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Men Among the Ruins, an essay by Julius Evola. Sept couleurs, 252 pages.
Testimonianze su Evola, a collection of essays published and edited by Gianfranco de Turris. Ed. Mediteranee, Rome, 235 pages.
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One of Evola’s last books to be published in Italy is a collection of articles entitled Ricognizioni195 (Mediteranee, Rome, 1974). In France, in addition to Men Among the Ruins, there are translations of The Doctrine of Awakening (Adyar, 1956; second edition by Archè, Milan, 1976), The Metaphysics of Sex (Payot, 1959 and 1976), The Hermetic Tradition (Ed. Traditionnelles, 1961 and 1968), Ride the Tiger (La Colombe, 1964), The Mystery of the Grail (Ed. Traditionnelles, 1967), The Yoga of Power (Fayard, 1971), Revolt Against the Modern World (Ed. de l”Homme, Brussels, 1972), and Mask and Face of Contemporary Spiritualism (Ed. de l’Homme, Brussels, 1972).
Headed by Mr Paolo Andriani, the Julius Evola Foundation has expressed its intention to preserve the books and manuscripts left behind by Evola and to ‘defend the values of a culture that is consistent with Tradition’, establishing its headquarters in the writer’s former home (Corso Vittorio Emanuele 197, Rome).
A collective work on Julius Evola, the Man and the Work was published in 1977 by Copernic Editions. It includes texts by Jean Varenne, Michel Angebert, Pierre Pascal, Renato Del Ponte, Robert de Herte196 and Vintila Horia.
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Jean Cau
Let none count on me when it comes to subsidising, at tax payer’s expense, so-called artistic expressions whose only purpose is to destroy the foundations of our society. Those who knock at this Ministry’s door with a begging bowl in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other will have to make a choice!
Upon uttering these words in Paris in early May 1973, Mr Maurice Druon, then Minister for Cultural Affairs, triggered a huge wave of hues and cries. The intelligentsia spoke of a ‘scandal’, as people marched in the streets and published petitions.
That is when a voice was heard, putting things right. By referring to matters using the past tense and resorting to a great deal of irony, ‘Mr Maurice Druon proceeded to put his foot down in 1973 and basically declared that the democratic state was sick and tired of playing the role of the silver fox supporting a tart that spends her time insulting him, threatening him with an untimely death and swooning with love, on the other side of the partition, in the arms of a gigolo whose red scarf possesses the strange virtue of seducing all the ladies. From his armchair, Mr Druon screamed that he was fed up with producing a play in which he relentlessly played the part of a cuckold’.
The voice was that of Jean Cau, in Paris-Match.197 Readopting a serious tone, he then added:
Let us open our eyes and stop dreaming. We are truly in 1973, and I have been woken by people shouting “Death to Druon!”. The Landerneau intellectual is in a state of madness and no matter how much one showers him with self-evident facts, the jet only manages to increase his wiggling. We are, then, in 1973 and are experiencing, under the impact of the most incredible deceptions, the crumbling of an entire world. Therein lies the question; the entire question. In a daze, this society witnesses its own waning and massification in a 20th century that has now become demographically, industrially and urbanistically uncontrollable. Petrified, its eyes widened in horror, it beholds the colossal phenomenon embodied by the end of Christianity, stuttering as it wonders whether it is even possible to experience human liberty when the latter is devoid of all transcendence. That is when its artists wince and suffer convulsions, its comedians disrobe, and its intellectuals hasten to orbit around planet Utopia in swarms.
Wearing a jacket and displaying short hair, fifty-two-year-old Jean Cau has the eyes of a man that has seen enough to know what he is talking about. Although he has followed the same classic path as many of today’s intellectuals, he has, for a change, done so in reverse.
