Memoirs from Beyond the Grave - by Chateaubriand

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Key ideas: Chateaubriand was a French writer, politician, and historian. The Memoirs, published in 1833, include not only the details of his persoonal life but also a record of important historical and political events of the era.

NOTES

Consequence of education

As education reaches down to the lower classes, they will discover the secret cancer that gnaws away at the irreligious social order. The excessive disproportion of wealth and living conditions was accepted while it was implicit; but as soon as that disproportion was generally perceived, the old order received its death-blow.

Recreate the aristocratic fictions if you can; try to convince the poor, when they have been taught to read and no longer believe, once they are as well-educated as you, try to persuade them then that they must submit to every kind of privation, while their neighbors possess a thousand time their needs: as a last recourse you will have to kill them...

When steam-power has been perfected, when, united with railways and the telegraph, it has abolished distance, it will not be merely goods that travel but ideas too, re-equipped with wings. When the fiscal and trade barriers between various States have been removed, as they have already been removed between the provinces of individual States; when different countries in daily contact seek the unity of all nations, how will you revive former modes of separation?

Society is no less threatened by the spread of intelligence

Society, on the other hand, is no less threatened by the spread of intelligence than it is by the development of brute nature: imagine labour condemned to idleness by reason of the multiplication and variety of new machines; picture to yourselves a single, universal mercenary matter replacing the mercenaries of farm and household: what will you do with the unemployed human race?

What will you do with the passions which have fallen idle at the same time as the intellect? The strength of the body is maintained by physical exercise; once labour is lacking, strength disappears; we shall become like those Asiatic nations which fall a prey to the first invader and which are unable to defend themselves against a hand that bears the sword.

Freedom is only preserved by effort

Thus freedom is only preserved by effort, because effort produces strength: remove the curse pronounced against the sons of Adam: 'Insudore vultus tui, vesceris pane: in the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread' and they will die in slavery.

Also see Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition: Labor tools and freedom and Kaczynski's The power process

The divine curse therefore enters into the mystery of our fate; man is less the slave of his sweat than of his thought: that is why, after studying society as a whole, after passing through various degrees of civilization, after imagining new forms of progress, one finds oneself at the start once more, in the presence of Scriptural truths.

For the old Europe, then, there is no return

For the old Europe, then, there is no return. Does the young Europe offer more hope? The world now, the world without consecrated authority, seems lodged between two impossibilities: the impossible past, and an impossible future. And do not believe, as some imagine, that if things are in evil straights at present, good will be reborn from evil; human nature troubled at its source cannot make such easy progress.

For example, the excesses of freedom lead to tyranny; but the excesses of tyranny lead only to greater tyranny; the latter by degrading us renders us incapable of liberty: Tiberius did not return Rome to a republic; he left Caligula as his successor.

To evade explanation, people are content to say that time may be concealing in its breast a political constitution we have not yet seen. Could the whole of antiquity, the greatest geniuses of antiquity, comprehend a society without slaves? And we see it still in existence. They claim that in the civilization yet to be born the species will become greater; I myself once advanced that statement; yet is it not to be feared that the individual is diminishing?

We may toil together in future like bees preoccupied with our honey. In the material world men associate to work, a multitude arrives more swiftly and by multiple paths at what it seeks; masses of individuals can raise Pyramids; studying in their own specialty, those individuals will meet together in scientific discovery; they will explore all the corners of the physical creation.

But is there anything equivalent in the moral world? A thousand minds might well coalesce, but they will never compose the masterpiece which issued from Homer's brain.

Comments on absolute equality

Now, a few serious comments on absolute equality: that equality would not only lead to servitude of the body, but also slavery of the soul; it would have no lesser effect than to destroy the moral and physical inequalities of individuals.

Our will, in state control, under total surveillance, would see our faculties fall into disuse. Our nature, for example, partakes of the infinite; forbid our minds, or even our passions, from thinking of boundless good, and you reduce man's life to that of a snail, you metamorphose him into a machine.

For, make no mistake: without the possibility of reaching the ultimate, without the idea of eternal life, the void is everywhere; without individual property no one is free; whoever has no property cannot be independent; he becomes a proletarian or a wage-earner, whether he lives in the current era of private property, or in a state of communal ownership.

Common ownership would resemble society in one of those monasteries at whose gate the bursar distributed bread. Hereditary and inviolable property is our private defense; property is nothing other than liberty.

Absolute equality which presupposes total submission to that equality would emulate the harshest slavery; it would make of the individual human being a somnolent beast, subject to constraining action, and obliged to walk the same path forever...

Of those who propose this aim of rigorous and absolute equality, the more rational ones conclude that to establish and maintain it requires force, despotism, tyranny, in one form or another.

The partisans of absolute equality are forced first of all to attack natural inequalities, in order to lessen or if possible eliminate them. Unable to do anything with the primary state of the organism and its development, their work begins at the moment when the child leaves its mother's breast.

The State then seizes it: the State becomes the absolute master of the spiritual and organic being. Mind and conscience, both depend on the State, both are subject to it. There is an end, from then on, to family, paternity, marriage.

A male, a female, children manipulated by the State, of whom it makes what it will, morally, physically, a servitude universal and so profound that nothing escapes it, that it penetrates to the very soul itself.

As regards what concerns material things, equality cannot be established in a way the least bit permanent through simple division.

If it acted alone on the earth, one can conceive the world shared out into as many portions as there are individuals; but the number of individuals perpetually varies, therefore the initial division must be perpetually changed.

All private property being abolished, only the State has rights of possession.

That mode of possession, if voluntary, is that of the monk constrained by his vows to poverty as to obedience; if it is not voluntary, it is that of the slave, where nothing alleviates the harshness of his conditions.

All the bonds of humanity, empathetic relationships, mutual devotion, exchange of service, the free gift of self, all which constitutes the charm of life and its grandeur, all, all is gone, gone without hope of return.