Romain Rolland: Real peace demands that the masters of war be eliminated

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

Nobel prize in literature recipients on peace and war

French writers on war and peace

Romain Rolland: Selections on war

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Romain Rolland
From A World In Birth (L’enfantement) (1933)
Translated by Amalia de Alberti

“…I see the despoiling of the world – so overwhelming and beyond measure, in the subjection of the war years and the disorganization that followed, that the unworthy conquistadores (hardly one of whom rises beyond the level of ill-bred mediocrity) have fallen short in their victory, and have been unable to organize the division of the spoils. In a few years, they have succeeded only in upsetting the economy of the world, the compass of which has gone crazy, and accumulating mountains of gold and riches of a useless nature – worse than useless, devastating – on the two ruined continents. I see war, wars in preparation or in progress, everywhere, under cover of the sinister buffoonery of Geneva: the League of Nations. I see, under the shameful farce of Disarmament, the monstrous increase of war budgets, even in nations which have been bled white, which do not devote a tenth of their remaining resources to the upkeep of their own house – public works, bread for the unemployed, education. Everything by which men live, all the blood of others, flows to destruction: everything to the guns!…I see destruction of vital values everywhere – wheat burned in countries where millions are dying of hunger…

“Wars – war; of all business the most enormous and the most juicy. Juicy with gold, juicy with blood, for the magnates, manufacturers, and traffickers of the metallurgic and chemical industries, for the monopolies and trusts of wheat and of cotton and of accumulated stocks of merchandise; and it is juicy with dividends and coupons for the bourgeoisie and their ‘shares’ (the only thing they glory, these sons of those great bourgeois of ’89). The rest of the juice goes down the throats of the starvelings, the quill-drivers and venal thinkers, ever on sale to those who can pay!…

War, Commerce, and Piracy
Are three in one, consubstantial. *

“…the pacifism of Geneva is a traitor to the real peace. Its true object and its effect is to benumb the inert nations, so as to deliver them up. Real peace demands that the masters of war be eliminated. They will be so only after the assault upon their Bastilles…”

“[I]t is only a question, when millions of workers in Europe are dismissed, of opening to them new factories for engines of war and for industrial and chemical products of dual usefulness. The most revolutionary workers rush into them, and by a savage irony assist in forging the death which will sweep away their brothers of other nations, or will rebound upon themselves with the poisoned breath of the engines which the manufacturers sell, without scruple, to hostile nations…”

“…And first, let these millions of breasts learn to cry, with unanimous, implacable derision, the ‘No!’ that will break the order of death, and hamstring the murderous powers. Let strike and revolt answer the threats of imperialist wars! Strike in the forges. Strike in factories. Strike in transport…”

*Krieg, Handel und Piraterie
Dreieinig sind sie, nicht zu terennen.

(Goethe: Faust)