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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: France

Diplomacy, Ben Franklin Style

13 Friday Oct 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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American History, American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, Comte de Vergennes, Diplomacy, France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Adams, John Paul Jones, Richard Henry Lee, The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Fleming, Voltaire

“In France, seventy-year-old Franklin began the third phase of his extraordinary life. His fame as a scientist and philosopher blended with the huge excitement he generated as the spokesman for the embattled new republic, the United States of America. With consummate shrewdness, Franklin wore the simple clothes of an American Quaker, an imaginary character created by savants such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The French wanted to believe that in the new world a new kind of man was emerging, free of the corruptions and infirmities of their decadent old world. Franklin was more than ready to encourage this illusion. One excited Parisian wrote: ‘€œEverything about him announces the simplicity of primitive morals€… The people clustered about him as he passed and asked: “Who is this old peasant who has such a noble air?”‘

The old peasant, whose primitive morals had enabled him to maintain wives on both sides of the Atlantic without a hint of scandal, was soon displaying his gift for backstairs diplomacy. He began by charming France’€™s foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes. With the help of several American victories on the battlefield, Franklin persuaded this cautious veteran of twenty-four years™ service in Europe’€™s capitals to back the United States, first with secret aid and then with a formal alliance in 1778. This was only the beginning of Franklin’€™s French accomplishments. He secured over $40 million in loans and gifts from the French treasury — €”the equivalent of perhaps $600 million today — €”money that kept the bankrupt American government functioning. He supervised the shipment of tons of supplies and weapons to America. He armed and equipped American sea captains, such as John Paul Jones, who preyed on British shipping in their home waters with spectacular success…

In a cheerful letter to a grandniece in America, Franklin had [an] explanation for his dalliances: ‘Somebody gave it out that I loved ladies; and then every body presented me their ladies (or the ladies presented themselves) to be embraced, that is to have their necks kissed. For as to kissing on the lips or cheeks it is not the mode here, the first is reckoned rude, and the other may rub off the paint. The French ladies have however 1000 other ways of rendering themselves agreeable; by their various attentions and civilities, & their sensible conversation. ‘Tis a delightful people to live with.’…

Occasionally, one madam or mademoiselle asked him if he cared for her more than the other pursuers. With a smile Franklin would reply in his limping French, ‘€˜Yes, when you are closest to me, because of the power of the attraction.’

The remark combined flirtation and a reminder of his fame as a scientist. He was comparing the lady’€™s impact on him to the way an electrified piece of metal drew iron filings to it. Behind these amorous games lay the goal Franklin never forgot — €”persuading the French to back the faltering American Revolution. He knew — €”and cheerfully approved — the passion for politics among upper-class French women. He hoped their enthusiasm for his amiable American ways would be transmitted to their influential husbands or lovers.”

__________

Pulled from Thomas Fleming’s The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers.

Move onward:

  • How will future historians view the American experiment?
  • Thomas Jefferson’s advice to his teenage grandson
  • ‘The Light Has Gone Out of My Life’: Young Teddy Roosevelt in Love and Grief

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Sam Harris: The Meaning of the Paris Attacks

16 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Essay, Politics, Religion

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Charlie Hebdo, civilization, Daesh, France, interview, ISIL, ISIS, Islam, Islamic State, Islamism, Jihadis, Jihadism, Lawrence O'Donnell, Maajid Nawaz, morality, Paris, Paris Attacks, Podcast, religion, Sam Harris, Still Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon, terror, Terrorism, The Last Word, violence

Paris Terror Attacks

“This is the big story of our time, and it is an incredibly boring one. Let the boredom of this just sink into your bones: realize that for the rest of your life, you’re going to be reading and hearing about, and otherwise witnessing, hopefully not firsthand, the lunacy and attendant atrocities of jihadists.

Please pay attention to the recurrent shrieks of Allahu Akbar. This is the cat call from the Middle Ages, or from Middle Earth, that we will have to live with for the rest of our lives. So this fight against jihadism — this is a generational fight. This is something we are doing for our children, ultimately, and for our children’s children.

We have a war of ideas that we have to wage, and win, and unfortunately we have to wage it and win it with ourselves first. And again, this requires an admission that there is such a war of ideas to be waged and won.

We have grown so effete as a civilization as to imagine that we have no enemies — or if we do, that they are only of our own making… It is not mere wartime propaganda that we will one day look back on with embarrassment to call ISIS a death cult. To call them barbarians. To call them savages. To use dehumanizing language.

They are scarcely human in their aspirations. The world they want to build entails the destruction of everything we value, and are right to value. And by “we” I mean civilized humanity, including all the Muslims who are just as horrified…

We have a project that’s universal, that transcends culture; that unites everyone who loves art and science and reason generally, who wants to cure disease, who wants to raise each new generation to be more educated than the last. And this common project is under assault…

And unfortunately, most of us have to keep convincing ourselves that evil exists, that not all people want the same things, and that some people are wrong in how they want to live and the world they want to build. And if we can’t convince ourselves of this once and for all, well then we’ll have to wait to be convinced by further acts of savagery of the sort we just saw in Paris. Why wait?”

