André Spire (1868–1966)

Frenchman. Jew. French Jew. Jewish Frenchman. French poet. Jewish poet. Jurist and senior official of the French State, committed “within the city.” Theorist and innovator of free verse. Militant of the workers’ cause. Jewish militant. Zionist militant. All these threads woven together compose the life of André Spire. So — Spire, a Jewish intellectual? He would, no doubt, have felt confined within so summary a definition, too cramped for a rebellious being launched along paths so different, followed together, inextricably intertwined, and which made of him — civic commitment and literary work alike — an unusual alloy, at once profoundly of his time and essentially atypical.

A succinct portrait is something of a wager. Let us content ourselves with a brief overview.

André Spire was born in Nancy into a Lorraine Jewish family, French since the eighteenth century, of the middle bourgeoisie, in which the Nathan and Spire families, deeply republican, had long been involved in the life of the city. His grandfather, president of the city’s Bureau de bienfaisance (charity board), his father a lawyer and then a notary, a municipal councilor, partners at the head of a shoe factory, would no doubt have found it natural for the son to take up the reins. But his young sensibility, formed in the proximity of workers’ children, and a political awakening — socialistic, then socialist (but never beholden to a party) — through contact with the nineteenth-century thinkers of solidarity and of the social question, dictated to him that he should not owe his comfort to the labor of others, nor ever become a notable. Studies in law and political science led him to the Conseil d’État, which he entered on 1 January 1894. And there, beyond his professional duties as a jurist, moved by an imperious desire for social justice inherited from his family, he threw himself, as early as 1896 — in those times when labor legislation scarcely existed — into action in the service of the workers’ cause and of the rescue of workers who were victims of industrial accidents, of illness, or of unemployment. With René Bazin, a colleague, he founded La Société des visiteurs (the Society of Visitors), a philanthropic association of a new kind which, through a network of home visits and services (medical and legal advice, employment bureaus and interest-free loans), sought to facilitate reintegration into the world of work.

The years following the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair saw the emergence of the movement of the Universités populaires (popular universities). Spire joined in this generous, idealistic enterprise of bringing together the cultivated milieus and the proletariat for the sharing of classical and scientific culture, aimed at the awakening of working-class and trade-union consciousness so as to obtain better living conditions and labor legislation. At the end of 1899, he founded L’Enseignement mutuel (Mutual Instruction), with Daniel Halévy, a popular university (UP) in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, whose organization and content they oversaw until 1906. And in parallel, at the same period, he became close to Charles Péguy, contributed to his Cahiers de la Quinzaine, and to several other left-wing reviews.

Spire thus seems to have the profile of one of those Jewish Fous de la République (Madmen of the Republic) described by Pierre Birnbaum — patriots and republicans who, embodying the ideals of the French Revolution, placed themselves body and soul at the service of the country in the highest functions of the State, the Army, the Administration, the University.¹ Yes, but to say so would be to leave out of account his revolt against the bourgeoisie, and the Dreyfus Affair.

Captain Dreyfus, arrested in November 1894, was publicly degraded on 5 January 1895. Now, the following week Spire fought a duel to restore Jewish honor by arms. He had been at the Conseil d’État for a year when La Libre Parole, the virulent antisemitic newspaper of Édouard Drumont — which fed on denunciations and calumnies — on 9 January called into question the number of young Jewish auditors admitted to the Conseil through favor, as it claimed, when admission was made there exclusively by competitive examination. On the spot, Spire replied by sending a letter to the newspaper, provoking the exchange of seconds. One did not trifle with honor in those days. On 12 January 1895, he fought with the sword against the author of the article. When very young he had already known antisemitic provocations and incidents. In 1886, the year of his baccalauréat, the same Drumont’s La France juive (Jewish France) appeared. “From that date on,” he would recount, “one is always under arms. And my parents, who were no more than lukewarm Jews in religious terms, but proud, in the midst of their non-Jewish social relations in Nancy, and despite old family friendships going back nearly a century, felt themselves on alert, in a state of insecurity.²” Maurice Barrès, his senior at the lycée in Nancy, had named his father “among those barons of industry who suck the blood of their workers.³” “Brawls, insults, slaps, exchanges of seconds.⁴”

His duel thus falls at the very beginning of the Affair, after the antisemitic campaign of 1892 against the presence of Jewish officers in the army, Drumont’s duel against Captain Crémieu-Foa, and that of the Marquis de Morès, which had ended in the death of Captain Armand Mayer at the end of 1894. In the electric atmosphere of the nascent Affair, Spire regularly practiced fencing in the salle d’armes, which he would continue to do in 1910–1912 during the resurgence of antisemitism on the eve of the First World War. If his duty of reserve as a senior official long prevented him from associating himself with the first protests in favor of the revision of Dreyfus’s trial, he signed, in L’Aurore of 27 November 1898, the protest against the arrest of Colonel Picquart, and sent his resignation as a reserve officer to the Minister of War — who demanded his dismissal from the Conseil d’État without being able to obtain it.

