Pessimism and the Revolutions of 1848 Paul Gottfried Historians have long argued that an intimate connection exists between the failure of Europe’s liberal and, in France at least, rad- ical agitation of 1848 and the spread of pessimistic values during the following two decades. Gyérgy Lukacs, in The Destruction of Reason, has treated this point at some length. He ascribes the rising popularity throughout the 1850's of Arthur Schopenhauer, the most systematic and erudite interpreter of pessimistic thought, to “a purely bourgeois form of irrationalism.”! The defeat of the revolu- tions of 1848 had left many Germans politically frustrated. What resulted was an “ideologically altered situation” in which Schopen- hauer “suddenly grew famous and supplanted Feuerbach as the ideological leader of the (German) bourgeoisie.” Moreover, French capitalists, frightened by the workers’ revolt that took place in Paris during June, 1848, helped to give pessimism its “international effect.” Indeed they knew its world despair for what it actually was, “an indirect apology” for their own economic interests.? Cesare Vasoli, an Italian Marxist, levels the same charge in his preface to the Italian edition of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea, Also identifying i pessimismo with a cynical rejection of the revolutionary impetus of 1848, he calls his subject “the master who taught us to transform the absurdity and conflicts of the social order by ignoring true reason for the fascinating image of a totally irra- tional universe.”$ No wonder that Schopenhauer provided so many with “the perfect theory for extreme [social] disengagement” (dis- impegno spinto) \4 Modern German democrats, who, like the Marxists, scour the last century for lost historical opportunities, have also focused on the disenchantment of the German Left after 1848. The return to 1 Gydray Lukacs, Werke (Berlin, 1962), IX, 172. Lukacs’ use of “irra- tional” to describe almost all post-Hegelian, non-Marxist Gerinan thought, stems often to be as ritualistic and self-defensive as the medieval Church’s reference to the “stiff-necked Jews.” 2 Ibid., pp. 180 and 181. 3 Cf. I! Mondo come Volonta « Rappresentazione (Bari, 1968), I, xi, « Ibid., pp. xi and xii. 193194 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS bureaucratic despotism in Vienna and to bumbling autocracy in Berlin by 1850 caused erstwhile constitutional reformers to lose faith in their political mission. One ominous expression that this disappointment supposedly took was the espousal of pessimistic views. Hajo Holborn, in A History of Modern Germany, has tried to make this accusation without its usual sting. While denying that the “generation of 1850 embraced pessimism in despondency over the loss of the revolution,” he regards their attachment to it as ex- pressive of political inertia.5 Pessimism, by exalting philosophy and art over politics, supplied the German middle class with a rationale for their “reduction of human life to the private sphere, in dis- regard of the individual’s participation in the political and social process.”6 Throughout these criticisms there seem to run common assump- tions: that Schopenhauer and other pessimistic writers were widely read in the 1850's because disaffected liberals and radicals required some means of political escape and that, once pessimism was allowed to fill this need, it increasingly calloused men to social problems. Despite the appeal of these notions, neither one will hold up under close inspection. Both of them show the peril of inferring a causal link between events—in this case, the reaction to a frustrated rev- olution and the surge of pessimistic sentiment—merely on the basis of their alleged proximity in time. The thesis under dispute can claim little documentary support. For its defenders have adamantly resisted the use of data, relying almost exclusively on their own intuitions. Thus they have argued as follows: since Schopenhauer taught that the worlds of nature and history were simply the apparitions of a blind universal will, disappointed reformers and anxious capitalists must have turned to him to buttress their antisocial mood. Moreover, since Giacomo Leopardi, Leconte de Lisle and other nineteenth-century pessimists mocked the emptiness of human aspirations, they were read in the fifties by those wishing to be absolved from political responsibility. Such speculation, however, is highly deceptive. Some of the most outspoken Schopenhauerians and pessimists of the 1850's were also dedicated radicals. Julius Frauenstidt, Schopenhauer’s 5 Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany (New York, 1969), III, 121. * Ibid., p. 122.REVOLUTIONS OF 1848 195 closest and most active disciple, went his own way on social issues. In 1848 he passed out revolutionary tracts in Berlin, even while his master inveighed against the embattled crowds in Frankfurt.? Otto Lindner, Schopenhauer’s first convert among journalists, combined liberal tendencies in politics with a ferocious anticlericalism.6 And Leconte de Lisle, France’s leading pessimistic poet of the fifties and sixties, became a republican during his youth. He remained such until his death in 1896 and inculcated his followers, like Théodor Bainville, with his own political outlook.