Jean Cau - quotes

 

Jean Cau used to reproach his friends for their lack of adjustment:
Formerly, capitalism was a matter of having children work in mines. Nowadays, it is defined as compulsory school attendance until the age of 16. Capitalism was once synonymous with the presence of slums, of a sixty-hour week without a single day off; nowadays, it is Club Med. It’s time the Left understood this.
[The Left, however, clearly failed to understand, and Jean Cau left.]
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Look at them! Look at them, will you? Behold our politicians’ horrible languid maws (keep smiling!); the courtier-like faces of department managers. They are indeed salesmen, for the very power of nations is measured in relation to their own mercantile activity. The moist glow of submission to the crowd, the mass, and the majority is what flickers in their eyes. Where has the exemplary face gone to? Where is the severe and exemplary voice? Where are the harsh words that drive the best people to gather among the crowd as the latter, now tamed, finds itself possessed by a sense of will, instead of being agitated by a gloomy sort of fever?
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I used to be a member of the assault platoon and part of the leftist intelligentsia, but the years of service that I dedicated to them had me in a state of permanent scepticism, of often derisive contemplation. One reproached me for having such an attitude and unjustly equated it with a crime… Well, let it be my crime, then!
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To this very day, socialism and liberty have failed to prove that they can be united in matrimony without having one of them — eek! — strangle the other.
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It will have taken me years of reflection and lucidity before I finally dared to question — and express in the form of questions — the sacrosanct egalitarianism which had, up until recent years, been my milk and honey.
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Let us state the facts both harshly and clearly. It takes more than a thousand tendencies to create a will. With a thousand currents, what you have before you is not a river but a maze of streams that follow the craziest directions. And I say to you: a thousand heresies do not equal a Church, nor do a thousand desires result in love. What would you do with a thousand soldiers that lack the leadership of a captain? Or of children that have neither father nor master? And what would a million words be worth without stylistic organisation, or millions of men that do not constitute a people? One might as well call it all a magma.
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This century has gone mad, losing its mind to all the cowardice, resignations, lies, deceptions and ugliness; and what one has labelled its “civilisational crisis” is, in fact, nothing but the fearful rejection of all grandeur.
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Going against the grain or, idea-wise, against all that the prevailing intellectual utopianism whispers or shouts in our ears, I state, in all tranquillity, that decadence is perfectly combinable with scientific progress and that our societies are not necessarily experiencing ascension and good health just because they conduct heart transplants, land on the moon, break the wall of sound and align Nobel prizes in onion rows: Euclid, Archimedes, Theophrastus, Hipparchus, Herophilus, and a hundred others rose to the very firmament of science at a time when both Athens and Greek power sank into the depths.
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For when the day comes for people to be astounded by our failures, our grand-nephews must, after all, be made aware of the fact that there were at least a few soldiers who refused to put down their weapons and raise their hands in surrender.
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What is valuable is not life itself, but what one does with it. […] There are a few destinies, and the rest are just lives that lack any and all interest: nothing but the stuff of women’s novels, idle rumours, the crackling of bubbles rising from the sludge of a pond when stirred, and cinematographic tales.
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For valour has no need of recompense.
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Your invincible dialectics, quibbler’s discourse, massive treatises and computers stand helpless in the face of all that, within me, burns your words to ashes.
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Let us make love, not war, but where exactly shall we do so? In the Sargasso Sea. And how shall we make love? Through a sorry mixture of psychedelic orgies. To do so is to forget that love and war have not always been in a state of enmity.
In a world devoid of enemies, there are no friends either: one only loves insofar as one is also able not to love. And when everything is of equal value, everything is worthless:
War used to result in young people’s deaths. True enough. Sustained peace, however, kills and drains youth. Furthermore, war singles out the Others. The enemy. I am only an individual to the extent that Others exist and my very being is exasperated all the more strongly and intensely when this Other chooses to object and espouse self-denial. Enemies are a necessity: they hold me to my own definitions, force me to embrace myself, and compel me to draw the line that demarcates me from the rest and within which my difference is very much alive.
