Evil: A History in Modern French Literature and Thought 9781472543585

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Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the invaluable assistance and guidance of a number of people. Colleagues and students from the Department of European Cultures and Languages at Birkbeck College have provided me with an intellectually stimulating teaching and research environment, including a term’s sabbatical leave in 2009, that has helped me develop and refine many of the ideas contained within this study. The constructive feedback and criticism of Patrick Baert, Sarah Kay, Rosemary Lloyd and Roger Pearson have given this book a more coherent shape than it would otherwise have had. I am grateful to Rodopi for granting me permission to publish an earlier version of the section on Raphaël Confiant and Victor Hugo in Chapter 7. Heartfelt thanks go to the unfailingly efficient and helpful editorial team at Continuum, especially Colleen Coalter, Laura Murray and Srikanth Srinivasan, all of whom have steered this book through its final stages with the minimum of fuss. I have benefitted at different times and in various ways from the moral support of Dennis Clarke, Casimir d’Angelo, Zahid Durrani, Memet Erdemgil, Ceri Evans, Carlos Galvis, Clare Mulholland, John and Lisbeth O’Donnell, Francis and Isabella Poku, Jonathan Shih, Carl Watkins, Peter Williams and Greg Zinger. My late father Remo Catani, who sadly did not live to see this book completed, and mother, Nicole Catani, have been a constant and much-valued source of encouragement. Finally, I owe my biggest debt of gratitude to my wife, Mary Poku-Catani, whose consistently sound advice, admirable patience and understanding have sustained me on what has been a long, at times arduous, but ultimately rewarding journey.

Introduction

Aims and objectives This book argues that evil is a vitally important concept and theme in modern French literature and thought. The following propositions will be examined in support of this argument: first, evil provides an essential focal point for some of the most polemical ideological and philosophical debates to have marked French and Western history since the Enlightenment, especially on religion, the Terror, slavery, colonialism and the Holocaust; secondly, evil is a topic common to a broad spectrum of otherwise ideologically opposed French and Francophone authors, poets and thinkers; thirdly, evil can profitably be used as a conceptual tool in the literary evaluation of these writers; finally, and more broadly, the problem of evil is a debate of very long standing that is particularly ripe for re-evaluation in a post-9/11 world in which informed, critically objective definitions of evil have become superseded by a superficially biased, normative rhetoric of evil that serves diametrically opposed political and religious ideologies. There is an unquestionable critical gap for a new interdisciplinary approach to notions of evil in modern French literature. Existing studies are few, often confined to specific authors or movements (especially Decadence), and are thus methodologically narrow in that they favour a predominantly aesthetic approach. What is required, and what this book argues, is that as well as being of aesthetic interest, a number of important post-Enlightenment literary works on evil by both French and Francophone authors reflect a convergence of philosophical, historical, scientific, gender-related and ideological concerns that are crucial to an understanding of our contemporary moral and political dilemmas. That even today the two best-known studies on the relationship between evil and nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and European literature remain Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony (first published in 1930), which argues that evil is primarily a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon stemming from Romantic disillusionment, and George Bataille’s Literature and Evil (1957), which celebrates evil as a form of transgression, is evidence of this glaring critical gap. If Praz’s study is too narrowly focused on the relationship between evil and literary aesthetics, then Bataille’s welcome shift from purely aesthetic to more ethical terrain ultimately also flatters to deceive, owing to a strong theoretical agenda that overemphasizes the transgressive aspect of evil to the detriment of its many other important facets. It was not until 1998 that

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the need for greater interdisciplinarity with respect to evil in French literature was recognized by Myriam Watthée-Delmotte and Metka Zupančič.1 Disappointingly, however, the tantalizing prospect of a critical reorientation offered by this study is never truly fulfilled because its various contributions ultimately prove to be too self-contained, individualistic and eclectic to constitute an overarching and fully developed interdisciplinary methodology. The same can also be said of Scott Powers’s very recent edited volume, which includes a commendable range of Francophone writers on evil, but restricts its historical focus from Sartre to the present day, including two contributions on Jonathan Littell alone.2 Most literary criticism on evil, then, would benefit considerably from a more wide-ranging, interdisciplinary methodology that would counterbalance both its eclecticism and its intrinsically aesthetic approach to the topic. By the same token, many non-literary and more general studies of evil are limited in intellectual scope by an over-selective analysis of evil’s relationship to history. This approach often implicitly serves the particular interests of self-contained and influential academic disciplines, each with its own identity and set of theoretical preconceptions, which has led to the standard scholarly practice of compartmentalizing and fragmenting the study of evil into a series of discrete and unrelated historical traumas. The Holocaust, to take the most obvious example, has more often than not been appropriated and analysed in almost hermetic isolation by the field known as Holocaust Studies; slavery by Postcolonial Studies, the Terror by French Republican historiography, and so on. Ethical philosopher Hannah Arendt was instrumental in advocating a more inclusive, comparative analysis of history and evil in the post-Enlightenment era, an analysis that resists the scholarly insularity and partisanship that such rigid disciplinary boundaries often unwittingly encourage. Her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) drew parallels between Nazism and Stalinism and On Revolution (1963) argued that Robespierre’s Revolutionary Terror was a precursor to twentieth-century totalitarianism. Both works paved the way for an ‘assimilationist’ approach to evil, what I propose in Chapter 7 as the most broad-minded and ethically responsible way of evaluating its relationship to history. This model proposes a retrospective, comparative study of history as a series of man-made atrocities, each one pertaining to a specific period and social context, but from which it is nevertheless possible to extrapolate certain common characteristics and patterns of reoccurrence that serve as vital reminders of our duty as a civilized society to prevent such atrocities as Nazism from ever being repeated in the future. Arendt’s assimilationist approach, also endorsed by fellow ethical philosopher Giorgio Agamben, anticipates that of more recent comparative historians, such as Eli Sagan, who maintain that comparing the tyrannical disposition and policies of Robespierre with those of Hitler, Stalin and Mao significantly enhances rather than diminishes our understanding of the root causes and moral repercussions of the acts for which they were ultimately responsible.3 Initial hostility to Arendt from the likes of Eric Hobsbawm for the ‘excessively moral, even metaphysical quality of her approach’ and ‘her conflation of very different social experiences into a single story’ has, as Tony Judt asserts, been replaced by a degree of historical consensus that terror is not ‘an extraneous political device’, but ‘the primary motor and logic of modern tyranny’.4 In similar vein, Max Silverman has in a recent article pertinently outlined the advantages

Introduction

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of a shared methodological analysis of the evils of slavery and the Holocaust that cuts across the sometimes unnecessary disciplinary boundaries that separate Holocaust Studies from Postcolonial Studies.5 Be that as it may, this ‘assimilationist’, and by extension interdisciplinary, approach to man-made atrocities, atrocities which for the sake of convenience I shall refer to as ‘historical evils’, remains fiercely contested by a significant portion of the academic community, from across a range of disciplinary backgrounds, that actively endorses a more ‘exceptionalist’ methodology. Many specialists from the fields of political science, ethical philosophy and French historiography have independently objected that the mere act of comparing discrete evils from different eras and sociopolitical contexts is profoundly irresponsible, either because this can greatly diminish the gravity of a particular evil (a view held by many from the field of Holocaust Studies who regard this tragedy as too singularly atrocious to be compared with anything else), or for the opposite reason that this can just as easily exaggerate and distort the severity of a particular ‘evil’: many Republican French historians, for example, protest that Robespierre’s Revolutionary Terror has now become so indiscriminately identified with twentieth-century totalitarian ‘evils’, that it can no longer be studied as a politically self-contained and legitimate act in its own right.6 Regrettably, however, although this vocal opposition ostensibly reflects moral indignation at the threat interdisciplinarity supposedly poses to responsible and intellectually robust scholarship, in reality it often conceals an underlying anxiety to protect an ideologically biased view of a particular evil and/or an academic sense of ‘ownership’ over that evil, which makes the pious defence of rigour and objectivity seem both disingenuous and hollow. Thus the angry opposition of French historians to the labelling of Robespierre’s Revolutionary Terror as totalitarian is as much a reflection of their inward-looking nationalist desire to safeguard France’s proud Republican self-image as it is about their quest for greater historical accuracy; in the same way, as we shall see in Chapter 1, standard interpretations of 9/11 advanced in the United States by even the most eminent political scientists are often psychologically conditioned by a strong sense of wounded national sovereignty that allows blatant pro-American sentiment to block all reasonable attempts at an impartial and comprehensive analysis of the causes of Islamic radicalism. These are both examples of how certain ideological preconceptions reflect a given community’s perfectly human, self-protective and thus ‘exceptionalist’ response to an evil that has particularly traumatized or affected it, but which unfortunately yields an unsatisfactory type of scholarship where critical objectivity is abandoned in favour of partisanship and intellectual censorship. Consequently, the final, and longest, chapter of this book argues, pace Arendt, for a more inclusive and integrated approach to these ‘historical evils’ that brings them within the same purview through a comparative analysis of representative literary texts. The justification for such an interpretation is twofold: first, from both a specifically French and more general Western perspective it gives a less historically fragmented, biased and localized picture of evil that transcends polarizing ideological and disciplinary divisions, while at the same time paying due consideration to the horrors and fierce debates that are unique to each of the evils in question; secondly, it fulfils our ethical duty in a post-9/11 age to provide a more conceptually rigorous and balanced approach

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to evil at a time when our very capacity to rely on evil as a morally instructive and independent category of thought is in grave danger of being lost. An interdisciplinary approach that counterbalances one-sided and over-selective interpretations of evil, either as a purely aesthetic category within literature, or as a discrete historical trauma dominated by a particular academic discipline or ideological agenda thus lies at the heart of this study. Nevertheless, in order to remain manageable and coherent, a wide-ranging project of this nature has necessitated rigorous and apposite selection of primary and secondary material. Inevitably, difficult decisions have had to be made on both pragmatic and ethical grounds as to what authors, texts or themes to include or exclude. One major example will suffice to clarify the choices made. No chapter is devoted to French Decadence because a vast critical literature (starting with Praz) already exists on the subject, and in any case French Decadence, by its very nature, lends itself above all other movements and genres to a purely aesthetic approach to evil which the current book regards as too narrow in focus.

Evil and the Enlightenment Chapter 1 provides a selective overview of how important and distinctive disciplinary approaches to evil frame my analysis of the authors and thinkers explored in this study. Chapters 2–5 compare and contrast representative authors and thinkers who provide a new definition of evil that seeks to answer the same ethical imperative: namely, how to respond coherently and reassuringly to the major intellectual and sociopolitical dilemmas of their times. Their re-evaluation of evil invariably reflects their attempt to get to grips, conceptually and morally speaking, with two types of potentially disconcerting historical transition: either a ‘paradigm shift’ – a radical change in the intellectual landscape  – or an equally dramatic overturning of established social or political values. In other words, evil is redefined in response to changes both in the history of ideas and the sociopolitical Zeitgeist. An example of the former is to be found in Lautréamont and Zola’s reaction, discussed in Chapter 3, to the shift from theology to Scientific Positivism. Both redefined evil as instinct and atavism in response to Darwinism and Lombrosian criminology. Examples of the latter – the use of evil as critical tool for gauging sociopolitical transformation – are to be found in Balzac and Baudelaire’s response to the disconcerting impact of the rapid capitalist urbanization of France: this phenomenon, they felt, was more easily grasped through the conceptual prism of evil perceived as secular urban vice, rather than as theological sin and suffering. Often, of course, intellectual changes coincide with, and are indissociable from, sociopolitical ones: the modernity to which Balzac and Baudelaire’s empirical re-evaluation of evil was responding also coincided with a shift in intellectual circles from theology to secularism. With the dawn of the twentieth century, the hegemonic grip of science as the ‘new religion’ was felt by some, notably Gide and Proust, to be just as stifling and dogmatic as the orthodox Christianity that had preceded it. Hence their Nietzschean and Bergsonian call, analysed in Chapter 4, for a subjective notion of evil based on individual agency and moral self-determination rather than on predetermined, uncontrollable biological urges. Chapter 5 investigates how in

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the 1930s Céline and Bernanos came up with a new, psychologically ambivalent and physically destructive type of evil that emerged from the moral vacuum and pessimism left by post-war trauma and the economic Depression. No longer was evil the product of individual self-determination as it had been for Gide and Proust, nor was it the manifestation of the instinct and atavism defined by Lautréamont and Zola, but was an external, pervasive, intangibly corrosive force; its very elusiveness and shadowy presence made it difficult to pin down conceptually, prompting both writers to define it indirectly through other paradigms: Bernanos labelled it as ‘ennui’, and Céline called it ‘la haine’ (hate). Analysis of evil in this chapter partially draws upon Julia Kristeva’s notion of the ‘the abject’, that morally ambivalent, physically repulsive category that threatens the autonomy of the human subject and is a salient characteristic of Céline’s writing. Thus all the novelists or poets discussed in Chapters 2–5, whether secular or religious, liberal or reactionary, re-examine and redefine evil out of a real sense of intellectual engagement and moral urgency: their re-evaluation of this concept may well at times reflect, or even serve, their own biased beliefs and outlooks, but behind their reassessment of evil lies a genuine commitment to seek out moral truth and philosophical clarity in the face of disconcerting changes in the intellectual and social landscape. The last two chapters, however, are devoted to writers and thinkers who reveal a major stumbling block: specifically, the emergence in the modern era of self-serving institutions and political ideologies whose all-pervasive power increasingly impinges on our individual freedom to use evil as an ethically productive conceptual resource. In other words, these authors suggest that if we are to find plausible moral and philosophical explanations for the existence of evil, then we must begin by unmasking the repressive intellectual climate that prevents these explanations from being sought out in the first place. Our immediate task, they suggest, is not so much to define what evil means, but to establish exactly how its meaning can still properly and openly be debated in the society in which we live. If the independently minded novelists and poets discussed in Chapters 1–5 can justifiably be regarded as the unwitting beneficiaries of the secular Enlightenment’s timely unshackling of evil from its dogmatic theological moorings, then Chapters 6 and 7 shift our focus to those authors and thinkers who ask themselves whether the Enlightenment legacy of granting us the freedom to define evil for ourselves has been quite as genuine or unequivocal as we have been led to believe. This ‘meta-critique’ of evil  – the transposition of the problem of evil from the existence of evil itself to the lack of freedom we have to discuss it – was first advanced by Sartre in the 1950s, followed by Foucault in the 1970s. Both philosophers were quick to recognize that the post-Enlightenment moral consensus that evil is fundamentally a problem of metaphysical injustice  – a view that seemed fully attested not only by the suffering of the Lisbon earthquake, but also by the more recent and greater tragedy of the Holocaust – was no longer sufficient; rather, they argued that evil was now an institutional as well as a metaphysical problem. Writing against the grain of post-Holocaust ethics, Sartre and Foucault therefore identify a new type of evil that has nothing to do with man’s scandalous inhumanity to man and everything to do with the French State’s hidden abuse of its secular power and knowledge through its reappropriation and manipulation of evil as an instrument of social control, under

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the respectable guise of its supposedly progressive and democratic institutions. Sartre and Foucault’s critiques respectively demonstrate that France’s reputedly transparent and liberal criminal justice system, in conjunction with legal and scientific bodies of knowledge, is silently able to monopolize and classify definitions of evil in such a way as to reinforce its own mechanisms of authority. Chapter 7 concludes this study with a discussion of the ‘historical evils’ already outlined above: the Holocaust, slavery, the Terror and 9/11. It argues that the worrying degradation of evil from sophisticated category of independent critical thought to repressive instrument of social authority is a consequence not only of the excessive institutionalization of power and knowledge so devastatingly pinpointed by Sartre and Foucault, but also of the proliferation of political ideologies that provide a respectable outlet for deeply biased and knee-jerk reactions to specific man-made atrocities. In Western liberal democracies, especially the United States, the most recent example of this normative ideological reappropriation of evil is the so-called War on Terror, the foreign policy that emerged in the wake of 9/11, subliminally conditioning Westerners to identify evil exclusively by the stigmatizing and aggressively rhetorical label of ‘hostile Islamic Other’. But as already suggested, this impoverishment of evil from responsible instrument of critical thought to the superficial pawn of an emotive political discourse is not a consequence of 9/11 alone. Rather, the legacy of 9/11 is an invitation for us to re-examine the equally reductive and pernicious ways in which we have already allowed other ‘historical evils’ to degenerate into an emotionally charged ideological self-interest that diverts us from our more pressing ethical duty to evaluate the moral repercussions of such events with a greater degree of critical objectivity. Consideration is thus given to two issues: how a nationalist political and academic Republican discourse within France has minimized the State’s responsibility for the evils of ‘la Terreur’ and slavery; how the Holocaust has encouraged Western liberal democracies to adopt a ‘victim-based’, defensive ideology that has confined our ethical role to protecting ourselves from evil, rather than making any concerted effort to define what is good. Each of the novelists examined in that chapter  – Hugo on the Terror, Confiant on slavery, Germain and Littell on the Holocaust and Dantec on 9/11 – provide provocative and independent readings of a particular ‘historical evil’, an important counter-discourse that pertinently unmasks those normative ideological prejudices that compromise our ability to interpret evil dispassionately by allowing a dangerous moral complacency to set in.

Secularism versus theology However, one final methodological point needs to be made. If this book primarily draws on literary and philosophical texts to pinpoint the unique ethical advantages evil offers us as a sophisticated category of thought, despite its reductive institutionalization and politicization; if it endeavours to demonstrate that evil repays careful reconsideration as an invaluable conceptual resource that allows us to map and negotiate major transitions in intellectual and social history, a secondary concern has been to identify texts that reflect the equally constant tug-of-war in the modern era between

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religious and secular notions of evil. Though by and large secularism has had a more favourable press than Christianity since the Enlightenment, especially following the shockwaves of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, theodicies have periodically made an important and influential comeback. Thus most of the chapters in this book reflect the competing claims of both religious and atheist notions of evil, each one exposing the other’s weaknesses: for instance, the Catholic Bernanos’s belief in the power of prayer and the expiation of sin through sacrifice offers a more uplifting and altruistic alternative to Céline’s agnostic nihilism; by the same token Zola’s secular theories of atavism as the cause of criminality severely undermine the efficacy of Catholic moral consciousness as a regulator of evil actions. Some writers or poets, such as Baudelaire or Lautréamont, lean unmistakably in one direction, but cannot fully pin their flag to either the religious or the secular mast. Baudelaire is an agnostic fascinated by the secularized world of urban vice, but he is also obsessed with the idea of Original Sin, frequently using a Christian explanatory framework to confront moral dilemmas within his poetry; similarly, Lautréamont strongly endorses the Darwinian challenge to Divine Creation, yet cannot fully abandon the idea of God as a philosophically valid explanatory framework for man’s metaphysical rebellion against unmerited suffering.

1

Approaches to Evil

As a foretaste of the methodology adopted in this study and in order to situate this methodology in relation to existing approaches to evil, this opening chapter provides a necessarily selective survey of some of the key thinkers and writers on this subject in contemporary thought. This selection is more or less equally divided between French and non-French commentators, whose theories shed invaluable light on the corpus of French and Francophone texts that form the central focus of this book. Moreover, for the sake of convenience, I have classified these commentators according to the disciplines or categories with which they are most commonly identified: namely, philosophy, politics, gender, science and literature; but as will become quickly apparent, this disciplinary classification is at times debatable and interchangeable, as some commentators straddle the subject matter of more than one discipline. Ethical philosopher Alain Badiou, for instance, is discussed in the section on philosophy, but would equally be at home in the section on politics; by the same token, Sade, whose work is usually seen to lie at the intersection of philosophy and literature, is discussed under politics. But the very contentiousness of neat disciplinary compartmentalisation provides ample justification for the methodological reorientation proposed by this book: namely, that the study of evil, whether considered as a subject in its own right or as an important leitmotif that enriches our understanding of French literary texts, would benefit from a far more interdisciplinary approach than exists at present.

Philosophy and evil Ricœur: The phenomenology of evil The problem of evil is not just a speculative problem: it calls for a convergence between thought, action (in the moral and political sense) and spiritual transformation of one’s feelings.1

The late Protestant philosopher Paul Ricœur, one of the most prolific and versatile commentators on evil of the late twentieth century, argues that speculative thought, by which he primarily means classical theodicies, has erroneously encouraged us to interpret evil in an emotionally detached way that compels us to rationalize it as a self-contained metaphysical problem. These classical theodicies are too narrowly focused on David Hume’s logical interpretation of evil which avers that the following

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three propositions cannot all be true: God is all-powerful, God is absolutely good, yet evil exists. This Humean propositional logic informs God, Freedom and Evil (1974) the influential work by analytical and fellow Protestant American philosopher Alvin Platinga, who is not named, but implicitly targeted by Ricœur’s critique. We need to rethink evil in a far more productive way that takes into consideration two aspects of evil that speculative thought ignores: our personal experience of suffering and our capacity to combat evil through moral action. In other words the questions we should be asking are not ‘what is evil?’ but ‘how can we fight it?’ and ‘how can we render our own suffering tolerable and meaningful?’ I focus here on Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology (1985), which both summarizes and expands on several of his earlier works on evil, notably Fallible Man (1960) and The Symbolism of Evil (1969). In this dense, short treatise, Ricœur demonstrates a typically wide methodological range by drawing on hermeneutics, theology and psychoanalysis to retrace the way in which speculative thought has consistently misconstrued the problem of evil and brought it to an intellectual and moral impasse: what Ricœur aptly calls a ‘speculative aporia’. Ricœur’s starting point is to show the glaring disjuncture between the actual phenomenology of evil and its philosophically and theologically abstract interpretations: in other words, speculative thought on evil fails adequately to reflect our actual experience of evil, specifically the extent to which suffering dominates that experience. By subdividing evil into two types – moral evil and physical evil, or sin and suffering – theology has circumscribed suffering into a very specific category that legitimizes and neutralizes it. Moral evil is presented as the evil we commit, and physical evil as the evil we endure: the punishment we must incur for that offence. But this subdivision plays down the extent and variety of the suffering we encounter. By confining suffering to the category of physical evil (as that to which we are subjected as a punishment for a sin we have committed) theology masks the fact that suffering also belongs to the category of moral evil, because to commit an evil invariably means making someone else suffer as a result of our own actions. In other words, suffering straddles both the categories of moral evil and of physical evil. Secondly, the reality of the suffering we experience is minimized and distorted by theological and legal discourse: in French the word ‘peine’ means both punishment and suffering, therefore reinforcing a notion of suffering as that which results purely from legitimate human actions; once again this does not take stock of man’s inhumanity to man: specifically, of the many illegitimate forms of suffering that we inflict on our fellow human beings. Nor does it take into account the many different types of suffering we endure that go far beyond explicit forms of punishment: corporal punishment and imprisonment do not account for the feelings of remorse, shame and guilt that the moral evils we commit engender within us. The depth and complexity of feeling we experience when confronted with these multiple and interconnected forms of suffering is thus lost in translation as a result of the mediation of reductive linguistic and moral discourses that are conducive to a narrow speculative approach to evil. Historically speaking, the first culprit in this regard is the discourse of myth. Myths tend to explain evil in terms of its origins and specifically in relation to our cosmic origins. In other words, the misery of the human condition is presented as something ancient that first emerged when the universe was created. This focus on origins reduced the problem of evil to the

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following question: where does evil come from? This reductive approach to evil was further complicated by the fact that myths were written in such an allegorical and ambiguous form that they lent themselves to a variety of competing interpretations, notably the myth of the Fall, from which Augustine’s account eventually emerged as the most influential. At a given point – what Ricœur calls the stage of ‘wisdom’ – man recognized that myths needed to do more than merely focus on the origins of evil: an explanation of how the human condition came to be so miserable needed to be replaced by an explanation of why this was so, and specifically why this was so for any given individual. Hence was the theory of retribution introduced: all suffering is merited because it is a punishment for an individual or collective sin, both known and unknown. This theory had the advantage of taking suffering seriously, at least as a category that is distinct from moral evil, but it had the disadvantage of immediately effacing that distinction by advancing a purely moral vision of the world. This is because the idea of retribution, whether divine or administered by human justice, did not prevent suffering from appearing excessive and arbitrary beyond the limits of any just moral framework. The book of Job was the first attempt to take this sense of unjust suffering seriously. Job’s impassioned dialogue with his friends and God about the relentless succession of terrible torments he endures for no apparent reason gave emotive expression to man’s indignation at the disproportion that he felt existed between moral evil and physical evil. Ricœur argues that the next watershed in forging a speculative approach to evil was Augustine’s interpretation of the myth of the Fall. Augustine introduces a Neo-Platonic conception of evil as a lack or absence of good, as opposed to the traditional tragic vision of Gnosticism that posits evil as a demonic substance or entity that is locked in perpetual battle with the forces of good. Augustine nuances our understanding of evil by replacing the question unde malum? (where does evil come from?) with unde malum faciamus? (why do we commit evil?) He thus moves myth away from its focus on origins to the question of human moral agency and free will. It was Augustine who firmly established the moral polarities of sin and suffering and the theory of retribution, and henceforth evil was no longer to be seen as an external demonic force, but as an internal act committed by a human moral agent who abuses his free will. But this moral vision of the world has a fatal flaw: namely, that in order to render the idea of retribution more credible, and placate man’s objections that the individual suffering he feels is arbitrarily disproportionate to the particular sins he has committed, the idea of sin had to be expanded from individual acts to a more serious historical and collective sin. In other words, the gravity of human sin had to be increased in keeping with the degree of suffering which was its putative punishment. But by making sin a collective, as well as an individual mistake, Augustine only increased man’s sense of impotence in the face of suffering: for if he legitimized suffering by plausibly making it the direct consequence of individual human culpability, then he also delegitimized suffering by rather implausibly positing it as the consequence of a pre-existing evil, as a universal biological legacy over which the individual moral agent has no control. This is what in Ricœur’s view makes Augustine an ‘anti-Gnostic Gnostic’: he both denies Gnosticism (evil is not a substance, but an act) and reaffirms it through the discourse of Original Sin that presents evil as a pre-existing presence in the world.

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‘Original Sin’ is simply another way of describing evil as a prior ‘demonic’ substance in the world, as something that is already there. In seeking to rationalize the myth of the Fall, Augustine pays the heavy price of exacerbating, rather than diminishing, man’s feeling of unjust suffering. This attempt to rationalize evil according to a moral vision of the world was much later taken up by classical theodicy, which increasingly approached the problem of evil through the prism of logical, noncontradictory propositions: What is presupposed in this way of posing the problem is not itself put in question, namely the propositional form in which the terms of the problem are expressed and the rules of consistency which it is thought the solution must satisfy. (pp. 33–4)

If the goal of theodicy has always been to address the problem of evil, then it must first question the premise according to which it typically formulates this problem. This  entails adopting a dialectical, as opposed to totalising, mode of thinking that moves beyond the Humean logic of noncontradiction and systematic coherence that underpins classical theodicy. Ricœur is especially critical of Leibniz’s approach, identifying the seeds of a new dialectical method in Kant and Hegel. He rejects Leibniz’s theodicy, which is founded on the premise that a just and powerful God created the best of all possible worlds, on the basis of the discrepancy between Leibniz’s minimisation of evil and our actual human experience of evil: for the human suffering we endure makes it abundantly clear that the balance between good and evil in the world leans significantly towards the latter. Like Augustine before him, albeit from a different perspective, Leibniz fails sufficiently to recognize the deep sense of indignation that suffering engenders.2 Consequently, Ricœur looks more favourably on Kant’s practical attempt to tackle the problem of evil from the perspective of human subjectivity, in particular because, like Augustine, Kant shifts our focus from the origins of evil, to its capacity to enable morally worthy human actions. However, Kant goes one step further than Augustine: first, because he no longer regards suffering as an unavoidable burden that is inflicted as a punishment, but conceives of it as a contingent aspect of human existence that can be curbed by the proper exercise of certain innate predispositions within man such as sociability, which it is his ethical duty to cultivate; secondly, because Kant replaces the doctrine of Original Sin with the notion of radical evil: no longer is evil regarded as a biological or historical legacy that accompanies man from birth, but as a propensity (Hang), within human nature, which competes with an equally intrinsic predisposition (Anlage) towards the good. Kant refuses to be drawn on the origins of radical evil, claiming that these are inscrutable ‘unerforschbar’, but his theodicy at least has the merit of re-emphasising the role of free will in determining evil. This is also true of the third metaphysical theodicy considered by Ricœur, which is provided by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit, albeit from a historical and even more dialectical perspective than Kant’s. The German idealist identifies two types of evil that reflect the two antithetical dimensions of the human Spirit that divide it from itself: namely, ‘conviction’ (Ueberzeugung) and the ‘conscience that judges’. Throughout the progressive course of History, these evils eventually cancel each other out by virtue of

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a dialectical battle between them that leads to their ultimate reconciliation and thus the final unification of a previously self-divided Spirit. ‘Conviction’ refers to the overriding characteristic of great men of action, those who make history, which manifests itself in the violent passions that derive from their erratic genius; ‘the judging consciousness’, on the other hand, is devoid of passion, but armed with a capacity for sober reflection which seeks to curb the violent excesses of these capricious men of action; however, it is itself dogged by its own particular ‘evil’: namely, the pretension to universality and the hypocritical tendency to pontificate on morality from the safe haven of language, rather than deriving moral lessons directly from the cauldron of human action. Thus the ‘active conscience’ and the ‘conscience that judges’ each acknowledge their respective evils – excessive, unpredictable violence versus hypocritical complacency – and mutually iron them out by a process of reconciliation which culminates in the unification of Spirit. Though Ricœur praises Hegel for his historicisation of evil through the dialectical method he himself favours, he nevertheless has serious reservations about the optimistic conclusions the German philosopher reaches: in particular the fact that his system fails to empathize with the victims of suffering. Thus in the end, Hegel is subject in Ricœur’s eyes to the same charge as Leibniz: he constructs a theodicy whose optimism is manifestly too far removed from the harsh reality of human suffering. In his whistle-stop tour of speculative discourse on evil Ricœur arrives at the following conclusion: namely, that despite some valiant attempts to place evil within the sphere of human moral agency and to develop a more dialectical and less totalising methodology, speculative thought has reached a dead end, a ‘speculative aporia’ that stems from its continued failure to assuage the depth of injustice we feel at human suffering. A fresh approach to evil is thus required so as to render this aporia ‘productive’. Ricœur takes his cue from what Protestant philosopher Karl Barth calls ‘broken’ theology (p. 59), a theology that responds positively to our sense of injustice at the cycle of retribution, by recognising that evil is a lived experience that does not have to be reconciled with the idea of God’s goodness and the goodness of creation. This paves the way for a psychoanalytical approach to suffering modelled on Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia. Freud describes mourning as a gradual severing of all the links that make us feel the loss of a love-object as if it were the loss of part of ourselves. This process of severance, though painful, eventually gives us the freedom to form new emotional attachments. The catharsis of mourning, Ricoeur suggests, can fruitfully be applied to suffering itself. The first step is to deliver ourselves from the feelings of culpability and victimisation that the theory of retribution has instilled within us: we must reject the notion that God is punishing us for sin and instead, embrace the idea that unmerited suffering is a fact of life that we must accept. The second step is to protest against God, as a way of expressing both our dissatisfaction with the idea of divine authority and our impatient hope for a better life. The third and crucial final step is to recognize that our reasons for believing in God should have nothing to do with our need to explain the origins of suffering. Suffering is only regarded as scandalous by those who conceive of God as the source of all goodness in creation, who is indignant at the existence of evil, has the courage to endure it and expresses sympathy towards his victims. But if we have faith in God for its own sake, despite the existence of evil, then we will have successfully incorporated the aporia of speculative thought into the process of mourning. The culmination of this

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process is the renunciation of the very desires that lead us to protest against suffering in the first place: the desire to be rewarded for our good deeds; the desire to be spared the experience of suffering; the desire for immortality. And perhaps this renunciation, Ricœur suggests, this capacity to love God with no ulterior motive or expectations is ultimately to be found in the book of Job, a biblical character who, despite unimaginable torments, is able to love God regardless: ‘To love God gratuitously is completely to get out of the cycle of retribution to which the lament still remains captive, insofar as victims complain about the injustice of their lot’ (p. 72).

Neiman: The banality of evil If the strength of Ricœur’s approach is to expose the lack of fit between our experience of evil as unjust suffering and the detached logic of classical theodicy – ‘speculative aporia’ – then its weakness is to overestimate the degree to which that suffering can be rendered psychologically tolerable through a religious faith that draws on the therapeutic benefits of psychoanalysis. In other words, Ricœur retains the belief that suffering can be made tolerable, not by abandoning theodicy but by changing it: by shifting its focus from a propositional to a phenomenological argument, from universal logic to personal experience. However, Susan Neiman, one of the most important secular humanist philosophers writing today, argues that no theodicy in the post-Enlightenment era is capable of reconciling man to suffering. As a powerful champion of the Enlightenment, she consistently defends the secular value of reason as the main instrument in our search for moral clarity. Her work helps us to understand how the post-Enlightenment debate on evil has arisen. She convincingly argues3 that the problem of evil was given new and dramatic prominence with the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and was subsequently intensified by the Holocaust. Central to Neiman’s argument is Kant’s claim that man has an innate need of reason to make sense of the world. At the heart of human experience is the gap between is (how the world is) and ought to be (our rational desire to understand it) which constantly draws us in two opposed directions. Our desire to make the world intelligible is reflected in our moral expectation that virtue and happiness should be systematically connected (i.e. good ought to be rewarded and evil punished).4 Before Lisbon, Neiman argues, this moral assumption appeared to be fully justified by the dominant paradigm for explaining evil: Augustine’s theological account of the Fall. Man became a sinner by abusing his free will which led God to divide evil into two categories: moral evil (sin) which is inherent to man as a result of the Fall, and natural evil (suffering), which is the punishment meted out by God for man’s sin. God, however, is not merely punitive but also good: if he punishes man’s sin he also rewards his virtue with the promise of an eternal afterlife. Sin and suffering, virtue and happiness are thus logically connected within a balanced moral framework. But the scale of human suffering caused by Lisbon, Neiman claims, was so extreme that for the first time in history Augustine’s rationale for explaining evil was shattered. What sin (moral evil) was so great that it justified punishment (natural evil) on this scale? Moral outrage at the extent of man’s suffering prompted sceptical attacks by Hume and Voltaire which not only refuted Augustinian theology but also the very existence of a just and omnipotent God.5 What

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Kant was later to identify as the gap between nature (our experience of the world) and reason (our desire to understand it) became psychologically intolerable. Evil was now a problem which threatened our moral assumptions and thus our ability to understand the world. It is precisely a failure to recognize this threat Lisbon posed to our rational moral assumptions that is the central flaw of Ricœur’s argument, which makes his plea for us to renounce our perfectly rational desire to protest against suffering and be rewarded for good deeds seem all the more implausible and optimistic. In his Discourse on Inequality (1754), and a letter to Voltaire on the subject of Lisbon (1756), Rousseau addressed this new problem of evil by redefining its Augustinian categorisation.6 Rousseau dismissed the existence of moral evil, introducing instead a new conception of natural evil. Evil, he argued, was the result not of the Fall, but of a social corruption that has alienated human beings from their own true nature, which is good. Evil is our doing, but this does not mean that we are inherently perverse. This is because contrary to what orthodox theologians claim, the source of evil lies outside the will (the one wrong choice which has supposedly led to our Fall). Instead, evil can be explained as a historical contingency which over time has produced the systems of artifice and injustice now organising our society. Knowledge, not penance is needed to undo the damage. Rousseau’s account, therefore, is naturalistic rather than theological because it requires no reference to supernatural intervention or sin. It means that evil can more readily be understood and thus more easily eradicated. In this regard, Rousseau was the first philosopher to place responsibility for evil firmly in our hands, not God’s. But if his secular definition of evil as social, not moral (and agency as human rather than divine) discredited the Augustinian link between sin and suffering, it also led to a different but equally serious problem: namely, that if man demystified evil by redefining it as a secular, historically contingent phenomenon he ran the risk of normalising it by making the world appear less threatening. The more man shifted responsibility for evil onto himself rather than God, the more he risked minimising its negative connotations. Neiman argues that this paradox was illustrated in devastating fashion by Auschwitz, and in support cites Hannah Arendt’s perceptive account of the banality of evil. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt stressed the mechanized, anonymously bureaucratic process behind the genocide which de-individualized evil and pointed to a gap between evil acts and evil intentions.7 Even the most terrible acts, Arendt showed, are not necessarily the product of malice. Eichmann was following orders: he felt no guilt. Neiman asserts: ‘Auschwitz posed philosophical problems because it left the nature of assuming responsibility very unclear’.8 Even the most immense crimes that cry out for retribution (what philosophers, following Kant, label ‘radical evil’) are carried out by people whose motives are no worse than banal. Neiman’s post-Kantian secular account incisively pinpoints three critical aspects to the post-Enlightenment debate on evil: first, that the problem of evil has evolved over the course of history; secondly, that we have an innate need to rationalize evil; and thirdly, that this need is frustrated by two factors: the historical reality of evils (the natural evil of Lisbon, the radical evil of the Holocaust) that exceed human comprehension, and the difficulty of establishing responsibility for them. If we ascribe responsibility to God, then his account of moral evil falls woefully short of our expectations; but if we ascribe responsibility to man, then social evil is equally

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unsatisfactory in allowing the banalisation of an evil as radical as that of the Holocaust. Thus, Neiman argues that a secular explanation to evil is the only valid substitute for theodicy, an argument she pursues in her second book, where she shifts her focus from Lisbon to the contemporary moral upheaval caused by 9/11.9 Neiman’s critique begins by denouncing the unreflective attitude to evil engendered by 9/11, which was fuelled by the Bush administration’s ‘apocalyptic public discourse’ that used this event as a pretext for demonising Islamists as evil. This reaction, Neiman argues, was wrong on three counts: first, because it appealed to a Christian fundamentalist base while appearing acceptably nondenominational to everyone else; secondly, because it was incendiary; and, thirdly, because it conveniently precluded the need to explain the causes of these acts: ‘For this President, condemning terrorism as evil eliminates the need for understanding it.’10 This same criticism, as we shall see in the next section, is made by Judith Butler. However, contrary to Butler, Neiman interprets 9/11 in the context of Enlightenment philosophy. She draws a metaphysical parallel between the ‘natural’ evil of Lisbon and the political evil of 9/11. Contemporary terrorism, she claims, seeks to reproduce the same arbitrariness, chaos and indifference to suffering as natural disasters: neither type of event comes with a warning, nor does it make a distinction between the innocent and the guilty. If, following the Lisbon earthquake, Enlightenment thinkers replaced the term ‘natural evil’ with ‘natural disaster’ because the scale of the suffering led them to conclude that nature was ‘blind to moral judgements’, so too ‘by imitating nature’s implacable disregard for the difference between the just and the unjust, terrorism rejects the very basis of morality.’11 This indiscriminate attitude to morality is a particular feature of contemporary terrorism, because earlier terrorists at least had the ‘decency’ to cancel plots that would have killed innocent bystanders.12 But Neiman’s suggestion that our moral indignation at the destructiveness of nature is equivalent to that which we feel towards man-made acts of violence is suspect, because it underestimates the degree to which moral reactions to acts of political terrorism are far more conditioned by ideological bias than those engendered by natural evils. And because ideologies invariably represent particularist national, political and religious interests they have the effect of polarising moral judgements, rather than forging a moral consensus. The old saying ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ is no less applicable to 9/11 than it is to other acts of terrorism. It polarizes moral opinion not only between the Western and Islamic worlds, but also  –  albeit to a lesser degree – within the West itself. Despite the genuine outrage provoked by 9/11 throughout the whole world, it has still understandably caused more anger in the United States than elsewhere. To acknowledge this point is neither to minimize its gravity, nor to single out Americans any more than we should criticize Northern Irish and British citizens who still feel outrage at the Irish Republican Army (IRA) attacks perpetrated from the 1970s to the 1990s, or Spanish citizens incensed by the bombings carried out by Basque separatists Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA). Whether we care to admit it or not, the fact remains, (I return to this point in Chapter 7), that even Western responses to 9/11 are subject to a greater degree of moral relativism than Neiman would care to acknowledge.

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Her attempts to identify objective universal criteria for defining evil is on safer terrain when she revivifies Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil, which is rooted in universal human psychology, rather than biased political ideology. For this theory not only makes it more reasonable to speak of evil actions as opposed to intrinsically evil people, but also discredits the notion that we can always pinpoint evil intentions: this is because ordinary people can find themselves drawn into evil actions without intending them, or even recognising them as such. Thus, what we should really fear is not psychopaths but our own predisposition towards evil: Were Eichmann and his cohorts psychopathic monsters who were uniquely hateful or vicious, it would be easy to externalize the evils the Nazis committed. Evil would be whatever acts of barbarism are committed by those kinds of beasts. Arendt’s analysis unnerves those reluctant to draw the conclusion she explicitly intended: under the wrong sort of circumstances, most of us are capable of the wrong sort of actions.13

This is the crux of Neiman’s argument to which I return at various points in this book: we are uncomfortable with the idea of the banality of evil because we do not want to recognize the possibility that we ourselves, in extreme circumstances could commit unspeakable acts. This scenario has received empirical confirmation from social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who set up a controlled experiment that entailed placing decent, law-abiding volunteers in an artificial prison where they were subdivided into the roles of prison guards and prisoners. The unnerving result was a scenario akin to William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies (1954):14 it engendered in psychologically sane and morally upright human beings disturbing acts of brutality that led Zimbardo to terminate the experiment prematurely. Neiman further legitimizes her revival of Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil by using it as a springboard to propose its positive counterpart: the banality of good. Simply put, this notion means focusing less on celebrated heroes or icons of virtue such as Martin Luther King or Mother Teresa, and more on the anonymous, unnoticed acts of goodness performed by ordinary people. Neiman’s rationale for this is essentially pragmatic: we tend to elevate goodness into an idealized heroism which is too daunting and detached from our own experiences to be a genuine spur for us to perform acts of virtue: ‘Goodness is no less banal than evil, but clear instances are harder to find, which is why we turn to literature and movies and myths.’15 The attributes of the ordinary citizens Neiman identifies as ‘Enlightenment heroes’ are happiness, a faith in the powers of reason, dignity and courage.16 Her theory of the ‘banality of good’ provides a useful interpretative framework for my reading of two of the novelists I discuss in Chapter 7: Victor Hugo and Raphaël Confiant. Both novelists champion the ‘unsung heroes’ of history rather than cultural icons such as Robespierre or Louis Delgrès. All told then, Neiman has provided the best defence of Arendt’s banality of evil in a contemporary context. Her underestimation of the polarising and reductive role of political ideology in shaping our responses to evil is the one weakness in an otherwise brilliant argument. This role is more convincingly explored by French philosopher Alain Badiou.

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Badiou: The ideology of evil Alain Badiou vehemently attacks the dominant paradigm for addressing evil in post-Holocaust Western thought: what he identifies as an ‘ethical ideology’ based on difference and consensus.17 The ethics of difference (broadly originating in Levinas) are predicated on a respect for the irreducible alterity of the Other and the consequent need to protect this Other from victimisation and misrecognition. This ethical stance typically demands the denunciation of racism and nationalism (both of which threaten the Other) and the endorsement of multiculturalism. The ethics of consensus (whose origins lie in Kant) are based on the presumption that there exist self-evident abstract universal rights or attributes that are the result of a wide consensus, what we call ‘human rights’. Badiou attacks these two pillars of the so-called ethical ideology on the basis that they lead to an excessively defensive attitude whereby human rights are merely defined negatively as the right to non-evil: rights not to be offended or mistreated with respect to one’s life, one’s body or cultural identity. Ethics thus defines man as a victim, instead of as an agent of the good. Such ethics provide the rationale for a Western global capitalist system that purports to safeguard ‘liberal’ Western values against hostile outside influences. Bush’s policies after 9/11 are the perfect example of the consensual ethics Badiou despises. Badiou retraces the source of this negative ethics to overemphatic perceptions of the Holocaust as the paradoxical ‘measure that is unmeasurable’ (p. 63): on the one hand, it stands out as the historical example of radical evil par excellence, against which all other evils must be measured; on the other hand, its uniquely evil status means that it is sacrilegious to compare the Holocaust to anything else. It must also be regarded as an evil that is beyond the limits of thought, an atrocity too ‘inconceivable’ or ‘unspeakable’ to be measured. To counter this ethical double bind, which means that no evil can be defined on its own merits, Badiou proposes a subjective philosophy that is chiefly concerned with the transformative power of a radical commitment (or ‘fidelity’) to a process that he calls a truth or a truth procedure. Badiou asserts that ‘a Truth is a concrete process that starts by an upheaval (an encounter, a general revolt, a surprising new invention)’ within a particular situation, and ‘develops as fidelity to the novelty thus experienced. A Truth is the subjective development of that which is both new and universal.’18 Crucially, this subjective development, Badiou demonstrates, hinges on a radical reinterpretation of evil. Contrary to the theories put forward by Ricœur and Neiman, he starts by reversing the order in which most religious and secular doctrines tackle the question of evil by first asking what is good; secondly, he rejects the anti-humanism of much modern philosophy by associating the good with truth; and thirdly, instead of reducing evil to the rigid or negative a priori definitions and values of theology on the one hand (evil as sin) and ethical ideology on the other (evil as that which threatens human rights), he situates evil within the very structure of human subjectivity, agency and freedom. Evil is simply the interruption of a subject’s fidelity to a truth by the various sorts of corruption it must inevitably face: fatigue, confusion and dogmatism. The logical relation of good and evil is thus perfectly clear: first, the good (the affirmation of a truth), then the risk of evil (as perversion of the good). Badiou’s argument informs this study, and especially Chapter  7, by bringing into sharp relief first, the politicisation

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of evil as a major hindrance to its objective moral evaluation, and secondly, our contemporary ‘victim mentality’ which points to a wider problem Annette Wievorka has defined as ‘the era of the witness’: namely, the transformation of victim testimony into a media spectacle that has replaced rational debate with an under-scrutinized appeal to emotions that encourages passive citizens to seek recognition in victimhood rather than deliberative action.19

Evil and politics Badiou’s legitimate concern that contemporary society has abandoned meaningful philosophical debate (why do we suffer?) for expedient ideological imperatives (how do we protect ourselves from suffering), gets to the heart of the problematic relationship that exists between evil and politics today: namely, how to retain the ability to think critically about evil without succumbing to the influence of normative ideology? Symptomatic of this dogmatic politicisation of evil is its indiscriminate identification with the emotive notion of ‘Terror’, the term originating in Robespierre’s counter-Revolutionary policy of 1793, but linked more recently to the controversial notion of the ‘War on Terror’ triggered by the events of 9/11. If in the main the condemnation of 9/11 by French intellectuals has not, as I argue in Chapter 7, been as vociferous as that of their American counterparts, some such as Alain Finkielkraut, have supported America’s victim-status without reserve to legitimize a policy of counter-violence against a hostile Islamic enemy; whereas conversely, Judith Butler, as we shall see below, has incurred the wrath of many of her US compatriots by arguing that such policies should be tempered by attempts at understanding the root causes of this hostility. As for moral opinion on the ‘Terreur’ of 1793, this tends to be more explicitly polarized along national lines, though not exclusively so: Sophie Wahnich’s defence of Robespierre’s ‘Terreur’ as a political necessity rather than a political evil typifies those recent French Republican historians explored in Chapter 7 who reject Arendt’s identification of terror with totalitarianism; in this regard she is supported by Žižek, but not Sade, one of the earliest critics of ‘la Terreur’ who advocated an alternative form of Republicanism rooted not in the State oppression of Robespierre’s capital punishment, but the individual freedom of materialist libertinage.

Finkielkraut versus Butler Alain Finkielkraut’s controversial 2002 book L’imparfait du présent not only unequivocally defends America as the innocent victim, rather than unwitting perpetrator, of the September attacks, but is also savagely critical, rather than tolerant, of Islam.20 Finkielkraut highlights the singularity of September 11, 2001, as an event, which, whether perceived from a historical or philosophical perspective, is morally speaking without precedent. In this regard, he strays into the dubious practice, denounced by Badiou in relation to the Holocaust, of ‘hierarchising’ evil: of singling out a particular historical episode as ‘more evil’ than its predecessors. First, Finkielkraut distinguishes the suicide bombings of 9/11 from previous acts of terrorism. They

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bear no relation to what Camus in L’Homme Revolté called ‘delicate murderers’, or political terrorists with a conscience, such as those who aborted the assassination of the Grand-duke Serge in Moscow in 1905 when at the eleventh hour they realized that innocent children were travelling in his carriage. Nor can the suicide bombers of 9/11 be labelled, as some defenders of Islam would have us believe, as ‘martyrs’ or ‘kamikazes’. Martyrs, Finkielkraut reminds us, sacrifice their own lives, and not those of other people, in the name of a higher cause; as for the Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II, their perception of death is that of a noble sacrifice carried out for a common cause, which has absolutely nothing to do with the present-day suicide bombers: for according to Japanese tradition such acts were morally legitimized by a fanatical adherence to a strict military code that in no way transgressed the rules of warfare (pp. 223–5). Perhaps mindful that his condemnation of the September attacks on historical grounds is somewhat flimsily based on a highly selective chronology of terrorism and of the various labels attributed to it, Finkielkraut seeks to add philosophical weight to his argument by discrediting theological and socio-economic theories of violence. First, he quickly dismisses as ludicrous the theological idea of Original Sin, the notion that mankind has inherited a debt of guilt that needs to be expiated through innocent suffering; secondly, he rejects the secular socio-economic argument that has most often been used against theology, notably by Rousseau and Sartre, whereby crimes of violence are explained as the inevitable consequence of the desperate poverty and humiliation of an oppressed group who have no other means of fighting their oppressor (pp. 225–7). This argument has often been used to justify the terrorist activities of Palestinians against Israelis. But Finkielkraut cleverly turns this philosophical paradigm of oppressor/oppressed on its head to attack those Islamists or Western liberals who express outrage at American imperialism. For it is precisely those who cast America in the role of oppressor, blaming it not just for September 11, but for all the ‘evils’ of our planet – the creation of Israel, the humiliation of Islam, turning a blind eye to Rwanda and even global warming – who paradoxically end up reinforcing the American hegemony that they are seeking to denounce (p. 232). What ‘Islamic anger’ should be denouncing in the West are its worst features: financial greed, rampant consumerism and the selfish pursuit of well-being (p. 233). Finkielkraut’s critique advocates a belligerent stance against Islam, rather than any attempt to understand the causes of 9/11. An event has taken place that no interpretation can dissolve. There has been an expression of rage that it has become scandalous to dilute into its causes. Something else has appeared which cannot be reduced to the image of the starving or the wretched of the earth. This reality is not just economic or social. There is an enemy. And this enemy has waged war against western civilisation. (p. 228)

Finkielkraut’s earlier philosophical cogency degenerates into an emotive rhetoric (‘rage’, ‘scandalous’, ‘enemy’, ‘war’) that leaves no space for rational debate and has more in common with the political discourse that characterized George W. Bush’s administration than with the rigorous critique one would expect of a highly respected ethical philosopher. Even the language in which he frames his clinching argument – that

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the real reason Islam hates the West is because of the latter’s more civilized treatment of women and its strong support of Israel – is emotionally charged and conjectural (p. 233). The suspicion remains, then, that Finkielkraut’s argument is tinged by Islamophobia, which presupposes condemnation without understanding. Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004) refutes Finkielkraut’s view that attempting to understand the causes of 9/11 is tantamount to excusing it. Butler was one of a vocal minority of American intellectuals to speak out at the height of the Bush administration against the political abuse of the word ‘Terror’ in the light of 9/11, an abuse which has since been toned down by the Obama administration, but by no means eradicated.21 At the time, Butler argued that even to question the use of the word ‘Terror’ and the policies with which it was associated was considered by many American intellectuals, even on the left, as an act of treason. So powerful was this politicisation that it had three negative effects: anti-intellectualism and censorship, the categorical identification of terrorism with Islam, the manipulation of images of violence and suffering by the Western media. First, Butler denounced the opprobrium heaped upon that vocal minority of American intellectuals such as her, who, in a spirit of philosophical and ethical rigour dared to encourage constructive debate on the causes of 9/11. These isolated voices were condemned by a moral majority who perceived any attempt even to explore the possible motivations behind 9/11 as tantamount to excusing or endorsing it. A pejorative anti-Soviet Cold War vocabulary was recycled for new anti-Islamic political ends, meaning that oppositional voices were regarded by both the American Right and even large sections of the liberal Left as ‘refuseniks’.22 This created a climate of intellectual censorship where no serious debate about 9/11 was possible without risk of vilification by both the academic community and public opinion. Butler bleakly summed up the situation thus: To charge those who voice critical views with treason, terrorist-sympathizing, antiSemitism, moral relativism, postmodernism, juvenile behaviour, collaboration, anachronistic leftism, is to seek to destroy the credibility not of the views that are held, but of the persons who hold them. It produces the climate of fear in which to voice a certain view is to risk being branded and shamed with a heinous appellation.23

Secondly, she argued that the word “terrorist” was reserved for unjustified acts of violence against First World nations, specifically the United States, whereas the acts of violence they conducted were conveniently legitimized as a ‘just war’. During his administration, George W. Bush proposed a binarism in which only two positions were possible – ‘Either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists.’ In a new formulation of the Cold War distinction between ‘East’ and ‘West’ this same binarism ‘returns us to the invidious distinction between civilisation (our own) and barbarism (now coded as “Islam” itself).’ Though there is no doubt that the United States did suffer violence, to present itself as the exclusive victim of violence in order to justify using ‘limitless aggression against targets that may or may not be related to the sources of one’s own suffering’, is both immoral and often, illegal.24 If this moral defence provided by the United States were not blatantly one-sided enough, it has further been bolstered, Butler maintains, by the categorical exclusion from its public discourse, especially journalism, of the numerous victims of the military violence it inflicts. Only certain deaths, notably

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those of the American soldiers and victims of 9/11 are deemed ‘publically grievable’: they are scrupulously given individual identities and thus ‘humanized’, whereas others, especially the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilian casualties, remain totally unrecognized, ignored and hence ‘dehumanized’.25

Žižek versus Sade Contrary to Butler’s moral problematisation of ‘Terror’, Žižek has no qualms about defending its legitimacy, both with regard to Robespierre’s specific counter-Revolutionary policy implemented in 1793, and as a rehabilitated, emancipatory notion that speaks directly to our modern ethical concerns. He begins his rehabilitation of this term by defending Robespierre’s explicit moral justification of Terror as a form of virtue: If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless.26

Žižek defends these words on the grounds that Terror is a form of justice that emanates from virtue; this justice must remain inflexible because it punishes the enemies of the Revolution. Žižek claims that Robespierre’s notion of revolutionary terror cleverly overrides the opposites of punishment and clemency by making rigour and charity coincide. This defends him against the charge of tyranny: ‘To punish the oppressors of humanity: that is clemency; to forgive them is barbarity. The rigour of tyrants has that rigour as its sole principle: that of the Republican government is based on beneficence.’27 If in the light of the Stalinist gulags, Albert Camus had condemned Robespierre and Saint – Just as naive for basing their notion of ‘Virtue’ on Rousseau’s premise that man has a natural inclination towards the exercise of reason in the name of the general good (a premise that was quickly disproved by the political factionalism that led the Committee of Public Safety to lose sight of its original unity of purpose28) then Žižek considers Robespierre’s Terror to be a form of clemency that serves the general good. He further rebuts the standard accusation that Robespierre was a tyrant on two grounds: first, by emphasising his pacifism and secondly, by reclaiming his policy from a Marxist perspective as a measured way of ensuring ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, or the empowerment of those who do not belong to society. In this regard, Žižek suggests, Robespierre took his cue from Danton, who saw the Jacobin Terror as a necessary pre-emptive action that would prevent the greater violence threatened by the ‘sans-culottes’. Not content to rehabilitate Terror in its original political context, Žižek seeks to marshall it to our contemporary ethical demands. He takes his cue from Alain Badiou’s call for a reinvention of ‘emancipatory terror’, a galvanising notion devised to serve as an antidote to the defensive ‘biopolitics of fear’ that characterize our present-day liberal democracies: essentially the negative ‘victim mentality’ that Badiou believes conditions our attitude to evil. ‘Emancipatory Terror’ is envisaged as a counterweight to this regressive ‘politics of the status quo’, (which Žižek traces to the late-twentieth-century shift in values from ‘humanism and terror’ to a stark ethical division between

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‘humanism or terror’). Such a politics has ‘fear as its ultimate mobilising principle’ (fear of immigrants, crime, ecological catastrophes etc.) to the extent that it has discredited the very notion of ‘humanity as a collective subject [that] has the capacity to somehow limit impersonal and anonymous socio-historical development.’ In other words, global capitalism conceives of the social process as dominated by ‘an anonymous Fate beyond social control’ which precludes or severely limits collective human agency. Any attempt to steer society in a particular direction is quickly dismissed as ‘ideological and/or “totalitarian’’’. Like Badiou, however, Žižek is better at highlighting the problems of Western liberalism – specifically, its ethical complacency  – than he is at proposing solutions to it. Thus, his suggestion that ‘emancipatory terror’ could resolve the contemporary ecological crisis not only smacks of a rather forced attempt to make an outdated concept relevant to twenty-first century ethical concerns, 29 but also underestimates the overwhelmingly negative connotations of the word ‘Terror’, which has become virtually synonymous in the modern public consciousness with the fight against radical Islam. A more convincing attempt to reframe the notion of ‘Terror’ in a new political light is proposed by Sade in the most polemical chapter of his Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), ‘Yet Another Effort, Frenchman, If you would become Republicans’, a text that was written contemporaneously to ‘la Terreur’ of 1793.30 Sade’s masterstroke was to advocate a new form of Republican government that re-prioritized the order in which moral values and political laws are conceived. Instead of the State imposing the values it wants on individuals – laws dictated by the demands of authority, such as the draconian measures implemented under Robespierre’s ‘Terreur’ to suppress counter-Revolutionary activity  – it was up to individuals to create a system of governance that reflected their pre-existing moral needs. Political ideology in other words should seek not to undermine individual moral autonomy, but serve it. Having been imprisoned for ‘political moderation’ in December 1793, narrowly escaped execution and witnessed the use of the guillotine from his prison window, Sade was well placed to see how evil can become a political instrument that suppresses individual freedom.31 If Žižek had the luxury of justifying ‘la Terreur’ through the retrospective lens of a political ideology that post-dated it, then Sade saw the suffering it caused at first hand. Written against the backdrop of fear and uncertainty that reigned during the transition from religious feudalism to secular Republicanism, Philosophy in the Bedroom is thus directly rooted in human suffering, which as Ricœur and Neiman remind us, is better understood when actually experienced than it is when mediated through speculative theory. It is thus both a work of its time but also one that speaks to present-day ethical concerns in its attempts to redress the imbalance of moral decision making away from political authority and back to the individual, while at the same time recognising the need for a modicum of State intervention. Key to Sade’s argument – and in this he anticipates Nietzsche, whom I discuss in Chapter 4 – is his advocacy of a new political system that would no longer allow society’s moral values to become entrenched and obsolete, but instead ensure that these values are fully compatible both with man’s innate moral predispositions and the historical context in which he lives. For Sade, man’s innate morality lies in the materialist philosophy inspired by d’Holbach

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and La  Mettrie which maintained that man’s behaviour, like that of nature itself, is exclusively governed by the pursuit of pleasure and self-interest. And if this is the case, then it follows that any obstacle imposed by society on man’s innate pursuit of pleasure and self-interest must be considered as repressive, because it is entirely unnatural. If the material laws that govern nature provide the philosophical rationale for Sade’s defence of individual freedom, then France’s repressive pre-revolutionary religious monarchy furnishes the historical one. This repression, he argues, endures in outdated laws that seek to render man’s moral conduct incompatible with the laws of nature. He identifies as the main source of this repression any law that places obstacles to sexual freedom. This is why Sade welcomes the arrival of a new Republican government as an opportunity to ensure society’s total emancipation from centuries of religious and feudal despotism. His agenda, especially in view of Robespierre’s draconian measures, is to ensure that this still fragile Republic is able to devise its very own, progressive laws  – laws that not only will secure good governance, but also establish a political system liberal enough to grant the individual the freedom to be his ‘natural’ self that was denied him under the old system; specifically, laws that allow sexual libertinage to prosper within a more secular and egalitarian system. In order to devise new laws, it is first necessary to understand what was wrong with the old ones. He identifies the four acts the religious monarchy considered to be most evil: slander, theft, ‘impure’ sexual acts and murder, and explains why under the new Republic such value judgements no longer apply and need to be reversed. Slander is re-valorized on the grounds that it flushes out vice in the wicked and reinforces virtue in the virtuous; theft because it is a great socio-economic leveller between rich and poor which also reinforces the egalitarian principles of the Revolution; ‘impure’ sexual acts – prostitution, adultery, incest, rape and sodomy – in actual fact benefit both the collective needs of the Republic and the individual desires of its citizens. These are acts of ‘libertinage’ – the pursuit of non-procreative sexual freedom – that both fulfil man’s innate materialist quest for pleasure and self-interest, yet are also collectively binding and conducive to the prosperity of the nation. Legalized brothels are thus defended as sexual safety-valves for both men and women that defuse the potential within them for violent political unrest; in similar vein, adultery offers an escape from the repressive ‘unnatural’ vows of monogamy. As for murder, considered by the religious monarchy as the most serious crime of all, this is perfectly consistent with the laws of nature, which is locked in a constant cycle of destruction and renewal, since material decay is a necessary precondition for material regeneration. Since matter never actually dies but merely changes form, killing someone is simply contributing to the production of a new life (pp. 330–1). Secondly, murder also benefits the political rule of law, specifically the legitimate act of warfare which strengthens a nation and rids it of enemies that threaten its survival (p. 332). Thirdly, murder has but a negligible impact on society, whose health and survival is hardly affected by the small loss of human life for which murder is responsible; fourthly, so far as the prosperity of the Republic is concerned, murder not only instils a warrior-like mentality that strengthens a nation (the violent games staged by the Romans in the amphitheatre made the public more ‘virile’), but is also a necessary mechanism for ‘culling’ its excess members when the Republic’s resources are overstretched (an argument that completely contradicts the previous

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Christian monarchy’s desire to increase the population at all costs). Sade concludes that murder is a necessary evil, despite the suffering it undoubtedly causes: ‘a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is necessary to tolerate in a republican state’ (p. 337). The crux of Sade’s argument lies in his moral distinction between murder and capital punishment: the former, as we have seen, legitimately answers the ‘Voice of nature’, man’s innate predisposition to violence; whereas the latter is an illegitimate instrument of repression that serves political authority, as opposed to human need. Though he does not designate it by name, Sade’s condemnation of capital punishment is a thinly veiled attack against Robespierre’s revolutionary policy, defended by Žižek. Sade’s philosophy of libertinage may at times be questionable in its defence of certain individual ‘freedoms’ such as rape (on the grounds that no man can claim exclusive ownership over one woman since the notion of ‘sexual property’ goes against the laws of nature by inhibiting the pursuit of pleasure, pp. 319–20), but it retains an ethical vitality and freshness in its denunciation of political tyranny and its proto-Nietzschean recognition that definitions of evil are not fixed, but the reflection of a specific historical context.

Evil and gender No discussion of evil, especially in a historical context, can ignore the question of gender. An initial distinction can be made between the social phenomenon of evils carried out predominantly against women, such as rape or domestic violence and the historical identification of evil with women, which harks back to the Catholic stereotype of Eve as the female temptress held responsible for seducing Adam into eating the forbidden fruit. Given that the religious and cultural history of evil feature repeatedly throughout this study, it is with the latter phenomenon – representations of women as evil – that I am primarily concerned here, although self-evidently, such representations are at times indissociable from those social evils directed against women. Two formulations of the stereotype of the evil feminine stand out, which became particularly prominent in the intellectual debate and cultural representations of the late nineteenth century. The first is the identification of women as witches, which reached its zenith during the infamous witch-trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and became inter alia the subject of historian Jules Michelet’s work Satanism and Witchcraft (La Sorcière) (1863); the second is the cultural stereotype of the ‘femme fatale’, who figures prominently in Barbey’s work The She-Devils (Les Diaboliques) (1874), and as Mario Praz points out, emerged as the dominant personification of evil in the latter half of the nineteenth century after the first half had been peopled by male heroes inspired by Byronic Satanism. Both stereotypes have a common origin: that of the ‘demonic’ female who constitutes a moral threat to patriarchal power. This stereotype authorizes the stigmatisation of women, which Simone de Beauvoir, in her pioneering feminist study The Second Sex (1949) saw as a projection of patriarchal authority that subordinated woman to the inferior role of ‘Other’, whose identity could never be her own because it has only ever be defined in relation to men. This is because History,

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including the Bible and the book of Genesis itself, is a masculine construct, which has relegated women to a subordinate role from the beginning of time: ‘Religions forged by men reflect this will for domination: they found ammunition in the legends of Eve and Pandora.’ Eve, Beauvoir goes on to state, was never envisaged as an autonomous being, merely as Adam’s companion – she was physically created by God from Adam’s flank in order to rescue him from loneliness.32 Given that the origins of this ‘myth of Eve’ are inseparable from the patriarchal manipulation of power and religion which silences the voice of women, then this manipulation is most fruitfully examined through the work of men. It would be legitimate to assume that Jules Michelet, a secular and liberal Republican historian fiercely opposed to the Catholic Second Empire who had paid homage to the opposite sex in his work Woman (1860), was the perfect male candidate to undermine this stereotype by exposing the injustices inflicted on women by libertine priests during the witch-trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Conversely, Michelet’s contemporary and bitter enemy Barbey d’Aurevilly, an arch-Catholic monarchist who despised what he saw as the morally vacuous Third Republic and was notorious for his misogynistic statements gives every appearance of reinforcing the stereotype of the ‘evil feminine’, personified in his portrayal of aristocratic female sinners in The She-Devils, about whom he says in his preface ‘there is not one of them who is pure, virtuous and innocent’.33 But read more closely, a paradox emerges which reverses our prior assumptions: namely, that for all his sympathetic defence of witches as the naïve and passive victims of libertine priests, Michelet manipulates historical facts to suit his anti-Catholic agenda (what Frank Bowman defines as ‘virulent anti-clerical propaganda’), thereby ignoring a whole dimension of female moral agency that is located in what feminist historian Sarah Ferber calls ‘hagiographical discourse’.34 By the same token, Barbey’s portrayal of ‘femmes fatales’ is far less stigmatising and dogmatic than it seems, for it affords women a significant degree of moral and intellectual dignity, as well as superiority over men. Barbey’s sixth and final story in The She-Devils, ‘A Woman’s Vengeance’ illustrates this well. The woman in question is La duchesse d’Arcos de Sierra-Leone, who avenges her husband’s brutal killing of her platonic lover, Don Esteban, by prostituting herself in Paris in order to destroy his reputation. She is a splendid example of traditional Catholic Spanish nobility, the last descendant of the Turre-Cremata (‘burnt tower’), a noble, blue-blooded family, which included the great Inquisitor Torquemada. Her vengeance is praised as an example of a crime ‘of extreme civilisation’ which speaks to ‘the higher degree of intelligence of the criminals’ (p. 215). Her prostitution in no way contradicts her superior intellect because this is a profession she has freely chosen: she determines her own (im)moral actions. She is not, as Peter Cogman has perceptively argued, the victim of circumstance, such as those women of ill repute found in Naturalist fiction, nor does she conform to the sentimentalized prostitute of an Hugo or a Dumas fils, the ‘whore with a heart of gold’ who is ripe for redemption by a well-intentioned male suitor. In fact, not only is prostitution a vocation over which she expresses no shame, but it is one in which she maintains a certain pride and dignity no matter what difficulties she may encounter.35 Secondly, her intellectual superiority to her male client and interlocutor Robert de Tressiginies is confirmed by her articulate and sophisticated voice: she exerts authority and control over her largely silent and

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emasculated male interlocutor through her superior use of language, through the story she recounts with eloquent self-assurance. As Eileen Sivert has argued, this story gives her ‘textual’ as well as ‘sexual’ power because she recounts it to all her male clients in the hope and expectation that it will eventually reach her husband and humiliate him socially.36 Thus, despite his explicitly reactionary Catholic pronouncements which predictably lead him to stigmatize women as archetypal sinners descended from Eve, Barbey’s female protagonists are dignified and free moral agents, who are both sexually and intellectually empowered, and utterly self-assured. This is hardly the case with the women depicted in Michelet’s apparently more liberal-minded Satanism and Witchcraft;37 though he manifestly sympathizes with these women, he does so in an implicitly patronising tone, that reduces them to a state of weakness and suffering that completely denies them any kind of voice with which to express independence of thought, social insight or freedom of choice. Let us take for instance his description of Madeleine, one of the possessed young women in the so-called Gauffridy trial that took place at Marseille in 1610: They brought the trembling girl, and exorcised the demon within her by putting these cold dead bones in contact with her cheeks. She did not die of horror, but from that time she was absolutely at their disposal; they had got what they wanted, the death of conscience, the extermination of all that was left of moral sense and free will. (p. 136)

Ferber’s more accurate account of this exorcism exposes Michelet’s manipulation of historical fact. She maintains that, if at times Madeleine was undeniably manipulated into admitting the presence of the devil, at other times she appears to have ‘been attempting some control over the outcome of the interrogations’, lunging out at her interrogators when they were attempting to record evidence of the devil’s presence.38 She was never the blank slate Michelet suggests she was. But Michelet’s historical revisionism is even more blatant in his account of the Loudun witch-trials of 1634, the most notorious in French history. These have inspired inter alia Ken Russell’s controversial film The Devils (1971) and Michel de Certeau’s magisterial sociological study of the Loudun witch-trials. The main episodes can be summarized as follows: in September 1632, in the Ursuline convent at Loudun, a number of nuns began to see apparitions: first, of a dead priest, the Prior Moussart, but subsequently of Urbain Grandier, a handsome young cleric who had recently arrived in Loudun. As the apparitions intensified, leading to uncontrollable shouting and writhing from the nuns, demonic possession was suspected, exorcists were called in and Grandier was quickly accused of casting an evil spell over the nuns, in particular over the prioress of the convent Jeanne des Anges. Grandier was eventually found guilty and burnt at the stake in 1634. As de Certeau has shown, alleged proof of Jeanne’s demonic possession was the inscriptions on her hand by the demons that possessed her of the mighty forces that had triumphed over them: Jesus, Maria and Francis de Sales. Such was Jeanne’s notoriety that she toured the whole of France in 1637, displaying her hand to the general public, as well as to France’s very highest authorities: the Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis XIII himself.39

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As in the Gauffridy trial, the cause of the alleged possession can, according to Michelet, be reduced to two factors: the ‘ennui’ of the convent and the arrival in Loudun of an attractive priest. The possessions of Loudun are simply fraudulent imitations of the prior possession that took place in Marseille and for which Gauffridy was prosecuted. Jeanne des Anges’ hands are merely fake stigmata painted afresh everyday and the exorcisms dismissed as an elaborate spectacle designed to satiate public hysteria: This was why something of Sorcery must always be an ingredient in legal cases of this sort; the Devil supplied the only really interesting motif. Of course he could not always be shown leaving the accused’s body in the form of a black toad . . . but at any rate the mise en scène was grand and imposing enough. (p. 146)

Contrary to Michelet who dismisses the exorcisms and deliberately avoids referring to Jeanne by name, Sarah Ferber emphasizes instead her gradual acquisition of moral autonomy and influence through the spiritual authority and cult of sanctity that developed around her both as a result of her exorcisms and long after the exorcisms had ceased. The culmination of Jeanne’s transition from dangerous ‘possessed female’ to venerated living saint was the writing of her autobiography in 1644 which was explicitly modelled on the life of Saint Teresa of Avila.40 Ferber shows how this sixteenth-century Saint ‘loomed large in the French spiritual landscape of the seventeenth century’.41 Jeanne’s spiritual trajectory was facilitated by the Jesuit Father Surin who, as her chief exorcist also became her spiritual ‘sponsor’, helping her acquire a reputation as a ‘living saint’. Under his guidance, she became a beneficiary of miracles, including a visitation by the figure of St. Joseph, but most notably of all by a guardian angel with whom she came to communicate regularly throughout her life.42 St Teresa, during her own life, had also been influenced by an angel and this hagiographical precedent, coupled with Jeanne’s own experience, undoubtedly sustained the high public profile that she acquired as a female mystic. Unsurprisingly, this profile made a number of male Catholic clerics, including, Surin himself, feel decidedly uneasy and redundant because it meant that women such as Jeanne could now achieve direct communication with God without the intermediary of a male spiritual director.43 Exorcism was, after all, a male preserve and even the more liberal-minded Catholic priests had difficulty adjusting to the growing importance of female mysticism and of the newfound independence and moral agency accorded to women.44 Interestingly, this very same female mysticism of Saint Teresa is also attributed to the duchess in ‘A Woman’s Vengeance’. Where the narrator unflatteringly compares her to the sexually voracious Messalina and Agrippina (p. 228), she reasserts both narrative control and her moral dignity by comparing her platonic love for Vasconcellos to ‘that ecstatic love which St. Teresa had for her divine Spouse’ (p. 233). Read through the lens of female mysticism Barbey’s ostensibly stereotypical stigmatisation of the ‘femme fatale’ is turned on its head, while Michelet’s apparently more liberal defence of witches is shown to sacrifice female agency to the demands of his anti-Catholic agenda. This ‘hagiographical discourse’ also counters the profusion of stigmatising medical discourses in the late nineteenth century that

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latched onto Loudun as a prime example of female hysteria.45 By evaluating female behaviour according to specific biological and emotional symptoms, discourses of hysteria, as Jan Matlock has argued, effectively sanctioned the moral policing of women by men, by ‘reducing women to their bodies’.46 It is precisely this possibility of recuperating a powerful female moral agency from within the strictures of a patriarchal discourse that informs my reading of two marginalized and oppressed female characters: Baudelaire’s urban prostitute ‘Miss Scalpel’ (‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’), and Bernanos’s grieving mother in Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d’un curé de campagne).

