If the French wouldn’t loathe themselves, they would be worthy of our contempt. It is the first time in their history when they are to experience such a feeling, but it has neither the deserved strength, nor a torturous thrill. We, the other-born, experience this feeling from the first moment of our self-reflection, we are born with it and it ages and develops together with us, with our experiences and alienation, as a sort of Jews without an expectation for a messiah. All the countries that have failed have something of that equivocal Judaic fate; they are continuously eaten up by a feeling of unfulfillment. As if we were born out of our element, and “the homeland” becomes a symbol of endless doubts, a question mark which finds its answer neither in the ethnic, nor in the sentimental and sometimes not even in the geographical.
France was here; she found her place in the world, on all planes of existence. The only thing she hasn’t found is her future, or rather, she lost it. How could she have avoided her old age? Will her obsolete glory exalt her to a noble denial? Has the century of Enlightenment left her enough intellectual resources for her to cultivate some superb negations? A twilight epoch which doesn’t understand itself to be so loses its poetry and becomes ridiculous.
France is at a stage where it should be embalmed, and any project and hope attempted now would be vulgar and would throw a sad shadow over its past glory. Ripe civilisations than haven’t glorified their extinction arouse the pity of inferior nations. – Walking along the banks of the Sienne, I dream of a crepuscular magnificence that would impose its own absences to this entire continent caught up in uncertainty. Will France know how to be present by what it is no longer?
My destiny is to envelop myself in the slag of the too-civilised. How better to prove my strength than by enduring amidst their rot? The ratio between barbarity and neurasthenia is the equilibrium point of this formula. An aesthete of cultural twilights, gazing with tempest and fantasy at the dead waters of the spirit…
I see the lack of this Citadel’s future reflected together with my own in the untroubled peace of the Sienne, and so I temper my troubled weariness in the vacant river.
Having come with youthful pessimism from primitive lands, from the Wallachian sub-world, into an overripe civilisation – what a chilling contrast! Without any past into an immense past; from the tremor of a beginning to the weariness of an ending; with tumultuousness and vague longing in a country that loathes soulfulness. From the sheepfold to the salon, from shepherd to Alcibiades! What a leap over history and what perilous pride! Your ancestors crawled in torment, and you think that even scorn is too much effort, and irony without abstract sadness a vulgar endeavour.
To not be able to live except in a country where everyone is intelligent. A universe composed of agoras and salons, an intersection of Hellas and Paris, here is the ultimate space for exercising one’s mind.
Human becoming unfolds between two poles: herding and paradox. Culture signifies a sum of trivialities: the cult of nuance, a delicate complicity with error, the subtle and fatal game of abstraction, the charm of disintegration. The rest is merely agriculture.
*
There are gentle decadences, galloping decadences, and vertical decadences. The French one seems to be somewhere in the middle. Three ways to sink to the bottom, differentiated by their rhythm. What a sad spectacle… It reveals life as being a game of a shameless fatality and ruthless force. What is civilisation, in substance? A systematisation of the absurdity of life, a provisory order of incomprehensibility. The moment its values are exhausted and they can’t urge an individual to belief and action, life reveals its non-sense.
The one who lives in the margins of all forms of culture, who doesn’t fall victim to any of them, condemns himself to gaze at the nothingness of nature through their transparency. The succession of civilisations is the series of resistances which man raised against the horror of pure existence.
*
A peoples is vital as long as it brandishes force, perilous both for it itself as for others. However, when the disequilibrium and rummaging action within them starts neutralising, when every present moment stops being a crisis fertile in future possibilities – its tension cannot overcome time anymore. These peoples fall into time, and historical events overcome them. The phenomenon of decadence is the manifestation of this fall into and under the rule of time. No telluric force erupts and imposes a new configuration to history anymore. The act of becoming is then merely the inertia of disintegration, the impossibility of a surprise.
A country which is no longer a danger to itself – in which no one is surprised anymore – wants to dwell in the negative symbols of time: in the cradle and the grave.
In vain does time flow for it… It can’t furnish it with a future. Everything withers in the world: desires, thoughts, hopes, and civilisations. Only one thing always remains in bloom: the absurd, the intemporal absurd.
