Guy Debord
retour
Panegyric
Volume I
“Panegyric means more than eulogy. Eulogy no doubt includes praise of
the
person, but it does not exclude a certain criticism, a certain blame.
Panegyric
involves neither blame nor criticism.”
LITTRÉ, Dictionnaire de la langue française.
“Why ask my lineage? The generations of men are like those of leaves.
The wind
casts the leaves to the ground, but the fertile forest brings forth
others, and
spring comes round again. So it is that the human race is born and
passes away.”
Iliad, Canto VI.
I
“As for his plan, we profess to be able to demonstrate that there is no
such
thing, that he writes almost at random, mixing up facts, reporting them
incoherently and out of order; confounding, when he treats of one era,
that
which pertains to another; disdaining to justify either his accusations
or his
eulogies; adopting without examination and the critical spirit so
necessary to a
historian the false judgements of prejudice, rivalry or enmity, and the
exaggerations of ill humour or malevolence; attributing to some people
actions
and to others speeches that are incompatible with their characters;
never citing
any witness but himself or any other authority but his own assertions.”
GENERAL GOURGAUD, Examen critique de l’ouvrage de M. le comte Philippe
de Ségur.
ALL MY LIFE I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in
society, and
immense destruction; I have joined in these troubles. Such
circumstances would
no doubt suffice to prevent the most transparent of my acts or thoughts
from
ever being universally approved. But, I do believe, several of them
could have
been misunderstood.
Clausewitz, at the beginning of his history of the campaign of 1815,
gives this
summary of his method: “In every strategical critique, the essential
thing is to
put oneself exactly in the position of the actors; it is true that this
is often
very difficult.” The difficult thing is to know “all the circumstances
in which
the actors find themselves” at a given moment, in order to be in
position to
judge soundly the series of their choices in the conduct of their war:
how they
accomplished what they did and what they might have been able to do
differently.
So, above all, it is necessary to know what they wanted and, of course,
what
they believed; without forgetting what they were ignorant of. And what
they were
ignorant of was not only the result still to come of their own
operations
colliding with the operations that were opposed to them, but also much
of what
was even then making its weight felt against them, in the disposition
or
strength of the enemy camp — which, however, remained hidden from them.
And
basically they did not know the exact value they should place on their
own
forces, until these forces could make their value known precisely at
the moment
of their employment — whose issue, moreover, sometimes changes that
value just
as much as it tests it.
A person who has led an action, the great consequences of which were
felt at a
distance, has often been nearly alone in his knowledge of some rather
important
aspects, which diverse reasons have encouraged him to keep hidden,
while other
aspects have since been forgotten, simply because those times have
passed or the
people who knew them are dead. And the testimony even of the living is
not
always accessible. If one person does not really know how to write,
another is
constrained by more current interests or ambitions, a third could be
afraid, and
the last risks burdening himself with the worry of protecting his own
reputation. As will be seen, I am not hindered by any of these
obstacles.
Speaking then as coolly as possible about things that have aroused so
much
passion, I am going to say what I have done. Assuredly, a great many —
if not
all — unjust rebukes will find themselves at that moment swept away
like dust.
And I am convinced that the broad lines of the history of my times will
stand
out more clearly.
I will be compelled to go into some details. That could take me rather
a long
way; I do not deny the magnitude of the task. I will take whatever time
is
necessary. Even so, I will not say, as Sterne did when beginning to
write
Tristram Shandy, that I will “go on leisurely, writing and publishing
two
volumes of my life every year . . . if I am suffered to go on quietly,
and can
make a tolerable bargain with my bookseller.” For I surely do not want
to commit
myself to publishing two volumes a year or even promise any less
precipitous
rhythm.
My method will be very simple. I will tell of what I have loved; and,
in this
light, everything else will become evident and make itself well enough
understood.
“Deceitful time hides its traces from us, but it goes by, quickly,”
says the
poet Li Po, who adds: “Perhaps you still retain the cheerfulness of
youth — but
your hair is already white; and what is the use of complaining?” I
don’t intend
to complain about anything, and certainly not about the way I have been
able to
live.
Much less do I wish to hide its traces, when I know them to be
exemplary. It has
always been rare for someone to set out to say exactly what the life he
has
known really was, because of the subject’s many difficulties. And this
will be
perhaps even more invaluable at present, in an era when so many things
have
changed at the astounding speed of catastrophes; in an era about which
one can
say that almost every point of reference and measure has suddenly been
swept
away, along with the very ground on which the old society was built.
In any case, it is easy for me to be sincere. I find nothing that can
cause me
the least embarrassment on any subject. I have never believed in the
received
values of my contemporaries, and today no one takes cognizance of any
of them
any more. Lacenaire, perhaps still too scrupulous, exaggerated, it
seems to me,
the responsibility he had directly incurred in the violent deaths of a
very
small number of people: “Even with the blood that covers me, I think
I’m worth
more than most of the men I’ve met,” he wrote to Jacques Arago. (“But
you were
there with us, Monsieur Arago, on the barricades in 1832. Remember the
Cloître
Saint-Merry. . . . You don’t know what poverty is, Monsieur
Arago.You’ve never
been hungry,” the workers on the June 1848 barricades soon answered not
him but
his brother, who had come like a Roman to harangue them on the
injustice of
rebelling against the laws of the Republic.)
There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting
from
oneself, chosen as the centre of the world; one finds oneself thus
capable of
condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful
chatter. One has
only to mark off the precise limits that necessarily restrain this
authority:
its proper place in the course of time and in society; what one has
done and
what one has known, one’s dominant passions. “Who then can write the
truth, if
not those who have felt it?” The author of the most beautiful Memoirs
of the
seventeenth century, who has not escaped the inept reproach of having
spoken of
his conduct without maintaining the appearance of the coldest
objectivity, made
an apt observation concerning truth: in the quotation above, he
supported the
opinion of the Président de Thou, according to whom “the only
true histories are
those that have been written by men who have been sincere enough to
speak truly
about themselves.”
One might be surprised that I implicitly seem to compare myself, here
and there,
on a point of detail, with some great mind of the past or simply with
personalities who have been noted historically. One would be wrong. I
do not
claim to resemble any other person, and I believe that the present era
is hardly
comparable to the past. But many figures from the past, in all their
extreme
diversity, are still quite commonly known. They represent, in brief, a
readily
accessible index of human behaviour or propensities. Those who do not
know who
they were can easily find out; and the ability to make oneself
understood is
always a virtue in a writer.
I will have to make rather extensive use of quotations — never, I
believe, to
lend authority to a particular argument, but only to show fully of what
stuff
this adventure and myself are made. Quotations are useful in periods of
ignorance or obscurantist beliefs. Allusions, without quotation marks,
to other
texts that one knows to be very famous, as in classical Chinese poetry,
Shakespeare, and Lautréamont, should be reserved for times
richer in minds
capable of recognizing the original phrase and the distance its new
application
has introduced. Today, when irony itself is not always understood,
there is the
risk of the phrase being confidently attributed to oneself — and,
moreover,
being hastily and incorrectly reproduced. The antique ponderousness of
exact
quotations will be compensated for, I hope, by the quality of the
selection.
They will appear when appropriate in this text; no computer could have
provided
me with this pertinent variety.
Those who wish to write quickly a piece about nothing that no one will
read
through even once, whether in a newspaper or a book, extol with much
conviction
the style of the spoken language, because they find it much more
modern, direct,
facile. They themselves do not know how to speak. Neither do their
readers, the
language actually spoken under modern conditions of life being socially
reduced
to its indirect representation through the suffrage of the media, and
including
around six or eight turns of phrase repeated at every moment and fewer
than two
hundred words, most of them neologisms, with the whole thing submitted
to
replacement by one third every six months. All this favours a certain
rapid
solidarity. On the contrary, I for my part am going to write without
affectation
or fatigue, as if it were the most natural and easiest thing in the
world, the
language that I have learned and, in most circumstances, spoken. It’s
not up to
me to change it. The Gypsies rightly contend that one is never
compelled to
speak the truth except in one’s own language; in the enemy’s language,
the lie
must reign. Another advantage: by referring to the vast corpus of
classical
texts that have appeared in French throughout the five centuries before
my
birth, but especially in the last two, it will always be easy to
translate me
adequately into any future idiom, even when French has become a dead
language.
Who, in our century, could not be aware that he who finds it in his
interest
instantly to affirm whatever he is told will care nothing for how he
tells it.
The immense growth in the means of modern domination has so marked the
style of
its pronouncements that if the understanding of the progress of the
sombre
reasoning of power was for a long time a privilege of people of real
intelligence, it has now inevitably become familiar to even the most
dull-
witted. It is in this sense that the truth of this report on my times
will be
rather well proved by its style. The tone of this text will in itself
be
sufficient guarantee, for everyone will understand that it is only by
dint of
having lived in such a way that one can have the expertise for this
kind of
account.
It is known for certain that the Peloponnesian War took place. But it
is only
through Thucydides that we know of its implacable development and its
lessons.
No cross-checking is possible; but neither was it necessary, because
the
veracity of the facts, like the coherence of the thought, was so well
imposed on
his contemporaries and near posterity that any other witness felt
discouraged
when faced with the difficulty of introducing a different
interpretation of the
events, or even quibbling over a detail.
And I believe one will likewise have to rest content with that in the
history I
am now going to present. For no one, for a long time to come, will have
the
audacity to undertake to demonstrate, on any aspect, the contrary of
what I will
say, whether it is a matter of finding the slightest inexact element in
the
facts or of maintaining another point of view on the subject.
Conventional as this procedure might be judged, I think that here it is
not
useless first of all to sketch out clearly the beginning: the date and
the
general conditions under which began a story that I will not fail to
abandon
subsequently to all the confusion demanded by its theme. It may
reasonably be
thought that many things appear in youth, which stay with you for a
long time. I
was born in 1931, in Paris. My family’s fortune was at that time
shattered by
the consequences of the world economic crisis that had first appeared
in America
a little earlier; and the remnants did not seem capable of lasting much
beyond
my majority, which is what in fact happened. So, then, I was born
virtually
ruined. I was not, properly speaking, ignorant of the fact that I
should not
expect an inheritance, and in the end I did not receive one. I simply
did not
grant the slightest importance to those rather abstract questions about
the
future. Thus, throughout the course of my adolescence, if I went slowly
but
inevitably towards a life of adventure, with my eyes open, it can none
the less
be said that I had my eyes open then on this question, as well as on
most
others. I could not even think of studying for one of the learned
professions
that lead to holding down a job, for all of them seemed completely
alien to my
tastes or contrary to my opinions. The people I respected more than
anyone alive
were Arthur Cravan and Lautréamont, and I knew perfectly well
that all their
friends, if I had consented to pursue university studies, would have
scorned me
as much as if I had resigned myself to exercising an artistic activity;
and if I
could not have those friends, I certainly would not stoop to consoling
myself
with others. A doctor of nothing, I have firmly kept myself apart from
all
semblance of participation in the circles that then passed for
intellectual or
artistic. I admit that my merit in this respect was well tempered by my
great
laziness, as well as by my very meagre capacities for confronting the
work of
such careers.
Never to have given more than very slight attention to questions of
money, and
absolutely no place to the ambition of holding some brilliant function
in
society, is a trait so rare among my contemporaries that it will no
doubt
sometimes be considered unbelievable, even in my case. It is, however,
true, and
it has been so constantly and perpetually verifiable that the public
will just
have to get used to it. I imagine that the cause resided in my
devil-may-care
upbringing encountering favourable terrain. I never saw bourgeois at
work, with
the baseness that their special kind of work inevitably entails; and
there
perhaps is the reason why in this indifference I could learn something
good
about life, but, all told, solely through absence and lack. The moment
of
decadence of any form of social superiority is surely rather more
amenable than
its vulgar beginnings. I remain attached to this preference, which I
felt very
early on, and I can say that poverty has principally given me a great
deal of
leisure, not having ruined properties to manage and not dreaming of
restoring
them through participation in the government of the state. It is true
that I
have tasted pleasures little known to people who have obeyed the
unfortunate
laws of this era. It is also true that I have strictly observed several
duties
of which they have not the slightest idea. “For you see nothing but the
external
appearance of our life,” the Rule of the Temple stated bluntly in its
time, “but
you do not know the severe commandments within.” I should also note, to
cite all
the favourable influences met there, the obvious fact that I had
occasion then
to read several good books, from which it is always possible to find by
oneself
all the others, or even to write those that are still lacking. This
quite
complete statement will stop here.
Before the age of twenty, I saw the peaceful part of my youth come to
an end;
and I now had nothing left except the obligation to pursue all my
tastes without
restraint, though in difficult conditions. I headed first towards that
very
attractive milieu where an extreme nihilism no longer wanted to know
about nor,
above all, continue what had previously been considered the use of life
or the
arts. This milieu had no trouble recognizing me as one of its own.
There my last
possibilities of one day returning to the normal round of existence
disappeared.
I thought so then, and what came after proved it.
It must be that I am less inclined than others to calculate, since the
choice
made so quickly, which committed me to so much, was spontaneous, the
product of
a thoughtlessness on which I have never gone back; and which later,
having had
the leisure in which to judge the consequences, I have never regretted.
It could
easily be said that in terms of wealth or reputation I have never had
anything
to lose; but, finally, neither have I had anything to gain.
This milieu of demolition experts, more clearly than its precursors of
the two
or three preceding generations, was then entirely mixed up with the
dangerous
classes. Living with them, one for the most part lived their life.
Lingering
traces obviously remain. Over the years, more than half the people I
knew well
had sojourned one or several times in the prisons of various countries;
many, no
doubt, for political reasons, but all the same a greater number for
common-law
offences or crimes. So I met mainly rebels and the poor. I saw around
me a great
many individuals who died young, and not always by suicide, frequent as
that
was. On the matter of violent death, I will note, without being able to
put
forward a fully rational explanation of the phenomenon, that the number
of my
friends who have been killed by bullets constitutes an uncommonly high
percentage — leaving aside military operations, of course.
Our only public actions, which remained rare and brief in the first
years, were
meant to be completely unacceptable: at first, especially by their
form; later,
as they acquired depth, especially by their content. They were not
accepted.
“Destruction was my Béatrice,” wrote Mallarmé, who
himself was the guide for a
few others in rather perilous explorations. For it is quite certain
that whoever
devotes himself to making such historical demonstrations, and thus
refuses all
existing work, will have to know how to live off the land. I will
discuss the
question in more detail later on. Confining myself here to presenting
the
subject as its most general, I will say that I have always been content
to give
the vague impression that I had great intellectual, even artistic
qualities of
which I preferred to deprive my era, which did not seem to merit their
use.
There have always been people to regret my absence and, paradoxically,
to help
me maintain it. If this has turned out well it is only because I never
went
looking for anyone, anywhere. My entourage has been composed only of
those who
came of their own accord and knew how to make themselves accepted. I
wonder if
even one other person has dared to behave like me, in this era. It must
also be
acknowledged that the degradation of all existing conditions appeared
at
precisely the same moment, as if to justify my singular folly.
I must likewise admit — for nothing can remain purely unalterable in
the course
of time — that after some twenty years, or a little more, an advanced
fraction
of a specialized public has seemed to begin no longer to completely
reject the
idea that I could well have several real talents, which are especially
remarkable in comparison with the great poverty of the stray thoughts
and
useless repetitions that these people have for a long time believed
they had to
admire; and even though the only discernible use of my gifts ought to
be
regarded as entirely nefarious. And then of course it was I who refused
to
agree, in any way, to recognise the existence of these people who were
beginning, so to speak, to recognize something of mine. It is true that
they
were not ready to accept everything, and I have always said frankly
that it
would be all or nothing, thus placing myself definitively out of reach
of their
possible concessions. As for society, my tastes and ideas have not
changed,
remaining as strictly opposed to what it was as to all that it claimed
to want
to be.
The leopard dies with his spots, and I have never intended, or believed
myself
capable of, improving myself. I have really never aspired to any sort
of virtue,
except perhaps that of having thought that only some crimes of a new
type, which
could certainly not have been cited in the past, might not be unworthy
of me;
and that of not having changed, after such a bad start. At a critical
moment in
the troubles of the Fronde, Gondi, who had given such sterling proofs
of his
capacities in the handling of human affairs — notably in his favourite
role of
disturber of the public peace — improvised happily before the Parlement
de Paris
a beautiful quotation attributed to an ancient author, whose name
everyone
vainly searched for, but which could be best applied to his own
panegyric: “In
difficillimis Reipublicae temporibus, urbem non deserui; in prosperis
nihil de
publico delibavi; in desperatis, nihil timui.” He himself translated it
as “In
bad times, I did not abandon the city; in good times, I had no private
interests; in desperate times, I feared nothing.”
II
“Such were the events of that winter, and thus ended the second year of
the war
of which Thucydides has written the history.”
THUCYDIDES, The Peloponnesian War.
IN THE ZONE of perdition where my youth went as if to complete its
education,
one would have said that the portents of an imminent collapse of the
whole
edifice of civilization had made an appointment. Permanently ensconced
ther were
people who could be defined only negatively, for the good reason that
they had
no job, followed no course of study, and practised no art. Many of them
had
participated in the recent wars, in several of the armies that had
fought over
the continent: the German, the French, the Russian, the American, the
two
Spanish armies, and several others. The remainder, who were five or six
years
younger, had come there directly, because the idea of the family had
begun to
dissolve, like all others. No received doctrine moderated anyone’s
conduct, much
less offered his existence any illusory goal. Diverse practices of the
moment
were always ready to present, against all evidence, their cool defence.
Nihilism
is quick to moralize, as soon as it is touched by the idea of
justifying itself:
one man robbed banks and gloried in not robbing the poor, while another
had
never killed anyone when he was not angry. Despite all the eloquence at
their
disposal, they were the most unpredictable people from one hour to the
next, and
they were occasionally rather dangerous. It is the fact of having
passed through
such a milieu that permitted me to say later, with the same pride as
the
demagogue in Aristophanes’ Knights: “I too grew up in the streets!”
After all, it was modern poetry, for the last hundred years, that had
led us
there. We were a handful who thought that it was necessary to carry out
its
programme in reality, and in any case to do nothing else. It is
sometimes
surprising — to tell the truth, only since an extremely recent date —
to
discover the atmosphere of hate and malediction that has constantly
surrounded
me and, as much as possible, kept me hidden. Some think that it is
because of
the grave responsibility that has often been attributed to me for the
origins,
or even for the command, of the May 1968 revolt. I think rather that it
is what
I did in 1952 that has been disliked for so long. An angry queen of
France once
called to order the most seditious of her subjects: “There is rebellion
in
imagining that one could rebel.”
That is just what happened. Another, earlier contemner of the world,
who said
that he had been a king in Jerusalem, had touched on the heart of the
problem,
almost with these very words: The spirit whirls in all directions, and
on its
circuits the spirit returns. All revolutions go down in history, yet
history
does not fill up; the rivers of revolution return from whence they
came, only to
flow again.
There have always been artists or poets capable of living in violence.
The
impatient Marlowe died, knife in hand, arguing over a bill. It is
generally
thought that Shakespeare was thinking of the death of his rival when he
made,
without too much fear of being reproached for heavyhandedness, this
joke in As
You Like It: “it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a
little
room.” The phenomenon that is absolutely new this time, and has
naturally left
few traces, is that the sole principle admitted by all was that there
could
precisely no longer be either poetry or art, and that something better
had to be
found.
We had several points of resemblance with those other devotees of the
dangerous
life who had spent their time, exactly five hundred years before us, in
the same
city and on the same side of the river. Obviously, I cannot be compared
to
anyone who has mastered his art like François Villon. And I was
not as
irremediably engaged as he in organized crime; after all, I had not
studied so
hard at university. But there had been that “noble man” among my
friends who was
the complete equal of Régnier de Montigny, as well as many other
rebels destined
for bad ends; and there were the pleasures and splendour of those lost
young
hoodlum girls who kept us such good company in our dives and could not
have been
that different from the girls others had known under the names of
Marion l’Idole
or Catherine, Biétrix and Bellet. I will speak of what we were
then in the argot
of Villon’s accomplices, which is certainly no longer an impenetrable
secret
language. On the contrary, it is generally accessible to the well
informed. But
thus will I put the inevitable criminological dimension into a
reassuring
philological distance:
J’y ai connu quelques sucs que rebignait le marieux, froarts et
envoyeurs ; très
sûres louches comme assoses, n’étant à juc pour
aruer à ruel ; souvent greffis
par les anges de la marine, mais longs pouvant babigner jusqu’à
les
blanchir.C’est là que j’ai appris comment être beau
soyant, à ce point qu’encore
icicaille, sur de telles questions, je préfère rester
ferme en la mauhe. Nos
hurteries et nos gaudies sur la dure se sont embrouées.
Pourtant, mes contres
sans caire qui entervaient si bien ce monde gailleur, je me souviens
vivement
d’eux : quand nous étions à la mathe, sur la tarde
à Parouart.
[There I met a few heads the executioner was waiting for: thieves and
murderers.
They were accomplices one could be proud of, for they never hesitated
when it
came to resorting to force. They were often picked up by the police,
but they
were good at feigning innocence and misleading them. That’s where I
learned how
to deceive interrogators, so that for a long time after, and here too,
I’d
rather remain silent about such business. Our acts of violence and our
earthly
delights are past. Yet I vividly recall my penniless comrades who
understood so
well this delusory world: when we met in our hangouts, in Paris at
night.]
I pride myself on having neither forgotten nor learnt anything in this
regard.
There were cold streets and snow, and the river in flood: “In the
middle of the
bed/the river is deep.” There were the girls who had skipped school,
with their
proud eyes and sweet lips; the frequent police searches; the roar of
the
cataract of time. “Never again will we drink so young.”
It could be said that I have always loved foreign women. From Hungary
and Spain,
from China and Germany, from Russia and Italy came those who filled my
youth
with joy. And later, when I already had grey hair, I lost the little
reason that
through the course of time I had, with great difficulty, succeeded in
acquiring,
for a girl from Córdoba. Omar Kháyyám, having
given the matter some thought, had
to admit: “Indeed the Idols I have loved so long/Have done my credit in
this
World much wrong:/Have drowned my Glory in a shallow Cup,/And sold my
Reputation
for a song.” Who better than I could feel the justice of this
observation? But
also, who more than I has scorned all the valuations of my era and the
reputations it awarded? The result was already contained in the
beginning of
this journey.
That took place between the autumn of 1952 and the spring of 1953, in
Paris,
south of the Seine and north of the rue de Vaugirard, east of the
carrefour de
la Croix-Rouge, and west of the rue Dauphine. Archilochus wrote “Come,
go then
with a cup . . . draw drink from the hollow tuns, draining the red wine
to the
lees; for we no more than other men can stay sober on this watch.”
Between the rue du Four and the rue de Buci, where our youth so
completely went
astray as a few glasses were drunk, one could feel certain that we
would never
do any better.
III
“I have observed that most of those who have left memoirs have clearly
shown us
their bad actions or their penchants only when, by chance, they have
taken them
for feats or good instincts, which occasionally has happened.”
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Souvenirs.
AFTER THE CIRCUMSTANCES that I have just recalled, it is no doubt the
quickly
acquired habit of drinking that has marked my entire life. Wines,
spirits and
beers: the moments when some of them became essential and the moments
when they
returned have traced out the main course and meanders of days, weeks
and years.
Two or three other passions, which I will talk about, have almost
continually
taken up a lot of space in this life. But drinking has been the most
constant
and the most present. Among the small number of things that I have
liked and
known how to do well, what I have assuredly known how to do best is
drink. Even
though I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written much
less than
most people who write; but I have drunk much more than most people who
drink. I
can count myself among those of whom Baltasar Gracián, thinking
about an elite
distinguishable only among the Germans — but here very unfair, to the
detriment
of the French, as I think I have shown — could say: “There are those
who have
got drunk only once, but it has lasted them a lifetime.”
Furthermore, I am a little surprised — I who have had to read so often
the most
extravagant calumnies or unjust criticisms of myself — to see that a
total of
thirty years or more have passed without some malcontent ever
instancing my
drunkenness as an argument, at least implicitly, against my scandalous
ideas —
with the one, belated exception of a piece by some drug addicts in
England who
revealed around 1980 that I was destroyed by alcohol and had thus
ceased to be
harmful. I never dreamed for an instant of hiding this perhaps
questionable side
of my personality, and it was there beyond doubt for all those who met
me more
than once or twice. I can even note that it has sufficed me on each
occasion a
rather few days in order to be highly regarded, in Venice as in Cadiz,
and in
Hamburg as in Lisbon, by the people I have met only by frequenting
certain
cafés.
First, like everyone, I appreciated the effect of slight drunkenness;
then very
soon I grew to like what lies beyond violent drunkenness, when one has
passed
that stage: a magnificent and terrible peace, the true taste of the
passage of
time. Although in the first decades I may have allowed only slight
indications
to appear once or twice a week, it is a fact that I have been
continuously drunk
for periods of several months; and the rest of the time, I still drank
a lot.
An air of disorder in the great variety of emptied bottles nevertheless
remains
susceptible to an a posteriori classification. First, I can distinguish
between
the drinks I consumed in their countries of origin and those I consumed
in
Paris; but almost everything there was to drink was to be had in Paris
in the
middle of the century. Everywhere, the premises can be subdivided
simply between
what I drank at home, or at friends’, or in cafés, cellars,
bars, restaurants,
or in the streets, notably on café terraces.
The hours and their shifting conditions almost always retain a
determining role
in the necessary renewal of the moments of a spree, and each brings its
sensible
preference to bear on the available possibilities. There is what is
drunk in the
mornings, and for a long while that was beer. In Cannery Row a
character who one
could tell was a connoisseur professes that “there’s nothing like that
first
taste of beer.” But I have often needed, at the moment of waking,
Russian vodka.
There is what is drunk with meals, and in the afternoons that stretch
between
them. There is wine some nights, along with spirits, and after that
beer is
pleasant again — for then beer makes one thirsty. There is what is
drunk at the
end of the night, at the moment when the day begins anew. It is
understood that
all this has left me very little time for writing, and that is exactly
as it
should be: writing should remain a rare thing, since one must have
drunk for a
long time before finding excellence.
I have wandered extensively in several great European cities, and I
appreciated
everything that deserved it. The catalogue on this subject could be
vast. There
were the beers of England, where mild and bitter were mixed in pints;
the big
schooners of Munich; and the Irish; and the most classical, the Czech
beer of
Pilsen; and the admirable baroquism of the Gueuze around Brussels, when
it had
its distinct flavour in each artisanal brasserie and did not travel
well. There
were the fruit liqueurs of Alsace; the rum of Jamaica; the punches, the
aquavit
of Aalborg, and the grappa of Turin, cognac, cocktails; the
incomparable mezcal
of Mexico. There were all the wines of France, the loveliest coming
from
Burgundy; there were the wines of Italy, and especially the Barolos of
Langhe,
the Chiantis of Tuscany; there were the wines of Spain, the Riojas of
Old
Castille or the Jumilla of Murcia.
I would have had very few illnesses if alcohol had not in the end
brought me
some; from insomnia to vertigo, by way of gout. “Beautiful as the
trembling of
the hands in alcoholism,” said Lautréamont. There are mornings
that are stirring
but difficult.
“It is better to hide one’s folly, but that is difficult in debauchery
or
drunkenness,” thought Heraclitus. And yet Machiavelli wrote to
Francesco
Vettori: “Anybody reading our letters . . . would think that sometimes
we are
serious people entirely devoted to great things, that our hearts cannot
conceive
any thought that is not honourable and grand. But then, as they turned
the page,
we would seem light, inconstant, lustful, entirely devoted to vanities.
And even
if someone judges this way of life shameful, I find it praiseworthy,
for we
imitate nature, which is changeable.” Vauvenargues formulated a rule
too often
forgotten: “In order to decide that an author contradicts himself, it
must be
impossible to conciliate him.”
Moreover, some of my reasons for drinking are respectable. Like Li Po,
I can
indeed nobly claim: “For thirty years, I’ve hidden my fame in taverns.”
The majority of wines, almost all spirits, and every one of the beers
whose
memory I have evoked here have today completely lost their tastes —
first on the
world market and then locally — with the progress of industry as well
as the
disappearance or economic re-education of the social classes that had
long
remained independent of large industrial production, and so too of the
various
regulations that now prohibit virtually anything that is not
industrially
produced. The bottles, so that they can still be sold, have faithfully
retained
their labels; this attention to detail provides the assurance that one
can
photograph them as they used to be, not drink them.
Neither I nor the people who drank with me have at any moment felt
embarrassed
by our excesses. “At the banquet of life” — good guests there, at least
— we
took a seat without thinking even for an instant that what we were
drinking with
such prodigality would not subsequently be replenished for those who
would come
after us. In drinking memory, no one had ever imagined that he would
see drink
pass away before the drinker.
IV
“ ’Tis true, Julius Caesar wrote his own Commentaries; but then that
Hero’s
Modesty in his Commentaries is equal to his Bravery: He seems to have
undertaken
that Work only, that he might have no Room for Flattery to impose upon
future
Ages in the Matter of his History.”
BALTASAR GRACIÁN, The Compleat Gentleman.
I HAVE KNOWN the world quite well, then, its history and geography, its
scenery
and those who populated it, their various practices and, particularly,
“what
sovereignty is, how many kinds there are, how one acquires it, how one
keeps it,
how one loses it.”
I have had no need to travel very far, but I have considered things
with a
certain seriousness, according them each time the full measure of the
months or
years that they seemed to merit. Most of the time I lived in Paris,
exactly in
the triangle defined by the intersections of the rue Saint-Jacques and
the rue
Royer-Collard, rue Saint-Martin and rue Greneta, and the rue du Bac and
rue de
Commailles. And I have in fact spent my days and nights in this
restricted space
and the narrow frontier-margin that is its immediate extension; most
often on
its eastern side and more rarely on its northwestern side.
I never, or hardly ever, would have left this area, which suited me
perfectly,
if a few historical necessities had not obliged me to depart several
times.
Always briefly in my youth, when I had to risk some forays abroad in
order
further to extend disruption; but later for much longer, when the city
had been
sacked and the kind of life that had been led there had been completely
destroyed —which is what happened from 1970 onwards.
I believe that this city was ravaged a little before all the others
because its
ever-renewed revolutions had so worried and shocked the world, and
because they
had unfortunately always failed. So we have been punished with a
destruction as
complete as that which had been threatened earlier by the Manifesto of
Brunswick
or the speech of the Girondist Isnard: in order to bury so many
fearsome
memories and the great name of Paris. (The infamous Isnard, presiding
over the
Convention in May 1793, had already had the impudence to announce
prematurely:
“I say that if through these incessant insurrections the national
representatives should happen to be attacked — I declare to you, in the
name of
all of France, Paris will be annihilated; you would soon have to search
the
banks of the Seine to determine whether this city ever existed.”)
Whoever sees the banks of the Seine sees our grief: nothing is found
there now
save the bustling columns of an anthill of motorized slaves. The
historian
Guicciardini, who experienced the end of the freedom of Florence, noted
in his
Ricordi: “All cities, all states, all kingdoms are mortal; everything,
whether
by nature or by accident, comes to an end and finishes sooner or later;
so a
citizen who sees the collapse of his country should not lament so much
the
misfortune of the country and the bad luck that it has encountered this
time;
rather, he should mourn his own misfortune; because what happened to
the city
had to happen anyway, but the true misfortune was to have been born at
the
moment when such a disaster had to take place.”
It could almost be believed, despite the innumerable earlier
testimonies of
history and the arts, that I was the only person to have loved Paris;
because,
first of all, I saw no one else react to this question in the repugnant
“seventies.” But subsequently I learned that Louis Chevalier, its old
historian,
had published then, without too much being said about it, L’Assassinat
de Paris.
So we could count at least two righteous people in the city at the
time. I did
not want to see any more of the debasement of Paris. More generally,
little
importance should be granted to the opinion of those who condemn
something
without having done all that was required to destroy it and, failing
that, to
prove always so foreign to it that they still actually had the
possibility of
being so.
Chateaubriand pointed out — and rather precisely, all told: “Of the
modern
French authors of my time, I am also the only one whose life is true to
his
works.” In any case, I have certainly lived as I have said one should,
and this
was perhaps even more unusual among the people of my time, who have all
seemed
to believe that they had to live only according to the instructions of
those who
direct current economic production and the power of communication with
which it
is armed. I have resided in Italy and Spain, principally in Florence
and Seville
— in Babylon, as they said in the Golden Age — but also in other cities
that
were still living, and even in the countryside. Thus I enjoyed a few
pleasant
years. Much later, when the tide of destruction, pollution and
falsification had
conquered the whole surface of the planet, as well as plunging down
nearly to
its depths, I could return to the ruins that remained of Paris, for
then nothing
better remained anywhere else. One cannot go into exile in a unified
world.
So what did I do during that time? I did not try too hard to avoid
dangerous
encounters; and it is even possible that I cold-bloodedly sought some
of them
out.
In Italy I was certainly not well thought of by everyone, but I had the
good
fortune to meet the “sfacciate donne fiorentine” when I lived in
Florence, in
the Oltrarno district. There was that little Florentine who was so
graceful. In
the evenings she would cross the river to come to San Frediano. I fell
in love
very unexpectedly, perhaps because of her beautiful, bitter smile. I
told her,
in brief: “Do not stay silent, for I come before you as a stranger and
a
traveller. Grant me some refreshment before I go away and am here no
more.” At
that time Italy was once again losing its way: it was necessary to
regain
sufficient distance from its prisons, where those who stayed too long
at the
revels of Florence ended up.
The young Musset drew attention to himself long ago for his thoughtless
question: “Have you seen in Barcelona,/an Andalusian with sunburnt
breasts?”
Well, yes! I’ve had to say ever since 1980. I played my part — and
perhaps my
greatest part — in the follies of Spain. But it was in another country
that that
irremediable princess, with her wild beauty and her voice, appeared.
“Mira como
vengo yo” were the truthful words of the song she sang. That day, we
didn’t
continue to listen. I loved that Andalusian for a long time. How long?
“A period
in proportion to our vain and meagre span,” said Pascal.
I even stayed in an inaccessible house surrounded by woods, far from
any
village, in an extremely sterile, exhausted mountainous region, deep in
a
deserted Auvergne. I spent several winters there. Snow fell for days on
end. The
wind piled it up in drifts. Barriers kept it off the road. Despite the
exterior
walls, snow accumulated in the courtyard. Logs burned in the fireplace.
The house seemed to open directly on to the Milky Way. At night, the
nearby
stars would shine brilliantly one moment, and the next be extinguished
by the
passing mist. And so too our conversations and our celebrations, our
meetings
and our tenacious passions.
It was a land of storms. They would approach noiselessly at first,
announced by
the brief passage of a wind that slithered through the grass or by a
series of
sudden flashes on the horizon; then thunder and lightning were
unleashed, and we
were bombarded for a long while and from every direction, as if in a
fortress
under seige. Just once, at night, I saw lightning strike near me
outside: you
could not even see where it had struck; the whole landscape was equally
illuminated for one startling instant. Nothing in art has seemed to
give me this
impression of an irrevocable brilliance, except for the prose that
Lautréamont
employed in the programmatic exposition that he called Poésies.
But nothing
else: neither Mallarmé’s blank page, nor Malevich’s white square
on a white
background, nor even Goya’s last pictures, where black takes over
everything,
like Saturn devouring his children.
Violent winds, which at any moment could rise from one of three
directions,
shook the trees. Those on the moors to the north, more dispersed, bent
and shook
like ships surprised at anchor in an unprotected harbour. The compactly
grouped
trees that guarded the hill in front of the house supported one another
in their
resistance, the first rank breaking the west wind’s relentless assault.
Farther
off, the line of the woods disposed in squares, over the whole
half-circle of
the hills, evoked the troops arranged in a chessboard pattern in
certain
eighteenth-century battle scenes. And those almost always vain charges
sometimes
made a breach, knocking down a rank. Piled-up clouds traversed the sky
at a run.
A sudden change of wind could also quickly send them into retreat, with
other
clouds launched in their pursuit.
On calm mornings, there were all the birds of the dawn and the perfect
chill of
the air, and that dazzling shade of tender green that came over the
trees, in
the tremulous light of the sun rising before them.
The weeks passed imperceptibly. One day the morning air announced the
arrival of
autumn. Another time, a great sweetness in the air, a sweetness you
could taste,
declared, like a quick promise always kept, “the spring breeze.”
In regard to someone who has been, as essentially and continuously as
I, a man
of streets and cities — one will thus appreciate the degree to which my
preferences will not overly falsify my judgements — it should be
pointed out
that the charm and harmony of these few seasons of grandiose isolation
did not
escape me. It was a pleasing and impressive solitude. But in truth I
was not
alone: I was with Alice.
In the midwinter nights of 1988, in the square des Missions
Étrangères, an owl
would obstinately repeat his calls, fooled perhaps by the unseasonable
weather.
And this unusual run of encounters with the bird of Minerva, its air of
surprise
and indignation, did not in the least seem to constitute an allusion to
the
imprudent conduct or the various aberrations of my life. I have never
understood
in what way it could have been different, nor how it could have been
justified.
V
“As a scholar and a man of learned education, and in that sense a
gentleman, I
may presume to class myself as an unworthy member of that indefinite
body called
gentlemen. Partly on the ground I have assigned, perhaps; partly
because, from
my having no visible calling or business . . . I am so classed by my
neighbours.
. . .”
THOMAS DE QUINCEY, Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
A COMBINATION OF circumstances has marked almost everything I have done
with a
certain conspiratorial allure. In this very area, many new professions
have been
created at great cost with the sole end of showing what beauty society
had
recently been able to achieve, and how it reasoned soundly in all its
discourses
and all its plans. Whereas I, without any salary, provided the example
of
completely opposite schemes; this has inevitably been badly received.
It has
also led me to meet, in several countries, people who were rightly
considered
lost. The police watch them. The specialized thought which can be
viewed as the
police form of knowledge, expressed itself with reference to me in 1984
in the
Journal du Dimanche of 18 March: “For many police officers, whether
they belong
to the crime squad, the DST, or the Renseignements
généraux, the most serious
trail leads to the entourage of Guy Debord. . . . The least that can be
said is
that, faithful to his legend, Guy Debord has hardly proved talkative.”
Even
earlier, in the Nouvel Observateur of 22 May 1972: “The author of The
Society of
the Spectacle has always appeared as the discreet but indisputable head
. . . at
the centre of the changing constellation of brilliant conspirators of
the
Situationist International, a kind of cold chess player, rigorously
leading . .
. the game whose every move he has foreseen. Surrounding himself with
people of
talent and goodwill, while keeping his authority veiled. Then breaking
with them
with the same nonchalant virtuosity, manoeuvring his acolytes like
naive pawns,
clearing the chessboard move after move, finally emerging as the sole
master,
and always dominating the game.”
My sort of mind leads me at first to be amazed at this, but it must be
recognized that many of life’s experiences only verify and illustrate
the most
conventional ideas, which one may have already encountered in numerous
books,
but without believing them. Recalling what one has experienced oneself,
it is
not necessary to inquire into every detail of the observation never
made, or its
astonishing paradox. Thus I owe it to the truth to note, following
others, that
the English police seemed the most suspicious and the most polite, the
French
police the most dangerously trained in historical interpretation, the
Italian
police the most cynical, the Belgian police the most rustic, the German
police
the most arrogant, while it was the Spanish police who proved
themselves the
least rational and the most incapable.
For an author who has written with a certain degree of quality and so
knows what
it means to speak, it is generally a sad ordeal when he has to reread
and
consent to sign his own answers in a statement for the police
judiciaire. First,
the text as a whole is directed by the investigators’ questions, which
are
usually not mentioned and do not innocently arise, as they sometimes
hope to
appear to, from the simple logical necessities of a precise inquiry or
from a
clear understanding. The answers that one was able to formulate are in
fact
hardly better than their summary, dictated by the highest-ranking
officer and
obviously rewritten with a great deal of awkwardness and vagueness. If,
naturally — but many innocents are unaware of it — it is imperative to
have
precisely corrected every detail by which the thought that one had
expressed has
been translated with a deplorable unfaithfulness, it is necessary to
give up
quickly on having everything transcribed in the suitable and
satisfactory form
that one used spontaneously, for then one would be led to double the
number of
those already tiresome hours, which would rid the greatest purist of
the taste
for being so to such a degree. So then, I here declare that my answers
to the
police should not be included later in my collected works, because of
scruples
about the form, and even though I signed the veracious content without
embarrassment.
Having certainly, thanks to one of the rare positive features of my
early
education, a sense of discretion, I have sometimes known the necessity
of
showing a still more pronounced discretion. A number of useful habits
have thus
become like second nature to me; this I say while ceding nothing to
malicious
persons who might be capable of claiming that that could in no way be
distinguished from my nature itself. No matter what the subject, I have
trained
myself to be even less interesting whenever I saw greater chances of
being
overheard. In some cases, I have also made appointments or given my
views
through letters personally addressed to friends and modestly signed
with little-
known names that have figured in the entourage of some famous poets:
Colin
Decayeux or Guido Cavalcanti, for example. But it is obvious that I
have never
lowered myself to publishing anything at all under a pseudonym, despite
what
some hack libellers have sometimes insinuated in the press, with an
extraordinary aplomb, while prudently confining themselves to the most
abstract
generalities.
