Monument of Reaction by Peter Brooks

Mac-Mahon decreed the restoration of the Vendome Column, begun in 1873 and finished in 1875. But well before Mac-Mahon’s presidency, the most reactionary elements in France undertook the incarnation of its anti-Communard (and anti-republican) sentiments in the stone of the Basilique du Sacre-Coeur, of Basilica of the Sacred Heart. It would rise on the height of Montmartre, just about where the National Guard cannons had stood, those cannons whose attempted capture had ignited the Commune insurgency. The basilica dominates the Paris skyline still today; it’s the sight that generally meets your eyes first in arriving of last when leaving the city. It’s a building hard to place architecturally or historically. Tourists flock to it as one of the wonders of the world on a par with the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, possibly without much attention to its place in French history and the political message it conveys. Frommer’s travel guide to Paris offer this capsule version: “After France’s 1870 defeat by the Prussians, the basilica was planned as a votive offering to cure France’s misfortunes.” That’s a considerable bowdlerization. The builders of Sacre-Coeur saw it as expiation for the sins of republican France, most egregiously represented in the Commune.

The story of the basilica may evoke incredulity, so improbable and even perverse as it may seem. The idea for the church originated in 1870 with two laymen, Alexandre Legentil and Hubert Rohault de Fleury, who attributed France’s defeat by Prussia to French decadence and secularism, its falling away from the way of Christ. They called for a “national vow” to rededicate France to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This was the extreme version of a popular story that wanted to see 1870-1871 as divine chastisement. We encountered a left, secular version in Zola’s vision of Paris burning in expiation of the luxury and corruption of the Second Empire, in The Debacle. Such a thorough catastrophe had to be justified as the wages of sin. France’s moral failure was evidenced not only in defeat by Prussia, but also its inability to rescue Pope Pius IX from Italian insurgents who were intent on stripping the Vatican of its temporal power. Napoleon III’s Italian and papal politics amounted to A doomed balancing act: he was attempting at once to promote Italian unity and to protect the pope’s rule over Rome – which the insurgents insisted must be the capital of Italy.

Part of the complex story in which the emperor managed to make enemies on both sides was the formation of the Papal Zouaves, an international volunteer corps in defense of the pope that recruited from France many unredeemed reactionaries, especially from the Vendee region, in Brittany, that had long resisted republican rule during the Revolution. These Zouaves, commanded by Athanase de Charette, great- nephew of a famous Vendee general, joined the French Army of the Loire in which Flaubert, like many of his contemporaries, placed their last hope for reversing the fortune of war and breaking the Prussian siege of Paris. Charette, though, insisted that his Zouaves retain a separate identity within the army officially dedicated to republicanism. Along with Louis-Gaston de Sonis, a famously pious Catholic general, he led a heroic, though vain – and somewhat absurd- charge at the Battle of Loigny, in the Loire Valley, on December 2, 1870.

Toward evening, as light was fading on that cold and bloody engagement of what remained of the French Army, de Sonis ordered a charge on the Prussian positions. His troops hesitated, and he turned to Charrette and his Zouaves tyo lead the charge. The standard-bearer of the Zouaves unfurled their white royalist banner with its emblem of the bleeding heart and the words, “Sacre Coeur de Jesus, Suavez la France,” reflecting the belief that only the Sacred Heart of Jesus could work the miracle of French salvation. The charge resounded not only with the cry “Vive la France!” but also with “Vive Pie IX!” More than half the legion fell dead. Both Charette and de Sonis were wounded; de Sons had to have a leg amputated the next day. Neither ever reconciled to the republic. The cult of the Sacred Heart in which they had enlisted brought together the irreconcilables of modern France.

