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    Malraux and De Gaulle

    by

    Charles De Gaulle and the Founding of the Fifth Republic in France

    Lecture delivered February 1977
    Kenyon College
    Gambier, Ohio

    The last conversation between Charles de Gaulle and André Malraux took place about a year before the General died in November 1970. They had collaborated politically since they met in 1945, when de Gaulle headed the French provisional government in the aftermath of the liberation of their country by Allied troops. The history of that meeting and that collaboration interests me, but it’s not what I’m here to talk about. I intend to describe their collaboration on the level of ideas, not history. Because they both looked at politics as Frenchmen thinking of France, I will approach them from two angles. First, describe their analyses of what they saw as France’s two major problems: the French national character and modern technology. Then I’ll describe their strategies for mitigating those problems in terms of epistemology, ethics, and politics. Their political strategies were of two kinds: institution-making and myth-making. You’ll notice that I spend more time on de Gaulle than on Malraux; that’s because I’ll be giving a lecture on Malraux tonight.

    Those of you who have read de Gaulle’s Memoirs of Hope know de Gaulle’s assessment of the French national character. His opinion there remained unchanged since at least the mid-1930s, when he called the French “changeable, uncertain, contradictory,” with “plenty of passion but little constancy.” “Each Frenchman,” he wrote at that time, “holds too much to his independence,” a habit that makes “common action unequal and uneasy.” The “dominant and contradictory passions of the French in each [historical] period” are “the desire for privilege and the taste for equality”–a remark Malraux quotes in Felled Oaks.

    These inclinations worsened in the twentieth century for spiritual and political reasons. “Incertitude marks our period,” he wrote in 1932: denials, losses, scandals, and deceptions “have shaken the established order.” This weakening of morale affects and is affected by the lack of political direction; parliamentarianism, the rule of the political parties, yields what might be called a stagnant instability—lots of orating, careers made and ruined, but no consistent policy. This twofold unsteadiness will bring danger in wartime—the disaster of 1940, when Nazi Germany conquered France in a matter of days—and mediocrity in peacetime.

    Still, de Gaulle remained a republican. He didn’t regard Frenchmen as corrupt, or at least entirely so. During two world wars he saw their “instinctive will to survive and to triumph.” That instinct is superior to the conscious thought of France’s parliamentarians. Good republican rulers first of all must acknowledge the underlying moral strength of the French and then guide it rightly.

    Malraux’s analysis of the French national character resembled de Gaulle’s. In 1932, thirteen years before they met, Malraux asserted that “there exists in France a psychological individualism and an ethical individualism, which are nearly always confused.. The first sets its value on ‘difference,” on the unique character of ‘each one'”—this roughly equivalent to what de Gaulle called the desire for privilege); “the second on the absolute right of ‘action’ demanded by the individual”—or, as de Gaulle put it, “the taste for equality.”

    Malraux agreed that certain things about the moral atmosphere prevailing in the twentieth century magnified these characteristics. These were the crisis of belief, but less as the crisis of French politics as the crisis of Europe, of Western civilization. In his 1926 book The Temptation of the West, one character finds “an essential absurdity” “at the center of European man,” who wants not only to love—to lose his individuality—but to be loved—to please his individuality. Political scientists have described what they call the ‘whipsawing’ of French life: the oscillation between extreme individualism and frantic groupishness. Malraux finds the civilizational foundation of this national trait in the individualism that insists on self-importance while unable to ignore the opinions of other selves.

    There is thus a stubborn theatricality about Western man. The events of May 1968, when student demonstrators allied with leftist trade union groups to challenge de Gaulle’s regime, seem to exemplify this will-to-drama. An extremely British historian named Anthony Hartley provided this unenthusiastic account of ‘The Events’: “The one-day general strike on May 13 was rapidly followed by strikes and occupations all over France, until, by the end of the week, the entire country was paralyzed…. [At the Sorbonne], as anarchists, Maoists, and Trotskists peddled their ideological wares, and groups of students argued about every subject on earth, others among them coupled on the floor of the corridors underneath a banner proclaiming, ‘We fear nothing, we have The Pill….’ ‘Contestation’ was the order of the day, and the symbolic ‘happenings’ staged by the students were more decorously imitated in factories and offices.” America’s own ‘Movement’ types had some drama kings and queens among them—you remember Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin—but the French seemed to have more yeast in them, with less conscious self-parody. One gets the sinking feeling that those students really imagined themselves scandalous and shocking, instead of merely inane.

    A difficult people to govern, then. And the crisis of May ’68 illustrated the second of the two problems seen by de Gaulle and Malraux. Malraux said that May ’68 was a “crisis of civilization” provoked by technology, by modern science, and de Gaulle concurred. De Gaulle had written on technology many times, beginning in 1934 with the publication of his book, Towards a Professional Army. There he emphasizes the worthwhile characteristics of modern tank warfare, saying that it resuscitates many of the ancient virtues of warriors—most importantly, battlefield leadership and therefore the need of character in the military leader.

    But de Gaulle also knew that technology can lend itself to modern tyranny, the very opposite of character. Hitler defeated France with superior tanks and planes. Stalin’s underling, Molotov, conceived himself as it were technologically; he “was and wanted to be only a cogwheel in an implacable mechanism.” De Gaulle saw that the machine is power in modernity. In his famous radio appeal to the French of June 18, 1940 he insisted: “Crushed today by a superior mechanical force, we can vanquish in the future by a superior mechanical force. The destiny of the world is there.”

    For the next thirty years de Gaulle tried to gain this real power for France, while at the same time knowing, as he said in a 1945 speech, that “the great social and economic problem of our time consists of saving liberty and making it live inside the rigid and bellicose organization that the machine imposes.” In the Bayeux Manifesto of 1946 de Gaulle argued that mechanization makes the state more necessary than ever but also more dangerous, as modern rulers may attempt to turn the nation itself into a sort of machine, accelerating national life to the point where all moderation, all balance is lost, the ‘machine’ whirs out of control, and the tyranny that turned on the ignition key fails. In two 1959 speeches at French universities he described modern man as being “at grips with the universe, that is to say first of all with himself,” a man who wants to “emerge from himself, to accede to that new world where desires remain infinite but where nature ceases to be limited.” For that reason, technology, both in itself and in its psychological effect, hugely increases the human capacity for doing good and for doing evil. Both American-style corporate capitalism and Russian communism are technocratic ideologies in the bad sense–systems of excess, lacking in moderation, and therefore lacking in humanness.

    Along these lines, de Gaulle told an interview that May `68 was a revolt “against modern society, against the society of consumption, against mechanized society, whether it be communist in the East or capitalist in the West.” “How to find a human equilibrium for civilization, for the mechanical modern society? There is the great question of the century!”

    For Malraux the question was similar. The legendary conqueror, Alexander the Great, symbolizes the West: “Powerless against himself (he kills Clitos), all-powerful against the world.” Since the eighteenth century, science has served this ‘conqueror’ psychology and exaggerated it by its failure—its necessary failure—to answer the fundamental ethical question, ‘What is man doing on the earth?’ In 1937 Malraux said that although “the struggle against nature, the exaltation of the conquest of things by man,” remains “one of the highest traditions of the West, from Robinson Crusoe to the Soviet cinema” (Malraux was friendly with the great Russian cinematographer, Sergei Eisenstein), “we refuse to consider this struggle as a fundamental value.”

