People From Paris

"I was not able to work in the several excursions and ascensions made in the neighborhood, where it was very beautiful. One is so surprised by these grand aspects that it would be necessary to remain a long time before finding the interpretation capable of rendering them. I am going to finish the season at Auvers. There is nothing like one's natural every-day surroundings where one really takes pleasure. The pictures we do then feel the effect of their home-life, and the sweet sensations we experience in it."

"Our poor friend Sisley, alas! will not assist at the final triumph, which is near, and of which he has seen but the dawning: he is gone too soon, and just at the moment when, in reparation for long injustice, full homage is about to be rendered those strong and charming qualities which make him a painter exquisite and original among them all, a magician of light, a poet of the heavens, of the waters, of the trees — in a word, one of the most remarkable landscapists of this day."

"Yesterday Sisley was looking for me everywhere. Madame Latouche told me that he wanted some information about the technique of painting fans. Well, this means my fans are spoken of.. .I only fear one thing: that they will finally say that's all I am good for! [fans!]"

"As for Sisley, I just can't enjoy his work [visiting the Paris Impressionism-exhibition of art-dealer M. Petit, May 1887], it is commonplace, forced, disordered; Sisley has a good eye, and his work will certainly charm all those whose artistic sense is not very refined."

"Our poor friend Sisley, alas! will not assist at the final triumph, which is near, and of which he has seen but the dawning: he is gone too soon, and just at the moment when, in reparation for long injustice, full homage is about to be rendered those strong and charming qualities which make him a painter exquisite and original among them all, a magician of light, a poet of the heavens, of the waters, of the trees — in a word, one of the most remarkable landscapists of this day."

"The novelty of fascism in History consists in its emancipation of the European Right from the impasse that is inseparable from the counterrevolutionary idea. In effect, in the nineteenth century the counterrevolutionary idea never ceased being trapped in the contradiction of having to use revolutionary means to win without being able to assign itself any goal other than the restoration of a past from which, however, the revolutionary evil arose. There is nothing like this in fascism."

"The historians of our era, obsessed by the determinist idea and by the sociological conception of history, often tend to misjudge what was accidental in the European tragedy in the twentieth century and the role played by several men. They don't want to see that sometimes monstrous events have small causes."

"Because the only serious way to approach the study of the two original ideologies and political movements that appeared at the beginning of our century, Marxist-Leninist communism and fascism in its Italian and German forms, is to take them together as the two faces of an acute crisis of liberal democracy that arose with the First World War."

"The point communism and fascism have in common is the fundamental political deficit of modern democracy. The different types of totalitarian regimes that are established in their name share the will to put an end to this deficit by restoring the main role to political decisions and by integrating the masses into one party through the constant assertion of their ideological orthodoxy. The fact that the two ideologies proclaim themselves to be in a situation of radical conflict does not prevent them from reinforcing each other by this very hostility—the communist nourishes his faith with antifascism, and the fascist his with anticommunism. And both fight the same enemy, bourgeois democracy. The communist sees it as the breeding ground for fascism, while the fascist sees it as the antechamber of Bolshevism, but they both fight to destroy it."

"In the case of Hitler and his accomplices, however, the Jews not only incarnate Bolshevism in their eyes but also stateless capitalism. This allows the Nazis to magically unite in the same hatred a single people who presumably incarnated two contradictory ideas and social regimes."

"Therefore, I think that the thesis of fascism as a 'reactive' movement against communism only explains part of the phenomenon; it fails to explain the differences between Italian and German fascism… But Hitler and the Nazis didn't need this to give substance to their hatred of the Jews, which was older than the October Revolution. In fact, before them, Mussolini, whom they so admired, had led anticommunist fascism to victory without anti-Semitism."

"The fascist movement fed on anticommunism, the communist movement on antifascism. But both shared a hatred for the bourgeois world, which allowed them to unite."

"Lenin takes power in 1917, Mussolini in 1922, Hitler fails in 1923 to succeed ten years later. Thus, ten years later Mussolini fascism can be considered a 'reaction' to an Italian-style Bolshevism, also arising out of the war and more or less modeled on the Russian example. In the same manner, Nazism can be made into a response to the German obsession with the Komintern, a response along the dictatorial and revolutionary lines of communism."

