Rites of Holy Terror: Sadean Governmentality in France's Les Dieux ont soif - Johns Hopkins University

Rites of Holy Terror: Sadean Governmentality in France's Les
   Dieux ont soif

   Andrew Pigott

   MLN, Volume 132, Number 4, September 2017 (French Issue), pp. 1062-1089
   (Article)

   Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2017.0081

        For additional information about this article
        https://muse.jhu.edu/article/681394

[ Access provided at 13 Apr 2020 00:42 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]

Rites of Holy Terror:
Sadean Governmentality in France’s
        Les Dieux ont soif
                                     ❦

                           Andrew Pigott

France contra Burke
Les Dieux ont soif is not, by the lights of modernism, a difficult text.
On the contrary, it divulges its meaning with an all-too-eager readi-
ness. History, meanwhile, has pared away its complexities, delivering
to our retrospective gaze not a text so much as an emphatic laundry
list of themes. France’s contemporaries may have struggled to place
this roman à thèse, antithetical, in its manifest pessimism, to its author’s
militant engagements; but for us it no longer poses any such difficulty,
especially if we subscribe to the New York Times. From Edmund Burke
to Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton to . . . David Brooks, conserva-
tive thought has deployed the Revolution as a foil, taxing with Terreur
any and all attempts at systemic reform. That discursive scrim cannot
help but mediate our reading. Les Dieux ont soif, feted as “prophecy,”
will thus seem simply and straightforwardly to prefigure the atrocities
to come; for us, his wised-up posterity, Anatole France will have unwit-
tingly prefaced Le Livre noir du communisme. There is in this no small
measure of truth. I submit nonetheless that though we have tongues
to praise it (faintly), we lack eyes to view this work in its proper inborn
light; that in understanding too much too quickly, we misunderstand
both the novel’s message—and, along with it, ourselves.

      MLN 132 (2017): 1062–1089 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press

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   France no doubt abetted the confusion. Swapping narratives for
nitty-gritties and fantasies for fact, the Revolution, in Burke’s cease-
lessly reiterated critique, stands accused of neglect: neglect of reality,
of nature, of those commonly-acknowledged truths that, stubborn
and rock-hard, refute its idealism thus. And so, à propos of les droits de
l’homme, the cautious politico declaims: “I cannot stand forward and
give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and
human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped
of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical
abstraction” (23)—though this withholding of blame suffices to damn
its object. Interchangeable terms of abuse jostle in the screed that
follows: “the dissoluteness of an extravagant speculation” (72), “the
infectious stuff which is imported by the smugglers of adulterated
metaphysics” (95), etc. Each ferocious tweak limns more boldly the
now-familiar caricature. Their Revolution traffics in false currencies, in
signs decreed more wondrous than things, in geometric abstractions
forced, at immense human cost, on humanity for its own supposed
good. Les Dieux ont soif relays this pat appraisal with painterly meticu-
lousness. Thus the second-hand effusions of Évariste Gamelin, whose
final elected guru passes every landmark “on the road to serfdom,”
replicating the jargon that had, for over a century, been marshaled
to condemn him:
  [Robespierre] concevait une métaphysique révolutionnaire, qui élevait son
  esprit au-dessus des grossières contingences, à l’abri des erreurs des sens,
  dans la région des certitudes absolues. Les choses sont par elles-mêmes
  mélangées et pleines de confusion; la complexité des faits est telle qu’on
  s’y perd. Robespierre les lui simplifiait, lui présentait le bien et le mal en
  des formules simples et claires. (538)

When, vexing Gamelin to frothy eloquence, Citizen Blaise retorts:
“Vous êtes dans le rêve; moi, je suis dans la réalité” (455)—he con-
veys more than his own disdain: he voices a persistent leitmotif, one
modulated by such an array of social agents—from aristocrats to
peasants, prostitutes to priests—that they enact, in their resistance to
revolutionary dreamscapes, the very republican values that Gamelin
et al would doom them to uphold. First among equals, Brotteaux
transmits its purest variant: “[Il faut] gouverner les hommes tels qu’ils
sont et non tels qu’on les voudrait être” (512). Now, when Brotteaux
talks, we tend to listen, for he is so coercively likeable that he seems
to speak not only for himself, but also for Anatole France; which is to
say, not only for Anatole France, but also for Edmund Burke and the
tradition that he reared. One imagines, in fact, that amid the escalat-

1064                       ANDREW PIGOTT

ing terror, Brotteaux has leveraged his expat connections to obtain a
copy of Burke’s famous tract; after all, it provides the source material
for his most trenchant witticisms. When, for instance, Burke consigns
the National Assembly to an aesthetic pigeonhole—“Everything seems
out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all
sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this
monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily
succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate
contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate
scorn and horror” (25)—-Brotteaux cheerfully concurs, promoting
the English, all-too-English frame of reference that has enabled his
diagnosis: “Nos juges, tout de noir emplumés, travaillent dans le genre
de ce Guillaume Shakespeare, si cher aux Anglais, qui introduit dans
les scènes les plus tragiques de son théâtre de grossières bouffonneries”
(522). Burke’s panegyric to “natural” governance—“[which], in a con-
dition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor
of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression” (46)—Brotteaux
likewise recasts, freighted now with a mordant despair befitting his
time and place: “L’unique fin des êtres semble de devenir la pâture
d’autres êtres destinés à la même fin” (474). As these echoes, allu-
sions, and overlappings accumulate, we may come to view Les Dieux
ont soif as the work not of one mind, but of two: France the master
stylist, Burke the maître à penser.
   Yet no will-to-synthesis could eliminate the residual dissonances, and
the game of parallel quotation cannot obscure one obvious fact: in a
real-world meeting of minds, Burke and Brotteaux would soon exhaust
their shared perspectives, inspiring mutual antipathy and distrust. The
caesura thus inlayed, at once infinitesimal and profound, cautions
against overhasty assimilation; in this way France breaks free to assert
his difference, even as our (Anglophone) tradition makes ready to
subsume him. Into the smooth comparisons that it invites, Les Dieux
ont soif encysts nodes of inalienable contrast, and counting them up
we draw the inevitable conclusion: Anatole France does not belong in
the conservative canon; his critique of La Terreur diverges radically from
the boiler-plate it mimics. In fact the two describe a perfect chiasmus
of opposition. The Burkean program, as Corey Robin reminds us,
grows pregnant with its antithesis, effecting a complete transvaluation
of the virtues it would uphold and the vices it would exterminate.1
Revolution has battened on the liberalities of the old regime, flood-
ing its modest constraint with an upsurge of fanaticism, drowning its
 1
  See Robin.

