Struck yesterday, as I leafed anew through Gide’s journal, by its religious aspect. It is primarily a Protestant self-examination, and then a book of meditation and prayer. Nothing in common with Montaigne’s essays, the Goncourts’ diary or Renard’s journal. The basic thing is the struggle against sin. And keeping up the journal is very often presented as one humble means—one humble trick—to facilitate struggle against the Evil One. E.g.: ‘I have never been so modest as when constraining myself to write every day in this notebook a series of pages that I know and feel to be so definitely mediocre . . . I cling desperately to this notebook; it is a part of my patience; it helps keep me from going under’ (7 February 1916).footnote¹ And (16 September 1916): ‘I shan’t succeed without a constant effort, an hourly effort, constantly renewed. I shan’t succeed without deceit and attention to detail. Nothing gained if I aim to note here only things of importance. I must make up my mind to write everything in this notebook. I must force myself to write anything whatever.’footnote²

So his notebook is a task, a humble daily task, and it is with a certain humility that one rereads it. Of course, it is not and cannot be that alone. First, because of Gide’s personality and writer’s craft, and then because of the dialectical notion of notebook both imposed and executed by the writer. But the framework remains religious. Whence the austerity of this journal, and on occasion its sacred character. At the same time it is the journal of a classic author. In other words, it contains a book of rereadings, and of meditations upon these rereadings. Moreover, the severe quality of many of the notes too must be attributed to this. There is no question of this notebook being the reflection of a life. It is a kind of religious and classical offertory; a moral account-book, with a page for the credit side, a page for the debits. And almost every note, more than the faithful transcription of an act or feeling, is itself an act. Act of prayer, act of confession, act of meditation.

In the light of this, I returned to my own notebook and saw how different it was from Gide’s. It is above all the notebook of a witness. The more I go on, the more I consider it as testimony: the testimony of a 1939 bourgeois draftee on the war he’s being made to fight. And I too write anything whatever in my notebook, but I do so under the impression that I’m justified by my testimony’s historical value. Let us be clear: I’m not an important person nor do I meet important people, so my journal won’t have the same value that Giraudoux’s or Chamson’s might.footnote³ On the other hand, I’m not in a privileged position—on the Maginot line, for example, or on the contrary in the intelligence service or a censorship office in the rear. I’m at an artillery staff headquarters twenty kilometres from the front, surrounded by petty and middle bourgeois. But, precisely because of all this, my journal is testimony that’s valid for millions of men. It is a mediocre and, for that very reason, general testimony.

But here there intervenes what Gide would call one of the Devil’s tricks: I am emboldened by the very mediocrity of my condition, I am no longer afraid of being mistaken, and I speak boldly about this war because my errors will have a historical value. If I am mistaken in considering this war as a swindle, etc., this error is not just my own stupidity, it is representative of a moment in this war. Others, more or less intelligent than me, more or less well informed, have been surprised like me, have reacted like me, without writing it down, or using other words. No more is needed to convince me that everything I write is interesting: even the confession of my sullen moods, for they are sullen moods, blues, of 1939; even that ‘anything whatever’ which Gide apologizes for writing—and forces himself to write. So I shall write anything whatever without humility. You can see pride’s ruse. Too lucid to attribute value to everything I write (tittle-tattle, gossip, political soothsaying, passing moods), I still end up conferring such value upon all my notes without exception, by a detour via History. I use historical relativity to endow my notes with an absolute character. The advantage of this trick—for it does have an advantage—is to give me the sense of my historicity, something I’d never really had. To give it me daily in my humblest actions, whereas in the month of September I’d attained it only in the sublime—which is always to be avoided. But in consequence this journal has no humility. What is more, as I’ve noted somewhere, it has no intimacy. It is a proud, pagan journal.

From another point of view, and in a quite different spirit, this journal is a calling into question of myself. And there again a parallel might be made with Gide’s confessions. But this is merely apparent. In fact, I don’t do this calling into question with groans and humility, but coldly and in order to move forward. Nothing of what I write is an act, in the sense in which I was speaking of Gide’s acts. It consists of recordings, and as I write these down I have the (fallacious) impression of leaving what I write behind me. I’m never ashamed of it, I’m never proud of it. There’s almost always a gap between the moment when I felt and the moment when I write. So it’s essentially a fair copy. Except, perhaps, in a few cases when the feeling has governed the writing directly. When I write, I try to establish a solid, clearly defined foundation as a point of departure. After all, among primitive peoples there are ceremonies to help the living person to die; to help the soul detach itself from the body. My ‘confessional’ notes have the same purpose: to help my present being slip into the past—push it in a bit deeper, if need be. There’s a degree of illusion there, for it’s not enough to denounce a psychological constant in order to modify it. But at least that sketches some possible lines of change.

All these remarks naturally led me on to compare Gide’s moral formation with my own. So that’s what I have done. I shall try to record here, this afternoon and in the days to come, the various moral attempts I have made since my eighteenth year; and I shall endeavour to uncover certain moral constants I have discovered thereby, constants that could be termed my moral ‘affections’. For I imagine everyone freely determines a kind of moral affect for himself, on the basis of which he grasps values and conceives his own progress. For example, from the outset I undoubtedly had a morality without a God—without sin, but not without evil. I shall return to this.

I lost my faith at the age of twelve. But I don’t imagine I ever believed very strongly. My grandfather was Protestant, my grandmother Catholic. But so far as I could see, their religious feelings if decent were frigid. With my grandfather, there was a rejection on principle of the whole religious business, as a great cultural phenomenon, combined with a ‘dissenter’s’ contempt for clerics. I think he cracked anti-clerical jokes at table and my grandmother rapped him on the fingers, saying: ‘Be quiet, Dad!’ My mother made me make my first communion, but I think it was more out of respect for my future freedom than from true conviction. Rather as certain people have their children circumcised for reasons of hygiene. She has no religion, but rather a vague religiosity, which consoles her a bit when necessary and leaves her strictly in peace the rest of the time.