Europe in 1919, partly to popularize Romain Rolland's point of view and partly to document the "German answer" to it. He published both the former and the latter in his brochure Romain Rolland's Manifest und die deutschen Antworten (1919). Nicolai lobbied to have the Declaration appear in several German newspapers, reviews, and even in theater programs in 1919, including Demokratie, Forum, Freiheit, Berliner Tageblatt, Deutsche allgemeine Zeitung, Vorwarts , and Germania .[78]
Karl Kraus, the eminent Viennese satirist, social critic, and poet, refused to sign Romain Rolland's Declaration and gave his reasons. Kraus was unprepared to forgive German intellectuals for their sordid behavior during the war. Nor could he express solidarity with other names already on the list. Kraus's opposition to the war was based on a conservative desire to preserve culture and traditions. He neither shared the assumptions of European pacifists or left-wing intellectuals about the war nor agreed with their methods for posing complicated moral questions.[79]
Romain Rolland and the Italian idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce had not corresponded during the war but knew of each other's activities through intermediaries. Croce signed the appeal in terms that underscored his ambiguous relationship to Romain Rolland's antiwar thought.[80] Croce pedantically referred the French writer to a text that summarized his own writings on the Great War:
It is very willingly that I fix my signature under your noble appeal. But I wish, so that you may understand the sense and the limit of my approval, that you read the book [L'Italia dal 1914 al 1918 ] I am sending you, which is the record of all that I have written during the War. You will find your name sometimes, and thus the reason for our divergences. I believe that war is sacred , but that truth is equally sacred, and that it must not be employed as an instrument of war. The instruments of war are made of other materials.[81]
Romain Rolland admitted to Croce that the two had distinct social and ideological preferences. In exchange for the book he had sent, Croce should consult Romain Rolland's anthology of antinationalist and anti-imperialist writings, Les Précurseurs . Despite their differences, as idealists they could concur on intellectual liberty, which was implicit in their sacralization of the mind.[82]
Romain Rolland encountered unexpected refusals from four dis-
tinguished members of the French intellectual and scientific community. The French economist and pacifist Charles Gide objected to the Declaration on the grounds that it "neglected the nation's right of existence in order to recognize only the unity of the universal proletariat, which will become the doctrine of the International."[83] Likewise, Charles Richet, a Nobelist in physiology and member of the French Academy of Sciences, refused to endorse the text.[84] Marie Curie, Nobelist in physics and in chemistry, declined to sign, perhaps out of "timidity or nationalist obstinacy," wrote a disappointed Romain Rolland. He had reluctantly solicited Anatole France's signature, even after expressing his reservations about including France on Clarté 's board. He angrily remarked that the elderly skeptic had "shut himself up smugly in a discreet and padded silence."[85]
There were many favorable reactions to his appeal, several of which opened new intellectual relationships in his life. The cordiality and emotional intensity of these letters reassured the French writer.[86]
Romain Rolland was both delighted and irked at the response of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Russell wrote warmly: "I do not know how to express to you how I rejoiced at receiving your letter and the Declaration which accompanied it. It marks the end of the isolation of war time."[87] Russell sympathized with Romain Rolland's efforts to reconcile intellectuals in all countries. Nevertheless, he had reservations about the third paragraph of the text, which he found too accusatorial and self-righteous, and which contradicted the manifesto's claim of fellowship:
I do not desire to impose on them the task of saying publicly: Peccavi [I have sinned]. I would prefer to make the reconciliation as easy as possible. I would not want to proclaim that we are their total superiors from a moral point of view. I would like to do everything that is possible to diminish rancors within nations, as well as international rancors. For my part, I would prefer a constructive paragraph rather than a criticism, a paragraph attending to the future and the great tasks which now remain for intellectuals.[88]
Romain Rolland interpreted Russell's answer as encouraging and generally approving. Though disinclined to embrace those thinkers "who betrayed once and who will betray a second time,"[89]
he urged Russell to petition for English signatories to the Declaration.
