Our Dark Side (12 page)

Although he did not have time to love or marry Fantine, or even to feel any desire for her, Valjean adopts Cosette and officially becomes her father – and literally her heavenly father, says Hugo. As he watches her sleeping in her nightclothes, he feels for the first time a ‘shiver of ecstasy', but also a ‘mother's agonized tenderness without knowing what it was' (Hugo 1982: 391). Valjean simultaneously becomes the child's mystical lover, her divine father and the mother who nurses her.

Ten years later, when Cosette has married Marius – their marriage is a nightmare disguised as a happy ending – Valjean, who has been excluded from the order of bourgeois normality, is overcome by fit of fetishism. He takes the clothes in which he dressed the orphan when they first met from the case he keeps carefully locked and hidden away in a little trunk (‘inseparable') from which he refuses to be separated. He then collapses, his face drowned in the stocking, vest and shoes of the child who has gone for ever: ‘First the little black dress, then the black scarf, then the stout child's shoes which Cosette would still have worn, so small were her feet, then the thick fustian camisole, the woollen petticoat, and, still bearing the impress of a small leg, two stockings scarcely longer than his hand. Everything was black' (Hugo 1982: 1141).

Hugo uses an animal metaphor inspired by Buffon rather than Darwin to introduce Javert into Valjean's story: ‘Endow this dog with a human face, and you have Javert … a deep and savage furrow formed on either side of his nose as though on the muzzle of a beast of prey. Javert unsmiling was a bulldog; when he laughed he was a tiger … a dark gaze, a formidable mouth' (Hugo 1982: 165–6).

Born in prison, the son of a fortune-teller whose husband was in the galleys (Hugo 1982: 164), he too is a child of poverty. But having grown up outside society, all he knows of it is its accursed share, ‘those who prey on it, and those who protect it' (Hugo 1982: 165). He became a police officer in the same way that others become criminals. Cold and lugubrious, dressed in black, emotionless, chaste and full of abnegation, his main passion is a hatred of books. He holds all rebellion up to public obloquy and worships authority so much that he identifies with the Law so as to pervert it all the more.

He can apply it only because he has never been forced to think about the law. Fanatically stupid and submissive, and convinced of the infallibility of what he believes to be legal or illegal, he carries out his task without ever asking himself about the meaning of his actions. He persecutes Fantine because she is a prostitute and in order to protect a repugnant bourgeois, Monsieur Bamtabois
³⁶
– because he is a representative of the established order. It makes no difference to him that Batambois has always humiliated the young woman, who is ill and who has lost her death, purely for the pleasure of destroying her. Javert is the very incarnation of the banality of evil.
³⁷
‘A prostitute had assaulted a citizen', writes Hugo (1982: 183). ‘He, Javert had seen it with his own eyes. He wrote on in silence': ‘Javert's ideal was to be more than human; to be above reproach' (Hugo 1982: 1106).

When Valjean frees him from his chains inside the barricade, Javert cannot understand why his worst enemy does not kill him, even though he has been ordered to do so. Worse still, he cannot understand why Valjean has told him the whereabouts of his hiding place. Such is Valjean's vengeance: he gives his persecutor the only gift he cannot accept: the ability to choose his destiny. Valjean, in other words, transforms Javert – the irreproachable agent of the banality of evil – into a Javert ‘derailed' (Hugo 1982: 1107). Javert lets Valjean go free and then destroys himself because, for once in his life, he has glimpsed the lethal sheen of the sovereign good. ‘And now what was he to do? It would be bad to arrest Valjean, but also bad to let him go. In the first case, an officer of the Law would be sinking to the level of a criminal, and in the second the criminal would be rising above the law …' (Hugo 1982: 1105).