__________

Comments from Sam Harris on the preface to his newly republished essay “Still Sleepwalking toward Armageddon”.

You’ll find more of Sam’s takes on these issues in his newest book, coauthored with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance. I was lucky enough to meet Maajid two weeks ago in Washington and can enthusiastically recommend this quick, clarifying read. Watch Sam and Maajid talk about the roots of their conversation and the conclusions they’ve made in the following clip from The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:


The photograph was taken this weekend as mourners gathered at The Place de la République in Paris.

More for the Francophiles:

  • The ultimate poem about the city of lights: “In Paris with You” by James Fenton
  • Meet Napoleon Bonaparte
  • A few of the best words from some indomitable Frenchmen: Jules Renard, Blaise Pascal, Edmond de Goncourt, Alexis de Tocqueville, Albert Camus

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Meet Napoleon Bonaparte

13 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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Alexander the Great, Andrew Roberts, Battle of Leipzig, Biography, European History, France, French Revolution, George Patton, history, Josephine Bonaparte, Julius Caesar, military history, Monarchy, Napoleon, Napoleon: A Life, Romeo and Juliet, St Helena, Ulysses Grant, War, Winston Churchill

Napoleon Bonaparte

“Napoleon Bonaparte was the founder of modern France and one of the great conquerors of history. He came to power through a military coup only six years after entering the country as a penniless political refugee. As First Consul and later Emperor, he almost won hegemony in Europe, but for a series of coalitions specifically designed to bring him down. Although his conquests ended in defeat and ignominious imprisonment, over the course of his short but eventful life he fought sixty battles and lost only seven. For any general, of any age, this was an extraordinary record. Yet his greatest and most lasting victories were those of his institutions, which put an end to the chaos of the French Revolution and cemented its guiding principle of equality before the law…

The leadership skills he employed to inspire his men have been adopted by other leaders over the centuries, yet never equaled except perhaps by his great devotee Winston Churchill. Some of his techniques he learned from the ancients — especially his heroes Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar — and others he conceived himself in response to the circumstances of the day. The fact that his army was willing to follow him even after the retreat from Moscow, the battle of Leipzig and the fall of Paris testifies to his capacity to make ordinary people feel that they were capable of doing extraordinary, history-making deeds. A more unexpected aspect of Napoleon’s personality that also came out strongly over the course of researching this book was his fine sense of humour. All too often historians have taken seriously remarks that were clearly intended as humorous. Napoleon was constantly joking to his family and entourage, even in the most dire situations.

Napoleon’s love affair with Josephine has been presented all too often in plays, novels and movies as a Romeo and Juliet story: in fact, it was anything but. He had an overwhelming crush on her, but she didn’t love him, at least in the beginning, and was unfaithful from the very start of their marriage. When he learned of her infidelities two years later while on campaign in the middle of the Egyptian desert, he was devastated. He took a mistress in Cairo in part to protect himself from accusations of cuckoldry, which were far more dangerous for a French general of the era than those of adultery.

Napoleon Bonaparte at the Sphinx

Yet he forgave Josephine when he returned to France, and they started off on a decade of harmonious marital and sexual contentment, despite his taking a series of mistresses. Josephine remained faithful and even fell in love with him. When he decided to divorce for dynastic and geostrategic reasons, Josephine was desolate but they remained friendly. Napoleon’s second wife, Marie Louise, would also be unfaithful to him, with an Austrian general Napoleon had defeated on the battlefield but clearly couldn’t match in bed…

Napoleon represented the Enlightenment on horseback. His letters show a charm, humor and capacity for candid self-appraisal. He could lose his temper — volcanically so on occasion — but usually with some cause. Above all he was no totalitarian dictator, as many have been eager to suggest: he may have established an unprecedentedly efficient surveillance system, but he had no interest in controlling every aspect of his subjects’ lives.

Overall, Napoleon’s capacity for battlefield decision-making was astounding. Having walked the ground of fifty-three of his sixty battlefields, I was astonished by his genius for topography, his acuity and sense of timing. A general must ultimately be judged by the outcome of the battles, and of Napoleon’s sixty battles and sieges he lost only Acre, Aspern-Essling, Leipzig, La Rothière, Lâon, Arcis and Waterloo. When asked who was the greatest captain of the age, the Duke of Wellington replied: ‘In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.’

He convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment and a story whose sheer splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries. He was able to impart to ordinary people the sense that their lives—and, if necessary, their deaths in battle—mattered in the context of great events. They too could make history. It is untrue that he cared nothing for his men and was careless with their lives. He lost a friend in almost every major battle, and his letters to Josephine and Marie Louise make it clear that these deaths, and those of his soldiers, affected him. Yet he could not allow that to deflect him from his main purpose of pursuing victory, and he would not have been able to function as a general if it had, any more than Ulysses Grant or George Patton could have done.

Napoleon certainly never lacked confidence in his own capacity as a military leader. On St Helena, when asked why he had not taken Frederick the Great’s sword when he had visited Sans Souci, he replied, ‘Because I had my own.’”

__________

From the introduction to Andrew Robert’s new biography, published November 4th last year, Napoleon: A Life.

