Cover

Preface

Two Books

About a decade and a half ago, a young scholar from Oxford, England, set out in the company of a lady companion named Margaret on a journey of fourteen thousand miles across France. The author of acclaimed biographies of Hugo, Balzac, and Rimbaud, Graham Robb owed his early, superficial understanding of the French language to an Algerian Berber in whose auto shop in a Paris faubourg he worked for a time. The couple's mode of travel was by time machine. Theirs was not the futuristic invention of H. G. Wells but a contraption already a century old: the humble perennial bicycle, powered by human muscle and breath, regulated by nothing more complex than gear ratios, critically dependent on a strong inner tube, and capable of speeds no greater than the stagecoaches familiar to readers of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma.

Graham Robb had a wide familiarity with the history of monarchical and Republican France, of the great personages who animate the histories of that noble country that so many knowledgeable and sophisticated people have so long considered to have been the most civilized in Europe, and of its transformation during the course of the nineteenth century by revolution, war, political reform, industrialization, social reform, and centralization. Robb himself was in search of another France: the old, prerevolutionary country that had managed to survive a century and a quarter of nationalism and centralization, from 1789 until cataclysm befell Europe in 1914.

Of that country, Robb had little more than an informed apprehension. On the day the Bastille fell to the Paris mob, French was a language as incomprehensible as English or German to the nine-tenths of the inhabitants of France living outside the capital city. “It was a country that had still not been accurately mapped in its entirety” when Balzac wrote, Robb notes. “A little further back in time, sober accounts described a land of ancient tribal divisions, prehistoric communication networks and pre-Christian beliefs. Historians and anthropologists had referred to this country, without irony, as ‘Gaul’ and quoted Julius Caesar as a useful source of information on the inhabitants of the uncharted interior.”¹

In prerevolutionary times, “France” meant the province of which Paris was the heart. “As far as French anthropology is concerned, prehistory did not end until the Revolution. Before then, the State took no interest in the cultural and ethnic diversity of the masses.” To put the matter differently: the national government in Paris left them alone. The French provincial's fatherland, his Marianne, was his pays; while the pays within the territory historically known as France were so numerous that, as late as 1937, some of them remained unknown. The pays (from the Latin pagus) was understood by Julius Caesar to be a region that a tribal entity recognized as home, often no broader than the clang of a village church bell could carry. “Some of these towns and villages were flourishing democracies when France was still an absolute monarchy,” Robb observes. These communities were proud of their provinciality. Far from wishing to expand their sense of identity, they were rather concerned with straitening and deepening it. So well managed were the pays and the towns that formed their nuclei that crime appears to have been nearly nonexistent in prerevolutionary France. Away from the capital, almost everyone spoke a separate and distinct patois.

In the opinion of two late-twentieth-century scholars, Hervé Le Bras and Emmanuel Todd, “from the anthropological point of view, France ought not to exist.” Robb asserts that, owing to the complex genetic inheritance of the Celtic and German tribes who invaded the Roman province, the same could be said from the point of view of ethnicity: “Before the mid-nineteenth century…France was effectively a land of foreigners.” If the government of these various tribes was democratic in a rudimentary, patriarchal sense, in religion they embraced local superstition, paganism inherited from their Celtic forebears and from the Romans, and Christianity (Roman Catholicism) with substantial grafts of paganism and superstition, often tolerated by the local priest and even by his superiors, who recognized the utility of incorporating local legend with the universal Faith. Young people married their blood relations, and most people lived their entire lives in the pays, venturing perhaps no more than a few miles from their front doors. “Foreigners” were disliked and distrusted, to the point of being set on occasionally by the natives. There was a lively belief in witchcraft, conducive to witch burning. As travel was at best infrequent, trade between the various pays was uncommon, and each was therefore self-supporting, living off its modicum of land and natural resources.