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lucidity in a dream-dimmed tide; we must therefore suspend our ways
the better to preserve them, fighting zealotry with zeal, utopias with
utopianism. “To destroy [the] enemy,” in short, “the force opposed
to it should be made to bear some analogy and resemblance to the
force and spirit which [its] system exerts.”2 Against this strange metas-
tasis, this becoming-revolutionary in the service of counterrevolution,
France plants his tricolore. Like a deep-cover spy he impersonates the
enemy, and seems at times to defect to the enemy’s side; still, though
imperiled by its own subtlety and well-nigh guaranteed (as its critical
reception proves)3 to mislead, his strategy issues the most, perhaps the
only, effective rebuttal to the conservative myth. The forces of reaction,
arrayed to destroy what they themselves now actively embody, prompt
not a correspondingly reactive maneuver, but a potent deactivation: a
subtraction from and resistance to the revolutionary project, applied
toward the furtherance of its aims. The Terreur here depicted does
not then, or does not only, illustrate the tragic pitfalls of left-wing
radicalism; indeed, the Jacobins at their most extreme effect a rear-
guard campaign, subverting the subversions they once stood for and
bequeathing to modernity (or so I claim) the paradigm of its gov-
ernmentality. This is the nub of historical truth that Les Dieux ont soif
mars its beauty to release; that through its limpid delivery it hides in
plain view, and in its haste near-fatally defers. This, freed at last from
the trappings of “prophecy” and restored to its native self-tensions,
is the crux that enfolds its true prophetic content; the crux that we
must mount a full-scale recovery operation—reading both with the
text and against its deceptive grain—to receive.

Freaks of Nature, Criminal Law
Tremors of doubt inflect even the novel’s most unequivocal design
feature: its gallery of characters, who rather than plausible individuals
resemble mere characteristics grown lopsided and preponderant. It
becomes quickly apparent, in fact, that France has plotted them on
a conventional grid. The humors, indexed to Empedocles’ primary
elements, steer the course of four vessels so conventionally pre-pro-

  2
    From Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace. Cited in Robin (49).
  3
    As in this appraisal by George Orwell: “But though Anatole France could speak up
for the working class in a story like Crainquebille, and though cheap editions of his works
were advertised in Communist papers, one ought not really to class him as a Socialist
[. . .] In a crisis he was ready to identify himself with the working class, but the thought
of a Utopian future depressed him [. . .] There is an even deeper pessimism in Les
Dieux ont soif, his novel about the French Revolution” (174).

1066                      ANDREW PIGOTT

grammed in their dispositions, so predestined in their destinies, that
the status of free agency and the moral calculus it sustains seem in
their case beside the point. Brotteaux conforms most readily to type—
ironically for such an avid reader of Lucretius; indeed his Epicurean
bent, polemically at odds with the finite pluralism still prominent in
his day, can be attributed to his role in that very scheme. Thought-
ful, calm, tolerant of opposing viewpoints, and (despite his constant
praise of cruelty) suicidally kind, Brotteaux partly justifies the charges
of collusion levied against him, for without a single blip or blemish,
he is the paragon of British phlegm. Water accordingly marks him
like a brand: the given surname “Ilettes” derives from isles, and the
pseudonym Brotteaux (meaning, in Lyonais, an isle of the alluvial
plain) adds further density to the associative matrix; in keeping with his
nature, he even prefers to argue “[les] pieds dans le ruisseau” (479).
Desmahis also flows—or, rather, wafts—undeviatingly in his element.
Voluptuousness, alacrity, and pep define him; he flits and flutters into
view, spinning fanciful yarns (“il dressait son torse athlétique sur le
siège, à la gauche du cocher, qu’il étonnait en lui contant qu’en un
certain pays d’Amérique les arbres portaient des andouilles et des
cervelas” [506]), pursuing casual sex (“Je suivais une femme divine,
en chapeau de paille, une ouvrière des modes [. . .] ” [458]) or pledg-
ing ephemeral love (“—Vous croyez, Élodie, que je vous aime? —Je le
crois, puisque vous aimez toutes les femmes. —Je les aime en vous.”
[623]); mostly, though, we plod thickly into the spaces he has vacated
(“La vitrière avertit Gamelin que le citoyen Desmahis n’était pas chez
lui, ce qui ne pouvait beaucoup surprendre le peintre, que savait que
son ami était d’humeur vagabonde et dissipée [. . .]” [458]), for he
grazes his world as lightly as the fleeting breeze. Of course he does:
a hyperbole of the sanguine temperament, he bears a strong affinity
for, and acute resemblance to, the wind. France takes great pains to
establish the analogy; he even, at one point, foregoes all subtlety and
casts Desmahis as the literal figure of his elemental daimon: “Desma-
his soufflait dans les cheveux des citoyennes les graines légères des
pissenlits” (510). Élodie’s love life cues us in to her temperament.
Excitable and impulsive, she swoons quick and hard for the wrong
sorts of men; practical and aggressive, she inverts the norms of pair-
bonding and takes charge of her own courtship, leading the leads
of her self-produced drama to the decisions she has decided upon
in advance. Where passion emits its smokescreens, moreover, fire
churns and crackles below. The element bookends her tragic fling
with Gamelin: as she plies her wiles in the stamp shop, we learn, “ses

