The journal Backwards has found itself under pressure, and Palluel, considerably worn down by the good cause, has had to struggle hard against the impatient individuals who—just as before, when they claimed to be making the world march in an opposite direction—name themselves the sole representatives of Progress. They have been trying to buy Palluel, and today we find the valiant editor of Backwards in his office, in the process of resisting an assault by these excessively hurried progressives.
From general considerations like: “Don’t encroach, gentlemen, on the work of the returning generations; let us prepare their task by softening the sometimes difficult transitions, but not hurry precipitately along the road of Progress!” it has reached the point of personal arguments. Pushed to the limit, Palluel does not hesitate to mete out rough treatment in his turn to the ambassadors—or, rather, the leaders—of the party of excessive hurry.
One of them was a young millionaire financier, the son of speculators from the troubled times. Enriched by clever gambles during public disasters, or in the equipment of armies, the young financier had, in the old era—when socialism had appeared to have a chance of seizing power, with all its advantages—undertaken to serve as the financial backer of the party’s newspapers, in order to take a hand in their direction. The other was a historian, one of those writers who, from generation to generation, work to confuse the few truths that can still be discovered in various narratives of events taken from contemporaries and eye-witnesses.
“My dear Monsieur Bouquigny,” said Palluel, taking a sheaf of old newspapers and pieces of paper, yellowed by age, from a box, “it’s useful to have these archives in order. Here’s a certain little document that you seem to have forgotten, and which I propose to publish some day or other, to edify the salons enthusiastic for your pleasant follies of old age! What a delightful little program it is, dating from your pre-New-Era career:
“ ‘Abolition of property and reversion of land, of built property and all industrial equipment to the collective, scientific organization of social collectivism.
“ ‘The citizen owes his labor to the collective.
“ ‘In return, the collective owes the citizen shelter, nourishment, plus an indemnity whose amount is fixed.
“ ‘No more taxes, no more rents, etc.
“ ‘Division of citizens into several classes: period of activity until (age to be decided), semi-activity thereafter or reserve, inactivity for old age.
“ ‘Directors, inspectors of labor—national, regional, municipal—sub-directors, sub-inspectors, secretaries, overseers, etc, indispensable cadres furnished by the workers’ syndicates which have led the class struggle to triumph, and, of course, national recompense to these valiant combatants, or to other citizens for services rendered. Allocation of suitable residences in the seized domain to the profit of the collective. Regional and municipal houses of discipline for those refractory in performing social duties, etc.’
“Have you forgotten, my dear Monsieur Bouquigny, these little kindnesses, which society has only avoided by reason of the complete change in the march of time? I appear, do I not, to be reading you a set of prison regulations…?”
Monsieur Bouquigny took up his pince-nez, took the piece of paper, turned it over and gave it back to Palluel. “Astonishing,” he said. “Truly curious. There were times when the world was positively insane… and that is exactly why I say, since we are now heading in the right direction, that it is necessary…”
Palluel stopped him with a gesture. “Dear Monsieur, and very eminent historian,” he said, turning towards Bouquigny’s acolyte, “in desiring a more rapid march backwards, have you also forgotten your own writings, your historical works on the ancient régime, your civic manual for young citizens, your great History of the use of maternal schools and wet-nurseries? What will become of you, unfortunate plebeian? According to you, in France prior to 1789, there was nothing but a population of miserable slaves, submissive to the most oppressive reign of pitiless and ignoble tyrants! Twenty-none and a half million serfs attached to the soil or trades, atrociously exploited by 5000 lords or monks! Before 1789, manual workers in towns and peasants in the fields toiled all day without pay for the nobles and the priests, beating the ponds by night to prevent the frogs from keeping the aristocrats awake; their wives and daughters were subject to the droit du seigneur. The noblemen of town and country could, for the slightest trifle or by simple caprice, throw any honest citizen into the dungeons of their châteaux or hang them from the gibbets with which the land bristled, etc., etc. Dismal images and vile atrocities everywhere, the frightful hardships of prisons crammed with these unfortunates. The towns, as everyone knows, were mere molehills without monuments of any sort, without art and without beauty, populated by ignorant manual workers performing thankless tasks they hated, surrounded by gross superstitions, turpitudes and ignominies. The sad and wretched rural areas were where the poor serfs vegetated, scratching the soil under the aristocratic whip…
“That was what our country was and what our unhappy ancestors endured before the wind of 1789 came to regenerate the nation, giving it consciousness of itself and creating the Fatherland that had been non-existent before, along with the arts, sciences, letters, industry and everything else—everyone knows that! There, according to you, is the rightful and true picture of these frightful times; there is the Ancien Régime of serfdom, ignorance and misery—and yet you are in so much of a hurry to get back to it?”
The ex-eminent historian opened his eyes wide. He too, in going backwards, had forgotten many things. Forgetfulness: a precious faculty given to men, without which they would be victims of torments and hindrances of every sort! He had completely forgotten.
“Wait, don’t protest,” said Palluel. “I can hear someone now who lived through those olden times before the Deluge of 1789, and who will be able to tell you about it, knowing whereof he speaks.”
