496
VICTOR BROMBERT
group, or even-the ambition is not uncommon--of an entire
epoch. Half a century later, in Simone de Beauvoir's
Les Man–
darins,
professor Dubreuilh asks himself: "What does it mean,
the fact that man never ceases talking about himself? And why
is it some men decide to speak in the name of others: in other
words, what is an intellectual?" But the very question implies
the answer: the intellectual is precisely the one who has decided
to speak, and speak up, in the name of humanity. This sense
of "global responsibility" is one for which intellectuals have
been much criticized. But if it is true, as Raymond Aron sug–
gests in
L'Opium des intellectuels,
that this eagerness to think for
all humanity does not go without a measure of pride, it must
also be added in all honesty that it marks not only moral cour–
age, but a deep and beautiful yearning to reaffirm man's soli–
darity with man.
Is there a "race" of intellectuals? Vincent Berger, the hero
of Malraux's
Les Noyes de l'Altenburg,
observes, during the
symposium which brings together philosophers from various
countries, that these faces so diversely and profoundly char–
acteristic of the different nations to which they belong, never–
theless resemble each other. "My father discovered to what
extent intellectuals constitute a race." But a "race," needless to
say, recognizable through moral rather than physical traits.
What are these traits? One hesitates to undertake this moral
portrait. Sensibility modeled on thought; faith in the efficiency
of ideas as an organizational force in the tangible world; the
utilization of culture as an instrument for criticizing tradition;
the unselfish, gratuitious pursuit of truth, but simultaneously
the pursuit of a humanitarian ideal; the transmission or preach–
ing of moral values; the sensation, now proud, now humiliating,
of existing outside the social framework, and yet, on the whole,
an obvious sympathy for the laboring groups of the country
and a consequent attraction to Leftist political parties; a feel–
ing of "not belonging" and of impotence; jealousy of the men
of action; the cult of revolt, sometimes even of anarchy; the
