I understand France through everything that is rotten in me; Germany, Russia, and the Balkans – through the chaos in my blood, the blood of a telluric race.
Decadence means collective lucidity: a soul reaching its expiration date.
This is what happened to France – how did it lose its soul?
A nation deposits a piece of itself into its objectives as it creates them. A sentiment dies with each artwork; an emotion with each gesture; a possibility with each movement. Culture absorbs a nations reserve of feelings; it is the graveyard of its heart, an economy of its blood. Every creation of French genius – a church, a maxim, a battle – has added to Frances’ present and taken away from its future. The actualisation of a people – the translation of their dynamic depths into symbols – reveals their vitality and foreshadows their end. An act of creation leads to death, it materialises the spirit into an objective form and kills the vital power of its soul. Underneath a culture lay the corpses of countless men. The corpses of countless men – this is the meaning behind the current spiritual void of the French.
Their affective anaemia is of temporal nature, it is not a crisis precipitated by growth nor a historical accident, but the conclusion to a centuries-long process, the ultimate coronation of their destiny. The French not only don’t have feelings anymore, but they are also ashamed of them. Nothing offends a Frenchman more than a soulful person. They are a people embalmed in skepticism; an alexandrianism without the grandeur of the Greco-Roman one; an obvious finality, experienced without noise and without drama. Because the French are a drama only for a scholar, for whom France is only a case study where he validates his philosophy of culture.
Think about the Slavs, the Russians, in whom the soul sings – a people of dawns to come. The telluric is boiling in their blood; feelings bloom like flowers from their soul. Their reflexes are uncorrupted; their instincts are as a prairie in full bloom. However you look at them, everywhere you look in them, you see the future – a near future or the future of the centuries to come.
What do you see when you look at the French? Jaded and exhausted instincts – an eroded soul. Their instincts were vigorous at some point – between the Crusades and Napoleon, in the French epoch of the world. But the centuries that are to come will be a vast desert for them; the future of the Gauls will be a development of their emptiness into an inevitable extinction. France is suffering from a cafard of agony.
Great nations shipwreck at the margins of history not by accident, but by a necessity inscribed in their seed. There is no human intervention or rational calculus that can save them sliding into extinction.
Whatever inner reforms are made in France, whatever measures are enacted – there is nothing that will make the French decide to make children again. When a peoples love life, they refuse to continue it. The abyss between the love for voluptuousness in life and having a family is unbridgeable. Sexual refinement is the death of a nation. The maximal exploitation of immediate pleasures; their prolongation beyond their natural limits; the conflict between the urges of one’s sensations and the urges of one’s intellect are a sign of decadence and are expressed in the helpless attempt of an individual to master his debased reflexes. Lucidity is reflected into biology, the will to not “endure” has catastrophic consequences. Only people who believe in something can make children – people who adhere to something, who are unconscious enough to be able to feel themselves a part of a wider organism called the nation and to participate in it.
A people who doesn’t believe in their own myth are on a pathway to depopulation. The emptiness of French villages is a crushing sign that the French don’t have a mythology anymore. A nation must grave images to live, and the individual must worship an idol in order to take act in the world.
As long as there was life in France, it was capable of transforming concepts into myths. The strength to give ideas a sentimental value, to project the contents of the soul into logical things and to employ its vitality to make fictions real – this is what it means to transform concepts into myth, this is what it means for culture to flower. The fecundity of a peoples is revealed in their myths, in their adherence to these myths, in their battle, suffering, and death for these myths. The “ideas” that France produced, she fought for with its whole soul, and at the cost of its own blood. If France had a decisive role in the spiritual history of Europe, it is because it gave life to these ideas, it animated them, it extracted them from the neutral realm of abstract nonbeing. To believe means to give life.
But the French are incapable of either believing or giving life to anything anymore. They do not even want to believe – because that risks being ridiculous. Decadence is the inverse process of growth: it is the retransformation of myths into concepts.
The French are a peoples that find their own categories to be empty – and have a vague desire to join in their spiritual emptiness. All that is left is intelligence without heart, which is sterile. And their irony, now unsupported by a strong pride, becomes a mere auto-irony.
In its most radical form – this process is characteristics of the intellectual class. However, it would be erroneous to think that it hasn’t seeped into all social strata. This crisis is structural and fatal.