A whole sheaf of influences and events, of readings, encounters and discoveries would then converge to make of this man committed within the city a champion of the Jewish identity revival (historical and cultural, not religious) and a herald of Zionist ideas, drawing him out of the trajectory foretold for an israélite in the service of his country. “I had become a Jew again with a capital J,” he would later write of this suddenly altered direction of life.⁵ The Jews he met in his province and in Paris — assimilated, comfortably settled, content with their acquired rights — were for the most part hardly distinguishable from those bourgeois he abhorred: timorous beings, muffling a part of themselves, very “comme il faut,” very “happy-medium,” fearful of stoking the reawakening of antisemitism through situations or stances too conspicuous. From compromise to compromising, modeling themselves on the non-Jewish French bourgeoisie — that model of social success — flattened into sometimes ashamed israélites, they had lost vitality and authenticity by dint of walking with one hand before their nose, he would say, citing the English writer Israel Zangwill, whom he discovered shortly after himself encountering the Jewish proletariat of London, vibrant with an intense and authentically Jewish life despite wretched conditions.

Like the French Jews, he owed an immense debt of gratitude to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, to the revolutionaries of 1789, to the courageous Abbé Grégoire and his essay on La Régénération physique, morale et politique des Juifs (The Physical, Moral and Political Regeneration of the Jews) (1789), to the ideals of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity — but he quickly detected their inadequacies and their share of shadow: the generous and liberating emancipation was also a snare, since, by making the Jews free and equal men, it amputated a part of themselves, depersonalized them, dissolved the “Jewish soul,” grinding down what remained to them of collective identity. In any case, he warned, should the Jews be tempted to forget their specificity, however attenuated, others would take it upon themselves to remind them of it — as the antisemitic campaigns and the upheavals of the Affair had just so violently demonstrated. A Jew, then, can never and must never lower his guard. And it is here that he reveals himself to run against the current of his generation and of what has been called franco-judaïsme — that universalist fusion of the ideals of the Republic and the moral values of Judaism with a passion for France.

It is as a poet that he rebels, not, in the first place, as a militant “intellectual.” In 1908, gathering texts written as early as 1904–1905, he launched a provocative — and innovative, for it was in free verse — broadside, Poèmes juifs (Jewish Poems), which he would enrich up to their definitive edition of 1959, poems with often evocative titles: L’ancienne loi (The Ancient Law), Rêves juifs (Jewish Dreams), Écoute Israël (Hear, O Israel), Exode (Exodus), and Assimilation, of which here are the closing lines:

“You are pleased! You are pleased! Your nose is almost straight, upon my word! And besides, so many Christians have a slightly curved nose!

You are pleased, you are pleased! Your hair barely curls, upon my word! And besides, not all Christians have straight hair!

[…]

You are pleased, you are pleased! The Christians invite you to all their feasts! You know how to behave there almost as badly as they!

In tails, in tennis whites, in dinner jacket, in morning coat, You know how to cluck there: “delicious,” “admirable,” With the same chic as the least of them.

You are pleased, you are pleased! They take you along, when they go to round off the evening, There where all their pleasures come to their end!

By the handful, by the mouthful, They amuse themselves, they go their way… But you, what do you do in your corner?

What do you do in your corner, awkward and sad, Full of pity, full of contempt? Jew! you lack stomach!

So much suppleness, so much constraint, So many attempts, to end up here? Behave yourself, do as the others do, Or they will laugh at your nose!

And drive away, then, your good old soul That, until now, still comes seeking you.”

It is in elliptical form and with the force of a cry that he addresses his contemporaries — satirical vignettes, sarcastic and scathing caricatures, apostrophes, lyrical incitements, epic appeals, to provoke a surge of dignity, to rekindle an extinguished flame, to lash consciences, to urge regeneration, to urge a standing-upright. The respect of others can be commanded only if one begins by respecting oneself. Certain poems also sing the beauty and the grandeur of the “Jewish people,” of the “Jewish nation” — terms that likewise set their author against the current, and that contain the themes and the guiding threads of his life to come. True emancipation, he says in this early part of the century, is the reconquest of self, the reconstitution of a Jewish identity, individual and collective, and the indispensable (re)construction of a Jewish homeland. Zionism was Spire’s slow, tenacious and solitary combat — no longer only through his poems, but also in numerous articles and public stances. He was often disavowed and opposed by his non-Jewish contemporaries, but above all by the Jews who, asserting themselves universalist and French, were hostile to any form of affirmation other than spiritual and religious, and to any country other than France — the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Rabbinate foremost among them.

Henceforth — from the years 1905–1909 on — he would lead parallel lives at once: his profession as a jurist at the Office du Travail and then at the Ministry of Agriculture (occupied above all with social and labor legislation, with field investigations in France and in England), his life as a writer (essays, criticism), as a poet (successive collections of poems, theoretical work on French versification and experimental phonetics that would culminate in his work become a classic, Plaisir poétique et plaisir musculaire (Poetic Pleasure and Muscular Pleasure), Corti, 1949), and his life as a Jewish militant.

