Julius Caesar: Gallic War. In The Landmark Julius Caesar. Edited and translated by Kurt A. Raaflaub. New York: Anchor Books, 2017.

 

Caesar came, saw, and conquered, frequently, but why? In his excellent introduction to this volume, Kurt A. Raaflaub remarks that the Gallic War goes well beyond military history, encompassing geopolitics, comparative politics, and ethics. He calls Caesar’s book “an education in Romanness,” and truer words have seldom been written. One may add that for Caesar, Romanness isn’t merely Roman. Romanness is the preeminent example of what man, a citizen, and a country should be. Scarcely some latter-day ‘cultural relativist,’ Caesar intends to show Romans why they deserve the vaster empire he and his men have won for them and what virtues will be needed to keep it. He does so, not in the manner of a moralist—a Seneca, a Cicero—who names and describes the virtues, inquiring into human nature, but as one who shows these virtues in actions. The original title of the book was Res gestae—simply, “achievements,” and particularly public achievements. ‘Caesar’ is the public man, almost exclusively, not the private man who married, cut business deals, and wenched. ‘Caesar’ isn’t Julius; he is the model Roman and therefore the model man and citizen, preeminently worthy of emulation, just as ‘De Gaulle’ in Charles de Gaulle’s memoirs isn’t Charles but the model Frenchman, the man ‘of Gaul’ who understands that when the French follow that part of their heritage that the Roman conquest bestowed upon them, “all is well.” 

Caesar designs the Gallic War as a narrative proof of the Roman right to empire, the justice of Romans’ claim to rule the others. The three parts into which Gaul is divided, ruled by the Belgae, the Aquitani, and the Celts, differ in languages, institutions, and laws, and the peoples of Gaul also differ from the surrounding peoples—Germans, Britons—and from the many Gallic tribes even differ from one another—the Helvetii from the Boii from the Sequani, and so on. But almost all of these tribes and peoples strive for rule by means of warfare. Some are more warlike than others, but there isn’t a commercial republic, a Venice or a Singapore, among them. In Caesar’s victories, in his way of war and his way of peace, Romanness demonstrates its superiority over Gaulishness, Germanness, Britishness. Given the universal human political purpose of ruling, and the universal human military means to that end, the Romans excel everyone because their regime, their way of life, brings them victory and sustains them in their rule over their defeated rivals.

Romanness could weaken, however. Caesar sees that, too. The “most warlike” Gauls are the Belgae “because they are the farthest from the civilized sophistication” of Transalpine Gaul, the province ruled by Rome; “merchants come to them least often with imports that foster an effeminate disposition; they are also the closest to the Germans living across the Rhine River, and they are constantly at war with them.” The Helvetii, too, “surpass all the Gauls except the Belgae in bravery,” fights the Germans “in almost daily battles, either trying to keep them out of their own country or else actually waging war in the Germans’ territory.” Potentially, Rome might endanger itself by its own civilized way of life, which might foster ‘effeminacy’ or weakness, cowardice, softness. To keep the edge of its moral sword sharp, to maintain the virtus of its citizens, it needs war, imperial rule, even if that rule might, if fully secured, lend itself to what Montesquieu would later call the decadence of the Romans.

At the same time, warlikeness alone fails on the battlefields it craves when set against Roman civilization. In 61 B.C., “the most noble and wealthy person” among the Helvetii was Orgetorix. “Tempted by desire for kingship,” he allied with the aristocrats (his fellow ambitieux) and “persuaded his nation to leave their own territory with all their forces” on a mission to “take over the whole of Gaul and rule it.” Geopolitically, “the Helvetii are closed in on all sides by natural boundaries”: the Rhine River on one side, separating them from the Germans, the mountain range separating them from the Sequani, and the waters of Lake Lemannus and the Rhône, separating them from the Roman province. We can break out of nature’s confines, Orgetorix asserted, since we “excel all others in bravery.” But Orgetorix never got out of (the future) Switzerland, betrayed by an informer and brought to trial. A ‘populist’ of sorts, as indeed Caesar himself had been and would continue to be, on his own road to kingship, Orgetorix escaped by summoning some ten thousand slaves and freedmen clients from throughout the country. He was soon hunted down and recaptured, dying by what might have been suicide.

But even so, “the Helvetii did not give up their efforts to realize their intention to migrate from their country.” In 58 B.C., with their Gallic allies, including the Boii (latterly the Bohemians or Hungarians), they planned a mission to occupy the territory of the Santones. But between that territory and Helvetia lay either the territory of the Sequani or the province of the Romans. Geographically, the route through Transalpine Gaul was the easier to traverse. News of this plan brought them to the attention of Caesar, “hastened to leave the city” of Rome and, “by the most strenuous marches possible…hurried to Ulterior [or ‘Cisalpine’] Gaul and arrived near Genava.” Repeatedly, Caesar will cite Romans’ excellent ‘intel,’ as we now call it, their “celerity,” their quickness to act in light of such information, and their energy in so acting. The surprised Helvetii assured him that they merely intended to pass through the Roman province, doing no harm. They asked permission to do so, which Caesar had no intention of granting, for several reasons. One concerns justice and memory. He “remembered well that the Helvetii had killed the consul Lucius Cassius, routed his army, and sent it under the yoke”—this, nearly fifty years earlier. That is, he “remembers” the event not from experience but from the histories he has read, and perhaps from the accounts he heard as a child. Romanness is mindful; Romanness remembers. Romans write histories. More immediately, knowing not only the plan of the Helvetii but their warlike nature, he doubts that such a people, with their “hostile attitude,” “would be disciplined enough to refrain from committing outrage against persons or property” as they passed through Roman territory. Romanness is mindful in more than justice and in memory but in prudence.

In his prudence, Caesar duly noted that his legion alone could hardly survive a battle with the Helvetii on their own territory. Temporizing, he told their emissaries that he would consider their proposal, that they should return at a set date for his answer. This would enable Roman reinforcements to arrive. Meanwhile, he set his soldiers to work building a long wall and digging a trench along it, placing outposts at intervals along these structures and fortifying them, “so that he could prevent the Helvetii from crossing over more easily if they tried to defy his orders.” When the emissaries returned, he cited “the custom and precedent of the Roman people,” which “did not allow him to let any people make their way through the Province.” Custom and precedent being defenseless in themselves, “he made it clear that he would prevent them if they tried to apply force.” This they did attempt, but his defensive measures prevented them from crossing the Rhōne. 

This left the Helvetii with the alternative possible route, thought the territory of the Sequani. Geographically, this passage was too narrow to traverse without their permission, and that was not forthcoming. They asked an ally of theirs (Caesar calls him their “friend,” in the Aristotelian sense of a political friend), an Aeduan, Dumnorix, to serve as an intermediary, as he was “very influential among the Sequani,” owing to his “kindness and generosity to them.” [1] (His bond with the Helvetii was his marriage to the daughter of Orgetorix, the originator of their planned expedition.) Like his late father-in-law, Dumnorix wanted the kingship of his people “and was eagerly scheming for political change; thus he wanted to have as many nations as possible bound to him through his favors.” He agreed to the proposed diplomatic intervention and succeeded in winning both the Sequani’s and the Aedui’s consent to Helvetian passage into the territory of the Santones.

Well informed as always, Caesar learned of this and liked it no more than the Helvetii’s preferred route through the Province. In this, he displayed his prudential sense of geopolitical advantage. The Santones lived near the Province; Helvetian occupation of that territory “would place the Province in great danger with a warlike population, enemies of the Roman people, right next to land that was open to attack and very abundant in grain crops.” Again exhibiting Roman celerity and energy, “he rushed to Italy by long marches,” enrolled reinforcements and returned to Transalpine Gaul “by the shortest way through the Alps.” By June of 58, he had five legions poised across the Rhône from the Helvetii. Calling attention to Roman prudence again, he notes that before leaving for Italy he had installed his legate Titus Labienus as the officer in charge of the fortifications along the river. Labienus was a tribune of the Roman plebeians; Caesar’s political and military friendship with him betokens Caesar’s own ‘populist’ strategy in Roman politics. Caesar is the wiser Orgetorix; where the ambitious Gaul failed, he will succeed, both as conqueror of Gaul and, not so long afterwards, king of the empire he expanded far northward. 

He attacked and routed the Tigurini, one of the four Helvetian tribes, along the east side of the Arar River (today’s Saône). This was the tribe that had killed Lucius Cassius and sent his army under the yoke. “Thus, whether it was by chance or by the design of the immortal gods, the part of the Helvetian people that had brought this immense calamity on the Roman people was the first to suffer punishment”; having been elected Pontifex Maximus, Caesar allows himself the occasional glance at Rome’s civil religion. And the occasional glance at his family: “Caesar was avenging not only a public outrage but a private one as well,” as “the Tigurini had killed the legate Lucius Piso, the grandfather of his father-in-law, in the same battle in which they had killed Cassius.” The Roman memory is long, and so is the reach of its justice.

Caesar had his soldiers built a bridge over the river in order to pursue the other Helvetii, who “were very disturbed at his sudden arrival.” They had taken twenty days to get across the river but Caesar, in his celerity—made possible by Rome’s superior civilization in the form of military engineering—got across in only one. The unpleasantly surprised Helvettii sent emissaries to him, and the head of the delegation argued as follows: make peace with us and we will go and stay wherever you say, but if you continue to wage war, “remember the Romans’ past misfortune and the warlike spirit the Helvetii had always shown.” Our virtue is bravery, not cunning—evidently a suggestion that Caesar’s surprise maneuver must have been some sort of trick. The emissary thinks and speaks like a citizen of Crete or Sparta as described in the opening of Plato’s Laws. Caesar replies that he does indeed remember the Romans’ past misfortune at the hands of the Helvetii, “and to the extent that the Roman people had not deserved what had happened to them, he was even more outraged.” You Helvetians were the tricksters, then, catching the Romans off guard by attacking them for no reason. And currently, they had attempted to trespass on Roman territory and had “rendered the lives of” Rome’s Gallic allies, the Aedui, Ambarri, and Allogbroges, “miserable.” As for your past victory, again speaking as Pontifex Maximus, with Roman auctoritas, “it was the habit of the immortal gods,” whose memories are even longer than those of the Romans, when they wished to take vengeance on people for a crime, to give them unusually good luck for some time and hold off punishing them in order to cause them even more pain later from the drastic change in their circumstances.” All this notwithstanding, Caesar exhibited another Roman virtue, magnanimity; he would overlook these acts of injustice if the Helvetii provided hostages (insurance against any treaty violation) and compensated the Aedui and the Allobroges for the damages they had inflicted upon them. The Helvetian rejected the offer, proudly announcing that the Helvetian way was “to receive hostages, not give them”—thereby illustrating the difference between Roman magnanimity and Helvetian hubris.

Preparing to continue the war, Caesar demanded the grain his Aeduan allies had promised for his troops and animals. He then learned something about the Aeduan regime. Their “highest official” admitted to him that the unofficial and real rulers of the Aedui were holding back the grain and making patriotic appeals to the Gauls to expel the Romans. The hapless man protested that “there was no way that he could gain control over these people,” and that in betraying their secret plan he was putting his own life at risk. The Aeduan regime was no ally of Rome, at all, and Caesar suspected that its head was Dumnorix, the Aeduan who had ties with both the Helvetii and the Sequani. Liscus admitted as much in a private conference, explaining that Dumnorix, “a man with singular boldness, armed with huge influence among the lower classes because of his generosity,” had obtained lucrative conflicts by intimidating all rivals, thereby “accumulat[ing] lavish means for bribery” and supporting a small private army. He hated the Romans because he calculated, as the husband of a Helvetian, that the Helvetii would support his ambitions for a kingship, while the Romans, if victorious, would reduce the influence he had amassed. 

Caesar would have done just that, except that Dumnorix’s brother, Diviciacus, had long exhibited “the highest devotion to the Roman people, the greatest goodwill toward himself, and outstanding loyalty, justice, and moderation”; Caesar “was afraid that punishment of Dumnorix would strike Diviciacus to the heart.” The true Roman exhibits fides, trustworthiness. Moreover, to rule like a Roman, one must understand political friends and enemies alike, not only in their political ambitions but in their family connections. In their interview, Diviciacus tearfully confessed that he knew of his brother’s treachery, acknowledged that he had even undermined Diviciacus’ own position among the Aedui, but still begged Caesar not to deal with him “too harshly.” He asked this out of “brotherly love” and also because all the Gauls would assume that it was Diviciacus who had betrayed his brother to the Romans. In response, “Caesar took his right hand. He calmed him and asked him to stop begging. He said that Diviciacus’ friendship was worth so much to him that he would refrain from punishment for the outrage done to the Roman state and overlook his own hurt feelings in order to accommodate Diviciacus’ wish and requests.” He contented himself by bringing Dumnorix before him, laying out the charges against him, then letting him off with a warning and taking the precaution of “assign[ing] guards to Dumnorix so that he could be informed of what he did and with whom he spoke.” 

Having thus assured himself allied support, he moved against the Helvetii. At the town of Bibracte he fought and won a “long and bitterly contested battle,” which resulted in Helvetian surrender with the exception of 6,000 men from the tribe of the Verdigeni, who fled across the Rhine into German territory. Caesar ordered their pursuit and capture, punishing them with death. As for the remaining Helvetii, he ordered them to return to their own territory after they rebuilt the towns and villages they’d burned. “He did not want the land they had left to remain empty; it was good land for agriculture”; without them on it, “the Germans living across the Rhine would cross from their own territory into that of the Helvetiii and thus become the neighbors of the Gallic Province and especially of the Allobrogres.” A Roman understands the need for geopolitical buffers.

The war finished, Caesar received emissaries from “nearly all of Gaul,” who offered congratulations on his victory. Although they knew he’d waged war for the sake of Rome, “the outcome had proven no less useful” to them. “The Helvetii had been extremely prosperous in their homeland, but they had left it with the intention to wage war on Gaul in its entirety, to establish their rule over it, and to choose, out of a great number of possibilities in the Gallic territory, whatever area seemed most suitable and fertile, turning all the other nations into tribute-paying dependents.” With Caesar’s permission, they requested a secret meeting amongst themselves, the outcome of which was a petition to Caesar, delivered by Diviciacus. 

