Introduction to the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders

 

During the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Government committed vast resources to a secret program of cultural propaganda in Western Europe. A central feature of this program was to advance the claim that it did not exist. It was managed, in great secrecy, by America’s espionage arm, the Central Intelligence Agency. The centerpiece of this covert campaign was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 until 1967. Its achievements – not the least its duration- was considerable. At its peak, the Congress for Cultural Freedom has offices in thirty-five countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over twenty prestige magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances. Its mission was to nudge the intelligentsia of Western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of ‘the American way.’

Drawing on an extensive, highly influential network of intelligence personnel, political strategists, the corporate establishment, and the old school ties of the Ivy League universities, the incipient CIA started, from 1947, to build a ‘consortium’ whose double task was to inoculate the world against the contagion of Communism and to ease the passage of American foreign policy interests abroad. The result was a remarkably tight network of people who worked alongside the Agency to promote an idea: that the world needed a pax Americana, a new age of enlightenment, and it would be called the American Century.

The consortium the CIA built up –consisting of what Henry Kissinger described as ‘an aristocracy dedicated to the service of this nation on behalf of principles beyond partisanship’- was the hidden weapon in America’s Cold War struggle, a weapon which, in the cultural field, had extensive fallout. Whether they liked it or not, whether they knew it or not, there were few writers, poets, artists, historians, scientists, or critics in postwar Europe whose names were not in some way linked to this covert enterprise. Unchallenged, undetected for over twenty years, America’s spying establishment operated a sophisticated, substantially endowed cultural front in the West, for the West, in the name of freedom of expression. Defining the Cold War  as a ‘battle for men’s minds.’ It stockpiled a vast arsenal of cultural weapons: journals, books, conferences, seminars, art exhibitions, concerts, awards.

Membership of this consortium included an assorted group of former radicals and leftist intellectuals whose faith in Marxism and Communism had been shattered by evidence of Stalinist totalitarianism. Emerging from the Pink Decade of the 1930s, mourned by Arthur Koestler as an ‘abortive revolution of the spirit, a misfired Renaissance, a false dawn of history,’ their disillusionment was attended by a readiness to join in a new consensus, to affirm a new order which would substitute for the spent forces of the past. The tradition of the radical dissenter, where intellectuals took it upon themselves to probe myths, interrogate institutional prerogative, and disturb the complacency of power, was suspended in favor of supporting ‘the American proposition.’ Endorsed and subsidized by powerful institutions, this non-communist group became as much a cartel in the intellectual life of the West as Communism ha been a few years earlier ( and included many of the same people).

‘There came a time .  .  .  when, apparently, life lost the ability to arrange itself,’ says Charlie Citrine, the narrator of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift. “It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job. From say, Machiavelli’s time to our own this arranging  has been one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project. A man like Humboldt, inspired, shrewd, nutty, was brimming over with the discovery that the human enterprise, so grand and infinitely varied, has now to be managed by exceptional persons. He was an exceptional person, therefore he was an eligible candidate for power. Well, why not?’ Like so many Humboldts, those intellectuals who had been betrayed by the false idol of communism now found themselves gazing at the possibility of building a new Weimar, an American Weimar. If the government – and its covert action arm, the CIA – was prepared to assist in this project, well, why not?

That former left wingers should have come to be roped together in the same enterprise with the CIA is less implausible than it seems. There was genuine community of interest and conviction between the Agency and those intellectuals who were hired, even if they didn’t know it, to fight the cultural Cold War. The CIA’s influence was not ‘always, or often, reactionary and sinister,’ wrote America’s preeminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ‘In my experience its leadership was politically enlightened and sophisticated.” This view of the CIA as a haven of liberalism acted as a powerful inducement to collaborate with it – or, if not this, at least to acquiesce to the myth that it was well motivated. And yet this perception sits uncomfortably with the CIA’s reputation as a ruthlessly interventionist and frighteningly unaccountable instrument of American Cold War power. This was the organization that masterminded the overthrow of Premier Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, the ousting of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954, the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, the notorious Phoenix Program in Vietnam. It spied on tens of thousands of Americans; harassed democratically elected leaders abroad; plotted assassinations; denied these activities to Congress; and, in the process, elevated the art of lying to new heights. By what strange alchemy, then, did the CIA manage to present itself to high-minded intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger as the golden vessel of cherished liberalism?