*
In the perspective of vitality, to be a developed culture is harmful because you’ve stepped – several steps even – beyond the certainties of life, you’ve freed yourself from the fecund burden of your values.
A developed country is an accomplice to no ideal. It gathers in itself everything which could be described as a negation of the Gothic, meaning a negation of impetus, of transcendence, of heights. Its energy doesn’t rise upwards, it bows downwards. France is the spires of Notre-Dame falling into the Sienne; – a cathedral that refuses the sky.
Individuals, alike to civilisations, advance by advancing out of life. Any measure of progress implies an equivalent measure of ruin. In historical terms, to make an ultimate progress means to accomplish your ultimate mission; In individual terms, to be unable to continue life.
What can you learn from overripe civilisations except how to die? Will France be capable of teaching me a lesson in honourable agony?
*
A whole country that believes in nothing anymore – what an exalting and degrading spectacle! To hear every last citizen, even the most lucid one, saying: “La France n’existe plus”[France doesn’t exist anymore], “Nous sommes finis”[We are done for], “Nous n’avons plus d’avenir” [We have no future anymore], “Nous sommes un pays en decadence”[We are a country in decline] – what an invigorating lesson for one who doesn’t like being lied to. I have often relished voluptuously in the bitterness of France, I’ve delighted in its lack of hope, I’ve unleashed my disappointing thrills on its hillsides. After being the spiritual centre of Europe for centuries on end, its accepting to slip to the margins of Europe imbues in France a vague sentiment of seduction in negative. It’s the space of fulfilment for a scholar of declivity, the poisonous waterhole that quenches his incessant fever. How anxiously I have waited for France’s denouement – so fertile in bitter inspirations! Alexandrianism is erudite debauchery made into a system, a theoretical spirit in twilight, a shriek of concepts – the unique moment in which the soul can see its shadows as being the objective developments of culture.
That the collapse of France resounds – that is due to its antecedents and the nature of its history. France doesn’t love violent rhythms and unhuman excesses; it does not know of Elizabethan drama or German Romanticism. Powerful symbols of hopelessness or the gifts of fierce exclamations are foreign nature to it – where, then, will you find a Saint Theresa in this country of smiling intelligent girls? – France will simply proceed to decline at the natural rhythm of its evolution. Because she didn’t consume her vitality in reckless abandon, her old age can’t be an occasion for harsh force. The measured gentleness of Montaigne keeps vigil at her twilight, the same way it did at her dawn. France is expecting a decent end. There exist moments where to be hopeful is ignoble and to search for happiness is improper.
*
France is undoubtedly an organism, but she achieved such a high level of cultural development, that her symbolic composition is rather more alike to geometrical figures than to the categories of biological becoming. Her values are composed based on schematic models and abstract purity. You may ask yourself: How is it possible for something based on eternal forms to die? How can forms, that participate in the eternally unchanged, be used up?
Is the decadence of France akin to a geometrical decomposition? It would be so, if decadence was a sickness of forms … But it is a sickness of the soul, whose ruin is reflected in the world of values, of forms, and of culture properly-said. As a civilisation system-in-itself, France could live on indefinitely; but the ones who maintain it, who produce it, cannot support it anymore, cannot keep producing it. The values of a country can endure, but the soul, its roots, endure no longer – the men have been drained up. As it rots, its creations enter spiritual history, which is only a more flattering form of archaeology, the true end of human endeavours.
The political and spiritual history of France, having known no breaks and no pauses – like Spain after the fall of the empire or Germany after the peace of Westphalia – developed following the laws of natural growth. Its process of becoming is natural. That’s why it has never bothered producing a theory of becoming, and why the rest of the world considered it static. Dynamism – when made into an abstract cult – presupposes inner breaks and in-accomplishments, an inability to evolve normally. It’s the countries without natural accomplishments that have the need for a theoretical parade of becoming. German irrationalism and Russian apocalyptic thought – religious or nihilistic, doesn’t matter – sprung up from the thirst for accomplishment of two great peoples whom history hasn’t smiled to, peoples who had a surplus of vitality which they weren’t able to express in objective accomplishments and values. They had too much life for their minor political reality: they were passionate about possibilities, this is what dynamism is born out of, while France, in all the centuries of its supremacy, was an actuality. When looked at from the outside, its evolution has a minima of disagreement, absences and pauses. What use then would a theory of becoming be to it? She knows that she is. A country sure of its future, master over her time, she has no need for dynamism; she lives it – except if she refuses it in her decadence by refusing the ridiculous, something which would compromise the fame for lucidity she had in the past …
*
France can still accomplish a revolution, but it will be one without greatness and originality and it won’t echo through the centuries. She will borrow the myths of others – the example of French communists, who have sole proprietorship over the revolutionary vein of the country – tainting the discourse with old phrases, bodging it with anarchical themes and with the panicked wailing of the petit bourgeoisie. Before completely exhausting her power of social nourishment, the chaff – la populace – will have to triumph, to make its appearance. Life exists only in the periphery. A proletariat France is the only possibility. Only, her working class lacks any heroic resources and any glorious impetus. The revolutionary career of France is all but finished. The only thing she can still fight for is the desires of stomach.
