Chapter Seven: THE SAINT-SIMONIAN HISTORICAL ELEMENT
Saint-Simonianism and Louis Napoleon
The influence of Saint-Simonianism on Napoleon III was more commonly noted among contemporaries of Louis than among later historians of the Second Empire. For example, Sainte-Beuve is widely reported to have hailed the arrival of Napoleon III on the French political scene as "Saint-Simon on horseback," the historic embodiment of that thinker's thought. [1] Such a view of the Emperor gets its fullest articulation in Joly's Dialogue.
According to Octave Aubrey, the influence of Saint-Simon was a lot more than something Napoleon absorbed from the intellectual atmosphere of nineteenth century France. While a political prisoner for five and half years in the fortress of Ham, Louis Napoleon read deeply in the corpus of Saint-Simon and even annotated his works! Like other despotic ideologues of later times, Napoleon remarked upon the formative experience of his years of study in prison -- "my university," he later dubbed it. Albert Guerard repeats the more common view of the Second Empire -- a "gilded age" of pleasure seeking and profiteering that witnessed "the triumph of materialism in all its forms." However, he sees "another aspect to the period," more revealing of the Emperor himself and "his deeper views." Like observers contemporary to Napoleon, he links such levels of thought in the Emperor to Saint-Simonianism.
According to Guerard, "without being formally associated with the Saint-Simonian school, he was animated by its spirit." In particular, he notes the religious character of such thought expressed in its "fundamental principle" that "the first duty of government is to promote the welfare, material and moral, of the most numerous and poorest class." Furthermore, "it is significant that a number of Saint-Simonians, Father Enfantin, and the Pereire brothers, without abjuring the messianic hopes of their youth, became prominent business leaders under the Second Empire." [3]
Twentieth century historians of the Second Empire, who are aware of Saint-Simonianism, may see it as having some bearing on diverse social and economic projects of the Emperor, but they typically do not see it as having any coherent political influence. Saint-Simon and his intellectual progeny are best studied with other curious thinkers of the day, such as Fourier in France or Owen in Great Britain, who proposed radically flawed social experiments in the face of the dislocation brought on by industrialism. Most noteworthy in this regard is the thinking of George G. Iggers. He meticulously draws out the totalitarian implications of Saint-Simonian doctrine but denies any practical influence to its teaching beyond its contribution to the climate of ideas in the early nineteenth century. For Iggers, Saint-Simonianism is nothing but "a totalitarian fantasy." [4] For Joly, it gave form to the real world in which he lived.
More recent scholarship sees the Iggers thesis as an overwrought distortion of the thrust of Saint-Simonian thinking. Emphasizing certain "softer" elements in the thought of the Saint-Simonians, the Manuels see the revolution they espoused more as a "tender failure" [5] than a "totalitarian fantasy." However, they seem to agree that the Saint-Simonians exerted no great influence on political practice and stand in a line of interpretations beginning with Marx who branded Saint-Simonianism as "utopian," engaged only in sterile speculation because it misperceived the material reality of the historic process.
It is not surprising that current readers of Joly's work largely miss the Saint-Simonian connection to the Dialogue. It is indeed never made explicit there, though numerous references are made to "new theories" of which Machiavelli is the spokesman. In this regard, Joly seems to prefer to follow the real Napoleon who ever remained the enigmatic "Sphinx of the Tuileries." He disguised his motives, never, as Guerard says, formally acknowledging his association with the Saint-Simonian school, which stood in a certain bad repute for its esoteric practices and cultist proclivities. [6]
In establishing the link between Machiavelli in the Dialogue and Saint-Simonianism, we will reestablish the link between Napoleonism and Saint-Simonianism perceived early on by the more astute contemporaries of the Second Empire. Later, we will argue that the earlier view, most richly developed by Maurice Joly, can help resolve the historic controversy surrounding the Second Empire as well as the enigma of Louis Napoleon. The element of Saint-Simonian thought is the key to a full understanding of the Dialogue in Hell and the Emperor.
