3
Above the Battle
For Peace is not mere absence of war, but it is a virtue that springs from force of character.
Spinoza, A Political Treatise
Romain Rolland was disengaged during the Dreyfus Affair and partially engaged during the campaign for a people's theater. His activities during the Great War marked another stage of his entrance into the political arena.
Just before the declaration of war, Romain Rolland was in transition. He conceived of an alliance of international writers, clustered around a review, that would lead a "crusade against worm-eaten literary, moral, and social dogmas, against the lies of our nations." Intellectual collaboration would also have a positive thrust: "These small fraternal armies would struggle for a renewal of life and of thought."[1] Against the racial and militaristic excesses of those with fixed nationalist ideas, exemplified by Action Française writers Bourget, Barrès, Maurras, Bazin, and Prévost, he called for a fusion of idealistic thought and realistic action. His engagement was predicated on both a critical analysis of the present and a capacity to act.[2]
Romain Rolland increasingly disassociated himself from Péguy's brand of nationalism and Catholic revival. Péguy could no longer be counted on to give direction to an international journal. "I do not have worse enemies than the new friends of Péguy." To recruit intellectuals, the crucial criterion of the review must be that it enlarged freedom of the mind. One had to be strict about membership in such an association of free thinkers. Although he appreciated André Gide's talent, Romain Rolland would exclude him. Gide was a great dilettante; his intelligence was primarily "critical, contemplative, and static."[3]
Romain Rolland had brief ties with the Italian journal La Voce , published in Florence under the direction of Giuseppe Prezzolini,
Gaetano Salvemini, and Giovanni Papini. Unlike most French writers of his generation, he was encouraged by the new developments in Italian cultural life. His two-year fellowship in Rome, 1889–1891, taught him to love the Italian people, landscape, language, and artistic and musical sensibility. La Voce articulated a courageous and vital pan-European vision that incisively addressed social questions and positioned itself at the interface of writing and politics.[4]
On the eve of World War I, Romain Rolland seriously entertained the idea of inaugurating an international review. He hoped to unite writers of distinction from all Europe around a cultural conception of European community. He was in direct contact with such figures as Léon Bazalgette, H. G. Wells, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan Zweig, Jean-Richard Bloch, and Emile Verhaeren.[5] The war temporarily postponed his dream of intellectual fraternity; it did not entirely shatter it. After the war, in 1919, and again in the 1930s, he returned to his project of recruiting an international elite of principled, nonparty-affiliated thinkers who would stand for independence and mutual understanding between cultures. Romain Rolland's oceanic idea of intellectual fraternity—his belief that united voices swayed public opinion more than solitary voices—predated the war. It became a leitmotiv in his career as an engaged writer.
When the Great War was declared on 3 August 1914, Romain Rolland was forty-eight, too old to be conscripted. He remained in self-imposed exile in Switzerland throughout the war years. Though this is the most well-documented period of the French writer's life, it is still subject to a variety of interpretations. The meaning of his activities has been obscured by the ultimately ambiguous connotation of the words "Above the Battle" (Au-dessus de la mêlée), the title of Romain Rolland's best-known essay and subsequently of a collection of writings from the period 1914–1915. From the summer of 1914 until his death, his name and intellectual politics would be associated with that phrase.[6]
Above the Battle contained sixteen articles, primarily open letters, essays, appeals, manifestos, literary criticism, and political journalism. These pieces addressed the loss of good sense by all the participants in the mass slaughter of World War I. Despite the detachment, neutrality, superiority, and distance implied by the word "above," Romain Rolland was profoundly touched by all aspects of the war. The sources dispel any doubt about his thoughtful, subjec-
tive involvement. Nothing could be further from the oceanic feeling than the reality of total war. He lamented the destruction of reason and the abandonment of critical judgment, which were early and serious casualties. If Europe were to avoid further holocausts, reasoned judgment had to be restored. To begin that process a few isolated voices must be heard.[7]
