John Ma: Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. 

 

The ancient Greek polis or ‘city-state’ only seems familiar to us, having read the historians, philosophers, and playwrights who flourished within them (well, mostly in Athens, which didn’t always allow its philosophers to flourish). But readers of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’s La Cité Antique have glimpsed the alienness of the polis, how entirely unlike modern states, especially modern liberal states, it was. In our time, the open society continues to have its enemies, but in antiquity there were no open societies. Enemies were rival poleis, rival empires, and rival factions contending with one’s own regime no regime asserted liberty in our sense of the word, that is, personal liberty held against the state. No polis justified itself by securing, or at least claiming to secure, natural rights held by individual persons. Whatever regime a polis might have had, it was exclusive. The ancient regime also exemplified religion in the original sense of the word: the binding of the people to divinely inspired laws given to that polis. Religious liberty as we think of it was unknown, even if a few philosophers asserted freedom from religion. 

In this magisterial study, Columbia University professor John Ma unfolds the history of the polis with particular attention to how its rulers adapted themselves to the pressures of war and factionalism. He defines a polis as a small territory (typically about 300 square miles), ruled by adult male citizens, with an overall population that included slaves, freeborn foreigners, women, and children, all excluded from share in that rule. Although the citizens owned property, their rights to their property were defined by their fellow citizens, or in a tyranny, by the one ruler. “The polis defines itself as commonwealth (koinon), a community (koinonia) of citizens, a constitution (politeia)”—that is, by “the terms that Aristotle explicitly deploys to describe the rise and the essence of the polis in his Politics.” Throughout, Ma inclines toward Aristotle’s understanding of Greek politics (albeit with some qualifications), emphasizing the prudential ways in which it was ruled, while acknowledging the religion-bound character of the polis somewhat in passing.

But if “Aristotle witnessed” the emergence of the polis, why did it emerge? And why did it endure so long, if at least in attenuated form, from 350 BCE to 400 AD—into the Roman empire?

Ma begins with the prehistory of the polis. He emphasizes that there was “no clear path of development,” no historically inevitable march, during this time; things might have turned out differently. And in any case, reliable information is hard to find, limited as scholars are to archeology and poetry.

From 1400 to 1200 BCE, the Late Bronze Age, lands bordering the Aegean Sea featured “palace-entered polities” which controlled large territories and populations, essentially as estates. Rulers determined who would use the land, for what purposes, practicing what Ma delicately calls “the mobilization of labor” for fortifications, places, hydraulic works, and monuments to themselves and the gods. These were warrior polities, “monarchical, hierarchical, bureaucratic”—in many ways “the antithesis of the later form of the polis.” Departing from Aristotle, Ma denies that “the polis grows out of the primitive ‘tribal’ structures”; tribes actually came into being at the same time as the poleis did; these were “interlocking processes.” This could occur because smaller communities existed among the palatial estates as “clustervilles” that stood ready to rise up and expand, asserting self-rule, after the estates collapsed.

It is only in the late eighth century BCE that the poems of Homer and Hesiod “provide sustained political statements about communities, values, and action.” By then, societies ruled by the aristoi or “best men” and by the basileis or kings (a title descended from the palatial and post-palatial power holders) become visible. These “lordly elements often found themselves in tension with “a strong, explicitly sense of community and public interests.” Rulers remained warlike; “glory and honor [were] obtained by killing and stripping opponents, or by obtaining plunder.” In peace, there was feasting, leisure, luxury, all carried out “in an unflinching theater of distinction.” The lords modeled their lives on the lives of the gods, justifying their rule as saviors of the people from enemies (including enemy gods) and therefore entitled to near-godlike status—ordering religious rituals and judging disputes. Ma warns against confusing these communities with feudalism, which exhibits a relatively stable hierarchy. Warlike competition and the “social reciprocity” of lavish feasts made them far more contested than the feudal states of Christendom. Moreover, the king had no serfs or peasants paying rent to him; he was a landowner ruling a household which included slaves. And he needed to pay heed to the activities of the councils, in which the community met, engaged in religious rituals of their own and upheld a “sense of the common good.” Kings competed with one another in war, parleyed in feasts, but also needed to exhibit “the sense of obligation toward the community.” “Collective opinion” mattered, although the councils themselves met only at the behest of the king. “The world of the Homeric epics is about the city: the community finds its expression in a nucleated built environment, defined by walls, sharing public spaces”—a human artifact that is the setting for norms, obligations, and community power that enforces these things, and which symbolizes them. “This was not yet the polis,” but the materials for the polis are visible.

To study the polis, one must first turn to the middle of the eight century BCE, when “the first documentary record” of the use of the word appears in the community of Drēros. “The Drerian officials hold power on terms decided by the community, according to permanent, public, known, and stated rules” which have religious sanction; no king convenes the assembly. Among those things ordained by assemblies are tribes; that is, tribes are political institutions, governmental forms, a means of organizing the population. “The working of state institutions probably required the distribution of the population into such groups to ensure an openly fair sharing of power.” Other groups—dining groups (for example, the famous Spartan messes), drinking groups, phratrai, or “brotherhoods,” genē —now appear, and even militaries are reorganized, with ordinary soldiers sharing the spoils of war along with the heroes. War is now understood as rightly waged for the benefit of the community, the defense of that community against foreign powers in conflicts over territorial borders along with political dominance or freedom. Politicians therefore begin to speak of union as clearly as they do today, searching for commonalities uniting town and countryside, town dwellers with farmers. The polis was not only a real place but an “imagined community.”

The laws now “strive for universalizing force and comprehensiveness, with far-reaching authority within society.” In Ma’s view, this is no longer only religious but rational law, with categories of crime set down in a logical way, including crimes against the polis itself, and with considerations of “how far the law should stay unchanged, how law itself can be changed” in an orderly way. The ‘rule of law,’ as distinguished from the rule of persons, gives rise to a distinction between the law and rulers’ decrees, with the greater authority going to the laws. Laws also bolster attempts at political administration, including the administration of finances. Collection and expenditure of revenues become orderly, too; “the polis was hence a form of political economy.”

“The most important and durable aspect of the consolidation of poleis and their interaction is the pattern of mutual, self-aware recognition [of other poleis] as peers.” Poleis competed with one another in games in which athletes represented their communities. They erected shrines and held festivals attended by foreigners, as seen in Pindar’s poetry.

In the following centuries, poleis increasingly prospered, offering the stability that led to increases of population and of settlements. They also inclined toward egalitarianism, if not yet toward democratic regimes, having in many instances replaced the arbitrary rule of “the best men.” True, “the demos, the commons, are never simply the whole community,” but neither are they the elites. The aristoi of course challenged, or attempt to adapt to, these egalitarian trends, often by replacing “aristocracy of birth” with “various forms of competition” intended to establish superiority on the ground of innate strengths of body and (especially) of soul. This ensured the continuation of warlikeness and displays of wealth. But elite ‘pushback’ seldom stayed “the appearance of public institutions and rules for power-sharing, the clear location of legitimacy of power in communal interests and universally applicable rules, communicated to the whole community which they concern”—a communication, it might be added, made feasible by the small size of the poleis. While “in the story of the polis the rich will always be with us, the crucial question, however, is that of the place, and the nature, of these wealth and power elites, once the communities take the developmental path of strong integration that characterizes the polis.”

Tensions between the many who were poor and the few who were rich (with ambitious would-be ‘ones’ waiting in the shadows, hoping to seize upon disorder and exalt themselves above both) led to conflicts over regimes. As described by Aristotle, regimes consist of rulers, ruling institutions or offices fashioned for their purposes, a way of life, and a purpose or set of purposes for the polis. “One solution to the travails of integration was to consolidate strongly a small group of stakeholders chosen on grounds of birth and especially wealth, and to exclude the rest of the population of the territory” from rule—an oligarchic regime, as in Sparta and Crete. In these poleis, “the restricted group” of rulers must “present itself as the whole community,” often by making a “claim to divine or heroic descent.” “The other, diametrically opposite path was to structure the polis through wide inclusiveness, by the integration of a large segment of the adult male population as citizens, in strict distinction to noncitizens, namely foreigners and especially the enslaved”—a democratic regime, as in Athens. It, too, claimed divine sanction, as when the founder of democracy in Athens, Solon, declaimed: “Our polis will never perish by the destiny of Zeus or the will of the happy immortal gods—for such is the great-hearted guardian, might-fathered daughter,” Athena, “who holds her hands over us.” Thanks to her, eunomiē, literally good-lawness, “makes all things orderly and adjusted, and often lays fetters upon the unrighteous.”

Enter the “classical” polis, seen from 480 to 180 BCE. It did not begin auspiciously. What Ma calls the “Hundred Years’ War” between Athens and Sparta does indeed resemble Europe’s Hundred Years’ War between the Plantagenet and Valois dynasties, both conflicts drawing neighboring states into the fighting as allies. With the advantages of territorial and population size, Athens began as the hegemon, the lasting traces of which may be seen in “the astonishing ensemble of marble buildings on the Akropolis”—symbols of religio-political authority. In effect, the Athenians had imitated the Persian empire the Greeks had united to defeat.

Sparta eventually won the war, thanks to financial aid from that empire, enjoying hegemony for the next thirty years only to collapse in its turn, having overstretched. Both Athens and Sparta provoked resistance from smaller poleis, forming coalitions against their oppressors, as “the mounting costs of raw power politics doomed imperial aspirations.”

These vicissitudes did not break the poleis, however; they reinforced it as a state form. Within that form, Athens famously continued to exemplify democracy, Sparta oligarchy, with various mixtures of those regimes seen elsewhere. In Athens, democracy without any substantial bureaucracy made for “immediate responsive[ness] to popular decisions,” decisions demagogues attempted to sway. As seen in Socrates’ trial, these decisions included judging, not only lawmaking and policy. “The assumptions between democratic practice and its institutional logic were well understood by critics of democracy: Plato attacks the very epistemological basis of mass decision as a principle in his fictionalized portrayals of Socrates.” Not only philosophers but the wealthy felt the pinch, as the latter bore heavy financial burdens.

Sparta saw oligarchy, “the rule of the few, the better, the rich.” Whereas corruption of the people in Athens took the forms of rhetoric/demagoguery and sophistry from itinerant teachers, the Spartan rulers corrupted the people the old-fashioned way: with money and patronage. Like most oligarchs, the Spartan politeuma or ruling body presented itself as aristocratic/virtuous, claiming to bring “order balance, self-control, and even justice” to the polis. “The few wielded power on grounds of merit,” the few claimed, inasmuch as the rich were too rich to be corrupted or greedy and too smart to make bad decisions. By contrast, “democracy could be portrayed as irrationality and madness.” Oligarchs struggled and often factionalized over the question of whether to require equality among themselves or to establish a hierarchy of merit.

Whatever regime it established, the polis itself remained and strengthened as attempt at achieving hegemony by one polis or another floundered. In a sense, the polis became the new ‘hegemon,’ universalizing itself throughout Greece in what Ma calls “the great convergence.” “The poleis were all militarized (aligning militiamen, elite troops, and even their own fleets), heavily fortified, and endowed with a strong sense of identity, interests, and continuity.” They were “remarkably successful at playing the long game and achieving freedom”—that is, autarkia or self-rule—in the Hellenistic period. To resist the power of the larger poleis, the smaller ones formed leagues, “uniting autonomous cities within common decision-making processes and institutional frameworks to produce highly effective shared goods on the social, economic, and political fronts.” Disputes between poleis could also be arbitrated by third parties, in “a network of peer-polity interaction.” The Macedonian conquests (350-280 BCE) removed the possibility of hegemony from individual poleis, but the poleis adapted to the foreign hegemon, retaining “a strong sense of identity, interests, and continuity,” backed by sufficient military force to make “the constant exercise of force” against them unsustainable. Moreover, Macedon wasn’t the only empire in the Mediterranean world, a the Ptolemies of Egypt, the Seleukids of Syria, and others competed for influence, enabling the poleis to play them off against each other.

As poleis increased in number, so did regimes of ‘the many’—some of them democracies, others ‘mixed regimes,’ as Aristotle calls them. Ma attributes this to the increasingly peaceful atmosphere of the great convergence, an atmophere in which the military prowess of oligarchs and monarchs could not thrive because it became less eneessary. “Negotiations and compromise” among and within poleis became the norm, a norm better suited to popular self-government. Politics itself became less sharp-edged, as disputes over regimes faded or, to put it in Ma’s more academic prose, “as a consequence of decoupling of claims to excellence from political domination, association and groups vied for distinctiveness without centrifugality.” Civic life became more political in Aristotle’s sense of the term: reciprocal, a matter of ruling and being ruled in turn. Elites didn’t disappear; they adapted to popular rule by serving the public good as defined by ‘the public’—serving in office and loaning money to the polis during their terms of service, exhibiting evidence of good character in their public dealings, and submitting to public scrutiny of their actions while in office.

