Anathemas and Admirations (15 page)

“What will the Self become?” This concern is not that of a mystic, for whom the self, precisely, is a nightmare he intends to be rid of by vanishing into God, where he knows the ecstasy of unity, object and end of his quest. De Maistre seems never to have attained unity by sensation, by the leap of ecstasy, by that intoxication in which the contours of being dissolve; for him unity remained the obsession of a theoretician. Attached to that “self” of his, he had difficulty imagining the “heavenly Jerusalem,” the return to a blessed pre-division identify as well as that nostalgia for paradise he must nonetheless have experienced, if only as a limit-state. In order to conceive how such nostalgia can constitute an everyday experience, we must consider a figure by whom de Maistre was strongly influenced, that Claude de Saint-Martin who admitted to possessing only two things or, to use his own words, two “posts”: paradise and the dust. “In 1817 I saw an old man in England named Best, who had the faculty of quotings to anyone he met, very appropriate passages of Scripture without his ever having known you before. Upon seeing me, he began by saying, ‘He has cast the world behind him.’” In a period of triumphant ideology, when the rehabilitation of man was noisily undertaken, no one was so deeply anchored in the Beyond as Saint-Martin, nor more qualified to preach the Fall: he represented the other face of the eighteenth century. The hymn was his element, indeed he was the hymn: examining his writings, we have the sensation of finding ourselves in the presence of an initiate to whom great secrets were transmitted and who, exceptionally, did not waste his ingenuity upon them. A true mystic, he disliked irony — antireligious by definition, irony never pays; how could this man who had cast the world behind him have resorted to it, who perhaps knew but one pride, that of the Sigh? “All nature is but a concentrated suffering”; “If I had not found God, my mind could never have attached itself to anything on earth”; “I had the happiness to feel and to say that I would believe myself wretched indeed if something prospered for me in the world.” And let us add this vast metaphysical disappointment: “Solomon reports having seen everything under the sun. I could cite someone who would not be lying if he said he had seen something more: that is, everything above the sun; and that someone is very far from glorying in what he has seen.”

As discreet as they are profound, such notations (taken chiefly from the posthumously published works) cannot win us over to the intolerable lyricism of
L’Homme de Désir,
where everything is vexing except the title, and where, unfortunately for the reader, Rousseau is present on every page. A curious fate, let us remark in passing, that of Rousseau, acting on others only by his dubious aspects, and whose windiness and jargon have spoiled the style of a Saint-Martin as much as that of a . . . Robespierre. The declamatory tone before, during, and after the Revolution, everything that heralds, reveals, and disqualifies Romanticism, the horrors of poetic prose in general, stem from this paradoxically inspired and unsound mind, responsible for the generalization of bad taste toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next. A deadly influence that marked Chateaubriand and Senancour, and that only Joubert managed to escape. Saint-Martin yielded to it all the more readily because his literary instincts were never very certain. As for his ideas, pastured in the vague, they were capable of exasperating Voltaire, who after reading the book
Des Erreurs et de la Vérité
wrote to d’Alembert, “I do not believe that anything more absurd, more obscure, more insane, and more foolish has ever been printed,” It is irritating that de Maistre should have shown a pronounced taste for this work, though this appeared, it is true, at a time when he was sacrificing both to Rousseauism and to theosophy. But at the very moment he was renouncing one and the other, moving away from illuminism and, in a spasm of ingratitude and ill humor, taxing Freemasonry with “stupidity,” he kept all his sympathy for the
philosophe inconnu
whose theses on “primitive knowledge,” matter, sacrifice, and salvation by blood he had adopted and developed. Would the very notion of the Fall have assumed such importance for him had it not been vigorously affirmed by Saint-Martin? The notion was certainly banal, even stale, but in rejuvenating it, rethinking it as a free mind disengaged from all orthodoxy, our theosophist conferred upon it that extra authority which only the heterodox can impart to tired religious themes. He did the same for the notion of Providence, which, preached (thanks to him) in the Lodges of the period, acquired a seductiveness it could have received from no Church. It was also one of Saint-Martin’s merits to have given — in the midst of “endless progress” — a religious accent to the malaise of living in time, to the horror of being imprisoned within it. De Maistre would follow him on this path, though with less exaltation and ardor. Time, he tells us, is “something compelled that asks only to end”; “Man is subject to time, and nonetheless he is by nature alien to time, so much so that the notion of eternal happiness, joined to that of time, fatigues and frightens him.”