For Legentil, Rohault de Fluery, and others who joined in the national vow, 1870 was not only a failure but also a sin that needed expiation, which could best be symbolized in a new religious edifice that made evident a rededication of the French nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. “This temple,” declared Monsignor Joseph- Hippolyte  Guibert, archbishop of Paris, “will stand among us as a protest against other monuments and works of art erected for the glorification of vice and impiety.” There were early proposals that the basilica be constructed on the foundation of the Opera, designed by Charles Garnier under Napoleon III but not yet finished, which was considered by many to be the very incarnation of Second Empire excess and decadence. What would be more appropriate than a severe church in its placed? But nothing could equal the allure of Montmartre, especially its height: the foundations of the church would stand higher than the top of the Pantheon, home of such impious ancestors of the republic as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The Butte Montmartre was highly symbolic, and not only because of its elevation above Paris. Its name originally meant “mountain of martyrs” from the travails of early Christians. St. Denis, bishop of the city, is supposed to have been seized, tortured, and decapitated by the heathen Gauls there in 327. A chapel to his memory was destroyed in the French Revolution. Archbishop Guibert was persuaded in 1972 that Montmartre was the place for the expiatory church. His predecessor, Monsignor Darboy, had resisted the idea as unnecessarily confrontational; but the relatively liberal Darboy had been shot as a hostage by the Commune, and had been replaced by the hard-liner Guibert. Climbing the Butte in October, Guibert exclaimed: “It is here, it is here where the martyrs are, it is here that the Sacred Heart must reign so that it can beckon all to it!” So in 1873 the National Assembly, dominated by non- Parisians – les ruraux – who were largely conservatives, monarchists and Catholics, voted, 382 to 138, to declare the site on Montmartre “of public utility,” which in France means you can then take the land by the equivalent of our eminent domain, and raise funds for the project.

There followed, inevitably, a story of intense conflict. Here were the most reactionary elements of France intent in creating a monument that would over- top the Pantheon, symbol of the secular greatness (the Eiffel Tower was still in the future), The cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus had an interesting and, from a secular point of view, sinister history. It dated to a relatively recent candidate for sainthood, Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, who in the seventeenth century had visions of the wounds of Christ – of what he was made to suffer by humanity – which, with the support of the Jesuits, was proclaimed a symbol of divine love for humanity. She was beatified by Pope Pius IX in 1864 (and canonized by Benedict XV in 1920). Wearing the image of the bleeding Sacred Heart of Jesus was thought to ward off danger. During the resistance to the Jacobin republic in the Vendee, peasant soldiers stitched the emblem to their jackets to protect against  republican bullets. It became a symbol of allegiance to the monarchy and the Church and rejection of the republic- a conflict that would play itself out all through the nineteenth century in France. There arose a legend that Louis XVI, imprisoned by the Jacobins, vowed to dedicate France to the cult of the Sacred Heart were he to be delivered from captivity. When instead he died on the guillotine, the cult only grew stronger, uniting those intent on counter-revolution. (When Stendhal, for instance, wants a symbol of Restoration reaction, he has his women characters educated in the convents of the Sacred Heart.) So by the time of the Terrible Year, the proposition to crown impious and insurrectional Paris with  church dedicated to the Sacred Heart was an audacious gesture of anti-republicanism and clerical potency.  But by  1873, the legislature had few members willing to oppose the clergy. In a phrase that seemed to sum up the thinking of the right-wing majority, the bishop of Perpignan declared that the church high on Montmartre would be a lightening rod “to protect us against the lightning bolts of divine anger.”

So work began.. in 1876 a provisional chapel was completed, and became  important as a place  of pilgrimage for the faithful from all over France, and hence for the collection of donations for the construction of the permanent church, itself conceived from the start as a pilgrim’s goal. In addition to the contribution of large donors, there provisions for modest ones. You could over time full up as card ruled off in squares, the “carte du Sacre-Coeur,” for ten centimes a square, and when you had filled in all the squares, you had purchased a stone for the church. You could then write out a vow on parchment that would be sealed in a glass tube and placed within a hollow that was cut into the stone (in order to secure  the tongs that lifted it into place). Your vow, sealed in glass, would be cemented into place before the next row of stones was laid. The basilica is literally filled with such texts, as if in representation of its self-conscious creation as itself a message to the people of France.  Pilgrimage  to the site became an important rite for provincial French who held fast to the beliefs that so many Parisians had abandoned. This divide between leftist, non-believing Parisians and devout denizens of rural and small-town France as also part of the story: Paris needed to be chastised and brought to heel.

