Chantal Delsol: Prosperity and Torment in France: The Paradox of the Democratic Age. Andrew Kelley translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025.

 

“I am a French woman who is critical of France.” Why so?

While “it is so good to live in France”—one of the most materially prosperous countries in the world, blessed with natural beauty and some of the world’s most elegant architecture and cuisine, no longer worried “about either tyranny or war—the French nonetheless maintain a sour mood about their life. Nothing is ever good enough; they have “a propensity to expect perfection here below,” and the quotidian perennially disappoints such expectations. They have cultivated “the habit of the ideologue.”

Not only France but Europe generally has encouraged the mindset of ‘globalization,” the belief that because we humans are all of one species, we as individuals can establish strong and satisfying social and even political bonds with all other individuals worldwide, as fellow ‘citizens of the world.’ The problem is, we can’t. Our families, our neighbors, our co-workers, our country—what Delsol nicely calls “the atmosphere of our existence”—constitute the real, as distinguished from the imagined, world we actually live in. In the ancient world, the world of small poleis, of civil religions, of families who knew who their ancestors were without any need for extensive research, this was obvious. More, the ‘ancients’ regarded the political community as superior to the individual. In modern France, Charles de Gaulle attempted to revive something of ‘the spirit of the city’ under conditions of modern statism, but today’s France has begun to wake up to the fact that France lacks the grandeur he ascribed to it, that it is “mediocre and ordinary” among the nations of the world. Reality having disappointed them, the French look beyond it to an imaginary France fully integrated into an imaginary world. They are perpetually frustrated utopians.

Hélas, if you drive reality out with a pitchfork, she will return. “Each people finds its own identity in some reality or concept that characterizes it and that is close to its heart.” In France, this is a regime, “its republican state,” which is as much an identity for them as empire is for Russians and freedom is for Americans. Yet “in France, the republican state is losing its substance and is beginning to look like the other neighboring states,” an EU-ified entity, a dilute being. It is crucial to understand that we are all of the same species, lest we fall from patriotism into nationalism, from freedom into slaveholding. Nor should we define human beings as merely poor, bare, forked animals, as that way (especially if not relieved by religious conviction) leads to the cynicism that animates and abets tyrants. But we cannot live as if we were human beings, simply. More than that, families, neighbors, co-workers, fellow citizens not only bring us serious and satisfying attachments; they keep us grounded in reality. Flights of fantasy can’t last if you are dealing with the neighbor’s dog.

What once gave the French a sense of national pride? Delsol recalls the story of Clovis, “the first barbarian king to be baptized,” entitling France to be called the “eldest daughter of the Church.” When the French Catholic Church suffered partial eclipse during the Enlightenment and the revolution (the Revolution) that the Enlightenment inspired, the French could now boast of their country as “the eldest daughter of the revolution.” To this day, “France persists with the view that it invented universalism,” even if “the United States can say the same,” and this claim gives it a sense of ‘exceptionalism.’ Yet, the more ‘universal’ the rest of the world becomes, the less exceptional France must be. “If France is doing poorly today, it is…on account of something that has been lost or that one thinks, rightly or wrongly, has been lost, and this is what one could call our historical grandeur.” France resembles “an older person who was once famous.” She awaits her close-up in vain.

The Republic: Delsol distinguishes republicanism from democracy, and it is important to understand how she defines those terms, since she does not define them the way an American is likely to do. Following the lead of James Madison in Federalist #10, an American might define republicanism as representative government, distinguishing it from democracy, a regime in which the people rule directly, as in the New England town meetings Alexis de Tocqueville saw and esteemed. Insofar as government officials are elected by the citizens, and insofar as institutions of federalism, of various levels of self-government prevail, America can rightly call itself a democratic republic, without contradiction, even while distinguishing republicanism and democracy as regimes. What Delsol means by ‘republic’ is the “pre-modern holism” of the ancient polis. That republic featured citizens who “depended closely on one another and that did not really exist in terms of individuals”; they were citizens in close union, so much so that they identified that union as the political good, condemning any sign of individuality (Socrates, for example) as suspect. For the ancients, “the good is sum-bolos, while evil is dia-bolus, separation.” And there is something to this. Fraternity is indeed “a natural tendency” in the human heart, even before it becomes codified into an element of morality. “Man is not only inclined to evil, he is also inclined to good, which means attention to the other”; “the disinterested feeling is a natural penchant,” seen in all human societies first of all in the family, in the care of parents for children.

The fraternity cited in the French revolutionary formula of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity signifies an attempt to bring the spirit of ancient republicanism into the large modern state, which is very far from the intimacy of the ancient polis. But in such a large place, democracy requires the institutional articulations provided by federalism, and this is precisely what the French have abandoned since the centralizing, Machiavellian, Bourbon dynasty brought the aristocrats to Versailles, the better to corrupt and keep an eye on them. This is where Tocqueville enters into Delsol’s analysis, not so much the Democracy in America as The Old Regime and the Revolution, in which Tocqueville shows how the centralized republican regime of the Jacobins imitated the centralized monarchic regime of the Bourbons and issued in the centralized despotic regimes of the Bonapartes, greater and lesser. In such modern states, whatever their regime, there flourishes a sort of familial care; under monarchic regimes paternalism, under republican regimes the fraternity of “civic friendship, of which the ancients spoke when describing a well-ordered city.” Under conditions of modern statism, the attempt to bring centralization and a strong sense of political union to large populations living in extensive territories must prove utopian. Indeed, even in the ancient poleis this proved utopian, the stuff the dreams of Socrates City in Speech were made of.

