Anathemas and Admirations (17 page)

This vice of our nature, far from saddening de Maistre, delights him, and he seizes upon it in order to praise to the skies the papacy, royalty, the Spanish tribunals, and all the symbols of authority. Of the Jesuits, those accomplices of autocracies, he was first the pupil, later the spokesman; and such were his admiration and his gratitude that he admits to being indebted to them “for not having been an orator of the Constituent Assembly.” The judgments he passes on himself almost always concern the Revolution and his relations with it; and it is always with regard to the Revolution that he defends or denigrates France. This Savoyard who once called himself “the most French of all foreigners” is one of those who best penetrated the genius of the “initiator nation,” destined — by its dominant quality, the spirit of proselytism — to exercise over Europe a “veritable magistracy.” Providence having decreed, he tells us, “the era of the French,” he cites in their regard Isaiah’s phrase: “Every word of this people is a conspiracy.” Applied to France at that moment, the phrase was true; it would be less so subsequently, and would cease to have any meaning at all after the war of 1914.

If the Revolution was present in all the shocks of the nineteenth century, none of them could equal it. Obsessed by the figures of ’89, the insurgents of ’48, paralyzed by the fear of betraying their models, were epigones, prisoners of a style of revolt that they had not created and that was, so to speak, imposed upon them. A nation never produces two great revolutionary ideas, nor two radically different forms of messianism. It gives its measure but once, in a circumscribed, defined epoch, the supreme moment of its expansion, when it triumphs with all its truths and all its lies; it exhausts itself afterward, as does the mission with which it was invested.

Since the October Revolution, Russia has exerted the same kind of influence, terror, and fascination that France generated in 1789. In its turn, Russia has imposed its ideas on a world that welcomes them, subjugated, trembling, or zealous. And its proselytizing power is even greater than France’s was; de Maistre, today, would maintain more appropriately that Providence had, this time, decreed “the era of the Russians”; he would even apply to them Isaiah’s phrase, and perhaps would also say of them that they are an “initiator nation.” Moreover, in the very period he lived among them, he was far from underestimating their capacities: “There is no man who desires as passionately as the Russian”; “if we could imprison a Russian desire beneath a fortress, that fortress would explode.” The nation that at the time was said to be indolent and apathetic to him seemed “the most mobile, the most impetuous, the most enterprising in the universe.” The world did not begin to realize as much until after the Decembrist rebellion (1825), a crucial event after which reactionaries and liberals — the former out of apprehension, the latter out of desire — began predicting upheavals in Russia: here was evidence of the future that required, in order to be proclaimed, no prophetic faculty. Never had anyone seen a revolution so sure to come, so expected, as the Russian Revolution: the most widespread reforms, the humanization of the regime, the best will in the world, the largest concessions — nothing could have stopped it. There was no merit in its explosion, since it existed, so to speak, before appearing and since it could be described down to the last detail (one need merely think of
The Possessed)
before manifesting itself.

Since the only guarantors of “good order” were, in de Maistre’s eyes, slavery and religion, he advocated the maintenance of serfdom for the consolidation of czarist power, since the Orthodox Church he disdained seemed to him adulterated, warped, contaminated by Protestantism, and, in any case, unlikely to counterbalance subversive ideas. But did the Catholic Church, in the name of the true religion, succeed in preventing the Revolution in France? He never even asks himself the question; what interests de Maistre is absolute government and in his opinion all government is absolute government for, he claims, “the moment it can be resisted on the pretext of error or injustice, it no longer exists.”