After the fledgling republic survived the restoration crisis, thanks to the intransigence of Comte de Chambord- who insisted that the crown be represented in Bourbon colors, and President Mac-Mahon’s failed attempt to override the Assembly in 1877, it began to secularize and to emerge from the rigors of “Moral Order.” Successive governments tried to kill the basilica project, but without success. The Radicals led by Georges Clemenceau in fact by 1882 won a vote, 261 to 199, to stop the building, but their action never took effect, largely because the government feared the loss of jobs for the workers on the project. It moved forward despite the fact that the Montmartre site proved to be a difficult and expensive one on which to build. It turned out there were gypsum mines, for material used in making plaster of Paris, honeycombing the hill. Before the real building could begin, it would be necessary to sink masonry pillars deep into the hill as supporters for the edifice. Eighty-three pillars were driven into the Butte. This was costly and time-consuming. Still the project continued. Between 1876 and 1910, 76 billion francs was spent on it. Meanwhile, in 1889, Zola’s novel Paris dramatized a (failed) anarchist plot to blow up the Sacre- Coeur. The basilica was finished by 1914, but its consecration was delayed by another war with Germany – the Great War – until 1919. France had by then officially voted for the separation of church and state (in 1905), but that perhaps made the emblem dominating the secular city all the more powerful.

The strange architecture of the Sacre- Coeur has significance as well. A competition for the design of the church attracted seventy-eight entries, which were put on public display at the Palais de L’Industrie in February 1874. There was a curious deficit of design in the indigenous tradition of Ile-de-France., the Gothic cathedral, probably because the small, squarish plot on Montmartre didn’t lend itself to a long Gothic nave. The Romanesque style, newly popular, predominated. Many entries proposed domes. The winner – on the judgment of a panel that consisted half of architects and half of clergy, with Archbishop Guibert reserving the final decision to himself- had many domes. It was the work of a relatively obscure but well-connected architect from the southwest of France, Paul Abadie, considered to be a disciple of Viollet-le-Duc, the great restorer, many would say simultaneously the destroyer, of Gothic monuments through-out France. Abadie was a diocesan architect, and hence held the advantage of enjoying long-standing relations with a number of bishops. His model for the Sacre-Coeur was apparently the cathedral of Saint- Front in Perigueux, which he had restored starting in 1852 or, more accurately, reconstructed.

Saint-Front dates mainly from the twelfth century, though with earlier foundations and many later restorations, including Abadie own, which was a complete make-over that regularized the cathedral. It was had always been something of a stylistic mystery, since it resembles so little the indigenous French tradition (but that was true of a number of other churches in the southwest as well). Its dome was thought to derive from St. Mark’s in Venice, and there is a generally  “eastern” feel to the structure – more Byzantine than French. Some have cited Hagia Sophia in Istanbul as is source. So while the Basilique du Sacre-Coeur is often referred to as ‘eclectic” in style (the campanile, for instance, is clearly of Italian inspiration), it strikes the viewer, still today, as a radical and unwelcome break in the stylistic traditions of the Ile-de-France. Perhaps, it has been suggested, it is supposed to represent a self-conscious hearkening back to an earlier moment in Christiam inspiration, a renewal of the tradition of proselytism that was part of the Catholic revival of the post-Commune years. St. Front, the first bishop of Perigueux – appointed by St. Peter himself, in some versions of the legend- is held to have converted much of Perigord in the fourth or fifth century. The conversion of unbelieving French was on the minds of the basilica’s sponsors.

How strange, when one thinks about it, that glorious Paris should be crowned with this image of repentance and expiation. Although the national vows was formulated following defeat by the Prussians in December 1870 and January 1871, the crimes of the Commune would soon take the dominant place in the complex of sins to be expiated. After the laying of the cornerstone, Rohault de Fleury, who had joined with Legentil in devising the original vow, declared: “Yes, it is here where the Commune began, here where Generals Clement Thomas and Lecomte were assassinated, that the church of the Sacred Heart will rise! Despite ourselves, this thought would not leave us during the ceremony you have just read an account of. We remembered this hill furnished with cannons, overrun by inebriated fanatics, inhabited by a population hostile to any religious idea and seemingly animated most of all by a hatred of the Church.” Republican France, though now holding  political power, would have to see rise before all eyes a symbolic refusal of all that the republic stood for. The basilica was from the start “at war with the spirit of modern times,” as a dissenting deputy put it: an appeal to those who rejected modern French history, and perhaps modernity itself.

