Chamfort was not his real last name. In fact, it is still
not certain whether his name was really Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, son of a Clermont grocer, or
whether he was the bastard child of a Clermont canon. Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort, like many
another Enlightenment demi-sage, came up through the ranks from a seemingly
engulfing provincial obscurity by inventing himself in a different milieu.
His
success as a writer falls in the period of the 1770s. He earned money from a
hit play; he wrote for enlightened journals; he found an aristocratic patron.
And he enjoyed eating, drinking, talking and fucking. He mingled with some of
the big names, wrote a catty little verse about Candide, received a letter of
praise from Rousseau. His life, although he didn’t know it then, was falling
into a pattern of anecdotes. For instance, on the subject of making love, his
biographer Pellison recounts that a woman told him, once, “this curious thing.
I don’t love smart men in love – they are watching themselves parade on by.”
[impossible to capture the phrase, ils se regardent passer- ‘they are people
watching themselves’ might be a better translation]. A remark that sticks with Chamfort, and that
he records, later.
He
was a good looking young man. Another biographer, Arnaud, records that he was
the lover of an actress, Mlle. Guimard, “famous for the perfection of her bosom
and who did her makeup each day before the portrait that Fragonard had painted
of her.” [xiii]
But
already, at twenty five, Chamfort’s life had changed much for the worse.
Famously. As Remy Gormount wrote: “Chamfort’s secret, why use periphrases that
don’t trick anybody, is in the syphilis that tormented him for a period of
thirty years, during the time first of his greatest genital activity, and the second,
and then in the third, the more discrete but more conscientious and refined
period.” His looks fell away. He recovered, but with a disfigured face. Much
like Mirabeau – to whom he has a strange, doppelganger relationship – Chamfort
had experienced the down side of the libertine moeurs in his body, and he
didn’t like it. An anecdote – how they trail our man, how they dog him like
devils – from Abbé Morellet, a habitue of the Madam Helvetius’ salon, where
Chamfort was a faithful attendee:
“I
saw him, he said, in the society of Saurin and Mme Helvetius… this happened to
me twenty times at Auteuil that, after having heard him for two hours in the
morning recounting anecdote after anecdote and making epigram after epigram
with an inexhaustible talent, I would leave with my soul as saddened as if I
was leaving the spectacle of an execution. And Mme. Helvetius, who had much
more indulgence than I do for that kind of wit, after having amused herself for
hours listening to his malignity, after having smiled at each ‘hit’, told me,
after he had parted: Father, have you ever seen anything as tiring as the
conversation of Chamfort? Do you know that it makes me blue for the entire day?
And this is true.”
For
between 1780 and 1788 – the decade in which Herder, a writer with a similarly
confused relationship to the enlightenment, is inspired by his discovery of
Nemesis and history – Chamfort ‘retires’ from the circles of the intellectuals
and the long stays as a house guest at the estates of the nobility. He was in
his forties. It is now that he leaves behind poetry and the theater and begins
writing down his epigrams and anecdotes.
He has a sense that this will make a book, and calls the project – in
one of those flashes of mordant wit that depressed Mme Helvetius – Produits de
la civilisation perfectionnée.
This
is one of Chamfort’s maxims:
“Hope
is only a charlatan who ceaselessly tricks us. And, for me, only after I’ve
lost it does happiness begin. I would gladly place over the gate of paradise
the verse that Dante put over that of hell: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi
ch’entrate.
…
Well, Chamfort threw himself, body and soul, into the
revolution. He impoverished himself, he wrote speeches for Mirabeau and
Tallyrand, he, it is said, suggested the title for Sieyes critical pamphlet
(Qu' est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? Tout. Qu'a-t-il? Rien) which neatly
summarizes what, actually, all modern political revolutions are about – the
struggle between what is really All – the working class – and its false
political position – what does it have? Nothing.
A title that is echoed in one of Chamfort’s maxims:
“Me, all; the rest, none: thus it is with despotism,
aristocracy, and their partisans. Me, this is an other; an other, this is me:
thus it is with the popular regime and its partisans. After this, decide
yourself.”
