A State of Rudeness

Whether it's interesting or not is (almost) impossible for me to say, but I feel like a ramble about the research I've been doing for the French Revolution story. I still don't anticipate writing the story itself for years. In my view literature, and art itself, are most worthwhile when they are the thoughts and experiences and knowledge of years, encoded (in a way) by the author or painter or musician, and then left to the reader or spectator or listener to decode over years with the help of his own thoughts, experiences, and knowledge. So, also because I like a finely wrought piece of work for the superficial immediate enjoyment of it, and out of undistilled curiosity, I am taking pains to build up a very thorough understanding of the state of France before and during the Revolution and possibly up to the exile of Napoleon to the island of Elba.

A priority is to understand where the revolutionaries were coming from. The more I learn [largely, I admit, from Wikipedia] the clearer it is that they fell into very diverse factions — the apparently bloodthirsty hébertistes, Montagnards, Jacobins; sympathetic clergy and aristocrats; ambitious and resentful minor aristocrats and lawyers and so on —and that certain ideas of the revolutionaries regarding the rights of man and the injustice of the tax system and so on were actually quite in vogue in higher circles. Honestly I think that it was the ambition and class resentment from those who were or felt snubbed by the upper class which had far more to do with setting the events of the Revolution in motion than the oppressed peasantry. In Brittany this seems to be even more the case, where the king was respected as a very distant entity, the Catholic church was strongly engrained in the fabric of society, and taxes like the gabelle (salt tax) were not as harsh thanks to the late accession of the province to France and I think to the favourable terms wrung out by Anne de Bretagne.

Personally I am skeptical as to the degree to which the droit du seigneur was exercised — it appears to be a propagandistic gimmick, like the much-touted "bra burning" of the 1960s and 70s which never happened once — and I think I read that the corvée, or mandatory labour exacted of peasants for the building of roads and other infrastructure, was essentially gone (at least in Brittany?) by 1789. But it is clear that the tax system was ridiculous and injust. First of all, that it was weighted so that the great majority of the burden fell on the poor. Secondly, that it was gathered by private contractors who apparently had free rein in exacting higher sums than the royal treasury would ever demand or receive. Thirdly that the taxes were so complicated; besides the gabelle there was the capitation (head tax), the vingtième (property tax), the octroi (I think the English term is market tax; it was levied of peasants entering cities to sell their produce), and the taille (church tithe), to name four examples. When this joke was rendered utterly humourless by bad weather, crop failure, and the shortage of bread and other staples, of course the fat was in the fire.

The monarchy itself was bankrupt thanks to decades (or centuries, depending on how one sees it) of warfare whether direct or indirect as in the case of America's War of Independence, Louis XV had squandered the prestige of the throne through his reckless spending and menagerie of mistresses and presumably his disenchanting descent into bawdy old age, and Louis XVI was an ineffectual figure whose questionable advisors quite overshadowed him on policy questions. In the course of the Enlightenment the superstition which may have propped up the construct of divinely appointed kings was eroded, new ideas arose on points of law and governance and the social hierarchy, and the staunchly successful Glorious Revolution (1688) in England and even the very fledgling American republic which the French king had supported pointed the way to a different course. Besides the system of buying positions in government invited nepotism, laziness, and a continuing or even expanding gap between the powerless have-nots and the powerful haves.

Anyway I imagine that drafting a virgin government in one's mind as the government one grew up and possibly suffered under edged closer and closer to obsolescence must have inspired feelings of considerable giddiness. (Kind of like when Obama succeeded Bush.) I am trying to follow the mental processes of those who did it back in the 1780s and later. So, aside from toiling through Rousseau, I want to read Montesquieu (I just found out about De l'esprit des lois and have downloaded it onto the computer to read at leisure) and other more contemporary or at least French philosophers, and go back to the Roman and Greek models of government as described in Plutarch's Lives and elsewhere.

