France

16. Lüthy, From Calvin to Rousseau (28 July 2024)

by kurto

Sketches the 17th- and 18th-century Geneva’s contribution to Western political economy, commencing with Calvinist government and concluding with subjection to French Louisianan oligarchy and Rousseau’s utopianism.

To Weber as to Marx, the Reformation was the first bourgeois revolution, foreshadowing capitalism. Lüthy dismisses Weber’s thesis of Calvinist Protestantism promoting capitalism, showing predestination is not pivotal to Calvin and simplistic definitions obscure more than they clarify: it’s survives only because succeeding scholars couldn’t agree definitions either. The Reformation was evidently a milestone in the progression from the medieval to the modern world, and Calvinist views indeed underpinned northwestern Europe; but this was just one of many conditions, also to include money (specie) from the new world, emigration (especially Huguenot) within Europe prompted by the Counterreformation, the rise of banking, and the maturation of medieval republican city-states. Is it not also evident that the Counterreformation stifled what would have happened in Catholic countries, especially as Spain and Italy were the more advanced economies?

Calvinism was important for manifesting reformist Christianity most clearly independent of politics and statecraft. The connection to economics is less fear of predestinarian uncertainty and more release of fears of other men, of social stricture. The Reformation destroyed social hierarchy more than it shaped individual values. Calvin broke the hold of usury by common sense: wealthy lenders have richer men as clients, demonstrating the borrower is not always and evidently prey. The rule of equity (i.e., the golden rule) guides proper lending, Calvin observed in overturning Aristotelian view that money (interest) does not engender money. Protestant lenders were no different from Catholics for example in maritime credit, bills of currency exchange. Ironically classical Greece alone among the ancients employed a productive credit system, to support the agricultural regions near the poleis.

Neither the French monarchy nor the country’s national church fits comfortably into the common dynastic vs national schema. France’s centralizing tendencies were most evident in the Academy Francaise (i.e., control of language), which produced clarity over fuller participation in the Enlightenment. Louis XV’s reign completed his predecessor’s making aristocratic and heritable bourgeois office completely dependent on the throne. The constitution of society was economic and social, not only political – a regime in the full sense of the word. The French economy amounted to starveling producers and consumers exempt from tax; there were regional exceptions in Brittany, Normandy, and Languedoc that proved the rule. Quesnay’s primary concern was distribution of ‘net product’ of agriculture (i.e., primary produce) among the royalist entourage: Louis XV’s era was an age of unbounded, reckless enthusiasm not the edge of the abyss. The rise of the Atlantic trade from 1760 undermined the specifics of physiocratic economics, and Quesnay lacked the tooling of the modern discipline, but he was not wrong in his assessment of the country’s dynamics. By contrast, Turgot changed men’s minds in their understanding of the state’s role in the economy.

Rousseau sought to understand the act by which a people is a people, but compromised by proposing the tyrannical general will. Having posited society corrupts natural man, he could not allow for civic order which protects individual rights. In fairness, he saw the Greek city-state as a model; his eloquence raised its applicability to large, modern nations – and led directly to 20th-century tyrannies. In his own time, Genevan democrats (‘populists’) brought the general will to Louis XV’s France, foreshadowing Mirabeau and Robespierre.

In France, finance was the preserve of Catholic royalist administrators, banking was open to all, that is to Protestants. The former traded with Spain, the latter with faster-growing England. Absolute monarchy and public credit were discovered by Necker to be incompatible, and in the late 18th century the latter won. The Protestants retained the anti-dogmatic attitudes of 17th-century emigres to Geneva, mixed with the Enlightenment’s freethinking, critical reasoning, and sovereignty of conscience. But in the storm of the Revolution, the Catholic Church proved a shelter against the radicals, whereas the Protestant churches lacked institutional bulwark: liberalism was first to succumb.

