The Party of Intellectuals

Translation of one of Charles Péguy's most poetic rants

It’s difficult not to fall in love with Péguy. His writing style, wittiness, tenderness, and mystical spirit are hard to find, let alone find combined in someone’s spirit… Below is a short translation of what Péguy thought of intellectuals and modernity. 

He is an intellectual, of course, but he sees himself as an outsider and, more importantly, as a man not “of ideas” but “with ideas.” The distinction, I believe, is essential. He despised those who submitted, fully and totally, to abstractions, and those who fell into the trap of modernity.

Translation from “De la situation faite au parti intellectuel dans le monde moderne devant les accidents de la gloire temporelle,” Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 1907 (Série IX, cahier 1, p. 9-145).

---

When one says, when one notes that the introduction, that the initiation of a young man into the great modern intellectual party automatically opens to him all the powers of modern temporal domination — places, riches, honors, vanities, sinecures, chairs, titles and decorations, secular prebends, civic rents, advancements, state governments, parliamentary political dominations, honor of saving , — today, —the Republic, —and above all everything that I see which is the most popular today by and among our young people: to have a tremendous and brilliant marriage, half-rich, or completely rich, of this wealth very particular to prominent academics, in our aristocracies of republican defense, in our political heritage, in our heredities of the government of the mind, — when we have said all this, when we have enumerated all these greatnesses, —all these sad miseries, — we have said nothing yet; nothing has been said that everyone today does not already know, — declare, admit, recognize, proclaim in some way, that when one is bright, and today, everyone is smart, that we have not said what others have not already discovered.

But nothing really interesting was said, either.

Opinions are formed quickly and once and for all on these wickednesses, on the wickednesses of contemporary history, judgments are formed, resolutions are taken, and decisions are made from every side.

A young man who wants to become a deputy, minister, son-in-law, state councilor, or even obtain a cheap professorship in higher education knows perfectly well how to go about it.

He knows what advances to make, what pledges to give, what promises to make, what promises to keep, what words to keep; and what words to break, what oaths to take; and what oaths to betray, what deals to sign or accept, and what deals to contest, when and how to swear, when and how to perjure oneself, what treasons to commit, and they know how one can betray treasons themselves.

A painter plays around quite difficultly by putting whites on whites and blacks on blacks. Our young comrades play it easy by placing betrayal upon betrayal.

Speaking with them in so-called scientific language, we will say that they commit betrayals of betrayals, betrayals squarely, betrayals to who knows how many powers. They are not only heard there. They are experts at it. They are artists there. They know all this much better than us. They have a skill that we will never have.

We are fools for caring about them, for even daring to talk about them. We are novices among them. They know what they have to do and are doing, and we will never know. They don't need our information; they have more than us; they have some that we don't have, that we never will have, nor of our disclinations and discouragements. They despise us. They think we are fools. They are quite right.

On these great wickednesses, on governmental turpitudes, on political scandales, on the cunning of parliamentary combinations, on electoral fraud in political elections and in literary elections, on the means of entering the Collège de France through the door of the window, on the art and manner of defending the Third French Republic in Assyriology, sides are taken.

Those who want, want, and those who do not want, do not want.

Those who want, want so much that you could not make them want more, nor less.

Even if you would be good at something, which you are not, those who do not want, do not want so much that you cannot make them not want more, nor less, because you are good for nothing.

All habits and usages are adopted, which is usual and customary.

Amidst these public or secret perversions, these acts of temporal dominations, sides are taken. Taken swiftly. Lives are hurried. Whoever aspires to reach, reaches.

If it doesn't happen, there are too many.

It's not due to a lack of understanding.

The young man knows his business. Let's not concern ourselves with his affairs.

(…)

There are games on both sides of temporal social climbing. Turpid souls go to turpitude; servile souls go to servitude. Fools, go for honesty.

And the best thing is that they have such a taste, the imbeciles, for honesty, for old probity, that they stay there.

(...)

The modern world is degrading. Other worlds had other occupations. Other worlds had other ulterior motives, other ulterior intentions. Other worlds had other temporal schedules between meals. The modern world is degrading.

Other worlds idealized or materialized, built or demolished, created justice or created force; other worlds created cities, communities, men, or gods. The modern world is degrading. It's its specialty.

I would almost say that it's its job if we didn't have to respect this beautiful job above all else. When the modern world degrades, let's say that it is then that it works on its part.

The modern world is degrading. It degrades the city; it degrades man. It debases love; it degrades women. It degrades the race; it degrades the child. It degrades the nation; it degrades the family; it even degrades (always our limits).

It has succeeded in degrading what is perhaps the most challenging thing in the world to degrade because it is something which has, in itself, as in its texture, a particular kind of dignity, like a singular incapacity to be degraded: it debases death.