Julien Benda

Let us examine those so-called political passions, by which men rise up against other men, the main ones being racial passions, class passions, national passions. Those persons most determined to believe in the inevitable progress of the human species, more specifically in its necessary progression towards more peace and love, cannot deny that, for a century now and increasingly so with each passing day, those passions have reached, in several and most important senses, a degree of perfection never before seen in history.

In the first place they affect a number of people that they have never affected before. When studying for example the civil wars that shook France in the 16th century and even at the end of the 18th century, we are struck by the small number of people whose souls were truly disturbed by these events. While history, up until the 19th century, is full of long European wars that left the vast majority of the population completely indifferent, apart from the material damage they caused, it can be said that today there is hardly a soul in Europe who is not touched, or does not believe they are touched, by a passion of race or class or nation and most often by all three.

It seems that the same progress is being made in the New World, while in the Far East huge bodies of men, who seemed exempt from these feelings, are awakening to social hatreds, to the regime of parties, to the national spirit as a desire to humiliate other men. Political passions have today reached a universality they have never known before.

They have also attained a certain degree of compactness. It is clear that, thanks to the progress of communication between people, and still more, to the spirit of group formation, the holders of the same political hatred, who, a century ago, felt bad about each other and hated, if I may say so, in a scattered order, today form a compact passionate mass, in which each element feels connected with the infinite number of others.

[…]

I also believe I can still see a great increase of political passions in the relation they present today to other passions in the same person.

While it seems that, for a bourgeois of old France, political passions - although they took up much more space than is usually thought — nevertheless took a back seat to the passion for gain, the appetite for enjoyment, family feelings and the calls of vanity, the least that can be said of his modern counterpart is that, when political passions enter his heart, they do so to the same extent as the other passions.

Compare, for example, the tiny place occupied by political passions in the French bourgeois as he appears in the fabliaux [tales], in medieval comedy, in the novels of Scarron, Furetière and Charles Sorel, with the place they occupy in the same bourgeois as portrayed by Balzac, Stendhal, Anatole France, Abel Hermant and Paul Bourget (of course, I am not talking about times of crisis, such as the League or the Fronde, when political passions, as soon as they take hold of the individual, take hold of him completely).

The truth is that today political passions invade most of the other passions of this bourgeoisie and alter them to their advantage. We know that nowadays family rivalries, commercial hostilities, career ambitions and competitions for honours are imbued with political passion., An apostle of the modern mind clamours for Politique d’abord [Politics first]. He might have noticed that nowadays it is Politics everywhere, Politics always, and nothing but Politics.

We have only to open our eyes to see how much more powerful political passion becomes when combined with other passions, so numerous, so constant and so strong in themselves. As for the man in the street, to measure how much the relationship of his political passions to his other passions has increased in the modern age, one only has to consider how long all his passion, according to Stendhal, was reduced to wishing 1) not to be killed, 2) to have a good, warm coat. And then we may recollect that, when a little less misery allowed him some general ideas, it took long before his vague desires for social change were transformed into passion, that is, to show the two essential characteristics of a passion: the fixed idea and the need to take action.

I think I can say that, in all classes, political passions today have reached a degree of preponderance over other passions that they have never known.

The reader has already named a major factor in the feelings that we are discussing here: political passions made universal, compact, homogeneous, permanent and preponderant. Everyone recognises that this is largely the work of the cheap daily political newspaper.

One cannot help but daydream and wonder if it might not be the case that inter-human wars are only just beginning when one thinks of this instrument of cultivation of their own passions that men have just invented, or at least to take it to a level of power never seen before, and to which they offer themselves, with all the fulfilment of their hearts, every day as soon as they wake up.

[…]

Finally, I will mention one last considerable development that is present today in all political passions, whether they be of race, class, party or nation. When I look at these passions in the past, I see them as pure outbursts of passion, as naive explosions of instinct, devoid, at least for the most part, of any extension of themselves into ideas, into systems.

The revolts of the workers of the fifteenth century against the propertied classes were not accompanied, it seems, by any doctrine about the genesis of property or the nature of capital. Those who committed massacres in the ghettos do not seem to have had any insight into the philosophical value of their action. And it does not appear that the assault of Charles V's bands against the defenders of Mézières was fuelled by a theory about the predestination of the Germanic race and the moral baseness of the Latin world.

Today, I see every political passion equipped with a whole network of strongly constituted doctrines, whose sole function is to represent to it, from every point of view, the supreme value of its action, and in which it projects itself its passionate power, naturally increasing tenfold.

It is enough to look at the ideological system of German nationalism known as Pan-Germanism and at that of French monarchism to realize to what point of perfection our time has brought these systems, with what application, what tenacity each passion has been able to build, in all directions, theories apt to satisfy it, with what precision these theories have been adjusted to this satisfaction, with what luxury of research, what work, with what profound investigations they have been pushed in every direction.

Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organisation of political hatred. It will be one of its chief claims in the moral history of humanity.

Since their inception, these systems have consisted in establishing the fact that each passion is the agent of good in the world, and that its enemy is the genius of evil. However, today it intends to establish it not only in the political order, but also in the moral, intellectual and aesthetic order: anti-Semitism, Pan-Germanism, French monarchism and socialism are not only political manifestations; they defend a particular mode of morality, intelligence, sensitivity, literature, philosophy and artistic conception.

Let us add that our era has introduced two new features into the theorisation of political passions that singularly intensify them. The first is that today everyone claims that their movement is in line with the ‘direction of evolution,’ with the ‘profound development of history.’ We know that all the current passions, whether they belong to Marx, Maurras [1] or H. S. Chamberlain [2], have discovered a ‘historical law’ according to which their movement merely follows the spirit of history and must necessarily triumph, while their adversary contravenes this spirit and can only know a deceptive victory. This is nothing more than the age-old desire to have Fate on one’s side, but it is put forth in a scientific form. And this brings us to the second new development: the claim that all political ideologies today are based on science, that they are the result of the ‘strict observation of facts.’ We know what assurance, what rigidity, what inhumanity, quite new in the history of political passions, and of which French monarchism is a good example, this claim gives to these passions today.

In short, political passions today present a degree of universality, compactness, homogeneity, precision, continuity and preponderance in relation to other passions that has been unknown until now. They are becoming conscious of themselves in a way that we had not seen before. Some of them, poorly acknowledged until now, are awakening to this awareness and have joined the old passions. Others have become more purely passionate than ever, possess the heart of man in moral regions they did not reach before, and have acquired a mystic character that has not been seen in them for centuries. All finally equip themselves with ideological apparatuses by which they proclaim to themselves, in the name of science, the supreme value of their action and its historical necessity.

In terms of both surface area and depth, spatial values and internal strength, political passions have now reached a level of perfection that history has never seen before.

The present age is truly the age of politics.

 

Notes

[1] Charles Maurras (1868-1952) was a French monarchist and a leading nationalist political theorist He was one of the main organizers and propagandists of the political movement Action Française.

[2] Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) was a British thinker and essayist who promoted racism, white suprematism and a hatred for the Jews. During World War I, Chamberlain sided with Germany against his country of birth. He took German citizenship in 1916.