Misanthropy Read online

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  With this short exercise in disillusion, the misanthropist surveys the general scene and condenses his view of it into a mere three pages. He had studied Louis’s France, and learnt all he needed to know. But if La Rochefoucauld learnt from the France of the Sun King, for his part, Louis learnt a great deal from the Frondes. He would never trust Paris, the parlements or most of the older nobility again. With the end of the Frondes, the monarchy in France turned more and more in the direction of absolutism, and the interests of the state became increasingly separate from those of ordinary people. The Sun King declared that the state was him. A monarchical personality cult emerged. The nobility survived quite comfortably. But they had been tamed and disempowered, and were ever more clearly subordinated to the sovereign will. Meanwhile, tax demands grew ever more burdensome.

  Expansionist wars, annexations and land-grabbing were the stuff of Louis XIV’s reign. War was one of the Sun King’s favourite pastimes, and he was happy to sacrifice other people to his passion, including the court nobility. In 1672, when the French crossed the Rhine under a hail of enemy fire, half the youth of the court were lost. But as the great playwright Jean Racine told Louis, it was predictable that he should boast that the generality of his soldiery were brave, for life in the army was so dreadful that most of them were glad to end it quickly. There were repeated outbreaks of famine and epidemics, land lay abandoned and towns became depopulated, while the impoverishment of the people was dire. France seemed increasingly describable as a conspiracy of the strong against the weak.

  Hence for Archbishop François Fénelon, writing in 1694, France was ‘nothing more than a great hospital, devastated and without provisions’.15 The peasants were eating cabbage stalks and bread made from fern-roots. Unlike Henri IV, Louis XIV was indifferent to his people, did not want to listen to tales of their condition and found Christ’s identification with the poor quaint if not objectionable. Thus absolutist monarchy brought greater and greater suffering and misery to the vast majority of the French. Misery indeed: ‘If Paris and the court offer a prospect of wealth and pleasure’, stated a Venetian ambassador in 1660, ‘the provinces are a sink of indigence and misery’.16 ‘There are miseries on earth that grip the heart’, wrote La Bruyère, contemplating the French peasantry, with a humanity rare in his day (CH, p. 180). No release from wretchedness was thinkable for those who suffered it, not least because the monarchy continued mercilessly to repress domestic insurrections.

  Louis had broken the backs of the nobles. It was an explicit principle of his to corrupt them sufficiently to be able to govern without, but not against them, though he also resorted to terror, intimidation and casual violence. Anyone might expect a spell in the dungeons. The Duc de Nevers was imprisoned for baptizing a pig, the Comte de Bussy thrown into the Bastille for a four-line distich that suggested that the king had a ‘preposterous mouth’.17 Others were banished from the kingdom, or themselves chose exile, while punishments were frequently meted out at random and on the spot. A poor woman whose son had died during the building of the Sun King’s magnificent palace at Versailles (1664–1710) shouted insults at Louis; he duly had her whipped. The Sun King made his inferiors very afraid: Madame de Sévigné recounts the story of a maître d’hôtel, due to entertain the king, who ran himself through with his own sword when he discovered that the sea-bass he had ordered for the king’s dinner had not arrived on time.18 At the court, spies were everywhere. When the Chevalier de Grammont made slighting reference to Mazarin, his companions blenched, since they knew the spies ‘would faithfully discharge their duty toward their employer, as they accordingly did’.19

  All of this coincided with the construction of Versailles, a testimony to the power of the king and the relative impotence of everyone else. Versailles ‘imprisoned the most distinguished members of the aristocracy in a gilded cage’.20 The byzantine atmosphere, the luxe insolent et audacieux of the great palace by no means concealed its more disturbing side. The braggadocio of some of the nobility was patent, if subdued. La Bruyère describes them swaggering into church, weapons at their hips, like gunmen swinging into bars in westerns: ‘There was almost nobody’, the moralist remarks, ‘that did not have at his side the wherewithal to kill another person with one thrust’ (CT, p. 11). Duels often took place. Versailles was crammed with adulterers and gamblers. More chillingly, an extraordinary criminality also lurked in the holes and corners of Louis’s court. Doctors were reputed to murder children. The vogue for poisonings and devilish practices prompted chief of police Gabriel-Nicolas de la Reynie – a man conspicuous for his uncommon decency and rectitude – to declare that he had altogether lost faith in humanity: ‘Men’s lives are up for sale’, he said, ‘as a matter of everyday bargaining; murder is the only remedy when a family is in difficulties. Abominations are being practised everywhere – in Paris, in the suburbs and in the provinces’.21 Live babies stolen from the poor were allegedly sacrificed in black masses.22 When the police swept the underworld for the disreputable accomplices of courtly killers, they dragged up alchemists, kidnappers, counterfeiters, defrocked priests, back-alley abortionists, mountebanks and peddlers of love-philtres.