Thus, “the great, current drama of republican fraternity comprises both its utopian character and, in the end, its dissolution” in contact with the hard rocks of the real world. “So as not to lose this fraternity,” this treasured illusion, “one confuses it with compassion, which has no limit.” There are no borders, the Doctors without Borders hope. That is, “the republican idea is more moral than political.” Since “civic friendship is a virtue,” an element of a morality, and morality requires consent, individual liberty, a republic (democratic or not) “begins from the presupposition that citizens are freely able to forget themselves in the face of the public entity,” capable of regretting that they have but one life to give for their country. Morality requires effort, action, practice, a “going beyond oneself” that is not “antinatural.” Such freedom goes against the establishment of “censors who impose republican virtue,” which would be “a false virtue for a subjugated people,” without the consent of the governed. And just as the republican way of life cannot simply be imposed, so it cannot sit well with “modern individualism,” with a populace in which people walk past one another, paying attention not to their fellow citizens but “to their own music.” Henry David Thoreau adjured his readers to march to the drumbeat they hear, no matter how measured or far away, but Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, alone.

“Made for ancient, holistic societies and revived in the modern era to serve a political ideal, the republican model is probably obsolete,” which is not to say that some currently democratic regime might not try it again, at some point, or have it imposed upon it by some foreign regime. What has prevailed in France is a strong but not tyrannical central state that has broken up local and regional communities, leaving the French guarding the one thing they still control: their individuality, now hardened into individualism. “Today, the contradiction between the republican ideal and the importance of individual wills produces disastrous effects.” Putting it in terms of French political thought, Delsol asks, “Is the society inaugurated by Jean Bodin still viable in the era of mobile phones?” Under modern conditions, both republicanism and individualism are ideologies, unrealizable ideals, vehemently asserted against one another.

Both republicanism and individualism undercut democracy as Delsol defines it. “Democracy is an anthropology; it supposes, rightly or wrongly, that all the adults in the city are capable of thinking and expressing the common good,” and “a political system” based on that anthropology. “A republic is an ideal of communion, which is quite a different thing”; it is “a moral atmosphere and hope.” The perversion of democracy is “the triumph of the masses,” majority tyranny; the perversion of republicanism is “moral hypocrisy,” talking the communal talk while walking the self-interested walk—the sort of thing one sees in any clerisy, religious or secular. In these terms, Americans, emphasizing liberty as self-government, founded a democracy while the French, emphasizing unity, fraternity, founded a republic, or tried to. This is why many among the French aspired to socialism when it became obvious that republicanism would never bring the communalism they craved, only to fall back to the republican ideal when communism failed. But since the newly revived republicanism supposes that France must “work for the entirety of humanity and not for a particular group of people,” and since, moreover, “there is no solidarity without a face,” this ideal too now “withers in disappointment.” “This entirely messianic manner of considering the republic allows us to understand why France is so undemocratic,” having “always privileged the union of hearts in comparison with people’s freedom.” Putting the matter in cogent metaphorical terms, Delsol remarks, “For the United States, the revolution consisted in becoming emancipated from the English motherland and in waiting for the constitution from the founding fathers. The French Revolution was organized around the murder of the king”—a father—which “was symbolic at first, then real, but subsequently it coalesced around the symbol of Marianne, the mother of the republic.” The French state mothers the French, and “its maternal attitude corresponds to the infantile attitude of its citizens.”

In all of this, Delsol performs a very fine task. She brings Tocqueville’s argument into the twenty-first century. As per The Old Regime and the Revolution, she remarks that “the republic fears democracy because the latter, by conferring power to intermediate governing bodies in the name of freedom, always more or less becomes similar to an oligarchy.” In this mistrust of subsidiarity, of federalism, France prefers “a direct alliance of the supreme chief (be it the king or the president) with the people.” While an enemy of the old lines of the French monarchy, Bonaparte practiced a “version of enlightened despotism,” dissolving the old provinces and redividing the country into departments directly subservient to the central state that he ruled, all in the hope that this would make the French happy. But making the French happy isn’t an easy thing to do. “What a utopia! And at the same time, he worked for what is universal: his work is meant to open up a blank slate valid for all peoples,” as he conquered his way through Europe. But equality under Napoleon abolished the old oligarchies only to establish a new one, with bureaucrats occupying the offices of the central state, “as one will see later with the Soviet Union.”

In Delsol’s judgment, de Gaulle was a sort of Bonapartist, a nominally Catholic centralizer in the manner of Charles Maurras. [1] De Gaulle “hated political parties,” “only want[ing] a direct agreement between himself and the people.” “Isn’t this the beginning of tyranny this rejection of intermediaries?” This isn’t quite fair to de Gaulle, however. De Gaulle hated the political parties not as such but because they upheld the regime of parliamentary rule, with an executive so weak that the country failed to defend itself against Hitler, accelerating the decline of France in the world. With their petty bickering over spoils, the parties made France smaller, made the French smaller-souled. De Gaulle’s intention was first to establish a strong executive, a regime in which citizens could elect a president empowered to make firm decisions, especially respecting foreign policy, and then to devolve substantial state power to intermediary bodies. It was the French, not de Gaulle, who rejected this, precipitating his resignation from office in 1969, just as the resumption of parliamentary rule had precipitated his resignation in 1946.

This left France with exactly the regime Delsol describes: a centralized and technocratic pseudo-republic. “Democracy in France is still very primitive”; “we have a long way to go before we reach democratic maturity.” Currently, the French government “wants to hold all the conditions of the lives of its subjects in its grasp” through what Tocqueville called “soft despotism” and what the French call the état-providence, the provider-state or “welfare state.” The state doesn’t mind if the French enjoy “the freedom to squabble perpetually about metaphysical questions” as “inveterate pontificators on all matters that have no reality,” so long as they never think in practical terms, which might lead to reasoned political action, citizenship. Leave the real world to us, the statists imply. “Centralization makes citizens unlearn solidarity,” even as it permits them to dream about it. It is a formula for burning, impotent resentment.