    Like de Gaulle, Malraux saw the dilemma: in order to protect values other than those of modernity, one needs power, and machines embody power. In the Spanish Civil War, in World War II, and in his talks with rulers as diverse as Nehru and Kennedy, Malraux repeatedly heard two complaints: modernity lacks a supreme value; sheer survival requires continued modernization. At the same time, these necessary means of survival also endanger the nations–not only because nuclear weapons could destroy them, not only because nuclear weapons make such nations as France more dependent upon others for defense, but also because technology threatens the very idea of the nation. Technology gratifies consumption, and the most efficient producers of consumer goods are international, even anti-national corporations.

    I said before that the strategies de Gaulle and Malraux devised were ethical and political. Politics derives from ethics, and ethics presupposes an ‘epistemology’–to use a Greek-sounding word invented in the last century–a theory of knowledge. How does one come to know right from wrong?

    You probably didn’t think de Gaulle had an epistemology. He did, and he derived it from the writings of the turn-of-the-century French philosopher, Henri Bergson. With Bergson, de Gaulle believed that the mind consists of two faculties: intellect and intuition. Intellect clarifies; it readies conceptions for use but does not produce them. The intuition does that, with its “direct are very often revelations of mystery, not any certain truth. To Malraux, the important thing is to convert these experiences into consciousness; the wider the field of experience, the better. contact” with “the realities”—that is, nature. Intuition is not only the faculty of “profound perception”—profound because it gets beneath the surface of things–it’s also the faculty of “creative impulse” because it links the mind with nature, and nature is not only orderly but ordering. Hence participation in nature via intuition is creative, order-making, as well as realistic; the military leader has a well-developed intuition which gives others “the impression of a natural force which will command events,” although in fact it’s insight into the nature of things which accounts for his success. The leader must also have a well-trained intellect; “the true school of command is general culture,” in which one learns discernment and orderliness. “Behind the victories of Alexander, on always finds Aristotle.”

    Malraux’s epistemology is essentially religious or epiphanic; he believed that there are certain moments in one’s life when thins stand revealed as they are. Inasmuch as Malraux was an agnostic, these moments usually reveal mystery, not any certain truth. Malraux seeks to convert these experiences into consciousness; the wider the field of experiences, the better.

    Notice that both of these epistemological stances incline toward an active life, not a life of contemplation. De Gaulle aimed at a life of military leadership and eventually statesmanship, Malraux at adventure, then publishing, soldiering (in the Spanish Civil War, and finally politics. For them, doing rivaled thinking in the moral order of rank.

    Activity implies ethics: what should one do? The chief Gaullist virtue is “character”—”the virtue of difficult times,” the moral equivalent of intuition. The man of character realizes himself in struggling with a difficulty; psychologically, his reward is “the austere joy of being responsible.” “If the affair succeeds he distributes advantage generously and, in the case of a reverse, he does not allow reproach to descend on any but himself.” He has little taste for revenge; in the dozens of speeches de Gaulle made during the war he mentioned revenge only two or three times. His man of character recalls Aristotle’s magnanimous or great-souled man, described in Book IV, chapter 3 of the Nicomachean Ethics. Notice how alien he is to almost everything you believe or aspire to. The man of character is benevolent to his followers, but not compassionate. Indeed, when de Gaulle toured newly-liberated French cities in 1945 he spoke “not of pity, which none wanted, but of aspiration and pride.” The man of character may desire glory, but popularity means nothing to him. He’s not a ‘nice guy.’ He is not ‘sensitive.’ He doesn’t crave love. A republican, yes, but a republican aristocrat. Men and women of democratic temperament will likely find him off-putting, even offensive.  But they may find that they need him, in difficult times.

    If character is the moral equivalent of intuition, moderation is the moral equivalent of intellect. It tells this strong-willed man of character when to stop. In his 1938 book, France and Her Army, de Gaulle criticizes Napoleon because “each victory excited even more [his] ambition, exaggerating his projects, pushing them beyond the boundary of the possible. There comes a day when the proportion between the means and the ends breaks, and all the contrivances of genius are in vain.” “Souls, like matter, have their limits,” and Napoleon exhausted the French. As you will remember, this was de Gaulle’s criticism of modern tyranny, as well; without moderation, perhaps this man of character would become a near-tyrant. As a republican aristocrat, de Gaulle wants to rule by the consent of the governed. Citizens who share in rule assume responsibility for themselves, and “one cannot be responsible if one is not free.” He went so far as to say, “We would prefer the fall of atomic bombs to the loss of liberty.”

    Malraux also praises strength of character and responsibility, finding it in the great Spanish painter, Goya. “To allow his genius to become apparent to himself it was necessary that he should dare to give up aiming to please.” More than de Gaulle, whose man of character finds strength in moments of solitude, Malraux esteems fraternity. But he never descended to what he consistently regarded as democratic sentimentality. Malraux reports with evident approval that de Gaulle “reproached in Saint Augustine the absence of political spirit, for having compared it to an assembly of brigands.”

    De Gaulle thought that “our times are hard for authority”—hard for political life—because conventions are doubted and little “taste for deference” remains. He also thought such attitudes could not last. “These political animals have need of organization, that I to say of order and of leaders.” De Gaulle is unmodern in calling man a political animal, but neither was he straightforwardly an Aristotelian. For Aristotle the political community arises from simpler communities, both depending on the human capacity for speech and reason. De Gaulle’s epistemology doesn’t ascribe to speech and reason the power of apprehending nature; intuition does that, assisted by the intellect, which clarifies intuition. At most one might argue that Bergsonian intuition parallels the capacity for noesis seen in the older philosophers. If so, it is a sort of apprehension that knows movement as readily as stable forms, which leads to activity as much as to contemplation, and to a politics that emphasizes the importance of executive action as much as legislative debate and judicial deliberation.

    Gaullist politics aims at grandeur, which appeals to “the obscure wish of men” who are imperfect, and therefore “accept collective action with a view that it leads to something great.” The Gaullist citizen augments himself through participation in such action. This contrasts with the explanation of politics seen in the ‘social contract’ theories, which often regard political life as an unfortunate necessity. I am tempted to call it a political Nietzscheism, but I resist that temptation in fear of succumbing to death by untenable paradox.

    In light of all this, de Gaulle asserted that “sentiment alone does not suffice for building political constructions.” And although at one point in his Memoirs of Hope he announces that the voice of the people is for him the voice of God, four pages later he adds, apropos of his strategy for ridding France of its now-burdensome colony, Algeria, “I would lead the game in such a way as to accord little by little the sentiment of the French with the interest of France, while evading whatever would rupture national fidelity…. It is only progressively, by utilizing each concussion as the occasion to go further, that I would obtain a current of consent strong enough to gain all. Without ever changing course, it was therefore necessary to maneuver until the moment when, decidedly, good sense would pierce the mist.” What the statesman’s intuition, intellect, and character enable him to see clearly, citizens must be brought to see in good time.  His prudence derives from thinking, theirs from experience guided by the elevating of their minds toward the good of their country.

