The Ideas That Led the World: Intellectuals and History

The sociological right, Alain de Benoist notes in Vu de droite (View from the Right), has always shown a certain reticence towards doctrines.¹ This phrase, written four years ago, remains strikingly relevant today. It is, for example, revealing that there is no right-wing weekly publication of the intellectual quality of Le Nouvel Observateur. Inability? Probably not. But rather an almost congenital distrust of ideas. Ideas are distrusted because they force drastic choices. Ideas condemn one to lucidity and courage. The comfortable right does not like that. Neither does the activist right, for that matter, which considers the battle of ideas as wasted time and never misses an opportunity to reinforce the caricatured image it enjoys presenting of itself.

However, ideas lead the world. At least those that take on a mythical dimension and are carried by intellectuals who know how to be both fighters and missionaries — which seems to me the best definition one can give of a revolutionary. This is undoubtedly one of the great lessons of history: one must first sow the idea to later reap the harvest of action. The idea comes first, and those who forget this are condemned either to frenzied, ridiculous activism without purpose or future, or to a withering reformist pragmatism, powerless to stir souls because it is limited to a purely material and managerial horizon.

The great upheavals of history have been prepared by intellectuals, that is to say, by men who make a profession of thinking and teaching their thoughts, personal reflection and its dissemination being for them acts of founders. “One cannot have a Lenin before having had a Marx,” Alain de Benoist likes to remind us. We once said, somewhat jokingly, that our school of thought intended to be a sort of collective Marx. A quip is very often a discreet way of revealing the core of one’s thought. It is not useless, today, to recall that our vocation lies in the realm of ideas, and nowhere else.

Those who mock ideas or doubt their effectiveness would do well to consider this: the Church, in its “great wisdom,” understood — when it was still just a suspicious community within the Roman Empire — that it first needed to win over minds in order to one day take control of the entire society and shape it according to its conceptions. This required the development of a doctrine that, while remaining faithful to the Judaic origins of Christianity, integrated certain key ideas of late Hellenism. “Confronted with Greco-Roman culture, Christianity strove to assimilate certain values by adapting and rethinking them.”2 Saint Paul is thus the author of an intellectual construction where the message of the Gospels converges with a Hellenism marked by Gnosticism and mystery religions, as Guignebert,3 Loisy,4 and, more recently, Bultmann5have well demonstrated. Saint Paul, who “to win pagans to the Gospel, wanted to present it to them in terms that were familiar to them,”6was imitated by Clement of Alexandria and Origen. These intellectuals, succeeded in the 4th century by Augustine, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus, allowed the Church to expand its influence to the point of being able to achieve a true cultural revolution, which itself was a means of gaining recognition, initially, from political power, before taking control of it and placing it under a veritable moral guardianship.

The Church is so aware of the primordial role of ideas that it arrogated to itself, for a thousand years, the monopoly on intellectual life. In the Middle Ages, “the term ‘clerk’ simultaneously meant the educated man and the one who, through tonsure, had entered the Church. Until the 14th century, ‘laicus’ (layman) was synonymous with ‘illiteratus’7 (illiterate)”. The contrast, obviously, is stark with an Antiquity where Greek thinkers and Latin writers were free from any religious tutelage exercised by a clergy: thought was then a work of reflection conducted by free citizens, who had no other rules and constraints than their own convictions.

The Church understood that its desire for spiritual hegemony requires strict control of intellectual life. “There is nothing more fundamental in the intellectual history of Europe in the Middle Ages,” believes historian Jacques Paul, “than the alliance concluded between the Church and culture.” And he adds: “In the realm of knowledge as it is developed in schools and universities, the Church imposes its faith and its dogmas. Received almost universally as true, these religious affirmations are like precursors to the exercise of thought (…) Christian faith brings with it beliefs that impose themselves on intellectual reflection (…) Medieval thought does not just coexist with what must be considered as a given, it is permeated and shaped by it.”8

Classical culture, inherited from the Greco-Latin tradition, must be nothing more than a tool, in service of an aligned, univocal thought. If any cleric is tempted to be seduced by the charms of ancient thought, he is quickly called to order, for beneath the seduction of classical literature lies paganism. Thus, in the 6th century, Pope Gregory the Great castigates Desiderius, the Bishop of Vienne: “In the same mouth, the praises of Christ cannot marry with the praises of Jupiter. It is serious and criminal for a bishop to sing verses, a thing which is not even suitable for a pious layman.”

In the functional tripartition that Adalberon, Bishop of Laon, presents around 1020 as the ideal society, the clerics – the oratores – assume the first function, above the bellatores and laboratores who embody the second and third functions. This is further confirmation that those who think – that is to say, those who pray – hold, and should hold, sovereignty. Pontifical theocracy would take this logic to its ultimate conclusion by contesting any autonomy of the temporal power of monarchs, including the emperor.

However, as early as the 12th century, a movement of intellectual emancipation emerges, primarily in Paris. Clerics who have broken ranks, called the Goliards, challenge the straitjacket imposed on intellectual life. Monastic circles, which had for centuries jealously preserved the monopoly on all intellectual activity, denounce the freedom of thought and expression of the Goliards. Saint Bernard sends a veritable ultimatum to the professors and students of Paris, heavily influenced by the Goliards: “Flee from the midst of Babylon, flee and save your souls!” Peter Abelard, whom Jacques Le Goff sees as “the first great figure of the modern intellectual,”9 symbolizes, through his work and life, the emancipation movement that will break the Church’s intellectual monopoly. This “awakener of ideas” is, in fact, the precursor to the men of the Renaissance. Defeated by the hatred of Saint Bernard, Peter Abelard will triumph, three centuries later, through the work of Lorenzo Valla, Galileo, Copernicus – of all those who will create this “springtime of the world in which man, capable at any moment of transcending the determinations of his nature through the force of his will and the power of his intelligence, becomes the artisan of his own destiny.”10

It must be said, here, that intellectuals have, during the medieval centuries, maintained, at the risk of their freedom and their lives, a movement of resistance. Punctual resistance, discontinuous, of diverse tonality according to its manifestations, but always in reference to what Sigrid Hunke calls the “other religion of Europe,”11 whose central element, from Pelagius to Meister Eckhart, is the primacy of man’s free will in his search for the divine – while John Scotus Eriugena, the champion of pantheism in the 9th century, offers the fine example of a thought which, having gone unnoticed in his time, provokes a true mental revolution several centuries later by denouncing all forms of dualism. “The seeds sown in vain in the frozen soil of his time,” writes Sigrid Hunke, “germinated in the middle of the 12th century to give birth to luxuriant vegetation.” Beyond the centuries, the intellectual and spiritual influence of John Scotus Eriugena gives birth to the great pantheistic song of the Renaissance, which Paracelsus summarizes in a few verses:

And here is the great thing to meditate upon:

There is nothing in heaven or on earth that is not also in man.

For God who is in heaven is also in man:

For where, other than in man, is heaven?

Since the 16th century, the great movements that have marked modern and contemporary history have been the fruit of ideas often sown by men whose message seemed, in their time, to remain without echo. More than others, perhaps, the case of those 19th-century men whom we can call “the awakeners of peoples” and to whom Jean Mabire has devoted a masterful work seems characteristic to me. They are exemplary guides for us.

Jahn the German, Petőfi the Hungarian, Mickiewicz the Pole, Mazzini the Italian, Grundtvig the Dane, Pearse the Irishman: all played the role of pioneers and apostles, by completely dedicating their lives to the mission they conceived as their raison d’être.

When Friedrich Jahn undertakes to group young Germans to organize resistance against the occupation of Napoleonic troops, he launches a message to awaken consciences and hearts: “At the start,” he says to his companions, “we are here only as people of goodwill. Our task is to set in motion the liberation movement. How, I do not know. But I know that the first battle to be fought is in the souls. Why is our people passive? Because its soul is sick. It has lost hope and confidence. It is through words that we can restore these to them, by explaining that no power is invincible or eternal. There are abundant examples of dominations that collapse. Let each of us be a model of behavior for our people, let us teach them pride, each in our own environment and above all in educational establishments.” The message that Jahn felt he carried dominated his entire life. The last sentence he wrote before passing away on October 15, 1852, is this: “German unity has been the dream of my childhood, the dawn of my youth, the sun of my manhood. It is now my evening star, inviting me to eternal rest.” The unity of his country would only be realized twenty years later, but he was one of those who had contributed the most to giving birth to a collective soul, without which there is no people.

