Misanthropy Read online

  Laclos’s vision is therefore pitiless: power is inexorable, its victims foreordained. This is not just because the world is composed of knaves and dupes, and the knaves win every time. The trouble above all is that Cécile’s and the Présidente’s very ordinariness, their frailties, flaws and ambivalences, the fluttering vagaries of their emotions, the sensual promptings of their bodies are precisely what leave them hopelessly vulnerable to domination. Honour, piety, fidelity, romantic passion, vows of eternal love are mere straws in the fire, and the novel relentlessly empties out the language in which they are expressed. Here the rigour of Laclos’s irony is terrifying. However, Laclos’s misanthropically conceived world is not one like Saint-Simon’s in which human monsters are everywhere, but rather a world in which there is finally no appeal against the monsters, in which the monsters alone can be sure to flourish, gloating. The basilisk will always mesmerize its victims. Indeed, the novelist himself becomes a basilisk, drawing the reader into an invidious complicity with his libertines’ exquisite inventiveness, admiration for their psychological subtlety and penetration, and amused delight like theirs at their virtuoso performances. We are dishonest if we do not see this. We are obtuse if we do not see the point.

  Les Liaisons dangereuses is Laclos’s implacable rejoinder to the sentimental, self-deceiving presumption that the Enlightenment was busily making ‘all men honest, and all women modest and reserved’.64 The Présidente flees to a convent, where she quickly dies. Cécile retires to a convent, too. Danceny, Cécile’s lover, leaves for Malta, there ‘religiously to observe vows which will separate [him] from a world’ that has already conveyed to him ‘the idea of so many accumulated horrors’ while still so young.65 Far away, beyond all hope of consolation, in a last, mad letter, the Présidente dwells on Valmont’s image. But by now it is inextricable from the idea of a demonism at large and rampant in the world. Her devil will not cease tormenting her; indeed, she cannot herself let go of him, since, however false and treacherous his appearances, they never fail to beguile. If anything encapsulates the conclusion to which Laclos wants to lead us, this letter does. The misanthropists of the Ancien Régime often started at court and ended up in solitary retirement. So, too, one of the worldliest novels ever written at length reveals itself to have been also a spiritual meditation.

  Finally, in the dog-days of the misanthropic tradition, de Sade’s chilling achievement is to turn libertine misanthropy around and convert it into a positive philosophy. De Sade’s world is one in which Nature is ungainsayably supreme and drives us, above all, to use others for our own purposes. This means that the relatively strong will brutalize, exploit and humiliate the relatively weak and take their pleasures, however extreme, at their expense. We may as well celebrate this, thinks de Sade, since it is the principle tyrannically at work in Nature. In the 1960s, sexual radicals occasionally used to suggest that de Sade’s writings were really a libertarian account of perverted drives we would all be better for recognizing and accepting.66 But they were very remote from de Sade’s historical world. Not for no reason did de Sade write a play entitled Le Misanthrope par amour. His insane Cent vingts journées de Sodome (1785) is a huge, mind-numbing catalogue of the modes of sexual use of the other which freely include extravagant torture, rape and murder. Not surprisingly, the chief users turn out to be men, especially aristocratic men, the used, women, especially women of the lower classes. If Cent vingts journées is not a psychosexual handbook, neither is it an archly ironic exposure of the true logic of Ancien Régime decadence.67 Nor is it intended to shoot the ground from under itself by virtue of its very hyperbole. In Philosophie dans le boudoir, de Sade argues for an end to laws against murder, rape and any form of sexual misconduct (because they are ‘unnatural’). The author of Cent vingts journées means what it says. Yet, at the same time, the possibility of irony is always latent within it. We can read Cent vingts journées as a sexualized allegory of the social structures of Ancien Régime France, and the horrors and miseries they produced, at a stage at which they had lasted for so long and become so fixed in place that they seemed like the misanthropic truth of human history itself.

