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553 La Révolution comfirme, par le sacrifice, la superstition. — Charles Baudelaire It is very difficult to express in few and clear words what I feel: emotion, gratitude, surprise. Above all: I have been touched that you, Mr. President, have had the goodness to deliver the Alexis de Tocqueville Prize personally to me. I will never forget your gesture. Your generous words heighten my emotion: I see in them that sign of friendship, precious among all, that sometimes a writer addresses to another of a different tongue, although those tongues might be as close as Spanish and French. My gratitude for this is double: to the man of state and the writer of French, a language whose literature has been my second spiritual land. My gratitude to the jury of the Alexis de Tocqueville Foundation is mixed with a slight and very agreeable sensation of unreality. When Mr. Alain Peyrefitte had the kindness to announce the decision of the jury to me, my first reaction, I confess, was of astonishment and even incredulity: why me, a poet? Very quickly I suspected the reason: at one time or another, moved as much by the accidents of my life as by the changes and upheavals of the world and of my country, I have participated in public life, and I have written some books on the history and politics of our time. Over and above the doubtful merits of my writings, I imagine that the Foundation has wanted to reward in me, writer from a continent frequently torn between the forced immobility of despotisms and the convulsions of sectarians, a faithfulness. In effect, I have always tried to be faithful to that attitude that the work and person of Alexis 3 Poetry, Myth, Revolution Original title: “Poesía, mito, revolución.” Source: Octavio Paz, Poesía, mito, revoluci ón. Precedido por los discursos de François Mitterrand, Alain Peyrefitte, y Pierre Godefroy (Mexico: Vuelta, 1989), pp. 47–69. 554 : oCtavio paz de Tocqueville exemplifies and that can be summarized thus: my liberty begins with the recognition of the liberty of others. In the dawn of the modern age, before a spectacle that has since been repeated many times: the tyrant disguised as liberator, Chateaubriand wrote these prophetic words: La Révolution m’aurait entrâiné . . . mais je vis la première tête portée au bout d’une pique et je reculai. Jamais le meurtre ne sera à mes yeux un argument de libert je ne connais rien de plus servile, de plus lâche, de plus borne qu’un terroiste. N’ai je pas rencontré toute cette race de Brutus au service de César et de sa police?1 Since my adolescence I have written poems, and I have not stopped writing them. I wanted to be a poet and nothing more. In my books of prose I intended to serve poetry, justify and defend it, explain it before others and before myself. Soon I discovered that the defense of poetry, undervalued in our century, was inseparable from the defense of liberty . From this my passionate interest in the political and social matters that have shaken our time. After the Second World War I became acquainted with André Breton and his friends. I do not share today many of their philosophical and aesthetic ideas, but I keep intact and alive my admiration. In his writings as much as in his life, liberty and poetry appear with the same fiery face, simultaneously seductive and turbulent. Nor did he, like Chateaubriand at the other extreme, ever confuse the tyrant with the liberator. Liberty is not a philosophy, nor even is it an idea: it is a movement of the conscience that brings us, in certain moments , to pronounce two monosyllables: Yes or No. In its instantaneous brevity, like the light of the lightning flash, the contradictory character of human nature reveals itself. Throughout the course of history and in the most diverse circumstances , poets have participated in political life. I do not refer to the concept of poetry as an art in the service of a state, a church, or an ideology . We already know that that concept, as old as the political and ideo1 . “The revolution had pulled me along . . . but I saw the first head on the end of a pike, and I drew back. I will never see in murder an argument for liberty; I know nothing more servile, more cowardly, more narrow of mind than a terrorist. Have...

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