Romain ROLLAND ( 1866-1944) Intellectual, writer... Lot 419

Romain ROLLAND ( 1866-1944) Intellectual, writer and journalist. D.A.S. dated December 15, 1933. Foldings. Plea entitled All for Torgler! against the arrest of Ernst Torgler (1893-1963) by the German authorities following the burning of the Reichstag. Following the attack, an attempt was made to accuse three Bulgarians: Popov, Tanev and Dimitrov, and then Ersnt Torgler, a KPD member of the Reichag. The trial, which took place from September 21 to December 23, 1933, concluded with the acquittal of the accused, but they were kept in detention, the trial having above all the aim of putting communism on trial. Willi Mützenberg, exiled in France and having understood the scope of the plot, launched an appeal to French intellectuals and journalists such as Paul Langevin, André Gide and André Malraux. "The prosecution backed down in the face of the imposture of its first charges against Dimitrov, Popov, and Tanev, awkwardly displayed before the eyes of the world, by the falsity of the testimonies and the flagrancy of the alibis. She had to, through the voice of the empire prosecutor, recognize them as innocent. But in its impotent spite, which was expressed in furious invectives by Goering, the public prosecutor, who felt threatened by him, sought revenge by handing over Torgler to the executioner. Ernst Torgler, of all the defendants the most inoffensive, - of all the political militants the purest, - the man whose whole life by selflessness and devotion, - the most distant in his party, by discipline and temperament, from any individual violence, - the most incapable of committing a stupid act of theatrical and useless terrorism, like the burning of the Reichtag, which sweats in its flames, the Erostratism of a minus habens, pushed by the deceitful provocation of those who engineered this Neronian mise-en-scène, - the man who, strong of his only innocence, did not hesitate, in front of the frenzy of the first hours, that the provocateurs unleashed against him, to come to give himself up to their vengeance, to defend the honor of his party the man whom they imprisoned for seven months, for five months [held in irons on his hands and feet] in chains, knowing him to be innocent, - the man whose head they claim today, knowing him to be innocent, in order to throw him to the vengeance of those who, wanting to trap Marxism, have caught themselves in their own trap of false testimony and lies pierced to light... Ernst Torgler, the atoning victim of the crime of his executioners and of his own innocence, which allows them to strike in him not the man, but the party! Crucify him therefore, the innocent! If you dared to carry out this crime, you would give the great party of the proletariat the laborum, the bloody symbol and the banner of the tortured, under whose sign it will march to victory."