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You Are Wonderful * 1
A collection of statements and documents on our methods of pacification – Des Rappelés
témoignent (Mobilized Reservists Bear Witness) 2 – has just been published. Have you
read it? These mobilized reservists are Christians, chaplains, priests. With regard to the
overall policy, it seems likely that their opinions differ, so they do not say a word about
it. But they have in common a will to reveal the gangrene – still a long way from
affecting the entire Army, but which can no longer quite be prevented from spreading –
of the cynical and systematic use of absolute violence. They hide nothing, and denounce
all the war crimes committed before their eyes: pillaging, rape, reprisals against the
civilian population, summary executions, use of torture to extract confessions or
information. These measured, intelligent accounts, anxious to be fair to everyone, even
the most guilty, constitute the most damning evidence. Reading them is absolutely
unbearable; you have to force yourself to go from
* Les Temps Modernes, No. 135, May 1957.
1 It seems to me indispensable that the brochure about which I am going to speak is given the
widest possible circulation. It is for that reason that I have written this article, which was intended
for a major daily newspaper. The newspaper having refused it, I am publishing it in Les Temps
Modernes.
2 Published by the Comité de Résistance Spirituelle (Committee of Spiritual Resistance), 14 ter,
rue du Landy, Clichy (Seine).
one line to the next. Nevertheless I feel that I must strongly recommend this brochure to
all those who are not yet familiar with it, and I would like all French people to read it.
The fact is that we are ill, very ill; feverish and prostrate, obsessed by her old dreams of
glory and by the sense of her shame, France is struggling in the midst of a vague
nightmare which she can neither flee nor decipher. Either we see clearly or we are done
for.
For 18 months our country has been the victim of what the legal code has called a
‘demoralization offensive’. And it is not by sabotaging its ‘morale’ that you demoralize a
nation, it is by degrading its morality; as for the procedure, everyone knows it: by
precipitating us into a despicable adventure, they have instilled in us, from without, a
sense of social guilt. But we vote, we give mandates and, in a way, we can revoke them;
the stirring of public opinion can bring down governments. We personally must be
accomplices to the crimes that are committed in our name, since it is within our power to
stop them. We have to take responsibility for this guilt which was dormant in us, inert,
foreign, and demean ourselves in order to be able to bear it.
However, we have not sunk so low that we can hear the cries of a tortured child
without horror. 3 How simple everything would be, how quickly everything would be
sorted out if these cries reached our ears once, just once, but they do us the favour of