The one who has wandered through the French countryside – previously animated by passion – finds himself overcome by a monotony and a feeling of silence, made even worse by the exclusive presence of old people, whose wrinkled faces don’t console you even with a memory of a past glory. Whatever part of a French province you find yourself in, you are struck by a total lack of life, of rhythm, of children, of future. The olden churches keep vigil over the total death that lowered itself unto the French countryside, their saddened spires invite you, in a vague and obsolete coquetry, to leave their sight, to not flee this absence of life.
Nowhere have I been so overcome by a desire to run, to run amok, than when I wandered the countryside of France. It’s as if I wanted to run away from the smell of death, from the stuffy air of a permanent finality. I knew, however, that entire centuries happy people lived in these dead places where I have wandered. Glory must be paid back however. This “eternal” nation will become a country like any other before it completely wastes away.
Under Napoleon, she still had youth. His marshals were young boys. He himself, at 30 years old, already had more than enough glory. He had a country capable of madness too.
If by miracle, a Napoleon would spring up amidst so many old Frenchmen, what would he be able to achieve? Probably only philanthropy, pension reform, and document archiving.
Oh, how great France used to be!
*
The 1789 Revolution has lived its hour – and the bourgeoisie together with it. One has all the right to believe that in its early hour, this revolution was generous, prodigal, perceptive. If you’ve experienced it in its period of decomposition with its avaricious, querulous, and petty spirit, you can easily see that such a social program could lead to nothing else but swift ruin. This revolution concentrated all the vices of the French people into one. In its crepuscular form it only values money and pleasure – compared to the individualism and the cult of freedom it bleed for another time. Its end marks the most mediocre point in French history. France has only one social reserve left: the proletariat. And only one formula: communism. This is the only salvation its Jacobin tradition can conceive off.
But even the proletariat suffers from a lack of mission, from the shadow of this country’s history. The furor of its modern masses has only left it with material revindications and the exhibition of material needs and hate. France no longer has a revolutionary destiny, because it has no real ideas to fight for. Any kind of revolution it will perform this century will never have a special significance.
Its past spiritual forms are of no use to it. Catholicism is so pathetically stale as a spiritual form that to attempt a renewal through it would be equal to a legalisation of death. What possible use can a people with dormant instincts extract from soporific liturgies and sermons constituted of Latin quotes which are dreamier than a dream? Spiritual exhaustion leads to cultural mumification. All its Gallic joyfulness will not stop France from becoming a spiritual mummy, the same way the Greek oracles didn’t stop that happening to the Greeks and the Roman gods didn’t stop that happening to the Romans. The Fates are more ruthless with nations than they are with individuals.
Because France as a culture is already fully-formed, it cannot appeal to any foreign solutions. A transfusion of blood would only prolong its agony. This act of cowardice would be unworthy of its great past. It can only raise to the heights of its past if it will accept its end with style, masterfully cultivating a decadent culture, extinguishing with great pomp – and even corrupting its neighbours and the whole world with decadent and dangerous inspirations. Negation can still be effectively used in other nations, as a kind of noble plague. After so much fanatisms, shouldn’t Europe engage in some scepticism? And are we not all preparing for a great evil this century, in which France’s contribution could be amongst the most important? If France has one more mission in the world, it is to give a formula to our incertitudes and to eat away at our certitudes. It is powerless, therefore it is exposed to irony and pity. It’s force to create new beliefs has long been extinguished.
It has never missed the mark in its past. It has missed the mark by refusing its alexandrine end, it has missed the mark of its end, and that would be a shame.
France is waiting for a Paul Valery full of pathos and cynicism, an artist of absolute void and lucidity. He – who is the most correct out of all the Frenchmen of this century –, a symbol of a sterile culture par excellence through the perfection of his style, is however not the maximum expression of decadence because he lacks a vague prophetic nuance and the prideful bravery to go beyond the pale. On the line of his refinement, the French can still be fecund. Renouncing content is the secret to Valerys writing and to the future of France. An absolute cult of premises, a dynamism without illusions, this is the path to alexandrine possibilities. If France will not become the country of dangerous subtlety, we will have nothing to learn from it. Who will be the one to find a formula for its exhaustion?