Inside, the church is richly decorated with mosaics, some of them quite extraordinary in subject matter to anyone who bothers to look closely. High above the alter, the mosaics of the cupola, executed by Luc Olivier Merson, representing the national vow, with the presentation of a replica of the basilica by four successive archbishops of Paris, along with its lay sponsors:  Alexandre Legentil, Hubert Rohault de Fluery, and Emile Keller, the Legitimist deputy  who floor-managed the legislation enabling the project, Generals de Sonis and Charette, the family of Louis XVI, with the king kneeling in a posture of devotion, dedicating France to the cult of the Sacred Heart. There is also in the background a proletarian sans-culotte from the time of the great Revolution, leaning with indifference against a pillar. The mosaics offer a celebration of the most radially reactionary figures of modern French  history; they also constitute an illustration of a claim to the continuity of Catholic France, interrupted by revolution, contested by a radicalized proletariat, but nonetheless the interpretation of French history . If you descend  to the crypt of the basilica, you will find an urn holding the heart of Legentil, the first to propose the vow.

The basilica participates fully in that crucial battle of emblems that followed the Terrible year. The Comte de Chambord on his deathbed asked that the bannerof the Saxred Heart that had been unfurled by Charette during the unavailing charge at the battle of Loigny – the one we see in the mosaics- be placed over his body. It was a sacred relic. The church in Loigny-la-Bataille holds a stain-glass window where St Henri is represented in the likeness of Chambord, the King Henry V who never was. As Rene Remond writes in Sites of Memory, still today the Sacre-Coeur is “the symbol and the rallying sign of all those who refuse the Revolution.” A site of memory, indeed: a place of pilgrimage explicitly designed to call to mind the long tradition of Church opposition to irreligious France and its attempts to upset the reigning political order. France in this view is an apostate nation that must be brought back into the fold. The victory of the ultraconservative, Catholic, monarchic France is perpetuated in the white stone of the basilica. One can by this point say it is only a symbolic victory, sine France followed the course of republican perdition ever more resolutely into the future.

Yet symbolic victories are not without importance, especially in France . . .

Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris; The story of a Friendship, A Novel, And A Terrible Year by Peter Brooks; Basic Books. N.Y., 2017. pages 124-132

10 February 2017

OS: There’s been quite a lot of activity  the last few months. My country, America has had an election.

VP: I congratulate you on that.

OS: Donald Trump won. This is your fourth president, am I right? Clinton, Mr. Bush, Obama, and now your fourth one.

VP: Yes, that’s true.

OS: What changes?

VP: Well, almost nothing.

OS: Is that your feeling? In between all of the four presidents or do you think . . .?

VP: Well, life makes some changes for you. But on the whole, everywhere, especially in the United States, the bureaucracy is very strong. And bureaucracy is the one that rules the world.

OS: The bureaucracy rules the world. IN all countries?

VP: In many countries.

OS: You said this to me last time – there was a system, we call it the military industrial security complex in America.

VP: Yes, we’ve got a similar system – such systems exist everywhere.

OS: Some people call it the Deep State.

VP: Well, you can call it different names, but this doesn’t change the essence.

OS: Is there any possibility, a hope of change with Mr. Trump?

VP: There is always hope. Until they are ready to bring us to the cemetery to bury us.

OS: [smiles] Wow, that’s very Russian. Very Dostoyevsky. The election has been heavily criticized and the narrative written by the West has now become that Russia interfered in this election to the benefit of Mr. Trump.

