by Greil Marcus
for your prayers have been the greasy smoke over the battlefields of our Europe
Go forth then into the tragic and exalting desert of a world where God is dead
and till this earth anew with your bare hands
with your PROUD hands
with your unpraying hands
Today Easter day of the Holy Year
Here under the emblem of Notre-Dame of France
we proclaim the death of the Christ-god, so that Man may live at last.
The cataclysm that followed went beyond anything expected by Mourre and his fellows, who first planned merely to let loose a few red balloons. The organist, warned that a disruption might take place, drowned out Mourre just after he pronounced the magic words “God is dead.” The rest of the speech was never delivered: swords drawn, the cathedral’s Swiss Guards rushed the conspirators and attempted to kill them. Mourre’s comrades took to the altar to shield him—one, Jean Rullier, twenty-five, had his face slashed open. The blasphemers escaped—his habit streaked with Rullier’s blood, Mourre gaily blessed the worshippers as he made for the exit—and were captured, rather rescued, by the police: having chased the four to the Seine, the crowd was on the verge of lynching them. An accomplice had a get-away car ready; seeing the mob advancing on the quai, he didn’t wait. Marc, O and Gabriel Pomerand, present in the cathedral, slipped away and headed straight for Saint-Germain-des-Prés to spread the news.
THE CONTEXT
The context of this event, which made the papers all over the world and is now forgotten, is no longer obvious. In 1950 religion had been granted a new respect, a new silence in its face. The campaign to get women off the job and back into the kitchen was matched by a campaign to get everyone back to church. The pope—Pius XII, an antisemite whose fascist sympathies were only lightly veiled—was treated by even the secular press as beyond criticism, a dispensation never granted John XXIII, or for that matter John Paul II. The action of the Notre-Dame four would be an outrage today; in its time it was tantamount to murder.
The following day the New York Times devoted its first four pages, four full pages, to Easter-around-the-world. The lead stories featured the Fifth Avenue parade and the pope’s homily on the social gospel; the “untoward” Notre-Dame incident received the same number of lines as an item from rainy London:
“Three mental cases? “Three boors? “Three heroes?”
Michel Mourre, center, with lettrist poets Ghislain de Marbaix, left, and Serge Berna, in police custody following the Notre-Dame incident, Combat, 12 April 1950
In the late morning there was an “Easter Parade,” stimulated by an offer of one of London’s popular papers of a £50 prize for the best dressed woman seen in Central London. Radio, stage and screen stars braved the weather wearing their best finery.
In Paris Notre-Dame was front-page news in banner headlines. L’Humanité, the Communist Party daily, denounced it. In more liberal terms the unaffiliated Combat did the same: “One recognizes the right of each person to believe, or not believe, in God. One recognizes as well that farce is necessary, and that, in certain circumstances, even practical jokes are defensible. But . . .” Sticking to its role as the popular forum for the avant-garde, the paper opened its pages to a debate on the matter: led by André Breton, much of surrealist Paris rallied to the defense in letters that ran for days.
The basic tone of these letters was oddly nostalgic. What was odd was the nostalgia for a past that had never quite happened, for great days that had not exactly been lived, for an explosion that never took place. The surrealists joyously claimed patrimony over a great public event, but within that joy was a vacuum of shame over their twenty-year wait in cafes and galleries for bastard children to fulfill their legacy. “It is fitting that the blow should have been struck here, at the very heart of the octopus that is still strangling the universe,” Breton wrote of Notre-Dame. “It was there too that, in our youth, I and some of the men who have been and are my traveling companions—Artaud, Crevel, Eluard, Peret, Prévert, Char and many others—sometimes dreamed of striking it.” In all his years as a tribune of revolt, had Breton ever yielded up so much surrealist territory, ever conceded that as against an event, even a false one, a dream was just a dream? Mourre “took action,” René Char wrote, as if Mourre’s crystallization of the surrealist spirit, if that was what it was, suddenly revealed Char’s years as a Resistance fighter as no more than a contemplative substitute for a confrontation with real life. Showering apologies, the bad fathers came forth to claim their sons, but the sons did not claim the fathers.