It is permitted, but not desirable, to wonder where such a predilection
to
contradict all authorities could positively lead. “We never pursue
things so
much as the pursuit of things”: certainty on this subject has been long
established. “One loves the hunt more than the catch. . . .”
Our era of technicians makes abundant use of the nominalized adjective
“professional”; it seems to believe that it has found there some kind
of
guarantee. Of course, if one contemplates not my emoluments but only my
abilities, there can be no doubt that I have been a very good
professional. But
in what? Such will have been my mystery, in the eyes of a blameful
world.
Messrs Blin, Chavanne and Drago, who in 1969 published a Traité
du Droit de la
Presse, concluded the chapter concerning the “Danger des apologies”
with an
authority and experience that felicitously lead me to believe that they
should
be accorded a great deal of confidence: “To vindicate a criminal act,
to present
it as glorious, meritorious, or lawful can have considerable persuasive
power.
Weakwilled individuals who read such apologies will not only feel
absolved in
advance if they commit those acts, but will even see in their
commission the
opportunity of becoming important people. The knowledge of criminal
psychology
shows the danger of apologies.”
VI
“And when I think that these people march side by side, on a long and
difficult
journey, in order to arrive together at the same place, where they will
run a
thousand dangers to achieve a great and noble goal, these reflections
give this
picture a meaning that profoundly moves me.”
CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, Letter of 18 September 1806.
I HAVE BEEN very interested in war, in the theoreticians of its
strategy, but
also in reminiscences of battles and in the countless other disruptions
history
mentions, surface eddies on the river of time. I am not unaware that
war is the
domain of danger and disappointment, perhaps even more so than the
other sides
of life. This consideration has not, however, diminished the attraction
that I
have felt for it.
And so I have studied the logic of war. Moreover, I succeded, a long
time ago,
in presenting the basics of its movements on a rather simple board
game: the
forces in contention and the contradictory necessities imposed on the
operations
of each of the two parties. I have played this game and, in the often
difficult
conduct of my life, I have utilized lessons from it — I have also set
myself
rules of the game for this life, and I have followed them. The
surprises of this
Kriegspiel seem inexhaustible; and I fear that this may well be the
only one of
my works that anyone will dare acknowledge as having some value. On the
question
of whether I have made good use of such lessons, I will leave it to
others to
decide.
It must be acknowledged that those of us who have been able to perform
wonders
with writing have often given the least proof of expertise in the
command of
war. The trials and tribulations met with on this terrain are now
innumerable.
During the retreat from Prague, Captain de Vauvenargues marched along
with
troops hurried in the one direction still open. “Hunger and disorder
tramp in
their fugitive tracks; night shrouds their steps and death follows them
in
silence. . . . Fires lit on the ice illuminate their last moments; the
earth is
their fearsome bed.” And Gondi was distressed to see the regiment that
he had
raised about-face quickly on the Pont d’Antony, and to hear this rout
referred
to as the “First Corinthians.” And Charles d’Orléans was in the
vanguard in the
unfortunate attack at Agincourt, which was riddled with arrows along
its course
and broken at its end, where one could see “all the gentle and
chivalrous nobles
of France, who were at least ten to one against the English, be thus
defeated.”
He was to remain captive in England for twenty-five years, little
appreciationg
on his return the manners of another generation (“The world is bored
with me —
and I with it”). And, unfortunately, Thucydides arrived with the
squadron he
commanded a few hours too late to prevent the fall of Amphipolis; he
could only
ward off one of the many consequences of the disaster by landing his
infantry at
Aeion, which saved the town. Lieutenant von Clausewitz himself, with
the fine
army marching on Jena, was far from expecting what would be found there.
But all the same, at the Battle of Neerwinden in Royal-Roussillon,
Captain de
Saint-Simon gallantly took part in the five charges by the cavalry,
which had
already been exposed, a fixed target, to the fire of enemy cannon whose
balls
swept away whole files, while the ranks of “the insolent nation” kept
re-
forming. And Stendhal, second lieutenant in the 6th Dragoons Regiment
in Italy,
captured an Austrian battery. As the Battle of Lepanto raged on the
sea,
Cervantes, at the head of twelve men, was unshakeable in holding the
last
redoubt of his galley when the Turks tried to board it. It is said that
Archilochus was a professional soldier. And Dante, when the Florentine
cavalry
charged at Campaldino, killed his man there, and still liked to evoke
it in the
Purgatorio, Canto V: “And I say to him: What force of fatality/has
taken you so
far from Campaldino/that no one’s ever seen your burial place?”
History is inspiring. If the best authors, taking part in its
struggles, have
proved at times less excellent in this regard than in their writings,
history,
on the other hand, has never failed to find people who had the instinct
for the
happy turn of phrase to communicate its passions to us. “There is no
more
Vendée,” General Westermann wrote to the Convention in December
1793, after his
victory in Savenay. “It died under our sabre along with its women and
children.
I have just buried it in the swamps and woods of Savenay. I have
crushed the
children under the hooves of our horses, massacred the women — they, at
least,
will not give birth to any more brigands. I have not even one prisoner
to
reproach myself for. I have exterminated everyone. . . . We take no
prisoners,
for we would have to give them the bread of liberty, and pity is not
revolutionary.” A few months later, Westermann was to be executed with
the
Dantonists, blackened with the name of “The Indulgents.” Shortly before
the
insurrection of 10 August 1792, an officer of the Swiss Guards, the
last
remaining defenders of the person of the monarch, wrote a letter
sincerely
expressing the sentiments of his comrades: “All of us have said that if
any harm
came to the king, and there were not at least 600 red coats lying at
the foot of
the king’s stairway, we would be dishonoured.” A little more than 600
guards
were finally killed when the same Westermann who had first tried to
neutralize
the soldiers, by advancing alone among them on the king’s stairway and
speaking
to them in German, understood that there was nothing left to do but
launch the
attack.
In the Vendée, which still fought on, a Song to Rally the
Chouans in the Event
of a Rout declared just as stubbornly: “We have only one life to
live,/we owe it
to honour./That’s the flag we must follow. . . .” During the Mexican
Revolution,
Francisco Villa’s partisans sang: “Of that famous Northern
Division,/only a few
of us are left now,/still crossing the mountains,/finding someone to
fight
wherever we go.” And the American volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade
sang in
1937: “There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama/It’s a place that we all
know too
well,/For ’tis there that we wasted our manhood/And most of our old age
as
well.” A song of the Germans in the Foreign legion rendered a more
detached
melancholy: “Anne-Marie, where in the world are you going?/I’m going to
town
where the soldiers are.” Montaigne had his quotations; I have mine. A
past marks
soldiers, but no future. That is why their songs can touch us.
