an ass festival to start things off

Oh – if only I had the wings of angels, which are made of gold and good for purchases in most shopping centers and stores! But I have human limbs, and flesh is worth shit, so I bend over texts and correct them. I make suggestions. I must slave and bugger my own imagination, and fall behind every 8 ball that I set up. I would like to be the blogger equivalent of Babe Ruth, pointing to the stands, waiting for the next pitch. But this is not going to happen. I am, rather, the equivalent of some Pinter vaudevillian, full of bile and tags.

Still, I am a Sagittarian, and thus stubborn as a mule – or a jackass. I do want to keep going in this thread. And jackasses are, as a matter of fact, the subject of this post.

I have already written about asinine philosophy. The thread I am aching to pursue – the growth of police forces in the nineteenth century – should start, I think, with the story of a jackass.

The year is 1793. In Lyon, the forces of counterrevolution briefly seized the city. French soldiers loyal to the Convention have brought that freshet of the ancien regime down. During the brief period of white rule, some of Lyon’s most prominent Jacobins were cut down. The Convention sends two representatives to oversee the punishment of the town – Joseph Fouché and Collot d’Herbois, who take the post together to Lyon on November 7, 1793 (17 Brumaire).

Who were these two? Although Fouché had cast his lot with the Jacobin, he was not an enragé. In Nantes, where he grew up, he was trained in theology – which meant, in 1789, that he believe in precisely nothing. His real passion was balloons – but the revolution was at the door in Nantes. As Louis Madelin notes, he first thrust himself into prominence by communicating with Brissot – who, as we observed in last week, was almost certainly, at one time in his life, a police informer. But Brissot was now, of course, a power – forming a clique, with Condercet and Paine, among others. Brissot had particularly come out against slavery:

“The president of the club of the friends of the Constitution believed he was able to felicitate Brissot in the name of the society. Great movements in the city, where the trade in blacks constituted for many of the merchant marine a lucrative commerce; where – on the other side, more than one bourgeois – including Fouché – had plantations in Saint-Domingue, or counted friends there among the colonists that emancipation ruined. Before the general emotion, Fouche didn‘t hesitate: he retracted…”

And so Fouché, with the soul of Julien Sorel, advanced in the network of the Jacobins. Collot d’Herbois was different. Fouché’s biographer is suitably scathing about this character:

"An old actor, Collot had retained that character of noisy vanity, yet earth to earth, applied to little things, capable of a sensibility ceaselessly shocked by things, those manifestations of violent sentiments, often false, but sometimes so tragic, that he ended up, like a good ham, imposing on his own self, no longer discerning in himself the true from the false and the mask from nature. For the rest, a histrion as much as a tragedian, he passed from tears to laughter, amusing himself by terrifying the Jacobins by his indignant arias and turning about and making everybody laugh with his routines in bad taste. In the end, a middling ham, thrust into too vast a scene with a role in which they left him to figure out for himself his miserable improvisations. Add to this that he drank and ate, amused himself vulgarly, always drunk, quickly becoming an alcoholic, entertaining himself, as a stylish amateur of the backscene, with gourmet meals after playing the great scenes, and mixing with the drunks from capital wines the applause of the common seats.”

The French revolution, like all true revolutions, effortlessly created myths. -Or no, not effortlessly - but the effort is hidden behind the libidinal tugging on events, as in an animated cartoon in which, from an inkwell, there emerges a potent drop, that shakes itself into a figure, who takes up a pen and draws in all the parts of himself that he needs after fining his hand. As we have been emphasizing, the zone of adventure - not defined or captured by the grid of vocations or classes - exists as the reservoir of the modern, even as the modern devotes an increasing amount of time trying to repress that zone. And so these two, like Hermes and Dionysos, came to Lyon. The secret policeman and the actor – a couple that has had such a long, long career in our very lives! Haven’t they masturbated and betrayed us until we hardly exist any more?