Caesar’s political friend explained that Gaul had many tribes but only two main factions, the Aedui leaders of one, the Averni of the other. With their principal allies, the Sequani, the Aedui had attempted to break the military deadlock by inviting the Germans into Gaul. “Then, when these wild barbarians got a taste for the fertile land, the way of life, and the wealth of the Gauls,” they brought over still more troops, which now numbered around 120,000. The Aedui and their client states had “lost their whole leading class, their whole council, the whole of their cavalry class” in war with this coalition, either in battle or as hostages. Even the Germans’ Sequani allies had had a third of their lands confiscated by order of the German king, the tyrannical Ariovistus. He had ordered them out of another third. “It would not be many years before all the Gauls were driven out of their own territory and all the Germans had crossed the Rhine.” Only Rome could prevent this. 

Caesar assured them that he could and would. The Aedui were longtime allies of Rome. “Given the greatness of the empire of the Roman people,” he considered their distress “extremely shameful both to himself and to his state.” German expansion was also dangerous “to the Roman people,” given the unlikelihood that such “a wild and barbarous people” as the Germans would content themselves with the conquest of Gaul, only. Marauding German tribes had descended into the Italian peninsula before. To these threats to Roman honor and Roman lives, he added the character of Ariovistus, who had become “so proud and arrogant that his behavior was no longer tolerable.” His regime was tyrannical, the enemy of Roman republicanism. Moreover, “Caesar came to believe that he should take action against this threat as quickly as possible” because the Gauls who had talked with his own soldiers had frightened them with tales of German military prowess. “Panicked babbling” threatened to make cowards of them all, de-Romanizing them, undermining not only the Roman empire but the Roman regime that had cultivated the virtues by which Romans had won that empire, preeminently courage.

After Ariovistus refused to meet Caesar’s emissaries, Caesar called a meeting of his officers. As a citizen of the Roman republic, Caesar had studied the art of rhetoric, and he now exhibited it. He argued as follows: Ariovistus “would not reject either Caesar’s or the Roman people’s friendship,” once he had duly considered his proposals. “But if, driven by insane rage, he should start a war, what did they actually have to fear? Why had they lost trust in their own bravery or Caesar’s competence?” The Cimbrian and Teutonic tribes had in fact been defeated, decades earlier, by troops under the command of Gaius Marius. The Roman army had also put down a slave rebellion in Italy, winning a dangerous civil war. Given these victories, “it could be judged how beneficial firmness of courage is”—in contrast to the insane rage of the barbarian tyrant, which is no virtue at all. Indeed, the Germans had often been defeated by the Helvetii in their never-ending wars, and we just defeated the Helvetii. The only reason Ariovistus had rolled up his victories against the Gauls was that the Gauls were war-weary and because the Germans had surprised them. “His victory had thus been achieved by calculation and planning rather than bravery”—the same argument the Helvetian emissary had deployed against Caesar. “Though such a strategy could work against inexperienced barbarians” like the Gauls, “not even Ariovistus himself could hope that our armies would be fooled by it.” If any of your fellow officers conceal their fear “by pretending concern for the grain supply or the narrow roads,” you should understand that they are as arrogant as the Helvetii had been, “lacking confidence in their general’s ability to do his duty or else by daring to tell him how to do it.” As a matter of fact, Rome’s Gallic allies have already guaranteed the grain supply and he, Caesar, had mapped out a good route into German-ruled territory. His authority derives not only from his capability but his virtue: “Whenever armies had refused to obey their general’s orders, it was because of a setback when the general’s luck failed, or lese some crime had been found out and financial misconduct prover,” but “his own life had been shown to be blameless throughout, and his good fortune was apparent from the war with the Helvetii.” Having readied a just and reasonable peace offer, having exposed his enemy’s irrationality, having exhibited his own good fortune, owing to his own courage and prudence, and relying on his officers’ fides with respect to their commander’s authority and on the officers’ and soldiers’ courage—the virtue Gallic gossip about Ariovistus’ enormities had tested—it was now time to act. He drew the logical conclusion, a command to action: “move camp during the fourth watch of the coming night, in order to find out as soon as possible whether his soldiers were motivated by self-respect and duty or by cowardice.” However that may turn out, he still has his 10th Legion, “about which he could not have any doubts and which would in the future serve in the function of a praetorian cohort,” a just honor in return for their fidelity and courage. No worry of that, however, since “By the time Caesar had ended his speech, the attitude of all those present was marvelously transformed, and they were filled with the greatest enthusiasm and passion to start the war.”

Tyrants being moved more by the actions than by the words of others, Ariovistus, recovering his reason, now agreed to the meeting he’d earlier refused. With a precautionary guard, Caesar came to the enemy camp, offering an alliance. Reminding Ariovistus of gifts he’d received from Caesar and the Senate in the past and of the Romans’ firm alliance with the Aedui. The Aedui had enjoyed “a position of leadership” among the Gauls before their alliance with Rome. Rome had done nothing to ruin that position, it being “the habit of the Roman people to wish not only that their allies and friends were not deprived of anything that belonged to them but also that their influence, status, and honor were enhanced.” Germans too can enjoy such an alliance, if they desist from making war on the Aedui or their allies, return the hostages, and bring no more men across the Rhine. To this, Ariovistus replied that he crossed the Rhine at the invitation of the Gauls; the Gallic lands he ruled were granted to him by the Gauls; the Gauls started the war against him, and he won; he was prepared to renew the war if the Gauls offered war, but in any case, he had fought an exclusively defensive war. As to the Romans, he had arrived in Gaul “before the Romans did.” The Romans “were wrong in obstructing him in pursuing his rights.” He doubted the alleged firmness of the Roman-Aedui alliance, in view of the lack of mutual military support in recent wars. If it came to war between himself and Caesar and if he killed Caesar, “he would be doing a favor to many noblemen and leaders of the Roman people,” who disliked and distrusted the ambitious general, but if Caesar left and agreed to his “unlimited control over Gaul, Ariovistus would reward him on a grand scale, and whatever wars he wanted waged, he would carry them out for him with no effort or danger on his own part.”

Drawing upon Roman memory, preserved in Roman histories, Caesar denied that the Germans’ claim on Gaul predated that of the Romans, recalling the victory of Quintus Fabius Maximus over the Averni and Ruteni and 121 B.C. At the time, “the Roman people had forgiven them and neither turned their country into a province nor forced them to pay tribute,” unlike Ariovistus. The Senate had decreed Gallic freedom: “after it had been defeated in war, [it] was to live by its own laws.” This implies that the gradual conquest of Gaul the Germans were undertaking could have no legitimacy in the eyes not only of Caesar but of the Roman republic. 

Sure enough, while this talk was going on, Ariovistus’ horsemen had been moving closer to the site, harassing the Roman troops. Ending the discussion, Caesar withdrew with his soldiers, making sure that a report of this conduct and of Ariovistus’ words circulated throughout his camp. “The army was fired up much more and inspired with an even greater keenness to fight.” Upon receiving another invitation to parley, Caesar declined to attend personally, sending emissaries instead, whom Ariovistus put in chains. This was a just casus belli. In September 58, the two armies fought along the Dubis River. Though outnumbered, the Romans won and the Germans fled, as did Ariovistus. 

“Having, in a single summer, brought two very significant wars to a conclusion, Caesar led the army to winter quarters among the Sequani.” Leaving Labienus in charge, he then returned to Cisalpine Gaul where, as provincial governor, he presided over the judicial hearings—that is, returning to civil life in peacetime and the rule of justice under law, which must be secured before it can be practiced. Such is Roman gravitasi, seriousness.

The First Book of the Gallic War shows why a statesman like de Gaulle rested content with the historical memory of the Roman conquest while bitterly resisting the Germans. In his estimation, from antiquity to the midpoint of the 20th century, Germany never really abandoned its barbaric ethos. Despite its vaunted Kultur, German still remained the home of “sublime and glaucous monsters,” with a military elite that perpetually overreached itself because it lacked mesure. German thinkers often despised mere ‘civilization,’ contrasting it with that Kultur, and that, in de Gaulle’s view, typified the problem. By contrast, the Caesar of the Gallic War embodies a measured, balanced, civilized regime, exhibiting the classical virtues of courage, moderation, justice, and prudence, along with the crowning virtue of magnanimity. Frenc grandeur, as de Gaulle understood it, owed its origin to this Roman greatness, blended with the energy and independence, the passion for self-government, native to the Gauls and later refined by the influence of a Christianity both Roman and rightly ‘imperial’ or ‘catholic.’ 

Neither de Gaulle nor Caesar saw anything unrealistic about these virtues, as Machiavelli famously proclaimed, arguing instead for what he called virtù, which substitutes vulpine shrewdness for classical prudence and leonine rage for classical courage, eschewing justice and moderation, and ignoring magnanimity. Contra Machiavelli, the classical virtues lend themselves to mindfulness of what de Gaulle calls “the realities”: provisioning and organizing troops, forming alliances, seeking knowledge of shifting political and military alliances, knowing how to speak to military officers and soldiers alike. He does not show how to speak to civilians from patricians to plebs, although he indicates that he can do that, too; in this, de Gaulle was far more instructive. But he does show that military virtues can entitle the victors to rule an empire, if those virtues encompass a substantially wider range than a warrior people’s characteristic bravery and cunning. In the Gallic War, Caesar teaches Romanness to his readers, elevating the ambitious souls of those who study it with the most ardor to citizenship in Rome and to civilization in the world.

 

Note

1. The political friendship illustrated here is the friendship between equals. Political friendships or alliances may or may not be between equals; in Latin, the words for equal and unequal friendships are not the same.

 

Charles Maurras: The Future of the Intelligentsia & For a French Reawakening. Edited and translated by Alexander Jacob. London: Arktos Press, 2016.

 

Almost no one reads him in America. Catholic-sympathizing royalists—Maurras himself was an agnostic whose writings were anathematized by the pope in the 1920s—one who came down on the wrong side of French regime struggles from the Dreyfus ‘affair’ to the Vichy demi-government’s collaboration with France’s Nazi conquerors, tend to get little notice, here. Yet in France, the spirit of Action française, the movement whose journal Maurras edited from its inception in 1899, survives in attenuated form, and so does the organization—no longer a full-fledged political party but a sort of think-tank dedicated to teaching young ‘Right-wing’ activists. It remains staunchly monarchist and patriotic, opposing both French republicanism and federation within the bureaucratized auspices of the European Union. Maurras himself remains a perceptive cultural historian, and not without some telling political thoughts, despite his almost uniformly bad political judgment and virulent antisemitism.

Maurras admits his own imprudence near the beginning of his 1905 book, The Future of the Intelligentsia. Characteristically, he wraps his admission in hauteur: paying homage to his friend, the writer René-Marc Ferry, founder of a short-lived journal Minerva, Maurras recalls, “We imagined that the Attic olive tree and the Latin laurel united in the French fashion would definitely make the people rush to us,” but “we did not take into account a small fact,” that “the good people were dead,” that the “refined and cultivated society” of old Paris “does not exist any longer.” “We did not want to believe it,” and in encouraging the Quixotic effort Ferry proved himself “too good for your century.” “The enlightened love of letters, and much more the love of philosophy” have perished. Without the “humanist literature,” the arts and sciences become increasingly barbaric, as European politics has become. “I would like to be wrong, but, after so many years of very refined intellectual life, a French high class that does not want to read any more seems to me to be close to its downfall,” and “the bad taste of the new masters” now dominates. Although he detests what he takes to be the internationalism of French Jews, he respects their esteem for “an intelligentsia”; Jews “would not commit the pathetic errors, the omissions, the confusions in which the good faith of our friends may allow itself to get lost.”

Very well, then. Ferry’s strategy didn’t work because it no longer could work. Political and social circumstances have changed. Since “today, everybody is armed and trained,” so too must the intelligentsia be. “For a long time, we have no longer been able to walk and discuss things under the plane trees,” like the interlocutors in Plato’s Phaedrus. We intellectuals must therefore move from political philosophy to political action. “Action! And I ask for nothing better.” Move from the Phaedrus to Maurice Barrès’s Les déracinés, the novel chronicling young Frenchmen from Lorraine who lose their way, morally and spiritually, in contemporary Paris. Restoration of the life of the mind can only come from vigorous political action, now, action in defense of French monarchy and, to the extent now possible, France’s traditional way of life. Can this be done? “No mind can flatter itself that it has a really satisfactory and certain knowledge of the future. To foresee, even try to foresee, is a sickness of the heart” because “the future is either fear or hope,” and to fear and hope rightly comes only from underlying sentiments well refined. The first of these is patriotism, the opposite of deracination, love of one’s own soil and the ways of one’s own people. Thought severed from the sensibility fostered by the old regime has only led to the “mechanism of modern moeurs,” its power animating the “electric wagon that moves dividing the world into plebeians and patricians.” Modernity founds itself on the “material forces” of “blood and money”; discarding its kings and aristocrats, the French have “passed under the rod of the financial merchants who are of another flesh than ours, that is to say, of another language and another thought”; here is the locus of his animus toward Jews, Germans, and (not incidentally) the great commercial republics of England and America. “Fortunately, the conquering force is not single,” as “blood and money combat each other.” If only the intelligentsia will act, act not as a moderating arbiter between the two forces but as a force that tips the balance from money to blood, to nationality, then it will reverse intellectual deracination and vulgarization while winning an ally with the material force intelligence needs to protect itself but cannot wield directly. “The interest of the man who thinks may be to have more money, but the interest of thought is to attach itself to a free country, which only the hereditary virtue of blood will be able to maintain. In this free country thought equally reclaims order, that which blood can establish and maintain.” Maurras recognizes the need for “wise and prudent” action, even as he fails signally, and will continue to fail signally, to achieve wisdom and prudence. 

Maurras links intelligence to spirituality, the spirituality of the Catholic Church. He is thinking of the French Catholic Church, remaining a sharp critic of spiritual internationalism along with financial internationalism. Under this noticeably ‘secularized’ Catholicism, “if one wishes to avoid an individualism that suits only Protestants, the moral question becomes once again a social question: no customs without institutions.” As in Barrès, so in Maurras: the individual can cultivate himself only as a member of immortal nation, and the nation cannot survive if it attempts to rule itself under the regime of democracy. 

It is here that Maurras begins his cultural history of France, a history intended to counteract the contemporary illusion that the power and prestige of men of letters is at its zenith. After all, most intellectuals now suppose, under democracy “the most certain of facts is that we live under a government of public opinion,” and we intellectuals “are the people who extract this opinion and set it to work,” even “creat[ing] it, bring[ing] it into the world,” making us “masters of everything.” “The swords of yesterday have been beaten not into ploughshares but into printing presses,” instruments of the coming “sovereignty of the intelligentsia.” Maurras dismisses this illusion. “No conception of the future is more wrong, even though it is presented to us with equal clarity and warmth.” 