Make more introductions:

  • Meet Alexander
  • Meet Augustine
  • Meet Isaac Newton
  • Meet Thomas Jefferson (then his father)

Napoleon Bonaparte

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The Hungarian Photographer Who Stormed Omaha Beach

06 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History, Photography, War

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Adolf Hitler, battle, combat, Combat Photography, D-Day, Dwight Eisenhower, English Channel, film, France, Invasion, Life Magazine, Normandy, Omaha Beach, Photography, Propaganda, Robert Capa, Slightly Out of Focus, Soldiers, Spanish Civil War, Steven Spielberg, War, War Correspondent, World War Two

D-Day Invasion

“I would have to make up my mind and choose a barge to ride in… On the one hand, the objectives of Company B looked interesting, and to go along with them seemed a pretty safe bet. Then again, I used to know Company E very well and the story I had got with them in Sicily was one of my best in the war…

If at this point my son should interrupt me, and ask, ‘What is the difference between the war correspondent and any other man in uniform?’ I would say that the war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay and greater freedom than the soldier… The war correspondent has his stake — his life — in his own hands and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute.

I am a gambler. I decided to go with Company E in the first wave.

Once I decided to go in with the first assault troops I began to convince myself that the invasion would be a pushover and that all this talk about an ‘impregnable west wall’ was just German propaganda. I went up on deck and took a good look at the disappearing English coast. The pale green glow of the vanishing island hit my soft spot and I joined the legion of the last-letter-writers. My brother could have my ski boots and my mother could invite someone from England to stay with her. The idea was disgusting, and I never mailed the letter. I folded it up, and stuck it in my breast pocket…

They fixed a gas mask, and inflatable lifebelt, a shovel, and some other gadgets around me, and I placed my very expensive Burberry raincoat over my arm. I was the most elegant invader of them all… The coast of Normandy was still miles away when the first unmistakable popping reached our listening ears. We ducked down in the puky water at the bottom of the barge and ceased to watch the approaching coastline… It was now light enough to start taking pictures and I brought my first Contax camera out of its waterproof oilskin. The flat bottom of our barge hit the earth of France. The boatswain lowered the steel-covered barge front, and there, between the grotesque designs of steel obstacles sticking out of the water, was a thin line of land covered with smoke — our Europe, the “Easy Red” beach.

My beautiful France looked sordid and uninviting, and a German machine gun, spitting bullets around the barge, fully spoiled my return. The men from my barge waded in the water. Waist deep, with rifles ready to shoot, with the invasion obstacles and the smoking beach in the background — this was good enough for the photographer. I paused for a moment on the gangplank to take my first real picture of the invasion. The boatswain, who was in an understandable hurry to get the hell out of there, mistook my picture-taking attitude for explicable hesitation, and helped me make up my mind with a well-aimed kick in the rear. The water was cold, and the beach still more than a hundred yards away. The bullets tore holes in the water around me, and I made for the nearest steel obstacle.

A soldier got there at the same time, and for a few minutes we shared its cover. He took off the waterproofing of his rifle and began to shoot without much aiming at the smoke-hidden beach. The sound of his rifle gave him enough courage to to move forward and he left the obstacle to me. It was a foot larger now and I felt safe enough to take pictures of the other guys hiding just as I was. It was still very early and very gray for good pictures, but the gray water and the gray sky made the little men, dodging under the surrealistic designs of Hitler’s anti-invasion brain trust, very effective.

I finished my pictures, and the sea was cold in my trousers. Reluctantly, I tried to move away from my steel pole, but the bullets chased me back every time. Fifty yards ahead of me, one of our half-burnt amphibious tanks stuck out of the water and offered me my next cover. I sized up the moment. There was little future for the elegant raincoat heavy on my arm. I dropped it and made for the tank. Between floating bodies I reached it, paused for a few more pictures, and gathered my guts for the last jump to the beach.

Now the Germans played on all their instruments, and I could not find any hole between the shells and bullets that blocked the last twenty-five yards to the beach, I just stayed behind my tank, repeating a little sentence from my Spanish Civil War days, ‘Es una cosa muy seria. Es una cosa muy seria.’ This is a very serious business.

The tide was coming in and now the water reached the farewell letter to my family in my breast pocket. Behind the human cover of the last two guys, I reached the beach. I threw myself flat and my lips touched the earth of France. I had no desire to kiss it.”

Robert Capa

__________

A section from Robert Capa’s memoir of World War Two, Slightly Out of Focus.

70 years ago today, Capa trudged up the French coast to capture the first and only photographs of the opening assault on Omaha Beach. He used a pair of Contax II cameras mounted with 50mm lenses to snap a total of 106 pictures in the first two hours of the invasion. But only eleven frames would survive. No, they did not get lost in the skirmish, shot through by a German gunner, or sink to the bottom of the English Channel. They melted at the Life Magazine offices in London, after a fifteen-year-old lab assistant set the dryer too high, bleaching the emulsion in the negatives of three and a half of Capa’s four film rolls.

The surviving photos, which would soon come to be known as “The Magnificent Eleven,” are the sole visual record of the invasion and some of the most striking combat photography ever captured. They were printed in the July 19th Life Magazine article “The Beachheads of Normandy,” with a fitting caption, “slightly out of focus,” which Capa later came to think of as a metaphor for his memory of wartime — so it became the title of his book.