When Joly wrote the Dialogue in Hell, Louis Napoleon was securely in the saddle. His despotic regime was well in place. The Dialogue in Hell is not merely the step-by-step recounting of the establishment of this regime, as fascinating and informative as this is. Joly was convinced that the actions of the Emperor were fundamentally motivated by a new way of thinking, an ideology that gave coherence to the revolutionary steps he took. The thinking that informed Napoleon's regime is what made it so unique and portentous. We now turn to a brief elaboration of that ideology and its pretensions to world-historic significance.
The Saint-Simonian View of History
The Saint-Simonian understanding of history attempts to synthesize both ancient and modern conceptions. To the ancient way of thinking, history is cyclical. The natural laws of growth and decay serve as the pattern for the understanding of human things. Political history "made sense" not in terms of some ultimate meaning but as belonging to certain cycles-rhythms of genesis, growth, disintegration, and death. This is the fated dispensation of all things ephemeral. It is manifested in the rise and fall of political regimes that, in turn, elicits the response of historical actors. Their conduct in these circumstances remains the most profitable study for understanding the human dilemmas and our common lot. [7]
Different assumptions inform the modern concept of history .Political history is understood, not as part of a natural scheme of things and subject to fate, but as a progression in time of events largely determined by human causes and effects. As expressed by the Montesquieu of the Dialogue, who can be seen as spokesman for such a view, the sequence of events is also progressive.
History came to be perceived as a process, with clear lines of development. It manifests the progress of reason whose advances are cumulative, irreversible, and potentially universal in its effect. The proper posture of man, therefore, is not one of manly equanimity and moderation in dealing with limitations that can not be changed. Rather, it is one of hopeful endeavor in the full realization that the scope of human events and nature itself is not subject to fate alone, but responsive to rational human effort.
As in the modern view, the Saint-Simonians see history essentially as a process reflecting the universal advance of reason but whose political effects are variable, as in the ancient view, passing through progressive extremes of order and dissolution. The historic process is not then an open process of simple linear progress but a varied one, with a definitive and necessary conclusion in the coming to pass of a universal society .Unlike the ancients, this greater dispensation of things is not caused by blind fate beyond human control. It is the product of human effort in the fulfillment of a rationally determined end to which all history can be seen as tending.
In the Paris Lectures of 1828, the Saint-Simonian historical view gets its most detailed elaboration. Like natural phenomena, history is shown to be subject to certain laws. And its future "behavior" can be confidently predicted when these laws stand fully revealed.
"Organic" and "Critical" Moments
"The law of history development" shows itself in two distinct and alternating states of society. [8] In the one state, which is called "organic," all human activity proceeds from a "general theory" or doctrine. "The goal of all social action is clearly defined." It is accepted and acted upon by all orders of society, according to their different capacities and functions. It engages the individual totally in his threefold capacity as an "intellectual, sentient, and physical being." The other state, called "critical," is marked by the cessation of all communion of thought, fellow feeling, and collective action. "Society appears as a mere agglomeration of isolated individuals fighting each other."
Each of these states has occupied two periods "in a long historical series." The first organic period occurred during the religious era of ancient Greece, marked by the ascendancy of the pagan gods. It was followed by a period, commonly called "philosophic" because of the presence of such luminaries as Plato and Aristotle, but which the Saint-Simonians would "term more exactly the critical period" because it opposes the religiously-based orthodoxy that integrated and defined life in the ancient polis. Later, a new doctrine was formulated that finally established dominance over the West. The Church administered a new organic epoch which, in turn, began to dissolve in the sixteenth century, (among other things, the moment of Machiavelli, whose critique of the former order had broadened in the centuries that followed).
Critical epochs themselves can be further subdivided "into distinct periods." The first is marked by the arousal of "the most sensitive men," whose call for the end of the old established order finds a sympathetic response in the masses, loosened from all authority. This period erupts with "accumulated rancor" and issues into a burst of collective action that serves destructive purposes only. "Soon there remains of the former institutions nothing but ruins to testify that there once has been a harmonious society."