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Every mother who brings a child into this world believes herself to be giving birth to a king. Looking at his own child, every father considers it to be the Lord of the Earth. All of this is very well and good, very powerful and very sweet, and very un-democratic. An ever-indignant and masochistic mother, democracy demands equality for all her children, even at the cost of their resulting worthlessness. Should any one of them break free and raise himself above the latter, the wicked mother proceeds to scold him and says: “Be like your brothers! Be their equal!”
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It is impossible, by definition, to equal others from above, which accounts for the fact that egalitarian societies are necessarily pervaded by tedium or despair. Love supposes the presence of a Master. Once there are no longer any genuine Masters, the entire society is one of slaves. Those slaves, however, are all sad and hollow. In this kind of society, the bourgeois is nothing but a promoted and shameful slave.
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The morality of the bourgeoisie is that ‘it is better to be a live dog than a dead lion’, which is the equivalent of forgetting that the dog will eventually die as well and that ‘before his death, the lion was indeed alive; and lion-like’. In ancient times, ‘both aristocrats and peasants were willing to come to terms with having their sons led to their deaths. The bourgeois, on the other hand, “harbours” his children because neither courage nor heroic obedience are part of his legacy. The aristocrat says: “If my son is a coward, he sullies my good name”; as for the peasant, he states: “If I fail to defend my land, my enemy will claim it”. By contrast, this is what the bourgeois says: “If my son is killed, who will be my heir and succeed me in running the business?”’.
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How does one define politics? Is it the fact of governing people? I, for one, say that this is not the real issue and that it is a matter of providing them with reasons to live and to die, of bestowing self-forgetfulness upon them. And people’s reasons to live have always been identical to their reasons to die. To remove either lot is to collapse the other.
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My very origin has determined my belonging to the people. My ancestors have been peasants since the dawn of time, and the very nobility of my lineage and race is epitomised by the fact that we have never bought nor sold anything. Our hard work, yes indeed — for what we give is our own blood.
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Any show of power leads to finger-pointing and is soiled with spittle. Children, women, delinquents, criminals and madmen loudly protest their own “oppression” and disarm the hand that either beat them or protected them. And the more one’s head is gnawed at by the termites of weakness, the more one’s body is disintegrated by violence. Echoing the pace at which our laws grow ever weaker, the criminality in our walls gains in strength, manifesting its presence with the loud sound of solicitor-like chattering. Such is also decadence: the death of laws, the proliferation of jurisprudences and the confusion of thoughts.
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Just imagine a President of the Republic who would declare: “Should France be attacked, either by conventional means or using an atomic bomb, I solemnly swear that it would rather choose death than submission!”. Such a president would render our country invulnerable. “Let us abstain from attacking these madmen”, the enemy would say, “they are capable of sacrificing their lives to the very last man in the name of honour”. I invite the one who would seek this supreme office to ask himself: will he, or will he not, pick liberty over life and death over slavery? His response to this single question should decide which direction our votes take. My own voting slip would bear the name of anyone who would say: “I promise you death over dishonour”. Admittedly, of course, my candidate might end up only securing two votes: his own and mine.
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Where am I? I am where I choose to be, in the place where I feel free and unclad, in the crisp air that immerses me and strengthens me with the knowledge of harsh and therefore perfectly untimely blatancies.
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In France, the leftist adventure through our cultural regions is an absolutely hilarious one. The Mandarin culture has approached the people with a facial expression akin to that of a modern clergyman on his way to a brothel, and the result was almost instantaneous: only the middle and petty bourgeoisie proceeded to treat itself to the cultural revolution one celebrated in some temples. On their part, the people simply went to the Châtelet, on a fishing trip or calmly turned on their TV sets.
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In the name of God, it is all too late. In the name of man, it was and still is mere utopia. For both these reasons, let us approximate and declare that it is the irrational that awaits us next, just around history’s corner.
Prior to the cleaning of his stables,  spent thirty years living in the most unpleasant conditions. And it is now the ‘stables of the West’ that await… Hercules’ coming.
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from the book View from the Right, Volume III
by Alain de Benoist