1 - An unprecedent step
2 - My political duty
3 - American civilization
and concept of preventive war
4 - The spirit of our
literature
5 - Your literature and
the critic of political power
6 - Will you become the
instruments of a creeping priesthood ?
7 - The writer is not
a servant of culture
8 - Observers and judges
of the world politics
9 - The Attestors of universality
10 - Your Vanguard's duty
11 - Your anxious patriotism
12 - Apostles of lucidity
13 - The definition
of justice
14 - The Security
Council of UN
15 - Appeal to other
judges
1 - An unprecedent step 
For
a President of a State to address the foremost writers of a
foreign power, there is no precedent. Such an initiative may
enter the prerogatives attached to my function if a political
duty imposes it to me, and if my message meets the vocation
of universality that belongs to literary genius. However, extremely
singular political circumstances compel me to clarify the relationships
that your great writers entertained with the spirit of their
nation and, through it, with the grandeur of humanity being
civilized at school of literature.
2 - My political duty
The political obligation that constrains me to write in the
way that is yours, that of fights through writing, arises in
the following way : my Foreign Affairs Minister informed me
that because of the disastrous portrait of your country which
your President in the exercise of his mandate enhances and spreads
in the whole world, your State Department has decided to ask
each and everyone of you to try to cure by some talented pages
the cataclysm which strikes the effigy of your nation on the
scale of the whole planet and, for that, you are called upon
to write a panegyric of the American culture which would be
diffused through the diplomatic channels of your country throughout
the five continents, including by the care of your ambassador
in Paris. You are called to praise the greatness of your civilization,
and to write in the manner of psalms patriotic hymns to the
glory that your continent acquired when it was winning fame
for its defence of freedom and democracy on the entire planet.
I do not know if you will obey or if you will freely respond
to these pressing calls from your State Department to its inspired
children; but while your fatherland sustains its intention to
destroy the grounds of public Law that several centuries of
reflection from most famous lawyers and most well-known for
their wisdom government men tried to conceive and write with
precision in the words and with clear thinking inspired by their
reason, you will understand that it falls under my responsibilities,
not to suggest their answers to great writers, therefore to
disobedient intelligences, but to explain to you what I see
as the nature of French literature, and its relation to thoughts.
3 - American civilization and concept
of preventive war
Your people wanted to be a guide of mankind, and the torch of
a democracy moving towards a world of justice and truth. Secured
by these principles, your State created an alliance between
republican virtue and the sovereignty of your God. And now the
white House requires of you to legitimate the concept of preventive
war against the Demon. From now on, your enemy is called the
" axis of evil ", and you fight it in the name of " immutable
justice " which you embody. We, who have fought tyranny for
more than two centuries, and who have made the fight against
despotism, the banner of our foreign policy, we also condemn
the Iraqi regime; but we notice that the Iraqi government does
not threaten at all the American people, and that he does not
bear any responsibility in the misfortune which struck you on
September 11, 2001.
Will you crush an innocent population under a carpet of bombs?
Will you massacre thousands of men, women and children only
for the purpose of laying hands on the black gold which you
covet the treasure ? Will you put American literature at the
service of such an ambition or will you move back from the profanation
of the heart of your nation which is asked to you ?
4 - The spirit of
our literature
It
is in order to help you to answer this question in your heart
and conscience that I obey to my duty of President of the Republic
of the rights of reason to speak to you also in my heart and
conscience about the spirit of our literature. You know that
literature was born only five centuries ago, at the time when
we concluded a new alliance between writing and thoughts. It
is by leaving the darkness of the Middle Ages that our writers'
pen found anew its legitimacy in defending and illustrating
the rights of human intelligence. Since then, our nation is
unfalteringly attached to the prerogatives of our cerebrum,
and to the prerogatives of the critical mind.
All our great authors found themselves philosophers of history
and politics; and it is what connects them to the genius of
your nation since you entered the arena of thoughts at the end
of our century of Enlightment. But remember our common origins
: in the XVI th century, the Renaissance was born from an intellectual
impulse within Christian religion.
This
rediscovery of Socratic introspection was based on criticism
of Roman orthodoxy, engaged in assuring an unquestioned reign
of its severely hierarchical Church: Marot, du Bellay, Rabelais,
Montaigne, all our great writers were at the same time observers
without compliancy of society ,and defenders of Protestant's
freedom of thoughts. Our XVII th century also obeyed to the
intellectual vocation that inspires us since Erasmus, but with
a tenacity hidden under the same features of Catholicism and
Protestantism : Descartes got into trouble with Rome, Pascal
illustrated a Protestant form of Catholicism, which we call
Jansénism, Molière attacked the devout, La Fontaine left us,
in the funny or wild form of its fables, a treaty of politics
more detailed and more ferocious than Le Prince written
by Machiavel, Racine the pietous turned out to be an observer
of human heart that his knowledge of the Court's life placed
to a thousand miles from devotions and from his century, and
the genius of Corneille is that of a witness of tragedy in History
and politics. Then, our XVIII th century took over criticism
of the narrow control papal authority exerted over the rights
of thoughts : Voltaire, Diderot, and the encyclopedists began
again, with a renewed fervour, the war of reason which began
during the Renaissance in philology, and that Renan will continue
during the XIX th century in his Histoire du Christianisme
(History of Christianity) and his famous Vie de Jésus
(Life of Jesus) .
