Daniel Halévy

He was the one who so elegantly remarked of Proust, his former schoolmate at the Lycée Condorcet, that he had “large, Oriental eyes.” Daniel Halévy, essayist and historian, was born in Paris in 1872 into a family of German Jewish origin. Less of a poet than he aspired to be, his youth was nonetheless marked by the Belle Époque and by writing for a school literary magazine, Le Banquet, which he co–founded with, among others, Robert de Flers and Fernand Gregh, both of whom later became writers. This fleeting moment in time, this “small category of beings,” left a profound imprint on the young Halévy, shaping both his conception of history and his post–war political views. A war that he saw as both a rupture and an impossibility.

Nostalgic yet striving for realism, Halévy criticised the cosmopolitan ideal championed by Vernon Lee, which he considered obsolete. In 1921, within the Revue internationale de Genève, he published an article filled with veiled allusions, addressed to the writer but even more so to their mutual friend, Irene Forbes–Mosse. Shortly before, the latter had written to him from Germany, confiding her desire to return to Italy, as well as her difficulty in accepting the conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles meant to end the war, yet ushering in another: that of reparations. Exiled in England from 1914 to 1918, Vernon Lee also confided in her friend Irene her longing and her hope of returning to Il Palmerino, her Florentine home, but above all, of finding herself again, along with others, her own people: “I am fairly well but very heartbroken and longing for Italy, my house (with you in it again!), and for the Past. Since one does not dare think of a future any longer.” (1915). Woven into this epistolary exchange, beneath the surface, is a subjective dimension of space, one that expresses the self rather than containing or defining it. One senses within it a particular conception of time, which does not distinguish the past from the future, but rather orients itself towards the latter.

Halévy’s publication in the Geneva press was deemed highly clumsy by Lee, especially due to his failure to explicitly mention the name of their German friend, Irene Forbes–Mosse, at a time when Germany was already being erased, indeed, humiliated by the victorious powers. The journal itself, written solely in French, symbolised a desire to restore linguistic hegemony and reflected a certain bitterness towards that supposed golden age when Europe was under France’s influence. Ultimately, Halévy’s article, through literature and a supposedly apolitical conception of the writer’s role, reveals a kind of micro–history of post–war power relations and an increasing difficulty in granting Germany a voice.

In this sense, our first name and surname weave the fundamental link that binds us to the other; but they do not only engage the responsibility of the other, they implicate our very existence. I am addressed, my existence is thereby recognised, and my consciousness takes shape. Thus, according to Lee, to omit the name “Irene” was to trample once again on what little self–awareness Germany might have retained. Moreover, while Halévy called for a literature detached from political conflict, Lee gently reminded him, though not without a hint of irony, that the very act of writing in the Revue internationale de Genève, closely tied to the pacifist and cosmopolitan project of the League of Nations, founded in Switzerland in 1920, was itself a political gesture. Against Halévy’s vision of a “refuge in books” and a reform of states from within, Lee firmly opposed a pacifist vision akin to cosmopolitism, one that existed beneath or beyond borders – Il Palmerino being, in her eyes, a reservoir of peace.

According to Sébastien Laurent, historian and professor at Sciences Po, Halévy’s post–war totalising conception of literary aesthetics – akin in this sense to Mallarmé’s total poem – marked a preliminary stage in his ideological shift, from Dreyfusard socialism to traditionalism, and even towards Vichyism in the final quarter of his life. A trajectory that may seem surprising, but which finds its roots in the very history of political thought. Patrice Rolland, professor of law, thus asserts of this man, passionate about Nietzsche and the discovery of human nature, who died in 1962 in Saint–Germain–en–Laye, that “his traditionalism is not a renunciation of his youthful liberalism; rather, it expresses the impasse and lack of solutions for a liberalism that was not political enough,” or in other words, one that aspired to be literary. Perhaps this is the fate of those who do not fully succeed in becoming poets, unlike Proust, of whom Halévy himself said that he was “a man of the world.”

Alan B.