486
VICTOR BROMBERT
cultivated individual without any mandate, but who obstinately
wants to impose his chimerical ideas on
.a
concrete reality, he
recalls the old proverb:
«A chacun son metier et les moutons
seront bien gardes."
A member of the French Academy, Emile
Gebhart, congratulating Barres on his article against the pro–
fessors, turns out to be even more violent, showering insults on
what he calls the "battalion of the discontented": virtuosos of
Latin metrics, pale paleographers, embittered metaphysicians,
microbe hunters and other abstracters of quintessences.
2
Echoes
of these reactions will still be felt a few years later in the novels
of Romain Rolland: Jean-Christophe is appalled by the number
of
literateurs
who specialize in politics, form leagues, and sign
petitions.
"I do not trust those who speak of what they don't
know," he confides to his friend Olivier
(Le buisson ardent).
As
for Daniel Halevy, he will recall long after
(Apologie pour notre
Passe)
how he and his friends were accused of being nothing
but bookwormish intellectuals in rebellion against an entire
people.
Stigma II: The ,dea'th of instinct
"One is always unfair when one attacks professors,"
Barres admits with candor in
Mes Cahiers,
though he does
not bother to analyze his brand of unfairness. There is of course
the age-old suspicion of the thinker and teacher against whom
the social group seeks vengeance by means of a caricature based
on the conventional and much-belabored contrast between intel–
ligence and knowledge. ("I'd rather be intelligent than an
intellectual," proclaims Barres.) But more significant still, as
far as Barres and his contemporaries are concerned, the last two
decades of the nineteenth century witness a real offensive against
the "pernicious professor": novels such as Barres'
Deracines,
as
well as Bourget's
Le Disciple
and
L'Etape
or Unamuno's
Love
2. See the letter of February 25, 1898, quoted by Barres in
Mes Cahiers,
II,
pp.
3-5.