® It is noteworthy that Frauenstidt and de Lisle found nothing incompatible between pessimism and republicanism, either before 1848 or afterwards. Significantly too, Schopenhauer’s most vocif- erous defender in France by the 1870’s was Emile Zola, the natu- ralist and social radical.!° His most important Russian admirer was Tolstoy, who hailed his assault on both sensual lust and material greed.11 Ferdinand Brunetiére, who popularized pessimistic thought in France during the 1880's, presented Schopenhauer primarily as a teacher of social ethics. Guided by the Christian-Buddhist prin- ciple of self-denial, he had putatively set out to cleanse his age of “the illusion that man is put on this earth to be happy.”!2 Brune- tiére defined the pessimist as one who poignantly grasps “the con- tradiction between ideal and reality” and who bestirs his contem- poraries to remove it.18 From this evidence, one may appreciate the difficulty of as- sociating pessimism with the escapist needs of the frustrated revolu- tionaries of the 1850's. Nonetheless, one may find other grounds to question this association, namely, that pessimistic ideas, especially 7 Gf, Hermann Berger’s dissertation, Julius Frauenstad? (Rostock, 1911), especially pp. 10-12. 8 Read Lindner’s letter of introduction to the master in Arthur Schopen- hauer, Sammiliche Werke, ed. Paul Deussen (Munich, 1929), V, 18. ® On de Lisle’s life, see Irving Putter, The Pessimism of Leconte de Lisle (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954); for the poet's attempt to reconcile pessi- mism with a worldly outlook, cf. La derniére Illusion de Leconte de Lisle, Lettres Inédites Emile Leforestier, ed. Irving Putter (Berkeley, Calif. 1968), p. 109. 10 Cf, Alexandre Baillot, Influence de la Philosophie de Schopenhauer en France (1860-1900) (Paris, 1927), pp. 225-227; Richard Gebhard, Uber den Einfluss Schopenhauers auf die schéne Literatur, Jahrbuch der S. Gesell- schaft (Heidelberg, 1928), XV, 328. 21 Baillot, pp. 2 and 3. 12 Ferdinand Brunetiére, Questions de Critique (Paris, 1896), p. 155. 18 Cf, Brunetiére’s piece in Revue Bleue, No. 5 (January 30, 1886), p. 138.196 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS in the form that Schopenhauer gave to them, made their most dramatic inroads in the eighties and nineties, not in the fifties. It may be argued that Schopenhauer, after a lifetime of neglect, saw his fortunes markedly shift shortly before his death in 1860. The fifties and sixties, it can also be contended, revealed other portents of change. Frenchmen, like Arthur Gobineau and Ernest Renan, explored the implications of biological determinism, often with gloomy results, while de Lisle sang hymns to Nirvana and Baude- laire to “the foulest of our iniquities, boredom.” Nonetheless, the years between 1850 and 1870 offered only a foretaste of the outpourings of philosophical despair that were heard during the last quarter of the century. Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget and Maurice Barrés were only a few of the French novelists whose literary dialogues abound with pessimistic apho- risms.1¢ Alphonse Diétrich, Schopenhauer’s translator, has described the reception of his works into France during the eighties as an “intellectual torrent bringing life and fertility from afar.”15 In a lengthy monograph Alexandre Baillot has demonstrated how per- vasively the influence of Schopenhauer affected every aspect of French literature and scholarship. In 1878 Joseph Reinach, a fervent rationalist, complained that the losers of the Franco-Prus- sian War had “turned to the victors for consolation.” Rather than to recoil in wounded pride, they had allowed the enemy to contami- nate them with an “exotic plant”: German pessimism.16 One need not wonder that a proud people, once brought low, would meditate on the futilities of human struggle. What causes more surprise, however, is that their German conquerors were equally given to somber contemplation, and this at a time of politi- cal unification and of general economic prosperity. In 1876 one prominent critic noted that pessimism had “poisoned (German) society to the marrow.’’7 With reluctance he conceded, however, that this tenet “spoke for what lay deep in the times.”18 Certainly this last observation was correct! In 1867 Eduard MK. W. Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France (The Hague, 1964), pp. 138 and 139. 35 See Alphonse Diétrich’s translation of Schopenhauer’s Parerga (Paris, 1877), p. vii. 18 Cf. Revue Bleue, No. 44 (May 4, 1878), 1041. 11 Johannes Huber, Der Pessimismus (Munich, 1876), p. 5. 18 Ibid., p. 72; see also Wilhelm Busch, Arthur Schopenhauer (Munich, 1878), p. 237.REVOLUTIONS OF 1848 197 von Hartmann (1842-1906), a retired Prussian officer, published The Philosophy of the Unconscious, a bold speculative work that synthesized Schopenhauer’s irrational all-pervasive will with an essentially Hegelian scheme of history.19 Hartmann incorporated the latest findings in the physical and biological sciences, theology, esthetics, and even much of the socialist criticism of industrial capi- talism. His burden was to prove the continuing struggle of the con- scious intelligence, especially in man, to subdue the source of all life and misery, the unconscious will.2° He ended his investigation by urging his readers to convoke a world congress to call a halt to human existence.21 Despite this curious proposal, The Philosophy of the Uncon- Scious became an object for heated discussion throughout Germany and France. By 1876 it had passed through 7 German printings, and the author was forced to write a preface to the last one, pre- senting the reasons for his immediate success—in contrast to an earlier pessimist’s almost lifelong neglect.2?_ Schopenhauer also reaped posthumous benefit from the growing public responsiveness to pessimism. Already in 1874 Friedrich Nietzsche, one of his admirers, lamented that a mass following would soon vulgarize his thought.?8 On the other hand, his cult attracted to itself artists and thinkers of high caliber. Among them were Richard Wagner in music, Jacob Burckhardt in history, Nietzsche and Paul Deussen in philosophy, and Wilhelm Busch, Frank Wedekind and Thomas Mann in literature.?4 There are thus two requirements which our study of pessimism should be made to fit. It must emphasize more the end of the cen- tury than the middle, and it must find reasons for a pessimistic impulse as much applicable to a triumphant nation as to a defeated one. On the basis of comments made by observers and adherents of pessimism, it is possible to hazard at least three reasons for its 1 For a flamboyant defense of Hartmann’s synthesis, A. Taubert, Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner (Berlin, 1873). 20 Eduard von Hartmann, Die Philosophie der Unbewussten (7th ed.; 2 vols; Berlin, 1876). 21 Ibid., II, 403-407. 22 Ibid., introduction to Vol. I; see also the invidious comparison between Schopenhauer and himself in the collection of pieces, The Sexes Compared and Other Essays, trans. A. Kerner (London, 1895), p. 146. 28 Nietzsche, Werke (Leipzig, 1906), II, 292. 2 Ingrid Kraus, Studien iiber Schopenhauer und den Pessimismus in der deutschen Literatur des XIX Jahrhunderts (Bern, 1931).198 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS ascendancy during the second half, and especially during the clos- ing twenty years, of the century, One of them involves the fact that the class of financiers and industrialists which had consolidated its economic power in Western Europe by 1850 inclined increas- ingly toward pessimistic doctrines afterwards. Lukacs was correct in his observation of this trend. Where he went wrong, however, was in construing middle-class pessimism as the guileful defense of capitalism under assault. Charles Rémusat, a French journalist, reflected as early as 1860 on the almost ludicrous sincerity of “the victors of the present, blaming their age for causing them to wor- ship wealth.”25 Their grief, he concluded, could be ascribed both to spiritual discontent and to the insecurity of having been forced into positions of social authority they still found alien. Whatever the case, however, it was not die-hard aristocrats or revolutionaries but the arrivistes of the Second French Empire who became the loudest pessimists.26 In 1859 Adam Doss, a disciple of Schopenhauer, spoke of a sudden “turning inward” among many of his countrymen.27 Fif- teen years later, Johannes Huber, in a popular commentary on pessimism, wrote of the educated class’s massive revolt against