First, that it’s an a-cosmical culture. Meaning, it is not without land, but above it. Its values have roots, but they are articulated in-themselves; their origin point is irrelevant. Greek culture is the only other one to exhibit this phenomenon of detachment from nature – not by distance from it, but by the harmonious fulness of their spirit.
What has France loved? Style, the pleasures of intelligence, the salon, reason, small perfections – Expression over Nature. In France we witness a culture of forms which conceals the elemental forces of nature and gilds every passional outburst with a layer of thoughtful refinement.
Germany, England, and Russia are countries of inequality in genius. Their lack of inner form condemns their evolution to happen through peaks and troughs, by alternance of excess and tranquillity. Only France has developed in a regular fashion from its birth to its death. It is the most accomplished country and has given the world everything it had to give, it has never lost its way, it had a Middle Ages, a Renaissance, a Revolution, and an Empire. And a decadence too…
It's the country which has accomplished its duty. It’s the country of accomplishment. Slavs and Germans are fatalities: they crash into destiny, they explode into time, they don’t flow normally, while France has been gifted a measured destiny. It has developed in parallel to nature. The French man had always referenced himself against history, not nature. The individual defines himself as man, and not as individual. A country of humans, and not of individuals.
A-cosmical cultures are abstract cultures. Because they lack a contact with their originary stratum, they also lack a metaphysical spirit, that spirit which searches and probes under life. French intelligence, philosophy, and art always remain within the world of what can be known. And when they start to feel around its margins, they don’t express that – the way English poetry or German music does.
France? The Refusal of Mystery.
*
France is rather more similar to Ancient Greece than to anything else. But while the Greeks routinely united the game of intelligence with a metaphysical spirit, the French couldn’t go as far as that, they – who love a paradox in conversation – were not able to live in paradox as situation. These two peoples: the most intelligent ones under the sun.
*
I don’t think I would be so fond of the French if they hadn’t been so bored at so many points in their history. Their boredom lacks infinity. It is the boredom of clarity. It is the tiredness from things understood. While Germans consider honourable banalities to be the correct substance of a conversation, the French prefer an untruth well-said to a truth badly-formulated.
An entire people sick with cafard; that is the most fitting term for both their upper and lower class. Cafard is psychological or visceral boredom; – it is a moment in time overgrown with a sudden emptiness, without a reason – while ennui is the prolongation of an inherent emptiness of being into the spiritual. Compared to it, Langeweile is a simple lack of an occupation.
The 18th century was the most French century. It was the salon-become-universe, it was the century of embellished intelligence, of pure finesse, of pleasant and beautiful artificiality. It is also the century that was the most bored, which had time in abundance, which only strived for leisure time. Oh, how wonderful it would’ve been to rest under the shadow of the ironic smartness of Madame du Deffand, perhaps the most clairvoyant being of that century! “Je ne trouve en moi que le néant, et il est aussi mauvais de trouver le néant en soi qu’il serait heureux d’être restée dans le néant” [In myself I see nothing but nonbeing, and I feel just as bad to discover nonbeing in myself as I feel happy to remain in nonbeing]. In comparison, her friend Voltaire who once said “je suis né tué” [I am born dead] was only an erudite and industrious clown. Nonbeing in a salon – what a wonderful definition of prestige!
Chateaubriand – a British Frenchman, like any Breton, is only a wheezing trumpet in comparison to the gentle effusions of the unyielding Madame. France had the privilege of having smart women that knew how to introduce coquetry into spirit and superficial and delicious charm into abstractions.
A pithy saying is worth more than a revelation. The latter one is profound, but can’t express itself; the former one is superficial, but expresses everything. Is it not more interesting to accomplish yourself superficially than to compromise yourself profoundly? Where does one find more culture, in a mystical utterance or in a “punchline”? Obviously in the latter, even though one has to proclaim the opposite.
