English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Nerval's discretion and the final admission concerning Ulysses 0:00 The link is made explicit by Nerval himself, but with his famous discretion, which means we don't notice it right away—a literally suicidal discretion, if I may say so, in his case. I'm alluding to a superb text by Baudelaire, a great text where Baudelaire is in one of his great rages, of which he holds the secret, that the gentle Gérard rarely has.
0:40 Baudelaire pounds the table against someone who had written a diatribe against his "poètes maudits," saying, with a certain rigidity, that their spleen, their suffering—one must be happy, a duty of happiness already. What are these people who are so happy? A sort of pre-Nietzschean figure already, that's what it is. It's a spirit of gravity, to speak in Nietzschean terms—one must be happy, perhaps. It was Monsieur Janin, and there was another one too. In short, it's a draft letter so full of anger that he didn't send it right away.
1:13 At one point he says: a year ago, to the day, an admirable man, a writer, and one who was always lucid—he's speaking of Nerval—in his time, and who was always lucid, whereas it's Nerval's madness that will create his legend. It's good, "he was always lucid," that's underlined, "chose one of the darkest streets of Paris to loose his soul, with a discretion that resembled contempt." That's what I want to recall. So what I mean by this is that Nerval isn't Joyce—he's not going to put "Ulysses," basically, as the title of his work.
1:49 Ah, that's clear—the reference is explicit right from the title, it's more emblematic. No, Nerval waits a bit like someone going to see a psychoanalyst who waits until the very last seconds, when the analyst says, well, look, we have ten seconds left, or else it'll be next time—and who suddenly comes out with it and says it right away, whereas he'd kept silent until then. Nerval, on the last page of his text, since the reader is about to leave him, suddenly brings forth in his novella—I'll explain later that the pitch is the novella and all that—but suddenly brings forth from his novella a character who dialogues with the author, with himself, who springs up, there's no other word for it, who is in fact the ordinary reader, visibly exasperated by all these detours, especially since we still haven't found the book, there's about half a page left before the end, and who says to him, come on, you've been imitating, you've been imitating, and then begins a rather humorous cascade—you imitated Diderot, who imitated Sterne, who imitated Swift, who imitated Merlin Coccaie, who imitated Rabelais, and of course, since we're each time looking for the model, it ends up hitting on the very first model, on Homer.
3:03 and suddenly, on the last page, when it's none other than the author of the Odyssey who makes his hero wander for ten years around that fabulous Ithaca whose queen wove and unwove her tapestry, suddenly he blurts it out. And the proof that it's not me who brought in a connection between the two, is that the quest—we'll show afterward that the official pitch of this novella is the quest for a book that he had come across by chance on the quays, and that he can no longer find once back in Paris, neither in the libraries nor in the bookshops. I'll come back to that. But this book, the Story of the Abbé de Bucquoy, the proof that it's indeed this book that represents Ithaca—that is, what should be the end, the goal of the race, of the quest, of the journey, and the end of the detours—is that the reader says, yes, but Ulysses did eventually find Ithaca again, at least he did.
3:50 And Nerval answers: and I found the Abbé de Bucquoy again. So the connection is... First way of answering your question, what connection? I see, well, the connection Nerval makes, even with his discretion—with Nerval you always have to try to tease things out, in the structuralist sense of the term. For instance, in Sylvie, a prose novella, apparently autobiographical, a kind of elegy, seen from afar, a fairly common genre, especially at the time—at one point, speaking of Sylvie, of her little village there in the Valois, her little hamlet, it's always a hamlet by the way, he says, I love her window where the vine embraces the rosebush.
The vine-branch and the rosebush: a signifier that emerges 4:30 You see, we slip past it—Nerval's sentence is so transparent that we slip past it, like Schubert's music, so transparent, like the water in which the trout frolics, or the stream that the exile in "La Belle Meunière" follows along—it's so clear and transparent that we cross over, without paying attention, these signifiers. I love her window where the vine embraces the rosebush. You'll tell me there's nothing to notice, even the comparisons are fairly classic.
5:00 Yes, except that in Les Chimères—there we're in the poems, in the tone of madness, "Am I Love or Phoebus, Lusignan or Biron," loss of identity, there's a word. In the Chimères it says: "And give me back the arbor where the vine allies itself with the rose." Bang! Suddenly we have exactly the same image, the vine entwined, here allied with the rosebush, and we realize it's not at all what we thought. Well yes, there was presumably a little vine and a rosebush on Sylvie's window, in the realistic novella—that was the trap we fell into. No, no, no, no. There's something, a signifier that suddenly imposes itself, that arises out of the simply human.
Symmetry of the two carnages and deaths in the Valois 5:32 Well then, when he suddenly cites, after so many references, the author of the Odyssey, the connection is established. There's a second thing to answer your question. You say, I understood the story of the two massacres, the initial massacre and the final massacre. But the symmetry between the two—in mathematics, symmetries are studied closely. And we know that there is symmetry where there is an invariant element. What's called the axis of symmetry, what doesn't move during the transformations—we can speak in mathematical terms.
6:02 Well, this invariant is that it's Ulysses each time who is the instigator of the massacre. We can't forget that, it's an important element. Not only are there two massacres, but they're all the more symmetrical because it's the same instigator who contrives the sack of Troy through the subterfuge of the horse. It's indeed Ulysses who came up with the idea. I'm not the one who invented this. And who, of course, with his bow, through another ruse of a worldwide standard, carries out the massacre of the suitors at the end.
6:34 For now one might say: a slim connection. A slim connection. First, we're far from the massacre when we're in the misty landscapes of the Valois, in the inner landscape, so to speak—the ponds, the woods, the memories of centuries past, the abbeys, the châteaux, the proper names, already before Proust, the name of the place, the name, the toponyms.
7:08 Except that, as we advance in our stroll through the Valois, the corpses multiply. Curious. As soon as we visit an abbey, some old building, we have to go to the cemetery, we have to look at the tombs. And generally speaking, the setting is always marked, if not by a death, then by a decline.
7:38 The title is Angélique. But already the title poses a problem, because it's a late title. Nerval had first titled it Les Faux Saulniers, the Salt Traffickers. Because the story of the Abbé de Bucquoy connects with very well-organized gangs of the time, sort of Robin Hood types, a bit of outlaws, a bit of resisters against the police.
8:08 royal police, who trafficked in salt, which was a royal monopoly through the "gabelle" tax. So this novella was first called Les Faux Saulniers, Salt Traffickers, then—it was published in 1850, which is important, at the midpoint of the century. Nerval takes a long time before daring to publish on his own account, so to speak—not in the editorial sense, but I mean speaking in his own voice—since until then he was known as a freelance writer, a reporter, someone who wrote reviews of shows, articles.
8:46 He was something of a day-laborer of literature. You have to see the first volume of the Pléiade edition, out of the three Pléiade volumes of Nerval—the first volume, which is the thickest, is made up almost entirely of his articles, a truly considerable amount of grinding work, and it played a role, incidentally, in his illness at the end, an overwork caught between theater matters and the writing of articles. So there's that, and then suddenly, at the midpoint of the century, he ventures into prose narratives and begins to say "I"
9:17 in his own right. The first long prose narrative is "Voyage en Orient." I'd set aside his poetic production, which is tied to rhythms of intermittent bouts of madness—I'm thinking of the Chimères in particular—and move on to his prose works. And especially the travel narratives, "Voyage en Orient," "Lorely," which brings together, in a kind of compilation, several texts about the trips he made in Germanic countries, both Holland and Germany broadly speaking.
9:50 And finally, "Les Filles du Feu," his collection of novellas, which is perhaps his best-known work along with Aurélia and Les Chimères—these are Nerval's emblematic titles. And Angélique is the novella that opens the collection, that begins the series of the daughters of fire. First of all, I still haven't said what it's about, but I've situated it. So: the first novella of a prose collection belonging to the period when Nerval inaugurates his prose vein.
1850: between the end of romanticism and modernity 10:28 And in the middle of the century, I'd say this before giving the pitch, one last clarification—that is, at the moment when Romanticism, which had been the great movement that since the late 18th and early 19th centuries had invaded all of literature, thought, and not only literature but also history, music—Romanticism was starting to go out of fashion in literary circles; the end of Romanticism was officially consecrated by the failure of Hugo's play, Les Burgraves, in 1853.
10:58 So this corresponds roughly to a Romanticism that's in the process of handing over the reins. To what? I'm speaking as in literary histories, I mean, I'm using the well-known divisions. It depends on the genre. In poetry, it's in the process of ceding ground to the Parnassians. In prose, it's in the process of giving way to the Realists. It's going to be, of course, after the great generation of Romantic poets, the great novelists—Stendhal, of course, and Flaubert, and Zola, right up to the end of the century, there you go.