That Chamfort the pessimist, Chamfort the executioner of the
Enlightenment smile of reason, was also Chamfort the revolutionary, Chamfort
the anti-monarchist, was a paradox that the lineage of reactionary writers in
the 19th century, up to and including Nietzsche, tried to find ways
of explaining. Chamfort’s sotie, his double, was a reactionary, Antoine de
Rivarol, who, before the revolution, ran in the same circles as Chamfort, wrote
for the same journals, cultivated the same charming cynicism. Afterwards, in
exile, he became Chamfort’s most bitter critic. But he was not the only one:
Chamfort seemed to especially burn the anti-revolutionary crowd. Unlike
Tallyrand, whose motives seemed transparent – greed – Chamfort seemed to have
reached his conclusions coherently; he seemed to have thought they unfolded
from his dethronement of God and his corrosive view of man. There was, in the
reactionary view, a pit even under cynicism, and Chamfort was its guardian
devil. Thus, among the conspiracy minded among them (and the exiles from the
French revolution were massively inclined to theories of conspiracy – De
Quincey rightly compared their visions to that of an opium smokers) Chamfort
must be accounted for as a kind of intellectual criminal master mind. After
all, it was Chamfort who came up with the slogan that smelled of blood and
jacquerie: War on the castles! Peace to the huts! (Guerre aux chateaux! Paix
aux chaumieres!) under which, in effect, the countryside of France seemed to be
reorganized. In 1810, Marmontel, an old litterateur, publishes his memoirs and
includes an anecdote about Chamfort – long dead, of course, by 1810, another
victim of the Terror. I’ll quote from Pellison’s biography:
‘The passage is curious – we have to cite it. When Marmontel
objected to Chamfort’s reform projects, [saying] that the better part of the
nation will not let any attack be carried through on the laws of the country
and the fundamental principles of monarchy, he (Chamfort) agreed that, in its antechambers,
in its counting houses, in its workshops, a good part of the stay at home
citizens would find perhaps that the projects bold enough to trouble their
repose and their enjoyments. But, if they disapprove, that will not, he said,
be but timidly and quietly, and one has to impose upon them that determined
class which has nothing to lose in the change and believes it sees much to
gain. In order to organize them into a mob, one has the most powerful motives,
famine, hunger, money, alarms and terrors, and the delirium to blaze a path and
the rage by which one will strike upon all minds. You have not heard among the
bourgeois but the eloquent speakers. Know that all your tribune orators are
nothing in comparison with Demosthenes
at a quid per head who, in the cabarets, in the public places, on the
quais announce the ravages, the arsons, the sacked villages, flooded with
blood, the plots to starve Paris. I call those gentlement the eloquent ones.
Money principally and the hope of pillage are omnipotent among the people. We
are going to make a test of Faubourg Saint-Antoine. And you won’t believe how
little it costs the Duc D’Orleans [The rival of King Louis XVI] to have the
manufactury of honest Reveillon sacked,
which was the living of one hundred families. Mirabeau has gaily upheld the
idea that with a thousand Louis D’or one can create quite a pretty
insurrection.”
Thus spake Chamfort, the Goldfinger of his time. Evil keeps
a book, and ticks off in it just what he will do: destroy the living of a
hundred innocents, spread rumors, dethrone culture. Did Chamfort really put the
fear of God into Marmontel? The conversation is recorded years after one of the
major participants committed a very bloody suicide, so we don’t know what
Chamfort did. We don’t know whether this was mockery. The note about the Duc
D’Orleans sounds significantly false. But the falsity at the bottom of this is
that those who “came from the people”, the intellectuals, and adhered to the
aristocracy couldn’t imagine someone going back to the people, except on behalf
of some powerful figure. As Chamfort wrote:
“All who emerge from the class of the people are armed
against it to oppress it, from the militia man, the mercant become the
secretary to the king, the preacher who comes from a village to preach
submission to arbitrary authority, the historian son of a bourgeois, etc. These are Cadmus’ soldiers: the first armed
turn against their brother and jump on them.”
Chamfort is one of Cadmus’s soldiers who, to the surprise of
all, turns not against his brother, but strikes at Cadmus the King. To a
certain extent, to an extent that the pessimistic line that came after Chamfort
could not believe he could accept, he did accept the bitterest consequences of
the revolution:
“In the moment that God created the world, the movement of
chaos must have made one find the chaos more disorganized than when he rested
in the midst of it in its peaceful state.
Likewise, among us, the the embarrasment of a society reorganizing
itself having to appear as an excess of disorder.”
This is what makes Chamfort stand apart – his notion of the
irrevocable is not a nostalgia for what is lost, but is instead a hope, expressed in a language that goes back
to the Bible, that it is truly lost.
…
“… writing, on the contrary, is always rooted in a beyond of
language, it develops like a seed and not like a line, it manifests an essence
and threatens with a secret, it is a counter-communication, it intimidates. We
will find in all writing the ambiguity of an object which is at the same time
language and coercitation: there is, at the bottom of writing, a
“circumstance” that is foreign to
language, there is something like the glance of an intention that is already no
longer that of langauge. This glance can very well be a passion for language,
as in literary writing; it can also be the threat of a penality, as in
political writing: writing is then charged to join in a single dash the reality
of acts and the ideality of ends.” – Barthes, The Degree Zero of Writing
(…l'écriture, au contraire, est toujours enracinée dans un
au-delà du langage, elle se développe comme un germe et non comme une ligne,
elle manifeste une essence et menace d'un secret, elle est une
contre-communication, elle intimide. On trouvera donc dans toute écriture
l'ambiguïté d'un objet qui est à la fois langage et coercition : il y a, au
fond de l'écriture, une « circonstance » étrangère au langage, il y a comme le
regard d'une intention qui n'est déjà plus celle du langage. Ce regard peut
très bien être une passion du langage, comme dans l'écriture littéraire; il
peut être aussi la menace d'une pénalité, comme dans les écritures politiques :
l'écriture est alors chargée de joindre d'un seul trait la réalité des actes et
l'idéalité des fins)
The common approach to Chamfort’s ‘maxims’ and “anecdotes”
has been to consider them as a philosophy – and to eventually dismiss them as a
philosophy. Pellison, his nineteenth century biographer, remarks on the
similarity of temperaments that seems to exist between Chamfort and
Schopenhauer. But Chamfort was, Pellison concedes, not a systematic thinker.