*
Life – when it is not suffering – is a game. We must be grateful to France for cultivating it with so much mastery and inspiration. From the French I learned to take myself seriously only in darkness, and when in the presence of other people – to make fun of everything. The school of France is that of perfumed and perky un-seriousness. Stupidity seeks a goal in everything; seeks intelligence, purpose. France’s great art is superficial distinction and grace. To use talent for purposeless things – meaning for worldly things – is to be a disciple at the Gallic school of skepticism.
The conclusion of the 18th century, not yet tainted by the idea of progress: the universe is a farce of the spirit.
*
You may believe in many things, you may construe divinities to worship or sacrifice to, but they come from outside, they are exterior absolutes. The true divinity of man is the criteria that lay in his blood and by which he judges things. From what perspective you judge the nature of things, from what unconditioned psychological state you select your values – here is one’s effective absolute manifest; an absolute adopted by faith is powerless and bland in comparison.
The divinity of France: taste — good taste.
According to France, if the world is to exist, it has to be pleasing; to be well-made; to be aesthetic; to be bounded; to be delightfully discernible; to be a sweet flower of finitude.
A people with good taste cannot love the sublime, which is nothing but bad taste made monumental. France considers everything which exceeds form as being a pathology of taste. France’s intellect can’t contain the tragical, because just as the sublime, its main trait is that of indiscernibility. It is not for naught that Germany – das Land der Geschmacklosigkeit [the country of lack of taste]– has cultivated them both: categories of the margins of culture and soul.
*
Taste is the antipode of metaphysics; it is the category of the visible. It being incapable of unravelling the cobweb of fundamental essences – which is discerned using the barbarity we call “profundity” – it delights in the ephemeral of appearances. Everything which does not delight the eye is a non-value – that seems to be its law. And what is the eye? The organ of eternal superficiality. The search for proportion, the fear of lacking proportion – is the basis for its continued desire for visible contours. Architecture, embellished according to its inherent form; interior paintings and landscape paintings lacking a deep perspective (Claude Lorrain – a Ruysdael stuffed into a salon and afraid of dreaming); music of an accessible grace and controlled rhythm – all are expressions of proportion, of the negation of infinity. Taste is well-measured beauty raised to categorial perfection. The peril and dangers of beauty are monsters in its eyes; infinity – a fall. If Dante was French, he would’ve only written the Purgatory. Where would he have found the strength and boldness one needs to write the Inferno and the Paradise?
*
Sociability has been both the merit and the sin of France. It’s as if these people were born with the single purpose of meeting up and exchanging words. Their need for conversation arises from the essential a-cosmical nature of this culture. This culture is not and cannot be defined by the forms of monologue and meditation. The French were born to speak and raised to discuss. If they are left by their lonesome, they yawn. And when their whole society yawns? It’s the story of the 18th century.
The moralists gossip about man and his relationship with his fellows; they never managed to raise to the level of man’s condition as such. That’s why they cannot overcome sourness and bitterness – nor the anecdote. They decry pride, vanity, pettiness, but they do not suffer from the inner loneliness that comes with being a creature in this world. What would La Rochefoucauld say if he were in the middle of nature? He would undoubtedly think about the insincerity of man, but he would not be able to conceive of the hidden sincerity which comes from the fear of isolation man feels when he finds himself metaphysically alone. Pascal is an exception. But even in him – even in the most serious Frenchman – one finds an oscillation between the salon and the monastery. He is a worldly man sick with not being French except through the way he formulates his thoughts. Through the leftover health that remains in him he is not different from the rest of the moralist litter. Suppress the Port-Royal in him: he becomes a simple chatterer.
*
If we still read the Roman moralists from the Roman era of decadence , it is because they have probed deep into the idea of destiny, and they did it hand-in-hand with examining man’s nature. We don’t meet that in the French – in any of the French. They didn’t create a tragic culture. Their reason – not so much reason itself, but its cult – has tempered the tempestuousness nature inherent to humanity, that nature which makes us think how small we are in the world, and how merciless destiny is to us . France lacks an aspect of the irrational, of the possible-fatal. It has never been an unhappy country. Greece – who many have envied for its sense of harmony and serenity – did experience the torture of the unknowable aspect of life. The French language can’t tolerate Aeschylus. He is too powerful.