11:33 So Romanticism is in the process of handing over the reins. But there's not yet the revolution inaugurated by Baudelaire, the revolution of modernity, the one that dismisses both the Realists and the Romantics back to back, that makes the synthesis in which modernity still bathes as far as its attempts at explicitation and formalization are concerned. We'll have occasion to come back to this. Formalism, Symbolism, Impressionism, no matter. The rest, in fact. A single role that Baudelaire played there in essence.
12:03 But Nerval, precisely, and especially in 1850, and in between, there's no more Romanticism. And there's not yet modernity. He can't rely, as Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé could, on a Baudelairean precedent. Rimbaud says: Baudelaire, the first of the seers, king of poets, a true god. But the form so praised in him is petty. It's a merciless gesture. He lived in too artistic an environment. In short. But there's a legacy. That's it—the movement had been launched by Baudelaire.
12:34 With Nerval, there is none. So this text is quite unique, because I'm going to show you that it expresses exactly all the themes that will develop from Baudelaire onward, up to almost today. I'd say from Baudelaire to Kafka, practically. But if this importance isn't attributed to him, etc., it's because, once again, it stems from that famous suicidal discretion which is something of an ethic of his behavior, never apparently upsetting the forms and styles.
13:04 Even though people say he has an incomparable prose style, nonetheless he fits easily into conventions, apparently. Except—I'll make a small exception for the matter of dream. He knows it, he's conscious of it, he's the first, after Jean Paul in German literature, to have integrated dream as literary material, one might almost say as a classic. We're in 1850—let's now move on to the pitch. The pitch.
The pitch: the abbé de Bucquoy and the Riancey amendment 13:35 The narrator of this novella, who speaks in the first person, addresses the director of Le National, so he has a contract to send serial articles at a regular interval, and he had promised him precisely an article on the Abbé de Bucquoy. How did he come into contact with this figure? Well, he was traveling, as ever, Nerval the wanderer.
14:05 He doesn't say why nor what the purpose of the trip was, but the novella begins on the banks of the Main—M-A-I-N—in Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, with the famous book fair, of course. He's leafing through the books of the secondhand booksellers there, on the quays of the Main, "Mainlust" as the Germans say, "the pleasure of the Main"... And by chance, in his searching, he comes across a work with a title several lines long, as was done at the time: "A most rare occurrence, or the History of the Sieur Abbé Comte de Bucquoy, in particular his escape from Fort-l'Évêque and the Bastille, with several works, in verse and prose, and in particular the Gamme of Women."
14:51 Strange, "gamme," G-A-M-M-E, with a single M. "And in particular the Gamme of Women, sold at Jean de France's, rue de la Réforme à l'Espérance, in Bonnefoy, 1719." He finds this book, he wants to buy it, because it interests him. He'd always been fascinated by the period we'd today call baroque, let's say—he devoured Scarron, comic novels. And he wants to pay for it, and this often happens on his travels, since he has this modesty, this discretion.
15:22 To avoid having to tell the reader that he was broke, he didn't have the money on him. And, no matter, I'll be in Paris in two days, one finds all the books there. What one can't find in Frankfurt in terms of books, surely, I'll find in Paris. And there begins the novella, a kind of chase through staircases, mazes, and rooms, suites of rooms in libraries, specialized booksellers, and the book slips away. Sometimes it's been misfiled, well, a genre problem.
15:53 Maybe it's been filed among the novels. But that's not the problem. It's a catastrophe for Nerval, the fact that he can't find it. That's where it gets interesting. That's where the pitch really begins. Because meanwhile, while he was traveling, a law had been passed in France. But it's real, you can check it—the official journal—an amendment was passed, an amendment bearing the name of its instigator, the Riancey Amendment, which forbade authors from publishing serialized novels, serialized historical novels.
16:27 Which had been, at the time, the glory of Dumas—Dumas who was a school friend of Nerval's; Gautier, Dumas, and Nerval were together at Charlemagne. And so, you see, if Dumas could no longer write historical novels, censorship dealt either with fiction—we'd say today—or with history, the real. There's no in-between. Since it's no longer that, then suddenly it's fiction, the real, well, afterward. And there's an obvious political dimension, because the public followed these serial novels enthusiastically—it was Eugène Sue, who was very popular in particular, Les Mystères de Paris, in the newspapers.
17:04 And it was this same public that was grumbling on the barricades. So the popularity of serial novels was worrying the Guizot governments and other counter-revolutionaries. Well, so Nerval sums up the situation like this: "On my return to Paris, I found literature in a state of indescribable terror." The word is strong, Nerval has humor, but still, he never chooses his words at random. Terror. But it's not the red terror, it's apparently the white terror.
17:34 "Following the Riancey amendment to the press law, newspapers were forbidden from inserting what the Assembly has taken to calling the 'serialized novel.'" Curious. The Assembly. The "serialized novel." "I have seen many writers, foreign to any political color, in despair over this measure which struck cruelly at their means of existence. As for me"—I develop this because there's the whole problem of genre classification that I'll get into later, which is already raised here—"as for me, who am not a novelist" [he's not a Dumas, Nerval, he's not the grand form, not the long breath, not the sprawling novel]
18:12 "as for me, who am not a novelist, I trembled to think of the vague interpretation that might be given to these two words bizarrely coupled together: 'serialized novel.' And pressed to give you a title, I settled on this one: L'Abbé de Bucquoy." So it's vital for Nerval to find the book, to prove properly to the censors and the police that this is indeed a historical document dealing with the story of a real person, and not that he's making things up. Otherwise he sends his newspaper into ruin, and himself into prison. That's the pitch. But back to the book.
The book eludes him: pretexts and Viennese censorship 18:42 It slips away. One day, the Arsenal has it. Ah! It has it, but it's closed. Without any date given for its reopening. Another time it can't be found because the Sainte-Geneviève library is being completely renovated on account of rodents. There's humor here. Rodents got into the crates. And he says one has a choice between the mouse of Athens and the Cossack rat of Russia that devours manuscripts. The book slips away. And Nerval multiplies the pretexts for not finding it.
19:16 Sometimes there's almost an offhandedness toward the reader. But it took me a while to notice, because of his discretion, because he's always so courteous, wonderful, we're charmed. Which proves—so we don't see that he's pulling our leg a bit. Fine, I'll grant that, we can't verify that the library was closed. That, I can't say is—well, it is an argument. One can't obtain the book from a closed library. But what to say, for example, once, about an argument like this: "Yet another idea occurred to me," after already 40 failed attempts at various institutions consulted to find the book, "yet another idea occurred to me."
19:48 "The Arsenal library must be nearby. It's a very fine library that Paris underrates. The Arsenal library is closed for the holidays, but I know a curator there." He's in Paris, he has the keys—in fact it's Charles Nodier, a writer who had been one of Nerval's literary mentors and who ran the Arsenal library. He has the keys, he was formerly very kind to me, he'd surely be willing to let me have exceptional access to this book, which is one of those the library holds in great number. There, it's solved. "I had set off, when a terrible thought stopped me."
20:21 This time it's not the closed library—what is it now? "It was the memory of a fantastic tale that had been told to me long ago." And here he speaks of the former director of the library who had been woken in the night by an untimely bell, and whom he mistook for a ghost—an utterly far-fetched story. He concludes it like this, with a dialogue between the former curator and his concierge, at one in the morning: the concierge sees with dismay the bell-pull start moving on its own. The red tassel dances frantically along the wall. The curator opens his door on his side and sees before him only the concierge crossing himself.
20:53 "It's the soul of your predecessor come back." "Did you see it?" "No, but ghosts can't be seen by candlelight." "Well, we'll be there tomorrow without any light." "Sir, you may well try it alone. And I myself will go pull that same bell—who knows if it isn't the ghost who will open the door for me." There, he's really pulling our leg. That's not the behavior of someone trying to find a book. So there is indeed, at the outset, a blockage due to censorship. Let's keep that in mind. Nerval doesn't deprive himself of a few allusions, since we're on the subject of censorship. Nerval says: "I'm beginning today to grow alarmed at the suspended condemnations hanging over the newspapers for the slightest infraction of the new law's text."
21:32 "Fifty francs' fine per seized copy is enough to make the boldest recoil, for newspapers with a print run of only 25,000—and there are several—this would amount to more than a million in fines. One understands then how a broad interpretation of the law would give the authorities the means to extinguish all opposition." All that because the authorities demand that no one should know which of the novel or history should decide between the two. "Chance had me living in Vienna under a regime of censorship."
