Status Anxiety

by Botton, Alain De

  Three decades earlier, Napoleon Bonaparte, then the most powerful man in Europe, had himself felt no less vulnerable to the prick of satire. On coming to power in 1799, he had ordered the closure of every satirical paper in Paris and told his police chief, Joseph Fouché, that he would not tolerate cartoonists’ taking liberties with his appearance. He preferred to leave his visual representation to Jacques-Louis David. He commissioned the great painter to depict him leading his armies across the Alps, looking heroic on a horse, and so pleased was he with the result—Napoleon Crossing the Saint-Bernard (1801)—that he turned to David again to record the apogee of his triumphs, his coronation in Notre-Dame in December 1804. It was an occasion of high pomp: all the grandees of France were gathered, Pope Pius VII officiated and delegations had been dispatched by most European countries to pay their respects. Jean-François Lesueur had composed a suitably imposing score. Blessing Napoleon, the pope called out across the hushed cathedral, “Vivat imperator in aeternam.”

  Upon completing his rendition of the scene, Le Sacre de Joséphine, in November 1807, David offered it “to my illustrious master.” A jubilant Napoleon made the painter an officer of the Legion of Honour in recognition of his “services to art” and proclaimed to him, as he pinned the medal on his chest, “You have brought good taste back to France.”

  Not all artists, however, saw Napoleon as David did. A couple of years before the unveiling of Le Sacre de Joséphine, the English caricaturist James Gillray had published a very different view of the event, which he entitled The Grand Coronation Procession of Napoleone the 1st Emperor of France (1805). But there was never any talk of awarding him the Legion of Honour for restoring good taste to France.

  Jacques-Louis David, Le Sacre de Joséphine, 1807

  Gillray’s drawing shows a preening, swollen, strutting emperor at the head of a parade of flunkies, flatterers and prisoners. Pope Pius VII is pictured, but he is hardly the holy man of David’s version: here, the papal robes shelter a choirboy, who lets slip his mask to reveal the face of the devil. Josephine, far from the fresh-faced damsel David would paint, is an acne-scarred balloon. Carrying the train of the emperor are representatives from the countries already conquered by Napoleon—Prussia, Spain and Holland—whose participation does not appear to be precisely voluntary. Behind them are rows of shackled French soldiers, their condition indicating that this is not an emperor to whom the people have given power willingly. Keeping these last in line is Police Chief Fouché, stepping out smartly and, as Gillray explained in the caption, “bearing the Sword of Justice,” which is coated with blood.

  The drawing sent Napoleon into a fury. He instructed Fouché to imprison, without benefit of trial, anyone caught trying to smuggle copies of it into France. He lodged a formal diplomatic complaint against Gillray through his ambassador in London and vowed that if he were ever to succeed in invading England, he would personally go looking for the artist. The reaction was characteristic of the Emperor: when negotiating the Treaty of Amiens with England in 1802, Napoleon had attempted to insert a clause stipulating that all British caricaturists who drew him should be treated in the manner of murderers and forgers, who were subject to extradition and prosecution in France. The English negotiators, puzzled by the request, rejected the amendment.

  2.

  Louis-Philippe and Napoleon would likely not have responded so vehemently if humour were just a game. In fact, as humourists and their targets have long recognised, jokes are an enormously effective means of anchoring a criticism. At base, they are another way of complaining: about arrogance, cruelty or pomposity, about departures from virtue or good sense.

  The most subversive comedy of all may be that which communicates a lesson while seeming only to entertain. Talented comics never deliver sermons outlining abuses of power; instead, they provoke their audiences to acknowledge in a chuckle the aptness of their complaints against authority.

  Furthermore (the imprisonment of Philipon notwithstanding), the apparent innocence of jokes enables comics to convey with impunity messages that might be dangerous or impossible to state directly. Historically, for example, court jesters could poke fun at royals over serious matters that could never even be alluded to by other courtiers. (When King James I of England, who presided over a notoriously corrupt clergy, had trouble fattening up one of his horses, Archibald Armstrong, the court fool, is said to have advised him that all he had to do was make the creature a bishop, and it would rapidly gain the necessary pounds.) Noting the same impulse in his Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious (1905), Freud wrote, “A joke will allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly or consciously.” Through jokes, Freud suggested, critical messages “can gain a reception with the hearer which they would never have found in a non-joking form … [which is why] jokes are especially favoured in order to make criticism possible against persons in exalted positions.”

  James Gillray, The Grand Coronation Procession of Napoleone the 1st Emperor of France, 1805

  That said, not every exalted person is ripe for the comic plucking. We rarely laugh, after all, at a doctor who is performing an important surgical operation. Yet we may smile at a surgeon who, after a hard day in the operating room, returns home and tries to intimidate his wife and daughters by talking to them in pompous medical jargon. We laugh at what is outsized and disproportionate. We laugh at kings whose self-image has outgrown their worth, whose goodness has not kept up with their power; we laugh at high-status individuals who have forgotten their humanity and begun abusing their privileges. We laugh at, and through our laughter criticise, evidence of injustice and excess.