Evil and science In the late nineteenth century, science, most notably Darwinism and Lombrosian criminology, had a huge impact on interpretations of evil, both within French literature and in the wider public consciousness more generally, because it suddenly undermined society’s presupposition that there exists a clear-cut boundary between animal instinct on the one hand and a specifically human moral agency on the other. The assimilation of human cruelty to animal instinct was disturbing to many because it shifted the burden of moral responsibility for evil from the rational human consciousness to uncontrollable physiological impulses. This, as we shall see in Chapter 3, was a major dilemma posed by Zola’s Naturalist theories: if crime is the result of uncontrollable physiological urges, can humans be held accountable for it? Is there any room left for individual moral agency? If Zola left this dilemma unresolved, Lautréamont tackled it head on: on the one hand he welcomed Darwin’s identification of humans with animals, rather than with God, because this undermined both God and man’s arrogant claims to moral superiority; on the other hand Lautréamont did not wish to label man as a being who is exclusively governed by instinct, because to do so would diminish his moral autonomy. This explains his attempt to counterbalance his protagonist Maldoror’s instinctual cruelty with a lucid and discriminating consciousness, an empirical exploration of evil as a route towards self-knowledge. In this regard, Lautréamont recalls not only Baudelaire’s ‘conscience dans le mal’, but also Sade’s materialism: his celebration of Darwinian instinct is in many ways a reformulation of Sade’s interpretation of nature, derived from Holbach and De la Mettrie, as a perpetual cycle of creation and destruction. However, where Zola presents self-regulated instinct as something that is beyond our human capabilities, Lautréamont and Sade emphasize its absolute moral necessity: instinct must be subordinated to rational control if it is to enhance the individual’s freedom from oppression and her moral self-awareness. If the late nineteenth century signalled a paradigm shift from religious to scientific notions of morality, more recent scientific theories such as evolutionary biologist Marc D. Hauser’s Moral Minds have persuasively sought to bridge the ethical gap that such a shift opened up: in particular that which separates the irrational physiological dimension of human behaviour from the rational exercise of moral agency.47 This conundrum was one which Darwin himself acknowledged in passing, but never fully resolved. Though

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he noted that animals show some capacity for moral behaviour, such as altruism, he never fully reconciled evolutionary theory with morality, preferring instead to devolve responsibility for human moral behaviour to God.48 Thus although Darwin is frequently identified with atheism in that his theory of natural selection presents a major challenge to the biblical story of Creation, it is ironic that he himself did not actively denounce Christianity. Hauser, however, has built upon Darwin’s suggestive but limited discussion of morality as a component of the animal world by showing that the capacity for moral behaviour is in fact largely inherent to human biology. In other words, it is false to assume that moral agency and decision making is incompatible with biologically determined behaviour. For in the same way, as Steven Pinker has convincingly demonstrated, that humans possess a ‘language instinct’, an innate capacity for learning and using language, so too do they possess a ‘moral instinct’, an intuitive shared capacity for arriving at sophisticated conceptions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Thus, an ingenious synthesis of evolutionary biology and linguistics based on exhaustive empirical research allows Hauser to fill the lacunae left by Darwin concerning the question of moral agency, and we can only speculate as to how Zola, who was such a devotee of Scientific Positivism, would have responded to such a theory when it came to portraying characters such as the murderer Etienne Lantier in The Beast in Man (La Bête humaine) (1885). However, like other avowed secularists such as neo-Darwinian Richard Dawkins, whose polemical views are explored in Chapter 3, Hauser’s theories unsurprisingly give short shrift to Christian conceptions of morality. For he argues that religious notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, notions which frequently underpin our laws and institutions, often appear far less just than that intuitive morality that is an integral part of our genetic blueprint. Hauser provides detailed case studies as compelling evidence of the superiority of our ‘moral instinct’ over officially sanctioned laws or religious doctrine, but his argument is likely to satisfy the atheist far more than the believer. By equating theological definitions of evil with Christian society’s institutional authoritarianism and hypocrisy both Dawkins and Hauser are the secular disciples of Voltaire and Sade, but unlike their Enlightenment predecessors they are not prepared to debate the metaphysical dimensions of religious morality explored by Ricœur or Neiman.

Evil and literature As already suggested in the introduction, literature on evil has generally been ill served by literary criticism on evil, either owing to an eclectic approach that fails to map the evolution of evil as a concept, or to an intrinsically aesthetic approach which treats evil as an isolated, self-contained trope. Neither approach gives sufficient weight to the centrality of evil as both product and agent of history: as moral barometer of significant intellectual and social changes, and, so far as traumatic events such as Lisbon, the Holocaust or 9/11 are concerned, the very catalyst for such changes. Nor, without a more interdisciplinary methodology, can we fully appreciate the multifaceted nature of evil as a paradigm that, at various times and in certain contexts, bears the unmistakable imprint of philosophy, politics, gender and science. This was precisely the criticism levelled by Benedetto Croce against Mario Praz’s seminal work The Romantic Agony, which in his view severely

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underestimated the degree to which Romantic and Decadent literature was shaped and influenced by metaphysical or religious crises. If Praz grudgingly concedes that ‘the history of ideas and ideals during the nineteenth century constitutes a necessary frame for the picture I have painted’, then he warns that this history ‘is a part which completes, rather than conditions, the whole’.49 Literature on evil, he steadfastly maintains, expresses a perverse erotic sensibility – a combination of pleasure and suffering – that is almost exclusively the aesthetic offspring of literary influence and transmission: The mysterious bond between pleasure and suffering has certainly always existed; it is one of the vulnera naturae which is as old as man himself. But it became the common inheritance of Romantic and Decadent sensibility through a particular chain of literary influence.50

If Georges Bataille broadened Praz’s hermetic interpretation of evil in literature from aesthetic to ethical terrain, then he did so at the cost of subordinating evil to the notion of transgression, in so doing ignoring its equally important non-transgressive aspects. Nor was Bataille sufficiently precise in his historical contextualisation of evil. His ethical position allows for only the most schematic historical distinction to be made between the moral freedom he longingly attributes to a primitive, pre-Christian and pre-capitalist society (which he defines as ‘sacred’), and the moral constraint he laments as the dominant feature of our ‘profane’ present-day Christian, bourgeois utilitarian society, whose origins can roughly be traced back to the nineteenth century. This somewhat hazy and broad-brush attempt at historicizing evil does insufficient justice to the subtle and complex evolution of evil as a concept that continually redefines itself in tandem with very specific and frequent paradigm shifts and socio-political upheavals.51

Chateaubriand Yet it would be wrong to suggest that no aesthetic evaluation of evil is ever justified. In certain instances, such an evaluation has resonated with the ethical concerns specific to a historical moment. This is precisely what happened with Chateaubriand’s unjustly neglected work The Genius of Christianity (Le Génie du Christianisme) (1802), published at a time when France felt profoundly disenchanted with the failed values of the Revolution.52 Chateaubriand defends Christianity not on the strength of its metaphysical arguments, but on the basis of its aesthetic accomplishments which are reflected both in God’s creation (the beauty of nature), and the work of man’s own hands for which Divine Creation acts as inspiration (works of art, music, literature, architecture). Both the beauty of the natural world and the manifold works inspired by it thus provide humanity with the emotional and spiritual solace it so badly craves in an era when it has become desensitized and disillusioned by the instrumental rationality of the Enlightenment. The ‘speculative aporia’ of traditional theodicies so lamented by Ricœur finds a refreshing antidote in Chateaubriand’s emotionally charged ‘aesthetic’ theodicy which can also be regarded as an important work of literary and artistic criticism in its own right. Contrary to Voltaire or Sade’s savagely ironic assaults on the

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notion of a just God, Chateaubriand furnishes us with an optimistic defence of the Divine Creator that rests on a positive aesthetic and psychological re-evaluation of evil, as opposed to a negative speculative and metaphysical interpretation. He tailors his discussion of evil, in other words, to man’s emotional needs and his sensitivity to beauty rather than his rational faculties. This strategy is especially evident in Chateaubriand’s reinterpretation of the Augustinian account of the Fall via his highly poeticized description of the serpent and his psychologically nuanced analysis of Adam. After acknowledging the evil qualities (‘pernicious spirit and artful malice’, p. 111), which are ascribed to the serpent in the Scriptures, the narrator recounts his own travels in Canada in 1791 where he witnessed a Canadian shepherd charming a rattlesnake with his flute. In a passage rich in metaphor the snake’s ‘Satanic’ nature is shown to be counterbalanced by its acute sensitivity to music: ‘The tints of azure, green, white, and gold, recover their brilliancy on his quivering skin, and, slightly turning his head, he remains motionless in the attitude of attention and pleasure’ (p. 113). As for Adam, he is depicted not as some remote abstract ancestor whose disobedience of God gave modern man the fatal legacy of Original Sin, but as a human being with whom he can immediately identify, someone whose actions and psychological motivations are similar to his own. Sin in Chateaubriand’s account is not some arbitrary concept determined by an unjust God, but the natural consequence of a universal psychological and emotional flaw. Adam’s mistake was to let the equilibrium between man’s emotional and rational faculties tilt too far towards reason (pp. 116–7). His disobedience of God by eating the forbidden fruit stemmed from his overeager desire for immediate knowledge. The acquisition of knowledge of the world demands from man a more patient and psychologically balanced approach, one that over the course of time tempers his rational eagerness with an openness to new types of feeling and emotion. Chateaubriand’s psychological modernisation of the Story of the Fall also implicitly acts as a salutary warning to man within his own era: for Adam is portrayed as a cipher to promote those qualities required by modern man in the post-Enlightenment age. His punishment for his excessive pursuit of knowledge is implicitly used to denounce the Enlightenment’s own overemphasis on the pursuit of knowledge. In other words, not only does Chateaubriand modernize traditional theology by giving it a contemporary psychological and emotional resonance, but he also uses it as a vehicle to construct a retrospectively damning critique of the preceding age of secular Rationalism that he and many of his generation so abhorred. If Adam’s mistake was to privilege reason over sentiment, then this very same error has been repeated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Despite his disobedience of God, Adam is pertinently modernized into an anti-Enlightenment hero.

Mirbeau If Chateaubriand’s aesthetic reinterpretation of evil catered to society’s needs in the immediate post-Revolutionary era, then by the end of the century such an approach had lost its ethical force. This was recognized by polemical novelist Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden (Le Jardin des supplices) (1899), which upon first reading appears

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to be a stereotypically Decadent work about the emasculation of a blasé young man by a ‘hysterical’ ‘femme fatale’, Clara, who becomes sexually aroused by Chinese torture gardens.53 Yet the novel also questions the perverse eroticism it appears to celebrate. The Chinese torturer Clara and her lover encounter in the garden can be read as a parody of the typical Decadent who is fixated on aesthetic refinement to the detriment of everything else: he bemoans the loss of torture as an art form, the fact that torturers are now unqualified and hopelessly unschooled in the sophisticated and meticulous skill that true torture demands: ‘The mere shoemaker can presume to fill these honourable and difficult positions. No more hierarchy, no more traditions’ (p. 145). The aesthetics of torture is a proud tradition of an ancient Chinese nation, now threatened by the encroaching influence of the European colonizers: ‘For I’m an old conservative myself, an uncompromising nationalist, and I despise all these practices, all these new methods which the Europeans [ . . . ] are bringing us under pretext of civilisation’ (p. 145). He denounces the English massacres in India as wasteful, idiotic and far too easily carried out: ‘what a vulgar, inartistic business! And how stupidly – yes, stupidly – they’ve wasted death!’ (p. 146). Two types of evil are invoked here that respectively allegorize the conflict between colonized and colonizer, Chinese tradition and a technocratic Western civilisation: evil as an aesthetics of torture on the one hand, and a prefiguration of Arendt’s banality of evil  – the thoughtless, bureaucratized evil of mass slaughter  – on the other. Far from advocating the reintroduction of torture as an art form, Mirbeau deliberately exaggerates this aesthetic defence of evil in order to highlight, by way of counterpoint, the cynical detachment and moral complacency of mechanized mass slaughter which anticipate in tone Céline’s depictions of trench warfare and Littell’s account of the gas chambers. In a self-parody of his own reputation as a Decadent author, Mirbeau issues a warning that clinging to aesthetic tradition for its own sake detracts from the more pressing dangers of evil as a non-aesthetic moral category. The intellectual range and striking modernity of his novel allows it to wriggle free of the erotic aesthetics Praz attributes to Romantic and Decadent literature; nor is it reduceable to the purely transgressive dimension of evil championed by Bataille. Its self-critical stance suggests an ethical direction for the kind of literature that is required in an early twenty-first century in which political ideology and media sensationalism impede our capacity to arrive at a meaningful conception of evil.

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The aporia of Romanticism From around the late 1830s French authors and poets who were serious about tackling the problem of evil found themselves at a crossroads: whether to abandon or persevere with Romanticism as the most suitable literary and intellectual vehicle for achieving this. Up until that point, and since around 1820, Romanticism had proved itself to be the most socially pertinent and psychologically appropriate outlet for interpreting evil: inspired by the emotional religiosity of the ‘pre-Romantic’ authors Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël, its discourse had successfully resurrected a rather ‘traditional’ metaphysical and theological moral framework that perfectly captured the profound disillusionment felt at that time with the secular values of the Enlightenment, a disillusionment that Paul Bénichou has aptly called ‘désenchantement’ (disenchantment).1 Specifically, the roots of this ‘désenchantment’ lay in the bitter disappointment felt by a new generation of young poets and writers, comprising Lamartine, Hugo, Musset, Vigny and Nerval, at the failed intellectual and political legacy of the French Enlightenment: its worship of reason, philosophy, secularism and social ideals not only in their view had insufficiently catered to man’s individual, emotional and spiritual needs, but also had been instrumental in shaping the universalist, progressive principles of the French Revolution, principles that were severely discredited and destroyed by the excessive violence of the Terror, and the subsequent humiliation of Napoleon at Waterloo. If the inevitable political backlash to these failures was the Bourbon Restoration’s re-establishment of conservative Catholic Royalism in 1815, then the literary response was the radical rehabilitation, especially by the first wave of Romantic lyrical poets, of those values that had most been neglected by the Enlightenment: selfhood, feeling, the imagination and spirituality. Lamartine’s hugely popular collection of verse poems Poetical Meditations (Méditations poétiques) (1820), ushered in a new type of literary voice that spoke directly to the collective malaise of an entire generation of young men through its suggestive lyricism, psychological religiosity and a Rousseauistic rejection of society in favour of the emotional solace provided by nature.2 This early Romantic privileging of spirituality over secularism, personal introspection over social concerns, nature over civilization and imagination over reason found its most suitable outlet in lyrical poetry rather than the philosophical prose that had been so revered in the previous century, a generic and formal reorientation which

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in turn lent itself to a re-evaluation of evil that was considerably more suggestive and nuanced than that of the sceptical Enlightenment ‘philosophes’. For Voltaire and his fellow sceptics, the Lisbon earthquake had provided irrefutable philosophical evidence that evil was ripe for a radical reinterpretation from a non-Christian perspective: the sheer scale of innocent deaths inflicted by this natural disaster, they felt, had destroyed once and for all any theological claims that human suffering was the logical and just punishment for sin; their harsh conclusion, therefore, was that evil was now unequivocally synonymous with unmerited suffering. The early Romantics, however, were unwilling to conceive of evil in such starkly rationalist, anti-religious terms, nor could they countenance nature as a purely cruel, destructive entity: to soften the blow dealt by the post-Lisbon Voltairean identification of evil with unjust suffering, they therefore advocated a more spiritually uplifting and psychologically subtle approach to evil that not only was indebted to Rousseau’s more optimistic appraisal of nature as a beneficent, nurturing force, but also very deliberately reinserted evil back into a religious, symbolic framework where God, divine punishment, Satan and a whole host of biblical figures from the Old Testament played a defining role. Satan, especially, is key to understanding this initial Romantic reinvigoration of evil: if the arch-rationalist Voltaire had dismissed ‘le diable’ as a ridiculous figure of religious superstition, and therefore of no value whatsoever in interpreting evil, the first generation of French Romantics, inspired in part by Byron, reincarnated him as the definitive metaphysical rebel against divine injustice.3 Satan became for them the symbolic answer to all their prayers: first, he was directly plucked from a traditional theological discourse that was once again allowed to flourish under the Catholic Bourbon monarchy; secondly, as a solitary rebel against God he was the archetypal individualist, thus catering to the Romantic predilection for personal rather than collective concerns, and thirdly, his energetic heroism was far more appealing to a new Romantic sensibility that cherished emotions and the imagination rather than the sober, reasoned analysis of evil typically provided by the ‘philosophes’. Satan was thus a paradoxical figure: both the traditional, biblical incarnation of evil, and the perfect contemporary agent of the good who had the requisite power and charisma to embody and articulate modern man’s deep-seated spiritual and psychological frustrations. This early ‘Satanic’ Romanticism, then, reflected the defiant pessimism of a new literary generation whose post-Enlightenment disillusionment was intellectually commensurate with the political revival of religion brought about by the Bourbon Restoration. However, by the late 1820s, the Catholic Royalism of an ageing Bourbon monarchy that had initially struck a chord with these disaffected young poets was now becoming too conservative, stagnant and oppressive. In the face of what Peter Brooks has aptly called a ‘gerontocracy’, the frustration of disenfranchized youth boiled over into the July Revolution of 1830, and the enthusiastic backing of the more liberal and dynamic ‘bourgeois’ King Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, who ushered in a more forward-thinking period of industrialisation and economic prosperity.4 Suddenly, faith in social progress was restored and a new, utopian literary idiom was required to promote and celebrate it. Consequently the biblical ‘Satanic’ Romanticism that had largely focused on the raw emotional appeal of nature gradually gave way to so-called Social Romanticism that now drew inspiration from the values of modern civilisation and its associated utopian political doctrines, chief among which were Saint-Simonism. The cosmic gravitas and

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elemental force of Old Testament vocabulary gave way to the exciting new idiom of the industrialized world; supernatural figures now had to jostle for position with a man-made urban landscape, from which even Satan was gradually excluded. Even the normally sceptical Vigny sought to accommodate in his poem ‘Paris’ the fast pace of industrial and social change within a more flexible, futuristic Romantic discourse that still retained its basic theological edifice but also sang the virtues of a harmonious secular modernity as a reassuring antidote to the universal injustices of metaphysical evil.5 However, like Satanic Romanticism before it, Social Romanticism was quickly to peter out. By the late 1830s, the initial optimism and prosperity of the Bourgeois Monarchy was gradually revealing itself to be no more than a series of dashed hopes, false dawns and a recipe for economic corruption and instability, the consequences of which were significantly to diminish the appeal of a socially engaged, utopian literature. So far as its impact on literary portrayals of evil were concerned, this collective disillusionment of the 1840s was in many ways worse than that of the 1820s, because the early Romantics had at least been galvanized and emboldened by a spirit of metaphysical revolt that had found positive outlets in the dynamic rebelliousness of Satan and the consoling bosom of nature; the later Romantics, however, simply regressed to a cosmic pessimism that rejected both society and nature as beneficial influences, resulting in a purely defeatist interpretation of evil that was articulated via an increasingly circular, speculative discourse that throughout the following two decades, ultimately served to compound, rather than alleviate, their growing sense of despair. The defiant sense of possibility that had been a hallmark of early Romanticism had thus developed a hardened, cynical edge, all contemporary approaches to evil by this stage having been exhausted and a moral and intellectual impasse – equivalent to Ricœur’s ‘aporie spéculative’ – reached; the inevitable result was a dispiritingly sterile approach to evil that was excessively abstract, inward looking and defeatist. Hence the dejected tone that came to dominate such late Romantic poems as Vigny’s ‘Le Mont des Oliviers’ (1862), which bleakly closes with God’s deafening silence to Jesus’s dying protestations on the Cross at his unjust suffering on behalf of mankind, or Nerval’s similarly titled ‘Le Christ aux Oliviers’.6 Even the moral force of Hugo’s more optimistic poem ‘Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre’ (1855) was considerably diluted by its overwrought illustration of the metaphysical doctrine of metempsychosis, based on the esoteric, Neo-platonic notion of the ‘Great Chain of Being’, which categorizes evil as the material imperfection inherent to all living creatures, each of whom must strive to achieve ultimate reunion with the perfection of the Divine Creator.7 That this doctrine was too abstract, reductive and idealistic to strike a chord with a contemporary readership’s day-to-day gritty experiences of evil seems obvious. By this time, however, Balzac and Baudelaire had already recognized the need to modernize and reinvigorate literary representations of evil in a more relevant and accessible way.

The shift to urban evil The aporia of late Romanticism, its ultimate inability to advance the debate on evil in a socially pertinent and contemporary way, allows us better to appreciate, by way of counterpoint, what was so refreshing and trenchant about Balzac and Baudelaire’s

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literary approaches to the topic. Despite the obvious generation gap between them, not to mention their political differences and contrasting literary genres – the novel and the poem – both were equally determined to replenish evil as a serious category of moral and intellectual thought through their unprecedented emphasis on its productive and inextricable link to the modern city. Their timely re-evaluation was based on the prescient realisation that a post-Romantic, post-theological reinvigoration of evil was a matter of ethical necessity that would most fruitfully be realized through a direct engagement with the previously unexplored urban vice and criminality of the new, expanding capitalist metropolis. For the older Balzac (1799–1850) this metropolis was the emerging industrial Paris of the 1815–30 Bourbon Restoration, viewed through the retrospective lens of the Bourgeois Monarchy of the 1830s and 1840s when this capitalist expansion was in full flow; whereas the younger Baudelaire (1821–67) wrote contemporary verse and prose poems on the Paris of the 1850s and 1860s that was caught in the throes of the radical urban transformation known as Haussmannisation. Despite these different time frames and urban spaces, both men unequivocally reinterpreted evil in the light of metropolitan, Parisian experience, especially those experiences conventionally considered as marginal and outside the orbit of social control; this topical and unmediated encounter with modernity they considered to be far more relevant to the ethical demands of their contemporary readership than the hackneyed theological metaphysical approach of late Romanticism. If this latter literary movement was by the late 1830s fast descending into an anachronistic predictability and losing its already tenuous grip on social reality, Balzac and Baudelaire on the contrary sought to reconnect evil back to the identifiable rhythms of everyday urban life, presenting it as an integral key to understanding the central ethical dilemmas of modern human experience. Despite the fact that both the novelist and poet, especially the older Balzac, had undeniably grown up admiring and emulating certain aspects of Romanticism, and even though they shared, like many of the fully fledged Romantics themselves, certain anti-modernist attitudes  – Balzac was a lifelong Catholic Royalist, while the more politically liberal Baudelaire still subscribed to De Maistre’s traditionalist doctrine of Original Sin – both men were also prescient and pragmatic enough to recognize that life in the capitalist modern city was playing an increasingly influential role in redefining social mores, generating an unprecedented and unexpected array of ethical challenges that gave a whole new meaning to how evil should be understood. Paris was a seedbed of all manner of ‘urban’ vices and crimes  – prostitution, gambling, drug-taking, blackmail, theft, extortion and so on – that Romanticism, even in its more progressive 1830s ‘social’ phase had been too scared or reluctant to explore, preferring instead to focus on the Saint-Simonian doctrines of industrial progress and communitarian values.8 But Balzac and Baudelaire could see that the ‘bad’ modernity ignored by the utopian Social Romantics was potentially more morally instructive than the ‘good’ modernity they promoted: what would truly sharpen their readers’ moral perspective, they felt, was not the respectable, visible facade of metropolitan progress, not some didactic theory on how to achieve the ideal urban community, but an insight into the hidden lives of the marginalized and dispossessed, those who escaped the reaches of centralized authority and whose underworld city existence functioned according to its own moral code.

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Despite his conservatism, even the Catholic Royalist Balzac realized that exclusively rehashing the topic of evil through the same old metaphysical and theological lens to which Romanticism had stubbornly clung throughout its successive incarnations was conducive to moral stagnation and a potential desensitisation to evil as it now appeared in its modern contemporary guise. For Balzac the original seeds of society’s moral indifference were political and institutional: they had been sown by the French Revolution’s destruction of the nobility, a ruthless process of secular democratization that had paved the way for a new moneyed bourgeoisie’s unfettered pursuit of ‘or’ and ‘plaisir’ during the capitalist explosion of the Restoration. His fiction was thus driven by a nostalgic Catholic Royalist desire to recover the stability of the old pre-Revolutionary feudal order, when the rampant forces of modern capital had been kept in check by the unimpeachable moral authority of the Church and the nobility. For the liberal agnostic Baudelaire, on the other hand, especially the politically disillusioned Baudelaire who emerged from the ashes of the 1848 Revolution, society’s moral paralysis was of a predominantly psychological and individual, rather than religious and political order, and was firmly rooted in the present rather than the past: it was to be found in that existential malaise and feeling of helplessness known as ‘ennui’, a debilitating state of mind that left its hapless victim frustratingly devoid of moral energy and direction. Despite his recurrent De Maistrean reference to Original Sin, Baudelaire consistently emphasizes the secular, psychologically intangible condition of ‘ennui’ as the true essence of the modern condition, a condition that far outweighs in importance the more clearly defined and established theological categories of sin and suffering: this shift in emphasis signals his acknowledgement that man was now entering a post-theological age where religious terminology alone was losing its capacity to define man’s social and moral predicament. Despite the crucial differences in the causes they attribute to society’s state of moral inertia – the political erosion of religious authority for Balzac, the psychological state of ‘ennui’ for Baudelaire – both men are nevertheless agreed that the antidote to this stagnation lies in the urgent recovery of moral energy and direction that paradoxically can only be achieved through a lucid and radical re-evaluation of evil. And they saw the catalyst for this re-evaluation, the repository of what they called ‘la conscience dans le mal’ and ‘l’énergie du mal’ at the heart of the secularized and vibrant modern city itself: a brave new world of capitalist expansion beneath whose surface lay a bubbling cauldron of vice and criminal activity that was awaiting exploration and elucidation. Simply put, society could intellectually and morally replenish itself in a far more meaningful and contemporary way if it took the trouble to understand at first hand this unfamiliar urban jungle, rather than continuing to make its moral judgements purely on the basis of a priori theological definitions of evil that seemed increasingly anachronistic and disconnected from the gritty realities of modern existence. For if it was ever to regain a true sense of clarity and direction, to recapture a pertinent idea of its ethical priorities, then society had no choice but to adopt a pragmatic, rather than a defensive attitude to metropolitan capitalism, one that would pay heed to its visceral and sordid aspects, however controversial these may be. The ethical urgency of making this ‘paradigm shift’ from an abstract and theological to a ‘warts and all’ secular interpretation of evil, from the mediating influence of the Bible to the raw directness of urban experience, from a philosophically rigid to a more Machiavellian approach, was a harsh truth that even the Catholic traditionalist Balzac was pragmatic enough to acknowledge. Like Baudelaire,

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he saw that society had to expose itself, however reluctantly, to those aspects of the modern city that took it outside its intellectual and moral comfort zone, beyond those mainstream experiences that it was used to explaining and validating according to established preconceptions of good and evil that belonged to the metaphysical religious discourse that Romanticism had made its own. It is precisely those points at which this discourse breaks down, where ‘traditional’ Romantic definitions of good and evil seem blatantly hackneyed and out of touch with the new secular dimensions of modern capitalism that this chapter uncovers and investigates, with particular reference to Balzac’s Parisian novel A Harlot High and Low (Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes) (1843), and a selection of Baudelaire’s urban poems from The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal) (1857) and The Parisian Prowler (Le Spleen de Paris) (1869). The new type of evil to which they expose their readers in these works is the repository of a morally galvanising lucidity and energy – ‘la conscience dans le mal’ and ‘l’énergie du mal’ – that derives its impetus not from pre-existing philosophical concepts, but from untapped experiences that lie dormant within the rich storehouse of the modern city itself, awaiting to unleash their potential to neutralize the ennui and moral passivity in which society would otherwise continue to languish. This chapter is thus based on two interrelated propositions: that modernity  – understood here as the new capitalist metropolitan experiences that are integral to nineteenth-century Parisian life – aids us in interpreting evil, and that this evil – the vice and criminality with which this industrialized urban existence is inextricably associated – in turn helps us unlock the mysteries of modernity. First, I focus on two examples from Balzac and Baudelaire that act as warnings to their readers of the increasingly intolerable discrepancy between a priori metaphysical and theological interpretations of evil and the new ethical challenges thrown up by the modern city: Lucien’s imprisonment and suicide in A Harlot High and Low, which stem directly from his misreading of the modern capital according to his biblical Romantic preconceptions about evil; Baudelaire’s poem ‘To the Reader’ (‘Au Lecteur’) from The Flowers of Evil, which similarly warns his readers against the anachronistic dangers of relying on a purely theological and Romantic approach to evil; secondly, as a corrective to this hackneyed approach, both men invite their readers to make a virtue of necessity: instead of superimposing a familiar interpretative framework derived from theological Romanticism on a modern city whose new moral universe has radically outgrown this framework, they should seek to wipe the slate clean and derive a fresh understanding of morality from the unexplored vices and criminality generated by the modern city itself; for Balzac this ‘urban’ approach to evil is best epitomized by the master-criminal Vautrin, whose superior lucidity and power are manifested in that ‘conscience dans le mal’ and ‘énergie du mal’ that he garners from his unique and intimate acquaintance with the complex rules of the modern city, an acquaintance that is immeasurably enhanced by his familiarity with, and foothold in, its criminal underworld; Baudelaire, too, depicts all manner of criminals, gamblers and prostitutes, whose disreputable, unconventional lifestyles are governed by vices that paradoxically provide us with a rare insight into the new existential and moral dilemmas that characterize modern capitalist society; thirdly, if the two most positive features to be recuperated from the vices and criminality of the modern city are the morally galvanising ‘énergie’ and

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‘conscience dans le mal’ that they provide, then paradoxically these qualities are often most visibly present in those individuals who are also at the furthest margins of society: it is Vautrin’s homosexuality, shifting identities and vague origins, that afford him the freedom to circulate within the modern city unconstrained by social obligations; similarly it is the social isolation of Baudelaire’s prostitute Mademoiselle Bistouri that paradoxically endows these ‘outcasts’ with a moral purpose and exceptional lucidity that are beyond the reach of more conventional city-dwellers. For both authors the vertical and horizontal demarcation of social space is an important indicator of this marginality: Vautrin inhabits both the criminal ‘underground’ as well as the respectable surface of Paris, whereas Mademoiselle Bistouri occupies the un-policed periphery outside Haussmannised Paris. My analysis of this productive two-way relationship between modernity and evil – based on a post-theological, post-Romantic outlook that seeks out fresh moral lucidity and energy via the exploration of secular modern vice associated with social marginality – is underpinned by a further consideration: to offer a timely corrective to the dominant and excessively negative critical assumptions about modernity. For if modernity does indeed help us ‘read’ evil more positively, then so too does evil allow us to reassess modernity in a far more constructive light. Thus the Marxism of Lukàcs that interprets Balzacien modernity through the lens of class conflict, the post-structuralism of Prendergast that reads it as a form of linguistic instability and indecipherability, the post-Benjaminian ‘trauma theory’ of Ulrich Baer that compares Baudelairean modernity to the postHolocaust cityscapes of Paul Celan, all reinforce a negative stereotype of modernity as destructive, threatening, opaque to interpretation and morally disempowering; but by seeking to understand modernity through the evil that it generates while at the same time reassessing what evil means through the modern experiences that created it, we arrive at a more fruitful and mutually beneficial re-evaluation of two paradigms  – modernity and evil – which taken in isolation, are all too often interpreted negatively or reductively. Be that as it may, I suggest that a key distinction does need to be made between Balzac and Baudelaire’s respective reinterpretations of evil and modernity so far as their differing conception of the relationship between authorial control and moral authority is concerned. The conservative Catholic Balzac, who was also partially constrained by the normative conventions of the serialized crime novel, frequently employs a ‘God-like’ omniscient narrator whose exploration of evil, no matter how unsavoury, is never quite fully prepared to compromise the moral authority or selfassurance of the writer or his readership; the more liberal Baudelaire on the other hand, who also had greater scope for experimentation in his verse and in particular his prose poems, frequently presents evil as morally destabilizing and conducive to selfdoubt not only in his bourgeois narrators but also in his readers. Baudelaire, in other words, is quite prepared to sacrifice the traditional subjective autonomy of the poet and to undermine the secure presuppositions of his bourgeois readers if this means confronting and exposing uncomfortable moral truths; whereas Balzac’s exploration of unprecedented aspects of metropolitan evil is always conducted from a safe distance that leave both author and reader relatively unscathed. What both authors do share, however, is an acknowledgement of the obsoleteness of Romantic theology, and it is to this that I now turn.

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Balzac: From Romantic theology to social pragmatism A central episode in A Harlot High and Low illustrates how evil, the discourse used to define it and the urban space in which this discourse circulates shapes the existence of its central hero, Lucien de Rubempré, whose short life tragically ends in imprisonment and suicide. Lucien, as in many Balzac novels, represents the young, handsome provincial Romantic hero who sets out to conquer the French capital, brimming with a Napoleonic ambition for social and literary success. Initially naïve, idealistic and innocent to the ruthless ways of metropolitan life he is made privy by his protector and ‘father figure’ Vautrin to the survival skills required to succeed in the capital – the acquisition of money and a mistress – but at the price of being sucked into his web of criminal activity. Once he has been accused by the authorities of a crime into which Vautrin has trapped him, Lucien’s most fatal error is ironically that of being too truthful: in the courtroom he admits to knowing Jacques Collin, the real identity of Vautrin (whose other aliases include ‘Trompe-la-Mort’ and ‘l’abbé Carlos Herrera’), and he is thus condemned to death for his association with this master-criminal. Lucien prefers suicide to this ignominious ending, hanging himself in his prison cell. But what is of interest here is not so much the failure of Lucien to survive in the urban jungle, but how this failure is a product and reflection of his outmoded attitude to evil. For his farewell letter to Vautrin is couched in a particular rhetoric of evil that clings to the theological discourse of Romantic metaphysics, rather than displaying the modern and more secularized language of urban vice. Lucien employs the hyperbolic biblical idiom of the early Romantics, a language that places Vautrin in a noble, respectable lineage of evildoers that descend from Adam, Cain and Abel. Rather like the heroic rebellious Satan celebrated by the early Hugo, Lamartine and Vigny, such men are marked out by their uncompromising superiority over other men; in a sustained metaphor Lucien compares them to wild animals who require vast open spaces in order to exercise their exceptional power, but whose appetites prove to be insatiable and thus destructive: As you once said, there is the posterity of Cain and that of Abel. Cain, in the great drama of Humanity, is the opposition. You descend from Adam by this line in which the devil still blows on that fire whose first spark was struck in Eve. Among that demonic progeny, there appear from time to time, terribly, one or two of massive constitution, who sum up in themselves all human energy, and who are like those feverish animals of the wilderness whose form of life calls for the vast spaces they find there. People like that are dangerous in society as lions would be in the heart of Normandy: they must feed on something, they devour common men and browse on the money of fools; their play is so perilous that they end by killing the humble dog they have made a companion of, an idol even.9

Lucien makes the mistake of referring to Vautrin in a Romantic poeticizing discourse that makes no attempt to analyse the pragmatic, Machiavellian nature of his criminal activities or to connect them to the urban space in which he operates. Lucien’s symbolic recuperation of Vautrin in the grandiose language of the Bible and of nature give a metaphysical dimension and gravitas to his mentor’s conduct that seems inappropriate,

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given the latter’s heavy involvement in the shady dealings of the Parisian criminal underworld. But this anachronistic discourse also masks a more subtle message that voices the political opinions of the novelist himself. Balzac is using Lucien’s outmoded rhetoric to express his own moral judgement on the actions of historical figures, claiming that the superior power and intellect of such men need not result in evil when God so chooses; but when God lets men ‘rot’ for a generation, their superior qualities are misused, resulting in the emergence of tyrants such as Robespierre and Carlos Herrera himself: When God chooses, such mysterious beings may be Moses, Attila, Charlemagne, Mahomet or Napoleon; but when He allows these giant instruments to rust on the sea-bottom of a generation, they become only Pougatcheff, Robespierre, Louvel and Father Carlos Herrera. Endowed with power over tender souls, these are drawn to them and ground small. In its own way the spectacle is great and beautiful . . . It is the poetry of evil. (p. 399)

The allusion here is to a generation that has lost its religious faith, which constitutes a serious loss of moral authority that allows such notorious figures as the secular Revolutionary icon Robespierre to emerge; thus Balzac subtly expresses his nostalgia for Catholic monarchism and his deep-seated historical disillusionment with the French Revolution that resulted in the bloodshed of the Terror. Balzac, in other words, is not only exposing Lucien’s naivety in clinging to such an uncompromising and grandiose rhetoric of evil; but he is also acknowledging the regrettable obsoleteness of this rhetoric in a contemporary post-Revolutionary society where a more pragmatic and Machiavellian perception of evil as secular urban vice has now become a far more viable and apt survival tool. Lucien’s fatal courtroom admission and his equally naïve recourse to an anachronistic language of evil encapsulate his failure to recognize what Susan Neiman has referred to as the Kantian separation between ‘is’ and ‘ought’: in other words that the moral realities of the world (the way the world is) do not conform to our expectations of it (what we think the world ought to be). Romantic theology describes an evil that is no longer reflected in reality and this is the harsh truth that Lucien discovers to his cost.

Baudelaire: From sin to ‘ennui’ If Lucien’s reliance on Romantic, religious discourse proves to be dangerously anachronistic and out of step with changes in contemporary social mores, then Baudelaire makes the very same point in the poem ‘To the Reader’, albeit from the later perspective of the Second Empire, rather than the Bourgeois Restoration. The famous opening poem to The Flowers of Evil is important in reorientating the reader’s perceptions of evil from the abstract metaphysical and theological subdivision of sin and suffering favoured by the Romantics to a more empirical and psychological notion of evil that is related to ‘ennui’. Theological vocabulary and doctrine is ironically knocked off its pedestal so as to alert the reader to the existence of a more visceral

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and morally productive form of evil that is anchored in contemporary everyday human experience. This reorientation of perceptions of evil from religious concepts to psychological experience derived from modern life draws attention to the anachronism of a theology that has cultivated in contemporary man an unthinking attitude to evil that breeds moral complacency. Simply put, the poem invites him to replace his hypocritical and passive observance of theology, a passivity that makes him susceptible to the energy-sapping state of ‘ennui’, with a new, more dynamic and lucid perception of evil as urban vice which offers him a potential escape route from this ‘ennui’. The first stanza subtly begins this reorientation of evil by ‘deconstructing’ the long-established theological classification of evil that condemns sin as the most serious immoral act. However, in the very first line sin is ranked only third in a list of minor misdemeanours that include stupidity, error and stinginess. These four petty crimes ‘possess our spirits and fatigue our flesh’, the emphasis on physicality suggesting immediately the visceral, as opposed to purely metaphysical, impact of evil on mankind.10 But the verb ‘possess’ (‘occupent’) is out of place here: its physical sense of ‘inhabiting’ would be more appropriate as a qualifier for ‘flesh’ (‘corps’), whereas by the same token, ‘fatigue’ (‘travailler’), which suggests mental anguish, would seem more apt for ‘spirits’ (‘esprit’). This use of chiasmus to effect an ironic reversal suggests that the established theological definition of evil as ‘sin’ (‘pêché’) does little to awaken the modern consciousness, but merely indoctrinates our minds: sin literally fills our heads, but does not prompt us to reflect upon it, does not adequately stimulate ‘la conscience dans le mal’. The notion that theology breeds an unthinking attitude to evil is continued in lines 3–4 with the debunking simile that suggests that we feed our remorse in the same unreflective way that a beggar feeds his vermin. This point is amplified in stanza two, in which the Catholic cycle of sin and repentance is repeatedly satirized as the most expedient way society has found to expiate its sins without having to pay heed to their moral significance. So cynical and lazy have we become in our attitude to evil that we have fallen into the habit of expecting confession to lead to some sort of reward for having acknowledged our sin, so that we can start sinning all over again with impunity (‘We offer lavishly our vows of faith/And turn gladly back to the path of filth,/Thinking men’s tears will wash away our stains’). The third stanza, taps into the occultist discourse of alchemy, by acknowledging Satan Trismegistus as the sinister power, who, in our sleep, vaporizes our moral willpower, which is compared to a rich metal (‘riche métal’). Balzac, as we shall see, frequently makes this same connection between moral energy and willpower: loss of ‘volonté’ depletes our vitality and moral self-discipline, thereby accelerating our death. But apart from emphasizing this important link between energy and willpower this stanza is also a reminder that evil is not some remote metaphysical category that is removed from everyday experience: the term ‘evil’s pillow’ (‘oreiller du mal’) suggests that evil lurks in even the most banal and domestic aspects of our daily lives such as the pillow where we lay our heads at night to sleep. Stanza 4 similarly employs theological terminology to define evil: not only is Satan the alchemist who vaporizes our willpower, but also the puppetmaster who controls us. But here again, Satan is not portrayed as some abstract rebel mobilized by the Romantic imagination. The emphasis on ‘repugnant objects’ and the ‘stinking pit’ (‘objets répugnants’ and ‘ténèbres

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qui puent’) give evil a decidedly earthy quality that anchors it in gritty, everyday experience. Evil here is once again a visceral experience rather than a metaphysically abstract category. Satan may well be invoked, but he is removed from the realm of pure abstraction to be immersed in the grimy repugnant sphere of human sensory experience. The following stanza develops this theme further by comparing readers to lust-filled, debauched individuals who kiss and nibble at the breasts of an old whore. This introduces the modern ‘urban’ theme of prostitution that features so strongly in the ‘Parisian scenes’ section of The Flowers of Evil, as well as the prose collection The Parisian Prowler, both of which I examine below. Stanza 6 marks a further shift from Romantic metaphysics to a modern conception of evil rooted in the mind: for the first time the notion of the devil is internalized as a dimension of human psychology, rather than simply being posited as the external, autonomous agent  – Satan Trismégiste and the puppetmaster  – of the preceding stanzas. No longer are we manipulated by the Romantic solitary rebel who pulls our strings, but evil is an integral dimension of our own psyche that has multiplied into a ‘demon nation’ (‘un peuple de démons’). Neither is the abstract notion of death figured as a metaphysical concept; death, like evil, is psychologically internalized as a presence which descends and spreads within our lungs like an invisible river. Once again, Baudelaire is renouncing the metaphysical, abstract terminology typically employed by Romanticism to confront existential questions of evil and death, in favour of a more physical and earthy language that is fully immersed in the gritty reality of lived modern human experience. Stanza 7 further emphasizes this radical shift from a detached, theological conception of evil to one that is rooted in sensory, contemporary existence. Suddenly the earlier theologically specific references to sin, repentance, Satan, Hell and the devil are abandoned to be replaced by a more modern, secularized vocabulary of evil that is suffused with energy, passion, movement and vitality. Having acknowledged both the flawed nature of our existing attitude to evil: one that is passive, unreflective and only pays lip service to religion – and the dangerous consequences of such an attitude – moral impotence, susceptibility to further corruption by the devil’s interference, and the spectre of mortality in the form of eternal damnation – the poem now alerts us to the new attitude to evil that we should adopt in order to escape this impasse and reactivate a more productive, reflective and life-affirming agency. The ‘modern’ evils of rape, poison, stabbing and arson are energetically presented in a positive light as a powerful antidote to ‘The banal canvas of our woeful fates’ (‘Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins’). Failure to recognize the ‘fine designs’ (‘plaisant dessins’) of these modern evils stems from our lack of passion and willpower: ‘It’s only that our spirit lacks the nerve’ (‘C’est que notre âme, hélas! N’est pas assez hardie’). In the following stanza, Baudelaire once again modifies the imagery he chooses to depict evil, which he now, for the first time, significantly refers to by the word ‘vices’. Our manifold vices are now personified as a menagerie of writhing and howling animals that are generally regarded as dangerous, destructive or unattractive ‘monstres’: vultures, scorpions, snakes, monkeys (ll. 30–3). We soon realize that this extended metaphor paves the way for the poetic personification of the biggest threat of all, one that exceeds in its potential destructiveness, ugliness and ignoble nature all of the evils listed thus

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far in the poem: ‘Ennui’. This evil is neither obvious, nor tangible, but insidiously lethal: ‘Though making no grand gestures, nor great cries,/He willingly would devastate the earth/And in one yawning swallow all the world’. ‘Ennui’ is allegorized as a pipe-smoking, dreamy and yawning persona to epitomize the psychologically intangible, rather than theologically metaphysical quality of evil that Baudelaire saw as central to the modern condition. In this regard, he sets out the paradoxical ethical imperative for the whole of his collection: the ennui that characterizes the modern condition can be overcome through the urban vice that is also a product of this very modernity.

Balzac: Criminality and slang If for Balzac the tragic consequences that emanate from excessive reliance on a Romantic theological discourse on evil are illustrated through the plight of Lucien, a little further on in the novel he proposes to his readers an alternative type of discourse on evil that is far more suited to the modern realities of urban vice: criminal slang. In an impassioned and extended analysis, the Balzacien narrator pays homage to an imaginative, resourceful ‘argot’ that is the exclusive province of the criminal underworld: Whatever people may think, there is no more energetic or colourful language than that of this subterranean world which, ever since the first empires and their capital cities were founded, has been tossed about in cellars, in ships’ holds, in ‘dens of iniquity’, in ‘dives’, in the below-stage, the trap-door area of the theatre of society, where the machinery is kept and the footlights are fed and from which, at the Opera itself, blue flames are belched and magicians emerge. (p. 441)

In the same way that the respectable cultural sphere of the opera derives an unacknowledged power and artistry from its hidden underground props and technicians, so too does conventional society conceal a ‘monde souterrain’, a criminal underworld, with its very own unrecognized artistic history and energetic inventiveness. Moreover the creative dynamism of this criminal slang admirably keeps pace with historical inventions in a way that the banal terminology of present-day society patently does not: the guillotine has more imaginatively been renamed in criminal slang as ‘Mount Unwilling’ (‘l’Abbaye de Monte à Regret’), while the railway, the quintessential nineteenth-century symbol of modernity, is referred to as the ‘iron horse’ (‘le roulant vif ’, p. 443). The Balzacien narrator positively revels in the richness and resourcefulness of this alternative discourse to which he ascribes an ancient and noble lineage that can in part be traced back to no less a literary giant than Rabelais : ‘Let us further acknowledge the high antiquity of slang! It consists of one tenth of words from the Romantic language, another tenth of the old Gaullish tongue of Rabelais’ (p. 442). The importance of this reference to Rabelais is twofold: first, it endows criminal slang with the highest form of cultural respectability; secondly, it also resurrects a forgotten pre-Revolutionary model of feudal society with which Rabelais’s

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literary world is inextricably associated. Balzac develops the political dimension to his cultural critique in the succeeding chapters where he makes it abundantly clear that this slang is employed by a criminal elite whose success stems largely from its ability to organize itself along unequivocally feudal and aristocratic lines. This is particularly evident in the narrator’s description of the so-called Grands Fanandels, a tightly knit and supremely efficient criminal fraternity whose sophisticated use of slang, aside from signalling unique powers of verbal inventiveness, also provides a secret code that allows this fraternity consistently to outfox the hapless police authorities: The swell mob [‘la haute pègre’], which is that world’s Faubourg Saint-Germain, its aristocracy, formed itself, in 1816, . . . into an association called the Grands Fanandels, which brought together the best known gang chiefs and various bold individuals, then without other means of livelihood . . . The Grand Fanandels had each his private fortune, capital funds in common and a code of behaviour of their own. They owed each other help-in-aid at need, they all knew each other. They were, moreover, beyond the ruses and seductions of the police, they had their own charter, their passwords, signs by which they recognised each other. (pp. 444–5)

It is not only the smooth running and know-how of this criminal elite that distinguishes it from the ineffectual forces of law and order, but also its considerable financial clout, to which Balzac had already alluded in Old Goriot (1835): These dukes and peers of the underworld had founded, between 1815 and 1819, the famous society of the Ten Thou’, so called from the agreement by virtue of which none of them undertook an operation in which the loot was less than ten thousand francs. (p. 445)

At the head of this organization is none other than Vautrin, or Jacques Collin himself, known by his fellow criminals as ‘the Dab’ or ‘the boss’ (‘le maître’, p. 453). Balzac further reinforces a discourse that already underscores the aristocratic, feudal structure of this criminal fraternity (the references to ‘dukes’ and ‘peers’) by deliberately entitling a chapter ‘His majesty the Dab’ (pp. 453–7). Thus, evil appears to be a double cause for celebration, both for its hidden cultural cachet reflected in the verbal richness of its slang and as a nostalgic throwback to a hierarchical, feudal model of power that is manifestly superior to the failing democratic institutions of post-Revolutionary society. Be that as it may, despite his apparent enthusiasm for a criminal underworld that constitutes an undiscovered linguistic and noble Mecca to which his contemporary readers should be made privy, the Balzacien narrator at the same time tempers his literary and historical revisionism by conforming to a normalizing cultural practice to which many nineteenth-century French novelists adhered, especially his fellow writers of serialized fiction, and which has perceptively been diagnosed by cultural historians David Pike and Dominic Kalifa : namely, representing the evil of the nineteenth-century metropolis as a vertically or horizontally segregated space. The crime novel’s conventional identification of evil, either with an underground or a peripheral space, was intended to satisfy a new mass readership’s growing fascination

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with urban crime – a fascination that truly took off with the publication of Eugène Sue’s hugely popular serialized novel The Mysteries of Paris (1842) – while at the same time exploiting that spatial division in order to maintain a reassuringly protective barrier between the dangerous immoral world of the criminal and the safe moral universe of the reader. Metropolitan criminality, therefore, took on a spatialized literary identity that corresponded less to crimes themselves, than to the normalizing cultural production these inspired. Pike has argued that the medieval and vertically hierarchized Christian cosmology of Heaven and Hell was increasingly transposed to literary representations of the nineteenth-century city.11 So far as Balzac is concerned this ‘vertical segregation’ is unmistakably present in the narrator’s depiction of Vautrin’s ‘monde souterrain’ both as an enticing mysterious realm of Machiavellian schemes, illegal financial transactions, secret codes and earthy linguistic inventiveness, and as an undesirable anarchic realm that constitutes a real moral threat to the world above. As Pike puts it, the world above is ‘the world of law, order, economy, conformity’; which is ‘given structure and order by what it excludes beneath it as unfit’.12 Echoing Pike, Kalifa has made the similar point that late-nineteenth-century novelists preferred to reconstruct the urban spaces in which crime took place according to the fixed moral parameters they wished to present to their readers, rather than any desire to stay true to actual sociological and urban transformations.13 Thus before the July Monarchy ‘la Cité’, located at the heart of Paris, was the traditional centre of crime despite paradoxically being adjacent to the Concièrgerie and the Courts of Justice, places of repression and order. However, from the 1830s onwards, the overpopulated centre of ‘le vieux Paris’ began to shift outwards and with it, the crime and symbols of authority with which this centre had been associated: the guillotine was transferred from Place Grève to the Barrière Saint-Jacques in 1832, and the suburbs began to take on an unmistakably criminal identity – between 1835 and 1850 the Canal Saint-Martin was terrorized by gangs who drowned their victims, the quarries of Montmartre became a ‘no-go’ area and the Cour de Bicêtre was populated by chain gangs. Conversely, as the suburbs became criminalized, so too did the centre become decriminalized: the Concièrgerie, the fearsome prison that once contained the most sinister individuals in the whole of France was, against all odds, transformed by the assassin Lacenaire into a literary salon in 1836. Kalifa thus charts a horizontal shift of crime and criminal institutions from the centre to the periphery that complements Pike’s analysis of the contemporaneous literary demarcation between underground and the surface. As we shall see, however, this geographical reality of the ‘criminalized suburb’ was not fully to be reflected in literature until Baudelaire’s prose poems in The Parisian Prowler . For despite this historical decentralization of crime and authority, many crime novelists, even as late as the Second Empire when a further wave of decentralization took place under baron Haussmann, were adamant that they would retain the identification of crime with the old centralized Paris that had existed prior to the July Monarchy, because this identification allowed them to maintain a reassuring opposition between respectable aristocratic Paris and disreputable subterranean Paris. Balzac’s frequent association of Vautrin with the labyrinthine streets of ‘la Cité’ and the underground spaces of la Concièrgierie may well be, geographically and historically

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speaking scrupulously faithful to the period he depicts (1815–30), but it also signals his nostalgia, at the time of writing (the late 1830s), for a bygone era when crime was committed in central Paris near places of law and order that were far better able to control and contain it. Balzac’s recuperation of criminality from the modern city as an exemplary political and cultural model that is manifestly superior to the weak legitimate institutions of his own post-Revolutionary society must therefore be tempered by his adherence to the moral and aesthetic expectations of his readership. He may well profess his admiration for the criminal fraternity’s linguistic inventiveness and feudal organization, but at no stage can he afford to allow these to become direct threats to the contemporary status quo. In fact, he subtly undermines his celebration of criminal slang through his simultaneous reinforcement through language of the moral distance that has already spatially been created between his readers and the criminals who inhabit the ‘monde souterrain’: Each word of this language is a brutal, ingenious or fearful image. Breeches do, indeed, go up and down. Sleep is a gentle thing, kipping and dossing are not, they suggest the hunted animal, the Thief, flinging himself down, exhausted, to a deep and necessary oblivion, while the powerful wings of suspicion plane overhead. (p. 441)

This narrator’s jolly, self-confident tone underpins an ostensibly pedagogical agenda, suitably peppered with imperatives, that explains to the reader in painstaking detail the powerful etymology and originality of the various slang words; but in the process the reader also becomes acutely aware that he has been thrust into a radically unfamiliar world whose indigenous language is in fact completely alien to his own. Despite the narrator’s supposedly noble, educative intentions, he is also cynically manipulating the reader, by constantly keeping him in a position of intellectual inferiority and ignorance that accentuates the linguistic division between his own bourgeois world and that of the criminal. Balzac’s omniscient, God-like narrator thus engages the reader’s fascination for criminality through the respectable lure of literary creativity and aristocratic hierarchy; yet at the same time he also redoubles his efforts through spatial and linguistic distancing and segregation to remind the reader that this criminal world, though in many ways seductive and admirable, is also radically different from his own and is meant to remain that way. And lest we were left in any doubt, the narrator’s comparison of robbers to savage wild beasts metaphorically erects a further hierarchical barrier between the respectable world of the reader and the undesirable criminal elements from which he must remain protected. The reader must therefore sufficiently be exposed by the narrator to the potential historical and moral lessons urban vice can provide, on the condition that neither the writer nor the reader are asked to relinquish or question their own subjective autonomy or moral integrity. This strategy of controlled engagement with the vice of modernity is, however, not always followed by the Baudelairean narrator, who, as we shall see in our analysis of the next poem, is quite prepared to put his own moral and aesthetic autonomy on the line, if his confrontation with urban vice yields new ways of coping with man’s existential and ontological dilemmas.

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Baudelaire: The new ethics of vice Less revered and commented upon by Baudelaire critics than its companion piece ‘Dusk’ (‘Crépuscule du Soir’), ‘Gaming’ (‘Le Jeu’, pp. 195–7) is nevertheless a poem from ‘Parisian scenes’ (‘Tableaux parisiens’) that as recently as 2007 was felt sufficiently modern to be featured in The Times as a perfect illustration of the psychology of addiction through gambling.14 Indeed, it is perhaps evidence of this poem’s striking modernity that it should have elicited the interest of a contemporary British broadsheet, rather than a specialized work of French literary criticism. However, as Frieda Hughes herself recognizes, this poem is about far more than just gambling: it is about finding some kind of purpose to our lives.15 Accordingly, this poem is most profitably read not only for its undoubtedly insightful observations on the particular vice of gambling, but also for the broader existential and ethical questions that a confrontation with this vice raises. The pun within the title itself immediately alerts us to the poem’s ontological possibilities: not only does ‘Le Jeu’ refer to gambling, but it also punningly alludes in French to ‘je’, the first-person pronoun, thereby hinting that what is at stake here is the very status of modern subjectivity itself. The first stanza paints a bleak den of urban vice: pale-skinned, ageing whores, wearing heavy make-up and garish jewellery that dangles awkwardly and noisily from their withered ears, are seated in shabby armchairs with provocative, yet pitiless gazes. The aura of stagnation and decay is stylistically reinforced by the alliteration on ‘faded armchairs’ (‘fauteuils fanés’, l.1), the slow, heavily punctuated rhythm and the absence of verbs. The enjambement in the French version between ‘oreilles’ (‘ears’) and ‘Tomber’ (‘drop’) connotes the idea of the Fall, although, in keeping with the deliberate transition from religious concepts of evil to a new perception of urban vice, this poem largely eschews theological terminology. Stanza 2 draws the reader further into this underworld den of vice, adopting a highly cinematic ‘point-of-view’ technique. The description takes on a nightmarish quality that blurs the boundaries between the prostitutes of the previous stanza and the gamblers clustered around the green felt of the gambling table. Human beings are denied any subjective identity, instead, being broken up into their component body parts: faces without lips; lips devoid of colour; toothless jaws; feverish fingers fumbling into empty pockets; trembling breasts. This disjointed, dehumanized and nightmarish tableau is once again given a visual directness and disturbing immediacy by the extreme elision of verbs. There is a sinister undercurrent of death: the absence of colour (accentuated by the contrasting green felt of the gambling table) suggests lifelessness and the reference to infernal fever alludes to an inexorable journey towards death. Nevertheless, the feverish energy of the fingers which surreptitiously fumble inside empty pockets and trembling breasts appear to be engaged in those twin activities to which, we will recall from Balzac, human behaviour can be reduced in the modern city: the pursuit of ‘or’ and ‘plaisir’ (‘gold’ and ‘pleasure’). It is not clear whether these unidentified fingers seek money or sexual pleasure, or both, but whatever the case, this stanza encapsulates the intense expenditure of libidinal and sexual energy with which urban vice is associated in both Balzac and Baudelaire.

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Stanza 3 shifts its focus more specifically to the gamblers themselves, but what is significant, is that among them, there are poets. Beneath the dirty ceilings, low-hung lamps project their ‘glow/Over the brilliant poets’ gloomy brows,/Who come to squander here their bloody sweat’. The verb ‘squander’ (‘gaspiller’) suggests a wasteful expenditure of energy by once illustrious poets who now find themselves in these distinctly non-literary, insalubrious surroundings. This can be read as a debunking of the Romantic myth of the poet as divinely inspired genius. The word ‘front’ frequently appears in Hugo as a metonymy for poetic genius: the brow which is touched by divine inspiration. Here, however, the word is invoked to describe what Marxist critic Marshall Berman has aptly referred to as the ‘desanctification’ of the poet.16 There is no divine light, only the dim glare of ‘pâles lustres’. If ‘Au Lecteur’ showed us that a true understanding of urban vice demands a rejection of the theological Romantic world view, here Baudelaire goes one step further: this vice implies a rejection not only of Romantic morality, but also of Romantic status, that is, it also means sacrificing the poetic kudos and authority that was associated with this Romanticism. This double repudiation of the Romantic morality and reputation of the poet is confirmed by stanza 4. If the Balzacien narrator maintains a spatial division between the subterranean world (‘monde soutterain’) of crime and the morally respectable world of the writer and reader, then the Baudelarean narrator collapses these boundaries. Here, the creative artist himself – the figure of the poet – is sucked into this very world and faced with the possibility of relinquishing his own aesthetic reputation, control and autonomy: poet and gambler become dangerously indistinguishable. This is suggested by the split subjectivity that characterizes the first-person narrator, who implicitly presents himself as one of the ‘fallen’ poets who inhabit the gambling den: ‘There in an idle corner of that den/I see myself – cold, mute and envying’ (ll 15–16). The narrator is both the observer of this gambling den and the observed: he sees himself sitting in a corner, cold, taciturn and silent. The emphasis on split-subjectivity suggests a dissolution of the traditionally unified Romantic lyrical voice, while muteness suggests a loss of poetic inspiration, a sign of creative impotence, which is antithetical to the Romantic idea of the divinely inspired genius. Yet stanza 5 signals the realization by the poet/narrator that this loss of traditional Romantic aesthetic and moral autonomy may be a price worth paying if it means recuperating from the vice of modernity new existential and ontological possibilities. The repetition and interstanzaic enjambement of the verb ‘enviant’ refers to the narrator/ poet’s powerful attraction to, and envy of, a potentially alternative mode of existence incarnated by the whores, gamblers and fallen poets: their ‘wasteful’ expenditure of libidinal energy and money may well be self-destructive, but it also betokens a more intense mode of living, a ‘tenacious lust’ (‘passion tenace’), a celebration of the moment that provides a release from the inertia of ‘ennui’ and the fear of mortality. The oxymoron ‘morbid gaiety’ (‘funèbre gaité’) encapsulates the self-destructive euphoria that characterizes a lifestyle that seeks to stave off the double threat of ‘ennui’ and a predictable existence that culminates in death. Given the conflicting nature of this lifestyle, stanza 6 leaves the poet in a quandary: does he allow himself fully to yield to this fascination with self-destructive vice, or does he remain in a more conventional moral space that eschews this seductive euphoria

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and intensity? The dilemma is encapsulated in the juxtaposition of the verbs ‘envier’ (‘envy’) and ‘s’effraya’ (‘takes fright’) which connotes the inner tension he feels between fascination and fear, moral daring versus moral conservatism: My heart takes fright to envy this poor lot Who rush so fervently to the abyss, And who, drunk on their own blood, prefer, in sum, Suffering to death, and Hell to nothingness!

These ‘pauvre homme[s]’ (‘poor lot’) may well be accelerating their journey towards the gaping abyss of death (‘abîme béant’) through their self-destructive vices, but these vices have the advantage of encouraging a heightened sensory mode of being, an intoxicating dynamism (‘drunk on their own blood’) that is preferable to the more conventionally bland detached nihilism that keeps us in the passive state of ‘ennui’. Suffering and Hell (‘Douleur’ and ‘enfer’) are preferable to ‘death’ and ‘nothingness’ (‘mort’ and ‘nèant’) because at least they are associated with an intensity of feeling that death and nothingness do not possess. Thus, the poem concludes with two approaches to life that encapsulate two ways of coping with ‘ennui’ and death: a cautious, cerebral and abstract approach or a more foolhardy, self-destructive, but intense and sensory attitude. Though the poem ends on a note of moral equivocation, it opens up the possibility of a new post-Romantic subjectivity which is able to recuperate from urban vice a dynamic approach to existence that escapes the moral passivity of ‘ennui’. In this final section, I explore how this new ethics of modernity through vice is often allied to, and enhanced by, its association with social marginality. Both Balzac and Baudelaire create a cast of characters whose superior ‘conscience dans le mal’ and ‘énergie du mal’ is actually increased, rather than inhibited by their status as social outcasts or ‘misfits’ in society. Let us now examine some of these.

