They were not modest, they compared themselves to famous groupings, to the Encyclopaedists or the Hegelians.
Rosenthal thought their principal undertaking should be an encyclopaedic critique of values, and a sort of general reduction of ideas to their true motives: no study seemed to him more important than the critique of mystification and the exposure of mendacity. Laforgue dreamed of a kind of generalization of Marx’s analyses on the fetishism of commodities — some universal charactery of deception.
It was, after all, the morrow of the War and the first peacetime disorders. They were emerging from a prodigiously mendacious time, when the entire education of the young had been accompanied by solemn twaddle, fuelled in turn by the requirements of prosecuting the War, then by the success of the grand machinations of the Peace. They realized they had been deceived no less at school than their fathers or elder brothers had been at the front. Their mothers, lonely and glibly heroic like all wives of men who will die in wars, had themselves lied with a disconcerting civic ease. Ten years after Versailles, almost all the men who had returned from the front, saved at the last instant when the clarion of the Armistice sounded, still hesitated to unmask the meaning of the rhetorical inventions for which they had fought: rarely does a person have the courage to retract and cry from the rooftops that he once took the word of liars; it is necessary to be strong indeed for such public confessions — people would rather have been accomplices than dupes. It will easily be understood why Laforgue and his comrades despised no one more deeply than War Veterans. The voices that had been raised after the last day of the War still seemed few in number: they did not compel the young men’s recognition. Everything depended upon the chance of an encounter that did not always occur. By about a year Laforgue and Rosenthal had missed the Clarté movement, which was already disintegrating.
Behind the closed shutters of the shop in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, or in their lecture-rooms in Rue d’Ulm, they spent hours mulling over these matters. Comrades who did not form part of the team would come to visit them; they would talk till very late, drinking coffee that Bloyé handed round, until they were tipsy with words and smoke. For example, Rosenthal would say:
— A modern encyclopaedia could only be based on the sincerity of insolence. Nobody expects anything of us other than insolence. We must announce, with sufficiently prophetic means of expression to unsettle the smug, the decline of the age of mendacity. Such an annunciation will not be achieved without a system: that’s why our special mission in philosophy consists in giving a new tone, and the accents of our age, to all the denigratory systems — Spinoza, Hegel, Marx. . Our undertaking will thus be more like the Hegelian Encyclopaedia than the Encyclopaedia of d’Alembert, which has all the defects of the bourgeoisie’s compromises. . If people are at death’s door, that’s because they’re suffocating inside shells of mendacity. We shall tell those hermit-crabs why they’re dying! They’ll be furious with us, nobody likes truth for its own sake. Marx said that men must be given consciousness of themselves, even if they don’t want it. They don’t like consciousness, they like death. . For a certain time, my friends, our sole task will be to denigrate their ideas and disaccustom them to flattery. . There’s no phrase I admire more than Lenin’s about the profanation of gold, do you remember? ‘When we are victorious on a world scale, I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.’
Then Laforgue said:
— What I’m a bit worried about is the possible duration of this mission. . Do you know whom I compare us to?
— No, Rosenthal replied.
— I compare us to that brilliant group of Young Hegelians, such as Bruno Bauer and his ilk, who definitely preferred revolutions in consciousness to the rough and tumble of actual revolutions. Don’t you know that little epigram on the Doktorklub?
Unsere Täten sind Worte bis jetzt und nock lange
Unter die Abstraktion stellt sich die Praxis.
There are days when I wonder if it wouldn’t be more worthwhile sticking posters up on walls, with the chaps in some party cell. .
— That’s just inverted romanticism, and pretty low quality too, Rosenthal replied. Victory in thought must precede victory in reality.
— If only it could, said Laforgue. That’s exactly why you strike me as idealist. Doesn’t it really come down to the fact that reality strikes us as rather hard to shift?
— I don’t agree, Rosenthal interrupted. The function of philosophy consists exclusively in the profanation of ideas. No violence is equal in its effects to theoretical violence. Later comes action. .
— It comes, said Laforgue, when theory has penetrated the masses. Do you think it’s our theory which the masses are just waiting to be penetrated by?
— We shall see, replied Rosenthal.
Yet Bernard was more impatient than all the rest. But nothing then seemed to him more urgent than to utter a few cries which he usually called messages — and which lacked simplicity. In December and again in February, Rosenthal published pages in Civil War that had no serious chance of shaking capitalism.
V
His first cries uttered, his first cries written, Bernard wanted action.
Civil War had been going for three months, it had five hundred subscribers and eight hundred single-copy purchasers, three publishing houses were giving it advertising. This was a great deal, it was a success, but it could not be called a historic upheaval in French thought. Rosenthal would no doubt have been content with talking about anger or the depreciation of values, or the ruses of bourgeois Reason, if such arguments had provoked legal actions — but with this absurd freedom of the press, the Public Prosecutor was still making no move. It was impossible to view the exercise of philosophy as an act.
Spring was about to arrive. People had been through hard months, but the ice was melting, winter was dying in showers of rain, one felt like rising early, the days were lengthening like the plants you see tremulously growing and unfolding on the cinema screen. In Rue de la Paix, the shop-girls came out in droves and crossed Place Vendôme and Rue de Rivoli arm in arm. From time to time the weather would be fine, as though summer, autumn or late-spring days that had not made their appearance months earlier — stifled by rain or a storm — were now dispensing their warmth upon still-numbed hands and still-chapped lips. There were still hoarfrosts on the lawns of the Luxembourg, but between two spring showers the sky would come back into view.
Apart from this oncoming spring, it was a bad time for impatient young men. Things seemed generally to be calming down, in economics and politics alike. There was a moment when the history of Europe appeared as slack as a neap-time sea, when people forgot war and peace, the Ruhr, Morocco and China. The season at Deauville had never been as brilliant as that year — indeed people would still be speaking of it during the summer of ’37, not such a bad summer itself in terms of race-meetings and casinos. At Rosenthal’s parents’ house, ladies who had had their belle époque during the period of Mobilization-is-not-war would say: