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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Romain Rolland: Selections on war
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Romain Rolland
From Mother and Son (1926)
Translated by Van Wyck Brooks
Since 1900 Roger Brissot had enjoyed a brilliant career. His resounding case, his success in the Palais de Justice and then in Parliament, had carried him to the first rank. In the Chamber, he kept within the limits of the radical and Socialist parties, watchful lest either spring a leak, always ready to pass from one boat to the other. Minister several times and of all portfolios, public instruction, labor, justice and even, once, the Navy. Like his colleagues, he was as comfortable in one seat as another, they fitted every one. After all, whatever the department may be, it is all the same machine under the same management. When one knows how to handle it, the rest – the personnel under one’s administration – is of little importance. The only thing that counts is the administration.
In treating so many subjects, he had enriched his store of ideas, or, more exactly, his repertory of words – without learning much that lay beneath them, for he was too busy talking to have the time to listen. But he talked very well. On one point, however, his knowledge was really profound, the breeding of the electoral cattle and their exploitation. On this subject several statesmen of the Third Republic were past masters; they had the keyboard of the masses at their fingers’ ends, they had the secret of touching its weaknesses, passions, and manias. But no one was a more accomplished virtuoso, no one could set vibrating with more sumptuous sonorities the sovereign chords of democracy, the brazen-tongued ideologies that overlaid, evoked and over-excited the virtues of the race and its hidden vices, than the honorable Brissot. He was the greatest parliamentary pianist. His party, his parties – for he permitted himself to claim more than one! – appealed to his talents on every occasion for resounding discourses, those chamber concerts, the music of which, spread out on the great white placards (voted by acclamation, at the expense of the electors), made the tour of France. He never refused; he was always ready. He was equally competent on all subjects – aided, of course, by active and well-informed secretaries. (He had a whole crew of them.) His devotion to his party – to his parties – and to his own glory was only paralleled by his lungs. The latter never tired.
This zeal and this voice, equally magnificent, were very useful to the Republic during the Great War. The war mobilized them. Roger Brissot was charged with convincing the world and the people of France of the high truths for which they were driving themselves to ruin. He was sent on missions to distant parts. He had taken the precaution to resume, at the beginning of the war, his stripes as a Major of Reserves in the cavalry; and in this quality he was even attached for some time to the General Headquarters…But they led him to understand that he would serve the country more efficaciously in the trenches of America; and he had lavished his breath there without ever exhausting it.
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Brissot’s career had been unclouded – save for the clouds that envious rivals tried to throw over his oratorical past, which was marred by a few ardent flights, certainly a little imprudent, towards the empyrean of international pacifism. But it is fatal for a man who is always talking to talk about everything, and one cannot expect him to be bound by every one of his words: he would be drawn and quartered by more than four horses. And then pacifism is, as its name indicates, a harmless potion the use of which is lawful in times of peace – prohibited only when war has sounded: for only then would it be efficacious. That was what the great orator had no difficulty in demonstrating – except to his faithless enemies whom nothing could convince, not even the burning zeal that Brissot used in denouncing his former companions as infatuated pacifists, disguised Germans, who maintained their right to pursue their game in times of war at the risk of unnerving a fatigued people and taking away from them the costly fruit of victory.
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