How do the French justify this regime, ‘in their own minds,’ as the saying goes? In answering the question, “Is it better to obey a single, distant government or a multitude of smaller governments close to oneself?” the French, as individualists, have preferred distant and “anonymous authoritarianism” to the local authoritarianism that knows them as individuals. To know me as an individual is to compromise my privacy; to know me as a statistic is to keep your distance from my inner world, my precious if unrealizable ideals. Local government, government that is on my own ‘level,’ also offends my sense of equality, as “it is shameful to obey one’s equals.” “In order to agree to obey, one must find a higher-level leader,” a lion, a great man, a leader. While the Federal Republic of Germany owes its federalism, philosophically, to Johannes Althusius, France produced, then followed, Bodin. [2] Under Bodin’s state, “the more the state helps me, the more my initiative diminishes, and the more my initiative diminishes, the more I need the state,” my mother in perpetuity.

Mothers protect. They also praise their good little boys and girls, nurturing “the French passion for positions of status” which the mother-state provides on condition of proper behavior. Even “well before the revolution, the ambition of every upstanding member of the bourgeoisie in France was not to become a somebody and make a fortune in business,” in the manner of those tedious Englishmen, “but to be able to buy a ‘position.'” When the practice of purchasing a government office was abolished in the name of bureaucracy, France turned to education, to state examinations, as a more democratic means of supporting the new oligarchy. (Jesuit missionaries had seen that system in China, bringing the idea of the mandarinate back to France in the late eighteenth century. In his effort to counter the parliamentarians and to empower the executive, de Gaulle promoted what became the École Nationale d’Administration, the ENA, with its graduates, the French mandarins, called the Énarchs. As with all regimes, this regime produced a characteristic human ‘type,” “a specific type of person,” one who loves France, “serv[ing] it with all his heart,” “devot[ing] himself to the general interest with the self-abnegation of a monk” while denigrating businessmen as “greedy people who think only about money and acquire it by any means possible,” regardless of the common good. The problem is that “a society where there are only annuities does not work,” as it promotes not industriousness and satisfying achievement but “laziness, negligence, permanent unhappiness.” In such “egalitarian, and thus unrealistic systems, the elites—or people on the nomenklatura list—always end up simultaneously lying to themselves and exempting themselves from the common condition,” as seen in the state officials who run the national education system, “this great drunken vessel,” “one of the world’s most expensive and most poorly rated,” while placing their own children in private schools. Thus, while “our system was supposed to be based solely on dedication to public service,” most understand “that this is not really the case” while “pretend[ing] to ignore it.”

If the democratic anthropology assumes that human beings are capable of governing themselves, the anthropology of French administrative-statist republicanism assumes that “subjects are incapable of managing their affairs without the help of a public authority.” Because every long-established regime “orients one’s temperament”—although not irrevocably, as a regime “is not a matter of essence, but a way of being and thinking that is linked to customs and laws”—the French regime “confirm[s] the definitely childish nature of lambda individuals, who cannot decide their complete destiny on their own.” The “disarmed citizen” of France “thinks only, to the detriment of others of saving his or her own skin,” an ethos that inclines individualism and statism at the same time. Because (as a remnant of aristocratic pride), French people prefer honor over commerce, this, along with democratic and republican egalitarianism, yields a “culture of envy.” I can no longer command your respect, but if you dare to rise above me, I sure as Hell will drag you back down. Delsol carefully insists that “human beings are profoundly equal at their core: both in the tragedy of their fate and their quest for meaning in life.” But equality isn’t egalitarianism. Egalitarianism “can lead to an understanding of fraternity as the erasure of differences,” as when “every difference is called ‘discrimination’ or when individual merit, an essential quality of liberal society, is criticized in the same way as any inequality of wealth or birth.” On the extreme Left, this means “always cherishing the egalitarian ideal that can be attained only via terror.” As social and economic differences narrow, bitterness against those that remain intensifies; “the greater is the equality, the greater is the feeling of inequality.” And so, in France “egalitarianism and the love of privileges constantly clash in real life,” with the latter being the love that dares not speak its name, closeted, an object of mistrust. Mistrust among citizens defeats the republican quest for unity. 

Add to this the distrust of the provinces, which remain to some extent traditional societies, for Paris, its residents priding themselves on their modernism, their chic-ness, their cosmopolitanism, their progressivism, and one sees how difficult the establishment of any genuine federal democracy must be. Exacerbating the divide, at least since the eighteenth century, has been the rise of the French “intellectual,” born “at the very moment in which the prestige of the clergy fades”—a “matter of substitution,” as rationalist and universalist secularists pushed aside the often quite reasonable Catholic (i.e., universalist) clergy. The intellectuals have been for the most part utopians, ideologues—a term invented by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, who meant by ‘ideology’ the “science of ideas.” That science was pursued by Henri de Saint-Simon’s followers, “a new clergy capable of implementing a politics guided by science,” and by Auguste Comte’s ‘positivists.’ By the beginning of the twentieth century, “the majority of French intellectuals sided either with fascism or with communism,” both ideological and purportedly scientific. Despite such honorable exceptions as Raymond Aron and Julien Freund, “France is a country that is particularly smitten with ideologies,” “prefer[ring] ideas to realities.” The Leftist ideologies valorize ever-advancing progress toward a vaguely defined “emancipation” of human beings; the Rightist ideologues are equally historicist in their orientation, but they want to go much more slowly and never to leave the old ways entirely behind. As if they were good democrats, both claim that the people are on their side, as indeed Lenin once did, only to rage and to recur to mass murder when he learned otherwise. Ideology always carries inside it the potential for self-righteous murder because the attempt to make ideality into reality must overcome the recalcitrant body. Fascism and communism were both materialist, to be sure, but they were dialectical materialisms aimed at eliminating all social and economic ‘contradictions’ on the road to an imagined supreme and perpetual unity.