The extent to which America’s spying establishment extended its reach into the cultural affairs of its Western allies, acting as unacknowledged facilitator to a broad range of creative activity, positioning intellectuals and their work like chess pieces to be played in the Great Game, remains  one of the Cold War’s most provocative legacies. The defense mounted by the custodians of the period- which rests on the claim that the CIA’s substantial financial investment came with no strings attached – has yet to be seriously challenged. Amongst intellectual circles in America and Western Europe there persists a readiness to accept as true that the CIA was merely interested in extending the possibilities for free and democratic cultural expression. ‘We simply helped people to say what they would have said anyway,’ goes this ‘blank check’ line of defense. If the beneficiaries of CIA funds were ignorant of the fact, the argument goes, and if their behavior was consequently unmodified, then their independence as critical thinkers could not have been affected.

But official documents relating to the cultural Cold War systematically undermine this myth of altruism. The individuals and institutions subsidized by th CIA were expected to perform as part of a broad campaign of persuasion, of a propaganda war in which ‘propaganda’ was defined as ‘any organized effort or movement to disseminate information or a particular doctrine by means of news, special arguments or appeals designed to influence the thoughts and actions of any given group.’ A vital constituent of this effort was ‘psychological warfare,’ which was defined as ‘the planned use by a nation of propaganda and activities other than combat which communicate ideas and information intended to influence the opinions, attitudes, emotions and behavior of foreign groups in ways that will support the achievement of national aims.’ Further, the ’most effective kind of propaganda’ was defined as the kind where ‘the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own.’ It is useless to dispute these definitions. They are littered across government documents, the données of American postwar cultural diplomacy.

Clearly, by camouflaging its investment, the CIA acted on the supposition that its blandishments would be refused if offered openly. What kind of freedom can be advanced by such deception? Freedom of any kind certainly wasn’t on the agenda in the Soviet Union, where those writers and intellectuals who weren’t sent to the gulags were lassoed into serving the interests of the state. It was of course right to oppose such un-freedom. But with what means? Was there any real justification for assuming that the principles of Western democracy couldn’t be revived in postwar Europe according to some internal mechanism? Or for not assuming that democracy could be more complex than was implied by the landing of American liberalism. To what degree was it admissible for another state to covertly intervene in the fundamental processes of organic intellectual growth, of free debate and the uninhibited flow of ideas? Did this not risk producing, instead of freedom, a kind of ur-freedom, where people think they are acting freely when in fact that are bound to forces over which they have no control?

 

The CIA’s engagement in cultural warfare raises other troubling questions. Did financial aid distort the process by which intellectuals and their ideas were advanced? Were people selected for their positions, rather than on the basis of intellectual merit? What did Arthur Koestler  mean when he lampooned the ‘intellectual academic call-girl circuit’ of intellectual conferences and symposia? Were reputations secured or enhanced by membership of the CIA’s cultural consortium? How many of those writers and thinkers who acquired an international audience for their ideas were really second-raters, ephemeral publicists, whose works were doomed to the basements of secondhand bookstores?

In 1966, a series of articles in the New York Times exposed a wide range of covert actions undertaken by America’s intelligence community. As stories of attempted coups and (mostly botched) political assassinations poured onto the front pages, the CIA came to be characterized as a rogue elephant, crashing through the scrubland of international politics, unimpeded by any sense of accountability. Amidst these more dramatic cloak-and-dagger  exposés came details of how the American government had looked to the cultural Brahmins of the West to lend intellectual weight to its actions.

 

The suggestion that many intellectuals had been animated by the dictates of American policy makers rather than by independent standards of their own generated widespread disgust.. The moral authority enjoyed by the intelligentsia during the height of the Cold War was now seriously undermined and frequently mocked. The ‘consensocracy’ was falling apart, the center could not hold. And as it disintegrated, so the story itself became fragmented, partial, modified – sometimes egregiously – by forces on the right and left who wished to twist its peculiar truths to their own ends. Ironically, the circumstances which made possible the revelations contributed to their real significance becoming obscured. As America’s obsessive anti-Communist campaign in Vietnam brought her to the brink of social collapse, and with subsequent scandals on the scale of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, it was hard to sustain interest or outrage in the business of Kulturkampf, which in comparison seemed to be fluff on the side.