As it concerns Shakespeare, he sounds sweet and mellow in French, although after reading Racine, Hamlet and Macbeth seem to set fire to their French verse. It’s as if the French language caught fire from the tumultuousness and passion of Shakespeare’s words. The infinite has no place in France’s landscape. Only maxims, paradoxes, notes, and essays. Ancient Greece was more complex than France.
Valéry’s statement that man is an animal born for conversation is obvious in France and intelligible everywhere else. Definitions have a much stricter geographical limit than customs.
*
Countries – unfortunately – exist. Each one of them assumes and crystalises a set of errors by calling them values, and then cultivates them, combines them, gives them worth and validity. The totality of these values forms the individuality and implicit pride of a country, but their tyranny also. They unconsciously weigh down on the individual person. However, the more skilled he is, the more he detaches from their pressure. As he forgets them – by the fact of his living – the deficiency of his personal identity is assimilated to the nation of which he makes part of. That’s how one explains the fact that even saints have a national character. The Spanish saints are only similar to the Italian or French ones through their saintliness, not through the accidents of their personal biography. They maintain an accent through which we are able to determine their origin.
What do we do when we speak of France? We describe the way people have wronged in a fecund manner on a certain piece of land. To be for France or to be against it is only to accord yourself or to disaccord yourself with these mistakes.
*
France achieved greatness two times in its lifetime: in the age of cathedral-building and during the time of Napoleon. That is, in two moments that were foreign to its specific genius. Cathedrals and Napoleon – one can’t imagine something more un-French than that. And still, the French people resonated with these aims: they hauled slabs of stone in the Middle-Ages and they died at the feet of the Pyramids and on the fields of Berezina. The French created the Gothic style of architecture – of Germanic origin – and they followed the last figure of the Italian Renaissance on the battlefield. In this way, they overcame themselves twice; they overcame their finite perfection through a contact with two inspirations of foreign nature. Frankish blood erupted in the creation of the Gothic, that was its Germanic element; in the Napoleonic campaigns – the Mediterranean genius for military expedition.
Barring these two moments, France has never thirsted for another. Not for foreign languages, not for foreign cultural imports, not even a passing curiosity towards the outside world. This is the glorious defect of a perfect culture – one which considers its own law to be the only form of life there is.
A country happy with its own space, with a geographical personality that is well-defined, a country that happy even in its physical aspect. There is no mercilessness in its nature, and no great dangers in its blood. It has imposed form to the Germanic element in its own makeup, it has cut its momentum, it has reduced it to horizontality. Thus is explained why the French Gothic is more delicate, more humane and accessible, while the German one invades the heights, like a vertical ultimatum addressed at God. In a certain way, French cathedrals are even compatible with good taste. They don’t abuse architecture; they don’t compromise it by the means of infinity. What we are witnessing is simply a people of immanence with the genius for subtle and revelatory details: the ornament. That’s why there is nothing more French than a Gobelin tapestry, a furniture, or a lacework. Or on the architectural plane: a manor or a hotel (in the old sense of the word, an intimate palace). The spirit of a menuet gently and sweetly criss-crosses this happy civilisation.
It wasn’t able to be original but only in these products of intimacy. When these products ran their course, it exhausted the good part of its possibilities. Decadence is nothing else but the inability to continue to create values that define you.
In the 18th century, France was the law of Europe. Since then, it has only been an influence. Symbolism, impressionism, liberalism, etc. are its last vital contacts with the world before falling into fatal absence.
*
A happy civilisation. How else could it have been since it hasn’t known the temptation to leave for other lands? If it wasn’t for Napoleon to take them on an expedition across the world, they would have remained the perfect province of Europe. He had to disembark from a boat to once more jolt them awake. He knew how to give an imperialist content to their vanity, also called glory. That’s why, perhaps all his expeditions have the nature of literature. The French fought in order to have stories to tell. There was no necessity in their great adventure, they only wanted to appear great in the eyes of Paris.