But then a new and more formidable empire forced its way into the Aegean. By the middle of the second century BCE, the Romans had established their empire in the region. Ma asks, “What did Roman control change in the polis?” And “to what extent did polis culture shape the forms taken by the Roman conquest, and subsequently, by the Roman empire?” The answers turn out to be quite interesting because neither conquest nor empire were simple, straightforward things.

With the Hellenistic period’s Macedonian hegemon broken and the regional Aetolian and Achaian leagues gone, “the poleis recognized that the axis of the world had tilted.” Embassies to Rome were dispatched. Some Greek politicians dragged their feet while others hastened to cozy up to the apparent masters of the new world order. For its part, the Roman Senate did not press matters too closely. Rome had defeated the major Aegean powers but hadn’t really attempted to conquer Greece. As a result, “local ‘liberty” continued under a haze of “negotiation, litigation, boundary-pushing, and consultation.” Ma calls this the “Indian Summer” of the polis as “civic freedom was paradoxically an integral part of Roman provincialization.” It might be added that this was nothing new in ancient imperial practice. Cyrus the Great didn’t mind sending the Israelites back to Jerusalem, didn’t mind if they ruled themselves with their own laws, so long as they paid him tribute while doing so. Ancient empires were impressive in size but not so impressive in their capacity to centralize full political authority over their subjects. Their subjects often were not entirely subjected.

“It is clear that Roman provincialization in Greece, Macedonia, and Asia Minor coexisted with the general freedom of the island poleis of the Aegean.” This included the perpetuation of more or less democratic regimes there, no longer pressured by “the big regional leagues,” which of course had been centered much closer than Rome. Nor did the prestige of the gentlemen decline, as they continued to support the democracies monetarily. Democrats needed oligarchs and oligarchs needed democrats: politics, ruling and being ruled, continued. And some Romans were impressed; “this world offered a model for Cicero.” “It is worth remembering that the debates of the second century BCE polis, rather than simply ‘Hellenistic philosophy,’ influenced Roman political thought.”

“Local freedom meant litigating out a situational space of freedom, a bundle of organized privileges within the flow of Roman power,” a matter of “constant hard work” for the rulers of the poleis. Increasingly, Greek politicians “equated freedom with friendship of Rome.” This is what Polybius had feared: a gradual, ‘creeping’ sort of imperialism, a movement from Roman hegemony to Roman empire over Greece. When Athens finally rebelled against Rome in 86 BCE, it was too late. It was Cicero himself who asserted Roman oversight of Athenian finances while proclaiming Athenian freedom: “Never mind—at least they think they have autonomia.“

In Cicero’s time, Rome itself saw regime change, from the republic to monarchy. “Under Caesar and preponderantly under Augustus, colonies of Roman veterans were installed in the Peloponnese, the norther Aegean, and in Asia Minor.” That is, monarchs, having come to power by military means, prudently saw to it that the soldiers who had boosted them into rule were dispersed and rewarded, well away from the capital city, enhancing Roman influence in the imperial territories. Nonetheless, once again the poleis proved resilient, as their Roman overseers began to adopt the Greek language and “Greek civic ideologies and images.” if the polis requires self-rule to be a polis, self-rule did persist.

But it persisted in increasingly attenuated form. “The statues of Roman emperors joined the statues of the gods in temples,” their images appeared on Greek coins, and the “ruler cult” flourished, expressing “a communal understanding of dependency before Roman power” and upon the peace it secured. Indeed, “the emperor decided directly on the very existence of a polis as a corporate, recognized entity with institutions.” The emperor appointed provincial governors empowered to issue laws and policies and enjoying judicial authority as well. Greek cities participated in the punishments meted out by the courts, guarding prisoners and providing “the facilities for executions in the arena as gladiators or by wild beasts.” The emperor also imposed taxes, with the responsibility for their collection imposed upon the poleis. “The cities thus acted as instruments in their own exploitation.” With these progressive tightenings of rule, “we are not quite seeing bureaucracy at work, but a routine regular attention from the center, generating the concrete manifestations of the state.”

The empire still functioned by the process of city petitioning and Roman response to the petitions, so a significant taste of political rule remained. “Even in the Roman empire, the polis never quite forgot its origins as a state, a self-ruling community. On the Roman side, petition and response “allowed the empire to show itself repeatedly, consistently, as a field of rationality, legal-mindedness, and responsiveness,” as “a political rather than an administrative entity.” “Viewed coldly, the Roman empire appears as the end of the line for civic autonomy,” but the Greeks, throughout their history, have seldom viewed things coldly. And, as Ma insists, for the Romans, the poleis‘s “internal political and social order had to be preserved, in ways centered on the continuity of public goods” in order not to kill the golden-egg-laying geese. Thus, “for all the modifications, simplifications, and developments brought about by Roman power, the political life of the Greek city-state remains recognizable from earlier times.”

Still another regime change took place with conversion of Constantine to Christianity in the third century AD. Gradually, Church bishops replaced not only the existing priests, destroying or repurposing the temples, but also “took over some of the roles of the civic elites”—representing a polis before the emperor, for example. More importantly, the division between the regime of the emperor and the regime of the church wiped out the religio-political character of the polis, as Fustel de Coulanges saw and as Machiavelli deplored. Between Empire and Church, “the status of citizen (politēs) disappears, replaced by a concept of mere inhabitant.” By the sixth century, “the ancient city faded out of recognition.”

Ma mistakenly takes Aristotle to be an institutionalist, simply, overlooking one of the elements of his idea of the politeia or regime, the Bios ti or way of life. But Ma does not himself ignore that element, pointing to the festivals, associations, and “public performances” in the poleis, as well to the continued importance of public opinion. The public opinion that directed the way of life of the polis was in turn shaped by religion. “The polis was what the polis did, and what the polis did was to worship and honor the gods, through ritual events and material manifestations.” It is true that it is Fustel, not Aristotle, who emphasizes this feature of the polis, but Aristotle’s account is also a defense of philosophy, an activity not always in accord with political religion. The prophetic religion, Christianity, which had suffered persecution along with philosophy so long as the ancient civic religion prevailed, dealt with that religion by pushing it aside. Yet insofar as it then took on civic responsibilities, too, the prophetic religion in turn opened itself to philosophic scrutiny and political tensions. Difficulties persisted.

Looking back at the polis, Ma admits, as Marxists insist, that the polis had ‘contradictions’ within it, notably the contradiction between the few who were rich and the many who were poor. But he also observes that these contradictions register the diversity of the polis; such tensions occur in an organization of any substantial size. “The polis, as a koinon or participatory community of citizens, is different in nature from predatory extractive states” inasmuch as “revenue-raising activities are directly purposed toward the solidaristic provision of public goods…through investment or redistribution.” It is indeed a ‘commonwealth.’ It typically offered some protection for rich and poor alike. As Benjamin Constant remarked, it was not a liberal state in the modern sense, protecting the rights of individuals against the state. As a ‘closed’ society, it did not welcome foreign immigrants. An of course it rested upon slavery, which enabled citizens the leisure to engage in politics in the first place. But one must ask, what ancient society was not exclusive (except for the empires, which ‘included foreigners by conquering them) and slave-owning? The polis achieved political liberty for many of its inhabitants, which is more than can be said for any type of community previous to it, or of many that followed it.

 

Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. Volume III. October 2017-January 2020. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2020.

Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. Volume IV. February 2020-May 2022. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2022.

 

Having set down the fundamental principles and practices of his ideology as enunciated in speeches and other documents in the first four years of his rule, Xi elaborates on those principles and practices in statements issued during the subsequent three years, with emphasis on the centrality of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese regime. [1] He is especially vigilant with regard to possible sources of intra-Chinese opposition to Party rule, whether they might issue from the provinces, the military, or from ideological deviationists within the Party itself. In doing so, he must navigate the changes in policy the Party itself has implemented during its now hundred-year history, since those changes might themselves provoke charges of deviationism from the tenets of Maoism. Admittedly, the Party has led “a major turnaround with far-reaching significance,” the move “from a highly centralized planned economy to a socialist market economy” and from a condition of isolation from the outside world to “one that is open to the outside world in every respect” (Speech at the Ceremony Marking the Centenary of the Communist Party in China, 7/1/21, iv.6). This notwithstanding, he is careful to remark that “the Party has united the Chinese people and led them in writing the most magnificent chapter in the millennia-long history of the Chinese nation,” thanks to “the concerted efforts of the Chinese Communist, the Chinese people, and the Chinese nation” which has remained faithful to the Party’s “founding mission” and “firm leadership, without which “there would be no new China and no national rejuvenation” (ibid.7-9). “The Party was chosen by history and the people”; its leadership must be upheld and strengthened by “follow[ing] the core leadership of the CPC Central Committee,” “act[ing] in accordance with its requirements” as it continues to follow “the path, theory, system and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” thereby “unit[ing] the Chinese people,” whose “fundamental interests” it “has always represented,” having “no special interests of its own” (ibid. 9-10). 

“Marxism is the fundamental ideology upon which our Party and our country are founded; it is the very soul of our Party and the banner under which it strives” (ibid.11). And rightly so, because “the scientific truth of Marxism-Leninism” provided “a solution to China’s problems” and animates “the capability of our Party and the strengths of socialism with Chinese characteristics are attributable to the fact that Marxism works” (ibid.11,13). Against “the three mountains of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat-capitalism,” the Party combined communism and nationalism to rejuvenate the country (ibid.15). “Realizing our great dream demands a great project,” namely, “strengthening the Party that is building momentum,” the “Marxist governing Party” that is “the vanguard of the times, the backbone of the nation” (ibid.17). Consonant with this, “our Party—the “highest force for political leadership”—has “continued to uphold dialectical and historical materialism” (ibid.19), combining “the tenets of Marxism with China’s conditions and the outcome of a range of innovations in theory, practice and system” in accordance with “the wisdom of the Party and the people” (Speech to the Second Full Assembly of the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 10/31/19, iii.144).

Regarding the military, it is an “irrefutable truth that [the Party] must command the gun and build a people’s military of its own,” maintaining “the Party’s absolute leadership over the people’s armed forces,” taking “comprehensive measures to reinforce the political loyalty of the armed forces” (ibid.12-13). Under that rule, the military will both protect “our socialist country” from foreigners, “preserve national dignity,” and “protect peace in our region and beyond,” inasmuch as “peace, concord and harmony are goals that China has pursued and carried forward for more than 5,000 years,” although (he assures his listeners) “the Chinese nation does not carry aggressive or hegemonic traits in its genes” (ibid.13). Peace, concord and harmony include “resolving the Taiwan question and realizing China’s complete reunification” as the Party’s “unshakeable commitment,” “tak[ing] resolute action to utterly defeat any move towards ‘Taiwan independence'” (ibid.16). 

Against any suggestion that such centralized authority might yield tyranny, Xi claims that “a hallmark that distinguishes the Communist Party of China from other political parties is the courage to undertake self-reform,” practicing “effective self-supervision and full and rigorous self-governance” (ibid.15). In an earlier speech, he had affirmed that the “people’s democratic dictatorship under the leadership of the working class based on an alliance of workers and farmers” assures that “all power of the state belongs to the people” (Speech at the First Session of the 13th National People’s Congress, 3/20/18, iii.168). Now, he asserts that “orderly and law-based” succession of Party leaders proves that “a country’s political system is democratic and effective,” along with law-based governance generally, the expression of public opinion “through open channels,” whether government offices are distributed “by way of fair competition,” and “whether the exercise of power is subject to effective checks and oversight” conducted by the self-governing Party (Speech to the Central Conference on the Work of People’s Congresses, 10/13/21, iv.297). That is, Chinese “democracy” is to “should be judged” by the Chinese people, “not by a handful of meddlesome outsiders” such as international human rights organizations (ibid.298). “There is no uniform or single model of democracy; it comes in many forms,” and it is “undemocratic in itself to measure the world’s diverse political systems against a single criterion” (ibid.298). In China, for example, “the people exercise rights by means of elections and voting,” although of course this means the affirmation of candidates selected by the self-supervising Party (ibid.299). Quoting his predecessor, Deng Xiaoping, “we cannot adopt the practice of the West” since “the greatest advantage of the socialist system is that when the central leadership makes a decision, it is promptly implemented without interference from any other quarters” (ibid.299). Such decisions are always in accordance with the rule of law, inasmuch as “leadership by the CPC is the most fundamental guarantee for socialist rule of law,” a rule that “must benefit and protect” the people because the Party acts as their vanguard, “lead[ing] the people in enacting and enforcing the constitution and the law” (Speech at the first meeting of the Commission for Law-based Governance under the CPC Central Committee, 8/24/18, iii.332-333, 334). “Under no circumstance should we imitate the models and practices of other countries or adopt the Western models of ‘constitutionalism,’ ‘separation of powers,’ and ‘judicial independence'” (ibid.333). If some of this sounds a bit like circular logic, well, “socialist rule of law must uphold CPC leadership, while CPC leadership must rely on socialist rule of law,” a rule in which “leading officials, though small in number, play a key role in implementing the rule of law” (ibid.334, 336). This will lead to “social harmony without lawsuits” and the emphasis of “moral enlightenment over legal punishment”—sometimes called ‘re-education’ (ibid.333). In this, “upholding CPC leadership and socialist rule of law must be the fundamental requirement for legal professionals” (ibid.344). “The Party’s leadership, the people’s position as masters of the country, and law-based governance form an indivisible whole” (Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, 10/18/17, iii.4).