Unable to come to terms with the spectacle of his ‘derailment', Javert commits suicide, but not before he has written a few ridiculous notes ‘for the good of the service' (1108). But his suicide, unlike Emma Bovary's, does not make him face up to his failings or experience a redemptive death. He returns to the accursed world from which he came, to his own dark side: ‘A tall, dark figure … stood upright on the parapet. It leaned forwards and dropped into the darkness. There was a splash, and that was all' (Hugo 1982: 1109).
³⁸

Thénardier stands at the point where the destinies of the persecutor and the persecuted intersect and reminds one of a sort of inverted Homais. Like the apothecary, he wants to be a materialist, a Voltairean, a progressive, a liberal, a Bonapartist and a philosopher, or what Hugo calls a
filosophe
. Thin, angular and bony, he cultivates a sickly appearance so as to hide the fact that he is in the best of health. The weasel-faced Thérnadier looks like a man of letters and has the manners of a statesman, even though the putrefied stench of the corpses he profaned in order to rob them still lingers.

Having ruled the battlefields of the Napoleonic era, where he killed the wounded and robbed the dead,
³⁹
he now keeps an inn with his wife, who is broad-faced, fat, red-faced and has ‘a slight beard' (Hugo 1982: 341): ‘Had it not been for the romantic tales she read, which now and then caused the coy female to emerge surprisingly from the ogress, no one would ever have thought of her as a woman. She was like a drab grafted onto a fishwife. She talked like a gendarme, drank like a coachman, and treated Cosette like a gaoler.' Carried away by his passion for himself, Thénardier is neither the embodiment of the banality of evil nor a perverted figure of the Law. Pure filth, he feeds on the destruction of the human race, starting with his own family: Eponine dies saving Marius after having betrayed him while Mme Thénardier vanishes into prison like a human wreck. As for Gavroche, he dies a heroic death at the foot of the barricade, having become an inverted image of his father. Like Jean Valjean, he becomes the fraternal patriarch of the children of the streets.

Having destroyed his
genos
, Thénardier, prince of vice, hatred and cruelty, flees to America with Azelma. In becoming a slave-trader, he realizes his greatest ambition and becomes humanity's universal executioner.

It is to Old Europe – and only Old Europe – that we owe the first formulation of a crepuscular and highly perverse project that consists in completely inverting the progressive ideals of positivist medicine and surreptitiously transforming them into the criminal science known as ‘racial hygiene'.

During the second half of the nineteenth century and in the wake of Darwinism, the sexologists began to deploy their new classifications of the perversions, while writers were striving to reveal the turpitudes of the progressive society. At the same time, the highest scientific authorities in Germany were inventing biocracy,
⁴⁰
or in other words the art of governing peoples not with a policy based upon a philosophy of history, but to the life sciences and the so-called human sciences – anthropology, sociology, and so on – which were at the time sub-divisions of biology.

No matter whether they were conservative or progressive, these scientists were honest and virtuous heirs to the Enlightenment, and had realized that industrialization was damaging both the soul and the physics of proletarians who were being exploited more and more in unhealthy factories. Violently hostile to religion, which was, they thought, leading men astray with its false moral precepts, they wanted to purify the cultural and scientific structures of their countries, and to combat all the forms of ‘degeneracy' that had emerged from industrial modernity.

They therefore invented a strange kind of science that was at once Darwinian, Nietzschean and Promethean and the perfect embodiment of the power of the classic
Kultur
Germany had inherited from Goethe and Hegel. Man could be regenerated through science, reason and self-transcendence. They were quickly imitated by both the Communists
⁴¹
and the founders of Zionism and especially Max Nordau,
⁴²
who saw the return to the Promised Land as the only thing that could free European Jews from the bastardization into which they had been plunged by anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred. Like the scientists, the Zionists wanted to create a ‘new Jew'.

These Enlightenment doctors, who were in favour of Jewish emancipation and strict controls on procreation, introduced a state-backed project to regenerate bodies and souls. It was a eugenicist project that encouraged, among other things, the purification of the population thanks to medically supervised marriages. They also wanted to force the masses to give up the ‘vices' of smoking, drinking and unruly sexuality. They introduced screening programmes for the diseases that were gnawing away at the social body: syphilis, tuberculosis, and so on. Some, like Magnus Hirschfeld, who has already been mentioned, pioneered homosexual emancipation and supported the programme because they were convinced that science could create a new type of homosexual who could finally rid himself of the perverse heritage of the accursed race. Like the founders of Zionism, he wanted to create a new man: the ‘new homosexual'.

