The present war appears to me more and more as a war of races against nations.
I do not in the least despise the idea of race; I would be even more careful not to deny it. The wrong of racism is not that it affirms the inequality of races—an inequality as obvious as that of individuals—but that it gives this inequality an absolute character, subordinating morality itself to it, to the point of claiming to set the morality of masters against that of slaves. If a morality of masters exists, it can differ from the other only by the scope and severity of its demands; but public opinion has sunk so low, even among Christians, that the word master instantly evokes the idea of subjection, not protection. “There are no privileges; there are only services”: such was once the fundamental principle of the old French monarchical law. But it can be understood only by a nation of old stock, of lordly stock, for whom the clearest mark of base origin is to be naturally tempted to make use of the weak instead of serving them. When people speak of the liberal or democratic tradition of my country, they forget that it expresses—often without knowing it—an aristocratic conception of life. For it has neither the meaning nor the spirit of a simple revenge of the oppressed against the oppressors; it translates, into a vocabulary unfortunately put within reach of the first comer, of an uncultivated public—in short, of the modern world—the feeling, at once Christian and chivalrous, that true equality can be born only in a society old enough for the close solidarity of freely accepted obligations to make each of its members in turn servants conscious of their rights and masters conscious of their duties. But who today cares about the experience accumulated over the centuries by a people as wise and as humane as ours? Politicians repeat the word democracy at random, and the docile public firmly believes that this word means the same thing for a peasant from the Île-de-France as for a miner in California. What matters to a man is not having rights, but having the pride needed to bear their burden naturally and with dignity, for rights weigh heavier than duties.
The notion of race has an immense advantage for subordinate or decadent nations, which find in it a crude but effective remedy for the feeling of inferiority that gnaws at them. The superiority of a race is not measured, in fact, by services rendered; it is independent of the reasoned judgment of history. To establish it, it is enough to prove that it has remained intact—even in mediocrity; what does it matter? Even if it has lived for centuries under the most humiliating subjection, one will be content to say that it was unjustly oppressed, that crafty peoples, who were not worth more than it, abused its robust simplicity, its vigorous innocence, as Ulysses did Polyphêmos or Delilah did Samson. For the mystics of race have always shown great contempt for the Spirit. The complementary mystique of the mystique of Race is that of Instinct.
Europe was once an immense reservoir of races. The races gradually drew closer to one another according to their natural affinities; but the Nation properly so called—the historical Nation—is a magnificent achievement of human genius. I am absolutely ignorant, and we shall always be ignorant, of the intrinsic, absolute value of the various races whose harmonious collaboration ended by accomplishing that miracle of enthusiasm and reason that was seventeenth-century France; but it matters no more to argue about the respective merits of the Breton, the Picard, the Fleming, the Auvergnat, the Norman, the Provençal, or the Gascon than about the exact share that belongs to each of Ronsard’s, Corneille’s, or Victor Hugo’s ancestors in the work of those great poets. The spirit of the Nation did not suppress the genius of France; it merely absorbed it.
Europe worked for a thousand years to substitute nations for race and to constitute a hierarchy of nations. It was natural that the first places in such a hierarchy should fall to the nations that had achieved their unity earliest and stamped their national character more deeply: France, England, Spain. No one doubted then that Germany was a great people, a vigorous race; it nonetheless offered the spectacle of a monstrous headless association whose political anarchy was a danger to Europe. No one thought then of denying the color and brilliance of the Italian republics, any more than the glory of its philosophers or poets; but all these dazzling qualities could not disarm the just distrust due to a motley, unstable people—Christian by sensibility, pagan by morals and politics, incorrigibly and naïvely simoniacal, always torn by wars. What, then, was missing from these vast and rich human communities in order to reach unity sooner—that is, national dignity? Chance, perhaps? One meets such individuals: superbly gifted, whose dazzling conversation would seem to provide the material for a hundred books, and who have never managed to write a single one. They too blame bad luck. But when one knows them better, one understands the reason for their impotence: they never wanted to sacrifice any of their brilliant gifts; they tried to draw from them, day by day, the greatest possible advantage—in short, they preferred themselves. As Marshal Lyautey said of one of his collaborators, when people were surprised that he did not have his full esteem:
“What can you do? He lacks a particle of love, without which there is no great human work.”
Germany and Italy no doubt lacked that particle of love. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the realists had an easy time proving that France’s immediate interest would have been to merge with England into a vast Empire that would have enslaved Europe. That was then the thesis of the great bourgeois and the intellectuals—that is, of most churchmen—practical, measured minds who deplored Joan of Arc’s exaltation, the blind loyalty of the common people to a dauphin without soldiers and without money. It would assuredly have been Machiavelli’s thesis, had he lived a hundred years earlier. But our people had that particle of love that others lacked. It remade an already almost lost unity. While Italy and Germany still had to wait nearly five centuries before consenting to the sacrifices necessary for their own unity, France had already earned twice over the title and dignity of Nation.