Robert Capa and Gerda Taro Robert Capa - D-Day Normandy Robert Capa - D-Day Normandy Robert Capa - Soldier - Spanish Civil WarRobert Capa

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Martin Amis: How Britain, Germany, and France Have Reconciled Their Roles in World War II

27 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Interview, War

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Adolf Hitler, Battle of Britain, BBC, combat, Conquest, Denmark, England, European History, France, Germany, Greece, history, Martin Amis, Martin Amis's England, Nazi Germany, Nazism, Third Reich, War, World War Two, Yugoslavia

World War 2

“Britain, I think rightly, derives a great deal of strength from its performance in the Second World War. Perhaps no other nation in Europe emerges from that war intact — either because of the humiliation of conquest, the humiliation of initiating the war, or the humiliation of collaboration.

And more materially: Hitler conquered a string of countries in a matter of days, sometimes a matter of hours. Denmark, 24 hours; France, 39 days; Yugoslavia, 7 days; Greece, 12 days. And leading up to the attack on Russia, which until halfway through 1941 looked as though it was going to be maybe 45 days. The only defeat suffered by Germany in that time was the Battle of Britain in 1940.

There were all these governments in exile that were standing with us, but we stood alone and we did prevail in the end, although as a minor player by the time the war ended. And I think that’s fit to shape how you see yourself for generations. There was always a feeling — and I think a perfectly intelligible feeling — that a great evil had been bested in the end.

Germany has made superhuman efforts to come to terms with its past. And still wants to talk about it. And is not shying away from it. But it seems to me that France has made no efforts at all in that direction: the myth of the resistance nation has completely supplanted the reality of the collaborationist nation. It takes all my powers of imagination and empathy to think myself into a French skin or a German skin for that reason, because of how tremendously diminished I would be. And ultimately, the English performance, and conduct, in the war is something to be proud of. That is not the case elsewhere.”

__________

From the BBC program, released in March of this year, entitled Martin Amis’s England.

More Amis:

  • On storytelling: why failure, not success, is its main subject
  • On memory: why it matters more as you age
  • On innocence: why the world is getting less so

Martin Amis

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The Brilliant, Unread Journal of Jules Renard (Part II)

01 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

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Burgundy, Chitry, Diary, France, French Literature, French Novelists, Journal, Journals, Jules Renard, Life, literature, Musings, Novels, Paris, Reflections, The Journal of Jules Renard, W. Somerset Maugham, Wisdom

Jules Renard

No one ever talks about the journal of Jules Renard.

That’s how I began my first post about this journal, and it’s regrettably true. Renard’s journal is rarely cited, nearly impossible to find even on the internet, and virtually unmentioned in lists of the greatest diaries in history. Still, those who are aware of this collection of witticisms and observations know how stunning it is. It floored W. Somerset Maugham when he first fanned through it and it’s flatly described on Wikipedia as, “a masterpiece of introspection, irony, humor and nostalgia.” I recommend you pick up your own copy of the text, which many scholars have suggested is unique in the annals of literary history, as it is the only private work that surpasses the entirety of its author’s published oeuvre. This post features highlights from its second half (1900-10).

For context: when we left off at the end of 1899, Renard was a 36-year-old writer and budding politician, splitting his time between Paris, which he alternately romanticizes and loathes, and his country home in Chitry, a provincial town in Burgundy where he indulges his passion for nature and quiet reflection. A year and a half before, Renard’s father, François, had taken his own life at the peak of an excruciating chronic illness. Jules was the first on the scene, and that lacerating experience has stirred in his mind a latent fixation on mortal questions. In addition, this tragedy propels Jules into a fresh state of mind as the family’s new patriarch: he recommits himself to his political ambitions (he would be elected mayor of Chitry in 1904), while overseeing the workers of his country estate (including its noble foreman Philippe) and cherishing more and more the serene presence of his wife, Marie (whom he affectionately refers to as Marinette).

Beyond that, however, my impressions about the general significance and trends in Renard’s thinking are merely that – impressions, and I think you’ll have a more rewarding engagement with the words if you browse through them at your own pace and without preconceptions. Ultimately there are many adjectives to ascribe to these jottings, through perhaps the most apt word is also that most overused one: beautiful (It’s too heavy to be “pleasurable,” too airy to be “profound”). It’s a beautiful series of reflections which are the product of a patient but swift intelligence, sharp eye, and palpably human heart. I have bolded my personal favorites.

__________

1900

You think about death as long as you hope to escape from it.

The task of the writer is to learn how to write.

My imagination is my memory.

The bird feels nothing when you clip its wings, but it can no longer fly.

At the Exposition from Great Britain, Guitry shows me paintings by, I think, Reynolds. No need to explain myself: the beauty of these works reach to the bottom of the heart. It is painting for lovers. Images of children, little girls, women, leave us with the sadness of not being loved by them.

The best in us is incommunicable.

Time passed through the needle’s eye of the hours.

A dream is only life madly dilated.

To be content with little money is also a talent.

1901

There are places and moments in which one is so completely alone that one sees the world entire.