Of all this, the civilized Parisian minority knew nothing, or next to nothing. Its members had little or no cause to venture into the provinces, and the roads in any case were atrocious or nonexistent. The large majority of France stretched away, as yet unmapped, between its boundaries of ocean, mountain, and plain; the many blank spaces within the territorial outline might have been inscribed “Here Be Hippogriffes.” To the hippogriffes themselves—people who lived their whole lives in a small town or village—“French imperial justice [when it finally reached them] could be just as shocking and incongruous as it was to the people of colonial North Africa.”

The new French Republic, in its eagerness to demonstrate national unity, fixed the new administrative boundaries with a cavalier disregard for existing tribal divisions. It was equally careless of the hundreds of tiny discrete civilizations in which the “France” of the time abounded; hence, Robb says, “modern France is not just the result of continuous traditions; it was also formed from disappearances and extinctions.” In Year II (1794) of the Republic, Abbé Henri Grégoire published a report titled “The Necessity and Means of Exterminating Patois and Universalizing the Use of the French Language.” Based on questions sent out to, and mailed back from, town halls across the country, Grégoire's report showed France to be a linguistic muddle of numerous patois and two Romantic languages—French in the north and Occitan in the south—which, on closer inspection, could be understood as having been fractured into numerous incomprehensible dialects. The situation was as Grégoire had feared, only much worse. Six million of the fifteen million “French” people, it seemed, were wholly ignorant of the language of polite Europe. Another six million could scarcely be said to speak French. Of the three million able to converse in it, a great many were incompetent to write the language. How could France plausibly call itself a nation in the absence of a national, a common language? Lacking such, the “French” people were, in the abbé's estimation, “too ignorant to be patriotic.” Some of these citizens even believed that King Louis XVI still sat on his throne at Versailles.

Abbé Grégoire's report launched a national campaign to “universalize” the French language. Grégoire proposed building roads and canals, establishing schools and libraries, and simplifying the language by ridding it of irregular verbs. And he urged that the national government pay greater heed to France's border regions, where counter-revolutionaries were active. A century later, the Third Republic tackled the patois problem head-on with its educational policies, decreeing that children caught speaking their regional language should be subject to humiliating punishment. Eighty years after that, in 1972, President Georges Pompidou asserted, “There is no place for regional languages in a France that is destined to set its mark on Europe.” The campaign for a universal French language continues today, as the Élysée Palace grapples with the arrival of peoples from North Africa, the Near East, and Asia.

Further, postrevolutionary governments adopted a conscious policy of erasing the immemorial divide between north and south, which they viewed as irrational as well as divisive, in ways having nothing to do with geography. The first step toward this end was the creation of départements—administrative units that ignored natural boundaries in favor of an approximate equality of size that ensured their administrative centers were no farther than a day's journey from any location subject to their jurisdiction. “The idea,” Robb writes, “was that timeless, natural logic should prevail over the old feudal and tribal traditions…. In this way, ‘prejudices, habits and barbaric institutions consolidated by fourteen centuries of existence’” would be swept away. Language barriers were explicitly ignored, despite objections from some councils—like that of Saint-Malo on the borders of Brittany—that they would be forced to work with people who spoke ‘languages predating Caesar's conquest.’” By such means, the peoples of France were shorn of their particular collective names and reduced to a single category—“the French”—while “provincial” became the equivalent simply of “peasant.”

“For all its practical virtues,” Robb suggests, “the division of France into départements helped to create a process that can best be described as the opposite of discovery. Ignorance of daily life beyond the well-connected cities and familiarity with the monuments and personalities of Paris would be signs of enlightened modernity.” For the central government, this process of autoamnesia was essential to the formation of the new French nation. Yet the former life, lived in what Graham Robb so poignantly describes as the old “suffering land of fragmented village states,” had been no dark chaos of formlessness and unreason but an intensely human way of existence, piquantly evoked in a plenitude of fine detail by the modern historian.

