SOURCE: "The Case against Engagement: Julien Benda and La Trahison des Clercs," in The Spectrum of Political Engagement: Mounier, Benda, Nizan, Brasillach, Sartre, Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 26-48.

[Schalk is an American writer and educator. In the following excerpt, he considers Benda's views on political engagement and examines the critical reception of Th e Treason of the Intellectuals, as well as the practical understanding of Benda's ideas by various thinkers.]

The idea of a treason or betrayal of the intellectuals has had an enormous success. This concept may be viewed as the reverse of the coin of engagement, or perhaps a slightly distorted mirror-image. It has become a commonplace in America and England. In France it may be traced back at least to the Dreyfus Affair, when intellectuals acquired along with their name a special critical function, and because of the victory signified by the revision of Dreyfus' first trial, gained "a droit de cite unknown in other countries." Both Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard intellectuals accused each other of betraying their "true" functions. The explicit formulation of La Trahison des clercs did not, however, come until 1927, and in France at least the concept has become inseparably (and rightfully) identified with Julien Benda.

Though he has had a number of distinguished American admirers over the years, including T. S. Eliot, Julien Benda is not well known in this country. Specialists in French literature and intellectual history will recognize him as a polemicist and critic, a second-rank figure who throughout his very long life was overshadowed by several generations of brilliant contemporaries. He is remembered primarily for one book, though he wrote fifty and more than one thousand articles. La Trahison des clercs was first published in 1927, and translated into English in 1928 as The Tresson of the Intellectuals.

Benda's controversial attack on certain types of modern intellectuals has often been dismissed as unscholarly polemic. In his introduction to The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963, Christopher Lasch states: "… I have not wished to write a tract, another Trahison des clercs, and I state my own prejudices here only in order to make it clear what they are, not because this book is intended to document them."

Even when Benda's contribution has been viewed positively, it has been rather badly misperceived. In April 1965 a symposium on "The Intellectual in Politics" was held at the University of Texas, and the proceedings were published in 1966 with a preface by H. Malcolm Macdonald. Macdonald felt that despite the divergencies of the views of the participants, a consensus did emerge, "… on the necessity of the intellectual, however defined, to remain true to his task of being what Julien Benda has called 'the conscience of humanity.'" In a vague and general sense that every intellectual from Ayn Rand to Herbert Marcuse could probably accept, Macdonald's assertion is correct. However, a close reading of the eight papers presented at the symposium reveals an almost total ignorance of the specifics of Benda's thought. Only one speaker, the Swedish political scientist and parliamentarian Gunnar Hecksher, refers specifically to La Trahison des clercs, but his brief remarks show little understanding of what Benda was advocating in that work. One other participant, the German historian Klaus Mehnert, does take a position close to that adopted by Benda in La Trahison des clercs, but he never mentions Benda by name.

Eugene McCarthy, at the time Senator from Wisconsin, was the last speaker at the symposium, and McCarthy made an eloquent plea for greater political involvement on the part of intellectuals. Without reference to Julien Benda, Senator McCarthy used the phrase "treason of the intellectuals" in exactly the opposite sense originally intended by Benda. No one would accuse Senator McCarthy, a man deeply steeped in Catholic theology and a talented poet and essayist in his own right, of lacking intellectual credentials. It is interesting to recall that two years after this speech was delivered McCarthy became the leader of the "Dump Johnson" movement, which attracted many American intellectuals and which appears to be a rare case of intellectuals having some demonstrable political influence, in that President Lyndon Johnson did not seek a second full term of office in 1968.

Senator McCarthy's "error" does suggest that while the notion of the "treason of the intellectuals" is very much a part of our political climate, there is no widespread awareness of the authorship of the term. Even when Benda's authorship is recognized, the precise meanings he attached to the concept of la trahison des clercs have long been forgotten, and there has been heated debate, since the Second World War at least, as to precisely what segment of the intellectual class is treasonous. One's own political predispositions clearly play a major role in determining whom one identifies as the betrayers.

To deal fully with the uses and misuses of Benda's concept of the betrayal of the intellectuals would require a long essay. As an illustration of the diversity of views, here are four examples chosen from a large number.

Lawrence Stone defines the "ultimate trahison des clercs" as "the conscious denigration of the life of the mind."

Robert Brustein says "We have been witnessing a modern trahison des clercs, signified by the surrender of men and women with great potential to America's hunger for personalities."

