Ellul and Personalism

A Brief Introduction to Ellul’s Early Political Engagement

by Jacob Rollison

Around the time he was finishing his doctorate in law, publishing his first articles, and receiving his first teaching posts, a young Jacques Ellul was engaged in several political movements that called themselves “personalist.”

There were several “personalist movements of the 1930s [that,] faced with what they perceived as a global crisis of modern society, attempted to find in ‘personalist’ references the solution to this crisis.” (1) This “crisis” of society included the fallout of the First World War, an economic depression, and the rise of the authoritarian regimes of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany, alongside waves of antisemitism, anti-parliamentary protests, political scandals and protests, and radical nationalism, among other things. (2) Each with its own emphases, these movements sought a personal interpretation and response to these crises.

Among these movements, there were two major currents, each publishing its own journal. These include the review L’Ordre Nouveau (“The New Order”), organized by Alexandre Marc and involving the Swiss Protestant thinker Denis de Rougemont. (3) This movement developed personalism as a humanist and Nietzschean philosophy by 1931. Then, the more popular review Esprit (“spirit,” “mind,” or “intellect”), centered around the Catholic thinker Emmanuel Mounier in 1934, adapted it to Mounier’s own Catholic thought, calling it “communitarian personalism.” (4) With different emphases, all of these groups shared the following characteristics:

1. A critical attitude toward liberal society, including “Americanization.”
2. A moral or spiritual perspective.
3. Opposition toward communism and fascism.
4. A revolutionary attitude.
5. This “revolution” should include everything—it should be a “spiritual revolution” as much as a societal one, changing us as much as society.
6. This “spiritual” aspect was rooted in their differing conceptions of the person.
7. Political decentralization, returning to local, human-scale politics.
8. A personal revolution, implying personal commitment and incarnating these values in one’s lifestyle. (5)

But there was also a third movement. Jacques Ellul and his close friend, Bernard Charbonneau, were “at the origin of the most individualist, most anti-authoritarian, most . . . regionalist faction of the personalist movement, but also the one with the most ecological tendencies.” (6) Christian Roy describes this third group as the “Bordeaux School,” a type of “Gascon personalism.” (7) The Bordeaux School was rooted in Charbonneau and Ellul’s shared discussions, and it mixed the emphases of both Esprit and Ordre Nouveau. For example, this school was centered around Charbonneau and Ellul’s chief concern of human freedom in dialogue with the natural world (for Charbonneau) and God (for Ellul); it shared Ordre Nouveau’s focus on decentralizing politics and Esprit’s focus on community, but it was less Nietzschean than Ordre Nouveau and came from Protestant roots (contrary to Esprit’s Catholicism). (8)

We might say that Ellul and Charbonneau were searching for the personal scale of human life in relation to the natural world, right when this scale was disappearing. In their article “Directives for a Personalist Manifesto,” Ellul and Charbonneau note that “When man resigns himself to no longer being the measure of his world, he divests himself of all measure.” (9) Wars of attrition, centralized approaches to government, the increasing use of abstract statistics, economic expansion that endangered their ways of life, the speed of technologies surpassing anything the world had seen to this point—all of this made it harder and harder to be a simple “person.” Because of increasing economic growth, finding this personal scale demanded an ascetic practice, a refusal of either too much or too little. They note that “In the capitalist state, man is less oppressed by financial powers . . . than by a bourgeois ideal of security, of comfort, of guarantee.” (10) Furthermore, the Bordeaux School emphasized common human knowledge over specialized expertise. (11) Roy writes, “The Bordeaux School of personalism has been the first critical theory to challenge this assumption of the neutrality of Technique, and to stress its systematic character, structuring every aspect of life around its own aimless expansion.” (12)

It is also important to note that when Ellul says “person” he means the opposite of a member of a “mass.” In 1935, Ellul attended a Nazi rally in Germany out of curiosity. This experience showed him the powerful emotional manipulation made possible by new techniques of modern propaganda, and it scared him profoundly. In his 1937 article “Fascism, Son of Liberalism,” Ellul describes a shift taking place in western society, from a society based on law to one based on propaganda and technique. He is talking specifically about the dictatorships of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany but, notably, before the outbreak of World War II.

