Camus’s attempt to grasp this implacable logic in order to help break its hold on revolutionary activity is the primary inspiration for The Rebel. And the study of the ordeal of St. Just is crucial to the analysis that Camus works out.
If we are truly at grips with a tragedy of the Western intellect, one of its crucial forms is revealed in the struggles of St. Just to inaugurate the reign of justice. His is the bourgeois version, built around formal principles and eternal values. Camus evaluates this logic by observing, “Morality, when it is formal, devours.” For St. Just, the disintegration begins almost immediately.
From the moment that the laws fail to make harmony reign, or when the unity which should be created by adherence to principles is destroyed, who is to blame? Factions. Who compose the factions? Those who deny by their very actions the necessary unity. The faction divides the sovereign. It is therefore blasphemous and criminal. It, and it alone, must be combatted. But what if there are many factions? All will be combatted, without let-up. St. Just exclaims: “Either the virtues or the Terror” (R, 124; L’HR, 157).
Observes Camus, “St. Just dreams of an ideal city where manners and customs, in final agreement with the law, will proclaim the innocence of man and the identity of his nature with reason” (R, 125). “But this is a vision of purity which is not of this world.” As a dream it may invigorate and ennoble. As a guide to action it can only lead to oppression and terror. St. Just insists. He will be satisfied with nothing less. If virtue is not freely chosen, it must be imposed, consistent with Rousseau’s injunction that we may have to “force them to be free.”
Sade, or Debauchery in One Castle
Progress, industry, production, and the future—or the revolution, the reign of virtue, and the classless society—we are clearly in a new era. But before the temple of the new gods can be raised, that of the old gods must be destroyed. As the bourgeoisie come to power, the age of reason culminates with the ascension into the Jacobin heaven of the eternal principles in whose name St. Just seeks to bring about the republic of virtue.
If the Enlightenment is the Christian world rationalized, its vision is built upon rejection of the irrational, of the wild and daemonic, of the passions of the human soul and the call of the human heart. The faith of deism is detached and calculated. Its deity is rational and impersonal. It is oblivious to the passions and pathos of the solitary individual. The subjective, the personal, the spontaneous, have no place in the emerging era. Public repression of these dionysian forces can only lead to their private fermentation. There is a dialectic of denial that increases the force while distorting the shape of the rejected. Sade, its most dramatic expression, launches a full scale attack on the ancien regime, on the rationalized Christianity that is the Enlightenment, and on the emerging bourgeois order (R, 37).
Sade is the repressed underside of the Enlightenment. Nature is not reason, it is instinct and power. Humans are not virtuous by nature, they are cravings for the expression of sexual passion. And society is not institutionalized civic virtue, it is an order based upon the repression of desire and the oppression of people. “Sade denies God in the name of nature . . . and he makes nature a power bent on destruction” (R, 38). “The only logic known to Sade was the logic of his feelings” (R, 36), a reality denied by the rationalists of the emerging order—though not, it should be noted, by Rousseau. 1 lis rebellion is directed against an unjust world built upon the denial of the personal, the passional, the spontaneous. “The freedom he demands is not one of principles, but of instincts” (R, 38).
But, “from rebellion Sade can only deduce an absolute negation.” Rejecting a society that rejected him and a world that had no place for untamed desires, Sade’s demand is for unbridled freedom. Absolute negation leads to the demand for absolute freedom. Rejection of the divinity of reason and of the view of a reasonable nature gives rise to the divinity of the passions
and the view of nature as sexual instinct, power, and the will to dominate. He presciently saw the logic by which “the republic [of the revolutionaries] . . . founded on the murder of the King—who was King by divine right… [was] deprived . . . of the right to outlaw crime or to censure malevolent instincts” ( R, 39). Hence the hypocrisy of their rule. Prisoners’ “dreams have no limits and reality is no curb.” Being totally rejected, he rejects totally. Being denied personal expression, he demands the right to unlimited expression. Nurtured in the bowels of a tortured soul, his rebellion is prophetic. “His desperate demand for freedom led Sade into the kingdom of servitude; his inordinate thirst for a form of life he could never attain was assuaged in the successive frenzies of a dream of universal destruction” (R, 36—7). In both the logic of his development, and the place he gives to the passions of the individual in opposition to the reigning deities, Sade points a path into our modern era for the sensitive individual.
