BENDA, JULIEN

BENDA, JULIEN (1867–1956), French writer and philosopher. Benda studied history and philosophy at the Sorbonne. His first book, Dialogues à Byzance (1900), offered a bold analysis of the manifestations of corruption in French society, which formed the background of the Dreyfus Trial. Benda wrote several novels, especially in the first years of his literary activity, including L'Ordination (1911), which reveal his rationalistic outlook and rigorous morals. But Benda was first and foremost a philosopher who preferred to express his ideas in essays defending reason, science, and responsible thinking against the cult of intuition. In Le Bergsonisme, ou une philosophie de la mobilité (1912) and in other works, Benda attacked Bergson's irrationalism; in Belphégor (1919; Eng. tr. 1929), Benda rejected most contemporary writers, such as Romain Rolland, Paul Claudel, Maurice Barrès, George Sorel, and Charles Péguy, his former friend. Benda's militancy increased in his most famous book La trahison des clercs (1927; The Great Betrayal, 1928), in which he castigated contemporary thinkers and writers, including the intellectuals and the professionals. He accused them of having sold reason or of having left it to the state, to society, to the parties, to the family, etc. He charged them with having forsaken service to reason and to the perennial truth, all for the sake of temporary success. The rigorous conclusions which oppose any compromise are the   basis of his views in theology, history, and aesthetics, in his last books such as Essai d'un discours cohérent sur les rapports de Dieu et du monde (1931) and La France byzantine; ou Le triomphe de la littérature pure… (1945). This last work was sharply criticized. Although Benda did not convert to Christianity, he was completely isolated from Jewish life, and considered his Jewish origin a burden. He had to seek refuge during World War II in southern France. However, he regarded the Jewish problem as only a minor aspect of the war. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: H.E. Read, Julien Benda and the New Humanism (1930); P. Brodin, Maîtres et témoins de l'entre deux guerres (1943); C. Mauriac, La trahison d'un clerc (1945); R.J. Niess, Julien, Benda (Eng., 1956). (Hiram Peri)