The Forgotten French Resistance
Nemoianu, Virgil
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Forgotten French Resistance" boyant gesture, was an inward-looking and selfdestructive culture. Its main preoccupation was to level, to equalize, and to streamline its own population, and above all to...
...This brings us to those who were left out from the anthology...
...He died in 1794 of the consequences of his suicide attempt when he was arrested for the second time by the revolutionary authorities...
...The entirety of these 200 years was not at the destructive and the oppressive anti-religious level of 1790-1800, or of 1880-1910, or of the 1990s (and on...
...Mostly the French were extremely different from this tradition of conservative Whigs that prevailed in Anglo-Saxon lands...
...Yes, there were some better and some worse moments...
...On the contrary, some of those not included in Blum's anthology such as the great Rivarol or the virtually forgotten Mallet du Pan taught a lesson or two to Burke...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW boyant gesture, was an inward-looking and selfdestructive culture...
...There were also, most stubborn and chivalrous, the open "reactionaries," ideological essayists interested perhaps less in victory than in honor...
...The French version of "political correctness" does all it can to sweep under the rug this historical truth...
...On the other hand I will quickly admit that I was very glad to see how Blum's anthology, albeit indirectly, brings to the fore a well-hidden historical secret: that Catholic thinkers and politicians were initiators in the struggle for economic fairness These critiques of the ratism was much closer to the medieval one, and did not demand strong-arm measures...
...Augustine and Bossuet), an organic view of society (complementarity of social classes and necessity of a strong, clear-cut monarchy), and a rejection of some key Enlightenment assumptions, specifically individualism, in which they suspected early the slide toward subjectivity and relativity...
...a generation or two later...
...By contrast, they denied sharply the very foundations of modernizing evolution...
...In the two centuries that followed, the more France managed to "reinvent," no, to disembowel itself, the less prestigious its position in the world became...
...More important as an objection is the following: Blum slides on a tangent from OCTOBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59 BOOKS IN REVIEW conservatism to Demochristian and Sociochristian positions...
...So...
...All this in a calmer and more explanatory tone for Bonald, a more bellicose and often sarcastic tone by De Maistre...
...What they had in common was an acceptance of the providential philosophy of history (in the tradition of St...
...it included even some left-wing posi tions, such as his unreserved support of total free dom of the press and his surreptitious availability to socialism and democracy, but these had to coexist with defiant and strong arguments in favor of tradi tion, continuity, dynastic loyalty, chivalric arrogance...
...And one almost forgotten thinker whose importance cannot be underrated was Jacob Nicolas Moreau, the teacher of kings...
...There were thoughtful philosophers and scientists and theologians: Lamennais, Taine, Ozanam, Lubac, Maritain, Guitton, to name a very few...
...Now this is all well and good, but the truth is that in early 19th-century France there were a number of prominent and efficient conservatives who did not necessarily highlight their religious inclinations, or did not always connect these with their political activities...
...These critiques of the industrial-capitalist system are based on compassionate principles and are in many ways analogous to the critique of the manufacturing North by the "Fugitives" and "Southern Agrarians" in the U.S...
...and specifically in the emergence and growth of trade unions...
...Its main preoccupation was to level, to equalize, and to streamline its own population, and above all to erase with ferocious determination the label of "eldest daughter of the Church," to de-Catholicize itself...
...His contemporaries Bonald and Joseph de Maistre are usually mentioned together, although they were completely different in their modes of writing...
...praise of executioners...
...a generation or two later...
...More than one of France's greatest writers spoke out boldly and intelligently: Balzac and Baudelaire, Claudel and Raspail, and dozens of others...
...A close reading of Blum's selection from La Tour du Pin shows that his vision of corpo 60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2005 ety wit who had been a man of the left in his early career, but who did not hesitate to turn against the revolutionaries eventually...
...The adventures of Napoleon (one of the greatest losers ever known in the history of mankind) are emblematic for the future of France, at the beginning of these two centuries: his insane "Louisiana purchase," his disastrous naval defeats at Trafalgar and Aboukir, the ultimate humiliation in 1815...