Vautrin: Poacher turned gamekeeper We have already seen how among the many pseudonyms he possesses, Vautrin is referred to by his fellow outlaws in reverential tones as ‘le Dab’, the master-criminal who stands in splendid isolation at the apex of a secret fraternity whose superior organization and financial clout allows it to run rings around the forces of law and order. Of all Balzac’s characters, he is the best-known villain, the most dangerous, powerful and intelligent practitioner of vice and criminality and the most adept at applying his criminal mind to mastering the rules of the complex metropolis. Until the very end of the novel, when he is finally stopped in his tracks and is offered a ‘deal’ by the authorities to become chief of police (more of which later), he more than anyone controls and manipulates the police and judiciary who pursue him, as well as the lesser criminals who look up to him for financial support and protection; no space within the modern city is unknown to him or holds any fears for him: in short, Vautrin is the ultimate personification of modern vice, of the mutually productive and necessary relationship between criminality and urban existence: both fascinating

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and threatening, elusive and omnipresent, and concealing within him rare depths of moral energy and lucidity. Yet while this point may seem obvious, critics have given it surprisingly short shrift. All too often they have distanced Vautrin from his primary identification with modernity and vice so as to remould him according to their own theoretical paradigms. Despite their undeniable strengths, both the Marxist critique of Lukàcs and the post-structuralist theory of Prendergast are cases in point, because neither gives a particularly satisfactory or accurate account of Vautrin’s dual relationship to evil and modernity. Lukàcs’s analysis of Balzac’s fiction is not confined to his depiction of the modern city, which is the principal focus of this chapter, but encompasses the class conflicts that destroy both rural and urban societies as a result of the bourgeois capitalism that proliferated throughout France following the extinction of the nobility by the French Revolution. Lukàcs reserves the word ‘modern’ for the formal distinction he makes between the realist novel (which he considers to be good) and the modernist novel (which begins with Flaubert and he considers to be bad).17 Contrary to Zola’s modernism, which gives only a selective, incomplete picture of man as a biological being and is based on the reductive, hypothetical notion of the ‘average’ man or woman, Balzac’s Realism works because of its ‘totalizing’ methodology which relies on his theory of the ‘type’: his comprehensive depiction of individual well-rounded characters who are also typical representatives of their social class at a given historical juncture: The realism of Balzac rests on a uniformly complete rendering of the particular individual traits of each of his characters on the one hand and the traits which are typical of them as representatives of class on the other.18

This intricate intermeshing of a particular character with a general social situation at a given historical moment at times works admirably well: one such example, as Christopher Prendergast points out in his important work The Order of Mimesis, is Crevel from La Cousine Bette who is ‘a concretely realised figure whose individual traits, habits, mannerisms of speech are systematically invested with representative values (referring to the type of the ‘bourgeois parvenue’ in the France of the 1840s)’;19 but when it comes to Vautrin, Lukàcs is left with a major problem: here he is presented with a character whose origins are vague, his identity unstable, and who belongs to no recognizable social class or group. Since Lukàcs cannot, according to his own methodology, categorize Vautrin as a representative type, because he is so unique and socially undefinable, he is forced to come up with a different sort of categorization which falls far short of his own exacting Marxist demand for a historically concrete, totalizing and mimetic literary form: namely, as the literary incarnation of the Romantic fantastic: The figure of Vautrin is the incarnation of this fantastic quality in Balzac . . . Vautrin takes the stage with the same motivated-unmotivated suddenness as Mephistopholes in Goethe’s Faust or Lucifer in Byron’s Cain. Vautrin’s function in Balzac’s Human Comedy is the same as that of Mephistopheles and Lucifer in Goethe’s and Byron’s mystery-plays.20

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As we have already seen, however, this comparison of Vautrin to the most celebrated ‘evil’ characters of German and English Romanticism is precisely the sort of metaphysical Romantic discourse on evil that leads to Lucien’s downfall: Vautrin, on the contrary, recognizes that it is an anti-Romantic approach to life, a pragmatic interpretation of evil through the lens of modern capitalism that ensures success and survival. So the irony is that not only does Lukàcs completely misread the modern, post-Romantic evil that Vautrin incarnates, but as a Marxist critic seeking to pay homage to Balzac’s social realism, he is also forced to draw on the legacy of European Romanticism. Prendergast offers a powerful post-structuralist reading of Balzac that offers us not only a timely reappraisal of Lukàcs’s theory of the ‘type’, but also a more socially integrated interpretation of Vautrin that avoids the trap of Romantic stereotyping into which the Marxist critic has fallen. Where Lukàcs’s theory of the type presupposes that a transparent reading of modern capitalism is successfully achieved by virtue of Balzac’s mimetic representation of social class through an omniscient narrative voice, Prendergast demonstrates that Balzac’s text is characterized by what he calls a ‘degraded mimesis’, that is, multiple and shifting narrative viewpoints that on the contrary reflect the very instability and indecipherability of modernity. Where Lukàcs attempts  – unconvincingly as we have seen – to sidestep his historically engaged social typology by placing Vautrin in a completely separate but anachronistic literary category, Prendergast on the contrary emphasizes Vautrin’s contemporary pertinence as a metaphor of the modern city itself. He is a ‘ceaselessly self-metamorphosing’ sign, a ‘texte undéchiffrable’, who successfully adapts himself to the unstable nature of modernity by virtue of his constantly shifting identities that allow him to ‘claim[s] complete authority over the decipherment of the text of society’;21 this ‘text’ remains unintelligible to all but Vautrin, owing to its confusing proliferation of dubious economic contracts, transactions and laws  – specifically the Social Contract and its heir the Napoleonic Code  – whose glitches and ineffectiveness only he has the know-how to spot. His multiple disguises as priest, diplomat, magistrate, commercial traveller, not to mention the signs on his body (the stamp as convict which he erases when he becomes Carlos Herrera) not only afford Vautrin the elusiveness and mobility necessary to ‘decode’ these competing discourses within society, but also mean that he ‘incarnates the spirit of anonymously mobile capital, its origins opaque, its transactions murky, its “life” that of continuous circulation.’22 Vautrin, according to Prendergast’s reading, thus becomes a double metaphor in Balzac’s text of the indecipherability of modernity and the instability of the capital that drives this modernity forward. The problem, however, with this essentially semiotic reading of Vautrin is that it loses sight of his quintessentially criminal identity as a source of his unique moral energy and lucidity. While Prendergast quite rightly questions Lukàcs’s reductive fixation on social class by emphasizing Vautrin’s unstable identity as the key to his deciphering of modernity, the danger with his approach is that it risks depriving Vautrin of any personal identity of his own and reducing him to a mere semiotic function of Balzac’s text whose sole purpose is to reinforce the negative post-structuralist assumption that modernity is unstable and opaque to interpretation, an assumption which, as we shall see, is also inherent to the ‘trauma theory’ that has similarly come to dominate readings of Baudelairean modernity.

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In short, neither Lukàcs’s theory of the type, nor Prendergast’s theory of the ‘indecipherability’ of modernity pay sufficient attention to the mutually productive relationship that Balzac identifies between evil and the modern city, a relationship that is contingent on our acknowledgement of Vautrin’s carefully constructed criminal identity. Far from playing a purely Mephistophelean or semiotic role, Vautrin has a very clear, hierarchically defined status as ‘le Dab’, the elite criminal mastermind who bestrides a secret fraternity of notorious Parisian outlaws like a colossus. And his aristocratic standing within the criminal community stems from his unique ability, more than the ‘ordinary’ criminals who look up to him, to strike a successful balance between ‘la conscience dans le mal and ‘l’énergie du mal’. Balzac revives his theory of energy expounded in his earlier texts Louis Lambert (1832) and The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831) which essentially state that those with the greatest capacity for vice possess a surplus of moral energy, the expenditure of which is inherently self-destructive unless it is carefully regulated by willpower (‘volonté). The downfall of the other criminals in A Harlot High and Low, is that they succumb to their sexual desire which leads them to fatigue and indolence, fear of work and a level of economic expenditure on the women to whom they are attracted that can only be sustained by ever more reckless criminal activities that ultimately result in their being caught and condemned to death: Passion is almost always, with these people, the original reason for their daring operations, their murders. The excessive love which draws them, constitutionally, say the doctors, towards woman, occupies the whole moral and physical strength of these energetic men. Hence the idleness that devours their days; for amatory excesses demand both rest and restoring meals. Hence that distaste for all work, which compels such people to adopt quick means to procure money. Even so, the need to live and to live well, itself so violent, is nothing in comparison with the prodigalities inspired by the female to whom these faithful hounds want to give jewellery, and who, always ravenous, loves good cheer. The young woman wants a shawl, her lover steals it, and the woman finds in that a proof of love! That is how one proceeds to theft, which, if the human is examined with a magnifying glass, must be regarded as an impulse almost natural to man. Theft leads to murder, and step by step murder leads the lover to the scaffold. (pp. 446–7)

This mutually destructive link between the excessive expenditure of libidinal energy and of economic capital is strikingly similar in tone to Baudelaire’s poem ‘Le Jeu’, yet with none of the latter’s ontological or existential benefits. Where the poem’s gamblers and prostitutes lead a vice-riven, self-destructive life that at least has some ethical basis in an intensity of living that allows them to stave off the inertia of ‘ennui’ and their fear of mortality, here sexual energy and money are merely squandered irresponsibly with no obvious moral rationale or tangible psychological rewards. Vautrin, however, is the exception to this rule. Not only are his origins murky and his identities constantly shifting, but he is also a closet homosexual, who therefore suppresses his sexual urges, sublimating them through his ‘paternal’ relationships to handsome young men like Lucien or the Corsican bandit Théodore Calvi, both of whom he secretly desires. Thus, Vautrin’s superior moral lucidity, discipline and

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capacity for action derive not only from his access as criminal banker to almost infinite financial resources, but also from his enforced celibacy, which allows him to avoid squandering his ‘énergie du mal’ in reckless sexual and criminal activities, and channel and regulate it instead through carefully calculated intellectual crimes that reinforce his hegemony on the modern city. Even when Vautrin is finally stopped, realizing that the game is up and that the only way to avoid prison is to accept the offer to become chief of police, his superior moral judgement is still very much in evidence in the devastating critique he provides of the fate that awaits the criminal once he has been rereleased back into society: As things stand, you, the representatives of justice, don’t want to concern yourselves with the conditions of life for an ex-convict. The law may be satisfied, but society isn’t, it keeps up its mistrust, and it does all it can to justify that mistrust to itself; it makes life impossible for a freed convict; it should give him back all his rights, but it forbids him to live where he chooses. Society says to the wretch: Paris, the only place where you can hide and the surrounding district for so many miles around, you shan’t inhabit! . . . Then it submits the ex-convict to police surveillance. Do you think one can live under those conditions? In order to live, you must work, for you don’t leave prison with a private income. You so arrange things that the convict shall be clearly marked, recognized, hemmed in, then you imagine that people are going to have faith in him, when society, the law, the world about him do not. You condemn him either to hunger or to crime. He can’t find work, he is inescapably driven back to his old trade which brings him to the scaffold. (p. 541)

Vautrin’s diatribe is a damning indictment of the sort of social utopianism that Hugo was later to use in Les Misérables (1866). Hugo famously upheld the wayward urchin Gauvin as a shining example of crime acting as a spur to moral rehabilitation. The criminal can, and should, be reintegrated back into society. But Vautrin’s assessment is far more sober and pragmatic: once a criminal, always a criminal; society never lets the offender forget his past, so his prospect of reintegration is minimal. He will be banished from Paris, whose urban jungle would offer him a safe haven, and marked out for stigmatization by the rest of society; unable to obtain employment he would either be forced back into a cycle of crime, resulting in punishment by the death penalty, or simply starve. Vautrin’s pessimistic criminological analysis explains the psychology behind his acceptance to become chief of police: he has no other alternative. So we should be wary of the confessional passage in the following chapter that suggests that Vautrin is a ‘new’ man, has learnt the error of his ways and is deeply remorseful for his actions: His own air of kindness, directness, simplicity, of a man speaking freely without bitterness, without that philosophy of vice which till then made him so terrible to listen to, caused it all to seem like a transformation [‘eussent fait croire à une transformation’]. This was no longer the same man. (p. 543)

Were it not for the French pluperfect subjunctive (‘eussent fait croire’) we might take Vautrin’s moral epiphany at face value. But the narrator’s ironic use of this tense

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suggests that Vautrin’s decision is based purely on pragmatic necessity, rather than any genuine conversion to virtue. Although we might assume that Balzac’s Catholicism demands that Vautrin will eventually succumb to the superior force of the ‘good’, the pragmatist and realist within him also acknowledged that in modern society the religious, metaphysical polarization of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ no longer applies, that the moral boundaries of the modern metropolis are far more blurred and interchangeable than they used to be, and thus a theological model of redemption is thus no longer viable. If Lucien made the fatal mistake of naively clinging to this schematic, theological world view, Vautrin will not repeat it: alive to the Machiavellian workings of modern society, his repentance is merely an act designed to secure his own survival. His ‘moral reintegration’ into society must be seen to take place at a social and institutional level, even if in reality it is anything but sincere. And this in turn invites suspicion from Balzac’s readers about the moral integrity of the forces of law and order. If the poacher can turn gamekeeper so easily, then is there really any difference between the criminal and the authorities? In the following prose poem by Baudelaire, we will examine a quite different kind of socially marginal character, Miss Scalpel (‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’), whose manipulation of vice, like Vautrin’s, offers a coping mechanism for modernity, but contrary to Vautrin, is contingent on her exploration of sexual fantasy, rather than its suppression. Where this poem has lent itself to a brand of criticism that associates Baudelairean modernity with trauma and victimization, I propose a more productive reading that links it to a new ethically proactive recuperation of vice that frees Miss Scalpel from the limitations of gender, economic and religious stereotypes.

‘Miss Scalpel’: Female empowerment through vice The poem begins with the narrator, the typical male bourgeois ‘flâneur’ whose firstperson perspective dominates much of the collection, wandering into a dimly gaslit suburb on ‘the edge of the city outskirts’ where he is suddenly accosted by a mysterious prostitute who asks him whether he is a doctor, to which he says no and attempts to press onwards; nevertheless, he allows himself to be escorted by this ‘tall sturdy girl, with very sincere eyes, light makeup, her hair flowing in the wind with the strings of her bonnet’.23 If for Balzac it was the underground spaces of Paris that signalled the locus of criminality and marginality, then for Baudelaire it is the capital’s periphery: the Haussmannisation of the 1850s and 1860s pushed crime into the outskirts away from the well-lit boulevards. Baudelaire is bound neither by the generic conventions of the crime novel, nor by a nostalgia for the Restoration Paris that had criminality at its centre. Both the reader and the narrator are therefore spatially primed for an encounter that lies outside the safe haven of bourgeois social control and morality that they inhabit. Despite entering into this unfamiliar terrain, the male flâneur self-consciously asserts his mastery of the situation through a display of disinterested curiosity: ‘I passionately love mystery, as I always hope to untangle it. So I allowed myself to be dragged off by that companion, or rather by that unhoped-for enigma’ (p.115). The narrator here exhibits a confidence in his own ability to decipher the unfamiliar aspects of modernity and makes it quite clear that it is he, as the self-possessed male subject wishing to indulge his idle curiosity, who has made the decision to allow this female companion to escort him back to her quarters. He therefore reaffirms traditional social and gender roles

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through a confident air of masculine bourgeois superiority. This show of intellectual mastery and insouciance is continued in the narrator’s dismissive and self-confident description of Mademoiselle Bistouri’s living quarters: I omit the description of her hovel; it can be found in several well-known old French poets. Except, and Régnier did not notice this detail, two or three portraits of famous doctors were hanging on the walls. (p. 115)

Basking in his own powers of observation, the narrator is subsequently disarmed and lulled into a false sense of security by Mademoiselle Bistouri’s hospitality, which is displayed through her cosy fireplace and her offer of cigars and mulled wine. She continues to mistake the narrator for a surgeon, but at this stage he is not visibly shaken by this misrecognition. Indeed, the text implies, but does not explicitly state, that a sexual encounter then takes place between the narrator and his interlocutor, suggested by the temporal break in the narrative and Mademoiselle Bistouri’s switch from the formal ‘vous’ to the more intimate ‘tu’: ‘A few moments later, addressing me by the familiar tu, she repeated her familiar antiphon, and said, “You are a doctor, aren’t you, my kitten?” (p. 116). Be that as it may, there is no indication of any financial transaction taking place between the interlocutors, thereby casting doubt on the standard prostitute/ client relationship; this element of doubt is reinforced as we gradually discover that Mademoiselle Bistouri already makes a habit of subverting the normal economic logic of a prostitute acting as a fetishized object of male desire who receives money for her sexual services: rather it is she who is the desiring subject and the clients the objects of her own sexual fantasies. If according to Benjamin prostitution was the central metaphor for the commodification of modernity, then this particular prostitute short-circuits this process in two ways: either she visits doctors, the objects of her sexual fantasies, and pays them for their time, irrespective of whether she is ill or not; or in the case of a young intern who is ‘as pretty as an angel’ but whose parents have no money she invites him to her quarters on the implicit understanding that she requires no payment from him: ‘I told him, “Come see me, come see me often. And with me, don’t worry. I don’t need money”’ (p. 117). Moreover, she goes on to tell the narrator that her secret fantasy is to ask the young intern to visit her ‘with his instrument case and gown, even with a little blood on it!’ Following Maria Scott, one can of course legitimately read these references to doctors, surgical instruments and blood as a critique of the dubious practice of backstreet abortion to which many unfortunate women at the time were subjected.24 Yet it is also possible to read this more positively as a subversion of traditional economic and gender roles via a prostitute who chooses not to take money from men, but boldly explores a new realm of female sexual fantasy where it is men, and not women, who are the object of sado-masochistic desire. If the intern’s blood-spattered apron remains a fantasy, even to recount that fantasy to a male interlocutor is a bold and provocative gesture of female self-affirmation. Thus, modernity need not be associated with trauma and victimization but with a new moral and sexual empowerment located in the vice which this very modernity generates.

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‘Miss Scalpel’ also puts paid to the idea, advanced by Prendergast in relation to Balzac, that the modern city renders human identity ‘indecipherable’: it quickly becomes clear that the male narrator’s self-professed ability to ‘decode’ the mysteries of modernity is supplanted by the prostitute’s superior ability to keep tabs on the inhabitants of the modern city through her possession of both lithographs and photographs of Parisian doctors, old and young, which she shows to the increasingly uncomfortable narrator: Look! Here’s Z, the one who told his class, referring to X, ‘That monster who carries his soul’s darkness on his face!’ All that, because the other one didn’t agree with his position on the issue! They really joked about that in Medical School, those days! Don’t you remember? – Look, here’s K – the one who denounced to the government the insurgents he was treating at his hospital. That was the period of insurrections. How could such a handsome man have so little heart? (p. 116)

This visual ‘mapping’ of the doctors to whom she is attracted is not just some twisted fantasy, but also offers Mademoiselle Bistouri a focal point for making probing judgements on the modern-day relationship between ethics and aesthetics, and ethics and politics. First, she questions the assumption, originating in Rousseau, and shared by Balzac himself, that outer beauty is synonymous with inner virtue. She dismisses Z’s attack on X for supposedly displaying in his facial appearance the inner darkness of his soul as a spurious claim, originating in a petty disagreement: the doctor who made such a claim, she reminds us, did so merely to spite his rival who did not share his point of view; secondly, by the same token, she emphasizes that a beautiful face can hide the most morally pernicious actions: despite his good looks another doctor, K, treacherously denounced the patients to whom he was tending during the riots to the government authorities. Baudelaire’s rejection of the idea that moral character coincides with physiognomy is both antithetical to Balzac’s Rousseauistic notion that outer beauty and inner virtue coincide, as well as to later theorists such as Nordau and Lombroso who similarly argued that moral degeneracy was reflected in physical ‘anomalies’. What is more, the allusion to political betrayal by an outwardly respectable citizen (the handsome doctor K) perhaps alludes to Baudelaire’s own feelings of betrayal by the outwardly ‘virtuous’ noble ideals of 1848, which resulted in bitter disappointment. Appearances can be deceptive and what at first glance seems virtuous may mask its very opposite. But Mademoiselle Bistouri’s visual mapping is not limited to a nostalgia for the past, but is also focused on the present. Apart from her lithographs of older doctors, she has in her possession a bundle containing photographs of younger doctors. Photography was, of course, a relatively new medium in the 1860s and this shows that the protagonist is fully attuned to the changes of modernity in a way that the narrator is not. Mademoiselle Bistouri not only is acquainted with two generations of doctors, but this acquaintance is also reflected via the two representational means at her disposal of ‘mapping’ modernity: the lithograph and the photograph. It is thus Mademoiselle Bistouri, not the male narrator, who emerges as the more successful ‘decoder’ of modernity, who subverts and emancipates herself from traditional economic and gender roles and makes perceptive ethical observations on

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the nature of aesthetics and politics. All this adds to the male narrator’s gradual feeling of emasculation and encroaching self-doubt. Be that as it may, there is a problematic aspect to Mademoiselle Bistouri’s identity that cannot easily be ignored: her amnesia. Most critics have interpreted this as the suppressed memory of a traumatic sexual experience such as rape, loss of virginity or the start of the menstrual cycle.25 Even if this is the case, however, the uncertainty and confusion with which the poem ends, is emphatically shown to be the male narrator’s and not Mademoiselle Bistouri’s. So baffled, morally destabilized and riven with self-doubt has he become that he has no choice but to have recourse to the standard theological model of morality in a desperate attempt to make sense of his encounter: What weirdness you find in big cities, when you know how to walk about and look! Life swarms with innocent monsters . . . O Creator! Can monsters exist in the eyes of the only One who knows why they exist, how they were made and how they might have been able not to be made? (p. 118)

The male narrator, like Balzac’s Lucien, makes the mistake of leaning too heavily on a theological moral framework which is clearly no longer equipped to interpret the new ethical challenges generated by modernity. God is unable to provide him with any clear answers and thus he assumes that Miss Scalpel is an ‘innocent monster’; yet as we have seen, she is far more than that: she embodies in her actions and observations a superior ‘conscience dans le mal’ and an ‘énergie du mal’ which mean that she cannot simply be dismissed as the victim of circumstance that critics and the narrator himself make her out to be. If a negative reading of the relationship between evil and modernity is to be found then it is in Baudelaire’s prose poem ‘Beautiful Dorothée’ in which the narrator reveals the social evils of slavery, prostitution and paedophilia as products of the global capitalist modernity of European colonialism.

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Evil and Science: Lautréamont and Zola

Darwinism versus Creationism Darwin’s publication of The Origin of the Species in 1859, which in the following decade became well known to French readers via translation, gave a new prominence to the natural sciences, ushering in an age of Scientific Positivism that posed an unprecedented and genuine threat to traditional theodicy. Darwin’s work invited the most radical reinterpretation of theological evil since the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and for three important reasons: first, his theory of evolution implied that man was no longer created in God’s image but evolved from apes;1 secondly, Darwin’s concept of ascent from beast to man opposed the Christian doctrine of the Fall of Man; thirdly, evil was now seen as instinctual and biologically universal in origin, as opposed to a sinful act resulting from man’s free will that was punished by God. Today, the battle for minds between Darwinists and Creationists rages more fiercely than ever: the spate of exhibitions, media coverage and publications celebrating, especially in the United Kingdom, the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth in 1809 has been countered by an anti-Darwinist backlash undertaken by Creationists, chiefly, though by no means exclusively, in the United States. Prominent neo-Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins, whose polemical books such as The God Delusion, combined with high-profile television documentaries, interviews and debates, champion evolutionary theory as the philosophical and ethical bedrock of the secular rationalist crusade against religions of all denominations.2 Dawkins upholds Darwinism as the modern-day continuation of the Enlightenment mission to pit the illuminating powers of reason against the ignorant forces of religious superstition and bigotry. Evil, he argues, is caused by religion, not resolved by it: whether it is perpetuated by Islamic fundamentalists or North American Evangelists, organized religion is responsible for wars, terrorism, abortion, the abuse of women, homophobia and all manner of ills which it is the task of scientific rationalism to combat and dispel. The anti-theological crusades of Dawkins in the United Kingdom and fellow evolutionist Daniel Dennett in the United States have elicited equally vociferous responses from staunch believers, principally from Creationists who defend to the letter the book of Genesis, the existence of a benevolent God, and the theological notions of sin and suffering. Even in France, where Darwin’s legacy has enjoyed the protection of a strongly secular Republican education system, the Creationists have recently made inroads, albeit from an Islamic rather than Christian

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perspective, causing a storm of controversy with the appearance of Turkish author Harun Yahya’s book L’Atlas de la Création in 2006.3 This raging battle between Darwinists and Creationists has even spilled over into the cultural arena, a notable example being the 2009 revival in London’s ‘Old Vic’ theatre of Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s 1955 play Inherit the Wind, inspired by the famous 1925 ‘ Scopes Monkey Trial’, starring Kevin Spacey as the Federal lawyer who defends a schoolteacher from a small religious town in the American mid-west whose reputation has been ruined for daring to place Darwin on the school curriculum. Here, the Creationist versus Darwinist debate is contested on grounds that are not only intellectual, but also political and ideological: this play was written at the height of McCarthysim, its anti-Creationist position a veiled attack on the notorious Senator’s arch-conservativism. Since its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, Darwinism has thus become synonymous with a secular liberalism that promotes freedom of thought and expression, as opposed to a Creationism that is frequently associated with a bigoted, reactionary politics. For one camp, ‘evolution’ is the road to human progress, whereas for the other, it is merely ‘evilution’, the road to moral perdition.4 Yet because this debate has morphed from one of strong intellectual disagreement into outright ideological warfare, each side accusing the other of a dangerously flawed immorality, it is easy to lose sight of what either has to say about evil as a concept. In maintaining that suffering is the rational and just punishment for sin, Augustine’s doctrine of the Fall has the merit of forcing man to take individual moral responsibility for the evil he commits. Yet as we have seen throughout this study, that suffering, especially since Lisbon, has increasingly struck man as disproportionate to any sin he has committed, thereby discrediting the notion of an omnibenevolent God and religion more generally. The discrepancy between its rational account of suffering and man’s experience of it has repeatedly proven to be theology’s Achilles heel, despite its painstaking attempts to justify the existence of evil on moral grounds. Even Augustine’s famous ‘free will defence’ – the notion that man’s Fall from grace was of his own doing because he abused the gift of free will God gave him – does not completely absolve theology from accusations that man’s propensity to sin since his expulsion from the Garden of Eden was predetermined by God from the outset.5 By rejecting Original Sin and the notion of suffering as divine punishment, Darwinism thus had the welcome advantage of suddenly freeing human destiny from this yoke of an all-powerful God. Yet this enticing prospect of moral liberation from excessive religious authority was not as straightforward as it seemed: for it merely replaced theological determinism with a new, secular form of determinism, where man was no longer beholden to sin and to God, but to the biological instinct that he shares with animals. Immoral actions were henceforth to be perceived as the result of unconscious drives over which he has no control and this created an altogether new ‘problem of evil’. Instinct had replaced sin as man’s inescapable lot. It is within this context that this chapter fruitfully compares and re-examines two late-nineteenth-century literary works, published at a time when the paradigm shift from Christianity to Darwinism, religion to Scientific Positivism, was still in its relative infancy, giving them a historical urgency that brings this new problem of evil into particularly sharp relief: Lautréamont’s Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror)

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(1869) and Zola’s The Beast in Man (La Bête humaine) (1890).6 Despite, generically and stylistically speaking, having little in common – the former is a highly subjective, viciously satirical work of prose poetry published during the dying days of the conservative Second Empire as Darwinist ideas were only just filtering into France, while the latter, published some two decades later when these ideas had gained wider currency under the more liberal secular Third Republic, is a ‘roman judiciaire’ that casts a retrospective socially critical glance over a corrupt Second Empire on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War  – both works respectively centre around two male protagonists, Maldoror and Jacques Lantier, whose identities are defined exclusively by the evil acts they commit. Lautréamont’s criminal outlaw Maldoror is at first sight the incarnation of pure, unrelenting, gratuitous evil, committing unspeakable torture, rape and murder almost at will; while Zola’s train driver Lantier, though also an ‘outsider’, is basically a decent, hardworking citizen who struggles in vain against violent atavistic urges that drive him to murder women to whom he is sexually attracted. Zola’s novel was predominantly shaped by two theoretical and ideological influences: first, by pioneering Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s theory of atavism  – the notion that many criminals are born, not made, owing to regressive traits that hark back to an earlier, more ‘primitive’ stage of evolution – which essentially gave a sociological underpinning to the novelist’s earlier endorsement of instinct (derived from Darwin) and heredity (Taine) as the main driving forces of human behaviour; secondly, by secular Republicanism, the political ideology Zola deemed most suited to his role as the self-appointed literary champion of the underdog and crusader against the entrenched social injustices of the Second Empire. Lautréamont’s position, both intellectual and political, is however, far more difficult to pinpoint, for two main reasons: first, because of the scarcity of biographical detail about his personal life, social outlook or beliefs, and secondly, owing to the notoriously transgressive content and form of Maldoror, which although much admired by critics ranging from André Breton to Julia Kristeva, has deprived it of the status of canonical text. And yet if Lautréamont’s ambivalent reputation as an elusive maverick means he has missed out on Zola’s broader critical and public recognition (most notably as the voice of moral authority whose 1898 article ‘J’accuse’ courageously defended Captain Dreyfus) it is he who emerges as the more nuanced and searching interpreter of evil, because contrary to the novelist, he is not beholden to the twin demands of Scientific Positivism and political ideology. Zola’s interpretation of evil as atavism and political corruption is deeply problematic on several levels. First, it completely erodes man’s moral autonomy in the perpetration of evil: Lantier’s physiologically determined behaviour leaves absolutely no room for the exercise of his individual moral consciousness. Secondly, Zola’s fictional style at times incorporates religious symbolism and political allegory, both of which undermine his purported adherence to Positivism’s secular, objective outlook, which his Naturalist technique claimed to replicate through an impartial narrative voice. As we shall see, there is nothing secular or impersonal about his description of atavism, which he either describes in the religious terminology of the Fall, or personifies as an uncontrollable locomotive that allegorizes the apocalyptic demise of the Second Empire. Atavism is wrenched from its empirical physiological meaning to take on a highly symbolic function.

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By refusing to pin his flag to the mast of Scientific Positivism or Republicanism, Lautréamont’s interpretation of evil, however, possesses the multifacetedness and flexibility necessary to allow for the existence of man as both independent, selfreflexive moral agent, and as a biological organism who is also prone to a more physiologically driven, unmotivated type of evil. Both authors are also equally anxious to come up with a new literary genre on evil that distinguishes them from their predecessors or rivals: Zola from Hugo’s socio-economic novels on evil on the one hand and Dostoevsky’s psychological portraits of crime on the other, and Lautréamont from the hackneyed urban realism of Balzac or Eugène Sue, both of which he parodies in Canto 6. Yet once again, it is Lautréamont who emerges as the more intellectually coherent and stylistically innovative writer. If Zola’s achievement of producing a new, meticulously researched crime novel exposing the legal and political corruption of the Second Empire is let down by a political and religious symbolism that contradicts his supposedly secular scientific agenda, then Lautréamont more suggestively comes up with a new hybrid literary form, a kind of ‘scientific prose poetry’, that dovetails perfectly with his dual account of evil as both a metaphysical concept that retains the morally speculative, figurative language of theology and a biological paradigm steeped in the rational, empirical discourse of Scientific Positivism. Let us now compare more closely the competing influences of theoretical and literary discourses on both writers’ interpretations of evil, before considering why Lautréamont’s more cross-disciplinary, hybrid approach ultimately proves more nuanced and coherent than Zola’s.

Zola: Lombroso, Hugo, Dostoevsky Lombroso’s influential work, Criminal Man (L’uomo delinquente), first published in 1876 and subsequently revised in four later editions, essentially founded the discipline of criminal anthropology. It had three main aims: first, to focus on a new type of empirical scientific research that focuses on the criminal rather than the crime; secondly to criticize the philosophical doctrine of free will that underpinned the post-Enlightenment legal system established by Cesare Beccaria; and thirdly to suggest that atavism – the regression to an earlier stage of evolution – was the most important factor in determining criminal behaviour.7 Though critics remain divided as to how faithfully and extensively Zola incorporated Lombroso’s theories into his novel,8 the Italian’s notion of atavism, with its emphasis on the physiologically unmotivated as opposed to psychologically motivated causes of crime, provided the Naturalist author with the requisite scientific ammunition with which to refute two competing types of crime novel, both published in 1866: Hugo’s socio-economic interpretation of crime, epitomized by Les Misérables, and Dostoevsky’s psychological approach, incarnated in Crime and Punishment. Les Misérables, as Proux has convincingly shown, was based on the notion of jurisprudence outlined by the Enlightenment legal philosopher Beccaria, who had argued that punishment should fit the crime: the severity of a penal sentence should be strictly assessed in the light of the damage the crime has caused to society as a whole.9 Such a notion of justice was predicated on Rousseau’s belief in the

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innate goodness of man, his capacity for developing moral self-awareness through a punishment proportionate to his crime and the preservation of the moral welfare of society as a whole. Thus, Gauvain, the street urchin of Hugo’s novel is not innately bad, but steals out of economic hardship. His sentence allows him to learn from his mistake and become morally reintegrated back into society. Lombroso’s criminological theory of atavism, however, explicitly challenged Beccaria’s legal premises as too idealistic, abstract and ineffectual. He argued that many criminals are born, not made: they are physiologically predisposed to crime and not innately good as Beccaria and Hugo would have us believe; thus, the idea that they have the capacity for moral self-awareness and remorse is highly questionable. Lombroso’s case studies led him to conclude that only an empirical examination of specific criminals, rather than a general philosophical analysis of crime, could safeguard society. The punishment, in other words, should fit the criminal, not the crime. Consequently, what is needed is a justice system where less emphasis is placed on the punishment of crime, than its prevention through such social measures as disarmament, regulation of migration, the introduction of divorce to prevent spousal violence, a tax on alcoholics, the encouragement of institutions such as savings banks and life imprisonment or the death penalty for repeat offenders in serious crimes.10 As champion of the underdog Zola would have been opposed to such measures, which recent anti-Lombrosian commentators such as Delia Frigassi have criticized as draconian, repressive and ultimately conducive to Social Darwinism; what Zola did identify in the Italian’s theory, however, was a compelling scientific paradigm for interpreting evil that allowed him to differentiate himself from the theoretical approaches of his literary peers.11 But Zola’s quest to find his own literary voice on the topic of evil was not merely, as eminent Zola critics Roger Ripoll and Philippe Hamon have shown, a reaction to the Hugolien ‘social’ model of crime as a spur to moral self-improvement: he was also throwing down the gauntlet to the contemporary Russian crime novel that was threatening the hegemony of French Naturalist fiction in the 1880s.12 In particular, Zola set out to counter Dostoevsky’s seductive explorations of the unique, psychological motives behind crime, by emphasizing instead its universal and unconscious physiological causes; the Russian’s exhaustive, evangelically influenced analysis of the psychological and metaphysical categories of remorse and guilt which he portrayed as the inevitable consequences of crime, was replaced by Zola with a depiction of criminals as physical beings in whom moral consciousness plays a minimal role and is secularized and completely subordinated to their irrational biological drives. What is more, where crime is presented by the Russian as a mark of individual moral intelligence through educated characters such as Raskalnikov, Zola stressed the opposite: crime was also the province of the ordinary, uneducated man.13 Thus, where Hugo and Dostoevsky differ from Zola is in their belief that crime has the capacity to enhance, rather than diminish, individual moral agency and self-awareness. For Hugo the causes of crime may chiefly be social and economic, but they are conducive to the moral rehabilitation of the perpetrator; for Dostoevsky the motives of crime are invariably selfish and psychological but they testify to the perpetrator’s moral autonomy and intellect, an idea that, as we shall see in the next chapter, was later to be explored by Gide in The Vatican Cellars. Crime is an indicator of

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moral independence and free will. But Zola drew on atavism to make the very opposite point: crime signals a radical loss of self-control and moral autonomy. No more is this illustrated in his novel than in Jacques Lantier’s total vulnerability to his primordial impulses, to the ‘beast in man’; the train mechanic’s initial assumption that he could remain in complete control of his sexual liaison with Séverine proves to be tragically misplaced as his uncontrollable atavistic urges overtake him to the extent that he kills her against his will: Behind the ears fiery teeth penetrated his head, invaded limbs, drove him out of his own body as the wild beast whom he knew and feared galloped into his blood.14

Here, the atavism that normally lies dormant within Lantier re-emerges through sexual arousal as a personified force that overrides his very sense of autonomous selfhood. He becomes totally alienated from his own body, completely overtaken by a force beyond his control. Yet if these irrational physiological causes of crime render the perpetrator morally impotent, they have the same effect on the forces of justice which mistakenly assume that such crimes must be the consequence of premeditated, rational motives. Ripoll and Hamon have stressed that Denizet, the examining magistrate assigned to solve Severine’s murder, is a direct parody of the self-confident prosecutor in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) who places his faith in his superior powers of deduction to resolve the crime.15 Where the Russian investigator’s infallible logic leads him to prove that Raskalnikov is the culprit, Denizet’s ‘logic’ and stubborn attribution of rational motives to the crime lead him on a wild goose chase towards the wrong suspect: the known criminal Cabuche. Denizet is ironically presented by the narrator as a celebrated analytical mind whose capacity to solve complex crimes is second to none: ‘It was a masterpiece of fine analysis, his colleagues averred, a logical tissue of reconstruction of the truth, indeed, a work of real creative power’ (p. 338). But such lavish praise is meant to be interpreted ironically by the reader, who by this stage in the novel has already been made aware as to who the real murderer is: Jacques Lantier. Denizet, though aware of Jacques’s adulterous relationship with Severine, sees it as illogical, even patently absurd that this man would kill his beloved without good reason, especially when the known criminal Cabuche was obsessed with Severine, caught red-handed standing over her body drenched in blood, and only able to come up with the confused, unconvincing alibi that he was going for a stroll (‘Cabuche grew confused, and refused to answer, finally saying that he was out for a walk,’ 339). By working his way along a supposedly infallible chain of logical deduction, Denizet confidently concludes that Cabuche must have had a rational motive for killing Severine, namely, sexual opportunism, since there was no evidence of theft: though Cabuche knew that her jealous husband Roubaud could return at any minute, he was also aware that she was leaving the next day and thus may never again have a better opportunity to rape her: He must have been acting in the grip of a culminating crisis of lustful desire and been out of his mind from the thought that if he did not profit by this last moment

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in which Severine was alone in this deserted house, he would never have her, for on the following day she was to leave. From this point the examining magistrate’s conviction was complete and his case unshakeable. (p. 340)

Although Denizet acknowledges sexual desire as a possible cause of the crime, he regards this desire as inseparable from moral intent and premeditation; it does not occur to him, that such desire can, as Lombroso argues, be irrational, unpredictable and capable of overriding free will and rational choice altogether. Thus, Zola’s re-appropriation of Lombrosian atavism offers us a doubly dispiriting reading of evil: one where crime occurs independently of any moral agency or intent, and where miscarriages of justice are the result of the authorities’ mistaken assumption that intent must exist. Crime is thus a rudderless destructive force in thrall to an atavism that neither its victims nor society are capable of understanding, containing or bringing to justice. In the next section, I consider Lautréamont’s more nuanced attitude to crime: both as the product of physiological drives that are explicable in Darwinian terms as biological instinct, and of a discriminating moral consciousness that hones its selfawareness through recourse to a theological, as well as scientific, frame of reference. Lautréamont, in other words, is not prepared to make an irreversible leap from a metaphysical theological interpretation of evil to a secular scientific one, but remains open to both interpretations.

Lautréamont: Theology ‘biologized’ Lautréamont’s work paradoxically intermeshes opposing religious and scientific paradigms that correspond to two different conceptions of literature: a proto-Naturalist Darwinian identification of humans with animals as innately destructive beings governed by instinct and devoid of free will and a late-Romantic championing of man as a morally lucid metaphysical rebel who pits his wits against an omnipotent and unjust God. Lautréamont modernizes the Romantic revolt against sin and unmerited suffering by placing a proto-Naturalist emphasis on biological instinct as the explanation for human behaviour. Two philosophically and epistemologically incompatible paradigms for interpreting evil are thus paradoxically set side by side: Darwin’s secular notion of man as a physically finite being governed by instinct alternates with the Augustinian theological model of evil that posits man as a morally responsible sinner whose suffering is determined by God. Lautréamont, as we shall see, pushes this contradiction to breaking point: he acknowledges and criticizes the enduring influence of Christian authority by adopting a discourse that is decidedly scientific and Darwinian rather than metaphysical or religious in tone; yet he stops short of fully endorsing the atheism, rational rejection of the supernatural and privileging of instinct over moral agency that this Darwinian science demands. Instead, in Lautréamont’s Darwinist discourse, God still exists as Creator of the world (albeit a decidedly cruel one), a world in which ghosts, hermaphrodites and archangels have their allotted place, and man remains fully conscious of the evil he commits. At the same time, however, and in equally paradoxical fashion, Lautréamont frequently sings the praises of Darwinism and the theories of the

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positivist sciences in general, not in the atheistic rational language in which they are normally expressed, but in a reverential religious idiom normally reserved for paying homage to the benevolent Christian God. Thus, Lautréamont ‘biologizes’ theology and ‘theologizes’ science in a paradoxical and ironic way that would be frustrating and baffling to Richard Dawkins and the Pope in equal measure, but which according to his own moral premise offers a more multifaceted view of evil that allows him to denounce the innate cruelty of both man and God. The moral agenda he sets his poems is forcefully outlined in the second Canto: My poetry will consist exclusively of attacks on man, that wild beast, and the Creator, who ought never to have bred such vermin.16

Lautréamont’s double moral justification for Maldoror’s evil acts  – to combat the innate cruelty of man, and the equally intrinsic callousness of the unjust God who created him – is expressed in a discourse that is at once theological (‘the Creator’) and biological (‘wild beast’; ‘vermin’). This crucial section early in the work alerts us to the epistemological and philosophical paradox of the competing accounts of evil: man is a sinner created in God’s image; but he is also an animal governed by instinct. The text is concerned with how to bridge this philosophical and epistemological divide between Creationism and Darwinism. Early on in Canto 1, we are told that Maldoror’s shortlived career as a good person was swiftly and unceremoniously ended by his discovery of his Fallen condition: I will state in a few lines that Maldoror was good during the first years of his life, when he lived happily. That is that. Then he noticed that he had been born evil: an extraordinary fatality! (I, 3, p. 31)

Although this passage refers to Maldoror specifically, the hyperbolic irony of ‘extraordinary fatality’ parodies at a more universal level man’s inescapably Fallen condition. Man’s innate cruelty is thus given a theological explanation. But in the same breath the passage undermines this account of sin by attributing Maldoror’s intrinsically evil nature to biological causes: namely, as a boiling of blood inside him (‘the blood used to rush to his head every day’), which it is unnatural for him to suppress (‘until, no longer able to bear such a life, he flung himself resolutely into a career of evildoing’, p. 31). Maldoror is thus both the descendant of Adam and of apes: governed as much by sin as he is by instinct. The physiological necessity to externalize his inner evil impulses has thus far only been tempered by his fear of the long list of punishments meted out by justice. Whenever he hugs a small child Maldoror ‘felt like tearing open its cheeks with a razor’, (p. 31). As we shall see, these are not dissimilar to those murderous urges Lantier feels in The Beast in Man every time he experiences sexual arousal. The difference between Lantier and Maldoror, however, is that Maldoror has learnt to feel no embarrassment at his physiologically murderous impulses, for to admit to them is a sign of sincerity (‘He was no liar, admitted the truth and said that he was cruel’, p. 31). Maldoror’s admission of man’s unconscious, biologically driven cruelty  – which deprives him of willpower  – at least possesses the merit of being

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truthful and authentic. In this regard, Lautréamont reformulates in more provocative terms Baudelaire’s recognition of man’s moral hypocrisy in ‘To the Reader’: if evil is an inescapable part of the human condition, then we might as well make it a necessary virtue, one that is pursued knowingly and without complacency, rather than concealed or attenuated. But whereas Baudelaire supplemented a purely theological interpretation of evil with a psychological one (by identifying ‘ennui’ rather than sin as the source of evil that is most pertinent to man’s modern existential condition), Lautréamont combines theological doctrine with physiological causes to human behaviour. Though no mention of Darwin is explicitly made, it is plausible to assume, as Anna Balakian has argued, that Lautréamont was familiar with his ideas through translation.17 Lautréamont places Maldoror’s innate cruelty on a distinctly physiological as well as theological footing that problematizes the issue of man’s moral responsibility for evil. But this does not mean that Maldoror resigns himself to a conception of evil governed exclusively by instinctive behaviour: he also wants to regulate this instinct through his individual moral agency. Several episodes demonstrate that for Lautréamont the body is not only a source of evil actions but also of knowledge about what evil is, and how this knowledge in turn serves a specific moral purpose: namely, to counteract human and divine injustice. This knowledge of evil is gradually acquired through Maldoror’s witnessing of God’s cannibalism, his coupling with a female shark that has savagely devoured shipwrecked passengers, his encounter with God in a brothel and his devouring by parasites in a parody of the book of Job. All these episodes, despite their corrosive irony and shock value, employ the scientific discourse of Darwinism as a catalyst to further moral speculation: human physiological behaviour is never allowed to stray beyond the orbit of human consciousness and moral agency as it does in Zola, but instead offers an epistemological model that bridges the gap between theological and Darwinian conceptions of evil, inviting a new type of moral speculation. In the first episode, Maldoror’s youthful deafness is a metaphor for his former innocence about life in general, and ignorance of evil specifically. This innocence is shattered when out walking one day he turns his eyes towards the heavens and is greeted by the sight of God sitting on a throne made up of gold and human excrement and devouring the torso of a man. Below him in a pool of blood, the heads of God’s next victims intermittently emerge gasping for air, only to be brutally kicked in the nose until he is ready to eat them. Once a particular victim has been consumed, God plucks his next one out of the bloodbath, systematically devouring his head, legs, arms and torso, and chewing on the bones until nothing remains (II, 8, pp. 85–6). The divine makes no apology for his cannibalism; he inflicts suffering deliberately and knowingly for his own pleasure (‘I created you, so I have the right to do whatever I like to you. You have done nothing to me, I do not deny it. I am making you suffer for my own pleasure’, p. 86). Divine authority is savagely debunked through biological discourse. God is presented in the crudest physiological terms, as possessing a ‘brain-bespattered beard’, (p. 85). The narrator reinforces this biological satire in a gesture that erodes the reader’s moral certainties by appealing to his own bodily responses: the euphemistic description of the human bloodbath as a lake of fish is designed to whet the appetite of the reader, making his own human instinct for food uncomfortably complicit with theological cruelty of the most abject sort (‘Cannot whoever wishes also eat brains

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just the same, which taste just as good and just as fresh, caught less than a quarter of an hour before in the lake – the brains of a fish?’, pp. 85–6). Nor is Maldoror himself immune to physiological responses. Rather like Lantier, he is overcome by trembling, as well as a tight chest until he is forced to expel a cry from his mouth, a cry so loud that it restores to him the sense of hearing (‘the shackles of my ears were suddenly broken’, p. 86). But this hearing is not merely one of the five senses, but also an epistemological tool: henceforth it is associated in Maldoror with the perception of, and pity for, human suffering: ‘Since then, no human sound has reached my ears without bringing with it the feeling of grief which pity for great injustice arouses’, (p. 86). But later on, he recalls, this pity turned to fury when he discovers the extent of human cruelty, which is depicted as a ‘tiger-like stepmother whose hardened children know only how to curse and do evil’, (p. 86). The newly acquired faculty of hearing, therefore, coincides with the double discovery of God’s evil and the equally cruel nature of humanity. Hence his decision to pay heed only to the non-human language of nature: a falling avalanche, the anguished cry of a lioness seeking her young; a storm; the condemned man awaiting the guillotine; the octopus recounting its victory over swimmers and the shipwrecked (pp. 86–7). The relationship between physiology and evil, therefore, is threefold: it gives graphic expression to theological injustice; it lures the reader into perpetrating this evil through his bodily responses; it affords through the faculty of hearing a knowledge of human suffering, while at the same time heightening awareness of human cruelty. But most crucially, and contrary to Zola, the physiological dimension of man is not presented as separate from moral agency but subordinated to it. God’s cannibalism conflates the biological urges of Darwinism with the moral self-consciousness of Christianity: he devours his victims like an animal, but he does so knowingly and intentionally; secondly, Maldoror’s hearing is an epistemological avenue not only to his own judgement about human suffering and cruelty, but also the reader’s: by being thrust into a complicity with God’s cannibalism the reader is forced into a moral reflection about his or her own physiological appetites. The seemingly incompatible notions of evil as instinct and evil as sin are thus reconciled in a discourse in which metaphysical and theological speculation is enhanced, rather than negated, by biological factors. Physiology leads to greater moral self-awareness and agency, and not their eradication. Maldoror’s honing of his moral consciousness through evil is further enhanced by his consideration of another crucial theoretical component of Darwinism: natural selection. Indeed, this, perhaps the most explicitly Darwinian episode of Lautréamont’s prose poems occurs in Canto II when Maldoror witnesses the savage killing of shipwrecked passengers by hungry sharks. This adaptation of the Darwinist position, as Balakian reminds us, is also a challenge to the pantheistic view of creation held by Victor Hugo, known as the ‘Great Chain of Being’.18 As we saw in Chapter 2, Hugo’s metaphysical poem ‘Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre’ figures creation as a vertical ladder at the top of which is God, who represents goodness and perfection, whereas at the bottom are the simplest material life forms which are identified with evil.19 Through virtuous acts, the lowest life forms can be reincarnated into higher life forms until they reach God: the process known as metempsychosis. The moral and physical worlds are thus structured according to a vertical hierarchy, in the Neo-platonic tradition, which

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depends on the upward impulse of all life forms to seek reunion with God. Hugo’s pantheistic optimism, which identifies moral regeneration with the vertical ascent from animals towards God, is reversed by Lautréamont, who proposes a ‘descent’ into the animal world as a superior means of achieving moral freedom. This validation of animal instinct is borne out in Canto II when Maldoror witnesses sharks ruthlessly preying on drowning passengers: What is this army of sea-monsters cleaving the water so rapidly? There are six of them. Their fins are strong and they are forcing their way through the heaving seas. The sharks soon make an omelette without eggs of all the human beings moving their limbs on the unstable continent; they share it out according to the law of the strongest. (II, 13, p. 110)

The mention of ‘the law of the strongest’ is a clear echo of Darwin’s law of the survival of the fittest, which is further illustrated by the fact that the dominant female shark has to fight off the other sharks in order to have sole possession of the human remains. Maldoror witnesses this spectacle from the shoreline in complete admiration, helping the female by firing at one of the sharks with whom she is fighting and diving into the water with a knife to kill the others. The episode ends with the sexual coupling of Maldoror with the female shark in which he identifies a kindred spirit. What is literally speaking a shocking portrayal of bestiality has, from Maldoror’s perspective, a deeper moral and philosophical purpose: it acts as a sexual metaphor of Darwin’s theory that all species are interlinked; and it justifies the premise that if both God and man are cruel, then it follows that animals are Maldoror’s natural allies. It is thus the logical consequence of Maldoror’s fight against human and divine injustice. Sex for Lautréamont is not simply a biological urge, but a philosophical necessity; whereas for Zola, as we shall see, sex is purely physiological because it heightens the murderous impulses of atavism. In Canto III, in the infamous ‘brothel scene’, Lautréamont reinforces this point further: the eroticisation of God  – his sexual activity with whores  – is another Darwinian metaphor taken to its logical extreme in order to make a deeper moral point: that the Great Chain of Being is a myth and that God is neither just, nor omnipotent. In his peripatetic journey, Maldoror chances upon a former nunnery converted into a brothel where he meets a hair, which recounts the sexual exploits of its master, whom we eventually discover is none other than God himself. The extreme blasphemous tone is obvious (the conversion of a nunnery into a whorehouse, the idea that God can visit prostitutes), but its underlying justification – to bring God down to earth, to make him aware of the suffering he inflicts on man – only gradually becomes apparent. The passage not only supports the Darwinian ‘descent of Man’ by privileging lower life forms over God, but it also employs a parodic observational tone, typical of the empiricism of Scientific Positivism: Maldoror observes what he believes to be a stick, which, rather like a battering ram repeatedly smashes into the walls of the house. It eventually becomes apparent that this is no stick but a hair, and that the repeated thrusts made by the hair have distinctly phallic connotations: ‘It could not break down the obstacle. I began to look at it more and more carefully,

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and saw that it was a hair! (III, 5, p. 138). The hair gradually recounts that it has been forgotten by its ‘master’ from whose head it has become physically detached during the latter’s sexual exploits in the bedroom with an unidentified ‘degraded woman’. Our curiosity as to the identity of the ‘master’ is ironically heightened by Maldoror’s own curiosity, expressed as a refrain throughout the passage: ‘And I wondered who his master could be! And I pressed my face even harder against the grating!’ (p. 139). This refrain uncomfortably places the reader in the role of curious voyeur (we wish to know who the author of these sexual exploits is), and its reference to a ‘grating’ or screen satirizes the idea of Christian confession, calling to mind the confessor’s curiosity to glimpse the priest through the confessional screen. The hair’s increasingly graphic description of its master’s sexual activities, combined with the endless deferral of the latter’s identity heightens both Maldoror’s and the reader’s suspense to an unbearable degree. Eventually the hair goes silent, there is a clap of thunder followed by a flash of ‘phospherescent light’ and God finally reveals himself. In a long and self-justificatory monologue, he expresses his guilt at his shameful visit to the brothel (p. 142). He recounts how his archangels did not dare ask the reason for his absence from heaven, of his ‘Fall’ from the celestial realm. In a graphic parody the only evidence of his activity are the drops of sperm and blood that remain on his face: the former from between the thighs of the prostitute, the latter from the veins of the martyr: the innocent young man he flayed alive. The graphic illustration of God’s sinful and cruel nature through sexual torture and the most base evocation of biological matter: blood, sperm, skin is a biological, Darwinian reworking of the Romantics’ metaphysical rebellion against an unjust God. God is brutally brought to the level of ‘lower life forms’ of base matter, and the personification and monologues of the hair and skin privilege the perspective of these forms over the Divine Creator. To make matters worse God himself is reduced to the level of base animal instinct: the blood and sperm are inexorably drawn to his throat like a magnet; he is racked with remorse and chokes as he suddenly becomes aware of his own lack of omnipotence (‘They are suffocating me, those implacable drops. Until now, I had considered myself the Almighty; but no, I must bow my head before remorse which cries out to me: “You are only a wretch!”’, p. 143). The ironic discrepancy here is palpable: something as crude and miniscule as bodily secretions have the power to reduce God to a vulnerable, quivering wreck. When God comes to the end of his self-admonitory monologue, the language employed by Maldoror once again draws on Darwinian metaphors that express the negative character attributes of the divine in terms of the crossing of the species barrier: Royal soul, which in a moment of forgetfulness abandoned itself to the crab of debauchery, to the octopus of weakness, to the shark of individual abjection, to the boa of amorality, and to the monstrous snail of imbecility! (p. 144)

God’s multiple character flaws are mapped out and personified as so many different species of life form. He is overtaken and condemned by a Darwinian discourse that completely undermines his theological credibility.

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Thus, despite its shock-value, its crude emphasis on blood and sperm, this episode imparts a moral lesson via the Darwinian ‘de-hierchisation’ of the Great Chain of Being: God’s shocking awareness of his own imperfections undercuts the idea of his omnipotence, but also brings into play the whole confessional structure of Christian doctrine with its obsession with guilt and remorse, redemption and rehabilitation. This use of eroticism to dramatize a long-standing metaphysical dilemma – the questionable justice of God in a cruel world – is arguably more thought-provoking than the sterile eroticism of The Beast in Man, for which Gilles Deleuze has arguably provided the most compelling interpretation which helps us understand why Zola’s account of the relationship between sex and evil is far less conducive to moral reflection than Lautréamont’s.

Deleuze: Eroticism and the death drive Deleuze provides a powerful alternative to a Lombrosian reading of Zola’s atavism in his article ‘Zola et la fêlure’ (‘Zola and the crack-up’), reproduced in The Logic of Sense in 1969.20 Deleuze’s qualification of Zola’s atavism in The Beast in Man as ‘fêlure’, or ‘crack’ is based on a passage in chapter 2, where the narrator speculates about the origins of atavism in Lantier as a flaw that characterizes all members of the Rougon Maquart family from which he comes (p. 60). Deleuze makes an important distinction between what he calls ‘small heredity’, the direct transmission of specific hereditary traits that manifest themselves in an instinctual attachment to tangible things such as alcohol and women, and the ‘grand heredity’, which is the heredity of ‘la fêlure’ which transmits only itself rather than a specific characteristic. In other words, instinct is a ‘heredity of the Same’ because it tangibly and ‘noisily’ transmits the same thing, whereas the ‘crack’ or ‘fêlure’ is a ‘heredity of the Other’ because even though it is transmitted silently and imperceptibly, the form it takes varies according to the type of instinct that makes it visibly manifest. Put more simply, ‘the crack’ is the silent gap through which a particular instinct is transmitted and gives it visible form: ‘beneath the noise of the instincts, the crack silently extends and transmits itself.’21 Where Lombroso defined atavism as criminal urges that have visible physiological manifestations in the individual, such as the shape of the forehead or a protruding jaw,22 Deleuze on the contrary takes a proto-Freudian view by identifying ‘the crack’ with the death drive that lurks beneath all other instincts: ‘the death instinct comes to be recognised beneath every instinct.’23 Instincts (‘small heredity’) are ‘fixed ideas’ underpinned by the death drive (‘grand heredity’ or the ‘crack’ itself). Thus, Misard’s ‘fixed idea’, the discovery of his wife’s money, is one he can only pursue by killing her in a silent combat; the death drive in Lantier is a ‘cerebral crack’ which he recognizes as lying dormant beneath all his instincts. This is why, Deleuze claims, Lantier avoids women, wine and money, adopting instead the ascetic disciplined life of a train mechanic.24 Perhaps the most poignant example of this fatal combination of eroticism and death is also to be found in chapter 2, just after Lantier has stopped himself from sleeping with Flora, fearful that his physical urges have reawakened the murderous impulses that

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lie dormant within him. What Lombroso refers to as atavism and Deleuze the ‘crack’ becomes fatally manifest when Lantier’s sexual desire coincides with his compulsion to kill. Lantier bursts into tears, shocked at the return of his atavistic urges that he has so strenuously tried to suppress. Zola adopts a Flaubertian free indirect discourse that suggests both an interior monologue from Lantier trying to make sense of his atavism and an authorial comment on its origins: ‘Kill a woman! Kill a woman! It throbbed in his ears, ringing from out the deep past, out of his adolescence, but now it had become reinforced with all the augmenting, maddening fever of sexual desire’ (p. 59). Whether we choose to read it in Lombrosian or Freudian (Deleuzian) terms, Zola’s eroticism, his depiction of sexual acts, is only ever portrayed as destructive and unconducive to moral reflection. This compares unfavourably to the more productive outcome of sex acts in Maldoror, acts which on the contrary provide a spur to further moral speculation and progress: Maldoror’s coupling with the shark confirms man’s affinity with animals which are both free from moral rules and immune from the innate cruelty of man and God; God’s cavorting with the prostitutes, recounted by a hair, satirizes the hierarchy of Creation and also invites us to question divine omnipotence, justice and the Christian obsession with remorse, guilt and confession. Zola’s sterile eroticism however, stems from an atavistic view of man where no such moral insight or self-awareness is possible. Yet there is another negative aspect to Zola’s scientific discourse of atavism that Deleuze and other commentators overlook: namely, the theological symbolism that pervades and undermines it. Not only is it unclear whether the narrative voice belongs to Zola or Lantier, but also this voice contradicts the supposedly secularized discourse of Scientific Positivism by speculating about the origins of atavism in the theological language of the Fall: On every occasion that attack was like a sudden onslaught of a blind fury, an ever new thirst for vengeance of some unknown hurt done him long, long ago, but which he never could recall precisely. Did it mean that this was all of such very ancient origin, springing from some evil that womenkind had done to men, born of rancour accumulated in the male through the generations since a first act of deception deep in prehistoric caves? (p. 61)

Contrary to the secular empirical terms in which Lombroso posited them, the origins of atavism are here surprisingly presented as a male desire for revenge against women, a desire that implicitly harks back to the figure of Eve who is commonly held responsible for the Fall. Though the Garden of Eden may have been replaced here by primitive caves, the religious stigmatization of the evil feminine for the ‘first act of deception’ is unmistakable. The boundaries between theology and science are further blurred by the homophone in French between ‘mâle’, referring to the sexual urges of men, and ‘mal’ meaning sin. A biologizing discourse (‘male’, ‘race’) is merged with a religious one (‘evil’, ‘rancour’, ‘deception’) creating a terminological slippage that undermines the objective secular, scientific discourse that was meant to characterize both Zola’s Naturalist technique and the empirical theory of atavism on which he drew. Whether we read this as an inner monologue from Lantier, a desperate plea to conventional Catholicism

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as his only means of making sense of his inexplicable impulses, or as a deliberate authorial intervention on Zola’s part which invites his readers to question their own Catholic assumptions that evil is the product of free will, the religious symbolism creates an unnerving moral equivocation that undermines Zola’s purported claims to secular, scientific objectivity. This equivocation is heightened by Lantier’s fears that his sexual and murderous impulses are being reawakened by an ancient desire for revenge: ‘under that need to avenge the wrong done his kind so long, long ago, the male in him would open that door and would strangle her’ (p. 63). How do we account for this need for vengeance? Acknowledgement of this theological allusion to Eve’s Original Sin is absent in Deleuze’s otherwise brilliant reading. The male/evil (‘mâle/mal’) pun and the stigmatization of women suggests an interpenetration of biological and theological discourses, an epistemological blurring of boundaries that recalls Lautréamont, but is unresolved rather than deliberate. For Lautréamont, on the other hand, the interpenetration of theological and biological discourse is at all times consciously staged and reworked as a spur to moral reflection on the nature of evil. No more is this strategy in evidence than in Canto IV, when he parodically ‘biologizes’ the biblical text on evil par excellence: the book of Job. Let us now examine this episode.

Maldoror as ‘anti-Job’ Through the figure of Maldoror, Lautréamont, as Steven Winspur has perceptively demonstrated, parodies the biblical figure of stoic resistance par excellence, Job, whose relevance to the problem of evil remains central to contemporary philosophy.25 The invasion of Maldoror’s body by parasites recalls from the fourth sentence onwards elements in the biblical narrative such as the leprous growths that God produces on Job’s skin, forcing him to move away from his house and sit outside in the dirt. For Christian philosophers, such as Ricœur, Job, as we have seen, epitomizes the ultimate endurance of piety in the face of unmerited suffering at the hands of a vengeful God. However, for contemporary secular Norwegian philosopher, Lars Svendsen, the book of Job discredits theodicy. God takes away everything Job has  – children, servants, herds and health – because he is confident that his faith will remain regardless. But instead of feeling compassion for his misfortune, Job’s loved ones – the very people who should sympathize with him – actually blame him for it. Because they live under the illusion that cosmic justice exists, that good fortune rewards virtue and suffering punishes sin, then they assume that Job must deserve such punishment. Theodicy is discredited because it creates an abstract metaphysical principle that stands in the way of sympathy.26 However, Maldoror, as Winspur has argued, is an anti-Job: he is not ‘the Godfearing figure of piety from the Hebrew Scriptures but a reversal of this character who finds strength precisely in a refusal of piety.’27 Where Job eventually acknowledges God’s omnipotence, Lautréamont’s anti-Job challenges it: it is precisely his ability to withstand any evil inflicted by God that makes him a worthy adversary, just as powerful as the Creator himself. Lautréamont’s re-appropriation of Darwinian discourse gives Winspur’s brilliant intertextual reading an extra layer of meaning: the destructive

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savagery of the parasites and animals that attack Maldoror, spanning a broad range of species described with the utmost anatomical precision, merely strengthens Maldoror’s conviction that he is justified in resisting a tyrannical God. Like the sexual coupling with the female shark the extreme shock-value of this passage  – his castration by a viper, the throwing of his testicles to a dog by two hedgehogs, the attack on his anus and buttocks by a crab and two jellyfish – also has a serious philosophical underpinning: Darwinian savagery is paradoxically made the instrument of a divine vengeance which is turned back against God himself (IV, 4, p. 160). Maldoror asks for no pity from his fellow men, merely that they acknowledge this episode as a further moral justification for fighting their tyrannical oppressor: Leave me to kindle my tenacity at the flame of voluntary martyrdom . . . Adieu, I shall delay you no longer; and, so that you may learn a lesson and keep out of harm’s way, reflect on the fatal destiny which led me to revolt, when I was perhaps born good! (p. 161)

In the next section, we shall see how Lautréamont’s re-evaluation of evil through his ‘biologization’ of theology is complemented by the opposite strategy: namely, the ‘theologization of science’.

Lautréamont: Mathematics ‘theologized’ We have seen the significant epistemological importance of Darwinism both in honing Maldoror’s understanding of evil and galvanizing his efforts to use that evil as a weapon for fighting human and divine injustice. But his recuperation of science is not just confined to the natural sciences, but also extends to the exact sciences. In a carefully constructed stanza in Canto II, mathematics is presented as the ultimate scientific spur to a proper understanding of evil: ‘Arithmetic! Algebra! Geometry! Awe-inspiring trinity! Luminous triangle!’ (II, 10, p. 93). Arithmetic, algebra and geometry are here presented as a Holy Trinity whose ancient powers have dissipated the fog or confusion within his mind. Mathematics is praised in the spiritual, reverential tones that would normally be reserved for God: science, in other words, is paradoxically ‘theologized’, the power of the divine transferred from God to the core principles of mathematics. Maldoror unexpectedly attributes his love of mathematics not to their conventional power of measurement or quantification but to the valuable moral lessons they impart in his twin fight against divine and human injustice. The coldness of mathematics which is ‘free of all passion’ has given him the capacity to suppress his personal passions and to reject treacherous offers of sympathy from his fellow men (‘I used it [coldness] to reject scornfully the ephemeral pleasures of my short journey and spurn the well-meaning but deceptive advances of my fellows’); its analytical, deductive and synthesizing powers have given him the ‘dogged prudence’ to untangle the ruses of his mortal enemy and to attack him instead (‘ to outdo the pernicious wiles of my mortal enemy and to attack him skilfully in turn’); finally, logic has allowed him to plunge into the darkest recesses of humanity to discover man’s innate capacity for evil

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(‘by means of this terrible auxiliary, [logic] I discovered in mankind . . . the black and hideous wickedness which lurked amidst the noxious miamasta admiring its navel’). This discovery has in turn allowed him to topple God from his pedestal (‘With the poisonous weapon you lent me, I brought down from his pedestal, built by man’s cowardice, the Creator himself!) The three main branches of mathematics are here presented as equivalent to a Holy Trinity that is endowed with spiritual qualities normally reserved for Christianity itself (logic even being described as the very ‘soul’ of mathematics). This moralizing, speculative discourse is once again vital in indicating that for Lautréamont science – the natural sciences of Darwinism and the exact science of mathematics – should not be regarded as a self-contained body of knowledge that lies outside the domain of morality or indeed has negative implications for it, but offers an alternative epistemological model to Christianity in honing our understanding of evil as a means of combating injustice. The evil which mathematics has allowed him to uncover is itself personified as a biological life form (a black viscous mass that ‘crouches down’ contemplating its navel) thereby suggesting a transposition of the new secular discourse of the natural sciences onto the traditionally theological category of evil, a transposition which simultaneously occurs in the very opposite direction when he refers to mathematics in a speculative, didactic discourse that is usually the exclusive preserve of religion. This mutual reversal and interpenetration of two supposedly incompatible discourses encourages the reader to bridge the reductive gap and stark choice between two opposing intellectual systems that society was now forcing him to make, that is, between secular Scientific Positivism and Christianity. Maldoror productively synthesizes these two bodies of thought, which, when perceived in isolation within their respective frames of reference, prove to be equally incapable of providing a sufficiently nuanced and morally galvanising account of evil. The mutual interpenetration of biological, mathematical and theological discourses provides Lautréamont with an invaluable epistemological means of understanding evil that is morally and intellectually consistent with his desire to fight human and divine injustice. In the next section, we shall see however, that such intellectual coherence was not always present in Zola.

Zola: Atavism allegorized We have seen how Zola’s identification of evil with uncontrollable physiological drives gives his characters limited scope for moral agency, self-awareness or remorse: Lantier only commits murder when his urges get the better of him; he is incapable of doing so intentionally. This contrasts with Lautréamont’s narrator Maldoror, whose more extreme and seemingly gratuitous acts of cruelty are consistently reconnected back to a broader theological and metaphysical framework that provides his acts with a lucid moral justification and the possibility of self-examination and remorse. Secondly, evil in Zola is a source of repeated confusion and frustration to his characters, rather than knowledge and progression; Lantier’s moral self-awareness is restricted to consciousness of his urges, rather than a capacity to explain, overcome or learn from them: he is stuck in a deterministic pattern of behaviour, especially regarding

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his sexual urges, from which there is no escape. Again, this contrasts with Maldoror, for whom even the cruellest consequences of his bodily impulses, including acts of sexual torture, are always counterbalanced by the valuable acquisition of new moral insights. His recognition of that instinctive, Darwinian, aspect to human behaviour that links man to animals such as dogs or sharks is always subordinated to the body’s role as an epistemological vehicle towards self-understanding and a spur to moral speculation. Contrary to Lantier, Maldoror is subject neither to physical constraint nor to ignorance; or if he is, this state is only temporary: he is quickly able to attain a feeling of uninhibitedness that nevertheless does not prevent him from tapping judiciously into his bodily sensations in order to hone and develop his moral outlook. Thirdly, the more apparently rigorous scientific underpinning of Zola’s notion of evil has at times been shown to be both conceptually and ethically suspect: his atheist endorsement of Lombrosian atavism incorporates the theological discourse it is meant to reject, and this same atavism legitimizes physiological and racial stereotyping that paves the way for Social Darwinism and the dangerous political ideologies this engenders. Yet whatever the moral difficulties inherent in his atavistic view of evil, Zola is undeniably successful in denouncing ‘social’ evils: namely, the incompetence and corruption of the Second Empire’s legal and political institutions. Crimes remain unresolved either because of incompetence or a lack of insight on the part of the investigators (the failure of Denizet’s investigative ‘logic’), or because of the wilful obstruction of justice in the name of protecting a higher authority. The first murder in the novel, the killing of respected judge Grandmorin by Roubaud to avenge the sexual abuse of his wife Severine becomes a ‘cover up’ designed to protect the Second Empire’s political credibility at a time when its reputation is in tatters one the eve of a general election. To prevent the scandalous behaviour of a high-ranking judge being made public at such a crucial juncture, and to speed up the resolution of a high-profile murder that opposition newspapers have seized upon in order to attack the already beleaguered government (p. 111), the secrétaire générale of the Ministry of Justice, Camy-Lamotte, decides it is politically expedient to turn known criminal Cabuche into a scapegoat, even though he discovers through a match of Severine’s handwriting that she and her husband Roubaud are the real culprits. Proux has argued that the novel’s denunciation of the corrupt scapegoating of an innocent man presciently anticipates Zola’s outrage at the scapegoating of Captain Dreyfus some eight years later. Be that as it may, in Zola’s novel insufficient evidence is found to prosecute Cabuche and the case is conveniently shelved. Zola’s crime novel thus offers us both an admirably modern insight into the cynical sensationalism of media politics and a trenchant dissection of the corrupt wheels of justice. The murders take on an allegorical social significance that has implications beyond their atavistic origins. If Zola’s identification of evil with atavism erodes individual moral agency and self-awareness then it appears to reclaim a wider moral function by being transformed into a political allegory that exposes State corruption. But this political allegory comes at the price of contradicting his scientific theory. In the same way that he allowed the theological symbolism of the Fall to contradict his Lombrosian secular interpretation of evil, he further undermines this interpretation by collapsing the boundaries between an atavism that is meant to pertain exclusively to

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human physiological impulses, and the mechanical operation of a machine controlled by man. The locomotive becomes transformed from a docile obedient mistress to a ferocious uncontrollable beast that takes on a life of its own during the climactic fight between Lantier and Pequeux, prompted by Pequeux’s sexual jealousy, culminating in their dramatic and bloody death on the railway tracks. It becomes a runaway train, bereft of drivers, which hurtles along the track, carrying drunken soldiers to the front, who remain blissfully unaware of what has happened. As the chapter unfolds, the locomotive is no longer affectionately ‘sexualized’ as a pseudo-mistress but is increasingly presented as a dangerous, savage beast that embodies the same primordial urges, the identical ‘beast in man’ that until that point has remained the province of human physiology. What matter the victims which that locomotive might crush in its tracks! Was it not itself plunging on into the future? So why care about blood spilt? Driverless in the darkness, blind, deaf beast let loose among death, on it rushed, packed to the full with cannonflesh, with soldiers now stupid with fatigue, in drunken song. (p. 365)

The uncontrollable atavistic urges that were previously identified with Lantier and Roubaud, are transposed here onto a runaway train that stands as a metaphor for the lack of moral direction of a Second Empire government that is irresponsibly sending men to a war for which the nation is not prepared. The train’s indifference to the imminent bloodshed alludes not just to the people it will run over on its destructive course, but to the terrible destruction of a war France was destined to lose. Given this historical catastrophe it is surprising, then, that Deleuze should interpret this passage in a positive Marxist and psychoanalytical light, arguing that the train has an epic dimension associated with the death drive, but instead of following its usual selfdestructive path, this death drive turns against itself and points to an optimistic future, signalled by the singing soldiers: What Zola’s socialist optimism means is that the proletariat already makes its way through the crack. The train as an epic symbol, with the instincts it transports and the death Instinct it represents, is always endowed with a future. The final sentences of La Bête humaine are also a hymn to the future – Pecqueux and Lantier are thrown off the train, as the deaf and blind machine carries the soldiers, “already silly with fatigue, drunk and bawling,” toward death.28

Deleuze’s reading overlooks the fact that Zola was a Republican rather than a Socialist, the defender of the socially oppressed rather than a champion of the dictatorship of the proletariat; moreover there is little evidence to suggest that the Franco-Prussian War is depicted here in anything other than the bleakest of terms, as indeed it was in the last chapter of his earlier novel Nana (1880). Where Deleuze enthusiastically latches on to the word ‘future’ as evidence of an optimistic future for the proletariat (who are supposedly symbolized by the soldiers), the words ‘darkness’, ‘death’ and ‘cannonflesh’ suggest foreboding and needless slaughter, and the soldiers’ extreme fatigue can more

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plausibly be read as a metaphor of France’s military unpreparedness for the war that awaits it. If in order to mount a critique of evil as a social category – the corruption and ineptitude of the Second Empire – Zola has recourse to a political allegory that is inconsistent with his scientific theory of evil (in its transposition of atavism from man to machine), then Deleuze misconstrues the function of that allegory altogether through a rose-tinted historical lens. If we add to this the further contradiction of Zola’s religious symbolism, then we can better appreciate why Lautréamont’s own concluding remarks and literary approach to evil deserve to be regarded as the more intellectually cogent, convincing and consistent. Let us now examine the concluding Canto.

