1938 letter from Weil to Bernanos about what she witnessed in Spain:
However ridiculous it may be to write to a writer, who is always, due to the nature of his profession, inundated with writing, I can’t keep myself from doing so after reading The Great Cemeteries Beneath the Moon. Not that this is the first time a book of yours has touched me; The Diary of a Country Priest is in my opinion the most beautiful, at least of those I have read, and truly a great book. But, although I may have loved others of your books, I had no reason to bother you by writing to you. For this last one, it’s another matter: I have had an experience corresponding to yours, although it was briefer, not as profound, situated elsewhere, and in appearance – in appearance only – undergone in a very different spirit.
I am not Catholic, although—what I am going to say is going to seem presumptuous to any Catholic, coming from a non-Catholic, but I cannot express myself otherwise—although nothing Catholic, nothing Christian has ever seemed foreign to me. I have sometimes told myself that, if only they were to put up a sign on the doors of churches that entrance is forbidden to anybody enjoying an income higher than such-and-such an amount (not very elevated), I would at once convert. From childhood, my sympathies have been turned toward associations claiming a connection with the despised strata of the social hierarchy, until I realized that these associations are of a nature to discourage all sympathies. The last one to inspire my confidence was the Spanish C.N.T. I had traveled a bit in Spain – a small bit – before the civil war, but enough to feel the love it is difficult not to feel towards this people; I had seen in the anarchist movement the natural expression of its grandeurs and its vices, of its most and least legitimate aspirations. The C.N.T., the F.N.I., were an amazing mixture, where absolutely anybody was allowed in, and where, consequently, you found jostled together immorality, cynicism, fanaticism, cruelty, but also love, the spirit of brotherhood, and above all the most beautiful demand for honour amongst humiliated men; it seemed to me that those who had come there inspired by an ideal outnumbered those who were impelled by a taste for violence and disorder. In July 1936 I was in Paris. I don’t like war; but what has always horrified me the most in war is the situation of those behind the lines. When I found that, despite my efforts, I couldn’t keep myself from participating emotionally in this war, that is, from desiring every day, every moment, the victory of one side and the defeat of the other, I said to myself that Paris was behind the lines, and I took the train for Barcelona with the intention of enlisting. It was the beginning of August 1936.
An accident made me shorten perforce my stay in Spain. I spent several days in Barcelona; then, in the middle of the Aragonese countryside, on the banks of the Ebro River, fifteen kilometres from Saragossa, at the precise spot where recently Yaguë’s troops crossed the Ebro; then in the palace at Sitges, transformed into a hospital; then once again in Barcelona; in all about two months. I left Spain against my will and intending to return there; subsequently I made no attempt to do so. I no longer felt the inner necessity to participate in a war that was no longer what it had appeared to be in the beginning, a war of starving peasants against landholders and a clergy in cahoots with them, but rather a war between Russia, Germany, and Italy.
I recognised that odour of civil war, blood, and terror your book gives off; I had breathed it. I saw nothing, and heard nothing, I have to say, that quite reaches the shameful horror of certain of the stories you tell – the murders of old peasants, the balillas hitting old men with clubs to make them run. What I heard nonetheless sufficed. I almost witnessed the execution of a priest; during the minutes spent waiting, I asked myself if I was just going to watch, or get myself shot by trying to intervene; I still don’t know what I would have done if a lucky chance had not prevented the execution.
So many stories pressing to be told… But it would take too long, and what would be the point? A single one will suffice. I was at Sitges when the militiamen of the expedition to Majorca returned, defeated. They had been decimated. Out of forty young boys who had started out from Sitges, nine were dead. We learned it only when the thirty-one others returned. The very next night, nine punitive expeditions were made; they killed nine Fascists – so-called – in this little town where, in July, nothing had taken place. Among these nine was a baker about thirty years old, whose crime, I was told, was having belonged to the local militia; his aged father, whose only child and only support he was, went mad. Yet another: in Aragon, a little international group of 22 militiamen of every country, after a light engagement, captured a young boy of fifteen, who was fighting as a Phalangist. As soon as he was captured, all atremble from having seen comrades killed around him, he said that he had been enrolled by force. He was searched, a medal of the Virgin and a Phalangist’s card was found on him; he was sent to Durrutti, the chief of the column, who, after expounding for an hour on the beauties of the ideal anarchist, gave him the choice between dying at once and enrolling at once in the ranks of those who had made him a prisoner, against his comrades of the night before. Durutti gave the child twenty-four hours to reflect; when these twenty-four hours were up, the child said no and was shot. Durrutti was nevertheless in certain regards an admirable man. The death of this little hero has never ceased weighing on my conscience, although I learned about it only after the fact. This too: in a village that reds and whites had taken, lost, retaken, relost I don’t know how many times, the red militiamen, having retaken it definitively, found in the caves a handful of haggard souls, among whom were three or four young men. They reasoned thus: if these young men, instead of going with us the last time we retreated, stayed and awaited the fascists, it was because they were fascists. So they shot them at once, then fed the others and considered themselves very humane. A final story, this one from behind the lines: two anarchists told me how, with some comrades, they had captured two priests; they killed one on the spot, in the other’s presence, with a gunshot, then they told the other he could leave. When he was twenty paces away, they shot him down. The one who was telling me the story was very surprised when he didn’t see me laugh.
