1Inflexions: Our issue devoted to honour would not have been complete without the presence of a man who placed truth before servile compliance. As early as 1948, at a time when leaving or being excluded from the communist party would have appeared to be the ultimate dishonour, you put the honour of the truth about what was going on in the Soviet Union before your personal interest, before the obligation to be loyal to a political commitment, to show solidarity, and to comply blindly with discipline.

2Edgar Morin: That attitude was the fruit of various episodes. Firstly, we need to remember that I was a war communist, i.e. I became a resistant at the time of the first resistance by Moscow, of the first counter-offensive, and of Pearl Harbor, a period before Stalingrad but during which hope became possible. In my teens, I had read all of the literature critical of the Soviet Union under Stalin, I knew everything about the Party, about Trotsky, and, with so-called “rational” reasoning, I had come to accept that the situation was due to the weight of the past, the responsibility for which lay in the capitalist encirclement and in the backwardness of Tsarist Russia. I thought that as soon as the universal victory of socialism had been won, there would be fulfilment ; a thought that, moreover, corresponded to the communist ideology which is an ideology of liberty. It should be recalled that, a short time before the October Revolution, Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution that the aim of communism was to abolish the State. That was a libertarian aim! So I was tremendously hopeful, especially at a time when even the communists were opening up to the rest of the world.

3During the War, I had two identities: I belonged to a Gaullist resistance movement, and, under-cover, I had ties with the Communist Party. I was comfortable in both identities because the ties with the Communists were mystical and the ties with the Gaullists were more fraternal, and almost friendly, whereas in the Party everything was very rigid with draconian security rules. I therefore had this hope, and I even converted a good number of friends with my faith.

4So, what went awry? Firstly the arrival in France of the cultural hardening that was called Zhdanovism. Henceforth, only one literature was recognised and accepted: socialist realism. It was the time when Elsa Triolet asserted that a writer who was not communist was talentless, and when we were told that Sartre was receiving money from the American Embassy, and a good deal of other nonsense. A genuine cultural regression. I then did a first deed of dignity. The head of the intellectuals, Laurent Casanova, had gathered together the communist intellectuals of Paris. For Les Lettres françaises, the weekly literary publication of the Party, I had interviewed Elio Vittorini, an Italian communist who, like my friends and I, considered that the cultural front was different from the political front, i.e. that culture should be independent. I was very pleased to have done the interview. So when, during that meeting, Casanova exclaimed: “Who does this Italian think he is, coming here and lecturing to us French communists?”, I broke the respectful silence and said: “The fact that Elio Vittorini is Italian has nothing to do with the debate in hand.” I then had the feeling that I had committed a great sacrilege. Casanova, who was a clever man, smiled meekly, saying: “We need a report about Vittorini to be presented to a later session ; who could write it? » One of my friends put my name forward, and so I was assigned to writing the said report. In my subsequent report, I praised Vittorini’s arguments, which were then attacked violently. And my friends and I were finally defeated. We tried to rally a few other intellectuals to our cause, but they bottled out.

5And yet, although defeated, I stayed in the Party which, in my eyes, still embodied a force for the future, even though I was aware of things that weren’t right and that I kept quiet about. During the Kravchenko trial [1], for example, while a large section of the French intellectual elite rallied to the defence of his accusers, only one of that elite dared assert that Kravchenko was telling the truth. That man was Claude Lefort [2]. And I knew he was right, but I remained silent, I remained silent… Margaret Buber Neumann, who was a witness at the trial, was insulted and called a liar by the barrister. I had met her shortly before, through Emmanuel Mounier, who was the Director of the magazine Esprit, and I was shattered by what she told me: she was the widow of the communist leader Heinz Neumann, who was a victim of Stalin’s Great Purge and was shot in 1937, and she was deported to a gulag and then handed over to Nazi Germany after the Nazi-Soviet Pact and imprisoned at Ravensbrück. We knew! We were shattered but we did nothing publically because we knew that to speak up meant “bang!” Execution. And when David Rousset asked for a commission of former deportees to be set up to write a report on the Soviet Union, my friend Robert Antelme [3], who had been deported, was unable to be forthcoming. When Tito was expelled, I knew that all of the accusations were imbecilic, but I did not make the trip to Yugoslavia.

6Inflexions: What was the breaking point?

