THE FRENCH INTELLECTUAL
501
equally growing white-collar proletariat, and occasionally
merged with it. A bitter Valles, himself the son of a submissive
schoolteacher, has drawn the caricature of these pitiful young
men, sons of peasants or petty bureaucrats, who find in the
teaching profession a life of humiliations and vexations. Need–
less to say, Valles' picture is very one-sided: some of the freest
minds of France-a Taine in philosophy, a Jaures in politics,
a Romain Rolland in literature-were the products of this very
training. The
Ecole N01'male Superieure,
in particular, played
an immensely important role in determining the intellectual life
of the country. But Valles is not the only one to complain:
at the turn of the century, somber diagnoses are beginning to
come in from all quarters. Serious newspapers such as
Le
Temps,
scientists, writers, professors, politicians show concern
over the growing army of young men with diplomas. Not only
Barres, according to whom all Frenchmen dream of becoming
bureaucrats, but men such as Gabriel Monod repeatedly call
attention to the dangerous plethora of university graduates and
to the "bureaucratic plague" which saps the energies of the
country. "The history of the Third Republic," writes a par–
ticularly acid critic, "will be marked by the admittance of all
to the liberal professions and by the growth of the army of
failures."6 No wonder Marxist propagandists attempted to ex–
ploit this situation, for unquestionably, ever since the middle
of the nineteenth century, France had been witnessing a steady
proletarization of its intelligentsia-which finally led to syn–
dicalist organizations such as the
Confederation Generale des
.Travailleurs InteUectuels
and the
Compagnons de l'Intelligence.
It is, therefore, not surprising that, side by side with the
intellectuals' idealism and political involvements, the novel
should also have mirrored this social phenomenon. From Valles'
pitiful Vingtras
pere
to Sartre's Matthieu Delarue, ashamed
5. Jean Rabain,
"Pourquoi trahissent-ils?", Revue Bleue,
November 1929,
pp.
657-660.
