PART THREE
LEFT-WING CULTURAL POLITICS OF THE 1930S
7
Intellectual Antifascism and the Amsterdam-Pleyel Movement
We proclaimed ourselves the enemies of Fascism, but actually Fascism had its effect on us, as on almost all Italians, alienating us and making us superficial, passive, and cynical.
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
In the 1930s antifascism fused a powerful emotional and intellectual approach to contemporary history. Romain Rolland occupied a prominent place in elaborating and popularizing this negative passion, situated at the border of politics and culture. Perceiving fascism as a potent threat, he attempted to organize and to create ideological legitimacy for a broad-based interclass coalition to oppose it. He deployed his talents and risked his international reputation as a moral force and pacifist spokesman, while transforming in the process the style of the committed writer. Antifascist politics also suffused his literary works in the era. His epic novel L'Ame enchantée , the successor of Jean-Christophe , made resistance to fascism central in its narrative, characters, and unifying vision.
Before Mussolini's March on Rome and the Fascist Party's seizure of power on 30 October 1922, Romain Rolland considered fascist theory and practice to be repugnant precisely because it contradicted the cultural legacy of Italy.[1] Fascism was a new form of barbarism, another deformation of the Great War, not simply a reversion to dictatorial politics. He quickly recognized fascism's dynamic strength, its capacity to tap thwarted Italian historical and military pride. He predicted that "Fascism will either burst open like an abcess or be reabsorbed into itself."[2] He saw the attraction fascism held for intellectuals such as Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Henry de Montherlant, and he also realized its potential to take root in France as a mass movement.[3]
Mussolini was the incarnation of post—World War I Caesarism. Romain Rolland compared the fascist regime with the decadent years of the French Bonapartist tradition. He was appalled by the leadership cult around the duce. Mussolini lacked Napoleon Bonaparte's intelligence, strategic skills, and world vision. The duce was a mock hero who stood for conquest and adored destruction for its own sake. Romain Rolland distanced himself from left- or right-wing social movements that were intoxicated with notions of violence and domination. "I have indeed no sympathy for Mussolini and Fascism. . . . Between Bolsheviks and Fascists there are differences of ideas, but not of methods."[4]
He anticipated that Italian antifascist intellectuals might oppose Giovanni Gentile's edict requiring all state functionaries to swear oaths of loyalty to the fascist regime. His hopes were quickly disappointed. Modern Italy needed a Victor Hugo "to throw a glove in the face of a tyrant." Benedetto Croce was unable to play such a leadership role, despite his opposition to fascism. Croce limited his protest to "the absurdities of Fascist 'intellectual imperialism.' " The origins of fascism, Romain Rolland saw, were the north-south division in Italy, the disappointments after the World War I experience, and above all the backlash against the threat of socialist revolution in 1919 and 1920. Fascist movements emerged when industrializing societies entered chaotic periods of transition.[5]
The kidnapping and assassination of Giacomo Matteotti, the reformist deputy of the Partito Socialista Unitario (SPU), in June 1924 and the squadristi assault on Giovanni Amendola on 21 July 1925 provided the reference points for Romain Rolland's subsequent thoughts on Italian fascism. He was despondent over "the egotistical cowardice" of the majority of Italian intellectuals who supported the government. He was offended by philosophers who abused the dialectical method by "justifying all crimes and complacencies to reward force." He was outraged by the Jesuitical twists of Catholic writers who rationalized "the atrocities and shames of Fascism by quoting the Gospels." French intellectuals needed to be alerted that Italian fascism represented "a danger of the foremost kind." He urged Clarté to publish articles documenting and analyzing the Italian regime. All "healthy" forces would have to be mobilized to combat the spreading pestilence.[6]
Romain Rolland's first public antifascist statement came on the
occasion of Mussolini's warlike provocations in Tripoli in 1926. Italian fascism's existence obliterated all hope for disarmament. Mussolini's regime demonstrated a nihilistic contempt for diplomacy and world peace, as evidenced by its belligerent rhetoric and its preoccupation with territorial annexations. Romain Rolland counseled pacifists and internationalists to oppose fascism. He called for vigilance against the threat in France, where internal fascist agitation was mounting. Fascists behaved like agents provocateurs. They appeared to be a stabilizing force while deceptively inciting their frenetic followers to violence and war. Fascists were criminals without a sense of guilt. Fascism negated the cosmopolitan spirit, violated civil rights, and perverted all civilized values.[7]
On the occasion of a Parisian street brawl between rightists and communists in the spring of 1926, he argued that fascism was incompatible with the French tradition of republican government and democratic process. It contradicted the legacy of the French Revolution—the rights of man and the struggle for human dignity. Fascism undermined individual creativity, critical thinking, freedom of conscience, and the right to resist oppression.
Every regime founded on the principles of Italian fascism is degrading for the human conscience. It rules by contempt for the most sacred freedoms, by imposed lies, and by fear.
Every attempt to introduce it in France is a crime. A crime against the France of free reason. A crime against the free people who made the Revolution. A crime against the free Soul.[8]
Romain Rolland endorsed antifascist activities in a letter to Filippo Turati, saluting the founding of his oppositional newspaper in Paris, La Libertà . He attacked Mussolini for enslaving the Italian countryside through the establishment of a tyrannical dictatorship. He voiced his solidarity with Italy's "most loyal and persecuted representatives," its antifascist refugees. He identified their struggle to emancipate Italy from Mussolini's yoke with the universal struggle against social injustice, cruelty, cynicism, and unreason: "The fight you wage is not only for the liberation of a great oppressed, humiliated, outraged people—it is for the freedom of the entire world."[9]
Amendola's death on 1 April 1926 personally affected him, for the two had collaborated before the Great War in the context of the
intellectual movement, La Voce . Amendola was one of the Italian luminaries to contribute to Romain Rolland's sixtieth birthday festschrift in 1926, just a few months prior to his assassination.[10] In a letter of bereavement, Romain Rolland expressed his grief to the Amendola family and indicted the fascist regime for orchestrating the homicide. He elevated Amendola's death into a moral symbol for all antifascists. He began to sacralize the antifascist cause. There could be no antifascist resistance without historical memory:
I have no need to tell you, sir, of our indignation at this hideous and disgraceful crime that made your father the sacred victim. Nothing will obliterate the stigma from the brow of the assassin. He will remain branded by it for the future. . . . The long suffering of this great, silent, and stoical martyr has reverberated in the hearts of the free men of France. As in the catacombs under the Compagna, near your home, where the eternal lamp of remembrance burned before the image of the persecuted, we consecrate an altar, in our memory, to the noble image of the wise and gentle Amendola.[11]
In 1926, Rabindranath Tagore was given a brilliantly orchestrated grand tour of the modern sights and cities of Italy, which showed him only the glories of the fascist regime. Tagore's visit in June culminated with two interviews with Mussolini. The duce disarmed the politically naive Tagore with courteous flattery. Throughout his stay, Tagore met only two antifascists. Tagore's speeches were distorted in the fascist press, making him sound like a fervent admirer of Italian fascism and insinuating that he attributed the renewal of Italy's grandeur to Mussolini's inspirational qualities.[12]
To make Tagore aware of internal realities in Italy, Romain Rolland placed him in contact with spokesmen for the refugee antifascist opposition. Tagore had been systematically misled by meetings with individuals who "apologized" for fascism or "adulated the Master."[13] Italian fascism was based on the "politics of crime and hypocrisy."[14] Romain Rolland emphasized the destructive side of Italian fascism, the repression of political parties, the jailing and wounding of five or six hundred innocent victims. Only fools mistook its militarism, annexationism, and primitive nationalism for grandeur. It was appalling that a man of Tagore's sensibility could enter into dialogue with this dictator, the "assassin of Amendola and Matteotti." Tagore's trip would demoralize progressive public opinion in Europe, especially young people, students and
"antifascist personalities."[15] Antifascist refugees represented a free and authentic, but currently martyred, Italy. To rectify the situation, he urged Tagore to investigate the "moral misery and nameless suffering"[16] of the antifascists.
In 1927, Romain Rolland began thinking about an antifascist strategy for Europe. Because of their primary experience with fascism, antifascist emigrés should lead the campaign against Mussolini by publicizing the "unheard-of violence and political deportations," documenting the widespread atmosphere of domestic repression, and exposing the presence of Mussolini's spies in France. He exhorted the exiled Italian antifascists to contradict Mussolini's official lie that his regime was unanimously supported and to present evidence that "Fascist politics are the gravest peril to international peace."[17]
Romain Rolland preferred making public antifascist statements as an independent voice. Just as he remained outside pacifist and Gandhian organizations, so too would he refuse to make a permanent alliance with established centers of the antifascist struggle. He declined the invitation by the distinguished historian and liberal antifascist Gaetano Salvemini to join the central committee of the International Democratic League to Reconquer Italian Freedom, even though he was totally opposed to fascism's "crimes, lies, and stifling of all freedoms." He participated in charitable programs designed to aid the victims of fascist tyranny. He reserved the right to issue protests only in situations of real crisis. If he were to release one at each request, it would diffuse his moral efficacy. Currently, his cultural writing had a higher priority than his strictly political engagements. He disliked the ideological disposition of Salvemini's movement, specifically its liberal-democratic parliamentarism and its "simplistic" anticlericalism, which would divide and limit left-wing groups in France. He doubted that the antifascist struggle could be led by a "third force"; rather, it should reflect a political coalition of leftist and progressive forces. Salvemini's group placed hostility to communism at the center of its political philosophy, but one could be antifascist without being equally anticommunist. More crucial, Romain Rolland predicted that communism "could be one of the most vigorous battalions of the attack against Fascism." Communist intellectuals such as Henri Barbusse could heighten the public awareness of fascism.[18]
In November 1926, Romain Rolland joined forces with Barbusse to inaugurate an International Committee Against Fascism. Barbusse and he were aware that movements outside Italy would not necessarily replicate the Italian model. In February 1927, they issued an appeal "To the Free Minds, Against Fascism," which denounced the persecutions and savage terror in both Mussolini's Italy and Coudreanu's Romania. Romain Rolland became one of three honorary presidents (along with Barbusse and Albert Einstein) of the first huge French antifascist meeting, held in Paris at the Salle Bullier on 23 February 1927. Paul Langevin, the eminent scientist and vice president of the League of the Rights of Man, presided over the assembly.[19] Such symbolic gestures allowed Romain Rolland to justify his antifascist orientation without jeopardizing his distance from political parties or social movements.[20]
In letters to Barbusse, he criticized the communist perspective on antifascism for being no less parochial than the liberal approach. As a free thinker and a Gandhian, he urged Barbusse to extricate the antifascist committees from Moscow's tutelage. His antifascism was that of the mediator, bridging the ideologies and tactics of left-wing opinion in Europe. Because there were similarities of method between fascists and Bolsheviks, communists lacked the moral authority to contest fascist ideas and politics.[21] Communist antifascist propaganda was dogmatic and expediently served the foreign policy needs of the Comintern, cynically publicizing the misery of fascist victims to make a case for the superiority of communism over Western capitalism. The facts of fascist excesses should be presented to European public opinion so that intelligent readers could draw their own conclusions. By focusing only on the repression of Italian communists and by omitting Mussolini's reprisals against "bourgeois, preachers, Socialist or Radical republicans,"[22] the communists distorted the full picture of the fascist horror. Fascism threatened all progressive political parties, all cultural and leisure life, not just Marxists. Before associating with him in an all-out struggle against the extreme right in Europe and France, Barbusse should declare his own commitment to "democratic rights." If he protested the curtailment of civil liberties and political opposition in the Soviet Union, his universalism would be proved. "It is precisely because I belong to the army of proletarian progress that I demand of its leaders an exemplary moral discipline and a religious respect for freedom."[23]
Romain Rolland simultaneously opposed the red-baiting tendencies of liberal antifascists and the doctrinal posturings of communist antifascists. It was morally correct for unaffiliated intellectuals such as H. G. Wells, Shaw, Russell, Nansen, Unamuno, and himself to participate in public forums where fascist ideologies were dismantled. It was still possible to work against "fascist ideas" in the late 1920s without engaging in political action.
Two major shifts in the late 1920s and early 1930s prompted Romain Rolland to reassess his intellectual politics: the increasing expansionism of Japan and the rise of National Socialism in Germany. As these fascist powers ascended, he began to jettison some of his Gandhian and humanitarian formulas for world peace. Anti-imperialism preceded antifascism both as an ethical position and as a political commitment. He did not yet sharply distinguish between fascist and communist forms of violence.
When the revolutionary communists of the Parisian Clarté group provoked him to take a position on Western imperialism, he pointed out that the extreme left was partisan in its diatribes against right-wing violence but silent about the cruelties of the left, including communism: "For a very long time I maintained a position against all assassins—Fascist or revolutionary . . . . I spare no one. I make alliances with no one. I do not whimper over my solitude, but find that solitude is healthy in an epoch of herds."[24]
Fascism represented an extreme, undisguised form of imperialism. Fascists offered an ideological justification for aggression and conquest. The reality of secret treaties, capitalist coalitions, the armaments industry, the buying and selling of peoples in underdeveloped countries caused Romain Rolland to reject the soft thinking of pacifists who placed their hopes in international legal treaties, the League of Nations, or unilateral declarations of peace. If France disarmed in the late 1920s, it would remain isolated, permitting belligerent nations like fascist Italy to invade, occupy its territory, and plunder it. Despite its ideological connection to the Soviet Union and despite the absence of moderate elements in it, he welcomed the educational efforts of the Anti-Imperialist League, particularly its internationalism, antimilitarism, and defense of the victims of colonization.[25]
In a tribute to the American pacifist John Haynes Holmes, Romain Rolland leveled serious charges against American imperi-
alism. Following Europe's decline after the Great War, America's prominent but abusive place in world affairs had to be recognized. He unmasked the ideological component of American foreign policy, especially the self-righteous legitimization of United States imperialism, the privileged position of the dollar, and the shallow, conformist nature of the American values imposed on the lands they dominated. American corporate imperialism fused arrogance and innocence:
The Anglo-Saxon temperament of America is proud and strong, wholehearted in its likes and its ideas, self-assured and obstinate. It has a singular ineptitude—which strikes all of us, Europeans—to understand the mentality of other peoples, to enter into their psychology (and their physiology), to "size up" their spirit, their passions, their peculiar needs. It tends to believe that what is true for itself, that whatever is the Good for it, should be so for all other nations in the world. And if the latter do not judge the matter the same way, it is they who are mistaken, and America has the right to impose it on them, in their own interest and in the interests of the world. Such a conception leads to the will to conquer the world, under the cover of a narrow moralism, wedded (without its knowledge) to natural instincts of greed and domination.[26]
If the rigid and insensitive policies of the United States were not opposed by responsible American citizens, then America was preparing itself for the eventual rebellion of oppressed nations.
Like most opponents of twentieth-century colonialism, Romain Rolland saw the progressive edge of the imperialistic impulse. Underdeveloped countries now dominated by Europe had benefited from improvements in health and hygiene, administration, transportation, communication, technology, and the utilization of natural resources. However, these benefits were almost always forced on native populations without adequate cultural or psychological preparation.[27]
He warned anti-imperialists to be distrustful of the "pan-European" and idealist pacifists, who, despite their internationalist rhetoric, were wedded to increasing their profit margins and accelerating the process of "the exploitation of the rest of the globe." Nor would big business hesitate to collude with European fascist powers. Anti-imperialists had to decode the self-serving language of imperialism, unveiling the sinister interests at play.[28]
As a Gandhian internationalist, Romain Rolland contested the
British presence in India, but he also interceded on behalf of peoples colonized by the French, developing a mordant critique of French empire building. When French authorities forcefully deported a young Annamite student who joined the Communist Party, Romain Rolland collaborated with the Anti-Imperialist League. He articulated the human rights of a foreigner living and studying in France, angrily protesting the political savagery of the colonial bureaucracy:
I join myself to the protest of the Anti-Imperialist League against the massacres in Indochina. And I spit my contempt in the face of the executioner's servants who have just delivered Tao to the associated French Indochinese assassins.[29]
Founded in 1927, the Anti-Imperialist League was a communist front organization. Romain Rolland was asked in March 1931 to become the "honorary president" of the League. He declined the presidency because he disagreed with the League's opposition to the Gandhian movement and because of the Comintern's hostility to pacifist ideology and peace movement activism.[30] Yet he sympathized with many principles of the Anti-Imperialist League. At an anticolonial meeting held in Paris at the Salle Bullier, sponsored by the French Communist Party, he denounced French imperialism for its political economy of larceny and for its extermination of native populations. "Colonial politics" contained the metaphors of his moral critique of imperialism, which spilled over into his writings against fascism:
Dear comrades,
I associate myself with your anti-imperialist action against the crimes of French politics in Indochina. Modern democracies are a compound of hypocrisies. Among all the hypocrisies one is particularly insolent and repugnant at the present hour: that of civilizing colonialism. It has been exactly a half century since Jules Ferry, representing the most intelligent and crafty part of the dominant bourgeoisie, tried to substitute conquest, after agreement and sharing of the rest of the earth, for the old traditional politics of nationalist rivalries on Europe's soil. They have clearly covered themselves with the flags of European Peace, or with that of civilization, in which these sharks call themselves missionaries. Undoubtedly, this politics has led Europe to an afflux of riches enabling an entire class to get fat off of it. But this peace and ease are paid for liberally by the price of oppression, theft, when it did not lead to the extermination of the races of Asia and Africa. And the petit-bourgeois egoism of Europe accommodates itself to it perfectly. It ungratefully acknowl-
edges that it wallows on the spoils of these peoples delivered over to the great European bandits.
Upright consciences can no longer tolerate this duplicity. Let us tear away the mask! Let us force these Tartuffes and cowards to see their face in the mirror! Let their mirror cry to them: "Liars! Thieves!" And let us not tolerate what is currently produced under the cover of idealism, a cunning pan-Europeanism, which is an association of the capitalisms of France, Germany, and the great business democracies, yesterday at war, today reconciled, so as to better ransom the world! We defend the rights of all men of the earth. All the oppressed are our brothers. We do not work for a nation or for Europe. We work for the workers of the universe![31]
By late 1931, Romain Rolland held that social revolution was the only effective instrument to smash European and American imperialism. The sentimental homilies and puerile tactics of the peace movement were insufficient in the face of a "murderous and brutal" coalition of imperialists bleeding the countries of China and Japan. To aid the process of self-determination, he urged the peoples of China and Japan to form a "fecund unity." This step would not only help get the "great bandits" off their backs but might also point the way to a general coalition of the working classes of Europe and America. He now fully justified the need for social—rather than national—revolution in order to extricate colonized people from the yoke of the colonizer and to ensure the possibility of a lasting peace: "He who wants peace wants the elimination of the eternal makers of war. He who wants international peace, wants revolution."[32] In attacking Japanese incursions into China in the autumn of 1931 for "beheading the revolution," he called for a worldwide union of European consciences and class-conscious workers to resist "the Fascist systems of plutocracy and militarism."[33]
Romain Rolland's most stinging denunciations of imperialism were triggered by political repression in India and Indochina. He protested events not widely publicized in Western Europe, unmasking breaches of the legal system, deportations, forced labor, and incarceration of the native populations. His interventions criticized the widespread abuses of both justice and the democratic process in colonial situations. He penned an impassioned appeal for the Meerut prisoners of India, thirty of whom had been held illegally for four years awaiting trial for sedition. Their crime: attempting to organize a trade union. Most of the Meerut prisoners were sympathetic with the Indian Congress Party; a minority
were Indian communists. He demanded an immediate retrial and denounced systematic British repression. Imperialism was a system "based on the atrocious, degrading, and murderous exploitation of nine-tenths of the world's peoples." The captivity and eventual deportation of the Meerut prisoners stripped the British colonial rule of all pretense of legality and protection of human rights. Here was imperialism "that established and maintained itself by terror." The oppressed colonized would eventually develop awareness of their oppression, precipitating revolt to eject the imperialist dominators.[34]
After cataloguing the impact of imperialist "terror" by the Dutch in the East Indies and the French in Indochina, as well as the colonial penetration into China and Korea, he added some choice words about the American "diabolical" variety of open-door imperialism,
compounded of hypocrisy and cruelty, which makes the churches the bagmen of the Standard Oil Company, which turns itself into the ally of the rotten Kuomintang generals, and the supporter of the massacres in Cuba; which grants the Philippines their independence in order to subjugate them better by economic means; and which lights up in South America the fire of wars and of bloody dictatorships.[35]
Romain Rolland predicted that the organized international of labor would ultimately "break the yoke of imperialism."
In a declaration in support of political prisoners in French Indochina, he deployed sarcasm to blast the Daladier government. It was cynical to invoke the rights of man to legitimize the imprisonment and forced labor of ten thousand Annamites. Any imperialist government that forfeited the rights of its colonized populations must be held accountable. It was "absurd" for Daladier to justify these policies in the name of "freedom." "And it is that sort of government that dares to speak, in the name of human conscience, against the butchers of liberty, against fascism. We deny moral authority to it." Against Daladier's deceptions and repressive actions, Romain Rolland linked antifascist politics and sentiments to the struggles against corporate capitalist and colonial exploitation: "Let France at least have the honesty to recognize the same right and duty for the citizens of the countries that the France of the great companies has conquered and that she is exploiting!"[36]
The Amsterdam-Pleyel movement marked a gradual break with Romain Rolland's antiwar, idealistic, and Gandhian engagements . Fascism jeopardized the precarious peace and revealed the limitations of Gandhian theory and practice. He was stepping less obliquely into the political arena. He could no longer justify remaining intransigently independent or marginal in the face of obvious economic, political, and cultural crises. Amsterdam-Pleyel propelled Romain Rolland into the 1930s, changed his way of looking at the world and at the role and responsibility of the intellectual, politicized his language, and oriented it toward action. His engagement with the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement turned him away from abstract, universalistic forms of social and historical analysis. Because the dangers of imperialism, war, and fascism were transparent, his style of intellectual politics changed. Amsterdam-Pleyel provided one last opportunity to articulate a revolutionary version of Gandhism and intensified his preexisting sympathies for communism. Amsterdam-Pleyel was born with tensions and contradictions that were never entirely resolved. Many of its political and ideological ambiguities spilled over into the French Popular Front government itself. As a symbol of unity on the left, Romain Rolland personally embodied these ambivalences.
The Amsterdam-Pleyel movement was born in the spring of 1932 as an eclectic international committee of intellectuals. The Amsterdam Congress was actually convened in Amsterdam from 27 August to 29 August 1932. Willi Münzenberg, the catalyst, was himself a colorful, renegade militant of the Communist International. Not only did Moscow distrust the pacifist ideology associated with the anticipated Amsterdam Congress, but it had not yet hammered out a Popular Front strategy nor developed a thoughtful analysis of fascism. Münzenberg's vision coincided with the desires of Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse to generate a broad-based movement uniting disparate progressive and left-wing groups, including the communists and socialists. Historians have rightly emphasized the importance of Münzenberg, behind the scenes, preparing and administering this international gathering. An organizational genius, a brilliant tactician, and an expert in modern propaganda technique, Münzenberg orchestrated the vast assembly of "intellectual and manual workers" without the full consent of the Comintern.[37]
The call for the Amsterdam Congress and the idea of establish-
ing an International Committee for the World Congress Against Imperialist War were triggered by the Japanese incursion into Manchuria in the fall of 1931. The Amsterdam Congress accorded anti-imperialism a higher priority than antifascism. By 4–6 June 1933, when the Congress met at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement had evolved ideologically into an explicitly antifascist mass movement. The Pleyel Congress was a direct response to Hitler's assuming the chancellorship in Germany in March 1933 and to the clamor of a distinctly fascist militancy by French rightwing movements. The Amsterdam-Pleyel movement definitely opened the French left to the idea of an alliance of French communists and socialists, which might include other progressives. In 1933 the exact nature of that coalition needed to be elaborated. Amsterdam-Pleyel subsequently became one of the eleven constituent organizations to merge with the French Popular Front. The idea of such unity was enormously popular among the worker rank and file. It also became the agency by which many partisans of the French Popular Front came to communism in the mid-1930s.
Romain Rolland participated in the Amsterdam Congress while serving as president of the International League of Fighters for Peace in 1932. Though French pacifism between the wars has not found its historian, we must remember how deeply rooted antiwar sentiment was in France, particularly in left-wing, moderate, and progressive opinion. To call the varieties of antiwar feeling a social movement is to exaggerate, but there were clearly mass support and articulate spokesmen in socialist, Radical, and anarchist circles.[38]
French communism, however, did not adequately differentiate communist anti-imperialism from pacifist anti-imperialism and unconditional opposition to war. Communists claimed to be antiwar but were not necessarily advocates of peace or nonviolence. Maurice Thorez, general secretary of the PCF, blasted the intellectual sponsors of the Amsterdam Congress as late as 28 June 1932 for their "pacifist petit-bourgeois mind," a well-worn term of Leninist reprobation.[39] From the communist standpoint, the pacifist ideology might weaken the military resolve of the Western democracies, still reeling from the war and the world economic crisis, draining their will to stand strongly against Germany or Japan if war broke out. Communists were uneasy about the penetration of pacifist ideas, fearing they might contaminate the purely proletarian and
revolutionary thrust of communist doctrine and program. Furthermore, the Comintern had grave reservations in the summer of 1932 about United or Popular Front strategies (here Münzenberg was an exception), specifically about the broadness of such an alliance and the precise nature of socialist and pacifist participation. Above all, in 1932 and 1933 the communists had not yet decided to postpone the goal of a proletarian revolution in order to construct an interclass, antifascist movement that might include the progressive part of the capitalist world. Only in 1934, after the debacle in Germany, did Moscow decide that international fascism had to be defeated first and that socialist revolution could be delayed.[40]
Romain Rolland, although publicly linked to Barbusse, campaigned in private for a pluralistic anti-imperialist, antiwar coalition. He wanted pacifists, progressives, nonconforming individuals, and class-conscious intellectuals included. The movement should not be dominated by working-class leadership and Communist Party priorities. Barbusse tried to maintain the goodwill of those noncommunists recruited to the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement, while defending the territorial integrity of the USSR, distinctly jeopardized by a militaristic Japan and by a resurgent, expansionist Germany.[41]
In publicizing for the Amsterdam Congress, Romain Rolland appealed to progressive intellectuals to end their neutrality by taking a public stand. International writers of genius graced the Committee of Initiative, including Gorky, Shaw, Russell, Wells, Einstein, Heinrich Mann, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and John Dos Passos. From France, Barbusse was named, along with Paul Langevin, and the pacifist intellectuals Victor Margueritte and Félicien Challaye. China was represented by Madame Sun Yat Sen, Japan by Sen Katayama. This distinguished group had the collective responsibility to oppose world war. The parliamentary leadership of the Western democracies was paralyzed. "Never was the threat heavier and more crushing. Europe is delivered to the Fascisms of the sword and of business. The stupefied democracies, betrayed by their parliamentary leaders, no longer have the force to react. A monstrous criminal outrage prepares itself." Because of the catastrophic threat of world war, to be triggered by competing imperialist systems, Romain Rolland urged intellectuals to enter into an alliance (front unique ) with advanced workers from metallurgical, chemical, and transportation industries. An
anti-imperialist coalition without the solidarity of mental and manual workers would be absurd and self-defeating.[42]
The Amsterdam-Pleyel movement aimed to group all opponents of war together in an umbrella organization. It embraced people of all parties and did not exclude members of any mass movement. All parties referred to left-wing associations in France, to "Socialists, Communists, syndicalists, anarchists, Radicals, republicans of every nuance, freethinkers and Christians, the nonparty members, all pacifist and war resisters' associations, all independent individualities."[43] Romain Rolland sought to unmask those who profited from war. The Amsterdam Congress countered the warmongers by generating a tidal wave of opinion from those revolted by war.
In promoting the Amsterdam Congress among pacifists, Romain Rolland soberly assessed the capacity of war resisters to prevent war in the West. In 1932 neither individuals nor collective antiwar groups had enough power to prevent the next war. Positioning himself on the side of "revolutionary pacifism," he called for a collective, tightly disciplined organization of war resisters who would systematically subvert the main organs of the state to prevent the unleashing of hostilities. He pushed revolutionary Gandhism to a nonviolent syndicalist conclusion, advocating a mass general strike to incapacitate production, hinder mobilization for war, and ultimately topple the state apparatus. "I believe in the invincible power of total Non-Acceptance, without violence, of a people saying No to the State that abuses them: total stoppage of every social activity, of all the wheels of State."[44]
The revolutionary nonviolent solution, however attractive as a tactical preference, was not realistic in contemporary Europe. No European satyagraha campaign could be mobilized. The European Gandhians lacked a leader, an organization, finances, and a significant number of followers. In practice, Romain Rolland suggested that there could be no war resistance unless the workers of the arsenals, building trades, and heavy industries were recruited. In the absence of a viable peace movement, he invited pacifists to collaborate with labor, each group maintaining its organizational and tactical autonomy. "Let us exclude no one!" Against the domination of big business, one had to draw on the organized workers' capacity for struggle. Moreover, pacifists had to recognize that the
peace issue transcended party and doctrinal concern.[45] Urging pacifists to clarify the specificity of their "engagement," he criticized the amorphous quality of pacifist discourse. Refusal to participate in war must be linked to analysis of social injustice, the socioeconomic determinants of war, and the organizational activity, mentality, and political consciousness of the European working class. Aware that his form of revolutionary nonviolence might unleash domestic unrest, he no longer supported nonviolent techniques to the exclusion of alternative methods of action. It might be appropriate to utilize more aggressive tactics—perhaps even to risk civil war or class warfare. "We are not leaders—(we did not want to be)—but guides. We have the duty to know exactly the road [to struggle] in which we engage others."[46]
This defensive conception anticipated the alliance that became the Popular Front. Romain Rolland urged the parties and trade union movement of the left to abandon their long-term animosities, to stop competing with one another, and to mute their divergent interpretations of the present situation. The Amsterdam Congress grouped the Third and Second Internationals, voluntarily allied in opposition to European and Japanese imperialism. No international could prevail over another or outvote another. The congress ought not to break down into majority and minority factions. Emergency circumstances required strategic unity, but without collapsing tactical and ideological differences and without jeopardizing the preexisting autonomy of the constituent groups. "We want to find a terrain of agreement that worker organizations and representative individualists may employ all together against war while leaving to each its own independence, its full and free choice of means to employ."[47]
Despite the resonance of the antiwar appeal among rank-and-file workers, despite the popularity of the anticapitalist and anti-imperialist sentiments expressed in the advance publicity for the Amsterdam Congress, Romain Rolland's objectives collided directly with the deep-seated hostility between communists and socialists. This historical rivalry was not overcome. Rather than join a common coalition against powerful opponents, communists continued to refer to their socialist brothers as "social fascists." Socialists, in turn, continued to denounce dictatorial tendencies in the Soviet Union and in centralized European communist parties. As late as
the summer of 1932, the two worker internationals intensified, rather than diffused, their divisive relations. Vilification remained the rule, collaboration the exception. The consequences of such enmity were particularly disastrous in Germany, where a divided left failed to form a coalition against the National Socialist party.
Without official socialist participation, Romain Rolland and Barbusse could not claim that the Amsterdam Congress truly represented a unified proletarian front against war. From the first publicity about the congress in June 1932, Second International socialists balked and ultimately withheld their support for the venture. Despite exchanges of letters and even a personal meeting between Friedrich Adler, a leader of the Austrian Social Democrats and secretary of the Second International, and Barbusse in Zurich to negotiate terms, the socialists repudiated both the Amsterdam Congress and the strategy of the "United Front" against war.[48]
Adler challenged the organizational structure of the congress, protesting the composition of the executive committee. Workers should be represented to make their presence commensurate with their importance. Although intellectuals such as Romain Rolland were "sincere" and "courageous," they were essentially uncritical and easily deceived, for the congress was controlled by outright communists such as Barbusse, the international chairman, and the secretary of the World Congress, Louis Gibarti, a lackey of Willi Münzenberg. Above all, Adler feared that the Amsterdam Congress would be twisted into an antisocialist forum, not a rallying point for war resistance. The latent purpose was to create propaganda for the Soviet Union and to disrupt the socialist parties all over Europe, thus deforming the congress into a "crime against the working class."[49]
Romain Rolland and Barbusse underscored that the Amsterdam Congress was designed to be above parties, and that workers, not only intellectuals, were widely represented. To refute the charge of communist domination, they pointed out that the majority of the executive committee was noncommunist. The Third International had demonstrated its nonsectarianism by endorsing the congress even though "idealistic pacifists" were included. Adler forgot that the organizational autonomy and tactical freedom of every constituent group had been guaranteed from the beginning. Both Romain Rolland and Barbusse perceived Adler's socialist view as one of
a "spirit of hostility" against the World Congress. Such a view revealed socialists' inertia and inability to innovate. Rather than promote daring ideas, they retreated once more into a posture of suspicion and denigration. Adler's obstructionism indicated the unwillingness of socialists to participate in a united front that tried to fuse the international working-class organizations with pacifist and progressive intellectuals in a mass antiwar coalition. For Romain Rolland the socialist reaction to the Amsterdam Congress replicated the loss of nerve and the inadequate social and political analysis of 1914. It reflected how international socialism had undergone a process of "embourgeoisement." Socialist leadership trusted only respectable parliamentary opposition and desired to come into power by succeeding more liberal and centrist ministries.[50]
The World Congress Against War opened in Amsterdam, 27 August 1932, in a charged atmosphere. Over 2,200 international delegates entered the immense Palace of Industry singing revolutionary songs, surrounded by red banners with the inscription: "Struggle With Us Against Imperialist War." When Barbusse appeared at 1:30 P.M., he was greeted by "frenetic ovations," and the crowd rose and spontaneously struck up the "International" in various languages. The two watchwords were "War on War" and "A Single Front." After electing a permanent international committee, the congress proceeded with the real business at hand: hammering out a strategy against imperialist war.[51]
Because of a serious respiratory illness, Romain Rolland was under doctor's orders not to attend the Amsterdam Congress. Following Barbusse's opening remarks, Romain Rolland's Declaration to the World Congress was read in his absence by the French pacifist-feminist Gabrielle Duchêne, president of the French section of the International League of Women for Peace and Freedom. Romain Rolland was explicitly identified with a pacifist position at this congress. After extending his fraternal greetings to the delegates, his Declaration commented on his evolution since World War I: "And permit the man who was marked by the title during the war, as if it were an injury, of being Above the Battle , to deploy the great flag of the single front: Above all parties! "[52] He underscored the educational value of this demonstration. Tactical divergence was tolerable if the goals of action converged. These goals constituted an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and uncompromising anti-
war activism. Such tactical eclecticism permitted agitation and propaganda for pacifist struggle as well as for individual and mass action.
