Jean Cocteau, French poet, “Being hated by idiots is the price you pay for not being one of them”

Jean Cocteau was born in 1889 in Maisons-Laffitte into a cultured, bourgeois Parisian family to parents who instilled in him a passion for the arts. Getting a start at a young age, he was a prolific avant-garde polymath of various arts who produced numerous highly regarded works for the theater, ballet, silver screen, art galleries and literature.

One of the constants across his artistic creations, all of which were essentially poetry, was imbuing them with mystery. The Frivolous Prince, a moniker that he got from one of his early works, held the belief that “the secret of poetry is to take things from the places in which habit has set them and reveal them from a different angle as though we see them for the first time.”

“The less a work of art is understood, the less quickly it will open its petals and the less quickly it will wither,” he once said.

He is known for the ballet Parade, which is considered the first modern ballet. He created it when he expressed interest in the developing a ballet and Sergey Diaghilev, the head of the Ballets Russes, challenged him with “étonne-moi” (surprise me). He would later use the quote in other works that he produced.

In his play La Machine infernale, which is an updated take on the story of Oedipus and Jocasta, who are completely helpless victims of fate in his version, he delved into another common theme, alienation. This was also present in his novel Les Enfants terrible and film La Belle et le bete (Beauty and the Beast), which happens to be one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite films.

Cocteau was part of the avant-garde art scene in Paris who counted among his friends artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, composers Darius Milhaud, Erik Satie, and Arthur Honegger, and poets Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, just to name a few. While he influenced them and they him, the person who is considered to have helped him truly come into his own was Raymond Radiguet.

Despite being his younger, he became Cocteau’s intellectual mentor, transforming and shaping Cocteau’s writing style. Radiguet persuaded Cocteau to avoid trendy and flash-in-the-pan literary movements.

The two were lovers but their intense relationship was cut short when Radiguet died of typhoid fever in 1923. This tragedy threw Cocteau into a deep depression which led to him becoming a opium addict. He would eventually cure himself of his addiction after two stays at a sanitarium, but he never fully got over losing Radiguet.

The Frivolous Prince spent his later years in Villefranche-sur-Mer on the south coast of France where he tried his hand at décor, where he refurbished the 14th-century Chapelle Saint-Pierre which was in ruins along with other projects. Cocteau passed away in October 1963 in Paris.

“Being hated by idiots is the price you pay for not being one of them”

Cocteau left us with many memorable and humorous quotes, but one that is perhaps a great reflection of Radiguet’s influence on him is as follows: “Being hated by idiots is the price you pay for not being one of them.” The polymath artist was always pushing the boundaries in the various art forms he delved into and at times receiving strong pushback and criticism.

Even in his personal life he took slack for publicly downplaying Hitler’s failings when he rose to power despite Nazi policies towards homosexual lifestyles. He defended his view by saying that Hitler was fighting his own homosexual desires.

The quote suggests that animosity toward people who are at odds with mainstream consensus is a badge of honor. That people should embrace their own individualism and shrug off criticism.

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