The second period in critical epochs marks the interval that separates the destruction of the former order and the construction of the new. At this point, "anarchy has ceased to be violent" but it has grown wider and deeper with the conditions of society replicating themselves in the personality of the individual in a complete divergence of feeling, reasoning, and action. It is an age (most recently, the moment of Romanticism) marked by a sickness in the soul that longs for a return to a time that unites man to his fellows by sympathetic bonds.
As the historical process evolves, it expands to cover wider and wider segments of mankind. The first organic period is identified in a precise geographic place -- Greece. It is succeeded in a second such period by a system that includes "all of the Occident." It follows in Saint-Simonian doctrine that a third organic period will be universal, succeeding in turn the dissolution that affected the West in its recent revolutionary past. Indeed, the universal ground for the Saint-Simonian future is a factor that points to its definitive character.
The new general state of mankind, which the Saint-Simonians proclaim as our future, will form the third and final organic link "in an uninterrupted chain" of history. A simple return to the happy moments in the past presents no practicable solution for modern men. The new era will not be identical with such former "organic" states but "will share striking similarities to them with respect to order and unity" which will advance to its most complete realization "in the full association of humanity." The epoch will evince an ascendancy of a new doctrine that embraces all the modes of human activity, once again reintegrating the individual to society that has been in the process of dissolution under the influence of a destructive critical doctrine.
Organic epochs are characterized by a consensus of beliefs, which the "Doctrine of Saint-Simon" intends to serve in the future. This core set of shared principles finds full expression in society and is reflected in its institutional arrangements. A unity of purpose, effectively organized and looking toward a comprehensive view of things, marks such periods as "philosophic." Strictly speaking, there have been no more philosophic doctrines "worthy of the name" than there have been "general states of mankind," a situation having occurred only twice in the past, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, the precise character of which is crucial to understanding the lines of future developments.
"Critical" periods, in turn, may be characterized as the time of the progressive erosion of the former philosophic unity that is the basis of the integrated social order. These critical periods reach their term .in egoism and social confusion, creating an objective "need" for a new order, which falls to the prophetic "genius" to articulate philosophically. The Saint-Simonians identify both critical periods with a presiding figure as they identify the genius of the future "organic" order with their spiritual mentor, Saint-Simon.
It was the appearance of Socrates that marked the beginning of the end of the older order in antiquity. The defenders of this order correctly saw in his life a threat to the city's gods and its fundamental beliefs. But in ordering his death, they unwittingly had served to make his questionable life attractive and respectable, the immediate heirs and beneficiaries of which were Socrates's pupils, Plato and Xenophon. [9] In commanding this individual's death, they liberated the critical spirit and, ironically, guaranteed the "death" of the society they had intended to defend.
The appearance of Socrates, which first marks a period of dissolution, also serves history in a progressive way by making possible the eventual emergence of a new and higher historical order. Indeed, Socratic science (Neo-Platonic and Aristotlean) conjoin with Biblical revelation in the great synthesizers of the Middle Ages (Augustine and Thomas) to form the constitutive elements of a new doctrine. This is given organizational expression by the Church in the society of the Middle Ages. Critical science, it should be well noted, passes into the philosophy of the new epoch and becomes part of the theoretical underpinning of a new faith that reaches its ascendancy under the institutionalized protection of the Church and its Pope.
Such considerations mark critical epochs as inherently ambiguous-destructive from the point of view of political unity, but constructive and progressive in preparing and as a part of a "greater human association. " Thus, the progress of science and philosophy has had varied political effects and may be said to be the cause of history's cyclical turns, which the ancients more narrowly observed and construed as fate.
According to the Saint-Simonians, the appearance of Bacon marks the second critical period and inaugurates .the dissolution of the Middle Ages. Since the sixteenth century, "scientists all follow the road opened by Bacon." [10] With the Enlightenment, we reach the furthest reaches of Baconian science and the beginning of the death throes of the Middle Ages, whose principles and institutions suffer from irremediable attack, preparing the way for an era of revolution and social dissolution that characterizes the present crisis.