the modern tendency “to sanctify the here and now.”2% Let us bear in mind that this rejection of material values—as a criterion for human improvement—did not signify a contempt for social con- cerns, What it reflected was the weariness left by mere material acquisition and, in the case of the Germans, the shattering of the spiritual hopes attached to political unification. Rudolf Haym, one of Schopenhauer’s most virulent critics, quite rightly interpreted the increased following as symptomatic of a growing scorn for German economic and national aspirations.2° Nietzsche, Burckhardt and other Schopenhauerians often brought together their criticism of philistine culture with tirades against nationalism. What was more, such chastisement made a vivid im- pression on the German middle class. Edmund Pfleiderer, publicist of the seventies, poked fun at the merchants and journalists who quoted Schopenhauer.30 They were bewitched by a philosopher 25 Revue des deux Mondes, 1 August 1860, p. 732. % Ibid., pp. 729-731. 21 Schopenhauer, Sammtliche Werke, V, 701. 28 Huber, p. 90. 29 Rudolf Haym, Arthur Schopenhauer (Berlin, 1864). 80 Edmund Pfleiderer, Der moderne Pessimismus (Berlin, 1875), pp. 28-30.REVOLUTIONS OF 1848 199 who had loathed commerce and journalism. How incredible then that they aped their bitterest detractor, by exclaiming to their dinner companions: “Tout notre mal vient de ne pouvoir étre seuls!”31 Pfleiderer puts into relief the intensity of bourgeois self- hate and of the revolt against materialism in his time. What is important, however, is that this burgeoning spirituality never led to any large-scale revival of traditional religion. The reasons are not far to seek. By the last third of the century, both Biblical criticism and evolutionary biology had diminished every- where in Western Europe the credibility of revealed truths. But the fruits of science often embittered lives more than they enhanced them. In 1871 Renan, a generally optimistic evolutionist, charac- terized nature, nonetheless, as “little more than absolute insen- sitivity, transcendent immorality.”82 It behaved toward humanity like “a deceitful tyrant,” preserving the genus by abandoning the individual to the misery of his passions.33 Such doubts about the benevolence of nature bore heavily upon a generation that had been shaken in its religious faith. They also account for much of the appeal which pessimistic ethics had in the last century. Wilhelm Gwinner, Schopenhauer’s contemporary and biographer, a devout Lutheran, had admired pessimistic philosophy for its implied defense of the Christian dogma of original sin.34 But such an idea would have been inconceivable for later pessimists. The Schopenhauer they read was intended as a substitute, not as a supplement, for Christianity. Only after having passed through a period of religious doubt did Brunetiére discover Schopenhauer the moralist together with an enthusiasm for the evolutionary writings of Renan.35 Burckhardt, too, found “the philosopher,” after he had lost his Christianity—a casualty to Biblical criticism.36 And Paul Bourget, Nietzsche and later Wedekind would all fall under the in- fluences of pessimism and naturalism at the same point in their lives. The strength of the pessimistic creed was that it provided not * Ibid., p. 23. 32 Emest Renan, Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques (Paris, 1876), p. 30. 83 Fbid., p. 30; pp. 19-27. *% Cf. Carl Gebhardt’s vita of Gwinner in Jahrbuch der S. G, No. 8 (1919), 208-227. 36 John Clark, La Pensée de Ferdinand Brunetiére (Paris, 1954), especially pp. 12-20. 38 Eric Heller, The Disinherited (New York, 1959), pp. 85-88.200 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS only an attack on what Burckhardt called “the bumptious and brutal optimism” of the age, but one apparently in line with scien- tific thought, Frauenstddt hailed Schopenhauer as a precursor to Darwin. In fact, his picture of the will objectifying itself in higher and higher forms of life by means of instincts and drives did provide a lyrical anticipation of evolutionary science.37 Furthermore, Schopenhauer and Hartmann were keenly con- cerned with biological proofs for their voluntarism and made their readers mindful of this fact.88 For many of them, pessimism gave expression to their own conflicting attitudes, the demand for scien- tific certification for their convictions and a nostalgia for the old- time religion. Schopenhauer, Hartmann and Brunctiére, all tried to do justice to both of these attitudes; and their attempt to find an intellectually respectable basis for Christian virtues such as self- denial and compassion seemed to wed the best of two worlds.3® At the same time, however, pessimism demanded no loyalties that were rigid or absolute. It left its followers free to construct different philosophies and life styles, while holding them together through little more than the appeal to common sentiments. Scho- penhauer during his lifetime had asked for men who would follow him unquestioningly, but his apostles, an implausible band of theos- ophists, religious skeptics and proto-Wagnerians, had each served him in his own way.