    Employed in matters foreign and domestic, de Gaulle’s tactic served two strategies directed at the founding of a new republican regime in France: institution-making and myth-making. In studying the Fifth Republic’s institutions, you will see how de Gaulle attempted to reestablish the link between the French state and French society, a link that had been broken some two centuries before. He did this first by reestablishing the existence of a state with a real executive branch, as opposed to a state misruled by a collection of parliamentary interest groups. Technology makes a stronger state more necessary than ever for two reasons: parliamentary immobilism might slow technological advance by failing to supply money for research; more important, left on their own, technology and science generally may have no direction other than their own interest. The state, de Gaulle said. must ensure that “concurrently with a scientific and technical formation, pure thought the philosophy that expresses it, the literature which asserts its worth, the arts which illustrate it and also the morality which proceeds from conscience and reason inspire and orient this immense effort of evolution.” The state has responsibility for the country as a whole, beyond the responsibilities of any of the interest groups within it and beyond the sum of their interests.

    De Gaulle treats economics the same way, calling economic development “the route that leads us to the summits.” Free enterprise “must not be a rampart of immobilism, but a base for élan, for risk, for development.” De Gaulle again wants to use a modern phenomenon—industrial capitalism–for an unmodern purpose: grandeur. The states provides the power and the overall planning, without controlling all the individual firms, as under socialism. But can such a modern phenomenon—to which de Gaulle adds another, a strong executive branch within a centralized state—really lend itself to unmodern ends? De Gaulle addressed the problem of modern statism. He did so with his notion of “participation.” After After the rebuilding of the French state, the decentralization program called “participation” became de Gaulle’s intended institutional reform. In order to reestablish the link between state and nation, a reformation of the character of French citizenship was indispensable to prevent the newly empowered state from dominating the nation. De Gaulle had first to wrest power from the interest groups and empower the state; he then tried to redistribute part of that power to the citizens, to men as Frenchmen, instead of to men as business operators or laborers.

    The name “participation” came late, but decentralization—reflecting, as it does, the Gaullist esteem for individual and collective responsibility—formed part of de Gaulle’s plan for reforming the French army as far back as the early 1930s. During and after the war years he spoke o the association of labor, capital, and technology as a third choice between communism and laissez-faire capitalism. Under the Fifth Republic, in 1964, de Gaulle instituted the Commission on Regional Development, whereby the plans and the credit of the state were to be “conjugated with local initiatives and resources.” In 1966 he announced that “in the future and when evolution in its course will reveal the opportunity, we must undoubtedly reunite in a single assembly the representatives of the local collectives with those of the great organisms of the economic and social order to deliberate on affairs of this nature before the National Assembly.” The crisis of May 1968 brought just such an opportunity for decentralization. De Gaulle didn’t urge the economic decentralization he had proposed two ears earlier, instead trying for Senate reform and regional reapportionment. He lost that referendum by five points and resigned the presidency soon afterwards,

    The only way de Gaulle could make the interest groups consent to his policies was to get a majority of the population on his side; in modernity, even the interest groups must acquiesce, however reluctantly, to a clear statement by the majority. But the many are disinclined to serve the ends of the few. Modernity, whose soul is egalitarianism, prefers not to serve uncommon purposes. Only an extremely skillful statesman can arrange things otherwise, and one miscalculation can defeat him.

    De Gaulle recognized that institutions alone will not suffice to counteract the toxins of egalitarianism. “Without doubt,” he said, “the malaise of souls which results in a civilization dominated by matter would not be cured by whatever regime that there may be.” Only a “change of moral condition, which would make Man responsible instead of being an instrument” could do that. Institution help, but it is “consent which renders the laws fruitful.” Events can push people to consent, but events have meaning only in relations to principles of some sort. And principles seize the imagination by the means of myth. As de Gaulle put it in 1944, one of the two preconditions of French grandeur is republican order; the other is “concentrated ardor which allows building legally and fraternally the edifice of renewal.” Without ardent consent both laws and fraternity will die by force, or perhaps by indifference and the lassitude it brings.

    Malraux stated the problem as well as anyone. In 1958, when de Gaulle returned to power, “I did not think that the twentieth century, or France, aimed at the birth of a constitution surrounded by a Roman respect, like that of the United States; I thought that a constitution which made of the referendum a means of government would be made for the people, and not the people for the constitution.”

    Any political myth reinforces a claim to rule. De Gaulle founded his claim to rule on le salut public—the public safety, salvation, and welfare, as demonstrated by his actions during World War II and in the crisis over rebellion in France’s Algerian colony in the late 1950s. Malraux defined le salut public as a non-chauvinistic patriotism founded on the idea of “responsibility at the service of liberty” and therefore of authority embodied by the state at the service of liberty. For de Gaulle, liberty and responsibility finally mean the same thing: the moral aspect of that man-sided concept, grandeur. In Felled Oaks Malraux writes that grandeur involves a “harsh rejection of the theatrical.” If the West, especially the modern West, loves theatricality, de Gaulle’s fusion of liberty and responsibility attacks something near the core of people like us. It would end the fragility of our individualism by strengthening that in us which unites us with others without making us vulnerable to their caprices, making our public side public again, our private side private.

    No grandeur, though, in an age of skepticism: in 1945 de Gaulle spoke of the need to “give the French people constitutional faith.” Ten years earlier he’d written that “some great national dream” maybe “necessary to a people for sustaining its activity and conserving its cohesion.” This “common hope lessens divergences and gathers together devotions. If the masses in our country today seem to have lost the sentiment of the general interest, the lack of exterior ambitions is perhaps related to this debility.” Or, as he writes in the often-quoted first paragraph of his War Memoirs, “France is really herself only at the first rank; only vast enterprises are capable of compensating for the ferments of dispersion that her people carry in themselves. In short, in my judgment France cannot be France without grandeur.” Hope is the link between the French people and the grandeur of France. The faith—constitutional and extra-constitutional—on which hope depends is a faith in France confirmed, de Gaulle hoped, by the regime’s success in carrying out the “vast enterprise” of détente between the two Cold-War blocs and the simultaneous building up of a Europe of les patries —of the fatherlands—a Europe of federated but still-sovereign peoples extending from the Atlantic to the Urals. This assertion of French independence of action from both sides in the Cold War was intended to give the French consciousness of themselves as a people capable of working toward the morally and politically great task of reconstituting European civilization against the modern forces of hyper-capitalism (which de Gaulle associated with the United States) and modern tyranny (seen in the Soviet regime but not in Russia as a fatherland). Many historians and journalists have observed that the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia damaged the regime as much if not more than the ‘Events of May,’ because that invasion so sharply set back de Gaulle’s hope for détente, for enlisting a decreasingly ‘Soviet’ Russia in the task of rebuilding Europe.

    To de Gaulle, the referendum establishes not so much the legitimacy of de Gaulle as the legitimacy of the French. Do they consent to living up to France? In the 1969 referendum on Senate reform, the French lost. But they might regain their legitimacy, perhaps long after de Gaulle and Malraux have died. Hence de Gaulle’s act of writing his unfinished Memoirs of Hope and hence Malraux’s writing of Felled Oaks.