  At the hands of the best comics, laughter hence acquires a moral purpose, jokes become attempts to cajole others into reforming their character and habits. Jokes are a way of sketching a political ideal, of creating a more equitable and saner world. Wherever there is inequity or delusion, space opens up for humour-clad criticisms. As Samuel Johnson saw it, satire is only another method, and a particularly effectual one, of “censuring wickedness or folly.” In the words of John Dryden, “The true end of satire is the amendment of vices.”

  3.

  History reveals no shortage of jokes intended to amend the vices of high-status groups and shake the mighty out of their pretensions or dishonesty.

  In late-eighteenth-century England, for instance, it became fashionable for wealthy young women to wear colossal wigs. Cartoonists offended by the absurdity of the trend quickly produced drawings that amounted to a safe vehicle for urging these ladies to come to their senses—a message that, as Freud would recognise, would have been risky to convey explicitly, given that the wig-wearers owned, or were related or married to men who owned, large tracts of the realm.

  At the same time, a fashion for breast-feeding took hold among high-society women, a group who had never before concerned themselves with babies who now insisted on suckling their infants in order to fit in with progressive notions regarding motherhood. Women who hardly knew where the nursery was in their own house began compulsively exposing their breasts, often between courses at luncheons and dinners. Once again, the cartoonists stepped in to call for moderation.

  Engraving from the Oxford Magazine, 1771

  James Gillray, The Fashionable Mamma, 1796

  By the second half of the nineteenth century, yet another affected habit had seized the English upper classes, whose members took to speaking French, especially in restaurants, to demonstrate their intellect and eminence. The editors of Punch saw in the trend a fresh vice to amend.

  Scene- A Restaurant near Leicester Square. Jones. “Oh- er- Garsong, regardez eecee- er- apportez- voo le- la-” Waiter. “Beg pardon. Sir. I dont know French!” Jones. “Then for goodness' sake, send me Somebody who does!”

  Illustration from Punch, 1895

  A century later in the United States, there was more than enough “wickedness and folly”among Manhattan’s
elite to keep the cartoonists of the New Yorker occupied. In business, many chief executives had a new interest in seeming friendly to their employees —seeming being, unfortunately, the operative word here. Instead of changing many of their more brutal practices, they contented themselves with camouflaging them with bland technocratic language, which they hoped might lend some respectability to an exploitation not so very different from that perpetrated by the satanic mills of old. The cartoonists, though, were not fooled. At heart, business remained committed to a starkly utilitarian view of employees, wherein any genuine, rather than ritualistic, talk of those employees’fulfilment, or of their employers’ responsibilities to them, was tantamount to heresy.

  Slave galley: “Human resources”

  So great were the demands of business that many high-ranking executives, particularly lawyers, permitted the clinically efficient mind-set of their jobs to permeate all areas of their lives, usually at the expense of any spontaneity or sympathy.

  “You know what I think folks? What’s important is to be warm, decent human beings… ”

  “I consider myself a passionate man, but a lawyer first.”

  “Joyce, I’m so madly in love with you, I can’t eat etc. but that’s not why I called…”

  Meanwhile, a military class was enjoying unparalleled prestige based on its power to destroy the globe. Cartoonists encouraged their audiences to smile critically at the deathly serious demeanour of the generals.

  4.

  Beyond being a useful weapon with which to attack the high-status of others, humour may also help us to make sense of, and perhaps even mitigate, our own status anxieties.

  A great deal of what we find funny has to do with situations or feelings that, were we to experience them in our own, ordinary lives, would likely cause us either embarrassment or shame. The greatest comics shine a spotlight on vulnerabilities that the rest of us are all too eager to leave in the shadow; they pull us out of our lonely relationship with our most awkward sides. The more private the flaw and the more intense the worry about it, the greater the possibility of laughter—laughter being, in the end, a tribute to the skill with which the unmentionable has been skewered.

  Unsurprisingly, therefore, much humour comprises an attempt to name, and thereby contain, anxiety over status. Comedy reassures us that there are others in the world no less envious or socially fragile than ourselves; that other fellow spirits wake up in the early hours feeling every bit as tormented by their financial performance as we do by our own; and that beneath the sober appearance society demands of us, most of us are daily going a little bit out of our minds, which in itself should give us cause to hold out a hand to our comparably tortured neighbours.

  “Which Microsoft Millionaire are you thinking about now?”

  “I usually wake up screaming at six-thirty, and I’m in the office by nine.”

  Rather than mocking us for being so concerned with status, the kindest comics tease us: they criticise us while simultaneously implying that our basic selves are essentially acceptable. If they are both acute and tactful enough, we may acknowledge with an openhearted laugh bitter truths about ourselves from which we might have recoiled in anger or hurt had they been levelled at us in an ordinary—which is to say, accusatory—way.

  5.

  Comics, no less than other artists, hence fit rewardingly into Matthew Arnold’s definition of art as a discipline offering criticism of life. Their work strives to correct both the injustices of power and the excesses of our envy of those positioned above us in the social hierarchy. Like tragedians, they are motivated by some of the most regrettable aspects of the human condition.

  The underlying, unconscious aim of comics may be to bring about, through the adroit use of humour, a world in which there will be a few less things for us to laugh about.

