The Agonizing Storm of Suicide: A Spiritual Symptom and the Disorder of the Modern World

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[Le Suicide. 1834 (engraving) · Emile Antoine Bayard. Private Collection /Bridgeman Images]

Every age is inclined to look around and believe it is witnessing an unprecedented rise in suicides. In the seventeenth century, British newspapers warned of the spread of the “English malady,” as voluntary death was then called. Two centuries later, French alienists sounded the same alarm. By the late nineteenth century, Durkheim was watching the rising number of cases in France with concern. Perhaps there has never been an age in which no one said, “The number of cases is rising.” Yet when we compare the data available over one or two hundred years, where there are epidemiological studies, we find a surprising stability that may suggest that this kind of death is part of human history.

Statistics, however, are not my subject here. I would like to comment on a poem. I begin with this brief reflection on the perception of “proliferation” because that is precisely the impression that animates Charles Béranger’s verses in Le Suicide, published in 1834 and available here at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

It is a lyrical meditation on the feeling that suicide is spreading through the modern world like a fury, a scourge, a moral fever. It is still some way from the scientific or sociological analysis that Durkheim would propose a few decades later. Curiously, though, the poem and the sociologist converge on one crucial point. Suicide appears here as something more than a private, isolated act: a collective symptom, a metaphysical malady, a spiritual crisis of civilization.

Béranger is clearly a moralist, in the sense of an observer of manners and mores. Above all, he is a lyrical prophet. His poem creates an atmosphere heavy with hopelessness, which paradoxically points toward a possible theology of salvation. Between the cry and the supplication, between denunciation and prayer, there emerges something like a tragic psalm of modernity.

From the opening lines, the tone is openly apocalyptic:

La mort semble avoir pris possession du monde, / Le suicide y règne…

[Death seems to have taken possession of the world, / Suicide reigns there…]

Death appears as a sovereign power, and suicide, its “daring athlete” [Athlète audacieux], travels the world marking lives with a “hideous, fleshless” hand. Suicide is given a demonic, almost biblical personification. This kind of death is conceived as a moral epidemic, a cosmic force of devastation, rather than as a subjective decision. The image of the hurricane that “gronde, mugit, éclate et tonne” turns an individual act into a collective storm.

This lyrical treatment of suicide can be read as a late echo of Augustine’s criticism of mors spontanea, as though Béranger were a Romantic heir to De Ciuitate Dei, transplanted into modern disorder. For Augustine, suicide signified a rupture with the divine order. For Béranger, it is a sign that this order has already been forgotten. We live in an age in which freedom has turned to poison:

Te fit libre. C’est là de ses dons le plus beau ; / Mais il ne t’a pas dit de te faire bourreau !

[He made you free. It is the fairest of his gifts. / But he did not tell you to make yourself an executioner!]

Freedom without transcendence is freedom turned against itself. At this point, the aesthetics of the poem touch a moral nerve in the Christian tradition. Human freedom is affirmed, with a warning about the abyss it opens when cut off from grace.

I would like to draw attention, however, to another aspect of the moralist poet’s perspective. Béranger’s criticism reaches beyond the suicidal individual. He denounces the cultural structures of his age and casts a sharp eye on the mass media:

Tous les journaux, ces trompettes vivantes / De la vieille bavarde à la centuple voix…

[All the newspapers, those living trumpets / Of the garrulous old woman with a hundredfold voice…]

The press, with its “hundredfold voices,” makes a morbid spectacle of the names of the dead, commoners and kings alike, reinforcing contagion. The poem suggests that modern culture has turned pain into a headline, death into noise, and private suffering into public spectacle. In a Romantic and religious register, this criticism anticipates something later addressed by thinkers such as Debord, Foucault, and Sontag: the transformation of suffering into spectacle and the normalization of death as an object of symbolic consumption.

I might have given this very brief commentary on Le Suicide the title “Poets, Save Us: A Cry for the Art That Redeems.” I did consider it, because one of the poem’s most moving passages is its appeal to poets. Béranger addresses art with an imperative that is both moral and redemptive:

Ô poètes, chantez, de vos chants les plus doux ! … Que votre voix éclate / En un cantique saint qui console et qui flatte 

[O poets, sing your sweetest songs!
… Let your voice ring out / In a sacred hymn that comforts and

caresses]

Here poetry seems to be conceived as something beyond an expression of pain, as a spiritual remedy. Amid the metaphysical collapse of the century, the poet is invoked as a prophet of renewal, capable of recovering love, faith, and hope. It is fitting that the ending transfigures the storm of the opening into a humble prayer:

Grand Dieu, mets en leur cœur du calme et du courage.

[Great God, put calm and courage in their hearts.]

It is the supplication of someone who recognizes the limits of reason and poetry and, in a final gesture, yields to transcendence. This ending might be read as a poetic theology of patience, akin to the Augustinian patientia that replaces Stoic fortitudo. Here it takes the form of a lyrical cry from an ailing world, with the force of an appeal rather than a dogma.

From an aesthetic point of view, the poem is typical of nineteenth-century French moral Romanticism in its grandiloquent diction, cosmic imagery, and prophetic patterns of repetition. At the same time, it stands in tension with modern discourses that sought to secularize and psychologize suicide, as Durkheim would do sixty years later. Béranger insists, by contrast, on the theological character of the crisis.