Ferdinand Mount defines the treason of the clerks as "this prostration of mind before brutish might, not excluding that of Julien Benda, who coined the phrase.…"

Richard Cobb defines the trahison des clercs as "intellectual commitment to political extremism."

A MAN WHO DETESTED CHAPELS

The controversy over la trahison des clercs continues and Benda remains relatively obscure. One reason for this apparent paradox is suggested by Rene Etiemble in his preface to the third edition of La Trbison des clercs (1958). Etiemble points out that for more than half a century Benda had obstinately refused every philosophical and political "mode." Benda produced polemics against Bergsonian intuition, Maurrassian sophism, and later intellectual "fads" such as surrealism and existentialism. Throughout his long life he had never received much except "hatred and sarcasm," had never reached many people, and had gained several thousand influential enemies with one work. La Traison des cleres infuriated the literary people, who are especially "rancorous and vain." The media, Etiemble adds, which in a few weeks can make an inoffensive imbecile" into a star, spent fifty years lowering Julien Benda into the image of a "fanatical, odious, and raging little man." Julien Benda was, as Andre Lwoff writes, a nonconformist, a man who "detested chapels." When he died in extreme old age his passing was barely noticed.

While Benda's technical mastery of French literary style has never been questioned, his methods of argumentation may also help to explain his lack of eminence. Readers who are familiar with La Trahison des clercs, even those in sympathy with Benda's fundamental positions, may well conclude that the imprecise knowledge of what Benda stood for is deserved. Raymond Aron, author of another, very different polemic against a large group of his fellow intellectuals, finds Benda's arguments often confused. Aron writes: "… if the betrayal consists in overvaluing the temporal and undervaluing the eternal, the intellectuals of our time are all traitors."

While Aron's formulation is persuasive, it is not a completely correct definition of what Benda came to view the betrayal to be. Benda would have been in full accord with Aron's assertion that "… the tendency to criticize the established order is, so to speak, the occupational disease of the intellectuals." Yet the matter is complicated because Benda would by no means claim that the criterion for discerning betrayal is criticism of the established order. In many cases it would be a betrayal not to challenge, and challenge publicly, the established order.

Pierre Chambat has shown, through a close examination of Benda's entire opus, that Benda was concerned with what he perceived as a "crisis of civilization." Even in La Trahison des clercs, Benda did not limit himself to the rather specific question of "Who betrayed?" He attempted to deal with many, if not all, facets of the intellectual's role in modern society. Such inquiries inevitably pose serious difficulties, since the individual commitment of the writer is so deeply enmeshed in the problem he is studying. Robert J. Niess, author of the definitive published biography of Julien Benda, recognizes these difficulties and proposes an interesting, if somewhat discouraging solution: "To discover the true role of the clerc, to learn whether or not he has betrayed, and to date the betrayal successfully would be the task of the perfect historian, that is, the unfalteringly alert mind, not only universally learned but completely impartial both politically and intellectually and strengthened by the most rigorous kind of philosophical training." Niess believes that Benda was especially weak as an historian. While Niess' judgment of Benda's skill as an historian may be disputed, his own analysis of the origins of La Trabison des clercs has been recognized as a masterful exercise in the history of ideas. The concept of the clerc is traced by Niess back to Dialogue a Byzance, published in 1900. Already Benda conceived of a body of clercs serving as the conscience of society, but it took him a long time to develop his central idea of a mass treason of the intellectuals. La Trahison des clercs is viewed as the essential document in Benda's intellectual life; at least with the hindsight we now possess he seems to have been progressing toward it all through his early and middle career, and after 1927 he constantly amplifies and defends it.

Niess' own judgment of La Trahison des clercs is quite ambivalent. There is a rather striking dichotomy between high praise and sharp criticism, which suggests that he was uncertain in his own evaluation. Niess points up many of the vagaries and inconsistencies in Benda's argumentation, the flagrant biases, and even finds examples of faulty reasoning. Yet he is convinced that in the future La Traison des clercs will be seen as the one work which best combines Benda's passion and logic into a "brilliant system of social criticism." Niess is persuaded that it will hold up as "one of the most considerable books of our time." This dichotomy is again manifested in Niess' conclusions on Benda's entire career. He is quite severe; Benda made a "catastrophic intellectual error, the error of constant generalization without sufficient regard to facts.…" Yet Benda will someday be conceded an "honorable place in that brilliant line which he himself described, the line of St. Paul and Luther and Pascal, men who eternally prevent the world from slumbering in indolence and evil."