VP: You know, this is a very silly statement. Certainly, we liked President Trump and we still like him because he publicaly said that he was willing, he was ready to restore American-Russian relations.*  And when journalists from different countries were asking questions about that, they were trying to catch me, so to speak, I was always asking back, “Are you against good relations between the US and Russia? All the journalists were saying, “Yes, we want good relations between these two countries. We support that.” Well, that would simply be ludicrous in Russia not to welcome that, certainly we welcome the re-establishment of relations. And in this sense we are glad that Donald Trump has won. Certainly, we’ve got to wait and see how, in reality, in practice, the relations between these two countries are going to develop. He was talking about a re-establishment of economic ties, of a joint fight against terrorism . Isn’t that a good thing?

OS: Yes, so why bother to hack the election then?

P: We were not hacking the election at all. It would be hard to imagine that any other country – even a country such as Russia- would be capable of seriously influencing the electoral campaign or the outcome of the election. And some hackers indeed revealed problems that existed within the Democratic Party, but I don’t think that it has influenced in any serious manner either the electoral campaign or its outcome. Yes, these unrecognized  hackers, they have brought to light the problems that existed, but they didn’t tell any lies, they were not trying to deceive or fool anyone. And the fact that the chairwoman of the executive committee of the Democratic Party has resigned testifies to the fact that she admitted it’s true – everything that has been said. So hackers are not the one’s to blame. These are internal problems of the United States. These are people who tried to manipulate  public opinion shouldn’t have tried to create an image of an enemy in the face of Russia. They should have apologized to the electorate, but they didn’t do that. But that is not right, that is not the main problem. Judging from everything, the US people have been waiting for some serious change.

I refer in particular to security-related matters, to the fight against unemployment and the need to crate new jobs in the country. I refer to the protection of traditional values, because to a great extent, the US is a Puritan nation, to a great extent. Well, at least in the hinterland. And Donald Trump and his team have been very wise in running their electoral campaign. They knew, they understood where their voters were located. The states where the concentration of electors was.  And they knew what people living in those states required. They knew how to get the majority of electors to win. When I watched his speeches during the campaign, I thought he went a little bit too far from time to time. But it turned out he was right. He knew the fiber in the souls of the people. He knew how to play to win their hearts. And I think that no one is going to be able to challenge the outcome of this election. Instead, those who’ve been defeated should have drawn conclusion from what they did, from how they did their jobs, they shouldn’t have tried to shift the blame on to something outside. And I think that Obama’ outgoing team has created a minefield for the incoming president and for his team. They have created an environment which makes it difficult for the new president to make good on the promises that he gave to the people. But in reality, we’re not waiting for anything revolutionary. We are looking forward to the new administration when it has been completed, when they are willing to launch a dialogue with Russia, with China, with Asia, with all the other countries. So that we can finally understand when the new administration addresses the key issues on the international agenda, and our bilateral agenda as well.

OS: But, you know, even Trump has said the Russians hacked the election – that was a quote.

VP: I do not understand what he means when he says, “Russia hacked the election.” I’ve heard different statements of his saying that any hacking attacks, given the current level of technologies, can be produced by anyone anywhere, by a person who lies on his bed somewhere and has a laptop. And you can even make it seem as if the hacker attacks are coming from another place, so its very difficult to establish the original source of attack.

OS: Well, this all seems to me still historically  enormous – I’ve never seen where the two leading political parties, Democrat and Republican, the intelligence agencies, FBI, CIA, NSA, and the political leadership of NATO believe this story that Russia hacked the election. It’s enormous.

VP: This is not exactly how it is. Well, I think you’ve read the documents related to that, the analysis that have been published.

OS: Have you read the 25 page report?

VP: Yes, I have. One intelligence service says that there is a great probability that Russia has interfered. Another intelligence service says that the probability, the certainty is not that great. They make some conclusions based on the analysis that they had conducted. But there is nothing concrete. Nothing clear-cut. You see? I don’t know if that is proper. It reminds me of an ideology, kind of a hatred for a certain group like anti-Semitism. If someone doesn’t know how to do something, if someone turns out to be incapable of addressing this or that matter, anti-Semitists always blames the Jews for their own failure,. They blame the Jews. Those people have the same attitude towards Russia, they always blame Russia for anything that happens. Because they do not want to recognize their own mistakes and they are trying to find someone to shove the blame on, on our side. . .

