The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  Impatiently waiting upon the judgment of editors, Maurice took matters into his own hands and founded a review. It was not unusual for ambitious young writers to do so in fin-de-siècle Paris. Little reviews abounded. When Maurice launched Taches d’Encre (Ink Spots) on November 5, 1884, with help from Claire Barrès, it became one of the 130 or more that lived the life of mayflies during the 1880s. Readers were warned that it would appear every month for only one year and have only one contributor—himself.

  As far as its life span is concerned, his warning was excessively optimistic. The first issue contained an essay entitled “Baudelaire’s Madness,” a short story set in revolutionary times, a review defending high German culture against the animadversions of a popular Germanophobe, and miscellaneous remarks about books, authors, and literary life. The second issue contained a similar assortment. But after four monthly offerings of almost fifty pages each to a short and dwindling list of subscribers, the review ceased publication. Barrès wrote its epitaph twenty-one years later: “Raising funds, finding a publisher, recruiting subscribers, and engaging readers are a rough gauntlet. One needs energy to climb staircases all over Paris, and resilience to keep knocking on doors that slam shut! For a young man who has literary ambitions, the founding and directing of a little review is an excellent apprenticeship; it cannot fail to teach him these two essential truths: 1) that money is almost omnipotent; 2) that the literary industry is an industry of beggars.” If he was as alert as other provincials—Flaubert and Zola, for example—to the opinion of hometown readers, a report from Claire Barrès that their fellow Charmésiens took umbrage at his irreverence, his pervasive sarcasm, and especially his defense of German culture might not have displeased him. What one Parisian reviewer praised as “strange” and “sickly” in his prose and another as suavely contrarian was all that Charmes-sur-Moselle associated with big-city decadence. On the Left Bank, however, Taches d’Encre made him a more conspicuous figure.

  Maurice also frequented the Right Bank, at night more often than by day, and the Butte Montmartre rather than the fashionable west end. To provincial bourgeois, nothing could have been more decadent than his nocturnal rambles. Slumming had become all the rage among toffs and adventurous young ladies of the upper class. Snobbery in this inverted form challenged its initiates to visit dangerous neighborhoods on the Butte—“apache territory”—and risk assault by hooligans or rub against the unwashed at cabarets like Le Chat Noir and subject themselves to Aristide Bruant’s musical taunts at Le Mirliton.8 Maurice, on the other hand, wanted to penetrate the tragic strangeness, as he put it, of Paris’s lower depths.

  Befriending natives of the Château Rouge district comported with his excursions into the bas fonds of the human psyche. Although Maurice never met the celebrated neurologist Jean Charcot, during a visit home he witnessed hypnosis as practiced by a local pharmacist on epileptics and hysterics, of whom there was apparently no lack in Charmes. “You wouldn’t believe what I see every day,” he wrote to his friend Léon Sorg. “It’s frightening. It turns all one’s ideas about life upside down.” In Paris, where young Sigmund Freud had been a near neighbor between 1883 and 1885, Maurice attended Dr. Benjamin Ball’s lectures on morbid psychology at the Sainte-Anne asylum (founded twenty-two years earlier, under Napoleon III, to replace the city madhouse). When Le Voltaire, a prominent newspaper of the political Left, signed him up for freelance articles, he devoted his first one to the new discipline of psychiatry. It must have gratified his anxious mother, who in their correspondence had often recommended literature on disorders of the mind—Théodule Ribot’s work, for example. Ribot was a professor of experimental psychology at the Collège de France and the author of Diseases of Memory and Diseases of the Will. His magnum opus, Heredity: A Psychological Study, appeared in 1885.

  Maurice may have hoped to gain from Dr. Ball’s lectures a better understanding of friends who had veered off the road they’d once traveled together into a dark woods, above all Stanislas de Guaita. It was indirectly through Maurice that Guaita met Sâr Mérodack Péladan (born Joséphin Péladan), a black-bearded occultist often seen swanning around the Latin Quarter in a velvet tunic with leg-o’-mutton sleeves, a jabot, tan gauntlets, and doeskin shoes.9 Guaita became Péladan’s disciple after embracing the idea that magic of the ancient Near East held the key to mankind’s salvation. Together they founded a school called the “Kabbalist order of the Rosicrucians.” In due course Guaita, heavily addicted to morphine (as were other of Maurice’s friends), would spend more time at the family château, applying Kabbalist exegesis to the Hebrew Bible, than in Paris.