Lautréamont: Evil and ‘scientific prose poetry’ Canto VI is a self-conscious quest on Lautréamont’s part for a new literary genre that can accommodate both moral speculation on evil and an acknowledgement of its physiological manifestations – a genre, in other words, that is capable of synthesizing the theological with the Darwinian, the spiritual with the material without appearing too forced or contrived. Having spent the first five Cantos ‘attacking Man and Him who created him’, Maldoror states his intention, in the form of a 30-page novel to inject some vitality and physical presence into figures that he hitherto believes to have been presented in too abstract a way: Vitality will surge into the stream of their circulatory system and you will see how startled you will be when you encounter, where at first you had only expected to see entities belonging to the realm of pure speculation, on the one hand the corporeal organism with its ramifications of nerves and mucous membranes and, on the other, the spiritual principle which governs the physiological functions of the flesh. (VI, I, p. 211)

This passage reiterates Lautréamont’s attempt to bridge the gap between the spiritual and the physiological, the theological and Darwinian interpretations of evil, which in thematic and narrative terms is illustrated by the archangel disguised as a crab and then God’s appearance in the guise of a rhinoceros to prevent Maldoror from killing the innocent adolescent Mervyn. The question remains, however, as to how this gap can convincingly be bridged in literary language. In order to draw his readers’ attention to this problem, Lautréamont’s strategy is first, to parody existing literary genres – notably the urban crime novel made famous by Balzac and Eugène Sue  – in order to show their inability to strike the right balance between a morally speculative and scientific discourse and secondly, by way of counterpoint, to propose a new hybrid type of narrative – what we might call a ‘scientific prose poetry’ – that is able to accommodate these two positions more seamlessly. On one obvious level, Maldoror is a parody of Balzac’s master-criminal Vautrin. Like Balzac’s anti-hero he too is pursued by the police and ‘veritable army of agents and informers’ (p. 214); he is also feared by respectable bourgeois society, has an intimate knowledge of the labyrinthine city streets and adopts multiple and ‘superior disguises’.

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He also adopts Vautrin’s father/protector role by using his magnetic charisma to target an attractive and innocent young man, Mervyn, offering to become his mentor and confidant. The homoerotic undercurrents, the sinister power of Maldoror, not to mention the meticulous descriptions of nocturnal gaslit Parisian locations such as la Bourse, la rue Vivienne and Montmartre not only bear all of the thematic hallmarks of Balzac and Sue’s urban realism, but also, their allegorization within the urban jungle of the Manichean battle between good and evil. But this apparent homage to the Balzacien crime novel is undermined by the off-the-cuff remark that presents the meticulous and geographically specific urban realism that is a feature of Balzac’s style in an ironic light: ‘Today he is in Madrid; tomorrow he will be in Saint Petersburg; yesterday he was in Peking’ (p. 214). This flippant allusion to Malodoror’s globetrotting is too geographically and temporally unrealistic to be plausible. It soon becomes apparent, therefore, that Lautréamont emulates this genre in order to parody it. This is particularly the case in the famously incongruous sequence of similes used to describe Maldoror’s first encounter with Mervyn: He is as handsome as the retractility of the claws in birds of prey; or, again, as the unpredictability of muscular movement in sores in the soft part of the posterior cervical region; or, rather, as the perpetual motion rat-trap which is always reset by the trapped animal and can go on catching rodents indefinitely . . . and, above all, as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table! (pp. 216–7)

Famously praised by the surrealist Breton as the unexpected juxtaposition of antithetical elements which create a jolt in the reader, these oxymoronic images, which provocatively bring together the traditionally incompatible worlds of science and poetry, anatomical and aesthetic vocabulary can also be read as a parody of Balzac’s urban realism, the limitations of which point to the need for a more hybrid literary genre. The incongruous simile comparing the beauty of the adolescent Mervyn to the uncertainty of muscular movements or to a rat trap can be read in parodic terms: first, it undermines the strong mimetic relationship between a signifier and its referent that is typical of realist fiction; secondly, it debunks Balzac’s emphasis on the innocent ‘angelic’ beauty that often characterizes his young male protagonists; thirdly, it injects a degree of precise scientific detail that is too extreme to be considered as a genuine aesthetic description. Lautréamont and Balzac here, suddenly part company. Why, then, the parody? Because Lautréamont considers established literary considerations of evil – in this case the Balzacien crime novel – to be hackneyed and reductive. In Chapter 2, we saw how evil in his novels is presented as enticing so as to satisfy his readers’ fascination with crime, but also as a potential threat to the bourgeois order that must be contained and defeated, rather than understood or recuperated. Lautréamont, on the other hand, goes much further in his exploration of evil: he rehabilitates it not for its own sake, but because the moral insights it yields can be put to good use to fight a greater evil: divine and human injustice. If the new discoveries of science, as we have repeatedly seen, can fruitfully be combined with the traditional speculative thought of theology to re-evaluate the

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multifaceted aspects of evil, what it means to our lives, and what moral lessons we can draw from it, then this discovery needs to be given a commensurate literary dignity and flexibility, neither of which are to be found in established literary genres. Thus, throughout this final Canto the presence of science within the recognizable parameters of the urban crime novel is deliberately flagged up and exaggerated in order to expose the obsoleteness of this dominant literary genre and the need to identify a new means of representing evil. One episode in particular illustrates this strategy. Mervyn, secretly followed by Maldoror, and overcome by an inexplicable distress, returns from his fencing lessons to the sanctuary of his overprotective bourgeois household. He hurls himself onto the sofa where he is embraced by his mother, who begins crying. His authoritarian military father orders her to stop: ‘Wife, begone from here, go and weep in a corner ; your eyes move me and you would do better to close up the ducts of your lachrymal glands’ (pp. 219–20). The unfavourable contrast of the stern and distant patriarch with the sympathetic emotional mother is something of a Balzacien cliché, and of nineteenth-century realism more generally, a cliché that is flagged up here by the excessively scientific description of the mother’s tear ducts. Furthermore, stereotypical patterns of female behaviour, typical not only of Balzac, but also of much early nineteenth-century French fiction   – attending the theatre, reading courtly literature, suffering from migraine  – are undermined by highly specific reference to medicine: My gentle master, if you will permit your slave, I shall go and look in my room for a phial of turpentine spirit which I habitually use when migraine invades my temples after I have returned from the theatre or when reading a stirring chronicle of British chivalric history throws my dream-laden mind into the bogs of drowsiness. (p. 220)

Urban realism is thus presented as too patriarchal and staid to accommodate within its narrative a new scientific discourse, which merely appears out of place with its emphasis on pharmaceutical terminology. If Lautréamont parodies the urban crime novel, he also questions the value of those didactic novels associated with Naturalist fiction that reduce the causes of evil to social deprivation and especially drunkenness. Maldoror encounters on a park bench a young man named Aghone, whom society has labelled as ‘mad’, and is still traumatized by the death of his three sisters, all called Daisy (‘Marguerite’), who were devoured by the family dog after they took refuge in its kennel as a result of their violent, drunk of a father killing their favourite canary. The young man has become a hopeless alcoholic like his father, and reliant on public charity to survive. However, for Maldoror, ‘the important lessons to be learnt from this grave experience’, (p. 233) are not the social destructiveness of drink, a topical theme in latenineteenth-century literature, but an ability to exercise total power over the ‘madman’. After showing the man compassion by taking him to dinner, he places a vase on his head, crowning him the ‘king of the intellect’, to which the young man responds by kneeling ‘in self-abasement at his protector’s feet’ (p. 234). Maldoror realizes just how

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easy it is to manipulate a vulnerable person who has lost all his moral bearings and is no longer able to tell the difference between good and evil: What was his object? To find a thoroughly dependable friend, naive enough to obey the least of his commandments. He could not have found a better one, chance had been kind to him. He whom he found on a bench, has not, since an incident in his youth, known the difference between good and evil. (p. 234)

This serves as a warning to the reader of the very real dangers to which man is subject when he loses his moral consciousness, or ‘conscience dans le mal’. Individual moral agency must be retained at all times in order to preserve our own identity and autonomy. This, once again, distinguishes Lautréamont’s approach to evil from Zola’s: not only did Zola himself write novels in which he denounced alcoholism as a social evil passed down from generation to generation (for instance the laundry-woman Gervaise in The Dram Shop [L’Assommoir], 1877) – a problem which is clearly not the primary focus of Maldoror’s enquiry – but, contrary to Lautréamont, he did not see it as remotely irresponsible or dangerous to advocate a notion of evil which denies the individual the use of his moral consciousness, whether this denial is caused by atavism or drink. Such a danger is of course averted by the moral consciousness instilled in the reader by Lautréamont’s synthesis of a scientific and theological approach to evil. Indeed, his interpenetration of Darwinism, mathematics and religion is further reiterated when God, in a last-ditch attempt to protect Mervyn and defeat Maldoror, first sends an archangel disguised as a crab (p. 756), then himself appears in the guise of a rhinoceros, natural and supernatural creatures thus becoming interchangeable and indistinguishable. But it is in fact Maldoror who defeats these divine emissaries by hitting the crab (p. 758) and firing a bullet at the rhinoceros (p. 764) and thus is he able to execute his plan to kill Mervyn by constructing an elaborate catapult that will propel him to his death. Through Maldoror Lautréamont once again differentiates himself from the Balzacien urban crime novel where the ‘evil’ master-criminal is defeated by the ‘virtuous’ forces of justice who represent a God-fearing society; here the very opposite happens: it is evil that triumphs over virtue, but this victory is no gratuitous celebration of evil as an end in itself, because it fulfils Maldoror’s moral agenda which is to defeat the innate cruelty and injustice that is common both to man and God. Maldoror’s final act – the killing of the unfortunate Mervyn – provides a logical conclusion to the central concerns that have been brought into sharp relief through his exploration of evil: first, Mervyn provides another regrettable, albeit necessary sacrificial lamb in his moral crusade against man whom he considers, like God, to be innately cruel; secondly, both the manner of Mervyn’s death (he is flung through the air by a catapult elaborately constructed by Maldoror) and the way it is recounted provide a dual perspective that is at once mechanistic and speculative, thereby reiterating Lautréamont’s attempt to bridge the gap between two systems of thought – science and religion, and more specifically Darwinism and Creationism – that are normally deemed to be incompatible and incommensurate with each other; and, thirdly, Mervyn’s death also allegorizes the timely death of an old literature of evil and the welcome birth of a new one: it signals the demise of the hero from urban crime fiction and the emergence

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of a more modern hybrid genre, a ‘scientific prose poetry’ that is able to represent evil in a more flexible, relevant and nuanced way through the harmonious balance it strikes between a rational, literal prose that accommodates scientific discourse on the one hand and a suggestive, figurative language that is more suited to speculative religious thought on the other. The theorems of mechanics allow me to speak thus; alas! We know that one force added to another force will produce a resultant consisting of the two original forces! . . . The golden-haired corsair, all at once and quite suddenly, stops running, opens his hand and releases the rope. The recoil of this operation, so opposite to those that had preceded it, makes the balustrade creak in its joints. Mervyn, followed by the rope, is like a comet trailing behind it its flaming tail. The iron ring of the running knot, glittering in the sun’s rays, invites one to complete this illusion for oneself. (pp. 244–5)

This passage merges the precise, rational discourse of mechanics with the figurative, allusive language of poetry, yet not in the starkly oxymoronic way that attracted the surrealists in the ‘he is as handsome as’ similes discussed above. Here, a matter-of-fact logical analysis of the dynamics of force and movement is more subtly intermingled with an allusive poetic description of Mervyn as a comet that leaves a blazing trail in its wake. The same balance between utilitarian scientific precision and metaphorical suggestiveness is achieved in the dual description of the metal ring that on the one hand forms part of the catapult erected by Maldoror to break Mervyn’s bones and hurl him through the air, and on the other hand delicately shimmers in the sun’s rays. Thus, in the same way that Lautréamont successfully combines two seemingly incompatible intellectual doctrines: theology and Scientific Positivism, so too does he synthesize the two styles to which these doctrines correspond, speculative poetry and rational prose, but in a way that is more effortless and seamless than in his previous comparisons. Thus, has he arrived at the new hybrid genre of ‘scientific prose poetry’ which most aptly reflects his multifaceted re-evaluation of evil. Consequently, although Lautréamont’s Maldoror, like Zola’s novel, ends with a violent and dramatic death – that of Mervyn – this death does not so much allegorize the ‘political’ demise of the Second Empire as the death of a particular type of literature that has become outmoded and inadequate to the task of reflecting an approach to evil that is both scientific and theological. It is no coincidence that Mervyn, a parody of the young man typical of Balzacien urban realism, meets his death on the dome of the Pantheon, the resting place of canonical establishment figures, who represent France’s traditional cultural heritage: His body strikes the Dome of the Pantheon, while the rope coiled itself around the upper wall of the immense cupola. On its spherical and convex surface, which resembles an orange only in its form, one can, at any hour of the day, see a dried skeleton hanging. When the wind blows it, they say that the students of the Quartier Latin, fearing a similar fate, say a short prayer (p. 245)

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The transition from a rational to a metaphorical vocabulary, the dangling of Mervyn’s corpse on the dome of the Panthéon, allegorically point to the death of the ‘old’ literature and the emergence of a new form in which science and religion, prose and poetry no longer clash, but seamlessly combine. The reference to students who fearfully pray as they walk past the corpse reinforces this coded pedagogical thrust to this passage, that is, the need for readers to dispense with tradition and pursue new literary avenues of enquiry into evil. It is for this formally innovative representation of evil, one that successfully accommodates his synthesis of the philosophical speculation of theology with the recent discoveries of Darwinism, that Lautréamont ultimately deserves to be regarded as a more subtle and searching thinker on evil than Zola.

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Evil and the Self: Gide and Proust

The anti-Positivist backlash The last chapter showed how the challenge posed by Scientific Positivism to Christianity redefined man’s relationship to evil in both an ethically liberating and restrictive way. Liberating because Darwin’s rejection of the Story of Creation and his substitution of instinct for sin, which paved the way for Lombroso’s physiological notion of atavism, freed man from the doctrine of the Fall and the burden of Original Sin which for centuries had branded him as innately predisposed towards evil. The heavy burden of responsibility for evil had thus finally been lifted from man’s shoulders. And yet also restrictive, because as our analysis of Zola showed, in removing one ethical problem Scientific Positivism merely introduced another: if even man’s most heinous actions were now attributed to uncontrollable biological impulses then the burden of moral responsibility was replaced by a loss of moral responsibility. From the 1880s onwards, a number of intellectuals felt that this threat science posed to moral autonomy was indissociably linked to a wider threat posed to the very status of the individual. If moral self-determinism was lost, they argued, then so too was individuality. And this crisis of individuality they attributed not just to the biological and material determinism of science, but also to its methodological doctrine of impersonality. The pioneering Positivist theorist Auguste Comte strongly endorsed the objective experimental method in the evaluation of phenomena, a method which strictly banished any subjective intervention from the individual scientist as ‘imagination’.1 The self was sacrificed to the higher demands of universal knowledge. The two philosophers and two novelists examined in this chapter  – Nietzsche, Bergson, Gide and Proust – reflect this intellectual backlash against Scientific Positivism’s anti-individualism. All four seek to restore the status of the individual by rehabilitating his moral autonomy and heterogeneity, specifically insofar as these qualities allow him to determine evil for himself, and thus place himself in an ethically responsible relationship to it. First, I examine Nietzsche’s ‘genealogy of morals’, his re-valorization of established Judaeo-Christian notions of good and evil that in his view condemn man to a conformist ‘slave morality’ that is compounded by the impersonal scientific method; secondly, I consider ‘duration’ (durée), Bergson’s qualitative psychological notion of time that he regards as the key to releasing our authentic individuality from the strictures of a Positivist age that confines us to a spatial and quantitative view of

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the world; thirdly, in the second part of this chapter, I suggest that Nietzsche’s sharp distinction between ‘slave morality’ and ‘master morality’ is transposable to the central characters of Gide’s novel The Vatican Cellars (Les Caves du Vatican) (1914) who parodically embody the repressive conformism of scientific culture or Catholicism, with the exception of the cultured aesthete and murderer Lafcadio; finally, I argue that ‘Finding Time again’ (‘Le Temps retrouvé’), the concluding volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) (1927) combines both a Nietzschean historical awareness of the ‘genealogy of morals’ in its re-valorization of accepted definitions of evil with a Bergsonian belief that the psychologically fluid temporality that governs individual consciousness is the most effective means of gaining moral insight. Despite their shared hostility to Positivist anti-individualism, I conclude by suggesting that the relationship between evil and selfhood advanced by the novelists emerges as more ethically responsible and plausible than that proposed by the philosophers. Ethically responsible, because contrary to Nietzsche’s individualism, which at times strays into elitist and Socially Darwinist territory, Gide and Proust’s individualism encompasses the exercise of moral self-regulation both in life and in art: the former acknowledges that those who write on evil are as morally implicated as those who commit it, the latter warns that the unlimited pursuit of sexual vice is as destructive to the creative process as to life itself; and plausible, because neither novelist strays into Bergson’s utopian mysticism which disappointingly minimizes evil as a moral problem altogether.

Nietzsche: The genealogy of morals Nietzsche’s originality was to suggest that our real moral failure as a society lies not so much in our inability to abide by its rules, but in the rules themselves. Contrary to what we commonly think, no moral rule is ever intrinsic and universal, possesses no truth value in itself, but always originates in self-interested, narrow motives generated by a specific context, which makes it every bit as suspect and prone to human error as the conduct it is intended to judge. This is why moral values need to be re-evaluated: Let us articulate this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first be called into question  – and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed, . . . a knowledge of a kind that has never yet existed or even be desired. One has taken the value of these values as given, as factual, as beyond all question; one has hitherto never doubted or hesitated in the slightest degree in supposing the “good man” to be of greater value than the “evil man”, of greater value in the sense of furthering the advancement and prosperity of man in general (the future of man included). But what if the reverse were true?2

Nietzsche’s ‘genealogy of morals’ means recognizing that our moral system is based on values that are not innate but historical contingent, and thus ripe for re-evaluation, including the notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, which we commonly assume to have a fixed

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meaning. His genealogy reveals an important historical distinction between a ‘premoral’ order, vaguely associated with pre-Socratic Greece, and the later morality initiated by the Judaeo-Christian tradition which established the restrictive definitions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to which we still adhere today (‘the slave revolt in morals begins with them’).3 Our entrenched Judaeo-Christian tradition, based on altruistic egalitarian values that have been consolidated by the more recent growth of political democracy, condemns all forms of individualism as dangerously upsetting to the moral status quo, whose main concern is preserving the welfare of the ‘Other’. Any assertion of individuality is thus associated with violence, excess, abuse of power  – evil itself  – because it is only ever seen as damaging to one’s fellow man. But Nietzsche wants to alert us to the negative effects of this anti-individualist conformism: it stifles the untapped human potential and dynamism that individuality would unleash: Everything that raises an individual above the herd and causes his neighbour to fear him is henceforth called evil; a proper, modest conforming, equalizing mentality, what is average on the scale of desires gains a moral name and respect. (p. 88)

Egalitarian conformism leads to a generic mediocrity, an ‘equalizing mentality’ that renders society timid, unadventurous and morally anaemic. Any attempt to break free of that mediocrity through a dynamic affirmation of selfhood that could threaten the values common to the moral majority leads this majority to recoil in horror and condemn that act as ‘evil’.

Science as ‘slave morality’ It in this context that we must understand Nietzsche’s rejection of science. For science is characterized by that same bland homogeneity he associates with Christianity and democracy and which, like them, suppresses selfhood as a vehicle for affirming values that modern society now fears as ‘evil’, instead of celebrating them as ‘good’. Especially problematic is scientific objectivity, which sacrifices the human potential to powerfully express its individuality to the strictly impersonal demands of universal knowledge. The ‘objective man of science’ is forced to be so subservient to the requirements of epistemology that he becomes depersonalized to the point of anonymity, being reduced to a mere ‘mirror’ or instrument for reflecting a world made up of objects and facts to which he feels absolutely no personal emotional or psychological attachment. The self-effacing behaviour he is forced to adopt is so extreme that he possesses no identity, originality nor aspirations of his own and is thus not worthy of the respect or admiration that society grants him. Consequently, Nietzsche does not so much attack the findings of science, which are perfectly acceptable within their own frames of reference, but the timid, mediocre mindset or ‘slave morality’ that an overzealous adherence to its methodology engenders: The objective person, one who no longer curses and scolds like the pessimist, the ideal scholar in whom the scientific instinct blossoms fully and finally after thousands of

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Evil: A History in Modern French Literature and Thought complete or partial false starts, is certainly one of the most precious tools that exist: but he needs to be put into the hands of someone more powerful. He is only a tool; let’s say that he is a mirror, not an ‘end unto himself ’. The objective man is indeed a mirror: above all, we must admit, he is accustomed to subjugating himself, with no desire other than what knowledge, what ‘reflecting’ can offer him.(p. 97)

What emerges here is a savage parody of the scientist as the pitiful embodiment of slave morality: an uncharismatic, weak-willed nonentity whose personality is eradicated to the point of becoming insignificant, rendering him utterly indistinguishable from everybody and anybody else. The rigidly anti-subjective methodology of science so staunchly defended by Auguste Comte, shares with the egalitarian ethos of Christianity a stubborn resistance to the slightest expression of a powerful or distinctive individuality that would disrupt the smooth homogeneity upon which its objective view of the world depends. Not only is such an approach demeaning to the scientist, who remains spectacularly unfulfilled and hemmed in as an individual, but also to society as a whole, which remains frustratingly bereft of powerful, inspirational personalities to release it from its state of moral stagnation. The scientist falls woefully short of this requirement, because the complete suppression of his personality desensitizes him to morality altogether: not only is he unable to exercise any moral judgements of his own, but he is also incapable of determining any morally decisive course of action that could inspire the rest of humanity. This is why society does him far too great an honour when referring to him as a powerfully influential ‘philosopher’, given his complete inability to think or act for himself, particularly in the domain of moral affairs: ‘Nor is he a model human being; he neither precedes nor follows anyone; in general he puts himself at such a distance that he has no grounds on which to take a side between good and evil’ (p. 98).

Noble creativity as self-affirmation The homogenizing egalitarianism of Christianity and politics, combined with the sacrifice of individuality to the altar of scientific objectivity more than justify in Nietszche’s view a return to a moral-value system based on the reaffirmation of a proactive individuality that pushes back the oppressive boundaries of a conformist society in which human potential remains frustratingly impoverished and untapped. This is why harnessing this empowering potential of selfhood should take total priority over the conventional moral expectation that we cater to the needs of the vulnerable Other, needs which Nietzsche considers to be an unwanted distraction from re-establishing the required ethical vigour of ‘master morality’: The noble type of person feels himself as determining value  – he does not need approval, he judges that ‘what is harmful to me is harmful per se’, he knows that he is the one who causes things to be revered in the first place, he creates values. (p. 154)

The realization of human potential or ‘overflowing power’ for which Nietzsche sees the ‘noble type’ of individual as the best vehicle finds its utmost expression in a dynamic

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artistic creativity that values the intensity of feeling derived from cruelty. Cruelty is a distinguishing hallmark of the great cultural works of the past, but to the detriment of present-day culture its inclusion has been censored by a fearful religious morality, save for a minority of exceptional creators such as Wagner, or contemporary Japanese playwrights, whose tragedies restore cruelty to the morally reinvigorating prominence it deserves: ‘Almost everything that we call ‘high culture’ is based on the deepening and spiritualizing of cruelty – this is my tenet’ (pp. 120–1). Though the word ‘cruelty’ has a less metaphysical and more sensory resonance than ‘evil’, it is close enough in meaning to signal that Nietzsche’s philosophy considers a positive reappraisal of evil to be a fundamental requirement in his task of reinvigorating society through individualism and cultural creation. Be that as it may, if his rehabilitation of dynamic individuality and artistic creativity can be legitimized as a way of re-infusing a morally anaemic society with fresh vitality and purpose, there is also a deeply disconcerting side to Nietzsche’s critique: namely, that this individuality is re-evaluated as an end in itself, which at times veers towards outright egotism and an exploitative elitism. What for instance are we to make of Nietzsche’s more controversial aphorisms, such as the following? : Life itself in its essence means appropriating, injuring, overpowering those who are foreign and weaker; oppression, harshness, forcing one’s own form on others, incorporation, and at the very least, at the very mildest, exploitation. (pp. 152–3)

This quotation encapsulates what Robert Holub has called the ‘darker side’ of Nietzsche’s thought: namely its uncompromising elitism, which implicitly legitimizes a form of Social Darwinism. When his conception of nobility ‘calls for more freedom and creativity, for an end to repression and levelling of individual differences, his philosophy quite rightly meets with general approval’; but there are other times, as in the above quotation, when ‘he affirms a return to an aristocratic social order in which the happiness of the vast majority would be sacrificed for an elite caste that will produce and enjoy a European cultural renaissance’ (p. xxxiii). Bergson’s recuperation of selfhood and moral autonomy from the universalizing constraints of Scientific Positivism through his re-valorization of the psychology and inner temporality of the self has the advantage, as we shall see in the next section, of avoiding the sinister undercurrents of Nietzsche’s Social Darwinism. However, where Nietzsche at least provides some mitigation for these views by re-evaluating evil in accordance with its historical and philosophical context, Bergson disappointingly pays short shrift to the moral meaning of evil by reducing it to an empirical category whose problematic aspects can easily be transcended by a utopian mysticism.

Bergson: ‘Durée’ and the self Bergson’s reservations about Positivism are both similar and different to those of Nietzsche. Similar, because he too criticizes Positivism for curtailing moral freedom and individuality owing to its anti-heterogeneous conception of selfhood; but different, because his rehabilitation of the self rests on a re-evaluation of time rather

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than of social hierarchy, and because he identifies the main threat to individuality not so much in the methodological objectivity of science, as in its excessively materialist and mechanistic approach to reality which fails to acknowledge duration as the most important aspect of that reality. Where Nietzsche seeks out heterogeneous selfhood by making a hierarchical distinction between human beings, the early Bergson identifies this heterogeneity within the same human being by making a qualitative distinction between two layers of the self: the conventional ‘superficial self ’ and the more authentic deep self (‘moi profond’), which correspond respectively to two notions of time: the ‘spatialized’ artificial time of science and the psychological ‘real’ time of duration, which forms the cornerstone of his philosophy and is first outlined in Time and Free Will. To say that consciousness exists in the mode of duration is to conceive of life flowing along like a stream, all the parts of which course in and out of one another. Any portion can be drawn off from the whole but then it will lose the qualities it has as part of the stream’s flow. In the same way, every moment of an individual consciousness is intimately bound up with all the others, taking its quality from the fluid interpenetration of all the parts, so that to detach any single one is to deprive it of what makes it an instance of consciousness, both an element and representation of the particular mind that gives it life: Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego [self] lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.4

Duration is a form of time that cannot be measured or divided up into hours, minutes and seconds that correspond to the quantitative measurement of the physical existence of physical things. It is pure flow, and not a succession of discrete, blocks or segments that can be measured by the ‘clock time’ according to which we normally function. Although our immediate awareness of our mental being (“the immediate data of consciousness”) occurs in the mode of duration, we quickly forget this because we predominantly live our lives in the outer world of spatiality which demands that we adopt a perspective modelled on geometry in order to operate effectively. It is through ‘spatial thinking’, of which scientific analysis is the most powerful form, that we learn to operate efficiently in the world and gain some degree of mastery over it; and because our lives require this ability to act upon external objects, this type of thinking comes to dominate our perception of ourselves as well, cutting us off from the more meaningful and authentic experience of the lived or ‘real’ time of ‘durée’. Quantitative spatialized temporality is what governs our conventional ‘superficial self ’, whereas the ‘deep self ’ is located in the qualitative heterogeneous psychological flow of consciousness where past and present co-mingle and interpenetrate one another: Below homogenous duration, which is the extensive symbol of true duration, a close psychological analysis distinguishes a duration whose heterogeneous moments permeate one another; below the numerical multiplicity of conscious states, a qualitative multiplicity; below the self with well-defined states, a self in

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which succeeding each other means melting into one another and forming an organic whole. (p. 128)

Bergson makes it quite clear that only rarely do we allow the ‘deep self ’ to emerge from the shadow of the ‘superficial self ’ and consequently seldom do we attain the individual freedom and wholeness of being to which it would give us access. Though it is the ‘superficial self ’ that dominates our existence, it is in fact only the phantom of the ‘deep self ’, the form it takes when it is projected into space and social discourse: Hence there are finally two different selves, one of which, is, as it were, the external projection of the other, its spatial and, so to speak, social representation. We reach the former by deep introspection, which leads us to grasp our inner states as living things, constantly becoming, as states not amenable to measure, which permeate one another and of which the succession in duration has nothing in common with juxtaposition in homogeneous space. But the moments at which we thus grasp ourselves are rare, and that is just why we are rarely free . . . Hence our life unfolds in space rather than in time; we live for the external world rather than for ourselves; we speak rather than think; we ‘are acted’ rather than act ourselves. To act freely is to recover possession of oneself, and to get back into pure duration [my emphasis]. (pp. 231–2)

This crucial passage makes the attainment of individual freedom and plenitude contingent on reconnecting ourselves to our ‘deep self ’ and the experience of duration that characterizes it. Bergson’s notion of duration, then, identifies the potential for the recovery of meaningful selfhood and moral autonomy from Scientific Positivism, even if he concedes that its actual realization is thwarted by the social discourse of which this Positivism is an integral part.

Creative evolution Perhaps recognizing that in practical terms the notion of duration could only be taken so far in relation to the individual, Bergson’s later work, Creative Evolution (1907) seeks to extend its relevance to the whole of material existence. Duration is renamed as ‘vital impetus’ (‘élan vital’). The catalyst for this re-conceptualization was once again Bergson’s dissatisfaction with Positivism’s mechanistic and materialist view of reality, specifically Herbert Spencer’s First Principles, a hugely popular mechanistic study of evolution. Bergson took issue with this work for overlooking the philosophical importance of Time as the lived experience of change. Spencer’s claim to have traced step by step the evolution of living things was exposed by Bergson as the reconstruction of evolution out of mere fragments of the evolved.5 Rather like a child who fits together the pieces of a puzzle and prides himself on having reconstructed a picture, Spencer assembled the present results of evolution, imagining that he had traced them back to their origin.6 Spencer’s theory thus fell completely into the trap of ‘spatialized thinking’ that Bergson had earlier criticized as the conventional and restrictive modus operandi

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of the ‘moi superficiel’. He reduced evolution, as Gallagher puts it, to ‘a juxtaposition of instantaneous elements in space which eliminates duration.’ By failing to grasp the nature of ‘real time’, or duration, Spencer had failed to grasp the nature of change and had thus produced a philosophy that lent itself to the analysis of inert matter, rather than of life as process. It was precisely so as to incorporate the experience of change into the evolutionary process that Bergson came up with the notion of ‘élan vital’: ‘durée’ envisioned not merely as the psychologically liberating fluid consciousness of the inner self, but also as the continual process of creative dynamism behind the whole of existence that drives all life forms forward. ‘Élan vital’ was conceived as the animating principle of creation that would guarantee the moral progress of society and override the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and matter, which had caused such a cleavage between Christianity and Positivism. Where Darwin argued that all living organisms evolve through chance mutations, Bergson on the contrary attributed a psychological purpose to existence, arguing that all living beings possess an animating impulse or creative drive that imposes their needs on the matter that would remain inert in their absence. Any being that endures is by definition an instance of creative evolution because it continually remakes itself as it evolves. The ‘élan vital’, therefore, refers to the purposefulness that drives evolution forward. But as Seigel points out Bergson is careful not to let ‘élan vital’ completely eradicate the polarity between mind and matter, between duration and space, he had established in his early philosophy. ‘The élan vital inside the universe never did away with the inert quality of brute matter, which persisted as a source of decay, against which life had constantly to reassert itself.’7

‘Élan vital’ and mysticism In his final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) Bergson harnesses ‘élan vital’ to the moral progress of humanity. This progress is achieved via certain exceptional individuals such as mystics who tap into a higher plane of experience that participates in the forward movement of creation as a whole. The mystic is a being who is able to break outside the bonds of nature and the inertia of matter and reach a higher mode of being, an emotion of liberation that participates in the dynamic movement of the ‘élan vital’, and is associated with a divine principle: The great mystic is to be conceived as an individual being, capable of transcending the limitations imposed on the species by its material nature, thus continuing and extending the divine action.8

The mystic is regarded as a role model for society whose heightened state of mind is infectious and capable of spreading from soul to soul. Exalted by this creative emotion he transmits his fervour to others, drawing them in his wake. Bergson gives examples of deeds by powerfully creative people: Jesus’s new model of moral living and Rousseau’s campaign to remake life on ‘natural’ principles are in Jerrold Seigel’s words: ‘instances when the inner life of duration overflowed into the external world and altered it.’9

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However, this mystical aspect of Bergson’s philosophy comes at a price: namely, that it is far too utopian to consider evil as a problem worthy of moral analysis. Contrary to Nietzsche, who despite his Social Darwinism succeeded in re-valorizing and problematizing evil in a nuanced way, Bergson merely dismisses physical suffering as invariably self-inflicted through recklessness and excess (‘due to imprudence or carelessness, or to over-refined tastes, or artificial needs’, p. 260). As for moral suffering, this is magnified by our propensity to reflect upon it and prolong its existence in our consciousness (‘our pain is indefinitely protracted and multiplied by brooding over it’, p. 260). The negative impact of suffering, he argues, can simply be contained if we adopt an optimistic empirical outlook that reminds us that life as a whole is good and that we have the capacity to reach a spiritual state of ecstasy that transcends any notion of pleasure and pain: (‘an unmixed joy, lying beyond pleasure and pain, which is the final state of the mystic soul’, p. 261). Proust, as we shall see, proposes an antithetical, as opposed to dialectical relationship between matter and spirituality, one that does not valorize the role of the mystic as harbinger of moral progress, but that of the novelist as trenchant moral observer. To this end, the writer not only has a duty to reject matter altogether as a source of physical decay that threatens the completion of his work, but also to latch onto those epiphanic moments of duration – time experienced as pure flow – as the source of moral psychological insights that constitute the content of his opus. Shifting its focus from philosophy to literature, the second half of this chapter argues that Gide and Proust’s anti-scientific attempts to restore a meaningful relationship between selfhood, moral freedom and evil both echo and move beyond the arguments advanced by Nietzsche and Bergson. Despite significant areas of overlap between the philosophers and the novelists, the latter emerge as more nuanced, balanced and ethically responsible in their analysis of the relationship between these three categories.

Gide: Science as ‘slave morality’ Gide’s The Vatican Cellars both endorses and questions a Nietzschean reading of evil. It will be recalled that the German philosopher sees ‘slave morality’ reflected both in the weak-willed ‘objective man of science’ who sacrifices his individuality and moral autonomy to the universal demands of epistemology, and in the ‘equalizing mentality’ of the moral majority who endorse a Christianity that seeks to efface all forms of heterogeneity and individual expression. Gide’s characters Anthime  Armand Dubois– the scientist who converts to Christianity after his vision of the Virgin Mary – and Amédée Fleurissoire – the devout Catholic who is murdered by Lafcadio on the train – offer caustic parodies of the crisis of individuality and moral freedom engendered by both science and religion. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Lafcadio can be seen to embody ‘master morality’, the ultimate expression of which is his murder on the train of a stranger, Gide’s infamous ‘acte gratuit’. Where Gide differs from Nietzsche, however, is in placing limits on the extent to which individualism and moral autonomy can be pursued. Where critics have pertinently noted Gide’s parody of scientific theory, my focus here is on his parody of the conformist mentality adherence to this theory engenders.

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Harlon Patton has argued that the novel’s character Anthime is a parody of the spirit of Positivism that dominated the 1880s through his experiments on rats that are explicitly linked to the scientific phenomenon known as ‘tropismes’.10 This term, coined by Jacques Loeb, the French-speaking German botanist who was known at the time to a wider public, refers to the predictable physical responses of animals to certain conditions such as changes in light. Anthime’s lesion and limp, which make him incapable of maintaining linear movements, is reminiscent of the movements noted by Loeb in disabling animals; his sudden conversion by the Virgin Mary who pierces him with a metal rod recalls Loeb’s fertilization of a frog’s egg by the insertion of a needle; finally, Patton cites the ‘laboratory conditions’ – a rectangular space enclosed by glass and subject to changes in light – that are replicated in the train compartment where Lafcadio carries out his infamous murder. Insightful though Patton’s observations are, he overlooks the wider moral import of Gide’s parody of science which has decidedly Nietzschean overtones. Science is shown to be a source of institutionalized conformism and social oppression that is no different from religion. Prior to his conversion Anthime rather smugly celebrates the secular freedom and infallibility of scientific enquiry; but this freedom proves to be illusory for after his conversion, he loses the support of the Freemasons who had backed his experiments, being promised instead financial support from the Vatican, which never arrives. His newfound devotion to Christian acts of charity merely substitutes his earlier and equally obsessive experiments on rats. Anthime’s predicament reveals two equally oppressive systems of thought, with the social power to impose a similarly conformist mindset that impedes all individual freedom and scope for moral autonomy. It is not merely scientific and religious dogmas in themselves that are parodied here, but the conformist ‘de-individualizing’ mentality these engender. No more is this mentality evident than in the devout Catholic Amédée. Time and again his moral paralysis and complete lack of initiative are exposed by his inability to assess and respond decisively to unforeseen situations. His clumsiness, naivety and passivity recall those character flaws identified by Nietzsche in his parody of the ‘objective man of science’ whose capacity for individual thought and action has completely been suppressed. Nothing Amédée does is assertive or determined independently of the wishes of others: his marriage is decided by his wife, not him; even then, he renounces his conjugal rights out of respect for the feelings of his friend who originally had designs on his new spouse11 (pp. 105–6). He blindly follows the orders of the manipulative Protos in the mistaken belief that he is assisting with the rescue of the Pope. His vulnerability to attacks from fleas and mosquitoes (pp. 125–6) shows that even insignificant insects are capable of controlling his destiny. His seduction by the disreputable Carola not only makes a mockery of his Christian vow of celibacy, but is another example of his lack of moral resolve: in a comical episode that savagely parodies the Fall, he attributes the rashes on his face to a sexually transmitted disease contracted as a result of his ‘sinful’ loss of Virginity to this wanton woman (p. 132). His Catholic guilt is the object of further ridicule when he asks Protos and his friend the debauched Cardinal whether he should confess his adulterous act, to which they merely respond with barely suppressed laughter (p. 155). Amédée, then, is both the

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antithesis of Nietzschean master morality and living proof that religious indoctrination is as much a barrier to subjective moral agency as science. Amédée’s pathetic fate, then, implicitly invites the reader to consider alternative interpretations of evil that both emanate from, and assert the power of the individual and renounce the ‘slave morality’ of Catholicism.

Lafcadio and ‘master morality’ At the opposite end of the scale to Amédée, Lafcadio would seem to provide this alternative. In many respects, he is the very embodiment of Nietzschean master morality, as opposed to slave morality: he determines his own values, irrespective of external influences or constraints, embodying Nietzsche’s statement that ‘the noble type of person feels that he determines value, he does not need anyone’s approval’. Brought up in a privileged environment of uninhibited moral freedom he respects only his own opinions and actions and scorns those of others; even on those rare occasions when he does deign to help his fellow man (most notably when he rescues children from a burning building and carries an old lady’s bag), he views his acts purely as heroic ones, motivated neither by altruism nor pity, but a sense of his own power (again let us recall Nietzsche: ‘The noble person helps the unfortunate too, although not (or hardly ever) out of pity, but rather out of an impulse generated by an overabundance of power’.) This power is demonstrated by the strength, bravery and agility he displays when climbing into the burning building to rescue a small child: ‘With a bound he caught hold of the top of the wall unaided’ (p. 159); and his recollection of how he helped an old lady in distress triggers within him a Nietzschean sense of domination over the whole of humanity: ‘I felt as though I could have clasped the whole of mankind to my heart in my single embrace – or strangled it, for that matter. Human life! What a paltry thing!’ (p. 177). Here are examples of the Nietzschean ‘will to power’, that central aspect of his philosophy whereby every form of existence, whatever its apparent nature or aim, was not self-preservation, but ‘the will to appropriate, dominate, increase, grow stronger.’ The will to power was always to be reaching out beyond any given state of existence (what Nietzsche called a ‘will to self-overcoming’) and thus was directed as much against its own form of existence as it was against other beings or objects.12 Lafcadio’s infamous ‘acte gratuit’ would seem to be the ultimate expression of this will to power, an attempt to transcend stable individuality by acting without any preconceived notions of limits to human action. In the infamous scene on the train where he commits the murder, Gide provides in his narrative contrasting metaphors of individual freedom versus constraint that recall the Nietzschean opposition between master morality and slave morality. Lafcadio’s sense of freedom, vitality and self-possession contrasts with Amédée’s clumsiness, frustration and timidity. Notwithstanding the heat and the suit he is wearing, Lafcadio feels completely at ease and uninhibited: ‘he breathed ease and comfort at every pore’ (p. 176); despite his shirt collar his neck does not feel too tight and he feels completely alive and at one with himself: ‘He was at ease in his skin, at ease in his clothes, at ease in his shoes; . . .

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his foot, in its elastic prison could stretch, could bend, could feel itself alive’ (p. 176). Amédée, by contrast, feels constrained and uncomfortable in his clothes, his attempts to button up his shirt meeting with considerable resistance: ‘but the starched linen was as hard as cardboard and he struggled in vain’ (p. 183). Lafcadio reminds us of Nietzsche’s emphasis on self-glorifying individuality over action as the real yardstick by which moral values should be measured: ‘It’s not so much about events that I’m curious, as about myself ’ (p. 185).

The dangers of master morality: Gide’s anti-Nietzscheanism However, if the Lafcadio presented by the Gidean narrator both before and during his infamous ‘acte gratuit’ incarnates a seemingly uninhibited Nietzschean master morality, the narrator subsequently casts considerable doubt on the legitimacy of this carefree, self-possessed mode of being by insinuating, contrary to the German philosopher, that self-determined, transgressive actions have serious moral repercussions, for which the individual must accept full responsibility. An ‘anti-Nietzschean’ side to Gide thus emerges, one that is given explicit formulation in his famous Letters to Angel and which some critics have attributed to the Dostoevksyean strand of his thinking. This strand is resolutely opposed to Nietzsche in valuing a notion of selfhood based on humility, confession, psychological complexity and self-abnegation.13 At first, this more self-critical side to Lafcadio is by no means apparent, since he shows precious little remorse for the crime he has committed. But his earlier abundant feeling of power and lack of empathy for others is gradually and inexplicably replaced by an unspecific, death-like sense of lethargy and an acute sensitivity to the cutting words of Protos, whose friendship and approval he clearly values: He tried to reflect, but a strange torpor – a despairing numbness- crept over his mind; it was not of his crime that he thought nor of how to escape; the only effort he could make was not to hear those dreadful words of Julius: ‘I was beginning to care for you,’ . . . If he himself did not care for Julius, were those words worth his tears? (p. 233)

Gone is the earlier insouciance and disdain for the opinions of others, but rather a role reversal in which Lafcadio exhibits that same troubled psyche and physical discomfort that had previously affected his unfortunate victim Amédée on the train. It is only at the very end of the novel, when the long-suffering and sweet-natured Géneviève de Baraglioul finally declares her undying love to Lafcadio, despite knowing about his heinous crime, that he finally expresses a distinctly anti-Nietzschean sense of remorse and contemplates a course of action – handing himself in to the police – that is determined primarily out of consideration for Géneviève’s feelings, rather than his own: Even if I escaped from the police, I could not escape from myself . . . And besides, you would despise me for escaping.’

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‘I, despise you!’ ‘I lived unconscious; I killed in a dream, in which I have been struggling ever since.’ (p. 235)

Although this love scene is too hyperbolically clichéd to be taken entirely at face value, it nevertheless shows a Lafcadio whose prior sense of self-worth and utter belief in his own superiority to the ‘slave morality’ of the ‘herd’ has succumbed to a humbling dose of moral paralysis and self-doubt. Gide toys with his readers’ expectations by deliberately denying us any form of moral resolution. We are left in total suspense as to whether Lafcadio will turn himself in to the police or not. His final dilemma is tantalizingly poised between maintaining his uninhibited Nietzschean affirmation of life through his egotistical attempts to free himself of all forms of moral obligation and compromise and curtailing his heightened sense of individuality by making an altruistic concession to Géneviève’s needs, which would inevitably entail turning himself in. His reluctant feelings of empathy towards Géneviève are locked in battle with his instinctively individualistic inclination to disdain another human being who has developed an unhealthy attachment to him: From the distant barracks a bugle’s call rings out. What! Is he going to renounce life? Does he still, for the sake of Genevieve’s esteem (and already he esteems her a little less now that she loves him a little more), does he still think of giving himself up? (p. 237)

The Gidean narrator, then, subtly introduces limits to his earlier Nietzschean championing of moral freedom through individuality. The autonomous self must be reconquered from the ‘de-individualizing’ homogeneity of scientific objectivity and Catholic morality, but not to the extent of advocating a morally irresponsible egotism that ignores empathy and consideration for others. If Gide imposes such limits on the individual’s moral freedom of action, then by the same token he implies that these limits to moral freedom apply to the realm of artistic creativity itself. Both the realm of action and the realm of fiction demand a moral responsibility and restraint that prevents the self from endorsing a freedom that would encourage it to drift towards a dangerously irresponsible egotism.

Julius: The creative responsibility for evil As a novelist Julius de Baraglioul is the only ‘creative’ character of The Vatican Cellars, a man who, like Lafcadio is seduced by the potential for individual moral freedom he discerns within the ‘acte gratuit’, and who like Amédée’s murderer, falls into the trap of believing that this freedom relieves him of accepting responsibility for evil. If Julius explores the ‘acte gratuit’ in the realm of fiction, as opposed to reality, Gide insinuates that as a writer, he is no less subject to taking full responsibility for that act than Lafcadio. In other words, merely committing the ‘acte gratuit’ to paper without paying heed to its moral repercussions is not necessarily any more justifiable than

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committing the ‘acte gratuit’ itself. Creative licence does not exempt the creator from moral responsibility for evil: moral barriers should not be suspended just because evil is represented, rather than committed. From the beginning of the story we are made aware of Julius’s stereotypical role as ‘frustrated novelist’. He and his brother-in-law Anthime allegorize the clash between scientific and literary values, each man making personal digs against the other’s cherished world views. If Julius is annoyed that Anthime hates his novel On the Heights (L’Air des Cimes), Anthime is equally piqued that Julius shows a complete lack of interest in his scientific experiments (‘But his brother-in-law, apparently, knew nothing about his scientific research’, p. 25). Given Gide’s characteristic use of ‘mise en abyme’ it is possible to regard the novelist Julius as his alter ego, especially since he, like Gide himself, is a writer keen to explore the creative and moral possibilities afforded by the ‘acte gratuit’. Julius’s problematization of disinterested evil throughout the novel can thus also be read as Gide’s self-referential investigation of the same theme. There are essentially two phases in Julius’s contemplation of the ‘acte gratuit’: the first is when he reveals to his other brother-in-law Amédée that the seeds of this idea began to germinate when he was at the Vatican trying to meet the Pope; the second, follows Amédée’s actual murder when Julius confides to the killer Lafcadio that his literary idea, which by now is reaching fruition, has found its perfect correlative in the murder that has just taken place. The enthusiasm with which Julius recounts his initial literary revelation to Amédée is particularly ironic because it supersedes the moral urgency of his meeting with the Pope. By this point in the story, Amédée, as we have seen, has been the unfortunate victim of all manner of misfortunes in his eventful journey to Rome, and thus has reached the end of his tether; consequently, his desperation to extract information from Julius as to whether or not the Vatican plot to kidnap the Pope is true, information that can only be revealed if Julius divulges whether or not he has been successful in meeting the Divine Pontiff, has reached fever pitch. The novelist Julius, however, is far more interested in talking about his great literary discovery: the ‘acte gratuit’. Every time Amédée tries to press Julius for the vital information he seeks, Julius digresses or is distracted, much to Amédée obvious exasperation: ‘My dear fellow, I will now confess something I didn’t dare tell you just now. When I found myself in the Holy Father’s presence . . . well, I was seized with a fit of absent-mindedness . . .’ ‘Absent-mindedness?’ repeated Fleurissoire, aghast. ‘Yes, I suddenly caught myself thinking of something else.’ ‘Am I really to believe you?’ ‘For it was precisely at that very moment that I had my revelation . . . “Well, but”, said I to myself, pursuing my first idea, “supposing the evil action – the crime – is gratuitous, it will be impossible to impute it to its perpetrator and impossible, therefore, to convict him.”’ ‘Oh!’ sighed Amédée, ‘are you at it again?’ (pp. 170–1)

In this exchange, Amédée’s extreme frustration is as palpable as Julius’s boundless enthusiasm. A further layer of irony is added to the situation by Julius’s appropriation

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of the religious term ‘revelation’ to a literary context. The selfish demands of literary creativity thus vastly overshadow the gravitas of a meeting with the spiritual leader of the Christian world. Julius seems to display an obsessive egotism that is incommensurate with the considerable moral demands of the situation in which he finds himself entangled. When the murder on the train predictably finds its way into the international press Julius’s all-consuming excitement about the ‘acte gratuit’ is fuelled even further. When he meets Lafcadio, oblivious to the fact that the latter has just carried out the very type of act he wishes to turn into a literary topic, he conveys to him his enthusiasm about the motiveless crime, despite having already discovered from the newspaper that the victim of the murder is none other than his own brother-in-law Amédée. Indeed, the motiveless crime is idealized by Julius to such an extent that it appears to provide the magic formula that will immediately remove all creative and personal obstacles from his path: as a writer he is excited at having alighted upon an original literary topic that gives him the licence to portray a character – the perpetrator of this crime – who possesses an unprecedented degree of moral freedom and autonomy; as a man hemmed in by the numerous demoralizing demands of society, this surge of creative freedom unleashes within him a newfound sense of his individual self-worth; for the first time in his life he envisages a bright future unburdened by the demands of career, public approval and critical acclaim: . . . up till now the only things to hinder me have been impure considerations – questions of a successful career, of public opinion – the poet’s continual vain hope of rewards at the hands of ungrateful judges. Henceforth I hope for nothing  – except from myself – henceforth I hope for everything from myself – I hope for everything from the man who is sincere – everything and anything! For now I feel in myself the strangest possibilities. And as it’s only paper, I shall boldly let myself go. We shall see! We shall see! (pp. 193–4)

This capacity for the topic of evil to harness the human potential for individual self-fulfilment through a creative passion and energy is, of course, strikingly reminiscent of Nietzsche’s call for a return to cruelty as the most morally reinvigorating topic of high culture. But if Nietzsche imposes no moral restrictions on the individualism pursued through evil, irrespective of whether that evil is a real act or a purely artistic creation, then this complete suspension of moral responsibility does not appear to be shared by Julius: for in the crucial last line of this quotation he is careful to legitimize his unlimited exploration of ‘disinterested evil’ on the premise that this exploration is conducted purely on the creative medium of the written page and not in real life: ‘As it’s only on paper’. But Julius forgets this crucial ‘As’, abandons his distinction between the ‘creative’ and ‘actual’ moral freedom to which the individual is entitled in his celebration of evil the minute he reads in the newspaper about a murder that seems to provide a real illustration of the motiveless crime he seeks in his fiction. His excitement at this discovery overrides the moral parameters he has only just established: Yes, up till this very evening I was hesitating, and then, this very evening, the latest edition of the newspaper brought me just exactly the example I was in need of. A

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providential stroke! Frightful! Only think of it! My brother-in-law has just been murdered! (p. 196)

Though he acknowledges the terrible assassination of his brother-in-law, it seems that Julius’s sheer creative excitement at identifying a murder that corresponds to his literary project – his discovery of the ‘the example I was in need of ’ – supersedes his moral revulsion at the death of a close relative. The sincerity of his revulsion is further undercut by his ironic application to his novel of the religious adjective ‘providential’. Even when he reads out the newspaper article to Lafcadio, he refers to the murderer as a ‘hero’ rather than the monstrous criminal who has killed his innocent relative: ‘In the meantime Julius went on reading: . . . which seems to prove the crime was premeditated. [Why this particular crime? My hero had perhaps merely taken general precautions just at random . . . ]’, (p. 198). Julius’s mind is thus utterly fixated on finding a living embodiment of the literary ideal to which he aspires, to the extent of eroding all sense of his individual responsibility for evil. Forgetting his earlier caveat, he suddenly blurs the moral boundaries between ‘real evil’ and ‘fictional evil’, envisaging the exciting possibility of an actual motiveless crime: he surmises that if the six thousand francs the victim had on him were not taken, this would indeed prove that the crime really was ‘désintéressé’, that money was not the motive behind the murder, and this would dovetail perfectly with his literary ideal: ‘Yes, yes. Let’s suppose for a moment that there had been no six thousand francs – or, better still that the criminal didn’t take them – why, he’d have been my hero!’ (p. 199) The crucial words ‘he’d have been my hero’ (‘c’est mon homme’) show that Julius is still caught up in the selfish pursuit of a creative writer searching for the perfect character, rather than acting as a morally responsible human being who discharges his altruistic duty to register the full implications of a terrible act of wrongdoing. It is only when Lafcadio points out a line from the article overlooked by Julius stating that in actual fact the money was not taken, therefore suggesting the chilling possibility that this really was a motiveless crime, that Julius suddenly comes crashing back down to earth and his conscience finally takes precedence over his creative enthusiasm. Julius is struck by an overwhelming feeling of guilt as he begins to register the full moral repercussions of a real motiveless crime, as opposed to a purely hypothetical one. He suddenly realizes with horror that he has allowed his creative excitement completely to overshadow his sense of moral responsibility. The minute the full horror of evil intrudes onto its fictional idealization, then alarm bells start to ring, his conscience intervenes, and motives must immediately be attributed to this evil in order to render it morally plausible and acceptable: It was just now that I was mad . . . Oh, poor Fleurissoire! Oh, unfortunate friend! Luckless, saintly victim! His death just comes in time to cut me short in a career of irreverence – of blasphemy. His sacrifice has brought me to reason. And to think that I laughed at him! (p. 200)

Earlier on, already consumed by his literary project, Julius had not taken Amédée’s farfetched story of the Vatican plot at all seriously. But now, racked with guilt at his death,

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he prefers to believe that Amédée must indeed have been telling the truth, since the alternative possibility – that he could have been killed for no reason at all – is too awful to contemplate. When Lafcadio reminds Julius that only a few moments earlier he was utterly convinced that the crime was without motive, that it was the perfect illustration of his ideal, the novelist reacts furiously, defensively refuting the possibility that the motiveless crime could actually exist: ‘Do you want to know why the ruffian murdered him?’ ‘I thought it was without a motive.’ ‘To begin with,’ exclaimed Julius furiously, ‘there’s no such thing as a crime without a motive. He was got rid of because he was in possession of a secret . . . which he confided to me – an important secret – over-important for him, indeed. They were afraid of him. That’s what it was. There!’ (p. 200)

The crucial point here is not whether the Vatican plot is true or not, or whether Amédée really was killed because he was harbouring a dangerous secret: what is crucial for Julius is that a plausible reason be found for his brother-in-law’s murder that would give it some moral sense and purpose, and quash all speculation that he could have died in vain. Such a crime would be easier for Julius to accept than a motiveless one, even if it contradicts his earlier literary ideal of the motiveless crime. And Julius’s dilemma implicitly points to the complex moral dilemma faced by Gide himself regarding his own responsibilities as a novelist who chooses to write about evil. Is he justified in assuming that moral rules only apply in real life, but can be suspended in a fictional setting? Julius has learnt that such assumptions are dangerous. And if they are, then to what lengths should the novelist be allowed to pursue his creative freedom in his exploration of immorality? Should gratuitous evil be any less morally sanctioned if it is a fictional topic than if it is real? Does the creative artist have a duty to condemn evil, even when that evil is explicitly presented as a pure hypothesis rather than a real event? Is Lafcadio’s moral detachment from his real crime any worse than Julius’s own moral distancing from his hypothetical depiction of such a crime? In a nutshell, is evil any less morally pernicious just because it is presented as a fiction rather than a reality? Just as the criminal must accept full responsibility for the evil he commits, so too, it seems, must the writer be conscious of the moral repercussions of the evil he chooses to commit to the page. Evil is still evil even if it is only a fictional game and not actually carried out. We shall see in the next section how Proust similarly argues that moral responsibility for evil cannot simply be suspended by those individuals such as Charlus, who in certain contexts choose to regard it as a harmless sado-masochistic game. Like Gide, Proust warns that evil can never be dismissed as a purely self-indulgent pursuit, but remains a serious business at all times that demands constant ethical vigilance, irrespective of whether that evil is deemed to be real or imaginary. Whether it is regarded as a creative pursuit, as it is for Julius, or a sexual vice, as it is for Charlus, evil should never be divorced from an individual consciousness that takes responsibility for its consequences.

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Proust: Evil and patriotic ideology Despite Jonah Lehrer’s recent claim that Proust’s famous notion of involuntary memory presciently anticipates some of the latest theories in neuroscience,14 there can be little doubt that in his own lifetime the novelist identified two major problems with science: its objectivity and its material determinism. Where for Gide objectivity impedes moral action, for Proust it inhibits moral perception by discouraging any subjective interpretation of the world. So accustomed have we become to accepting everything ‘objectively’ as if it were a scientific fact, that we fail to question whether an alleged ‘fact’ or incontrovertible ‘truth’ – such as the intrinsically ‘evil’ nature of the Germans – really is a truth or simply a prejudice. Science, in other words, encourages a ‘pseudo-objectivity’ that acts as a barrier to our moral psychology. Secondly, Proust, contrary to Gide, is wary of the material determinism of science because he regards matter as a source of moral destruction and creative sterility. His anti-materialism is evident both in his portrayal of the demise of Charlus who succumbs to his biological urges for sado-masochistic sex, and his personal fears as a writer about his own ability to complete his novel before physical decline and death intervene. The objectivity of science thus makes us blind to prejudice, and its materialism vulnerable to mortality, both biological and artistic. Hence in what follows we shall see how time was Proust’s weapon in his fight against this double threat: first, he adopts a historical temporal perspective, akin to Nietszche’s ‘genealogy of morals’ in its retracing of our supposedly ‘objective’ definitions of evil back to their prejudiced sources; secondly, he adopts a psychologically fluid notion of time, similar to Bergsonian duration, that frees the individual’s moral consciousness and creative faculties from the clutches of a destructive and finite materialism. During the Dreyfus Affair, during the war, in medicine, I had seen people believe truth to be a kind of fact, believe that ministers or doctors possess a yes or a no which requires no interpretation, and ordains that an X-ray photograph indicate what the patient has without interpretation, believe that the men in power knew whether Dreyfus was guilty, knew (without having to send Roques to make enquiries on the spot) whether Sarrail did or did not have the means to mobilize at the same time as the Russians. There is no moment in my life which would not have served to teach me that only coarse and inaccurate perception places everything in the object when the opposite is true: everything is in the mind.15

This passage recalls Nietzsche’s apt warning against the dangers of assuming that our moral values are intrinsic and synonymous with objective ‘truth’. The narrator echoes the German philosopher by showing just how easy it is to blur the boundaries between facts, which belong to the material world of scientific analysis and require only observation, and opinions, which belong to the world of morality and demand careful interpretation. He harks back to a time when his naive perception of reality was unable to distinguish between these two categories, allowing him to consider Captain Dreyfus’s ‘guilt’, confidently proclaimed as such by the government and the press, every bit as factual and authoritative as a simple X-ray. But this supposed ‘fact’, as history

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showed, was of course a blatant prejudice, since Dreyfus was but a mere scapegoat whose innocence was eventually proven. An X-ray lends itself to a scientific view of reality, merely requiring observation rather than careful interpretation; the Dreyfus Affair, however, demands a far more subjective intervention into the moral psychology of politics, and a historical understanding of the prejudices and interests that underpin it. This example shows why it is dangerous to extend the objective ‘scientific’ approach we apply to matter to the realm of morality, and why it is necessary to disentangle the concrete world of objective fact from the murky world of subjective prejudice. By placing truth value within an object, as science encourages us to do, we suppress the necessary discriminating safety-valve of our own subjectivity. As Nietzsche reminds us, our moral precepts are not the concrete facts we assume them to be, not ‘things in themselves’, but inventions; far from possessing any innate truth value they each bear their own genealogy and subjective imprint. In the context of World War I, the French propaganda machine condemns the Germans as evil to such an extent that, in the eyes of most Frenchmen, the definition of ‘evil as German’ has automatically become an incontrovertible truth, as was the case several decades earlier in relation to Dreyfus’s ‘guilt’. The possibility that evil could have any other meaning does not even arise. But Proust’s genealogical approach to evil exposes this so-called fact to be a blatant ideological prejudice: there is of course nothing intrinsically evil about Germans; it is just that this definition is the projection of French patriotic hatred at that particular historical moment, in the same way that today the West projects evil onto Islamic radicalism. It is primarily as a result of his exposure to Charlus’s ‘Germanophilia’ that the narrator develops a moral consciousness that is far more sophisticated and discriminating than the one he possessed at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. First, his long conversations with the Baron alert him to the need to flush out the prejudice that disguises itself as ‘fact’, especially the supposedly intrinsic ‘truth’ that evil is synonymous with all things German; and secondly, they show him that the most penetrating moral insights demand the discriminating exercise of our individual subjectivity: they can only be arrived at if as heterogeneous beings we have the courage to arrive at our own opinions, rather than conforming to the status quo. Charlus possesses a key moral quality that affords him the detachment and single-mindedness necessary to deconstruct the myth that evil is intrinsically German: his anti-patriotism. This attitude is both inherited and cultivated, stemming from a combination of noble Bavarian origins on his maternal side and a genuine capacity to feel empathy for others (p. 83). His sympathy for the underdogs of society, especially those condemned in courts of law, makes him naturally sensitive to the imminent defeat of the Germans and conscious of their forgotten role as the victims, as well as perpetrators of the war, a fact that is all too evident from the famine from which they are now suffering: Ultimately M. de Charlus’s position was a compassionate one, the idea of a loser made him feel ill, he always took the side of the weak, he never read the judicial reports in the newspapers so as not to have to suffer in his own body the pain of the condemned man and the impossibility of assassinating the judge, the executioner and the crowd cheering the fact that ‘justice had been done’. He was convinced in

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any case that France could not now be beaten, and he also knew that the Germans were suffering from famine, and would be obliged, at some time or other, to surrender. (p. 83)

Charlus provides that moral relativism necessary to defuse a surfeit of French nationalism that is intent on turning the Germans into scapegoats. He casts further doubt on the purportedly virtuous claims of the French patriots when he exposes the moral hypocrisy of a national press that exploits this patriotism for purely self-serving and opportunistic ends. The journalists Brichot, Norpois, Legrandin and the baron’s arch-enemy Morel ride the wave of anti-German sentiment primarily to relaunch or further their own journalistic careers; moreover, since Charlus is part of that select few within high society who are privy to the sex scandals in which many of these journalists are themselves secretly implicated and which would taint their reputation if made public, he is conscious of the sheer moral hypocrisy and audacity they display when they accuse the German enemy of sexual perversion (p. 84). But patriotism, and the moral duplicity of the press, Charlus reminds the narrator, are flaws that are not exclusive to the French: the scapegoating of Germans by the French press is no different in tone from the vilification of the French by the German propaganda machine. The same ideologically expedient projection of evil onto the ‘Other’ takes place on the opposite banks of the Rhine and thus any attempts by the nations’ leaders, Poincaré and Kaiser Wilhelm, to claim the moral high ground over their opposite number are entirely pointless and relativistic, because their respective pronouncements are fundamentally identical and, when perceived from a neutral standpoint, utterly indistinguishable: When I read: ‘We shall fight against an implacable and cruel enemy until we have obtained a peace which will guarantee us a future free from all aggression, so that the blood of our brave soldiers shall not have flowed in vain,’ or: ‘He who is not for us is against us,’ I do not know whether the sentence comes from the Emperor William or from M. Poincaré, because they have both, give or take a few variations, pronounced each one twenty times . . . (p. 107)

If the language of patriotic sentiment expressed during the Great War varies little according to geographical location, then conversely it can change dramatically depending on the historical context from which it emerges. The historical arbitrariness that underpins our moral values is brought home to the narrator when he compares the attitudes towards patriotism at the height of the Dreyfus Affair with those of the World War I. When the Affair dominated the French political scene in the late 1890s, Dreyfusisme was roundly condemned by the moral majority as anti-patriotic, irreligious, and anarchical; but yesterday’s traitors, like the Dreyfusard minister M. Bontemps, have become today’s patriotic heroes. Where he was once vilified and disgraced by the Écho de Paris for his ‘treacherous’ support of the supposedly guilty Dreyfus, he has since become one of the staunchest Republican opponents of Germany and therefore a hero. The word ‘Dreyfusisme’ has lost its former negative connotations because revisionist opinion has since assimilated it to Republican respectability. But

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at the height of the Affair, as during the Great War, nobody bothered to ask whether ‘Dreyfusisme’ had any intrinsic moral worth: ‘Dreyfusism was now integrated into a range of respectable and normal things. As for wondering what intrinsic merit it had, nobody gave it any greater consideration now, in accepting it, than formerly, when they had condemned it’ (pp. 33–4). The ideologically driven fickleness and hypocrisy that shape definitions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, as opposed to any sense of their intrinsic moral value is further illustrated at the height of World War I by those who claim that the words ‘Dreyfusards’ and ‘anti-Dreyfusard’ no longer have any moral relevance. These, however, are the very people who in the future will be indignant that the word ‘boche’ (the derogatory term used by the French to designate the ‘evil’ Germans) will merely arouse curiosity in the same way that the words ‘chouan’, ‘sans-culotte’ or ‘bleu’ have lost the pejorative ideological charge they once possessed at the height of the French Revolution (p. 35). The nature of the anti-German sentiment that held sway at the height of the Dreyfus Affair is so different from that of World War I, that it might as well belong to a prehistoric era: one of the most fashionable ideas was the claim that the pre-war period was separated from the war by something as deep, something seemingly as longlasting, as a geological period, and Brichot himself, the great nationalist, whenever he made allusion to the Dreyfus case, would say: ‘In those prehistoric times’. (p. 34)

Our failure to see how the morality of the present differs completely from that of the past makes even relatively recent events seem ancient and blinds us to the arbitrary role of history in shaping our notions of good and evil. This is why, the narrator gradually discovers, a Nietzschean genealogy is necessary to free us from our fixation on the values of the present – values that we assume to be timeless – and instead adopt a perspective from which to interpret morality as a process of change and constant re-evaluation, rather than a fixed given in which we can permanently trust. But this genealogical approach to morality is not merely desirable in the political realm, for artistic opinion is no less subject to ideological preconceptions about evil than politics. The German culture previously so revered in France in the late nineteenth century is unsurprisingly vilified in the early part of the war when patriotic hatred of ‘les boches’ is at its peak; yet as the hardships of war drag on and feelings of cultural deprivation begin to run high, there is a gradual softening of attitudes towards German art, which, tacitly at least, begins to be accepted once again on the proviso that it does not compromise French nationalist ideology. Substantial proof of patriotic duty is still required from those whose opinions are anything less than critical of the ‘evil’ German enemy. Thus, in the latter stages of the war, when a famous French professor writes an important study of Schiller, the publication of his book is given the moral seal of approval by the French press purely on the grounds of his considerable military bravery, the tragic loss of two sons in the trenches and on the understanding that his praise for this famous German author is tempered by the pejorative term ‘boche’, as opposed to the more respectful ‘Allemand’. Reverence for German art and civilization is thus acceptable only if sufficiently counterbalanced by a vigorous display of patriotic opposition to

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the evil enemy (pp. 145–6). The nationalist pursuit of victory still demands that the officially sanctioned polarization between ‘virtuous’ Frenchman and ‘evil’ German be maintained at all times. Yet the politically expedient double standards behind this facade of moral respectability become increasingly evident to the narrator the more he recognizes that true moral insight into society is to be found not by examining that society’s official values, but by delving into the complex and heterogeneous psychology of the individuals that inhabit it. No one person is ever entirely ‘good’ or ‘evil’, but each one of us is riven with a host of moral contradictions. We have already seen how Charlus, for instance, displays an admirable courage of conviction and humanity in his anti-patriotic stance. But his defence of the Germans is by no means entirely selfless; it is also motivated by entirely egotistical and perverse reasons that the narrator puts down to his so-called Charlusism: namely, the fact that he finds Germans sexually repulsive. Charlus’s homosexuality is sado-masochistic: this means he is attracted only to those whom he identifies as a source of evil and suffering; therefore, to condemn the Germans as evil would mean being attracted to them sexually and succumbing to the same sado-masochistic urges he fulfils in Jupien’s brothel: But pleasure for him was never without a certain tendency to cruelty . . . any man he loved became a delicious torturer. He may have believed that taking sides against the Germans would be acting as he acted only during his periods of sexual pleasure, that is, in opposition to his compassionate nature, burning with desire for seductive evil, and crushing virtuous ugliness. (p. 85)

As we shall see, the sheer complexity of Charlus’s moral psychology and the ultimate source of his self-destruction stems from his ambitious attempt to maintain an impossible balance between two incompatible approaches to morality that correspond to two entirely different conceptions of evil: in the public sphere he courageously and conscientiously harnesses his moral judgement to the task of minimizing the oversensationalized definition of evil perpetuated by political patriotism; in the private sphere, however, which for Charlus means the gay underworld of Jupien’s brothel, he suspends his conscience altogether and merely conceives of evil as a sexual game that provides a delectable source of self-indulgence. Evil for Charlus exerts revulsion and fascination in equal measure depending on whether he finds himself in a socio-political or a sexual context. But Proust, like Gide, implicitly objects to this contradictory attitude, reminding us that evil should only ever be regarded as a serious business: it can never be a purely aesthetic or ludic category, for such an approach, as we shall see, leads to a dangerous suspension of individual moral responsibility for evil.

