"Intelligence, what a little thing on the surface of ourselves!"
The formula is from Maurice Barrès.
How can we not think about it when we review, as Laurent Wetzel has just done, the contrasting destinies of twenty great intellectual figures during the dark years?
Pierre Brossolette and Marcel Déat, Marc Bloch and Robert Brasillach, Raymond Aron and Drieu la Rochelle, all had well-made brains and had received a high-level education.
And yet, the least that can be said is that, faced with the trauma born of the defeat of June 1940, both sides made very different choices.
Marc Bloch, Pierre Brossolette, Simone Weil, Germaine Tillion obeyed above all a patriotic leap, reinforced by the horror of totalitarianism.
The logical reasoning, the certainty that nothing was played, that one day the situation would evolve in a favorable direction, all this was based in their cases on quasi-reflexes.
The armistice signed, no one hesitated.
Demobilized
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