Giuseppe Mazzini, for his part, was haunted by the dream of Italian unity, at a time when the Holy Alliance was doing everything to prevent the rise of national consciousness in Europe. He liked to repeat to the militants he had grouped behind him: “Let us always sow the good word. And then we will be ready at the hour of harvest.”

The same will to be an awakener is found in Nikolaj Grundtvig who, without hardly leaving his work table, exerted on his nation and his era an influence that shows the weight an idea can have on human history. It is in violent terms that Grundtvig addresses his Danish compatriots, calling them to assume a destiny worthy of their past: “Stand up then, debased and fallen people / Leave the degrading bed of softness / Rise towards the sky / Remember that you are descended from the combative race of the North / That you were born for action.”

Equally passionate is Sándor Petőfi, whose brief existence is entirely focused on awakening his Hungarian homeland: “The anger of youth / Could it possibly leave me? / No, this noble passion / Forever inhabits my soul.”

Echoing him, sixty years later, is Patrick Pearse. He too knows himself, wants himself to be a founder. When one of his friends tells him that the insurrection against the English is madness, he responds: “One day, millions of men not yet born will inhabit the nation that we are going to build for them.” This nation must first be affirmed in spirit. “If spiritual Ireland disappears,” Pearse asserts, “then real Ireland will die too.” And this spiritual nation, it is the song of the poet that will make it live. For it is culture that carries within it the identity of a people. It is therefore for this that we must first fight. In this, all the “awakeners of peoples” are in agreement.

The first texts of the young Mazzini are literary critiques. In the confrontation between classicists and romantics, he immediately saw a metapolitical dimension. The proponents of classicism are also those of the established power, while romanticism and nationalism go hand in hand. In 1829, Mazzini founded an association called «Societe de culture» (“Society of Culture,”) whose aim was to organize a traveling library which, by distributing books and newspapers, circulated the ideas that were bubbling in many European countries. Mazzini knew that the Italian idea passed through the works of historians, artists, and novelists. In 1875, Francesco De Sanctis, historian of the Risorgimento, would acknowledge: “It was culture that created the unity of the homeland.” Once launched into the heart of political action, Mazzini would never forget to recall the primacy of the cultural. “We state the necessity of a new encyclopedia,” he writes. And, at the very moment when he calls for revolution for all the youth of Europe, he writes an article on the philosophy of music, where the quasi-religious vocation of opera that Wagner would later illustrate is already expressed. In exile in London, Mazzini’s most pressing concern is to open a school for the children of Italian emigrants.

The first revolutionary activity of the young Mickiewicz is to write poems. And when he creates, with a few comrades, a “Society of Friends of Useful Amusements,” a label innocuous enough to divert the attention of the Russian occupier, the introductory text intended for new recruits stipulates: “Attachment to the native land consists of loving and learning your language, remembering the virtues and exploits of ancestors to try to imitate them according to your strengths and talents.” The consciousness of identity through rootedness: this is what a volume of verses published by Mickiewicz in 1823 expresses. He himself explains the meaning of the title he has chosen, The Dziady: “The dziady is the name of a feast celebrated to this day by common people in many districts of Lithuania, Prussia, and Courland, in memory of the ancestors in general. The origins of this feast go back to paganism; it was formerly called ‘feast of the goat,’ presided over by the Koslarz, at once priest and poet. Today, as the enlightened clergy and landowners strive to uproot a custom linked to superstitious practices too often blameworthy, the people celebrate the dziady in secret in chapels or deserted hovels, near cemeteries. A banquet is commonly set up there composed of various dishes, drinks, and fruits; and the souls of the deceased are evoked… Our dziady have this peculiarity that pagan rites have been mixed with conceptions of the Christian religion, all the more so as All Souls’ Day falls around the time of this solemnity. The people believe that, through the dishes, drinks, and songs, they bring relief to the souls in purgatory.”

The Russian police would eventually understand the subversive dimension of cultural action, as Mickiewicz was condemned, along with several comrades, for “having attempted through education to propagate an unreasonable nationalism.”

With his friends deported to Siberia, Mickiewicz does not give up the cultural weapon. He writes: “The soul of the song wanders over the tombs / And, when the moment comes, awakens the heroes.” Settled in France, holding a chair of Slavic languages at the Collège de France, Mickiewicz speaks to an enthusiastic audience about history, but, notes his colleague and friend Michelet, to draw from it principles of action, to awaken souls and arouse wills.