  De Sade, however, completed Cent vingts journées in the Bastille. A mere five years later, the prison had disappeared. The ill-fated Louis XVI (1774–92) was a well-meaning and even beneficent ruler. He abolished serfdom, torture and discriminatory taxation and promoted the toleration of Protestants and Jews. Yet the court and political power remained unhelpfully cut off from the people, a separate world. The effects of despotism had bitten too deep. New ideas became more subversive. The contemporary Church and even the Catholic religion itself came under more fire. More people were rapidly becoming more literate, and revolutionary thought disseminated itself in a range of different cultural forms. There was a widespread desire for equality, whether absolute or an equality of rights. Louis XVI supported the American Revolution, but the result was the spread of revolutionary notions like popular sovereignty, the democratic spirit, the political triumph of reason and the regeneration of society. The stage was being set for a historical event that was to transform France and indeed the world, the French Revolution. The people were about to burst on to the scene.

  The Revolution killed off the misanthropic tradition, and did so brusquely. The titles of the period tell the tale: Kotzebue’s Misanthropy and Repentance (1788), Schiller’s The Misanthrope Reconciled (1790), Paul Emil Thieriot’s Timon All Alone (1794). As Daniel Cottom remarks, ‘in this era of the rights of man’, humanity so swiftly and fully established itself that misanthropy quickly became ‘all but unthinkable’.68 The great new cause swept up the misanthropists with it. Laclos joined the revolution. So, too, more eccentrically, did de Sade. But the change is most precisely captured in the fortunes of Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, best known as Chamfort. From a humble background, Chamfort was a man of scintillating talent. He was a deeply literary and learned but also an inveterately witty man, an ingenious and fascinating conversationalist, not only a fount of bons mots, but a collector and recollector of the bons mots of others (not least, misanthropic ones). In Chamfort, if anywhere, we get a vivid sense of misanthropy as social currency, a talk that, to some extent, did the rounds. He gripped the attention of those who knew him. His sayings went into circulation. His misanthropy is as rooted in the conditions of the Ancien Régime as La Rochefoucauld’s, and at times he echoes him. However, Chamfort’s misanthropy was bred of a different experience.

  Chamfort was a free spirit, for whom freedom was not only a (forlorn) political imperative, but also just his ordinary way of being Chamfort. He was heedlessly spontaneous, disinterested both by nature and by conviction. Truth as he saw it, however searing, had absolute priority over social protocols. This was not a recipe for comfortable survival in the Paris of Louis XV and Louis XVI. Chamfort lived like a republican and egalitarian. But this he did before the fact. His gifts ensured that he made the acquaintance of the great, who often greatly admired him. But Chamfort was the very opposite of the shrewd modern networker: if the key to making one’s fortune was the will to ‘se pousser’ (pushiness),69 he himself was not disposed to exploit his contacts; indeed, he repeatedly declined their offers. As a young man, he scrabbled for work. To a degree beyond his comprehension, he got sucked into petty literary feuds and was abandoned by fair-weather friends. Chamfort repeatedly said that he longed to live a secluded philosophic and literary life, entirely indifferent to society. If this attracted the charge of misanthropy, then so it had to be.70

  In short, he could reach no accommodation with the dominant idioms of his world. But it was nonetheless a world he knew very well. In a host of maxims, reflections and anecdotes, he indicted it. One should eat, he suggested, at the tree of knowledge, which induces detachment from all the usual human concerns. Society then appears as a ‘factitious composition’ that gets further from nature the more one ascends the social ladder (MP, p. 8). It is a giant structure of boxes into which ‘no-one really fits’ (MP, p. 4
8). Its artificiality takes many forms: a ‘mania for celebrity’, for example, which makes only for unhappiness and degrades ‘moral character’ (MP, pp. 3, 39). Yet our attachment to the artifice of social constructions is unflagging. The fool who identifies his character with his role and ‘takes his importance for merit and his credit for virtue’ is the very model of social life (MP, p. 50). ‘Be a Charlatan’, then, or expect to be pilloried (MP, p. 33). Social survival is impossible, save theatrically; authenticity is the ‘rarest’ of virtues (MP, p. 22). Men reduce themselves to nullities, just to fit in. Writing for such a society, Chamfort thought, merely turned him into a performing monkey. Why would one court publicity rather than shunning it, given the public’s inane criteria for judgement?