It seems unlikely that Benda will acquire this prominence (since he never had it during his lifetime) and retain it simply because he made people angry and kept them alert. Perhaps Niess felt that intellectuals reading Benda would sense intuitively that his message was an important one, reminding them of truths about their calling. H. Stuart Hughes, in his pathbreaking study of the intellectual history of Europe between 1890 and 1930, Consciousness and Society, selects La Trahison des clercs as one of three works of "intellectual summation," a "directional signpost" for the middle and late 1920s. On balance Hughes is even more critical than Niess, and he finds La Trahison des clercs a deeply flawed book. Hughes does, however, value the work as a "moral remonstrance," and a call to an "examination of conscience."

What is the nature of this "moral remonstrance" that both Niess and Hughes find in La Trahison des clercs? For Hughes it must be an important factor, since without it Benda's simplification of the issues, his "profoundly parochial outlook," his "narrowness of intellectual range," would hardly make the book worthy of mention.

THE ORIGINAL CONCEPTION OF LA TRAHISON DES CLERCS

Julien Benda never pretended to be a tolerant man; he hated his ideological and political enemies with an unremitting passion. Many readers will be annoyed by his stubborn refusal to consider opposing views, his digressions, his merciless hammering at the same points. Still the central line of his argument in La Trahison des clercs can be disentangled. A careful reformulation of this argument should serve three purposes. First, in viewing the strengths and weaknesses of the work in clearer focus, the reader will be able to evaluate its importance for himself or herself. Second, Benda's intellectual and political evolution after 1927 will be easier to comprehend, in particular the quite fascinating and apparently contradictory changes in his views on the political involvement of intellectuals. The common misconception of Benda as purely an "ivory-tower" theorist will be laid to rest definitively. I also hope to show that even in 1927 the question of political action of the clerc, and thus the question of engagement, posed the crucial paradox for Benda. Benda may have resolved it to his own satisfaction, though I doubt even that and find his ambivalence showing through in the very vehemence of his denials. The other ambivalence—that of the commentators—has, I believe, its roots in the same paradox. Benda touches painful nerves and reflects, in his own way, the doubts and hesitations felt by several generations of practicing intellectuals in Europe and America.

Benda opens La Trahison des clercs by formulating the essential qualities he finds in modern society at large. Both the intellectuals and humanity in general have been placing greater and greater emphasis on temporal concerns. This is an age of politics; political passions and those of race and class are now reaching almost everybody, even spreading to the Far East. (Benda may have been thinking of the Chinese Revolution of 1927, though as is almost always the case he makes no specific historical reference. He prefers to remain on a general, theoretical plane.) We know, Benda adds, precisely who our political enemies are, and thus we can hate them more bitterly. A "condensation" of political hatreds has developed, along with a greater uniformity of thought.

Again and again Benda stresses the growth of nationalist passion, the overweening concern with national glory and pride. He is horrified by new doctrines which advocate crushing enemy cultures totally, rather than incorporating the vanquished within the conquering society. Benda's distress at the rise of mystical nationalism cannot be overemphasized, and he frequently returns to the subject throughout his work. He devotes almost as much attention to the related issue of the rise of ideology in general. The passions of the past were precisely passions—that is, "naive explosions of instinct," with no theoretical grounding. However, a broad spectrum of intellectuals, from Karl Marx to Charles Maurras and their varied followers, have elaborated networks of doctrines designed to support political passions. These networks are effective and have increased the strength of political passions. Buttressed by a careful intellectual organization, each of the modern ideological systems argues that it is the "agent of good" in the world, and that its enemy represents the "genie of evil." Each system tries to be totalitarian, in the sense of covering all aspects of life, believing itself destined to succeed, and claiming that its ideology is founded on science.

Benda believes that these new, systematized passions arise from two fundamental desires: (1) temporal good, and (2) the wish to be separate and unique from other human groups. The former relates to class passion, the latter to racial passion, and nationalism unites the two. These passions are realist in that they relate to the world and are nonidealist, though they are so strong that one might term them "divinized realism." Men want to be in the real and practical world and not in the disinterested, metaphysical realm; no one would die now for "principles," for abstract universal values like justice. Older idealist passions, such as those motivating a "pure" crusader, have been absorbed by nationalism. The pragmatic behavior of a single localized state has become divinized—the state has become God and Mussolini's Italy admits it. Later in La Trahison des clercs Benda comments with disgust on the Italian intellectuals' eulogy of warfare and scorn for civilian life, their praise of the morality of violence. He finds their apologies for the warlike instinct a "stupefaction of history."

