One of the many illusions that Talleyrand does not harbor is that of order: he never sees order around him, even if he strives to create it. For Talleyrand, from 1789 until his death, the revolution never stops: and he predicts it will be a long time before it comes to an end. On the eve of July 1830, he wrote to Baron de Barante: “We are moving toward an unknown world with no pilot and no compass; only one thing is sure—that all this will end in shipwreck.⁶⁴ The English Revolution lasted half a century. Ours is only forty years old; so I cannot hope in any way to see its end. I even doubt whether the present generation will witness it and, save for circumstances that are not to be counted upon, those who see it shall have no cause to rejoice. We are entering upon new adventures …” For Talleyrand, an age becomes revolutionary when words and deeds, freed from all dependency and hurled like missiles, constantly distort life, shape it with rough fingertips, force it into reaction. The thrill of being part of an advancing movement—like a wave, not of the sea, but of personal will—was long seen as a fond illusion, yet in the end it nauseated clear-thinking minds (Baudelaire and Flaubert after 1848). Seen from a distance over two centuries from that magnificent beginning, it is an illusion that merits only disdain—and it still stirs the good conscience of the Western intelligentsia (though it’s a West that binds the world like sticky tape). There is a continual yearning to “go to the people,” which eventually ends with confinement in a torture chamber.⁶⁵

For Alexis de Tocqueville, too, the French Revolution is the start of a “permanent state,” a new connection between doctrine and violence, which seemed likely to last. Meantime a new species of mankind was perpetually at work, offering the world a disruptive unity, in the same way that monks in their cloisters had once nurtured its invisible bonds between one invasion and another. It is “a turbulent and destructive race, always ready to demolish and ill-equipped to build; a race that not only practices violence, ignores individual rights and oppresses minorities but—and this is new—claims that this is how it must be; it declares it as doctrine: that there are no individual rights and, so to speak, the individual himself does not exist: there is only a mass, for the achievement of whose ends everything is always permissible.”⁶⁶ And, even if Tocqueville never sought to recount history but to speculate about it, his description strays in the direction of a Russian novel: “For the past sixty years there has always been a great school of revolution open to the public in whatever part of the world where all restless, violent spirits, men deep in debt … would go for training and instruction.”⁶⁷ For example, Berlin University, where a penniless nobleman, Mikhail Bakunin, arrived with money borrowed from his friend Alexander Herzen, to taste the “voluptuousness of destruction.”