He who has not lived before 1789 does not know the sweetness of living.
—Talleyrand (1754-1838)

Call it one man’s opinion; but Talleyrand happens to have been one of the most perspicacious and all-savoring of men. He had his faults but he was open to experience, well traveled and well read, eclectic, not at all doctrinate.

His remark has the ring of authority. It seems to articulate a general experience: life in the old regimes offered many satisfactions—of a healthy kind (“sweetness”). Life after the undoing of tradition is missing something important, at least to intelligent men of sensibility and good will.

“Before 1789” means before the loss of everyday experience in a society in which aristocratic, not mass-democratic, values and modes constituted the social paradigm; before the experience of State aristicide and before the divinization of democracy. It would be charitable to grant that Talleyrand had some idea of what he was talking about. He lived thirty five years before the Revolution and about fifty beyond it; long enough to recognize the steady drift (not only in France) toward democracy, that is, toward societies increasingly abandoning the traditional ideal of excellence and handing governance over to the Numbers, the mass who live, as John Buchan puts it, “for the day and their bellies.”

Talleyrand knew what life was like when the excellence advocated and symbolized by Christian aristocracy was an orienting ideal, the nucleus of acculturation. We know rather less, and the savants of democracy want to keep it that way: They know that the attainment of excellence and the clear recognition of superiority are “elitism,” an evil horrible to contemplate. Champions of Liberty and the open mind, they hide what they can and censor what they can not. Under their hand, things thin out, disappear. Pre-democratic European history; the achievement of the West in the fine arts, theology, and philosophy; even the history of the United States when it was still known (and loved) as a somewhat aristocratic republic: this has become forbidden knowledge; little of it remains on the bookshelves or in the school curricula. Print and film go more and more to things demotic and culturally exotic. Schools, libraries, government agencies, legislators, networks, and the press initiate or support generally covert attacks on intellect, factuality, particularity, and acquaintance with the Western heritage.

When one has lost something the heart if not the head knows to be immensely valuable, one may not want to be reminded of it. Hide, censor, discourage notice. One may even try to cheer up by telling oneself—and of course others— that what has been lost was not really valuable but, the more one thinks about it, actually evil—elitist, aristocratic.

Talleyrand suggests that, whatever its shortcomings, the aristocratic past was inspiriting—in everyday streets, not just in the polished halls of the Chateau d’Azay or Versailles. The pre-democratic past had the vigor, warmth, and “character” (the individual genuineness) of the personal life—which is also the poetic life and the only place where inwardness can grow. Aristocratic aegis favored and fostered that life which preceded the prefabricated and packaged life of machinisme. Aristocracy, particularly on the Continent, was agrarian, and the personal, the authentic life gives its best yields far from the madding crowd. Even in England, long inclined toward a more citified economy, aristocracy and gentry constituted a bloc generally dubious about and opposed to the encroachments of machine living. It was a plebeian conglomerate—the tinkers, traders, merchants, hawkers, build-scapers—that financed and in general peopled the early modern republics that edged toward democracy. These enterprising plebs, an ever-expanding segment of “the people,” wanted, and got, a milieu where “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” a world busier, faster, shriller, grimier, more demotic, and more impersonal than the old one. Talleyrand’s douceur owed much to aristocracy’s backwardness. Backwardness meant not only the countryside quietness sprinkled with villages and sleek and fleecy animals; it meant continuity as well, an easy thing to love, a supplier of love! In 1860 Marian Evans (George Eliot), that warm-souled genius, was still speaking for millions, not just for the noblesse: “I desire no change that will break the ties of the past.”