The notion that a philosopher must work within a ‘system’,
which figured largely in the 19th century, still has an influence on
the definition of philosophy – in fact, the teaching of philosophy often comes
down to a puppetshow of conflicting systems – if you claim x, you are a
critical realist, and if you claim y, you are a nominalist. Etc.
Barthes was concerned with another system – the system of
ecriture. This has a lot more relevance to Chamfort. Chamfort wrote his
“Products” out of a reaction to, a consciousness of, the writerly function.
That function – which, as with all middleman positions, has a relation to the
basic one of pandering – is both under attack in the Maxims – from the
beginning, the very idea of the maxim is ridiculed as the idea of a mediocre
mind – and, inevitably, chosen as Chamfort’s instrument. What other instrument
is there? But the notion of maxim, of a rule, if only a rule of thumb in the
Repulic of Thumbs, puts us on the track of Chamfort’s sense that his writing
was political. It is to this that the
reflection tends; political scandal is the whole point of the anecdotes he carefully
amassed. When his listeners at Mme Helvetius came away from his conversation
with the sad sense of being present at an execution, it was no accident.
So, what was this politics?
Because Chamfort was intentionally freeing up his writing
from the literary – and thus the systematic – it is easy to quote him, but hard
to point to one passage or another that would provide the key to him. It is
this very freedom that “intimidates”, to use Barthes term. But to threaten
politically implies an order that can be violated, a standard from which one
can judge. And there are many passages from the Maxims that hint at this order
– that, as it were, give us the mythic foundation for the series of sacrifices,
of executions, that space themselves in
both the Maxims and the Anecdotes.
This passage from the first section of the Maxims, for
instance.
‘I have often noticed in my reading that the first movement
of those who have performed some heroic action, who have surrendered to some
generous impression, who have saved the unfortunate, run some great risk and
procured some great advantage – be it for the public or for some particulars –
I have, I say, noted that the first movement has been to refuse the
compensation one offered them. This sentiment is discovered in the heart of the
most vile men and the last class of people. What is this moral instinct that
teaches men without education that the compensation for these actions is in the
heart of he who has done them? It seems that in paying them we take from them. [Il
semble qu’en nous les payant on nous les ote]” OC 1812, 2:28
The insistence of the writen, here, is caught in that
repetition of “I have often remarked” – its way of pointing to the superfluity
of the oral, the way, in the economy of speaking, repetition serves to organize
a series that is continually disappearing, going beyond the attention of the
listener, which is strictly not needed in writing (for after all, the reader
has merely to glance back) and that appears there nevertheless to ‘glance
beyond’ the written object, to connote the theater of conversation. But the
major economic instance, here, is of course the gift – or the sacrifice. The gift – the heroic act, the generous
impulse - initiates an internal circuit in which the outward gift (the true
gift) is compensated by an inward gift (which is marked, already, as a
compensation). But it is a circuit that takes away when it pays – which is the
deficit at the very heart of payment, the free lunch that is the despised, impossible
other in the crackerbarrel wisdom of capitalism.
This is, of course, a very Rousseau-like stance. However, it
joins Rousseau to a moralist theme – of self satisfaction. Or at least of self
compensation. As in Rousseau, nature is identified with a primary process –
with spontaneity. The secondary process is that of payment. Chamfort does not,
here, reflect on the connecting link of compensation – that there must be
compensation of some kind is assumed.
The executioner’s melancholy arises from the perception that
the rupture between the regimes of compensation has corrupted us in such a way
that there is no going back. It is an irrevocable movement.
“Society is not, as is commonly believed, the development of
nature, but rather its decomposition and entire remaking. It is a second
edifice, built with the ruins of the first. We rediscover the debris with a
pleasure mixed with surprise. It is this which occasions the naïve expression
of a natural sentiment which escapes in society. It even happens that it
pleases more, if the person from whom it escapes is a rank more elevated, that
is to say, farther from nature. It charms in a king, because a king is in the
opposed extremity. It is a fragment of ancient doric or corinthian architecture
in a crude and modern edifice.”
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