Given its huge membership of 89 million and 4.5 million “grassroots organizations,” preserving and developing the Party’s Marxist character “is not easy” (Speech at the Sixth Group Study Session, Political Bureau of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 6/29/18, iii.114). The improvement of “the institutions and mechanisms by which the Party exercises leadership” includes “the reform of the national supervision system,” with “checks and oversight over the exercise of power” by the Central Committee (ibid.5), which will “ensur[e] that the Party exercises overall leadership and coordinates work in all areas” (Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, op.cit. iii.74). In appointing officials, for example, the Party will emphasize “political performance,” meaning the willingness to “follow the leadership of the CPC Central Committee and act in accordance with its requirements” with “full confidence in the path, theory, system and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” that is, in conformity to Xi Jinping Thought. That thought follows the principle of Mao, who “said that politics meant making more people support us and fewer people oppose us”—the “key to the Party’s success in leading revolution, economic development, and reform” (“Speech at the first meeting of the Commission for Law-based Governance under the CPC Central Committee, op.cit.347). This is what “the sense of responsibility” among Party members means (ibid.347). “The fundamental purpose of strengthening the Party’s organizations is to uphold and improve overall party leadership and provide a strong guarantee for advancing the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics” arming members with “the theoretical weapons of Marxism” and teaching them how to use them in order to “improve our ability to apply theory in practice” (Speech to the 21st group study session of the Political Bureau of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 6/29/20, iv.581, 583). At times, Xi’s conception of the Party resembles that of a Christian church: “A political party must have faith. For the Communist Party,, this refers to the faith in Marxism, communism and socialism with Chinese characteristics,” fortified by reading “more Marxist classics and classical works on adapting Marxism to the Chinese context,” in order to “truly understand the Marxist stance, viewpoint and methodology, and internalize them so that they uphold faith in Marxism and persevere in pursuing their ideals with strong convictions,” ideals that “should be the beacon of faith for Party officials (Speech to the Second Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, 1/11/18, iii.585-586).

Xi quotes Lenin: “The proletariat can, and inevitably will, become an invincible force only through its ideological unification on the principles of Marxism being reinforced by the material unity of organization”—a strength, Xi adds, that “no other political party in the world has” (ibid.583, 584). This effort is especially important with the “primary-level Party organizations”—i.e., the ones at the grassroots—which directly oversee the people (ibid.585). “Managing human resources, including officials and talent, is essentially a matter of how to put people to good use” under the system of “democratic centralism,” the “fundamental organizational and leadership principle of our Party” (ibid.587). Taking “strong action to transform lax and weak governance over the Party” by “follow[ing] the core leadership of the CPC Central Committee,” its authority and “centralized, unified leadership” by “tighten[ing] political discipline and rules” will “ensure that political responsibility for governance over the Party is fulfilled at every level of the party organization” within a strong “cage of institutions” (Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, op.cit.iii.8,9). Thus, “we will continue to strengthen the Party’s ability to cleanse, improve, and reform itself, and forever maintain its close ties with the people” (ibid.iii.27). This will combat formalism and bureaucratism (“the obsession with official posts and power”) within the Party (Speech to Commission for Discipline Inspection at the Third Plenary Session of the CPC of the Central Commission, 1/11/19, iii.581, 582). There are, he warns, “cliques bound together by political and economic interests attempting to usurp Party and state power” practicing “unauthorized activities fanned by factionalism that sabotage the Party’s centralized and unified leadership” (ibid.587). Only if the Party can “cleanse itself’ of such elements, terminating their activities, can China “break the cycle of rise and fall,” by which he means the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties seen throughout the country’s history (ibid.592).

“No matter what kind of work they do and how high their rank” Chinese Communists “are first and foremost Party members” whose “primary duty is to work for the Party” (Speech at the National Conference on Strengthening the Party in Central Party and Government Departments, 7/9/19, iii.125). That is, “political awareness is not abstract” but always to be manifested by the principle, “Be loyal to the Party,” its beliefs, organizations, theories, guidelines, principles and policies” (ibid.125). As Mao said during the Korean War, “The enemies have more steel than morale, while we have less steel but higher morale” (ibid.126). By “democratic centralism” Xi means the practice of “solicit[ing] opinions from a certain number of Party members”; “of course, after collecting opinions and advice from all parties involved, it is the Central Committee that makes the final decision,” given the fact that in “such a huge Party in a vast country like ours if the final and sole authority of the Central Committee were undermined, the decisions of the Central Committee were ignored, and everyone followed their own way of thinking and worked their own way, nothing would be achieved” (Speech at the Second Full Assembly of the Third Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 2/28/18, iii.196, 197). “Delegation of power,” under the Chinese Communist regime, thus means top-down rulership, after consultation with “a certain number” of Communist Party operatives. “Weak political commitment and a lack of regular and sound political activities” must never be permitted (Speech to the Second Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, op.cit.584). To ensure that this will happen, “we will establish supervision commissions at the national, provincial, city, and county levels,” an “anti-corruption working mechanism under the Party’s unified leadership” (ibid.593). “This will make some people unhappy” (ibid.594). Needless to say, “discipline enforcers must first discipline themselves,” being “a key target of people with ulterior motives” who “seek to corrupt them.” (ibid.iii.594). “We cannot allow ourselves any respite” (Speech to the Study Session on implementing the decisions of the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 1/11/22, iv.38). “Self-reform is key to ensuring our arty never betrays its nature and mission” (Speech to the Second Full Assembly of the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 11/11/21, iv.629). Since “the history of our Party is like a most lively and convincing textbook,” in 2021 the Central Committee launched “an education campaign on CPC history in the whole Party and society to review, study and promote the Party’s history,” which will give Party members “a better understanding of our cause, firmer commitment to our ideals, higher standards of integrity, and greater determination to turn what has been learned into concrete actions” (Speech at a criticism and self-criticism meeting on the education campaign on CPC history to the Political Bureau of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 12, 27-29,/21, iv.634). Such study will buttress an overall campaign to combat the “hedonism and extravagance” concealed under formalism and bureaucratism (Speech to the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, 1/18/22, 641). 

Xi does not fail to invoke a sort of populism, having learned from Russian and European communism generally the danger of allowing deep-seated popular resentment of Communist Party rule. “One main reason for [the] failure of communism in Russia “was that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union became detached from the people and turned into a group of privileged bureaucrats who only served their own interests,” “imperil[ling] the fruits of modernization” (Speech at the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 1/11/21, iv.197).  He associates populism with the anti-corruption campaign, remarking that “the people resent corruption most,” making it “the greatest threat our Party faces” (XXX, 10/17/18, iii.72); “it may even lead to the loss of power” (Speech to the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee, Commission for Discipline inspection, 1/22/21, iv.589).  More generally, the “centralized, unified leadership” of the Party takes a “people-centered approach” to his work, he assures his listeners, as “the people are the creators of history,” the “fundamental force that determines our Party and our country’s future” (Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, op.cit.iii.23). “The fundamental goal for the Party since its founding, in uniting the people and leading them in revolution, construction and reform, is to give them a better life” (Speech at the deliberation session of the inner Mongolian delegation to the Third Session of the 13th National People’s Congress, 5/22/20, iv.61). If the Party becomes “detached from the people” it will lose the “vital force” of the people’s creativity (Speech commemorating the 120th birthday of Zhou Enlai at the World Leadership Alliance, Imperial Springs International Forum, 11/30/17, iii.161).  “The people are our Party’s greatest strength in governance,” and “the Party works for the people’s interests and has no interests of its own” (Speech at the Conference on the Aspiration and Mission Education Campaign, 5/31/19, iii.163). The Party leadership guarantees “that the people are the masters of the country”—hence the Leninist formula, “people’s democratic dictatorship” (Report to the Nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, op.cit.iii.37-38). He promises to “expand the people’s orderly participation” within that regime, presumably with emphasis on the “orderly” (ibid.39). Party committees “should strengthen democratic oversight, focusing on the implementation of the major principles, policies, decisions, and plans of the Party and the state” (ibid.40, emphasis added, although it may not be needed). When it comes to the many ethnic groups within China, the CPC will lead all of them toward “Chinese socialism,” inasmuch as “the Chinese nation is a big family”; to “uphold socialist values,” the Party will build ” cultural home shared by all ethnic groups” by “highlight[ing] China’s cultural symbols” (Speech at National Conference commending Model Units and Individuals for contributing to Ethnic Unity and Progress, 9/27/19, iii.351-353). “Having a stronger sense of national identity is essential to defending the fundamental interests of all ethnic groups,” and this can be achieved by “build[ing] a cultural Great Wall for safeguarding national unity and ethnic solidarity, pool[ing] efforts of all ethnic groups to defend national security and maintain social stability, and effectively combat[ing] infiltration of extremist and separatist ideas and subversion” (Speech at the Central Conference on Ethnic Affairs, 8/27/21, iv.279). “Chinese culture is like the trunk of a tree, while individual ethnic cultures are branches and leaves; only when the roots are deep and the trunk is strong can the branches and leaves grow well” (ibid.1v.281).

Chinese culture, under Xi’s definition, is fundamentally non-Chinese—specifically, Marxist. “Why does Chinese Socialism work? Because Marxism works.” (Speech to the Study Session on implementing the decisions of the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 1/11/22, iv.35). He repeatedly elaborates on the Marxist character of the regime, lest there be any misunderstanding of this. “We need to uphold and apply the worldviews and methodologies of dialectical and historical materialism” and to apply “Marxist views on practice, the people, class, development and contradictions, and truly master and apply well these skills” “so as to better transform such ideas and theories into a material force for understanding and changing the world”—adapted, to be sure, to Chinese circumstances (Speech Commemorating the Bicentenary of the Birth of Karl Marx, 5/4/18, iii.97). He quotes Marx himself as writing that “Chinese socialism may admittedly be the same in relation to European socialism as Chinese philosophy in relation to Hegelian philosophy” (Second Full Assembly of the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19the CPC Central Committee, 10/31/19, iii.145). “We should uphold the guiding position of Marxism in the ideological field, base our efforts on Chinee culture, and continue to guide agricultural development with the core socialist values” (Speech to experts and representatives from education, culture, health and sports sectors, 9/22/20, iv.357). “It is the sacred duty of Chinese Communists to develop Marxism,” to “open up new prospects for the development of Marxism in contemporary China and the 21st century” (ibid.98). As a historicist, he avers that “the era is the mother of thought; practice is the fount of theory” (Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, op.cit. iii.28). Literature, the arts, and social science must “foster and practice the core socialist values,” “consolidating the guiding role of Marxism,” “strengthen[ing] confidence in the culture of Chinese socialism and better present[ing] China to the world” (Speech at the Joint Panel Discussion of members of the literary, art, and social science circles during the Second Session of the 13th CPPCC National Committee, 3/4/19, iii.376). The “fundamental issue” is to know “who we are creating and speaking for”: the people, who are “the source of inspiration for literary and artistic creations” and the field of study for the social sciences (ibid.378). Literary and artistic works should “create an enduring epic about the people” (Speech to the 11th National Congress of China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and the 10th National Congress of the China Writers Association, 12/14/21, iv.372) while “present[ing] China as a country worthy of friendship, trust and respect,” which would undoubtedly serve the interests of Chinese diplomacy (ibid.376).