That occasionally one encounters in de Maistre impulses of liberalism — echoes of his early education or expressions of a more or less conscious remorse — is undeniable. Yet the “human” side of his doctrines is of only mediocre interest. Since his talents ripen and really function only in his antimodern excesses, his outrages to common sense, it is natural that it should be the reactionary in him who holds our attention. Every time he insults our principles or upbraids our superstitions in the name of his own, we have occasion to rejoice: the writer then excels and outdoes himself. The darker his vision, the more he will enfold it in a light, transparent appearance. The impulsive aesthete that he was concerned himself, even in the midst of his high rages, with the minuscule problems of language; he fulminated as a litterateur, even as a grammarian, and his frenzies not only failed to diminish his passion for the correct and elegant formulation but augmented it even more. An epileptic temperament infatuated with the trifles of the Word: trances and boutades, convulsions and bagatelles, grace and a foaming mouth — everything combined to compose that pamphleteering universe at whose heart he harried “error” with blows of invective, those ultimatums of impotence. It was his humiliation that he could never erect his prejudices and his fixations into laws. He took revenge for this situation through utterance, whose virulence sustained in him the illusion of efficacy. Never seeking a truth for its own sake but only in order to make it an instrument of combat, unable to acknowledge others’ absolutes (or to be indifferent to them), defining himself by his refusals and still more by his aversions, de Maistre needed, for the exercise of his intelligence, inveterately to execrate someone or something, and to brood over his or its suppression. This was an imperative, a condition indispensable to the fecundity of his disequilibrium, without which he would have fallen into sterility, the curse of thinkers who refuse to cultivate their disagreements with others or with themselves. The spirit of tolerance, had he yielded to it, would not have failed to smother his genius. We may further note that for someone so sincerely taken with paradox, the one way of being original, after a whole century of declamations concerning liberty and justice, was to embrace the opposing opinions, to hurl himself upon other fictions, upon those of authority — in short, to exchange aberrations.

When, in 1797, Napoleon read in Milan the
Considerations sur la France
, perhaps he saw in them a justification of his own ambitions and something like the itinerary of his own dreams: he had only to interpret to his advantage the arguments for royalty that de Maistre made there. On the other hand, the speeches and writings of the liberals (of Necker, of Madame de Staël, and of Benjamin Constant) must have vexed him, since he found in them, according to the expression of Albert Sorel, “the theory of the obstacles to his reign,” Repudiating the concept of destiny, liberal thought could scarcely beguile a conqueror who, not content to meditate upon destiny, still aspired to incarnate it, to be its concrete image, its historical translation, tending as he did by nature to rely on Providence and to consider himself its interpreter. The
Considérations
revealed Bonaparte to himself.

Too much is made of love-hate, and we forget that there exists an even murkier and more complex sentiment: admiration-hate, the very feeling that de Maistre nourished for Napoleon. How lucky to have for one’s contemporary a tyrant worthy of being abhorred, to whom one might dedicate a cult in reverse and whom, secretly, one would like to resemble! In obliging his enemies to raise themselves to his level, compelling them to jealousy, Napoleon was a real blessing. Without him neither Chateaubriand nor Constant nor de Maistre could so readily have resisted the temptation to measure, to proportion: the histrionics of the first, the instability of the second, and the rages of the third partook of his own histrionics, his instability, his rages. The horror he inspired in them included a good deal of fascination. To combat a “monster” is necessarily to possess some mysterious affinities with him, and also to borrow from him certain character traits. De Maistre recalls Luther, whom he insulted so, and even more Voltaire, the man he attacked most, as well as the Pascal of the
Provincial Letters
, enemy of the Jesuits — that is, the Pascal whom he loathed. As a good pamphleteer, he set upon the pamphleteers of the other side, whom he understood so well, for like them he had a mania for inexactitude and a talent for parti pris. When he defines philosophy as the art of disdaining objections, he defines his own method, his own “art.” Yet preposterous as it seems, the assertion is nonetheless true, or almost true: who would defend a position, who would support an idea, if he had to multiply his scruples, ceaselessly weigh pros and cons, and conduct a reasoning with all due precautions? The original thinker forges ahead rather than digging in: he is a
Draufgänger
, an enthusiast, a breakneck, and in any case a determined, combative mind, a rebel in the realm of abstraction, whose aggressiveness, though sometimes veiled, is nonetheless real and effective. Under his apparently neutral preoccupations, camouflaged as problems, stirs a will, functions an instinct, as indispensable as intelligence to the creation of a system: without the collaboration of that instinct and that will, how to triumph over objections and over the paralysis to which they doom the mind? No assertion that cannot be annihilated by a contrary assertion. In order to offer any opinion about anything, bravura action and a certain capacity for thoughtlessness are necessary, as well as a propensity for letting oneself be carried away by extrarational reasons. “The entire human race,” de Maistre says, “is descended from one couple. This truth has been denied like all the rest; and what of that?” This means of disposing of objections is practiced by anyone who identifies himself with a doctrine or who merely adopts a well-defined viewpoint on any subject; but rare are those who dare acknowledge as much, who have probity enough to divulge the method they employ and must employ, on pain of hardening into approximation or silence. In one of those blunders that do him honor, de Maistre, priding himself on an abusive use of “and what of that?” implicitly yields the secret of his extravagances.

