When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  That term comes from Michael Young’s 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy, and it was not meant kindly. Young’s book is a parable of a society in which intelligence has become the governing criterion of society and the bedrock of a new, self-satisfied elite. The poor, who previously had their misfortune to blame for their benighted circumstances, are now told that they merit their lowly status. Although Young projects his narrative forward to 2034, he was in fact taking issue with the education system introduced by the 1944 Butler Act which separated, in the words of Matthew’s gospel, the sheep from the goats, by shepherding the cleverest children into grammar schools and leaving the rest in second-class secondary moderns. At the end of The Rise of the Meritocracy, the helots rise in rebellion against the new hierarchy. The riot takes place at St Peter’s Field, Manchester.

  After a spell as a concert hall, home to the Hallé Orchestra and the place where Bob Dylan reacted to a cry of ‘Judas!’ as he plugged in the guitar to play ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, the Free Trade Hall is a hotel these days. It was there, in the hotel on St Peter’s Field, that Tony Blair’s Les Dawson joke was conceived. They hardly count as among the most edifying words associated with that spot. Indeed, of all the words delivered in the Free Trade Hall, perhaps the most complete account of what politics can achieve was given by the visiting American president Woodrow Wilson on 30 December 1918. Wilson flattered his audience by knowing his history: ‘This is a doctrine which ought to be easy of comprehension in a great commercial centre like this. You cannot trade with men who suspect you. You cannot establish commercial and industrial relations with those who do not trust you. Good will is the forerunner of trade, and trade is the great amicable instrument of the world on that account.’

  The process of democratic politics is never perfect. The authorities reacted brutally to the protesters at Peterloo. Generations struggled with contagious diseases and high infant mortality. It took a party to split apart for the interests of the consumer to prevail over those of the merchants. The addition of the working class and women to the franchise was scandalously late. It took the vision of Disraeli to see that the working men and women, the ‘angels in marble’, might conceivably reward him with their vote. But slow as politics is, there is no way faster.

  Recognition that the individual must be taken seriously as a moral agent, the idea that unites the passionate arguments of Wilberforce, Pankhurst, King and Kinnock, arrives through political progress. There is a story about the sculptor Jacob Epstein which is a telling metaphor both for the process of writing speeches and the method of politics. At the unveiling of his bust of the Labour foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, Epstein was asked how he managed such a perfect likeness. ‘I just take a block of marble,’ he said, ‘and chip away all the bits that don’t look like Ernest Bevin.’ The angel is in the marble somewhere. The process of sculpting is called politics.

  5

  REVOLUTION:

  THROUGH POLITICS THE WORST IS AVOIDED

  The Rebel

  ‘Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes,’ said Camus. The Rebel, from which that magnificent line is taken, is a set text of liberal democracy. It says so much about the relationship between the speaker and the spoken at. It describes the distinction, which runs through every part of this book, between the open and plural society and the missionary men who believe they have located the route to utopia. Too many people in the rich, fortunate democracies are tempted by easy ideologies that promise instant justice. It is critical, but it can be hard, to insist on the provisional virtues of the free society over the false pledge of the fantasist. One such fantasist, who has competed with Camus in French intellectual life for the title of the prince of glamour, was Jean-Paul Sartre.

  Sartre and Camus first met briefly in June 1943 at the opening of Sartre’s play The Flies, but did not get to know one another properly until Camus started to join Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the Café Flore and the two male writers discovered a shared passion for the theatre. Sartre even suggested that Camus play the lead in his new drama No Exit. Their friendship was cemented when each wrote appreciative reviews of the other’s sense of the absurd, Camus on Sartre’s The Wall and Sartre returning the compliment with a generous review of The Stranger. But the two men were to split, and it was on a fundamental question. It is important to say, since Sartre is a representative figure of a kind of Western self-loathing that persists into our time, that Sartre was a fluent fool philosopher while Camus was the true lover of wisdom.

  Camus’s contribution to the discussion went on in the pages of Combat, a resistance journal he edited during the Second World War. In truth, neither man did a great deal of resisting in occupied Paris, although Camus took more risks than Sartre and did at least have the grace to acknowledge his comparative safety afterwards. By contrast, during l’épuration (the purge) between 1944 and 1949, in which collaborationists were identified, tried and punished for treason, Sartre lied shamelessly about the extent of his resistance activities. He was still maintaining heroic status, quite wrongly, when he died. His status as a villain does not rest on his being a man of low moral repute, though. It rests on the errors of his politics.

  Although throughout the 1940s the two men shared a superficial view of the political world, the division between them was actually fundamental. Camus came to understand that liberty can only be attained outside a fully-fledged all-explaining ideology, Sartre, by contrast, was always too ready to visit the latest revolutionary fashion on a grateful world. Their first clash came in 1948 in the pages of the left-wing journal Caliban. Sartre’s piece, titled ‘To Be Hungry Already Means You Want to Be Free’, in which he argued that individual liberty was impossible in a democracy because the people are serfs to the bourgeoisie, inspired a caustic dismissal from Camus. Sartre thought that violence was the proletariat’s natural response to humiliation. This was simplistic, crude and one-dimensional, thought Camus.