The reader with some general knowledge of Benda's positions may be confused at this point, for he descends from the ivory tower into the heat of a polemic against a specific regime, even before he has elaborated his doctrine of the role of the clerc. Over the years his attacks on Italian fascism grew more vehement, especially after the invasion of Ethiopia.

Perhaps Benda realized that his remarks on Italy could lead him into a logical dilemma, for he makes the qualification that the clerc may become involved in external politics when an abstract injustice has been committed. (Of course, he can provide us with no universally applicable key to determine when an event may be classified as a true injustice, though he names Voltaire's role in the Calas Affair, and Zola's advocacy of Dreyfus' innocence as examples of justified involvement.) He could have cited his own participation in the Dreyfus Affair, which Pierre Chambat, in his judicious analysis of this aspect of Benda's career, does not hesitate to term "engagement." Only a decade later, in 1936, did Benda publicly admit and discuss his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair. This led Paul Nizan to remark that Benda "wanted to see in the Affair only a combat of eternal verities, when, in fact, it was simply a matter of an historical engagement."

Enough examples have been given to show that when Benda mentions specifics, it is easy to detect a leftist, or at least a liberal political inclination. I shall return to this important point later. Presumably Benda felt himself on surer ground in La Trahison des clercs when he added two general criteria for involvement. First, the true clerc never espouses causes for any personal gain. Also, if the clerc is really fulfilling his function he will be scorned and insulted by the layman.

Here, then, is the first mention of the problem of when and why the intellectual should enter the political arena. Benda's embarrassment is, I believe, evident to the reader. Probably because it is more difficult to prescribe contemporary behavior than to look to the past with the benefit of present knowledge, Benda devotes more attention in La Trahison des clercs to the question of how the intellectuals should have responded to the recent and dramatic changes in that part of humanity which he terms "lay" as opposed to clerical.

In the past the clercs had stood apart from the masses, were devoted to the metaphysical and the speculative, and scorned practical ends. This elite boasted a lineage of two thousand years and had always been in "… formal opposition to the realism of the multitudes." Thanks to the vigilance of these intellectual sentinels, humanity had at least "… done evil while honoring the good." This contradiction was the honor of humanity and kept civilization on its proper course until around 1890. At that time a sharp transition took place, and those who had been a "brake" on the realism of the masses began to stimulate that realism. To show that there is a qualitative difference in the contemporary period Benda cites individuals—Theodor Mommsen, Heinrich von Treitschke, Ferdinand Brunetiere, Maurice Barrés, Charles Maurras, Gabriele d'Annunzio, Rudyard Kipling, and his former friend Charles Péguy, who had died during the first Battle of the Marne in 1914. The names of Georges Sorel and Friedrich Nietzsche are then added for good measure, and Benda finds everyone on the list to be equally evil. All are men of true political passion. (It is important to note that all of these intellectuals, with the possible exceptions of Péguy and Sorel, about whom there is heated scholarly debate, are strongly identified with the political Right. Had he been so inclined, Benda could have included in his first list of betrayers prominent, indeed internationally known, intellectuals who were active in left-wing causes, such as Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse. The latter had been a member of the French Communist Party since 1923.)

The group of intellectuals Benda chose to denounce are condemned because they desire action and immediate results and have descended eagerly into the political forum. No disinterested group remains; the modern clerc is strongly xenophobic.

Benda does admit that external historical circumstances have played some role in this change in clerical attitudes, though he still wishes that the clercs had not acquiesced so joyfully. The historians, as guilty as the novelists and poets, are glorifying nationalism, producing pragmatic rather than disinterested work, and using history to strengthen political causes. The literary critics are unobjective and partisan; even the metaphysicians, supposedly the most abstract of all, are becoming political. The latter change is, Benda claims, totally without historical precedent.

"Intense" is a mild word to describe the degree of Benda's own French patriotism, and though he set forth an elaborate series of arguments to defend his loyalty to France, he is susceptible to the charge of xenophobia himself. His indictment of Germany, "the cancer of Europe," began in 1905 and persisted through his last published articles in 1954. As one might expect, he claims that the German philosophers, such as Fichte and Hegel, were the first to betray. Though the French have all too frequently heeded the siren song of their colleagues across the Rhine, "the nationalist clerc is essentially a German invention." Instead of honoring the abstract quality of what is uniquely human, the nineteenth-century German intellectuals began the trend of looking concretely at mankind so that differences become clearly visible. Even Christianity, and the agnostic Benda was always an admirer of the early Christians, has been subverted by the nationalists. Christ has been made a "professor of national egotism." Marxism in its guise as internationalist philosophy is not a valid substitute, Benda believes, since it has concrete aims and speaks in the name of one group, instead of all humanity.

