Romain Rolland and the Politics of the Intellectual Engagement

David Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351492638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

This intellectual portrait of Romain Rolland (1866-1944)--French novelist, musicologist, dramatist, and Nobel prizewinner in 1915--focuses on his experiments with political commitment against the backdrop of European history between the two world wars. Best known as a biographer of Beethoven and for his novel, Jean-Christophe, Rolland was one of those nonconforming writers who perceived a crisis of bourgeois society in Europe before the Great War, and who consciously worked to discredit and reshape that society in the interwar period. Analyzing Rolland's itinerary of engaged stands, David James Fisher clarifies aspects of European cultural history and helps decipher the ambiguities at the heart of all forms of intellectual engagement.Moving from text to context, Fisher organizes the book around a series of debates--Rolland's public and private collisions over specific committed stands--introducing the reader to the polemical style of French intellectual discourse and offering insight into what it means to be a responsible intellectual. Fisher presents Rolland's private ruminations, extensive research, and reexamination of the function and style of the French man of letters. He observes that Rolland experimented with five styles of commitment: oceanic mysticism linked to progressive, democratic politics; free thinking linked to antiwar dissent; pacifism and, ultimately, Gandhism; antifacism linked to anti-imperialism, antiracism, and all-out political resistance to fascism; and, most controversially, fellow traveling as a form of socialist humanism and the positive side of antifascism. Fisher views Rolland's engagement historically and critically, showing that engaged intellectuals of that time were neither naive propagandists nor dupes of political parties.David James Fisher makes a case for the committed writer and hopes to re-ignite the debate about commitment. For him, Romain Rolland sums up engagement in a striking, dialectical formula:

PART ONE

FIN DE SIÈCLE IDEALIST

1
The Languages of Engagement

I shall say that a writer is engaged when he tries to achieve the most lucid and complete consciousness of being embarked, that is, when he causes the engagement of immediate spontaneity to advance, for himself and others, to the reflective.

Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?

Nietzsche says somewhere that only that which has no history can be defined. I will offer no definition of the intellectual in this book.¹ Nor will a definition of commitment be forthcoming. Rather, I propose to investigate the evolution of intellectual engagement in the context of twentieth-century European history, focusing primarily on the period from 1919 to 1944.

Recent scholars of modern French intellectual life have emphasized its negative aspects or have categorized several aspects of the phenomenon. In The French, Theodore Zeldin ironically advised “how not to be intimidated by their intellectuals.” Régis Debray identified three historical stages of French intellectual life marking shifts in the sociology of knowledge: university professor, modernist writer, and media celebrity. Raymond Aron focused on the alienation of French thinkers from their own social origins and political ideology. Michel Foucault designated two intellectual traditions: the “universal” and the “specific,” the first incarnating a timeless, suprahistorical form of justice, mercy, and law, the second contesting power concretely, materially, and on an everyday level.²

In focusing on one pivotal figure, Romain Rolland (1866-1944), my study examines the ways in which he espoused and revised the notion of being a committed writer in Europe during the period between the two world wars. This intellectual portrait reflects three years of rewarding research in Paris, where I frequented libraries for sources that are not available in America. My research was highlighted by extensive visits to the Archives Romain Rolland, where I was presented, thanks to the generosity of Madame Marie Romain Rolland, with thousands of pages of unpublished letters, diary entries, manuscripts, and invaluable primary documents.

After working on this intellectual portrait for over a decade, I am convinced that one writes a biographical study out of either an intense idealization or an equally powerful need to denigrate the subject. My attitudes toward Romain Rolland have oscillated between overestimation and unfair criticism. Time, distance, selfanalysis, and constructive criticisms from outsiders have helped me strike a complex balance that emphasizes tensions. My perspective clearly tilts toward a critical appreciation of Romain Rolland the man and of his dilemma in finding an engaged position pertinent to his era.

A historical and critical study of Romain Rolland’s engagement should not only explore areas neglected by previous scholars but also clarify ways to make progressive intellectual commitment meaningful in society today. An analysis of Romain Rolland’s itinerary of commitment may help to decipher the basic ambiguities, continuities, and discontinuities that still constitute the engaged stance.