Christianity also envisioned such a unity, but one only to be consummated by divine intervention. In this world, Christianity promoted secularization: the distinction between Jerusalem and Athens, revelation and reason, Church and State, not necessarily as enemies but as possible complements to one another. The establishment of a certain political and social space between Church and State permits a degree of liberty for citizens. Delsol contrasts secularization with the secularism of the modern West (and indeed with the modern East). Secularism wants ‘Athens,’ rationalism, and State to subsume ‘Jerusalem,’ reason, and Church. This subsumption has been especially pronounced in France, where, since Voltaire and his Enlightenment allies, religion is supposed “to be the real villain of history.” In contemporary French life, this has caused two problems: scientific progress hasn’t made religion go away, as “human beings have an intrinsic need to seek out mysteries,” knowing “that they have to die” and not knowing “the meaning of their existence” without searching for it. Moreover, the presence of Islam in France, a religion that tolerates no secularization, has unsettled the would-be secularization of lambda man, menacing both his secularism and his lambdanianism, threatening to take the lambda to the slaughter.

Delsol accordingly turns to “the present state of religion” in France. “Today, in France, what does Catholicism, which is traditionally the country’s dominant religion, represent?” Maurras, she writes, dominated much of French religio-political thought before the Second World War. But Maurras wasn’t a real Catholic; he held to a form of Machiavellianism, regarding religion as a thing for “the weak-minded—children, women, and fools,” a useful instrument with which to foster the civic order. Delsol objects, “if religion is a pleasant tale that serves only to bind society together, it will fade away at the first opportunity,” and it did, with atheist Marxism taking its place among many intellectuals in the second half of the century—even infiltrating the Church itself, with its then-fashionable “left-wing Catholics” who “abandoned religion before Marxism.” With Marxism’s refutation in ‘history,’ the only standard its proponents recognized, some of this generation of French have returned to Catholicism. French Catholic converts are “not numerous”, but they are important “because they are active and because they are in the process of supplanting the old communist elite.” They form families more cohesive than the families of the secularists, whose esteem for family life inclines to the tepid. Catholic families can better “withstand the educational and social crisis” in France better than “individualist-decomposed-recomposed families.” “An elite is forming in this crucible.” As it has among the Muslims. Given the long history of European Christianity against Islam, the tensions may not end well. And both oppose the new pantheism (anticipated by Tocqueville in his Democracy in America), which has found a home in ‘environmentalism,’ in ‘ecology,’ combining science with the worship of Gaia, Mother Earth—Marianne in Birkenstocks. “Ecology is unquestionably the great religion of the coming century, and its status as a natural religion encourages the worship of nature,” with Greta Thunberg as its prophetess. “The new religious conflicts are between supporters of transcendence and those of paganism.”

As to the Muslims in France, they began their emigration after decolonization in the early 1960s. This worked well, providing a source of laborers for French industry, so long as the families of the workers remained at home. But the Jacques Chirac administration authorized family reunification in the mid-1970s, the Muslim population increased just as the postwar economic prosperity had begun to decline. The children of Muslim families struggled in school, suffered unemployment and ostracism, turning “to traditional and radical Islam, so as to regain a lost identity.” France is not the only honor-loving society; Islam, with its quite literally militant fervor, presents it with a thumotic rival, one now embedded in, but separated from, French life. While “the United States manages to federate diverse cultures through pride in being American and saluting a common flag,” Muslims take no pride in being French—France being the land of their birth but not the object of their allegiance. 

And then there is Europe, that is, the ‘European project,” the European Union. Its eighth president, Jacques Delors, understood that the Union consisted of several states, with distinct ways of life contributing to “the culture of Europe as a whole.” “However, he was a French mandarin, convinced bout the unparalleled value of the state and all that comes with it.” Ingeniously enough, he set about to turn the principle of subsidiarity “into a Jacobin principle” by claiming that the several subsidiary states were incompetent to the tasks the Union proposed. “If, for example, the ecological common good that is required [by the Commission] is the ecological level of Denmark, then all other countries will be declared insufficient and will lose their autonomy to Europe,” that is, to the Commission. This is how “institutional Europe has, over the years, become a vast, centralized technocracy governed by a liberal-libertarian current of thought that has replaced Marxism among Europe’s elites.” The technocracy hands down not laws but “directives,” their authority founded on the claim that “government is a science” animated by materialism and pragmatism. Since science means knowledge, there is no need pressing need for elections by ignorance populaces. And many of the elected executives among the constituent states of the Union themselves “reflect the ‘progressive’ ideology desired by Europe: globalism, multiculturalism, individualism, and unlimited emancipation”—Angela Merkel and France’s own Emmanuel Macron being among the prominent examples. Progressives of their stripe “do not want opponents with whom they debate; they want only enemies who represent Evil par excellence”—Marine le Pen, Viktor Orban. Having “arrogate[d] right and legitimacy to itself alone,” Progressivism implicitly denies politics—ruling and being ruled, in turn—and, increasingly, the principle of consent. Delsol doubts that this can end well, if continued.

“It is utopia that depresses us. France certainly does not suffer from a lack of finance, talent, or luck: it suffers from being unrealistic.” And, increasingly, Americans have contracted the French malaise.

 

 

 

Notes

1. On Maurras, see “The Monarchist Kulturkampf of Charles Maurras” on this website under the category, “Nations.”
2. Althusius, who died in 1633, was one of the few anti-centralizers among German jurists and philosophers, but his ideas were revived by Carl J. Friedrich, who collaborated with post-World War II jurists in drafting the constitution of the Federal Republic.

 

François-René vicomte de Chateaubriand: Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem. A. S. Kline translation. London: On-Demand Publishing, 2011.

Part One: Greece.

Part Two: The Archipelago, Anatolia, and Constantinople.

