French essayist
Julien Benda
(
French:
[?ylj??
b??da]
; 26 December 1867 ? 7 June 1956) was a French philosopher and novelist, known as an essayist and
cultural critic
. He is best known for his short book,
La Trahison des Clercs
from 1927 (
The Treason of the Intellectuals
or
The Betrayal by the Intellectuals
).
Life
[
edit
]
Born into a Jewish family in Paris, Benda had a secular upbringing.
[1]
He was educated at the
Lycee Louis-le-Grand
. After a period at the
Ecole Centrale Paris
, he turned to history, and graduated at the
Sorbonne
in 1894.
[2]
His father's death in 1889 left Benda independently wealthy.
[1]
He wrote for
La Revue Blanche
from 1891 to 1903. His articles on the
Dreyfus affair
were collected and published as
Dialogues
.
[2]
He disagreed strongly with
Henri Bergson
, the leading light of French philosophy of his day, and launched an attack on him in 1911, when Bergson's reputation was at its height.
[3]
In July 1937 he attended the Second International Writers' Congress, the purpose of which was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals to the
war in Spain
, held in
Valencia
,
Barcelona
and
Madrid
and attended by many writers including
Andre Malraux
,
Ernest Hemingway
,
Stephen Spender
and
Pablo Neruda
.
[4]
Benda survived the German occupation of France and the
Vichy regime
1940?1944, in
Carcassonne
. The journal of
Jean Guehenno
described his life there, and his character: "Unbearable, yet likeable."
[5]
He died in
Fontenay-aux-Roses
, on 7 June 1956.
[2]
Works
[
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]
Benda is considered to be primarily an essayist.
[6]
He was nominated for the
Nobel Prize in Literature
four times.
[7]
His single nomination for the
Goncourt Prize
was in 1912 for
L'Ordination
. He lost out to
Andre Savignon
's novel
Les filles de la pluie
. Voting was tied, and the casting vote went to
Leon Hennique
, in a notorious election that caused Hennique to give up the presidency of the Academie Goncourt.
[8]
La Trahison des Clercs
[
edit
]
Benda is now best remembered for his short 1927 book
La Trahison des Clercs
, a work of considerable influence. It was translated into English in 1928 by
Richard Aldington
; the U.S. edition was titled
The Treason of the Intellectuals
, while the British edition was titled
The Great Betrayal.
Aldington's translation was republished in 2006 as
The Treason of the Intellectuals
, with a new introduction by
Roger Kimball
. This polemical essay argued that European intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries had often lost the ability to reason dispassionately about political and military matters, instead becoming apologists for crass nationalism, warmongering, and racism. Benda reserved his harshest criticisms for his fellow Frenchmen
Charles Maurras
and
Maurice Barres
. Benda defended the measured and dispassionate outlook of
classical civilization
and the internationalism of traditional Christianity.
Closing this work, Benda darkly predicts that the augmentation of the "realistic" impulse to domination of the material world, justified by intellectuals into an "integral realism," risked producing an all-encompassing species-wide civilization that would completely cease "to situate the good outside the real world." Human aspirations, specifically after power, would become the sole end of society. In closing, he concludes bitterly, "And History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died."
[9]
Benda's word "clercs" was borrowed by
Anne Appelbaum
in her 2020 book
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
.
[10]
Other works
[
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]
Other works by Benda include
Belphegor
(1918),
Uriel's Report
(1926), and
Exercises of a Man Buried Alive
(1947), an attack on the contemporary French celebrities of his time. Most of the titles in the bibliography below were published during the last three decades of Benda's long life; he is emphatically a 20th-century author.
In his 1933 publication
Discours a la nation europeenne,
Benda responded to
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
's
Addresses to the German Nation
.
[11]
Bibliography
[
edit
]
- L'ordination
? 1911
- Les sentiments de Critias
? 1917
- Belphegor : essai sur l'esthetique de la presente societe francaise
? 1919
- Les amorandes
? 1922
- La croix de roses ; precede d'un dialogue d'Eleuthere avec l'auteur
? 1923
- Lettres a Melisande
? 1926
- La trahison des clercs
? 1927
- English translation,
The Betrayal of the Intellectuals
, by
Richard Aldington
:
- The Treason of the Intellectuals
- Cleanthis ou du Beau et de l'actuel
? 1928
- Properce, ou, Les amants de Tibur
? 1928
- La Fin de l’Eternel ?
