David E. Sanger: New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2024.

 

His troops massed along the Ukrainian border, Russian president Vladimir Putin flew to Beijing, where he met with Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping, showing “the world that he and his fellow autocrat could combine their power and influence” for “one common purpose: to stand up to the United States, frustrate its ambitions, and speed along what they viewed as its inevitable decline.” Against political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s claim, made in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, that “western liberal democracy” stood “as the final form of human government,” abetted by worldwide commerce and Internet conversation, the allied despots essayed to prove that monarchy, abetted by disciplined state elites and supported by populations unified by nationalist fervor and fear of the regime, would overbear the democratic republics by using commerce as a weapon and controlling computer linkages within their territories, while building up their military power and testing the nerve of complacent republican politicians, who had shown themselves incapable of guarding their countries’ borders even against peaceful (if often illegal) immigrants.

New York Times journalist David E. Sanger regards this as “a more complex and dangerous era than we have faced in nearly a century,” with two major powers aligned against the United States and its allies, with dangerous regional threats from Iran and North Korea, and with the ever-present undercurrent of Islamist terrorism. “We all have a lot to lose.”

Although the 2002 meeting between Vladimir Putin and U.S. president George Bush fostered “the storyline…that the Cold War was over, never to return,” that Russia would join the World Trade Organization and possibly the European Union (with NATO membership to follow?), the fundamental problem was that the Cold War hadn’t ended the same way as World War II: Germany, Japan, and Italy had had their regimes changed from tyrannies to republics, but Russia was no republic and the Communist Chinese regime went through it all untouched. True, Putin could join the Americans in a campaign against terrorism, but “it soon became clear that everyone had a different definition of who was a terrorist and what to do about them”—an unsurprising point to anyone who understands that different and indeed fundamentally opposed regimes are likely to define things differently. “It was Putin’s bet that if he joined with the Americans’ antiterrorism efforts, the West would look the other way on some of Russia’s human rights issues.” In this, he had the support of the new generation of Russian intelligence operatives and military officers, who despised their elders for having ‘lost’ the Cold War. Putin shared this sentiment: “By allowing the Soviet republics to flourish, each with its own distinctive culture, he argued, [the Soviet rulers] sowed the seeds of splitting away from Moscow.” Marxism-Leninism had been too optimistically internationalist. And so, Putin “didn’t keep a bust of Lenin in his office; he kept one of Peter the Great,” Russia’s modernizing czar. The extension of NATO to the Central and East European countries liberated by the disintegration of Soviet power proved a unifying threat to Putin’s Russians—a threat that would have been no threat at all, had the Russian elites intended to move toward a republican regime. They didn’t. As President Bush ruefully confided to his aides and allied foreign heads of state, “I think Putin is not a democrat anymore,” still nursing the assumption that he ever was one.

When it came to cultural independence, Ukraine irked Putin more than any other neighbor. “Ukraine is not even a state!” he is said to have said, and has obviously proven that he believes, by his actions. He had already launched cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, successfully invaded Georgia in 2008, paying “almost no price” for these adventures. Indeed, the subsequent Obama Administration embarrassingly proposed a “reset” of relations with Putin’s Russia, only to be rewarded by the conquest of Crimea in 2013. President Obama sighed “that Russia would always care more about the Ukrainians than Americans would,” and that, in his words, “this is not another Cold War” since “unlike the Soviet Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology”—a point that proves not that it wasn’t another Cold War but that it wasn’t the same kind of cold war. “The United States failed to update its own perception about who Putin was and where he was headed.” Throughout, “the United States was consistently underreacting to Putin’s escalating gambits,” thanks to progressivist-historicist assumptions shared by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Bush’s former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice put it most exquisitely, telling Sanger, “Fighting for territory, thinking in ethnic terms, using resources to wage war. I thought we had moved beyond that. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We thought the linearity of human progress should have left all of this behind.” But “should” isn’t “would.” And when it comes to geopolitics, regimes count more than “human progress.” On into the Obama Administration, “the United States failed to update its own perception about who Putin was and where he was headed.” Even Obama’s last year in office, the administration was divided on that point, with Secretary of State John Kerry assuring himself that Russia was no more than “a declining competitor” and the Pentagon regarding it an “increasingly potent threat,” citing Putin’s own statements, the modernization of his country’s nuclear arsenal, along with the invasion of Crimea. As for the Trump Administration, the president persisted in ignoring the evidence, preferring to worry about Islamist terrorism. His second National Security Director, H.R. McMaster, did his best to alert him to the danger and was out of office in a year. Trump apparently accepted Russian claims that Ukraine was rightfully an integral part of Russia, suspecting its government of having interfered in the 2016 election on Biden’s side. 