In an age of absolutes, to reject one requires putting another in its place. Sade rejects God in the name of nature, at the same time rejecting reason in the name of the passions. Hence he rejects the established order, based as it is, at least in principle, on a reasoned and just nature. To this he counterposes a mechanical and purposeless universe of unbridled desire and the will to power. Sexual instinct becomes his god; its complete freedom of expression, the law of conduct. But such freedom knows no bounds. “Sade . . . obeys no other law than that of inexhaustible desire. But to desire without limits is the equivalent of being desired without limit. License to destroy supposes that you yourself can be destroyed. Therefore you must struggle and dominate. The law of this world is nothing but the law of force; its driving force, the will to power” (R, 41). But the law of force needs a realm in which to operate. “If they [the passions] do not reign at least over a specified territory . . . they are no longer the law.. .. The law of power .. . must fix the boundaries, without delay, of the territory where it holds sway, even if it means surrounding it with barbed wire and observation towers” (R, 42).
“The most unbridled rebellion, insistence upon complete freedom, leads,” therefore, “to the total subjection of the majority. For Sade, man’s emancipation is consummated in these strongholds of debauchery where a kind of bureaucracy of vice rules . . . the men and women who have committed themselves forever to the hell of their desires” (R, 42). Unbridled passion for one is the reduction of others to the status of object. It can only complete itself in the closed world of total oppression. Of course, such domination requires rational calculation. Things can’t be left to chance. Thus unbridled passion dialectically defeats itself by requiring calculation. Absolute freedom requires the establishment of complete domination. Unlimited personal expression calls for the reduction of others to the status of object—which only invites others to do likewise to oneself. At the center of such a demonic universe stands the solitary individual whose passions will to dominate, but over what? A world of dead objects. Such irrational passions know no limit, not even those of the individual self. These forces of nature once absolutized and unleashed can only lead to the destruction of the human. Thus the demand for total freedom ineluctably results in total “dehumanization coldly planned by the intelligence[:] The reduction of man to an object of experiment, [and] the rule that specifies the relation between the will to power and man as an object” (R, 46-7).
But, if Sade’s logic is prescient, his lesson was not widely appreciated. Rather he suggests the direction that the rebellion against rationalized Christian values was to take in the West. In one sense, passing through the Romantics it ends with the Nazis, in so far as nature as biological passion is deified in the action of the folk. More pervasively, if less obviously, the demand for personal expression of irrational and repressed sexual instincts points the way through the Romantics to a more subtle deification to which brief attention must be paid.
ROMANTICISM
Romanticism “is the cry of outraged innocence” (R, 47). Incarnating the feeling that the individual has been cheated by life, it throws back to the world its defiant challenge. Where Sade had been a solitary and rejected individual, Romanticism becomes a broad cultural movement of the disaffected. Initially rooted in an increasingly marginalized stratum of anomic artists, it gave expression to the increasing rootlessness of a population whose lives were being turned upside down by industrialization. But they initially expressed this rootlessness in terms drawn from and against a Christian world they felt had betrayed them. Their inspiration comes from an attempt to find a place for the self in a world that seems increasingly indifferent to its fate. Here Romanticism follows Sade in his demand for passionate self-expression. Facing a world that proclaims its divine justification, the Romantics respond in turn by rejecting it. Since God rules over that world, the Romantics reject God in the name of rebellion. “Lucifer-like” they challenge the ruling order. But as isolated individuals in touch more with their alienated sensibility than with any positive possibilities of collective action, a sense of impotence pervades their every effort. A rebellion without concrete possibilities of constructive expression, the positive content of their rebellion is quickly lost in the swelling tide of pent-up rage. Having been cheated by the world, they want amends. Having no specific responses to offer, they want everything changed. Condemned by their alienation from society, and from a sustaining work in process, they want adventure now. Frenzy will be the answer to boredom; apocalypse, the response to temporal dispersion and death. “The human being who is condemned to death is, at least, magnificent before he disappears, and his magnificence is his justification” (R, 51).