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Dear Michel, I’m not going to give you a lecture.

Once again, you know all this so I’m not going to preach.

But I’m sure you understand that we’re no longer back in the Hašek days.

Or those of the mutineers of 1917* and other “men against” in Francesco Rosi’s film.†

Or even in the lyrical and ultimately rather grotesque merry-go-round in La Comédie de Charleroi,* Drieu-style.

We’re with Giono,† inches away from his “integral pacifism.” And I’m sure there’s no need to show the inevitable sequence that led this otherwise admirable author of Roi sans divertissement and Jean le Bleu to become a supporter of Pétain.

I hope you understand that I’m not accusing your father.

I haven’t overlooked or ruled out the thousand possible explanations you might have uncovered for his strange attitude: modesty, prudence, protecting a third party, even—who knows—the double dealing of a hidden member of the Resistance, as in René Clément’s Le Père tranquille.

No.

What interests me in this story is you.

What I find worrying is how you use the anecdote and your way of being apparently satisfied with the most pessimistic, the most distressing explanation, as if this indifference suited you today.

You can be a pure writer, dear Michel, and still feel summoned to a rendezvous with history—see Rimbaud and the Commune.

You can be concerned only with the absolute, the supreme book, etc., and still keep an ear open for human sobbing—see the little-known Conflit et confrontation, in which Mallarmé claims to offer “points of clarity” to the “blind flock” of “navvies.” He doesn’t give an inch when it comes to his poetry; on the contrary, he sees conflict and confrontation as the spiritual brothers of poetry.

Or you can be like Proust in Norpois’s words, a “flute player.” You can see the public space as a hostile place that makes you literally ill and whose only virtue is to allow you to pass from “one private home to another.” And yet you can still have an infallible radar for detecting an opponent of Dreyfus.

But a word to the wise is enough; sorry to go on.

Now to Goethe’s saying.

First of all, I’d like to point out that Goethe’s exact words (“I prefer to commit an injustice than to tolerate disorder”) were said during the French Revolution in front of the city of Mainz, which had been recovered by the Prussians. He said it only minutes after personally intervening to prevent the lynching of a French soldier who had been evacuated by the troops of the duke of Weimar. In the context, the “injustice” consists of sparing an enemy soldier who may be a great criminal. The “disorder” is that of the unleashed, bloodthirsty rabble, ready to tear a man to shreds. Thus, in his mouth the phrase really means the opposite, exactly the opposite of what you say he meant. Indeed, since Barrès,* he has always been misrepresented.

So there you are. I hate that line as everyone quotes it and as you in turn apply it.

I hate it because of Barrès, who, since he was the first to distort it in this way, was also a sort of second author.

I hate it because of Dreyfus, the innocent Dreyfus, who was the real target both of Barrès himself and of the dirty “intellectuals” claiming to rehabilitate Barrès.

I hate it because of all the innocents it has allowed, since Dreyfus and like Dreyfus, with the same clear conscience and in the name of the same reasons of state, to be unscrupulously condemned.

I hate it because of those judges who at least once in their career come into possession of “new evidence” indicating that someone who has been convicted may be innocent but close the file with a sigh because, well, that’s how it is, you’re not going to start up everything from scratch, set the whole machine in motion again, discredit it, weaken it, instill doubt … better to drop it, calmly put on your slippers and have your dinner … better an injustice than disorder …

By chance I had dinner the other evening with a great judge, Philippe Courroye. You would need to know the history of my relations with him to understand. I would need to