5 - Your literature
and the critic of political power
Your
nation was only ten years old in 1789 when we created modernity
by forging at all points the rational States still alive today.
This ended definitively the wars of religion that devastated
our continent for three centuries. This is why your literature
is deeply bound to ours. Your genius has its deepest roots in
the critic of the power of the States. You too are wary of politics
and temptations of tyranny which it nurturs in its bosom.
But
perhaps is it also dangerous to be born in the cradle of the
Reformation because there isn't any religion safe from a relapse
into orthodoxy. For five centuries, our fight for the conquest
of the rights of thoughts has to start over and over. Our adversaries
are obstinate and are armed to the teeth ; but they also rise
from their ashes in our own walls, where our administrative
democracies replaced Roman bureaucracy. Since Kant, the different
Protestantisms yielded everywhere to the temptation of making
sacred the bodies of the State, as if it were a substitute of
ecclesiastical hierarchy, and Prussian Protestantism collaborated
with Stasi by natural respect of authority. *
Our
kings were always catholic, even under the Édit de Nantes
(Edict of Nantes)*,
and monarchy had to abolish this Edict, because our Protestants
were delivering our strongholds to Anglican England. Since 1905,
we understood that nations taking seriously their theology cannot
allow themselves to divide the mind of their people between
rival confessions while they each claim to offer the single
truth. If religious truth did exist, there wouldn't be two of
them. This radical contradiction made our democracy unviable
during one whole century. Three monarchies and two empires succeeded
our Revolution of 1789. Its last avatar was the reign of a catholic
State on defeated France from 1940 to 1944.
6 - Will you become the instruments of
a creeping priesthood ?
The turbulences of our bicephalous history bring us to observe,
informed by a long experience, the interested offer made by
your Government to sing its glory and its war feats just when
its sceptre is strengthened in the Gulf. Every religion oscillates
between evaporation and stiffness. When religions are powerful,
they line up on the side of States which support them. The centuries
of Roman priesthood were those of Inquisition. Are you sure
that an America of psalms does not emerge from the canticles
to culture ? Who convinces you that your President does not
want transform you into instruments of an insidious priesthood
? Since when is literature at the service of an alliance of
war with piety? In France, the authors whose pen delivered the
orders of our victorious kings carried the title of historiographers
of the Court. In our democracies, patriotic wars gave birth
only to painters of death. Les Croix de bois, Le Feu, Le Voyage
au bout de la nuit, these are the titles of the works of our
painters of war that made a mausoleum from glory of weapons.
7 - The writer is not
a servant of culture
In
this spirit I would like to say to you what we understand, in
France, by the term literature, and how our writers are, if
not all philosophers by vocation, at least born to weigh and
measure the power of the State, and to meditate on History -
this being, in our eyes, the Socratic grounds of the introspective
vocation of philosophy. And initially, I feel that the steps
taken by your State towards you is an offence to your writer's
vocation. How does the State dare presenting you as servants
and employees at the defence of culture ?
Literary genius is not a mercenary of culture, because culture
is only a small flowered garden, and your mission is to fly
over it with great flaps of wings. Literature overlooks History's
relations with life and with death. What would your great composers,
your great painters, your great poets say if your government
asked them to wear the garments of the defenders of what you
call culture which is only the cluster of customs and habits
of various people of the world ? You are the grave's interlocutors
because you were born with tragedy. It was twenty-five centuries
ago at the battle of Salamine.
8 - Observers and judges
of the world politics
I
hold you for advisers and guides for the heads of State, because
you are observers and judges of world politics. Our great novelists
of the XIX th century were visionaries of History. They pursued
the conquests of political lucidity of the three previous centuries
: Stendhal observes from afar the social machine of his time.
He sees the bourgeoisie substituting the rights of industry
to those of the altar. Zola paints the French people with the
colours of L'Assommoir and of Germinal. Balzac brought a whole
society to a dramaturgy of ambition and money. With Les Misérables,
Victor Hugo boosts poverty to an epic of injustice. But didn't
you have your painter of mediocrity and of boredom with the
author of Babbitt , which symbolizes, in France, Mr. Homais
in Mme Bovary ? With Faulkner and Hemingway, didn't you
have your visionaries of the throes of death? What would they
say if the American government had asked them to leave for a
moment their grave so as to defend, at your sides, the day to
day way of life which it pompously calls the " American culture
", and that in the name of a State from now on determined to
trample the international Law to avenge an insect's sting ?