The intelligentsia consists of men of letters, poets, orators, philosophers—those who wield “the power of the word”—but Maurras will center his historical account on the men of letters. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, “letters served their function as an adornment of the world,” striving to “soften polish, and amend common moeurs.” “They were the interpreters and, as it were, the voices of love, the sting of pleasure, the enchantment of long winters and long old age”; “they did not yet claim to govern.” An absolute monarch, a Louis XIV, “would not at all have tolerated” such pretensions,” and when orators, philosophers, and poets ventured to present the best regime for the state they did it ‘Platonically,” “almost always by avoiding seeking an immediate application and a serious realization.” They might invoke pagan themes but seldom if ever “deviat[ed] from the doctrines of the Gospel.” In all this, they displayed “measure and character.” The effects of letters on customs were “indirect and distant”—intentionally so. 

The eighteenth century saw an entirely different approach. The Enlightenment intelligentsia aimed at reform and indeed at revolution; more, they aimed at ruling, first undermining the existing regime with satire and then reaching for control of it. This could happen because “the genius and modesty of their predecessors of the grand siècle had ensured their credibility.”  Rousseau enjoyed the authority to “usurp the attributes of the prince, those of the priest and even of all the people, for,” being Swiss, “he was not even the subject of the king, nor a member of any large military state of significance in the Europe of that time.” To hold in one’s hands monarchic, priestly, and popular authority amounts to tyranny, “the general dictatorship of letters.” Moreover, in the eighteenth century “letters reigned not as virtuous or just,” not according to the natural principles of politics, “but precisely as letters,” “call[ing] itself Reason.” This so-called reason “accorded neither with the physical laws of reality or with the logical laws of thought”; its victory was therefore “absurd.” “When the royal authority disappeared, it did not at all, as is said, cede to the sovereignty of the people; the successor of the Bourbons is the man of letters.” The Bourbons unwittingly collaborated in their own demise. Thanks to the efforts of the intelligentsia, “a new order of feelings was introduced in hearts, and affected practical life, towards 1789.” They, and the French aristocracy, crucially including the military officers, by then “seriously doubted the justice of their cause and the legitimacy of this work of leadership and government that they had in public office.” Maurras remarks that the same sort of timid abdication occurred again in the revolution of 1848-1850, and not only in France. It was not a matter of lacking coglione, as Bonaparte rather unkindly asserted. “The Revolution had taken place in the depths of their mentality,” minds molded not by philosophy but “philosophism.” 

From 1789, “no government was more literary,” a judgment confirmed by the political sociologist Michael Mann, who writes that the French revolutionaries would have made “a fine ‘Department of Western Civilization.'” [1] “The governing ideas are the ideas of the ‘philosophes,'” Maurras observes, and “the system of morals and institutions that they had formerly composed in private, they imposed steadily on public life.” Since “the majority of the ideas of that time were imprecise,” general, abstracted from social and political reality, the revolutionaries’ actions “entailed a large number of mutilations and destructions even when [their method] served just ideas,”; reaching for the realization of ideals that could exist only in their minds, “our men of letters were therefore induced to spare neither things nor persons.” As for their sometime collaborator and eventual successor, Napoleon Bonaparte, “one should savor the ideologue in him”; “he represents the crowned man of letters,” the self-conscious beneficiary of Rousseau and Voltaire, the continuer of the Revolution “and with it all that the literature of the eighteenth century dreamed of,” turning it into the Napoleonic Code. This gave Napoleon’s regime coherence. But it was the coherence of “dreams without substance.” To this day, to the beginning of the twentieth century, “all our misfortunes flow from these mendacious appearances,” which “contradict the profound necessities of the real order.” In this, Napoleon may rightly be considered the heir of Enlightenment rationalism and “the greatest poet of French Romanticism.” 

Despite this, he was also “the last of the nationalist statesmen” in France and a military genius. In this aspect of his soul and his actions Napoleon I “personifies the ironic and harsh response of the military men of the XIX century to the literary dreams of the XVIII.” Infected though they were by “philosophism” (Napoleon himself claimed, perhaps pretended, that “I draw up my battle plans from the dreams of my sleeping soldiers”), the harsh facts of warfare kept them at least partially grounded in reality. 

This left nineteenth-century France with a knot of contradictions, never unraveled. Revolutionary literature was universal, but nineteenth century politics was nationalist. Revolutionary literature understood labor-capital relations as individualistic, man to man, worker to boss, but nineteenth century economics was industrial, impersonal, corporate. These relations were concealed, if poorly, by the “absurd, odious, and fragile core of the legal fictions” that supported them. Since “the men of letters did not understand anything of the workers movement but what it presented in a revolutionary way, instead of building with it, they contradicted it in its organizational work and stimulated it in its destructive effort,” “embitter[ing] it and lead[ing] it to violence.” “Thus everything that the force of events undertook that was useful or necessary”—the possible rapprochement between workers and capitalists—the “literary intelligentsia led astray or contested methodically.” The authority of these intelligentsia quite rightly began to decline. Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Balzac, Hugo—none wielded the authority of Voltaire and Rousseau. The men of letters who did share in ruling France—the royalist prime minister after the Bourbon restoration, the Comte de Villèle, Napoleon III’s prime minister, Émile Olivier, and Third Republic prime minister Léon Gambetta—all “presented themselves as practitioners [of politics]; they would have been offended by being put in the same company as Rousseau.” “Their common ambition was to present themselves first of all as statesmen and men of action,” as indeed Maurras and his allies sought to do in the next century, with considerably less success.

Despite its decimation in the Revolution, the old aristocracy survived. Understandably, aristocrats viewed the parvenu intelligentsia with suspicion. Understandably but ill-advisedly: “It would have been wise to restrain sly smiles and to retain insults that were often paid dearly.” “The inorganic condition of society, the instability of governments, in this regard, permitted only movements of passion.” That is, contra Tocqueville’s advice, the aristocrats failed to reassume their rightful function, and “neither a directed politics nor a tradition” would be rebuilt. [2] The remnants of “old France” might invite the intelligentsia into its parlors from time to time, but never admitted such persons into their confidence, and so never exerted influence upon them. As a result, “the French intelligentsia of the XIX century continued its career of a dethroned old queen by separating itself increasingly from this other defeated queen, the French high society of the same period,” isolating itself from her or revolting against her. It appealed, Caesarlike, Napoleonlike, not to “its natural public” but to the crowd and drew much of its inspiration not from French but from German and English sources. The patriotism French letters and their readers accordingly declined.

Meanwhile, industrial capitalism and its captains of industry enriched not only themselves but spread affluence throughout the country. “The new luxury was in its principle an increase in comfort, a more intelligent adjustment of life, the means of being worth more, of acting more, the multiplication of the facilities of power.” It enables “the rich man of today…to move as he pleases,” making him more cosmopolitan, more ‘internationalist,’ than the old aristocrats, who were bound to the land and the people on and near their land. Money no longer leveled class distinctions, as it had done in the time of transition of the ruling classes from the feudal lords to the bourgeoisie. Money now “accentuated the old separations or rather dug quite new ones.” One separation that widened was that “between the French intelligentsia and the representatives of the French interest, French power, those of the past or of the present.” “Incorporeal in nature, incapable of possessing or administering the material order, the intelligentsia penetrates this new life and this new world as a visitor,” having no part in it.

Today, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the mechanized character of industrial capitalism “has complicated the material life of the French higher classes,” differentiating it from the other classes, very much including the intelligentsia, which “find[s] itself rejected and excluded from a certain circle of life.” Modern life in the new regime has left the men of letters behind. Insofar as they do participate in that regime, they themselves become industrialized, so to speak. Like capitalists, they produce works appealing to the ‘mass market.’ They do make money, but not enough to join the ranks of the really rich. Their prosperity amounts only to “the false colors of glory,” not the real thing. A writer today, lacking the patronage of the old aristocrats, now find themselves subject to “the most diffuse and soft, the most fleeting and colorless of popularities.” “As a pure business, literature, is thus a bad business and men of letters are very small manufacturers,” with “mediocrity” as “the dividend of the best merchants of paper copies.”

“I am told that socialism will sort everything out.” Maurras doubts that very much, rejecting the Marxist dream of the omnicompetent ‘new man’ of communism. A writer, Maurras quite sensibly maintains, is seldom a good printer or paper merchant, the example of Benjamin Franklin notwithstanding. In expecting historical laws to transform human nature, socialists bet on a chimera, no strong horse. “Socialism cannot change very much in this natural law”: in human nature one sees not “fixed quantities that may vary with the economic and political conditions but a psychological relationship that is maintained when the quantities are altered,” ensuring that the ‘type’ of the man of letters seldom combines with the ‘type’ of the businessman. “The merchant remains a merchant and the poet a poet,” regardless of whether wealth becomes equalized across those two classes. And, of course, this will result in the constant recurrence of economic inequalities, whatever the socialist rulers may intend. Meanwhile, under the actual prevailing conditions of capitalist industrialism, writers for now can make money, although Maurras foresees the consolidation of publishing houses that will erect barriers to entry for the men of letters to come. A century later, even the Internet, which promised and delivered on its capacity to ensure every writer a means of publishing, becomes increasingly ‘policed,’ as it already is under the state-socialist regime of China. “That is the fact of all forces. It is impossible to approach them without their seeking to submit and enslave.”

Conditions of literary work under the new oligarchy will force the writer “to exchange a little of outspokenness for money,” causing him to flex “his taste, his opinions before the financial power of his newspaper, journal or bookshop.” Literary independence remains only for those who are independently wealthy (in the past, La Rochefoucauld) or those content in poverty (Diogenes, St. Francis).  Having “proposed to have the world at his feet,” he “suddenly finds himself prostrated before the world.” He begins to lose “his raison d’être, the secret of his strength and his power, which consists in being determined only considerations of the intellectual order. His thought will cease to be the pure mirror of the world and will participate in these simple exchanges of action and passion that form the life of the vulgar person. Thus, the only liberty that there is will be threatened in him; in him the human mind runs a risk of being captured.” And they will be hunted, since “the moment that the intelligentsia has become a capital and it can be exploited very fruitfully, human types had to be born to hunt for it because there is the most magnificent interest in it.”

What is more, and more menacing, there is “a peril that seems more pressing when one observes” it arises: the peril of entanglement in “the market of politics.” There, intellectuals are in demand. “In fact, after our 100 years of Revolution, the masses decorated with the title of a public think that they have been clothed once again with the sovereignty of France”; “whoever directs public opinion is the actual king.” In economic terms, this produces “a surplus value…in favor of these directors of opinion,” those whose “private opinion makes public opinion.” As noted, those who make private opinion are those who pay the intelligentsia, who are merely the ones with the ability to make public opinion. Since the democrats aren’t stupid and ignorant, they tend to suspect the oligarchic mind and the commands it issues behind the intelligentsia’s hired hand. Since the oligarchs are now internationalists, they use their hired hands to shape, or rather misshape, French public opinion in forms that no longer serve the rights and interests of the French. And those oligarchs may not even be from France.

Maurras cites the examples of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Before the first war, the “liberal press” in France claimed that Prussia embodied the principles of Voltaire and Frederick the Great against the ‘reactionary’ Catholic monarchy in Vienna. This struck French observers of Bismarck as what we’d now call a bit of a stretch, but no matter—Bismarck himself had already put many among the intelligentsia on his payroll, who went to work deceiving “the benighted masses” about the Iron Chancellor’s intentions. [3] The sad fact is that “patriotism does not make itself felt equal in all the members of the same fatherland,” and it often “requires very large public ills” to remind the public of it. These came soon enough, as an unprepared France lost the 1870 war and the Bonapartist regime collapsed, replaced not by a legitimist monarchy but by the Third Republic. “The democratic journalists, who repeat with a victorious tone that one does not buy opinion, should study in Bismarck how to dupe it.”

“The illusion of French politics is to believe that good sentiments can be maintained and perpetuate themselves by themselves and, in this way sustain in a constant manner the overwhelming care of the state.” On the contrary, Maurras insists, “Good sentiments are good accidents,” unless reinforced by and within institutions, institutions which “should be defended and maintained at all costs.” What France lacked in the 1860s and still lacks now is not patriotism: “We lacked a well-constituted state,” one that “would have been able to police its press and impress on it a suitable direction.” The French state, democratic-republican in name, oligarchic in fact, “a machine to earn money and to consume it, a mechanism without morality, without a fatherland and without a heart,” readily sold itself to the Prussians, leaving itself unprepared for the war in which the victors seized Alsace and Lorraine. “A blind and fluid force, an indifferent power, equally capable of destroying the state as of serving it, the national intelligentsia,” having become like the money it chased, “could be turned against the national interest when foreign money willed it.”

Prussia then, Germany now, along with England, despite their commercial and financial heft, retain their monarchs. There, “money cannot constitute the leader of the state because it is birth and not opinion that creates” the monarch. The monarchic circle “has its own law, irreducible to the forces of money, inaccessible to the movements of opinion: the natural law of blood,” of heredity, of family. This “difference in origin is radical,” functioning “in parallel with the powers of money,” ruling and being ruled by those powers reciprocally, but still capable of “resist[ing] them.” And they can also “direct opinion and ensure the competition of the intelligentsia and reprimand it against the solicitations of money.” The natural law of public opinion, embodied by passion, flows where it will; the quasi-natural law of money flows where it finds opportunities for increase; the natural law of blood flows through the more stable channel of heredity, “a political power distinct from money and opinion.” Even religion proved susceptible to the money power, since by now the state has taken control of religion, and money control of the state. (Maurras neglects to mention that the French state, following Machiavelli, had largely taken control of the French Catholicism during the seventeenth century, which was one reason why the “philosophists” targeted both.) And as for the universities, once ordained and controlled by the Church, they now belong to the state, too, and “through its subsidies, the state controls or at least supervises our different literary or artistic bodies and associations,” as well, binding them to “its master money.” “The French state is uniform and centralized; with its bureaucracy reaching every school reading-desk in every little village, such a state finds itself perfectly armed to precent the constitution of any serious adversary, not only against itself but against the plutocracy of which it is an expression.” 