An ‘Enfant Terrible’198
Back in the 1960s, Jean Cau embodied one of the ‘progressive intelligentsia’s’ greatest hopes. Collaborating closely with Jean-Paul Sartre, he wrote for both Les Temps modernes199 and France-Observateur.200 In L’Express,201 he published sensational interviews that were both appreciated and dreaded. Robert Lazurick,202 Alain de Lacoste-Lareymondie,203 and young paratroopers: under the weight of his questions, interviewees brayed as if they were horses being whipped and readers shivered. It was a time when his talent enjoyed recognition without any reluctance. He was thus awarded the prix Goncourt204 in 1961 for his book entitled La pitié de Dieu.205
People readily recognised him around 1963, on the terrace of the Café de Flore. He wore his hair long and a shawl around the neck. The Left’s ‘false audacities’ already annoyed him and he often attacked ‘living-room revolutionism’. Back then, there was a lot of talk about ‘modern socialism’ and ‘neo-capitalism’, and Jean Cau used to reproach his friends for their lack of adjustment:
Formerly, capitalism was a matter of having children work in mines. Nowadays, it is defined as compulsory school attendance until the age of 16. Capitalism was once synonymous with the presence of slums, of a sixty-hour week without a single day off; nowadays, it is Club Med. It’s time the Left understood this.
The Left, however, clearly failed to understand, and Jean Cau left. His trip to Algeria awakened profound doubts in his mind and his news report, in which he described what he had seen, earned him bitter criticism.
Two years later, he publishes Le meurtre d’un enfant,206 a narrative in biographical form in which he begins to organise his ideas. It also constitutes a source of inner purification for him. ‘What is an adult if not one who inherits a childhood? What is an adult if not the betrayer and murderer of a child?’.
The book is fraught with imagery. An egg and a pebble. The pebble is tough and accurate. It is also faithful, characterised by the loyalty of stone. The egg, on the other hand, ‘is akin to love: if rotten, it only stinks when broken’. And it is Jean Cau who begins to break the eggs of his own past — the war, the Liberation. He feels equally Jewish and ‘Nazi’, meaning different. He asks:
What teenager of my generation never dreamt, both briefly and shamefully, of being the twenty-year-old SS youth who, having taken out his dagger, spread butter on a slice of bread, his back propped against his tank?
He passes judgement upon a certain type of intellectual:
Allow me to propose an infallible recipe to anyone that longs to succeed in today’s literary or cinematographic field — let them write a book or shoot a film in which men have been reduced to a wreck, to zombies, to spineless and mushy invertebrate creatures, and where women, by contrast, have gained absolute power over these tattered virilities. Their success is guaranteed.
Leftist milieus greeted the book with a slightly awkward smile. The ‘enfant terrible’ had a taste for paradox and was, furthermore, becoming a source of weariness and concern.
He has since acknowledged the impact which politics in general and, above all, General de Gaulle’s style have had on him:
I must admit that he contributed to my awakening. At last, the great man was among us, a man alongside whose pantaloons the egalitarian and breathless parties of democracy barked. At long last, the admirable master stood at the head of the horde!
In his eyes, de Gaulle seemed like one of the survivors of a generation in which heads of state still retained a certain significance: Stalin, Mussolini, Churchill, Hitler, and Mao Zedong. Jean Cau contrasts their immense shadows with the dull reality of ‘petty administrators’:
Look at them! Look at them, will you? Behold our politicians’ horrible languid maws (keep smiling!); the courtier-like faces of department managers. They are indeed salesmen, for the very power of nations is measured in relation to their own mercantile activity. The moist glow of submission to the crowd, the mass, and the majority is what flickers in their eyes. Where has the exemplary face gone to? Where is the severe and exemplary voice? Where are the harsh words that drive the best people to gather amo
ng the crowd as the latter, now tamed, finds itself possessed by a sense of will, instead of being agitated by a gloomy sort of fever?
Le meurtre d’un enfant ends with a challenge:
I used to be a member of the assault platoon and part of the leftist intelligentsia, but the years of service that I dedicated to them had me in a state of permanent scepticism, of often derisive contemplation. One reproached me for having such an attitude and unjustly equated it with a crime… Well, let it be my crime, then!
Three Books, One Long Cry Against Decline
When asked today about his former friendships, Jean Cau remains silent. Nietzsche once gave the example of Mirabeau,207 who had no recollection of the insults or infamies he had been subjected to — for one only remembers what one takes seriously. And for Nietzsche, the most ‘earnest seriousness’ is that of ‘a child at play’.