9 - The Attestors of
universality
You
are not only the witnesses of the genius of your nation : you
are the attestors of universality in the New World; and it is
for this reason that you have to cast the same critical glance
over your nation that our writers didn't cease to cast over
France for more than five centuries. All great literature is
at school of anger. Where are your "Grapes of wrath "
? From Faulkner to Henry Miller, from Dos Passos to Sinclair
Lewis, they are everywhere, the fires of your creators' rage.
It is Paris that carried them to the light, in translation,
because you were not yet ready to recognize the genius to its
pace and to the metal of its voice. But since your literature
is a child that our century of the Enlightment saw arising beyond
the seas, and since we entered together the era of democracies
of reason, you share duties with us - and initially the duty
to light up the people when their leaders abuse of their ignorance,
of their naivety and of their credulity.
10 - Your Vanguard's
duty
I
hear that, on your soil, many citizens of goodwill have the
feeling that Iraq threatens America in a mysterious way , and
that your President cannot explain his reasons to the people;
and that, consequently, your fellow-citizens must trust your
President, who is obeying secret reasons : great dangers are
threatening the safety of your nation.
Ignorance,
credulity and naivety of the people, we have known this for
three thousand years. We know that these only change of clothes
according to the times and places. But it was even more difficult
to fight stupidity when it adorned with the prestige of the
heavens or the furies of hell. It was even more difficult when
recently it would propose a concrete proletarian paradise. Our
great writers grappled with the folly of ignorance since we
left the darkness of the Middle Ages.
In your turn, will you learn how to fight ignorance, credulity
and naivety at the school of the great literature of all times
and all nations? Will you explain to the American people that,
among a large number of nations, alas, having frightening weapons,
but not your bomb of Hiroshima, Iraq is the only one which seems
to be a honeycomb ? Why does this country attract troubadours
of virtue, knights of the Golden Fleece, crusaders of Holy Sepulchre,
the ones thirsting for the well of truth, and the lovers of
the beautiful Dulcinée of Toboso, all who sits in your Government
? It is that the Golden Fleece, the Holy Sepulchre, the wells
of truth, and tutti quanti of moderns is called oil. Isn't that
easier to explain to American people than the evil spells of
witches, the danger of heresies, the eternal tortures of the
damned and the nuclear lightning which used to appear as a mean
of major excommunication ?
Yet, your anthropologists know so little of the human cerebrum's
secrets that they did not succeed in refuting Marxist's redemption.
Thus your images ridiculed your senator Mccarthy, and this suffice
to refute the belief in the world's salvation through the advent
of Soviet paradise on heart. From Cervantes to Rabelais, from
Swift to Kafka, writers are visionaries of the insanity of nations.
The literary genius has the eyes of Ezechiel : they are wide
open to the Hercules of madness.
11 - Your anxious patriotism
I have been told that your compatriots are all at once anxious
and devoted patriots. We tried this terrible mixture ; like
today's Americans, our ancestors felt at the same time pious
and anguished to see their Church juggling with the Gospels
and the States. At that time, our writers purified Arethuse's
fountain water, that of the word of Christ. For the faithfulls,
they remembered the anguish of a god nailed to the gallows.
You too are self-murderers of spirit. Don't you think that our
former theologians, now converted to the lights of reason, still
have lessons from the gallows to give to your Protestant writers
? For we all are at once sons of Voltaire, and connaisseurs
of the torment when anguish marries fidelity. Your martyrdom
is to drink the hemlock of reason on the Way of the cross of
the unjust war dreamt by your Picrochole . Will you submissively
climb the steps of this scaffold ? Will you let the blade of
your State cut your neck, you who are, like all the writers
of the world, the sons of Tolstoï's Guerre et paix (War and
peace) and Dostoïevski's L'Idiot (The Idiot) ? You
are the anxious ones and the faithful ones among the nations
- but it is on Ixion's wheel of History that you are nailed.
Today,
it is on your soil that you have a rendez-vous with the law
of the World : for the first time, your turn has come to fight
the eternal alliance of States with injustice. By the new ecclesiocraty
of thoughtlessness and superficiality which your quarrelsome
press represents, tell your nation: " Think by yourselves, open
your ears, speak freely". One of our writers, Boetius, wrote
four centuries ago a Traité de la servitude volontaire (Treaty
of the voluntary servitude). Remember that the worst kind
of servitude is involuntary, and that it arises with political
naivety of people.
