Paul Nizan: The Conspiracy

In order to keep young people quiet, men of forty tell them that youth is the time of surprises, discoveries and great encounters; and tell all those stories of theirs about what they would do if they were twenty years old again and had their youthful hopes, teeth and hair, but also their splendid experience as fathers, citizens and defeated men. Youth knows better, that it is merely the time of boredom and confusion: nary an evening, at twenty, when you do not fall asleep with that ambiguous anger a giddy sense of missed opportunities engenders. Since the consciousness you have of your existence is still uncertain and you rely on adventures capable of furnishing proof that you are alive, late nights are none too cheerful. You are not even tired enough to experience the joy of sinking into slumber: that kind of joy comes later.

No one thinks more steadfastly about death than young people, though they are reticent enough to speak of it only rarely: each empty day they deem lost, life a failure. Better not risk telling them that such impatience is unfounded, that they are at the lucky age and preparing themselves for life. They retort that such an existence — as infant larvae waiting to be brilliant insects at the age of fifty — is a merry one indeed! Everything for our future wings — do you take us for hymenoptera? What is this insect morality? At the age of thirty, it is all over, you make your peace; since you have begun to grow accustomed to death and tot up the remaining years less frequently than at twenty, what with all the work you have, the appointments, the obligations, women, families and the money you earn, you end up believing in your existence entirely. Youth has had its day, you go and pay little visits to the corpse, find it touching, happy, crowned with the pathetic halo of lost illusions: all this is less hard than seeing it die in vain, as one does at twenty.

This is why Laforgue and his friends stayed awake so late, as if to multiply their chances. But at two o’clock in the morning in Paris, you can really count only on picking up a girl with legs so exhausted by her vigil and with such a longing for sleep that her bedroom is no place to expect much from life, as she undresses, all yawns and without any thought for those heart-rending gestures of coquetry, or humility, which women resort to when awake, to hide some defect of their breasts, a crease in the stomach, a scar, or age, or the flaccid symptoms of misfortune.

Every evening they went home cheated. Should they then have stuck it out to the end, not slept at all, seen the day born in the whitening of the stubbly small hours when, at least for a moment, one can believe that everything is beginning, that one will see everything, that one will be able to sing like the colossi of the dawn? But at their age, eyes close. .

Two days later, Rosenthal came to meet with his friends again.

All these encounters take place at the Ecole Normale, in Rue d’Ulm. This is a large square building dating from the time of Louis-Philippe; a courtyard forms its centre, with a cement pool where goldfish circle lazily; a festoon of great men runs between the windows, to set an example; a cold stench of refectory soup hangs about the glazed arcades; a naked man dying against a wall, proffering a stone torch that nobody is willing to take from his hands, symbolizes the War Dead; flanking Rue Rataud there is a tennis court, and between Rue Rataud and Rue d’Ulm a garden embellished with a carved stone bench and two naked women of somewhat flabby outline, often decorated with obscene inscriptions. At one extremity of the tennis court stands a little physics laboratory, in the style of the historic sheds where famous inventors discovered the internal combustion engine or the wireless detector; at the other extremity ten years ago there used to be a gymnasium and some plant biology laboratories, falling into ruins round a little botanical plot dubbed ‘Nature’.

From the rooftops you can discern — with the feeling of exaltation and power that altitudes inspire — the entire southern half of Paris and its misty horizon, bristling with domes, steeples, clouds and chimneys. It is on these roofs that Laforgue, Rosenthal, Bloyé, Jurien and Pluvinage spoke again about Civil War, without exaggerating the importance it might have, but reckoning all the same that it would take its place as one of the thousand little undertakings thanks to which, when you come right down to it, the world is thought to change.

It was the end of June in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-eight. As these young people were living in a country quite as good as any other, but where the Prime Minister was just then explaining in a speech to the Chamber that he was not sorry to have been nicknamed by the communists Poincaré-la Guerre and Poincaré-la-Ruhr — because if he had not visited the wartime front lines with his puttees and his little chauffeur’s cap, and if he had not gone across to the other bank of the Rhine, where would France be? — and as they were not driven by the depressing need to earn their daily bread immediately, they told each other it was necessary to change the world. They did not yet know how heavy and flaccid the world is, how little it resembles a wall that can be knocked to the ground in order to put up another much finer one, how it resembles instead a headless and tailless gelatinous heap, a kind of great jelly-fish with well-concealed organs.

It cannot be said that they are entirely taken in by their speeches about transforming the world: they view the actions that their phrases entail simply as the first effects of a duty whose fulfilment will later assume forms altogether more consequential; but they feel themselves to be revolutionaries, they think the only nobility lies in the will to subvert. This is a common denominator among them, though they are probably fated to become strangers or enemies. Spinoza, Hegel, Marxism, Lenin — these are still just great pretexts, great muddled references. And since they know nothing about the life men lead between their work and their wives, their bosses and their children, their little foibles and their great misfortunes, their politics is still based only upon metaphors and shouts. .

Perhaps Rosenthal is simply destined for literature and is only provisionally constructing political philosophies. Laforgue and Bloyé are still too close to their peasant great-grandfathers to commit themselves, without many arrière-pensées and mental reservations and serious mystical revelations. Jurien lets himself be drawn along by comrades remarkably different from himself; he has the feeling he is sowing his wild oats, as his father — a radical schoolteacher in a Jura village — puts it, and that Revolution is less dangerous to health than women: admittedly, it gives less pleasure at first and does not prevent him from having bad dreams. Pluvinage is perhaps the only one among them who adheres fully to his action; but it is an adherence that cannot but end badly, because he is basically concerned only with vengeance and believes in his destiny without any ironic reflection upon himself.

All this is terribly provisional, and they are well aware of it. It is at twenty that one is wise: one knows then that nothing commits or binds, and that no maxim is more unworthy than the notorious saying about the thoughts of youth being realized in maturity; one consents to commit oneself only because one senses the commitment will not give one’s life a definitive shape; everything is vague and free; one makes only sham marriages, like colonials looking forward to the great wedding organs of the mother country. The only freedom seen as desirable is the freedom not to choose at all: the choice of a career, a wife or a party is just a tragic lapse. One of Laforgue’s comrades had just got married at twenty; they spoke of him as of a dead man, in the past tense.