THE WRITER AND SOCIAL STRATEGY
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him. The result was that he had come to feel that he was a person apart,
in the air and rootless, a Ganymede who had been carried off in the
claws of an eagle; and he had the continual feeling that he was superior
to his milieu. But after the Revolution the bourgeoisie itself assumed
power.
It
was this class which should logically have conferred on the
writer a new status; but this could only have been done if the writer had
consented to return to the bourgeois fold. Now there could be no question
of that. In the first place, two hundred years of royal favors had
taught the writer to despise the bourgeoisie; but, what was more im–
portant, he had been accustomed to regard himself as a clerk, cultivating
pure thought and pure art.
If
he returned to his own class, he would
undergo a radical change.
If
the bourgeoisie was, indeed, a class of op–
pressors, it was not parasitic; it despoiled the worker, but it worked with
him. The creation of a work of art was equivalent to providing a service.
The poet was expected to place his talent at the disposal of his class in
the same way as an engineer.... In exchange, bourgeois society would
invest the writer with a special aura. But he would lose on the deal. He
would sacrifice his independence and his claim to superiority. He would,
to be sure, be a member of an elite, but there was also an elite of doctors
and an elite of solicitors. The hierarchy was constituted inside the class
in accordance with its social utility; and the guild of artists would take
a secondary position just above the teaching profession.
Such is M. Sartre's account of the situation which arose after
the Revolution. Whatever its origins, the Revolution led to the emer–
gence of a new and aggressive middle class-a middle class whose
ethos w.as essentially bourgeois in the fullest sense of that term.
My first witness from among the writers of the time is Stendhal.
I am going to quote three passages from his autobiography,
La Vie de
Henri Brulard:
My family were the most aristocratic people in the town. This
meant that I became a fanatical republican on the spot.
All the elements which compose the life of Chrysale
2
have been
replaced in my case by romance. I believe that this speck in my telescope
has been useful to me as a novelist. There is a sort of
bassesse bourgeoise
to which my characters could never succumb.
I had, and still have, the most aristocratic of tastes. I would do
everything in my power to ensure the happiness of the
peuple;
but I
think that I would rather spend a fortnight of every month in prison
than have to live with shopkeepers.
2. He was the bourgeois parent in Moliere's
Femmes savantes.
