484
VICTOR BROMBERT
in favor of a retrial had appeared in
Le Temps
signed by
Anatole France, Zola, Emile Duclaux (director of the
Institut),
F. Feneon (secretM"Y of the
Revue Blanche),
Fernand Gregh,
Lugne-Poe, Jacques Bizet, Th. Ruyssen, Daniel HaIevy, Gabriel
Trarieux, Andre Baunier, Marcel Proust, Robert de Flers,
Victor Bernard, Lucien Herr, Ferdinand Brunot-and many
others.
If
one follows
Le Temps
throughout these first three
months of 1898, one is struck by the frequency with which the
word "intellectual" appears. On January 25th, an article entitled
«
Le proletariat intellectuel"
complains of the plethora of use–
less mandarins threatening the social equilibrium. Only a few
days later, Jean Psichari, dean of studies at the
Ecole des Hautes
Etudes,
sends an open letter in which he demands the right for
"intellectuals" to intervene actively in political matters. Rarely
has a group become so vehemently aware of itself.
As
for the newness of the word, no doubt can subsist. In
a pamphlet entitled
Les etapes d'un intellectuel
(1898), Albert
Reville proudly proclaims : "Let us use this word, since it has
received high consecrations." CIemenceau, in an article dated
January 23rd, in
L'AurOTe,
employs the word in italics. On
April 5th, Anatole France uses it in an article that appears in
L'Echo,
and which is destined to serve as a starting point for
the third conversation of
L'Anneau d'Amethyste.
All the while
Maurice Barres affirms (though with considerable bad faith)
that it is Clemenceau who invented the term, and that this
"neologism" was very "poor French" indeed.
l
Whatever the
exact date of the creation of this word (the Hatzfeld and Darm-
1.
Scenes et doctrines du nationalisme.
With bad faith, for he himself
had used the word some ten years earlier in
Sous l'oeil des Barbares
(1888), though in a somewhat different sense. What Barres disliked
by 1898 was obviously not the word, but what it had come to stand
for. As for Paul Bourget, he had used the substanive as early as 1882
(La Nouuelle Reuue,
v. 16, pp. 865-895) in his essay on Flaubert whom
he described as a victim of the corrosive poison of "Thought." It
i~
interesting to note, however, that in
Le
Disciple
(1889) the word
appears only twice, each time in a derogatory sense.
