Charles Tilly: The Contentious French. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, May 13, 1987.

Traditional history is political history. Herodotus and Thucydides record popular customs, but they concentrate their attentions on the politikoi, the men of the polis—rulers or statesmen. But in the last two centuries, as democracy and its attendant egalitarianism have advanced in Western Europe and the Americas, historians have looked more carefully at ‘the commons.’ Jules Michelet, the great oratorical historian of the French Revolution, titled one of his books, simply, The People, and such later Frenchmen as Fernand Braudel and his followers have in many respects continued this populist emphasis.

Because the people do not rule directly in modern republics, and have not ruled at all in most previous regimes, democratic historians tend to shunt politics aside. Social and economic life concern them proportionately more. With Marx, some call politics superficial, ‘epiphenomenal,’ a thing determined by underlying socio-economic ‘forces.’

Charles Tilly refutes the Marxist or neo-Marxist view. His refutation is all the more convincing for its being inadvertent. Tilly gives every evidence of believing himself a neo-Marxist of some sort, but his scholarly diligence surpasses his apparent ideological assumptions, and corrects them.

He begins in the approved neo-Marxist style: “‘Sedition,’ ’emotion,’ ‘mutiny,’ ‘riot,’ and ‘disturbances’ are terms of disapproval, power-holders’ words.” He prefers “contention,” and indeed no sane person ever denied that the French are contentious. Tilly shows how the forms of popular contention in France changed with the economic concentration of power in capitalism and the political concentration of power in the modern state.

His “point of reference… differ[s] greatly from that of most political history.” He believes “that a new era has begun not when a new elite holds power or a new constitution appears, but when ordinary people begin contending for their interests in new ways.” Perhaps because it would be difficult to call attention to modern “statemaking,” as Tilly does, and then to relegate politics to the status of mere ‘superstructure,’ he avers that almost everything is political: “politics concerns power in all its guises.” (Thus do feminist neo-Marxists speak of ‘sexual politics’ and ‘the politics of the family,’ realms usually regarded as private.)

Tilly gives his study a useful specificity (Marxists say, ‘concreteness’) by attending to five diverse regions of France: Burgundy, Anjou, Paris and its suburbs, Languedoc, and Flanders. The largest portion of his book concerns the seventeenth century, but he carries his narrative into the 1980s.

Seventeenth-century France saw the consolidation of monarchic authority at the expense of what remained of the feudal aristocracy. Louis XIII and Louis XIV unified France by war: the combined pressures of foreign enemies, French military power, and domestic taxation, dissolved the independent authority of the aristocracy, fusing it to the central state. Before mid-century, peasant food riots (Tilly calls them “grain seizures”) often had the support of anti-royal aristocrats; after the Fronde, the aristocrats were co-opted and the peasants were on their own.

In this, Tilly shows, capitalism was royalism’s tool. To finance wars and to circumvent the aristocracy, the Crown deliberately promoted taxable commerce. French capitalism grew because the kings wanted it to. Truly, “waxing capitalism and growing state power walked hand in hand,” but more than that, politics led economics by the hand.

Rebellion did not disappear. It became “more plebeian.” “Class war was on the way.” In marking the transition from monarchy to the republic in the eighteenth century, Tilly slights Alexis de Tocqueville. In The Old Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville likewise shows how absolute monarchy brought on republicanism, which then brought on Bonapartism, by centralizing political power and by replacing the rule of law and guidance by clergy with (not to put too fine a point on it) money. Tilly’s analysis suffers badly in contrast to Tocqueville’s, as the latter carefully measures political and intellectual currents along with social and economic ones. Tilly labors under the simplistic, Marxist dichotomy between material interests, which are “real,” and principles (“natural rights and reason”), which are said merely to “clothe” the “real” interests. Tocqueville commits no such crudities; as a real politician, he knew better.