In this article and others, he describes how the mass is the opposite of a human community. In such a community, individuals are separate from the group while still linked to it, and their participation is wilful and thought out; while in the mass, the reactions of all individuals are the same, and this separation is forcefully destroyed—their participation in this action bypasses their own thinking. We might go as far as to say that under fascist propaganda, society is thus constituted by a type of psychological warfare on its own citizens. So when Ellul calls for a “personalist” revolution, he is calling for active resistance to a process of massification which characterizes contemporary society—he is calling us to rediscover human proportions in our politics and in our societies.

Concretely, the Bordeaux School often took the form of camping trips organized by Charbonneau and Ellul. They invited intellectuals and sometimes students, to discuss the challenges of this society in crisis, looking for a political response. The concrete practice of camping together meant that they were incarnating their aspirations for a changed society in their very lifestyle.

At first, like the other groups, the Bordeaux school produced and published its own writings. Around 1934, Ellul wrote an article titled “Personalism, Immediate Revolution,” and he and Charbonneau even published a “Personalist Manifesto” before Mounier published his own. To make this happen, they bought a printing press around 1934. (13) For a time, Ellul and Charbonneau affiliated their small group with Esprit. Attracted by Mounier’s political nonconformity, the rigorous thought behind Esprit, and Mounier’s openness to dialogue, the two friends went to meet him in Paris in 1933. Ellul describes Mounier as having an exact and lucid view of things and said that the political movements of the era owed him a great debt. Ellul and Charbonneau decided to start a regional group originally called “the Bordeaux group of friends of Esprit.” (14)

But by 1937, the differences between our two friends and Mounier led them to end this affiliation. In an article published after Mounier’s death, Ellul gave several reasons for this. First, Mounier focused too much on thinking and publishing, while Ellul certainly wanted an equal focus on action. Second, Ellul and Charbonneau thought of their affiliation as a democratic link between two different but equal movements with united causes; Mounier, with his Paris-centered viewpoint, treated them as less important. Third, after 1934, Esprit began to drift from being an apolitical movement toward a leftist affiliation. (15) Finally, differing spiritual positions caused a serious rift: Mounier’s Catholic theology led him to a more optimistic view of human possibilities, while Ellul’s Protestantism led to a view of the person as more fragile and in need of God to be freed from oneself. In short, if personalism is about the person, Ellul’s and Mounier’s “persons” were so essentially different that working together became impossible. (16)

So, having broken with Mounier and Esprit in 1937–8, (17) Ellul and Charbonneau briefly drew nearer to L’Ordre Nouveau and Denis de Rougemont, before the journal ceased in 1938. (18) But Ellul’s involvement here did not last very long, because of his acceptance of a teaching post at Montpelier in 1937 and then Strasbourg in 1938, and then World War II, which separated him from Charbonneau and from organized personalist political engagement. (19) After Ellul’s participation in the Resistance during the war, his short administrative stint in Bordeaux left him largely without political hopes. Other than his working with de Rougemont and Charbonneau on an ecological movement in the late 60s and 70s, (20) this was, more or less, the end of Ellul’s constructive involvement in concrete institutional politics.

Because Ellul’s engagement in personalism ended before his writing career began in earnest, one might think that it marked just a short phase in his life, one that did not have a large impact on his later work. However, most of the themes that Ellul addresses throughout his later sociological writings are already present in his few personalist articles. These include:

• The dangers of propaganda to society: see Propaganda (1964) or Histoire de la propaganda (History of Propaganda [untranslated], 1967);
• The sterility of technicized politics: see The Political Illusion (1967);
• His modifications and use of a Marxist framework for understanding society: see Critique of the New Commonplaces (1966), Métamorphose du bourgeois (Metamorphosis of the Bourgeois [untranslated], 1967);
• The need for true revolution, and rejection of false revolutions: see De la révolution aux révoltes (From Revolution to Revolts, 1972), Autopsy of Revolution (1969), and Changer de revolution. L’inéluctable proletariat (Change of Revolution: The Ineluctable Proletariat [untranslated], 1982)
• An emphasis on incarnation in ethics and resistance: see, for example, Presence in the Modern World (1948)
• A concern for technique as the determining factor in western society and institutions: see The Technological Society (1954), The Technological System (1977), and The Technological Bluff (1988).