What of the revolutionaries? The businessmen have ensured their complicity along with that of everyone else, funding both ‘Right’ and ‘Left.’ “In this way it oversees the attacks and can direct them,” especially against any wealth that “retains something personal”—landed wealth and small business, interests more likely to retain a sense of patriotism, sentiments favoring the national rights and interests. Under these conditions, “the intelligentsia will be debased for a long time.” “A foolish moralism will judge everything,” the judges partisans “hypnotized by an idea of the good and evil conceived without any nuance and applied fanatically” in the manner of Tolstoy, that great novelist, inane religionist and vacuous political thinker. “A patrician class in the order of things but a truly democratic barbarity in thought, that is the classification of the near future.”

As for the more distant future, it may improve if the intelligentsia “tries to regain again its order, its fatherland, its natural gods” against an equally disordered, fluid democracy and oligarchy, internationalism, and the unnatural god of money now worshipped universally. To do this, “the best elements of the intelligentsia” must ally themselves with the old aristocrats,” “forc[ing] itself to respect and support our old philosophical and religious traditions.” It may then begin to perform “the true function of the intelligentsia, to see and make visible what regime would be the best, to choose it authoritatively and even to orient the other forces in this direction”—the direction of monarchy. Can the intelligentsia, by exposing public opinion “to feel the profound nullity of its powers” in the face of the oligarchs, not be persuaded to “sign the abdication” of the democracy’s “fictive sovereignty”? Admittedly, that would “demand a commonsense act from one who is deprived of common sense,” but “is it not still possible to find absurd reasons for an act that is not that at all?” In the event, both the Communists and the Nazis would find absurd reasons for absurd and vicious acts, so Maurras’s hope could have had plausibility to some of his fellow litterateurs. “Exposed to perish under a victorious quantity, intellectual quality absolutely does not risk anything in making an effort; if it loves itself, if it loves our last relics of influence and liberty, if it has some visions of the future and some ambition for France, it is fitting for it to lead the reaction of the desperate, “ally[ing] itself with those who try to do something beautiful before sinking.” “In the name of reason and nature, consonant with the ancient laws of the universe, for the welfare of order, for the duration and progress of a threatened civilization, all hopes are borne on the ship of Counter-Revolution.” The problem was that the modern tyranny of Communism and Nazism appealed to the illusion of mass empowerment, whereas Maurras aimed at disillusionment of the democrats, at admitting that they were mistaken in wanting power.

Some four decades later, writing in the middle of the Second World War, and now aligned with General Pétain’s not-so-sovereign regime in Vichy, Maurras continued to ask, “How will France awaken?” [4] In answering, he taps into the Heideggerian vein: “The actions by which France, in the course of its trials, has made an end of its forgetfulness of itself, and has regained possession of its real being its true personality and physical and moral qualities, which are part of its destiny” will stem from asking, “What do we do, what have we done, what are we used to doing and what will we do to emerge from this abyss of evils?” We must consider France’s “past rebirths.” He thus offers a political history of France complementary to the ‘cultural’ history he had written in 1904.

France consists of two strains: the Gallic type, “perfectly defined in the tribes that followed (or did not follow) Vercingetorix around 80 BC,” and the Roman type, whose representatives conquered the Gauls. “France thus had at that time all it needed to have” well before the Franks (themselves a Romanized Germanic people) invaded in 420 AD. “We are Gallo-Romans.” From the Gaul, France received the virtues of bravery and the “taste in intellectual matters and in matters of eloquence”—the “art of fighting and that of speaking well.” Generosity, enthusiasm, ardor, “the readiness to take risks, the instinct to undertake enterprises and conquests, a mystical philosophy, but learnt from at the highest speculations of the great ages of Egypt Greece and Etruria, a religion full of poetry, a poetry full of dreams, fierce and graceful, or sublime, ritual which ranged from human sacrifice to the solemn picking of the sacred mistletoe by the priestess in a white robe armed with a golden sickle, and, in nature, a serious effort at clearing a vast extent of forests, an already scientific agriculture and nascent industries that were much advanced”: such were the ethos and the actions of the Gauls. Writing only three years after the debacle of 1940, Maurras would inspirit the French, again.

He knows the Gallic vices, too, the worst of which was already observed by Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars. “His most powerful ally against the Gauls was, in Gaul itself, the discord of big children” whose “outburst of contrary opinions had betrayed commands there and paralyzed action.” Fickle and factitious, “the Gaul is like a wolf to the Gaul.” Rome gave Gallia the unity of direction and order it never had on its own. “This was naturally, and properly, the Roman contribution: order and reason.” Under Roman rule, the Gauls thrived; “hardly had Rome fallen upon them than they began to rival them in all the arts of written eloquence, rhetoric, jurisprudence, philosophy, poetry.” In designing their buildings, the Gauls learned from the Romans but soon innovated, an effort yielding first Romanesque and then Gothic architecture. In politics, the Gallic “mosaic of clans” and “the imperial statism of the centralizing Caesars” gave way to “lineaments of a new aristocratic, hierarchical, monarchical status: the feudal order.” In this new political form, as a result of it, “souls themselves were gradually transformed and here was developed in them a synthesis of emotion and intelligence, of illuminating consciousness and generous movement” defined by “the extreme vigor of a natural élan” now “orderly, enlightened, and reasonable,” and “the forces of the heart magnified by the thought that directs them.” “This definition allows us to identify our France with the eternal and universal culture that was foreseen by the ancient Hellene Anaxagoras as an expression of humanity: ‘At first all things were entangled and confused, Mind emerged to distribute them according to an order.'” The Gallo-Roman “civil state of our fatherland” combined “Gallic strength” with “Roman order.” Subsequent ethnicities, whether Greek Iberian, Moorish, Burgundian, Basque, or Scandinavian, all became integrated into the national union, a consolidation made more thoroughly and more readily because “all their distant dissimilarities were equally received into the bosom of the same uniform religion which (note well) spoke to God and men in Latin, prayed and chanted in Latin,” the language of the Roman Catholic Church.

Owing to France’s Gallo-Roman ethos, French women have taken on a far different aspect than women of other nationalities. “The English woman is a child, even as an old wife or as a grandmother; among us, the Gallic spirit, in its feminine, sensitive and generous aspect, has brought about the fact the men allow themselves to be led by the nose.” “The French woman is, in France, everywhere a queen: at the salon, the farm, the shop, the large store. There is no woman in the Académie française, but she is the great elector of it.” “This deep penetration of the French woman by the virile spirit and the French man by feminine sensitivity is not better observed anywhere else than in the religion of France,” animated as it is with a serious “rigorous orthodoxy…understood and defended in it with clarity and vigor.” In the French we see “the androgyne of Plato, the male and female being which grants the scepter alternately to the mind and to the heart when it does not confer sovereignty, as often happens, to the simultaneous synthesis of both”— a “taste of internal truths, of moral experience,” disciplined by “an iron logic, the nuances of a subtle judgment which chooses and excludes, which cuts and rejoins.” [5]

To those who might suggest that this is all a bit ‘much,’ Maurras rejoins, “Why should I be modest about my fatherland, which has been conquered?” 

After the Roman retreat, France was reunited twice, first under the Franks (Clovis, Dagobert, Pepin, Charlemagne), then under French kings, beginning around 700 AD, when French aristocrats joined forces and crowned duly recognized monarchs, who proceeded to make themselves “indispensable to the population by repelling the new invasion’s and rendering increasingly more specialized police services,” eventually assuming “the role of overlords, supreme arbitrators and senior judges. It was a centralized judicial system under the monarchy, a system which combined feudal and Roman law, which did the most to keep France united, providing civil peace at work, on the streets, and in the markets. To this “benevolent authority [there] corresponded voluntarily that generous obedience wherein the real citizen finds a benefit and honor, wherein the power from above commands confidence from below”; although not fully political in Aristotle’s sense, monarchic rule enjoyed the consent of the governed. “The governed and the governing met each other halfway.” 

Conversely, “every French crisis began with the head of the state,” when the lesser aristocracies and/or regents ruling on behalf of a child-king became “the scourges of the monarchy” and “the scourges of the nation.” Such rebellions did not signify tyranny but a “regression” to the Gallic spirit of faction, when “the rods of the faces began to separate and act alone,” just as their ancestors had done before the arrival of the Romans. For more than seven centuries, the monarchic regime would recover and reunite France.

It was the overthrow of the monarchy by republicans in 1789, followed by the Jacobin insurgency three years later, which plunged France into “the era of ever deeper invasions in the century-and-a-half which followed.” Decapitating the king decapitating the unifier of the factions; once freed, the factions invited foreign exploitation and conquest of the country. The Bonapartists who tried to reconstitute monarchy lacking legitimacy; it is one thing to be a leader, another to be a king. The Bourbons who briefly restored the true monarchy, and even the Orléanists who made a legitimist claim, restored unity and peace to France, but their work was ruined by “an elected democratic leader, Napoleon III,” whose “foolish foreign policy” led him to defeat and strong executive rule to discredit. This latter Napoleon produced the defeat at Sedan, the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, “a tribute of five billions and, much worse than that, the establishment of the democratic republic,” since Bismarck prevented any monarchical restoration.” The Third Republic’s notorious factionalism left the state in a shambles, eventuating finally in total collapse in the face of Nazi-German assault. 

“Royalty supposes…a prime moral element which consists of two principles that are adhered to, alive and practiced: orders and obedience”—a “legitimist state of mind.” If and when the English, Americans, and Russians combine to liberate France, that moral element and the regime it supports must and can return. Surely we have learned the lesson republican regimes have taught us. “Why should we not govern ourselves any longer? Well, because it is a shenanigan: we govern ourselves badly, we do not even govern ourselves.” Republicanism means “the government of the worst canaille, sometimes basely cynical, sometimes so hypocritical that it sprinkles bloody holy water in both cases.” There remains one legitimate heir to the French throne: the Comte de Paris, Henri d’Orléans. And he is a real Frenchman, not a foreigner called in by necessity, as the French were forced to do more than once in their happier, monarchic centuries. Elections cause division and war, monarchs unity and peace. As a result, “the next day can no longer fail to arise when, with negligible exceptions, each Frenchman will see his personal fate hung directly on the fate of France and when the latter fate will be felt to be threatened so much that the least functionary, the least boss engaged in industrial or agricultural exploitation, the least proletarian who is father of a family will be held by the throat by a double and same necessity: to maintain for himself and his family members the condition of a French life and not to have a false idea of his condition.” “The wish for ‘Long live France’ is only the seed of another wish: ‘Long live the king.'”

It took a real statesman to right French politics, insofar as they could be righted. Instead of compromising himself by collaborating with the Nazis, Charles de Gaulle opposed them from the beginning, urging his countrymen to rearm themselves in accordance with the practices of modern, mobile warfare in the 1930s, then exiling himself first to London, then to Algeria, after fighting in the Battle of France in 1940. And although manifestly concurring with some of Maurras’s diagnosis of France’s cultural-political ills, especially its neglect of France’s Roman or Latin characteristics, as contrasted with what de Gaulle called its “Mediterranean restlessness,” he saw that if modern tyrants appealed to the democracy, and legitimist monarchists could only hope that the democracy would come to its senses, the way to defend the democracy against tyranny was to provide republican regimes with a strong executive, a monarch within a republican regime. He said to Malraux, “Our sensitive souls called me a Maurras when I re-established the republic,” but “can you see Maurras going into battle to enforce universal suffrage in the Presidential elections?” But on the other hand, “What democracy? Stalin, Gomulka, Tito, yesterday Peron? Mao? The United States had its monarch—Roosevelt—and it misses him.” De Gaulle understood that Maurras was attacking the parliamentary republic, the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Republics. The Fifth Republic, the one he founded, differed from all the others because it featured an executive, a president, with the authority to defend the country. In failing to reinvigorate federalism in France, as Maurras wanted, and in delaying but failing to prevent France’s drift toward European internationalism, away from the confederal “l’Europe des patries,” which Maurras also wanted, de Gaulle identified the same enemy Maurras had deplored: “In all this lot, my only enemy, and France’s, has always been money.” [6] 

 

 

Notes

1. “Just like the members of a modern department, no one two centuries later would read any of their works had their authors not become world-historical terrorists.” Michael Mann: The Sources of Social Power, Volume II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
2. Although Maurras evidently owes this insight to Tocqueville, he makes no mention of that, likely preferring not to encourage an alliance between the aristocratic class of “old France” with the democracy.
3. Historians now suspect that Napoleon III was intimidated by Bismarck’s threats in a conference they held shortly before the war. The two hypotheses do not necessarily contradict one another.
4. As Alexander Jacob observes in his useful introduction, Maurras quite characteristically supported the Vichyite Pétain but not the Vichyite Pierre Laval. Pétain represented to him the true, Roman or Latinist character of France, whereas Laval was a German sympathizer through and through. This fine but politically irrelevant distinction landed Maurras in prison after the war, convicted of treason by French republicans.
5. In Plato’s Symposium, it is the comic poet Aristophanes who tells the story of the three sexes seen in human beings in their original nature: male, female, androgyne. In order to teach a due humility to humans, Zeus cuts all of them into halves: the originally round, two-headed, four-legged, four-armed humans become one-headed, two-legged and two-armed, but each of these halved humans longs for its former ‘other half,’ with the original males longing for males, the original females longing for females, the original androgynes longing for individuals of the opposite sex. In alluding to this story, Maurras invokes the comic poet, not the tragic poet Agathon or the philosopher Socrates, both of whom offer different accounts of the nature of erotic love. Maurras wants his readers to think of the true France as neither tragic nor rationalist but happy because balanced, untormented by unrealizable longings or irreconcilable ‘factions’ in its ‘soul.’
6. André Malraux: Felled Oaks (Terence Kilmartin translation, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971, pp. 93, 116). Money, but without the antisemitic edge Maurras gave to his critique.

 

 

 

Daniel J. Mahoney: The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation. New York: Encounter Books, 2022.

Jon D. Schaff: Abraham Lincoln’s Statesmanship and the Limits of Democracy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019.

 

In every generation, people commonly deplore the paucity of it. But what is statesmanship? What exactly do people feel their politicians lack?

