“At length I remembered the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: "Then let them eat brioches.”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions”
Or cake, as we English like to say. I thought I'd get the grand old journalistic cliché in nice and early, before the merde really does strike the windmill blades and every headline writer in the land starts falling back on it.
“Ils n'ont pas de pain? Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!” as any schoolboy knows is the famous line said to have constituted the last straw that broke the camel's back leading to Queen Marie Antoinette's eventually literal downfall at the guillotine. And why not I employ yet another cliché while we're at it, since this article in a sense concerns a repetitive and depressing historical cliché about government?
I'd caution readers not to take any facts too seriously when it comes to Antoinette though, because a quick search around whatever history books still in circulation not fashionably linking the fabled utterance to the endeavours of white colonial British interests in the slave trade will correctly point out that there's no evidence she said anything of the sort. It is best attributed to Rousseau who made the point in 1765 when Marie Antoinette was 9-years old and the French Revolution still about 25-years in her future. A slow-burn insult to the French people then, if ever there was one.
Rousseau was referring vaguely to “a great princess” in his Confessions. No one seems to know who he was talking about or even if he made it all up. Sayings such as this one do tend to stick once the mud has been chucked, (sorry). Astute artisans of baking and others will also note that no pain appears in the quotation, instead brioche is the recipe of the day. That is what we'd more probably describe as a luxury bread, having as it does in it eggs and butter.
Poor Marie was done up like a kipper, then. If she was ready to divest herself of wealth and privilege in support of the great unwashed Gallic peasantry of her day then this smear does nothing to help her cause. The appearance of hypocrisy seldom does. How delicious was “Cake-gate” to journos during the COVID lockdowns? I bet allusions to monarchs recommending cake were everywhere, but since I didn't read much news in those days I wouldn't know.
The perils associated with running regimes leaning towards the totalitarian are well documented. You can survive for precisely as long as you can hold back the awful tide of resentment building up as a result of your everyday disregard for the generally accepted standards of fairness and decency by which we muddle along. People tend to get shirty about it all, but is there something in this about the nature of tyranny itself?
Many tyrannies do tend to exhibit a predilection for luxury and comfort in the face of hardship and poverty in the populace. Ever since the day when he and his missus had the extreme misfortune of getting shot to pieces by angry representatives of President Ceausescu's populace, the statistics relating to their subsequently revealed extravagant lifestyles are astounding. Their palace was never fully completed due to their unfortunate demise; however, the total volume of the palace’s interior was 2,500,000 cubic metres, more than that of the largest Egyptian pyramid. Please don't remind me that that's not as big as the Pentagon, but then the Pentagon doesn't have 220-thousand square metres of handmade Transylvanian carpets covering its floors purely for the purposes of expressing its opulence. The foundations of the palace were 500-metres deep with interconnected tunnels leading to the Ceausescu’s residences elsewhere and were constructed bomb proof.
The Romanian State under Antonescu recall, supplied the German Luftwaffe with petrol for the entire Second World War and yet its people we're allowed just two hours of heating per day. By the time he died, Ceausescu was building what the locals called “starvation factories”: intended for the proles to dive into on the way home from the real factories they worked in, in order to collect a pre-packaged warmed up meal to consume in their darkened houses due to the national policy of “saving energy”.
Many corresponding examples can no doubt be traced describing this relationship between tyranny of rulers on the one hand and privations among a nation's people on the other. Boris Johnson may not have been an absolute monarch, a Kim Il Sung or a Russian Tsar, nevertheless being saddled with a large majority can tend to heighten people's expectations of government, I'd suggest. People might start expecting you to just get the job done, what with not having to face significant opposition and all that.
I do not intend to suggest that there is in any way a due comparison to be made between the excesses of tyrants such as Ceausescu and his wife Elena with a democratically elected government in the UK. Or Marcos and his wife Imelda, for that matter. For one reason, I cannot really say if Ceausescu or Marcos professed a desire that all citizens of their countries should live equally, suffering the same outcomes from economic hardships while enjoying the common benefits in times of plenty. If they did not then at least you could not accuse either ruler of hypocrisy. There's something of a cliché surrounding that theme in English folklore I reckon. How many times do you hear it said, at least the Tories are honest about their sleaze?
And yet I still feel like there does exist a link between the infamous tyrant luxuriating at his people's largesse and mere mortals of ancient democracies who amount to no more than short term hiccups in history's record book despite receiving the privilege of heading up an entire nation. Those ones who for example, though in support of socialist or communist ideologies, yet enjoy a luxurious lifestyle, often characterized by wealth, privilege, and comfort. Those for that matter too who aren't even socialists and yet who think rank hath its privileges.
We're on a roll with French here, so here's another: l'hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu, which translated means 'hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue'. That saying is maxim 218 from the Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims of François de La Rochefoucauld.
Put simply it means that if virtue, or virtuous behaviour were inconsequential then there'd be no need for hypocrisy in the first place. Every time a hypocrite takes the time to hide his own vice by feigning virtue, he's really saying that he'd like to bask in the reflected glory of appearing to be virtuous despite not being so. Think of it as a backhanded compliment to a system of morality somewhere beyond your own aspirations. If you are consumed with greed then at least from your lowly position you can pay your respects to virtue by looking upwards and copying those who really do practice generosity. Thus you may even gain some respect, admiration or social approval along the way.
At this point people who do that voodoo I like to refer to as psychology would probably like to pop the word “shame” into our conversation in order to get at more humanistic instincts or motivations driving hypocrisy, but I'm not going there. I'm talking about Rochefoucauld here and good old-fashioned themes related to the way reality used to be assumed to work and which were considered part of the everyday composition of the cosmos. Even the tyrant Ceausescu liked to be thought of as a teetotaller, not to mention nobly ascetic and far beyond the grubbier aspects of everyday existence.
How times have moved on. It was Ed Miliband who criticised David Cameron for not practising what he preached in failing to bear the burden of austerity equally and that the signature phrase of that government, “we are all in this together” had been reduced to empty rhetoric. He was correct in that accusation I'm sure, but in maintaining the fiction that we really were all in it together Cameron paid his homage to virtue. The most recent inhabitants of the corridors of power, Miliband among them, could be accused of being champagne socialists, but I'd never do that myself, since what do I care if a socialist is a consistently effective socialist or not? A socialist who's lost his way as an adept in the 'high calling' of his own philosophy is an irrelevance.
What's more to the point is the approach being taken by our current leaders towards virtue. How do they respond to the sort of accusations that Ed Miliband threw at David Cameron? We've been treated to the revelation so far of about £107,000 worth of freebies to the Prime Minister, not to mention £14,000 to the Education Secretary and £7,500 to the Chancellor. I don't doubt more is on the way.
“We do now know precisely how they respond to all this, as it happens. As the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting commented to the BBC,
“I'm really proud of people who want to contribute not just their time and volunteering but their money to our politics. It is a noble pursuit, just like giving to charity. And we don't recognise that enough.”
'Greasing the wheels' then, as the old cliché goes, is no longer a matter of vice or virtue. Those who donated suits, football tickets, specs, tickets to Taylor Swift concerts and all the rest should've been jolly proud of their public service. Don't feel like you're a hypocrite because we don't, says Wes. Vice itself has been repurposed as virtue. Pensioners can go away and eat their brioches for all we care. Perhaps we really are one step closer to tyranny?
James Gatehouse.