M LN                                       1067

yeux de feu charbonnaient leurs orbites” (449)—and Gamelin loses
his head; he also, of course, loses his head, after which her newest
flame surfs in on a wave of coded details: she lights the way with “une
allumette enflammée,” ignites her (expertly prepared) furnace, and
fuels its fire with an erstwhile love-token (“elle regarda, avec mélan-
colie, la bague qu’elle portait à l’annulaire de sa main gauche[. . . .]
Elle la regarda, jusqu’à ce que les larmes eussent brouillé sa vue, l’ôta
doucement et la jeta dans les flammes” [267]). Fire-queen and fervid
doer, she could, without costuming or rehearsal, embody the role of
Choleric in a morality play. We are thus left with one final humor to
place. Who in this vehicle of pure types could perform the functions
of the melancholic? Who indeed, if not Évariste Gamelin—serious,
suspicious, exacting, catastrophic Gamelin?
   But here we encounter a glitch. Gamelin, “avec ses grands yeux
ardents, son beau visage ovale, sa pâleur, ses abondants cheveux noirs,
partagés sur le front et tombant à flots sur ses épaules, son maintien
grave, son air froid, son abord sévère, sa parole ferme [. . .] ” (450),
certainly looks the part; he also inhabits a mood-dampening, life-
negating nimbus of gloom. So far so bad, but as we well know, as France
and Burke alike never cease to emphasize, he and the ideologues who
prime his melancholia float around with their heads in the ether—not,
as the element earth should betoken, with their feet on the ground.
The Burkean intertext serves both to unveil this contradiction and to
inscribe within its spatial duality other, more troubling binarisms: the
heavenly, it appears, is down-to-earth; so too—in keeping with Burke’s
furious semiotic—are the concrete abstract, the lawful transgressive,
and the natural unnatural. Barring further evidence, skeptics might
read these reversals as the byproduct of historical contingency, and
dismiss the inferences I have drawn as groundless readings-in. Yet
other, stronger indices lay bare a point of inflexion, where the rule-
bound world subsumes its own unraveling, and order snarls in disarray.
Take the densely patterned theme of “nature.” Gamelin, it does not
shock us to learn, has jettisoned what little he ever possessed of the
stuff. Élodie, on multiple occasions, bemoans his manque de naturel.4
Brotteaux notes the deficiency as well, and stacks against his Terror-
ist’s creed “la Nature, ma seule maîtresse” (80). These cajolements,
of course, carry little sway. Nature’s loss, incurred by the pursuit of a

  4
   “Je n’ai pas répondu à votre lettre: elle m’a déplu; je ne vous y ai pas retrouvé. Elle
aurait été plus aimable, si elle avait été plus naturelle” (461). “Elle détourna la tête,
tout ensemble attristée et souriante, et déçue. Elle l’aurait voulu plus intelligent des
choses de l’amour, plus naturel, plus brutal” (474).

1068                          ANDREW PIGOTT

greater good, he can write off as so much collateral damage; and so,
like his doppelganger Orestes—atop whose matricidal frame he paints
his own lis-pure likeness—he wipes its imprint clean from his heart:
“Quelle destinée que la sienne! C’est par piété filiale, par obéissance à
des ordres sacrés qu’il a commis ce crime[. . . .] Pour venger la justice
outragée, il a renié la nature, il s’est fait inhumain, il s’est arraché les
entrailles. Il reste fier sous le poids de son horrible et vertueux forfait
. . . ”(484). And yet. There on Virtue’s blood-specked tribune, where
“des sublimes personnages” ritually abjure the claims of Nature (“un
juré patriote est au-dessus des passions,” 595), Nature orchestrates a
covert putsch, filling passion’s vacancy with its most tainted products:
envy, hatred, naked lust. Like appealing to like, these arbiters of dis-
interested virtue misconstrue every virtuous and disinterested act that
surfaces on their docket; witness the pornographic leers they clap on
Athénaïs. The verdict they hand down, recalling to mind a tragic stooge
of noted perversity, thus reveals their secret shame: “La culpabilité
des accusés crève les yeux [. . .] ” (601). Goaded by sexual jealousy,
Gamelin likewise commandeers the powers vested in him, dispatching
an innocent man to the guillotine. Nature, then, exacts her due from
those most wont to shun her. This may seem like nothing out of the
ordinary; our knowing smirks, in any case, register no real surprise. Yet
to these bad-faith cathexes—easily dismissed as hypocrisy—a troubling
symmetry accrues. Nature, it transpires, does not merely re-absorb
into her field the deviations ranged against it; she actually seems to
prefer them: these inner swerves and self-subversions, these crimes
that body forth her law. By considering the context, not (for once) of
the French revolution, but of France’s contemporary era, we take the
full measure of her perversity. Darwinism had by this time recovered
from its late nineteenth-century swoon, conferring on sexual reproduc-
tion a privileged spot in the scheme of things.5 “Nature,” here, thus
denotes a stereoscopic amalgam of the death-dealing machine (more
on which below) and the procreant urge that feeds it. Enter Élodie
and her œillets—an unsubtle metonym bestowed on her elected suitors.
Peppered with this token early on, Gamelin establishes certain . . .
mimetic correspondences; and so, unsurprisingly, he hallucinates its
red silhouette right into the notebook of an imaginary rival. But the
halo of bloodshed cresting this innocuous flower—that, now, does come
as a surprise. There it is, nonetheless: “un œillet rouge [. . .] comme
une goute de sang” (529). Faced with any other novel, we might safely