Jean Cau plays and forgets, and thus writes with a hammer. He proceeds to align his ideas as they occur to him, in a series of pamphlets: the result is an occasionally baroque sort of disorder from which various aphorisms emerge.
In 1967, in his Open Letter to Western Dog Heads,208 he expresses his opinion on the notion of ‘difference’ between men and women, Whites and Blacks, etc. In 1968, in Le pape est mort,209 he undertakes to analyse the authority-liberty binomial:
To this very day, socialism and liberty have failed to prove that they can be united in matrimony without having one of them — eek! — strangle the other.
In the wake of the May riots, when, at the Sorbonne, anarchists smeared inscriptions such as ‘the more one makes love, the more one conducts a revolution’, Jean Cau writes, perplexed: ‘And what do you think of that, oh Robespierre210 , Lenin211 and Mao Zedong’?212 He is overcome with indignation as a result of hearing Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s213 friends shout: ‘We are all German Jews’ and ‘CRS214 = SS’. He expands on things further:
If, in future, the gates of genuine concentration camps were shut, detaining swarms of genuine Jews, none of you would go out and “demonstrate” with a black flag fluttering in front of you, demanding that the gates be opened. It scares me, dear students, to hear you play with slogans of such gravity. CRS = SS, really? Or is it perhaps your sincerest wish for the CRS to genuinely become the SS? What you had better do, rather, is ask yourselves whether by defining Others as something they are not, you will not end up, sooner or later, forcing them to become what you have been claiming all along.
In L’agonie de la vieille215 (1969), Jean Cau takes a seat at the bedside of democracy and composes a funeral dirge:
I can hardly imagine (as is said of ketchup when it starts to go off) how one could still manage to “catch up” on democracy. Every day, in this Western park of ours, I watch as its tiny flame wanes, as if it were a lamp running out of oil and smouldering […]. There are three forms of Catholicism currently collapsing: that of Rome, that of Washington and that of Moscow; and upon their ruins, the ryegrass of nationalism silently grows. And herein lies the supreme derision: should an international sentiment surface tomorrow, it will draw both its impulses and cementation from the threat embodied by a billion xenophobic Chinese nationalists, all of whom are armed to their very teeth.
One last step is taken with Le temps des esclaves216 (1971):
It will have taken me years of reflection and lucidity before I finally dared to question — and express in the form of questions — the sacrosanct egalitarianism which had, up until recent years, been my milk and honey.
Jean Cau says that men are not equal and targets the weakness of the masses:
Let us state the facts both harshly and clearly. It takes more than a thousand tendencies to create a will. With a thousand currents, what you have before you is not a river but a maze of streams that follow the craziest directions. And I say to you: a thousand heresies do not equal a Church, nor do a thousand desires result in love. What would you do with a thousand soldiers that lack the leadership of a captain? Or of children that have neither father nor master? And what would a million words be worth without stylistic organisation, or millions of men that do not constitute a people? One might as well call it all a magma.
Although Le temps des esclaves is an important book, little has been said about it:
The book’s lack of success did not arouse any bitterness in me, as I had chosen to rid my reflection of all contemporary grime and of all kinds of trends and courtyard conformism. One cannot rage against the wolves and be part of the pack. I have made my choice and am willing to pay the price for the silence or hostility that surrounds some of my writings.
So as to allow people to gain a better understanding of the significance he attaches to this text, Jean Cau published Les écuries de l’Occident217 in 1973. To the first part, which picks up where Le temps des esclaves left off, the author added a second and entirely new part. The style is a sparkling one. Formulas follow one another in quick succession, each as accurate and sharp as a blade. The book has a subheading: Traité de morale I.218 There would also be another: La grande prostituée.219 Together, the three books form one single long cry against decline.
Jean Cau specifies his diagnosis:
This century has gone mad, losing its mind to all the cowardice, resignations, lies, deceptions and ugliness; and what one has labelled its “civilisational crisis” is, in fact, nothing but the fearful rejection of all grandeur.
