The Human Comedy (44 page)

This social fact is obvious in every era and always accepted by the people; its reasons of state are self-evident: It is at once an effect and a cause, a principle and a law. The common sense of the masses never deserts them except when people of bad faith arouse them. This common sense rests on verities of a general order, as true in Moscow as in London, as true in Geneva as in Calcutta. Everywhere you find families of unequal fortune within a given space, you will see them form classes—patricians first, then the upper classes, and so on below them. Equality may be a
right
, but no power on earth is capable of converting it into a
fact
. It would enhance the happiness of France to popularize this thought. The benefits of political harmony are still obvious to the least intelligent masses. Harmony is the poetry of order. And order, reduced to its simplest expression, is the agreement of things: Unity, isn’t that the simplest expression of order? Architecture, music, poetry, everything in France, more than in any other country, is based on this principle; it is inscribed on the foundation of its clear, pure language, and the native tongue will always be the most infallible index of a nation. You see its people, moreover, adopting the most poetic, modulated melodies; attracted to the simplest ideas; preferring supremely thoughtful, incisive motifs. France is the only country where some small phrase could bring about a great revolution. The masses have never rebelled except to bring men, things, and principles into harmony. No other nation has a better idea of the unity that should rule aristocratic life, perhaps because no other has better understood political necessity: History will never find her behindhand. France has often been mistaken, like a woman led astray by generous ideas, by a warmth of enthusiasm that may initially overtake calculation.

So to begin with, the most striking feature of the Faubourg Saint-Germain is the splendor of its mansions, its great gardens and their quiet, once upon a time in keeping with the princely fortunes drawn from its great estates. And this space between one class and the entire capital is but a material embodiment of the distances between ways of life that are bound to keep them apart. The head has its designated place in all creations. If by chance a nation allows its head to fall at its feet, sooner or later it is sure to discover that it has committed suicide. As nations do not want to die, they set to work at once to refashion a head. If they lack the strength for this, they perish, as did Rome, Venice, and so many others.

The distinction between the upper and lower circles of social activity introduced by their different ways of life necessarily implies that among the leading aristocracy, there is real capital value. In any state, under whatever form of government, when the patricians fail to maintain their complete superiority, they weaken and are soon overthrown by the people. The people always want to see money, power, and initiative in their leaders’ hands, hearts, and heads: Their province is speech, intelligence, and glory. Without this triple power, all privilege collapses. Nations, like women, love force in those who rule them, and their love does not flourish without respect; they will not grant their obedience to someone who does not impose himself. An aristocracy fallen into contempt is like a lazy king or a husband in apron strings; it is a nullity on its way to nonexistence.

So the separation of the great, their separate way of life, in brief, the general customs of the patrician caste is at once a sign of real power and the reason for its death as soon as that power is lost. The Faubourg Saint-Germain let itself be laid low, temporarily, for refusing to recognize the obligations of its existence when it was still easy to perpetuate. It should have had the good faith to see in time, as the English aristocracy did, that the institutions have critical turning points—words no longer have the same meaning, ideas take on another guise, and the forms of political life are totally transformed without their foundations being deeply altered. These ideas demand further development, which forms an essential part of this story. They are given here as a definition of causes and an explanation of facts.

The grandeur of the aristocratic châteaus and palaces, the luxury of their details, the unstinting sumptuousness of the furnishings, the
atmosphere
in which the fortunate owner, born to riches, blithely and confidently moves; the habit of never stooping to calculate the trivial interests of daily existence, the leisure, the higher education required at an early age; in brief, the patrician traditions that give him social powers that his adversaries scarcely offset by their tenacious studies—these things should all lift the spirit of the man who possesses such privileges at an early age and stamp on his character that self-respect whose least consequence is a nobility of heart in harmony with the noble name he bears. This is true for some families. Here and there in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, you encounter persons of fine character, but they are clear exceptions to the rule of general egotism that has caused the ruin of this world apart. These privileges are the birthright of the French aristocracy, as they are of every patrician flowering formed on the surface of nations so long as their existence is based on the
estate
. The landed estate, like the financial estate, is the only solid foundation of an organized society. But the patricians hold these many advantages only to the extent that they maintain the conditions in which the people grant them. There is a kind of moral fiefdom whose
tenure
assumes service rendered to the sovereign, and here in France today the sovereign is surely the people. Times have changed, as have weapons. The
knight banneret
formerly wore a chain-mail tunic and a halberd, could skillfully handle a lance and show his pennant, and that was enough. Today he must prove his intelligence, and while in the old days, all he needed was a great heart, in our day he must have a good head as well. Skill, knowledge, and capital form the social triangle on which the escutcheon of power is inscribed, and it forms the basis of the modern aristocracy today.