Crucial to this ‘cultural’ Marxism is the “education campaign” directed at members of the Chinese Communist Party itself, a campaign intended to inculcate “deeper understanding, firmer commitment, greater integrity, and stronger action” at the service of the Party (Speech at the preparatory meeting for the education campaign on CPC history, 2/20/21, iv.592). Marxism has been enriched and broadened with contributions from Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and, of course, Xi Jinping himself. Marx and Engels “systematically revealed the historical law that socialism would eventually replace capitalism,” a “trend of human society” that is “irreversible” (ibid.593). Today, a new education campaign “will help all Party members to be clear about China’s strategy of realizing national rejuvenation within the context of a wider world that is undergoing change on a scale unseen in a century” while maintaining the Party’s “distinctive features as a Marxist party” and affirming what Mao called its “magic weapons”: its “united front, armed struggle, and strengthening the Party,” thereby “carry[ing] forward the revolutionary spirit” “through to the end”(ibid.594-595, 597,599). At a seminar with “teachers of political philosophy,” Xi identified “the key to improving our education in political philosophy” as “fully implement[ing] the Party’s policies on education” for the purpose of “ensur[ing] that the younger generations can shoulder the responsibility of rejuvenating the Chinese nation” along Marxist lines (3/18/19, iii.382). Teachers educating Chinese students in this system should “have strong political convictions,” “love the country and the people,” “learn to use dialectical and historical materialism,” “broaden their vision of knowledge, the world and history,” “exercise strict self -discipline online and offline,” and “have an upright character” (ibid.384). They will “integrate political principles with scientific rationale,” that is, “integrate theory and practice,” obedient to the Party because “China’s success hinges on our Party” (ibid.384, 385). This goes for school administrators, as well, and of course for the Party secretaries who supervise them. This will be a moral as well as a “scientific” education because “selfless devotion and being open and above board are our defining qualities as Communists” (ibid.604). Here is where Confucius may be brought in, properly subordinated to Communist “political philosophy,” since the sage enjoins us, “When you meet people of virtue and wisdom, think how you should learn to equal them; when you meet people with poor moral standards, remind yourselves against such behavior” (ibid.604). This notwithstanding, Marxism and not Confucianism remains “an instrument to transform our objective and subjective world” (Speech at the 15th group study session of the Political Bureau of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 6/24/19, iii.617). “We will foster a Marxist style of learning” (Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, op.cit.iii.68), as party members “consciously guide practice with theory and ensure that all aspects of our work better conform to the demands of objective and scientific laws” (Speech at the First Plenary Session, 19th CPC Central Committee, 10/25/17, iii.85).”Struggle is an art, and we must be adroit practitioners” of Marxian dialectics (Speech at the Central Party School 9/3/19, iii.265). “Once a communist party loses its ideals, it is no different from other political parties”; in losing “this motivating force and inner bond, it will become a disjointed group, doomed to failure” (Speech at the opening ceremony of a training program for young officials at the Central Party School, 9/1/21, iv.607). It is easy to maintain ideological discipline in revolutionary times but “in times of peace” one must “safeguard the authority of the Central Committee and its centralized, unified leadership,” “faithfully follow the Party’s theories, guidelines, principles and policies, and implement the decisions and plans of the Central Committee to the letter,” strictly aide by the Party’ political discipline and rules, be honest with the Party,” and “put the cause of the Party and the people above anything else” by obeying its commands (ibid.609, 619). 

The Party will also rule the political economy of China, sometimes directly with state-owned enterprises, sometimes by its supervision in accordance with the laws the Party enacts. In November 2012, the same month Xi assumed the office of General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, the 18th National Congress of the Party established the “Two Centenary Goals” for building “socialism with Chinese characteristics”: achieving “a moderately prosperous society” by the year 2021, the Party centenary, and “a modern socialist country” by 2049—that is, a fully modernized, prosperous nation, “democratic” and “harmonious” in Xi’s meaning of those terms, and (obviously, if unstated) the dominant world power (iv.82 n.1). Against the slogan, “The American Dream,” Xi lauds “the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation” now that “socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era” (“Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era: Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, 10/18/17, iii.1). Moderate prosperity will entail “poverty elimination,” for which the “top leaders” in each district (especially rural areas) “are the first persons responsible” for “research[ing] and formulat[ing] an action plan on poverty elimination” and “set[ting] a timetable and roadmap for ending extreme poverty in three years” (Speech to a seminary on targeted poverty elimination, 2/12/18, iii.182). “Extreme poverty” has “shackled the Chinese nation for millennia,” but with such “targeted measures” as relocation businesses from “inhospitable areas,” state-funded job opportunities and subsidized housing renovation, along with better education and health care, the poor can be motivated to work harder and not to live their lives on the dole (ibid.185-186). This program includes a Chinese equivalent of Lenin’s New Economic Policy—reducing administrative regulations, permitting a limited free market, and granting property rights. The intra-Party campaign against corruption comports with this program. “A new type of cordial and clean relationship between government and business should be established” (Speech at a meeting on private enterprise, 11/1/18, iii.313). To be sure, “entrepreneurs should cherish and maintain a positive social image, love the motherland, the people and the Party, practice the core socialist values, and promote entrepreneurship,” including international ventures (ibid.315). [2]

In the targeted year of 2021, Xi declared victory in the Party’s war on poverty. Every year since the announcement of the Two Centenary Goals, he reports, “an average of 10 million people, equivalent to the population of a medium-sized country, have escaped from poverty” (Speech to the National Conference to Review the Fight Against Poverty and Commend Outstanding Individuals and Groups, 2/25/21, iv.147). Nearly 20 million persons received subsistence allowances or other aid, and more than 24 million disabled Chinese had also received subsidies. One of the main jobs provided by the government was forest warden, with more than 1.1 million “impoverished people” now “earning their livelihood by protecting the environment” (ibid.147). “No other country throughout history has been able to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty in such a short period of time,” proving that that the CPC “has unparalleled capacity to lead, organize and implement” as “the most reliable force for uniting the people and guiding them to overcome difficulties and forge ahead”; thus, “as long as we are steadfast in our commitment to upholding the leadership of the Party, we will be able to overcome any difficulties or obstacles on the road ahead and fulfill the people’s aspirations for a better life” (ibid. 151, 154). In turn, the CPC owes its success in this enterprise to Marxism, which recognizes that socialism comes in two stages: “undeveloped socialism,” which lasted in China from the founding of the PRC in the late 1940s until 2012, and “comparatively developed socialism,” the current stage (Speech to the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 1/11/21, iv.187). But Marx and Lenin “did not envisage the possibility of a market economy under socialism” (Speech to the Central Conference on Economic Work, 12/8/21 iv.243). Lenin’s NEP was a step in that direction, but it was left to the CPC to establish “the socialist market economy,” looking for a way “to boost the positive contribution of capital…while keeping its negative effects under control” (ibid.243). Capital must be regulated, as “no capital of any type can be allowed to run out of control”; this includes control of profits and prices (ibid.244). The regulation and guidance of “the use of capital” matters not only economically but stands as “a political issue of both practical and theoretical significance,” since capital might undermine the regime of socialism (Speech to the 38th group study session of the Political Bureau of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 12/8/21, iv.251). Capital, he reminds his comrades, can be and is held in public/Party as well as in private hands. In this matter as in all others, “we must uphold Party leadership and the socialist system and keep to the correct political direction” by “prevent[ing] unchecked growth of capital while encouraging investment,” “properly manag[ing] the operation of capital and distribution of gains” not exactly in the communist way, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs (the communist stage of history has not yet been reached) but by the principle from the socialist state to each according to his work (ibid.253, 254). 

In considering international commerce, Party members must understand that “in today’s world, markets are the scarcest resource” and China has the biggest single market—a “huge advantage for our country,” an advantage of which “we must make full use” (Speech at the study Session on implementing the decisions of the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 1/11/21, iv. 204). Competition in the international market (“Chinese enterprises now have interests that extend to many countries around the world”) will firm up the domestic economy, expanding the already “vast domestic market” by making export products and services better and stimulating industrial development (ibid.205). To facilitate such commerce, Xi tells attendees at the World Economic Forum at Davos that the world should “abandon ideological prejudice and jointly follow a path of peaceful coexistence, mutual benefit, and win-win cooperation” (Speech to the World Economic Forum Virtual Event of the Davos Agenda, 1/25/21, iv.535). That is, he artfully downplays the regime conflict that he will advance in non-economic areas in order to strengthen China’s capacity for success in that conflict in the long run. The most famous instance of Chinese economic outreach, the Belt and Road Initiative, “under the strong leadership of the Party Central Committee,” will connect China via “hard connectivity” (physical infrastructure) and “soft connectivity” (“harmonized rules and standards” along with “people to people connectivity”) (Speech at the third meeting on the Belt and Road Initiative, 11/19,21, iv.573). This will “expand mutual political trust and strengthen policy coordination to guide and facilitate cooperation” along the Belt and Road corridor—all while “uphold[ing] the centralized, unified leadership of the Party” (ibid.573-574, 576, emphasis added). 

Even such carefully regulated openness to international commerce poses obvious threats to “national security,” over which the Party must retain “absolute leadership” (Speech to the National Security Commission, 19th CPC Central Committee, 4/17/18, iii.254). The National Security Commission was founded in 2014 for exactly that purpose, “making sure that the national security principles and policies are implemented, improving the working mechanism making great effort to improve its strategic capacity for understanding the overall situation and for planning future development” not only by technical and administrative improvements to the security apparatus but by “strengthening the Party and its work among national security departments,” “resolutely uphold[ing] the authority of the Central Committee and its centralized, unified leadership so that we can build a loyal and reliable national security force” (ibid.255). “We must assign the highest priority to political security,” “ensur[ing] the security of our state power and political system,” not reactively but proactively (Speech to the 26th group study session of the Political Bureau of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 12/11/20, iv.454, 455). This very much includes “the Party’s centralized and unified leadership over cybersecurity and IT application,” which must be made to “move in the right direction” by regulating, operating, and using the internet “in accordance with the law to ensure that the development of the internet is within the bounds of the law (Speech to the National Conference on Cybersecurity and IT Application 4/20/18, iii.361). 

As with the national security apparatus, so with the military—another potential source of regime subversion and overthrow. Since Xi’s appointment as Party Secretary, “the CPC Central Committee and the Central Military Commission (CMC) set about strengthening the military and its political governance,” “emphasiz[ing] the need to promote our Party’s full and rigorous self-governance and govern the military with strict discipline in every respect” (Speech to the Central Military Commission on Strengthening the Party, 8/17/18, iii.445). “Political commitment is the most important criterion and political integrity an essential requirement for our military personnel” (Speech to the Central Military Commission Conference on Talent, 11/26/21, iv.446).To assure “absolute Party leadership over the military,” military officers will receive more intensive “theoretical education” (i.e., Marxist instruction) (Speech to the Central Military Commission on Strengthening the Party, op.cit., 445) to “ensure their absolute loyalty to the Party and the state” (Speech to the Central Military Commission Conference on Talent, 11/26,21, iv.446); Party organizations within the military must be strengthened; Party discipline within the military must be improved and enforced, curbing corruption and “punish[ing] vice”; and, overall, “ensur[ing] Party self-governance with stricter, harsher, and more punitive discipline” (Speech to the Central Military Commission on Strengthening the Party, op. cit.446). While “transform[ing] the military into world-class armed forces,” this ever-enhanced power must be ruled attentively by the civilian Party (ibid.446). With these efforts, “we can build a socialist military policy framework with Chinese characteristics” (Speech to the Central Commission on reform of the military policy framework, 11/13/18, iii.451). The “dream of building a powerful military” can work in accord with “realizing the Chinese dream” (Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Part of China, op.cit.iii.6). “The Party must command the gun and build up the people’s armed forces” (Speech to the 32nd group study session of the Political Bureau of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 7/30/21).

As with national security, military actions should be ‘proactive.’ Xi cites the example of “China’s resounding victory in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea” not only as “a declaration that the Chinese people had stood upright and tall in the East” (“ending our century-long history of humiliation following the Opium War of 1840”), and not only as a counter to “the aggressors’ plan to destroy China in its infancy with the troops it had sent to the PRC border,” but as an example of military pre-emption, citing Mao’s maxim, “Throw one hard punch now to avoid taking a hundred punches in the future” (Speech on the 70th anniversary of the Chinese People’s Volunteers’ entry into the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea, 10/23/20, iv.83). In “realizing the Two Centenary Goals,” “we must not forget the grueling route to victory in this war” (ibid.86).