  As related by Peter Bowler in Darwin Deleted.
  5

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ignore the undertones; but Gamelin’s foretold doom makes clear
an unsettling truth: Nature likes her carnage frequent and vigorous:
“Quand la charette passa devant la fenêtre de gauche [. . .] une main
de femme [. . .] écarta le bord de la jalousie et lança vers Gamelin
un œillet rouge que ses mains liées ne purent saisir, mais qu’il adora
comme le symbole et l’image de ces lèvres rouges et parfumées dont
s’était rafraîchie sa bouche. Ses yeux se gonflèrent de larmes et ce fut
tout pénétré du charme de cet adieu qu’il vit se lever sur la place de la
Révolution le couteau ensanglanté” (617). She also, apparently, likes
it unnatural—or so suggest the oddly timed hunger-pangs that wrack
poor Élodie; for as Gamelin’s crimes escalate, the gyre of her libido
widens: “Maintenant il lui faisait horreur, il lui apparaissait comme un
monstre: elle avait peur de lui et elle l’adorait. Toute la nuit, pressés
éperdument l’un contre l’autre, l’amant sanguinaire et la voluptueuse
fille se donnaient en silence des baisers furieux” (542); “Elle l’aimait
de toute sa chair, et plus il lui paraissait terrible, cruel, atroce, plus
elle le voyait couvert du sang de ses victimes, plus elle avait faim et
soif de lui” (563). She even, in a final paroxysm of lust, transforms the
implement of his atrocities into a phallus: “‘Eh bien! moi aussi, mon
bien-aimé, envoie-moi à la guillotine; moi aussi, fais-moi trancher la
tête!’ Et, à l’idée du couteau sur sa nuque, toute sa chair se fondait
d’horreur et de volupté” (607). Élodie, moreover, does not represent
some outlying tendency; France stitches her predilections deep into
the weft of human desire. Gamelin’s maculate conception, spurred by
the dismembering of Damiens (“Tout le temps qu’elle s’était tenue à
la fenêtre pour voir le régicide tenaillé, arrosé de plomb fondu, tiré
à quatre chevaux et jeté au feu, M. Joseph Gamelin, debout derrière
elle, n’avait pas cessé de la complimenter sur son teint, sa coiffure
et sa taille,” 444), delivers on this score an object lesson: venery and
slaughter make passionate bedfellows, and Nature wallows fondly in
her own self-spawned negations.
   Monstrosity, in both its moral and its zoological modes, follows the
same line of development—as one might well expect, since “monstre”
here signifies “unnatural in the tragic extreme.” When Julie intercedes
on her husband’s behalf, she posits of Évariste, in whom she retains a
modicum of faith: “Mais, maman, ce serait un monstre, s’il refusait!”
(571). Gamelin of course refuses; not even fraternal loyalty, not even
filial warmth can tar his abysmal purity. And so, calling down death
upon his brother-in-law (whom he never much cared for anyway . . . )
he finds himself arraigned in no uncertain terms: “Scélerat! Monstre!”
(595). Even dear old mom, whose maternal delusions survived the

1070                         ANDREW PIGOTT

reign of Marat, breaks down and admits the obvious: “Je ne voulais
pas le croire, mais je le vois bien, c’est un monstre” (576). As before,
these judgments seem entirely clear-cut, the binaries that subtend
them—Telemachus vs. Orestes, life vs. death—secure in their proper
alignment. Yet an odd pastoral interlude will have preemptively
scrambled their coordinates. Before the final bloodbath engulfs them,
France’s bit players take a trip to the countryside. They there encoun-
ter “La Tronche,” an unfortunate girl on whom France virtually pins
the badge “freak of nature”—in all its ambiguity. Breach of Nature’s
contract, manifestation of its purest form, she straddles a threshold
of indistinction, where norm and anomaly pass through one another,
and the exception grounds the rule. A monument to disproportion,
she spans “plus longue que haute” (513), has thighs for arms and
trunks for thighs, and two of practically everything:
  Vous voyez cette créature [explains the local officier de santé], ce n’est pas
  une fille, comme vous pourriez le croire: c’est deux filles. Comprenez que
  je parle littéralement. Surpris du volume énorme de sa charpente osseuse,
  je l’ai examinée et me suis aperçu qu’elle avait la plupart des os en double:
  à chaque cuisse, deux fémurs soudés ensemble; à chaque épaule, deux
  humérus. Elle possède aussi des muscles en double. Ce sont, à mon sens,
  deux jumelles étroitement associées ou, pour mieux dire, fondues ensem-
  ble. Le cas est intéressant. [. . .] C’est un monstre que vous voyez là, citoyens
  [. . .] (515–16, emphasis mine)

Indeed, she would seem to represent a textbook case of monstrous
singularity. Yet though she explodes Nature’s every frame of reference,
her fleshy nomadic gobs express its seminal, its supernatural sublimity.
“La nature a de ces bizarreries,” says the country doctor (516). Lost in
contemplation of her riotous bulk, “surpris et amusé du jeu bizarre de
la nature qui avait construit cette fille” (513), Desmahis will eventually
bed her—thus securing Nature’s imprimatur. Others, we deduce, have
preceded him: “dès qu’elle comprit ce qu’on lui voulait, rassurée,
elle ne témoigna ni surprise ni contrariété [. . .]” (519). What gives?
   Let us revisit the ventriloquisms perpetuated on Burke’s legacy.
We have, after all, left unresolved the question that launched us: why
does France echo with such meticulous care, why recast as compel-
ling drama, the tenets of a creed he so obviously rejects? Ruling out
the allure of provocation, we must hypothesize a peculiar project
indeed—one subtle in style and weighty in substance, and so strangely
paradoxical, so effectively perverse, as to solicit the jargon of psycho-
analysis. France introjects (albeit consciously) the doctrine’s most
salient terms while reconfiguring their gestalt. Burke had superposed

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the realms of nature and of politics, and had centered them on an
axis dividing decent from depraved. France retains (as it were) the
horizontal alignment; for him too, the laws of nature and the nature
of our laws exist as on a continuum, one binding within its harmonic
range—from wasp’s nest to royal court—the varied voicings of a single
phrase. Yet he blurs, or mutually enclasps, the vertical oppositions that
make conservatism conservative. His freaks of nature do not, as we
have seen, disturb the natural order; nor by implication does crime
violate the law. In every setting, the norm couches its decrees in the
idiom of their transgression; it affects itself by suspending itself, and
casts its (deviant) regularities in the mold of (regulated) deviancy.
   The very same transvaluative logic, let us recall, characterizes Burke
in his militant phase; France imputes it to La Terreur—thus branding
his Jacobin death squad with the mark of counterrevolution. First of
their kind, they have spawned generations of fighters, who, destroying
their world in order to save it, ground the status quo in its own self-
abrogation. A different set of textual references, more subtly displayed
than the noisy hysterics of Burke and company, tracks their ancestry.
An excursus therefore seems in order. France, we shall see, situates
his Terreur within—and at the gory climax of—a mutated strain of
French thought, in which the arc of “criminal law” inflects, tipping
over into lawful crime.

