by Antal Szerb
Chamfort is the most important forerunner of nineteenth-century pessimism. Schopenhauer learnt much from him. Many of his sayings still in circulation are wrongly attributed to the great German philosopher, who occasionally forgot to mention his sources. But their construction is lighter, altogether more French, than Schopenhauer’s, and thus more ‘modern’. His aphorisms might have come from the pens of such contemporary French ironists as Paul Morand, Montherlant or Cocteau. With the reader’s permission, we shall translate a few of these, since there is no other document that so consistently and concisely expresses the guilty conscience of the years preceding the Revolution.
The poor are the blacks of Europe.
They govern the people the same way as they think. They feel free to utter stupidities the way ministers feel free to commit blunders.
In France they spare the arsonists and punish those who sound the alarm.
Only the history of a free people is worth studying. The history of a people under a tyranny can be nothing more than a collection of anecdotes.
Consider this: for thirty or forty centuries we have struggled to enlighten ourselves, and the result is that the three hundred million people living in the world are the slaves of some thirty tyrants.
Courtiers are like beggars who have grown rich by begging.
Society, and the world at large, are like libraries. At first glance everything seems to be in perfect order, because the books are arranged by size and shape. But in reality everything is chaotic because the books are not grouped by subject, contents or authors.
There are two great orders of society: those who have more to eat than they have appetite, and those who never have food enough to satisfy their hunger.
Life is a sort of illness which is eased every sixteen hours by sleep. But this is just a palliative. The only cure is death.
I have my doubts about wisdom. According to the scriptures it begins with fear of the Lord. I rather think it begins with the fear of mankind.
In some centuries public opinion is the worst opinion.
Society was made necessary by physical disasters and the misfortunes of the human condition. But society merely adds to the calamities of nature: its problems make governments necessary, and governments simply aggravate the misfortune. Such is the history of the human condition.
It was only the failure of the first floodwaters that prevented God from unleashing the second.
And here are a few aphorisms about women and love—
However badly a man may think of a woman, there is always some woman who thinks even worse of her.
Do you know any woman who does not assume, when she sees another paying attention to one of her male friends, that she is taking too much of an interest in him?
It is a very unlucky man who can bear in mind, when he meets a woman close up, what he knew about her from afar.
In our time, the piquancy of secrets has been replaced by the piquancy of scandal.
I remember meeting a man who broke off with an opera singer when he discovered that she was just as insincere as any respectable woman.
Is it my fault that I always prefer women who are loved by others to those who are not loved?
And so we make our way down the social ladder: Laclos, nobleman; Chamfort, déclassé; and the third, Beaumarchais, plebeian. Beaumarchais is from the same layer as his own Figaro—the non-privileged person who lives off the privileged: the flunkey. The Revolution, unfortunately, brought this layer above all others to the surface. The future was with Beaumarchais. Figaro was the New Man.
Or perhaps not. Not yet a bourgeois, only a non-aristocrat, Beaumarchais, like Laclos and Chamfort, is the antithesis of the aristocracy.
Here we might mention an episode from Beaumarchais’s truly dazzling life, as it is distantly connected with our little history. Its title might well be: Figaro as Diplomat.
When Louis XVI acceded to the throne in June 1774, Beaumarchais informed his Chief of Police, a M Sartine, that a pamphlet was being printed in London and Amsterdam that was extremely insulting to the royal couple. He asked for authorisation to travel to the scene to stop the writer, one Angelucci, from publishing. As always in his dealings with Beaumarchais, Louis procrastinated for ages and then, as always, ended by granting permission. The writer received a letter of commission from him which he wore at all times around his neck, hanging from a gold chain in a gold box, out of respect for the King.
His negotiations went well. Angelucci agreed to abandon publication on payment of one thousand four hundred English pounds. Beaumarchais personally saw the pamphlet burnt in London, then the two men travelled to Amsterdam and destroyed the print run there. But what a cunning fellow this Angelucci was! He secretly kept back a copy and took it to Nuremberg, where it was finally printed.
But Figaro was still himself. “I am like a lion,” he wrote to Sartine. “True I have no money (author’s note—neither do lions), but I have my diamonds. I shall convert everything into cash and continue on my way with fire in my heart. I don’t speak German, but I shall travel night and day, and woe to the rascal who has forced me to cover three or four hundred miles when I’d much rather have my feet up. When I catch up with him I shall seize all his papers and murder him, as he deserves, for all the trouble he has caused me.”
On 14th August he overtook the scoundrel in a wood in Liechtenstein. Beaumarchais leapt from his coach, grabbed hold of Angelucci, tore the pamphlet from him, plus 35,000 francs, but then gave him back some of the money out of the kindness of his heart. However Angelucci reappeared shortly afterwards, accompanied by another ruffian. Beaumarchais overpowered the two of them but was wounded in the process.