The sound of voices was audible in the office of the journal—not a dispute, for the voices seemed to be in agreement, but something akin to a duet of exclamations redolent with bitterness. It was the man of the 18th century ahead of his time, the venerable Monsieur Le Coq de le Bénardière, who was talking to an editor of Backwards about the 19th century, about which, for the moment, he was still learning. It was necessary to conclude that his impression was not very favorable, for he appeared at present to be developing a veritable indictment of the century of light and science. The editor, perhaps by way of equipping himself to write an article, like any good journalist, was agreeing completely with his conclusions and echoing them.
Monsieur Le Coq de la Bénardière was a sanguine man, even a trifle violent and authoritarian by nature; when he had something on his mind and felt himself touched by conviction, he spoke loudly and clearly, without forsaking his bourgeois politeness.
“Misery of my life!” he cried. “Pretentious and presumptuous generation, look what you have made of the house that we, your ancestors, founded, built, decorated and rendered as agreeable as possible to live in, which we left to you without any suspicion that that you, wretched and naughty children, would overturn everything, change everything, demolish everything, insulting your fathers and treating them as inept barbarians enmired in darkness and filth! With the absurd idea that humanity began with you, and that you alone have been capable of saying, doing or thinking anything reasonable and acceptable! Ah—were we monkeys, then, your ancestors?”
“In truth, Monsieur de la Bénardière, you’re quite right—but did you not also have some of these same ideas relative to the century that preceded yours?”
“Never!” said Monsieur de la Bénardière, striking the table. “Look out for your writing desk…never! Entirely to the contrary, we were full of respect for the 17th century, the great century; we bowed down to its great men, its great ideas, we took shelter in its shadow. While you, our children, are not content to merely treat all your ancestors as blockheads; you attempt to make a tabula rasa of their work
s, to erase them, so to speak, and with an obstinate ferocity, to behave as if they had never lived, thought and worked—which they did more than you, perhaps, and in any case, infinitely better!”
“You’re getting angry, Monsieur de la Bénardière,” said Palluel, “with good reason, I admit—but be patient; your time will come again.”
“And how, Monsieur, shall we recover the house that we have abandoned? Nothing remains standing of that which we loved, of that which we respected, or merely of that which we knew. Everything has been suppressed, materially and morally; you have destroyed it all! Is anything left of the France that I knew? The four centuries’ worth of edifices that constituted her face in 1788, in Paris as in our provinces, has disappeared, and I search for their sites in vain. The picks and spades of sons have overturned the work of fathers, ferociously and stupidly persevering in obliterating its traces, like parricides murdering a progenitor and burying the body! Oh yes, stupidly, one can shout it out, in looking at what they have put in place of the grandiose monuments in the midst of which we lived, in contemplating their dismal, vulgar, ostentatious or gloomy buildings! Can I recognize it, your Paris of immense and cold rows of cages for rent, replacing the 500 edifices that the religion, charity wealth or power of fathers raised, the thousands of more modest houses with their own character? Can I recognize my little town, stripped in the same fashion of the attire that the work of centuries had designed for it?
“Around me, instead of all that might embellish and ornament life, elevating it by the contemplation of those beautiful things that make the eye and the mind negligent, oblivious to stains and vices, I see nothing but the aggressive collection, accumulation and overcrowding of all that may, in the moral order as in the material, contribute to making life uglier, baser and sadder! Have you instituted a cult of ugliness? Or have you, degenerate children, acquired a taste for that which is base, trivial, odiously flat and banal? Go then to ask for lessons in good taste, not from your builders of palaces or cathedrals, but from the simple village peasants constructing the hovels of our era! What is there to look at now in your era? What fodder have you left for the gaze of the worthy man possessed of eyes? Nature alone! Nature eternal, which you have not yet spoiled!”
“But…but…” the eminent historian stammered, “you are utterly scornful, Monsieur, of modern taste!”
Monsieur de la Bénardière disdained to hear, or even to look at the eminent historian, thus demonstrating that he put him on the same footing as the productions of modern taste.
“Oh, yes,” he continued, “I have just been reading your history; I have emerged from your history since 1789 as from a nightmare! You might have economized on all your revolutions, since all the modifications really necessary, the progress demanded by experience, we either had in 1788 or would have acquired peacefully, in the natural way of things. A transformation of the fiscal system, wrought entirely by a process of useful liberalization, and the entire management of France would have been ameliorated! In 1788, we had an aristocracy that was an ornament, the stout remnant branches of the old oak of French monarchies, sustained everywhere by the growth of its roots… It was a force, as in the past, and a decoration, the nation in flower! And the aristocracy was open—ever open, whatever you may say, to the accession of everyone, but accession that had to be justified by good reasons! Deign to take up the Royal Almanac and see whether, in the highest functions of plebeian names, new names are not proudly intermingled with the oldest names of the most ancient French annals! Your equality would make me laugh, if it did not make me weep! It is in everyone’s interest that there should be several layers in society, several ranks—that is the margin of advancement so necessary for the emulation of all. Evidently, the greater number, the mass will remain lower down, but if they do not distinguish themselves with any particular merit, that is, and always will be, justice.
