Aesthetic French Quotes

Wherever you go in the next catastrophé Be it sickroom, or prison, or cemet’ry Do not fear that your stay will be solit’ry Countless souls share your fate, you’ll have company!

When art as an expression starts to appear, without prompting, all over the suburbs and villages of this country, what we are saying is: we are confident enough to create our own living, our own entertainment, our own aesthetic. Such an aesthetic will not be donated to us from the corridors of a university; or from the Ministry of Culture, or by the French Cultural Centre. It will come from the individual creations of a thousand creative people

The writer has to die to give birth to the intellectual in the service of the wretched of the earth.

There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depicted it, as infinitely desirable – and yet he had a profound reluctance to return. But it is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia – for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled. And yet such fantasies are not just idle daydreams or fancies; they press toward some fulfillment, but an indirect one - the fulfillment of art. These, at least, are the terms that D. Geahchan, the French psychoanalyst, has used. With reference in particular to the greatest of nostalgies, Proust, the psychoanalyst David Werman speaks of an 'aesthetic crystallization of nostalgia' - nostalgia raised to the level of art and myth.

The great has terror for its basis... the beautiful is founded on mere positive pleasure...

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture— the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that. “Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.

It is in Keats that the artistic spirit of this century first found its absolute incarnation. And these pre-Raphaelites, what were they? If you ask nine-tenths of the British public what is the meaning of the word aesthetics, they will tell you it is the French for affectation or the German for a dado; and if you inquire about the pre-Raphaelites you will hear something about an eccentric lot of young men to whom a sort of divine crookedness and holy awkwardness in drawing were the chief objects of art. To know nothing about their great men is one of the necessary elements of English education. As regards the pre-Raphaelites the story is simple enough. In the year 1847 a number of young men in London, poets and painters, passionate admirers of Keats all of them, formed the habit of meeting together for discussions on art, the result of such discussions being that the English Philistine public was roused suddenly from its ordinary apathy by hearing that there was in its midst a body of young men who had determined to revolutionise English painting and poetry. They called themselves the pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood. In England, then as now, it was enough for a man to try and produce any serious beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen; and besides this, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - among whom the names of Dante Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais will be familiar to you - had on their side three things that the English public never forgives: youth, power and enthusiasm.

Since the days of Peter the Great, Russia had looked to the West for her civilization, even to the extend of adopting French as a second language - or as a first for people of station and learning. The United States, recently cut loose politically from England, still drew heavily on the Old World for her art, literature, science and philosophy. Intellectuals from both nations flocked to Europe in search of eduction and aesthetic stimulation, and many became so enthralled with European civilization that they failed to return. In Russia as well as in the United States many an indignant patriot would rant about the need for serving European apron strings.

But the relationship between the between the two cultural paradigms has always been a dialectical, not cyclical. The romantics were not repeating their ancestors. On the contrary, they brought about a cultural revolution comparable in its radicalism and effects with the roughly contemporary American, French, and Industrial Revolutions. By destroying natural law and by reorienting concern from the work to the artist they tore up the old regime's aesthetic rule book just as thoroughly as any Jacobin [a 18th century political French club] tore down social institutions. In the words of Ernst Troeltsch: "Romanticism too is a revolution, a thorough and genuine revolution: a revolution against the respectability of the bourgeois temper and against a universal equalitarian ethic: a revolution, above all, against the whole of the mathematico-mechanical spirit of science in western Europe, against a conception of Natural Law which sought to blend utility with morality, against the bare abstraction of a universal and equal Humanity." [Unquote Troeltsch] As will be argued in the subsequent chapters, it was Hegel who captured the essence of this revolution in his pithy definition of romanticism as "absolute inwardness" [absloute Innerlichkeit - in German - אינערליכקייט]. It will also be argued that its prophet was Jean-Jacques Rousseau: if not the most consistent, then certainly the most influential of all the eighteenth-century thinkers. Writing in 1907, Lytton Strachey caught Rousseau's special quality very well: "Among those quick, strong, fiery people of the eighteenth century, he belonged to another world -- to the new world of self-consciousness, and doubt, and hesitation, of mysterious melancholy and quiet intimate delights, of long reflexions amid the solitudes of Nature, of infinite introspections amid the solitudes of the heart." Percy Bysshe Shelley, who derided the philosophes as "mere reasoners," regarded Rousseau as "a great poet.

