THE FRENCH INTELLECTUAL
481
secretly disturbed by it. Much of the fictional work of Sartre
and of Simone de Beauvoir testifies to this uneasiness. Henri
Perron and Robert Dubreuilh,
in
Les Mandarins,
proudly
affirm that they are intellectuals, but deep
in
their hearts they
are assailed by fears that they may have no function whatso–
ever, that they are merely sterile windbags or- as Scriassine puts
it-guilty of a mental and political "masochism" typical of all
intellectuals. Perron is fully aware of the pejorative connota–
tions of the word: "I am an intellectual. I am sick and tired that
this
word has been made an insult." And it is not one of the
functions of petulant Ivich,
in
Sartre's
L'Age de raison,
to
exacerbate the scruples, hesitations and guilt feelings of
Matthieu Delarue-a function which Nadine, her counterpart
in
Les Mandarins,
fulfills with even more gusto by uttering cruel
and occasionally even obscene statements about intellectuals.
The term "intellectual" (that is the substantive
"un intel–
lectuel")
is a fairly recent word in the French language. One
would search in vain for it
in
the Littre dictionary (1863-1877).
To
be
sure, nineteenth-century writers, groping for the word,
made use of certain expressions that vaguely corresponded to
this
idea. Balzac, for instance, in his
Illusions perdues,
calls
Michel Chrestien a
"bohemian de l'intelligence."
Yet quite
significantly, when the French delegates to the First Congress
of the Workers International in Geneva (1866) asked for the
exclusion of all delegates who were intellectuals (a Proudhonian
attack on the Blanquists), the appropriate term was still want–
ing: they were forced to use the clumsy expression "workers
of the intellect" ("
les ouvriers de la pensle").
All the socialist
literature of the latter part of the nineteenth century bears wit–
ness to the absence of the term. There is talk of the
"profes–
sionels de l'intelligence,"
of the
"travailleurs de la pensle."
Zola,
in 1897, still employs the circumlocution
"professionels de
l'intelligence"
and CIemenceau, in his articles for
L'Aurore,
refers to the
uhommes de pur labeur intellectuel."
All tends to
prove that by 1895, the term was not yet
in
common usage.
