Misanthropy Page 7
For obvious reasons, Pascal was not much inclined to suggest that his hatred of human existence was coloured by life in Louis XIV’s France. Yet the Pensées repeatedly suggest that the two were inseparable, or, at least, that the court amply justified Pascal’s revulsions. Politics is ‘a madhouse’, he writes, for which there can be no rules, and kings and emperors are madmen in it (P, p. 322). The whimsical and random distribution of power is evident enough in ‘duchies, royalties and magistracies’ (P, p. 409). So, too, lying and flattery are intrinsic to the relationship between the great and the Jesuits (P, p. 504). The Church is full of ‘unworthy’ priests (p. 347). When Pascal discusses the ‘probability’ of fashions – by which he means that that they are plausible only within existing cultural horizons, and otherwise absurd – his example is duelling (P, p. 262). When he discusses the fallen world, he repeatedly resorts to analogies with the king and the Parlement. For Pascal, there is a founding and irremediable injustice at the heart of all things, yet he never stops calling it injustice. At one very striking moment in the Pensées, he even becomes acutely historicizing, apparently grasping the meaning of the failure of the first Fronde: ‘In 1647, grace for all; in 1650, it was rarer’ (P, p. 615).
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So, though Pascal’s greatest gift was doubtless an extraordinarily fine and delicate spirituality, there is nonetheless a deep strain of contemporary misanthropy in his writings. In general, misanthropy in Louis XIV’s France was less identifiable with a particular, limited set of misanthropists than it was an insistence that circulated in the society in a number of different and complex ways. Perhaps predictably, we find it in the work of Martin de Barcos, Saint-Cyran’s nephew and Arnauld’s friend. But the misanthropic insistence is equally traceable in François de La Mothe Le Vayer, protégé of Richelieu, critic of Jansenism and friend of Molière. It crops up (a little later) in the Nouveaux Dialogues des Morts by Fontenelle, in many ways a worldly and conventionally successful man (member of the Académie Française, secretary to the Académie des Sciences). According to Fontenelle’s version of Guillaume de Cabestan, the Provençal troubadour, the alternatives of Reason and Folly are so only for insignificant dunces. In fact, the world is peopled with fools, all ‘equally foolish’.40 Those who are officially called fools are merely those whose folly does not fit in with that of others. But folly is necessary, for it protects men from what would otherwise be a desolate encounter with themselves. Fontenelle was getting his argument partly from La Mothe Le Vayer, who declares that those who aspire to be doctors in ‘this great Hospital for the Incurable’ are ‘the greatest fools of all’.41
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, better known simply as Boileau, was by no means immune to the lure of misanthropy. ‘The Satire of Mankind’ describes man as ‘the dumbest animal of all’, one embarked on ‘an insensate course’, restlessly flitting from one thought, tenet, sentiment and style to another.42 Their ambition, hatred and greed all make human beings more fearsome than beasts. Worse still, only human beings destroy, not merely their kind, but the earth. In their thirst for wealth and pleasure, even knowledge and learning, humans promote and hasten the devastation of the world. A harebrained Alexander ‘puts Asia to the torch’, and man in general is so enamoured of fame that he will be
killed indiscreetly at the breach, to get
his mad bravado in the next gazette.
What price, asks Boileau, the illusion of a properly civil State? Give up books and ideas, and be ‘unjust, violent, faithless, two-faced, false’, work in finance or in law or, best of all, become a tax collector. The men of learning will end up fawning on you, and you’ll get the women, too. All in all, if the ass is ‘misanthropic’, it is ‘with good reason’, not least because humans have the temerity to call each other asses.
So much is misanthropy a discourse, and so compelling is it as such, that even improbable luminaries are caught up by it. Pierre Bayle, for example, was, from the perspective of the Louis-Quatorzian court, at least, a marginal figure, a Huguenot who (wisely) spent most of his life at a distance from Paris, an unconventionally modern rationalist and sceptic inclined to liberalism and religious doubt who advocated universal toleration. But he also stoutly believed in the doctrine of original sin, was sympathetic to Manichaeanism and adjudged that ‘man is wicked and unhappy. ... History is but a collection of the crimes and misfortunes of humankind’.43 Fénelon was a churchman, Greek scholar and liberal, pacifist and resolute opponent of Louis XIV’s wars, much admired for his saintly life. Yet it is not hard to find him sounding like a misanthropist:
Let men be men, that is to say, weak, vain, inconstant, unjust, false and presumptuous. Leave the world to be always the world. … Leave everyone to follow their nature and habits: you will not be able to improve them: the shortest way is to leave them be, and suffer them. Accustom yourself to unreason and injustice.44
Fénelon’s was in some ways a proto-modern mind. Yet, superficially at least, his acceptance of unalterable wrong in that last sentence hardly seems to be modern at all.
