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of human realities is conceivable in itself but unrealizable in fact should make us more understanding with regard to a de Maistre. Though we may regard one or another of his opinions as abhorrent, he is nonetheless the representative of that philosophy immanent to any regime congealed in terror and dogmas. Where can we find a theoretician more fanatically opposed to becoming, to praxis? He hated action as the prefiguration of a rupture, as the likelihood of becoming, since for him to act was to remake. The revolutionary himself deals this way with the present in which he installs himself and which he would eternalize; but his present will soon be the past, and by clinging to it he ends up joining the advocates of tradition.
    The tragic aspect of the political universe resides in that hidden force which leads every movement to deny itself, to betray its original inspiration, and to corrupt itself as it confirms itself, as it advances. This is because in politics, as in everything, we fulfill ourselves only upon our own rains. Revolutions start in order to give a meaning to history; such meaning has already been given, replies reaction, we must submit to it and defend it. This is exactly what will be maintained by a revolution that has triumphed; hence intolerance results from a hypothesis that has degenerated into a certitude and that is imposed as such by a regime — from a vision promoted to the rank of truth. Each doctrine contains, in germ, infinite possibilities for disaster: since the mind is constructive only by inadvertence, the encounter of man and idea almost always involves a deadly sequel
    Imbued with the futility of reforms, with the vanity and the heresy of improvements, reactionaries would spare humanity the lacerations and exhaustions of hope, the pangs of an illusory quest: be satisfied with what has already been acquired, they suggest; abdicate your anxieties in order to bask in the bliss of stagnation and, opting for an irrevocably official state of affairs, choose finally between the instinct for preservation and the craving for tragedy. But man, open to all choices, rejects precisely this one. In this rejection, in this impossibility, his drama is played out, whence it comes about that he is at once, or alternately, a reactionary and a revolutionary animal. Fragile though the classical distinction may be, moreover, between the concept of revolution and that of reaction, we must nonetheless retain it, on pain of chaos or confusion in the consideration of political phenomena. It constitutes a reference point as problematical as it is indispensable, a suspect but inevitable and obligatory convention. And it is also the one that obliges us constantly to speak of “right” and “left,” terms that have no correspondence to intrinsic and irreducible givens, terms so summary that we should like to leave to demagogues alone the faculty and the pleasure of utilizing them. It sometimes happens that the right (we need merely think of national uprisings) prevails over the left in vigor, force, and dynamism; espousing the characteristics of revolutionary spirit, it then ceases to be the expression of an ossified world, of a group of interests or of a declining class. Conversely, the left, snagged in the mechanism of power or imprisoned by antiquated superstitions, can easily lose its virtues, harden, and exhibit the very flaws that commonly affect the right. Vitality being no one’s privilege, the analyst must determine its presence and intensity with no concern for the doctrinal varnish of this or that movement, this or that political or social reality. Next let us consider nations: some make their revolution on the right, others on the left. Though the former’s revolution is often but a simulacrum, it nonetheless exists, and this alone reveals the inanity of any univocal determination of the notion of revolution. “Right” and “left”: simple approximations that unfortunately we cannot do without. Not to