482
VICTOR BROMBERT
Else why would Karl Kautsky's pamphlet
De Sozialismus und
die Intelligenz
have appeared in
((Le Devenir Social" (1895),
under the title
Le Socialisme et les carrieres liberales?
Yet, only
a few years later, in the work of Romain Rolland for instance,
the term is already familiar. Why the emergence of the tenn?
What occurred in the intervening years?
The answer is spelled out clearly: the Dreyfus case, that
"holy hysteria," as Romain Rolland put it. For this ideological
war which, eight years after the abortive Boulanger revolution,
opposed the two spiritual families of France, was not merely
an expression of all the bitterness accumulated since 1789 by
a nation with too good a political memory. It marked above
all a great moment in the intellectual history of the country,
serving as a catalyst for already prevalent tendencies, but
also
opening a new era which Albert Thibaudet has aptly called the
((Republique des Professeurs/'
and which, he felt, was brought
about by "an insurrection and a victory of intellectuals." The
struggle between the two irreconcilable mystiques was probably
not followed anywhere with greater intensity than in the little
Librairie Bellais,
the
Revue Blanche,
the editorial rooms of
I'
Aurore,
and in the teaching profession (the
((Universite")
which, at a time when even Jaures' Socialist Party was indif–
ferent (or too prudent), constituted the first professional or
social group to throw its weight behind the defenders of Dreyfus.
To the intellectual, "the Dreyfus case is the palladium of
history," writes Julien Benda, who was himself deeply marked
by the crisis
(La ] eunesse d'un clerc).
Thibaudet sums it all
up: "This Dreyfus case ... this tumult of intellectuals ... "
It is indeed impossible to overestimate the significance of the
Dreyfus case to the intellectuals, or the importance of the intel–
lectuals' participation in this uproar. It is difficult to think of
the French intellectual in historic terms without situating
him
first in the passionate climate of a crisis which confirmed un–
equivocally his vocation of moral responsibility. Indeed, all
evidence points to the fact that it is during this ideological