OS: Russia has been accused of enormous treachery now. Now this is a major charge and the media repeats and repeats it, and it seems to have entered the lexicon in the United States – it’s just taken for granted. You can say Russia hacked the election, and many people say Trump is in the Kremlin’s pocket, has a debt to the Kremlin. So, you see where this leads. It makes it impossible to correct relations with Russia. Very difficult for Mr. Trump if he indeed intends to do so, to reset relations.

VP: As I said, and can say it again – any talk about influencing the outcome of the election in the United States, all these are lies. But we that see this campaign of manipulating the information has a number of goals. First, they are trying to undermine the legitimacy of President Trump. Second, they are trying to create conditions that preclude us from normalizing our relations with the US. Third, they want to create additional weapons to wage an internal political war. And the Russian-US relations in this context are a mere instrument, a weapon in the in the internal  political fight in the US. . . .we do not want to get mired in that. Many in the US think that all these claims about hacker attacks are fraudulent and we are glad that there are people like that. However there are people who promote this idea and express this insane notion because they want to use it as an instrument of political attack, and our refutation is not going to stop them from doing that. They are only going to use our refutation in order to continue using new instruments. We know all their tricks.

* From Putin’s point of view these relations foundered on several key issues. The U.S. reneged on the ABM treaty and has enplaced several of these systems in Eastern Europe, under the now hollowed out pretext of protection from Iran’s nuclear program; U.S. support for the coup d’etat  in Ukraine and the economic price that both Russia and Ukraine are expected to pay for that, as well as failure to insist on the Minsk agreement to end the civil war there: failure to respect the wishes of the people of Crimea to become part of Russia though the had previously granted Kosovo that privilege; blaming Russia for the aggressive attack of Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili on  Abkhazia and South Ossetia; covert support for Islamic radicals in  Chechnya and Syria.

Phantom Generation by Lydia Ginzburg

[The generation that was born @1900,  in Russia, young adults at the time of the Revolution, lived through the purges of ’37 and ’38, the  Patriotic War during which Ginzburg endured and survived the blockade of Leningrad in which a million starved to death. These are excerpts from the ‘Theoretical Section’ of her story “Otter’s Day.” They were drafted between 1943-45, published posthumously in 2011.

There is opaque quality to much of Ginzburg’s writings, a circling around without fully landing. It is not simply a matter of the difficulty of translating the beautiful colloquialisms of Russian into English, or ironic play.  These notes were  stowed away in the drawers of her desk. There was a moment of great risk for her, during the purge against “The Jewish Doctors’ Plot” but Stalin fortuitously died, the prosecutions ended and she survived.]


History has devoted an interval of time to proving  the impossibility and horror of an egotistic sense of life. With every means at its disposal it has reiterated and hammered home that the singular person has no value. It has repeated again and again – woe to the egoists and the hedonists: there is nothing in the world more defenseless and fragile than egoists and hedonists.

Open and masked forms of history’s lessons. Under the masked forms people made use of many benefits and escaped many calamities – for a time. But they received the most terrible in full. Even more than their share, because they were decidedly unprepared for it.

A second ordeal cannot elicit a reaction like the previous one. History has proven the futility of this reaction. For a normal thinking person it necessarily elicited the reaction of disgust at egoism, which had condemned a person to the greatest helplessness and misfortune. This ordeal had to generate longing for a severe civic sense of life, which accepts the fact of death and accepts the burden of life, understood as connectedness. In this way a new consciousness must be born, which creates new culture. For in the area of the culture of philosophy and the humanities, the subjective consciousness of the twentieth century already long ago lost its ability to create anything fruitful.

Two great illusions have been destroyed – here, the illusion of humanistic socialism; there [in the West], the illusion of humanistic individualism.


Thus, only now has the historical fate of this phantom generation and the symbolism of its fate become comprehensible. The first ordeal elicits an extremely individualist-hedonistic reaction; the second proves the unfoundedness of this reaction. The combination of both these acts within the bounds of a single generation is important, because humanity comes to know the truth only on the basis of its own experience, never on the experience of other generations.

