No Middle Ground
MARTIN, BENJAMIN F.
No Middle Ground The Idea of France By Pierre Birnbaum Hill and Wang. 370 pp. $32.00. Reviewed by Benjamin F. Martin Professor of History, Louisiana State University; author, "France and...
...He feared the hatred between the Jacobins and the Ultras, or the Left and the Right, was so profound that neither side would consider anything short of revolutionary change...
...He famously declared, "La Révolution est un bloc," to be taken whole or not at all...
...The 1789 Revolution proclaimed its goal of refashioning France root and branch, renouncing all that had gone before as tainted...
...King Louis IX (1214-70)—Saint Louis—took care to crusade at home against Muslims and Jews before crusading in the Holy Land...
...Already, both sides recognized that the battle for society would be waged in the public schools...
...The recovery after World War II, and above all the advent of the Fifth Republic in 1958, altered the terrain by creating a rival technocracy under civil servants educated at the newly-founded École National d'Administration (ENA...
...Instead of a militant citizenry, these énarques offered a dirigisme, or state management, appropriate to the complexities of a new political order...
...They finally gave up their attachment to Utopian myths and settled down—until multiculturalism arrived, in the form of Muslim immigration from North Africa...
...One of the founders of the ThirdRepublic(1870-1940),former constitutional monarchist Adolphe Thiers, proclaimed, "The Republic will be conservative or it will not be...
...Did the defeat of Vichy clear the way permanently for a Republican society...
...Politician Léon Gambetta's declamation, "Clericalism, there is the enemy...
...Like their crusading forebears, the revolutionaries gave no quarter to difference, putting down the counterrevolutionary Vendée region by killing at least 150,000 men, women and children (with some estimates putting the total as high as 600,000...
...Whether applied by revolutionaries or monarchists (now counterrevolutionaries), the inevitable outcome of imposed uniformity was rebellion...
...they fought bitterly over the interpretation of controversial historical icons like Joan of Arc...
...Some of the factual lapses seem to challenge the book's view...
...The depth of the chasm was never more clearly revealed than in the early 1890s, when Pope Leo XIII ordered French Catholics to seek at least a truce with the Republic...
...As for the Church, despite acts of contrition for Vichy, its influence in French life has declined precipitously: A 1994 poll in Le Figaro showed that only 64 per cent of children are baptized...
...During the 1968 student rebellion, one graffito, with a nod to Meslier, expressed the Republican anger at technocratic arrogance: "Mankind will be truly free only when the last bureaucrat is strangled in the bowels of the last sociologist...
...But the 1968 dissent passed and in the Fifth Republic, interestingly, most of the political leadership, whether Gaullist, neo-Gaullist, or Socialist, has been trained at the ENA...
...Because the uniformity was defined from above as the only acceptable stance, this rebellion was considered treason...
...Charles de Gaulle's father was one of many Catholics who broke ranks by defending the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, and even lost his job because of his insistent view...
...Soon the Dreyfus affair revealed just how polarized France remained...
...One regrets only that he tends to adopt the stance of a lawyer instead of a judge—as if he were bringing France before the court of history rather than consulting the history of France to render judgment...
...To recover what had been lost to the Revolution, he advocated the violence of the Jacobins, exalting the role of the executioner and demanding redemption through blood...
...Since 1945, a Maistre-style Right has been impossible in France...
...However, the extent of social change since World War II was demonstrated by the Church's outright disavowal of Le Pen, and even more so by the rapid decline of his political movement...
...Thus, the 18th-century Enlightenment took aim at the alliance of throne and altar—a protest best illustrated by Jean Meslier's notorious formulation: "Mankind will be truly free only when the last king is strangled in the bowels of the last priest...
...They took their cue from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's conception of government by the General Will: What the people would do if they knew what to do...
...Catholics countered by protesting the excessive rationalism that the bishops collectively referred to as "the root of all our troubles...
...Building on the precedent of royal justice at the scaffold, the revolutionaries made sacred the Terror and the guillotine that carried out its sentence...
...When the Catholics woundup on the losing side, the Republicans punished them by eliminating state subsidies for the Church, closing many of its schools, and stunting the careers of civil servants and military officers who attended Mass...
...Of course, even more than in the Dreyfus affair, they could not have been more wrong...
...His thesis is based on a rich combination of history and ideology that is both the glory and the curse of French academic writing—the curse because only the cognoscenti can follow all the obscure allusions...
...Alas, history appears to validate Tocqueville's concern: In less than a century, France had three revolutions, varying degrees of constitutional monarchy, two empires, two republics, and the bloodiest of civil insurrections in the Paris Commune (1871...
...After NapoleonBonaparte, the Revolution incarnate, was finally defeated in 1815, the restored monarchy reluctantly agreed that the clock could not be turned back completely to 1789...