Saint-Simonianism and the Dialogue
In the element of Saint-Simonian philosophy, just described, we may now profitably return to the dispute between Machiavelli and Montesquieu that serves as the dramatic focus of Joly's Dialogue. It is their understanding of universal history that is ultimately put to question in their "wager" and this determines the sufficiency of their respective political sciences, invoked in history's name. Montesquieu elaborates his view of history in Part One and Machiavelli in the concluding parts of the Dialogue, where an alternative view is progressively revealed. We thus come to the full historic implications of Machiavelli's teaching eventually. It is only at the end that we come to a full appreciation of what his "founding" portends and the sense that he has elaborated a totally "new" political science, explicitly opposed to the Montesquieuan understanding of things.
The initial lines of their dispute would have us believe that Machiavelli is arguing the ancient or medieval conception of history with the most formidable spokesman of modernity, Montesquieu. The latter confidently expounds the progressive historical view that has superseded and discredited his opponent's position. Machiavelli's cyclical view of history seems to hearken back to a view that would have political life tied to an ineluctable fate which, like the natural order of things, exhibits a time of growth and decay, order and dissolution.
Montesquieu, at least, thinks he is responding to such a view when he claims that the cumulative discoveries of reason have put politics on a progressive course. Through his own efforts, man can eliminate much of the control of fate and with it the ancient debilitating fear of the living agents, "despots" and "priests," who supposedly control it. Montesquieu points to what he thinks is certain historical evidence that vindicates his position. At the same time, he underscores his own contributions to political science in opening society to reason and establishing the stable conditions for self-rule.
The material and moral advance of man is guaranteed in a regime that effectively guards against a lapse into despotism. The new "constitutional era" which Montesquieu celebrates holds no possibility for a return to an "era of revolution," anarchy, and despotic rule. The historic swings between autocracy and anarchy are overcome in a regime of "ordered liberty." This ends the turmoil that formerly marked political life and which was most acute perhaps at the moment of Machiavelli in the sixteenth century.
Evidence from contemporary events alone would challenge Montesquieu's optimism. Cognizant of the recent anarchy that shook the West, Machiavelli launches his first serious attack on the theories of his interlocutor, who is found crucially ignorant of such events. Framed in Saint-Simonian terms, the present moment reveals the active revolutionary period as having ceased with the violence of 1848. The West has arrived at that pregnant moment when the old "critical" epoch has reached its term, as anarchy has grown wider and deeper within society. It is the interval that prepares the "birth" of a new order, the founding of which is the active goal of Napoleon III.
Such considerations give the proper perspective from which to view the real scope of Machiavelli's historical understanding of things. Broader and more complex than that of the ancients, it begins to meld more fully and obviously with the Saint- Simonian understanding of history when we consider the character of the Machiavellian or Napoleonic revolution as aiming precisely at a new and final "organic" order. This leaves the "critical" science of Montesquieu open to the charge leveled by the Saint-Simonians and repeated by the Machiavelli of the Dialogue that it has failed to definitively solve the political problem and has, rather, issued into an "age of revolution" and instability.
The cyclical view of history propounded by Machiavelli is not, as Montesquieu imagines, the ancient or Medieval conception. Machiavelli is not in fact so limited by the time in which he lived and the thought that dominated it. Rather, Machiavelli argues in the mode of the Saint-Simonians and would have those "cycles" of political and social life integrated into the full scope of world history as part of a long and "uninterrupted chain" and process.
Machiavelli gives voice to the Saint-Simonian contention that links the historic crisis facing the West to the diminishing hold of religion and the final passing of the medieval order. Montesquieu initially perceives Machiavelli, who was "born on the borders of such an epoch," as its defender and its last effective spokesman. He sees Machiavelli's opposition to the modern understanding of politics he espouses as stemming from ignorance of more recent historical developments and a stubborn defense of the politics of an epoch -- no matter how "modern" the idiom or how clever the arguments -- that history has passed by.
