Paul Nizan - The Conspiracy

Page 78 MENE TEKEL PERES: the reference is to the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast, see Daniel, 5, vv. 25–8: ‘And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing; MENE — God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it. TEKEL — Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. PERES — Thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.’

Page 89 Italians: by analogy with the post-war chambers in Italy, which had given their support after 1922 to Mussolini and his fascist movement, fuelled by the resentful aspirations of demobilized officers.

Page 92 Georges Duhamel (1884–1966), poet, novelist and playwright; his war novels give an unsparing picture of the horrors of war itself, but a highly sentimentalized one of its victims.

Max Scheler (1874–1928), German phenomenological philosopher and sociologist of knowledge, published the collection of essays Vom Umsturz der Werte in Leipzig in 1919.

Page 93 Henri Massis (1886–1970) and Alfred de Tarde (born 1880), under the joint pseudonym Agathon, published a series of influential surveys of public opinion in the years immediately preceding the First World War, notably L’esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne and Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui . They identified a new generation of French youth, breaking with fin de siècle nihilism and narcissism, more open to the appeal of patriotic virtues, indeed specifically more ready to combat Germany — both on the cultural and on the military planes. In the case of Massis, at any rate, the conclusions of the survey were to a large extent tailored to a prewritten script.

Page 101 Auteuil, etc. — fashionable racecourses.

The Company is the Company of Stockbrokers, rough equivalent of a London city guild.

1927 was the year in which Julien Benda’s influential La Trahison des clercs (Treason of the Intellectuals) was published.

Page 103 Camelots du Roi: youth organization attached to Action Française, a far-right grouping founded in 1899 and led by Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet. Originally republican, after 1908 Action Française became increasingly royalist, Catholic and anti-Semitic, drawing many of its themes from the writings of Edouard Drumont (1844–1917), a prominent anti-Semitic and anti-Dreyfus propagandist, founding editor of La Libre Parole . The Jeunesses Patriotiques formed by Pierre Taittinger represented a proto-fascism which by the twenties had more appeal in France than the royalist nostalgia of Action Française.

Page 103 Rue Saint-Guillaume: site of the then Ecole Nationale des Sciences Politiques.

Page 104 Conciergerie: play on words — the Conciergerie is in fact a famous prison, forming part of the Palais de Justice.

Page 109 Otto I sat on the Greek throne from 1832 to 1862.

Page 112 The Hecatonpylus or ‘hundred gates’ was Homer’s designation for Thebes on the upper Nile.

Page 110 Hédiard’s is a luxury food store on Place de la Madeleine in Paris.

Page 111 Palikars: irregulars in the Greek War of Independence, in which Byron, Admiral Andréas Miaoulis, Marcos Botsaris and General Theodoros Kolocotronis played greater or lesser roles. The interior of the Erechtheum dates from the period when it was used as an Ottoman harem.

Page 116 Emile Bréhier (1876–1952) taught philosophy at the Sorbonne 1919–46 and wrote the standard French history of philosophy in seven volumes.

The Power of a Lie , play by the Norwegian author Johan Böjer (1872–1959), published in 1903.

Page 117 André Marty (1886–1956), a prominent Communist leader — who in 1919 had led a mutiny in the French Black Sea fleet; of whom Hemingway was to give an unflattering portrait as a vain and bloodthirsty commissar in For Whom the Bell Tolls ; but who would be expelled from the Party in his old age for expressing doubts about the role of the Soviet security police — was convicted in 1929 for articles urging soldiers to resist the imperialist warmongers.

Page 121 Bois-Belleau in the département of the Aisne was the site of fierce battles in October 1914 and again in July 1918.

Urania was the Muse of Astronomy and Geometry.

The church of Sainte-Clotilde is in the 7th arrondissement in Paris.

Page 122 Grande Mademoiselle: Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier (1627–93), niece of Louis XIII, took an active part on the side of Condé in the second Fronde, fell in love at the age of forty-two with a Gascon adventurer named Lauzun. The king initially consented to their marriage, but changed his mind and imprisoned Lauzun for ten years. They may then have been secretly married, but Lauzun, whom she had greatly enriched, abandoned her. She wrote lively memoirs, and a number of less interesting novels.

Pedro I was emperor of Brazil from 1821 to 1831.

Page 124 The Compagnie Général Transatlantique was controlled by the Péreire family and their Crédit Mobilier.

The Crédit du Nord challenged the six national banks from its base in the northern départements .

Eugène Mathon (1860–1935) was a self-made textile manufacturer and proponent of corporatism.

Page 125 Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82), in his novel Les Pléiades (1874), presented his three heroes as ‘kings’ sons’, or alternatively calenders (mendicant dervishes), adrift in a world populated by fools, brutes and rogues.

Auguste Scheurer-Kestner (1833–99) was a notable of the Third Republic, Vice-President of the Senate, uncle to Jules Ferry’s wife, the most eminent of exiled Alsatian politicians after 1870, and one of the foremost defenders of Dreyfus.

Page 126 Pera is a district of Istanbul.

Diana of the Crossways: eponymous heroine of the novel by George Meredith.

Page 131 The Hague Conference on the Young Plan was held from 6 to 31 August 1929. It was designed to provide a final solution to the German post-war reparations problem, and German acceptance was rewarded by the evacuation of the Rhineland by June 1930.

In August 1929 there were major clashes in British-administered Palestine, following a dispute over Jewish use of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

Page 132 Chéron, the French Finance Minister, and Snowden, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, clashed openly over German reparations at the Hague Conference. Henderson was then the British Foreign Secretary, Jaspar the Belgian Premier.

Page 134 Concert Mayol: nightclub similar to the Folies Bergères.

Page 144 Charles Fréminville (1856–1936), engineer, played a large part in introducing Taylorism into France and was President of the first Comité National de l’Organisation Française (1926–32).

Henry le Châtelier (1850–1936) was a chemist and metallurgist, an early French advocate of Taylorism.

The neo-Saint-Simonian movement in France in the twenties was led by such men as Henri Fayol, Ernest Mercier and Eugène Mathon; many of them were graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique, and many of them too had fascist leanings.

Page 155 Perthes-lès-Hurlus: village near Rheims taken by the German army in October 1914, retaken by the French in 1915.

Page 156 Emile Combes (1835–1921), Prime Minister 1902–5, is mainly remembered for his fiercely anti-clerical policies.

At the Tours Congress in December 1920, a majority of the Socialist Party voted to join the Third International, thereafter changing its name to Communist Party.

Page 159 Alfred Jarry monkey: in Jarry’s Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (1911), there is a monkey named Bosse-de-Nage.