7Edgar Morin: It was the arrest and trial of Lazlo Rajk [4]. I already knew intuitively that the accusations levelled against him were implausible, but it was my friend François Fejtö then publishing a magnificent article in Esprit demonstrating that they did not hold water that finally fully convinced me. After that article, Fejtö asked me for help: he feared he would be chloroformed at the Hungarian Cultural Centre in Paris where he worked at the time. So I met him and we came out of the building together in spite of the individuals who were staring at us. I then became aware of the chasm that was opening up, and that was when the break really occurred inside me. What was very odd was that at that time I was still capable of accepting the Party using oppression and restraint, which I was able to consider as being temporary. But it was the inflationary spiral of lies that hurt me and that was the cause of my break with the Party. That is why truth is more important than loyalty.

8My break with the Party took place in stages. I started by not renewing my card in 1948, but I masked that. In my work unit at the Centre d’Etudes Sociologiques (ces), everyone thought I was working as a militant in my home unit, and in my home unit, everyone thought that I was a militant at the ces. Then, in 1950 or 1951, I published an article in L’Observateur in which I reported on a symposium that had been held at the ces. In particular, I wrote that urban revolutions had succeeded only when they had been accompanied by a movement in the rural areas, and I cited the examples of the French Revolution in the towns and cities and the Great Fear in the rural areas, and of the October Revolution with all the power lying with the Soviets and the land with the peasants… I also wrote that Mao Zedong was excluded from the Communist International when he turned to the rural areas. I was then summoned by Annie Kriegel [5] – she subsequently changed a lot!–, who subjected me to a genuine interrogation:

9

AK: “What do you think of a communist who writes in the magazine of the Intelligence Service?”
EM: “I am not from the Intelligence Service and so I don’t know what you are talking about.”
AK: “Did you speak to our great comrades Langevin, Joliot-Curie… Did you ask them what they thought of a communist who writes in L’Observateur?”
EM: “I think it’s a leftwing magazine.”
AK: “You dare to insult our comrade Mao Zedong!”
EM: “No, he tells of that himself in his Memoires.”

10The machine was rolling. A friend, who was a concierge opposite my home and who was a member of a unit that I had never attended (I had totally ceased to work as a militant), invited me to a meeting. I thought it was a meeting of the “combattants de la paix” (“peace fighters”). So I put on my best suit and went. In came Annie Kriegel who said: I demand the exclusion of comrade Morin ; the Party needs to purify itself. » And everyone voted to exclude me. I must say that that night I was grieved because to be excluded from the Party then was an excommunication, a herem like the one pronounced against Spinoza. On going home from the meeting, I heard a gramophone playing the Ukrainian March that I used to sing back in the time of victories and of hope. I had lost all hope. But in the morning I was happy, I was free, and I have remained free.

11Inflexions: You were free from the weight of lies.

12Edgar Morin: The Party was a Church, and its building was a holy place. When I went to Greece, I fraternised with communist workers. And so I had in me both a strong family tie, in particular since I had lost my mother while I was very young, and, at the same time, an increasing repulsion. It has to be said that, even before my exclusion, I had fallen out with many dear friends who did not accept that I could say such “foul things”. I lost false friends but I kept my true friends. It was a period of internal liberation. It was so much greater than my submission to Party discipline and to loyalty to the Party at the cost of the lies!

13Inflexions: You mentioned Robert Antelme who left the Party soon after you. His book, The Human Race, is one of the most powerful ever written.

14Edgar Morin: It’s the most human book imaginable, in which Robert Antelme wrote: “Nos bourreaux sont eux-mêmes des êtres humains” (“Our executioners are themselves human beings”). It is a founding book and the humblest and the least grandiloquent work that I know, written with everyday words, and therein lies its force. It is a great literary book without any literature. A book that touches us in our daily lives: the unconscious gesture that can suddenly give an opportunity to pull ourselves together, everyday cowardice, hunger. I’ve never understood hunger so well… And when I eat a piece of bread, very often I think of that book. The end is deeply moving. The Russian deportee asks: “Wir sind frei?” (“Are we free?”) and Antelme answers: “Ja, Ja.” The feeling of solidarity with the human race is, for me, one of the preconditions for honour. Respect for the defeated… There are a certain number of principles like that.