The poems of our dreams, upon which reason acts, on waking, as the sun acts upon the dew.

Love kills intelligence. The brain and the heart act upon each other in the manner of an hour-glass. One fills itself only to empty the other.

A great shiver of wind passes over the countryside.

It is hailing over the hills. A disaster! But, once the hail has melted, the peasant does not spend time being sorry for himself: he goes back to work.

God, so much mystery – it is cruel, it is unworthy of you.
Taciturn God, speak to us!

A walk through the fields. Each one of my steps raises a friendly ghost, who comes with me. The memory of my father, his smock blown by the wind.
Marinette appears, and the earth is gentler to the feet.

The wind that knows how to turn the pages, but does not know how to read.

At work, the difficult thing is to light the little lamp of the brain. After that, it burns by itself.

Keep going! Talent is like the soil. The life you observe will never cease producing. Plough your field each year; it will bear fruit each year.

I ought to have a tiny portable table, so that I could go out and work, like a painter, under the open sky.

1902

The theatre is the place where I am the most bored, and where I most enjoy being bored.

So long as thinkers cannot tell me what life and death are, I shall not give a good goddamn for their thoughts.

I have lived on all the planets: life is a joke on none.

Those unexplored expanses, always fallow, in even the best friendships.

Weep! But not one of your tears must reach the tip of your pen and mix itself with your ink.

Sarah’s attitudes: she can look intelligent when she is listening to things she does not understand.

I shall end by not being able to do without city life in Paris. I shall acquire an anxiety in solitude. After a day, not of work, but of study, a walk on the boulevards in the evening – those lights, those women, those people – takes the shape of a reward.

When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.

It’s many days since I’ve felt ashamed of my vanity, or even tried to correct it. Of all my faults, it is the one that amuses me most.

Reverie is nothing but thought thinking of nothing.

Not the smallest charm of truth is that it scandalizes.

A cloud, for Philippe, is a threat of rain. He does not know that certain clouds have no function but to be beautiful.

Philippe does not like to dream: it tires him as much as to do the harvest.

Suddenly I stop in the middle of a field, and this question alights on me like a great black bird: ‘By whom were we created and why?’

Words must be nothing but the clothing, carefully made to measure, of thought.

1903

In my church, there is no vaulting between me and the sky.

When you rejoice over being young, and notice how well you feel, that is age.

Irony is an element of happiness.

A sentence must be so clear that it pleases at once, and that it is reread for the pleasure it gives.

Nature is never ugly.

Philippe. Fresh air and garlic will make him live a hundred years.

He who has not seen God has not seen anything.

If rest is not to some extent work, it quickly becomes boredom.

A butterfly got on the train at Clamecy and traveled with me.

There is nothing as meanly practical as religion.

The falling leaves tumble away on the ground what life is left to them. One of them has the honor of being pursued by my kitten.

One can quickly discover if a poet has talent. In the case of prose writers, it takes a little longer.

1904 

The beggars know me. They lift their hats to me and inquire about my family.

As mayor, I am supposed to look after the maintenance of the rural roads; as a poet, I like them better neglected.

I no longer dare to say: “Tomorrow I shall work.”

The window pane has faults that double the stars.

Ah, yes!, the dream: To be a socialist and make a lot of money.

1905

The simple life. We need a servant to close the shutters, light a lamp, as though a decent man shouldn’t find pleasure in these little household chores.

I have an anti-clerical mind and the heart of a monk.

The cat asleep, well buttoned into its fur.

I am no longer capable of dying young.

In the taste of life, there is something of a fine liqueur.

Little Joseph, Philippe’s young son, died last night.

The sparrows say of us: “They build houses so that we can build our nests in their walls.”

I am very fond of looking at the faces of young women. It amuses me to try to guess what they will be like when they are older.

On Sunday evenings Philippe is bored. He replaces the strap on a wooden shoe and goes to plant potatoes. He walks the dog and weeps for little Joseph.

God is no solution. It doesn’t arrange anything. It makes nothing right.

To what good are mementoes, even photographs? It is comforting that things die, as well as men.

Without its bitterness, life would not be bearable.

If you desire popularity, do not try to be right.

The working man goes to political meetings, the bourgeois to lectures.

The joy of a finished work spoils the work you are about to begin: you now believe it is easy.

The peasant is perhaps the only man who does not like the country and never looks at it.

Old age does not exist. At least, we do not suffer from continuous old age at the end of our lives; like trees, we have, every year, our attack of age. We lose our leaves, our temper, our taste for life; then they come back.

It is enough to have a sumptuous taste of success: no need to stuff yourself with it.

Life is badly arranged. The poor and uneducated should be rich, and the intelligent man, poor.

1906

The clock marching, with its heavy, rhythmic tread – One, two! One, two! – while standing still.

Yes, God exists, but He knows no more about it than we do.

I do not know whether God exists, but it would be better, for His own credit, that He did not.

I have come to the age where I can understand how deeply I must have annoyed my teachers when I went to see them and never talked to them about themselves.

A cat, who sleeps twenty hours out of twenty-four, is perhaps God’s most successful creation.