Daniel J. Mahoney and Jon D. Schaff take up this question. Although both books are historical studies, the authors intend to understand virtues that their readers can profitably think about, because such virtues remain possible today, and are, as always, much needed. In Schaff’s words, “the power of Lincoln’s thought is precisely its continued ability to speak across time to our present situation.” Mahoney ranges widely (one of his favorite words is “capacious”), writing chapters on Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Vaclav Havel. Schaff attends to Lincoln alone; the only other politician to whom he devotes his attention is Lincoln’s successful rival in the 1858 Illinois U.S. Senate race, Stephen A. Douglas, who might be described as an extraordinarily gifted non-statesman. Mahoney’s interest in statesman-to-statesman comparison derives from his interest in greatness understood as magnanimity or greatness of soul. Perhaps because Schaff finds ‘greatness’ conceived unmagnanimously by Donald J. Trump entirely distasteful, he concentrates his attention on moderation and prudence, on self-government as the rule of reason in the individual soul and, sometimes, in what he calls “the soul of democracy”—its way of life and its ethos. Contemporary Americans very often define liberty in the way Aristotle identifies as typical of citizens in a democratic regime: ‘doing as one likes.’ Neither Aristotle nor Lincoln regarded that as an adequate definition. “The central argument of this book,” Schaff writes, “is that for free people remain free, they must live within limits,” limits finally imposed on them by themselves. Not easily done: that’s where statesmanship comes in.

Beyond moderation and prudence, Schaff identifies an intellectual or ‘theoretical’ virtue in Lincoln, one that provided him with a standard for political thought and action. “He seemed able to stand both inside and outside democracy at the same time,” understanding and explaining the principles of the Declaration, which reflect human nature as such, while offering “friendly critiques of democracy’s excesses,” the excesses of the regime that aims at securing unalienable natural rights but has the potential for “democratic despotism.” To show this, Schaff accounts for the well-worked ground of Lincoln’s critique of slavery (and of abolitionists) prior to the Civil War and his justification of making war in defense of the Union, but he also calls particular attention to the neglected area of Lincoln’s domestic policies: the protective tariff, the Homestead Act, the National Bank Act, among others. He considers not only Lincoln’s virtues but his policies to “provide lessons to our contemporary readers seeing to find solutions to the stresses put on our political system through such phenomena as the globalization of economics and the rise of a presidency-centered government.” We need to think more seriously about virtue, natural right, and policy because “we cannot assume the continuation of that democracy [Lincoln] sought so nobly to advance”—an assumption Lincoln himself rejected as a young man in his Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum at Springfield, Illinois. 

Schaff begins his definition of statesmanship with what one might describe as a ‘Heideggerian’ move. “The idea of statesmanship can be explained via the concept of time.” His point is (thankfully) quite un-Heideggerian, however: whereas the ancients conceived of time cyclically and the moderns have often conceived it linearly, even as an onward-and-upward progression, time in fact “partakes of both of these characteristics, both continuity and change,” fitting the image neither of circle nor line but of spiral. A spiral is a continuous line; in terms of morality and politics, over time we return “to certain fundamentals, enduring ideas, practices, or self-conceptions.” Yet, as Aristotle famously insists, we do so “in the light of new circumstances.” Since “certain foundational ideas or principles recur across time” under new conditions, “a statesman is needed to interpret these foundations anew” or more precisely to adapt them to those practices which are possible under those conditions. “In Lincoln’s case, he needed to explain natural rights, the rule of law, and the role of the presidency to a new generation of Americans whose vision of the founding ideas of the nation was already dimming.” This needs doing because democratic citizens incline to push aside natural rights and constitutionalism in order to be ‘free,’ in order to get what they want. Lincoln aimed at persuading his fellow citizens to live within the limits of the “rule of law, natural rights, powers of government, political economy, and presidential power” as granted by the Constitution—a “political gospel of limitations” animated by “humble expectations” respecting “democratic politics.” 

With Aristotle, Schaff understands politics as architectonic, a means of reinforcing certain human characteristics and weakening others. Lincoln would inflect “democracy’s soul,” the character of the average American, the moral atmosphere the nation breathes by exemplifying “the political virtues of prudence and moderation,” by upholding the natural rights citizens would secure through their political institutions, and also by upholding the natural rights those citizens would secure by the form of political economy that best conduces to genuine liberty. 

“Two central political ideals that govern the statesman are prudence and moderation, but our contemporary political discourse tends to denigrate or misunderstand these two grand principles,” mistaking pragmatism and even opportunism for prudence mistaking political centrism, splitting the difference between two political parties, as moderation. Aristotle offers a superior definition of prudence: “practical wisdom is right reasoning about good ends.” As for moderation, it consists in intentionally limiting one’s passions and appetites, disciplining their excesses while avoiding their starvation. In politics, this means the recognition and rejection of demagoguery, of speech that either inflames the desires or leaves citizens cringing in fear; it also means recognizing and rejecting ideology, systems of thought that mischaracterize philosophy in the way best stated (and in the end exemplified) by Marx, not as a passion of the head, the erotic longing of the mind for knowledge, but as the head of a passion. The ideological “quest for an unsullied politics is at the heart of the fallacy ‘Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.’ It is not. It is voting to mitigate an evil, which is good.” 

In his Temperance Society Address, for example, “Lincoln warns against the temptation toward denouncing our political opponents as merely evil,” in the “tendency of ideologues,” assuming that we “have nothing to learn from those who disagree” and therefore “dismiss[ing] them with a fair hearing.” The Address “sets out many themes that would dominate his antislavery rhetoric in the 1850s”: the total eradication of the consumption of alcoholic beverages is impossible; “those who do not drink are not morally superior to those who do,” as “abstinence is not usually a sign of virtue but an absence of appetite”; and finally, “before changing the laws the statesman must change public opinion.” Abolitionists of alcohol resembled abolitionists of slavery, inclined to break a law they detested rather than working to change it, and instead imprudently attempting to overleap public opinion instead of persuading fellow citizens—that is, rather than treating them as fellow citizens. Not only immoderate and indeed violent actions, in the manner of a Carrie Nation or a John Brown, but “fiery denunciations,” immoderate speech fails to convince opponents that you “mean them well.” “In this way moderation is the handmaiden to prudence for democratic statesmen. By recognizing the legitimate claims of all, they open more ears to their message, making their own success more likely.” 

Regarding slavery, then, moderation “does not necessarily mean a middle ground between abolitionists and the ‘positive good’ school of slavery that had taken hold in the South.” Lincolnian, statesmanlike, moderation “took into account he many competing goods in the American democratic order, of which the natural equality of man is only one.” For example, in the 1844 presidential election an abolitionist third party, the Liberty Party, likely won votes that otherwise would have gone to Henry Clay instead of proslavery James Polk, who promptly supported the admission of Texas to the Union as a slave state. The moderate position consistent with natural right was rather to contain slavery, leaving it alone where it exists but preventing its spread to the territories that will become new states. This policy, he argued, would lead Southerners eventually to discard slavery in order to compete with the more prosperous, genuinely republican, states which recognized the moral and economic benefit of freeing all men to contribute to American prosperity by having them work for themselves, not for a master. “This would allow for the end of slavery without violence and within the confines of Southern constitutional rights.” In a republic, “what is the use of advocating something that not only cannot succeed”—in this case, the immediate abolition of slavery—but “will alienate the majority of one’s constituency”—a prospect no serious republican politician will entertain, given the foundation of the regime not only on the natural rights to life and liberty but to the consent of the governed that those rights imply.

While esteeming moderation in politics, one must take care not to confuse it with the fake moderation propounded by Senator Douglas. Douglas decried Lincoln’s claim that a house divided cannot stand, that the United States could not remain united if half-slave, half-free. He claimed that it could be so maintained if residents in the Western territories settled the matter by a vote, on the basis of popular sovereignty. Lincoln reminded Illinois voters in the 1858 election that popular sovereignty can only be just if the people rule in accordance with the natural rights that their sovereignty aims at securing. “While rhetorically supporting self-government, Douglas was undermining true self-government by declaring himself indifferent as to whether an entire class of men and women could legitimately be bound into slavery.” For Lincoln, slavery could finally be abolished but only if the Union were preserved “as the surest way to bring about the end of slavery.” One might add that the Confederates agreed, which is why they rebelled.

In so arguing, Lincoln did not place himself “above reproach”—and would not, holding as another instance of human equality that no human being is above reproach—but “perceived correctly the competing claims regarding the goal of ending slavery” while making “a good faith effort to adjudicate among those claims.” Had an abolitionist like his future Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase won the presidency, the border states would have left the Union, empowering Confederacy to succeed, frustrating the abolitionist cause once again. In “balanc[ing] legitimate claims”—as, for example, the right of slaves to liberty and the right of the families of slaveholders to rest secure in their lives on their land—the statesman moderates passions on both sides, whether they are self-righteous moral indignation or excessive fear. And in terms of the rule of law, the Constitution did indeed give protection to slavery, but the rule of law itself cannot survive half-obeyed and half-disobeyed. To change the law in the direction of justice in a republican regime, “government must rule by the people’s consent,” eschewing today’s tactic of “crude denunciation.” “Lincoln’s example has never been more essential.” 

Moving from the statesmanlike virtues to the principles those virtues should embody and defend, Schaff turns to Lincoln’s defense of natural rights, which he “intended to shape public opinion and rededicate the American people to the proposition of natural rights expounded in the Declaration of Independence.” The Declaration respects consent, respects regimes of popular sovereignty, but uphold “a standard outside of majority rule,” limiting majority rule by that standard. “Lincoln’s advocacy of natural rights was part of a conscious attempt to shape the opinion of the people in the direction of limiting their own rule.” In this, once again Douglas was his most formidable opponent. Schaff explains that Douglas wanted the main east-west rail line to run through Illinois. That was no fault in a man elected to represent Illinois. However, to accomplish this the Northwest Territories would need to be admitted to the Union, territories in which slavery had been prohibited by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. By invoking what he called “the great principle” of popular sovereignty unconstrained by natural right regarding slavery in the territories, he tacitly disposed of natural right in favor of economic prosperity. He did, Schaff concedes have one thing right: Lincoln’s policy of keeping slavery out of the territories could, and in the event did, lead to secession and war. His approach, Douglas contended, would save the Union by keeping the decision on slavery local, not national. In this sense, Douglas in effect argued that “the only equality that mattered was the equality of states,” which is indeed a feature of the constitutional design of the national government. But this didn’t make Douglas the moderate on the speaking platform, the upholder of unqualified popular sovereignty as the middle ground between abolitionism and slaveholding. It made him merely a centrist, a split-the-difference man who jettisoned the moral principle that recognized his own rights as a man. Laws designed by popular sovereignty without regard to human nature and its unalienable rights could be overturned quite readily by the Supreme Court in its infamous Dred Scott decision, which already had denied that a black man had any rights a white man needed to respect—a claim that confuses skin color with human nature.

Lincoln instead held that Douglas’s version of popular sovereignty “taught a dangerous indifference toward natural rights by failing to treat slavery as a wrong,” a tyrannical form of rule that had no right to be extended into territories where it did not exist. In making this argument, he invoked not only the arguments of the Founders, particularly the logical syllogism of the Declaration of Independence, a declaration of the rule of reason against tyranny, but also the authority of the Founders, the veneration for them still felt by Americans. Obviously, today’s efforts to cause Americans to despise the Founders aims at destroying the heartfelt admiration for them that animateded previous generations, while appeals to passion (and not only or even mainly by Mr. Trump and his supporters) erode the practice of deliberation, of practical reasoning in our political life. In advocating unconstrained popular sovereignty, Douglas seemed to believe that original sin had skipped Americans,” who needed no statesmanship because they “needed no improvement.” He would replace monarchic despotic rule, ‘I am the law,’ with the democratic despotic principle, ‘We are the law.’ And without even the pretense of divine right to cover his tracks. “This is the rule of the mob, a majority that confuses justice with whatever the majority wills.”

Political rhetoric, however well-considered and eloquent, cannot gain consent from an unreceptive people. To perpetuate American political institutions and to secure the natural rights of American citizens, Lincoln advanced civic and scientific education. Aside from their rights, another distinctively human characteristic is the capacity to improve the techniques by which he shapes natural objects in order to preserve and enhance human lives. As Schaff writes, beavers “fell trees the same way they have always done, but humans “invent new and better ways of cutting down trees.” Human inventiveness, rightly applied, “enhances human freedom by making man more efficient in his labor,” spending less time making a living and more time living well. This also means that (as Aristotle suggests) slaves could be replaced by machines. But the observation, reflection, and experiment required for discovery require education. “Further, his ability to analyze problems and argument and to cultivate his higher mind and morals makes an educated man more fit for self-government.” Slaveholders kept their slaves illiterate and were none too scrupulous about ensuring public education for poor whites, either. Scientific and civic education must remain together, neither the property of ‘the few.’ Not only can the few rule, aping the habits of the European aristocracy, over a slave plantation, but in subsequent decades a new oligarchy would arise, “mating technology with advanced bureaucracy,” a condition Tocqueville calls as “soft despotism” and what Schaff describes as “the systematic abuse of human dignity in the name of progress.” On the contrary, “all progress must be consistent with the dignity of the human person, as that is a good superior to the goods of comfort and ease.”

In sum, “a Lincolnian approach to rights would take into account prudence and moderation in addition to the appeals to abstract ideas,” discerning “where rights are less applicable or when the application of rights-theory would lead to obvious absurdities,” such as claiming that one has the right to enslave another, prostitute oneself, or addle one’s mind with drugs. Personal dignity and the common good count for something, too, and indeed provide the framework for identifying and understanding rights. Rights limit the authority of government to tell me what to do, but rights are rightly to be defined, limited by the nature of a human being.  “When rights-talk is used to argue for autonomy without limit” it is a sure sign that a country lacks “statesmen to teach the people the limits of the limit of natural rights.”

The third pillar of Lincoln’s political architectonics, a set of activities in which virtues and natural-rights principles come together, consists of political economy under a government that gives scope to agricultural, commercial, and industrial activity. For this, Americans need neither the “minimalist state” of the libertarians nor the regulatory state of the Progressives but “a strong and active but limited government.” Lincoln derived his core political-economic policies from Alexander Hamilton, the early advocate of commercial republicanism, import tariffs, public finance, and a vigorous executive. (It has been said that Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers pursued Jeffersonian ends—equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—with Hamiltonian means, although Hamilton in fact preferred constitutional means, as the Supreme Court vainly attempted to maintain in the mid-1930s. It is rather than Hamilton pursued those same Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means.)

Henry Clay and his Whig Party carried Hamilton’s policy into the middle of the next century, calling them collectively “The American System.” As the Framers of the Constitution had intended, so the Whigs intended to “link together the large republic,” increasingly threatened by the dispute over slavery, “through economic ties”—the blood that coursed through the veins of Mr. Madison’s anti-Leviathanian “extended republic.” For this, not only a national bank and a protective tariff but also internal improvements (as we now say, infrastructure) would link farmers to industrial workers and the rising urban middle class, moderating the class-hatred factionalism seen in modern states and, indeed, in political communities of any size and antiquity. Lincoln was no agrarian, unlike the Jeffersonians of the past and the Bryanites of the future. He had done legal work for railroads and endorsed the full Whig program, helping to carry it into the new Republican Party. 

