The Greatness of Ellites

 Introduction  By Alexander Jacob

Maurice Muret (1870–1954) was a Swiss journalist and author who studied in Lausanne, Leipzig, Paris and Munich. He became editor of the Journal des débats in 1895 and contributed to the Foreign Affairs section of the Gazette de Lausanne from 1909. Muret was an anti-Dreyfusard and follower of Charles Maurras and the Action française. He published a book on L’esprit juif (The Jewish mind) in 1901 and disseminated German and Italian literature in France. During the First World War, Muret was decidedly Francophile and wrote two works condemning Germany’s role in starting the war, L’orgueil allemand (German arrogance) (1915) and L’évolution belliqueuse de Guillaume II (The belligerent development of Wilhelm II) (1917). He published a work entitled Le crépuscule des nations blanches in 1925, which was translated into English by his American wife, Charlotte Touzalin, as The Twilight of the White Races (1926). His next works included L’Archiduc François-Ferdinand (1932) and Guillaume II (1940). His defence of aristocratic and heroic cultures was crystallised in two further works, Grandeur des élites (Paris, Albin Michel, 1939) and France héroïque (1943), whose heroes range from Vercingétorix to Maréchal Pétain.

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Muret’s book on the elites is a social history in the form of a shimmering tapestry of characters, both historical and fictional, who exemplify the elites of the cultured societies of Western Europe from ancient Greece to early twentieth-century Britain. Thomas Carlyle had maintained that great historic periods are propelled by heroic individuals, who give their life to the realisation of an ideal while Marx put forward the contrary theory that it was not individuals who led the masses but the masses that led the individuals. Rejecting both these notions, Muret insists that it is elites that constitute the essence of a great period of history. He gainsays Carlyle by pointing out that ‘[t]he great man has something immoderate and excessive whereas the Western genius, considered in its most noble creations, always contains something measured, tempered, balanced’. In other words, it is not sufficient to have enlightened personages to direct the affairs of an entire nation in a particular direction but there must be an elite class, or caste, that is capable of moulding society in its image. The essential basis of the elites of Europe is identified by Muret as the humanist ideal, and it is this that constitutes the strongest bulwark against the rising tide of the mass mentality emerging from Bolshevist Russia. 

Muret notes that, even though the decline of the European aristocracy began with the French Revolution, the individual was still glorified in Western Europe and the concept of mass rule did not fully arise until the advent of Marxism. The Russian Revolution thus was a more alarming manifestation of the rise of the masses and the proletariat and this, Muret surmises, is partly because the aristocracy in Russia was not a very enlightened one and its loss was not felt by the Russian people as a very deleterious event. However, in its glorification of the proletarian, Bolshevism remains an extreme danger to the traditionally elitist societies of Western Europe since, according to Muret, hierarchical societies cannot be abruptly dismantled in order to make way for the rule of the lowest elements of the population. Rather, such societies should be preserved in an organic manner by a social mobility that allows upward movement only in carefully graded stages. Now that the mass ethos of Bolshevism was threatening the Western countries as well, Muret believes that only the Western ideal of humanism could offer an effective resistance to the Asiatic invasion from Russia. 

Humanism is essentially a Graeco-Roman phenomenon that was revived in Italy during the Renaissance and further developed in the court of Louis XIV in the seventeenth century. Although it underwent a relative decay in the eighteenth century under the pressure of the Englightenment’s adoration of reason and empiricism, it was restored in a striking manner in the English ideal of the gentleman that rose to prominence in the Victorian Age. In the aftermath of the devastating First World War, both Italy and Germany turned to statism as a political bulwark against Bolshevism. But Muret considers statism as not sufficiently related to society to be able to create the elites necessary to counter the Bolshevist rulers of the future society. Germany’s racialism too is opposed to humanism and to Christianity, which Muret sees as the indispensable foundation of European morality and culture. He therefore hopes that France and England will be able, through their existing elites, to continue the humanistic social paradigm that alone can resist the Bolshevist propaganda of the dictatorship of the proletariat. While the British are not naturally part of the Graeco-Latin humanist culture — even though they still study it carefully in their schools — the French indeed have a longer traditional affiliation with it. As he says, ‘Hellenism and Latinism have entered the blood of France to such an extent, the prestige of Classicism and the elites that it engendered remains so strong in this country that they try more to hoard its advantages for the benefit of the masses than to suppress them radically.’