Two features of the misanthropic insistence during the Ancien Régime are worth particular emphasis, since they shed light both on the link between it and the society that bred it and on the history of misanthropy. The first is the motif of flight to the desert: in the fifth century, for misanthropists, this was quite literally a choice they might make. By contrast, it is hard to think of a convenient and nearby desert that seventeenth-century French misanthropists might have flown to (and survived in). Yet there was clearly a fad for thinking of doing so: Liselotte, for example, declared her longing for the lone wild spaces remote from the court, which for her meant ‘eating cherries on a mountaintop at five in the morning’.45 In its comic aspect, the desire for the wilderness was a ready butt of Molière’s satirical humour, but it also had a serious aspect, as in the case of Pasquier Quesnel, ascetic, Jansenist, friend of Arnauld and significant influence on Saint-Simon, who recommended ‘withdrawing from the world’ and going into the wilderness ‘in order to seek salvation’.46 It is a testimony to the quite extraordinary power of the Augustinian mindset that what was a literal proposition in the fifth century could last through twelve centuries to become a powerful and to some extent seductive metaphor in the seventeenth.
As a metaphor, it stood for renunciation. Indeed, there were many genuine French ‘renouncers’, like the solitaries of Marlagne, who lived in cloistered poverty. In one of its aspects, renunciation was a religious drive. But religious renunciation was only one form of the more pervasive phenomenon of taking refuge ‘from a corrupt world’.47 Apologists for a contemptus mundi were legion. Not only Augustinians and Jansenists but Oratorians, Huguenots and Trappists all sought to inculcate a disdain of pride, praise, the desire for eminence and the will to dominate. The opposition between the party of renunciation and les mondains even stood in for a democratic politics. Logically enough, the party of renunciation was anti-Jesuit. As far as it was concerned, the Fathers who had been caught smuggling South American gold into Europe disguised as chocolate bars pretty well summed up the Society of Jesus.
The second noteworthy feature of misanthropic discourse during the Ancien Régime is the questioning of the relation between human beings and animals. We have seen this already in La Rochefoucauld. Boileau’s ‘Satire on Mankind’ is directed partly at idle fantasies that humans are lords of creation. The notion of the great Chain of Being deriving from Plato and Aristotle passed through Neoplatonism to medieval societies, and from there to the Ancien Régime at least as far as the mid-eighteenth century, when Abbé Pluche’s bestseller Spectacle of Nature was still placing mankind at the top of the chain, with ‘the other forms of life disposed beneath it in interlinking patterns’.48 Cartesianism, with its assertion that animals are machines and man alone is rational, provided a formidable buttress to this thought. Radical misanthropy will have no truck with this bogus order. Human beings have no ontological privilege over animality. They rather ceaselessly collapse back into
it, demonstrating their difference from it only by successfully deceiving themselves about their august status. Unable to castigate the derelictions of a miserably hierarchical society without fear of dire reprisal, the misanthropically inclined could at least work to undermine its intellectual basis. Take (Jean de) La Fontaine, in the first fable of Book XII of the Fables et épitres, Les compagnons d’Ulysse. Ulysses and his companions land on Circe’s isle. Circe transforms Ulysses’s men into beasts, while Ulysses himself remains immune to her potions. Knowing that Circe has fallen in love with him, he demands that she restore the manhood of his men. But the lion, now a king, despises the idea of returning to mere citizenship. The bear asks Ulysses why he should think that the form of a man is any more alluring than his own. Worst of all, the wolf demands: ‘If I were human, according to your faith/Would I love carnage less?’ ‘Scélérat pour scélérat’, villain for villain, it is better to be wolf than human being. All the newly converted animals agree: they have been liberated into truth by rejecting the ‘laws of acting well’.49