  The demise of Taches d’Encre did not leave Maurice idle. He had visited Bayreuth the year before and paid homage to Wagner, the idol of the day, in Le Journal Illustré.10 He published book reviews in Anatole France’s Les Lettres et les Arts Illustrés, a Paris chronicle in La Vie Moderne, and cultural commentary in other magazines (sometimes under the pseudonym “Oblique”) and thus eked out enough money, with his father’s allowance, to cover expenses when he left the Latin Quarter for a larger flat near Clichy, around the corner from Émile Zola’s town house.

  How to become self-sufficient was the question. By 1886, Auguste Barrès had despaired of his son ever practicing notarial law. The family tried, without success, to secure him gainful employment in the Senate or the Chamber of Deputies—a clerkship of the sort that hadn’t prevented well-known writers from pouring out stories and novels after a day at the office. Maurice’s emotional state complicated matters. Though he had made a modest name for himself, it hadn’t dispelled his doubts. As fast as he ran, depression stayed hard on his heels and, whenever it caught up, robbed the seemingly impervious ironist of all self-confidence. By turns lofty and morose, the prophet of a new era and the superfluous man, he claimed to be suffering from a disease known to psychiatrists of the day as “cerebral anemia.” Others called it infirmity of purpose. The remedy for it, his family agreed, was winter in Italy.

  Young Maurice Barrès in a pose and in attire appopriate to the author of Le Culte du Moi.

  Maurice spent two successive winters in Italy. What he remembered most vividly of the first—besides a collection of German metaphysical studies available to guests at the hotel he occupied in Lucerne, en route to Milan—was the numbing cold. More agreeably memorable was his second voyage, in 1887. It began with a fortnight touring Venice and being enraptured by all he saw there: Tiepolos in the Accademia; canals flowing between escutcheoned walls; Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore; a January sun slanting over faded red facades. These conjured up Baudelaire’s image of Beauty as a “dream of stone,” and every parcel of his soul, he wrote, was “fortified, transformed.” Thinking that this aesthete’s Jerusalem might have occasioned a new birth, he left Venice happier than ever, or happy for the first time, though perhaps not noticeably so to writers he met during the next stage of his journey, in Florence. There he moved in the company of Anglo-American expatriates. A letter of recommendation from the French novelist Paul Bourget prompted Henry James to offer Barrès lunch at a restaurant on Via Tornabuoni. Through James, he met Robert Browning and Violet Paget (alias Vernon Lee), the Renaissance scholar and author of supernatural tales. He studied Italian; he read a history of the Risorgimento; he took long walks, as much for the pleasure of gazing at young Italian women as of admiring “the artistic glories of the public place”; and he wondered how much longer it would take him to find purchase in a world whose rewards he coveted. “When, then, will I be done with these slow preparations of my life?”

  In one sense Maurice was the eternal initiate, toeing the margin of life while posing as an exemplar of personal authenticity. In another sense he entered the public arena with dramatic pirouettes. A year after his Italian awakening, he published Sous l’Oeil des Barbares (Under Barbarian Eyes), the first installment of a trilogy whose appeal to disaffected French youth was such that literary journalists dubbed him “prince de la jeunesse.” Barrès would soon become a name
to be reckoned with.11

  The title of the trilogy, Le Culte du Moi (Cult of the Self), was not only a lure but a caveat to readers expecting a plot and realistically portrayed characters. Cut from the same cloth as Taches d’Encre, the work of a sole contributor, Sous l’Oeil des Barbares follows a loner, Philippe, through mazes of abstraction and emotion from his school days (when his pariahdom begins), to Paris (where money talks and hypocrisy rules), to enlightenment, to prostration, and finally to prayer. His “rebirth” takes place when a kind of ecstatic agnosia that Barrès describes as “love of love” replaces his nebulous involvement with nameless women. At night, in a garret high above Paris, the sensible world disappears and Philippe finds himself transported by indefinable images. He has no limits. The universe penetrates him. He is all beings. “His was a virgin consciousness, a new world innocent of ends and causes, in which the myriad bonds that tie us to people and to things fall slack, and where the mundane dramas playing through our heads are merely a spectacle.”