Beaumarchais’s rather less imaginative coachman gave a different version of the story. According to him, Beaumarchais got out in the wood to shave himself, leaving the driver to go slowly on ahead. When they met again, his hand was bandaged up. He claimed he had been attacked by robbers, but the driver had the impression that he had simply cut himself while shaving.
In Vienna Beaumarchais was received with considerable suspicion. It transpired that he had not given Angelucci the one thousand four hundred pounds, but had promised him an annuity instead. They thought it best to lock the eccentric diplomat up.
He was however subsequently released. He returned to Paris and presented his bill. Louis XVI’s government generously, if reluctantly, met his claim for expenses amounting to 72,000 pounds. Sartine excused the actions of the Viennese court with the words:
“Look here, old chap, the Empress took it into her head that you were some sort of adventurer.”
The suicidally bad conscience of the French ruling class is best seen in connection with Beaumarchais’s masterpiece, The Marriage of Figaro. Its popularity, together with the outcome of the necklace trial, is regarded as the most notable harbinger of the Revolution.
The King read the play in manuscript and expressed the view that it should not be performed. The Censor was of the same opinion, as were the Keeper of the Seal (the Minister of Justice) and the Chief of Police. This aroused so much popular discontent, Mme Campan relates, that “Never, in all the years preceding the collapse of the monarchy, were the words ‘oppression’ and ‘tyranny’ uttered with more passion than at this time.” After much wrangling, the play was performed in April 1784. In the leading role was the Comte de Vaudreuil, Marie-Antoinette’s intellectual friend and thus an indirect link to the Queen herself. The King’s two brothers were present on the opening night. The aristocratic audience received it with wild enthusiasm, whereupon Beaumarchais became even more impudent than ever. To a duke who had asked for a box in the theatre so that his female relatives could see the play masked and incognito, he sent this churlish reply. “I cannot respect, Your Excellency, the sort of woman who is willing to see a play she considers immoral provided that she herself is not seen …”
Not long afterwards Breteuil did lock him up for one of his impertinences—not in the Bastille, which would have been
too good for someone like him, but in St Lazare. But by then the time of reckoning was close at hand. The few days Beaumarchais spent in prison produced a far greater outcry than the fate of all of the thousands who, under the three successive Louis, spent years, or their entire lives, without access to trial, in the Bastille, St Lazare and other prisons.
The royal family did their best to placate enraged public opinion and its orchestrator, the mutinous Figaro, by staging The Barber of Seville at Trianon with Marie-Antoinette as Rosina. Moreover, which perhaps pleased the great financiers even more, they finally honoured the claim brought against them for 2,150,000 livres.
Meanwhile, night after night at the Comédie Française, Figaro continued to pour his irony and impertinence onto the enthusiastic nobles filling the auditorium.
“No, Count, don’t do it!” he roars, when he hears that his master Count Almaviva intends to seduce his bride Suzanna. “Don’t even try! Just because you are a grand seigneur, do you think that instantly makes you a genius? My, how birth, riches, rank and office make a man proud! But what did you ever do in return for those privileges? You took the trouble to be born, and that was all. Otherwise you’re just like anyone else. But I, damn it, when I was just one of the nameless crowd milling around down there, I had to show more learning and wit just to make ends meet than the entire Spanish Empire did in a hundred years; and you want to start something with me? …”
And sitting there in their boxes, Almaviva and all the other counts rejoiced that at last someone had spoken the truth.
Viewed from a distance, Beaumarchais was not the most ‘left-wing’ of the writers in his time. The Marquis de Condorcet was much more of a revolutionary. In his works he waged war on every kind of social abuse, from forced labour to Negro slavery, and later, when a prisoner of the Revolution, wrote his most resolutely optimistic masterpiece, in which he showed how humanity progresses irresistibly towards freedom and equality … and then took poison. The Abbé Reynal described the behaviour of Europeans in the two Indias, East and West, combining geographical, historical and economic facts with eloquent diatribes against the wars of conquest against the natives. He was introduced to Frederick the Great, and given a ceremonial reception by the Lower House in England; for twenty years his book was a Bible on two continents, and even the young Bonaparte, in his student days, would echo his sayings.
And then “the party of the lost children”, as Taine calls them: “Naigeon and Sylvain Maréchal, Mably and Morelly, the fanatics who laid down the binding dogmas and highest duties of atheism, the socialists who proclaimed a common weal in order to exterminate selfishness, and wanted to establish a society in which all who sought to retain their ‘contemptible private property’ would be declared public enemies, treated as dangerous lunatics and locked away for lifelong solitary confinement.”
These people were sometimes imprisoned by the Ancien Régime, sometimes not, but Mably addressed one of his books to the Duke of Parma, and the Poles asked him to write them a constitution.
“The writers and the ruling class waged a bitter war against each other,” says Mercier, “but there was never any doubt that the former would emerge victorious.”
