Chapter XV: The Triumph of Reason

1899

_Le triomphe de la raison_ is no more than a fragment of the great fresco. But it is inspired with the central thought round which Rolland's ideas turn. In it for the first time there is a complete exposition of the dialectic of defeat--the passionate advocacy of the vanquished, the transformation of actual overthrow into spiritual triumph. This thought, first conceived in his childhood and reinforced by all his experience, forms the kernel of the author's moral sensibility. The Girondists have been defeated, and are defending themselves in a fortress against the sansculottes. The royalists, aided by the English, wish to rescue them. Their ideal, the freedom of the spirit and the freedom of the fatherland, has been destroyed by the Revolution; their foes are Frenchmen. But the royalists who would help them are likewise their enemies; the English are their country's foes. Hence arises a conflict of conscience which is powerfully portrayed. Are they to be faithless to their ideal, or to betray their country? Are they to be citizens of the spirit or citizens of France? Are they to be true to themselves or true to the nation? Such is the fateful decision with which they are confronted. They choose death, for they know that their ideal is immortal, that the freedom of a nation is but the reflection of an inner freedom which no foe can destroy.

For the first time, in this play, Rolland proclaims his hostility to victory. Faber proudly declares: "We have saved our faith from a victory which would have disgraced us, from one wherein the conqueror is the first victim. In our unsullied defeat, that faith looms more richly and gloriously than before." Lux, the German revolutionist, proclaims the gospel of inner freedom in the words: "All victory is evil, whereas all defeat is good in so far as it is the outcome of free choice." Hugot says: "I have outstripped victory, and that is my victory." These men of noble mind who perish, know that they die alone; they do not look towards a future success; they put no trust in the masses, for they are aware that in the higher sense of the term freedom it is a thing which the multitude can never understand, that the people always misconceives the best. "The people always dreads those who form an elite, for these bear torches. Would that the fire might scorch the people!" In the end, the only home of these Girondists is the ideal; their domain is an ideal freedom; their world is the future. They have saved their country from the despots; now they had to defend it once again against the mob lusting for dominion and revenge, against those who care no more for freedom than the despots cared. Designedly, the rigid nationalists, those who demand that a man shall sacrifice everything for his country, shall sacrifice his convictions, liberty, reason itself, designedly I say are these monomaniacs of patriotism typified in the plebeian figure of Haubourdin. This sansculotte knows only two kinds of men, "traitors" and "patriots," thus rending the world in twain in his bigotry. It is true that the vigor of his brutal partisanship brings victory. But the very force that makes it possible to save a people against a world in arms, is at the same time a force which destroys that people's most gracious blossoms.

The drama is the opening of an ode to the free man, to the hero of the spirit, the only hero whose heroism Rolland acknowledges. The conception, which had been merely outlined in _Aërt_, begins here to take more definite shape. Adam Lux, a member of the Mainz revolutionary club, who, animated by the fire of enthusiasm, has made his way to France that he may live for freedom (and that he may be led in pursuit of freedom to the guillotine), this first martyr to idealism, is the first messenger from the land of Jean Christophe. The struggle of the free man for the undying fatherland which is above and beyond the land of his birth, has begun. This is the struggle wherein the vanquished is ever the victor, and wherein he is the strongest who fights alone.