The supposedly eyewitness authority of the Pseudo-Turpin finds a parallel in another genre in which vernacular prose was pioneered: that of the historical memoir. There were twelfth-century verse histories narrated by authors who had personally participated in the events they describe, such as the Third Crusade. But the Fourth Crusade of 1202-4 saw a switch to prose. This shameful fiasco, in which the crusaders were induced to turn aside from the Holy Land and attack instead the Christian city of Constantinople, inspired two contrasting accounts. Robert de Clari--ignorant of higher-level strategy, but all agog at the splendours of Constantinople--gives a worm's eye view. Geoffroi de Villehardouin, by contrast, has a top diplomat's suave authority and a leader's eye for the aesthetics of war--the splendid sight of a fleet, or the noble heroism of a ruler. For both authors the medium of prose seems to convey the purported authenticity and transparency of lived experience.

The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth There was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone’s The Bloomsbury Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf ’s writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis. James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian ‘moment’ in terms of ‘short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf ’s use of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough’. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner’s 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962). The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962); translated by Jean Stewart, 1965) was the first full-length study ofWoolf ’s oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.’ This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf ’s feminism, either. his heavy use of extracts from A Writer’s Diary. He lays great emphasis on subjectivism in Woolf ’s writing, and draws attention to her interest in the subjective experience of ‘the moment.’ Despite his philosophical apparatus, Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insists that Woolf has indeed ‘no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life, not ideology’. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for him a ‘purely psychological’ writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist and historicist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjective and the psychological: ‘To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and

The society’s ‘look’ is a self-publicizing one. The American flag itself bears witness to this by its omnipresence, in fields and built-up areas, at service stations, and on graves in the cemeteries, not as a heroic sign, but as the trademark of a good brand. It is simply the label of the finest successful international enterprise, the US. This explains why the hyperrealists were able to paint it naively, without either irony or protest (Jim Dine in the sixties), in much the same way as Pop Art gleefully transposed the amazing banality of consumer goods on to its canvases. There is nothing here of the fierce parodying of the American anthem by Jimi Hendrix, merely the light irony and neutral humour of things that have become banal, the humour of the mobile home and the giant hamburger on the sixteen-foot long billboard, the pop and hyper humour so characteristic of the atmosphere of America, where things almost seem endowed with a certain indulgence towards their own banality. But they are indulgent towards their own craziness too. Looked at more generally, they do not lay claim to being extraordinary; they simply are extraordinary. They have that extravagance which makes up odd, everyday America. This oddness is not surrealistic (surrealism is an extravagance that is still aesthetic in nature and as such very European in inspiration); here, the extravagance has passed into things. Madness, which with us is subjective, has here become objective, and irony which is subjective with us has also turned into something objective. The fantasmagoria and excess which we locate in the mind and the mental faculties have passed into things themselves. Whatever the boredom, the hellish tedium of the everyday in the US or anywhere else, American banality will always be a thousand times more interesting than the European - and especially the French - variety. Perhaps because banality here is born of extreme distances, of the monotony of wide-open spaces and the radical absence of culture. It is a native flower here, asis the opposite extreme, that of speed and verticality, of an excess that verges on abandon, and indifference to values bordering on immorality, whereas French banality is a hangover from bourgeois everyday life, born out of a dying aristocratic culture and transmuted into petty-bourgeois mannerism as the bourgeoisie shrank away throughout the nineteenth century. This is the crux: it is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality, whereas the Americans have succeeded in preserving some humour in the material signs of manifest reality and wealth. This also explains why Europeans experience anything relating to statistics as tragic. They immediately read in them their individual failure and take refuge in a pained denunciation of the merely quantitative. The Americans, by contrast, see statistics as an optimistic stimulus, as representing the dimensions of their good fortune, their joyous membership of the majority. Theirs is the only country where quantity can be extolled without compunction.

Intellectual discussions of matière philosophique or matière esthetique kept their basic form (and more of their high intellectual flavor) in English discussions of matters philosophical and matters aesthetic. It has that same fancy sheen when extended to jokey phrases that never occurred in French at all, as in “I’m an expert in matters mixological.

Self directed scholarship has an aesthetic dimension. For a long time I had on the wall of my study the following quote by Jacques Le Goff, the great French medievalist, who believes that the Renaissance came out of independent humanists, not professional scholars. He examined the striking contrast in period paintings, drawings and renditions that compare Medieval university members and humanists: “One is a professor surrounded and besieged by huddled students. The other is a solitary scholar, sitting in the tranquility and privacy of his chambers, at ease in the spacious and comfy room where his thoughts can move freely. Here we encounter the tumult of schools, the dust of classrooms, the indifference to beauty in collective workplaces,There, it is all order and beauty,Luxe, calme et volupté

I was independent now and beginning to find the presence of other people irksome, and I felt that in the end I would have to speak only with myself, that my own best friend and companion would be that other self of mine, that teacher inside me with whom I was beginning to talk more and more. It may also have been because of everything I learned from the professor, who outdid himself in insults, because no coachman cursed his horses the way this professor of French literature and aesthetics cursed us.