As a young poet, Grundtvig undertakes a sort of pilgrimage on the island of Zealand, in search of vestiges of the pagan era. There he finds the reason for his future action. “It is in this place,” he writes, “in the midst of the oaks / That dwell the sleeping gods of the North / Tears flow from my eyes / As I contemplate what stands here.” Son of a pastor, himself destined to become a pastor of the Danish Evangelical Church, Grundtvig feels his true vocation is to give back to the Danish people the sense of their historical destiny. He translates into modern Danish the old chronicles of the Viking age. Then he has the idea of a school of an entirely new type, where, breaking with academic teaching, the future leaders of Denmark would be initiated into the spirit, the profound inspiration of Scandinavian culture. Grundtvig says, “We must not form scholars, but living men, capable of taking part in the great movement of liberation of peoples.” He adds: “Our school will be at the service of the culture specific to each people. The basic disciplines will be history and literature. Very few citizens know the very structure of the Danish state. They must discover it through our origins, our customs, our legends, our national chronicles and our folk songs (…) What I want to teach them, or rather transmit to them, is a philosophy of life. Or, even more simply, a way of being, a style.”

The first course that Grundtvig gave, on June 20, 1838, was titled “The Nordic Conception of Life.” And, in 1844, before ten thousand people, the strange pastor began his teaching by saying: “Our school must be inspired by the memory of the god Heimdal, who, to raise his dwelling as high as possible, had placed it on the Himmelbjerg.” Grundtvig’s folk school, initially open to peasants, was located in a vast farm. Peasants came there on foot, from tens of kilometers around, in all weather. They were told about the ash tree Yggdrasil, Valhalla, and Ragnarok. In return, they taught their educators the popular traditions still very much alive in this mid-19th century. It was, truly, a cultural revolution.

It was also a cultural revolution that Jahn realized by proposing an educational system fully integrating the exaltation of the body, putting young people in direct contact with nature, a nature conceived as the cosmic environment where man finds his balance and draws his strength. Body and mind are inseparable. What matters is not the accumulation of knowledge, but the formation of character. This is why Jahn, anxious to train future liberators of the national territory, found no better solution than to create a gymnastics society, in a setting of lakes, moors, and forests. He recorded his principles in a book that would mark an important milestone in the history of the German national movement. “One has a divine feeling in the breast,” he writes, “when one knows that one can do something, if only one wills it.” One of his disciples would later add: “We must restore our inner unity, unite heart and mind, faith and reason, soul and body, man and fatherland, thought and language.”

It was in this spirit that the first Burschenschaften or student corporations were founded. Jahn, in working towards the foundation of a cultural nationalism, had done revolutionary work in a Europe still marked by the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment philosophy.

Formation of mind and body: this was also the goal that Patrick Pearse set for himself. First, despite the English occupier, to save the Gaelic language! Such was the aim of the Gaelic League, which young Pearse joined – along with a sister organization, the Gaelic Athletic Association, an ideal framework for preparing young Irish people to one day confront the English. “The Gaelic League,” Pearse declared on the eve of the armed Easter Rising of 1916, “will be recognized in history as the most revolutionary influence that Ireland has ever known.”

Aware of the cultural stakes, Pearse created a college near Dublin in 1908, when he was not yet thirty years old. From this college would emerge several classes of future Irish nationalists, who received there an education more than mere instruction. “Character first,” Pearse repeated, without knowing he was echoing Friedrich Jahn’s formula. Boys and girls were to become aware above all of belonging to a people who wanted to one day become a nation. This awareness was best guaranteed by mythology and history. Thanks to them, young Irish people discovered their roots. “When one speaks of a people,” writes Pearse, “when one speaks of a nation, the living are unrecognizable and appear to us as strangers if they do not recognize themselves in their dead, if the dead and the living do not become one.”

Through cultural action, Pearse intends to give Ireland back its identity. He does not hesitate to collect, from the most unrefined peasants, the survivals of a language that he modernizes and puts into writing, to give it the widest audience. The poet, as a result, has a revolutionary action. He prepares minds for future uprisings.

This is precisely what Petőfi does when his poems, love songs and war songs inspired by peasant traditions, are written in Hungarian, a language that thus regains a literary status monopolized until then, in the intellectual life of the Magyars, by German and Latin. Petőfi’s poems, having become the voice of an entire people, circulate from village to village. While wandering on the roads of his country, Petőfi discovers that a poet’s vocation is to express the soul of his people. He says it: “With the people, forward then, poets / All, forward, through flames and tempests”. For, he adds, narcissism is unworthy of a true poet: “If you know only how to sing / Your own woes, your own joys / The world has no need of you”.