‘History,’ wrote Archibald MacLeish, ‘is like a badly constructed concert hall, with dead spots where the music can’t be heard.’ This book attempts to record those dead spots. It seeks a different acoustic, a tune other than that played by the official virtuosi of the period. It is a secret history, insofar as it believes in the relevance of the power of personal relationships, of ‘soft’ linkages and collusions, and the significance of salon diplomacy and boudoir politicking. It challenges what Gore Vidal has described as ‘those official fictions that have been agreed upon by all together too many too interested parties, each with his own thousand days in which to set up his own misleading pyramids and obelisks that purport to tell sun time’. Any history which sets out to interrogate these ‘agreed-upon-facts’ must, in Tzvetan Todorov’s words, become ‘an act of profanity. It is not about contributing to the cult of heroes and saints. It’s about coming a close as possible to the truth. It participates in what Max Weber called the ‘disenchantment of the world’; it exists at the other end of the spectrum from idolatry. It’s about redeeming the truth for truth’s sake, not retrieving images that are deemed useful for the present..’

Erasmus by Siegfried Kracauer

 

I sometimes wonder whether advancing age does not increase our susceptibility to the speechless plea of the dead; the older one grows, the more he is bound to realize his future is the future of the past – history


Roughly speaking, my interest lies with the nascent state of great ideological movements, that period when they were not yet institutionalized but still competed with other ideas for supremacy. And it centers not so much on the course followed by the triumphant ideologies in the process as on the issues in dispute at the time of their emergence. I should even say that it revolves primarily around the disputes themselves, with the emphasis on those possibilities which history did not see fit to explore.

 

This interest is intimately connected with an experience which Marx once pithily epitomized when he declared that he himself was no Marxist. Is there any influential thinker who would not have to protect his thoughts from what his followers – or his enemies, for that matter – make of them? Every idea is coarsened, flattened, and distorted on its way through the world. The world which takes possession of it does so according to its own lights and needs. Once a vision becomes an institution, clouds of dust gather around it, blurring its contours and contents. The history of ideas is a history of misunderstandings. Otherwise expressed, an idea preserves its integrity and fullness only as long as it lacks the firmness of a widely sanctioned belief. Perhaps the period of its inception is most transparent to the truths at which it aims in the midst of doubts.

 

One might argue here that history does not know such caesuras; that actually the controversy goes on after an idea, or what remains of it, has gained ascendency. As a matter of fact, the tradition of any ruling doctrine is a story of continual attempts to adjust it, however precariously, to contemporary demands, ever-changing situations. And these attempts at reinterpretation may lead far away from it; no dogma is immune against heresy and corrosion. But even so the initial phase of an accepted idea appears to have a significance of its own which distinguishes it from all subsequent phases. Were it otherwise, the history of many a powerful belief would not comprise efforts which tend to justify the concern with the time of its birth. They invariably spring from the conviction that the dominant creed of the epoch has been corrupted by accretions, misconceptions, and abuses which altogether obscure its precious core. And it is logical that this view should kindle a desire to undo the injurious work of tradition and rehabilitate that creed in its virgin purity. From its corrupted state in which it is all but unrecognizable the eyes turn back towards its yet unspoiled origins. A case in point is Luther. His development also shows that the return to the sources is sometime tantamount to a fresh departure, the restorer revealing himself as an innovator.

 

