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.