Economic and military policy being closely linked to foreign policy Xi maintains that socialism with Chinese characteristics “offers a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence,” “offer[ing] Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing humanity”—an approach, one suspects, that will eschew any dependence upon the United States or the commercial republican regimes of Europe while substantially increasing dependence upon the regime in Beijing (Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, op.cit.iii.12). The Soviet Union’s disintegration dealt “a severe blow to world socialism” but, as Deng Xiaoping observed at the time, “So long as socialism does not collapse in China, it will always hold its ground in the world” (Speech to the Second full assembly of the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 11/11/21, iv.93). Now, more than three decades later, “upholding the authority of the CPC Central Committee and strengthening the Party’s centralized and unified leadership over China’s foreign affairs” will prevent any such thing from happening and moreover “build global partnerships through pursuing a broad diplomatic agenda” that includes “steering reform of the global governance system to promote greater equity and justice”—i.e., world socialism (Speech to the Central Conference on Foreign Affairs, 6/22/18, iii.496). Since “the world is undergoing momentous changes of a scale unseen in a century,” “Remain[ing] loyal to the Party,” Chinese diplomats must “pursue continuous learning and self-improvement,” “gain[ing] a keen understanding of the Party’s theories, principles and policies, as well as Chinese laws and regulations,” practicing the “self-discipline” that stems from the knowledge that “the power to make foreign policy rests with the CPC Central Committee, which exercises centralized and unified leadership over China’s foreign affairs” (Speech at the meeting for Chinese diplomatic forces, 12/18/17, iii.489-491). All of this may well qualify Xi’s praise of “multilateralism” at various international gatherings. [3]

In all, “a well-founded system” or regime “is the biggest strength a country has, and competition in terms of systems is the most essential rivalry between countries” (Speech to the Second Full Assembly of the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, 10/31/19, iii.144), whatever verbiage on “multilateralism” may purport. The Chinese regime combines “the tenets of Marxism with China’s conditions”; its “innovations in theory, practice and system…crystalize the wisdom of the Party and the people and are in alignment with [China’s] history, theory and practice,” all of those firmly subordinated to the principles of Marxism with Chinese characteristics. In the words of Deng, “By absorbing the progressive elements of other countries [our socialist system] will become the best in the world. Capitalism can never achieve this.” (ibid.149). Ergo, the commercial republics will slowly fall into the dustbin of history.

 

Notes

1. See “The Comprehensive Strategy of Xi Jinping, 2012-2017,” on this website under the category, “Nations.”
2. In this effort, the newly acquired, formerly capitalist regions of Hong King and Macao have had a distinctive role, with investments on the mainland and “a demonstration role in market economy” (Speech at a meeting with delegations from Hong Kong and Macao, 11/12/18, iii.460). Hong Kong and Macao also helped the mainland obtain export orders from the West, given their long and cordial relations with the commercial republics. For its part, the PRC “piloted many of its opening-up policies in Hong Kong and Macao first, gained experience and then introduced them into other parts of the country step by step,” “allowing the country to advance opening up while effectively controlling risks”—i.e., keeping firm control of market forces in the hands of the Party (ibid.461). “Hong Kong, Macao and the mainland work side by side with one heart and one mind” as the formerly separate regions “integrate into the overall development of the country, and share the glory of a strong and prosperous motherland” (ibid.463)—although Xi does hope that they “will integrate their development into the overall development of the country more proactively” (ibid.465) “improv[ing] local systems and mechanism for enforcing the Constitution and the Basic Laws” (ibid.466). This is the real meaning of the slogan, “One Country, Two Systems”: two systems gradually becoming one, under the Communist regime. The same formula will apply to the recalcitrant Republic of China on Taiwan, as the mainland and China “belong to one and the same China” (Speech at a meeting marking the 40th Anniversary of the release of the Message to Compatriots in Taiwan, 1/2/19, iii.470). “As the Chinese nation moves forward towards rejuvenation, our fellow Chinese in Taiwan should certainly not miss out,” especially given Xi’s assurances that “Taiwan’s social system and its way of life will be fully respected, and the private property, religious beliefs, and lawful rights and interests of our fellow Chinese in Taiwan will be fully protected” (ibid.471, 472). Initially, at least: with regard to religion, for example, Xi has insisted that “religions in China should conform to China’s realities, and we should guide religions to be compatible with socialist society” (Speech at the National Conference on Religious Affairs, 12/3/21, iv.302). Religious believers “must learn more about the history of the CPC, the PRC, reform and opening up, and the development of socialism” while “train[ing] Party and government officials engaged in religious work so that they will have a good command of the Marxist view on religion, the Party’s theory and policies on religious affairs, and increase their knowledge on religion, so as to  raise their capacity to provide guidance” (ibid.304). With regard to any move formally to declare Taiwanese independence, he warns, “those who forget their roots, betray their motherland, and seek to split the country will come to no good end; they will be condemned by the people and indicted by history” (Speech at a meeting marking the 110th anniversary of the Revolution of 1911, 10/9/21, iv. 478-479).
3. See, for example, Speech at the CPC and World Parties Summit, 7/6/21, iv.499; Speech at the 12th BRICS Summit, DATE, iv. 529; Special Address to the World Economics Forum Virtual Event of the Davos Agenda, 1/25/21, iv.537-542).

François René vicomte de Chateaubriand: Political Reflections on the True Interests of the French Nation: and on Some Publications Which Have Lately Appeared. No translator listed. London: Henry Colburn, 1814.

_____. The Monarchy According to the Charter. No translator listed. London: John Murray, 1816.

 

By 1814, the French Revolution and the rule of Napoleon, including his disastrous wars, had bled France. More, it had left the French with the worst kind of political factions—regime factions, in which partisans of hereditary monarchy, republicanism, and Bonapartism menaced one another and the country as a whole. Yet perhaps the nation’s very exhaustion meant an opportunity for a settlement. This was the hope of the Bourbon Restoration, whereby the Count of Provence, brother of the late Louis XVI, returned from exile, ascended the throne as Louis XVIII, and wrote the Charter of 1814, a new constitution for a new regime of limited monarchy. Napoleon’s celebrated enemy, the long-exiled vicomte de Chateaubriand, applauded the Restoration, joined the king during his brief exile when Napoleon returned to power during the period called the Hundred Days, and wrote his Political Reflections in an attempt to answer criticisms of the Charter, “to reconcile opinions, and to call the attention of all Frenchmen to their true interests” (“Advertisement”). 

Chateaubriand begins with a moral analogy. If a man guilty of “the greatest crimes” was condemned by a judge, surely the criminal’s brother could not have “amiable intercourse” with the judge; “the cry of blood has separated these two men eternally” (1.1). The same would be true, and even more justifiable, if the man condemned had been innocent. Would it not then be rash of the ones who condemned Louis XVI to death to attempt to vindicate the execution in the presence of his brother? And yet Louis XVIII “has given his word to forget everything,” having pardoned his brother’s killers (1.4). In his government, he has continued officeholders in their places, regardless of whether they have been royalists or republicans, with the only disqualification being moral turpitude, the only qualification being “intelligence and integrity” (11.61).

Unfortunately, others lack the king’s prudence, to say nothing of his Christian spirit. They seek to justify the execution of Louis XVI, attempting to exculpate themselves from charges that the king himself has not lodged against them. There are precedents for such self-justification. Protestants in France (and in England, with Cromwell) have asserted “the legality of regicide,” as have Catholics, as far back as the sixteenth century. Indeed, “the arguments then produced are written with a vigor, science and a logical reasoning rarely to be found in these days” (3.8), when authors seek “by mutilated and ill-explained [Bible] quotations to disturb the minds of simple believers, while to themselves these quotations are merely subjects of ridicule” (4.12). They thus “kindle the altar of immolation with the double torch of fanaticism and philosophy”—a “perfectly new combination,” a sort of demonic reverse-Thomism (4.13). And while the enemies of England’s Cromwell had been persecuted by him, “they were for the most part perfectly moral and religious men” who “did not enrich themselves with the spoils of the proscribed,” as the French revolutionaries had done when confiscating properties held by the Church and the aristocracy (4.15) in “one of the most flagrant acts of injustice produced by the revolution,” the “most dangerous [example] ever given to mankind” (6.37). Nor did the English civil wars of the seventeenth century cause “the arming of all Europe” against England, as the French Revolution had done (4.18). Fortunately (or providentially) “the bravery of our soldiers saved France from the dangers to which you had exposed her, by calling down the vengeance of all nations on an unexampled crime” (4.18). 

Chateaubriand doubts that “these deplorable apologies” betoken any hope of a return to a republican regime; the former revolutionaries have been “cured of that chimera.” Further, the “limited monarchy” of Louis XVIII’s Constitutional Charter assures them “all proper guarantees of liberty” (5.19). The apologists exhibit rather “a diseased conscience which nothing can tranquilize, an insufferable vanity which is angry at not being exclusively called to the king’s counsels,” and “a secret despair arising from the insurmountable barrier between Louis XVIII and the murderers of Louis XVI”—does he really pardon us, they ask themselves (5.19). To this latter worry Chateaubriand responds that the king is “very firmly fixed upon the throne,” from which “no human power can now shake him” (5.26). He has no need to ‘make sure of them,’ as Machiavelli advises his ‘prince.’ The king “has no reason to dissemble”; “compassion is his birthright,” and “his word is besides pledged” (5.26). His critics rather seek “to agitate men’s minds, to disseminate idle fears,” and “foment dissensions”—suggesting that they haven’t been entirely cured of republicanism, after all (5.27). But today’s post-revolutionary, post-Napoleonic “France has a great need of repose”; “everyone who truly loves his country [will] endeavor to pour oil into her wounds, not increase and inflame them,” especially since “the miseries at which they repine are trifles in comparison with the errors into which they had fallen,” less than two decades ago (5.28). Prominent among these, as remarked earlier, was the confiscation of the property of the king and the aristocracy. Nonetheless, no reversal of these confiscations, no return of property to the returning exiles, should be undertaken. This would only “repair one injustice by violently committing another,” threatening the ruin of the “new families” and bringing “new convulsions” upon France (6.38). “Disinterestedness and honor are the two great virtues of the French nation: with such a foundation everything may be hoped for” (6.38). Instead of expropriating the expropriators, the King proposes to compensate the exiles with monies allocated annually from his own revenues. This is one instance proving that “the King is the glory and safety of France” (6.38). His intentions have been confirmed throughout this year, as “vengeance was dreaded” by many but, “with the character of the King being bey degrees better known, men’s fears were calmed” (9.45).

It is true that Louis XVIII “insisted on receiving the throne as his inheritance, not as a gift of the people” (10.51). Rightly so, in Chateaubriand’s estimation, as hereditary monarchy is better than elective monarchy. “We are not a republic, and he ought not to recognize the sovereignty of the people” (10.52). Law and hereditary kingship “are perfectly compatible, or rather they are one and the same thing, according to Cicero, and according to common sense” (10.52). Louis XVIII is not “King of the French”—the “master, the possessor, of them”—but “the King of France”—possessor of the country, “proprietor of the territory,” especially against foreign encroachments (10.53). And he is so “By the Grace of God,” inasmuch as “everything is by the Grace of God” (10.54). Pace Enlightenment philosophes: “The greatest philosophers were of the opinion that a religious formula was no less favorable to politics than to morals” (10.55). Chateaubriand argues that the French Republic “last[ed] but for a moment” because its founders “sought to separate the present entirely from the past, to build an edifice without a base, to pluck up religion by the roots, to renew our laws entirely, to change even our language,” an ambition leading to a “monument floating in the air, which had no support in heaven or on earth,” consequently vanishing “with the breath of the first storm” (X.55). When the English, “more reasonable than ourselves,” built their existing political institutions “on the base which they found,” some called it slavery, but “it is owing to such exaggerated views of things that we have passed from the excess of demagogism” under the republic “to the most abject submission to a tyrant,” Napoleon (10.57). The English, by contrast, have “strengthened the bases of liberty among them by giving that liberty a sort of sacred character” (X.58). In France, “a wise and monarchical liberty” can be “the offspring of our own moeurs,” with features “we should recognize [as] our own” (X.59). “An order of things must consequently be found, in which all that is venerable in the political ideas of our forefathers may be preserved without opposing the present ideas too much” (XIII.74).

