Edme Froment was not in the least a Tolstoyan pacifist.  At first he thought the war more a folly than a crime, and if he had been free, he would have withdrawn, like Perrotin, into high dilettantism of art and thought, without attempting the hopeless task of fighting the prevailing opinion, for which he then felt more contempt than pity.  Since his forced participation in the war, he had been obliged to acknowledge that this folly was so largely expiated by suffering that it would be superfluous to add anything to it.  Man had made his own hell upon earth, and there was no need of further condemnation.  He was on leave, at Paris, when he came across Clerambault’s articles which showed him that there was something better for him to do than to set himself up as a judge of his companions in misery; that it would be far nobler to try to deliver them while taking his share of the common burden.

The young disciple was disposed to go farther than his master.  Clerambault, who was naturally affectionate and rather weak, found his joy in communion with other men, and suffered even when divided in spirit from their errors.  He was a confirmed self-doubter.  He was prone to look in the eyes of the crowd for agreement with his ideas.  He exhausted himself in futile efforts to reconcile his inward beliefs with the aspirations and the social struggles of his time.  Froment, who had the soul of a chieftain in a helpless body, dauntlessly maintained that for him who bears the torch of a lofty ideal it is an absolute duty to hold it high over the heads of his comrades; that it would be wrong to confuse it in the other illuminations.  The commonplace of democracies that Voltaire had less wit than Mr. Everybody is nonsense.... “Democritus ait; Unus mihi pro populo est....  To me an individual is as good as a thousand.” ...  Our modern faith sees in the social group the summit of human evolution, but where is the proof?  Froment thought the greatest height was reached in an individual superiority.  Millions of men have lived and died to produce one perfect flower of thought, for such are the superb and prodigal ways of nature.  She spends whole peoples to make a Jesus, a Buddha, an Aeschylus, a Vinci, a Newton, or a Beethoven; but without these men, what would the people have been?  Or humanity itself?  We do not hold with the egotist ideal of the Superman.  A man who is great is great for all his fellows; his individuality expresses and often guides millions of others; it is the incarnation of their secret forces, of their highest desires; it concentrates and realises them.  The sole fact that a man was Christ, has exalted and lifted generations of humanity, filling them with the divine energy; and though nineteen centuries have since passed, millions have not ceased to aspire to the height of this example, though none has attained to it.

Thus understood, the ideal individualist is more productive for human society than the ideal communist, who would lead us to the mechanical perfection of the bee-hive, and at the very least he is indispensable as corrective and complement.