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VICTOR BROMBERT
marche).
Opinions such .as these seemed to corroborate the
worst suspicions of a Brunetiere!
Here again it is noteworthy that very similar accusations
were fired from the extreme Left as well as from the traditional
Right. Proudhon, it is well known, resented all "mandarins."
The anarchist ex-nobleman Bakunin tirelessly insisted that
it
would never be possible to convert to socialism the "aristocrats
of the intellect," domineering, caste-conscious and filled with
contempt for the working classes. French socialists, at the turn
of the century, more than ever before express hostile sentiments.
In a lecture delivered to a Parisian student group in 1900,
Hubert Lagardelle describes the intellectuals as arrogant and
thirsty for power.
Paradoxically-as though it were not enough to be caught
in the cross-fire of the extreme Right and the militant Left–
the intellectuals find themselves in the ambiguous position of
being classified simultaneously as an aristocracy and as a pro–
letariat. As early as 1860, the brothers Goncourt had noted with
a measure of bitterness, in
Charles Demailiy,
that the new
generation of artists and journalists no longer belonged to the
comfortable bourgeoisie as did the generation of 1830, but that
instead the new
boheme,
whipped on by economic need,
lived, worked and "fought for its soup" with "all the hatreds of
a proletariat." At the time of the Dreyfus case, a collective
pamphlet appears,
Les Proletaires intellectuels en France
(among the callaborators are Henry Beranger, Paul Pottier and
Pierre Marcel ) . Barres is also delighted by the expression (which
he attributed to Bismarck): an important chapter of his novel
Les Deracines
is entitled
aLe Proletariat des bacheliers."
Aristocrats and proletarians, elite and proletariat- these
"accusations" are contradictory only in appearance: according
to a Brunetiere the intellectuals are precisely a proletariat of
arrivistes
whose totally insane ambition it is to usurp the
privileges of an elite. But the importance of such accusations
cannot be limited to the intentions of those who formulate
