Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre

Chapter 7: France and Germany

C H A P T E R 7 France and Germany THE VOYAGE OF GERMAINE DE STAËL Benoît Chantre: In the course of our discussion, Clausewitz has appeared to us as a writer who went beyond the boundaries of his discipline. His treatise relates to more than the military, and at times touches on literature and anthropology. The way On War focuses on Napoleon places us at the heart of the European problem: French-German relations. Stylistic questions, while they interested Clausewitz, did not prevent him from falling into what you call “romantic lies,” namely, unavowed imitation of a single model. We have thus situated Clausewitz in a history of desire, intensification of mimetism as the driving force behind human behavior. The growing danger is simply one and the same thing as what we more generally call the escalation to extremes. In the face of this peril, it is clear that there is an urgent need to resist mimetism . By this alternate route, you have clarified the goal that has been driving your research from the beginning. All of your work was germinating in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, which you published in French in 1961. The book describes a double conversion: to novelistic truth and to Christian truth. It was against the “falsehood” based on the supposed autonomy of our desires that you defined novelistic genius, which alone can flush out the hidden mediators of such desires: I desire a given object only because another desires it or could desire it. If the other is far away in time and space (and perhaps even merges into the surrounding 157 158 France and Germany culture), then my desire will be peaceful, almost “natural.” However, if the other is nearby and becomes a real or possible rival, I will become wild with desire: I will hang on frantically to my difference. Institutions take root in the duel, and their role is nothing other than to control violence. However, history shows how this “human nature” is eroding: mythological falsehood, revealing its own secret, has become over the centuries a “romantic falsehood” by allowing resentment to appear. This is the great discovery of the nineteenth century. Clausewitz belongs to the period when the mechanism that produces culture is revealed in all its violence. In the course of our discussion, you have shown how close you were to romantic sensibility: you said that you read On War out of love for Chopin. You are thus grateful to that feverish period for having shed light on “things hidden since the foundation of the world.” The paradox of your position lies in this attraction and rejection. At the heart of an extremely unstable world, you seize the opportunity of what needs to be “intimate mediation,” when violence is turned upside down and into reconciliation. So we have to talk about romanticism as a historical movement, and no longer as a metaphor for mimetic desire. For you, it is simply one with the ambivalence of France’s relations with Germany. An exceptional woman incarnated that ambivalence at the dawn of the nineteenth century: Germaine de Staël. Her essay De l’Allemagne, published in 1813, helped to launch not only romanticism in France, but also the idea that only French-German dialogue could save a Europe that was torn apart by the Napoleonic adventures. René Girard: The first ten years of the nineteenth century are fascinating. They contain the seeds of everything that was going to happen, namely the crumbling of Europe around the French-German nexus. Why did Hölderlin go to Bordeaux? Because he was more sensitive than anyone else to Germany’s provincialism. Yet he brought nothing back from France. He, who was naïve enough to believe in the French Revolution, suffered greatly from the absence of dialogue between the two countries. He rapidly returned to Tübingen, where Madame de Staël could have met him in 1806, when she was visiting Goethe, Fichte, Schiller and Schlegel for her research. He is the one she should have met, but that did not happen. Exiled by Napoleon, Germaine de Staël went to Germany to marshal forces for a literary and political war. However, she misses Hölderlin, who had chosen to remain silent for the reasons that we have tried to explain. And so the misunderstanding begins. We know that De l’Allemagne launched romanticism in France, but could it have established real dialogue between the French...