Excursus: Montaigne avec Sade
Nature, in its blind fecondity, might well have “constructed” La Tronche
without any ulterior motive; France, for his part, fished her from the
literary canon with a specific goal in mind. Why, of all possible defor-
mities, select a body redoubled from within? Perhaps because, in one
of his better known essays, Montaigne had described a similar case:
  [I]l estoit aagé de quatorze mois justement. Au dessoubs de ses tetins, il
  estoit pris et collé à un autre enfant sans teste, et qui avoit le conduict du
  dos estoupé, le reste entier: car il avoit bien l’un bras plus court, mais il
  luy avoit esté rompu par accident à leur naissance; ils estoient joints face à
  face, et comme si un plus petit enfant en vouloit accoler un plus grandelet.
  La jointure et l’espace par où ils se tenoient, n’estoit que de quatre doigts
  ou environ, en maiere que si vous retroussiez cet enfant imparfait, vous
  voyez au dessoubs le nombril de l’autre: ainsi la cousture se faisoit entre
  les tetins et son nombril [. . .] (712)

True, La Tronche has more thoroughly assimilated her less (or more)
fortunate twin, and can carry on unencumbered by the dangling bits

1072                            ANDREW PIGOTT

of a botched hanger-on; but France need not explain the discrepancy,
as Montaigne has already obliged: “Ce double corps et ces membres
divers, se rapportans à une seule teste, pourroient bien fournir de
favorable prognostique au Roy de maintenir sous l’union de ses loix
ce pars et pieces diverses de nostre estat [. . .]” (712). Two centuries
later, the Third Estate would disregard this “favorable prognostica-
tion,” integrating into its fractional body the separate functions of
government and begetting upon a terrorized Republic its own species
of enfant monstrueux: parliamentary dictatorship, of which La Tronche,
in her gruesomely merged jointures, bears the signatory imprint.
   The slippage from freak show to omen expands the compass of
monstrosity, which, in all its unlikely variants, stems from the etymon
monstrum: meaning to signal, to show, and (in slightly altered form) to
admonish. Michel Jeanneret explains its significance to the sixteenth
century: “[L]e monstre peut aussi revêtir une portée plus grave. ‘Les
monstra, dit saint Augustin, tirent leur nom de monstrare, en ce qu’ils
montrent quelque chose en le signifiant.’ S’ils troublent l’ordre des
choses, c’est pour être perçus comme signes divinatoires; ce sont
des accidents chargés de sens, des messages chiffrés qui demandent
à être expliqués” (131–32). This ancient semiology both lends the
concept considerable depth and broadens its range of manifestation.
“Les monstra” no longer need evoke the goo-smeared teratologies of
popular cinema; any old weather event will do—as Pantagruel, in
his discourse on celestial signs, makes sure to remind us.6 Once the
ken of scholars and priests, such esoterica seem (at least in France’s
universe) to have permeated the poorer classes as well, lodging there
long past the decline of their prestige. Madame Gamelin thus makes
sense of senseless turmoil, and decocts from “les misères de son
temps” the reassuring bromides of Destiny: “Elle conaissait [. . .] à
plusieurs signes, que les affaires ne feraient qu’empirer. À Nanterre,
une femme avait accouché d’un enfant à tête de vipère; la foudre
était tombée sur l’église de Rueil et avait fondu la croix du clocher;
on avait aperçu un loup garou dans le bois de Chaville. Des hommes

   6
    Ne plus ne moins que jadis, en Athenes, les juges Areopagites, ballotans pour le
jugement des criminelz prisonniers, usoient de certaines notes scelon la varieté des
sentences : par Θ signifians condemnation à mort : par T, absolution : par Λ, amplifica-
tion : scavoir est, quand le cas n’estois encores liquidé. Icelles, publiquement exposées,
houstoient d’esmoy et pensement les parens, amis et aultres, curieux d’entendre quelle
seroit l’issue et jugement des malfaicteurs detenus en prison. Ainsi par telz cometes,
comme par nots aetherées, disent les cieulx tacitement : Homes mortelz, si de cestes
herueuses ames voulez chose aulcune sçavoir, apprandre, entendre, congnoistre,
preveoir, touchant le bien et utilité publicque ou privée, faictez diligence de vous
representer à elles, et d’elles response avoir [. . .] (357).

M LN                                1073

masqués empoisonnaient les sources et jetaient dans l’air des poudres
qui donnaient des maladies . . .” (461). The full spectrum of mon-
sters—from the viper-headed brood to the unscheduled comet—have
in common their uncommonness, as well as the historical turmoil in
which they typically lie embedded. The abnormality of the phenom-
enon received, combined with its receiver’s thirst, triggers a pulsation
of de-monstrative significance. This all seems clear enough.
   It is, however, precisely at this point that irksome complications
arise. The status accorded to “les juges Aréopagites”—as well as,
implicitly, to Pantagruel’s magisterial erudition—preemptively quells a
nagging question, and in so doing raises it: how does one distinguish,
from the accidents and atrocities that comprise life on earth, those
misprisions charged with divine portent? Who performs the requisite
triage? Our comic book monsters burst ostensively onto the scene: we
know one when we see one, our attention piqued by some seminal
trauma. Montaigne’s monstres render no such courtesy; no sooner
do they out themselves, in fact, than they recede back into the fold
of normalcy: “Nous appelons contre nature ce qui advient contre la
coustume: rien n’est que selon elle, quel qu’il soit. Que cette raison
universelle et naturelle chasse de nous l’erreur et l’estonnement que
la nouvelleté nous apporte” (713). Nature flouts the criteria brought
to bear on its profusion; the “disturbances” we take note of, and the
messages we hold them to contain, reflect not the superiority of our
knowledge but the smallness of our minds. Must we then conclude
that monsters do not exist? In a sense, yes: would the scales but fall
from our eyes, that infant’s deformity would not rouse our bigoted
concern, but would rather unveil some higher, more intricate scheme.
Yet this surprising twist is undercut by a prior reversal, which both
upholds and invalidates its claims: “Ce que nous appellons monstres,
ne le sont pas à Dieu, qui voit en l’immensité de son ouvrage l’infinité
des formes qu’il y a comprinses; et est à croire que cette figure qui
nous estonne, se rapporte et tient à quelque autre figure de mesme
genre inconnu à l’homme. De sa toute sagesse il ne part rien que bon
et commun et reglé [. . .]” (713). Shuttled thus into a single clause,
the substantives “l’immensité” and “l’infinité” generate a good deal
of explosive tension; and Montaigne cannot, for all his pious tone,
subdue the force of their detonation. Though encompassed by created
nature, each represents a distinct phase of being: the finite world,
and, diffused within its confines, the infinite wellspring of its genesis;
an economy of norms, and an excess that both holds them fast—and
overspills their fixity. Immanence, in short, must strain to accom-

