Brain workers, comrades, scattered throughout the world, kept apart for five years by the armies, the censorship, and the mutual hatred of the warring nations, now that barriers are falling and frontiers are being reopened, we issue to you a call to reconstitute our brotherly union, and to make of it a new union more firmly founded and more strongly built than that which previously existed.
The war has disordered
our ranks. Most of the intellectuals placed their science, their art, their
reason, at the service of the governments. We do not wish to formulate any
accusations, to launch any reproaches. We know the weakness of the individual
mind and the elemental strength of great collective currents. The latter, in a
moment, swept the former away, for nothing had been prepared to help in the
work of resistance. Let this experience, at least, be a lesson to us for the
future!
First of all, let us
point out the disasters that have resulted from the almost complete abdication
of intelligence throughout the world, and from its voluntary enslavement to the
unchained forces. Thinkers, artists, have added an incalculable quantity of
envenomed hate to the plague which devours the flesh and the spirit of Europe.
In the arsenal of their knowledge, their memory, their imagination, they have
sought reasons for hatred, reasons old and new, reasons historical, scientific,
logical, and poetical. They have labored to destroy mutual understanding and
mutual love among men. So doing, they have disfigured, defiled, debased,
degraded, Thought, of which they were the representatives. They have made it an
instrument of the passions; and (unwittingly, perchance) they have made it a
tool of the selfish interests of a political or social clique, of a state, a
country, or a class. Now, when, from the fierce conflict in which the nations
have been at grips, the victors and the vanquished emerge equally stricken,
impoverished, and at the bottom of their hearts (though they will not admit it)
utterly ashamed of their access of mania—now, Thought, which has been entangled
in their struggles, emerges, like them, fallen from her high estate.
Arise! Let us free the
mind from these compromises, from these unworthy alliances, from these veiled
slaveries! Mind is no one's servitor. It is we who are the servitors of mind.
We have no other master. We exist to bear its light, to defend its light,
to rally round it all the strayed sheep of mankind. Our role, our duty, is to
be a center of stability, to point out the pole star, amid the whirlwind of
passions in the night. Among these passions of pride and mutual destruction, we
make no choice; we reject them all. Truth only do we honor; truth that is free,
frontierless, limitless; truth that knows naught of the prejudices of race or
caste. Not that we lack interest in humanity. For humanity we work; but for
humanity as a whole. We know nothing of peoples. We know the People, unique and
universal; the People which suffers, which struggles, which falls and rises to
its feet once more, and which continues to advance along the rough road
drenched with its sweat and its blood; the People, all men, all alike our
brothers. In order that they may, like ourselves, realize this brotherhood, we
raise above their blind struggles the Ark of the Covenant—Mind, which is free,
one and manifold, eternal.[1]
Romain Rolland in L’Humanité (26 June, 1919)
[1] Stefan
Zweig, Romain Rolland: The Man and His
Work, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1921 [Scholar
Select reprint]), pp. 351-353. Composed
by Rolland, this manifesto was published on the same day the Versailles Peace
Treaty was signed. Individual signators to the Declaration from across the globe included: Rolland, Albert Einstein, Benedetto Croce, Maxim Gorki, Rabindranath Tagore, Heinrich Mann, Upton Sinclair, Jules Romains, Georges Duhamel, and Bertrand
Russell.
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