In the Wall Street Journal, Michel Gurfinkiel reviews the new book by Frederick Brown, For the Soul of France—an account of nineteenth-century France, in all its glory and all its disaster. As Gurfinkiel remarks, from 1830 to 1905,
France passed through no less than four different constitutions; three dynasties (the Bourbons, the Orléans and the Bonapartes); two republics; three revolutions (1830, 1848 and 1870); one coup that worked (Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s in 1851) and two that were either merely attempted (in 1877) or fantasized (in 1889); two civil wars (the June crisis in 1848 and the Commune in 1871); one disastrous defeat to a nascent Germany (1870) that led to the momentary occupation of more than one-third of the country; two major financial scandals, in 1873 and 1892, that swept away most upper- and middle-class savings; and, finally, a turn-of-the-century judicial scandal (the Dreyfus Affair) that prompted a far-reaching law in 1905 mandating the separation of church and state.
Gurfinkiel is an extremely sharp commentator, but doesn’t that last phrase of his make you hesitate, just a little? I mean, since when has the Dreyfus Affair been primarily about French laïcité and the separation of church and state? Yes, the liberals triumphed over the long course of the affair, but I had never thought it a struggle over religion—certainly not over the restoration of Catholicism as the French national religion.
Except, as Gurfinkle observes, Brown’s book takes everything in nineteenth-century France to be about Catholicism: “Brown simplifies his task by operating with a single organizing principle: Most of the turmoil in France during this period stemmed from battles over the restoration of the Catholic Church as France’s main societal institution.”
Hmm. As Gurfinkle recounts Brown’s narrative, For the Soul of France insists:
With the tide of history against them, the clerically minded resorted to outlandish bids for power and influence. A misbegotten coup in 1889 ended before it began when its putative leader, the reactionary French general Georges Boulanger, fled to Belgium. In the mid-1890s, the clericals, hoping to rally the public’s support for the church, launched an anti-Semitic campaign. Mr. Brown ably describes how a genteel theological and social contempt for Judaism was transformed into an unbridled hatred for Jews.
And, of course, “the crusade culminated in what came to be called the Dreyfus Affair. . . . The sorry episode certainly didn’t result in the abandonment of French anti-Semitism, but its clerical proponents—and their broader hope for the restoration of a royalist, anti-Enlightenment, anti-republican France—were discredited.”
The (understated) admission that the Dreyfus Affair “didn’t result in the abandonment of French anti-Semitism” suggests that perhaps Gurfinkle knows he shouldn’t quite buy Brown’s thesis of liberal advancement quite so uncritically. But, regardless, the Dreyfus Affair was a horse everyone tried to ride at the time—and continued to ride for many years to come. Not least among them are the liberal Catholics whom Gurfinkle ends his review by praising:
one wishes that Mr. Brown had provided a wider comparative context. He might have contrasted the eruptions of reactionary French Catholicism during the 19th century with, for instance, the more progressive politics of Catholics in Belgium, Germany and Italy. And what about the faction within the French church that denounced its antiliberalism and anti-Semitism? Dissidents did exist—and were gradually to dominate French Catholicism in the 20th century.
Those Catholic dissidents, too, got plenty of mileage from the Dreyfus Affair, using the whole mess—in the French equivalent of, say, anti-anti-Communism—to discredit their opponents in the Church.
Given all this, it’s tempting—oh, so tempting—to rage against Brown’s book, and Gurfinkle’s surprising less-than-critical acceptance of its account of its thesis, for buried in all of it is a pretty straightforward anti-Catholicism that takes Zola’s version of the Dreyfus Affair as the only correct version.
But, you see, if you begin walking down that path, you end up having to defend Action Française and the whole mess of French conservative reaction. Yes, the triumphant French liberals were awful, and the hatred of Catholicism they indulged produced a church-state relation among the worst in the Western world.
But, the truth is that the conservatives were just as bad. There remains to this day a snarl in French conservative thought, where all sorts of threads are knotted together: nationalists tangled up with anti-Semites, monarchists, anti-Dreyfusards, Lefebverists, and those aging colonialists who long to reconquer Algeria. They infect one another with their paranoias and they blacken one another with their pasts. And, since often the only thing they actually have in common is Catholicism, they offer a perpetual occasion for anti-Catholicism to feel good about itself.
Can anyone pull free the important threads in modern French thought from all the ugly and extraneous material with which they are entangled?