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Muret believed that elites are formed initially under enlightened autocrats such as Pericles in fifth century B.C. Greece and Louis XIV in seventeenth-century France. The original formation of an elite in the classical world is identified by Muret in the aristocratic democracy of Periclean Greece. Here the Greek adoration of beauty combined with virtue resulted in the cultivation of what was called kalokagathia, or the combined beauty of mind and body in the well-formed Greek aristocrat. The Greek civilisation was essentially an urban one, even though it benefited from maritime trade as well. Athenian culture was centred around the polis, or city, with the agora,1  or public square, serving as the open-air meeting place for talented young men and their philosophical masters. Its generous humanism was devoted to the cultivation of literary eloquence and artistic excellence and, like its leader Pericles himself, it was opposed to both Spartan chauvinism and militarism. 

The democracy of Athens was an aristocratic one insofar as its government was constituted of eupatrides, or men of good Greek ancestry, and only Athenian citizens voted in the assemblies to the exclusion of slaves and immigrants. Pericles embodied all the virtues of an aristocratic Greek, having first served in the army and then devoted his life to the public service of Athens, which he fulfilled with astonishing taste and judgement as patron of the imposing public works and arts that fill even modern minds with awe. His demagogic opponent, Cleon, on the other hand, was a symptom of the decay that Greece was soon to suffer with the decline of the aristocratic democratic government of Athens. Cleon was opposed to the Athenian aristocracy and when he took over the leadership on Pericles’ death in 429 B.C., his reign was marked by bad government as well as bad manners. This decay was accelerated by the Hellenic expansion of Greece under the Macedonians and the substitution of Eastern luxury for the older kalokagathia civic virtues of Athens.

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With the rise of Rome, a new variant of aristocracy emerged in the West that was to have a lasting impact on the whole of Western European culture. Roman aristocracy was in its origins a rustic and military one. The original patricians were, rather like the later English squires, raised on estates in the country and served in the army, as the legendary figure of Cincinnatus, for example, did in the fifth century B.C. Although Rome began as a monarchy, it was, in 510 B.C., replaced by an aristocratic Republic ruled by patricians. The patricians were at first clearly distinguished from the commoners, or plebeians. However, gradually the two were increasingly intermixed. The aristocratic ethos was a rather austere one and practical. The hatred that Cato the Elder manifested for Carthage in the second century B.C. (‘Carthago delenda est’) was the hatred of a Roman peasant-soldier for the mercantile luxury of the Carthaginians. It was also the hatred of a land-based civilisation for the maritime one of the Phoenician. The Romans were also not a particularly scientific people and their devotion to the arts was not so original as that of the Greeks. However, the discipline that marked the Roman aristocracy was extremely impressive and constituted the foundation of the laws that were formulated in the Twelve Tables of the fifth century B.C. and later extended over the empire as Roman Law. Muret points out that the Romans were preoccupied with laws because they loved justice for its own sake and not, like the Hebrews, in order to foster petty tribalistic chauvinism.

Rome was distinguished in its developed phase by imperialism and the imposition of systematic laws both in Italy and in the expanding colonies of the Roman Empire. The Roman conquests were, to be sure, marked by cruelty and celebrated in triumphs that were humiliating for the conquered princes and armies. But the subsequent rule of the Romans in the colonies did not disturb the local traditions of the colonised but instead incorporated these nations systematically, under the Roman Law, into the famous pax romana. In fact, some defeated princes even voluntarily gave up their kingdoms to Rome and its superior legal and adminstrative organisation. 

The rule of the colonies by the governors was generally honest but, with the increasing wealth acquired through Rome’s colonial possessions, the gap between the rich and the poor increased and the latter had to be pacified through the organisation of proletarian games, such as gladiatorial fights, which betrayed a vulgarity and brutality of taste that still shock modern historians. Finally, with the advent of Christianity and its personal as opposed to state religion, Rome was undermined in its very foundations, which were the Roman ‘polis’ and the extended state. The Roman Empire was soon turned into a Christian one and the new religious empire was marked by Christian morality and its doctrine of Love. However, the Roman aristocratic imperium continued, in the subsequent centuries, to exercise a radiant influence over the whole of Europe through its stunning civilisatory achievements aptly crystallised in Pliny the Elder’s words: ‘May this divine benefit last forever which seems to have given to the world the Romans, like a second sun, in order to enlighten it!’

