Chapter I: Front Matter

The Great Betrayal

(La Trahison des Clercs)

By
Julien Benda

Translated by
Richard Aldington

London
George Routledge & Sons, Ltd.
Broadway House, Carter Lane, E.C.
1928.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
STEPHEN AUSTIN AND SONS, LTD., HERTFORD.

_Contents_

Translator’s Note
Author’s Foreword
I - The Modern Perfecting of Political Passions
II - Significance of this Movement--Nature of Political Passions
III - The ‘Clerks’--The Great Betrayal
IV - Summary--Predictions
Notes
[Footnotes]
[Transcriber’s Notes]

_Translator’s Note_

The title of M. Benda’s book is _La Trahison des Clercs_. The word ‘Clercs’, which occurs throughout the book, is defined by M. Benda’s as ‘all those who speak to the world in a transcendental manner’. I do not know the English word for ‘all those who speak to the world in a transcendental manner’. But in Chaucer’s time the word ‘clerk’ (‘a clerke of Oxenforde’) meant anyone who was not a ‘layman’, a word employed by M. Benda as the antithesis to ‘clerk’. We still use the word in this sense when we speak of a ‘clerk in holy orders’ and retain its root in ‘cleric’. A ‘cleric’ is the person described by M. Benda as ‘pre-eminently a clerk’. If the words ‘in holy orders’ are subtracted from ‘a clerk in holy orders’, the remaining ‘clerk’ is roughly what M. Benda means, though he also uses ‘clerk’ to include ‘a clerk in holy orders’. Nowadays a clerk is a person who performs sedentary labour in an office, and the word in England is pronounced ‘clark’. In America a clerk (pronounced ‘clurrk’) is what the English call a shop-assistant. In order to avoid a misleading title I have called this translation _The Great Betrayal_, giving M. Benda’s title in brackets afterwards. Where the word ‘clerk’ first occurs in the book, I have added the words ‘in the medieval sense’, and throughout the text I have invariably written the word in inverted commas, ‘clerk’, to avoid any possible misunderstanding.

I should add that the words ‘real’ and ‘realism’ are nearly always used in this book as the antithesis to ‘ideal’ and ‘idealism’. Other abstract words are used in a rather special sense which I hope will be plain from the context.

R. A.

‘The world is suffering from lack of faith
in a transcendental truth.’

_Renouvier._

_Author’s Foreword_

Tolstoi relates that when he was in the Army he saw one of his brother officers strike a man who fell out from the ranks during a march. Tolstoi said to him:--

‘Are you not ashamed to treat a fellow human being in this way? Have you not read the Gospels?’

The other officer replied:--

‘And have you not read Army Orders?’

This retort will always be thrown back at the spiritual man who tries to take the direction of the material. To me it seems a very wise one. Those who lead men to the conquest of material things have no need of justice and charity.

Nevertheless I think it important that there should be men--even if they are scorned--who urge their fellow beings to other religions than the religion of the material. Now, those who should play this part (to whom I have given the name of ‘clerks’ in the medieval sense of the word) have not only ceased to do so, but are playing an exactly contrary part. Most of the influential moralists of the past fifty years in Europe, particularly the men of letters in France, call upon mankind to sneer at the Gospel and to read Army Orders.

This new teaching seems to me all the more deserving of serious attention because it is addressed to a humanity which of its own volition is now established in materialism with a decisiveness hitherto unknown. And I shall begin by showing this to be true.