In spite of Borel’s absence in historical studies related to the intellectual, cultural and political general history, and notwithstanding the predominant narrative on Borel’s mathematical and public lives, usually separated in two different parts, I rather propose to consider Borel, for the whole period of his life, one of the major scientists amongst the “intellectuels engagés,” who bloomed during the Third Republic. But such an assumption demands an imperative need for interdisciplinary monographs, prior to the composition of the biography, which I will just indicate.
One of the keywords of my chapter is “Intellectual.” But on which criteria can we define what was then an intellectual? Were the criteria ideological? If so, would this criterion refer to shared values on science and its role for social and economic progress, which also meant the existence of shared values about scientists and their role to ensure peace? Or were the criteria rather social? In this case, would such criteria relate to the professional specific characteristics of men and women working in intellectual fields? Borel obliges us to revisit such historiographical questions.
Another of my keywords, linked to the previous one, is “engagé,”
that is, “committed.” But which were the fights Borel committed to, the fights he chose and in which he left his mark? Which were the possible grounds of commitment in Borel’s time, before or after the war? Were they only the fights that intellectual and cultural history – a history focused on the elites of this scientific “Pantheon” – had privileged and valued?
Finally, as underlined before, we are repeatedly facing Borel’s self, Borel’s agenda. We do not lack sources associated to Borel, quite the contrary. We have, in particular, those he produced all along his life:
scientific notices on his works, discourses, newspaper articles, interviews and private correspondence, linked to his different commitments, whether mathematical, political or societal. Also, we are also left with the autobiography his wife wrote and published a decade after Borel’s death, under the name of Camille Marbo. This book has contributed to a certain doxa regarding Borel, his choices and his states
of mind at different moments of their lives. However, this abundance is quite problematic. Actually, Borel had changing attitutes about his work and himself, on his citizen or politician commitments, sometimes even at the same period of his life. A man of power, a man of powers, he also tried to promote particular images of his activity and commitments. We need to decrypt them in their complexity, with due caution and hindsight, without being misled.
I would like to argue now how – before, during and after the war - Borel was both a scientist and a committed intellectual. But first I have to come back to the notion of “Intellectual,” in order to explain adjectives such as “pro-Dreyfus” or “dreyfusards,” in French, which I use about Borel’s scientific and intellectual networks. In 1898, the author Émile Zola published an article in a newspaper protesting against the unfair sentence of high treason for a military man, Alfred Dreyfus, primarily an anti-Semitism sentence, and against the way the trial had been run on grounds of reason of State. Petitions, which were said to be intellectual petitions, circulated among academics, scholars and writers to require the trial resumption, as well as Dreyfus’s release. With this pro-Dreyfus movement, the word “Intellectual” represents for the first time the idea of a group reflecting a given perception of the social world and expressing itself as a political category. That is where historians traditionally based the birth of the “Intellectuel engagé.”
4.1. Before World War One
Let us first see Borel’s different initiatives in the domains of the scientific culture and politics before the war. I have already mentioned several editorial undertakings, as La Revue du mois, launched in 1906, which had quite a success, achieving one thousand subscribers in a few years. This review was open to scholars and thinkers from all over the world, who were invited to contribute with their articles to the development of ideas in all scientific and cultural domains. The editorial board was composed, besides his wife, by his nearest comrades of the ÉNS, some of them mathematicians, but also the physicist Paul Langevin and the physicochemist Jean Perrin. The commercial editor was Felix Alcan, who was not just any editor, but rather the editor who had taken the side of the young pro-Dreyfus Parisian academics in social and natural sciences, having edited their publications. This editorial board, Borel included, was actually fully pro-Dreyfus. One of Borel’s aims, when launching the review, was also to gain a foothold in different Parisian intellectual salons, not only those related to the scientific field,
but also literary and legal millieux. Borel shared another undertaking with the editor F. Alcan. He became, as mentioned before, director of a new collection for the popularization of science, La nouvelle collection scientifique. Between 1909 and 1914, there were already 10 volumes, each with 3000 copies sold, authored by Borel and, once more, some of his closest scientist friends: Perrin, Painlevé…
On the political side, Borel demonstrated commitments as a citizen in several opportunities, besides the Dreyfus Affair. He was a member of the Ligue des droits de l’homme (Human rights league), and gave, for example, popularizing talks at the Université populaire meetings. He participated in the campaign for his friend Paul Painlevé’s election to the Parliament in Paris (1910). Painlevé, professor of mathematics at the Sorbonne, was a member of the radical party. It was Borel’s first strictly political commitment.
