Jorge Benitez
“You don’t arrest Voltaire.” Charles de Gaulle, 1968
Charles de Gaulle was a soldier and a patriot. He was also an intellectual steeped in the great tradition of French letters. Years before its capitulation in 1940, he had accurately outlined how Nazi Germany would defeat France. Unfortunately, the French high command did not listen to him, and humanity paid the price for the mistake.
In 1968, Jean-Paul Sartre joined the Maoist-inspired student protests and ended up in jail. When President de Gaulle heard of the detention, he ordered the release of Sartre with the quip, “You don’t arrest Voltaire.” Sartre was the great philosopher, but in that instant, de Gaulle proved to be the more subtle and elegant thinker. He was also the more magnanimous of the two French giants. Given his hatred of de Gaulle, it is doubtful that Sartre would have forgiven the general had their roles been reversed. He should have been more gracious in light of the experience of Robert Brasillach twenty-three years earlier.
In 1945, General de Gaulle refused to stop the execution of Robert Brasillach, a brilliant intellectual and writer whose crime was the use of his talents in support of the Nazi occupation of France. Like many French fascists, Brasillach was more than a politically and racially motivated ultranationalist. His fascism had an aesthetic dimension. He and his Nazi friends shared a romantic worldview centered on the cult of beauty. They longed for a world of beautiful bodies living in idyllic settings reminiscent of paintings by Nicolas Poussin. The concept seems far- fetched to the more utilitarian Anglophone world where even the Left is mostly transactional, but in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and even the Soviet Union, ideology was inseparable from aesthetics. Fascists and Socialists alike shared a lingering romanticism that sought beauty in utopian perfection. Intellectuals and artists held the keys to that beautiful future. They understood, as did Stalin and Mussolini, that the people were merely a means to that end. Therefore, it is no accident that the mostly left- of-center French intelligentsia petitioned de Gaulle to spare Brasillach’s life precisely because he was a brilliant man of letters or that the general refused the request for exactly the same reason. The signatories of the petition included the poet, Paul Valéry; the philosopher, novelist, and playwright Albert
Camus; the poet, playwright, and critic Jean Cocteau; the painter André Derain; and the composer Arthur Honegger. If Brasillach had been a run-of-the mill traitor, he may have survived, but in de Gaulle’s eyes, his intellect and artistry made his crimes unforgivable.
Sartre, Brasillach, and de Gaulle shared an approach to life and art that defied their ideological and professional differences. In a very French sense, they were all soldiers in a war for the glory of France and, by extension, humanity. French universalisme said as much. Even a self-styled anti-colonialist and revolutionary communist like Sartre could not escape his ingrained belief in the superiority of French thought and expression. Paris was the epicenter of that superiority, and Sartre and his lover Simone de Beauvoir reminded Albert Camus that his Algerian birth would always condemn him to an inferior status. He may have been French, but his accent was not Parisian. His thoughts were too Mediterranean and Dionysian. His socialism lacked the requisite Hegelian incomprehensibility, Marxian monomania, and Kantian moral rigidity. In short, he was insufficiently German to be French. This paradox lay at the heart of a Parisian identity crisis that still governs its aesthetic complexities. Where does France end and Germany begin? France is a mostly Latin country with both German and Italian roots. The Franks were a Germanic tribe, but the Latin they adopted as their language became the basis of French. Geography itself speaks to the internal conflict as France borders Italy and Spain to the south and Belgium and Germany to the north and east. That geography showered France with cross-cultural blessings and simultaneously cursed it with centuries of war. Paris bears the scars and showcases the blessings.