In order to prove to a generation the futility of humanism, its incapacity to solve the contemporary tasks of life and the tragic doom of egoism, it was necessary to completely turn a generation into mincemeat. And history made it into mincemeat. The generation turned out to be the experimental material of history. And history burned and disemboweled it and turned it into a bloody mess. The end results were inevitable; the only discussion could be about the forms were opened or masked.

In its open form fascism turned people into slaves, condemned them to eternal burdens and deprivation in the name of Leviathan’s interests, subjected them to systematic extermination and systematic moral decay. It deprived them of human dignity, their very human likeness, and placed them in front of the spectacle of their own baseness, decay and disgrace. And people understood. That is, for now certain people have understood, and the majority has inwardly matured to the point of understanding that egoism as the measure of human behavior is similar to death, that hedonism, individualism and humanistic socialism are untenable, and this on account of two factors that have been revealed emphatically – the illusory nature of individual existence and the ineradicability of social evil.

Those who were condemned to physical annihilation and moral decay lost, more easily than others, the illusion of the absolute value of the individual consciousness (soul). Perhaps at last they will realize that everything valuable in a person, the very idea of value  belongs only to the basis of the community. Culture is a phenomena of connection. The word is the condition of the spiritual life of a person – it is a factor of association. The absolute value of a singular consciousness is an illusion, a psychological aberration of individualism.

The new method of examination corresponds to the new (at this point still predominantly negative) concept of a person. The psychological novel of the 19th century arose on the great illusions of individualism. Now the examination of the person as a closed, self-sufficient soul has a sterile, imitative quality. The contemporary understanding is this: not a person, but a situation. The intersection of biological and social coordinates, from which the behavior of a given person is born, the way this person functions. A person functions as this intersection. This dismal analytic method does not occur to me as valid for all times, but as the most adequate for the negative concept of a person that exist at the present moment.

The second discovery of the anti-hedonistic order is the discovery of the ineradicability of social evil. Together with the refutation of the value of the single individual it separates, to the highest degree, the people of the 20^th century from the people of the 19^th. The latter piously believed in the eliminability of social evil by social means – this was the very premise of humanistic socialism.

It turns out that social evil cannot be eradicated – only replaced. That is, in the place of the evil that has been eliminated, another rises up quickly and dialectically (concrete examples include freedoms, the mutual displacement of higher and lower cultures, families, women, etc.) The question lies only in the historical dialectic of choosing the more suitable evils, the lesser evils.

It is not a matter of extirpating social evil, for this is impossible – it is a matter of finding a relationship to it. A relationship is a defense; otherwise evil collapses on the naked egoist like a crushing hammer. A salutary relationship (the acceptance of necessity) can be found only in ascetic citizenship. In the condition of open forms, a generation lost important motivating illusions of the 19th century; beyond that, it lost all possibilities of the kind of (creative) activity that takes initiative of one’s own; lost the inertial forms of everyday life, lost even the substitutes for material goods.

But at one time they started to prime this generation for these substitutes, in order to furnish it with some kind of content for their lives. But the pre-war economy and politics could not sustain this. This had to be stopped short and replaced by the slogan of preparedness for mobilization. This was the last blow. The generation lost everything, including a human image and likeness.

In the interval this generation’s position was horrible, worse than it could even have expected. The second ordeal gave its existence a kind of historical meaning. The meaning was that of a terrible, catastrophic denouement of the one-and-a- half-century-long epic of the individualistic consciousness (there was no one to think about this. If there were people who could think, then they would have thought about this).

During the time of the greatest unfreedom the generation attained the semblance of inner freedom and independence through the awareness of the fact that the difference between open and masked forms [of evil] is unimportant. Does it make any difference whether such-and-such people didn’t take advantage of certain rights and benefits, if the result was one and the same? And it even happened that the greater the rights and benefits – the worse the result (again there arises the problem of the replaceability of social evil).

Within the open form, the difference between winner and losers turned out to be even less significant. And the losers who were in the most unpleasant circumstances received satisfaction from this. Where are the careerists and the establishments where they were making their careers? Here stand their empty, looted apartments. And their owners tossed about along the roads [of war]. What difference is there between published and unpublished books, if there are neither authors nor readers? For people belonging to the generation doomed to extermination, the definition of success was not to die.