Romain Rolland does not assume every conceivable committed stand, especially if one were to allow for a fascist form of engagement,³ for left-wing Catholic forms,⁴ for anarchist or libertarian Marxist forms,⁵ or if one conceived of engagement as encompassing a broad spectrum.⁶ Sartre is historically correct in relating commitment to the conflicts and strivings of the non-party-affiliated French left-wing intellectual since the time of Zola.⁷ Romain Rolland was a nonconforming writer who comprehended the contradictions of bourgeois society in Europe before the Great War and who consciously worked to reshape that society in the period between the wars. He also attempted to salvage and rethink the humanist stance for the man of letters.⁸ This familiar theme of the crisis of liberal Europe, particularly of its belief system and political philosophy, takes on fresh meaning if examined from the perspective of the engaged writer’s role and responsibility.⁹

Methodologically, I have situated this book at the points of convergence of Romain Rolland’s writings with his times, moving back and forth from text to context. The book is organized around a consecutive series of open debates, each touching on what it means to be an intellectual. To understand Romain Rolland’s quarrels with his contemporaries is to penetrate the dynamics of French intellectual life. Public collisions were often accompanied by private rumination leading to new research, the modification of previous positions, and the reexamination of the intellectual’s function. The polemic appears to be the crucial framework within which intellectual life takes shape. The style of French intellectual discourse is both more ideological and rhetorical than equivalent forms in English-speaking countries. In following Romain Rolland’ s engaged career, I have discovered that polemics have rules and parameters. There are a common idiom and common assumptions among disputants. There are established ways of disagreeing, even of excommunicating someone who errs egregiously or who commits intellectual treason.¹⁰

Romain Rolland wrote continuously, creating lengthy cycles of novels, plays, biographies, musical studies, and essays, while producing newspaper articles, prefaces, open appeals, protests, manifestos, and petitions. He penned one of the most consequential correspondences in modern European intellectual history, well over sixty volumes (of which twenty-five have already been published in selected editions). His letters are often eloquent and intimate. They are almost always oriented toward promoting intellectual dialogue. The public outpouring was matched by private autobiographical musings: for every four years of his life, he composed well over two thousand pages of an intimate diary, recording his impressions about people and events to use for his own projects and selfclarification.

My choice of the title Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement implies that the writer’s engagement takes place on the border between solitary, contemplative activity and sociopolitical activity. Commitment occurs at this interface, where intellectual activity impinges on the political structures and struggles of the day, and politicized action transforms the contours and choices of those living a life of the mind. Each of Romain Rolland’s languages of engagement encompasses values, feelings, and metaphors that make it possible for the writer to criticize the present and the past, while affirming possibilities for the future. If the engaged stance is always on the frontier between politics and culture, if it is always ideological and utopian, it is also designed to promote deeper consciousness and reflectiveness on the part of the intellectual.

In Romain Rolland’s search for a viable form of intellectual politics consistent with his world vision and yet pertinent to his times, he experimented with five discernible languages of engagement: the language of the oceanic sensibility, the language of the free mind, the language of pacifism, the language of antifascism, and the language of fellow traveling.

Chapter 2 will illustrate his oceanic sensibility. Romain Rolland’s vision included a progressive, democratic political outlook and a mystical form of religious belief. The oceanic feeling turned on a metaphysical notion of the wholeness of human beings, their inherent capacity for heroism, and their ability to take an ethical stance and to establish amorous bonds with other people and the environment. He would not relinquish the oceanic feeling as circumstances changed or as he evolved new styles of commitment. Chapter 3 traces the parameters of Romain Rolland’s antiwar stance from 1914 to 1919, distilled enigmatically in the slogan “Above the Battle.” Chapters 4 and 5 describe his version of the free mind, a defense of critical thinking that was combined with militant internationalism, extreme individualism, a refusal to accept one unified philosophical system of thought, and a reluctance to join political parties or social movements. Chapter 6 depicts Romain Rolland’s contribution as the European popularizer of Gandhi. Gandhism extended his role as antiwar dissenter during the Great War and sharpened the pacifist and anti-imperialist discourses in which he trafficked during the 1920s. Chapters 7 and 8 map out his formulation of an intellectual antifascism and his subsequent merger of antifascist resistance and an effective form of political action. Antifascism was the culmination of Romain Rolland’s intellectual politics. It determined his commitments during the Popular Front era, his repudiation of pacifist theory and practice, and his growing sympathies for international communism. Chapters 9, 10, and 11 explore Romain Rolland’s career as a fellow traveler, documenting his metamorphosis from critical to uncritical supporter of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

