Epistle to MM. the Intellectuals
We have found in the manuscripts of E. Armand the vibrant appeal below addressed to Intellectuals. The painful circumstances through which our friend is passing make it so topical that, while ignoring the occasion on which it was written, we are publishing it in extenso. It goes without saying that, given the author’s situation, we cannot pursue any controversy concerning these lines. — La Mélée.
That we have learned much from this small number of men whom we call Intellectuals because — belonging to the so-called liberal classes — they have made that which relates to the things of Intelligence the great, the principal, the essential business of their life; that we have learned much from them, this is something we cannot deny without missing the most elementary of established facts. And not only have they taught us much, but, whatever the branch of human knowledge to which they were devoted, their example — their example above all — has contributed not a little to forming us. The history of their existence, at once fertile and eventful, has awakened, aroused, created in us the desire to resemble them. And to resemble you, O Intellectuals, was to nourish the design, then the will, to be an original personality, a “unique,” an individual to opposing the ambient determinism his personal way of being, his own determinism. For it has never occurred to us to call intellectuals any other men than thinkers and researchers “for real,” that is to say those who think and who seek — who expose the outcome of their thoughts and the result of their research — without any concern for circumstances and considerations of a religious, economic, political or other nature.
You were and have remained for us the cerebral producers whom nothing could make bend, neither promises nor threats — promises of honors and advantageous positions, threats of suffering in your persons and in your property.
Not that you believed yourself to be in possession of the scientific, economic, political, religious truth. Not that you had cherished for a single instant the hope of imposing your truth. You would not have interested us in that case. But your efforts and your research had led you to a conclusion of a nature perhaps to undermine or to undermine what the dominant and the dominated had hitherto admitted as the expression of truth in some particular sphere of human intellectuality.
Now you felt compelled to publish the fruit of your research, your truth. You did it. And you remained insensitive to the conciliatory voice of this utilitarianism of public office which advises not to confront too openly the hostility of the powerful or the anger of the multitudes. Yes, you remained Intellectuals, making intellectual matters the great passion of your life. You remained deaf to the invectives that descended from the palaces, to the clamors that rose from the crossroads. You did not prostitute yourselves. You exhibited what you knew, as you felt it, as you experienced it, according to your personal experiences, the acquired knowledge of your time, the capacity of your investigative tools; you revealed the means to which you had recourse to reach your level of knowledge. You have made known your hypotheses, displayed your utopias; you have shared the doubts that still assailed you and proclaimed the hopes that possessed you entirely. — You have described the situation of your thought and revealed the exact state of your knowledge. And this despite the bleating of the human herds — despite the alarm cries of the shepherds and the howling of their dogs. This is why your example has had as much impact on our individual development as your teaching. The latter may have become outdated, undergone the patina of centuries, but the former has lost none of its freshness. Time has had no hold on it.
Certainly, I have often asked myself, what would we be without the Intellectuals, without those who have made thought and research — I repeat — the dominant occupation, the supreme preoccupation of their existence? — What would we be without those who have never wanted to make their cerebral faculties and the treasure of their knowledge a tool of careerism or an instrument of popularity? In what depths of superstition would we crawl? Of what childish fears, of what horrifying terrors would we not be the blind slaves or the unconscious dupes? Would we even know how to read, write, reason, compare? What poor shivering and frightened beings would we be without thinkers and researchers? Would we not bend under the anathema of the priest? Would we not bow under the curse of the lawyer? Are we not like the leaf that trembles and quivers in the autumn wind? To whom do we owe this strength of temperament that makes us hear, without any other sign of mood than a shrug of the shoulders, religious excommunication or social banishment?
To the Intellectuals — that is to say, to the workers and artisans of intelligence whose temperament and character endowed them with such pride and dignity that they preferred to undergo the most dreadful fate rather than keep silent about their truth, that is to say, to conceal, to bury their thoughts and their knowledge.
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But if we were ungracious in denying what we owe to intellectuals, it would be an action on their part that would be ill-suited to the portrait we have drawn of their character if they forgot what they owe us. Because you owe us, and a lot, intellectuals. This is said without offending your pride. To us, those dissatisfied with dogmatic teachings, to us, those dissatisfied with doctrines that claim to be beyond revision, to us, the lovers of rare, new and unprecedented cerebral sensations, to us, the moral outsiders, the socially undisciplined, the legal outsiders. To us, who have never been able to satisfy the formulas established “once and for all” nor quench the thirst with the texts forever “received.” No, you cannot have forgotten that without this handful of tormented, anxious people, riders of chimeras, always more or less banned from social conventions — always more or less excluded from official schools — you would have greatly risked having at the beginning neither listeners nor appreciators. Remember that if we came to you with such spontaneity, it is because we saw in you innovators, originals, misunderstood — outsiders, religious, scientific or economic or political. We felt you to be a little of our own kind, we whose fate is to be rejected and outlaws. And in all the centuries, since we began to think, we have always existed, and you have always found us there, you who do not teach to please the Powerful of the World, but because, for a reason of an intimate nature, you feel compelled to teach. We have never failed you. When you were chased from the Temples or thrown out of the Academies, you were always sure to find us around you on the outlying paths, in the lower halls and in the upper rooms.