The revolutionary vocation of cultural work is recalled by Petőfi in 1847, to one of his friends, also a poet: “When the people will reign in poetry, they will be ready to reign in politics as well.”

The action of the “awakeners of peoples” has a dimension that is primarily moral, I would even be tempted to say religious. “The current problem consists in the necessity of reintegrating morality into politics,” Mazzini tells his first companions when he founds the Young Italy movement. And at the end of his life, when he seems abandoned by almost everyone after an existence totally devoted to the struggle, he reminds his last faithful followers: “Be apostles. Do not let yourselves be seduced by the pride of your intellectual superiority… Never forget that our flag is above all a flag of moral renovation, and that the precursors of all renovation are required to show its signs in themselves… Have the courage of your faith, the logic, the inexorability of your principle.” And again, a few months before his death: “It’s about instilling virtue where corruption dominates today.”

Virtue. It’s a word that often appears in Mazzini’s writings, and which should be understood in the sense of Roman virtus. What he wants to give to his country is a soul. Exiled in London, he writes: “Italy matters little if it is not to accomplish great and noble things for the good of all (…) If I have done anything for my country, it is to have preached unity to it, while the clever ones only spoke to it of federalism. But it is moral unity that matters; it is the soul of the nation that I want: the body is nothing without it.” He adds: “The republic we will found will not only be a political fact, but an immense religious fact.” He tirelessly repeats to the members of Young Italy: “The moral applications of our principles are primordial and essential (…) Our association is essentially educational, until the day of deliverance and even after.” For Mazzini, this primacy of moral imperative supposes that the intellectual’s only vocation is to serve the cause of the people, without concern for glory or personal advantages. When the city of Rome proclaims itself a republic in February 1849 and designates Mazzini as triumvir, he works day and night to establish a new State (whose history will be brief), taking his meals in a cheap restaurant as in the time of clandestinity and always dressed in his eternal black suit, which he adopted once and for all in his youth, to mourn a humiliated and subjugated Italy.

Mickiewicz, too, sees salvation for his country only in a spiritual renovation. At a time when France is led by a Louis-Philippian bourgeoisie, he writes to a friend that the Polish movement must be given “a religious and moral character, different from the plutocratic liberalism of the French.” And he adds: “Perhaps our nation is called to preach to the peoples the gospel of nationality, of morality, of religion, and contempt for budgets, this unique foundation of current politics”!

The word “moral” is obviously not taken in the mawkish, almost Saint-Sulpician tone that is usually found in the bourgeois tradition. It is about a heroic morality. Pearse says it unambiguously: “The basis of national action must be morality. This morality is that of strength and courage. It is that which drives peoples to make history.”

Consequently, the only true revolutionary is one who begins to make the revolution within oneself, who proves capable of descending sufficiently into oneself to shed the old man. Mickiewicz asserts: “Do not believe that the inner struggle is a waste of time, that it is useless to the external world. All external strength depends on the inner struggle and victory.” The organization he founds, the Society of United Brothers, is first and foremost a community of believers. He is convinced that it is mystics who will make the new times. Grundtvig says it too: the greatest adventures are first internal. Who could claim to awaken their people if they do not first awaken themselves?

One must live one’s ideas. Mazzini repeats this constantly to his comrades: “It is only through virtue that the brothers of Young Italy will succeed in rallying the multitudes to their faith.” One must embody the idea, be an example, a symbol. This is what Mazzini was, according to the beautiful testimony given to him by Nietzsche: “Among all the beautiful lives, the one I envy the most is that of Mazzini: this absolute concentration on a single idea, which becomes, so to speak, a flame in which all individuality is consumed.”

Mazzini had entered nationalism as one enters a religion. This quasi-religious exaltation was experienced by all the “awakeners of peoples.” Mickiewicz sings of the “call to heroism, to great and high wills, to unlimited sacrifice.” And Pearse: “I have never submitted / I have made myself a soul greater / Than that of the masters of my people / And I say to the masters of my people: beware!”