Decadents looked to Charles Baudelaire, author of The Flowers of Evil (1857), as an important influence. He described his aesthetic project as an alchemical process of extracting beauty from evil.

The heyday of conspiracy theories had been the reaction to the French Revolution. Like a virus, they would come to life every time that society was led into a state of anxiety and fears. But in the Modern Era they turned into a true secular religion. The surge of these theories in the Modern Era reflected the need to explain the collapse of a seemingly unshakeable ancien régime. This collapse was so unexpected, the break with medieval civilization so inevitable, and the upheaval so profound and so fraught with far-reaching economic, social, and political consequences that it needed an explanation. But the level of a patriarchal society's political culture changed too little, and the earlier one remained the explanatory matrix. Hence Divine Providence did not disappear, but a new fetish came to replace God: humans will and reason. In this respect, conspiracy is a sort of replacement of Revelation for an ill-defined, immature patriarchal consciousness disintegrating under the pressure of the Enlightenment, already having lost the integrity of faith but not yet having gained a basis in reason. Conspiracy gives the masses who have been cast out of the traditional matrices of thought explanations of the world missing outside of religion. Hence it contains elements of both religion (a parallel reality fitted to a ready-made picture of the world, teleologism) and rationalism (total logicalization, the search for cause-and-effect links and the hidden reasons for a phenomena lying within the interests of agents, and fitting the world into a logically interconnected system). This drama that burst onto Europe after the French Revolution finally arrived in Russia, with a century's delay.

When the Sieur de la Chesnee Monstereul made a list of tulip names in 1654, he included fifty-five of the Agate class alone, and in the Netherlands we find, in various tulip books, names such as Agaat Bisschop, Agaat Fenis da Costa, and Agaat van Enckhuysen. Other French tulips were marbr es or jaspees, and in the Netherlands names like Ghemarmerde [marbled] de Goyer, Ghemarmerde van der Eyck, Ghemarmerde van Willem Willemsz, and so on, were usual. Tulips were not a collector's item simply because they were expensive but because they were part of the same aesthetic universe as shells and many other items so prized in early modern collections. Tulips, like shells, could be stone.

Everything that Paris still represents in terms of style is founded on a concept of value already evident in all the luxury commerce that flourished under Louis XIV's patronage. Value was not primarily about price and performance but was determined by intangible factors: it was a matter of aesthetics and elegance. It's not enough to offer customers a good product: you have to make them feel special by providing a hefty dose of emotion and drama along with the merchandise. The accessory initially rose to prominence as the most evident way of convincing women to want superfluous things and to change simply for the sake of change. Emma Bovary's precursors, women stuck in the provinces and dreaming of becoming as chic as that creature who became mythic just as soon as couture came into existence, the Parisienne. First, high fashion must advertise. Without advertising, la mode simply cannot exist. Without advertising, who would think to buy a Rolex rather than an ordinary watch? Only advertising can guarantee band recognition on a scale large enough to support an industry. Second, in the case of high fashion, the familiar adage is worth a thousand words is certainly true. And finally, nothing sells fashion more effectively than that heady mixture: sex and celebrity. Ads must create a lifestyle; consumers are looking for a brand that suggests the universe to which they aspire. Any truly innovative concept is only as good as its marketing campaign. In Paris you spend your money with so much more pleasure and contentment than in cities where you live almost in complete solitude, surrounded by your wealth but deprived of all amusement.

Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man's understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life. The heritage that we can now more fully transmit is richer than ever before. It is richer than that of Pericles, for it includes all the Greek flowering that followed him; richer than Leonardo's, for it includes him and the Italian Renaissance; richer than Voltaire's, for it embraces all the French Enlightenment and its ecumenical dissemination. If progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we are born any healthier, better, or wiser than infants were in the past, but because we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being. The heritage rises, and man rises in proportion as he receives it. History is, above all else, the creation and recording of that heritage; progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use. To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man's follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing. The historian will not mourn because he can see no meaning in human existence except that which man puts into it; let it be our pride that we ourselves may put meaning into our lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends death. If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And to his final breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life.

