A word or two to begin with. Ian Hamilton Finlay's Desmoulins Connection are not perfectly-framed, perfectly-formed works, holding and manifesting their content, and nothing but, in some art-for-art's sake manner, like some Heideggerian jug. They are decidedly nearer the knuckle than a jug gets. A read-through quickly shows that they lack (though perhaps repine for) the poise of proverbs or epigrams. They are too occasional (in the sense of being responses to specific occasions) to be aphorisms; bit they are not occasional, throwaway, trivial, bon mots, or quips. Where there is humour it is always, and with good cause, black; these are not the witty apothegms of the English tradition, of Sidney Smith or Saki. they are rather more embattled than that; perhaps constituting fragments of a larger, general, unrealised - and maybe unrealisible - polemic. If Finlay's Little Sparta has been characterised as a "hedgehog garden", the Desmoulins Connection are – to modify Friedrich Schlegel – " hedgehog fragments"; barbed, rebarbative. (The Schlegel fragment is occasionally translated with 'porcupine'; and it might be salient to remember the old belief that porcupines could throw their quills - were capable of attacks as well as defence.) As Schlegel also said, when reason and unreason meet, there's an electric shock. It's called polemic. 'But why fragments? At the time of the French Revolution, Chamfort had to write thus, producing summations of the state of affairs as that changed; events were moving too fast for lenghty reflection. The defeat of the French Revolution from within was also, for its supporters abroad – including Friedrich Schlegel, an admirer of Chamfort – a defeat from without; and a related urgency exists for German Frühromantik and ist notion of the fragment, fragmentary as the remains of some great building. The attempt is made to insinuate between the retreat to the private / personal / ethical, and the administered domain of the public / social / political, some new means of meditation. Baumgarten called it the aesthetic; and considered in these terms it is equally crucial to understanding Finlay's neoclassicism or early German Romanticism. The linkage, of course, begins in the French Revolution, with the Jacobin artist-revolutionary David; and the fragment as polemic-in-extremis reappears in Austria with Karl Kraus at the end of the next century and continues in ours, with Ian Hamilton Finlay. This is not a strategy of despair; as Quatremere de Quincy pointed out, a classical architecture - any ordered system - can be reconstructed in its last detail from the smallest fragment.
Affaire has been, since Dreyfus or before, the French term for a scandal capable of being made newsworthy. Heidegger was accused of an equivocal stance towards the Third Reich. Finlay was accused of an ambigious rapport with Nacism (see Blum); a possible parallel with Heidegger was itself grounds for suspicion. 'Allo 'Allo, an English television programme, was accused of disrespect for finding humour in the German occupation and French Resistance. In all three cases the verdict that mattered was already given by the media long before any competent, informed or legal opinion was given - these being in consequence inconsequential. (See journalism )
Athens was more cosmopolitan, more liberal than ist reclusive, austere, spartan neighbour to the south. Plutarch recalls an Athenian politician disparaging the Spartans as uneducated; a Spartan replied 'your point is correct, since we are the only Greeks who have learned nothing wicked from you Athenians, '
Blum, legal representative of the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme. Ignorant of Finlay's work, he was heard on French radio with Catherine Millet speaking of its 'ambiguous rapport with Nazism': she added that there was evidence that Finlay was also an anti-Semite. Within hours of the boadcast, Finlay's comission to celebrate the bicentenary of the signing at Versailles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man was cancelled by the French Ministry of Culture. The minister responsible left office shortly afterwards. 'If it were not for the government, one could not laugh at all, now, in France', Chamfort wrote.
The Committee of General Security was responsible for counter-espionage during the French Revolution; its members included the Artist David. Liberal historians have accused it of a paranoid fixation on 'foreign plots '; later scruity of the archives of neighbouring powers revealed such plots to have been legion. (The CIA did try to poison Castro's cigars.)
The Committee of Public Safety was an arm of the National Convention, for a time the de facto government of Revolutionary France. Danton was an early member, as later were Robespierre and Saint-Just. The Committee lost much of its power after the counter- revolutionary coup of Thermidor, and vanished under the Directory. In the words of one American historian, the hundred days before Thermidor 'were not primarily a time of destruction. They were a time of creation, of abortive and perhaps visionary creation. To found a Republic was the chief aim of the victorious Committee after Ventose.'