‘ This diversity of approach, however, helped to give pessimism an even broader following. In noting the reasons for Schopen- hauer’s mounting fame, Frauenstiidt commented on his empiricism and his contempt for jargon-ridden academic philosophies, Brune- titre on his literary grace and his ethical concern. And yet, both of them also emphasized the wide range of his learning, for cer- 8? See especially Frauenstidt’s Briefe iber die Schopenhauer’sche Phi- losophie (Leipzig, 1854) and Das sittliche Leben (Berlin, 1868) for two attempts to place Schopenhauer’s vitalistic understanding of nature into the context of evolutionary biology. 38 It is interesting to note the disproportionate representation of physicians and natural scientists among the initial contributors to the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft (set up in 1911), well over one third. Cf. Jahrbuch der S. G. No. 1 '(1911), 105-112 for the list of dues-payers. 28 Read Brunetiére’s statement of this point in Revue Bleue (30 January 1886), pp. 138-144; and Huber, pp, 82-90. 49 For Schopenhauer’s quarrels with his disciples, see Sémmtliche Werke, V, 152-156 and 365-372.REVOLUTIONS OF 1848 201 tainly catholicity was one of his most striking features as a writer.41 Pessimism, for Schopenhauer and later for Hartmann, could only be valid in proportion to its bearing upon all branches of knowl- edge. Like the Hegelian system to which it opposed itself, it had to be relevant to everything—or else it was relevant to nothing. Because of this spacious perspective, however, many students of pessimism disregarded its internal cohesiveness. Baillot has men- tioned the fact that its attractiveness to French [ittérateurs in the last century had far more to do with its “thematic possibilities” than with the force of Schopenhauer’s or Hartmann’s arguments.*? Thus writers as different in their social and cultural values as Zola, Bourget and Barrés, drew freely upon a common storehouse of apergus. It should be added that each one found within it his own statement of belief.43 ‘There was, however, another use to which pessimism lent itself, and that was as a stepping-stone to more conclusive systems of value. In Schopenhauer as Educator (1873), Nietzsche acclaimed the master for having summoned the bold to advance beyond him.*+ Three years later he already felt sufficiently confident to style pessi- mism “simply a stage in the cure of the free spirit.”45 Schopen- hauer had been right in speaking of the unattainability of happiness and in praising music and tragedy as the vehicles for the disin- terested contemplation of the will. On the other hand, he had erred in disparaging life on account of its torments. What he should have done was “to affirm being, not to deny it.”46 The destiny of the free spirit was to create in suffering, even to the point of abjuring the Socratic maxim that “knowledge should bring happiness” or its Schopenhauerian equivalent that truth and the avoidance of pain are one.47 Pessimism played a transitional role of equal importance in the evolution of other thinkers. Mention might be made of Burck- 41 For examples of his intellectual versatility (and savage wit), cf. the essays and aphorisms in Sammiliche Werke, ed. A. Hubscher (Wiesbaden, 1948), Vols. V and VI. 42 Baillot, p. 327. 45 Ibid.; and Gebhard’s study in Jahrbuch der S. G., pp. 328 and 329. 44 Nietasches Werke, UL, 214. 45 [bid., TIL, p. 46. 40 Ibid., VIII, p. 413. 