For Romain Rolland, European war meant civil war, the unnecessary but deadly duel between misguided brothers, exacerbated by the deployment of new scientific and technological weaponry. In the international as well as the French context, where force confronted force on the most primitive level imaginable, his situation as a writer became anomalous. He departed from the almost universal capitulation of writers, philosophers, scientists, and academics to the war effort, regardless of their prewar ideological positions or of nationality, regionality, class, generation, or gender. Everyone wanted war and rallied to the war effort in the first months of mobilization. This bellicosity was strikingly evident among socialists, syndicalists, pacifists, and religious leaders, who had been vociferously antiwar in peacetime. During the war itself, very few were heard either to oppose it or to raise questions about it.[8]
Above the Battle was Romain Rolland's refusal to bend to the considerable pressures of the historical moment, including the mass uncritical support for the "Sacred Union." He challenged the sacredness of the Sacred Union, as well as the notion of unity in war. His call for the restoration of sanity on all sides of the trenches disrupted the unprecedented unanimity in favor of war. By lifting the veil of consensus, he provided Europeans with another perspective on these events besides nationalism—an example, if only moral at first, of how to oppose the war colossus. He argued that a mindless and pretentious collusion with the war effort intensified the catastrophe. The virulent intellectual counteroffensive clearly showed that his writings touched a sensitive nerve.[9]
Romain Rolland's war criticism derived not from socioeconomic analysis but from the vantage point of the indignant moralist. His writings unmasked the ways intellectuals enlisted their learning and their imaginations in the effort to legitimize the war. He spoke out against the war precisely because of the unexpected, near-total collapse of movements organized to prevent wars or at least to
keep war circumscribed. He was not surprised by institutional Christianity's direct sponsorship of the military effort, but he was perplexed by the rapid and almost complete breakdown of the Socialist International. He was shaken by the assassination of Jean Jaurès, a monumental figure in the Second International, who might have become an antiwar leader and spokesman.[10] He refused to allow his intelligence and oceanic sensibility to be mobilized in 1914 or in the years thereafter.[11]
He was sensitive to the scope of destruction but did not forget the smaller tragedies in the lives of the soldiers fighting and dying on their respective fronts. The incantatory opening of "Above the Battle" conveyed a tender sorrow for the young shedding their blood generously but uselessly:
Come let us make a stand! Can we not resist this contagion, whatever its nature and virulence be—whether moral epidemic or cosmic force? Do we not fight against the plague, and struggle even to repair the disaster caused by an earthquake? . . . No! Love of my country does not demand that I hate and kill those noble and faithful souls who also love theirs, but rather that I should honor them and seek to unite with them and for our common good.[12]
There was an apparent paradox in his calling for temperateness and compassion in the midst of the most furious and barbaric of passions. Romain Rolland's tactful moderation required that he control his own feelings of moral repugnance for the war. In a context marked by frenetic expressions of hatred, nationalistic diatribes, and racial excesses, his writings suggested that love, cooperation, and empathic understanding were possibilities unextinguished by the hostilities. His self-restraint and faith in the unity of mankind stood in stark contrast to the verbiage extolling the inherent superiority of one civilization over another. He appealed to intellectuals, whose learning and critical method should have made them immune to nationalism and militarism, but who had been the most easily swept away by xenophobia and primal imperialistic emotions. He had no illusions about his ability to convince others, break through the darkness of censorship, or calm the ubiquitous ferocity of murderous rage: "I know that such thoughts have little chance of being heard today."[13]
In attacking the unanimity of war support, Romain Rolland rec-
ognized World War I's modernity. A prolonged and savage war required a well-orchestrated ideological reinforcement; to maintain national unity, high morale, and the will to fight, techniques of mass persuasion and manipulation were employed. The cultural sector became an invaluable collaborator because of its special ability to juggle words and ideas. Language was denatured in the attempt to justify the immensity of the violence and sacrifice, all sanctified in the name of patriotic principles.[14]