The legacy of Hellenism, which for a time had been maintained by the classical French intellectuals, has at least been defeated. The modern clerc has the infantile wish to think of everything as "in time," never as outside or beyond time, and is concerned only with the contemporaneous, the immediate, present circumstances. One can see how appalled Benda would have been at the emphasis on "relevance," which was so important in American university curricula in the 1960s. The powerful new trend toward pragmatic career training which has surfaced in American (and European) colleges and universities in the 1970s would have equally distressed him. Benda finds all such new doctrines a reversal of Platonism, since they claim that real values are seen and concrete instead of "clouds" (nudes) of justice and temperance. For the first time in history clercs approve the judges of Socrates. Again and again Benda attacks the moral flavor the new clercs have given to realism, while stressing repeatedly that we are at a turning point in history. "The divinisation of the political" is the greatest and most evil work of the modern clercs. Even Machiavelli said that politics and morality were disassociated, and Charles Maurras now claims that "politics determine morality."

The new emphasis on man's natural violence especially distresses Benda, along with the preference for authoritarian regimes. When confronted with barbaric behavior, the clercs now invoke human nature and claim that nothing can be done. They have forgotten that the moralist is essentially a "utopian" and they derive a romantic pleasure from pessimism. The clercs even praise war for itself and not as a "sad necessity." Modern man is turning to Sparta for inspiration. The clercs have created and popularized a new honor—the honor of practical courage leading to the conquest of things. In Benda's view civilization is simply not possible unless functions are divided, and they are no longer divided when the clercs are laicized. Thus the general anti-intellectualism, the exalting of the man of arms over the man of study, the praise of action over thought, the unconscious over intellect, are to be expected.

Benda is convinced that despite all the pressures to conform it is possible for individual clercs to resist and remain independent. He clearly believes as strongly as does Noam Chomsky in the responsibility of intellectuals. If one is a real thinker, Benda states, he will be a universalist. However, today humanity wants its scholars to be "not guides but servants," and for the most part, that is what humanity gets. The general conclusion of La Trahison des clercs is that the political realism of the clercs is not a random fact but instead "linked to the essence of the modern world." The sceptic might accuse Benda of vast oversim-plification and infer that he found the entire world to be treasonous, except himself, of course. Benda might have agreed with the second point, if pressed on the matter. He argues that because of the clercs' evasion of their duty, humanity now both perpetrates evil and honors it. Perhaps because of his deep-rooted pessimism, Benda was often an accurate prophet, and he predicts that civilization will move toward "the most total and perfect war that the world will have ever seen." It should be emphasized that these words were written in the relative calm of the mid-1920s, several years before the sense of living in a period "between two wars" became prevalent. Whether this new war is to be between nations or classes, Benda's diagnosis is somber. He sees little hope for peace and finds that most pacifist doctrines weaken the true cause of peace.

Benda pulls all his arguments together in a final summary, where he adopts a more inflexible position than he had earlier in the work. He now states that the true clerc must be totally disengaged from society. When the clerc declares to mankind that his "kingdom is not of this world," he may be crucified, "… but he is respected and his word haunts the memory of men." Yet in the real world of 1927 the betrayers dominate—Nietzsche, Sorel, Barrés, and their ilk, and Benda emphasizes again that this is no temporary aberration but rather a permanent trend in world historical development.

Benda wonders whether realism may not after all be the dominant force in human society. Coupled with the growing conquest of Nature, realism could easily produce a relapse into the worst forms of violence and cruelty—another striking prediction for 1933-1945. The best that one can hope for, Benda believes, is some form of union of nations and classes, though the "universal fraternity" which would emerge is not really desirable. It would merely be a higher form of nationalism, with the nation calling itself Man, and naming God as the enemy.

And henceforth, unified into an immense army, into an immense factory, no longer aware of anything save heroism, discipline, inventions, scorning all free and disinterested activity, no longer placing the Good above the real world, and having for God only itself and its wishes, humanity will attain great things—that is, a really grandiose control over the matter which surrounds it, a really joyous consciousness of its power and its grandeur. And history will smile to think that Socrates and Jesus died for this species.