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The revival of classical Graeco-Roman learning in the Renaissance was accompanied by a focus on individualism that acquires a bravado almost anticipatory of Nietzsche’s ‘superman’. However, unlike Nietzsche’s ideal, the Renaissance man remains mostly Christian in his faith and achieves in the ideal of humanism a perfect blend of the classical sources of European culture with the Christian moral doctrines that had penetrated Europe since the early Middle Ages. There is no doubt that the Christian religion had assumed the mantle of the pagan Roman Empire with considerable ease and dignity and unified even greater expanses of Western Europe than the Roman Empire had done. It also exalted religion to the same level as politics in forming a dual reign of Emperor and Pope. And, just as it had absorbed several elements of the Graeco-Roman cults into its ritual and theological framework, it also accepted and codified the Germanic feudal system into an impressive hierarchical social institution. It thus succeeded in refining the Germanic knights through the chivalric institutions that came into the fore in the Middle Ages. 

The earliest Renaissance poets, like Dante and Petrarch, are marked by their admiration of classical learning and focus on the Italian language and identity. In France too, ever since the High Middle Ages, there are signs of an impending change of worldview. The discovery of ancient Greek literature served to increase the scientific spirit just as the voyages of exploration expanded the horizons of the southern European princes. While it is true that mediaeval scholasticism too displayed elements of classical learning and even certain scientific formulations, it was confined mainly to the monasteries, and the antique ideas did not penetrate secular society until the Renaissance. The establishment of the Platonic Academy of Florence by Cosimo de’ Medici in the fifteenth century is a significant landmark in Western European history in that it successfully combined classical learning with the Christian faith. Muret points particularly to Pico della Mirandola as a proponent of Renaissance individualism and humanism since his view of man was not confined to the traditional Christian one with its stress on the original sin of the first man. Rather, Pico focused on the free will innate in man, which allows him to choose between a debased earthly life and a spiritual godlike one. Apart from Pico, Muret adduces the example of Leon Battista Alberti, who was a typical Renaissance man talented in several disciplines, being ‘a mathematician who was also a jurist, this moralist who was also a painter, a sculptor, an orator and a physician’. Alberti’s most remarkable achievements were in architecture but he was, no less than Leonardo da Vinci, a polymath typical of his astonishingly creative age. Leonardo himself combined scientific curiosity with aesthetic feeling and it must be remembered that, in spite of his intensive scientific experimentations, he too died a Christian. 

The Renaissance doubtless also suffered a weakening of the Christian spirit that had predominated in the Middle Ages. Thus Boccaccio reveals considerable impiety in his compositions and Machiavelli’s pragmatic cunning can clearly not be considered a model of Christian morality. Further, the unrestrained personality in the Italian Renaissance was often a surprising combination of aesthetic taste and judgement with amoral and even criminal social behaviour. Muret gives two brilliant examples of this apparent contradiction — that of Sigismondo Malatesta, who was at once utterly amoral in his personal life and one of the greatest patrons of the arts in the period, and of Benvenuto Cellini, who was not only a superlative sculptor and goldsmith but also a customary assassin. 

The reactions against the untrammelled individualism of the Renaissance geniuses were not absent but unfortunately they were directed in a quasi-Protestant manner that did not make a serious effort to unify the classical outbursts of the Renaissance with Christian faith. Thus we have the example of Girolamo Savonarola, the proto-Protestant reformer who rebelled against the Medici rule in Florence but was not supported by Pope Alexander VI, who excommunicated and had him executed. Similarly, when the Italian Renaissance moved north through Johannes Reuchlin, who was deeply influenced by humanist learning, it did not succeed in establishing a unity of classical artistic exuberance with the Roman Catholic doctrines. Rather, the Germans who followed Luther tended to separate the classical world from their more Puritanical, iconoclastic view of Christianity. Thus the unity of Europe itself, which might have been achieved through a unity of the Renaissance ideals with a reformed Church, remained unaccomplished.