  Chamfort had immersed himself in ‘the memoirs and monuments of the century of Louis XIV’ and earlier, and was intimate with the tale of France under Louis XV (MP, pp. 47, 191). Part of him felt that he knew enough of what he took to be an age-long history to generalize assuredly on the basis of his knowledge. ‘Prejudice, vanity and calculation … govern the world’, and the engine that drives society is the endless struggle between these little drives (MP, pp. 42, 57). ‘Reason, truth and sentiment’ have almost no place in it (MP, p. 42). The consequences of this endemic dissymmetry are best known to those charged with keeping public order, who end up ‘with a horrible opinion of society’ (MP, p. 66). Furthermore, men in their imbecility continually bend to tyrants. The reign of Tiberius is the norm, not an exception: history is largely ‘a train of horrors’ (MP, p. 122). The beginning of wisdom is therefore ‘the fear of men’ (MP, p. 34). Again, solitude, flight and a contemptus mundi turn out to be the true marks of honesty. But there is also a Chamfort who states that the evils he describes are only ‘as old as the monarchy’, and therefore ‘not irremediable’ (MP, p. 51). He thought of them as specific to certain cultures. That his France seemed to put ‘all natural and moral ideas’ into reverse did not discredit those ideas themselves (MP, p. 102). Thus Chamfort can argue that the misanthropist is actually a philanthropist in disguise (MP, p. 70; once more, misanthropy turns out to be incomplete). The misanthropist hates the unequal conditions under which men have to live. He despises man, because man hardly begins to measure up to what he might be. ‘We must start human society all over again’ (MP, p. 134).

  Hence, when the Revolution arrived, it absorbed Chamfort from the start. He threw himself into it, joining revolutionary groups, listening, watching, talking, even orating. He could think of nothing else, and wrote little. He was careless of the fact that the Revolution had soon deprived him of his pension. He was, he felt, at last alive, and full of ideas and hope. For a while, he was secretary to the Jacobins. Wrenched from its moorings by a wave of change, his misanthropy abruptly came to seem irrelevant, and vanished from his thoughts. It was now clear that men could ‘form a reasonable society’ after all (MP, p. 138). Chamfort’s progress, then, would appear to be an object lesson: as a free, just, equal, democratic republic seems close at hand, so misanthropy fades and dies. The younger Chamfort had written that ‘any man who is not a misanthropist at forty has never loved human beings’.71 Now, at fifty, what he had taken to be only the unfulfilled possibilities of human life appeared to be on the point of realization.

  The story, however, has a last grim coda. As Robespierre, Marat and Danton increasingly took over the Revolution, Chamfort grew more and more critical of the Jacobins. Furthermore, he was not about to rein in his habit of speaking freely, or using his wit to devastating effect. As always, Chamfort’s bons mots were soon on others’ lips. He was arrested, imprisoned, released, then threatened with arrest again. But he was, he said, a free man, and would not tolerate any more constraint. He chose to attempt suicide, instead, but hideously botched it. He lived on for a short while, and remained avid for the latest news, though he said it merely confirmed him in the view that he had been quite right to want to kill himself. ‘The horrors that I see now’, he said, ‘make me want to try again’.72 He found himself livelier than ever. Too bad that he no longer cared to live. If the Ancien Régime had caused his misanthropy, the Revolution finally confirmed it in place.