LA TRAHISON DES CLERCS AFTER 1927

There are hints in the original edition of La Trahison des clercs that under some circumstances Benda would allow the intellectuals to enter the political arena without betraying. In general, however, the correct way for the clerc to act in the modern world is to protest vocally, then submit and drink the hemlock when the State so orders. Any other action is treasonous. H. Stuart Hughes' criticism seems justified: "Had they followed to the letter the advice Benda offered, few European intellectuals would have survived the two decades subsequent to the publication of his book."

Doubtless to Benda's delight, La Trahison des clercs immediately stirred up passionate controversy, and Benda produced a great deal of polemical journalism in the decade after 1927. He collected some of his best articles and published them in a volume entitled Precision (1930-1937). Here we find a considerable evolution in Benda's thought on the subject of political involvement of the clercs, a movement not exactly toward compromise, but toward some recognition that the realities of modernity had to be faced in new ways. He tried to maintain continuity with his earlier positions by including a prefatory note explaining that he had chosen articles which dealt primarily with critiques of La Trahison des clercs. These attacks had helped him to clarify his own positions, and he asserts that the articles selected were not mere sallies. The immediate subject was to serve as a pretext for more universal considerations.

The promised emphasis on universal problems in Prreision is very hard to detect. Benda ranges widely, from discussions of educational policy and nationalism to a strong attack on marriage as one of the greatest betrayals of the modern clerc, since the clerc should reduce his "temporal surface" to a minimum. In some of the articles, however, the major themes of La Trahison des clercs are reexamined, first in a renewed attack on rightist clercs like Barrés, then in a more detailed treatment of the distinction between political speculation and immediate political action. Benda argues that there is a profound difference between the theoretical political analyses of the great clercs of the past and the conviction of many contemporary (1932) intellectuals that they are the "saviors" of society. The true task of the intellectuals remains "… to think correctly and to find truth, without concern for what will happen to the planet as a result."

Yet as the 1930s wore on, Benda participated in the general movement toward engagement which is such an important phenomenon in the intellectual history of that decade. He began to sign leftist manifestoes, becoming for a time a "fellow traveler," what the French call a compagnon de route of the French Communist Party. In Precision Benda tried to explain that he was not betraying by asserting that he would join such appeals only when they seemed to defend "eternal principles." The clerc must preach justice and truth without regard for the practical consequences of his position. Even in a totalitarian age Benda demands a strict idealism. It is natural to compromise, but the intellectual must "… elevate himsel above that which is natural." He retained enough optimism to believe that continuous pressure on political leaders can have some effect, can constrain them to be partially just. "History is made from shreds (lambeaux) of justice which the intellectual has torn from the politician."

Paul Nizan is surely correct when he describes the Benda of the mid-thirties as a clerc de gauche. Benda publicly stated that the mystique de gauche is acceptable for the clerc, as long as he does not descend into lapolitique. The leftist mystique is noble whereas that of the Right is ugly because it honors force. Yet in the articles published in the early 1930s Benda still emphasizes repeatedly that he will strictly limit his collaboration with the communists. In an article dating from 1934 entitled "For Whom Do You Write?" Benda professes a real inability to grasp the arguments of revolutionary writers—Paul Nizan is the example he cites—who claim that an intellectual who is reserved and withdrawn from society is really aiding capitalism. Benda cannot see how writers like Paul Valery and Jean Giraudoux "… serve the ComitW des Forges or the powerful banking interests. Even less that they serve them consciously."

The communist intellectuals attack the man "who meditates between his four walls" for not acting, even when his literary production "labors in the sense which is dear to them." The communists should recognize that there is an element in a writer which remains outside the social regime, that in France there exists a long tradition of literary independence, that French writers will not make good militants, whether communist or fascist. Benda follows this logic to the extreme of stating that he had written his polemical works "… with the perfect conviction that they would not change my contemporaries, … and [in any case] I care very little about this changing." In two hundred years some bibliophile—and he hopes that the species will still exist—might open his work and remark with surprise that in this universally pragmatic age here was one man who did not cooperate. Benda decides that he had been writing for such a judge.