  The split was confirmed in 1951 when Camus published his classic work The Rebel. This is the book in which he gives up on the idea that history has a purpose. Camus argues that revolutions start with noble intentions but lead to ignoble consequences. The revolution to overthrow a cruel regime goes full circle and installs a new tyranny. Freedom and justice are lost as regimes that believe in their own metaphysical truths ‘make murder their tool’. The inexorable conclusion is that the end of communism is the Gulag and the Great Purge. Camus had the wisdom, in a time and a place when such ideas were de rigueur, to see that it was an arrogant error made, despite their manifest differences, by each of Maximilien Robespierre, Adolf Hitler and Fidel Castro, in supposing that history is tending towards a destination. Beyond human aspiration, there is no end and no point. There is only time and chance. Perhaps this makes life absurd but there we are. Politics is the system by which we gather to accept and negotiate this ineluctably tragic fact of human existence. Camus understood that the supreme political virtue was moderation; Sartre never did, and in politics, if you don’t understand that you don’t understand anything.

  It was obvious from the review of The Rebel in Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes that he was the philosopher-king of missing the point. The review was written by a junior editor called Francis Jenson, but Camus, like everyone else, took the contents to be the disguised view of Sartre. Jenson disparaged Camus’s central thesis that revolutions are, by definition, bound to fail and liable to end in violence. Camus responded to Sartre, dismissing Jenson, with a choice selection of the term, as ‘your collaborator’, by asking him to address the central point of The Rebel, which is that murder is never a justifiable way to secure freedom from oppression. Sartre was not quite able to bring himself to say what followed from his immature view, which is that the Gulags must tend towards some ultimate good.

  Sartre made do with ad hominem attacks on his former friend, and the two conducted an intellectual battle throughout the 1950s. While Sartre concocted elaborate insults, Camus continued to oppose totalitar
ian politics of both Left and Right. He resigned from UNESCO in 1952 when Franco’s Spain was admitted. He criticised Soviet repression of strikes in East Berlin and in Poland and his 1957 speech ‘The Blood of the Hungarians’ is a pellucid statement of his political thought, applied to real life rather than, like Sartre, to some metaphysical fancy. The rift between the two former friends was never healed and ended only when Camus died tragically young at forty-six in a car crash in 1960.

  The exchange between Camus and Sartre was, in one sense, a period piece. As they talked in the cafés of Paris they shared the table with Nazi and SS officers. Paris was, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, ‘a vast Stalag’. After the war they both realised that a new battle had begun. Sartre thought he was on the right side of history, but Camus understood that history doesn’t have a side. History does no work for us; we have to choose for ourselves. In this sense, the dispute between Camus and Sartre is timeless and it was Sartre, the intellectual who chose frivolously and wrongly, who was the more fêted of the two. The argument is with us still.

  Despite an alliance that has lasted since 1778 and despite the gift of the Statue of Liberty, France has a claim to be the home of facile anti-Americanism. On the political Right, Gaullism is saturated with anti-American claims of French superiority. The political Left, and this was true not just in France, found in alleged American materialism an example of the decadence it detected under late capitalism. A loathing of the West, rooted equally in hatred of America and hatred of capitalism, is a constant temptation, especially on the political Left. There are plenty of people in rich, democratic societies who believe that all the evils in the world are merely the process by which the consequences swirl back on the real perpetrator, the United States of America. Sartre gave a distinguished voice to the idiotic thesis that violence from other nations is the inevitable, and justifiable, response to the humiliation they have received from America and the West. We should not be sentimental about where this argument leads. It leads to a baroque justification of the show trials such as can be found in Sartre’s The Communists and Peace.

  Wherever there is political power there is always a struggle about how to wield it between the moderates and the more extreme elements: a choice to be made between the Jacobins and the Girondins, between the dying embers of the Weimar Republic and the new force of National Socialism, between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, between the liberal democrats and the historically destined communists. In retrospect the victors and the vanquished of these conflicts seem obvious to us, but we have to remember that they didn’t at the time. In history as it is lived rather than as it is predicted, immoderate politics has always exerted a glamour. Liberal democracies demand patience and patience is usually in short supply. Many distinguished people have demanded a short cut to utopia.

  Camus was one of the intellectuals to whom we should still look because he had the fortitude to be clear on the most important question of all, which is the contest between advanced dreams of utopia and the lesser virtues of liberal democracy. This question is still with us today and good guides are needed. The other guide in Camus’s time was the unjustly neglected Raymond Aron, who resigned from the board of Les Temps Modernes in 1945 because of Sartre’s communism and whose The Opium of the Intellectuals is a book-length devastation of the fatuity of Sartre and his kind. They were the thinkers, along with Léon Blum, the leader of the Popular Front and defiant opponent of the Vichy regime, who were prepared to take on, to cite the title of Tony Judt’s study of the three heroes, the burden of responsibility.