  Versailles seemed to be begging for its Lewis Carroll. It was a dementedly hierarchical society that proliferated minute symbolic indicators of social rank within an extraordinarily complex system. The system covered a multitude of practices, from kissing to parking one’s carriage at the Louvre. It associated certain postures with each rank; that is, it determined who could sit, kneel or stand with whom, and on what, in any given situation. The intricate rules governing the use of seating were mind-boggling. Cardinals, for example, were to stand before the king, sit on a stool when with the queen or royal children, use a chair with a back with royal grandchildren and an armchair with the princes of the blood. The system was also linguistic; remembering who was to be addressed how might have driven the fussiest practitioner of etiquette to distraction. Punctilio, however, had not the slightest bearing on conduct. The king himself was quite indiscriminately promiscuous, and once scaled a roof and clambered in through a window at Versailles in order to visit a maid of honour.23 He had a child by a gardener. Meanwhile, his ex-mistresses were packed off to convents, sometimes to die there.

  The hierarchical system was also preferential, the reverse of a meritocracy – it was only the king’s friends, for example, who could hope to rise to the higher commands in the army. This, however, did not discourage court politics, but rather diversified and intensified them. The court, after all, was the place where brilliant people made careers. That there was finally only one significant source of power meant not that the court smothered ambitions, but that it focused them. ‘The whole court is filled with intrigue’, wrote the woman called simply Madame (a.k.a. Liselotte, the Princess Palatine of Bavaria, the king’s sister-in-law).24 Courtiers constantly sued for the Sun King’s ear, or for the ears of the influential. For his part, Louis relentlessly played them off against each other. Cabals, coteries, factions, camarillas and sodalities plotted against each other, faced each other down, changed and often exchanged (or shared) their members. Splits, fissures and deadly rivalries were everywhere. Since there was no democratic system of alternation in power, everyone was caught up in a constant scrabble for its vestiges, as for prestige, money, appointments to high positions and promotions.

  At this point, the logic of misanthropy under the Ancien Régime should start to become clear. Such a society was bound to generate intense, often mutual, and sometimes general loathing. As Ladurie puts it, the hierarchical structure produced a cascade de mépris (contempt) that flowed from top to bottom.25 Hierarchy tended to breed misanthropy, all the way down the chain. Since the police opened letters on the king’s instructions, the king’s lover and later wife, Madame de Maintenon, discovered that Liselotte thought of her as a whore, a witch, an ageing ape, a repulsive horror and a pile of shit. But Louis wanted his courtiers at each other’s throats. He declared for example t
hat a special jerkin ornamented with gold stripes and braid might be worn by some courtiers but not others, in the hope, precisely, that it would create envy.26 Envy was useful, because politically disabling, where solidarity was dangerous, a lesson that Louis had learnt from the Frondes. When Versailles’ smaller cousin the Château de Marly was built, people almost literally fought for invitations. The Sun King had ‘no more fervent an opponent’ than the great memoirist of his court, the Duc de Saint-Simon.27 Saint-Simon ‘took the very lowest view of human nature’,28 was an inveterate loather of Versailles and most of those in circulation there. His, he thought, was an ‘age of monsters’.29 When he tartly noted that Marly had been built on a site favoured by ‘snakes, carrion, toads and frogs’, he also had other kinds of reptile in mind.30