Benda recognizes the power of Paul Nizan's arguments for a communist humanism. Nizan only made him see more clearly how different his conception of humanism is. It is, he proclaims, based on classical culture, and he holds strongly to the dichotomy between spiritual and material life. The reconciliation of intellectual and manual labor holds little attraction for him, since man is great only when he obeys his "divine part." He has no sympathy for those who "drink life through all their pores." Benda rejects contemporary left-leaning writers like Jean Guehenno and Jean-Richard Bloch who call for humane rather than intellectual values. He prefers emaciated figures who lived the pure life of the spirit, and cites as examples Dante, Erasmus, Fenelon, and Pope Leo XIII. For Benda the Marxist-inspired religion of "total" man is merely a revitalized romanticism, venerating passion and action. There is no such creature as a "total" philosopher; one practices philosophy only "with the spirit." Spiritual and economic activities are totally distinct, and therefore his humanism demands the autonomy of the spiritual life, freedom for the spirit to escape society, even to act against society, to challenge any "established order." Benda realizes that he has the communists, the Hitlerians, and the Action Franwcaise against him, and the reader may perceive a certain nobility in his isolation, in his determination to retain his vision of classical humanism. It seems clear that if he had not been fettered by his idealism, if it were not for his adhesion to the classical (and in his view eternal) values of truth, justice, and reason, he would have gone the whole route and joined the Communist Party.

As the decade of the thirties progressed, "his scruples did fall away," though never completely. He felt obliged to confront a new question; how should the clerc respond in an extreme situation, when two equally brutal factions exist and are clashing with such violence that one must inevitably crush the other and dominate Europe if not the world? Benda phrased this question in a note first published in January 1937 in the Nouvelle Revue franpaise. His response shows a substantial change since 1934 in his attitude toward communism and toward political involvement, though one can find a slender thread of continuity even with La Trahison des clercs (because, as we have seen, Benda admitted in the earlier work that the existence of absolute injustice validates involvement).

By 1937 Benda has actually become critical of the intellectual who remains in monastic isolation, pursuing his disinterested labor of science, poetry, or philosophy! In a very striking statement, which would not have sounded out of place had it appeared in Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Temps modernes after the Second World War, Benda wrote:

I say that the clerc must now take sides. He must choose the side which, if it threatens liberty, at least threatens it in order to give bread to all men, and not for the benefit of wealthy exploiters. He will choose the side of which, if it must kill, will kill the oppressors and not the oppressed.

The clerc must take sides with this group of violent men, since he has only the choice between their triumph or that of the others. He will give them [the communists] his signature. Perhaps his life. But he will retain the right to judge them. He will keep his critical spirit.

By 1938, Benda went as far as to claim that through their actions and the policies they advocated the communists were the only truly patriotic party in France. By keeping his critical spirit intact and not joining the French Communist Party, Benda probably spared himself a good deal of moral anguish when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed at the end of August 1939. Benda quickly denounced the pact as a trahison in an article dated September 1, 1939.

Despite suffering, exile, vicious anti-Semitic attacks by the fascist intellectual Robert Brasillach ("circumcized diplodocus" was one of Brasillach's more inventive and relatively mild insults), and extreme old age Julien Benda managed to survive the Second World War and retain his critical spirit. In June 1940 he fled Paris and barely escaped to Carcassonne in the Vichy zone. The Germans seized his Paris apartment in 1941, and all his notes and his library were taken and have never been recovered. Benda held an entry visa for the United States, where he had made a series of successful lecture tours in the years 1936-1938, but the Vichy government refused to allow him to leave. In May 1944, his friends warned him just in time and he escaped arrest by the Gestapo. He managed to get to Toulouse, where he stayed until the summer of 1945. During the Occupation his pen was of course silenced, except for a few pieces which appeared in clandestine resistance journals and a book published in New York in 1942. As soon as he was free to publish again, a flow of works that would have been impressive from a man half his age began to appear. (Chambat lists fourteen fulllength books and the articles number in the hundreds.)

Neither the violent and terrible events of the two previous decades, nor his shifts of position in the 1930s, nor his willingness to offer "tactical support" to the communists from 1943 to 1950, could alter Benda's conviction that the initial thesis of La Trahison des clercs had lost none of its truth. He never saw, or at least never admitted, any contradiction between his passionate political commitment, which Paul Nizan and Pierre Chambat both categorize as "engagement," his vast journalistic output which dealt usually with day-to-day social and political issues, not "the eternal," and the fact that he is widely recognized as the leading spokesman in twentieth-century France "for the case against committed literature or thought." In Les Cahiers d'un clerc (1950), he stated: "I could rewrite my Trabison des clercs exactly as I wrote it twenty years ago."