Charlus: Evil as materialism By the end of his encounters with Charlus, the narrator is well aware that, far from possessing any innate truth value, the ‘official’ public definition of evil as German masks a highly prejudiced jingoistic sensationalism that expediently serves the needs of the French society of the time. He has learnt that an approach to reality based on his

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own subjective interpretation is far more reliable than his former passive absorption of reality that entailed placing his trust in that reality’s supposed ‘objectivity’: I had realised that it is only coarse and inaccurate perception which places everything in the object, when everything is in the mind; . . . I had seen people vary in appearance according to the idea that I or others had of them, a single person being several according to the people who were observing him . . . Finally, the proGermanism of M. de Charlus, like the way Saint-Loup had looked at the photograph of Albertine, had to a certain extent helped me to detach myself for a moment, at least from my belief in the pure objectivity of it, and made me think that perhaps the same applied to hatred as to love and that, in the terrible judgement that at this moment France pronounced on Germany, which she deemed to be beyond the bounds of humanity, the primary factor was an objectification of feelings . . . What in fact made it possible that this perversity was not entirely intrinsic to Germany was that . . . I had already seen in my country successive hatreds which had, for example, made traitors – a thousand times worse than the Germans to whom they delivered France – of Dreyfusards such as Reinach with whom today patriots were collaborating against a country every member of which was by definition a liar, a wild animal, or a fool, exceptions being made for those Germans who embraced the French cause . . . (pp. 221–2)

If his subjectivity has been honed to unmask the politically driven agenda behind definitions of evil, he must also turn his attentions to another, more covert type of evil, with a quite different genealogy, that is shaped not by the collective demands of national survival, but by the select sexually transgressive tastes of the French aristocracy: namely, the gay, sado-masochistic prostitution of Jupien’s brothel. If domestic politics require that Germans conveniently be labelled as evil, then the demands of the flesh conveniently identify evil with pleasure: scapegoating the enemy fulfils a political desire, whereas sado-masochism fuels a sexual fantasy. We are invited to acknowledge the uneasy coexistence of two completely different worlds, that function according to two irreconcilable moral systems: in the public sphere, the heroic, altruistic acts of military sacrifice and bravery in the trenches, devotion to patriotic duty, bombs raining down on an innocent French populace united and dignified in its opposition to the vile German enemy; in private, the decidedly less dignified world of selfish debauchery and insouciance, of wilful escapism from the innocent suffering outside, a fleeting contact between shady identities from different nations and social strata and a tense, unstable relationship between wealthy aristocratic clients and working-class gigolos. The Proustian narrator does not so much endorse a self-hating homophobia, as point to the moral irresponsibility that is associated with adopting an attitude to evil – namely, the selfish pursuit of sado-masochistic sex – that treats evil merely as game, rather than as a serious moral category. Charlus, who in the public domain is the exemplary, morally sophisticated exponent of an anti-patriotism that exposes the nationalist extremism that scapegoats Germans as evil is, within the sanctuary of Jupien’s brothel, the principal cultivator of a morally irresponsible attitude to evil: one that explores it purely as a source of

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forbidden sexual pleasure. The sado-masochistic beatings performed on Charlus are all the more pleasurable to him if he knows that the young man performing them has committed a crime. And conversely, any indication that the male gigolos to whom Charlus is attracted have produced a charitable act in the war effort is met by the Baron with utter disdain. The expression of gratitude by the male prostitute to Charlus that his client’s money will be sent to his penniless soldier brother, far from eliciting the Baron’s compassion, merely infuriates him: The bad impression received by the Baron was further aggravated by the way in which the beneficiary thanked him, as he said: ‘I’ll send this to the old dears and save a bit of it for our kid at the front.’ (p. 135)

Charlus’s sexual practices and fantasies are conducted in a tightly controlled and regulated environment, strongly reminiscent of the cloistered world of Sade, where only the selfish pursuit of pleasure matters: any hint of compassion and normative morality is an obstacle to this aim. Where Zola portrays violence and criminality as barriers to sexual desire, in Proust, they positively fuel it. Where Jacques Lantier feels guilt at the atavistic murderous impulses that re-emerge when his desire is aroused, Charlus positively relishes the sexual excitement he feels at the mere mention of criminality and violence. Lantier’s destructive physiological determinism which robs him of his moral freedom is in Charlus replaced by a highly self-conscious regulation and cultivation of sexual urges. Selfish hedonism replaces uncontrollable biological impulses. What is most difficult for the narrator to digest, however, is that the moral boundaries dividing the two notions of evil to which he has been exposed throughout the novel – the evil shaped by politics and the evil identified with materialism  – have become dangerously blurred. Young men who in one context are brave, virtuous and prepared to risk their lives for their country, in another are quite happy to act as paid gigolos for supposedly respectable wealthy aristocratic clients who seek out sexual beatings. In one passage, the gigolo Maurice, who has no compunction about inflicting beatings on his debauched client Charlus, in the same breath expresses his willingness to sacrifice his life for a noble officer who has been killed in the trenches: ‘You see? Some rich people are all right. I wouldn’t mind getting myself killed for someone like that,’ said Maurice, who obviously performed his terrible fustigations of the Baron only out of mechanical habit, a neglected education, need of money and a preference for getting in a way that was meant to be less trouble than working, but which may in fact have been worse. (p. 129)

This passage reveals an alarming level of moral cynicism where the very possibility of disentangling ‘good’ from ‘evil’ becomes radically destabilized. Maurice’s apparently selfless claim to be willing to sacrifice his life for that of another man is contradicted by his complete moral detachment from the sexual beatings he simultaneously performs on Charlus, which are purely attributed to pragmatic and opportunistic motives: force of habit, a poor education, the desire to make money and the belief that his role as sexual ‘torturer’ is less taxing than having to earn a living through a ‘proper’ job.

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Herein lies the route to the ‘banality of evil’ that was later to be diagnosed by Hannah Arendt. The shocked narrator contemplates the apparent suspension of all moral values in Jupien’s brothel, where conscience has been replaced by a moral desensitization and routine mechanical habit that completely erodes our individual responsibility for evil: One might have thought them fundamentally bad, but not only were they wonderful soldiers during the war, true ‘heroes’, they had just as often been kind and generous in civilian life, even model citizens. They had long ceased to pay any heed to the moral or immoral implications of the life they led, because it was the life that everybody around them led. Thus, when we study certain periods of ancient history, we are amazed to find men or women, good in themselves, taking part without scruple in mass assassinations, human sacrifices, which probably seemed entirely natural to them. (p. 145)

The narrator warns against the dangers of moral desensitization through habit. Acts that we are initially reluctant to perform because our conscience finds them distasteful gradually become absorbed into a mechanical routine which distances us from any feelings of remorse. The gigolos, who in the public domain are considered brave soldiers and good citizens, at first recoil with horror at the prospect of conducting sado-masochistic beatings on their wealthy clients, but soon become accustomed to this practice as a matter of course. The narrator warns against the ‘banality of evil’: the notion that ordinary people, throughout human history, have found themselves performing unspeakable acts of barbarity without themselves being considered intrinsically evil. As mitigation for the gigolos’ mode of conduct the narrator does cite, with a hint of patronizing condescension, their lack of education and economic deprivation (p. 145), but these are certainly not excuses that can be extended to their wealthy and cultured clients, especially Charlus, whose enthusiastic complicity in these acts is intended to satisfy his insatiable pursuit of physical pleasure. Vice for Charlus has no real moral value: it is merely a pawn in a pleasure-seeking game. It is a sexual fantasy, quite different from the suffering of the trenches. His moral consciousness becomes detached from his actions to the extent that he loses all sense of dignity and descends inexorably into madness: In him, as in Jupien, the habitual separation between morality and a whole order of actions (something which must also occur in a number of public offices, sometimes in that of a judge, or perhaps that of a statesman, and in plenty of others too) must have been established for so long that habit (no longer ever asking moral sentiment for its opinion) had grown stronger with every day that passed, until the day when this consenting Prometheus had himself nailed by Force to the rock of Pure matter . . . yet perhaps my phrase ‘rock of pure matter’ is not exactly right. It is possible that in this pure matter there still subsisted a small quantity of mind. This madman was quite aware, despite everything, that he was prey to a kind of madness and, for those few moments, was just playing a part, since he knew perfectly well that the man beating him was no more of a villain than the small boy who draws the short straw in a game of soldiers and has to play

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the ‘Prussian’, and whom everyone chases in a fervour of genuine patriotism and mock hatred. (pp. 146–7)

This passage shows the unsustainability of the moral equilibrium Charlus tries to maintain between two contradictory attitudes towards evil: on the one hand, his discriminating consciousness dampens the patriotic excess that fosters hatred of Germans; on the other hand he egotistically indulges in a sexually driven debauchery that positively revels in accentuating the material attractions of evil. The Prometheus comparison suggests that Charlus surrenders to the determinism of matter, yields to the transgressive temptations of the flesh to the point where he is on the inexorable path to self-destruction. Just as the Greek God was chained to a rock, his liver repeatedly eaten by eagles as a punishment for stealing fire from Zeus, Charlus has wilfully transgressed the moral order through physical excess. His debauchery and the madness to which it has driven him do not completely eradicate his moral consciousness  – he realizes that his sexual ‘torturers’ are no more evil than the little boy who in children’s war games is designated as the German scapegoat  – but it clearly shows that his complete abandonment to his biological urges is fast eroding his sense of moral responsibility, leading to madness. Whether evil is the product of political ideology or sexual predilection, somebody has to be held morally responsible for it. There is something reminiscent here of the dilemma faced by Julius in The Vatican Cellars. Where he saw crime merely as game, as the ideal fictional subject to explore in his next novel, he felt no sense of moral obligation, only complete creative freedom; but as soon as that crime became a reality then suddenly its moral repercussions were brought home to him and his conscience had to intercede in time to keep his creative impulses in check. The same is also true of Charlus, except that his conscience does not intervene in time to save him. His exploration of evil as sexual fantasy may well be seen by him as a harmless pursuit conducted in a private space where all moral barriers are suspended, safe in the knowledge that he is cordoned off from the judgemental, homophobic public space in which he pursues his anti-patriotic moral crusade. But treating morality as a self-indulgent game always exacts a heavy price: it leads to self-destruction which eradicates the sense of moral responsibility provided by our conscience and leads to physical and social demise. There can be no escape from our sense of moral responsibility for evil; not even in the materialism of sexual pleasure or the creative fantasy of fiction.

Moral and creative consciousness Proust thus emerges as an anti-materialist: matter is a potentially uncontrollable source of egotistical, self-destructive evil. Charlus serves as a warning about matter’s capacity to destroy our moral compass if we allow ourselves to slip into an irresponsible approach to evil that sacrifices our conscience to the selfish pursuit of sexual pleasure. Counteracting this biological evil calls for a different type of subjective moral psychology: not the retrospective Nietzschean historical perspective that countered politicized evil, but a

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psychological temporality that is more akin to Bergsonian duration. The Proustian narrator thus emerges with a notion of duration, an invigorating interpenetration of past and present states of mind that provides the requisite sense of heightened freedom and clarity of thought to overcome the inertia and decay of matter and provide lucid moral judgements that find ultimate expression in his novel. But whereas in Bergson consciousness is able to transcend matter, by taking the form of that creative dynamism he calls ‘élan vital’, an energy or life force that drives the human race forwards through a mystical state of plenitude, the moral consciousness envisaged by Proust is a purely aesthetic, rather than evolutionary form of creativity, that does not contribute to the collective advancement of the species, nor to any type of transcendent mystical experience. Proust has no interest in situating human moral progress in relation to other life forms; nor does he wish to enter into a dialectical relationship with matter where consciousness is re-dynamized by its confrontation with its inert resistance. Matter is simply the enemy which prevents consciousness –and specifically the writer’s consciousness – from operating freely and creatively, suspended from any sense of its own mortality. It is a source of biological instinct that destroys our moral compass; but even more seriously, a source of artistic mortality that threatens the creation of the work of art itself. The independence of mind from matter is especially important to the Proustian narrator whose overwhelming concern is to transcribe his moral insights onto the page before he dies. The illusion, however fleeting, that he can complete his novel before his body fails him is afforded to him by isolated privileged moments of conscious experience that mobilize his creative faculties in a way that offers temporary respite from his own material mortality. This illusion of ‘extra-temporality’ – of an escape from the corrosive effects of time on his physical self – is provided by a moment of epiphany that is akin to Bergsonian duration in its exhilarating feeling of psychological fluidity that suspends the conventional temporal boundaries between past, present and future: So many times in the course of my life reality had disappointed me because at the moment I had perceived it, my imagination, which was my only organ for the enjoyment of beauty, could not be applied to it, by virtue of the inevitable law which means that one can imagine only what is absent. But now all the consequences of that iron law had suddenly been neutralized, suspended, by a wonderful natural expedient, which had held out the prospect of a sensation – sound of a fork or hammer, same book title, etc. – both in the past, which enabled my imagination to enjoy it, and in the present, where the actual shock to my senses of experiencing the sound, the touch of linen, etc., had added to the dreams of the imagination the thing which they were habitually deprived of, the idea of existence – and, thanks, to this subterfuge, had allowed my being to obtain, to isolate, to immobilize – for the duration of a flash of lighting – the one thing it apprehends; a little bit of time in its pure state. The being which had been reborn in me when, with such a tremor of happiness, I had heard the sound common at once both to the spoon touching the plate and the hammer hitting the wheel, or felt the unevenness beneath my feet common to the stones of the Guermantes’ courtyard and St Mark’s baptistery, etc.,

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this spirit draws its nourishment only from the essence of things, and only in them does it find its sustenance and delight. (pp. 180–1)

The Proustian notion of ‘duration’  – the fluid interpenetration of past and present moments within consciousness – gives the self the same palpable feeling of wholeness and liberation as Bergson’s, but it does so through a more specifically aesthetic operation that entails the mutually productive merging of sense impressions with the imagination. ‘Time in its pure state’ is felt whenever these two types of aesthetic conscious activity coincide, activities which usually function in isolation from one another in discrete time frames (the imagination, which compensates for an absent reality, tends to be associated with the past, whereas our sense impressions are invariably triggered by the concrete world of the present). And it is matter itself – nature – temporarily released from its usual physical and destructive role that provides the creative impetus for this operation: first, by generating a particular sense impression (such as the sound of a fork or hammer) that triggers the recollection or imagination of a similar experience in the past, and secondly, by enhancing our appreciation of this sensory experience in the present moment. Matter thus has a suggestive, supra-temporal potential that points beyond its finite concrete existence. Proust offers us an alternative, psychological and spiritual dimension of reality that liberates us from the fact-based concrete materiality that he earlier identified as the province of scientific observation. But the sense impressions and imaginative faculties set in motion by matter do not just offer the self a new and heightened state of consciousness; they also offer the self the illusion that it has escaped, however fleetingly, from the constraints of conventional time and thus from the iron grip of its own mortality: ‘One minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us, in order to feel it, the man freed from the order of time’ (p. 181). Proust describes the liberating experience of time experienced as pure flow, elevating it to a quasi-celestial experience which appears to cheat death and therefore render all anxiety about the future irrelevant. Rather like the ‘deep self ’ Bergson identifies with ‘duration’, Proust identifies an ‘authentic self ’ that is obtainable only through a continuous consciousness within duration. But despite this temporary recovery of an authentic self through a duration that appears to cheat death, the spectre of mortality in Proust is never far away, returning with a particular urgency whenever the narrator considers the task of writing his novel. The more the writer considers the daunting task of transcribing his moral observations onto the written page the more he is confronted by a sense of his own mortality, his own material demise as a potential creator of the great novel he has still to write for posterity: ‘The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up’ (p. 345). So far as the creative process is concerned, the temporality that governs matter lurks as an ever-present threat to the human spirit, gradually hemming it in from all sides, as if it were trapped in a fortress, from within which it desperately tries to stave off its imminent and inevitable demise. Contrary to Bergson’s spiritualist optimism, there is no sense in Proust of consciousness being the superior, defining quality that sets humans apart from lower, less intelligent life forms; rather the opposite is true: human consciousness is subject to the same physical imperfections as other species (such as ‘protozoa’ or ‘the

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body of a whale’, p. 345), imperfections that drag it back down to the level of the most simple and rudimentary living organisms. Be that as it may, the writer remains buoyed by the conviction that he has something of great value to communicate to his reader and is therefore anxious to transcribe his discoveries as quickly as possible. The metaphorical description of his consciousness as a crumbling fortress is soon replaced by the more positive image of his brain as a rich seam waiting to be tapped for its jewel-like riches: ‘I was well aware that my brain was a rich mining-basin, in which was a vast expanse and enormous diversity of valuable deposits. But would I have time to exploit them?’ (p. 614). The narrator continues to allay his anxiety by upholding his conviction that Time, though an unavoidable threat to creativity, is also an aspect of human existence that immeasurably enriches our understanding of the self, and this is a sentiment that is intuitively felt by everyone. This realization encourages the narrator to persist with his novel: Moreover, the fact that we occupy an even larger place in Time is something that everybody feels, and this universality could only delight me, since this was the truth, the truth suspected by everybody, that it was my task to try to elucidate. (p. 355)

These concluding words point to the centrality of Time as the ambivalent matrix of his novel. On the one hand, Time understood purely in its conventional sense as a material, measurable, concept is unequivocally destructive and a source of great anxiety: a reminder to the writer of that finite, biological dimension of our being that inhibits his capacity to create; on the other hand, Time, perceived as duration – in the Bergsonian sense of the lived experience of a fluid, continuous consciousness  – offers him the most productive route towards understanding and capturing the sheer richness and complexity of human moral psychology. He ends his novel on an ambivalent note: if he is granted the ‘biological’ Time needed to complete his work before he dies, then he will be in a position to demonstrate that ‘psychological’ Time offers us that superior insight into human moral psychology  – warts and all  – which a purely ‘spatialized’ conception of the human denies us. The Proustian narrator’s subjective temporality affords him a unique moral insight into the human condition, an insight that as we have seen also signals his independence from the superficiality of political ideology and the ‘pseudo-objectivity’ instilled by scientific culture.

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Evil and Ennui: Bernanos and Céline

The death of individualism We have seen how the paradigm shift endorsed by Lautréamont and Zola from a theological notion of evil as sin and suffering, to a scientific conception of evil as instinct and atavism, was in turn followed by Proust and Gide’s substitution of individualism for human biology as the source of evil. Evil, in other words, was no longer governed by fixed, universal rules, but hinged on individual choice and interpretation. The question ‘what is evil?’ was thus reformulated as: ‘who defines evil?’ The rigid moral categories imposed from outside by science, religion and politics were cast aside in favour of the human subject’s internal psychological capacity to judge for herself. To be sure, Proust and Gide are at pains to remind us that this newly acquired moral self-determination should not overlook our social responsibilities to others (to do so, as we have seen, leads to the self-destructive egotism of a Lafcadio or a Charlus); but in the face of the excessive determinism of Christianity, Positivism or nationalist ideology it acted as a timely reminder that the self could exercise its own moral agency, was capable of pursuing an ethical trajectory of its own making. And above all, they argued, it was the writer who stood out as the person most able to identify and interpret what evil is by virtue of the creative act itself: writing demanded a lucid detachment, social responsibility and unique powers of insight that allowed the author to define evil, and attribute value to it, on behalf of his readers. Both the notion of evil and the status of the individual thus emerged enhanced and enriched by this early-twentieth-century shift in thinking: evil was no longer reduced to a single a priori concept, and the self became an independent moral agent emancipated from the strictures of rigid social mores. But what if the power now invested in the individual that had supplanted the faith formerly placed in science, religion and politics was itself also misfounded? What if the capacity for self-determination with regard to evil proved to be as limited and ineffectual as those moral laws previously imposed by theology, science or politics? This is the problem posed by Céline and Bernanos in the 1930s. From their respective atheist and religious standpoints, they severely question the efficacy of autonomous moral agency. Evil was no longer something to be interpreted and established by the self-possessed individual; it was an entity in itself that existed independently of the human subject and eluded definition: an unknowable, all-pervasive force that caught the subject unawares, eluding his or

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her defence mechanisms, physically and mentally eroding his sense of identity. Where Gide and Proust had presented their central protagonists as shrewd arbiters of moral values who could determine for themselves what evil was, and thus exercise a degree of control over it, for Céline and Bernanos this situation was completely reversed: for now it was the human subject who was determined by evil and, more worryingly, held in thrall to its power. But how can we explain this shift in the balance of power from an independent moral agent who is capable of mastering evil by dint of his own judgement, to a new notion of evil as an external force that tyrannically controls the individual and is resistant to interpretation? Essentially by the pessimistic and volatile climate of 1930s France, a climate that allowed evil to spread insidiously by profiting from the erosion of credible moral frameworks that could curb its growth and domesticate it. Three interconnected historical factors explain this moral erosion. The first, and most important, was postwar disillusionment: both writers had been traumatized, and become embittered by, their experience of fighting in the World War I; notwithstanding the considerable bravery and zeal they had displayed as soldiers in battle (both men were injured in the trenches, Céline severely so),1 their fiction nevertheless struck a chord with an entire disenchanted generation in denouncing modern warfare for its barbarity and horror, rather than praising it according to traditional heroic virtues of patriotic military action. A letter from Céline to his parents, written from the front line at Verdun in September 1914, positively drips with that caustic emotional directness that some 20 years later was to characterise the brutal battle scenes in his famous novel Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit): We barely sleep three hours a night and walk around rather like automata governed by the instinctive desire for victory or death . . . for three days the dead have been continuously replacing the living to such an extent that mounds have formed that are being burnt, making it possible in some places to cross the Meuse by foot, walking over the German bodies of those who tried to make it across and were wiped out by our unrelenting shell-fire.2

This harrowing portrait of human suffering, given explosive force by the image of a riverbed clogged up with corpses, typifies the unrelenting savagery that Céline associates with war in his novel. Céline’s transposition of this graphic cynicism from his early correspondence to his later fiction suggests that his first-hand experience of the horror of the Great War was still at the forefront of his mind when he was writing in the 1930s. And I shall argue that a slightly more muted, albeit equally palpable scepticism about the nature of military action similarly pervades Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d’un curé de campagne), written in the same decade. But the latent trauma of war that provides a strong autobiographical undercurrent to the broader pessimistic outlook of both novels was further accentuated by a second major crisis that cast its shadow over the 1930s, prompting fierce debate on what constituted a fair and stable society: namely, the economic Depression. Indeed, while writing their novels, both authors were themselves suffering severe financial hardship: Bernanos as an exile in Majorca struggling to pay his debts in France,3 Céline as a novice doctor

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based in a decidedly downtrodden suburb of Paris. Thirdly, of particular concern to the deeply religious Bernanos at this time was the double threat to the political and moral credibility of the Catholic Church. On the one hand, Catholics were losing ground to the Marxists: in a period of acute economic hardship, the possibility of redressing material injustices through class war was unsurprisingly more enticing to the working class than the prospect of eternal afterlife preached by the Church; on the other hand, traditional Catholicism was fast becoming associated with Fascism, in particular with the atrocities carried out by the Phalangist supporters of Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Thus, a combination of post-war disillusionment, material hardship, and the erosion of Catholicism’s spiritual integrity by both left- and right-wing political parties, made for a divided and unstable society, one where established values and institutions were suddenly exposed as vulnerable and open to scrutiny. The confident self-reliance and spirit of moral independence characteristic of the Proustian and Gidean era were suddenly replaced by a period of chronic self-doubt, anxiety and deep ideological rifts. Where Gide and Proust had championed individual self-determination in order to loosen the dogmatic stranglehold that science, religion and politics maintained over interpretations of evil, Bernanos and Céline faced the opposite problem: it was precisely the absence of a dominant moral framework, an absence that stemmed from a chronic social malaise, that rendered the self increasingly susceptible to a seemingly gratuitous, indiscriminate, evil that a crisis-riven society was incapable of containing or defining. Where Gide and Proust regarded moral frameworks as too powerful, Céline and Bernanos saw them as too weak. This fragility is exposed by Céline and Bernanos’s ruthless debunking of those socially legitimized practices and structures that were generally considered to give reassuring moral meaning and direction to our existence: war, civilian life, colonialism, capitalism, science and medicine, psychiatric institutions in Céline; war, Christianity, Communism, medicine, family life in Bernanos. All are revealed to be hypocritical fragile masks, superficial ideals, behind which an all-powerful and intangible evil lurks. For Céline the patriotic heroism of war masks a desperate and cowardly desire for self-preservation at any price in the face of meaningless killings; the outward respectability of civilian life conceals child abuse and crime motivated by greed; the patriotic enterprise of colonialism is merely a cover for personal enrichment, the proliferation of incurable diseases and the enslavement and beating of the colonized subject; the American dream promised by capitalism, it transpires, is brutally dashed by crushing solitude, dehumanizing drudgery and a total indifference to the suffering of others; the pursuit of scientific and medical progress is undermined by economic greed and spiteful personal vendettas; and psychiatric institutions contain patients whose sexual perversions and madness make them barely distinguishable from the supposedly ‘normal’ civilians who live outside their walls. If Bernanos’s redemptive Catholic perspective offers a slightly more hopeful portrait of French society than Céline’s shockingly nihilistic depiction, he is equally uncompromising in his portrayal of evil as an omnipresent, insinuating presence that paralyses moral structures from within. The Catholic Church has become impersonal and institutionalized to the point of preaching humble obedience instead of alleviating poverty during a time of Depression; Communism’s professed desire to eradicate social iniquities merely masks

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an ambition to transform everyone into petty capitalists; medicine and the doctors who practice it are hopelessly ineffectual and weak willed in the face of innocent suffering; the stable bourgeois family unit is riven by adultery, jealousy and matricidal hatred; and war has become an impersonal, mechanized and barbarous killing machine that epitomizes the frightening moral apathy into which modern man has descended. Thus, despite their antithetical religious and secular stances, both writers demonstrate with forensic precision how these institutions and practices that supposedly constitute the moral glue that binds the community together are in reality in a state of social meltdown: this results in the rapid emergence between the cracks of a new, indiscriminate and gratuitous type of evil that takes on the same elusive, visceral and unstable qualities as the society from which it originates. In what follows I examine three interrelated aspects of this evil that both authors address in an attempt to capture and convey its notorious complexity and elusiveness: its history, its linguistic expression, and its antithetical relationship to love. First, both novelists subtly chart the origins of evil to the deep-seated psychological trauma that is the historical legacy of the Great War, a trauma which is further exacerbated by the relentless gloom of economic Depression. Secondly, both make strenuous efforts to address the very real difficulties inherent in representing this evil by finding an appropriate style and conceptual vocabulary; since this type of evil was historically without precedent and intrinsically paradoxical in nature, no pre-existing literary models could do it justice – for it was neither specifically physiological (as it was for Zola), nor was it exclusively psychological (as for Proust and Gide), but combined elements of both: it was symptomatic of an intangible collective malaise, but at the same time an unmistakably visceral and physically destructive experience. In order to convey as authentically as possible these two seemingly contradictory aspects of evil, their innovative solution was twofold: first, to give a sense of the elusive psychological dimension of evil indirectly through cognate, equivalent terms – hatred (‘la haine’) and the abject in Céline; ‘ennui’ in Bernanos; secondly, to give concrete and authentic expression to the more visceral and physically destructive effects of evil through the evocative metaphor of disease: tuberculosis, leprosy, syphilis and malaria in Céline; a corrosive cancer in Bernanos. Both writers thus combine a vocabulary of complex mood and emotion with harsh and gritty evocations of material decay in a style that is deliberately pared down, eschewing all literary preciosity and erudition: Céline employs slang, whereas Bernanos prefers the direct simplicity of the diary form over complex literary exposition. Thirdly, having sought to define this intangible evil as accurately and unpretentiously as possible, both novelists wonder whether or not it can be defeated, especially by the antithetical power of love, which could act as a potential antidote to its destructive impact. As a believer in the notion of spiritual love, Bernanos’s Catholic priest looks to exorcism and altruistic humanity as indispensable ways of limiting the spread of evil; but through his apocalyptic portrayal of Robinson and Madelon’s tempestuous relationship, the more nihilistic Céline brutally demystifies the very notion that love conquers all. History, language and love thus underpin the two novelists’ respective portrayals of evil and it is to these that I now turn.

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The folly of war As already suggested, both Céline and Bernanos belonged to that generation of young men who bore the deep-seated psychological scars of the Great War. While Céline’s novel is written with hindsight, transporting the reader back to the trenches and their devastating consequences, as opposed to Bernanos’s novel which discusses war purely from the contemporary standpoint of a 1930s provincial French parish, both articulate the same fundamental dilemma: that of a society not only confronted with economic Depression, but also still struggling to reconcile the barbaric legacy of the war experience with the traditional glorification of military action as the epitome of patriotic heroism. To this particular generation the notion of patriotic ideology and the rhetoric that perpetuated it appeared hollow, mendacious and morally perverse in the light of the unimaginable and pointless suffering that had been inflicted by the terrible events of 1914–18. In a forceful letter to Frédéric Lefèvre about his 1926 novel Sous le soleil de Satan, Bernanos commented that this glaring discrepancy between the traumatic futility of war and the hyperbolic language of patriotism that sought to disguise it with anachronistic and inflated notions of heroic bravery was a particular source of concern to writers at that time, who felt disillusioned and misunderstood: Everything had been taken from us. Whoever held a quill at that time found himself compelled to reconquer his own language, to remould it from scratch. The most reliable words were withheld, the most noble were empty and failing us. It was common practice to refer to the re-enlisted warrant officer, killed by chance in battle not even as a hero but as a saint . . . I knew very well that the lie came not from the big things, but the words themselves.4

The writer, in other words, had to wrest language back from the normalizing, falsified rhetoric of patriotism to produce authentic literary works that conveyed the visceral, gritty reality of the war experience as it really was. Thus, whether they adopted a religious or a secular perspective, there was an awareness among writers that putting a moralizing gloss over the unprecedented phenomenon of twentieth-century mechanized mass slaughter was both irresponsible and misleading. Both authors see this awareness perfectly encapsulated in the plight of the mobilized soldier. As the narrator of The Diary of a Country Priest says: ‘for all of my generation the word “soldier” brings to mind the very usual sight of a civilian during military service’.5 Soldiers, in other words, fight not out of moral conviction, but legal obligation. The notion of individual moral agency is thus completely alien to a whole generation. In similar fashion the overarching myth cynically exposed by Journey to the End of the Night is that war is justified in the name of a higher virtue: ‘la Patrie’. Suddenly, the idea that killing is perfectly acceptable, indeed even heroic, provided it is carried out in the name of the motherland, is open to moral scrutiny. Céline brutally dismantles this notion of patriotic duty through the actions of his two central protagonists Bardamu and Robinson, who represent the antithesis of the brave, heroic soldier who believes that the evil perpetrated by war has a higher noble cause. They are terrified, cowardly, indifferent to the German enemy

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and want to survive at all costs. Contrary to Proust, who condemns his protagonists for their naive patriotism, the result of ideological indoctrination that demonstrates excessive adherence to a flawed moral conviction, Céline’s central protagonists never had any moral principles in the first place. Robinson and Bardamu do not even pretend to be patriotic: they just want to avoid dying. Through their eyes we are merely privy to the sheer horror and violence of war, epitomized by the graphic description of the death of a horseman and colonel by shellfire: The blast had carried him up an embankment and laid him down on his side, right in the arms of the dismounted cavalryman, the courier, who was finished too. They were embracing each other for the moment and for all eternity, but the cavalryman’s head was gone, all he had was an opening at the top of his neck, with blood in it bubbling and glugging like jam in a pan. The colonel’s belly was wide open and he was making a nasty face about it . . . All that tangled meat was bleeding profusely.6

The force of the projectile thrusts them into an embrace, a caustically satirical depiction of fraternal love, which is further debunked by the shocking comparison of blood to jam and the presence of a gaping stomach wound. The visceral quality of Céline’s language is effectively conveyed both via the onomatopoeic description of the blood gargling from the colonel’s neck and his bathetic comparison of the human victims to pieces of flaming meat. On the other hand Bernanos’s character Olivier, contrary to Bardamu and Robinson, is a young man who has actively chosen to fight. And contrary to Bardamu, what he opposes is not so much the idea of war itself, as the moral bankruptcy into which modern warfare has descended in an increasingly secularized society. This bankruptcy has two causes: the Church’s increasing concession of its spiritual authority to the State, and the rapid mechanization of the modern military machine. The first of these is discussed by Olivier in the historical distinction he makes between the soldier who fought for the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne out of a strong moral conviction – namely, the defence of God and the Christian Church – and the modern-day soldier who is merely the desensitized servant of the State. Olivier’s frustration at the secularized nature of the modern-day soldier’s role is epitomized in his description of the death of his commander, who was discovered to have been a priest only after he died: ‘How did he die? Strapped to a pack-mule like a sausage. He got a bullet in his belly.’ (p. 189). Bernanos’s direct, violent description of death is strikingly similar to Céline’s depiction of Bardamu’s commander: the dehumanizing comparison of the victim to a piece of meat; the dispassionate, matter-of-fact evocation of his demise. The crucial difference, however, is that Bernanos traces the pointless barbarity of war back to the erosion of spiritual values which could restore to war some much-needed moral legitimacy. Bardamu’s description stems from cynical indifference, whereas Olivier’s is the product of moral outrage at the soldier’s obsoleteness in a secular society. Olivier attacks the Church for abrogating its control of military power to the State. Modern-day Christianity has compromized its integrity and autonomy through a

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series of expedient concordats with the State. Its former ability to give war a spiritual justification has now been replaced by a concession to the temporal self-interest of high finance: ‘And the titulary gods of the modern world – we know ’em; they dine out, they’re called bankers’ (p. 195). Aside from the decreasing spiritual authority exerted by the Church over the conduct of military action, Olivier also expresses anxiety at the mechanization of warfare. In a passage which anticipates Hannah Arendt’s notion of the ‘banality of evil’ (discussed in more detail in Chapter 7), Olivier voices his concern that this mechanization blurs the boundaries between evil intentions and evil actions. Mass destruction can be inflicted at the flick of a switch from high up in an aeroplane without heed to the suffering it causes: The cleverest killers of tomorrow will kill without any risk. Thirty thousand feet above the earth, any dirty little engineer, sitting cosily in his slippers with a special bodyguard of technicians, will merely have to press a button to wipe out a town, and scurry home in fear – his only fear – of being late for dinner. Nobody could call an employee of that description a soldier. Can he even deserve to be called an ‘army man’? And you people, who refused Christian burial to poor mummers in the seventeenth century, how do you mean to bury a guy like that? Has our trade become so debased that we are no longer responsible for any of our actions, that we share in the horrible innocence of our steel machines? (p. 194)

Two points emerge from this passage: first, the mechanization of warfare erects a disturbing barrier between the act of killing and the perpetrator’s moral consciousness of that act. Technology means that the pilot who drops his bombs from high up in the sky not only is completely desensitized to the suffering he inflicts down below, but also has no sense of the moral purpose or consequences of his actions. For this reason he cannot really be called a soldier, but an engineer: an automaton executing orders through technology, rather than a conscious being influencing events by virtue of his own moral agency. The ‘horrible innocence’ of the aircraft engineer anticipates Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil, which, as I have already suggested in the introduction, contemporary philosopher Susan Neiman in particular sees as the most morally dangerous manifestation of evil today: the capacity of ordinary humans to carry out acts of indescribable evil through the thoughtless execution of orders. The trivialization of evil is given particularly ironic poignancy by Olivier’s statement that the main concern of the aeroplane ‘engineer’ is to carry out the bombings as quickly as possible so that he gets back home in time for dinner. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the nightmarish scenario of detached, mechanized slaughter evoked by Olivier presciently anticipates the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, when unspeakable suffering was inflicted by the handful of pilots who were ordered to drop the atom bomb upon Japan. But the desensitization brought about by mechanized warfare is also compounded by the soldier’s loss of moral prestige: no longer the proud missionary of Christ as he was in the era of Charlemagne, his role since the seventeenth century has been reduced to that of the obedient servant of the secular state. Thus, it is not only the moral legitimacy of war, but that of the soldier himself that have been

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compromised by the rapid onset of a state-sponsored modern mechanized warfare which the Church has done nothing to prevent. Both Céline and Bernanos, then, place the moral legitimacy of modern warfare under the spotlight. The killing and destruction such warfare authorizes can no longer be assumed, as it was in the past, to have a noble purpose that renders it immune to accusations of being evil. And this realization of the questionable virtues of modern military might is especially important because it conditions the moral psychology of the novelists’ respective central protagonists, Bardamu and the priest. Bardamu is traumatized by war to such an extent that he sees its morale-sapping violence reproduced everywhere in civilian life, as does his erstwhile companion Robinson, who retreats into a cynical indifference towards humanity, the frustrating effects of which, as we shall see, lead his lover Madelon to kill him at the end of the novel. If for Céline, however, modern warfare inflicts deep psychological scars that cannot be removed, for Bernanos, it nevertheless has some redeeming features, acting as a spur to seek out an alternative and more positive form of moral action: the priest’s conversation with Olivier about the contemporary dangers of the ‘banality of evil’ highlights the need to wage a spiritual, rather than temporal, war against evil in the world.

Evil: The search for an authentic language A questioning of the moral justification for war, therefore, opens up a fissure in the traditional social fabric. For it reveals the lurking presence of an evil that infiltrates society, despite the checks and balances that this society puts in place in its attempts to maintain the moral status quo. And most crucially, this proliferation of evil as a pervasive, uncontainable force, one that exposes the fragility of the law, also reflects the psychological trauma of a war-scarred generation. It is not, in other words, an evil that has clear metaphysical contours, that easily lends itself to reassuringly precise abstract philosophical, religious or scientific definitions, but the intangible manifestation of a mood of frustration bubbling beneath the surface of respectable society. To reduce this evil either to the abstract theological terminology of sin and suffering or to its secular scientific equivalents of instinct and atavism would thus fail to capture the deep-seated malaise and emotive charge that underpin it. As already suggested, Bernanos and Céline were therefore faced with a particularly daunting challenge: to find an appropriate idiom – both stylistically authentic and conceptually accurate – in which to represent a new evil for which there was no pre-existing discourse. This language had to be psychologically nuanced and subtle enough to encapsulate the collective malaise of which this evil was a symptom, yet without relinquishing the physical directness needed to convey the volatile and corrosive impact of this evil on the human subject. Whereas at one end of the moral and literary spectrum Zola had explained evil acts according to uncontrollable physical impulses and biological drives, and at the other end Proust and Gide had argued that evil was primarily determined by subjective psychological insight and evaluation, Céline and Bernanos had the more complex task of defining a new type of evil that combined both physical and psychological characteristics.

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Both writers employ a stripped-down style tailored to their ethical search for authenticity, which for Bernanos means an unpretentious spiritual approach to life, and Céline an unflinchingly bleak, nihilistic view of the world. Consequently, Bernanos avoids the complex, multilayered narrative typical of the modernist novel in favour of the psychological subjectivity and confessional quality of the first-person diary, which has two distinct advantages: first, contrary to the mimetic realism of Zola, which is confined to representing on external visible reality, it accommodates supernatural explorations of evil; secondly, it favours a more transparent, honest language that escapes the repetitive, allegorical didacticism of Catholic dogma. As for Céline, his equal commitment to stylistic authenticity and honesty is instead reflected in a pessimistic world view where neither spiritual nor supernatural solace have any part to play. He identifies slang as the perfect linguistic solution, owing to its raw emotional directness which punctures and debunks the overwrought stylistic pretentiousness that in his view characterize Proust’s ‘neo-classical language’ – a language too sterile and elitist to capture the visceral quality of the human condition. So despite their antithetical outlooks, both authors embrace a stylistic approach to evil that is deliberately anti-literary. This is reflected not only in their concrete directness and non-erudite style, but in their deep-seated reservations about the writer’s social efficacy in the face of evil. Contrary to Gide and Proust, they refuse to accord any special vocation or privileges to the writer, either in their capacity as authors themselves, or via their protagonists. Instead, they debunk the very notion of the writer as a socially ‘superior’ figure. D’Abimcourt is a simple country priest who often self-consciously struggles with expression and regards erudite language as too inauthentic and narcissistic. Bardamu is a similarly unexceptional doctor whose hostility to literature is reflected in his irreverential attack on Montaigne (p. 258), in which he debunks the canonical author’s profound writings on suffering as completely irrelevant to the needs of his disease-ridden patients. Where the socially elitist Gide and Proust, as we have seen, pay frequent homage to the creative intelligence, celebrating the writer’s separateness from society and his uniquely eloquent altruism in interpreting, isolating and domesticating evil, Céline and Bernanos on the contrary flag up the prosaic nature of their works, the moral impotence of the novelist and their characters’ subjection to the same mediocrity and banal suffering as other members of society. This deliberate espousal of pared down stylistic authenticity and unpretentiousness is, however, insufficient in itself to capture the unprecedented complexity and notoriously elusive dimension of this type of evil. Consequently, both Bernanos and Céline recognized, as well as some of their more discerning critics, that readers also required some kind of identifiable conceptual foothold provided by a cognate, equivalent vocabulary of evil if they were to gain some purchase on what this evil means. This attempt to pin down the ambivalent nature of evil is conveyed via the cognate terms the abject and hatred for Céline, and ennui for Bernanos. Contrary to hatred and ennui, which were terms chosen by the authors themselves, the abject was a notion applied only retrospectively to Céline by Kristeva; but its conceptual subtlety and richness provides us with a pertinent and intellectually coherent starting point from which to interpret Céline’s particular portrayal of evil and it is to this that I now turn.

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The abject Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject, which she convincingly applies to Céline’s writing, sheds light on both the psychological ambivalence and physically repulsive nature of evil in his novel. The abject refers to the human reaction of horror elicited by a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by a loss of distinction between subject and object, or between self and other. The primary literal example of what causes such a reaction is the corpse, because it makes our own eventual death palpably real: it is ‘death infecting life’.7 However, other manifestations of physical decay can elicit the same reaction: excrement, an open wound, faeces, sewage. These physical manifestations of decay are reminders of that which we normally exclude from our lives in order to live: this is why they destabilize our identity. Kristeva argues that in the past religion excluded the abject from normal life as a form of taboo or impurity (e.g. the lepers in the Old Testament). It therefore had a mechanism in place for ‘purifying the abject’. But in a modern ‘dechristianized’ society, religion’s cathartic capacity to purify the abject has disappeared. In the absence of clear moral frameworks, the abject is no longer kept away from the human subject, but infiltrates our lives, operating in the borderline zones of human experience, grabbing us at the most fragile moments of our subjectivity, unmasking the unsavoury truths of our human condition. The abject can include crimes like Auschwitz because they draw attention to the fragility of the law. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a saviour . . . Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law – rebellious, liberating, and even suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses a body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you . . . 8

Thus, it is not physical decay per se that is abject, but rather those morally ambivalent experiences that provoke within us the same horror and destabilization of identity as this decay. In other words, the repulsion and unease we feel when confronted by a corpse is akin to our reaction to louche and pernicious manifestations of evil such as hidden crimes, disguised hatred, treachery, which for Kristeva, all constitute forms of abjection. Two obvious examples from the novel fit Kristeva’s subtle definition: Bardamu’s betrayal of his friend Robinson by having furtive sex with his partner Madelon, and Robinson’s conspiracy with the petty-minded Henrouille family to cover up the murder of their ageing mother-in-law for money. Such crimes operate in the shadows and can emerge from the most unlikely source (a treacherous friend for instance); above all their duplicitous and hypocritical nature take us by surprise, thereby

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exposing our vulnerability: this is why they destabilize our identity. The menacing unpredictability of the abject contrasts with more obvious and clear-cut affronts to morality, such as those crimes that possess a certain grandeur in their conception because they take explicit pride in displaying their contempt of the law. Such is the type of crime committed by Gide’s Lafcadio, because it assigns a certain noble value to evil that is transparent, defiant and deliberate. But this is not what we find in Céline. Evil acts are on the contrary surreptitious, cowardly and mediocre. Kristeva’s theory of the abject thus brilliantly pinpoints two major characteristics of Céline’s evil: first, its blend of psychological and physical characteristics – it possesses a moral ambivalence that reproduces within us the same psychologically destabilizing effects as a death-infected physical world – and, secondly, its capacity to unmask and expose the fragility of social structures. But as I have already suggested, what her theory of the abject does not do is sufficiently trace the origins of this evil to collective patterns of human psychological behaviour generated by history: in particular World War I, the Depression and colonialism. These three historical occurrences generate within Céline’s characters an intolerable psychological pressure that seeks an outlet in explosive moments of cathartic release that take the form of gratuitous hatred directed towards one’s fellow man. This externalization of hatred releases the pent-up rage and suppressed emotion that these events have subconsciously generated within him. Thus, if the Kristevan abject allows us to pinpoint evil acts that are both physically degrading and expose the fragility of the law, then hatred acts as the vent or safety-valve for the suppressed traumatic impulses of a post-war generation.

La haine Céline provides us with three particularly poignant examples of how evil manifests itself as an explosion of hatred that emanates from the underlying traumas and destructive impulses of the human psyche: first, his violent encounter with Lola in New York, which is the culmination of his dire experience of poverty; secondly, his witnessing of child abuse in Paris which he associates both with material hardship and latent post-war trauma; and thirdly, the petty-minded, vindictive cruelty he suffers on his sea voyage to Africa, which unmasks the savagery and ruthless self-interest that lie behind the supposedly civilizing virtues of the colonialist mission. The first episode demonstrates the corrosive power of hatred, borne of a pent-up frustration that combines a desperate desire for self-preservation with subconscious feelings of revenge. Having been reduced to a state of dismal solitude and penury in New York and in the hope of extracting money from her to survive, Bardamu visits Lola, his flighty ex-lover who callously abandoned him in disgust at his cowardice during the war. In the period preceding this climactic encounter Bardamu’s experience of America has been one of relentless and unmitigated misery: we are offered an unforgiving tableau of an urban jungle, ruthless capitalist exploitation, the dehumanizing alienation of factory work, loneliness, social hostility, poverty and squalor. The myth of the capitalist American dream pedalled by Hollywood movies is harshly debunked by the catalogue of setbacks suffered by Bardamu. While Bardamu’s trip to America is set in the immediate post-war

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period, Céline’s uncompromising depiction of joblessness, destitution, desperation and alienation – especially in the so-called land of opportunity – are obviously coloured by the bleak psychological mood of the 1930s Depression era in which he was writing. And while Bardamu may not consciously reflect on his plight as a victim of ruthless capitalism, his cold reception by Lola and her visible embarrassment at his presence act as catalysts that unleash the months of pent-up resentment that have gradually crushed his spirit. When out of polite indifference he asks about Lola’s mother, she replies that she has liver cancer. Seizing his opportunity, Bardamu decides to exploit Lola’s vulnerability in order to extract money from her: he resolves to torment her to such an extreme about the incurability of her mother’s cancer that Lola will pay him to leave. Here, Céline demonstrates the corrosive linguistic force of evil. Such is the unrelenting impact of Bardamu’s words that Lola protests that they are directly worsening her mother’s condition: ‘You’re wicked! Wicked! Saying awful things like that is just your cowardly way of avenging yourself for the rotten situation you’re in . . . And I just know you’re doing my mother a lot of harm by talking that way!’ (p. 201). Undeterred, Bardamu steps up the level of his cruelty so as to target Lola directly, by telling her that the cancer is hereditary. She finally chases him out giving him a hundred dollars and threatening him with a gun. Thus, the hatred directed by Bardamu at Lola has an unconscious motive: namely, to release his pent-up frustration at the brutal dehumanization he has suffered at the hands of American capitalism. Lola is made the unfortunate scapegoat of his suppressed anger and misery. But Bardamu identifies these sudden outbursts of gratuitous hatred not just in himself, but throughout society and in all walks of life. Back in Paris, his witnessing of child abuse is more disturbing still because it continues the bleak socio-economic context of his American experience, only this time mingled with an element of sexual perversity. From his insalubrious dwelling in Rancy, his life marred by solitude, poverty and illness, he repeatedly witnesses the sexual molestation of a young girl by her parents in a neighbouring flat (pp. 239–40). More disturbing than the beatings meted out to the daughter is the fact that this abuse has become a ritual preamble to the parents’ frenzied love-making in the kitchen, punctuated by crudely perverse language. Bardamu’s overwhelming sense of moral impotence in the face of such a perverted sexual ritual is palpable: ‘I was no good for anything, I was helpless’ (p. 240). But Bardamu’s self-loathing and moral impotence is further compounded by the return of Robinson, his former companion-in-arms, whose ‘repulsive substance’ reopens the psychological wounds inflicted by the war ‘I felt he was bringing back a bad dream I’d been unable to get rid of all those years’ (p. 242). Above all, Robinson’s unwelcome presence leads Bardamu to draw a disturbing analogy between the morally sanctioned and clinical killing of the war and the latent, more gradual killing that contaminates civilian life, but is hidden beneath a fragile veneer of respectability. This blurring of moral boundaries between the supposedly legitimized evil of warfare with the perverse cruelty and infamy that infiltrates peacetime existence is brought into particularly sharp relief by the sexually abusive neighbours: I knew what they were after and what they were hiding beneath their innocent look. To kill and get killed, that’s what they wanted, not all at once of course, but

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little by little like Robinson, with all the old sorrows they could summon up, all the new miseries and still shameless hatreds, except when they do it with out-and-out war, and then it’s quicker. (p. 242)

Not only does the hypocritical and morally pernicious behaviour described here perfectly conform to Kristeva’s definition of the abject, it is also given an implicit historical dimension as the continuation within civilian life of the psychological trauma of war. The third episode – Bardamu’s interminable journey on a colonialist ship bound for Africa – further blurs the boundaries between socially legitimized acts of cruelty and the pervasive evil that now infiltrates all facets of civilian life. The journey is described in terms of impending menace. Embarked on a long sea voyage to the ‘Dark Continent’, Bardamu gradually finds himself the target of hatred from his fellow passengers. No direct reason is given: petty rumours circulate that his aloofness and presence as a fee-paying civilian – as opposed to a fully fledged colonialist settler or soldier – are the reasons for his ostracization. But these are mere pretexts. He becomes a focal point, a scapegoat for an innate and inexplicable human emotion; he is the ‘foul and loathsome vilain’ (p. 108), the convenient target of a visceral misanthropy that desperately seeks an outlet. The fact that he is guilty of nothing in particular is irrelevant. Where there is normally a motive for hatred, here none is deemed relevant: ‘When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves’ (p. 110). To paraphrase Gide, this is not so much a ‘gratuitous act’ as a ‘gratuitous emotion’: the essence of the evil described by Céline lies in the unconscious emotion behind it, not in a deliberate desire to transgress the moral code. What is also interesting – and this aligns Céline with Bernanos – is that this hatred is inextricably linked to physical degradation, and disease in particular. The passengers who have so forcefully taken it upon themselves to target their hostility towards Bardamu are ‘malarial, alcoholic, syphilitic in all likelihood’ (p. 108). These diseases are either incurable (malaria) or linked with social stigmatization (alcoholism, syphilis). The physical degradation intrinsic to ‘la haine’ is further emphasized by the humiliating fact that Bardamu is trapped inside his cabin and has to exercise control over his bodily functions. Like a net closing in, hatred takes on an unremittingly visceral quality that brings Bardamu to the very brink of physical and mental collapse. In Kristevan terms, he is fully immersed in the abject, his sense of self threatened by a confrontation with the decomposition of his own body. But in a surprising turn of events, it is at this point that Bardamu, in a desperate bid at self-preservation, paradoxically re-appropriates the legitimizing discourse of war. If, as Kristeva suggests, the abject threatens to dissolve human identity because it presents the individual with that which is normally excluded from, what in Lacanian terms, is known as the ‘symbolic order’ – the realm of language and the law – then Bardamu escapes the abject by invoking the legitimizing discourse of patriotism in order to salvage his identity. The colonialist soldiers who torment Bardamu finally decide to confront him openly in a traditional military discourse. ‘In the name of my comrades in arms and of the passengers on this ship, who are justly indignant at your unspeakable behaviour, I have the honour to demand an explanation!’ (p. 112).

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Bardamu immediately latches on to this language as a means of escaping what he thought was his imminent demise: ‘I had feared some sudden death blow impossible to parry, but in talking, the major was offering me a way out (p. 112)’. He eloquently invokes the notions of patriotism, the motherland, shared heroic experiences in the war as a means of legitimizing his presence on the ship and placating the gratuitous hatred to which he has been subjected. He ends his impassioned speech with ‘Vive la France!’ (p. 114), and just to make absolutely sure he has ensured his survival he flatters the vanity of the soldiers and officers on board by asking them for stories about their heroic exploits. What this episode shows is that the gratuitous hatred aimed at Bardamu is kept at bay by the cynical and desperate re-inscription of his identity into the legitimizing discourse of war as a form of patriotic duty. We have seen that in reality Bardamu scoffs at the idea of defending the virtues of patriotic military action: he prefers to save his own skin, denouncing war as a cycle of pointless destruction that either kills the individual, or at best, inflicts lasting psychological as well as physical damage upon him. The paradox thus emerges that his vulnerability to the gratuitousness of evil is temporarily overcome by invoking the very discourse that legitimizes the evil of war, a discourse, which, deep down, he despises. He appropriates the very language that ‘normalizes’ evil – that of heroic duty – and uses it as a weapon to fight the intangible evil of ‘la haine’ that is symptomatic of the fragility of the moral structures – nation, patrie  – on which that normative language is based. This shows a more complex linguistic strategy at work in the novel that goes beyond Kristeva’s analysis of slang as the language of the abject: namely, one in which Bardamu cynically and deliberately re-appropriates the eloquent, erudite language associated with patriotic heroism, purely as a means of escaping the abject. These three episodes of gratuitous hatred supplement our reading of the Kristevan abject because they introduce an important psychological dimension to evil that is filtered through the cumulative trauma of history. The mediocre evil of everyday life, the despicable human compulsion to hate and destroy one’s fellow man is merely an extension, albeit one that no longer survives in morally legitimized form, of the evil that was openly celebrated in the war. Thus, Bardamu’s post-war disillusionment, the actual gratuitous killings of the enemy that were presented in morally palatable form as acts of patriotism are in his own mind no different from the torment, abuse and cruelty which he has witnessed subsequently in the economic Depression and colonialism of civilian life. Evil is too indiscriminate to be contained by any legitimizing moral framework.

Ennui We have seen then, how the elusively ambivalent nature and origins of evil, an evil for which there is no pre-existing linguistic terminology, is figured in Céline through the cognate notions of the abject and hatred. These two terms capture both the psychologically intangible and the physically corrosive manifestations of evil. The same strategy of seeking to define evil through an appropriate language that encapsulates its elusive, yet physically destructive characteristics is employed by Bernanos, except that

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the term he invokes is that of ‘ennui.’ Bernanos likens evil to ‘ennui’ in the Baudelairean sense: that all-consuming feeling of spiritual emptiness and desolation that makes the individual feel impotent and helpless. It is worth quoting the longest passage in the book on evil: The world of evil is so far beyond our understanding! Nor can I really succeed in picturing it is a world, a universe. It is nothing, never will be anything but a half-formed shape, the hideous shape of an abortion, a stunted thing on the very verge of all existence. I think of sullied translucent patches on the sea. Does the Monster care that there should be one criminal more or less? Immediately he sucks down the crime into himself, makes it one with his own horrible substance, digests without once rousing from his terrifying eternal lethargy. Yet historians, moralists, even philosophers refuse to see anything but the criminal, they re-create evil in the image and likeness of humanity. They form no idea of essential evil, that vast yearning for the void, for emptiness: since if ever our species is to perish it will die of boredom [ennui], stale disgust. (pp. 113–4)

A number of important observations are made here. First, there is the sheer conceptual elusiveness of evil: to comprehend its magnitude is beyond our mental capacities. It has no ontological form, other than that of an aborted creation. Secondly, because of this intangible and incomplete quality, the narrator attempts to define evil not philosophically in terms of what it is, but physically in terms of what it does: it is a type of devouring medusa that engulfs everything in its path. This imagery is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s description of ‘ennui’ as a ‘monster’ in ‘To the Reader’. The self-proliferating physical destructiveness of evil is such that it overrides and subsumes both the evil act itself and the criminal who commits it. The mistake made by moralists, historians and even philosophers, is that they equate evil with its perpetrator. In other words, they locate the source of evil in the individual moral agent. But, the narrator argues, this type of evil – the one he evokes indirectly through the cognate notion of ennui – is not the result of self-determination as it was for Gide and Proust; it is too powerful and discrete for that: rather, it is an entity in itself that exists and exercises its power independently of the human subject or of the crime they commit. The crime and the criminal are merely incidental manifestations of a notion – evil – that goes about its business whether they exist or not. Finally, the narrator turns back to the nature of evil itself: he defines it as a sort of emptiness or abyss – a metaphor that aptly captures the moral void and psychological disillusionment of the time. This image of emptiness is tied to the psychologically abstract notion of ennui, which as we have seen, Bernanos associates with cancer and the loss of Christian values. Thus, evil in Bernanos is figured as a complex synthesis of psychological mood and physical destructiveness: ennui, cancer, a monster, an abyss – which completely overwhelms and erodes the very fabric of individual moral agency. Max Milner’s reading of Bernanos’s evocation of evil through the trope of ‘ennui’ and the images of emptiness and decay with which this ennui is associated, is predominantly theological and Neo-platonic: namely, as a void that insinuates itself in the wholeness of being. Just as goodness is associated with the plenitude and perfection of God and creation, then so too evil is linked to its

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opposite: namely, with imperfection, an absence of plenitude and wholeness of being. But while Milner’s ontological, Christian reading is perfectly consistent with Bernanos’s Catholicism, it overlooks another aspect to his interpretation of evil: namely, the causal link between ennui and the banality of evil which leads to warfare. For in Bernanos, as in Céline, ennui leads inevitably back to the underlying trauma of war. The scale of evil’s power over the human agent is linked back to war itself. For ennui spreads like a fungus that eats away at the individual until he reaches a dangerous level of moral apathy that leads to wars: Humanity will have slowly been eaten up as a beam by invisible fungi, which transform in a few weeks a block of oakwood into spongy matter which our fingers have no difficulty in breaking . . . (As for instance the world wars of today which would seem to show such prodigious human activity are, in fact, indictments of the growing apathy of humanity. In the end, at certain stated periods, they will lead huge flocks of resigned sheep to be slaughtered). (p. 114)

This physically corrosive evocation of the psychological notion of ennui culminates in Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’: that evil which men commit out of moral apathy, when all sense of individual responsibility has been lost. This banality inexorably results in regular wars, bloodbaths blighting every generation. So Bernanos’s ennui can be read in both secular and theological terms, be interpreted both retroactively and presciently: as the symptom of a ‘decomposed Christianity’ that harks back to Baudelaire’s spiritual emptiness and world-weariness of the nineteenth century; but also anticipating that modern banality of evil or moral apathy that was later to be diagnosed by Arendt as the underlying cause of the genocide of the World War II.

The exorcist If Céline and Bernanos both define a new paradoxical type of evil that is as insinuating and intangible as it is physically corrosive and visceral, their strategies for tackling this evil are quite different. As a Catholic, Bernanos could not tolerate a pessimistic capitulation in the face of evil. Contrary to the atheist Céline, he resolves to fight this evil, against the odds. A covert way in which this fight is carried out is through the Christian practice of exorcism. Exorcism, as the Catholic Encyclopaedia reminds us, is: ‘1) the act of driving out, or warding off, demons, or evil spirits, from persons, places, or things, which are believed to be possessed or infested by them, or are liable to become victims or instruments of their malice; 2) the means employed for this purpose, especially the solemn and authoritative adjuration of the demon, in the name of God, or any of the higher power in which he is subject.’9 In our modern secularised era, it has become very difficult to speak of exorcism or demonic possession with any degree of critical objectivity that allows us to take it seriously. One reason, as we saw in Chapter 1, is the undoubted abuse of this practice by a patriarchal Catholic Church that stigmatized

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vulnerable young women as being possessed by the devil according to the negative gender stereotype of the ‘evil feminine’. Another is its more recent sensationalization into a superstitious cult and quasi- ‘horror genre’ by the film industry: the late Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) portrayed possession and exorcism as forms of mass hysteria, even capable of inducing young women to be sexually aroused by Christ on the Cross; less shocking, but perhaps more frightening, were William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), and the derivative The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), both memorable for their indelible images of head-spinning young girls, writhing and contorting on the floor, uttering anguished demonic cries in the presence of traumatized onlookers and austere, Latin-spouting priests. Whatever their cinematic merits, dramatic scenes such as these tend to overshadow a more balanced and theologically informed appraisal of exorcism as a serious attempt to eradicate evil, which for all its abuses, as feminist historian Sarah Ferber has shown, led in some instances to the acquisition of a powerful female moral agency through martyrdom and sainthood. Today, however, the Catholic Church, the only Christian denomination to have codified and ritualized exorcism, quite sensibly considers the act a very dangerous one, to be carried out only in the most extenuating circumstances. Solemn exorcisms can be exercised only by an ordained priest (or higher prelate) with the express permission of the local bishop and only after careful examination to exclude the possibility of mental illness. Nor should the strictly religious practice of exorcism in any way be confused with superstition or magic. Thus, exorcism retains a theological currency that warrants serious attention, albeit with the requisite degree of circumspection. For present purposes, however, a more critical approach to exorcism, devoid of our modern preconceptions, allows us to discern in Bernanos’s novel two compelling indications that suggest that he took this practice seriously as a means of expelling evil. First, there is a similarity between the priest and Jesus; secondly, there is an allusion to the demonic possession of women. That the priest is a thinly veiled allegory of Christ has already been noted by commentators: he lives a life of poverty and humility, capable only of consuming bread and wine, which has obvious allusions to the Eucharist. Although he does not explicitly model himself on Christ (his consumption of cheap wine and bread happen to be the only substances his stomach can tolerate) the allegorical echoes, as Malcolm Scott has noted, are numerous.10 But the parallel between the priest and Jesus is also specifically pertinent to exorcism: for whereas exorcisms are practically absent from the Old Testament, the New Testament includes exorcism among the miracles specifically performed by Jesus. Indeed, the curing of possessed individuals by Jesus  – in a non-ritual manner  – are signs of his divine filiation and of the coming of the rule of God.11 That Jesus did not merely exercise delegated power, but a personal authority that was properly his own, is evident from the direct and imperative way in which he commands the demon to depart; ‘He cast out the spirits with his word, and he healed all that were sick.’12 What is more, certain kinds of spirit, Christ explained, could only be cast out by prayer or fasting.13 That the priest regularly prays and is forced to fast because of his weak stomach, both reinforces his symbolic role as a modern Christ figure, and also endows him with the attributes of a spiritual being with the power to exorcise evil from the world. Secondly, as will be recalled from my analysis in Chapter 1 of Michelet and the Loudun witch-trials,

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exorcism was invariably linked with female demonic possession and it is therefore surely no coincidence that the two parishioners with whom the priest is most concerned, Chantal and her mother, are women implicitly portrayed as possessed. Though the priest carries out no ‘official’ exorcism, his encounters with the women are described in terms that strongly suggest both a state of possession and a sustained attempt on his part physically to expel evil from their souls. The absence of any ‘official’ ritualized exorcism presents the priest in a better light than the manipulative libertines condemned by Michelet’s text: far from stamping his ‘superior’ patriarchal authority over a submissive female, his motivation is purely to eradicate evil and allow mother and daughter to regain happiness through love. Chantal, the proud and defiant 12-year-old daughter of the local Count and Countess, is simultaneously consumed by a long-standing anger and hatred against her mother, whom she believes to be incapable of loving her because she is paralysed by grief at the death of Chantal’s brother, and by a more recent jealousy of her father, to whom she is much closer, but who is ‘betraying’ Chantal by conducting a clandestine affair with the governess. One evening after mass, the priest unexpectedly finds Chantal in the Church and attempts to get her to confess. Though this encounter is outwardly presented as a confession, it is in fact more akin to a veiled exorcism: first, Chantal actively resists the priest’s spiritual intervention, frequently punctuating their dialogue with violent explosions of hatred that are incommensurate with her childlike demeanour (most notably her wish to gouge out her mother’s eyes, stamp on them and kill her, p. 101); secondly, the priest gets Chantal to recite words that allude to her possession by a demon (‘Dear God, I feel bound to offend you, now, but it is not I who wish to offend, but the devil in my heart’, p. 102); thirdly, the curé describes Chantal’s appearance in dramatic, ominous terms that suggests she is inhabited by an external evil force completely beyond her control (‘An unusual, almost alarming nobility of expression bore witness to the power of evil, of sin, that sin which was not her own’, p. 107); finally, at the end of the encounter, which is described as exhausting and arduous, like a real exorcism itself, the priest suggests that the evil that inhabits her is in its final death throes and about to be expelled from her body (‘instinctively I felt this was her great and final struggle against God, that evil was leaving her’, p. 108–9). All these elements point to the priest’s attempt to exorcise demons from a possessed young woman. The suggestion that the priest is conducting ‘unofficial’ exorcisms of ‘possessed’ female parishioners, is also to be found in his even more prolonged and eventful encounter with Chantal’s mother. Where Chantal had mainly expressed intense feelings of hostility and violence, her mother’s words are punctuated by profound bitterness and disillusionment at the injustice of her son’s death, which has led to her loss of faith. Like Chantal, the Countess actively resists the priest’s resolve to steer her towards virtue; yet once again he persists in his attempts, finally persuading the Countess to toss into the fire the lock of hair she insisted on keeping in memory of her dead son. There are two pointers that once again suggest that this encounter is akin to an exorcism: the first, is the priest’s graphic personification of evil as an animal-like, physical ‘enemy’ that needs to be expelled from its lair and its presence exposed in the eyes, mouth and voice of the individual (‘my mere presence will draw sin out, summon it up to

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the surface, into the eyes, the lips, the voice . . . ’, p. 120); secondly, there are several references to the sound of voices – either the sudden and unexpected modulations in the Countess’s voice (‘her voice was hard to recognize, it had become strident, dragging out the ends of the words’, p. 120), or a more general reference to anguished cries and growls being ‘wrenched’ from the bosoms of human beings (‘And I heard, or thought I heard, the groaning of so many men, their dry sobs, their sighs, the rattle of their grief, grief of our wretched humanity, pressed to earth, its fearsome murmurings’, p. 134). If we recall from Chapter 1 that one sure sign of possession was to be inhabited by a cacophony of voices belonging to demons in a tone or language that is too strange and foreign to consciously be articulated by the possessed individual, then Bernanos’s allusion to voices and garbled utterances that need to be expelled must surely be more than just a coincidence. And, also noticeable is that aside from the exorcism itself, love is presented as a powerful compensatory force with the potential to defeat evil. The priest realizes that love is the biggest casualty of the Countess’s bitterness and anger at her son’s death: she is unable to feel maternal love for her own daughter or spiritual love for God. Hence his description of Hell – the most graphic embodiment of evil – as the absence of love: ‘Hell is not to love anymore, madame’, (p. 128). In a quite different secular context it is this absence of love, its very obsoleteness as an ideal that engenders evil at the climax of Céline’s novel.

