Free Anathemas and Admirations by E. M. Cioran Page B

foreign countries, and to the wrong done to France as a result, the persons for whom these shopkeeping objections signify something . . .” Shopkeeping objections! Unsurpassable, his bad faith is either a joke or a sort of madness: “Louis XIV crushed Protestantism and died in his bed, covered with glory and heavy with years; Louis XVI toyed with the thing and died on the scaffold.”
    In another place, in a fit of . . . moderation, de Maistre acknowledges that the critical spirit, a spirit of protest, appears well before Luther, and he rightly traces it back to Celsus, to the very beginnings of the opposition to Christianity. For the Roman patrician, in effect, the Christian was a dismaying, actually inconceivable phenomenon, a subject of stupor. In his True Discourse , a moving text if ever there was one, Celsus raves against the actions of this new sect that has managed, through its intrigues and its excesses, to aggravate the situation of the empire, presently beleaguered by the Barbarians. He did not understand why a man might prefer to Greek philosophy a suspect and nebulous teaching which disgusted him but of which, not without a certain despair, he foresaw the contagious power and the terrible opportunities. Sixteen centuries later, his argumentation and his invective were adopted by Voltaire, who, similarly aghast at Christianity’s amazing career did his best to advertise its ravages and its abuses. That such a work, whose salubrity leaps to the eye, should be at the origin of the Terror is another exaggeration of de Maistre’s, for whom irreligion and scaffold are correlative terms. “We must absolutely slay the spirit of the eighteenth century.” he urges, forgetting that this spirit he so hates had only one fanaticism, that of tolerance. And then by what right condemn the guillotine when one has been so tender about the stake? The contradiction does not seem to disturb the admirer of the Inquisition; servant of one cause, he legitimated its excesses while execrating those committed in the name of another. This is the paradox of the partisan mind, and it is an eternal one.
    To regard the eighteenth century as the privileged moment, as the very incarnation of evil, is to indulge in aberrations. In what other period were injustices denounced so rigorously? A salutary oeuvre of which the Terror was the negation and not the consummation.
    “Never,” says Tocqueville, “had tolerance in religion, mildness in command, humanity, and even benevolence been more extolled and, it appeared, more acknowledged than in the eighteenth century; the right to wage war, which is in a sense the last refuge of violence, was itself confined and rationalized. Yet from the heart of such gentle manners would nonetheless emerge the most inhuman revolution.”
    In reality, the period, too “civilized,” had achieved a refinement that doomed it to fragility, to a brilliant and ephemeral term, “Gentle manners,” and dissolute ones go together as is proved by the Regency, the most agreeable and most lucid — hence the most corrupt — era of modern history. The vertigo of being free was beginning to weigh on men’s minds. Already Madame du Deffand, more indicative of the century than Voltaire himself, had remarked that liberty was “not a good thing for everyone,” that rare were those who could tolerate its “darkness and its emptiness.” And it was to flee this “emptiness” and this “darkness,” it seems to us, that France flung herself into the wars of the Revolution and of the Empire, in which she willingly sacrificed those habits of independence, of defiance, and of analysis that a hundred years of conversation and skepticism had enabled her to acquire. Threatened with disaggregation by this debauch of irony and intelligence, France would recover her balance through the collective adventure, through a craving for submission on a national scale. “Men,” de Maistre informs us, “can never be united for any goal