"It is the fact of the privileged relationship of the Jews to democratic universalism that makes possible the understanding of the particular nature of modern anti-Semitism as opposed to medieval anti-Semitism. These two forms of hatred of the Jews are not incompatible, and their effects can be cumulative. But the older form is rooted in Christianity—in the Jewish refusal to recognize the divinity of Christ—whereas the more recent form doesn't have the same content as the Christian charge. Rather, it accuses the Jews of hiding a will to dominate the world behind the abstract universality of the world of money and the Rights of Man."

"The German extreme Right, and even the entire Right, did not need communism to hate democracy. The national Bolsheviks admired Stalin. I concede that Hitler privileged the hatred of Bolshevism, but as a final product of the democratic bourgeois world. In fact, certain of his close accomplices, such as Goebbels, made no mystery of hating Paris and London more than Moscow."

"After all, in my country as well, and in democratic Europe, fascism, a fortiori in its Nazi form, was a more or less taboo subject for the historian. I mean that the moral condemnation directed against the two regimes precluded not only studying them, but also understanding the popularity they enjoyed between the two wars. And that taboo that impeded all types of comparative analysis, and even the idea of an interdependence between communism and fascism, was just as great, even if it did not have the same historical or cultural reasons."

"The Mussolinian fascism of 1919 can be seen as a 'reaction' to the threat of Italian-style Bolshevism, also arising out of the war and following more or less the Russian example—a reaction in the broadest sense of the word, since Mussolini, who, like Lenin, comes from an ultrarevolutionary socialism, can more easily imitate it in order to fight it."

"Nazism was a German form of Bolshevism."

"Hitler did a better job than Stalin of accomplishing Lenin's totalitarian promises—better, too, than Mussolini."

"It was in Nazi Germany that Bolshevism was perfected; there, political power truly absorbed all spheres of existence, from the economy to religion, from technology to the soul. The irony, the tragedy, of history was that both totalitarian regimes, identical in their aim for absolute power over dehumanized beings, presented themselves as protection from the danger presented by the other."

"The idea of the October Revolution as the product of a plot of international Judaism is part of this type of representation. I don't deny for an instant that there were numerous Jewish militants on the first Bolshevik staff as well as in the socialist movement, especially in the countries of Eastern Europe. But this is not an observation from which one can infer, even by definition, the existence of a particular Jewish plot. The accusation belongs on a different plane from that of rational thought or historical analysis."

"In Fascism, as in Communism, the idea of the future was based on a critique of bourgeois modernity ... It rose from a variety of currents and from authors of very different origins, all of whom demonized the bourgeoisie. The doctrine was cast as post-Marxist, not as pre-liberal."

"Born of war, both Bolshevism and Fascism drew their basic education from war. They transferred to politics the lessons of the trenches: familiarity with violence, the simplicity of extreme passions, the submission of the individual to the collectivity, and finally the bitterness of futile or betrayed sacrifices."

"To understand this relationship we may start with what has become an accepted observation: Stalinized Bolshevism and National Socialism constitute the two examples of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes. Not only were they comparable, but they form a political category of their own, which has become established since Hannah Arendt."

"The fact that Communism and Fascism assigned contradictory roles to history and reason—the emancipation of the proletariat versus the domination of the Aryan race—mattered little."

"The bourgeoisie is a synonym for modern society. The word designates the class that gradually destroyed, by its free activity, the old aristocratic society founded on a hierarchy of birth."

"The American people were possessed by the capitalist spirit without ever having had a bourgeoisie; French political society, in contrast, created a bourgeoisie devoid of the capitalist spirit."

"What was new about Hitler and Stalin was what Friedrich Meinecke, in an attempt shortly after World War II to express his horror at Hitler’s moral nihilism, called a ‘ Machiavellianism of the masses'."

"Fascism was born of the reaction of the particular against the universal, the national against the international. In its origins it was inseparable from Communism, fighting the latter’s goals even while adopting its methods… Communism and Fascism grew up on the same soil, the soil of Italian Socialism. The founder of the fasci in March 1919, Mussolini was a member of the revolutionary wing of the Socialist movement prior to supporting Italy's entry into the Great War; then, immediately afterward, he found himself in violent conflict with the Bolshevik-leaning leaders of his former party."

"In many thundering discourses, Hitler expressed his respect, if not admiration for Stalinist Communism and its leader."

"Nazism was a form of Bolshevism turned against its initial form."

"The last people in the world in whom the personality would consent to be absorbed into pantheism is the French."

"France is the daughter of freedom. In human progress, the essential part, the main force, is called man. Man is his own Prometheus."

