The Clock of the Centuries

by Albert Robida

  “Hmm!” said Monsieur de la Bénardière, still in the grip of his deep pessimism, for reasons that were all too justified.

  “The History we have to hand, uncertain as it is, will permit the Council for Prevention to act effectively on governments. The Council will guide, in every possible fashion, by warnings or actions, good governments, kings, ministers and statesmen, helping them to extract the maximum number of satisfactions from the good situations and happy period traversed, which they can combine in order to shower them down on populations—satisfactions which, alas, ever since there have been governments and populations, have hardly piled up under that relationship. And when the difficult times come, the periods of misfortune and desolation, the Council for Prevention, permanently constituted, will search for the most efficacious ways and means of getting out of those calamitous periods with the best possible results. To anticipate, to strive, to ameliorate! It is a superb role that the committee will play in operating a sort of revision, day by day, of the history of the world, in trying to weaken evil and fortify good, favoring good and useful actions and neutralizing, so far as it might be possible, the bad ones.”

  “If harmful individuals could be seized as soon as they show their faces, and hanged without further ado, I’d have more confidence,” said Monsieur de la Bénardière.

  “My dear Monsieur, let’s not forget that we cannot suppress the past as we please. We must inevitably submit to time’s backward march; we can only try to soften and organize things.”

  “The time of perturbations is getting close now,” said Palluel. “The Council for Prevention only has a few years in hand for consideration! Brrr! What other epoch can manifest such a fine collection of harmful individuals? There’s little time to devote to the question of the imminent return to Earth of those who will see once again the great upheaval of nations, shaken by a fit of political epilepsy that will grip all Europe. What they know of their sins in old age will render the harmful, the evil and the injurious less offensive, I hope. We shall soon see again the old tremblers of the Plain who, out of laxity, replied in the affirmative with their votes—their pollice verso 26—to all the demands for heads, the ex-guillotiners who subsequently became the undistinguished courtiers of the Empire and the excellent prefects furnishing conscripts for the imperial hecatombs. Afterwards, we shall see those who devoured one another in the struggle: the great wild beasts; the terrorists who plied the guillotine’s blade so freely.

  “Let us wait for them with a firm stance: the talkers and the fighting-men, the hypocritical and the ferocious, the rogues and the madmen, and let us work for their amelioration…”

  “What will you do with them? What?” demanded Monsieur de la Bénardière, raising his arms in the air.

  “My dear Monsieur,” said Montarcy, “you only arrived recently; you are still ignorant of the new order of things. The backward progression of life is favorable to the amelioration of the human race! Already, the thinkers and the observers have been able to establish real progress. No, man is not the imperfectible and irreducible animal that we thought; people are beginning to recognize that today!

  “Having to retrace a life already lived, proceeding backwards towards naïve and candid youth, forgetting painful phases, trying, by virtue of an understandable interest, to avoid faults and falls—that enormous circumstance has enormous consequences! And one has a better sense of the connection between generations, the solidarity between them and the cousinly relationship—so as not to abuse that beautiful word but besmirched word fraternity—the cousinly relationship binding everyone together. Look, here’s a very simple calculation. Every one of us has two grandfathers and two grandmothers, which makes eight for the preceding generation and 16 for the one after. At four generations per century, we arrive in 200 years at 512 grandfathers and grandmothers. Which is to say that the man without a home, the unfortunate who has no family and no place in the world, nor shoes on his feet, who wanders starving through inhospitable streets, would, if he were suddenly transported to the time of Louis XV, have 256 paternal houses. Imagine this: the rich man of today, who looks down from the height of his luxury without sympathy, might encounter him at the hearth of a communal ancestor!”

