At the end of this eulogy (which is convincing and borders on sincere admiration), suddenly we find a dramatic reversal: the wizard discovers that he is unable to control the subterranean powers he has conjured up, the victor is suffocated by his own overproduction and is forced to bring forth from his loins the digger of his own grave—the proletariat.
This new force now enters the scene: at first divided and confused, it is forged in the destruction of machinery and then used by the bourgeoisie as shock troops forced to fight its enemy’s enemies (the absolute monarchies, the landed property holders, the petite bourgeoisie), until gradually it absorbs the artisans, shopkeepers, and peasant landowners who once were its adversaries but have now been turned into proletarians by the bourgeoisie. The upheaval becomes struggle as workers organize thanks to another power that the bourgeoisie developed for its own profit: communications. And here the Manifesto cites the example of the railways, but the authors are also thinking of new mass media (and let’s not forget that in The Holy Family Marx and Engels were able to use the television of that age—namely, the serial novel—as a model of the collective imagination, and they criticized its ideology by using the very language and situations the serials had made popular).
At this point the Communists come onstage. Before saying in a programmatic way what they are and what they want, the Manifesto (in a superb rhetorical move) puts itself in the position of the bourgeois who fears them, and advances some terrified questions: Do you want to abolish property? Do you want common access to women? Do you want to destroy religion, the nation, the family?
Here things become more subtle, because the Manifesto seems to reply to all these questions in a reassuring way, as though to mollify its adversaries—then, in a sudden move, it hits them in the solar plexus, winning the cheers of the proletarian public … Do we want to abolish property? Of course not. But property relations have always been subject to change: did not the French Revolution abolish feudal property in favor of bourgeois property? Do we want to abolish private property? What a crazy idea; there is no chance of that, because it is the property of a tenth of the population, which works against the other nine-tenths. Are you reproaching us for wanting to abolish “your” property? Well, yes, that is exactly what we want to do.
Common access to women? Come on, we prefer to relieve women from their role as instruments of production. Do you see us having common access to women? Possessing women in common was invented by you, since apart from using your own wives you take advantage of workers’ wives, and as your ultimate sport you practice the art of seducing your peers’ wives. Destroy the nation? But how can you take from the workers something they have never possessed? On the contrary, we want to turn ourselves into a nation and triumph…
And so on up to the masterpiece of reticence that is the reply to the question of religion. We can intuit that the reply is “We want to destroy this religion,” but the text does not say so: just when it broaches such a delicate topic, it glides over it and lets us infer that all transformations come at a price, but for goodness’ sake, let’s not take up such delicate issues immediately.
There then follows the most doctrinal part, the movement’s program, the critique of different kinds of socialism, but by this stage the reader is already seduced by the preceding pages. And just in case the programmatic part is too difficult, here we find a final sting in the tail, two breathtaking slogans, easy, memorable and destined (it seems to me) to have an extraordinary future: “Workers have nothing to lose but their chains,” and “Workers of the world, unite!”
Even apart from its genuinely poetic capacity to invent memorable metaphors, the Manifesto remains a masterpiece of political (but not only political) oratory, and it ought to be studied at school along with Cicero’s Invectives against Catiline and Mark Antony’s speech over Julius Caesar’s body in Shakespeare, especially as it is not impossible, given Marx’s familiarity with classical culture, that he had in mind these very texts when writing it.
Article published in L’Espresso, 8 January 1998, for the 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto.
THE MISTS OF THE VALOIS
I discovered Sylvie when I was twenty, almost by chance, and I read it knowing very little about Nerval. I read the story in a state of total innocence, and I was bowled over. Later I discovered that it had made the same impression on Proust as it did on me. I do not remember how I articulated this impression in the vocabulary I had then, especially as now I can only express it in Proust’s words from the few pages he devotes to Nerval in Contre Sainte-Beuve (Against SainteBeuve).
Sylvie is certainly not, as Barrés (and a certain strand of “reactionary” criticism) insisted, a typically French, neoclassical idyll; it does not express a rootedness in the French soil (if anything, by the end the protagonist feels uprooted). Sylvie speaks to us of something that has unreal colors, the kind of thing we sometimes see when asleep and whose contours we would like to pin down, and which we inevitably lose when we awake. Sylvie is the dream of a dream, and its oneiric quality is such that “we are constantly compelled to go back to the preceding pages, to see where we are….” The colors in Sylvie are not those of a classic watercolor: Sylvie is of “a purple color, a pink-purple color like purple-violet satin, at the opposite pole from the watercolor tones of moderate France.'” It is a model not of “gracefulness full of restraint” but, rather, of a “morbid obsession.” The atmosphere of Sylvie is “bluish and purple,” although this atmosphere is found not in the words but in the spaces between one word and another: “like the mists in a morning at Chantilly.”*
Perhaps at twenty I could not have put it like this: but I emerged from the story as though my eyes were glazed, not quite as happens in dreams, but, rather, as though I were on that morning threshold when you slowly awaken from a dream, you confuse the first conscious reflections with the last glimmers of the dream, and you cannot make out (or have not yet crossed) the border between dream and reality. Without having read Proust at that time, I knew I had felt the mist-effect.
I have reread this story very many times in the course of the last forty-five years, and on each occasion I would try to explain to myself or to others why it had this effect on me. Each time I thought I had discovered the reason, and yet each time I started to reread it I would find myself as at the beginning, still a victim of the mist-effect.
In what follows I will try to explain why and how the text manages to produce its misteffects. But whoever wants to follow me must not be afraid of losing the magic of Sylvie by knowing too much about it. On the contrary, the more the reader knows about it, the more able will’s/he be to reread it with renewed astonishment.†
Labrunie and Nerval I must begin with a very important distinction. I want to eliminate from the outset an unwelcome character—namely, the empirical author. The empirical author of this story was called Gérard Labrunie, and he wrote under the nom de plume of Gérard de Nerval.
If we try to read Sylvie thinking about Labrunie, we are immediately on the wrong track. For instance, one then has to try, as many critics have done, to see how and to what extent the facts narrated in Sylvie refer to Labrunie’s life. Thus it is that editions and translations of Sylvie are generally accompanied by biographical notes debating whether Aurélie was the actress Jenny Colon (incidentally, whoever looks at her portrait, reproduced in various editions, becomes seriously disillusioned), whether there really was an archery company at Loisy (or whether it was not rather at Creil), whether Labrunie really had received an inheritance from his uncle, or whether the character of Adrienne was based on Sophie Dawes, Baroness of Feuchères. Many solid academic reputations have been built on the basis of such meticulous research, all very useful for writing a biography of Gérard Labrunie but not for understanding Sylvie.
Gérard Labrunie committed suicide after passing through several psychiatric clinics, and we know from one of his letters that he had written Sylvie
