DURATION AND ÉLAN VITAL

What drew Bergson’s students to call him an enchanter? What motivated socialites to send servants
ahead of time to reserve seats for his lectures? Why was he meticulously read by presidents and
prime ministers? Why did his enemies want to murder him? Why did others contemplate suicide
before they were saved by reading Bergson? Why were his books placed on the index of forbidden
texts?Why did the most important French philosophers and polemicists pen full monographs about
him? How did his philosophy become more of a movement, often called le Bergsonisme, that
sometimes escaped the intentions of the philosopher himself? Why did his work affect so many
fields beside philosophy, from musicology to film theory? Why was his work relevant across the
entire political spectrum, pleasing, equally, anarchists, syndicalists, and fascists? How did some of his
key phrases end up in the Nuremberg trials, in advertisements, and in contemporary novels?

During the trial of major German war criminals after World War II, the chief prosecutor for the
French Republic cited an excerpt from one of Bergson’s last books:

We know what it is, this mystic faith of which Bergson was thinking. It was there at the zenith of the
Greco-Roman civilization, when Cato the Elder, the wisest of the wise, wrote in his treatise on
political economy. …

It is this mystic faith which, in the realm of politics, has inspired all the written or traditional
constitutions of all civilized nations ever since Great Britain, the mother of democracies, guaranteed
to every free man, by virtue of Magna Charta and the Act of Habeas Corpus, that he should be
“neither arrested nor imprisoned, except by the judgment of his peers delivered by the due process
of the law.”

It is this faith which inspired the American Declaration of 1776:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men have been endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights.”

It is that which inspired the French Declaration of 1791:

“The representatives of the French people … have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration the
natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man. Consequently, the National Assembly recognizes and
declares, in the presence and under the protection of the Supreme Being, the following rights of the
man and of the citizen.”63