In these years, Chinese rulers were touting the ‘peaceful rise’ of their country. A straightforward analysis of the Chinese regime would have shown that the rise of China, peaceful or otherwise, portended badly for the rest of the world, but the same ‘progressive’ or ‘evolutionary’ hopes prevailed. In 1997, President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin negotiated a trade agreement with Vice Premier Zhu Rongji, who seemed to want to move toward a free market in his country. “The belief underpinning these visits—and virtually every element of American policy toward China—was that it would be economic and diplomatic malpractice not to entice the country toward the West,” since (it was hoped) “increased exposure to Western norms and legal systems would seep into Chinese society,” thereby “embolden[ing] China’s population to seek more capitalist reforms and, ultimately, political reforms,” setting “China on a slow train to freer expression and some form of democracy.” Meanwhile, “the more deeply that China and the West became intertwined, the less chance there would be for conflict because both sides would have too much to lose.” That two-way street proved to carry heavier traffic in one direction than in the other. But those governing the great commercial republic “assumed China’s economic interests would overwhelm its other national objective,” seeing every bit of counterevidence as “a brief deviation from Beijing’s inevitable destiny, “ignor[ing] what was occurring in plain sight.” The Communists’ crackdown on Hong Kong, that hub of capitalism, their claims of “exclusive rights to vast parts of the South China Sea” with a naval buildup to match, their bullying of foreign investors, their technology thefts, eventually disabused many if not all Americans of their illusions, a quarter of a century or so later. 

Xi Jinping became CCP General Secretary in 2012. Although he made his intentions plain to the Party cadres, those speeches were not widely known in the West for decades. [1] His “agenda remained a mystery” to U.S. intelligence agencies; it was still “easy to make the mistake of presuming that because Xi seemed fascinated by America, he was gradually becoming Americanized.” But fascination is not admiration. “What increasingly attracted the attention of the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI…was what Chinese operatives were doing in the United States,” such as offering “remarkably cheap bids to build the 3G and 4G networks of rural telecom carriers located around the country’s nuclear missile silos.” Hmmm. And then there was the theft of digital security files of 22 million U.S. government employees and their families, “Part of a broader [!] campaign by China to understand every detail and vulnerability of the American elite.” No worries, Xi told President Obama, he would cooperate in “hunting down cyber threats” and would never militarize those islands in the South China Sea.

This is not to say that regime change did not come to China. It just wasn’t the regime change anticipated by the dupes. Mao’s tyranny had been replaced by a Party oligarchy, as had occurred in post-Stalinist Russia, decades earlier. But Xi set about “concentrat[ing] power in the hands of one leader,” himself. Viewed with maximum benevolence, or perhaps naivete, it may have been that the oligarchs had become “convinced that the only way for the country to survive in a world of chaos and upheaval [was] to centralize power again, even at the cost of the openings that made China rich.” Rush Doshi, President Biden’s director for the China-Taiwan division of the National Security Council, rather suspected that this was part of “a grand strategy to displace American order, first at the regional and now at the global level.” This suspicion had been shared by Trump’s third National Security Director, John Bolton, but the president, thinking like the businessman he was, preoccupied himself with trade negotiations, gave no serious thought to China’s military and political ambitions. This is not to say that commercial relations between the United States and China were not a major element in America’s dilemma: “Americans might tell pollsters that they viewed Beijing as their country’s number one threat, but they weren’t going to give up their shopping habits,” which largely consisted of purchasing Chinese-made products at Walmart.

