Anathemas and Admirations (16 page)

The tragic aspect of the political universe resides in that hidden force which leads every movement to deny itself, to betray its original inspiration, and to corrupt itself as it confirms itself, as it advances. This is because in politics, as in everything, we fulfill ourselves only upon our own rains. Revolutions start in order to give a meaning to history; such meaning has already been given, replies reaction, we must submit to it and defend it. This is exactly what will be maintained by a revolution that has triumphed; hence intolerance results from a hypothesis that has degenerated into a certitude and that is imposed as such by a regime — from a vision promoted to the rank of truth. Each doctrine contains, in germ, infinite possibilities for disaster: since the mind is constructive only by inadvertence, the encounter of man and idea almost always involves a deadly sequel

Imbued with the futility of reforms, with the vanity and the heresy of improvements, reactionaries would spare humanity the lacerations and exhaustions of hope, the pangs of an illusory quest: be satisfied with what has already been acquired, they suggest; abdicate your anxieties in order to bask in the bliss of stagnation and, opting for an irrevocably official state of affairs, choose finally between the instinct for preservation and the craving for tragedy. But man, open to all choices, rejects precisely this one. In this rejection, in this impossibility, his drama is played out, whence it comes about that he is at once, or alternately, a reactionary and a revolutionary animal. Fragile though the classical distinction may be, moreover, between the concept of revolution and that of reaction, we must nonetheless retain it, on pain of chaos or confusion in the consideration of political phenomena. It constitutes a reference point as problematical as it is indispensable, a suspect but inevitable and obligatory convention. And it is also the one that obliges us constantly to speak of “right” and “left,” terms that have no correspondence to intrinsic and irreducible givens, terms so summary that we should like to leave to demagogues alone the faculty and the pleasure of utilizing them. It sometimes happens that the right (we need merely think of national uprisings) prevails over the left in vigor, force, and dynamism; espousing the characteristics of revolutionary spirit, it then ceases to be the expression of an ossified world, of a group of interests or of a declining class. Conversely, the left, snagged in the mechanism of power or imprisoned by antiquated superstitions, can easily lose its virtues, harden, and exhibit the very flaws that commonly affect the right. Vitality being no one’s privilege, the analyst must determine its presence and intensity with no concern for the doctrinal varnish of this or that movement, this or that political or social reality. Next let us consider nations: some make their revolution on the right, others on the left. Though the former’s revolution is often but a simulacrum, it nonetheless exists, and this alone reveals the inanity of any univocal determination of the notion of revolution. “Right” and “left”: simple approximations that unfortunately we cannot do without. Not to resort to them would be to renounce taking sides, to suspend one’s judgment in political matters, to free oneself of the servitudes of duration, to require of man that he waken to the absolute, that he become uniquely a metaphysical animal Such an effort of emancipation, such a leap outside our sleepers’ truths, is accessible to few. We are all dozing, and paradoxically, that is why we take action. Let us continue, then, as if nothing had occurred, let us go on making our traditional distinctions, happy not to know that the values appearing in time are, in the last instance, interchangeable.

The reasons that impel the political world to forge its concepts and categories are quite different from those invoked by a theoretical discipline; if they appear equally necessary to both, those of the former still conceal realities that are less honorable: all doctrines of action and of combat, with their apparatus and their Schemas, were invented only to give men a good conscience, permitting them to hate each other . . . nobly, without embarrassment without remorse. Upon reflection, would it not be legitimate to conclude that when facing events, the free mind, refractory to the play of ideologies but still subject to time, has a choice only between despair and opportunism?