In Romain Rolland’s journey, there were no sudden, unmediated leaps forward in the articulation of the engaged stand, in the transformation of one form of engagement into another, or in the politicization of engagement. The relationship of writing to commitment was dialectical. He could be engaged and disengaged at the same time. At moments, he was almost totally disengaged. His various languages of engagement were inextricably linked to the circumstances of Europe and the world. He was committed while thinking critically about the problematic of commitment. To be engaged is not to be married to the politics of dogma or blind faith.¹¹ Nor does Romain Rolland’s career support the theory that engaged writing debases art while offering only a superficial gain in the artist’s moral stature. The politics of his intellectual life serve to raise questions about the function of culture and morality and its intersection with politics in the twentieth century.

Romain Rolland summed up his version of intellectual engagement in one brilliant dialectical phrase: “Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will.” My task will be to analyze and elucidate what he meant.

2
An Oceanic Sensibility

It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of “eternity/’ a feeling of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, “oceanic.”

Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) opens with a comment about the role of the writer in society. In fact, Freud had Romain Rolland specifically in mind when he reflected on the uneasiness of man in modern civilization:

There are a few men from whom their contemporaries do not withhold admiration, although their greatness rests on attributes and achievements which are completely foreign to the aims and ideals of the multitude. One might easily be inclined to suppose that it is after all only a minority which appreciates these great men, while the large majority cares nothing for them.¹

Freud composed these lines at a midpoint in the period between the two world wars. He presented Romain Rolland as someone who used authentic standards of judgment and sought neither power, position, nor money for himself. Freud pointed to the Frenchman’s unique cultural achievements as distinctly contrary to the daily activities of the multitudes. Romain Rolland’s “greatness” consisted of mastering the process of cultural affirmation, in a context of miscomprehension, indifference, even hostility from large sectors of the society. He participated in cultural production while appreciating the widely divergent ideas and contrasting methods of inquiry of others also involved in the work of civilization.²

For Freud, Romain Rolland’s sensibility blended artistic intuition with intellectual rigor and psychological probity with encyclopedic erudition. His writings were pleasing and exalting to his readers. His plays, novels, biographies, and essays were recurrent sources of consolation. Freud recognized that Romain Rolland’s idealism was not sentimental, passive, or mystified. Nor did it spring from a naive faith in the omnipotence of ideas or in the soothing but illusory ideals of beauty. Rather, it was anchored in struggle and adversity. He had the courage of his convictions—an attribute that was especially telling when he was confronted directly or challenged in a crisis. He affirmed idealistically the possibility that love and good will could be extended to all of humanity.³

Freud did not customarily compose tributes to living European intellectuals. Romain Rolland received this homage precisely because he asked profound, if elusive, questions. Just as he understood the limits of available knowledge, so too did he recommend further research and reflection to expand what was knowable. Romain Rolland’s living presence as a writer could not be ignored. His ideas escaped facile labels, simplistic categories, or mechanistic refutations. His audience lived with or against his perceptions, welcoming the invitation to enter into dialogue with him. To read his works was to confront one’s own cultural assumptions, to rethink one’s methods of analysis. Thus, Freud’s deepest acknowledgment to Romain Rolland was in taking seriously his critical perspective. Many European intellectuals of the interwar period reacted as Freud did to Romain Rolland’s writings, whether in the form of a public debate or in private forms of self-clarification.⁴

Freud had sent Romain Rolland a copy of The Future of an Illusion in 1927. Romain Rolland .replied in a letter on 5 December 1927, coining the phrase “oceanic feeling” and describing it in evocative, vitalistic imagery:

Your analysis of religions is fair. But I would have liked to see you analyze spontaneous religious feeling or, more exactly, religious sensation. . . .

I understand by that—quite independently of all dogma, of all Credo, of every Church organization, of every Holy Book, of all hope in a personal survival, etc.—the simple and direct fact of the sensation of the “eternal” (which may very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible limits, and in that way oceanic). The sensation is, as a matter of fact, subjective in character. . . .

I, myself, am familiar with this sensation. Throughout my whole life I have never lacked it; and I have always found it a source of vital renewal. In this sense I can say that I am profoundly “religious”— without this constant state (like an underground bed of water which I feel surfacing under the bark) in any way harming my critical faculties and my freedom to exerci...