When Talleyrand, romantic adventurer and faithless bishop, went riding through the American forests followed by Courtiade, the most impeccable of servants, he was trying wih some difficulty to pass the time and distract his mind from the dire news every ship was bringing from France. Amid the dense vegetation, far off the beaten path, a cry would sometimes ring out: "Courtiade, are you there?" Back would come the respectful and distant reply: "Heavens, yes, monseigneur, I'm here." Talleyrand would smile at his own incongruity as a feudal remnant now on the other side of the frontier of la societé, and he would look around. At such times he had the impression that he was moving against the stream of history, shifting both in time and in space as he gradually left behind him cities, villages, farms, and fields and ended up among the beaver hunters in Conneticut, wading throufh vast swamps and getting lost in the woods. In those images he seemed to see, decomposing before his eyes, the improbable amalgam of civilization which was returning little by little to its simple elements. "With every day that passes," he noted, "we lose sight of more of those inventions that our needs have made necessary as they proliferate. We seem to be travelling backward in the history of the progress of the human spirit." But that era of "progress" had many surprises in store. As he came up against the absolute basics, Talleyrand encountered two exemplary characters: the woodsman and the fisherman. He drew their portraits, which turned out to be not the profiles of two forms that had been abandoned by history in its earliest days but the foreshadowings of two faces that history was about to assume: the silhouettes of the first new men, who already awaited Tocqueville. In there native wilderness they were preparing to take the stage, as representatives of the masses. Indeed, they represented those who, in an age devoid of irony, would be called "mass men." The odor specificus of the masses came to Talleyrand not in the city but amid the desolation of untouched nature. It was a curious fact, one to be noted down. Talleyrand attached those two portraits, as instructive clinical cases, to his "Memoir on the Commercial Relations between the United States and England," which he was to read at the Institut de France on April 4, 1797.
The woodsman. "The American woodsman is interested in nothing. Any notion of sensitivity is foreign to him. Those boughs so elegantly sprouted by nature, the fine foliage, the bright color that enlivens a part of the forest, the deeper green that darkens another part—all this means nothing to him. He has no memories to call upon in any particular place. His only thought is for the number of ax-strokes required to chop down a tree. He has never planted anything; he does not know such pleasures. Any tree he might plant is worthless to him, because he will never see it when it has grown sufficiently large to be chopped down. Destruction is what keeps him alive. Destruction is everywhere; hence, every place suits him. He cares nothing for the field where he has done his work, because his work is only toil and no idea of sweetness is associated with it. What emerges from his hands does not pass through all the stages of growth that so touch the farmer's heart. He does not follow the destiny of his products. He does not know the pleasure of new ventures. And so long as he does not forget to take his ax with him, he has no regrets about leaving the spot he has dwelled in for years."
The fisherman. "The American fisherman acquires from his profession a spirit that is almost equally indifferent. His affections, his interest, his life lie on the margins of the society to which he thinks he belongs. We would be prejudiced if we believed that he is an especially useful member of it. For we must not compare these fishermen with those of Europe or believe that this is the way to train sailors—to create sturdy, skilled men of the sea. In America, except for the inhabitants of Nantucket, who hunt whales, fishing is a job for the lazy. The only courage these men show is to go two leagues offshore when there is no threat of bad weather, a mile when the weather is uncertain. And the hook is the only harpoon they know how to handle. Hence, their skill is no more than a little trick; and their activity, which consists in hanging one arm out of a boat, closely resembles idleness.
"They have no love for any particular place and know the land only by the ugly house where they live. It is the sea that feeds them. Thus, their homeland is determined by a few cod more or less. If these seem to decrease in one place, the fishermen move off at once and seek another homeland, where there are more cod.
"When certain political writers said that fishing was a form of agriculture, they made a statement that sounds witty but that contains no truth. All the qualities, all the virtues associated with agriculture are wanting in the man devoted to fishing. Agriculture produces patriots in the true sense of the word. Fishing can create only cosmopolitans"
It was not a La Bruyère of barbarity who spoke in these terms to the members of the Institut, but a sociologist of the age of inflation and of paramilitary gangs. Around him echo Rathenau and Hitler, and the hoboes clinging to freight cars, and the mounted police. We see not the trunks of majestic trees but waste paper fluttering over Wall Street in the Sunday silence. Removing Talleyrand's Woodsman from his frame of sylvan exoticism, we discover Jünger's Arbeiter: the uniforms of the soldier and the worker are already superimposed on him, without there being any need to unleash storms of steel. This man is a trigger of technical violence: his place can be any place, because his mind has lost the mnemotechnical loci from which it can hang images ("he has no memories to call upon from any particular place"). His shadow is that parasite the Fisherman, whom society absentmindedly counts among its members, though he does not belong to society. His inertia is malign and hostile; he is one of the migrant Lumpen, the proletarian starfish.
Woodsman and Fisherman will one day discover they are enemies; for the present, in the American wilderness, they are united in their hatred for the earth that still generously envelops them. It is a hatred for all that grows and that, in growing, becomes sweet and fades. Their pace is different from everyone else's: they strike blows, they pull and tug—gestures that are a metaphor for those of the gambler who rolls the dice. And in this devotion to the blow lies their cosmopolitan mission: the blow is the same everywhere ("destruction is everywhere; hence, every place suits him"); the plant has the flavor of a single place. The garrulous citoyens whom Talleyrand had left behind in Paris were still good, solid, agricultural patriots. But they already seemed archaic and out-of-date compared to these two new characters, who, beyond the frontier, were acting out the gestures of burgeoning history.
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