Be this as it may, I feel immensely attracted by the eras which preceded the final establishment of Christianity in the Graeco-Roman world, the Reformation, the Communist movement. The fascination they exert on me must be laid to my hunch that they carry a message as important and elusive as that of the trees which aroused Proust’s compassion. And what would the message be? One thing is certain: it does not figure among the contending causes of those eras but is hidden away in their interstices; it lurks, for instance, behind the debate between Celsus and Origen, or the religious disputes between Catholics and reformers. Its location is suggestive of its content. The message I have in mind concerns the possibility that none of the contending causes is the last word on the last issues at stake, that there is, on the contrary, a way of thinking and living which, if we could only follow it, would permit us to burn through the causes and thus to dispose of them – a way which, for lack of a better word, or any word at all, may be called humane. Werner Jaeger alludes to it when discussing the desire for mutual penetration between Greek culture and Christian faith in the second century A. D.:  ‘Both sides must finally have come to recognize that .  .  .  .an ultimate unity existed between them, and a common core of ideas, which so sensitive a thinker as Santayana did not hesitate to call ‘humanistic’ .  .  .   Actually both sides failed to achieve that ultimate ‘humanistic’ unity. Need I expressly mention that the possibility of it presents itself at every juncture of the controversy which threads the historical process? There are always holes in the wall for us to evade and the improbable to slip in. Yet even though the message of the humane is virtually omnipresent, it certainly does not claim attention with with equal urgency al the time. No doubt this message, whether received or not, is particularly pressing and definite in the eras  which reverberate with the birth pangs of a momentous idea.  It is they in which the mingling antagonists are challenged to ask the fundamental questions instead of having to tackle this or that sham problem handed down by tradition.

The figure of Erasmus, who lived among the antagonists  without belonging to them, illustrates most of what has been said just now in so striking a manner that I cannot resist the temptation to insert a few remarks about him. They are based on the assumption that he came as close as was possible in his situation to delineating a way of living free from ideological constraints; that in effect all that he did and was had a bearing on the humane.

Erasmus never tired of spreading the message of it. His editions of the Greek New Testament and the Fathers as well as his Adagia and Colloguia with their constant recourse to Greek and Latin authors clearly testified to his desire to revive the original simplicity of the Christian doctrine and to accept the ancients he admired into the company of the saints. His satires on monasticism and the corruption of the clergy were no less public property than his demands for Church reform in the spirit of Christian humanism. Nor did he easily miss an opportunity to publicize his ideas about the pitiable condition of the poor, the greed of the princes and other secular affairs; his tracts and letters teem with references to topical issues, conveying views whose often far-sighted modernism owed much to his de-dogmatized Christian outlook. He abhorred violence and sympathized with the common man, the simple soul. All this the contemporaries knew. They also knew that he was loath to take sides and shunned clear-cut decisions. And they could not help noticing that he invariably rejected the positions offered him by popes and kings. ( the stock opinion that he did so out of his sense of independence is a model case of sloppy thinking.)

The conclusion that Erasmus stood out like a monument for everybody to see would seem to e unavoidable. However, the strange thing is that in spite of his outspokenness he was the most elusive of men. ‘Nobody has been privileged,’ a friend of his formulated, ’to look in the heart of Erasmus, and yet it is full of eloquent content.’

Secrets mean a challenge to the interpreter. Judging from the evidence, the psychological make-up of Erasmus related to the build of his mind in a significant way. It should therefore be possible to trace the diverse aspects of this figure to a hypothetical common source. Such an attempt may not afford insight into the heart of Erasmus but it will at least reveal something about the forces that shaped its contents. Now both the personal leanings and the intellectual pursuits of Erasmus coincide in suggesting that he was possessed with a fear of all that is definitely fixed. To state the same in terms involving his spiritual self, he was essentially motivated  by the conviction that the truth ceases to be true as soon as it becomes dogma, thus forfeiting the ambiguity which marks it as truth. His fear –or should I say, his nostalgia for perfect immediacy? – reflected this conviction; a spiritual rather than a psychological fear, it was largely identical with the mystical strain in him which has been repeatedly emphasized in the literature.

Everything falls into a pattern once you think of this fear as the prime mover behind the scenes. For one thing, various seemingly unrelated personality traits of Erasmus find their natural explanations in its stirrings It makes one understand his distrust of philosophical speculations and his unwillingness to participate in theological disputations, bound as they were to run into a medley of categorical assertions. It accounts for his ingrained repugnance to any binding commitments and his skeptical attitude towards alleged solutions of certain religious problems which, he observed on some occasion, had better be put off till the time when ‘we shall see God face to face.’ And it naturally was at the bottom of his hatred of the absolute assuredness in which Luther indulged – Luther whose turn to the Bible and fight against the abuses in the Church Erasmus unswervingly approved at the risk of getting increasingly entangled in polemics which incommoded him greatly.