Chateaubriand acknowledges that no new regime can simply imitate the Ancien Regime. France now has “two great classes”: the aristocrats (comprising most of the royalists), “those who are not obliged to work for a living”; and those who are so obliged, those whom “fortune places in a state of dependence” (XIII.71-72). Both need “good laws”; the commoners also need additional “consideration” because “equality…has been established in education and fortune,” an equality that has carried them “from the empire of custom to the empire of reason” (XIII.72). Add to civil-social equality the liberty of thought and of political action and it is evident that “it would be dangerous to outrage” le peuple (XIII.72). That is, Chateaubriand already sees the ‘Tocqueville problem’—the difficulty of founding a regime of liberty on an egalitarian social base. Louis XVIII also sees this, and “it is what he has provided for in the Charter,” where “all the bases of a rational liberty are accurately laid down, republican principles being so happily incorporated with it, that they serve to strengthen and uphold the grandeur of the monarchy” (XIII.73).

Louis XVIII’s Constitutional Charter of 1814 denies sovereignty to the people, lodging it firmly in the State, which consists of the monarchy and a bicameral legislature with a Chamber of Peers for the aristocrats (members to be appointed by the king) and a Chamber of Deputies (replacing the Estates-General of previous regimes) for the commoners, a small percentage of whom would be entitled to vote, based on a stringent property qualification. The main republican feature of the new government is its list of legal rights enjoyed by all Frenchmen: freedom of religion (although the Roman Catholic Church would be the ‘established’ or State church), freedom of speech and of the press, due process, and a strong right to hold private property against the State (“we are the first people in the world who, by the constitutional act, have abolished the right of confiscation” of property, “a fatal source of corruption, of injustice, and of crimes” [XIV.77-78]). In a turn away from the militarism of both the First Republic and the Bonaparte regime, conscription is abolished. The king initiates the laws, which the parliament then may or may not ratify. The king appoints his ministers, who are not responsible to the legislature. He also appoints the judges. The king conducts foreign policy, including military policy. Being a gift from the king to the people, the Charter is not amendable by the people or the legislature, but neither may the king amend it. The regime is, then, a genuine but limited monarchy, limited by its aristocratic and democratic elements, intended to be perpetual, to end the regime turmoil of the previous three decades.

Both constitutionalist republicans and royalists of the ‘absolutist’ stripe have objected to the Charter. The republicans want additional reforms, more power to the people. Chateaubriand chides them for their impatience, noting that the English Constitution has taken “ages” to reach its current form and riposting that for the French “perfection must be immediately attained” and as a result, “everything is lost because everything is not gained” (XIV.77). As a guard against an overbearing national State, “public opinion” stands as a formidable if informal counterweight (XIV.79). Indeed, “the sensibility of our nation in this respect is so strong, that the great fear is lest, like Athens, it should be too much alive to the inspirations of our orators” (XIV.80). Even under the old monarchy, “we have placed in our opinions the independence which other nations have placed in their laws,” “rarely submitting unconditionally to the opinions of others” (XIV.83). 

With respect to the aristocrats, much suspected among the people, Chateaubriand begins by citing Montesquieu. The philosopher calls honor the principle of monarchy, virtue the principle of a republic. In this bicameral legislature, with one aristocratic branch and another democratic-republican branch, balancing one another, “political virtue” or liberty will be upheld because the aristocrats, lovers of honor as ardent as the king, will rally around him, protecting him from republican excesses (XV.84). The problem with the previous Bourbon regimes was that the aristocratic representatives sat in the Estates-General, where they leaned toward republicanism, leaving the aristocratic defenders of monarchic rights, of the monarchic principle of honor, in civil society, not the government. Now, with the Chamber of Peers, they return to the government itself, along with honor. There, they will be “the preservers of all traditions in which honor is concerned,” “the heralds-at-arms of past times” (XV.88). The Chamber of Peers will become “an excellent nursery of offices, of orators, and of statesmen” (XV.88).

For their part, many Royalists, longing for a return to the absolute, unlimited monarchy of the pre-revolutionary Bourbons, regard the Charter as English-all-too-English, incompatible with French moeurs and with France’s more perilous geopolitical circumstance on the main part of the European continent, often threatened by foreign armies. If the bicameral legislature dithers on military spending, they say, “we shall have an enemy at the gates of Paris!” (XVI.92). If, once his army is funded, and the king “can dispose of the soldiery at his pleasure, he may destroy our pretended constitution whenever he is so disposed” (XVI.92). As to our moeurs, in its essence the Charter is an Enlightenment document, they charge, more in line with utilitarian-Lockean England than with France. On this, Chateaubriand concedes that the Enlightenment has “strangely perverted” such terms as constitution, liberty, and equality; in Santo Domingo, for example, “the throats of white men have been cut, to prove that blacks ought to be free”; in France, “reason has been deployed to dethrone the deity and, in leading the human race to perfection,” men “have been made to descend lower than the brutes” (XVI.92-93). That is to say, what Montesquieu means by republican virtue and what Robespierre meant by it are two very different things. And following the excesses of the Revolution, “to rescue ourselves from systems ill-understood, we have plunged into ideas directly opposite”—the “outrages” of Napoleonic tyranny (XVI.93). “The double lesson of anarchy and despotism teach us then that the glory and happiness of France is only to be sought in a wise medium” (XVI.93). Advocates of republicanism in France have charged religion with murder and tyranny; advocates of absolutist monarchy and even Napoleonic despotism have accused reason of the same thing. “This manner of reasoning, on either side, is futile: what is essentially good”—and both religion and reason are essentially good—must “remain so, independently of the evil purposes to which it has been applied” (XVI.94).

The fact that the Charter constitutes a regime resembling the mixed regime of England does not mean that it cannot be good for France. To say so “is a very great error” (XVI.94). The mixed regime wasn’t invented by the English. “It was the opinion of all the ancients that the best form of government possible”—the best one in practice, as distinguished from theory—should include the powers of the one, the few, and the many (XVI.95). Ancient philosophers (Pythagoras Aristotle, Plato, Cicero), one lawgiver (Lycurgus), and sober historians (Polybius, Tacitus) all endorsed the mixed regime, whereas Christianity instituted the representative government adapted to ‘secular’ government by the moderns. Moreover, the origin of the idea doesn’t matter. “It suits our present situation,” is in “no way adverse to our moeurs,” and is “not an absolutely foreign production” (XVI.97).

Having lost so many of its aristocrats on the battlefields of the wars imposed upon it by its geopolitical position, France’s monarchy strengthened too much in the seventeenth century. This was the origin of Ancien Regime absolutism. Louis XIV’s chief minister, Richelieu, “completed the ruin of the aristocratic power” (XVI.100). The First Republic not only ruined them politically but killed or exiled the bulk of them, leaving France vulnerable to Bonaparte. The Charter seeks to recover some of the old equilibrium while giving the King the power he needs to defend the realm on the soil where it sits. “Can anyone seriously believe that if an enemy were on the frontiers, the two houses would refuse to grant the King an army, or that the proprietors of estates would tamely suffer them to be invaded?” (XVIII.110). Surely not “among a people so tenacious of honor, so deeply enamored of military renown” (XVIII.110). And even given its continental position, there could not be “an invasion so sudden, so unexpected, that he should not have received some notice of it a long time beforehand” in this time before motorized transport capable of Blitzkrieg (XVIII.111). True, “it is evident that much greater authority must be left to the executive power in France than in England,” that there is a greater need for secrecy and dispatch—even to the point of needing, in times of national emergency, an executive similar to the Roman dictator—but this is not necessarily a danger to the republican element of the regime (XVIII.111-112). “Our monarchy, perfectly free at home, ought to remain wholly military abroad,” and it can, since in France, unlike England, where manufacturers are honored as much as military officers, the soldier is regarded as “a man who not only exercises the noblest of professions but pursues the most useful career for the State,” combining honor with utility (XVIII.113). The French begin to understand that the republican liberty cap must be concealed “beneath a helmet” (XVIII.113). 

As for the danger that the monarch will overbear the legislature, public opinion will prevent it. Even under the Ancien Regime, public opinion “served, as it were, instead of a Charter” (XVIII.115). “Everything, even to the politeness of our moeurs, became a check upon absolute authority”; “why then should this opinion, formerly so powerful, have now lost its force?” (XVIII.115). It hasn’t, as seen in the influence of the newspapers. And politically relevant public opinion today no longer confines itself to France. “There is, moreover, at the present day, a general opinion which predominates over all particular opinions: this is the European opinion—an opinion which obliges one nation to follow the others”; “you must, whether you will or not, be hurried along in the current of the times” (XIX.119). By this, Chateaubriand means something rather more modest than Hegel’s dialectically unfolding Absolute Spirit. He simply observes that the old balance between “the three orders of the state”—the clergy, the aristocrats, the commoners—has been “destroyed” (XIX.121). “It is difficult to express how favorable to virtue was this division in the order of respective social duties”: sacrifices “exacted from the priest”; “delicacy of sentiment” from the aristocrat; “fidelity, probity, respect for the laws, and an observance of good moeurs” from the commoners (XIX.123). That balanced regime “produced the long existence of the ancient monarchy,” which “depended more upon moral force than upon political coercion” (XIX.123). But the Revolution destroyed that regime and it cannot be reconstructed. The cat of democratization is out of the bag. In the new social order, to which political regimes throughout Europe must be adapted, “there are some persons who displease you,” you royalists (XIX.128). Too bad: “be it so” (XIX.128). And take heart, since “they will pass away, and France will still remain” (XIX.128). It is “inevitable” that “men’s minds” return slowly “to a state of quiescence” after a revolution, but that “is not such an evil as ought to make us renounce the good of our country,” make us reject the Charter because it fails to do the impossible, to return to the Ancien Regime (XIX.128-129). As Tocqueville will later remark, “the moeurs of the times” have changed, and that is “a necessity to which all things are imperiously forced to yield” (XIX.130). 

“To be a good patriot, or a man for one’s country, it is necessary to be a man of the times” (XX.131). It isn’t to become a Hegelian, a historicist, but to be “a man who, waiving his own opinions, prefers the happiness of his country to everything else,” one who “seeks no impossibility” but “endeavors to make the best use of the materials which are offered to his hand,” a man of practical reason and moderation “who believes, with Solon, that in an enlightened but corrupt age, it is our duty not to regulate our moeurs by the Government but to form the Government agreeable to the existing state of moeurs” (XX.132). [1] That is what the Constitutional Charter does. Aristocrats take note: some of your rights had been “destroyed in public opinion” before the Revolution and Bonaparte (XX.133). Under the Charter, however, you may still hold the rank of officers in the army, even if you must share it with commoners “who have received a respectable education” (XX.133). And aristocrats from the provinces will no longer be held back from rising in the ranks. “Who is he, then, that amongst you will oppose the generous alliance of liberty and honor,” the “essential constituents of nobility”? (XX.136). The Chamber of Peers gives aristocrats an important set of rights and responsibilities in the regime, a more important set than they enjoyed in practice under the absolute monarchy of the last century of the Ancien Regime. The Charter “restores to the gentry their ancient share in the government” and “at the same time draws them nearer to the people as their protectors and defenders,” as they were before Louis XIV and Richelieu fully established absolutism. 

And for the commoners, “the most numerous class in France,” the Charter enables all the French “to enjoy that liberty which we have purchased with the purest blood of France,” treating “man with his just dignity” (XXI.144). Far from a historicist, Chateaubriand lauds the Charter’s acknowledgment of “natural rights,” seen in its opening to “all Frenchmen” the opportunity to serve in civil and military positions (XXI.144). You are not getting a republic, but “what man is there who can now be silly enough to dream of a republic after so much sad experience?” (XXI.145). Surely “the Convention has cured us forever of all desire for a republic” even as “Bonaparte had corrected our love of absolute power” (Conclusion.158).Under the new monarchic regime, your natural rights are given legal force with representative government, the right of petition, property rights including the abolition of confiscation, “personal independence, and a safeguard against the attacks of government” seen in all the rights now formalized (XXI.146). “One idea alone has survived” the Revolution,” namely, “the idea of a political order of things which should protect the rights of the people without infringing upon those of the Sovereign” (Conclusion.158).

Finally, the King “finds in the Charter its safety and its splendor” (XXII.148). He has ample resources to protect himself from revolutionary assault and to win the approval of public opinion, whether through “military glory,” patronage of the arts and sciences, or “political researches” into policies that will “give additional value to the institutions of his country” (XXII.148). French monarchs have themselves changed their ways of ruling as circumstances changed, so why should they pine for the old absolutism that can no longer be?