  But there was also a religious reason for misanthropy being conspicuous in Louis-Quatorzian France. If St Augustine was important for the history of Western misanthropy, he had recently provoked little discussion within the Church. But as a new interest in free will crept into learned circles, so, in opposition to it, Augustinian ‘rigorism’ also returned. In early seventeenth-century France, it led to an assertion of the importance of having faith guide State policy, and from this emerged Cornelius Jansen and his friend Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, (the Abbot of) Saint-Cyran. Jansen and Saint-Cyran saturated themselves in Augustine’s writings. In 1634, Saint-Cyran became spiritual director of Port-Royal, an abbey for Cistercian nuns, and it flourished and grew in reputation, becoming the headquarters of Jansenism. By 1638, however, Jansen was dead and – on Richelieu’s orders – the ‘dangerous heretic’ Saint-Cyran was in prison, to die on his release in 1643. But thanks to Antoine Arnauld, a later director of Port-Royal, and his circle, by the mid-1640s, the term ‘Jansenist Party’ was in use and Jansenism was spreading to male religious orders.

  Jansenism sprang, again, from the Augustinian emphasis on the natural depravity of human being, which only divine grace could redeem. It comprehensively challenged the principal orientations of the Jansenists’ great enemies, the Jesuits, the dominant clerical influence at court. The worldly Jesuits had refined their traditional science of casuistry to the point where it meant pandering to the powerful, rich and fashionable, since casuistry made for a seemingly endless flexibility in the salving of consciences (or so the Jansenists said). In the 1650s, Arnauld and the Jansenists attacked this Jesuit ‘laxism’, winning the university and even in some degree the Papacy over to their side. Jesuitry encouraged the courtly life. By contrast, Jansenism repudiated a theology that spelt involvement in the world and advocated the worldly doctrine of attrition, imperfect contrition. It tended to make people solitaries, encouraging them to flee the endemic and ineradicable corruption of the world and inclining them to misanthropy.31

  The Jansenists were in due course to reap the whirlwind. Given their repudiation of worldliness, the character of Louis XIV’s court and his absorption in it, a confrontation was certain to ensue. Furthermore, many Jansenists had originally been frondeurs. The king himself saw them as a Republican party inside the Church and State. They were ‘the main source of discourses of resistance to royal authority articulated by the magistracy; and thus, ultimately, of the “desacralization” of [the French] monarchy’.32 According to the Archbishop of Paris, Louis finally decided that he wanted to ‘hear no more of those endless people, those Port-Royal people’.33 He would smash this ‘party of innovators’.34 His officers invaded Port-Royal and removed all the (female) novices and boarders, dismissing its director. The royal council ordered the bishops to impose a formulary denouncing Jansenism on all their subordinates, and Arnauld went into hiding; then, like other Jansenists, fled and died in exile. The older generation of nuns struggled to keep Port-Royal going until, in 1709, Louis formally closed it down, razed it to the ground and had the bodies of its dead disinterred and dumped in a common pit.

  Jansenism contributed to seventeenth-century French misanthropic discourse to a degree beyond the confines of strictly religious interests. Saint-Simon had Augustinian and Jansenist sympathies, and La Rochefoucauld was influenced by Augustinianism and increasingly overtaken by the Jansenist spirit, though, as Sainte-Beuve later noted, he had ‘no use’ for religion itself.35 But here one devoutly religious figure looms particularly large. At the Jansenist Madame de Sablé’s, La Rochefoucauld may have brushed shoulders with the great philosopher, theologian and mathematician Blaise Pascal.36 Pascal turned to Jansenism in 1646, and thereafter his name and fortunes were closely connected with it. In 1654, he underwent a mystical experience that was decisive for him, and drove him still further from the claims of the world. Pascal had too painfully exquisite a mind fully to convert to any movement. But he remained an ally of the Jansenists, and they and his work formed part of the same ethos. His Lettres Provinciales excoriated the Jesuits and their ‘laxism’. The Jesuits, however, were winning the day. As the enemies of Port-Royal forced its capitulation, one of its greatest stalwarts, Pascal’s sister Jacqueline died, it was said, of a broken heart. To Pascal, who suffered very intensely at the news, nothing could seem more drastically to bear witness against the world and its party.