But I wanted to get to the jackass. The government in Paris had made a few helpful suggestions about razing Lyon to the ground – but the secret policeman was certainly not going to do that. Fouché was the first in a long line of modern secret policemen who preserve, behind a career of crime, certain scruples. Beria, according to legend, finally pulled the plug on Stalin. And what better tool to do down a tyrant than his secret agent? That is, from the point of view of Nemesis. What eventually happened, as we know, was a horror. At a certain point, they simply lined up Lyonnais, in chains, and plowed them down with cannonshot – because there were too many to exterminate via firing squad.

Fouché’s biographer insists that, at first, Fouché thought he had devised a middle way.

"Before the ceremony, prelude ordered by the ex-oratarien [Fouché], one saw the two proconsuls go through the town, followed by a group armed with axes and picks, attack.. the crosses and statues, to disinfect the churches one by one, chasing out the constituional clergy and pillaging the altars. The old cult abolished with its relics and signs, one saw it emerge once again. The bust of Chalier [a murdered Jacobin], a savior god, appeared carried on a tricolor palanquin, flanked by an urn in which, by a pious illusion, one pretended to carry his ashes. The group stumbled along surrounded by a cohort that shouted to all of terrified Lyon, down with the aristos! Up with the republic! Up with the guillotine! Patriots followed carrying urns and chalices rifled from altars, and an ass covered with a cape and crowned with a mitre. Tied to his tail was a crucifix, a bible and the gospel. The three representatives of the republic were there, Collot, Laporte and Fouché, giving an official air to this irreligious ceremony. They went through the devastated religious city, and came to the place de Terraux. There they knelt before the bust of Chalier, then they spoke. Collot, swollen and solemn, mewed out a honorable amends, of which the originality was disputable. Savior God, see at your feet the nation lying on its face, asking for your pardon for the impious assassination of the best of men…. Manes of Chalier, be venged!… Fouché wept, you are no longer here, Chalier… [Laporte] was not used to either the stage or the podium, hesitated, and then said, death to the aristos. After this debauch of eloquence, a brazier was lit, a crucifix and a gospel was burnt, and the ass drank out of the calice extended to him.”

After this, the ass festival in Zarathustra is the height of sanity.

Marx and Malthus

The two people who have taught me the most about reading Marx over the last couple of years are a., Amie, whose essay on the German Ideology graced this blog (with a bonus pic of Bliss!), and b., N Pepperell at Rough Theory, whose blogposts are such excellent guides to reading Capital that they make fish sing and cats bark. And she is back, with this post about Marx and Malthus.

paper dolls

Fly, informer, spy, confidential agent, double agent, rat, louse, Schlamasse, squeak, squeeler. In 19th century England, it was the universal opinion that the French invented the spy system. We know that, at least for Europe, Napoleon invented the police system. Stendhal and Hazlitt’s Napoleon, the bringer of light, was perhaps the single most important figure in the modern history of European policing, since in the territories France conquered, and those governments which it controlled, Napoleon insisted on a modern police force. He himself had re-organized the urban gendarmerie under Fouche, and instituted a tighter police force in the countryside – and these innovations he pressed upon Saxony, Bavaria, the various Italian principalities. Under Napoleon, it is true, the gendarmerie were more militarized than they came to be by mid-century – that is, where they remained. But Prussia, that excellent copier of a state, soon was instituting its own urban and rural police forces.

“… who is there that disputes that intelligence respecting plots against the State in nine cases out often must arrive through polluted channels It can only be obtained from repentant traitors from accomplices or from informers Though there may be those whose minds are so philosophically turned that they wish all discoveries to be providential rather than employ such agents still I confess I must hold it prudent to employ human means to maintain human institutions.” – George Canning.

The period between the fall of Napoleon and the first reformist Whig government, in England – from 1815 to 1830, about – saw the reaction swallowed up by the new system. Stendhal, of course, saw this and recorded it in the Red and the Black – the spirit of Julien Sorel, who hides his reading of Napoleon and assumes a piety that nobody believes and everybody expects, brooded over Europe. As Napoleon’s police had, originally, mixed politics and security against crimes of property and person, so, too, did the successor police organizations. Vidocq is, famously, a sort of police god, a sort of Hermes of detectives, who crosses quite easily from criminal to cop and back.