22:02 Vienna, at the time, was the capital of NATO—sorry, of the Holy Alliance, which served the same function then as NATO does today—so much so—there's nothing meaner than those who hold power over peoples. Those who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as was said of the French émigrés, that's the worst kind. They've learned nothing, understood nothing anymore, that's the worst of it. The aspirations of peoples—but on the other hand, they haven't forgotten their fear. They're vicious, they come with the spirit of revenge, those who have learned nothing.
22:32 the spirit of revenge. They created the Ukrainian situation. So, they say the following—he's in Vienna, that is, in the holy of holies. "Chance had me living in Vienna under a regime of censorship, finding myself somewhat short of funds owing to travel expenses." That happens more than once. One takes an unplanned trip, and given the difficulty of having money sent from France, I resorted to the simple expedient of writing for the local newspapers. Freelancing.
23:02 We paid 150 francs for a sheet of 16 very short columns. I gave two series of articles that had to be submitted to the censor. I waited several days first. Nothing was returned to me. I forced myself to go find Monsieur Pilat, P-I-L-A-T, the director of this institution, explaining to him that they were making people wait too long for the visa. He was extraordinarily obliging to me. And he did not, like his near-namesake Pontius Pilate, did not wish to wash his hands of the injustice I was pointing out to him.
23:35 I was also deprived of reading French newspapers that were available in cafés, such as the Journal des Débats and la Quotidienne. Something with which one risked nothing. Monsieur Pilat said this extraordinary sentence to me: 'You are here in the freest place in the Empire.' Colon: 'the censorship offices.' There you have the importance of the theme. You tell me, but in fact, this novella recounts the story without any question of characters, there's no Angélique yet, all that. But precisely, Nerval devotes far more lines to the impossibility of finding his book, to the point that some commentators have said this is already a very modern approach, setting up an anti-novel, as we say today.
Angélique de Longueval and the departure for Compiègne 24:14 This void, this unforeseen inability to find the book, opens up a space for creation. We're going to talk about something else. And among other things, there are multiple digressions, multiple detours, and suddenly, in Letter 4, a major turn. Because up to now, all this has taken place in Paris. When you do that, it's a bit stifling, all the libraries.
24:44 And here, starting from Letter 4, after all these chapters of extreme precision, we get this text: 'I had the idea of going to the archives of France, where they gave me the authentic genealogy of the Bucquoys.' They find out a bit about the origins of the family, after all. 'Their family name is Longueval.' One single stroke, Longueval. 'In going through the numerous files relating to this family, I made a most fortunate discovery.'
25:18 In fact, this discovery is a manuscript written by the great-aunt of the Abbé de Bucquoy, so by an ancestor of his, a generation earlier, who has no connection at all with the Abbé de Bucquoy himself — he wasn't even born yet — and who tells a bit of her own life story. Interesting, nothing more. 'I have taken a few extracts from it which I shall try to link together with a faithful analysis.' So instead of sending the story of the Abbé de Bucquoy as promised to the newspaper, since he can't find it, he sends as a substitute the story of Angélique de Longueval, the abbé's great-aunt.
25:53 In any case, it's a document he has, one can't accuse him of making it up, it's a document that holds him to it. Except that — 'The next day, being All Saints' Day itself' — let's keep this well in mind, because all these dates are going to matter, we are in autumn. You spoke of decline earlier. Decline is carnage in slow motion. It's the softened version of carnage. 'I did not fail on this occasion for distraction and study.' Ah, we're going to leave Paris, we're going for a walk.
26:23 And here, I'm obliged to quote it straight through: 'Old provincial France is barely known. This region especially, which is nevertheless part of the surroundings of Paris. There is a somewhat fantastical side to it, it's right at hand there, just past Le Bourget, so to speak. At the point' — and look how precise this is — 'where Île-de-France, the Valois, and Picardy meet.' Someone said of Nerval that he was someone for whom borders are not lines but spaces. He always dwells at the edge of sharply defined genres.
26:56 Here it's not genres, it's regions, but that's exactly it. 'Divided by the Oise, the Aisne, and cut off by the — [Cipé], one may dream the finest pastoral idylls in the world. The language of the peasants themselves is the purest French, barely altered by a pronunciation in which the endings of words rise skyward like the song of the lark, in children, in the form of a kind of warbling. I arrived last evening at Compiègne, still pursuing the Bucquoys in every form, with that slow obstinacy which is natural to me.'
27:31 And here we suddenly are at Compiègne. Up to now, let's follow the places carefully. That's what I'd like to do in this rereading. We started from Frankfurt. We spent laborious days of fruitless research in Paris, where we learned all sorts of things, all sorts of digressions but not the book. We didn't find it. And here we are at Compiègne. But how did he manage to get us on board? That's the right expression, because the language plays on the word. To 'embark' someone is also a bit to swindle them, to double-cross them.
28:12 I'm looking for a book. I can't find it. So I talk about something else. There's a stowaway on board. It's the great-aunt. He tells the story instead of the abbé's, or his great-aunt's. But Angélique's story is itself interrupted by yet another digression. So the procedure doesn't change. But there are two big parts. Frankfurt at the start is very quick. It's just the opening move, as we say in music, the bow stroke. Then afterward it's Paris. There's a very long stretch there. The libraries, the bookshops, the specialized booksellers.
28:43 Then the Valois. The countryside. The countryside so green and so fertile. And that already makes for a lot of plot. At the start he was traveling, we don't know why. 'In 1851 I passed through Frankfurt.' 'I passed through Frankfurt' is all we've understood. Afterward, as soon as he finds the book, we finally have a plot. 'There, I must...' 'I don't have enough money on me but I'll find the book in Paris.'
29:13 The book being unfindable, I slot in the story of Angélique de Longueval. That's already a lot of plot. Afterward, that's not enough. Angélique's own story is going to be interrupted by one very long digression — not by several small digressions. And we can sense the digression coming from the very start, as soon as he arrives in the new place, the new topology. We are in the countryside, at Compiègne. Let's remember well that we're at All Saints' Day. All Saints' is followed the next day by the Day of the Dead. We spoke of carnage earlier.
29:43 'At the Hôtel de la Cloche, then, in Compiègne, celebrated by Alexandre Dumas' — he must have eaten well there, quite the glutton. 'There was a great commotion this morning.' The language has become somewhat archaic, deliberately so, it's normal — we're in the provinces, still under something of the Ancien Régime, not like in Paris. 'The dogs were barking, the huntsmen were preparing their weapons. I heard a beater say to his master: here is monsieur le marquis's gun.' So there are still marquises in Nerval. We've made a dive into time, it's not just a displacement in space. Well, that's classical, it's not only in Nerval that displacement in space is also, of course, the return of a past.
30:19 But here it's made quite explicit. 'I was preoccupied with quite another hunt.' A metaphor — as Plato hunts for ideas, he hunts for the Abbé de Bucquoy's book. 'I inquired at what hour the library opened.' We came here for that, let's not forget our pitch, the main thing: I found the book. 'On All Saints' Day, I was told, it is naturally closed.' Well, there you go. Here we are in the provinces, with the countryside on top of it — for sure we won't get the book today.
30:49 'And on other days, from seven in the evening to eleven, I fear I shall make myself here more unhappy than I already was.' So he ought to go back to Paris if there were more consideration for the exhausted reader that we are. 'I had a letter of introduction to one of the librarians, who is at the same time one of our most eminent bibliophiles.' He was kind enough to show me the town's books, that is, Compiègne's, but also his own — but there he no longer had anything new to report about the Abbé de Bucquoy — 'among which are found precious autographs, such as those of an unpublished correspondence of Voltaire' — imagine that — 'and a collection of songs' — no longer philosophical texts — 'set to music by Rousseau,' scores by Rousseau, 'and written in his own hand, whose fine, clean execution I could not see without emotion, bearing this title: old song set to new tunes.'
The detour via Ermenonville and Rousseau's empty tomb 31:38 'Here is the first, in the Marotic style' — and one might say it's Nerval himself speaking — 'the less I am what I once was, the less I shall ever be able to be it again.' And now, watch, here's the passage where he justifies this new digression that's going to run through our legs, because it's a change of geographical route: 'This gave me the idea of returning to Paris by way of Ermenonville' — why not, if it's a shortcut after all. He has the nerve to add: 'which is the shortest route in terms of distance' — very well — 'and the longest in terms of time.'