He also, and surprisingly, when one looks at his non-war policies, practiced the Whig approach to the president’s relations with Congress. Well known for his vigorous prosecution of the Civil War, which “necessitated extreme actions by the chief executive that would normally be unconstitutional,” Lincoln let the legislative branch take the lead on, well, legislation. “Innovative and nationalistic proposals such as the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, the Legal Tender Act, and the National Bank Act were enacted by [the Thirty Seventh] Congress and were in perfect harmony with Lincoln’s Hamiltonian and Whig roots.” Congress could enact these laws because Southern agrarians had chosen to stay at home and attempt secession instead of reporting to Congress and voting. Schaff rightly observes that Lincoln’s approach to domestic policy as president belies the claim of many Progressives, including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt (during his post-presidential career), Herbert Croley, and such lesser lights as Mario Cuomo and George McGovern, who claim him as their distinguished predecessor. “The main differences between Lincoln and the Progressive concern a belief in the power of centralized government, advocacy of a strong presidency, and a rejection of the founders’ basic political science as inadequate for modern times”—to say nothing of the Progressives’ replacement of natural rights with rights derived from allegedly ever-progressing ‘History.’ Centralized government, yes: but limited by the Constitution. A strong presidency, yes, but primarily in exercising war powers. In view of political science, has the Progressives’ main institutional innovation, the administrative state, improved the security of Americans’ lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness? Woodrow Wilson’s “living constitution,” ever evolving away from the limiting, balanced constitution of the Framers, attractive only insofar as he could reject (as he did) “the natural rights foundation of the republic” as “abstract, sentimental, and rationalistic, rather than practical,” more French than American, has undermined the democratic character of the society it purports to enhance by establishing a ‘new class’ of bureaucratic oligarchs, directly wielding both economic and governmental power at the same time.

Unlike Progressive presidents, and even their ‘conservative’ counterparts, Lincoln never pretended that the diverse interests of Americans could find “representation in one man” who styled himself as their ‘leader’ on the ‘cutting edge of History.’ He made no domestic policy statements before his inauguration, “simply referring interrogators to the Republican platform,” and took no public positions on such policy after his inauguration, either. He instituted no permanent bureaucracies and fomented no ‘wars’ on poverty, disease, or drugs—that is, the extension of executive war powers to domestic ills. Would such an approach meet the challenges American face today?

This question brings Schaff to what he calls a “provocative in the best sense” suggestion, that Lincoln evidently neither a libertarian in our contemporary sense nor a socialist in any sense, might have proved sympathetic to the political economy of Distributism, as enunciated in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 tract, Rerum Novarum, and seen in the United States with the initiation of the Catholic Land Movement. Both Lincoln’s notion of free labor and “the distributist vision” combine economic and political theory in a manner that opposes the moral anarchy and oligarchy of undiluted capitalism as well as the oligarchic violation of property rights of socialism. Schaff thus finds “a surprising congruence” between Lincoln and the Pope. As he explains it, Distributism counters the separation of labor from ownership and formal ownership of corporations by stockholders who in fact wield little or no power over corporate policies with an economy of small farms and workshops along with joint ownership of large corporations by “workers of hand and brain.” Under the principle of subsidiarity, whereby self-government begins with families and local associations, and solidarity or the common good, the improvement of the bodies, souls, and property of each citizen, Distributism decentralizes both economic and political life.

How does this compare with what we know about Lincoln’s understanding of political economy? Lincoln’s economic thought was influenced by not only by Hamilton but by contemporary economic theorists Francis Wayland and Henry C. Carey, who asserted the superiority of free labor over slave labor, the “right to rise” in prosperity over the condition of a hireling or (as Marx memorably put it, a ‘wage slave’), and the direction of citizens who do work for wages towards self-employment in small farms and shops they own—a “bulwark against despotism.” It must be said that the last plank in that platform looks more like the economic notions behind Jeffersonian democracy than those underlying Hamiltonian federalism. Lincoln also followed Wayland and Carey in espousing the labor theory of value, maintaining that nature provides only a small percentage of the humanly usable value of any product, with human beings supplying the much larger balance; this theory was first formulated by John Locke (and later abused by Marx); all three men derive their economic thought from a rather un-Catholic thinker. Schaff sees this latter point, noting that the Distributists were explicitly Christian in a way Lincoln was not, and less Lockean-‘individualist,’ too. Still, in arguing for a political economy by saying that “material well-being is good, but not as good as being independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings,” Lincoln and the Distributists concurred. On the question of statesmanlike prudence, however, one might wonder if Lincoln had lived on past 1865, he would have aligned himself with a Catholic social movement. In those years, Catholicism wasn’t as controversial as slavery had been, but it was a largely Protestant country.

Schaff’s argument on Distributism occupies the center of his book. From there, he turns to a more detailed consideration of Lincoln’s more strictly political policies: the claim that he effected a “Second American Revolution,” the genesis of the realignment of American politics from the failure of the Whigs to the longstanding success of the Republicans, and his continued fidelity to the Constitutional prerogatives of Congress.

Schaff argues that contrary to Progressive and indeed Marxist historians like the Beards and many ‘conservative,’ especially Southern ‘Redeemer’ historians alike, Lincoln’s presidency precipitated no revolution in America. After all, the Republican Party took its name from the kind of regime the Founders established, a regime of popular sovereignty under the moral limitation of natural rights and the political limitation of separation of powers, among others. And it organized itself first locally, then nationally, not under the ‘leadership’ of one or a few partisan heroes. Lincoln himself didn’t join the party until 1856, two years after its founding.

The Republicans’ antecedents, the Whigs, themselves organized in opposition to the administration of Andrew Jackson, whom they styled “King Andrew” for what they took to be his overbearing use of executive power—for example, his role in dismantling the second iteration of the national bank and his populist rhetoric. The Whigs soon collided with the rock of slavery, however. Frustrated by the party’s weak stance on that issue, Salmon Chase organized the Free-Soil Party in the late 1840s, which took over the Northwest Territory doctrine of no slavery in the territories. “A free West settled by small farmers would promote the respectability of labor so undermined by the quasi-aristocratic plantation system of the South.” The Compromise of 1850, with its strengthened fugitive slave provisions and its repeal of the Missouri Compromise, put the Free-Soilers on the road to extinction, just as the Kansas-Nebraska Act would prove the beginning of the end of the Whig Party, a few years later. The Democratic Party, controlled by the Southern oligarchs, controlled the regnant American party, but their triumph proved Pyrrhic, as Douglas’s popular sovereignty energized Northern Democrats who wanted to bury the slavery issue without vindicating slavery and the Republican Party organized as a force dedicated to defending the principles of the American regime as the Founders had designed it.

For their part, Republicans saw that opposition to slavery wouldn’t suffice as a campaign issue after the defeat of their first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, in 1856. They adopted the Whigs’ American system program, which proved timely when the country suffered a recession the following year. When the Democrats opposed homesteading, they lost votes in West, but had the endorsed it they would have lost votes in the South, where the oligarchs wanted assurances that the new territories would admit slaves. 

With secession, Republicans had a free hand in implementing their platform. President Lincoln did exert some influence on Congress, ‘jawboning’ members at the White House and writing letters, but for the most part kept hands off. Congress members wrote and introduced the laws, with the Lincoln administration providing information but exerting no real pressure. Lincoln did delegate Treasury Secretary Chase to work with Congress on the Legal Tender and National Bank acts, deploying him much as Washington had done with Hamilton. The difference between Lincoln’s approach and that of Progressive presidents was that Lincoln never spoke publicly about any of the domestic measures he supported. His many speeches concerned secession, the war, and slavery insofar as it could be abolished as a means of winning the war. Nothing could be further from the Wilsonian practice of serving as the nation’s ‘opinion leader.’ Being a natural-rights man, not a progressive-historicist imagining himself on the cutting edge of ‘History,’ Lincoln had no reason to suppose that he needed to overstep his Constitutional duties as the executor, not the framer, of laws. “It is fair to say that Lincoln’s participation and actions in the legislative process were few and judicious,” and he established no substantial White House staff that could have “regularized the president’s legislative and political operations,” as things stand now. He was, in short, “a Whig in the White House,” depending not on an administrative state but on party members to implement his policies. 

The party system had its faults, “such as corruption,” but it also “advanced certain goods.” To win elections (and thereby government jobs for their loyalists), party bosses needed to form broad coalitions. These were easily disrupted when a group within the party perceived a threat to some fundamental interest, as seen in the fissures within the Democratic Party in the 1850s, resulting in the electoral debacle of 1860. “A coalition-based system” thus “encouraged moderation,” not only in campaigning but in governing, since the same people who organized and won the election campaign often went into the new government. Following the excellent scholarship of James W. Ceaser, Schall remarks that the candidate-centered political campaigns of today put a premium on raising money from interest groups and on spectacular appeals drawing attention to themselves and to the alleged perfidy of their opponents. When such politicians govern, the show never stops, leading to the atmosphere of perpetual crisis and rhetorical sensationalism we now see. “Lincoln shows us a better way.”

“Lincoln was not a revolutionary statesman of any sort,” but rather a defender of the founding, a true moderate, who ruled by law except in those instances when the supreme law of the land itself, the Constitution, would have been threatened by over-scrupulous adherence to one of its provisions—the famous example being the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in a capital city with a large population of quislings, one of whom eventually murdered him. In non-war matters, he respected Constitutional limits on presidential power. “There is nothing here that could not be defended by the typical American founder.” 

“Lincoln’s defense of natural rights and the rule of law and his respect for public opinion showed the profound recognition that to be an advocate of democracy, one must be a moderate advocate.” Democracy untethered from natural rights and the rule of law become majority tyranny; untethered from public opinion, it becomes despotism. “Democracy is only good as long as it serves to protect natural rights.” That is, the statesmanlike virtues of moderation and prudence must be combined with a sound theory of justice. A democratic statesman can do no less.

Daniel J. Mahoney understands statesmanship as a form of human excellence encompassing the classical virtues of moderation, prudence, justice, and courage, but also greatness rightly understood as greatness of soul, magnanimity, and often a touch of genuine philosophizing. Maintaining continuity with Schall’s fine study, I shall begin with Mahoney’s understanding of Lincoln’s statesmanship, then work backward to and forward from that chapter to give an account of the book as a whole.

Democracy or popular sovereignty inclines citizens to “impatience and ingratitude in the best of circumstances,” Mahoney begins, but today’s “highly ideologized climate marked by collective self-loathing and an unremitting desire to repudiate the inheritance of the past, ingratitude becomes inseparable from a vulgar and destructive nihilism.” No matter that George Washington fought bravely in two wars, leading Americans to victory in their war for independence; no matter that he presided over the Constitutional Convention with dignity and skill; no matter that he eschewed any hint of the military dictatorship that King George III cynically expected him to establish, throughout “subordinat[ing] narrow personal ambition to an austere sense of public duty and reptation well earned.” He was a slaveholder—to be sure, a slaveholder who freed his slaves in his Last Will and Testament, setting an example which, if followed by his fellow plantation grandees, would have ended slavery in the United States before a civil war could have been fought over it. Never mind: “The fact that he owned slaves must negate everything else,” according to our contemporaries. This “tyrannical ‘presentism’…drives out both patriotic attachment and a capacity for measured judgment and admiration” in souls burning with “a moralistic rage that owes little or nothing to authentic moral and political judgment.”

Abraham Lincoln, who “would complete the founders’ work by saving a union dedicated to the great proposition of liberty and equality ‘under God,’ defeating a Confederate rebellion dedicated to the indefinite perpetuation of chattel slavery, freeing the slaves, and pointing toward ‘a new birth of freedom,'” nonetheless now comes under polemical fire for allegedly racist remarks he made during his debates with Senator Douglas, remarks which were in fact anything but racist if read with care and in context. Mahoney sees through such nonsense, calling Lincoln “the greatest of our presidents and surely the most philosophically minded,” a statesman who “knew human nature and human right, its limits and possibilities,” thereby becoming “the greatest American defender of natural right and of the requirements of mutual accountability and responsibility of free men under both the political and moral law.” In so doing, he removed any doubt (which should never have arisen in the first place, given the example of Washington) that natural right entails moral duty, that even the elemental right of self-preservation doesn’t obviate “one’s obligation to respect the rights of others.” If, as Aristotle maintains, politics means reciprocity, ruling and being ruled in turn, that political reciprocity requires the moral reciprocity between right and duty.

In this, Lincoln corrected or perhaps clarified the account of natural rights seen in Locke and in the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. At least as he it is usually interpreted, ‘Lockean liberalism’ puts rights first, making duties ancillary to them. It may be argued that Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education exhibits a sufficient degree of Stoicism to call that claim into question, but however one resolves the matter it is the ‘individualist’ dimension of Locke that impresses most readers today and, as Mahoney notes, Locke’s Second Treatise on Government does uphold a right and duty to self-preservation above one’s duty to his “station” in life—which might be guard duty at a military encampment. Jefferson, too, defended slavery, which he loathed, on the grounds of self-preservation, famously explaining that slaveholders “have the wolf by the ears” and dare not let go of their mastership lest freed slaves kill them. On the other hand, Jefferson’s Declaration ends with the signatories pledging to each other of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor—a decidedly un-‘Lockean’ thought, indeed.

Be this as it may, Lincoln rebalanced any tendency toward simplistic ‘rights-talk’ while rejecting Caesarism. In this, Mahoney sees a comparison to Cicero, the “philosopher-statesman and great-souled man who opposed despotism “in the twilight years of the Roman Republic.” More, Lincoln succeeded in defending his republic. 

No less than Schaff, Mahoney finds “prudence at the service of principle…to be the quintessence of morality applicable to the political common good,” and finds Lincoln exemplary in that regard. Without a “due respect to public opinion,” “there could be no movement toward ‘a new birth of freedom,’ only moral posturing and impotent rage” as seen in Abolitionists and slaveholder apologists alike. And the new birth of freedom, freedom for the slaves, accompanied both the preservation of the Union, “one nation,” and the firm acknowledgment of the providential God whose citizens governed themselves “under God.” The young Lincoln began as an atheist, a rationalist, and a fatalist. The mature Lincoln felt the gratitude democrats too often carelessly forget. The young Lincoln knew his own genius, relying on it to carry him ahead; the mature Lincoln saw more than his own, and even more than his nation’s efforts in the vindication of natural right for all Americans which the cataclysmic war, self-sacrificial war had made possible.