 

Having voyaged to the westernmost frontier of European civilization, the United States of America, in 1791, meeting George Washington (“There is virtue in the gaze of a great man”), and finding material there for his novel, Les Natchez, in 1806 Chateaubriand undertook a similar journey for a similar purpose, from Paris to Jerusalem, returning through Egypt, Tunisia, and Spain. The literary result was Les Martyrs, a prose epic intended to complement his 1802 treatise, The Genius of Christianity. [1] His bête noir, Napoleon, had crowned himself Emperor of France two years earlier and had defeated Austria at Austerlitz in 1805; Napoleon would go on to ally France with the Ottoman Empire, a political liaison that may account for some of Chateaubriand’s asperity in his portrait of the Turks. While “in the deserts of America I had contemplated the monuments of nature”—complementing his earliest major work, Essai Politique, Historique, and Morale, sur les Revolutions Anciennes et Modernes considerés dans leurs Rapports avec la Révolution Français de nos Jours, in which he presented a theory of natural right [2]—and while he already “knew two of the realms of antiquity,” the Celts, ancestors of the French, and the Romans, their civilizational ancestors, he had never seen Greece, the civilizational cradle of Rome, or Jerusalem, cradle of the Christendom that had pervaded Greece, Rome, and France. “I may be the last Frenchman to leave my country to travel to the Holy Land with the ideas, aim and sentiments of the pilgrims of old, but if I have not the virtues that once illuminated the Lords of Coucy, de Nesles, de Chatillon, and de Montfort, at least their faith remains to me.” In this enterprise, Chateaubriand never strays far from the spirit of Jerusalem Delivered, Tasso’s epic poem of the Crusades. 

Arms and religion. In Greece under the Turks, he will meet a man who cannot understand why he would travel “to see the various peoples, especially those Greeks who were dead,” but when he describes himself as “a pilgrim on my way to Jerusalem,” the man “was fully satisfied.” “Religion is a sort of universal language understood by all men. The Turk could not understand that I had left my homeland out of a simple motive of curiosity”—Aristotle’s dictum, “Man wants to know,” having no echo in his soul—but “he found it quite natural that I should undertake a long journey to pray at a shrine.” Nor was this only a Muslim assumption, as “I had found the savages of the New World indifferent to my foreign manners, but solely attentive like the Turks to my weapons and my religion, that is to say, the two things that protect mankind in regard to body and soul.” [3]

Leaving French soil proper, he spends five days in Venice, then part of Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy, a client state ruled by the Emperor’s son-in-law. He then embarked to Trieste, which had been returned to Austrian control by France only a few months earlier. “The last breath of Italy expires here on this shore where barbarism begins”—that is, modern Greece, under Ottoman rule. On the Austrian ship taking him to Messenia, during a storm, the Catholic captain hangs a light in front of an image of the Virgin Mary, reminding Chateaubriand of “the affecting nature of this cult that yields empire over the seas to a weak woman,” reminding him that “what unsettles human wisdom is the proximity of danger; at that moment mankind becomes religious, and the torch of philosophy reassures less in the midst of the tempest that the lamp lit before the Madonna.” With the captain and the sailors, he prays “for the Emperor Francis II, for ourselves, and for the sailors…drowned in those sacred waters.”

Having “found ourselves at the gates of the Adriatic,” “I was there, at the frontier of Greek antiquity and the border of Latin antiquity”; “Pythagoras, Alcibiades, Scipio, Caesar, Pompey, Cicero, Augustus, Horace, Virgil, had crossed this sea.” After all, “I journeyed to seek the Muses in their own country.” Chateaubriand does not travel in the manner of today’s tourist ‘sightseer.’ When he sees a site, he hears the voices of poets and historians. “Woe to him who sees not nature with the eyes of Fenelon or Homer!” Or the occasional philosopher: “climate more or less influences the tastes of a people,” Montesquieu observes, in Chateaubriand’s words. “In Greece, for example, everything is smooth; everything is softened; everything is as full of calm in nature as in the writings of the ancients”; this is “why ancient sculpture is so little troubled, so peaceful, so simple.” “In that land of the Muses, nature suggests no abrupt departures,” bringing “the mind to a love of consistent and harmonious things.” “Nothing would be more pleasant than natural history, if one were to relate it always to human history: we would delight in seeing the migratory birds forsake the unknown tribes of the Atlantic shores to visit the famed peoples of the Eurotas and Cephissus,” and “perhaps some bird of the Americas attracted Aristotle’s attention on the waters of Greece, that philosopher failing even to suspect the existence of the New World,” and “often the marches of peoples and armies followed the wanderings of a few solitary birds, or the peaceful migrations of camels and gazelles.” “Long before mankind,” God’s creatures knew “the extent of man’s abode.”

The sea is another matter. There, the sublimity of nature rivals the beauty of the land. On the island of Corfu, west of the Greek mainland, “Odysseus was hurled after his shipwreck,” Aristotle came in exile and, under the Romans, Cato met Cicero after the battle of Pharsalia. (“What men! What suffering! What blows of fortune!”) And “it was from Corfu that the army of crusaders departed that set a French nobleman on the throne of Constantinople”—the Count of Flanders, who led the Fourth Crusade in 1204, who reigned as Baldwin I, the first Latin emperor. Despite the glory of the ancients (that “glory must be something real, since it makes the heart beat in one who is only a spectator of it”), Christian martyrs have equaled or perhaps excelled them: “Is a martyr to freedom any greater than a martyr to truth? Is Cato, devoting himself to the liberation of Rome, more heroic than Sosipater, allowing himself to be burnt in a brazen bull, in order to announce to men that they are brothers; that they should love each other; help each other; and rise nearer to God through the practice of virtue?” The superiority of the Christians to the ancients will be the theme of The Martyrs.

Chateaubriand landed at Methoni, on the western Peloponnese. Greece is now ruled by the Turks or, as Chateaubriand insists throughout, misruled. Yes, the chief civilian official of the city, the Agha, had cleared the roads of bandits, but his methods were not scrupulous. “It would have been too slow and too boring for a Turk to distinguish the innocent from the guilty: they killed, with a knock on the head as one kills wild beasts, all those hunted down by the Pasha. The robbers perished, it is true, but along with three hundred Greek peasants who had nothing to do with the matter.” When Chateaubriand sees the Christian and Muslim graveyards set next to each other, the Christian graveyard “dilapidated, without gravestones, and without trees,” “we see even in the freedom and equality of death a distinction between tyrant and slave.”