A fine theory is as good as a great name. The Rothschilds, those modern
Fuggers
of the nineteenth century, are princes of deed. A great artist is really an oligarch; he represents an entire century and almost always becomes a law to others. Thus the art of the word, the high-pressure machinery of the writer, the genius of the poet, the merchant’s constancy, the willpower of the statesman that concentrates a thousand dazzling qualities, the general’s sword—the aristocratic class must have a monopoly today on these personal conquests made by a single man over a whole society in order to impose himself, as it formerly had a monopoly on material force. To remain at the head of a country, it must always be worthy of leading it, of being its mind and soul in order to direct its hands. How do you lead a people without having the powers to command? What would the marshal’s baton be without the captain’s innate power to wield it? The Faubourg Saint-Germain played with batons, believing that they were power itself. It reversed the terms of the proposition that called it into existence. Instead of throwing away the insignia that offended people and quietly retaining its power, it allowed the bourgeoisie to seize authority, clung fatally to its insignia, and constantly forgot the laws that its numerical weakness decreed. An aristocracy whose numbers scarcely constitute a small fraction of a society must today, as yesterday, multiply its means of action in order to counterbalance the weight of the popular masses in times of great crisis. In our days, those means of action must be real force and not historical memories.

The nobility in France, unfortunately still so inflated with its former vanished power, faced a kind of presumption against it, which made it difficult to defend itself. Perhaps this is a national defect. The Frenchman is less likely than other men to lower himself, moving only from the step where he finds himself to the next one up. He rarely laments the unhappiness of those over whom he has raised himself, but he always moans to see so much happiness above him. Though he may have a great heart, too often he prefers to listen to his mind. This national instinct pushes the French forward, this vanity wastes their fortunes and rules them as absolutely as the principle of thrift rules the Dutch. It has dominated the nobility for three centuries, which in this respect was preeminently French. The man of the Faubourg Saint-German, observing his material superiority, always concluded that he also possessed superior intellect. Everyone in France confirmed him in this belief, for ever since the establishment of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the aristocratic revolution that began on the day when the monarchy left Versailles, the Faubourg Saint-Germain has always, with a few exceptions, depended on the power that in France must be based more or less in Faubourg Saint-Germain—hence
its defeat in 1830
.

In that period, it was like an army operating without a base. It had failed to take advantage of the peace to implant itself in the heart of the nation. It sinned through a lack of education and a total blindness to its larger interests. A certain future was sacrificed to a doubtful present. Perhaps this blunder in policy may be attributed to the following cause. The physical and moral distance that the nobility so keenly maintained between itself and the rest of the nation has had fatal results during the past forty years: sustaining personal feeling by killing caste patriotism. When the French nobility of former times was rich and powerful, gentlemen knew how to choose their leaders in moments of danger and to obey them. As their power waned, they grew undisciplined; and, as in the last days of the Roman Empire, every man wanted to be emperor. Regarding themselves as all equally weak, they believed they were all equally strong. Every family ruined by the Revolution, ruined by laws abolishing the right of primogeniture and forcing them to share their wealth equally among their offspring, thought only of itself instead of the larger family of the nobility. And it seemed to them that if each individual grew rich, the party would be strong. A mistake. Money, too, is merely an outward sign of power. All these families were made up of people who preserved the high traditions of refined manners, true elegance, fine language, noble restraint, and pride in harmony with the life they led; a life filled with petty occupations that become trivial when they are no longer merely accessories but become the center of life. There was a certain intrinsic merit in these families but this was strictly on the surface, leaving them merely a nominal value.