It fell to Democratic foreign policy advisers Kurt Campbell and Jake Sullivan, their expectations of positions in a Hillary Clinton administration resoundingly denied, to use their unexpected idle time to write an article in Foreign Affairs outlining the several “camps” among “the Washington establishment” regarding China. Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Sandy Berger and for most of his career, Joe Biden advocated “engagement” with the Communists, still expecting that the Communists might reform themselves; Cambell himself had advocated an “allies first” policy, whereby the United States would strengthen its relations with “allies surrounding China” such as the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam; the hardline skeptics of Communist intentions advocated preparation for possible armed conflict; others (taking a position that Washington establishmentarians typically call ‘nuanced’) advocated a piecemeal approach, dealing with each regional issue as it arises, sometimes working with China, sometimes against; finally, the ever-sanguine ‘globalists’ advocated working with China on such international matters as climate change and pandemic protection. The article’s authors admitted that some of these policies could be mixed and matched.

Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency was “grappl[ing] with the paradoxes of Xi himself,” a man who had placed “the security of the state…ahead of economic growth,” invoking some of the phrases of no less Marxist-Leninist a tyrant as Mao Zedong. But, but, the analysts supposed, “China’s new contest with the West wasn’t about ideology; it was chiefly a technological battle for supremacy and for global influence that comes with spreading Chinese telecommunications networks and aid around the world.” At the time, Xi’s speeches were not available in the West, speeches in which he insisted repeatedly that he was indeed a Marxist and the Communist Party, animated by “Marxism with Chinese characteristics,” must remain the sole ruler of China, with Xi as Party Chairman. To anyone familiar with Marxism in theory or with Communist practice, there is no contradiction whatever between Marxist “ideology” and the ambition to win technological supremacy over ‘capitalism’ and to spread “influence” “around the world.” Indeed, Marxist historicism fuses theory and practice, making any such rigid distinction misleading in attempting to analyze Communist policies. There was no “paradox.”

As for poor Biden, his warnings to Putin, consisting of a list of “red lines” that he must not cross, with no stated penalties for crossing them, was no more effective than his policy in Afghanistan, which culminated in the Taliban’s return to power, for which “the White House was quick to blame everyone but itself.” Sanger regards the American military withdrawal as strategically correct but botched in the execution, something of a reprise of the fall of Saigon in 1975. This “reminded the world that superpowers have limits,” although evidently China hasn’t gotten the message, and it’s not clear that Russia is on board, yet, either. “The mullahs in Tehran, the Chinese generals fulfilling Xi’s orders to prepare for a conflict in Taiwan, and Putin’s apparatchiks, all had good reason to believe that Biden and the United States, with its famously short attention span had no stomach for the kind of international entanglements that had dominated the American Century,” now more than twenty years in the past. As an example, Sanger recalls China’s successful test of a hypersonic missile, a technology Americans had yet to master, along with its nuclear missile buildup and he development of a robotic satellite arm that could disable U.S. satellites. All of this threatened to neutralize American antimissile defenses. “It was complicated enough during the Cold War era to defend against one major nuclear power”; “for the first time in its history,” American strategists “would have to think about defending in the future against two major nuclear powers with arsenals roughly the size of Wahington’s—and be prepared for the possibility that they might decide to work together.” 

Putin took the opportunity to invade Ukraine, alleging not only that it was rightly an appendage of Russia but that it was currently ruled by “Nazis.” Of course, as he tenderly put it, “what Ukraine will be—it is up to its citizens to decide,” although it must be remarked that the decision would be made under duress. In this case, “nothing the Biden administration did…would keep Putin from invading Ukraine,” especially given Europeans’ absurd confidence that he would never do such a thing. In February 2022, Putin undertook the aforementioned trip to Beijing, after which he and his fellow despot issued a statement announcing that “friendship between the two States has no limits,” although their “bilateral strategic cooperation is neither aimed against third countries nor affected by the changing international environment and circumstantial changes in third countries.” Given Putin’s claim that Ukraine has no real status as a sovereign country, this didn’t contradict his intention to invade. 

