2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 207creative and “dynamic” powers: Germany, Italy, and Japan.’^425 Dulles
was not the first to apply Bergsonian oppositions, such as the opposi-
tion between the static and the dynamic, to international affairs. Bergson
himself had notably done so in a presidential speech delivered at the
annual public meeting of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques
on December 12, 1914, an authorised translation of the opening portion
of which was published in the British religious periodical the Hibbert
Journal in April 1915 under the heading of ‘Life and Matter at War.’^426
In a speech in which he sought to convey the ‘inner meaning’ of the war,
Bergson predicted that despite Germany’s impressive material power,
Britain and France ultimately would triumph in a war in which there was
‘[o]n one side, mechanism...[and]...on the other, life, the power of cre-
ation which makes and remakes itself as every instant.’^427 In view of the
way in which Dulles’s applied the notion of life as an ongoing struggle
between the forces of statis on the one hand, and the forces of dyna-
mism on the other, to international affairs, it is worth recalling the con-
trast that Berber had drawn between the static and dynamic conceptions
of international law and that Berber had identified the static conception
of international law with France. For the same reason, it is also worth
recalling that one of the lines of argument energetically pursued by the
Fascist propagandist Francesco Coppola at the 1934 and 1935 sessions
of the ISC was the following: the post-war international security system
as an ‘immobile equilibrium’ cannot accommodate ‘the moving and
living forces’ that have emerged since the war’s end and unless a more
(^425) Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, 49.
For the centrality of the conflict between the static and the dynamic in Bergson’s philoso-
phy see chapter two, ‘The Reality of Change,’ in Gunn, Bergson and His Philosophy.
(^426) Henri Bergson, ‘Discours en séance publique de l’Académie des Sciences Morales et
Politiques,’ in Henri Bergson, ed., Mélanges (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1972),
1107–8, and Henri Bergson,‘Life and Matter at War,’ Hibbert Journal 13, no. 3 (1915):
465–75. Henri Bergson’s speech at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques was
published in full in Great Britain in the following form: Henri Bergson, The Meaning of
the War: Life and Matter in Conflict, with an introduction by H. Wildon Carr (London: T.
Fisher Unwin, 1915). ‘Life and Matter at War’ was republished in the United States in the
following form: Henri Bergson, ‘Life and Matter at War,’ The Living Age, July 31, 1915,
25964.
(^427) Bergson,‘Life and Matter at War,’ 465, 475.