1074                      ANDREW PIGOTT

modate transcendence: as the medium of its expression, its hugely
cramped abode. Bulged by the source of its quickening, the sprawl of
nature then bursts, the scene of a transfinite transgression. And so,
if all accidents prove necessary, all deviations normal, it is because,
there at the threshold of their dawning, necessity proves accidental and
normality deviant. Behind every law lies a violation curtailing its sway;
within every causal sequence, no matter how pedestrian, an upheaval
to make it strange. Monsters are indeed nowhere to be found, but
only because they turn up everywhere we look; and convention errs
not in isolating freaks from Nature, but in depriving Nature of its
inherent freakishness.
   Thus the paradoxes of monstrosity, the governing tensions of a
Nature revealed, that with his bucolic detours and old-maid mimicries
France keys into. Yet though we detect, between Montaigne’s expansive
awe and the sourer ironies of Les Dieux ont soif, the strumming of a
sympathetic vibration, this does little to explain France’s key insight:
that among (formerly distinct) registers, analogical correspondences
might obtain, synaptic leaps be effected. Across his world’s interlock-
ing planes, be they ethical, political or zoological, “the monstrous”
performs its characteristic shuffle, behaving in this less like a concept
than a “signature”—i.e., “something that in a sign or concept marks
and exceeds such a sign or concept referring it back to a determinate
interpretation or field, without for this reason leaving the semiotic to
constitute a new meaning or a new concept” (Agamben, The Kingdom
and the Glory 4). If, in the pages above, we failed adequately to desedi-
ment the fields splayed open before us, it is because “[s]ignatures
move and displace concepts and signs from one field to another
[. . .] redefining them semantically” (Agamben, The Kingdom and the
Glory 4)—and onto every disparate surface our signature embossed
the self-same schism, splitting principles from their mode of applica-
tion, powers that be from the force that they exert.
   A schism that piggybacks, as we have seen, on the vector of Burke’s
logic, caustically distilled and eerily distorted. We must assume that
France achieved his desired effect, however perverse; for like all radi-
cal abominations, his monster did not spontaneously mutate, but was
instead molded, spurred, vexed to nightmare—by the catalyst, as it
happens, of an offhand allusion, which extends the reach of Mon-
taigne’s cosmology and leagues Burke with a very odd bedfellow. Or
so I contend. When, touching the war effort, he imputes to his young
Terrorist the following train of thought: “les généraux, terrorisés,
s’apercevaient qu’ils n’avaient pas mieux à faire que de vaincre. Ce

M LN                                  1075

que les enrôlements volontaires n’avaient point apporté, une armée
nombreuse et disciplinée, la réquisition la donnait. Encore un effort,
et la République serait sauvée” (555), he cannot fail knowingly to
echo, and with what mordant relish, Sade’s semi-serious tract, Français,
encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains. Still, though his malicious
intent rings out clearly enough, its significance seems at first blush less
than obvious. The rapprochement might, after all, suffice unto itself
and the irony it focuses; it might, at most, level an oblique charge of
guilt-by-association. Yet between les montagnards and the sideline jeerer
they would gladly have beheaded, France elicits a deeper affinity:
witness the atmosphere, described above, of pervasive sexual sadism;
witness the paradox—in Gamelin’s case repressed, in Sade’s gleefully
embraced—of a Republic that, seeking to safeguard its values, enacts
their wholesale debasement. The family resemblance, in fact, proves
more firmly enracinated than France himself might have realized:
for inspection reveals, buttressing its casual assembly, a single genetic
matrix informing his source material. Put another way—the heedless
citations that France, like all cultured novelists, draws on and deploys,
cross-pollinate beyond his (likely) purview, endowing his novel with a
coherence in excess of its (probable) design. (An observation that, of
course, heftily qualifies the thesis statement above. A writer too often
limited by his own limitless talent, France here gives himself the slip,
unclenching the controlled chaos, the intentful supersession of intent,
that wrings greatness from the merely good, and adds genius to esprit.)
   . . . Because, as it turns out, Sade recasts “D’un enfant monstrueux”
in Gamelin’s preferred idiom: that of natural philosophy and of its mor-
alizing offshoots. Indeed, to understand why crime as Sade conceives
it must so surpass its bad reputation, we need only consider Gamelin’s
likely reading list. The Earl of Shaftesbury had, in 1699, penned the
moral template for “unnatural” (“inhuman”) delight. Nature, in his
telling, has vouchsafed to every heart the proclivities (towards love,
pity, etc.) most dear to its own, and has made our happiness contingent
on their flourishing. What then of pain and cruelty, those commodi-
ties that so abound in this our only world? Reality wrings from him
a grudging concession: we must entertain the possibility (impossible
as it sounds) of a dire mutation—a diabolical pleat in the fabric of
being, where fester and ooze the so-called “unnatural affections.” These
entail an “unnatural and inhuman delight in beholding torments and
in viewing distress, calamity, blood, massacre and destruction with a
peculiar joy and pleasure” (226). Shaftesbury, like Hobbes before
him, distinguishes “inhuman” jouissance from those “self-passions”