Today, at last, I look at Paris.
Twenty years ago I did not see it. I had only my ambition. I only read books.
Now I stop in front of the Louvre, in front of a church, at a street corner, and I say: “What wonders!”

Perhaps genius is to talent what instinct is to reason.

An honorable man of talent is as rare as a man of genius.

The page you write on autumn must give as much pleasure as a walk through fallen leaves. 

Imagine life without death. Every day, you would try to kill yourself out of despair.

Laziness: the habit of resting before fatigue sets in.

I may be my age and a mayor: when I see a policeman I am uneasy.

“New poets.” Remember that term, for you will not hear from them again.

Walk in the little wood. Sniff the scent of mowed hay. On the road, a blackbird hops along in front of me as though inviting me to follow it.

God, in His modesty, does not dare brag of having created the world.

The profession of writing is, after all, the only one in which one can make no money without being thought ridiculous.

The sun rises before I do, but I go to bed after it does: we are even.

The beauty of new things, after all, is that they are clean.

What happens to all the tears we do not shed?

The friends one is very fond of and never thinks about.

In the evening, when Marinette, after a good day filled with work, listens to her children or other youth, looks at one, then at the other, never missing a thing, she is beautiful, she has something holy about her.
With a single glance, she takes in their entire life, of which she remembers every detail.

1907

As I age, I understand life less and less — and value it more and more.

To the young. I shall tell you a truth that you may not like, because you look forward to novelty. This truth is that one does not grow old. Where the heart is concerned, the fact is accepted, at least in matters of love. Well, it is the same with the mind. It always remains young. You do not understand life any more at forty than you did at twenty, but you are aware of this fact, and you admit it. To admit it is to remain young. 

A young man without talent is an old man.

We are in the world to laugh. In purgatory we shall no longer be able to do so. And in heaven it would not be proper.

It is more difficult to be an honorable man for eight days than a hero for fifteen minutes.

The fields of wheat in which partridges have their little streets.

Immense morning sky. Clouds will never be able to fill it.

One must write as one speaks, if one speaks well. 

I want to do things right, and have someone, anyone, take note of it.

I stopped in the middle of a field, like a man suddenly hearing beautiful, solemn music.

Walks. The body advances in a straight line, while the mind flutters around it like a bird.

1908

A window on the street is as good as a stage.

If my books bore painters as much as their paintings bore me, I forgive them.

A cloud sails along as though it knew where it was going.

My life gives the impression of being in harmony with itself, and yet I have done almost nothing of what I wanted to do.

Collectivism — ridiculous! Talent can be nothing but individual.

My ignorance and my admission of ignorance – these constitute the best part of my originality.

Silence. I hear my ear.

When the defects of others are perceived with so much clarity, it is because one possesses them oneself.

What most surprises me is this heart which keeps on beating.

You sit down to work. For a long time, nothing. You don’t even try. All at once, a sort of breath passes, and the fire catches.

1909

One shouldn’t run down friends: they are still the best thing we have.

Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.

There is false modesty, but there is no false pride.

The Luxembourg gardens are nothing but a dome of leaves under which people dream.

Life is neither long nor short: it merely has drawn-out moments.

__________

Jules Renard suddenly succumbed to arteriosclerosis in April of the following year. You can read the highlights from the first half of the journal here, or buy your own copy of the real thing.

Jules Renard

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The Brilliant, Unread Journal of Jules Renard (Part I)

17 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

A Writer's Notebook, Diary, France, French Literature, French Novelists, Journal, Journals, Jules Renard, Julian Barnes, Life, literature, Musings, Novels, Reflections, W. Somerset Maugham, Wisdom

Jules Renard

No one ever talks about the journal of Jules Renard.

I hadn’t heard of it until I fell upon the work of Julian Barnes, who references it occasionally in his nonfiction. But I was so struck by these crisp, cited epigrams that I decided to pick up a copy of Renard’s journal several months ago — and now, having parsed through them, am sharing some of the highlights with you.

These words are nowhere else on the internet; TheBullyPulpit is the only site on the web with a substantial selection of this text. Yet it is only a fraction of Renard’s entire magisterial work, and I encourage you to pick up your own copy of this very readable, very witty, and very wise tome. Some scholars have made the astounding assertion that Renard’s journals make him unique in the annals of history: he is the only writer whose private jottings supersede in every respect his published work.

To give you some sense of their magnitude, Wikipedia describes his journal as, “a masterpiece of introspection, irony, humor and nostalgia.” W. Somerset Maugham was so moved after reading Renard’s journal that he decided to publish his own collection called A Writer’s Notebook. In the introduction, Maugham pays tribute to Renard’s masterpiece, calling it, “… wonderfully good reading. It is extremely amusing. It is witty and subtle and often wise…”

I think of it as a chronicle of life from a man who brimmed with humor and perspicacity, and grew in wisdom through the patient examination of both nature and human beings.

What follows are my selected highlights from the first half of this collection (1887 to 1899). They should be read in the context of Renard’s life: he was a relatively well-known Parisian novelist as well as a statesman (the governor of his provincial French town), so his musings are not only gratuitous literary witticisms, but utilitarian, applicable, and sage reflections on the lived-life of a common man. I have bolded my personal favorites.

