La France contre les robots – At the Crossroads of Humanity, Law, and Prophetic Utterance
La France contre les robots – At the Crossroads of Humanity, Law, and Prophetic Utterance

Summary/Abstract: ‘On ne comprend absolument rien à la civilisation moderne si l’on n’admet pas d’abord qu’elle est une conspiration contre toute forme de vie intérieure’, wrote French journalist and novelist Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) towards the end of the Second World War and his self-imposed exile in Brazil, in his last completed volume of essays, La France contre les robots, published in 1947. More than half a century stands between the nib of the author’s quill and the modern reader, leaving the text, its effervescent polemic and abysmal, rhetorical depths uncorroded and infinitely topical. The hermeneutics this article steps into was as complex at the time the essay was written as it is now, concerned as it is with the relationship between man and machine. Aware that mechanization has already started to (re)write history as we know it, Georges Bernanos is most concerned with the fact that ‘la civilisation des machines est celle de la quantité opposée à celle de la qualité’ in a paradigm which encourages ‘d’une manière presque inimaginable l’esprit de cupidité’ and whose most dramatic effect ‘n’est pas dans la multiplication des machines, mais dans le nombre sans cesse croissant d’hommes habitués, dès leur enfance, à ne désirer que ce que les machines peuvent donner’. With studies of law and literature and a profound understanding of the falls and decays of the human soul, treasuring that ‘supplément d’âme’ Henri Bergson speaks about, Bernanos has constantly sought to explore the perilous trails of self-estrangement mechanization, this ‘modern era’, as it is often referred to, opens in a myriad of facets and reflexions that urged him say that ‘nous n’assistons pas à la fin naturelle d’une grande civilisation humaine, mais à la naissance d’une civilisation inhumaine qui ne saurait s’établir que grâce à une vaste, à une immense, à une universelle stérilisation des hautes valeurs de la vie’. What he tries to defend is the uniqueness and singularity of man, his complexity, and not to demonize machines and their part in reconfiguring progress, in any and all of its aspects. Danger, he warns, ‘n’est pas dans la multiplication des machines, mais dans le nombre sans cesse croissant d’hommes habitués, dès leur enfance, à ne désirer que ce que les machines peuvent donner’. The key in which we intend to approach Georges Bernanos’s La France contre les robots plays with the dichotomy of the ‘productive man’, epitome of the technical society, an offspring of the Anglo-Saxon skill and labour doctrine, more mechanical in its philosophy than the French ideological legal scheme of interest in the ‘impact of a personality in a work of the spirit/mind’ of the ‘contemplative man’. Whilst the first is merely a reflexion of his age, estranged from his own self, though very much a master of his time, the latter becomes the depository of the writer’s hopes and symbol of creative humanity.

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