But the war was not quite as bitter as he suggests. We should not forget that just as the nobility played the role of friends of the people, the writers posed as the upholders of a persecuted but defiant middle-class morality. In reality those who spoke for the Court and the aristocracy were actually in agreement with the writers and the common people: some sort of change was bound to come—in short, revolution. Except that the word ‘revolution’, as used at the time, did not have its present meaning. The Latin revolvere comes from the verb ‘to turn’ (hence the rotating-barrel ‘revolver’), and its early usages all imply a sense of turning, as in ‘la révolution des saisons’—the ‘revolving’ seasons of the changing year. As we have already said, in that idyllic and optimistic period, with its predisposition to expect miracles, the coming changes were imagined as being entirely peaceful. Never in their wildest dreams did people imagine that when they did arrive they might be for the worse. “Nothing serves better than the history of our Revolution to persuade philosophers and statesmen of the virtues of humility,” says Tocqueville. “Never was there an event of such magnitude, or one that was more thoroughly prepared for, over a longer period of time, that was less foreseen.”
Count Haga, looking around the city of Paris in 1784, must surely have noticed all the signs, but even he failed to see what was coming. On that negative note I would like to conclude my general survey.
After the Revolution, the often-mentioned La Harpe wrote a little story which better than anything registers the unsuspecting innocence of the years before the Revolution. This account, which we quote word for word in the following, is not a true history, rather a retrospective fiction. But if a prophet, such as Cazotte claimed to be, really had appeared during those years, it might well have been one.
It is as if it all happened yesterday, but in fact we were in the early days of 1788. Some members of the Academy were sitting at table—all noblemen and people of high intellect, since the membership was large and included people from all levels of society: courtiers, high-ranking officials, writers and academics. As usual we had dined extremely well. Over dessert the excellent Malmsey and Rhenish wines had freed up the mood … Chamfort was reading aloud from his godless and outspoken stories, and the more aristocratic ladies had not yet required the assistance of their fans. There was a flood of jokes against the Church; one came from Voltaire’s La pucelle, another from Diderot’s philosophical verses. One of the guests told a story that put a sudden stop to the laughter. His hairdresser had said to him, while applying the powder: “You see, sir, I’m just an oppressed starveling, but that doesn’t make me any less religious than the next man. It’s getting to the point where there could soon be a revolution. It’s absolutely essential that all this superstition and fanaticism should make way for philosophy and take some account of reality. But when that day comes, and who those people will be who bring the triumph about …”
Only one person held aloof from the ensuing uproar of discussion. This was Cazotte, an otherwise congenial if eccentric fellow, sadly given to visionary dreaming. Finally he spoke. In a voice of deadly seriousness he declared:
“Gentlemen, you can be quite sure we will all live to see the great and glorious revolution that people so heartily desire. You know I am something of a prophet, and I repeat, we shall all live to see it.”
The guests poured loud mockery on this. Condorcet led the way.
“You, M Condorcet, will end your days on the floor of a dungeon. You will die of poison you have taken to escape the scaffold—poison you will have been forced to keep about you at all times, in the happy days that lie ahead.”
There was laughter, and Chamfort sprang to Condorcet’s defence. Cazotte told him he would soon know that Eteokles and Polyneikes were brothers, when those who never have food enough to satisfy their hunger set aside a hideous fifteen minutes to attend to those who have more than they can possibly eat. (When the time came, Chamfort opened his veins with twenty-two slashes of a razor.) Next, Vicq-d’Azyr (the Queen’s doctor), Nicolai (a leading member of Parlement), Bailly (the astronomer) and Malesherbes, the Minister of Justice, were each addressed in turn. And always with the one refrain—the scaffold.
“This is incredible,” people cried out from all sides. “Cazotte has sworn that we’ll all be annihilated.”
“I haven’t sworn …”
“So the Turks, or the Tartars, really are within the gates?”
“Not at all; what I said was that men will be governed by philosophy and reason alone.”
“Wonderful,” said La Harpe. “And have you no prophesy for me?”
“You will be the greatest miracle of all. You will become a Christian.”
“Well, then,” laughed Chamfort, “no harm there. So long as we don’t perish before La Harpe becomes a Christian, we sha
ll all live for ever.”
The Duchesse de Grammont spoke next:
“It’s lucky we women won’t be part of the revolution. Or rather, I think, we might get involved to some extent, but no one will harm us because of our sex …”
“Your sex, ladies, will not protect you, and it will make no difference whether you involve yourselves or not. They’ll deal with you the same as they do with the men. No distinction will be made.”
Cazotte was warming to his theme. His words swelled up in waves, like the bars of the scaffold, every one a ghastly prophesy.
“So you see,” said the Duchesse de Grammont with a smile, “you won’t even grant me the benefit of a confessor.”
“No, my lady, there will be no confessor, neither for you, nor for anyone else. The last condemned person to have that privilege …”
He stopped for a moment.
“Well, which happy mortal will have that privilege?”
“It will be his last: that person will be the King of France.”
The host instantly rose from the table, and everyone followed his example.
