The Clarté Group

The pain and horror of the great war have led to a blossoming of revolutionary and pacifist ideas. The great war itself has had but a few sparse and mediocre champions, and counts not a single great monument. The finest pages written about the world war are not those that exalt it, but rather those that condemn it. The greatest writers, the most profound artists have felt, almost unanimously, an acute need to denounce and curse it as a monstrous crime, a terrible sin of the Western world. The heroes of the trenches have not found illustrious champions. The spokesmen of their glory, devoid of all poetic luster, have been limited to journalists and civil servants. Poincaré — a lawyer, a bureaucrat — is he not the greatest champion of the French victory? The war to end all wars — contrary to what the skeptics say — has not signaled a setback for pacifism; far from it, its influences and elected representatives have served the pacifist cause. No, this bitter trial has not diminished the pacifist cause, it has elevated it, exasperated it, rather than dashed its hopes. (Not to mention how the war itself was won by the very preacher of peace: Wilson. Victory fell to those peoples who believed themselves to be fighting to make this the last of all wars). It can be observed that we have entered a period of decadence in war and martial heroism, at least within the history of thought and art. Ethically and aesthetically, war has lost much ground in recent years as humanity has ceased to find it beautiful. Martial heroics do not interest artists as they once did. Contemporary artists prefer an opposite and antithetical theme: the horrors and suffering of war. Under Fire will likely go down as the truest account of the war, and Henri Barbusse as the greatest chronicler of its battles and trenches.

The intelligentsia has adopted, on the whole, a pacifist attitude, but this pacifism does not yield the same results in all its adherents. Many intellectuals believe that peace can be achieved by carrying out Wilson’s program, and they await results of messianic proportions from the League of Nations. Other intellectuals believe that the old social order, within which armed peace and nationalist diplomacy are fatal, is impotent and inadequate for the realization of the pacifist ideal. The germs of war rest in the body of capitalist society. To overcome them, it is therefore necessary to destroy the regime whose historic mission has already, viewed from another perspective, been carried out. The central nucleus of this tendency is the clartist group spearheaded, or rather, represented by, Henri Barbusse.

Clarté, at first, drew to its ranks not only revolutionary intellectuals, but also some others situated within the ranks of liberal and democratic thinkers. But these latter could not keep step with the forward march of the former.

Over time, Barbusse and his friends came into ever greater solidarity with proletarian revolutionaries, and as a result became entwined with their political activity, bringing l’Internationale de la pensée closer to the path of l’Internationale communiste. This would prove to be Clarté’s fatal trajectory. Revolution is a political act, a concrete actualization. No one can truly and effectively serve revolution isolated from the masses who make it. Revolutionary labor cannot be detached, individualistic, unfocused. Intellectuals of a true revolutionary character have no choice other than to accept a place within a collective enterprise. Today, Barbusse is an adherent, a soldier of the French Communist Party. Not long ago he presided over a congress of former combatants in Berlin, and from the tribune of this congress, he told the French soldiers of the Ruhr that, even if their superiors ordered it, they must never fire against German workers. These words cost him time in court, and could well have cost him a jail sentence. But to utter those words was for him a political duty.

Intellectuals are generally averse to discipline, programs, and systems. Their psychology is individualistic and their thought is heterodox. Above all, they brim over with an excessive sense of individuality, which almost always feels itself superior to common norms, and intellectuals often harbor a disdain for politics, which strikes them as the stuff of bureaucrats and the hoi polloi. They forget that it may be so during the quiet periods of history, but not in the lively, weighty revolutionary periods, in which new social states and new political forms gestate. In these periods, politics ceases to be the domain of a humdrum professional caste; it instead begins to seep into the popular realm and invades and dominates all areas of human life. Revolution is of great, vast human interest. Nothing opposes the triumph of this greater good, save for the threatened prejudices and privileges of an egotistical minority. No free spirit, no sensible mind, can be indifferent to such a conflict. Today, for example, it is hard to conceive of a thinking man without the social question on his mind. Intellectuals are in no shortage of indifference and deaf ears when it comes to the problems of their time; but this indifference and deafness are not normal. They must be classified as pathological exceptions. “To make politics,” Barbusse writes, “is to go from dreams to real things, from the abstract to the concrete. Politics is the implementation of social thought; politics is life. To admit a solution of continuity between theory and practice, to abandon one’s own efforts to the actors, even conceding in them a benevolent neutrality, is to give up on the human cause.”

Behind an apparent aesthetic repugnance for politics, there sometimes hides, disguised, a vulgar conservative sentiment. Writers and artists do not like to come out and declare themselves explicitly reactionary. There is always a certain shyness among intellectuals to declare allegiance to the old and outdated. But in reality, intellectuals are no less docile and susceptible to conservative prejudice and interests than common men. It is not always the case that power has enough riches, honors and institutes at its disposal to guarantee itself a broad clientèle of writers and artists. Above all, it turns out that revolution does not arrive solely by a coldly conceptual road. Revolution is, more than an idea, a feeling. More than a concept, a passion. To understand it, one needs a spontaneous spiritual disposition, a special psychological capacity. The intellectual, like any idiot, is subject to the influence of his environment, education, and interests. His intelligence does not operate freely, but has a natural inclination to adapt to the most comfortable ideas rather than the most just ones. Reactionary tendencies in an intellectual, to put it in few words, are born of the same roots and mechanisms as the reactionary tendencies of a shopkeeper. The language may be different, but the workings of the attitudes are identical.

Clarté no longer exists as a rough draft or the beginnings of an International of Thought. The International of Revolution is unified and one of a kind. Barbusse has recognized it by swearing his allegiance to communism. Clarté survives in France as a nucleus of vanguard intellectuals given over to the task of preparing a proletarian culture. Their proselytizing will grow alongside the maturation of a new generation, one that does not content itself with a theoretical sympathy with revolutionary assertions, but which knows how to accept them, cherish them, and implement them without mental reservations. Clartists, Barbusse once said, have no official ties with communism, but they affirm that international communism is the living incarnation of a well-conceived social dream. Clarté today is one more face, one more wing of the revolutionary party. It represents an effort of the intelligentsia to hand itself over to revolution, and an effort of revolution to take control of the intelligentsia. The revolutionary idea has to tear conservatism not only from the halls of institutions, but also the minds and spirits of mankind. Alongside the conquest of power, revolution is now taking aim at the conquest of thought.