Misanthropy Read online

  We will happen on our three traditions again, Cynic, for example, in America, indignantly satirical in eighteenth-century England, Augustinian in seventeenth-century France and America. The book will repeatedly open up differences with these forms of misanthropy, and others, but also close them. It will not stall in misanthropic griping. But neither will it meekly cede to contemporary cheerleaders. Equally, while it ranges from Timon and the Cynics to contemporary queer misanthropy and posthumanism, and there is a great deal of historical narrative in it, it does not offer a comprehensive historical account of its subject. That would take several volumes. There are obvious omissions, medieval, Victorian and German romantic misanthropy, for example, and, even more glaringly, non-Western misanthropies (alas, I have no relevant expertise). ‘The Pelagians claim’, writes Evans, ‘that grace shines freely on all: the true light lights everyone who comes into the world’.53 The true light lights everyone: we can be of good cheer, all is well with the world, the lusts of the flesh are a natural good. Everyone, or at least the generality (leaving aside a few terrorists and paedophiles), is basically or at least potentially virtuous, there is equality of spiritual opportunity, though true salvation comes of self-help, is born of one’s own efforts and must be underwritten by law not grace (another Pelagian theme). Interestingly, in Rome, Pelagianism was a particular favourite of affluent elites, for whom it was clearly a comfortable philosophy. We live, in a loose sense, in times that, in comparison, for example, to the Cold War decades, seem more Pelagian- than Augustinian-inclined, notably in a range of public, official and, increasingly, university discourses, all of which have a certain investment in the Pelagian tone. See for example Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature),54 though Pinker actually comes somewhere between Pelagius and Pollyanna. But if cultural Pelagianism is at all dominant at the present time, it has not been so for long, is, as we shall see, only insecurely so, and may possibly not remain so for very long, either. (Pelagianism has had its moments of currency; they did not last). It is partly with such sober caveats in mind that this book proceeds.

  1

  MISANTHROPY AND THE OLD ORDER

  It is not by chance that the most famous misanthropist in European literature appears in Paris in the middle of the seventeenth century. Molière’s Le Misanthrope was first performed on 4 June 1666 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, under the sign of the Ancien Régime, by then securely lodged in place. Misanthropy was very much a part of this environment. According to Nancy Mitford, Louis XIV’s Versailles was stuffed with cynics for whom human goodness was likely to seem a fantasm.1 Molière was by no means the only writer to fasten on the figure of the misanthrope as a contemporary type. In his Caractères, for example, the moralist Jean de la Bruyère tells us about ‘Timon, the misanthrope’ (a contemporary figure). Timon is ‘outwardly civil, and even ceremonious’. But he ‘does not become familiar with other men’, and underneath nurses ‘an austere and savage mind’, harbouring no ‘desire to be better acquainted’ with his fellow humans.2 The writers were picking up on such strains of thought and attitude as they formed part of the culture around them. In the Louis-Quatorzian court, misanthropy was an intellectual option. Madame de Sévigné, for instance, though light of touch, recommended misanthropy as a bulwark against adverse ‘strokes of love and misfortune’.3 But why should there have been so pungent an odour of misanthropy under the Sun King? The answer involves telling a historical story.

  The Renaissance monarchy in France was limited in its authority, partly held in check by the representatives of the king’s subjects, the Estates General, comprising the three estates, nobility, clergy and those below both. But this system had been secured in place by Henri IV, bringer of peace, proponent of religious toleration and a skilled politician whose concern for his subjects was self-evident. Henri was assassinated in 1610. By 1614, the Estates General was in eclipse. It was not to meet again until 1789. Under Louis XIII, this paved the way for an increasingly dominant monarchy, and the rise to power of Armand-Jean de Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu. Richelieu was intent on consolidating royal power, and displayed ‘an almost sadistic attention to detail in matters of repression’.4 For the Cardinal, the second and third estates were of no account. What mattered was chiefly control of the first estate, the nobility. The monarchy duly sought to ensure its grip on the nobles, and steadily encroached on the powers of the French parlements, the legislative bodies dominated by the aristocracy, of which the most eminent, in Paris, was known simply as the Parlement. The monarchy brought dissenting aristocrats to heel, bought or executed them. It put down revolts with summary and often extreme violence.

