Henri Bergson and the Ontology of Diplomacy

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This nearly completed article looks at Henri Bergson’s two diplomatic missions to the United States during the First World War as examples of citizen-diplomacy. Bergson, who was one of the most well-known French public intellectuals in the United States, and was well-connected with the cognoscenti of the U.S. east coast, officially travelled as an individual who wanted to speak directly to the American people. He had in fact been chosen by the French government to quietly circumvent the state-to-state relations of the French embassy's official capacity in Washington. Both missions, one in 1917 to get the United States to join the war, the other in 1918 to encourage an Allied intervention in the Russian Revolution, thus involved concealing Bergson role as an agent of the French government in order to portray the war as one of people-to-people solidarity. While he publically argued that France and the United States were connected by their shared republican ideals, he was sent to shift attention away from traditional diplomacy and mobilize the will of the people (and President Wilson) directly. The purpose, in other words, was a reflection of, and a contribution to, the changing ontology of diplomatic practice at the beginning of the 20th century, namely the significance of mass politics and the instantiations of an international public sphere. 

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That said, there is a theoretical problem with tracking Bergson's actual influence on Wilson or U.S. public opinion. Though Bergson was a highly celebrated intellectual in the U.S. (following a successful visit in 1913), his personal connections were largely confined to people who already favoured U.S. intervention. Moreover, Wilson's resistance to a declaration of war persisted well into late March 1917, even after every member of his own cabinet had advised him otherwise. On two occasions, he gave as his reason his white supremacist anxiety that U.S. participation in the world war would further weaken the "white races" in the impending world struggle against the "Asian races." That said, historians all agree that there are no empirical traces of his final decision-making process, except what can be extrapolated in the gap between his efforts at mediation in January and his war message to Congress in April. Bergson met only once with the president while in Washington during that time, but French philosophers (and Bergson biographers) Philippe Soulez and Frédéric Worms have long argued that Bergson succeeded in reflecting back to Wilson the image of philosopher king who stood at the cusp of a world historical moment. The re-emergence in the spring of 1917 of the socialist international, as well as the cross-border activism of feminist pacifists, may have framed Bergson's message: that the world now depended on the action of those two revolutionary states (France and America) who had originally advanced a radical new ontology of world order, an order based in a shared commitment to the universal rights of humans.