TSVETAN TODOROV
5
J
had been reduced
to
treatments of the beautiful. Writers and artists returned
to the city and threw themselves passionately on one side or the other. And
even when the "affair" was over, their engagement remained - to such a
degree that they often became committed party hacks rather than deriving
prestige from their spiritual superiority. This is the period Julien Benda was
describing when he spoke of "Ia trahison des clercs." Benda reproached the
contemporary "clerics" - that is, intellectuals - not for having renounced their
proper exercise of spiritual power, but for having radically modified the no–
tion of that ideal by substituting particular concerns (of nation , race, class) for
universal ones, material appetites for spiritual values, and intuition for the
demands of reason. They betrayed their identity, which had once been op–
posed
to
that of the "laity," and finally cast their lot with them in the name of
a "realistic ideal" - as if such a thing could exist.
Although many pages of Benda's 1927 essay still retain their force and
relevance today, his selective use of history, as well as a certain ideological
parti-pris,
mar the analysis, and few of his predictions have proved right.
(He considered Barres the typical "cleric," for example, but Barres was not
widely imitated by succeeding intellectual generations, who hardly can be
charged with excessive realism.) Yet in a certain sense there really was a
trahison des clercs:
betrayal , not of any transhistorical ideal (that is, the
rejection of practical considerations), but of a society that incarnates, albeit
imperfectly, the democratic and humanitarian principles inherited from the
French Revolution. Its betrayal, alien to the spirit of the Romantic period,
was prepared by the generation of"smiters." This betrayal consisted in the
intellectuals' engagement with different sorts of ideology - nationalist, fascist,
communist - that are all incompatible with democratic principles. Sartre is an
obvious example. In this the "clerics" - or at least an important group of
them - were actually opposed to the "lay" masses in most European coun–
oies, and did not become their passive spokesmen as Benda had charged.
Since then , things have changed. The Second World War, among its
other consequences, weakened and marginalized the European states, dealing
European nationalisms a serious blow from which they have not recovered.
Today they resurface only in rather particular forms: as a cultural demand,
as a response
to
conflict with non-European countries (the colonies), or as the
ideology of a relatively marginal extreme right. Fascist ideology was defini–
tively discredited by revelation of the "final solution." The renouncement of
the communist dream was slower in coming: despite the millions of Soviet
victims of the 1930s, Communism's prestige was enhanced by the War.
Neither the macabre show-trials of 1948-49, nor the repression of Berlin in
1953,
nor the crushing of the Hungarian revolt in 1956, nor even the occu–
pation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was enough to shake Western intellectuals'