  Richelieu was followed by Cardinal Jules Mazarin in 1642, and Louis XIII by Louis XIV in 1643. Richelieu had maintained an increasingly militarized state. Mazarin also understood that his and his royal master’s power and authority were intricately bound up with waging war elsewhere. Richelieu had discovered that the French had been seriously undertaxed, and zealously set about remedying the problem, himself becoming an immensely wealthy man. Mazarin, who also accumulated a vast personal fortune, raised taxes again. Though the aristocracy was exempt from taxation, the government found ways of squeezing it, too.5 Meanwhile the parlements, and especially the Parlement, were becoming increasingly critical of royal policy. Between 1623 and 1645, France saw various popular uprisings. By 1648, the country was ripe for major revolt.

  On 26 August, the government arrested three leading parliamentarians, one of whom, Pierre Broussel, was the hero of the Parisian poor. This resulted in the ‘Days of the Barricades’, when, according to Jean François Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, ‘cries of Republic!’ were audible for the first time in France.6 The unrest duly led to the first of the two rebellions known as the Frondes. The first Fronde crossed the boundaries between the classes, spreading to the disaffected aristocracy. Its two key themes were taxation and disempowerment. The sides signed a peace treaty in March 1649. The second Fronde, however, was far more serious, since it involved not only all the classes, but powerful princes and the leading army commanders (the Great Condé, Turenne). It was sparked off by Mazarin’s arrest of Condé in January 1650. That a mere royal créature – and an Italian given to solecisms at that – should behave thus to a member of the ancient, chivalric noblesse d’epée was intolerable. The crisis became radical, then revolutionary, with republicanism much in the air. From late 1651 to late 1652, the civil war grew bloody and destructive. But Condé lost his grip on Paris, while Turenne was reconciled to the monarchy and took over command of the royal armies, finally defeating Condé in October 1652, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

  The monarchy definitively crushed the Frondes, but those who had been in their vanguard did not simply disappear. To understand the meaning of misanthropy during the early decades of the Ancien Régime, one has partly to imagine how far spectres from the past continued to bulk large at the court of the young Sun King, glowering resentfully, recalling the days when it was not self-evident that a stripling monarch should have such extraordinary power and wield it so arbitrarily. Condé the great warrior remained. (He was rehabilitated in 1659, though the king never entirely forgot his treason). Henri IV’s bastards were moodily stalking about Louis’s court as late as the 1670s. Brilliant friends of former frondeurs, like Madame de Sévigné and the Comtesse de Lafayette, cut significant figures at court. Memories of a France different from that of monarchical absolutism persisted. The period that runs from the Fronde to the death of Louis XIV – a period that had begun in hopes, however mixed, diverse and contradictory, of social transformation, only to see them dashed – sees the emergence of French misanthropy as a discourse. This discourse was precisely a consequence of recollections of a future curtailed.

  If any single writer is associated with the Fronde, the spirit of the Fronde and the significance of its defeat, it is the beguiling figure of François, Prince de Marcillac and, from 1650, Duc de la Rochefoucauld, le vaincu de la Fronde, as Jean Lafond calls him.7
The La Rochefoucaulds were an ancient and distinguished noble family close to the throne. They were deeply concerned for the honour and lustre of the family name. They had for generations been soldiers distinguished for their valour, and cherished the family tradition of gallantry, chivalric duty, fidelity to one’s liege lord and fighting for the faith. They saw Richelieu as just a venal upstart, and loathed him. La Rochefoucauld père joined the attempt to oust the Cardinal on the so-called Day of the Dupes, and was disgraced. His son, however, remained at court, where the sets he frequented ensured him the company of people who, in large degree, shared his inherited values.