15It is true that, in my experience, I have often been fired up. By the revolts in Poland, for example, the first in 1956, the Polish October, and then the revolts of Walesa and Gdansk. I had great admiration for those Polish people and for my Hungarian friends, but I realised that, once liberated, all of these countries fell back into humdrum daily existence, like we did after the Liberation, and that humans are capable of wonderful things and then of falling back down, and even of drifting or of shifting positions.

16Something important for me and that has helped me has been to observe such shifts. Some very dear friends from my teenage years, who were pacifists because they were marked by the weight of the Great War, accepted defeat in 1940 and then, as the War became global, became collaborators. They therefore shifted without noticing it. This also applied to the communists who joined the Party through generosity and who then changed into implacable Bolsheviks. Joubert said that “in troubled times, the problem is not to do one’s duty but rather to recognise it”. Many people were perturbed in June 1940, including me, but some reacted immediately, often former communists who had left the Party like Vernant and who then joined it again, even without any hope, or else outraged people who would not accept defeat, like Frenay. I am one of the second wave. In 1940, I was still marked by pacifism, and I was still perturbed. I had to wait, and to think.

17Inflexions: Do you think that there can be conflicts in honour? During the Algerian War, for example, some officers and generals considered that honour obliged them to keep Algeria French, and that the honour of the army was to foment a putsch, while French citizens thought that honour obliged them to be against the putsch. Does not a time come when two honours confront each other, when we forget what, perhaps, is the supreme value of honour, i.e. relations with others and self-esteem?

18Edgar Morin: Yes, doubtless it does. Many people say to me that resistance fighters defended a pure cause, a magnificent cause that is no longer to be found today. I reply that our cause was pure but that it also had its darker side. For example, we fought for the liberation of France but immediately afterwards France crushed the first revolt for independence of the Algerians in Constantine. The dark side is that we kept colonialism while we had ourselves decolonised. I think that for those who went to fight in Algeria, the flaw was that we considered Algeria to be a French possession, a situation made complex by the number of pieds noirs there and by the Army who, after Indochina, did not want to a accept another defeat. We thus had honour locked up in military honour that took account neither of the colonial situation that had been imposed on the Algerian people since 1830 nor of the international situation whereby France was doomed to lose that war – France lost it politically but not militarily. Therefore, I quite understand people like La Bollardière, Servan Schreiber and all those, civil or military, who rebelled through a feeling of honour, and of priority of their ideas.

19Inflexions: Can we forgive lack of honour?

20Edgar Morin: Forgiveness? In the Spring of 1944, I was convinced that we had two traitors in our movement, people who had been arrested and then turned by the Gestapo. With Mitterrand, who was in charge of the movement, we decided to eliminate them physically. Maybe they were innocent ; above all they were very dangerous. Then, Paris was liberated. One of the suspected traitors left the capital and joined de Lattre’s army ; and the other we arrested and held prisoner in a hotel of the Le Marais district of Paris. But faced with this poor guy who had been beaten, I was sickened and said to myself: “It’s over. We’ve won. He can’t do any harm any more. Maybe he spoke under torture, but it’s over now. » Once we’ve won, we don’t need to avenge ourselves. He was freed and subsequently had a fine career. I won’t give his name away. He might have been innocent…

21Inflexions: Do you think that, in 2014, having a sense of honour has become a value that, if not outmoded, is at least muted?

22Edgar Morin: Yes, I think that, for many, a sense of honour is less important. But what is strange is that specific codes of honour remain like those in force in gangs or in the world of organised crime… And note that schoolchildren do not sneak on or denounce another classmate. It’s a spontaneous rule of honour, a solidarity. I think that there is something that, sadly, young people are not taught, and that is that honour starts with a relationship with yourself, based on which relationships with others are established. Respect for oneself is a precondition for respect for others. It’s one of the maxims that I have borrowed from Pascal and from Niels Bohr who says: “The opposite of one profound truth is another profound truth.” We always need to find the truth that has sometimes become mad in others. For instance, look at anti-Semitism. The truth is that there is a singularity in the historical destiny of Jews over two thousand years with the persecutions of the Middle Ages, and the relegation into peasant or shopkeeper careers. But transforming that singularity into a perverse destiny aimed at destroying the civilisation is a truth that has gone mad. The same applies to anti-Islamism or anti-Romism.

23Inflexions: In your opinion, is commitment, in the most radical sense of the term, part of honour? Does this time at which you have lived mean that you have been faced to a larger extent than others in preceding centuries with choices bringing honour to the fore to a rare extent?