"The history of France begins with the French language. Language is the primary sign of nationality."

"The intimate fusion of races is the identity of our nation, its personality."

"England is an Empire, Germany a race; France is a person."

"Michelet held that the Vedas "were undoubtedly the first monument of the world" and that from India emanated "a torrent of light and the flow of reason and Right". He proclaimed that "the migrations of mankind follow the route of the sun from East to West along the sun's course. . . . At its starting point, man arose in India, the birthplace of races and of religions, the womb of the world"."

"With the world began a war that will only end with the world, and not before: that of man against nature, mind against matter, freedom against fate. History is nothing but the story of this endless struggle."

"Each year, it is necessary to respire, to take breath again, to revive ourselves at the great living sources that forever keep their eternal freshness. Where can we find them if not at the cradle of our race, on the sacred summits from where descend the Indus and the Ganges?"

"Whereas, in our Occident, the most dry and sterile minds brag in front of Nature, the Indian genius, the most rich and fecund of all, knows neither small nor big and has generously embraced universal fraternity, even the identity of all souls."

"That year will always remain a dear and cherished memory; it was the first time I had the opportunity to read the great sacred poem of India, the divine Rarnayana. If anyone has lost the freshness of emotion, let him drink a long draught of life, and youth from that deep chalice."

"From India comes to us a torrent of light, a river of Right and Reason."

"Out of India, [[French Revolution|until [17]89]] there fell a torrent of light—the river of Right and Reason."

"Follow the migrations of mankind from East to West along the sun's course and along the track of the world's magnetic currents; observe its long voyage from Asia to Europe, from India to France.... At its starting point, in India, the birthplace of races and of religions, the womb of the world ."

"My book is born in the full light of the sun among our forefathers, the sons oflight-Aryans, Indians, Persians and Greeks . . . . This trinity of light quite naturally met with opposition from the sombre genius of the South by way of Memphis, Carthage, Tyre and Judaea. Egypt in her monuments, Judaea with her scriptures, established their Bibles, tenebrous but of lasting influence.... Now that our parent Bibles have come to light it is more apparent to what extent the Jewish Bible belongs to another race. It is a great book, without doubt, and always will be- but how gloomy and full of gross equivocation-beautiful but full of doubt like death...."

"India seemed to have a powerful attraction for Michelet. In the "Journal" he kept, the following note is to be found: The little ruins of the Mediterranean world can no longer assuage the craving for ruins which is felt by my ravaged heart. I need the desolations, the cataclysms of the Orient, the annihilation of whole races, the deserts...• The Hall of the Nibelungen is not enough. I need the great plain of the Indian world where the Gurus perish by the hundred thousand ...."

"The year 1863 will remain cherished and blessed. It was the first time I could read India’s great sacred poem, the divine Ramayana.... This great stream of poetry carries away the bitter leaven left behind by time and purifies us. Whoever has his heart dried up, let him drench it in the Ramayana. Whoever has lost and wept, let him find in it a soothing softness and Nature’s compassion. Whoever has done too much, willed too much, let him drink a long draught of life and youth from this deep chalice.... Everything is narrow in the Occident. Greece is small — I stifle. Judea is dry — I pant. Let me look a little towards lofty Asia, towards the deep Orient. There I find my immense poem, vast as India’s seas, blessed and made golden by the sun, a book of divine harmony in which nothing jars. There reigns a lovable peace, and even in the midst of battle, an infinite softness, an unbounded fraternity extending to all that lives, a bottomless and shoreless ocean of love, piety, clemency. I have found what I was looking for: the bible of kindness. Great poem, receive me!… Let me plunge into it! It is the sea of milk."

"New “agronomy,” [was] an experimental science of agriculture founded around midcentury by the chemist and botanist Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau"

"The French botanist and chemist Henri-Louis Duhamel de Monceau (1700–1782) identified a fungal disease on the bulbs of saffron crocus (now named Helicobasidium purpureum) and illustrated its sclerotia on the bulbs. His report was read to the Academie royale des Sciences in April 1728; it was “wellconceived, thorough, and conclusive, and led to his election as adjoint chimiste in the same year” (Eklund 1971:223). Duhamel discovered that this fungus spreads underground from one bulb to another. In his Éléments d’agriculture (two volumes, 1762; English edition, 1764), he also accepted insects as a cause of some plant diseases."

"Though he loved many innovations in science and devoted his life to introduce useful ones in the arts, he didn't like them in politics and even less in the statutes of the academies"