  However, engagingly, Marcillac kept on joining the wrong party, to the point of becoming an outsider, even a malcontent. At Richelieu’s bidding, he was briefly thrown into the Bastille. After Richelieu’s death, he joined the so-called Cabale des Importants, who were united in their hatred of Mazarin.8 Though, in 1648, he suppressed a minor rebellion on Mazarin’s behalf, Mazarin did not reward him as he wished. He therefore broke with the Cardinal and joined a cabal against him that included Retz, the Prince de Conti, and Condé’s sister and Marcillac’s own lover, the Duchesse de Longueville. On that basis, according to Madame de Motteville, Marcillac ‘entered gaily on the crime of lèse-majesté’9 – punishable by death – and swiftly became one of the leading rebel officers in the first Fronde. Unsurprisingly, in the second Fronde, he allied himself with the Condés. Orders went out for his arrest. He performed prodigious feats of courage. La Rochefoucauld – as he now was – fought desperately in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, taking a musket bullet in the face. Thereafter he would look out upon the world with damaged eyes.

  By the end of the second Fronde, La Rochefoucauld was ruined, hopeless, mortally tired, his castle gutted, his aristocratic status reduced, his friends dead, fled or become turncoats. He was an unusually reflective and nuanced man, but also one possessed of what Victor Cousin called ‘the elegant effrontery of the grand seigneur’. He was proud, contemptuous and given to ‘disgust with things’, but also lacked a certain worldliness.10 He had proved incapable of bending the courtly knee or playing the game of realpolitik, and had therefore been fated to disenchantment in a world where king and ministry were steadily disempowering his class. La Rochefoucauld did not suppose, in modern fashion, that his melancholy was just a neurosis, or a consequence of his character. He had far too much arrogant self-belief for that: ‘Much [of my melancholy] comes to me from outside sources’, he wrote, and ‘fills my imagination and occupies my mind’.11 For a while, he had flared into grand, Satanic revolt against absolute power. Now, defeated, he turned to writing his memoirs, particularly dwelling on what he had come to see as the temporizations, disloyalties, deceptions, follies and failures of the frondeurs, their furtive but consistent prioritization of their personal interests: the tergiversations of Retz, always motivated by his own ambition (La Rochefoucauld had once trapped Retz in a door, head on one side, body on the other, and instructed his men to kill him, in vain); the self-seeking and vast greed of Condé, repeatedly willing to have the king buy him off, never satisfied with what he was offered; the inconstancy and treachery of Madame de Longueville, who deserted La Rochefoucauld for fellow-frondeur the Duc de Nemours; the pathetic rivalry between Nemours and his brother-in-law the Duc de Beaufort, rebels who ended up fighting each other.

  The king eventually forgave La Rochefoucauld, and by 1664 he had made his peace with Mazarin and the court. He was not granted access to the court itself, however, and so lurked on its fringes. Bound from now on ‘to my sulky humour’, in his first published work, he ‘announced his misanthropy’,12 and began to compose the Maximes for which he remains famous. The Maximes take the world to be an objective disproof of La Rochefoucauld’s inherited chivalric ideals, which had come to seem like ‘illusions néfastes [dangerous illusions]’.13 The two great laws of human conduct are unrelenting self-interest, and men’s refusal to acknowledge it. La Rochefoucauld became expert in tracking amour-propre, self-love, self-regard, through all its devious and winding ways, down to its most secret lairs, detecting its metallic insistence beneath the most virtuous and humane appearances. His was, he wrote, an endless task. ‘Whatever discovery one makes in the country of self-love’, he said, ‘there still remain unknown territories to explore’ (R, p. 43). The manifestations and modes of expression of self-love were infinite.