Either way I have actually read documents on Gallica, the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in their entirety, and it's nice to have a goldmine of primary sources at my fingertips. Jacques Necker's history of the Revolution (which I have admittedly not read in its entirety by a longshot; but what I wrote about the causes of the Revolution above is largely informed by the book's opening chapters) is most approachable. Even though it's tied up with a tragic massacre in Avignon which prefigured the Terror in Paris, I enjoyed, too, a speech by the Abbé Mulot in rebuttal to a Sieur Rovère (a revolutionary who had apparently falsely masqueraded as a marquis), of which I copied out my favourite insults. He calls Rovère "one of those low intriguers who know the tortuous paths which lead to crime but not to the scaffold" ("bas intriguans qui connoissent les routes tortueuses qui conduisent au crime sans arriver à l'échafaud"), which strikes me as a truly lovely turn of phrase. Later, and less imaginatively, he exhorts Rovère to "Blush, then, once, sieur Rovère, for the impudence of your lies" ("Rougissez donc une fois, sieur Rovère, de l'impudence de vos mensonges."). Evidently what the church gained in Mulot, the eloquently hyperemoting tradition of lofty French tragedy lost.

[Disclaimer: the above translations from the French are obviously my own and likely inaccurate. And I hope the final remark does not sound unkind.]

Rousseau persists in being a pain in the neck. The quirky view which philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke had of man in a state of nature rather amuses me — though if I had ever taken the pains to slog through the Leviathan instead of knowing of it through pleasant, civil, and short references this may not be the case — because it lines up so funnily with modern conceptions of prehistoric man. And because it's nonsense and at the same time a weird instinctive understanding of a scientific phenomenon, like the idea of the atom which certain ancient Greeks had formed millennia before Niels Bohr, or John Dalton, for that matter. [N.B.: We learned about Dalton in school, which is to say briefly and long ago, and if he did help determine our modern understanding of atoms it's purely a fluke that I vaguely remembered.]

But! I object to being called upon to glamourize the existence of Neanderthal man and to pretending that living In The Bosom of Nature is a beautiful experience. The tableau of Man in a State of Nature blissfully grazing on a fruitful and readily accessible supply of acorns is possibly the biggest tosh I've ever read. There have been much more entertaining and convincing accounts of the Pays de Cocagne or Schlaraffenland. Besides, now that anthropology is an established field of study Rousseau's ideas on the subject are just so blatantly invalid. Besides Rousseau's ideas, though I wouldn't call them fascist because the underlying airy-fairy touchyfeelyness is so disparate, are morally repugnant and essentially eugenicist. The possession of a paper copy of the Discours sur l'origine, etc., would I think be worthwhile just so that I can fire it at the wall as soon as I read, for instance, the part where he thinks that the Spartan practice of leaving "malformed" babies out in the cold to die is peachy. In the meantime I just play out violent fantasies of him being chased by a mammoth over the hummocky neolithic tundra or something.

Then his ideal of man in a state of nature is so hypocritically snobby, generalizing, callous, and totally brutish and depressing:

Alone, idle, and always surrounded with danger, savage man must be fond of sleep, and sleep lightly like other animals, who think but little, and may, in a manner, be said to sleep all the time they do not think: self-preservation being almost his only concern, he must exercise those faculties most, which are most serviceable in attacking and in defending, whether to subdue his prey, or to prevent his becoming that of other animals: those organs, on the contrary, which softness and sensuality can alone improve, must remain in a state of rudeness, utterly incompatible with all manner of delicacy; and as his senses are divided on this point, his touch and his taste must be extremely coarse and blunt; his sight, his hearing, and his smelling equally subtle: such is the animal state in general, and accordingly if we may believe travellers, it is that of most savage nations. We must not therefore be surprised, that the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope, distinguish with their naked eyes ships on the ocean, at as great a distance as the Dutch can discern them with their glasses; nor that the savages of America should have tracked the Spaniards with their noses, to as great a degree of exactness, as the best dogs could have done; nor that all these barbarous nations support nakedness without pain, use such large quantities of Piemento to give their food a relish, and drink like water the strongest liquors of Europe.

Source: A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of The Inequality Among Mankind [Gutenberg]

&$%*@#! Anyway, I know that his thoughts were influential and that the Discours does capture archetypes and trains of reflection which remain and always have been relevant, but I just hate being confronted with declarative statements that are misguiding and untruthful, i.e. being lied to, especially when couched in repugnant pseudohumane sentiment.