Paul Nizan - The Conspiracy

Rosenthal felt like a smoke, and said to Laforgue in an undertone:

— Did you spot that society type Léon Blum shaking the miners’ hands, those horny hands of theirs? Talk about old family retainers, I must say. .

Around one in the morning, Laforgue said:

— I can’t take any more of this. Let’s get the hell out of this cellar!

They made their escape, taking precautions, but no one noticed their departure. Outside, Laforgue continued:

— Well, we’ll have had the honour of keeping watch beside the body of Jean Jaurès.

— Yes, said Bloyé. It’s even an honour we’ll have shared with M. Eugène Lautier.

— And with Herr, said Rosenthal.

— Which is much odder, Laforgue went on. Because after all, with him you really don’t have to worry, he’s not got any little trick up his sleeve. He must have been the only person who was actually thinking, as if the body blow of July ’14 had happened only yesterday, about Jaurès — a fellow who had been in the same year as Baudrillart and Bergson, and who had strength, hairs on his chin, courage, a voice and who, in his youth, had written a thesis in Latin on the reality of the sensible world. .

People were beginning to move away from the Chamber, taking the Pont de la Concorde or Boulevard Saint-Germain, in order to catch the last Métros. Some groups lingered, however, still listening to the muffled strains of the funeral marches issuing from the loudspeakers between the columns. An imponderable haze submerged the flutings and the great tricolour drape that flapped from top to bottom of the Palais-Bourbon’s façade; the Seine was unusually lonely and black, and in the silence of Paris you could hear it rending and gently hissing round the piles of the bridges as though you had been walking through open countryside beside its waters. When they reached the Légion d’Honneur building, Laforgue said:

— All in all, there was a prize little band of swine there this evening. Instead of playing at being pallbearers and pious young university types, we’d have done just as well being out on the embankment with the others.

The next day, at the start of the afternoon, they had positioned themselves on the corner of Rue Soufflot and Boulevard Saint-Michel, and were circulating from group to group: they were beginning to love the echoes and contingencies of large gatherings. It was 25 November, the weather was grey, the women were feeling none too warm with that little wind round their legs, under their coats. A voice was raised behind them:

— Proper All Saints’ Day weather.

Another voice replied:

— It’s the month, isn’t it. . Funeral weather, you might say. It must have been finer the day Jaurès died, in July ’14. .

By and large, people were fairly content with this apposite climate, since it was a death parade that was about to take place, starting from the Palais-Bourbon and finishing in the frozen crypts of the Panthéon in a clutter of standards and immortelles, and people do not like contradictions between the heavens and humanity — funerals in spring when the cemeteries are flowering, or weddings beneath the rain.

The crowd was dense on the pavements all the way from the Law Faculty to Rue de Bourgogne: with crowd-like decorum, coughing and stamping its feet, it waited patiently for the great men in the cortège and for the communists, who had assembled around noon all along the Champs-Elysées as far back as the Marbeuf Métro station, so people were saying.

The boulevard was as empty as a dried-up riverbed. From time to time a dark police vehicle would pass slowly by, its tyres crunching over the sand. At last a noise was heard coming from the West, then a swelling tide of shouts in which were intermingled relief, anger and joy.

— If it’s another instalment of last night, said Rosenthal, it’s going to be a really trashy affair.

— Can’t tell, said Laforgue. Let’s not forget the people who were calling for Jaurès last night outside the Chamber, as if they had the power to raise him from the dead — and who weren’t looking any too happy. .

The mobile catafalque arrived, a strange scarlet-and-gold platform recalling the civic displays of the French Revolution, its draped daises, its baroque floats celebrating the harvest, youth, war, patriotism and death. The cortège followed: it was a narrow ribbon of men in mourning, and magistrates, professors, military officers, in which there were peaked caps, top-hats, white starched shirtfronts, sashes worn across chests and around bellies, ermines, taffeta robes, pale-blue masonic ribbons, medals, sabres, famous faces casting furtive glances to right and left, all along that petrified stream, at the two moving ridges of chests, heads, legs and shouts that were perhaps about to surge onto the carriageway. People were thinking, of course, about the crossing of the Red Sea: and the Prime Minister was doubtless not much prouder than Moses — with that Pharaoh and his war chariots galloping at his heels, and the two liquid walls growing impatient at being miraculous for so long — and was in a hurry to reach the shore of the Panthéon.

An empty space opened up, then voices in the ranks of the crowd said:

— There they are!

The boulevard filled up: it was the workers from the outlying districts, the masses from the city’s densely populated eastern and northern neighbourhoods; they held the carriageway from one bank to the other bank, the river had finally begun to flow. The people in the first cortège, who were respectable people, did not sing, but these ones were singing, and since they were singing the Internationale, the tenants in Rue Soufflot and Boulevard Saint-Michel, who had never seen anything like it and who were beginning to feel rather small behind their looped drapes and their half-curtains, started shouting out insults and shaking their fists — but since no one heard their shouts, these demonstrations by the residents were of no particular importance.

The spectators on the pavements opened their eyes wide and craned their necks to read the inscriptions on the banners, which were along the lines of: ‘Jaurès, a victim of war, is being glorified by his murderers’, and which protested against the Dawes Plan, the Left Cartel, fascism and war, and called for Revolution and the arraignment before a revolutionary Tribunal of those responsible for the War: perhaps these were slightly Utopian slogans, but no doubt could be entertained as to the fresh truth of these rallying cries when people told themselves how the socialist deputies had just voted through the Interior Ministry’s secret budget.

One could not help thinking of vigorous forces, of sap, a river, the flow of blood. The boulevard suddenly merited the appellation ‘artery’. The men and women on the pavements had perhaps from the outset wanted to remain calm, because they had come here with their families, out of curiosity, or out of gratitude, or to see famous people pass by, or out of loyalty to the sentimental images Paris retained of Jean Jaurès and his boater and his old tailcoat and his fists uplifted against war, there beneath the wide skies of the Pré Saint-Gervais: but there was no way of remaining calm. It is of no avail being a Parisian and accustomed to great funerals — what with all the ministers and cardinals and academicians and generals who die — and to parades and cortèges; there is no fever that spreads faster than the flames of great processions, and since it had never crossed the minds of the demonstrators coming from the Champs-Elysées to assume suitable expressions, those on the pavements told themselves that if Jaurès were all at once to return, he would probably be rather pleased to see people happy at being two hundred thousand in his honour, and that the crowd filling the carriageway was in the right: this is why the pavements allowed themselves, after hesitating for a moment, to be seduced. The motionless men no longer resisted the moving men, nor the spectators the spectacle, nor the silent ones the singers; they stepped down to experience the river’s movement. Laforgue, Rosenthal and Bloyé lost what deference to convention they had left, they too plunged in and began to sing.