No one taught me how to analyse a book, how to read from a safe distance, how not to lose sight of context, how to grasp the things left unsaid. No one taught me about schools of thought or even the ideologies meant to give depth to a mundane story. No one taught me aesthetics, language... All these, I discovered in high school while studying the classics, and broadened this knowledge at the Higher Teachers' Training College in Yaounde, from which I graduated as a French teacher. But I had already developed a habit. All my life, I would read the same way l had started off—intensely, passionately, instinctively—and sentence fragments would stick with me […] Books soothed my soul, made me angry, made me strong. They made me laugh and cry. They pushed me to examine existence with my own mind, to trust my intuition, to stretch my mind to perceive—against the backdrop of characters, nature, and plot—the intricate symphony of time that beams our being to the world. As a child, reading made me feel less lonely, less insignificant, less vulnerable. As an adult, I developed enough discernment to understand that, while reading had not made me a better person, it had made me more levelheaded towards my own motivations, and freer.

Parrhassios contradicts this notion by revealing that deception is the truth, and vice versa. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was particularly fond of this story, and quoted it in his seminars during the 1960s and 70s. Aristotle’s Poetics The Poetics (c.

She made her way to her favorite area of the daycare. The smaller of the two playrooms' aesthetic was a nod to her Frenchie's white-and-black piebald coat, with splashes of purple to add a royal flare. Portraits of Duchess hung on the walls in gilded frames. Was it a bit over the top? Absolutely. But when it came to her baby there was no top. Seconds after she entered the room, Ashanti was bombarded by a cadre of feisty canines with Napoleon complexes. This is what she missed the most. Having to devote so much time to baking, she didn't get to play with the dogs nearly as much as she wanted to. "Hey, Lulu and Sparkle," she greeted the Pomeranians, giving each dog one of the dime-sized treats from her pocket. "And how is my favorite Chihuahua," she called to Bingo, who had been coming to the daycare since the first week it opened. She followed the treats with quick head rubs for each dog, then went in search of Duchess. "Where's my dog?" Ashanti asked Leslie, who was running the Parkers' Cavalier King Charles through the agility maze. Leslie gestured to cushioned mats in the corner. Ashanti walked over and found Duchess hugged up next to Puddin'. The two lay in a yin-yang pattern, with Duchess's head nestled against Puddin's chest, and her squat legs arcing around the puffy topknot atop the poodle's head. "Kara was right. You two really do need a room." At the sound of her voice, Duchess's stubby tail started wagging like a windshield wiper gone haywire, but she still didn't move away from Puddin'. "If you don't get over here," Ashanti said. She reached down and lifted Duchess into her arms. "Don't forget who keeps you in tiaras and rawhide," she said, nuzzling the dog's flat nose with her own.

There is something about the first frost that brings out the caveman--- one might even say the vampire--- in me. I want to wear fur and suck the meat off lamb bones, and on comes my annual craving for boudin noir, otherwise known as blood sausage. You know you've been in France for nearly a decade when the idea of eating congealed blood sounds not only normal, but positively delightful. When I was pregnant, my body craved iron in silly amounts. I could have eaten a skyscraper. It's a shame that it's not on the French pregnancy diet--- forbidden along with charcuterie, liver, and steak tartare. It's true that boudin noir is not the sort of thing I'd buy at any old supermarket. Ideally, you want a butcher who prepares his own. I bought mine from the mustached man with the little truck in Apt market, the same one I'd spotted during our first picnic in Provence. Since our first visit, I'd returned many times to buy his delicious, very lean, saucisses fraîches and his handmade andouillettes, which I sauté with onions, Dijon mustard, and a bit of cream. I serve my boudin with roasted apples--- this time, some Golden Delicious we picked up from a farm stand by the side of the road. I toasted the apple slices with olive oil, sprinkled the whole lot with sea salt, and added a cinnamon stick and a star anise to ground the dish with cozy autumn spices. Boudin is already cooked through when you buy it, but twenty minutes or so in a hot oven gives it time to blister, even burst. I'm an adventurous eater, but the idea of boiled (or cold) boudin makes me think about moving back to New Jersey. No, not really. I admit, when you first take it out of the oven, there are some visual hurdles. There's always a brief moment--- particularly when I serve the dish to guests--- that I think, But that looks like large Labrador shit on a plate. True enough. But once you get past the aesthetics, you have one of the richest savory tastes I can imagine. Good boudin has a velveteen consistency that marries perfectly with the slight tartness of the roasted apples. Add mashed potatoes (with skin and lumps), a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and wake me in the spring.

