France 1940-1990: How to Break Away from Evil

Abstract

IN THE SPRING of 1939, for once intellectual France is not debating about betrayal, the trahison that ranges, like a genetic malediction, around its temples and chapels. The man of the hour is Jean Giono, and his propheticism is aggravated by the winter wind (vent d'hiver) (the expression is Roger Caillois's) that is blowing through Europe. His Lettre aux paysans sur la pauvrete et sur la paix (Letter to the Peasants on Poverty and Peace) gives to the pacifist camp a cultural depth that it did not previously have. It's nothing more nor less than a question of how to break away from the evil (se retirer du mal) that the world represents. This calamitous world has an absolute opposite, the civilization, founded on an absence of cupidity and aggressiveness, while the world functions on waste and on permanent war. Let us note right away that Giono thus precedes by some thirty years a new French anthropology that will see in primitive societies a paradise lost, where the question of power and inequality has no meaning. In the meantime, the French peasantry will have disappeared in its archaic version that was prolonged so long by the politics of the Third Republic. But in April, 1939 the crusade of poverty against war fortunes echoes, as everyone immediately feels, the fulminations of P guy. Thus the multiple echoes of the gionist campaign intersect quite naturally a resurgence of interest in the author of L'argent. We know that the latter-day Peguy also saw in the peasantry the last rampart against the modern world, that sector of the nation escaping from the fatal embourgeoisement. It is true that Peguy sees in the peasant a soldier. But in the meantime the apocalypse has changed content: it is not France that is threatened with non-existence, as in 1913, but traditional Civilization. The mortal enemy is no longer Germany, but...Technology. A large part of the intelligentsia dream of a great leap backwards that will guarantee perpetual peace by unilaterally removing France from the history of armed nations prey to a will for unlimited power. It's a kind of reverse saint-simonism-a state of stationary penury (instead of In-