In such an epoch, Christian doctrine provided the organizational principles of society. Repeating the charges of the Saint- Simonians, Machiavelli claims that the thought of Montesquieu, among others even less prudent, has inevitably bred individualism and atheism, whose effects have been to loosen the bonds of society, setting it upon its anarchic drift. The progress to such a point marks a definitive period that coincides with the most recent "critical" moment in the Saint-Simonian "Law of Historical Development." Its beginning can be said to lie in the Renaissance of the sixteenth century and its tentative steps toward modernity. It ends with "the great Montesquieu" whose works, especially The Spirit of the Laws, represent the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment and the systematized application of modern principles of thought to the understanding of politics and history.
According to Machiavelli, the necessity for order in society requires unlimited personal rule, the legitimacy of which cannot be called into question. Montesquieu claims to have discovered in "popular sovereignty," rightly understood, a new principle of rule and an alternative to the notion of "divine right," defended by Machiavelli as providing the authoritative grounding for the Middle Ages. The modern constitutional regime, organized on a popular basis, better attains the political stability sought by Machiavelli, not by despotic repression of popular will and impulses, but in their liberation and through the guarantee of freedom of thought.
The period roughly from Machiavelli and the Renaissance to Montesquieu, which coincides with the most recent "critical" moment in the Saint-Simonian "Law of Historic Development," also accords with their essential understanding of such epochs. The era over which the thought of Montesquieu presides is founded expressly on "critical" principles, opposed to the political arrangement of the Middle Ages. The success of the Enlightenment project dissolves the former order but fails to secure an enduring basis for politics, at least according to Machiavelli and his reading of contemporary history. This creates the need for a new founding to arrest the anarchy such principles have engendered. The overriding necessity for order requires a return to a political orthodoxy that once again sanctions personal rule in religious terms. The conditions that define "organic" orders as such are reestablished but in accord with certain historical principles, advanced by Montesquieu, which do no violence to critical elements of the "modern spirit."
A Return to the "Organic" Conditions of Society
In conformity with the conditions of an "organic" order, the Saint-Simonian ideologue wants to put an end to what it sees as the alienated modern soul -- the disaccord that one feels between oneself and the "mind" and "heart" of one's fellows, and to put an end to a situation where satisfaction of one's "material interests" can be had only at the expense of others. In sum, to "cure" the sickness" in the soul, the individual once again must be fully integrated with his fellows in a greater community of shared "religious" purpose. It is not by coincidence that successive parts of the Dialogue endeavor to fulfill precisely the Saint-Simonian perspective in this regard and that the discussion as a whole ends with a description of the new "religious consciousness."
More precisely, Part Two explains how in a literate nation the Machiavellian founder will use a "free press," the chief safeguard of the Montesquieuan system, to his own advantage. It contains in outline the essentials of a new orthodoxy and the means to ensure its propagation. The security of autocratic power in modern times is crucially premised on winning over the "minds" of the subject.
The political revolution in Part Two is complemented in Part Three by an economic revolution. The prince promises a vast industrial expansion, led by the state and its use of credit, which ultimately looks toward a more complete scientific organization of the nation's productive forces. This has as its putative goal "the amelioration of the lot of the poor." They were perceived to be systematically excluded from sharing in material benefits as a result of the organization of liberal society and its failure, under uncoordinated conditions, to make good on what was promised by the advance of technological knowledge.
The political and economic revolutions in Part Two and Part Three proceed apace and are integral to each other. On the basis of unencumbered political power, the prince may undertake the reformation of society. On the basis of economic expansion, in which the poor now share, the prince defuses the principal source of revolutionary discontent and begins to win popularity to his new despotic rule. In Part Three, the "material interests" of man are enlisted to the same regime that succeeded in Part Two to win over their "minds."