The French don’t suffer from a sickness for travel. Their sickness is rather for the fireplace, the salon, or the manor. Particularly for these.
What an example full of significance is a Joachim Du Bellay, who while in Rome longs for “la douceur angevine” [Angevin gentleness/sweetness], who feels the pull of his native village and people while living in the Eternal Citadel! Or Baudelaire, when he sings a song of journey – under fear of boredom and the influence of English poets – but finds himself unable to run away from the Latin Quarter in Paris! In his youth, his longing for Paris makes him stop his journey in India!
The French have sacrificed the world for France. They have nothing to seek in foreign lands. In fact, haven’t so many foreigners sacrificed their own country for Paris? Perhaps here one could find an indirect explanation for the incuriosity of the French, for their provincialism. Only that, this province at one point dictated the spirit of a whole continent! France – just like Ancient Greece – was a universal province. These two are also the only countries which regularly operated the concept of the barbarian, a negative qualification of the foreigner – which expresses nothing in essence but the refusal of a well-defined civilisation to open itself up to newness. One of France’s principal vices was the sterility of perfection; nowhere is it manifested as obviously as in their writing. Their care to formulate properly, to not mangle the word and its melody, to harmonically link ideas – these are French obsessions. There is no culture that has been more preoccupied with the issue of style than the French one, and it is the culture of the most beautiful and flawless writing. There is no French author who is irredeemably bad at writing. They all write well; they all see the form before they see the idea. Style is a direct expression of culture. You can meet Pascal’s thoughts in any church sermon or book, but the way he formulates these thoughts is unique; that is his genius. Style is the architecture of the spirit. A thinker is great insofar as he matches ideas properly; a poet, matches words properly. France holds the key to these matchings, that’s why it has gifted a plethora of talented authors. In Germany, if a thinker is able to express himself impeccably – he must be a genius, and then some!
The one who doesn’t know how to formulate will always remain at the margins of culture, even if his intuitions are profound. Style is the mastery of saying. And this mastery is everything. Truths flatly expressed don’t live on in the world of the spirit, while errors and paradoxes charmingly and unascertainably said are placed firmly in quasi-eternity, with the knowledge that these sayings are only referenced with a vague or precise respect, depending on the circumstances or the mood they are cited in.
We must do away with cheap enthusiasm for ignorance in order to have culture. Culture enjoys all the advantages of unreality. The moment it stops enchanting us, it falls apart and drifts off. The values of culture are essentially abstract flurries to which we attach our poor exaltations. Culture is a comedy which we take seriously.
That’s why one shouldn’t exaggerate its merits. Culture is situated at an unknown height above that which is. Culture is overcome by that which is, and that which is doesn’t reveal itself to our anxiety but very rarely.
Intelligent, catholic, avaricious – three ways to not lose yourself, three forms of security. Exaggerations against the ego, perilous generosity on the plane of the spirit and of banality – these do not exist in the French. Their taste and culture exists in order to create limitations. Their fear of losing themselves in a random excess has closed them off into an affective rigidity. Are there a people who are less sentimental than them? The heart of a Frenchman melts only at a well-placed compliment. His vanity is unspeakably great; flattering it may even make him sentimental…
Generally, the Frenchman is capable of intimacy, but not of loneliness. A lone Frenchman is a contradiction in terms. However, sentimentality presupposes a wastage of an isolated soul into lyricism, an undisciplined vibration without a rational justification. To love without being ashamed of loving; to adore without irony; to be passionate without distance…
But the Frenchman disdains the folkloric dimension of the soul. More than that, he is superior to the soul, if he is not outside it altogether…
We, people from other countries, can easily lose our geographic self-awareness and start living in a kind of continuous exile, neither sweet, nor sour. We love nature, and not the human landscape of the fireplace, full of relatives and friends. Regret and nostalgia are the only way we obtain a home. The French sit at home from the moment of their birth, they have both a physical and inner homeland which they love without reserve and never humiliate it by comparing it with other ones; they have never felt rootless in their own homeland, they haven’t experienced the tumultuousness of an unsatiated longing. They are maybe the only people in Europe who haven’t know the experience of nostalgia – a form of endless sentimental unfulfillment. They lack folk music, which we find only it its south (Basque country, Provence, from a Spanish and Italian influence), and they have never struggled with a feeling of inability-to-settle which tortures Slavs, Germans and the Balkan peoples, and is expressed in their varying forms of “Sehnsucht”[longing, nostalgia, desire]. The French are a people overwhelmed with opportunities, endowed with clarity, capable of boredom but not of sadness, loving approximations in faith, and above all these: they have a normal history, without discontinuities, without misses or absences. They developed century-on-century, embodied their values, put their ideals into circulation and were present in the modern era like no other people were. They are now paying for this presence with their decadence; they are atoning for their significant life, for their radiant realisations, for the entire world of values they have created. If they would have sat idly by, their vitality would’ve remained uncompromised. For great nations, a dawn is their noble punishment.
