Lipstick Traces (39 page)

This could be contained. As a public space the Tabou was a secret. The invasion of Notre-Dame by another band of lettrists was a different story.

At 11:10
A.M.
on 9 April 1950, four young men—one got up from head to foot as a Dominican monk—entered Notre-Dame in Paris. Easter high mass was in progress; there were ten thousand people from all over the world in the cathedral. “The false dominican,” as the press called him—Michel Mourre, twenty-two—took advantage of a pause after the credo and mounted the altarplace. He began to read a sermon written by one of his co-conspirators, Serge Berna, twenty-five.

Today Easter day of the Holy Year

here

under the emblem of Notre-Dame of Paris

I accuse

the universal Catholic Church of the lethal diversion of our living strength toward an empty heaven

I accuse

the Catholic Church of swindling

I accuse

the Catholic Church of infecting the world with its funereal morality of being the running sore on the decomposed body of the West

Verily I say unto you: God is dead

We vomit the agonizing insipidity of your prayers

for your prayers have been the greasy smoke over the battlefields of our Europe

Go forth then into the tragic and exalting desert of a world where God is dead

and till this earth anew with your bare hands

with your PROUD hands

with your unpraying hands

Today Easter day of the Holy Year

Here under the emblem of Notre-Dame of France

we proclaim the death of the Christ-god, so that Man may live at last.

The cataclysm that followed went beyond anything expected by Mourre and his fellows, who first planned merely to let loose a few red balloons. The organist, warned that a disruption might take place, drowned out Mourre just after he pronounced the magic words “God is dead.” The rest of the speech was never delivered: swords drawn, the cathedral’s Swiss Guards rushed the conspirators and attempted to kill them. Mourre’s comrades took to the altar to shield him—one, Jean Rullier, twenty-five, had his face slashed open. The blasphemers escaped—his habit streaked with Rullier’s blood, Mourre gaily blessed the worshippers as he made for the exit—and were captured, rather rescued, by the police: having chased the four to the Seine, the crowd was on the verge of lynching them. An accomplice had a get-away car ready; seeing the mob advancing on the quai, he didn’t wait. Marc, O and Gabriel Pomerand, present in the cathedral, slipped away and headed straight for Saint-Germain-des-Prés to spread the news.

The context of this event, which made the papers all over the world and is now forgotten, is no longer obvious. In 1950 religion had been granted a new respect, a new silence in its face. The campaign to get women off the job and back into the kitchen was matched by a campaign to get everyone back to church. The pope—Pius XII, an antisemite whose fascist sympathies were only lightly veiled—was treated by even the secular press as beyond criticism, a dispensation never granted John XXIII, or for that matter John Paul II. The action of the Notre-Dame four would be an outrage today; in its time it was tantamount to murder.

The following day the
New York Times
devoted its first four pages, four full pages, to Easter-around-the-world. The lead stories featured the Fifth Avenue parade and the pope’s homily on the social gospel; the “untoward” Notre-Dame incident received the same number of lines as an item from rainy London:

In the late morning there was an “Easter Parade,” stimulated by an offer of one of London’s popular papers of a £50 prize for the best dressed woman seen in Central London. Radio, stage and screen stars braved the weather wearing their best finery.

In Paris Notre-Dame was front-page news in banner headlines.
L’Humanité,
the Communist Party daily, denounced it. In more liberal terms the unaffiliated
Combat
did the same: “One recognizes the right of each person to believe, or not believe, in God. One recognizes as well that farce is necessary, and that, in certain circumstances, even practical jokes are defensible. But . . .” Sticking to its role as the popular forum for the avant-garde, the paper opened its pages to a debate on the matter: led by André Breton, much of surrealist Paris rallied to the defense in letters that ran for days.

The basic tone of these letters was oddly nostalgic. What was odd was the nostalgia for a past that had never quite happened, for great days that had not exactly been lived, for an explosion that never took place. The surrealists joyously claimed patrimony over a great public event, but within that joy was a vacuum of shame over their twenty-year wait in cafes and galleries for bastard children to fulfill their legacy. “It is fitting that the blow should have been struck here, at the very heart of the octopus that is still strangling the universe,” Breton wrote of Notre-Dame. “It was there too that, in our youth, I and some of the men who have been and are my traveling companions—Artaud, Crevel, Eluard, Peret, Prévert, Char and many others—sometimes dreamed of striking it.” In all his years as a tribune of revolt, had Breton ever yielded up so much surrealist territory, ever conceded that as against an event, even a false one, a dream was just a dream? Mourre “took action,” René Char wrote, as if Mourre’s crystallization of the surrealist spirit, if that was what it was, suddenly revealed Char’s years as a Resistance fighter as no more than a contemplative substitute for a confrontation with real life. Showering apologies, the bad fathers came forth to claim their sons, but the sons did not claim the fathers.

Of the four “illuminati”
(Combat),
only Mourre was held: the archbishop
charged him with impersonating a priest. Dispatched for psychiatric testing, Mourre won
Combat’s
editorial reversal when the court-appointed alienist, one Dr. Robert Micoud, summarized Mourre’s “frenzied idealism,” “contempt for external perception,” “prereflexive cogito,” “indifferent ocular-cardiac reflexes,” “ortho-sexuality (shamefacedly admitted),” “ability to go straight to the heart of a doctrine” and “to travel in an instant through various epochs,” “irritation at the suggestion that Being may have preceded Existence,” “ideational fugacity,” “surprise attacks by sonorous parachute-drops and nose-diving neologisms,” and “exaggerated angular paranoiac logic, in which there is more rigorous narrowness than narrow rigorousness.”

