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.