Of the four “illuminati” (Combat), only Mourre was held: the archbishop charged him with impersonating a priest. Dispatched for psychiatric testing, Mourre won Combat’s editorial reversal when the court-appointed alienist, one Dr. Robert Micoud, summarized Mourre’s “frenzied idealism,” “contempt for external perception,” “prereflexive cogito,” “indifferent ocular-cardiac reflexes,” “ortho-sexuality (shamefacedly admitted),” “ability to go straight to the heart of a doctrine” and “to travel in an instant through various epochs,” “irritation at the suggestion that Being may have preceded Existence,” “ideational fugacity,” “surprise attacks by sonorous parachute-drops and nose-diving neologisms,” and “exaggerated angular paranoiac logic, in which there is more rigorous narrowness than narrow rigorousness.”
Postcard, 1980s
This was a masterpiece of French literary criticism. Clinically, it was also accurate—but mixing politics with his prescription, Dr. Micoud blew himself out of the water. Mourre might cause no more trouble in cathedrals, the psychiatrist reported, but short of confinement in an asylum he posed a definite threat to “public tranquility in middle-class districts.”
Dr. Micoud had gone too far, a second scandal drowned out the first, and after eleven days in custody Mourre was set free. Three months later he wrote Malgré le blaspheme (In Spite of Blasphemy), a book so acceptable to the church that the archbishop, the very man from whom Mourre seized the mass, recommended that all church libraries stock it. Once past biographies of Charles Maurras (1868–1952), the charismatic leader of the monarchist, protofascist faction Action française, and of Felicité de Lamennais, a nineteenth-century crusader for religious liberty, Mourre became a hack ecclesiastical encyclopedist; he died, respectable and bygone, in 1977. The Notre-Dame incident, one Combat correspondent noted at the height of the furor, was if nothing else “a fine beginning for a literary career.”
IN SPITE
In Spite of Blasphemy remains an extraordinary document. “Why,” Mourre wrote, “had we not been able to adapt ourselves to the world?”
Armed with their complex-detectors, the psychiatrists could always pin it on our anti-social attitude. It was very strange, however, that there were so many anti-socialites and paranoiacs, very strange that an epidemic of mental diseases had suddenly laid low the whole of French youth. In this world, where we had been looking for life, we had found only wreckage. We could have dreamt, as I had, of the good old days of prosperity or tried to make a pilgrimage through the old institutions which once spread their blessings over the face of the earth; but all we could find were empty structures without a soul, all cracked, crumbling and condemned. Ghosts of splendour, memories of vitality—in spite of ourselves, we had to indulge in a romantic taste for ruins and dead glory.
We would force ourselves to keep quiet at the mention of our old dreams, accept the ruins and be happy in them, and become ruins ourselves, self-conscious, self-satisfied ruins. We had reached the point where we systematically went out of our way to find ugliness, evil and error in everything, but for most of us this was undoubtedly only a desperate show of bravado, a mask to conceal our disappointment at not having found truth, beauty and good.
In the tradition that stretches from Augustine’s Confessions to the sermons of Little Richard (“I was a drug addict! I was a homosexual! I sang for the devil!”), Mourre’s nihilist testimony only meant that the worse the s
ins, the greater the ultimate piety—or, as Raoul Vaneigem would put it, “pissing on the altar is still a way of paying homage to the Church.” Always, Mourre explained, he looked for a whole truth, an absolute: God had promised it. Marxism, existentialism, and their like were no more than dessicated versions of God’s promise—since without God man is nothing, they were, like all other humanisms, megalomaniacal solipsisms. Because God’s promise never left him, Mourre said, he found himself incapable of living out either the abstractions of philosophy or the routines of everyday life: “It was God that I had to kill objectively in order to be free.” Announcing the death of God, Mourre felt that death fall back on him, a reeling blow that felt like a kiss: Christ’s kiss to the Grand Inquisitor. The circle closed; Mourre had written “the history of a failure,” and now it was over. No wonder the archbishop was happy.
