I smell a rat

 

Tocqueville, like Flaubert and Kafka, had a bad case of imposter syndrome – or at least that is how I interpret the writer’s complex. He was always setting out, as a young man, on precisely defined projects in foreign countries – America, Ireland, England - and finding in the midst of them that the definition was too limiting, uninteresting, and just not for him.

Over him towered the example of Chateaubriand, to whom he was related: Tocqueville’s aunt married Chateaubriand’s brother, and as that couple perished in the Revolution, their children were brought up by Tocqueville’s parents. Thus, he very naturally became part of the salon around the Grand Old Man. So he knew how the writer’s role was at the intersection of politics and knowledge, in the broad sense – a kind of science, a kind of art.

There’s a charming letter that Tocqueville wrote to the Comtesse de Grancey (his cousin, another descendent of a family whose members died in some quantity beneath the guillotine) from Ireland in 1835. He explains that he is in Kilkenny – for what purpose, he is rather vague. It all has to do with what an anthropologist would call field work. For Tocqueville, this meant attending trials and talking to judges and lawyers, among others.

“ I came here attracted by the assizes. Not being able, myself, to judge or condemn anyone, I wanted to have the pleasure of seeing how these things are done by others.

Doesn’t this remind you of the fable of the cat who was metamorphosed into a woman, and who was surprised running after rats? For a philosopher like me, there is nothing, besides, more curious than the assizes.”

Tocqueville’s mind was well stocked with the fables of La Fontaine and the stories of Perrault. In this little sentence, something shines out: you are what you hunt. An especially wise maxim for a writer, a tribe known for self-delusion. What you hunt and how you hunt it is all out there, if you know how to look.

2.

In the recent NYRB, there’s a review by Linda Hunt the book on Robespierre by Marcel Gauchet, an author who rather fancies himself a republican in the vein of Tocqueville. Hunt is rather merciful with a book that, as she writes, seems wilfully ignorant of any new scholarship about Robespierre, or maybe any scholarship at all. Gauchet’s thesis is the conservative one: modernism, by which a jumble of events from the French revolution to the rise of the bourgeoisie, was consequent upon the “de-christianization”. Hunt begins the review in the tried and true manner of the Cold War liberals – whose style lingers on:

“Before Hitler and Stalin (and Putin), there was Maximilien Robespierre, the leader of the French Revolution during the period in 1793–1794 known as the Terror.”

Imagine writing: “Before Hitler and Stalin (and Putin) there was Thomas Jefferson…” Or, William Pitt, or Toussaint L’ouverture, etc. In Jefferson’s case, the affinities with Hitler – an entire world view shaped by racism and the need for Lebensraum, to the point of supporting ethno-cide – is pretty clear. But the stupidity of the list is really marked by the parentheses “(and Putin)”, elevating Putin to the heady company of the great murderers, when in actuality he is still well below George Bush in murderous effect. It is by such means that Cold War liberalism became the undertaker of its own principles, since if Robespierre (and Putin) equal Stalin and Hitler, the crimes of Stalin and Hitler are normalized, diminished, and whitewashed.

In any case, Hunt’s review gets better after its first sentence. And she coops Gauchet’s most sweeping thesis in a useful paragraph:

“Modern democracies, he maintains, emerged as the religious foundations of collective existence crumbled; religion did not disappear, of course, but it no longer provided the crucial legitimation for the political and social order. Modern democracies therefore face the challenge of explaining to the citizenry what holds society together in the absence of any transcendental justification.”

This strikes me as a pretty shaky thesis, although it is pretty commonplace. It depends on a sort of collective, qualitative erosion: the religious foundations “crumble” – somewhere. In the minds of the intellectuals? Of the educated class, the governors? In the ordinary life of the people? And this, too, assumes something called the “religious foundations.” While it is true that in France, in contrast to Britain (which emerged from the Puritan revolution with a closer tie to religious institutions in the ordinary life of the masses), de-Christianization as marked by the increasing disuse of Christian rituals has been closely traced by historians like Michel Voyelle, who used testaments, which classically contained a “spiritual” passage, to track the decline of Christian authority in the 18th century, it is a bit too facile to take this decline as a proof of some great skepticism concerning “transcendental justification”; it could as well be the parallel to a legitimation crisis striking the idea that certain families were proxies for and entitled to rule the state, or region, etc. Herzen, in the 19th century, derided the Russian royal family for believing that Russia was defined by a family – the family of the czar. These families – in England with Henry VIII, in France with Louis XIV, in Russia with Peter the Great – succeeded in throwing off supposedly rooted forms of religious practice in favor of others – which to my mind points to the practical foundation of what holds society together, which is the power of some established elite.

I’m not sure that many people need a transcendental justification for what holds society together. However, I am sure that some do. And this might have something to do with the story of the French Revolution. I’ve been reading Michon’s novel, The Eleven, recently. The novel centers on a painting of the Commission of Public Safety – Robespierre, St. Just, Barrere, etc. – painted by Corentin. There is no real painting named The Eleven, and no real painter named Corentin: like Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Marbot, Michon is using a fake vita as the form in which to put his story – and his quasi thesis, which is that the French Revolutionary leadership contained an awful lot of would be authors. Literature, as his narrator puts it, was taking the place of religion. Religion, here, is much more expressly the kind of thing that happens when people pay tithes, go to church, and are preached to and directed by minions of the church, priests and such. Michon is most concerned with literature as we informally know it – but for me, literature is an effect of media, and it is media that is truly working as the underground mole against the ancien regime. In France in 1789, in other places like Russia in 1917… As Thomas Mann once put it, the ancien regime ended in 1914, not 1789. It was not a transcendental justification, but the formation of the time zone of the contemporaneous – a “we” in time – that, to my mind, defines society among its members.

Which gets us back to the cat, the woman and the rat – for doesn’t this demonstrate how what you hunt and how you hunt it defines who you are – what woman you are – under appearances? To me, the rat is not the transcendental justification of the social at all. And when somebody else’s rat is put in those terms…

I smell a rat.