Throughout its history, Paris has been a battle-ground for philosophy and art. That history is visible in the sculptures that adorn streets, parks, plazas, bridges, and buildings. Paris defies iconoclasm and seldom destroys the symbols of its history to suit changing moral fashion. Despite the current Western craze for socio-historical moralizing, l’Arc de Triomphe stands in beaux-arts grandeur as a monument to Napoleonic imperialism. Although the French Revolution cut off the heads of some statues along with those of aristocrats, the iconoclastic hysteria did not last. Reason and aesthetics prevailed over self-righteous emotionalism. In Paris, art transcends the dirt of history. Revolutions come and go along with saviors and villains, while the latter often inspire better art. In the end, the art matters more than the politics or the history behind it. As for the
morals, they are little more than a capricious and annoying guide for social harmony, something to be raised or lowered like the hemline of a Chanel skirt, preferably without injuring the wearer. Like Manet’s Olympia, today’s moral outrage is tomorrow’s masterpiece. Puritanical qualms are exiled to Geneva, or as Robespierre discovered, excessive virtue must be guillotined.
In a city adorned with sculptures of male and female nudes, sensuousness and sensuality matter more than priggishness. The Parisian gaze is cosmopolitan. It looks and stares at everything. It judges everything. It is easily shocked only to fall in love, eventually, with the offending sight or object. The only scandal is the absence thereof. Scandal fuels argumentation, and argumentation is the lifeblood of a Parisian intellect that thrives on opposition. Parisian discourse is serious, witty, provocative, and occasionally coquettish. Philosophy is a public sport rather than the preserve of shy academics. The opinions and conclusions are taken as mutable suggestions. The construction of the argument and the lan- guage at its core are more important than the conclusions. After all, what is the point of justice without elegance? Would it not be repackaged bar- barity? Freedom without art is worse than tyranny. Equality without style is vulgar criminality. Speech is an art, and language is the heart of speech. To Pa- risian ears, the unaesthetic or inarticulate philoso- pher should remain silent. Awkwardness is not a virtue.
Paris is expressive rather than expressionist. The Cedar Bar inspired fistfights. The Left Bank inspires wit and an occasional revolutionary. The latter seldom lasts. Despite periodic flirtations with ideological extremism, Paris is too Voltairean and civilized to embrace Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Chairman Mao beyond a juvenile tryst. Besides, the Swiss Rousseau and the Chinese Mao were as intolerant as they were boorish. Paris, on the other hand, demands subtlety. Talleyrand must triumph over Napoleon.
The aesthetics of complexity are incompatible with binary thinking. At its best, Paris embraces contradictions. Marcel Duchamp may have stopped painting, but he loved and collected surrealist paintings nonetheless. He defied the secular teleology of
Clement Greenberg. As Duchamp made clear:
‘Art is produced by a succession of individuals expressing themselves; it is not a question of progress. Progress is merely an enormous pretension on our part. There was no progress for example in Corot over Phidias. And “abstract” or “naturalistic” is merely a fashionable form of talking—today. It is no problem: an abstract painting may not look at all “abstract” in 50 years.’
Painful experience has also taught Parisians that binary thinking and notions of progress inform the totalitarian impulses of intellectuals such as Sartre and Brasillach. History shows that intellectuals and artists are often more erudite and creative than smart or compassionate. They assume that they can reason their way through any challenge without the burden of empirical evidence, or that they can reinvent the world without regard for the consequences. As the French-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov observed:
‘What dictators and avant-garde artists share in common is their radicalism, or if one prefers, their fundamentalism: they all wish to work out of nothing without taking into account what already exists in order to construct in accordance only to their own criteria. […] That which they have in common is their totalizing ambition which does not acknowledge any limit and will not admit any divergent opinion: the artist wants to abolish all other aesthetic canons, the dictator is ready to shatter all the previous norms of social life. That which they have in common is ultimately the lack of consideration for individual opinion and a preference for standardized collective productions. […] Their ambition is infinite; all the while it designs a closed space and therefore will not recognize anything outside itself. Drunk with pride, artists and dictators hold the same conviction in mastering the entire process of construction — whether of artworks or societies’ Nearly 80 years after the execution of Robert Brasillach, as the Western world seems to seek authoritarian solutions, history has tragically proven de Gaulle to be correct. The aesthetics of complexity are preferable to binary simplicity.
The world should follow his example and free Voltaire.