12 - Apostles of lucidity
You
are apostles and missionaries of political lucidity, not since
the Renaissance, but since Thucydide and Tacite. All my life,
I made oracles out of you, because in my modest place, I am
only a navigator to which the helm of History is unceasingly
torn off from his hands. Confronted with the violent madness
which seized your nation, do you believe that it is with my
consent that the principle of preventive war was introduced
to the UN? The ancients used to say that gods turn mad those
they want to ruin. I tried to constrain by all means possible
your unbridled Ajax. Help me to tie him with a strait jacket
until the day that your nation will have rekindled its spirits,
and will give us again lessons of courage, wisdom and freedom.
13 - The definition
of justice
Today,
I need you for the essential, and the essential relates to the
definition of justice. Know that politics is so much the hostage
of force that it unceasingly proclaims that justice is on the
side of power. Thus, your State called upon all the resources
of your theology of power ; and, in this spirit, you maintained
that it does not belong to the omniscient God who you are to
yourselves to reveal the sins to the creature, but to the creature
to confess them until the last one, in order to try, by a meticulous
and complete penance, to possibly become worthy of being spared
by your wrath.
I
managed to disarm for a time your theology of war. I said to
your President that his role of head of the American skies is
badly perceived in Europe , and that if you refuse to say to
the UN's inspectors where the sins of Iraq are hiding, we would
judge that you only are sly casuists, and that you refuse to
peace its chances, in order to start a deluge of fire. Our European
remarks were heard, and you had to give up the political pitfalls
of your God.
But
we are trapped by forces specific to politics, forces that enables
it to baptize power in the baptism water of justice; for the
UN admitted that it was fair to condemn only one nation to destroy
its weapons for only one end : to allow your army to seize its
oil. And now, if the Security Council decided, by a majority
of its members, that your enemy did not entirely disarm itself,
the expression of justice would supposedly come from the lips
of this built majority.
14 - The Security Council of UN
The
UN Security Council which is supposed to decide between peace
or war, and which France will chair from the 1st January onwards,
counts a majority of microscopic States over whom your government
made itself complete Master, and that your government bound
to his power by treaties which forbid these Lilliputians to
oppose your foreign policies. It is a great paradox to make
Justice reign by the voice of your servants when their dependence
toward you deprives them of their sovereignty. What a parody
to have puppets pronounce oracles of international ethics while
you pull these puppets' strings. What a masquerade to witness
History being subjected under our eyes to such force. France,
Russia and China, permanent members of the Council, gave up
in advance their right of veto. A certain sum of money from
you was sufficient to buy Colombia, Romania, Singapore or Mauritius.
It has been a long time since History ceased offering to the
whole planet the scene of such a caricature of justice ; it
had been a long time since force had not presented, in the play
of its madness, a more burlesque law-court than the court for
which your government is asking you to change the verdicts of
absurdity into decrees of international law. Will France be
an accomplice of the God who will speak by the voice of your
servants ? Will we back the States that you will have bribed
? Pygmies to your account, and that you will have disguised
into secondary actors in the background of democracy, will they
drive Europe to kneel in front of their aureole?
15 - Appeal to other
judges
France
appeals to other judges. Since five centuries, our writers are
judges of the idea of justice. The greatest among you had the
justice of God himself appear before their court of justice.
From Eschyle to Shakespeare, from Sophocle to Cervantès, they
lent their pen to the Isaiah dormant within them. Are there
greater sovereigns than those who look at nations with the eyes
of prophets, and who tell you that the God of America nails
you on the gallows to make you pay the tribute of your salvation
? They know that the God of America is still the idol who furnished
the necessary winds for the Greek fleet to depart for Troy.
Your Iphigénie is called literature. It is literature that your
State asks you to sacrifice to your idol in order to ensure
a profitable crossing to your ships.
Here is what I would like to hear from your lips as great writers
of a free America. Your God will give you all the gold of Priam
if you sacrifice justice on the altar of war. But see how the
heads of State are of little weight at your side. Only you have
the power to give a voice to the literary genius, of which you
are the guardians, but on the condition that you be its heroic
victims. You are beckoned to drink the hemlock of sacrifice
to the spirit that makes resuscitative the heart of literature.
Tomorrow, the tocsin will ring the hour of carnages. Before
the charge, it is to you that I appeal. You are the visionaries
of the madness of nations. For centuries, your failures are
those of thoughts. You are patriots, but your fatherland is
a vessel, that of intelligence in storms of History. Help your
literature to hold the rudder of reason before your civilization
and ours sink in the shipwreck of international law.
As
President of the Republic, I will not betray the ideals of my
country. The world awaits France's response to the question
of knowing if force dictates the law, failing that justice has
force for itself.
1
- The Stasi : is an abbreviation of Staatssicherheitdienst;
i.e the political Police of RDA from 1950 to 1989 .
2
- The Edict of Nantes is a treaty signed by Henri IV in Nantes
on April 13 th 1598 that had established the rights of Protestants
in France , ending the War of Religion between Catholics and
Protestants.
translated
by Marilyse Devoyault
