Public Enemies (11 page)

I have infinitely sympathized with, felt, and finally embraced the maxim by old Goethe: “Better an injustice than disorder.”

Above all, I have been fascinated by the phrase, so mysterious in its generality, from Auguste Comte, “Progress is nothing other than the development of order.”

Are we going to have to resort to philosophy for the rest of our exchanges? It bothers me that I still don’t have access to my books. Go on, let’s let the old mother sleep a little longer. And since you conclude your letter with another story about your father, I will tell you a story about mine, though I admit mine is a little more ambiguous.

Let’s be clear: my father was too young to be part of the “French Resistance.” There were of course exceptional cases; I think there may even have been fifteen-year-olds who were executed; let’s say that he could just about have been involved, but he did nothing about it. To tell the truth, even if he had, he wouldn’t have boasted about it; but I would certainly have known about it from his sisters, so proud of him, so quick to cut an article out of a newspaper if there was some mention of one of his Himalayan expeditions. If there were any heroic feats, I would have heard about them, but as far as heroic feats go, there were none.

Nor on the other hand did he collaborate with or get involved in the acts of violence perpetrated by the Milice; I don’t think he was even involved in the Chantiers de Jeunesse,
^*
or at least he never talked about it. Actually, I believe (and it’s disturbing when you think about it) I never heard my father mention General de Gaulle or Marshal Pétain. From which I am forced to conclude that he spent the war years pursuing purely personal projects (of the sort, I imagine, that every teenager does).

Once, only once, he told me a story that reminded me that he had lived through the war. It was about two young French Resistance fighters who had killed a German officer in the metro. (Had my father had some sort of contact, whether close or distant, with these young men? I have no idea, but thinking back on the way he told the story, that’s what I believe.) And what did he, personally, think about this act of resistance? He had concluded that it was “not very interesting.”

I can still picture him as he said those words and I regret the fact that I did not question him further. That “not very interesting” is as frustrating in its laconism as a Zen koan. Did he mean to show his contempt for an act of resistance that would immediately have triggered the execution of a dozen French hostages in reprisal? Was he trying to tell me that the idea of
Free France
was not, in itself, a subject likely to fascinate him? Or was he, more profoundly, trying to let me know that it seemed to him “not very interesting” to assassinate someone in the metro regardless of the motive? I don’t know, I still don’t know; but doubtless, in my case too, the mark of my father still carries weight.

I don’t know which of us will get first prize as the better “recorder.”

But I have to say, dear Michel, that you are surpassing yourself when it comes to enormous, provocative confessions that will give the blabbermouths something to talk about.

Let’s go over all this slowly, calmly, without being contentious and particularly without getting annoyed. (It’s quite possible that in our little exchange you’ve already won over the mockers, the sniggerers, those with a sense of humor, whereas I’m known not to have one, so I’m not going to add to that …)

The problem with your last letter is, of course, not your civic abstention, your nonallegiance, your attitude of “just pretend I’m not there, actually I’m not there anymore, I go from bubble to bubble, from one private home to another, I don’t identify with any community, I feel less and less of a citizen, more and more depoliticized and free, a literary Bartleby with his ‘
I’d prefer not to
,’ throwing open the door to the ‘possibility of an island.’ ” Why not? After all, that may be an acceptable definition of a writer.

Nor does it have anything to do with your living in Ireland
and your fiscal expatriation. It’s true that in my case I could technically do this too, since between my American adventures, my trips, and the way I live, according to my lawyer’s expert calculations I end up spending far less than the famous “six months a year” that qualify you as a tax resident in Paris. The fact is, I don’t take advantage of this and continue to pay those confounded taxes like a good boy, a good citizen. But why, fundamentally? Is it really out of virtue? Purely out of my civic duty? Or is it also—let’s be frank—because I don’t dare, I haven’t got your nerve, and it would make a mockery of the big fuss I make with my concern for mankind. (“What, he makes us feel guilty, he makes us look like swine who put their interest before honor, happiness before justice! He spares us none of his indignation! He denounces so-and-so! He calls on you to vote for some other one. And now we find out that he’s stashed all his money away in Ireland or Malta, yuck …”) So it’s nothing to show off about. Nor is it a good idea to try to be too crafty.

What troubles me, what I find staggering, is not even what you say about war, that it makes you feel sick, the lack of courage you attribute to yourself, your “good soldier Schweik”
^*
side, hesitating as in Hašek between disobedience and lack of respect, passive resistance and militant anarchism, affability as a strategy, internal desertion, shirking, the silent revolt. That’s how everyone functions. No one, apart from fools, deliberately exposes themselves to danger. It’s only in books and particularly
in the weak novels of Drieu, Jünger,
^*
or Montherlant
^†
that combatants are courageous in the sense that you seem to give the word. I’ll even let you in on a secret: I’m not sure that I’m any braver than you are. It’s possible that violence, the real violence I saw in Sarajevo, Africa, Southern Asia, Afghanistan, frightens me just as much as you, precisely because I know it, because I can smell its usual packaging from miles away. You can’t imagine my state of panic in 1998, for example, when I was reporting for
Le Monde
in Panjshir and had to stay close to Massoud, who didn’t bat an eyelid as shells from 155s fell a few feet away from us, whereas I … As for these men of war, like Massoud for example, whom I have spoken of so highly, as for the ones I ended up becoming an adviser and friend to, like the Bosnian Izetbegović,
^‡
would like to point out that it wasn’t so much their heroism that fascinated me but their way, as Malraux said, of
making war without loving it
. There too, we are more or less in agreement. And it’s my turn to reassure (or disappoint?) you, by telling you that you are not less “ridiculous” but less of a coward than you think.