“In what way of business were you your connection began or your began with Mr Thistlewood and Mr Watson and the other prisoners? I was in the figure making way. What do you mean by the figure making way? Such as figures for children what they call paper dolls which I took up myself? Where did you live At No 5 Newton street Holborn? That was your actual employment when your acquaintance with the prisoners began? It was. Did you not state to some of the prisoners that you were in great distress when your acquaintance began with them first? Yes I did. Were you in great distress? Yes I was. Were you ever in commitment before this time? No. Never. Upon no charge whatever? Commitment do you say? Í.. Yes I was. Were you ever at such a place as Guildford in the county of Surrey? Yes. How many times have you been in commitment or in custody before the present occasion? Twice." – Testimony of John Castle, police spy, in the Spa Fields Riot trial of James Watson.

Paper dolls. This, to borrow a term from Barthes, is the punctum, the extra reality of the surrealists, the fingerprint of Nemesis – the detail that both calls for and resists symbolization. A clue that is more than a link in the chain of causes, and less than a proof of anything. The material of history that resists the great suck and binding of universal history. What the gods do not know - our mortality. Something in it won’t give itself to meaning, to the police or the judges. And yet, of course, the judges and the police continue, they go on. John Castle, in this trial, was exposed as a government provocateur, who most likely got money from Lord Sidmouth’s minions, or some extra-governmental group formed by the government, spent it to make himself popular, and urged on the riot that ensued at Spa Fields. With the riot in hand, the government could pick up and prosecute the radicals it had targeted and hang them.

“But Adrastea holds a scale before even the true romantic character: she draws and line and speaks, saying: no further! Hermes was sent before the divine Achilles that he not misuse the slain body of his enemy, who was now only a man, a son and a brother. Every romantically happy person feels the rule in himself: not over the Rubicon! Here is the border. It is well when he recognizes or has a sentiment of this feeling in himself. We never love a hero more than when he knows how to measure himself in his fortune [Glueck] and uses it well. Then we, with him, feel that intensity of fortune; the Nemesis in us prophesies his happy future. To the eventurer [Ebenthuer] who doesn’t know this, to the Alcibiades who shortens the tails of all the dogs and overturns all the statues to Hermes so that all of Athens will speak of him, as with so many other of the Pucks of history who ride here and there in midday, without seeing that their fairy hour is long gone, to them we can’t even say farewell – for they vanish.” - Herder, Adrastea

And what happened to those against whom Castle testified?

The movies deceive us. The noose is knotted, the drop is sprung, the hanged man dies. But no, this is not how the hanged man dies. In Gatrell’s the Hanging Tree, he tells of the end of those another radical against whom a government spy testified in the Cato Street conspiracy case. Ings told the hangman “Now old gentleman, finish me tidily: pull the rope tighter, it may slip.” But:

“These precautions did little good, however. There was a common pattern in what ensued. As an early nineteenth century broadside representatively decalred, the noose of one man’s halter “having slipped to the back part of the neck, it was full ten minutes before he was dead.’So too at the very last Tyburn hanging in 1783: ‘the noose of the halter having slipped to the back part of the neck, it was longer than usual before he was dead… Ings struggled on the end of his rope for five minutes before he was still.”

Five minutes, ten minutes. Governor Wall, another spy spotted radical, fifteen minutes. Let the camera linger on that. Let five minutes go by as a man or woman is strangled by a slippery rope, hands tied behind him or her. The uterus bled, the oons of a man, his urine and shit, were expelled. And such shame was mixed with fortune, such Rubicons were crossed, as the culture of happiness was founded on the tombs of the adventurers.

The tree of death

Flies.

Les mouches, from les Mouchards.