Romain Rolland insisted that the manufacturers of warmongering rhetoric were hypocritical and nihilistic. He refused to recognize any metaphysical or metalinguistic legitimacy for war. He organized his protests around this key perception: that intellectuals, public officials, journalists, labor leaders, and clergy had deepened the murderous passions of the war and thus perpetuated the conflagration. They not only undermined the possibility of a compromise peace, but prepared the ground for future bloodshed.[15]
Intellectuals had betrayed their function as guardians of European culture, preservers of knowledge. The Great War, Romain Rolland predicted, would be remembered as the war of the intellectuals: "The intellectuals on both sides have been so much in evidence since the beginning of the war, they have, indeed, brought so much violence and passion to bear upon it that it might almost be called their war."[16] The responsible intellectual should meet the challenge of war by retaining his commitment to social justice and understanding of others, by refusing to circulate distortions and partial truths, and above all by rejecting any position grounded in hatred and cruelty. Generalizing from his own association with the International Red Cross, providing aid to prisoners of war, Romain Rolland demonstrated that meaningful humanitarian work was possible in the midst of combat. An idealist without illusions, he admitted that "we cannot stop the war, but we can make it less bitter."[17]
He exhorted intellectuals to use the liberating elements of their cultural and historical legacies, never subordinating themselves to legalistic, military, or governmental authorities. Against the frightening spectacle of the "militarization of the intellect," more pronounced in Germany but insidiously present in France, he urged intellectuals to practice antiwar protest, aimed at civilians behind the lines, who constituted public opinion. The apparent monolith of war enthusiasm was not universally solid. Though the govern-
ments monopolized the media, though articulate voices refused to speak out, Romain Rolland intended to make dissenting ideas accessible to the public.[18]
Romain Rolland's ideal intellectual served as a moral guide especially to untutored youth and to misguided intellectuals. The critical task was to see reality clearly and to maintain a humane perspective on all the combatants. War resistance might tax internal resources, but the antiwar thinker did not permit emotional biases, personal preoccupations, or political allegiances to distort reality. The intellectual liberated by contesting and dissolving all forms of cult worship. Idols such as patriotism and national honor were amalgams of the irrational and mediocre, served by conformism and the blind acceptance of authority. To prevent intellectuals from further fetishizing the nation, a few must illustrate that an opposition to such grotesque and disorienting forms of devotion could be mounted.[19]
World war demanded that thinkers demonstrate the fullness of their characters. Resistance to war, grounded in analytic understanding and the refusal of collective murder, became central in the modern intellectual's scale of values. Without it an insane chauvinism would prevail.[20]
The Above the Battle articles launched a career of heretical intercessions around the question of how to prevent war. The substance of these writings contradicted the regrettable associations of the word "above." Romain Rolland's message should not be misconstrued as objectivity, aloofness, insensitivity, or self-righteousness. Above the Battle , contextually, was an active form of engagement, directly addressing the all-pervasive atmosphere of massacre in Europe. Composed at the height of his popularity, these pieces transformed the public's perception of him. He became the proverbial intellectual traitor. His name was banished from the literary press. Many parents forbade their children to read his texts. In months, the darling of the French literary left and the cultivated public became a pariah. He was accused of the ultimate treason—the betrayal of France at the hour of its greatest trial. He opposed the war at great risk to his life, his reputation, and his future influence as a man of letters. After 1914 his works were misrepresented and slandered because of this opposition. For the remainder of his life, opponents would attack Romain Rolland ad hominem by invoking the slogan "above the battle."[21]
There was an eighteen-month interim between his last public statement in Above the Battle and his first journalistic piece in late 1916. After being actively engaged, he disengaged and entered a period of introspective meditation. The combined pressure of his isolation, vicious attacks from France and Germany, and the desertion of respected friends prompted him to reevaluate his position. On 9 November 1916, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1915. The Nobel Prize symbolically legitimized his humanitarian antiwar stance and was widely regarded by Europeans as a surrogate Peace Prize. Romain Rolland's name reverberated internationally. He was irritated about being awarded the Nobel Prize, which might injure his claim of independence and interfere with his need for solitude.[22]
In 1914 and 1915, Romain Rolland had a prepolitical consciousness. If the war educated him, opposing the war gradually politicized him. His writings began to stir people, and from 1916 to 1919 he was a point of reference for antiwar opinion in Europe, America, and the world. After studying documents on the war, he asked searching questions about its causes and its consequences. Self-examination and the dictates of conscience gave way to more political and ideological considerations. He reluctantly realized that his own generous feelings had become dangerous and that acquiescence in a murderous atmosphere was impossible. He argued that the real responsibility for the war lay not with European leaders of state, but rather with the financial and industrial oligarchy who reaped huge profits from the hostilities. Eventually, his outrage at the continuation of the war fueled a major critique of European capitalism and its complicity with the political reaction. He connected these developments to the worldwide policies of imperialism. Romain Rolland abandoned his Eurocentric worldview during the war and became increasingly receptive to non-European civilizations and the emerging movements of national liberation in developing areas.[23]
During the early years of the Great War, it was difficult to distinguish his antiwar sentiments from the antimilitarism of minority Socialists and syndicalists in France. Romain Rolland's relations with certain Socialist and syndicalist journalists were more often precarious than comradely; he disagreed with their advocacy of
class struggle and desire to see a violent socialist revolution emanate from the global war.[24]
Romain Rolland's relationship with Henri Guilbeaux illustrated the tenuousness of his connection to the revolutionary-left Zimmerwaldians and underscored the political limits of his antiwar dissent. To avoid having his name compromised or his thought annexed by Guilbeaux, Romain Rolland separated his vision from that of the revolutionary socialists. Separation was complicated by the fact that he published in Guilbeaux's journal. He admired Guilbeaux's courage, talent, and loyalty but disapproved of his excessively polemical tone. Especially he deplored Guilbeaux's efforts to transform Demain , the Geneva periodical he edited from 1916 to 1918, into a leading propaganda organ for the Bolshevik wing of the Russian socialists exiled in Switzerland. Through Guilbeaux, Romain Rolland became peripherally associated with the great revolutionary adventure soon to begin in Russia. Before returning to Russia in his sealed car, Lenin telegrammed Guilbeaux to "bring Romain Rolland if he agrees on principle." Obviously, Romain Rolland disagreed with Bolshevik principles at that moment. Despite efforts to link him with the Russian revolutionaries, he remained unenlisted, a sympathetic but critical outsider.[25]
During the Great War, he tended to draw cultural and moral conclusions from his own public positions. If there were implicit politics in his message they were reformist and pacifist. Yet his texts cogently criticized the social conditions of a decaying European society and were often accompanied by angry denunciations of the political and educated elite. His writings echoed among the tiny pockets of socialists and revolutionary syndicalists throughout Europe. Romain Rolland's themes made members of the Vie ouvrière group, in France, conscious that political action was possible. Inveterate European revolutionaries read him for spiritual as well as political sustenance.[26] Rosa Luxemburg's letter to Luise Kautsky, written while Luxemburg was imprisoned in Breslau jail, is a poignant example:
I too learned to love him (Romain Rolland) and suggested to Hannes that we either travel to Paris together to make R.R.'s acquaintance, or else invite him to come to Germany. After all, we live but once and good men of this caliber are few and far between; why should
we forgo the luxury of knowing them and seeking spiritual contact with them? . . . Shall we not carry this idea out, "God willing?"[27]
Lenin, living in exile in Switzerland, expressed uneasiness that a Bolshevik comrade had not received Romain Rolland's articles: he volunteered to go to the library to make exact copies of the texts. Even Bolsheviks, who disagreed with his antiwar position, found Romain Rolland's writings illuminating on the massive upheavals created by the war. During the entire postwar period, Romain Rolland was invoked as a symbol of intellectual opposition to war by communists, syndicalists, and revolutionary socialists of many nations, not just France.[28]