De Maistre could no more be an opportunist than he could despair: his religion, his principles, forbade it. But with his moods prevailing over his faith, he frequently had fits of discouragement, especially at the spectacle of a civilization without a future: witness his observations on Europe. He was not the only man who believed that he was dying with the continent.
.
. . In the last century and in ours, many have been convinced that Europe was on the point of expiring, or that it had only one recourse: to conceal its decrepitude by means of coquetry. The notion that the continent was in its death agony had spread and acquired a certain vogue on the occasion of the great defeats — in France after 1814, 1870, and 1940; in Germany after the collapse of 1918, or that of 1945. Yet Europe, indifferent to its Cassandras, cheerfully perseveres in its agony, and that agony, so stubborn, so durable, is perhaps equivalent to a new life. This whole problem — which comes down to a question of perspective and of ideology — if it is meaningless for Marxists, nonetheless preoccupies both liberals and conservatives, horrified as they are (though as defenders of different positions) to be witnessing the disappearance of their reasons for living, of their doctrines, and of their superstitions. That a form of Europe is dying today, no one will dispute, though such a death must be seen as no more than a simple stage of an immense decline. With Bergson died, according to Valéry, “the last representative of European intelligence,” The formula might serve for other homages or speeches, for we shall find for a long while to come some “last representative” of the Western mind. . . . He who proclaims the end of “civilization” or of “intelligence” does so out of rancor toward a future that to him seems hostile, and out of vengeance against history, faithless history that does not deign to conform to his image of it. De Maistre was dying with his own Europe, with the Europe that rejected the spirit of innovation — “the greatest scourge,” as he called it. It was his conviction that in order to save societies from disorder a universal idea, acknowledged by fair means or foul, was necessary, which would eliminate the danger of entertaining, in religion and in politics, novelty, approximation, theoretical scruples. That this universal idea was incarnated in Catholicism he had no doubt, the diversity of regimes, of mores, and of gods troubling him not at all. Against the relativism of experience he set up the absolute of dogma; that a religion might cease to submit to it, that it might permit private judgment and liberty of thought, he declared harmful and did not hesitate to deny in the name of religion. “Mohammedanism and paganism itself would have done less harm politically if they had been substituted for Christianity, with their species of dogmas and faith; for they are religions, and Protestantism is no such thing.” So long as he maintained some loyalty to the principles of Freemasonry, he remained quite open to a certain liberalism; once his hatred of the Revolution drove him into the arms of the Church, he slid toward intolerance.

Whether they take their inspiration from utopia or from reaction, absolutisms resemble and unite with each other. Independent of their doctrinal content, which differentiates them only on the surface, they participate in one and the same schema, one and the same logical process, a phenomenon proper to all the systems that, not content to posit an unconditional principle, also make of it a dogma and a law. An identical mode of thought presides over the elaboration of theories that are materially dissimilar but formally analogous. As for the doctrines of Unity, they are so closely related that to study one, whatever it may be, is thereby to scrutinize all the regimes that, rejecting diversity in concept and in practice, deny man the right to heresy, to singularity, or to doubt.

Obsessed with Unity, de Maistre raves against any attempt likely to dissolve it, against the least impulse of innovation or even of autonomy, without realizing that heresy represents the sole possibility of reinvigorating men’s consciences, that by shaking them up it preserves them from the sluggishness into which conformism plunges them, and that if heresy weakens the Churchy on the other hand it reinforces religion. Any official god is a god alone, abandoned, soured. We pray with fervor only in sects, among persecuted minorities, in darkness and in fear, conditions indispensable to the proper exercise of piety. But for a de Maistre, submission — I should say, rather, the rage of submission — surpasses the effusions of faith. Lutherans, Calvinists, Jansenists were, if we are to believe him, merely rebels, conspirators, traitors; he abhors them and advises, for their annihilation, the use of all means that are not “crimes.” Yet if we read his apology for the Inquisition, our impression is that even this last resort is one he does not entirely reject. De Maistre is the Machiavelli of theocracy.

Unity, as he conceives of it, presents itself in a double aspect: metaphysical and historical. On the one hand, it signifies triumph over division, evil, and sin; on the other, definitive instauration, final apotheosis of Catholicism through the victory over temptations and modern errors. Unity on the level of eternity; unity on the level of time. If the first transcends us, if it escapes our possibilities for control, the second we can envisage and deal with. Let us say it straight off: it seems to us illusory; it leaves us skeptical. For we do not see what religious idea would today be capable of achieving the spiritual and political unification of the world. Christianity is too weak to seduce or to subdue men’s minds; an ideology or a conqueror must be resorted to. Will the task fall to Marxism, or to a Caesarism of a new type? Or to both at once? Such a synthesis seems dismaying only to reason, but not to history, that reign of anomaly.