Since fascism was another form of imperialism, Romain Rolland declared that an opposition to imperialist war meant an all-out resistance to fascism:
Among Germans, on the day after a Hitlerian coup d'état, or among those peoples dominated by fascism [fascistisés ], it is clear that the dangers are greater, therefore it is more meritorious to risk oneself, to take a stand, against the obscure forces of nationalist suggestion, surging from the misery and despair of those who cynically exploit the Reaction.[53]
World war, wars between colonizer and colonized, class warfare, and even civil wars might break out. Against this apocalyptic backdrop, the country most in need of peace and most jeopardized by world war was the Soviet Union. He asserted that to be antifascist and anti-imperialist meant defending the Soviet Union for its own sake and for its symbolic power as "a hope and an example for all exploited peoples."[54]
The Declaration ended by addressing intellectuals in sympathy with the Amsterdam Congress, particularly doctors, teachers, and liberal professionals. They had the responsibility to act in militant struggle on the side of the class-conscious and antimilitaristic working class. Each group needed the other to form a politicized symbiotic alliance.[55]
The final program of the Amsterdam Congress was summarized in the "Manifesto of the World Congress Against War." The manifesto urged a sustained alliance of mental and manual workers to coordinate defensive action by workers, peasants, and all oppressed masses. It opposed imperialist wars, including those perpetuated by capitalist profiteers in India, Morocco, and Nicaragua and the Japanese incursion into China. It opposed war propaganda, military preparations, imperialist rivalries, the 1919 peace treaties, and the League of Nations. It posited that capitalism as an economic system had reached a crisis stage, as evidenced by the Depression and the subsequent starvation, unemployment, and unequal distribution of wealth in Western Europe and the United States. It denounced the bogey of "Red Imperialism" as a device to divide and weaken the
working class. It advocated self-determination for the Soviet Union, especially in the face of contemporary capitalist threats to its existence. For mass action against war to be effective, an organized, disciplined movement was needed, with the working class playing the pivotal role. The manifesto condemned members of the Second International for their "opportunistic" collaboration with the present social order, which strengthened capitalism. This violated the principles of socialism and indicated that socialists had not evolved beyond their disastrous 1914 capitulation to war. Last, the manifesto held that pacifist resistance to war—including faith in referendums and legal channels, plebiscites, and conscientious objection—was "futile."[56]
The political orientation of the manifesto was more anti-imperialist and antiwar than antifascist. Fascism was mentioned only twice, as an indictment of the Versailles Peace Treaty, and as one instance of extreme nationalism.[57]
Though not present at the Amsterdam Congress, Romain Rolland in September 1932 wrote a summary of its achievement. He relied on the official bulletin of the World Congress Against War, reports published by pacifists, centrists, and communists, and distorted accounts in the reactionary bourgeois, socialist, Trotskyist, and Surrealist press. He received information from Madeleine Rolland, who attended the congress in his absence.[58] Statistically, the 2,200 delegates represented 30,000 worldwide associations with over "thirty million members."[59] Although the thirty million figure was surely exaggerated, it dramatized the historical significance of the event. Broad support existed for a united front against war, imperialism, and social injustice. Breaking discipline with the Socialist International, 291 socialists attended the congress. The dissident socialists understood the need for a public stand against world war and an alliance with progressive sectors of Western capitalist societies, including the communist parties and communist-dominated trade union organizations. They put aside their traditional animosity toward the Russian Revolution to sign a statement in defense of the "Soviet Revolution."[60]
Romain Rolland was heartened by the reverberations of the Amsterdam Congress in intellectual circles and among "liberal professionals." The congress was endorsed "by an elite of French intellectuals," including Georges Duhamel and André Gide. In addition,
prominent French academics, pacifists, and communist intellectuals sanctioned it enthusiastically. These "masters of pen and thought," linked to a just cause, could ignite public opinion and create a momentum toward future fronts. He emphasized the democratic, nonpartisan structure of the congress: members of many nations and political tendencies were provided with a forum and allowed "freedom of speech." The congress did not exclusively reflect the communist point of view.[61]
The manifesto of the Amsterdam Congress had a "composite" and diffuse quality. Romain Rolland played no part in writing it. The document was designed to maintain a tenuous unity among various different political outlooks and world visions and could not satisfy each constituent group. One could criticize the manifesto constructively: Romain Rolland, in fact, stated that he would have refused to sign it because of its reductionistic condemnation of conscientious objectors. In reiterating his commitment to a militantly applied form of Gandhian satyagraha, he asserted that the "collective Refusal" of nonacceptance could definitely paralyze the modern state and be effective in war resistance. He completely supported the congress in "its appeal to the union of intellectual and manual [workers] and its appeal to organized direct action by the proletarian masses against war." The congress succeeded in creating "an international Committee of struggle against imperialist war."[62]
Romain Rolland's critique of the manifesto was not rhetorical. He was prepared to resign from the committee, he told Barbusse, unless more accurate and less "disdainful" distinctions were made about pacifists and the role of the nonviolent resister in the Amsterdam movement. The manifesto confused the Gandhians, who were prepared for militant forms of collective action against war, with individual antiwar resisters, many of whom were "cowardly and often hypocritical exploiters of a verbal and comfortable pacifism, a pacifism without risk." The Amsterdam movement attempted to coordinate both violent and nonviolent resistance to war and capitalist imperialism. The Amsterdam Congress echoed throughout Western Europe because it did not impose one set of tactics or organizational priorities over another, but rather allowed for their coexistence. If Barbusse symbolically represented the associated energies of human labor preparing for the social revolution,
Romain Rolland stood for a nonviolent nonacceptance that had its legitimate place both in the resistance to global militarism and in the construction of a durable, nonexploitive society. He would withdraw if one political means or ideological tendency were given a privileged role. In demanding the activist rights of both Gandhian nonacceptors and individual conscientious objectors, he argued that in certain circumstances refusal to serve in the military could be a revolutionary tactic. Independent from all parties, his intention was to mediate between the scattered pacifist factions and the more organized groups of proletarians:
I do not confuse a tactic of struggle with Struggle . I call for the foundation of a kind of General Headquarters of all parties of Revolution: violent and nonviolent, in order to elaborate a plan of action, not one plan, but a common plan, not servilely identical, but intelligently linked and coordinated.[63]
In order to retain the prestige of his name for the Amsterdam committee, the international bureau of the World Committee Against War issued a statement clarifying its position on pacifism in December 1932. This document, authorized by the Communist Parties of France, Germany and the Soviet Union, and probably written by Willi Münzenberg, stated that "conscientious objectors have their place in our ranks . . . and that unconditionally."[64] Romain Rolland, in principle, won the rectification he sought.
Following the Amsterdam Congress, in late August 1932, a public meeting took place at the Salle Bullier in Paris, along with a public demonstration by 20,000 people. Antiwar meetings were simultaneously held in Leningrad and Tashkent; 140,000 reportedly attended the Moscow gathering. By 15 October 1932, Willi Münzenberg, always held in suspicion by the Comintern hierarchy, was replaced by the more reliable Georgi Dimitrov. Dimitrov, however, was arrested in Berlin on 9 March 1933 and charged with complicity in the Reichstag fire. His arrest allowed Münzenberg to resume control.[65]
The Amsterdam movement reconvened at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, 4–6 June 1933. At this meeting, antifascism became the force cementing the alliance. The Salle Pleyel meeting, however, represented a demonstrable shift away from Romain Rolland's idea that there were no enemies on the left, toward a more coherently com-
munist perspective. It was sponsored and financed by Moscow, and Münzenberg was more visibly in charge than at the previous meeting in Amsterdam. After June 1933 the movement was known as the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement. Romain Rolland and Barbusse remained its nominal presidents.[66]
Romain Rolland's letter to Barbusse was not his only attempt to maintain his independence while collaborating with communist front organizations. He was determined not to be an easily deceived fellow-traveling intellectual. He refused to sign a "mediocre and hollow" article called "I Accuse," written by Louis Gibarti, but carrying Romain Rolland's name. The piece was intended for the countertrial of the Reichstag fire being held in London. He never agreed to sponsor such ventures unless he could both "examine and verify the documents." Behind Gibarti, whom Romain Rolland found sympathique and disinterested, he suspected the expedient and contemptuous hand of Münzenberg. "I never sign anything except that which I write myself, only after maturely studying it ." He would not be a showpiece or simpleminded dupe of the communists, even in the name of antifascist propaganda: "I am not a man . . . to be used as a blind and passive instrument." He reminded Gibarti and Münzenberg that he had never subscribed to a political party, nor did he intend to become a communist intellectual who was "militarily regimented" or "weak in character." Communist efforts to parade Romain Rolland's name not only discredited the cause being served ("that of the proletarian revolution and the USSR") but also risked turning the French writer into an opponent—someone who might have to publicly contradict these flagrant abuses. Romain Rolland and Münzenberg exchanged letters, agreeing about the communist abuse of its fellow travelers. Communists often behaved aberrantly and shortsightedly, forgetting the importance of creating a "large movement."[67]
The Amsterdam-Pleyel movement historically ended years of isolation for the French Communist Party, opening the process of constructing a Popular Front coalition. The movement coalesced too late to be effective in the German context; its appeal was insufficient to heal the cleavages between the German Social Democratic and German Communist Parties. It formulated an antifascist alliance (first conceived of as an opposition to capitalist imperialism and to war), which would embrace progressive elements in the
bourgeois world while being consistent with the goals of the international communist movement. Amsterdam-Pleyel revealed a desire to postpone the proletarian revolution in order to extinguish the threat of fascism.
The Amsterdam-Pleyel movement propelled Romain Rolland further into the political arena. As he became more engaged, he reassessed his idealism and his conviction that fascism could be resisted by words, by cultural products, or by nonviolent strategies alone. Amsterdam-Pleyel introduced him to politics 1930s-style, including some of its more distasteful sides, such as the need to make alliances with passive or opportunistic members of organized socialism, with ruthless representatives of international communism, and with paralyzed and mystified elements of the pacifist and centrist wing of the progressive bourgeoisie. Amsterdam-Pleyel further politicized him, even though he was still attempting to mediate between the left and the progressive center. His form of commitment became less linked to unrealizable goals and much more connected to the practical modalities of the European context. From the Amsterdam Congress until the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he would be committed to antifascist agitation and propaganda and to direct mass action. Amsterdam-Pleyel pushed him further away from "above the battle" metaphors, thereby marking a turn toward an all-out, unflinching resistance to fascism in general and to Nazism in particular.
Examining Romain Rolland's much-neglected roman fleuve, L'Ame enchantée , written between 1922 and 1933—the dates marking the accessions of Mussolini and Hitler, respectively—we must remember that Romain Rolland's sociopolitical commitments fused with his art. If Jean-Christophe was the great European novel of internationalism and cultural harmony before the Great War, L'Ame enchantée was the early 1930s' most potent antifascist novel. Both the story line of the novel and the trajectory of the leading characters, Annette Rivière and her son, Marc Rivière, mirror Romain Rolland's intellectual politics from 1929 to 1933—the years in which the final volumes, L'Annonciatrice (The Annunciation ), were written. The Rivières pass from the world vision of liberal, nonconforming individualism to a position of critical support for the communist
revolution. Antifascism was the crucial mediating factor in their evolution. Romain Rolland endowed antifascist resistance with a privileged role in the birth of a new society.
The first hypothesis of the novel was the neo-Marxist one that "the entire capitalist regime of this degenerated bourgeoisie" was indissolubly bound up with the origins, popularity, and continuance of fascism. Though he did not provide a systematic political and economic analysis of the relationship between international capitalism and the development of fascism, Romain Rolland pointed out that the "grand bourgeois have been wise enough to return the cudgel to their duces and their führers." The capitalist profiteers and fascist leaders cemented their parasitic relationship by the unquenchable desire to amass profits, acquire markets, and take raw materials and territory.[68]
In the novel fascism was an international movement, although Romain Rolland drew distinctions between fascist and extreme right-wing regimes in Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Balkans and between German and Italian forms. Fascist practice was characterized by its aggressive, dynamic nature and its appeal to revolt. Fascism in the novel became synonymous with conquest, imperialistic designs, and war. Fascist regimes were typified by mindless emotional ideologies and by primitive war ethics, "fighting for the sake of fighting." More significant, fascism meant "eternal imperialism," perpetual violence without a goal, contradicting any rational view of progress. Generated by desperate men without hope or vision, fascism once in power created a world of pogroms, wars, and the cynical division of the globe into conquerors and the conquered.[69]
Romain Rolland painted an unattractive portrait of Mussolini, unmasking the cult of dictatorial leadership and deflating the uncritical hero worship at the heart of the fascist social movement. The duce is portrayed as a histrionic, self-manufactured, self-aggrandizing tyrant, devoid of human sympathies, unable to love, without compassion for the weak or downtrodden. He was a willful man, capable of strong hatreds, who compensated for his "arid and burning soul" by acts of revenge and by devoting himself to the "torch of smoking action." Beyond conventional categories of good and evil, the duce was driven by his quest for glory, money, and power. Mussolini's activism, and his subsequent social programs, transformed only the surface of Italian society, not its sub-
stance. His fascist regime accommodated itself to the hierarchical and authoritarian institutions of the past, including king, church, family, and private property. He subverted more democratic alternatives—the trade unions, professional federations, and the Italian Socialist and Communist Parties. The novel concluded that "these ducis, the condottiere , were great butchers."[70]
As a novel of political engagement, the work moves beyond a critique and vilification of fascism to offer examples of resistance to the regime by crucial characters.[71] Preserving freedom and creativity in Europe meant not only understanding fascism but also working actively to wipe it off the globe. The young Marc Rivière allowed his bookstore in Paris to become a center of the Italian antifascist emigration in France. The refugee antifascists were articulating a "lost cause." Fascism was too firmly entrenched in Italy to be defeated by the antifascist resistance abroad. Romain Rolland accurately depicted the splits within the antifascist movement between democratic republicans and communists. These divisions weakened the antifascist forces, limiting the movement's effectiveness. Though Marc's mother, Annette, tried to conciliate between the various factions, the narrator (in obvious selfcriticism) indicated that the project of leading all the "troops of the Resistance"—communists, socialists, liberals, and pacifists—in a single front against the fascist reaction was also doomed to failure. It was a "Utopian dream." Despite personal risks to himself, especially from the French secret police and from Mussolini's agents provocateurs operating in France, Marc championed the cause of the Italian antifascists by publishing antifascist books, newspapers, and brochures and by participating in antifascist agitation in Paris.[72]
Romain Rolland created poignant episodes of antifascist resistance within Italy's borders. Out of sensitivity to human suffering, the character Count Bruno Chiarenza was increasingly involved in political antifascism.[73] The gratuitous Blackshirt attack on a defenseless old colleague in Rome became his turning point. Count Chiarenza interceded for his friend in the street brawl, then testified at the court tribunal, where he transformed the victim's defense into an indictment against the fascist police, courts, and the government itself. Hounded by the secret police and Blackshirts, the count was finally forced to flee Italy. He took refuge in Paris and joined Marc
Rivière and Julien Davy, an antifascist from an older generation (antifascism also served to repair generational conflicts). Davy played the role of honorary president of the International Antifascist League.[74]
Marc Rivière's evolution within the novel from an amorphous intermediary of various ideological strains (he described himself as anti-imperialist, pro-Soviet, pacifist, and antifascist simultaneously) to one more closely connected with the Communist International and the organized French proletariat paralleled Romain Rolland's political itinerary in this period. Marc tried unsuccessfully to link the Gandhian social experiment in India with the Leninist Soviet Union, as the novelist tried to do in organizing the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement. Fascism changed the historical consciousness of the characters, modified the specific political nature of their engagement, and drastically altered their language. If fascism posed a threat to all of Europe, then the Action Française and the fascist leagues posed a potent danger in France. In a scene situated at a peaceful, legal meeting of the Secours Rouge International, held to commemorate an anniversary of the Paris Commune, he depicted a direct confrontation in which Coty's fascist troops disrupted a demonstration. Marc Rivière and Julien Davy were slated to be the principal speakers. The event ended with a riot between left and right, during which Marc, in an explosion of rage, killed one of his adversaries. Against the fascist barbarians, counterviolence was both inevitable and justifiable. The scene itself presaged a final collision between fascists and antifascists.[75]
The novel's various perspectives on fascist brutality were preludes to the climactic episode: the assassination of Marc Rivière by a gang of Blackshirt hoodlums on the streets of Florence. Italian fascism had deformed a once great city of learning and culture into a city of terror and street violence. Vacationing in Italy with his Russian-born wife, Assia, and his mother, Marc witnessed a squadristi assault on a harmless old man and his adolescent son. The crowd witnessing the incident remained inert, paralyzed with fear. No one but Marc dared to intervene. He leaped into the fray and was stabbed to death. Yet the meaning of his life did not perish. Annette, Marc's mother, successfully mourned her son by internalizing both the spirit and the substance of his engagement . She continued the
antifascist resistance. After her death, the revolutionary antifascist struggle was passed on to Marc's son, Vania, thus allowing the cycle of the "Enchanted Soul" to be completed by the next generation. Marc died morally, heroically, resisting the forces that negated community, culture, social justice, and voluntary sacrifice. Fundamentally, Marc's sacrifice was neither empty nor suicidal, because it made Annette realize that "one could no longer remain outside the fight."[76]
To sharpen the struggle against fascism, Annette called for an immediate, unequivocal alliance against it. She grew intolerant of all the men, parties, and movements who took refuge in the untenable gray areas between fascism and the integral antifascist resistance. Annette's will to unify the progressive forces of the left could not be thwarted by theoretical or tactical differences of opinion. Just as she concentrated on reconciling the Communist and Socialist Internationals, so she also attempted to merge the struggle against fascism with the international opposition against colonial oppression and a sympathetic outlook on the Soviet Union and the class interests of the organized forces of labor. "The true line of demarcation between parties is between those who will and those who will not act."[77] The Rivières could no longer survive the 1930s as nonconforming individualists. Antifascism jolted them into making meaningful contact with a mass movement struggling for peace and social dignity in the world.
Before her death, Annette was stirred (as is the reader) by an extravagant gesture on the part of a character who was modeled on Lauro de Bosis, the Italian antifascist poet who flew over Rome in October 1931, dropping antifascist leaflets. De Bosis was killed on that mission. For Romain Rolland, he represented a kind of enchanted antifascism, and his flight contained a mythical as well as a political message for contemporaries. In the novel, Silvio Moroni audaciously flew his airplane over Rome, dropping leaflets to the Italian people, inciting them to revolt. Silvio Moroni was motivated by his hatred of Mussolini's dictatorship. The plane crashed; his flight ended in death, and the gesture triggered no uprising. Yet this emphatic "No" to the tyrant humiliating the Italian people symbolized antifascism as both a noble sacrifice and an act of affirmation. For Annette, Silvio's violent death, like Marc's, had tragic meaning in demonstrating that action against powerful adversaries
was possible and necessary. It set a precedent for future opponents of all fascist tyrannies.[78]
Romain Rolland's perception of the international fascist menace in 1933 saturated the final volumes of L'Ame enchantée . He recognized the ascendancy and the offensive nature of fascism and indicated how progressive and revolutionary forces needed to regroup their ranks to prepare a defensive antifascist strategy. He grasped the historical importance of fascism's appeal as an anti-Marxist ideology, its seductiveness as a defender of order and stability. He accepted the schematic Marxist view of the class structure of fascism, namely, that the rich, influential, and economically powerful—the grand bourgeois—had handed over the instruments of state violence and control to the fascists. These shrewd capitalists did so by default, preferring the fascist hooligans who were willing to risk world war to the prospect of socialist revolution or radical reform within their own borders. France and England lacked the will to fight to protect political freedoms and human rights outside their own borders. The French and the British might balk at including the Soviets in a wider antifascist alliance. Stating that one was either for or against fascism, Romain Rolland legitimized the necessity of battle against the fascist antagonists. The former pacifist now employed military metaphors. The antifascist battle was a variant of the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave. To smash the fascists, he now held that all available instruments ought to be used, including violent ones.[79]
One passage of this novel, summarizing the discourse of antifascist engagement, represented the core of Romain Rolland's position in 1933:
The road was blocked for the present. The Revolution in Europe allowed the Reaction the initiative to take the offensive. . . .
The enemy made the first move. Its leaders knew how to exploit the unnecessary panic to which the chatterers of the Revolution, by their imprudent threats, had moved the troubled flocks. Throughout Europe, fascism posed itself as the defender of the moral and social order, of the woolen stocking, of the coffers of the family, of the country, of the "sick mother" and the Father God. The grand bourgeois, having with good reason lost confidence in their own energy, were wise enough to hand the bludgeon to the duces and the führers, risen from the people, whose energy was intact, and who transformed themselves from wolves to watchdogs. . . . The black or brown plague spread from one country to another; its virulence
increased with success. Even France and England, the last deposit banks of democratic freedoms, forgot how to make use of them and withdrew them from circulation.
It was no longer the time to tergiversate. Either for or against! Academic discussions for violence or nonviolence were out of season. The crucial question was of uniting all the forces of violence and nonviolence, against the block of all the forces of Reaction. All should find a place in the army: the great organized Refusal of Gandhi and the attacking troops of Lenin. Conscientious objection, strikes in factories and transport, insurrection, everything was a weapon in the battle that Annette's mind now accepted. She recognized that combat was necessary.[80]
The intellectual politics of L'Ame enchantée pivoted on the unity of intellectuals and workers in an international antifascist alliance. The novel recapitulated the themes of Romain Rolland's intellectual antifascism and opened vistas to a more politicized antifascism for the remainder of the 1930s, anticipating the Popular Front politics of the middle 1930s, with its emphasis on struggle and resistance.
8
Antifascist Resistance
Antifascism is not only the vast field where liberals mingled with Communists as the war in Spain demonstrated. . . .It is a feeling, an attitude, and also a politics.
André Malraux, "Préface," L'Indépendance de l'esprit
For Romain Rolland the year 1933 was marked by a preoccupation with the Nazis. The Weimar Republic entered its final stage when von Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor on 30 January 1933. Romain Rolland followed events in Germany by listening to the radio and attentively reading the German, Swiss, and French press. Living in Switzerland allowed him to think through the National Socialist phenomenon from a variety of perspectives. At first Romain Rolland found Hitler's speeches monotonous and unintelligible. Hitler's spoken German was bad; his orations seemed imbecilic. The French writer did not immediately grasp how these hysterical outbursts of "supernationalism" could appeal psychologically and politically to large sectors of the German population. By March 1933 he no longer underestimated Hitler and his entourage: "Each night I listen to the frenzy of these hallucinated Germans—Goering, Goebbels, Seldte, Papen, Hitler—their husky barkings and their raging shrieks to the crowds that applaud them." These staged mass meetings, somewhere between religious rite and mass theater, revealed the primitiveness at the heart of the Third Reich: "The uninterrupted clamor of Heil! Heil!, regular and decisive like the blows of a sabre; and the parade of musical brass instruments, fifes, and drums; the religious national hymns; Hitler's vociferation continues, choking on the ends of its sentences, almost like an apoplectic fit which invokes: Thou, Master God!"[1]
Hitler's seizure of power transformed Romain Rolland into an integral antifascist intellectual. Having risked his literary reputation in France for his antiwar writings during the Great War, he
was ready to alienate his German public in 1933 by adopting an unrelenting anti-Nazi stand. Thus, he wrote to his German publisher: "It is inevitable that I will participate publicly against the state of violence in Germany, as much as I have against the Reaction in all countries. And at this very hour I am protesting against Hitlerian terrorism."[2]
Urged by the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists to respond to the National Socialist takeover, Romain Rolland penned a sharp denunciation of Hitler's regime. Typically, his first committed anti-Nazi stance began as a proclamation to humanistic intellectuals to unite against and unmask Nazi barbarism:
At one stroke the brown plague has surpassed the black in its horror. Hitlerian fascism in several weeks has totaled more unworthy violence than ten years of its master and model, Italian fascism. The burning of the Reichstag, which it has used as a clumsy legitimation, is an act of gross police provocation, which deceives no one in Europe. Before the public opinion of the world, we denounce these outrages and lies: the entire public authority put into the hands of a party of violent reaction; full official authorization bestowed in advance on crime; all freedom of speech and thought strangled; the insolent intrusion of politics even into the Academies where the few solitary writers and artists who have preserved the courage of their opinions are expelled; the arrest of men held in the highest esteem, not only by the revolutionary parties, but among the Socialist and bourgeois liberals; the institution of a state of siege through the whole of Germany; the suspension of elementary rights and liberties on which all modern civilization is based. We appeal to all to join us in our protest, all those writers, all spokesmen for opinion, all those in Europe and America to whatever party they belong, who feel the unworthy outrage perpetrated to the essential dignity of man and citizen, and the solidarity that binds us to those who fight against the unrestrained terrorism of a reaction that is without scruples as it is without curb.[3]
Asked to endorse a large antifascist meeting organized by the Comité d'Aide aux Luttes Contre le Fascisme Hitlérien, Romain Rolland castigated the National Socialists for their unrestrained cruelty, ignorance, ethnic intolerance, and repressive policies. If he sympathized with the antifascist emigrés, he implied that real resistance to the "German executioners" would be propelled by the disciplined activity of revolutionary workers. Nazi atavism caused him to heat up his own rhetoric, comparing Hitler's excesses with acts of religious intolerance, including the atrocities of past history:
Though I am ill I do not wish that my voice should be missing at your protest meeting against the butchers of Germany. May these murderers, these torturers, be thrust aside, by the giant fist of the revolutionary masses of the world! These frenzied imbeciles, within several weeks, have flung Europe several centuries backward, beyond even the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes—to the abject time of the St. Bartholomew Massacre![4]
Romain Rolland urged his younger colleague Jean Guéhenno to open up the pages of Europe to such persecuted antifascist refugees as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, in order to "protest against the unheard-of criminal attacks of Hitlerian fascism, particularly in regard to free thought and the intellectuals."[5]
As early as 10 January 1933, Romain Rolland learned that the German government intended to present him with the Goethe Prize, Germany's most distinguished award for writers in the arts and sciences. The president of the Reich, von Hindenburg, personally awarded him the prize on 19 April 1933, through the German consul in Geneva.[6] Although the award was designated for the year 1932, before the National Socialists came to power, and in spite of his deep appreciation of German culture, he unequivocally declined it. He cited his opposition to Hitler's policies and the führer's perversion of German history, heroes, and ethical spirit. In rejecting the Goethe Prize, Romain Rolland inaugurated a tradition of writers refusing official literary awards because of political and cultural engagement . He suspected that the Germans were trying to buy off his opposition, to co-opt his sympathies for the antifascist cause.
I keenly feel this honor, but it is painful for me to write you that in the current circumstances I cannot accept it. . . .
But look at what is taking place in today's Germany: the crushing of freedoms, the persecution of parties opposed to the government, the brutal and infamous proscription of the Jews, all of which rouse the world's revolt and my own. You are aware that I have expressed this revolt in public protests. Such a politics will ruin Germany in the opinion of millions of men from all countries of the earth; it is a crime against humanity.
It is impossible for me to accept an honor by a government that has made this politics its program of ideas and action.[7]
A key determinant of the Nazis' rise to power was the destructive bickering between left-wing parties in Germany, above all the
Communist and Social Democratic Parties. Accepting the Communist viewpoint, Romain Rolland indicted the Social Democrats for their inaction and divisiveness, which in turn stemmed from an inaccurate historical analysis of fascism and deep personal weakness and passivity on the part of the leadership. Antifascism was historically doomed unless antifascists risked defeat in practice:
What affects me politically is not so much the brutal trauma of the fascist movements as the almost total abdication of the parties opposed to them. . . . One must dare to be defeated , but with one's weapons in hand, fighting, without asking for mercy, or consenting to agreement. . . . If they pretend, as the degenerate Socialists of today, to save their skins, to risk nothing except what is absolutely safe, then let them withdraw from the field of action. They are only good for taking notes in a library. None of the leaders of the Second International has the right to usurp direction. They have betrayed the expectations of the masses that were entrusted to them. Gandhi would condemn them no less than Lenin. For the essential point is not "violence or nonviolence," it is "to act." The worst defeat, the only irremediable defeat, is not inflicted by the enemy but by oneself.[8]
His analysis of the National Socialist seizure of power reflected his disappointment that the German left failed to unify or put aside their differences—as had been proposed in the Amsterdam Congress manifesto in the summer of 1932.[9]
Most non-Jewish antifascist intellectuals failed to situate anti-Semitism at the center of their perception of German fascist theory and practice. Here, Romain Rolland was once more the exception. He understood that the combination of racial anti-Semitism and nationalism was lethal. He insisted that all anti-Jewish policy was ignorant and barbaric, disputing the scientific and philosophical grounding for any doctrine based on ethnic supremacy. He realized that anti-Jewish opinions were specifically National Socialist in origin and that Italian fascism contained no such "stupid and disastrous racism." He predicted that the persecutions and expulsions of the Jews (he did not anticipate organized genocide) would be a heinous crime against the German state itself, not just against the innocent Jewish victims. Rolland's antifascism was internationalist, that is, fundamentally antiracist and antinationalist:
In the unclean persecution of Jews in Germany today, one does not know whether to condemn more severely the stupidity or savagery of the rulers. . . . And the absurdity becomes grotesque (if it were
not grievously tragic) when it is the supposed nationalists who thus act as the worst enemies of their nation . . . . Hitlerism reveals itself to the eyes of the world as a usurpation of power over the great German people by savage illiterates or spiteful, malignant creatures, like Goebbels, whose weak and violent brain has been spoilt by Gobineau's ill-digested paradoxes about the "Inequality of Human Races," and by the fumes of a delirious pride intent on believing in the supremacy of his race.[10]
To denigrate the Jews was to denigrate the cosmopolitan spirit and all European thought and science. It was totally unjustifiable to charge the Jewish race with "vices and its own special infamy," given the outstanding "virtues and great gifts" Jews had historically manifested. He connected Hitler's anti-Jewish statements with police measures and illegal violence against an unarmed civilian population. Romain Rolland, the "enemy of every form of Fascism," held that the Nazis surpassed them all by the crudeness and bestiality of their anti-Jewish dogma.[11]
Romain Rolland reacted to the proscription and burning of books by attacking fascist anti-intellectualism. Intellectuals were indispensable in any peoples' struggle against fascism. If books emancipated the mind, only the disciplined action of mental and manual workers could be directed against "the despotic obscurantism of Hitler, which imprisons ideas and burns books, which tortures and kills human beings."[12]
In late May of 1933, Romain Rolland was named honorary president of the International Antifascist Committee, then planning for the large congress to be held at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. His earlier work with Barbusse on the Amsterdam Congress was sharpened by the antifascist perspective. Front mondial became its journal, watchword, and program. After May 1933, the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement, while turning politically toward the Popular Front, made the struggle against fascism its highest priority.[13]
It was puzzling that Romain Rolland's well-publicized anti-Nazi writings had not generated a counterattack in the Third Reich. He wondered how long the fascist press would spare his books; he expected his texts translated in German to be taken out of print and burned. On 14 May 1933, he wrote an open letter to the Koelnische Zeitung outlining his objections to the new "National-Fascist" Germany. He wrote as a citizen of the world who had been nourished
by Goethe, Beethoven, Nietzsche, and Einstein. Hitler's ideology and action brutally distorted the Germany of the Weltburger:
That Germany is being stamped out, stained with blood, and outraged by the "National" governors of today, by the Germany of the Swastika, the Germany that drives away from its bosom the free spirits, the Europeans, the pacifists, the Jews, the Socialists, the Communists, all who wish to found the International of Labor.[14]
He reminded his German audience that he had opposed the "iniquity" of the Treaty of Versailles since 1919. The führer had hatched a paranoid notion to provoke an emotional support of Germany's rearmament and expansionist aims. Although Germany had real grievances, the conspiracy theory was "a murderous error," reflecting the "delirium of despair." The emergence of National Socialism did not negate Romain Rolland's loyalty to the other Germany.[15]
His critique of the Nazi regime was well documented by witnesses who were harassed, surveyed, imprisoned, or persecuted by the Brownshirts. He had read the published accounts of victims and listened to the radio speeches of the leaders, and his complaints against German fascism were not exaggerated.[16]
Romain Rolland's open letter to the Koelnische Zeitung ended the brief period of benign treatment by the German press.[17] Six fascist intellectuals responded to his challenge during the months of May and June 1933. Their remarks were first published in the Koelnische Zeitung and then in a brochure entitled "Six Avowals of a New Germany" (1933). Rudolf Binding, the most illustrious of these writers, defended the deeper National Socialist intentions in coming to power.[18]
Romain Rolland quickly discontinued his debate with the writers clustered around the Koelnische Zeitung . Real dialogue with fascist intellectuals was impossible: the dissimilarity in historical, linguistic, and conceptual frames of reference was too great. The heart of the Hitlerian revolution remained "a religion of rearmament," the goal of which would be world war. National Socialism went beyond old-style nationalism, standing for a "new and more violent paroxysm" of chauvinism. He carefully read Mein Kampf in German and advised Western nations not to disarm in the face of Hitler's desires to conquer, so clearly spelled out in this text.[19]
Romain Rolland was sensitive to the deceptive methods used to
annex celebrated major thinkers of the past to contemporary political movements. He was deeply disturbed when Nietzsche's sister, the disreputable ideologue Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, sent Mussolini a telegram referring to the duce as "the most admirable disciple of Zarathustra." He immediately resigned from the Nietzsche Gesellschaft , saying that his perceptions of the German philosopher and poet contradicted the fascist one perpetrated by his heirs and by the leading archivists. "I was the friend of Amendola and Matteotti, whom Mussolini assassinated. I am the champion of ideas that Mussolini tramples down. Thus, I have no place in an association that glorifies the Condottiere ."[20]
Fascism notoriously appealed to rebellious youth and to war veterans alienated by the societies they returned to after 1918. If antifascist resistance were to be effective, it too had to catalyze young people. Thus Romain Rolland wrote a "Call to Youth" to rally those with antinationalist, anticapitalist, internationalist sentiments into a "world front." Fascism in one of its "twenty masks" remained a historical possibility in France, in view of the popularity of the extreme nationalism espoused by the French military, the clergy, the reactionary supporters of the church, and right-wing jingoist, royalist, and anti-Semitic groups. Fascism threatened the world's social development by deliberately subjugating "labor and thought." European youth should form a common front against the fascists, the "new Holy Alliances of Reaction."[21]
Six days before the last free election of the Weimar Republic on 27 February 1933, the Reichstag was set ablaze, beginning an unprecedented period of National Socialist violence. On 28 February 1933, the Reichstag Fire Decree was passed. Though directly aimed at the German Communist Party, its language was loose enough to be applied to all opponents of the government. Former Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe was framed as the arsonist of the Reichstag. A public trial took place in Leipzig in which Ernst Torgler, a leading parliamentary member of the German Communist Party, and Georgi Dimitrov, a prominent Bulgarian communist, were placed on trial for complicity in the fire. The Reichstag fire trial catalyzed world opinion, resulting in massive rallies and demonstrations from Rotterdam to New York City. An Antifascist Commission of Inquiry was created in London to collect the facts of the case and to indict the leadership of the National Socialist Party,
whom it accused of being truly responsible for the fire. Under the auspices of the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism, the second Brown Book appeared, thoroughly documenting Hitler's terror. Called The Reichstag Fire Trial , by the end of 1933 it had been published in German, French, English, and American editions.[22]
In arresting Dimitrov, the secretary general of the Communist International, the Nazis were putting into practice the anticommunist bias implicit in their ideology. Romain Rolland had never been deceived by National Socialist legality. The Nazis set the tone of the Third Reich immediately on taking office, by persecuting and assassinating independent intellectuals and dissidents. They legitimized their crimes by invoking anti-Marxism. Romain Rolland pointed to the murder of the Social Democrat Theodor Lessing, and to the arrest and torture of the German anarchist Erich Mühsam, to depict the degrading nature of German fascism.[23]
Whether he campaigned for the innocence and acquittal of Dimitrov, Torgler, Thaelmann, or for the arrested writers such as left-wing intellectual Karl Ossietzsky and pacifist Kurt Hiller, Romain Rolland's appeals unmasked the Nazis' terroristic methods and laid bare their abuse of the judicial process. The "true" incendiaries of the Reichstag were the upper echelons of the National Socialist leadership, including Goering and Hitler himself.[24] He depicted the accused as committed martyrs and exemplary men of decency who embodied the civilized core of Germany itself.