Not at all exempt from that naïveté so characteristic of dogmatism, he will make himself the interpreter of all the possessors of a certitude and will proclaim his happiness and theirs: “We, happy possessors of the truth” —a triumphal language that for the rest of us remains inconceivable but that delights and fortifies the believer. A faith that acknowledges other faiths, that does not believe itself to possess a monopoly on truth, is doomed to ruin, abandoning the absolute that legitimates it, resigning itself to being no more than a phenomenon of civilization, an episode, an accident. A religion’s degree of inhumanity guarantees its strength and its duration: a liberal religion is a mockery or a miracle. Reality, a terrible and exact observation, true at every point for the Judeo-Christian world; to posit a single god is to profess intolerance and to subscribe, willy-nilly, to the theocratic ideal On a more general level, the doctrines of Unity proceed from the same spirit: even when they lay claim to antireligious ideas, they follow the formal schema of theocracy, they even boil down to a secularized theocracy. Positivism derived a great advantage from “retrograde” systems, whose content and beliefs it rejected only to adopt their logical armature, their abstract contours. Auguste Comte treated de Maistre’s ideas as Marx treated Hegel’s.

Variously curious as to the fate of religion but equally subjugated by their respective systems, positivists and Catholics exploited to the best of their abilities the thought of the author of
Du Pape;
freer, Baudelaire found in it, out of sheer inner necessity, several themes, such as those of evil and of sin, or certain of his “prejudices” against democratic ideas and “progress.” When Baudelaire makes “true civilization” consist in the “diminution of the traces of original sin,” is he not inspired by that passage of the
Soirées
where the perfect “state of civilization” is presented as a reality situated outside the realm of the Fall? “De Maistre and Edgar Poe have taught me to reason”: perhaps it would have been more precise on Baudelaire’s part to admit that the ultramontanist thinker had furnished him with obsessions. When he invokes a “diabolic providence” or professes “satanism,” Baudelaire turns certain Maistrian motifs inside out, aggravating them and lending them a character of concrete negativity. The philosophy of the Restoration had certain rather unexpected literary extensions: the influence of Bonald on Balzac was as powerful as that of de Maistre on Baudelaire. Probe the past of a writer (especially of a poet), examine in detail the elements of his intellectual biography and you will always find some reactionary antecedents. . . . Memory is the condition of poetry, the past its substance. And what does Reaction assert, if not the supreme value of the past?

“What one believes true, one must say, and say it boldly; I should like, were it to cost me dear, to discover a truth likely to shock the entire human race: I should tell it point-blank.” The Baudelaire of “absolute frankness,” of
Fusées
and of
Mon Coeur mis à nu,
 is contained and somehow heralded in this remark from the
Soirées
, which gives us the recipe for that incomparable art of provocation in which Baudelaire was to distinguish himself almost as much as de Maistre. Everyone distinguishes himself there, moreover who — whether with lucidity or with acrimony— rejects the clever enchantments of Progress. Why do conservatives wield invective so well, and for the most part write more carefully than the adepts of the future? It is because, furious at being contradicted by events they fling themselves, in their confusion, upon the Word, from which, lacking a more substantial resource, they derive vengeance and consolation. The others resort to it more casually and even with contempts accomplices of the future, sure of themselves with regard to “history,” they write without art, even without passion, conscious as they are that style is the prerogative and somehow the luxury of failure. When we speak of failure, we are thinking not only of de Maistre but also of Saint-Simon. In one as in the other, the same exclusive, limited attachment to the cause of the aristocracy, a host of prejudices defended with a continual rage, the pride of caste carried to ostentation, and a similar incapacity to act, which explains why they were so enterprising as writers. When the former concerns himself with problems, when the latter describes events, the slightest idea, the merest fact, explodes under the passion each invests in it. Trying to dissect their prose is tantamount to analyzing a thunderstorm. Far be it from us, however, to put the duke and the count on the same footings the former restored and recreated an epoch, he worked straight from life, whereas the latter was content to animate ideas; now, with concepts, how attain to the plenitude of genius? There is no true creation in philosophy: whatever depth and originality it achieves, thought always maintains itself at a derived level, this side of Being’s movement and activity; art alone rises to that height, art alone imitates God or substitutes for Him. The thinker exhausts the definition of the incomplete man.