32:13 Almost provocative — now that he has set foot again on his maternal earth — the myth of Antaeus among the Greeks, Antaeus whom Hercules had such trouble suffocating, he had to lift him into the air, because as soon as he touched the earth he was the son of Gaia, of the earth, and regained his strength. He has just returned to his maternal earth, he's starting to lighten up a bit with us. Is this a reason connected to the Abbé de Bucquoy? Not at all, and he specifies: 'One cannot reach Ermenonville, nor get away from it' — ah, this is becoming almost a black point, sorry, a black hole, as they say in astrophysics, one from which not even light itself can escape, so strong is the gravitational pull there — 'one cannot reach Ermenonville nor get away from it without walking at least three leagues' — that's still four kilometers... three times four, twelve kilometers, three leagues on foot, no direct carriage. So why?
33:06 'But tomorrow, the Day of the Dead, is a pilgrimage I shall accomplish respectfully' — because to Rousseau's tomb at Ermenonville — a third purpose for the novella. First: find the book. Second: while waiting to find it, tell the story of the abbé's great-aunt, Angélique. Third: go to Rousseau's tomb. But what do you want from us, what are you getting at? Well, let's say — Nerval spent his childhood in that region, Rousseau's tomb is part of the scenery for him, personal memories, yes, no doubt, certainly — that's a very psychologizing-reductionist tendency, bringing the whole field of meaning back to what interests the individual person, in quotation marks — I don't know if the writer's particularity is individual — yes, except that, regarding the allusion to Ulysses which I mentioned, which I brought up earlier at the end — so we need to pay attention to his trajectory — except that, after all—
34:16 there is perhaps something fetishistic — Nerval feels like paying his respects at Rousseau's tomb, it's the Day of the Dead, so two less personal reasons: it's his native region, here's one of the most visited monuments in the area, for the rare people who wander into these remote corners, it's Rousseau's tomb. Ah, but precisely — there are no remains of Rousseau inside! Nerval repeats it constantly — Rousseau's tomb, emptied of his ashes, because at the time of the Convention, the Revolution came to fetch the philosopher's body and remains to put them in the Panthéon. So it's a pure sign of a tomb, that's fairly rare. In what way does this novella take up, in a very unexpected mode, roughly speaking, the structure of the double carnage that we saw inaugurated by the Homeric epic? Because at this point there's no carnage, quite the opposite — there are misty abbeys, ponds, it's a fine escape in the taste of the period. But in fact, as soon as he moves, it turns out that the ground on which one walks, and whose firmness
35:26 conditions our walk, for us readers accompanying him — this ground gives way, just as the book gives way, literally. And it gives way because it's a porous ground, there are too many tombs beneath this ground. So it's not carnage in the present, like the sack of Troy as Homer describes it to us, but visibly the absence of carnage that we so appreciate in these beautiful impressionist landscapes — one thinks of Corot, who preserves that peacefulness of the Île-de-France for us — like a mask concealing a much more violent past. And when they arrive at Ermenonville, with him, with his walking companion Sylvain — a character he invents, first because he's an emblematic man, the man of the woods, Sylvain, he's an emanation
36:37 of this land of forests — proof of which is that Nerval's most famous novella is Sylvie — there really is a typically Nervalian intention to blazon with the name, but never mind, this character resembles it so much that, moreover, this character disappears as soon as they leave the Valois, as soon as they return toward Paris. Very interesting — he appears when we're learning, he disappears when we're in the city. So it's with him that they arrive near Ermenonville. Leaving the park — the park where Rousseau's tomb is — 'we headed toward the church situated on the height, it is very old' — for example, quite banal, the strollers, what they're going to see, the curiosities, the church, the château — 'it is very old, but less remarkable than most of those in the region,' which is fair enough moreover. 'The cemetery was open, a tomb was needed' — 'we saw there mainly the tomb of De Vic, a former comrade-in-arms of Henri IV' — there, he makes good on what he saw at the censor's and at the — all the historian's work, he's not just making things up — 'who had given the domain of Ermenonville as a gift,' it's a family tomb whose legend stops at an abbot — so we see he's busy scrutinizing the plaques — in the sweep there remain, next
Cemeteries, charnel pits and autumn melancholy 37:47 'daughters who married bourgeois men, such was the fate of most of the old families.' Two flat abbots' tombs, very old — one might say the tomb inscription is becoming more and more erased — 'two flat tombs of abbots, very old, whose inscriptions are difficult to decipher' — there were mice earlier, the rodents attacking the manuscripts in the libraries, which had already been hard to preserve, and now here it's time, the rain, the elements that wear away the writing of the sign par excellence, the tomb — soma sema, Plato made that pun already — the first of tombs is the sign, a sign is made to give a presence to what isn't there. So it began with the departed, of course, the dear departed. 'Two very worn flat abbots' tombs, whose inscriptions are hard to decipher, can still be seen near the terrace' — then what could be even more erased? That's where we see that the tomb is a fundamental symbolic element in this text. 'Then, near a path, a simple stone on which one finds inscribed: Here lies Almazor.' Almazor — is it a fool?
39:02 Is it a lackey? Is it a dog? The stone says no more. From the top of the terrace he looks again at the park he has just left, and again at Rousseau's tomb — we never leave, then, a softened carnage, agreed? The corpses are not bloody, not carnage in the sense of raw flesh, agreed? Death is present — he even says, when he walks between Senlis and Ermenonville, that during the conflicts between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, there are fields that are veritable charnel houses, he speaks of heaps of corpses near Montépilloy — Montépilloy, where only a small fragment of a keep remains. So what's happening?
39:44 Because we had the impression that the two spaces — the Parisian space, somewhat malefic, with its harassments too, the censorship, the frenzy, the theater, the amorous adventures, the sorrows, the worldly stakes, as Clouscard would say — between that world and the world we've arrived in from Compiègne, there is a total break. Moreover, the fourth letter says it very well, right down to the vocabulary — we see this dichotomy. And what's very interesting, from a strictly literary point of view, but which also concerns us here for our purposes, is that Nerval himself is well aware that he keeps breaking the author-reader contract by always doing something other than what he proposed, but he spends his time apologizing for it in his preferred mode, that of preterition: 'no one will hold it against me if I add a few digressions here' — on the mode of digression.
40:54 And he keeps repeating these apologies each time he's about to interrupt the flow of the narrative, because Nerval, every time he apologizes, only aggravates exactly the effect he claims to be minimizing by apologizing. I'll end with the last of these apologies, which no longer concerns the flow of the plot, the pitch, but a break in tone — from the cheerful, journalistic, playful tone to melancholy: 'it is the Day of the Dead that I write to you' — sorry for these melancholy thoughts, forgive me, my reader — and yes, Romanticism drawing to its close — before, one would have said, bravo autumn — 'forgive me for these melancholy thoughts, having arrived at Senlis the evening before, I passed through the most beautiful, the saddest landscapes one could see in this season' — it's a delightful stroll, an autumn walk, since he says 'it is the Day of the Dead that I write to you,' it's dated, and so at the last—
42:04 at the last festival of autumn's splendors, a little bit early November, and so there's a theme of decline here — autumn, the twilight of the year, let's remember the little sequence of the young girls at Senlis. On leaving, 'I was able to admire, under a ray of the setting sun, under a ray of setting sunlight, the cathedral facing the half-demolished Roman tower, clad in ivy' — we are in autumn, the year is declining, we're at sunset, the day is declining, the buildings whose existence we're told about are the Roman fortifications, half-demolished and covered in ivy, so buildings in ruin. And when he walks around Senlis and passes, for instance, through Montépilloy — well, never mind, it's already known — but here he says they are walking over a veritable battlefield and that real charnel pits were discovered at Montépilloy. So when I speak of carnage,
Hölderlin: Greek tragic death and modern death 43:14 I'm sticking very closely to the text — it's simply that the relationship to time is different. Greek carnage appears to us more concentrated, more compressed in time, briefer, like a dramatic climax, whereas here we're talking about a gradual decay. It's interesting to note, since I like to bring into dialogue words considered mad — I'm thinking of Nerval's, which I'm going to cross with Hölderlin's. Hölderlin, in a letter to Böhlendorff, speaks precisely of this — he speaks of the difference in the tragic among the Greeks, which is to perish, to be consumed, as he says, by a fire one has not learned to master, and he says that we, we moderns, we Germans in the Hegelian sense — that is, the Spanish too, all of Western Europe — we make our way toward death little by little, as if in a small package or a small box. It's a letter
44:24 very significant, and he adds — this is the most important part for me — it's less grandiose as a destiny, granted, ours, the modern one, but it's more profound. It's astonishing why — Hölderlin, truly — that is, we see to what extent, in a deceptive imagery whose absolute reference point is supposedly Greece etc., who would say what difference there is between this tragic death — that at least had some grandeur to it, in Sophocles, in Aeschylus, compared to — well, no, it may be less grandiose but it's more profound, carnage. This generation had begun with the sorrows of young Werther by Goethe, Hölderlin and Goethe's generation, and Goethe confided, as he often did, to Eckermann, telling him: I almost regret having written Werther, given the number of suicides that followed. I'm speaking of carnage again, I'm not exaggerating or overstating things — and I could give plenty of other examples, the very beautiful opening of Hölderlin's hymn 'The Titans': 'for he has died long ago, many captains, beautiful women'
