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“Despotism, in short, reigns in silence, and leaves man the right to be silent; usurpation condemns him to speak, it follows him into the inner sanctum of his mind and, by forcing him to lie to his own conscience, it robs him of the last consolation that still remains for the oppressed.

… … …

“Usurpation debases people at the same time that it oppresses them; it accustoms them to trample on what they used to respect, to woo what they despise, to despise themselves and, if it manages to endure over time, once it has fallen, it even cancels out any possibility of freedom, any improvement.”⁷⁹

These words certainly describe the transition from Stalin to Brezhnev far more than the fall of Commodus or the effects of the Napoleonic Empire, as Constant must have imagined. But they also herald the reign of those absurd legitimist usurpers whose murmurings would soon be discernible at the Congress of Vienna.

Benjamin Constant mentions in passing one of the bitterest and most incomprehensible truths for those contemporaries, such as Talleyrand, who had been born back in the age of douceur, when ridicule was fatal: “But ridicule attacks all and destroys nothing.” Here he was naming one of the arcana imperii of Sovietism. And one of the main elements of political strength for the Soviet leaders was the very fact that they understood it. Excessive ridicule—its relentless, daily production—can lead to the total neutralization of its destructive power. And perfection is reached when anti-Soviet stories become a part of the regime. As for the results, these will be much more fruitful and lasting if all this is applied to a mind like that of the Russian, who is a virtuoso when it comes to self-contempt, as Gogol and Dostoyevsky demonstrated.

The theory of legitimacy, through which Talleyrand triumphs at the Congress of Vienna, rests on two axioms of public law: “That sovereignty cannot be obtained simply through conquest; nor can it pass to the conqueror if the sovereign does not hand it over to him.”⁸⁰ The first point, however, stopped all attempts to go back to the origin, since conquest casts a shadow over it: there is always a native ruler who has been overthrown. The second point offered no answer in situations where sovereignty is abandoned without being handed over: here a gap, a deficiency, appears, as in the silent law of nature compared with the written conventions that sanction it. In political reality a sanction is therefore needed—and it will be the “sanction of Europe.” Europe appears here for the first time as a second nature, a mystical body (“an almost mystical community of states,” as Guglielmo Ferrero would write) that has the power to confer sovereignty.⁸¹ In conclusion: it was recognized that the laws of nature did not extend to all circumstances of life, but sometimes had to be supplemented and replaced by a second nature, identified as Europe. The aporia that the Congress of Vienna was trying to resolve was not so much political as epistemological. The political remedy was a shrewd fiction; as for the epistemology, it could wait. But the whole lack of plausibility was clear: not least because the body of Europe was not “mystical”—or no more so than Madame de Krüdener, prophetess of regeneration, who journeyed under the banner of the Holy Alliance. To cover this defect, after the Congress of Vienna there was a growing wave of declamation in support of Order, which has continued uninterrupted until today. Into those howling waters then came the ever more rabid declamation of the democratic and revolutionary enemy. Turning away from the contemplation of those insipid waves, Baudelaire gathered his fleurs du mal on the cliffs.