Will Morrisey Reviews

Mort Rosenblum: Mission to Civilize: The French Way. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, March 18, 1987.

For 2,000 years, the rooster has symbolized France. He rarely stops crowing, for, as Mort Rosenblum notes, the sun never sets on the French Empire, even today. The political and economic character of the empire no longer overawes anyone. But France is “perhaps the only cultural superpower”: “Freed of its colonies, it is the master”—a mastery “based firmly and squarely on illusion.”

Rosenblum is an American journalist. By illusion, he very nearly means culture, which to be sure is not exactly political, military, economic, or technological. Culture is not tangible, and both the American and the journalist in Rosenblum doubt the reality of the intangible. As an American, Rosenblum undoubtedly knows that American popular culture—its music, movies, even some of its television shows—predominates; however, he means high culture, not low.

To his credit, despite his apparent materialism, Rosenblum also senses that Voltaire and Rousseau, though dead, are not simply dead, not illusory. He does not see clearly why this is so. Perhaps one might suggest that Voltaire and Rousseau each expresses in an unsurpassed way certain thoughts that reflect human nature. Not the whole of human nature, to be sure. But recognizable parts of it—not illusions or at least not sheer illusions. If, as Rosenblum rightly says, “France adds up to more than the sum of its parts,” his book’s parts add up to less than a whole, because he hasn’t thought through what ‘cultural power’ or ‘cultural empire’ means. The French mission civilisatrice does indeed “project the rayonnement ,” the radiance, “of our culture,” as President Mitterand crows. But what are that rayonnement and the sun that generates it?

Rosenblum cannot quite say, although he says much, and much of that with wit and sense. (“The French use some English or concepts not readily found in their own language, such as fair play and gentleman.“) He identifies two principal components of Frenchness: realism and illusionism. “In France, power and self-interest are respectable goals,” but one must leaven this hard dough with panache: “One can assume any pose, and command any priority, if it is done with conviction and flair.” Oddly, neither Rostand nor his Cyrano rate an entry in the book, but the shadow of that famous nose falls on every page.

France’s universalist idealism—from the medieval crusades to ‘save’ Jerusalem to the modern ‘Rights of Man’—receive less emphasis here. Fitting neither the realistic nor the illusionistic frame, but borrowing from the contents of both, it may better explain the attraction of the rayonnement than either. Charles de Gaulle described French collaborators during the war with the Nazis as “realists who know nothing of the realities.” In doing so, he represented the strength of France, neither low-realist nor illusionist. At the time he said that, de Gaulle was scarcely more than a voice on the radio in London, and Hitler ruled continental Europe. But de Gaulle was right. Whether it speaks for liberation or conquest, French civilization owes its appeal to a partly arrogant but partly true insistence that it defends and advances humanity, civilization itself, and not only France. It therefore carries with it its own anti-imperialism, for once a conquered people discover their rights as men and citizens, rights inherent in the humanity they share with their conquerors, they have all the principles they need to end that imperialism—and the conqueror begins to lose the reason he had for his conquest. All that remains is the practical question of whether those ruled are ready to rule themselves.

History obsesses France, and Rosenblum rightly discusses the history of the French mission. He is wrong to devote only 150 pages of a 450-page book to that discussion, giving over the remainder to rehashes of well-known events and personages in a deadpan style reminiscent of the late American humorist Will Cuppy. Still, there are insights: “Those who defended colonialism as noble, and those who rejected it as immoral, each saw their view vindicated,” but in two world wars “to a large degree, France owed its freedom to officers trained in the colonies.” Rosenblum also sees that French universalism succeeds best against particularisms, tribalisms. It begins to sputter when confronted with any rival universalism; he mentions Islam, but he might also cite American principles and Marxist ideology. (De Gaulle shrewdly tried to undermine the last two by calling them mere disguises for national ambitions.)

Rosenblum has visited every corner of the French cultural empire, and he never fails to say something informative about each one. At times he has too much to say, as when he allocates twenty pages to a narration of the French destruction of a “Greenpeace” ship interfering with nuclear testing in the south Pacific; the story speaks well for Rosenblum’s journalistic diligence, but adds little to the argument of his book.

He well describes “the elaborate trompe-d’oeil” by which France ‘decolonized’ many of its African territories while retaining control with ‘advisors’ and ‘technicians.’ The still-colonized former colonies generally prefer this arrangement. In Gabon, Rosenblum asked one citizen, “Don’t you sometimes feel there are too many white faces around here?” “On the contrary,” the man replied, “there are not enough.”

As for French racism, it of course exists. But French universalism includes toleration, which often mitigates the worst hostility. Regrettably, other types of universalism do not invariably preach toleration. “For Islamic politicians, businessmen, warlords, and terrorists who feel hemmed in by the stern lines of East and West [that mark the Cold War], Paris is a secular Mecca. It is the capital of live and let live—or not.” France has difficulty delimiting its own toleration, and thus falls victim to the intolerance of others. The political fanatics it tolerates within its borders do not always tolerate it, and citizens pay in blood for a too-complaisant ‘realism.’

Rosenblum optimistically predicts, “It is certain that there will always be a France.” He should be more cautious. When he describes his friends Jean-Claud and Hélène, “both in advertising, world travelers,” as “the best of modern France,” one must worry about modern France. While I am sure these people make pleasant company, rayonnement needs more than globe-trotting publicity types to make it worth defending or heeding. Jean-Claude hopes his son “will have both roots and wings”; one knows not whether to tremble more for the mixed metaphor or the logical confusion that produced it. Rootedness and flight don’t go together, and if the best of modern France assume they do, Frenchness may turn all-illusory, on the way to evanescing.

The rayonnement of medieval France, the France of the Crusades, uneasily but impressively combined Roman and Christian forms of piety. The rayonnement of modern France is the Lumière, the Enlightenment—quite different from the civic virtues of Rome or the spiritual universalism of Christianity. The Enlightenment replaces patriotism and charity with toleration and public liberality empowered by the scientific conquest of nature. Its power comes from its appeal to comfortable self-preservation elevated somewhat by sentiments of generosity. It attracts, in part because it refuses to command. Its weakness comes from its neglect of politics, of the particular (this country, this regime), its inability to command. Its weakness is its strength, its strength its weakness.

The prospects for Frenchness may depend upon whether and how the best of modern France can make la Lumière only one part of the spectrum of rayonnement. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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