Read Online Anathemas and Admirations by E. M. Cioran - Free Book Online

to the pleasure of having foreseen and trumpeted it abroad. But it is especially the theoreticians of Reaction who exult (tragically, no doubt) over the reality or the imminence of the worst — of the worst that is their raison d’être. “I am dying with Europe,” de Maistre wrote in 1819. Two years earlier, in a letter to de Maistre himself, Bonald had expressed an analogous certitude: “I have no news for you; you are in a position to judge what we are and where we are going. Moreover, for me there are certain things that are absolutely inexplicable, escape from which does not seem to me within human power, insofar as men act by their own lights and under the influence of their wills alone; and in truth, what I see most clearly in all this ... is the Apocalypse.”
    After conceiving the Restoration, both men were disappointed to see that once it had become a reality, it failed to erase the vestiges of the Revolution in men’s minds — a disappointment that they anticipated, perhaps, judging from the eagerness with which they abandoned themselves to it. Whatever the case, the course they assigned to history was quite ignored by history itself: it flouted their projects, it belied their systems. De Maistre’s darkest observations, the ones that reveal a “romantic” complacency, date from the period when his ideas seem to have triumphed. In a letter of September 6, 1817, he writes to his daughter Constance, “. . . an invisible iron arm has always been over me, like a dreadful nightmare that keeps me from running, even from breathing.”
    The rebuffs he suffered from King Victor-Emmanuel doubtless had much to do with these fits of depression, but what disturbed him most was the prospect of new upheavals, the specter of democracy. Unwilling to resign himself to the future forming before his eyes, though he had foreseen it, he hoped — with the incurable optimism of the defeated—that since his ideal was threatened, everything else was, too; that along with the form of civilization he approved of, civilization itself was disappearing: an illusion as frequent as it is inevitable. How to dissociate oneself from a historical reality that is collapsing, especially when it was previously in accord with one’s inmost self? Finding it impossible to endorse the future, one lets oneself be tempted by the notion of decadence, which, without being true or false, at least explains why each period, in attempting to achieve its own individuality, does so only by sacrificing certain very real and irreplaceable earlier values.
    The old regime had to perish: a principle of exhaustion had undermined it long before the Revolution came to finish it off. Should we deduce from this the superiority of the Third Estate? Not at all, for-the bourgeoisie, despite its virtues and its reserves of vitality, by the quality of its tastes marked no “progress” over the fallen nobility. The relays occurring down through history reveal the urgency less than the automatism of change. If in the absolute nothing is dated, in the relative, in the immediate, everything risks being so, for the new constitutes the sole criterion, metamorphosis the sole morality. To grasp the meaning of events, let us envisage them as a substance offered to the eye of an utterly disabused observer. The makers of history do not understand it, and those who participate in it to any extent are its dupes or its accomplices. Only the degree of our disillusion guarantees the objectivity of our judgments, but “life” being partiality, error, illusion, and will-to-illusion, is not the passing of objective judgments a passage to the realm of death?
    The Third Estate, in asserting itself, would necessarily be impermeable to elegance, to refinement, to a worthy skepticism, to the manners and the style that defined the old regime. All progress implies a retreat, any rise a fall; but if we collapse as we advance, that collapse is limited to a circumscribed sector. The advent of