Heroism, which presupposes a strange mixture of blood and futility, can no longer be the atmosphere in which she breathes. A peoples with dormant instincts has never been able to give humanity a new ideal to strive for, not even fragments of such an ideal. A wakeful intelligence, unsupported by vitality, becomes the artificial instrument for small quotidian deeds, for a fall into an irremediable mediocrity.
A race achieves greatness only by longing for what is beyond its frontiers, by hating its neighbours and desiring to subjugate them. To be a great power means to not admit values parallel to your own, to not allow life for others, to impose yourself in an imperative and intolerant sense. Great powers are sick with a desire for the far-away, with a virile languish for space. Their citizens scorn the minor comfort of their households; the peasants see beyond the horizon of the plough. In times past, wasteful energies and power desiring glory proceeded out of French villages.
…Nowadays, the ploughman is boring, the households numb, the work without charm. The same kind of weariness must’ve descended on roman legionaries after the monumental fury of their expeditions came to an end. Agriculture cannot replace glory. Once a peoples have tasted a lot of the latter, once they achieved it, they have nothing to replace it with. This is the case of France, whose only contents are its past glory, and that is unable to warm anyone’s soul anymore. In decadence, a person becomes alienated from themselves. Creation, for him, is then limited to preparing his own vague absence, to maintaining his own sterility, as the failure of the individual is reduced to a subtle intellectual fanfare meant to conceal the rot in his spiritual backbone. The spirit which exalted lavish meanings in a spry allegro ends up becoming an inebriated andante, the predestined rhythm of all forms of dormition, be they historical or individual.
*
Alexandrianism can be considered a successful form of culture when it represents a plenitude of decrease. There exists fertile disintegrations and sterile disintegrations. A great civilisation that is provincialized decreases its spiritual volume; when it extends the elements of its disintegration, when it universalises its failure – its twilight maintains its spiritual symbolism and gives it an appearance of nobility. A certain pathos of old age is becoming of a culture in decline; it could even make a great epoch out of its downwards slope. Then the individual belonging to it can be proud of its present: he even has the right to scorn its past and its future. More than that, he is obliged to do so. By keeping silent about its previous fame and looking at its future possibilities from above, he stretches out in the aesthetic cradle of refinement, he stops being afraid of time. However, the ones who don’t have something of Alcibiades in their blood have nothing to do in the overripe ages of a culture. If he be young – it’s embarrassing; if old – it’s agonising. Being incapable of playing within the rules of a decadent spirit – because spirit is play – he finds himself powerless.
To be conscious of the historical reality of decadence is not a great achievement; it is however extremely hard to draw its consequences, to be honest with the truth that was made obvious to you. Few people can actualise the complex style of decadence in a lucid manner, few are aware of the phenomenon which they are forced to live out by the forces of becoming.
An alexandrine epoch is an epoch of synthesis. In it all forms of culture interpenetrate each other because of a lack of productive originality of its present culture, which has only a summarising-destiny of spiritual balance-sheets and accounting. To descend to the bottom with this immense cultural material, what an enviable destiny! But how many are capable of tasting from this over-fulness of decrease?! In order to live in the overflowing void of a spiritual evening in full vibrancy, it is asked of you to have not only a good historical education, but also an education that places you at a distance from the world, a certain Neronian sensibility without his insanity, an inclination towards great spectacle, towards rare and dangerous emotions, towards courageous inspirations. The one who doesn’t love the ambiguous attraction of spiritual crossroads, what can he search for in times where the joints of a civilisation start cracking and new forms are being fermented in foreign lands – perhaps, only chaos?