  What will happen at daybreak, Barrès asks, when his hero rejoins the “non-Self”—the world over which “barbarians” enforce their moral ascendancy? What will colleagues accustomed to seeing him strive for mediocre goals and squander himself in trivial pursuits make of his transformation? Will social commerce dull the “sublime influence” of that nocturnal trance? Will he conform? “Not at all,” writes Barrès. “This night celebrates the resurrection of his soul. He is Self. He is the passage through which ideas and images proceed solemnly. He trembles with haste. Will he live long enough to feel, think, try everything that stirs him about people moving across the centuries?”12

  The question is posed by a man for whom limits are anathema, as they were for Barrès. While undoing the “myriad bonds” that make him a hostage to society, his alter ego embraces all of humanity. Rejecting the cant of barbarians, who dress themselves for the social masquerade of everyday life in “formulas rented from the reigning costumer,” Philippe resolves to name things and assign values as he sees fit.

  In a preface written for a later edition, Barrès defended himself against critics who decried his anarchical skepticism:

  [It’s not that we’re heroic]. Our lack of heroism is such that we would, if we could, adjust to the conventions of social life and even accept the strange lexicon in which you have defined, to your advantage, the just and the unjust, duties and merits. We have to smile, for a smile is the only thing that enables us to swallow so many toads. Soldiers, magistrates, moralists, educators—though we are powerless to swim against the current sweeping us downriver all together, … don’t expect us to take seriously the duties you prescribe and sentiments that haven’t cost you a tear.

  Readers who feel at odds with the “order of the world” are assured that the only tangible reality is the Self. It is a fortress to be defended against “strangers,” against “Barbarians,” against the myth that the world outside is something more solid than a canvas for one’s imagination. But if withdrawal fosters lucidity, will it not also result in the torpor from which Philippe prays to be delivered at the end of Sous l’Oeil? Free he may be, but free for what? “It is said of the man of genius, that his work enlarges him; this is equally true of every analyst of the Self,” Barrès continues.

  The modern young man suffers from lack of energy and self-ignorance.… May he learn to know himself. When he does, he will identify his genuine curiosities, he will go where instinct points and discover his truth.… He will acquire reserves of energy from this discipline and an admirable capacity to feel.

  He will also acquire the ability to combine with like-minded souls. Only when the fortress of the Self has been secured can it surrender to the “man of energy” or the “man of genius,” introducing a new religion. “Indeed, we would be delighted if someone furnished us with convictions.” The narrator’s final words are addressed imploringly to the “master” who will guide him in life, “be you axiom, religion, or prince of men.”

  Like those Romantics for whom “energy” was a human endowment far more consequential than reason or piety, he made the word his battle cry. Acquaintances wondered how Barrès the militant nationalist had suddenly come to supplant Barrès the aesthete. Henry James, for one, distrusted him. But in fact his nationalism followed logically from the central argument of Le Culte du Moi. It was only a matter of expanding the Self to coincide with France, of viewing France as a fortress under siege by barbarians (the non-Moi in one guise or another), and of joining the fray should history present a triumphant embodiment of the nation’s instinctual life.13

  History complied. Until 1888, Barrès had been more or less unconcerned with the vicissitudes of the Third Republic. One year later, he abandoned his stance of antisocial dégagement; when a general named Boulanger emerged as a political force threatening the Republic itself, he threw in his lot with him and stood for election to the Chamber of Deputies on a Boulangist platform.

  Georges Boulanger had graduated from the elite military academy of Saint-Cyr in 1857 and had risen quickly in the ranks after distinguishing himself (with serious wounds to prove it) in the colonial wars: at Robecchetto, during Napoleon III’s Italian campaign, and in the invasion launched on May 21, 1871, to recapture Paris from the Communards. By June 1880, when a liberal government amnestied surviving insurgents, Boulanger’s role in the brutal repression known as la semaine sanglante (bloody week) had largely been forgotten. Indeed, he had become a protégé of Léon Gambetta, the republican eminence chiefly responsible for legislation granting amnesty. In Boulanger Gambetta found, or thought he had found, that rarest of birds: a high-ranking cavalry officer with great panache and apparent sympathy for the common man. Gambetta did what he could (before his death in 1882) to promote Boulanger’s career. Georges Clemenceau, Boulanger’s fellow Breton, did likewise. Appointed inspector of infantry, then commander of the expeditionary force in Tunisia, Boulanger was given a ministerial portfolio in 1886 and as war minister made himself immensely popular, instituting reforms that benefited the ordinary recruit.

  If Boulanger came to embody the furor Gallicae—France bold and triumphant—the occasion that engraved his popular image was the military review at Longchamp on Bastille Day 1886. He prepared for it by acquiring a magnificent black horse that showed his person and his horsemanship to great advantage. Frock-coated, top-hatted government leaders were lost in a sea of more than a hundred thousand spectators and shouts of “Vive Boulanger!” “Vive l’armée!” drowned out “Vive la République” as the general, white plumes fluttering, cantered around the racetrack. Boulanger, not the president of the Republic, was the cynosure of all eyes. And when the review ended, far more people than a police cordon could restrain mobbed their idol.

  Long before this glorification, Clemenceau had begun to doubt the wisdom of fostering Boulanger’s career. “There’s something about you that appeals to the crowd,” he warned. “That’s the temptation. That’s the danger I want you to guard against.” He might as well have asked Zephyr to guard against blowing. The born actor in a star role on France’s most prominent stage could not resist playing it for all its worth. Being “offensive-minded” was his passionate motto. While it thrilled the masses, it unnerved his political confrères, and unnerved them all the more when monarchist newspapers seized upon one of Boulanger’s more provocative speeches to warn that under a republic, France was riding for another fall. In Berlin, Otto von Bismarck argued the same. “We have to fear an attack by France, though whether it will come in ten days or ten years is a question I cannot answer,” he told the Reichstag. “If Napoleon III went to war with us in 1870 chiefly because he believed that this would strengthen his power within his country, why should not such a man as General Boulanger, if he came to power, do the same?”

  Boulanger’s new cognomen, General Revenge, voiced the dream of a national Second Coming. The Ligue des Patriotes, an organization whose membership dwelled fanatically on the deliverance of Alsace and Lorraine from German hands,
formed up behind him. Its founder, Paul Déroulède, became Boulanger’s knight-errant. Known for his patriotic poems, his duels, and his monomaniacal oratory, Déroulède traveled the length and breadth of France beating a drum-roll of revanchism. “Throughout the whole of my journey,” he told a large crowd that gathered at the Gare du Nord to welcome him home after one tour, “the name of a single man, the name of a brave soldier, has been my touchstone. It is the name of the supreme head of our army, the name of General Boulanger!” Thanks to photogravure, images could now be turned out en masse, and the image of Boulanger swamped France. Framed chromolithographs hung in town houses and taverns and mayors’ offices. A memento industry reproduced his image on dinner plates, on pottery, as sculpted pipe bowls, on soap, on shoehorns.

  This enthusiasm was by no means universal, least of all among moderates in the Chamber of Deputies, who constituted a majority. It alarmed them that Boulanger, far from being the passive object of hero worship, played to the passions he roused, and that his rich friends swayed opinion makers with well-placed largesse. They saw Boulanger’s immense popularity as a dark shadow cast upon the Republic itself. One prominent liberal, Jules Ferry, wrote to a colleague that France’s neighbors, even the most benevolent, would never trust a government inclined to look away when its chief of staff publicly flirted with civil and military demagogy: “The renown he craves, his verbal imprudences, the fantasies aired around him … have unleashed in the German press and public a bellicosity of which we should take careful note.”

  Since mayhem might have resulted if Boulanger were dismissed outright, moderates devised a Machiavellian strategy. They would bring down the otherwise acceptable prime minister, René Goblet, on some extraneous issue and thus make way for a new cabinet, from which Boulanger could be excluded with relative impunity. It meant sacrificing the bathwater to get rid of an unwanted baby. And so it came to pass. Dropped from the new cabinet, Boulanger was instead made commander of the Thirteenth Army Corps, based in Clermont-Ferrand in south-central France, an assignment tantamount to exile.