As we now know, this turned out to be a “short invasion, long war.” The Ukrainians didn’t think of themselves as Russians, after all. By March, Putin admitted, “this will probably be much more difficult than we thought.” On the other hand, “the war is on their territory, not ours,” and “we are a big country, and we have patience.” They would need it, since they “failed at what they thought they were best at, what the U.S. military calls ‘combined arms operations,’ the ability to integrate land, sea, and air power together in precisely coordinated battlefield operations.” One retired Russian general observed, “there is no doubt that Russia will be added to the category of countries that pose a threat to peace and international security, subjected to the most severe sanctions, transformed into a pariah in the eyes of the international community and probably lose the status of an independent state.” But although the first two predictions have proved accurate, the third is only partly true (Russia is no pariah in the eyes of China, and that’s important), while the last seems highly unlikely—unless the general meant that Russia might eventually become a satellite of China. Moreover, as one American major-general put it, the original battle plan “was the worst plan on earth,” spreading Russian forces “too thin” and neglecting to set up adequate supply lines for the troops, since they expected a blitzkrieg-like victory reminiscent of the Germans in France in 1940. And “furious, united Ukraine” had a regime advantage; as a republic, its military had instituted a “flexible hierarchy, one that empowered lower-level officers to make decisions in real time.”

For its part, the United States provided a range of weaponry to Ukraine, while worrying about what weapons to send and how the Ukrainians might use them. Would the Ukrainians launch a major barrage against targets within Russia? Would that lead to a third world war? Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky did in fact request a missile that could hit targets deep within Russian territory. “Putin was out to kill [Zelensky] and eradicate his country” in “a war [Ukraine] would never win if Putin could fire on Ukraine from Russian territory” with impunity; “Biden’s preoccupation was avoiding escalation.” Putin took full advantage of these worries, threatening to use short-range nuclear weapons against Ukraine if faced with what he defined as “an existential threat for our country”—leaving the parameters of his existentialism conveniently undefined. “Anyone who hoped the age of nuclear gamesmanship had ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall discovered that the holiday from history was over.” For a brief time, when Ukrainian counterattacks pushed Russian forces out of Kharkiv and Kherson, “Washington was swept by a haunting fear, that the Ukrainians were so successful…that Putin would conclude he had only one real option left to avoid the humiliation,” to make good on his nuclear-war threat. Instead, he issued a military call-up of 300,000 “more men to throw into the fight.” The Ukrainians, who had argued that “Putin would threaten repeatedly but never press the button” on nuclear weapons use, could at most intimidate Ukraine’s allies—bad enough, in Zelensky’s eyes. 

As to the Chinese, “understanding Biden’s preoccupation with Ukraine,” might it not “conclude that the moment had come” to attack Taiwan? In light of China’s June 2022 declaration of “sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction” over the Taiwan Strait, denying its status as an international waterway, that possibility had become more likely. Biden countered by distinguishing Taiwan from Ukraine. Taiwan, he noted, is an island democracy whose partnership with the United States stretches back decades that is also host to the most critical network of semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the world. “If Taiwan ceased to exist—or smoldered under Chinese artillery barrages—the digital economy would crack apart.” While geopolitically important, Ukraine isn’t as important. Accordingly, America would not intervene with troops in Ukraine, but Taiwan was another matter. Yes, trade (including trade in semiconductors) had increased between Taiwan and Communist China, trade relations scarcely translate into peace, as Germany and France had proved, repeatedly, in the years 1870-1940. Just before a scheduled visit to Taiwan from House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the CCP navy “shot eleven ballistic missiles into the sea around Taiwan,” perhaps to indicate that Speakership is less impressive than Actionship. “By circling the island, they were saying that this was all Chinese waters.” Taiwan is economically and geopolitically important not only because it sits along a major sea lane but because it is the leading manufacturer of microchips, “the technology America let get away” because U.S. technology companies have “gradually moved production overseas without much thought about the national security implications of becoming so dependent on the supply of chips from a single vulnerable island off the coast of China.” That is, corporate executives thought exclusively in terms of free international market markets and not in terms of political regimes that can make them unfree for military, political, and (national) economic advantage, “a strategy reinforced by the reassuring myth that in a globalized world, it didn’t really make any difference where you produced the semiconductors that fuel the information age”. Corporate executives are sophisticates when it comes to economics and luxury items, but often naifs when it comes to geopolitics. “America’s dependence on a complex, easily severed supply chain for [micro]chips became even more acute than our dependence on the Persian Gulf for oil” had been before the discovery of substantial reserves of natural gas in North America. 