In de Maistre’s thought, entrance into eternity is effected not by ecstasy, by the individual leap into the absolute, but by the mediation of an extraordinary event, one likely to seal off becoming — and not by the instantaneous suppression of time achieved in delight, but by the end of time, the denouement of the historical process in its entirety. It is — need we repeat? — as a prophet and not as a mystic that de Maistre envisages our relations with the temporal universe: “There is no longer any religion on earth: the human race cannot remain in this state. Dreadful oracles announce, moreover, that ‘the time has come.’”

Each epoch tends to think that it is in some sense the last, that with it ends a cycle or all cycles. Today as yesterday, we conceive hell more readily than the golden age, apocalypse than utopia, and the idea of a cosmic catastrophe is as familiar to us as it was to the Buddhists, to the pre-Socratics, or to the Stoics. The vivacity of our terrors keeps us in an unstable equilibrium, favorable to the flowering of the prophetic gift. This is singularly true for the periods following great convulsions. The passion for prophesying then seizes everyone; skeptics and fanatics alike delight in the idea of disaster and give themselves up in concert to the pleasure of having foreseen and trumpeted it abroad. But it is especially the theoreticians of Reaction who exult (tragically, no doubt) over the reality or the imminence of the worst — of the worst that is their raison d’être. “I am dying with Europe,” de Maistre wrote in 1819. Two years earlier, in a letter to de Maistre himself, Bonald had expressed an analogous certitude: “I have no news for you; you are in a position to judge what we are and where we are going. Moreover, for me there are certain things that are absolutely inexplicable, escape from which does not seem to me within human power, insofar as men act by their own lights and under the influence of their wills alone; and in truth, what I see most clearly in all this ... is the Apocalypse.”

After conceiving the Restoration, both men were disappointed to see that once it had become a reality, it failed to erase the vestiges of the Revolution in men’s minds — a disappointment that they anticipated, perhaps, judging from the eagerness with which they abandoned themselves to it. Whatever the case, the course they assigned to history was quite ignored by history itself: it flouted their projects, it belied their systems. De Maistre’s darkest observations, the ones that reveal a “romantic” complacency, date from the period when his ideas seem to have triumphed. In a letter of September 6, 1817, he writes to his daughter Constance, “. . . an invisible iron arm has always been over me, like a dreadful nightmare that keeps me from running, even from breathing.”

The rebuffs he suffered from King Victor-Emmanuel doubtless had much to do with these fits of depression, but what disturbed him most was the prospect of new upheavals, the specter of democracy. Unwilling to resign himself to the future forming before his eyes, though he had foreseen it, he hoped — with the incurable optimism of the defeated—that since his ideal was threatened, everything else was, too; that along with the form of civilization he approved of, civilization itself was disappearing: an illusion as frequent as it is inevitable. How to dissociate oneself from a historical reality that is collapsing, especially when it was previously in accord with one’s inmost self? Finding it impossible to endorse the future, one lets oneself be tempted by the notion of decadence, which, without being true or false, at least explains why each period, in attempting to achieve its own individuality, does so only by sacrificing certain very real and irreplaceable earlier values.

The old regime had to perish: a principle of exhaustion had undermined it long before the Revolution came to finish it off. Should we deduce from this the superiority of the Third Estate? Not at all, for-the bourgeoisie, despite its virtues and its reserves of vitality, by the quality of its tastes marked no “progress” over the fallen nobility. The relays occurring down through history reveal the urgency less than the automatism of change. If in the absolute nothing is dated, in the relative, in the immediate, everything risks being so, for the new constitutes the sole criterion, metamorphosis the sole morality. To grasp the meaning of events, let us envisage them as a substance offered to the eye of an utterly disabused observer. The makers of history do not understand it, and those who participate in it to any extent are its dupes or its accomplices. Only the degree of our disillusion guarantees the objectivity of our judgments, but “life” being partiality, error, illusion, and will-to-illusion, is not the passing of objective judgments a passage to the realm of death?