This was a masterpiece of French literary criticism. Clinically, it was also accurate—but mixing politics with his prescription, Dr. Micoud blew himself out of the water. Mourre might cause no more trouble in cathedrals, the psychiatrist reported, but short of confinement in an asylum he posed a definite threat to “public tranquility in middle-class districts.”

Dr. Micoud had gone too far, a second scandal drowned out the first, and after eleven days in custody Mourre was set free. Three months later he wrote
Malgré le blaspheme
(In Spite of Blasphemy), a book so acceptable to the church that the archbishop, the very man from whom Mourre seized the mass, recommended that all church libraries stock it. Once past biographies of Charles Maurras (1868–1952), the charismatic leader of the monarchist, protofascist faction Action française, and of Felicité de Lamennais, a nineteenth-century crusader for religious liberty, Mourre became a hack ecclesiastical encyclopedist; he died, respectable and bygone, in 1977. The Notre-Dame incident, one
Combat
correspondent noted at the height of the furor, was if nothing else “a fine beginning for a literary career.”

In Spite of Blasphemy
remains an extraordinary document. “Why,” Mourre wrote, “had we not been able to adapt ourselves to the world?”

Armed with their complex-detectors, the psychiatrists could always pin it on our anti-social attitude. It was very strange, however, that there were so many anti-socialites and paranoiacs, very strange that an epidemic of mental diseases had suddenly laid low the whole of French youth. In this world, where we had been looking for life, we had found only wreckage. We could have dreamt, as I had, of the good old days of prosperity or tried to make a pilgrimage through the old institutions which once spread their blessings over the face of the earth; but all we could find were empty structures without a soul, all cracked, crumbling and condemned. Ghosts of splendour, memories of vitality—in spite of ourselves, we had to indulge in a romantic taste for ruins and dead glory.

We would
force
ourselves to keep quiet at the mention of our old dreams, accept the ruins and be happy in them, and become ruins ourselves, self-conscious, self-satisfied ruins. We had reached the point where we systematically went out of our way to find ugliness, evil and error in everything, but for most of us this was undoubtedly only a desperate show of bravado, a mask to conceal our disappointment at not having found truth, beauty and good.

In the tradition that stretches from Augustine’s
Confessions
to the sermons of Little Richard (“I was a drug addict! I was a homosexual! I sang
for the devil!”), Mourre’s nihilist testimony only meant that the worse the sins, the greater the ultimate piety—or, as Raoul Vaneigem would put it, “pissing on the altar is still a way of paying homage to the Church.” Always, Mourre explained, he looked for a whole truth, an absolute: God had promised it. Marxism, existentialism, and their like were no more than dessicated versions of God’s promise—since without God man is nothing, they were, like all other humanisms, megalomaniacal solipsisms. Because God’s promise never left him, Mourre said, he found himself incapable of living out either the abstractions of philosophy or the routines of everyday life: “It was God that I had to kill objectively in order to be free.” Announcing the death of God, Mourre felt that death fall back on him, a reeling blow that felt like a kiss: Christ’s kiss to the Grand Inquisitor. The circle closed; Mourre had written “the history of a failure,” and now it was over. No wonder the archbishop was happy.

From the first day, the papers made the most of the irony that “the false dominican” had, once, actually prepared for the priesthood. That was not the half of it. It had been a seeker’s road; on it one could travel in in instant through various epochs. To read
In Spite of Blasphemy
today is to begin in Paris in the 1940s—and then to find yourself in the mid-1960s, when every question was open, then in the early 1970s, when so many one-time questioners desperately surrendered to answers. It is to feel yourself carried forward to London in 1976, when Mourre’s “We would become ruins” would have been painted on punk jackets if the grammar hadn’t been too fancy and Jamie Reid’s Sex Pistols slogan “
BELIEVE IN THE RUINS
” wasn’t already on them, to move backward to May 1968, when “
SOON TO BE PICTURESQUE RUINS
” spray-painted on the boulevard St. Michel was graffiti advertising a vacation for tourists the new revolution promised would never be born, and then to cross the boulevard St. Germain to the rue de Four, to walk into a cafe called Moineau’s, in the early 1950s, when a few people who called themselves the Lettrist International set out to keep the promise Mourre had made and broken. For there was another tradition of the absolute, moving alongside that of sin and redemption: the long line of fatal spells, the tradition of seeking ugliness, evil, and error in everything, the legend of the attempt to turn the mask of disappointment over the absence of truth, beauty, and good into a real face. As with the music of the Sex Pistols, the noise of the dadaists, and the prophecies of the groups that formed
around Guy Debord, the road Michel Mourre took to Notre-Dame is itself a version of the story I am telling, just as his event was sketched out in the versions that preceded it and was engraved in the versions that followed it. In the years that brought him to the cathedral, Mourre acted out a secret history of a time to come, a time that would never know his name.