Spiritually armed, these men conceive the role of the intellectual only as immersed, directly and permanently, in action. Total commitment goes without saying. Thought without action is nothing. Mazzini significantly gives the title “Thought and Action” to one of the journals he founds. Action is first and foremost daily militancy, humble and indispensable. Describing the activity of the first nuclei of Young Italy, in exile in Marseille, Mazzini writes: “We had no office, day and night plunged into work, writing letters and articles, questioning travelers, fraternizing with sailors, folding printed materials, binding bundles, alternating between intellectual occupations and manual labor.”

Grundtvig, who has a profound contempt for the triumphant mercantile society, which he accuses of having corrupted his compatriots, conceives of the intellectual only as a combatant. “The spirit of combat,” he says, “is identical to the spirit of life. Where there is no struggle, there is no life.” Pearse teaches his students: “I will boldly preach the ancient faith that struggle is the only noble thing.” In his collection of poems titled “Songs of Sleep and Sorrow,” he expresses the melancholy of the poet deprived, by the harsh necessities of action, of the tranquil enjoyment of beauty. But it is to conclude that the sacrifice is commensurate with his sensitivity. For the hour inevitably comes to leave the pen and take up the rifle. Wanting to be fully poet and soldier means putting “one’s skin at the end of one’s ideas.” Mazzini is the first to enlist in the legion of volunteers gathered by Garibaldi. In a farewell poem to his wife, Petőfi writes: “I have left my lute to take up my saber / Poet I was, now I am a soldier.” At the bivouac, he finds time to scribble a few verses: “A thought pains me: To die in a bed, between pillows / To slowly wither like a flower / That a hidden worm gnaws to death.”

These are not mere rhetorical figures, designed to shock the bourgeoisie. Petőfi falls, arms in hand, against the Russians in 1849. He was twenty-six years old. As for Pearse, shot at thirty-seven by the English, he writes: “If the Irish are not free, it is because they have not deserved to be. It is not reasonable to count on the Almighty to cancel the temporal laws that bridle us. Only armed men will break the chains that armed men have forged for us.”

All these men are aware of the tragic dimension of their destiny. They embrace it joyfully. They have, once and for all, sacrificed their person to the cause they serve. With full lucidity. “I have cast my gaze,” writes Pearse, “on this road before me / On the action that I see and on the death that will be mine.” And Mazzini: “We are convinced that the Italian cause will be better served by our death than by our life. Italy will live when Italians learn to die.”

The “awakeners of peoples” have all paid dearly for the price of fidelity. Prison, exile, solitude, misery, and, at the end of the road, death – a death that apparently marks the failure of the enterprise to which one has devoted body and soul. More than anything, perhaps, it is solitude that tests the revolutionary. Abandoned by many of his own, exiled in London, Mazzini notes: “I feel more and more each day the desert and solitude that surround me.” He is tortured by doubt. Will his life have ultimately served no purpose? But, he says, “one day I finally woke up with a tranquil soul… And the first thought that came to me was this: life is a mission. Any other definition is false.”

Adversity toughens. Jahn notes for himself, and teaches the young men who follow him: “One should wish for a man enough misfortunes so that he learns to fight victoriously, enough adversities so that he bears them with magnanimous strength, enough sorrows so that he learns to know himself entirely.” Difficulties forge individuals just as they forge peoples: “Without the pains of childbirth, no people can be born to life.”

All these men have experienced repression. They have learned from it: it is in the trial that determination hardens and character is tempered. One who endures it comes out either broken or forever hardened. Mazzini, in a text titled “Faith and Future,” announced to his disciples their destiny: “To be alone and not despair.” Tenacity, primacy of will, refusal of compromises – for compromise is a compromising – these are the qualities that make revolutionaries. And this is the tribute that Garibaldi paid to Mazzini: “He was the solitary guardian of the sacred fire, keeping watch alone when others slept.”

What remains of the thought and action of the “awakeners of peoples”? The essential: the myth. At a moment when it is already known that the Easter Rising of 1916 will end in failure, Pearse says to his companions: “The honor of Ireland has already been redeemed.” Jahn knows that the idea of Volkstum, the substance of the people, is now on the march in Germany. By appealing to the longest memory, Mickiewicz definitively roots his people. His compatriot Bandrowski will say of his poem Pan Tadeusz: “It is the book of the Polish nation. Everything that we, Poles, know about ourselves, everything that we do not know, but only feel, as our own expression, our style, our ethnic impulse, is contained in this work.” Grundtvig wants to awaken the collective unconscious of his compatriots: “Rise up my brothers, we must act! / Like birds escaping winter / Myths are reborn in Thule.” As for Mazzini, who wants to resurrect the greatness of Rome, he knows the Roman myth is eternal and throws a challenge to his adversaries: “The stones of Rome may still belong to you for a time, but the Soul of Rome is ours, the thought that lives in Rome belongs to us.”