The processes of nationalization and centralization at work in nineteenth-century France were linked inevitably with, and depended on, the expansive growth of the country's transportation infrastructure—its roads, waterways, and railroads—and of its industrial base. Just as inevitably, nationwide development entailed harmful effects together with the beneficial ones. Those regions of the country most directly served by the improved transport arteries certainly found themselves better connected to the rest of France than they formerly had been, but towns, villages, and entire regions bypassed by the main arterial systems were left still more disconnected and remote than ever. The result was not simply what Robb calls “the contraction of space and the gravitational pull of Paris”; it amounted to what Victor Hugo saw as the slow disappearance of France. The rail companies, which brought prosperity to some cities, such as Marseille, ruined others, like Beaucaire, a town situated on the Rhône whose fortunes were tied to the international fair it had hosted for centuries. By degrees, the metropolis on the Seine was colonizing the rest of France—by military fortresses, like Napoléonville in the rebellious west; by economic development; by the industrialization of the French countryside; by speculative industrial agriculture (exemplified by the disastrous silkworm bubble); by ecological havoc (the deforestation of the Alps and the Pyrenees, for instance); and by suburbanization. “Everyone knows that the nineteenth century was an age of change,” Robb adds, “but for many people of the time, roads, railways, education and sanitation were trivial innovations compared to the complete and irreversible transformation of their physical world.”

The “discovery of France,” as Robb calls it, involved all these things and more, among them the exploitation and destruction of national treasures, many of them acquired from the sale of properties confiscated from the Roman Catholic Church and from the châteaux of the aristocracy. “No sooner did poets and art lovers learn of this magical land [undiscovered France] than they found it in ruins”—despite the best efforts of the novelist Prosper Mérimée, appointed inspector general of historic monuments in 1834, to save it.

After 1815, British tourists flocked to France. Tourism increased apace throughout the nineteenth century as the English and the Americans were joined eventually by Parisians venturing outward from the capital to encounter “the wonders of France,” both the cultural and the natural varieties. And yet, Robb notes, “Never before had it been possible to cross the country in such a state of blissful ignorance. As early as the 1850s, the great roads from Paris were being drained by traffic from the railways.”

Certainly not among the wonders of France was French provincial cuisine, which was nearly meatless and relentlessly dull. This did not prevent tourists from discovering what they fancied to be regional specialties, notwithstanding the fact that these dishes were often unrepresentative of the region. Quite frequently, indeed, they were available chiefly in Paris itself—from which they might even have originated. This was only one aspect of the growing cult of French “diversity,” imagined to be nourished and protected by the same connoisseurs in the capital who were pillaging provincial towns of their finest artwork, which they conscientiously removed to Paris. In these and other ways, what was offered as being distinctively French became, essentially, simply Parisian.

By midcentury, village locals, though still conversing in patois, spoke of modern topics rather than of age-old concerns, while the French bourgeois who sped past them on their way to somewhere else continued to regard them almost as prehistoric relics. “Politics has arrived with conscripts and migrants, postmen and railroad engineers, apostles of socialism sent from the central committee in Paris, and traveling salesmen who sell manifestoes instead of magic spells,” Robb observes of this period. Thirty years later, the progressives began a campaign to nationalize the youth of France. “The fatherland,” wrote Ernest Lavisse, a professor at the Sorbonne and author of a series of teachers' manuals, “is not your village or your province. It is all of France. The fatherland is like a great family.” Hence the Third Republic's assault on patois, through punishment meted out to schoolchildren who insisted on speaking the language of their earliest childhood.

Small wonder that a nostalgic memoir of a provincial French boyhood enjoyed a smashing success one year before the outbreak of the Great War, which nearly destroyed France while transforming it forever. Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier, recounts the author's life as a boy in the rural Bourbonnais. It provided at the time, and does still today, what Graham Robb calls “a tantalizing sense of la France profonde as a distant but familiar place, a little world full of simple things that spoke of another age.”