More decisive, his fear of the fixed also explains the position which his Christian humanism was to occupy among the competing ideologies of the period. To be sure, Erasmus championed a cause in the sense that he aimed at religious regeneration and social improvements. But since his aversion to formulas and recipes  with their congealed contents prompted him to keep his ideas, so to speak, in a fluid, they did not, and could  not, jell into an institutionalized program; from the outset, their true place was in the interstices between Catholic doctrine, as established by tradition, and the hardening creeds of the reformers. One might even assume that Erasmus would have disavowed, or indeed no longer recognized, his own message had it confronted him in the guise of one of these beliefs; their hold on the masses was bought at a price he was not willing to pay. His cause was precisely to put an end to the historical causes.

This carries all-important implications for the way in which the world responded to Erasmus. The universal fame he rapidly won indicates that at least some of his ideas and endeavors ingratiated themselves with people at large. Not to mention his influence on the Spiritualists, the Spanish mystics, and, in later days, enlightened 18^th-century minds – influences partly due to misunderstandings - , he led the theologians back to the sources of Christianity, spread the gospel of humanism, and encouraged fuller literary expression. It cannot be doubted either that his concern for a better society, his belief in perfectibility through knowledge and education, and his insistence on what has time and again been confused with tolerance gave a voice to longings whose existence the soft halo surrounding his public image tends to confirm. Many may have welcomed Erasmus as a liberator redeeming them from narrow-mindedness and prejudice. In the ‘Erasmus-atmosphere,’ to use Walther Koehler’s term, they could breathe more freely.

But they were scattered in the crowd; they did not rally round Erasmus. His message proper was of little practical consequence; it created a mood rather than a movement, a mood as intangible as a transient glow in the night, a fairly-tale‘s  promise. There were Lutherans, no Erasmians. How could have it been otherwise?  True, Erasmus wanted to change institutions, yet he did not want the world to corrupt his inner most cravings by institutionalizing them. Out of his all-pervading fear of the fixed he himself prevented  his  ‘cause’  from degenerating  into a cause, even though he was aware that his reluctance to become ‘engaged’ inevitably spelled defeat. ‘I am afraid,’ he wrote seven years before his death, ‘that the world will ultimately carry the day.’

This was exactly what happened: the world, a world split into camps, blurred his intentions and objectives. His wide visibility notwithstanding, Erasmus remained largely invisible. Conservative Catholics and reformers alike lacked the language to comprehend a message which cut across, and transcended, the doctrines to which they adhered. The language they used was geared to their respective causes. So the vision of Erasmus disappeared behind a veil of misinterpretations. Small wonder that he sat between all chairs imaginable. Luther rudely called him an Epicurean, which in measure he was, and zealous schoolmen accused him of having touched off a religious and social revolution, which was not entirely untrue either. And since he heeded his own counsels in sifting the good from the bad in the conflicting doctrines, the warring antagonists, offended by his refusal to let himself be cast in the role of a partisan, presented him as a weakling who wavered irresponsibly between Rome and Wittenberg and took refuge in unavailing compromises.

 

From the angle of the world Erasmus was a fickle customer indeed. He defended the uprising of the German peasants as a revolt of misery and despair, but no sooner did they commit excesses than he (sadly) admitted the necessity of repressive countermeasures. He attacked the rigidity of a tradition which opposed the philological revision of sacred texts and yet exhorted the pious to bear with traditional abuses, arguing that it was impossible to create a new world overnight. His evasive attitude towards the cult of the saints and the confession – institutions which he neither criticized nor wholeheartedly endorsed – could not but strengthen the impression of his intrinsic ambiguity. And this ambiguity went hand in hand with his eternally reiterated pleas for peaceful agreements at all costs. ‘I love concord to such a degree,’ Erasmus declared in 1522, ‘that should a debate develop I would rather forsake part of the truth than trouble the peace.’