“In defense of Brissot, it should be remembered that "spying" for the police could take the form of reporting on the mood of certain sections or milieux of the city rather than betraying friends. Spies, often called mouches (a term apparently derived from the name of the no- torious sixteenth-century agent Antoine Mouchy), buzzed like flies around the cafes and public places where gossip was to be gathered.”

In Robert Darnton’s essay about whether Brissot was, as his Jacobin enemies claimed, a police spy, Darnton weighs the evidence and concludes that probably he was. In that parenthesis he affirms a doubtful etymology. It is an interesting case study, this etymology. Voltaire spread the idea that Mouchy, who was not an agent, but a theologian/inquisitor, gave birth to the many maggoted mouchards, or spies – mouches being the word for fly – that buzzed around and gathered information for the police. Abbe Coblet, in the nineteenth century, should have put a stop to this etymological myth. He showed that the mouchard and the mouche were pure Picardy inventions, coming from the found of the French language. Even those who’d doubted the Mouchy etymology had claimed that in Latin, the word musca, fly, was used for police spies. But as Coblet points out, there is a world of difference between those who trap the words you speak and those who trap you. The musca was a gossip, the mouche was a spy whose delicate task it was not only to report the news to the police, but often to “encourage” the news.

Mouchy lived in the sixteenth century, when the religious wars started a whole new era in the secret history, or history of secrets, that exist under our history. It is a sewer of betrayal and tears, and it feeds the tree of death – the gibbet or the guillotine.

Nemesis lives in the sewers.

The other side of the happiness culture is the culture of fear. We cannot dispense with or minimize fear and its production when trying to get a sense of the human limit.

According to V.A.C. Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree, some 30,000 people were condemned to death in England and Wales between 1770 and 1830. 7,000, he estimates, were actually executed. This compares favorably with the estimated 73,000 executed between 1530 and 1630 – the secret religious war – but very badly with the number hung between 1701 and 1750. In the 1820s, Gatrell says, the hanged break down like this: two thirds were hung for property crimes, a fifth for murder, a twentieth for attempted murder, and the same percent for rape and sodomy. By the strange fruit of the tree shall ye know them. As Gatrell points out, while capital punishment was becoming extremely rare in Prussia, Russia, Scotland and Ireland, in England and Wales, it was enjoying a golden age.

Let’s end this post with a quote from George Cruikshank:

“At that time I resided in Dorset Street Salisbury Square Fleet Street and had occasion to go early one morning to a house near the Bank of England and in returning home between eight and nine o clock down Ludgate Hill and seeing a number of persons looking up the Old Bailey I looked that way myself and saw several human beings hanging on the gibbet opposite Newgate prison and to my horror two of these were women and upon inquiring what these women had been hung for was informed that it was for passing forged one pound notes The fact that a poor woman could be put to death for such a minor offence had a great effect upon me and I at that moment determined if possible to put a stop to this shocking destruction of life for merely obtaining a few shillings by fraud and well knowing the habits of the low class of society in London I felt quite sure that in very many cases the rascals who forged the notes induced these poor ignorant women to go into the gin shops to get something to drink and thus pass the notes and hand them the change.”

a traveller in a wood

Both Gilles Deleuze and Stephen Gould had trouble with structures that were perfectly tree-like. The central trunk of a theme, and then subsidiary branches, diminishing towards the top. Gould objected to the old tree of evolution, which put man on the very top of the tree (although his superiority consisted in coming down from the tree altogether – and yet, in dreams, yes, he wants to be at the top). Deleuze objected to universal history erecting its tree on every shore of every ocean, Europe, or the West, on top, encouraging the other branches to follow – and in the meantime, boosting their fruit. Such were the problematic trees.