Europe still has enough vitality to make use of delicate and poisonous scepticism. The German and Slavic blood calls for it, it needs it. Scepticism gives noblesse to virility and distinction to force. The spiritual future of this continent will be made up of a mix of universalism and scepticism. Empires dissolve ideologies. In their place will rise infinitely refined scepticism. The deficiencies of France will adorn the energies of fresher nations and will thus ease their process of disaggregation. In the same way, it will serve as a model to great modern nations; – it will show them what they are heading towards, where they will end up and will serve to slow down their enthusiasms. France prefigures the destiny of other countries. It has reached the end sooner than others, because it has spent more of itself and for longer than others. When the Germans entered into Paris – they, who know history – saw their own end, they read their future in the resignation and exhaustion of the Great City.
A peoples begin in an epic poem and end in a eulogy.
*
In the epoch when a race is strong, it automatically produces people who put forwards directives, hopes, reforms. Their insistence and passion for these proposals makes the masses adore them and it proves the vital strength of that race. The need for renewal, either with truth or with falsities, is a defining feature of a period of growth. A lunatic like Rousseau represents a peak of effervescence, but who cares about his opinions nowadays? His tumultuousness is only interesting to us by the echo it produced in history, and the meaning of this echo. An apparition of such great dimensions like Rousseau is nowadays unthinkable. The people don’t want for anything, and in this case, who is left to propose them something, and what exactly would he propose? Peoples are insofar as they are fat in ideals, insofar as they can’t breathe from being overfull with belief. Decadence is an ideal holiday in which everything else seems disgusting, it is an intolerance of the future – and as such it means a degradation in the time-feel of that peoples, and has an inevitable consequence: no more prophets, and implicitly, no more heroes.
The vitality of a race is manifested in the willingness of an individual to die for values which are beyond his own limited interests. A hero dies willingly, and he only consents to this sacrifice because he is unconsciously possessed by the life-force of his race. The race sacrifices its individuals from an excess of force. A race struggles from too much life in their heroes. When a race stops producing them – and stops partaking in a heroic type of life, it’s own sterility makes a permanent negative mark on its own becoming. The antipode of heroism is loving life as such, that’s why decadence can’t inspire an epic-poetical spirit. In Greco-Roman times, Epicureanism or Stoicism represented the definitive end of the Homeric world which lived by the poetry of action that ended up as a civilisation wallowing in the prose of reason. The finish line for France is no other than this: the prose of reason. Nations start their path in history by sublime errors – and end their path in sterile truths.
Homeric heroes lived and died; the snobs of the West chit-chat about pleasure and pain.
The French of Crusade glory have settled down in kitchens and cafes: in bien-etre and boredom.
It is natural for a dying people to not want to die. Historical old-age, alike to physical old-age, represents a cult of life lacking in life. A shrivelled up and wrinkled state of becoming…
An insistent search for happiness, a thirst for paradise, the desire to overcome the sad nature of the present moment are all proofs of a serious exhaustion. You abandon the infinite when you desire to exhaust yourself fully in the immediate. There is nothing more pathetic than to see a nation which truly abused the attribute of “grand” – la grande nation, la grande armée, la grandeur de la France –degrading itself by joining the masses in their search for some leftovers of happiness. No war, no revolution, no monument and no exceptional act has ever been accomplished without a passion for adventure even at the cost of pain and suffering, and without that implication of fortune and misfortune that crowns every deed worthy of glory. “Le Français moyen” [the average Frenchman], “le petit bourgeois” are shameful terms that currently circulate in France and bloom on top of its past acts of greatness. This has to do with that irony of life where the sacrifice of a hero leads to a boring delight in mediocrity, it’s as if the glory won by blood is there only to be trampled on by future sceptics.
*
You can say that a peoples was touched by decadence when problems infiltrate into their blood, doubts into their feelings, insecurity into their reflexes. The spirit intervenes into the body. Biological decadence is the crystallisation of rationality into automatisms. Biological functions stop reacting to immediate temporal stimuli and don’t fulfil their purpose according to their inherent need. Life fully exists only if its unconscious. An old culture erodes life’s foundation, slows down its spontaneous reactions and corrupts and smothers the blood.
The disappearance of the irrational from a races blood is the danger of having a ripe civilisation, just as barbarity is the danger of its initial momentum. You add a drop of consciousness in its circulation – the landscape of its world changes.
