ROGER LEWIS

What frightened Pascal Bruckner as a baby, I wonder? Because something certainly leapt on him in the dark to make him so fearful and caustic about emotional commitment, romantic yearnings and tender feelings.

He’s French, so help me, and from my own experience of the République (I resided in Normandy in the 90s), by the age of seven your average Frenchman, in addition to his racing bicycle, possesses a small moustache and a string of mistresses.

They are in love with love, the French, and make exaggerated Inspector Clouseau noises while scattering rose petals on restaurant tables.

They squirt themselves with Givenchy while Charles Aznavour warbles on the gramophone and Edith Piaf ne regrette rien, which I always thought slightly morally lax of her. If they are not doing it, they are looking forward to it.

“The best part of love is when you’re going up the stairs,” said French Prime Minister Clemenceau – to do what exactly – hunt for your reading glasses?

Bruckner’s book seeks to reverse the sentimental trend. His aim is to strip away the illusions and false expectations connected with all matters of the heart.

It has to be said, he does a pretty thorough demolition job, starting with religion.

Our author points out that any religion based on a doctrine of love – I think he must mean Christianity – has a history of persecution and violence, bile and hatred.

The Inquisition, for example, tortured and burned people to save their souls… Yes, yes, we’ve had all this from Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, so let’s move on.

Shakespeare said that love is merely a madness, and so it is – the churning emotions that inspired so many grand operas; the jealousy and fear of rejection; the impossible bind of believing you can’t live without someone, nor can you live with them.

We’ve all been there, usually as teenagers. We grow out of it and acquire mortgages.

Bruckner, however, is obsessed with the devastation love can cause, the adultery that takes place, the cheating and the lying, the sheer selfishness, as people inevitably succumb to a surge of shameless behaviour. What many think of as love is, according to Bruckner, merely lust – sexual passion. When someone says “I love you” what they mean is “I want you”.

He’s rather puritanical about sex, is our Bruckner. He mentions with approval that “Mahatma Gandhi liked to spend the night alongside naked women to test his resistance”.

And if he doesn’t approve of randiness, Bruckner certainly puts a dampener on what courtship can lead to, ie people pairing off and getting married.

Our author is one of those continental philosophers (complete with long flowing hair –- AC Grayling has imported the annoying look to England) who goes in for revolutionary ideas about transforming the established order.

He’s against the traditional bourgeois family unit, because it is “domestic imprisonment”.

Marriage is a confidence trick, where “one’s excessive hopes are dashed by a mixture of servitude and cruelty”. To be married for a long time is absolutely no proof that the institution is a success – it’ll just mean or imply a prolongation of “the agonies of bitterness and disappointment”.

Starting with the Queen and Prince Philip, I’d like to see couples who have celebrated their Diamond Wedding Anniversary give Bruckner a piece of their mind.

As for children, Bruckner can’t see joy there, either.

“We love our children so that some day they will abandon us,” he states. Eh, we love our children so that some day they can become independent and fulfilled. Possibly the translation is at fault.

Abandonner doesn’t mean abandon as in reject, so much as to give up, to hand over, to relinquish. A crucial difference.

But on the general evidence of this book, a best-seller in France, Bruckner is a grouch. Love means forging personal attachments and bonds. These he doesn’t want.

Love and the responsibilities it brings impinge on his notions of personal freedom.

This simply seems sad and lonely to me – although I do know people like this. They end up drinking themselves to death in London’s gentlemen’s clubs.

“Unmarried persons,” we are told, “have richer personal relationships” – richer than whom or what, we are not told.

I look at my own private life and I don’t see poverty except in the financial sense.

My wife and I enjoy our routines, our cosy familiarity. We accept each other’s flaws and daftness – though now I will be interrogated about what I may mean by Anna’s flaws and daftness.

We laugh at the same silly things, can speak volumes to each other without saying a word, squabble like a pair of furious hens over trivialities, come together over disasters, such as the boiler going kaput. This is what builds up after 35 years, a country or continent with two citizens.

Bruckner’s vision of the future is chilling, though it is already coming about. He sees a world of solitary souls who form their relationships exclusively online via social networking sites.

By conducting virtual liaisons in cyberspace, with genetically engineered babies born in laboratories, “the terror of the preliminaries is avoided”.

Not only will Romeo no longer need to meet Juliet in the flesh – with all the heartache and uncertainty real encounters can cause – he will also not have to pay for the candlelit dinner. – Daily Mail