Part Four represents the keystone in the structure of the Saint-Simonian regime that Machiavelli erects. It describes a revolution in "spiritual" realms that complements the revolution in political and economic realms, previously elaborated in respective parts of the Dialogue. The rule. of the all-powerful prince on behalf of the interests of the "poorest and most numerous classes" is endowed with the higher justifications of religion, the principles of which are advanced by a new kind of leader. The new prince claims the allegiance, not only of the mind, but speaks to deeper levels of truth associated with the "hearts" of his subjects, levels to which religion heretofore uniquely spoke.
The "spirit of the age" is exalted in art and architecture that has the new prince and what he represents as its theme. Art ceases to be "critical" -- individualistic" and "heroically negative" -- as it manifested itself at the moment of Romanticism. As at the time of the Middle Ages, it once again finds inspiration in serving "positive" ends, giving aesthetic embellishment to the new under lying religious consensus of society. [11] Indeed, the revival of art would be the most telling element of the return to organic moments as such.
In a revolution that touches religious consciousness and the nature of civilized life itself, Machiavelli reveals the full scope of the historic change he intends. It is as a god and in terms of a new understanding of religion that the new Machiavellian prince pursues his towering political ambitions and attempts to stamp his personality on the historic order to come. He has combined the role of Romulus and Numa in a new founding that has Rome in many of its particulars as its most relevant precedent. Put succinctly, he attempts a return to the "organic" conditions that formerly characterized politics, but in the context of modernity and looking toward universal influence.
At the end of the Dialogue proper, Machiavelli asserts that the respective positions of the two antagonists, spelled out in Part One, have finally begun "to come together." The elements of Saint-Simonian thought which guide the Machiavellian founding reveal for us the real basis of this "rapprochement." Key principles of "critical" science that opposed the medieval order are reflected in the organization of a new "organic" society, which is offered as the third and final link in a long historical process, succeeding Montesquieu's "constitutional era."
The new order presents itself as completing the democratic thrust of history with which Montesquieu thought he was aligned in establishing the constitutional regime. It replaces the regime of individual "rights," which supposedly remain "cruelly abstract" for the majority of peoples, with a regime of unlimited power, dedicated to the "amelioration of the lot of the poorest and most numerous classes." To the thinker who stands for "progress," the return to unlimited personal rule is associated with "barbarism." The Machiavellian prince, however, presents his rule as an historic advance that draws upon the deepest sources of authority in the West to justify itself in modern times. As Machiavelli argues, such rule gives concrete fulfillment to the material interests of its subjects as it also answers to deeper desires, ultimately of religious origin, which are satisfied in a this-worldly context.
The return to the "organic" conditions of society in the context of modern times, the step that essentially defines the Saint- Simonian project, explains the ambiguity in the character of Machiavelli as well as his regime. Machiavelli is not so limited by the horizon of the Middle Ages as Montesquieu initially presumes. He defends a return to a new kind of personal rule, not as a reactionary, but in terms of historic "progress." At the same time and in dramatic fashion, a "new" Machiavelli emerges which shatters Montesquieu's stereotypic view of his interlocutor and mocks the condescending posture he had assumed toward him.
The Saint-Simonian ideology that lies behind Machiavelli's thought remains unidentified in the Dialogue. This heightens the ambiguity of the character of Machiavelli and his regime while it gives Joly's work its dramatic power. It forces the reader for whom the Dialogue was intended, as it does Montesquieu, to further reflection on the character of Machiavelli and his politics. However, as that politics is associated with the infamous name of Machiavelli, the reader is led to contemplate his regime from the point of view of an unprecedented tyranny, potentially universal in scope. In this way, the literary mode of Joly's teaching opens to political lessons of great consequences to Joly's contemporaries, threatened by such a regime. Joly's way of proceeding in all this is motivated to serve didactic purposes in the most effective way.
In the following chapter, we will discus in greater detail the character of the new regime from the point of view of the new religious foundations for politics. In the chapter after that, we will try to come to terms with the figure of Machiavelli as he has come to light in Joly's work.
