Octave Mirbeau’s defiant 1910 preface defending Le Calvaire against patriotic attacks. The French author’s sharp response to critics who condemned his honest portrayal of war, invoking Stendhal and Tolstoy while skewering jingoistic nationalism.
The Calvary has been thoroughly roughed up by the patriots—those people don’t joke about—as badly mauled as a barrel of German beer (which might wound my vanity) or a Wagner opera (which might flatter it). The patriots have torn from my book a short chapter dealing with war, painfully (perhaps they would have preferred I discuss it cheerfully, like a vaudeville or a ballet), and it’s on this chapter alone that their wit has been exercised, leading those who haven’t read it to believe that The Calvary is a military novel. The vengeful epithets, the righteous labels haven’t been spared me. There have also been unexpected declarations, swollen with the most impatient patriotism; some wanted to die for the fatherland within twenty-four hours, with laughter on their lips, just to prove to me that the fatherland wasn’t dead and that I hadn’t killed it. On this subject, I have read admirable phrases worthy of entering, still wet with ink, into impartial and definitive History. I admit it was a fine spectacle and, above all, a consoling one.
From everything written about The Calvary, it emerges that I’m a blasphemer, because I dared mix a plea for pity with war’s implacable ferocities; that I’m an iconoclast, because seeing the ruin of things and the death of young men moved and troubled my soul; that I’m a German spy, because I wanted to look defeat in the face; that I’m a draft-dodger, because people suppose my novel will be translated into German, which, until now, had never happened to a French work… I could go on… The most charitable have claimed, with sad regrets, that I’m an unconscious fool, because one must never write what’s true, and one must, beneath writing’s hypocritical garlands, disguise the truth so well that no one can ever discover it. In short, it’s established that I have committed a criminal, anti-French work, or at the very least, an imprudent one…
People who wish me well have advised me to respond… Respond to whom? To what? And what would I say?… I confess I understand nothing of these reproaches, and I would be prodigiously astonished at having incurred so many accusations if I weren’t long familiar with the habits of a certain Parisian journalism, with the things it respects today and vilifies tomorrow, without knowing exactly why, except that there are subscribers and they must be satisfied.
Not one, among the fiercest patriots, has suspected Stendhal’s patriotism for writing the battle of Waterloo; all praise the ardent human love that dictated Tolstoy’s inflamed pages against war; I haven’t heard that the lowliest reporter has descended into Ludovic Halévy’s conscience to reproach him for The Invasion, a dark and terrible book, despite its formal wrappings, despite the political party spirit animating it. What more can I say?… I haven’t written a book about war; I have, in a chapter recounting with pain the heartbreaks of a defeated army, developed the psychology of my hero, who is a tender soul, an anxious and dreamy spirit. That’s all.
Besides, everyone understands patriotism in their own way. Patriotism as I understand it doesn’t deck itself out in ridiculous costumes, doesn’t go howling at funerals, doesn’t compromise, through inopportune demonstrations and criminal provocations, the safety of passers-by and the very honour of a country. For that’s where we are today. On days of national celebration, public mourning, events that throw crowds into the streets, one trembles lest patriotism commit one of those dangerous pranks that could bring irreparable disasters.
Patriotism, as I love it, works in contemplation. It strives to make the fatherland great with its poets, its artists, its scientists honoured, its workers, its labourers and peasants protected. If it sticks a few fewer plumes in generals’ hats, it puts a bit more wool on poor people’s backs. It struggles to discover the mystery of things, to conquer nature, to glorify it in its works. It tries to be, thanks to its genius, the unfailing source of progress where peoples come to drink. And if it doesn’t resemble the frenzied brutes, the criminal iconoclasts, burners of paintings, demolishers of statues, who cannot understand that Art and Philosophy break the narrow circles of frontiers and overflow onto all humanity, it knows, believe me, when necessary, how to “get its face smashed in” on a battlefield, like the others and better than the others.
1910.
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Léon Hennique Novel 