Renard began this journal in 1887, when he was 23. He kept writing it until his sudden death in 1910.

__________

1887

Work thinks; laziness muses.

She has a very mean way of being kind.

I have an almost incessant need of speaking evil of others; but no interest at all in doing evil to them.

It astounds us to come upon other egoists, as though we alone had the right to be selfish, and be filled with eagerness to live

We often wish we could exchange our natural family for a literary one of our choice, in order that we might call the author of a moving page “brother”.

Sometimes everything around me seems so diffuse, so tremulous, so little solid, that I imagine this world to be only the mirage of a world to come: its projection. We seem to be still far from the forest; and even though the great trees already cast their shadow over us, we still have a long journey to make before we walk under their branches.

It is in the heart of the city that one writes the most inspired pages about the country.

1888

A thought written down is dead. It was alive. It lives no longer. It was a flower. Writing it down has made it artificial, that is to say, immutable.

In order to do certain crazy things, it is necessary to behave like a coachman who has let go of the reins and fallen asleep.

1889

A peasant must be twice sure of a fact before he will bet on it.

The scholar generalizes, the artist individualizes.

The blackbird, that minuscule crow.

Men of nature, as they are called, do not spend much time talking about nature.

The ideal of calm exists in a sitting cat.

A simple man, a man who has the courage to have a legible signature.

To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.

The friendship of a talented man of letters would be a great benefaction. It is a pity that those whose good graces we yearn for are always dead.

I can’t get around this dilemma: I have a horror of troubles, but they whip me up, they make me talented. Peace and well-being, on the contrary, paralyze me. Either be a nobody, or everlastingly plagued. I must make a choice.

I prefer to be plagued. I am stating it.

I’ll be properly annoyed when I am taken at my word.

I read novel upon novel, I stuff myself with them, inflate myself with them, I’m full up to my throat with them, in order that I may be disgusted with their commonplaces, their repetitions, their conventions, their systematic methods of procedure; and that I may do otherwise

This evening, memories are using my brain as a tambourine.

1890

The annoyance of having to pass in front of a bench on which people are sitting. Because, in truth, sitting on a bench places a man at a great advantage. He can look people over, laugh if he pleases, think his thoughts. He knows that the passers-by can do nothing of the kind; they can neither stop, nor look, nor, in their turn, laugh.

Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.

I have built such beautiful castles that I would be satisfied with their ruin

We are ignorant of The Beyond because this ignorance is the condition sine qua non of our own life. Just as ice cannot know fire except by melting, by vanishing. 

1891

To write in the manner that Rodin sculpts

When someone shows me a drawing, I look at it just long enough to prepare a comment.

Style is to forget all styles.

The critic is a botanist. I am a gardener. 

To seize the fleeing idea by the scruff of the neck and rub its nose on the paper.

I very humbly confess my pride. 

1892

We are all poor fools (of course I am speaking of myself), incapable of being either good or bad for two consecutive hours.

When he looked at himself in a mirror, he was always tempted to wipe the glass.

Oscar Wilde next to me at lunch. He has the oddity of being an Englishman. He gives you a cigarette, but he selects it himself. He does not walk around a table, he moves a table out of the way. His face is kneaded with tiny red worms, and he has long teeth, containing caves. He is enormous, and he carries an enormous can.

In art, never do as others do; in morals, act like everybody else.

At twenty, one thinks profoundly and badly.

There is in my heart something like the reflection of a beautiful dream that I no longer remember.

He is deaf in the left ear: he does not hear on the side of the heart.

The fear of boredom is the only excuse for working.

To be a boy, and to play alone, in full sunlight, in the square of a little town.

He had a fear of working, and was annoyed because he did not work.

He wept cats and dogs.

1893

When he praises anyone, he feels that he is slightly disparaging himself.

The more one reads, the less one imitates.

It is now the fashion, when one has completed someone’s portrait in the blackest of strokes, to add: “But he is very nice.”

To spend one’s life judging oneself is very entertaining, and, on the whole, not very difficult. 

I am moved by nature because, when I look at her, I need not worry about looking stupid.

If the word arse appears in a sentence, even in a sublime sentence, the public will hear only that one word.

And the brook murmurs without pause against the stones that try to prevent it from flowing.

A village where only the trees are capable of emotion.

How to describe the delicate thing that happens when a brilliant insect alights on a flower? Words, with their weight, fall upon the picture like birds of prey.

I am never bored anywhere: being bored is an insult to oneself. 

The clouds, their bellies swollen with rain, crawl over the woods like black spiders.

He has always encumbered himself with unnecessary friendships.

It is, when all is said and done, when faced with the subject of death that we feel most bookish.

The reward of great men is that, long after they have died, one is not quite sure that they are dead.

I don’t care about knowing many things: I want to know the things I care about. 

1894

As sad to watch as someone you love disappearing into the fog.

There are no friends; only moments of friendship.

Life can do without logic; literature cannot.

Thirty years old! Now I am sure that I shall not escape death.

Who will tell, who will paint the strange things I see?

To think is to search for clearings in a wood.

Happy people have no talent.

All day, I was drugged with sadness.