Under this regime, Chateaubriand maintained vigilance, as even “the slightest sign of fear or even of caution, exposes you to their contempt.” “A Turk is as pliable if he sees that you do not fear him, as he is offensive if he discovers that he has inspired fear in you.” He had French honor to uphold. At the city of Coroni, he recalls the Frenchmen who participated in its retaking from the Turks in 1685. “I enjoyed discovering these traces of the path of French honor, from my very first entry to the true home of glory, and to a country whose people are such good judges of worth.” Of course, “where does one not find such traces!” Throughout his journeys he found them: “The Arabs showed me the graves of our soldiers beneath the sycamores of Cairo, and the Seminoles beneath the Florida poplars.” Talent and arms: “If I myself have followed, without glory, though not without honor, those twin careers in which the citizens of Athens and Sparta acquired so much renown, I console myself by reflecting that other Frenchmen were more fortunate than I.” But now the Turks possess the olive trees of Coroni. “Tears came to my eyes seeing the hands of an enslaved Greek bathed in vain by those streams of oil that brought vigor to the arms of his forefathers so they might triumph over tyrants.” At once tyrannical and largely impotent, the Turkish state cedes effective rule to individual Muslims. The establishment of a public institution such as a drinking fountain or a caravanserai results from “the religious spirit, and not the love of country, since there is no country.” But even the religious spirit has waned. “It is remarkable that all these fountains, all these caravanserais, all these bridges are crumbling, and date from the early days of the empire: I do not think I encountered one modern construction along the way; from which one must conclude that religion is enfeebled among the Muslims and, along with that religion, Turkish society is on the point of collapse.” The regime will offer no help, however, as the state apparatus consists of “tyrants consumed with the thirst for gold, who shed innocent blood without remorse in its pursuit.” “If I had ever thought, with those whose character and talents I otherwise respect, that absolute government is the best form of government, a few months’ sojourn in Turkey would have completely cured me of that opinion.”

In southwest Peloponnese, where the ancient Spartans had ruled, “I could scarcely convince myself that I breathed the air of the homeland of Helen and Menelaus.” Sparta now consists only of a single white cottage. “Tears sprang to my eyes, as I fixed my gaze on that little hut, which stood on the deserted site of tone of the most famous cities of the world, and which served only to identify the location of Sparta, inhabited by a single goatherd, whose only wealth is the grass that grows on the graves of King Agis, and Leonidas.” Not long after, his Turkish escort brought him to another site, with “ruins everywhere, and not one human being among the ruins”—Sparta having been not only deserted by the modern Greeks but forgotten. He recalls the Spartan prayer, “Let virtue be added to beauty!” But now, “the sun blazes down in silence, and ceaselessly devours the marble tombs,” the only remaining life being the “thousands of lizards, noiselessly climbing and descending the burning walls.” While “I hate the Spartan moral code, I cannot fail to understand the greatness of a free people, and I cannot tread that noble dust without emotion,” the glory of the Spartan nobility confirmed by “a single fact”: when the dissolute Roman tyrant Nero came to Greece, “he dared not venture to Sparta,” the memory of whose austerity remained as a silent rebuke to his life and rule. There is an ironic coda to Chateaubriand’s visit. The Spartans’ statues and altars honoring Sleep, Death, Beauty, and Fear (“which the Spartans inspired in the enemies”) have disappeared, but he finds what may have been the pedestal of the statue of Laughter “that Lycurgus erected among those grave descendants of Hercules.” “An altar of Laughter remaining alone in the midst of buried Sparta offers a gloriously triumphant subject for the philosophy of Democritus”—the philosopher of atomism who snickered at the human failure to acknowledge the inevitable dissolution of all things.

Despite the rule of the Turks, Christianity has fared somewhat better. At Corinth, Chateaubriand recalls the Apostle Paul: “That man, ignored by the great, scorned by the crowd, rejected as ‘the sweepings of the world, only associating at first with two companions, Crispus and Gaius, and with the household of Stephanus: such were the unknown architects of an indestructible temple and the first Christians of Corinth. The traveler casts his eyes over the site of this famous city: he sees not a remnant of the pagan altars, but he sees a number of Christian chapels rising from the midst of the Greek houses. The Apostle can still give, from heaven, the sign of peace to his children.” Still, regarding Greece generally, “What silence! Unfortunate country! Unhappy Greeks! Will France lose her glory thus? Will she be thus devastated, and trampled, in the course of centuries?” Wherever he goes on this journey, Chateaubriand registers this strong sense of Sic transit gloria. “The Lord killeth and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up” (1 Samuel 2:6), he recalls. “This changeability in human affairs is all the more striking because it contrasts with the immobility of the rest of nature,” inasmuch as “wild animals experience no alteration in their empires or change of habits.” “I saw, when we were on the Hill of the [Athens] Museum, storks forming their battalion and taking flight for Africa.” “For two thousand years they had made the same journey, and were as free and happy in the city of Solon as they are in the city of the commander of the black eunuchs. To the heights of their nests, that revolution cannot reach.”

The impermanence of human things may be seen at Salamis, which “is now almost completely erased from the Greek memory.” “The indifference the Greeks show concerning their homeland is as shameful as it is deplorable; not only are they unaware of their own history, but they virtually ignore…the ancient language which is their glory.” At Piraeus, now deserted, “I walked a while beside the sea which bathed the tomb of Themistocles; in all probability, I was at that moment the only person in Greece thinking of this great man.” And “though one could still recognize Athens from its ruins, one could also see from the overall architecture and the general character of the monuments, that the city of Athene was no longer inhabited by the same people.” He is left with the Athens of antiquity, where “the higher sentiments of human nature acquire something elegant…that they lacked at Sparta.” At Athens “love of country and freedom…was not a blind instinct, but an enlightened sentiment, founded on that taste for beauty in all its form, that the sky had so liberally disposed.” While “I would have wished to die alongside Leonidas,” I would “live alongside Pericles.” At the ruins of the Areopagus, he recalls not only Pericles but Alcibiades and Demosthenes, who spoke there “to the most thoughtless yet most intelligent nation on earth,” men who issued “many cruel and iniquitous decrees” but also “generous speeches against the tyrants of their country.”