Mr. Robb's book implies a question of crucial importance for modern times. Even if we suppose the France of the present day to be a stronger, wealthier, happier, and altogether “better” country after two centuries of nationalization, centralization, and social equalization, is it really a more “democratic”—or, at any rate, a freer—country, affording its citizens a greater liberty, together with a larger measure of personal authority and dignity, than it was before the Revolution? The question is relevant not only to France but to many other countries in the modern democratic world, including especially the United States: the nation that inspired Alexis de Tocqueville to predict, in his seminal work Democracy in America (1835), that democracy was the future of the West.

* * *

One hundred seventy-three years after Alexis de Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont landed at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1831, the editors of the Atlantic Monthly proposed to Bernard-Henri Lévy, the celebrated French philosophe and man of the Left, that he retrace the steps of his illustrious compatriot in America and write up his experiences for their magazine.

Lévy admits to having held the distinguished author with whose texts he was extensively unfamiliar in low esteem. Like most of his contemporaries, he had regarded Tocqueville as “an old-fashioned hiccupping aristocrat, an adept of lukewarm thinking and happy mediums, a quibbling, overscrupulous dilettante, a moaning sensitive, a sad Narcissus, a boring, reactionary public intellectual, a sententious activist, a man of wit who amused himself by posing as a writer, a failed politician, a pale imitator of Montesquieu, a lightweight version of his uncle Chateaubriand (who seemed to have preempted the entire gamut of attractive roles)…. For people like us [the sixties radicals], ignorance of Tocqueville, this [estimation of the] moderating spirit straddling the Old World and the New, the Orléans and the Bourbons, resignation to democracy and fear of revolution, was, I'm afraid, commonplace.”²

In the end, Lévy agreed to undertake the Atlantic's somewhat vulgar project. He read up on Tocqueville, flew to the United States, rented cars and purchased plane tickets, and traveled widely across the nation, exceeding by thousands of miles his predecessor's itinerary throughout a young republic less than half the size of the present continental colossus. His purpose (he explains at the start of American Vertigo, the book that Lévy developed from the magazine assignment) was also Tocqueville's purpose: to evaluate the stage of development of his own democratizing society by comparison with the form of a realized democracy created by “democratic revolution”; to search out the origins of this democracy in the New England states; and to discern, in Tocqueville's words, the alternate paths leading “to slavery or freedom, to enlightenment or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.”

M. Lévy had as well another concern, possibly an ulterior one. After citing Goethe's remark that the United States allowed Europeans to view their own history recapitulated in America, he notes that American democracy is essentially a European idea. America therefore, in Europe's moment of doubt, is “the only tangible proof that its own supranational dream is neither a piece of nonsense nor an unattainable ideal.” Were democracy in the United States somehow to fail, Europe would stand to “lose a little of its reasons for belief, and, hence, a little of its motivating force: its famous constitutional patriotism, its aim of adding to everyone's national feeling the liberating allegiance to an Idea.” So the question weighing heavily on Bernard-Henri Lévy's mind as he traveled around the United States was, “What is the present state of democracy in America?”

America and Americans are greatly changed since 1831–2. So are French intellectuals. Tocqueville would be shocked and scandalized by the United States today—as indeed he would be by his native France and by the England he so greatly admired. It is impossible, really, to imagine him at home in the modern democratic world. Bernard-Henri Lévy, by comparison, is the consummate postmodernist, thoroughly comfortable within the milieu that created him and that has rewarded him with worldly success and influence far beyond those with which Tocqueville himself was favored. What disturbed Lévy on his American journey were the things that typically shock men of the Left: the persistence of poverty and of capital punishment; prison conditions; the physical separation of rich and poor; fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity; “racism”; and military adventurism. The displacement, by secularism and moral relativism, of traditional morality rooted in Christian doctrine fails to alarm, much less offend, him; rather, he approves of the phenomenon. Lévy is hardly inclined to perceive the indispensable connection between religious belief and democratic government on which Tocqueville insists throughout Democracy in America.