  Everything is, at bottom, interest; interest speaks even in disinterest. Piety, honour, duty, the philosopher’s superb indifference to life: all are disguised vices, tastes devised by amour-propre. Bounty, liberality, merit, friendship, sincerity, good sense, sound judgement must not be taken at face value. La Rochefoucauld’s own sexual disposition and his sexual experience, and above all his desertion by the Duchesse de Longueville, made his view of love deeply cynical. His acuteness, subtlety, wit and grasp of paradox are unforgiving, and ruthlessly bar all ways of escape. Constancy, for example, is only secret inconstancy, a series of separate attachments to the beloved. Humility is a ruse whereby one feigns submission in order to win the submission of others. Courage is self-regarding: courage under torture, for example, springs only from the fear of envisaging death. ‘Folly accompanies us through all the phases of life’ (R, p. 77), and the wisdom of age is just a function of the inability to set a bad example any longer. One finds happiness when fortune justifies one’s poor conduct. But pride in unhappiness is a perverted assertion of self-worth. However much one seeks to disguise one’s passions, ‘they will always announce themselves for what they are’, that is, as the ruling powers (R, p. 43). Yet no man is sufficiently clever to know all the evil for which he is responsible, not least because the mind attaches itself to what is easy for or agreeable to it, and therefore protects itself against insight and self-knowledge. However invisible to itself, even ignorant of and stupid about itself amour-propre may be, ‘nothing is as impetuous in its desires, as hidden in its design or as crafty in its conduct’ (R, p. 129). We are naturally self-idolaters, and are therefore hardly likely to see ourselves clearly.

  La Rochefoucauld’s generalizations do not come without reservations and exceptions. For all that, his work of destruction is intransigent. While he never lets go of a certain conception of honesty and decency, it is clear that, in a world where self-love imperiously requires self-deception, any morality can only be precarious. Hence the dominant voice in the Maximes is one that refuses to surrender its elevated authority, but is in one sense also impotent. As such, it mirrors the predicament of La Rochefoucauld and his class. Yet La Rochefoucauld was destined to a still worse fate. He ended his life scarred, racked by gout, often in horrible pain and grimly disabused. Before he died, he nonetheless managed to write his Réflexions morales.

  Commentators have sometimes sought to rescue La Rochefoucauld from the charge of a prevailing cynicism.14 They have pointed to the variety of the Maximes, the extent to which they pass different kinds of judgement. Yet one might at least ask whether, in the very moments when La Rochefoucauld relaxes his vigilance, he actually confirms the second part of his thesis, that it is finally impossible to look unflinchingly at the dismaying truth. In any case, no attempt to make La Rochefoucauld sound more upbeat can withstand the Réflexions morales. Take for instance ‘Du rapport des hommes avec les animaux’ (R, pp. 179–82). Human beings are to each other, states La Rochefoucauld, as the species of animals are. There are humans who are purely ferocious, like tigers, those who dress up their ferocity in the garb of generosity, like lions, humans who are crudely and avidly ferocious, like bears, pitilessly ferocious, like wolves, and industriously and deceitfully ferocious, like foxes. Like dogs, some humans will prove noble and courageous but destroy their own kind. Others hunt for the pleasure of those who feed them or are creatures of fury, barking and biting. There are humans, like birds, commendable only for their plumage and gorgeous colours; like parrots, who gabble on and don’t understand what they are saying; like monkeys, who know how to please with their manners, ha
ve a certain wit but invariably do mischief; like peacocks, who are merely beautiful, whose song displeases and who destroy their habitat; and like birds of prey, who live on rapine. Equally, there are humans who, like myriad forms of natural life, exist chiefly to nourish others.

  The cats are watchful, malicious and faithless, padding on velvet paws. The vipers have venomous tongues, the poisonous toads make one shudder, while the spiders, fleas and flies are unbearably irritating. There are owls that fear the light, and animals that stay alive by hiding underground. There are horses, useful, then abandoned as soon as they have outlived their usefulness. The hares are frightened of everything, the rabbits scared and reassured in the same moment, the crocodiles weep as they kill, the hogs live in shit. There are canards privés, tame ducks who betray their kind, swallows always following fine weather, brainless maybugs, and cicadas who spend their lives singing. The bees respect their leader and are well regulated and industrious, while moths seek out the fire that will consume them and ants look after themselves with foresight and economy. Many animals are unaware of their own strength, notably, perhaps, the oxen, who work all day to enrich their owners.