Céline: ‘Hell is not to love anymore’ The priest may well be dismissed and pitied by most of his parishioners as a naively well-intentioned alcoholic; he may also wrestle with the dogmatic demands of his faith, but his stubborn perseverance shows that some effective moral action against evil is possible provided it is subordinated to divine grace. However, no such message of hope is to be found in the closing pages of Céline’s novel, which also dramatically pit evil against the allegedly positive force of love, with the crucial difference that the former triumphs over the latter. If the priest was eventually able to expunge evil from the Countess by convincing her that, ‘Hell is not to love anymore’, Madelon’s killing of Robinson diagnoses the same problem – evil is caused by an incapacity to love – except that in this case the outcome is more tragic. If the Countess dies, she does so having regained the precious capacity to love; whereas Robinson’s death is loveless and cynical in the extreme. That Madelon should be capable of a crime as serious as murder is especially shocking to the reader, because of all the main characters in the novel she is the least tainted by moral weakness and cynicism. She has nursed an ungrateful Robinson back to health after his temporary blindness caused by his botched assassination of Mme. Henrouille, worked herself to the bone to support him and given up her untroubled existence in Toulouse to follow him to a life of hardship and turmoil in Paris. This final section of the book combines the two privileged modes that Kristeva sees as emblematic of Céline’s style: the carnivalesque and the apocalyptic. In an ill-advised attempt to mend relations with Robinson and Madelon after Bardamu has hit her, the latter suggests a trip to the funfair to clear the air. The attentive reader will know from

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Bardamu’s previous two visits to the funfair that this ‘carnivalesque’ location acts as a catalyst for a moral crisis: his visit to the shooting range with Lola earlier in the novel had triggered in Bardamu a reminder of the madness of war and his violent, uncontrollable outbursts lead to his swift hospitalization in a psychiatric ward. In this later visit to the funfair, the intended celebratory mood of the attractions also masks an unbearable tension, only this time between Madelon, Robinson and Bardamu, with the latter’s recently acquired lover, Sophie, looking on in silent embarrassment. The climactic (or to use Kristeva’s term ‘apocalyptic’) argument in the taxi between Madelon and Robinson leads to Madelon shooting him in an explosion of frustrated rage, an act that is completely unexpected from a character who up until that point had been so admirably docile and patient (p. 433). And crucially, this climactic scene hinges on the impossibility of achieving love. If for Bernanos the Countess’s capacity to love was restored through her spiritual reunion with God, for Céline Robinson defiantly proclaims his incapacity to love to Madelon, whose frustration at his sheer indifference towards her, which is of a piece with his passive disregard for everything in general, reaches boiling point. Robinson’s cynical attitude to love is harshly revealed in his callous dismissal of the genuine affection that Madelon feels towards him, which he describes as an irritating and clinging sentimentality that reminds him of copulating in a toilet: Everything, absolutely everything disgusts me and turns my stomach! Not just you! . . . Everything! . . . And love most of all! . . . Yours as much as everyone else’s . . . The sentimental tripe you dish out . . . Want me to tell you what I think of it? I think it’s like making love in the shit house! (p. 431)

The priest’s capacity to restore love through spiritual elevation contrasts sharply with Robinson’s desecration of this emotion through his provocatively slangish reduction of love to the base human acts of copulation and defecation. The reference to excrement, of course, recalls the Kristevan abject, but here abjection has a particularly corrosive and ironic force because it qualifies neither crimes nor evil acts, as was the case earlier in the novel, but the supposedly more morally uplifting and innocent notion of love itself. Even love, Céline seems to be telling us, is subject to moral contamination, a contamination that is metaphorically evoked through the most repellent form of physical degradation. Contrary to Bernanos, who alludes to love as a form of spiritual hope and regeneration, Céline cynically presents it as one more fragile illusion to which human beings naively persist in clinging. And whereas the Countess at least dies in a dignified manner, at peace with herself and with God, Robinson’s death in the back of a taxi is messy, pointless, protracted and utterly ludicrous. Instead of the moral epiphany and emotional catharsis that gives the Countess’s death some lasting meaning, Robinson is reduced to a gibbering wreck, unable to utter any words other than ‘Hep! Hep!’ (p. 433) The glimmer of hope that can be salvaged from Bernanos’s otherwise dispiriting portrait of an ordinary parish community is nowhere to be found in Céline, who concludes his novel with the same portrayal of omnipresent evil with which he began.

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The long, sombre walk back along the canal after reporting Robinson’s macabre death to the commissariat merely serves to remind Bardamu of the horror of war: Passing the bistro by the canal, we knocked on the shutters for a while. It made me think of the road to Noirceur during the war. The same little light over the door, on the point of going out. (p. 440)

The imminent extinguishing of the light above the door serves as an apt metaphor for the extinguishing of all hope with which the novel concludes. And it was perhaps this relentless pessimism about human nature and destiny that paved the way for Céline’s regrettable flirtation with Nazi politics, for which many critics have never forgiven him, and even today continues to reduce his literary standing within France. Yet the purpose of this chapter has not been to analyse the political evils which Céline is said to have supported, abhorrent though these may have been. Despite the polemical efforts of some commentators to discredit him altogether,14 efforts which in some cases are as morally questionable in their flimsy exposition as the author’s own dubious political beliefs, Céline’s later association with anti-Semitism and right-wing politics does not legitimize our wholesale dismissal of his talent as a writer, and particularly, so far as this book is concerned, as a remarkably lucid writer on the psychology of evil at a particularly troubled moment in French history.

6

Evil, Power and Knowledge: Sartre and Foucault

From metaphysical to institutional evil The preceding five chapters have examined a heterogeneous body of novelists and poets whose significant disagreements – whether literary, political or religious – were superseded by their common identification of evil as an undeniably complex, but ultimately productive conceptual tool for mapping disconcerting ‘paradigm shifts’ and radical social transformations within the context of their times. The precise definition each gave to evil may well have varied in accordance with their individual outlooks and the ethical preoccupations specific to their era, but their belief in the social pertinence of this concept was unanimous. This chapter compares two philosophers, as opposed to exclusively literary figures: namely, Sartre and Foucault. The rationale behind this shift from literature to ‘thought’ on evil is twofold: first, because it acknowledges the absolute centrality of evil in shaping the outlooks of France’s two leading twentiethcentury post-war intellectuals (Sartre dominating the period 1945 to 1968, and Foucault from the late 1960s to his untimely death in 1984); secondly, because despite the generation gap that in most respects makes their philosophical and ideological positions diametrically opposed to one another, both men published works  – Sartre an exhaustive literary biography of Genet, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (Saint Genet, comédien et martyr) (1952), and Foucault a study of the prison system Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison (Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison) (1975) – that invite us to reconsider evil not only as a long-standing metaphysical problem of unjust suffering, but also as an unidentified institutional problem of social repression. Most other post-war philosophers paid short shrift to this ‘new’ institutional problem of evil, considering its metaphysical aspect  – how is the existence of evil justified when the innocent continue to suffer so much? – to be of far greater concern. Initially raised by the book of Job and dramatically resurrected in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the problem of unmerited suffering unsurprisingly loomed larger than ever before in the consciousness of a public still reeling from the terrible shock of the Nazi death camps. This unprecedented tragedy placed moral philosophers on high alert, prompting them to confront evil in one of two ways: the first, more dominant approach, which has since been criticized by Alain Badiou, was to consider evil exclusively from the perspective of the suffering victims of radical evil, an evil so extreme – and for which the Holocaust itself came to stand as the definitive example – that any attempt to explain it rationally

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was deemed both impossible and morally repugnant; the second approach, proposed by Hannah Arendt, was to examine instead the standpoint of the perpetrators of radical evil according to the controversial notion of the banality of evil – the idea that mere thoughtlessness or arbitrary circumstances are enough to lead even the most ordinary people to commit terrible atrocities. I weigh up the pros and cons of these two positions in Chapter 7. Suffice it to say that contrary to their philosophical contemporaries, Sartre and Foucault alert their readership to a hitherto unidentified problem of evil that does not require the Holocaust as its benchmark for moral evaluation. This is not the radical evil blatantly perpetrated by an overtly totalitarian regime, but a more surreptitious evil that results on the contrary from hidden mechanisms of repression of which the public is unaware, precisely because these mechanisms operate under the auspices of outwardly respectable legal and judicial institutions that constitute the nerve centre of our antitotalitarian, democratic State. Without our realizing it, these State institutions – which function in close collaboration with officially recognized bodies of knowledge, such as criminology and psychiatry – have systematically categorized and codified evil in such a way as to allow them to exert an excessive degree of control over all aspects of our lives. This normative institutionalization of evil has led to a dangerous paradox: namely, that authoritarian power structures silently proliferate within our modern democratic State, which undermine the progressive values of justice and freedom from oppression (values which originate in the secular Enlightenment) this very State is meant to endorse. Recognizing this moral contradiction, Sartre and Foucault thus attempt to restore evil to a ‘de-institutionalized’ independent category of thought, to release it from this closed circuit of normative State power and knowledge – what Foucault aptly defines as the ‘juridico-scientific complex’ – so that evil might once again fruitfully be employed as an ethical tool by free-thinking autonomous individuals. How these two philosophers set about ‘rescuing’ evil from the clutches of institutional appropriation and control is the central focus of this chapter. But in order to understand the originality and import of their critical re-evaluations of evil it is first necessary to have some notion of the intellectual and political history of the Enlightenment, whose largely positive reputation these re-evaluations implicitly question and undermine. The institutionalized evil they unmask can, on the contrary, be regarded as a negative consequence of the secular Enlightenment, one that endangers its proud Voltairean heritage of emancipating man from political and religious tyranny, and yet at the same time should not be confused with another damaging legacy of the Enlightenment: namely, the ‘instrumental reason’, identified by Adorno and Horkheimer, that led society inexorably to the catastrophe of totalitarian Fascism. Let us briefly contextualize then, Sartre and Foucault’s positions in relation first, to the Enlightenment’s Voltairean legacy and, secondly, to its more sinister Fascist heritage analysed by their German philosophical contemporaries.

The threat to Voltaire’s Enlightenment legacy The most common misconception challenged by Sartre and Foucault’s critiques is that the modern criminal justice system that emerged from the secular Enlightenment is fairer and more transparent than its more obviously authoritarian feudal and religious predecessor. At first glance, this perception is strongly supported by historical evidence.

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For it was the excessive presence of evil in the world – whether considered as political or metaphysical evil – that first triggered the laudable Enlightenment crusade to combat all forms of oppression: indignation at the social iniquities of an absolutist monarchy and Church on the one hand, and the unmerited suffering of the Lisbon earthquake on the other, fuelled a growing moral consensus that freedom and justice were fundamental and indispensable human rights. And this consensus in turn naturally explains post-Enlightenment society’s increasing eagerness to transfer moral authority from God and the monarchy to a completely new figure: the radical secular intellectual, for whom Voltaire came to stand as the trail-blazing, modern example. Whether it was via his scathing attacks on the Augustinian theodicy stubbornly defended by the Church even after Lisbon, or his vicious pre-revolutionary satire of Louis XVI’s blatant abuse of power, it was Voltaire, as the most outspoken of the ‘philosophes’, who initiated a proud secular French tradition (which was later continued by Zola and Sartre himself) of the public or ‘messianic’ intellectual: the key spokesperson for a post-theological, post-feudal society, who, as Michel Winock has shown, is deemed to possess the single-mindedness, radicalism and critical acumen necessary to denounce and remedy all forms of social tyranny and injustice.1 I return to this point below. Yet when viewed in a harsher light, this same Enlightenment secularism, as Foucault’s critique in particular implies, is shown to have a sting in its tail, because no sooner had a welcome degree of intellectual and social autonomy finally been wrested by Voltaire and his followers from the clutches of an authoritarian Church and monarchy  – providing man with the longed-for moral ammunition he needed to tackle evil as both metaphysical and political problem  – than this autonomy was once again snatched from his grasp by a less visible, but equally self-perpetuating source of authority. An ostensibly more liberal, decentralized system of secular institutional power that promised to consign to the scrapheap of history the feudal tyranny for which King and Church had so roundly been castigated, proved upon closer inspection to have the same propensity as these traditional powers to deploy evil as an effective instrument of State repression. Although it was no longer visibly exercised from the pulpit or the palace, this new institutionalized State authority made its presence felt in a more subtle and surreptitious guise via a normative discourse of crime and punishment that was supposedly committed to moral progress and justice, but in practice was far more concerned with justifying and enhancing its own theoretical influence and legitimacy. This new type of evil was no longer an easily identifiable problem for which the Church or King could directly be held responsible, but a wolf in sheep’s clothing: mere putty in the hands of an outwardly liberal secular State that duped man into believing that the moral justice and freedom he so avidly coveted were now within his reach, when in many ways they remained as elusive as ever before.

Adorno and Horkheimer: The failure of Enlightenment Reason If the institutionalized evil diagnosed by Sartre and Foucault raises serious questions about the secular Enlightenment’s progressive Voltairean legacy, their critiques target the Enlightenment only indirectly. In this regard, they differ considerably from their philosophical contemporaries from the ‘Frankfurt School’, Adorno and Horkheimer,

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whose Dialectic of Enlightenment, originally published in 1944, unequivocally denounces the failure of the so-called Enlightenment project and specifically its faith in reason, for contributing to the barbaric totalitarian evils of Nazism.2 Their work bears the imprint of the pessimistic post-Holocaust era in its bold assertion that the rationalism once so revered by the eighteenth-century ‘philosophes’ as the ultimate guarantor of individual freedom and objective liberal thought, was always destined to become its own worst enemy: most shockingly, through its cynical re-appropriation by the Fascists into a ruthlessly efficient instrument of totalitarian power. Key to the terrifying success of the Fascist regime was its paradoxical ability to ‘rationalize the irrational’: to provide a legitimate and coherent ideological outlet for festering anti-Semitic feeling via a well-oiled propaganda machine that was able to communicate its message of hatred via a carefully orchestrated mythological rhetoric and iconography that tapped into the latent fears of the German collective psyche. As a political phenomenon Fascism was in the end nothing more than the inevitable historical culmination of an Enlightenment reason that had already radically been ‘instrumentalized’ into an impersonal economic logic that ruthlessly permeated every facet of modern industrial society, little by little ‘extinguishing the subject’ by making the need for individual moral reflection completely redundant. So relentless and comprehensive was instrumental rationality in its suppression of individuality that it was easy for a German nation already brainwashed by anti-Semitic propaganda to become desensitized and duped into accepting the eradication of the Jews as a cold economic and military necessity.3 Adorno and Horkheimer’s bleak assessment of a totalitarian system that ruthlessly profited from this ‘corruption’ of Enlightenment reason typifies the post-Holocaust approach to evil as the source of an innocent suffering so extreme that any reaction to it other than moral outrage is inconceivable. Sartre and Foucault’s unmasking of a more subtly hidden, institutionalized power, however, exposes us to an altogether different type of evil whose danger lies precisely in the fact that it does not elicit moral outrage, because its modus operandi quietly affords it free rein to reinforce State mechanisms of authoritarian control beneath the respectable facade of a liberal democratic system, as opposed to the undisguised, brutally repressive methods of the Nazi regime. Inasmuch as the former subtly inhibits individual freedom and the latter was responsible for genocide, it would be wholly inappropriate to draw a moral equivalence between these two systems of government. By the same token, however, it must also be recognized that the mechanisms of power used by liberal democracies can be regarded as more morally pernicious than those of totalitarian States because they remain disguised and undetected; hence Sartre and Foucault’s concerted attempts to expose them to public scrutiny, albeit from discrete philosophical perspectives that assess the nature and impact of institutional power in quite different ways. The next section will examine how they each seek to define power and to expose its abuse through a ‘de-institutionalization’ of evil.

Power and the de-institutionalization of evil If Sartre and Foucault identify the same problem – the repressive State power that results from the unmonitored institutional re-appropriation of evil  – their interpretations

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of precisely how that power manifests itself differ according to their opposing philosophical and ideological agendas. As a Marxist existentialist, Sartre locates social power in class politics: he considers the French Republic’s rigid categorization and normalization of evil to be symptomatic of its bourgeois anxiety to minimize the threat evil poses to its social hegemony; this process entails expediently offloading all responsibility for evil onto a criminal underclass from which the bourgeoisie seeks to distance itself as much as possible. The post-Marxist, post-humanist Foucault, however, conceives of power as neither explicitly political in its intentions, nor as concentrated in the hands of one particular class or group, but rather as a diffuse, apolitical phenomenon that derives from the mutual interaction of judicial institutions with new bodies of knowledge. On the one hand the justice system exerts authority over its citizens by categorizing them according to definitions of evil it obtains from the new social sciences of criminology, psychiatry and so on; on the other hand, these disciplines are themselves able to enhance their own social legitimacy by dint of their association with a State-sanctioned system of crime and punishment whose institutionalized subjects provide them with suitable new objects of analysis and modes of enquiry. Evil is thus normalized through a combination of knowledge and power – the ‘juridico-scientific complex’ – which is not necessarily intentional or conscious, but nonetheless constitutes an authoritarian mechanism of social control. Sartre and Foucault’s respective attribution of power to different sources  – the bourgeoisie and the ‘juridico-scientific’ complex  – is matched by their use of different benchmarks to measure the effects this power has on the human subject. As a Marxist existentialist, Sartre considers the autonomous reflective consciousness to be the touchstone of human subjectivity, the precious kernel of our individual moral freedom which he wishes above all to shield from the institutionalization of evil by a bourgeoisie that fears this consciousness as the biggest potential threat to the moral status quo. This is why it is above all Genet’s unique consciousness, not just as criminal but as crime writer, that Sartre endeavours to ‘rescue’ from the stigma of criminalized ‘Other’ that bourgeois society foists upon him; for only consciousness can provide Genet with the singular identity he needs to prevent his assimilation into the institutionalized anonymity of crime figures. For the post-existentialist and more apolitical Foucault, however, it is the body, rather than consciousness, that is the most important component of human identity. Accordingly, his critique evaluates exactly how institutionalized evil impacts on our bodily needs, dispositions and behaviour. This view is consistent with Foucault’s notion of the ‘decentred subject’, his idea that far from possessing the capability of defining our own identity through the exercise of an autonomous consciousness, as Sartre believes we do, we are in fact already ‘pre-constructed’ subjects, shaped by a multitude of competing social discourses and institutions that determine our destiny and deprive us of moral autonomy. These important philosophical distinctions between political power and diffuse power, ‘conscious’ versus ‘corporal’ subjectivity, also inform the different methodologies employed by Sartre and Foucault in pursuit of their shared ethical goal of ‘de-institutionalizing’ evil through the unmasking of its repressive mechanisms of social control. Their works touch upon four key questions that bring into sharp relief those aspects of institutionalized evil that most need to be addressed: the first, is the role of the intellectual, and the value society is prepared to invest in him as a credible

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voice of opposition to institutional authority; the second is criminal subjectivity and the extent to which that subjectivity  – the criminal consciousness in Sartre and the criminal body in Foucault – is repressed by institutional authority; thirdly, both works denounce the artificiality of moral hierarchies imposed by social authorities intent on maintaining a clear-cut separation between ‘evil’ criminals and ‘virtuous’ law-abiding citizens when in reality these hierarchies are revealed to be far more permeable and blurred than we are led to believe; fourthly, both works examine the precise role played by literature in fighting this institutionalization of evil; Sartre echoes his ringing endorsement of the ‘messianic’ intellectual by championing the unique oppositional power of literature and the writer, whereas Foucault, in keeping with his scepticism about the intellectual, considers literature to be a medium that is morally compromised from the outset by its tacit complicity with institutional authority.

The role of the intellectual Any assessment of Sartre and Foucault’s contrasting evaluations of the social effectiveness of the ‘intellectual’ in combating institutionalized evil must first take into consideration the broader Oedipal conflict between two philosophical generations. By the mid 1960s, Sartre’s post-war stranglehold on French philosophical and political life was finally begin to loosen, much to the relief of a new generation of Young Turks who were only too ready to topple him. A backlash was gathering momentum from a growing number of emerging intellectuals who were anxious to escape the overbearing ‘paternal’ shadow of Sartrean Marxist existentialism, which they considered passé, preferring to pin their flag to the mast of the new doctrine known as structuralism. William Bourton ironically expresses this rebellion as akin to that of adolescents rejecting the authority and tastes of their unfashionable parents,4 whereas contemporary philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who first rejected, then later embraced Sartrean philosophy, recalls that for his generation much of the appeal of Foucault and his structuralist contemporaries Lacan and Althusser lay in their ‘massive avoidance of Sartre’ (‘l’évitement massif de Sartre’).5 What sealed Foucault’s reputation as the standard-bearer of post-Sartrean philosophy which brought this intergenerational conflict to a head, was his publication of The Order of Things (1966). In his favourable review of the work, J-M Benoît heralded Foucault as the man who would at last rescue France from the hegemonic grip of Sartre’s ‘messianic’ intellectualism.6 Despite this Oedipal crisis, and notwithstanding Foucault’s irritation at Sartre’s hostile review to his work, which was essentially critical of its anti-Marxist and anti-historical position,7 personal relations between the two men do not appear to have been so antagonistic as to prevent them from combining forces on a number of social causes: throughout the 1970s they marched side by side to defend the rights of factory workers, demand better conditions in prisons (a point to which I return below), and campaign on behalf of the Vietnamese boat people seeking sanctuary in France.8 Be that as it may, these temporary alliances could not paper over fundamental philosophical and ideological differences. For The Order of Things constituted a major

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assault both on Sartre’s Marxist existentialism and the conception of the intellectual that this philosophy implied. There was a marked renunciation on Foucault’s part of overtly political engagement, in favour of a post-Marxist model of critical thought that as Lawrence Kritzman aptly puts it is ‘independent of utopian models’.9 In May of that year, Foucault himself outlined the philosophical differences with his predecessor by making a telling distinction between the ‘new’ generation comprising himself, Lacan and Lévi-Strauss which was concerned with the notion of ‘system’, and the preceding Sartrean generation, which had been concerned above all with ‘meaning’. It was declarations such as these that led Foucault to be identified, somewhat reluctantly, with the structuralists. In 1978 (by which time he had become identified with the post-structuralists), he refined this distinction further, stating that there was a clear philosophical division between on the one hand Sartre and Merleau-Ponty who stood for a ‘philosophy of experience, of meaning, of the subject’, and on the other hand Cavaillès, Bachelard, Koyré, Canguilhem and Foucault himself who espoused a ‘philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of the concept.’10 If this distinction is broadly applicable to the two works under consideration, we shall nevertheless see how Sartre, as well as Foucault, considers the objective forms of rational knowledge that constitute our society, while Foucault, by the same token, occasionally draws on the harrowing personal experiences of criminals such as the regicide Damiens. In the main however, Foucault’s retrospective assessment of a philosophical ‘paradigm shift’ in the France of the late 1960s is both accurate and consistent with his radical re-valorization of the role of the intellectual. If Sartre retained his faith in the intellectual as the most important voice of moral authority, Foucault thought it was about time this figure became more self-contained and modest in his ambitions: The role of an intellectual is not to tell others what to do . . . The work of an intellectual is not to shape others’ political will; it is, through the analyses that he carries out in his own field, to question over and over again what is self-evident.11

Foucault’s unequivocal distinction between the Sartrean idea of the ‘messianic’ intellectual as formulator of universal truths and shaper of the collective political will, and his own, more measured notion of the ‘specific’ intellectual as an unexceptional citizen whose remit is merely to question that which is self-evident, is carried over into their works. Sartre didactically proclaims Genet as the voice of moral opposition for the Cold War generation; whereas Foucault confines his task to exposing, with clinical detachment, the institutionalization of evil within the criminal justice system, inviting the reader to form her own moral judgements. Sartre and Foucault’s contrasting philosophies and conceptions of the intellectual also reflect the different routes by which they first alighted upon the topic of institutionalized evil. For Sartre this topic was the logical culmination of an intense period of literary and political gestation on the problem of evil in general. Evil formed the touchstone of both his literary biography of Baudelaire (1947) and his play The Devil and the Good Lord (1951), which explores the moral consequences of political tyranny and can be read as an allegory of the Cold War shift towards totalitarian Stalinism. Foucault’s engagement with the institutionalized problem of evil, however,

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was triggered by a more concrete and localized social injustice: namely, the appalling prison conditions in France in the early 1970s. The plight of a number of imprisoned Maoists, some of whom Foucault knew personally, drew his attention to this problem, leading him in February 1971 to become co-founder, along with Daniel Defert, of the ‘Groupe d’Information sur les prisons’ (GIP). Although this organization’s avowed goal was to gather information about the deplorable conditions inside State prisons, the GIP was also, as Miller suggests, ‘meant to be a testing-ground for a new type of intellectual – self-effacing, yet subversive, modest yet cunning.’12 This is a reiteration of Foucault’s notion of the ‘specific’ intellectual, which rejected as obsolete Sartre’s ‘messianic’ intellectual. And in accordance with this re-valorization of the intellectual as self-effacing figure, the founding statement of the GIP concluded as follows: It is not up to us to suggest a reform. We wish only to make known the reality. And to make it known instantly, nearly day by day: for the issue is pressing. We must alert opinion and keep it alert.13

The detailed affidavit provided by one particular prison psychiatrist Dr Edith Rose, who worked at the prison in Toul which exploded into violent rioting in December 1971, struck a particular chord with Foucault. Dr Rose painstakingly documented the harrowing conditions in prison which had sparked the riots and had led, among other atrocities, to a dramatic increase in suicide attempts. Her careful documentation of these conditions was indicative of the low-key, non-didactic methodology Foucault was himself to employ in Discipline and Punish some four years later. He enthusiastically noted that ‘instead of criticizing the prison as an institution, Dr. Rose had simply “exposed what had happened, on such a day, in such a place, in such circumstances.”’14 Such words could just as easily apply to the methodology employed by Foucault himself in his study of the prison system. Having examined the context in which these works emerged, let us now turn to the works themselves, focusing in particular on their respective discussions of three key theoretical areas: first, the institutionalization by the State of the criminal’s identity, whether this is principally achieved via the criminal consciousness (Sartre) or the criminal body (Foucault); secondly, the imposition by the State of artificial moral hierarchies that seek to separate criminals from non-criminals; and, thirdly, a consideration of whether or not literature has an active role to play in opposing this institutionalization of evil.

Criminal subjectivity: consciousness The central premise of Sartre’s exhaustive biography of Genet, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952) is that against overwhelming odds, Genet is successfully able to ‘de-institutionalize’ evil via a uniquely provocative semi-autobiographical prose that not only denounces the bourgeois State for its normative and reductive re-appropriation of evil, but is also able to restore that evil to its rightful place as a galvanizing notion that mobilizes and unleashes man’s repressed individual consciousness. Genet effectively uses his literature as a unique vehicle for transforming ‘Evil’ into ‘la conscience dans le

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mal’, evil as mere pawn of the State into evil as a powerful catalyst for individual moral agency and self-awareness. Genet’s literary recuperation of evil from bourgeois social control amply fulfils Sartre’s existentialist demand that man must become master of his own destiny by responsibly exercising the moral freedom he is born with through the individual choices he makes, no matter what potential obstacles to this freedom society may throw at him. The remarkable trajectory of Genet’s own life and writings bears testimony to his unique ability to overcome an obstacle that for most men would have been insurmountable: his criminalization by society from an early age. Orphaned as a child and put into foster care he quickly turned to a life of petty crime which resulted in repeated spells in correctional institutions and prison. Genet’s identity, both as thief and homosexual, was thus quickly determined and stigmatized as one of society’s undesirables: a threatening ‘Other’, fit only for a life of crime. But Genet makes the bold and singular decision to abandon the criminal career society expects him to pursue in order to write about his crimes instead. In this way he is able to make a virtue of necessity: to turn his moral ostracization into the very source of his moral freedom, a freedom that allows him to exact revenge against a society that has sought to predetermine his life according to its rigidly institutionalized preconceptions about evil. Instead of behaving as society expects him to behave, as the threatening criminal ‘Other’, he turns his criminal acts into literary weapons, seductive objects of aesthetic beauty that lure and ensnare the reader into an unwitting empathy with those acts. Once this identification is ensured, Genet is able to pounce on the unsuspecting reader, who finds himself trapped and forced to confront his own latent bourgeois attraction to evil, which conventional society normally suppresses as too shameful to be acknowledged. Genet thus paradoxically chooses to embrace the criminal identity society has thrust upon him, not through acts, but an oppositional literature that allows him to ‘criminalize’ the reader who has always sought to criminalize him. This, however, is no easy task. As the archetypal institutionalized criminal, Genet finds it especially difficult to assert any kind of moral autonomy, so emphatically does bourgeois society suppress his individual consciousness. His priority thus becomes to recover that consciousness, wrench it from the homogenizing clutches of institutionalization so as to reconquer his individual freedom and unique identity. The major stumbling block faced by Genet in this enterprise is that society prefers to interpret crime as a statistic, rather than as a moral choice: it merely documents crimes as a sequence of punishable offences, instead of acknowledging them as discrete acts that are the individual products of a particular moral consciousness. In other words, so long as society is able to keep tabs on the punishment of crime, it need not concern itself with the psychology or motivations of those who carry it out. Crimes are thus emphasized to the detriment of the criminals in whom they originate. Sartre objects that the State’s emphasis on criminal acts rather than the criminals who commit them, morally desensitizes society to the existence of evil, suppresses its ‘conscience dans le mal’; hence why the criminal justice system and the social sciences that provide it with theoretical support need to be reminded that crime results from a moral choice to commit evil, and cannot simply be neutralized and dismissed via an impersonal set of statistics. Sartre’s rehabilitation of Genet revolves not only around restoring this crucial causal link between

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criminal consciousness and crime, but also making the average Frenchman, the non-criminal, aware that evil also lies dormant within his own consciousness, and is not something from which he can conveniently disassociate himself by projecting it exclusively onto a criminal ‘Other’: Society puts up more easily with an evil action than with an evil word. For specialists, magistrates, criminologists, sociologists, there are no evil acts, only punishable acts. For the man in the street, there are evil acts, but it is always the Others who commit them. Genet wants to reveal to the former that evil exists and to the latter that its roots are to be found in themselves.15

The reason why statisticians, criminologists and sociologists are far more interested in identifying punishable, rather than evil actions, is because the bourgeois State’s main concern is to maintain the status quo, by keeping crime under control and thus the population happy. Genet himself, according to Sartre, is aware of this banalisation of evil, to paraphrase Arendt’s term; he is only too mindful of the fact that the social authorities are more interested in the punishment of crime than in the attribution of guilt or moral responsibility for it. His initial attempts to counteract this banalisation of evil by actively committing crimes himself amounts to precious little, because none of these criminal acts is ever perceived as unique or exceptional, but merely as one more in a long line of undifferentiated statistics. His trip to Nazi Germany in 1934 makes him realize that his thefts in no way distinguish him from a population that is already prone to stealing and is thus just as immoral as he is: It is a nation of thieves. If I steal here, I perform no singular action which fulfils me; I obey the usual order. I am not destroying. I am not doing evil, I disturb nothing. Scandal isn’t possible. I am stealing in the void. (p. 491)

But any misconception he may harbour that committing a crime in the supposedly more morally upstanding and liberal French Republic could achieve the notoriety and singularity that eludes him in Nazi Germany, is similarly dispelled. In France too, theft is regarded as belonging to the natural order of things: it merely contributes to a crime rate that is neither exceptional nor alarming, since it is exactly the same as the birth rate and marriage rate (p. 491). Genet’s problem is that try as he might, he cannot make his evil actions stand out from those of other criminals without these actions immediately becoming absorbed and forgotten in an undifferentiated, generalized set of statistics. Short of committing so many crimes that he would single-handedly alter the crime figures and force society to acknowledge a new pathological trend, Genet must find a way of making his own criminality stand out from the herd, give it a singular significance that makes people sit up and take notice: If Genet were to ‘destroy’ this order, he would, by his own force, have to transform the crime rate to the point of making it the symptom of a pathological state: only then would it appear to statisticians as a virus, in short as a social disease. (p. 491)

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Sartre employs a proto-Foucauldian vocabulary to argue that whether in democratic France or totalitarian Nazi Germany institutional authority deals with crime in the same cynical and morally detached way: an army of statisticians, backed by legitimizing bodies of scientific knowledge ‘explain away’ the criminal’s actions until their moral specificity and threat to society is completely liquidated and the criminal is absorbed and depersonalized into a set of statistics that makes him conform to an average. Society’s ‘conscience collective’ mobilizes these institutionalized bodies of knowledge that reduce criminality to an unremarkable, anonymous set of figures, until such time as it is completely satisfied that the criminal’s identity and actions have been neutralized and rendered totally inoffensive. Society’s priority, in other words, is to de-individualize the criminal and his actions, remove any potential horror or fright that they might elicit in the law-abiding citizen, until they are deemed to be sufficiently unthreatening and under control (p. 491). Genet understands this social phenomenon perfectly well; he recognizes that in such a conformist society the criminal cannot possibly assert his individual identity, cannot hope to make the public aware of his unique consciousness through his criminal actions alone. This is why he decides, in what Sartre regards as a life-changing decision that his priority should shift from committing crimes, to writing about them: ‘The inexpiable act consists not in doing evil but in representing it’ (p. 494). Sartre, in other words, identifies in Genet a potential way out: social institutions may well suppress the criminal consciousness, but in the right circumstances this consciousness can reassert its autonomy, prove its unique existence, and even ensnare the consciousness of the non-criminal Other. In other words, ‘la conscience dans le mal’ is latent, and awaits release through literary expression. As we shall see, Foucault believes the opposite to be true. The younger philosopher’s assessment of how evil institutionalizes the criminal subject starts from a completely different premise than Sartre’s: namely, that the justice system does not so much suppress and ignore the moral consciousness of the criminal, as reconstruct and substitute that consciousness from the outset. Or to put it another way: Foucault’s critique dismisses the Sartrean notion that there is such a thing as a prior, latent consciousness, such as Genet’s, waiting to be identified and set free via literary expression, for that consciousness was never allowed to exist in the first place. Sartre’s claim that society’s fixation on punishing the crime is a dereliction of its duty to understand the criminal, is contradicted by Foucault’s counter-assertion that the main flaw in the justice system is in fact its abandonment of its original moral mandate to make punishment fit the crime, so intent has it now become on compiling a detailed profile of the criminal based on a speculative reconstruction of his identity from a vast body of scientific theory that often bears only a tenuous relation to the particular act for which he is being punished. Sartre, in other words, argues that criminal consciousness is dangerously underdetermined; whereas Foucault objects that it is overdetermined as he suggests in the following passage: The criminal’s soul is not referred to in the trial merely to explain his crime and as a factor in the judicial apportioning of responsibility; if it is brought before the court, with such pomp and circumstance, such concern to understand and such

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‘scientific’ application, it is be judged and to share in the punishment . . . Psychiatric expertise, but also in a more general way criminal anthropology and the repetitive discourse of criminology, find one of their precise functions here: by solemnly inscribing offences in the field of objects susceptible of scientific knowledge, they provide the mechanisms of legal punishment with a justifiable hold not only on offences, but on individuals; not only on what they do, but also on what they are, will be, may be.16

If Sartre accuses the justice system of completely ‘depersonalizing’ the criminal by removing him from public view, suppressing his consciousness, concealing his identity behind an anonymous set of statistics which fail to address his individual psychological motives, Foucault makes the very same accusation, but from the opposite point of view: the criminal’s individuality is denied not because he is made invisible, but rather, because he is thrust into the spotlight, brought to the law courts supposedly to assess the nature of his crime, but in practice so that his entire personality can be scrutinized, analysed and mulled over by a body of ‘scientific’ experts such as criminal psychiatrists and anthropologists whose intervention in the judicial process begins with his arrest and continues throughout his incarceration. The regrettable outcome of this system is that what ends up being judged is not the crime of which he is accused, but his entire life. And the basis of this judgement is not his consciousness, but a preconceived notion of it, a generic criminal ‘profile’ – what Foucault ironically calls soul (‘âme’) – constructed according to pre-existing theories, assumptions and assessment reports about his past, present and future conduct. Knowledge in this context is thus the instrument not of selfless justice and understanding, as it purports to be, but of excessive institutional power: a knowledge that ends up legitimizing the State’s absolute control over the individual, instead of enhancing its ability to punish as fairly as possible the particular act of which he is accused.

Criminal subjectivity: The body ‘Scientific’ profiling aside, the most compelling illustration of Foucault’s anti-Sartrean hypothesis that criminal subjectivity is neither unique nor self-defining, but socially predetermined from the outset, is the justice system’s authoritarian treatment of the criminal body. In fact, it is only by exerting control over the body that social authority is able to gain access to the mind. In this regard, Foucault’s approach contrasts markedly with that of Sartre, for whom the body, far from facilitating social control of the mind, actively seeks to prevent it. In fact, the typical Sartrean criminal body, of which Genet’s fiction provides plenty of examples, acts as a protective shield, a foil or screen that deflects the gaze of any form of social authority that tries to objectify or ‘depersonalize’ the consciousness contained within that body; this body is thus the dispensable outer shell that serves the needs of the more precious inner kernel of consciousness. For Foucault, however, the body is an end in itself, the most important and tangible dimension of human subjectivity, given the complete absence of an innate unique consciousness.

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The centrality of the body to Foucault’s critique is contained within the very title of his book in the words, ‘discipline’ and ‘punish’, (‘surveiller’ et ‘punir’). Historically speaking, these terms encapsulate a crucial paradigm shift that took place in the late eighteenth century between a feudal Christian system of justice that conceived of the body as a legitimate target for the harshest, publically administered physical punishment, and a secular Enlightenment society that replaced this gruesome spectacle of the tortured and executed body with a more discrete rehabilitation of the body behind closed doors, a rehabilitation that was carefully implemented via new ‘disciplinary’ methods of surveillance, pedagogical assessment and knowledge-acquisition. These new methods were intended to serve the needs of the criminal and the authorities alike: individually tailored to reform the specific offender, yet also instilling within this offender new modes of conduct and patterns of behaviour that provided the authorities with the precious empirical data they needed to compile a criminal profile that would in turn serve as a theoretical model for assessing future offenders. The criminal was thus both the specific object of carceral reform and a scientific case study. In his opening chapter, Foucault brings the moral implications of this paradigm shift into sharp relief through his juxtaposition of two quite different archival sources: the first, is the harrowing first-hand 1757 testimony of the public execution of the failed regicide Damiens, a staunch atheist and anti-monarchist whose punishment in the eyes of the monarchical society he has sought to overthrow finds ample moral justification in the unexpected public contrition he shows when he begs God for forgiveness (pp. 3–6); and the second, is a far more banal and matter-of-fact early-nineteenth-century prison timetable that carefully maps out the daily routine of an incarcerated offender: education, prayer, exercise, productive labour (pp. 6–7). In the space of less than 50 years we find a radical change in the way society punishes crime: from the torture and execution of the body as public spectacle in order to extract Christian repentance, to the more humane rehabilitation of that body in a closed prison environment through increased economic productivity and the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Foucault’s critique exposes as flawed the moral assumptions that this shift naturally invites: that a society that switches its moral priorities from physical torture to knowledge and utility must necessarily be considered more liberal and less barbaric than one that does not. However, this new pain-free and inquisitive disciplining of the body comes at a price: that of sanctioning society’s use of the information it gathers about that body to extend its authority beyond its original moral mandate, which is merely to punish crime. The change in emphasis from the tortured to the disciplined or docile body, from pain to knowledge and utility, from public to private punishment has dangerously displaced the legitimate target of judicial authority from acts to individuals, from the crime to the criminal. Society’s legitimate mandate to punish crimes has morphed into a more ambivalent role that allows it to project onto the criminal a prefabricated generic identity that is not his own and bears little relation to his crime. The torture of the body, albeit abhorrent, at least has the merit of not masking ulterior motives: everything is on display for all to see; whereas the institutionalized rehabilitation of the body conceals a desire to police and manipulate the body that is arguably more dangerous, because it is tantamount to a policing and manipulation of the mind. This transition from the visible ‘tortured’ to the hidden ‘disciplined’ body is

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analogous to Foucault’s ethical break from a post-Holocaust metaphysical notion of evil as gruesome innocent suffering, to a more institutionalized perception of evil as a covert and apparently morally anodine method of social control. Indeed, despite the absence of torture nowadays, institutional authority acts directly on bodies more than ever before, but in a less obvious and more pernicious way: it imposes on individuals new modes of being and of acting from which stem an increase in economic efficiency (prisoners become better workers) and a decrease in political awareness (which fosters docility and hence more efficiency). But bodies have not just become ‘useful’ to the authorities for their physical labour power, but also for the emergence of new theoretical fields. For example, the need to standardize and increase the efficiency of bodily movements in military formations led to a new understanding of the body, perceived neither as a Cartesian body-machine, nor as the organic body of the physiological sciences, but, rather, in terms of its possibilities for useful action. It thus gave rise to a new discipline, ergonomy, which in turn was applied to maximize further the disciplining of bodies. But according to Foucault the most extreme manifestation of the policing of the body and the ultimate expression of social authority is what he calls ‘panoptisme’ that originates in Jeremy Bentham’s model of the Panopticon. Bentham’s Panopticon operates according to a brilliantly effective logic: an observational tower which allows its occupant to monitor all the movements of the prisoners, but is designed in such a way as to prevent the prisoners from seeing whether it is occupied or not. In other words, what is important is not that the tower permanently be occupied by a watchman, but that the prisoners believe this to be the case. In this way, power can effectively be exercised by the social authorities without any one individual being present: ‘Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’ (p. 201). The paradox emerges that a non-corporal form of power can be exercised over every physical movement of the prisoners; not only is authority disseminated without the slightest physical confrontation or violence, but this is also achieved without the physical presence of prison wardens or any other human agents (p. 203). If Foucault emphasizes the body’s total subjugation and capitulation to non-corporal power, then Sartre more pragmatically praises Genet’s strategic deployment of the body as a form of resistance to authority, a protective shell that not only shields his inner consciousness from the objectifying gaze and judgement of authority, but also manages to turn that gaze back onto authority itself. Drawing not only on Genet’s past life as a vagrant criminal but also his present existence as a criminal writer, Sartre demonstrates how Genet strategically re-appropriates the body as both an autobiographical and stylistic device for defusing and subverting normative social control. First, he expresses his body’s homosexual erotic urges via a tube of vaseline that symbolically defies and overturns the stigmatizing homophobic gaze of the police; and, secondly, he employs a seductively poetic language to lure his unsuspecting readers into a fascination and empathy with his criminal universe, only suddenly to switch that language to shockingly sexual and scatological references that force his bourgeois readers to acknowledge just how morally opposed that universe is to their own. Genet thus uses the body to unnerve and destabilize moral authority, whether that authority is represented by

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officialdom (the police) or his readership (the bourgeoisie). In the infamous ‘vaseline episode’ (pp. 488–90), Sartre’s conception of the body is almost diametrically opposed to Foucault’s. One day, Genet is stopped and imprisoned by the police in Barcelona, but instead of their authoritarian gaze being allowed to subject his body to constant observation and control as in Foucault’s Panopticon, that gaze is unexpectedly and reluctantly diverted towards the tube of vaseline that they have confiscated from his pocket and displayed on the table (‘I was sure that this puny and most humble object would hold its own against them; by its mere presence it would be able to exasperate all the police in the world,’ p. 488). The importance of this tube is that it is used for his (at that time) illegal homosexual encounters and therefore comes to symbolize the ‘criminal’ Genet himself. It displaces the judging gaze of social authority, in this case the police, from his own body onto an object which represents his ‘evil’ homosexuality. This displacement of the police’s gaze onto an inanimate object whose unchanging nature torments them with a constant reminder of a criminal identity they cannot control not only frees Genet from the stigmatizing gaze of authority, but also allows him to turn the tables on that authority: he becomes the judge of those who are meant to be judging him. No longer is he objectified as the criminal ‘Other’, but he becomes an autonomous subject who smugly observes the way in which others try, but fail, to objectify him: in other words he objectifies them (‘He would see them seeing his image and they would become objects for him precisely insofar as his reflection was an object for them’, p. 489) The paradox here is that, contrary to Foucault, Genet never allows the body merely to be objectified and fixed by the normative gaze of society. He displaces the scrutinizing gaze onto an ‘object-trap’ (p. 490) that thwarts the reader’s desire to fix it into a normative moral category. Where Foucault’s Panopticon effectively tracks every movement of the criminal body, to the extent that the criminal feels hemmed in from all sides, Genet’s rhetorical manipulation of the body through a process of screening and displacement, makes him the criminal subject who objectifies the reader. But Sartre identifies in Genet a second means by which the writer manipulates the body to defuse the impact of social authority: its transformation into a shocking metaphor of evil that forces the reader reluctantly to acknowledge his own guilty fascination with Genet’s criminality. Genet initially awakens within the reader a latent fascination for evil via his use of a beautifully poetic language that lures the reader into what initially seems to be a harmless moral empathy with Genet’s criminal life; however, this poetic facade suddenly gives way to shockingly scatological and sexual references to the body that expose to the reader the full extent of the morally repellent world into which he has unwittingly been drawn: a world of excrement, sexual secretions, blood, guts that are a million miles away from the stable bourgeois order to which he is accustomed: We catch ourselves willing what we do not want, affirming what we have always denied. Since to read is to re-create, we re-create, for the sake of its beauty the homosexual intercourse that is sumptuously bedecked with the rarest of words. But the words vanish, leaving us face to face with the residue, a mixture of sweat, dirt, cheap perfumes, blood and excrement. Is that what we willed? Behind us, Genet sniggers: ‘Poetry is the art of using shit and making you eat it.’ Genet’s art is

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a mirage, a confidence trick, a pitfall. In order to make us eat shit, he has to show it to us, from afar, as rose jam. (p. 498)

A seductive literary language thus entraps the reader into a moral empathy with a world he abhors. This is an example of Sartre’s praise of Genet’s superior linguistic powers as a ‘literary’ criminal, powers, which I discuss in more detail below, that allow him to ensnare the bourgeoisie into recognizing their own latent attraction to evil, an attraction which conventional society disingenuously denies by constructing rigid moral hierarchies between criminals and non-criminals. Let us now examine how both Sartre and Foucault seek to ‘deconstruct’ these moral hierarchies by showing the boundaries between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to be far more blurred than society is prepared to acknowledge.

Moral hierarchies Based on our analysis thus far we might be forgiven for thinking that Sartre and Foucault’s critiques rest on the premise that the institutionalization of evil affects only the criminal, so severely curtailed is his subjective freedom by mechanisms of social authority that seek to gain control of both his mind and body. But this is only one side of the story: for both philosophers are anxious to show that this institutional appropriation of evil also compromises the subjective freedom of the non-criminal, the ‘respectable’ bourgeois majority that comprises the bulk of their readers, who naturally assume that they belong to a ‘superior’ moral sphere to that of the criminal. Both philosophers seek to shatter this assumption, exposing as false and naive the comfort most of their readers – and by extension, you and I – derive from believing that an unbridgeable moral divide exists between the criminal ‘Other’ and the punishments to which he or she is subjected, and we, the non-criminals, the good citizens, whom social institutions are meant to protect and categorize differently. As the law-abiding majority, we operate under the mistaken belief that crime and punishment are normalized and segregated in this way so that we can continue our lives untarnished, safe in the knowledge of our own inherent moral probity. Sartre and Foucault both expose this moral hierarchy as disingenuous, but in different ways. For Foucault, this disingenuousness lies in society’s moral categorization of institutions; specifically, its strict differentiation of institutions designed to punish criminals from those that are meant to cater to disadvantaged law-abiding citizens; as we shall see, in practice both types of institution employ similar ‘disciplinary’ methods that often confuse the boundaries between legitimate punishment on the one hand and the repressive use of power on the other. As for Sartre, he questions the assumption that there exist two different types of moral consciousness: the socially undesirable criminal consciousness on the one hand and the socially desirable virtuous consciousness of the ‘average Frenchman’, or what he ironically calls ‘the Just’ on the other. What both philosophers reveal beneath the commonly accepted social differentiation between criminal and non-criminal is an underlying sameness. Foucault’s critique exposes how the same fundamental disciplinary logic underpins the governance of all social

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institutions, irrespective of the specific moral goals they each claim to serve; whereas Sartre, as we shall see, reveals a universally human propensity for evil that flies in the face of the received wisdom that the criminal mind is morally distinct from that of the average citizen. Foucault’s critique uncovers a universal network of power beneath distinctive institutions; whereas Sartre unveils a latent fascination with evil that is common to every individual consciousness. Foucault considers our faith in this moral segregation to be misplaced because the disciplinary model upon which our modern secular society is constructed, namely that of the prison, is in reality not confined to the prison alone, but infiltrates other institutions that ostensibly bear no relation to criminal institutions. There is therefore a deeply disturbing blurring of moral boundaries between institutions dealing with ‘good’ citizens’ and those that discipline ‘bad’ ones. It is perhaps no coincidence that Foucault saves this point for the last chapter of his book, because it is arguably the most morally unsettling revelation that he makes to the reader, more so even than his first chapter which outlines in gruesome detail the hanging, drawing and quartering of the regicide Damiens. He begins by identifying the young offender’s institute La Mettray – coincidentally the very institute in which Genet himself spent part of his childhood and to which Sartre alludes when recounting the events of Genet’s childhood – as ‘the disciplinary form at its most extreme, the model in which are concentrated all the coercive technologies of behaviour’, (p. 293). The point about Mettray is that its harsh disciplinary methods, more than those of any other institution, bring into sharp relief the unsettling blurring of moral boundaries between criminals and non-criminals: not only did it contain delinquents condemned by a court of law, but it was also responsible for minor offenders acquitted under article 66 of the ‘code civil’, as well as ‘boarders held’ who under the guise of ‘paternal correction’ were subject to the same disciplinary regime as official delinquents. This means that Mettray is a ‘punitive model, at the limit of strict penalty’, which was ‘the most famous of a whole series of institutions which, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law, constituted what one might call the carceral archipelago’ (p. 296–7). Foucault’s assessment of the severe disciplinary regime of La Mettray as a place where even minor delinquents were treated as hardened criminals unwittingly strengthens Sartre’s argument that Genet’s ability to overcome this very type of stigmatization is nothing short of extraordinary. However, from Foucault’s purely institutional perspective, the worst effect of this ‘carceral archipelago’ is its normalization of punishment to such an extent that, without our realizing it, it significantly lowers our threshold of tolerance of what we consider to merit punishment (p. 301). The insinuating mechanisms by which our tolerance of what we consider to be a fair punishment is unconsciously reduced is implicitly presented by Foucault as more morally dangerous than the brutal spectacle of torture typified by the execution of Damiens. This execution was undoubtedly barbaric, but at least there was no ambiguity whatsoever about the relationship between the crime and the punishment. Everything was spelt out, made visible in gruesome detail to the watching public. A clear demarcation existed between Damiens, the criminal regicide, and the non-criminal public who witnessed his agonising death. But now, in our modern era, it is the blurring of moral boundaries that, according to Foucault, we should find most disturbing. Foucault meticulously documents a range of social

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institutions outside the prison system, each with a precise social function; yet the same disciplinary logic of the prison – ‘the carceral archipelago’ – is quietly at work in all of them: And still moving away from penality in the strict sense, the carceral circles widen and the form of the prison slowly diminishes and finally disappears altogether: the institutions for abandoned or indigent children, the orphanages .. . . the establishments for apprentices . . . ; still farther away the factory-convents . . . And then, still farther, there was a whole series of mechanisms that did not adopt the ‘compact’ prison model, but used some of the carceral methods: charitable societies, moral improvement associations, organizations that handed out assistance and also practiced surveillance, workers’ estates and lodging houses – the most primitive of which still bear the all too visible marks of the penitentiary system. And, lastly, this great carceral network reaches all the disciplinary mechanisms that function throughout society. (p. 298)

At what point does the prison end and the orphanage, workhouse or factory begin? What morally legitimizing framework allows us to distinguish the guilty criminal from the innocent victim of social circumstance? And when do the purported virtues of solid discipline teeter over into the gratuitous cruelty of illegitimate punishment or authoritarian economic exploitation? These are the questions posed by Foucault, and which the pervasive nature of the carceral network he outlines to us make it impossible for him, or we as readers, to answer with any reassuring degree of certainty. If Foucault’s critique of power and knowledge – of the interrelationship between social institutions and the human sciences that authorize the pernicious extension of their disciplinary regime – lead us to the uncomfortable realization that the institutional boundaries between criminals and non-criminals are far more porous than we have been led to believe, and that the punishments meted out to the former are reproduced in more pervasive and disguised forms in the disciplinary mechanisms that affect the latter, then in a similar vein Sartre shows how Genet deliberately blurs the boundaries between the criminal class and the non-criminal majority. Genet’s masterstroke, argues Sartre, is subtly to lure the reader into a moral empathy with the crimes he commits; thus by the time the reader realizes what has happened it is too late: his moral consciousness has become wholly enmeshed in, and indistinguishable from, the moral consciousness of the criminal Genet. The reader recoils in horror at his unwitting empathy with Genet, because this empathy leads him to the uncomfortable realization that, against his better judgement, he too, the reader, has a latent attraction to evil, an attraction that conventional morality would normally suppress and prevent him from recognizing. Genet’s seductive technique exposes the reader to a part of himself that he would rather not confront: namely, his secret fascination with evil. Under normal circumstances the institutionally approved disciplines of criminology and sociology conveniently provide the reader with the comforting illusion that he belongs to a moral sphere that exists at a safe distance from the category known as criminality; but this false hierarchization leads to self-deception on the part of the ‘average Frenchman’ because it provides him with the perfect pretext to project his own latent attraction

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to evil onto a criminal class that he can easily stigmatize as the morally undesirable ‘Other’: Moreover, Genet addresses not the criminologist or sociologist but the average Frenchman who adorns himself with the name of good citizen; for it is he who preserves the idea of Evil, while science and law are tending to break away from it; it is he who, burning with desires that his morality condemns, has delivered himself from his negative freedom by throwing it like a flaming cloak on the members of a minority group whose acts he interprets on the basis of his own temptations. What a prey! The Just man is so good at playing innocent that he gets caught up in his own game: evil thoughts remain foreign to him since, by definition, they are the Other’s thoughts; he encounters them with sad astonishment in the course of his experience and recognizes them precisely by the fact that they are Other, by the fact that he would not have had the indecency to conceive them . . . Genet, who has been a victim and instrument of the good citizen since childhood, is now able to avenge himself at last: he is going to apply to him the lex talionis. He will make that innocent discover the Other in himself; he will make him recognize the Other’s most improper thoughts as his own; in short, he will make him experience with loathing his own wickedness (pp. 494–5)

Two subtle messages emerge from this dense passage. First, Genet’s literature exposes the true motives behind those normative scientific and legal theories of evil which offer us an expedient refuge from a reality we would rather not confront: namely, that the existence of evil, far from being confined to a criminal minority, is in fact a universal object of consciousness that, deep down, exerts a fascination on all of us, irrespective of whether we are criminals or not. Secondly, Genet’s revelation to his readers of this unpalatable truth is his own sweet revenge against a society that has consistently labelled him as a criminal since childhood. Given that he has been objectified by society as an undesirable ‘Other’, and that the freedom to determine his own moral destiny has been suppressed by this stigmatizing label, then he will now reverse the roles: he will now be the judging moral agent who objectifies the reader, he will be the one to suppress the reader’s moral freedom by forcing him to identify that inescapable part of his consciousness that makes him indistinguishable from the criminal Other. No longer able to retreat into self-deception about his own virtue, the reader is thus knocked down from his smug position of moral superiority and forced to acknowledge his moral equivalence to a member of society that the legally sanctioned disciplines of criminology and sociology had earlier allowed him to judge and stigmatize. And in this regard he employs precisely the same tactic as that employed by contemporary novelist Jonathan Littell in The Kindly Ones, when he provocatively suggests that the Holocaust was as much caused by unremarkable, ‘respectable’ citizens as it was by Nazi ‘monsters’. Sartre quotes one example from Genet’s fiction that illustrates this point well: the author’s encounter with an old woman, a thief recently released from prison, who is old and frail enough to be his own long-lost mother. The description, as Michael Scriven has argued, ‘contains a series of ambiguous references which invite the reader to understand Genet’s prose as an apology for a conventional humanistic response to

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the destitute: pity and compassion for the poor, affection for one’s mother, the desire to treat her generously, to cover her with flowers and kisses, and so on.’17 The reader cannot fail to be moved by the following description: ‘I know nothing of her who abandoned me in the cradle, but I hoped it was that old thief . . . “What if it were she?” I thought . . . Ah, if it were, I would cover her with flowers, with gladiolus and roses, and with kisses! I would weep with tenderness over those moonfish eyes, over that round and foolish face!’ (p. 506). Sartre argues that Genet’s humility, his secret longing that the old woman might just be the mother who abandoned him as an infant, his desire to cover the woman with kisses and flowers, elicits great sympathy in the morally conventional bourgeois reader who is disarmed by the sheer power of filial love that Genet appears to express. It matters little that Genet should describe the woman’s face in unflattering terms because the reader understands that his filial love transcends the individual merits of the person to whom it is directed. But what the reader is decidedly unprepared for is that Genet’s homage to his mother should suddenly express a desire to spit on her and vomit all over her hands: I’d be glad to dribble all over her, I thought, overflowing with love [does the word glaïeul (gladiolus) mentioned above bring into play the word glaviaux (gobs of spit)?] To dribble on her hair or vomit into her hands. But I would adore that thief who is my mother. (p. 506)

The ‘good’ citizen is utterly destabilized by this statement because by now his empathy with Genet is complete, and he cannot renounce it: he has been lured into a moral identification with Genet that forces him to legitimize an immoral course of action that he would normally condemn outright. He has embraced Genet’s filial love as if it were his own, identified with the compassion Genet appeared to be expressing for the woman and therefore he must also embrace Genet’s desire to vomit all over his mother. This is an example of what Sartre describes as Genet’s ‘sainthood’ (p. 563), the moment in his fiction which forces the reader to acknowledge that the Genet he has condemned as a criminal has in fact led a life of solitude, ascetism, degradation and exile, every bit as admirable as that of the saint himself. Scriven rightly points out that this passage allows Genet to exact his revenge both on his mother for deserting him and on the reader for exiling him from the community of the ‘Justes’, by showing that his evil is a product of their own making.18 But Genet does more than this: he also shows that the reader is every bit as attracted to evil as he is himself, even if he does not want to admit to it.

Literature If Sartre praises Genet for a literary style that breaks down conventional moral hierarchies by forcing the reader into an identification with the criminal, this in part stems from his abiding faith in the unique power of literature to shape society’s collective moral consciousness and conduct. He regards literature as a crucial vehicle for change, a voice that opposes authority and questions received values. But for Foucault, the opposite

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is true: literature is vastly overestimated as an instrument of moral change and social critique. Foucault displays the same scepticism towards literature as he does towards the overinflated Sartrean notion of the ‘messianic’ intellectual; whereas, conversely, Sartre’s ‘sacralization’ of literature and the writer as privileged purveyors of universal truth is entirely in keeping with his endorsement of the messianic intellectual as truthteller and oppositional voice of the dispossessed. If Sartre did not necessarily consider the figure of the intellectual and the writer to be one and the same, as he was to make clear in his late work A Plea for Intellectuals (1972), the moral authority he invested in them was. Foucault’s work, however, is characterized by a deliberate anti-literariness and a categorical refusal to privilege literary works over non-literary ones: No one has ever really analyzed how, out of the mass of things said, out of the totality of actual discourse, a number of these discourses (literary discourse, philosophical discourse) are given a particular sacralization and function . . . Literature had to stand for the rest. People wrote the history of what was said in the eighteenth century, via Fontenelle, or Voltaire, or Diderot, or La Nouvelle Heloïse, etc. Or they regard these texts as the expression of something that, ultimately, could not be formulated at a more everyday level. In this respect, I moved from the expectative (pointing literature out when I happened to encounter it, without indicating its relations with the rest) to a frankly negative position, trying to bring out positively all the non-literary or parallel discourses that were actually produced at a given period, excluding literature itself. In Discipline and Punish I refer only to bad literature . . . 19

Literature is accorded a special status only because it is institutionalized by academia and the avant-garde, who accord it a subversive function based on their own ideology rather than the opinions of the public, many of whom do not even bother to read it. This situation creates what he calls a ‘very heavy political blockage’.20 Foucault goes on to explain that in order to escape this ‘blockage’ he has deliberately focused throughout his own career either on minor, non-canonical writers, like Raymond Roussel, or on non-literary documents such as his study of the peasant convicted of murder, Pierre Rivière.21 Certainly, with a few notable exceptions, such as his article on Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Foucault resolutely avoided literary criticism, as he makes clear in the following passage:22 In order to know what literature is, I would not want to study its internal structures. I would rather grasp the movement, the little process, by which a type of nonliterary discourse, neglected, forgotten as soon as it was made, enters the literary field. What happens? What is triggered off? How is this discourse modified in its efforts by the fact that it is recognized as literary?23

Thus, Foucault goes out of his way to knock literature off its pedestal, to champion instead more ‘ordinary’ discourses that do not constitute official intellectual history and which, for that reason, reveal more ‘authentic’ forgotten truths. Foucault’s deep suspicion of the social value of literature is evident from his veiled attack in Discipline

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and Punish on the bourgeoisie’s enthusiastic transformation of crime into a popular literary discourse that reinforces dominant power structures. He paradoxically denounces the same hidden mechanisms of power as Sartre, only contrary to the existentialist he regards literature as complicit with those mechanisms, rather than opposed to them. Sartre’s lavish praise of Genet’s oppositional literature as one that ‘rescues’ crime from trivialization by an official authority that seeks to reduce it to bland, unthreatening statistics is debunked by Foucault’s assessment that literature also contributes to the trivialization of crime, because it transforms it into a sugar-coated, inauthentic discourse that sacrifices social reality for the morally conformist aesthetic tastes of official authority. This aesthetic fetishization of crime first became apparent in the 1830s, when the criminal exploits of Vidocq and Lacernaire were glamorized by the educated bourgeois ruling class whose fascination for ‘la métaphysique du crime’, concealed a desire to control, compartmentalize and neutralize this crime. Vidocq whom as we saw in Chapter 1 provided the model for Balzac’s master-criminal Vautrin, was the first criminal to be ‘turned’ by the police: like Vautrin at the end of A Harlot High and Low (1842) he was the first former criminal to become chief of police. The importance of Vidocq’s ‘conversion’ for Foucault is that it signals the beginning of a dangerous blurring of boundaries between legality and criminality, a blurring that silently paves the way for criminality to be co-opted by the State into a form of power that serves the needs of official authority: ‘It was then that the direct, institutional coupling of policing and delinquency took place: the disturbing moment when criminality became one of the mechanisms of power’ (p. 283). Instead of exposing the official abuse of State power, as Sartre believes it does, crime literature in Foucault’s view actually reinforces this abuse. Seen in this light, the cult of celebrity surrounding Vidocq does not so much reflect the daring or unique nature of his crimes, which were in fact quite petty, but fulfils the State’s underlying desire to make criminality as compliant as possible with its mechanisms of social control. In other words, bestowing on criminal deeds an intellectual and aesthetic dignity is a strategic way of neutralizing those deeds by turning them into an unthreatening, seductive discourse that is firmly controlled by the dominant social class. This was, of course, the strategy adopted by the conservative Balzac in his aesthetic celebration of Vautrin. And this neutralization of criminality through literary discourse is even more apparent in Vidocq’s celebrated contemporary, Larcenaire, whose criminal deeds and writings were feted by a Parisian bourgeoisie, who prior to his execution in 1836, came in droves to visit the prison cell he occupied and had transformed into a literary salon. Foucault makes the important point that this fanfare of publicity surrounding Lacernaire in the 1830s provided the government of the day with a timely diversion from two potentially devastating sources of social unrest: the failed terrorist attack carried out by the regicide Fieschi, and the public outrage generated by the abolition of chain gangs. In other words, the overemphatic celebration of a relatively petty criminal defused the subversive potential of more serious threats to the social order. But in a brief footnote (p. 323, n. 20) Foucault makes an equally important point that refers back to the anti-literary concerns of his earlier work: namely, that the vast publicity surrounding Lacernaire’s trial and the publication of his mémoires  – a publication

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that was officially sanctioned and overseen by the Chef de sureté  – completely overshadowed the publication of the more ‘authentic’ mémoire written around the same time by the forgotten peasant Pierre Rivière, who was unjustly executed for parricide. This, for Foucault, is further confirmation of the highly institutionalized and canonical status of literary discourse, a status that makes it automatically complicit with official mechanisms of power that deprive it of that truthfulness and subversive potential that can only be found in forgotten archival sources that have never been part of the literary canon. Sartre, however, disagrees with this view. He argues that literature  – for which the crime literature of Genet stands as the quintessential example  – can escape institutionalization, be recognized as truthful, authentic and subversive. So far as Sartre’s reading of Genet is concerned, this anti-institutional power of his literature is especially evident in its stubborn resistance to generic convention and market forces. Sartre singles out Genet for special praise because of his singularity and authenticity as both man and writer: here was no ordinary, conventional crime-writer, one whose own life remained at a safe distance from his morally threatening subject matter, and for whom crime was merely a fictional conceit tailored to the tastes of a particular reading public; Genet, on the contrary, really was a criminal whose personal experience of theft and homosexuality (which at the time was still ludicrously considered a crime) and whose subsequent institutionalization and incarceration, constituted the very fabric of his oeuvre. Genet has absolutely no interest in conforming to public taste and demand: he writes exclusively for himself; his works are the outpourings of his psyche, a means of working through and resolving his own moral dilemmas. Consequently, for Sartre, much of the power of Genet’s literature derives from the fact that it cannot easily be pigeonholed into an identifiable genre; in other words, contrary to his criminal acts, which we analysed earlier, his works resist the type of classification that would reduce them to a mere statistic on a graph or chart. In an important extended footnote, Sartre points out that Genet’s books belong neither to the clandestine genre of the pornographic novel, nor to the more respectable and ‘official’ genre of edifying literature (p. 494). Both these categories can easily be classified because each is targeted at a very specific readership. The pornographic or licentious novel is paradoxically less scandalous than Genet’s works because it follows a formulaic pattern, where places and characters matter little so long as the novel satisfies the pleasure-seeking needs of a particular clientele. These novels are not especially disturbing even to the morally upstanding citizen who does not read them because their sexual content is universally known to be clichéd, predictable and hence boring. However, Genet’s works are not boring precisely because they do not conform to an established, predictable genre whose premise is to meet particular expectations. In fact, they reverse this logic: far from trying to satisfy the pre-existing and specific demands of a specialized clientele, they are aimed at all readers in order to displease all readers by undermining their expectations. Composed with significantly more stylistic virtuosity than the pornographic genre, Genet’s works naturally garner much greater critical praise, yet their obscenity incurs the same moral disapproval from the authorities which inevitably led to some of his works being banned. His works are thus both ‘beautiful’ and ‘unpleasant’, constituting a paradox that renders them singularly

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unclassifiable and hence far more disturbing and unsettling. And it is precisely because his novels on crime are not reducible to a recognizable classification that they are more powerful than his criminal acts, acts which no matter how serious, struggled to achieve any kind of distinctive singularity or notoriety because their impact would always be defused through their assimilation into an undifferentiated mass of statistics; but Genet’s writings on evil succeed where his criminal acts failed: their resistance to generic classification allows them to escape the normative clutches of society that his crimes alone could not. Elsewhere Sartre points out that Genet’s subversion of conventional generic classifications is matched by his subversion of the economic logic of supply and demand that governs commercial literature. Since he does not write in order to satisfy the tastes of a specialized clientele, Genet’s literature resists this commercial logic. In fact, it reverses it altogether. Genet is perfectly comfortable with the idea that his works can generate some economic profit, provided that upon purchasing his books the reader is left with the feeling that he has been ‘robbed’ or short-changed, that the supply (the sale of Genet’s books) does not meet the demand (what the reader expects in return for his purchase). Genet wants the money that the reader spends on his works to give him a completely different product from the one he was expecting and the way he achieves this ‘theft’ of the reader is via the seductively deceitful content of his works: seductively deceitful because they initially draw the reader in with their stylistic virtuosity, only then to force the reader when it is too late to confront the evil that is latent within him but which he prefers not to acknowledge. Thus, the sale of Genet’s works constitutes a kind of metaphorical theft that is more powerful than the criminal act of stealing itself. Sartre’s conviction that crime literature can have a greater social impact than crime itself pays homage to the power not only of literature on evil, but also of literature more generally.