Certainly, we do not possess to the same degree as you the talent to express what we feel and what we sense: our thoughts, our aspirations, our dreams; but we are “evolved” enough to distinguish the chatterbox who holds forth from the “knowledgeable” one who expresses or publishes what he knows or what he realizes. We know how to distinguish between the one who speak: to hear himself speak and the one who speaks because he is internally driven to deliver a message, his message.
And you remember, O Intellectuals, that we did not then bargain with you for our sympathy or our support — ineffective, I admit, but sincere. We offered them to you wholeheartedly and you will admit that they were then a great comfort to you. We composed the only audiences willing to hear you — the only readers of your cerebral productions: your poems, your articles, your books. Our newspapers and our magazines — our poor little newspapers and our irregular magazines of which we always wonder if the next issue will appear — our newspapers and our magazines mentioned your name, discussed your writings, reported on your books, — when you managed to discover a publisher, which was not an easy thing. You came to “chat” in our groups (you did not then give conferences), in the smoky back room of some obscure tavern. But you have not forgotten that we have always taken your theses and hypotheses seriously — the proof is in the warmth with which we exchanged our views and marked our divergences of conception. In our very cramped sheets, your “communiqués” passed in extenso or nearly so. In short, we considered you as “camarades” and you were not surprised or distressed by this familiarity.
Since then, for you at least, times have changed. Success has come. A more or less relative success, I grant you; but you no longer wait for our mixed and somewhat heterogeneous public to be read and listened to. You are probably not yet a member of the “Académie Française” — this august company still has only forty seats — and certain examples show not only that “bohemian” literature itself leads there, but also that the fact of having been distinguished by the so-called “avant-garde” press in no way prevents you from being admitted. You are perhaps part of artistic or literary societies where you rub shoulders with decorated writers, colorful novelists; politicians who are friends of letters and statesmen who are lovers of the Muses even preside over some of your conferences. You are probably not among the great men, but you are no longer among the unknown; your fame, that’s the word — is established and increases day by day. You have the ear of a respectable and distinguished public, an elite public. So you are sought after to write prefaces or present plays. Every periodical that inserts a letter from you now announces it months in advance, so flattered and honored is it. Your books sell — which is good — and are read — which is better. Your dramas and comedies are applauded. And both are worthy of it. Your latest poetry was recited, I am assured, in an official ceremony. No wonder the “young” writers crowd around you to solicit your advice — a little — and your protection — a lot.
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Your frequentation — however distant it may have been — of our circles has not left you unaware that we also have “intellectuals” among us, our intellectuals. Our intellectuals, as you must have noticed, have not passed through the Lycées or the grandes écoles; they have barely attended primary school. They do not hold any diploma. They do not possess a university degree. They have not had the time to sit at the foot of the chairs occupied by the illustrations of knowledge. They are neither professors nor men of letters. They do not exercise a liberal profession. They have educated themselves. They have studied alone, without professors to elucidate the obscurity of the texts or comment on the aridity of the formulas. They have drawn all they know from second-hand or third-hand books, perhaps inflicting unheard-of deprivations on themselves in order to buy this or that master’s book, which had ended up in the dusty shop window of a starving second-hand dealer. No money. No patron. Poverty and misery. Misery and poverty. Because daily bread is never certain. Ah! Who will describe them, some of the lives of our intellectuals! Who will tell of the endurance, the patience, the obstinacy that they had to show and deploy in order to succeed in founding a newspaper or a magazine, for example, the day when they felt the strength to arouse or renew a movement of ideas — or to succeed in publishing a book expounding their philosophy of life or their conception of being — or, less presumptuously perhaps — allowing them quite simply to develop their thoughts or to have their say on the events of which they were witnesses.
Who will ever know that such a petty magazine, such a puny sheet — the very ones that welcomed you with such good grace when you were making your debut, O Intellectuals, who will ever be able to say what such a poor work of a hundred pages has cost in work, in vigils, in pains, in worries, in steps, in errands. And when we think of all that has been unleashed on some, on most of our Intellectuals — the lies, the slander — when we think of all the obstacles placed across their path by jealousy, envy, malice, we wonder if there is enough admiration under heaven to show it to them. Life has been harsh for them, and destitution and suffering are or have been familiar to them.