45:34 'and poets, and in our day such a great multitude of men.' So I want to reconnect our path to this point to ensure its continuity: the threat of the second, bloody carnage has by no means disappeared — on the contrary, it has worsened, because the negative element has been eluded, exactly like Ulysses at each stopping point, each time — a bit like the Flying Dutchman, the ghost ship — well, the legend has it that every seven years the sea must cast him back on land so he can find a woman to whom he'd be so faithful that he'd no longer need to set sail again on an endless voyage. And indeed, we can observe that at each stage of Ulysses's journey there's a Nausicaa here, a Circe there, a Calypso, etc. So I mean to say there is indeed a meaning in this: it means that carnage has been eluded
46:44 within structures that allow one to escape it, to move away from it, to set it aside, to abstract oneself from it — but that doesn't mean its threat has been removed. On the contrary, it hasn't been dealt with, it's been eluded. I'll finish, though, our engagement with Nerval's text. What emerges from it — one must clearly distinguish, in this past that returns by way of the detour, two pasts with radically distinct, even conflicting, contents. Let me explain: there's the return of the individual past — that's where he spent his childhood, so he does like any one of us would, seeing something close to his roots, as they say, and so, logically, if that were the only determining factor—
Mortefontaine avoided, Rousseau targeted: force and right 47:55 if that were the only past whose pursuit he proposes we follow, it should logically lead us to his mother's village, Mortefontaine, where he also spent part of his childhood, most often on holiday moreover, since he was schooled in Paris, which is never more than 40 km away — even though the text abounds in little remarks — I'm thinking especially of the text of Sylvie, here it's in Les Filles du feu but not in Angélique, in the one that follows — where there are several passages showing that if he was able to captivate the little peasant girl, it's because he was the little Parisian. It's very close in kilometers — that's why I'm going to specify — it's very far socially, these little towns that are still, as he says, in the last years of the 18th century. So this singular, individual past ought to center around a place, a topos that would be a little bit the center, the capital of this magical space—
49:05 this space that fertilizes his writing, the maternal space located in the Valois, but very precisely centered around — there's the barycenter of this whole gravitational field: Mortefontaine, terrible toponym uniting in a single word origin and end, because the fountain is the origin, it's the source, it's the primal nourishment, it's the first libation, it's what feeds, what saves, what restores — and here the fountain has run dry, dead fountain, as if the word already contained a warning: don't come here on a pilgrimage, there's nothing to see, as he says in a poem, more enigmatically, but the content is the same. 'The thirteenth returns' — once you've gone round the clock face, twelve, you come back to thirteen — thirteen is like one, the thirteenth returns, it's still the first, and it's always the same, it's the same moment, it's death, or the dead woman—
50:16 'oh delight, oh torment,' etc. — and moreover, to be even more explicit, in the following quatrain he says: 'love her who loved you from the cradle to the grave' — there's an explicit maternal dimension — 'she whom alone I loved still loves me tenderly, it is death, or the dead woman,' etc. So we shouldn't be too surprised if, contrary to what one might expect from a romantic destiny, in quotation marks, he doesn't take us, doesn't end his journey at his mother's village — he almost never speaks of Mortefontaine, which he names very briefly once, in passing, regarding an itinerary. So Mortefontaine is far from occupying the central position it should occupy. Instead, he centers the whole objective of the walk on Rousseau's tomb, which is a few kilometers away. Now, one must specify here: Mortefontaine is the mother's village, but it's not where his mother is buried — his mother is buried in far-off Silesia, as he says, which is now in Poland, he says it's now called Glogau, because she had the imprudence to follow her husband on the campaigns—
51:26 Napoleonic campaigns there in eastern Europe, and she died of a fever caught, according to Nerval, after crossing a bridge laden with corpses — through that imaginative element, Audreyel, which is part of family legend, never mind — but anyway her tomb is there, and that explains much of Nerval's traveling in Germany, going further in that direction, when he went to Leipzig practically a year before his death. But none of that is talked about in Angélique, precisely — that's why it's not a text like the others: the objective is Rousseau's tomb, the tomb of the man who wrote The Social Contract, whose opening pages all insist on the fact that it is no longer force that should govern human relations, social relations, the relations proper to a community — it can no longer be force, because force is what reigns in nature, whereas here it must be right, law — not for moral reasons, he doesn't say it would be better if right prevailed, that it would cause less damage than force, it's not a moral point, we don't really have a choice, Rousseau says,
52:36 namely that the strongest man, if we stick to force, is never strong enough to remain master forever unless he converts his force into right and obedience into duty. That's the problem: you cannot at the same time claim force — as Hobbes does, as practically everyone does, still today the Anglo-Saxons — and at the same time demand that legitimacy be conferred on you. If I hold power by force, then anyone who exercises a force superior to mine — a conspiracy of eunuchs in the seraglio, whatever, some military coup in a government, NATO, because I'm a country that resists, whatever — I lose my power by the very same principle that gave me access to it, force. So force explains well enough why I occupy power for a certain stretch of time, but it certainly cannot confer on me even a minute of legitimacy. So I cannot demand obedience from peoples, I can only exercise the force that their submission implies.
53:48 Now, this journey of Angélique in Nerval derives from a text first written in 1850, at the turn of the century, at the moment when the last hopes of returning to the spirit of the great Revolution — which the Restoration had tried to smother, and which the revolutions of 1848 had put back on the agenda — were collapsing. How curious, this whole chronology suddenly — we're not in the autumnal delights of Senlis, but this is the backdrop to this novella — and at the moment when the prince-president, as he was called, the future Napoleon III, was sheathing his claws, about to exercise once again what was called arbitrary power under the Ancien Régime, within a regime that had vaguely sought a compromise between democratic aspirations and the well-understood interests of the Holy Alliance, co-governed by Austria for military power and by England for financing it. So here we are in the middle
Parnasse, Baudelaire, Rimbaud: Nerval's solitude 55:00 of the century, in the middle of the shift, so to speak, in aesthetic, literary terms — Romanticism is passing the baton, it's going out of fashion. In literary textbooks it's officially made to end, as if it happened at midnight on December 31, in 1853, with the failure of Hugo's Les Burgraves — well, it's not working anymore. And we know full well what's going to replace it: in poetry, the Parnassian school, that is, more carefully crafted verse, because Romanticism, supposedly, neglected form, it put too many thoughts into verse, and thoughts put into verse don't suffice to make a poem. So there we're going to attach ourselves to making beautiful things, like a craftsman — I'm using these metaphors on purpose — thinking of titles by Gautier like Émaux et Camées — that's how you work enamels or hardstones, hard material, Enamels and Cameos. The Parnassians have often been reproached for being a bit marmorean, a bit cold, by contrast with, in opposition to, Romanticism. So there will be a Romanticism that's warm, a bit careless in form, and a Parnassian school that's perhaps colder, less moving, but so well struck, as they say—
56:11 for a line of verse or for a mark on metal or in a mold. And then compromises explode — no, it doesn't work, we think we're done with Romanticism, now we're Parnassian in poetry. Meanwhile in the novel, in prose, there's the great rise of Realism, which made up the golden age of the classic French novel, Stendhal, Flaubert — the theme resurfaces a bit sharper. So Romanticism does return in interest — no, no, no, the mal du siècle that characterized the Romantic period, the mal du siècle returns in a sharper form, we can call it spleen, whatever — it's Baudelaire who's going to reconcile them both, and the Parnassian solution, which he keeps — fortunately there was this mediation — the well-struck line, the almost Racinian line, 'the tomb, confidant of my endless dream,' Baudelaire's line, I believe it's in Spleen et Idéal — well, there we go, and there, it's the cold, marmorean side that gets borrowed — but to come back to the—
57:21 synthesis of the new sensibility that Romanticism brings, absolutely new, absolutely modern, to speak like Rimbaud, and at the same time with a form even botched, well, he did what Chénier had discouraged doing at the end of the 18th century when he said — or rather he subscribed to an imperative of André Chénier's — namely, 'on new thoughts let us make ancient verses' — that doesn't work either, that's a superb synthesis, Baudelaire. Even that explodes with Rimbaud, when he reviews all his predecessors in poetry — when he gets to Baudelaire, he begins with unprecedented praise: Baudelaire is the first of poets, the first of the seers, king of poets, a true god. 'But the form, so vaunted in him, is petty. He put new wine in an old bottle,' as in the Gospel — that's what he's saying — 'so vaunted in him is petty, he lived in too artistic a milieu' — ah, we clearly see the somewhat aestheticizing side of his search for form, we see it well, he anticipates contemporary debates, those who tell you: did you like the film? No—
58:31 'formally, no, I like the story but I don't like it formally' — well, anyway, so we clearly see these debates. Ah, at the moment when Nerval places this text, Romanticism was passing the baton, the Baudelairean revolution that would give birth to literary modernity had not yet happened — watch out, the accursed poet doesn't exist yet, whereas he is the first — and so an onto-historical, I should say, solitude in Nerval's case, that's why I take him up, it's not that I don't like — Nerval, don't misunderstand me, I'm not the only one — Aragon on Nerval, Proust on Nerval, for different reasons, Barrès adored him because he would be seen as the poet of the homeland, the poet of the soil, thoroughly rooted in the Valois — I'm caricaturing a bit but that's how it is with Barrès — the Surrealists, because with him, automatic writing, dreams, he brought dream and the unconscious into literature; Proust because of the magic of memories, the alchemy with which he admired Sylvie above all, with which Nerval expresses so well the process of reminiscence, how the past comes to illuminate a discouraged present.