In Barcelona they killed on average, on these punitive expeditions, about fifty people a night. It was proportionally much less than at Majorca, since Barcelona is a city of more than a million inhabitants; what’s more, a deadly street battle took place there that lasted three days. But the numbers are perhaps not the essential thing in such a matter. The essential thing is the attitude about murder. I never saw, either amongst the Spanish, or amongst the French, whether they had come to fight or just to look around – the latter kind most often colourless and inoffensive intellectuals – I never saw anyone express, even in private, repulsion, disgust, or even disapproval with regard to the blood shed pointlessly. You speak of fear. Yes, fear had a share in these slaughters, but where I was, I didn’t see the share that you attribute to it. Seemingly courageous men – there is at least one whose courage I witnessed with my own eyes – would, in the middle of a meal full of camaraderie, relate, with a nice brotherly smile, how many they had killed in the way of priests or “fascists” (a very broad term). I acquired the feeling that, whenever the temporal and spiritual authorities have placed a category of human beings outside of those whose life has a value, there is nothing more natural to a man than to kill. When one knows it is possible to kill without risking either punishment or blame, one kills; or at least one surrounds those who kill with encouraging smiles. If perchance one feels a little disgust, one keeps quiet about it, and before long one extinguishes it, for fear of seeming to lack manliness. One is swept up; it is an intoxication impossible to resist without a strength of soul I am obliged to consider exceptional, since I have never encountered it anywhere. In contrast, I have encountered peaceable French persons, whom I did not despise up to this point, who would not have had themselves the idea of killing, but who bathed in this atmosphere soaking in blood with visible pleasure. For the latter I can never have any esteem in the future.
Such an atmosphere immediately wipes out the very goal of the struggle. For one can formulate the goal only by relating it to the public good, to the good of human beings – and human beings are of no worth. In a country in which the poor are, in a very great majority, peasants, the improved condition of the peasants must be an essential goal of any association of the extreme left; and this war was perhaps, above all, a war for and against the apportionment of lands. Well now, these wretched and magnificent peasants of Aragon, who had remained so proud beneath their humiliations, were for the militiamen not even an object of curiosity. Without acts of insolence, without insults, without brutality – at least I saw nothing like that, and I know that theft and rape, in the anarchist columns, were subject to the death penalty – an abyss separated the armed men from the unarmed population, an abyss completely similar to the one that separates the poor and the rich. That could be sensed in the attitude of the one group, a bit humble, submissive, fearful, and in the ease, the nonchalance, the condescension of the other.
You go off as a volunteer, with ideas of sacrifice, and you end up in a war of mercenaries, with many additional cruelties and even less idea of the regards due to the enemy.
I could continue such reflections indefinitely, but one has to limit oneself. Ever since I was in Spain, and since I have been hearing and reading all kinds of considerations about Spain, I can mention no one, other than you alone, who, to my knowledge, has bathed in the atmosphere of the Spanish war and has resisted it. You are a royalist, a disciple of Drumont – what do I care? You are nearer to me, incomparably, than my fellow militiamen of Aragon – those comrades I nonetheless loved.
What you say of nationalism, of war, of French foreign policy after the war also went straight to my heart. I was ten years old at the time of the Treaty of Versailles. Up until then I had been a patriot with all the exaltation of children in time of war. The desire to humiliate the conquered enemy that spilled out so repugnantly everywhere at that moment (and in the years that followed) cured me once and for all of this naive patriotism. The humiliations inflicted by my country are more painful to me than those it may suffer.
P.S. I included my address without thinking. For, first of all, I think you must have better things to do than answer letters. And then, I am going to spend one or two months in Italy, where a letter from you would not perhaps follow me without being stopped on the way.
Mlle Simone Weil
3, rue Auguste-Comte
Paris (VIe)
Notes from a Room 