Chateaubriand prefers the Parthenon to the Areopagus. “The greatest masterpiece of architecture among both ancients and moderns,” the Parthenon’s harmony and strength [remain] visible in its ruins.” Modern architecture, “slender…when we aim at elegance,” “heavy, when we pretend to majesty,” cannot match the rule of reason, of mathematical balance, seen in the Parthenon. “We should not conceal from ourselves the fact that architecture considered as an art is in its principles predominantly religious; it was invented for the worship of the deity.” Moderns introduce its features into their homes, “ornamentation fitted only for the house of the gods.” And while Gothic architecture, the style which “is ours,” French, born “to speak with our altars,” elicits Chateaubriand’s praise, his fundamental sensibility leans toward the beautiful, not the sublime, despite his Christian convictions. “If after seeing the monuments of Rome, those of France seemed coarse to me, the monuments of Rome in turn seem barbaric now I have seen those of Greece.” And speaking of barbarism, “the Parthenon survived in its entirety until 1687, when the commercial Venetians “bombard[ed] the monuments of Pericles.” “A year of our warfare destroys more monuments than a century of fighting among the ancients. It seems that everything opposes perfection of the arts among the moderns: our nations, manners, customs, dress and even our inventions.” Continuing the ruin, Lord Elgin, citizen of still another modern commercial nation, “ravag[ed] the Parthenon” in order to transfer its bas-reliefs to the British Museum. “Only light reveals the delicacy of certain lines and colors,” but “this light is lacking beneath English skies.” In a larger sense, “What can have destroyed so many monuments of gods and men? that hidden force that overturns all things, and is itself subject to the unknown God whose altar St. Paul saw at Phaleron.”

Not without human assistance. Chateaubriand recalls that after the Romans conquered Athens, “gladiators mounted their blood-stained games in the Theater of Dionysus,” replacing “the masterpieces of Aeschylus Sophocles and Euripides,” as Athenians “flocked to such cruelties with the same zeal with which they had flocked to the Dionysian rites.” “Perhaps nations, as well as individuals, are cruel in their decrepitude as in their childhood, perhaps the spirit of a nation exhausts itself; and when it has created everything, traversed everything, tasted everything, filled with its own masterpieces, and unable to produce new ones, it becomes brutalized, and returns to purely physical sensation.” So far, Christianity has prevented “modern nations from ending in such a deplorable old age: but if all religion were extinguished among us, I would not be surprised if the cries of dying gladiators were to be heard on those stages which today echo to the grief of Phaedra or Andromache” in the plays of Racine. In an echo of his argument in The Genius of Christianity, Chateaubriand remarks that even the ruins of ancient Greece found their first students among the Jesuits and the Capuchins. When later travelers visited the Parthenon, “already the priests, religious exiles among those famous ruins hospitable to new gods, awaited the antiquary and artist.” The priests “did not parade their knowledge: kneeling at the foot of the cross, they hid, in the humility of the cloister, what they had learned, and above all what they had suffered…amidst the ruins of Athens.”

“In Greece, one indulges in illusions in vain: sad truth pursues one. Huts of dried mud, more suitable as the dens of animals than the homes of men; women and children in rags, fleeing at the approach of stranger or Janissary; even the goats frightened, scattering over the mountainside, and only the dogs left behind to welcome you with howls: such is the spectacle that robs you of memory’s charms.” There, under the Ottoman Turks, “a minaret rise[s] from the depths of solitude to proclaim slavery.” “These people destroy everything, and are a veritable scourge.”

Chateaubriand traces the beginning of Greek decline to the Peloponnesian War. “The vices of Athenian government,” the regime of democracy, “prepared the way for the victory of Sparta,” since “a purely democratic state is the worst when it comes to fighting a powerful enemy, and when a unified will is necessary to save the country”—precisely the argument Charles de Gaulle would make against parliamentary republicanism, a century and a half later. “Obedient to the voices of factious orators, they suffered the fate they had earned for their follies.” Then it was Sparta’s turn, in its case succumbing to the vices of a military aristocracy, where the women, untouched by the military discipline undergone by the men, “became the most corrupt women in Greece,” and the children, imitating their fathers, gave themselves over to “tearing each other with tooth and nail.” Further, the Spartan regime made no effort to unite Greece under its sway, preferring to retreat back behind its walls, once Athens had been defeated. Had they “incorporat[ed] within it the peoples conquered by its arms,” they “would have crushed Philip [of Macedon] in his cradle.” “With nations it is not as it is with men; moderate wealth and love of ease, which may be fitting in a citizen, will not take a State very far”; “not knowing how to take advantage of one’s position to honor, expand, and strengthen one’s country is rather a defect of spirit in a people than a sense of virtue.”

Although “I still think that there is plenty of spirit left in Greece,” thanks to human nature itself, “I am convinced that the Greeks are not likely to break their chains in the near future,” and even if liberated, “they would not immediately lose the marks of their irons.” The Ottoman Empire “has not brought them the harsh and savage customs of men of the North,” as the barbarians brought to Italy, “but the voluptuous customs of those of the South.” And the Koran, the other element brought them by the Turks, “preaches neither the hatred of tyranny, nor the love of liberty.”

