The Conspiracy

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Paul Nizan. The Conspiracy

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PAUL NIZAN was born in Tours, France in 1905, the son of a railway engineer. A close friend of Sartre at the Lycée Henri IV and at the Ecole normale supérieure, he joined the Communist Party in the late 1920s and became one of its best-known journalists and intellectuals. His works include Aden, Arabie; Les Chiens de Garde; Antoine Bloyé; and Le Cheval de Troie. In 1939, following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Nizan left the party and was killed the following year in the Battle of Dunkirk fighting against the German army.

Paul Nizan

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It was quite hard actually for Rosenthal to forget that he was Jewish: his name sometimes inspired him with a kind of shame, which he considered ignoble and blushed for; it inspired him also with pride, and among his friends he would sometimes begin a sentence with the words ‘As a Jew, I . . .’, as though he had inherited secrets of which they would always remain ignorant – recipes for knowledge of God, intelligence or revolt; as though, for his salvation, he had had an exhilarating and bloody history to exploit, a history of battles, pogroms, migrations, legal proceedings, exegesis, knowledge, real power, shame, hope and prophecy. But he had only to find himself among his kinsfolk to detest them, to tell himself that the Jewish bourgeoisie was more dreadful than all others, Jewish banks more ruthless than Protestant banks or Catholic banks: he had scant acquaintance with the economy of other faiths.

How hard it was to be burdened by the problems of two millennia, the tragedies of a minority! How hard, not to be alone!

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