From Chateaubriand to Brexit: the Double Bind of Modernity

On the occasion of the Brexit drama, in order to illustrate the penetrating light that literature casts on the ideological and material relationships of forces that make and unmake history, we can do no better than begin with a text by Chateaubriand. This text, taken from his History of English Literature, was so important to the author of René that he reproduced it almost word for word in his Memoires from Beyond the Grave. With an elegance rarely equaled, it highlights the major European problem inherited from the Enlightenment, to which, for two centuries, France and England have been equally confronted, but on opposite terms: the aspiration to equality, on the one hand, authority on the other. France has overcome this contradiction, not without difficulty, by seeking to reconcile its unitary, vertical model, which has governed the…