*
Every people have their own issues which they try to solve until they exhaust them; then they detach from these issues, and search for others – and when they can’t find anything else, they sit in their own emptiness. It is natural for these issues to be illusory; the question is if they are quality illusions or not. Second-rate people cultivate illusions of bad quality. Therefore, those illusions can’t be objects worthy of reflection, only of desperation or sourness.
In the domain of philosophy, France has constrained itself to a set of questions and answers which have always exhibited the same leitmotifs: raison, expérience, progrés, but have never exhibited the equivocal characteristics of a personal metaphysics or subjective theology. Pascal couldn’t erode Descartes. His triumph secured a kind of dry intellectual comfort for French thought, has fated it to banality, to a lack of risk, and has distanced it from the fecundity that concepts in the neighbourhood of the absurd have, those concepts that etch themselves into the pale eternity of marble. In truth, there isn’t a French philosophy, the way there is an Indian, Greek, or German philosophy. For a system of thought has no vitality unless it discusses dynamic reality; unless it discusses the functions of potentiality until it reaches salvation or desperation. Bergson had to come at the end of French philosophy to discover the concept of Becoming, something that Ekhart understood perfectly right at the beginning of German philosophy.
But the one who wants to understand the limits of France – and to describe a country means to define its limits, not to specify its content – the most revelatory example has to do with music. Music betrays the sonorous emanations that sprung up from the dark uncontrolled affectations of man; betrays what is most thick, most remote, most profound in man.
Music is a serious art; it cannot be anything but serious. Music doesn’t know irony; there is no sonic equivalent to a witticism. None of France’s virtues are compatible with the dignity of music, that’s why they haven’t created anything great in it. Still, they have created more than the English, who are absolutely sterile in the art of sound, even if they love it more than the French.
Music has a kind of abstract piety, which the Germans possess, or a vast and inspirational naivety which we find in Italian music from the 18th century – the only truly Italian music, because opera as an artform is but a sinister masquerade, passionate whining lacking in magnitude and depth.
The sublime is the banal category of music; its spirit is tragical momentum or vast quietness. Rameau, Couperin, and Debussy – the last one is seemingly so different from the other ones – exemplify French-ness by being tender and refusing tumultuousness. Their sonic schema is a lacework in the process of coming undone. Debussy is a salon-Slav; an Oriental Parisian.
Berlioz alone has a vast spirit. But how can one not notice its false immensity? How can one not be annoyed by its performative force, by his attempting for vastity and tension? He is merely trying to find infinity… César Franck’s situation is similar to that of the admirable Ruysbroeck – he carries in his blood a mysticism that is very little Gallic in nature…
France is the country of constrained perfection. It cannot rise to the categories of supra-culture: the sublime, the tragical, the massively-aesthetical. That’s why it could never and will never produce someone like Shakespeare, Bach, or Michelangelo. Compared to them, even Pascal is but a maestro of details, a cobbler of scraps.
