The Conspiracy. Paul Nizan

      

      PAUL NIZAN was born in Tours, France in 1905, the son of a railway engineer. A close friend of Sartre at the Lycée Henri IV and at the Ecole normale supérieure, he joined the Communist Party in the late 1920s and became one of its best-known journalists and intellectuals. His works include Aden, Arabie; Les Chiens de Garde; Antoine Bloyé; and Le Cheval de Troie. In 1939, following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Nizan left the party and was killed the following year in the Battle of Dunkirk fighting against the German army.

      The Conspiracy

      Paul Nizan

      TRANSLATED BY QUINTIN HOARE

      FOREWORD BY JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

      Including a previously unpublished letter by Walter Benjamin

      English-language edition first published by Verso 1988

      This updated paperback edition published by Verso 2011

      © Verso 2011

      Translation © Quintin Hoare

      First published as La Conspiration © Editions Gallimard, Paris 2005

      Foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre from his Situations (vol. 1) © Editions Gallimard 1948

      Letter to Max Horkheimer (dated 24 January 1939), aus: Walter Benjamin,

      Gesammelte Briefe. 6 Bände Band VI: Briefe 1938–1940 © Suhrkamp Verlag

      Frankfurt am Main 2000

      Translation © Esther Leslie

      All rights reserved

      The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Verso

      UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

      US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

       www.versobooks.com

      Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

      Epub ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-838-9

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

      Typeset in MT Janson by Hewer UK Ltd, Edinburgh

      Printed in the US by Maple Vail

      CONTENTS

       Translator’s Note

       Foreword: On The Conspiracy by Jean-Paul Sartre

       PART ONE

       The Conspiracy

       PART TWO

       Catherine

       PART THREE

       Serge

       Appendix: Walter Benjamin to Max Horkheimer

       Notes

      Translator’s Note

      In The Conspiracy, Nizan draws on cultural, political and historical sources that will often be unfamiliar to English-speaking readers, half a century after its original publication. A few explanatory notes have, therefore, been provided at the end of the book, to which readers may if they wish refer – but without burdening the text of the novel itself with any inappropriate apparatus of reference numbers.

      Perhaps the most important thing to explain is something about the French system of higher education, in which a particular role is played by a group of elite Grandes Écoles in Paris, most of which go back in their present (approximate) form to the Revolutionary or Napoleonic period, and which flank the University of Paris (Sorbonne). Rosenthal and his friends attend what is still the best known of these, the Ecole normale supérieure in Rue d’Ulm. This is entered by annual competition, open to pupils from lycées (roughly equivalent to grammar or high schools) all over France. However, certain well-known Parisian lycées like the Louis-le-Grand of this book (which the author himself attended with Jean-Paul Sartre in the early twenties, and which stands next door to the Sorbonne) specialize in preparing for the Ecole Normale Supérieure entrance: pupils from less prominent lycées throughout the country transfer there at the age of eighteen for this purpose. At the Ecole Normale Supérieure, students are prepared not simply for a first degree (licence), but also for the more difficult agrégation, a competitive examination which qualifies successful candidates to apply for a strictly limited number of teaching posts (in history, mathematics, philosophy, etc.) in lycées – posts which carry higher salaries than those open to teachers who only have ordinary degrees.

      Other Grandes Écoles figuring here include the Ecole Nationale des Chartes, for archivists and librarians; the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques (now the Institut d’Etudes Politiques) in Rue Saint-Guillaume; the Ecole Polytechnique (familiarly known as X), which has a military status and qualifies pupils either for technical branches of the armed services or for engineering branches of the public services, through an education specializing in mathematics and the physical sciences; and, in the domain of technical and vocational education, the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures and the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers.

      The Conspiracy is set in the political context of France between 1924 and 1929. In 1924, the Right-dominated Horizon-Blue Chamber (so called after the colour of the French Army’s field uniform between 1915 and 1927) was replaced in general elections which led to a coalition government of the Left Cartel. Poincaré, the conservative politician most identified with France’s hard line towards defeated Germany and in particular with French occupation of the Ruhr (1923), was replaced as Premier by the Radical-Socialist Herriot, while Millerand was similarly replaced as President by Doumergue. By 1925, however, the Right held governmental power once more, with a series of ministries headed for the most part either by Briand (1925–26 and again in 1929) or Poincaré (1926–29).

      I should like to express my gratitude to Christine Donougher, Marie-Thérèse Weal, and especially Madame Rirette Nizan, for their kind help when I was finalizing this translation.

      Foreword: On The Conspiracy

      Nizan speaks about youth. But a Marxist has too much historical sense to describe an age of life – such as Youth or Maturity – in general, just as it marches past in Strasburg Cathedral when the clock strikes midday. His young men are dated and attached to their class: like Nizan himself, they were twenty in 1929 – the heyday of ‘prosperity’ in the middle of the post-war period that has just ended. They are bourgeois, sons for the most part of that grande bourgeoisie which entertains ‘anxious doubts about its future’, of those ‘rich tradespeople who brought up their children admirably, but who had ended up respecting only the Spirit, without thinking that this ludicrous veneration for the most disinterested activities of life ruined everything, and that it was merely the mark of their commercial decadence and of a bourgeois