Tilly observes that while monarchic state-building tended toward standardization in language, administration, laws, and forms of coercion, capitalism tended toward differentiation, with different geographic regions specializing in different products. This may partly explain why capitalism survived and indeed thrived after the 1789 revolution, while its progenitor, the Old Regime, died—this, despite the fact that capitalist management of food distribution caused at least as much resentment as royalist conscription and taxation.

Republicanism in one sense accelerated political centralization. “If there was any quintessentially revolutionary act in France as a whole, it was the seizure of power in municipalities by committees acting in the name of the nation,” committees linked to “a national network centered in Paris.” “No king ever built such a structure,” which included direction intrusion into local church prerogatives and strong, pervasive police powers. That it also included, after Bonaparte would again include, political representation of the people on all levels of government, is a fact our neo-Marxist historian prefers not to stress.

Popular contention changed with these political changes, but slowly, reactively. Not until 1848 did the old forms of contention—”grain seizures,” temporary occupation of privately-owned land, protests against tax collectors—finally give way entirely to rallies, strikes, and demonstrations. (That food riots declined because “capitalist agriculture” actually feeds more people than pre-capitalist agriculture does not find its way into Tilly’s account.) And while he rightly points to the decline in agricultural population, particularly in the twentieth century, Tilly neglects to say that this means his “ordinary people” are no longer ordinary, that commercial republicanism satisfies new types of “ordinary people,” that rallies, strikes, and demonstrations therefore rarely threaten the commercial republican regime itself, although they may help to topple a government. The heart of a neo-Marxist throbs softly to the beat of sentimental populism, to a half-imaginary past of agrarian virtue and hardy independence. Neo-Marxism amounts to the syncopation of revolutionary ardor with nostalgia.

Tilly’s egalitarianism animates his scholarship. This serves his readers well more often than not, as he uncovers and reports masses of illuminating information that might otherwise gather dust in regional archives. When that egalitarianism overwhelms his scholarship, he may unwittingly mislead those vulnerable to losing their way in data. Tilly denigrates the forms of ‘elite’ politics, and of political institutions generally, even as he uncovers the decisive effects of those forms. The French have been so contentious because they have contended over regimes, and such struggles are harder to settle by compromise than food shortages or even property rights. And in focusing so exclusively on popular contention, he obscures the success of commercial republicanism, the regime wherein “ordinary people” feel most at home, once they know its forms by experience.

Alice Yaeger Kaplan: Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, May 27, 1987.

Neo-Marxism means Marxism plus whatever’s trendy. It has colonized many university departments in the United States—mostly in the social sciences but increasingly in the humanities, as well. Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s study of fascism among French intellectuals before the Second World War excels many products of this ideology. She writes what she calls “progressive” literary criticism, trying to nudge fascism into refuting itself. But her lively mind is so honest, it allows readers to nudge neo-Marxism into refuting itself, too.

Almost every extended act of literary criticism today begins with a discussion of ‘theory,’ the scholar’s beliefs about language and ‘texts.’ Because almost no literary scholar today has any real knowledge of philosophy, these exercises incline toward confusion. Kaplan burns the obligatory incense before such idols as psychoanalysis, feminism, the Frankfurt School, and ‘deconstructionism.’ She is best when her intelligence ascends from the cave of academic fashion and sees for itself.

She notices the many contradictory elements in fascism: elitism and populism, modernism and primitivism, paternalism and “mother-bound feelings,” ‘Right’ and ‘Left.’ But she also wants to show how fascism—the world derived from the Latin fasces, the axe with rods bundled around its handle, symbol of authority in ancient Rome—could bind together disparate ideas and sentiments, make them into a usable instrument of political power—the ‘totality’ of totalitarianism, that word Mussolini invented to name a new form of tyranny. She patiently looks for coherence beneath the apparent contradictions, eschewing the partisan histrionics that mar so much Marxist writing.

She does find several coherent patterns, but presents them in a way that reveals her ideology’s defects. Following the neo-Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin, she accurately observes that many fascist intellectuals veil economic and political reality with esthetic categories. Such men can even “describe objects that are used to kill as if they are purely creative.” She concedes that this strategy “is not necessarily fascist; we have seen it since.” She does not say where. She might be thinking of the less extreme ‘New Left’ rhetoric of the 1960s and early ’70s. (“Small is beautiful,” they claimed.) If so, estheticism does not distinguish fascism from other ideologies, including at least some variants of neo-Marxism.