It ideals crumble; -- and the symbol of life they carried with them too. The culture will die on all the planes of the spirit; but even worse so, death will sip into its veins. Sophistication is poison to blood.
What is Decadence, what is France? Rational blood. This opposes it to “primitives”, be they in art or in any spiritual plane. France is everywhere as little primitive as possible, meaning less fresh, less unmediated, less absolute. The auroral stage of a civilisation is characterised by its naïve relationship with objects and values. Everything that enters into their perception and reasoning maintains an unconditional state, like a virginal thrill of a spirit opening itself up to the world. A “primitive” creates without awareness, without a technical obsession or aesthetic reflection, directly from an instinct That places him in the unmediated life of things. He is the man that lives in the ecstasy of the object. That’s why his vision is so little problematic and so little infected by scepticism and self-consciousness.
In the crepuscular stage of a civilisation, scepticism replaces ecstasy, and reflexes don’t answer to the immediate presence of things. Here we find ourselves at the antipode of a primitive epoch. The artist becomes a scholar of perception – loathing the act of seeing itself – and makes out of man a parallel being to himself. Previously, the artist breathed mythology and God; now, the considerations of others.
The diseasing of instincts is the catastrophic triumph of spirit and culture, which in its totality, does nothing but throw question marks to biology. Their quantity grows proportional to spiritual refinement. The history of civilisations coincides with that of biological crises, which honour “life” by diminishing it.
The French have spent themselves through excessive being. They don’t love themselves anymore because they feel that they did so too much in the past. Patriotism is the result of a reflexive excess of life; there is nothing less spiritual than love for one’s country, it is the sentimental expression of animalistic solidarity. Nothing offends the intellect more than patriotism. The spirit infiltrates you, chokes the ancestors in your blood and wipes out from your memory that calling that comes from the plot of land that fanatical illusions have christened as: the fatherland.
How can reason orientated towards its essential purpose – towards the universal and void – motivate an individual who loathes being a citizen to lower himself to emptily praising the beautiful Citadel? The deterioration of instincts in Frenchmen is the mark of a great disaster for France’s fate.
Just as Stoicism spread the idea of a “citizen of the world” – because no “local” ideal would satisfy an individual already sick of an immediate and sentimental geography – in the twilight of the Greco-Roman civilisation, our epoch – its decadence being open to the most accomplished culture – will nurture a yearning towards a “universal Citadel”, in which man, lacking an immediate content, will search for a distant one, the contents of all men which is vast and imperceptible.
When the ties that keeps fellows within a community in a cattle-like state of restfulness break down, they spread their antennas towards one another in an empty nostalgia. A modern man’s only dwelling appropriate for his needs is an empire. It is a call for an exterior solidarity, in which the vast reach of an empire both oppresses and liberates him. At that point, what can a fatherland do for him anymore? When a man is so full of scepticism, any corner of the world can be his home. A consciousness, once purified from the obscure urges of its blood, frees itself from its native spirit, from being embedded in the traditions of its ancestors. When you can easily wander the through centuries with your mind and heart, the whole universe can become a substitute-cradle and you detach from your maternal inheritance and childhood imprinting. The march of history quells the Earth’s voice. The unfolding of history has crumbled the citadel’s walls, just as it will crumble the walls of your consciousness. To be at home anywhere – this is what a ripe civilisation imposes on its men because its seed has now bore fruits, and they have rotted. By the way, what is civilisation? A pointless festival of the world.
*
France’s misfortune is that its twilight happened in an epoch when everyone is aware of history. The 19th century left us its perspective on civilisation, its historical data, and the philosophy of it as an inheritance. We are all, in different degrees, victims of information and very little naïve when it comes to judging historical vitality and values. Alexandrianism – which is a style of culture built on the basis of historical feeling – obliges us to synthesis, which we abuse readily, with great fantastical action and with great scholarly irresponsibility. As aesthetes of a historical universe, we judge the beliefs of others like premises and their decadence as a spectacle. We can only speak of France’s twilight period aesthetically; it doesn’t provoke pain in us, just as it doesn’t provoke pain in the French. The developments of universal history have the character of vistas. And what is Becoming itself if not the tragi-comical function of our delight?
France is an exceptional occasion for us to verify negative experiences. It urges us to disabuse and playfulness, to paradox and irresponsibility. Its destiny makes our failures look better, or to pour our failures on top of its failures to create an exhaustion-alloy for future aesthetes to taste from.