From the first day, the papers made the most of the irony that “the false dominican” had, once, actually prepared for the priesthood. That was not the half of it. It had been a seeker’s road; on it one could travel in in instant through various epochs. To read In Spite of Blasphemy today is to begin in Paris in the 1940s—and then to find yourself in the mid-1960s, when every question was open, then in the early 1970s, when so many one-time questioners desperately surrendered to answers. It is to feel yourself carried forward to London in 1976, when Mourre’s “We would become ruins” would have been painted on punk jackets if the grammar hadn’t been too fancy and Jamie Reid’s Sex Pistols slogan “BELIEVE IN THE RUINS” wasn’t already on them, to move backward to May 1968, when “SOON TO BE PICTURESQUE RUINS” spray-painted on the boulevard St. Michel was graffiti advertising a vacation for tourists the new revolution promised would never be born, and then to cross the boulevard St. Germain to the rue de Four, to walk into a cafe called Moineau’s, in the early 1950s, when a few people who called themselves the Lettrist International set out to keep the promise Mourre had made and broken. For there was another tradition of the absolute, moving alongside that of sin and redemption: the long line of fatal spells, the tradition of seeking ugliness, evil, and error in everything, the legend of the attempt to turn the mask of disappointment over the absence of truth, beauty, and good into a real face. As with the music of the Sex Pistols, the noise of the dadaists, and the prophecies of the groups that formed around Guy Debord, the road Michel Mourre took to Notre-Dame is itself a version of the story I am telling, just as his event was sketched out in the versions that preceded it and was engraved in the versions that followed it. In the years that brought him to the cathedral, Mourre acted out a secret history of a time to come, a time that would never know his name.
HE WAS
He was born in 1928, into a bourgeois, suburban Paris family; socialist, almost red, but cut with doubt. His father was a municipal architect, dependent on political connections for his commissions. No Mourre, he proudly told his only child, had been baptized for a hundred years, and Michel did not see the inside of a church until he was sixteen. The official family hero was Michel’s paternal great-grandfather, a member of the Paris Commune. But when Michel’s father was away, Michel’s maternal grandmother whispered tales of another ancestor—an aristocrat, she thought, who ended on the guillotine, martyr to the bloodlust of Robespierre and Saint-Just.
Politics dominated the dinner table, all brags and taunts; Michel’s mother kept silent. She was crazy. When Michel was eight and the family was on vacation in Brittany, she took him to a narrow wooden bridge overhanging a deep gorge and said that she was going to dash herself to pieces on the rocks below. If Michel loved her he would follow: “We’ll punish the lot of them!” Back in Paris, she turned to tarot cards, seance tables, automatic writing: suburban surrealism.
In 1940 she died a long and miserable death from cancer; Michel’s father had all but abandoned her for his mistress. As the Nazis approached Paris, the father made ready his escape to the south, convinced that as a socialist he would be immediately put up against a wall and shot. He led Michel up to the attic and there burned twenty years of left-wing newspapers, manifestos, talismans: his pictures of Léon Blum, Popular Front prime minister of France in 1936–37, of La Pasionaria, Communist heroine of the defeated Spanish Republic. He did it, he explained, to protect the family—Michel and his grandmother—who were to be left behind.
To Michel his father was already as dead as his mother. He was a hypocrite. Before the war he parked his car well away from Popular Front meetings, so as to arrive on foot “like the rest of the workers”; following the Communist Party line that with the Hitler-Stalin pact in force “National Socialism was still Socialism,” he soon returned to Nazi Paris. He married his mistress; Michel refused to live with them. He went through puberty parentless, under the wing of his hapless grandmother. Sometimes he was shunted off to his Alsatian uncle, who reveled in the Nazi conquest. Why not? The Germans put on good concerts in the parks. They were polite. Life went on.
RIGHT FROM
Right from the start, In Spite of Blasphemy is full of real venom: throughout, “I hated” seems its most common claim. The book offered no apologies to the pieties of the postwar period. “[He was] a weak man,” Mourre wrote of his father, “who could not understand the need for heroic adventure or the lust for power . . . [he] refused to admit that Fascism was the price he had to pay for Democracy, for the lies of Democrats like himself.” La Pasionaria, a Stalinist, might have agreed—but to Michel’s father, whose politics were as sentimental as they were convenient, La Pasionaria was an innocent. To Mourre, looking back after Notre-Dame, or even to adolescent Michel, looking forward into oblivion, no one was innocent. As Michel and his grandmother tried desperately to board a train out of Paris, as they were shoved back by the crowd, the boy saw the same people he had seen at his father’s Popular Front rallies, and he was sickened.
