(_b_) Some will object to me: ‘How can you treat men like Barrès and Péguy as “clerks” and blame them for lacking the true spirit of “clerks” when they are so openly men of action, with whom political thought is obviously occupied solely with the needs of the present hour, solely spurred on by the events of the day, while the former scarcely ever gave expression to his political thought except in newspaper articles?’ I reply, that this thought, which in truth is practically nothing but a form of immediate action, is given out by its authors as the fruits of the highest speculative intellectual activity, the result of the most truly philosophical meditation. Barrès and Péguy would never have consented to be looked upon as mere polemical writers, even in their polemical works.[33] These men, who indeed are not ‘clerks’, gave themselves out to be ‘clerks’ and were considered as such, (Barrès gave himself out to be a thinker who condescended to the arena), and it is precisely as such that they enjoy a particular prestige among men of action. In this study my subject is not the ‘clerk’ such as he is, but the ‘clerk’ such as he is considered to be and as he acts upon the world in that capacity. I shall make the same answer with regard to M. Maurras and the other instructors of the _Action Française_, of whom it will be said even more truly that they are men of action and that it is indefensible to cite them as ‘clerks’. These men claim to carry out their action by virtue of a doctrine derived from a wholly objective study of history, from the exercise of the most purely scientific spirit. And they owe the special attention with which they are listened to by men of action entirely to this claim that they are _men of learning_, men who are fighting for a truth discovered in the austerity of the laboratory. They owe it to their pose as combative ‘clerks’, but essentially _as ‘clerks’_.