...author, "France and the Après Guerre, 1918-1924" Generalizations about national behavior have long been punctuated by the interjection, "Yes, but not France...
...Still, the case Birnbaum presents is impressive...
...If so, the French have had an excess of creativity...
...was almost the motto of the Third Republic leadership...
...But it did not tolerate the inveterate enemy of the Left and of "Republican" society: the Catholic Church and its vision of social relationships...
...Unlike being German or Swiss, to be French in Republican society has become not a matter of bloodlines but of adopting the French language, history and customs...
...The so-called Most Catholic King Charles IX and his mother, Catherine de Medici, presided over the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 that killed at least 10,000 French Protestants...
...At times Birnbaum presses his brief too far: It contains several questionable interpretations plus a few factual errors, and it suffers from the omission of counterevidence...
...and a bare 8 per cent of Catholics go to confession even once a year...
...Many of the immigrants have refused to assimilate...
...This ""exceptionalism," argues Pierre Birnbaum, the Sorbonne's wise political theorist, derives from a historical determination to create a politically and religiously homogeneous state...
...In supporting the puppet Vichy government, the Right and the Catholic Church thought that their hour had come at last...
...Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front party, a throwback to the ideology of social uniformity on the Right, exploited the fear of a cultural pluralism similar to that of the U. S. to win 15 per cent of the vote in 1997 under the banner of "racism...
...In general, the French seemed to accept this version of governance...
...It was indeed conservative in many ways yet also "liberal"—meaning conciliatory in Tocqueville's sense...
...Weak and bitterly divided, France fought poorly in 1940, few seeming to believe the regime worth defending...
...Here as well, though, the Vichy experience was a cautionary tale: Practically all of the country's high administrators had carried on from the Third Republic into Vichy and then into the short-lived Fourth Republic (1946-58...
...Arno J. Meyer has recently argued in Vie Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions that history is at its most creative in those moments when retribution runs rampant...
...Louis XIV's quest for "un roi, une loi, une foi"—one king, one law, one faith— was a high point in a campaign that went far beyond mere absolutism...
...In 1889, Republicans celebrated the centenary of "their" Revolution with a Universal Exposition in Paris marked by the completion of the Eiffel Tower...
...The prophet of the Ultras, Birnbaum maintains, was Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), for whom the only genuine authority was the Catholic Church and its expression through a religious monarchy...
...Its rationale was the difficulty of governing a heterogeneous population with the fragile structures of the early modern nation: Imposing power from above was meant to reduce the risk of internal division...
...But as Birnbaum points out, the "enlightened" revolutionaries, the Jacobins, were of a piece with the establishment they despised because they too demanded a homogeneous culture— society remade as a unified whole...
...As for the first concentration camps in France, they were established in the late 1930s, not under Vichy...
...The vast majority of the French now seem to tolerate a level of diversity unthinkable by either the Right or Left at any earlier point in France's history, though Birnbaum may be a bit hasty in declaring ethnic harmony...
...Other historians place the turning point away from cultural homogeneity much earlier, back in the Third Republic, while acknowledgingthatthere was one last and horribly bitter period from the mid-1930s through Vichy...
...Catholics like priest and legislator Hippolyte Gayraud could only howl, "We have centuries to take our revenge, and history proves that we always do ! " The experience of the Great War (1914-18) generated the appearance of a "sacred union" within France, but Birnbaum makes a compelling case that it was more accurately a mere damping of domestic fires...
...The defining symbol was the affaire des foulards, the debate begun in 1989 over whether Muslim girls had the right to wear headscarves in public schools...
...The regime that evolved in the 1870s made a bid to end this pattern...
...less than 50 per cent of couples have religious marriages...
...The author skillfully traces the origin and course of the internal French wars, and he makes a credible argument for this polarization as the source of French exceptionalism...
...The cost of victory—nearly 1.4 million dead—combined with economic and foreign policy failures in the 1920s and '30s to rekindle the flames, especially after the electoral victory of the Popular Front in 1936 and then the threat of war...
...Georges Clemenceau, alatter-day Jacobin, immediately resisted reconciliation by arguing that embracing the Republic meant embracing the Revolution and the secularism it embodied...
...What resulted was the semblance of conformity, but also a latent smoldering hatred...
...But not so their most vehement supporters, the Ultras, so named for their allegiance to ultraroyalism...
...In 1685 the "Grand Roi" Louis XIV revoked his grandfather's Edict of Nantes, granting limited toleration to Protestants, and drove over 200,000 of them into exile...
...Catholic social reformer Albert de Mun, for instance, came to terms with the Republic long before 1914, making him an early example of cultural compromise...
...There was no middle ground...
...Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) was pessimistic that France could ever develop the kind of stable, open society he had found in America...
Vol. 84 • September 2001 • No. 5