The Third Estate, in asserting itself, would necessarily be impermeable to elegance, to refinement, to a worthy skepticism, to the manners and the style that defined the old regime. All progress implies a retreat, any rise a fall; but if we collapse as we advance, that collapse is limited to a circumscribed sector. The advent of the bourgeoisie liberated the energies it had accumulated during its forced absence from political life; from this perspective, the change provoked by the Revolution incontestably represents a step forward. The same is true of the appearance on the political stage of the proletariat, destined in its turn to replace a sterile and ankylosed class; but it is just here that a principle of retrogradation functions, since the last-comers cannot safeguard certain values that redeem the vices of the liberal era: the horror of uniformity, the sense of adventure and of risk, the passion for a relaxed tone in intellectual matter the imperialist appetite on the level of the individual, much more than on that of the collectivity. . . .

An inexorable law strikes and directs societies and civilizations. When, for lack of vitality, the past collapses, clinging to it serves no purpose — and yet it is this attachment to antiquated forms of life, to lost or bad causes, that makes so touching the anathemas of a de Maistre or a Bonald. Everything seems admirable and everything is false in the Utopian vision; everything is execrable and everything seems true in the observations of the reactionaries.

It goes without saying that in positing heretofore so clear-cut a distinction between Revolution and Reaction, we have necessarily sacrificed to naïveté or to laziness, to the comfort of definitions. One always simplifies out of facility — whence the attraction of the abstract. The concrete, fortunately exposing the convenience of our explanations and our concepts, teaches us that a revolution that has run its course, that has established itself, becomes the contrary of a fermentation and a birth, ceases to be a revolution, that it imitates and must imitate the features, the apparatus, and even the functioning of the order it has overturned; the more it exerts itself in doing so (and it cannot do otherwise), the more it will destroy its principles and its prestige. Henceforth conservative in its way, it will do battle to defend not the past but the present. Here nothing will help it so as much as following the paths and the methods employed by the regime it has abolished. Hence, in order to insure the permanence of the conquests it prides itself on, the revolution will turn from the exalted visions and dreams from which it had formerly drawn the elements of its dynamism. Only the prerevolutionary condition is truly revolutionary, the one in which men’s minds subscribe to the double cult, of the future and of destruction. So long as a revolution is only a possibility, it transcends history’s givens and constants; it exceeds, so to speak, its context. But once it has occurred, it conforms to that context and, prolonging the past, follows its ruts — all the more successfully if it utilizes the techniques of the reaction it had previously condemned. Every anarchist conceals, in the depth of his rebellions, a reactionary who is awaiting his hour, the hour of taking power, when the metamorphosis of chaos into . . . authority raises problems no utopia dares solve or even contemplate without falling into lyricism or absurdity.

Every impulse of renovation, at the very moment when it approaches its goal, when it realizes itself through the State, creeps toward the automatism of the old institutions and assumes the face of tradition. As it defines and confirms itself, it loses energy, and this is also true of ideas: the more formulated and explicit they are, the more their efficacy diminishes. A distinct idea is an idea without a future. Beyond their virtual status, thought and action degrade and annul themselves: one ends up as system, the other as power: two forms of sterility and failure. Though we can endlessly debate the destiny of revolutions, political or otherwise, a single feature is common to them all, a single certainty: the disappointment they generate in all who have believed in them with some fervor.

That the basic, essential renewal of human realities is conceivable in itself but unrealizable in fact should make us more understanding with regard to a de Maistre. Though we may regard one or another of his opinions as abhorrent, he is nonetheless the representative of that philosophy immanent to any regime congealed in terror and dogmas. Where can we find a theoretician more fanatically opposed to becoming, to praxis? He hated action as the prefiguration of a rupture, as the likelihood of becoming, since for him to act was to remake. The revolutionary himself deals this way with the present in which he installs himself and which he would eternalize; but his present will soon be the past, and by clinging to it he ends up joining the advocates of tradition.