The Biden Administration understood that “the technology race for advanced chips and the arms race with China had essentially merged,” with surveillance satellites, killer satellites, hypersonic missiles, military drones, and quantum computers now expanding battlespace into outer space and cyber space, the latter including both the gathering of information and the dissemination of ‘disinformation.’ “The Chinese were relying on American innovation—and the openness of the Western system—to build the tools intended to defeat its creators,” eyeing Taiwan while ramping up its own technological infrastructure. The complexity of the matter made the emergency difficult to convey. This wasn’t only a problem of domestic politics but of international politics. “While both capitals insisted that they were not requiring countries to pick a side, it increasingly appeared that is exactly what they were seeking”—inevitably, given the regime conflict and its geopolitical scope. “Dozens of small, seemingly technical decisions” had large, indeed worldwide implications. There are now “three interlocking arms races,” the race for nuclear weapons, the race for dominance in outer space, and the race for dominance in cyberspace, including artificial intelligence—all depending, “at their core, on who can produce the most potent next-generation chips.” “Which countries would join the ban on selling the most advanced chips to China?” Which would purchase Chinese technology, including technology with spyware built into it? Which would line up on Taiwan’s side if Communist China attacked? Most statesmen would prefer not to choose, even as American statesman preferred not to choose sides in European wars in the first century and a quarter of U.S. foreign policy. But the new, worldwide character of international relations and the new ‘totalitarian’ regimes animated by the new historicist ideologies have made that stance largely untenable, whatever one’s wishes may be.

In the more purely economic realm, Beijing practiced “a tactic known as ‘debt-trap diplomacy.” The CCP’s much-touted Belt and Road initiative, consisting of international transportation and other development projects linking China with numerous countries across Asia and into Europe, plunged countries into debt to Beijing; the price of repaying the debt, unpayable fiscally, was Chinese ownership of that infrastructure, thereby increasing Chinese influence over governments and populations. If a government moved to cancel a Belt and Road project, as Malysia did in 2018, the CCP was happy to launch cyberattacks upon it until it backed down, as Malaysia did. American apologists for China claimed that “China was going through the same learning curve that the United States had gone through in the twentieth century—in which some of its aid initiatives were successful and some sparked debt crises.” But of course the American regime differed from the Chinese regime. A closer analogy would be America’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century ‘Dollar Diplomacy,’ whereby the American Navy could be sent to protect American business assets threatened by foreign governments. However, the abandonment of ‘Dollar Diplomacy’ wasn’t a matter of moving along a learning curve; it was a matter of returning to principles already learned and taught by the American Founders. Chinese policies are entirely consistent with the principles of Marxism with Chinese characteristics, and so any learning curve will be entirely a matter of refining tactics, not of changing fundamental strategy. 

As the war in Ukraine continued, NATO pulled together and, in the case of Finland, expanded to the Russian border—precisely Mr. Putin’s stated worry about Ukraine, although in fact Russian conquest of Ukraine would mean an advance toward, not a buffer against NATO. This notwithstanding, as Finnish president Sauli Niinistö remarked to Sanger, while there may be two billion citizens of commercial republics worldwide, there are about eight billion subjects of tyrannies and oligarchies. To counter this imbalance, the West can only appeal to ‘quality’ instead of ‘quantity,’ to technological advances in military and intelligence-gathering capacity and to some extent a more reliable alliance structure, given the distrust despots so rightly entertain regarding one another’s motives. Still, although both sides play divide-and-conquer, neither has divided or conquered its enemies and the much-predicted political demise of Putin and, lately, of Xi have not materialized. (Nor would the ruin of their political fortunes necessarily alter their states’ foreign policies for the better.)

Sanger summarizes: state sovereignty now has taken the lead against globalist complacency, very much including the assurance of secure international supply routes; republican regimes are on the defensive against “strongmen”; the China-Russia alliance is “stronger than at any point since the Korean War”; nuclear sabers are rattling, mass terror well publicized. The new ‘multilateral’ world, rather like the pre-World War I world but with weapons of mass destruction, “may indeed prove a near-permanent condition for the next several decades.” “The addition of new players, acting sometimes independently and sometimes in tandem, makes the current era far more complex to manage than the old one.” And much more simply, “America has never faced a competitor like China before.” This is the challenge faced by the Trump Administration most immediately and by the American people and their allies, fundamentally..

 

Note

1. See “The Comprehensive Strategy of Xi Jinping, 2012-2017,” on this website, under the category, “Nations.”

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Notes

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

 

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

Part One: Greece.

Part Two: The Archipelago, Anatolia, and Constantinople.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Notes

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