Desmoulins, a school-friend of Maximilien Robespierre, street figure, pamphleteer and public orator, active in the fall of the Bastille - also witnessed by Chamfort. Later a journal editor, he was perhaps much swayed by his own skills with words as he swayed others with them; he certainly understood journalism: 'I could not perfectly esteem the man of whom no evil said '. Precocious and unreliable, a brilliant journalist and poor politician; guilliotined with the Dantonists, he 'dreamed of a Republic in which everyone would have loved'.
Edinbourgh: 'The Athens of the North '.
Finlay, Ian Hamilton: Scottish poet, short- story writer, playwright, publisher of books and prints, magazine editor and publisher, landscape gardener and polemicist. Born 1925, resident in Little Sparta.
The Follies war began after the National Trust gave their name to a book which took a facetious and patronising view of architecural follies, and also described Little Sparta (in no sense a folly ), without either author having seen it. Letters of complaint about these flaws - involving the publisher, the National Trust, the National trust for Scotland and the Saltire Society - had no effect; however, a public campaign - the Follies War - persuaded the National Trust to withdraw their name from a second edition. The English press, with customary perspicacity, reported the war as a campaign by the Saint Just Vigilantes, a 'romantic Scottish nationalist group'.
Forster, the English novelist, wrote in his What I Believe that 'if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friends, I hope I should have the guts to btray my country', citing Dante 's placement of Brutus and Cassius in Hell for betraying Caesar rather than Rome. Forster's essay was written in 1939; thereafter, his stance would probably have involved betraying his friends too. (See liberal )
Fowler, an arts journalist, here an exemplar, a type. Dante named those in the Inferno who personified the ills of the age, for that reason; and was still accused of personal animus. Pound's Hell cantos record similar villains who had so little character that even their names could not resist corruption: 'And the betrayers of language, /.......n and the press gang / and those who lied for hire'. (See Januszczak, journalism.)
France, 'a country in which it is often useful to display one's vices, and always dangerous to show one's virtues', said Chamfort. The cancellation of the Versailles project and the manifold institutional and governmental corruptions displayed publicly and officially in the French War and the War of the Letter induce a suspicion that the culture has dissolved in an amalgam of vulgar postmodernism, relativism, pragmatism, and expediency. If - as some French theorists have suggested - argumentative rigour, even truth, are merely conventions in a language-game upheld solely by provisional consensus, then it might well make perfect sense to assert that the monument to Walter Scott in Princess Street, Edinbourgh, is actually to his fellow-novelist Balzac. 'As a temporary condition, scepticism is logical insurrection; as a system it is anarchy' - Schlegel. (See Blum, Hayat, Hirschfeld, Millet, Salomon.)
The French War opened with offensives in the French press from critics and artists keen to see Finlay's Versailles commission cancelled. An atmosphere of chauvinism pervading the simultaneous election campaign - chiefly from Le Pen's National Front, but no means them alone - made this signally easier. Claims by Blum, Hayat, Hirschfeld, Millet and Salomon, before and after the radio broadcast with Millet and Blum, eventually bullied the government into backing down, fearful of the effect of 'a torrent of slanderous attacks' on Finlay and his work, reflecting back on the state that sanctioned it. The Ministry of Culture went on public record that the ministry and the government in no way questioned Finlay's integrity or that of his work, generally or specifically. An international campaign to have the decision reversed (see War of the Letter ), in part because the implications were so degrading for France, had no effect; response from French offiialdom became more and more sluggish and muted. ('Degrade themselves as will, institutions … sustain themselves by sheer bulk, and no one can do anything against them. Dishonour and ridicuke slide off them like musket balls off the hide of a boar or crocodile ' - Chamfort.)