Lévy's impressionistic, on-the-run portrait of the United States of America in the first years of the twenty-first century is finally an unpleasant one, although the author himself appears not to see it that way. The French count, coming so many years before him, did not, it is true, extend his sociological investigations to taverns, gambling dens, and brothels—the nineteenth-century equivalents of the casinos, gay bars, strip clubs, and lap-dancing joints that Lévy describes in fairly graphic detail in American Vertigo. In his determination to assess the validity of the prevalent European stereotype of the obese American, he visited a weight-loss clinic in California and finally concluded from direct observation that the percentage of grossly overweight Americans is no greater than that of the inhabitants of an ordinary French village. The obesity quest, however, furnishes Lévy with a metaphor for American society as a whole: “A social obesity. An economic, financial, and political obesity…A global, total obesity that spares no realm of life, public or private. An entire society that, from the top down, from one end to the other, seems prey to this obscure derangement that slowly causes an organism to swell, overflow, explode.” America, M. Lévy thinks, is a nation “that has strayed from, or broken, that secret formula, that code, that prompts a body to stay within its limits and survive.”

“Obesity” is one of several “derangements” Lévy observed during his travels in the United States. Another is what he calls “the chopping up of American social and political space,” the nation's “differentiation” amounting to “tribalization—the transformation of America into a plural nation, a mosaic of communities, a rhapsody of ethnic groups and collectivities that makes increasingly problematic the realization of the venerable problem…inscribed in the motto of the country: E pluribus Unum.” And a third is “the derangement of the mechanisms of memorialization” in America, typified for Lévy by the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, an institution based on a mythic history of baseball that is known publicly to be a myth—more frankly, a hoax—while being celebrated widely as truth. Later, this “myth” connects in the author's mind with the Kennedy myth: the accepted view that John F. Kennedy was a secular saint, an aristocrat, and a great statesman—all so contrary to historical fact that sophisticated Americans recognize these propositions to be demonstrably false. The American public's determination to live in a world of dreams conjured by sentimentality, publicity, and a willingness to be gulled by “truths” it knows, or at least suspects, to be untrue disturbs and even angers M. Lévy—no doubt aware that what Sir Henry Sumner Maine in the late nineteenth century called “the most difficult form of government” requires a firm public grip on reality in order to survive.

Lastly, Lévy ponders the identity of the American nation, which he denies is determined by any particular race, or a soil that is particular or fixed itself. Rather, he says, American identity is based on an abstract “Idea” and a dedication to personal autonomy, self-realization, and even self-reinvention. He quotes President Clinton, who affirmed in his first inaugural address that it is for each generation of Americans to decide for itself what America is, and adds: “I want myself to say that [America] is nothing else, when all is said and done, but a prodigious yet mundane machine whose purpose is to produce more Americans—a magnificent illusion, an Idea again…one of [Nietzsche's] ‘useful errors,’ one of those ‘tall tales,’ that allow a human being, whoever he may be, to represent what he is and what he has become in order to survive.”

Graham Robb's The Discovery of France calls into question whether the French centralized democracy of the twenty-first century is really more free and “democratic” than the far more loosely organized constitutional monarchy of Tocqueville's day. (The same might be asked of the United States, which in the early 1830s was predominantly an agricultural and frontier society whose population had little, if any, contact with the powers that dwelt in Washington, D.C., or even those in their respective state and territorial capitals.) Similarly, American Vertigo invites the reader to consider a question critical to the present time, to the future age, and to the book you are holding: Does the United States, as Bernard-Henri Lévy described it a century and three-quarters after Tocqueville's sojourn there, resemble a polity, a society, that in its structure, mind, and soul is still conducive to democratic government, to democratic freedoms, and to liberty itself?

How one answers this question depends, as we shall see, on how one understands the words democracy, freedom, liberty—and, above all perhaps, liberalism, which claims to embrace all three things within its own, increasingly ample bosom.

AFTER TOCQUEVILLE

Contents

Preface

Two Books

Part I

Democracy after Tocqueville