Pierre Mac Orlan, in Villes, recalled the attack on Bouchavesne, which
was
entrusted to yonug hoodlums serving in the French army, assigned by law
to the
African light-infantry battalions: “On the road to Bapaume, not far
from
Bouchavesne, where the Joyeux redeemed their sins in a few hours,
climbing up a
mound, the mound of the Berlingots Woods, one caught sight of Picardy
and its
torn dress.” On the opposing slopes of the sentence, with a skilful
awkwardness,
which this mound overhangs, one recognizes memory and its superimposed
meanings.
Herodotus reports that at the pass of Thermopylae, where the troops led
by
Leonidas were annihilated at the end of their useful holding action,
next to the
inscriptions that evoke the hopeless combat of “Four thousand men from
the
Peloponnesus” and the Three Hundred who had it said in Sparta that they
lie
there, “obedient to its orders,” the seer Megistias is honoured with a
special
epitaph: “As a seer, he knew that death was near — but he refused to
leave the
Spartan leader.” One does not have to be a seer to know that there is
no
position so good that it cannot be outflanked by much superior forces;
it can
even be overwhelmed by a frontal attack. But in certain cases it is
good to be
indifferent to this sort of knowledge. The world of war presents at
least the
advantage of not leaving room for the silly chatter of optimism. It is
common
knowledge that in the end everyone is going to die. No matter how fine
defence
may be in everything else, as Pascal more or less put it, “the last act
is
bloody.”
What discovery could still be expected in this domain? The telegram
sent by the
King of Prussia to Queen Augusta, on the eve of the Battle of
Saint-Privat, sums
up most wars: “The troops performed prodigies of valour against an
equally brave
enemy.” Everyone knows the brief text of the order, briskly relayed by
an
officer, which sent the Light Brigade to its death on 25 October 1854,
at
Balaclava: “Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the
front —
follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. .
. .” It
is true that the writing is a little imprecise; but no matter what
anyone has
said, it is no more obscure or erroneous than a multitude of plans and
orders
that have directed historic undertakings to their uncertain ends or
inevitably
dire outcomes. It is amusing to see what superior airs journalistic and
academic
thinkers put on when it comes to giving their opinions on what had been
military
operations. Since the result is known, they need at least one victory
in the
field to refrain from harsh mockery; and so they limit themselves to
observations on the excessive price in blood and the relative limits of
the
success achieved, compared to others that, according to them, were
possible that
very day by going about it more intelligently. These thinkers have
always
listened with a great deal of respect to the worst visionaries of
technology and
all the chimeras of the economy, without even thinking of examining the
results.
Masséna was fifty-seven years old when he said that command
wears one out, as he
spoke before his staff when he had been charged with conducting the
conquest of
Portugal: “You don’t live twice in our profession, no more so than on
this
earth.” Time does not wait. One does not defend Genoa twice; no one has
twice
roused Paris to revolt. Xerxes, as his great army was crossing the
Hellespont,
formulated in perhaps just one sentence the first axiom at the base of
all
strategic thought, when he explained his tears by saying: “I was
thinking about
the extreme brevity of men’s lives, for of the multitude before our
eyes, not
one man will still be alive in a hundred years.”
VII
“But if these Memoirs ever see the light of day, I have no doubt that
they will
incite a prodigious revolt . . . and as in the times in which I wrote,
especially most recently, everything tended towards decadence,
confusion, chaos,
which have only grown in the meantime, and since these Memoirs exude
nothing but
order, rule, truth, fixed principles, and expose everything that is to
the
contrary, which increasingly rules over the most ignorant and with the
greatest
possible authority, then the revulsion against this truthful mirror
ought to be
general.”
SAINT-SIMON, Memoirs.
A DESCRIPTION OF The Rural Life of England, which Howitt published in
1840,
exhibited a no doubt excessively generalized satisfaction in concluding
that
every man who has a feeling for the pleasures of existence should thank
Heaven
for having let him live in such a country at such a time. But, on the
contrary,
our era dares not render too emphatically, with regard to the life that
is lived
now, the general disgust and the beginnings of terror that are felt in
so many
areas. They are felt, but never expressed before bloody revolts. The
reasons for
this are simple. The pleasures of existence have recently been
redefined in an
authoritarian way — first in their priorities, and then in their entire
substance. And these authorities who redefined them could just as well
decide at
any moment, without having to burden themselves with any other
consideration,
which modification could be most lucratively introduced into the
techniques of
their manufacture, completely liberated from the need to please. For
the first
time, the same people are the masters of everything that is done and of
everything that is said about it. And so Madness “hath builded her
house . . .
on the highest places of the city.”
The only thing proposed to people who did not enjoy so indisputable and
universal a competence was to submit, without adding the least critical
remark,
on this question of their sense of the pleasures of existence — as they
had
already elected representatives of their submission everywhere else.
And they
have shown, in letting themselves be relieved to these trivialities,
which they
have been told are unworthy of their attention, the same geniality of
which they
had already given proof by watching, from a greater distance, life’s
remaining
glories slip away. When “to be absolutely modern” has become a special
law
decreed by a tyrant, what the honest slave fears more than anything is
that he
might be suspected of being behind the times.
Men more knowledgeable than I have explained very well the origin of
what has
come to pass: “Exchange-value could have formed only as an agent of
use-value,
but its victory by force of its own arms has created the conditions for
its
autonomous rule. Mobilizing all human use and seizing the monopoly on
satisfaction, it has ended up directing use. The process of exchange
became
identified with all possible use and has reduced it to its will.
Exchange-value
is the condottiere of use-value, which finishes by waging war for its
own
advantage.”
“Le monde n’est qu’abusion” [The world is only deception], Villon
summarized in
one octosyllable. (It is an octosyllable, even though nowadays a
college
graduate would probably know how to recognize only six syllables in
this line.)
The general decadence is a means in the service of the empire of
servitude, and
it is only as this means that it is permitted to be called progress.
It should be known that servitude henceforth truly wants to be loved
for itself,
and no longer because it would bring some extrinsic advantage.
Previously, it
could pass for a protection; but it no longer protects anything.
Servitude does
not try to justify itself now by claiming to have conserved, anywhere
at all, a
charm that would be anything other than the sole pleasure of knowing it.
I will speak later of how certain phases of another, not very
well-known war
unfolded: between the general tendency of social domination in this era
and that
which, despite everything, has been able to come and disrupt it, as one
knows.
Although I am a remarkable example of what this era did not want,
knowing what
it has wanted does not seem enough to me to establish my excellence.
Swift says,
with a great deal of truthfulness, in the first chapter of his History
of the
Four Last Years of the Queen: “Neither shall I mingle panegyrick or
satire with
an history intended to inform posterity, as well as to instruct those
of the
present age, who may be ignorant or misled; since facts, truly related,
are the
best applauses, or most lasting reproaches.” No one has known better
than
Shakespeare how life passes. He finds that “we are such stuff as dreams
are made
on.” Calderón came to the same conclusion. I am at least
assured, by the
preceding, of having been successful in conveying the elements that
will suffice
to make abundantly clear, so that no sort of mystery or illusion might
remain,
all that I am.
Here the author ends his true history: forgive him his faults.
index