Accordingly, with his Second Inaugural Address “Lincoln reached the heights” of “philosophical-minded statesmanship.” “In it, poetry and theology meet philosophy and the highest tasks of statesmanship geared to civic reconciliation without forgetting or eschewing the requirements of natural and divine justice.” If both sides in the Civil War “prayed to the same God and read the same Bible,” shall the victors judge the losers harshly after the war is over? The slaveholders were wrong, and God’s Providence went against them, but now is the time not to judge, lest the victors (some of whom had profited from slavery without owning slaves themselves) render themselves incapable of reconciliation, necessary to preserve the Union and the republican regime dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, for which the war had been fought. “Judge not that we are not judged,” the Biblical judgment that Lincoln quotes in the Second Inaugural, remains in his mind, as it was in the minds of the first Christians, utterly foreign to the “moral relativism or the moral indifference that today goes by the name of ‘nonjudgmentalism.'” “If Lincoln had survived Booth’s assassination attempt, he would have promoted Reconstruction”—regime change in the oligarchic Southern states—with “the same mixture of principle and refined and morally serious practical wisdom that guided his struggle against efforts to extend slavery to new states and territories.”

Was Lincoln, then, a Christian? “Not in any simple sense, perhaps, but certainly in a sublime philosophical sense that is unthinkable without Christianity.” His statesmanship defended not only a political union but a union of “principle and prudence in a manner worthy of classical wisdom,” of Cicero, “while allowing God’s mysterious Providence to guide him in the inner struggles that afflicted his soul”—his “sublime, anguished but charitable soul”— “drawing on the ennobling resources of both reason and revelation.”

Can Americans now “still be trusted to hold on to” the principles Lincoln vindicated and the Union he saved? “Not if we ignore the wisdom of Lincoln and the Founding Fathers who inspired him. The choice is up to us in a union gravely divided once more.”

In Mahoney, we see an understanding of statesmanship, and of Lincoln’s statesmanship, that shares Schaff’s insight into the moral and political necessity of prudence, moderation, justice, and courage. Schaff presents far more of what Lincoln actually did, what policies he pursued in order to secure the Union as a true commercial republic. Mahoney points more to the capstone of classical virtue, magnanimity, and to the spiritual dimension of statesmanship in a democratic but also largely Christian nation—Christianity being, as Tocqueville saw, the mustard seed of modern democratic society. What accounts for Mahoney’s emphasis? He explains his intention in the introduction to his book.

“There is virtue in the gaze of a great man.” So Chateaubriand writes, recalling his dinner with Washington at Mount Vernon. What does he mean?

A great man likely knows himself to be your superior in mind and heart. Yet, being genuinely great, he does not look askance at you, down on you, or with the air of an entomologist studying a beetle. He looks at you as an equal, not in mind or heart but in your personhood, in your rights, in your humanity. He seeks to govern with you, not over you or against you, because his soul is always greater than the authority he wields. His soul is the real basis of his authority, and you can see that in his eyes.

So unlike Napoleon. André Malraux described him as a great mind but a small soul. As Mahoney puts it, “Bonapartre revealed the false allure of greatness shorn of the cardinal virtues” of courage, moderation, prudence, and justice, “first discerned by the ancients and further developed by Christian thought,” virtues that form “the core of genuine political greatness.” The statesmen he studies here exhibit a “rare combination of magnanimity and moderation,” good judgment, and a firm commitment to the good of their political communities.

The American Founders, “inspired by the accounts of political nobility” seen in the works of Cicero and Plutarch, prudently understood, in Madison’s words, that “wise statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Accordingly, they designed “political institutions where ‘power checked power,’ institutions that would make political greatness less necessary if not superfluous.” With the flourishing of democratic or egalitarian minds and hearts within that institutional framework, Americans over time began to succumb to a “doctrinaire egalitarianism or relativism that many today confuse with democracy,” falling into the habit of liking instead of admiring, captious sneering instead of stern judgment. In their fallacious egalitarianism, they misunderstand politics by thinking of it in such subpolitical categories as ‘power’ or ‘race, class, and gender’—categories that prevent them from understanding politics as a distinctly human activity, an exercise in deliberation rather than mere assertion and dominance. “One cannot promote justice on the ‘willful’ premises of Machiavellian (and Nietzschean) premises” because “if one begins with nihilistic premises, if one reduces every argument to a pretense for domination and exploitation, one necessarily ends with the self-enslavement of man,” the negation of “our civilized inheritance despite the perfectionist or utopian veneer that invariably accompanies it.”

With such an unsteady foundation (which includes going so far as to deny that it, or anything else, has any foundation at all), Machiavellian political philosophy and social science “veer incoherently between false realism and an idealism that acknowledges no constraints on the power of the human will to remake human nature and society.” At one moment, we hear calls for ‘transhumanism,’ at another we see the treatment of human beings as if they were beasts—aborting them, manipulating them, murdering them en masse. Aristotle described the person who lived outside the political community as either a god or a beast; to so conceive persons who live inside the political community is to destroy that community.

“What is needed is a return to true realism, to a moral conception of politics that is fully realistic but that also acknowledges that the good, the search for legitimate authority or even the best regime, the exercise of the practical virtues…are as real as, and certainly more ennobling than, the reckless and groundless pursuit of power as an end in itself.” One of Machiavelli’s most eminent philosophic enemies, Cicero still provides in his “thoughts and deeds much ballast or a morally serious and authentically realistic political science that avoids the twin temptations of dogmatism and cynicism.” This needn’t mean “a return to classical politics per se,” which would lead us on a quixotic quest for the dissolution of modern states and the reconstitution of poleis. What we can retrieve from ‘the ancients’ is that “judicious mix of realism and moral aspiration” the classical philosophers commended, exemplified by the statesman. Such men can and have existed in the modern world of large and centralized states, and Mahoney offers six examples: Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Vaclav Havel.

As philosopher and statesman, “Cicero despised the Epicureans, whose reduction of the good to the pleasant encouraged an abdication of moral and political responsibility on the part of the one, the few, and the many”—the components of any political regime—leaving “no reason to be brave or courageous or to make sacrifices for one’s country.” Cicero opposed not only the rule of the appetites in the human soul but also the rule of the spirited, thumotic part, standing instead for civilian rule in Rome, a country that valorized military prowess a bit too much for its own good. “His standard was ‘honestum‘—the fine, the noble, the honorable—at the service of civilized liberty.”

Although “half-classical modern democratic statesmen” such as de Gaulle and Churchill (half-classical because their minds and hearts were decisively inflected by Christian civilization, as well) “embodied important aspects of this Ciceronian ideal,” even as they “lived in an era strikingly different from Cicero’s, an era in which the technological achievement of modern science made new, all-encompassing tyrannies and worldwide wars possible,” while at the same time softening democratic souls with “creature comforts,” making pacifism in the face of such tyrants “a much more powerful temptation” than it had ever been. In the world of our time, “the Ciceronian statesman must spend as much time warning against pacifist illusions as in reminding warrior republics of the ultimate superiority of the urbane virtues to military courage.”

Although Machiavelli charges Christianity, not the modernity he in crucial ways inaugurated, with the folly of pacifism, and even Churchill mistakenly concurred, “there is no evidence that the Prince of Peace espoused pacifism in politics or was providing anything other than the demanding requirements of discipleship form a radically perfectionist or eschatological point of view.” There are indeed “enduring and abiding tensions between classical honor” and “Christian ethics understood as beneficent mercy and at times great forbearance in the face of evil,” but Churchill’s own “mixture of fidelity, forbearance, goodwill, classical honor, and moral realism” proved that the great-souled man need not lack ‘Christian’ virtue, as seen (it should be noted) in the writings of Seneca, who writes not only of magnanimity and the rule of reason over anger but also of mercy and the doing of favors, the human equivalent of grace. For his part, in his De Officiis Cicero “spiritualiz[es] magnanimity,” pointing to “humility and restraint much more than self-assertion or precipitous adventures” as characteristic of the great-souled man.

In forming their understanding of politics, Aristotle and Cicero studied the character and actions of a real statesman, Solon, that mediator between the claims of ‘the few’ and those of ‘the many’—a “just and honorable mediator between the enduring political distinctions,” a task that mimics in politics the moral task of finding the virtuous mean between the vicious extremes in the human soul. “Like Solon, Cicero defended the inviolability of private property against rapacious oligarchs, thieving tyrants, and men of ‘unbalanced soul,'” to use one of Solon’s turns of phrase. This was no defense of oligarchy as a regime, as Cicero himself was a ‘new man’ who had advanced in Roman politics on the strength of his own virtues. Nor was it a denigration of Rome’s “industrious and law-abiding plebeians.” It was an attempt to secure what Aristotle had called the ‘mixed regime,’ a regime designed so that the few who are rich and the many who are poor must cooperate by deliberating together, by ruling and being ruled in turns, identifying the public good as consisting of laws and actions that benefited both ‘sides’ and the political community as a whole. In this, statesmanlike greatness of soul works for political moderation, even as men like Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte despise moderation as mediocrity, a thing beneath their ‘Machiavellian’ virtù.

For a careful examination of what greatness consists of, Mahoney turns first not to his statesmen but to political philosopher Robert K. Faulkner’s 2007 study, The Case for Greatness. Faulkner contrasts Lincoln’s ambition to preserve his country, winning the just esteem of his fellow citizens, with the imperial ambition that fired the souls of Cyrus the Great and Napoleon—the first limited to the defense of justice, the second unlimited and despotic. This serves as an introduction to a careful analysis of Aristotle’s account of the magnanimous man, which the philosopher intends to be read not in isolation but with his account of justice, the common good, the rule of law, patriotism, public spiritedness, and his balanced, ‘mixed’ regime. In Faulkner’s view, “Aristotle moderates the autarchy or self-sufficiency of the great-souled man by tying his greatness to the common good of a fee and civilized polity and to a deeper thoughtfulness about the ends and purposes of human life,” whereby the moral virtue of magnanimity takes its bearings from “the self-knowledge made possible by philosophical reflection.”

Mahoney isn’t quite buying it. Faulkner “goes too far in simply identifying the great-souled man with the public-spirited gentleman-statesman.” The great-souled man isn’t so easy to ‘domesticate’; his insistence on self-sufficiency rests uneasily with Aristotle’s understanding of man as a ‘political animal.’ Such statesmen as Washington, Lincoln, and Churchill filter the coruscant light of magnanimity through the Christian-democratic lens of “common humanity,” along with “Cicero’s republican appropriation of a qualified Stoicism” (a politically aware Stoicism), and “the modern doctrine of the rights of man.” Given these refinements of Aristotle’s portrait, Mahoney prefers to think of a tradition of magnanimity which these later statesmen refined in the circumstances of their own countries and times. “This tradition moderated magnanimity while acknowledging its just and elevating claims.” With that, he turns to the statesmen themselves, beginning with Burke.

In Burke, Mahoney finds prudence, but a noble prudence, aristocratic in the best sense and enlightened by the theoretical wisdom of political philosophy. Mahoney disputes two influential interpretations of Burke: the conservative-romantic picture of a traditionalist denouncer of political rationalism and the Straussian presentation of Burke as the founder of philosophic historicism, a predecessor of Hegel.

Burke was neither the “enemy of human reason” nor an early proponent of historicist rationalism. As he watched the French Revolution careen toward self-destruction on a field of blood, he saw that “any ideological project to remake society de novo” as “the triumph of madness,” of unreason masquerading as enlightened vindication of the rights of man. The French revolutionary conception of rights altogether severed itself from prudential-political reason. Hence Burke’s preference for “the great primeval contract of eternal society,” the centuries old partnership in science, art, and virtue that has actually happened, and may continue, if men are not beguiled by the myth of some original ‘social contract.’ Even in its own devastating civil wars of the 17th century, English liberty survived, uniting conservation of what Western civilization had discovered and built with necessary and well-considered reforms. The French should have followed this example, as the Old Regime deserved reform, not the kind of radical revolution attempted by the revolutionaries, with their “politicized atheism” ginning up what Burke calls a secularized “bigotry of their own.” The Jacobins not only committed regicide, they gloried in it, holding up the bloodied, severed heads of the royal family to jeering crowds. They denied property rights to aristocrats if not to themselves; they even practiced cannibalism, all in an effort to eradicate the religious dimension of French society while retaining the fanaticism of the worst Christians. “The enemy of Britain and the civilized world was not historic France but an ‘armed doctrine’ that had conquered and warred on the France that was an integral part of European and Christian civilization.”

As such, Burke was no moral, cultural, or historical relativist. He adhered to the natural law doctrine, which had been incorporated into the Western tradition but was not itself merely a matter of tradition, if tradition is to be equated with convention. He well-known esteem for prudence or practical wisdom with theoretical wisdom, inasmuch as (in a vintage Mahoneyan aphorism) “prudence needs principle as much as principle needs prudence.” Political reason remains, well, rational. And “tradition is indispensable to political reason precisely because it is a powerful vehicle for passing on the inherited or tried-and-true wisdom of the human race,” not some “‘mystical’ or irrational substitute” either for theoretical or practical reason. Burke is a critic of an all-encompassing political rationalism but never of political reason within its legitimate sphere.”

This makes Burke “the first and greatest critic of the ’emancipation of the will’ from natural and divine superintendence,” the confusion of consent with mere assent. The emancipation of the will can lead to anarchy, including the anarcho-capitalism of radical libertarians, or to an especially lethal form of tyranny, as seen in Leni Riefenstahl’s glorification of Hitler, aptly titled The Triumph of the Will—a catastrophic and short-lived triumph, as it turned out. Despite their ritualistic denunciations of ‘fascism,’ too many self-styled social democrats today assert individual and collective autonomy, willfulness concealed as egalitarianism, “a conceit that enslaves human beings under the pretext of making them gods.” 

With their reductionist misunderstanding of human nature, anticipating later reductionisms which came to deny human nature altogether, Burke remained “above all a partisan” of what he called “the unbought grace of life,” life that has never been purchased with either money or political power. Put to the test in practice, Enlightenment rationalism “was not so reasonable after all,” forgetting the moral limits human nature defines for itself precisely by being a nature distinct from the natures of other natural kinds and from nature as a whole, even as it forms part of nature as a whole and limited by it.

Burke thus “remains very much our contemporary,” so long as we understand that he stood in circumstances quite different from our own. He lived in a Europe in transition “from the old regime to the world of modern liberty,” from the rule of titled aristocrats to the rule of the people, democracy. We live in a world in which that transition has been fully effected. Yet the political prudence Burke lauds and once embodied remain indispensable in this new world.