I like rain that lasts all day, and don’t feel that I am really in the country until I am well caked with mud.

We spend our lives talking about this mystery: our life.

Lifting one’s head, one could see up there, between the top branches of the trees, a river of sky flowing.

What does the bird do in a tempest? It does not cling to the branch: it follows the storm.

When I have experienced great difficulty in writing a page, I consider it well written.

Suppose, instead of earning a lot of money in order to live, we should try to live on little money?

1895

The good that one expects does not come to pass, but unexpected good does. There is justice, but he who dispenses it is playful. He is a jovial judge, who laughs at us, plays tricks on us, but who, when all is weighed, never makes a mistake.

There are good writers and great ones. Let us be the good ones.

Toulouse-Lautrec. The oftener you see him, the taller he grows. He ends up by being taller than average.

In literature, the real is distinguishable from the false as fresh flowers are from artificial flowers: by a sort of inimitable scent.

With its purring, the cat accompanies the tick-tock of the clock; it is the only music in the room.

What pleases women most is gross flattery concerning their intelligence.

All our criticism consists of reproaching others with not having the qualities that we believe ourselves to have.

At work in the morning: at first, mist, sometimes impenetrable. And, gradually, clearing. It is like a small sun slowly rising in the brain.

The truly free man is the one who will turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse.

Literature, a queer sort of occupation: the less one produces, the better it must be.

1896

To take notes is to play the scales of literature.

The little light existing in the mystery that surrounds us comes from ourselves: it is a false light. The mystery has never shown us its own.

There is in me a substratum of coarseness that allows me to understand peasants and to enter deeply into their lives.

It is cheating to try to be kind. You must be born kind or never meddle with it.

I am made only to listen to the earth and watch it live.

Put a little moon into what you write.

Incapable of sustained effort, I read here and there, and write here and there. But I do believe that this is the lot of the true artist.

We did not have the same thoughts, but we had thoughts of the same color.

A morning so gray that the birds went back to bed.

There is no paradise on earth, but there are pieces of it. What there is on earth is a broken paradise.

We are never happier than when our jokes have made the maid laugh.

It is in the cafés of small towns that one sees humanity at its most hideous.

1897

I have not renounced ambition. The fire still burns in me—a banked fire, but alive.

A man in love with truth need not be either great or a poet. He is both without trying.

Men like my father respect only those that get rich, and admire only those that die poor.

I am a realist bothered by reality.

Nothing adds to your age like the death of a father. What? So I am now father Renard, and Fantec, from being a grandson, becomes a son.

Half-past one. Death of my father.

One can say of him: “This was only a man, merely a mayor of a poor little village,” and yet speak of his death as though it were the death of Socrates. I do not reproach myself for not having loved him enough. I do reproach myself for not having understood him.

For a while, his death made me feel uprooted.

My father. The next day I had to leave the table in order to go away and weep. It was the first time, in the twenty hours that I had sat by him. Floods of tears came to my eyes; I had not been able to squeeze out one before.

He killed himself, not because he suffered too much, but because he did not want to live otherwise than in good health.

I read what I write as though I were my mortal enemy.

It is in the gentle climate of this woman that I should like to live and die.

1898

Failure is not our only punishment for laziness: there is also the success of others.

I was brought up by a library.

When I give a hundred-franc bill, I give the dirtiest one.

First you love nature. It is only much later that you reach man.

If you want to please women, tell them the things you would not want other men to tell your wife.

Inspiration is perhaps only the joy of writing; it does not precede writing.

Our egoism is so excessive that, in a storm, we believe the thunder to be directed only at us.

Death is comforting: it delivers us from the thought of death.

A stupid faith cannot but displease God.

Let us stay at home: there we are decent. Let us not go out: our defects wait for us at the door, like flies.

There is nothing like a disciple to show us our faults.

I turn home, my heart filled with anguish because I have watched the sun set and heard the birds sing, and because I shall have had so few days on this earth I love, and there are so many dead before me.

One could say of almost all literature that it is too long.

God does not believe in our God.

I always feel like saying to music: “It isn’t true! You lie!”

1899

I feel that someone guides me.

I was born with two wings, one of them broken.

Spiders draw plans of capital cities.

The cat is the life of furniture.

The gentle melancholy of working on Sunday, when the others are loafing.

I am not content with intermittent life: I must have life at each instant.

For a writer who has been working, to read is like getting into a carriage after a toilsome walk.

I am not content with intermittent life: I must have life at each instant.

In an instant, the mind travels over immense dream countries, while the eyes go over reality like tortoises.

At the bottom of all patriotism there is war: that is why I am no patriot.

The air, at midday, burns and hums.

To think is not enough; you must think of something.

Our life seems like a trial run. 

Meadows are meadows, but fields are earth.

Return to Paris. The setting sun is pink like the interior of a seashell.

One should have the courage to prefer the intelligent man to the very nice man.

Style is the habit, the second nature of thought.

Jules Renard

__________

The highlights of Jules Renard’s journal entries, 1887 to 1900.

Be on the lookout for highlights from the second half of his journals, which I’ll hopefully post in the next few weeks.

If you liked these, read more reflections from a variety of thinkers on the quotes page.

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