Departing the mainland for the Cyclades archipelago, “a kind of bridge over the sea linking Greek Asia Minor to the true Greece,” Chateaubriand arrived at the harbor of Zea, known in antiquity as Ceos, whose most renowned son was the lyric poet Simonides, considered by Plato’s Socrates to be a precursor of the Sophists and confident of Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse. [4] Chateaubriand judges him “a true genius, though his mind was nobler than his heart,” a man who sang the praises of the ruler Hipparchus and then “sang the murderers of that prince.” [5] “One must accommodate oneself to one’s times, said that wise man: the ungrateful soon shake off their feelings of gratitude, the ambitious abandon the defeated, and the cowards join the winning side. Wondrous human wisdom, whose maxims, always superfluous to courage and virtue, serve merely as a pretext for vice, and a refuge for cowardly hearts!” Chateaubriand has in mind the accommodations of his own generation of sophists, who accommodated themselves to the tyranny of Napoleon. He also thinks of the “eloquent sophist” of the previous century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote that he wished to be exiled on an island in the Cyclades. Had this happened, “he would soon have repented of his choice”: “separated from his admirers, relegated to the company of coarse and treacherous Greeks, he would have found, in valleys scorched by the sun, neither flowers, nor streams, nor shade; he would have seen around him only clumps of olive trees and reddish rocks, covered with wild sage and balsam; I doubt that he”—the solitary walker—would have “liked to continue his walks for long, to the sound of wind and sea, along an uninhabited shore.”

He finds Smyrna similarly bleak, having been fought over twice by the Turks and the Greeks, then “continually plundered” until, by the thirteenth century, “only ruins existed.” Recovering after the Ottoman Empire established itself firmly there, it was then ravaged by “earthquake, fire, and pestilence.” “There was nothing to see in Smyrna.” To those who might view this report with disappointment, he can only reply, “I have a confounded love of truth, and a fear of saying what is not, that in me outweighs all other considerations.” Smyrna did feature a civil society (“I was obliged to resume the aspects of civilization, to receive and pay visits”) but “it was not what we call society that I had come to the East to seek: I longed to see camels and hear the cry of the mahout,” the elephant-driver. 

His spirit rebounds when he considers that in arriving at Smyrna he was, “for the first time, treading the plains of Asia Minor,” feeling “imbued with respect for that ancient land where civilization began, where the patriarchs lived, where Tyre and Babylon rose, where Eternity summoned Cyrus and Alexander, where Jesus Christ accomplished the mystery of our salvation.” And where Homer lived (would that “I might have acquired Homer’s genius merely by experiencing all the misfortunes by which the poet was overwhelmed”). And it is where Alexander the Great, a figure worthy of Homer’s art, defeated the army of Persia’s Great King in the fourth century BCE. “Alexander committed great crimes: his mind could not withstand the intoxication of success; but with what magnanimity he purchased his life’s errors!” Chateaubriand praises the “two sublime comments” Alexander made. At the beginning of his campaign against Persia, he gave his territory to his generals and when asked what he would keep, he replied, “Hope!” And on his deathbed, asked to whom he left the empire, he replied, “To the most worthy!” “His untimely death even added something divine to his memory; because we always see him as young, beautiful, triumphant, with none of those infirmities of body, with none of those reversals of fortune that age and time bring.” 

Constantinople brings him back to melancholy. The former capital of the Christian Roman Empire, it has been ruined by the Turks, its rulers since 1453. Amidst the “packs of masterless dogs,” “you see around you a crowd of mutes who seem to wish to pass by without being noticed, and have the air of escaping the gaze of their masters: you pass without a break from a bazaar to a cemetery, as if the Turks are only there to buy and sell, and to die…. No sign of joy, no appearance of happiness reveals itself to your eyes: what you see are not people, but a herd that an Imam leads and a Janissary slaughters,” a land with “no pleasure, but debauchery” and “no punishment, but death.” “From the midst of prisons and bathhouses rises the Seraglio, the Capitol of servitude: it is there that a sacred guardian carefully preserves the germs of plague, and the primitive laws of tyranny.” “Such vile slaves and such cruel tyrants ought never to have dishonored so wonderful a location,” but so they have done. “I could not help pitying the master of this empire,” whose “unhappy end”—Selim III was deposed by the Janissaries, then murdered—justified Chateaubriand’s pity “only too well.” “Oh, how wretched despots are in the midst of their happiness”—once again, glancing at Napoleon—and “how weak amidst their power!” They cannot “enjoy that sleep of which they deprive the unfortunate,” their subjects. “I only like to visit places embellished by the virtues or the arts, and I could find, in that land of Phocas and Bajazet neither the one nor the other.” He embarked for Jerusalem “under the banner of the cross which floated from the mast of our vessel.”

 

Notes

1. See “Chateaubriand’s Defense of Christianity,” on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
2. See “Chateaubriand and Political Philosophy,” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
3. That it is a Turkish Muslim assumption, reflecting Islam’s turn away from philosophy and ‘secular’ learning generally, may be seen in Chateaubriand’s account of a village in which an orphaned girl, sent to Constantinople, returned having mastered Italian and French and with manners of civility, “which made her virtue seem suspect.” The villagers “beat her to death” and collected monetary reward “allotted in Turkey to the murder of a Christian.” The Pasha of Morea took his share of the blood money and then, claiming that “the beauty, youth, learning, and travels of the orphan gave him legal right to compensation,” that is, extra money. Thus did religion and corruption collaborate in murderous tyranny.
4. Xenophon’s Hiero, a dialogue between the tyrant and the poet, occasioned an exchange between Leo Strauss and the Hegelian polymath, Alexandre Kojève. See Leo Strauss: On Tyranny: Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence, Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Timothy W. Burns and Bryan-Paul Frost, eds.: Philosophy, History, and Tyranny: Reexamining the Debate between Leo Strauss and Alexnder Kojève. (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2016). See also “Tyranny and Philosophy” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
5. In Felled Oaks André Malraux judges Napoleon to have been a man of great mind but small soul (a judgment de Gaulle does not share); Malraux was an admiring reader of Chateaubriand, and his allusion suggests that Chateaubriand may be thinking of Napoleon in this passage.