  The speeches that follow show the tragic consequences of the belief that history has a destiny. Camus’s analysis of the French Revolution traces the source of the terror back to aggressive idealism. Nobody ever defined the philosophy of terror with such unrepentant candour as Maximilien Robespierre. But as gruesome as it was, the revolution gone wrong was only a prelude to hell. The unsurpassable example of Adolf Hitler cannot be avoided if the subject is the glamour of rhetoric. The speech as rally and ritual has never penetrated so far down into the dark recesses of the human mind. By that comparison, the allure of Fidel Castro is a gentle mistake, but it is an important one all the same, for the reason that Sartre gave us unwittingly, which is that utopian certainty can never be satisfied until perfection has been achieved. These are not speeches that we need, but we do need to understand them.

  Then there are the rebels, the crucial figures who fought for justice without abandoning the political virtues. Neither Václav Havel nor Elie Wiesel would have chosen their status as, in the first case a velvet revolutionary and in the second case a witness, but they are the survivors who came through to tell the story. Communism and fascism were a living hell and the bombastic, destined certainty of Adolf Hitler and Fidel Castro contrasts vitally with Havel and Wiesel’s resigned and sorrowful reflection on the past. That disenchanted tone – rhetoric without illusions – is also, however, the source of what is beautiful and elevating in their words. But the very fact that those words needed to be said is a tragedy without redemption. Camus says a lot in a single sentence in The Rebel: ‘None of the evils that totalitarianism claims to cure is worse than totalitarianism itself.’ Camus knew what it was and he named it. It was the plague.

  MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE

  The Political Philosophy of Terror

  The National Convention, Paris

  5 February 1794

  Thomas Carlyle famously called Maximilien Robespierre the ‘sea-green incorruptible’ of the French Revolution because he was so intellectually consistent and unyielding. Indeed, in his speeches, Robespierre pushes reason to an unreasonable extent. He also conducted a private life of conspicuous virtue, staying in simple, unfurnished rooms, walking everywhere and refusing even to take a carriage. His puritan lifestyle was devoid of any of the trappings of power or celebrity. But virtue cannot be read across from the private to the public, and it is for his record as a man of politics that Robespierre’s capacity for corruption has to be judged. If the transformation from a provincial lawyer to the central figure in the Reign of Terror is not a clear example of corruption, then corruption no longer has any meaning. The odyssey of Robespierre from an ordinary man of reason, and a fierce opponent of the death penalty, into a man prepared to see opponents go to the scaffold for the sake of an idea requires some explanation. He was the finest orator of the Terror, the man who put forensic, lawyerly aptitude at the service of the perversion of an idea. There is perhaps no more pertinent example of utopian longing gone horribly, viciously wrong than in the rhetoric of Robespierre and the parable of revolution that, unwittingly, he tells.

  Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre (1758–94) was born in Arras, the son of a lawyer, the profession he entered himself after an education in Paris. Robespierre’s mother died when he was six. His father could not cope with the grief or the responsibility and so fled, leaving young Maximilien to be brought up by elderly relatives. At twelve, he was awarded a scholarship to the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He qualified there as a lawyer at the age of twenty-three, and on graduation received a special prize for exemplary academic success and good personal conduct. He returned to Arras and began working to pay off his father’s debts.

  Robespierre’s life changed when he was elected as a deputy in the Estates-General, the formal but essentially powerless body that met in the prelude to the Revolution in 1789. France was in severe debt and Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette had become symbols of an authority that was no longer recognised. The Estates-General of 1789 demanded greater powers, the upshot of which was the creation of a new legislative body, the National Constituent Assembly. Two months after Robespierre’s election to the Estates-General the French Revolution broke out. On 14 July citizens stormed the Bastille, the fortress that represented the idea of absolute monarchy in France. Rebellion spread from the city to the countryside and Robespierre took part in the drafting and dissemination of the revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen.

  In April 1790 Robespierre was elected the president of the Jacobin political club and then, after the monarchy fell in August 1792, the first deputy for Paris to the National Convention. He made his name as an orator with a series of assaults on the integrity and legitimacy of the monarchy. He became a vocal supporter of the declaration of France as a republic, the decision to put the king on trial for treason and the execution of King Louis in January 1793. The execution of the king began a struggle for pre-eminence in which the radical Jacobins prevailed over the more moderate Girondins whose leaders were arrested. Control of France passed to the Committee of Public Safety (a sinister title, in retrospect), of which Robespierre was a member. His rhetorical skill meant that he quickly came to dominate proceedings on the Committee.