SOURCE: "Conversations in France-II, III: Benda on Democracy," in The Nineteenth Century and After, Vols. CXLIII and CXLIV, Nos. 852 and 853, February and March, 1948, pp. 107-12; 156-60.

In the following essay, which consists of the last two installments of a three-part article, Siepmann provides an account of some of his conversations with Benda and outlines the principal ideas in La grande epreuve des democraties.

During the last few months [of 1944] I have made friends with M. Benda. He is an extraordinary old man.

M. Benda lives in a cell, a tiny room in an out-of-the-way quarter. During the war he lived at Carcassonne in the same asceticism. He lived, moreover, under the noses of the Germans after their occupation of the southern zone, without any of the precautions suggested by the fact that he was one of the world's leading anti-Nazi prophets.

He went further. He wrote, smuggled out...