*
The country in the middle of North and South, France is a Mediterranean with a layer hoarfrost on top. In the land which gave birth to cathedrals and Pascal, the blue is of a darker hue – and however much it excelled in lucidities, they are however marked by a suggestion of obscurity. France, in its totality, is rather more profound than it seems. Out of all great countries, no other one gives the impression – at first glance – of more superficiality. This is because she has cultivated appearances. But she cultivated them profoundly; she nursed them; she groomed their aspects. Without a feeling for the subterranean world and essences, she is the world of the phenomenon in itself. A landscape of Monet – which exhausts the poetics of the visible – satisfies it. Impressionism is the most natural creation of French art; it is somewhat the conclusion of French genius. If appearances are everything, France is right. There is not much you can say about it. She has even understood the appearance of darkness. A disapproval of metaphysics might in the end save her a spot in eternity. A culture of fugitive mysteries, but without mystery – and without wild genius.
Here lies one of her constitutive shortcomings and the explication for her calmness in decadence. The whirlwind of emotion, which the English have inside them, but conceal, and only sometimes let loose – that is lacking in France. How subdued she seems in comparison to England! She has no equivalent – even a minor one – to Shakespeare!
No matter how much a civilisation carries inside it a germ of death– by the grace of its evolution itself – and no matter how close it gets to its fatal terminus, an inner tumultuousness provokes a certain thrill of life which conceals the inevitable decomposition of this civilisation. France, however – in all aspects of its spirit – has worked to temper this primal tumultuousness in man. The effort it put into stylisation has killed the wild genius and passional originality inside him, which otherwise fit the English poets and the entire Anglo-Saxon race so well. There is nothing in it of that infinite dream that great civilisations have and nothing of that fear for the margins of immanence, which are the impetus for inspiration. A profoundly a-poetic nation. Is it not significant that Baudelaire and Mallarme – its first great poet, its second great artist – were nurtured from the poetic substance of England, that they are, not only in their intellectual formation but also in the intimacy of their souls – anglicized, and – anglicising?
France has too little an opening towards chaos, towards the drama of imperfection and towards cosmic creations. An a-cosmic culture is a culture with no great poets. What can French culture oppose to even the English pre-romantic poets?
Ambiguous states, monumental imperfection – how could she give shape to these in her linear language? And, how could she give them shape when she lacks them? The nuances the German languages has for sad emotions are completely foreign to her. The plethora of poets belonging to German Romanticism excelled in the gamut of ambiguity, an ambiguity that encompasses the world. Poetry is only exercised within the in-determinations of the metaphysical, in the emptiness between the soul and the heavens. A person like Novalis is incompatible with the style of French culture, the style of phenomenal perfection.
France opposes the infinite by way of elegance – this is the root of all the merits and deficiencies of its genius.
A spirit becomes inquisitive when nothing seems more absurd to it than Obviousness. But then, what is spiritual elegance but a sustained cult of the obvious? The thick darkness at the bottom of a civilisation is what sustains its dynamism, while its sum of light is what condemns it to sterility. The abolition of rhythm and dialectic is the punishment for a static equilibrium. Rationalism – as a form of life – is a negation of life. Progress itself – which can only be conceived of as time fulfilled – signifies the constant ruination of existential forms.
France represents a type of culture that is essentially anti-Dionysian. The ecstasy and inebriation of the spirit, communion in fertile spiritual confusion and a troubled smile of a spirit that mysticises the world are ill-fitted for the inclination towards dissociation which French culture excels in. The cult of contours – the cult of drawing on the spiritual plane – makes it an un-genius culture. Because everything which is bounded within the limits of form, bounded within the interior of pure appearance, remains outside of the realm of genius. A country with lakes of thought, but without an ocean… Sometimes it makes you think that the Age of Enlightenment was created as a ruthlessly perfect protest against the infinite. The sun, the seas, the continents of feeling in a man’s soul were too vulgar to be allowed into the abstract horizon of the French salon. No other civilisation has ever sieved the universe so finely and nowhere has the eye been trained so much in the art of framing, and the act of framing made into a symbol of accomplishment. In Spain, Van Gogh would’ve been considered a natural occurrence; In France, the Dutchman is an apocalyptic figure. Orgiastic furor doesn’t have a place in the spirit of France, which has always defined itself in opposition to the dark recesses of man’s soul and its spiritual oracles. Too much decorum, however, can give of a feeling of sterility and smallness. Our need for vastness urges us towards over lands, France – with too many domes, and not enough spires – doesn’t satisfy our search for spiritual heights, nor for spiritual depths. A-cosmic cultures become anaemic because they live in the mediocrity of obviousness.