And everybody knows, even in Germany, that it is not Thaelmann the man that the Hitler government is persecuting, but rather it is persecuting the principle of Communism. . . . The entire world is therefore entitled to declare that any secret sentence passed against Thaelmann would be a moral penalty against the Hitler government. The world would charge them with the murder.[25]
Romain Rolland's intervention in the Reichstag fire trial resulted in a letter of grateful acknowledgment by Georgi Dimitrov.[26] A second repercussion was the formation in France, largely under the auspices of the French Communist Party, of the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (AEAR), ably directed by Paul Vaillant-Couturier. A founding member, Romain Rolland also emerged as a visible leader, along with André Gide and the young André Mal-
raux. If he was a showpiece, he was also politically and ideologically at one with the AEAR. He shared their analysis of the current world economic crisis and their desire to reconcile workers and class-conscious intellectuals, while avoiding annexation to any political party. He agreed with their criticism of neutrality as a form of submission to the dominant class and their attempts to develop proletarian literature, to ignite people's art, and to organize a revolutionary culture in France opposed to conformist and fascist conceptions of art. He felt at home in an organization that mediated between the cultural sector and the working class. The AEAR represented over 550 engaged intellectuals. This typical 1930s communist front organization promised its members, simultaneously, independence and unity under the umbrella of antifascism. Romain Rolland offered his "Message" to the AEAR in the form of an antifascist salute. He had "chosen" sides because he found Nazi politics reprehensible. "I join in protest against the executioners of Germany, those murderers, torturers, those frenzied individuals."[27]
Romain Rolland aided antifascist refugees from Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. He lent his name to the International Committee of Relief to the Prisoners and Deported of Italian Fascism, and he supported the German Library of Burned Books set up in Paris. During this time, he served as honorary president of the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement, presiding over the World Committee Against Fascism. He was particularly alarmed by events in Czechoslovakia, where crowds were hypnotized by Hitler's oratory and elaborately staged rallies. The minority of three million Germans in Czechoslovakia longed for a master and were incapable of realizing the dangers of Hitler's "hallucinated violence." This added up to a collective psychological preparation, a yielding to the "mirage of Anschluss ."[28]
In September 1933, Romain Rolland learned from his German editor and translator that his books had been banned in the Third Reich. The Nazi minister of the interior ordered not only that publication of his antiwar essays The Free Spirit (Der freie Geist ) be blocked but also that the printer's plates be destroyed.[29] Several of Romain Rolland's friends, writing from the German concentration camps at Oranienburg, reported that Jean-Christophe was conspicuously displayed under a glass case with the works of Marx and Engels and the classics of Russian and German communism, in the
"museum of damned books, either burned or to be burned." He was gladdened that the Nazi campaign to mute his opposition had concluded. Jean-Christophe, in gesture and in spirit, was now aligned totally with the antifascist cause: "This concentration camp leader, this Nazi fanatic, is not wrong: against Hitlerism, against all the tyrants who trample humanity under foot and who oppress working people, Jean-Christophe will always display the raised fist."[30]
Romain Rolland summed up his intellectual politics in a letter to French pacifist intellectual Victor Margueritte. He prodded his French comrades to distinguish between executioners and victims, to reject any compromise or covenant with a fascist regime, and to conceive of the ongoing antifascist combat in political terms. Hitler's presence in central Europe, coupled with the aggressive foreign policy explicitly outlined in Mein Kampf , made neutrality impossible. A racist, vengeful, fascist Germany was preparing for world war; it was too late for nuanced critical analysis. World peace could not be preserved while fascist movements stayed in power. He now posed the antifascist struggle in Manichean form: not to struggle against the oppressive counterrevolutionaries was to acquiesce. However, he remained ecumenical about the tactics best suited to combat fascism:
As far as I am concerned I will never make an agreement with fascism, and I am resolutely against Hitler's Germany. As for the means of combating it, that is another question. There are means other than war between nations. It is a question of supporting a non-Hitlerian Germany. The Leipzig trial is also a struggle. . . . Hitler must fall. He must, for the peace of the world depends on it. . . . Anyone who has read Mein Kampf knows the words of the secret orders, the excitative lessons taught to the nation; he also knows the feverish and continuous currents being made in Germany . . . and cannot doubt what awaits France and Europe momentarily, if they do not build a bulwark against the rise of this racism drunken with revenge and ready to be released by the fascist regimes, which take hold against all the freedoms and hopes of the world. We cannot conciliate between Reaction and Revolution. We must make a choice. Never has the issue of choice been more clearly posed than today.[31]
French historians view the right-wing riots in Paris on 6 February 1934 as the "pivotal event of the decade, at least in internal affairs."[32] On that day, the tenuous Republican synthesis began
visibly to unravel in the face of a challenge by indigenous reactionary and protofascist organizations such as the Action Française, Croix de Feu, and Solidarité Française. This day of disorder emerged from a framework of parliamentary inaction and disillusionment precipitated by the financial scandals of the Stavisky Affair. No longer could Frenchmen luxuriate smugly in their own democratic freedoms and constitutional rights, feeling that violence abroad could not impinge on France. It became evident that authoritarian, nationalistic, royalist, neoromantic, and anti-Semitic enemies of the Republic existed and that they would use aggressive, illegal, even paramilitary tactics to gain their ends.
Romain Rolland responded to the events of 6 February 1934 by penning an impassioned appeal to "the People of Paris." He consciously echoed the Paris Commune and the great days of the French Revolution. He supported the general strike planned by French communists and socialists on 12 February, which temporarily diffused the right-wing threat and set the stage for the Popular Front coalition to be hammered out in the summer of 1934. Because of the inherent danger of the February riots, he deliberately glossed over fine distinctions between fascist movements and traditional, conservative associations. French fascism arose from an international capitalist and imperialist system in deep crisis, which explained its grotesque distortions and one-dimensionality. Fascism's activist, mock-heroic, venturesome, militarist mentality coalesced into politics of desperation and cruelty. The events of 6 February proved that fascism had to be taken seriously, that it was urgent to begin orchestrated resistance, especially by those who hoped for a revolutionary solution to France's problems. He offered the idea of a people's front in which revolutionary writers joined hands with organized labor in an unrelenting battle against fascism. Romain Rolland's call to the people of Paris recalled Michelet as much as Marx. The strategy of the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement began to take on the style and content of the Popular Front:
Fascism is the last convulsion—which may be fatal—of the capitalist Reaction. It is the virus as an entirety of a rotten regime, the infection of which penetrates into the politics and into the State: imperialism, nationalism, racism, colonial banditry, the exploitation of the world of labor by international finance; all the monstrous forms of the
corrupt business mentality; all the ideological brutalization of its pride and servility, which the bankrupt bourgeois intelligence offers up to the service of the duces and führers, have been put into action with their strength multiplied a hundredfold.
Beware, everybody! Call out to all the forces of Labor, to the million hands of the proletarians, and to the Mind of the revolutionary writers and artists, who have remained faithful to their cause, which is our own! Between fascism and us, struggle to the death. Voltaire's words: "Ecrasons l'infâme ."[33]
Another appeal, written for May Day 1934, rendered Romain Rolland's idea of a popular front more concrete. As a brother he asked intellectuals to abandon their priestly functions and aloofness, to take a life-affirming, activist position based on the historical presence of fascism—"the monstrous parasitism of a murderously exploiting regime." As the danger increased, his rhetoric escalated. In the face of the internal and external threat of fascism, no one could remain isolated or detached. Fascism changed everything. Antifascism became synonymous with the fusion of intellectuals and organized workers:
The decisive battle has begun [est engagé ]. It is no longer permissible to keep outside. . . . I make an appeal to all my fellow intellectual workers.
I appeal to life against death, against that which kills, against the ravages of humanity: . . . the dictatorship of the great companies and the Fascisms drunken with blood. Proletariat, here are our hands! We are yours. Let us unite! Let us close up our ranks! Humanity is in danger.[34]
Romain Rolland was persuaded that fascism was inextricably linked with the economic interests of international capitalism. He adopted the Marxist analysis that behind each indigenous fascist movement there stood a self-interested capitalistic-imperialistic ruling class. The truth of this was frequently manifest only after the fascists came to power, betrayed their antibourgeois appeal, and became another Party of Order. Fascism, in short, was a historical mystification. It advertised itself as anticapitalist, yet it was funded and politically backed by corporate and finance capitalism—"Banks, Heavy Industry, and Big Business." Antifascists had to decipher the hidden from the surface structure of fascism—to strip the ideology of its lies, expose its propaganda machinery, and lay bare its nationalistic, hierarchical, and racist reality. Beneath every fascist regime
were the class interests and iron "grip of high capitalism [grand capitalisme ]." Profascist youth were being duped by slogans and symbolism manipulated by their fascist leaders; they were forced into military ventures at odds with their romantic and rebellious ideas. Antifascist resistance aimed to enlighten young people, especially those who could be reasoned with.[35]
Romain Rolland saw an analogy in the crushing of Austrian Social Democracy in February 1934 and the barbarous repression of the Spartacists. He vilified the role of the Catholic church in legitimizing Austrofascism; Dollfuss's clerical fascism grafted a specifically "Catholic moral and religious hypocrisy" to its feudal, reactionary, militarist, and petit-bourgeois constituency. All fascist movements employed lies, trickery, and Machiavellian devices; all were cynical, self-serving, and murderous. But clerical fascism lacked the ideological candor of Italian or German fascism. Even European liberals were offended by it, because, at its core, it jeopardized all freedom of thought and all secular progress. He praised the Viennese socialists and underscored the historical lessons of 12 February, namely, the importance of a military resistance to fascism and the imperative for the European revolutionary parties to prepare for such combat. Defeats were inspirational, if studied and not repeated. Violent conflict with fascistic movements was becoming unavoidable:
The heroic defeat of the Viennese fighters for socialism has infused new blood into the revolutionary parties of Europe. It has produced union within their ranks. It has dispelled their illusion of a social conquest without conflict, dispelling the illusion of an evolutionary, persuasive approach to social struggle. It has taught them the virile virtues and necessary laws of action. The lesson of Vienna will not only serve Vienna. The whole world has gathered strength from it. Let us salute the heroes who paid for the lesson with their blood![36]
Romain Rolland articulated his own version of antifascist commitment to Carlo Rosselli, a leader of the Italian antifascist refugees in Paris and editor of the newspaper Giustizia e libertà . Integral antifascism meant absolutely no compromise with any fascist regime. Fascism in Italy could best be damaged by infiltrating the fascist syndicates. The most potent weapon against "exacerbated nationalism" was internationalism built on a global alliance of workers and intellectuals. Antifascism was part of a class struggle that had began after the Great War and its peace treaties. Antifascists
had not only to embrace the distant "dream" of a classless society but also to accept authority and cohesiveness in preparing themselves for armed struggle. Fascist governments were organized militarily, highly centralized, and technologically sophisticated. Those unwilling to accept the inevitability of armed clashes with the fascists ought to resign from the ranks of the antifascist resistance: "Antifascism must be constituted in an international army having its leaders and its recruits, its iron will, and its discipline."[37]
Most antifascist intellectuals concentrated their analytical skills exclusively on the Nazis. Not so Romain Rolland. Through the efforts of the communist front organization, the Italian section of the Secours Rouge International, organizations in Paris of antifascist women refugees, committees in defense of political prisoners, and Carlo Rosselli's antifascist newspaper, he could reliably document repression in Mussolini's Italy. He also learned of the pathetic situation of Antonio Gramsci, who, despite a serious vascular disease, was serving the seventh year of a thirty-year prison sentence. He portrayed Gramsci as the exemplary communist intellectual for the 1930s. Just as the young Raymond Lefebvre represented what was best in French communism at its genesis, so the dying Gramsci symbolized the possibilities of Italian and international communism in the fascist era. It is an irony of history that the young Gramsci had a long-standing admiration for Romain Rolland, referring to him as the "Maxim Gorky of Latin Europe." Gramsci had, in fact, adopted Romain Rolland's dialectical formula for the engaged intellectual as the motto of his newspaper, L'Ordine nuovo . For Gramsci, this phrase condensed the revolutionary socialist process: "Pessimism of the intelligence; optimism of the will." Romain Rolland had not met Gramsci and had not known that Gramsci borrowed his aphorism.
Deeply stirred by Gramsci's history, his current agony in prison, and his intrinsic dignity, Romain Rolland penned one of the most forceful antifascist tracts ever written. Immediately translated into German, Italian, and English, it publicized Gramsci's fate as a martyr of Italian communism and helped win Gramsci's release from prison on 25 October 1934.[38]
The brochure opened with an ode to the persecuted victims of Italian fascism, with statistical evidence about those tried, sentenced, and deported by Mussolini's Special Tribunal since 1926.
For those unconvinced by statistics, Romain Rolland composed thumbnail sketches of school teachers and working-class women imprisoned for political reasons, often judged guilty by association. Instead of writing a "whole martyrology of the prisoners and deportees," he introduced his public to Gramsci—"to the greatest of the dying ones." Gramsci's ordeal symbolized the agony of the entire Italian antifascist resistance. His hopes stood for the possibilities of a liberated Italy, an Italy of human dignity, authentic culture, and social justice.[39]
Gramsci had the qualities Romain Rolland extolled in an intellectual: sensitivity, lucid intelligence, courage, the willingness to fight, and the visceral need to defend moral and political principles. Gramsci's task in the 1920s was precisely the same as Romain Rolland's in 1934: to fight for "the realization of the united front of the working class, for the theoretical revival of the Party, and for the conquest of the most advanced section of the petite bourgeoisie and intellectuals." For the broader antifascist cause, Gramsci represented the man of unbreakable spirit, impossible to humiliate, prepared to die to resist Mussolini's oppressions:
The freedom they [the fascists] offered him, on condition that he ask for mercy—on condition that he repudiate his views—that he serenely refused to do; doing so would have been a form of suicide . Nor do we ask forgiveness for him. He who has faithfully fought all his life for his faith has nothing to ask forgiveness for.
So, he will die. And Italian Communism will have its great martyr, whose shadow and heroic flame will guide it in future struggles.[40]
By late 1934, Romain Rolland had moved decidedly closer to a fellow-traveling position. He thought that the international communist movement shared his antifascist outlook and that the coordinated armed efforts of the European and Russian working classes were required to vanquish fascism. His "Greeting to the Spanish Revolution" signified his consciousness that the Spanish Civil War had become the crucial world arena for the fight against fascism. The former Gandhian now glorified military action against the Falange. He predicted that there would be global reverberations from the campaign in Spain. Even if defeats and bloodshed were excruciating, all revolutionary victories sprang from past failures. In offering his fraternal solidarity to the Spanish revolution, he under-
scored to the French the necessity of persevering in the antifascist struggle: "We make common cause with the unconquered Revolution of Spain. We owe it a debt of gratitude for its enormous sacrifices. Let us try to tend its wounds and tear their prey from the executioners!"[41]
In an article written for a Soviet journal, Romain Rolland discussed fascism's potential to germinate in France. Despite Amsterdam-Pleyel and the recently launched Vigilance, the organization of French antifascist intellectuals, the egotism, individualism, privileged status, and purely spiritual concerns of most intellectuals were alarming. The French cultural community cut itself off from constructive experiments taking place in the Soviet Union, divorced itself from meaningful forms of contact with workers, misunderstood class struggle, and isolated itself from the complex web of contemporary politics. French intellectuals smugly enjoyed their honors and narcissistically maintained their superiority. If fascism were to emerge in France, it would tap the aggressive and calculated ideology of French nationalism, especially as expressed by Action Française intellectuals. French fascism would cement the traditional antidemocratic forces: the army, the petite bourgeoisie, state functionaries, the upper clergy, and a small but powerful sector of big business and industrial combines. Moreover, French fascism would use the recent parliamentary scandals and disillusionment with the Third Republic for its own ends. Romain Rolland pinned his hopes on a coalition of youth, intellectuals, and working-class parties.[42]
Mussolini began to implement his grandiose fantasies of a new Roman Empire when his troops invaded Ethiopia in March 1935. This was a flagrant violation of Ethiopia's self-determination and a slap in the face to the League of Nations.[43] Romain Rolland reacted by abusing the duce for his unjustifiable imperialistic aggression. Fascist governments were war-making regimes: the Ethiopian war finally demystified Italian fascism. "The abominable criminal acts committed against the Ethiopian people display to the eyes of the world the monstrous face of Mussolinian Fascism." Such massacres would ultimately be devastating to the Italians themselves, for they left behind the "inexpiable rancor of the colored peoples against white civilization." Italy's penetration into Ethiopia revealed the underlying "cynicism" of fascist ideology, the "piracy"
of its imperialist designs and the "greediness" of its military and economic appetite. Mussolini, the histrionic "Roman Caesar," had to be ousted. Authority had to be placed in "surer and cleaner hands," in order to prevent such "enormous and imbecilic appetites" from being transformed into policy.[44]
In a piece first entitled "Peace Is Fatal for Hitlerism," Romain Rolland modified his pacifist views in the light of new circumstances and made them consistent with integral antifascism. He subsequently revised the article's title to "Through Revolution, Peace." It became the epilogue to a major volume of essays published under the same name. Contextually, the revision reflected the threat in France of a powerful alliance of big business and nationalists who controlled the right-wing and bourgeois press. It was "the duty of every man who sees clearly to speak clearly and to assume his responsibilities." Hitler's dictatorship was a permanent danger because it amalgamated "revenge, aggression, and conquest under the Machiavellianism of his diplomatic profession of peace, which contradicts his chauvinistic publications and rabid appeals in the interior of his country." War was not the solution: to go to war with the Nazis was to fall into a trap set by the profiteers and nationalists of the capitalist West. Sincere antifascists demanded peace, for "it is not war, it is peace that is fatal for Hitlerism." Fascist regimes lacked the internal mechanisms to resolve their social and economic problems. Instead, they rearmed their populations and readied themselves for war. Without the prestige of conquest and military glory, no fascist regime could survive. Consequently, he urged the nations of Europe, including the Soviet Union, to remain united and compel Hitler to accept peace. Only desperate and destabilized countries sought war. Healthy, well-organized states recognized that war was always a "sinister adventure," that it always profited the few while sacrificing the many. Without peace, Hitler would never confront the "just demands of his people whom he has abused, deceived, oppressed, degraded and led to ruin." If world war legitimized Hitler's tyranny, then antifascists supported social revolution because they knew that any other form of peace was based on social injustice. In the contemporary framework, revolutionary class struggle and a defensive battle against fascist dictatorships took precedence over pacifist politics. Before peace could be constructed, fascism must be exterminated.[45]
On the occasion of a plenary meeting of the World Committee Against War and Fascism, held in Paris on 23–24 November 1935, Romain Rolland enthusiastically endorsed the French Popular Front, spoke of the constructive role of the Soviet Union in the world conflict against fascist imperialism, and restated the integral antifascist ideology. Mussolini's expedition into Ethiopia had unleashed an era of fascist wars. The League of Nations' reaction, although welcome, was tardy, and its sanctions had little effect. The leading members of the League, England and France, sought to preserve their own empires. "A party of treason" existed in France that wanted to undermine the Popular Front and the idea of a pact of collective security between France and the Soviet Union by negotiating a secret diplomatic treaty with the Nazis. France would sacrifice its allies in Eastern Europe and Russia in exchange for a Nazi guarantee not to invade France's borders on the Rhine. Such a plan was a gigantic miscalculation. It would only postpone a German military violation of France's borders. True peace could not conceal "imperialist and Fascist aggressions." Antifascist forces, in contrast, had to unify democratic and proletarian organizations and build a "Grand Army" that would bring together "Communists, Socialists, pacifist revolutionaries, conscientious objectors, republicans who have remained loyal to the idea of the Rights of Man of 1789, social Christians who have remained loyal to the ideal of the Gospel against the Church." Progressive intellectuals had an obligation to join in active struggle. For now, intellectuals like himself had to abandon their fantasies of the "one against all." Their talents were needed on the side of working-class revolution. The "greatest danger" was to mistake the intentions of Hitler's Third Reich. These "preachers of hate and extermination" would implement their policies unless they were decisively stopped by antifascists who personified a new order of "peace, progress, and freedom."[46]
In March 1936, Romain Rolland granted the communist poet and writer Louis Aragon an interview, published in Cahiers du bolchevisme, which described his situation on the eve of the electoral victory of the French Popular Front. The Great War and events in the postwar era had forced him to rethink his individualism and his affinity for contemplation divorced from practical action. "Now Romain Rolland finds himself engaged in battle, and he is forced to engage in a camp." That camp was international socialism, best
exemplified by the principles of the international communist movement. He insisted that his own cultural evolution preceded his politicization. Earlier cultural projects, such as the People's Theater, were unrealizable in the period from 1897 to 1904. Because the present era was saturated with fascism, he envisioned no end to conflict in his lifetime. National Socialism had forced him to jettison any hope of a Gandhian form of resistance in the struggle against fascism. If it was chimerical to think that fascism could be opposed nonviolently then it was also absurd to think that the strategy of French integral pacifism, of "internal Resistance," would prove effective against a powerful and completely amoral enemy. Popular Front antifascism represented an active and intelligent reaction to fascist proscriptions of freedom, not a capitulation.[47]
Addressing his Bulgarian comrades, Romain Rolland admitted that antifascist struggle superseded his pacifist world view; nevertheless he called the antifascist struggle a struggle for peace:
If . . . I am a pacifist, I am also an antifascist, and my pacifism is revolutionary. I call all free men from all countries to unite together against the fascisms which threaten all the freedoms of Europe and which are violently opposed to social progress. Every fascist movement is based on a murderous ideology of racism or dominating imperialism, which leads to wars of conquest and the enslavement of other countries and other peoples.[48]
He published two important articles in January 1936, coinciding with the formation of a coherent Popular Front coalition in France. Both were published in Vendredi , a weekly that staked out a nonparty-affiliated but sympathetic position toward the French Popular Front. Vendredi , founded in November 1935, was directed by three younger colleagues of Romain Rolland: André Chamson, Jean Guéhenno, and Andrée Viollis.[49] The Vendredi articles and subsequent debates with French pacifist intellectuals revealed that the politics and ideology of antifascism were no longer compatible with integral pacifism. They triggered an impassioned polemic in Vendredi and in the pacifist, liberal, and left-wing press. These articles, later collected in a brochure entitled Comment empêcher la guerre? (How to prevent war? ), marked a turning point in the history of antifascism and revealed a major divergence between antifascism and French pacifism.
"For the Indivisible Peace" completely severed Romain Rol-
land's connections with French integral pacifism. It singled out the periodical Le Barrage for censure along with two former friends, the professor and journalist Félicien Challaye and the distinguished historian Georges Michon. Present circumstances demanded that Romain Rolland repudiate the current stance of French pacifists, even old comrades whose discourse and present orientation had been inspired by his own writings and example. Now he found that pacifist position was "outside of good sense and the truth of facts." The French pacifist conception of the historical situation was deeply flawed. Pacifists did not realize that the current hour was one of deep and converging crises; their terminology was equivocal; they constantly underestimated Hitler. They set up misleading and inaccurate analogies between the present and 1914. They manifested a naive trust in the tactics of boycott and moral reprobation, which proved untenable during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Above all, Challaye and Michon lacked a critical analysis of fascism, particularly of Hitler's dictatorship and of his stated goals. The absence of such an analysis rendered the pacifists hopelessly anachronistic and ineffective. For Romain Rolland, National Socialism meant "delirious pride, despair, fury and misery." Hitler's foreign policy signaled expansion both into France and into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Only the ignorant could deny that the National Socialists were preparing Germany for war with "tenacious and burning frenzy." That French pacifists glossed over or apologized for the führer's rearmament and plans for conquest was serious enough: that they were willing to deliver themselves and the French nation over to the Nazis without armed resistance was fatal. It betrayed the commitment to the antifascist cause.[50]
His conception of antifascism still served the cause of peace because it eliminated any prospect of a reconciliation between France and fascist Germany. Even the casual reader of Mein Kampf could detect Hitler's real destructiveness and the blatant hypocrisy of his assurances that he desired peace. Mein Kampf was "a Bible of racist hatred and of anti-French vengeance." Romain Rolland read the text in German. The führer's attempts to prevent its translation into French were a perfect example of "conscious bad faith": Hitler clearly did not wish the French to know of his anti-French and antidemocratic designs. Because Nazism was the "eternal enemy," the partisans of world peace should realize that no detente could be
made with Hitler's regime. The Nazi leader's consistent refusal to sign pacts of common assistance and nonaggression with the Western democracies proved that his intentions were "criminal." It was impossible to strike political deals with an "aggressor" such as Hitler or to display weakness before him.[51]
French integral pacifists deluded themselves that a diplomatic alliance could be reached with Germany that would allow Hitler free rein to pillage Eastern Europe and "ruin our greatest ally," the Soviet Union. Pacifists were still captured by the illusion that legal methods, passive resistance, or organized Gandhian techniques could be employed effectively to stop a Nazi invasion. No organized movement of nonviolence existed in Western Europe or France, and Romain Rolland reminded Challaye and Michon that Gandhism had not yet succeeded in India, in the "country where there are more possibilities for success." By alleging that antifascist refugees were warmongers, French pacifists did themselves and these victims a great injustice. In fact, the antifascist emigrés were "living victims of the devastations caused by the savage Fascist and Nazi dictatorship": their critical perspective should be heeded, not berated. The peace he wanted was relative and situational, predicated on current realities, not on shadows and absolute ideals of faith. In the spirit of the French Popular Front, he exhorted Europeans to rally into a gigantic antifascist alliance: "Europe, let us take this in hand. Let us constitute the Ring! The Ring of Peace. And beware anyone who touches it!"[52]
European integral pacifists in the period 1933–1936 adopted an absolutist moral position best summarized in Bertrand Russell's statement: "None of the evils achieved by war is an evil as great as war itself." Romain Rolland rejected Russell's slogan in 1936 as being too unconditional. He stated that slavery was the worst of all evils, "an abyss, a nothingness."[53] The antifascist cause presumed that certain wars were worth waging, especially those linked to the liberation of oppressed peoples. Yet such pacifist intellectuals as Challaye and the Dutchman Barthélemy de Ligt persisted in calling for unilateral disarmament, preferring German occupation to the risk of world war against Hitler.
Romain Rolland's article unleashed a wide debate, including a well-publicized counterattack from French pacifists, liberals, and anarchists. Henri Bouché, an expert on Germany's military pre-
paredness, responded that Romain Rolland suffered from "alarmism" concerning Hitler's offensive military capabilities. He predicted that Germany would reach the military level of other European powers only by 1938. Bouché affirmed that there was "still time left to organize and construct peace."[54]
Félicien Challaye opened his refutation by admitting the French writer's "preponderant" influence on his own pacifist development. Nevertheless, Challaye accused Romain Rolland of stirring up French hatred for Germany. His agitation for internal French unity returned to the concept of the Sacred Union of 1914. His advocacy of a French-English-Russian antifascist alliance, a coalition that revolved around armed resistance, meant brinksmanship with Germany. After studying Hitler's public appeals for peace, Challaye was certain that the führer wanted not revenge on France but "general disarmament." As for Mein Kampf , Challaye challenged Romain Rolland to read the text in its historical perspective. Hitler's anti-French utterances could be understood contextually. Hitler had written the work while serving a jail term during the French occupation of the Ruhr. The book reflected Germany's antagonism to the peace treaties of 1919 and French postwar aggression. Challaye interpreted Mein Kampf as merely a "maneuver for national cohesion." This already twelve-year-old book would not guide Hitler's policies as chancellor: he would be more responsible and conciliatory in office.[55]
Challaye concluded with two statements of faith. First, if war were to break out, integral pacifists would concentrate on "localizing the conflict," that is, diffusing the hostilities, preventing them from escalating into total war. Emotional slogans such as Romain Rolland's "Indivisible Peace" and "Constituting the Ring of Peace" only extended war and increased its ravages. In the eventuality of a German-Soviet military clash, Challaye proposed uncompromising nonintervention, even against the aggressor. Pacifists could legitimately use the tactics of "nonmilitary sanctions (moral, diplomatic, economic, and financial)." Second, if Hitler invaded France, "an absurd hypothesis" according to Challaye, pacifists should refuse participation in such a defensive war, even risking foreign occupation and the renunciation of basic civil liberties. Equating war with the "absolute evil," the "supreme calamity," Challaye believed that a Nazi occupation would, on balance, be less disastrous than the
"deaths, ruins, and sorrows" arising from armed resistance. Challaye could more easily tolerate a fascist dictatorship than armed combat.[56]
Other integral pacifists chided Romain Rolland for his implacable stand against Hitler. Ex-Communist Georges Pioch argued that Challaye's "moral resistance" to fascism was more reasonable than Romain Rolland's proposals of "material resistance," because the latter presupposed that war was inevitable and that only armed battle could successfully meet Hitler's challenge. Just as Pioch eschewed Romain Rolland's desire for military "discipline," so he diagnosed a war "psychosis" developing in his writings, an unfortunate product of his "despair of Germany and of man." L. Cancouet lamented over Romain Rolland's departure from the pacifist position and drew analogies between the French writer's present "warmongering" rhetoric and that of such Action Française hawks as Maurice Barrès and Paul Bourget. Sylvain Brousaudier was stupefied by Romain Rolland's anti-Hitlerian stance. Expressing the strong anti-Soviet sentiments of many pacifists, he accused him of being too "worried about the defense of the USSR." For Brousaudier, the old prophet and pacifist leader had become a "partisan." He could no longer be trusted as a "guide and light." Léon Emery contested the image of the "Hitlerian monster" in Germany, suggesting that contemporary Germany lagged far behind other countries in armaments and that a negotiated peace with Hitler remained a realistic possibility. Cajoling French pacifists to be loyal to what Romain Rolland once was, Emery denounced his "caricatures" of Challaye's pacifist solutions.[57] Finally, Alain, the leading French philosopher of Radicalism, formerly an epistolary friend of Romain Rolland, penned a harsh reference to his intellectual politics in one of his Propos: "Romain Rolland has abandoned his role. He has spoken like a man of government; it is not his business."[58]
Romain Rolland's second Vendredi article, entitled "For the Defense of Peace," appeared on 6 March 1936. It reiterated his impatience with the pacifists' equivocations, their incapacity to produce a coherent definition of pacifism, and their lack of a concrete program of antiwar action. He placed the task of realizing the social revolution higher than all abstract loyalties to peace. To appreciate the present danger of German fascism was to grasp the urgency of strug-
gles of the "exploited and oppressed" on a global level. Pacifists did not understand that Hitler wanted "to annihilate France" and that the unarmed resistance against fascism was totally futile.[59]
The metaphor "Ring of Peace" illustrated his idea of an international antifascist strategy, concretized as an alliance of France, England, and the Soviet Union for the "collective security" of all Europe. Such a coalition of the Western democracies with the USSR did not prohibit the entrance of a nonfascist Germany. Germans, however, had to prove their good faith by accepting the "obligation and guarantees" of this pact by immediately signing a nonaggression pact with these nations. Whether or not Germany participated, nothing could break the pact of collective security. There could be no world peace while fascist governments remained in power: "I will never make my peace with Hitlerism because of the revolt of my heart against its injustices and crimes, its proscriptions and assassinations, its debasement of humanity."[60]
The article ended with a strong statement on behalf of the Soviet Union. Admitting the USSR's "errors and weaknesses," he argued that it offered the world an example of strong opposition to fascist regimes, while its program of social reconstruction generated hopes for "social progress" and "human happiness." Antifascists had to defend the fortress of the Soviet Union for the sake of the Russians and for the real interests of progressive Western Europeans. If communist Russia fell, it would leave the West totally demoralized: the "West will have no blood to resist the iron claw of the massive reaction or its own despair—Defense of the USSR or death!"[61] The Soviet model reinforced his notion that stable world peace presupposed social revolution. French pacifists were locked into a rigid way of perceiving the world and themselves, ways outmoded now because they were based on the horrors of the World War I experience. Pacifists had a mortal fear of bloodshed and total war and they had swallowed a one-dimensional picture of the Soviet Union.
