FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?
it ceased to believe in them completely.
Pragmatic
truth had replaced
revealed truth.
If
censorship and prohibitions were more visible, they
covered up a secret weakness and a cynicism of despair. There were
no more
clerks;
church literature was empty apologetics, a fist
holding on to dogmas breaking loose;
it
was turning against freedom;
it addressed itself to respect, fear, and self-interest, and by ceasing
to
be
a free appeal to free men, it was ceasing to be literature. This
distraught elite turned to the genuine writer and asked
him
to do the
impossible, not to spare his severity, if he was bent on it, but to
breathe at least a bit of freedom into a wilting ideology, to address
himself to his readers' reason and to persuade them to adopt dogmas
which had become irrational with time. In short, it asked that he
become a propagandist without ceasing to be a writer. But it was
playing a losing game. Since its principles were no longer a matter
of immediate and unformulated evidence and since it had to
present
them to the writer so that he might come to their defense, since there
was no longer any question of saving them for their own sake but
rather of maintaining order, it contested their validity by its very
effort to re-establish them. The writer who consented to buttress
this shaky ideology at least
consented
to do so and this voluntary
adherence to principles which, in the past, had governed minds
without being noticed now freed him from them. He was already
going beyond them. In spite of himself he was emerging into solitude
and freedom. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, which constituted
what in Marxist terms is called the rising class, was trying at this
same time to disengage itself from the ideology that was being im–
posed upon it and to construct one better suited to its own purposes.
Now, this "rising class," which was soon to claim the right to
participate in affairs of State, was subject only to
political
oppres–
sion. Confronted with a ruined nobility,
it
was in process of very
calmly attaining economic pre-eminence. It already had money, cul–
ture, and leisure. Thus, for the first time, an oppressed class was
presenting itself to the writer as a real public. But the conjunction
was still more favorable; for this awakening class, which was reading
and trying to think, had not yet produced a revolutionary party
which would secrete its own ideology as the Church did in the
Middle Ages. The writer was not yet wedged, as we shall see that
he was later to be, between the dying ideology of a declining class
537