Sitting in Atlantic St. grill downing early morning cup of prison-like coffee stale rolls of cinnamon while up above freeways headed for suburban slums Gold Coast dwellers/ruling class sass Goodwill truckdrivers for talkin’ simple talk. No comment on the front page news. Through painful hurt sought desperately the obit page in rage to see if was really true, ‘bout you. Winter come-togethers fill my every thought Billie sings the blues communication complete, Cable (spool) table replete w/french bread apples cheese rhineskeller wine imported elegant tabacco, discussion of ideas politculture peoples lit & art, marxist aesthetics, how best to serve. Now, savoring on Neruda’s notes i think of you & Jimmie/son savoring favorite chocolate M & M’s. Them’s the thoughts i had of you today. No lavish praise no mournful elegy, just one last Vashon Island ferry ride to pray and cast an orchid into Puget Sound to see you safely on your journey to the other side.

As the Italian diplomat Giovanni Battista Primi Visconti concluded after a lengthy sojourn at the court of Versailles: “He [Louis XIV] knew how to play the king perfectly on all occasions.” During the final decades of his reign, he became a sort of one-man stylistic police, obsessively checking to make sure everything around him constantly lived up to his aesthetic standards. When all was just right, he took great pleasure in the conspicuous display of gorgeousness. For example, on December 7, 1697, the King—he was then fifty-nine—hosted some of the grandest festivities of the age to celebrate the marriage of his eldest grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne. For one evening reception, Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors was lit with four thousand candles, transforming it into a vast arcade of flickering light.

The thing is, the French are highly sensitive to aesthetics. Anything unattractive—even something as insignificant as an underdressed tourist—can make them uncomfortable.

You do understand what I mean!” he exclaimed, pleased to see Maude responding to his song. “I chose Nina Simone to show you something else. Just like you, Nina Simone had a classical background. When she was younger, she wanted to become a concert pianist. Her skill was beyond measure and she used it in a wide repertoire of jazz, blues, and R&B songs. And I think you can do the same. Music knows no limits and I truly understand why James insisted on signing you, Maude.” Maude remained silent, still thinking about his rendition of Nina Simone. “All you have to do is dig deeper. Try finding some suffering in you. Don’t sing the Cenerentola with a smile. Although you look like a girl who’s had it all. You know, the nice girl from the North of France, who grew up in a quiet, small town with her loving mom and dad and brothers and sisters, always top of her class, quick-tempered when things didn’t go her way. A bit spoiled, I guess. You have to put all that—” “Spoiled?” Maude blurted in utter disbelief, the word echoing through her mind. Of all the things he could’ve said about her, spoiled was the last word that could have appeared remotely appropriate to describe her. As for suffering, she’d had plenty of that, too, which is why she didn’t want to think about it. Not while she was so happy in New York and Carvin and the Ruchets were the last thing she wanted in her head. She painfully pushed the Ruchets away from her mind and turned to Matt, eyes flaring up again. “You know nothing about me, Matt,” she said, her voice quivering with emotion. “And you obviously know nothing about suffering, or you wouldn’t idealize it the way that you do. You see it as a romantic notion that seemingly gives depth to songwriting. And it does. Not because the singers actually thought of woe in a purely aesthetic way, but because that’s how they actually lived. You will never understand that,” she finished, trembling from head to toe. And with that, she grabbed her bag, coat, gloves, scarf, and stormed out of Matt’s Creation Room, slamming the door behind her.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) has so often been accused of being fascism’s progenitor that his case requires particular care. Intended for the Lutheran pastorate, the young Nietzsche lost his faith and became a professor of classical philology while still extraordinarily young. For his remaining good years (he suffered permanent mental breakdown at fifty, perhaps related to syphilis) he invested all his brilliance and rage in attacking complacent and conformist bourgeois piety, softness, and moralism in the name of a hard, pure independence of spirit. In a world where God was dead, Christianity weak, and Science false, only a spiritually free “superman” could fight free of convention and live according to his own authentic values. At first Nietzsche inspired mostly rebellious youth and shocked their parents. At the same time, his writing contained plenty of raw material for people who wanted to brood on the decline of modern society, the heroic effort of will needed to reverse it, and the nefarious influence of Jews. Nietzsche himself was scornful of patriotism and the actual anti-Semites he saw around him, and imagined his superman a “free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-worshipper, the dweller in forests.” His white-hot prose exerted a powerful intellectual and aesthetic influence across the political spectrum, from activist nationalists like Mussolini and Maurice Barrès to nonconformists like Stefan George and André Gide, to both Nazis and anti-Nazis, and to several later generations of French iconoclasts from Sartre to Foucault. “Nietzsche’s texts themselves provide a positive goldmine of varied possibilities.