The witty, sociable eighteenth century also produced a few naysayers, naysayers and misanthropes in Paris. One of them was Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort. Presumably born in 1740 as the son of a canon and a noblewoman, grew up in Clermont-Ferrand in the house of a grocer, at the age of twenty-four he was a successful author in Paris under the name de Chamfort, socialite, darling of women, loner with boundless desire for freedom, ungrateful favorite of aristocratic society, then sympathizer of the revolution and finally under the reign of terror in 1794 suicides: The biography alone makes this revenant between the epochs interesting. Sentences like “Life is a sickness from which sleep relieves us every sixteen hours, the cure is death” are Cioranian blackness.
As much as this stumbling society man recommended retreat and the peace of mind in solitude in his writings, one does not believe him personally. He went down in literature, whom Voltaire predicted at a young age that he would make it far, not with his youth dramas and academic speeches, but with his posthumously published “maxims and thoughts, character pictures and anecdotes”. One readily recognizes him as a latecomer to the French moral philosophers of the 17th century, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld. However, his temperament was too confused and too involved in social life for him to be able to simply utter polished words of wisdom from a contemplative distance. nietzsche saw in him the wittiest of all moralists, “gloomy, suffering, glowing” to be sure, but one “who found laughter necessary as the remedy against life”. The French literary critic Sainte-Beuve, on the other hand, interpreted his snippets of thought in 1851 as a deeply felt social resentment.
The aphorisms that surfaced after Chamfort’s death probably represent only a part of the notes jotted down on loose slips of paper over decades. The rest are lost. A friend of the author arranged what has been preserved thematically, numbered it and edited it in 1795. Further editions with newly discovered fragments have since appeared, also in German. Thanks to a current edition, everything that is known about aphorisms from Chamfort is now available. And it’s worth it, this radical convention-breaker, about the Matthes & Seitz has been offering the readable biography of Claude Arnaud under the title “Chamfort – The women, the nobility and the revolution” since 2007, on the tortuous paths of his thinking about reason and passions, about love, friendship, dissimulation and vanity, in other words: about the to follow the shrill comedy of the people in society.
He outdid his contempt for men with his contempt for women
The trick of philosophical misanthropy is that it easily ferments into resentment in contact with personal experience. Chamfort was not immune to this, for example when it came to women. With the aphorism that the best philosophy about the world is to combine sarcasm and cheerfulness with forbearance in contempt, he has prepared an excellent recipe. However, he outdid his disdain for men with that for women. Was his cheap abuse of them due to the fact that he contracted a disfiguring and periodically debilitating disease at an early age while having intercourse with a woman, probably a prostitute? In any case, he thought little of love between the sexes. “Love as it occurs in society is just the exchange of two whims and the touch of two skins,” is one of his famous aphorisms. And marriage especially, it is said elsewhere, comes after love like smoke after a flame.
At least that sharpness kept Chamfort from adopting a pose of detached purring. He always put passions above reason and wisdom. With the passions that nature has placed alongside reason, she apparently wanted to help man over the unpleasantness of the latter, he wrote, and then, as if out of pity, shortly after the loss of the passions she also redeemed him from a life only reason remained. Chamfort was clever and sincere enough to see the falsity of society in his epoch first in himself. He despises the nobility, but his friends are puffed up courtly, he confesses, he loves frugality and yet associates with the rich, literature is almost his only consolation in life and yet he hardly has any contact with the esthetes, and he considers illusions indispensable , but I can do without them. Conclusion: “Hope is just a charlatan that keeps deceiving us, and for me happiness only began when I lost it.”
But if there is one trait that stands firm in these considerations, it is that of strength of character. For Chamfort it was both a principle of life and a lived reality. He was convinced of the necessity not only of ridicule, but sometimes also of hatred of society. A witty man is lost if he does not have the energy of character at the same time, he wrote, because “if you have Diogenes’ lantern, you also need his cane.”
He implemented this conviction in his personal life by dedicating himself to the revolution as a friend of Mirabeau against his own interests and privileges. Just as fearless, he then openly opposed the abuse of power by the reign of terror and was temporarily imprisoned for it. This experience was so traumatic for him that he horribly clutched himself for fear of being arrested again. Surprised that he was still alive after the pistol shot, he cut his carotid artery with a razor, and also opened the veins in his wrists and ankles until the neighbors saw the blood running under the door. Albert Camus praises him in a foreword from 1944 preceding this issue as a “moralist of the revolt”, whose sense of justice did not accept the injustice inherent in every act, but who believed he had to express this in total refusal. In the carefully edited and translated edition by Ulrich Kunzmann and Fritz Schalk, one can read how much life-affirmation resonates behind Chamfort’s radical objection to society.