I was reading Madame de Stael’s Considerations on the principle Events of the French Revolution – as one does – and found this perfectly formed sentence that rang my chimes. De Stael is explaining the predominance of a Richelieu or a Mazarin, who though foreigners came to possess such absolute power in France, and she produces this perfectly balanced sentence:
« Les individus de cette nation sont trop vifs pour s'astreindre à la persévé- rance qu'il faut pour être despote ; mais celui qui a cette persévérance est très-redoutable dans un pays où, la loi n'ayant jamais régné, l’on ne juge de rien que par l'événement. »
« Les individus de cette nation sont trop vifs pour s'astreindre à la persévé- rance qu'il faut pour être despote ; mais celui qui a cette persévérance est très-redoutable dans un pays où, la loi n'ayant jamais régné, l’on ne juge de rien que par l'événement. »
Translation: The individuals of this nation are too lively to submit to the perseverance it takes to be a despot; but he who has that perseverance is very formidable in a land where, the law having never reigned, one judges only by the event."
De Stael’s Considerations, according to the introduction by Laurent Theis, made a large stir when they appeared in April, 1818, the year after her death.. Remusat wrote that it was an event on par with the appearance, in 1802, of Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity, De Stael had died in 1817, as the White Terror was abating, but while the Reaction to the Revolution was still strong.
By the time she died, she was a force apart, a real force in Europe. Having, through her father, the fabulously rich banker Jacques Necker, entry to all the great houses of the Ancien Regime before the start of the Revolution, and being a brilliant woman – a quick study who instinctively combined the culture of sensibility and the ideals of reason in her own bearing in the world – she had made herself almost singlehandedly (shout out here to Benjamin Constant, her sometimes lover) the transitional figure between 18th century revolutionary principles and 19th century liberalism.
It is from that perspective – a classical liberalism that was still magmatic, still unclassical – that she surveyed the Revolution.
This, to her, meant having a strong sense of the France of the Old Regime – a France with its multiple terrors and wars, and its striking inability to produce a governmental form that would legitimate the social hierarchy by which it was ostensibly ruled.
Liberalism, which gives scope to inequality of wealth and power as an inexpungable part of human society, and preferable to the attempt to abolish them -an attempt that is both violent and futile – has long had a hard time with justice. If justice before the law is, in theory, where all citizens are equal, the practical situation of justice forms not an exception to the rule of inequality but a reflection of it. How could it be otherwise? The third power of government is based on a theoretical miracle, even as liberalism's great charm as a political system is the acknowledgement that miracles don't happen.
“One judges only by the event” – by what the powerful do, not the rules to which they are theoretically bound. In this, I think we can see reflected not only French history, but American history too. In our late neo-liberal hour, it is characteristic, maybe diagnostic, that the breakdown of all parts of the justice system – from police enforcement to the almost comic marketplace in lawyers that gives the rich a headstart to the imbecility and political ambitons of the judges to the inhumanity of the jails – we are witnessing something like an Ancien Regime moment. De Stael’s idea of the outsider who gets inside and becomes a despot is a pretty prophetic description of the extreme right leader – Trump and Bolsanaro being the latest examples. These leaders thrive when the system of justice unwinds as completely as they have unwound in the U.S. Surely among the multiple reasons that Obama was succeeded by Trump is the Obama administration’s idea that punishing big businessmen and businesses was an economically bad idea – in essence, giving their seal to the oligarchy. The Chickenshit club of the Justice department – as Jesse Elsinger called it in his book – casts its shadow today. Who among us thinks that the scoundrels at the top, the Sam Bankman-Frieds, are going to receive the same treatment, the same punishments as some black 19 year old accused of selling an ounce of crack? Nobody. The very idea is laughable. The whole of the legal profession exists to make that a no-go. Les Miserables, dressed up in American popular culture, is going on every day in every city in America, and we all know it.
Events ride mankind, and always will. But rules soften events, make them easier riders. As the rules cease to apply, we all feel the spurs in our flanks, drawing blood. They will ride us to death.
No comments:
Post a Comment