1076                           ANDREW PIGOTT

(e.g. anger, vengefulness and fear) which modulate our natural-born
egotism: “to delight in the torture and pain of other creatures indiffer-
ently, natives or foreigners, of our own or of another species, kindred
or no kindred, known or unknown, to feed as it were on death and
be entertained with dying agonies—this has nothing in it accountable
in the way of self-interest or private good [. . .] but is wholly and abso-
lutely unnatural” (226). To be “indifferent” in this way is not, or is not
only, to greet suffering with apathy; it is to vent a malice unprovoked,
to practice cruelty without cause, to foster in the deep heart’s core
the autogenesis of evil. Shorn of false semblance, such a man would
reveal not his manhood but his monstrosity. Fortunately, the prefixes
“un-” and “in-”, enforcing as they do a governing tautology, banish
these “affections” to the fenlands of idle speculation: humans cannot
be inhuman; nature cannot bear unnatural fruit.
   And yet it does. Whether in defiance of Nature’s System or of
the moral law that it dictates, Sadean crime chalks the boundary of
human experience, and then proceeds to cross it.7 What his century
had imagined only to disavow, his libertines make vividly, intolerably
real, inverting the discourse from which (piqued by the aphrodisiac
of theory) they crib their salient jargon. Depraved Jérôme sums up
their guiding precept: “Oh! Il n’y a de délicieux au monde que les
jouissances despotiques; il faut violenter l’objet que l’on désire; plus
de plaisirs, dès qu’il se rend” (Sade, Œuvres 2: 629). If, as the moralists
warn, these affections rage “in opposition to the order and govern-
ment of the universe,” beaching their vessels in “a desert and in the
horridest of solitudes, even when in the midst of society” (229), they
reclaim the curse that strands them, making of vice a virtue: “Soyons
isolés [. . .]” (Œuvres 2: 431). Sade’s scélérats, in short, seem perfectly
aware of the role assigned them. A chemist more erudite than your
average villain—a villain more vile than your average chemist—broo-
ding Almani has despoiled Nature of her secrets the better to thwart
her designs: “Le motif qui m’engage à me livrer au mal est né chez
moi de la profonde étude que j’ai faite de la nature [. . .] Un de vos

   7
    Obviously, more remains to be said on the matter. By tracing the Holbachian
intertext—a touchstone for Sade’s more erudite villains—we would arrive at the same
conclusion. Holbach’s causal determinism necessitates in matters moral a strident fatal-
ism; yet Holbach does not issue carte blanche for vicious behavior. Instead, his Nature
strong-arms its warring subunits into a proto-Rawlsian accord, optimizing across its
spectrum the curtailment of endogenous harm. A close reading of Le Dialogue entre un
prêtre et un moribond would, I believe, show Sadean crime to be a “première cause” of
the sort that Holbach’s system precludes—the perpetuation, on and by Le Système de la
Nature, of the depravity it sought to curb; the manifestation, contra Nature’s dictates
but within its sphere, of the unnatural.

M LN                                    1077

philosophes modernes se disait l’amant de la nature; eh bien, mon
ami, je m’en déclare le bourreau. [. . .] Oui, mon ami, oui, j’abhorre
la nature [. . .] [J]e vais si bien démêler ses secrets, que je puisse,
si cela m’est possible, devenir encore plus méchant, pour la mieux
heurter toute ma vie [. . .] [B]arrons-la dans ses œuvres pour l’insulter
plus vivement; et troublons-la, s’il est possible, pour l’outrager plus
sûrement” (778-79). Madame d’Esterval may lack his erudition, but
her grandiosity soars to infinity and beyond, ranking her chief among
the death-feeders: “[C]’est elle [la nature] que je voudrais pouvoir
outrager. Je voudrais déranger ses plans, contrecarrer sa marche,
arrêter le cours des astres, bouleverser les globes qui flottent dans
l’espace, détruire ce qui la sert, protéger ce qui lui nuit, édifier ce
qui l’irrite, l’insulter, en un mot, dans ses œuvres, suspendre tous ses
grands effets [. . .]” (945–46). Many more examples could be adduced.
   They would all, however, exhibit the same flaw: egregiously selec-
tive editing. For despite these cosmic aggressions, Sade affirms what
he negates, rallying Nature—without irony—to his and his libertines’
side. Thus self-isolating Dubois, who in a speech cited above (. . . in
drastically truncated form) surveys her life of crime and finds it lawful:
“Soyons isolés, ma fille, comme nous a fait naître la nature: lui voyons-
nous jamais lier un homme à un homme ? Si quelquefois nos besoins
nous rapprochent, séparons-nous dès que nos intérêts l’exigent, parce
que l’égoïsme est la première des lois de la nature, la plus juste, la plus
sacrée, sans doute” (431). Likewise Almani, that goat-defiling scourge
of all things Natural: though cursed with boundless rancor, he must
resign himself never to vanquish Nature’s law—but in his rebellion
to enforce it; not to halt its handiwork—but, like a fawning adjunct,
to expedite its completion:
  [À] peine suis-je sorti du berceau de ce monstre [la Nature], qu’elle
  m’entraîne aux mêmes horreurs que celles qui la délectent elle-même!
  [. . .]Sa main barbare ne sait donc pétrir que le mal; le mal la divertit donc?
  et j’aimerais une mère semblable! Non; je l’imiterai, mais en la détestant;
  je la copierai, elle le veut, mais ce ne sera qu’en la maudissant [. . .] Mais
  la putain s’est moquée de moi, ses ressources l’emportent sur les miennes:
  nous luttions trop inégalement. [. . .] [N]e pouvant deviner le motif qui
  plaçait le poignard en ses mains, j’ai su lui ravir l’arme, et m’en suis servi
  tout comme elle. (779–80)

D’Esterval also admits defeat, confessing herself mastered by the very
brute force that she has tapped, if meagerly: “[J]e souffre peut-être
encore plus que vous de la médiocrité des crimes dont la nature
me laisse le pouvoir. Il n’y a, dans tout ce que nous faisons, que des

