XXIV
OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT WILSON
Monsieur le Président,
THE peoples are breaking their chains. The hour foreseen by you and desired by you is at hand. May it not come in vain! From one end of Europe to the other, there is rising among the peoples the will to resume control of their destinies, and to unite, that they may form a regenerated Europe. Across the frontiers, they are holding out their hands to one another for a friendly clasp. But between them there still remain abysses of mistrust and misunderstanding. These abysses must be bridged. We must break the fetters of ancient destiny which shackle these peoples to nationalist wars; which have compelled them, century after century, to rush blindly upon one another for their mutual destruction. Unaided, they cannot break their chains. They are calling for help. But whither can they turn for help?
You alone, Monsieur le Président, among all those whose dread duty it now is to guide the policy of the nations, you alone enjoy a world-wide moral authority. You inspire universal confidence. Answer the appeal of these passionate hopes! Take the hands which are stretched forth, help them to clasp one another. Help these peoples, groping in the dark, to find their way, to establish the new charter of freedom and union whose principles they are seeking earnestly but confusedly.
Reflect: Europe is in danger of falling back into the circles of hell through which she has been toiling for more than four years, drenching the soil with her blood. In all lands, the peoples have lost confidence in the ruling classes. At this hour, you are the only one who can speak to all alike—to the common people and to the bourgeoisies of the nations. You alone can be sure of an attentive hearing. None but you can act as mediator to-day (and will even you still be able to act as mediator to-morrow?). Should this mediator fail to appear, the human masses, disarrayed and unbalanced, will almost inevitably break forth into excesses. The common people will welter in bloody chaos, while the parties of traditional order will fly to bloody reaction. Class wars, racial wars, wars between the nations of yesterday, wars between the nations which have just been formed, blind social convulsions, with no further aim than the gratification of the hatreds, the envies, the crazy dreams of an hour of life looking forward to no morrow.…
Heir of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, take up the cause, not of a party, not of a single people, but of all! Summon the representatives of the peoples to the Congress of Mankind! Preside over it with the full authority which you hold in virtue of your lofty moral consciousness and in virtue of the great future of America! Speak, speak to all! The world hungers for a voice which will overleap the frontiers of nations and of classes. Be the arbiter of the free peoples! Thus may the future hail you by the name of Reconciler!
Villeneuve, November 9, 1918.
⁂
A few days later (December 4, 1918), “Le Populaire” published a letter from Romain Rolland to Jean Longuet, wherein Romain Rolland laid bare his most intimate thought and gave the reasons for his attitude towards Wilson. The letter was reprinted by "L’Humanité" in the issue of December 14, 1918, a special “Wilson Number.”
I am no Wilsonian. I see all too plainly that the president’s message, as clever as it is generous, aims (in good faith) at realising throughout the world the ideal of the bourgeois republic of the Franco-American type.
This is a conservative ideal and it no longer satisfies me.
Nevertheless, despite our personal predilections and our reserves for the future, I believe that the best thing we can do for the moment is to support the action of President Wilson. He alone will be able to curb the greedy appetites, the ambitions, and the fierce instincts, which will seat themselves at the peace banquet. Through his action alone is there any chance of bringing about a modus vivendi in Europe, one which provisionally at least shall be fairly just. This great bourgeois embodies what is purest, most disinterested, most humane, in the mentality of his class.[1] No one is better fitted than he to act as Arbiter.
June, 1919.
- ↑ Subsequent events have shown that this did not amount to much, after all. The moral abdication of President Wilson, abandoning his own principles without having the honesty to admit the fact, signalises the ruin of that lofty bourgeois idealism which, for a century and a half, gave to the ruling class, notwithstanding many mistakes, both strength and prestige. The consequences of such an act are incalculable.