*
Will you, after gazing at how an entire people are dying, know to strengthen your weak beliefs, to refuse to be infected by it through your inner strength? The sight of great decline can strengthen and heal us. The virus may erode our dignified being, but the will to life initiates a counter-reaction. You want to live, even when you participate in the sure march of death. To make your destiny a protest against fate, to wage war to fatality – this is the triumphal conclusion to historical spectacles. Although I understand the last Romans, softened by vice, unbelief, and luxury incomparably better than the early ones, coarse, healthy and with belief in their idols – I have somewhere inside myself a respect for their altars of illusion and their temples not yet shaken by irony. When old Cato said that two augurs can’t sincerely look into each other’s faces without laughing, I concur with him, but not without a feeling of regret for his vital superstition. When your symbols have been annihilated by lucidity, life is but bitterly wandering through deserted temples. How can you continue living with only ruined gods? The urge to live beckons you to adopt other deceptions and you can’t live in decadence without glimpses of false beliefs. The throbbing of your lifeblood demands you conquer vacant land; cemeteries provoke an urge to conquer. The barbarian wakes up. Vitality is the only answer to scepticism.
When instinct has the last word, the risk of slipping down the slope of extinction is much lower. People who belong to decadent cultures don’t have instinct anymore, so their salvation becomes an impossibility. The protest of instincts against twilight temptations presupposes a hidden base of health and force which the crepuscular reflexes couldn’t suppress.
But then, there exists in man a covetousness for being which fully disarms any call from the abyss, a naughty unsatiety for existence that tramples over any dilletante complicity with an ambiguous crepuscular noblesse. No matter how much you enjoy the dismemberment of a civilisation, as long as your own joints are holding up fine, you remain an aesthete with uncorrupted resources, not yet being ripe enough – except in your thought – to die and not yet being rotten enough to descend to the bottom, but only prideful enough to get your hands dirty in this decadent spectacle. Until you’ve laid down your arms, until your universal-historical view hasn’t completely eroded your backbone, you possess sufficient strength for any spectacle. A certain kind of moribund fury lies in decadent aesthetes. But they enjoy the spectacle of death more than death itself. The question is: up to what point can they resist this fatal game, up to what point can they resist the attraction of the incurable?
*
An entire civilisation sat outside the realm of possibility. This is the meaning of a double haunting: individual and historical. An end equally in heartbeat and in values. The soul stops going progressing in tow with the former and stops overflowing into the latter. A country without a soul stops being a menace to those around it.
The Slavic world stands menacingly in front of Europe because it has an excess of soul. Russia has too much of it; France – too little. They are sat in most significant contrast; they demand each other, like a twilight demands a dawn. Dostoevsky’s novels reveal the prophetic desert of the human heart; his characters are heroes. Les Fleurs du mal – a desert without future; an individual suffering, powerless in any temporal aspect. The psychological misery of the Slav is fertile, it is open to possibilities; individuals have a destiny – and they have it especially when they are decomposing; they decompose from too much life. The Dostoevskean finality is foreboding of a world that is to come; the Baudelairean one is a finality of culture, void of soul and values. France lacks the energy that makes up the existence of a hero. Russians can be negativists, but they believe in negation, they don’t taste from it in a detached way. Intensity, not orientation, is what determines the quality of beliefs. They create spiritual perdurances, even when they fight against the spirit. A belief is always a threat, because it is a sign of life, meanwhile intellectual scepticism only affects other intelligences.