NB: the example of Genevan oligarchies sacrificing Calvinist self-governance to Catholic Paris is relevant to 21st-century USARFU (p. 260)

11. McMillan, Modern France 1880 – 2002 (28 April 2024)

by kurto

A disappointing collection of thematic overviews that fails to get at France’s approach to the great sociopolitical questions. The authors neither ground core problems nor suggest departures, but frequently trend toward sociology as well as left-liberal consensus circa 2000; the essays ignore Maastricht, fairly enough for a history but illogical in light of attacks on right-wing ‘identitarianism’.
• The long-term goal of the Third Republic was to build the state for plutocrats as well as bourgeois, never mind the Dreyfus affair’s ruptures. But radical democrats and emergent socialists found no common ground: democratic (i.e., liberal) socialism was ‘impossible’
• Fin-de-siecle governmental persecution of Catholics, led by Rousseau-Waldeck over 1899-1902, parallels Bismarck’s earlier efforts: the separation of 1904, undoing Napoleonic concordat, exposed the church’s dependency on the state. Despite the hostility, many clergy fought for France in World War I, earning some respite; in the early Fifth Republic, de Gaulle and other ministers again brought Catholics to the fore; there is no discussion of Muslim immigration
• France’s descent over 1815-1945 stems from demographic decline – there is no linkage to the Catholic plight – especially after Germany’s 1870 unification. By 1910, France was the world’s leading immigrant country, attracting Belgians, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, and French colonials to work at large, industrial firms. Traditionally rural France, which contacted the outside world via the bicycle (presaging the Tour de France), finally succumbed in the postwar era to economic modernization – though small farms persisted, protected by the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy, and the state remains the country’s largest employer
• Only after 1936 did France subordinate her foreign policy to Britain, and in the postwar era much her impulse has been to restore independence and grandeur
• In addressing the French Communist party as well as ‘committed’ intellectuals (said to ‘think in German’), the authors allude to obvious dead-ends but adduce no evidence of remorse. However, the Fourth Republic collapsed because it was designed to counter the extinct Communist threat; Algeria mattered mainly to the political classes; the Fifth Republic minimized the influence of the Fourth’s ‘notables’, for example by referenda. Mitterrand’s Parti Socialiste, succeeding the SFIO (Section francaise de l’Internationale ouvriere), wisely limit doctrinaire politics, mimicking the more flexible right, and so succeeding in 1981
NB: Barres: intellectuals are those who believe society is founded on logic

21. Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville (12 November 2023)

by kurto

A scholarly but anachronistic biography dwelling on what the 19th-century pioneer ought to have written were he a 21st-century academic. Tocqueville was a brilliant mind ‘trammeled’ by Catholic, aristocratic background; Brogan is regularly unhappy he cannot be conscripted into the march of history, the telos of egalitarianism. Though the author seems to have read and re-read not only major works but surviving letters, it’s sometimes difficult to hear Tocqueville through the academic criticism. The Frenchman’s original identification of problems in democratic political philosophy is dismissed or denigrated.
Fundamentally a Norman aristocrat-cum-19th-century French nationalist, Tocqueville was born to lead as Brogan demonstrates in a thorough telling of his life. Upended by the French Revolution, schooling ‘failed’ to produce bourgeois manners, though his electoral politics in La Manche were painstaking. Primary intellectual influences included Montesquieu, Chateaubriand (source of the US sojourn), Guizot, Mill and to a less extent Pascal. He always opposed Bonaparte as representing tyranny.
By 1830, he had rejected his Catholic Norman heritage, eventually siding with the democratic age, but remained nostalgic for aristocracy. As a budding lawyer, he dealt with émigré / dispossession claims which provoked sympathy but also acknowledgement of the finality of French Revolution. The cataclysm had liberated man of tyranny of class, but exposed liberty to equality of ends. During his US tour he grasped the dynamics of entrepreneurialism and popular self-government, but missed the importance of cotton and didn’t address political parties. Subsequently, as a writer, his great themes became equality, liberty, and the Revolution.
As a politician, though seen by Bourbons (‘legitimists’) as a traitor and Orleanists as a time server (which exposure helped prompt his American sojourn), he most valued independence of party, and further advocated local self-government versus France’s traditional centralism. Liberty entailed the right to call power to account. Though he helped write the 1848 constitution, he opposed Louis Napoleon as tyrannical.
Tocqueville in Democracy in America emphasized the effects of equality, in The Old Regime and the French Revolution of liberty (or its loss). The secret to making men do good is appealing to high purposes. Society’s institutions reconcile liberty and equality. Democratic society (often) may prefer equality to liberty as a security. One of the French Revolution’s notorious legacies was dissolving freedom of association, in contrast with the American tendency of establishing voluntary associations. Having had little experience of politics, ancien French aristocrats had little knowledge of how to avoid catastrophe. ‘The general level of hearts and minds will never cease to decline while equality and despotism are partners’ (p. 567). It’s vital to understand the balance and the trend (tendency) – indicative of his contribution to what’s become sociology.
Brogan thinks Tocqueville a brilliant mind ‘trammeled’ by Catholic, aristocratic background, and considers his understanding of tyranny of the majority his ‘most serious mistake’. The Frenchman is criticized for consulting only American elites while ignoring the middle classes (notwithstanding his official mission of reviewing prisons and, separately, his rough-and-ready travels). He lived through a great epoch of arts but didn’t enjoy it.
He was a Romantic, drawn more to the old order (Old Regime) than the exemplar of the new (Democracy). Tocqueville ‘refused to admit’ the privileged, instrumental role of parties: power is the object of politics, each side pressing its case to have the better claim, not high purpose. His economic theory was antiquated and ‘obsessed’ by concern for property and the consequences of mob rule.
Tocqueville could not ‘admit’ that Algerian colonization would end badly, and ‘tritely’ predicted the US and Russia would predominate a future era. Repeatedly, the ‘game is given away’ when the subject’s conclusions don’t match the author’s. (Relatedly, Brogan dismisses Berlin’s theory of two liberties without explanation.)
In all, a frustrating read. See further Daniel Mahoney in Claremont Review of Books: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/a-noble-and-generous-soul/

