significations” (CDRi: 776 ). On the other, he employs a term from the
Critiqueto describe objective spirit ontologically as “culture as practico-
inert” (FIiii: 44 ). These features were shared by Mallarme ́’s entire
generation: “The incestuous eroticism, the taste for failure and for
non-Being, the desperate idealism, the Manicheanism, the preciocity,
the nihilism: these themes pervade theobjective spiritof the period, and
all of them express the historical and social connection as much as, if not
more than, the history of a particular individual.”^26 Again, it is the
family which mediates that objective spirit and its concrete incarnation
in the individual lives of its members.
Sartre is employing what has emerged as a methodological principle:
the relation between the individual and his sociohistorical milieu.
It builds on the root concept of “situation” that is introduced inBN
(^26) M 83. For example, he speaks of “the bourgeois brand of Manicheanism known as “distinc-
tion” (M 37 ). InThe Communists and Peace, in theCritique, and again in theFamily Idiot,
Sartre cites three generations of industrial families and their behavior as they strive to
distinguish themselves from the lower classes. The exchange of calling cards, the Victorian
mores, the wearing of uncomfortable clothing to exhibit the importance of self control and
the like, Sartre takes as a sign to the workers that they should be more thrifty and rest
content with their wages;
Within this bourgeois Manichean framework the poets transform themselves into pure
souls. Their asceticism is the very image of Victorian cant. Never do they resemble the
bourgeoisie more closely than when they attempt to set themselves apart from it; for they
wish to prove their superiority through denial, through their contempt for life and
nature, through negativity; whereas the bourgeoisie, unable to ground its privileges in
Being, claims to distinguish itself from the people by means of self-inflicted privations
and taboos, that is, through Negation. Thisfin de sie`clepoetry holds itself up as a mirror
in which the ghosts of defunct aristocrats can admire themselves. But what it really
reflects, despite itself, is the image of the great industrial and commercial families.
(M56)
This genealogical argument is a favorite of Sartre’s, whether to critique the generations of
industrialist capitalist families (inThe CritiqueandThe Communists and Peace)ortobe
pursued in tandem with the generations of poets and novelists, as we see here and will
observe again in the Flaubert study. Again, there is a common infection that afflicts these
three authors. Its symptoms are a misanthropy, a self-hatred that ends in a negative relation
to humanity in general, a metaphysics of pessimism, and an anti-Semitism. “These hollow
civil servants are receptacles for the whole society’s prejudices. They are its temporary
incarnation” (M 59 ). They imbibe the objective spirit of their time, especially their status in
the generational genealogy and their relation to the Second Empire with which they sustain a
love/hate relation: attacking its mores while seeking its favors: Baudelaire seeking public
recognition, Mallarme ́in pursuit of the civil servant’s pension, and Flaubert coveting the
rosette of the Legion of Honor, which he refused to wear after the debacle of Sedan where
the French Army was defeated wholesale and Napoleon himself captured by the Prussians.
Mallarme ́: the shadowy side of lucidity 391