The reflections of French moralists on man – absolute in their irreproachable finitude – are however very modest when compared to the visions about man we find in Beethoven and Dostoyevsky. France doesn’t offer grand visions; it teaches you form; it gives you formulas, but not soul. Thinkers and artists who only know French culture suffer from a serious sterility, and an exclusive contact with it is truly perilous. French culture should only be used in order to correct the extremism of heart and thought, as a school of limits, of good-sense and taste, as a guidebook that stops you from falling into ridiculously grand sentiments and attitudes. It’s sense of measure exists in order to heal us from pathetic and fatal errors. If used in this manner, its sterilising action is welcome.
*
The middle-class man is more accomplished in France than anywhere else. His level is above that of the English, German or Italian one. In France, mediocrity has reached such a perfection in style that it’s difficult to find stupidity exemplified in the average man on the street. Everyone is well-groomed, everyone is a bit cultured. In this way, France is great through trivial things. It’s possible that civilisation, at the end of the day, is nothing but refinement of banality, the perfectioning of trivial things and the insertion of intelligence into the daily accidental. Meaning, to make naturally occurring stupidity as pleasant as possible, to clothe it in a veil of grace, to give it a lustre of wit. France has undeniably the smallest number of heavily, helplessly, eternally stupid people out of all nations. Even its language naturally opposes stupidity. Here, one often hears witticisms worthy of a literary salon in rural taverns. This nation allows neither profundity but neither imbecility, things that create in other nations a million of nobodies and a handful of geniuses. France’s equilibrium is in mediocrity.
We have to be grateful to France for cultivating the vice of not being banal. If the most refined Nordic person is not ashamed to say an obvious thing and to repeat it for as long as it is needed, if no Germanic person experiences the shame of being obvious – the Gallic space is a source of spiritual refreshment because it delights in paradox, facile or otherwise. Both the strength and the defect of the North derives from it not being aware of the burden an ugly conversation places on the interlocutor. If Germans don’t have great novels, if their prose is unreadable, it isn’t only because music and metaphysics are fitting means of expression for them, but because they are not capable of talking, not capable of entertaining different levels of discussion. The novel is a creation of the French and Russians: people who like to talk and who know how to talk. One must only look at the soporific dialogue in the average German novel, at their national incapacity to not monologue to be convinced of the inevitable deficiency of their prose. In a person that loves the aroma of an urgent and immediate word, Germany causes only an infinite yawn. Poetry, music, and philosophy are the creations of an individual by his lonesome. Germans only exist by themselves or all together, they are never in dialogue. While France is the country of dialogue which naturally refuses inspiration from its neighbours across the Rhine, because their inspirations are raw and lacking in form.
There is nothing less German than the French 18th century – and there is nothing more French than that century. Everything was decorative in that century: from the outwards appearance of the people to the embellishment of their spirit. Intelligence became the outward ornamentation of man. Elegant laziness and subtle chit-chat are its noble superficiality. It forgot that sin exists: the great excuse of that century. That’s why the great libertinage of that century can’t be condemned: none of their pleasures were tarnished by a self-awareness of guilt – that can only result from a plebeian panic or from solitude, something that wasn’t given any worth in the infinitely social world of the French. Fragonard is symbolic of the unleashing of sensuality and of all the indiscretions of the senses. There is no one in the history of painting who emanates such a perfume of – or thirst for – delicate voluptuousness and innocent vice; is the solution to the mystery of happiness to be found in sensation? What is certain is that the modern epochs that cultivated it most intensely, the Renaissance and the 18th century, were also the ones spiritually furthest away from the Crucifixion. Intelligence and sensation can reach a great understanding and they might even help each other. However, when the soul intervenes in this relationship, it disturbs their peace with its obscure restlessness. Man reveals his subterranean or heavenly nature in that moment – and peace, the flower of immanence, wilts away. It is harder to be stylishly superficial than to be profound. For the former, you need to be very cultured, for the latter – a simple disequilibrium in faculties. Culture is nuance; profundity – intensity. The human spirit breaks under the burden of sincerity – a form of barbarity – if it isn’t taken with a dose of artificiality.