7. Badiou, Adventure of French Philosophy (14 May 2023)

by kurto

Collected essays of a 2d-tier postmodern paladin, demonstrating French philosophy has run itself up the political dead ends of power as determinative and nihilism. Badiou asserts 20th-century existentialism – from Sartre in the 1940s to Deleuze in the 90s, including Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan – rivals ancient Athens and 19th-century German idealists (but not Republican Florence, which says something of the political bent).
Finitude is intended to deprecate the possibility of universals. Truth is a process or labor, not the pursuit of veracity of proposition. Postmoderns confuse scientific advances and consequent revision with the impossibility (futility) of settlement, and so surrender to nihilism (the point at which ‘enjoyment and dying are indistinguishable’). That calculus advances does not compromise arithmetic. But postmoderns prefer to seek profundity in paradox, though enigmas borne of logic chopping are not signposts to wisdom.
Consciousness implies unconsciousness, which is to be considered part of the subject and its intentions; subject do not imply objects. Plato’s subject is detached from ideas; Descartes’ is not because reason (thinking) is required. If we deemphasize the humanity of the subject we should not ne surprised activities such as politics are becoming inhuman.
Badiou’s though moved from dialectical (in which the event identifies the subject) to mathematical (formalism). His primary interlocutors are Plato and Hegel; his opponent Kant. A Maoist, he seeks to make a virtue, a practical theory of irrational behavior of the mob: several essays lament the ‘failures’ of 1968, when the French failed to follow the Red Guards; the ‘actually existing’ didn’t conform to the philosophy of history. Interestingly, deconstruction was a disaster for philosophy, a preoccupation with words and etymology overlooks that French language depends on syntax.
On the basis of implications, there is ever so much to disagree with – the margins are littered. In fairness, however, this book isn’t a postmodern primer.

9. Dine, French Rugby Football (6 June 2006)

by kurto

Not for beginners is this cultural history, which favors academic theory at the expense of recounting events. Thus there is no mention of the 1999 World Cup semifinal versus New Zealand, nor does the author address the question of why the XV de France is so unpredictable. He’s at his best exploring ‘le rugby du villages’, showing for example how a postwar construction boom in Lourdes helped produce the country’s dominant team from 1948-60. The book also does well in summarizing the transition to professionalism, but does not really delve into the persistence of violence, which is described as an amateur tradition that continues to function as an extension of provincial territoriality. In keeping with Annalisme and structuralism, Dine skips over worthies like Lourdes’ Jean Prat. Once exception is Jean-Pierre Rives — but ties to Albert Ferrasse are of primary interest. Dine evidently would have preferred that league surpassed union because of the latter’s Vichy ties, and that Ferrasse have been succeeded by someone other than Bernard Lapasset. As with Braudel, it is impossible not to profit from this work. But in taking this subject on his terms, rather than the contemporary context, his conclusions become idiosyncratic and politicized.

10. Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity (25 July 2006)

by kurto

The true nature of the Enlightenment is best demonstrated by 18th-century Britain, where such concepts as nature, liberty, reason, rights and truth were most fully adumbrated in the concern for the ‘moral sense’. The thesis is revisionist, for the French philosophes have been considered to embody the paradigm, and only the Scottish (but not Burke!) have been understood as members of the canon. But British writers from Shaftesbury through Smith and on to the great Anglo-Irishman, along with the practical example of John Wesley’s Methodists, demonstrate the fundamental predilection to see dignity in all men. Not so the philosophes, preoccupied with the ‘ideology of reason’, as were the British Dissenters, or the Americans, focused on the politics of liberty. So Britain’s ‘sociology of virtue’ makes the strongest claim to the Enlightenment’s essence; however, each country’s subsequently development bears something of the others. A bibliography worth exploring, and worth revisiting for its brilliance and clarity.

12. Johnson, Napoleon (4 Sep 2006)

by kurto

Bonaparte, a militarist whose desire to conquer the Continent foreshadowed the total warfare of the 20th century, is a prime example of unbridled ambition to absolute power. The Corsican was a master of cartography and logistics, and typically sought to attack in order to isolate and conquer. But in sweeping away Europe’s old order, he substituted nepotism not enlightened government or culture; his favorable reputation largely rests on a propaganda apparatus (including mastery of the contemporary news cycle via semaphore). Though he anticipated Stalin and Hitler, the French have proclaimed him a hero. Thematic and synthetic rather than chronological, the book is a typically strong effort from Johnson.

14. Bonald, True and Only Wealth of Nations (12 July 2023)

by kurto

A collection of speeches and essays by Louis de Bonald, a contemporary opponent of the French Revolution, emphasizing sociopolitical gaps created by jettisoning monarchical order including the Catholic Church. Bonald identified three sea changes in the 18th century: in morals, doctrines, and laws whereby aristocrats sacrificed Christian values for rationalism (e.g., physical sciences replacing religious virtue).

A proto-capitalist society in which all depends on individuated agreement and nothing on established order is inherently unstable, and unstructured. Society depends on dedication to higher elements (beyond self-interest); families perform the alchemy of such realization. Bonald echoes Burke in affirming a statesman is capable of improvement and inclined to preservation.

Economic growth, beyond a certain point, entails diminishing returns to public spirit and resources. The wealth of nations is not measured in taxes, which are needs not a product; excess of needs is a sign of distress. Morals and laws are the true wealth of society, family, and nations.

Urban industry enslaves mankind. Man should find subsistence in the family. Government cannot fill the bap because it operates on appropriation.

Marriage is devalued by severing the religious from the civil. Its goal is children; its responsibility is care of the child’s education. To recover the state, Bonald quotes Montesquieu in observing one must regain the family from women and children. Modernity, seeking to evenly distribute power so as to affirm equality, cannot hide from tyranny of authority, that is the role of private interests in the public sphere. It succumbs to weakening of the natural and thus rise of tyranny.

• Men do not invent truths but derive new consequence from those long known.
• One should never obsess with abuses that a part and parcel of good things, nor the advantages of poor things.
• Abstractions are generalizations applying to nothing; morals are generalities pertaining to everything.

As with many, Bonald’s views will sometimes seem anachronistic, but read carefully, they contain true-to-from (i.e., era) answers to age-old problems.

5. Sarkozy, Testimony (7 Apr 2007)

by kurto

Outlines the political platform of French president (to be) Nicolas Sarkozy. The author is a retail politician who rose to the finance and interior ministries, unusual for someone who is not an ‘Enarque’. His the more remarkable for being overtly post-Gaullist in a conservative party; Sarkozy writes he is focused not on international grandeur but instead on domestic capabilities and progress, particularly relative to Europe. (He is of course a pan-European, but also an Americanist.) Driven by political examples, such as the pernicious effects of the 35-hour week, and drawing on examples from his time in government, the work does not stamp out a doctrine per se, but constitutes an interesting snapshot.

1. Doyle, French Revolution (7 Feb 2012)

by kurto

Narrates the course of Europe’s first and probably greatest popular uprising, synthesizing political and social perspectives as well as competing interpretations. Making good use of illustrative facts amid the twists leading to Napoleon’s ascension in 1798, Doyle’s work reverts to the themes of political theory and faction, class and regional (especially Parisian) antagonisms, economic distortion and hardship, and international conflict borne of cynical French adventuring. Fueled by Enlightenment thought, the protagonists ‘failed to see … that reason and good intentions were not enough by themselves to transform the lot of their fellow men. Mistakes would be made when the accumulated experience of generations was pushed aside as so much routine, prejudice, fanaticism, and superstition’. The cost was millions of dead and as many or more lives wasted. Clearly written, worth re-reading.