A Shot Across the Bow

From Liah Greenfeld's illuminating book Nationalism:

"The unique predicament of the French noblesse consisted in that their increasingly problematic status was the only problem on which they were allowed to focus. They were denied the possibility of nursing other ambitions or employing their energies in pursuits that were less futile. At the Court, as well as the sovereign courts of the capital, they lived, like exotic pets, in a gilded cage, well fed and groomed, but reduced to indolence and boredom, which drove them to seek diversion in ways which they might otherwise have renounced. They felt caged. In these circumstances, the preoccupation with precedence was indeed an attempt to insist on their threatened dignity, on the fact that they were proud men, and not pets. Some asserted their independence differently: they escaped into dissipation. Denied liberty to do or to be anything in the public sphere, they enjoyed it to the full in the privacy of their bedrooms. There was a definite affinity between the rejection of the society which humiliated them and sexual license; it expressed the rejection of the norms (that is, the tutelage) of this society in a sphere where audacity was guaranteed relative impunity. This association of sexual freedom and opposition to absolutism had significant consequences: it was perpetuated in the values of the new society which succeeded the 'old regime,' and sexual freedom remained an important aspect of liberty a la francaise. Neither of these ways of coping with the problem, however, was satisfactory. It was becoming increasingly onerous - indeed ignoble - to be noble in France. By the time [Louis XIV] died, the situation of the French aristocracy became insupportable, and many of its members were seeking for ways to escape it altogether. What they needed was a new identity."

Due to the maturity of historiography achieved over the past century, the present age offers an unusual opportunity: the possibility of recognizing the multifold accretions of cultural life for the product of particulr periods that they in fact are, and precisely relating them to both the circumstances of their birth and their subsequent careers. Of course, in my opinion, historiography also reveals that, despite the exactitude of the method applied and the integrity of the evidence reviewed, cultural themes - at once products of the mind and of accident - retain a certain ineluctable and irreducible personality that experience cannot irradicate, and which in fact might cause the theme to reveal itself more fully even as its origins are eclipsed.

The above quotation is illustrative in this regard. Despite the temptations of "twas ever thus," as one pursues one's education, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, no matter how mundane and permanent some phenomenon of culture may appear, somewhere, at some time, there arose its initial manifestation - as a habit, as a doctrinal forumlation, as an artistic theme, as an expression of political ideology, as a theological inference, or as a criticism of these. Such seems to be the case with, for example, "the sexual revolution," which long predated the invention of the birth control pill, and, as an aspect of ideology, clearly attends the development of a specifically (or in any case, originally) French expression of Liberalism, or Nationalism. Please pardon the unconventional synonmym of these notions; their identity will be a running theme of this blog.

Is it not curious that something so obvious, so pre-intellectual and merely animal, an aspect of behavior as pursuit of sexual pleasure - for which nature has provided the instinct - should come to be the subject of doctrinal formulation, and one related to political justice? What - does a person, in the depths of her orgasm, suddenly envision an Order? The Parlement in its choir? The apotheosis of the Office of the Prime Minister, of the President? Are we to believe these fantasies?

Of course, the demagogues preach precisely this to the gullible, but even if we do not accept Ms. Greenfeld's conclusions as dispositive, let us at least not be confused, and imagine we are observing the otherwise occult pillars of Justice where are only other erections - nor that it is mere prudery which compels us to point out this simple but apparently persuasive error.

Rather this passage ought to raise a basic question for the student of the present: from time immemorial, human societies were dominated by kings, and by nobility, but where did they go, and what happened to them?