These words hint of the motives behind his conduct. With Erasmus, the notion of peace was pregnant with Christian meanings; it foreshadowed a fulfillment beyond the reach of established creeds which, poor substitutes of the unattainable truth, breed only conflict and bloodshed. Hence, what the staunch devotees among Catholics and Protestants stigmatized as undecided wavering on his part was in reality nothing but the deceptive outward appearance of his unwavering determination to move straight ahead towards the peace he envisioned. Fortunately, he was a masterful navigator; for as matters stood, he was obliged to steer his way between rivalling parties with prudence and much finesse. Yet despite the fact that he pursed a middle course and what looked to the world as such, Erasmus was the opposite of a compromiser. His efforts to bring the dissenters back to the fold and impress upon the Church the need for reforms did not result from opportunistic, basically anti-Utopian considerations but, conversely, amounted to an utterly uncompromising attempt to remove the causes that prevented the arrival of peace. Utopian  visionaries condemn those who stick to the middle of the road on the ground that that they callously betray mankind to perpetuate a state of imperfection. In the case of Erasmus  the middle way was the direct road to Utopia – the way of the humane. It is not by accident that he was a friend of Thomas Moore.

That most of his contemporaries should ignore an approach which would have lost all its meaning if it had become a cause lay in the nature of things. The question is whether Erasmus himself realized where the way he followed would lead him. His message pointed into an abyss: did he fathom its depths? In one of his Colloquies he has Eusebius, its protagonist, extol the divine power moving such ancient authors as Cicero or Plutarch and then proposes that ‘perhaps the spirit of Christ or Plutarch is more widespread than we understand.’ It is the very thought of Erasmus which Eusebius epitomizes. Taking his cue from the apologists and the revered Origen, Erasmus held that the pagan sages too were inspired by divine revelation and that, because of  the radiant manifestation of the Logos in Jesus Christ, Christianity was the consummation of the best of antiquity. This extension of Christianity into the virtual goal of all worthy non-Christian strivings permitted him to reconcile his devotion to ‘Saint Socrates’ with his faith in transubstantiation and to protest the Christian quality of his humanistic concerns. He conceived of the humaneness to which he aspired as an outgrowth of Christian liberty.

For all we know this might well be the whole story. But is it? Note that Erasmus was reportedly as inscrutable as he was outspoken. There must have been things he left unsaid -  perhaps things too dangerous to be revealed? To venture a guess at what will forever remain his secret, it is not entirely improbable that, in pondering his road and its destination, Erasmus arrived a conclusions which so filled him with fright that he preferred to lock them away in his heart. He may ( or may not) have surmised that in the last analysis he aimed at something beyond the pale of Christianity; that, thought to the end, his true design was once and for all to wreck the wall of fixed causes with their dogmas and institutional arrangements for the sake of that ‘ultimate unity’ which the causes mean and thwart.

Memoirs From Beyond The Grave by Chateaubriand

 

Book Six, I. Prologue

London, April to September 1822;

            Revised in December 1846


Thirty-one years after having set sail for America as a simple sub-lieutenant, I set sail for London with a passport conceived in the following terms: Laissez passer sa seigneurie le Vicomte de  Chateaubriand, pair de France, ambassadeur du Roi pres Sa Majeste Britanique, etc., etc. ‘Let pass his lordship the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Peer of France, Ambassador of the King to His Majesty, the King of Britain.’ No description; my greatness was supposed to be enough to make my face familiar everywhere.

A steamboat, chartered for me alone, carried me from Calais to Dover. When I set foot on English soil, on April 5, 1822, I was saluted by the cannon of the fort. An officer came on behalf of the commandant to offer me an honor guard. Down at the Shipwright Inn, the owner and waiters of the place received me with deep bows and bare heads. Madame the Mayoress invited me to a soirée in the name of the loveliest ladies of the town. Monsieur Billing, an attaché of my embassy, was awaiting my arrival. A meal of enormous fish and monstrous quarters of beef restored Monsieur L’Ambassadeur, who had no appetite at all and who was not tired in the least. The townspeople, gathered beneath my windows, filled the air with their loud huzzahs. The officer returned and, despite my protest, posted sentries at my door. The next day, after distributing no small amount of my master the King’s money, I was on my way to London, to the booming of cannon, in a light carriage driven at full trot by a pair of elegantly dressed jockeys. My servants followed in other carriages, and couriers dressed in my livery rode alongside the cavalcade. We passed through Canterbury, drawing te gaze of John Bull and of every horse and rider that crossed or path. At Blackheath, a common once haunted by highwaymen, I found an entirely new village. Soon after, I saw the immense skullcap of smoke that covers the city of London.