The same criticism weighs against many other insights Kaplan offers. Yes, as the fascist state establishes itself, “the populist ideal” of revolutionary fascism “mutates toward an elitist one”—but the same is true under communism and even, to a much lesser degree, in republics. True, the lack of a strong middle class made Italy and Germany more vulnerable to fascism than was France—but the same held true for the conditions of Marxist victories in Russia and China. Granted, fascism used intellectuals, then swept them aside after gaining power—as did Marxists, who used ‘fellow travelers’ in exactly the same way (and this doesn’t make the latter Marxists, or even proto-Marxists). Unquestionably, fascists use language to subvert truth—as do totalitarians of the ‘Left’ and, more moderately, almost all rhetoricians. Fascists did indeed “place invective on the side of science” (or maybe vice-versa), but in this they could teach nothing to Stalin and his Lysenko.

I do not suggest that Kaplan should have written as extensively about communists, or French communists; authors need not be taxed for the books they choose not to write. But by almost entirely omitting any reference to communism, she goes too easy on her own Marxism and fails properly to ‘frame’ her picture of French fascism. She sees that fascism “was conceived by its enthusiasts as a new form of revolt, competitive with Marxism,” but she neglects to show concretely how this—so to speak—dialectic worked.

The neo-Marxist emphasis on political economy, psychology, and esthetics neglects the moral dimension of politics. Her dismissal of “moralism” serves Kaplan fairly well in her chapters on Marinetti and Céline, but it spoils her chapters on Sorel and Drieu la Rochelle, and weakens those on fascist broadcasters and film critics. Sorel’s notion of the general strike, for example, appeals less to estheticism than to a kind of morality: to heroism, and particularly to the refusal of vengefulness even within a violent revolution. Drieu la Rochelle’s anti-feminism, along with his admiration for ‘masculine’ warrior virtues, likewise comes from a moral impulse; he does not so much celebrate killing (as Kaplan would have it), but risk, self-sacrifice.

Kaplan makes much of the “banality” of French fascist writing, by which she means its apparently “unserious” character, the unthreatening frivolity that makes it easy to ignore but also easy to disseminate among the unwary. This is oversophisticated. Not “banality” but fascism’s undeniable appeal to the spirited virtues neglected in modern democratic life—courage, honor, manliness—makes it dangerous. Without that, and left with only the likes of Céline, fascism would have little or no attractive force, even among intellectuals.

And even insofar as fascist writers were “banal” or unserious, does that really set them apart from much of the inter-war Parisian literary scene generally? Only racism and economic conservatism appear to distinguish fascism from communism. On economics, Kaplan asserts that fascism subordinates it to “ideology.” This is true, but not in the way she means it: in Germany and Italy, “the economic structures of the fascist state are basically unchanged from those of the capitalist one.” Obviously, no major aggrandizement of the state can leave an economy “basically unchanged,” a fact embarrassing to Marxists, whose states never get around to withering away (as promised by Lenin) precisely because they too put ideology above economics.

This leaves racism, or at least nationalism. Because Kaplan’s neo-Marxism prevents sympathy for nationalism, she cannot begin to account for its appeal to French intellectuals. Without that account, she cannot adequately explain the virulently racist nationalism of the worst fascists.

“Fascism seems to be about making life into art—a transformation that promises to give artists an enormous role.” This appearance pleases certain notable inclinations both intellectual and French. Yet Marxism in its own way also wants to transform life into art. So, in a different way, does capitalism. And what of ‘post-modernism itself? Does it not attempt to The whole modern enterprise, beginning with Machiavelli, is ‘about’ using human art to conquer nature. If this is a problem, and I think it is, then neo-Marxism cannot solve it. Neo-Marxism cannot get past its own deeply modern presumptions.