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c h a p t e r 1 A Surfeit of Politics or, Why I Would Have Preferred the Nineteenth Century When Marcel Proust was a boy of thirteen, he was given a questionnaire to fill out. The questions concerned his favorite heroes in literature and real life, his favorite color, his favorite composer, and also some very personal questions , such as, What is your current mood? and, On what occasions do you lie? This kind of parlor game has been repeated many times since. Years ago I was given such a questionnaire for publication, and I provided answers with some reluctance, for I wondered how interesting these personal details would be to others and how genuine and spontaneous my answers could possibly be, with someone looking over my shoulder. One question asked if writing was my favorite occupation. My first article was published in 1942, my first book in 1947 (I believe it was 1947; I do not now think highly of it and have been reluctant to check it). But writing has certainly not been my favorite occupation at all times. My heroes in history and literature have changed over the years, and even my favorite color has changed from blue to red during the last decade. The Best of Times On another occasion I was asked in what period I would have liked to live, if I could have chosen. The period into which I was born, Europe after World War I, was not the best of places. The period after World War II was preferable but in retrospect not ideal either, and I am reluctant to name a distant age for lack of empathy. To have been a contemporary of Pericles or Socrates no doubt has great appeal, provided one did not belong to the hoi polloi, the masses, the underclass. But I lack imagination: What would life have been like without so many of the amenities of modern life we now take for granted? It would probably have been short. Pericles and the philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle did live to a ripe old age, but most did not. Alexander the Great was thirty-three years old when he died; today this would be considered too young to be a colonel. Hannibal was twenty-six when he became commander in chief of the army of Carthage. 2 best of times, worst of times To be a citizen of Rome must have been a source of much pride—Civis Romanus sum—but it was an age of virtue (in theory at least, not always in practice ), not of great sweetness, let alone refinement. The transition from the traditional virtues praised by Cato and others to the luxury and decadence of later years was too sudden and too extreme, and virtue, as John Adams once said, is not always amiable. The saeculum of Emperor Augustus was thought by most contemporaries to be a Golden Age, but Edward Gibbon had harsh words about Roman decadence in later years. Most have considered it as the main cause of the decline and fall, together with territorial overextension (parallels with America in our time are drawn, and often overdrawn). Yet the Eastern Roman Empire, with all its negative features, lasted for another thousand years after the so-called fall of Rome. I grew up with romantic fairy tales, full of old castles, fortresses with battlements and drawbridges, young knights and princesses, minnesingers, nightingales and blue flowers, witches and charcoal burners, enchanted evenings in whispering forests, a silvery moon and great solitude. But the Middle Ages were not the best of times to be alive, as always with some notable exceptions such as Spain before the Reconquista or Baghdad or Sicily or Italy during the Renaissance . What Edmund Burke wrote about the unbought grace of life and the age of chivalry under the old regime in France was no doubt correct, but one had to belong to a very small class to enjoy it. This takes us to the nineteenth century, and with it the appeal is growing. Napoleon III was far from an ideal ruler, and there was of course censorship with Victor Hugo exiled to Guernsey. The years after the French defeat 1870– 71 were years of depression, Paul Verlaine’s “Je suis l’Empire à la fín de la décadence .” But it was also the Paris of the cafés and concerts, a city of great joy of life. Entertainment was by no means the privilege...

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