*
When does a civilisation enter decadence? When individuals begin to be aware; when they no longer want to be the victims of ideals, of beliefs, of collectivity. When the individual wakes up – the nation loses its core, and when all of them wake up – it rots. There is nothing more dangerous than one’s desire to not be deceived. Collective lucidity symbolises exhaustion. The drama of the lucid man is the drama of the nation. Once it beginnings unfolding, every citizen becomes a small exception, and these totalised exceptions determine the historical failure of that nation.
Centuries on end, France did nothing but believe, and when it doubted, it did so within the frame of its beliefs. It believed, one by one, in classicism, in the Enlightenment, in the Revolution, in the Empire, in the Republic. It believed in the ideals of the aristocracy, of the church, of the bourgeoise, of the proletariat – and it fought for them all. Its efforts were transformed into formulas which it then gave to the whole of Europe and the World, who then imitated them, perfected them, compromised them. It has experienced the process of their growth and decline with greater intensity in the first place; it created ideals which it then used until it couldn’t use them anymore, until it loathed them. But a nation cannot generate beliefs, ideologies, forms of state and inner life endlessly. It must at some point stumble. Its spiritual springs must eventually dry out. At that point it wakes up, aware of its own emptiness, and crosses its arms in fear of the future.
*
Let’s transpose ourselves into the situation a Frenchman of the last decades finds himself in. What could I adhere to?
To democracy? But after a whole century of abusing the word “peuple” [the people], after the mysticism of liberty has been used up, after the usefulness and uselessness of the Revolution’s ideals has been verified, what new meaning could I attribute to this idea? A people that have realised a great Revolution which has taken roots everywhere, once these ideas have become compromised, these people have lost their ideological predominance. A century of preparation for the Revolution, and a century of disseminating it has placed France in the centre of doctrinal and political thought. But the ideals of 1789 have become rust; their prestige is nothing but an obsolete grandiloquence. The greatest modern revolution is now old junk. What did it represent? A combination of rationalism and mythology: a rationalistic mythology. More precisely: Descartes shaking the hand of the average man on the street. Democracy doesn’t provoke any kind of enthusiasm anymore, and it is a fading anachronism to aspire to it.
To the motherland? But it has no longer any meaning. France was already a motherland in the Middle-Ages when other nations weren’t even aware of themselves as nations. It has been loved and worshipped; it has produced all possible values it was capable of. There is not a moment in its history that would inspire regret. It has fulfilled itself maximally in every age; not a whisper of desolation, not one serious absence. Everywhere it has produced the men it was called to. In the name of what can it expect more men to arise? What more can it offer to itself and to humanity?
The French have nothing to die for anymore. Cerebral skepticism has become organically rooted in them. Their lack of future has become the substance of their present. France can produce a hero no longer – for no Frenchman is unconscious and profound anymore.
A nation can only create if values are the criteria of life, not if life is the only criteria of value. To believe in the fiction of liberty and to die for this fiction; to launch an expedition for glory; to believe the prestige of your country to be necessary to humanity; to substitute humanity with your ideals – these are values.
To value your own skin over your ideal; to think with your stomach; to oscillate between horror and voluptuousness; to consider mere life as more important than anything else – this is life.
But the French don’t love anything anymore, they are merely living now. They haven’t been able to die for a long time already; they’ve done it too often in their past. What new beliefs are there left for them to die for? Now that they’ve run out of vitality, they’ve become aware of life, and Decadence is nothing more than an exclusive cult of life.
You live in order to do something, but in decadence life becomes a goal in itself. To live as such – that’s the secret to ruin. It is natural for a people to exhaust themselves, if they do not exhaust it is a sign of sickness, of inefficacy, of an eternal deficiency. Only people who haven’t lived – and the Jews – don’t decline.
But France has lived with an efficiency rarely met in history. It has overlived. While in its period of magnification it did so for the sake of its values– and those values were its life – now these values are void and its life is deficient.
An exhausted people distance themselves from their creations. They only participate in the spiritual world through intelligence because the psychological deposits of their spiritual beliefs have run dry.
What would I do if I were French? I would repose in cynicism.