Romain Rolland

Romain Rolland was born in 1866 in the small town of Clamecy, France. Having graduated from the École Normale Supérieure, doctorate in history and literature, as well as being passionate about music, the intellectual is best known for his literary commitment during the Great War. Comparable to and often likened to Zola’s J’accuse (1898), his article Above the Battle, published on 22 September 1914 in the Journal de Genève, stands as the most famous pacifist manifesto of the First World War. Calling for a higher perspective beyond belligerent quarrels and asserting that a “great people assailed by war does not only have its borders to defend” but also “its reason,” this piece played a significant role, alongside the publication of Jean–Christophe some ten years earlier, in securing his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915. This ideal of non–violence, inspired by the thoughts of Tolstoy and Gandhi, did not merely correspond to a specific historical moment – the war itself – but also crowned a life trajectory that Rolland had been shaping for nearly two decades, one defined by encounters, travels, and a certain spirit, or atmosphere of the time, which was profoundly intertwined with Italy.

Thus, Rolland maintained a correspondence with Vernon Lee from 1908 to 1921, now carefully preserved in the archives of the University of Oxford. Notably, he facilitated the serial publication in his journal, Les Tablettes, of Lee’s pacifist essay The Ballet of Nations (1915), accompanied by illustrations from the Belgian artist Frans Masereel. In return, in 1914, when Above the Battle was published, Vernon Lee actively supported his Nobel nomination by encouraging the translation and dissemination of Jean–Christophe (1904) to an English-speaking audience. A year later, from London, she even wrote in a letter to Helmer Key, a Swedish musicologist and member of the Union of Democratic Control:

“Cannot the prize–giving become deliberately organised in view of intellectual pacification and collaboration? And should not the prize intended for those who have furthered the cause of peace be unanimously offered to the writer who before the war, but when its bitterness was preparing, set the German Jean–Christophe alongside the Frenchman Olivier as his companion and complement, the writer, since the war, of Above the Battle, Monsieur Romain Rolland?”

This expressed solicitude towards the French writer did not, however, preclude nuances, even dissensions, between the two intellectuals regarding the stance to adopt in response to the prolongation of the war. Likely influenced by his two years at the French School in Rome from 1889 to 1891 and his exposure to Italian aristocratic circles, Rolland defended a profoundly intellectual, or intellectualist position on the conflict, which, according to Lee, verged on religiosity, a “seraphic” attitude akin to that of angels. Distinguishing herself from her younger contemporary, she asserted that she was “not, like her friend Romain Rolland, above the battle, but simply outside of it.” Lee could not conceive of Rolland’s aspiration to engage human reason as a whole in the understanding of the conflict and in the pacifist struggle against a war she deemed necessarily sterile, for being absurd. However, according to historian Blaise Wilfert’s article A Great Cosmopolitan? Romain Rolland and Italy, or the contradictions of an inter–nationalist, the all–encompassing conception of intellectual engagement that Rolland promoted was not the extension of a blind cosmopolitanism that disregarded national identities. On the contrary, Rolland’s political vision distinguished between the Nation, acknowledged as a historical and cultural reality, and nationalism, an ideology that exceeded mere passive recognition and openly promoted the Nation as a primary frame of reference.

Nevertheless, beyond this view of the Nation as a fact, an entity transcending partisan divisions, Rolland’s contributions from 1908 onwards to the Florentine journal La Voce, founded by Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Papini, as well as his ties to the French Institute of Florence, reveal, according to Wilfert, a more international dimension of Rolland’s nationalism. In this sense, La Voce was a project opposing what was perceived as a manifest decadence in both Italian and French art, particularly within Symbolist literature, which Rolland considered purely and merely evocative, a form of literature detached from reality. Similarly, Wilfert notes that the conferences and concerts given by Rolland – who was also a pianist – at the French Institute of Florence were highly irregular. Moreover, at that time, the IFF, founded in 1907 by Jean Luchaire, was far more an institutional expression of a common Latin identity between France and Italy than a true hub of cultural exchange. Finally, to substantiate his position, the historian highlights that Rolland’s novel Jean–Christophe (1904), despite its depiction of reconciliation between nations, was based on a “fictional reworking of national clichés of the time” – with Germany portrayed as nebulous, while France and Italy were associated with more favourable qualities, of harmony and clarity.

Ultimately, though he had also been a prominent figure of the Nouveau Front Populaire in France, as well as a supporter of communism and the Soviet Union, Rolland announced his withdrawal from politics in 1940, following the rupture of the Nazi–Soviet Pact. In reality, this was more a declaration of intent than an effective decision. For this man, for whom politics was a matter of humanity, continued to express his views on current events, not without a certain detachment, seeking rather an indistinction in tragedy. Eventually, in the end, he finally embraced the early 20th–century vision of his friend Vernon Lee: being “en dehors de la mêlée.”

Alan B.