59:41 and reopen all the perspectives, they will return, these gods that you always weep for, time will bring back the order of ancient days, the earth has trembled, a prophetic breath expresses itself in prose in Les Filles du feu — so I'm not saying I'm sure of that, I'm not only, but what I find eminently singular in the Nervalian experience, and it's all the more pathetic to know that he was long considered, contrary to this eminent singularity that I ascribe to him, as a minor Romantic — well, that's an overstatement now, but still, for a long time — because of his legendary discretion. He's not the type to write a manifesto for the new poetry; he's someone who, on the contrary, borrows the most conventional, the most hackneyed genres — hack writing, reviews of fashionable plays, etc.
1:00:40 to get his message across — it doesn't matter through which channel, he tries to force a message through any channel whatsoever. I'll give one last example of this relative — this suicidal discretion that is characteristic of Nerval and that spared him many compromises — one last example: a text, perhaps the famous 'I am the shadowy one, the widower, the unconsoled,' this poem so admired by the Surrealists and the Symbolists because it's not the mystery, but which is simply so beautiful — 'my brow still red from the queen's kiss' — this poem, originally,
1:01:50 Nerval wrote it on the back of a calling card, purely by chance, because Dumas was late, his servant had said he wasn't in, and said 'you'll tell him — I'll tell him, sir, on whose behalf?' and Nerval states his identity on the back of the card: 'I am the shadowy one, the widower, the unconsoled' — he states his identity, it's really extraordinary, this work. So, we're between two centuries, the century hesitates, Nerval does not hesitate — he goes back to the sources of the first Romantic explosion, back to all the origins — but when I say back to the source, what do I mean?
Back to Rousseau and happiness, an Enlightenment value 1:02:34 It's Rousseau, and at a historical moment when the die is not yet cast — it's not Rousseau, we're not talking about restoration or about finding a balance between forces — no, we are under the Ancien Régime, and this singular situation of the text, which does not yet have, as would be the case in the generations of Mallarmé, an avant-garde it can claim, all of whom trace themselves back practically to Baudelaire, but which no longer wants to indulge in Romanticism either — I would say today, rather bluntly, which has been well mediatized and is in the process of passing the torch, but of water that has not yet flowed — and so he makes for himself a Rousseau, but a Rousseau we're taught little about, a Rousseau who holds together both — and here I come back to it — the singular destiny, the one that meant Nerval should have made his way toward Mortefontaine, and the collective destiny — in short, the author as much of the Confessions
1:03:45 as of the Social Contract, as much of the Reveries as of the Discourse on Inequality — in short, an author who holds together these two parts that all of modernity will desperately try to reconcile: individual fulfillment, collective life. I don't need to draw you a picture. And going back to Rousseau, we are this side of the Terror — there's no question of it, there's no compromise at all — and above all there is, as a central theme in Rousseau's Reveries, the theme of happiness, which unifies the whole of the 18th century, to the point of reconciling Voltaire and Rousseau — on that they agree, it's a value they share: the value of happiness, which is already great progress, in the progressive sense, that it became such an eminent value, because before that, even just the century before, it was salvation, in Pascal for example — it's not quite the same thing, it's not about an earthly fulfillment here and now, which is what characterizes happiness, which presupposes a positive relation
1:04:55 to the world, whatever it may be, and that's its first difference from salvation or the beatitude of the saints, which is another eminently respectable determination but designates another reality. The first thing that characterizes it, that specifies happiness, is a positive relation to the world — the world being what is given here and now, not in a beyond or an afterworld, to speak like Nietzsche. Second determination of happiness: a certain temporal thickness, it is the long duration — there it differs from pleasure, which can be of an almost infinite intensity but ephemeral. So this theme of happiness, thus doubly determined — by its necessary relation to the world and by its duration — the fact that duration was at the center of the whole effort of the Enlightenment — it's interesting to note that as the keystone of the Enlightenment movement there is a notion that is not cognitive, neither first nor last: happiness is not a cognitive notion,
1:06:05 it's not a notion of mass or of speed or of substance or of accident — it is closer to what Kant calls the principle of pleasure and pain than to the categories of true and false; we don't care about truth here. So if I make this long digression, which isn't really one, we come back on the contrary to the heart of the debate on the notion of happiness, in order to raise the real question now — to return to the text: how did it happen that in less than a generation we went from a collective discourse — the Enlightenment is a great European movement, even if it shines especially in France — but still, one that draws all its lines of force toward this keystone, as I keep saying, which is the theme of happiness — in less than a generation there will emerge what we'll call the mal du siècle — how?
The carnage between the Enlightenment and the mal du siècle 1:07:15 What happened for us to go, in less than a generation, from a collective discourse — the Enlightenment is a great European movement, even if it shines especially in France — but still, one that draws all its lines of force toward this keystone, as I keep saying, which is the theme of happiness — to, in less than a generation, what we'll call the mal du siècle taking shape? What happened? It's odd that we don't reflect on that. Let me take two texts to show how much the Enlightenment converges on happiness: the end of Voltaire's Letter on Commerce — or, after having compared, always the Anglo-Saxon model for him, which is quite simply English at the time, positive as for his whole era, moreover — he began by writing the English Letters, so at the end of the Letter on Commerce, then it was the English Letters — after this happiness that in England a merchant could be ennobled whereas in France it's held in contempt, etc.
1:08:24 held in the utmost contempt — French nobility — all that's going to be very good. A French marquis who wants to and does conquer Paris arrives in Paris from deep in some province with a name, saying: a man like me, a man of my quality, sovereignly despised, a merchant — I really don't know which is more useful to his country, a man like me or a well-powdered lord who knows exactly at what hour the king gets up and at what hour he goes to bed, all while giving himself, forgive the expression, the airs of a slave in a minister's antechamber — or a merchant who from his office gives orders to Surat or to Cairo and who contributes — this is the end of the text — to the happiness of the world, drawing a drop of gold at the end there, literally and figuratively. How can we go from this quest for happiness to, all of a sudden, this expression of unhappiness that will characterize the coming century, whether in the Romantic form of the mal du siècle, or in the Symbolist form, to use classifications, starting from Baudelaire's spleen, without even going as far as modern anguish — I'm thinking of Kafka, I'm thinking of Beckett, I don't know, the Void, what happened?