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Notes
1. Sainte-Beuve was literary critic at Le Globe and himself frequented Saint-Simonian circles. He was an apologist for the Second Empire and Napoleon III. His statement about Napoleon and Saint-Simon can be found in Albert Guerard, France, new edition revised and enlarged by Paul. A. Gagnon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 312.
2. See Octave Aubrey, The Second Empire, trans. Arthur Livingston (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1940), 22.
3. Guerard, France, 312.
4. See Georg G. Iggers's Preface to the second edition of The Doctrine of Saint Simon. An Exposition (New York: Schoken Books, 1972),22. Iggers denies any appreciable and "direct relevance" of Saint-Simonianism to "later thought and practice." He stresses its large contribution to the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century.
5. See Frank M. and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1979), 63 1 and 635.
6. The Saint-Simonians for a time lived on the Rue Monsigny. The sect eventually split between the followers of Bazard and Enfantin. The latter wished to establish a fantastic sacerdotal commune with very lax notions about the relationship between the sexes. His group moved to Menilmontant, where, distinguished by an extravagant way of dressing, they lived in communistic fashion. The sect was broken up in l 832 after the public trial of Enfantin whose bizarre antics and behavior, influenced in part by his readings of Mesmer, intentionally provoked jurists and audience. He was condemned and imprisoned for outrages against the social order.
7. See Karl Lowith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 4. Lowith describes the ancient understanding of history thus:
The ancients were more moderate [than Hebrew and Christian thinkers] in their speculations. They did not presume to make sense of the world or to discover its ultimate meaning. They were impressed by the visible order and beauty of the cosmos, and the cosmic law of growth and decay was also the pattern of their understanding of history. According to the Greek view of life and the world, everything moves in recurrences, like the eternal recurrence of sunrise and sunset, of summer and winter, of generation and corruption. This view was satisfactory to them because it is a rational and natural understanding of the universe combining recognition of temporal changes with periodic regularity, constancy, and immutability. The immutable, as visible in the fixed order of the heavenly bodies, had a higher interest and value to them than any progressive and radical change.
8. This summary of the "Law of Historic Development" is drawn mainly from Iggers (ed.), The Doctrine, "On the Necessity of a New Social Doctrine" (First Session) and "The Law of the Development of Mankind: Verification of this Law by History" (Second Session).
9. For a discussion of the "critical era" of antiquity, see Iggers, (ed.) The Doctrine, 17 and especially 216.
10. Iggers (ed.), The Doctrine, 7.
II. Think of the epoch's (mankind's?) greatest artistic and architectural achievement -- the medieval cathedral.
It should be well noted that Louis Napoleon showed himself very sensitive to the concerns we are talking about here when he commissioned Charles Gautier to construct the opulent Paris Opera and to give it such prominence in the reconstructed city. The Communists and Nazis were equally sensitive. They, too, thought their respective world historic revolutions would occasion the regeneration of art.
The artistic legacy of Louis Napoleon is decidedly more mixed. It is, at its worst, tinged with Romanticism, an imitative pastiche, tending to ostentation and excess. What are we to say of Mitterand's Opera, la Pryramide, la Defense, and his library (dubbed the T.G.B., the tres grand bibliotheque, in a play on the T.G.V. -- Train de Grande Vitesse)? If contemporary debate is any indication, his legacy is much more douteux than that of Napoleon III.
The adjectives most frequently heard in this regard are "sterile," "grandiose," "shocking," "inaccessible," "pharonical" "playful," "inefficient," "iconoclastic," and "expensive." Defenders would counter that most of these things were said of Mr. Eiffel's tower. Is all this just another example of the old time-lag phenomenon, when mass tastes will eventually catch up with the avante-garde's inspirations? Or is it the case of the advance of a "negative aesthetic," an assault (sometimes bold, sometimes whimsical) on the canons of taste itself?
Mitterand's motivations, I believe, were very much like those of Louis. France would lead the way in giving artist expression to a new age, post-modern, for lack of a better term. He clearly was competing with Eiffel in giving landmarks to the landscape of the City of Light. In any case, Joly was on to something when he gave such emphasis to "building policy" in his book.