    De Gaulle tells Malraux, “In our country, one can found nothing durable on the lie; that is a troubling and certain fact.” The Gaullist myth is no lie, although it is partly imaginary.  It’s founded on a reality: the French nation, which de Gaulle believed to be more lasting than such ideologies as fascism and communism. The Gaullist myth also rests on principles. Malraux tells him that lesser men won’t be able to use the myth for selfish purposes “because a myth becomes inactive when separated from what gave it birth,” and evocations of grandeur do not persuade when issued by mediocrities. What gave de Gaulle’s myth its birth was “the sentiment that [de Gaulle’s] motives, good or bad, were not those of the politicians”—motives of self-interest and group-interest. “To legitimize sacrifice is perhaps the greatest thing a man could do.” In saying so, the agnostic Malraux acknowledges what Chateaubriand, whom he takes as a forebear in the tradition of French autobiography, called the genius of Christianity, itself so deeply a part of what made France great.

    In his book on American politicians, the historian Richard Hoftstadter titled one chapter, “Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth”—giving us to understand that he disapproves of that sort of thing. This only shows that historians at times fail to appreciate that statesmen do not necessarily aspire to university chairs in contemporary ‘history departments.’ They have other, sometimes greater ambitions. If a statesman intends to appeal to the best in his people, he must select what’s best in himself and display that, hoping to persuade fellow-citizens that the virtues displayed deserve emulation and deference. Malraux says that in one sense de Gaulle made the myth of de Gaulle with his radio speeches during the war. In another sense, however, de Gaulle embodied a pre-existing myth; he was, Malraux writes, “the last metamorphosis of the myth of France.” Metamorphosis: the creative part was de Gaulle’s adaptation of that myth to his own, his country’s own, circumstance.

    That circumstance may have defeated Gaullism in the end. De Gaulle tells Malraux that “the soul of politics, in Europe, was the nation. After the [atomic] bomb, does the nation remain what it was?” Worse, de Gaulle’s prime minister and successor as president, Georges Pompidou, told a journalist that he didn’t know what “participation” really meant. According to Malraux, de Gaulle thought “that he was the last statesmen before [the triumph] of the age of technique”–that is, the triumph of the putatively scientific administrative state—”the last statesman for whom the values of the spirit remained fundamental.” The last statesman of European Christian humanism.

    But reality can surprise, as both men also knew. If the Gaullist regime, the Fifth Republic, isn’t what de Gaulle wanted it to be, it’s nonetheless true that there are more people alive today who could identify the name of de Gaulle than those of Pompidou or Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing. Memoirs of Hope and Felled Oaks exist because de Gaulle and Malraux intended to keep it that way. The title, Felled Oaks, refers to Hercules, the hero of Greek myth. Hercules’ heroism manifests in his labors as a destroyer of monsters–the dragon-slaying monsters of Christian-European legend derive from him—and thus as a guardian and protector of men. Hercules was said to preside over Greek education. At the end of his life he built his own funeral pyre (out of pine branches in the Greek version, but out of oaks in Victor Hugo’s version, the French version). Before the flames touched him Zeus transferred him to Olympus, the home of the immortals. By writing Felled Oaks Malraux transfers de Gaulle out of the mundane world, the world of Pompidou and Giscard. He writes, “The legendary man is the man who escapes destiny,” calling to the “human instinct for the more-than-human.” With Malraux’s book, de Gaulle-as-myth remains present, for us. He could be present for others, after everyone here today is dead. The effect that presence may have on political life in that future will depend on those who engage in it.

    2016 NOTE: This lecture, along with “Can Democracy Be Cultural?” was delivered at the invitation of Professor William V. Frame, then chair of the Kenyon College Political Science Department and later the president of Augsburg College in Minnesota. Professor Frame had introduced me to the study of Charles de Gaulle several years earlier, when I was a student at the college. The lecture on the Gaullist founding was for his class in comparative politics; the lecture on Malraux was for a general college audience. Eventually, I wrote and published books on both de Gaulle and Malraux.

    Malraux and De Gaulle: Can Democracy Be Cultural?

    by

    Can Democracy Be Cultural?

    Lecture delivered at Kenyon College
    Gambier, Ohio
    February 2, 1977

    In 1974 People Magazine appeared, and with it the embourgeoisement of tabloidism. Novelist and art historian André Malraux–himself no innocent in the arts of self-promotion–died two years later, without disclosing what he thought about it, or indeed if he had noticed it at all. We nevertheless do know what he thought of the sort of thing. Near the beginning of his novel disguised as a biography, he writes, “Gossip provides, cheaply, the relief we expect from the irrational, and with the psychology of the unconscious, what men hide–which is often only pitiable–is too complacently confuse with what they don’t know about themselves.” Malraux considered the contemporary taste for secrets a manifestation of “envious baseness”: “In the order of the secret… men are a little to easily equal.”

    Readers have come to seek confession in memoirs. Confession is self-gossip. And while for the Christian it voices penitence, which merits forgiveness, for a non-Christian it tends toward self-indulgence–or masochism, a subspecies of the same thing. We read literary confessions–the sort of autobiography invented by Rousseau–because they’re literary, not because they’re confessional. In his Confessions, “the guilty is saved, not because he imposes a lie, but because the domain of art is not that of life. The proud shame of Rousseau does not destroy the pitiable shame of Jean-Jacques, but it brings him a measure of immortality. This metamorphosis, one of the most profound that can be created by man, is that of a destiny submitted to into a destiny dominated.” If Rousseau were not Rousseau, had he written the Confessions badly, compounding his private shame with the public shame of botched art, who would read them? Voyeurs can always find more immediate titillation.

    Still, Malraux wants something more from autobiography than artistic triumph, the victory over destiny. He wants the subject of the autobiography to count as much as the expression. He therefore purges his story about “Malraux” of “all that matters only to me.” The anti-memoir will feature almost nothing about parents, brothers, teachers, wives, and children. In this Malraux is the anti-Rousseau.

    He opposes Rousseau on another level, too, although he never says so. Rousseau attacks the modern delight in circulating knowledge and art like money though the veins of Leviathan. A ‘civilized’ people, Rousseau believed, loves its own slavery, enticed by governmentally-inflamed “artificial desires” sated only by means of the arts and sciences. “Astronomy was born of superstition,” he writes, “eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride.” In what’s called civilization, “our hatred of other nations diminishes, but patriotism dies with it.” Technology–specifically, the printing press–enabled this corruption to take hold and advance. By rewarding mere talent instead of virtue, for the principles of virtue are “graven in every heart,” whereas real talent is uncommon. ‘Enlightenment,” so called, allows a man who might have made a good clothier to imagine himself a poet or mathematician and to look down on those who don’t possess his self-supposed talent. Widespread cul0ture ruins the virtues that republican self-government requires. And although Nietzsche was no republican, Rousseau may stand behind his famous warning that the Romans “degenerated amid the cosmopolitan carnival of arts, worships, and moralities,” that his contemporaries were “walking encyclopedias” and “restless, dilettante spectators.”

    At issue, then, are technology, the moral origin and political purpose of culture. Malraux considered these themes for fifty years. He did not agree with Rousseau. While serving in President Charles de Gaulle’s cabinet as Minister of Culture, at times he seemed to advocate a sort of cultural utilitarianism, going so far as to say that France should put the greatest number of works of art at the service of the greatest number of men.  And when he served in President Charles de Gaulle’s cabinet as Minister of Culture he once went so far as to say that France should put the greatest number of works of art a the service of the greatest number of men. “I was answering some idiot or other in the National Assembly,” he explained. His real answer to Rousseau and other non-idiots was indeed more thoughtful than that.