The incompleteness of misanthropy, the fact that it appears mixed with other discourses, is perhaps conspicuously evident in La Bruyère. La Bruyère is not his Timon, and does not speak with his voice. Timon is one of a range of his ‘characters’. La Bruyère’s task, in the fashion of the classic moralist, is partly to pick them out, describe them and thus provide a moral account of the world. This may entail ‘admiring little’, but it also means ‘approving much’ (CT, p. 86): the words do not sound misanthropic. Nor for that matter does the ‘tissue of eulogies’ (not least of Richelieu and the king) in La Bruyère’s speech upon admission to the Académie Française (CT, p. 447). The book even includes a paean of praise to Condé. Yet La Bruyère also feared that he was spending his time to no avail: ‘A philosopher wastes his life in observing men’, he wrote, ‘and wears his wits out in exposing vice and folly’ (CT, p. 85). There is a dark counter-swell in the Caractères which becomes more pronounced as the book wears on. La Bruyère asks: ‘If it be usual to be vividly touched by things that are rare … why are we so little touched by virtue’ (CT, p. 104)? ‘How difficult it is to be content with anyone!’ he exclaims (CT, p. 141). He successively excoriates a range of types to the point where one wonders to whom exactly the judicious moral distinctions with which he began were supposed to apply. By the time of the chapter ‘On Man’, he is declaring that ‘if we are not to rage against men, their callousness, ingratitude, injustice, pride, self-love and forgetfulness of others’, it is only because ‘they are made thus, it is their nature’ (CT, p. 264). The end of ‘Of the Court’ effectively clinches his gloomier case:
He who despises the court after having seen it, despises the world.
The city makes one disgusted by provincial life; the court undeceives one as to the city – and cures one of the court.
A healthy mind acquires at court a taste for solitude and retirement. (CT, pp. 228–9)
Both La Bruyère’s logic and his irony point to a misanthropic conclusion.
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In the long run, the condition of France under the Ancien Régime was to engender devastating hatreds, not only of the monarchy and government but of the Catholic church. Economic crisis, poverty, starvation and tax hikes all continued until the death of Louis XIV in 1715. The power of the aristocracy, Parlement and towns continued to weaken. Regent Philippe d’Orléans (1715–23) was initially considerably more flexible in his policies than the Sun King had been, then retracted most of his liberal and decentralizing initiatives. The liberal Regency ceded to an authoritarian Regency. After the death of the Sun King, the country saw long periods of peace, progress and even relative plenty. However, the initially popular Louis XV (1715–74) more and more alienated his people by his persistence with high rates of taxation, his losses in wars, political incompetence and spendthrift ways, his sexual conduct and decadent court, and, most of all, his continuing despotism and indifference to the popular will. Indeed, he repeatedly, quite literally told his aristocracy to fuck off.50 When Robert-François Damiens sought to kill the king, the extraordinary discrepancy between the ‘assassin’s’ pathetic little weapon – a three-inch penknife – and the means of his execution – burnings, bone-breakings, flesh-tearings, dismemberment by four horses – speaks volumes.
The historian Colin Jones has demonstrated that eighteenth-century France was by no means just the sink of political iniquity and cultural backwardness it has sometimes been taken for. In particular, the Enlightenment inaugurated a thought of social improvement via human reason, and an attack on organized religion. According to Voltaire, writing in 1751, ‘A revolution occurred in people’s minds’.51 Yet Louis XIV continued to cast a long shadow over his successors. The old absolutist machinery did not disappear. The monarchy was as remote from the people as ever: after 1745, Louis XV ‘virtually never again ventured outside the palace circuit’.52 Court huggermugger was still as it had been. The gulf between wealth (in 1720, the Prince de Conti needed three carts to take his converted bullion home) and poverty (in the same year, hospitals and poor-houses ‘had to shut their doors’)53 was monstrous. The episcopate reached ‘fabulous levels of wealth’.54 Tax evasion continued to be ‘an aristocratic point of honour’.55 The people enjoyed no personal or religious freedoms, and the cascade de mépris was installed at the heart of government. The most obvious social and political grounds of seventeenth-century misanthropy had not changed. Nor did its major intellectual sources simply disappear. Jansenism had not died with Port-Royal. Figures like Antoine de Noailles, Archbishop of Paris from 1695, clung on. Indeed, the Jansenist tradition became more powerful and influential as the eighteenth century wore on, especially in the law. It even triumphed over the Jesuits along the way.
