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
- On Maurras, see “The Monarchist Kulturkampf of Charles Maurras” on this website under the category, “Nations.”
- 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.
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