    Can democracy be cultural? To say what democracy and culture can be implies knowledge of what they are; for a practical man, it implies a knowledge of what they are today. Malraux always wanted his ideas enacted, never neglecting to define current circumstances, the givens with which he worked. In the first half of this lecture I’ll discuss Malraux’s diagnosis of twentieth-century culture and politics, reserving his proposed cure for the contemporary human condition for the second half.

    Malraux’s 1926 epistolary novel, The Temptation of the West presents this diagnosis in its first and simplest form. In it, a young Frenchman, visiting China, exchanges letters with a young Chinese, who is visiting Europe. The Chinese discovers an “act of faith” underlying ancient Greek civilization in particular and the West in general. To express it, he modifies Protagoras’s maxim thus: “measure all things by the duration or intensity of one human life. The West, in the person of Oedipus, confronts the East, its emblem the Sphinx. That is, mind, will, and activity confront sentiment, sensibility, and contemplation. The “soul of Europe” consists of “ceaseless creation renewed by action in a world destined for action”–action against the world, against the other. The Western individualist makes of death a terror because death is the ultimate loss of self. Because death is unavoidable, this individualist, insofar as he conscious of that, lives an anguished life. He may attempt to escape this anguish–the usual routes are patriotism, God, and love–but they’re all futile: “to lose oneself it is first necessary to believe in oneself.” Hence “at the center of European man, dominating the great moments of his existence, there exists an essential absurdity.” “After the death of the Sphinx, Oedipus attacks himself.”

    The death of the Sphinx: Malraux sees Eastern civilization as no less arbitrary than his own; moreover, it is being killed by the West. The East’s weakness is its contempt for force. It can’t expel the West because its disdains the forceful means of doing so–specifically, the use of the human mind to master nature instead of contemplating it. Of the two civilizations, the East will die first. In the 1920s, in France, many young people were fascinated by Asian religion and philosophy. So was Malraux. But he never adopted them. He would have regarded any such effort as escapist–a nostalgia that cannot defend itself.

    But “the most subtle temptation” is “reserved for the best” Europeans: “it is no longer Europe or the past which invades France at the beginning of this century, it is the world which invades Europe, the world with all its present and all its past, its amassed offerings of forms, living or dead, and of meditations….” This is Nietzsche’s cosmopolitan carnival, but Malraux partly disagrees with Nietzsche on its effect: “There will be in the victory of forms over mind something more profound than the force of pleasure and the exaltation of a slightly vulgar sensibility. Voluptuous pleasure, and that of novelty, easily seduce mediocre spirits, but they will be without force against those prepared to combat them.” Malraux thinks we are now seeing, not philosophical reconstruction, but “the occasionally bitter game of artistic experiments.” This is 1926: he’s thinking of the Cubists and Picasso.

    But that occasionally bitter game might entail a sort of prolegomena to philosophic thought, even if Malraux doesn’t call it that. He calls for “voracious lucidity,” which aims at artistic forms as much as ideas or sentiments. But of course voracity suggests eros and lucidity suggests the capacity for making distinctions–elements of the philosophic life as defended by Socrates.

    Be this as it may, in his mature writings Malraux elaborates on these early insights and criticisms. His view of the history of Western civilization is fairly simple. Three cultural periods preceded our own. The first was the long epoch when the West oriented itself by an Absolute, of one sort or another. At one time people assumed that the artists in those centuries aspired to realism, that they wanted to paint like Raphael but didn’t know how. “Once we cease to regard such works as clumsy imitations of their models, we realize that the power through which they make their impact on us–what we would now call their creative power–was initially the power of giving form to that which made the human animal become a man and freed him from the chaos of his beginning, from his instincts…. If man had not set up against appearance his successive worlds of [absolute] Truth, he would not have become a rational animal but a kind of ape.” This period was interspersed with a few transient humanisms–classical Greece and the Renaissance being the familiar ones.

    A decisive shift occurred in the eighteenth century. As Malraux writes, “For the possession of oneself through accord with God, man substituted the accumulation of knowledges: Europe separated itself from Being, and became master of the world.” Individualism combined with the urge to conquer the Other had always been latent in Europe; now it ruled European souls. Rousseau criticizes the Encyclopedists, but Malraux sees that in one respect he wasn’t so far from them as he thought: “In his attempt to substitute ethics for religion… Rousseau at the same time substitutes it for politics. But in place of the system of values he attacks he has another–that of the individual–and his political system, which is democracy.” One could quibble by observing that Rousseau didn’t advocate democratic government only democratic direction of government. The basic point is sound. Malraux sees that Rousseau’s political philosophy, like that of the Encyclopedists, is for the most part both individualistic and egalitarian. That’s why his celebrated ‘general will’ as it’s usually understood–careful readers of Rousseau will know that the Rousseau I’ve presented here tonight is an oversimplified, even vulgarized Rousseau–isn’t really tyrannical because each individual by nature is orally equal to his fellow-citizens; for that reason, the will of an uncorrupted majority expresses his own, as well as its own, good.

    The third cultural period has consisted of the substitution of “political exaltation” and History–that’s History with a capital ‘H’–for the killed religion. Malraux regards these substitutions, exemplified by nationalism and the historicist internationalism of Marx, as fake Absolutes which had to fail.

    They did, quickly. The artists were among the first to sense the problem, and Malraux points out that the nineteenth century was the first in which the best artists as a group opposed the prevailing beliefs and customs. Soon there were two claimants to that honorific title, Art: such painters as Manet, Cézanne, and Van Gogh; and the painters who appealed the tastes of most art buyers–members of the so-called academic school.

    In philosophy, at the end of the century, that great destroyer, Nietzsche, emerged,  a figure Malraux usually cites only to refute. But Nietzsche’s writings influence Malraux more than those of any other, as we’ll see.

    Malraux calls what we see today “machine-civilization.” It retains the forms of eighteenth and nineteenth-century scientific rationalism while having lost–thanks to the efforts of the artists and Nietzsche–much of its faith in that rationalism. Insofar as science has a supreme value, it is Truth; this “new god,” as Malraux calls him, produces more objects for us right before our eyes than the other gods did, and he can destroy them just as easily. “But he is a mute god,” even to those who believe in him. Unbelievers doubt him without restoring an orderly irrationalism, either. Western values, in Malraux’s words, “preserve life more and more, and govern it less and less.”

    Indeed, Western values are hardly values at all, only objects of desire such as power and happiness. Among all its inventions, Malraux notices, machine-civilization has invented neither a temple nor a tomb. It has failed to do so because it thinks of the human soul as a mental faculty. “It is an imaginary faulty,” Malraux contends. “The soul does not exist independently of transcendence, or of the supreme value which is reflected in it. A mirror which reflects nothing is simply a pane of glass.” Men only devote temples to something or someone that transcends them; they only invent tombs when they believe they have souls.

    This metaphysical blindness distorts the modern understanding of human nature, which in turn distort our understanding of education, politics, and culture. In Malraux’s opinion, “the capital psychological problem of our time” is, “How do we become what we are?” He thinks that “Man only builds himself in pursuing what surpasses him.” Modern science’s principal contribution to the study of human nature is contemporary psychology, which is an internalized fatality, a historical determinism of the emotions. As such, it believes genuine elf-overcoming to be futile; one can only learn to understand and be reconciled with oneself, doing so by looking inward and backward–to childhood trauma, for example. For all their differences, both Rousseau and Freud look almost exclusively to origins when they search for wisdom; the state of nature or early childhood, the moral sentiments or the unconscious. What they find differs as do their methods, but the direction of the search is the same. With it, the self isn’t something one overcomes.