He then adds:
Going against the grain or, idea-wise, against all that the prevailing intellectual utopianism whispers or shouts in our ears, I state, in all tranquillity, that decadence is perfectly combinable with scientific progress and that our societies are not necessarily experiencing ascension and good health just because they conduct heart transplants, land on the moon, break the wall of sound and align Nobel prizes in onion rows: Euclid, Archimedes, Theophrastus, Hipparchus, Herophilus, and a hundred others rose to the very firmament of science at a time when both Athens and Greek power sank into the depths.
All one can do is witness and take stock of the situation:
For when the day comes for people to be astounded by our failures, our grand-nephews must, after all, be made aware of the fact that there were at least a few soldiers who refused to put down their weapons and raise their hands in surrender.
Les écuries de l’Occident and Le temps des esclaves are both dedicated to Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, the lieutenant of the Imperial Army who, on 25th November, 1970, took his own life in public because he could not bear living in a country where the notion of fatherland no longer meant anything.
With his black visor rendering his eyes invisible, the lieutenant unsheathes his Samurai sword, whose blade casts a still and brilliant reflection, before proceeding to wrap it in a layer of white silk paper. Protruding out of this sheathe, only the tip of the blade remains visible, approximately four fingers long. Using both hands along the silk paper, he clasps the sword and plunges its uncovered extremity into his own belly, at the level of his left groin, and slowly eviscerates himself.
The ‘great prostitute’ is, in fact, none other than the ugliness that egalitarianism secretes. With its warm and unsavoury tongue, it licks at our contemporaries. Jean Cau defines it with a single formula, one that simultaneously defines egalitarian thought: ‘Whatever breeds hatred of life’.
Never has anyone, in recent times, reaffirmed the rights of life over verbal constructions and ‘justifications’ with such strength. Time leads to the dispersion of words and history to the oblivion of masses; cities, sands and empires are submerged in water; yet life remains. ‘Life is in the right. It never discusses things; it arises, that’s all’. Alexis Carrel once said that ‘the quality of life is more important than life itself’ (in Man, the Unknown), which Jean Cau clarifies further:
What is valuable is not life itself, but what one does with it. […] There are a few destinies, and the rest are just lives that lack any and all interest: nothing but the stuff of women’s novels, idle rumours, the cr
ackling of bubbles rising from the sludge of a pond when stirred, and cinematographic tales.
Death and the Devil
In answer to the plebes that ask for ‘reasons to live’, Jean Cau responds that there are none:
All that there is are passions for life. There are certain strengths, momentums, loves and instincts. As regards reasons, however, there are none.
The author resorts to images rather than explanations. He mentions Albrecht Dürer’s220 Ritter, Tod und Teufel, which depicts a Knight riding his horse through life, flanked by Death and the Devil:
He is invincible and victorious. It is of no concern to him whether one follows him or not. For valour has no need of recompense.
History, however, only bestows a destiny when ‘life flows in torrents within the veins of a people’. And if the present no longer has a future, it is because it has severed its ties to its own past. Jean Cau writes:
Any people that longs for a future must grant and ordain upon itself a simple past and, if at all possible, one that is completely organised and distorted through myth.
To which he adds:
The deeper into the distant and virtually immemorial past the roots of a myth delve, the more sap will inundate its trunk and the vaster and higher its foliage will reach. Is there thus anyone who would fail to notice that the most obscure, profound and distant of all myths is that of race? It is henceforth the latter that the Blacks of America resort to and through which Israel has experienced its rebirth. “The Jewish people” is the term used by Ben-Gurion, and once awareness of it has been stirred up within the people, race awakens upon demand…
Just as a sportsman must remain ‘in good shape’, ‘the same is true of a people and a civilisation: they must, likewise, stay in shape and believe in their own fitness’ (the expression is a reworking of Spengler’s221 ). When lacking courage, man, whose origins are an enigma, always strives to come up with justifications that make his situation seem normal. The same applies to peoples. When their past is obscure or disparate, they adopt a naturally internationalist attitude; this marks the beginning of a reversal of values.
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