  “Of course they’re clever. They have to be clever. They haven’t got any money.”

  III

  POLITICS

  Ideal Human Types

  1.

  Every society holds certain groups of people in high esteem while condemning or ignoring others, whether on the basis of their skills, accent, temperament, gender, physical attributes, ancestry, religion or skin colour. Yet such arbitrary and subjective criteria for success and failure are far from permanent or universal. Qualities and abilities that equate with high status in one place or era have a marked tendency to grow irrelevant or even become undesirable in others.

  A shaft sunk into selected strata of history reveals a catholic range of what different societies in different ages have chosen to regard as honourable traits.

  Requirements of High Status In:

  Sparta, Greek Peninsula, 400 B.C.

  The most honoured members of ancient Spartan society were men—more particularly, aggressive men with large muscles, vigourous (bi)sexual appetites, scant interest in family life, a distaste for business and luxury and an enthusiasm for killing (especially Athenians) on the battlefield. The fighters of Sparta never used money; they avoided hairdressers and entertainers; and they were unsentimental about their wives and children, if they had them. It was a disgrace for such a man ever to be seen in the marketplace; indeed, even knowing how to count was frowned upon, as an indicator of a commercial bent. From the age of seven, every male Spartan was required to train as a soldier, sleep and eat in barracks, and practise battle manoeuvres. Marriage was no impediment: husbands, too, had to live in the barracks, though they were allowed to spend one night a month with their wives in order to perpetuate their kind. Weak and defective infants were commonly taken out to the barren slopes of Mount Taygetus and left there to die of exposure.

  Western Europe, A.D. 476–1096

  In many parts of Europe, following the collapse of the western Roman Empire, the most revered individuals were those who modelled their behaviour on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. These saints, as the Catholic Church deemed them, refused to take up arms, never killed other human beings and tried not to kill animals, either (like many saints, Bernard was a vegetarian; he is even said to have walked very slowly, keeping his eyes on the ground, so as not to step on ants, for they were God’s creatures, too). Saints shunned material goods; they did not own horses or property. For Saint Hilarion, home was a cell measuring five feet by four. Saint Francis of Assisi claimed to be married to “Lady Poverty” when he and his followers lived in wattle-and-daub huts, had no tables or chairs and slept on the floor. Saint Anthony of Padua ate only roots and grasses. Saint Dominic de Guzman averted his eyes when he passed the houses of rich merchants.

  Saints strove to suppress whatever sexual feelings they may have had and were noted for their extreme physical modesty. Saint Casimir sent away a virgin planted in his bed by his family. Saint Thomas Aquinas is said to have been locked up in a tower with a woman who attempted to use her beauty and perfumes to seduce him; though momentarily aroused, he ultimately abstained and accepted from God a “girdle of perpetual virginity.”

  Western Europe, circa 1096–1500

  In the period after the First Crusade, it was the turn of knights to become the most admired people in Western European society. Knights came from wealthy families; they lived in castles, slept in beds, ate meat and saw nothing wrong in killing those they thought un-Christian (especially Muslims). When they were not killing people, they turned their attention to animals: John de Grailly, for example, boasted of slaughtering four thousand wild boars. Knights were accomplished lovers, too, and wooed women at court, often through the skilful use of poetry. They prized virgins most of all. They were interested in money, but only when it came from land, not through trade. They also liked horses: “Knights have not been chosen to ride an ass or a mule,” explained Gutierre Diaz de Gamez (1379–1450), author of The Unconquered Knight (circa 1431). “Knights do not come from among feeble or timid or cowardly souls, but from among men who are strong and full of energy, bold and without fear, and for this reason there is no other beast that so befits a knight as a goo
d horse.”

  England, 1750–1890

  In England, by 1750, knowing how to fight was no longer a prerequisite to respectability; more important was knowing how to dance. Status now belonged almost exclusively to “gentlemen.” Well off and not expected to do much more than preside over the management of their estates, they might dabble in industry or trade (particularly with India and the West Indies) but should by no means allow themselves to be confused with the inferior caste of merchants and industrialists. They were supposed to like their families and refrain from leaving their children on hillsides to die. At the same time, it was perfectly all right for them to keep mistresses in town.

  Much emphasis was placed on the cultivation of a certain languid elegance. It was important to take care of one’s hair and to visit a barber regularly. Lord Chesterfield, in his Letters to His Son (1751), advised that a gentleman’s conversation should be free of any “misplaced eagerness” that might result in the repetition of “trifling or ill-timed anecdotes with silly preambles like ‘I will tell you an excellent thing.’” Chesterfield also stressed that a gentleman ought to be able to execute a decent minuet: “Remember that the graceful motion of the arms, the giving of your hand, and the putting-on and putting-off of your hat genteelly are the material parts of a gentleman’s dancing.” As for relations with the opposite sex, a gentleman was meant to marry, while bearing in mind that (in Chesterfield’s words) “women are only children of a larger growth.” If seated next to one at dinner, a gentleman was to “prattle” on to her rather than hold his tongue, lest she mistake his silence for dullness or arrogance.