When a new edition of La Trabison des clercs was published in 1947, Benda added an important introduction in which he emphasized that the clercs were still betraying their true function to the profit of practical interests. The practical interests he cites are the love of order, the monolithic state, the Communist Party (sic) or collaboration during the 1940-1944 period. No excuses were valid; any clerc was treasonous if his realism led him to accept fascism as a "fact" at the moment of Hitler's greatest triumphs. Benda eagerly joined the controversy over the "right to error," and was bitterly critical of intellectuals like Francois Mauriac who, even though they had impeccable resistance credentials, advocated the commutation of sentence for convicted collaborationist writers like Robert Brasillach. Benda believed that Brasillach's execution was completely justified. No alienation of individual liberty is to be tolerated; the clerical ideal remains "disinterested thought," and any intellectual who abandons that ideal must face the consequences. Thought must be "rigid" and adhere only to itself.

Thus two decades later Benda's theoretical opposition to most forms of engagement remains as firm as it was in 1927. He does at this time clarify his view on democracy. The clerc can adopt, even proselytize for, the democratic system and still remain loyal, because democracy has never existed: "… with its sovereign values of individual liberty, justice, and truth, it is not practical." The duty of the clerc remains constant. "When injustice becomes master of the world, and the entire universe kneels before it, the clerc must remain standing and confront it with the human conscience."

THE FUTURE OF JULIEN BENDA AND LA TRAHISON DES CLERCS

Students of intellectual history are well aware of the pitfalls in trying to predict the influence of a scholar, artist, or other intellectual figure on future generations. One can never be certain that a forgotten author is really dead and buried, neatly in place with a paragraph in the literary histories. Because external conditions become propitious, or perhaps through the effort of a few scholarly defenders, an author can quite suddenly be found relevant, cited and reprinted, translated and talked about.

The first significant effort to pull Benda from oblivion was made two years after his death by the critic René Etiemble. In his preface to the third edition of La Traison des clercs Etiemble emphasized Benda's belief that the true clerc will never say "my country right or wrong." Etiemble suggests that in 1958 more French artists and intellectuals are ready to struggle for universal values than in 1927. Etiemble mentions professors and journalists, priests, the Archbishop of Algiers, even a general. The opposition press took substantial risks to tell the truth about the Algerian War, and the Catholic daily La Croix rather belatedly published some articles which conferred upon it the "honor" of being seized in Algeria. There may be truth in the notion that in his native country Benda always retained what is best termed an "underground influence." The French intellectuals who became involved in the movement to end the war and grant Algeria independence were guided more by an outraged sense of justice than a desire for power and prestige.

As far as contemporary America is concerned, the ideas Benda championed may be traced to three distinct areas of our intellectual life, though his role in their formulation and advocacy is rarely recognized. First, there is the notion of professionalism, which is held by a substantial majority of the American academic community, and is quite close to the "pure" position advocated by Benda in La Trahison des clercs. The sense of working within a discipline, of striving for the admittedly impossible goal of perfection within that discipline, the conviction that this unremitting labor is the important task for the scholar and intellectual, would not be foreign to Benda. Nor would the belief that outside involvement is painful, unnecessary, and to be avoided whenever possible, and that the university is a sacred place where the quest for pure, nonutilitarian knowledge should be pursued—though Benda himself was never part of the French university system.

Second, the vocal attacks during the 1960s by America's dissident academicians on the "Establishment Intellectuals"—holders of government contracts, cabinet advisors, consultants of all varieties, those who perform military research—remind one of Benda's denunciation of the new generation of realist cleres.

Finally, the political behavior of America's "Alienated Intellectual Elite," primarily in opposition to the Vietnam war, shows in its rationale a resemblance to the more activist strain in Benda's thought.… The evidence strongly suggests that Benda could not really resolve the contradiction between his commitment and his scholarly detachment. That dilemma was shared by many intellectuals during the period of engagement in the 1960s, and there is no reason to suspect that the tension is any less present now that the balance in America has swung sharply back toward detachment. It is perhaps significant that The Treason of the Intellectuals has been back in print since January 1969 in a paperback edition.

In France during the 1960s there was a steady flow of publications about Benda and several of his works were reprinted. A fourth edition of La Trahison des clercs was published in 1975, with an important new introduction by Andre Lwoff. Lwoff, interestingly enough not a littérateur but a scientist and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, believes that La Trahison des clercs has withstood "the dual trial of time and of history." Because of what Lwoff calls the "atemporal character" of Julien Benda's masterwork, it is safe to predict that Benda will continue to irritate, challenge, and enlighten future generations of intellectuals, in France and wherever his work is available.