Plunging into this gulf of carbon vapor, as though into one of the maws of Tartarus, and crossing the entire town, whose streets I well remembered, I landed at the embassy in Portland Place,. There the  chargé d’affaires, M. le Comte George de Caraman, the secretaries of the embassy, M. le Vicomte de Marcellus, M. le Elise Decazes, M.de Bourqueney, and other attaches welcomed me with dignified deferentiality. Every usher, porter, valet, and footman of the house assembled on the sidewalk. I was presented with the cards of the English ministers ad foreign ambassadors, who had already been informed of my upcoming arrival.

On May 17, in the year of grace 1793, I disembarked at Southampton in my way to this same city of London, an obscure and humble traveler coming from Jersey.  No Mayoress took notice of me,. On May 18, William Smith, the mayor of Southampton, handed me a travel permit for London to which a copy of the Alien Bill had been attached. My description read, in English: ‘Francois de Chateaubriand, French officer in the emigrant army, five feet four inches high, thin shape, brown hair and brown side whiskers.’ I modestly shared the least expensive carriage with a few sailors on leave. I changed horses at the most miserable inns. Poor, sick, and unknown, I entered a rich an opulent city, where Mr. Pitt reigned. I found lodgings, for six shillings a month, under the laths of a garret at the end of a little street off the Tottenham Court Road, which a cousin from Brittany had prepared for me:

Ah! Monseigneur, que votre vie,

D’ honneurs aujourd’ hui si remplie,

Differe de ces heureux temps!

Yet another sort of obscurity has come to darken my days in London. My political positon is overshadowing my literary fame, and there is not a fool in the three kingdoms who doesn’t prefer the ambassador of Louis XVIII to the author of The Genius of Christianity. I shall see how things turnout once I’m dead, or once I’ve ceased to fill M. le Duc Decazes’s post in the Court of  George IV – a succession as bizarre as the rest of my life.

Now that I am in London as the French ambassador, one of my greatest pleasures is to abandon my carriage in the corner of a square and go wandering on foot trough the backstreets I used to frequent; the cheap, working-class suburbs where sufferings refuge with similar sufferings; the unheralded shelters I haunted with my partners in distress, never knowing whether I would have enough bread to survive the morrow – I, whose table is laden with three or four courses today. In all those narrow and destitute doorways that were once open to me, I meet only unfamiliar faces. No longer do I see my compatriots wandering the streets, recognizable by their gestures, their gait, the state and cut of their clothes; no longer do I catch the sight of those martyred priests, wearing their little collars, their big three-cornered hats, and their long black threadbare frocks, to whom the English used to tip their hats a they passed by. Wide streets lined with palaces have been cut, brides built, and promenades laid; Regent’s Park occupies the site, close to Portland Place, where once meadows were covered with herds of cattle. A graveyard, which dominated the view from the window of one of my garrets, has disappeared into the confines of a factory. When I go to see Lord Liverpool, I am hard pressed to pick out the empty spot where Charles I’s scaffold once stood,. New buildings, closing in around the statue of Charles II, have encroached, along with forgetfulness, on memorable events.

How I mourn, amid my insipid pomp, that world of tribulations and tears, that time when my sorrows mingled with the sorrows of a whole colony of exiles! It’s true then that everything changes, that the poor die the same as the prosperous. And what has become of my brothers in emigration? Some are dead, and others have suffered various fates: like me, they have seen their family and their friends disappear, and they find themselves less at home in their own country than they were in a foreign land. Was it not in that land that we had our gatherings, our amusements, our celebrations, and above all our youths? Mothers and young maidens, starting their lives in adversity brought home the weekly fruit of their labors, then went out to revel in some hometown dance. Friendships were struck up in the small talk of the evenings, after the day’s work, on the grass of Hampstead or Primrose Hill. In chapels, decorated with our own hands in dilapidated rooms, we prayed together on January 21 and on the day of the Queen’s death, deeply moved by the funeral oration delivered by the emigrant curé of our village. We strolled along the Thames, gazing at the ships towering over the docks and loaded with the riches of the world, admiring the country houses of Richmond – we who were poor, we who were deprived of our fathers’ roofs. All these things were true happiness!