The maximum a Frenchman could actualise would be a Pascalian existence without much unrest. His only future form is a void Pascal – while the Russians, sat at the opposite end geographically and spiritually, have behind them an inner tradition of sects, the absolute power to make errors and adhere to them. The Universe growls in them. The only thing they lack is a form in order to fulfil themselves in the objective order of culture. The only things the French have anymore is forms. The Germans are sat somewhere in-between exhaustion and growling; they still have soul, but are theoretically forced to look at French becoming without scorn, as they are far enough away from their origin to not be able to abstract away the dangerous questions that history puts in front of them. Not yet ripe enough in terms of culture, the Russians have the right to look down at France. They don’t have to deal with the issues it raises, because they breathe wholly within the realm of possibility.
The risk that is undertaken by an individual that likes to glide above cultures is developing a false ego, losing one’s own sense of measure and taste, an inauthentic expansion of one’s dimension from trying to live according to too many values. The limitations of France are an antidote for a false ego, they are a safety-break of classicism for tendencies towards vagueness. She maintains a classical heredity even in anti-classicism. Even her confusions have something of Racine in them. The heavy verses of Valery, full of unknowns, are formally derived from the author of the Phaedra; the unintelligible in them respects the guise of clarity, their depths are presented in style. Is there a mysticism that is less orgiastic and with quieter ecstasies than the French one? And one with so many classical saints, with so many Francis de Sales’ and with such cool spirit?
When we try to contain too much inside ourselves, we end up falsifying the world and, first and foremost, ourselves. We lose the means of rediscovering ourselves. But France is the school of bounded containment, a lesson against the unlimited ego. Whoever hasn’t followed it risks dying an apprentice of virtualities. To be a vast soul tempered by French form – what a fecund human type!
Let us at least learn this much from crucial historical moments: to fit our defects into available templates, to profit from the ruination of others and, by strengthening the viscous matter of the spirit, avoid eulogies. There are no contents left in France for one to extract; she is, however, an entire universe of templates that can be assimilated to safeguard your soul from losing its temper.
A countries lack of life can safeguard us from the dangers of life. A salvation from the whirlwinds of enthusiasm – on the plane of culture – can only be found in the act of expression. Will the future bear a culture of formal orgies? Will Europe find a formula that would reconcile the profound craziness of the Slavs or the theoretical debauchery of the Germans with the intellectual calligraphy of France? This latter one can’t supply a spiritual core. Will the Slavs and Germans be able to vitalise its forms, however? Because I can’t imagine a country with less of a backbone than France. No holy illusion – and every illusion is holy – rests in her bones. Only emptiness and a silent vigil rule over her empire of finished beliefs.
What is needed for our vital palpitations is a corrective categorial. Loose passion, unchained from any normative bindings, leads to a disarticulation of the spirit, to a brazen Gothic that cancels its style through its own enthusiasm. A barbarity within categories is the only way to fruitfully combine life and the spirit. Otherwise, the irrational aspect of life will lower culture to the level of the too-terrestrial Balkans, just as the domination of abstract templates of the spirit will lead to an ossification like that of France. The paradox of the times to come: will they be defined by typic ecstasies and a cult of geometry, by a fugue of simultaneous passion and reason?
I wish for a culture of logical oracles, of lucid Pythias … and of men who control their reflexes from a fulness of life, and not from a lack of it.
The one who’s lived a dissolution to its natural end can still rediscover himself, while the one who remained stuck in the middle of it has lost himself forever. You’ve lived a dissolution, if you have the strength, you remake yourself; hidden vibrations lead you back to the vital horizon of the future. You must not, however, judge how much courage you’ve got by how objective rot you’ve experienced. You’ve tasted your own rot to satiety; you must not taste less from exterior one. The minor therapeutics of restraint leads to failure; that of boldness, to a collapse or rebirth. Have you been as carrion to the carrions of the world? Then you deserve to see the spring of future spirits. History is something you must battle with; you must wrestle with the past just as you do with the present. The one who scours an epoch of history with timidity or out of erudition is weak and a coward. You must see the whole of universal history as a battlefield for your bravery. And if you lack that warrior impetus, you must then transform it into a dream, to excuse the siesta of your instincts under the premise of unreality.