Even as he bid them farewell, Romain Rolland urged his pacifist interlocutors to face up to fascism. The time was past now for pious phrases, moral indignation, prayers, or minutes of silence. Either pacifists assumed responsibility for action against fascism, or they should retire from the political arena. What estranged him from the pacifists was his revolt against German fascism, which they did not
share: that is why he repeated, untiringly, "Fascism is the enemy that must be smashed . I am engaged in a struggle to death against it." He departed from the pacifists with "regret, pity, but no blame." Events had surpassed their ideological comprehension and their capacity to respond creatively with politicized action. Since pacifists spoke only to themselves, he banished them from the French Popular Front: "They imagine that to defend peace they must take refuge in their boutiques, those who have never understood the true sense of the word International , its exigencies, its duties—the duty of struggle, duties of alliance, so that we can arrive at conquering the past for a classless society for the entire world."[62]
French pacifist intellectuals reacted violently to their "excommunication" from the Popular Front. Victor Basch, president of the League of the Rights of Man, found Romain Rolland's analysis of German fascism "pathetic." He accused the French writer of "despairing" of Germany and held that Hitler truly wanted an entente with France. Hitler could be persuaded to adhere to the principles of European collective security. Although the collapse of the Soviet Union would be a "profound disaster" for the Western democracies, Basch was unwilling to countenance any form of military antifascist alliance. He completely opposed a coalition between France and the USSR. Finally, Basch, echoing Challaye, considered any resort to injurious coercion inappropriate, even if reacting to an invasion of Hitler's armies.[63]
Michel Alexandre and Léon Emery expressed faith in the League of Nations as a viable deterrent to war. Romain Rolland, they said, criticized the tactic of boycott unfairly: it had never been rigorously applied during Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. Moreover, his view that the Russians would realize a "new superior humanity" was unbefitting a pacifist. Pierre Cuenat posited a synthesis of revolutionary and integral pacifism. While denouncing war and military preparations for war, he demanded "total, universal, immediate, and controlled disarmament." If war were to break out, Cuenat proposed the tactic of a united front of conscientious objectors and revolutionary pacifists working together toward the "dissipation of capitalism" as the desired goal.[64]
As late as June 1937, a writer with the pseudonym Marc Rivière, borrowed from the antifascist novel L'Ame enchantée , upbraided Romain Rolland for "going over to Stalin" and for promoting "interna-
tional war" in his propaganda for armed resistance against Hitler. Challaye, in another article, attempted to discredit Romain Rolland by red-baiting him. Rather than address the practical issues regarding his perception of fascism and specifically of Hitler's intentions, he vituperated against Soviet communism and its gullible fellow travelers.[65]
Romain Rolland replied to the second wave of pacifist attacks on his antifascist proclamations by publishing three appeals in Paix et liberté , the organ of the National Committee of Struggle Against War and Fascism, formerly the Amsterdam-Pleyel committee. Hitler's strategy was to lull neighbors like France to sleep, while preparing for an invasion or for attacks against their allies, in particular the Soviet Union.[66] Pacifists erred in thinking they could "prevent war" by arguing that Hitler was conciliatory or statesmanlike or that he had legitimate grievances. Furthermore, French pacifists sterilized their doctrine by distancing themselves from mass movements committed to radical social change. The "indivisible peace of Europe" referred to one buttressed by international ties of genuine solidarity among all the peoples facing fascist aggression. His commitment to European peace excluded its imposition by a conquering Germany on a fearful or hesitant Western Europe. Peace was not enough, especially coupled with the indignities and contradictions of the capitalist social system or the deformations of fascism.
We demand our place in the ranks of a great army of Progress, which renews the social order. Our world Peace is that of the new Revolutionary order, which can and will revise the injustices and errors of the old order. Peace and Revolution are linked. By necessity and by the irresistible élan of Revolution, Peace! And by Peace, the large, powerful, and fecund course of Revolution![67]
Antifascism and pacifism were no longer compatible. They would remain antagonistic until after the international destruction of fascism. Once the politics of fascism were broken and its ideology discredited, the social revolution could be regenerated. Only after the inauguration of a classless world would the reign of world peace be made possible. Romain Rolland was aware of the failure of the League of Nations during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. He rhetorically asserted that "the people" themselves could serve as
agents of antifascist resistance if they were united, class-conscious, internationalist, disciplined, and, above all, armed.
Antifascism emerged as a reaction to the sharp polarization and collective fears of the 1930s. For progressive intellectuals the crisis was conceived of as simultaneously moral and political. Yet historians have disregarded antifascism, thinking it too amorphous a social constituency, too indistinct a political creed, and "too vague and diffuse" an ideology to lend itself to an analytic perspective.[68]
Antifascism became the doctrine of French left-wing intellectuals in the 1930s, whether they were Marxists, communists, socialists, democrats, or heirs to the Jacobin and populist traditions. It also resonated with important sectors of the organized working class. Antifascism yielded spectacular events in the French Popular Front government of Léon Blum as well as in the massive international solidarity generated by the Spanish Civil War. Antifascism was the bridge between French communists and socialists, dominating the political discourse of the left from 1934 to 1937 and temporarily repairing the bitter rivalries and deep resentments between the left parties and trade unions. Antifascism helped fuse French enthusiasm for the successful Russian Revolution with an older, more democratic tradition in the French labor movement and with French republicanism. The cultural historian must see antifascism as a major component of the decade's climate of opinion.
To get an analytical grasp of antifascism, however, we must go to writers, not historians or sociologists. Malraux condensed its social and psychological dimension in a lapidary formula: "Antifascism is not only the vast field where liberals mingled with Communists . . . it is a feeling, an attitude, and also a politics."[69] It was a moral imperative. The politics were predominantly those of the French Communist Party's support of the French Popular Front, including intervention in Spain. The language was politicized, even militarized: the intension was to ignite the audience into action. There was pessimism that world war seemed inevitable, but also optimism that fascism could be smashed.
From 1933 until his death, Romain Rolland held that fascism in power was the world's most potent threat to the preservation and
reinvention of culture. Fascism could be fought effectively if its nihilistic core could be unmasked. By 1933, he stood defiantly as an integral antifascist. Antifascism became the key reference point of his intellectual politics, the means to the liberation and self-determination of peoples. It defined all of his subsequent engaged activity. He advocated maximum resistance to fascism, by both intellectuals and the organized working class.
Romain Rolland's antifascist commitments motivated his break with pacifist theory and practice in the early months of the French Popular Front. It was responsible for his final break with Gandhi, even after Romain Rolland had extended his pacifist politics to a revolutionary, syndicalist conclusion. It made him far more receptive to the Soviet Union and to the Comintern's policies, especially after the Comintern embraced antifascism in 1935. He anticipated that the Russians would be an indispensable link in any prolonged military struggle against Hitler. By 1936, he realized that the German fascists could mobilize vast military and technological resources and that Hitler's territorial ambitions extended to Eastern Europe and Russia as well as France.
The reality of expansionist fascism finally forced him to abandon the First World War as his reference point. The need to defeat fascism meant postponing the European social revolution. Romain Rolland advocated the Marxist thesis that capitalists would opt for fascism before risking social revolution or radical reforms in their own countries. He collaborated with communist front organizations because his analyses and commitments coincided with theirs. Malraux generously assigned to Romain Rolland's antifascism "abundance, dignity, stature, and resonance."[70] In terms of Romain Rolland's intellectual politics, the rise of the French Popular Front meant that the engaged writer was explicitly antifascist. If antifascism was the high point of his politicization, it also encouraged solidarity with other intellectuals, workers, mass movements, and nations repelled by fascism, even to the point of risking world war.
9
The Politics of Critical Support
Who fights for Communism must be able to fight and not to fight; to speak the truth and not to speak the truth; to perform services and not to perform services; to keep promises and not to keep promises; to go into danger and to keep out of danger; to be recognizable and not to be recognizable. Who fights for Communism has only one of all the virtues: that he fights for Communism.
Bertolt Brecht, The Measures Taken
Ten days after Lenin's death, Romain Rolland eulogized the Bolshevik leader with a mixture of criticism and affection: "I did not share the ideas of Lenin and of Russian Bolshevism. But precisely because I am too individualistic and idealistic to adapt myself to the Marxist creed and to its materialist fatalism, I attach extreme value to the great individuals, and for Lenin, I have a real admiration." In the middle 1920s, he drew a parallel between Leninism and Bonapartism, suggesting a will to power in both ideologies and a hardening of the revolutionary impulse into tyranny. Both Lenin and Napoleon were disciplined, activist, innovative, and highly authoritarian. Both practiced political expediency, combining a moral vision and a dictatorial style that radically transformed their epochs. Lenin's self-abnegation and "will of steel" had fused with communist doctrine to produce a powerful religious faith. "Never before had human action produced a master of men, a more absolutely disinterested dominator."[1]
Responding to P. Kogan's address "Western Revolutionary Art," Romain Rolland argued that Leninism drastically simplified cultural and political activity. His own alternative was more vitalistic and opposed to state policy restricting scientific research or artistic production. The "class-against-class mentality" was a mechanistic and dangerous form of dogma. All attempts to legitimize dictatorships were sophistic rationalizations of oppression. Romain Rolland's vi-
sion pointed to universalism, self-reflection, and voluntary political association rather than to the Leninist emphasis on proletarian domination. Nor did he accept the inevitable triumph of the victimized slave through violent social confrontations and political collisions. He feared the Leninist hegemony both in its political practice and in its ideological line. A revolutionary intellectual existed outside of a party or social movement.
As I understand it, the truly revolutionary mind never permits the congealing of forms of life. . . . The truly revolutionary mind tolerates no social falsehood. It is incessantly at war with every prejudice. . . . It is as armed against the new prejudices of the Proletarian Revolution as it is against the old prejudices of bourgeois democracy, . . . for in its eyes every social and political form marks only an hour on the dial. The art issued from it must function to uphold freedom against all. [To uphold] the whole truth. . . . On the road to truth we often find ourselves the companions of the revolutionary proletarians. But free companions. Not enrolled. . . . And working not for the domination of one class but working for all men. We shall not tolerate it that one class of men be either oppressive or oppressed.[2]
After the Rollandist periodical Europe refused to publish a novella by Maxim Gorky that was critical of Bolshevik functionaries, Romain Rolland upbraided the editor, Léon Bazalgette, for allowing politics to bias aesthetic judgment. If Europe were to provide a corrective to the "detestable influence" of the Nouvelle Revue française, the worth of literature had to be determined according to its artistic and human value. "In art there are no parties of Left or Right." Europe could express the editors' personal views and "prejudices" but should also offer essays with contrasting points of view. The Parisian literati were blind to the internal realities of the Soviet Union, ignorant of its language, and misinformed about its social and cultural conditions. They stressed only the "grandeur" of the revolution. Romain Rolland never denigrated its stunning accomplishments, but communisant French intellectuals seemed oblivious to the Russian Revolution's "ignominies," that is, "the suffering, ruins, cruelties and imbecilities that weigh on millions of innocents."[3]
During Romain Rolland's Gandhian period, in the 1920s, he maintained that there were essential similarities between fascist and communist methods: the use of violence, one-dimensional political philosophies, the party spirit, and the systematic curtailment
of both traditional civil liberties and intellectual freedom. He chose to remain autonomous.[4]
In May 1927, Romain Rolland replied to charges by the Parisian anarchocommunist weekly Le Libertaire concerning the Soviet secret police and government persecutions of Russian anarchists and Social Revolutionaries. Although the sources could not be verified, it appeared that the Soviets had arrested their political opponents. Twentieth-century politics made him realize that "the worst is always certain" and that expediency was the motor force of all systems of government. Yet the Russians had no monopoly on repression or hypocritical rhetoric: "Every government, whether it is imperialist, bourgeois, fascist, or communist unfailingly does everything that it condemns in its adversary, and everything that condemns it and its ideas to failure and to ruin." Soviet abuse of power was reprehensible because it was directed against former participants in the October Revolution, the "old comrades of its ordeals and sacrifices." The French writer called for a general amnesty of Russian anarchists and Social Revolutionaries, an end to the mutual resentments between the Bolsheviks and their fraternal opponents. He urged a unified front against common enemies as an antidote to Bolshevik extolling of force. The European left would perceive this as an act of good faith. By amnesty he meant emptying the prisons in "good sense and magnanimity." The slogan "Russia is in danger" suggested that the Soviets' existence was threatened externally by European imperialists and hostile neighbors, while it remained unprepared for war or invasion. The Soviets undermined the ongoing social experiment by circumscribing individual freedom within their borders. If the Soviet revolution were crushed, not only the Russian peoples but also the entire world "will be thrown back several stages," deprived of a practical opportunity to implement progressive social ideals. His judgment on Bolshevik repression was mixed: "Whatever have been the injustices, stupidities, and often even the crimes of the Russian Revolution, the Russian Revolution represents the greatest, the most powerful, and most fecund social effort of the modern world."[5]
The French communists pounced on his interpretation of Soviet repression with a sectarian article by Jean Brecot in La Vie ouvrière . Brecot regretted Romain Rolland's association with the "counterrevolutionary" anarchist weekly Le Libertaire , whose anti-Soviet cam-
paign was "wedded to the general bourgeois attack against the USSR." Brecot challenged the evidence of repression in Russia, suggesting that the documents were suspect, "provided by emigrés and by members of the old czarist aristocracy." Romain Rolland's anticommunist formulas derived from his "passive and pacifist attitude," which was fundamentally metaphysical and "above the battle." The French writer misunderstood class struggle and lacked the political acumen to distinguish between various forms of government. He lumped them together indiscriminately and "condemned them equally." If he worked "at a Citroën factory," he would grasp the "great economic laws" of class conflict and the practical modalities of the political arena. Brecot disagreed that the Soviet government should collaborate with its political renegades. Amnesty for the anarchists and Socialist Revolutionaries was strategically unwise. It might unleash civil war in Russia, thus fulfilling the wish "of all the anti-Bolshevik forces in the world."[6]
Reverberations of his Libertaire polemic reached the Soviet Union. On 2 September 1927, Anatole Lunacharsky, the broad-minded people's commissar of education, requested Romain Rolland's collaboration with the new review Revolution and Culture , which was to be a literary supplement to Pravda . Lunacharsky assured him that his writings would be published uncensored in accurate translations, though the editorial board reserved the right to comment on any article submitted. Despite their divergences from him, Soviet writers accorded him "great respect." Lunacharsky predicted that the association "will be imminently useful to our public."
Your reply to the newspaper Le Libertaire has shown us, at the first attempt, that your objective wisdom is superior to the hesitations of many intellectuals who sometimes call themselves our friends. That does not mean that I agree with all that you have written in this letter; but the magisterial political tone is just and morally elevated.[7]
Romain Rolland accepted Lunacharsky's invitation cautiously. He agreed to contribute an occasional article, writing as a "free Frenchman." If he opposed the European bourgeois press campaign to debunk the Russian Revolution, he knew also of major injustices emanating from the Bolsheviks themselves. To counter the anticommunism of the "hypocritical reaction" and to unmask the plots of the "international Profiteers," he emphasized the "gran-
deur," "historical necessity," and progressive aspects of the Soviet Revolution. He would not endorse the unnecessary excesses of Soviet communism: "My aversion for certain of its political methods, too connected to the worst errors of the reactionary politics that it combats, for its narrowness of doctrine and for its dictatorial spirit. I have condemned without regard its duplicity and its violence." He realized the monumental innovativeness of this great social revolution: internal democracy and self-criticism were the best assurances that it would remain "the powerful vanguard of human society." To persuade Western intellectuals to sympathize with the Soviet cause, Communist Party leadership had not only to upgrade its simplistic slogans but also to jettison the mindless posturing so prevalent in Soviet Marxism. Intellectuals would resist such alliances until the Soviets demonstrated a consistent antifascist perspective that incorporated a thoroughgoing commitment to human dignity, enlightened self-reflection, and basic individual freedoms: "You will rally the phalanx of vigorous minds, which refuses its obedience to dogma whatever it may be, and which leads a struggle against all Fascisms, whether of the right or left."[8]
Asked by the Society of Cultural Relations between the USSR and Foreigners (VOKS) to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Soviet Revolution, Romain Rolland hyperbolically celebrated the event as "the greatest anniversary of social history." Professing his revolutionary fraternity as a non-Marxist French intellectual, he glossed over the ethnic, geographical, historical, and cultural differences between his Russian comrades and himself. He stressed instead a powerful unifying bond—labor. Labor created abundance, vitality, gave meaning to life; labor was more than just the "spirit of life," it was the "sole king of the world." The Russian Revolution's supreme accomplishment was to establish the dignity of labor as its operative social principle. The USSR was the world's strongest barrier to "all the imperialisms, fascisms, and obscurantisms" currently on the rise in Europe. In modern Russia existed the possibility of a collaboration between mental and manual labor. As a "Republic of Labor," the Soviet Union had already surpassed the most advanced socioeconomic achievements of the French Revolution while avoiding some of its "errors and crimes." After one decade, the Soviets appeared to have avoided the bloodthirstiness of the Terror, the chaos of internal disunity and civil wars, and the
destabilization of the rapid succession of government. The enemies of these revolutions were similar: the coalition of the European reaction, dictated by the interests of big capital and the military, with Great Britain the most flagrant of all. To date, the communist revolutionaries surpassed the French Jacobins in political wisdom. Rather than export their ideas by war or by conquest, they were dedicated to building "their own house in a reliable manner." Rather than replace the old regime with a new structure of privilege, they fostered a relatively egalitarian form of construction within their own borders. The Russian Revolution on its tenth anniversary symbolized a hope for the world's future.[9]
The anarchocommunists of Le Libertaire strongly contested Romain Rolland's salute to the Soviet Union. Russian emigré N. Lazarevitch alleged that the Frenchman failed to distinguish between the Soviet people and the Soviet rulers. Anarchists still faced torture in prisons, and worker sovereignty did not exist in the USSR. In fact, the dictatorship of the proletariat exploited the majority of Russian workers, many of whom were "crushed in mines and factories."[10]
Romain Rolland cited the impartial study by the liberal Italian Catholic Guido Miglioli, The Soviet Village (1927), to document the élan of the Soviet peoples and to underscore the "immense" achievements of only ten years. Lazarevitch's analysis was one-sided, omitting that in the USSR "the development of good and evil are mingled in gigantic proportions." To object to Soviet crimes without praising its creative initiatives was polemical and contrary to disinterested inquiry; such analyses were misguided. Compared to the social stalemate and political regression in postwar Europe, the Russian model stood as a significant "island" of progress. Romain Rolland consistently refused to adopt the perspectives of ultra-leftist or anarchist groups during the interwar period. Instead he called for a common front, an interclass leftist alliance against the political and social injustices of the reaction: "I do not defend a party. . . . When I think of the Tenth Anniversary of the October Revolution, I do not think of Stalin, Bukharin, Trotsky, or Zinoviev—or of Lenin. I think of the broken chains of the fallen Bastille. Now the work must be finished, for other Bastilles remain."[11]
To Lazarevitch, Romain Rolland's articles exemplified how the Soviets cynically exploited his reputation and naivety. He was "in-
voluntarily" situated on the side of the intellectual idealist, which accounted for his biases "against the proletariat."[12]
Romain Rolland replied that he was unable to separate the realities of the Soviet government and the Russian people. If Romain Rolland's allegiances were with the intelligentsia, how could Lazarevitch explain his "lively sympathies" for the Russian Revolution, despite his explicit disclaimers: "I am . . . at least the only nonBolshevik, noncommunist, nonpolitical intellectual who has spoken for the Russian Revolution at the present time." Lazarevitch did not understand that much of his life had been spent deflating the intellectual class of its superiority. He rejected Le Libertaire's ouvrièrist view as a presumptuous and reductionistic form of dogma: "I do not believe in [the class dogma] of the workers unless you enlarge the name to all those who live of and for their Labor, as I live also."[13]
Romain Rolland's tenth anniversary greetings to the Soviet Union triggered an emotional polemic by two Russian emigré writers, Constantin Balmont, a poet, and Ivan Bounine, a distinguished writer who in 1933 became the first Russian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In two open letters published in the anticommunist daily L'Avenir , the exiled Russians accused the Frenchman of "shaking hands with assassins." According to Balmont, the Soviet regime was synonymous with massive destruction. The majority of the Russian population opposed the Bolshevik regime. Bolshevik abuses included censoring all printed material, denying religious liberties, plundering the peasantry, throwing millions out of work, and executing or destroying the sanity of leading Russian intellectuals.
Bounine exhorted Romain Rolland to return to the role of "world conscience" and "humanitarian." The French Nobel laureate ought to repudiate the "brigands and band of ill-doers who have devastated and exhausted Russia over the last ten years." Bounine supplied him with ghastly information from noncommunist sources and appealed to him as a well-informed, liberal-minded Russian writer, not an "obtuse reactionary." He summed up his disillusionment in one sentence:
If certain of us hate the Russian Revolution it is solely because it has atrociously offended the hopes that we have put into it; we hate in it what we have always hated and will always hate: the tyranny, the arbitrariness, the violence, the hatred of man for man, of one class for another, the baseness, the imbecile cruelty, the trampling of all
divine prescriptions and of all the noble sentiments; in short, the triumph of the muzzle, of the villainous.[14]
Romain Rolland acknowledged that the world of these two "representatives of human nobility" was irrevocably shattered. The emigré writers were destined to live out their existence in psychological and cultural exile in a world that received them with "indifferent egoism or intolerable pity." He distrusted the current allies of Balmont and Bounine. They had become "instruments" of the European reaction, the "monied imperialist moral order" that wanted to crush the Soviet Revolution, not to restore the Russia for which these artists yearned. The imperialists wanted a dependent Russia they could manipulate to their own advantage. Knowing that the anti-Soviet Russian writers had developed a mental framework that prevented them from being reconciled to the revolutionary regime, Romain Rolland wrote for self-clarification. It was practically impossible to have dialogue with a "martyred writer."[15]
Balmont and Bounine failed to appreciate the historical context of the Russian Revolution and how that context decisively affected its first decade of existence. The Bolsheviks contended with the heritage of czarism as well as with severe, converging crises—the cataclysmic effects of the First World War, foreign invasion, and a civil war followed by a period of famine, epidemics, and massive population dislocations. After the final squelching of the European revolution in the early 1920s, the Soviet Union stood completely isolated internationally and menaced by internal opponents, its borders surrounded by enemies.[16]
Although he was publicly "disgusted and horrified by their ferocious errors and crimes," Romain Rolland was convinced that the Soviets were creating a new world. An impartial observer had to be "struck by the original reconstruction and vigorous renewal" taking place there. Profoundly uprooted emigrés clung to rigid ideas fueled by frenetic rage against the Soviet state. They conspicuously omitted all mention of Soviet achievements. As a corrective, he highlighted educational, technical, scientific, and social advances taking place in the USSR. Bolshevik collectivization and the establishment of worker and peasant councils promised glorious results, reversing centuries of stagnation and mystification. Having radi-
cally broken with the past, the Russian communists were building a new world that would benefit their children and grandchildren. Underscoring the "joy," the "health," and the "vital sprightliness" of Russian youth, he explained Soviet exuberance in terms of a collective sense of purpose.[17]
Balmont and Bounine's allegations that his information on the USSR derived from Communist Party sources were misleading. Romain Rolland distrusted the orthodox line of every political party and had always refused to compromise his intellectual independence by joining one. His pro-Soviet sentiments stemmed not from politics but from his historical imagination. He was kept informed of Soviet affairs by travelers, scholars, and writers, many of whom visited him in Switzerland after their journeys to the USSR. These witnesses represented the spectrum of classes, countries, opinions, professions, and ideologies. Over two-thirds had begun their investigations unsympathetic to communist ideas. The sincerity and aptitude for observation of such men as Georges Duhamel, Luc Durtain, Max Eastman, Scott Nearing, Guido Miglioli, and Maya della Torre were irrefutable.[18]
The fellow traveler's task was to support the revolution in a balanced and analytical manner, which was impossible for the exiled Russians. He criticized the policies of curtailing human freedoms within Russia just as he advocated that the Soviets openly discuss substantive issues. Romain Rolland was particularly appalled by the institution of domestic espionage, predicting that "the monstrous organ of the secret police" might denature Russian life.
Another disgrace, worse still, so degrading that we shall not dream of dissimulating, that inspires in us, as in you, a limitless disgust, is informing. We contemptuously denounce this ignoble poison that withered the soul of a nation, and to which too many souls in Russia have become accustomed.[19]
While acknowledging abuses of power, the Russian Revolution had to be preserved in an open-ended manner to enable it to fulfill its destiny. "It is the hope, the miserable hope, of the human future." It was Balmont's and Bounine's "hope," in spite of themselves. The Soviet Revolution inspired Romain Rolland with a tragic pessimism
about historical advance: "human progress, which the proscribed Condorcet affirmed with intrepid serenity before he committed suicide, is brought about at the price of millions of sacrifices."[20]
Romain Rolland's play Les Léonides (1928) addressed itself to the perception of a social revolution by its historically conscious emigrés and victims. It rendered the dialogue with Balmont and Bounine an art form. Romain Rolland created an implausible situation in which the two leading characters, both exiled to Switzerland in the late 1790s, resolved their seemingly insurmountable political and attitudinal differences. The final agreement between emigré aristocrat Prince de Courtenay and the outlawed Jacobin Mathieu Regnault was a synthesis of old and new France, implying that a purposeful mutuality could be generated after ten years of revolution. Using the Leonid meteor showers as a symbol of movement and reconciliation, the play demonstrated that the old was inevitably destroyed and that the new emanated from it.[21] The problematic was whether there could be cooperation instead of bloody collision between the extremes of the ideological spectrum. This question crystallized Romain Rolland's dilemma as an engaged writer in the late 1920s, when he found himself writing as an idealistic Gandhian attempting to blunt violent extremes and at the same time maintain a critical but supportive perspective on the USSR.
Romain Rolland's relations with the Romanian writer Panaït Istrati (1884–1935) disclosed his ambiguous sympathy for the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In addition, it revealed the ways in which he reflected on criticism of Russian communism deriving from an extreme left or ex-communist perspective.
Istrati was a creatively disturbed, self-taught man of letters, much closer to the tradition of picaresque than to proletarian literature. This traveler with a taste for danger and excitement was also a rebel and a passionate individualist. He developed original narrative forms and spun enchanting, ingenious autobiographical tales. After a suicide attempt in 1921, Istrati composed a desperate letter to Romain Rolland in Switzerland.[22] This letter began a complicated but deeply felt relationship between the two writers. Romain Rolland was captivated by Istrati's storytelling genius and his remarkable mastery of the French language after only seven years' practice. Istrati's prose was marked by its tragic cheerfulness, its sparkle and lucidity. In a 1923 preface to Istrati's Kyra Kyralina , Ro-
main Rolland celebrated him as a "new Gorky from the Balkans" (un Gorki balkanique ).[23]
Romain Rolland helped launch Istrati's literary career. Royalties, publishing contracts, and fame were not long in coming. Twenty years older than Istrati, he empathized with the Romanian's longings for "friendship" but also played the role of disciplinarian. He exhorted Istrati to create: "I do not expect hysterical letters from you. I expect books. Produce them: they are more important and more lasting than you, who are merely the vessel containing their seeds."[24]
His direct experience of poverty among the marginal and abandoned peoples of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor led Istrati to join the Communist Party in the mid-1920s. Communism represented to him the possibilities of fellowship extended to an entire community. To honor the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, Istrati toured the Soviet Union for sixteen months in 1927–1928, criss-crossing from the Siberian north to the western Caucasus. He knew Russian and various national dialects. Because of his ties to Romain Rolland, Gorky granted him an interview. What Istrati saw was disillusioning: his faith in Soviet communism suddenly crumbled. In 1929, he published a three-volume work describing and interpreting his voyage, called Vers l'autre flamme .
Istrati exposed the bureaucratic and doctrinaire aspects of the Soviet communist organization, the privileges party functionaries enjoyed in everyday life, and aspects of injustice and of gross insensitivity toward the masses. He unmasked the pervasive role of spying and denunciation throughout Russian society. His outrage sprang from the harassment and imprisonment of comrades by the Soviet police system. Vers l'autre flamme articulated the revolutionary anarchist perspective of dissident Russian intellectuals, which in the late 1920s closely paralleled that of the Trotskyist opposition. Istrati was one of the earliest disillusioned communists to lay bare glaring abuses in the Soviet Union. His works also contained much exaggerated, even sophistic, criticism. His prose could be self-discrediting and his hyperemotionality often interfered with the logical argument and the coherent grounding of his perceptions. Yet passages describing human degradation and the stifling of intellectual life in the USSR were prescient.[25]
Romain Rolland responded to Istrati's exposé as if it were a
betrayal. The French press, already anti-Soviet, widely publicized Istrati's reports. Romain Rolland was heartbroken by the volumes but not in the least persuaded by them. Istrati's assessment, he alleged, had been influenced by Victor Serge and other dogmatic "anti-Moscow revolutionary anarchists"; Istrati's account was not balanced by countervailing research findings or by an acknowledgment that the dissidents' framework might itself be distorted. Istrati's picture was marred by the "frenetic excess of his customary passion, as he stabs Russia as a whole." Lacking objectivity and restraint, Istrati twisted the virtue of fellowship into a vice. He magnified the jailing and harsh treatment of his close friends in order to take revenge on the Soviet government, but he totally discounted the self-sacrifice being channeled into building Soviet society. Istrati had told him privately that two of the volumes published under his name had been written by friends. Romain Rolland felt that many of Istrati's comrades were neither personally decent nor politically trustworthy. To deceive the public about authorship was to act in bad faith and did not inspire Romain Rolland with trust in the accuracy of the account.[26]
He did not hide his differences from Istrati. It was unconvincing to "stigmatize an entire regime" on the evidence of concrete injuries to particular individuals. He did not contradict the fact of Soviet excesses, but he questioned Istrati's emphasis and challenged his interpretative zeal.
For your friends, the innocents, heroes, voluntary martyrs, everything is confusedly concealed in a stream of abuse. Your justice is the supreme injustice. It is iniquitous to generalize about one hundred million beings from the dirtiness [malpropretés ] of a dozen, or of a hundred. The only one to profit from this infuriated revenge is the Reaction. . . . You could have gotten to the essentials of this business without denying what is healthy in Russia, and what deserves to be saved, defended, exalted.[27]
He did not dispute the substance of Istrati's report on specific cases of political repression in the USSR. He never regarded Istrati as a counterrevolutionary agent, nor did he employ other derogatory epithets to dismiss his charges. He questioned the logical and historical strategy of drawing universal conclusions from isolated factual examples. Nor did Romain Rolland endorse the revolutionary anarchist or the Trotskyist critique of the origins and inherent
evils of Stalinism. While they were unmistakably gifted, these ultra-leftists had their own axes to grind. Their analyses were often self-serving and rhetorical, tactically divisive and extremist in relation to European left-wing politics. He had felt estranged from the anti-Stalinist ultra left since its genesis, not seeing a huge difference between its denunciations of the Soviet Union and those of the European right. He never embraced a contemporary report on the Soviet situation that eliminated references to the accomplishments and progressive nature of the experiment.
If he disavowed the extreme left's use of Istrati, he found the communist reply equally reprehensible. He refused to toss books by ex-communists such as Istrati into the intellectual ashcan of history. L'Humanité's labeling Istrati a counterrevolutionary agent or capitalist spy left Romain Rolland with "disgust and contempt" for communist journalism. The "blindness and stubbornness" of the French communist press reflected nothing but venom; PCF analogies were appalling if not ridiculous. They lambasted Istrati for not toeing the party line, while praising Barbusse for being a "people's writer" or "proletarian" artist simply because his public pronouncements were consistent with the Comintern.[28] The Istrati episode revealed that the age of ideological posturing had begun. The engaged writer was challenged to preserve his free moral perspective, not to be swept away by the polarization of politics and culture into the neat left/right categories so characteristic of the discourse of the 1930s. It took courage to resist the splitting and fragmentation of the left: many disillusioned writers, following Istrati's precedent, might drift into despair or cynicism. That, too, was a dead end.
By 1929, Romain Rolland viewed political repression in fascist regimes as typical of both the ideology and politics of fascism. Violence and nihilism were its essence. Yet as a fellow traveler, he separated Soviet abuses from Soviet construction, acknowledging acts of cruelty but seeing them as oversights, not representative policy. They did not negate the vast industrialization, the economic planning, the cultural effervescence, and the regeneration of an entire continent. In the Soviet Union, the whole was considerably greater than the parts, the socialist humanist core compensating for the internal errors, violences, and deformations.[29]
In a debate with the Romanian pacifist intellectual Eugène Rel-
gis, author of The Pacifist International (1929), Romain Rolland took issue with pan-European ideas. They disguised nationalism and revived an archaic form of Eurocentrism. As he evolved from a revolutionary Gandhian position, he grew closer to a politicized version of fellow traveling. Romain Rolland used his debate with Relgis to reply directly to Julien Benda's Treason of the Intellectuals (1927). Benda's concept of the mind was abstract, Platonic, and even frozen; his superordinate ideas transcended history. In upholding the privileges of a "clericature of the mind," Benda deprecated political activity. He was blind to the contemporary mesh of politics and culture, and his metaphysics clouded the intellectual's responsibility to social justice: "Never shall I tire of denouncing the injustices of action, and of working for the amelioration of social conditions." Though not formally affiliated with a party or association, Romain Rolland no longer considered himself an apolitical writer. Intellectuals ought not to denigrate the field of politics, which touched all aspects of life, including "sustenance, labor, [and the] freedoms."[30]
Intellectuals were obliged to understand the roots of poverty to eliminate, or at least reduce, its staggering impact. "[The intellectual] has no right, in the name of the mind, to disdain material realities that are the basis and the first condition of the mind. . . . Before everything else, we must think of reducing their misery." The counterpolitical attitude was untenable in a crisis-ridden era. Romain Rolland's mission as a writer impelled him to make his literary skill available to class-conscious workers struggling politically to free themselves from material poverty:
I am the servant of the hungry, the exploited, the oppressed. Before giving them, if I can, the treasures of the mind, I owe them bread, justice, and freedom. My very participation in the privileged realm of intelligence provides me the means, imposes on me the duty, of effectively aiding the community—by illuminating, if I can, the right road and the dangers that beset it. No, I will not turn my back on politics.[31]
By 1930, Romain Rolland's fellow traveling pivoted around the defense of the Soviet Union. Today the USSR is a political, industrial, and military superpower. But from his vantage point, the country's existence was threatened by the "International of Business," a term designating American and European corporate capi-
talists, imperialists, reactionaries, clerical hypocrites, and fascists with multiple masks. The titanic effort of Soviet social reconstruction required peace in order to reach completion. He called for an end to the doctrinal and tactical divisions among progressive European friends of the USSR. He urged a collective alliance against "the most filthy reaction: that of money, of the sabre, of the cudgel, of the tiara." Convinced that there was a conspiracy against the Soviets, he urged European public opinion to lobby against the militaristic sectors, to prevent an unholy "crusade against the rebellious reds." The left could unite against the common enemy without accepting "Moscow's political direction." He was particularly distressed by the role of the bourgeois nationalist press and the church in stirring up antagonisms to the Russian communists. They invoked the canons of religious morality, justice, and civilization to justify "the foulest kind of Reaction." Western anti-Soviet propaganda was motivated by the fear that the Five-Year Plan might succeed and become an exportable model. He predicted that within three years the Soviets would be industrially and militarily capable of "defying your assaults."[32]
His perception of the Soviet Union figured in a debate with Gaston Riou over the issue of pan-Europeanism in early 1931. Romain Rolland declared himself "anti-European." His public ought to liberate themselves from outdated notions of the nation-state and democratic ideologies camouflaging empire; beneath the sublime principles of the United States of Europe lay the interests of big business. He defended the Soviet Union because an organized, international campaign threatened to encircle and subdue the communist state.[33]
The anti-Soviet conspiracy was masterminded by multinational corporations, particularly the iron and steel industries and the huge oil and gasoline companies such as Standard Oil. These cartels colluded with White Russian emigrés, mercenary armies in the Balkans, and the reactionary political parties of Europe and America. The Western democracies had perverted their historical, legal, and philosophical origins by functioning as empires. The public required information unavailable through media controlled by nationalist or capitalist interests. Europe was an antiquated idea unless Russia were included. He also called for an immediate revision of the 1919 peace treaties and urged Europeans to ready them-
selves for an extended period of decolonization in Asia, Africa, and the Islamic world. He pointed to the Moscow trials of November–December 1930, which consisted of charges against L. K. Ramzin and Russian technicians accused of "wrecking," to illustrate that the USSR was truly in danger. He never questioned the validity of the charges against Ramzin, presuming that he was "guilty of sabotage and treason."[34] Just as he would not protest publicly against other revolutionary tribunals and purge trials in communist Russia in the mid- and late 1930s, Romain Rolland's silence reflected his belief in an internal conspiracy against the Soviet experiment.