1:09:34 It's a short span all the same — how can there be such a reversal? I can't help but notice this — it's not, it's not an arbitrary approach I'm taking at random, it's objective, you just have to measure the gap — there are, after all, a few tiny little events called the English Industrial Revolution, the French political revolution, and Europe ploughed through by imperial armies from Spain to Moscow, and starting from Waterloo there is put in place the exact opposite of a synthesis, of a sublation — a compromise that will mark the beginning of long years of counter-revolution that will characterize the contemporary world. It's interesting to know that after the Commune, for example, a man like Monsieur Thiers said: now the problem is that it won't always work to crush demonstrators
1:10:44 with companies of dragoons and cuirassiers, now we have to learn to win elections — he had really grasped the problem, that power, to ensure its perpetuation, will always have — it's better, it's a good mutation, it's less bloody at any rate. We arrive here at a nodal point, if I may say so — it is indeed a bloodbath that occupies, chronologically, the place between the quest for happiness that characterizes the optimism of the Enlightenment and the relation to unhappiness expressed by the following generation — and that's not just in the heads of writers or philosophers or poets, it's a real bloodbath, one that churned up many peoples and many nations — and there, to the point that I often say to myself that since every century, scholastically,
1:11:55 has a proper name — because if it were just a number it would be a bit abstract — instead of saying 18th century we say the Age of Enlightenment, instead of saying 17th we say the Grand Siècle, the century of classicism, the 16th century we name the Renaissance — and the 19th has none, and perhaps because it's too recent, we don't have enough hindsight to unify it under one banner — but if there had to be one, I would propose the century of revolutions, because from then on it never stops: from 1789 onward, every time the counter-revolution settles back in, there is once again a contestation of the compromise, giving 1830, giving 1848, giving the Paris Commune, giving 1917 — it never stops. And worse, there are revolutions without bloodshed — that worries the party of bloodshed even more. What's more dangerous than someone like Allende — good God, an anti-Stalinist Marxist who plays the democratic game — he absolutely must be gotten rid of by any means
1:13:05 and by force and by bloodshed. But well before that already, there are revolutions I'd call silent, because they're made without barricades — I'm thinking of the Liberation, the gains of social security, of pay-as-you-go pensions — those are considerable advances. There we emerge from — the counter-revolution, I've said it, I maintain it — between the French Revolution and us, the longest stretch is occupied by the counter-revolution: the great long period of the Holy Alliance, France under Louis XVIII, Charles X, etc.
1:13:42 and then the war of 1914, etc., and every time the working-class opposition has to be locked down — for the Tarines, of course — but there are a few victories wrested by the party of social progress from the reactionary forces, from — the conservatives, the reactionaries are meaner because they've been afraid — those who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as we used to say about the émigrés — they were afraid, they'll take their revenge — most men are wicked and unhappy, says Spinoza — they're afraid, they're wicked, and — but tell me, these advances, since I was talking about the Liberation, well there had been '36, paid vacations, there have been short periods like that trying to make up a bit for the lost time of the counter-revolution — but to come back to '45 precisely, why did it happen there — 50 million dead, and it passes — so the bloodbath is not an obsession, it took that to restore
1:14:52 hope and happiness to fashion — it took that imposed suffering — because if it were the sovereign people itself that had decided to make 50 million dead in order to impose its struggles, it would be known — it's a grave matter. So what's the connection with Nerval? The main one is this: I don't address myself to the working class, there are people whose job that is, it's not my training, not my background — I address myself rather to those who are still in the sincere indecision in which the generation that lived through Nerval's time was plunged. Nerval expresses this indecision quite well at the beginning of Sylvie — while at first he has drawn us into a story — there again, instead of pounding the table and wanting to make a manifesto for new art, he inscribes himself instead in a hackneyed genre, the novella with autobiographical resonance — he has drawn us into a sentimental story and immediately he sets it in historical context,
The strange era of Sylvie and the aestheticizing illusion 1:16:02 I quote: 'We were living then in a strange time, such as usually follows revolutions or the decline of great reigns. It was no longer the heroic gallantry of the Fronde, the elegant and adorned vice of the Regency, the skepticism and mad orgies of the Directory' — this is, I believe, where a lot of people today will recognize themselves — 'it was a mixture of hesitation and idleness, of activity and utopia, of brilliant utopia, of philosophical or religious aspiration, of vague enthusiasm mixed with certain instincts of renewal, of weariness with past discords, of uncertain hopes — something like the age of Peregrinus and of Apuleius' — he takes examples that are significantly situated at a moment called the decadence of the Roman Empire, of the late Empire — 'material man aspired to the bouquet of roses that was to regenerate him through the hands of the fair Isis. Ambition, however, was not of our age, and the greedy scramble that was then being made for positions and honors kept us away from the spheres
1:17:12 of activity that were possible; there remained to us as refuge only that ivory tower of the poets, into which we climbed ever higher to isolate ourselves from the crowd' — at those high points to which our masters guided us, we breathed at last the pure air of solitude — all this is said in the imperfect tense, as if it were past — 'we drank oblivion from the golden cup of legends, we were drunk with poetry and love — love, alas, of vague shapes, of pink and blue tints, of metaphysical phantoms; seen up close, real woman revolted our naivety; she had to appear as a queen or a goddess, and above all not to be approached' — you'll say, what's the connection with today's hedonistic eroticism? I'm getting there. 'A few of us, nevertheless, cared little for these Platonic paradoxes, and, through our dreams renewed from Alexandria, sometimes waved the torch of the underworld gods' — underground, as we'd say today — 'which lights up the shadows for an instant with these trails of sparks.' This generation, Nerval's generation, all had their fathers in the Grande Armée — Nerval's father was a doctor in the Grande Armée,
1:18:22 that's how his mother died so far away — and they are the princes of the cafés, as Musset called himself, self-mockingly: 'I am the café prince.' There's a gap — and if there had been, if a historical solution had been found, there would be none of this malaise, this mal du siècle. I come back to it: a solution — a compromise is not a solution, it's only a way of deferring the return of the final bloodbath. So it's mainly for this reason that I make this reference to Nerval — because we must not — it's to dissuade the contemporary actor from giving in to the aestheticizing illusion that was that of this generation, as it had been that of the German Romantics, and this is why I hold to it so much:
1:19:33 it is through this mode of aesthetic expression that the capitalist status quo continues to exert, can exert, this seduction — via the salesmen, as Clouscard would say, who know exactly whom they're dealing with. I'm thinking of Jean Witold — he's been forgotten now, but he was a music critic at the time; France Musique didn't exist yet, but he was in charge of the classical music program on Radio France — and at the time Jean Witold, who died long ago — the Jews, of course, tell each other a story from the camps — I believe he had been at Bergen-Belsen, where he had been deported — he said: we were guarded by an SS man watching us, a young SS man who was constantly playing, while guarding us, Bach's deep partitas in G, and he couldn't help telling him that a sharp was needed there where he was playing a natural F — he looked at him furiously, because we weren't even allowed to speak to the superman, I mean — and then afterward there was a bond, they talked about music, he asked him for tips. Whereas the generation of today, I'm thinking of the leftists
1:20:43 and Trotskyists, all believe that Mr. Anyone is an ignoramus — me, I'm on the left and cultivated, and in front of me there's a fascist with a thick neck and thinning hair who delights in Nordic Gothic sites glorifying Atlantis and who wants the death of the Jew and of the 'Judeo-Muscovites,' to speak like the people currently in power in Kyiv when they talk about the pro-Russians — 'Judeo-Muscovite power,' an avatar of 'Judeo-Bolshevism' no doubt — and the advantage with Nerval is that he went all the way to the end of this illusion, and so he was able to express its limit, and so he serves me somewhat as an immense reductio ad absurdum. We need to go back to the theoretical effort deployed by Rousseau — as Lenin says, without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice.
The collective past and the occultation of history 1:21:53 We must make this long refounding detour without letting ourselves be taken in by nostalgia — that's why I hold to this text, because it turns out that, insofar as there is a singular past — I pick up my thread again at that point and I'll finish on this — it's in fact a collective past that keeps striking him in the face all the time. We understand the allusions better now to the battles that took place in the country, the fact that there are corpses scattered across the fields he walks through — why, every time he reaches a church or something, he can't help looking in the cemetery at the identities on the gravestones — there's a whole weight of collective past there. In short, it's not just my personal story that has made me who I am, there is a collective story, there is a social contract that would remain abstract, and that would ignore this past, would be condemned to failure. We must therefore accept that we are the result of a becoming, and in short,
1:23:03 reconnect with the dimension that is no doubt the most occulted by the contemporary world — the historical dimension. I seem to be playing with paradox — one would think, on the contrary, that what's happening is modernity, the fact that history has risen to the zenith of the human sciences. Not at all — it's quite telling that, apart from the so-called hard sciences, the natural sciences to put it plainly, opposed to that body of knowledge we have the human or social sciences — I like the debates that have taken place between the two, I understand them very well, but I see how derisory the stakes are compared to the real stake, which is hidden, and which consists in the fact that in both cases we are supposed to be talking about science — that's the scam. The scam isn't in knowing whether they are human sciences or social sciences — the point is to know that we're talking about science, period, nothing more to see, the inquiry is over, there's only scientific research left on one side — and this reminds me of Clouscard's serious quip, when he told me that the human sciences appeared in order to lock down the rise of nascent Marxism, which chronologically
1:24:14 is unavoidable, even if a correlation is not a cause — it's still... So, in order not to repeat this lamentable situation, we find ourselves either dealing with an escapism that doesn't even take the same risks as a Nerval, a Rimbaud, a Van Gogh — to leave literature aside — that doesn't even take the risk of the aesthetic adventure lived out to the end, which also ends in bloodshed, in madness or suicide, or both in Nerval's case — so this lamentable situation which offers us either to be a great creator, but one who gets sent to the slaughter, or to be an important reference in the human sciences, or in neopositivism, or in tragic escapist idealism.