His aesthetic is thus, paradoxically, both dated and profoundly contemporary. It is dated because it no longer persuades modern readers who have distanced themselves from sacred language. It is contemporary because it senses the metaphysical unease that accompanies the loss of meaning and continues to haunt us in other forms.

 “Le Suicide” is a poem poised between denunciation and prayer, between the aesthetics of the tragic sublime and the hope of spiritual salvation. Its power lies less in offering answers than in restaging the struggle within the modern soul as it faces emptiness and the temptation of the end.

Like a Romantic Augustine, Béranger calls for a voice that will comfort us and will still believe that life, however fragile, is worth living.

  Prof. (and student) Alexandre H. Reis My translation of the poem appears below.  

Le Suicide (Suicide), by Charles Béranger
27 August 1834

Death seems to have taken possession of the world.
Suicide reigns, and, furious victor,
Its voice vibrates in the air: the hurricane roars,
Bellows, bursts, and thunders. Daring athlete,
It marks with its hideous, fleshless hand
The heads it means to take, and we see its plunder
Grow by the day, without effort or pity.
People want to die. Why? Because others have died.

Death begets death, like an avalanche
Gathering force over this declining world.

The destroying Angel stamps the fairest brows
With fiery, ravaged, black, and deeply bitten marks
Plain to all, even to the undiscerning.
Its arm threatens everything, like thunder
That destroys the vine and the olive at once,
The farmer’s roof, the boatman’s raft.

Yet the storm is brief. A light wind scatters it.
Another tempest roars, blowing over humankind
The icy breath of a dark despair.

Our world lies under a thick cloud.
The light that escapes it is dreary and lights up only
Hatred or scepticism, fear or anger.
We live on selfishness or disbelief,
And God seems to have forgotten to be good to us.

God has not sent his heavenly messenger,
As when he clears the sky in answer to the farmer’s prayer.
Days follow days, and despair is what remains.

Every day brings an immense clamour
Of death. All the newspapers, those living trumpets
Of the garrulous old woman with a hundredfold voice,
Display in mourning on their bloodstained pages
The names of the children of the people, and of the children of kings,

Of princes, of the powerful. Everywhere suicide
Insinuates itself. Its pallid breath has poisoned
The air we breathe. I wake trembling,
Afraid I have lost the friend I left dreaming
When I parted from him that night, not far from the river.

And I fall asleep, steeped in bitter pain
At sufferings voiced in a thousand different cries,
A veritable chorus of the damned, inspired by the hells.

Each day I fear the evils of the day before.
Man who wishes to die, the God who watches over you
Made you free. It is the fairest of his gifts.
But he did not command you to make yourself an executioner!

What? Lovers leave life together,
Finding in their hearts nothing more to invite them
To pleasure and happiness, which they no longer understand!

Ah, love itself becomes a dreadful mystery
When our soul is insensible to the great name of God
And he reaches us only as an indistinct sound,
A hollow word without power, like an infant’s babble.

Can all the days of hope have passed?
Has God no voice left to reach our hearts?
Men of fifteen cry out their pain,
And their voices do not lie. To prove it, they die!

Death, always death! Oh, for those who remain,
Alas, to live is now a burdensome duty!
Where are we to find, where are we to seek calm and hope,
If they are absent from the heart of joyful childhood?

What poet, in a tender, melodious voice,
Will intoxicate the universe with harmonious sounds,
Open wide our hearts, and moisten our eyes
With tears of joy that bring relief to the soul?

O poets, sing! Yours are the flames
That let us see, through the ages past,
The ages to come, revealed to our eyes.

Tell us of the future, of its power, of its glory.
Make us love God. Tell us the story
Of the happiness he keeps for our children yet to come.

Why these songs of death? Is your power
Only to bring despair? Let your voice ring out
In a sacred hymn that comforts and caresses,
And makes death retreat from us.

O poets, sing your sweetest songs!

The world will listen. When the globe we inhabit
Was still ablaze, when the multitude of men
Was still held captive in a breath of the divine,
Matter was all and intelligence was nothing.

God said, guiding that shapeless mass,
Which trembled at the sound of his loving voice:
“Go forward without ceasing. Progress is your law.”

His voice calls it out still, and we, men without faith,
Forget our sacred origin and seek,
We seek to halt the divine power,
To turn back in life and annihilate ourselves,
We who can begin nothing and bring nothing to an end!

Life holds us in a sublime web.
Its foundation is the unknown, but its summit is visible.
It is God who draws us, raising by his hand
An eternal tomorrow, the shelter of the universe!

Ah, why hurry to leave life
Before it has had time to ripen?
Happiness and faith do not lie in death.
Man, whether commoner or king, to live is your destiny!

Death is an empty word that does not move the wise.
It is a new country, a distant land
That all will visit, and that owes to all
A whole world of love, happiness, and pleasure.

But one must reach it by the common road.
A frail and sickly existence
Is the lot of a man ill-conceived,
Ill-formed, ill-begotten, whom his mother received
As a fatal seed of pain and anguish.

You pronounce an anathema on the world that wounds you.
You call for death and think it will bring you
Rest, but rest cannot lie there.

Seek elsewhere, seek. Universal life
Holds hidden treasures. Woe to whoever falters
In the infinite space it offers us to cross,
And which we cannot leave, even in dying!

Seek. God, who fills the worlds and the spaces,
God, who for a moment hid his face from you,
Made you for life and love. His hand
Set supports along the road.

Rest a hundred times, but make the journey.
Great God, put calm and courage in their hearts.

Translation by Alexandre H. Reis