The function assumed by these 19th-century intellectuals, by these awakeners of peoples, we claim to embody today, we whose vocation, whose essential raison d’être, is to fight for the cause of peoples. This is the main conclusion I will draw from this day of November 29, 1981: to refer to “Gramscianism” to define our action is first and foremost to take up for ourselves, and try to embody, Gramsci’s definition of “organic intellectuals.”

By using this expression, Gramsci “assigns intellectuals a specific role. He asks them to win the cultural war.”12 This amounts to defining the function of intellectuals as that of an avant-garde charged with awakening, then guiding the revolutionary consciousness of the working class, by overturning the values in power and putting in place a new system of values, which is expressed by and in culture. This is the role we assign ourselves – except that we replace the notion of “working class” with that of the community of the people. A community of the people that is to be built today, because its very idea has been undermined, then destroyed, by the merchant ideology. An ideology that knows very well – and has always known – that only popular communities are a real obstacle to its enterprise of domination and destruction.

Today, the mission of the organic intellectual, our mission, seems to me to be summed up in four imperatives.

1. To step back from the immediate. Not to get bogged down in the artificiality of political games. We refuse to let ourselves be imprisoned in an alternative that would condemn us to choose between the camp of wheeling and dealing and the camp of Christian-Marxist-humanitarian utopia. We will not shed a tear over the fate of Mr. Moussa. Nor will we allow ourselves to be moved by the sermons tinged with secularized evangelism of Mr. Mauroy.
2. To create and emit a discourse of rupture. Rupture from the dominant ideology, from the ideology in place, from this egalitarian ideology present in the ranks of both the former political majority and the new one – liberalism and social democracy being only two complementary facets of the same worldview, an economistic, utilitarian, materialistic worldview, whose reductionism brings down the destiny of men to a calculation of production and consumption figures. Our discourse of rupture can only be that of a third way, both on a national and global level.
3. In our world of simulacrum and simulation – to borrow Jean Baudrillard’s insightful vocabulary – to create a new mythical dimension, the only one capable of restoring reality to its status. Alain de Benoist wrote: “I do not believe – without disdaining them – in grand intellectual constructions that address only reason. One does not create a sensibility, but one can, sometimes, awaken it.”13 He is joined today, four years late, by Régis Debray, who, in his Critique of Political Reason14, observes, using Pareto’s vocabulary, “the correlation between the vitality of beliefs and the stability of aggregates”. In other words, the failure of any system of organizing societies that would not be underpinned by a mythical dimension, a dimension – to call things by their name – that is properly religious. “Why is it necessary,” Régis Debray wonders, “that men aggregate, not by virtue of a clear and distinct idea, but to sacrifice to the least rational part of their nature?”15 And he is forced to answer: “In this sense, indeed, politics is less a matter of logic than of emotion, and the strength of an idea comes, first, from its lyrical capacity.” It is up to us to give birth to the poetic emotion of the 21st century. I am convinced, for my part, that this emotion has a name, and that this name is paganism.
4. Finally, the fourth and last imperative of the organic intellectual is commitment. Total commitment, which alone allows for the close, permanent, invigorating link between theory and action. “Without revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary action,” Lenin reminded us. But to emphasize the indispensable necessity for the intellectual of militant engagement, he also liked to quote Goethe’s maxim: “Theory is gray; what is green is the eternal tree of life.” For us, an intellectual can only be engaged. Otherwise, he does not deserve the name of intellectual, but that of histrion and parasite.

For thirteen years, we have been trying to respect the four imperatives I have just enumerated. We are trying to be organic intellectuals, and we will continue, without deviating an inch, insensitive to the vicissitudes of political current events, on the path we have set for ourselves. I don’t know what tomorrow holds for us. But I know that, whatever happens, our honor will be to have fought, without hesitation, without compromise, without denial, faithful to a motto from the depths of ages that summarizes the mission of an intellectual worthy of the name: “Do what you must, come what may.”

Footnotes