To set races against nations is not to substitute a new order for an old order; it is to wipe out at a stroke the effort of ten centuries; it is to return Europe voluntarily, consciously, to its primitive chaos. Nothing is at once more ridiculous and more tragic than to see the same worthy people who readily call themselves conservatives, and whom the very word revolution makes tremble, regard with indifference—if not with sympathy—the greatest revolution of all time. In vain do dictators proclaim themselves revolutionaries; in vain do they sometimes claim, for example, that one of the principal aims of their enterprise is the annihilation of the petty bourgeoisie: the petty bourgeois is not afraid. That is because the petty bourgeois has grown accustomed to thinking by mirage, which is the least tiring way of thinking. The word revolution instantly evokes for him the image of a crowd of poorly dressed, poorly fed individuals struggling against the police. He will never distrust a revolution that announces itself with well-ordered processions, preceded by the band, and that writes the word Discipline on its flags.
Race is rebelling against nations. That is a fact that will seem much more serious to future generations than the advent of Syndicalism, which fifty years ago filled the Respectable with terror. For social conflicts within a traditionally organized society can always, sooner or later, be arbitrated. But who will arbitrate tomorrow the colossal struggle of race against nations? Internationalism itself is only the distortion of a just idea, for after all there are common interests more precious than national interests. There is an international law. There will never be an interracial law.
There will never be an interracial law for a very simple reason: nations can merge with one another. Civilization has made them moral persons, matured by experience; and having achieved their unity only slowly, thanks to the reciprocal concessions of the various races that compose them, they are naturally inclined to an external policy of collaboration and arbitration. Races, on the contrary, cannot merge without becoming corrupted. Nothing matters to them except to keep themselves intact, incorruptible; and the feeling that exalts them can only be that of an absolute superiority, a kind of mystical election—indisputable, uncontrollable—since it has been conferred on them by blood; it is the superiority of blood. What other mission could they assume in the world except that of annihilating everything that does not resemble them? For everything that does not resemble them threatens them; it is a threat to their integrity, to their purity. It was in this spirit that the Jews did not content themselves with defeating non-Jews: they exterminated the defeated. For the same reason the new Chosen Race, the German race, exterminates the Jews—or has them exterminated by nations reduced to the role of servants, thus called to collaborate in the preservation of the sacred blood, the blood of the masters.
Never has such a blow been struck against Western civilization—that is, against ancient Christendom! But Christians themselves scarcely seem to measure its gravity. They try to believe that racism is an abstract idea, a professor’s idea, and they leave it to other professors to refute it in a certain number of heavy articles that no one will read. The Church formed the fatherlands, created an ideal type of fatherland as different from that of the ancient fatherland as a Saint Francis of Assisi can be from the Sages of the Stoa or their disciples, from a Seneca or a Cato. The Church had made Europe a community of fatherlands—often divided among themselves, often enemies—yet remaining more or less obscurely conscious of their original brotherhood; and Christians watch being destroyed, not only in facts but alas in minds, in consciences, one of the most precious conceptions in history. When the world questions them, they keep silent, or answer it with phrases of whining, moaning eloquence, strewn with sad rhetorical flowers without sap and without scent. Perhaps they have not even lost all hope of using, by a clever maneuver, the reborn paganism—of letting it calmly exterminate the Jews and the Freemasons, for example. That is like setting one’s own house on fire in order to get rid of a burglar locked inside. Once the old dwelling is in ashes, they probably flatter themselves that they will rebuild it, though they had neither the strength nor the courage to repair it when it was still standing. What misery!
People speak of a future German hegemony as though it were simply to succeed the old French hegemony, and frivolous minds who believe that history is an eternal repetition readily compare Mr. Hitler to Napoleon. But Napoleonic hegemony was a political hegemony. Mr. Hitler has never hidden that he pursued a very different enterprise: that of a vast spiritual revolution, a gigantic overturning of values. When the old Europe has accepted, as an accomplished fact, the domination of a superior race over nations, what will remain of the fatherlands? What will even the name fatherland mean? For a racist, what is a fatherland in the traditional sense of the word, if not a disgusting mixture of mixed races, therefore corrupted? Fools talk about a new order. What order? I can see clearly the one that is collapsing, but the other has not yet been born. Under the pretext of putting an end in Europe to national rivalries, Europe is made the stake of the two races that still remain there, the Germanic and the Slavic, which will moreover, sooner or later, have to prove their superiority over the yellow race.
Georges Bernanos. Published in La Nouvelle Relève in January and February 1942.