  But this was not the effect the Revolution had on France, or indeed on much of Europe. The misanthropic tradition of the Ancien Régime accordingly migrated, and its last flickers are visible elsewhere, in cultures indifferent or hostile to the Revolution. The most obvious heirs to La Rochefoucauld and Saint-Simon are perhaps some of Byron’s great, melancholic solitaries and outcasts, filled with an aristocratic contempt for arbitrary and despotic power, a horror of senseless bloodletting and an ardent devotion to ideals of freedom and justice, but likewise with a disdain for the mass of men, for human being itself, from which their aristocratic postures leave them distant. Thus Manfred nurses ‘the Promethean spark’, but has ‘no sympathy with breathing flesh’.73 Cain, one of those ‘Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant/In his everlasting face’, is granted the ‘prophetic torture’, a vision of the wretchedness of man’s future. But it leaves him ‘unfit for mortal converse’ – and spiritually equipped to kill his brother.74 Byron’s heroes are the reverse of Schiller’s, for whom the struggle with power means identification with the oppressed.75 Or take Leopardi: from the Marches in Italy, of aristocratic stock, he made plans to flee – even saw himself as about to become the very embodiment of freedom – only to be blocked by his old-school father. Thenceforth human nature would come to seem ‘frale in tutto e vile’, frail and base in everything, seeking ‘piuttosto le tenebre che la luce’, darkness rather than light.76

  Otherwise, the discourse peters out, if grandly, in Chateaubriand, a descendant of Breton aristocrats, and Lermontov, a Muscovite of aristocratic stock. There was clearly a historical logic to this: though it would take some time to accomplish the process, modern democracy was increasingly calling the august status of the aristocracy into question, and bringing its age-long status to an end. At this point, we may grasp the full significance of what has been the most imposing European misanthropic tradition since the Renaissance. With the exception of Chamfort, it was the product of a privileged class or classes. La Rochefoucauld and Saint-Simon were scions of old aristocratic families. Pascal’s father belonged to the noblesse de robe. La Fontaine’s parentage was wealthy provincial middle class, attached to a ducal estate. La Bruyère, though middle class, had close links with the Condés. Compare these with the ancestry of some of the leading philosophes of the Enlightenment: Diderot’s father was a master cutler, Rousseau’s a watchmaker, Morellet’s a papermaker, Marmontel’s a tailor. Voltaire’s father had been notary to Saint-Simon.

  But misanthropy sprang from a complex and ambivalent set of conditions. Though La Rochefoucauld and Saint-Simon were caught up in a powerful nostalgia for a vanished aristocratic heritage, none of the authors in this chapter were apologists for the aristocracy. Indeed, to a greater or lesser extent, they were its scourge. Admittedly, they castigated an aristocracy that Louis XIV and his successors reduced to political impotence, that had fallen from grace. But that is precisely the point: misanthropy emerges from a class that continued to enjoy the fruits of its position – wealth, luxury, licence – but had also been definitively stripped of its most formidable powers. It had miserably failed in any major attempt to oppose and thwart its enemies, above all, in the case of the Frondes. Ancien Régime misanthropy proper begins with the Frondes, not just because the end of the Frondes spells defeat for the anti-monarchist cause, but because it spells disaster and moral disgrace for the aristocracy. Thereafter, again and again, aristocratic intellects, or intellects close to the aristocracy, turn on the aristocracy itself, with a sometimes gleeful scorn. The question remains, however, as to why contempt for one’s own should become contempt for the human race tout court.

  The misanthrope despises both his overlords and his peers. At moments, he may be drawn to the cause of the suffering classes, and even, fleetingly, to that of social transformation. La Bruyère
had his moments of compassion for the poor. The peasantry, he suggested, should not be in need of the bread for which they sowed the seed when they were sparing others the trouble of sowing themselves. Saint-Simon, too, was capable of generosity to the poor and took a genuine interest in their welfare. He worked to improve the condition of those who laboured on his estates. He could recognize that social problems had political and economic causes, and even blamed the starvation of the people on a conspiracy (the ‘famine pact’).77 From time to time, Pascal is wistfully aware that the social evils he anathematizes may not after all be the inevitable consequence of fallen nature, but stem from the historical particularity of an autocratic regime. Somewhere struggling desperately at the back of his mind, like a tiny, almost asphyxiated creature, there is even an undimmed notion of a ‘brilliant flaring of true equity’ that would enthral ‘all peoples’.78

  Yet none of this is finally material. For La Bruyère, the peasantry belonged to a world entirely apart – in effect, subhuman: