Later, the Prime Minister slowly climbed the steps of the Panthéon, between two lines of miners who were still playing a decorative and symbolic role, and began to speak: he could be seen extending his arms, puffing out his chest, laying his hand on his heart, but not a word of his speech could be heard amid all the bursts of cheering and booing that were erupting from all sides on the black-and-grey square. The demonstrators, moving forward as slowly as lava, threw their placards against the railings; and the Thinker, who had never looked greener or more hungry, gazed vaguely with his eyes of bronze at that pyre of wood, calico, cardboard and everlasting flowers that rose up before Jaurès’s coffin, like the crutches, votive offerings and sticks before a miraculous site. The whole crowd was drifting away via Rue Valette, Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, Rue Clovis and Rue de l’Estrapade: darkness began to fall and yellow lamps were lit over its dispersal.
Between the Hôtel des Grands Hommes and the corner of Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, Laforgue said with a sigh:
— No question about it. One knows which side one should be on.
— That second cortège was needed, replied Rosenthal who was feeling a bit drunk, to cleanse us of our night of dissimulation. .
Nothing is more difficult than the systematic exploitation of an event of the heart, nothing more swiftly damped than the reverberations of love at first sight. Examinations, laziness, literature, curiosity about women, all the false manoeuvres in which the arduous life of adolescents is dissipated, long prevented Laforgue and his friends from drawing from those violent memories of 24 and 25 November all the practical consequences they should have implied: for years, it was merely something they held in reserve.
It might be thought odd that they were not shaken by certain events in the years ’25, ’26, ’27 and ’28: but that would be to take insufficient account of the diversions into which so many young men are enticed, when at a stroke they discover books and women. In July ’25, Laforgue was going for Sunday excursions out of Paris, and taking out dancing at Saint-Cloud and Nogent-sur-Marne a little salesgirl from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, who seemed to him the most important thing in the world. In May ’26, Rosenthal forgot everything in favour of the revelations in the Ethics. The war in Morocco, the Canton rising, the English general strike were barely anything more to them than great opportunities for a few days of political enthusiasm: they signed manifestos that committed them far less than their parents thought. The interest they took in the world lacked specificity. The Sacco and Vanzetti affair, with all those heads broken in Paris, might have played a role in their lives that would have marked them more severely than the Jaurès ceremonies; but it was the holiday period, none of them was in Paris, the whole business was simply an item of news that they read in the papers, with a forty-eight hour delay, in Brittany or in the Midi.
Throughout all these years, they would have periods of passion when they would resolve to go to bed at three in the morning: this was more than was needed to pass their examinations, it fell a bit short of forgetting themselves. They would espy a trail and plunge in, less to gain knowledge than with the hope of stumbling upon a mirror or a source. They discovered one after another Mendelssohn, the ‘Unknown Philosopher’ and Rabbi ben Ezra. After a couple of weeks, humour would prevail, they would wake up and return to the cinema almost every evening. They were eager young men, but lazy.
This superficiality did not prevent them from believing in Revolution: they cared little about appearing truly inconsistent. They sometimes examined their consciences — but only to conclude that they did not incline towards Revolution out of love for humanity, nor out of any strict adherence to events. It is quite true that there was not the least scrap of philanthropy in their natural impulse to revolt: humanitarianism struck them as entirely counterfeit, nor did they view Revolution as a secular rebirth of Christianity.
— What I like about Revolution, said Laforgue, is that the civilization it promises will be a hard civilization.
— Agreed, said Rosenthal. The age of ease is coming to an end. .
They were stirred more by disorder, absurdity and outrages to logic than by cruelty or oppression, and really saw the bourgeoisie, whose sons they were, less as criminal and murderous than as idiotic. They never doubted for a moment that it was in decline and doomed. But they wished to fight not for the workers — who, fortunately, had by no means waited for them — but for themselves: they viewed the workers merely as their natural allies. There is a great deal of difference between wanting to sink a ship and refusing to sink with it. .
The intense family repugnance they felt for the bourgeoisie might have led them to a violent, but anarchist, critique. Anarchism, however, struck them as illiterate and frivolous: their academic studies saved them. They scorned the generation that had immediately preceded them, for having expressed its revolt only in poetic vocabularies and upon poetic sureties: the moment seemed right to endow anger with philosophical guarantors.
— Let’s start being serious, said Bloyé.
Rosenthal commented:
— It will be seen later that a historic change occurred, once Hegel and Marx superseded the Schools of Rimbaud and Lautréamont as objects of the younger generation’s admiration.
They liked only victors and reconstructors; they despised the sick, the dying, lost causes. No force could more powerfully seduce young men who refused to be caught up in the bourgeoisie’s defeats than a philosophy which, like that of Marx, pointed out to them the future victors of history: the workers, destined for what they somewhat hastily judged to be an inevitable victory. Moreover, they went so far as to convince themselves, with excessive complacency, that the Revolution was accomplished now that they themselves positively no longer identified with the bourgeoisie: a kind of smug pride made them speak of post-revolutionary consciousness. No one would have dreamed of finding them dangerous; they worked less to destroy the present than to define a dreadfully contingent future.
Civil War took up a great deal of their time during the first months: they had no suspicion at the time that what was most important about the venture was the fact that it gave them opportunities for extensive reading, and their first chance of sustained relations with workers, and that they would later recall, with the surprise which the memory of happiness gives, the hours they used to spend with deft, sardonic compositors in the little book printshop in Rue de Seine where they went to correct their proofs and lay out the journal.