Provoked by Serge Radine's articles in a Swiss newspaper expressing "uneasiness over the 'materialism' of Communist thought," he addressed himself to the elusive question of "idealism versus materialism." These labels concealed more than they revealed. Romain Rolland was historically conscious of fifty years of "filth" shielded by the banner of "idealism." Neither ideological nor semantic differences mattered: what mattered were the concrete accomplishments and the degree of sacrifice involved by those participating in Soviet planning. "The entire question is to know if the movement of construction in the USSR is going toward a more just human organization—the only just and fruitful one. And I believe it is." The Russian communists should be evaluated in terms of quantifiable achievements, not compared to a "hypothetical paradise." Critics of the Russian Revolution should focus on the principle of the social division of labor: "The problem is to divide and distribute labor equally. And by the sole fact of this equitable division, to restore to millions of human beings the right to leisure and the possibility of individual development." Calling for a realistic assessment of Soviet deeds, he was unable to resist mythical allusions: the Soviet experiment was a "Herculean labor." Soviet internal violence was a distortion, resulting from the desire to "clean up their Augean stables." The Gandhian Romain Rolland was becoming less easily disgusted by the role of expediency and less moralistic about the role of compromise and coercion in the work of social reconstruction: "One has no right to be squeamish because the builders have had to soil their hands." The young Soviet leadership inspired confidence in that they were pragmatic visionaries who knew how to implement policy. Soviet sympathizers should not be put off by communist "dogmas and errors" and should remember Russia's backwardness and the disad-
vantageous framework in which the Bolshevik Revolution was made. Europeans "had much to learn" from the Soviet leadership. For the moment, only a provisional evaluation could be made. Ultimately history would be the judge of Russian accomplishments and misdeeds.[35]
Romain Rolland answered a query by two Soviet literati, the autodidact and gifted proletarian writer Fedor Gladkov and the constructivist Ilya Selvinsky, who upbraided him in the leading Soviet literary review, Literaturnaya gazeta , for being an "individualist" and a "humanist." His "comrades" should know that he was one of the Soviet Union's most "loyal friends and defenders" in Europe. He contested the self-righteous tone of contemporary Russian writing and the dismissal of all other forms of struggle as absurd, outdated, or idealist. Just as there were hypocrites who mouthed humanitarian rhetoric in the West, so there were impostors, scoundrels, and self-aggrandizing individuals within communist circles. Communists who demonstrated a capacity for faith and self-sacrifice were "individualists without knowing it—and (without knowing it?) the true champions of humanity." He voluntarily entered the Soviet camp carrying with him a European heritage of critical and creative freedom, a method and tradition not always present among Soviet militants and intellectuals. Soviet writers ought to have the largeness of mind not to reject him, to set aside their parochialism and attempt to integrate what was valid in his aspirations and cast aside what was not.
I bring to you, I bring into your camp, the camp of the workers who are masters of their destiny, the sacred banners of freedom of thought and humanity. Do not reject them! Be proud of them! Rejoice that they come to fight on your side. . . . The gods of the old world, freedom, humanity , are deserting the camp of your enemies. They are coming over to you. Welcome them! And grasp the hand of he who leads them to you. They shake your hand—Fraternally.[36]
Romain Rolland now exalted the Soviet Union as a workers' haven for those who opposed fascism, imperialism, and integral nationalism and for those who were authentically committed to a republic of emancipated laborers. Still mediating between the Gandhian and fellow-traveling ideologies, he began to veer more toward the Soviet Union than toward India. Yet his idea of the USSR remained mythical: a society founded on socialist humanist princi-
ples, which promoted self-scrutiny and which tolerated no forms of racial, ethnic, hierarchical or social privilege. This mythical notion implicitly criticized the reality of dictatorship in the Soviet Union and debunked the monolith of party privilege and narrow Marxist sectarianism.[37]
Gorky's writings and political itinerary became the themes to which Romain Rolland appended his views on the USSR. He began to revise and blur the distinctions between the fellow-traveling and the communist writer. Gorky's rallying to the Bolshevik government and ideology became a foil for criticism of Western intellectuals and questions about the cherished values of "liberalism and individualism." Gorky's social origins, his roots in the Russian peasantry and artisanat, his experiential knowledge of the common people, and his voluntary decision to embrace the Russian Revolution suggested an end to the long-standing isolation of the intellectual from the masses. Events in Russia now made a mutually beneficial union between workers and thinkers possible, allowing them to focus their energies toward common projects.
The independent mind is . . . condemned to die if we do not succeed in transforming it in full humanity, in this "black earth," which is the Laboring people. Gorky has come from there. Now he is one with the very conscience of the proletariat. He is its intellectual crown. They are inseparable from one another.[38]
Western intellectuals substituted an "aristocracy of the mind" for an aristocracy of birth, which they had helped to destroy before and after the great French Revolution. Art and literature supplanted religion as the "opium" of the French intellectuals. Taking refuge in aestheticism, formalism, or involuted philosophical discourse, French thinkers offered plausible rationalizations for complacency about pressing social realities. Apathy and cynicism were the rule, engagement the exception. Notwithstanding the extraordinary moment of the Dreyfus Affair, intellectuals entered the social arena reluctantly and cautiously; most sustained their revolt "for only a brief moment." From his perspective of critical support for the Soviet Union, Romain Rolland judged intellectuals irresponsible: "They have deadened the public conscience, supplied men with alibis to escape from social responsibility, chapels in which to shut themselves up and take refuge from reality, pretexts to turn
their backs on action and to say: 'I wash my hands of injustices.'"[39] Even the most clear-sighted, from Flaubert and the birth of modernism, exempted analytic understanding from action. The times no longer permitted writers to be "above the battle" or to retreat to the island of an "independent mind." The writer's isolation and ethical conscience were ambiguous legacies.[40]
Writing a preface to Gorky's Eux et nous (1931), Romain Rolland openly identified with Gorky the communist intellectual. At the same time, the dichotomy made him uncomfortable: it was paranoid and Manichean, even for an era of crisis when engagement was mandatory. He clung to the oceanic idea of an alliance among left-wing workers and progressive intellectuals. His concept of choice was not nearly as sharp or exclusive as that of Gorky, whom he preferred to think of as guide and preserver of culture.
This Gorky . . . a privileged person of art and intelligence, a master writer, passing over with all of his genius and glory to the camp of the Revolution, and addressing the intellectuals of Western Europe from the other side of the barricade. I, too, cross over to that side of the barricade, and grasp Gorky's fraternal hand.[41]
The Soviet Revolution provided and restored culture to the Russian people. Gorky, the "shock" writer, took exaggerated positions because of the great deeds being accomplished in Soviet Russia, particularly the narrowing of the cultural gap between the elites and the masses.[42]
Just as Gorky found Western individualism "limited," Romain Rolland upbraided liberalism in the light of its "deformities." The Soviet Union fortified the intellectual capacities and nourished the emotional needs of its citizens, allowing the individual to achieve "the free development of all his strengths and aptitudes." In decadent Europe, one found a stupefied and languid intellectual sector, the embodiment of subjective "sterility" and "pessimism." Gorky was correct that "class, race, nationalism, and religion" thwarted creative freedom. European intellectuals who advocated an extreme individualism only imprisoned themselves in a "prideful illusion." "The will of the mass, in its greatest moments of creative action, assigns itself a goal inaccessible to a single individual, however much a genius he might be ."[43]
Gorky's passage into the communist camp, his dedication to the
task of Soviet construction, and his revolutionary fervor all added up to a significant tribute to the Revolution itself, suggesting that the best of secular culture might be preserved and updated in the USSR. Gorky understood both the "grandeur" of their epoch and the need for disciplined sacrifice to actualize the historic task. Romain Rolland emphasized the international and universal dimension of the Soviet experiment, its potential fusion of freedom and necessity. The Bolshevik Revolution testified not to the inspired leadership of the Communist Party but to the masses seeking self-expression and self-determination: "A people of 160 million works not only for itself, but for all of humanity, by showing humanity the miracles created by the intelligently organized will of the masses."[44]
He did not cite Gorky's congratulatory passages about the Communist Party and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nor did he endorse the Leninist line on imperialism. From these omissions we can infer that he did not wholly approve of Soviet organization and policy. He never embraced the crucial features of Marxism-Leninism as a model of the transition from capitalism to socialism. He made no mention of Stalin and so lent no credibility to the emerging personality cult.
Romain Rolland's autobiographical essay "Good-bye to the Past," composed on Easter Sunday 1931, constituted a major reevaluation of his antiwar writings from a fellow-traveling vantage point. His farewell to the Gandhian position reflected his perception of international fascism and reappraisal of the Russian Revolution after fourteen years. His antiwar utterances from 1914 to 1919 had mourned for the butchered millions and at the same time indicted those responsible for their murder: "orators, thinkers, Churches and Governments."[45]
But that historical juncture was past. The unresolved tension of his pacifist writing had been between absolute freedom of the mind and active commitment to socialist revolution, partly inspired by the Russian example. In 1917, Romain Rolland had refused Lenin's offer to join him in his return to Russia, believing that such an affiliation with Bolshevism would compromise his integrity and autonomy. He was never prepared to be a professional revolutionary on Leninist terms or to adopt Bolshevik tactics, since he was "repelled by the sanguinary violence of their methods."[46] In 1931, however, he repudiated abstractions and cosmic ideals to uphold
"truth in action," that is, ideas that were modifiable by being put into practice. He gradually gave up his illusions about a Western intellectual elite, having learned, painfully, that his ideas were only possible for an exceptional self-disciplined and ascetic minority. He extended his critique of the wishful "democratic ideology," begun in Liluli , to the "bourgeois ideology" as a whole. The twenties had revealed that modern nationalism was inextricably linked to expansionist corporate capitalism. One could no longer oppose the idols of the fatherland without taking strong positions against imperialism and militarism. The Soviet Union alone was a restraint to world war and global domination by the strong over the weak. He now trafficked in the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic of master and slave and cited Marx with approval. Formerly, mature class-conscious workers were few and isolated. The contemporary working-class struggle was remarkable in its doctrinal coherence, its organizational structures, its demonstrated leadership, and its rank-and-file solidarity. Despite the "weariness and torment" occasioned by Soviet politics, Romain Rolland's new frame of reference was not the Great War but the dangers of international fascism, the global conflict between capitalism and socialism, and the creative possibilities of socialist revolution:
Then, how the very march of events, Ananke, which Marx reduced to the iron law of economic materialism, and which, severing the world into two camps, daily witnessed the gulf between the colossus of International Capitalism and that of the other giant, the Union of Proletarian Workers, had ineluctably led me to cross the abyss and range myself on the side of the USSR.[47]
Romain Rolland played a peripheral role in the Aragon Affair of 1932. Here he differentiated his moralistic fellow-traveling commitment from the Surrealist and the Communist Party postures.
Louis Aragon's poem "Front rouge," first published in Russia in 1931, appeared in French in Littérature de la révolution mondiale early in 1932. At the time, Aragon was both a Surrealist and a Communist. "Front rouge" can hardly be regarded as a masterpiece, but its incantatory celebration of the Soviet Union, its call for mutiny in the army, and its violent harangues against rightwing leaders such as Frossard and Déat scandalized the public. The poem blasted Socialist parliamentary reformists Léon Blum
and Joseph Paul-Boncour, unequivocally urging its readers to murder these politicians:
Fire on Léon Blum
Fire on Boncour Frossard Déat
Fire on the trained bears of social democracy
French authorities indicted Aragon and charged him with incitement to assassination. If convicted, he faced a five-year prison sentence. To defend the creative license of his Surrealist-Communist colleague, André Breton published a pamphlet ironically entitled Misère de la poésie (1932).[48] At the same time, Breton tried unsuccessfully to rally leading French writers to Aragon's cause, arguing that "Front rouge" must be understood as an example of "poetic freedom," not as politics or journalism. Both André Gide and Romain Rolland declined to endorse Breton's defense of Aragon. Breton published Romain Rolland's refusal in the same pamphlet, commenting on his inability to comprehend poetry.
Romain Rolland's letter firmly disavowed the Surrealist support of Aragon. There was no radical distinction between writing and action, especially when both text and context were saturated by politics. It was an evasion of moral responsibility to hide behind formal aesthetic principles or abstract notions about psychic life. Surrealist modernism contradicted his concept of the engaged writer's accountability for his words and images. Those who failed to remember the past, or who remembered selectively, participated in a crime ("the forgetting of a crime is a crime"). To attack the sham of the bourgeois judiciary, the Surrealists should remain conscious of the link between ideas and action. Maurras's murderous writings against Jaurès before the Great War were a case in point. After Jaurès's assassination, neither Maurras nor the Action Française assassin was punished for the murder this form of writing encouraged. Instead of defending Aragon's right to publish exaggerated poetry along dubious modernist lines—a poem divisive for the French left in that it exhorted Surrealists and communists to do violence to socialists—Romain Rolland insisted that adolescent invocations of aggression had disastrous historical repercussions. If there were to be no enemies on the left, socialists and communists would have to recognize their common enemies (the extreme right), while intellectuals clarified the ideological nature of the struggle.
Vituperation against Blum deflected energy and did not raise political consciousness. His intellectual politics contrasted fundamentally with the Surrealists, whom he saw as infantile and irresponsible:
I do not sanction the terms of the protest that you have communicated to me. I do not approve of them for the honor of Aragon himself or the Surrealists.
I ask you to do honor to yourselves by distinguishing yourself from the remainder of writers, attributing to you the will that nothing that you write be "literature," that everything that you write be an act. It ill becomes you to take refuge behind the screen of symbolism or of poetic "interiorism."
We are combatants. Our writings are our weapons. We are responsible for our weapons as are our worker and soldier comrades. Instead of denying them, we should accept our responsibilities for them. Let each of us be judged individually for the arms he employs![49]
Though begun in November 1929, L'Annonciatrice , the final volumes of Romain Rolland's epic novel L'Ame enchantée , were not completed until April 1933.[50] Considering that its writing extended from the time of the Wall Street crash to Hitler's seizure of power, one would not expect the images of "soul" or "enchantment" to figure so centrally. Romain Rolland fused the mystical and the political, transposing his fellow-traveling views into the thought and actions of his leading characters. His intellectual politics at this moment were characterized by a pre-Popular Front type of engagement, broadly antifascist and pluralistic, but with pacifists now excluded from the progressive coalition. The social awareness of the Rivière family mirrowed the problematic of commitment in the early 1930s. In Chapter 7, I analyzed L'Ame enchantée 's negations in terms of its integral antifascist ideology. The novel's positive vision turns of the coming to communism of the enchanted soul, that is, the Western humanist intellectual. In tracing the ambiguities of this voyage, Romain Rolland depicted the psychological dimensions of fellow traveling for an entire generation. His engagement announced the birth of a different kind of intellectual, one who participated in the creation of an innovative social and cultural community.
The Rivière family endured an extended, often painful, process of self-reflection. Deciphering deceptive forms of commitment became as crucial as participating in valid ones. Romain Rolland unmasked official 1930s pacifism as a hypocritical attempt to derail
rebellious action or co-opt revolutionary engagement. Beneath the platitudes of pacifism were the harsh realities of preparation for war, profits from the armaments industry, and the cynical attempt to destroy the workers in body and spirit. Those currently mouthing the rhetoric of peace were almost all the unrepentant chauvinists of the Great War. Their high-minded language hid the forces that blocked radical change and encouraged passive acceptance of the status quo.[51]
Marc Rivière functioned as an intellectual with communist sympathies. He liberated himself from the paralyzing constructions of European thought: the legacy of Cartesian rationalism and French skepticism, the undervaluation of emotions, and the self-referential tendencies of modern French art. But instead of celebrating the intrinsic healthiness of free thinking, the bewildered Marc wondered if consciousness itself might not be an illness.[52]
Depicting Marc's evolution from detachment to an engagé stance, Romain Rolland harshly condemned theories that could not be modified in the light of new circumstances and revised in application. He scorned those who played promiscuously with thinking as if there were no priorities in the realm of ideas. As he employed the metaphor of engagement more often, he contrasted it with the tactics of political evasion: "Thus, the intellectuals escaped any painful contact with the real, with rough hands, dirty hands and blood. They made use of their ideas, their prostitutes, to escape the responsibilities and risks of social action."[53]
Romain Rolland showed that a majority of French intellectuals refused to align themselves with the organized working class out of their own sense of class superiority. Although most French intellectuals arose from either the working class or the petite bourgeoisie, most had gained middle-class status through education or acquiring a veneer of culture, the result of social mobility. Once they "arrived," these individuals appointed themselves "watchdogs" over the national patrimony of art and knowledge. The intellectuals' disdain for the popular masses masked a deep current of self-hatred. Their denial of their origins had reactionary implications for all concerned.[54]
Marc assumed the impossible task of repairing the extreme splits that characterized interwar European cultural life, especially between the thinkers who refused to act and the militants who acted
without reflection. He became a man of thought who risked taking action, thereby achieving a partial synthesis of thinking and will. Engagement mediated between culture and politics. It allowed Marc to advocate a principled defense of human dignity while participating in specific struggles against humiliation, beginning with total opposition to all forms of fascism. The verb engager signaled a new style of intellectual life, which neither devalued the self nor diluted politicized forms of struggle; to not engage in battles was to be defeated in advance.[55]
Marc discovered that there were degrees of engagement. Several intellectuals in the novel took committed stands that stopped short of direct political action. In the early 1930s Marc realized that intellectuals acting alone were powerless. Their protests were ritualized verbal performances, lacking originality, influence, or the ability to operate on a number of levels at once. The protest of the left-wing writer was another bogus strategy in the intellectual's arsenal of self-deception. He expressed Romain Rolland's own ironic critique of the interminable statements of position by committed Parisian intellectuals, including himself.
A very small number of writers—always the same ones—were sufficiently lacking in appetite to protest. But their protests, as thin as themselves and just as monotonous, to which Marc added his, evoked no echoes; they were repeated every week, with the crimes they described. In the end, they passed unnoticed. Or the good public grew bored, saying: "What again!" . . .
Marc himself became infected with the boredom, felt disengaged from the rain of protests without action. They ended by becoming an evasion for one's conscience, a side door one slipped through, to fly from the dangers of action, or a painful confession of impotence. When he had signed a dozen, his heart failed him and his angry hand broke the pen on the M of his signature. And instead of his name, he wrote the word of five letters [merde ].[56]
For the protagonists of L'Ame enchantée , engagement was elaborated into a 1930s world vision of socialist humanism, balancing the negativities of antifascism, and promising an oceanic fellowship with the class-conscious masses. Both were indispensable to a durable socialist alternative to fascism and liberal democracy in collapse. Engagement supplied these fictional characters with the courage to die while resisting oppression. "Where there is no impulse to resist, there is nothing to lose."[57]
In the novel, the historical reality of the USSR served as a correc-
tive to Romain Rolland's pronounced idealism about historical change. At first, the Soviet Union was only a disorienting "enigma" to the main characters: "The USSR gave him vertigo."[58] Soon it was recognized as a "necessary counterweight" to reactionary Western nations. Beneath fellow traveling was a conception of the anti-Soviet conspiracy that typified 1930s political discourse on the left. Several characters uttered pro-Soviet sentiments not because they admired the Soviet Union or agreed with communist methods of analysis or practice, but because they opposed the enemies of Russian communism.
Thus he found himself daily more deeply engaged in the battle against the whole clan of the anti-Soviet coalition. Not that he did not detest Communism; but he hated and despised their adversaries. Now he no longer had a choice. A fight to death was being engaged [s'engageait ]. He felt himself being surrounded by their spies and police agents, and he employed them against his own, who were sometimes the same.[59]
The anticommunists combined ideological hatred for communism as an economic system with demonizing Bolshevik leaders. Members of the anti-Soviet camp were Machiavellian: they did not hesitate to employ spies, police, mercenary armies, diplomatic alliances, political leverage, and economic blockades to encircle and strangle the Russians.
The fellow-traveling characters in this novel viewed the Soviet Union as a young, isolated, undeveloped nation equally vulnerable to its hostile European neighbors on the West and to an aggressive Japan on its East. They never perceived the USSR as a superpower with expansionist ambitions, never believed that it possessed the industrial or military capacity to defend itself against fascist militarism.
French Marxism in the 1930s responded to Marc's need to be contemporaneous and linked to the forces of historical change. Yet Marxism remained closed to Marc, its Hegelian roots foreign to his allegiance to the Kantian categorical imperative. He was unable to integrate Marxism with his idealist, individualist sense of self, nor was he drawn to Marxist historiography, theorizing, or political economy. He read selected passages of Marx's works, not entire treatises, so he rarely glimpsed the power of Marxist epistemology. He attended the tedious meetings of communist militants more out
of guilt than enthusiasm. Though he resisted Marxism on a visceral level and acquired an insufficient Marxist culture, he found something compelling about revolutionary socialism. It was lucid and it was designed to meet political and economic necessity:
[The self] would only touch the Marxist field with the tip of a disdainful nose. This humiliating preeminence of the "economic" over the "psychic" revolted him. Yet he and his mother had painfully "paid" to learn what it costs to come up against the "economic" and that it has to be taken into account. But he and his mother were romantics—shall we call them outdated? or eternal?—whose real purpose in life is to vindicate their independent souls against all the fatalities that oppress them.[60]
In voicing his solidarity for politicized groups of French workers and students, Marc attacked the capitalist colossus at its sources. He was quickly designated a "public danger" in France. Nationalists, protofascists, and centrist coalitions assaulted him in print. The Soviet Union's program of planning was a positive alternative to crisis-ridden Europe after the collapse of the world economy and the ascendancy of fascism. For Marc, the Soviet Union had to be preserved so that its anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and antifascist model could come to fruition. Fifteen years of revolutionary practice meant that the idea of social revolution was no longer a utopian abstraction.
Though distanced from his uncommitted intellectual peers, Marc, like his creator, remained uneasy about affiliating with the rebellious masses.[61] He agonized over and ultimately refused to endorse the inequities and ideological rigidities that were inevitable in communist associations. The fellow-traveling writer was destined to remain outside the Communist Party, suspect to members and equally suspect to the bourgeois cultural establishment. Romain Rolland provided his cast of fellow-traveling characters with a variety of opinions about the Soviet Union, thus outlining options for European progressives in the 1930s. The older generation of nineteenth-century intellectuals, described as gentle Nietzscheans, offered an empathic but world-weary judgment of Russian communism, shrewdly seeing the Soviet experiment as a mixture of atrocious follies and remarkably vital projects:
They were curious as to the Labors of the Russian Revolution, and they followed them with a sympathy which did not exclude criti-
cism; but it was that of aged friends, who regretted that they could not take their part in the suffering and even in the youthful errors engendered by a Truth, a new Life.[62]
Marc wanted to mediate among Russian Bolshevism, the French intellectual left, and the working class. By publishing inexpensive translations of Marxist and revolutionary classics, he not only educated the French (and prepared the foundations for more rigorous research into Marx's thought for future generations) but also alerted his public to the urgency of thoughtful action. Marxism implied a rational understanding of social and political struggle. It showed the intellectual and educated worker the necessity of disciplined action. The quite different attitude of Marc's mother, Annette, toward these texts, which she helped translate, reflected her deeper understanding of historical process.[63]
The impulsive Assia, Marc's wife, articulated a wholehearted, unsubtle defense of the USSR. Assia represented the emotional commitment of the true believer, the ardent procommunist who, disillusioned by the brutalities of Russian communism, would become an equally ardent anticommunist. To her, the Soviet Union stood for something universal, hopeful, and pure. It was antifascist to its core. A cult of personality or severe social distortions occurring in Russia were unimaginable to Assia.[64]
Marc expressed Romain Rolland's deep ambivalence about fellow traveling. He distrusted Communist Party discipline, secrecy, doctrine, determinism, homogenization of culture, and bureaucratic organization. He hated the overemphasis on violence and proletarian class conflict. He was appalled by the despotic imposition of "correct" modes of inquiry and cultural forms onto others. He irreverently protested against all the "imposed Gods." Marc found the authoritarian tendencies among the French Communist Party leadership equally foreign to his own need for democratic tolerance, reflective insight, and empathic understanding. He never legitimized the "iron hand of ideological, social, economic, and police dictatorship."[65] Soviet brutality and the network of terror were no less destructive than the harsh repression of the czarist regime they had supplanted.
Unconvinced by the dialectical acrobatics of Marxist intellectuals
in the 1930s and distressed by their sophistic blurring of facts, Marc refused to accept the priority of ends over means. Such a refusal was essentially moral. The communist intellectual viewed the Soviet Union as a model of social revolution and industrial development. The fellow traveler recognized that French workers would be inspired by the Soviet Revolution but urged them not to follow it like a blueprint. Social revolution had to be commensurate with each country's history and level of civilization:
The French workers had no experience as yet of the social combat in which they were about to engage. No doubt they would acquire it at the price of more than one disaster, as had revolutionary Russia before 1905. With this essential difference: that the USSR now existed as an example and support. They must learn from the strategic school of Moscow, but with the knowledge of the resources proper to France, to the country's mental needs, and the tenacious attempts of the old Parties of Revolution—free from the wounds of past campaigns and from its young unions. Marc, henceforth, applied himself to the task. He was still only a pupil.[66]
Several factors explain the pro-Soviet sentiments of the fellow-traveling characters. Soviet planning contrasted vividly with chaotic Europe and the "imbecility of the old world" in the world depression. Soviet educational campaigns compared favorably to Western anti-intellectualism and consumerism. The novel stressed the measurable achievements of the Russian people, the faith of the youth, and the pride of the workers—a combination of self-abnegation and construction that led Marc to believe that "no sacrifice is disproportionate to such a goal." If a god was being born in the Soviet Union, that god was purposeful, intelligent action. Modern capitalism in crisis was the degraded religion, representing the trinity of "War, Commerce, and Piracy . . . three in one, consubstantial."[67] In the hands of "Marxist, materialist, atheist youth," communist projects would realize "social welfare and happiness." The energy of Russian communism was irresistible. Its monumentality appealed to Romain Rolland's sense of heroism and its ideology appealed to his need for something to believe in. He celebrated the "supremacy of Labor, free, equal, and sovereign."
The cosmopolitan and internationalist Marc knew that the class struggles of French workers were related to those of the colonized
in Indochina, China, Africa, and Central and South America. Mirroring Romain Rolland's work with the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement, Marc tried to construct a broad, pluralistic Popular Front.
So Marc continued to sell and publish books and pamphlets of antifascist, anti-imperialist, pro-Soviet, pro-Gandhian, etc., propaganda . . . without deciding to take up a clearly defined position among these various lines of battle. He was trying to make himself the link between the armies and to lead them (utopian dream) to make a common front against the massive forces of the Reaction. Of course he did not succeed.[68]
His mythical version of the Soviet Union did not blur Marc's awareness of tensions and blunders. The novel's committed characters wagered on the Soviet experiment. It was Italian fascism that sobered them and finally showed them capitalism's adaptive tendencies and its ability to absorb its radical opposition.
Paradoxically, Marc's assassination at the hands of Blackshirts consolidated Annette's subsequent engagement . The character of Annette—the enchanted soul—symbolized the transition between two epochs and two conceptions of revolution, the bourgeois French Revolution and failed French revolutions of the nineteenth century and the victorious materialist October Revolution. She bridged the ideas of Michelet and Marx, Péguy and Lenin, the supporters of the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement and Gramsci. Mourning her son did not push her to disavow communist front activities. These fictional fellow travelers tragically realized that only through "the voluntary sacrifice of a generation" could a revitalized and just world be born. That meant risking transient injustices to realize the desired end: "Certainly he [Marc] could not overthrow the enslaving order without binding himself to a new, but consented to, temporary, contract of servitude, which was for an end that made sacrifices legitimate."[69]
The specter of fascism alerted Annette to the pressing necessity for politicization and self-renunciation. Antifascism meant transcending her lifelong individualistic revolt, her own brand of nonconformist, freewheeling feminism. She allied with those ready to fight to crush the fascists, to defend a fragile and encircled USSR. Above all, Annette made the transition because of her desire to prepare Europe's terrain for a social revolution. Annette joined the "grand army of the Revolution" by stamping engagement with a 1930s neo-Marxist legitimacy. The novel climaxed with a passage
advocating the primacy of labor, a vision of the harmonious relationship between two prototypical groups—factory workers and writers. The final victory of labor signaled an end to stale middle-class morality and the necessity for "illuminating a new morality." That task was relegated to the future, beyond the achievement of a classless society.
Annette struggled without seeing her efforts come to fruition. Her grandson, Vania, would implement the work begun by his father and grandmother. He, like his teachers, would engage in battle cheerfully, maintaining an inner state of calm and impartiality, without taking the slogans or abstractions of his engagement terribly seriously.[70]
Romain Rolland's novel elevated fellow traveling to a potent strategy against international fascism. At the same time, fellow travelers, in alliance with the working class and often with communist organizations, initiated the extended process of constructing a humane, peaceful, classless society without a disastrous gap between mental and manual workers. Fellow-traveling engagement provided the characters of L'Ame enchantée with the courage to resist and linked them to those who acted consciously to transform their society. It married contemporary radical politics to self-reflective forms of introspection:
In short, both were following the track that led to their true goal, to the first action that is the maturity of every full life. It was their proper line of development. It was adapted to that of the epoch, marching toward the necessary Revolution. In the great upheavals of the earth, little streams follow the same slope as the rivers, and all mingle their waters.[71]
L'Ame enchantée is engaged literature in that it advances a critical and nuanced fellow-traveling perspective. Its attitude toward communism set the stage for and resonated with left-wing intellectuals during the Popular Front era.
10
The Cultural Politics of the Popular Front
I think that Communism will make dignity possible for those with whom I am fighting.
André Malraux, La Condition humaine
The Popular Front era, 1934 to 1937, unfolded against a backdrop of sharp political polarization and collective fear. Writers gave expression to profound social cleavages, making manifest what had been hidden in earlier epochs. The impact of the Great Depression, the ascendancy of international fascism, particularly after Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, and strategic shifts on the part of Stalin and the Communist International in favor of Popular Front alliances converged to produce a reevaluation of the intellectual's role in the struggle for political and social justice.
Antifascist intellectuals provided the French coalition with moral authority, prestige, ideological legitimacy, a rhetoric of hope, and a cultural effervescence in the theaters, cinema, universities, and artistic associations. Left-wing artists such as Romain Rolland participated in or supported experiments in popular education: worker universities, agitprop theater, social cinema, and the proliferation of Houses of Culture. Generation gaps closed: Malraux and the almost seventy-year-old Romain Rolland shared the presidency of the World Committee Against War and Fascism. The Popular Front's cultural politics were marked by a moderate, fraternal spirit and a willingness to work within the legal and institutional framework of the Third Republic. If the elected leaders could not be persuaded to take action, then direct appeals to the population were launched.
Antifascism was the cement of the Popular Front coalition. Its temporary unity depended on the collaboration of individuals and groups in a broad interclass alliance. It could not have existed without the consent of nonproletarian social classes. The heteroge-
neous people's front updated the democratic and Jacobin heritage of the French Revolution, attempting to reconcile diverse sectors of the French population with the organized working class. Malraux characterized it as "Michelet's revenge on Marx." There was a universal, patriotic quality to its appeal, a populist and vaguely socialist underpinning rather than a sectarian emphasis on class against class.
Romain Rolland's Popular Front sympathies changed his reception within communist circles. His election to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1932, the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement's shift into a more aggressive antifascist, pro-Soviet line in the summer of 1933, and his evolution from a revolutionary Gandhian position toward a more politicized fellow traveling enhanced his standing.[1] French and Soviet communist writers effusively welcomed his voluntary offer of fellowship. They blunted the critical edge of his writings on the Soviet Union, playing down his deliberate distance from the Communist Party apparatus and his ambivalence toward Leninist action and doctrine. They conspicuously praised the political content of his journalism, criticism, and fiction, particularly the concluding volumes of L'Ame enchantée .