47 Cf. Karl Léwith, Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen (Stuttgart, 1956), for a study of Nietzsche's apotheosis of the suffer- ing hero in history and art.202 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS hardt, who espoused Schopenhauer’s ethics in the seventies in re- sponse to his own “epoch of Roman decadence.’’4® His subsequent despair over social and cultural leveling dispelled his belief in the possibility of a “pessimistic mission” to Europe. A more turbulent Schopenhauerian critic of society was Wedekind who shocked Wil- helmian Germany with his dramatic treatment of sexuality, His carly plays, like Springtime Awakening (1891), proclaim an ethic of sensual fulfillment in defiance of all religious taboos. The moral indignation in his first drama, however, eventually yielded to a desperate uncertainty. Wedekind had once believed that Schopenhauer’s will was the “fateful inescapable determinant of life’ and that it was immediately present in erotic activity.49 Then the doubt crept in that men were the dupes, never the knowers, of the will and that sexuality served only to preserve this relationship. By the end of his career, the playwright grew skeptical of all values, and scornful of the flesh whose rights he had once defended.5° There were yet other signs of the limits of pessimism. In France Paul Bourget exchanged Hartmann and naturalism for a redis- covered Catholic faith.51 Thirty years later Brunetiére followed his example—after the failure of his plan to build a new world religion upon pessimistic cthics.52 Maurice Barrés, who extolled Hartmann in his first novel, Le Culte de Moi, underwent an even more remarkable odyssey.53 By the eighties he became discontented with the artistic egotism and posturing characteristic of his early work. He began to grope toward something more ethically compelling, “an axiom, principle or prince of men.”54 His later novels, such as Sous Poeil des Bar- bares, tell where his search led. Suffusing them is a mystical French nationalism that invokes his country’s landscape and ruins. What is depicted as the bane of this patriotic fervor, however, is Barrés’s old love, German philosophy. Its barren abstractions and contempt 45 See Burckhardt, Briefe, ed. F. Kaphan (Leipzig, 1935), pp. 327, 340, and 493; and H. J. Schoeps’s portrait of the historian during his last years in Gestalten an der Zeitwende (Berlin, 1936), pp. 7-23. 49 Quoted in Paul Fechter, Frank Wedekind (Jena, 1920), p. 18. ‘0 Tbid., pp. 59-64; and the closing scene of the play Der Tod und der Teufel in Wedekind’s Gesammelte Werke (Munich, 1922), V, 32-36. 5 Baillot, p. 313. 82 La Pensée de F. B., pp. 117-120. 58 Le Jardin de Bérénice (Paris, 1894), p. 9. 54 Sous Poeil des Barbares (Paris, 1892), p. 20.REVOLUTIONS OF 1848 203 for the historical imagination were supposedly demoralizing the French character.55 Such examples underscore the adaptability of pessimism to the needs of late nineteenth-century French and German thinkers. As the demands of science and modernity came to impinge on their existences, there resulted a crisis of belief. Its effects were felt most joltingly in Western Europe during the latter half of the last cen- tury, and the crisis launched people upon a frantic quest for new certitudes. One need not be surprised that many of those affected embraced pessimism for a while. It gave something to both sides of their spiritual tension, while casting doubt on the purpose of lives which had been suddenly deprived of meaning. Thus in portraying the eruption of pessimism, it is imperative to add one further element to our picture of middle-class self-rejection and disintegrating values. It is pessimism’s promise to offer a staying power to those who were still spiritually in transit, As we have mentioned, the receptiveness of men to such medicine did not necessarily imply any political apathy on their parts. In many instances, pessimistic ideas even highlighted or intensified some form of social concern. But where such was not the case, there is still no reason to treat pessimism merely as an “indirect apology” for human in- iquities. To deny some men the right to assign greater weight to philosophical questions than to the issue of social reform is to engage in intolerable priggishness, But what is worse, it is to invite intellectual disaster. It is to encourage the historian to make two grievous errors: to try to impose his own values on other ages and to accuse whoever in the past did not share them of being dishonest, stupid or both. The linking of pessimism to the aftermath of the the °48 revolu- tions reflects such errors at work. Its advocates hope to explain the listlessness of postrevolutionary middle-class reform by pointing to a movement which offends them ideologically. Their attempt at tracing a causal relationship is less than convincing, however; for having misconceived both the nature and thrust of the movement in point, they are forced back on guesswork to lend credence to their bias, Perhaps it is time to abandon such speculation—or at least to find more suitable targets for our political peeves. 88 Tbid., pp. 17-19; and E. R. Curtis, M. B. und die geistigen Grundlagen des franzisischen Nationalismus (Bonn, 1921).