“All Europe seems now disposed to adopt the system of moderate monarchies” (Conclusion.151). There is no need to yearn, Napoleon-like, for a vast empire, since “France only ends where French is no longer spoken”; its cultural empire remains, provoking no hatred (Conclusion.152). [2] “Let us now replace the heat of discord and the ardor of conquest by a taste for the arts and for the glorious exertions of genius,” no longer “look[ing] beyond ourselves” (Conclusion.154). That heat and that ardor have enhanced the French character, the French ethos, “both in force and in gravity,” making us a “less frivolous, more natural, and more justly simple” people (Conclusion.155). Religion now wins real converts rather than persons who merely go through the motions. And “morals have not only survived in our hearts, but are no longer the mere fruit of domestic instruction, being now founded upon the dictates of an enlightened understanding”—an enlightenment not of abstract theory but of harsh experience (Conclusion.155). And so, “Let us then pride ourselves in being Frenchmen—in being free Frenchmen, under a monarch sprung from our own blood,” not under the Corsican Bonaparte, “esteem[ing] other nations without forgetting ourselves” (Conclusion.157). 

The still-unsettled character of regime politics prompted Chateaubriand to intervene in the debate a year later with another book, The Monarchy According to the Charter. At this point, he was a member of the Chamber of Peers, with a “duty to declare the truth to France,” and a Minister of State, with a “duty to declare the truth to the King” (Preface v). At this time, “France appear[s] to me to be menaced with new misfortunes” because its new regime of constitutional monarchy is marbled with officers who opposite it and work against it from within (Preface vi).

There are two kinds of monarchists in France: those who support the Bourbon Restoration and those whose opinions are animated by “the moral interests of the revolution”—the Bonapartists (Preface vii). Representative government, seen in the legislature, resembles that well established in contemporary England and the Netherlands. There are also the state administrators, consisting not only of the ministers but also their putative subordinates; Chateaubriand sees that a good man appointed to run an administrative department may have limited influence over the functionaries. Additionally, although the ministers act in the name of the king they may nonetheless act in ways incompatible with the king’s interests.

So, “Three modes of government might exist under the legitimate king”: the ancien regime of absolutism; a despotism or tyranny along Bonapartist lines; the constitutional monarchy under the Charter (I.1). Napoleon is gone, and with him any real prospect of despotism. Absolutism, too, is finished. “There remains then the legitimate monarchy under the constitutional charter,” the “only good mode now left to us” and “the only possible one” (I.2). Unfortunately, “we have contrived to mistake the spirit and character of the Charter” (II.3), succumbing to passions and interests (“our temper”), pursuing aims that contradict one another, opposing both the spirit and the operation of the government, and exhibiting a lack of courage seen in our fear of liberty and preference for “the tranquility of arbitrary power” (II.3). Addressing both the moral principles animating the several factions and the regimes they advocate, “I hope to adhere, above all, to the plain principles of common sense, a rarer quality than its name indicates—alas!” because “the Revolution has so confounded all our ideas, that in politics, as well as religion, France has to begin again with the catechism” (II.4).

The Charter sets down four elements of a “representative monarchy.” These are the King, exercising the royal prerogative, the House of Peers, the House of Deputies, and the Ministry. According to the royal prerogative, “nothing is done directly by the King himself”; he is “as it were, a divinity, placed behind our reach, inviolable and infallible”—pope-like (IV.6). [3] “His person is sacred, and his will can do no wrong.” This is why French citizens may “discuss public affairs without offense to the Monarch, and we may criticize measures which, though in his name, are the mere acts of his Ministers” (IV.6). To put it another way, the King must permit his ministers “to act according to their own views,” not as “the mere executors of the royal will” (V.7). The King sanctions laws; he does not originate them. As a result, members of the legislature “hardly knew how to act when, in the name of the King, they were invited to attack the best interests of the throne” (V.9). If the legislature ventures to reject an ordonnance sanctioned by the King, then his wisdom is denied and a second ordonnance on the subject must declare, at least in effect, that his wisdom was deceived. “All this is miserable, and injurious to the royal person and royal dignity” (VI.11). The King’s approval ought to be “reserved for the final sanction of the law…and not for the sketch of a law proposed by Ministers, and liable to alteration, and even rejection, by the legislature” (VI.11). Under the ancient regime, the King was indeed “the supreme legislator,” but that is no longer the case under what is in reality a mixed regime with a legislature that actually legislates (VI.11). Under the current, mistaken, notion of the Charter’s spirit and character, either the King (in fact his Ministers) will dominate the legislature, curbing “free discussion” of the proposed laws, or that discussion will “impair the respect due to the King’s name, and tend to a degradation of the Royal authority,” France’s only hope for “tranquility and happiness” (VI.12). Although Bonapartists and absolutists fear that such a reform of the Charter, making its letter conform to its spirit and character, will revive the First Republic’s “mania for lawmaking,” Chateaubriand doubts it, as “the spirit of the nation” is no longer revolutionary, the legislature is bicameral, no longer unicameral as it was under that regime; existing procedures slow things down, permitting time for deliberation to overtake the passions of the moment, and the King has not only veto power over laws approved by the legislature but the power to dissolve the legislature and to require new elections (VII.13). Both the King and Ministers and the legislature ought to have the power to propose laws, freely and openly, “open to public observation” (VIII.16). That way, Ministers will no longer be able to “work upon the conscience of the loyal, by exclaiming, ‘It is the King’s proposal—it is his royal will—his Majesty can never consent to this or that amendment” (IX.19). Both the executive and the legislative branches of the government will need to concur, if a proposed law is to be enacted. Indeed, most laws should be initiated by the legislature; ordonnances should be advanced sparingly. “Can it be doubted that it is more reasonable, more decent, more dignified, that the Chambers should discuss and propose, and that the King should examine and approve” (XI.23)?

This hardly renders the King impotent. “Accountable only to God and his conscience,” he heads the French Catholic Church, standing as the exemplar of family duties and “the fountain of their education and morals,” and he can pardon those convicted under the laws, all while maintaining his power to sanction or reject proposed laws; he appoints and dismisses his Ministers, wields the power to declare war, and acts as commander in chief of the army (XII.25). This is a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch enjoys very substantial powers, indeed.

The Revolution attacked the French aristocracy, which now needs “higher privileges, honors, and fortunes” in order to make the Chamber of Peers into a truly independent branch of the legislature. Chateaubriand recommends making more of the peerages hereditary, restoring primogeniture (indispensable to the maintenance of a stable aristocracy), and the redemption of some of the lands confiscated by the revolutionaries. “When the Peers have inferior titles, and less territorial property, than the Deputies, the political balance is destroyed—the natural force of the aristocracy either is lost, or goes to swell the democratic importance of the Chamber of Deputies,” which will come to wield “a dangerous but inevitable preponderance, uniting to its natural and legitimate popularity, the equality of titles and the superiority of fortune” (XIV.31).

With regard to the Chamber of Deputies, Chateaubriand recommends that it function like the British House of Commons, although he is careful not to say so explicitly. He praises the practice of questioning the Ministers and of requiring the Ministry to be “identified with the majority of the Chambers” (XV.36). Press accounts may not insult the body as such, although they may insult individual members, whose speeches, however, may not be altered by newspaper editors. As a further restriction on journalistic exuberance, “the Deputies may call a libeler to their own bar or may direct a public prosecution against him in the courts of justice” (XVI.37). Still, “without the Liberty of the Press there can be no representative government,” a regime “founded on enlightened public opinion,” since “the Chambers cannot be aware of that opinion if the opinion has no organ,” if the press cannot function as “the tongue of the people” (XVII.39). Thus, the police, who operate at the behest of the Ministers, will “destroy the Constitutional balance” by “turn[ing] the public opinion against the Chambers” if they are charged with supervising the press (XVIII.40). As things now stand, “there is no sort of calumny which has not been heaped upon the Chambers” in an effort to discredit it and to further centralize power in executive hands (XIX.43). “No free constitution can exist” under such conditions (XIX.44), even if press freedom is “not without danger” (XX.45). Accordingly, press restrictions should be imposed not by executive action but by “the laws alone” (XX.45). “Ministers sincerely constitutional can never wish us to risk the state, in order to spare their feelings,” “the smarts or itchings of a miserable vanity” (XXI.48). When a legislator, “in his place, should make a severe observation on a Minister, the latter should not think that France is therefore undone, and that the nation is ruined because he is laughed at” (XXXVII.79). If Ministers wish to promote their policies, they should have their own journals, their own writers, to “gather public sentiment about them” (XXI.49); they should exercise freedom of the press to counter opposition politicians and writers exercising that same freedom. And if they simply can’t tolerate criticism, “they should go live elsewhere” (XXI.50). For such sensitive souls, “a free government can never please them” (50). “Under a constitutional Monarchy, public opinion is the legitimate source and principle of administration” (XXIV.56).

What the Ministers can and should do is to prepare the budget, then submit it to the Deputies for their approval. Again, this should “go smoothly” if the Ministry “will return to just principles” and if the Cabinet is part of a legislative majority. The Ministry should be assembled out of eminent men who exhibit “shrewdness in discovering the characters of mankind and art in managing them,” “firm, bold, [and] decided in the measures” “deliberately adopted” by his colleagues (XXVII.59), men whose private opinions may differ but, “once assembled in Cabinet, they should thenceforward have but one mind” (XXV.57). The Cabinet should be sufficiently numerous to divide administrative work equitably”; a numerous body will also increase the number of allies the Ministry has and lessen intrigue “by affording many and fair objects of ambition” (XXVI.58). As to relations with the legislature, “instead of calumniating it, court it,” and “not with words only, but by measures” (XXVIII.60). If the measures you approve contradict the opinions of the legislators, “make no apology or praise” regarding them but tell the legislators “that a fatal necessity presses [them] upon you” (XXVIII.61).

Currently, there is one Minister who exemplifies the type of Minister who must never serve in the administration of a constitutional Monarchy: Joseph Fouché. Fouché was Minister of Police from 1799 (during the time of the Directory, just prior to Napoleon’s accession) to 1810, then again in 1815 until his death in 1820. A Jacobin, then a Bonapartist, always a Freemason, he voted to execute Louis XVI, ransacked churches, and actively participated in the Terror, averring that “the blood of criminals fertilizes the soil and establishes power on sure foundations.” An inveterate intriguer (even Napoleon regarded him with caution), he undertook the “White Terror” against supposed enemies of Louis XVIII. “A minister of this sort,” Chateaubriand observes, “can only be ostensibly employed with the mutes of the seraglio of Bajazet or the mutes of the senate of Buonaparte” (XXIX.64). Consideration of Fouché brings Chateaubriand to a critique of the Ministry of Police itself, which he judges incompatible with the constitutional Charter. “If the Charter, which professes to secure individual liberty, is obeyed, the General Police can have neither power or object” because “this General Police is in fact a political Police, a party engine,” its “chief tendency” being “to stifle public opinion,” to “stab…the constitution to the heart” (XXX.65-66), “attack[ing] the first principles of political order” (XXXIII.70). “Unknown under the old regime—incompatible with the new—it is a monster born of anarchy and despotism, and bred in the filth of the revolution” from which Fouché emerged (XXX.66). “What a bitter irony is the word LIBERTY in his mouth, who, at the end of his eulogies on freedom, can arbitrarily and illegally arrest any of his Majesty’s subjects!” (XXXI.67). “Can debates be free in presence of a bashaw who listens to them only to mark the man, whom he may at leisure denounce and strike, if he cannot corrupt?” (XXXI.67). After all, even under the terms of the Charter, if in a national emergency the Charter is suspended, the police have the power to arrest “all the civil and military authorities” (XXXV.74). “Good God! How can we suffer to exist, in the heart of a constitutional Monarchy, such a seraglio of despotism, such a sink of public corruption,” a department “whose nature is to overleap or violate all laws,” headed by a Minister “whose communications with all that is vile and depraved in society tend to blunt every good feeling and inflame every bad; to profit by corruption and thrive by abuses” (XXXV.75). If such a Ministry must exist, put it under the control of the Minister of Justice and the Attorney General—that is, under the rule of law.

Underlying such Ministerial excesses are the principles and interests of the Revolution, “the falsest doctrines,” “walking hand in hand with irreligion,” entertained by men who “imagine that those who advocate the cause of piety and morals [are] secretly undermining the Charter,” “as if religion and liberty were incompatible” (XXXVIII.81). On the contrary, as Chateaubriand had argued in The Genius of Christianity, “every high and generous public feeling” is “intimately connected with reverence for the principles of justice and of Christianity” (XXXVIII.81). [4] To those secularists who speak of “reaction” while fearing “vengeance,” Chateaubriand replies that all “practical” reaction—i.e., acts of vengeance—must be “repressed”; “but how can they, and why should [the Ministers] endeavor to check moral reaction”? (XXXVIII.82). Such men as Fouché, “who professed the wildest theories of liberty under the Republic,” and then “practiced the most abject baseness under Buonaparte,” can hardly find sincere common cause with advocates of the Charter, since they find in that document “a King whom as republicans they hate, and FREEDOM, which as slaves they abhor” (XXXVIII.82). Such men, and indeed all men under representative government will do well not to act “upon their own vague suspicions and irritable humor” (XXXVIII.83). “The true rule” is “to weigh and measure consequences and facts”; “a statesman should think only of the results” of a proposed measure, because “in politics, if we once stray from the guidance of facts, we shall bewilder ourselves irretrievably “(XXXVIII.83). If a Minister cannot lead, or will not follow the majority, then he must call for the dissolution of the legislature or resign; “it is for him to consider whether he has the courage to risk (even eventually) the safety of the nation in order to keep his place”(XXXIX.85). In the meantime, he should defend his proposals in the legislature: “What higher duty can he have than to attend in Parliament and share in its debates?” (XL.86). 