None of these families had the courage to ask themselves: Are we strong enough to wield power? They grabbed at power as the lawyers did in 1830. Instead of acting the protector, like a great man, the Faubourg Saint-Germain was as greedy as an upstart. When the most intelligent nation in the world understood that the restored nobility had organized power and the budget to its own profit, it fell mortally ill. The nobility wanted to be an aristocracy when it could only be an oligarchy, two very different systems, which anyone who is clever enough will understand by reading attentively the patronymics of the lords of the Upper House. Of course, the royal government had good intentions, but it constantly forgot that it owed everything to the people, even its happiness, and that France, that capricious woman, must be happy or beaten at whim. If there were more like the Duc de Laval, whose modesty made him worthy of his name, the throne of the elder branch would have been as secure as the House of Hanover today. In 1814, but especially in 1820, the French nobility had to rule over the most enlightened epoch, the most aristocratic bourgeoisie, and the most female country in the world. The Faubourg Saint-Germain could easily have led and amused a middle class in love with art and science and drunk with distinctions. But the petty leaders of this great intellectual era all hated art and science. They did not even know how to present religion in the poetic colors that would have endeared it to the people, although they needed its support. When Lamartine, Lamennais, Montalembert, and several other writers of talent were renewing or expanding religious ideas, gilding them with poetry, those men who were ruining the government made the bitterness of religion felt. Never was a nation more complacent, like an exhausted woman who becomes an easy one; never did power stumble more clumsily; France and woman prefer lapses from virtue.

If the nobility meant to establish a great oligarchical government, the Faubourg should have searched within its ranks for the coin of Napoleon, turned itself inside out to find a constitutional Richelieu. If this genius was not among its members, it should have sought him as far as the cold garret where he might lie dying, and it should have assimilated him, just as the English House of Lords constantly assimilates the chance aristocrat. Then they should have ordered this man to be ruthless, to chop off the dead wood, to prune the aristocratic tree. But in the first place, the great system of English Toryism was too large for small minds and to import it required too much time, for in France tardy success is no better than a fiasco
.
Besides, far from adopting a policy of redemption and seeking force where God has put it, these petty greats hated any capacity that did not issue from them; in brief, instead of being rejuvenated, the Faubourg Saint-Germain grew aged.

Etiquette, the other most crucial but secondary institution, might have been maintained if it had been kept for great occasions, but it became a daily battle, and instead of being a matter of art or ceremony, it became a marker of power. If from the outset the throne lacked a councillor equal to the circumstances, the aristocracy above all lacked the knowledge of its general interests, an instinct that might have made up for any deficiency. It balked at
the marriage of Monsieur de Talleyrand
, the only man who had one of those anvil minds in which new political systems are forged and nations gloriously revived. The Faubourg mocked ministers who were not gentlemen and did not provide gentlemen superior enough to be ministers. It could have rendered real service to the country by ennobling justices of the peace, by fertilizing the soil, by constructing roads and canals, by making itself an active territorial power, but it sold its lands to play the stock exchange. The Faubourg might have raided the bourgeoisie of its men of action and talent, whose ambition only undermined its authority, by opening its ranks to them. Instead, it preferred to fight them, unarmed, for tradition was all it had left of the reality it formerly possessed. To its misfortune, the nobility retained just enough of its former wealth to sustain its arrogance. Content with its memories, none of these families seriously thought to urge its older sons to take up arms, which the nineteenth century tossed so plentifully into the public square. The youth, excluded from political life, danced at
Madame’s
while they should have been in Paris, working under the influence of young, conscientious talents, innocents of the Empire and the Republic, work that the head of each family should have begun in their administrative counties. There they might have won back the recognition of their titles by unremitting pleas in favor of local interests, by conforming to the spirit of the century, by reshaping the caste system to suit the taste of the times.