*
The phenomenon of decadence is the final conclusion of historical maturity. A culture that is ripper doesn’t signify an advancement in value, but in life. We have no right to value the unravelling of culture as a peak of it. That which erudition is to spiritual vigour and old age is to the clashing of forces, that is what decadence is to the ascending movement of vitality. Sclerosis is the punishment that life incurs for its own excesses. France is paying for centuries of tumultuousness with immobility. This is a degradation that she can be proud of and one which she can give a style to by way of cynicism. The nation which made the greatest deal out of the idea of progress is reduced to sitting outside of it. Isn’t this a beautiful penance and a sanction full of meaning? The concept of progress – the refusal of death on the historical plane – that sprung up from the most dynamic and superficial optimism bears the sin of lacking a metaphysical basis. To believe in an eternal and unstoppable advancement means to cover your eyes to what is essential. The metaphysical deficiency of the modern man has never been revealed as clearly as in this conception. And as it was France that bore it, she is the first to pay for it. Her precipitated decadence, therefore, is equal to an act of justice. History is punishing her for giving it a value which it has not and a dignity of which it is incapable of. Generosity is a serious theoretical crime. Without it, however, a civilisation cannot justify its march under the sun. It reveals the power of illusion – of life – that a peoples are capable of. The greater they were, the more crushing their “wake up” moment will be. A seed of quixotism is what determines the inner possibilities of a race. The civilisation that this race will produce is the fruit grown from this seed. When this fruit has overripened – man, with all the values he obtained from this fruitful delusion, is to be sat outside his own calling, tending the garden of his own exhaustion with repentance and apathy.
But France isn’t punished in this ironic fashion only for her superstition of progress, but also for all the grand and noble slogans under which she concealed her transience. “La civilisation française” [French civilisation], “la France dans le monde” [Worldly France], have these not expressed in an apparently concise grandiloquence that the French civilisation is the only valid type and does not the addition of a national adjective to all values have the purpose of individualising a form of culture that is considered as a universal symbol? More than any other, hasn’t “La France éternelle” [Immortal France] set into words the hopeless effort to escape the inevitable unravelling effect of time? No excess of verbal prestige can stop or conceal the fatal unfolding of time. The fact that no Frenchman has ever thought of “la France mortelle” [Mortal France] is obviously because they were denying the truth out of fear. A foreign contemporary cannot however allow himself such deceitful beliefs because his understanding of historical fatality is what will ornament his spirit, but in the negative.
*
A country is great not insofar as the level of pride it raises in its citizens, but insofar as the level of enthusiasm it inspires in foreigners, through the febrility that transforms a foreign-born into dynamic satellite of it. Has there ever been a country that has had more patriots of foreign blood and customs? Haven’t we all – in times of crisis, in bouts or in enduring spirit – been French patriots, haven’t we all loved her with more passion than even her own sons, haven’t we exalted or humiliated ourselves in this easiest of passion to understand, and yet so inexplicable? So many of us who’ve come from other lands, haven’t we embraced it as the only earthly fulfilment of our longings? We who’ve come from so many different countries, from world-failed countries, this meeting with a successful humanity conquered us in its vision as a perfect home. All those who’ve wasted days and years on its streets, who’ve spilled over the innocence of our spirit into a love which we do not regret, even if, by doing so, we’ve abandoned the capacity to someday bear fruits in our native lands, which are now far away from us in space and even farther in nostalgia. That we’ve gifted it the best of what resided in our beliefs or that we’ve delighted in her scepticism as thought it was a high-duty – what country has gathered more flattering homages and renunciations than her? We’ve spoiled her so much, that neither she nor we will have the opportunity for such a lyrical union again. We will have to reckon with other countries, but we will do so without enthusiasm and without worship. Something of her has passed into our being, something which killed the infancy of our spirit. Where could we possible find an impetus for naïve conceptions? That seed of childhood which gives birth to time has lost its vigour in a country drained of future by its over-great past. Our aimless wanderings towards something new is often supressed by the negative strength of a race which is about to complete its purpose in the world. We carry on our shoulders and in our thought reflections of its end. Maybe that’s why all our ideas have something from the monotony of the pulses of its agony. Wherever we’d make a step to, whatever lands or pathways, France will never die alone, we will always be together, experiencing the playful taste of transience. No matter how many hopes we may hold on to, the burden of this inheritance will hopelessly remove us from the center of the future, to its margins.