Hayat, editor of a Parisian arts magazine which attacked Finlay after the Versailles cancellation - the second phase of the French War. Yves Hayat knew Finlay, published his work and articles on it; without discussion or comment, when the climate of opinion changed in certain Parisian circles, so did Hayat, linking Finlay with Nazi atrocities. Like Michael Schmidt, he doubtless murmurs William Blake's Opposition is True Friendship to himself in selfjustification. 'Whoever confesses disbelief in friendship, or has no friends of his own, shall be banished'- Saint-Just, Republican Institutions.
Hirschfeld, a sculptor living in France, a one-time collaborator with Finlay. A demand that Finlay change a previously accepted method of crediting joint work ended the association. Hirschfeld then circulated portions from Finlay's correspondence with him, in French government, artistic and press circles; these were referred to by Millet and Blum on French radio in a way which was instrumental in provoking the cancellation of the Versailles commission. The Ministry of Culture deplored the deliberately tendentious circulation of fragments of private correspondence quoted out of context. A French court later found Hirschfeld guilty of seeking to destroy Finlay's reputation instead of pursuing his profesional complaint through the appropiate legal channels. Finlay's original case for libel never came to trial, following submissions from Hirschfeld and a number of French journals that any such offence would be covered by a general amnesty on minor crimes and misdeanours passed by the Frnch parliament in the wake of the 1988 presidential election. Subsequently in the War of the Letter major journals in England and France repeated Hirschfeld's version of the events, and denied Finlay or his supporters the right to reply. (See journalism) 'Stupidity would not be totally stupid if it did not go in terror of intelligence. Vice would not be totally vicious if it did not virtue '(Chamfort)
Januszczak, for years a significant figure in English journalistic and television circles, wrote once that Finlay's work did not even belong to the world of art. Waldemar Jauszczak is here not a name, but a Dantescan thicket of errors, an emblem of a time. (See Fowler, liberal.) Schlegel justifies our concern: 'If the artist does not want to use polemic wholesale, he should at least choose individuals who are classics and have lasting worth. If, as in the lamentable case of self-defence, this is not possible, the individuals should, by means of polemic fiction, be idealised as much as possible, to represent objectve dullness and objective stupidity: for even they, like everything objective, are infinitely interesting, as subjects worthy of higher polemic ought to be'.
Journalism 'only seems to be serving the present. In reality it destroys the intellectual receptivity of posterity', said Kraus, adding that 'journalists say: Without us there'd be no culture!, as maggots say: Without us there 'd be no corpses!'. Walter Benjamin said that news in newspapers always came shot through with its own explanation; but that was in the bad old days. His friend Adorno wrote that 'the noiseless din that we have long known in dreams booms at us in waking hours from newspaper headlines'.
Letter: see Follies War, French War, Ligue des Droits de l'homme, Little Spartan War, War of the Letter. And swearing.
Liberal: 'among people who move with the times there are some - many - who don't want to stop at the difficult places' - Schlegel. (See moderate.)
Ligue des Droits de l'Homme: The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen set out natural rights to liberty, freedom from oppression, fredom of eypression and equality before the law. For Michelet it was a credo; speaking for the French nation he wrote 'we wanted to engrave its laws of unbending justice and indestructible equity on the stone of eternal right and the rock of the world'. This sentence was to have been carved in stone as part of Finlay's bicentary Revolutionary Garden at Versailles, where the Declaration was made; however, the commission was cancelled, in part at least because of the ill-informed intervention of a prominent member of the international human rights orgaisation the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, Michel Blum. Subsequent correspondance and visits to the Ligue 's office did nothing to clarify the situation. Contrast the Societe des Amis des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen, set up in 1790 in the Cordeliers district of Paris. This group, known as the Cordeliers, took the Declaration seriously, and acted to right individual as well as collective wrongs, seeking to promote freedom of expression and equality before the law. Members included Danton, Marat and Desmoulins. It would appear that where the current Ligue des Droits de l 'Homme is concerned, Chamfort is opposite: 'in order to view things correctly, one must give words the opposite sense to the world gives them'.
Little Sparta: Desmoulins records that the radical Cordeliers district of Revolutionary Paris was a 'little Sparta'. Quite coincidentally, the same name was given to Ian Hamilton Finlay's demesne to the south of Edinbourgh in Scotland; it was only to be expected that, history repeating itself, the 'Athens of the North' would attack it (see Strathclyde Region).