At sixty-seven, the man of letters and former pacifist spokesman became a showpiece of the international communist movement, a prototype of the new intellectual. Communist writers hyperbolically asserted that his political and philosophical evolution was complete. His entry into the revolutionary camp meant more than the arrival of an exceptional talent with an impeccable reputation; it bridged Europe's lasting cultural achievements and the Soviet attempt to preserve and revolutionize culture. Romain Rolland brought with his "energetic and intransigent" communist sympathies a cultural legacy that included Shakespeare, Goethe, Beethoven, and Tolstoy. "The works of Romain Rolland and, above all, L'Ame enchantée are the prototypes of a new literature, of the only literature that in our day has a reason for existing."[2]
To commemorate the tenth anniversary of Lenin's death, Romain Rolland reflected on the great Bolshevik's life and work. The Bonapartist Lenin of the 1920s, the man of dictatorial will and political expediency, gave way to a Popular Front Lenin acceptable to the fellow traveler. Lenin fused art and action. He was so profoundly stirred by Beethoven's sonatas that he protected himself
against their beauty by not listening to the music; he would not let art deflect him from his revolutionary métier . The Lenin of 1934 was not simply a master of the Kremlin, but a devotee of Turgenev and Tolstoy. Romain Rolland read about Lenin's humanism in French translations of Russian studies by Guirinis, Krupskaya, Gorky, and Stalin. Romain Rolland endorsed a Marxist understanding of people and culture; he no longer trusted "universalism." He vilified "apolitical" or "neutral" bourgeois writers. Lenin's insight into Tolstoy's works demonstrated that towering masterpieces of literature were bound by historical necessity. The artist was never "disengaged from the atmosphere of his time." The contradictions within Tolstoy's works reflected the social and intellectual tensions of Russia before the 1905 Revolution.[3]
He portrayed Lenin as an artist of revolution, not a ruthless professional revolutionary, one who transformed political struggle. His philosophical world view merged with the often pitiless task of social upheaval. Lenin "realized in himself, as no other, the historical hour of human action that is the proletarian Revolution." He achieved a "perpetual communion with the elementary forces manifested in the masses."
Because he understood that revolution was not chaos but part of the normal order of things, Lenin shifted the practice and theory of revolution into a "metaphysic." He complemented his incisive sense of the real with a powerful but disciplined ability to dream. Identification with the masses gave him an energy and self-confidence. He mastered the laws of social life and bent them in a revolutionary direction. He gave expression to dreams in the framework of what was historically possible: "Thus, his dream was action." He exhorted his party comrades to dream, but to combine dreams with "serious" attention to the external world in order to "realize our fantasy scrupulously."[4]
The Soviets echoed his spirited defense of the USSR at the First Soviet Writer's Congress, held in August 1934, but not attended by Romain Rolland. In his didactic address, "Contemporary World Literature and the Tasks of Proletarian Art," Karl Radek, an important communist journalist who often served as a spokesman for Stalin, lavished praise on Romain Rolland and glorified his solidarity with the international proletariat. As an example of "great revolutionary literature," L'Ame enchantée documented the history of a
bourgeois intellectual who moved into the revolutionary camp after reconciling his old humanist "vacillations." His fellow traveling refuted the tendentious charge that no literary talent could support the working class and still produce a major work of art.[5]
Romain Rolland's critical essay "Panorama" was completed on 1 November 1934; it formed the introduction to an anthology of his engaged writings, Quinze Ans de combat (1935), surveying the continuities and discontinuities of his intellectual politics from 1919. By the word "combat" he underscored the impassioned controversies he had waged with competing intellectual coteries, political movements, and ideologies. He tried to neutralize his reputation of being above all battles, to demonstrate that there had been no rest or retreat. The central theme of "Panorama" was the relationship of political commitment to humanism, how the European intellectual's perception of the Soviet Union altered the tasks and responsibility of the writer.[6]
In no other sustained piece of prose did he explore his relationship to Marxist thought and reflect on the problematic of socialist humanism. Like most of his French contemporaries in the late 1930s, Romain Rolland had read Marx unsystematically and mostly in translation. He did not grasp the technical, philosophical, or economic component of Marx's thought; rather, he extrapolated the kernel of humanism, especially from the earlier, anthropological Marx, just becoming available to most Europeans. He was captivated by Marx's writings on alienation and his critique of idealism. In the corpus of his writings only here did Romain Rolland quote from Marx's early texts, including The Holy Family (1845), On the Jewish Question (1843), and Preparatory Notes to the Holy Family . He then applied Marx's analytical tools to his own development as an intellectual idealist. Socialist humanism suggested a way out of idealist mystification.[7]
In his analysis of Feuerbach and the left Hegelians, the young Marx demonstrated that notions of abstract liberties always masked estrangement from oneself, one's community, and the products of one's labor. Marx understood that the freedoms codified in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were inherently bourgeois in that they crystallized the mentality of the "small property owner." They stood as barriers to higher, more social aspects of freedom. Romain Rolland redefined humanism as a synthesis of the rational and
the oceanic, as "the sense of the truly human, complete, conscious, the communion of the one with all." Meaningful intellectual activity reduced the discrepancies between "real and abstract being " and pointed the way toward "the natural and logical coexistence of Communism with humanism ."[8]
Assisted by Marx's "lucidity," Romain Rolland unmasked the ideals in which he had trafficked. Upholding the integrity of the individual and freedom of conscience might have been tenable in previous historical periods (as before and during the Great War). A contemporary articulation of these "word fetishes" seemed "naive," an indirect apology for abuses of power that had been justified by these former "noble and pure human ideals."[9]
To posit unrealizable ideals as the motor force of history was self-defeating. When intellectuals transformed freedom and equality into nonreferential and nonhistorical essences, they were contributing to another alienating form of knowledge. His immersion in Marx's texts made Romain Rolland aware that he could not be sincerely committed "to building a new order" unless he was vitally connected to a mass political movement capable of both understanding and implementing this goal.[10]
The Russian Revolution's commitment to socialist humanism obliged him to clarify his relationship to the "powerful Communist movement." The Soviets were making positive strides toward the construction of a new social order. Yet as a fellow traveler and not a Communist Party member, he maintained his critical posture toward Soviet distortions, the unnecessary violence and stupidities perpetrated by the revolutionary regime. He still detested the "dictatorial spirit" of the Communist International, the doctrinal inflexibilities, and the "abuses" of communist propaganda. He indirectly criticized Stalinism by discussing the inadequacy of Soviet leadership after Lenin's death.
There was a great gap between Marx's cogent theory and contemporary communist practice. In Romain Rolland's perspective, however, the Soviet Union was an open-ended experiment capable of rectifying itself. The Soviet Revolution derived from "historical necessity." European writers were obliged to educate the public about this new experiment, indirectly enabling it to survive. Promoting world peace remained "the base of all my social thought," but he was increasingly aware that international capitalism gave rise to
fascism of every variety. The USSR promised a deterrent to the inherent evils of capitalist economies in crisis. A viable strategy against fascism and world war was a crucial goal of his international Popular Front activities. Like other fellow travelers from the peace movement, he equated communism with antimilitarism and antifascism. Although world war would disrupt the USSR's "fecund social development," peace could be only a respite; he predicted that a clash between fascism and communism was inevitable.[11]
In contrast to fascist anti-intellectualism and disdain for culture, Romain Rolland appreciated the multidimensional quality of cultural work underway in the Soviet Union in 1934. The Marxist view of "the totality" was not far removed from the Rollandist notion of the oceanic feeling: both suggested that a harmonious relationship was possible between free beings voluntarily participating in a rationally organized and productive community. He was seduced by the discernible advances of the Russians in the areas of science, technology, literature, and cinema; he was persuaded that the Soviets wanted to proliferate and honor important forms of culture, not simply to launch engineering projects.[12]
He remained cautiously optimistic that the concept of labor might be sufficiently broad to implement a "just, free, betterordered humanity." He quoted Stalin's clever metaphor for writers, "engineers of human souls," and he accepted the equalitarian proposition that no form of labor was superior to another. But he realized that the achievement of a mutually liberating relationship between intellectuals and the proletarian masses would require years of struggle. He urged the communists to remain conscious of their own prejudices. One served the USSR best by retaining a healthy concept of "independence in the Revolution," namely, a toleration of democracy, criticism, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and irreverence within party ranks. Socialist humanism was a sham unless the Soviet people were granted freedom of speech as well as freedom to work.[13] He fought for a form of socialism that preserved basic individual liberties.
"Panorama" did not pay homage to Stalin's simplifications and vulgarizations of Marxism. It did not endorse Stalin's program of socialism in one country, his Russian nationalism, or the emerging cult of personality around the Soviet leader. Romain Rolland mentioned the "dictatorship of the proletariat" merely as a "fatal
and severe stage" of the revolution. The "transitory violence" of the revolutionary upheaval was unfortunate, not to be magnified into a major theoretical construct.[14] It was less significant than the everyday work of building a society along socialist humanist lines. Not accidentally, his most transparently pro-Soviet essay concluded not in celebration of Stalin or the party dictatorship, but with a quotation from the brilliant fellow-traveling French writer André Malraux. Malraux, addressing the First Congress of Soviet Writers in November 1932, stressed the humanistic potential still to be realized in the USSR, which would protect individualism and creativity.[15]
Asked by his comrades at Commune about his relationship to his audience, Romain Rolland could not separate "why" he wrote and "for whom." Writing was a necessity: it was his form of "thinking and acting." Rejecting the static notions of optimism and pessimism, he wrote to catalyze others into action: "I have always written for those who march ." Currently, he felt most connected to the organized masses of proletarian workers whose vision coincided with their "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," and who waged a prolonged battle for the "establishment of a human community without frontiers and class." His version of communism included the idea of conquest. Communists were not contaminated by self-interest or excessive compromise. The engaged intellectual wrote for "the avant-garde of the army on the march," and the masses, in return, replenished the writer's energies. He was not discouraged by the intellectuals who were terrified by massive social change: "We writers launch the rallying cry to the sluggish." Apparently delighted by these remarks, Aragon referred to the old French master as "one of the first Soviet writers in France."[16]
He differentiated his fellow traveling from the agitprop methods adopted by Henri Barbusse, France's leading communist intellectual of the era. After his celebrated controversy with Romain Rolland in the early 1920s, Barbusse joined the French Communist Party and became a leading spokesman for Russian communism in Western Europe. His collaboration with international communism was accompanied by a narrow conception of intellectual commitment predicated on total loyalty to the party. From 1923 to 1934, Barbusse functioned as one of French communism's most visible
organizers and journalists, a bridge to army veterans and progressive intellectuals. As Barbusse's energy became focused on communist causes, his creative work deteriorated. Contemporaries such as Romain Rolland were aware of the inferior quality of his art, the absence of complexity in his scholarship, the conspicuous lack of imagination in his biographies. Barbusse's decline as an intellectual left a huge gap between the stirring pages of Le Feu and the obsequious prose and maudlin hero worship of Staline (1935). The creative writer in Barbusse was eclipsed by the organizer of conferences and the orator at huge demonstrations.[17]
Romain Rolland remained fond of Barbusse; they agreed on certain causes and on substantive social issues but disagreed on fundamental ways of mobilizing political support and achieving cultural goals. Romain Rolland had glimpsed the dangers of outright Communist Party membership during their open debate; Barbusse's ten years of militancy confirmed that he had betrayed the writer's métier .
In the last personal letter written before Barbusse's death, Romain Rolland sketched his critique of the Communist Party intellectual, differentiating his own independence and allegiance to progressive struggles. Barbusse forgot that the writer's chief obligation was to be "truthful and logical and especially courageous." Honesty and coherence did not mean avoiding political engagement, but they required that "the writer must be loyal to himself." Nowhere was Barbusse's abandonment of good faith more manifest than in his public appeals to other intellectuals. Romain Rolland was irritated by the "certainty" of Barbusse's rhetoric and his use of "military commands." Barbusse had mastered a crude form of communist thinking: his discourse specialized in forms of intolerance, and he persuaded through "imperatives," employed the "language of theoreticians of economy" in inappropriate contexts, and intimidated by mouthing pseudoscientific, "correct" modes of analysis. He alienated humanist French intellectuals by the "haranguing tone of meetings."[18]
By the middle of the 1930s, fellow travelers tended to distinguish Soviet communism and German fascism sharply by their respective attitudes toward cultural freedom. The first appeared to promote cultural activity, whereas the second seemed totally hostile to it, subordinating it to ideological priorities or the exigencies of a mass
movement. In his public writings Romain Rolland appeared to accept this contrast. But as the Victor Serge affair would illustrate, he had many private reservations concerning it.
Victor Serge was a writer of exceptional ability and productivity who held editorial and administrative positions in the Communist International in the 1920s. He was half-Russian and half-Belgian. His political leanings before the Bolshevik Revolution were anarcho-syndicalist. While living in Russia in the twenties, Serge emerged as an articulate critic of Soviet programs and foreign policy. He was one of the earliest opponents of Stalinism and may have coined the term "totalitarian" to describe bureaucratization and organized repression in the Soviet state. The Soviets regarded Serge as a thorn in their side. They designated him a member of the Trotskyist counterrevolutionary deviation. Serge was arrested by the Soviet police in 1933 and exiled to the Ural Mountains. It was alleged that he was an accomplice in Kirov's murder. Serge's detention and persecution became a cause in left-wing circles in France, Switzerland, and Belgium. Socialist Magdeleine Paz campaigned for Serge as a victimized political prisoner, defending his right to publish on humanitarian grounds. By the summer of 1935, agitation was mounting in France for some action on the case. The Surrealists joined in the clamor, embracing Serge's rights according to the principles of free speech.[19]
The Victor Serge affair climaxed at the moment of the International Writers' Congress for the Defense of Culture, convened in Paris at the Mutualité in June 1935. Several speakers agitated for Serge's release. Censorship and detainment of a dissident writer resembled the methods of fascism. André Gide interceded for Serge, even though he made pro-Soviet pronouncements at the congress. Romain Rolland was traveling in the Soviet Union at the time and carried on personal diplomacy for Serge with leading Soviet authorities and with Stalin himself. Stalin promised a thorough inquiry. Yagoda, head of the Soviet Police, was unable either to turn up incriminating evidence or to get a confession of wrongdoing. As a result of Romain Rolland's intervention, Serge was finally released from captivity and granted permission to leave the Soviet Union with his family.[20]
Serge and Romain Rolland were on friendly terms although they disagreed on matters of political ideology. Serge had attacked him during the debate with Barbusse, offering sarcastic remarks about
his advocacy of intellectual independence. During Romain Rolland's Gandhian phase, Serge had vilified him for his petitbourgeois mystifications. He opposed the strategy of the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement as unrealistic and contrary to the needs of the European working class. Despite their formidable differences, however, the two corresponded, knew one another's work, and were mutually concerned about repression in the Soviet Union. Romain Rolland volunteered to be Serge's intermediary during his years of imprisonment, forwarding his manuscripts from Switzerland to his Paris publisher. Serge and he suspected that these manuscripts were being intercepted. He "often intervened . . . with Soviet authorities in [Serge's] favor." In his eyes Serge was "a writer of great talent." Moreover, he felt attached to Serge's most active supporters in Europe, especially Jacques Mesnil.[21]
What troubled him was Serge's "political personality." His allies used his arrest to "insult the Soviet government." Though he lacked corroborative evidence, he guessed that Serge had joined a small sect of disgruntled ultra-revolutionaries. Serge had an extremist past; he had reprimanded Lenin for not applying "revolutionary violence" in the first year of the October Revolution. The Serge affair placed Romain Rolland in an awkward situation. He intervened as a diplomat to Soviet authorities to secure Serge's freedom without endorsing Serge's political analysis or promoting Serge's anti-Soviet sentiments to his European admirers. The specific injustice against Serge could not be generalized into a full critique of Stalin's tyranny. His goal was to mediate between Serge and Soviet authorities without fueling anti-Soviet propaganda in Europe and America. A lapidary sentence summed up the dilemmas of critical support for the fellow-traveling intellectual: "Let us help Serge, but let us not permit serving him to be used against the Union of S[ocialist] R[epublics]!"[22]
Romain Rolland made a four-week summer visit to the USSR in 1935. Publicly he extolled the virtues of the Soviet system, toning down his earlier reservations. Privately, he remained critical of internal Russian policies. Much of his political journalism now appeared in communist organs or in the fellow-traveling press. For an article in the PCF's regards , he replied both to the "hateful excitations" of French pacifism, specifically the pacifists clustered around Le Semeur , and to the use of the Kirov assassination to create anti-
Soviet propaganda. Those who approached the USSR without a historical perspective would never achieve a "just appreciation" of its accomplishments. By using their own political tradition and value system to evaluate the Soviet experiment, American centrists missed the crucial point that "the proletarian Revolution had never bragged of liberalism and was never made by liberal promises." The Russian Revolution provided a dynamic alternative to the "pseudoliberalism" of the West, in particular its "laissez-faire" system, which was simply an "instrument in the hands of the most powerful, richest, and most crafty."[23]
Romain Rolland offered a metapolitical argument to support the dictatorship of the proletariat. To achieve the peace and social freedoms implicit in a well-organized classless society, it was necessary for the Russians to establish a "provisional , but absolute" class dictatorship. He did not examine the contradictions of a "provisional absolute," as he had done as a freewheeling critic and Gandhian in the 1920s. The Soviet government was determined to vanquish the old order. They reacted with "rigor and energy" against external or internal enemies. It was quite probable that conspirators orchestrated Kirov's assassination of 1 December 1934. If in fact a "conspiracy by young, violent, and irreflective men" existed, it was proper for Soviet authorities to take strong measures against it. World opinion would readily exploit Soviet "abuses." He still opposed "exceptional tribunals and summary arrests." Sorting out the reality of plots from the brutality of the Soviet apparatus of repression was not easy. After studying the available documents and reading the "acts of accusation and avowals" in the communist press, he was convinced that the one hundred men charged with the crimes were not "innocent." Nevertheless, he hoped that they would receive a fair hearing, conducted with normal judicial procedure, so that their verdicts would be "judged in broad daylight."[24]
His detractors obscured the fact that he was no longer the same man who had written Above the Battle ; he identified himself as the author of L'Ame enchantée , an antifascist fellow traveler. He noted that the USSR employed comparatively less state terror in the service of socialist causes than had the Jacobins and Robespierre in the service of republican causes, even though the Russians faced "greater danger." Romain Rolland was unable to predict whether
the Soviet leadership would retain their moderation, preventing dangerous "exceptional procedures" from being unleashed. Anti-Soviet critics declaimed against Stalin while remaining impervious to the repressions of reactionary governments in Spain and elsewhere: they were indifferent to the "state of almost permanent crime that reigns in fascist states in Europe." "We must judge social action not from the empyrean of abstract and comfortable ideas but from the heart of action."[25]
Romain Rolland's trip to the Soviet Union lasted from 23 June to 21 July 1935 and was spent mostly in Moscow and its immediate vicinity. It was his only visit. In the summer of 1935, Moscow was experiencing great enthusiasm for the Soviet Constitution, which was nearing completion. The period was characterized by a general loosening of controls. He could not know that the Soviet Constitution, so egalitarian and democratic on paper, would never be implemented, or that the climate of liberalization would be followed by one of terror in which an entire generation of revolutionaries and innocent victims would be exterminated. The Soviet society he glimpsed was not truly representative of Russia as a whole. As he did not read or speak Russian, he relied on his half-Russian wife, Marie Koudachef, to translate. This severely hampered his capacity to establish rapport with Russians he encountered. In recognition of his sympathies for the Russian Revolution and his reputation as a world conscience and major literary figure, he was accorded a fraternal welcome. While part of this warmth may have been a genuine expression of Russian exuberance, Soviet authorities clearly orchestrated his travels and commanded the open demonstrations of affection for him. A four-week stay conducted under these circumstances could only furnish impressions, not definitive conclusions.[26]
His Soviet visit was highlighted by his stay at Gorky's residence and by a series of meetings with top government and cultural officials, including members of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party. He was granted two interviews with Stalin, a rare honor for a European man of letters. Romain Rolland's impressions were printed in a posthumous account in 1960, four years after Khrushchev's Twentieth Party Speech, during a period of partial de-Stalinization within communist circles in France. This extract, taken from his Journal of June–July 1935, and called "A
Sojourn at Gorky's," contained some critical remarks on Soviet policies, ideology, and leaders that remained unpublished in the 1930s. He clearly suppressed them at the time.[27]
Although he enjoyed Gorky's candor and earthiness, Romain Rolland was shocked by his "brutality," evidenced in his Manichean division of the world into allies and enemies of Soviet communism. Adversaries, in Gorky's view, had to be "crushed as enemies and bastards." Observing Stalin during a ceremonial meal, Romain Rolland commented on the Soviet leader's "maliciousness." (Lenin had spoken of Stalin's "rudeness.") Stalin's sense of humor was sadistic. He teased others for being "too serious," and he "intimidated by making pleasantries." Stalin punctuated his "tough form of joking, bantering, and making fun" with "good-hearted laughter." The vignettes of Stalin were decidedly negative: "He has the humor of a buffoon or practical joker, [and he] is a little rough and peasant in his witticisms."[28]
After viewing two Soviet films, Eisenstein's Potemkine's Revolt and The Mother , Romain Rolland was struck by their "bloody and sinister vision." Soviet cinema exuded a kind of primitive hatred that was abundant in this new society. He deplored the Russians' tendency to copy American techniques and tastes rather than develop their own. He expected divergence between Soviet and Western forms of culture and was disappointed by the inability of the Russian leadership to converse in any language other than their own. This "regrettable" fact made him wonder about the depth of Soviet internationalism. He was disturbed by flagrant intolerance within the Soviet educational and political systems.
Romain Rolland's public statements did not reflect his uneasiness. Before leaving the Soviet Union, he proclaimed in an open letter to Stalin that he was "fraternally linked to the Soviet People." He universalized the appeal: more than "the ardent center of the international proletariat," Russia was a symbol of "world progress" and of "humanity as a totality." He campaigned to protect the communists from their enemies, not out of allegiance to Marxism or the principles of class conflict, but to serve the Russian population and the world by creating a positive alternative to declining capitalism and expansionist fascism. In a rare expression of public praise for Soviet Communist Party officials, the French writer ap-
plauded their "tireless struggle" and "heroic élan," persevering against "a thousand obstacles."[29]
In October 1935, he published a summary of his impressions of the Soviet Union in Commune , a leading fellow-traveling journal. He underscored the "vitality" of Soviet society. he had personally witnessed the "unanimous sentiments of the people" in live demonstrations and in letters received from every Russian region. The Soviet masses were expressing deeply felt emotions, not acting "from dictated orders." Yet he crystallized his image of Soviet élan in the pejorative phrase "collective psychosis." The Russian masses externalized their enthusiasm while participating in a "psychosis of faith, joy, and assurance in the truth and victory of a cause which these millions of men incarnate in the world."[30] He did not explain or explore its dangerous, volatile, unrealistic and disordered aspect.
The leadership of the Central Committee impressed him with their practical intelligence and their confidence in the efficacy of planned communitarian activity and in the scientific rigor of Marxist conceptualizations. Soviet leaders blended willfulness and subtle intelligence in a philosophical doctrine "embracing the totality of human problems." The dialectical nature of Marxism was tempered to meet the needs of social action and adapt to new situations. The Soviet leadership's tactical flexibility easily accommodated the "relative and changing necessities of action." His portrait was not of ruthless technicians of power: he detected a "faith at the moral base of all the important leaders." There was a "passionate disinterestedness" among the political vanguards and an absence of "poisoned egotism." Individual personalities grasped that "with them or without them" their project would succeed.[31]
For those who drew a fallacious comparison between communism and fascism, he now differentiated the two systems. Having accepted the totalitarian analogy in the 1920s, he attempted to dismantle it in the mid-1930s. Unlike Stalin, Mussolini was preoccupied only with personal power and glory. Issuing from a "violent pessimism" and a pseudophilosophical "base of nothingness," the fascist governments centered on the "monstrous pride" of the leader, the "sinister grandeur" of territorial conquests, the neglect of qualitative social changes, and the failure to resolve the problem of political succession. Stalin and his "great Bolshevik compan-
ions" were, in contrast, fearless optimists, without illusions. Orienting themselves to the future, they anchored their social construction to the "Marxist Gospel," which provided them with both a "materialist dynamic" and a historical schema of "ineluctable laws of human development." If they were "realists," Soviet leaders were also motivated by a "social idea of justice and panhumanism that is more idealist than human dreams."[32]
After seventeen years of planned construction, the Soviet people's confidence in the revolution was "enlarged, enlightened, and ennobled." He glimpsed a latent communitarian heroism on the part of the Russian masses; there was a willingness among them to "sacrifice voluntarily" for the future. The observable achievements of Soviet labor were historically unprecedented, setting an example to the world. The second generation of Soviet leaders would probably surpass the current one in "amplitude" and in efficient, less disruptive techniques of industrialization. His brief trip to the USSR reinforced his notion that Soviet success was bound up with the "best hopes of the world."[33]
In an open letter to a Swiss pastor in answer to the "slanderers" of the USSR, he refuted the charges that Soviet Russia was an authoritarian dictatorship with an expansionist foreign policy opposed to peace, whose internal policies were anti-Semitic and antireligious. Romain Rolland was aware of communist "errors and injustices," distortions derived from the historical genesis of the Revolution. Far more significant was the "heroic" daily construction of an industrial society out of the debris of backwardness, war, civil war, and famine. To counter the insinuation that the Soviet communists coerced the masses into happiness, he invoked the millions of illiterate and exploited people who had suffered under the czarist regime. The prerevolutionary ruling class, with the complicity of the church, had saturated the masses with "religious and lay ignorance," enabling the "exploiters" to perpetuate their control over the Russian economy and society. The communists were beginning to reverse this prerevolutionary pattern. One of their toughest battles was to "disintoxicate" the Russian population from "their moral prejudices as well as their dogmatic practices."[34]
The Soviets desired world peace in order to complete their domestic projects. They built a "powerful army" to deploy against
their enemies—the most dangerous being German fascism—in event of an invasion. The Russians sought diplomatic and military alliances with the European democracies and joined the League of Nations in September 1934. Such tactics did not demonstrate "bad faith or political Machiavellianism." The Antifascist Front was a "conditional alliance," calling for a settling of accounts with Hitler before returning to "the state of permanent combat that still exists against the capitalist States." The Soviet leadership demonstrated "good sense" in maintaining an international stand against fascism. Nor had the communists capitulated in their reaction to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Although diplomats such as Maxim Litvinov, Soviet foreign minister during the Popular Front era, were truly anti-imperialist and antifascist, they were "realistic" enough to understand the limits of the current historical situation. They were not deceived by "idealistic rhetoric" or tempted by unilateral forms of brinkmanship. If the Soviet Union alone went to war against Mussolini, they would have weakened their logistical position in Europe once general warfare was declared.[35]
Although the Soviets were opposed to the development of Zionism on their own "terrain," this did not prove they were anti-Semitic. The regime considered racism fundamentally "repugnant" to its basic legal and ideological principles. Ethnic minorities and various nationalities were treated with "perfect equality." Jews were conspicuously visible in important occupations "up to the highest positions in government." As a direct antidote to the Nazis' aggressive anti-Jewish policies, the Russians established the experimental community of Birobidjan as a refuge for the "Jews persecuted in the Balkans and in Germany." Romain Rolland refused to accept unnuanced denunciations of the Soviet Union's policies on religious persecutions. To discuss this issue, each allegation had to be examined specifically. As far as he knew, "religions are protected in the USSR up to the present."[36]
The Soviet government faced violent conspirators attempting to sabotage or topple the regime. Fascist Germany now financed and stimulated the anti-Soviet "conspiracies and assassinations." Romain Rolland pointed to the Kirov murder to illustrate the depth of the "frenetic opposition" to the most able of Soviet administrators. Stalin behaved less "radically" than had his counterparts in the
French Revolution's period of Terror. So far no "evil had been inflicted" on Zinoviev and Kamenev, suggesting perhaps that Stalin "resisted the wave of anger after Kirov's death."
He used the forum of a debate with Julien Benda to advance the fellow-traveling position. Benda's notion of nonapplied intelligence was sophistic. He interpreted Benda's preoccupation with the "frozen world of abstract ideas" as encouragement for the "combinazioni of the present masters." Benda's style of intellectual life kept thinkers self-deceived and removed from the dangers to be encountered in the "domain of the real." Intellectuals had to test their formulations with scrupulous regard to political and social realities. Not acting on one's perceptions of the world was the greatest example of human treason. Intellectuals refined the "special weapon" of intelligence, but there was no inherent "superiority" in this weapon: "It would be nothing without the arms of our proletarian companions." By forging a community of mental and manual labor, the Soviets showed their understanding of the seminal role of the politically active writer, those "engineers of souls ," who helped to "inaugurate a more just, freer, better ordered humanity."[37]
Benda erred by opposing "realism of action" to "idealism of thought" and by resurrecting the discredited Platonic separation of mind and body. The USSR's social experiment was designed to resolve these dualisms. The "new man " emerging under these novel conditions was a potentiality, someone who might achieve liberation in a society without the alienating distortions of class, racism, nationalism, or religious prejudice. Individuals could attain a "universal harmony" of thought and action because they concentrated on the unfolding of emotional and intellectual capacities in a society uncontaminated by "nationalism and militarism." One did not have to be a Russian or a communist to grasp the USSR's significance: it was "our Soviet country."[38]
The publication of two volumes of Romain Rolland's selected essays, Quinze Ans de combat (1935) and Par la révolution, la paix (1935), extensively documented his itinerary as an engaged writer. Quinze Ans de combat , published by Editions Rieder in their "Collection Europe," reflected his status as a Popular Front fellow traveler. Par la révolution, la paix appeared in the Communist Party-financed Editions Sociales Internationales in the "Collection Commune" series sponsored by the AEAR.