To be alexandrine, meaning to be lyrical and cold; participating with your whole soul, but objectively; to overflow spectacularly. It is impossible to feel the present and the future differently that in this way.
When a country stops living in potentia, what else can it inspire in you but an ironic tenderness? The pathology of the present? My wounds touching France’s wounds. What a fateful meeting!
*
A decadence whose meaning we can all understand can be fertile for us, but not for the ones that are living inside it. We can enrich ourselves once again on the back of France. We are intellectual vampires feasting on its death throes.
We make our spiritual tent in its lack of myths, and its emptiness an adventurous exercise. Oh, how embarrassing its future ambitions are! A country which serves only the purpose of spiritual exaltation, a country without a loadbearing support, but one in front of which we can still define ourselves, the way we would do in front of an overcast sky knowing that it’s hiding a bright blue one. Because no matter how much good-will you have, its only excuse is its past. When Europe will be shrouded in shadow, France will serve as its living grave.
*
A man ripped away from the world of values leads to an instinctive nihilism which limit a man to the cult of sensations. When you don’t believe in anything, sensations become your religion, and the stomach your finality. The phenomenon of decadence is inseparable from gastronomy. That Roman, Gabius Apicius, wandered the coasts of Africa to find the tastiest langoustines and couldn’t settle for any one spot because none were to his taste – is symbolic for the type of gastronomic digressions which sprout out of nihilism. From the moment France has lost its beliefs, the act of eating was raised to the rank of ritual. What is revelatory is not the act of eating itself, but the fact of meditating it, speculating it, to spend hours doing it. The awareness of this necessity, the supplementation of a need with culture – just as in love, represents a weakening of instincts and values. Everyone has experienced this: when you suffering a bout of scepticism in your life, when you are disgusted with everything, lunch becomes a celebration. Food replaces ideas. The French are aware that they are eating for more than a century now. Starting with the lowliest peasant and up to the most refined intellectual, lunchtime is the daily liturgy of their empty souls. The transformation of an immediate necessity into a phenomenon of civilisation is a dangerous development and a grave symptom of illness. The stomach became Rome’s grave; it will, inevitably, become the grave of French rationality.
*
Alexandrianism is the period of savant denials; refusal as cultural style. Man meandering through ideals; the thinker snakes his mind subtly through ideas. Neither of them settles down anywhere. They have no fatherland, no dwelling place. Decadence is the lack of a spiritual roof, the spiritual negation of home. Where would you rest your bones and fix your inspiration in? Your erudite imagination urges you towards all horizons; no high winds can stop your curiosity for outdated novelties. It is a hopeless adventure, a nostalgic hopelessness.
There exist countries which are fecund and vast only in their decadence. That is the case of Ancient Rome, too constrained in its dawn, but overwhelming in its twilight. The gush of oriental religions, the multitude of new idols placed on top of their autochthonous superstitions, skepticism and immorality infiltrating provincial mores signify its twilight as being its period of accomplishment.
The end of France has no dimensions. It is too natural, too obvious, too little-padded; it is the logical conclusion of its becoming; it is so logical that it doesn’t surprise. The extraordinary is not a category that applies to France. An agony lacking grandeur. As if its inner void will simply … end. This country has no cover on its path to Nothingness, it lays completely uncovered in front of its own future. Everything that is not bitterness in it is a sign of vulgarity.
Gallic joyfulness has lost its quick and generous rhythm, it is a joyfulness without substance, a refuge from worries and responsibilities. The hollowness of France – seen in the search for entertainment at any cost – becomes a sad sight for an outside viewer. The need to laugh at any cost – a fear of furrowing brows – gives a crude impression of a race degraded to the level of carnival. In previous centuries, this race didn’t take life seriously out of an excess of seriousness; now, from overwhelming emptiness, from the throes of an evacuated heart. The sentimentality of sadness inspire fear in it; it laughs from bitterness, as a spasm of sour blood. It’s decline, obvious for almost a century already, hasn’t urged any of its sons to protest hopelessly. It’s as if all are waiting only to slowly slip into the nothingness, unfeelingly, with their wealth and all… A general feeling of loathing now dominates in a peoples who century after century constituted the lifeblood of an entire continent and the glory of the human world – this race is now irredeemably condemned to an future of anonymity.