When I come home in 1822, instead of being greeted by my friend, trembling with cold, who opens the door of our garret calling me by my first name, who goes to bed on a pallet next to mine, covering himself with a thin coat and with nothing but moonlight for a lamp, I walk by torchlight between two lines of footmen ending in five or six respectful secretaries, and arriver, riddled along the way by the words Monseigneur, My Lord, Your Excellency, Monsieur, L’Ambassadeur, at a parlor draped in gold and silk.

- I’m begging you, young men, leave me be! Enough with these My Lords! What do you want me to do with you? Go and laugh in the chancery, as if I weren’t here! Do you think you can make me take his masquerade seriously? Do you think I am stupid enough to believe that my nature has changed because I’ve changed my clothes? The Marquess of Londonderry s coming to call, you say, the Duke of Wellington has left his card: Mr. Canning came looking for me; Lady Jersey expects me for dinner with Lord Brougham; Lady Gwydir hopes that I will join her in her box at the Opera at ten o’clock; Lady Mansfield, at midnight, a Almack’s .  .  .

Have mercy on me! After all, where can I hide? Who will deliver me? Who will rescue me from these persecutions? Come back, you lovely days of indigence and solitude! Rise up and live again, my companions in exile! Let us go, old comrades of the camp-bed and the pallet, let us go out into the country, into the little garden of some forgotten tavern, and drink a bad cup of tea on a wooden bench, talking of our foolish hopes and or ungrateful homeland, mulling over or troubles, looking for ways to help each other or one of our relations even worse off than ourselves.

This is how I’ve felt and what I’ve thought these first days of my embassy in London. Only by saturating myself in the less ponderous sadness of Kensington Gardens have I been able to escape the sadness that besieges me beneath my own roof. At least these gardens haven’t changed ( I assured myself of this again in 1843); the trees alone have grown taller: here, in perpetual solitude, the birds build their nests in peace. It’s no longer even the fashion to meet in this place, as it was in the days when Madame Recamier, the most beautiful of French women, used to walk here followed by a crowd. Now, from the edge of the deserted lawns of Kensington, I love to gaze at the running of the horses across Hyde Park and the high society carriages among which one might pick out my tilbury, standing empty, while I, become once again a poor little émigré, climb the path where the banished confessor not long ago recited his breviary.

It was in Kensington Gardens that I contemplated the Essai historique. It was there that, reading over the journal of my travels overseas, I drew from it the loves of Atala. I was there, too, after wandering in the country, under a low English sky, glowing, as though shot through with polar light, that I penciled the first sketches of the passions of René. By night, I stored the harvest of my daydreams in the Essai historique and The Natchez. The two manuscripts advanced side by side, though I often lacked the money to buy paper, and, for want of thread, fastened what sheets I had together with tacks pulled from the windowsill of my garret

These places where I had my first inspirations make me feel their power; they refract the sweet light of memories over the present – and I feel myself prodded to take up the pen again. So many hours are wasted in embassies! I have as much time here as in Berlin to continue my Memoirs, this edifice that I’m building from dry bones and ruins. My secretaries in London want to go picnicking in the morning and dancing at night, and I am glad to let them go. The men, Peter, Valentin, and Lewis, go to the tavern; the maids, Rose, Peggy, and Maria for a stroll on the sidewalks; and I am delighted. I have been left the key to the street door: Monsieur L’Ambassadeur is in charge of the house. If you knock, he shall open. Everyone is gone, and I am here alone. Let us get down to work.

It was twenty-two years ago, as I have just said, that I sketched The Natchez and Atala here in London; I am now at the precise moment in my Memoirs when I shall set sail for America: this coincidence suits me marvelously. Let us cancel out those twenty-two years, as they have in effect been canceled out of my life, and se off for the forests of the New World. The story of my embassy will be told when the time is right, if it pleases God; but as long as I remain here for a few months, I should have the leisure to proceed from Niagara Falls in New York to the Army of the Princes of Germany, and from the Army of the Princes to my refuge in England,. The Ambassador of the King of France can then recount the story of the French émigré in the same place where the latter was exiled.