With the Congress of Vienna a new kind of spectacle appeared in politics. No one in that prolonged social gathering could believe that the purpose of the negotiations was what everybody claimed—the restoration of monarchist sovereignty. Instead, there was an urgent need to test out for the first time in lavish orchestration the language of concealment, which would make such a contribution to the political process over the next decades. “The grand remarks about ‘reconstructing social order,’ about ‘regenerating political order in Europe,’ about ‘a lasting peace based on a division of power,’ etc., etc., were made to reassure the people, and to give an air of dignity and importance to that solemn meeting, but the real purpose of the Congress was to share out among the winners the spoils taken from the losers.” This is what Friedrich von Gentz noted in his memorandum of February 12 for Prince John Caradja, hospodar of Wallachia. But the division of spoils among the victors is what happens in any war: if a perceptive observer like Gentz felt the need to point it out, it was precisely because he had a bleak awareness that the real significance of the Congress lay in its paraphernalia, much more than in its ultimate decisions. A new aesthetic of politics was unfolding there. And Gentz felt it to such an extent that he wanted to record, at the very outset, how, beneath the masquerade of grand phrases and grand balls, the old unshakeable purpose of politics—“the dividing out of spoils”—persisted.
Metternich noted in the margin of Gentz’s memorandum that those words reflected the “peculiar frivolousness” of the author, in whom he recognized “the rarest intellectual gifts and a true wealth of positive understanding.” According to Metternich, Gentz made the mistake of placing too much faith in his impressions, which were often the result of society chat. But what was the Congress, other than a constant stream of society chat, where the spies and the ladies played a role no less important than the ministers and heads of state? Metternich knew this better than most, which is confirmed by his final comment on the memorandum: “All in all, this account is correct.”
At the Congress of Vienna—and for the first time at a meeting of Western powers—there is concern about popular approval. Fear has brought the need for this entirely new caution, which requires innovations in language and conduct. Talleyrand is, as usual, the quickest to recognize it and would calmly state that at the Congress he defended “the cause of the people.” How could such a change take place?
A quirk of history has turned the clock back. These rulers of ancient dynasties arrive at Vienna like as many parvenus of power, primordial usurpers. The Napoleonic disease has infected them all. His most perverse achievement has been to wipe out the expanse of time over which monarchs had given douceur to their power. Now they all appear like popular insurgents who need, however, to give an artificial patina of history to the crude reality of their command. This is how they are caught in the snare of legitimacy that Talleyrand has set. This is why they come out with “grand phrases” designed to reassure their people.
In their shortsightedness, they imagine these phrases will be enough to tide them over for a long while. They don’t take into account that these are drugged words: those who use them once will have to use them again and again, more and more frequently, until they become bound up in those words, until they require those same words to be used by their subjects, since such words in the meantime have become an essential instrument of power.
And yet someone, a few months before the opening of the Congress of Vienna, had described that new trajectory of the word, providing even a glimpse of the Stalinist trials to come. Benjamin Constant’s De l’Esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation had been printed on January 30, 1814:
“Despotism banishes all forms of liberty; usurpation needs those forms in order to justify overthrowing what it has replaced; but in seizing them, it profanes them.
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“The despot forbids debate, and demands only obedience; the usurper prescribes a ludicrous test, as a preliminary to acceptance.
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“There is no limit to the tyranny that seeks to secure a semblance of approval.
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“It is usurpation that has invented those so-called acts of public sanction, those high-flown addresses, those monotonous compliments, a customary tribute that the same men generously proclaim, in more or less the same words, about the most conflicting decisions: in words where fear apes all the appearances of courage in order to celebrate its own shame and give thanks for its own misfortunes. A singular device that deceives no one! A game that impresses no one and should have yielded long ago to the arrows of ridicule! But ridicule attacks all and destroys nothing.
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“Despotism, in short, reigns in silence, and leaves man the right to be silent; usurpation condemns him to speak, it follows him into the inner sanctum of his mind and, by forcing him to lie to his own conscience, it robs him of the last consolation that still remains for the oppressed.
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“Usurpation debases people at the same time that it oppresses them; it accustoms them to trample on what they used to respect, to woo what they despise, to despise themselves and, if it manages to endure over time, once it has fallen, it even cancels out any possibility of freedom, any improvement.”
These words certainly describe the transition from Stalin to Brezhnev far more than the fall of Commodus or the effects of the Napoleonic Empire, as Constant must have imagined. But they also herald the reign of those absurd legitimist usurpers whose murmurings would soon be discernible at the Congress of Vienna.
Benjamin Constant mentions in passing one of the bitterest and most incomprehensible truths for those contemporaries, such as Talleyrand, who had been born back in the age of douceur, when ridicule was fatal: “But ridicule attacks all and destroys nothing.” Here he was naming one of the arcana imperii of Sovietism. And one of the main elements of political strength for the Soviet leaders was the very fact that they understood it. Excessive ridicule—its relentless, daily production—can lead to the total neutralization of its destructive power. And perfection is reached when anti-Soviet stories become a part of the regime. As for the results, these will be much more fruitful and lasting if all this is applied to a mind like that of the Russian, who is a virtuoso when it comes to self-contempt, as Gogol and Dostoyevsky demonstrated.
The theory of legitimacy, through which Talleyrand triumphs at the Congress of Vienna, rests on two axioms of public law: “That sovereignty cannot be obtained simply through conquest; nor can it pass to the conqueror if the sovereign does not hand it over to him.” The first point, however, stopped all attempts to go back to the origin, since conquest casts a shadow over it: there is always a native ruler who has been overthrown. The second point offered no answer in situations where sovereignty is abandoned without being handed over: here a gap, a deficiency, appears, as in the silent law of nature compared with the written conventions that sanction it. In political reality a sanction is therefore needed—and it will be the “sanction of Europe.” Europe appears here for the first time as a second nature, a mystical body (“an almost mystical community of states,” as Guglielmo Ferrero would write) that has the power to confer sovereignty. In conclusion: it was recognized that the laws of nature did not extend to all circumstances of life, but sometimes had to be supplemented and replaced by a second nature, identified as Europe. The aporia that the Congress of Vienna was trying to resolve was not so much political as epistemological. The political remedy was a shrewd fiction; as for the epistemology, it could wait. But the whole lack of plausibility was clear: not least because the body of Europe was not “mystical”—or no more so than Madame de Krüdener, prophetess of regeneration, who journeyed under the banner of the Holy Alliance. To cover this defect, after the Congress of Vienna there was a growing wave of declamation in support of Order, which has continued uninterrupted until today. Into those howling waters then came the ever more rabid declamation of the democratic and revolutionary enemy. Turning away from the contemplation of those insipid waves, Baudelaire gathered his fleurs du mal on the cliffs.
The right of conquest, which establishes its own laws, relates back to the arbitrary nature of language. Legitimate sovereignty relates back to the lingua adamica, to the sound that reveals the secret name of things. Now, the grammar of the Adamic language has never been reconstructed. And grammar is the action of language. The primacy of the praxis sought to wipe out even the memory of the Adamic language. But memory lasts longer than action.