24Edgar Morin: We should not forget that, down through the centuries when people had no choice, when they were immersed in a religion, dissidents nevertheless existed who, by need for and respect for the truth, faced death: look at Giordano Bruno! I was struck by the Soviet dissidents. One of them, I can’t remember who, openly criticised Stalin in the Komsomol Pravda and was immediately thrown into jail. There are people who have the courage to express themselves publically knowing that they are risking their lives.

25Inflexions: Can we say that you were one of the first dissidents of the French Communist Party (pcf), even if the word “dissident” did not exist in 1948?

26Edgar Morin: Yes and no, because there was a whole generation of dissidents between the Wars: Gide, who wrote Retour de l’urss, Souvarine, Victor Serge… But we have forgotten that. The Maoists completely eclipsed the experience of our generation. I think that I was one of the first from that generation.

27Inflexions: Did the events of May 68, in which you were a major player, reinforce your sense of being right to abandon your membership of the Party? For you, was it a time of confirmation or of questioning?

28Edgar Morin: I was enthused by this upsurge of libertarian and community spirit. Indeed, I closed my eyes to some rather stupid aspects like the slogan “crs ss” (comparing the French riot police (crs) to the ss). I only saw the wonderful side of a juvenile aspiration to a better world, to something else. I was therefore all for the fervour of the beginnings, comparable to a burgeoning revolution, because, afterwards the movement was interfered with by the Trotskyists, Maoists, and others. But I stand by what I wrote during that period because I was already aware of everything I’ve just said.

29Inflexions: Are the paths of honour so different?

30Edgar Morin: In 1943, the clandestine « Editions de Minuit » published L’Honneur des poètes, resistance poems by Éluard, René Char, Aragon, Vercors, Desnos, Lescure… In 1945, Benjamin Péret, a great surrealist poet, wrote Le Déshonneur des poètes on his return from Mexico, a tract in which he spoke out against occasional poetry. He was wrong but, nevertheless, there was something true in what he said.

31It is often difficult to choose the right path. I wrote an article in Le Monde a while ago on Syria, in which I wondered whether Western intervention might risk worsening things by globalising, or internationalising the conflict even further. Not intervening would also be very serious because we would then allow the appalling process to unfold. I suggested another solution: that the major powers agreed to put pressure on the belligerents to stop the massacre, and then see what could be done. I was therefore in the grip of contradiction, and the solution that I proposed would have been possible if the United States, Russia, and China could have been capable of agreeing. But that time is yet to come… So there are cases when commitment is self-evident, and others when it is not…

32Inflexions: Is dishonour more evident than honour?

33Edgar Morin: Certainly. But there too, what is dishonour for some is not for others. I dishonoured myself because I left the Party ; I was a traitor – being a traitor is as dishonouring as it can get. And yet I knew that I had saved my honour.

34Inflexions: Are honours not in contradiction with honour?

35Edgar Morin: That can happen. But, for my part, the honours that I have received, for example the Honoris Causa doctorates or the Legion of Honour, have helped me to protect myself. Especially in the scientific world in which I have had my entire career, at cnrs (France’s National Scientific Research Centre), where, for a very long time, I was not taken seriously. All my ideas appeared hare-brained: complexity, inter-disciplinarity… I was considered as a marginal, but my honoris causa doctorates were my shields. There are therefore cases when honours help to maintain honour, while also being honoured, and within a certain framework, when they protect honour. But this is not necessarily true. I think that life requires compromises between requirements for honour, for truth. But there is no clear boundary between compromise and compromising on principles, which means that you can be doing the latter while believing you are merely doing the former. And yet compromising on principles leads to dishonour. We then refuse to see that dishonour by justifying ourselves in a multitude of fashions. What led me to be somewhat vigilant was seeing the shifts in position of so many of my companions, particularly in the Party. I am one of these people who has experienced several upsurges in awareness ; a voice inside me said “no” on several occasions, the first being a purely cultural one. It’s true that I have made compromises that could have turned out to be compromises of principles, but these upsurges prevented me from being degraded. I also think that, today, a truth cult exists. But what is “truth”? Of course there are moral truths: fraternity, good… But there are also de facto truths, for example lies about the Chinese cultural revolution, about the Soviet Gulags… Such insults to truth arouse the deepest revolt in me.