So, as we can see, a network emerges with Perrin, Painlevé and Langevin, all young “normaliens” scientists and professors at Sorbonne, all of them pro-Dreyfus, another network, not at all separated from the first one, as it was created among the editorial world of Felix Alcan. But Borel knew the importance of academic power and he attended also other networks, like those of his father-in-law, Paul Appell, mathematician and dean of the Faculty of Science of the Sorbonne.
4.2. During the war
Borel’s life changed during the nearly five years that the war lasted.
He left aside his mathematical researches and was engaged on two fronts. On the scientific field, like most scientists of his age, he participated in the scientific mobilization; on the military side, he was, in spite of his age, on the front line where he was wounded in two occasions. But, unlike most scientists, he had a quite singular experience, being several times member of ministerial cabinets. A first time, in 1915, Painlevé, as minister of education, called him at the head of the “High Commission for inventions and national defence.” In 1917, Painlevé, while being prime-minister and war minister, asked Borel to be the secretary-general of the government, which was for him an even more striking experience. The consequences of these ministerial experiences were quite strong. Borel discovered a taste and an expertise (in his view) for public affairs. At the same time, he got acquainted with the State political staff and created new political, scientific and industrial networks. Familiar until then with the academic power, he discovered and cultivated a new relationship with power. To conclude, Borel’s war
experience moved the horizon of what he considered feasible and the type of networks on which he could rely, as we can see for the after-war period.
4.3. The inter-war decades
A first change can be noticed when considering the range of his activism in the intellectual field. Besides the continuation of his before-war mathematical and scientific editorial commitments, he had two main battles. The greatest one was his involvement for peace and a pacifist Europe in the international intellectual cooperation within the framework of the Société des Nations (SdN), together with Marie Curie, Paul Langevin, Jean Perrin, among others. He even was, in 1938, President of the International Union of Associations for SdN. The second one was the intellectual trade unionism; he was one of the co-founders, together with other scholars and men of letters, of the confederation of intellectual workers (CTI). In the mid-twenties, the CTI had already 200 000 persons affiliated to unions or groups of engineers, technicians, teachers, scholars, writers, artists or journalists. The meaning attributed in this case to “intellectual”, that is, “intellectual workers,” is social rather than ideological. We are far from a narrow cultural elite producing ideology.
The change was great on the political side too. Actually, Borel became a professional politician affiliated to the moderate leftist radical party, which was his friend Painlevé’s party. Just after the war, he was for a few years a political editorialist in a radical newspaper of the southwest of France. He gathered a part of his chronicles in a book called Organiser (To organize), edited by Alcan. With this book, inspired by his war experience in the ministerial cabinets, he wanted to promote what should be a rational and scientific organization of society. Moving from theory to practice, he run for a political mandate and became member of the Parliament for Aveyron (the rural department where he was born). Elected in 1924, he remained MP twelve years and even was a member of the government, for some months, as minister of the Navy.
But Borel had another elective mandate, much more surprising for a professor of the Sorbonne, member of the Academy and of the intellectual and mundane Parisian elite. He became mayor and regional councilor of Saint-Affrique (his rural birthplace) for more than twenty years till 1951, except during WWII, when Vichy dismissed him.
At the same time, his political activism extended in the domain of research administration and policy on several grounds. First, he was the
promoter of the creation of a new institute of the Faculty of Science in Paris, the Institut Henri Poincaré dedicated to mathematics and theoretical physics. It was created in 1928, thanks to the fund of the Rockefeller Foundation, who wanted to support mathematical research on a high level in some European cities, like Paris and Göttingen, after WWI. He campaigned also, while a member of the Parliament, for the funding of the research laboratories. In the longer term, he was, together with Jean Perrin, at the head of several campaigns for the creation of a CNRS in the twenties and in the thirties, that is, the creation of a national center for scientific research, dedicated first of all to pure research, or rather applied research resulting from pure research. So how should the politician Borel be qualified? Was he a scientist in politics, with specific battles linked to science, its institutions and its resources? Or was he rather a classic politician engaged in the problems of those who had voted for him? It is not easy to decide, when we consider, on the one hand, altogether Saint-Affrique and the rural France, and on the other, the scientific research and Parisian Sorbonne. And, as we shall see, Borel himself does not help us to be clear.
5. THE (TOO) NARROW CIRCLE OF FRENCH SCIENTIFIC