Of course, both wrote in the shadow of the flaming Christmas trees, Yggdrasil, of the great echt deutsch Christmases remembered by Sebald, ah the advent calendars with the pictures of ss men, ah the chocolate swastiksa, the address by Rudolf Hoess with the family gathered around the tree, all hope and purity upon which were hung, as ornaments, the fates of the peoples, Jews, Gypsies, Ukranians, Serbs, burning away until Goethe’s death cry rang out – more light! – and so it was, so it was, trees of flame lighting up all the cities, Hamburg, Hannover, Leipzig, Dresden, all must celebrate Christmas and the tree, all must be part of the communal ash, all must sacrifice. Gunter Grass knew what he was doing when he made Santa the Gasman in the Tin Drum.

Still – the human limit is arboreal. Two trees stand in this wood – the tree of happiness and the tree of this world. Branch enjambs with branch. By 1815, the planting is dome. Comes the growing.

And me, the chronicler of this two tree forest that grows over the face of the world – I’ve gone from trunk to branch and root to twig, tree drunk, sap blessed. As the artificial paradise is laid down (and what is paradise without the tree?), those in the branches experience the most curious feeling of ilinx – as though the world were not under the trees at all, but somewhere in a crook of the branches. This is the effect of the artificial paradise, and it is compared by all who resist it – from Marx to Tolstoy to G.B. Shaw, among so many others – to intoxication, vertigo, opium poisoning.

I have a long way to go. The branches are so thickly clustered that I can’t see the stars.

Further notes on solitude

... I started out last month positing a tentative binary – individualism vs. solitude – that I took from Rousseau. It seemed to me then that Rousseau could not bring together his view of civil society founded on a fundamental equality and his view of the continuing dependence of women The contradiction imploded in his narratives. And the move, late in Rousseau’s life, to elevate solitude seems to me to be a political move, or hold the seeds of a politics. Contra Todorov, Rousseau did not represent his solitude as an exception. It was, potentially, the right to solitude, the development of solitude, that provides us with a whole new view of the relationship between the self and society. Solitude is a social development.

This made me wonder about the right to solitude of women. Solitude, as I am trying to understand it, is not the right of the property holder who can shut the door on the public sphere and stay at home. That kind of privacy does fit with an emerging individualism. But solitude has aspects that are strikingly different from the ideal individual of the individualist ethos.

I’ve held solitude on the margins, so to speak, as I’ve been looking at the culture of respectability, and the question of the condition of England – that is, why England’s greater political freedom was embedded in a palpable moral narrowness, as Herzen, among many other foreign observers, noted. A longstanding story about Britain claims that it was the first developed country to develop a strong, modern sense of privacy. Privacy, self-improvement, order were the hallmarks of respectability. De Stael, for one, attributed the English excellence in the novel to the greater role played in England by the private life. To her, the novel introduces epic proportions into the bedroom and the study, so to speak.

Now, are these rooms of someone’s own the equivalent of solitude?
This is where my binary should help me a bit. I want to associate solitude with extremes, with limit cases – with the sublime that Edgeworth condemns. The extremes are either the retreat from enlightenment to the archaic, or the leap over the enlightenment to the revolutionary. The equal right to solitude, from the point of view of the culture of respectability, muddies the divisions between the public and private sphere. It brings the question of equality, which is the question of justice, into the dimension of how we are to live, here, on our beds, in our chairs, as well as in our work, in our laundry tubs, offices, mines. A right to solitude, rather than a right to property, would give us a much different political discourse, and a much different sense of where politics is going on, and what it is for.

Can solitude bear this weight?

….
The England de Stael sees in 1793 and in 1814 was, perhaps, passing through its most European phase. It isn’t surprising that German philosophy, sentimentalism, and romantic poetry were creating a cult of solitude, making it one of the central motifs of romantic poetry. Peter Conrad’s in a brilliant essay I need to discuss has claimed that the movement in English literature is to pastoralize epic themes, to release the poem from the heroic in order to celebrate the private. But I think this use of the private, like de Stael’s, is a way of drawing a division between the public and private sphere that goes against the grain of solitude.

