"… sed victa Catoni": The Defeated Cause of Revolutions

Etienne Tassin .. sed victa CatonF The Defeated Cause of Revolutions Qui cherche dans la liberté autre chose qu’elle-même estfaitpour servir. (He who desiresfrom liberty anything other than itselfis bom to be a slave.) —Tocqueville Victrix causa deisplacuit, sed victa Catoni. (The victorious causepleased thegods, but the defeated onepleases Cato.) —Lucan IN PLACING THE PHRASE BY LUCAN (PHARSALIA, I, 128) AS AN EPIGRAPH to her future reflections on judgment, Hannah Arendt insinuates that judgment must honor the defeated, the victims of history, and save them from oblivion. But the phrase does not only concern the exercise of judgment: it also invites us to reconsider the meaning of actions. Cato is not a spectator—he is a fighter who pays with his life the defeat of his cause. Thus we can ask, with regard to the contrasting interpre­ tation that Arendt offers of modern revolutions, how their failure or their success is significant. Does revolution not take its meaning from being nothing other than a defeated cause? It is the least we can take from On Revolution. Understood from the point of view of Cato of Utica, the defeated cause is then no more a failure. There is something still at play in revolutionary struggle that cannot be evaluated according to an instrumental judgment, and that holds a political treasure. It is social research Vol 74 : No 4 : Winter 2007 1109 this political meaning of revolutionary action—the lost treasure that also pleased Cato—that I would like to evoke here, away from historical explanations that reason in terms of success or failure. THE PHARSALIA Two names summarized the civil war that had been engaged for a year: Caesar and Pompey. After the battle of Pharsalia, which saw the downfall of Pompey’s armies, Cato the Young reunited what was left of the republican army to continue the fight in Africa beside Metellus Scipio. Having learned that Metellus Scipio had also been defeated at Thapsus, Cato chose suicide—“in order not to survive to freedom,” biographers say. Cato was a stoic. Before killing himself, he read again, in Utica where he had found refuge, Plato’s Phaedo. Cato’s entire life seems condensed in the phrase that would become famous, employed by Lucan to summarize his struggle in his De Bello civili sive Pharsalia: “Victrix causa deis placuit, sed vieta Catoni” (Pharsalia, I, 128): “The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated one pleases Cato.” Lucan makes Cato into the figure ofthe republican, opposed to Caesar’s imperial aims. A man of action engaged against tyranny, the governor of Sicily who rallied to Pompey by virtù, Cato is of a stoic sensibility. A reader of Plato, he prefers death to servitude. Why does Lucan say that at the difference ofthe gods, the defeated cause pleases Cato ofUtica? This question enfolds in fact three enigmas. Why “at the difference of the gods”? Why this attraction toward the “defeated cause”? Why does it depend on a certain form of “pleasure”? ARENDT AND LUCAN Hannah Arendt has doubtless come across Lucan’s phrase through Friedrich von Gentz, a friend of Rahel Varnhagen who, she says, liked to quote him. Nevertheless, evoking for the first time Lucan’s phrase about Gentz, Arendt wrote: “His success at knowing all there really was to know left him ultimately indifferent toward the destruction of every­ thing he had sought to achieve in his political life. From his distancing 1110 social research himself from everything specific—and not from any fixed conviction or determinate point of view—comes the phrase with which he closed his apologia to Amalie Imhof: Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni” (Arendt, 1995: 56).1Would the stoicism and republicanism drawn from Lucan have become resignation and disillusionment, indifference and lack of interest for politics? And why does this lack of interest concern “everything specific”? Ten years later, in 1942, Arendt begins her review of Paul R. Sweet’s book devoted to von Gentz with the quotation of Lucan as it appears in conclusion of the letter that the latter addressed in 1828 to Amélie von Halvig. Arendt presents, it seems, the successive political commitments of von Gentz as a mix...