Du Pessimisme

Man never ceases to wonder why he is unhappy. Although pessimism has always existed, it seems to have flourished in certain periods of our history. The end of the French Revolution and of the Empire marked the return to an Ancien Régime which left little to be hoped for. Romanticism and Schopenhauer fuelled the despair and fed upon it. Byron, Leopardi, Chateaubriand, Poe and Baudelaire sang of the depression which accompanies passions, dejection, boredom and melancholy. The history of progress is that of disenchantment. Modernity was disowned as soon as it dawned. In a world in which God is “dying,” and man has turned evil, syphilis, urbanisation and industrialisation leave us feeling hopeless. Sustained by the most celebrated writers, pessimism invaded the 19th century from Southern to Northern Europe. It almost comes as a surprise that Freud and psychoanalysis should have emerged so late in a society in which anguish and depression had ruled unchallenged for so long, and more so in Paris than in any other capital. The 20th century would usher in an even more devastating apocalypse than the one anticipated by writers and philosophers. Germany may have had a pessimistic mindset, but France experienced it with passion and still stubbornly cultivates it for specific reasons that the author attempts to elucidate. He examines without compromise or militantism the causes of a phenomenon that shows no signs of abating.