1078                       ANDREW PIGOTT

idoles et des créatures d’offensées ; mais la nature ne l’est pas, et c’est
elle que je voudrais pouvoir outrager [. . .] et je ne puis y réussir”
(945). And so, when at the rate of three times per page some Sadean
mouthpiece declares Nature a party to her own destruction, we must
conclude that he means it.
   Sadists thus straddle an unbridgeable divide. Checking the box on
every conceivable transgression, they find themselves garlanded with
success—and not by some countervailing force, some satanic fury
exiled from creation, but by the very magisterium they besmirch.
The Mosaic tablets do not, for all that, collapse under the weight
of their portentousness, and gayer customs do not arise to displace
them; rather, the old statutes remain in force, more firmly ensconced
by the shock of their infringement. Sade himself attests to their stay-
ing power; for if modern admirers did not malign his vileness with
praise—if (say) he really did “stand” for sexual freedom—his work
would lose its capacity to scandalize. Torture, rape, mass murder and
enslavement: pursued for the pleasure they procure, these crimes
retain their former status—as rank monstrosities, affronts to Nature
so horrendous, they seem to emanate from some other world. As, in
a sense, they do: propelled by an inner dynamism, they outstrip the
nexus of causality, and so foment rebellion within Nature’s ranks. How
then could Nature itself ordain them? We have seen nonetheless that
it does. The contradiction may appear indissoluble; yet when viewed in
the light of a darker obscurity—that, precisely, of Montaigne’s “Enfant
monstrueux”—it softens into a workable tension. Behind the monist
trompe-l’oeil that he delineates, albeit with such sardonic strokes as to
focus (rather than divert) our gaze, Sade has constructed a bi-polar
machine, folding into the site of its contraction the generative potency
named (among other aliases) God. Unseated from its heavenly perch,
it pools now in a basin incommensurate to its span: the field of con-
dign regularity, of causal chains and charitable drives that theorists
call the world. “Nature,” in other words, comprises two distinct polari-
ties made uneasily to coincide. There unfolds the sum total of being;
and there, geysering free from every constraint, the abyssal churn that
makes it be. Holbach’s so-called Système, once the snuggest of fits, thus
explodes into a scene of revelation, its substance a weave ingrained
with catastrophe. For as with Montaigne, the mundane sports mon-
strosity’s truest face, and norms midwife their attendant deviancies.
Nature, like the sovereign transcendence it has usurped, applies its
law tenaciously—by the vector of that law’s suspension.

M LN                                1079

   “Sovereignty,” “law”—these and other likeminded terms come unbid-
den, as if secretly inwrought with that which they purport to describe:
the thing itself, Nature. The image of a world pristine, of a “system”
unwarped by civilization and its encroachments, achieves full legibility
only in relation to the civic art par excellence—a paradox sufficiently
gnarled to trigger (or merely reflect) its converse desublimation.
Nature may seem to us rife with proto-politics, but only because the
social sphere, pried wrongly from its grasp by an overhasty binarism,
in fact extends its reach. Such, in any case, is the presupposition
informing much “materialist” discourse; thus the ease with which
(rewording the same longwinded treatises) one transposes Le système
de la nature onto Le système de la société. Sade affirms the homology with
a maniac zeal. His most fully-fledged utopia, “Encore un effort . . . “,
name-checks Nature at a rate of two times per page—a tic that, for
all its rebarbative excess, sheds light on a radical univocity: to both
the ordered precincts of its discharge and to the zoological riot that
(in older mythologies) it holds at bay, the law applies equally. Nature’s
monstrosity, explored above, amply warrants the use of la rature, as
does Sade’s famous discourse on liberté, égalité and fraternité. For the
law has changed faces. Once designed to restrain and repress, it has
swapped its erstwhile negative function for a troubling positivity:
no regime could eliminate the thousand delinquencies that flesh is
heir to; but Sade’s Republic quite literally produces them, purveying
a moral depravity which, in the bygone days of its legal legality, it
strained against, if feebly. This, its modus operandi, does not signal a
shift in registers, does not reverse the old polarities or inscribe a new
inverted code—any more than the unnatural affections, defying a
Nature that encompassed them all along, revealed an order whole and
integral to itself; rather, the law fissures internally, branched between
a regimen of decrees and the founding authority that appoints—and
supersedes—their jurisdiction. Like the cosmos it reduplicates, the
legal sphere enfolds, is indeed sustained by, the force of an originary
transgression; and so, engendered by its breach, the law abounds in
criminality. Its agents and institutions, haloed by a pitch-dark radiance,
honor their stated purpose by embodying its negation; its “long arm,”
cocked lethally to protect the individual, thereby withholds her rights—
making rape (among other depredations) compulsory. The paradox
evolves through countless permutations, embracing in its sweep the
entire social economy: for the sake of property, theft is promoted;
for that of freedom, slavery; for that of life, murder . . . Pasolini, in
his update of Les 120 jours . . . , revealed the finality toward which it

1080                      ANDREW PIGOTT

extends: for the sake of We the People, the State pronounces a death
sentence on us all.
   “History,” writes Benjamin, “is the subject of a structure whose
site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the pres-
ence of the now [Jetztzeit]” (261): not the rosary-like enchainment of
data-points, but a “constellation overflowing with tensions,” a “monad”
where far-flung epochs abridge the years between them, and in an
access of convulsive truth collide. Pasolini, in merging the death-feeder
and the death-head (or in any case its cousin once-removed . . . ),
reveals the single set of tensions underlying them both, and refers
us to the theorist who most lucidly analyzed their enmeshment: Carl
Schmitt. Associated now with modernity’s defining trauma, the hard-
right jurist hearkened back to earlier times. The centuries directly
following Montaigne, when “the conception of God [. . .] belongs
to his transcendence vis-à-vis the world” (49), espouse a theology
as yet unmuddled by Hegelianism; their politics prove more cogent
as well, and with good reason, since “all significant concepts of the
modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” (36)
and “to that period’s philosophy of state belongs the notion of the
transcendence of the sovereign vis-à-vis the state.” (49) This harmony
established, this segnatura scrolled, we may pivot between domains,
descrying in (for instance) miracles and “state exceptions” the same
topology differently arrayed. If—as in Montaigne—Nature hosts an
alien force that both abolishes its norms and guarantees their con-
tinuing efficacy, then—as in Sade—the law is born, extra-legally, of
a sovereign will not bounded by its dictates. “Facts on the ground”
may, after all, shift dramatically at any moment, empowering the rule-
bound executive to break the rules as he sees fit; the “how,” in any
event, will never wholly constrain the “who” who decides on its use. Yet
Schmitt’s model does not, or does not only, shed light on the triad of
Montaigne, Sade and France; rather, each in his own way dramatizes
its implosion. Their contexts vary, but the dynamic holds reliably firm:
Schmitt’s dialectical engine founders, causing the antipodes it once
divided (norm and exception, law and anomie . . . ) to interleave and
fuse. As every creature is shadowed by the prospect, always-already
realized, of its own monstrous perversion, so every instance of the
law belies the rhetoric in which its deputies stand cloaked—for it
typifies the very crime it seeks ostensibly to deter. There then arises
“an extreme and spectral figure of the law, in which law splits into a
pure being-in-force without application (the form of law) and a pure
application without being in force: the force-of-law” (Agamben, State of