I doubt it. On all topics that touch on religion and public life—from Jewish relations to Catholic relations to Muslim relations—I can’t think of anything good the French state has to teach. Left or Right, the only lesson about democracy that France offers the world is: Don’t try this at home.
Joseph Bottum is editor of First Things.
Comments:
As for what can be learned from the French counter-revolutionaries, I think there is a great deal. First of all, there's Catholic social doctrine, which was largely based on the work of French counter-revolutionaries like Le Play and La Tour du Pin. Second, there is the clear articulation of a non-liberal, non-individualist vision of society given by de Maistre and Bonald. Robert Nisbet has pointed out how important their ideas were for the discipline of sociology, and they're ready to be appropriated by American conservatives, should we ever decide to become intellectually serious.
Most of all, the French show us the other road, the one not taken by Anglo-Saxon conservatives. The English conservatives were "moderate" and "prudent", meaning that when push came to shove, they always surrendered to liberalism. The French Right decided to stand its ground, and lost. In America, there's a conservative movement, but only the name "conservative" has been preserve, because it's whole purpose is to defend and promote liberalism. Today, France, England, and America are already Jacobin paradises; we think it some sort of victory that at least they're not Bolshevik paradises. Despite divergent resistance strategies, they all seem to have reached this endpoint at about the same rate. It seems that the vile creed of liberalism is unstoppable. Defeat is inevitable; the only question is: which hill do we want to die on--what do God and honor require? From this point of view, the French choice to not compromise at all does not seem unreasonable.
I don't think I can, but let's examine the snarl. Part of the snarl comes from French history: during the "Ancien Regime", one might say, France was a Catholic country, but not a catholic one. The French church (unlike the Anglican one) maintained the Catholic doctrines of the sacraments, etc, but in many ways the head of the French church was not the Pope but the King of France (just as the King of England was the head of the Anglican Church).
This ambiguity is incarnated by Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin. Were they churchmen infiltrating the state, or where they politicians using their religious connections to gain power? This question is anachronistic, but that is just the point. There was a conflation in the French (and European) mind between Church and State, and nobody seemed to think it was unusual that high ranking churchmen were also high ranking statesmen. Of course, this is just one aspect of the Absoluate Monarchy: the Church is simply one aspect of royal power.
Both the "liberals" and the "conservatives" are infected by this conflation. The "liberals" think they must smash the Church to establish political liberty. The "conservatives" think they must re-establish the monarchy to renew the country religiously.
This conflation of Church and State had other bad consequences. It lead to the idea of the Absolute Nation, for the French Revolution simply replaced the King by the Nation. The Nation became the source of all political power, as well as the ultimate horizon against which the citizens live their lives. But if France is the absolute, there is no place in the universe for Germany, and vice-versa. After the unfortunate incidents of the first half of the 20th century, Europeans have realized that there is a problem with this idea, and shrink back from it. But there is nothing to replace it, so they flee from anything absolute. This is one cause of the continent's spiritual malaise. Christianity is suspect, because of the lingering effects of the conflation between Church and State.
Part of the problem in France is that the French Revolution is considered as the pivot of history. Anything that happened before is grouped into the "Ancien Regime", and only serves to prepare for the Revolution. Thus one forgets that the "Ancien Regime" is not that ancient, but in fact arose after the distingration of the medieval order.
But progress is being made. The famous "Law of Separation of Church and State" in 1905, in spite of being depicted as a final defeat of the Church, was actually beneficial. The conflation between Church and State is slowly dissipating from people's minds. But the long-term winner is the Pope. Not only can he name French bishops without (much) interference, he is also regarded by many French Catholics as the true head of the Church and as a rock ("Pierre") in times of persecution or confusion.
The decline of France as a great power, and the decline of the influence of French language and the country's intellectual elite, began during this same 19th century with all of its instabilities, as the book describes. However, as always, the problem with the French is that no matter how much the empirical facts suggest they are no longer the top of the world as they once were, they continue to behave as if they were. This attitude, in all of its grandiose egomania, is summarized by the popular description of their most famous present day philosopher, Bernard Henry Levy, "God is dead, but my hair is perfect."
Levy once had insightful and courageous things to say, such as his well-known book from 30 years ago, "Barbarism with a Human Face," in which he turned against the left and exposed Marxism as an inhuman doctrine and system. Nowadays, he has become just another good-looking celebrity trotting around the world, still with a good head of hair for a man of his age. After all the sound and fury of the 19th century, he and his actress wife showboating their way around the world represent the end result.