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By Root 837 0

then, some weeks later, I began to feel annoyed. Not because of the whiff of shame attached to the term reactionary, that seemed rather funny; but because it’s important to agree on the meaning of words. A reactionary is someone who favors some previously existing social configuration—something it is possible to return to—and someone who militates in favor of such a return.

Whereas, if there is an idea, a single idea that runs through all of my novels, which goes so far as to haunt them, it is the absolute irreversibility of all processes of decay once they have begun. Whether this decline concerns a friendship, a family, a larger social group, or a whole society; in my novels there is no forgiveness, no way back, no second chance: everything that is lost is lost absolutely and for all time. It is more than organic, it is like a universal law that applies also to inert objects; it is literally entropic. To an individual convinced of the ineluctable nature of all decay, of all loss, the idea of reaction would never occur. If such an individual could never be reactionary, he would on the other hand, obviously, be conservative. He would always consider it best to conserve what exists, what works more or less, rather than rush headlong into some new experiment. More attuned to danger than to hope, he would be a pessimist, melancholy by disposition, and generally easy to get along with.

In short, I was angry with Daniel Lindenberg, who, in calling me a reactionary, demonstrated such a complete lack of understanding of my books that it occurred to me that maybe I was a bad writer; then I thought maybe he was a bad reader (or that he hadn’t read me, that he was working from index cards). Eventually I reread the magnificent article Philippe Muray devoted to The Elementary Particles, entitled “And, in Everything, Foresee the End,” and I felt serene.

All things, therefore, die, including mental constructs, and as for the French nation, French patriotism, they are already dead. They have been dead for a long time; specifically, they have been dead since 1917 at about the time the first mutinies took place because, to be frank, it was all getting to be a bit too much.

Here too we need to step back a little. Here is a verse from a song that, at the time, everyone in France would have known:

The Republic calls us

Let us prevail or let us perish

A Frenchman must live for her

For her, a Frenchman must die.*

Okay. It must be admitted that the Third Republic, with its famous Black Hussars, had clearly succeeded in something for an entire generation to go off to be massacred in 1914 with the feeling that they were only doing their duty and, in some cases, go off enthusiastically.

A few days ago, the last French combatant in the First World War died and, to mark the occasion, we heard again the testimony of his comrades, the former poilus. People have always been killed in wars, that’s what wars are for. But back then men lay howling and dying for days at a time, a few feet from their comrades, and then rotting and decomposing, still only a few feet from them. These men who had to share their trenches with rats, their rations with worms, who were riddled with lice, who had to relieve themselves in the trenches wherever they could; and all this went on for months, for years, for a war that was utterly absurd, the reason for which no one can quite remember.

A government can ask much of its citizens, of its subjects; but there comes a moment when it asks too much; and then it’s over. In going beyond the acceptable in that appalling, unjustified war, France lost all right to the love and the respect of its citizens; it brought discredit on itself. And such discredit is, I repeat, permanent.

This, it seems to me, explains a lot of things.

The nihilist rage of Surrealism and Dadaism, the surge of fury André Breton sometimes felt at the sight of a uniform or a flag.

The ease with which a generation of working-class people (whose parents and grandparents were probably irreproachable patriots) was convinced that the country of the workers