In fact, as the modernists of the nineteenth century came to recognize, solitude is more naturally connected with the crowd – as Hoffmann, Poe and Baudelaire saw.

oh I assure you, cried she, he is the best of men

This letter was sent from Juniper Hall Dorking Surrey in 1793:

“When J learned to read english J begun by milton to know all or renounce at all in once J follow the same system in writing my first english letter to Miss burney after such an enterprize nothing can affright me J feel for her so tender a friendship that it melts my admiration inspires my heart with hope of her indulgence and impresses me with the idea that in a tongue even unknown J could express sentiments so deeply felt my servant will return for a french answer J intreat miss burney to correct the words but to preserve the sense of that card best compliments to my dear protectress Madame Phillipe.”

The writer is Madame de Staël, who is learning English by reading Milton. Perhaps a method that is not as abstruse as it sounds, for who is more Latinate than Milton? And by our etymological roots shall we embrace each other, brothers and sisters.

I began this thread by thinking of an encounter that did not take place: the one between de Staël and Austen. We know that Austen was invited to meet de Staël in September 1814 and refused – although we know this from Austen’s brother, whose memoir of her is intended to project an image of such respectability that she could be excused for the offence against it that consists in being a genius.

The visit in 1814 was the second time de Staël visited England. The first, when the note was written, happened because her lover, Narbonne, had chosen to exile himself in England. As it happened, her coming to see Narbonne put her in proximity to another lover, Tallyrand. Fanny Burney, in 1793, was famous as the author of Evilena and Cecilia. As a girl, she’d known Samuel Johnson. As a woman, she was to know Napoleon Bonaparte. But in 1793, she was not to know de Staël for too long, after Burney’s father disclosed that de Staël was Narbonne’s lover. .

One would think that Burney’s father’s influence would not be so decisive to a woman who was, as Burney was, 41. In fact, meeting the Juniper Hall circle led to the daring act that divided her life in two and got her out from under her father’s wishes – for among them there was a genteel but poor French soldier named D’Arblay, a former aide de camp to Lafayette. He tutored her. He married her. Her father did not attend the wedding.

Her letters about the émigré set are fascinating, and revolve around her point of view:

“New systems I fear in states are always dangerous if not wicked. Grievance by grievance wrong by wrong must only be assailed and breathing time allowed to old prejudices and old habits between all that is done….”

Therre is a famous passage in a letter from Burney, one of those anecdotes so beloved by Calasso – perhaps he includes it in The Ruins of Karsch. At the height of Burney’s fascination with de Stael, she attended a dinner – this was after the execution of Louis XVI had depressed the spirits of the émigré group, who saw it as the end of their own lives. It was in the shadow of the execution of the King that Burney’s romance with D’Arblay was enacted –perhaps it was only through the tragic glamour cast on the group by a grief at once so public and so existentially and financially devastating that allowed the 41 year old Burney, the obedient daughter whose sense of respectability had been reinforced, as by Pavlovian shocks, when she attended George III’s wife at court, to burn down her scruples and actually marry the poor French officer. In any case, she sat next to de Stael at the table:

”M. de Talleyrand opened at last with infinite wit and capacity Madame de Stael whispered me How do you like him Not very much I answered but I do not know him Oh I assure you cried she he is the best of the men.
I was happy not to agree… “

…

De Staël was a writer in the sense that Voltaire was a writer – she mixed her experience into her writing and her writing into her experience so as to make a sort of scroll of her existence. Unlike Voltaire, however, whose observations were still rooted in a Plutarchian sense of character, de Staël had a sense of larger groupings – she had a sociological imagination, rather than a moraliste’s. She was one of the first person to understand literature not as an ornament of character or a fund of moral observations, but as a form of social self-reflection. Perhaps she owes part of this idea to Herder. In 1793, she had not yet formed it. While the king was on trial in Paris and Narbonne was considering going back and testifying for him – which would have put an end to Narbonne - de Staël was writing on the passions. The stars form their constellations for the wise shepherd, and themes fall helplessly into speech on the page when one has a Gnostic sense of history: de Staël read part of her book to Fanny, the part entitled: On happiness.