But there are two other things in your letter that are unacceptable or that I, in any case, cannot accept. The anecdote about your father and that ugly line of Goethe’s about injustice and disorder.

First, the anecdote.

It’s certainly a pity that you did not have the time or inclination to ask him more about it.

Of course, that’s often the way.

You don’t think about it when your parents are there.

When you do think about it, it’s because they’re no longer entirely there and you don’t dare.

And when, like myself two weeks ago—perhaps because of our correspondence, who knows!—you summon up the courage to phone a ninety-four-year-old aunt, your mother’s elder sister, the last witness to so many things (and also the first witness, incidentally, to my existence, since she was the midwife in Béni Saf, the Algerian village to which my mother returned to give birth to me), when you cross the line and think, “It’s too silly to leave all these unanswered questions, these shadows that remain, this suspended family saga, I’ve made up my mind, I’m going to phone,” then the devil gets in the way … She died, just a few days before we were to meet, on March 9 at Melun. So sad …

But in your case it’s almost worse.

I imagine you realize that this story of the German officer taken out by two members of the Resistance, this image of your father, and the fact that, after hearing this story, you never thought of digging deeper than his laconic comment you say you remember of “not interesting” to really go to the heart of the matter and what they say about it is rather odious.

Your story states your refusal ultimately to take the side either of those young people or of the officer.

It puts on the same “uninteresting” level the Nazi idea of the one and the Free France to which the others aspired.

It excludes the idea that some wars are more just than others or that, when faced with extreme filth, when it’s the very idea of being human that is at stake and there is no other
way of saving it, violence must be espoused, with a heavy heart if you choose, dragging your heels if you say so, but all the same it must be taken up and it must triumph.

In other words, your story puts on an equal footing the absolute evil that is Nazism and the violence of reaction, that last-ditch resistance, which is not its own end but is just trying to stave off the worst. In passing, it should also be noted that it confuses, by gathering under the same dubious banner (I’m quoting you) the warmongers, those who “take up arms for any cause whatsoever,” the Basque separatists (who are, as I’m sure you’re aware, unscrupulous terrorists, killers of civilians, wreckers of a real democracy), and the Chechnyans (and I’m sure you’re also aware that they have only rarely succumbed to the temptation of terrorism, while they are the target of a total war, up to extermination, instigated by a KGB president who has sworn—Putin, this time in his own words—to “finish them off” right down to the last one, if necessary hunting them down “even in toilets”).

Dear Michel, I’m not going to give you a lecture.

Once again, you know all this so I’m not going to preach.

But I’m sure you understand that we’re no longer back in the Hašek days.

Or those of the mutineers of 1917
^*
and other “men against” in Francesco Rosi’s film.
^†

Or even in the lyrical and ultimately rather grotesque merry-go-round in
La Comédie de Charleroi
,
^*
Drieu-style.

We’re with Giono,
^†
inches away from his “integral pacifism.” And I’m sure there’s no need to show the inevitable sequence that led this otherwise admirable author of
Roi sans divertissement
and
Jean le Bleu
to become a supporter of Pétain.

I hope you understand that I’m not accusing your father.

I haven’t overlooked or ruled out the thousand possible explanations you might have uncovered for his strange attitude: modesty, prudence, protecting a third party, even—who knows—the double dealing of a hidden member of the Resistance, as in René Clément’s
Le Père tranquille
.

No.

What interests me in this story is you.

What I find worrying is how you use the anecdote and your way of being apparently satisfied with the most pessimistic, the most distressing explanation, as if this indifference suited you today.

You can be a pure writer, dear Michel, and still feel summoned to a rendezvous with history—see Rimbaud and the Commune.

You can be concerned only with the absolute, the supreme book, etc., and still keep an ear open for human sobbing—see the little-known
Conflit et confrontation
, in which Mallarmé claims to offer “points of clarity” to the “blind flock” of “navvies.” He doesn’t give an inch when it comes to his
poetry; on the contrary, he sees conflict and confrontation as the spiritual brothers of poetry.

Or you can be like Proust in Norpois’s words, a “flute player.” You can see the public space as a hostile place that makes you literally ill and whose only virtue is to allow you to pass from “one private home to another.” And yet you can still have an infallible radar for detecting an opponent of Dreyfus.

But a word to the wise is enough; sorry to go on.

Now to Goethe’s saying.

First of all, I’d like to point out that Goethe’s exact words (“I prefer to commit an injustice than to tolerate disorder”) were said during the French Revolution in front of the city of Mainz, which had been recovered by the Prussians. He said it only minutes after personally intervening to prevent the lynching of a French soldier who had been evacuated by the troops of the duke of Weimar. In the context, the “injustice” consists of sparing an enemy soldier who may be a great criminal. The “disorder” is that of the unleashed, bloodthirsty rabble, ready to tear a man to shreds. Thus, in his mouth the phrase really means the opposite, exactly the opposite of what you say he meant. Indeed, since Barrès,
^*
he has always been misrepresented.

So there you are. I hate that line as everyone quotes it and as you in turn apply it.

I hate it because of Barrès, who, since he was the first to distort it in this way, was also a sort of second author.

I hate it because of Dreyfus, the innocent Dreyfus, who was the real target both of Barrès himself and of the dirty “intellectuals” claiming to rehabilitate Barrès.

I hate it because of all the innocents it has allowed, since
Dreyfus and like Dreyfus, with the same clear conscience and in the name of the same reasons of state, to be unscrupulously condemned.

I hate it because of those judges who at least once in their career come into possession of “new evidence” indicating that someone who has been convicted may be innocent but close the file with a sigh because,
well, that’s how it is, you’re not going to start up everything from scratch, set the whole machine in motion again, discredit it, weaken it, instill doubt … better to drop it, calmly put on your slippers and have your dinner … better an injustice than disorder …