They have known hunger, expedients and prison. And when there is no violation of the economic or moral status of society to lock them up for a longer or shorter time, the supporters of the social state always find a pretext to throw them out of circulation for an indefinite period. What matters the arbitrariness, provided that their pen is broken or a gag is placed on their lips. There is always some magistrate ready to petition against them. For the dominant fear the influence of these men — without reputation, undesirable and whom good society banishes from its company. They fear them because they know that they are not for sale, that they are neither schemers nor careerists. And at the very time when professional intellectuals are beginning to reap the fruits of their labor, it happens that it is in a departmental prison cell or the workshop of a central prison that some of our intellectuals go to rest from years of struggle and hard work. This, O Intellectuals, you learned by frequenting us, at the time when you frequented us. You know very well that it is through the efforts of our intellectuals that this strange public was gathered, eager to listen to you at the time of your beginning in the life of letters; this singular publication, but fond of intellectual horizons other than the low and heavy sky of fashionable writers. You were not unaware that our newspapers, our reviews, our meetings were the work of our intellectuals and you thought then with us that one can no more blame the legal writer for having a heavy criminal record than a vine for producing grapes.
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I believe that we are in agreement so far, and this epistle would be difficult to understand if the rumor did not reach us of the lukewarmness that you show when you are asked to “occupy” yourself with those of our intellectuals deprived of a liberty that the harshness of the times makes even more precious to them. I am wary of the rumors that circulate under the cloak. However, it has been a long time since I heard that the Intellectuals who have arrived or are about to arrive end up caring little for the fate of those of ours who have recourse to them in critical hours. Without doubt, finding oneself “in a state of liberty” as the penitentiary documents say, one can write that in these times, it is better for an intellectual to find himself in prison than to see his prose mutilated by official and unofficial censors. But it is one thing to write this while sitting at one’s desk, and another thing, while one enjoys study and feels the vitality needed to accomplish the work to which one has devoted oneself, to undergo its realization. Naturally, the authors of sentences of this kind are unaware of the depressing influence of the prison regime on the prisoner; otherwise they would not venture to write it.
Prison is not, O Intellectuels, a vast building with thick, high walls, forbidding-looking jailers with coarse speech, chains, dry bread, water, dungeons from which the sun is banished from the beginning of the year to the end. It is that sometimes, but it is something else too; it is a system that takes the unfortunate person who finds himself involved in it, whole upon his entry, and only abandons him upon his exit, in what a state, alas! A method that aims to destroy in him any desire for an independent, autonomous life; which tends to stifle in him all originality, all initiative; which, with the help of deprivation and threats of disciplinary punishment, reduces him to the state of an automaton, of being incapable of showing a single manifestation of personal will. To eradicate every last shred of individual pride is the alpha and omega of the system. And that is not all. The worst result of this method is to maintain in the person subjected to it a state of endemic hypocrisy. Because the prisoner, if he does not want to be persecuted — and persecution, in the form in which it is exercised, is often a path towards physiological ruin, towards death, especially when the sentence lasts several years — finds himself forced to pretend to find everything natural, even if it were the most shameful and least excusable attack on the freedom of the person.
This, O Intellectuels, is what consists of, — stripped of poetry and its romanticism, — “the damp straw of the dungeons” No key-ring girl whose caresses come to console you for the harshness of her barbarian father. No tamed spiders or mice coming to eat the bread crumbs that you leave them. (They clean the corners of the rooms and install mousetraps today.) An environment that has nothing extraordinary about it and that resembles like a brother the ordinary social group, but whose pressure one feels more. On the side of those who guard you, an unheard-of mistrust of the desire to know, to learn, of Intelligence in general. And this impression which invades, in spite of himself, the detainee who thinks and who reflects, who wants to react, this sensation that he is losing his footing, that he is sinking, that he is descending into an abyss of ignorance of debasement always darker, always deeper, always more desperate!!!
Such is, in a necessarily unfaithful abridgment, the image of prison evoked by someone who has only known it through books. No, Intellectuals, it is not in prison that the place of the educator, the propagandist, the sower of ideas lies. And when one of them is surprised that your intervention is taking so long, with a view to obtaining — at least from an intellectual point of view — an improvement in his lot, it is, believe me, only after having fought with all his energy against the depressing atmosphere that he wonders why he is forgotten. Who knows, moreover, if you could have held out as long as he did, guarded yourself with as much vigor as he showed, against the assault of all the elements of discouragement that usually accompany a stay in a common law prison.
Perhaps it is the number and complexity of your occupations, and their importance, that have prevented you from thinking about these things as you could have done. But, let’s be frank, there is a shocking attitude in the hesitation that you seem to bring to bear on your person to intervene so that the fate of this or that of our intellectuals persecuted, debased and deprived of that food of the spirit, which is no less necessary to life than the beans or rice that are so sparingly measured out to him, may be alleviated. We know that you do not lack “acquaintances” or connections. Your criminal record is clean, O Intellectuals, You are received where you can be received by such or such personalities that you could convince to use their influence in order to obtain remissions or reductions of sentence, at least an improvement in the regime of the imprisoned,
This is why your inactivity astonishes and weighs on us. The love of your personal dignity insists on our behalf. Could you tolerate for a moment the thought of having received more than you have given, of still being indebted to us — morally or humanly speaking — in the end of having failed in reciprocity, this basis of relations between individuals called to serve each other?
E. Armand
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E. Armand, “Épitre à MM. les Intellectuels,” la Mêlée no. 18 (15 janvier 1919): 1-2.
Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur, last revised February 26, 2025.
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