Thus misanthropy did not wane, as Jones’s reassuring argument might make us imagine. Rather, its forms mutated. The scientifically minded, for instance, were now contributing to the attack on the notion of the Great Chain of Being. There was even a distinct strain of misanthropy among the philosophes of the Enlightenment, notably Rousseau. Perhaps the most pronounced shift in Ancien Régime misanthropy in the later eighteenth century lies in (the changes in) its relation to libertinism. In the sixteenth century, the libertines were actually a Protestant sect who believed that their own spiritual light was a sufficient guide in matters of religious faith. From there, the word came to designate persons ‘who refused to accept current belief and desired to free [themselves] especially from Christian doctrine’.56 The ‘learned libertines’ of the 1620s and after – La Mothe le Vayer, Gabriel Naudé, Gui Patin – were sceptics and materialists who saw themselves as disabused, their vision as clear, cured of sottise or rank stupidity. They thought about humanity differently, on the basis of ‘a principle of incredulity’.57
Intellectual libertinism defined itself against the mass of people, whom the libertines took to be ignorant, superstitious, irrational and swayed by senseless passion. Political power flourished on the basis of popular idiocy; but equally, since no hope lay in the people, revolt could breed only repression and regression. The libertine érudit took himself to be an exception to the rule of general asininity. He was therefore quite likely to end up misanthropic. That at least was La Mothe le Vayer’s conclusion, as he brooded on Democritus’s melancholic view of the city of Abdera.58 Giulio Cesare Vanini, who was soon to be burnt at the stake, asserted that humans struck the one ‘discordant note’ in creation.59 Cyrano de Bergerac railed against the ‘unbearable pride of human beings, which persuades them that Nature has been made for them alone’.60 La Mothe le Vayer took humanity to be ‘an impostor in nature’.61 His Prose chagrine endlessly multiplies the reasons for disgust with human life.
There were also libertine poets: Théophile de Viau, François Maynard, Nicolas Vauquelin des Yveteaux, Claude de Chouvigny, Baron de Blot L’Église. When de Viau and some others jointly published their Parnasse des poètes satyriques (1623), the book was publicly burnt. Some of the poets almost
suffered the same fate. The poets took libertine thought out into a raw, unadorned world of life lived close to the edge, a world of poverty and disease, flop-joints, taverns and whores. From this emerged a poetry that, as in the Parnasse, scanned the world from top to bottom, providing a social panorama and a misanthropic litany, together. ‘Deliver me, Lord’, writes the author of ‘Quatrains contre les hommes’, from vicious men, sottish men, scheming men, disloyal men, boastful, lying men, deceitful and hypocritical men, men who murder with a smile, malicious and avaricious priests, judges who side with wealth and power, ignorant philosophical disputants, irresolute and fickle, ever-changing men, men who make empty promises, men who preach false doctrines, jealous and possessive men.62 Deliver me, Lord. Adieu (O world). I have seen (mankind and fathomed it): these are typically insistent refrains.
The libertine poets often lived loose lives, but they were not intrinsically depraved. By the mid-eighteenth century, by contrast, writers and thinkers were forging a new unity between ‘licences de mœurs’ and ‘licences d’esprit’. Libertinage was becoming a science of dissipation, notably in the roman libertin.63 As it did so, its misanthropic inflections changed. To the pessimism of the seventeenth century, later libertinism added an explicit and emphatic disbelief in love and marriage, and a pointed disbelief in the virtue and integrity of women. Two eminences grises loom large at the end of this development, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade.
In Laclos’s classic epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), two aristocratic libertines, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, plot Valmont’s seduction of an adolescent girl, Cécile, and a judge’s pious wife, the Présidente de Tourvel. The libertines are not only witty, but awesomely clever. Their plot succeeds, only for them to turn savagely on each other, with disastrous consequences for both. These few bald words, however, do nothing to convey the great web of complication that Laclos spins as the predators inch slowly towards final victory over their prey. Certainly, Les Liaisons dangereuses is about sex. But, above all, it is about the will to power, which it reduces to a crystalline form, a wholly ruthless and amoral manifestation. It insists on the reality of that manifestation, indeed, its typicality: Valmont and the Marquise repeatedly draw parallels between their strategies and practices and those of conquerors, generals, rulers, politicians and courtiers. Nothing, the novel suggests, can properly resist a ferocious will to power, save another such will, and then, in violent fury, they will tear each other apart.