  “And as for all those wild and bloody revenants of the Revolution who are beginning to return,” said Palluel, “some of them sinister bourgeois forgotten in little towns, mulling over their terrible memories by the firesides of old pensioners, others corpulent lords strutting ostentatiously about vast estates or opulent church properties, members of the Chamber of Peers, still meddling in politics, do you imagine that the thought of finding themselves petty lawyers again, as before, mere provincial attorneys or needy novelists, will not incline them to be a little more easy-going and gentle during the hard period, when they will pay the leading roles in the great tragedy? For in the end, having passed through his great days again, Monsieur de Robespierre, to his great detriment, will have to go back to pleading petty cases at the Arras bar; the terrible Danton will put away his thunder and plead at the Châtelet. ‘Monsieur Danton,’ the judge will say, ‘it is useless to strike us down with your eloquence; all that is at stake now is a mere trifle of a case, a shopkeeper bringing an action for 100 écus!’ Barrère too will plead and fill in forms for minuscule fees; Carrier, the executioner of Nantes, will return to pressurize the pleaders of Aurillac; and Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, will again become the shyster of the Châtelet, embezzling money from his clients and serving as a police spy. Hébert, Père Duchêne,27 will have to go back to selling tickets to make a living; the frightful Marat will go back to work as a veterinary physician in the stables of His Royal Highness the Comte d’Artois, who will have been Charles X. Collot d’Herbois, the proconsul-executioner of Lyon, will reappear in the theatre as an actor and writer; people will whistle at him again in La Journée de Louis XII, a heroic comedy in four acts, L’amant loup-garou, Rodrigue et Séraphine, etc., etc. One can, I think, rely on that certainty of returning one day to their own particular humble origins to give these gentleman cause for some reflection!”

  “By the same token,” observed Montarcy, “I imagine that, for the Great Emperor, the prospect of one day finding himself merely a lieutenant of artillery might trouble him slightly upon his imperial throne!”

  “Most certainly! And what thoughts will that inspire in him? Will his politics not feel its effect, and will not the populations over which he trampled, and the victims of his cannon, and his own soldiers, old veterans or young conscripts, gain something therefrom?”

  “We shall see!”

  “Say rather: it must be!” said Palluel energetically. “It is in the great crises that the Council for Prevention will demonstrate all its finesse and ingenuity, deploying all the resources on which the international association of the most noble intelligences permits us to count.”

  CHAPTER XX

  The Cycle of Generations

  The years continue to pass—or, rather, to re-pass. Yet more changes in everything, in mores and ideas as well as the material conditions of life!

  The Chambers continue to work feverishly at their task—which is to say, unmaking a large number of laws that have ceased to be necessary and indispensable, and bringing back the old ones, almost always to everyone’s great satisfaction. This legislative work is not very exciting for Parliament and the electors, although there is always discussion, and even sensational discussion; this is, after all, the epoch of great parliamentary eloquence.

  Certainly, one can sometimes observe rather violent currents in public opinion—but such violence gradually dies away; anger and bitterness decrease; everything becomes calm. Parliamentary eloquence becomes increasingly considered and polished, more classical in form and content. Its effect is primarily soporific, except upon the true amateurs of the genre. Never has it been so easy and so comfortable to sleep in the Chamber. There are still, of course, contests of personal ambition, portfolios that are disputed, ministers to topple,
interests, jealousies and hypocrisies in conflict, programs to defeat, promises to break, friends to betray and oaths to violate—but much less bitterness is brought to bear in such matters. Everything is accomplished and supported more easily. Besides, one knows now that, for all annoyances that become manifest, as to all diseases of the body, tomorrow will unfailingly bring the remedy.

  Alas, one must expect a terrible revenge of parliamentary eloquence and an enormous reflux of malevolent, damaging and destructive power from the heyday of the Revolutionary Assemblies, which will mark the epoch when the venom of speech, overheated by streams of vitriol, brought France—seemingly at least—to its maximum of virulence and noxiousness.