Millet, editor of a Parisian arts magazine which attacked Finlay before the Versailles cancellation - the first phase of the French War - on the basis of false descripions of certain of his works. She was also heard with Blum on the French radio broadcast that preceded and provoked the cancellation, repeating inaccuracies about Little Sparta of a kind which her magazine had already printed and - by printing inadequate corrections - tacitly acknowledged to be inaccurate. ('There is no baseness which the press would not be ready to falsify and pass off as a magnanimous deed; there is no crook on whose head it would not place the laurels of glory or the oak-wreath of citizenly virtue, whenever that served its purposes' - Kraus.)
Moderate: 'moderation is the spirit of castrated intolerance ' - Schegel. (See liberal.)
Occupation, a period when 'if you wanted to destroy someone in paris you shouted "Jew!" Now you shout "Antisemite!" The vocabulary has changed, but the process has not changed.' ( Ian Hamilton Finlay in an interview, 1989.) According to the French Ministry of Culture, opposition to Finlay was 'deliberately playing on a very great sensivity in French society regarding manifestations of anti-Semitism and the aftermath of World War 2', that is to say - at the time of the Klaus Barbie trial and a chauvinist election campaign-playing on the difficulties France has had in coming to terms with collaboration during the Occupation, official and general anti-Semitism, and the deaths without trial of thousands of 'collaborators' after the end of the war. (see Affaire, France, Paris, racism.)
Paris: 'O Parisians! You frivolous, feeble and cowardly folk, whose love of novelty is a mania; … Who have a rage for liberty as if it were a new fashion in clothes; who have no inspirations, no plan, and no principles; who prefer clever flattery to wise advice; … who can always produce an isolated effort but are incapable of sustained energy; whose only incentive is vanity…' (Marat). It used to be said in England that Paris was wasted on the French; this is not necessarily the case. (See Affaire, Blum, France, Hayat, Hirschfeld, Millet, Salomon.)
Racism: 'Nothing is more narrow-minded than chauvinism or racism. To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for all. No petty prejudices!' - Karl Kraus.
Robespierre, a school-friend of Desmoulins, notorious in the Estates-General for his democratic views and opposition to the death penalty. Elected to the National Convention and, with Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, to the Committee of Public Safety; like Saint-Just and Chamfort, member of the Jacobin club. Unpopular in radical circles for his support of religious toleration. Opponent of the Hebertists and the Dantonists, guillotined in Thermidor. Robespierre was, of course, never president of France; but he did preside over a Republic, one and indivisible.
Saint-Just was linked with Maximilien Robespierre even before his election to the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. A Jacobin, opponent of the Dantonists and the Hebertists, guillotined in Thermidor, shortly after sponsoring the radical laws of Ventose, leaving his Republican Institutions unfinished. Revisionist historians in France omitted him from the list of actors in the French Revolution in the Dictionnaire critique de la Revolution francaise. The Saint-Just Vigilantes were named in his honour, at first as a jest, but later actualised, supporters of Ian Hamilton Finlay's work, ideas, and public stance.
Salomon, assistant editor of the Parisian arts magazine edited by Catherine Millet; she argued that artists should not make direct reference to World War 2 - the very act of allusion was suspect. Finlay made a response: 'Myriam Salomon owns the Second World War and you are not allowed to mention it.' Writing during the Barbie trial, she managed to suggest Finlay's complicity. Said Chamfort, 'the ordinary journalist cannot help writing farce.'
Sparta: more reclusive, more austere, more spartan than its neighbour to the north. Lycurgus's law-code penalised those who openly neglected to be as good as possible; and those who shirked the effort required to keep the laws were not thought of as full citizens. (See Strathclyde Region )
Strathclyde Region, lately the local government administrative area in Scotland which encompasses Little Sparta. A barn there was coverted into a garden temple to display art works, after the fashion of the one in which Canova showed his sculpures. Strathclyde Region refused to recognise that the temple might be entitled to rates relief (partial or total exemption from local property tax).
