Part 16

This transcription is based on the English edition of Aldington’s translation. Some corrections have been applied in consultation with both the French original (‘La trahison des clercs’, B. Grasset, 1927) and the American edition of the same translation (‘The treason of the intellectuals’, William Morrow & Company, 1928). Here are the main revisions.

• A text comparison with the American edition incorporated these changes from that edition: • page 28, footnote 28: ‘more idealistic passion than national[+ist] passion’; • page 44: ‘One wonders whether [+there is] a single modern thinker’ (grammatically necessary); • the fourth section, ‘Summary--Predictions’, is now correctly numbered ‘IV’, not a duplicated ‘III’; • The following changes were made with reference to the original French: • numerous instances of unbalanced quotation marks have been fixed; • page 117: removed an unclosed parenthesis beginning ‘(those of’ in favor of parallel phrases with semi-colons, as in the original French; • page 173: added balanced em-dashes after ‘Apart from Erasmus’ as in the original, to clarify sentence structure; • page 176: ‘the chaos of the provincial assembles → assemblies’ (original: ‘le chaos des assemblées provinciales’); • page 181, note 179: ‘with contradicting → without contradicting’ (‘a abouti sans se déjuger à une doctrine de la moralité de la guerre’); • A simple table of contents has been added. • The book cover image accompanying some versions of this text is original and placed in the public domain.