Stendhal

See also Chapter 92, 'The War of Rumi' in The Republic of Rumi: a Novel of Reality

“The reaction against Democracy in England and France is a very significant phenomenon,” Iqbal wrote in his notebook, Stray Reflections, in 1910. In his later work, The Blow of Moses (1936), Iqbal cited the French novelist Marie-Henri Beyle (1783-1842) – better known by one his pen names, Stendhal – as a manifestation of this reaction, and translated a quotation from Stendhal to the effect, “Democracy is a form of government in which heads are counter but not weighed”.

Stendhal was part of Napoleon’s administration and military, and remained skeptical about the struggle for the restoration of democracy after Napoleon. Apparently this attitude originated in an aristocratic bias and skepticism about the potential of the human being (two factors usually cited by Iqbal as the psychological reasons for the reaction against democracy in France and England).

The same skepticism seems to have prevented him from appealing to the nobler motives of his readers. Consequently, his fiction was starkly lacking in novelty, cathartic value and an appeal to imagination – elements that serve the basic purpose of all healthy stories in human society. Not surprisingly, his stories remained unpopular until the decadent trends, especially after the First World War in the 20th Century, found a respectable word for the lack of purpose in fiction: “realism”.

With an astonishing insight, Stendhal had foreseen this at least a century earlier, predicting that he would be rediscovered in 1935 (his revival started just around that time in the West; and through Iqbal’s famous translation a year later his quotation on democracy became the singularly most-often quoted jibe on the subject in Urdu).

Despite his pessimism, Stendhal’s wit is disarming. In the final analysis he comes out as a visionary who may have been connected with his society's “reaction against democracy” at the level of collective consciousness.