  In the meantime, all is calm and full of joie de revivre. We once knew joie de vivre, but it is that of revivre that we savor now. Fine and mild weather! It really does seem that the seasons are more beautiful and that the Sun shines more brightly. March is certainly now less cold and more discreet in its sudden storms, and more flowers bloom in the fresh April greenery. Springtime’s festivity is visible in the towns, as in the country, galaxies of daisies speckling all the meadows, white dresses and trousers adding to the gaiety of streets and promenades. Does it still rain sometimes, and does winter still bring its snows and frosts? Yes, certainly—but in sensing the march towards youth, the world passes through these tedious little intervals more easily.

  And what modifications in ideas! Truly the 19th century, with its abrupt orientations and disorientations caused by rapid changes of every kind, moral and political alike, in customs and conditions of life—a convulsive century full of passion and folly, which turned all ideas on their heads and whose heart ended up almost petrified by lamentable and gross materialism—marked the end of a human era: an era after which, with all hopes disappointed and all illusions dead, there was nothing better to do than retrace its steps in search of the tracks and grooves of preceding ages.

  Each generation that reappears corresponds to change in the social ideal. It is, for each one successively, the finest ideal—the one glimpsed in the days of the first existence.

  What astonishing small changes have been observed within the great change! One no longer hears talk of feminism or of feminine resentments against unjust and long-standing masculine spoliations; there is no longer any question of the famous Madame Y*** or the tempestuous Madame Z***, who dream of overturning these ancient and obsolete ways, the abolition of masculine monopolies and the accession of women to all social roles. These ladies are becoming wise little girls who study the petty catechism and baptize their dolls; their mothers or grandmothers, presently, are very considerate individuals, very calm, even timidly bourgeois, who embroider slippers for their husbands and whose minds, when they are not occupied with jam-making, wax indignant for three months over some petty infraction in the ordering of the chairs and the prie-Dieu at high mass, or over the slightly extravagant hat worn by a certain flighty individual about whom there is a great deal of gossip in town.

  These ladies would of course, be even more indignant, and would make their husbands party to their indignation, if they had ever been able to believe that at a certain moment, as rumor has it, women had dared to adopt masculine manners subversive of the natural order—a cavalier tone, as the slang of the time put it, I am assured—while, on the other hand, men, descending in their turn from some nook or canny of low society, would match their thoughts with the tone of their words and reel off uninhibitedly, in respectable drawing-rooms, jokes and expressions that a sapper of the 1820s would scarcely have dared risk in conversation with another sapper in a guard-room.

  It is also said, and is just as difficult to believe, that young ladies were quite fluent in slang learned while roaming freely in the fields, schoolboy slang reported to them by brothers, and the truly excessive language of contemporary soldiers. No, all these obviously-exaggerated tales are impossible to credit.

  It is certainly preferable that grumbling parents should sometimes to cry out impatiently: “Birdbrain! How little it needs to occupy the mind to a young girl!” than that people should say, with justified suspicion: “What’s behind those pretty eyes, and what troubling thoughts are rolling around in that head?”

  It is the general feeling, and there is no longer any question of irritated and unbalanced women. The fashion has passed; one no longer sees these ‘hysterical states of mind,’ as the jargon of the end of the 19th century put it. Ladies and maidens are generally sweet, reserved and very romantic, and sometimes remain romantic for quite some time. At the end of the day, comparing the fashions, this one is preferable.

  CHAPTER XXI

  The Principle of the Steam Engine Is Finally Forgotten!

  The railways are entirely decrepit and forgotten; people are no longer intent on scorching and burning vertiginously through life. Members of the public are less and less inclined to risk themselves in these dangerous conveyances, with which, for the illusory benefit of a needlessly exaggerated speed, one must risk terrors, bruises, grazes, chills and all kinds of death. One after the other, the lines have been abandoned; day by day, agriculture is reconquering the vast tracts of land formerly monopolized by railways and other abolished industries.