  Pascalian misanthropy is most apparent and comprehensible in his greatest work, the Pensées. Its founding principle is simple: ‘That nature is corrupt, proved by nature itself’.37 For Pascal the biblical Fall of man was a historical event, and its effects had been transferred from mankind’s first parents in an unbroken sequence. ‘How hollow and full of ordure is the heart of man!’ Pascal exclaims (P, p. 128). ‘But ye are of nothing, an abomination only’ (P, p. 542).38 Pascal gazed in disbelief at how difficult if not impossible it was for fallen man to recognize the effects of the Fall. How is it that men and women, ‘the sport of every wind’ (P, p. 40), weak as they can only be, are not ‘astonished at their own weakness’? How can they strut about as if they know for certain ‘where reason and justice lie’ (P, p. 63)? How is such a wholly baseless confidence possible, given man’s fickleness, his volatility, the fact that ‘the crushing of a coal’ can unhinge his reason (P, p. 68)? Beyond such questions lies a starker conviction of the peremptory violence of the human arrogation of the right to be, the will to persevere in one’s being: ‘Mine, thine. “This is my dog,” said these poor children. “That is my place in the sun.” There is the origin and image of the usurpation of the whole world’ (P, p. 86). Everything ‘tends towards itself’, writes Pascal: ‘That is contrary to all order’ (P, p. 466). Unlike us, he was intensely convinced that original evil is inseparable from the certainty of right and rights, which must always threaten to destroy the world. The persuasion of universal merit brings only havoc in its wake. But that persuasion can always find its reasons, which means in its turn that original sin is the apparently ‘unreasonable’ doctrine actually more reasonable than reason (P, p. 380).

  ‘Man’s condition’, announces Pascal: ‘inconstancy, boredom, anxiety’ (P, p. 61). In one of his best-known aphorisms, he writes that ‘all man’s unhappiness stems from one sole cause, which is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room’ (P, p. 121).This points to one particular theme within the misanthropic tradition, the idea that human beings should scatter and content themselves with a self-sealed, impenetrably monadic existence. Compare Pascal’s near-contemporary George Herbert:

  Surely if each one saw another’s heart

  There would be no commerce,

  No sale or bargain passe: all would disperse

  And live apart.39

  Pascal’s point about ‘man’s condition’, however, is that, because they are in thrall to it, in their ‘wretchedness’, men and women hustle and bustle, crave pleasure and excitement, endlessly seek ‘diversions’ – and that ‘is all that men have been able to invent by way of making themselves happy’ (P, pp. 56, 59, 123). But the very concept of diversion (or entertainment) proclaims the lack at its heart. We prefer the titillation of hunting the hare to contemplating the mortal creature, alternately whip up ou
r passions and seek objects for them. So, too, the mind flits about and ‘opinions move hither and thither, succeeding one another, pro and contra, according to one’s lights’ (P, p. 98). Worse, man finds quarrel in a straw: ‘An inch or two of cowl can put 25,000 monks up in arms’ (P, p. 59). In general, folly founds the exercise of power and is its guarantee, insofar as the power of leaders themselves is rooted in the folly and the weakness of their people.

  On the subject of human pretensions or hubris, Pascal was an extreme sceptic. Do not expect truth or consolation from human beings, he warns, for their reason is ‘merely feeble’, dwarfed by the infinity of things beyond it (P, p. 172). He famously said that ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me’ (P, p. 95), supposing that, if others did not feel the same, they were sunk in narcotic self-deception. There is even a Pascalian theory of addiction: the addict’s need is a function of an irrepressible but inadmissible terror, which is in turn a function of the ‘dumbness’ of the universe, the eternal refusal of infinite nature to confirm any man-made meanings. God provides no end to the infinite recession of meaning, since Pascal’s God is a deus absconditus, hidden from human view. This leaves individuals as, like addicts, condemned to their own particular ‘little dungeons’ for their brief lifespans and, since ‘the propensity towards self’ is the source of all disorder, humans are perpetually at war: ‘All men naturally hate each other’ (P, pp. 88–9, 97, 466). Thus one of the Pensées reads: ‘Contempt for our existence, dying for nothing, hatred of our existence’ (P, p. 111). For Pascal, human beings can transcend themselves only through self-hatred, hatred of the merely human in them, and through faith and thought, with God aiding them through the Redeemer, miracles and proofs. But the bleak corollary of this is that ‘Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world’ (P, p. 575).