These two volumes, coupled with the trip to Moscow, were warmly received by French and Soviet communists. Vladimir Pozner underscored Romain Rolland's evolution from antifascist to fellow traveler. The Frenchman, with his self-imposed exile, had always sought a "human country." His fellow traveling refuted the rationalizations of intellectuals who refused to participate actively in politics: "Let his example be meditated upon and followed." Pozner applauded his ability to strike a balance between a pro-Soviet stance and integrity as an independent voice.[39]
Nicolai Bukharin's "Greetings to Romain Rolland" celebrated the writer's high moral character. Bukharin's style illustrated the way the top Soviet party apparatus lavished praise on its illustrious fellow travelers. The leading Soviet communist theoretician portrayed Romain Rolland as "artist, musician, thinker, personification of human nobility, a man with a courageous and intrepid soul." The Soviet Union was touched by his understanding of the "struggle and victory of the proletariat." The Soviet people regarded him as a "glorious friend," welcoming him to the USSR with a "warm embrace."[40]
The extreme left in France reprimanded Romain Rolland in his current incarnation as antifascist and Popular Front fellow traveler. They articulated a critique of his intellectual politics still current among the non-Stalinist left in France. Marcel Martinet lashed out at him for becoming "Stalinized." Instead of supporting the Bolshevik Revolution in its young and exuberant period, he postponed his devotion until 1935, when it had ossified into "reason of State." Incessantly searching for heroes and examples of courage, he obscured the truth that "in the business of the working class and revolution, high personalities like Romain Rolland do not count, no personalities count." Soviet influence over the French proletariat was lamentable, dragging "our working class from stupidity to swinishness." The conversion of intellectuals into easily manipulated instruments of the Soviet regime, or Russian foreign policy, was pathetic. Those writers designated "engineers of souls" were in fact puppets; Stalin's concept of "socialism in one country" meant in practice the substitution of nationalism for internationalism. Martinet denounced the all-pervasive repression in the USSR. The Soviets exiled Trotsky, deported Riazanov, starved Serge, committed summary executions, and submitted workers to constant
police surveillance. Soviet "violence" not only perverted the principles of socialism but also rendered both the communist and fellow-traveling protests against fascism palpably "ridiculous."[41]
Romain Rolland's visibility as a fellow traveler triggered an angry denunciation by Leon Trotsky, who now saw him as an apologist for the Stalinist bureaucracy. The former humanitarian emerged as "the advocate of Thermidorean terror." He demonstrated analytical strength in the realm of "psychological perception" but never displayed "political clarity or revolutionary flair." Trotsky was alarmed by the French writer's factual ignorance about the Kirov assassination and felt that his public statements lacked "prudence." Drawing from his own previous association with Zinoviev and Kamenev and his knowledge of the internal mechanisms of the Kremlin, Trotsky stated that it made no "political sense" for either to have participated in a conspiracy antithetical to the "conceptions, goals, and political past of both men." Romain Rolland legitimized Stalin's campaign of reprisal against former revolutionaries without using "Marxist analysis" and without being a revolutionary himself. Dismissing Romain Rolland's political writings as "categorical and unreliable," the exiled Russian revolutionary compared the "psychological system" of the French academics with the functionaries of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Many French academics, he added, were "professional friends of Mussolini." Romain Rolland, too, had become an authoritarian personality cut off from the masses.[42] Trotsky's polemic was written with a personal and ideological ax to grind and disregarded Romain Rolland's record as an antifascist intellectual. Trotsky did not acknowledge Romain Rolland's protest, despite long-standing political disagreement, when governmental authorities had expelled Trotsky from France in 1934.[43]
In October 1935, Romain Rolland penned an introduction to a volume of collected essays entitled, significantly, Compagnons de route (the French term for fellow travelers), in which he paid homage to his lifelong literary companions. The volume included writings on Empedocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, Renan, Hugo, and Tolstoy, with a concluding piece on Lenin. He now glimpsed the possibility of synthesizing Europe's cultural legacy with the revolutionary tradition of Russia: "The assimilation of Goethe's spirit with the forces and laws of eternal Becoming is a permanent Revolution, which will
complete itself . . . in the present People's Revolution." The young Marx's writing optimistically pointed toward "the synthesis of thought and action." Europe's current impasse could not be resolved without "practical activity" and "social action." His fellow-traveling position fused dream and action. "Two maxims, paradoxically, which complete each other: 'We must dream,' says the man of action [Lenin]. And the man of the dream [Goethe]: 'We must act!"'[44]
Louis Aragon's "Interview with Romain Rolland, Engineer of Souls," brought together two artists of different generations, sensibilities, and cultural backgrounds. Romain Rolland embodied the potential in Stalin's term "engineer of souls" by facing the social responsibilities of the writer, always remaining "open to the future." Aragon described him as an important ideological "precursor" of the Popular Front. Romain Rolland now believed that the socialism being constructed in the USSR was "the only full and integral completion of individuality." In his own words: "Since the war my social sense has asserted itself and with it the necessity of an army, a campaign plan, and a party." Aragon underlined Romain Rolland's hostility to fascism in tracing his evolution to a procommunist perspective. Resistance to fascism would be ineffective if organized on Gandhian or pacifist lines. National paralysis of will could be prevented if the International of Labor "imposed peace on the world." The fellow-traveling intellectual worked for peace by expanding the struggles of the Popular Front on an "international scale." Aragon summed up his presence as "guide, master, and neighbor close to the heart of our country's proletariat."[45]
During the Popular Front era, French Communists placed Romain Rolland in a distinguished line of writers whose lives and works were unalterably opposed to cultural elitism, social hypocrisy, and political oppression.[46] For Malraux, Romain Rolland and André Gide were antidotes to Action Française writers and rightwing university professors. Their style of intellectual life opposed class inequalities, racial exclusivism, and imperialist policies: "France is not Racine, it is Molière; not de Maistre, it is Stendahl; it is not the Fascist poets under Napoleon III, but Hugo; not the academic signatories [endorsing Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia] but Gide and Romain Rolland."[47]
For an inquiry on the "decline of ideas of freedom and progress"
in Europe, Romain Rolland contrasted Western paralysis with the Soviet Union's efforts to construct a just society. Current Soviet planning made European decadence appear even more regressive than the militarism unleashed during the Great War. Intellectuals were part of the European malaise. Culture had become an "opium of the people," a retreat from the real world. If freedom and progress were to be meaningful values, they had to be struggled for on a daily, practical level. He sanctioned an assault on those oppressive institutional structures of the "bourgeois democracies" that denied workers an opportunity to realize their intellectual and productive potential.[48]
If formerly he was a "citizen of the world," he now regarded himself as a "worker of the world." The project of restoring to labor its dignity and productive power made him abandon his visions of world unity through music, Franco-German reconciliation, East-West dialogue, or the strategies of revolutionary Gandhian ideology. From 1927 to 1935 there had been a "slow, continuous, and reflective evolution of the mind" toward communism. His social philosophy sprang from two central assumptions: "the communion of all the living and the unity of the human species; and the indivisibility of thought and action." In the era of the Popular Front, there was no discrepancy between supporting the Soviet Union and adhering to these values. The USSR's existence proved that ideas and practice could be linked. Thought divorced from action was an "abortion or a treason."[49]
Romain Rolland's seventieth birthday was celebrated in late January 1936 in an atmosphere pervaded by the optimism of the French Popular Front. For a brief moment, the reclusive, mystical writer, in Swiss exile, became a living presence, signifying cultural and political unity for the French left. The idea of "no enemies on the Left" resonated with the readiness of French Communists, Socialists, and Radicals to put aside their differences to form a progressive interclass coalition. French pacifists were no longer a part of the unity. Romain Rolland was composing the Comment empêcher la guerre? essays which excommunicated French integral pacifists from the Popular Front alliance. It was a unique (and short-lived) moment in French cultural history: the man whose antiwar writings had been "treasonous" and "anti-French" twenty years earlier was now being showered with effusive praise, as an exemplar of the French man of let-
ters, extending the tradition of the Enlightenment philosopher and the socially conscious writer of the nineteenth century. A party was held to honor his seventieth birthday in the main hall of the Palais de la Mutualité in Paris, where dignitaries of the French left, including Léon Blum, Gide, Malraux, and many French communists, feted him. André Gide presided over this soirée d'hommage . Romain Rolland was praised for his internationalism, his perspicacious reading of contemporary political trends, and his willingness to revise his position in view of changing circumstances. Tributes to him were printed in the communist and fellow-traveling press, most particularly in L'Humanité, Regards, Commune, Europe , and Vendredi .[50]
Romain Rolland became the symbolic grandfather of the Popular Front: a reassuring presence, standing for fellowship on the left, the authentic defense of culture, uncompromising resistance to fascism, and strengthening the Soviet Union geopolitically by lobbying for an alliance of collective security. He was spokesman for a progressive coalition of nations, classes, world views, sexes, and generations. Even his long-standing enemies temporarily stopped denigrating him as a writer and deriding him as a sentimental conscience. Gide retracted harsh comments about Romain Rolland being "above the battle" during the Great War. The two fellow travelers shook hands and endorsed the same Popular Front causes. Praising him for incarnating "the honor and glory of France and of all humanity," Gide embraced the very spirit of the Popular Front.[51] (This appearance of fraternal unity was deceptive, however, and would be quickly shattered. Conflicting perceptions of the Soviet Union would transform Gide and Romain Rolland into irreconcilable opponents within the year.) In three successive articles, Marcel Cachin defined the French Communist Party's position, reporting hyperbolically that the "entire Popular Front had celebrated Romain Rolland at the Mutualité." He was elevated into "the most glorious intellectual of our epoch."[52]
In the spring of 1936, on the eve of the French Popular Front's electoral victory, Romain Rolland called for a new "people's theater." What he had campaigned for during the Dreyfus Affair had been premature historically. During the Popular Front era, its intellectual allies not only took energy from the working classes but also produced lasting literary masterpieces. Revolutionary theater outstripped other art forms in its potential for heightening political
awareness and mobilizing the masses: "Theater is a place of immediate communion; plays serve as the daughters and mothers of action." The conservative and centralized French state feared the "irruption of mass emotion and revolutionary energies" from a politicized people's theater and would never sponsor such a project. The bourgeois state would deflect the concept of decentralized Houses of Culture or blunt the radical edge of the experiment. If peace presupposed a social revolution, then a people's theater would thrive only "through Revolution." To prepare the "people of Paris" for the future cultural revolution, Romain Rolland advised using the huge theater of Trocadero, which was designed to house a massive audience and permit crowds on stage. Class-conscious antifascist intellectuals had to prepare for a "renewal of the present world." He urged progressive writers to enter into alliances with organized labor without losing sight of conflict: "It is necessary for the minds to prepare the victory. We are the arm, voice, and faith of history's human combat."[53]
After the Popular Front government came to power in May 1936 under the direction of Léon Blum, the first Socialist and Jewish premier of France, Romain Rolland attempted to conciliate between disparate elements on the left and center-left. In Clarté , the monthly review of the World Committee Against War and Fascism and the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement, he urged the masses of France to push their democratic sovereignty to its limits. He was inspired by the spontaneous wave of sit-ins initiated by French workers in May–June 1936. French proletarians proved their maturity by inaugurating a "movement of unprecedented strikes, and they demonstrated magnificent discipline and showed to an amazed world a People-King, master of its destinies." Opposition to the "audacious infamy" of fascist dictatorships cemented the Popular Front alliance. The common denominator was political resistance. The integral pacifists ought to be excluded from the Popular Front: they were blind to "the amassed dangers of fascism"; they advocated a naive and shortsighted policy of French isolationism, giving the fascists "carteblanche to extend and destroy our friends and allies"; they were unwitting "auxiliaries of fascism." Romain Rolland called himself an integral antifascist, which presupposed a readiness "to come immediately to the aid of those in every country struggling desperately against fascism" and to orchestrate a sustained policy of "vigilance
and universal defense" allowing the "Laboring Peoples" to take direction of governments and institutions.[54]
His initial impression of Blum's Popular Front was ambivalent. Romain Rolland now cautiously approached Blum after avoiding him for over three decades. Brushing aside a long-standing personal animosity and differences with Second International socialism over the Great War and the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement, he wrote a letter of reconciliation in early February 1936. He thanked the socialist leader for his "generous words" spoken at the Mutualité soirée honoring Romain Rolland's seventieth birthday. Their current comradeship was based on common struggles and common dangers: "The more threatened you are, the more I have wished for a long time to shake your hand."[55]
Only one week later, Blum was assaulted by a gang of Action Française thugs in Paris and nearly killed. Romain Rolland conveyed his sympathies through socialist journalist Amédée Dunois, wishing Blum a speedy recovery. He urged Blum to use the occasion to "extinguish" the danger of future Action Française provocations. Yet his pleasure over the Popular Front victory was qualified. Blum's electoral success was only a "conditional" first stage, marked by internal "compromises" and "risks." The new coalition should institute social and economic reforms, developing policies that might serve as models for other democratic governments. The Blum government was tenuous. There could be no blossoming of the French Popular Front, Romain Rolland wrote to Lucien Roth, unless the threat of French fascism was checked: "Although I don't like Blum (whom I have nevertheless learned to appreciate), I am happy that he is now, for the moment, the leader of an antifascist Popular Front."[56]
After the Spanish Popular Front government was established in February 1936, and especially after Spanish Republicans tried to mobilize Blum's government to their aid, Romain Rolland's attention shifted to foreign policy. The issue became urgent when the Spanish Popular Front urged Blum to intervene in Spain after 20 July 1936. Romain Rolland endorsed Vendredi's solidarity with the Republicans, hoping that Blum's government would intervene immediately: "Whatever be the dangers of the present hour, the worst danger is abstention through the prudence of the French government."[57]
In his declarations in favor of the Spanish Popular Front, he depicted the cause of the Spanish people as identical to that of the freedom-loving French. The Spanish Civil War unmasked the hegemonic designs of Hitler and Mussolini. The crushing of the Spanish Republicans would lead first to a fascist Spain, then to a general world war, ultimately pitting fascists against antifascists. Fascist military strategy made the "encirclement" of France a top priority. French nonintervention was not a benign form of neutrality; it was a blind and ill-advised sacrifice of the Spanish people and their legally elected government. Nonintervention was "iniquitous and monstrous"; it allowed Franco, with Hitler's and Mussolini's financial and military assistance, to destroy the Spanish revolution. He legitimized the use of all necessary means to assist Republican Spain: "To defend the peoples of Spain is to defend peace, the peace of France, of the West, of the world. . . . They are our brothers and our avant-garde."[58]
His propaganda for the Spanish Republicans clearly aimed to catalyze the progressive Jacobin sentiments of the French Popular Front. He was convinced that only a genuine people's movement could be counted on in the antifascist struggle in Spain. He campaigned to explode French neutrality and isolationism, endorsed by Blum's government. The Spanish cause was consistent with the interests of Popular Front France. There was no way to avoid a direct confrontation with the fascist enemy. The Western democracies should not yield to fascist challenges or bluffs. His appeals mirrored the justification offered by members of the International Brigades, who risked their lives and reputations to fight in Spain. The Spanish Civil War was the decade's great showdown. The cause of the Spanish Republicans was identical to the struggle to defend culture, to secure social justice, to smash barbarism, and ultimately to establish a durable and reasonable peace. The International Brigades struggled "against the murderous power of the past."
Humanity! Humanity! I call upon you, the people of Europe and America! Help Spain! Help ourselves! Help yourselves! It's you, it's all of us, who are threatened![59]
Romain Rolland sided with the Spanish Republicans with the full knowledge that Hitler and Mussolini contributed armaments
and economic aid to Franco's forces. If Franco came to power, the fascists would acquire military leverage in Europe and possibly in North Africa. After the bombing of Madrid and Barcelona, the fascists would shell London and Paris. He deplored the violence unleashed against innocent Spanish women and children, the gratuitous destruction of hospitals, nurseries, and civilian quarters. In Spain, the disarmed and the disabled were perishing along with the world's greatest art treasures. Authentic antifascism was fraternal; his contemporaries had no option but "to speak out, cry out, and act." Aiding Spain would demonstrate the solidarity of people of goodwill everywhere: "Come to the aid of Spain! Come to our aid, to your aid! Remain silent and tomorrow it will be your sons who perish!"[60]
Deeply moved by the tragedy of the Spanish Republicans and the courage of the International Brigades, incensed by flagrant fascist violations of the Non-Intervention Pact, he composed a strong letter to Premier Blum. He empathized with Blum's desire to help Spain without triggering a civil war in France, plunging into a general European war, or splitting his own divided Socialist Party. The political resolution of this dilemma should not violate the principles of the antifascist Popular Front, both in Spain and in France. The French Popular Front should divorce itself from England's desire to crush the Spanish Republicans. Holding that "the defeat of Spain is the defeat of France," he advised Blum to take decisive action. If the French Popular Front government failed to resist this "ambush of the fascisms against Spain's legal government and people," then Blum would be responsible for betraying the principles of democratic socialism, jeopardizing France's honor and security, and increasing the "insolence and greediness of fascism." Spain was France's neighbor. The two Popular Front coalitions were brothers. Because France possessed sufficient military might and could legitimize its entry into the Spanish Civil War, Romain Rolland predicted that French intervention would not precipitate general war. The Republic of Spain should not be allowed to "suffocate."[61]
Blum's refusal to intervene actively in the Spanish Civil War was a bitter disappointment to Romain Rolland. Such a display of "weakness of will" would have terrible repercussions for that part of France that was antifascist and for the Spanish people. World peace was damaged by cowardly capitulation to fascist violence. He grew
increasingly intolerant of all policies of "concession and compromise" to fascist movements.[62] Simultaneously, he moved even closer to the communist camp. He perceived that Soviet aid to the Spanish Republicans was constructive, and he was convinced that the politics of collective security would have safeguarded Republican Spain. In a flurry of open declarations and appeals, he tried desperately to ignite public opinion to pressure Blum for French aid to Spain. As the fighting continued, he employed more emphatic slogans, associating the Spanish people's struggle against fascism with "the fight for culture, freedom, and the independence of all men and peoples." Spain was now the chief arena of the antifascist struggle. If the "Ring of Peace" were to be broken there, then fascist expansionism would escalate.[63]
Franco's ideologues took a perverse pleasure in proliferating sadistic anti-intellectual slogans. The two most infamous ones, "Down with the intelligentsia!" and "Long Live Death!" reinforced Romain Rolland's perception that antifascist resistance was commensurate with the defense of cultural life. To the International Congress of Antifascist Writers, meeting in Valencia, Spain, in July 1937—during the Civil War—he penned the following greeting:
In these moments the civilization of the entire world is united in these capitals; a world menaced by the airplanes and bombs of the fascist barbarians, as it was in antiquity by the barbarian invasions. . . .
Glory to this nation of heroes, to these knights of the spirit, to this alliance of two faces—the power of the popular masses and their elected leaders! May this alliance serve as an example to the great democracies of Europe and America! May this alliance, strengthened in combat, safeguard the progress and liberty of the world![64]
On the anniversary of the defense of Madrid, he indicted the French and English policies of nonintervention in Spain. The fighting in Spain had an "epic grandeur" because the stakes were so high and because the choices were so clear. The Spanish Republicans represented not only the right of the Spanish people to self-determination but the very struggle for human dignity. He wrote about Spain from the moral and political perspective of the International Brigades, those who "gloriously lent witness to the present fraternity of peoples."
They feel with sorrow and revolt the unworthy treason of their governments who refuse to support the Spanish Republic, who sacrifice the defenders of Western freedom, and who have made the cowardly and perfidious Comedy of Non-Intervention a machine of suffocation.[65]
During this period, on 18 June 1936, Maxim Gorky died. In a moving tribute, Romain Rolland marked the event as "humanity's greatest bereavement since the death of Lenin." No other important writer had played so prominent a role in the cultural history of a postrevolutionary society. Gorky functioned as overseer of Soviet culture and adviser to Communist Party leaders. He died, tragically, before the implementation of the Soviet Constitution.[66] Romain Rolland's leave-taking mingled veneration and sorrow. If Barbusse's death had distanced Romain Rolland from the leadership of the French Communist Party, Gorky's death diminished his ability to influence the Soviet Communist leadership and signaled the beginning of the end of the engaged intellectual's impact in the 1930s.
At the height of enthusiasm for the Popular Front government, Romain Rolland's play Le 14 juillet (1902) was performed in Paris at the Alhambra Theater on 14 July 1936. These theatrical performances climaxed the cultural life of the French Popular Front. They reflected the euphoria and aspirations of the coalition and the visibility of its intellectual followers.[67] The play glorified the people of Paris for forcibly taking a stand against tyranny and conquering the Bastille. The production brought together some of the most gifted artists on the French left. Old and young, communist and noncommunist, they voluntarily joined their expertise in different genres and mediums. The music was composed by Milhaud and Honegger. Pablo Picasso designed a stage curtain, which evocatively combined mythological and political symbolism. In the context of the victorious Popular Front, Romain Rolland's dream of a people's theater appeared to move toward fruition. The center and left press responded to Le 14 juillet with great acclaim.[68] The playwright suspended his exile from Paris and made a rare public appearance at the play's opening night. He was greeted with thunderous applause by the politicized audience. To the image of intellectuals marching hand in hand with leaders of the French communist and socialist parties should be added the sight of the septuagenarian Romain Rolland, celebrated by the Popular Front spectators at the Alhambra
Theater, still standing for an indivisible left-wing alliance against fascism. For that brief moment, he was recognized as the cultural symbol of Popular Front unity against the fascist threat.
To commemorate the revival of his play and to draw the historical parallels between the Popular Front and the French Revolution, Romain Rolland penned his "Fourteenth of July: 1789 and 1936," integrating the Soviet Revolution into the populist and Jacobin spirit of the Popular Front. The crucial lesson of 1789 was that the people must "seize action by the name." The slogan of that day—"A la Bastille!" —helped to "unite and direct the forces of revolutionary action." Other "factual and symbolic" Bastilles remained to be taken. The respective constituencies of the 1789 Revolution and the 1936 Rassemblement populaire were similar: each was composed of "middle- and lower-class elements, lawyers, artisans, and proletarians." Both were interclass alliances cemented by shared sentiments and values, common enemies, and a common political orientation. He reminded his contemporaries that the original Bastille had been taken by force, not simply by an act of faith. New armies might be necessary to assault other Bastilles—a clear if indirect reference to the Spanish Republican cause.[69]
The "bad conscience" of the Old Regime still existed a hundred and fifty years later, however updated and disguised in the "new feudalism of finance and industry with their vassals of the intelligentsia and the press." His "comrades" of 1936 ought not to flinch in the face of new oppression. Jaurès's cautionary words, written about reprisals after the Bastille was taken, were still pertinent: "Proletarians, remember that cruelty is a reminder of servitude, for it certifies that the barbarism of the oppressor regime is still present in us!" The Popular Front was designed to resist fascism, not to imitate fascist methods of intimidation or repression. In the spirit of moderation, and contrary to the model of Soviet communism, Romain Rolland counseled the Popular Front to minimize the violence in social struggles: "This violence was the ransom of the Old Regime's totality of cruelty."[70]
Romain Rolland's intellectual politics during the French Popular Front provide a crucial point of entry into the era. He was integrally
connected to the origins, contradictions, victories, and defeats of the Popular Front. He contributed to the opening created by this brief political and cultural experiment, which took place under adverse circumstances. Dialogue between the classes inspired hope for social change and heightened militancy among the working class. This was reflected in the famous sit-in strikes of May–June 1936, which produced the Matignon Agreements. In a decade saturated with slogans, the call for unity between mental and manual workers did not seem to be empty posturing. It resonated with its partisans as a harbinger of the future communal society.
Most accounts of the cultural politics of the Popular Front are highly biased for and against.[71] Much art and culture of this period has been dismissed as agitprop, "low" or "dishonest." Critics of committed literature have labeled it didactic, self-righteous, unable to withstand close scrutiny—in short, a betrayal of art, or worse still, a new religion.[72] Clearly not all socialist and antifascist sentiments were easily expressed in revolutionary form.
The cultural politics of the Popular Front era marked the turning point between Romain Rolland's critical and uncritical fellow traveling.
Once again, his perception of fascism accounted for the shift. Beginning in 1933 and culminating in 1936, the European democracies appeared to be in an emergency situation. Searching for an antifascism of integrity and action, he joined the call for a grand unity between the progressive wing of the bourgeoisie and the working class. He opposed the rhetorical, conciliatory antifascism of Blum's government and pointed to the example of the Soviet Union's concrete aid and sponsorship of the International Brigades fighting in Spain.
The Popular Front transformed Romain Rolland's intellectual engagement. His fellow traveling became less nuanced, more prone to gross dichotomies in its basic opposition of fascism and antifascism. He still considered himself a spokesman for the oppressed but now focused on the victims of fascism. Fascism must be smashed before the struggles of the working class, the unemployed, the colonized, and the culturally deprived could be resumed. He welcomed the thrust toward a democratization of culture and politics in France, which meant increased participation by social classes who had historically been excluded. He vastly preferred Popular Front-style
governments to the centralization, secrecy, and authoritarianism of Stalin's regime. At the same time, he realized he could no longer influence internal policies in the USSR or the Communist International.
His own ideology syncretized, somewhat amorphously, antifascism, anti-imperialism, and socialist humanism. In his mind, this ideology was most coherently exemplified in the Comintern's support of the Spanish Republicans. He glossed over, or dismissed as divisive propaganda, charges that the Soviet Union took its revenge on noncommunist components of the Spanish left.[73] The Popular Front permitted him to raise the question of cultural as well as social revolution—who ought to play a vanguard or rearguard role, what ought to perish or be retained in the new society. The cultural politics of the Popular Front temporarily made him feel less isolated and promised the intellectual a more active role in the making of a revolutionary society. Even the generous idea of no enemies on the left had a built-in disclaimer, namely, that the left required an inflexible opposition to all forms of fascism.
The inspirational collective consciousness on the left appeared to integrate an awareness of history, community, and international solidarity. The authenticity of this solidarity was tested in extreme situations, as in Spain, or in the struggle against right-wing leagues in France. Romain Rolland's advocacy of a collective consciousness on the left was neither utopian nor aesthetic. Circumstances denied him the luxury of playing the role of conscience of the left. He compromised the absolute nature of his moralism, primarily because it was necessary to choose in a crisis. The central unifying elements of his vision remained fraternity and the oceanic bonds generated by resistance to the fascist enemy and the fascist threat to human dignity.
For the rest of the 1930s, he was silent about the distortions of Soviet communism. To have publicly condemned the internal or foreign policies of the USSR would inevitably have weakened the antifascist cause.
He now entered a period of uncritical fellow traveling.
11
The Politics of Uncritical Support
Perhaps later, much later, the new movement would arise—with new flags, a new spirit knowing of both: of economic fatality and the "oceanic sense." Perhaps the members of the new party will wear monks' cowls and preach that only purity of means can justify the ends. Perhaps they will teach that the tenet is wrong which says that a man is the quotient of one million divided by one million, and will introduce a new kind of arithmetic based on multiplication: on the joining of a million individuals to form a new entity which, no longer an amorphous mass, will develop a consciousness and an individuality of its own, with an "oceanic feeling" increased a millionfold, in unlimited yet self-contained space.
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
Several factors converged to solidify Romain Rolland's sympathies for Soviet communism and the PCF in the declining years of the French Popular Front. During the Popular Front era, the French Communist Party evolved from a minority revolutionary party into a mass political movement with a permanent base among organized workers. From 1932 to 1936 the PCF changed its political orientation, temporarily patched up its historic quarrel with French socialists, and left its seclusion. The national presence of the PCF was evident not only in the huge increases in membership and electoral strength, but also in its attraction for intellectuals, students, and members of the liberal professions. Reversing its chronic suspicion of intellectuals and lifting its rigid controls of artistic life, the party openly courted writers and sponsored avant-garde cultural projects. Many of the most significant artistic experiments of the era took place under the aegis of the PCF or the PCF-dominated trade union organization.[1]
As the French communists repudiated their parochial politics of the 1920s, their simplistic class rhetoric, and their dismissal of intellectuals and interclass alliances, they began to take more re-
sponsible stances on internal French policies and on foreign affairs.[2] In view of Romain Rolland's prior political itinerary, he was very receptive to PCF positions in 1936. He agreed with the PCF's desire to press Blum's government for armed intervention in Spain, and he endorsed the party's current stance on fascism. He understood the historical reasons for its close ties to the Soviet Union. He developed esteem for the leadership of the PCF. General secretary Maurice Thorez, the self-styled fils du peuple , echoed several of Romain Rolland's phrases in his own Popular Front journalism, most notably the defense of collective security formulated in the phrase "the Ring of Peace." Romain Rolland reciprocated in July 1936 by indicating to "Comrade Thorez" that he "entirely approved of the Party's firm and wise politics." He identified himself with precisely the same struggles that the PCF was committed to, "the great cause of the international Proletariat and for the defense of world Peace."[3]
Romain Rolland was simultaneously arguing in Comment empêcher la guerre? that the Western democracies had to contain and challenge fascist expansionism by forming a solid military alliance with the USSR. The clarity and strength of the PCF stance on Spain illustrated the bankruptcy and defensiveness of Blum's neutrality. The Popular Front government took the course of least resistance. Blum remained paralyzed by fear of internal tensions within the Socialist-Communist-Radical alliance, thereby violating the people's trust in it. Blum's rhetorical commitment to "Peace and Freedom" was undermined by his cautious isolationist policy and his vague, nonfighting antifascism. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and Western communist parties were providing arms, men, and money, not to mention propagandistic support, to the Spanish Republicans. Blum's failure to intervene in Spain and to sign a political-military alliance with the Soviet Union was unrealistic, in the light of the global thrust toward a military showdown between fascists and antifascists.[4]
On a more subjective level, as they had been during and immediately after World War I, Romain Rolland's writings were either omitted or vitriolically dismissed in the various cultural organs of the French extreme right, the pacifist right and center, the Radical center, the Socialist center and right, and the extreme left. He had stood for Popular Front cultural unity and had become a symbol of the Popular Front intellectual; he had been celebrated and glorified;
but by the fall of 1936 Romain Rolland was appreciated only by the communist and fellow-traveling press.[5]
André Gide's trip to the Soviet Union and the publication of his book Return from the U.S.S.R. in November 1936 triggered a scathing denunciation by Romain Rolland on the front page of L'Humanité . The violent reaction provoked by Gide's book effectively destroyed the tenuous cultural unity of the French Popular Front and of the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists. Intellectuals took sides for or against Gide's perceptions of Soviet communism and Stalinism. In a large, inexpensive Gallimard edition Gide's Retour sold 100,000 copies in two months. The Popular Front weekly Vendredi published an extract that reached a quarter of a million influential readers. The text was discussed and reviewed throughout France.[6]
Romain Rolland's response showed a complete lack of sympathy, except in the salutation and closing regards to his communist "comrades." "The U.S.S.R. Has Seen Others Like Him" does not bear scrutiny as a review at all. It never addressed the substance of Gide's critique of Soviet communism.[7] The tone was sarcastic and vindictive. Coming after the writings of istrati, Victor Serge, and a host of disillusioned communists, Gide's book struck Romain Rolland a crushing blow. He portrayed Gide as someone who acted in bad faith by consciously violating the engaged intellectual's task. This review was the culmination of his long-standing personal animosity toward Gide. The Nouvelle Revue française had ignored or denigrated his work for twenty-eight years. In this rejoinder, his spitefulness spilled over into slander, reasoned analysis gave way to ad hominem argument. He resented Gide's stature as France's leading man of letters, and he envied the huge popular success of this essay. Gide's pro-Soviet speeches delivered in the Soviet Union contradicted the vicious anti-Soviet remarks published in France. He accused Gide of allowing "his celebrity to be exploited by the enemies of the USSR." He was incensed by the timing of the book: not only would it be misused by the anti-Soviet press, but it also coincided with a climactic moment in the Spanish Civil War when the Republicans were fighting against overwhelming odds for Madrid. Its appearance weakened the antifascist French Popular Front and those who wished for an alliance of the Western democracies with the Soviet Union. Gide failed to overcome his personal narcissism and failed to perceive that the great social causes of the moment, specifi-
cally antifascism and support for the "universal workers' fatherland, founded by the October Revolution," transcended the writer's preoccupation with himself. Romain Rolland was temporarily beside himself with rage. "This bad book is, besides, a mediocre book, astonishingly poor, superficial, childish, and contradictory."[8]
Events in the Soviet Union far surpassed individual judgment, in Romain Rolland's view. The USSR stood for a revolutionary form of social advancement and economic development. One needed a historical consciousness to comprehend its significance. The work of the revolution required of the intellectual personal responsibility and a tenacious loyalty to the revolutionary process, both of which Gide totally lacked. Unlike Gide, who had never met Stalin, Romain Rolland had interviewed him twice and found the leader to be accessible and unpretentious, addressing him as "you" or as "comrade." It was wrongheaded to label him "the master of peoples." He quoted Stalin's phrase "Modesty is the ornament of the true Bolshevik" to refute Gide's argument of an emerging cult of personality in the USSR. He cajoled his audience to remain "unshakable in our battles."[9] In his declamation against Gide and in his identification with the Soviet experiment, as well as in his increasingly desperate portrayal of the antifascist struggle, Romain Rolland crossed the line from critical to uncritical fellow traveling. His subsequent reputation as an engaged writer would suffer from that decision and from this ill-tempered review.
Gide replied directly in his Afterthoughts on My Return to the U.S.S.R. , published in June 1937. He returned to his earlier view of Romain Rolland's inadequacy as a writer. More injurious, he raised serious questions about Romain Rolland's integrity, implying that the elderly writer's engagement with communism severely compromised him as a man of principle.
Romain Rolland's response gave me pain. I never cared very much for his writings, but at any rate I hold his moral character in high esteem. The cause of my grief was the thought that so few men reach the end of their life before showing the extreme limits of their greatness. I think that the author of Au-dessus de la mêlée would pass a severe judgment on the Romain Rolland of his old age.
Gide disliked the asymmetries in Romain Rolland's view of justice. As a fellow traveler, Romain Rolland vilified fascism but not the
deep-seated and well-known Soviet abominations: "Those who have the ideals of justice and liberty at heart, those who combat for Thaelmann—the Barbusses, the Romain Rollands and their like—have kept silent, still keep silent."[10]
In two articles published in L'Humanité in January 1937, Romain Rolland focused on the Spanish Civil War. The first was coauthored with Largo Caballero and La Pasionaria: here a Spanish socialist, a Spanish communist, and a French engaged writer joined hands in solidarity. The Soviet Union was aiding the Spanish Republicans and the International Brigades. The PCF consistently urged the Blum government to intervene in Spain. Romain Rolland lavished praise on the Soviet Union as "the great country of Socialism" and the French Communist Party "as the true representative of the people of France and its international mission."[11] He admired the PCF's historical evolution to its current Popular Front stance, especially against the "mortal threat of German and Italian fascist imperialisms." He contrasted Blum's weakness and uncertainty to the PCF's leadership, to which he hyperbolically attributed "wisdom, patience, and a firm political sense." The French communists understood that nonintervention in Spain jeopardized French "political security" along with the "necessary success" of the democratic cause. He expressed fraternity only with those willing to fight to the death for antifascist ideals: "Even if my voice is weak, it is for peace and freedom, it is for our brothers of Spain who defend them against the reactionary condottieri's aggression."[12]
In letters written in 1936, Romain Rolland's old colleague from Demain , Henri Guilbeaux, tried unsuccessfully to press him to speak out against the Moscow purge trials.[13] Guilbeaux had evolved from impassioned Bolshevik to violent anti-Stalinist. In The End of the Soviets (1937), Guilbeaux disavowed his communist loyalties. He borrowed information from Gide, Victor Serge, and Kléber Legay to attack the fellow travelers. He accused them of becoming "puppets in the hands of Stalinist functionaries" and acquiescing in the face of Soviet bureaucratization, Stalin's cult of personality, the widespread execution of Octobrists, and the perversion of the revolution's ideals. As Gide's "principal maligner," Romain Rolland ignored the internal reality of Soviet conditions and refused to address the serious social distortions deriving from "Stalin's omnipotence." Gide acted with "real courage," whereas Romain Rolland attacked
Gide through cowardly character assassination: "He is denounced as a homosexual for propagandistic purposes." In Guilbeaux's text, the geopolitical polarities of the 1930s were compressed into the politics of personal slander. Guilbeaux catalogued his grievances against the French fellow traveler in a chapter called "Romain Rolland's Marriage of State, Prisoner of the Kremlin." Romain Rolland's fellow traveling stemmed from his 1934 marriage to the half-French, half-Russian Marie Koudachef, a communist sympathizer. "Higher-ups" in Stalin's bureaucracy had sent her on a "special mission" to woo the French writer away from the influence of his pacifist and liberal sister, Madeleine Rolland. Romain Rolland, in short, was married to a Stalinist agent, which explained his uncritical support for the USSR despite his knowledge of the USSR's misrepresentation of history, Stalin's execution of "Lenin's comrades," and the restrictions on workers and "persecutions of peasants in Russia." After she became his secretary in 1929, and especially after the consummation of this Soviet "marriage of State," it was impossible to see the French writer without Madame Marie Romain Rolland being present. She allegedly filtered all critical perspectives that he might have had on international communism. It was regrettable, Guilbeaux concluded, that he was being so "shamefully exploited" by the communist leadership. He now served as a substitute for Barbusse, a literary showpiece who allowed himself to be manipulated by the "craftiness of the Kremlin masters."[14]
Romain Rolland read Guilbeaux's book and was furious about its insinuations. He privately broke relations with him, accusing his old comrade of libel and replying that such charges were defamations. To attack Romain Rolland's ideological leanings was one thing; to smear his marriage was betrayal. He also broke with a friend who favorably reviewed Guilbeaux's book, explaining that the "violation of my personal life was something not to be countenanced."[15]
As the French Popular Front coalition unraveled, Romain Rolland's fellow traveling became increasingly controversial outside communist circles. He, in turn, published almost exclusively in the PCF or communisant press. In the spirit of the French Popular Front, he endorsed the concept of decentralized Houses of Culture that would be democratic, firmly antifascist, and linked to a tradition of French skepticism, including Molière, Voltaire, and Anatole France.