Their tax assessors refused to visit Little Sparta to confirm the accuracy of their assessment, and letters were not fruitful. Eventually an official was sent to seize art works for sale to pay the unpaid rates; and this began the Little Spartan War, revolving largely around state recognition or non-recognition of art (or, indeed, any domain outside the legal or fiscal, defined by them in their terms). The Scottish Arts Council - despite legal obligation to do so - refused to advise or intervene. Spectacular hypocrisy was involved, in that Strathclyde Region was simultaneously promoting a Garden Festival in Glasgow including work by Finlay and persecuting him and his garden. (It is not possible for any man, inaided, to be as contemptible as an organisation' - Chamfort )
Swearing: 'Sir, in the Academy it is not done to use words that are not in the dictionary' (the Abbé de Renal, quoted by Chamfort). 'Well! There's one hint more: there's swearing ignorantly I'th darke, vainely; and there's swearing I'th light, gloriously' (Abiezer Coppe, English revolutionary).'Only foul oaths can introduce a religious element into correspondence with bureaucrats'(Table Talk of Ian Hamilton Finlay,1985).
Terror/ virtue: as 1989 showed, liberals and moderates would prefer to think about only the latter term of the pair, as if much of non- revolutionary history was not, as Hegel put it, a slaughterbench. This pusiianimity underlies much of the opposition to intelligent scrunity of Finlay's work, and was certainly important in the French War. It is, predictably, based on a misunderstanding of history: 'If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the mainspring of popular government in time of war is both virtue and terror: virtue without which terror is desastrous; terror without virtue is impotent' (Robespierre). Note that, contrary to revisionist theory, Robespierre espouses, inseparably, both terms of the dialectic.
The War of the Letter was the attempt made by Saint-Just Vigilantes and other friends and supporters of Finlay to get the cancellation of the Versailles commission reversed. Letters were sent by the Finlays and their friends: concrete poets, critics, curators, film makers, novelists, painters, poets, professors, sculptors, the Directors of the Tate Gallery in Liverpool and the Tate Gallery in London, and many others; they were sent to the French President, English and Scotish MPs and MEPs, French diplomats and politicians, the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, English, Scottish and French newspapers and magazines (see journalism) and arts organisations on both sides of the Channel - and many others. Most went unanswered; none was answered satisfactorily. (see letters.) 'The ugliness of our time has a retroactive force ', said Kraus.
Words to conclude. Some moderates may feel on looking at the Desmoulins Connection that the issues it broaches are details, fusses over nothing, best forgotten; that the Desmoulins Connection has limited artistic appeal, and that it would be better if Finlay were producing his 'real' work, away from 'politics'. Some liberals may doubt that state institutions would behave as detailed here. (They should heed Kraus' remarks on the accuracy of The Last Days of Mankind, his dramatic account of the First World War and its milieu: 'The most impossible deeds reported here really happened. The most glaring inventions are quotations'.) The glosses above, the Desmoulins Connection itself, should have made such 'liberal'/ 'moderate' misreadings impossible. If art is to be other than decorative and consumable - part of the 'heritage industry'- then it must engage with the rest of life. The Follies War should make us all alarmed that cultural commentary can be knowingly mendacious and cynical, leaving properly informed discussion to a minority. The performance of current cultural (and other) journalism suggests that these channels of comunication are now treacherous and unreliable, or at best silted up. The Little Spartan War reveals the almost thoughtless thoughtlessness of bureaucracy, and its indifference to everything except money. The French War suggests that this malaise extends beyond regional government and local arts administration to infect national government and ministries of culture, all opaque to enquiry or criticism; and this over the history of the French Revolution, whose grounding in Rousseau and the Enlightement supposedly lies behind all liberal governments world-wide. Goethe said of the first great victory of the Revolutionary French armies that it opened a new epoch in the history of the world. He also said 'in the beginning was the deed '. Finlay's words, works, acts, deeds in the realm of the aesthetic open up again a possible rapproachment of the personal and the political; to ask that it be reduced to 'art-for-art's-sake' is to ignore history, and to impoverish art and ourselves.