In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

386 CODES COLLAPSED
foresight cannot be replaced except by men of great foresight!" (Valle­
IncIan, 21).
The French writer Jules Romains offers yet another angle on the
problem of leadership. His play The Dictator, which is first performed
on Tuesday, October 5, at the Comedie des Champs-Elysees, presents the
dilemma of a man who assumes dictatorial powers at a time of political
crisis and thus claims to render a heroic service to his nation-but who
is also obliged to destroy the political career of his best friend because
this friend represents the radical wing of the parliamentary opposition.
At no moment does Denis, Romains' benevolent dictator, enjoy or abuse
his power. He maintains, with determined, superhuman effort, everyday
order and through it individual and collective survival: "Acts of sabotage,
overturned streetcars, brawls, deaths? Each moment a dispatch on
my table, a packet of dispatches, a violent jolt of bad news, one conflict
more, one breakdown more? Everything in ruins? Well! Here I am, trying
as hard as I can to prevent everything from collapsing, to keep everything
together, endeavoring yet again, and again, to make things last" (Romains,
29). Like a heroic pilot who is one with a plane that constantly
threatens his life and who manages to keep it from crashing, this dictator
endures all the attacks of a society he is determined to rescue. He engages
in the impossible task of sustaining the crumbling structure he inhabits.
[see Airplanes, Endurance, Engineers] No wonder the French press almost
obsessively compares Romains' play to the classical tragedies of
Corneille, for both focus less on the success of an action than on its form
and beauty. [see Action vs. Impotence] Leadership is thus discussed from
an existential perspective, rather than as a problem of political strategy.
This is why vague allusions to the "failures" of parliamentarism, as in
the following paragraph from a September 5 manifesto by the Spanish
dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, seem sufficient to legitimize dictatorship:
"Now that the parliamentary system has failed in its present form
and its inefficiency has finally been proven in the two countries most
similar to our own, ... no sane person would consider reestablishing it
in Spain, where its three years of suspension have not dulled any decisive
action on the international or economic fronts. On the contrary, this
period has facilitated such action because it has silenced the bold, egoistic,
or meddlesome voices which produced that system's discordant music"
(Garcia-Nieto, 148).