That tradition established the writer as a "combatant of the mind," using critical reason and satire against superstition and tyranny. He subsequently wrote appeals for political prisoners in Nazi Germany, denouncing the fascist regime for suspending civil liberties and using violent coercion: "Hitler's regime is a regime of terror, a dictatorship, that maintains itself by force." Speaking for the silent, arrested victims of German fascism, he brought Nazi concentration camps to Western attention and attempted to cajole the European democracies out of their inertia: "Hitler counts on silence and on the forgetting of the Western democracies who are betrayed by the cowardly weaknesses of their governments. But he is deceived. We do not forget the forfeiture of the oppressors nor the heroism of the oppressed."[16]
In a brief salute to the French Communist Party at its Ninth Party Congress, held from 25 December to 29 December 1937, he praised the party for its rapid growth over the preceding few years, its humanistic "enlargement" of thought, and its ability to incarnate the "most profound forces of France." At the same time, the PCF championed the international causes of the masses, rallying its rank and file to the ideal of the "Universal Union of Workers." The PCF was the "indestructible pivot of the Popular Front." "I view the great Party that derives from Marx and Lenin as the most logical and most firm representative of social justice. I feel mentally and emotionally linked to it."[17]
Earlier in the month of December 1937, communist critic Georges Sadoul compared Romain Rolland's place in twentieth-century literature to that of Voltaire in the eighteenth century and Hugo in the nineteenth. Sadoul studded his review of the maître 's latest book, Compagnons de route (1936), with superlatives: "Romain Rolland joins the genius of Stalin to the genius that inspired the works of Leonardo da Vinci. Romain Rolland is the most complete and clearsighted mind of our time."[18]
Turning to Romain Rolland's positions on Stalin's purge trials, we must remember that he never condemned or criticized these procedures in a public statement.[19] Nor did he endorse, justify, or applaud them. The French writer whose career as an engaged intellectual was built on speaking out against injustice reacted, paradoxically, with silence.
The difficulty in explaining his silence is compounded by his
expressed desire to remain an untainted conscience, oriented toward an oceanic contact with the masses. The politics of the late 1930s no longer allowed such purity. He held that events in Spain, the French Popular Front, and the all-out campaign against fascism took precedence over criticism of internal Soviet affairs. He could not rely on accurate facts or unprejudiced information about Soviet politics in the crisis-ridden 1930s: reports were colored by the biases of writers or editorial boards. It became virtually impossible to read a balanced or unemotional view of the Soviet Union after 1936. For years Romain Rolland asserted that the bourgeois and nationalist press discredited itself in reporting on Russian communism, as did the socialist, pacifist, and centrist media. The extreme left in France, whether Trotskyist, revolutionary syndicalist, or anarchist, relied too extensively on Victor Serge and Magdeleine Paz or on Leon Trotsky's "vindictive diatribes." He dismissed their accounts as "exaggerated" or completely paranoid. He distrusted critics of the Soviet Union who maintained deep-seated personal grudges against the government. Moreover, he suspected that there might be collusion between the Trotskyist extreme left, Hitler's Gestapo, and other European fascist movements, including Mussolini's government. He considered their "independence of opposition" untenable in the current context and hypocritical given their former roles in polemicizing against and purging revolutionary opponents.[20]
Influenced by the PCF press and by his own interpretation of contemporary circumstances, he accepted the theory that a real conspiracy existed against the Soviet system. Both Kamenev and Zinoviev had dubious pasts. They were accused of being "renegades and traitors" and were expelled from the Communist Party in 1927 and 1932. Both proclaimed their guilt in this crime. There was no reason to assume that their confessions were forced or invented. The real issue of the Moscow trials was "corruption." After studying French translations of the court proceedings in the 604-page Procès du centre antisoviétique trotskiste (1936), he was convinced that the accused had committed villainous acts. It was logical and inevitable that plotters might desire to topple the regime. The French writer suspected that Trotsky may have masterminded these intrigues, as Radek charged. He rejected Georges Duhamel's coverage of the trial as being uncritical, unhistorical, and overly indebted to Victor Serge. Duhamel portrayed the accused as "empty and flattened-out puppets," not spir-
ited revolutionaries fighting for their lives. Duhamel injected his own "academic consciousness" into his journalism, distorting it even further.[21]
To clarify the issues, Romain Rolland drew parallels between the Moscow purge trials and the period of the French Revolutionary Terror. He never doubted the "historical justification" of Danton's "condemnation." He cited Albert Mathiez's Etudes robespierristes for historical precedents of revolutionary treason countered by severe punishment: "Danton had also betrayed the Revolution." If counterrevolutionaries emerged in revolutionary situations, revolutionary regimes ought to be expected to punish these traitors harshly.[22]
Yet there was another side to Romain Rolland's perception of the Moscow trials, a private and moral one. Although he offered a historical justification, he agonized over the purges: "I feel pain and affliction at the Revolution torn between the furious duels of ideology, exacerbated by personal rancor and hate." The second wave of trials confirmed his "apprehensions and repulsions" over the first. He knew that innocent men and women were being victimized by Stalin's purges, though he was unable to grasp the scope of the systematic terror. "I no longer rejoice over what happens in the USSR. The malady of arrests and executions has gone on too long."[23] He was disturbed about the way Stalin's regime not only devoured its loyal opposition but also justified its repression in the name of high-sounding ideological principles.
Despite his public silence regarding the purges, Romain Rolland still operated within communist circles as a spokesman for human rights. When he learned of the persecution, arrest, and disappearance of Soviet citizens for political reasons, he interceded for their release. In the summer of 1937, he wrote a personal letter to Stalin, urging the Soviet leader to commute the sentences of Alexander Aroseff, the Moscow-based president of VOKS, and Aroseff's wife. Romain Rolland no longer exaggerated his influence or the willingness of the Soviet authorities to respond to such requests with compassion: "I am writing Stalin (without very much hope!)."[24] These intercessions were on behalf of innocent, highly reputable individuals caught in the momentum of Soviet repression. Because Barbusse and Gorky were dead, Romain Rolland used his notoriety and his connections with French Communist Party officials such as Maurice Thorez, international communists such as Georgi Dimi-
trov, and Soviet leaders, including Stalin himself, to guarantee that his appeals for human rights went through proper channels and were taken seriously. He never threatened to attack communism in public or to repudiate his fellow-traveling views if his appeals went unheeded. He alerted communist officials to particular errors and miscalculations on their part without breaking his faith in the overall cause of international communism.
Hearing of the arrest and detention of Oscar Hartoch, an eminent professor of medicine at the University of Leningrad, Romain Rolland realized that the purge was out of control. All his letters of inquiry went unacknowledged. He had received "no official answer since Gorky's death."[25] Through Thorez, he pressured Dimitrov to investigate the facts in the Hartoch case. He reminded the Bulgarian Communist Party leader that after Dimitrov's own arrest in Nazi Germany, he had been instrumental in securing his release. In the spirit of mutuality, Dimitrov ought to reciprocate. Romain Rolland was flabbergasted that a man with Hartoch's "inoffensive politics" could be charged with a "serious inculpation of any action directed against the regime." Hartoch was probably being persecuted by the police or the network of Soviet informants, "compromised by suspect relations or by thoughtlessness and ignorance." Romain Rolland argued on humanitarian grounds, asking for detailed information about Dr. Hartoch, underscoring that Hartoch's sister was a personal friend. Moreover, the request was urgent because of the doctor's failing health. Without challenging the fairness or health of the Soviet judicial system, he advised the Soviet leadership to behave more empathically toward the close relatives of its victims, to "conciliate its rigor with a little pity for innocents (friends and parents) who suffer from the detention of the accused."[26] He never concluded that the political repression under Stalin represented a form of fascism on the left.
He was saddened by the Soviet policy of secrecy. Regardless of Moscow's treatment of individuals, Romain Rolland remained convinced that the general cause transcended specific injustices: "Moscow knows well that whatever is done with regard to my request, I will hold to my unbreakable affection for the USSR." Six weeks later, he wrote another letter to Thorez, expressing his irritation at Dimitrov's failure to answer. He interpreted communist silence as a personal slight, not an indirect admission of generalized guilt.
The absence of dialogue reflected "a lack of regard and a lack of humanity which hurts me cruelly." Soviet indifference to his human rights appeals did not alter his "deep loyalty to the great cause that we serve. It is infinitely above all individualities."[27]
In early March 1938, the German writer Hermann Hesse asked him to intercede for two "absolutely innocent" persons being persecuted in the Soviet Union. Hesse urged him to write directly to Stalin on behalf of the writer Karl Schumuckle and the economist Valy Adler, daughter of Alfred Adler.[28] Romain Rolland, in turn, lamented to Hesse that he was unable to secure the release of his own personal friends in Russia. Alluding to Oscar Hartoch, he mentioned having written to Stalin twice and to other prominent Soviet leaders. The result: not "one single word in answer." Since the beginning of the purges two years earlier, Romain Rolland's petitions for "a number of other arrested or disappeared men" were greeted with "silence." Consequently, his influence was probably negligible, especially on behalf of people he did not know. With uncharacteristic resignation, he admitted that his effectiveness had diminished to zero since Gorky's death: "The 'philosophes' (as they said in the time of Jean-Jacques) no longer matter to the masters of power."[29] The Communist International no longer cared whether it alienated its progressive noncommunist intellectuals. As far as communist relations with intellectuals went, the Popular Front period was over.
The announcement of the third show trial in Moscow with Bukharin, Rykov, and Yagoda as central figures caused Romain Rolland further anguish. Yet he did not break his public silence. In a letter to the French communist intellectual Jean-Richard Bloch he wrote that the "trial in Moscow is a torment." He predicted that the "effects in America and France would be damaging to the internal unity of the New Deal and to salvaging unity out of a deeply split Popular Front." Writing to the Marxist sociologist Georges Friedmann, he indicated his full awareness of Stalin's dictatorial policies. The purge trials extended Stalin's authoritarian style. Before speculating on the "reasons for Stalin's leadership cult," he acknowledged that the cult "has often angered me as it has angered you." Stalin's policies were an exaggerated, perhaps paranoid, reaction to the existence of a real conspiracy against his government. He was creating a "new icon" of himself, deliberately forcing it
onto the minds of the Russian masses to protect himself "against the will of criminal attacks."[30]
These letters document that Romain Rolland knew much more about deformations of the Russian Revolution under Stalin than he stated in public. His appeals for compassion and pity from highranking Russian Communist leadership toward their innocent victims indicate his recognition of significant abuses within the Soviet system. He knew that Stalin, having consolidated power, was implementing a policy of terror. Yet as a European antifascist, he was not prepared to return to a position of critical support for the Soviet Union. The general emergency made it impossible to criticize Stalin's terror while remaining positive about other aspects of Soviet construction and agreeing with the Communist International's public record of antifascist activity and propaganda.
Sensing that his literary reputation and intellectual influence were eclipsed in France, especially as the French Popular Front moved toward collapse, Romain Rolland was exceptionally proud of the reception his works received in the Soviet Union. By November 1937, the Russians had published 1,300,000 copies of his literary works in translation, making him one of the most accessible French authors in the Soviet Union; he bragged that the "French language is read less in France than in foreign countries."[31]
Late in December 1937 he ended his twenty-four years of self-imposed exile in Villeneuve, Switzerland. He returned to the French provinces, not to Paris, reestablishing his roots in his own native soil, the countryside of his early childhood and boyhood. He purchased a "small but comfortable" house in Vézelay, a picturesque town perched in the sweet hilly countryside of Burgundy and known for its splendid Romanesque cathedral. He justified his move politically and symbolically, saying that he could no longer abide Swiss opportunism—the country seemed to be veering toward fascism—and that he wanted to demonstrate his solidarity with the declining French Popular Front. Suffering from intestinal and pulmonary illnesses, he left Switzerland because he could no longer "breathe free air" there, for the "contagion of the 'brown plague' or the 'black' has spread." France would be his final resting place. It represented the fragile legacy of freedom and the democratic possibilities of the Popular Front:
"My place is in the France of the Popular Front—and much more so now that it is threatened."[32]
In an open declaration on the front page of L'Humanité , entitled "The Mission of France in the World," he desperately called for a union of French writers, artists, and scientists against the fascist menace. The time for "prolonged dissension and internal combats" was over. Because France's "common welfare" was jeopardized, he urged progressive Frenchmen to "be silent on differences," that is, on conflicting interpretations of Soviet repression within the USSR, the French Popular Front, and the Spanish Civil War. He exhorted Popular Front France to remain the "last continental bastion of freedom." The Spanish Civil War proved that weakness in the face of fascism only made "the adversary arrogant and powerful." Antifascist intellectuals ought to emphasize consensus in this moment of dire crisis: "Let's call a truce to our disagreements."[33]
By the spring of 1938, Romain Rolland was disguising mixed feelings about French communism. He felt an affinity for the PCF's policies on foreign affairs and esteemed certain communist intellectuals and artists enormously. High on his list were Aragon, Paul Nizan, Jean-Richard Bloch, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Georges Friedmann, Roger Garaudy, and Léon Moussinac. A true socialist society required the voluntary consent of intellectuals with the organized working class; it needed the "cooperation and harmony of its free individual forces." Significant tasks for the Marxist intellectuals remained for the future: "It is our true task as writers, following Marx, to disengage virilely the real man from the abstract man, and to lead him to the threshold of a reign of true freedom , by showing as Marx did, the coexistence, or the coincidence, of Communism with humanism."[34]
After the fall of the Spanish Republic, he was certain that Czechoslovakia would be the next target of fascist aggression. Western politicians appeared willing to sacrifice the territorial integrity of the Czechoslovakian nation in return for some diplomatic or political deal with the unscrupulous Nazis. In early September 1938, the French writer sent a telegram to British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and to French president Edouard Daladier, strenuously warning them against allowing the German fascists to occupy Czechoslovakia:
We are convinced . . . that the French and English governments must obtain immediately an accord among democratic powers, in order to prevent by rigorous concord and by energetic measures those criminal violations perpetrated by Hitler against Czechoslovakian independence and integrity, and consequently against European peace.[35]
French intellectual pacifists, led by the lyrical novelist Jean Giono, blasted Romain Rolland for his telegram. They countered with a telegram of their own to the democratic heads of state, laying bare his "lies." Giono, Alain, and Victor Margueritte exhorted Chamberlain and Daladier to negotiate with, not threaten, Hitler. The words "prevent . . . by energetic measures" signified war.[36] This open exchange was the epilogue to the Comment empêcher la guerre? debate of early 1936. Once again, French integral pacifists opposed integral antifascism and counseled appeasement with Germany. This debate would reverberate in Vichy France, when intellectuals and militants agonized over the choice between collaboration or resistance. Many of the integral pacifists would collaborate, at least passively. Many antifascists became both active and passive resisters.
On 29 September 1938, Daladier and Chamberlain signed the Munich Accords with Hitler. To deflate Chamberlain's declaration that the agreement meant "peace in our time" and to reverse Munich's numbing effect on internal French politics, Romain Rolland composed a rejoinder. Published on the front page of L'Humanité , its title summarized its contents: "The Munich 'Peace' Is a Degrading Capitulation." Appeasing Hitler only accelerated the momentum of fascist pride, greed and expansionism. Having gained leverage in central Europe, the Nazis would soon make France a target. The real losers in this false peace, besides the Czechs, were those committed to the idea of an antifascist France: "But if we all love and want peace, we must consider that the one of Munich is a degrading capitulation that furnishes new arms against France."[37]
After the Munich Accords and Hitler's provocative overtures toward Czechoslovakia, Romain Rolland reminded himself that the German fascists used anticommunism as a pretext to legitimize their plans for world conquest. Hitler blended anti-Semitism and anticommunism to justify his assault on the remnants of Popular Front coalitions and Western democracies. The Munich Accords demonstrated that the führer used manipulation and "heinous
lies" to serve his own interests: "Hitler represents the democracies as 'Judeo-Communist'; he wants to kill them." As a student of German history and culture, Romain Rolland was seldom astonished by political developments there. Yet Hitler's excesses horrified him. He could not fathom the "facility with which German souls are taken by [Hitler's] combination of mysticism and violence. Hitler and the peoples following him are a formidable monster." This frenzy was particularly evident at the National Socialist mass rallies, where millions were hypnotized by the führer's "hallucinated personality," cruel oratory, and Wagnerian theatrics.[38]
After reviewing the various political disasters of the year, he dubbed 1938 a "year of mourning." Western democracies, particularly France, had to assume the burden of "shame and remorse" for both the "delivery" of Czechoslovakia to the German fascists and the "abandonment" of Spain to Franco. He considered worthy of praise the intervention in Spain by a "few, heroic volunteers," the fighters in the International Brigades, who risked life and limb for the Spanish Republic. The Popular Front was dead; he now promoted antifascism by emphasizing its nationalistic dimensions. "We know that on the earth of Spain, it is France they defended."[39]
Romain Rolland privately expressed his displeasure with the PCF's domestic policy in letters to general secretary Maurice Thorez. Thorez should prevent a "collision" between organized workers and the armed forces in a demonstration called for on 30 November 1938. Such a clash would weaken the unity of France and thereby benefit Hitler. Urging Thorez to end the Communist campaign of "furious exaggerations" and "verbal violence" against Daladier's government, he pointed out that this rhetoric only served the reaction. It smacked of self-defeat. The Communists would be labeled "antinational" in the French context. Although Daladier capitulated to German fascism in signing the Munich Accords, he was neither "a traitor nor a swindler," as the Communist press portrayed him. History would sufficiently admonish him for his miscalculation. The Communists, even if they were able to maintain an alliance with the Socialists, not a probability after Blum's second government collapsed, possessed neither the resources nor the power to sustain national unity. To safeguard the country's military and psychological readiness for war and to preserve the PCF as an autonomous party, he pressed Thorez to give
the "example of discipline and sacrifices." Preserving democratic France was now identical with the "cause of international socialism." Any other activity would result in "anarchy and confusion in which the enemy would profit." He closed his letter by sending his "respect and faith in the future to La Pasionaria."[40] Clearly, Romain Rolland's commitment to antifascism and to the Republican struggles in Spain and France far outstripped his endorsement of Thorez's parochial maneuverings.
Just as L'Ame enchantée explored the dimensions of critical support for communism in the early 1930s, the epic drama Robespierre addressed the ambiguities of uncritical support in the framework of the Moscow purge trials. This was Romain Rolland's last play and artistic summary, composed for his Theater of the Revolution cycle. He designed the play to be read, pondered, and interpreted rather than performed. It expressed his revised perceptions about a revolutionary upheaval that failed to live up to his mythical and humanistic hopes for it. Robespierre was a self-reflexive play without being apologetic or self-congratulatory. It did not offer an easy way out of the dilemmas of fellow traveling. In the preface, he admitted that he postponed writing it until he turned seventy-two. He was unable "to take possession of the subject" until the year 1938, when the parallels between France during the last months of the Terror and Russia during Stalin's purges were quite unmistakable.[41]
The play addressed three converging problems: the fatality of revolutionary action at a moment of crisis, the dilemmas of a complex revolutionary personality confronted with difficult options, and the assessment of a social revolution from a divided perspective of sympathy for the revolution's goals and revulsion at its systematic terror. In recreating the "moral truth" of the "hallucinated drama of the last months of the French Revolution," Romain Rolland was coming to terms with events in Stalin's Russia, which were equally "hallucinated" in the eyes of a moralist.[42] Although his uncritical fellow traveling took the form of public silence in the face of Stalin's aberrations, he explored his conscience about these events in this play. In a climate of suspicion and irrational frenzy, everything seemed possible, including the perversion of the spe-
cific ideals and accomplishments of a social revolution; a subtext of the play was the destruction of the idea of social revolution itself.
Romain Rolland's historical description of the summer of 1794 easily fit that of Russia 145 years later, in the period of the trials and the global ascendancy of fascism: "And the thousand and one daily suspended dangers of death—foreign wars, internal wars, invasions, conspiracies, assassination, mutual distrust—the illness of suspicion and the delirium of persecution."[43]
Napoleon once said that "politics is the modern fatality." Romain Rolland tragically interpreted that remark to embrace the dynamics of twentieth-century mass politics. Revolutionary leaders were compelled to make choices that honored or undermined a revolution. In Robespierre , the critical issue was how to save the Republic in a situation of unprecedented crisis. The play explored the problem of constructing the edifice of military dictatorship, dominated by a powerful but flawed leader, in order to preserve the revolution. Romain Rolland's characters refused this choice. Stalin accepted it. Instead of instituting a dictatorship, Robespierre persuaded his followers and adversaries with words. He was put to death. The revolution ended, its results remaining open to erosion and to interpretation. Revolutions created Manichean choices. Robespierre eliminated the centrist Danton and the extreme leftist Hébert in order to protect the Republic against its enemies, just as Stalin had purged Bukharin and Trotsky. Robespierre anchored his social and political philosophy in Enlightenment thought; Stalin in Marxism-Leninism. As a Jacobin, Robespierre was opposed to the domination of privilege. In order to realize his rational and progressive ideals, Robespierre adopted violent measures leading to unpredictable results. Lies, betrayals, accusations, and the guillotine were substituted for the decent aspirations of the Enlightenment.[44]
Romain Rolland had no intention of glorifying Robespierre. He presented a balanced portrait of Robespierre as the man who dominated the French Revolution. Thinking that he incarnated virtue, Robespierre pushed self-righteousness to extremes. He was tragically "isolated from the world." Robespierre refused to risk dictatorship to save the Republic, a decision pivoting on the notion of popular sovereignty. Robespierre's dedication to popular rights paralleled the contemporary struggle against fascism. Dictatorship equaled fascist forms of government (les faisceaux de la dictature ).[45]
Stalin's purges illustrated the "delirium of persecution" as pertinently as the worst bloodbaths of the Terror. Stalin's European contemporaries wondered how to justify Soviet crimes historically in the name of the lofty goals and noble principles of socialist humanism. Here Romain Rolland faltered: the purges were neither socialist nor humanist. If historians were to judge these events, they would have to be impartial and imaginative, not simply the "servants of success."[46]
In spite of his good intentions, Robespierre performed real evil. Romain Rolland, too, in sympathizing with the monumental Russian Revolution, refused to protest major acts of evil. The Terror, counterposed against the reality of Stalin's purges, illustrated the impossibility of maintaining the élan of social revolutions, of preventing the revolution from degenerating into crime or totalitarian dictatorship. The politics of uncritical support for socialist revolutions by the artistic or intellectual community would be tarnished, perhaps discredited, for another generation. The reality of a republic that protected popular sovereignty and preserved human freedoms was lost: "The Republic, the country [patrie ], all is lost. All our hopes in reason, in justice, in virtue. Humanity is condemned." The European fellow traveler observing the events in Soviet Russia expressed deep anguish about the historical significance of events thus: "The forces of circumstances have led us, perhaps, to results we had not foreseen."[47]
Romain Rolland confessed to having been swept away by wishful impulses. As a fellow traveler, he was overwhelmed by the logic of revolutionary upheaval, transformed into an unwilling accomplice to the crimes: "I have not sought to idealize them. I have spared neither the ones their errors nor the others their faults. I, myself, have been taken by the great wave that carried them. I have seen the sincerity of all the men who exterminate themselves, and the terrible fatality of Revolutions. It is not of a time. It is of all times."[48] The most damaging fatality of revolution was the inevitable slide from idealism to extermination. The engaged intellectual was not immune from this process of debasement. In Robespierre he questioned whether his own humanistic form of engagement might be nullified by the heinous results of Stalin's excesses. In Stalin's purge trials, the European fellow traveler observed the destruction of an oceanic feeling of community between intellectuals and manual workers;
this contact was twisted into the cynical expediency of dictatorial power politics, where individuals became numbers and where sensibility, consciousness, and morality were extinguished.
The literature on fellow traveling has been monographic or thematic. The case histories examine the particularities of a writer's fascination with communism; they draw no general or comparative conclusion.[49] The thematic scholars propose overarching theses: that fellow-traveling writers came to communism as a new form of religion; that their sympathies with communism demonstrated the potency of the liberal, enlightenment tradition; that communism legitimized their deep alienation from their own society and social class; or that communist commitment reflected profound self-deception (the last concludes that they were "guilty of fecklessness, dilettantism, arrogance").[50] Although there is some merit in each of these points of view, they tend to be decontextualized. They rob the intellectual in question of complexity and self-doubt. They reduce the problematic of fellow traveling by mixing critical analysis with condescension, self-righteousness, and downright hostility.
This account has elucidated Romain Rolland's fellow traveling by tracing its emergence from his itinerary of engaged stands. Fellow traveling cannot be comprehended outside of the specificities of the Popular Front era: it was historically relative, a reaction to cataclysmic events in the 1930s, above all the proliferation of fascist movements and the perceived inevitability of world war. In an era saturated with expansionist fascism, fellow traveling derived from a sober, defensive reassessment of European realities. It also recognized the improbabilities of a pacifist opposition to fascism, and the weakness of a conciliatory diplomatic approach to fascism by the European democracies and social democrats. Fascism could not be resisted without the firm resolve of the organized working class in Europe and without the military might of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Republican cause in Spain powerfully illustrated what occurred if the antifascist élan could not be maintained in practice as well as in principle.
The most inexplicable aspects of Romain Rolland's fellow traveling were not his public statements in support of Soviet policies, the existing Soviet leadership, and ongoing projects of social planning. What was constructive in the USSR made the contrast with European paralysis more vivid. His statements on the emergence of a
"new man," the practical wisdom of communist leadership, and the depths of the communist desire to defend culture seem hopelessly naive and wishful from a historical retrospect of fifty years. Yet this study has also documented his private doubts and disclaimers regarding Soviet Marxism and communist representatives in France, even in the most uncritical phase of his fellow traveling.
After making a career of conscientious protests, Romain Rolland neither endorsed nor criticized the most glaring communist excess of the era, the Moscow purge trials. It is not easy to reconcile committed writing and silence. Was this silence a betrayal of his own version of engagement? The fellow traveler refused to equate communism and fascism. He differentiated sharply between their governments, ideologies, leaders, and goals. To keep alive the hope of a Europe free from fascism, the fellow-traveling writer had to know when to keep silent, when public pronouncements no longer clarified issues, when protest might demoralize or divide the pockets of active resistance to fascism. Circumstance no longer permitted a critical, freewheeling dialogue within socialist and communist circles—no longer permitted the left-wing intellectual to remain tolerant, compassionate, irreverent, and free to infuse utopian ideas and artistic imagination into existing left movements. Romain Rolland's silence revealed his sense of desperation and mirrored the Manichean choices in an era of collapsing options. To purists, this silence may seem reactionary, even reprehensible—a collusion with atrocity, especially in someone who knew the concrete abuses and injustices perpetrated by the communists. Yet in the late 1930s, coinciding with the decline of the Popular Front, silence was a compromise consistent with an unyielding antifascism. The politics of uncritical fellow traveling corresponded to a historical juncture where debate and analysis could no longer illuminate individual and collective choice. Silence became a last resort, an attempt to maintain balance and lucidity, even if it implied an acquiescence toward communist dogma and tyranny.
Romain Rolland celebrated the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the French Revolution in 1939 with an article called "The Necessity of Revolution." This was his last essay published in Europe during his lifetime. He contrasted the French revolutionary experience with the contemporary state of the European democracies, obliquely commenting on the current deformations of the Russian Revolution.
He set up the philosophical writings of Turgot and Condorcet and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen to argue the essential identity between revolutionary activity and the maturation of reason. Revolutionary militancy since 1789 proved a universal point: that people could make history rationally regardless of the obstacles in their way. Revolutionary upheavals marked humanity's consciousness of its own power to change the environment, underscoring the possibilities of coherent action in which "man takes possession of himself and the world." Revolutions, then, were points of departure that could "and must be surpassed." The health of the revolutionary process depended on a sovereign people who were allowed to "judge and revise freely" the principles of any government. Twentieth-century social revolution created a disparity between free reason and revolutionary construction directed from above. Elliptically referring to the Soviet Union, he alleged that a "fearful distrust" of reason produced a kind of "bodyguard" that enclosed the revolution within narrow parameters. The revolution, rather than being the "protector," became a prisoner within its own confines, masochistically turning on itself, fearing dialogue, crushing dissent.[51] By inference, the Stalinist phase of the purge had pushed the Russian Revolution in an irrational direction.
To prevent "criminal usurpation" by a revolutionary regime, the people needed full freedom of inquiry and complete access to information. An educated populace served as a corrective to revolutionary centralization. The government must be accountable, "the principles and rules of government submitted to the free examination of every citizen."[52] Civil liberties and political rights were absent in Stalin's Russia. Romain Rolland preferred Popular Front-style governments to Stalin's dictatorship of the proletariat and his domestic network of terror; but the Popular Front had failed, leaving a major political and cultural void.
Aware that Europe was caught in the "snares of lying dictatorships that support ignorance and delirium," he proclaimed the necessity for a revolution that would bring to fruition the initiatives started in 1789. He no longer had the Soviet model in mind. All revolutionary achievements were regressions unless the three goals of Condorcet's Credo were fulfilled: "Destruction of inequality between nations; progress of equality in a people itself; and finally, the perfectability of man."[53] Romain Rolland's enlightened, populist
internationalism hardly tallied with Stalin's "socialism in one country" in 1939.
On 23 August 1939, the Soviet Union and fascist Germany signed a pact of nonaggression. The unexpected news of the NaziSoviet Pact struck like a lightning bolt in the community of French communist intellectuals and fellow travelers. Though not all the terms were clarified until the Russian invasion of Finland in the winter of 1939–1940, the pact wreaked havoc among the members of the French intellectual left. For Romain Rolland, the alliance of Hitler and Stalin created more difficulties than the purges: it called into question his twelve years of friendship with the Soviet Union. His own analysis of fascism, coupled with politicized antifascist activities, had cemented his ties with the French communists and the Comintern. The Nazi-Soviet Pact forced him to rethink his decision to choose between uncritical fellow traveling and antifascism. Now that the two irreconcilable enemies and divergent ideological systems made a diplomatic alliance, he could either denounce the pact publicly, voicing his considerable reservations about domestic Soviet policies and foreign affairs, or he could remain silent. Silence seemed to be the lesser of evils, even though he felt that the Soviets had broken faith with antifascism and betrayed the interests of international communism. The communists abandoned the Western democracies at the critical moment when a military confrontation with fascism was inevitable.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact snuffed out Romain Rolland's last hopes for a French interclass unity and for an equalitarian internationalism. The "Ring of Peace" had been smashed by the Russian communists themselves. He wrote Jean Cassou, editor of Europe , to indicate his awareness of the "sorrowful disarray" among the editorial board of the review. Fellow-traveling writers such as René Lalou and Luc Durtain reacted to the pact by publishing violent protests and resigning from Europe . Communist writers such as Bloch and Aragon published "absurdly obstinate" pieces that cynically defended the realism of the German-Russian alliance. In view of this confusion, Romain Rolland agreed with Cassou that Europe should temporarily suspend publication.[54] The major Rollandist journal of the interwar years ceased to exist until after the Second World War.
He praised Cassou for his "just moderation" and contrasted it with the "violent panic" of Lalou and Durtain and the "desperate
acceptance" of Bloch and Aragon. Rather than precipitate further schisms in the editorial board, Romain Rolland urged a "momentary retreat." Massive disillusionment with the USSR or toeing the party line were now beside the point. Every statement and accusation would be emotionally "exploited by different points of view." Silence was justified when polemics no longer clarified the issues: "We must wait and be silent until events slacken a little in the crisis."[55]
However, after "reading and meditating on the text of the Pact," and especially after learning that the Soviet Union forced the rupture of the British-French-Soviet diplomatic conference, he "addressed his resignation to the Association of the Friends of the Soviet Union." This symbolic act was done privately because he did not want his resignation to be "brutally exploited by the adversaries of the Soviet Union." The association ought to be dissolved because it had "no cause to exist now under its present form."[56] This quiet gesture ended Romain Rolland's engagement as a fellow-traveling intellectual.
The Russians, he conjectured, accepted the pact for "political reasons" or because of a Nazi "imperative" or "ultimatum." The Soviet Union had "gravely failed in its duties in this conflict." The Soviet diplomatic alliance with the fascists simultaneously betrayed the Western democracies and dishonored the Communist International. The former were left isolated and weakened against the fascist threat. The Soviet Communist Party "sacrificed" the loyal parties of France, Great Britain, and other countries. European communists would be tainted with "suspicion" and subjected to the "vengeance of the reaction." The Nazi-Soviet Pact might ultimately be assessed as a "horrible political blunder," or an "error," despite its Machiavellian designs. Whatever the pragmatic explanation for this alliance, he judged that it would "remain unpardonable."[57]
His disillusionment with the Nazi-Soviet Pact was not a temporary sentiment or a brief explosion of rage. He shared Georges Friedmann's "reaction" to it as a "double blow": it "had broken the confidence and faith" of nonfascist European countries and shocked non-Soviet communists and fellow travelers around the world. Counseling Friedmann against "unnecessary passion and weakness" with regard to the pact, he justified his own silence about
Soviet complicity with German fascism. If they were among the "first and most tenacious" opponents of fascism, they knew that one overwhelming responsibility remained: "Union in combat against Hitlerism." Although the pact shifted the international balance of power, he asserted bitterly, "it is not we who have changed." Despite the communists' reversal of their policies, antifascist French intellectuals ought to unite their shrunken ranks in order to prepare the all-out fight against fascism. In waging this battle, he exclaimed, "combatants of the mind have one other duty: lucidity."[58]
Romain Rolland wrote a public letter to President Daladier affirming his absolute antifascism, even after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from an alliance with European countries. His unalterable opposition to fascism transcended his fellow-traveling activities, remaining at the root of his intellectual politics in the 1930s. His desire to liquidate fascism was linked to his commitment to democracy and civil liberties:
In these decisive days when the French Republic rises to bar the road to Hitler's tyranny, which is flooding Europe, permit an old fighter for peace—who always denounced barbarism, perfidiousness, and the unbridled ambition of the Third Reich—to express to you my complete devotion to the cause of the democracies, of France and the world, in such danger today.[59]
He responded to Hitler's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and to the subsequent declaration of war with characteristic equanimity. Europe was being "delivered over to monsters." He reappraised his thirteen-year antifascist campaign as a failure. In these circumstances, despair and defeatism were inappropriate reactions. It was crucial "to maintain a firm and clear mind."[60] With absolute power invested in Hitler and now unleashed in war, he expected the most terrible devastation: "Hitler is a half-mad somnambulist who thinks himself inspired and whose imagination has been deformed by poorly digested false (racist) science and by Wagner's extravagances." National Socialism meant "war, destruction, and . . . degradation": only military combat could wipe out German fascism.[61]
Overcoming the Nazis remained the focus of his intellectual politics from 1939 until his death on 30 December 1944. Until the German fascists were defeated, their ideology discredited, and po-
litical methods dismantled, no work toward democratic socialist reconstruction could be completed:
I believe that all efforts of every Frenchman should converge from this moment on toward this chief if not exclusive goal: the total elimination of German fascism. Delenda est. After, one can discuss [other things]. But first, crush the monster. This is a question of life and death. I have never varied on that.[62]
It was in this pessimistic mood, but with the spirit of lucid antifascism, that Romain Rolland prepared himself for the ordeal of total war in the winter of 1939.