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Muret’s next exemplars of European elites are those of the high society of the time of Louis XIV, which, in the view of the Comte de Saint-Simon, was ‘a long reign of the vile bourgeoisie’. Indeed, Louis XIV, in his opposition to the nobility (the ‘gentilhommes’), favoured members of the bourgeoisie who formed now a new class of gentlemen (‘honnêtes hommes’) and who sought to enter either the court or the high society of the reputable literary salons hosted by aristocrats like the marquise de Rambouillet. The world created by such hostesses was one of extreme refinement, where women were always present and it was the constant endeavour of the male guests to please them with their wit and gallantry. Pleasing thus became more important than edifying or moralising, even though the guests included great literary figures like Corneille and Boileau. What was cultivated in these salons was decorum, graciousness, gentility and a general light touch that abjured pedantry and scholarly erudition in favour of a more generous and liberal attitude to life and letters. The Chevalier de Méré thus declared that ‘[i]t is to be hoped, in order to be pleasant always, that one would excel in everything that suits gentlemen without however being too interested in anything, I mean, without doing anything that does not present itself of its own accord and without saying anything that might prove that one wants to assert oneself.’ And La Rochefoucauld too advocates restraint in the expression of one’s feelings so as to avoid confrontation with one’s interlocutors. As Joseph Joubert put it, France in this century produced ‘an uninterrupted succession of generations not scholarly but friends of knowledge and accustomed to the pleasures of the mind who multiplied in France, that country in the world where this education was best offered and perhaps best received.’ 

Though the Grand Siècle produced some of the finest literary products of France, the universal man of the French seventeenth century was gradually turning away from the asceticism and mysticism of the Middle Ages to a more reasonable, and sentimental, view of the world. However, the seventeenth century bourgeois was still ruled not by Reason itself but by Right Reason, which did not go beyond the limits of Christian morality. As Racine remarked to his son, ‘one cannot be a gentleman without paying all one’s debts first to God and then to men, and there is only religion that teaches us the methods and helps us to satisfy both men and God.’ And in Madame de La Fayette’s novel La Princesse de Clèves, one gets a moving example of the force of the right reason governing human relationships in this society in Monsieur de Clèves’ words to the unfaithful princess: ‘In the mood in which you are, by allowing you your liberty I set stricter restrictions than I could have imposed on you.’

The delicate balance between society manners and morality in the seventeenth century, however, was too fragile to be universally sustainable. Bossuet for one criticised the high society values of his time forcefully: ‘The society people’, he would say of the Chevalier de Méré and those who resemble him, ‘lie to God and lie to themselves in claiming to conduct side by side a life of pleasure and true piety. These two things exclude each other absolutely.’ The fascinating equilibrium represented by the high society of the seventeenth century could not be sustained with the growing rationalism and empiricism of the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century, right reason was replaced by reason itself in the works of Voltaire and the Encylopedists, who rejected Christian morality, and of Rousseau, whose sentimentality even condoned the Terror of the French Revolution. As for the older aristocratic notion of honour, it was replaced by the more bourgeois one of ‘conscience’, which, being too personal and not associated with a whole class of people, could no longer serve as a foundation of social morality. Honour does reappear intermittently in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century but only in a military context, when Napoleon reorganised French society in an imperialistic fashion.

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The ideal of refinement evident in the French bourgeois high society of the seventeenth century is evident also in England in the eighteenth century. But the British gentleman has a different origin than the French honnête homme. Derived from the warrior nobility, the British gentleman is less sociable than the French gentleman and more snobbish. Indeed, the upper class character of the gentleman was an accepted part of the traditionally hierarchical society of Britain that dates back to the Plantagenets — who were indeed, as Augustin Filon suggested,2   the original founders of the British aristocratic culture. The social strata below the nobles and the gentlemen — that is, the middle class not elevated through knighthoods, and the working class — aspired to the status of a gentleman and there was little criticism of his social eminence. However, the British nobles and gentlemen gradually lost their warrior affiliations with the entry into the peerage of wealthy members of the middle class. Unlike the Prussian nobility who retained their military character during most of their existence, the British gentleman turned, like his French counterpart, into a high society figure. 