Rousseau: slaves against nature, what men have made 1:25:24 That's why I made this return to a time when we don't talk about human sciences, we still talk about history — with Marx — and Nerval's text, I took it because it brings us back to that, it brings us back to a Rousseau who is neglected — I take Rousseau because — it's not in the historical sciences that he distinguished himself, it's in the sciences of rigor, political philosophy, the history of law, political law, positive law. When, in the Social Contract, Rousseau says: force made the first slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them — and always in this same chapter on slavery, when he says: if there have been slaves, if there are today servile natures — because he is commenting on Aristotle, who said there were visibly men born to command, others born to obey, as if there were natures within nature — there is 'to be born' — that's why the ecologists love nature so much, because everything is decided from birth in these things — there are those born to command, they're born to obey, it's in the genes,
1:26:34 we'd say today, like Sarkozy when he said we'll have to see about teenagers who commit suicide, whether it's not in the genes — because it's not clear yet, all this — a French head of state, as though he were a scientific researcher expressing an opinion, why not, in a debate — 40 years ago that view was extreme-right and would have been thrown out of the lab — this is a head of state, and not of 1930s Germany, of France. So instead of that, Rousseau says: if there are slaves by nature, it's because there were originally slaves against nature — he re-establishes the historical dimension: if we're here, it's because things happened, things that we ourselves have done — and I quote him, in Émile: everything that men have made, men can destroy. What has been set up can be unset — that part I add. Everything that men have made, men can destroy; there is no ineffaceable character except those that nature imprints — and it's true that the law by which the earth compels the moon to revolve around it hasn't changed much — that law, there is no ineffaceable character except those that nature imprints — and that's the punch line of this passage in Émile: and nature makes neither the rich man, nor the prince, nor the great lord — that's something we made, so we can unmake it. Good God, let's return to that source.
Ecology and environmentalism: nature as justification 1:28:02 Why this long detour through a poet, a more dreamy, emblematic poet, to express things, historical stakes as concrete as social or political ones? A bit to shame the way the current ecological status quo locks down the situation — I'm alluding here, for me, to the main lock that blocks opinion in each person — we mustn't fight only against the people who are — I would call it ecologism, to distinguish it clearly from ecology. So let me be clear about the terms: if ecology is the struggle for the defense of the environment, then I'm at the front lines, and I don't think I'll be the only one — everyone will agree — who has ever seen someone tell me 'I like living in a bad, unhealthy, harmful environment'? That's nonsense, everyone seeks the best possible environment for themselves, outside their home — but no,
1:29:14 it's not the defense of the environment, it's the defense of nature that is at stake in the dominant discourse — that's the fundamental scam of the era we live in, and that's what would make me raise an alarm: there's a middle class trapped here in the ecological niche, which makes up the bulk of the currently dominant classes, broadly speaking, including at the global level — and what I'm saying is just as true for a Malaysian banker, even if the majority of course of those who exemplify this position are the Euro-American bourgeoisies — that doesn't mean it can't be found far from there, in any establishment, as they say, anywhere on the planet — a way of saying: look, my second home is exactly how I want it, and now they're going to build a McDonald's a kilometer away —
1:30:24 out of the question. There's a conservative and reactionary side that's quite visible, defending one's environment tooth and nail — I've seen, I'm not inventing hypotheses, I'm not caricaturing anything — coming back from Germany, passing through the Vosges for a change, I saw on a banner: 'yes to new highway ramps, but not around here' — that's extraordinary. I'm not a protector of that kind of environment, that is, the maintenance of a status quo of privilege, whether rightly or wrongly acquired — that we'd have to look at case by case. Oh yes, it would be interesting if we put a sign on every big luxury property, a bit like the district council puts up 'this much,' the town put up 'this much,' the state put up 'this much' — if we put up 'fortune amassed thanks to a million deaths in Angola, 600,000 in Vietnam,' or rather millions — it wouldn't be a bad idea either. Same for arms sales — in short, we won't try to sort out clean money from dirty money in banks, even the most venerable ones — the banks themselves, as you well know, that's been all over the financial news
1:31:34 since the beginning of the current crisis — the banks themselves can't manage to draw up their balance sheets, to separate their rotten, doubtful debts from their solid assets. That's quite telling. Well, that gives us lessons in accounting — and when I speak of the ecologist lock, once again, if it's about defending the environment, I'm at the front lines; if it's about defending nature, you'll do it without me. Now the scam is right there, in that slippage — and in every era power has always invoked the value of nature to justify the status quo. Take the preface to Racine's Phèdre, justifying a small departure from the version of his predecessor Seneca, who had written a play on the same subject, in which the tradition was that it's Phèdre herself who slanders her stepson
1:32:45 to Theseus — but here, he says, I prefer that it be the servant who commits this slander, because, he says, a princess by nature — slander is too vile a thing to be in the mouth of a princess, who by her nature has elevated feelings; it fits better in the mouth of a servant. There you have it, there are natures made to command, others to obey — and those made to obey have all the flaws, including a tendency to slander. Racine is a man of his time, I'm not making any anachronism, no accusation, thank God he existed, and that we have these admirable texts — but what interests me is that his argument is that it's innate — born, b-o-r-n — that's the lock of our era, it's not that where before there was more or less the religious — it's exactly the function that religion used to occupy politically — religion has other functions, thankfully, that's fine — but vis-à-vis power, it's the preservation of a status quo through the deterrence of any change that might alter it. I remember when I was in Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world,
1:33:55 there are enormous deposits of coal in the subsoil — well, there are mines, there are resources, there's enough, there is a mine — and so to move on to development, could we not exploit it — one time I ran into some experts, no, that would disturb the ecological balance — perfect, that's development aid for you. So I warn against the specter of bloodshed — currently, the aggressiveness that leads to bloodshed lies in ecologist aggressiveness. I'm quite serious. You'll tell me, wait, let's not exaggerate, I know it has a somewhat convulsive side sometimes, the green ayatollahs — well, all right, it's still not the Stalinist purges, it's not the stalag, it's not the gulag. Cohn-Bendit, an emblematic figure, at least in ecology, the very man who said, during the campaign over the referendum on the European Constitution, that he was fed up with 'Gaullo-Communism' — a terrible phrase — that we should be anti-Gaullist, I've said it before, I repeat it because it needs hammering home — that we should be anti-Gaullist, there are excellent reasons to be an anti-Gaullist, I voted against the Gaullist parties at the time.
Environmentalist aggressiveness and eluded carnage 1:35:07 every time — that we should be anti-communist, there can be excellent reasons for that too, which I respect — but that we should be against both, that's Pétain's program. Moreover, it's the 'wanted' on the Vichy posters that's even more troubling. And then the man who was libertarian in '68 and liberal in '98, to make a symmetry of the years, that's when he said it. So when I see the tendencies that claim these viewpoints, that want to be radical and are in fact still pillars of the status quo, I repeat it, I maintain that the ecologist sentiment is heavy with the bloodshed that awaits us, because it puts us objectively in a position of hostility toward all those who want to develop — I don't see by what right we would forbid
1:36:17 a billion, a billion one hundred million Chinese from having the same standard of living as ours — some even forbid them from reaching even a quarter of it, otherwise, they say, we won't be able to breathe on the planet anymore, it's finished. What does that mean — that we got to have our fun for three centuries and now we're going to forbid a billion and a half Chinese? They're taking people for fools, especially since progress in history has always been ecological — that too is completely hidden away. I mean that when charcoal was the main energy resource — if we had continued with charcoal, then we moved to coal, the coal found in coal mines — I'm still far from oil, from gas, from nuclear — but staying even with coal, and even with charcoal, if we had stayed at that more primitive stage of energy development, there wouldn't be a single tree left on the planet, given everything we consume in energy today. So it's a good thing we moved to coal, it's a good thing we moved to oil, since the ratio is roughly 1 to 7 in terms of the quantity of oil needed to produce what 7 times more coal would give — and as for nuclear, let's not even get into it, since with roughly that much enriched uranium you can supply energy
1:37:27 to all of Paris. So there, I wanted to add that — instead of seizing, in a time of crisis, and we are in one, an opportunity to reconnect with the historical consciousness that was that of all those who achieved the advances that preceded us — the French Revolution, the Popular Front, the Liberation — instead, we have alienated history into nature, we have put history in parentheses, we have acted as though — as if history — we believe we've eluded the bloodbath because I'm in the arms of Calypso, on an island far, far from Ithaca, believing myself to be somewhat