The threat to individual conscience and intellectual responsibility kept Romain Rolland from accepting mass political movements on the left as the exclusive agents of progressive social change. He feared that a social revolution after the Great War would lead to grave distortions. He withheld support from revolutionary movements in Western or central Europe because they lacked leadership, organization, discipline, and an appropriate sense of timing: it would be premature to unleash a revolutionary offensive on an exhausted Europe. Revolution would inevitably degenerate into a failure, a jacquerie; it would trigger a violent repression. He struggled to articulate an autonomous antiwar vision based on the dictates of conscience. His thought was not to be expropriated by those with a political or ideological ax to grind.[29]
Romain Rolland's stance was essentially humanitarian, charitable, Christian, and apolitical. He designed his writings to destroy the fallacious justification of the war, to demystify all idealization of military glory, and to signal his disapproval of the consensus mentality. In doing so, he transformed the content and style of intellectual commitment, popularized by Zola during the Dreyfus Affair, into an instrument of antiwar education and resistance to the warlike policies of the state. His perspective was militantly international and cosmopolitan. His public statements were typified by a spirit of tolerance and fairness, a concern for accuracy and documentation, and by the wish to diffuse the climate of fury and paranoia on both sides of the trenches. In a climate of war psychosis, he spoke the language of sound judgment, unfettered intel-
lect, and compassion. His opposition to the dehumanizing and hypnotic mass effects of the Great War, he claimed, would be vindicated by history.[30]
Romain Rolland had no illusions about the practical efficacy of his stand or his power to alleviate suffering either at home or on the fronts. His words were religious acts that would not alter the shape of the war. He spoke out to be at peace with himself and his conscience and to be true to his own oceanic sensibility. After the war, he expected to be regarded by a minority of left-wing and progressive public opinion as an example of humble heroism, intellectual independence, and moral intransigence. His name might remind the young and idealistic that it was possible to refuse war.[31]
In the period 1917–1919, Romain Rolland again played with the idea of a fraternal organization of intellectuals, an "intellectual's international" of thinkers who had not capitulated to war propaganda, but had honored the commitment to free and open inquiry, pursuit of the truth, and rigorous logic. The intellectual of conscience was the herald of a humanitarian society in the future. Romain Rolland's honor role of potential members included Bertrand Russell, E. D. Morel, Norman Angell, Israel Zangwill, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Henri Barbusse, Marcel Martinet, P.-J. Jouve, Maxim Gorky, Max Eastman, John Reed, G. F. Nicolai, August Forel, Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, and Gerhard Gran. These men upheld the idea of mutual cooperation between nations in their writings and in their personal lives. They withstood vituperative attacks, personal threats, and the prospect of trial and imprisonment. He endowed these intellectuals with Promethean power. They were life-affirming, creative, courageous, nonconformist, and unalterably opposed to the menace of modern warfare: "The register is, as it were, a picture of the untrammeled souls of the world wrestling with the unchained forces of fanaticism, violence, and falsehood."[32]
Romain Rolland exited from the war with oceanic sensibility intact. He was readying himself to reassemble an elite of world thinkers around his own pluralistic internationalist, pacifist, and humanitarian vision. As he had opposed the affiliation of intellectual forerunners with left-wing parties, so he urged them to remain separate from the institutional networks of the nation-state
and its artificial borders, which obstructed the circulation of anti-war thought. His libertarian stance heroicized the powers of independent thinkers in their resistance to the state:
The State is not our country. It is merely the administration of our country, sometimes a good administrator, sometimes a bad one, but always fallible. The State has power and uses power. But ever since man has been man, this power has invariably broken vainly against the threshold of the free Soul.[33]
Romain Rolland, the free Soul, emerged from the debacle of World War I emotionally and intellectually prepared for future battles.