While the British gentleman was originally not particularly religious and even somewhat brutal in his manners, the eighteenth century infused a religious element into social life that is exemplified in Joseph Addison’s fictional character Sir Roger de Coverley. Religion gained a greater foothold in gentlemanly society in the nineteenth century under the reign of Queen Victoria, who was essentially a ‘bourgeois’ sovereign. The Bible regained its importance after having lain dormant from the time of the Puritans, and sartorial style and church-going respectability were combined in the typical Victorian model of a gentleman. Muret gives as a prime example of the British gentleman of the Victorian age the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, who was considered the most elegant gentleman of his time.

Unlike the French gentleman, however, the British was not a particularly literary-minded one and showed less appreciation for the fine arts. He retained from his original warrior background the impassibility that marked the mediaeval knights and the traditionalism that became characteristic of the country squires. He also inherited from his warlike origins a taste for brutal team sports, like cricket and football, and willingly subjected himself to the harsh discipline of corporal punishment in the elite public schools of England. Yet, all this discipline was enforced on lives geared to monetary success in the Industrial Age, since Puritanical Christianity advocated not only hard work but also its material rewards. The original cast of the British gentleman, however, continued to survive in the soldierly gentleman of the British Empire, as evidenced, for example, in the characters depicted by Rudyard Kipling in his short story ‘His Private Honour’.

After the Great War, the gentlemanly ideal suffered increasing attacks from socialistic fronts and authors like Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells. While Wells criticised ‘the aristocratic prejudice’ of the English and hoped for a regeneration of English society through science and socialism, Bennett hoped for the destruction of the bourgeois order through ‘the alliance of ‘the intellectual and the proletarian’. Muret, however, brushes aside such socialistic criticisms and insists that the British gentleman still represents a valuable ideal of individual liberty since ‘[p]olitics, in his view, must not suffocate the human being for the benefit of a God or a king but make him serve both to the degree to which it is just while retaining his independence.’ Muret is, in general, rather partial to the bourgeois, whom he considers to have been, at least in the nineteenth century, the successor of the aristocrat and propagator of traditional culture. But he does acknowledge the weakness of the ability of the bourgeoisie to withstand the assaults of the masses below it once the latter become aware of the exploitation to which they are subjected by the bourgeois: 

… demos is in the process of making these classes, whose mastery they no longer wish to suffer, pay dearly for their faults. One could console oneself of this if all sorts of rules valid for all well-ordered societies were not in the process of perishing along with the bourgeoisie: the respect for tradition, the cult of the family, the spirit of order, prudence and economy. This entire bourgeois morality, a tested mixture of principles that were already dear to antiquity and of doctrines spread by the Gospel, is an execration to the masses because it imposes a brake on the naturally perverse instincts of man while the masses tend to shake off all manner of constraint.

He does not, however, like Willliam Lecky and Anthony Ludovici, denounce the bourgeois themselves for their plutocratic ambitions.3  And the transformation of the Anglo-Saxon gentleman, British and American, in the Atlanticist empire of today, into a mercantile individualist hardly distinguishable in his taste and judgement from a proletarian is a prospect that Muret in 1939 obviously did not envision.

In his concluding chapter, Muret reiterates the importance of the gentlemanly ideal as exemplified in the French Grand Siècle and in the British Victorian Age as modern representatives of the ancient Greek notions of kalokagathia and of the Roman pride in Roman citizenship. However, the special merit of Muret’s study of elites is indeed the stress he places in it on humanism as the essence of the high culture that they represent. He points out that, right from Graeco-Roman antiquity and through the Renaissance to the First World War, the greatest value of the elites has been their general devotion to humanism, for it is this that most fully embodies the glory of Western European civilisation. As Muret puts it: 

Humanism is the continuous and constant awareness of humanity. It invites us to know ourselves better, it invites us to love our neighbour better. It is at once the child of Plato and of Jesus Christ. It re-establishes man in his dignity, it gives him the knowledge of his duties. Between the past and the present it constructs a solid and safe bridge.

Maurice Muret 

The Greatness of Elites