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SPENGLER
The sacred heart of
darkness
By Spengler
What is
it about the French? Even Thomas Friedman of the New
York Times, who wears a "world citizen" badge on his
tweed jacket like a ski pass, has had enough. He
excoriates French "duplicity" at the United Nations,
adding, "France is so caught up with its need to
differentiate itself from America to feel important,
it's become silly." Which brings to mind Karl Marx's
quip about Louis Napoleon: history repeats itself, but
the first time was tragedy, and the second time was
farce. Today's French farce is the remnant of something
tragic: the confusion of French national peculiarity
with divine providence.
Recently a curious
little book made its way into my hands, a
long-out-of-print 1942 biography of the 17th century
French diplomat Pere Joseph, by Aldous Huxley. Huxley,
who foresaw a hideous fate for civilization in his
celebrated dystopia Brave New World, struggled
with the origins of the terrible world war then
consuming Europe. The red thread of his research took
him back to Father Joseph du Tremblay, the original
"Grey Eminence". Father Joseph's skulduggery on behalf
of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu became the stuff of
legend, thanks in part to Alexander Dumas's historical
fiction.
Huxley was half-mad with mysticism by
the time he fixed his gaze on Father Joseph, but
sometimes it takes one to know one. Richelieu's diplomat
and spymaster trained in a school of mystical
"self-annihilation" that substituted the interests of
France for the plans of divine providence. France
herself was God's instrument for salvation of humanity,
Father Joseph believed, such that her interests
justified any means, no matter how horrible.
Not
merely the temporal interests of the French state, but a
self-deifying delusion prompted these French clerics to
prolong the religious wars of the 1620s into the
terrible 30 Years' War (1618-48), killing most of the
population of central Europe. Richelieu and Pere Joseph
bribed and manipulated Protestant and Catholic alike to
extend the conflict. When they ran out of prospective
dupes, they deployed French forces. France emerged as
the mistress of Europe, with a depopulated Germany
divided into hundreds of impotent princedoms, and an
exhausted Spain and Austria unable to challenge her.
Richelieu and Joseph made Henry Kissinger look
like a pussycat by comparison. Louis XIII was a
weakling, a homosexual masochist incapable of providing
an heir to the French throne. Not the French monarchy,
nor the squabbling nobility, but a coven of Catholic
mystics ran the nastiest realpolitik of the
modern period. France's rival in Europe was the Habsburg
dynasty, then occupying the thrones of Spain and
Austria. To break Austria, leader of the Catholic party
in the religious wars, Richelieu subsidized the Swedish
intervention on the Protestant side. Notoriously, Father
Joseph duped the Austrian emperor into dismissing his
best general, Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein,
in order to give Sweden a freer hand. Father Joseph and
his spies probably had a hand in the Austrian decision
to assassinate Wallenstein after he tried to make a
separate peace with the Swedes. In the greater interest
of France, this Catholic fanatic paid Protestant and
Turk to harass the Habsburgs.
Huxley, searching
for the causes of the terrible world wars of the 20th
century, concluded that their source was to be found in
this horrifying period. French clerical mysticism was
the sacred heart of darkness.
It was in the
French court itself, though, that Richelieu revealed his
conspiratorial talents. Louis XIII's frustrated consort
was the Spanish princess Anne of Austria, a supporter of
her home country, which Richelieu wished to ruin.
Hormones outweighed homesickness, though, and Richelieu
cowed Anne by controlling access to her bedchamber. His
master stroke was to pair Anne with the dashing Italian
adventurer Giulio Mazarini, a Vatican spy whom Richelieu
recruited to French service. The future Cardinal Mazarin
not only succeeded Richelieu as prime minister, but
almost certainly (according to new evidence published by
Anthony Levi) was the father of Louis XIV.
All
nationalism worships God in the carnival-mirror of its
own reflection, but these 17th century French mystics
created a new and pernicious idea. Christian universal
empire, from Charlemagne in AD 800 to the Habsburgs in
1914, was by definition multinational, if not
anti-national. The Christians were the Ecclesia, those
called out of the nations, and only a truly universal
elite could rule them. Nationalism was to be suppressed.
That is why the 16th century church did not tolerate
translation of the scriptures into the vernacular.
Richelieu and Father Joseph overthrew this. In place of
universal empire, they proposed a Christian empire led
by a particular nation divinely appointed for world
mastery, namely France. Between the Sun King Louis XIV
and Napoleon Bonaparte, it became a going proposition
for the better part of two centuries.
France, to
be sure, was not the only nation that mistook itself for
God. Adolf Hitler turned the idea into something
unspeakably worse than the French ever could have
imagined. The Greek-speaking remnant of the Roman Empire
in Constantinople, the "Second Rome", saw itself as the
legitimate savior of the world. As Huxley observes,
Father Joseph's vision of France as the instrument of
providence was of one piece with his vision of a
French-led crusade to liberate Constantinople from the
Turks. Nineteenth century Russia suffered from the same
delusion of a liberated Constantinople. By some perverse
twist of fate, the French ambassador to the court of the
czar in 1914, Michael Paleologue, descended from the
last ruling family of Constantinople. He spurred Russia
toward a war that, he hoped, would wipe out the hated
Habsburg monarchy of Austria forever.
Habsburg
Austria, the embodiment of the medieval Catholic empire,
became the target of the French messianists, because it
was precisely this model that the French desired to
supplant. Catholic universal empire, the "prison of the
nations" in its 19th century Habsburg expression,
ultimately was a failure. By contrast, the United
States, a melting-pot nation of immigrants, achieved a
transcendant kind of universality, and thereby became
the world's dominant power.
It is this that
France cannot abide in its sacred heart of darkness.
Habsburg Austria was a competitor, but America is an
obsession. The fact that America twice saved France
during the 20th century merely reinforces the French
sentiment of ultimate irrelevance. Centuries of
accumulated bile ooze and gurgle in mortification. None
of it matters. France has no military power and a
sclerotic economy. Along with the rest of Europe, its
population is aging and soon will decline. Its protest
against American hegemony is the last echo of an evil
age in Europe whose passing will go unmourned.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
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