Two lives for the price of one: such is the bonus enjoyed by all those who, in passing from one century to the next, have found themselves inhabiting a different world, often without quite realizing it. Asphodels and butterflies, sun and clouds, carnations and cherries will tomorrow remain what they were yesterday. A comforting thought: we shall not be changing sky or planet any time soon. More disconcerting is how our manner of living, reacting, feeling and thinking has been transformed, upending old habits and assumptions. Have we lost or gained in the bargain? Each must decide for himself, by his own lights, according to what moves him—or leaves him cold.
Distant horizons having failed to keep their appointment, the hour of homecomings has arrived: the time of reckonings and, now and then, of nostalgia. As tomorrows fade, yesterdays return. One may welcome the change. One may also reflect on it.
The future was yesterday. We still remember it. We had programmes; now we have scruples. Our verbs have slipped from the future tense into the imperfect. We have moved from aspirations to assessments. The pro- words have lost their lustre—progress, programme, project. The dis- words are on the march: disenchantment, disengagement, disintegration. The planners are out of a job. We restore and preserve, safeguard and conserve. Even progressives have their doubts. Fortunately, the guardians of our inheritance are still at their posts: the École des Chartes, the Inventaire général de la patrimoine, curators and conservators. Ecological museums for rare orchids, a Panthéon for heroes, anthologies for poets, centenaries, bicentenaries and millennial commemorations for those who have left their mark on history. The Gallic cock has returned to the henhouse. Now and then it still flexes its claws to reclaim some semblance of historic destiny, but without ever explaining where, should matters turn serious, the commander-in-chief is to come from, nor who will draw up the battle plans. ‘Europe? What’s its telephone number?’ Kissinger once asked—a question better left unanswered.
‘When you don’t know where you’re going, look where you came from.’ These are hard times for the Principle of Hope, settled weather for Prudence. After the extremists, the archivists. Not so long ago, both Cross and Banner had their professionals. In villages and market towns one might encounter a Don Camillo and a Peppone, the parish priest and the communist mayor. Whites and reds. The Church as Party and the Party as Church. Each preached the Good Word, whether from the Holy Father or Big Brother, with missionary zeal. After years of quarrelling, they became an oddly endearing duo. Each had its tenors and choristers: one striking up La Jeune Garde, the other the Magnificat. On both sides voices rang out. The Petits Chanteurs à la Croix de Bois and the Red Army Choir alike could warm and enchant. Whether for Christ arisen or socialism under construction, the joy of faith renews the hymns of the past. Such is the miracle of tightly knit groups, the blessing of acting as one. We feel more deeply and intensely when we form part of a larger whole. We vibrate, come alive, reconnect, fall in step. It is a happiness one dreams might be permanent, indisputable and transcendent. And all this with complete confidence, even pride, despite—or perhaps because of—the lack of assurance either that the Christ child awaits us in Heaven or that equality will reign on Earth tomorrow. There is no proof in such matters, only certainties. Faith trusts. The Catholic crosses himself; the communist toes the line. Both with an eye to the millennium, if not the impossible. A collective dream sometimes inspires more devotion than a party manifesto. Most great enthusiasms are born of an error of judgement. Mathematicians, with rare exceptions, know nothing of such states of grace—nor the gloom that follows.
The working class, it turns out, will not be going to Paradise. Camillo and Peppone now find themselves unemployed, a little melancholy. A problem for archbishops as it is for the crowds marching from Bastille to République. For Jesus Christ no less than Karl Marx. Catechism and messianism have both found recruitment difficult of late. A more realistic age prefers butter croissants. The age of upheavals has given way to the age of upkeep. Everyone is resetting their watches; they were either running fast or running slow. Civic education no longer has much use for barracks. The future belongs to museums. To rapiers and arquebuses. Many of our adventurers have found their way back to the family home, including those who once declared that ‘the duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution’, when what was really at stake was always to remake one. Refusing to inhabit the present as it is produces that backward-looking futurist we call a rebel: someone who hopes to refashion a past failure into future success. Subversives are unrecognized traditionalists. Current affairs are not their natural habitat. Latin American guerrillas invariably borrowed the names of ancestors: Sandinistas, Tupamaros, Zapatistas, Montoneros. Out of those legends they fashioned banners, turning yesterday into tomorrow. A present without a past has no future. Hence the antiquarian streak that runs through every serious revolutionary. Firebrands need archives. Hence too the disarray of our futures now that our pasts are fading. When a country stops making history, it compensates by producing historians. Better that than nothing. We live off accumulated capital, but let us not complain. Those relics—they were for a worthy cause.
After all, our marble monuments, gilded halls and ceremonies have never done any harm to scientists, still less the trailblazing kind. Meanwhile, neural activity is mapped with microelectrodes; anti-idiotype cancer vaccines are developed; nuclear fusion promises to unleash vast quantities of energy. We may congratulate ourselves on our restorations and refurbishments, indebted as we are to the firefighters and craftsmen who rebuilt Notre-Dame. Happily, they are not alone. Nor should we forget Valéry’s warning: ‘Modern man is the slave of modernity. There is no progress that does not end in complete servitude.’ The atomic bomb taught us as much. More is never a guarantee of better. The Third Reich was replete with men of learning, and the distance from laboratory to crematorium is not so great. At bottom there are two kinds of duty to remember. One draws strength from the past, the other finds excuses in it. One furnishes resources, the other rehearses grievances. The first gives us a kick up the backside, the second puffs out our chest. The inflation of the ‘here-and-now’ has become so all-encompassing that one sometimes wishes for a little more distance to recover a sense of the future. It might help us see further and more broadly, even if that means revisiting the old idea of estrangement and the plays of Bertolt Brecht. It is the ‘view from afar’ that enables us to understand the present. Only by stepping back can we move forward. Towards the day when our age finally tires of worshipping itself.
In theory and in the popular imagination, our Republic is a democracy and vice versa. We use the two terms interchangeably, out of custom and carelessness. There were once attempts to distinguish them, in their principles as in their implications. A lost battle—one among many. Yet it is worth recalling, for the record, that they are not the same thing.