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:
— Don’t you think, my dear, this spring has a little whiff, as it were, of pre-war days?
There really was not much happening. People were on the whole amused by the Gazette du Franc affair, Prime Minister Poincaré had hundred-vote majorities, the Briand–Kellogg Pact was perhaps going to make people feel a bit safer. There were a few strikes, of course, but Halluin and the textile industry of the Nord were far away, and the taxi strike was really quite pleasant for the private cars, which could at last drive about in Paris. People might perhaps have been moved by the thirty deaths in the Rhine Army during the month of March: how dreadful those epidemics are, mowing down young soldiers in faraway countries during the showery season – not so far away as Indochina or Madagascar, but all the same a long way from their mothers! Thereupon Marshal Foch had died, in the same month as the Rhine Army soldiers, to whom people had given rather less thought. What an opportunity to go and queue up at the end of Rue de Grenelle – in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, with Englishmen, nannies from the Champ-de-Mars, old ladies and priests – to see what the funerals of illustrious families are like, and how old victorious marshals settle into death wearing their chinstraps! But in April, when soldiers fraternized in the Gard with the striking miners they were actually supposed to evict from the pits, people were fed up with all these stories about servicemen whereas only marshals – at most – were really tolerable. Eventually, however, the ladies felt easier in their minds. They were the same ones who, a few years later, would talk about pre-crash days as in ’28 they had talked of pre-war days, and who could be heard in drawing-rooms saying that in the last war their sons had been taken, which for France’s sake they could accept, but that in the next war their money would be taken too. Their minds had to be set at rest. Luckily, that year Prefect Chiappe showed that with him public order was in no danger: after 1 May and 1 August, people told themselves it would be a long while before the communists had bandaged all their wounds.
It was indeed a difficult year to get through, for young men who placed all their hopes in the aggravation of disorder, and for whom the only desirable future consisted in not having one. Already their parents, forever paved with good intentions, were reviving career plans for them about which they had long been doubtful, bearing in mind what this strange, tottering world of the twenties held in store. Laforgue’s father, who had quite some time ago consoled himself for his son’s refusal to enter the Ecole Polytechnique, spoke to him about doing a doctoral thesis, after his agrégation:
— Who do you take me for? Philippe exclaimed.
Was it all going to start up again, then? Were they finally going to be compelled, after invoking all the shipwrecks befitting great ornamental centuries, to sail upon the level waters of bourgeois life, observing nautical regulations and all the red signals on bridges?
The prosperity of ’29, those Markets that were so healthy despite their ups and downs and any check in the contango rate, appeared as oppressive to them as the celebrated failed Revolution of ’19, ten years earlier, had seemed to their elders.
They had lived amid such thrilling uncertainty, since the time when, at school, their classes had been interrupted by air raids and shellbursts and every door that banged had made them think of an explosion, that it seemed impossible to them that the sad age of indolence miraculously suspended by the four years of the War could ever resume its course.
Laforgue and Rosenthal dated history from nineteen hundred and fourteen: they would have liked to be able to call ’29 Year XV, numbering the dates of a new era in the same way that the Russians spoke of Year XIII of the October Revolution. Were they now going to have to remain in the continuation of the Christian era, and feel themselves bound in perpetuity to Jesus, Charlemagne, Henri IV, Louis XIV, Voltaire, Napoleon and M. Thiers? For several months they foresaw the advent of an age of regress and boredom, such as had not been seen since the Restoration or the first years of the Third Republic, when they would lament the warlike and peaceful exploits of their elders, just as the young men of eighteen hundred and twenty had lamented the Revolutionary Wars, the Italian Campaign and Napoleon’s anabases from one end of Europe to the other, or the young men of eighteen hundred and eighty had lamented the Burning of Paris and the Commune with its sixty days of great innovations. Would they then be reduced to writing poems?
They were well aware that the public authorities and their families were conspiring, as in the past, to make them relapse into brilliant futures, careers, worries about advancement, money and successful marriages. These pretensions struck them as repugnant, but they trembled to see them confirmed by the becalming of history: in their entire adolescence, there was perhaps no year more disturbing than that year of ’29, when everything contributed to a non-stop purr of contentment.
Thank God, in November, the Wall Street crash was to reassure them: they welcomed it like news of a victory. Since they tended to confuse capitalism with important people, when they saw their fathers’ faces they convinced themselves that they had been quite right to stake their lives on the cards of confusion, and that they could indubitably count upon a world destined for great metamorphoses. There was no question of settling down into an order that was about to die, no question of making their beds.
— Didn’t we say so! they exclaimed.
But they had had a narrow escape.
None of them was more sensitive than Rosenthal to these plunges and abrupt recoveries of potential. You must picture Bernard founding Civil War only in order to play for time, in order to occupy his mind, until he got a chance to show what he was capable of. He would gladly have been heroic: there were no opportunities.
One evening towards the end of March, in Rue d’Ulm, Rosenthal exclaimed that the Revolution required far more than articles:
—