    This leads to the problem of education: with such an understanding of human nature, education can’t form a man. It merely provides him with information about things of secondary importance. Metaphysics need not apply. Further, “Science, insofar as it is belief and not insofar as it is science, is belief in a future explication of the world.” Therefore, “Western man is unformed because he waits.” Finally, to form a man, examples are necessary, whether they are saints or Bolsheviks. “Exemplariness belongs to fiction.” And science-fiction has yet to achieve the exemplary.

    Politically, machines pose the ancient problem of means and ends in an extreme form. Machines pose the ancient problem of ends and means in an extreme form. Machines are the means of power in Malraux’s century, as he confirms in conversations with prominent statesmen–the ones who should know. The Senegalese statesman Léopold Senghor, who intends to found an African civilization on the idea of reuniting man and nature, nonetheless admits: “I want Africa, but I will not struggle against the machine because it alone will vanquish poverty.” The founder of Indian republicanism, Jawaharlal Nehru concurs. De Gaulle, who subordinated the abolition of poverty to the re-founding of French republicanism and the reestablishment of France in the world, agreed with some of Malraux’s criticisms of machine-civilization. But he also pushed to modernize French society, to build atomic weapons, and to add applied science to the curriculum in the schools. Without power, no independent France, and a France without independence must subordinate itself to Russia or America–to modernity. How to serve ends other than those of modernity when modernity imposes its means? You will recognize in this the political equivalent of the cultural dilemma depicted in The Temptation of the West: the modern West leaves no alternative to itself as it prepares its own suicide.

    The dilemma invites escapism. If some Europeans practice Eastern religions, others–the ones who think in political terms, adopt what Malraux calls “the lyrical illusion.” There is a certain type of would-be revolutionary (Americans by now know him well) who specializes in “exemplary revolts.” The fact that they are exemplary shows that he’s not entirely a creature of modernity. But he achieves nothing; his revolts have no chance of success. Politics, for him, is a matter of audacity and character alone, because he’ll never need to worry about the problems of ruling, discipline, or technology (except to oppose such things, Quixotically). He is an apocalyptic who doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care, that the apocalypse, arresting while it lasts, doesn’t last long and, without God to guide it, seldom ends well.

    Another way to attempt escape from the modern dilemma is to force your way out. Thinking of the postwar Stalinists, Malraux once said that “the fatal flaw of man Europeans intellectuals is masochism, a smug resigning of intelligence to the benefit of stupidity in the guise of strength.” The modern tyrants may raise a more important problem than the lyrical illusionists. They celebrate technology and attempt to deploy it to address precisely the problem of human formation Malraux finds in modernity itself. When crude methods of forming ‘Soviet Man’ or ‘the Aryan race’ fail disastrously, these tyrants or their successors are left with the use of force to prop up regimes that have lost their purpose. This problem of formation if the problem of education for the individual; for the community it’s the problem of political and cultural founding. Can one found and maintain a regime in this century without tyranny?

    In the domain of culture, machine-civilization brings mass-art, as opposed to popular art. “There is no longer a popular art,” Malraux writes, “because there is no longer a people” The artisans and peasants of earlier periods had saints, heroes embodying values held in common. “Every collective virtue is born of a communion” and “no profound communion is limited to sentiment” But modernity does so limit men; the emotions that “modern crowds” seek in art are usually “superficial and puerile”: “The pleasures of the romantic do not unite men, they isolate them.” Although Malraux is thinking of the sentimental stories Hollywood produced in the 1930s and 1940s, the best example of this isolating effect is contemporary pornography, which presupposes the viewer’s isolation and maintains it.

    The fiction that should serve values instead serves instincts., sentiments, and desires. One makes mass culture with what Malraux calls “the arts of satiation.” Technology mass-produces artifacts in two senses: it produces them in huge quantities and does so for the masses. Hollywood movies of are harmless as long as no one takes them seriously. Malraux knew that many people did, and said, “If States, one after the other, create Ministries of Cultural Affairs, it is because every civilization is threatened by the proliferation of it fantasy-life, if that fantasy-life is not oriented by values.”

    Given this diagnosis of modernity can democracy be cultural? Can culture and politics in the twentieth century be redirected? Toward what end?

    Malraux defines culture as “the incarnation of a system of values”–not the values themselves–and “a coincidence of sensibilities”–not the sensibilities themselves. The incarnation of one of the few remaining systems of values in modernity, and the place where sensibilities, not instincts or sentiments, coincide is the Imaginary Museum.

    In 1965 Malraux visited a museum in Delhi, India. Having viewed a display of artifacts produced by village craftsmen, artifacts which seemed to be deteriorating along with the popular faith of India, he moved to some of the great stone sculptures. Confronted by the West, they appeared to Malraux to be undergoing what he calls an “inverse transmigration.” Instead of the souls exchanging bodies, as in Hinduism, the bodies, the sculptures, “have changed souls.”

    Souls? Malraux has said that modernity doesn’t recognize or understand the soul. What is it about the best art that makes it one domain in which souls still exist?

    It has to do with something I mentioned earlier: the schism between the better nineteenth-century painters and the cultural period in which they worked. I said that the artists sensed the problem of modernity; Malraux says that the value with which they replaced the desires of modern science was the value of art itself. Malraux doesn’t say that the artists learned something from technology, but perhaps they did; he dos say that the artists decided to stop submitting themselves and their art to the forms of life and to start submitting the forms of life to their art. This amounts to the artistic conquest of nature. Modern art thus “revealed the presence [of this conquest] beneath all the history of art.” For the first time in centuries intelligent Europeans could see that (for example) the sculptors of Chartres Cathedral were not trying to imitate the forms of nature but rather to metamorphose everyday reality, to make of it a spiritual universe. Modern artists, often without any religious universe, instead metamorphose everyday reality, the forms of life, into the “particular universe” of the artist himself. In a sense, then, modern art is not only a conquest, but the most individualistic of conquests. It is ultra-Western and ultra-modern. In another sense, however, it is a new transcendent domain, and therefore something beneath which souls exist.

    Malraux sees the paradox. He writes that Raphael might ask, ‘Granted that this conquest would be of interest to  Van Gogh himself, why would anyone else care?’ And we do care; we look at Van Goghs.

    Van Goghs reside in museums. Why visit them? The museum, Malraux reminds us, “has never existed where the civilization of modern Europe was or was unknown,” and “it has existed among us for less than two centuries.” With the modern artists, the museum has contributed to delivering from their function the works of art which [it]bring[s] together; to metamorphose into pictures what were portraits.” And, I might add, to metamorphose what were idols into statues, what were Biblical scenes into mosaics, what were commemorations of dead heroes into tapestries. Of his visits to Egypt, Malraux writes, “I am as ignorant of ancient Egypt as radically as a man would be of love had he not experienced it; as radically as each one is ignorant of death. What I know are these figures which I contemplate in passing.” Metamorphosis is the museum’s work: an “inverse transmigration” where renewed souls inhabit old clay.