These people who had skipped over the offenses  and calamities that had oppressed them quickly accommodated themselves to new ones.

In the relative stabilization of reality there is both strength and weakness. The difference between East and West, generally speaking, is greatly exaggerated. But in regard to the present discussion, there is a difference. The West, with its masked forms and hedonistic illusions, turned out to be psychologically unprepared. The East, in contrast, for decades (and in the sense of historic tradition, from time immemorial) was raised in the spirit that [as the saying goes] “our planet is badly equipped for merriment”. This sense worked out a great number of qualities that are useful in such circumstances as these – a relative indifference to life, patience, endurance, habituation to calamities, and the conviction that calamities are what make up the normal form of existence. All of these are characteristics of armies of serfs, which, however, were cancelled out by another of its attributes – lack of initiative. These qualities, however, formed the basis of a sui generis (passive) heroism. Thus is the psychological essence of a peasant heroism. People will withstand calamities, because nothing else remains for them to do. And at that people will withstand them rather calmly, because they are indifferent, capable of endurance, and accustomed to calamities.

But the weakness is in the fact that what has taken place is only a quantitative strengthening, an amplification. No new quality was born that would bring with it enthusiasm and new initiative. With its habituation to calamities the East provided an average level of behavior (the ability to stand firm), whereas not being habituated, the West provided either disintegration, collapse (France) or an upsurge (England). For the Englishman the circumstances where they send him to dig trenches or dispatch him up to the roof is exotic, a factor belonging to a dizzying, new, unrecognizable  reality, for him these are completely new demands by the Motherland, which are therefore exciting. But . . .. take a fascist person, for whom all this is a still more unpleasant continuation of the habitual compulsions – to which he reacts with the habitual attempt to evade them, and in the case of failure – with passive endurance. In contrast to the first case, this material life does not turn into an ideological value and, therefore, does not serve as a condition for realization – that says it all. . .

[ The great myth about Eichmann was that he was, in a sense, passive, a mere cog in a machine, following orders which he could neither resist or evade, whereas the truth was that for a Nazi he was exceptionally active and innovative and therefore proved himself of inestimable value in implementing the holocaust.  Others suited themselves as Ginzburg describes here, worked evasively, sloppily, passively enduring an unpleasant continuation of habitual compulsions, fulfilling ‘abstract duties’ an comforting themselves as ‘ good family men’ see: http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-sessen-interviews-by-bettinna.html. Soldiers of the Wehrmacht  followed orders unquestioningly- to degree that shocked their opponents in the Red Army. See: http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2017/09/chronicles-of-war-by-jochen-hellbeck.html ]


Passivity (lack of initiative) is hyperbolically underscored by the fact that everything happening presses on and crushes a person, but he himself does not participate in anything, until the Leviathan extends its tentacles in order to grab him and use him to its advantage. If in stagnant conditions he has not become needed by the Leviathan, then he is doomed to the kind of idleness that, probably, is how they punish sinners in Hell. He is in the midst of everything, everyone is next to him (the building blocks), he suffers everything, but he himself does not participate, does not do anything. He does not know or see this idleness, though it threatens him with annihilation at any moment. He is closed in his circle and runs along the circle, purposely repeating uniform movements next to others who ae running along the same circles that do not intersect with his: the ring of the blockade, the circle, the day.

The psychology of the slave, that is of a person who has no values, who does not even present himself to himself as a value, whom nothing touches and who is directed by desires that are straightforwardly egotistical, the urges close to hand. In given situations this psychology became manifest to an exaggerated degree. A fashionable illness (dystrophy) brought it to a symbolic clarity. It’s basic features are: a beastly clinging to the pursuit of the most petty egotistical goals , and the loss of feeling of all immaterial values, including one’s own, which leads to indifference to life and death that is strangely combined with this petty clinging to life, which ends up as an easy death (from starvation).

The point is that tenacity is only stimulated by the unmediated impulses of suffering and pleasure – a return to an animal state.