7

Evil, History and Politics: From Hugo to Dantec

Sartre and Foucault convincingly highlight the institutionalization of evil into a criminal  discourse which reinforced State authority to the detriment of the Enlightenment’s legacy of moral and intellectual freedom. This chapter explores how the meaning of evil has become equally, if not more, overdetermined by the normative power of political ideology. Three types of political ideology will be explored. The first is the identification of evil with a hostile ‘Other’, perceived as a threat to national self-interest in the present. The most recent and notorious example of this is the reaction of the George W. Bush administration to the September 2001 attacks. The threat of Islamic radicalism generated the terms ‘Axis of Evil’ and ‘War on Terror’, making Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden into pariahs synonymous with evil itself. If the Obama government subsequently toned down this rhetoric, its existence is hardly new. Gilles Kepel has shown how this sensationalist discourse of evil merely recycled such Cold War rhetoric as ‘the Evil Empire’, used in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration to stigmatize its then enemy, the Soviet Union.1 And we have seen Proust’s magisterial analysis of French social mores during the Great War of 1914–18, when Poincaré’s government equated evil with all things German, the derogatory term ‘boche’ becoming normalized to the point that the French public did not even entertain the possibility that evil could be associated with anything or anyone else. In all three examples superficial emotive rhetoric empties the term evil of all philosophical import, reducing it to a morally and intellectually censored ideological pawn. Evil becomes the sensationalized focal point and psychological outlet for wounded patriotism allied to a feeling of acute vulnerability invariably triggered by a traumatic man-made historical event such as war or terrorism. But evil has been politicized by national self-interest in a second respect: namely, as a shameful legacy from the past that threatens to tarnish a country’s self-image in the present. Contrary to that national self-interest that sensationalizes and overstates the ongoing presence of evil, this second type seeks to minimize and suppress it, at times denying its very existence altogether. The French Republic is a case in point. It has been guilty of masking its culpability in Robespierre’s ‘Terreur’ of 1793 and more seriously still in the transatlantic slave trade, behind a Republican discourse that champions both the Revolutionary tenets of liberty, equality and fraternity and its pro-abolitionist credentials. The third type of politicization of evil is that identified by Alain Badiou. It does not pertain to the particularist interests of nation states, but rather the post-Holocaust legacy of Western liberalism, based on

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the ethics of alterity and human rights which fosters a negative ‘victim-mentality’ that reduces evil to a source of suffering from which we must be protected at all costs, thereby discouraging a more positive identification and pursuit of the good. All three political appropriations of evil share a common flaw: they foster an over-defensive mindset that discourages moral self-interrogation and meaningful ethical action. One possible and increasingly successful means of redressing this imbalance is via international law. Legal scholar Philippe Sands points to the increasing discrepancy in today’s world between moral responses to acts of political terror on the one hand and acts of genocide and crimes against humanity on the other.2 Since no agreed legal definition exists for the former, these invariably generate highly questionable unilateral responses such as the tortures still conducted today at Guantanemo (what Sands aptly calls a ‘legal black hole’); whereas the latter – genocide and crimes against humanity – are internationally recognized, brought to justice on the basis of multilateral agreement and thus override the ideological self-interests of individual nation states.3 The trials of Comrade Duch of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge and former Serb commander Ratko Mladić for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre for instance, would have been unthinkable prior to the Nuremberg Trials when the notion of genocide and crimes against humanity were first recognized and formulated by Raphael Lemkin.4 This internationalization of law and global moral consensus-building since World War II is a progressive aspect of the post-Holocaust ethics of human rights that Badiou’s critique overlooks – a means of exerting pressure on individual nation states such as France to accept responsibility even for atrocities committed in the past. If law can provide a practical avenue for countering over-politicized definitions of evil, then literature provides an intellectual one. Accordingly, the first half of this chapter explores three authors whose novels challenge normative ideological assumptions about two historical atrocities that have been classified as genocide and crimes against humanity: Sylvie Germain and Jonathan Littell on the Holocaust; Raphaël Confiant on the slave trade. These atrocities have respectively been appropriated by normative ideologies  – the Western liberal ethics of alterity and human rights and the French Republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity – neither of which deny the evil nature of these acts, nor that they produced guilty perpetrators and suffering victims. Rather, their mistake has been to impose an ethical imbalance between the voice of the victim and that of the perpetrator, an imbalance that impedes proper moral understanding of the causes of evil and of how it should best be punished and prevented. Germain and Littell defy the conventions of the Holocaust novel that until recently has made it virtually taboo to give extended consideration to the voice of the perpetrator instead of the suffering victim. There are at least three reasons for this taboo: first, there is an understandable desire for writers on the Holocaust to avoid accusations of empathy with evildoers;5 secondly, the Holocaust, as Badiou points out, has assumed the morally paradoxical and overbearing status of ‘measure that is unmeasurable’: the radical evil par excellence against which all other evils must be judged, yet at the same time retains the ‘transcendent’ status of an evil so ‘unspeakable’ or unfathomable that any attempt to understand it is deemed sacrilegious; thirdly, Western culture has entered what Wiewiorka calls the ‘era of the witness’, whereby ‘the act of testifying is now a media spectacle’ and victimhood an over-exploited source of recognition and identity in a world with few available forms of

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self-affirmation.6 To counteract this media sensationalization of suffering which runs the risk of falsifying testimony, some authors such as Charlotte Delbo have adopted a minimalist style characterized by anti-sentimental austerity and rhetorical constraint; however, as Carolyn J. Dean notes, minimalism also poses its own risks by appearing too experimental, ornate and self-reflexive to allow the reader truly to empathize with the experience of the victim.7 This representational double bind points to the ethical advantages of a Holocaust novel that shifts our focus away from radical evil and the suffering victims towards the banality of evil and the psychological motivations of the perpetrator. Far from suggesting empathy with the evildoer, this shift in perspective is envisaged, as Susan Neiman has argued, as a necessary, albeit uncomfortable step in moral self-recognition: the idea that in exceptional circumstances, every one of us has the capacity to commit unspeakable evils. Turning to a genocide that predates the Holocaust, I next consider Raphaël Confiant’s novel on the slavery of Guadeloupe and Martinique, an atrocity to which the dominant ideology  – national French Republicanism – responded by creating an ethical imbalance in the opposite direction: the enslaved victims have largely been silenced by the colonialist perpetrators who have sought to mitigate their culpability by exaggerating their abolitionist credentials. The second half of the chapter shifts its focus from genocides and crimes against humanity to two acts of political terror already sketched out in Chapter 1 – Robespierre’s counter – revolutionary ‘Terreur’ of 1793 and the more recent radical Islamic ‘terror’ of 9/11. To both of these, normative ideologies have responded with a degree of moral equivocation that reflects nationalist or religious bias and lack of global consensus on what constitutes ‘terror’, thereby breaking down neat polarities between victim and perpetrator altogether. Hugo’s novel Ninety-Three (Quatrevingt-treize) (1874) is discussed for its remarkably prescient anticipation of the fierce contemporary debate that rages between an ‘exceptionalist’ pro-Republican French historiography that defends ‘La Terreur’ as a political necessity and a more ‘assimilationist’ view that regards it as a political evil that anticipates twentieth-century totalitarianism. Finally, I consider ‘Vers le Nord du ciel’ (‘Towards the northern sky’), the first of three stories in neo-Catholic science fiction writer Maurice G. Dantec’s novel Artefact: machines à écrire, 1.0 (Artefact: type-writers, 1.0), which appears to chart an American narrator’s moving rescue of an orphaned girl from the burning Twin Towers. However, the initial suggestion of a clear-cut moral division between innocent American victim and evil Islamic perpetrator is destabilized both by the narrator’s own morally dubious intentions and the fact that the terrorists are themselves the products of the American global capitalism they claim to despise.

Germain and Littell: ‘La Shoah’ Sylvie Germain, as Ariska Koopman-Thurlings reminds us in her excellent study of the author, has long been concerned with the theme of evil in her work.8 This concern has been framed by her Judaeo-Christian consideration of evil and the silence of God and the quest for spiritual consolation.9 Her novel Magnus is the fictional story of a young boy who lost his mother during the intensive Allied bombing of Hamburg on July 28,

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1943. He is adopted by Thea Dunkeltal, the wife of a Nazi doctor who administers phenol to Jewish victims in concentration camps. Magnus, however, is brought up oblivious to his true origins, as well as to the real identity and political sympathies of his adoptive parents and the terrible deeds they carried out. He possesses no memory of his early childhood, owing to an amnesia triggered by the trauma of witnessing the woman who was holding his hand during the Hamburg bombings being burnt alive. We assume that the woman in question was Magnus’s real, biological mother, and this is certainly what he himself comes to believe as he gradually and painstakingly pieces together his identity. However, from an early age his adoptive mother has cynically exploited his amnesia to invent an alternative history for him. She calls him FranzGeorge after the two brothers she lost in the Battle of Stalingrad and convinces him that the cause of his amnesia was a fever he contracted in early childhood. Thus, the hero’s only attachment to the past is via his teddy bear, Magnus, whose name he adopts, even if this faithful companion is only a silent witness to the events of the past. The novel is thus a search for identity, a meditation on the absence of communication and an interrogation of memory, both personal and collective. It tracks the period 1938–85, from when the hero was about 5 to when he was 45. The main source of tension within the hero is between his admiration for his father and his horror, anger and guilt when he discovers his Nazi past. Strictly speaking, then, the narrative viewpoint is not that of the perpetrator of the Holocaust but of his direct descendant. But even so, Germain breathes new life into the Holocaust novel by shifting our focus away from victimhood and the related notion of the ‘unrepresentability’ of the Holocaust. First, Germain makes her novel deeply personal and direct by developing her analysis of ‘la Shoah’ in conjunction with the narrator’s own search for identity: this generates more empathy in the reader for the event described. Secondly, both the narrator’s amnesia and his relationship with his adoptive parents act as metaphors for the dangers of accepting history through the filter of ideological indoctrination: his anger and bewilderment upon gradually recovering his memory and discovering that his parents are Nazis who have lied to him invite the reader to be alert to the dangers of accepting ‘official’ normative, accounts of history at face value; Magnus offers a lesson to the reader that we have to relearn history from scratch. His amnesia allows him to wipe the slate clean and ‘unlearn’ the dangerously distortive historical lessons of his adoptive parents that he had previously taken for granted, and instead exercise his own, more discerning moral judgement when it comes to interpreting evil; this realization is reinforced by the narrator’s discovery and endorsement of Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil which chimes completely with his own discovery of his family’s descent into moral shame: A report on the trial of the Nazi criminal, written by the philosopher Hannah Arendt for the New Yorker weekly magazine, causes a sensation. She is criticised for her tone, felt to be casual, arrogant, and above all for her analysis and judgement. Magnus reads the indicted report and far from taking exception to it embraces the idea of the ‘banality of evil’. For him, it is no ill-considered concept but rather a finger placed unerringly on a wound so ugly and shameful everybody would rather not see it. Reading Hannah Arendt’s text he cannot help hearing in the background

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the voices of those other perpetrators of death and destruction he knew, with whom he came into close contact . . . Voices that would surely have responded, like Eichmann, in a curt monotone devoid of any remorse, ‘Not guilty’ to each charge made against them by a tribunal, had they been captured and brought to trial.10

In this crucial passage, the words ‘far from taking exception to it’ imply that Magnus’s reaction to Arendt’s theory is quite different from the standard angry response that her theory first provoked. Neiman ascribes this typical reaction to the difficulty we have in accepting that we ourselves can commit unspeakable evils. But Magnus, on the contrary, welcomes Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil as the logical confirmation and articulation of feelings towards the Holocaust that were already latent within him. It is precisely his own, prior experience of this banality that allows him to recognise just how valid the philosopher’s more impersonal theoretical interpretation is. By mapping the psychological complexity of a character, (albeit a fictional one), who personally comes face to face with people who directly embody the banality of evil Germain ‘demystifies’ evil, by removing it from its abstract, theoretical pedestal, and situating it within the more accessible realm of ordinary, everyday experience. This aligns Germain with Susan Neiman and Paul Ricœur in her endorsement of a modern attitude to evil that seeks to prioritize individual experience of evil over indirect conceptual analysis. This qualitative difference between interpreting evil as personal experience, as opposed to an abstract theoretical concept (Ricœur’s ‘speculative aporia’), recalls the earthy, visceral interpretations of evil provided by Balzac and Baudelaire, whose reinvigoration of this notion through the pulsating life of the modern city brought into sharp relief the rather arid metaphysical approach to evil of their Romantic predecessors, an approach that seemed far too remote from human experience altogether. Magnus’s natural progression to a consideration of the banality of evil on the other hand, stems from his realization, through his own life experience, that if they become morally complacent, ordinary people like his adoptive parents can be sucked into committing the most heinous crimes. It is precisely in this regard that Germain’s novel anticipates Jonathan Littell’s controversial, critically acclaimed bestseller, The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes) (2006), which re-valorizes the notion of banality in even greater depth, only this time through the eyes of a former perpetrator, rather than its descendant.11 In revealing interviews, Littell has suggested two reasons why the banality of evil is so central to his novel: the first is his personal encounter with this phenomenon through humanitarian work he conducted in the Balkan conflict of the mid-1990s. He recounts how a Serb colonel and former fisherman explained to him that he bombed Sarajevo, not out of a premeditated desire to ethnically cleanse the Bosnians, but because they stole his fishing tackle from his flat to the value of 20,000 Marks.12 This episode led Littell to the realization that an ordinary man, who is not intrinsically a monster, but started out as a simple fisherman, committed unspeakable evil for the most trivial of reasons: petty revenge. The implicit lesson to be drawn from this is one of moral self-recognition – a moral self-recognition he elicits from the readers of his novel: if he could do it, then so could you or I. Not for nothing did Littell state in the same interview that had he been born 30 years earlier he could have become a Nazi. Secondly, in a separate interview,

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Littell asserts that recent Holocaust historians, such as Christopher Browning, who in the last 15–20 years have commendably turned their attention to the perpetrators, have nevertheless fallen into the trap of underestimating the psychological specificity and arbitrariness of their actions.13 Such historians have naively placed their trust in the reliability of documentary sources, chiefly those interviews provided by the Nazis themselves, to conclude that many of the perpetrators were ordinary men and women who killed out of a basic obedience to authority and peer pressure, even if they found these actions morally reprehensible. Littell fully acknowledges that such first-hand testimonies often provide accurate and vital details about the implementation of the terrible events that took place in the death camps; but whether they truly reveal the full range of individual psychological motivations behind these events is another matter altogether. They tend to reduce banality to the ‘logic of obedience’. This is because, as George Bataille points out, ‘The perpetrators have no voice, or if they do speak, it is with the voice of the State.’ Statements made by perpetrators, in other words, tell us very little about their own intentions, because they invariably transfer responsibility for individual crimes onto a higher authority such as the State or party – this, of course, was Eichmann’s notorious defence, analysed by Arendt: ‘I was only following orders’. If Bataille is correct, as Littell believes he is, then the supposedly ‘authentic’ documented voice of the real perpetrators is merely an expedient, self-justificatory explanation that conceals the real reasons why they commit evil, reasons which according to Littell are often far more complex, unpredictable and surprisingly banal than we would like to assume. This does not mean to say that there were not people who killed solely out of ideological fanaticism such as Nazism, or anti-Semitism; but in many cases, as we shall see, such atrocities are carried out by individuals who initially seem as unremarkable and morally innocuous as the rest of us and simply end up killing for money, self-advancement, or some other perfectly ordinary reason that stretches credulity precisely because its trivial nature seems disproportionate to the seriousness of the act committed. This is why his fictional first-person narrator, former Schutzstaffel (SS) officer, Max Aue, who himself provides a semi-fictional reconstruction of real Nazi Adolf Eichmann offers us a greater psychological insight into banality than the documentary historians. As a former SS officer now hiding in France, Aue is in a sense the very antithesis of the plausible or real perpetrator: far from seeking to escape responsibility for his acts or those of his fellow Nazis, Aue is willing both to admit to his individual guilt and give a ‘warts and all’ explanation of the multitude of arbitrary and often trivial reasons that tragically led to ‘la Shoah’. Thus, as we shall see, those who accuse Littell of having created an implausible character are missing the point: it is Aue’s very implausibility, such as his unconventional sexual tastes – not only is he gay but he develops an incestuous attachment to his sister – and his purely fictional, as opposed to historical, existence that makes his perspective on the banality of evil paradoxically more compelling and truthful than any ‘real’ witness testimony. Yet this does not mean to say that Littell did not thoroughly research the historical setting of his novel, nor that he confines himself to fictional as opposed to real characters: he also provides psychological insight into the actions and motives of real Nazis such as Eichmann; but he chooses to reconstruct these historical figures as semi-fictional characters in a way that authentically lays bare

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their possible psychological motives, rather than exclusively confining himself to what they said in historical testimonies, which merely skim the surface of these motives. It is interesting to note that, like the documentary historians whose approach Littell considers reductive, there are critics who are largely sympathetic to Littell’s novel, such as Paul-Éric Blanrue, who give surprisingly short shrift to the importance of the banality of evil. This is a theory from which Blanrue is anxious to distance the novel and its central character in particular: We can hardly call banal someone who kills his mother, his step-father and his best friend. Or who sleeps with his sister and pollutes her entire house with his bodily secretions while contemplating a sex-change. And there is nothing remotely banal about someone who commits all these wrongs after having been hit by a stray bullet in Stalingrad.14

Blanrue draws attention here to those ‘sexually perverse’ tastes of the central protagonist that have understandably baffled some of Littell’s detractors, in particular Aue’s attraction to incest, sex-change and genital secretions. However, even if we accept Blanrue’s thesis that Aue’s singular tastes and actions make him incongruous rather than believable, the critic conveniently uses this lack of believability to overlook the far more numerous episodes and characters in the book that are on the contrary characterized by their ordinariness and plausibility, most notably in Aue’s prefatory remarks and in his lengthy psychological analysis of Adolf Eichmann. In a knowing nod towards Hannah Arendt, Littell consciously revives the notion of the banality of evil through his detailed semi-fictionalized reconstruction of Adolf Eichmann, the prominent Nazi upon whose actions and motives Arendt based her original theory. Through the eyes of his central narrator and his Nazi colleagues, Littell offers us a nuanced, in-depth psychological portrait of Eichmann that stresses the dangerous combination of his sheer ‘ordinariness’ and efficient bureaucratic mentality, both of which made him a prime candidate for succumbing to social ambition and the trappings of power. In his public role, Eichmann puts on an act: his voice and mannerisms become affected when he talks to Jews, he enjoys patronizing and shocking them with a combination of exaggerated politeness and swear words; he charms and fraternizes with Hungarian high society, thoroughly enjoying invitations to their castles and being treated as an equal in the company of countesses. But in private, the self-important delusions of grandeur that Eichmann displays in public are debunked by a reminder of his distinctly non-aristocratic origins as a humble policeman, of his extreme bureaucratic fastidiousness and prudence, his deference to social rank combined with envy, ambition and a fondness for the bottle: He took himself in fact for a condottiere, a von dem Bach-Zelevski, he forgot his deepest nature, that of a bureaucrat of talent, even of great talent in his limited field. Yet as soon as you saw him one-on-one, in his office, or in the evening, if he had had a little to drink, he became the old Eichmann again, the one who scuttled about the offices of the Staatspolizei, respectful, busy, impressed by the slightest stripe superior to his own and at the same time devoured by envy and ambition,

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the Eichmann who had himself covered in writing, for each action and each decision, by Müller or Heydrich or Kaltenbrunner, and who kept all his orders in a safe, carefully arranged, the Eichmann who would have been just as happy – and no less efficient – buying or transporting horses or trucks, if that had been his task, as concentrating on evacuating tens of thousands of human beings destined to die. (p.786)

Like the Serb Colonel Littell encountered in his own life, the Eichmann that he reconstructs here is a boringly efficient, unremarkable and mediocre man. And the surprising extent of his ordinariness is matched by the equally baffling arbitrariness and lack of moral reflection that lies behind his choice of career: we are confronted by the frightening possibility that Eichmann could just as competently and willingly have pursued a career in buying and transporting horses or lorries as in ordering the mass extermination of Jews. The narrator is suggesting the profoundly unnerving moral possibility that the difference between committing genocide and accomplishing menial tasks is purely incidental, and in no way contingent on the intrinsic moral qualities or choices of the individual. Eichmann’s mediocrity and thoughtlessness are further emphasized when he is described as an intransigent bureaucrat, completely unable to respond pragmatically to events. The narrator angrily refers to his intransigence and his ‘logician’s mentality’. Eichmann’s superior, Winkelmann, agrees with Aue that Eichmann has ‘the mentality of a subaltern’ who ‘does not have the slightest scruple about exceeding the limits of his authority, if he believes he’s acting in the spirit of the person giving him his orders’ (p. 723). Eichmann, in other words, is motivated by satisfying those in power: the extremity of his acts derives not from any intrinsic predisposition towards evil, but nothing more banal than gaining the favour of his superiors. Susan Neiman has made a similar observation with regard to the young doctor, played by James McEvoy in the recent film The Last King of Scotland (2006). He becomes embroiled in Ugandan dictator Idi Amin’s brutal regime, not because he sympathizes with it, but because he is seduced by the attractions of privilege and power that his chance association with Amin brings.15 Both Eichmann and the doctor succumb to the all-too-human traits of vanity, ambition and thoughtlessness: they are not presented as intrinsically evil individuals, merely weak ones who find themselves enmeshed in unspeakable acts. And this is Littell’s point: if an ordinary bureaucrat like Eichmann can be involved in the genocide, why not us? By focusing on the perpetrators, Littell’s unnervingly plausible tableau of the banality of evil in no way seeks to minimize the suffering of the victims; rather, he alerts us to the possibility that those whom we would feel more comfortable in labelling as genocidal maniacs have the same human foibles as we do, and thus perhaps, are we brought to the realization that we, too, are potentially closer to perpetuating genocide than we would like to think. Be that as it may, Littell’s shift in perspective from victim to perpetrator has vehemently been contested by some influential Holocaust commentators, not the least of whom is Claude Lanzmann, maker of the most famous French documentary about the Holocaust Shoah (1985). It is perhaps no surprise that someone who has provided such a moving testimony to the suffering of the Holocaust should have taken particular exception to the narration of this atrocity through the eyes of a former SS

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Officer. Irrespective of whether or not we subscribe to the notion of the banality of evil, Lanzmann has stated that even to entrust the task of bearing witness to the Holocaust to an SS Officer, as opposed to the Jewish victims or those who survived them is an ethical aberration: ‘The unimaginable paradox of The Kindly Ones is that the task of remembering, intellectualising and narrating the Shoah is entrusted to an SS Officer, who speaks.’16 Lanzmann also makes the legitimate point that Littell’s fascination with sexual perversity and the grotesque is both distasteful and irresponsible because it does not make his protagonist a believable character and thus invalidates the moral force of his argument. Nor is it responsible or realistic to portray an SS Officer who is so cultured and well read, since this makes him dangerously attractive to the reader.17 In different ways then, Lanzmann and Blanrue both strongly object to the novel on the basis that the central character is too refined and perverse to be credible, a flaw that they regard as logically inconsistent with Littell’s emphasis on the ordinariness or banality of evil. But perhaps, deep down, this accusation of implausibility acts as a convenient smokescreen for Lanzmann and Blanrue’s real moral concern: that Littell could, in fact, be right, that the gap between perpetrator and victim is actually far narrower than we would like to think, and that the Max Aues of this world, whom we would prefer to demonize and keep at arms length, are not so far removed from us in their capacity to commit evil. It is far easier for us as readers to think of Aue as a freak or a ‘monster’, because if we do so we place him in a restricted, enclosed category of immorality that is unequivocally different from that to which we, the moral majority, belong; by finding evidence of his singularity and difference we are able to maintain and legitimize that reassuring gap that separates those who commit evil from those who do not, the vile perpetrators from the innocent victims; maintaining this divide allows us to avoid confronting the unnerving possibility that there is the potential within all of us to commit the same evil. The banality of evil therefore implies, albeit in a negative sense, an ethics of sameness and selfhood, rather than difference and otherness, an ethics that considers all human beings as united in their potential to commit unspeakable acts. And this is precisely the reason why Littell moves away from the more established post-Holocaust ethics of alterity and human rights denounced by Badiou, because this ethics essentially allows for sameness and universality only in the shared experience of human suffering: it strictly avoids drawing moral parallels between those who commit evil and those who do not. This blurring of boundaries between victim and perpetrator, or more precisely between perpetrator and non-perpetrator, is confirmed by the implicit literary inter-text that opens Littell’s novel: ‘Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened’ (p. 3), which is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s famous closing line to his poem ‘To the Reader’: ‘– Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!’ (‘– Hypocrite reader, – fellowman, – my twin!’)18 In other words, the confessional tone of the SS Officer and his appeal to a shared fraternity that includes both himself and his readers is, like Baudelaire’s poem, (or for that matter the works of Lautréamont and Genet), a tactic for morally implicating the reader in the evils described within the text. In all these cases the reader is morally ensnared by the text, confronted by the unnerving realization that she is complicit in the evils committed by those ‘monsters’ about whom she reads: Littell gradually erodes the comforting barriers that we as readers and interpreters of the Holocaust have erected between ourselves and those

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individuals who carried out such unspeakable atrocities. We want to keep these barbarians at arm’s length, yet we reluctantly recognize in their psychology certain characteristics that recall our own ‘dark side’. This point is further reinforced when he suggests that the banality of evil is a characteristic of most perpetrators: There were of course sadists and psychopaths among them, as in all wars, and these men did commit unspeakable atrocities, that’s true. It is also true that the SS could have stepped up its efforts to keep these people under control, even if it did more in that line than most people realise. And that’s not easy: just ask the American generals what a hard time they had of it in Vietnam, with their junkies and their rapists, smoking dope and fragging their officers. But that’s not the problem. There are psychopaths everywhere, all the time. Our quiet suburbs are crawling with paedophiles and maniacs, our homeless shelters are packed with raving megalomaniacs; and some of them do indeed become a problem, they kill two, three, ten, even fifty people – and then the very same State that without batting an eye send them to war crushes them like a blood-swollen mosquito. These sick men are nothing. But the ordinary men that make up the State  – especially in unstable times – now there’s the real danger. The real danger for mankind is me, is you. (p. 21)

This passage is shocking on two counts: first, because, contrary to Eichmann and the historically documented perpetrators of ‘la Shoah’, this narrator makes no attempt to excuse the atrocities he and his associates have committed by hiding behind the ‘logic of obedience’; secondly, because he implies that the real dangers to society are not obvious criminals or delinquents, but ordinary people such as the reader himself. In other words, while evil on this scale is clearly inexcusable, and more could have been done by the SS authorities, like US colonels in Vietnam to restrain its most extreme perpetrators, the real problem is that everyone is potentially capable of committing it.19 Paradoxically, it is not the obvious candidates society normally demonizes as monsters that we should be wary of – the ‘loose canons’ such as paedophiles, psychopaths, rapists or the mentally ill – but rather we ourselves. If we cannot understand this point, he warns, then we should read no further. Littell’s focus on banality serves not merely as a platform for eliciting moral selfrecognition of evil in the individual reader, but also for a wider reconsideration of the moral worth of collective justice. Like Philippe Sands, he seeks out objective universal criteria for evaluating and punishing war crimes, only contrary to Sands he believes these criteria to lie in the ancient Greek system of justice: With the Judaeo-Christian approach we are saddled with wrongdoing and sin, caught up in the complex interplay between sinful thoughts and sinful acts. The Greeks had a far more straightforward attitude. This is the point I make in the book: when Oedipus kills Laos he doesn’t know it’s his father, but the gods couldn’t care less: you killed your father. He has sex with Jocasta, not knowing that’s she’s his mother, but that’s irrelevant: you’re guilty, end of discussion. Intention doesn’t come into it. This is exactly the approach that was adopted in the war trials, and

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it’s the only way of doing it. This particular bloke committed this particular act. The reason why he committed it is immaterial. Whether he acted in good faith, or bad faith, whether he did it for money or out of conviction, that’s his problem: he committed this act, he will be judged and sentenced. That’s it. In the end some people were executed, others sent to jail, some of them were released; there were even those who escaped arrest altogether . . . It’s not fair. Too bad. That’s just the way the process goes. Guilt has nothing to do with it.20

In this interview, Littell draws on Greek justice to bring into sharp relief the fundamental moral problem raised by the banality of evil: the impossibility of establishing clear criminal intent. We have seen on the contrary the sheer arbitrariness and thoughtlessness that has often led to these atrocities: crimes can result from ideological conviction, greed, envy, ambition, career choice, but not necessarily from a clear premeditated desire to commit evil. The Judaeo-Christian moral notion of justice is thus ill-suited to judging this banality of evil because it does not merely seek to establish evil acts, but also evil intentions, intentions which, as we have seen, are very difficult to pin down. Questions of intentionality revolving around sin and culpability plague Judaeo-Christian ethics in a way that they did not those of Ancient Greece. How, for instance, does one pinpoint evil intentions in the long and tortuous chain of command that constitutes the impersonal bureaucratic mechanism behind the act of genocide? It is very difficult to attribute responsibility to one person for the gassing of Jews since nurses, doctors, technicians, cleaners, labourers, police officers, train drivers, railway signalmen – all those who worked near or within the gas chambers, or facilitated the transport of Jews to their terrible fate, or disposed of their corpses or registered their deaths, had their allotted roles and followed specific orders; how does one apportion individual criminal intent for these acts, among a collectivity of individuals whose exact job descriptions may have been different, but who were all directly or indirectly engaged in the same mass process of extermination: Questioned after the war, each one of these people said: What, me, guilty? The nurse didn’t kill anyone, she only undressed and calmed the patients, ordinary tasks in her profession. The doctor didn’t kill anyone, either, he merely confirmed a diagnosis according to criteria established by higher authorities. The worker who opened the gas spigot, the man closest to the act of murder in both time and space, was fulfilling a technical function under the supervision of his superiors and doctors. The workers who cleaned out the room were performing a necessary sanitary job – and a highly repugnant one at that. The policeman was following his procedure, which is to record each death and certify that it has taken place without any violation of the laws in force. So who is guilty? Everyone, or no one? Why should the worker assigned to the gas chamber be guiltier than the worker assigned to the boilers, the garden, the vehicles? The same goes for every facet of this immense enterprise. The railway signalman, for instance, is he guilty of the death of the Jews he shunted toward the camp? (p. 19)

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All these people, one way or another, were involved in the genocide, and some, like the railway signalmen, were less directly involved than others, such as those who operated the gas valves; yet to try to subdivide or mitigate the guilt of particular individuals according to their different job descriptions is as suspect as trying to hide behind the excuse of ‘following orders’. Littell’s suggestion that the Nuremberg Trials sensibly chose to focus on acts rather than intentions is confirmed by Aue’s own summary of these trials in the preface to the novel: Why hang Streicher, that impotent yokel, but not the sinister von dem BachZelevski? Why hang my superior Rudolf Brandt, and not his superior, Wolff? Why hand the interior minister Frick and not his subordinate Stuckart, who did all his work for him? A lucky man, that Stuckart, who only stained his hands with ink, never with blood. (p. 20)

By administering justice, like the Ancient Greeks, on the basis of evil acts, rather than intentions, certain perpetrators appear to get off astonishingly lightly, while others are more severely punished for no apparent reason. However Littell’s point, confirmed by Aue, seems to be that this straightforward approach to justice is – no pun intended – the lesser of two evils: if establishing culpability and intention is practically impossible, especially when the ready-made excuse ‘I was only following orders’ is inevitably used, as it was by Eichmann, then our only solution is to condemn people for the acts they commit, irrespective of whether we understand these ‘acts’ to be only indirectly linked to the killings such as those of the railway signalmen, directly linked (turning on the gas), writing out orders, or merely following them. Some apparently harsh sentences may well result from this approach, but that is too bad: ‘that’s just the way the process goes’, as Littell says in the interview passage quoted above. Littell seems to be advocating a system of justice that accepts a necessary degree of arbitrariness that is commensurate with the arbitrariness that is inherent to the banality of evil itself, and in this regard his solution is perhaps more pragmatic – or at least more satisfying to secularists – than the Judaeo-Christian conception of justice that is focused on criminal intent. As well as inviting us to delve into some uncomfortable truths about our own susceptibility to immoral actions, Littell harnesses the banality of evil to a fruitful re-examination of our justice system.

Confiant: Slavery The one silver lining to the terrible tragedy of the Holocaust is surely the emergence of international justice first codified at the Nuremberg Trials by Raphael Lemkin into the now widely accepted notions of genocide and crimes against humanity. Recognition of such acts is not confined to those perpetrated in the present or recent past, but extends back to those that predate the concepts which now define them. And there is no greater example of this than the transatlantic slave trade which in France was not officially abolished until 1848. What is often forgotten, however, and a source of considerable embarrassment to the République is that the slave trade was first abolished in 1794

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on the back of the revolutionary principles of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’, only to be reintroduced by Napoleon in 1802. Consequently, la République has found itself caught between two conflicting moral demands: that of reconciling itself to its shameful colonialist past, versus the need to preserve its Republican heritage. This is precisely the dilemma highlighted by Martiniquan Raphaël Confiant’s 1998 novel L’archet du colonel (The Colonel’s Bow).21 His historical re-interrogation of the French Revolution’s legacy in relation to slavery is of particular importance: first, because it reverses the French Republican overemphasis on the celebration of abolition instead of focusing on the suffering caused by slavery; and secondly, because it seeks to plug the gap in historical material available on the impact this slavery had on the people of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Confiant’s novel was published in 1998, to coincide with the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the definitive abolition of slavery in the French Caribbean in 1848. A Comité de mémoire was set up in Martinique to counterbalance the French Republican celebration of abolition with a detailed investigation and recognition of the trauma that slavery had left on the country.22 The comité, which comprised among others Confiant’s fellow Martinican author Patrice Chamoiseau highlighted that two important steps in this historiographical reorientation were its role in encouraging the French government both to acknowledge slavery as a crime against humanity and to incorporate slavery and France’s role in it in the syllabus, whether in the ‘métropole’ or the former French colonies.23 Be that as it may, it was not until three years later in 2001 that the French government finally acknowledged slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity as a result of which a new committee on memory, Le Comité pour la Mémoire de l’esclavage, chaired by author Maryse Condé, was set up; this committee outlined a programme specifically intended to repair France’s amnesia about its past as ‘une grande puissance esclavagiste’ (‘great slave-trading power’); one day a year – May 10 – is now reserved for commemoration; an inventory will be made of all materials related to slavery and the slave trade; research and scholarship will be encouraged.24 Despite this progress, there are three factors that still mitigate against the French Republic’s claims to have taken full responsibility for its past, which are of particular relevance to Confiant’s novel: first, the continued reluctance in France to integrate its national and colonialist identities; secondly, its past and present failure to encourage or safeguard personal slave testimonies in French, where such testimonies have been amply documented and preserved in the English-speaking world, especially America; and thirdly, the particular dearth of testimonies in relation to the slaves of Guadeloupe and Martinique. The huge discrepancy, as Françoise Vergès points out, between the number of personal slave testimonies in English and in French stems from the fact that illiteracy was deliberately kept far higher in the French colonies.25 This means that personal testimonies of slavery in the French language can only be read ‘between the lines’ in police and court archives, or the diaries of the slave traders and of the abolitionists. As for the voices of the slaves themselves, these are practically non-existent, a problem compounded by the fact that in 1848, the year when abolition was declared once and for all in the French colonies, nobody thought it sensible to gather together the personal testimonies of the tens of thousands of emancipated slaves, a major oversight that contrasts unfavourably with the United States.26 Furthermore, whereas the English-speaking world left

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behind widely read and politically influential first-person literary accounts by former slaves – notably by Olaudo Equiano in 1789 and Frederick Douglass in 1846 – France left none.27 Finally, there is a more localized problem: histories of the slave revolts in the French Caribbean have predominantly focused on Toussaint Louverture and the successful slave uprising of St. Domingue which culminated in the establishment of the first independent black nation state of Haiti in 1804.28 But reliable slave histories exclusively devoted to Guadeloupe and Martinique are limited: there are few if any accounts in Creole which has a predominantly oral tradition; hardly any in English and only a handful in French, though this number is gradually growing.29 Echoing Vergès’s broader point regarding the paucity of French Caribbean slave testimonies, Frédéric Régent has noted that there are no written accounts by the Guadeloupean slaves themselves: only the biased accounts of the colonialists on the one hand, and the equally biased propaganda of the abolitionists on the other.30 It is in this light that Confiant’s novel needs to be understood: the glaring absence of personal slave histories in Francophone discourse, the need to salvage the occluded history of slave suffering from Republican discourse; the related need to fill a glaring historical gap regarding the plight of the Guadeloupean and Martinican colonized people that sheds light on their post-colonial identity. Contrary to post-Holocaust ethics that has tended to privilege the narrative perspective of the suffering victim over the guilty perpetrator, the suffering victims of slavery have been almost completely silenced by the Republican perpetrators. How does Confiant redress this imbalance? Essentially by interweaving two fictionalized historical narratives that bring into sharp relief two key moments in the history of Guadeloupe and Martinique: the main narrative, predominantly related through the eyes of fictional character Amédée Mauville (who featured in an earlier novel by Confiant),31 a Sorbonne educated young man of bourgeois mixed-race origin centres on the tricentenary celebrations in Martinique in 1935 of France’s colonization of the French Caribbean by Belain d’Estambuc; the secondary narrative predominantly focuses on the perspective of Louis Delgrès, a real historical figure, also of an educated mixed-race Martinican background who embraced the Republic’s opposition to slavery by joining the French colonial army in the early 1790s, only later to turn against the French when he realized that Napoleon’s aim was to re-establish slavery in Guadeloupe. Rather than capitulate to Napoleon’s envoy, General Richepanse, Delgrès and his rebel army preferred to blow themselves up with gunpowder on May 28, 1802. Despite his Martinican birth, Delgrès thus became a hero both of Guadeloupean independence and of heroic resistance against French colonialist slave oppressors.32 The relationship between these two narratives – one centred on 1935 and the other on the period 1789–1802 – is mediated through the figure of Amédée Mauville, who despite his Republican education in the metropole is vehemently opposed to the 1935 celebrations which he sees as a hypocritical betrayal and occlusion of France’s role in the slave trade. He thus represents an anti-assimilationist stance: Martinique should not seek further integration with a ‘mère-patrie’ (motherland) whose perpetuation of slavery has caused such suffering on the Martinican people. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Amédée’s father, Maître Mauville, a respectable pillar of the colonial community in Martinique, who plays a key role in organizing the tricentenary

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celebrations, is pro-assimilationist and cannot understand his son’s rebelliousness. Thus, father and son represent a tension between assimilation and autonomy, the relationship between metropole and colony that has always been a concern of Confiant’s work and is also addressed in L’Éloge de la Créolite.33 This tension is further overlaid with the question of race: Amédée’s father and indeed his other relatives, including his black mother and mixed-race uncles and aunts want him to marry a white woman whom they perceive to be more respectably aligned with the French Republican values of assimilation: indeed in the novel Amédée’s own mixed-race identity and metropolitan education embodies the conflicting loyalties inherent in the cultural hybridity that characterizes ‘créolité’. Until the end of the novel Amédée resists the assimilationist attitude of his family, preferring instead to pursue Ida, a black washerwoman, and to frequent ‘l’Historien’, a self-taught black man who frequents the disreputable bars in the working-class downtown area and acts as a surrogate father figure to Amédée. It is ‘l’Historien’ who reveals to Amédée that a portrait the young man has found in his family home and with which he has become obsessed because of the physical similarity to himself is none other than the mythical Louis Delgrès. Upon discovering this fact, Amédée, driven by his anger at the tricentenaire, proceeds to write a history of Delgrès in the form of ‘cahiers’ under the critical eye of ‘L’Historien’. It is these cahiers that constitute the second narrative that is the story of Delgrès’s abortive struggle against Napoleon. Amédée’s account of Delgrès certainly echoes historians of Guadeloupe Dubois, Moitt and Régent in highlighting the militarily and economically pragmatic, rather than purely philanthropic and ideological, designs of the French Republicans even prior to Napoleon’s reintroduction of slavery in 1802. First, as the fictional Delgrès reminds us, though the French Republicans officially banned slavery in the French Caribbean on February 4, 1794, this ban did not take effect in Martinique which was occupied by the English; secondly, though this ban was implemented in Guadeloupe under the command of General Victor Hugues, it quickly became reversed in all but name when the economy of the sugar plantations starting faltering and Hugues reintroduced forced labour and sent the previously freed slaves back to their atelier to sustain the colonial economy;34 thirdly, the rapid promotion of many mixed-race or mulatto officers into the French Republican army soon revealed itself to be motivated not so much by a humanitarian desire to extend the French tenets of liberty, equality and fraternity to a previously oppressed racial group as a pragmatic policy to recruit soldiers to fight the English and their Royalist French plantation-owner supporters. Indeed, the racial question is vital in any assessment of the extent of the Republican’s aims. After the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the French Assembly not only was reluctant to introduce the abolition of slavery straightaway but also delayed granting citizenship to the free coloured or mixed-race non-slaves until 1792, as they feared, especially following the successful slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, that they would side with the black slaves, incite revolt and undermine the White-plantation owners.35 For their part, many mixed-race people saw their own struggle as separate from that of the black slaves.36 Many, like Delgrès achieved newfound social status within the ranks of the army. But as Régent and Confiant himself highlight racial discrimination continued in the Republican army: Delgrès was never promoted to General and was stunned to

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discover that when posted to mainland France he was not perceived as a Revolutionary comrade but a coloured man.37 Confiant goes one step further than the historians in suggesting that a patronizing racial attitude was adopted even by the Société des amis noirs, the Republican organ of anti-abolitionism par excellence which included such luminaries as Condorcet, Saint-Just and the Abbé Grégoire.38 In a fictionalized encounter between Delgrès and the Société in Paris, the latter patronizingly ignore his views on the plight of the slaves, regard him as a curiosity and prefer instead to discuss the topic in excessively abstract terms that belie their ignorance of the true suffering of the slaves in the French Caribbean: They solicited my advice but without giving me time to reply and seemed to take particular delight in this intellectual jousting which gave absolutely no consideration to the genuine suffering of the Negroes, or their fears, despair or rage . . . in fact, this slavery which they were debating, could only ever be regarded by them in abstract terms.39

Thus, Confiant’s novel demonstrates that Republican ideology had severe limitations even before Napoleon re-established slavery in 1802. These limitations are further exposed and reinforced in Confiant’s depiction of the 1935 tricentenary celebrations. Again, he echoes existing historical accounts in portraying the carnivalesque and euphoric atmosphere with which they were greeted in Martinique; an atmosphere which has meticulously been documented by cultural historian Richard D. E. Burton.40 Burton highlights the falsity of the pro-assimilationist Republican discourse and iconography that accompanied these celebrations: the frequent allusion to France as a beneficent ‘mère-patrie’ who welcomes a suitably grateful and infantilized black French Caribbean population to its nurturing breast.41 Any acknowledgement of slavery and colonialism is occluded. Moreover, Burton highlights that opposition to these celebrations was surprisingly muted: the only gesture of note was a play entitled En Madiana, c’est fou, performed at the Théâtre Municipal in Fort-de-France, which a portrayal of the Caribbean slave massacres that was sufficiently uncompromising to prompt a walk out by a number of pro-assimilationist dignitaries.42 Again, Confiant fictionalizes a real historical event by naming this very play as one which Amédée Mauville organizes and participates in. He scandalizes the pro-assimilationist audience, including his father, by depicting the horrors of the slave struggle and the oppression of the colonialists.43 Once again Confiant merges fact and fiction to invite a reorientation of Martinican and Guadeloupean history away from a normative French Republican discourse that hypocritically promotes a policy of assimilation that occludes the suffering of the slaves.

Hugo: ‘La Terreur’ When it comes to confronting Robespierre’s revolutionary Terror of 1793, it is once again French Republican exceptionalism, rather than Western-liberal thought that prevails. Although this episode, according to Philippe Sand’s compelling moral distinction

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belongs, like 9/11, to the category of political terror rather than genocide or crime against humanity, this distinction is disregarded in favour of a nationally motivated response to ‘la Terreur’ based on the same moral defence of Republican ideology that it has adopted towards the legacy of slavery. In what follows I give a brief summary of the French historiographical ‘memory’ wars surrounding ‘la Terreur’; secondly, I argue that Victor Hugo’s novel Ninety-Three (1874), though written in the nineteenth century, presciently anticipates these debates; finally, I draw suggestive comparisons between Hugo’s and Confiant’s novels that bring into sharp relief the extent to which Republican ideology has morally compromised French responses both to slavery and ‘la Terreur’. Though the historiography of ‘la Terreur’ is a vast subject in its own right to which I cannot possibly do justice here, a certain shift in perspective can be discerned that has in the last two decades placed Republican ideology under increasing scrutiny: namely, since the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989, a year that also coincided with the collapse of left-wing ideologies in France and Western Europe, there has been an increasing tendency among historians to re-interrogate the Terror of 1793 in a negative light. Up until that point, the historiographical norm, especially within France, had been to interpret the French Revolution as ‘1789 without 1793’: ‘la Terreur’ was merely considered an unfortunate footnote in French Republican history that did not detract from the glorious Revolutionary process initiated by the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Up until the late 1980s, it was paradoxically the Marxist historians who guaranteed the defence of the Republican legacy: Mathiez saw the French Revolution of 1789 as the political act that inspired the Russian Revolution; Albert Soboul and Daniel Guérin legitimized the Terror on class-based and populist, rather than bourgeois, grounds: it was, they argued, the inevitable consequence of the hardships caused by the Revolution, notably the bread-shortages of the ‘Sans-Culottes’, rather than the premeditated and cynical calculation of Robespierre and Danton.44 Since the late 1980s, however, at least three factors have contributed to a historiographical reinterpretation of the Terror as a historical ‘evil’ that discredits the Revolution, rather than a political necessity that legitimizes it: first, the erosion of left-wing politics within France since 1989 which has discredited class-based interpretations; secondly, the shift to a cultural rather than political historiography, typified by Antoine de Baeque that privileges the victims of the Terror rather than its perpetrators, or the psychological and anthropological readings of Eli Sagan that assimilate the violence of the Terror to that of other twentieth-century horrors such as the Holocaust;45 thirdly, there has been a geographical broadening of focus on the impact of the Terror from Paris to the provinces.46 Staunch defenders of Republican ideology, such as French historians Patrice Gueniffey and Sophie Wahnich have been incensed by this backlash. Wahnich in particular takes issue with what in the introduction I defined as an ‘assimilationist’ interpretation of ‘la Terreur’: namely, those historians such as Sagan, who see ‘la Terreur’ as a precursor to twentieth-century totalitarianism. If 1789 was once seen by Marxist historians such as Mathiez as a positive inspiration for left-wing revolutions, then 1793 has more recently been seen as a negative precursor of atrocities such as the Holocaust or the Stalinist gulags. Wahnich partially blames this trend on the increasing influence of post-Holocaust ethics on French revolutionary historiography, in particular, the

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ethics proposed by Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, both of whom assimilate the Terror to totalitarianism, albeit from different perspectives. Arendt, whom as we have seen also commentated extensively on the Holocaust, argues that the French Revolution mistakenly valued equality over freedom: cruelty was justified in the name of reducing the gap between rich and poor, meaning that men were equal in rights but not free to act upon the world. Agamben, on the other hand, has argued that in promoting the notion of ‘peuple’ as sovereign the French Revolution spawned dangerous ideals (such as the Nazi notion of ‘Volk’) of homogeneous pure peoples; these ideals were used to justify the persecution of those (such as Jews) who did not conform to them. Wahnich attacks these two positions as dangerously decontextualized and lacking in political objectivity: the French Revolutionary Terror, she counters, was a specific event that was morally justified by the need to regulate and curb popular emotion: namely, the desire for revenge against the monarchy and the fear of counter-Revolution. Hence Danton’s famous statement: ‘Let us be terrible so that the people will not have to be.’47 If Wahnich rejects assimilation of ‘la Terreur’ to twentieth-century totalitarianism, she is also appalled by what she sees as the equally untenable assimilation of this historical episode to the more recent Islamic Terror of 9/11. She argues that a clear distinction needs to be made between the legitimate ‘Terror’ of 1793 and the illegitimate ‘Terrorist’ attacks inflicted by Osama Bin Laden. The first was carried out as a necessary measure to suppress counter-Revolutionaries who were threatening to reverse the gains of 1789; the second was an act of violence that had no underlying moral purpose other than to destroy America: ‘The violence carried out on September 11th 2001 aspired neither to equality, nor liberty. Nor did the pre-emptive war announced by the President of the Unites States.’48 Wahnich, by way of counterpoint, cleverly mounts a double defence of French Revolutionary ideology that portrays it as independent from, and superior to, not only Islamic radicalism, but also American anti-Islamic policy; she emphasizes that the French Republican values of equality and liberty are values that are neither shared by Osama Bin Laden, nor the Bush administration that launched the ‘War on Terror’ against him. Wahnich thus mounts a sturdy ethical defence of French Republican exceptionalism, an exceptionalism that in her view morally precludes the assimilation of ‘la Terreur’ either to twentieth-century totalitarianism, or to the post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’. It is in the light of this contemporary French historiographical debate between the ‘assimilationists’ who question the moral legitimacy of Robespierre’s political violence and hence of French Republicanism itself, and the ‘exceptionalists’, such as Wahnich, who defend Robespierre’s actions as politically essential to safeguarding the gains of the Revolution, that Victor Hugo’s nineteenth-century novel Ninety-Three takes on a renewed moral relevance. Though his novel refrains from explicitly taking sides, Hugo’s willingness to morally problematize ‘la Terreur’ and hence interrogate his own Republican beliefs positions him closer to the assimilationist interpretation than the exceptionalist stance. This can be seen in two ways: first, – and this is my central argument – Hugo’s re-examination of the Terror in the light of the terrible violence he witnessed both at the hands of the Paris Communards and Thiers’s provisional Republican government that brutally crushed them during the ‘année terrible’ of 1871 implicitly anticipates the more recent ‘assimilationist’ approach to ‘la Terreur’ of cultural

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historians such as Eli Sagan (to this list could be added ethical philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt) who regard this episode not as unique, unrepeatable and discrete, but as one that can, and should, act as a moral warning against future political ‘evils’; secondly, by focusing on the Vendée more than Paris, he also anticipates the approach of recent historians such as Colin Lucas who seek to extend, rather than minimize the moral repercussions of the Terror not just historically, but also geographically: the political violence of ‘la Terreur’ was not confined to Paris, but also had a serious impact on the French provinces.49 Let us first explore then, the parallels Hugo draws between the Paris Commune and his interpretation of the Terror. Of those critics seeking to read Ninety-Three from the perspective of Hugo’s reaction to the Commune, Sandy Petrey has put forward the most sustained and coherent case. He argues that Hugo privileges family over ideology in his novel, universal humanity over Republican politics, a scale of values that is directly attributable to Hugo’s own biographical experiences during the height of the Commune.50 For the concluding episode of the novel where the idealist Republican Gauvain compassionately releases the Royalist Lantenac after the latter has rescued peasant woman Michelle Fléchard’s children from the burning tower of la Tourgue can be seen as morally analogous to the grief and family loyalty Hugo felt at the death of his own son Charles, which led him to visit Brussels to tend to his widowed daughter-inlaw and grandchildren’s affairs and then to a country retreat in Luxembourg. Hugo’s own alternation between family duty and political engagement, his grief-stricken exile in Brussels on the one hand and his plea for amnesty for the Communards on the other is, for Petrey, thematized in the novel through Hugo’s alternation between on the one hand the political and historicized rhetoric of ideologically motivated characters such as Gauvain and Cimourdain, and on the other the more compassionate ‘pastoral’ or ahistorical language of depoliticized mother figures such as Michelle Fléchard.51 This argument carries some weight, though as Yves Gohin has pertinently argued Michelle Fléchard’s children’s savage destruction of the library of St. Barthélémy somewhat undermines the myth of childhood innocence.52 Rather than being predicated on an ethics of humanity and family, as Petrey argues, Hugo’s recontextualization and reassessment of the Terror in the light of the Commune can predominantly be seen as the reflection of a political dilemma. For if we consider the figures of Gauvain and Cimourdain who represent a utopian Republican pacifism versus a pragmatic Republican absolutism respectively  – or the anti-Robespierre versus the pro-Robespierre approach to the Revolution – then Gauvain’s call for amnesty is arguably an echo of Hugo’s own ill-fated call for amnesty for the Communards (most notably his attempt to get his ‘third son’ Republican journalist Henri Rochefort released),53 as opposed to Cimourdain, who might be seen to embody an excessively repressive form of Republicanism that was embodied both by Robespierre’s ordering of executions throughout 1793 and Thiers’s ruthless crushing of the Communards in 1871. But any explicit endorsement by Hugo of Gauvain’s pacifist Republican idealism as opposed to Cimourdain’s legitimation of political violence is mitigated by the fact that Cimourdain commits suicide and rises into Heaven with Gauvain, suggesting an unresolved political dilemma in Hugo’s

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own mind, one which appears to be amply reflected in his frequent letters and diary entries of 1871.54 Hugo’s unresolved moral dilemma is most poignantly crystallized in his morally ambivalent description of the guillotine, the instrument of the Terror par excellence, with which Cimourdain, the ‘incorruptible’ Robespierre figure of Hugo’s novel is associated. In the following quotations from the novel, the guillotine is first described as a mystery: it is likened to an Egyptian hieroglyph; it is then evoked in what Petrey calls a pastoral register (it is surrounded by heather);55 the focus then shifts to a rational description of the guillotine’s component parts and finally it is described as both the incarnation of negative human attributes and a work of genius: It lifted high against the horizon a profile of straight, hard lines, looking like a Hebrew letter, or one of those Egyptian hieroglyphics which made part of the alphabet of the ancient enigma. . . . It stood amidst the blossoming heath. One asked oneself for what purpose it could be useful? Then the beholder felt a chill creep over him as he gazed. It was a sort of trestle, having four posts for feet. One would have known the thing must have been constructed by man, it was so ugly and evil looking; at the same time it was so formidable it might have been reared there by evil genii. This shapeless thing was the guillotine.56

Hugo, in other words, shrouds this emblematic symbol of the Terror in a morally ambivalent light in that he both associates it with, and divorces it from, a reprehensible human agency. If on the French mainland the guillotine has become a highly charged symbol of French Revolutionary Republicanism – one that is condemned by those who consider Robespierre as a tyrant and defended by those who revere him as an uncompromising Revolutionary  – then in the former French slave colonies, the moral value of the guillotine is further influenced by the legacy of slavery. This can be seen if we compare Hugo’s portrayal of the guillotine to Confiant’s, which he represents from a markedly different moral and historical standpoint. Where in France, and especially Hugo’s novel, the purpose of the guillotine was ostensibly to execute Royalist counterRevolutionaries, in Guadeloupe it was used to execute counter-Revolutionaries who were specifically opposed to abolitionism. Indeed, as historian Laurent Dubois has argued, Victor Hugues, the Republican General sent by France to Guadeloupe to defeat the Royalist slave owners and their English allies used the guillotine extensively to execute his enemies. Thus, historically speaking, the guillotine, in this initial phase of Hugues’s arrival was a tool of abolitionist Republican ideology. Its use could legitimately be seen as a necessary evil in the name of conquering a greater evil: the slave trade. But portrayed through the eyes of Ignace, Delgrès’s companion in arms, a real historical figure, former slave and carpenter who can thus be seen to embody the views of the ordinary black colonized oppressed,57 Confiant’s depiction of the guillotine does not wholeheartedly embrace this Republican use of Terror, even if it is in the name of

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abolitionism. First, the guillotine is repeatedly referred to by Ignace and his companions as ‘Mme. Guillot’ which suggests its irreducible foreignness and alien status for the colonized slaves; secondly, the guillotining of former slave masters brings no joy to the slaves but is seen as a political process beyond their control: We had hoped we would be overwhelmed with joy, imagined the intense satisfaction we would feel at seeing our master drenched in his own blood, decapitated, when in reality all we felt was that we were in the hands of fate. Our actions were no longer our own. (pp. 203–4)

Finally, Solitude, again a real historical figure, who fought alongside Delgrès and Ignace while pregnant and was harshly executed in November 1802 once her baby had been delivered, harshly condemns this Republican violence as insignificant when one considers the atrocities she herself endured on the slave ships that carried her from Guinea to Guadeloupe:58 Over there in Guinea where your people captured my mother, all you left behind were cinders and endless crying. On the slave-ship on which you forced her to embark against her will, your sailors took great pleasure in humiliating her, and stripping her naked so you could take it in turns to violate her. (p. 206)

Thus, the Terror in a Guadeloupean context is presented as a hypocritical moral diversion from the real atrocities that took place before the so-called Republican ‘liberators’ arrived. Ultimately, both Hugo and Confiant undertake a historical re-interrogation of the role played by the French Revolution and Republican discourse through their moral investigations of the historical evils of slavery and the Terror. Confiant’s denunciation emerges as the more powerful in its content: he explicitly links the inconsistencies of a French Republic that abolished the slave trade for pragmatic as well as philanthropic reasons, allowed racial prejudice to endure despite abolition, allowed its re-establishment under Napoleon and promoted a policy of assimilation that masked the horrors of suffering of the descendants of slaves until the late 1990s. Hugo, for his part, implicitly proposes Gauvain as a figure of non-violent Republican idealism but does not condemn Cimourdain’s Republican absolutism outright, nor the use of the guillotine as the instrument of Terror with which Cimourdain is associated. However, in reinterpreting ‘la Terreur’ in the light of the political violence perpetrated by both the Paris Communards and the Republican government that crushed them, Hugo is at least prepared to acknowledge that the moral legacy of French Republicanism in relation to both of these traumatic historical episodes, is a chequered one. His nuanced, ambivalent and self-interrogatory stance contrasts with the uncompromisingly pro-Republican defence that Wahnich mounts in favour of Robespierre’s actions, actions that she regards as a morally legitimate political necessity that is totally unique, exceptional and incomparable to any other form of political violence. He may not attack Republicanism as explicitly as Confiant, but neither does he defend it with the blind zeal of Wahnich.

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What both novelists do share, however, is an awareness of the challenge they pose to Republican discourse in the type of history that they write. In other words, both Hugo and Confiant exhibit a deep concern with the moral responsibilities inherent in the methodological approach they adopt to their fictional histories. Hugo, it is true, drew on orthodox Republican historians such as Michelet, Quinet, Louis Blanc and Lamartine’s Les Girondins, but he also felt that unmediated direct sources such as Duchemin-Decépeaux’s Les Lettres sur l’origine de la chouannerie were more relevant in bringing out the life of ‘les inconnus de l’histoire’ (‘history’s unknown people’), as opposed to iconic figures such as Danton or Robespierre.59 Indeed, Hugo devotes more space to Cimourdain and the peasant woman Michelle Fléchard than he does to Robespierre, Marat and Danton. Confiant advocates a similar shift in historical perspective through the voice of l’Historien – the self-taught black man who is excluded and wilfully excludes himself from the Republican celebrations of 1935. Instead of writing a history of Louis Delgrès, he advises Amédée, he would do better to write the history of his own family, which is more representative of the plight of Martinicans under slavery than that of an exceptional, mythical figure: Deep down Delgrès is an exception, albeit a brilliant and admirable one, in the tragedy we have been living for three centuries. Your father, on the other hand, represents tens, if not hundreds of Martinicans who lived before his time, who live alongside him now and who – of this I have no doubt- will continue to populate this island tomorrow. Why talk about the exception before you have even portrayed the common man? (pp. 211–12)

A shared historical focus on the common man or woman rather then the exceptional icon, the careful elaboration of fictional histories of people, regions and nations hitherto largely ignored by normative Republican discourse: namely, the Vendée and the colonized Guadeloupeans and Martinicans, these are what ultimately unite Confiant and Hugo in their moral problematization of the French Revolutionary legacy.

Dantec: 9/11 If the ‘Terreur’ of 1793 pits French Republican exceptionalists against the ‘assimilationists’ who condemn it as an atrocity that prefigures twentieth-century totalitarianism, then the more recent ‘Terror’ of 9/11 has created a different type of moral division in France: that which separates intellectuals such as Alain Finkielkraut who unequivocally support the United States as a fellow Western ally in the fight against Islam, from those such as radical left-wing polemicist Thierry Meyssan who has controversially claimed that the bombing of the Twin Towers was a CIA-sponsored conspiracy to legitimize the US ‘War on Terror’.60 If Meyssan’s book is both conjectural and in poor taste, it nevertheless offers a disturbing indication of a specifically French strand of opinion on 9/11: namely, one that resurrects and exaggerates a long-standing exceptionalist discourse that denounces American imperialism (‘l’impérialisme américain’). That this work became a bestseller in France suggests a degree of moral equivocation towards

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America’s ‘victim status’ which, as Butler has argued, would never be acceptable in the United States itself. This is not to suggest that French public opinion was not in the main horrified by these attacks, but is a stark reminder of how reactions to particular atrocities are often contingent on national attitudes. Given this context we might legitimately assume that controversial Neo-Catholic science-fiction writer, Maurice G. Dantec, would unequivocally endorse Alain Finkielkraut’s pro-American and anti-Islamic response to 9/11. As one of the so-called finisecular novelists, or writers of the ‘contemporary extreme’, Dantec enjoys the same notoriety as his friend and contemporary Michel Houellebecq: both have chosen to live in exile from a French Republic they regard as corrupt and obsolete, both condemn Western-liberal techno-capitalism, and both have publically been condemned for expressing Islamophobic views.61 My purpose here is not to absolve Dantec of his more objectionable opinions, but rather to suggest, contrary to our expectations, that the first story of his three part 9/11 novel Artefact, ‘Vers le Nord du ciel’ (‘Towards the Northern sky’), radically destabilizes a neat moral polarity between wronged American victim and evil Islamic perpetrator. Contrary to the Schopenhauerian pessimism that characterizes Houellebecq’s fiction, Dantec’s story ultimately advocates a morally interventionist attitude to evil underpinned by a Christian humanist ethics that recalls Alain Badiou’s ethical injunction to pursue what is good. This is a moving science-fiction story of how the narrator rescues an orphaned little girl from one of the Twin Towers, working his way down the 90 floors before escaping to Canada where, pursued by the FBI, he looks after the girl and develops a close paternal bond with her. Until the end of the story we are led to believe that the narrator is a cyborg, armed with superhuman powers that allow him to overcome the scorching flames and suffocating smoke of the Twin Towers, save the girl’s life and whisk her off to safety on a mother ship. Throughout history he has been sent by this spaceship with explicit orders to document and witness human atrocities: his role therefore has strictly been confined to witnessing, rather than intervening in human affairs. But in rescuing the girl he contravenes his orders by developing an emotional attachment to his subject and seeking to change the course of history. Upon a first reading, the story seems to typify Dantec’s apocalyptic vision of evil. The burning Twin Towers are qualified by such terms as deluge, Armageddon, hell, typically theological, and undeniably overblown vocabulary that is characteristic of Dantec’s work and indicative of his De-Maistrean Neo-Catholic outlook. In his earlier novel, Villa Vortex (2003), the burning of the Twin Towers had been alluded to in a similar way.62 Dantec therefore ‘theologizes’, rather than politicizes, the attack, presenting it in apocalyptic terms, as he does the war in Iraq, the discovery and killing of Saddam Hussein and the internecine conflict that broke out between Shias and Sunnis: A thin transparent screen came into my field of vision. On it I saw . . . the former head of state come out of a hole where he had been hiding for months, then I witnessed the beginning of an intra-Islamic civil war, with paramilitary militia, death squads, various suicide bombers, on it I saw mosques destroyed by Muslims and other mosques razed to the ground in reprisals by other Muslims, on it I saw what looked more and more like the end of the world.63

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Passages such as these which present Islam in purely violent, apocalyptic and threatening terms as an endless sequence of killings, internecine conflicts, brutal reprisals and explosions do little to contradict Dantec’s well-documented Islamophobia. But his deeper purpose is not so much to demonize particular Muslim individuals for Islamic terrorism  – whether these be Osama Bin Laden as the evil mastermind behind the attacks, or Saddam Hussein as the tyrannical enemy of the West – as to depict this terror more generally as symptomatic of a wider inexorable descent into evil brought about by global technological capitalism, whose vast impersonal power supersedes human agency. As Lawrence Scher has convincingly argued, Dantec attributes the proliferation of evil to the technologization of society, rather than the moral designs of any single individual.64 In Villa Vortex, Bin Laden, whose personal wealth derives from Saudi oil production, is ironically described not only as ‘the Bedouin of the Apocalypse’, but also as a ‘Desert Oil Billionaire’, a product of the American techno-capitalist system which he ostensibly targets by attacking the Twin Towers (p. 634). Thus, ‘Islamification’, though portrayed by Dantec as a major threat, is in reality the most potent expression of a more globalized, techno-capitalist evil. This globalization of evil is further exacerbated by its visual appropriation as a media spectacle by CNN, an important point to which I return below. Dantec’s novella then, avoids a simplistic endorsement of the so-called Clash of Civilizations theory that morally divides the world between the ‘barbaric’ Islamic ‘Other’ and the ‘civilized’ West. This is further shown by his morally ambivalent stance towards the United States. On the one hand he appears to side with Alain Finkielkraut by sympathizing with America’s acute feeling of vulnerability and isolation in the world in the light of these attacks: A tragic equivalence, lit up by sacrificial fire. A victim. A soldier. Nothing more, nothing less, American life continued. But it would continue separately from the rest of the world, as if in parallel, even obliquely in relation to humanity. I had recognised to what extent the United States would be alone. Increasingly alone. (pp. 120–1)

This is typical of the language of sacrifice, victimization and isolation used by the US media and politicians in the aftermath of the attacks. On the other hand, Dantec’s narrator chimes far more with Thierry Meyssan’s attack on America when he also condemns the United States as a paranoid, authoritarian police state. The narrator and his adoptive daughter are relentlessly pursued by ruthless, heavily armed FBI agents, who are intent on monitoring and tracking down all those who were present in the Twin Towers at the time of the attack. The narrator’s more favourable depiction of Canada (where Dantec himself now lives) only serves, by way of counterpoint, to reinforce the picture of America as ‘Big brother’ who shadows her citizens’ every move. The narrator presents the American authorities who pursue him and the girl beyond the Canadian border as almost as big a menace as the Islamic terrorists themselves: They must already be patrolling the region. It won’t take them long to reach Natshquan. It won’t take them long to push on towards Fermont. It won’t take

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them long to come dangerously close to me. Dangerously for them, that is. (p. 168)

The narrator appears to be caught between a rock and hard place: between the ever-present menace of Islamic terrorism and the remorseless FBI agents who are closing in upon him, even in the northernmost reaches of Canada, and making him feel increasingly vulnerable and defensive. But the final twist of the story turns all our previous assumptions on their head: the narrator turns out after all not to be a sympathetic cyborg fleeing the clutches of a ruthless government agency, but a criminally insane patient undergoing treatment in a psychiatric institute in Newark. The first-person narrative turns out to be the fabrication of a paranoid schizophrenic suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The real narrator is an all-too-human father and husband who lost his wife and daughter in a car crash in 1997. He never actually entered the Tower to rescue the girl, but kidnapped her at the foot of the Tower just after she lost her mother in the tragedy. The pursuit by FBI agents is thus not the consequence of a sinister and paranoid police state, but a morally justified attempt to rescue an orphaned child from an illegal kidnapping. To make matters worse, the patient is suspected of having conducted illegal experiments on the girl and even killed her, since she has disappeared without trace. We are here transported back to the paedophilic serial killers of Villa Vortex who conduct experiments on innocent children and elude the clutches of the hapless authorities. As readers, then, we are unexpectedly confronted with a moral dilemma: torn between our sympathy at a father whose descent into insanity is clearly traceable to the tragic loss of his wife and daughter, a loss for which he seeks to compensate by kidnapping the victim of a bigger tragedy: 9/11; and a disgust at the possibility that he may have sexually abused and even killed an innocent child. Should we judge the narrator as a victim or a culprit? Should we sympathize with his all-too-human desire to find a surrogate daughter, or condemn him as a child molester? The clear boundary between victim and perpetrator that characterizes literature on the genocides of the Holocaust or the slave trade, are here broken down by Dantec’s vision of 9/11 as both a specifically Islamic attack and a wider global capitalist phenomenon. Moreover, upon discovering the narrator’s real identity: that of a criminally insane man, rather than a cyborg with human features, can we even attribute any credibility to anything he says? Are his anti-Islamic and anti-American critiques valid and to be taken seriously? However, despite this ambivalence, a more positive humanist reading of Dantec’s story is possible which transcends polarized ideological interpretations that seek either to condemn Islam as the hostile ‘Other’ or America as an imperialist paranoid police state. If the narrator’s disturbing actions can be read as the acting out of his own paranoid fantasy to recover his lost daughter, perhaps the story itself can be read as Dantec’s own fantasy to change the course of history by rescuing someone from the Twin Towers. If we suspend our disbelief for a minute and give credibility to the cyborg, we can discern a strand of touching moral interventionism not normally found in Dantec’s apocalyptic depictions or his Neo-Catholic Islamophobic pronouncements. From early on in the story, before we discover the narrator’s true identity, we are

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alerted to his desire to intervene in, rather than merely witness, the spectacle of human evil. He openly defies his mother ship by resolving to rescue the girl from the burning Tower. This is in sharp defiance of his orders, which throughout the history of human massacres has merely been to observe and scrupulously document events: ‘I had alerted my superiors, forewarned, if not alarmed them, by asking in vain that the sacrosanct politics of non-intervention which dictated their behaviour in human affairs be revised’ (p. 16). Later, we discover that the discipline and obedience he had displayed in his earlier missions when he confined his role merely to observing and documenting human suffering, no matter how horrendous it was, suddenly evaporated upon meeting the little girl: Yes, throughout all those massacres I had lived through alongside men I witnessed dying, witnessed killing, I more or less managed to impose on myself an iron discipline when it came to writing my volumes. But ever since Lucy Skybridge came into my life, via an aeroplane and a burning tower, my thousand year-old narrative thread gradually disintegrated. (p. 177)

In the end, it does not matter whether the narrator is cyborg or human, sane or paranoid: for he is arguably acting as a cipher for Dantec, one who implicitly allegorizes an attitude to evil that is morally interventionist, rather than observational. This suggests a positive alternative to the post-Holocaust ‘era of the witness’ that confines us to the status of victims of evil and the passive consumers of human suffering, to an ethics of interventionism such as that proposed by Alain Badiou.65 Witnessing and commemorating evil is not enough: we have to act upon it and prevent it, by pursuing what is good. And this is particularly the case in an age where technology and the media bombard us with images of human suffering – such as CNN’s film of the Twin Towers – which border on voyeurism, while doing nothing to prevent it. Dantec’s fiction abounds with examples of evil reduced to a mere spectacle, manipulated by media images: Nitzos, the explosives’ expert of Villa Vortex, for instance, makes a living by filming the war in Bosnia; Sha Massoud is killed by the Taliban posing as an Arab journalist, ‘with real Sony cameras!’ (p. 631). In Dantec’s world, films and images either cause evil, or display it gratuitously. Consequently, he proposes as a galvanizing alternative to this media sensationalization of evil, the spiritual solace offered by the different visual spectacle of nature, one that seems to be infused with the moral power of Divine Grace: Beauty, that gift of Divine Grace, calls on us to wish us good fortune, to fill us with its marvels. Aurora borealis. Magnetic lights, those which rise up from the North Pole, go through the Arctic stratosphere to spread out to the edges of the terrestrial orb in a cinematic otherwordly feast of colour and mists. (p. 171)

The cinematic metaphor is telling: the narrator wants to displace his focus on the world away from a desensitizing visual technology towards the thought-provoking ethereal, poetic beauty of nature:

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I am now recognising that writing does not entail imitating the positive reality of the world, but in extrapolating from it an other positivity, which will probably be called ‘negativity’, ignoring the fact that this is a quantum leap, a leap into the magnetic rivers and Northern lights. Herein lies the meaning of these ev-ocative words, which bring out a voice I do not recognise as my own. (pp. 176–7)

Once again, the narrator points to the necessity of not merely imitating or recording the world as it already is, but finding a new, alternative language that permits us to interpret the world in a different way. The Northern Lights symbolize an alternative, higher spiritual reality that elicits an otherworldly voice that is not our own. Given Dantec’s Catholicism, this voice can be interpreted as that of God, though we are not told so explicitly. Whatever the case, the narrator’s call for an explicit break away from the language of mimesis and endless reproduction – a language that merely records the world as it already is, but does not encourage us to act upon it – to a more suggestive poetic language that points to a richer, alternative reality, is commensurate with his earlier shift towards a moral attitude to evil that seeks to intervene and change the course of history, rather than merely observe and commemorate it. Despite his reactionary Islamophobic Catholicism and the morally ambivalent paranoia that pervades his story, Dantec thus proposes the seeds of an individual humane interventionism that recalls Badiou’s ethical injunction to shift away from our defensive attitude to evil, and instead identify and pursue what is ‘good’.