    The Imaginary Museum is the metamorphosis of the ordinary museum. With the improvement of the techniques of color reproduction , the domain of art we can see has enlarged That collection of paintings and sculptures each of us carries in his head encompasses a dozen civilizations, many centuries. Simultaneously, the effect of reproduction itself, the paintings and sculptures metamorphose; they become color plates, and, in a book, the Parthenon and a Greek coin may be of the same size. “What have they lost?” Malraux asks. “Their quality of being objects. What have they gained? The greatest signification of style that they can assume.” The art-book magnifies style because it alone can juxtapose a pyramid and a cathedral, both isolated from their original fuction. As we look at those two structures, we can say only as much as we know or imagine about the civilizations in which they were built–which is limited. What we can discuss as thoroughly as we wish is the contrast in style. The very fact that we speak of the ‘history of art’ reveals that we group things as art, including things whose makers thought of as gods, demons, talismans, shield–as anything but art: a word that may have had no equivalent in their language. Hence the Imaginary Museum is not an eclecticism. It is a humanism, and quite unlike the sentimental egalitarianisms that go by that name in contemporary political debate.

    Modern art and the museums, ordinary and Imaginary, contribute to the exaltation of art itself, permitting Malraux to define art as “that by which forms become style.” Style is signification–that is, a selection of parts of the universe oriented “toward an essential part of man”– towards the distinctively human in man . If modern artist subordinate everything to art alone, if they  orient their selection of phenomena toward the ‘artistic’ part of man, what then, is an artist? Non-artists often assume that artists express sentiments and portray objects, with a lot of sensitivity. But when he spoke to painters and sculptor, Malraux found that they wanted not so much to express sentiments and portray objects as to metamorphose them into works of art. A great artist, Malraux remarks, doesn’t become an artist because he experienced a sentimental upsurge while viewing a sunset and then murmured to himself, “I, too, will become an painter!’ No, he usually traces it to his ambition to an emotion felt while viewing a painting or a sculpture. His life’s work reflects not childhood struggles with parents but adult struggles with other artists’ work. It begins with imitation but ends with overcoming: a direct overcoming of other paintings and sculptures, and thereby an overcoming of the forms of the world, including death. This artistic overcoming is the artist’s ‘conquest’: unlike the conquest of an army or a technology, artistic conquest  doesn’t necessarily destroy the adversary. Our Imaginary Museum contains Picasso’s Las Meninas alongside that of Velázquez.

    What is the significance of this domain? Again, why would we care about Van Gogh’s style, or visit museums? The answer comes from looking at an obvious problem: if people become artists after looking art, where did the first artist come from? Malraux doesn’t believe in any representational instinct. It’s precisely the non-instinctive which gives rise to art: the conscious and creative power that freely attacks destiny, whether destiny takes the form of History, oppression, the natural world, death, the instincts, or sorrow. We care about the creative act because that which is in us that is against destiny is with the artist. It is our distinctively human part which expresses forms in terms of values–religious in other times, artistic in ours. The first artist was implicit in the first conscious human, the first one who began to act according to that consciousness, to oppose destiny both outside of himself and within himself. The impulse behind modern technology attempts to master outer destiny, but it usually does so at the service of inner destiny: instincts, sentiments, desires, those impulses in us which ally themselves with outer destiny, “the world’s indifference” to human things.

    Thus this will-to-creation has an ethical quality. Malraux says that “a torture-victim by Goya no longer belongs to torture-victims, but to painting.” Or, as he writes in the passage I quoted at the beginning of this lecture, Rousseau’s Confessions “save” the confessor “because the domain of art is not that of life”; a “destiny submitted to” becomes, through art, “destiny dominated.” Almost alone in modernity, artists retain this sense of formation, of overcoming not only the world but themselves. “It took [Goya] forty years to become Goya.” Moreover, because our most human part comes out in the artist, art is really a shared defense against destiny. This lonely effort at self-formation, of overcoming, yields a painting, a sculpture–or a poem or a symphony, for that matter–which is a human voice, not obliterating but holding its own against the inhuman voices around it, and around us. It is a presence, for us.

    Each of you knows this. Each of you has some lines from a poem, memories of paintings, books, songs–especially songs–which unite you with some artist who’s probably dead by now. These works of art have changed since they were made; you’re not the one who made them. But each one survives its maker’s death because insofar as it is artful it evidences his, and your, distinctively human part, which is not destiny. And the very technology  desires also brings us those things which oppose mere desires. Technology brings the Imaginary Museum. Not all power in modernity serves what one correspondent in Temptation of the West calls “the systematic allegory of itself.”

    Hence the importance of Picasso. You may have noticed reviews of the latest of Malraux’s books to appear in this country, translated under the title, Picasso’s Mask. Re-written, it forms a section of the second volume of Malraux’s anti-autobiography. Picasso’s importance to Malraux inheres in the purity of his modernism. Malraux defends Picasso against critics who say he never probed deeply into any one style but shifted restlessly from one style to another; they overlook that Picasso’s art is about metamorphosis. And metamorphosis, the result of creation, is modern art. True, Picasso’s art, in Malraux’s words, “is that of human limits…. That of our civilization which sneeringly expresses the spiritual void, as the Romanesque style expressed plenitude of soul.” Yet when Malraux visits Picasso’s burial-place at Vauvenargues he calls it a “mausoleum of creation” and a “temple beyond time, even if the centuries imprison Picasso in [our own time].” Both temple and tomb, then, for the civilization which had previously failed to invent them. With Picasso’s tomb, modernity has found its domain of transcendence, setting it against time and death–destiny.

    Malraux asserts that “the art of a living religion is… that of a defense against destiny by an immense communion.” Communion entails presence, in two senses: the presence of one’s fellows; and the presence of some value or purpose that acts on people as community, as a common unity. So Malraux says that “No civilization… ever began with the warrior. It began when the legislator or priest set out to civilize the warrior, it began when argument asserted its supremacy over brute fact. Every civilization implies the awareness of and respect for the other.” And the domain of art, where the voices of dead artists speak to us, make themselves present, embodies at least part of that necessary commonly-held system of values which can act on the modern community. Rousseau tells us that the Spartans didn’t merely observe the laws but loved them, and that this unified Sparta; the laws were present in the mind of each Spartan, as was the civil religion those law embodied. I mention this to suggest that Malraux’s Imaginary museum, modernity’s domain of transcendence, has a political aspect.  He writes that the  “attitude of man in the face of the universe,” basic to art, is also “what founds kingdoms  and constructs cities.”  I think Malraux wants to reconnect the artists and society, to end the schism that modernity provoked, by making art one aspect of political legitimacy in a way that would affirm artistic liberty. This can occur because the self-overcoming of the artist and the art-lover isn’t purely individualistic. “Enriching one’s fellowship with others nourishes…what makes a man human, which enables him to create, invent, or realize himself.” If this is Nietzscheism, it s a social and political Nietzscheism. Man’s artistic part is the foundation of politics because both art and politics are communal defenses against destiny.