1929
[11]
- Appositions
? 1930
- Esquisse d'une histoire des Francais dans leur volonte d'etre une nation
? 1932
- Discours a la nation europeenne
? 1933
[11]
- La jeunesse d'un clerc
? 1936
- Precision (1930?1937)
? 1937
- Un regulier dans le siecle
? 1937
- Un Regulier dans le siecle
(Paris, Gallimard) 1938
- La grande epreuve des democraties : essai sur les principes democratiques : leur nature, leur histoire, leur valeur philosophique.
? 1942
- Exercice d'un enterre vif, juin 1940-aout 1944
? 1945
- La France Byzantine, ou, Le triomphe de la litterature pure : Mallarme, Gide, Proust, Valery, Alain Giraudoux, Suares, les Surrealistes : essai d'une psychologie originelle du litterateur
? 1945
- Du poetique. Selon l'humanite, non-selon les poetes
? 1946
- Non possumus
. A propos d'une certaine poesie moderne
? 1946
- Le rapport d'Uriel
? 1946
- Tradition de l'existentialisme, ou, Les philosophies de la vie
? 1947
- Du style d'idees : reflexions sur la pensee, sa nature, ses realisations, sa valeur morale
? 1948
- Trois idoles romantiques : le dynamisme, l'existentialisme, la dialectique materialiste
? 1948
- Les cahiers d'un clerc, 1936?1949
? 1949
- La crise du rationalisme
? 1949
See also
[
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]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
a
b
Kritzman, Lawrence D.; Reilly, Brian J.; DeBevoise, M. B. (2006).
The Columbia History of Twentieth-century French Thought
. Columbia University Press. p. 270.
ISBN
978-0-231-10790-7
.
- ^
a
b
c
Murray, Christopher John (2013).
Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought
. Routledge. p. 77.
ISBN
978-1-135-45564-4
.
- ^
Robert C. Grogin,
Rationalists and Anti-Rationalists in pre-World War I France: The Bergson-Benda Affair
, Historical Reflections / Reflexions Historiques
Vol. 5, No. 2 (Winter/Hiver 1978), pp. 223?231, at p. 224. Published by: Berghahn Books
JSTOR
41298718
- ^
Thomas, Hugh (2012).
The Spanish Civil War
(50th Anniversary ed.). London: Penguin Books. p. 678.
ISBN
978-0-141-01161-5
.
- ^
Guehenno, Jean (2014).
Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris
. Oxford University Press, USA. p. 14.
ISBN
978-0-19-997086-5
.
- ^
Chevalier, Tracy (2012).
Encyclopedia of the Essay
. Routledge. p. 302.
ISBN
978-1-135-31410-1
.
- ^
"Nomination Database"
. Nobel Foundation
. Retrieved
19 April
2017
.
- ^
Kent, Allen; Lancour, Harold; Daily, Jay E. (1978).
Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science: Volume 24 - Printers and Printing: Arabic Printing to Public Policy: Copyright, and Information Technology
. CRC Press. p. 208.
ISBN
978-0-8247-2024-7
.
- ^
Benda, Julien (1956).
The Treason of the Intellectuals
, W. W. Norton and Co., pp. 202?203.
- ^
Laczo, Ferenc (13 July 2020).
"A Dreyfusard from the Right ? Twilight of Democracy"
.
Visegrad Insight
. Retrieved
24 August
2020
.
- ^
a
b
c
Cadeddu, Davide (2023).
"Julien Benda's political Europe and the treason of intellectuals"
.
History of European Ideas
.
49
(4): 708?721.
doi
:
10.1080/01916599.2022.2121303
.
hdl
:
2434/938015
.
ISSN
0191-6599
.
S2CID
252347376
.
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Nichols, Ray L., 1979.
Treason, Tradition and the Intellectual: Julien Benda and Political Discourse
. Univ. Press of Kansas.
- Niess, Robert J., 1956.
Julien Benda
. Univ. of Michigan Press.
External links
[
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]
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