After the death of Theodor Herzl, out of a concern for effectiveness and realpolitik, Israel Zangwill broke with the World Zionist Organization and created in 1905 the Jewish Territorial Organisation (ITO) — a Zionism without Zion, as he defined it (a-Zionist Zionism), which aimed to found a country wherever the Jews might enjoy political independence, anywhere at all, and not only in Palestine. Spire joined it at once and made himself the spokesman and the propagator of the Territorialist Movement in France.⁶ Yet, “territorialist” though he was, he attended the Zionist Congress in Basel in 1911 and, in 1913, that of Vienna.

From this period dates his intense activity on behalf of Zionism, both in the Jewish press (among others L’Écho sioniste, La Renaissance du Peuple juif) and the non-Jewish press (Le Mercure de France, L’Opinion, La Revue de Paris, Les Cahiers idéalistes). In his historical, analytical and political presentations of Zionism in the French Jewish milieu, but in the non-Jewish milieu as well, he had to be prudent: to convince the one without alarming the other through an excess of nationalism, not to raise in them the specter of dual allegiance, and to forestall objections. “The aim of Zionism,” he specifies, “is to create in Palestine, for the Jewish people, a homeland guaranteed by public law. It is therefore made only for those Jews who cannot or will not continue to reside in their present homelands.” Convinced that “the Jewish question” and a Jewish country would be an essential stake at the peace negotiations, then — as soon as the Balfour Declaration was proclaimed in 1917 — he founded, with a friend, the Ligue des Amis du sionisme (League of the Friends of Zionism), and its bulletin, Palestine nouvelle, which, during the deliberations of the Peace Conference, was the official organ in Paris of the Zionist Organization. In 1919, serving “as liaison agent between [the] Government and the official representatives of Zionism,” he was the spokesman of the (not very numerous) French Zionists at the Peace Conference, opposing the obstruction of the anti-Zionists led by Sylvain Lévi, the future president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU).⁷ Then, the peace having been signed, he made a lecture tour in the east of France and in Switzerland, and in 1920 he accompanied Chaim Weizmann to Palestine to negotiate with the French High Commissioner in Syria the question of the Syrian-Palestinian borders. In 1925 he set off for Bessarabia and Transylvania, charged with a mission both for the Ministry of Agriculture and its foreign-labor service and for the Jewish Universal Relief Conference, of which he was a committee member. The matter then was to save persecuted Jewish agricultural workers by placing them in France in the departments deficient in agricultural manpower (Gers, Comtat Venaissin), and to prepare them for an eventual departure for Palestine. The operation succeeded, setting off in L’Action française a campaign of calumnies against “the Jewish invasion of France” by “the dregs of Jewish vermin.⁸” In 1924–1925 he was also deeply engaged, alongside Albert Cohen, in the preparation and creation of the prestigious Revue juive, which, in the end, had but a single year of existence.

During the years that followed, and the rise of the Nazi perils for the Jews of Europe, one notes his presence within numerous protest bodies — among others the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (Vigilance Committee of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, CVIA, 1934) — but above all, from the mid-1920s on, his militant activity was exercised within committees such as the Ligue internationale contre l’antisémitisme (International League Against Antisemitism, LICA), the Comité pour la défense de la liberté de pensée (Committee for the Defense of Freedom of Thought), the Comité pour la protection des intellectuels juifs persécutés (Committee for the Protection of Persecuted Jewish Intellectuals), and the Comité national de secours aux réfugiés allemands victimes de l’antisémitisme et des persécutions hitlériennes (National Relief Committee for German Refugees Victims of Antisemitism and Hitlerite Persecutions), in which he took an active part by setting up, in the Blois region, an agricultural placement for young German émigrés. During these same years, and under the pressure of the threats then smoldering, he mobilized — and tried to mobilize — around the urgent necessity (foreseen as early as 1914 by Max Nordau and Israel Zangwill, and postponed sine die by the declaration of war) of convening a democratically elected World Jewish Congress, which would aspire to be, he said, “the global representation of the Jewish People, of the Jewish People considered as an entity, that is, as a collective being.⁹” But, he laments, the Jewish committees are all too often ineffectual by dint of inertia, of the scattering of energies, of an incapacity to unite, of internal quarrels. And yet, if history does not repeat itself in identical form, the Affair had taught him that it can take singular turns, and that one must know how to prepare for them.

I have given here only a few images of Spire the Jewish militant, committed off the beaten paths in the France of his time, at once a unifier and a free-lance fighter. It was thus that his mission as a Jewish “intellectual” was embodied — as a man of the concrete, “devoured by action,” as he describes himself. In the evening of his long life, he held above all to this component of his activity, and it is rightly that he is regarded as a precursor of the current of Jewish cultural renaissance of the 1920s. But far from having confined himself to this role of intellectual and militant, he leaves behind a body of work that left its mark on writers and poets as different as Apollinaire or Paul Éluard, Albert Cohen, Saint-John Perse, Senghor. More recently, writers such as Georges-Emmanuel Clancier or Henri Meschonnic have devoted fine studies to him, attesting to his place in the literary history of France.

Notes