  Our beautiful royal roads have recovered their cheerful movement, their circulation of stage-coaches, diligences, berlines, mail-coaches, poste-chaises, carts, etc. Monsieur Laforcade, whom we knew as a grandfather, is the post-master at Auxerre, on the road to Lyon and Italy. Despite the concurrence of river-borne transport, there is a diligence every day containing ten people who are traveling to Lyon—a journey taking four days in summer, five in winter.

  A beautiful road, perpetually ribboned with carriages and travelers of all sorts, amid the joyful racket of bells, horns and the cracks of postillions’ whips. It is a perpetual procession: trader’s carts carrying large bales of merchandise, very numerous and coming from every country, especially when the great fair is held at Beaucaire; poste-chaises bearing English lords to Italy; mail-coaches; horsemen; pedestrians; regiments changing garrison; peasants going to the nearest free market; companions on the Tour de France with their packages of personal belongings on their shoulders and ribbons in their hats.

  A little blond boy is playing by the roadside with his brothers and sisters; it is father Laforcade, who has scarcely donned his first pair of trousers.

  What changes in science, industry, commerce and everything else!

  Finally! Finally, the principle of the steam engine is on the point of being forgotten. It is already no more than a curiosity that scientists demonstrate to one another in their laboratories.

  Here is the last gasp of murderous and brutalizing mechanization, the closure of the last large factories, the disappearance of enormous industrial agglomerations draining life away and depopulating the countryside in favor of black cities of sad labor, and giant factories whose innumerable inconveniences have finished up sowing alarm in all minds not closed to reflection. Those ferocious machines, so long triumphant and dominant, have been cast down at last! Only the economists and statisticians, with hearts as dry as figures on balance-sheets, were able to contemplate them without shivering—and even to congratulate one another on their industrial and financial returns, uncaring about what the tons of manufactured products or the gold heaped up in coffers represented in terms of tears, misery and evils without number.

  For too long, mechanization and large-scale industrialism have crushed free and healthy individual work, erasing all that small-scale concurrence, bringing forth immense warehouse-barracks, industrial and commercial centralization—which is to say, the suppression of small and medium-sized independent situations, the servitude of human beings: slaves of the monster of iron and flame, workers reduced to mere hands, or tools!

  In addition to material harm, the immense factories brought promiscuity and its perils, eroding the family little by little, if not destroying it.

  All that is now finished, though! The creature of iron and steel
, the work of man that became his ferocious tyrant, expired with the death-rattle of its extinguished furnaces and the sinister grindings of its moving parts. The last blasts of its strident whistles and the last gasps of its cranks and pistons gave the impression of an exhausted fortress expending its last cartridges. The iron cog-wheels stopped, and the formidable monsters—so long victorious, harsh suzerains whose flamboyant keeps overlooked vast black regions—have collapsed one by one, becoming immense cadavers of rusty scrap iron, which the dust and the grass of the fields will transform into strange hills: the tumuli of the extinct Iron Age.

  This evolution accomplished, liberated humankind will be able to utter a long sigh of relief; entirely returned to old and sane ideas, it has already forgotten everything. To factory work and machine labor, people much prefer the more flexible work of the hand and traditional methods.

  Thus, everything that the 19th century called its achievements, all that it proudly proclaimed as its conquests, in the scientific context as in the political and social contexts, has fallen or vanished. We have seen all those so-called conquests rejected, one after another, in the name of true progress: that which must have for its goal, above all others, the true happiness of human beings and the real embellishment of life—good and simple truths too long misunderstood or lost to view.

  And in consequence of this return to good and simple ideas, one can foresee in the near future—after a temporary phase of definite difficulties—the re-establishment of guilds, traditions rediscovered with all their former authority. After a lapse more painful than genuinely long, old abandoned habits will be reborn and will rule life as they once did—which is to say, open and organized guilds, as much for the advantage and progress of the craft as for good regulation, apprenticeship, protection, foresight and help for the sick and the old.