Regrettably, the last three ministries under the Restoration regime have committed “the same error,” espousing principles “essentially contradictory to the principle of existing institutions” (XLI.88). In the first Cabinet, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord served in a Cabinet that was “totally unfit for business”—factitious, eager to rule by unconstitutional executive orders, quick to curb press freedom (XLII.91). In Cabinet “assembled all the survivors of those who have appeared on the stage from 1789 to 1816,” men “dissatisfied with themselves and everybody else,” “clubbing together in one stock of discontent, the vain regrets of imbecility, and the keener remorse of crime” (XLII.92). It was “soon overthrown by a storm which had might have prevented,” the return of Napoleon, “and France was nearly overthrown with it,” as Europe armed against him (XLIII.94). In the second Cabinet, omnipresent and infinitely flexible Talleyrand became Prime Minister. He and his colleagues took advantage of Louis XVIII. “Too long absent from France” in exile, he “did not understand the true state of the national mind” (XLIV.96). His Cabinet members deceived him—Talleyrand in particular being a past master of such tactics—and, admittedly, the King “is perhaps a better judge of business than of men” (XLIV.96). This Cabinet included Chateaubriand’s bête noir, Fouché. “If it were thought that the services of such a man could be useful, he should have been placed behind the curtain; consulted, counseled with in secret,” sparing “the shock which his public appointment gave to loyal feeling and to the dignity of the Monarch” (XLV.98). Predictably, Fouché worked to undermine the regime by isolating the King under the pretense that shadowy forces planned his assassination. “This farce ended I know not how,” but Talleyrand, as usual, landed on his feet, “glad to return to juster principles” in for the remainder of the brief life of the second Cabinet and on into the third (XLVIII.105). As for the Minister of Police, “it is the common affectation of great offenders to bear the tortures of conscience with gaiety,” and so he did (XLIX.108). In a final surge of dissatisfaction, the second Cabinet was vacated.

After the appointment of the third Cabinet, the legislature “did its duty by the King, whom it adores, and by the people, whose rights its guards,” both “strengthening the hands of the Crown with laws against sedition and “advanc[ing] the interests of the people with election and budget reforms (LI.112). But once again, Cabinet members (again including Talleyrand, now with the title “Grand Chamberlain of France”) sought to rule according to “the principle of revolutionary interests,” as their own slogan has it, alleging that the legislature doesn’t represent public opinion and that the royalists are incapable of governing (LIII.116). The same “system of revolutionary partialities” which “threw us into the danger from which we are but just extricated” will, “if pursued, again lead us into an abyss from which we will find no redemption” (LIV.118). This may happen because too many of their “honest supporters” fail to distinguish the material from the moral interests of the revolutionists (LV.120). They shouldn’t be deprived of property or of political rights, but their “anti-Christian and anti-social doctrines” (i.e., “whatever tends to render indifferent or praiseworthy, treachery, robbery, and injustice”) must be resisted (LV.120). The French must never “confound real and tangible interests with pernicious and destructive theories” (LVI.121). Church properties now controlled by the government should be restored and those lands confiscated from the aristocrats which haven’t been sold to commoners should be restored to their rightful owners. “Woe to the nation whose justice has two sets of weights and measures!” (LVII.123). And the French themselves want no more recurrence to revolution; “far from wishing for revolutionists, we are sick of them” (LX.131). The opinions of Parisians, heard “only in [one’s] own little circle,” should not be mistaken for the opinions of the French generally (LXV.145). On the contrary, in today’s France “every effort ought to be strained to secure the triumph of the principles of legitimate monarchy” (LXIII.138). “Public stations should not be filled with the King’s enemies” (LXX.156). Such “boasted idols of despotic administration” have been “disconcerted, astonished, and, as it were, lost, in a free Government” because they are “unacquainted with religion and justice” (LXXIII.167). And because they are, “they always attempt to apply physical force” (the police power) “to the moral system of things,” their “faculty for evil” now “useless under a moral and regular government” (LXXIII.168).

There is, Chateaubriand charges, a “secret purpose concealed behind the system of revolutionary interests” (LXXVI.173): regime change, the replacement of Louis XVIII with another, more pliable monarch who accedes to ruling “by the grace of the People,” not heredity, before the Bourbon family “will strike its roots too deeply” to be readily removed (LXXVII.177). The revolutionary faction has for the most part taken “all the offices” in the government, persecuting those it terms “the Ultra-Royalists” (LXXXI.187), hoping “to wear out the friends of the Throne, and to deprive the Crown of its last partisans” (LXXXIII.194). And since “the Altar would support the Throne, its restoration must therefore be prevented” (LXXXIV.196). Religion being “the keystone of legitimate Government,” the Ministry has made sure that no reestablished the Catholic Church “has risen from the grave of the Minister’s portfolio” (LXXXIV.196). And the Ministry has minimized clerical pensions, knowing that “parents will not consign their children to poverty and contempt” (LXXXIV.198). “The physical and material destruction of religion is inevitable in France, if the secret enemies of the State—who are, a little more openly, those of the Church—should, sometimes under one pretext, sometimes under another, succeed in holding the Clergy in the state of humiliation to which they are at present reduced” (LXXXIV.198). This humiliation includes not only keeping them in a condition of penury but bringing some of them up on false charges, putting them “into the dock among prostitutes and thieves” in a parody of Jesus’ mingling with publicans and sinners (LXXXIV.200). The revolutionists, whether republican or Bonapartist, “who have caused our misfortunes and still meditate our ruin,” “detest Religion because they have persecuted it, because its eternal wisdom and divine morality are in opposition with their vain wisdom and the corruption of their hearts”; “we are again returned to sophistry, the sneers and the injustice of 1789” (LXXXIV.200-201). If this campaign continues, “I do not fear to predict that the wish of Mr. Philosopher Diderot”—that he hoped to see “the last King strangled by a rope made of the bowels of the last Priest”—will “yet be accomplished” (LXXXIV.202).

The revolutionaries have even appealed to foreign powers for support, offering the French crown “to whoever would accept it”—on the terms of the revolutionaries’ principle of popular sovereignty (LXXXVI.212). That is, the same revolutionaries who had threatened the European monarchies, first under the Republic, then under Bonaparte, now sought their endorsement under principles fatal to those very monarchies. “The French Revolution which we had hoped was passed is but the prologue of a more dreadful tragedy: if Christianity be in danger, it cannot be denied, that Europe is thereby menaced with a general convulsion” (LXXXVI.215).

In a nod to modern social contract theory, Chateaubriand concedes that “society in its early stages may have been formed by a congregation of men, uniting their interests and passions; but it has been polished and improved only in proportion as these interests and passions have gradually been regulated by religion, morality, and justice” (LXXXVIII.220). Crucially, “no revolution has ever been terminated, but by a recurrence to these three fundamental principles of all human society” and “no political change has ever been consolidated and established, but by being founded on the state of things which it replaced” (LXXXVIII.220). So, for example, when ancient Rome changed its regime from a monarchy to a republic, “the Gods remained in the Capitol,” and when Charles II of England “re-ascended the throne of his ancestors, religion recovered its strength” and Parliament “preserved the political rights it had acquired” under the Cromwell regime (LXXXVIII.220). “This is what we have not chosen to do,” and as a consequence “the legitimate monarchy” faces the threat of “new misfortunes” (LXXXVIII.221). It can be “saved only by preserving and maintaining the political results of the Revolution, which have been consecrated by the Charter” while putting “a final stop to the Revolution itself” by realigning Church and State “for their mutual dignity and safety” (LXXXIX.222). Such a realignment would win clerical support for the Charter, strengthening its favor among the majority of the French, who are Catholics who deny that liberty means atheist license. “It is proved by the example of England that the existence of an endowed Clergy is not incompatible with that of a constitutional Government” (XC.225). More, “in proportion as the Church shall acquire property, the assistance which the State is obliged to provide will be diminished” and “the Clergy will at the same time resume the dignity which arises from independence” (XC.226-227). Additionally, the Church should keep the parish registers, bringing citizens into the world with the baptism that betokens their membership first in the Kingdom of God, prior to membership in the country of France—a sign that “the first duties of man are the duties of Religion and that these include all the others” (XC.227). Public education also should be restored to the Church and Bishops should sit with the aristocrats in the Chamber of Peers, as they do in the British House of Lords. “I have no doubt that the Clergy—connected with the soil of France by the property of the Church—taking an active part in our civil and political institutions—would at the same time form a class of citizens as devoted to the Charter as ourselves,” bringing with them “a salutary influence,” healing “the wounds of the Revolution, appeas[ing] the agitations of men’s minds, correct[ing] morals, reestablish[ing] the principles of order and justice, preach[ing] salvation, and finally reviv[ing] the spirit of religion which is the cement of social life, and of morality, which gives consistency to Political Institutions” (XC.228-229).

In sum, religion is not bigotry, nor does it harbor “a secret enmity against philosophy” (XC.230). Chateaubriand’s slogan is “King, Religion, and Liberty” (XC.231). For their part, the politically restored aristocracy can “introduce into our new state of society that tradition of ancient honor, that delicacy of sentiment, that contempt of fortune, that generous spirit, that faith, that fidelity which we so much need, and which are the distinctive virtues of a gentleman, and the most necessary ornaments of a state” (XCI.232). There need not be jealousy between “what we formerly called noble and bourgeois” (XCI.233). As for republicanism, “liberty is not new to the French Nobility,” men who “never did acknowledge in our Kings any absolute power but over their hearts and their swords” (XCI.234). Under the Ancien Regime, aristocrats had nothing serious to do. Brought to Versailles under the supervision of the monarchs and their police, they became “triflers by profession, endured rather than desired,” living lives “unworthy of the dignity of manhood” (XCII.237). “Let men of honor be no longer made dependent on knaves”; “such is the natural order of morality and justice” (XCII.238). [5]

Modernity’s statist bureaucracy is here to stay. Bonaparte had accustomed the French to an active government; by now, they “will not know how to walk alone” (XCII.241). For that reason, the King should pay “a more ostentatious attention to commerce, agriculture, literature and arts” and design “great public works” to award “brilliant distinctions to successful talents” in order to rechannel ambition away from revolution and toward the enhancement of civil life (XCII.241). [6] Then, “the radiant and innocent triumphs of peace would obliterate from [the people’s] memories and affections the guilty intoxication of anarchy and the bloody enthusiasm of war” (XCII.242). “Religion, the base of all well-ordered society, the Charter, honorable men, the political things of the Revolution but not the political men of the Revolution—such, in one sentence, is my system” (XCII.242-243). 

Chateaubriand’s intervention into the politics of his profoundly wounded country may initially seem remote to the concerns of human beings more than two centuries later. But is not the serious consideration of the aftermath of war and revolution a perennially important task?

 

Notes

1. For a similar observation, more than a century later, see Charles de Gaulle: Speech at Bayeux, June 16, 1946.
2. As seen in de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic with the efforts of Minister of Culture André Malraux, another admiring and careful reader of le Vicomte. See Will Morrisey: Cultural Founding in Modernity (Lanham: University Press of America, 1984). See also “Malraux and de Gaulle: Can Democracy Be Cultural?” on this website under the category, “Manners and Morals.”
3. “He is the head, or visible prelate, of the Gallican church” (XII.25).
4. For a review of Chateaubriand’s earlier book, see “Chateaubriand’s Defense of Christianity,” on this website under “Bible Notes.”
5. This is Tocqueville’s argument, set down two decades later in Democracy in America.
6. In different circumstances, this was the policy of Charles de Gaulle after his founding of the Fifth Republic, in collaboration with his Minister of Culture, André Malraux. See Will Morrisey: Reflections on de Gaulle: Political Founding in Modernity, Second Edition (Lanham: University Press of America, 1996).