I think that the memory of those terrified men and women crowding round the Gare de Lyon on the 11th of June 1940, that soulless, spiritless mob which was without hope because it was without a leader, will keep me forever from believing in the fine fairy-tales of Democracy. In my childish heart there occurred a sort of revelation, through which I recognized the necessity for order and the advantages of authority. The god that my father had wanted me to worship was crying for a railway ticket! The masses, the divine masses, were dying of fright because they were leaderless and cursing the freedom that had led them to ruin.
Such rhetoric might have been acceptable after May 1958, after de Gaulle seized power out of the chaos of the Fourth Republic. In 1950, it was obscene.
ABUSED
Abused at school for his shabby clothes and beaten up for his inherited anticlericalism, Michel fought back. Still, he had nowhere to go—and so in early 1944 he found himself caught up in the teenage collaborationist milieu. Fascism was a noble, exciting cause, Mourre wrote: “an amazing adventure was taking place.” The amazing adventure consisted mainly of rescuing victims of Allied attacks on the outskirts of Paris, but Michel’s group leaders wore attractive uniforms and carried real revolvers. He claimed in retrospect that he might just as well have joined the Resistance. But this was safer.
The Liberation of August 1944 struck Michel as a joke. Everything changed and nothing changed. One form of cowardice was exchanged for another. Jailed for collaboration, Michel attended his first mass: anything was better than the boredom of a prison cell. He heard a message he didn’t understand; he was filled with a vague sense of possibility. Released, he was arrested twice more in 1945; finally the charges were purged. “What had I betrayed?” Mourre said. “My country? I could not have betrayed it. I had never belonged to it.”
EXPELLED
Expelled from school for his presumptive crimes, sixteen-year-old Michel found a job as a government bureaucrat. He was required to sit in his chair for eight hours and work for one; he spent his time reading newspapers. In Lyons, Charles Maurras was on trial for treason.
Maurras founded Action française in the aftermath of the
Dreyfus affair. In 1894 the French officer Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was convicted of treason and sent to Devil’s Island; thanks in part to Emile Zola’s polemic “J’accuse,” the documents on which the conviction was based were proven false, and in 1906 Dreyfus was exonerated. The controversy split France. It exposed French antisemitism and official corruption; to many it deprived all hierarchical power of legitimacy. The scandal drew a line through French society, attaching thousands of intellectuals not to country but to values free of any nationalist patrimony; it set the stage for the surrealist revolt. To Maurras, the whole matter proved one thing: French culture was decadent, weak, and bankrupt. And he drew this conclusion not because Dreyfus had been expelled from French society, but because he was welcomed back to it: wearing the badge of the Legion of Honor, the kike traitor walked the streets like an honest man. France no longer existed; Maurras would recreate it.
In fringe newspapers and pamphlets Maurras campaigned for a return of the monarchy, simultaneously calling for a revival of classicism and an end to modern art. Against modernist ambiguity and relativism he demanded the purity of the Greeks; he discovered a “Mediterranean” link between the founders of Western civilization and their now lost and scattered descendants—all those who might read him and understand. It was a marginal movement in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, but it was fierce, seizing every defeat as a promise of final victory; brick by brick, Action française laid the foundation for the French acceptance of Nazism. Conquered by Hitler, Denmark tried to shield its Jews; France vomited them up.
With Hitler dead and Nazis on trial in Nuremberg, Michel was less captured by Maurras’ doctrines than seduced by his tone of voice. In the dock, the old man stood on his feet and denounced his accusers. Deaf and condemned, he spoke for hours; he left nothing out. He called for a greater France, a “true France.” He asked the youth of France to follow him—to avenge him. He “focused the first beams of order and essential discipline onto my spiritual anarchy,” Mourre wrote. “I no longer felt I was on my own. For several months I was as happy as an orphan who suddenly finds he has a mother and father.” As he faced the judgment of history, Maurras was a relic. To Michel he was the first promise of youth: no compromise, against all odds.