Tocqueville understands the Burkean regime of noble prudence while accepting the circumstances of his own France in his own century, where democracy had triumphed. Identifying equality as the democratic principle, liberty as the aristocratic principle, he argued for “liberty with a modicum of greatness” under democratic conditions. “It is beyond the ability of nations today to prevent conditions from becoming equal,” he wrote, “but it is within their power to decide whether equality will lead them into servitude or liberty, enlightenment or barbarism, prosperity or misery.” To accomplish this, statesmen will need to cut “any remaining links between democracy, rightly understood, and the revolutionary spirit of destruction and negation.”

Thus, during the revolution of 1848 Tocqueville worked “to defend a lawful republic,” the Second Republic, “against both the radical let and the Bonapartist right.” Bonapartism had already failed: Why would its reprise end any differently? As for the socialists, they shared the materialism of their ‘capitalist’ enemies, while intending to deploy the powers of the modern state, much enhanced, to place the French on “a new road to servitude.” A few years later, these efforts, considered calmly, brought him to distinguish the imprudence and injustice of the First Republic, reprised by the socialists of ’48, from the fundamental decency of the Second, which he took to be an attempt to re-enact the moderate early phase of the First, the phase of Lafayette and the still-reasonable republicans who took their principles from Montesquieu, not Rousseau.

Although Tocqueville himself found himself tormented by doubt, having abandoned his Catholic faith at the age of sixteen and becoming a sort of Pascalian without the Bible, “he remained a broadly theistic thinker who repeatedly expressed confidence in the existence and providence of God,” a Being whose will transcends the human will. Beneath that wise and good Being, human beings can reason politically, “more or less content with what he called ‘probabilistic truths,'” truths that deny the overconfident assertion of historical ‘laws’ seen in “various forms of historical and racial determinism.” By their fruits we can know such doctrines, witnessing “their deeply pernicious effects on liberty and the human soul.” As a student of Solzhenitsyn as well as of Tocqueville, Mahoney well knows that in the century after Tocqueville wrote those effects would multiply themselves far beyond anything Tocqueville anticipated. It was anguish enough that the Revolution of 1848 set back his hopes for “moderate regulated liberty disciplined by faith, moeurs, and laws” by “another generation or two,” that is, after the disappearance of, first, the “bourgeois king,” Louis-Philippe, and the Bonapartist Napoleon III. The Third Republic allied with Britain and the United States to defeat the military oligarchy of Kaiser Germany, in the process putting itself on the short slope to disaster in 1940, but in the meantime it had revived something of the political spirit that neither the ‘bourgeois’ principle of enrichissez vous nor the stifling of that spirit under a new Napoleon (who exhibited all of his ‘great’ ancestor’s smallness of soul but none of his military genius) could, or would, encourage.

He saw the best hope for republican liberty under democratic social conditions in the American regime, although he worried about the expansion of slavery in the 1850s, dying the year before the election of Abraham Lincoln. Like Lincoln, he longed for a new birth of freedom, not only in the American republic but someday, somehow, in Europe. Indeed, as Mahoney has designed his book, Lincoln’s statesmanship in many respects concluded the conflict and the dialogue between aristocrats and democrats which Burke and Tocqueville had considered with such care.

In the next century, however, all too many regimes not only failed to orient themselves toward Lincoln’s example of statesmanship and the American Founder’s understanding of natural right as the foundation of republicanism, instead abandoning themselves to the hard tyranny of ‘proletarian socialism’ and ‘national socialism.’ Even the republics seduced themselves with historicist dreams, putting themselves at risk for the “soft despotism” Tocqueville had warned against. In the second half of his book, Mahoney shows how Churchill, de Gaulle, and Havel successfully resisted the hard tyrannies without being able much to slow the new oligarchs of the administrative state.

Given the use of terror as an instrument of rule by the modern tyrannies, Churchill fully displayed what Solzhenitsyn calls “the courage to see,” to identify such tyrannies for what they are, as the indispensable virtue preparatory to resisting them and vindicating genuinely political regimes, the natural rights of human beings, and indeed the Western civilization such tyrannies assaulted. “Among twentieth-century statesmen, only de Gaulle shared this admirable lucidity and the determination to resist the inhuman totalitarian temptation on the intellectual, military, political, and spiritual fronts.” [1] Churchill and de Gaulle “still cared for the West as the West, a civilization worth preserving because it alone fully valorized the dignity of human beings who are souls as well as bodies, persons imbued with dignity and not playthings of ideological despotisms that in decisive respects were ‘beyond good and evil.'” Churchill’s defense of the West included a critique of the political Islam he encountered in Sudan in the 1890s, chronicled in the greatest of his early books, The River War. Fanaticism, fatalism, sensualism, and the abuse of women have “affected almost every Islamic land,” even as individual Muslims show courage and loyalty in battle—at times, in those days, as soldiers in the British Empire.

Churchill’s religious convictions resembled Lincoln’s. He began as an atheist, although he was never an “open scoffer” at religion, as Lincoln described his younger self. Neither did he become an orthodox Christian, even broadly defined. Like Lincoln, he came to sense a “Higher Power” or providential force at work in his life, “protecting him from death and injury.” His magnanimity, “a quintessentially and initially pagan virtue, was always accompanied by a sense of mercy, chivalry, duty, fair play, and concern for the ‘humble masses’ in their ‘cottage homes’ that took the hardest edges off of classical pride.” By 1932, in Thoughts and Adventures, he could praise Moses and the Israelites he led as having “grasped and proclaimed the idea of which all the genius of Greece ad all the power of Rome were incapable,” that “there was to be only one God, a universal God, a God of nations, a just God, a God who would punish in another world a wicked man dying rich and prosperous, a God from whose service the good of the humble and weak and the poor was inseparable”—a God, moreover, who saw in each human soul His own image, therefore commanding that each one treat all others with “a modicum of respect, charity, and decency.” “Not even classical paganism at its best—say, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics—could claim that. [2] Such Christian virtues made modern liberty, liberty easily overborne by the modern state, possible. Churchill’s soul, with “its admirable mix of magnanimity and moderation…is unthinkable without the Christianity that Churchill could never bring himself to reject.”

While admiring Churchill, Mahoney considers de Gaulle “perhaps the most impressive statesman-thinker of the twentieth century.” His thought is surely studied less than it should be. [3] From his favorite poet, Charles Péguy, de Gaulle “learned a generous patriotism that tried to bring together the best of France before and after 1789.” With Péguy, he esteemed the warrior-saint Joan of Arc, “who loved God and France with almost equal fervor.” France was worthy of love, having a vocation (in the Christian sense) “to bring liberty, civilization, and enlightenment to humanity.” Although superficial observers, including Franklin Roosevelt, suspected de Gaulle of harboring tyrannical ambitions, he detested the tyrannies of both ‘Left’ and ‘Right.’ Raymond Aron, a man not given to praise, called de Gaulle “an authentically great man,” unlike the tyrant-adventurer, Bonaparte, the risible Boulanger, and the senile Philippe Pétain of the 1940s. Like Washington, General de Gaulle remained a faithful defender of civilian and republican rule. [4]

De Gaulle reconciled his Christian faith with his own vocation, that of the soldier and statesman, because he “believed that the Christian, too, was called to the path of chivalry and personal and political honor,” as indeed the non-Christian Churchill did. More deeply, he found in his younger daughter, Anne, who was afflicted with Down Syndrome, a blessing and a joy—a joy (as Mahoney puts it so beautifully) “in his suffering and in the love it brought forth for Anne.” For her part, whenever Anne became frustrated and upset, if de Gaulle entered the room and sat beside her, she would find stillness, again. She knew her protector was with her.

As de Gaulle wrote, the “the man of character is a born protector,” a “good prince” (this, with a glance at Machiavelli’s prince, who has learned “not to be good”). Like Aristotle’s magnanimous man, the man of character “eschews revenge,” although de Gaulle’s magnanimity extends to “salutary action for the common good” as a means of overcoming vengeful impulse. To this moral virtue de Gaulle added the self-knowledge commended by Socrates: “Rarely has a statesman been so self-conscious about his own nature and motives and about the nature of the political whole (and the human world) in which he operates.” He understood the tension between Christianity and the classical moral political virtues, and perhaps some of the modern vices, likely by consulting his own soul, by the means of his self-knowledge, admitting that “every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning.” One will not find “evangelical perfection” in the statesman, he observed. As Mahoney puts it, “de Gaulle “was not bereft of Machiavellian virtù.”  He unhesitatingly abandoned the Algerian Harkis, Muslims who had fought with the French against their fellow Muslims in the 1954-62 war of independence when he decided to jettison the colony, which he now judged more trouble than it was worth. [5] But “unlike Aristotle’s magnanimous man, de Gaulle had a gift for seeing greatness in others,” recognizing Churchill and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer as his peers among statesmen, and saying of André Malraux’s writings: “Clouds, clouds. But every now and then, a lightning flash.” His friendship with Adenauer (who was granted the unique privilege, for a foreign leader, of dining in de Gaulle’s home in the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises) served the noble and indispensable political purpose of symbolizing the reconciliation of republican France and republican West Germany, only a bit more than a decade after the liberation of Paris from the Nazis. 

Mahoney doesn’t overlook de Gaulle’s errors of judgment. He imagined that Ho Chi Minh, and dedicated Communist, was only a nationalist and more, that Soviet Communism really amounted to an attempt to assert Russian greatness. That is, he inclined somewhat towards taking nationalism as the universal and perennial underlying cause of international poltics. While he correctly anticipated that “Europe would outlast a Communist ideology so at odds with human nature and the wellsprings of European civilization,” he badly misjudged the timing of Bolshevism’s demise, going so far to write to a startled and bemused Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin, “Come, let us make Europe together.” His efforts to pry the Communist ideologues who ruled Poland, Hungary, and Romania from the Soviet empire met with no better success. “This was wishful thinking on de Gaulle’s part,” and wishful thinking doesn’t cut it in a statesman. In such prudential matters, Churchill seems to have been wiser, even if Churchill willingly made deals with Stalin, a tyrant whose crimes far surpassed those of the mediocrities in 1960s Eastern Europe.

Despite such lapses, de Gaulle stands as a moral and political eminence of the first rank. So much so that even Henry Kissinger thought of himself as his inferior.

With Czech dissident, then president, Václav Havel, Mahoney completes his set of statesmanly portraits. He cannot be said to surpass Lincoln, who occupies the final place in Mahoney’s first set of three, and Mahoney immediately shows why. Havel “seems to have at least partly bought into the radically ‘individualist’ ethos of the 1960s, at least as regards ‘personal’ morality, “prone” as he was to depression, self-medication, and sexual promiscuity. Although “an intensely spiritual man,” his convictions leaned toward New Age ideology. Despite all that, Havel did think that “everything we do is remembered,” ontologically registered, recorded by “Being”—a thought likely borrowed from the fashionable Existentialism he learned as a student. This “provided cosmic grounds or support for moral responsibility,” carrying him through Czechoslovakia’s Communist years with courage and honor. He never succumbed to the “subjectivism and relativism” which deformed the generation of the 1960s.

Similarly, while worrying that “modern technological civilization did not have the moral resources to sustain itself and undergo a crisis,” lending himself for measured support for radical environmentalists and other ‘counterculture’ activists, he drew the line on the European peace movement, then intent on unilateral nuclear disarmament. While testing the boundaries of common sense, he never stepped to far over the line, “distrust[ing] Russia” and praising “civic activism” as a counterforce to statist bureaucracy, rather in the manner of Tocqueville. He, too, was a political man, one who considered “Being” as a force that “grounds, delimits, animates and directs” life on earth, very much including political life. “To revolt against its requirements and demands, its limits and obligations, is to succumb to arrogance and hubris and inevitably has ‘cruel consequences,'” as seen of course in the Communist regimes. Such “ideological despotism” finally must bow to the authority of the conscience that attends to the order of the cosmos—a Stoic thought from a not-unfailingly Stoic man. In all, as a moralist-statesman without illusion, Havel “exemplifies those intellectual and spiritual qualities integral to human freedom and dignity.”

Mahoney concludes with some thoughts on political conditions today. “We have come face to face with a new logocracy,” that is, “a tyranny founded on the manipulation of language and the forced imposition of ideological clichés with little or no connection to anything real or enduring.” Unlike Schaff, he finds some virtue in that “very imperfect man,” Donald Trump, a patriot who opposed “the culture of repudiation” even as he “lacked the self-discipline, the rhetorical precision, the self-control, and the liberal learning to be a true statesman.” Faults and all, he stood above his enemies, who deploy “a new Manichean racialism,” flirtation with neo-Marxist socialism, and the absurd claim that human beings can will their own ‘gender identity’ into an inane amalgam of clowning and malice—all at a time when China, Russia, Iran, and even North Korea openly threaten the country with destruction.

“Let us return to the heights,” Mahoney writes, not a moment too soon. (“No complications there,” de Gaulle once said.) “Cicero was indisputably right that magnanimity tempered by moderation—noble statesmanship informed by liberal learning, applied political philosophy, and high prudence—is among the best ways of life available to human beings,” along with the lives of philosophic inquiry and religious fidelity. “The choice is ours.”

 

 

 

 

Note

1. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher of course confronted Soviet communism, but they were too young to have attained office in time to oppose the Axis Powers. One exception to Mahoney’s claim is Harry Truman.
2. Perhaps not quite so. See Seneca’s essay, “On Clemency.”
3. For the best survey of de Gaulle’s thought, see Daniel J. Mahoney: XXXX
4. As Mahoney sees: “Perhaps only Washington rivals him for the austerity, the seeming inaccessibility, of he man behind the public persona,” sharing with de Gaulle “a stoicism, a recititude, that is all too rare in a democratic age,” even if Washington did keep better control of his temper, in good Stoic fashion. For my own part, I read all of de Gaulle’s published writings before reading more than a few of Washington’s. When I came to study Washington’s collected works, some years later, my first impression was “This man is just like de Gaulle.”
5. It is noteworthy that de Gaulle’s Christianity comes to light almost exclusively in his private life. His books and speeches bear hardly a trace of it, beyond recognition of Christianity as a central element of French and European civilization. Part of this reticence may be due to de Gaulle’s understanding of the longstanding, sharp divide between Christians and secularists in France, the country he wanted to unite. It may be for this reason that he refused to exacerbate old factions.