In England, Bertrand Russell, who signs with enthusiasm, asks that one cut out of the Declaration all disavowals of past misdeeds. And certainly the sentiment which inspires this demand is noble and pure: it is fine to be modest; but we must know how to guard a just pride, in the interests of a great cause, and not rush to wipe away the treasons of yesterday, for they will give way to the treasons of tomorrow.[90]
Toward the end of the campaign to circulate the Declaration, Romain Rolland was disillusioned by its immediate reception:
It is not even possible to unite the small handful of free intellectuals of Europe around a text, however mild and attenuated. One could say that certain of those who struggled most energetically during the five years of war are at present exhausted and doubt themselves. . . . My Declaration has received so many demands for modifications or attenuations from different sides, that in realizing them, nothing would remain other than the title.[91]
The principal objections concerned the Declaration's explicitly internationalist outlook and its demand that intellectuals criticize misbehavior and recant beliefs held during the war. Moreover, in an open appeal, it was considered inappropriate to treat nationalists and consensus intellectuals impartially. Compassion, it seemed, could be expressed in a moral history or in a psychological novel, "but not in a Declaration, which is an action, a rallying cry, an appeal to indecisive and disheartened youth who wait for a direction, a guide, in the disarray of souls."[92]
Intellectuals must be held accountable for their actions, inaction, bad judgment, and lack of moral fiber. Thinkers had served death and confusion by promoting a hatred that, Romain Rolland charged, "devastated, devastates, and will devastate Europe for a long time to come."[93] The same unrepentant men would prepare Europe for its next war, which seemed increasingly inevitable. He nearly abandoned the project of collecting signatures for the appeal. As a last resort, he might turn to younger intellectuals or enlightened war veterans. If they failed him, he would launch the Declaration under his own name, despite the personal risk, "because one must never stifle the cry of conscience, whether one is or is not understood."[94]
Romain Rolland explained his intransigence toward European pacifists in a letter to Russell. Many prewar pacifists—liberal internationalists, Christians, and antimilitaristic socialists—had become chauvinistic and warmongering during the hostilities. Their antiwar rhetoric had evaporated when the Sacred Union commenced. Their peacetime pacifism had to be regarded cautiously unless they could candidly confront their opportunistic reversal during the war. He would doubt their good faith until they proved their commitments to peace with action. He predicted that these "elements of moral compromise" would manifest themselves again as soon as a national emergency occurred.[95]
Romain Rolland lamented his failure to establish a center for intellectual internationalism in a neutral country. The free minds of Europe remained isolated in their own countries, "hermetically closed off" from one another. Common struggle was more efficacious than individual combat. While speaking out against "the corrupting lie . . . which infected all of European thought," he articulated his private conflicts about being engaged and disengaged at the same time:
I speak in any case against my own inclinations. For I am from taste a solitary person who loves nothing more than living far from cities and from action, in art and in nature. Circumstances have constrained me, and I am not grateful to them for that. But I would at least like to be engaged to aid the young "workers of the mind" of Europe and of America (indeed of some other countries) to multiply the occasions to assemble, to discuss together, to cooperate if possible on common works and projects, so that they can prepare for or cope with the new hurricanes, which we see amassing on the horizon.[96]
In 1919 Romain Rolland's engagement was clearly more cultural than political. He began his postwar career with a notion that action and spirit, politics and morality, collective and individual struggle, could be fused. His writings glorified human fraternity, panhumanistic ideals, and the moral tenacity of those historical actors and witnesses with an identifiable ethical consciousness. He wrote to inspire his readers with the goals he deemed transcendent and eternal. In this he adhered to an older tradition of the French moralist. Despite disclaimers, Romain Rolland tended to attribute to the intellectual priestly qualities and divine functions.
Romain Rolland's writings in 1919 were oppositional. He urged
intellectuals to protest the ill-conceived and vengeful Versailles Peace Treaty, to repudiate all forms of imperialism and latent and manifest forms of nationalism, to insist on his version of unofficial, nonlegalistic internationalism, and especially to reopen dialogue with one another, taking the first steps toward an international of the mind. Last, he linked a rudimentary pacifist outlook with a Western, secular, idealist and individualist position. Above all else, he wanted to demonstrate that the antiwar vision could not be domesticated by the Allied victory and that it could be differentiated from a Bolshevik, socialist, or liberal position.
Thus, many aspects of Romain Rolland's engagement with his contemporary sociopolitical reality veered toward the concrete, whereas much of the idiom remained abstract and aloof. To his poetic wartime confidant and subsequent biographer, Pierre-Jean Jouve, he wrote: "The only fecund action that we can take at this moment must be slow, tenacious, deliberate."[97] Creative action and quiet meditation presupposed mental readiness and understanding of process to yield lasting cultural results. Political intercession was evanescent and of doubtful efficacy.
Romain Rolland recognized that there were urgent, immediate abuses that required the committed intellectual's concern, if not active intervention. The end of the war did not erase glaring instances of social injustice, political oppression, economic exploitation, and cultural exclusion. Battles remained to be fought.
In 1919 Romain Rolland was engaged and disengaged at the same time. If he continued to address present-centered causes, it was always in the name of higher humanistic values. He was moving from the position of "Good European" toward a planetary vision. Romain Rolland's oceanic feeling enabled him to take public positions, often radical and militant ones, frequently uncompromising and impractical ones, while transcending time, space, causality, and particularity. His oceanic mysticism showed him how the part merged with the whole and prevented him from giving way to a persistent sense of futility. He continued to struggle without expecting a favorable outcome, always keeping humanity itself at the center of his engaged outlook:
What preserves me from lasting despair is that I can always escape the present; whether by habit, or by nature, my mind embraces great
spaces—centuries and the entire earth. Inspiration requires a calm, large, equal rhythm—a suitable rhythm—which overcomes fevers. I believe that we must accustom ourselves to this great breadth; the enormous world crisis, in which we are now engaged, does not admit of speed; there is a century, perhaps more, for addressing it; we will not see the end of it; but let us mark it with the rhythm of our pulses; let our secular thoughts make something of it. . . . Let each of us be the whole Man.[98]