“We did not expel the souls from our bodies. We did not have hearts like desiccated sponges, empty of all ideals and aborted of all religious sentiment! Above the highest interests and the great purely human things, we still perceived the superior regions and the immense mystery towards which the steeples of bell-towers directed our hearts! Superstitions, you say? I even admit superstitions; they are good, they are the parasitic ivy of religion, the humble ivy that attaches itself to old edifices but does them no harm, adding, on the contrary to their beauty. Take it upon yourselves to recover them, those superstitions! Better the exuberance of vegetation than desiccation and withering. The intelligence of encyclopedist brains cannot be found therein—fortunately!—but the fine and brave intelligence of rustic brains, solidly founded and entirely human!
“Your liberty, as we saw before you came to understand it, is oppression and violence, a brutal and disordered tyranny leading inevitably to the establishment of regulated tyranny. Your impossible equality will be a stupid abasement of all to a sub-normal level by a roller-press! Your liberty of 1789 ended in the prisons of 1793, where everyone found themselves equal before the guillotine, the supreme and final expression of that sweet word ‘fraternity,’ which was never so misunderstood as it was on the day when such a scaffold was made—yes, the fraternity of aristocratic and plebeian heads in the bran of the basket.
“Goodbye, Monsieur!”
“Wait a minute. You wanted to have a chat? Let’s chat…yes! In the bran of the basket, I tell you…the great carnage and the sound of the cannon…”
“A thousand apologies! I’m in a hurry…”
The ex-collectivist millionaire and the eminent historian had picked up their hats and sidled backwards to the door, but they were grabbed and held by the old and worthy bourgeois. Holding one by his coat-button and the other by the back of his collar and shaking the a little, he continued to put upon their heads, beneath the torrent of his vehement indignation, all the aberrations of a pretentious and culpable century.
CHAPTER XIX
The Grand Council For the Prevention
of the Errors of the Past
Monsieur Le Coq de la Bénardière had been ill for some time. He had learned too many things in too short a time, consuming the entire course of modern history in a single draught, overloading his mind. He had heaped surprise upon anger, joy upon fury, indignation upon melancholy. Moreover, his wife, who had seen the whole immense drama personally—and had, like all mothers, been particularly subject to its sorrows—had decided to speak.
His heart, still bleeding, overflowed then, and the worthy bourgeois, the father of a happy family in 1788, found out in the space of an hour what the formidable tempest had done to his family in the space of a few years—throwing some into prison and to the scaffold, condemning the others to the endless carnage of the Empire, to the bloody fields of battle, to the fields of snow and mud, to the hospitals ravaged by typhus and surgical infection.
Young doctor Montarcy had to look after the poor wounded old man. Meanwhile, a group of people came together in the offices of Backwards, composed of men of good will like the valiant writer Palluel, veteran of the good cause—thinkers both young and old, the young armed with the experience of a long life already unfolded and the old newly returned with the comprehension of the epoch to come.
Backwards, with the authority acquired in its already-long career, had succeeded in instituting a Grand Council for the Prevention of the Errors of the Past. This Council was universal; all the civilized nations were associated with the project. Sections in each country would only occupy themselves exclusively with their own country, but delegates would come together at three-monthly intervals in an international conference to discuss questions relevant to the community of nations.
At Monsieur Le Coq de la Bénardière’s bedside, the two initiators of the Council for Prevention, Palluel and Montarcy, were debating the final questions relating to the formation and functioning of the Council. Numerous difficulties of every sort could certainly be anticipated, and in its work of social defense, the committee would have much to do, but
obstacles and difficulties had to be overcome—the immensity of the cause demanded it.
Montarcy and Palluel re-read the list of Council members, still debating certain names before the definitive official sanction of the government of return—which is to say, informed—would be given to it.
“First and foremost, no politicians!” said Palluel.
“Understood—not under any pretext!” agreed Montarcy. “Anyone having been involved in politics, in any manner whatsoever—and, in consequence, having the pitiless and noxious virus in his veins—cannot be part of the Council, which is intended, above all else, to attenuate in the largest measure possible the often-disastrous effects of politics.”
“That’s the principle! From generation to generation, the Council will only recruit members from among those men who are entitled, by their intelligence or their character, to have an influence on the march of events and the destiny of populations—and who, more often than not, have been left or cast aside, and have lived without even getting close to the means of world government.”
“Very good!” said Monsieur de la Bénardière.
“Let us ameliorate the times! Let is work courageously to repair, to the greatest possible extent, the innumerable errors of the past! It is inadmissible that the generations, returning along the beaten track, should carelessly step into the same puddles; the Council for Prevention will be there to post lanterns at the most dangerous corners…”
“Of which there will be no lack along the road,” said Monsieur de la Bénardière.
“But which will be known, and which it will be necessary to negotiate better than before.”
“How? By what practical means?”
They will be sought out and discovered! It is sufficient, to put our hopes of amelioration into action, for each generation to bring together a company of fine minds, supported by the good will of governments.”
The Clock of the Centuries Page 20