We can thus see that most of Ellul’s lifelong political and sociological concerns and ambitions find themselves deeply rooted and well watered in the soil of personalism.

Notes

1. Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, “Aux origines de la pensée de Jacques Ellul ? Technique et Société dans la réflexion des mouvements personnalistes des années 30.” Cahiers Jacques Ellul no. 1, Les années personnalistes, 33–43, 34.

2. Patrick Chastenet, “Jacques Ellul. Une jeunesse personnaliste.” Cahiers 45–62, 52. Henceforth Jeunesse. Some of the information in this article is also in Chastenet, “The Political Thought of Jacques Ellul: A 20th Century Man.” Ellul Forum no. 38 (fall 2006), 3–12.

3. Loubet del Bayle also mentions Jeune Droite, made up of young intellectual dissidents associated with Action Française, a right-wing nationalist movement, but these last two qualifications seem to separate it so significantly from the others that it may be better not to group them together, at least after 1934. Loubet del Bayle, “Aux origines,” 34.

4. Christian Roy, “Ecological Personalism: The Bordeaux School of Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul.” Ethical Perspectives no. 6 (1999) 1, 33–44, 33.

5. These characteristics come from Jean Louis Loubet del Bayle, “Bernard Charbonneau and the Personalist Context in the 1930’s and Beyond.” Ellul Forum no. 26 (January 2001), 6–10. Henceforth “Beyond.”

6. Chastenet, Jeunesse, 52.

7. Roy writes that at a September 1936 meeting near Paris, Ellul, Charbonneau, and company were called the “group of Gascons,” a reference to inhabitants of the southwest region of Gascogne. Roy, “Entre pensée et nature. Le personnalisme gascon.” In Jacques Prades, ed., Bernard Charbonneau. Une vie entière à dénoncer la grande imposture (Erès, 1997), 35–49. The page numbers that cite come, however, from an earlier version of this paper, available at http://www.academia.edu/attachments/52574173/download_file?s=portfolio.

8. Roy, “Ecological Personalism,” 34, 40–41. Charbonneau, while perhaps culturally Protestant, remained an agnostic.

9. Ellul and Charbonneau, “Directives pour un manifeste personnaliste,” dating from 1935, published in Cahiers, 63–79.

10. Ibid., 68.

11. Ibid, 37.

12. Ibid, 41.

13. Roy, Gascon, 78–

14. Most of the information in this paragraph is given by Ellul in his 1950 article “Le Personnalisme et Mounier. Pourquoi je me suis séparé de Mounier.” Réforme no. 265 (15 April 1950), 6–7. Henceforth “Pourquoi.” The name of the group comes from Chastenet, Jeunesse, 54.

15. See Loubet del Bayle, “Beyond,” 7.

16. Ellul, “Pourquoi.”

17. Frédéric Rognon gives 1937 as the year for the split, in his Jacques Ellul. Une pensée en dialogue (Labor et Fides, 2013), 25. Roy gives 1938, in Roy, “Entre pensée et nature.” Ellul himself is unsure; see In Season, Out of Season: An Introduction to the Thought of Jacques Ellul (Harper & Row, 1981), 37.

18. Loubet del Bayle, “Beyond,” 7.

19. On their participation in L’Ordre Nouveau (as well as Ellul’s descriptions of this era of his life), see Ellul, In Season, 33–43.

20. On this later reappearance of personalism, see Jean Jacob, Le Retour de L’Ordre Nouveau. Les métamorphoses d’un fédéralisme européen (Droz, 2000).