Conclusion

In the French-made film Johnny Mad Dog (2008), directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, and based on the novel by Congolese writer Emmanuel Dongala, we are confronted with the brutal reality of child-soldiers who are on the rampage in an unspecified African country in the throes of ethnic conflict. Though it is shot in Liberia, which was itself ravaged by civil war in 2003, the film is also inspired by the conflicts of Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Dongala’s native Republic of Congo, where he experienced at first-hand the horrors of the 1997 civil war, from which he and his family had to flee for their lives. The film predominantly alternates between the perspective of the aptly nick-named ‘Johnny Mad Dog’, a 15-year-old youth who leads a band of child-soldiers under the command of an exploitative General, and Laokole, a motherless 16-year-old girl, who struggles against unimaginable adversity to look after her paralysed father and younger brother Fofo. Broadly speaking, then, we shift back and forth from the perspective of the perpetrator(s) – Johnny and his ‘army’ – to that of the victims, most notably Laokole; but as we shall see, this moral opposition is itself dramatically problematized and reversed at the end of the film. Without a hint of compassion or remorse, Johnny and his fellow soldiers ruthlessly blaze a trail through the unnamed war-torn capital, killing, raping or torturing anyone they suspect of belonging to the enemy Dogo tribe, to which the president they have been ordered to overthrow, belongs. They kill an old man for his pig, a young boy for his oranges, and rape a well-known female journalist they encounter in a school. As viewers, we become increasingly uncomfortable with this banality of evil, all the more so because these acts of violence are committed by children and not adults (the film’s harsh realism is given an added edge by its use of non-professional actors, some of whom had themselves been child-soldiers in the Liberian conflict). A number of deeply unsettling moral questions are raised: how responsible are these individuals for the acts they commit? And are they any less culpable for these acts because they are children and not adults? Do these children even have a moral compass? In an extraordinary scene, one of Johnny’s fellow child-soldiers cries in protest at Johnny’s orders to kill the pig they had previously stolen from the old man. Having shown absolutely no remorse for the rape and murders in which he has been involved, not a hint of compassion for any other human being, this young boy has nevertheless developed a deep attachment to an animal over the course of a few hours. He feels greater empathy for the life of an animal killed for food than he does for the innocent human lives he brutally destroys. He does have some moral consciousness of evil, some ability to recognize suffering, but not according to the scale of values we would expect.

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And yet despite this, as the film progresses, we begin to feel a degree of sympathy for these child-soldiers as they are not just the perpetrators, but also the victims of evil. They have no education, no families, no prospects; Johnny cannot even remember his real name, so long has he been embroiled in armed conflict. He feels particular resentment towards an affluent Westernized African couple whose house they raid. The wife is a highly educated schoolteacher and daughter of an ambassador; when Johnny defiantly orders her to calculate the area of a triangle she answers correctly, despite being under extreme duress, thereby further fuelling Johnny’s frustration at his own lack of education. As an act of revenge, he orders the terrified couple to have sex in front of them. When the coup is over and the president has successfully been overthrown, Johnny is reunited with his adult commander expecting to receive the financial reward he has been promised; however, the commander dismissively tells him that no reward is forthcoming, that his looting has been payment enough and that he should be content with a job as a UN security guard at the nearby refugee camp. We suddenly realize that Johnny, despite the terrible acts he has either committed or ordered, is himself as much a victim as a perpetrator of evil, an expendable commodity who does the dirty work of adults.1 At the camp, Laokole, who has in the meantime been searching in vain for her little brother Fofo and who out of desperation decides to adopt an orphaned girl instead, identifies Johnny whom she had previously encountered and whose gang had killed her already paralysed father. ‘You are a killer!’ she bravely shouts out to Johnny, who tries to placate her by taking her into an adjacent room, offering her a necklace and initiating sex. Fearful that she will be raped by Johnny (in a poignant line she dispassionately says to him ‘Raping is not loving’), in an explosion of rage she repeatedly hits him across the head with the butt of his rifle. The roles have dramatically been reversed: she, as the dignified victim of the film who has lost both her father and brother has become the perpetrator of the very violence to which she has been subjected. The film ends with no moral resolution, and no clue as to what fate befalls Johnny or the girl. Despite being French-made and adapted from a novel that Dongala chose to write in French, rather than his native Congolese dialect so as to reach a wider readership, the film deliberately eschews the Eurocentric perspective of similar recent films on African conflicts such as Hotel Rwanda (2004) or Blood Diamond (2006).2 White people are conspicuous by their absence: even the UN soldiers portrayed as the representatives of Western ‘civilized’ values are not White, but Asian. But this does not mean that the West does not carry its fair share of responsibility for the conflict: the guns used by the child-soldiers are Israeli-made Uzis; the child-soldiers adapt to their own dialect the war chants commonly sung by US soldiers; Johnny proudly points out that his Uzi is the same model as that used by US action hero Chuck Norris in the film Delta Force (1986). The West cynically fuels this tribal conflict with its globally exported arms and culture of violence. In a particularly ironic scene, the child-soldiers impassively march through a desolate cemetery while a propaganda loudspeaker blares out a speech by Martin Luther King which laments that a mere hundred years after his liberation from the horrors of slavery the black man is now enslaved once again, both in Africa and parts of America where he remains a second-class citizen. This speech is a stark reminder that the racial oppression of the past has been replaced by the tribal

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oppression of the present, the responsibility for which seems to be shared between the indigenous African tribes who tear each other apart and the Westerners who cynically encourage them to do so. The film offers little or no hope, exposing us to a banality of evil that is total and absolute, and which both echoes some of the works I have examined in this study and yet goes beyond them: the normally dignified and compassionate Laokole’s unexpected explosion of rage recalls the similarly long-suffering Madelon’s sudden attack against the amoral Robinson in the taxi at the climax of Céline’s Journey to the end of the Night; the young boy’s surprising attachment to a pig recalls the violent Maldoror’s equally baffling displays of compassion towards animals when he treats his human victims so badly; Johnny Mad Dog’s use of cocaine to inure him to the horrors he must commit recalls the anaesthetizing alcohol drunk by Bardamu in the trenches and the colonies, or the drug-fuelled escapism of the gamblers and prostitutes in Baudelaire’s poem ‘Gaming’. But what are we to make of the morally shocking message that children are used as soldiers? Even the most provocative writers explored in this study have tended to confine their portrayal of evil to that committed by adult on adult: despite Gide’s desire to push ‘disinterested evil’ to its limits, Lafcadio’s victim on the train is a fellow adult; Dantec’s victims of terrorism are adults – the sole survivor is a little girl; even Céline and Lautréamont, whose portraits of evil are perhaps the most gratuitous of all those examined in this study refrain from straying into the murky territory of evil committed by children on children, or children on adults. Céline does describe parental child abuse, and Lautréamont Maldoror’s appalling torture and killing of the adolescent Mervyn – acts of cruelty which are bad enough, and yet to which our jaded twenty-first-century eyes have regrettably become all too accustomed. Perhaps the media sensationalization and demonization of the Josef Fritzls of this world – the Austrian father who raped, impregnated and imprisoned his own daughter for years – has become so routine in our society that it paradoxically risks normalizing child abuse to the point that we are no longer shocked by it. If the evil committed against children no longer has the capacity to shock us, then perhaps a child’s capacity to commit unspeakable evil does: it is the last unspoken taboo because children are supposed to be innocent and vulnerable, as yet uncorrupted by the wicked ways of the adult world. A case in point is the 1993 abduction and killing of two-year-old toddler Jamie Bulger by two older boys aged only ten, which caused unprecedented public anger in the United Kingdom, not only because of the horrific act itself, but because the law courts deemed it appropriate to give the perpetrators a new identity owing to their young age. A heated debate arose as to whether or not there should be a fixed age of criminal responsibility.3 Were these two perpetrators too young to be held fully responsible for their crime, or was this crime so horrific that they deserved to be treated no differently from adults, as many in the public believed? We would rather not be confronted with such an awful moral dilemma, one which Western literature first explored in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), the story of middle-class school boys stranded on a desert island whose behaviour degenerates into outright barbarity. Philip Zimbardo’s controlled experiments, mentioned in Chapter 1, provide scientific confirmation that under conditions of extreme duress any human being can be driven to commit the most unspeakable acts. Yet even Golding’s work does not contain scenes as brutal as those

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of Johnny Mad Dog, nor does it consider the evil committed by a female, as opposed to a male child. Laokole’s spontaneous act of violence is a far cry from the premeditated ‘intellectualized’ crimes of Barbey’s aristocratic ladies, nor can it be framed according to the same Catholic gender stereotypes about the evil feminine. Yet there is a more sinister undercurrent to this film that reconnects back to the issues raised in this study. Considered from the predominantly Western perspective adopted in the preceding chapters, arguably the real reason why we are so shocked that child-soldiers fight such brutal wars, is because deep down we are uncomfortably reminded of similar acts of youth violence that take place on our own doorstep, but from which we have become cynically detached because they have become normalized and discussed ad nauseum by politicians and the media. Are Johnny Mad Dog and his gang so very different from the feral youths that terrorize the Parisian banlieues or North American and British inner cities? Is the disaffection, lack of education and prospects that lead African child-soldiers to commit violence so far removed from the reasons that drive disenfranchized Western teenagers into the gang culture famously portrayed by Mathieu Kassowitz’s powerful movie La Haine (1995)? In the developed Western world, we have less of an excuse for allowing this to happen. If we cannot clean up the mess to which we have contributed in the developing world, then we can certainly start by getting our own house in order. The problem, however, is that we have become every bit as morally desensitized to gang culture as we have to child abuse. We are fully conscious of the phenomenon, but respond to it by adopting a defensive siege mentality that is not conducive to a constructive moral solution. Media sensationalism has induced a cynical paranoia – the so-called politics of fear – that prevents us from addressing these problems lucidly and objectively. And this is precisely the issue this book has sought to uncover: namely, that normative ideology mainly cultivates a collective fear of evil, instead of individual critical engagement with it. The source of that indoctrination may have shifted over the last two-and-ahalf centuries from the pulpit to the television screen or the internet but it has always existed in some form, whether religious or secular in origin. The necessity of rescuing individual consciousness of evil from reductive ideology is one message of this book, which requires overturning the assumption that evil is committed by the threatening ‘Other’, and not by us. Pushed to its extreme this over-defensive ideological mindset is also morally dangerous because it paves the way for scapegoating. In our sensitive media age, politicians seek quick fixes and concrete solutions to protect their reputations. Zola presciently showed us that the government’s instinctive response to evil which generates public anger (with the help of sensationalist journalists) is to find a convenient scapegoat: the arrest of the innocent Cabuche is designed to placate the public’s mounting anger at the Second Empire’s incompetence, which in this instance is exhibited in its blundering attempts to catch the murderer of a judge; and this pattern of behaviour anticipates the Third Republic’s far more serious scapegoating of Dreyfus, brilliantly diagnosed by Proust and Mirbeau, which almost brought the entire French political system to its knees. Proust and Céline have shown us that whenever nations feel threatened their governments find it much easier to project themselves as innocent victims, and evil onto the enemy: it is far easier to blame evil on the Germans than

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to confront the evil for which we are responsible as a nation or individual. And yet is this scapegoating, this identification of evil with the Other any different from the Islamophobia of some of the most reactionary Westerners such as Finkielkraut, or the equally abhorrent anti-Americanism of Thierry Meyssan? Given that this ‘othering’ of evil encouraged by ostensibly democratic political ideologies is so fraught with ethical problems, a central concern of this book has been to shift attention to our own capacity to commit evil, instead of blaming that evil on an external source that lets us off the hook. Sartre praises Genet’s ability to bring out our latent universal fascination for evil which we are too ashamed to admit; Baudelaire’s poem ‘To the Reader’ also compels us to acknowledge our complicity in an evil from which we think ourselves exempt. If secularism has freed us from the yoke of Original Sin, by denying that we are all innately predisposed towards evil, then it has also done us a disservice by making it easier for us to project responsibility for evil onto someone else. If I am not evil, then somebody else must be. The pendulum has swung from the excessive moral determinism of Original Sin that makes us feel too guilty, towards secular ideologies that allow us to cast ourselves as victims whose fundamental right it is to protect ourselves from evil ‘Others’, whether these Others be master-criminals such as Balzac’s Vautrin, or Islamic radicals such as Bin Laden. Projecting evil onto an Other is the perfect way of exculpating ourselves from it. The challenge, then, has been to return us to a self-awareness of our own responsibility for evil, without burdening us with the excessive feelings of culpability that came with it under theodicy. Neiman’s solution, as we have seen, is to rehabilitate Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil. If ordinary individuals such as Eichmann can commit evil then so too, by implication, can we. But rather than making us feel guilty, or paralysed and alarmed at our moral laxity, Neiman suggests that our susceptibility to the banality of evil should on the contrary galvanize us into doing good. If unspeakable evils can be committed by unremarkable people and not monsters, then by the same token extraordinary acts of humanity are within easy reach of the average citizen as well as exceptional heroes. This is the lesson imparted by Hugo and Confiant, whose novels seek to prioritize the unsung heroes of history, rather than exceptional icons such as Delgrès. And though his critique disappointingly overlooks the phenomenon of the banality of evil Badiou, like Neiman, strongly advocates an ethical shift from the problem of evil itself to our individual capacity to do good. We should rid ourselves of the victim-mentality instilled within us by post-Holocaust ethical ideology fixated on the threat of evil, and instead concentrate on identifying what is good. Yet though morally commendable, both Neiman and Badiou’s injunction to pursue the good at times smacks of naivety and idealism; a more sobering counterweight to their approach is to be found in Jonathan Littell’s pragmatic and highly unconventional take on the banality of evil: namely, a return to secular Greek justice that punishes evil acts rather than intentions. Littell’s suggestion, provocative though it is, has the distinct merit of eradicating the difficult problem of establishing guilt and culpability that has dogged the Judaeo-Christian approach to justice, a problem that especially arises when seeking to pinpoint responsibility for the Holocaust. Theological and secular prejudices aside, this book has sought to address two further major challenges that must be faced if we are to do justice to the problem

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of evil: the first is how best to represent evil; the second is how exactly to define its relationship to history. The first challenge is essentially to narrow the gap between evil as we actually experience it and evil as it is figured in philosophical and literary discourse. Philosophy and literature have often failed in this enterprise, falling into one of two traps: the first, aptly labelled by Ricœur as ‘speculative aporia’, is to represent evil in too rigidly metaphysical and abstract a language that disconnects us from the experience of evil, especially of how we endure and overcome suffering; the second is to over-aestheticize evil. In literature, this speculative aporia is present both in the late Romantic poetry of Vigny and Hugo and the Holocaust novel characterized by the so-called minimalist style of writers such as Charlotte Delbo. The first two rehash metaphysically abstract notions of evil either as the problem of unmerited suffering inherited from the Enlightenment (Vigny), or according to the abstruse doctrine of metempsychosis that forms part of the esoteric tradition (Hugo); as a more authentic and recognizable alternative to these approaches I have explored the gritty and vital portrayals of evil as urban experience found in Baudelaire’s poetry and Balzac’s fiction. These contrast with Delbo’s self-consciously experimental style which makes it difficult for the reader to engage with the experience of the victim. Germain and Littell’s admittedly controversial shift from this mediated perspective of victims to the more direct psychological viewpoint of the perpetrators thus morally re-engages the reader in a new type of Holocaust literature that avoids the pitfalls of an ‘ethics of representation’ that is in danger of becoming stagnant, however well intentioned it may be. Another major problem that has particularly dogged literary rather than philosophical works on evil is to treat it as an intrinsically aesthetic category. The first obvious danger to such an approach, as I have been at pains to point out throughout this book, is that it ignores the extent to which literary portrayals of evil can tell us a great deal about the moral values and dilemmas of a given society: concerning history, politics, religion, the law, gender, philosophy and so on. Hence Mario Praz’s aesthetic model of literary criticism that regards evil purely as a topic of cultural transmission from Romanticism to Decadence is far too narrow and reductive. Reductive, too, was the Decadent movement itself which tended to celebrate evil as a self-indulgent artistic pursuit in its own right, one from which Mirbeau ultimately sought to distance himself by exploring a gendered aesthetics of torture as a means to an end rather than an end in itself: a platform from which to launch a more searching social critique of Republican prejudice and corruption and colonial exploitation. The second danger to an intrinsically aesthetic approach is that it risks glamorizing evil as the exclusive hallmark of the exceptional individual. This can have one of two detrimental effects: either it reduces evil to a sugar-coated, voyeuristic category as in Balzac’s fiction, or it is conducive to socially elitist ideas, as in the works of Barbey and Gide. Balzac’s focus on the dangerous criminal underworld of the uniquely charismatic and intelligent Vautrin panders to his bourgeois readers’ secret fascination with evil, a fascination they are happy to indulge on the tacit understanding that Vautrin’s threat remains at a safe distance from their own respectable middle-class universe and will ultimately be neutralized by the forces of law and order. The sheer hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie’s voyeuristic attitude to evil is cleverly exposed by Genet, whom Sartre praises for using his poetic style to ‘seduce’ his readers into a world of evil, but then not allowing them

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to escape its moral repercussions. Where Balzac merely titillates his readers by offering them a glimpse of the forbidden world of evil but then allowing them to escape with their moral reputations still intact, Genet traps his readers into that world by luring them into a moral empathy with the criminal that becomes so strong that it forces them to acknowledge their own latent attraction to evil, which respectable society would normally deny. By suggesting that evil is the domain not just of monstrous criminals but of all human beings, Genet’s fiction overlaps with that of Littell and Germain; the crucial difference, however, is that where the Holocaust novelists specifically focus on the dangers of man’s universal susceptibility to the banality of evil, Genet is arguably even more provocative in his suggestion that whatever form it takes, evil is something to which all members of society are actively attracted. As for Barbey and Gide, they can also be accused, like Balzac before them, of glamorizing evil as the particular hallmark of charismatic and intelligent individuals – aristocratic ‘femmes fatales’ and Lafcadio –, the difference being that these individuals very clearly belong to a social class that is more privileged than the self-made Vautrin’s humble origins. This makes for an even more morally problematic view of evil as the exclusive right not just of an intellectual elite, but a social one (in Lafcadio’s case, a kind of Nietzschean ‘superman’) to which conventional rules do not apply; this dubious defence of evil on elitist grounds can be traced via Baudelaire back to such redoubtable figures as the aristocratic Madame de Merteuil in Laclos’s eighteenth-century novel Dangerous Liaisons (1782). To his credit, however, Gide uses his famous mise-en-abyme technique to question the extent to which the gratuitous pursuit of evil is morally justified by any one individual, irrespective of their social background and even if that evil is confined to a purely fictional realm. While he does not go so far as to advocate the conservative Balzac’s aesthetic ‘compartmentalization’ of evil into spaces and scenarios that do not threaten the bourgeois status quo, he does suggest that the writer has a moral duty to assess and monitor the impact his representation of evil will have on real life. Gide’s identification of the potential causal link between fictional representations of evil and actual evil acts anticipates modern-day debates about the impact of the gratuitous evil portrayed on cinema screens or video games on the terrible crimes that are committed in our society today. Finally, this book has emphasized the necessity of recognizing the continual re-evaluations of evil in tandem with historical changes. Nietzsche’s incisive lesson that there is no such thing as values, only the ‘value of values’, stems from his prescient insight that definitions of evil are always to a significant degree shaped and modified by the specific social and cultural mores of a given historical period. Philosopher Lars Svendsen rejects this view on the grounds that it leads to moral relativism: throughout history there have always been, he argues, irreducible evils that transcend the particularities of period, culture and geographical boundaries.4 The authors and thinkers I have discussed, however, have provided us with plenty of evidence to support Nietzsche’s view: Proust points out how Brichot’s defence of Dreyfus in the late 1890s made him an ally in the eyes of most French Republicans of that period with the ‘evil’ German enemy; whereas some 15 years later during the Great War he is celebrated by the very same political faction as a virtuous French patriot who is heroically engaged in the struggle against the enemy ‘boche’. What have changed are not Brichot’s moral

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values, but those of the French Republic. In similar vein, Foucault shows how in the space of a few decades in the late 1700s a practice deemed to be perfectly morally acceptable  – public torture and execution  – was condemned and banned as utterly barbaric. Notions of what is good and evil do therefore change, sometimes radically so, yet this need not result in the moral relativism that Svendsen implicitly fears. For Philippe Sands has reminded us that international law is capable of providing even our ideologically polarized world with an irreducible and robust moral framework for addressing the most serious human atrocities, a framework that allows us, where necessary, to go back in history and condemn the crimes of the past, such as the Atlantic slave trade, even if at the time they were not judged with anywhere near the same severity as they are today. An ethical vigilance that allows us both to accommodate the inevitable changes in definitions of evil over time, yet which prevents us from allowing these fluid definitions to authorize an irresponsible moral relativism is surely a good start in a world where evil is sadly all too present, but often insufficiently understood or opposed.

Notes Introduction 1 Myriam Watthée-Delmotte, Metka Zupančič, Le Mal dans l’imaginaire littéraire français (1850–1950) (Paris : L’Harmattan, 1998). 2 Scott M. Powers (ed.), Evil in Contemporary French and Francophone Literature (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). 3 Eli Sagan, Citizens and Cannibals: The French Revolution, the Struggle for Modernity, and the Origins of Ideological Terror (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2001). 4 Tony Judt, ‘Hannah Arendt and Evil’, in Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (London: William Heinemann, 2008), pp. 76–7. 5 Max Silverman, ‘Interconnected Histories: Holocaust and Empire in the Cultural Imaginary’, French Studies: A Quarterly Review, 62, 4 (October 2008), 417–28. 6 Notably Sophie Wahnich and Patrice Gueniffey, discussed in Chapter 7.

Chapter 1 1 Paul Ricœur, Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology, trans. John Bowden (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 64. 2 Ibid, pp. 27–8. 3 Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 4 Neiman’s argument predominantly draws on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and his Critique of Practical Reason (1788). Ibid, pp. 57–84. 5 Voltaire’s scathing attack on the Augustinian thesis ‘Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon’ (1756) and Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) are cited by Neiman, pp. 41–57 and 130–69. 6 Rousseau’s letter was a response to Voltaire’s polemical poem. 7 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). 8 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, p. 269. 9 Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists (New York: Harcourt, 2008). 10 Ibid, p. 329. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid, p. 328. 13 Ibid, p. 335. 14 Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect (New York: Random House, 2007). Golding’s novel about the descent into barbarity of English public school boys stranded on a desert island was deeply shocking to conservative British society.

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15 Neiman, Moral Clarity, p. 372. 16 Ibid, pp. 372–414. 17 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001). Henceforth all references to this edition are included in the text. See also my, ‘Notions of Evil in Baudelaire’, The Modern Language Review, 102, 3 (October 2007), 990–1007. 18 See ‘On evil: An interview with Alain Badiou’, with Christoph Cox and Molly Whalen, Cabinet 5, (Winter 2001/2) (retrieved August 22, 2012). 19 Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 20 Alain Finkielkraut, L’Imparfait du présent: pièces brèves (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). Henceforth, all references to this edition with my translations are included in the text. 21 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). 22 Ibid, p. 4. See also Gilles Kepel, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 4. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid, pp. 34–6. 26 Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror, intro. by Slavo Žižek, trans. John Howe, ed. Jean Ducange. (London: Verso, 2007), p. viii. 27 Ibid, p. ix. 28 Albert Camus, L’Homme Révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), pp. 158–71. 29 Where ‘terror’ is reinterpreted by Žižek as the ‘ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures’ regarding carbon dioxide emissions, per capita energy consumption, and so on. Žižek, Virtue and Terror, pp. xxxvi–vii. 30 Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver with an introduction by Austryn Wainhouse (London: Arrow Books Ltd, 1965), pp. 296–339. Henceforth, references to this edition are in the text. 31 John Phillips, How to Read Sade (London: Granta Books, 2005), pp. 48–9. 32 Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), pp. 11 and 165. 33 Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, The She-Devils (Les Diaboliques), trans. Jean Kimber (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). Henceforth, all references to this edition are in the text. 34 Frank Paul Bowman, French Romanticism: Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Readings (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1990), p. 111; Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London: Routledge, 2004). 35 Peter Cogman, ‘Telling and Knowing in Barbey’s “La Vengeance d’une Femme”, French Studies, LI, 1 (1997), 30–42. 36 Sivert, Eileen, ‘Text, body and reader in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques’, Symposium, XXXI, 2 (Summer 1977), 151–64. 37 Jules Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft: A Study in Medieval Superstition, trans. A. R. Allinson (London: Tandem, 1965). Henceforth, all references are included in the text. 38 Ibid, pp. 79–80. 39 For a summary of the witch-trial and its causes, see Michel De Certeau, The Possession at Loudun, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 11–22.

Notes 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

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Ferber, Demonic Possession, p. 140. Ibid, p. 8. Ibid, p. 139. Ibid, p. 141. Ibid, p. 141. For instance J. M. Charcot’s disciple Legué, who situated Jeanne’s hysteria in the gastric system; see Bowman, French Romanticism, p. 119. Jan Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 132. Marc D. Hauser: Moral Minds: How Nature Designed a Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (New York: Harper Collins/Ecco, 2006). Ibid, pp. 335–6. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (second edition), trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. xxi. Ibid. Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alistair Hamilton (London: Calder Boyars, 1973). François-René de Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity: Or the Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion, trans. Charles I White (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1856). Henceforth, all references are included in the text. Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden, trans. Alvah Bessie (London: Bookkake, 2008). Henceforth, all references are included in the text.

Chapter 2 1 Paul Bénichou, L’École du désenchantement: Sainte-Beuve, Nodier, Musset, Nerval, Gautier (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). 2 Robert T. Denommé, Nineteenth-Century French Romantic Poets (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), pp. 42–62. 3 ‘Wherever evil came from, Voltaire was sure it did not come from the Devil, whom he dismissed as a grotesque superstition and a “disgusting fantasy.”’ See Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), p. 208. 4 Peter Brooks, ‘1830, 27–29 July: An Oedipal Crisis’, in A New History of French Literature, Denis Hollier, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 649–56. 5 This poem, published in 1833 during Vigny’s brief flirtation with Saint-Simonisme praises Paris as a vibrant hub of urban industriousness and technological progress towards an exciting, unknown future; Alfred de Vigny, Poèmes antiques et modernes ; Les Destinées André Jarry, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 143. 6 Vigny’s later poem despairingly concludes that man’s only possible reaction to God’s total silence in the face of his suffering is to respond in kind with his own disdain and silence: ‘Mute, blind and deaf to the cries of creatures,/If Heaven left us a world that appears aborted,/The just man will oppose absence with disdain/And will respond only with a cold Silence/To the eternal silence of the Divinity’; p. 195. Nerval’s ‘Le Christ aux Oliviers’ similarly conveys God’s complete insensitivity to man’s suffering: ‘I looked for God’s eye, only saw a black/Bottomless socket pouring out its dark/Night on the world in ever thickening rays’[my translations];

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Notes see Gérard de Nerval, Les Filles du Feu ; Les Chimères, Léon Céllier, ed. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1965), p. 243. The poem succinctly reduces evil to the following abstract definition: ‘Evil is matter, Black tree, fatal fruit’; see Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations, Pierre Albouy, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 388 [my translations]. Contrary to Marx who criticised his theories as ‘utopian’, Saint-Simon envisaged a future ‘industrial-technological’ society which could be developed without being capitalistic. See The Political Thought of Saint-Simon, Ghita Ionescu, ed. (London: Oxford, University Press, 1976), pp. 2–3. Balzac, A Harlot High and Low, trans. Rayner Heppenstall (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 399. Henceforth, all references to this edition are included in the text. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan, (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics (OUP), 1993), p. 5. Henceforth, all references to this volume are contained within the text. David L. Pike, Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 5. Ibid, p. 7. Dominique Kalifa, Crime et culture au XIXe siècle (Paris : Perrin, 2005) ; and Les crimes de Paris: lieux et non-lieux du crime à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris: BILIPO, Paris Bibliothèques, 2000). See Frieda Hughes, ‘Monday poem: a throw of the dice’, in The Times 2, Monday, October 15, 2007, p. 2. As Hughes neatly puts it: ‘Feeding an addiction gives us the illusion that we have some kind of purpose.’ Ibid. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, (London: Verso, 2010), new edition, p. 157. Georg Lukàcs, Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki et al. trans. Edith Bone (London: Merlin Press, 1972). Ibid, p. 43. Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 33. Lukàcs, Studies in European Realism, pp. 60–1. Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis, pp. 97–8. Ibid, p. 97. Charles Baudelaire, The Parisian Prowler, trans. Edward K. Kaplan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 115–18. Henceforth, all references to this edition are included in the text. Maria C. Scott, Baudelaire’s ‘Le Spleen de Paris’ : Shifting Perspectives (Aldershot : Ashgate, 2005), pp. 60–2. On this debate, see Jean-Louis Cornille: Fin de Baudelaire: Autopsie d’une œuvre sans nom (Paris: Hermann, 2009), p. 109.

Chapter 3 1 The link between man and apes was not made explicit by Darwin until his later work, The Descent Of Man (1871). 2 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Books, 2006).

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3 Harun Yahya, L’Atlas de la Création (Istanbul: Global Publishing, 2006). For the background to this controversy see Le Monde, ‘Offensive créationniste en direction des écoles françaises’, February 2nd 2007 , retrieved September 15, 2009. 4 The pun, from Inherit the Wind, is used by the character Matthew Harrison Brady (played by David Troughton opposite Kevin Spacey) to defend his Creationist stance. The inspiration for the play is the 1925 ‘Monkey Trial’ in which school teacher John Scopes stood accused of violating a Tennessee statute by teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution to his students. 5 On Augustine’s ‘free will defence’, see Henry Chadwick, Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 38–43. 6 Lautréamont was the pen name of Isidore Ducasse, and critics tend to refer to him by one or the other. Throughout this chapter, I refer to him as Lautréamont, since this is his more recognizable name. 7 Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, trans. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 13 and 91–3. 8 Pauline McLynn, for instance, refutes the notion that Zola’s novel is a ‘one-dimensional Lombrosian tract’, citing as other equally important sources the so-called Degeneration theorists Morel, Moreau and Trélat, whose works link crime to a morbid deviation from ‘normal’ humanity and the English novelist Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal (1890) with its notion of the ‘instinctive criminal’ (as opposed to Lombroso’s ‘born criminal’); see Pauline McLynn, ‘ “Human Beasts?” Criminal Perspectives in La Bête humaine’, in Zola: La Bête humaine: texte et explications, Actes du colloque de Glasgow, Geoff Woollen, ed. (University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1990), pp. 123–35. 9 Anne Rubinlicht-Proux, ‘Penser le droit: la fabrique romanesque’, Droit et Société, 48 (2001), 495–529. 10 Lombroso, Criminal Man, p. 13; see also Delia Frigassi on this point in Cesare Lombroso (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), pp. 113–14. 11 Fregassi quotes the legal sociologist Vaccaro’s attack on Lombroso for his ideological re-appropriation of Darwin’s theories of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, theories which in the wrong political hands would pave the way for the elimination of ‘undesirable’ elements from society; see Fregassi, Cesare Lombroso, pp. 114–16 and 130–1. 12 Philippe Hamon, La Bête humaine d’Émile Zola (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), esp. pp. 69–85; Émile Zola, La Bête humaine, Henri Vincenot and Roger Ripoll eds. (Paris: Le Livre de poche, 1984), pp. 429–31. 13 Raskalnikov is the central protagonist and murderer in Crime and Punishment (1885). 14 Émile Zola, The Beast in Man, trans. Alec Brown, (London: Granada Publishing Ltd, 1985), p. 326. Henceforth, referred to in the text. 15 See Hamon, La Bête humaine d’Émile Zola, p. 69; Ripoll, La Bête humaine, p. 430. 16 Lautréamont, Maldoror, trans. Paul Knight (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1978), Canto II, 4, pp. 73–4. Henceforth, all references to this edition are in the text. 17 Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1972), pp. 55–6. Balakian cites Clémence Royer’s translation and adaptation of Darwin’s The Origin of Species as a likely source. 18 Balakian, Surrealism, pp. 62–8.

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19 On Hugo’s poem as intertext, see Jean-Luc Steinmetz, ‘Isidore Ducasse et le Langage des Sciences’, in Lautréamont, Retour au Texte, La Licorne, 57 (2001), 151–65. 20 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Zola and the crack-up’, in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, Constantin V. Boundas, ed. (London: Continuum, 2001), pp. 321–35. 21 Deleuze, ‘Zola and the crack-up’, p. 326. 22 In the first edition of Criminal Man, p. 91. 23 Deleuze, ‘Zola and the crack-up’, p. 326. 24 Ibid, p. 327. 25 Steven Winspur, ‘Lautréamont and the Question of Intertext’, Romanic Review, 76, 2, (March 1985), 192–201. 26 Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Evil, trans. Kerri A. Pierce (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010), p. 73. 27 Winspur, ‘Lautréamont and the Question of Intertext’, 198. 28 Deleuze, ‘Zola and the crack-up’, p. 332.

Chapter 4 1 Gertrude Lenzer, ed., Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 34. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, 6, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 20. 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. and ed. Marion Faber, introduction by Robert C. Holub (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 93. Henceforth, all references to this edition are included in the text. 4 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Kessinger Publishing Company: Montana, 1910), p. 128. Henceforth, all references to this edition are contained in the text. 5 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), pp. 232–3. 6 Idella J. Gallagher, Morality in Evolution: The Moral Philosophy of Henri Bergson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), p.16. 7 Jerrold E. Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 125. 8 Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra et al. (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977). Henceforth, all references to this edition are included in the text. 9 Seigel, The Idea of the Self, p. 521. 10 Harlan R. Patton: ‘Tropismes and the Satire of Scientism in Les Caves du Vatican’, South Atlantic Review (1983), 35–42. 11 André Gide, The Vatican Cellars, trans. Dorothy Bussy (Penguin Modern Classics Harmondsworth, 1976). 12 See Seigel, The Idea of the Self, p. 552. 13 Gide argues that Nietzsche’s eventual downfall was to become trapped by his own philosophical system which did not allow him the catharsis of creativity; see his Lettre à Angèle, VI, 10 Dec. 1899, in André Gide, Essais Critiques, Pierre Masson, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), p. 40.

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14 Jonah Lehrer, Proust was a Neuroscientist (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011), pp. 75–96. 15 Marcel Proust, ‘Finding Time again’, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 6, trans. Ian Patterson, Christopher Prendergast, ed. (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2002), p. 223. Henceforth, all page references to this edition will be in the text.

Chapter 5 1 Bernanos emerged from the war relatively unscathed, but was permanently injured in a motorcycle accident. Céline, however, was seriously injured in battle itself: despite an operation and a lengthy stay in hospital, a bullet to the arm in October 1914 left him partially paralysed and in considerable pain for the rest of his life; see Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Bernanos: An Ecclesiastical Existence, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), pp. 62 and 71; trans; also: Philippe Alméras, Céline: Entre haines et passions (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994), pp. 40–2; Émile Brami, Céline: “Je ne suis pas assez méchant pour me donner en exemple . . .” (Paris: Écriture, 2003), p. 373. 2 Letter of September 10, 1914, quoted in Alméras, Céline: Entre haines et passions, p. 36 (my translation). 3 Bernanos retreated to Majorca in 1934 to escape financial worries, uncertainty surrounding his literary career and, as Von Balthasar puts it: ‘a profound disgust at political developments in France and Europe’; see Von Balthasar, Bernanos: An Ecclesiastical Existence, p. 74. 4 Quoted in Max Milner’s preface to Journal d’un curé de campagne (Paris: Lettres françaises, 1983), p. 11 [my translation]. 5 George Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris, (London: Harper Collins, 1977), p. 190. Henceforth, all references to this edition are in the text. 6 Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: John Calder, 1988), p. 22. Henceforth, all references to this edition are in the text. 7 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 3. 8 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. 9 The Catholic Encyclopaedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church, Charles G. Herbermann, ed. et al. (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907–58), 18 vols, v, p. 709. 10 Scott has persuasively argued that the priest ‘is the archetype of the saviour, identified metaphorically as the little cowherd, and symbolically as a Christ figure.’ There are at least three pointers to his allegorical role as a modern Christ: the wine he drinks, (both as a palliative to his pain and the blood of Christ); his selfless capacity to forgive injustice, and a humility in death which underlies his status as a Christian ‘king’. See Malcolm Scott, Bernanos: Journal d’un curé de campagne, Critical Guide to French Texts (London: Grant and Cutler, 1997), pp. 32, 65, 73. 11 See in particular the exorcisms carried out by Christ in the Gospel according to St. Matthew: 8: 16 f; 12:28, 28–34; cf. Encyclopaedia of Christian Theology, Jean-Yves Lacoste, ed., vol. I, 540. 12 Matthew’s Gospel, 8:16. 13 Matthew 17:15, 20; Mark 9:27–28; Luke 9:40.

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14 See for instance the highly polemical attack on the author in André-Alexandre Bonneton, As-tu lu Céline? (Matoury: Ibis Rouge, 2006), pp. 1 –10, 54. Kristeva, a far more intelligent critic, has argued that if ideological condemnation of Céline is justified, it should not be allowed to overshadow critical analysis of his literary merits; see Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 205.

Chapter 6 1 Michel Winock, Le Siècle des Intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1999). 2 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 3 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. See especially the final essay: ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment,’ pp. 137–73. 4 William Bourton, Entretiens: Sartre, D’un siècle à l’autre (Paris: Editions Labor, 2004), p. 81. 5 Interview in Magazine littéraire, no. 384, February 2000, quoted in Bourton, Entretiens: Sartre, D’un siècle à l’autre (Paris: Editions Labor, 2004), p. 81. 6 J-M. Benoît, Science Po information no. 9, 32; quoted in Bourton, Entretiens: Sartre, D’un siècle à l’autre (Paris: Editions Labor, 2004), p. 81. 7 For what David Macey has aptly called Foucault’s ‘politely dismissive’ response to Sartre see ‘Foucault répond à Sartre’, La Quinzaine littéraire 46, March 1–15, 1969, 21, quoted in David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 193. 8 James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 37. 9 See Kritzman’s introduction, ‘Foucault and the politics of experience’, p. ix. in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. ix. 10 Quoted by Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 33; originally published in Carolyn Fawcett’s translation as the preface to Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological, (Boston: Riedel, 1978). 11 ‘The concern for truth: an interview by Francois Ewald’, Magazine littéraire 207 (May 1984), 18–23; trans. Alan Sheridan; quoted in Kritzman, Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, pp. 255–67. 12 Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, p. 188. 13 Ibid. 14 ‘Le Discours de Toul’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 372, (December 27, 1971 – January 2, 1972), 15; quoted in Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, p. 191. 15 Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (W. H. Allen & Company, London:1964), p. 490. Henceforth, all references to this edition are contained within the text. 16 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 2nd edn, p. 18. Henceforth, all references to this edition are included in the text. 17 Michael Scriven, Sartre’s Existential Biographies (London: Mac Millan, 1984), p. 75. 18 Scriven, Sartre’s Existential Biographies, 75. 19 Interview with Roger Pol-Droit, June 20, 1975, published in Le Monde, September 16, 1986, trans. Alan Sheridan and quoted by Kritzman, Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture under the title ‘The functions of literature’,; pp. 307–13.

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20 Interview with Roger Pol-Droit, June 20, 1975, published in Le Monde, September 16, 1986, trans. Alan Sheridan and quoted by Kritzman, under the title ‘The functions of literature’, p. 310. 21 Michel Foucault, Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). 22 Michel Foucault, La Bibliothèque fantastique: À propos de ‘La Tentation de saint Antoine de Gustave Flaubert’ (Brussels: éditions de La Lettre Volée, 1995). 23 Interview with Roger Pol-Droit, June 20, 1975, published in Le Monde, September 16, 1986, trans. Alan Sheridan and quoted by Kritzman, under the title ‘The functions of literature’, p. 311.

Chapter 7 1 Gilles Kepel, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East, trans. Pascale Ghazaleh (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 4. 2 Philippe Sands, Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules (London: Allen Lane, 2005). 3 Sands, Lawless World, p. 142. 4 Genocide ‘designates the murder not of individuals but of the group qua group, including individuals . . . through their identification with the group and then also (or rather, first) requiring the destruction of the group’. See Berel Lang: ‘Evil inside and outside history’, in Evil after Postmodernism: Histories, Narratives, and Ethics (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 18. 5 Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘When the perpetrator becomes a reliable witness of the Holocaust: On Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes’, New German Critique, 36, 106 (Winter 2009), 1–21. 6 Quoted in Dean, Aversion and Erasure, p. 102. 7 Ibid, pp.102–3. 8 Mariska Koopman-Thurlings, Sylvie Germain: la Hantise du Mal (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007). 9 Ibid, pp. 251–8. 10 Sylvie Germain, Magnus, trans. Christine Donougher (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2008), p. 82. 11 The Kindly Ones, trans. Charlotte Mandell (London: Vintage, 2010). Henceforth, references to this edition are included in the text. 12 Interview with Florent Georgesco, January 2007, ‘Jonathan Littell, homme de l’année’, Le Figaro. , (retrieved November 15, 2009). 13 Interview with Samuel Blumenfeld for the New York Times, reproduced in Le Monde des Livres, November 17, 2006, , (retrieved January 18, 2010). 14 Paul-Éric Blanrue, Les Malveillantes: Enquête sur le cas Jonathan Littell (Paris: Scali, 2006), p. 107 (my translation). 15 Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists (New York: Harcourt, 2008), p. 331. 16 Claude Lanzmann, quoted in Blanrue, Les Malveillantes, p. 117 (my translation). 17 Blanrue, Les Malveillantes, p. 20 18 Littell also alludes here to François Villon’s ‘Le Testament’. See Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘When the perpetrator becomes a reliable witness of the Holocaust: On Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes’, New German Critique, 36, 106 (Winter 2009), 4.

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19 In the original French text, Littell refers to the French colonels in Algeria. No doubt the translator felt that the Vietnam War would resonate more strongly with an Anglo-American readership than the Algerian War. 20 Interview with Florent Georgesco, January 2007, ‘Jonathan Littell, homme de l’année’, Le Figaro. 21 An earlier version of the sections on Confiant and Hugo is to be found in my ‘The French Revolution: Historical necessity or historical evil? Terror and slavery in Hugo’s Quatrevingt-treize and Confiant’s l’archet du colonel’, in The Nineteenth Century: Institutions and Power, ed. David Evans and Kate Griffiths (Amsterdam: Rodopi: 2011), pp. 51–69. 22 De l’esclavage aux réparations: le Comité Devoir de mémoire – Martinique 1998–1999; sous la direction de Serge Chalons, Christian Jean-Étienne, Suzy Landau et André Yébakima (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2000). 23 Article 2 of law unanimously passed in l’Assemblée Nationale, February 19, 1999, which recognized slavery as a crime against humanity; cited in De l’esclavage aux réparations, pp. 153–5. 24 See Christopher L. Miller’s excellent study, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 386. 25 Françoise Vergès, “Esclavage: Le Poids des Témoignages”, Le Point, Hors-série, La Pensée Noire: Les Textes Fondamentaux, numero 22, Avril-Mai 2009, 17 26 Ibid. 27 For summaries of these two writers provided by Arlette Frund in La Pensée Noire, Le Point, pp. 20 and 26. 28 Bernard Moitt, ‘Slave resistance in Guadeloupe and Martinique, 1791–1848’, in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, Verene Shepherd and Hilary Mc D. Beckles, eds. (Ian Randle: Kingston, 2000), p. 919. 29 Three French studies on the subject appeared in the 1980s – Jacques Adelaïde-Merlande, Delgrès ou la Guadeloupe en 1802 (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1986); André Nègre, La Rébellion de la Guadeloupe (Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1987); Henri Bangou, La Révolution et l’esclavage à la Guadeloupe (Paris: Messidor/Éditions sociales, 1989). In the light of new archival material, they have been complemented and updated by Jacques Adelaïde-Merlande, René Bélénus, Frédéric Régent, La Rébellion de la Guadeloupe (1801–1802), (Archives départementales de la Guadeloupe, 2002) ; and Frédéric Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté: La Révolution française en Guadeloupe 1789–1802 (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2004). 30 To circumvent this historiographical bias Régent’s study relies on the detailed legal records of property transactions pertaining to slave owners during the Revolutionary period in Guadeloupe which provide a detailed and objective source of information on the slaves themselves: their age, provenance, ethnicity, skills, marital and economic status, as well as shedding light on the impact on their daily lives of colonial legislation. Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté, pp. 12–13. 31 Raphaël Confiant, Le nègre et l’amiral (Paris: Gasset et Fasquelle, 1988). 32 On Delgrès’s rise to prominence and military defeat see Frédéric Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté, pp. 413–18; and Laurent Dubois, ‘The promise of revolution: Saint-Domingue and the struggle for autonomy in Guadeloupe, 1797–1802’, in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, David P. Geggus, ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 121–9. 33 Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).

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34 On Hugues’s cynical policy, see Lucien-René Abenon, Petite histoire de la Guadeloupe (Paris: Harmattan, 1992), pp. 89–92. 35 See Dubois, ‘The promise of revolution’, p. 256; Moitt, ‘Slave resistance in Guadeloupe and Martinique’, p. 920. 36 See David Geggus, ‘The Haitian revolution’, in The Modern Caribbean, Franklin Knight and Colin Palmer eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 27. 37 Raphaël Confiant, L’archet du colonel (Paris: Mercure de France, 1998), p. 191. Henceforth, all references are contained within the text. For the complex racial policies at work in the Revolutionary army in Guadeloupe, see Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté, pp. 361–3. 38 See Laurent Dubois, ‘The price of liberty: Victor Hugues and the administration of freedom in Guadeloupe, 1794–1798’, in The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2nd edn; pp. 259–60. 39 L’archet, pp. 223–4 (my translation). 40 Richard D. E. Burton, La Famille Coloniale. La Martinique et la Mère Patrie: 1789– 1992, (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994). 41 Ibid, pp. 138–9. 42 Ibid, p. 144. 43 ‘Madiana’ is the Creole word for Martinique. The anti-colonialist and anti-assimilationist message of this play is reinforced by Amédée’s insistence that this language be spoken by one of its characters when he demands Martinique’s independence from France: ‘Té tala sé ta nou! Blan, viré lakay zôt, fout!’ [‘This land is ours! Whites, go home!’], L’archet, p. 209. 44 Albert Soboul, Les Sans-Culottes parisiens de l’an II. Mouvement populaire et gouvernement révolutionnaire, 2 juin 1793–9 thermidor an II (Paris: Clavreuil, 1958); Daniel Guérin, La Lutte des classes sous la Première République, 1793–1797, [1946] (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 2 vols. 45 Antoine de Baecque, La Gloire et l’effroi. Sept Morts sous la Terreur (Paris: Grasset, 1997); Eli Sagan, Citizens and Cannibals: The French Revolution, the Struggle for Modernity, and the Origins of Ideological Terror (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001). 46 For a useful summary of this historiographical shift, especially within France, see Patrice Gueniffey, La Politique de la Terreur: Essai sur la Violence révolutionnaire, 1789–94 (Paris: Fayard, 2000), pp. 9–17. 47 See Sophie Wahnich, La liberté ou la mort: essai sur la Terreur et le terrorisme (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003), pp. 59–63; Hannah Arendt, Éssai sur la Revolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1967); Giorgio Agamben, ‘Qu-est-ce qu’un peuple?’, in Moyens sans fins (Paris: Rivages, 1995); both quoted by Wahnich, pp. 17–20. 48 Wahnich, La liberté ou la mort, p. 103 (my translation). 49 Colin Lucas, La Structure de la Terreur.L’exemple de Javogues et du département de la Loire, [1973], trans. G. Palluau (Saint-Etienne: CIEREC-université Jean Monnet, 1990). 50 Sandy Petrey, History in the Text: ‘Quatrevingt-treize’ and the French Revolution (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B. V., 1980), pp. 98–119. 51 Petrey makes a convincing case for the coexistence of these two types of discourse throughout Hugo’s novel: History in the Text, pp. 35–50. 52 Yves Gohin: ‘Alternance et adhérence des contraires dans Quatrevingt-Treize’, pp. 156–78 in Victor Hugo: Romancier de l’abîme, J. A. Hiddleston, ed. (Oxford: Legenda, 2002), p. 164.

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53 See Graham Robb, Victor Hugo (London: Picador, 1997), p. 470. 54 In such comments as: ‘Ferocity on both sides. The Commune has barbarically killed 64 hostages. The Assembly responded by shooting six thousand people’, Victor Hugo, Œuvres complètes, 18 vols, Jean Massin, ed. (Paris: Club français du Livre, 1967–70), Tome seizième, 2, p. 723. 55 Petrey, History in the Text, p. 29. 56 Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three, trans. Frank Lee Benedict (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc. 1998) 2nd edn, pp. 383–4. Henceforth, all references to this edition are included in the text. 57 For Ignace’s historical role in the Guadeloupean rebellion, see Roland Anduse: Joseph Ignace, le Premier Rebelle (Paris: Éditions Jasor, 1989); also Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté, pp. 361–2. 58 Moitt, ‘Slave resistance in Guadeloupe and Martinique’, p. 924. 59 On Hugo’s historical sources, see the introduction to Quatrevingt-treize, Judith Wulf, ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 2002). 60 Thierry Meyssan, 11 septembre 2001: L’Effroyable Imposture (Chatou: Editions Carnot, 2002). 61 Dantec has controversially stated that ‘there is no difference between Islam and Islamism’, see his interview in ‘Voir’ October 5, 2006, < http://www.mauricedantec. com/articlephp./articleentretien-hedo-voir > (retrieved November 3, 2010). 62 Maurice G. Dantec, Villa Vortex (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). Henceforth, all references to this edition are included in the text. 63 Dantec, Artefact: Machines à écrire 1.0 (Paris: Albin, Michel 2007), p. 120. Henceforth, all references to this edition with my translations are included in the text. 64 Lawrence R. Scher, ‘Dantec’s Inferno’, in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme, Alain-Philippe Durand and Naomi Mandel (eds). (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 89–100, esp. pp. 90–1. 65 For an admirably succinct comparison of Dantec and Badiou’s political and ethical outlooks, especially on Christianity, see Douglas Morrey, ‘Dr. Schizo: Religion, Reaction and Maurice G. Dantec’, Journal of European Studies, 37, 3, 295–312.

Conclusion 1 That Johnny can so easily be assigned security detail in the camp is also a damning indictment of the efficacy of the United Nations in a conflict zone. 2 See Trevor Johnston’s excellent review of this film in Sight and Sound, December 2009, 19, 12, 63–4. 3 In the United Kingdom, the legal doctrine whereby there is a presumption that a child aged between 10 and 14 years old ‘could not form the necessary criminal intent’ is known as ‘Doli Incapax’. This was abolished for offences committed on or after September 30, 1998, by Section 34 and paragraph 1 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. Doli Incapax may still be relevant in cases where adults are charged with very old offences committed prior to this date, and which arose when they were below 14 years of age. See Andrew Keogh, Crime Line http://www.wikicrimeline.co.uk/index. php?title=DolI_Incapax, (retrieved October 12, 2010). I am indebted to my wife Mary Poku of Counsel, for alerting me to this legal point. 4 Svendsen, A Philosophy of Evil, p. 229.

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Index 9/11  6, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 30, 178, 180 Dantec’s vision of  187 Neiman’s interpretation of  16 abject, the  5, 126–7, 129 see also Kristeva, Julia abolitionism  182 Adorno, Theodor  140–2 Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Horkheimer)  142 Agamben, Giorgio  2, 180, 181 Althusser, Louis  144 altruism  30 Arendt, Hannah  2, 3, 15, 17, 111, 123, 132, 140, 148, 166, 167, 168, 180, 181, 195 On Revolution  2 Origins of Totalitarianism  2 atavism  63, 87 allegorized  77–80 Lombrosian definition of  73 Augustine  11, 12, 14, 62 Auschwitz  15, 126 Axis of Evil  163 Bachelard, Gaston  145 Badiou, Alain  18–19, 22, 23, 139, 163, 164, 185, 188, 189, 195 Balakian, Anna  69, 70 Balzac, Honoré de  4, 37, 38, 39–44, 46–9, 50, 52–5, 57, 59, 60, 80, 81, 167, 195, 196, 197 Harlot High and Low, A (Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes)  40, 42, 55, 160 Louis Lambert  55 Old Goriot  47 Wild Ass’s Skin, The  55 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules-Amédée  25–7, 196–7 She-Devils, The (Les Diaboliques)  25, 26

Barth, Karl  13 Bataille, George  1, 31, 33, 168 Literature and Evil  1 Baudelaire, Charles  4, 7, 29, 37, 38, 39–41, 43–6, 50–2, 55, 57, 59, 60, 131, 132, 145, 167, 171, 195, 196, 197 ‘Dusk’ (Crépuscule du Soir’)  50 Flowers of Evil, The (Les Fleurs du mal)  40, 43–6, 45 ‘To the Reader’ (‘Au Lecteur’)  40 ‘Gaming’ (‘Le Jeu’)  50, 55, 193 ‘Miss Scalpel’ (‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’)  57–60 Parisian Prowler, The (Le Spleen de Paris)  40, 45, 48 ‘To the Reader’  43, 69, 195 Baer, Ulrich  41 Beauvoir, Simone de  25–6 Second Sex, The  25 Bénichou, Paul  35 Benoît, J-M  144 Bentham, Jeremy  152 Bergson, Henri  87, 88, 91–3, 113 see also élan vital consciousness in  113 Creative Evolution  93–4 Time and Free Will  92 Two Sources of Morality and Religion, The  94 Berman, Marshall  51 Bernanos, Georges  5, 7, 29, 117–22, 124–5, 130–3, 136 Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d’un curé de campagne)  29, 118, 121 Sous le Soleil de Satan  121 Bible, the  26, 42 New Testament, the  133 Old Testament, the  36, 126, 133 Bin Laden, Osama  163, 186, 195 Blanrue, Paul-Éric  169, 171

218

Index

Blood Diamond  192 boche  163, 197 body, the  150–4 Bourbon monarchy  36, 38 Bourgeois Monarchy, the  37–8 Bourton, William  144 Bowman, Frank  26 Breton, André  63, 81 broken theology  13 see also Barth, Karl Browning, Christopher  168 Burton, Richard D. E.  178 Bush administration  20–1, 163, 180 Bush, George W.  18, 20, 21, 163 Butler, Judith  16, 19–21, 185 Precarious Life  21 Byron, George Gordon  36 Cain  53 Camus, Albert  20, 22 L’Homme Revolté  20 Canguilhem, Georges  145 capital punishment  see also murder Sade’s condemnation of  25 Catholic Royalism  35 Cavaillès, Jean  145 Celan, Paul  41 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand  5, 7, 33, 118–22, 120–37, 194 Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit)  118, 121, 135–7 hatred in  127–30 Chateaubriand, François-René de  31–2, 35 Genius of Christianity, The (Le Génie du Christianisme)  31 Cogman, Peter  26 colonialism  1, 127, 130 Comte, Auguste  87, 90 Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse)  4, 5, 7, 29, 67–73, 75–85, 117, 171, 193 see also theology, biologized; mathematics, theologized Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror) 62–3, 68–74, 76–8, 80–5, 193 see also scientific prose poetry, evil and Maldoror as ‘anti-Job’  75–6 Confiant, Raphaël  6, 164, 165, 174–8, 182, 183, 184, 195

L’archet du colonel (The Colonel’s Bow)  174–8 slavery, focus on  174–8 L’Éloge de la Créolite  177 metropole and colony, relationship between  177 contemporary terrorism  16 Creationism  62, 68, 83 see also Darwinism criminal anthropology  64 criminal consciousness,  institutionalization of evil and  154–8 criminal subjectivity  see body, the Croce, Benedetto  30 Dantec, Maurice G.  6, 165, 184–9, 185 Artefact: machines à écrire, 1.0 ( Artefact: type-writers, 1.0 )  165 Villa Vortex  185–8 Danton, Georges Jacques  22, 179, 180, 184 Darwin, Charles  29, 30, 67, 69, 71 Origin of the Species, The  61 Darwinism  4, 29, 68, 77, 85 see also Creationism versus Creationism  61–4 survival of the fittest, law of the  71 Dawkins, Richard  30, 61, 68 God Delusion, The  61 De Certeau, Michel  27 De la Mettrie, Julien Offray  29 De Maistre, Joseph  38, 39 de Staël, Germaine  35 Dean, Carolyn J.  165 Decadence  1 Defert, Daniel  146 Delbo, Charlotte  165, 196 Deleuze, Gilles  73–5 Logic of Sense, The  73 ‘Zola et la fêlure’ (‘Zola and the crack-up’)  73 Delta Force  192 Dennett, Daniel  61 ‘désenchantement’ (disenchantment)  35 d’Holbach, Baron  23 Divine Creation  7 Dongala, Emmanuel  191, 192 Dostoevsky, Fyodor  64, 65, 66 Crime and Punishment  64, 66 Douglass, Frederick  176 Dreyfus Affair, the  104–8

Index Dreyfusism  107 Dubois, Laurent  182 Duchemin-Decépeaux, Jacques  184 Les Lettres sur l’origine de la chouannerie  184 duration,  Bergsonian notion of, the  113 Proustian notion of, the  114 economic Depression, the  118, 127, 130 élan vital  93–5, 113 and mysticism  94–5 Emancipatory Terror  22 Enlightenment, the  1, 5, 7, 31, 35, 61, 64, 140, 196 Enlightenment reason, failure of  141–2 ennui  5, 39, 43, 44, 69, 130–2 see also la haine Equiano, Olaudo  176 eroticism,  and the death drive  73–6 Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA)  16 evil,  as an aesthetics of torture  33 assimilationist approach to  3 banality of, the  14–17, 33, 123, 140, 195 see also Neiman, Susan; Arendt, Hannah de-institutionalization of  142–4 see also criminal consciousness role of the intellectual in  144–6 and the Enlightenment  4–6 exceptionalist approach to  3 as German  105, 108 see also patriotic ideology ideology of, the  18–19 and literature  30–3 phenomenology of, the  9–14 see also Ricour, Paul evil and myths  10–11 and politics  19–25, 163–89 Finkielkraut versus Butler  19–22 three political appropriations of  163–4 Žižek versus Sade  22–5 and science  29–30, 61–85 see also theology, biologized evil feminine, the  25, 133 see also ‘Miss Scalpel’ under Baudelaire, Charles; witch-trials

219

stereotypes of  25 femme fatale, the  25, 197 women as witches  25 exorcism  132–5 Exorcism of Emily Rose, The (by Scott Derrickson)  133 Fall, the  11, 12, 15, 32, 50, 61, 63, 74, 78, 87, 96 Fascism  119, 140 Ferber, Sarah  26, 27, 28, 133 Finkielkraut, Alain  19–22, 184–6, 195 L’imparfait du présent  19 Flaubert, Gustave  53 Temptation of Saint Anthony, The  159 Foucault, Michel  5, 6, 139–62, 163, 198 Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison (Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison)  139, 159–60 Order of Things, The  144 French Decadence  4, 196 French Republican historiography  2 French Republicanism  180, 183 French Revolution, the  35, 39, 43, 53, 107, 175, 179, 180 Freud, Sigmund  13 Mourning and Melancholia  13 Friedkin, William  133 Exorcist, The  133 Frigassi, Delia  65 Gallagher, Idella J.  94 Gauffridy trial, the  27–8 Genet, Jean  171, 195, 196, 197 Germain, Sylvie  6, 164, 165–7, 167, 196, 197 Magnus  165–7 banality of evil, the  165–7 Gide, André  4, 5, 65, 87, 95–7, 104, 108, 117, 118, 119, 124, 125, 127, 129, 131, 196, 197 anti-Nietzscheanism of, the  98–9 Julius de Baraglioul as creative responsibility for evil  99–103 Lafcadio and master morality  97–9 Vatican Cellars, The (Les Caves du Vatican)  65, 88, 95–7, 112, 193 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  53 Faust  53 Golding, William  17, 193 Lord of the Flies  17, 193

220

Index

Great Chain of Being, the  37, 70, 71, 73 Guantanemo  164 Gueniffey, Patrice  179 Guérin, Daniel  179 Hamon, Philippe  65 Hauser, Marc D.  29, 30 Moral Minds  29 Haussmannisation  38 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  12, 13 Phenomenology of Spirit, The  12 Herrera, Carlos  43 historical evils  3 Hitler, Adolf  2 Hobsbawm, Eric  2 Holocaust, the  1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 14, 15, 16, 18, 30, 139, 140, 157, 164, 174, 179, 180, 195 Holocaust Studies  2, 3 Holub, Robert  91 Horkheimer, Max  140–2 Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Adorno)  142 Hotel Rwanda  192 Houellebecq, Michel  185 Hughes, Frieda  50 Hugo, Victor  6, 35, 37, 42, 51, 64, 65, 70, 71, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 195, 196 ‘Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre’  37, 70 Les Misérables  56, 64 Ninety-Three(Quatrevingt-treize)  165, 179, 180 terror in, depiction of  180–3 Hume, David  9, 14 Hussein, Saddam  163, 185, 186 Inherit the Wind (by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee)  62 involuntary memory,  Proust’s notion of  104 Irish Republican Army (IRA)  16 Islamic radicalism  3 Islamification  186 Islamophobia  21, 186, 195 Jacobin Terror, the  22 Jesus Christ  37, 94, 133 Johnny Mad Dog (by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire)  191–4 Judt, Tony  2 juridico-scientific complex, the  143

Kalifa, Dominic  47, 48 Kant, Immanuel  12, 14, 15, 18 Kassowitz, Mathieu  194 Kepel, Gilles  163 King, Martin Luther  192 Koopman-Thurlings, Ariska  165 Koyré, Alexandre  145 Kristeva, Julia  5, 63, 125, 126–7, 135–6 Kritzman, Lawrence  145 la haine  5 see also ennui La Haine  194 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de  24 la Terreur  178–81 see also Confiant, Raphaël; Hugo, Victor Lacan, Jacques  144, 145 Laclos, Choderlos de  197 Dangerous Liaisons  197 Lamartine, Alphonse de  35, 42, 184 Les Girondins  184 Poetical Meditations (Méditations poétiques)  35 Lanzman, Claude  170, 171 Last King of Scotland, The  170 Lawrence, Jerome  62 Lee, Robert Edwin  62 Lefèvre, Frédéric  121 legitimate Terror of 1793  180 Lehrer, Jonah  104 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  12, 13 Lemkin, Raphael  164 Levinas, Emmanuel  18 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  145 Lévy, Bernard-Henri  144 Lisbon earthquake of 1755  7, 14, 16, 30, 36, 61, 62, 139 and 9/11  16 Littell, Jonathan  2, 6, 33, 157, 164, 167–74, 168, 195, 196, 197 Kindly Ones, The (Les Bienveillantes)  157, 167–74 banality of evil in  167–74 Loeb, Jacques  96 Lombroso, Cesare  63–5, 87 Criminal Man (L’uomo delinquente)  64 Loudun witch-trials  27 Louis Blanc  184 Louis XVI  141 Lucas, Colin  181 Lukàcs, Georg  41, 53–5

Index McCarthysim  62 McEvoy, James  170 Mao Zedong  2 Marat, Jean-Paul  184 Materialism,  evil as  108–12 mathematics,  theologization of  76–7 branches of mathematics and the Trinity  77 Mathiez, Albert  179 Matlock, Jan  29 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  145 metempsychosis  196 Meyssan, Thierry  184, 186, 195 Michelet, Jules  25, 26, 27, 134, 184 Satanism and Witchcraft (La Sorcière)  25 Satanism and Witchcraft  27 Woman  26 Miller, James  146 Milner, Max  131, 132 Mirbeau, Octave  32–3, 194, 196 Torture Garden, The (Le Jardin des supplices)  32 modernity,  evil and  35–60 aporia of Romanticism, the  35–7 criminality and slang  46–9 new ethics of vice, the  50–2 Romantic theology to social pragmatism  42–3 shift to urban evil, the  37–41 sin to ‘ennui’  43–6 Montaigne, Michel de  125 moral consciousness,  literature and  158–62 multiculturalism  18 murder  see also capital punishment Sade’s advocation of  25 Musset, Alfred de  35 Napoleon Bonaparte  35 nationalism  18 natural disaster  16 natural evil  16 Nazism  2, 142, 168 Neiman, Susan  14–17, 30, 123, 165, 167, 170, 195 Nerval, Gérard de  35, 37 ‘Le Christ aux Oliviers’  37

221

Nietzsche, Friedrich  88–92, 95, 96, 101, 104, 105, 197 see also Social Darwinism Norris, Chuck  192 Obama, Barack  163 Obama administration  21 Original Sin  7, 11, 20, 32, 38, 39, 62, 75, 87, 195 patriotic ideology,  evil and  104–8 Patton, Harlon  96 Petrey, Sandy  181, 182 Pike, David  47, 48 Pinker, Steven  30 Platinga, Alvin  10 God, Freedom and Evil  10 Poincaré, Raymond  163 Postcolonial Studies  2, 3 Powers, Scott  2 Praz, Mario  1, 4, 25, 30, 31, 33, 196 Romantic Agony, The  1, 30 Prendergast, Christopher  41, 53, 55, 59 Order of Mimesis, The  53 Proust, Marcel  4, 5, 87, 95, 104–8, 117, 118, 119, 122, 125, 131, 163, 194, 197 see also patriotic ideology anti-materialism of, the  104, 108–12 consciousness in  112–15 In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu)  88, 104–8 Monsieur de Charlus  108–12 Quinet, Edgar  184 Rationalism  142 Reagan administration  163 Régent, Frédéric  176 Republicanism  64, 183 Ricœur, Paul  9–14, 30, 31, 37, 167, 196 Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology  10 Fallible Man  10 Symbolism of Evil, The  10 Ripoll, Roger  65 Robespierre, Maximilien  2, 3, 19, 22, 24, 43, 184 Robespierre’s ‘Terreur’ of 1793  163 Romanticism  35–40, 196 aporia of, the  35–7

222

Index

Satanic Romanticism  37 Social Romanticism  37 Rose, Edith  146 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  15, 20, 22, 36, 59, 64 Discourse on Inequality  15 Roussel, Raymond  159 Russell, Ken  27, 133 Devils, The  27, 133 Russian Revolution, the  179 Sade, Marquis de  19, 22–5, 29, 30, 31 Philosophy in the Bedroom  23 Sagan, Eli  2, 179, 181 Saint Teresa of Avila  28 Sands, Philippe  164, 172, 178, 198 Sartre, Jean-Paul  5, 6, 139–62, 163, 195, 196 Devil and the Good Lord, The  145 Plea for Intellectuals, A.  159 Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (Saint Genet, comédien et martyr)  139 de-institutionalization of evil in  146–50 Satan  36, 37, 42, 44, 45 Sauvaire, Jean-Stéphane  191 Scher, Lawrence  186 Schiller, Friedrich  107 Scientific Positivism  4, 30, 61, 62, 63, 64, 71, 74, 84, 87, 91 scientific prose poetry,  evil and  80–5 Scott, Maria  58 Scriven, Michael  157, 158 Seigel, Jerrold  94 sex,  in Lautréamont  71 in Zola  71 Shoah  170 Silverman, Max  2 Sivert, Eileen  27 slavery  1, 3, 6 see also Confiant, Raphaël; Hugo, Victor Hugo and Confiant and  183–4 Soboul, Albert  179 Social Darwinism  91, 95 Spacey, Kevin  62 Spanish Civil War  119 Spencer, Herbert  93, 94 First Principles  93 Stalin, Joseph  2

Stalinism  2 Story of Creation, the  87 Sue, Eugène  48, 64, 80, 81 Mysteries of Paris, The  48 Svendsen, Lars  75, 197 Terror, the  1, 6 illegitimate Terror attacks inflicted by Laden  180 legitimate Terror of 1793, the  180 theology  4 biologized  67–73 time  see duration totalitarianism  179, 180 tropismes  96 see also Loeb, Jacques Vigny, Alfred de  35, 37, 42, 196 ‘Le Mont des Oliviers’  37 Voltaire  14, 30, 31, 36, 141 Voltaire’s Enlightenment legacy,  threat to  140–1 Wagner, Richard  91 Wahnich, Sophie  19, 179, 180, 183 War on Terror  6, 19, 163 Watthée-Delmotte, Myriam  2 Wievorka, Annette  19 Winock, Michel  141 Winspur, Steven  75 witch-trials  25 see also evil feminine ‘Woman’s Vengeance, A’  28 World War I  107, 127, 163 World War II  164 Yahya, Harun  62 L’Atlas de la Création  62 Zimbardo, Philip  17, 193 Žižek, Slavoj  19, 22–5 Zola, Émile  4, 5, 7, 29, 30, 53, 64–6, 73–5, 77–80, 83–5, 87, 110, 117, 120, 124, 125, 141, 194 Beast in Man, The (La Bête humaine)  30, 63, 68, 73 Jacques Lantier (character)  73–5 Dram Shop, The (L’Assommoir)  83 Nana  79 Zupančič, Metka  2