We know what happened next. From 1920 onwards, the heirs to this biocracy, who were living in a Germany that had been defeated and bled to death, and that was constantly humiliated by the victor who had forced the unfair Treaty of Versailles on it, began to demand the application of this programme, together with euthanasia and the systematic practice of sterilization. They moved from the Enlightenment to the Counter-Enlightenment, and from a normative science that was already barbaric to a criminal science whose only goal was the implementation of a genocidal programme.

Obsessed with fears about the decline of the ‘race', they invented the notion of ‘negative life-value' and were convinced that some lives were not worth living: those of subjects with incurable illnesses, deformities, handicaps or anomalies, the mentally ill, and the so-called inferior races. The heroic image of the ‘new man' created by the most civilized science in the European world turned into its antithesis, into the hideous figure of a master race wearing SS uniforms.

This perverse project was the product of a science that had been erected into a religion and whose ideals of truth had been perverted in a country that had been deliberately humiliated. ‘Racial hygiene' was based primarily on the claim that human sexuality could be completely controlled. Although its proponents believed they were promoting the interests of humanity, they were simply caught up in the anthropological circularity that is typical of the essence of perversion: human is so exclusively human that they planned to exterminate human beings and to replace them with a perfect human race created by supposedly perfect biological hybrids (the
Lebensborn
).
⁴³
And so its supporters began by euthanizing the mentally ill,
⁴⁴
and ended up delivering Jews, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, homosexuals
⁴⁵
and other ‘degenerates or ‘abnormals' (dwarfs, twins, hunchbacks, sexual deviants), or in other words all the representatives of the ‘bad race' (the people of the perverse) to the ramp at Auschwitz.

The Marxist and homosexual film director Luchino Visconti, who was descended from the accursed race, has to be given credit for a more striking description than that provided by historians of the pernicious facets of the anthropological circle in which, as it moves from idealization to degradation, the great, perverse dream of the new man turns into its antithesis.
⁴⁶
Borrowing from both the saga of the Krupp family and the fictional world of Thomas Mann, Visconti shows the pitiless self-destruction of the great industrial family of the Essenbecks. The backdrop to this Oedipal tragedy and deliberate eradication is provided by the four great events that gave Nazism its murderous hold over the body of the German nation: Hitler's seizure of power, the Reichstag fire, the Night of the Long Knives and the burning of the great works of Western culture.

The power of this mythical story, which describes the genesis of the most perverse system ever produced by Europe – the genocidal system – stems from the fact that the main characters alternate between being victims and killers. They are all sumptuously elegant and stunningly beautiful in physical terms, but they are also inverts, transvestites, transgressive, sacrilegious and criminal. Despite the semblance of exquisite refinement, and even though they live in dazzling mansions decorated with the most prestigious signs of the great tradition of German
Kultur
, their sole ambition is to be the valets of the new Nazi order embodied by an SS captain – known as ‘the cousin' – who never becomes either a victim or a killer. Aschenbach is a Mephisto with no body and no soul, no forename and no emotions. He is the pure spirit of the new master race and his sole duty is to organize, in accordance with a logical rule, the total destruction of the genealogical bond that unites the members of the von Essenbeck family.
⁴⁷
Destroying that bond is a symbolic way of destroying the
genos
of the German nation, and therefore replacing it with its murderous antithesis: the genocidal drive.

Having been perverted by his mother, who is herself the slave of Aschenbach, who turns her lover into a criminal in the service of the master race, Martin, who is the last of the Essenbecks, goes from being a transvestite who is humiliated, to being a rapist and a paedophile, and finally translates his inner turmoil into a savage and imperious loyalty to Nazism, but not before he has possessed the body of his mother in an incestuous rite that has overtones of a macabre eroticism. She goes mad and is handed over to the medical scientists – now that her body has been defiled, she is no more than a ghost of what she once was. Her beauty is eaten away by her madness, and she is forced by her son to swallow cyanide alongside her lover after having witnessed a barbaric marriage scene in which a representative of the Law demands that the newly weds do not belong to the Jewish race.