...They were looking (romantically and nostalgically) toward a feudal-nobiliary past, not toward a bolstering and enrichment of the "bourgeois" and liberal present...
...I already mentioned the fundamental figure of Rivarol...
...He also has the merit of having coined the term "con servative" (as the title of his short-lived, but highly meritorious journal Le Conservateur...
...I would add here Chamfort, a worthy descendant of the great French moralists, a soci industrial-capitalist system are based on compassionate principles and are in many ways analogous to the critique of the manufacturing North by the "Fugitives" and "Southern Agrarians" in the U.S...
...It is this last group that Blum wants to remind us of...
...Now, I think it was a very shrewd move on Blum's part to choose two contrastive essays by Bonald that are not necessarily among his best, but indicate clearly the positions taken by Bonald himself...
...BLUM CONTINUES WITH TWO relatively minor figures, Keller and Le Play, both respectable activists, but hardly in the same category with the earlier selections...
...Chateaubriand's ideology was highly intricate...
...Truly inspired I find the anthologizing of La Tour du Pin, a genuinely outstanding statesman who is today all but forgotten...
...He had argued warmly in favor of a restoration of the medieval structure of crafts guilds, under the form of "corporations" that would bring together laborers and owners and reestablish a harmony between them...
...Obviously it does not claim to be exhaustive...
...There were lulls and there was brave opposition...
...It is about this opposition that Christopher Blum's book speaks...
...De Maistre was abrasive, paradoxical, witty, unpredictable, merciless (one of his essays is in Mostly the French were extremely different from this tradition of conservative Whigs that prevailed in Anglo-Saxon lands...
...Nevertheless what one likes best in his writing are the critiques rather than the proposed solutions...
...One of these, on Bossuet, indicates the former musketeer's continuity and staunch solidarity with 17th-century French traditions, the other, on Mme de Stael shows him taking his distances from "middle-of-the-road" conservatism (anti-revolutionary, yet broadly liberal...
...The French, and it is only fair to add, the Continental reactionaries in general, did not confine themselves to the kind of organic development that a John Adams or Edmund Burke recommended...
...It becomes therefore clear how these bold thinkers differ from their Anglo-American counterparts...
...Between these two positions it is almost inevitable that only the doctrines of Christian Democracy can act as a kind of bridge, as Chateaubriand had intuited sooner than most others...
...and certainly always brilliant...
...No, these were not disciples of Burke, as Blum tells us at the book's beginning, perhaps in order to make them more palatable to us...
...Generous policies were pursued by various governments, particularly a good many of those between 1815-1870...
...The best example (although there are many) is the one of Francois Guizot (and his cohorts, the "doctrinaires," some of whom were brilliant...
...He had been commissioned to act as the tutor to the unfortunate Louis XVI and to his brothers (Louis XVIII and Charles X): The small instructional handbook material he prepared and used for the occasion, he later developed in a larger book of "principles of morals, politics and public law" which seems to me the ultimate in open proclamation of absolute monarchy of divine right...
...We know by now that the different corporatist experiments (in Mussolini's Italy, in Peron's Argentina, to some lesser extent in the Portugal of Salazar and the Austria of Dollfuss) were not particularly successful from a socioe-conomic point of view, let alone that they seem to have needed authoritarian frameworks in order to function...
...Bonald by contrast was sedate, stolid, logical, and rational: Perhaps the best analysis of his work is one of Robert Spaemann's earliest books, which argues that Bonald is the father of sociology, a wouldbe science that later betrayed its progenitor with its leftist paradigms and agendas...
...Yet the most interesting part is that Chateaubriand ended up with the outlines of a future Christian Democrat thinking as the most hopeful and practicable solution for the future...
...it was supposed to support the state, instead of being supported by it...
...Thus the great Chateaubriand, the first selection in Blum's anthology...
Vol. 38 • October 2005 • No. 8