    The Imaginary Museum is more inclusive than a civil religion; art, Malraux writes, is “not a religion but a Faith.” This civil faith invites self-overcoming by fusing liberty and responsibility. If culture is “the incarnation of a system of values,” “the coinciding of sensibilities,” and “the ensemble of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought which have permitted man to be less enslaved,” then it prepares him for citizenship as well as for manhood. Liberty involves, among other things, the liberty to discover. For the community, this implies the protection of artists from the kind of censorship (and worse) exercised under the regimes of modern tyranny (called totalitarianism). The totalitarians sup[pose they know what Truth is–or at least how to get to it–whereas Malraux’s civil faith knows itself to be faith, not knowledge. The danger, Malraux sees, is that under conditions of liberty the arts of satiation have their chance, too. “In the battle for the human imagination, a civilization unwilling to impose its dreams on all its members must give each its opportunity.”

    This is why Malraux calls his humanism a tragic humanism. Liberty, today, means facing an unknown, facing it while struggling with destiny in the form of the arts of satiation and in the form of the nature of political action itself. As a character in one of his novels says, “Action is action and justice is justice”; they are seldom perfectly aligned. Unlike the Marxists, Malraux doesn’t unify value and act; as he acknowledged in The Temptation of the West, the Western inclination to act can destroy an admirable civilization. Fortunately, it can also build one, although on the level of politics it won’t be an incarnated ideal. To Malraux, human life is tragic because we can resist, but not obliterate destiny. Political life reflects that underlying human condition.

    At one point in the Anti-Memoirs Malraux has someone ask him, “In fact, what were you, politically,” in 1930–just before a modern tyranny took power in the country next to France. “Nothing. Say: liberal.” Malraux abandoned the political liberalism of his youth for what he came to call “cultural liberalism.” Unlike political liberalism, which he identifies with parliamentarianism, cultural liberalism “does not exclude strength of will but is founded on it.” Political liberalism admires but fails to defend liberty; French parliamentarianism failed to defend France against Hitler. Malraux told the democratic socialist parliamentarian Léon Blum that “Politics for me implies the creation, then the action of a state. Without the state, all politics is in the future.” The state defends the nation. Years later, in 1967, Malraux said, “I am subordinating social justice to the nation because I think that if one does not gain the support of the nation one will not have social justice, one will simply make speeches.” I’ve said that Malraux thinks the artist is both at liberty and responsible, both against destiny and for human-ness. “Cultural liberalism” expresses that thought politically. The statesman, the man of the state, not the parliamentarian, has the authority to insist on it. If what is in us that is against destiny is with the artist, what is in us that is against destiny is also with the statesman.

    Malraux advanced cultural liberalism in two ways: by institution and by myth-making. As Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Cultural Affairs, he attempted to make technology serve human ends. He did indeed seek to put the greatest number of works at the service of he greatest number of men but this was not, he insisted, a “culture for all”–doled out, as by American television, or imposed, as by totalitarians–but “culture for each one.” By this he meant each person may actively obtain it; culture, in Malraux’s words, “is not a heritage but a conquest” for artists and non-artists alike. Those who want it can try to achieve it. Those who don’t, don’t get force-fed. Malraux sought to decentralize culture in France by founding what he called “Houses of Culture.” For centuries Paris had been France’s political and artistic center; the provinces, on the other hand, inspired the word ‘provincial.’ Built in provincial cities, the Houses of Culture supplanted the bad ‘academic’ paintings in local museums with reproductions of great ones; Malraux added phonograph records, books, films, and facilities for staging plays and holding art exhibits and concerts: “a facility which invites use by anyone who cares to take advantage of it but does not force the masses through another political rolling mill.” That machine-image is no accident. Here again, Malraux associates totalitarianism with the wrong use of technology; both are agents of destiny, and both can be resisted by using similar though not identical means, namely, republican state power against totalitarian state power and technology in the service of values against technology in the service of instincts, sentiments, and desires.

    Speaking of which: institutions alone can hardly resist such forces; most people choose TV over Tolstoy. “For a very small number of men, passionate for history, [the past] is the object of an interrogation; its elucidation is a conquest, unceasingly pursued, over chaos For all the others, it comes alive only in becoming a vast, legendary fiction”–a myth, without which institutions stand lifeless. A myth isn’t true in the historian’s sense of the word but it’s the version of events by which “humanity is nourished.” As the European in The Temptation of the West puts it, “Our brothers are those whose childhood was ruled in accordance with the rhythm of the epics and legends which dominated ours.” Myth yields communion, and Malraux’s civil faith in art, which serves a system of values–tragic humanism–needs its legendary fictions. The Imaginary Museum helps but does not suffice: “Modern art no longer knows what can be an exemplary idea of man,” although “it often suggests to us an exemplary idea of the artist.”

    Fortunately, the domain of politics consists of more than institutions. “Every great form of politics which surpasses the politics of the politicians creates its particular human type.” In the France after World War Two, Malraux contended that “it is only among the Gaullists that there can develop the human attitude of which the liberal hero”–the exemplary figure of cultural liberalism–“would be the symbol.” Two such symbols did “develop,” and both of them appear in the Anti-Memoirs. One of them is the narrator and the other is de Gaulle. Tonight, there’s no time to discuss this “vast, legendary fiction” in detail; it must suffice to tell you that it presents tragic humanism in several domains, including art and politics. In politics, the virtues it upholds are austerity, unity, and national independence–all components of de Gaulle’s constellation-word, grandeur.

    Such a book won’t reach a mass audience, though some sections, published separately, were best-sellers in France. For a wider audience, political rhetoric is necessary, and both de Gaulle and Malraux spoke many times in defense of the Fifth Republic, often with electoral success. Thinking of art, Malraux observes, “The masses are far from invariably preferring what I best for them; still, on occasion they are drawn to it.” In politics, too: and when they are, they respond to that in themselves which is neither of the mass nor of the isolated individual: they respond to liberty–which is also responsibility–and to fraternity. They become a people, not a mass.

    Malraux scholar Janine Mossuz identified what she called the “Malraux triptyque“: liberty, authority, fraternity. I follow her in omitting equality from the famous French revolutionary slogan, not because Malraux denies equal natural or civil rights to his fellow citizens but because he has another point to make. Granted that technology, if it doesn’t imply a specific metaphysics, at least inclines toward one that denies Eastern contemplativeness. Granted, also, that technology and politics operate in the realm of action. Still, within those limits, technological and political power can serve the instincts or values. Malraux’s real opponent, especially in the last twenty-five years of his life, wasn’t so much technology as egalitarianism, the feeling that the instincts are the same as values, or ‘just as good’ as values–or even, as some of the students in the 1960s decided, better than values. At the beginning of this lecture I suggested Malraux’s reply to the mass-magazine called People: “In the order of the secret, men are a little too easily equal.” In publicizing the private, gossip insists that everyone is ‘really the same,’ while isolating each one in his envy of those famous folks who more prominent than he.

    A character in Malraux’s Spanish Civil War novel, Man’s Hope, a trade unionist, disdains what he implies is the bourgeois notion of egalitarianism. The contrary of humiliation isn’t equality, he insists, but fraternity. While it is true that fraternity implies some degree of equality–one doesn’t exactly fraternize with dogs, although one may like them–fraternity, unlike equality doesn’t preclude deference. Fraternity leaves room for military leadership and political governance.

    Consider the possibility that this century has been what it’s been because men have preferred to serve what Malraux calls destiny. They often do so by trying to conquer one aspect of destiny in order to gratify another–conquering the world at the service of History, or at the service of the instincts, or at the service of the State. I came here to ask you to look at something else.

    Can democracy be cultural? Insofar as it’s based on egalitarianism, no.