That Catholicism, better still that the Christian religion in its entirety, should be in utter deliquescence, our experience teaches us every day: as it now appears — prudent, accommodating, measured — Christianity would not tolerate an apologist so fierce, so magnificently unbridled, as de Maistre, who would not have denounced with such fury “the sectarian spirit” in others had he not been uniquely imbued with it himself. The man who cursed the Terror does not find one word with which to castigate the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; he even applauds it: “With regard to the manufactures taken by the refugees into foreign countries, and to the wrong done to France as a result, the persons for whom these shopkeeping objections signify something . . .” Shopkeeping objections! Unsurpassable, his bad faith is either a joke or a sort of madness: “Louis XIV crushed Protestantism and died in his bed, covered with glory and heavy with years; Louis XVI toyed with the thing and died on the scaffold.”

In another place, in a fit of . . . moderation, de Maistre acknowledges that the critical spirit, a spirit of protest, appears well before Luther, and he rightly traces it back to Celsus, to the very beginnings of the opposition to Christianity. For the Roman patrician, in effect, the Christian was a dismaying, actually inconceivable phenomenon, a subject of stupor. In his
True Discourse
, a moving text if ever there was one, Celsus raves against the actions of this new sect that has managed, through its intrigues and its excesses, to aggravate the situation of the empire, presently beleaguered by the Barbarians. He did not understand why a man might prefer to Greek philosophy a suspect and nebulous teaching which disgusted him but of which, not without a certain despair, he foresaw the contagious power and the terrible opportunities. Sixteen centuries later, his argumentation and his invective were adopted by Voltaire, who, similarly aghast at Christianity’s amazing career did his best to advertise its ravages and its abuses. That such a work, whose salubrity leaps to the eye, should be at the origin of the Terror is another exaggeration of de Maistre’s, for whom
irreligion
and
scaffold
are correlative terms. “We must absolutely slay the spirit of the eighteenth century.” he urges, forgetting that this spirit he so hates had only one fanaticism, that of tolerance. And then by what right condemn the guillotine when one has been so tender about the stake? The contradiction does not seem to disturb the admirer of the Inquisition; servant of one cause, he legitimated its excesses while execrating those committed in the name of another. This is the paradox of the partisan mind, and it is an eternal one.

To regard the eighteenth century as the privileged moment, as the very incarnation of evil, is to indulge in aberrations. In what other period were injustices denounced so rigorously? A salutary oeuvre of which the Terror was the negation and not the consummation.

“Never,” says Tocqueville, “had tolerance in religion, mildness in command, humanity, and even benevolence been more extolled and, it appeared, more acknowledged than in the eighteenth century; the right to wage war, which is in a sense the last refuge of violence, was itself confined and rationalized. Yet from the heart of such gentle manners would nonetheless emerge the most inhuman revolution.”

In reality, the period, too “civilized,” had achieved a refinement that doomed it to fragility, to a brilliant and ephemeral term, “Gentle manners,” and dissolute ones go together as is proved by the Regency, the most agreeable and most lucid — hence the most corrupt — era of modern history. The vertigo of being free was beginning to weigh on men’s minds. Already Madame du Deffand, more indicative of the century than Voltaire himself, had remarked that liberty was “not a good thing for everyone,” that rare were those who could tolerate its “darkness and its emptiness.” And it was to flee this “emptiness” and this “darkness,” it seems to us, that France flung herself into the wars of the Revolution and of the Empire, in which she willingly sacrificed those habits of independence, of defiance, and of analysis that a hundred years of conversation and skepticism had enabled her to acquire. Threatened with disaggregation by this debauch of irony and intelligence, France would recover her balance through the collective adventure, through a craving for submission on a national scale. “Men,” de Maistre informs us, “can never be united for any goal whatever without a law or a rule that deprives them of their will: one must be a priest or a soldier.”